flashback: drugs and dealing in the golden age of the london rave scene jennifer r. ward cullompton: willan publishing, 2010. isbn: 978-1-84392-791-4 (hardcover) rrp: $84.95 (hardcover) sean leneghan independent scholar (australia) originally developed for the treatment of blood-clotting by the german pharmaceutical company merck in 1912, ecstasy was subsequently “rediscovered” by the shulgins, who through their own experimentations and critical-self reflections had the remarkable foresight to anticipate the clinical use of the drug as an aid to psychotherapeutic practice. more recently, federally approved trials in the united states have openly sanctioned the legal use of ecstasy as an adjunct to psychotherapy in clinical trials treating people with post-traumatic stress disorder. standing in contrast to this controlled use in strict clinical conditions is one of the largest socio-cultural movements of the 20th century: transnational club and rave culture. it is against the backdrop of the rise of the “chemical generation” that jennifer ward’s ethnographic research focusses on the socio-economic networks that sell and distribute ecstasy. what is impressive about this ethnography is the unflinching honesty through which the author dives straight into the deep end of the london drug scene to study the use of ecstasy and the socio-cultural dynamics of its dealing. although some qualitative research has addressed the significance and meaning of these activities, ward addresses the paucity of ecstasy-based studies within the international research community as she describes and analyses the income generation and economic networks of ecstasy distribution. the central methodological orientation of this study derives from the ethnographic tradition generated by the chicago school in the 1930s and 1940s with its emphasis on extended immersion in socio-cultural contexts. this orientation to ethnographic research allows the ethnographer to get a detailed first-hand sense of the actions, meanings, emotions and projects of the individuals, groups or communities with whom the ethnographer is working. a central theme that emerges in ward’s work concerns the enterprising activities of rave and club participants. by focusing on this dimension, ward moves away from stereotypical simplifications of ecstasy users (e.g. derogatory terms such as “pill-heads”), preferring to conceptualise these people as active agents within the socio-historical worlds they live in. hence, what this ethnographic work accomplishes is an honest and detailed examination of the myriad activities surrounding the use and distribution of ecstasy. chapter one situates the study within the broader context of rave and ecstasy research, focussing on the theoretical and ethnographic debates and literature surrounding the field. chapter two discusses the numerous dimensions of the london rave scene, including detailed descriptions of ward’s own research and direct involvement in venues and milieus. chapter three explores the friendship networks, groups and styles associated with drug use and distribution. chapters four and five look at the organisational dynamics of drug purchasing and selling within public venues as well as private networks of distribution. specific attention is given to the safety strategies that are adopted by sellers to avoid being caught in the projects they are undertaking. chapter six provides a detailed examination of the role that women play in drug markets, overturning stereotypes and depictions of women as passive beings, and presenting them as active and central in the creation of networks. chapter seven discusses how drug selling operations were established and grew in proportion beyond their original scope. the obstacles that the people in these activities faced in seeking to move away from such lifestyles are also presented. the last chapter looks at the lives of these people after the study was completed. a summation of the ethnographic research is offered alongside theorisation of entrepreneurship, friendship and functionality in the london urban setting. a final synopsis of the london rave scene at the time of completion of the study is presented, looking at how, for example, mobile phones came to change the entire dynamics of clubbing and raving. ward’s book strikes me as an accurate and informative study. her approach is clear and astute as she presents these people’s lives and the activities they are engaged in. there is no doubt that her direct involvement in hanging out/blending in with these people led her to an intimate position within the workings and changing nature of relationships and networks. it is not my intention here to take issue with the kinds of theoretical claims that ward argues for in this study. rather, i wish to draw attention to some of the issues that are specific to ethnographic fieldwork, with its focus on participant observation, especially in drug scenes that are outside of clinical settings. what impressed me about ward’s own approach was the tremendous courage and honesty in her observations and analysis of activities such as drug dealing. what is often overlooked in so much scientific thinking, whether ethnographic or clinical, is the centrality of the dynamics of the researcher’s own psyche (the un/consciousness) in the generation of theoretical and empirical knowledge. my intention here is to draw attention away from our usual habits of thinking about the people within an ethnographic study, to looking at the observational situation itself. i am aware of these dynamics precisely because i have undertaken ethnographic fieldwork in comparable drug scenes in australia, which included direct participation in the use of ecstasy (leneghan 2011). the aim of this methodology is to complement the observations of other people with a synthesis of one’s own self-knowledge. thus, i think it is important for the researcher to reflect on themselves and the kind of knowledge that is included and excluded (for whatever reasons) from completed ethnographic monographs. it is in this sense that countertransference dynamics presented in the tradition of ethno-psychoanalysis are of the utmost relevance in the current methodologies of ethnographic practice. whether one is aware of one’s own un/conscious dynamics in the field, or whether one chooses to remain oblivious to them, our defensiveness, anxieties and conscious selections and deletions as thinkers is of the highest import, whether this is in the field, in a clinical situation, or at the writing-up stage. one of the praiseworthy aspects of ward’s study is her willingness to look at activities that are not only potentially dangerous but also illegal. in my own work in sydney, this was the only area that i consciously chose to leave out of my ethnographic investigations and writing. this was because i was seen, by those who did not know me, as an undercover police officer. it would be interesting to know whether ward kept a private research diary, incorporating her open field notes, observations and experiential self-reflections in the field. the latter, especially, are inclusive of the knowledge which is sanitised by the ethnographer, more often than not, through one’s defensive manoeuvres. these insights would give more of a real sense of ward’s participation in the scene: how did she arrive at ethnographic knowledge in the partition/encounter between observer and the observed? did she choose to participate in ecstasy use or distribution networks? if not, what are the situations in the field which preclude or dissuade an open discussion of these issues and dimensions to research? for me, these are not trivial questions, but are at the forefront of social science research in general. i see ward’s study as a valuable contribution to ethnography. in examining these people on their own terms, this work is honest and courageous, investigating human social fields that are charged with anxiety arousing encounters. the scope of this ethnography and its theoretical analysis will be useful to students and educators from a range of fields in the social sciences and the humanities. finally, this study could be used as a blueprint by future researchers wishing to undertake ethnographic research into the worlds of drug dealers and consumers. references leneghan, sean. 2011. the varieties of ecstasy experience: an exploration of person, mind and body in sydney’s club culture. saarbrücken: lambert academic press. the art of record production: an introductory reader for a new academic field simon frith and simon zagorski-thomas (eds.) farnham: ashgate, 2012. isbn: 978-1-4094-0562-7 (hardcover), 978-1-4094-0678-5 (paperback) rrp: £65.00 (hardcover), £19.99 (paperback) pat o’grady macquarie university (australia) the art of record production is a collection of essays offering significant theoretical contributions and frameworks for “a new academic field”. the book shares its title with the journal and association of the same name, where some of its chapters were originally published. its three parts—historical approaches, theoretical approaches and case studies—outline the broad and multidisciplinary studies being undertaken within the field, and provide theoretical and methodological concepts that are relevant to both students and academics. in the opening chapter, simon frith and simon zagorski-thomas consider theory, pedagogy and practice in record production, and reflect on the recent progress in record production scholarship, attributing much of it to the art of record production conferences. part i: historical approaches moves chronologically from the 1950s through to the present. george brock-nannestad offers a historical overview of lacquer discs and their role in early home recording. the chapter provides broader context to the debate of analogue versus digital recording techniques, while also highlighting the fast pace at which recording technology has advanced since the 1950s. susan schmidt horning’s chapter, “the sounds of space”, looks at the development of acoustic treatment in studios since the 1950s, including the trend from dead (or non-reflective) sounding rooms to more live sounding rooms. she considers the importance of acoustics in record production and the implications of multi-track recording on ideas of space. zagorski-thomas’ chapter, “the us vs the uk sound: meaning in music production in the 1970s”, offers a comparison between production aesthetics in the us and the uk. the chapter, which i found one of the most insightful of the book, offers a theoretical analysis of what zagorski-thomas presents as an established industry perception of practices over the period. the chapter is a reminder of while recording technology is largely transnational, there are significant cultural differences which inform local practices. referring to csikszentmihalyi’s theory of creativity, he argues that cultural domains and social fields in the uk and us have influenced record production techniques. paul théberge, author of the seminal text any sound you can imagine (1997), follows on from his “network studio” article (2004) by examining the influences of the internet on studios and highlighting the demise of large studio facilities. building on his previous work on musicological analysis, allan moore begins part ii: theoretical approaches by searching for a framework for the musicological analysis of recordings and record production. alan williams contributes “‘i’m not hearing what you’re hearing’: the conflict and connection of headphone mixes and multiple audioscapes”, an ethnographic study which outlines the practical issues relating to audioscapes in the studio, for instance, the difference in sound between a musician’s instrument in the live room and what they hear in their headphones. he also examines the advantages of personal headphone monitoring. michael jarrett’s chapter, “the self-effacing producer”, is mainly a transcript of interviews he conducted with producers on their working practice, and while insightful, the chapter seems out of place in part ii, lacking the theoretical focus of other chapters. phillip mcintyre’s chapter, “rethinking creativity”, again brings csikszentmihalyi’s theory of creativity to record production, providing a systematic model for understanding it through csikszentmihalyi’s concept of domain, field and agent. he conceptualizes the theory of creativity, which can be quite complex for those outside the field of psychology, through the inclusion of a series of popular musicians and bands. part iii: case studies begins with andrew blake’s analysis of suvi raj grubb’s stereo recordings of classical recordings, serving as the book’s first consideration of classical record production. frith considers the ideology of the producer in the context of rock, which, like much popular music, is consumed by audiences as recordings. he examines how the prominence of the producer in rock, while increasing, is still largely ignored by critics. in “the beach boys’ pet sounds and the musicology of record production”, jan butler continues a common theme present throughout the book of the recording as an object of analysis. she considers this through the context of the work of brian wilson, a pioneer in the confluence of recording practices and composition in popular music. in contrast to a lot of musicological analysis, butler contemplates the sociological factors of the album smile, which has only been widely recognized many years later. while the culture of practice is considered in the book, a broader examination of the culture among audiences surrounding recordings is not. the final chapter, “recording the revolution: 50 years of music studios in revolutionary cuba”, by jan fairley and alexandrine boudreault-fournier, offers a contrasting non-western perspective on recording practice, providing cultural considerations for recording practices in recording studios in cuba. the art of record production journal and association promotes a hybrid mix of theorists and practitioners. this mix is reflected in the book, where short—at times perhaps too short—commentary from industry practitioners is featured as an interlude to the three main sections. where the contributors are guided by zagorski-thomas’ questions, they provide some interesting insights, but where brief criticisms are made of concepts in the main chapters, it becomes awkward, particularly given it is an academic work. mike howlett’s contribution originally appeared in issue 6 of the journal, but is here reduced to a two-page extract in the second interlude. the extract fails to properly present his ideas by omitting the scholarly context of his study. his wider argument is destabilized by missing the body of his paper, and leaves it somewhat less convincing than his original work. in an academic field which is largely practice-based, it seems that dialogue between scholars and practitioners is important. however, a recent lecture i gave to record production masters students reminded me that the hybridity of practitioners and theorists can prove problematic. while i was presenting an introduction to scholarly thinking in record production, a professional with much skepticism of a particular scholar’s theory on multi-tracking interjected: “oh, well that person obviously hasn’t done much recording”. a similar tone is at times evident in this book. the book takes a significant step forward in establishing theoretical frameworks and also presents a roadmap for further research. in a book which merges both theory and practice, and is presented as being intended for students, greater focus on contemporary digital audio workstations (daws) seems appropriate. debate on preferred daws is frequent among practitioners, while students learning about audio production will, no doubt, spend much of their time interfacing with one or a number of daws. furthermore, despite being situated in a field which deals with constantly changing and emerging technology, this book does not clearly outline when each chapter was originally written. recording technologies and discourses can quickly date, and providing the reader with information on the time of the work gives much needed context. overall, this book is enjoyable and informative. those who are moderately familiar with literature on the topic will have already read much of the content. i, however, discovered some new and interesting material. references théberge, paul. 1997. any sound you can imagine: making music/consuming technology. hanover, nh: wesleyan university press. ———. 2004. “the network studio: historical and technological paths to a new ideal in music making”. social studies of science 34(5): 759–81. dancecult 3(1) 2011: guest editor's introduction to special issue on the dj, masthead and table of contents volume 4 number 2 2012 executive editor graham st john (university of queensland, au) managing editor tobias c. van veen (mcgill university, ca) reviews editor ed montano (rmit university, au) foreign languages editor luis-manuel garcia (university of chicago, de) art director cato pulleyblank (fairy punk creative studio, ca) copyeditors jerome hansen (uk) sheena d. hyndman (york university, ca) katrina loughrey (au) kath o’donnell (au) production director botond vitos (monash university, au) production assistants martin koszolko (rmit university, au) paul jasen (carleton university, ca) marc kushin garth sheridan dancecult journal of electronic dance music culture issue 4(2) 2012 issn 1947-5403 ©2012 dancecult published twice yearly at http://dj.dancecult.net international advisory board sean albiez (southampton solent university, uk), eliot bates (university of maryland, college park, us), andy bennett (griffith university, au), mark j butler (northwestern university, us), anthony d’andrea (university of limerick, ie), rebekah farrugia (oakland university, us), kai fikentscher (de), françois gauthier (université du québec à montréal, ca), anna gavanas (institute for futures studies, se), chris gibson (university of new south wales, au), jeremy gilbert (university of east london, uk), ross harley (university of new south wales, au), david hesmondhalgh (university of leeds, uk), tim lawrence (university of east london, uk), geert lovink (university of amsterdam, nl), gordon lynch (birkbeck university of london, uk), rene lysloff (university of california, riverside, us), alejandro l. madrid (university of illinois, chicago, us), charity marsh (university of regina, ca), tony mitchell (university of technology sydney, au), karenza moore (lancaster university, uk), andrew murphie (university of new south wales, au), christopher partridge (lancaster university, uk), anne petiau (itsrs / université paris 5, fr), hillegonda c rietveld (london south bank university, uk), geoff stahl (victoria university of wellington, nz), sonjah nadine stanley-niaah (university of west indies, jm), graham st john (university of queensland, au), will straw (mcgill university, ca), rupert till (university of huddersfield, uk), tobias c. van veen (mcgill university, ca), michael veal (yale university, us) dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture is a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture (edmc). a platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on the shifting terrain of edmcs worldwide, the journal houses research exploring the sites, technologies, sounds and cultures of electronic music in historical and contemporary perspectives. playing host to studies of emergent forms of electronic music production, performance, distribution, and reception, as a portal for cutting-edge research on the relation between bodies, technologies, and cyberspace, as a medium through which the cultural politics of dance is critically investigated, and as a venue for innovative multimedia projects, dancecult is the forum for research on edmc. cover image: monsters at satyricon (2000), vancouver, bc, canada. photo: tobias c. van veen. http://dj.dancecult.net volume 4 number 2 2012 executive editor’s introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 01 graham st john feature articles what to ask women composers: feminist fieldwork in electronic dance music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 03 magdalena olszanowski cross-dressing to backbeats: the status of the electroclash producer and the politics of electronic music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 david madden “clubs aren’t like that”: discos, deviance, and diegetics in club culture cinema . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 simon a. morrison from the floor – online the first four years of bangface weekender: an overview eric turner acid house night at cuckoo, hindley st., adelaide, south australia july 2011 cathy adamek reviews books how to wreck a nice beach: the vocoder from world war ii to hip-hop—the machine speaks (dave tompkins) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 tobias c. van veen groove music: the art and culture of the hip-hop dj (mark katz) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 murray forman the record players: dj revolutionaries (bill brewster and frank broughton) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 scott gaule popular musics: topics, trends & trajectories (tara brabazon) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 ed montano film big fun in the big town (dir. bram van splunteren) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 philip kirby welcome to the 6th edition of dancecult. slimmer than usual, and yet you’ll discover within a wealth of data on current developments in edm cultural studies. in “what to ask women composers: feminist fieldwork in electronic dance music”, magdalena olszanowski kicks off our feature articles with a study of the research methods for microfemininewarfare, an interactive database documentary investigating female edm artists. olzanowski focuses on the contribution of women to a male dominated music industry and through study of “feminist research-creation and friendship-as-method” contributes to broader discussions on female subjectivity. in “cross-dressing to backbeats: the status of the electroclash producer and the politics of electronic music”, david madden, follows with an examination of the emergence and production of electroclash. addressing the distinct character of this international rock/electro fusional genre said to signal an “attempt to reinvigorate dance music with a sense of sexuality, personality and irony”, madden examines the role of numerous women who have significantly contributed to shaping the aesthetics and production practices of electroclash. and in “clubs aren’t like that”: discos, deviance and diegetics in club culture cinema”, simon a. morrison considers methods by which filmmakers have translated edmc into film. through attention to the recent feature films ecstasy and irvine welsh’s ecstasy, morrison critically investigates creative approaches and technical devices adopted by directors in efforts to portray edm cultures and scenes in fictional narratives, asking “is it possible to distil the energy of the dance floor and represent the actions, practices and attitudes of its participants for an arguably passive cinema audience?” in our from the floor department, in this edition we have eric turner providing an overview of “the first four years of bangface weekender”, the edm festival at camber sands, east sussex, and cathy adamek reporting on an “acid house night at cuckoo” in hindley st, adelaide, in july 2011. we also have four book and one film reviews. there have been a few recent changes in our editorial and production departments. i wish to thank catherine baker, copyeditor at dancecult since our inception in 2009, who, following her involvement in our first five editions has departed for new adventures. the dedication to detail of the kind undertaken by catherine is among the practices keeping this journal going. let me take this opportunity to thank all of our copyeditors who sweat away behind the scenes. copyediting is a painstaking, albeit not thankless, task. congratulations to botond vitos who has stepped up to the role of production director beginning with this issue. i also welcome aboard paul jasen, martin koszolko, marc kushin and garth david sheridan, as our new production assistants. and this is ed montano’s first edition as our new review’s editor. congratulations ed. executive editor’s introduction doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.02.00 st john | guest editor’s introduction 2 errata there were errors in bernardo attias’ from the floor article “meditations on the death of vinyl” in issue 3.1. the article by farrugia and swiss referenced was published in 2005 (not 2009), and in the first endnote the reference is “farrugia and swiss (2005)” and not “ferguson (2009)”. graham st john executive editor tribal revival: west coast festival culture kyer wiltshire and erik davis santa cruz: tribal revival & kyer photography, 2009 isbn: 978-0-615-31587-4 rrp: us$50.00 (hardcover) tobias c. van veen mcgill university (ca) despite the advent of digital recording devices of every size and shape (read: camera phones), there have been not nearly enough attempts to adequately document in brilliant photography and text the electronic festival underground along the west coast of north america. though burning man is quite possibly one of the world’s largest if not most significant gatherings of freak culture and various media abound that render spectacular its participants, there are few attempts to portray such electronicultures in a thoughtful and insightful form. the same can be said for documentation of similar festivals up and down the left coast, from shambhala in bc to faerie worlds in oregon and harmony festival in northern california. with tribal revival, something of this archival mission has succeeded, with 200 pages of colour photography documenting several years of festival culture and expression from the west coast, circa 2002 through 2009. initiated by and featuring the exquisite photography of kyer wiltshire, tribal revival is split into three main sections, each introduced by an essay by the ever-intriguing erik davis, author of the seminal techgnosis: myth, magic and mysticism in the age of information (1998) and a slew of other texts exploring alternative culture, music and technology. davis opens the book by exploring what the festival means to its inhabitants: festivals can be a wild time, but for many participants the festival is also a vital space of cultural invention. within the environs of the gathering, half sacred and half imagined, another possible world appears. despite the variety of festivals and clans, certain values come to the fore: community over consumerism, the power of the feminine, the wisdom of consciousness exploration, and the ethical call to develop a hands-on harmony with the earth (24). to this end, wiltshire explores these themes in turn. something of the book’s significance is also given some thought in the introduction by johnny dwork, who as a “producer of neotribal festivals” speaks of the “magical vibe” inherent to collective creation of shared ritual experiences. praising kyer’s work—his touch and persuasion behind the lens—dwork writes how the still images presented within present their “real-life subjects as mytho-poetic avatars...demigods that channel or embody certain creative muses that are beyond, greater than, and different from their everyday selves” (19). though dwork’s definition of mythopoetic differs from my own (he calls it “the quality of gracefully manifesting one’s spiritual potential”), it is precisely this axis of mythos, the creation of the imagined but nonetheless real, in its tangible effects and memory, and poeisis, the art of invention that strives beyond craft, the art of formative creation itself, that generates the means as well as, providing some insight into the ever-mutating ends of neotribal cultures. the first section covers all manner of avatars, from masks and garb to two subsections on the performance of collective virtual worlds and real dreams. everything from full-page portraits of mudmen, faeries, goddesses to elven and imaginary creatures in their native environments grace these pages. opening the second section, play, is a double-page spread of a double rainbow above an ecstatic crowd at burning man in 2007. from here, winged performers, alien acrobats and otherworldly yogis begin to enter the frame, with a thoughtful section on festival kids—the future of imaginative culture—followed by body blue performers playing with hoops. undoubtedly the next few pages will inspire many, focused as it is on eros, with all manner of burning man’s erotic nighttime world on display, from cowboy cages to writhing fire-spinners. indeed, nudity is so casual and accepted throughout this book that the particular emphasis on eros as a section develops how the naked body is seen and enjoyed in different ways. my only comment on such nudity is that while female breasts are in, not enough images of the full body, male or female or otherwise, are depicted without some subtle censuring of the lower naughty bits. save for one particularly interesting picture of a male bdsm performer in scrotum-stretching apparatus, there aren’t quite enough manbits to say that kyer’s lens is an equalizer in this respect. kissing elves and naked, biking grannies follow, only to lead into one of the more difficult and intangible arts to capture, that of music. but wiltshire certainly does this well, as he does with all of his photographs of the ethereal and split-second motions of an evolving subject. while some images are portraits or set-up for the shot, many are evidently not, capturing in the freeze the motion of an organic and complex field of festival actors. documentary photography is never easy, and night-time, dance-crazed, psychedelic inflected photography is often a complete mess. “you had to be there”, we all say. wiltshire’s work overcomes the usual barriers to capturing the mass dance experience of interlocked enthusiasts, taking us into the heart of the dancefloor, as well as above it, able to see the intermingling bodies, visual projections, stage, speakers and lighting as the crowd nearly throngs off the page. not only humans grace the paper, as wiltshire explores live art, a unique form of improvised visual art performance prominent at worldwide psychedelic music festivals, with artists using paint, airbrush, aerosol or other media to create work that often intends to capture the psychedelic state of the body’s energy patterns and chakra fields. luminescent body-painting and airbrushing dovetails alongside creative uses of costume, with a few interesting pictures suggestive of steampunk subcultures. the third and last section, rite, ties together the underlying motivations that drive tens of thousands of participants to orientate their entire lives around alternative festivals. composed of pages devoted to prayer, transformation, fire, goddess and the new dawn, these pages try to combine all the preceding elements into a gestalt of the total experience of what wiltshire calls “tribal revival”. in this sense, the outward manifestations of the tribe in movement and worship are depicted in photographs that both capture tidbits of detail—such as the shape of praying hands—to the mass, whirling formations of fire worship, desert sun salutations and ritual dance. throughout the book the informative words of erik davis offer an introductory commentary to the phenomena depicted, but also a persuasive one well worth reading as a scholar. for example, in the fire section, davis meditates upon how “fire is the essence of the rite. all the other elements came to our ancestors ready to hand; only fire had to be tamed, or rather, since you can never tame it, fire was the original ally, the original pact” (172). though davis’ exuberance is perhaps a tad debatable—certainly agriculture, housing and irrigation, to name a few other elements transformed, also had to be tamed, as earth, air and water—davis is right in focusing on how fire is a contemporary rite that has emerged from traditional practices only to be reinvented into a new connective force that expresses the intangible nature of the festival itself. fire consumes itself; it destroys what it makes in its bright heat. and more so than the other elements, fire draws us all in, around the fire, to bear witness to its dangerous exuberance and to test our limits of control. in short, though it may be ancient in some ways and native to many cultures worldwide, in others the obsession with fire rituals and fire dancing is very much one born out of modernity’s demise (or whatever you’d like to call the latter end of the 20th century). that fire was used by fascist organisations in the early 20th century in their authoritarian rituals and is used today to symbolically demonstrate the continuing spirit of such mainstream events such as the olympics (yes, the nazis introduced the torch relay), demonstrates its inherent characteristic as a malleable element, an icon open to its neopagan reinvention. there is very much an ontology to the primal destructive/creative force of the flame; it is about, as davis writes, “being with the fire”. all of tribal revival bears forth similar conclusions: it is about being with the desert, with others, with the world in all its forms, and whether that be a flaming pirate ship in the desert or a prayer circle in the forest, it is about being with the full expression of our creative being on this planet that allows each of us to be without, to step outside of ourselves and become all that is other and alien to our humdrum existence, to be with others being without, including the upcoming generations, that marks all the potential of what post-edmc culture and its variants has to offer. the first four years of bangface weekender: an overview eric turner university of new mexico (us) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.02.09> the setting is bangface weekender a festival? the event’s categorisation as such is an object of contention among ravers in the uk. its three-day duration (friday afternoon to monday morning) and the fact that all attendees sleep no more than half a kilometre from its main stage may warrant identifying the event as a festival. yet this is not like most edm festivals because it has no camping facilities, it is impossible for its approximately 3,000 attendees to purchase tickets on an individual basis and all of its stages are indoors. with these characteristics at hand it is clear that the setting for bangface weekender is very peculiar. this “festival” takes place in a pontins, a budget holiday resort. establishments like pontins are a prominent feature of british seaside towns, and they were for the most part built in the postwar era to accommodate the needs of lower income families seeking a cheap break away on the seaside and only a few miles away from their homes (bbc 2011). these resorts typically feature easy access to the beach, self-catering and a main hall with several amenities. bangface weekender features a swimming pool, a game room and a bouncy castle. it follows that this particular type of setting means that instead of camping, festivalgoers share a chalet over the weekend. since the chalets can host between 4 and 8 people each, and the maximum capacity of the main stage does not exceed the maximum capacity of the chalets, a booth in the chalet is included in the ticket price, and tickets can only be purchased in groups of 4, 6 or 8 (bangface 2011a). for some, this may be a somewhat constricting arrangement, yet it must be pointed out that, at £120–150 per ticket, which is slightly below the average ticket prices for uk festivals, what bangface offers is considered by most good value for money. however it needs to be pointed out that the type of accommodation offered is very basic. the standard chalet is no more than 50–60 square meters in total, and is comprised of a small bedroom with two beds, toilets, shower, and a small living room with kitchenette, basic kitchen utensils and a sofa-bed for the other two lodgers. additionally, electricity for the chalet is not complimentary—it must be purchased at the resort shop. there is just enough space in those chalets for no more than 10–15 people to gather together, and enough space for some (not all!) of the chalet lodgers to sleep while others congregate. this idea of maximised common space is no more evident than in how the chalets are stacked together, in two floors, and with all buildings facing each other in large piazza-style squares, which are typically composed of between 20 and 40 chalets each. it must also be said that, partly because of the peculiar numbering system adopted for the chalets, and partly because of how the squares seem to all resemble one another, it is really easy to get lost in this little grey-bricked beehive resort. most bangface weekender ravers have at least one good story about getting lost and running in circles to find one’s chalet! it is thus clear that, from the outset, even if this setup may be seen as good value for money, it is certain that by spending a weekend here enjoying the party, the music and the (optional) sunshine one certainly gets a taste of gritty, basic, english working class-type leisure. i have even heard some ravers call this a “working class festival”. more to the point, this no-frills accommodation allows for comfort combined with interaction, as the pontins transforms itself into a ravers’ council estate, like a concrete madhouse for the young and reckless. bangface weekender has operated every year from 2008 to 2011 in the pontins in camber sands, east sussex. it is conveniently within two hours from london and less than an hour from brighton. although this festival has more of an indoor focus than most venues, the pontins is in a truly beautiful natural setting, facing the rolling hills and marshlands of east sussex and kent on one side, and one of the biggest sand beaches in the south of england on the other. the party so who organises bangface weekender? this is nothing but the biggest of the events created by the bangface hard crew. they started out in 2003 by running a monthly nightclub event in london, at the elektrowerkz club in angel, and have branched out through the annual weekender event as well as an annual boat party on the river thames and, since 2010, a guest show at glastonbury festival (bangface 2011b). bangface has been praised for throwing parties with a very particular atmosphere. all their events feature the distribution of inflatable objects (especially animals), trumpets, vuvuzelas and placards with comedic slogans among the crowd, as well as fancy dress themes. among the slogans seen in the past, a few outstanding ones are “hi mum i’m at a rave”, “i’ll bang your mum’s face”, “i’m not the messiah, i’m a very naughty boy”, “how’s my raving? call 899 896 393”, “camber sands dogging society”, “i’m f***ing s***ting myself” and “i’ll suck for doomcore”. the desire of the organisers to throw a really special party, and to involve the crowd in this, is nowhere expressed as much as during the weekenders. in 2008 the theme was “total meltdown” and guests were encouraged to dress in fluoro gear and boiler suits (bangface, 2012a). in 2009 the theme was “lost in face” and people were asked to dress as “aliens, astronauts and space monkeys” (bangface 2012b). bangface weekender 2010 had a “juracid park” theme to mark “the 65 millionth anniversary of the extinction of the dinosaurs” (bangface 2012c). 2011 was called “the amen” and had a horror theme (bangface 2012d). for each of the weekender events, a free chalet for the following year’s weekender was offered to the person or group of people with the best costume (and, if anyone looks at the bangface archive pictures, they have had to judge some tough competition) (bangface 2012 a,b,c,d). every weekender has also made the best of the space offered by the camber sands pontins: the “side activities” include a five-a-side football tournament, go-kart racing, a pool rave and use of the bouncy castle as the “inflataland” room, where various people would fight to knock each other off the castle with large inflatable objects (bangface 2012a, b, c, d). additionally, ravers have been welcomed at the entrance every year by a 10 metre high, inflatable reproduction of jabba the hutt aptly named gabba the hutt. on top of this, every chalet receives a welcome pack upon arrival. in 2011 this welcome pack consisted of two cans of energy drink, a lollipop, a cereal bowl and a beach bucket and spade, all adorned with the bangface black and white logo. thus bangface is a very unique party when it comes to aesthetics. however a similar argument should be made about the music played at the weekenders. it is definitely an electronic music festival, however no genre seems to be dominant: the stage seems to be shared equally by breakcore, gabba, dubstep, drum ‘n’ bass, dubstep and different types of techno. trance (both commercial and psy) is the only subgenre that is, for the most part, absent at bangface. however bangface isn’t exclusively electronica—a few comedy and acoustic acts are often thrown on at the 3rd stage for good measure. amongst the artists which have been featured at bfw are old school acts such as the orb and atari teenage riot; big names of the present such as squarepusher, venetian snares, and dillinja; top mashup artists such as luna c and shitmat, as well as plainly unusual performers, such as politically incorrect comedy singer kunt and the gang and the countryside alliance crew, a drum ‘n’ bass/hip hop sound system that does “countryside themed” and west country accented remixes of famous songs, with all crew-members performing on stage with the classic tweed farmer look. thus, this is an especially eclectic musical mix for an especially eclectic party. and this has not gone unrecognised in the uk raving scene, as testified by time out london saying that the 2009 weekender would “make bestival look like f***ing question time” (lawrence 2008). it has even won the attention of the international press (a quite rare form of positive publicity for the raving scene), with the new york times’ interview of the bangface main organiser, who goes by the nickname of james st. acid, which was published in 2007 and was used to promote the first weekender party (knight 2007). on the whole, this is not a party for the faint-hearted. the type of electronica that is played here is of the dark, heavy sort. at the same time the overall eclecticism of this party means that most versatile electronica fans will not leave unhappy. the party theme is in tune with the often irreverent spirit of many raves in the uk, where there is a marked popularity of colourful and eclectic fancy dress, often combined with sometimes morbid and often politically incorrect humour. it is clear that bangface weekender’s popularity—it has sold out each one of its four editions—owes as much to the creativity of the organisers as it does to their ability to cater to the aesthetic and comedic tastes of uk ravers. and the special setting of the camber sands pontins allows for extra and extended interaction whilst making the best of the amenities of the resort. the people the time has come now to turn my attention to the most important part of bangface weekender: the party people. first of all, a few clarifications: this is not a family friendly festival—only over 18s are admitted. the crowd is generally fairly homogenous in terms of age, and thus is formed mostly of 20 somethings with a few people also in their 30s and late teens. however, this festival has other types of diversity to offer. compared to other festivals in the uk, which tend to be composed by over 90% british residents, this party attracts many visitors from abroad, who travel specifically for this. there’s french, dutch, germans and belgians by the hundreds; plus danes, swedes, italians, spaniards and poles by the dozens. it’s interesting how hundreds of youths from around europe all congregate on these shores, which are a stone’s throw from where the decisive battle was won during the last successful foreign invasion of england, back almost a thousand years ago, in 1066. indeed, the determination of all festivalgoers, present company included, is outstanding and has been sometimes even rewarded by the organisers. in 2010, a group of sicilians were given a free chalet the following year as a reward for their determination. during the eyjafjallajökull volcano eruption, undeterred by the cancellation of their flights, they decided to drive the entire 5,000 kilometres to camber sands and back. at last year’s edition, having mentioned i’d flown straight from new mexico to attend, i was given an extra welcome pack. this irreverent solidarity runs across nationality and cultural lines. but it also rests on some forms of breaking the conventional rules and laws. every year the festival has a few gatecrashers, who are usually able to jump the fence that separates the pontins from the outside. they have to settle for partying in the chalets as rigorous wristband checks prevent them from going into the arena. however they usually are helped in their efforts to get away from security by other festival-goers. the predominant logic here is that, with the festival turning in good profits and selling out, a few intruders who could not afford their tickets are more than welcome. furthermore, it has often been the case that one year’s gatecrashers have become paying ravers by the following year, as well as vice-versa. [text removed at request of author] additionally, the possibility of playing your own music in the chalets creates the opportunity to throw small improvised parties. more enterprising ravers will also decorate their own chalets in the quirky ways to attract attention. the improvisation and organisation can take various forms and extents. my two most vivid memories of this are showing up to a chalet which had set up its own rig and sound system—the noise was making the walls and windows tremble—and attending a late night all-men “no tops” party, organised by a group of very loud and boisterous scottish ravers. on a final note, this festival sees the diy spirit of uk raving interact with a visually and musically eclectic party in a classic british working class setting. bangface is in so many ways as much a party as a multi-faceted cultural phenomenon. this phenomenon is facing a big change in 2012, as the festival moves to newquay in cornwall, in pursuit of a bigger site with camping options available (bangface 2012e). thus, the format is undergoing changes, but hopefully its spirit won’t. acknowledgements this article is dedicated to all the wonderful people of bangface, without whom this piece of work would have not been possible. in particular, i want to dedicate this to the inspirational sam “fez” may, who, with his unconditional love for bangface, gave me the determination and the passion to write this article. author biography eric turner is a 2nd year sociology phd student at the university of new mexico. his research interests include social movements, new media and the raving scene in the us and europe. email: <eturne84@unm.edu>. references bangface. 2011a. ‘‘bangface weekender 2011’’. bangface. <http://www.bangface.com/weekender/default.aspx> (accessed 3 march 2011). bangface. 2011b ‘‘bangface news’’. bangface. <http://www.bangface.com/> (accessed 29 may 2011). bangface. 2012a. ‘’bangface weekender 2008’’. bangface. <http://www.bangface.com/weekender/archives/bfw08/bfw2008.htm> (accessed 16 february 2012). bangface. 2012b. ‘’bangface weekender 2009’’. bangface. <http://www.bangface.com/weekender/archives/bfw09/bfw2009.htm> (accessed 16 february 2012). bangface. 2012c. ‘’bangface weekender 2010’’. bangface. <http://www.bangface.com/weekender/archives/bfw2010/bfw2010.htm> (accessed 16 february 2012). bangface. 2012d. ‘’bangface weekender 2011’’. bangface. <http://www.bangface.com/weekender/archives/bfw2011/bfw2011.htm> (accessed 16 february 2012). bangface. 2012e. ‘‘bangace weekender 2012’’. bangface. <http://www.bangface.com/weekender/default.aspx> (accessed 16 february 2012). bbc news. 2011. ‘‘pontin’s to get a disney makeover’’. bbc news. 6 february. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12378104> (accessed 15 january 2012). knight, sam. 2007. ‘‘bangface: the return of rave?’’. the new york times. 21 january. lawrence, eddie. 2008. ‘‘festival reviews: bangface weekender’’. time out london. 13 november. unveiling the secret: the roots of trance dave mothersole <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.01.10> figure 1. riding an enfield bullet, late 1980s goa. photo: teresa sconfienza. so there we were, three fresh faced south london former soul-boys in bashed up armani jeans and converse, huddled together on the back of a motorbike taxi, heading off to our first party. “we’ll show these hippies what it’s all about” i thought as the driver, perched up on the bike’s tank, deftly negotiated the pot holes and a million insects buzzed away in the warm night air. it was late august 1986 and still monsoon time. as we grew closer i could see dozens of royal enfields haphazardly abandoned on the pathway that lead to the carcass of the old catholic church where the party was being held. groups of people sat around outside smoking chillums. some looked up and stared as we passed by and it began to dawn on me that this might not turn out quite as i’d expected. nothing though, could prepare me for the shock i got as we walked inside. it was like stepping into another world. uv pictures of blacksploitation babes and leather clad joy boys hung from the walls as the speakers pumped out these dark, synthetic beats. wild-eyed loons in flip flops and rags leapt about next to girls who looked like they had just walked in off some milanese catwalk. an american kid in his late teens dressed in a mickey mouse tracksuit and sporting the best billy idol haircut i’d ever seen, walked up and offered us some liquid acid. “full trip or half trip” he leered, pulling out a whacking great needle-less syringe and gesturing at us to hold out our hands for a dose. “could change your life”, he said with a sly chemical grin and an air of overbearing superiority. i went for half, holding out my nervously clenched fist in a mixture of curiosity and fear. outside indian chai ladies from the local villages had set up little stalls selling tea and cakes and all around people were dancing like it was their last night on earth. clouds of pungent manali smoke filled the air as the incessant, narcotic groove chugged away like a runaway train. it was like lord of the flies and h.g. wells’ time machine in a blender with an acid fried version of miami vice. a post apocalyptic monte carlo reclaimed by nature and inhabited by a tribe of wild, decadent, jet set gypsies partying their way into some new collective consciousness. far from showing them what it was all about, we looked on in a mixture of horror, fascination and wide-eyed disbelief. passive observers who’d stumbled across this weird bacchanalian scene. in a church, at the end of a dirt track. a few thousand miles from where we from, but a million miles from anything we knew. as defining year zero moments go, this was a major one for me. i’d expected to find a few burnt out potheads singing bob marley songs around a campfire. not this. that american kid was right—life was never quite the same again. to understand how a bunch of western misfits, searchers, junkies and fugitives ended up dancing to a mutant strain of proto-techno on a beach on the arabian sea, you have to go back to the late 60s. the story of how goa became a magnet for freaks the world over, can be seen in the excellent facebook documentary, goa hippy tribe. suffice to say though, by the mid-70s, the full moon parties were in full swing with bands playing all night on big four way speaker stacks. come the early 80s, the original crowd of hedonistic settlers had been joined by a new generation, many of them european, who brought their own music with them. figure 2. dj laurent, danillo and dr bobby mid-1980s goa. photo: teresa sconfienza. it’s unclear exactly who set up the first electronic music parties in goa—some credit a character called dr bobby (father of tiga)—but it is known that many of the new arrivals would frequent clubs in ibiza, london, berlin, rimini and riccione when they returned to europe for the summer. it’s also clear that they had little or no attachment to the 70s rock favoured by the original crowd. initially they were met with some fierce resistance, but by 1983 electronic music had pretty much taken over. and so it was at the same time that chicago was creating house and detroit was forging ahead with what would become techno, the roots of trance were being sawn on the beaches of anjuna and vagator. and just as chicago had ron hardy and detroit had the electrifying mojo, goa had a dj called laurent. if it wasn’t for him, it’s quite possible that the music played at parties in goa would have been little more than a carbon copy of what was going on back in europe and america. but like all true pioneers, laurent made it much more than the sum of it’s parts and in doing so created a whole new style of music. legend has it that when he left france for goa he told his family he’d be back in a couple of months, though he was never to return. whether this is real or not is anyone’s guess.[1] goa has always been a place that lives on rumours and half-truths and separating fact from fiction has never been easy. for his part, laurent credits fellow frenchman fred disko with being the first person to play electronic music in goa. and there were of course others like swiss rudi, stefano and the now ubiquitous gil. but it was laurent who defined the style and set the parameters for what would become trance. he took all the new electronic music coming out of europe and america, cut out most of the vocals and parts he didn’t like, extended the parts he did and stitched it all together into one long, constantly morphing psychedelic groove. new wave, italo-disco, ebm, new beat, goth, electro, hi-nrg, synth-pop, house—anything was up for grabs. as long as it had the right vibe, it could be made to fit. but unlike his dj counterparts in the west, laurent didn’t use records—the heat and dust in goa made that impossible—he used cassettes. tapes had been played at parties in goa ever since the introduction of amplified music and by the early 80s the sony professional walkman was the deck of choice. it was hard wearing, sounded good and it had a pitch control. it also had a mechanical pause button with a very precise action. this was imperative, not just for playing live, but also as a way to re-edit and re-arrange tracks. many of the biggest hits in goa during the 80s were substantially re-edited, often to take out any unwanted vocals, but also to extend some of the rhythmic passages. laurent’s re-edits of blancmange’s “living on the ceiling”, boytronic’s “hurts” and soft cell’s “sex dwarf” are legendary examples, but many other songs had the same treatment. figure 3. dj laurent. photo: teresa sconfienza. removing the vocals was considered important as they would often distract from the dancer’s trip. however, it did depend on what type of vocal it was. anything that sounded pop-y was out, but more abstract subject matter, especially if delivered in a new wave style voice, was allowed. so acts like depeche mode, psyche and front 242 were often played with the vocals intact, whilst den harrow, for example, wasn’t. but whilst singing was often removed, newsreel and documentary style voices were used a lot. and as lsd and manali charas were the most prevalent drugs at parties, the audiences were very susceptible to the content of these soundbites. religion, rebirth, the cold war, drugs, time travel, mysticism, nuclear disaster and sci-fi were all popular themes and at times it felt like these messages were being beamed down directly from space; that we were god’s chosen ones, his disco dancing, cosmic flower children ecstatically gyrating our way, shiva-like into new realms and understanding. that’s probably why laurent’s style caught on. by taking the psychedelic aspects of experimental rock and applying them to electronic dance music, he had created a sound that was both accessible and otherworldly. it was functional too, which was important because like any other dj, his success depended on his ability to make people dance. the demographic in goa at that time was quite wide, with the age range going from 18–50 and the male to female ratio fairly even. his skill was to get all these people on board whilst simultaneously pioneering a new style of music. and like all truly great djs, he was able to do this because he had the ability to make records translate. tracks like orient affair’s “classic dance” or hypnosis’ “droid” may have sounded a bit camp or even pompous back in europe, but they were given a strange poignancy as 500 people kicked up dust clouds under the coconut palms. messing with song tempos was another laurent trademark and you would often hear him slowing hi-nrg tracks down to around 100 bpm. he really understood the importance of context. because of the drugs, the mind-blowing locations and the tribalistic nature of goan beach parties, he could make tracks feel and sound different. figure 4. gil and laurent at party on south anjuna beach, 1991. photo. goa gil. playing for anything up to 10 hours at a time he would move from dark, hard hypnotic beats during the night, to sweet, uplifting, sun kissed grooves in the morning. from skinny puppy and nitzer ebb to koto and laser dance; from 100 to 150 bpm; from nightmare-ish and scary to blissed out and glorious. it was a heady combination and one that had a tremendous impact on the lives of many. two youtube videos, the second of which contains the only known footage of laurent djing: goa beach party 1992 (part 1). goa beach party 1992 (part 2). after that first party, i stayed in anjuna for a few months as the season picked up, before travelling around india. i went back to goa the following year and fully immersed myself in the freak lifestyle. it was a wonderful time and i was lucky enough to be a part of some truly amazing parties. when i got back, acid house had started to happen in england, so i got involved in that and gradually lost touch with the goa scene. i’m not fan of what trance became. as soon as people started calling it psytrance and making music with goa in mind, it lost its way for me. that’s fine though. i’m not a fan of what punk became either—but that doesn’t stop the clash being my favourite band. just because trance became a narrow, soulless succession of drug triggers, that doesn’t take anything away from what laurent did back in the 80s and early 90s. his legacy goes beyond way beyond such limitations. apparently he’s still living in goa, doing his thing, shunning the limelight and occasionally turning down interviews with visiting journalists.[2] the real father of trance. a true legend. listen to dave’s tribute mix to laurent. a selection of the acts played by laurent and others in goa from 1983–1989: acts of madmen, alien sex fiend, a split second, anne clark, android, arthur baker, art of noise, bad, bappi lahiri, blancmange, borghesia, boytronic, cabaret voltaire, carlos peron, cassandra complex, cccp, chris & cosey, code 61, cyber people, daf, decadance, den harrow, depeche mode, devine, dr calculus, ecstacy club, egyptian lover, electra, fad gadget, fatal attraction, force legato, front line assembly, front 242, fockewulf 190, giorgio moroder, hard corps, hashim, house master boys, hypnosis, icarus, information society, ironic remark, i start counting, james ray and the performance, jellybean benitez, jean-michel jarre, john carpenter, karen finley, keith leblanc, koto, klf, kraftwerk, krush, lama, laser cowboys, laser dance, liaisons dangereuses, man parish, manufacture, mark imperial, mark shreeve, ministry, mittageisen, moev, morton sherman bellucci, moskwa tv, neon, neon judgement, new beat express, new order, newcleus, nitzer ebb, n.o.i.a., nux nemo, off, orient afair, peter richard, poesie noire, portion control, public relations, psyche, richard h. kirk, robotiko rejekto, sandy marton, severed heads, screaming trees, signal aout 42, simple minds, sisterhood, skinny puppy, space opera, spectrum, soft cell, syntech, tackhead, tangerine dream, tantra, telex, the maxx, time zone, torsten fenslau, total, tribantura, two of china, vicious pink, voyou, yello, zwischenfall, 400 blows, 4you, 16 bit. references davis, erik. 1995. “sampling paradise: the technofreak legacy of golden goa”. available at: <http://www.techgnosis.com/paradise.html> (accessed 20 february 2012). goa hippy tribe. facebook group at <http://www.facebook.com/goahippytribe> (accessed 20 february 2012). filmography “goa beach party 1992 (part 1)”. youtube. 9:47. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1p52fw4p-5o> (accessed 20 february 2012). “goa beach party 1992 (part 2)”. youtube. 9:45. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=gzjpdavy0rm> (accessed 20 february 2012). author biography dave mothersole is an english dj and music journalist. in the mid-1980s he went travelling to india and stumbled on the goa party scene, an experience that still informs his work today. he is best associated with the london tech-house sound and is widely regarded as one of its founding fathers. he has written for muzik magazine, mixmag and jockey slut and he spent years working behind the counter at swag records in croydon. over the last 20 odd years he has taken his sound to hundreds of parties across the globe and he continues to travel the world playing underground electronic dance music. <http://soundcloud.com/davemothersole>. this article was first published on bleep43, 14 april 2010. notes [1] in the reader comments to the original article, laurent himself confirmed that he did not return to paris. [2] there has been a fair amount written about goa in the 90s, but erik davis’ (1995) article is by far the best piece i’ve seen. it contains the only known interview with laurent. we call it swedish techno anna ostrom founder and general manager, svaj music café <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.12> a while ago, i got a cd from a friend in london. he's not a dj, but he had put together lots of tracks and i really liked what i was listening to. then i realised that roughly one third of the tracks were by swedish producers. he was quite surprised to hear this as he had no idea where the producers came from. and to be honest, perhaps it's not that important in the globalized music world of today. still, i often hear people saying: "oh, i just love swedish techno" and then they go on listing names of producers. perhaps it's not strange, given that in many specialised record shops internationally, you often find special categories such as "swedish techno". so, what is swedish techno, and is it relevant to talk about a certain national sound? for me and many others, the answer is very much about an era in history when, about 15 years ago,cari lekebusch, adam beyer and joel mull were fiddling with sounds and created something new. when i was buying records as a techno dj in the late 1990s these guys were favorites, but i also liked records by producers like jesper dahlbäck, samuel l session, mhonolink, robert leiner and thomas krome.swedish techno can be defined as loop-based and focused on compressed beats and the percussive elements in the track, compared to us or german techno that tended to focus more on raw bass lines and staccato synth stabs. compressors played a large part in the development of the sound at this time—cari lekebusch even produced a track called "de sju skenande kompressorerna", which is something like "7 compressors gone berserk". originally it was known as the stockholm techno sound but gradually, with the contributions of artists from other parts of sweden, it evolved into the swedish techno sound. swedish techno was also partially a club phenomenon that happened for a few years in the late 1990s. despite its internationally commercial success, the development of swedish techno over the years has not always been an easy path for all of those involved. especially between the mid 1990s and the early 2000s, the dance and club culture associated with techno was deemed unacceptable by the establishment and, thus, was heavily policed by the swedish authorities. in addition, gendered informal structures and hierarchies within the swedish techno scene have made it difficult for female djs/ producers to be recognized and accepted on the same terms as the male majority. the rave commission and the fight to dance in the beginning of the 1990s, there was no need to go outside stockholm in order to enjoy a proper techno night out. unfortunately the techno clubs were shut down, one after the other, as a result of policing and the crackdown carried out by the so-called "rave commission". this small division within the local police organisation was set up by the authorities in 1996 to fight drug abuse among youth, but has been criticised for being "culture police" whose methods were considered humiliating. since they abruptly and efficiently closed down many good techno club initiatives in a short period, there have been several high profile clashes between police, party-goers and club promoters. ever since their emergence, electronic dance music scenes have formed in response to oppressive authorities and governmental regulations (st john 2009). this is certainly the case with the swedish techno scene. the most prominent clashes took place at the techno club docklands in finnboda varv, nacka, just outside the stockholm city center. the media's portrayal of techno clubs as "drug liberal" was all that was needed for the public and the authorities to support the police to close as many techno clubs as possible. by the end of the 1990s, the number of techno clubs in stockholm had been reduced drastically, with venue owners categorically turning techno club promoters down in favour of clubs playing other kinds of music. some commentators went as far as calling it "musical racism". even though a new generation of techno producers was emerging, techno was a rather rare commodity in stockholm's clubs and bars by the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the following decade. this climate prevailed at the time when i, together with two friends, opened the dj café svaj in 2002. our aim with svaj was to enable as many djs as possible to have access to turntables, a dj mixer and an audience in an unpretentious context. also, by opening a daytime café, we thought we would avoid the disapproval of the swedish authorities and those among the population who were critical of electronic dance music (edm) and nightclub culture. but we were wrong. the fear and resistance surrounding the techno scene in stockholm at that time was remarkable. during the first six months, the windows in our venue were covered in mud, we received anonymous letters and emails telling us that we should move back to the suburbs where we supposedly belonged, and we were also reported to various authorities, including the landlord, for causing unacceptable noise, smells from the kitchen, etc. we were also harassed by members of the rave commission, who visited us regularly. the police had an unmarked car outside svaj for several months, and many of our guests told us they were stopped by the police leaving the café and were asked questions about cannabis and drug abuse. after some discussions with the police, they admitted that they were monitoring us because of the specific type of music (i.e. techno) played in the venue. however, after this initial period we received lots of positive media attention and also introduced an age limit of 20 years to have a coffee (!) at svaj. as a result, the rave commission lost interest in our business. in the present day, the legacy of the rave commission is disputed by various key players such as government research bodies, journalists and prominent cultural commentators. however, for many years the commission had strong support in the media, which contributed to public suspicions about rave, techno and dance club culture. at this time, "rave" meant "drugs" more than dancing, and any techno party was reported using words like "rave", "razzia" and "drugs", with newspapers running headlines in 1996 like "the police razzia ended the rave party", "drug dealing at the rave party" and "14 arrested after rave party" (jägerbrand 2006) in about 2003, techno started to become more popular in clubs categorized as more "upscale" in stockholm. gradually, techno and edm made their way into the commercial areas of the city center, with promoters booking famous international djs/musicians. as techno gained acceptance among the general public, the rave commission was forced to scale down its activities. as techno became more frequent in the swedish club scene, the media also started to change their attitude towards techno. when techno started being played more frequently in swedish clubs in the middle of the last decade, it was all about a style called "minimal techno", which is more melodic and softer sounding overall compared to the more slamming, faster-paced techno sound of the pre-2000s. new names started to emerge in the techno scene, not least artists coming from other genres such as pop, house, trance, and so on. those among the big swedish hitters in the 2000s include håkan lidbo, swedish house mafia, eric prydz, axwell, pär grindvik, thomas andersson, anders ilar, aril brikha, ozgur can, staffan linzatti, acaric/patrik skoog, john dahlbäck, ida engberg, the rice twins, petter, the field, dada life, zoo brazil, minilouge, hardcell, andreas tilliander, style of eye and many others. these producers are all swedish, but it would be very difficult to talk about them representing a certain "swedish" sound. in sum, "swedish techno" has traveled a path similar to many other genres that started among a few underground and dedicated enthusiasts and then "broke through" to become gentrified as a marketable brand in the commercial centers of the national and international music and club industry. this did not happen overnight, but rather through the persistence of djs and promoters who have struggled to keep the scene alive year after year despite hostile authorities. the masculine vanity one thing that stands out about swedish techno (along with most edm genres) is the male dominance among "big name" djs and producers. when media reported on the club and dj scene, prior to and throughout the time of svaj (2002–2007), the female contributors tended to disappear among the big names within the scene. as studies on electronic dance music culture have demonstrated internationally (gavanas 2009; hutton 2006; pini 2001; rietveld 2004; rodgers 2010), it is no coincidence that techno culture, dj technology and djing have been associated with men and masculinity. male djs are part of the norm while female djs are considered exotic exceptions. furthermore, socialization around djing and dj technology in techno culture tends to exclude female participants. consequently, it is an uphill battle to become accepted and recognized as a female dj in the techno scene—even in "gender equal" sweden. given the general oppression and policing against early swedish techno culture, there were internal hierarchies among participants in the scene that denied some people recognition and acceptance while celebrating others. during the years i was working with svaj, i noticed some interesting patterns. for example, mostly male djs approached us for gigs and, without any hesitation, they frequented the turntables, irrespective of their skills. obviously, there were lots of women who wanted to dj as well, but they were considerably more modest in their approach and it took a fair bit of encouragement to get them onto the turntables. in the beginning, most of the djs assumed that it was my male colleagues who were running svaj and especially the music part of the café. being a woman, it was assumed that i was responsible for the kitchen. when the djs came to svaj to give us their mixes, they always asked for the guys if i was the only person working. on our web page there were congratulations "to the boys at svaj" for a great music place and if djs wanted to book gigs they always approached my male colleagues. obviously, i was not approached about dj matters because women in the techno scene were not expected to possess any musical knowledge or technical skills. there were also some really comical situations when some of the male djs had problems with the equipment and there was "only" me in the venue. djs rarely came up with the idea to ask me for help and many were obviously embarrassed if i asked them if they needed help with the technology, especially if i then managed to solve the problem. after a while working at svaj, i used to entertain myself by not asking those who had problems with the dj gear if i could be of any help. instead i waited to see how long it would take before they admitted they could not figure out what was wrong with the equipment (or them). sometimes it happened that djs would ask me to call the guys who worked at svaj for assistance if they were not there. in stockholm's techno scene at this time, many male djs had no experience relating to females as equals in a music context. i remember especially one male dj who i had a dialogue with for quite a long time at svaj. when i told him about a recent gig i had at the same club where he had also djed, he was genuinely surprised and said:"what!! are you also a dj? is it your boyfriend who has taught you how to dj?"i thought it had been obvious that i was a dj due to our discussion, and besides that, i am pretty sure he did not know whether i had a boyfriend or not. he just assumed that i had a boyfriend since i knew how to handle turntables. i did not know how to answer his question, so i just asked, with a smile on my face, if it was his girlfriend who had taught him how to dj. for some reason he thought this was hilarious, because he laughed hysterically and said he would definitely come to my next gig: "how interesting to get the opportunity to listen to a female dj"! so why would it be interesting to listen to a female dj? it's not more interesting than listening to a male dj, i'd say. but since there were very few women playing the major clubs in sweden during the 1990s and early 2000s, female djs became exotic. further, female participation in, and contribution to, the music business is measured differently than male participation and contributions. women are often perceived to be less technically skilled then men. on the other hand, if you "surprise" the audience with your technical skills as a female dj, you get more attention as a dj than a male dj with the same level of skill. the phrase "not bad for being a lady" is definitely something i've heard quite often. while male djs get assessed according to their musical and technical skills, female djs are judged not only on their skills but on many other factors, including the way they look. i have often come across comments about the way female djs look rather than what type of music they represent. for example, i've heard on more than one occasion from other (male) djs that if there was an apparently unattractive woman behind the decks one could expect greater technical skills, and vice versa. i've also heard comments among other (male) djs, that attractive female djs were "attention seekers". yet at the same time, young and attractive female djs were definitely more popular than those who were older and/or less attractive to some of the promoters in the more upscale areas in stockholm, where one's appearance becomes more central to one's success. it was also in this area that one big promoter made a big thing about booking one of the world's most famous "topless" djs. further, in interviews with the press, other female djs and myself were always asked questions like "what's it like to be a female dj?" and "what do you do to encourage other female musicians?". as far as i know, my male dj friends were never asked similar questions. working with svaj, i got a good sense of how many active female djs there were, especially in stockholm, and what their music style and skills were. at our clubs and events we always set our target at 30% of performances by female djs and succeeded at attaining this, even though that meant booking the same female djs quite often. aiming for 50% would have been impossible because there were not enough female djs. while some promoters in stockholm were putting on "ladies nights" with exclusively female djs, we did not do this at svaj. instead, we wanted women to play on the same terms as men. but it was not without protest, especially when women were featured as main acts. i remember one guy complaining that he would not attend one of our club nights since we had booked a female dj—one of the busiest female swedish acts—in a prime slot. that the (male) dj who was playing afterwards, also in one of the prime slots, was far more inexperienced than this female dj was apparently of no issue. today, we're seeing significantly more women establishing themselves among the top techno djs, and journalists now show plenty of interest in both techno and female techno djs. there are, as i see it, three main reasons behind this development. first, techno has grown increasingly popular, has a greater audience and is more accepted than before. the media cannot, therefore, ignore techno as they did when it was an exclusively underground scene. also, it is likely that some of those who went to rave parties in the 1990s are now journalists themselves. since techno has grown in popularity, there are also more people—both males and females—who become djs. additionally, since there are now role models among female djs playing the clubs, many young females are encouraged to become djs themselves. finally, over the years, women in the edm industry in sweden have networked, organised clubs, formed record labels, produced music, worked closely with labels, joined edm programmes on radio channels, worked as managers for artists in the industry and talked about gender attitudes in the media—whether they wanted to or not. together, these things have made it easier for female djs in sweden in 2011. author biography anna ostrom has been part of the stockholm techno scene in several ways over the years. she was one of the founders of svaj, a techno café that was open from 2002–05, the promoter of svaj club during 2006–07 as well as an organizer of different parties and events from 2002–07 with the name of svaj. she has also been active as dj anaya for over ten years and she was part of ana international penetrator. together with dj gavana, she founded the dj network sister sthlm that was active2003–07. at present, she lives in london. <www.myspace.com/djanaya>. email: <reyanna12@hotmail.com>. references gavanas, anna. 2009. teknologi, genusifiering och andlighet bland djs på elektroniska dansmusikscener i berlin, london och stockholm [you better be listening to my fucking music you bastard!]. in rundgång: genus och populärmusik, eds. hillevi ganetz, anna gavanas, hasse huss and ann werner, 83–89. stockholm: makadam. pini, maria. 2001. club cultures and female subjectivity: the move from home to house. new york: palgrave. rodgers, tara. 2010. pink noises: women on electronic music and sound. durham: duke university press. hutton, fiona. 2006. risky pleasures? club cultures and female identities. aldershot: ashgate. st john, graham. 2009. technomad: global raving countercultures. london: equinox. jägerbrand, mikael. 2006. docklands—ravehimmel eller knarkhelvete? virvelvind förlag. dance floors of the mind: performing nightlife research during the day sheena hyndman york university (canada) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.01.14> over the last decade, electronic dance music (edm) has become a pervasive musical and cultural phenomenon, extending far beyond the realm of the underground dance scene and becoming something of a fixture in contemporary popular culture. the use of edm by non-club goers to accompany a variety of activities that take place off the dance floor is becoming increasingly common, as is the volume of electronic music consumed incidentally to more mundane daily activities such as shopping or watching television. as a result, there is a growing class of edm fans who enjoy, or at least appreciate, this style of music but are also unlikely to listen to it in more traditional edm consumption contexts, such as on the dance floor. leaving aside the question of whether or not such mainstreaming is beneficial for electronic music and culture, it is undeniable that the audience of edm is both broader than before and also significantly understudied. the majority of scholarly work that studies audiences of edm tends to focus on the perspectives and experiences of those who belong to club and festival cultures, ostensibly the main settings for the consumption of this music. however, new contexts for electronic music consumption and the corresponding broadening of the audience for edm speak to the need for some discussion of how non-club goers experience and assign meaning to edm. as such, i believe that it is instructive to investigate how the non-traditional consumer of edm experiences this music by considering where and how listeners engage with electronic music and what impact these interactions have had on shaping the opinions of these listeners. this essay will make a case for the benefits of performing edm-based research off the dance floor. to make this point, i will refer to interviews conducted in support of my doctoral research on the subject of remixing,[1] demonstrating that an approach to edm fieldwork that includes the perspectives of those whose experiences take place outside of edm’s normative consumption context can lead to conclusions about the uses and perceived value of edm that are potentially more nuanced than those arrived at via nightclub fieldwork alone. while daytime inquiries will certainly never usurp dance floor-based participant-observer fieldwork as the primary locus for edm research, i believe that expanding edm research beyond the purview of the nightclub allows for more diversity in the sample population, making the conclusions drawn from the data much richer than those arrived at through nightlife fieldwork alone. off-the-floor research methodology approaching the study of edm from outside the dance floor was a problem that puzzled me initially. i knew that i wanted my sample population to be as large as i could get it in a short period of time, and that i wanted to include as many different types of respondents as possible. in order to achieve this goal, i did two things: first, i delimited the parameters of the respondent pool into the four categories of dj/producer, record label representative, music blogger, and (for lack of a better term) non-musician audience member. limiting the type of people i wanted to include in my study to just a few groups seems an obvious thing to do, but there was much to consider in making this decision. i wanted the music industry perspective to be present in my work, but the music industry is large and complex, with many different players. i was also constrained by the time limits associated with funding and degree completion, a reality of performing research under the aegis of the academic institution, so i chose not to approach people who were unlikely to speak to me, such as pop stars or executives from major record labels. this, in turn, led to my decision to focus on the underground and independent music industry and, on the whole, getting responses from local djs and producers, small record labels and music bloggers proved to be quite easy, even when these people were only responding to decline my request for an interview. with respect to non-musician audience respondents, i decided that it was important for my study to reflect a broad swath of listening habits and music preferences. i didn’t want to hear only from people who enjoy and regularly consume electronic music, and i hoped to be able to add dissenting voices to my conversation about remixing in addition to the perspectives of die-hard fans and the people who only occasionally come into contact with remixed music. therefore, i approached anyone and everyone irrespective of factors such as age, gender, geographic location or music preference, a tactic that yielded a large and very diverse sample population given the constraints of my study. this brings me to the second point. in the implementation of my research, i used a method of non-probability sampling called “snowball sampling” in order to expand the pool of study respondents within a relatively short time frame. the snowball method of population sampling relies on study participants to reach out to the people in their own social networks and solicit their involvement in the study. like most methods of ethnographic research, this method has both advantages and disadvantages. the major flaw of this method of source acquisition is well-known to researchers—namely that to secure the involvement of interview respondents in this way means that i risk drawing from a sample pool that is more homogenous than other randomized methods of collecting interview data. however, an advantage of using this method is that it allows for a greater depth of exploration into the social uses and meanings constructed by the group being surveyed. as aram sinnreich notes, “[the] result isn’t necessarily generalizable to the population as a whole, but it says more about the symbolic system of a given social network than would a random sampling technique” (2010: 6). another advantage of the snowball method is that it is very compatible with today’s social networking websites because of the ease with which respondents who had already agreed to be a part of my research were able to pass along information about the study to potentially interested friends through a common media platform. the internet was instrumental in facilitating my field research, and i made extensive use of soundcloud, facebook and the hype machine to contact potential study respondents in addition to using skype, google phone and email to conduct interviews. combining snowball sampling and the internet proved to be a very successful strategy and, after 8 months, i ended up with a total of 81 study participants, exceeding my goal of 80 participants by a hair. i first came to understand how broad the audience for edm and remixes had become when i took a job as an indoor cycling, or spinning,[2] instructor in early 2010. ironically, this part-time job in addition to my full-time studies and teaching obligations was intended to supplement my income so that i could expand the number of nightclubs i performed fieldwork in—that is to say, i was looking to add club nights that charged a cover fee to my small roster of club nights where entry was free of charge—but it wasn’t long before i abandoned the idea of focusing the whole of my attention on dance floors. what i discovered shortly after becoming a spinning instructor was that, outside of the djs and club goers i had met on the dance floor, indoor cycling instructors are among the most avid consumers of edm remixes i’ve ever met. moreover, much of this consumption occurs despite the instructor’s preference for other styles of music. in other words, instructors choose edm for use in spin classes because of musical qualities such as tempo and pacing that help motivate participants during the workout and not necessarily because of the instructor’s preference for the remixed version of a song. this, naturally, led me to wonder why remixes are such an important part of group fitness, and what, specifically, made this style of music the ideal accompaniment for a really hard work out. moreover, i began to wonder what other types of people might listen to remixed music primarily off the dance floor, and why. the first group of people i interviewed as part of my dissertation research were my indoor cycling colleagues, whom i approached through email, and their responses regarding the perceived suitability of edm remixes versus non-remixed and acoustic/non-electronic music revealed interesting perspectives about how and why remixes are considered ideal for use in spin classes. in the main, i learned that much of what draws a spin instructor to a remix is similar to what brings people back to the club: remixed songs are often longer than their original versions, for instance, making it much easier to coax a hard working effort out of group fitness participants. such comments echo seminal disco producer tom moulton’s sentiments about the problems with the early disco dance floor, namely that the momentum gained while dancing to a good song can be lost quickly when the song ends almost as soon as it has begun (moulton in brewster and broughton 2010: 137). beginning my fieldwork by interviewing my indoor cycling colleagues opened my eyes to the fact that there are many contexts in which people make use of remixed songs in place of their original versions, and i decided to follow up on this idea with the rest of my non-musician audience respondents. this is where judicious use of the internet comes in: the first thing i did was send mass messages to my friends and family via email and facebook explaining my research project and asking them to participate. my plan was to secure the involvement of as many people as i could in this first request for participation, and then inquire as to whether they would feel comfortable asking any friends who might also be interested in my study to participate. in many instances, though, my respondents generously offered to spread the word about my search for participants for me regardless. up to this point, it may seem as though the study ran smoothly from start to finish, but this was hardly the case. i learned that i would need to contact hundreds of potential respondents in order to reach my goal of 80 participants because i could only expect a fraction of the people i emailed to return with their consent. and even when respondents consented (sometimes very enthusiastically) to participate in my study, i learned that i couldn’t count on their input until the interview was underway; many respondents who had agreed initially would forget about our scheduled interview, often more than once, or drop out later because they were too busy, they didn’t feel qualified to answer the questions, they misunderstood the purpose of the study and decided they were no longer interested, and so on. i also learned to follow up aggressively but without being too pushy. this was especially difficult for me because i am generally very shy around strangers in addition to being aware that i was asking my respondents for a huge favour without being able to offer much in return. to this end, i created a follow-up letter in which i politely reminded respondents who hadn’t been in touch for several weeks that i was looking forward to their insights, and to let me know as soon as possible if they had decided to withdraw from the study. in most cases, stragglers were apologetic about their tardiness and we were able to reach an agreement that suited us both, which included compromises such as giving respondents extra time to answer the questions or arranging a phone or skype interview in place of the write-in response. for those who would decline to participate after a long period of silence, i learned to be gracious in defeat: i thanked them for their time, wished them well, and moved on to recruiting more participants. the advantage of performing edm research away from the dance floor the main reason i advocate an approach to edm research that does not focus exclusively on the dance floor is because of the richness of the data that results when study parameters are broadened to include atypical use. when it came to discerning the effects of remixed music consumption on the listening habits of my non-musician audience respondents, this broad approach allowed me to gain insight on why it is that people listen to remixed music in a variety of different contexts. the responses of my indoor cycling colleagues discussed earlier, for example, are indicative of purposeful consumption of remixed music in a context outside the dance floor, and there were many other instances of such purposeful consumption mentioned by my respondents. teachers, in particular, were very likely to extoll the virtues of using remixed music as a part of their educational practice. take, for example, lara, a music teacher from edmonton, canada, who mentioned making use of remixes of jazz standards as a way to provoke classroom discussion and student interest in learning about music from the past. [now that] i’m surrounded by young teenagers, looking up electronic music for me is more advantageous, actually, for my teaching practice. because it’s something that will help me connect to my students a lot easier than if i said, “hey, let’s listen to ‘april in paris’”, and they’re going to go, “what the hell is this?”. but if i go, “hey, let’s listen to ‘april in paris’ remixed by lcd soundsystem”, they would get that.[3] another teacher named david, from philadelphia, argued that remixing is an effective way to involve people in the process of music making who might otherwise be impeded by certain prejudices about what it means to make music: i actually find [the remix] important as a pedagogy strategy. . . . remix as a process is actually a really great, easy way to get younger people involved in music production without bringing some of the baggage of musical talent, of high end production value. you know, a lot of kids can make a lot of really good work that’s really inventive and creative by using materials that they’re already familiar with and the conventions they’re already familiar with. so i actually see a lot of potential for remix as an educational tool.[4] besides making excellent points about the value of remixed music in teaching students about music history and creative practice, what both of these comments should demonstrate is that there is a healthy interest in using remixed music in ways that are not what one may think of as typical at first glance. because many people understand edm in general and remixing in particular to belong to a specific music culture, responses such as lara’s and david’s offer new insight into the sociocultural importance of the edm remix for people outside of edm culture. in addition to the types of purposeful consumption i’ve described above, there was a second category of consumption i was interested in studying. though many non-club goers actively seek edm and remixed music for use in myriad contexts, there is also a growing number of listeners whose consumption of remixed music happens most often by accident and with little, if any, input from the listener. i have called such instances “incidental music consumption”—that is, music listened to while in public spaces or while participating in activities where someone else has control over the music. the most commonly mentioned sites for incidental consumption of remixed music were public spaces such as coffee shops and clothing retailers, followed by film, television and the radio, and most respondents whose consumption of remixed music happens incidentally seemed to recognize that these transient encounters with remixed music had changed their attitudes about remixing and derivative expression for the better—that is to say, they were more likely to appreciate remixing as they encountered it more in their daily lives, even when their preferred styles of music falls squarely in the non-electronic milieu. despite the generally optimistic tone of most respondents, it was not the case that everyone who participated in my study perceived remixing to be a uniformly positive contribution to contemporary music culture. on this subject, one person’s responses stand out. fran, a 49-year-old mother from western canada, was especially vocal in her opposition to the very idea of remixed music, which she only listens to while driving in her car with her teenaged daughter, who assumes control of the radio dial. fran makes it explicit that she perceives remixing to be nothing more than intellectual property theft of a sort that denies listeners the chance to properly contextualize their experiences of so-called original music. however, it soon became apparent that fran’s intellectual preferences may be in conflict with what moves her emotionally when it comes to articulating what she dislikes about remixing. i think [remixes are] trying to take over. and i don’t think that should be allowed to happen, but you can’t stop it. why do you think it shouldn’t be allowed to happen? because, like i said, is the original artist going to be forgotten so that young kids will never hear johnny cash, they’ll just hear all this jazzed up stuff that doesn’t even resemble johnny cash. . . . i just don’t think they should be forgotten. without [the original artist], the remixes wouldn’t exist. so if i asked you whether or not you think remixes are important, what would you say? well, since i don’t go to dance clubs, they’re not important at all, in my opinion. that’s based on my age and my lifestyle. but, here’s the funny thing. i don’t mind listening to them in the van, and i think, “what’s happening to me?”. if it wasn’t for my teenaged daughter playing these all the time, taking over the radio in the car, i wouldn’t have been exposed to them and i wouldn’t have kind of liked them. and so i don’t mind because i like faster music with a faster beat, they’ve grown on me, put it that way. but can i live without them? absolutely.[5] fran’s response is interesting for several reasons, not least because of the apparent conflict between her intellectual preference for original songs and her visceral appreciation for remixed music based on certain musical qualities that are typical to remixing. what is most striking about this particular response, in my view, is that it thoroughly debunks any preconceptions about who typically listens to edm and why. fran is obviously not a fan of edm remixes, but such music does comprise a portion of her regular listening habits, unfortunate though it may be that such listening frequently happens against her will. one contrast between club-based edm research and my off-the-floor approach, especially apparent in fran’s response, is that club-based researchers are unlikely to encounter the voices of dissenters when they focus solely on the dance floor because a person who chooses to go to a club is probably doing so because of an appreciation for the music they expect to hear. by contrast, people who wouldn’t find themselves on the dance floor in a club, like fran, are exposed to edm on a regular basis by virtue of living in contemporary western society. moreover, these people have opinions about the place and value of this music that are overlooked and overshadowed by the perspectives of insiders. this is not to suggest that insider opinions are invalid, only that there is value in considering voices of dissent, especially as such voices can reveal complex and unexpected feelings that are not easily reducible to binaries such as good and bad, original and unoriginal, and so on. fran’s response is an important reminder that electronic dance music has extended its sphere of influence from the underground to the mainstream, indicating a need for scholars to consider the broader effects of this music and its associated culture. conclusion the purpose of this article has been to demonstrate that opening up the study of electronic dance music and culture to include what happens outside the dance floor can result in an unexpectedly rich data set. while i certainly don’t advocate neglecting the club as a site for edm research, my experience interviewing those who wouldn’t likely find themselves on the dance floor has demonstrated two things: first, there are a wide variety of ways that people use, experience, and interpret edm. second, there is a large group of consumers whose perspectives about edm and its place in contemporary culture have not yet been widely recognised. at present, the opinions of non-club goers seem to be most visible in newer research on the subject of remixing and musical derivativeness (e.g., hyndman 2012; sinnreich 2010). this is a great start, but there is much more work to be done. to overlook the perspectives of dance floor outliers, as is the case in so much of the existing literature on the subject of electronic music and culture, is to miss out on a golden opportunity to discover the full extent of edm’s cultural impact. acknowledgements i offer my sincerest thanks to luis-manuel garcia for his thoughtful and insightful comments on early drafts of this article, and for starting this very important conversation with this special issue of dancecult. i also thank graham st john for founding dancecult, a platform in which such a conversation between like-minded researchers can take place. author biography sheena hyndman is a recent graduate of the phd programme in ethnomusicology and musicology at york university in toronto, canada. her dissertation explores the remix as a mediator of changes in expected patterns of music production and consumption. dr. hyndman can be reached at sheena.hyndman@gmail.com. references brewster, bill and frank broughton. 2010. the record players: dj revolutionaries. new york: black cat. hyndman, sheena. 2012. “mediating musical experience: studying the effects of the remix on patterns of music production and consumption”. phd dissertation (ethnomusicology and musicology), york university. sinnreich, aram. 2010. mashed up: music, technology, and the rise of configurable culture. amherst and boston: university of massachusetts press. notes [1] in my dissertation, i define the remix as “a form of derivative musical composition that combines recorded sound with newly composed musical material” (hyndman 2012: 1). a more comprehensive discussion of remixing and remix analogues can be found in chapter one of my dissertation. [2] indoor cycling is better known as “spinning”, a term trademarked by the program’s founder, johnny g. [3] lara, interview with the author (telephone), 8 september 2011. [4] david, interview with the author (online via skype), 16 september 2011. [5] author’s emphasis. fran, interview with the author (telephone), 19 september 2011. 0. editorsintro-typeset3 vol. 1, no. 1 fall 2009 executive editor: graham st john managing editor: eliot bates reviews editor: karenza moore web design: todd thille iii editor's introduction featured articles 1 idm as a "minor" literature: the treatment of cultural and musical norms by "intelligent dance music" ramzy alwakeel 22 decline of the rave inspired clubculture in china: state suppression, clubber adaptations and socio-cultural transformations matthew m chew 35 neotrance and the psychedelic festival graham st john 65 too young to drink, too old to dance: the influences of age and gender on (non) rave participation julie gregory 81 dj culture in the commercial sydney dance music scene ed montano from the floor 95 convergence and soniculture: 10 years of mutek tobias c. van veen 118 the hardcore continuum? jeremy gilbert 123 the abstract reality of the "hardcore continuum" mark fisher 127 12 noon, black rock city graham st john 137 the inverted sublimity of the dark psytrance dance floor botond vitos reviews 142 we call it techno! a documentary about germany’s early techno scene (sextro and wick) hillegonda c rietveld 144 lost and sound: berlin, techno, und der easyjetset (rapp) sean nye 147 chromatic variation in ethnographic research: a review of psychedelic white: goa trance and the viscosity of race (saldanha) anthony d'andrea 150 global nomads: techno and new age as transnational countercultures in ibiza and goa (d'andrea) charles de ledesma 152 breakcore: identity and interaction on peer-to-peer (whelan) emily ferrigno 155 the high life: club kids, harm and drug policy (perrone) lucy gibson cover image: dj shockraver at out of system free party, italy, july 2008. photo by alex canazei www.alexcanazei.com international advisory board andy bennett griffith university (australia) mark butler university of pennsylvania (us) anthony d'andrea university of limerick (ireland) rebekah farrugia oakland university (us) kai fikentscher hunter college (us) chris gibson university of new south wales (australia) jeremy gilbert university of east london (uk) françois gauthier université du québec à montréal (canada) ross harley university of new south wales (australia) david hesmondhalgh university of leeds (uk) tim lawrence university of east london (uk) gordon lynch birkbeck university of london (uk) rene lysloff university of california, riverside (us) alejandro l. madrid university of illinois, chicago (us) charity marsh university of regina (canada) tony mitchell university of technology sydney (australia) andrew murphie university of new south wales (australia) christopher partridge lancaster university (uk) anne petiau itsrs / université paris 5 (france) hillegonda c rietveld london south bank university (uk) sonjah nadine stanley-niaah university of west indies (jamaica) will straw mcgill university (canada) rupert till university of huddersfield (uk) tobias c. van veen mcgill university (canada) michael veal yale university (us) dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture is a peer-reviewed, open-access ejournal for the study of electronic dance music culture (edmc). a platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on the shifting terrain of edmcs worldwide, the journal houses research exploring the sites, technologies, sounds and cultures of electronic music in historical and contemporary perspectives. playing host to studies of emergent forms of electronic music production, performance, distribution, and reception, as a portal for cutting-edge research on the relation between bodies, technologies, and cyberspace, as a medium through which the cultural politics of dance is critically investigated, and as a venue for innovative multimedia projects, dancecult is the forum for research on edmcs. from dancehall to raving, club cultures to sound systems, disco to techno, breakbeat to psytrance, hip hop to dub-step, idm to noisecore, nortec to bloghouse, global edmcs are a shifting spectrum of scenes, genres, and aesthetics. what is the role of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, religion and spirituality in these formations? how have technologies, mind alterants, and popular culture conditioned this proliferation, and how has electronic music filtered into cinema, literature and everyday life? how does existing critical theory enable understanding of edmcs, and how might the latter challenge the assumptions of our inherited heuristics? what is the role of the dj in diverse genres, scenes, subcultures, and/or neotribes? as the journal of the international edmc research network, dancecult welcomes submissions from scholars addressing these and related inquiries across all disciplines. dancecult is published twice a year. ii dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 editor’s introduction fusion festival 2007, germany. photo by sam rowelsky electronic dance music culture (edmc) is changing rapidly. even the genre, subgenre or microgenre you thought you knew yesterday is undergoing a transit that you are barely able to recognise. this rapid transformation in edmc, across a spectrum of fields, and in multiple locations, in the mainstream and a vibrant underculture, was a critical motivation for the formation of this journal, whose first lines you are now reading. a journal that will aid those who hold intellectual and research interests in edmc, comprising something of a group mind as it hosts wide ranging input from international scholars on research associated with edmcs. well, that and the fact that, until now, there has been no journal for the edm research community, whose members hail from multiple countries, with various disciplinary backgrounds and holding manifold research interests. “community” is the appropriate term here since the signs are that edmc is a growing field of research internationally, with an emergent network of researchers. and why wouldn’t it be, if we recognise that clubbing is one of the principal leisure pursuits of our times, or that contemporary life has become flush with the genres, scenes and aesthetics of electronic music. research has evolved rapidly in response to these conditions. scholarship has grown apace with the acceleration of edm movements and cosmopolitan scenes. from raves to clubbing, techno to hip hop, dancehall to psytrance, dub-step to ambient, dance cultures and their music have become contexts for the development of urban leisure economies, production industries, new spiritualities and alternative modes dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(1) 2009, iii-vi issn 1947-5403 ©2009 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.00 of citizenship. studies have emerged to investigate forms of electronic music production, performance, distribution and reception within mainstream and underground contexts. some researchers explore the role of the dj from aesthetic, economic and regional points of view. others focus on how electronic music has filtered into popular culture (e.g. cinema, literature and everyday life). others still, explore the role of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age and class in the formation of edmcs. with connections to disciplines engaged in inquiries upon music, media, religion, society and culture, an international edmc research network has grown steadily, at least since the formation of the mailing list dancecult_l in april 2005, with the assistance of geert lovink and listcultures; and soon after, with the launch of www.dancecult.net, the research and information portal for the edmc research network built almost single handedly by eliot bates. the open and archived email list has over 200 scholars subscribed, and the dancecult portal features an edmc-specific bibliography with almost 300 titles. dancecult, the journal, also known as dj (as in dancecult the journal), an open-access peer reviewed e-journal that uses the open journal systems (ojs) software developed by the public knowledge project and released under the gnu general public license (and brought to life here by eliot where it is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial-share alike 3.0 license) grew out of that development. it was a fairly natural growth in my view. an organic development. all that was needed was the dedication to get it sprouting. and so, together with managing editor eliot bates and reviews editor karenza moore, we have conspired to bring you the inaugural edition of this great adventure. and when i say “we”, i also mean our 25 strong advisory board comprised of experts across all the disciplines with interest in edmc, the contributors to this edition (the authors of feature and “from the floor” articles, and the reviewers of books, films and events), and you, readers and future contributors. the feature articles in this first edition offer an engaging crosscurrent of work in edmc studies, addressing a variety of themes in research from various regions observed from the vantage points of multiple disciplinary perspectives. in our first article, ramzy alwakeel undertakes an investigation of warp records, autechre and aphex twin by way of deleuze and guattari to conclude that idm (intelligent dance music) be read as a “minor” literature. in the second, the state repression and reflexivity of chinese clubculture is investigated by matthew m. chew. it is a theme widely addressed elsewhere (especially in the uk), but this is the first research to address the state reaction to chinese clubculture, and participant adaptations to these interventions. the third article, my own, addresses the role of the festival within psytrance (or psychedelic trance) culture, with specific reference to portugal’s boom festival and its cultural history, with the article advancing the theory of “neotrance” and contributing to the study of the religio-spiritual dimensions of edmc. next, the study of female rave participation in toronto warrants what julie gregory identifies as “accommodative resistance” facilitating and challenging discursive representations of age and gender. finally, ed montano’s piece on sydney’s commercial dj culture investigates dj selections in relation to what he regards as the imperatives of “entertainment” and “education”. another inspiration for this journal was the need for a professional venue for creative writing on edmcs. this is imperative within an area of study which explores the interfacing of bodies and music, and contends with the experience of altered states. there is a common tendency within sociology in particular, and in the more clinical corners of cultural and music studies, to offer rather lifeless scientific or densely theoiv dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 retical texts on edmc, and to justify such approaches with the explanation that it is impossible to render states of otherness (“trance”, “flow”, “vibe” etc), including one’s own conditions of mind and body alteration, through language anyway. such is typical of the social sciences, and studies in religion, for example, where given the general body of “language” available, this comes as little surprise. i am speaking here of the history of disciplinary constraints which leave many scholars ill-disposed to communicate what they observe, let alone experience (in a style that might be considered illuminating, or exciting, or even accurate). we must often turn to the business of journalism to find the best writing on raves and so it is no coincidence that the work of steven shapiro, simon reynolds, matthew collin or kodwo eshun are widely hailed as the best introductions to edmcs, pre and post-rave. this is extraordinary: academics sending their students to journalists to download the opening words and gain the originary insights on edmc. does performing ethnography amount to an institutionalised exercise in ringing the life out of the subject matter in the name of science, discipline or canon; to produce a text that is inaccessible to all but the few versed in a torturous tongue? i don’t know, since many academics, while holding that generation ecstasy is the best entry to rave, assume that the interest obtained will inspire “mature” ethnographies with research questions pursued within a delimited spatial area, and influenced by a thicket of appropriate heuristics shaped by developments in cultural and music theory. i do not question the importance of the latter. i am apprehensive, however, about how academic training may produce researchers and modes of representation remote from the subject matter, or which values personal experience and expression far less than theoretical frameworks that must be reproduced ad nauseam regardless of their relevance, or that apparently discourages heuristic innovations in the apprehension of the research subject. dancecult represents an effort to overcome these tendencies, or at least to strike a balance. and it seeks to achieve this by not only publishing feature articles that are representative of cutting edge research developments across the field of edmc, and which hold an energetic textual style, but by hosting work that is produced in the style of well crafted blog entries attending to field experiences and reports, interviews, and commentaries on current events. these latter pieces (1500-3000 words in length) are hosted in the from the floor section of the journal. in this first edition, dancecult offers a diverse selection of such pieces. the first article addresses montréal’s mutek festival, given retrospective treatment by long-time mutek reviewer and participant tobias c. van veen, who discusses the “body listening” of minimal techno and experimental electronica within the culture of the event. complementing alwakeel’s feature article, van veen queries the boundaries and definitions of the key terms forming the acronym edmc and contributes to our understanding of the porous boundaries between techno and psychedelia. intervening in the “hardcore continuum” controversy initiated by simon reynolds, jeremy gilbert and mark fisher offer pieces based on their presentations at a seminar by that name held on 29 april 2009 at the university of east london. included in this section is my own report on the 2008 burning man festival in nevada’s black rock desert, and an exploration of the “inverted sublimity” of dark psychedelic (or “darkpsy”) music and culture by botond vitos. dancecult aims to publish further interventions on these and other topics in future editions. editor’s introduction v beat generation 2008 at vaillant palace, genova. photo by alex canazei: www.alexcanazei.com finally, dancecult’s first reviews section offers reviews on one documentary film and five books. the film is this is techno! (reviewed by hillegonda c. rietveld), and the books are tobias rapp’s lost and sound: berlin, techno, und der easyjetset (reviewed by sean nye), arun saldanha’s psychedelic white: goa trance and the viscosity of race (reviewed by anthony d’andrea), anthony d’andrea’s global nomads: techno and new age as transnational countercultures (reviewed by charles de ledesma), andrew whelan’s breakcore: identity and interaction on peer-to-peer (reviewed by emily d. ferrigno) and dina perrone’s the high-life: club kids, harm and drug policy (reviewed by lucy gibson). it is my hope that this rich diversity of content stimulates debate and motivates inquiry, pushing the boundaries of research and writing. and, as the biannual scholarly mothership of edmc, dancecult – which by the way, encourages the inclusion of audio and visual material (ensuring that submissions follow our guidelines) – has been mobilised to accommodate such innovation and scholarship. graham st john executive editor of dancecult 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/hrv (za stvaranje adobe pdf dokumenata najpogodnijih za visokokvalitetni ispis prije tiskanja koristite ove postavke. stvoreni pdf dokumenti mogu se otvoriti acrobat i adobe reader 5.0 i kasnijim verzijama.) /hun 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/pdfxoutputintentprofileselector /documentcmyk /preserveediting true /untaggedcmykhandling /leaveuntagged /untaggedrgbhandling /usedocumentprofile /usedocumentbleed false >> ] >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice describing experience: working actively with fieldnote genres in anthropological fieldwork lars nørr mikkelsen aarhus university (denmark) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.01.16> unlike historians, anthropologists create their own documents. we call them fieldnotes, but we speak little about them to each other (sanjek 1990). figure 1. entering the field. photo credit: lea trier krøll (2011) when we are engaged in ethnographic fieldwork in nightlife environments, like all practitioners of fieldwork we use ourselves as methodological tools. for most ethnographers this involves acknowledging that we perceive the field subjectively, and that, to some extent, we ourselves become part of the field as we study it. this is of course also significant in that it impacts how we write our basic research document: the fieldnote.[1] the fieldnote is one of the essential elements of fieldwork, as its composition is the moment in which our more-or-less intangible experiences are transformed into analysable data upon which we can build our published ethnographies. the subject of fieldnotes, however, remains mostly a ‘black box’ of the ethnographic craft. the tendency among fieldwork practitioners to hide their fieldnotes and seldom discuss them probably has much to do with their rather personal character as well as with researchers’ insecurities about whether such writings are sufficiently “scientific”, as jean jackson concludes from interviews with a number of anthropologists about their relationship with their own fieldnotes (1990). it is clear from the vast body of literature on ethnographic methodology that there is a significant on-going effort on the part of its practitioners to develop the practice. this literature addresses such issues as what constitutes a “field” (gupta and ferguson 1997; hine 2006), the political implications of studying and representing others (pels 2000; mason 2006), and the expansion of fieldwork documentation to, for example, recorded soundscapes or photography (harper 2005; spencer 2011). the desire to critically examine and develop ethnographic practice is a consistent theme in the anthropological community. but fieldnotes, as essential as they may be, remain by and large in the dark, which not only hinders the development of this aspect of ethnographic practice, but also presents an obstacle to new practitioners’ gaining a foothold in the field. although fieldnote-writing is generally underrepresented in the methodological canon, there are some exceptions. one of these is writing ethnographic fieldnotes by emerson, fretz and shaw (2011 [1995]), in which the authors offer several useful examples of how to make and arrange one’s fieldnotes. roger sanjek’s 1990 anthology fieldnotes: the making of anthropology is another commendable book-length contribution to the effort to pry open the black box of fieldnotes. it is thus not impossible to find literature on the subject, but relative to other methodological considerations debated among anthropologists, such literature remains scarce. furthermore, many other potential modes of fieldnote-writing remain unacknowledged and unaddressed in the academic community. more has been written on ethnographies as texts, that is, how anthropologists represent their findings in the final published text. in this area we find several inspiring and sometimes very creative forms of representation, a classic in this regard being john van maanen’s tales of the field: on writing ethnography (1988), in which the author comments upon his own uses of “realist”, “confessional” and “impressionist” genres. we have subsequently seen even more experimental endeavours in the quest for representations that are considered more authentic, closer to the interviewee’s perspective or better able to highlight the subjective and contingent character of the text itself. in her article, “how much subjectivity is needed to understand our lives objectively?” (2002), shelly carter uses parallel texts in which she splits the page into two columns, placing a “hard science” representation of the “facts” of spousal violence in the left-hand column, side-by-side with diary-like extracts of her own personal experiences in the right-hand column. in another example, norman k. denzin presents extensive interview quotes as prose poetry, using these to explore new ways of sharing authorship with interviewees (2001). i believe that we can allow ourselves to be inspired by these ways of working with text much earlier in the research process, not least when working with our fieldnotes. figure 2. doing fieldwork. photo credit: lea trier krøll (2011) noting the notes between the autumn of 2011 and the summer of 2012 i worked as a research assistant for the project ‘safer bars and nightclubs’ at the centre for alcohol and drug research at aarhus university in denmark. one of the primary aims of this ongoing project is not only to identify key risk factors in bars and nightclubs across denmark (tutenges et al. 2011; see also tutenges 2009), but also to understand the attractions of different nightscapes for the people who use them. as part of the project, i undertook extensive ethnographic fieldwork in danish nightlife alongside ten other researchers. throughout this project, all fieldnotes were shared within the research group. in addition to reading each other’s notes, the researchers also discussed and analysed them together, attempting to develop our technique and focus as a group. in this article, i therefore not only use my own fieldnotes, but also those of several of my colleagues from the project, as i find their notes in many cases more compelling and better suited to this article than my own. while working on the project with my colleagues, i observed that most of us were using not only a certain repertoire of types of fieldnotes, but also a range of genres. before describing these genres in more detail (i.e. realist, confessional and poetic), i begin here by providing a brief outline of the “types” i found among our fieldnotes. some consensus does exist in the methodological literature on a common typology of fieldnotes, identifying at least three principal types in use by fieldworkers: 1) descriptive fieldnotes. these are what b. russell bernard refers to as “the meat and potatoes of fieldwork” (2006: 397). most fieldnotes are of this type, in which researchers describe their observations, experiences and feelings from the field. 2) analytical fieldnotes. while observing or writing up notes, researchers almost inevitably begin forming ideas, seeing patterns and reflecting on the data, and this will likely increase as the fieldwork proceeds. 3) methodological fieldnotes. these notes describe observations or thoughts regarding the fieldwork itself, perhaps addressing issues such as gaining acceptance in the field, finding informants or how and where to write fieldnotes. although the latter two types of fieldnotes usually stem from the observations recorded in descriptive fieldnotes, most ethnographers have some system for keeping the various types separate, such as using multiple columns or creating a separate section entitled “reflections”. in contrast to these abovementioned “types” of notes, which describe their contents, by “fieldnote genres” i mean to refer to certain modes of writing that may be found across all three types. what defines a mode of writing as a genre is that it can be said to use particular stylistic conventions, which relate to descriptive focus, word-choice, presuppositions about knowledge or social life, and so on. i now turn to the three main genres found in our collected fieldnotes. these genres to some extent mirror those used by van maanen in tales of the field, but whereas van maanen’s focus is the final text, mine is the fieldnote.[2] realist fieldnotes virtually every researcher engaged in fieldwork makes use of this genre in their fieldnotes, although its preponderance will vary from individual to individual and from project to project. fieldnotes written in this genre are often somewhat positivistic in their approach to recording data, as researchers try to describe their surroundings as neutrally as possible while also striving to avoid contaminating the data with personal judgments. the following is an example from my own notes, set outside a music venue in copenhagen: a few groups are standing out here even though the temperature is about minus ten degrees celsius. the odor of pot wafts from two persons standing in the small space between the two buildings flanking the venue. close to me is a small group of three guys and two girls, all between 18 and 22 years old. they seem to be very intoxicated, judging from their high spirits and unclear speech. suddenly, one of them throws his beer bottle to the ground one meter from where he and his group are standing, and it shatters (lars nørr mikkelsen, spring 2012).[3] one of the most notable characteristics of the realist genre is the apparent absence of the author (van maanen 1988: 46). in the example cited above, i am clearly focused outside of myself. i vaguely place myself in the scene by describing the small group as “close to me”, but clearly my interest here was not how the scene affected me or how i interacted with it. i describe the situation in a relatively neutral manner, based on immediate perceptions: i see what people do, i hear how they talk, i feel the cold and i smell the pot. i avoid adding “unnecessary” interpretation to the description; and when i do remark on this young group’s presumed intoxication, my assertion is supported by reference to their manner of speech, thus grounding even this interpretation in “immediate” experience. many ethnographers are justifiably critical of an exclusive reliance on this genre of writing, arguing that it is impossible to describe anything without doing so through a subjective frame of reference. the “danger” of the realist genre is that it can be seen to implicitly endorse such claims to pure objectivity. in the quotation above, i describe elements of the scene that i believe any other observer would confirm as real, but this does not change the fact that my description is selective. i do not focus on the cars passing by in the street or the band posters on the wall. instead, i focus on those people that i assume are attending the venue where i am conducting fieldwork—with particular attention to their substance use, since this is one of the main interests of our research project. but i neglect to comment on the playful and friendly atmosphere in which this took place, despite the possibility that such affective impressions may prove to be more useful in understanding and analysing the situation. although problematic on its own, this genre still has its uses. fieldnotes of this kind present data in a style that is comprehensible to readers outside of ethnographic disciplines, and they record valuable descriptions that are less likely to be dismissed as overly subjective or biased. confessional fieldnotes whereas realist fieldnotes focus primarily on events that are in some sense external to the researcher, confessional fieldnotes move the focus in and into the researcher, highlighting how social phenomena are imbued with meaning through subjective interpretation. some researchers have chosen to write most of their fieldnotes in this style, often motivated by a desire to understand how a phenomenon is perceived subjectively. but confessional fieldnotes rarely replace realist fieldnotes; instead, they are more likely to complement them. in the following quote, one of my fellow researchers describes her experience of elation while dancing in one of the project’s research sites: we dance, and i am seduced by the rhythms. i’m swaying with the bass as i bend my knees and slowly throw my torso forwards. i am taken over by the music and just want to be in it (maj witte, spring 2012). this researcher explores how it feels to inhabit this social space, focusing on her subjective experience rather than the surroundings. by describing her own thoughts and feelings, she strives to gain some insight into the experience of participants at this event. this same researcher also found employment as a bartender in one of the mainstream discotheques visited during this study, with the intention of gaining some insight into the experiences of those for whom nightlife is a workplace rather than a leisure-space. in the following passage, she describes her experience with a customer: he starts putting the coins, one at a time, into the tipping jar while looking at me. “tell me something about yourself!” he says. i smile, but inside i feel a combination of shy, pleased and uncomfortable. on the one hand it feels good that i’ve caught someone’s attention, but on the other hand the direct relation between the way his hand is floating over the glass with his fingers ready to let go of the coins as soon as i begin to speak also feels uncomfortable—yes of course i want the money, and he does look cute, but the way this is playing out makes me both insecure and uncomfortable—am i really standing here selling information about myself? i can’t say no, ‘cause as you know i am the sweet, smiling, interested bartender (maj witte, spring 2012). referring back to the earlier typology of fieldnotes, this account is primarily descriptive, and yet it contains striking analytic components—all the while foregrounding the researcher’s thoughts and feelings. she is new on the job at a commercial club where the staff are instructed to smile at all times and encouraged to flirt with the costumers. she describes her ambivalent feelings as she attempts to balance a desire to preserve her dignity and personal privacy with the occupational pressure to perform the role of the “sweet, smiling, interested bartender”. here, the researcher is still in the process of discovering the unwritten rules and emotional landscapes of the field, and it is precisely this unfamiliarity and discomfort that draws her attention to aspects of the field that “cultural insider” participants may not discuss so readily. figure 3. dancing in the field. photo credit: lea trier krøll (2011) poetic fieldnotes poetic fieldnotes are those that make use of writerly devices normally found in poetry, such as symbolism, metonymy, similes, metaphors and so on, thus creating interpretively-rich but often ambiguous meanings. in general, the poetic genre is employed less frequently in ethnographic fieldnotes, but it nonetheless did appear regularly in the notes of almost all of the researchers in our team. a poetic phrase can often express something complex or otherwise indescribable in a few words. in the following fieldnote, for example, a researcher reflects on a conversation she had with a very intoxicated patron while doing fieldwork: apart from paving the way for brief feelings of togetherness, i have sometimes seen such playful conversations with strangers turn to heavier issues, albeit while still striking a playful tone. i sense that this can create a sort of distance or other way of treating cultural—or sometimes personal—taboos and heavy subjects. sheltered by the night (lea trier krøll, autumn 2011). this fieldnote reflects analytically on an aspect of nightlife experience that can be difficult to describe, but the last phrase, “sheltered by the night”, is particularly striking. this phrase is clearly not a realist description, as it conjures up a nonsensical image when understood literally. instead, the phrase employs a kind of poetic imagery that attributes physical properties (i.e. the ability to provide shelter), to the night, as if it were a physical object rather than a period of time. it expresses a sense that the night is a safe haven of sorts, enabling the occasional discussion of “heavier issues” without the stakes associated with such conversations in the daytime.[4] the phrase also expresses something about the atmosphere in which these exchanges unfold. feelings and atmospheres are often difficult to capture in words, but poetic imagery can gesture towards these affective experiences and aid in their recollection. the use of poetic devices prompts an active engagement from the reader, encouraging associative and imaginative thinking that can highlight particularly interesting aspects of the phenomenon under study. whereas realist fieldnotes try to avoid interpretation, poetic fieldnotes explicitly interpret experience while also inviting further interpretation on the part of the reader. since the use of one’s own subjective experience to aid understanding is an essential aspect of ethnographic work, it seems sensible to avail oneself of the full range of expressive tools at hand to express that experience—including poetic ones. summing up in the wake of the postmodern turn in anthropology it has often been stressed that knowledge is always situated, only able to claim truth on its own terms and thus from a particular perspective. van maanen, carter and denzin acknowledge this insight by presenting their research in ways that not only highlight the narrative conventions and interpretive interventions of the ethnographic text, but also describe lived experience from multiple and contrasting perspectives. we may not have our final analysis in sight when we write our fieldnotes, but we are nonetheless already in the process of building the very foundation upon which this final representation will be erected. the value of fieldnotes as “scientific” data should not depend on the uniformity of its style and form, but rather on its utility for analysis; and a diversified approach to fieldnotes—one sensitive to the strengths and weaknesses of various genres—will surely add to such utility. by opening up the practice of fieldnote-writing to a variety of genres, we also open up our fieldwork to the complex realities of our fields, thereby increasing its capacity to make compelling readings of the lived world. acknowledgements thanks to frida marie gade and james horrox for proofreading and to my former colleagues at centre for alcohol and drug research,sébastien tutenges, lea trier krøll, ask greve, maj witte and ida thyrring, for granting me permission to use their fieldnotes for this article. thanks also to lea trier krøll for allowing me to use her photographs from the fieldwork. they demonstrate very well how photography can be used just as effectively as fieldnotes as research data, with different genres telling different stories. the research project safer bars and nightclubs is funded by trygfonden, familien hede nielsens fond and the centre for alcohol and drug research at aarhus university, denmark. author biography lars nørr mikkelsen has worked for several years as a bartender in music venues and nightclubs, both before and during his sociology studies at the university of copenhagen. until recently, he worked on the large research project “safer bars and nightclubs” with the centre for alcohol and drug research, aarhus university, in which he carried out extensive fieldwork on danish nightlife. references bernard, b. russell. 2006. research methods in anthropology. oxford: altamira press. carter, shelly. 2002: “how much subjectivity is needed to understand our lives objectively?”. qualitative health research 12(9): 1184–201. denzin, norman k. 2002. “the reflexive interview and a performative social science”. qualitative research 1(1): 23–46. emerson, robert m., rachel i. fretz, and linda l. shaw. 2011. writing ethnographic fieldnotes. chicago: university of chicago press. gupta, akhil and james ferguson. 1997. “discipline and practice: ‘the field’ as site, method and location in anthropology”. in anthropological locations: boundaries and grounds of a field science, ed. akhil gupta and james ferguson, 1–46. berkeley: university of california. harper, douglas. 2005. “what’s new visually?”. in the sage handbook of qualitative research, 3rd ed., norman k. denzin and yvonna s. lincoln, 747–62. thousand oaks: sage. hine, christine. 2006. “the virtual objects of ethnography”. in cybercultures: critical concepts in media and cultural studies, ed. david bell, 286–315. new york: routledge. jackson, jean. 1990. “i am a fieldnote: fieldnotes as a symbol of professional identity”. in fieldnotes: the makings of anthropology, ed. roger a. sanjek, 3–33. new york: cornell university press. sanjek, roger. 1990. “a vocabulary for fieldnotes”. in fieldnotes: the makings of anthropology, ed. roger a. sanjek, 92–120. new york: cornell university press. spencer, stephen, ed. 2011: visual research methods in the social sciences. new york: routledge. tutenges, sébastien. 2009. “safety problems among heavy-drinking youth at a bulgarian nightlife resort”. international journal of drug policy 20(5): 444–6. tutenges, sébastien, lars n. mikkelsen, merete l. poulsen, kim m. bloomfield, karen elmeland, vibeke a. frank and morten hesse. 2011. “fest i trygge rammer”. stof 18(2): 46–9. van maanen, john. 1988. tales from the field: on writing ethnography. chicago: university of chicago press. notes [1] the term “fieldnotes” does not refer here to the kind of notes often termed “jottings” (emerson, fretz and shaw 2011: 21) or “scratchnotes” (sanjek 1990: 95) written while actually in the field, but rather to the slightly more elaborated notes that most fieldworkers make as they “write up” their notes at home. a fieldworker might occasionally be able to write up their actual fieldnotes while observing in the field. however, as in most fieldwork, this is rarely advisable when studying electronic dance music culture or nightlife in general, since the act of writing risks getting in the way of “the doing” of fieldwork, that is, of the actual experience and presence in the field (jackson 1990: 23). [2] the first two genres—“realist” and “confessional”—are more or less directly derived from van maanen’s descriptions. however, i have replaced van maanen’s “impressionist” genre (which refers to a method of constructing the entire narrative in a manner similar to “gonzo journalism”) with what i call the “poetic” genre. the latter rarely encompasses the whole text, but rather “pops up” occasionally in fieldnotes. [3] the original fieldnotes are in danish. the translations are my own. [4] the expression “heavier issues” is also metaphorical, but it is not likely to indicate a poetic register in this context, since it is in common use in everyday danish. dancecult 3(1) 2011: guest editor's introduction to special issue on the dj, masthead and table of contents volume 3 number 1 2011 executive editor graham st john (university of queensland, au) managing editor tobias c. van veen (mcgill university, ca) reviews editor karenza moore (lancaster university, uk) art director cato pulleyblank (fairy punk creative studio, ca) production director gary botts powell (texas a&m university, us) production assistants ed montano (rmit university, au) botond vitos (monash university, au) operations assistant neal thomas (mcgill university, ca) copyeditors catherine baker (university of southampton, (uk) jerome hansen (uk) sheena hyndman (york university, ca) katrina loughrey (au) kath o’donnell (au) dancecult journal of electronic dance music culture issue 3(1) 2011 issn 1947-5403 ©2011 dancecult published twice yearly at: <http://dj.dancecult.net> international advisory board sean albiez (southampton solent university, uk), eliot bates (university of maryland, college park, us), andy bennett (griffith university, au), mark j butler (northwestern university, us), anthony d’andrea (university of limerick, ie), rebekah farrugia (oakland university, us), kai fikentscher (de), françois gauthier (université du québec à montréal, ca), anna gavanas (institute for futures studies, se), chris gibson (university of new south wales, au), jeremy gilbert (university of east london, uk), ross harley (university of new south wales, au), david hesmondhalgh (university of leeds, uk), tim lawrence (university of east london, uk), geert lovink (university of amsterdam, nl), gordon lynch (birkbeck university of london, uk), rene lysloff (university of california, riverside, us), alejandro l. madrid (university of illinois, chicago, us), charity marsh (university of regina, ca), tony mitchell (university of technology sydney, au), karenza moore (lancaster university, uk), andrew murphie (university of new south wales, au), christopher partridge (lancaster university, uk), anne petiau (itsrs / université paris 5, fr), hillegonda c rietveld (london south bank university, uk), geoff stahl (victoria university of wellington, nz), sonjah nadine stanley-niaah (university of west indies, jm), graham st john (university of queensland, au), will straw (mcgill university, ca), rupert till (university of huddersfield, uk), tobias c. van veen (mcgill university, ca), michael veal (yale university, us) dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture is a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture (edmc). a platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on the shifting terrain of edmcs worldwide, the journal houses research exploring the sites, technologies, sounds and cultures of electronic music in historical and contemporary perspectives. playing host to studies of emergent forms of electronic music production, performance, distribution, and reception, as a portal for cutting-edge research on the relation between bodies, technologies, and cyberspace, as a medium through which the cultural politics of dance is critically investigated, and as a venue for innovative multimedia projects, dancecult is the forum for research on edmc. cover image: randy stearns volume 3 number 1 2011 guest editor’s introduction to the special issue on the dj . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 01 anna gavanas and bernardo alexander attias feature articles the forging of a white gay aesthetic at the saint, 1980–84 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 04 tim lawrence the diy careers of techno and drum ‘n’ bass djs in vienna . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 rosa reitsamer rumble in the jungle: city, place and uncanny bass . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 chris chistodoulou headphone-headset-jetset: dj culture, mobility, and science fictions of listening. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 sean nye dj goa gil: kalifornian exile, dark yogi and dreaded anomoly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 graham st john conversations – online off the record: turntablism and controllerism in the 21st century, part 1 tobias c. van veen and bernardo alexander attias from the floor – online nomads in sound vol 2 anna gavanas meditations on the death of vinyl bernardo alexander attias turntables of doom kath o’donnell we call it swedish techno anna ostrom “war on the dancefloor”: the reproduction of power and pleasure at the amphi festival in cologne johanna paulson reviews books man vibes: masculinities in the jamaican dancehall (donna p. hopes) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .129 marvin d. sterling hold on to your dreams: arthur russell and the downtown music scene, 1973–92 (tim lawrence) . . . . .132 charlie de ledesma the idea for this special issue on dj culture came about during a sound system party in kingston in the summer of 2008. on a lawn in jamaica the guest editors for this issue met during a cultural studies conference and discovered that we both had been djing for years. there we were, both djs and academics, discussing dj culture on the island where it was born a half-century ago. we discussed our musical passions, our ideas about dj skills and technologies, our thoughts about dj history, and our feelings about current trends in electronic dance music. we had each presented papers on dj culture at the conference and the bottled up dj concerns we shared on that lawn in kingston finally resulted in this joint effort. a key impulse uniting us was a desire to perform scholarly work from the perspective of the dj; to mix together scholarly voices and approaches in a manner that allowed these voices to speak on their own while simultaneously encouraging the emergence of new perspectives through the interactions among them. our aim is to stimulate a wider conversation on dj culture, its influences, its technologies, and its histories. this issue of dancecult addresses itself specifically to the relations of pleasure and power that intersect in the space between the dj, the dance floor and the rest of the club world. electronic dance music, and its djs, producers and promoters have become increasingly central to popular culture in its various spatial configurations; translocally, glocally and transnationally. the dj has been a key figure in popular music since the 1950s, with today’s superstars functioning both as pioneers of musical taste and gatekeepers of the music industry. together with promoters, vjs and other key figures in club scenes, dj/ producers in edm have pushed forward musical and technological developments. this issue offers creative and intellectual accounts of dj cultures, featuring contributions from established djs/writers situated in various spatial and cultural configurations. we discuss djs as historians of the future and infrasensual cyborgs. articles address the technological, commercial and social developments and conditions that constrain and liberate djs, the power dynamics of music scenes, and their positions in wider socio-historical processes. first out is tim lawrence’s historical article on the significant and formative processes in dj culture that took place in 1980–84 at the legendary club “the saint” in new york city. situated at the historical juncture of neoliberalism, consumer culture, identity politics and the aids epidemic, lawrence traces the circumstances that led to the emergence of a white gay male aesthetic at the saint. he also traces the ways the anonymized saint’s djs pioneered a style of dj mixing which would become the dominant practice in house culture: the smooth and extended blending of texturally similar tracks. rosa reitsamer discusses the changing role of djs in the 1990s and 2000s viennese guest editor’s introduction doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.00 st john | editor’s introduction 2 techno and drum ‘n’ bass club cultures: from background entertainers into a hybrid of producers, promoters, performers and business strategists. she highlights economic and social network strategies in the diy careers of djs, and the ways their gendered self representations blur oppositions between art and money in their accumulation of social/ cultural/symbolic capital. the making of edm scenes as a “masculine” endeavor is crucial to chris christodoulou’s discussion of london’s drum ‘n’ bass scene. christodoulou examines the sonic textures of drum ‘n’ bass from a psychoanalytic perspective, finding in the music (as well as in the discourse surrounding it) an urban “uncanny” grounded in the material economic and social crises that form the backdrop of its emergence in dance music culture. those crises are marked most visibly in the postindustrial space of the city; its uncanniness is linked to male fears of female sexuality that are tamed with fetishised representations of female cyborgs who are both castrating and reassuring. to its predominantly male participants, drum ‘n’ bass culture—like the postindustrial city from whence it sprang—promises a return to the womb as a place of both safety and danger. the cyborg also plays a significant role in sean nye’s essay, which explores the technology of headphones as a visible icon of dj culture paradoxically marking both private listening and public performance. the historical emergence of “headphone cultures” is explored and contextualized, with emphasis on the irony of the dj as a dominant popular representation of listening while not using headphones the same way as everyday listeners. dj culture is both linked to and contrasted with the “headset” and “jetset” cultures that preceded it in visible headphone iconography; cold war era “command and control” becomes a metaphor to understand the male-centered world of the performing dj. graham st john explores the ambivalence surrounding psytrance dj goa gil in the historical context from which his dark take on the goa vibe emerged. st john traces goa gil’s musical development from early 1970s jam bands and cassettes to the “ruinous, unrelenting barrage of white label dark matter” that he is known for today. as both a selector and a shaman, goa gil provokes controversy, symbolising for some the birth of a communitarian neotribal spirit and for others a depressing descent into self-parody. our from the floor section begins with volume 2 of anna gavanas’ compilation series “nomads in sound”. the compilation features original compositions from contributing artists aimnbreak, bass trolls, dj aroma, djplaneten, foona, gavana, jgb, kutterfugel, nuphlo and ombudsman. this audiotextual project illustrates by means of sound and dj capabilities the inseparability and multidimensionality of edm cultures. words and text are not enough to address the meanings, visions and potentials of dj cultures. several complementary articles address the consequences of the technological transformations of dj culture, from turntablism to controllerism. first out, bernardo attias meditates on the death of vinyl from the perspective of someone who has lived to celebrate its life and the possibilities it has brought to the world. he discusses processes of authentication in relation to dj formats that have come and gone as well as the “circles of resonance” that legitimize new conditions and standards for what is considered musical dancecult 3(1)3 expression and skill. in our conversations section, attias explores these themes further in part 1 of a dialogue with dancecult managing editor tobias c. van veen. the exchange focuses on the difference between vinyl and digital dj cultures in terms of physical performance and virtuosity. in her article “turntables of doom”, kath o´donnell gets into these issues as well in the context of dj battles on hip hop scenes. she discusses turntablist battles as sonic fiction in terms of sounds, performance and the stories behind them. she also addresses post-modern hip hop djs as crate digging consumers and producers; digging physical crates as urban archaeologists as well as dust free crates on the internet. reitsamer’s viennese edm scenes correspond to anna ostrom’s article on the techno scene of stockholm from her perspective as a dj, club promoter and manager of a dj cafe. in both sites, female djs tend to be ignored by male centered social networks, which have gate keeping and taste making functions as to the recognition of djs. johanna paulsson’s contribution discusses pleasure and power at the ebm/industrial/ synth amphi festival in cologne. she explores the power relation between the dj and the crowd in combination with the militaristic aesthetics common in these genres. by incorporating taboo and sexual fetishes, the industrial and electronic body music scene creates a playground that both imitates and subverts the power relations and structures of the outside world. paulsson analyses the amphi festival in cologne as a microcosm of this dark scene, and therefore an ideal place to examine how the relationship between power and pleasure is manifest within the club as a combat zone. this edition also features two book reviews: donna p. hope’s man vibes: masculinities in the jamaican dancehall (reviewed by marvin d. sterling), and tim lawrence’s hold on to your dreams: arthur russell and the downtown music scene, 1973–92 (reviewed by charlie de ledesma). we’re also proud to feature original cover artwork by chicago artist randy stearns. interestingly, these accounts of dj culture—despite differing temporal and geographic contexts—describe dj culture as primarily a “masculine” pursuit. these articles bear witness to profound technological and cultural change while nevertheless reminding us that some things have changed little across time, space, format and technology. another common thread in contributions is technological development and its centrality to power dynamics. as technological conditions transform, actors in dj culture reassert their positions, ideals and philosophies. these are opportunities for further explorations in dj culture. we’re deeply grateful to all the contributors to this special issue, as well as to the hard-working reviewers and editors who helped shape the issue into what it is. and we’re especially thankful to our readers, without whom this is all only noise. as guest editors and djs we are happy to mix the inspiring voices of our contributors, allowing for endless new approaches, interpretations and conversations. anna gavanas and bernardo alexander attias guest editors, special issue on the dj discombobulated: dispatches from the wrong side simon a. morrison london: headpress, 2010 isbn 978-1-900486-73-6 (paperback) rrp: uk £11.99, us $16.95 (paperback) bina bhardwa lancaster university (uk) discombobulated is an eclectic collection of fifty dispatches which take a look at simon morrison’s global voyage (from 1999 to 2006) through the weird and wonderful offerings of clubland. his g&t-fuelled anecdotes (originally appearing in dj mag) are the product of journalism meeting autoethnography. the dispatches capture the writer’s varied and reflexive encounters while giving voice to those he meets. morrison’s use of alliteration, metaphors, rhyme and wit, not to mention his not-so-scant use of lurid language, help document his nocturnal adventures and make this book an enthralling read. the dispatches are not ordered chronologically as a travel journal might appear, heightening the discombobulated feel of the prose. instead, the dispatches are categorised under headings such as “wrong”, “on a theme of travel”, “spoofs” and “the most wrongest”. enter a hedonistic playground where random is the order of the day. this ambitious work spans clubbing hotspots across the globe. to cite a few, morrison’s discombobulated encounters include posing for snaps with gangster dave courtney in plumstead; trying on wigs with transvestite foo foo lumar; being on board a ship full of pirates and reliving the hacienda in manchester; almost being caught by bouncers for buying drugs off a non-drug dealer in luxor casino las vegas; a drunken camel ride in egypt; being entertained by female hostesses in a ktv bar in shanghai; staying at ibiza’s infamous pike’s hotel and partying at pacha; and sipping moet at kylie minogue’s 34th birthday bash in london. morrison’s exploration of club culture extends beyond the confines of club space. we follow morrison’s clubbing trajectory through pre-, inand post-club spaces (moore and miles 2004). the dispatches contribute to our holistic understanding of the clubbing journey whilst highlighting the blurring distinctions between these spaces (measham, aldridge and parker 2001). collectively, these dispatches are what characterise the wrong side as a demarcated space away from the moral right side. morrison writes “the wrong side is that hazy place you find yourself late in the proceedings: you don’t know how you got there... you sure as hell don’t know how you’re going to get out... and you’re resigned to just kicking back and enjoying the ride” (140). a fast-paced, humorous and vibrant tone with an all-star line-up is set in the opening chapters of the book. whilst in foo foo’s palace morrison states “clubland doesn’t have to be built on a bedrock of seriousness; there is equally room for boudoir and sillyness (sic)” (13). reflecting the playful ethos of clubland itself, morrison adopts a role not to be taken too seriously, where being accused of “pissing around in ibiza” (129) is not a worry. enjoying the ride is not viewed as a distraction or something to be editorially cut from his clubland tales but instead forms an integral part of his adventures. often discussed in relation to drugs research is the tendency for writers to produce sanitised accounts of their fieldwork whilst neglecting the role of pleasure (holt and treloar 2008); this aspect of clubland is a feature most definitely not omitted from morrison’s accounts. the writer suggests that thanks to globalisation and low-cost airfares, travel to foreign lands to go clubbing has never been easier. however he also notes that increasingly globalisation has given birth to homogeneous and unauthentic template cities (roberts 2006). drawing on his time in shanghai, he writes “the afternoon unwound with us trying to seek out ‘the real chinese shit’ and ended up with us in a shopping mall. and i'm looking around thinking... hang on... there’s starbucks, there’s mcdonald’s... we are in china right, not china white?” (195). this development is also mirrored in clubland where he notes “the more i travel the more it becomes obvious that electronic music is pulling the world together... and i don’t mean that in a hippy dippy way, it’s more that when you’re on a dancefloor and you’re spangled, you sometimes forget whether you’re in moscow or manchester, such is its connecting power” (26).the dispatches highlight how the spread of electronic dance music across the globe has contributed to the mcdonaldization of clubland on the one hand whilst simultaneously leading to increased diversification on the other, reiterating the view that “even though certain elements may be common to dance and club culture across the globe (e.g. music, fashion and drugs), nightclubbing has not become a homogenous global culture” (rief 2009: 3). credit must be given to morrison for covering a lot of ground in his work, not only geographically but also in terms of the range of scenes and spaces he visited. however, it could be argued that the dispatches offer nothing more than cultural snapshots which cover the breadth of the globe but lack depth. there are some destinations (such as manchester and ibiza) where a fuller picture begins to emerge due to repeat visits, but the dispatches are best viewed as “postcards from the edge” (157) with limited space for elaboration, amounting to mere glimpses of locations. the level of contextual insight becomes questionable as most of the dispatches are tales of morrison’s own insobriety or of the morning after the night before, written from inside (and often about) his hotel room. although the centrality of alcohol in clubland is discussed throughout the book and brief reference is made to illegal drugs (spliffs, pills and magic mushrooms), the writer misses an opportunity to further investigate the differing drug cultures situated in the varied spaces he inhabits. further, morrison’s insider status as journalist permitted him access to the finest clubs, vip areas, hotels and impressive celebrity interviews. limited attention is paid to the regular “live for the weekend” clubber. instead we get a view of clubbing from the privileged vip area of the club. despite these shortcomings, discombobulated is a fun and light-hearted read capturing the emergence and establishment of clubbing and electronic dance music culture as a vast and often highly profitable global business. references holt, martin and carla treloar. 2008. “pleasure and drugs: editorial”. international journal of drug policy (19): 349–52. measham, fiona, aldridge, judith and howard parker. 2001. dancing on drugs: risk, health and hedonism in the british club scene. london and new york: free association books. moore, karenza and steven miles. 2004. “young people, dance and the sub-cultural consumption of drugs”. addiction research and theory 12(6): 507–23. rief, silvia. 2009. club cultures: boundaries, identities and otherness. london and new york: routledge. roberts, marion. 2006. “from ‘creative city’ to ‘no-go-areas’: the expansion of the night-time economy in british town and city centres”. cities 23(5): 331–38. 4. stjohn-typeset 12 noon, black rock city graham st john university of regina, university of queensland disco duck. photo by dave le www.flickr.com/photos/splatworldwide/2825819212 it was a remarkable failure. my most impossible objective: to do the man in a day. yes, that was the plan. mounting pressures and misfortune back in the world (a new job approaching, a lost suitcase care of united airlines and other miscellaneous matters), forced my decision to attend the week-long burning man festival in nevada’s black rock desert for one day only. good thing, i thought, that my friend seth was driving up on wednesday night with the intention of departing by noon friday (i.e. about thirty hours after our eventual arrival inside the festival at 4:30 am thursday). seth would return to san francisco to catch a flight to his mate's wedding. he was solid about this. i was resolute too... but black rock city has ways of tampering with your default settings, disrupting connections with the outside world, exposing sound intentions to immolation. so there we were, making the six hour drive to nevada out of the haight in a hired honda element zipcar – me, seth, and his mozilla workpal arun. these guys are smart, explorationists, driven, dedicated tech-visionaries, not uncommon credentials for citizens of black rock city. we each had a bike strapped on at the rear – for black rock city, which this year would be populated by an excess of 50,000 burners, is a metropolis of treadlies, the principal means of transport throughout the city grid, down the promenades and across the open playa. stopping for supplies in reno – the emerald city of nevada, all grandeur and illusion – seth and i stocked up for our day long ride through the city of marvels and its environs (arun was staying for the duration). dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(1) 2009, 127-36 issn 1947-5403 ©2009 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.09 from the floor http://www.flickr.com/photos/splatworldwide/2825819212 http://www.flickr.com/photos/splatworldwide/2825819212 http://www.dancecult.net http://www.dancecult.net we had a two hour wait in the queue upon arrival. seth drove right into the left wing of the grid to our co-ordinates: the corner of g and 9:00. it was the mootopia camp just opposite the deep end, the popular dance camp completing their burning man adventure in 2008. soon enough i vied for some sleep inside a dome belonging to the root society, out on the edge of the city on the corner of the esplanade and 10:00. the dome featured a hive of comfortable dr seussian beds, no small hint of evolved bohemia. root society. photo by graham st john root society. photo by graham st john 128 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 root society. photo by graham st john with a linked entrance, a larger ninety foot dome featured the biggest indoor dance floor on the playa with a whomping sound system, clustered climbing positions for random displays of fleshy gesticulations, and hoisted rings and harnesses for nocturnal acrobatics. the place was a circus, and you the performer. i would find myself performing there later that night, but not before humping my pedals around the city, biting the dust on the soft, uneven desert surface, seeking shade under the man, positioned on a tower dedicated to diversity, one of the hallmarks, we’re informed, of the american dream, the theme of this year’s event. if there’s something that this event teaches us, it’s a tolerance for difference, a hospitality unparalleled, a meaningfulness in the desert of the surreal that manifests in the act, and indeed the art, of giving. we seek sanctuary at center camp under the intense midday sun, hovering for a while at the epicentre of the burner scene, a vast ritual-theatre with no script. there are several performance platforms around this vast arena, but the stage boundaries are fuzzy as i hitch a ride in the moving spectacle of fury crotchless riding chaps, painted nipples and pink parasols. having rung the virgin bell at the gate entrance only a few hours before, arun announces that he is overwhelmed by sensory data. it appears as if he’s had an empathogenic piñata broken over him and has merged with its contents. on his maiden burn, wearing a fur-lined moo outfit, he is already part of the performance. a stranger slips baileys into my iced coffee. it courses through my veins as we saddle up and head out. the day is filled with encounters – with new and old friends at camp low expectations part of the blue light district occupying a chock right on the wheel at c and 5:30-6:00. st john • 12 noon, black rock city 129 camp low expectations. photo by graham st john the camp could be called "the comfortable couch", or "got bacon", a lowkey affair whose hardcore geek mainstays have long assumed various volunteer roles at the event and in the organisation. there's usually a few imbedded freakologists lurking around. i also meet coach ted, a man whose been burning in absentia and finally made it home; the folks at spock mountain laboratories with the scoop on “dj testitio”; wonder woman and other mootopians; and ventured out into the deep end... the deep end. photo by graham st john as night falls over black rock city, it explodes with a collective charge unparalleled anywhere on the planet. the city ordinance to “leave no trace” and the commitment to develop responsible energy conservation strategies conflicting and other times complementing the orgiastic desire to lay waste to one’s personal and collective resources. after all we were burners, caste to perform in a ritual-theatre of sacrifice, sophisticated yet primal. and so, after dusk, with enough inspiration to overpower mor130 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 tality, we plough through the dune-ripples racing ahead of the spice worms who would intoxicate us with sleep, or worse… wakefulness. this was extreme partying, and we were the dosed-up denizens of deep playa. dismounting at the far terminus of the esplanade at 2:00, i'd been riding the escalator all the way to the roof. but this was no smooth transit, with no predictable momentum, nor clear meaning. no certain arrival, and an even less certain departure. with its blinking mirages, fine dust white-outs, and blizzards of sensory impressions obfuscating clear directions, clarity and certitude are in short supply on the playa, a delirium that is translated into a style of music that plays havoc with predictability. through broken polyrhythmic patterns, the festal distraction is embodied in the electro breakbeat, notorious for its derangement of repetition. aural decay, a breakdown of structure, and an arse-shifting funk. a spectre appears out of the desert night... it’s me… with fellow night rider, seth, who wears a plastic gold $ necklace, and arun, aglow in mootopian fur on an elwired steed, we dismount in the open space of the opulent temple, an art and sound camp in its sixth year, built on the perennial shores of breakdown and release. opulent temple. photo by stefan werner it was around midmorning and lee coombs was coming on. now here’s a guy who knows how to shift arse, and when it comes to finely sculpted and well-cropped playabutt, this is not, by anyone's countenance, a standard operation. coombs is a master of the build, accumulating all that tension, obtaining critical thresholds, until the electronic floodgates are finally opened and the playa-massive – the fleshive – is permitted to erupt with abandon. at the opulent temple, you know that moment has arrived as flames blast out from the dj booth, a chamber that is part steampunk time machine and alchemist’s laboratory. st john • 12 noon, black rock city 131 mutate and survive green gorilla lounge. photo by graham st john hours passed and it seems like i had danced across time and space … into the subjunctive realm. near sunrise over the other side of the man above 10:00, i stumbled into the dome of the root society. it was like morning assembly in the asylum, with duo 3l3tronic animating the disturbance. as the golden disc arose in the east, i made contact with the folks at the green gorilla lounge, hunkering down over the raw funk cooking in their dome. it was here that i made interception with an object words can hardly translate. disco duck after dawn. photo by graham st john 132 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 it was the most audacious sound art vehicle on the playa. a mobile three level club in the shape of a yellow bath-time duck, the disco duck had unloaded its weird human cargo to greet the rising sun. with an auxiliary vehicle (a fur-lined double-decker bus) stocked with an arsenal of champagne, and with the morning sunlight refracting off its golden glitterball head, the duck was exposed in all its splendor. after dusk, the giant duck with its green lasers for eyes and a fire-spitting mohawk, became integral to the nightworld at burning man. http://www.flickr.com/photos/quikbeam/2824483573/in/pool-burningman disco duck video constructed upon an armoured amphibious assault vehicle, an instrument of warfare is reclaimed and transmuted into a pleasure machine. although the amphibious vehicle lay hidden in its design, it is reminiscent of the reclamational work of legendary industrial-sculpture collective the mutoid waste co., renowned for recruiting war machines for radical assaults on the senses. throwing the first acid house warehouse raves in london at the old coach station and mutating the refuse of modern culture into the marvelous, these salvage-situationists had been instrumental conspirators in london’s reclamational sensibility. throughout the mid to late 1980s, and into the 1990s, the mutoids had been busy revivifying obsolescence and transforming forgotten landscapes into objects and sites of beauty, stirring those who came to witness, and dance, with a passion to make some noise. in london and across europe, furnishing squatted buildings with anthropomorphic engines, mutated bike parts, transmuted mig fighter jets, and raising subterranean spaces of difference where all became a spectacle to each other, they incited fellowship and inspired the imagination. mwco tankhenge framing rieschstaag berlin 1992. photo by rene menges st john • 12 noon, black rock city 133 http://www.flickr.com/photos/quikbeam/2824483573/in/pool-burningman http://www.flickr.com/photos/quikbeam/2824483573/in/pool-burningman mwco. set for “blast off 94”, tachelles berlin. photo by rene menges in australia, robin mutoid cooke’s mutonia sculpture park, which includes planehenge among other pieces, constitutes an important development in this recycladelic diaspora. this is important to mention not least since last winter solstice, mutonia, near marree in outback south australia, hosted the annual mighty burning demon festival, a small gathering in which the burning of an anthropomorphic figure transpires. sound familiar? the mwco were building “art cars” before the man was first set aflame on baker beach in the mid 1980s. you can see video compilations of early mutoid work on youtube at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amzltdrlico&feature=related>– note the “zombie beat” elicited by the mutoid band presaging an electronic soundtrack at parties. and robin mutoid’s lens on the mwco can be found in his chapter in a book i edited freenrg: notes from the edge of the dancefloor (common ground: 2001). <http://undergrowth.org/freenrg_notes_from_the_edge_of_the_dancefloor>. with the prospect of nuclear armageddon shaping their artifice, the mutoids developed a near obsession with a post-apocalyptic mad max aesthetic. “mutate and survive” – a rephrasing of the campaign for nuclear disarmament slogan “protest and survive” – became the mutoid mantra conveying dissatisfaction with conventional forms of protest which they thought ineffectual, and which would emblematize their own brand of resistance to the nuclear age. all of this is not remote from burning man. for one thing, the death guild, with their thunderdome arena and fleet of vehicles at least in part inspired by the road warrior, have long been integral to the event. the death guild illustrate that, out here, almost anyone can be a post-apocalyptic cult hero. for another thing, mwco artists landed at burning man in force this year with their head-turning motorised animatronic fire-breathing stallion (built from a v8 powered 4x4 and classic chevrolet and cadillac parts) and covered wagon with sound system and decks, spaghetti west 10, and a pair of dinosaur-like mechanical beasts: the dino-dumper and the clamp-o-saurus. 134 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amzltdrlico&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amzltdrlico&feature=related http://undergrowth.org/freenrg_notes_from_the_edge_of_the_dancefloor http://undergrowth.org/freenrg_notes_from_the_edge_of_the_dancefloor mutoid waste co's spaghetti west 10. photo by spolombian but i digress. it was now friday, approaching noon. apart from a couple of dozey hours on a mattress in the shade at the deep end, i’d hardly slept. at this point the reasoning behind my departure was occulted by a looming white-out, my plans drifting rapidly out of view. twenty-four hours in the desert and i was like sergeant howie, the archetype of order and organisation whose convictions made him the prime candidate for incineration in the wickerman. i rode downtown to camp low expectations to say goodbye to my friends. i arrive there and within minutes i’m drawing from a bottle of tabu dry. it was my friend michael's parting gesture. soon i’d be on the road back to california. just then, jessica says, “why don’t you stay.” "i can't." “why not?” i was stumped. i couldn’t rightly recall. but then i remembered something. i didn’t have water, much food, nor a tent, blanket, supplies for another 4 days in the desert. i’d prepared for one day, as i needed to get back to the city... for something. “but we have more than enough water, food. even a tent and a blanket...” i was reclining on a tres comfortable couch in the middle of the desert glissading on absinthe, surrounded by 50,000 fellow pilgrims within a two-mile radius. with each word she spoke i had fewer reasons to leave, until i was finally checkmated: “we can give you a ride back on the bus”. what had i been thinking? hadn’t i realised i’d get caught in this momentum, this open-ended potlatch of epic proportions, this vast canvas the significance of which lies in the relationships one forms through shared consumption in extreme conditions? out here, in one of the most physically inhospitable landscapes in the country, transformed over a week into one of the more socially receptive environments a human can know, i was like the guy who once turned up at the entrance naked as an experiment to learn if and how he could survive. my failure to leave and his successful survival are strangely connected, if by nothing other than the compelling gift. st john • 12 noon, black rock city 135 i would soon cycle back across the city to break the news to seth – himself on schedule to bail at noon. "congratulations", he smiles, handing me his remaining supplies, "you failed". exodus. photo by graham st john ••••••• acknowledgements thanks to crew at low expectations who made this short story odyssean, including seth, arun, paulie, coach ted, lee coombs, the super-cockers, and all those otherselves who burn. author biography graham st john is a research associate at the centre for critical and cultural studies at the university of queensland and was recently a postdoctoral research fellow in interactive media and performance at the university of regina, saskatchewan. his latest book technomad: global raving countercultures (equinox) will be published in september 2009. he is the executive editor of dancecult. see: www.edgecentral.net 136 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 http://www.edgecentral.net http://www.edgecentral.net dancecult 3(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 3(1): 129–134 issn 1947-5403 ©2011 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net man vibes: masculinities in the jamaican dancehall donna p. hope kingston: ian randle publishers, 2010 isbn: 978-976-637-407-5 (paperback only) rrp: us$24.95 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.06 marvin d. sterling indiana university (usa) given the predominance of men as djs, sound system crew, promoters and industry executives in jamaican dancehall, many social observers have noted the ways in which this subculture reflects a strong privileging of male sensibilities, anxieties and desires. this acknowledgement, however, often gives way to more generalized discussions of the subculture or, where gender does indeed become the focus, to commentary on its manifestations in the erotic dress and dance of female dancers. while these are certainly crucial to an understanding of dancehall subculture, the more complex sociohistorical, political and economic nuances of jamaican masculinity as expressed in this space have remained largely unexplored. this has been the case at least until the publication of donna p. hope’s man vibes: masculinities in the jamaican dancehall, a critical contribution to the growing corpus of scholarship on this subculture. hope employs a range of methodologies in her research. these include interviews with inner-city dancehall practitioners and lyrical analysis of the many songs, past and present, that speak to the multivalent construction of masculinity in contemporary dancehall. hope, a lecturer in reggae studies at the institute of caribbean studies at the university of the west indies, begins by articulating her principal concern with how dancehall culture, viewed by many jamaican social critics as variously hostile to the values of the jamaican middle class, is in fact engaged in a deep conversation with it. in the first chapter, hope mobilizes the gramscian concept of hegemony to define that particular manifestation of masculinity—strong, straight, financially secure, and sexually promiscuous—which is considered normative in much of jamaican society. she explores the literature on the colonial reviews dancecult 2(1)130 and capitalist terms in which black masculinities have historically been circumscribed throughout jamaica and the caribbean. hope is interested in a tension whereby poor afrojamaican men engage in extreme performances of a subcultural masculinity that is at the peripheries of the jamaican middle class experience, even as these performances in many ways reinscribe the hegemonic masculinity of that middle class. in each of the next five chapters, hope focuses on a key term in which this process manifests itself. in chapter two, she focuses on promiscuity as one such term. male dancehall practitioners’ emphatic declarations of their sexual prowess and conquests would appear distasteful by monogamous, christian, middle-class standards. however, hope notes that many middle-class men, too, secretly engage in this behavior; the ability to father and financially provide for many children in and out of wedlock is a measure of manhood for many jamaican men across classes. in the third chapter, hope focuses on gun violence as another aspect of hardcore dancehall masculinity; as is true in many other societies plagued by such violence, those who bear the guns are often only the desperate proxies of more powerful individuals higher up in the social order. the fourth chapter focuses on an intense homophobia as one of the more notorious expressions of masculinity in dancehall culture. hope notes that here again, such expressions are not confined to the dancehall but rather reflect a sentiment more generally felt throughout much of jamaican society. hope frames dancehall homophobia in relation to the mainstream in a range of ways: as “arguably a radical and extreme variant to jamaican masculine paranoia of the feminine where in many instances, male homosexuals are deemed gender traitors who violate the accepted rules of gender identity and/or gender performance” (69-70); as legally normative; as partly a product of religious fundamentalism; and as an attitude whose effects are socioeconomically inflected, whereby gay men who happen to be relatively privileged bear a degree of insulation that comes with class-based respectability. the fifth chapter focuses on conspicuous consumption as another prominent aspect of dancehall masculinity. hope chronicles the range of brand name commodities—from luxury cars to cell phones to alcoholic beverages—that have been in vogue throughout the history of contemporary jamaican dancehall. in her discussion of the british link-up crew, an especially extravagant group of men who have promoted dancehall events in jamaica, britain and the united states, hope notes that dancehall as an expression of desire to escape poverty is significantly situated not only in local terms, but also vis-à-vis jamaican migration to the colonial mother country and the geographically proximal superpower of the united states. “a scholar with an extraordinarily close ear to the ground of jamaican dancehall culture” reviews 131 in light of the strident homophobia of the dancehall, the sixth chapter of man vibes is perhaps the most intriguing. here, hope identifies what she sees as a recent shift in expressions of dancehall masculinity towards a “feminized aesthetic”, one which includes “regular visits even by the most hardened ghetto youth to cosmetologists for facials, manicures and pedicures . . . regular visits to salons for hair care . . . conspicuous and intricate hair styles (e.g. intricate cornrows), and plucked, trimmed and fashioned eyebrows” (125). skin bleaching, conventionally associated with women but also now evidenced among men (allegedly including the superstar dj, vybz kartel), is a further manifestation of this trend. the recent popularity of dance—again, conventionally the province of women or heterosexual dance partners—among individual as well as groups of men is for hope another indication of the emergence of this “‘softened’ variant of dancehall masculinity” (ibid.), one whose homosociality verges ambiguously on the homosexual. hope astutely notes that homosexuality—despite this trend toward a softened masculinity—remains marginalized in the jamaican dancehall, and discusses a subsequent backlash in which several dancehall artists have criticized this development in their songs. still, she views the trend as potentially transgressive. she writes that “this radically transgressive variant to dancehall masculinity . . . raises questions about the current constitution of hegemonic masculinity from which dancehall culture ultimately draws its strength” (142), and suggests that this development might be seen as an extension of a narcissistically embodied commodity aesthetic drawn from such transnational sources as western high fashion. while there may quite possibly be latent homosexuality in the feverish homophobia of the jamaican dancehall, hope’s suggestion above leads one to wonder how much this development is really about the feminization or homosexualization of dancehall masculinity. this is as opposed, or relative to what may more immediately be a local and transnational commodity aesthetic whose aspects of gender and sexual orientation are secondary (which is not to say unimportant). hope rightly abstains from facile social psychological observations about the meanings of this trend toward the feminization of dancehall masculinity, but concerning the quote above, on which this chapter ends, it would have been interesting if she had more extensively addressed the “questions” she believes this development raises about hegemonic masculinity in jamaica. indeed, i would have liked to have heard a bit more about what precisely hope believes are the challenges dancehall masculinities pose to hegemonic jamaican masculinity, beyond its status as something apart from the middle-class. the book contains some editorial infelicities which, smoothed over, would have given greater force to hope’s otherwise lucid writing. but this aside, what one garners from this book is the sense of hope as a scholar with an extraordinarily close ear to the ground of jamaican dancehall culture, and a sense of gratitude that she has taken on the fraught but important topic of masculinity in the dancehall in the systematic, sustained and sensitive way she has. man vibes is a welcome work that will advance the national, and international, conversation on this topic, hopefully, as its author writes in closing, in ways that will disclose more direct and socially beneficial “routes to empowerment for jamaica’s future men and women” (168). dancecult 2(1)132 hold on to your dreams: arthur russell and the downtown music scene, 1973–92 tim lawrence durham and london: duke university press, 2009 isbn: 9780822344858 (paperback only) rrp: £15.99 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.07 charles de ledesma university of east london (uk) a musical pioneer from new york’s golden downtown period: arthur russell and the infinite mix hold on to your dreams, on deceased new york musician arthur russell, is tim lawrence’s second book and follows 2003’s love saves the day (lstd). whereas the social and musical backgrounds of both are broadly similar authorial purpose and the resulting tone are markedly different. whereas the earlier book tells a straightforward history of disco, though varying from other accounts as lawrence argues that loft party supremo david mancuso’s role remained pivotal from first to last, hold on to your dreams is primarily an unswervingly intimate portrait of an unclassifiable, restless musician who “skipped between sounds and scenes with the nonchalant ease of a kid playing hopscotch” (2). in the preface, lawrence is clear about his endeavour: “along with the topography of russell’s choices, the testimonies of russell’s family, friends and collaborators have heavily shaped this book” (xix). he explains that, if alive, russell might have hindered the biography as the cellist, singer, songwriter and quixotic producer was “often cryptic and cagey when interviewed” (ibid.). intrigued when a leading light in the 70s disco scene told him that russell’s “mutant disco” tracks like “go bang!” and “it’s all over my face” are quite simply sublime, and that the quietly-spoken, obstinate man from the us mid-west was an unsung era from the golden days of downtown, lawrence set out to “combine the burrowing mentality of the archaeologist with the presentational outlook of the museum curator and the emotional sensitivity of a diarist” (xx). the word definitive is not strong enough for lawrence’s deep excavation of russell’s life. with clearly no stone unturned, the text might have been plodding and over-worthy. but lawrence repeats the trick of lstd: whenever he senses that a gossipy tale, music description or cultural analysis may start to tire, he shifts the beam to something else, confident enough to begin a new section sometimes unconnected from the one before. reviews 133 the chapters in hold on to your dreams tend to start with a contextualising section such as chapter four’s “intensities”, on how the experimental music scene took shape in downtown spaces like the kitchen. chapter five’s “variations” explores the time when disco had passed its creative and progressive peak. lawrence suggests that performance spaces integrated “all kinds of avant manifestations” (179) while generic distinctions blurred. this was russell’s time, a period when pop, new wave, experimental, jazz, funk and mutant disco rubbed shoulders, if not always easily or amicably. russell epitomised downtown’s wildly creative aesthetic in the way he always worked across genres and was quintessentially community-minded. but, for lawrence, russell’s gift reached beyond this time period too. he pre-figured the post modern, multi-mix where music would be re-invented in an infinite number of ways. however, early on lawrence identifies this renaissance man’s achilles heel (5). (he) spread himself across too many scenes and worked with too many musicians to build up a major reputation in a single genre, yet his lack of commercial success cannot be attributed solely to the music industry’s distrust of eclecticism. russell’s perfectionism was peppered with obstinacy—on one occasion he spent the whole day fine-tuning a kick drum while his co-musicians waited to begin. however, lawrence goes on to argue consistently and persuasively that “there was something beautiful about russell’s reluctance to decide on a final mix of many of his works” (ibid.). in a moving passage, lawrence explains how, towards the end, and to the immense sadness of his many friends, russell was just too sick to comment on how his multitude of mixes could be better dissected and reconstructed. there are many light hearted and frankly amusing stories on russellian disapproval. he complained loudly to all about heavyweight dance music producers larry levan and francois kevorkian’s remixes—which garnered significant scene-approval. russell had fulminated that the versions of “go bang!”, played to thousands of ecstatic gay dancers in clubs the saint and paradise garage, were too obvious and under-subtle, preferring his own complex, loopy takes, which strung a dizzying array of sonic ideas together as if out to confuse the dance floor. and when remix genius walter gibbons worked with russell in re-designing the beautiful “let’s go swimming”, an observer later offered lawrence an insight into the all-night studio sessions (262). “the word definitive is not strong enough for lawrence’s deep excavation of russell’s life.” dancecult 2(1)134 there were incredible scenes of screaming and fights... arthur was shrieking and tearing his hair out, raging around the studio like a psychotic bat, while walter was calmly snipping and pasting the tape as if it was macramé. arthur would say, ‘you’re ruining my fucking vision!’ and walter would reply, ‘arthur, arthur, calm down!’ (ibid.) if russell comes across as an obstinate perfectionist—and just a little “queeny”—then the reader is adroitly pulled into agreeing that moves to commercialise his, and downtown’s, singularly creative flow of music were (sort of ) unethical although clearly successful and worthwhile in cases like talking heads and laurie anderson. as lawrence reminds, russell’s view was that “music’s will to freedom was hard to contain, and each recording was capable of being re-born—played differently and experienced differently—in a unquantifiable range of settings” (190). lawrence remains an unashamed fan and a sensitive portrayer throughout but hold on to your dreams exemplifies the same kind of minor weaknesses apparent in lstd. sometimes his urgency at getting inside russell’s head, to better understand motivation, psychology, or just to aid a smoother chronological flow, comes over as a little strained. after lawrence declares that russell “embodied radical change” (189), he feels the need to add, “it’s possible that arthur struggled to grasp the full range of his activity” (ibid.). and throughout, lawrence feels irresistibly drawn to lists, the longer the better, where many authors consider such blocks of text prettier when shunted to a footnote, or endnote. small misgivings aside, hold on to your dreams is an exquisitely moving, comprehensive and impressive work of human forensics which helps unlock the numerous edges, seams, schisms and passions of the 1970s and 1980s downtown eras. rarely for works on nonart music—rather, popular music—cultures, it exalts in a uniquely detailed, satisfying and unswerving portrait of someone who, lawrence convinces, was a great yet largely unsung musician, composer and arranger. in addition, and with a keen eye on cultural milieu interchanges, lawrence identifies a profound effect of the russell aesthetic. whenever he could, russell . . . established the framework for an egalitarian, cooperative practice. he created music within a range of collaborative networks, and emphasized the group over his own individual presence (345). in what must have been a trying test, lawrence doesn’t shirk the final, tragic moment in april 1992 when russell died from aids-related complications, obscure, angry and frustrated, although surrounded by loved ones. he ends with a reflection from russell’s long term partner, tom lee, who tells lawrence that “he should have realized the end was coming when arthur stopped listening to his (sony) walkman, comparing side a and side b of the same recording” (333). in a postscript, lawrence tells how, since 2004, much of russell’s best work has been released, some even re-mixed, and a little of the many hours of dusty studio tape given the light of day for the first time. lawrence leaves us with the firm impression that his subject’s “ethic of pluralistic openness . . . has been embraced” (354). the record players: dj revolutionaries bill brewster and frank broughton new york: black cat, 2011. isbn: 978-0-8021-7089-7 (paperback) rrp: us$16.95 scott gaule manchester metropolitan university (uk) in the record players: dj revolutionaries, bill brewster and frank broughton contend that the underlining motivation for djing is to share music with others. “this is the thrill, and the compulsion, of djing. this need to share music, and to constantly find new music to excite people with, this is the primal force of djing” (4). the book focuses on this premise by exploring the lives of dj pioneers who have been influential in the creation of popular music and dance culture scenes and helped to shape social trends, sensibilities and the worldviews of generations of partygoers. brewster and broughton craft a carefully considered mix of narratives which explore the lives of djs across historical post-war music scenes and dance cultural movements, contributing an eclectic and informative text for anyone interested in the history of djing as a cultural practice. those expecting to encounter the authors’ usual humorous writing style may be slightly disappointed as what we are presented with are 46 verbatim interviews followed by illustrative discographies, unfettered by commentary and analysis, save for brief scene-setting introductions. the opening encounters hook the reader up with some of the earliest pioneers who can lay claim to making djing visible (and audible) in the public’s consciousness. those familiar with the authors’ acclaimed book last night a dj saved my life (1999) will have come across the authors’ archaeological finds before, digging up the tales of pioneer jimmy saville, who as early as 1943 began disrupting the societal belief that dancing in public could only be accompanied by live music. “now, it’s a startling admission that people didn’t think you could dance to records, but then nobody conceived it” (8). rare interviews with terry noel and francis grasso also highlight that contemporary djing sensibilities and techniques such as beat-matching aren’t as new as we may think, being practised in the late 1960s. after these early encounters, brewster and broughton weave together a series of storied arcs that bring together the tales of key djs and producers instrumental in shaping some of the most memorable underground party scenes and dance music moments from the 1950s through to the early 21st century. the arcs progress in a broadly chronological manner, covering northern soul, (proto) disco, house, techno, balearic and acid house before brewster and broughton bring into the mix players who have been influential in the british post-acid house inspired genres—jungle, progressive, garage and big beat. this final arc also brings to the fore narratives with djs responsible for the mass popularisation of electronic dance music (edm) from the mid-1990s, with the advent of the super-club and the emergence of djs as global nomads, folk heroes and pseudo-religious icons (e.g. sasha and tiësto). placing interviews of djs from the various scenes side-by-side, we learn of their lives behind the decks and in the studio and their reflections on the scenes they helped to shape. this makes for a stimulating read, as the voices of the players collide with one another, sometimes confirmatory and on other occasions casting contradictory lines of thought on the scene in question. the arc on chicago house was one of my favourites in this respect. enough space is given to the djs to tell stories on their own terms. this breathing room is particularly welcome, given the historical importance of some of the insights shared—witness the rare interview with francis grasso who passed away shortly after their conversation. investigative sensibilities also ensure plenty of moments where brewster and broughton the urban archaeologists come out to play and sample on behalf of the historical archivists and dj anoraks, enquiring about the novelty of equipment and techniques used and whether interviewees were aware of the significance, for example. if, as the authors contend, the primal purpose of djing is to share music with others, the book uncovers key first person insights that illustrate how emergent techniques, tools and sensibilities which have informed djing as a cultural practice are deeply rooted in the learning that occurs on the dance floor. for example, tom moulton, pioneer of the disco mix and inventor of the preferred dj 12-inch format, alludes to an observation he made in 1971 sitting at a beach party on fire island: they’d really start to get off on it and all of a sudden another song would come in on top of it and the people would be... and he was a terrible dj, too. it was a shame that the records weren’t longer so people could really start getting off. i came home and tried it and it took forever (137). in all respects, this was a defining moment that shaped moulton’s life in dance music production and as a consequence gifted djs the format they craved, an extended mix designed specifically for the dance floor. reflecting on the production of afrika bambaataa’s “planet rock”, the renowned electro producer arthur baker describes his conscious decision to capture what djs were doing in their sets by transferring it onto wax: what i was trying to do was mix in the dj bits of other records. it was a conscious thing. it was almost like a medley, but not really, because you only used little bits of things. i tried to create what a dj would do with records (208). the sampling-like approach coined by baker on “planet rock” prior to the widespread advent and use of sampling technologies illustrates how dj sensibilities honed on the dance floor have been fed back into the production process, helping to create the sampling cut and paste aesthetic that became so influential with edm production. somewhere between the sound-bite journalism of the popular music press and the reification of music and dance culture studies proliferating within academia, there is a genuine need for first person oral histories. this book provides a welcome reminder of how and in what ways oral approaches can contribute to our understanding. i believe this book has some fairly unique gifts to offer djs with an interest in understanding the roots of what they do and exploring more deeply their own relationship to creating and sharing music, not least because of its dialogical qualities. this conversational approach worked because it engaged me personally. i was able to place my “i” alongside the others and join in the conversation. in doing so the book spoke to the dj within me and re-ignited my passion for finding and sharing music. the book ultimately succeeds because this is what it sets out to do. its dialogical qualities also sets the record players apart and allows it to make a unique contribution to cultural and historical studies in popular music and related fields of enquiry. the conversational space created prompts the reader to engage with the text directly in an open and reflexive manner so that you become actively involved in the sense making process. this is refreshing and contrasts with the third person gatekeeper role favoured in academia, which bookends informants’ narratives with thoughts on what is meant, foreclosing alternative readings and interpretations. there are some minor criticisms with the book. most of the interviews took place in the mid to late 1990s giving the record players a slightly dated feel. there have been quantum-like shifts in djing over the last decade that have questioned the primacy of the spinning record and reconfigured the ways in which djs create and share music. the emergence of digital vinyl solutions (dvs) and controllerism are indicative of these developments and are an obvious omission in the present collection, save for some thoughts by sasha on using ableton to dj. the authors observe in their introduction that there are some important scenes that haven’t been included, namely reggae. in a book that attempts to plot points linking djing across times and geographies, there is always a risk of omitting important scenes. whilst an anticipated future volume will likely seek to redress this, in any follow up i’d like to see the authors make a more conscious effort to disrupt the predominantly anglo-american narratives of djing and club culture to be found in this book. small criticisms aside, i think this is a vital book. brewster and broughton seem to have a knack of producing accessible and informative material about dj culture that engages both practitioners and interested souls, whilst simultaneously making serious and valuable contributions to historical and socio-cultural studies of djing and popular music cultures. their latest effort does much to continue this tradition. references brewster, bill and frank broughton. 1999. last night a dj saved my life: the history of the disc jockey. london: headline. discography bambaataa, afrika and the soul sonic force. 1982. planet rock. tommy boy music (12-inch): tb 823. <http://www.discogs.com/afrika-bambaataa-the-soul-sonic-force-planet-rock/release/1080424>. decline of the rave inspired clubculture in china: state suppression, clubber adaptations and socio-cultural transformations matthew m. chew hong kong baptist university (hong kong sar) important elements of rave culture including the rave party format, ecstasy use and electronic dance music emerged in the uk in the late 1980s (mckay 1998; reynolds 1998; thornton 1996). this new clubculture faced a number of problems in the 1990s – clubs were increasingly commercialized and controlled by corporations, electronic dance music has been increasingly mainstreamed, and clubbing was increasingly considered a tourist income generator for city planners and local officials (chatterton and hollands 2003). at the same time, rave culture successfully diffused outside developed western economies and inspired different versions of clubcultures in localities throughout the globe (eg. chew forthcoming 2009a; sliavaite 1998; swedenburg 2001; saldanha 2002). the rave scene has entered a period of slower growth in the west since the early 2000s (mccall 2001; owen 2003). but what has happened to rave inspired clubcultures in non-western societies? has it faced a similar set of problems and did it peak at the same time as it did in the west? this study examines the case of china and finds that although the rave inspired clubculture there also went into decline in the early 2000s, the circumstances under which it did was markedly dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(1) 2009, 22-34 issn 1947-5403 ©2009 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.02 abstract this study examines the development of rave inspired clubculture in china between the late 1990s and the present. it focuses in particular on the harsh suppression of clubland by the chinese state in 2000, the reactions of clubbers and the club industry, and the clubcultural transformations that resulted from the suppression. a nationally coordinated anti-drug campaign that specifically targeted dance clubs was orchestrated by the central government and it has forced many clubs to close down. the rent-seeking practices of local officials also greatly intimidated clubbers. clubbers and club operators adapted to the adverse circumstances by transforming club spaces and inventing new club practices. although these adaptations have kept clubculture alive, they also generated negative sociocultural impacts: the undermining of sociality inside dance clubs, the weakening of the communal dimension of clubculture and the exacerbation of socio-economic stratification in clubland. keywords clubculture, night-time economy, sociality, dance clubs, rave party, ecstasy, chinese nightlife different from those in the west. developed along a different trajectory and under a different social context, clubculture in china was not plagued by problems experienced in the west. instead, the most formidable problem that it faced was forceful suppression by the state. this problem is not unexpected given the chinese state’s authoritarianism, paternalistic treatment of its citizens and fear of social disorder. the study’s substantive analysis is organized in three parts. firstly, i will document how the chinese government suppressed the rave inspired clubculture through the local police’s harsh and self-serving persecution of clubbers. second, i will illustrate how clubbers and club operators adapted to the repressive environment by inventing new clubbing practices and club spaces to protect themselves. thirdly, i will analyze the social and clubcultural consequences of government suppression and clubber adaptations. my conclusion is that as the rave inspired clubculture was increasingly driven underground in china, three important social characteristic of the clubculture – sociality, community and socioeconomic equality – were seriously undermined. to some extent, my approach traded depth for breadth. this was a conscious methodological choice because my research goal was to map the development of contemporary chinese clubculture rather than to elaborate particular micro processes of nightlife consumption. data for this study was primarily collected through participant observation in dance clubs and ethnographic interviews with clubbers, local officials, and club operators in china between mid-1999 and mid-2002. a major part of the participant observation was carried out in shanghai, wuhan, and beijing, and a minor part of it in guangzhou, shenzhen and chengdu. these cities represented the six party cities with most the prosperous dance club scenes in china at the time. i spent on average three nights per week observing parties in dance clubs, karaoke establishments and other settings in the three years, for around eight hours per night. there was a hierarchy of clubs in every big party city in china which were stratified along the dimensions of socioeconomic class and degree of globalization. i visited club venues that belonged to all different strata because club practices could be very different in them. i visited over thirty venues (including clubs and other nightlife establishments) multiple times in each of my three main cities (shanghai, wuhan and beijing). i did not visit many gay clubs, however, because this study does not focus on issues of gender and sexuality. i was an outsider to the club scene of china when i began this research in 1999, though i had ample clubbing experiences in hong kong and the united states. i approached the clubland in each of the six cities through identifying suitable participants in my social networks of hong kongers who worked in china. then through snowballing, i shifted my fieldwork attention to local participants with a focus on veteran clubbers, frequent and dedicated clubbers, wealthy clubbers and socially underprivileged clubbers. the snowballing process went very smoothly because of my identity. i let my research subjects know that i was an overseas chinese scholar doing research on clubculture. very different types of local clubbers – including successful businessmen, chinese celebrities, criminal gang members, middle-agers, expatriates, hostesses and poor college students – agreed to be involved in the research. the participant observation was conducted at club nights organized by these different types of local clubbers. i travelled where they chose to go and joined them in most of their activities. i joined in late-night meals, part of the routine of chinese nights-out, where i conducted ethnographic interviews. in most cases, even though i was relatively unknown, participants were very willing to speak up amid the relaxed after-party atmosphere. chew • decline of the rave inspired clubculture in china 23 background: dominance of the rave inspired clubculture in china, 1996-2002 according to veteran club operators in shanghai and beijing, a few dance clubs were established as early as the late 1980s in shanghai, beijing and guangzhou. at that time, a tiny number of chinese and expatriate populations in these globalizing cities participated in clubbing. when the contemporary clubculture associated with raves, ecstasy and electronic dance music emerged at the end of the 1980s in the uk, it was not immediately known or received in china. in the early 1990s, dance clubs were founded in a growing number of chinese cities. but the party culture supported by these clubs resembled the localized disco clubculture of 1980s hong kong and taiwan more than rave parties (farrer 1999). the phrase “dance club” was seldom used and clubs were referred to as “discos”. the music was mainly pop, ecstasy was rarely taken in these discos, and social attributes of clubbers were very heterogeneous. contemporary clubculture influenced only an elite minority of clubbers in china in the early 1990s – a minority composed of international students, expatriates, young members of the new rich and members of the underworld. towards the mid-1990s, a steadily growing number of chinese clubbers came to embrace rave inspired clubculture. even though rave parties were rarely organized in china, clubbers developed a taste for ecstasy, came to appreciate electronic dance music, and began to feel at home with a localized version of rave inspired clubculture. this clubculture reached a critical mass by 1997 and then developed into a mainstream nightlife form in china in 1998 and 1999. i observed that dozens of new clubs were established in each of the first tier party cities in china (ie. shenzhen, shanghai, guangzhou and beijing) and in a number of second tier ones (eg. wuhan, chengdu and fuzhou). playing techno and cantopop electronic dance music, serving only bottled water (due to the dehydration effect of ecstasy), and operating until the late morning, these clubs reflected a clear break from chinese disco clubs of the early 1990s. this clubculture continued to spread outside the highly globalized provinces and coastal metropolises into hinterland cities and mid-size towns in the 2000s (chew 2009a). both the elite, globalized club circuit and the mass-oriented, localized club circuit witnessed such changes. the rise of the rave inspired clubculture was so fast and abrupt that the chinese state did not immediately realize its social significance and did not know how to react. in 1998 and 1999, no coordinated efforts were made to regulate dance clubs or clubbers’ open usage of drugs. although the chinese state has always adopted a suppressive policy towards drug use, it did not seriously treat ecstasy as a menace at that time. instead, local officials were more eager to milk the new clubculture for personal gains – such as protecting dance club businesses for a fee – than to suppress it, especially when there were no central government directives for suppressive action. the unfettered growth of this clubculture lasted until the end of 1999, when the central government finally began to pay serious attention to the new clubculture and devised ways to squash it. many dance clubs were closed down at this time. in the several cities where i have performed fieldwork, i observed that about half of the existing dance clubs went out of business. the clamp down continued at least until early 2002 in most cities, though the intensive phase had ended earlier in some. despite suppression by the government and its subsequent contraction, the rave inspired clubculture still dominated chinese clubland in 2001 and 2002 because no clubculture was available to replace it. the post-rave and hip-hop clubcultures did not 24 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 arrive in china until the mid-2000s. in the early 2000s, the rave inspired clubculture evolved through adaptations and compromises instead of unbridled expansion. more recently, the central state abandoned the policy of high-handed, indiscriminate suppression of clubbing. between 2003 and the present, the local governments of numerous cities have been allowed to proactively develop night-time economies and nightlife districts (chew 2007). prime urban locations, adequate infrastructure and a legal framework that is more sympathetic to socially deviant nightlife activities were provided (chew forthcoming 2010). tamer forms of nightlife culture were subtly encouraged while the rave inspired clubculture was discouraged. the latest generation of localized clubcultures – those that accord with state imperatives – emerged in the mid2000s. in the present, domesticated versions of rave clubculture co-exist with hip-hop clubculture and hybridized local nightlife cultures that mix together bar, karaoke and live music performances (chew forthcoming 2009b). government suppression of the rave inspired clubculture unregulated drug use before 2000 the drug ecstasy is an integral part of rave culture. apart from energizing the crowd for all-night-long clubbing activities, ecstasy works symbiotically with electronic dance music to generate music-somatic bodily reactions, facilitates an oceanic and religious feeling, and encourages the collective values of plur (peace, love unity and respect) (malbon 1999; reynolds 1998). drugs tend to play an even more important role in chinese clubland than western ones. in the late 1990s, ecstasy use was not strictly regulated in china. chinese clubbers were able to take drugs in dance clubs openly without risks and club operators were not worried about clubbers openly taking drugs in their venues. for example, in the local club circuit in 1998, it was common to observe clubbers who sat by the main dance floor popping ecstasy and leaving a small pack of pills on their table. in vip rooms, it was common to find ecstasy pills, cocaine, marijuana and other drugs neatly arranged on the table. clubbers took ecstasy openly and continuously shake their heads. female clubbers transformed the “head-shake” motion into a dance pattern, swirling their heads rhythmically to the music as they danced. head shaking and the head swirl dance are localized bodily reactions of chinese clubbers to ecstasy highs. groups of topless men would hug and dance in unison at near-overdose delirium. ironically, my expatriate and overseas chinese subjects were not used to these activities because drug use is generally less unfettered in north america. local officials (or their relatives) collect under-the-table protection fees from or own shares in the absolute majority of nightlife business in china including commercial sex businesses and dance clubs. this is an open secret to which club operators and veteran clubbers can testify. that was why individual police raids targeting illegal drug use in dance clubs in 1998 were ineffective. the raided clubs usually revert to a business-as-usual status a few days (or weeks) later, with the help of local officials. the suppression campaign in 2000 was different, however. many criminological and official reports on the use of ecstasy in chinese clubculture were published around 2000 (eg. cheng 2002; liu 2001). the anti-drug campaign of 2000 was widely rumored to have been initiated personally by the general secretary jiang zemin. under this context of determined central state initiatives, local officials could no longer maintain their profitable rent-seeking relationship with local dance clubs chew • decline of the rave inspired clubculture in china 25 anti-drug suppression: the case of shanghai how heavily the anti-drug campaign impacted on clubland may be illustrated with the case of shanghai. shanghai’s clubland tended to be one of the least suppressed in china due to the city’s focus on economic development and its expatriate club crowds. but even shanghai’s clubland could not escape the brunt of the campaign. between 1997 and 1999, clubbers could openly use drugs in a number of clubs. club jbl, club huaer jie (club wall street), zhenai disco (true love disco), and jinye xingguang disco (tonight’s starlight disco) were the largest and most high profile among them. in early 2000, both jbl and huaer jie were closed down permanently. zhenai had to tame its club crowds and drug use there became much less conspicuous. jinye xingguang was able to postpone its demise until 2001 because it was strategically located in an ungoverned geographic location at the intersection of three police precincts. numerous smaller clubs were also closed down. shanghai’s clubbers migrated to small, low-profile and newly opened clubs after the first round of clamp downs in 2000. but the shanghai police immediately identified these clubs, raided them and permanently shut down most of them. club fangchengshi (club formula), for example, was a nicely decorated club that opened in 2000. it was located on the third floor and had no front entrance or signs. only clubbers who were in-the-know could find and get admission into the club. despite its extremely low profile, it was raided frequently and soon disappeared. older small clubs such as huangcheng disco (imperial city disco), club jingweixian (club grid) and club hongfen jiaren (club pink lady) had to operate very sporadically and were eventually forced to close down. the global club circuit frequented only by tourists, expatriates and the upper class in shanghai was relatively immune to the anti-drug raids in 2000. the police targeted the clubs that attracted ecstasy users and most of these belonged to the local club circuit. there were a few clubs in the global club circuit that also attracted ecstasy users. since their owners were expatriates and/or overseas chinese, the police had to go through more paperwork to get to them, but they too fell eventually. among these were club babylon, which went down in 2001, butterfly bar which closed its doors in 2001, and buddha bar which was shut down in 2002. the nation-wide nature of the suppression the state’s suppression of clubland was a nation-wide effort. the dance clubs in hinterland urban centers such as wuhan and chengdu were as heavily suppressed as those developed coastal cities such as shanghai, shenzhen and guangzhou. in wuhan, for example, all dance clubs were ordered to stop doing business in august 2001 and many of them had to remain closed for months (anonymous 2001). according to my observation, at least half of the over 100 dance clubs in wuhan went out of business that year. even the administratively separate city of hong kong began to tightly control drug use in 2000. between 1997 and 1999, the rave scene had grown rapidly in hong kong. by early 2000, a few rave parties took place every weekend. then hong kong police started to raid drug-centered clubs more frequently, though it did not fully adopt the hardliner suppression tactics of police in china. the police hassled ravers by conducting body searches of those entering a party and making ravers wait in unnecessarily long queues. these soft punitive tactics were effective, as they quickly cut down the number of rave parties to a few per month after 2001. favorite local rave spots, 26 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 such as the regal hotel at tsimshatsui and regal riverside hotel in shatin, had to permanently discontinue their operations. the anti-drug campaign not only shut down the operation of dance clubs and rave parties, it directly impacted clubbers. local police and officials easily make use of the anti-drug campaign to extract fees from clubbers, as china is an authoritarian country with completely dysfunctional legal and legislative systems. there is no way to hold officials accountable for their (mis)conduct. for example, the police can indiscriminately detain all clubbers in a dance club they are raiding without conducting any drug tests. in localities where the police tend to indiscriminately treat all clubbers as illegal drug users, clubbing becomes a high risk activity even for those who never use drugs. while in shanghai, police treatment of clubbers was relatively transparent and lawful, in smaller and inland cities, anti-drug campaigns became another opportunity for local officials to generate extra income. police rent-seeking in anti-drug campaigns: the case of wuhan it is common in china for local officials to re-interpret and carry out central government directives in ways which primarily serve their purpose of seeking rent. in the case of the anti-drug campaign in wuhan (the major city of central china), for example, i found that local police use the anti-drug campaign as an excuse to extract fines from clubbers. despite wuhan’s mediocre pace of economic development and globalization (relative to china’s coastal metropolises), it developed into one of the most important party cities in china from the mid-1990s. based on industry insiders’ observations and the foreign alcohol wholesale figures, wuhan‘s clubland rivaled that of beijing and shanghai in term of size. the wuhan city police had their work cut out when the antidrug campaign commenced in 2000. they raided dozens of the drug-centered clubs and continually arrested clubbers who frequented the remaining dance clubs. the police would release clubbers only if they paid informal fines. according to my interlocutors, the fine ranged from 2,000 to 10,000 yuan (at that time, 10 yuan approximated $1.00 usd) for most clubbers, but there is a case of a hong kong clubber paying 12,000 yuan to be released. the police adjusted the sum according to their estimation of how much the arrested clubber could maximally afford, with the estimation based on observations like the model of mobile phone the clubber carried or what s/he wore. although the fine was considered unreasonable by most clubbers, they would still pay it because they feared being taken to drug rehabilitation centers in which serious rights abuses can occur. as more and more clubbers were intimidated by the anti-drug campaign and police rent-seeking, the police arrested clubbers more arbitrarily and indiscriminately. for example, there were repeatedly raids on the nationally famous club qiaokou tiantian (daily disco at qiaokou), one of earliest national bases of local electronic dance music. many clubbers were detained without being tested for drug use, including some of my research participants who had never taken drugs and others who had not taken drugs on that particular night. in 2001, the police in wuhan changed their tactics and stopped raiding qiaokou tiantian. instead, they set up an ambush outside the front entrance to the club after three o’clock to arrest clubbers leaving the premises. by refraining from raiding the club, the police kept drug-centered clubs such as qiaokou tiantian from going out of business, while at the same time ensuring a steady stream of fine-paying clubbers. to avoid the almost nightly ambush, my interlocutors and i al chew • decline of the rave inspired clubculture in china 27 ways left through a side exit that took us to a neighboring public park. from there, we could walk to taxis parked 300 meters from the front entrance. adaptations to government suppression club operators’ adaptations dance club operators were forced to accommodate to the suppressive environment in 2000. they tried to disassociate themselves from drug use and to monitor clubber behavior inside club premises. at the entrance of many clubs, they posted announcements that prohibited drug use, described relevant laws and listed potential penalties. inside the clubs, a large number of security guards were stationed at critical spots (the middle of the dance floor, corners and second level spaces) to discipline clubber behavior. the security guards would intervene when observing illegal drug use, head-shake dancing, men removing their tops and other actions suggestive of ecstasy use. bottled water was the predominant drink at drug-centered dance clubs before the suppression campaigns, but since water consumption signifies ecstasy use, many clubs stopped supplying bottled water after 2000. another club adaptation involved the partitioning of open spaces into enclosed rooms. partitioned spaces are a popular interior design feature in china, where, for example, many restaurants devote a large proportion of their floor space to enclosed rooms. partitioned spaces became more prevalent in dance clubs from 2000. firstly, the spatial arrangement offered security and discretion for drug consumption for clubbers who could afford it. with lockable doors and toilets, the occupants of these rooms were afforded adequate time to discard illegal substances in cases of police raids. secondly, club management could better eschew moral responsibility and legal liability when clubbers were arrested for drug use. in response to intensified monitoring by police and other officials, many dance clubs were forced to shorten their operating hours, closing at 2:00 or 3:00 am (instead of 8:00 am, as was the case in the late 1990s). in periods of strictest control, many had to shut their doors at midnight. in some cases, however, “closing time” became a cover. thus, even if the lights outside the club entrance were switched off and patrons were not permitted entrance after a certain hour, some clubbers might still be dancing inside until dawn. clubbers with personal network ties to the management were also allowed to sneak in at any hour. the dj might have gone, the main dance floor cleared and clubbers may have left the main dance hall, but those who could afford it entered vip rooms and continued to party to recorded mixes. for example, while a nameless club in beijing’s chaoyang park always had its lights dimmed and entrance closed in 2001, it was effectively an operating venue catering specifically to veteran clubbers and ecstasy users. while these numerous adaptations were somewhat effective, they were only able to save a fraction of the clubs from going out of business. clamping down on illegal drug consumption meant that clubs lost the ability to earn commission from drug dealers operating in the premises. the undermining of this significant revenue source led many clubs to close down permanently. there were also other club operators and owners who opted to find other alternatives rather than adapt. one of them, a taiwanese subject living in shanghai, explained his reasoning. his main motivation for investing in the business was personal participation in the rave clubculture. when clubculture was harshly suppressed, he lost interest in running his club. he would 28 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 rather host secret private parties in villas in the outskirts of shanghai than maintaining a club that is constantly under state surveillance and the threat of raids, eventually reinvesting his capital in restaurant businesses. clubbers’ adaptations when state suppression of clubculture was sporadic in 1999, clubbers could avoid police raids by simply switching to clubs protected by corrupt officials or traveling to neighboring or satellite towns with club scenes protected by local officials. but in 2000, clubbers could no longer do that because few clubs or towns remained impervious to the nationally coordinated campaign. while dance clubs adapted to state suppression through institutional changes and management arrangements, clubbers adapted through constructing a range of modified and new party practices. clubbers had to discipline their own behaviors inside dance clubs. for example, they had to avoid doing head-swirling and the head-shake dance. as the police knew these bodily reactions signal ecstasy consumption, they could easily spot anyone using ecstasy immediately after they marched into a dance club. the management of the absolute majority of dance clubs started to prohibit their customers from performing head-swirls on the dance floor after 2000. chinese clubbers had to use lollipops, hugging cushions (as there are plenty of them in vip rooms), and other bodily reactions to express their ecstasy highs. another favorite clubbing practice that had to be modified was the chanting of clubber composed raps – named high-raps (hidie) by chinese clubbers – over electronic dance music. each major party city in china produced dozens of high-raps in their own local dialects in the late 1990s, which clubbers would chant aloud in unison on the dance floor. i have collected more than a hundred of these, most of which contain sexually explicit contents and some of them playful political commentaries, often directed at the chinese communist party and leading political figures. unsurprisingly, the authoritarian state could not tolerate the dissident content of these raps, with the result that that high-rapping became as heavily suppressed as ecstasy. club operators throughout china required their security personnel to prohibit clubbers from high-rapping. while the micro-management efforts required to implement such censorship may have been daunting, the task was taken up with fervor. i witnessed such censorship more than a few times in 2000 as my subjects attempted to high-rap. a small number of new high-raps are still written today and some club djs occasionally chant them, but it is much less widely diffused than before. because many dance clubs shortened their operating hours, clubbers had to find alternative spaces to party after the closing hours. a major solution was what i call “klubbing”: a hybridization of clubbing and karaoke entertainment practices (chew forthcoming 2010). during the anti-drug campaign, there were still underground clubs that stayed open until dawn catering specifically to ecstasy users. but there were few of them and most did not survive for longer than a few months. moreover, many were small and inconveniently located away from city centers. the most common after hour alternative club space for clubbers became karaoke rooms within hostess karaoke clubs or karaoke box clubs.1 there were usually a few hostess karaoke clubs and karaoke box establishments in each major party city that were willing to accommodate clubbers until morning. veteran clubbers would know where to locate these clubs and how to get into them. the karaoke rooms were set up like mini clubs, either by the chew • decline of the rave inspired clubculture in china 29 management or by clubbers in a makeshift way. the lights were dimmed and non-stop mixes of electronic dance music were played. some clubbers would even bring their own music cds, dj equipment and/or djs. clubbers could choose to watch cantopop, mandopop techno music videos, psychedelic graphics and animation videos, kung-fu movies, or videos of the dance floor scene taken at local dance clubs. but as klubbing became widely practiced among clubbers, karaoke boxes and hostess clubs eventually became a target of anti-drug raids as well. a surprising alternative space in which clubbers partied after hours was the taxi cab. the only public transportation available late at night is the taxi, many of which usually parked outside dance clubs waiting for clients. realizing that clubbers forced out of a prematurely closing club wanted more partying, enterprising taxi drivers would record electronic dance music tapes (because few taxis had cd players in the late 1990s) and play it loudly in the cab. clubbers who were forced to leave dance clubs would flock to these taxis, even if they were lining up at the end of the taxi queue. most of the drivers played techno, cantopop and mandopop electronic dance music but i have also heard chill-out compilations such as the café del mar series. after boarding the party taxi, clubber often requested drivers to tour around the city center and scenic spots such as bridges for an hour or two. a one-hour ride would cost around 250 yuan in shanghai and less in other cities. this price was tolerable in comparison to the expenses of an average dance club, especially when three or four clubbers went together. many clubbers were middle class white collar workers or businessmen in the daytime. they could not tolerate the risk of going to jail. some of them became so worried about the suppression campaign that they stopped partying in public and began to organize private parties. the more affluent among them would throw parties in suburban villas, while the moderately well-off did the same in hotel rooms and urban apartments. but the majority of “private parties” held by non-affluent clubbers were actually non-spectacular events held in private residences. for example, one of my research subjects turned her tiny and old apartment into a club almost every night within a period of two months in 2001. she would invite two or three close friends, some of whom invited other friends. she equipped the apartment with ultraviolet neon lights, gadgets that glow in the dark, candles and shiny wall decorations. while clubbing in a private space was, on the whole, safer than dance clubs, it still held risks. if neighbors complained to the police, the police would likely arrive at the scene before the party ended and they would arrest the participants. anticipating neighbor complaints, the hosts of private parties in hotel rooms and private homes often took great care to avoid disturbing neighbors. socio-cultural implications of adapting to government suppression government suppression has generated negative socio-cultural consequences for clubcultures in china. as dance clubs and clubbers adapted to the suppression, clubland managed to survive and provided the context for new local clubcultures to emerge in the mid-2000s. but there are important consequences to the adaptive tactics. most obviously, drug use became more restricted, certain clubbing practices had to be abandoned and certain music practices have been self-censored. but in addition to these, there were hidden socio-cultural costs that were no less significant. 30 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 the undermining of sociality sociality is one such cost. one of the cultural shocks that my non-chinese clubbing subjects typically experience in the current local club circuit in china is the altered and diminished role that sociality plays in dance clubs. sociality is one of the major rationales for clubbing. dance clubs function as a platform for individuals to socialize with others who share similar interests in music, drugs, and fashion; to meet and date total strangers; and to develop bonding with acquaintances and friends (communication studies 298 1997; grazian 2008). commonly, the dance floor, bar tables and common open areas of dance clubs provide the spatial stage where clubbers socialize with one another. but the interior spatial arrangement of chinese dance clubs do not facilitate sociality so strongly. many of the adaptive tactics adopted by clubbers and club management illustrate this tendency. for example, many chinese dance clubs have over half of their floor space sectioned into numerous enclosed rooms. each of these rooms is occupied by a particular group of clubbers who are willing to pay the minimum charge. many chinese clubbers are willing to pay this premium since, as previously discussed, it insures them against the risk of being arrested. these rooms become semi-private mini clubs within dance venues, the entrance to which is regulated by different groups of clubbers. socialization among strangers is restricted because clubbers who pay for the rooms are not likely to invite strangers inside indiscriminately. although open areas still remain in most chinese dance clubs, their potential to facilitate sociality is undermined by the existence of the private rooms. if about half of the clubbers in a dance club hide inside enclosed spaces and do not even publicly show their face to others, the “to-see-and-be-seen” element of clubbing sociality is inevitably hampered. the staging of clubbing activities through klubbing practices in the karaoke boxes of karaoke establishments and hostess clubs undermines sociality even more strongly since these venues do not feature any open areas at all. the same argument also applies to private parties in hotel rooms and private homes. the undermining of community another indirect cost of the adaptive tactics was the undermining of the community dimension of clubculture (goulding, shankar and elliott 2002). with a large party space and significant numbers of participants, the rave setting can be described in terms of durkheimian “collective effervescense” or freudian “oceanic” feeling (malbon 1999). whereas rave parties were a signature clubbing format in the west in the 1990s, they were the least available among all clubbing formats in china. participants of the global clubbing circuit in china often complained that they seldom had the opportunity to experience rave parties even while they had much experience with its associated music and drugs. the main reasons for the unavailability of rave parties were political and commercial risks. the political risk was the state’s aversion to gatherings of large crowds not initiated or controlled by officials, and the commercial risk was caused by the susceptibility of rave parties to rent-seeking by officials from numerous bureaus. while the political and commercial risks for any large-scale party production were already substantial before 2000, these increased after the suppression campaign began. the smaller a club was, the more likely that it could deflect risks. but a smallscale club setting was also less likely to facilitate a communal and spiritual atmosphere. the enclosing of dance club space into semi-private rooms is exemplary. in rave par chew • decline of the rave inspired clubculture in china 31 ties, hundreds or thousands of ravers listen to the same music mixed live by the dj, experience the same lighting and ambience, and dance in proximity to one another. but chinese dance clubs, vip rooms within dance clubs, karaoke boxes within a hostess or karaoke establishment, private apartments or hotel rooms cannot be the contexts for such a collective atmosphere. these constrained spaces undermine psychological immersion and prevent strangers from participating in each other’s energy. some clubbing practices were as important as club spatial setting in facilitating a sense of community in the chinese context. high-rapping and the singing of local chinese dance tracks, for example, were powerful practices that moved chinese clubbers to act collectively in dance clubs. clubbers would shout out the high-raps in unison, often with the initiation and prompting of djs or mcs. but after the state signaled disapproval of high-rapping in a high profile way through the official media, club managers became wary and censored the high-rapping of clubbers, djs and mcs in their clubs. although high-rapping can still be carried out in the vip rooms of dance clubs, karaoke boxes and private homes, these constrained spaces generate less collective energy and communal outcomes. the exacerbation of socioeconomic stratification the third hidden cost of the adaptive tactics is the exacerbation of socioeconomic stratification in chinese nightlife. in the early 1990s, chinese dance clubs typically accommodated clubbers from extremely diverse socioeconomic backgrounds (farrer 2002). but as the nightlife market expanded in the late 1990s, different dance clubs gradually developed their niches through catering to different socioeconomic groups. an inter-club hierarchy was established in each of the several major party cities in china by the late 1990s. the global dance club circuit attracted white expatriate males, overseas chinese males, upper-middle class local chinese males and young local chinese females. the clubs of this circuit are usually located in the central business districts, prime retail districts, scenic tourist spots or diplomatic districts. the local club circuit, which primarily attracts middle and lower income local chinese, was once scattered throughout the city and is now aggregated in government-planned nightlife districts. apart from the industrial development towards stratification from the early 1990s to the late 1990s, the adaptive tactics of club management and clubbers led to an additional dimension of stratification in clubland in the early 2000s. adaptive tactics resisting state suppression often required the mobilization of resources. some of these resources were free. for example, at a private party in her apartment, one subject took blankets from her bed to block off her doors and windows in order to prevent noise leakage. while this noise-prevention measure was entirely costless and broadly adopted by the private party hosts i have met, other tactics would incur costs. the provision of relatively safe spaces for clubbing often required substantial expenses ranging from audio equipment to suburban villas – expenses largely transferred to clubbers or the hosts. in other words, only clubbers and hosts who had the economic means and/or social connections to cover such expenses could enjoy safe and risk-free clubbing. clubbers without the requisite social and economic capital either had to either bear the full risks of state suppression or quit clubbing. another development towards social hierarchy involves the polarization of global and local club circuits. some dance clubs attempted to alleviate police pressure by repositioning themselves as prestigious, expensive and cosmopolitan clubs for the upper 32 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 middle class. other dance clubs moved deeper underground by relocating to very marginal areas in the city, restricting entrance and operating irregularly. lower income clubbers were intimated by the posh cosmopolitan clubs, whereas upper-middle class clubbers were turned off by the organized criminal affiliation of underground clubs. the polarization of global and local club circuits intensified during the early 2000s as a result. it only abated more recently after club operators invented new market positioning tactics – such as the re-packaging of dance clubs as middle-class lounge bars – to distract police attention. conclusion the previous analysis demonstrates that the rave inspired clubculture that prospered in late 1990s china stagnated in the early 2000s because of harsh suppression by the state. it is found that club operators and clubbers somewhat successfully adapted to the suppression campaign by modifying club spaces, practices and culture. but the adaptations generated negative socio-cultural consequences for chinese clubculture: the undermining of sociality inside dance clubs, the weakening of the communal dimension of clubculture and the exacerbation of socioeconomic stratification in clubland. a few years after high-handedly suppressing clubland, the chinese state took an unprecedented turn in dealing with nightlife: it began to embrace the night-time economy as a means of culture-led urban renewal, a cultural industry infrastructure, a tourist attraction and a source of local tax revenue. the suppression of the rave inspired clubculture was not entirely relaxed. but the state has indeed replaced heavyhanded suppression campaigns by administratively encouraging domesticated, socially and politically non-threatening clubcultures. clubbers and club operators are of course taking advantage of the state’s partial relaxation of suppression to re-engage in relatively unfettered forms of party practices. for example, after the popularity of ecstasy declined chinese clubbers followed the global fashion of drug consumption and discovered ketamine and other varieties of recreational drugs. a new dynamic of state regulation of clubland, clubber resistance and clubcultural transformation is transpiring at present, a dynamic that is more subtle and complex than that documented in this study. the investigation of this new dynamic will be a valuable future research direction. ••••••• acknowledgements i would like to thank graham st john and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on my paper. references anonymous. 2001. “yu dupin baoli seqing guagou wuhan suoyou diba tingye zhengdun” (due to connections to drugs, violence, sex, all dance clubs in wuhan have to reform and quit operating), online news article posted on august 24, 2001. <http://past.people.com.cn/big5/shehui/45/20010824/542908.html> (accessed 20 june 2002). chatterton, paul and robert hollands. 2003. urban nightscapes: youth culture, pleasure spaces and corporate power. london: routledge. chew • decline of the rave inspired clubculture in china 33 http://past.people.com.cn/big5/shehui/45/20010824/542908.html http://past.people.com.cn/big5/shehui/45/20010824/542908.html cheng, 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(san francisco). thornton, sarah. 1996. club cultures: music, media, and subcultural capital. hanover; london: university press of new england. author biography matthew m. chew is an assistant professor in the department of sociology, hong kong baptist university. his research interests include cultural sociology, globalization, social movements, new media, nightlife, fashion, intellectual history, cultural policy and social theory. his work deals with a variety of empirical materials including early modern japanese universities, chinese dance clubs and online games. notes 34 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 1 the major difference between hostess karaoke clubs and karaoke box establishments is the presence of hostesses (ie. women who provide romance and sex work) in hostess karaoke clubs. montano-typeset dj culture in the commercial sydney dance music scene ed montano macquarie university (sydney, au) abstract the development of contemporary, post-disco dance music and its associated culture, as representative of a (supposedly) underground, radical subculture, has been given extensive consideration within popular music studies. significantly less attention has been given to the commercial, mainstream manifestations of this music. therefore, this article examines the contemporary commercial dance music scene in sydney, australia, incorporating an analytical framework that revolves mainly around the work of djs and the commercial scene they operate within. the ideas, opinions and interpretations of a selection of local djs and other music industry practitioners who work in sydney are central to the article’s analysis of dj culture within the city and of, more specifically, dj self-understandings with respect to choices of records and in relation to the twin imperatives of entertainment and education. keywords sydney, djs, programming, mainstream, clubbers the arguments and observations contained within this article are based on ethnographic research i conducted in the sydney dance music scene between 2002 and 2006. in addition to the requisite nights out clubbing, this research involved qualitative interviews with twenty-one people (djs, journalists and promoters) conducted over a period between september 2004 and october 2005. all interviews were conducted “one-on-one”, as opposed to in groups, and took place in locations such as bars, coffee shops, and respondents’ homes (weber 1999: 321). furthermore, between september 2002 and december 2004, i was also a participant-observer, working at the sydney-based specialist dance music store central station records, and it was here i made contact with most of my interviewees, either directly, in the sense that they were customers of the store and so i came into regular contact with them, or indirectly through networks of contacts i managed to establish during my work at the store. while ethnographic research of this nature is not without problems (thornton 1995: 105-107), i believe this was the best methodology to employ for this particular project, and as brennan-horley notes, “what is clear is that detailed ethnographic research is required to understand the workforce and commercial dimensions of dance music culture” (2007: 126). dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(1) 2009, 81-93 issn 1947-5403 ©2009 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.05 in using the terms “dance music” and “dance culture”, i am referring to the “commercial”, dj-played music that one can hear in such sydney clubs as home, the arthouse, slip inn, and tank, and at various bars, pubs, festivals and events within the city area. the article is intended to complement analysis that has previously been conducted on sydney, and australian, dance music culture (examples being murphie and scheer 1992; homan 1998; gibson and pagan 2000; brookman 2001; luckman 2002; slavin 2004; brennan-horley 2007). more generally, the article is intended to contribute to the growing literature on dj culture around the world (examples being fikentscher 1991, 2000; klasco and michael 1992; langlois 1992; rietveld 1997, 1998; haslam 1997, 2001; poschardt 1998; reynolds 1998; brewster and broughton 2000; gerard 2004; farrugia and swiss 2005). djs and sydney while the emphasis and importance that is placed on the possession of technical skills, such as beat-mixing and operating particular types of equipment (turntables, cd players, laptop computers), varies from dj to dj, the one constant and essential requirement for any dj to be successful is an ability to select and sequence music in such a way that excites and interests the crowd. at the very centre of any dj set is the interaction that occurs between the dj and the clubbers on the dance floor, and the success of a dance event depends ultimately on the extent to which the dj is able to develop and sustain this interaction. while a dj presides over a dance floor, selecting the music and steering the flow of the event, this selection is determined by the reactions of the crowd, and a non-responsive crowd suggests a lack of engagement with the dj’s choice of music. an issue of tension in the sydney dance scene involves the performances of international djs, and how these performances impact upon the scene as a local entity. it is clear that developments in the structure of the dance party scene in sydney (with the establishment of large, annual parties and festival-like events that are staged at locations such as parks and other open public spaces, and are held during the day, such as field day, parklife, harbourlife, future music, global gathering, and good vibrations) have had an impact on the way clubbers perceive the relevance of international djs. from a marketing perspective, these djs serve to draw and attract people to the parties, and this has been interpreted by those within the scene in two contrasting ways. one is in a positive sense, in that these djs help to educate the scene with new music and to broaden the global perspective of the scene’s participants. in contrast to this, there is the negative argument that suggests these djs, and the emphasis that clubbers place on them, create a dj hierarchy of skill and ability, with the local djs being consigned to the lower reaches of this hierarchy. it is an obvious fallacy to suggest that all international djs are more skilful and more capable djs than their local counterparts, and yet this is a perspective that is deeply imbedded within the very fabric of the sydney scene. this stems, i would suggest, from the way the sydney dance scene has its roots in an imported culture, in that, with an emphasis on imported vinyl, on imported music, on imported sounds, and on imported styles, comes an emphasis on imported djs. with the centrality of the british, european, and american scenes to global dance culture, it follows that the key djs from these scenes will be elevated to a position of significance by clubbers around the world. as murphie and scheer suggest, “house music in australia is about constructing identities using borrowed or translated signifiers” (1992: 183). similar notions of importing and borrowing have 82 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 informed debates concerning the country’s popular music in general, for as hayward notes, “whatever its achievements, australian popular music has been principally derived from imported models” (1992: 6). this emphasis on overseas developments relates to the notion of “cultural cringe” that has permeated australian culture and society. with the country’s geographical isolation supposedly generating a degree of cultural isolation, “cultural cringe” involves the perception of locally-produced creative work as inferior to anything that originates outside of the country. sydney dj john wall acknowledges the notion as a reason for the emphasis that participants in sydney’s dance music scene place on international djs: … people talk about cultural cringe, and it’s very real. it’s not as bad as it was when i was young, but nevertheless, because we are a long way away… people kind of assume that overseas dance culture is probably better, or bigger, or more sophisticated, or whatever, and that therefore the djs are more skilful, it’s more competitive, more music is available there, and so on and so on and so on…1 ultimately, it is impossible to ignore the influence that international dance culture has had on the formation and development of the sydney dance scene, and as luckman points out, … the wider popularisation in australia of dance music and events in the early 1990s was fuelled, and hence participant’s [sic] expectations and styles informed, in large part by the european, especially british, experience. whether it was through fashion magazines, the growing celebrity status of overseas djs, the accessibility at a recorded level of overseas material, or people’s own travel abroad, the mythic ethos of the increasingly mainstream british scene loomed large over many australian’s [sic] consumer expectations. (2001: 6364; see also brennan-horley 2007: 124-125) to lend such emphasis to djs from outside of the scene does, however, obscure the important role the local djs have in shaping and sustaining local dance culture. while the concept of “international djs” emphasises the way dance culture exists on a global scale, it is important to note that it is the workings, happenings and events at the local level that give shape and structure to global dance culture. for this reason, the following discussion explores in greater detail the way local sydney djs interpret their profession, and works through some of the issues that shape and define the dj’s role. specific focus is placed on local djs, and what they perceive their responsibilities to be as a dj, and there is discussion of the multiple roles of the dj. consideration is given to the way djs approach their sets, what they play in these sets, the extent to which these sets are planned or spontaneous, and the tension that exists between the dj’s role as an entertainer and the dj’s role as an educator. the dj set an issue worth noting in discussing the role of the dj is the concern djs give to the progression of an entire night, as opposed to solely their own set, in that a dj will select their tracks in regard to their place within the night’s dj line-up and the time at which they are playing. certain tracks suit certain points in the night, and as the comments of djs show, in structuring their performances consideration is given not just to the content of their own sets, but also to the other djs that will be playing on montano • dj culture in the commercial sydney dance music scene 83 the same line-up. thus, for example, a dj who is scheduled to play at the beginning of the night has the role and responsibility to “warm up” the dance floor, which will be achieved through a balanced set of tracks that, on occasions, may send dancers into some degree of joyous frenzy, but on the whole, this particular role is about setting and establishing the mood. as the term infers, “warming up” involves exactly that, in the sense that it is the role of the first one or two djs to draw people on to the dance floor and warm them up for the headlining dj. as a result, the “warm-up dj” has to, at least in theory, restrain themselves from playing too many “anthems” or “big tracks”, the task of which is usually performed by the main dj, whose responsibility it is to “peak” the night, to create a sense of excitement, and “to prompt as strong as possible a response from the floor at least once during the evening” (fikentscher 2000: 41). this is an issue acknowledged by sydney dj trent rackus when he states: programming is very important to me in a night; you’ve got to have it so each dj complements the next… the vibe of the night should be built around each dj working towards the next one and giving it that flow, and creating the energy via that.2 discussing how he approaches the planning and structuring of a set, sydney dj john devecchis explains how, to maintain the flow and momentum of a night, it is important that the dj is familiar with the styles of music that the djs either side of them in the line-up will be playing: if i don’t know what a dj before me or after me plays, i find out. i played in brisbane recently at family nightclub, and i phoned the promoter and asked him what the guy before me played. he basically told me that he played a little bit more pumped-up than i do, so i was like, right, the first thing i need to do when i get there is ask this guy if he’ll pitch it down for his last three tracks, and i did, and it worked. for the guy after me, i was told he played quite vocal, so i made sure towards the end of my set i played three vocal tracks. you can mess a night up by changing the pitch or the style in one record, you can lose the floor, just like that.3 thus, to ensure the success of a club night or dance event, the dj has to familiarise themselves with the styles of the other djs that will be working around them. the logics of dance culture dictate that coherency, flow and momentum must be maintained, and any rupture in this flow can serve to negatively affect the atmosphere within the club. big tunes and little tunes within club culture, a certain tension exists between the extent to which djs are expected to play popular, well-known tracks, which typically generates an excited response from the dance floor, and the extent to which djs should pursue a more challenging, and less explicitly commercial, path by playing tracks that are less familiar to clubbers. in discussing their opinions regarding the extent to which popular, “anthem” tracks should be played during the course of a set, djs raise such variable and subjectively interpreted notions as “selling out” and “compromise of artistic integrity”, making it difficult to draw out a common and shared approach to this aspect of dj culture. the playing of too many “big tunes” in close sequence or throughout the course of one’s set, what rietveld refers to as “resorting to a kind of populism” (1998: 114), in84 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 vites criticisms not only of a lack of experimentation, but also of a selfishness to promote one’s own set at the expense of the following dj’s, in that if the warm-up dj peaks the night too early, through playing a selection of some of the most popular tracks of the moment, there is nowhere else for the following dj to “take” the night, which can disrupt the “flow” and “progression” of the night as a whole. given that the playing of popular tracks typically creates a sense of excitement within a crowd, to play such tracks during the initial stages of a night contradicts the ideologies of dj practice that dictate that a crowd should not be peaked too soon. citing a specific example, john devecchis describes the difference between the role of the warm-up dj and the role of the main dj in playing certain tracks, and the way the warm-up dj should, ideally, sacrifice the playing of certain tracks to avoid peaking the night too early: you know the track “so much love to give’?4 i saw one of the warm-up djs at home nightclub once, i won’t mention his name, about two years ago when the track was massive, he warmed up for an international, and he was doing a good job, and as his last track before the international came in, he played “so much love to give”. i’ve never in my life questioned a dj doing something before as much as i did that. he played the biggest tune of the moment as the very last track before an international came on. he peaked the crowd to the biggest they were going to get peaked all night, just as this poor international was coming on to play. it was the most unprofessional thing i’ve ever seen in my life… it was stupid. what’s the point of booking an international if your warm-up dj is going to outdo him? the job of a warm-up dj is to get the crowd warmed up, get a groove, and get people on the dance floor. the ones who try to steal the limelight shouldn’t be warming up for internationals, basically.5 the exact content of a dj’s set is thus determined not only by their own personal taste in music, but also by the time at which they are scheduled to play during the course of a night. while the way in which this is interpreted will vary from dj to dj, discussion of the issue reflects how there are certain unwritten rules of djing, rules that may be ignored on occasions, but on the whole, rules that help to maintain the musical flow and progression of a night. planning versus spontaneity the dj “set” typically lasts for between one to four hours, although as fikentscher observes, a dj’s allotted time can “vary from ‘guest spots’ which can be as short as one or two hours, to marathon shifts that can last in excess of twelve hours” (2000: 84). during this set, through a specific selection of music, the dj constantly alters the mood of their crowd, creating peaks and troughs, spring describing how, “typically, a set begins softly and builds to an intense peak, then mellows out to bring the dancers down and signal the set’s end” (2004: 50). these “peaks” represent moments when the dj works up a particular intensity in their crowd through the playing of certain tracks, which may incorporate some adjustment of sound through, for example, a cutting out, and then a reintroduction, of a bass line or a vocal line. in reference to these dance floor peaks, fikentscher notes how “both djs and dancers are aware of the significance of the moments, as the ultimate manifestation of the communication linking the booth with the floor” (2000: 41). it is through this work of the dj that the records played transcend their commodity status as simply purchased recordings, in the sense that, as langlois explains, montano • dj culture in the commercial sydney dance music scene 85 “they are actively “performed” by the dj himself, allowing spontaneity, surprise and creativity” (1992: 236), while brookman describes the centrality of the dj set to the clubbing experience and to the consumption of music that occurs within the clubbing environment, with the dj producing a “continuous flow of music, often feeding off the response of the audience in choosing the tracks to play” (2001: 19) (see also klasco and michael 1992: 61). in reference to the skills required for mixing, thornton labels djs “turntable musicians”, suggesting that they fashion entirely new music out of their “raw material” of records (1995: 63). théberge transfers this notion of musicality on to the equipment and technology used by djs, suggesting that the skills and techniques developed by djs have “transformed the turntable, a quintessentially reproductive device, into a productive one; a musical instrument of the first order” (2001: 15; author’s italics).6 in responding to the mood of the crowd (langlois 1992: 236), djs need to be able to improvise and work spontaneously, and it is in this sense that dj sets become performances, perhaps even more so than rock and pop concerts. a band or singer will often follow the structure of a set list, but it is extremely rare for a dj to approach a set with a predetermined playing order, and indeed, such practice is frowned upon within dj culture, and seen as contradicting the very notion of spontaneity that underpins djing. as sydney dj goodwill explains in regard to his own djing: none of it is predetermined. there’s probably [been] twice in the ten years i’ve been djing [when] i’ve specifically mixed two records together because it sounded good the night before. i hate that stuff. there are djs out there who play [like that], especially international djs that play the same set everywhere they dj. i’ve noticed it lots of times where i’ve been travelling and i’ve seen the same international [dj] playing three cities in a week, and they play the same set… that’s just cheating, it’s like sending your twin brother into work for you.7 djing is thus predicated on the immediacy of responding to the various different reactions of clubbers when they hear particular tracks. this dictates that a dance music event is a unique and unrepeatable happening, grounded very much in the moment in which it occurs, although as goodwill highlights above, not all djs work according to this principle. the inherent spontaneity of a dance music event dictates that a significant degree of pre-planning is ultimately a pointless exercise, in that a dj cannot predict exactly how a crowd will react to a particular track. this is not to say, however, that a dj goes to perform a set without giving some prior consideration to the records they will play, for as john devecchis explains, the exact style one chooses to focus on during a set is determined by the styles played by the other djs on the line-up, and the venue at which one is playing: [for example] i played at sounds on sunday (a weekly dance event held at the greenwood hotel in north sydney, which typically runs from 2pm until 10pm) and warmed up for jim baron from crazy penis. now i know that jim baron plays quite slow because i’ve seen him before, so i thought obviously i’m not going to play any big tunes, i’m warming up for an international, and i don’t want to pump it too hard. i knew it was going to be a hard set because he plays with the pitch really far down… so i had to plan my set. i practised for four hours, i pulled out every track that i thought i wanted to play, put them in my box, along with a few tracks i knew worked at sounds [on sunday] from playing there… now i’ve got an idea of what i’m going to play, but you don’t always stick 86 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 to it, you don’t have an idea what you’re going to play track for track, you just know these tracks are all kind of similar, and these next tracks all kind of lead on to them so i can put them together, and the next tracks lead on to them, and maybe pick out one every four or one every five and play them. that’s how i generally structure my set, but it depends on who i’m playing before or after… you have to have an idea, but you can’t plan.8 every dj has to ensure there is a flow and coherency to the set, and thus, a dj will, through the music played, vary the mood at several different points throughout the set, as sydney dj paul goodyear highlights when he describes his own approach to djing: for my sets, i always warm up, i never go in and “bang it”, i always kind of start off at a mellower pace, pick it up to a peak, maybe drop it back down a little bit… [it depends] on the gig where i’m working at, but that’s predominantly how i work… you have to cater for the crowd where you are playing. i always walk in and gauge the crowd.9 thus, most dj sets can be described as spontaneous creations that are very much tied to the moment in which they are experienced, despite the fact that some degree of preplanning is most likely to have been arranged. it is important, however, not to overemphasise this notion of spontaneity, for a set is predetermined simply by the fact that a dj can only take so much music to a particular performance. as sydney dj alan thompson highlights, all djs predetermine their sets through the music that they decide to take with them to a gig, while he also describes the processes that can determine what music he takes with him and what music he plays: there’s a great myth about that. many djs will say to you, “no, i don’t know what i’m going to play before i go into a club”. yes, you don’t know what you’re going to play, but you’ve got a hundred records in your box, so you’ve already decided what you are going to play… i might not necessarily know what order i’m going to play them in, but i’ve already obviously predetermined what i’m going to play by putting those one hundred records in the box, and how that works is, for me anyway, from front to back, my newest record is at the front, my oldest record is at the back, and then every week i might add one or two records, or i’ll think, “i’ve been playing that for ages now, i’ll take that out”, and that’s how my box works. any dj that says, “i have no idea what i’m going to do” is an absolute liar… it’s in what order you are going to play them [that you don’t know]… if i’ve played on a friday night, and i’ve mixed three records together and they’ve worked really, really, really well, i’ll play those three records in that row the next night, there’s no reason why i can’t do that at another club.10 the dj as consumer in purchasing music in much the same way as listeners and general consumers, the role of the dj involves consuming music. at the same time, presenting that music to an audience, the dj is “making a product – the performance of the music contained in that record” (brewster and broughton 2000: 21), or rather, as malbon prefers to see it, “while the music is usually produced elsewhere, the djs reproduce it through the use of technology” (1999: 82; author’s italics). brookman notes that the role of the dj as consumer is of relevance “since they are ultimately responsible for the purchase of music which is later consumed collectively by clubbers” (2001: 20), and thus, the dj acts as a “cultural gatekeeper”, or “cultural broker” (fikentscher 2000: 12), selecting music made by other djs and produc montano • dj culture in the commercial sydney dance music scene 87 ers, and presenting it to the wider clubbing public. théberge suggests that we can “consider the art of the deejay as founded, initially, upon a type of consumer knowledge – a knowledge of musical style based in judgement and connoisseurship” (2001: 15), while negus describes how djs are “key taste makers and consumers” (1996: 63). as such, clubbers actually experience “consumption” as practised for them. the process of consuming the records as a buyer is performed for clubbers, and is “indicative of the experiential component of consumption for participants in dance cultures” (brookman 2001: 20). the dj as educator versus the dj as entertainer alongside this consumption/production axis, the dj also acts as both a performer, in that it is their responsibility to entertain the crowd in the club, and a promoter, playing new records when no one in the crowd may have heard them before (frith 2001: 41). this dual role is acknowledged by brewster and broughton when they describe how, in their work, a dj is “entertaining an audience and at the same time urging [this audience] to go out and buy something – the records that [the dj] uses for [their] performance” (2000: 21). as haslam suggests, a key skill of djing is, … obviously not just to drop the popular, well-known songs at the right part of the night, but to pick the right new releases, track down the obscurer tunes and newest imports, get hold of next month’s big tune this month. (1997: 169) when discussing how he perceives the role of the dj, goodwill acknowledges the balance that has to be achieved in the work of the commercial house music dj between the playing of popular tracks and the playing of more obscure, lesser-known tracks: the dj is definitely there to entertain, that’s my whole job… i feel a little bit of my role is to expose more of an interesting side to what’s out there, i always try mix records together that people won’t think i’ll put together, and that’s how i’ve gotten a bit of a name for myself, i think, is for not sticking to one style in a set… i think my role is to entertain, like any dj, but i definitely put a large focus, personally, on breaking a new sound every time i dj, or a new style, or a record that’s a bit different and challenging the listener a little bit.11 trent rackus takes a similar approach towards his djing, describing a specific example of a club in sydney at which he used to play to highlight the balance he believes a dj should try to attain between entertaining and educating: i’d go to gas thinking i’m going to play [certain records] tonight, and i’m really going to try to stick to the programme, but i’d get there, and the dj before me had been playing big records, so you try [to] pull it back and play something less commercial, and you start to lose the crowd, and you don’t want to be playing to no one. at the end of the day, you’re employed by these venues to entertain the audience, and i think you’ve got a duty to them, when you’re charging them good money, to put on a performance, but it also comes down to what you can withstand yourself… there are certain records i could never, ever play, and i cringe when i hear other djs play them.12 88 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 as rackus goes on to explain, those djs that choose to pursue a commercial path can serve to undermine the educational approach that some djs try to take with their music: i was playing at homebar on saturday night and i finished up at 1.30am, and i was listening to what they were playing in the main room [at home], and it was diabolical. i heard three tracks in a row – lee-cabrera’s “shake it”, starsailor’s “four to the floor”, and freestylers’ “push up” – these are three of the most commercial records that i’d be almost embarrassed to play in a two-hour set, yet these people were just belting them out one after another. this is why people don’t become educated, and you find it harder to then go into a club and play cool music because people just don’t get it… not every other dj that is playing alongside of you, that’s not their goal to educate people.13 for paul goodyear, maintaining a balance between entertaining and educating is a central part of the process of establishing, and maintaining, a connection with the crowd on the dance floor, as he explains while discussing the role of the dj: for me it’s always been a two-way street. i like to educate, but i also love to play for the crowd too. i’m not one of these snobby djs that won’t play a madonna track or a kylie track. if that’s going to help my night work much better… if i give them something, then they’re going to be a lot more, i guess, open-minded, and let me be able to play brand new, cutting-edge stuff, and if it means playing a madonna track, or whatever, to actually achieve that, then i’m very happy to do that.14 through the responses outlined above, it can be seen how certain approaches to djing have been ascribed a particular relevance and purpose. educating a crowd has become linked to the playing of new music and to the musical tastes of the dj, while entertaining is associated more with catering to the desires of a crowd and subsequent compromise on the part of the dj. with its quick turnover of music, fashions and styles, dance music culture is very much based on contemporary happenings, with constant attention being given to new music, and with a “strong emphasis upon the ‘here and now’” (malbon 1999: 182). it is the job of the dj to actively seek out this new music, and to “educate” their audience with it, although the extent to which a dj may be free to do this may be limited or constrained by the music policy of the club in which they play, as well as by the demands and expectations of their crowd, particularly if these are of a more commercial nature and orientation. the “underground” is generally seen as a place in which new music can be given greater exposure and in which this music can be presented to a compliant audience, whereas commercially-minded audiences are seen as comparatively less adventurous and less experimental in their choice of venue and music, and demand, on the whole, music that is familiar and recognisable. as goodwill explains, while one part of the dj’s role is to educate their crowd with new music and new styles, playing in mainstream clubs can restrict the extent to which a dj is free to do this: i think that because i play at such overground venues, i probably teach a little bit less than people in the underground do… but then there’s this whole other argument that i always think about… because i do get guilty about playing in big clubs, i think to myself “is this cheap and easy?”, and then i do kind of calm myself down by thinking that what i do is teach people that are just learning about dance music something more, whereas i think a montano • dj culture in the commercial sydney dance music scene 89 lot of the underground has to do with preaching to the converted. everyone has a role and a responsibility to educate a little bit, it’s just a matter of where you decide to do it.15 we can identify multiple roles for the dj, such as promoter, educator and consumer of new music, but these are all subsumed under the dj’s main role as entertainer. the underlying principle that informs the everyday work of all djs is to entertain. the dj is paid to do a job, this job being to entertain a crowd, an essential part of which is playing the right type of music to actually attract this crowd into the club in the first place. if a dj fails to draw a crowd, then they are failing in their role to entertain. most djs in the sydney scene agree that there is a certain level of compromise involved in their work, and they mark a distinction between the local djs who are there essentially to entertain, and therefore have to structure their sets in order to cater for commercial crowds, and the international djs who attract clubbers purely through their status within dance culture, and who, while also having a responsibility to entertain, can incorporate more of an “educational” sensibility into their djing through the playing of new and unfamiliar music. sydney dj adam jesse explains how, for local djs like himself, the emphasis is on entertaining the crowd, and that it is only the internationally-known djs who really have the opportunity to educate their audience, while he also acknowledges a perceived difference between the underground and the commercial scenes: with djs like us, we’re doing what we can to get the gigs, whereas if you’re at the level like sasha, john digweed or paul oakenfold, then you’re educating. we need to push what sound works so we get more work… if you’re booked to play a commercial nightclub, you can’t go in there and try to educate people playing what you want to play, because the people that go to those clubs haven’t gone there for that sort of reason. they’ve gone to the club to socialise. you have to keep it exciting and familiar, and play what people know, but you go to an underground club where people have gone to that club specifically to hear underground house music, you turn around and play a cheesy commercial set, it’s wrong, they won’t want to hear that, they’ve gone there for a specific reason.16 conclusion it has been my aim to sketch an image of sydney’s dance scene through the words of the djs involved in it. this dictates that some of the observations and interpretations are contextually specific, yet at the same time, the global nature of djing, and indeed dance culture itself, means that these observations and interpretations can be drawn out and applied on a wider geographical scale, and thus, it is in this sense that this study transcends its specific focus on sydney and can be seen as relevant to dance scenes elsewhere in the world. the content of dj sets, planning versus spontaneity, warm-up spots, and the tension between the role of the dj as an educator and the role of the dj as an entertainer, are all issues that, when discussed by djs who work within the sydney scene, shed light on the workings that underpin dance culture in the city, yet they are also issues that inform dance scenes anywhere in the world. the djs in sydney work within a scene that is constrained and limited by the comparatively small population of the city. this not only affects regularity of work, but it also dictates that dance culture in the city itself, and in australia as a whole, lacks the industry infrastructure that has allowed scenes in europe and america to develop as key sites of development and progression in dance music. this has subsequently meant that dance culture in australia has developed with a reliance on the music, djs, 90 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 media and fashions of dance scenes overseas, and thus, djs in sydney play with music that is most typically foreign in origin. as a comparatively small scene, with a dependence on imported music, it can be argued that djs in sydney are more constrained by market demands, in that in order to maintain a level of popularity that generates sustained employment, they have to cater more to crowd expectations than djs in other territories where there are more expansive and diverse dance scenes, and where it is financially possible to engage in experimentation. this is not to say that sydney does not have a varied dance scene, but rather that the commercial concerns that are central to the scene and its continued existence do not accommodate the development of radical and experimental sub-scenes, and thus prevent the sydney scene from developing in the same way as dance scenes in places such as detroit, chicago and manchester have developed. with these commercial concerns the emphasis on the dj as an educator recedes in favour of a focus on the dj as an entertainer. if large clubbing crowds are gained through the playing of particular, or rather popular, tracks, then it follows that djs who play such tracks will be employed by clubs to cater to such crowds. if clubs wish to pursue such a commercial path even further, then club music policies will often be employed, which disrupts and constrains the freedom of choice a dj may have in selecting their music. yet it is largely idealistic to suggest that all djs are free to play whatever music they want, and that all djs can approach their work with the sole aim of educating a crowd with new and unfamiliar music. all djs, regardless of their fame and stature within dance culture, have to keep in mind the expectations of their crowd during any one set. as dance culture has developed into a mainstream phenomenon, the development of the concept of the superstar dj has helped to position the dj at the forefront of the culture, and it can be argued that this has had a direct impact on the sydney dance scene, negatively affecting the role and significance of the local djs. as djs from europe and america have been granted a degree of significance by those within global dance culture, djs in sydney have been reduced to a supporting role. as such, it is the international djs who are permitted, by clubbing crowds in the city, a greater degree of freedom in the music that they play, and can thus take an approach that focuses more on new music, so that international djs become ascribed a certain educational value by clubbers in the sydney scene, often at the expense of the local djs, who are subsequently seen more as entertainers, and less as promoters of new music. yet to reduce the workings of dj culture in sydney to such a simple dichotomy dismisses the very diversity that gives shape to the city’s dance scene. as the different responses outlined in this article suggest, there are many distinct and divergent understandings of the nature of djing work, dictating that it would be inappropriate to attempt to arrive at one defined and specific interpretation of dj practice as it relates to the sydney dance scene. whether in regard to understandings of educating and entertaining, or approaches in planning a dj set, every dj has a different interpretation of the issues that shape and define their job. thus, in interpreting and theorising dj culture, a certain degree of fluidity has to be incorporated into the arguments and judgements that are subsequently formed. the approach each dj takes to their work is defined by a number of factors, and these include the geographical location in which they are playing, the type of club at which they are playing, the order in the schedule they are playing, the type of crowd which they are playing to, the style of music they generally play, and their status and popularity within the scene in which they are playing. montano • dj culture in the commercial sydney dance music scene 91 ••••••• references brennan-horley, chris. 2007. “work and play: vagaries surrounding contemporary cultural production in sydney’s dance music culture”. media international australia 123: 123-37. brewster, bill and frank broughton. 2000. last night a dj saved my life: the history of the disc jockey. london: headline. brookman, chris. 2001. ‘forever young’: consumption and evolving neo-tribes in the sydney rave scene. bsc thesis (geosciences), university of sydney. farrugia, rebekah and thomas swiss. 2005. “tracking the djs: vinyl records, work, and the debate over new technologies”. journal of popular music studies 17(1): 30-44. fikentscher, kai. 1991. “supremely clubbed, devastatingly dubbed: some observations on the nature of mixes on 12-inch dance singles”. tracking: popular music studies 4(1): 9-15. ––––. 2000. "you better work!" underground dance music in new york city. hanover: university press of new england. frith, simon. 2001. “the popular music industry”. in simon frith, will straw and john street (eds), the cambridge companion to pop and rock, pp. 26-52. cambridge: cambridge university press. gerard, morgan. 2004. “selecting ritual: djs, dancers and liminality in underground dance music”. in graham st. john (ed), rave culture and religion, pp. 167-84. london: routledge gibson, chris and rebecca pagan. 2000. “rave culture in sydney, australia: mapping youth spaces in media discourse”. http://www.snarl.org/youth/chrispagan2.pdf, accessed 15 august 2003. haslam, dave. 1997. “dj culture”. in steve redhead, derek wynne and justin o’connor (eds), the clubcultures reader, pp. 150-61. oxford: blackwell. ––––. 2001. adventures on the wheels of steel: the rise of the superstar djs. london: fourth estate. hayward, philip (ed). 1992. from pop to punk to postmodernism: popular music and australian culture from the 1960s to the 1990s. sydney: allen & unwin. homan, shane. 1998. “after the law”. perfect beat 4(1): 56-83. klasco, mike and pamela michael. 1992. “crushing grooves: the art of deejay mixing”. electronic musician 8(10): 58-65. langlois, tony. 1992. “can you feel it? djs and house music culture in the uk”. popular music 11(2): 229-38. luckman, susan. 2001. “what are they raving on about?” perfect beat 5(2): 49-68. ––––. 2002. party people: mapping contemporary dance music cultures in australia. phd thesis, university of queensland, brisbane. malbon, ben. 1999. clubbing: dancing, ecstasy and vitality. london: routledge. murphie, andrew and edward scheer. 1992. “dance parties: capital, culture and simulation”. in philip hayward (ed), from pop to punk to postmodernism, pp. 172-84. sydney: allen & unwin. negus, keith. 1996. popular music in theory: an introduction. cambridge: polity. poschardt, ulf. 1998. dj culture. london: quartet books. reynolds, simon. 1998. energy flash: a journey through rave music and dance culture. london: picador. rietveld, hillegonda. 1997. “the house sound of chicago”. in steve redhead, derek wynne and justin o’connor (eds), the clubcultures reader, pp. 106-17. oxford: blackwell. ––––. 1998. this is our house: house music, cultural spaces and technologies. aldershot: ashgate. slavin, sean. 2004. “drugs, space, and sociality in a gay nightclub in sydney”. journal of contemporary ethnography 33(3): 265-95. 92 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 http://www.snarl.org/youth/chrispagan2.pdf http://www.snarl.org/youth/chrispagan2.pdf spring, ken. 2004. “behind the rave: structure and agency in a rave scene”. in andy bennett and richard a. peterson (eds), music scenes: local, translocal, and virtual, pp. 48-63. nashville: vanderbilt university press. théberge, paul. 2001. “‘plugged in’: technology and popular music”. in simon frith, will straw and john street (eds), the cambridge companion to pop and rock, pp. 3-25. cambridge: cambridge university press. thornton, sarah. 1995. club cultures: music, media and subcultural capital. cambridge: polity. weber, timothy. 1999. “raving in toronto: peace, love, unity and respect in transition”. journal of youth studies 2(3): 317-36. author biography ed montano has an ma in popular music studies from the institute of popular music at the university of liverpool and a phd on the commercial sydney dance music scene from macquarie university. he teaches  on a popular music history  course at macquarie university, works in music retail, and writes for the australian dance music website www.inthemix.com.au notes montano • dj culture in the commercial sydney dance music scene 93 1 john wall, interview with the author (sydney), 16 september 2005. 2 trent rackus, interview with the author (sydney), 13 september 2004. 3 john devecchis, interview with the author (sydney), 24 september 2004. 4 “so much love to give” was a hugely popular track in the sydney dance scene during 2002 and 2003; credited to together, it was composed by the two french producers dj falcon and thomas bangalter, and was initially released on the label roule records in 2002. 5 john devecchis, interview with the author (sydney), 24 september 2004. 6 see fikentscher (2000: 35-42) and langlois (1992) for detailed descriptions of the technical and practical skills involved in djing and mixing. 7 goodwill, interview with the author (sydney), 8 september 2004. 8 john devecchis, interview with the author (sydney), 24 september 2004. 9 paul goodyear, interview with the author (sydney), 11 may 2005. 10 alan thompson, interview with the author (sydney), 23 june 2005. 11 goodwill, interview with the author (sydney), 8 september 2004. 12 trent rackus, interview with the author (sydney), 27 september 2004. 13 trent rackus, interview with the author (sydney), 27 september 2004. 14 paul goodyear, interview with the author (sydney), 11 may 2005. 15 goodwill, interview with the author (sydney), 8 september 2004. 16 adam jesse, interview with the author (sydney), 18 september 2004. http://www.inthemix.com.au http://www.inthemix.com.au pathological crowds: affect and danger in responses to the love parade disaster at duisburg luis-manuel garcia university of chicago <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.15> from the moment the media coverage of the duisburg love parade began, there was a pattern emerging in the descriptions of and responses to the disaster. much of the outcome of the event was being attributed to the crowd itself, revealing a particular set of assumptions of what a crowd is and how it works. various commenters seemed to be coming to the same conclusion: there's something intrinsically wrong with large crowds, and by extension there's something wrong with people who are drawn to them. this essay reviews this recent discourse and traces it back to earlier theories of crowd psychology as well as current debates about crowds. it also provides a critical response to the characterization of affect and subjectivity in discourse about crowds. a lot has been said about the duisburg love parade tragedy already: about the logistics of the event's planning, the politics behind bringing the event to duisburg, first-hand accounts of the stampede, the reactions of former love parade organizers (e.g., dr. motte), and the history of the love parade itself. what i want to talk about here is crowds. in the context of my own work, i've read, thought and written quite a bit about crowds—especially in dance-music settings. and so, i couldn't help but notice a pattern emerging in the descriptions of and responses to the disaster in duisburg. numerous commentators on the web—whether in articles or user comments—seemed to be coming to the same conclusion: there's something intrinsically wrong with large crowds, and by extension there's something wrong with people who are drawn to them. this began with the "subtle blaming of victims", as described by prof. ed galea in a post on the fseg: fire, evacuation and crowd safety blog. posted only a day after the event, galea nonetheless amassed a substantial archive of links to online media coverage and commentary, all describing the event as a "crowd stampede" or "crowd panic", making the crowd and its actions the primary cause of death: while not directly stated, the implication conveyed when these types of phrases are used is that the incident was the fault of the victims, that it was their 'unreasonable' behaviour that caused or substantially contributed to the incident and resulted in the tragic loss of life. using such phrases is unhelpful, as it immediately diverts attention from other factors that may have contributed to or indeed been the root cause of the tragic event. despite questions raised about the planning and management of the event, the crowd itself remained a significant topic of discussion. in particular, many commentators took up the "crowd stampede" framing of the event and sought to explain how a group of seemingly-rational individuals could become so (self-)destructive. take, for example, these comments from several users on msnbc's newsvine site, in response to a report on "mass panic" at the love parade: jherek carnelian: a mob of people will respond like a herd of animals; that is to say, with "knee-jerk" reactions. crowds can be dangerous. i personally avoid them. hedwig: during a stampede (remember what happened at walmart less than 2 years ago?) the herd mentality sets in and the thinking logical part of our brain is temporarily overpowered by the instinctive reactions of our 'lizard brain'... some people here say 'it disgusts them that people act like animals'. the fact is our human decision making and cognitive aspect is only a thin veneer over the basic fact that we are herd animals. put a large enough crowd of people in one place and start applying various stimuli such as hunger, anger, fear, distrust etc and we all start to behave very predictably. if cameras had focused on the stampeding individuals and the footage been replayed to them later on, many won't remember exactly what they did or how it happened. they may remember what they felt. fear. waterdog49: i'm allergic to crowds. rash inducing. scott-308342: large crowds of people are scary—any group of people, anywhere, for whatever reason, hopefully the crowd control experts learn from this. there are at least three points being made repeatedly here: 1) all crowds are inherently dangerous; 2) crowd situations rob humans of their individual rationality and reduce them to "herd animals"; and 3) crowds are to be feared and avoided. this emphasis on emotion, irrationality and animal instincts is found not only in the comment-threads of news stories, but in the articles themselves, especially those written by authors claiming to have expertise on crowd dynamics. jeff wise, a science writer who has also authored a book entitled extreme fear: the science of your mind in danger, contributed articles to the blogs of both psychology today and freakonomics, commenting on the events at duisburg. in his essay for psychology today, entitled "behind the love parade tragedy: the psychology of stampedes", he writes: once panic takes hold, individual free will goes out the window and the mass as a whole becomes subject to a collective crowd psychology. not only do people in such situations show a tendency to mimic the behavior of those around them, but the sheer physical force of the crowd can become irresistible, capable of bending sturdy steel stanchions and knocking down brick walls (wise, psychology today: 2). for wise, the tragedy can be explained in terms of fear and panic, suggesting that irrational behavior takes over a crowd through imitation. notably, it is not only rationality that is at stake here, but also "free will"; when in a crowd, your behavior is no longer your own. in a comment thread about duisburg on metafilter, concerns about crowds were mostly couched in the passive-aggressive complaint genre of incomprehension: "why would anyone go to an event packed with over a million people?"; "i just don't get how those people would want to put themselves in such a situation"; "i don't see the attraction in being lost in a crowd like that"; "you know, you could have the same dancing, love, drugs, and whatever in the comfort of your own home with friends"; and so on. sometimes, these expressions of bewilderment were prefaced by the author's own horror of the crowd: "first of all, i can't stand being in a crowd..."; "crowds make me nervous, i can't imagine that being any fun"; "i'm too independent / unique / fragile / different to allow myself to be swallowed up by a crowd" (there was also an earlier comment thread that was closed after 51 comments, due to concerns about how the event was framed; essentially, the opening post made the cancellation of future love parades seem to be the primary tragedy, thus making the deaths at duisburg appear to be of secondary importance.) in all of these examples, large crowds are described as either unnatural or all too natural. either they were inhuman consequences of modern urban living, or they were the absurd extreme of the human desire for the company of others. in either case, themes of (animal) primitivism and modernity intermingle to create an image that is uncannily both wild and artificial, savage and inauthentic. fear of crowds is part of a larger tradition of deploring city life that has been around since the rise of urban centers, and some have argued that such frustration is simply part of the affective fabric of urbanity (e.g., nigel thrift's essay "but malice aforethought: cities and the natural history of hatred", which appears as both a journal article and a chapter in his book, non-representational theory). however, the discourse on duisburg has especially strong resonances with the field of crowd psychology [la psychologie des foules] that emerged in late 19th-century france. as the industrial revolution and rapid urbanization disrupted traditional social forms and practices, fears arose about the new social forms (or the lack thereof) emerging out of this chaos. the image of thousands of anonymous bodies milling about, cut from their social moorings and thus unpredictable, haunted many writers and politicians during this period. this was particularly significant for the french, for whom large urban masses recalled the violent mobs of the french revolution (and, later, the paris commune). some predicted that contemporary civilization was entering into an "era of crowds". the first psychological account of urban crowds appears in the work of gabriel tarde: the laws of imitation (1890), penal philosophy (1890), "les crimes des foules" ["the crimes of crowds"] in archives d'anthropologie criminelle 7 (1892), and opinion and the crowd (1901). working in the then-burgeoning field of criminology, he analyzed crowds from the standpoint of public safety and population management, thus tending to see all crowds as latently (if not always actively) dangerous. this assumption was supported by the theoretical model he used to explain the working of crowds (i.e., how it was possible for "civilized" individuals to take part in riots, mobs, panics), which included the "laws of imitation" that he used to explain nearly all social phenomena: people naturally imitate each other and, in crowds, this imitation speeds up and turns back on itself such that the whole crowd acts in erratic unison. gustave le bon would later take up tarde's concern with crowd dynamics (psychologie des foules, 1895; published in translation as the crowd: a study of the popular mind, 1897), substituting tarde's "laws of imitation" with a combination of cognitive erasure and "mental contagion". for le bon, entry into a crowd entailed a loss of one's rational capacities; one's mind is "lost" and replaced by a communal "crowd mind", whose functioning does not follow the logic of individualized human behavior. this crowd mind arises out of a dynamic of mental contagion, where the base impulses and instinctual, "primitive" drives of individual crowd members infiltrate other bodies and thus create a field of irrational, animalistic behavior. in the works of both tarde and le bon (as well as many writers who came after them), comparisons are constantly being made to "primitive" societies and "barbarian" behavior. the accounts of tarde and le bon are reproduced almost identically by jeff wise in his writings about the deaths at the duisburg love parade. in the article for psychology today cited earlier, he credits the imitation of behavior for the emergence of a "collective crowd psychology", fusing tarde's "laws of imitation" with le bon's "crowd mind". similarly, in his contribution to the freakonomics blog, wise repeats le bon's notion of contagion and overwhelming affect: "when crowds reach a critical density, they automatically become vulnerable to a contagion of blind fear that overwhelms any attempt at rational behavior". out-of-control affect (feelings, emotions) is a key concern for theorists of crowds, often serving dual-duty as both the cause and effect of crowd behavior. in a recent article, "the myth of the multitude, or, who's afraid of the crowd?" in critical inquiry (36: 4), william mazzarella suggests that the recent emergence of the concept of "multitude" (see hardt & negri, empire and multitude) is partly an attempt to avoid the messiness and volatility of affect that is attributed to crowds. mazzarella criticizes "multitude" theory as a sort of euphemism of crowds, which solves the "problem" of affect by ignoring it or claiming that new forms of collectivity will somehow overcome it. more to the point, he claims that analysts describe "politically progressive" collectives as multitudes, while "regressive" collectives continue to be crowds, often using the wildness of affect to mark a distinction between these two categories. coming from another angle, one could ask whether affect is really all that rampant and pervasive in crowds; are they always emotional tinderboxes? the physicist andreas schadschneider is quoted in a physics world article on duisburg as being skeptical about the operative role given to affect and "panic" in crowd disasters: "safety engineers have reviewed hundreds of disasters and found that, in the vast majority of cases, such behaviour has played no—or almost no—role in the tragic events. instead, the opposite is usually observed, with most people acting co-operatively and altruistically even under extreme conditions". with these observations in mind, we might wonder why there is such a persistent tendency to first blame emotions when something bad happens in a crowd. in any case, what unites the "classic" crowd psychology literature of the nineteenth century is its pathologizing stance: crowds are treated first and foremost as an illness, as an aberration that needs explanation and treatment. it's no surprise, then, to discover that this scholarship was aligned with the conservative anti-democratic political wing in france at the time. opponents of universal suffrage used these analyses to support their arguments that a nation ruled by the masses could only lead to atrocity. why leave the nation in the hands of an "electoral mob", when an elite aristocracy could handle it with cool professionalism? these class issues continue today. to put it bluntly, crowds come with the same class connotations that the "unwashed, teeming masses" have had ever since people have been living in cities. while supposedly classless (because they're anonymous and public), crowds are certainly not high-class or privileged. as portrayed by popular media, crowds usually happen in non-western and/or relatively poor areas of the world, spurred on by religious fervor, hungry desperation, or sectarian hate. they are more likely to happen wherever people gather in massive numbers, which includes the cities of many rapidly-industrializing nations of the "global south", such as brazil, india, or china. as mazzarella points out, crowds are characterized as simultaneously "the past of the (neo)liberal democracies of the global north" and "the present of nonor insufficiently liberal polities in the global south". for many writers, in other words, crowds are what failed or incomplete democracy looks like. and who gathers into crowds in europe or north america? working-class "hooligans" at soccer/football games. a "million man march" of african-american men, marching on washington. anti-globalization protesters at world trade organization meetings. bargain-seeking suburban shoppers mobbing a wal-mart on "black friday". young prolls at german techno festivals (proll is german slang for lower-class white youth, similar to a "chav" in britain). whether deliberate or not, the attribution of madness, danger, irrationality, and lack of control to crowds also associates these characteristics with non-elite, non-western, non-white, and otherwise "other" populations. these discourses teach people to be afraid of crowds, and, by association, to treat "those people" who form crowds as dangerous; it can even help justify brutal forms of control and dispersal. and so, i was both unsurprised and disheartened to see this pathologizing stance cropping up again after duisburg, such as in the following comment posted on the metafilter thread mentioned earlier: civil_disobedient: love, peace, music and dance can all be experienced in the comfort and safety of your home with small groups. there is absolutely no need to involve hundreds of thousands of people except for the fact that human beings are attracted to crowds of other human beings like moths to flames because of their intrinsic inability to find value in their own accomplishments and the desire to feel a part of something historically important so that they, by proxy, can feel historically important, despite having contributed anything but their presence. there are a lot of things wrong with this reading of crowds and crowd psychology, only two of which i'll deal with here. although i could agree with the claim that people rarely join crowds out of a sense of individualism or narcissism, there are at least two substantial problems here: the love, peace, music and dance one can get in a domestic space with small groups is simply not identical to the kinds of love, peace, music, dance and whatever else one can experience in a (partying) crowd. part of the experience of being in a crowd can't be reduced to a calculus of personal achievement and social warmth; it's also about the sheer thrill of feeling one's affects or emotions being mirrored, amplified, and circulated a thousand fold. it is also about the exhilarating (and sometimes terrifying) experience of being opened up to emotional energies that come from outside of you and aren't in your control. crowds are affective echo chambers where size does matter. maybe the individual subject isn't the point of crowds, anyway. why is individual accomplishment the primary, proper, healthy way to organize one's significance in the world? one of the possible pleasures of partying in a crowd is the sensation of coming undone, of feeling your sense of a bounded, unitary self unravel and fray at the edges. for some people, this sense of being temporarily relieved from the compulsion to be a consistent, coherent subject can feel like total bliss (for the lacanians among you: i don't quite mean jouissance here, but perhaps something like jouissance lite™). and so i end up supporting a part of the above analysis by thinking that those people for whom the world of the fully sovereign individual subject holds little hope are more likely to see in crowds the potential for something better, something full of potential. the anonymity and de-personalization of crowds can sometimes feel protective (just look at the histories and memoirs of queer nightlife, for example). the arguments i'm making here are not only in response to that comment posted on metafilter, but also to the wide swath of pathologizing comments about crowds made since the tragedy at the love parade, some of which i've cited here. crowds are capable of more than just stampedes and riots, and those who flock to them are not necessarily mindless nor are they somehow defective. after all, crowds are the stuff of riots and lynch mobs as well as of parties and pilgrimages. i'm not one to argue that crowds are the answer to human ills or even that they are necessarily good or bad. nonetheless, i don't believe that the only difference between people who party in small clusters and people who party in teeming masses is a damaged ego. people can feel good about themselves and still want the company of a thousand friends they've never met. author biography luis-manuel garcia is a ph.d. candidate in ethnomusicology at the university of chicago. he is currently wrapping up a dissertation project on musical affect, intimacy and crowds in the electronic dance music scenes of paris, berlin and chicago. his next project will focus on "techno tourism", the politics of mobility and urban gentrification. references associated press. 2010. 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"the myth of the multitude, or, who's afraid of the crowd?" critical inquiry 36 (4). <http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/36n4/36n4_mazzarela.html> tarde, gabriel de. 1890. the laws of imitation. trans. e. w. c. parsons. paris: félix alcan. reprint, gloucester, ma: p. smith, 1962. ———. 1890. penal philosophy. trans. r. howell. boston: storck. reprint, boston, ma: little, brown, and company, 1912. ———. 1892. "les crimes des foules". archives d'anthropologie criminelle 7: 353–58. ———. 1901. l'opinion et la foule. paris: félix alcan. reprint, paris: sandre and distribution l'harmattan, 2006. thrift, nigel. 2005. "but malice aforethought: cities and the natural history of hatred". transactions of the institute of british geographers 30 (2): 133–50. ———. 2008. non-representational theory: space, politics, affect, international library of sociology. new york: routledge. wise, jeff. 2010. "behind the love parade tragedy: the psychology of stampede". psychology today. july 24: <http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/extreme-fear/201007/behind-the-love-parade-tragedy-the-psychology-stampedes>. ———. 2010. "when crowds panic". new york times. 3 august: <http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/when-crowds-panic/>. groove music: the art and culture of the hip-hop dj mark katz new york: oxford university press, 2012 isbn: 978-0-19-533112-7 rrp: us$24.95 murray forman northeastern university (us) i knew something had shifted significantly the first time i noticed someone playing air turntables. it was around 1989; after a generation of seeing individuals playing air guitar, sweeping their arms in a windmill motion a la pete townsend or twiddling their fingers as if producing an elaborate arpeggio, it was slightly jolting to witness the hunched body language of the dj. as one hand floated level, backspinning an imaginary disc on an invisible turntable, the other hand executed tight side-to-side motions on an unseen crossfader. that the individual was mimicking the moves of a scratch dj was without question. mark katz provides a beautifully written account of the dj’s evolution in groove music: the art and culture of the hip-hop dj that is sure to stand as the go-to text for anyone seeking knowledge about the who, what, when, where, why and how of dj culture. apart from katz’s expertise in the study of music and technology, what makes this such an enjoyable and ultimately useful book is his proficiency as a storyteller. he establishes a perfect narrative tone encompassing elements of a nerdy gearhead, an awe-struck fan-boy, a competent dj, a quizzical scholar, a slightly skeptical curmudgeon, and an astute music journalist. rather than producing a flawed unevenness, these multiple perspectives reflect the intricate history and evolution of dj culture while simultaneously allowing katz to emphasize diverse themes across cultural domains. katz focuses explicitly on the “hip-hop dj.” as he explains, there are a variety of modes within which djs work (e.g. club or edm djs) but not all of these involve hip-hop and not all of them embrace the crucial facets of compositional creativity, battle, and performance that are essential to hip-hop’s dj practices. for the hip-hop cognoscenti this might seem obvious, but this book is oriented toward a wider audience and katz should be applauded for his capacity to present consistently compelling material that won’t alienate readers of expert or minimal knowledge. defining his project, katz writes, “the purpose of this book is to chronicle and investigate the rise of a new type of musician—the dj—who developed a new musical instrument—the turntable—and in doing so helped create a new type of music: hip-hop” (6). indeed, discovery and innovation—the “new” at the core of his mission statement—are on display throughout the book as katz’s analytical gaze encompasses technologies and artistic technique, sonic construction and aesthetics, and the formation of social and industrial infrastructures that enabled djs to find their footing as party rockers and to evolve as iconic figures and even celebrities on a gradually expanding scale. the book is organized chronologically, delineating developmental and transitional phases and isolating the temporal modalities within which the formal characteristics of the hip-hop dj evolved. some of the dj history that katz opens with is already well documented, with details about the socio-economic environment of the south bronx in the 1970s and early 1980s or oral accounts of the rise of key figures such as kool herc, afrika bambaataa, grandmaster flash or grandwizzard theodore circulating widely in publications and on the internet. despite the historical reiteration, however, the effort is not wasted. rather, in order for katz to fully engage the evolutionary process he must revisit these particular narratives in order to impress upon the reader the incremental, accumulative progression of the art of the hip-hop dj. his particular contributions to our understanding of the process lie in the refutation of romanticized notions of youth resistance that continue to permeate many mainstream and scholarly histories of hip-hop as well as his emphasis on the “hustle” which includes an unflagging creative striving coupled with a markedly capitalist entrepreneurial bent. like much of hip-hop, the art of the dj evolved within a sophisticated commercial context that gradually expanded to include a range of participants such as nightclub promoters, paying customers, record labels and audio technology manufacturers. moreover, this is not a straight retelling of the dj’s evolution that maintains an unbroken linear flow. throughout the book katz pauses to remind the reader of previously cited incidents, returning to established individuals or events with additional information and greater nuance. the themes of technology, race and ethnicity, the rise of the dj battle and other factors constitute the grooves that katz is working with. in much the same way that hip-hop djs produce different experiences of listening to, say, a classic james brown or curtis mayfield track (or, as he describes in chapter 3, the phrase “ah, this stuff is really fresh” from the 1982 track “change the beat” by beside and fab five freddy) by chopping it up on the turntables, katz produces narrative loops, dropping back into the groove of a story in a manner that continually recontextualizes the issues, offering alternative understandings of single moments and their principal protagonists, revising the original tale and adding greater complexity. it not only works as a strategy of telling, but it also masterfully reinforces a logic of dj practice that is at the book’s foundation. the book relies strongly on interviews with pioneering and veteran djs (some of which are featured on a helpful online companion website; note, however, that some of the links featuring recorded tracks are already defunct), adding a distinct authority to the project while presenting a sense of personality to the mix. some of the artists, such as grandwizzard theodore, qbert, dj shadow or dj a-trak are well known, but there are a host of lesser-known innovators here who provide insights galore. one comes away from the book with more than just an awareness of who did what, when, but also of who these people are and what drove them in their ongoing pursuit of dj artistry and excellence. katz presents their open admissions of accidental discovery and of failure and he is particularly adept at eliciting conversations about attribution and respect around issues of hip-hop legitimacy and claims of creative authority over specific turntable techniques such as “scratching” (and its myriad inflections), “transforming,” and ”beat juggling.” dj aladdin is cited in this discussion as he attempts to sidestep the implications of improper attribution and the ego-based antagonisms that can ensue, stating, “i don’t get into the political talk about the dj world” (119). katz, too, attempts to navigate the waters of conjecture and dispute, offering voice to djs who are highly opinionated about their art form and whose opinions are frequently at odds. in this regard, we see that this is not a simple game lacking stakes but, like anything of cultural value, it matters greatly how the lore is framed and what kinds of knowledge are produced. katz not only illuminates the details but he also offers insights on what it means and why some things might actually be worth fighting for. pertaining to this last point, in the later chapters katz engages several key debates about the relationships between original vinyl-based analog technologies and djs’ rising reliance on contemporary digital technologies, the role of women as hip-hop djs, and the sense of tradition that saturates the discourse of dj artistry. this is a kind of culmination, carrying the story into the current moment where the past and present mingle and, at times, collide violently. for instance, no one disputes the significance of women entering the ranks of accomplished djs yet there is an underlying sense that digital turntablism makes it easier for anyone to become a reasonably competent dj; hence, for some chauvinistic male djs the emergence of a greater female presence may be based on a decline or dilution of traditional techniques. in another context, katz explains how issues of modern technological convenience are not necessarily at odds with old school orthodoxies, citing several founding hip-hop djs (including afrika bambaataa or grandwizzard theodore) who accept the displacement of bulky and heavy vinyl which, over a lifetime, can contribute to chronic back problems. i take minor issue with a few aspects of the book. for instance, when grandwizzard theodore and others suggest that hip-hop djs made “something from nothing” (147; 253), a point that is repeated in several permutations throughout the book, katz seems to let it stand, even though the text is replete with counter-evidence indicating that hip-hop and the art of the dj evolved from a deep cultural heritage and rich local scenes that are, conversely, full. most readers would be aware of the intent of this sentiment, yet it also indulges an idealized notion of success over adversity that is at odds with many of katz’s own observations, such as when he articulates the love, nurture, support and creativity that seep endlessly through the hard cracks of tough urban conditions. while katz seeks to balance the recollections, presenting differing interpretations of this or that “fact”, the discourse of “something from nothing” offers one case where more rigorous challenge could be warranted. in a final assessment, on every page of groove music mark katz expresses his love, respect and most of all, his knowledge of the art of the dj. no one—and here i would include outsiders, passing fans, hardcore hip-hop heads as well as seasoned djs—will come away from this book without learning something new. the diy careers of techno and drum 'n' bass djs in vienna dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 4(2): 3–26 issn 1947-5403 ©2011 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.02.01 what to ask women composers: feminist fieldwork in electronic dance music magdalena olszanowski concordia university (canada) abstract this article reflects upon the research methods employed for microfemininewarfare (2013), an interactive database documentary that investigates female electronic dance music (edm) artists. the purpose of the documentary is to feature the contributions of women as composers, to show how they came to be composers and to reveal the tactics used to approach significant issues of gender in the edm community. i highlight the theoretical and methodological processes that went into the making of this documentary, subtitled “exploring women’s space in electronic music”. by constructing “electronic music by women” as a category, two objectives are addressed: first, the visibility of women’s contribution to the musical tradition is heightened; and, second, it allows an exploration of the broadening of discourses about female subjectivity. this article showcases feminist research-creation and friendship-as-method as effective research methods to glean meaningful content when applied to edm fieldwork. keywords: electronic dance music; feminist fieldwork; women electronic music composers; gender and music; gender and technology; research-creation, friendship-as-method magdalena olszanowski is a phd candidate at concordia university in the joint communication studies program in montreal. she is a graduate of the university of toronto (h.b.a.) and york university (m.a.). she is currently co-editor of open-wi: journal of mobile media. she has participated in the edm scene in nearly every capacity over the last fifteen years. see: <http://raisecain.net>. email: <raisecain@gmail.com>. feature article http://raisecain.net mailto:raisecain@gmail.com dancecult 4(2)4 introduction1 as part of the preparation for my interactive filmed documentary, microfemininewarfare: exploring women’s space in electronic music (2013), which profiles the contributions of female artists to the practice of edm, i travelled across europe and north america in spring 2011 to interview eight female electronic music artists: alicia bauer (performing as alley cat), chantal passamonte (mira calix), christine clements (vaccine), indra khera (mantra), libby floyd (the doubtful guest), mileece petre (mileece), sabina plamenova (subeena/ alis) and bérangère maximin. the majority of these women produce electronic dance music (edm), while bérangère is a pronounced fan of edm and applies some of its techniques in her music, and mileece has a robust history with the music as a participant and a dj and has released music on an edm label (lo recordings). the interactive documentary, comprising over thirty parts that tell a collective story, shows some of the tactics these women use to approach significant issues around gender. in presenting a group of subjects, i displace the dominant reading of edm as a phallocentric practice of individual dj-virtuosity and talent that is observed by researchers such as essl (2003), friz (2004), farrugia (2010) and kirn (2011). most critically, as i learned in making the documentary, women negotiate and use the tools in their art practice in divergent ways. i acknowledge the women’s multi-faceted contributions and practices in the community by asking them what tools they are using, how they learned the techniques they employ, where their tools are located (such as the home, the studio or someone else’s house) and what they like or dislike about the technologies they use (rodgers 2010: 8). in this article, i reflect on the processes of making my interactive documentary in order to highlight the need for innovative modes of presenting fieldwork in popular music studies. fieldwork in the edm scene does not have a long and rigorous history in academia, and as pini (1997: 153–4) has argued, when the music is discussed, women are often left out of these narratives. some exceptions can be found in the research of melissa bradshaw (2010) and rebekah farrugia (2010). i wish to contribute to this work via my documentary. situated within the field of cultural and communication studies, my research for the documentary was based on feminist-informed qualitative research methods (denzin and lincoln 1998) that culminated in a research-creation project—an interactive k-film documentary. k-films are interactive, non-linear films driven by a database of source material and editorial constraints (that establish the relationships between source scenes) put forward by the filmmaker. they are produced using the open source flash-based software known as korsakow.2 this means that the content is produced to be viewed on computer only. research-creation is a method of engaging in a creative practice for and as a result of academic research.3 to highlight some of the issues that relate to a method’s relationship to practice, the first part of my article engages in a theoretical discussion about the intersections of gender and edm, and includes consideration of some of the important tensions that exist in my choice to solely focus on female producers (see fig. 1). i situate the project within the existing literature and other forms of production. the second part 5olszanowski | what to ask women composers of my article focuses on the design of the project, highlighting the methods used in the preproduction stage. this section addresses the main mode of research inquiry: interviewing and friendship-as-method. the issues, implications and obstacles i faced, both theoretically and practically, will be presented through an evaluation of the process i undertook. in the conclusion, i raise some questions about the effectiveness of these methods in redressing problematic ideologies. figure 1. mantra near her home, hackney, uk. photo by magdalena olszanowski (2011). situating microfemininewarfare i situate the documentary within current edm moving image and scholarly discourse as well as database documentary aesthetics. a number of korsakow documentaries, telling multi-layered stories, are increasingly available.4 i studied these for an understanding of how vignette-style filmic architecture can capture an audience and incite them to watch a movie that requires continual clicking to move forward in a narrative. much of my focus, however, was on the wide range of film documentaries about electronic music.5 these showcase everything from the economic context of the production of techno music as seen in universal techno (1997) to the biopic style of moog (2004), which focuses on robert moog and the legacy of his synthesizers. my finding was that most documentaries fail to represent the complexity and diversity of women working as djs, sonic artists and electronic musicians at large. the few documentaries that challenge this omission focus particularly dancecult 4(2)6 on female djs and their experiences.6 i found no documentaries that dealt with female electronic music producers exclusively, other than the canadian-produced the delian mode (2009), which, as beautiful and cinematically captivating as it is, is about delia derbyshire, the seminal electronic composer who made her important contributions to early electronic music during the 1950s and 60s. a number of academic research publications deal with the complexity of being a woman in the edm milieu, and more specifically a female producer, dj, promoter and fan. maria pini (1997, 2001) and rosa reitsamer (2009), to name some key examples, discuss female subjectivity in edm based on ethnographic methods. one important project with which reitsamer was involved, along with marie josé belbel, is the online archive and cd-rom dig me out: discourses on popular music, gender and ethnicity (2009) that focuses on the myriad intersections of the female experience and music consumption and production, and contains work by a variety of composers, thinkers and artists. more recently, jodie taylor has examined older queer participants in edm (bennett and taylor 2012). in related research, angela mcrobbie (1994), anne oakley (1988), sarah thornton (1995) and sheila whiteley (2005), for example, have brought an explicitly feminist framework to the field of female-focused subcultural theory. my research is situated alongside these feminist contributions insofar as my work pays attention to this particular group of female artists, highlights my methodological approach and reflects on the making of microfemininewarfare. perhaps the most important contemporary work in this field is tara rodgers’s pink noises (2010), a landmark publication in the field of feminist edm research, and a work from which i have generously borrowed. pink noises is a much-needed compendium about women who are djs, producers and sound artists in electronic music and sound culture. pink noises focuses on a range of current female producers from across the globe, and is based on interviews rodgers conducted for her pinknoises.com website. each interview in rodgers’s book is prefaced with details regarding its context. for example, she specifies the relationship between her and each artist, the context and date of the interview and the type of interview being conducted. this reflexive, open-ended methodology and willingness to create friendships with her subjects is what franklin (1999) calls a holistic rather than prescriptive approach, because it gives voice to the women being interviewed instead of simply speaking about them. during a conversation i had in spring 2010 with edm producer vaccine, she commented on the reductionist representation she receives in the media, noting that women electronic artists always get lumped together based on the fact that they are female and are asked the same banal question: “what is it like to be a female composer?”7 these comments and remarks, spurred by a desire to tell a more robust story of women’s participation in and contribution to edm, motivated me to create a database documentary. these comments also point to a recurring theoretical and methodological issue: how do we talk about gender in relationship to the project without reducing the women’s experience to being singularly focused on gender? as i will demonstrate, these women’s insights helped me refine my research query. 7olszanowski | what to ask women composers gendered subjectivities: the thorny issue one of my hopes for the documentary is that other women will see it, be inspired by these women’s output like i was and pursue producing electronic music. as mentioned, although women participate in edm in various ways, few women pursue electronic music composition or consider themselves as composers, and the few who do are underrepresented in the electronic music milieu. therefore, my main research question is not just about how women participate in edm, but also about the reasons for which and methods by which women become composers. as pini (2001: 29–33) has also observed during her research about women at raves, the question of gender and subjectivity is a thorny one in projects such as these. on the one hand, i want to promote the contributions of a “class of subjects”, such as women, who are excluded. on the other hand, the limitation of the larger conversation to their gender, a limitation already experienced by most of my participants throughout their careers, is also a paradoxical challenge. on reflection, by constructing “electronic music by women” as a category, i was attempting to do two things: first, i wanted to heighten the visibility of women’s contribution to the broader musical tradition; and second, i wished to explore how their contribution enables the broadening of discourses about female subjectivity (mcrobbie 1994; petrolle and wexman 2005; pini 1997). in the same vein, i do not want to imply that these subjects constitute the decisive representatives of women’s space in the electronic music milieu,8 thereby universalizing the category of “woman”.9 knowing that these women are constantly asked about being women in a “maledominated milieu”, i made a deliberate decision not to ask questions that explicitly deal with their gendered identity as producers. i wanted to find out how these women carve out their space in the edm community and how they arrived at composing music. every question is already inherently situated in a woman’s lived experience. women engage in explorations of music in particular and distinct ways when they, for example, play with sounds, record live objects, pursue dance music and similar aesthetics and form collectives. in other words, their explorations make a feminist statement insofar “as they occupy a different cultural space than that of their male counterparts” (petrolle and wexman 2005: 5). that isn’t to say that the fields of participation are completely segregated but, as music scholar sheila whiteley (2005: 4) argues, female musicians have had to find their own voices “investing both their identity and experience in their music”, maneuvering through estrangement and individualism rather than belonging and lineage, attributes of male-centric frameworks. many of the subjects in my documentary mentioned that they did wish their social musical circle included more female composers. when i asked alley cat about her role models, her learning experience in the san francisco edm culture and her label, kokeshi, she lamented not receiving any demos from women. on the one hand, she pointed out that: “there were so many women doing stuff [in san francisco], it was normal. it wasn’t a weird thing at all, which was great, because i was so shy and insecure”. on the other hand, she also noted two important points throughout our conversations. first, that other young dancecult 4(2)8 girls don’t contact her: it does worry me now that you bring this up, that i don’t have any young women contacting me. maybe the girls on facebook liking what i do, maybe that’s enough; maybe they don’t need personal contact. perhaps they can see and follow movements. perhaps that would inspire them, i don’t know. maybe there’s none! maybe it’s all boys! i can’t think of recent times that a young girl has approached [me]. second, she makes the point that within these subcultural edm networks and circulations, young girls are absent from a pivotal step in the process: i get so many demos now and none of them are girls. obviously there are people like subeena (see fig. 2) or vaccine, but in terms of up-and-coming people, i can’t think of one demo i’ve gotten from a girl, unless no one is mentioning that. to be honest i’ve thought of that too, sending a demo under a different name. but i think a lot of the stuff i get is from young guys. no one has approached me: ‘i’m a young female producer, here are my tunes’, which is a bummer if you think about it (sighs).10 as alley cat points out, it is common practice for women to send their demos to artist labels under names that would not reveal their gender; so, she is uncertain whether any women have sent her their music. this is a double-edged sword because, on one hand, it supports the idea that fewer women are attempting edm production (and in turn reinforces the milieu as male-dominated) and, on the other hand, it assumes being male is the most effective way to present your music. hence, it is important to not re-otherize the “female composer” as solely engaging in a phallocentric milieu, because that “colludes in reinforcing the very hierarchy the researcher seeks to expose and criticize” (pini 2001: 7). experiential sites of production and consumption must be re-articulated and shown as sites for and of female experience, but without obscuring that they are predominantly masculine (pini 2001: 7–9).11 so that, thinking back to alley cat’s comment, fewer women feel the need to contemplate the idea of sending out their demos while purposefully hiding their gender. in other words, the presentation of these women’s experiences increases the visibility of female artists. like music scholars mcclary (2002) and simoni (2003) argue, biographical patterns exist, and common narrative threads emerge from interview materials that help us to understand the complexity of women’s situations and their dilemmas—on the ground. despite variances in networking and support, what makes these individual women start and continue to make music can be known by asking questions about their location, community and social position. dealing with tokenism according to rodgers (2010), isolating the female artist (by focusing only on femaleidentified artists) can be interpreted as tokenistic and essentialist. during a discussion i had with a colleague about my apprehensions in researching only female edm composers, my colleague pointed out that we almost exclusively ask questions about gender to women, 9olszanowski | what to ask women composers figure 2. subeena/alis at the park, london, uk. photo by magdalena olszanowski (2011). and not to men. women have to wrestle with the notion of gender at every turn, and many harbor conflicting feelings about it (rodgers 2010: 16). do women think focusing on gender trivializes their music and categorizes them more narrowly, or is it the specific and rigid way in which gender is constructed in discourse that is the problem? this latter hypothesis is supported by the existence of questions like “what’s it like to be a female composer?” and the kind of reductive language that accompanies these questions, which my interviewees made clear frustrates them. am i then participating in the same hegemonic framework by labeling these artists as specifically “female composers”? i am, indeed, working within that framework but simultaneously attempting to displace it with the rejection of questions such as “what is it like to be a female in a male-dominated field?” and “what is it about being a woman that makes you different from the other producers?” because they exhibit a counter-productive interrogation that narrowly focuses on stereotypical gendered characteristics. such questions can give women the opportunity to speak about their agency and provide an entry point to a discussion about overcoming obstacles. specifically, these hegemonic parameters can also give rise to exposing the essentialist contradictions of being a female producer in edm research. yet in my case, most of the subjects were explicit about the exacerbation of prejudice caused by these types of questions, as they position women as the other. instead, the women in my documentary wanted to talk about their music and not be pre-emptively typecast based on their gender; they wanted to focus first on the ways artistic practice relates to technology (see fig. 3), how it relates to community,12 and, only then, how this relationship is negotiated by female artists. one of the main struggles i faced when preparing my semi-structured interviews was that i didn’t want to slip into the very dancecult 4(2)10 essentialist discourse i was trying to overcome. while ellen g. friedman and miriam fuchs (1992: 41) write in the realm of literature, their assertions are applicable to edm: [v]iewing these [female] writers as a separate tradition is not isolationist; rather, it is a strategy in recovering them, in making them an object of discourse. separation is a means of offering women writers visibility that they would not otherwise possess and enabling discussions that could not otherwise proceed. figure 3. the doubtful guest poses with her favorite drum machine, the roland tr-606, london, uk. photo by: magdalena olszanowski (2011). in the next section of this article, i present some of the methodological approaches i used in order to maintain a multifaceted and non-reductive focus on gender issues. i discuss my selection process, interviewing techniques, the theoretical framework of research-creation and “friendship as method”. in particular, i show care in using critical interview techniques while maintaining a self-reflexivity with respect to my own position as a woman in this community. selecting the participants the artists that i chose to interview were selected because of their diversity. while there were degrees of overlap between them, all had emerged from different genres, styles and communities and were in various stages in their careers as artists. mira calix started as an 11olszanowski | what to ask women composers administrative secretary for warp records during which she was encouraged by the artists on the label to make music, eventually becoming the first female artist on the label. she has won many awards, including a british composers award and a royal philharmonic society award for her touring “my secret heart” installation. bérangère maximin is a full-time musique concrète composer interested in bridging the gap between the electroacoustic and electronic music communities in paris. the doubtful guest is the granddaughter of j.b. floyd, a well-known jazz musician; she is also a former opera singer who composes “acid of all genres”13 (she is touted as “the queen of acid”) and loves to collaborate with other artists. vaccine is a california-based full-time producer, was the first woman to release a dubstep record and has recently finished a two-year distance degree in medical transcription. mileece is a full-time composer who creates live interactive installations as well as music with plants using super collider, an object-oriented programming language. subeena is a producer and singer, owns a record label and received an ma in interactive media from goldsmiths in london, uk. alley cat is a mother, a full-time label and agency owner with her husband, a part-time producer and a dj who was greatly involved in the first all-women drum ’n’ bass dj collective in london. mantra is pursuing an msc in mental health research and manages a large music project that facilitates music-creation and djing for mental health patients in a hospital and studio setting; she is a full-time promoter and a bourgeoning part-time producer. these women are all more than mere producers; they each try to create community and space for themselves and others through acts such as starting record labels, planning events and collaborating with other artists. in the women’s experimental cinema (2007: 6) anthology, robin blaetz self-reflexively asks: “why these film-makers and not others?” like blaetz, i am aware of the subjective nature of my sample and case study. i faced several limitations including those of time (the limited free time of professional women), resources and access: not all of the women i contacted replied or were interested in exposing their lives. i employed opportunistic sampling methods (gregory 2009), contacting all the female electronic artists i know, and cold-emailing artists. i then used the snowball sampling technique (sedlack and stanley 1992) and was introduced to other artists. i was initially captivated by these women’s musical and creative output. during the filming, i became inspired and engaged by their thinking and their questions. after the interviews were brought to a close, these women became my collaborators in the very research i was conducting about them. put simply, my participants’ own inquiries into their work affected the production and structure of my research and my project; this, in turn, creates a position that is informed by the feminist-inspired tendency to “employ nonhierarchical, collaborative production practices” (blaetz 2007: 10). giving back in line with my research positioning, and through a collaborative discussion with the artists featured in the documentary, varying degrees of friendship and mutual support were formed as a result of my fieldwork. two examples follow. bérangère was thrilled with the photos i took of her, and will be using one of the portraits for an upcoming album (see fig. 4). dancecult 4(2)12 similarly, i was able to take a lot of photographs of vaccine throughout the three days we spent together, some of which she sent to her agent and is using as promotional photos. although uneasy with the notion of representation, she remarked that she has never felt as comfortable with a photographer as she was with me. we have been in touch on a regular basis, discussing some of the issues that came out of the interview; for example, the following is an email i received from her: semi-inspired by our conversation in the car, i had this wild notion pop into my head the other day that my duty, my purpose, my calling in life is to empower women, to uplift and encourage, and that it didn’t matter if i was having a bad day or laid up with a migraine; so long as i was serving my purpose, everything was okay. i was playing the album so far for my mother (whom i wish you could have met if she were in town when you were, you’d have gotten along so well), and she got tears in her eyes and said that i was going to inspire so many girls with my album. i hope so, . . . and that you inspire women with your documentary. you’re brave in ways i’m not, you do things i don’t, and that inspires me to be brave and do those things.14 figure 4. bérangère maximin. photograph that will be included in her album sleeve, paris, france. photo by magdalena olszanowski (2011). 13olszanowski | what to ask women composers “i just wanted to be part of it”: sharing our story shortly after i started participating in rave culture, i walked into a local record store in toronto, and asked to listen to some records at the listening booth. all the guys in the record store turned to look, and then ignored me. “oh, i’ll just play those for you,” the clerk replied. it took me a long time to get the courage to walk into another record store again.15 as the anecdote illustrates, microfemininewarfare doesn’t stem from a casual affinity with edm, as my lived experience is deeply embedded in the music on a personal, professional and academic level. this type of connection is an important component of doing feminist fieldwork (roberts 1988). i have participated in these communities in an active way for fifteen years as a dj, vj, promoter and record label co-owner, yet never as a composer. these lived experiences not only allowed me access to the community, but also gave me the language with which to question and understand its creators. most recently, i have participated in the music community through vjing (video jockeying), a video-based practice which was instrumental in the creation of microfemininewarfare. one of the underlying motivations for this documentary project was that i wanted to understand my own inability, and reticence, to either become or name myself a composer, particularly in the presence of male composers. in doing this research, i learned that i was not alone and that composition was often thought of as reserved for those who are “special”—who have innate talent. this was reinforced by a constant awareness of the problems potentially posed by a lack of formal musical training. as mira calix explains: i was very much in love with music. i think there was a part of me that thought only special people made music and i wasn’t one of those people. i think a lot of that came because i didn’t have any musical training, so it seemed slightly separate.16 asking participants how they started making music never revealed straightforward paths. one of the common narratives i encountered was that the women i interviewed often felt more comfortable promoting others rather than themselves. several of the women were promoters of other people’s music first, and did not see becoming a producer themselves as a viable career or option. for example, vaccine commented that, “i satisfied myself promoting other people’s music because i didn’t think i would be any good at writing my own”.17 at the same time as they expressed this fear and reticence (largely about their own talents and capacities), almost all the women voiced that upon hearing electronic music, they knew that they had to become more than fans. in the interviews, their enthusiasm for the genre and form was palpable. “i was just trying to get into it! i really wanted to be part of the whole thing!”, alley cat exclaims (see fig. 5).18 mantra expresses the same sentiment: i remember, they [the raves] used to have an upstairs bit and we’d be at the top looking down [at] lasers and music, and thinking, how can i not be a part of this, this is the most exciting thing in the world! it was right then and there i had to be part of it. it was when i went to college and i was 16 and we were raving, raving, raving and getting so into it.19 dancecult 4(2)14 after discovering edm, i, too, like all of the interviewees, knew i had to be part of it, and like most of the participants in my study, i began as a fan, then became a promoter before appearing on stage. figure 5. alley cat holds one of the first vinyl recordings she ever bought. photo by magdalena olszanowski (2011). feminist fieldwork: friendship as a method my research query emanated from my particular epistemological positioning as researcher, documentarian and fan. focused on a feminist epistemology and on collaborative researchcreation, i sought semi-structured face-to-face interviews as the most fruitful mode of inquiry. i did an initial pilot study with one of the interviewees, vaccine. i tested out the potential of the language i used in the final interviews to garner meaningful responses. however, i was also mindful of retaining a language accessible enough to work out any communicative and cultural barriers (so as to not make the subjects uncomfortable if i, for example, slipped into academic rhetoric). in line with my feminist epistemological positioning, oakley (1988) points out that much of the information in practical documentary books provides problematic and reductionist interview techniques that do not apprehend the feminist standpoint. she suggests that the paradigms of traditional interviewing are problems for feminist interviewers because the techniques still want to uphold an interviewer-interviewee relationship; they do not take into account “the validation of women’s subjective experiences as women and as people” (oakley 1988: 30). 15olszanowski | what to ask women composers “friendship-as-method”, as proposed by tillmann-healy (2003), is a type of feminist methodology that entails a willingness to create friendships with one’s subjects by taking oakley’s critique into account. it is the main method i employ, and borrow generously from tara rodgers’s pink noises (2010). rodgers uses this method as complementary to her other methods, because much of her work develops alongside evolving friendships, replete with their attendant mutual, personal and professional support (rodgers 2010: 3). oakley (1988: 44), in response to traditionally detached interviewing techniques, mentions that a transition to friendship can occur and, in fact, should not be obscured; it can help create a “collaborative approach to the research which engages both the interviewer and the respondent in a joint enterprise”. i was already acquainted with vaccine, one of the artists i interviewed, and i hoped that this research would open up a dialogue that could continue and flourish between us, as well as facilitate other subsidiary creative endeavors and friendships. since a large overarching theme in my project is community building, a major aspect of my work, in addition to the documentary itself, also involves building community with (and between) these women and introducing them to each other. the established professional relationships some of the women share between them were reinforced as they talked about each other with joy. alley cat (who lives in the uk) exclaimed: “i’m the #1 fan of hers [vaccine]. she’s awesome. she totally inspires me. i love her music. i wish i was as good as her!”20 they all mentioned that they should be more pro-active in not just establishing but maintaining their relationships with other women. vaccine (usa) says at one point: “i’m sure if subeena [uk] lived down the street, she and i would be jamming all the time”.21 during shooting of the documentary, i repeated their mutual admirations for each other, and made my own admiration of them visible. i also actively engaged in their lives and with their peers; for example, i helped build a garden at mileece’s l.a. home, and i watched alley cat’s daughter lilie demonstrate her skills on a mini midi keyboard. these engagements allowed us to break from the focused interview and build camaraderie. as part of my feminist methodology, i remained in an active dialogue with the subjects after filming in order to discuss what to include in the documentary (for the purpose of ascertaining whether they approved of the ways in which they are represented). the trust and confidence necessary for relationship-building puts stronger social pressures on a practitioner like myself (stronger than the pressures exerted on a typical documentary filmmaker), since being critical can be seen as a betrayal of the established trust. when addressing this problem through “friendship as method”, it is useful to set up a system in which both parties (the researcher and the subject) engage in a dialogue about their hopes and desires in relation to the project. this researcher-collaborator structure, as seen in the section “giving back”, was pronounced in my fieldwork and emphasizes “the diverse and the particular” in order to eschew essentialism or any sweeping generalizations about the women’s work (thornton 1995: 107). thornton (1995) notes that the two parts of ethnography (observation and participation) do not always work together and can often clash. as a participating insider, one has the tendency to privilege a group’s expressions, dancecult 4(2)16 yet as an observing outsider, the researcher focuses on what they see (thornton 1995: 105). recognizing this incongruity highlights the necessity to be self-reflexive in order to maintain enough of a critical distance so that the subjects are not victimized (as mere objects of sexism) or valorized (as heroes that have overcome struggle). that is to say, it is paramount to acknowledge the localized specificity of the context in which the interaction between researcher and subject takes place. i will parse out my approach in the next section, which focuses on my interview process. on site: the interview straddling the roles of participating insider and observing outsider, it was of utmost importance for me to remain self-reflexive; i did not want to only stick to the questions i had prepared, but i also wanted to engage with the stories about which the women were most excited. storytelling helps people connect to others (lowenthal 2008: 352), particularly through the act of disclosing personal information and relating to each other’s common experiences (dunlap and lowenthal 2010: 71). what follows here is a brief description of a typical interview i conducted.22 i tried to maintain the structure described for all the interviews, while also staying attuned to idiosyncrasies occurring within each interview. i met each woman at a location of her choice (although i encouraged meeting at their home) with a video camera, my still camera and a sound/camera assistant to help set up. i used a wireless lavalier microphone to allow freedom of movement for the subjects. i used all-natural lighting (see fig. 6). i regularly referred to my notebook of notes on each artist and the themes i wanted to explore. figure 6. mira calix stands outside her rehearsal space at the roundhouse, london, uk. photo by magdalena olszanowski (2011). 17olszanowski | what to ask women composers for the process of filming, i decided that i would interview the women first and then shoot extra footage (of them working in their spaces, of us chatting, etc.) afterwards. i decided this for several reasons: although i conducted a minor unrecorded discussion with each woman at first, i did not want my interviewees to talk too much before the camera started rolling because there was a chance something meaningful might come up; it would have been stiff and fake if i had asked them to repeat those remarks for the camera (rosenthal 2007: 177–9). a lengthy interview also takes a lot of time and emotional and physical strength. i was worried that if we were to chat, take photos and shoot the extra footage first, they would run out of time and energy for the main interview. indeed, when the camera was not on, the women were able to be more candid and clarify certain things they would not discuss on camera (as being public with certain experiences could potentially jeopardize their already unstable position as female artists in the field); they also informed me of more personal interactions and experiences that confront them as women and as composers. in line with my feminist research-creation perspective, i was open to what the women wanted to share with me and did not have expectations of a teleological outcome (oakley 1988: 47; chapman and sawchuk 2012: 22). while i did ask questions about the artists’ gear use, musical releases and places of residence (and the influence of all three things on their music production), i mostly concentrated on issues of artistic, philosophical and cognitive processes. through my research, ruminations and analyses of interviews, a number of central themes emerged: initial interactions with music, relationship to tools (instruments, hardware and/or software), internal spaces of composition, external spaces of the community, collaborative structures, and the compositional practices that define women’s music-making. these themes reflect the argument that “women who make electronic music routinely balance goals of individual achievement, collaboration, and musical community” (rodgers 2010: 243). as i had hoped, in the context of a long-form interview, more in-depth answers were given.23 i argue this was a consequence of my attention to creating a convivial space. having one, most often two or three days to spend with the women also gave them a chance to ease into our interaction, and an opportunity to see whether they trusted me. based on earlier interviews, i was able to ask follow-up questions, and i was also able to allow the subjects time to think over what they had previously told me. several remarked that having more than one day of interviews, although exhausting, was helpful and worthwhile.24 to reiterate, i curtailed straightforward questions about being a woman, and couched the issue within other kinds of questions, such as: “who did you ask for support when you started making music?” and “do you have any kind of rituals before or after you’re getting into the headspace to make music?”25 andra mccartney’s “in and out of the sound studio” (2003) specifically asks participants to reveal information about access to and education about sound technologies during childhood. she begins with the question, “how did you become involved in electroacoustic music?” (2003: 91); borrowing from mccartney, i applied this question to my own interview process. one of the questions i posed to my interviewees was about the relationship they had to their tools and their sonic space. this included dancecult 4(2)18 the physical gear, the software, the computer and the studio space they had set up (see fig. 7). i was careful not to steer my interviews into becoming a dialogue about “gear-porn”, a common kind of discourse that runs rampant in discussions about electronic music with a heavy emphasis on braggadocio. figure 7. vaccine in her home studio in del mar, california. photo by magdalena olszanowski (2011). piecing it together: knowledge production through making making and creating are some of the ways through which we can interrogate oppressive and reductive representations (battier 2003), especially by making things that can be shared and examined (kim 2011). motivated by documenting the experiences of female edm artists, my fieldwork culminated in a database documentary, a type of research-creation project. research-creation “is an emergent category within the social sciences and humanities in canada”, and, as a method of inquiry, combines artistic practice and scholarly theory. it is expressly useful for research that cannot be addressed without the engagement of a creative practice by the researcher (chapman and sawchuk 2012: 1). by giving attention to and foregrounding research process and experimentation, this method provides a different dynamic of generating data (chapman and sawchuk 2012: 14–23). in this way, it is similar to feminist methods—methods that also guide my project. feminist methods are focused on the transparency of the research method and the situatedness of the researcher. feminist research develops and experiments with epistemological approaches, and pays attention to process, one of the features it shares with research-creation. 19olszanowski | what to ask women composers the more i spoke to the women featured in microfemininewarfare about their compositional methods, the more i realized their work is strikingly parallel to my own method of research-creation. this is why i chose to present my research in a non-linear form: microfemininewarfare is a database documentary using digital video as a medium that a user/ spectator can view/explore and arrange much in the same ways that an edm composer arranges her songs. electronic music composition software is non-linear; the building of a track necessitates many layers and routes. through interacting with the documentary, the user/spectator is effectively creating the documentary’s narrative, much in the same way a producer does with their samples—they create a narrative based on pieced-together discrete parts they have accrued. the user interface (ui) of the k-film documentary is mediated through the interactive program with which it was built (korsakow) and is accessible online. as stated earlier, part of my feminist method was to use the subjects’ own work to guide my research inquiry and analysis. mira calix’s process inspired me to think about my own work in a similar way. within the interactive database system, i create what mira calix calls “devised/rehearsed improvisation, improvisation but within the realm of structure”.26 she uses this definition to describe most of her musical performance work, saying that, to me, devised improvisation is very different [from traditional improvisation]. it’s, say, this is a and this is b; you can kind of do what you want between a and b but there are all these rules and you have to behave in a certain way. and in b we come back together, maybe between b and c. so it’s devised, rehearsed and structured. it’s not just ‘let’s go.’27 the database documentary constitutes this type of configuration and necessitates the relinquishing of complete authorial control while maintaining the author’s responsibility for the overall shape of the work. mira calix explains in more detail: it’s very hard as a computer operator to just make a noise, or to be the kind of computer operator i am. for others maybe it’s easier. that is the restriction of my tool which is amazing, but again, i’m too controlling—i want to know the shape and want to have structure because i want it to be good, so i want to have some control of what they will be, even though the points in between may vary every time.28 microfemininewarfare has dozens of clips but the order in which the user plays them is relatively free within a thematic spider web. the user can either move through these clips thematically or, interchangeably, move through clips of a single artist. as there is no linear “play” function, the user participates by clicking through the vignettes; otherwise, the documentary will not continue. like a cd-rom or web page, the user is offered structured material, yet the user can also select how to move within this interactive medium and form her own path. allowing the korsakow software to “do its thing” makes everyone (user, creator, etc.) complicit in the fragmentation of the women’s stories—a key component aligned with my feminist ethics. my use of the interactive medium format does not stem dancecult 4(2)20 from a reductive utopian vision that new technologies can break down traditional modes of communication (blackman 1998: 133–4) but an exploration in broadening discourses about female subjectivity. the interactive medium can be a fruitful mode of storytelling when it acknowledges, through content and/or style, the discursive ideologies that obfuscate embedded forms of power and oppression (often the same ones the women in the documentary face). figure 8. mileece in her california home, los angeles. photo by magdalena olszanowski (2011). final reflections microfemininewarfare aimed to interrogate “the way things are” not through oppositional critique but by adding narratives that complicate the grand narrative of women, technology and electronic music. it is what ursula franklin would call a response to the constructed and reconstructed realities that are imbued with ideologies of oppression; these have been constructed yet reified as, precisely, “the way things are” (franklin 1999: 37). creating archives of female cultural creators that work against these dominant ideologies is only one starting point in the work to disentangle dominant gender-based stereotypes and destabilize dominant gendered discourse in order to create new discursive spaces for female composers. my approach sought to portray these women as faithfully as possible through an iterative and collaborative process that is self-reflexive in knowing the subjectivities involved in the telling of stories.29 a k-film documentary is an effective mode of employing research21olszanowski | what to ask women composers creation, precisely because, as i have outlined, it similarly foregrounds an iterative process of looking and a collaborative structure between the artwork and the viewer. significantly, the particular themes and concepts i raised through the making of the documentary lead to a variety of future research possibilities. for example, how do these methods account for ethnicity, race and class and their effect on female subjectivity in the production of music? questions about access must be addressed in this context, both in the way electronic music is produced and its dependence on access to tools, logistics and know-how (durant 1990: 187–9). both research-creation and friendship-as-method need to be explored further in their potential to address these issues and in their potential to showcase alternate non-linear, non-essentialist narratives of female edm artists that break with hegemonic discursive production. acknowledgements this would not have been possible without the generous time of all the women interviewed for the project, and my two on-the-road assistants jason chatzilias and jonathan oberlander. many thanks to other producers, djs, festival and party organizers and ravers who continue to support and believe in this work. thank you to my project committee ( jason nolan, caitlin fisher and phil hoffman) and colleagues at york university, especially jovana jankovic and sara udow. many thanks to andra mccartney’s doctoral seminar that allowed this article to come to fruition, and my doctoral supervisor kim sawchuk’s helping hand. notes 1 this article is drawn from the author’s ma thesis project microfemininewarfare: exploring women’s space in electronic music. 2 see <http://korsakow.org/learn/faq/> for a comprehensive overview of the application. 3 as described in sawchuk and chapman (2012:10–12), the practice of research-creation exists under different names in different parts of the world, such as: practice-led research, arts-based research, studio-based inquiry and performative research. 4 see, for example, forgotten flags (2007), a documentary trying to understand conceptions of nationalism through interviewing people about why they display their country’s flag outside their home. 5 see selection: the delian mode (2009), synth britannia (2009), the alchemists of sound (2003), moog (2004), modulations (1998), sonic acts: from stockhausen to squarepusher (1998), and universal techno (1996). 6 see girls gone vinyl (forthcoming). 7 vaccine, email to author, 25 april 2010. 8 lady j, also known as 1.8.7, is one of the few male-to-female transgender artists in electronic music. little information is available about her apart from a self-led facebook page, despite releasing albums and singles throughout the 1990s with remixes for artists like blondie and beastie boys. see feinberg (1996) for a discussion of transgendered musicians. http://korsakow.org/learn/faq/ dancecult 4(2)22 9 see witting (2007) for a comprehensive and critical discussion on the construction of “woman”. 10 alley cat, interview with the author (shepherd’s bush, london), 11 may 2011. 11 thank you to the anonymous reviewer for pointing out this crucial point. 12 for example, i asked mira calix: “when you were cutting your records, do you remember any of the conversations that you had at the mastering houses? i had others tell me it’s a community builder because you’re right there and the music is being made tangible from this conceptual visceral thing.” 13 doubtful guest, interview with the author (hackney, london), 17 may 2011. 14 vaccine, email to author, 22 july 2011. 15 many of the women i interviewed regaled me with similar stories off camera. 16 mira calix, interview with the author (hackney, london), 12 may 2011. 17 vaccine, interview with the author (del mar, california), 6 june 2011. 18 alley cat, interview with the author (shepherd’s bush, london), 11 may 2011. 19 mantra, interview with the author (hackney, london), 16 may 2011. 20 alley cat, interview with the author (shepherd’s bush, london), 14 may 2011. 21 vaccine, interview with the author (del mar, california), 5 june 2011. 22 an excerpt from one sample interview is included in the appendix. 23 see reitsamer (2011) for an empirical study of techno and drum’n’bass djs. 24 following the interviews, alley cat emailed me, mentioning how the interviews brought back memories of her being a determined young dj, despite many setbacks. recalling this made her more aware of her current reticence to produce music. 25 see excerpt from sample interview included in the appendix. 26 mira calix, interview with the author (hackney, london), 19 may 2011. 27 mira calix, interview with the author (hackney, london), 20 may 2011. 28 mira calix, interview with the author (hackney, london), 20 may 2011. 29 see haraway (1991) for a more detailed focus on multiple truths and fragmented knowledges. appendix an excerpt from an interview with mileece. los angeles, 7 june 2011. magdalena olszanowski: is it always pretty easy... mileece: it’s always really fucking hard. i don’t know what your question is but that’s probably the answer. (laughs) do you have any rituals, how do you prep yourself ? yea, like anything possible, mostly cleaning: i’ll clean and i’ll clean and i’ll do some more cleaning and then i’ll do some emails and then i’ll make some tea, and then i’ll finish my tea and i’ll make more tea, and then i’ll have to clean again because some time has gone by and i’ve made a mess with my tea and then 3 days later (laughs). it’s usually not that bad. i do procrastinate, but i’m usually working on something i need to work on anyway. it depends how long has gone by, if it’s been a long time i am actually afraid and 23olszanowski | what to ask women composers intimidated by this work. it’s funny i get intimidated by this sort of work, but if i’m going to sit down to a logic [software] song or to play the piano, i get intimated by that work too! if i sit down to do something and i have to do something, i’m generally intimidated before i do it, unless i do it because i have this kind of creative urgency that i really want to do something, in which case it comes very naturally and i don’t have to prepare at all. but then if things are in my way i actually get very frustrated which is why i like to keep things really organized. i get really annoyed if i want to do something creative and there’s a cable that’s missing. i get angry and furious and manic and pissed off and i feel like i’m going to lose the urge and this thing i have in my mind and that’s really bothersome, so i do sort of “prep-area” which is a sort of prepare your area, and that’s an important part and partly while i like to keep my surroundings super ergonomic and aesthetic and ready for those moments of creativity to emerge and be liberal so i don’t have to be confined or constrained by clutter by something i can’t find, and just generally uneasy because of something in my surroundings that is there. so yeah there are lots of things i do before i work, usually one or the other. usually taking way too much time and doing way too much procrastination and preparing or way too ambitious to do something super quickly and super angry because i can’t get it done quick enough. so yeah, (laughs) super fucking difficult whichever way. references battier, marc. 2003. “a constructivist approach to the analysis of electronic music and audio art – between instruments and faktura”. organised sound 8(3): 249–55. belbel, marie jose and rosa reitsamer, eds. 2012. dig me out: discourses on popular music, gender and ethnicity. san sebastian, spain: arteleku. <http://www.digmeout.org/> (accessed 17 august 2012). bennett, andy and jodie taylor. 2012. “popular music and the aesthetics of ageing”. popular music 31(2): 231–43. blackman, lisa. 1998. “culture, technology, & subjectivity: an ‘ethical’ analysis”. the virtual embodied: presence/practice/technology, ed. john wood, 132–46. london: routledge. blaetz, robin. 2007. women’s experimental cinema: critical frameworks. durham: duke university press. bradshaw, melissa. 2010. “hyperdub 2010 and kode 9 the knight of the living bassheads”. the quietus, 8 january. <http://thequietus.com/articles/03493-hyperdub-2010-a-state-of-thebass-nation-address> (accessed 2 sept 2012). chapman, owen and kim sawchuk. 2012. “research-creation: intervention, analysis and ‘family resemblances’”. canadian journal of communication 37(1): 5–26. denzin, norman k. and yvonna lincoln. 1998. the landscape of qualitative research: theories and issues. thousand oaks: sage. dunlap, joanna c. and patrick r. lowenthal. 2010. “from pixel on a screen to real person in your students’ lives: establishing social presence using digital storytelling”. the internet and higher education 13(1-2): 70–2. durant, alan. 1990. “a new day for music? 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jay stanley. 1992. social research: theory and methods. boston: allyn and bacon. simoni, mary. 2003. “project lovelace: unprecedented opportunities for music education”. organised sound 8(1): 57–60. thornton, sarah. 1995. club cultures: music, media and subcultural capital. cambridge: polity press. tillmann-healy, lisa m. 2003. “friendship as method”. qualitative inquiry 9(5): 729–49. whiteley, sheila. 2005. too much too young: popular music, age and gender. london: routledge. wittig, monique. 2007. “one is not born a woman”. in the second wave: a reader in feminist theory, ed. linda nicholson, 265–71. london: routledge. discography alley cat and vaccine. 2009. sweet spot/radiate. offshore recordings (12-inch): osr022. <http://www.discogs.com/alley-cat-vaccine-sweet-spot-radiate/release/1914801>. calix, mira. 2007. eyes set against the sun. warp records (lp): warplp150. <http://www.discogs.com/mira-calix-eyes-set-against-the-sun/release/879656>. doubtful guest, the. 2008. acid sauna. planet mu (lp): ziq189. <http://www.discogs.com/doubtful-guest-acid-sauna/release/1241712>. mantra. 2012. credentials. syncopathic recordings (wav): synco030. <http:// syncopathicrecordings.com/1050>. maximin, bérangère. 2012. no one is an island. sub rosa (lp): srv337. <http://www.discogs.com/bérangère-maximin-no-one-is-an-island/release/3524898>. mileece. 2003. formations. lo recordings (cd): lcd30. <http://www.discogs.com/mileece-formations/release/51445>. subeena featuring jamie woon and om’mas keith. 2009. solidify. planet mu (12-inch): ziq252. <http://www.discogs.com/subeena-ft-jamie-woon-ommas-keith-solidify/ release/2021724>. filmography blake, kara. 2009. the delian mode. canada: philtre films. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1442559/>. http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.02 http://www.discogs.com/alley-cat-vaccine-sweet-spot-radiate/release/1914801 http://www.discogs.com/mira-calix-eyes-set-against-the-sun/release/879656 http://www.discogs.com/doubtful-guest-acid-sauna/release/1241712 http://syncopathicrecordings.com/1050 http://syncopathicrecordings.com/1050 http://www.discogs.com/b%c3%a9rang%c3%a8re-maximin-no-one-is-an-island/release/3524898 http://www.discogs.com/mileece-formations/release/51445 http://www.discogs.com/subeena-ft-jamie-woon-ommas-keith-solidify/release/2021724 http://www.discogs.com/subeena-ft-jamie-woon-ommas-keith-solidify/release/2021724 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1442559/ dancecult 4(2)26 deluze, dominique. 1996. universal techno. france: la sept/arte. <http://www.jahtari.org/magazine/other/techno_docu.htm>. fjellestad, hans. 2004. moog. usa: zu33. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0378378/>. henrich, juliane and florian thalhofer. 2007. forgotten flags. germany: korsakow. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1251374/>. lafemme, jenny. forthcoming. girls gone vinyl. usa: parliament studios. <http://www.girlsgonevinyl.com/>. lee, iara. 1998. modulations. usa: caipirinha productions. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139468/>. oskamp, jacqueline and frank scheffer. 1998. sonic acts: from stockhausen to squarepusher. usa: independent. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0163844/>. pomphrey, roger. 2003. the alchemists of sound. uk: bbc4. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0963155/>. whalley, benjamin. 2009. synth britannia. uk: bbc. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1658487/>. http://www.jahtari.org/magazine/other/techno_docu.htm http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0378378/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1251374/%3e http://www.girlsgonevinyl.com http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139468/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0163844/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0963155/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1658487/ old instruments, new agendas: the chemical brothers and the arp 2600 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 6(1): 26–40 issn 1947-5403 ©2014 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.01.02 old instruments, new agendas: the chemical brothers and the arp 2600 hans t. zeiner-henriksen university of oslo (norway) abstract a preference for old vintage music equipment is widespread in electronic dance music. my point of departure for a discussion of this phenomenon is an interview from keyboard magazine in which the members of the production duo the chemical brothers proclaim their fascination with an old analogue synthesizer. two rather diverse theoretical approaches will inform and nuance my narrative here. wiebe e. bijker’s sociotechnical approach to the development of technology will highlight stages and processes in the transition from analogue to digital technology. in addition, sarah thornton’s concept of subcultural capital will direct attention to the old instrument as a prestige item that serves to maintain power structures within the music culture. keywords: vintage music equipment, analogue synthesizers, sociotechnical approach, subcultural capital, chicago house, detroit techno hans t. zeiner-henriksen is an associate professor in the department of musicology at the university of oslo, norway. since the mid 1990s he has been active in establishing music production as a field within the department and has lectured courses both in computer-based and studio-oriented production. in 2010 he completed his phd in musicology with a thesis titled “the ‘poumtchak’ pattern: correspondences between rhythm, sound, and movement in electronic dance music”. email: <h.t.zeiner-henriksen@imv.uio.no>.website: <http://www.hf.uio.no/imv/english/people/aca/hanst/index.html> feature article mailto:h.t.zeiner-henriksen@imv.uio.no http://www.hf.uio.no/imv/english/people/aca/hanst/index.html zeiner-henriksen | old instruments, new agendas 27 in an interview for keyboard magazine, june 1997, tom rowlands and ed simons of the chemical brothers pontificate about digital synthesizers that emulate analogue technology: i remember speaking to underworld a while ago, and they had just gotten one of the [clavia] nord leads. they were saying how amazing it was. but we haven’t bought any of those things yet. no [korg] prophecy or nord or any of those, and i don’t know quite why that is, because i’m sure if i did buy one i’d be quite impressed. part of it is me being wary of mass-produced . . . everyone is going out and buying the prophecy, and everyone is going out and buying the nord lead. it’s cool, and i’m sure i’m hearing those noises on records and thinking they’re good, but i suppose i’m more interested at the moment in . . . the most exciting piece of equipment we’ve got is the arp 2600. we’re really getting into that. it’s not very controllable, but some of the things you can come up with are wicked (rule 1997: 33). the arp 2600 is a rather small, monophonic, analogue synthesizer from the early 1970s that appears regularly on stage during performances of electronic music. surpassed possibly only be the minimoog, it is a highly acclaimed instrument for its era, and many musicians seem to prefer it despite the inherent deficiencies of its rather old technology. the other two synthesizers mentioned above—the nord lead and the korg prophecy—are both from 1995 and were among the first of many new models that arrived in the late 1990s to accommodate the rapidly growing electronic dance music scene and its interest in old vintage equipment. made specifically with the synthesizers of the early 1970s in mind, these instruments boasted the capabilities of the old analogue technology along with all of the advantages of the digital era. still, as the chemical brothers’ interview attests, many musicians continued to favor the original instruments. why might this be so? we like to think of the development of technology as a relatively linear path, where new discoveries rightfully replace older equipment. the most recent version of the iphone, then, is seen as the latest model in a long developmental line of telephones that have been used and eventually discarded. the newest model is, of course, also typically held to be the one that best serves our present needs. the development of the commercial synthesizer can be represented using a similar linearity, leading up to the newest models that are manufactured today. the most radical amendment in this development was the change from analogue to digital technology at the beginning of the 1980s. fully analogue synthesizers had several deficiencies that needed to be fixed: the oscillators were unstable and tended to go out of tune, for example, and they lacked the capacity to store sounds. their parameters were also set using continuous controllers, so it was difficult for the musician to relocate to the exact settings used earlier. digital technology addressed these problems and also introduced midi, which, together with hard-disk recording, revolutionized the production and recording practices of the succeeding decades. so why would anyone favor a monophonic instrument developed dancecult 6(1)28 before this essential conversion to digital technology? to consider this question, i will draw upon two theoretical perspectives: wiebe e. bijker’s sociotechnical approach to the development of technology and sarah thornton’s concept of subcultural capital. taken together, they will nuance my engagement with an issue that certainly has relevance beyond the case presented here. it concerns other music genres and many other types of instruments and music equipment as well (tube-driven pre-amps, compressors and microphones, ribbon microphones, tape distortion and even vinyl records). a theory of sociotechnical change bijker is connected to a group of researchers that pursues social-constructionist perspectives within the field of science and technology studies (bijker, hughes and pinch 1987). he rejects an approach to technology that locates the meaning of the artifact within the technology itself. instead, he favors an approach that encompasses “how technologies are shaped and acquire their meanings in the heterogeneity of social interactions” (bijker 1995: 6). such an approach, of course, eschews the assumption of a linear development of technological innovations. in his book of bicycles, bakelites, and bulbs (1995), bijker develops this approach through three specific case stories, one of which involves the development of the bicycle. during the nineteenth century, the bicycle advanced from a model with two wheels of approximately the same size (the boneshaker), to a model with two wheels of considerably different sizes (the high wheeler),1 and then back again to a model with two wheels of the same size (the safety bicycle). bijker’s arguments are schematized as a combination of theoretical topics and chronological steps, including, importantly, inventions relevant to the development of the object in question. an important step for bijker is to consider all the different groups (relevant social groups) that in some way are connected to the artifact, elucidating their overall perspectives and bringing forth their views on specific problems and possible solutions. he further identifies and describes two specific stages in a developmental technological process. the first stage is characterized by interpretive flexibility—the relevant social groups may compete among themselves regarding their suggestions as to how to proceed. the next stage bijker calls closure and stabilization; here the participants have reached a final consensus among the various possible ways forward. after such a closure has occurred, it becomes much more difficult to propose new directions that violate the consensus: “it is in principle always possible—although in practice very difficult—to reopen up a controversy once closure is reached” (1995: 85). bijker’s theoretical approach illuminates certain stages in the development of the commercial synthesizer that may explain aspects of the seemingly “backward” preference of the chemical brothers. his story of the bicycle has particularly interesting parallels in this regard, and i will therefore return to it in what follows. zeiner-henriksen | old instruments, new agendas 29 the transition from analogue to digital synthesizers bijker starts with a prehistory of the main developmental period in question. here he presents the boneshaker, which had two wheels of the same size, but offered, as its name implies, a rather unpleasant ride. the prehistory of the arp 2600 would be found in the large modular synthesizers of the 1960s, which consisted of separate units that had to be wired together (buchla 100 series, moog modular). the size of these instruments, as well as their complexity, likely represented hindrances for the performing musicians of the era, and the smaller, portable models that arrived at the beginning of the 1970s (synthi a, minimoog, arp 2600, eml-101) would have been intended to address them. these synthesizers were cheaper, their possibilities were more straightforward, and they displayed a relatively pedagogical design, making them much more accessible to many musicians who sought to understand and appreciate synthesizers. the vibration problem of the boneshaker was solved by the high wheeler, but this bicycle introduced a significant safety issue. through his discussion of relevant social groups, bijker next stresses that those groups that choose not to use an artifact can be just as relevant to its development as those groups that embrace it. the high wheeler was a demanding and unsafe vehicle for the majority of its potential users, while for a smaller group of young, upper-class men, those very aspects were an asset, making them look athletic and daring. the high wheeler, then, was a sort of macho bicycle—a tool for showing off—and for this latter group it served a particular purpose. thus, bijker concludes, whether an artifact is seen as “working” or “non-working” derives less from its intrinsic properties than from certain “socially constructed assessments” (1995: 75). in terms of the (keyboard-controlled) synthesizer, relevant social groups could view it in two ways: as a piano-type instrument, it could be played in the absence of any knowledge regarding how the sound is produced; it would therefore be available to the professional as well as the amateur; and it could be used in a large range of musical genres. as an organ-type instrument, on the other hand, the synthesizer would apply to a more limited number of musical genres and appeal mostly to the educated specialist, adept at shaping its sound by positioning its drawbars and knobs. the former interpretation frames the synthesizer as a “working” artifact for many musicians; the latter, as a prestigious, more exclusive artifact. synthesizer manufacturing grew exponentially during the 1970s; paul théberge notes in this regard that engineers and inventors decided to favor and support performing musicians within the popular music field over another relevant social group: the avant-garde composers who had up to that time been at the center of innovation in electronic music (1997: 55).2 still, while this new group of performing musicians, especially those connected to genres like progressive rock, found these smaller and more accessible synthesizers to be “working” artifacts, they remained “non-working” for most other pop musicians, and for a much larger group of amateur musicians. the manufacturers of synthesizers had taken an important step toward a piano-type instrument, in other words, but like the producers of bicycles a century before, they probably saw that an even broader market awaited them if they went several steps further. they needed a model, in the end, that did not require any knowledge dancecult 6(1)30 of sound synthesis, that could just be turned on and played, that had stable pitch oscillators, and, maybe most important of all, that had sounds that suited a greater range of pop and rock genres. disco dance music was mainly recorded using traditional electric and acoustic instruments, certain notable exceptions aside, such as the productions of giorgio moroder. most celebrated among these is donna summer’s “i feel love” (1977), whose sounds are almost entirely created with a moog synthesizer (lawrence 2003: 253–54). in many ways, this track anticipates the needs of 1990s dance music producers like the chemical brothers, especially through its combination of short, rhythmic, unaltered sounds and floating, sustained sounds with continuously modified filter settings and volumes. nevertheless, dance music producers like moroder were not considered an important user group until the 1990s and did not manage to influence the electronic music instrument industry until that era. in terms of bijker’s bicycle history, his description of the various solutions to the safety problem of the high wheeler concerns itself as much with societal changes as with technical specifications. the period before closure, then, is characterized by interpretative flexibility, though certain processes will favor certain stages of development over others. the rise and fall in popularity of various music genres is one process that impacted the development of the synthesizer in the 1970s. the keyboardists from the groups that were most strongly associated with synthesizers around 1975 (pink floyd, emerson, lake and palmer, yes) used a large palette of sounds and often altered various parameters while playing. five years later, a different genre was connected to the instrument in its name as well. synth-pop evolved in the aftermath of the punk movement; while it took up the instruments of progressive rock, it was also, to a certain extent, influenced by punk’s “do-it-yourself ” approach and rejection of oversized stage performances and symphonic pop-song formats. groups and artists like gary numan, ultravox, orchestral manoeuvres in the dark and depeche mode, then, fit their analogue synthesizers into much more straightforward pop structures. the conventional acoustic instruments of much 1970s pop were replaced by synthesizer sounds, often via the combination of short, percussive sounds and sustained, string-like sounds. compared to the progressive rock bands or giorgio moroder’s productions, for example, these songs seldom demanded any knob adjustment at all, and a new musical landscape took shape that favored small, inexpensive instruments with fewer outboard controllers. during the early 1980s, the use of synthesizers became more and more common in all popular music, and the demand for this instrument spread from the professional keyboard player to a much larger amateur market. apparently unrelated inventions that prove to be somehow connected to the artifact in question, lastly, may also impact the viability of some technological solutions over others. the air tire, for example, was essential to the ultimate closure of the bicycle. developers who chose this solution struggled at first with tires that got punctured and were difficult to repair, but eventually perfected models with smaller wheels that provided a faster, safer and altogether more pleasant ride (bijker 1995: 77–84). the development of the microprocessor zeiner-henriksen | old instruments, new agendas 31 was equally crucial in relation to the transition from analogue to digital synthesizers. at first, microprocessors were used to control the analogue components, but thanks to increases in both the microprocessor’s price and its processing power, all components were ultimately replaced by digital equivalents. théberge recognizes this era as the beginning of the electronic musical instrument industry’s dependence upon the computer industry (1997: 58). closure and stabilization: the yamaha dx7 if one instrument symbolizes the climactic transition from analogue to digital synthesizers, the yamaha dx7, which arrived in 1983, is the inevitable choice. it was an immediate success, both in how it influenced the very sound of pop music in its time and how it expanded the market for the instrument. the most famous analogue synthesizer from the 1970s, the minimoog, sold about twelve thousand units over the entire decade, while the yamaha dx7 sold over two hundred thousand units in the first three years of its release (théberge 1997: 73–74). while most of the major deficiencies of analogue technology had already been addressed through digitally controlled oscillators and storage systems, the dx7 introduced a completely new form of sound synthesis. analogue synthesizers from the 1970s and the hybrid instruments that were produced around 1980 used subtractive synthesis to produce sounds. with a basic understanding of the major components, many performers found this technology to be quite intuitive; one chose a certain type of sound wave for the oscillator(s) and simply filtered out (subtracted) the unwanted overtones. the yamaha dx7, on the other hand, used fm (frequency modulation) synthesis. it employed six oscillators to generate sine waves that could be arranged into different algorithms to modulate each other and together produce quite complex results (see chadabe 1997: 251; roads 1996: 224–50). compared to subtractive synthesis, the connections between the algorithms and the final sound waves they produced were much more difficult to grasp. the only outboard controllers it had were a pitch wheel and a modulation wheel; all other sound changes had to be programmed with membrane buttons, a data slider and a small lcd display. thus, most dx7 users, both those with analogue-instrument experience and newcomers to synthesizers, elected to work with the available prefabricated programs rather than learn to make new sounds themselves. the fact that the dx7 could thus be played without any knowledge of programming featured prominently in advertisements for the instrument as well (théberge 1997: 76). the crystal-clear digital sound of the dx7 was also crucial to its success. it boasted a range of presets that were much more faithful to the acoustic instruments they imitated than anything the analogue synthesizers could produce. the flute sound of the dx7, for example, was particularly hailed at the time for its verity. by the mid-1980s, then, the yamaha dx7 was a marker of pop music sound in general. the success of the dx7 led in many ways to a closure in the electronic musical instrument industry. while new hybrid instruments combining digital and analogue components were manufactured until at least 1986, fully digital synthesizers dominated the market by the dancecult 6(1)32 end of the decade. these instruments generally had few knobs and buttons to program or control sounds, and were sold with banks filled with prefabricated sounds that mainly perpetuated a sound aesthetics that relied upon the simulation of acoustic instruments. thanks to the digital sampling technology that was implemented into these instruments’ sound-synthesis processes, these simulations grew more and more convincing. the chemical brothers belong to a group of synthesizer users that arose in the 1990s. various genres of electronic dance music spread rapidly, as did its performers’ renewed interest in the synthesizer as an instrument in and of itself. for this group, then, a typical synthesizer of the early 1990s was not especially attractive, due to both its prefabricated acoustic-instrument programs and its distinctive, bright, polished digital sound. these performers did not want presets that sounded like acoustic instruments; they wanted sounds that could provide a good front solo or a bass line in a dance mix. while the stable digital components were easier to control than their analogue counterparts, they also lacked the rugged side effects of the inherent instability of the analogue instruments. furthermore, the lack of controllers to alter sounds while playing was a major drawback, both for performance purposes and for sound experiments in production. the developmental route that was sparked by the success of the yamaha dx7 had resulted in an instrument that did not meet the demands of this new user group. the preference of the chemical brothers for an instrument from long before the transition to digital synthesizers like the dx7 therefore reintroduces the debates and developments that led to a closure in the first place. théberge claims an act of “double production” is going on in the relationship between the electronic music industry and musicians’ magazines: “one industry produces technology, and the other produces consumers” (1997: 130). when keyboard magazine has an interview in which significant role models argue for the benefits of an older instrument, of course, this symbiotic relationship is set aside. it is a threat to the industry that potential buyers might want to purchase old instruments instead of new ones. the nord lead and the korg prophecy represent attempts to control this situation by offering consumers instruments that have some of the same abilities as the old ones, but the chemical brothers do not see these instruments as fulfilling their needs. why is this so? does the digital emulation of analogue components sound inferior to the old technology? the chemical brothers claim that the arp 2600 “sounds wicked”, which might be interpreted as a statement of allegiance to a type of sound that these digital synthesizers could not produce. furthermore, old analogue synthesizers have a number of outboard controllers that facilitate altering or modifying sounds while playing, and the instrument is housed in a wooden, not plastic, case, lending it both substance and a sense of history. nevertheless, digital synthesizers feature extreme flexibility when it comes to programming parameter settings, and they are far more practical in a stage performance, thanks to their ability to store programs. we are left to wonder, then: to what extent is the older instrument in itself a symbol of something prestigious that the new instrument cannot emulate? zeiner-henriksen | old instruments, new agendas 33 the analogue synthesizer as subcultural capital bijker’s approach exposes the chemical brothers’ dissatisfaction with a developmental direction. moreover, it demonstrates the significance of societal processes: the high wheeler had an important purpose as a tool for showing off. the arp 2600 may in similar ways have a specific role that connects it to the discourse of authenticity in popular music. thornton’s study of club culture supports this reading. she considers authenticity to be “arguably the most important value ascribed to popular music” (1995: 26) and describes the term in relation to how music is elevated “when it rings true or feels real, when it has credibility and comes across as genuine (1995: 26, emphasis in original). richard middleton observes that authenticity is used in discourses on popular music “to mark out the genuine from the counterfeit, the honest from the false, the original from the copy” (2006: 200), while keir keightley describes it as “the compass that orients rock culture in its navigation of the mainstream” (2001: 131). keightley further notes that authenticity is not actually an audible feature in the music, but is “a value, a quality we ascribe to perceived relationships between music, socio-industrial practices, and listeners or audiences” (2001: 131). the issue of authenticity as a value is as divisive in dance music culture as it is in popular music writ large, though the rules for what is considered authentic in the former arise from somewhat unique idiosyncratic principles. a typical performance by the chemical brothers—the two artists simply turning knobs on a selection of machinery—violates the most fundamental rules of what is considered authentic within the rock genre. however, within dance music culture, it can be seen as authentic in relation to the ideal of a dj who is genuinely focused on the music and the dance floor and not interested in drawing any attention to himself or herself as a person.3 thornton’s term subcultural capital derives from pierre bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital (1984), which refers to human assets of a non-financial nature that matter in relation to positions and power structures in society. while bourdieu’s concept addresses a national cultural unity, thornton’s concept relates specifically to a smaller cultural group that deviates from the larger culture within which it exists. her subculture, in fact, is defined as the culture of british dance clubs in the 1990s. during this decade, club culture spread throughout europe and had become a global phenomenon with many local variants around the turn of the millennium. in her study, thornton defines hipness as one form of subcultural capital. for the regular club-goer, hipness can be objectified through things like a record collection with cleverly chosen, “correct” albums or the right clothes or a trendy hairstyle, and it can be embodied through “being ‘in the know,’ using (but not over-using) current slang and looking as if you were born to perform the latest dance styles” (thornton 1995: 11–12). in the case of the chemical brothers and the arp 2600, the instrument itself can be seen as an objectified form of subcultural capital (or hipness): compared to a new digital synthesizer, for example, it is more difficult to acquire, and it is actually quite expensive, particularly in view of its deficiencies. the arp 2600 as an embodied form of subcultural capital would imply both an awareness of the status that this specific instrument dancecult 6(1)34 carries with it and the more definite ability to operate it. according to thornton, the term underground is used within club culture to indicate a certain subcultural quality or value: “more than fashionable or trendy, ‘underground’ sounds and styles are ‘authentic’ and pitted against the mass-produced and mass-consumed” (1995: 117). this aligns with how authenticity is used by rock culture to distance itself from more commercial pop music (keightley 2001). the chemical brothers indicate their disapproval of the fact that everybody can get their hands on new digital synthesizers (later in the interview, they also mention equipment made in very limited numbers by an esoteric german producer). this deliberate dissociation from the mass-produced and mass-consumed represents a means of maintaining certain power relations within a subculture. electronic music instruments and production tools have become much more accessible since the early 1980s, and this democratization of music production has narrowed the distance between the professional music producer and the amateur. thus, the chemical brothers likewise evoke the prestige of the arp 2600 to maintain a certain position and declare that their craft demands more than just the newest equipment. chicago house versus detroit techno théberge argues that musicians, following the advent of digital synthesizers and midi technology, became “consumers of prerecorded sounds” (1997: 3). the use of presets on synthesizers and cds with sampled grooves and bass lines that facilitated the production of dance music in the 1990s validates his argument. by contrast, you must make all of the sounds from scratch on an arp 2600, since there are no presets, prerecorded sounds or sample banks available. andrew goodwin wrote in 1988 that “authenticity is still very much present in the need for pop musicians to demonstrate musical competence” (1988: 44). to what extent, then, was the authenticity of producers of dance music in the late 1990s evaluated according to similar types of expertise? the answer may change depending upon the club genre in question. even if the music at times sounds rather similar, different attitudes toward equipment characterized the various subgenres of dance music. early chicago house music had links to the disco scene in new york through the influential dj frankie knuckles who had learned his skills in new york clubs during the 1970s. he brought with him an attitude towards music where the dance floor and the dancers were the focal point of the night. after a visit with producers of house music in chicago, journalist sheryl garratt described a production session “where everybody comes down to watch” and there was “a party going on in the control room” (1986). in the same article, dj marshall jefferson locates the music directly within the club scene: “house music?...you have to go to the clubs and see how people react when they hear it. it’s more like a feeling that runs through, like old-time religion in the way people jus’ get happy and screamin’. it’s happening! it’s…house!” ( jefferson quoted in garrat 1986). the central task, then, was about getting the crowd to dance, and probably the main focus of the production process as well. the reuse of bass lines or drum patterns was not uncommon. steve “silk” zeiner-henriksen | old instruments, new agendas 35 hurley uses, for example, a bass line from the last section of the warehouse’s classic “let no man put asunder (shep pettibone remix)” (1983) by first choice on his house famous track “jack your body“ (1986). the music that came from chicago to britain in the late 1980s included a few contributions by producers from detroit. this music was later promoted to the british audience via a special compilation called techno: the new dance sound of detroit. in contrast to the reputation of chicago house music, this music was presented as much more rational and intellectual, as well as radically new. an influential detroit producer, jeff mills described the detroit techno sound as: “if you hear something that kind of sounds like you’ve heard it before, then it’s not techno” (mills quoted in kempster 1996: 17). renowned producer juan atkins had been inspired by alvin toffler’s book the third wave to adapt a futuristic technology-oriented philosophy to his personal musical vision. to subordinate oneself, like a house dj, to the interest of the crowd did not fit this picture. in a 1988 interview for the magazine music technology, he says: “the music is not for everybody. it’s for certain people that want a little twist. some people are perfectly content with everyday pop—they don’t have an open enough mind to consider something new” (atkins quoted in trask 1988). this dichotomy gained a foothold in the discourses connected to the music as well. chris kempster writes: while house music was a post-modernist art form, ruthlessly eclectic to the point where some early house hits were simply thinly veiled rewrites of other songs, techno’s driving force was innovation. in its purism, its emphasis on stepping into the unknown, it is as modernist as cubism. detroit pushed dance music into the abstract, built not upon the legacy of disco, but on the spaces of funk (1996: 17). when british producers started to create their own electronic dance music tracks, the detroit musicians became an important inspiration, both musically and intellectually. techno gradually became one of the most dominant genres of the club-oriented dance music scene, signifying anything instrumental and electronic, whether intended for dancing or simply for listening. while producers of house undoubtedly made dance music, producers of techno were also exploring other directions, taking the music away from the dance floor.4 the chemical brothers are situated somewhere between house and techno. their tracks are mostly electronic, but many of their most famous tracks include vocals and have very danceable grooves. they are partly a dance act and partly a more performance-oriented act, having performed both as djs mixing other artists’ tracks for dancing crowds and in giant stadiums and at festivals where many of the audience generally watch the stage to see what the musicians are doing. hence they are faced with divergent expectations, depending upon the situation and the audience with whom they interact. in the keyboard interview, then, they are communicating with readers who are probably especially interested in their production techniques, and one would suspect that the duo is trying to demonstrate a kind of hipness through their knowledge of what is considered a more respectable or prestigious way of working linked to the arp 2600. in addition to having no preset sounds, the older dancecult 6(1)36 synthesizer is also considerably more difficult to introduce into a production with midisequencing, compared to the other synthesizers mentioned in the interview. the old analogue versus the new digital in his book rock music in performance (2007), david pattie examines how authenticity constructions are constantly adjusted. in the 1970s, the analogue synthesizer was seen to be violating the (unwritten) rules of rock music (see also goodwin 1988: 41). in the nme encyclopedia of rock (1977), for example, the german electronica band kraftwerk and their fans are condescendingly described as situated in an artificial, technology-ridden environment (pattie 2007: 7). following the synthesizer’s widespread introduction into most forms of popular music during the 1980s, the instrument was no longer considered inauthentic (except within certain genres); a decade later, a new division between the old analogue and the new digital synthesizer emerged, redefining the former (at the expense of the latter) yet again. pattie notes: “digital instruments were now cold avatars of inhuman, inauthentic technology” (2007: 7). this notion was not especially prevalent within the popular music culture at large but did dominate several influential cultural groups. joseph auner wrote around the turn of the millennium of an “entire ‘authentic instrument’ subculture” (2000: 3), one that was deeply engaged with instruments like the mellotron, the clavinet, the fender rhodes, the hammond b3 and, of course, the analogue synthesizers from the early 1970s, based upon a mixture of nostalgia and a true conviction regarding the perceived advantages of pre-digital technology. in his discussion of digital sampling and analogue aesthetics, tellef kvifte claims, “the very concept ‘digital’ has for many people strong connotations in the direction of ‘machine’, ‘automatic’, ‘not human’, etc., while ‘analogue’ has a much more human and authentic feel” (2007: 120). analogue electronic technology is based on an electric current, and all of its information is transferred in a continuous flow. in contrast, digital technology relies upon discrete digits, which certain cultural groups regard as less appropriate for the exchanges involved in human communication, particularly the more expressive and emotional types of communication, such as music. kvifte points to the fact that traditional musical notation (and even our alphabet) is a type of digital communication, in that one must choose among certain specific entities; he also indicates that new types of digital music software actually enable communication of a traditionally more analogue type (2007). when music is converted from digital to analogue signals (with a standard bit resolution) and played on normal speakers, it is in fact impossible for the human ear to detect that it initially was digital. however, some people’s resistance to mixing digital technology with human acts of communication is probably not rational and will remain strong in music cultures where technology by and large is rendered suspicious. the preference for old instruments in general is a well-established tradition within popular music. it is most openly expressed in music styles like folk, blues, country and rock zeiner-henriksen | old instruments, new agendas 37 and roll, all of which, according to keightley, derive their authenticity from romantic rather than modernist ideas (2001: 137).5 some musicians seem to see old guitars or amplifiers as a magical sonic gateway to the golden age of the music style in question (théberge 1997: 120). this idea evokes the nostalgic yearning for the past found in the romantic period as well as the european classical music tradition’s tremendous admiration for historically superior instruments such as stradivarius violins. of course, many old instruments are long forgotten and most types of old technology are obsolete. those that acquire the requisite prestige likely have some sort of quality that makes them stand out in comparison to others. bijker’s sociotechnical approach makes it clear that the process through which certain artifacts survive are as intricate as any developmental progression. furthermore, it explains the unique persistence of old instrument and technology despite direct competition from new, often superior products. when a closure has occurred—when a consensus concerning the ingenuity of the artifact has secured its position—it can be tremendously difficult to reopen the debate surrounding it and thereby announce its inferiority in comparison with newer technology. a study by fritz and colleagues shows, for example, that violinists actually gave higher scores to new violin models than to the old italian models in a blind test, and that a particular stradivarius was actually the least preferred instrument. nevertheless, they conclude their study with the no doubt accurate reassurance that the old italian instruments, with their historic importance, will surely maintain their position (fritz el al. 2012: 763). from a broader perspective, one can see similar processes and assumptions behind the persistence of the prestigious positions of old paintings, sculptures, buildings, works of literature, religious writings and, of course, musical compositions and musical styles. interestingly, keyboard magazine reacted to the growing popularity of old analogue synthesizers in the 1990s by establishing a column dedicated to vintage instruments. samantha bennett claims these musicians’ magazines have a dual identity, advertising for and bragging about new equipment while at the same time celebrating the mythical position of old equipment (2010). most keyboard magazine readers are musicians, and many probably combine an active interest in new equipment with a great respect for older instruments. the chemical brothers will undoubtedly gain approval among these readers for their choice of the old analogue synthesizer. the preference of the arp 2600, as mentioned, disrupts the idea of a linear development that favors the latest technological models over their generally flawed predecessors. since the nord lead and korg prophecy were released in 1995, many new synthesizers have been manufactured, in some cases especially for the electronic dance music scene, with new and better emulations of analogue components, more outboard controllers and more suitable sounds. in addition, a couple of expensive, fully analogue synthesizers (also in wooden cases) have been introduced that should satisfy the needs of the chemical brothers and their peers. computer software versions of the most famous analogue synthesizers have also given these models more attention, while at the same time making their sounds and controls more accessible (at least through a virtual version). it is hard to say if rejections by the likes dancecult 6(1)38 of the chemical brothers led directly to improvements of the first digital emulations of analogue synthesizers toward the truer analogue options available today. yet the situation has certainly changed. while it was not very difficult to discern between the sound of an analogue and a digital synthesizer in a music production in the 1980s and 1990s, this is no longer the case. producers have learned to tackle most of the challenges of digital technology and now rely upon devices and computer programs that emulate nearly all of the sounds and side effects of analogue technology. nevertheless, the old vintage synthesizers retain their prestige, and the debate rages on about the deficiencies of even today’s digital emulations. i believe bijker and thornton’s approaches offer useful insights into the foundations of this debate. the use of an instrument like the arp 2600 from the early 1970s may be seen as a reaction to the deficiencies of the current state of the art and an expression of dissatisfaction with the direction of the developmental process. concurrently, it may be seen as a token of authenticity, arising from a mixture of elitist ideas and more straightforward motives. it may finally be seen to signal aloofness toward newer, mass-produced equipment and its users while at the same time symbolizing a connection to history and tradition. in any case, the vintage instrument inspires musicians today as it did in the past, less as a technological triumph, perhaps, than as an important driving force in a creative process. notes 1 the bicycle with a large front wheel and a much smaller rear wheel is known by many names, including the ordinary, the high wheeler, and the penny-farthing (from two contemporary british coins of different sizes). i will use the most descriptive term, high wheeler, throughout the article. 2 in any sound you can imagine (1997), paul théberge writes extensively about the first years of digital technology (from 1983 to 1988) in musical instruments. his approach is motivated by raymond williams’s foundational work within cultural studies, and especially his perspectives on the role of technology as situated within society. théberge draws upon studies of the musical instrument industry, the media and consumers in his analysis of the complex relationship between music making and the manufacturing of instruments. his work is highly relevant to my discussion of the development of the synthesizer, particularly given the many parallels between bijker’s approach to the study of technological artifacts and williams’s cultural sociology. however, bijker’s explicit focus on technology and developmental processes presents certain useful perspectives that are less emphasized by théberge. 3 even though the audience is supposed to dance or just enjoy the music, there are always those present who are interested in equipment and evaluate performances in light of very specific instrument choices. these people may comprise a small minority of fans but generally wield an outsized influence in relation to, for example, the choice of an old analogue synthesizer. 4 house and techno are music genres that may sound confusingly alike, with the same four-tothe-floor bass drum pattern often constituting an identical rhythmic foundation. nevertheless, there are certain musical elements that signify the two genres. a typical house track usually has vocals, while techno tracks are more often purely instrumental. electronic synthesizer sounds zeiner-henriksen | old instruments, new agendas 39 are the main ingredient in techno, while house tracks may include instruments like electric guitar, electric piano and acoustic instruments as well. samples are more common in house tracks, while extensive use of effect processing characterizes techno. 5 keightley claims that popular music culture in general derives its authenticity notions from a mixture of romantic and modernist ideas, but that certain genres are more influenced by one than the other. a fascination with old instruments would be a romantic notion, for example, while an obsession with a completely new music (like that of the detroit techno producers) would be a modernistic notion. references auner, joseph. 2000. “making old machines speak: images of technology in recent music”. echo: a music-centered journal 2(2). n.p. bennett, samantha. 2010. “revisiting the ‘double production industry’: equipment manufacturing, consumption, and the music technology press in the late 2000s”. hanasaari cultural centre (helsinki, finland): music, law & business—biennial conference of iaspm norden. bijker, wiebe e. 1995. of bicycles, bakelites, and bulbs: toward a theory of sociotechnical change. cambridge, mass.: mit press. bijker, wiebe e., thomas p. hughes, and trevor j. pinch, eds. 1987. the social construction of technological systems: new directions in the sociology and history of technology. cambridge, mass.: mit press. bourdieu, pierre. 1984. distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste. trans. r. nice. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. chadabe, joel. 1997. electric sound: the past and promise of electronic music. upper saddle river, n.j.: prentice hall. fritz, claudia, joseph curtin, jacques poitevineau, palmer morrel-samuels and fan-chia tao. 2012. “player preferences among new and old violins”. proceedings of the national academy of science of the united states of america 109(3): 760–63. garratt, sheryl. 1986. “sample and hold: the house sound of chicago”. the face 09. <http://www.rocksbackpages.com/article.html?articleid=10166> (accessed 12 may 2014). goodwin, andrew. 1988. “sample and hold: pop music in the digital age of reproduction”. critical quarterly 30(3): 34–49. keightley, keir. 2001. “reconsidering rock”. in the cambridge companion to pop and rock, ed. simon frith, will straw and john street, 109–142. cambridge: cambridge university press. kempster, chris, ed. 1996. history of house. london: sanctuary publishing. kvifte, tellef. 2007. “digital sampling and analogue aesthetics”. in aesthetics at work, ed. a. melberg, 105–128. oslo: unipub. lawrence, tim. 2003. love saves the day: a history of american dance music, 1970–1979. durham, n.c.: duke university press. http://www.rocksbackpages.com/article.html?articleid=10166 dancecult 6(1)40 middleton, richard. 2006. voicing the popular: on the subjects of popular music. new york: routledge. pattie, david. 2007. rock music in performance. new york: palgrave macmillan. roads, curtis. 1996. the computer music tutorial. cambridge, mass.: mit press. rule, greg. 1997. “water into acid: the chemical brothers blow up”. keyboard 06: 30–37. théberge, paul. 1997. any sound you can imagine: making music/consuming technology. hanover, n.h.: wesleyan university press. thornton, sarah. 1995. club cultures: music, media, and subcultural capital. cambridge: polity press. trask, simon. 1988. “future shock”. music technology 12. <http://www.mobeus.org/archives/ juanatkins/> (accessed 12 may 2014). discography first choice. 1983. let no man put asunder (shep pettibone remix). salsoul records (12-inch): sg 397. <http://www.discogs.com/first-choice-let-no-man-put-asunder/master/66064>. hurley, steve “silk”. 1986. jack your body. london records/d.j. international records (12-inch): lonx 117. <http://www.discogs.com/steve-silk-hurley-jack-your-body/release/4394649>. summer, donna. 1977. i feel love. casablanca records (12-inch): nbd 20104. <http://www.discogs.com/donna-summer-i-feel-love/release/191224>. techno! the new dance sound of detroit. 1988. 10 records (2 x lp comp): dixg 75. <http://www.discogs.com/various-techno-the-new-dance-sound-of-detroit/release/57919>. http://www.mobeus.org/archives/juanatkins/ http://www.mobeus.org/archives/juanatkins/ http://www.discogs.com/first-choice-let-no-man-put-asunder/master/66064 http://www.discogs.com/steve-silk-hurley-jack-your-body/release/4394649 http://www.discogs.com/donna-summer-i-feel-love/release/191224 http://www.discogs.com/various-techno-the-new-dance-sound-of-detroit/release/57919 the diy careers of techno and drum 'n' bass djs in vienna dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 4(2): 27–47 issn 1947-5403 ©2011 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.02.02 cross-dressing to backbeats: the status of the electroclash producer and the politics of electronic music david madden concordia university (canada) abstract addressing the international emergence of electroclash at the turn of the millenium, this article investigates the distinct character of the genre and its related production practices, both in and out of the studio. electroclash combines the extended pulsing sections of techno, house and other dance musics with the trashier energy of rock and new wave. the genre signals an attempt to reinvigorate dance music with a sense of sexuality, personality and irony. electroclash also emphasizes, rather than hides, the european, trashy elements of electronic dance music. the coming together of rock and electro is examined vis-à-vis the ongoing changing sociality of music production/ distribution and the changing role of the producer. numerous women, whether as solo producers, or in the context of collaborative groups, significantly contributed to shaping the aesthetics and production practices of electroclash, an anomaly in the history of popular music and electronic music, where the role of the producer has typically been associated with men. these changes are discussed in relation to the way electroclash producers peaches, le tigre, chicks on speed, and miss kittin and the hacker often used a hybrid approach to production that involves the integration of new(er) technologies, such as laptops containing various audio production softwares with older, inexpensive keyboards, microphones, samplers and drum machines to achieve the ironic backbeat laden hybrid electro-rock sound. keywords: electroclash; music producers; studio production; gender; electro; electronic dance music feature article dancecult 4(2)28 david madden is a phd candidate (a.b.d.) in communications at concordia university (montreal, qc). madden’s research focuses on sound studies, electronic/popular music, gender and research creation. a lifelong multi-instrumentalist musician, his artistic practice involves electronic music production, sound design, and making videos. along with independently producing and releasing music and videos, madden’s sound works have been commissioned for contemporary dance works, research projects, videos and performances. <http://www.miraclebabysound.org/> introduction in the fall of 2009 i attended an electronic dance music1 party night held in montreal, québec at la société des arts technologiques (sat), featuring electroclash (discussed below) pioneers alter ego and two montreal-based djs, jordan dare and duvall, who also work within the frames of electro and techno. alter ego is a german electronic dance music production/performance duo comprised of roman flügel and jörn elling wuttke. touted by montreal mirror’s former dance music critic jack oatmon as “among the most talented, longstanding and influential techno producers in the world” (2009), flügel and wuttke present themselves as “alter ego live” while touring. after more than ten years of producing remixes, singles and albums, flügel and wuttke released the song “rocker” in 2004, reaching #32 on the united kingdom (u.k.) singles chart and becoming one of the most popular instrumental tracks of electroclash (roberts 2006: 21). in the same year, they won three major awards in groove magazine’s readers’ poll, including “best live act”, “best album” (transphormer) and “best track”, for the aforementioned “rocker” (resident advisor 2005). alter ego’s performance in montreal, coming a full five years after the release of “rocker”, led me to consider electroclash and how it emerged as a dominant form of electronic dance music in the early 2000s. electroclash is comprised of a “consortium of subgenres”, to borrow from charles kronengold (2008: 45), that combine the extended pulsing sections of techno, house and other dance musics with the reckless energy of rock and new wave. the genre signals an attempt to reinvigorate dance music with a sense of sexuality, personality and irony. electroclash also emphasizes, rather than hides, the european, trashy elements of electronic dance music. in this sense, the term “electrotrash” might work just as well as “electroclash” to represent the genre. i would like to use the specificity of this cultural moment to address the emergence of electroclash by asking: what is distinct about the genre and its related practices, both in and out of the studio? why do rock and electro come together at this point and in this way? and, what does electroclash portend in terms of our understandings of the politics of electronic music? using stuart hall’s oft-cited conception of articulation, none of these connections are inherently linked; rather, they exist “historically in a particular formation”, fashioned by social and cultural practice (1986: 54–55). http://www.miraclebabysound.org/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiwfatvwvga 29madden | cross-dressing to backbeats this article argues that the coming together of rock and electronic dance music can be explained vis-à-vis the ongoing changing sociality of music production/distribution and the changing role of the producer.2 instead of the monopolistic practices one sees in other media industries, or even in certain strands of popular music production earlier in the 20th century where a single firm controlled every aspect of production, including distribution and sales, with electroclash, many of the hierarchical and specialized duties of multitrack studio recording collapse around multi-tasking (digital) studio producers who can potentially control production, distribution, performance duties and the circulation of their aesthetics. it is worth emphasizing that these production practices are not exclusive to electroclash, let alone the professional music industry, as many noncommercial and amateur artists work in similar ways. numerous women, whether as solo producers or in the context of collaborative groups, have contributed significantly to shaping the aesthetics and production practices of electroclash, an anomaly in the history of popular music and electronic music, where the role of the producer has typically been associated with men. these changes will be discussed in relation to the way electroclash producers peaches, le tigre, chicks on speed, and miss kittin and the hacker often used a hybrid approach to production that involves the integration of new(er) technologies, such as laptops containing various audio production softwares, with older, inexpensive keyboards, microphones, samplers and drum machines in order to achieve the ironic backbeat-laden hybrid electro-rock sound. electro/clash given that electroclash is still understudied, particularly in relation to its history, producers and production practices, i begin by addressing certain conceptual distinctions between electro and some of its variations, and the broader international emergence of electroclash. electro currently operates as one of the primary defining categories of electronic dance music and includes the genres of house and techno, among others. electro primarily functions as a prefix in tandem with various musical descriptors, practices, and/ or vibes (as in, electroclash), and at times the genre is shortened to “electro”. electro initially represented a down-tempo (that is, slower) and funkier manifestation of the electronic funk/rap music that emerged in the early 1980s throughout certain urban centers in the western world, most notably new york city, where radio stations such as kiss fm and wbls mixed the genre into its electronic dance rotation (rietveld 2012). electro from this period, interchangeably referred to as electro-funk—as in, electronic funk music—and electro-boogie, is associated with the mechanical sounds produced by roland’s tr-8083 drum machine, as well as synthesizers and funky, repetitive bass lines, a holdover of disco and 1970s funk. electro also draws heavily from early hip hop, often incorporating similar vocal stylizations; additionally, vocal tracks of the electro genre frequently feature the use of vocoders4 and/or various other effects. susana loza describes the process of adding vocoders as “the ‘planet rock’/electro effect” (emphasis original), referencing afrika bambaata and the soul sonic force’s seminal “planet rock” (1982), where “normal vocals are forcefed through a vocoder and cartoonishly mangled into a 1950s-style robotized version http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ldcyjb8rhk dancecult 4(2)30 of the original” (2001: 350). bambaata’s “planet rock”, which incorporates elements of kraftwerk’s “trans europe express” (1977) and is heavily influenced by the work of yellow magic orchestra (ymo), g.l.o.b.e. and wiz kid’s song “play that beat mr. dj” (1983), and cybotron’s “clear” (1983) are all foundational cuts of this early strand of electro. even though the electro of the 1980s is very commonly referred to as either electro, electro-funk or electro-boogie, there is generally a tremendous amount of disagreement amongst electronic dance music producers, consumers, listeners and scholars when it comes to fixing certain musical styles within genre boundaries. mark j. butler refers to the work of the group cybotron as “proto-techno”, as one of its members, juan atkins, is considered to be one of the first techno producers. atkins, along with derrick may and kevin saunderson, are known as the belleville three, alluding to detroit, michigan’s southwestern suburb (butler 2006: 42–5). butler is careful to note, however, that genre “tensions call into question the unity that characterizes most historical narratives of ” electronic dance music (2006: 45–6). the apparent lack of genre cohesion and naming within electronic dance music also extends into broader historical narratives and conceptions of electronic music. as andra mccartney posits, one of the many challenges of defining electronic music is that the term “electronic music” is often used interchangeably with electroacoustic music, even by noted scholars and in important library collections. further, related terms like musique concrète, computer music and tape music are also frequently employed in overlapping ways (mccartney 2000b: 4).5 in other words, electronic music in its many forms and contexts is a rather fluid concept that can be used to describe anything from computer music to production techniques that use recorded sounds and microphones.6 although electroclash is one of the key innovations of electronic dance music of the last decade or so, it has not restructured dance music in the same way as previous developments have. unlike the emergence of house music in the mid-1980s, electroclash does not represent a total reorientation of electronic dance music culture. will straw writes that house music’s greater “importance comes from its recentring of the historical movement of dance-music culture as a whole” (1991: 383). straw continues: as was the case prior to the rise of house, dance-music within the western world has continued to be marked by opposed tendencies towards unity/coherence and diversity/differentiation, but the logics through which these processes unfold have become much more integrated. on the one hand, house music has drawn most dance-musical forms into various sorts of accommodation to it. . . . at the same time, however, the durability and expansiveness of appeal of house music are such that these variations have come to be positioned laterally within a division of tastes running across dance-music culture (straw 1991: 383). so, in thinking about electroclash as one of these lateral divisions, the genre has reoriented electronic dance music in many important ways, particularly in relation to production practices, aesthetics and the prominent role of women producers and performers. it is for these reasons that the focus of this text largely revolves around these intersections. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmguxjspgrq http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgqibfqwctu 31madden | cross-dressing to backbeats the emergence of electroclash stems from changes to electronic dance music culture in the late 1990s and early 2000s, changes that can be initially traced to the circulation of emotions and vibes emanating from parties and club nights around this time. “vibes” is a term that is generally employed by electronic dance music consumers and producers to represent the overall feel of electronic dance music party nights and events. in speaking of kingston, jamaica’s dancehall scene, julian henriques writes that the term vibes is “commonly used to describe the mood, atmosphere or ambience of a session, with the adjective ‘vibesy’” (2010: 63). while i would disagree with henriques’ notion that “such affective qualities are considered irreducible, requiring no further explanation, as with feelings themselves” (2010: 63), mainly because not all party night attendees feel the same way, and as sara ahmed points out, “even when we feel we have the same feeling, we don’t necessarily have the same relationship to the feeling” (2004: 10), henriques notes that these vibes, which i would suggest are bound up with emotions, can circulate and propagate as repeating frequencies far beyond the confines of a dance floor or dancehall (2010: 70–5). going further, it might be tempting to think of vibes as having a certain degree of agency, sociality and intentionality as they circulate and come into contact with more and more bodies.7 electroclash emerged in the early 2000s in various electronic dance music centers, such as new york, berlin, chicago, detroit and montreal, as the emotive response of many djs, producers, club promoters, listeners and dancers who observed or perhaps more accurately, felt, that certain styles of electronic dance music (e.g. minimal techno) were too serious and austere. the “back-to-basics” sound of electroclash, which, in part, was a reaction against the perceived excesses of the electronic dance music of the late 1990s, was embraced by the fashion-conscious worlds of new york and london (and electroclash artists), along with 1980s synth-pop, from gary numan and soft cell to the human league.8 in a personal interview with montreal-based party host, dancer and electroclash promoter mikey muscles, he suggests that by the early 2000s club nights and events were “just not enough fun; they took themselves too seriously”.9 while mentioning electroclash’s connection with the past, label manager and a&r for turbo recordings, thomas sontag, elaborates on some of muscles’ sentiments: [electroclash] . . . was a revisiting of the past. like it was pastiche to begin with. . . . i think it came out of the rise of dance music culture, the continued rise of dance music culture and a movement away from a lot of the kind of facelessness and lack of personality of like, post-rave big club djing and stuff like that and a lot of the dull repetition of clubs . . . and in montreal and globally, quite a lot of pretty boring, pretty standard house music and darker techno. . . . electroclash picked up a lot of really simple elements that never really lost their appeal to people.10 the assortment of sounds and music associated with this movement away from the experienced boredom of techno party nights and the facelessness of post-rave big club djing, as sontag calls it, initially developed without a conceptual home, as the term electroclash only came into use a full two years after many producers and groups were attempting to articulate music along these lines. dancecult 4(2)32 larry tee is a longtime club promoter, music producer and dj based in new york city and claims a certain paternity in coining the term electroclash, even having the term trademarked in 2001. as brent luvaas writes, tee used electroclash “to describe a diverse set of young performers doing ‘different but related’ things with electronic music” (2006: 171). in 2001 and 2002, tee founded and ran the electroclash festival featuring felix da housecat, peaches, 2 many djs/soulwax, along with many other artists. what is perhaps most interesting about tee’s electroclash festival and early definitions of the genre is that his definition included everything from the dance-y/glam-ish rock sounds of the scissor sisters to the sleazed-up house tendencies of felix da housecat. and, while the return to some idea of the distinct track/song was one of electroclash’s defining features, so too was the prominent way that so many women and gender-bending performers significantly contributed to the genre’s production and distribution practices. the aforementioned alter ego along with peaches—whose album the teaches of peaches (2000) is perhaps the most widely known full-length album of electroclash music—le tigre, ellen allien, chicks on speed, tiga, miss kitten and the hacker, and many others were at the forefront of the emergence of the genre. at the centre of electroclash’s new celebrated sexuality and gender play within electronic dance music is the berlin-based canadian artist peaches (née merril nisker), who has released four full-length albums since 2000: the teaches of peaches (2000), fatherfucker (2003), impeach my bush (2006) and i feel cream (2009). marnina gonick describes peaches as “a gender provocateur” (2009: 139) who, through her music, performances and her use of parody, deploys a “disruptive pedagogy” that “destabilizes fixed notions of sexuality, rendering the body and sex as comical” (2009: 140–2). going further, stéphane girard writes: [the] electroclash movement, contrary to the faceless, sex-less and pre-oedipal approaches to techno in the 1990s, was never afraid of domineering, strongly gendered performers who toyed with the signifiers of gender representation and various popular music-bound generic conventions in overtly explicit ways. examples include peaches, who has been photographed wearing underwear and revealing a stuff black penis and out-of-control pubic hair (2011: 119). key tracks from peaches’ electroclash-oriented material include “fuck the pain away” from the teaches of peaches, and “shake yer dix” from the album fatherfucker. beyond elements of sexuality and trashiness, the former song is driven by synthesizer bass lines and plays with the backbeat conventions that provide the rhythmic moorings of electroclash. nancy bottner, who characterizes peaches as a “sonic cyborg” by drawing attention to her imagery and lyrics, describes the artist’s music as “recorded very roughly, noisy, focused on voice and beat”, and “merging (post)punk attitude with 80s electronic music” (2005: 99). perhaps the most pronounced aesthetic feature of “fuck the pain away”, along with many other early electroclash songs, is the heavy reliance on synthesized, participatory hand-claps and the incorporation of vocals, almost following, or parodying, the classic folk and (cock) rock-song structure of a verse followed by a chorus. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khcmqoqt4ny&feature=related 33madden | cross-dressing to backbeats between 2000 and 2002, peaches’ “fuck the pain away” and miss kittin and the hacker’s “frank sinatra”, from first album (2001), became two of electroclash’s prototypical tracks. the vocals of “fuck the pain away” and “frank sinatra” are marked by an explicit and detached irony exhibited in both the tone of the vocal deliveries and content of the lyrics. this type of ironic vocal posturing is perhaps what connects electroclash most stridently with new wave and other forms of popular music, which, as kronengold tells us, often “parodize in the lyrics” while being “dead serious in the music” (2008: 58). irony also serves as a powerful production method for electroclash artists to explicitly play with gender norms and sexual practices through their lyrics. as david foster wallace writes, “for irony—exploiting gaps between what’s said and what’s meant, between how things try to appear and how they really are—is the time-honored way artists seek to illuminate and explode hypocrisy” (1997: 65), adding, “gifted ironists work best in sound bites” (1997: 67). in the first verse of “fuck the pain away”, peaches opens with: “sucking on my titties like you wanted me/calling me, all the time like blondie/check out my chrissy behind/it’s fine all of the time/like sex on the beaches/what else is in the teaches of peaches? huh? what?”. during an interview with caroline sullivan from the guardian in support of her second studio album fatherfucker (2003), where sullivan refers to peaches as “an equalopportunities vulgarian”, peaches remarked about the album’s title: “motherfucker’s so over. you call everybody a motherfucker—you call your mother a motherfucker. it’s a pretty extreme and intense word. instead of shying away from that, i thought i’d bring the fact that we’re using the word motherfucker in a really mainstream way to the fore” (sullivan 2006). other electroclash artists like chicks on speed and le tigre use irony and gender parody to deliver overtly feminist messages and/or align their music with feminist commitments, whether they refer to themselves as feminists or not. as judith butler writes, “gender parody reveals that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin. to be more precise, it is a production which, in effect—that is, in its effect—postures as an imitation” (1990: 188). chicks on speed’s most well known track from their electroclash-oriented material is the playfully entitled “we don’t play guitars”, the first single from their album 99 cents (2003), which was released on their own record label, chicks on speed records. the track features the lyrics: “we always thought that we were not a rock ‘n’ roll band, but it sure feels like rock n’ roll over here tonight/we don’t play guitars/we don’t play guitars/we don’t play guitars/we’re standing on stage with our microphones, but we don’t play guitars”. peaches makes an appearance halfway into the song and shouts out, “[w]ell you may not play guitar but i play guitar/and i love it”, before performing a highly distorted shredding guitar solo, which the artist mimes or “air guitar”-s in the track’s video while simultaneously floating above and facing the members of chicks on speed, strategically holding an electric gibson flying v guitar between her legs. le tigre, a feminist electronic music and performance art group (rodgers 2010: 245), released feminist sweepstakes in 2001 on the san francisco-based lesbian-feminist independent record label and video art distributor mr. lady, which folded in 2004. as tara rodgers writes, le tigre’s “lyrics engage feminist and queer histories and politics” (2010: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzmwkdtonpm dancecult 4(2)34 245). in “hot topic”, the lead-off single from their self-titled debut album, le tigre (1999), which rodgers notes “proclaims a litany of artists, activists and writers who have inspired them” (2010: 245), the group—whose members include kathleen hanna (formerly of riot grrrl group bikini kill), johanna fateman, and jd samson—calls out to numerous (women) artists, letting them know they are still listening: “carol rama and eleanor antin/yoko ono and carolee schneeman /you’re getting old, that’s what they’ll say, but/don’t give a damn i’m listening anyway”. women often find themselves pulled in two directions at the same time when working in highly masculinized technological fields, such as electronic music production: they are torn between downplaying aspects associated with femininity and pursuing a stereotypically masculine stance of control, or denying a connection with masculinity and taking a stereotypically feminine stance (mccartney 2000a: 317-8). one way to overcome this conflict, as mccartney writes, is to forgo swaying one way or another and pursue a strategy of irony, which “acknowledges contradictions without attempting to resolve them” (2000a: 318). in addition to the ironic stances taken by many of its producers and performers, electroclash signals a rhythmic shift within electronic dance music through the incorporation and circulation of the backbeat. the genre fits within a continuum of practices that are directly connected to the rise of house music in chicago in the mid-1980s (straw 1991) and disco in the early 1970s (lawrence 2003), both of which share the “four-on the-floor” with variations (e.g. tempo, timbre, etc.) as their structuring groove. again, electroclash is marked by a certain hybridity, combining the extended pulsing sections of techno and other dance musics with the song structural elements and reckless energy of various rock musics. as oatmon puts it, electroclash “mimics rock composition and sound quality without using any actual rock instruments” (2009), although numerous bands (e.g. le tigre, chicks on speed, lcd soundsystem) contributed to the early stages of electroclash using traditional rock instruments such as electric guitars and drum sets. as luvaas notes, “indie electropop bands like ladytron, soviet, and the faint were equally if not more responsible for popularizing” the electroclash genre (2006: 171). many electroclash djs and producers typically import a standard rock backbeat with much more aggressive and synthesized drum sounds and textures/timbres within the established conventions of electronic dance music tempi or bpm (beats per minute).11 for instance, tiga and zyntherius’ “sunglasses at night”, which sold over 200 000 copies in europe (primarily in germany and the uk), clocks in at 130 bpm (girard 2011: 110, 116). until the mid-2000s, it was not uncommon to hear hard rock, post-punk and new wave hits mixed into live electroclash dj sets—the cult’s “she sells sanctuary” (1985), joy division’s “love will tear us apart” (1980) and new orders’ “blue monday” (1983) were often featured at clubs and parties around this time. the integration of the backbeat follows a trajectory of changes in electronic dance music revolving around slight rhythmic adjustments, usually very specifically ascribed to a few individuals or particular samples.12 a recent example of this rhythm phenomenon, and one which echoes the developments of reggae and dub, is found in drum ‘n’ bass in the midhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqk4baug7ye http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqk4baug7ye 35madden | cross-dressing to backbeats 1990s, with the “amen break” serving as the core element of this genre and its variations. the amen break, usually shortened to just “amen”, is a sample from a short solo drum break played by gregory c. coleman on the winston’s “amen, brother” (1969), the b-side to the single “color him father”. the amen break was initially used in early hip hop recordings, in part because a slowed down version of it was featured on ultimate breaks and beats (1986), a compilation album of sampled drum grooves put together by breakbeat lenny (né lenny roberts) for its viral potential. as steve goodman puts it: “[what] the riddim album captures is the startling efficiency of breeding whole sonic microcultures out of one core loop” (2008: 161). in the context of drum ‘n’ bass, the amen is sampled, manipulated, or “cut up” and sped up, regularly at tempi exceeding 180 bpm.13 like the amen, the backbeat has its own origin story in popular music, with its roots in gospel music, early rock and roll and the recordings of little richard and chuck berry. john mowitt writes, in percussion: drumming, beating, striking, about how the backbeat emerged out of efforts by the “extraordinarily influential and woefully underrated session drummer earl palmer” to “answer to the accompaniment demands placed on him by a particular way of performing what were basically blues tunes” (2002: 26). as palmer remarks, “the only reason i started playing what they come to call the rock-and-roll beat came from trying to match richard’s right hand. ding-ding-ding-ding! most everything i had done before was a shuffle or slow triplets” (in mowitt 2002: 26). after palmer’s early rhythm experiments with the groove, the backbeat would develop into the standardized rhythmic pattern of numerous popular musics, including rock music. as mowitt emphasizes, “virtually every popular song that actually has a drum part now employs some variation of the backbeat” (2002: 26). the backbeat pattern is generally deployed in the context of a standard drum kit by using the bass drum (or “kick” drum) to mark the first and third beats of a measure and using the snare drum to hit beats two and four. in other words, the snare answers back to the call of the bass drum, which mowitt ascribes to “the african tradition of ‘call-and-response’ drumming patterns” (2002: 26). the hi-hat, or ride cymbal, simultaneously provides the glue, the momentum and the straight eighth-note feeling of the groove by playing either straight quarter or eighth notes, as opposed to the shuffle or slow triplets feel mentioned above by palmer (mowitt 2002: 26). in the context of electroclash, the backbeat is very regularly incorporated in a much more mechanized fashion; most recordings employ drum machines and sequencing technology to program the beats, resulting in perfect and unwavering metronymic time, usually between 120-35 bpm. this groove is played out in the aforementioned “frank sinatra”, although with a common variation—the hi-hats emphasize the offbeat of each measure, importing one of disco’s standard hi-hat patterns and giving the track a much lighter feel. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxzuq57_bym http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pja8nmixda8&feature=fvw dancecult 4(2)36 producers the various backbeats of electroclash emerged out of a production context of change, both in terms of the sociality of studio production and the role of the producer. as emma mayhew posits vis-à-vis popular music, “the producer’s role has remained a male domain”, and at the “top end of the recording industry women are significant by their absence as record producers” (2004: 149). similarly, bottner writes that, in accordance with other areas of popular music production, “electro is dominated by male producers/users and the absence of women is explained through recourse to the all too familiar dichotomies: competence and interest in soft/hardware technology or computer science are mainly ascribed to men, whereas women are understood as engaging with her body” (2005: 102). while i agree with bottner’s sentiment that electronic music production is dominated by men within the broader boundaries and context of electro, electroclash is significantly defined and inhabited by women music producers, performers, label owners and scene actors. in addition to peaches, chicks on speed and le tigre, as discussed above, other artists like ellen allien (née ellen fraatz)14 factor heavily in shaping electroclash on many different levels by taking on both entrepreneurial and artistic roles. in fact, drawing on the careers of the above named artists along with recent scholarship on the subject of diy djs in vienna (reitsamer 2011), it can be persuasively argued that a certain entrepreneurial experience seems to be an essential skill for artists working within the realm of current commercially produced electronic dance music. in the history of popular music, the term producer is suggestive of numerous connotations: from the artistic free agent with a mix of technical recording skills and aesthetic wherewithal, to the “money” person who stamps their name on recordings due to their capital investment and ownership of studio gear, to the above mentioned multi-tasking artists, to name just three. john ryan and michael hughes posit that, in the popular music industry, the prominence and influence of producers has increased since the 1950s, when record companies began outsourcing their production operations to studios outside the traditional structure of the recording industry (2006: 245–6). major record labels made the move towards outsourcing production in an effort to stay competitive with the burgeoning independent labels of the 1950s, many of which were focused on marginalized audiences. in this context of displaced production, or “decentralized and open production systems”, ryan and hughes note that a new role emerged within the industry: “the independent producer” (2006: 245). they write: [freed] from the bureaucracy of the major company, armed with the powerful new recording tool of multitrack recording . . . the independent producer was now ready to assume a status often equal to, and sometimes exceeding, that of recording artists in the production of popular music (ryan and hughes 2006: 245–6). sam philips, who established sun records, george martin, best known for his work with the beatles, chet atkins, who pioneered this role in the realm of commercial country music, and alfred lion of the jazz label blue note are generally considered the key figures 37madden | cross-dressing to backbeats of this production model. their primary roles were to develop a signature sound, develop recording artists and, perhaps most importantly, deliver commercially successful records (ryan and hughes 2006: 246). and, as these four examples make clear, the independent producer emerged as the domain of men, echoing mayhew’s sentiments.15 as noted above, phillips, martin, atkins and lion, along with numerous other record producers, engineers and musicians, worked within a context of analog multitrack recording. this type of recording usually relies on a division of labour that is both highly specialized and hierarchical, wherein recording artists work with song writers, producers and engineers who handle the technical side of recording (e.g. setting up microphones and handling the recording equipment). according to louise meintjes (2003), who examines various studio settings in post-apartheid south africa, decision-making along this chain is very hierarchical, with paid session musicians who often have the least amount of technical recording skills and experience resting at the bottom of the stratified division of labour, and with producers generally at the top. furthermore, meintjes argues that female vocalists who enter the studio “are tangled in a triple disadvantage: their gendered status maps onto their spatial status”, as they usually record vocal tracks from cut off and isolated recording booths, “and onto studio labor differences, where they are artists, not producers” (2003: 102). what is important here is the way meintjes’ elaborations are suggestive of diverging social relations, ones that do not work well with the production processes pursued by electroclash producers like peaches and le tigre, who produce their work outside of this specialized editing chain. additionally, the multitrack recording spaces described above are primarily inhabited and dominated by men. like many of the rap studios that tricia rose documents in black noise, “where technological discourse merges with a culture of male bonding” (1994: 58), music studios controlled by men often work to prevent access and problematize female participation, particularly as engineers and producers. as meintjes puts it, “[the] studio is remote and exclusive. it is closed to outsiders” (2003: 87). in this highly gendered situation, men very often act as gatekeepers and decide who can record, the type of material to be recorded and the specific roles that participants are to play. this partially explains why women have primarily only been able to access studio spaces within the popular music industry as singers and, even more rarely, as instrumentalists since the 1940s (mayhew 2004: 150). with the increased power, speed and availability of home computers, workstations and digital sound reproduction gear and ever dropping prices for this equipment, women like peaches have been able to bypass the standard institutional structures of access within the commercial recording industry by setting up their own studios, or places to record. jonathan sterne suggested that, in 2006, a decent digital home studio could be put together for around $2000usd, including cables and microphones, and a workstation, either a computer or a “standalone all-in-one ‘digital audio workstation’” (2006: 258). this type of studio would cost even less today, particularly with the growing second hand market for electronics where discarded devices can be purchased for far less than their initial market price. to create an electroclash or electronic dance music “studio” , one only needs a dancecult 4(2)38 laptop/computer, a few other outboard recording devices and a room—although one could technically record outdoors. this environment is markedly different from the enclosed and vacuum sealed spaceship-like studio spaces (meintjes 2003: 88), large mixing consoles, tape machines, and effects units that shaped many other forms of popular music. the dropping prices of digital recording technologies not only increases access for women, it provides the context for an initial expansion of aesthetics and practices within electroclash, particularly the lo-fi and distorted beats of peaches’ track, “fuck the pain away”. again, to quote bottner, peaches’ music is recorded “very roughly, noisy, focused on voice and beat” (2005: 99). these grittier timbres and beats challenge established conventions of electronic music production, which is regularly marked by the pursuit of the latest studio technologies and slick/clean sounding productions (see rodgers 2003). it might be useful to think of the studio practices and music of peaches as “semiotic expansionism”, to borrow from straw’s adaptation of peter wollen’s semiotic reductionism in readings and writings: semiotic counter-strategies (1982).16 peaches was able to write and record most of the teaches of peaches using a roland mc-505 (bottner 2005: 102), a small portable device also known as a groove-box that functions as a programmable sixty-four note polyphonic synthesizer and drum machine with twenty-six interchangeable drum kits to use in various combinations. with the mc-505, a producer is able to work with a set of previously recorded sonic materials—in other words, sounds that they did not record themselves such as drum timbres, handclaps or bass sounds, etc.—in combination with vocals or any other instruments that can be accessed. in this way, many electroclash studios operate as remix studios where sounds are rearticulated around certain established aesthetic conventions. these conventions are then solidified and circulated by various modes of distribution, whether at club nights, parties or through peer-to-peer file sharing and streaming. rather than thinking of these artists as using the latest in hi-tech studio equipment, it is important to emphasize that electroclash artists like peaches and le tigre produced much of their electroclash material by making do with whatever instruments they had access to. the aforementioned mc-505 used to make the teaches of peaches was first released in 1998 and was produced by roland until 2002 as the successor to its mc-303. although the mc-505 has an accessible user interface for programming rhythm patterns using a step sequencer, it lacks a sampler, is prone to “lock” or “freeze” during real-time operations, and its lcd screen, which displays the device’s settings, is very small and tends to lose pixels over time. these supposed design flaws prevented it from being widely accepted amongst electronic dance music producers. since the mc-505 was not taken up in the same way as roland’s tr-808 drum machine, which is intimately linked with hip hop production and house music, or its tb-303, known as the “acid machine” for its associations with late 1980s techno and acid house, the mc-505 quickly dropped in value.17 while the device initially came with a price tag exceeding $1200usd, it is now readily available on sites like ebay and craigslist at prices below $300, depending on the condition. interestingly, as a consequence of such a high degree of innovation, turnover, and competition, with devices and formats constantly being “improved” upon, electronic sound recording equipment can 39madden | cross-dressing to backbeats lose monetary value rather quickly, thereby making these devices available to those who could not afford them at the time of their release. perhaps it is useful to imagine theses producers putting together sounds and making tracks using left over and discarded sound reproduction technologies (see sterne 2003). as kathleen hanna of le tigre mentions in conversation with rodgers: “[we’re] really into whatever we can get our hands on at the time, utilizing it to create the sounds we want to make”, noting that the group eventually learned protools, “so we don’t have to rely on an engineer to help us sequence stuff or reorganize stuff at the last minute” (2010: 246). additionally, the portability of their studio instruments allows the group to work in numerous different spaces, in various combinations—in other words, individually or as a group—and at their own pace, as traditional multitrack studio recording is usually structured by expensive hourly rates. as hanna puts it: [the] amazing part about collaboration, especially electronic collaboration, is that we’re a group, but we each really get to thrive individually. . . . there’s something about being in your house or the studio by yourself, learning these things on your own time, coming to your own conclusions, and being able to feel like no one’s watching you and you can make crazy mistakes and erase it (rodgers 2010: 253). le tigre’s johanna fateman adds: “i feel like my best ‘art brain’ sometimes is happening at 3:00 am when i’m alone, eating candy in the middle of the night and working on music” (rodgers 2010: 253). conclusion the transformations to electronic dance music production discussed in this text must also be understood within the broader context of the popular music industry in the 1990s. the artist/entrepreneur electroclash producer crystallized as peer-to-peer file sharing practices proliferated and more traditional, high-end record labels and studios closed their doors, a trend that persists with cello studios (los angeles, ca) and the hit factory (new york city) folding in 2005 (sterne 2006: 258). yet even though many of the displaced and hybrid production practices detailed in this article might seem natural now, in the late 1990s and early 2000s there was an expansion of aesthetics and heterogeneity of production practices opened up by the possibilities of digital music culture and the many women who participated as producers and performers. with the increased affordability and availability of (discarded) sound reproduction technologies, artists such as peaches and le tigre were able to move away from costly multitrack recording and into their own spaces, on their own rhythms. these sorts of performative and collaborative production practices subvert many of the ideological underpinnings of electronic music and “challenge the myth of the genderless composer”, as mccartney writes (2006: 45). through the early 2000s, a distinct articulation formed around electroclash, with multitasking producers and djs attempting to appropriate the chain of creative music production using the backbeat as a shared rhythmic convention. dancecult 4(2)40 it might be tempting to think that the backbeat signified the rhythmic response to the aforementioned initial circulation of vibes and emotions from electronic dance music parties and club nights in the late 1990s and early 2000s. the beat’s inherent push-pull feel between 120–35 bpm combined with the folk/rock song structure and the participatory handclaps which mark so many early electroclash tracks have helped to engender a mixed musical audience, as the backbeat invited (indie) rock, new wave and pop music consumers to edm dance floors. in this way, electroclash operates within electronic dance music’s cyclical encounter with various genres of rock music, dating back to at least disco, followed by the early 1980s electro of afrika bambaata (rietveld 2012) and currently associated with the american producer skrillex (né sonny john moore), who released his debut ep, my name is skrillex, in 2010. the british/sri lankan artist m.i.a. (née mathangi arulpragasam), whose music is similarly focused on voice and beat, also continues to make connections with the sounds of electroclash.18 interestingly, m.i.a. began producing music after being introduced to roland’s mc-505 by peaches while the latter was touring with the british group elastica in 2001 (harrington 2005). in the four years between peaches’ “fuck the pain away” and alter ego’s “rocker”, electroclash transformed from a vocally driven genre to a largely instrumental genre. although peaches remains a prominent and active producer/performer, many other electroclash artists were unable to maintain their careers as electronic dance music producers during this transformative moment. georgina born reminds us, drawing on genre theory, “each art or musical work constructs connections to both prior and future or prospective works” (2005: 23), and, in many ways, “rocker” was electroclash’s defining swan song, incorporating certain foundational elements of the genre while signaling new sounds to come. it marks a subtle yet significant stylistic shift from the early electroclash songs produced by miss kittin and the hacker, peaches, and the many groups and djs that initially shaped the genre. with “rocker”, the heavy backbeat and synthesizer timbres of electroclash remain along with the classic rock-song structure of verse followed by chorus; however, the track is noticeably more rigid, techno heavy and slightly faster—in other words, it was produced with a faster bpm. “rocker” also lacks the handclap adornments that coloured many initial electroclash tracks and is marked by the absence of vocals, which have been replaced by screeching hi-frequency synthesizer lines that play out in the song’s chorus. the stylizations of “rocker” are indicative of a larger trend whereby the mid-2000s electroclash had been shortened to electro, as the clash, or “trash”, had been expelled. electroclash’s celebrated sexuality and trashiness was pushed to the margins and replaced by a pronounced techno austerity, returning to where it came from. acknowledgments i would like to extend many thanks to the following people for their helpful comments and editing suggestions: andra mccartney, brian fauteux, will straw, jonathan sterne, cornelius borck, hillegonda rietveld, bernardo attias, and anna gavanas. i would also like to thank the editors at dancecult. 41madden | cross-dressing to backbeats notes 1 the term “electronic dance music” is employed in this text as an “umbrella term”, to borrow from kembrew mcleod, that denotes “a heterogeneous group of music made with computers and electronic instruments—often for the purpose of dancing” (2001: 60). mcleod employs a “slash”—as in, electronic and/or dance music—to acknowledge that not all musics under this umbrella are “necessarily designed for dancing” (2001: 60). while i will refrain from using this “and/or” marking, i am using the term electronic dance music in a similar way. it is also worth mentioning that electronic dance musics are not just consumed on the dance floor and listeners engage with these musics in many and varied contexts. interestingly, mcleod’s analysis focuses on electronic dance music between 1998 and 1999 and precedes the naming of electroclash. however, the list of more than three hundred genre names compiled by mcleod include various permutations of electro, including “electro”, “electro-acoustic”, “electro-breaks”, and “electro-dub” (mcleod 2001: 60). 2 a discussion of the various uses of the term “producer” will appear at a later point in this article. 3 the tr—“transistor rhythm”—808 was produced by the roland corporation between 1980–83, and was succeed by the tr-909 from 1983–84. roughly 12,000 of the former and 10,000 of the latter were assembled (butler 2006: 64). many of these devices are still in circulation today and, because of their strong associations with numerous forms of electronic music and artists including hip hop, techno, electro and house, they have become increasingly more expensive as they are highly valued “vintage” musical instruments. 4 kay dickinson writes that initial interest in the vocoder from the pop music world “came from (mainly male) musicians with heavy investments in types of futurism”, and mentions its (slightly) later associations with electro artists (2004: 164). 5 mccartney acknowledges that numerous texts do not even attempt to define the term electronic music, choosing instead to present a “historical account that defines by description and inclusion or exclusion” (2000b: 4). 6 for instance, joel chadabe writes: “[electronic] music includes all music made with electronics, whether specifically with computer, synthesizer, or any other special equipment” (1997: x). 7 i am drawing here from ahmed, who argues, “[emotions] are intentional in the sense that they are ‘about’ something: they involve a direction or orientation towards an object. the ‘aboutness’ of emotions means they involve a stance on the world, or a way of apprehending the world” (2004: 7). 8 hillegonda rietveld, email to author, 11 june 2012. 9 mikey muscles, interview with the author (montreal, qc), 11 december 2009. mike tessier (aka mikey muscles) was the head promoter for neon productions (montreal), working onand-off between 2001–2009. neon productions was founded in 1998 and since its inception has booked many of the top international electro artists, along with promoting and creating its own party nights. 10 thomas sontag, interview with the author (montreal, qc), 23 september 2011. sontag (aka thomas von party) is a montreal based dj and the younger brother of tiga sontag, one of the key contributors of electroclash. he became label manager and a&r for tiga’s turbo recordings in 2005 when the label was relaunched. turbo recordings represents some of the dancecult 4(2)42 world’s most popular electro and techno artists, including ivan smagghe and boys noize. 11 mark j. butler (2006) attempts to broadly deal with electronic dance music while reserving its “detailed analysis” for techno (25). butler observes that electronic dance music typically works within a range 120–180 bpm (2006: 8). however, it should be noted that many electronic dance music genres operate outside of this range. for instance, many disco cuts are slower than 120 bpm and genres like drum ‘n’ bass, jungle, gabber, drill and bass, and breakcore all incorporate bpm exceeding 180. electroclash tracks tend to sit at the lower end of this spectrum, from 120–135 bpm. 12 as tim lawrence posits in love saves the day (2003), the emergence of disco, which, along with dub, is perhaps the first electronic dance music (veal 2007), can be traced to the developments of philadelphia-based drummer earl young in the early 1970s. in an attempt to make soul music more danceable, young started playing the bass drum on all four beats of the measure on cuts like “zing went the strings of my heart” (1972)—the first single by his band the trammps (2003: 120). this beat would be called “four-on-the-floor”, the foundation of disco and later in a slightly sped up and more aggressive manifestation, house music. 13 to listen to the amen break, please go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/amen_break. 14 ellen allien resides in berlin. in 1999, she founded the music label bpitch control, currently one of the most prominent electronic music labels in the world. in addition to working as a dj and label boss, allien is one of the most prolific producers of electroclash and techno. 15 virgil moorefield (2005) develops a similarly gendered narrative vis-à-vis the increasingly prominent role of the producer in popular music over the last fifty years. moorefield begins with phil spector, “who was to inscribe the term ‘producer’ firmly and indelibly into the vocabulary of pop record-making” (2005: 9), and moves on to discuss the work of various producers, including brian wilson, george martin, brian eno, bill laswell, quincy jones and trent reznor, among others. 16 will straw, email to the author, 7 april 2010. 17 for a discussion of hip hop and roland’s tr-808, see rose’s black noise: rap music and black culture in contemporary america (1994), chapter 3, “soul sonic forces” in particular. on the tb-303 and acid house, see gilbert and pearson’s “metal machine musics” from discographies: dance music, culture, and the politics of sound (1999). 18 m.i.a. has released three full-length albums since her initial experiments with roland’s mc505: arular (2005), kala (2007) and maya (2010). for a sampling of m.i.a.’s sound, refer to “galang”, from her debut album, arular. references ahmed, sara. 2004. the cultural politics of emotion. new york: routledge. born, georgina. 2005. “on musical mediation: ontology, technology and creativity”. twentieth-century music 2(1): 7–36. bottner, nancy. 2005. “sonic cyborgs? engendering dissonance and resistance in popular music”. annual review of critical psychology 4: feminisms 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new york: back bay books. wollen, peter. 1982. readings and writings: semiotic counter-strategies. brooklyn and london: verso books. http://www.montrealmirror.com/2009/092409/music3.html http://www.montrealmirror.com/2009/092409/music3.html http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?541 http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?541 http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2006/jul/24/electronicmusic.urban http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2006/jul/24/electronicmusic.urban 45madden | cross-dressing to backbeats discography afrika bambaata and the soul sonic force. 1982. “planet rock”. planet rock. tommy boy (12-inch): tb-823. <http://www.discogs.com/ afrika-bambaataa-the-soul-sonic-force-music-by-planet-patrol-planet-rock/release/2047>. alter ego. 2004. “rocker”. rocker. skint records (12-inch): skint 103. <http://www.discogs.com/alter-ego-rocker/release/338153>. ———. 2004. transphormer. klang elektronik (12-inch): klang elektronik 85. <http://www. 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kitty-yo (cd album): ky00033cd. <http://www.discogs.com/peaches-the-teaches-of-peaches/release/50236>. ———. 2003. “shake yer dix”. fatherfucker. xl recordings (cd album): xlcd 171. http://www.discogs.com/afrika-bambaataa-the-soul-sonic-force-music-by-planet-patrol-planet-rock/release/2047 http://www.discogs.com/afrika-bambaataa-the-soul-sonic-force-music-by-planet-patrol-planet-rock/release/2047 http://www.discogs.com/alter-ego-rocker/release/338153 http://www.discogs.com/alter-ego-transphormer/release/291892 http://www.discogs.com/alter-ego-transphormer/release/291892 http://www.discogs.com/chicks-on-speed-99-/release/377693 http://www.discogs.com/cybotron-clear/release/17859 http://www.discogs.com/globe-whiz-kid-play-that-beat-mr-dj/release/43616 http://www.discogs.com/globe-whiz-kid-play-that-beat-mr-dj/release/43616 http://www.discogs.com/joy-division-love-will-tear-us-apart/release/28027 http://www.discogs.com/joy-division-love-will-tear-us-apart/release/28027 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trammps-zing-went-the-strings-of-my-heart/release/2589489>. ultimate breaks & beats. 1986. street beat records (lp comp): sbr 501. <http://www. discogs.com/various-ultimate-breaks-beats/release/176831>. filmography “afrika bambaata & soul sonic force—planet rock”. 2009. youtube, 4:00. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ldcyjb8rhk> (accessed 13 june 2012). “cybotron—clear”. 2008. youtube, 4:47. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgqibfqwctu> (accessed 20 december 2011). “fuck the pain away—peaches”. 2009. youtube, time. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khcmqoqt4ny&feature=related> (accessed 5 december 2011). “kraftwerk—trans europe express (long version)”. 2011. youtube, 14:01. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmguxjspgrq> (accessed 7 december 2011). m.i.a. 2005. “m.i.a.—galang”. youtube, 3:32. <http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=dcl1rpgyxrm> (accessed 27 july 2012). “miss kittin frank sinatra”. 2010. youtube, 3:40. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pja8nmixda8&feature=fvw> (accessed 17 october 2011). schamoni, deborah. 2003. “chicks on speed—we don’t play guitars”. youtube, 3:58. <http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzmwkdtonpm> (accessed 12 june 2012). stubi, corine. 2004. “alter ego—rocker (official video)”. youtube, 2:28. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiwfatvwvga> (accessed 20 october 2012). http://www.discogs.com/peaches-fatherfucker/release/189103 http://www.discogs.com/peaches-impeach-my-bush/release/728316 http://www.discogs.com/peaches-i-feel-cream/release/1735591 http://www.discogs.com/skrillex-my-name-is-skrillex-ep/release/2446784 http://www.discogs.com/skrillex-my-name-is-skrillex-ep/release/2446784 http://www.discogs.com/cult-love/release/440460 http://www.discogs.com/winstons-color-him-father-amen-brother/release/423956 http://www.discogs.com/winstons-color-him-father-amen-brother/release/423956 http://www.discogs.com/tiga-zyntherius-sunglasses-ep/release/18500 http://www.discogs.com/tiga-zyntherius-sunglasses-ep/release/18500 http://www.discogs.com/trammps-zing-went-the-strings-of-my-heart/release/2589489 http://www.discogs.com/trammps-zing-went-the-strings-of-my-heart/release/2589489 http://www.discogs.com/various-ultimate-breaks-beats/release/176831 http://www.discogs.com/various-ultimate-breaks-beats/release/176831 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ldcyjb8rhk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgqibfqwctu http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khcmqoqt4ny&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmguxjspgrq http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcl1rpgyxrm http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcl1rpgyxrm http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pja8nmixda8&feature=fvw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzmwkdtonpm http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzmwkdtonpm http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiwfatvwvga 47madden | cross-dressing to backbeats “the trammps—zing went the strings of my hear”. 2008. youtube, 3:17. <http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=vx0pnqoenbq> (accessed 6 november 2011). “the winstons—amen brother”. 2009. youtube, 2:33. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxzuq57_bym> (accessed 15 june 2012). “tiga & zyntherius—sunglasses at night (2001)”. 2010. youtube, 3:42. <http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=rqk4baug7ye> (accessed 15 june 2012). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx0pnqoenbq http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx0pnqoenbq http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxzuq57_bym http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqk4baug7ye http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqk4baug7ye 5. vitos-typeset the inverted sublimity of the dark psytrance dance floor botond vitos elte university, budapest (hungary) twisted trip party 1, germany, 2007. photo by richard cattien based on my experiences and understanding of hungarian, czech and greek psytrance parties, this text offers a concise view on the aesthetic categories triggered by dark psychedelic dance floors. such dance floors incorporate crowds of varying sizes, influenced by psychedelic drugs, and dancing through the night (and sometimes through the morning) on a music which can be considered the hard core of psytrance. quality darkpsy music involves the organic evolution and breakdown of distorted and interwoven sound layers of high complexity, with an underlying tempo which exceeds 150 bpm, and often collapses down to zero or speeds up to hyperspeed. the main preoccupation of this genre seems to be the continuous transgression of its own perverted boundaries, both musically and semantically: the distortion, reversal, speeding up and destruction of rhythms and layers, the use of both menacing and nonsensical sound patterns, the continuous oscillation between horror and humor creates its characteristically demented atmosphere. when consuming psychedelic drugs such as the popular lsd, the flow of the music captivates the participant, and triggers a series of hallucinations, which traverse beyond and obscure the categories of everyday reality, disengaging the participant into a zone of the unknown. in this manner the dance floor generates an excess of (un)reality, a baudrillardian (1988) simulated medium from which distinct aesthetical sensibilities arise. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(1) 2009, 137-41 issn 1947-5403 ©2009 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.10 from the floor sample tracks by russian darkpsy artist psykovsky: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlsoz6ijndg psykovsky “isshoni taides” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncbwznq-1um psykovsky “p.s.y. love you” to identify this aesthetics i will borrow my key concept from lyotard (1991), who offers a perspective on the aesthetic category of the sublime. in his discussion he evokes the kantian sublime situation, in which an absolutely large object, which can only be thought as an idea of reason, collapses the faculty of representation. the human imagination fails to provide a representation corresponding to this idea, and this employs an indeterminate aesthetic pleasure that mixes pleasure with pain. the failure of expression gives rise to pain, which in turn engenders a double pleasure through two acts: firstly, the imagination aims to harmonize its object with the idea of reason, and secondly, the inadequacy of presentations acts as a negative sign of the immense power of ideas. the absoluteness of the idea is ultimately revealed by negative presentation. the sublime sentiment is called forth in romantic and avant-garde art, which are both preoccupied with the presentation of the unpresentable. however, while the romantic nostalgia tries to find the unpresentable at a great distance, as a lost origin or end, the avant-gardes concentrate on what is the closest, on the very matter of artistic work. lyotard also recalls burke’s thoughts on the negative pleasure of delight. certain objects and sensations are pregnant with the threat of our self-preservation; the sublime confronts us with the terror of an immense spiritual passion which carries the threat of nothing further happening (that is, the extinguishment of the system). the sublime sentiment derives from the relief that despite and within this threatening void, something still happens and occupies a place, a place which is merely “here”. while the dark psytrance dance floor is preoccupied with a similar problematic (the confrontation with the threat of the dissolution of the system), it situates the recipient in a different position, to a place which is not “here”, but “there”. if the sublime situation concerns the confrontation with the infinite ocean which surrounds and threatens our island of existence, then the dance floor will throw the subject in these waves. through this process, not the ability of representation, but that of conceptualization, is abolished; while acts of conceptualization would draw around the subject subsequent islands of interpretation, these islands are repeatedly dissolved by demented (music) waves. the dance floor freezes and expands the very moment of entering the zone of the forbidden/inaccessible (in the following moment, or immediately after crossing the frontier, the prohibition dissolves, and the unknown becomes part of the system). the impossible attempt of the dance floor aims at experiencing the immensity of otherness out “there”, without transferring it “here” (without integrating it into the self, thus dissolving or understanding it). therefore its very goal is being as ambiguous and “spaced out” as possible. psytrance parties are generally oversaturated with unusual, fantastic or bizarre decor and visual art, sometimes the partygoers themselves appear in costumes, and the use of symbols, such as sci-fi motifs or aliens, further dislocates the psychedelic experience of the participants. 138 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlsoz6ijndg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlsoz6ijndg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncbwznq-1um http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncbwznq-1um twisted trip party 2, germany, 2007. photo by richard cattien twisted trip party 3, germany, 2007. photo by richard cattien both the sublime and the darkpsy experience approach the frontier between world and un-world (between the system and its dissolution, the articulated and the unarticulated, finite and infinite); however, their perspectives are inverted. the sublime conceives its un-presentable entity from within the system, and conceptualizes it in the form of an idea of reason. this very idea occupies a place in the structure of the sys vitos • e inverted sublimity of the dark psytrance dance floor 139 tem. the dance floor inverts the sublime situation by attempting to explore the frontier from the outside, from an impossible space where all meaning is rendered inconceivable (including the meaning of the experience). this semantic breakdown is triggered by the positive presentation of a simulated, multidimensional freakshow. the show can be regarded as the inversion of the avant-garde sublime, because its obscure object of desire resides not in the great distances of the romantic thought, but in the very proximity, in the raw material of the dance floor: this hell broth is composed by the conglomeration of the weird musical and visual environment (an interplay of technology and nature), the interactive audience, and the drug. according to one of my informants, on the ideal dance floors the participants, under the influence of psychedelic drugs, are unable to do anything else, than “’dancing’ with twisted, out-of-this-world movements on the completely spaced out music”. the working mechanisms of psychedelics (most commonly lsd, and also other chemicals, the effects of which may vary) assure that each recipient acquires a different (alien) perspective on the performance, the only unifying point being the common unknowing of what exactly is going on. the demented dance floor simulates a modified tower of babel, urging for the dissolution of the platonic ideal, which is not collapsed by the multitude of its incomprehensible languages, but exploits this entropy, and keeps on growing or developing as an organic structure. in contrast with the formless kantian sublime, the inverted sublimity of the dance floor experience arises from the constant rioting, whirling, and – in a grotesque manner – from the reflexive transgression of forms. the party ultimately generates a system which artificially simulates or expresses the lack of rules: this is embedded in the very structure of the dance floor. the entropy of this structure is guaranteed by both the unpredictable nature of the psychedelic trip and the vague environment of the party. the latter is not meant to stabilize the experience in any way, but maximizes the detachment from “this world”. the ideal psychedelic environment transfers the participant to an unknown place, such as an alien planet, through the simulation of the dissolution or the evasion of the system. the aesthetic category disengaged in this process is that of an inverted sublime. an opposition with the sublime was already characteristic to the aesthetics of the grotesque (bakhtin 1968), an aesthetics which has slipped into psytrance as well. unlike the sublime sentiment which arises from the failure of expressing a conceivable entity of infinite proportions, the darkpsy dance floor attempts to express something which is inconceivable or unarticulated in the system. while the sublime relief is triggered by the fact that something happens despite of everything, on the dance floor nothing meaningful happens, or even: everything that is not meaningful happens. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1odpz5zc3w argentinian duo megalopsy performing at psycrowdelica festival, germany, 2009 ••••••• references bakhtin, mikhail. 1968. rabelais and his world. bloomington: indiana university press. baudrillard, jean. 1988. “simulacra and simulation”. in mark poster (ed), selected writings, pp. 166-184. stanford university press, lyotard, jean-francois. 1991. the inhuman. reflections on time. stanford university press. 140 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1odpz5zc3w http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1odpz5zc3w discography psykovsky. 2009. da budet. tantrumm records (cd): tancd007. http://www.discogs.com/psykovsky-da-budet/release/1621040 author biography botond vitos is a cultural anthropology graduate from the elte university, budapest, hungary where he recently completed his ma on the czech psytrance scene. his research interests include edmc studies, the cultural contexts and meanings of drug use and the relationships between music and technology. vitos • e inverted sublimity of the dark psytrance dance floor 141 http://www.discogs.com/psykovsky-da-budet/release/1621040 http://www.discogs.com/psykovsky-da-budet/release/1621040 hooked on an affect: detroit techno and dystopian digital culture dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 2 (1): 24–44 issn 1947-5403 ©2011 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.02 hooked on an affect: detroit techno and dystopian digital culture richard pope ryerson university abstract detroit techno is typically historicized as having grown out of the late 1970s and early 1980s middle-class, consumerist, and aspirational high school social party scene, giving the impression that detroit techno artists created forward-thinking music as a means to acquire subcultural capital and (re)produce their identities. in this essay, this position is nuanced for a more complex understanding of techno’s relation to the quotidian phenomenological encounter with the dystopian setting of detroit. concomitantly, predominant theorizations of affect within the humanities, which emphasize the utopian, hopeful dimensions of affect’s inherent productivity, are supplemented for an understanding of productive energy revolving around affects of dystopia and on a certain hopelessness which scholars, in the years ahead, will increasingly have to negotiate. keywords: techno, detroit, dystopia, affect, aesthetic, desire, subculture richard pope is a postdoctoral fellow at ryerson university. his recent work examines the dystopian horizon of contemporary capitalism and popular culture. he has published previously in camera obscura, space and culture, film-philosophy, and cinema journal (forthcoming). feature article pope | hooked on an affect 25 “without sounding too new-agey or metaphysical, i think that detroit, the actual location of detroit, is the instigator behind everything. —jason huvaere (in sicko 2010: 92) it’s the emptiness in the city that puts the wholeness in the music. it’s like a blind person can smell and touch and sense things that a person with eyes would never notice. and i tend to think a lot of us here in detroit have been blind to what was happening around us. and we sort of took those other senses and enhanced them, and that’s how the music developed. —derrick may (in reynolds 1999: 21) in 1956, the packard auto plant, once proud manufacturer of luxury vehicles, shuttered its doors. in the early to mid-1990s, it was one of the primary venues where second-wave detroit techno djs played to growing crowds. now, with much of it collapsed and in ruins, it is picked at day by day for whatever value its materials may still hold; city officials, long wanting to demolish the albert kahn-designed building, cannot even sort out who owns the 3,500,000 square-foot, thirty-six acre facility (bowman 2010). near the end of requiem for detroit (2010), a julien temple documentary for the bbc, an “urban explorer”—a detroit native—serving as the british director’s guide remarks that, in intersecting detroit’s industrial past and post-industrial present and future, the packard plant is, if not the geographical center of the city, its metaphysical or spiritual heart. with its “low droning heartbeat”, he suggests moreover that richie hawtin’s aka plastikman’s 1996 track “packard” poignantly reproduces the experience of the abandoned plant. for this native, the music, the view, and the city itself cannot be disassociated; instead, a certain affect knots them all together, there where he stands—but a “there” which, in his peripatetic “explorations” and dystopian flânerie, is at once everywhere and nowhere. even as it is the rise and fall of an industrial economy that has marked detroit’s unenviable fate, survival in this dystopian setting will, he intuits, require a technological disposition—or rather, it will require a techno sensibility, means or craft absented motive and systematic order; tekhne without logos, the cyberpunk, survivalist modus operandi (see mccutcheon 2007: 269). with the ongoing implosion of the global economy it has become increasingly evident that detroit’s fate marks the future of all cities and countries in (what has passed from the “developed” to) the undeveloping world. the ostensible economic gains of the oncemuch-lauded “post-industrial” economy, we learn more and more each day, were chimeric, achieved only through self-perpetuating boosterist bubbles and rising debt levels; this oncerising standard of living, designated experts and politicians now chime in near-unison, is never coming back. as the “knowledge economy” is increasingly revealed as a dissimulation dancecult 2(1)26 we are left face to face with the ruins of modernity, literally in the case of detroit. the most tragic aspect of the end, the dreaded “apocalypse” which has thereby already happened, is that we will never be able to point to an event which precipitated this demise, for it is in the nature of this demise to have foreclosed the historical dimension by which we might recognize just such an event. for detroiters, there is, despite the failed attempts to point to the race riots of 1967, no one event which precipitated the demise of the city, but rather an interminably long series of events and, moreover, “structural transformations”, piling one on top of the other like the ruins of the city (see herron 1993). if, as lacan once retorted to his headstrong students in may 1968, structures do walk the streets (in žižek 2004: 131), in detroit the deconstruction or demise of the dominant structures of modernity walks the streets, though this experience is best captured not by the famed parisian stroll but by the drive-by or drive-through—or by riding the people mover which improbably travels, in one direction only, between detroit’s abandoned skyscrapers. whereas the baudelairean flâneur went walking in search of modernity, detroit’s “urban explorers” and residents search for, or are rather confronted by, modernity’s demise. if the ontological oblivion of “late capitalism” (the expression deserves a new lease on life)1 is typically forgotten through praxis, through our going about our everyday lives shuffling between work and family and television, detroit techno, as our native, jason huvaere, and derrick may imply, implicitly—sometimes explicitly—confronts this oblivion. it does so, in part, by simply observing and playing to the real of its environment, but also, and concurrently, by remediating and developing prior imaginings of the future. unsurprisingly, detroit techno’s realization of the ontological oblivion of late capitalism was and is mediated or filtered through prior cultural imaginaries; looking forward, it also looks back to prior imaginings of the future according to a retrofuturist logic. however, detroit is unique in that many of these fictional imaginings of the future are physically etched into and as detroit’s cityscape; built as a utopian vision of the future, in detroit one must face, everyday, the reversibility of utopian capitalist fantasy and partial reality into dystopian capitalist reality. fixated on the real of dystopian affect, detroit techno thereby marks a kind of shadow culture for those who do not turn their radar away from the dystopia of the dehistoricized and desubstantialized present and the “future” which is its necessary result. indeed, in detroit there is a certain slippage between the real as the impossible, structurally excluded from discourse and experience, and the real as something which one “experiences” face-to-face on a daily basis; detroit’s real continually (re)becomes real. as such, detroit techno should remain differentiated from more popular european forms of techno; whereas the former is rooted in the dystopian detroit experience, the latter is often associated with the utopian “eu(ro)phoria” that greeted the fall of the berlin wall in 1989 (sicko 2010: 38). that is to say, according to the retrofuturist, adornian, and badiouan gambit of this essay, one should remain faithful to the artistic “truth-event” of detroit techno while staying cognizant of the ways in which it has potentially been betrayed, in more recent years, by the global growth of celebrity dj culture. a common complaint of detroit techno aficionados, of course, is that they repeatedly propagate myths about the pope | hooked on an affect 27 supposed uniqueness or purity of the form. rather than denounce these gestures as retrograde, however, they should be affirmed to the extent that claims of the music’s authenticity are addressed not towards a purity of presence/essence but on the contrary towards the onceeffective affective realization of the demise of presence, of logos, in an era in which the form was defined by techno djs proliferating heteronyms and confounding interviewers. in what follows, i will argue against two predominant readings of detroit techno. in the first, detroit techno is historicized as having grown out of the high school social parties that sprung up in and around detroit in the late 1970s and early 1980s. i will argue for detroit techno’s break from the consumerist and aspirational nature of this party circuit. in the second—which in some cases follows from the first—many readings of detroit techno delimit a utopian sensibility to its music and philosophy. arguing that this belief is misplaced, i concomitantly supplement predominant theorizations of affect that emphasize the utopian dimensions of affect’s inherent productivity. even when studies and theories of affect note how it is regressively harnessed by the right, they invariably end on a hopeful note that ambiguously outlines the possibility of the left, if not capturing affect for meaningful purposes, learning to live in its productive traces. in an era in which capitalism increasingly relies upon the production and circulation of hopeful affect, this argumentation leaves one at a certain critical impasse. relatedly, this line of argument renders impossible the analysis of detroit techno, whose productive and critical spirit evidently revolves around affects of dystopia and thus on a certain hopelessness. of course, the perennial hopeful turn of criticism is understandable; absent of such “optimism of the will”, many scholars wouldn’t put finger to keyboard. but what if, in the place of advocating an optimistic outlook upon the acknowledgement of the ongoing demise of “metanarratives” and symbolic culture, we remained at the level of, and, if not definitively came to terms with, grappled and tackled, the demise itself—what if, like so many presently undertheorized aspects of our culture, we remained, precariously, looking out at the broken horizon, hearing, like our wandering guide, a certain track? affect turns: from hopeful ethics to the cultural politics of radical pessimism one of the primary arguments of the “affect turn” within the humanities has been that affect is intrinsically productive and only secondarily captured, at a micro level, by individual consciousness and cognition, and, at a macro level, by political and cultural formations. another is that the turn to affect is fundamentally ethical in (re)considering all the subtle, precognitive relations that are so captured and reduced. massumi writes, affect is autonomous to the degree to which it escapes confinement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential for interaction, it is. formed, qualified, situated perceptions and cognitions fulfilling functions of actual connection or blockage are the capture and closure of affect... if there were no escape, no excess or remainder, no fade-out to infinity, the universe would be without potential, pure entropy, death. actually existing, structured things live in and through that which escapes them. their autonomy is the autonomy of affect (1995: 96–7). dancecult 2(1)28 as is well-known, this line of argumentation reaches its apotheosis in michael hardt’s and antonio negri’s empire (2000), in which is posited the existence of a global affective socialist collectivity that is only momentarily captured by circuits of capital. critics have rightfully observed the amenability of such “resistant” affectivities to further capitalist segmentation and intensification (or “endo-colonization” [virilio 1983]), when capitalist power is not simply indifferent to them (thompson 2005). it is not only that capitalism remains as adept as ever at incorporating that which resists it, but, more fundamentally, that the critical turn to affect largely operates according to the demands of what jodi dean has termed contemporary “communicative capitalism”, in which “the proliferation, distribution, acceleration, and intensification of communicative access and opportunity, far from enhancing democratic governance or resistance, results in precisely the opposite, [a] post-political formation” (2005); rather than producing meaning in the interests of the public sphere, communicative capitalism circulates predominantly meaningless, feel-good affect as well as discourses legitimizing this circulation. it is thus insufficient for affect theorists to gesture ambiguously towards a precognitive realm of ethics as the simultaneous arche and telos of their critiques (massumi 1995: 89; thrift 2008: 10, 19, 154, 169–70). i do not want to deny the possibility of an ethics grounded in and as affect; it has doubtless always already been practiced, for instance, in the face-to-face encounter (cf. goffman 1959). what is problematic is the almost marcusean insistence in a substrate realm of affect (e.g. eros) that might, with just the right approach, overcome all the world’s obstacles; at one with the contemporary logic of capital, such a story moreover projects and operates within a horizon of modernist utopian desire—however diluted—and is thus grounded in the sorts of fantasies the affective realm is supposed to deny or undercut. to be sure, the modernist striving for socialist utopia has not been wholly subsumed within contemporary circuits of capital, but when this utopian striving is diffused into an argument which proposes that this utopia is already here (only momentarily unrecognized), this more radical modernist striving collapses into the sort of happy-go-lucky utopia of social and technological connectedness performed via social networks; as such, this argument effectively becomes indiscernible from the logic of contemporary capitalism.2 instead, one should either stridently reassert the modernist striving for socialist utopia, in the logic of the contretemps, or trace the full extent of the dystopian situation. the temptations to be avoided are, on the one hand, to succumb to new age obscurantism and/or the hopeful disposition of hardt and negri’s empire, and, on the other, to articulate an ultimately comforting end point, as in apocalyptic discourses. what theorists of affect moreover ignore with symptomatic unison is the sticky, tricky business of jouissance, which increasingly attaches itself to an array of quotidian practices, getting “between” neighbours and lovers. the matter of jouissance becomes increasingly important to analyze in the shift from a culture revolving around narratives of desire to a culture marked by the blind propulsions and circuits of drive. desire involves the perpetual, failed chasing of its object, whereas the true aim of drive is realized in its repeated failure to reach its goal (žižek 1999: 82). “desire”, slavoj žižek writes, “desperately strives to achieve pope | hooked on an affect 29 jouissance, its ultimate object which forever eludes it; while drive, on the contrary, involves the opposite impossibility—not the impossibility of attaining jouissance, but the impossibility of getting rid of it” (žižek 1999: 293). put again, “desire stands for the economy in which whatever object we get hold of is ‘never it’, the ‘real thing’”; drive “stands for the opposite economy, within which the stain of jouissance always accompanies our acts” (žižek 1999: 291). crucially, the formation of national and worker collectivities was made possible by modern fantasies of utopia enabling a horizon of desire; with the demise of these fantasies and the resulting suffocation of desire, we become atomized from, and hence suspicious of, one another. the other sitting across from us “bugs” us, their jouissance violating our increasingly precarious sense of well-being (as tort lawyers working today know all too well). as the last half-century has demonstrated, the slow demise of modernity’s structures of meaning is more likely to breed hatred than hopeful affect and dispositions. while this does make the appeal to an ethics of affect all the more necessary, such an appeal would be stunted if it did not fully negotiate the dystopian setting in which it is made. as residents of detroit live, everyday, the affective disjunct between a utopian capitalist ideal and a dystopian capitalist reality, it is not surprising that artists of the city would give body to this experience, even or precisely as it undermines the ability of the individual to integrate its experiences as belonging to a self-identified monad. it is only by following this radical pessimism, “grounded” in affects of dystopia, that it might become possible to critically articulate an alternative to capitalism; whereas marxist theory has traditionally sought to demonstrate how the progress of capitalism inexorably leads to its revolutionary counter-logic, the focus now shifts to how capitalism’s regress might lead to something other. no hope animates this disposition, not even the most elemental utopian recognition that we have within contemporary capitalism the resources to enable an earthly utopia, a once-given that has irrevocably waned. to be sure, fleeting feelings of utopian ekstasis do come by those adjusted to living dystopically; they are affects of survivalism, of having survived, and of thereby being in the present moment (for there is no other). something of this takes place in detroit techno, as in rave cultures generally, but it is only in detroit techno that a more thorough apprehension of the dystopian environment takes place.3 in short, there is no simple opposition between dystopian and utopian affects, but there is a difference in how they relate in the different eras: whereas in modernity they were, to the extent possible, split off from one another (utopia was always over the horizon, the object of desire), today utopian affect exists, to the extent that it does, in the moment, in the liberating realization that one’s dystopian ex-sistence “can’t get any worse”.4 rather than trying to revive modernist utopian affect in a backhanded way, we should confront the demise of modernist ideals and the resulting dystopian setting along with the fleeting utopian moments which may arise in and via this setting. detroit’s dystopian, retrofuturist, and retrofitted environment overwhelms one’s senses and abilities of comprehension. it cannot be properly captioned, framed, or cordoned off. it exceeds all attempts to place it, to make it mean once and for all. for one to make any contingent sense whatsoever of a detroit factory returned to nature, an abstracted dancecult 2(1)30 corbusierian vision—the sort of vision that may have initially designed the factory—must be substituted with an embodied, multi-sensory perspective that traces the many competing layers and surfaces of the phenomenon. as perspectival lines do not, here, meet in the distance in order to produce a transcendent, abstracted meaning, one is presented instead with paradoxically profound layered surfaces, which contain within or across themselves several competing senses, or affects. it is, in short, an affective vision, and, with the proper reflexivity, a vision of affect, a sense of the contemporary moment as one in which structures of meaning have given way to the undecidabilities and instabilities of synaesthetic affect. with the power of sight no longer absolute, the other senses, as derrick may suggests in this essay’s epigraph, are increasingly relied upon to help one orient oneself within this increasingly dystopian environment. as vision becomes haptic, one’s ears perk up to hear what’s going on, and down, within a newly-emergent acoustic space. marshall mcluhan (1966) defined our emergent acoustic space as replacing one dominated by the linearity of renaissance vision; in the place of reading information line-by-line in the masterly production of meaning, one must increasingly, and precariously, scan the environment for patterns. techno could be seen as the music of acoustic space inasmuch as it creates repetitive patterns within and between tracks, in which listening, qua scanning, involves recognizing and affectively responding to minute differences. techno ambivalence: utopia/dystopia my conservative reactionary friend the end don’t justify the means you understand you take the butter from the table buy a gun you think the status quo will be there when you’re done you buy the missile buy the laser buy the tank evict the widow put the money in the bank you do it all in the name of economics economics economics well it’s just industrial lies hidden behind your eyes (x2) —cybotron, “industrial lies” detroit techno is widely acknowledged to have had an ambivalent relationship with technology. the sons of unionized african american auto workers, the first wave of detroit techno producers and djs, including juan atkins, derrick may, and kevin saunderson, observed how robotics were gradually replacing humans on the line, but, rather than simply opposing technological development it was ambivalently embraced as the means to survive their situation and orient themselves towards the future. as both commentators and the artists themselves have remarked, this sensibility was informed and influenced by alvin toffler’s future shock and the third wave, early video games, and repeat viewings of early 80s dystopian films like blade runner (ridley scott, 1981) (albiez 2005: 131; dery 2002; mccutcheon 2007: 266; walmsley 1999). certainly detroit, in its being not only pope | hooked on an affect 31 effectively run but designed by the big three auto manufacturers, was well-suited to this quasicyberpunk imaginary. i write “quasi-cyberpunk” since, in the popular understanding, the cyberpunk narrative typically involves the protagonist’s gleeful overcoming of his initially bleak situation through his clever appropriation of technology; it is not evident that detroit techno artists embody this view, nor is it apparent from their music, which, after all, knows no end to its “narrative”, no final “sublation” of the situation it addresses and cathects. jeff mills, an influential detroit techno producer and dj, in an interview discusses a formative childhood experience, where, to get away from the 1967 “race riots” in detroit, his family left for montreal where they took in expo ’67’s utopian visions of the future. the lengthy passage is worth quoting unedited to preserve the manner in which mills jumps back and forth from his experience of detroit to his experience of expo ’67: well for me, maybe one of the most influential things that happened was during the riots in detroit in 67. my parents decided to pack the family up and take the family out of the country because it was too violent in detroit—it primarily happened in our neighborhood in detroit, where all the bombings and all the police and the army came in, and they declared martial law. you could not leave your house. it was the summertime, there was no way you could keep six kids in the house in summertime, it was just impossible. so they decided to make a vacation, and they took all the kids to expo, in montreal, an exhibition on futurism—architecture, technology. and i must have been six or seven at that time. in detroit, you had to keep all the shades down, because there were snipers. if army men thought they saw something in the window that was pointed at him, he had the right to shoot at it. so we had to keep the shades down, in a dark house, in the middle of the summer, we had no air conditioning. there were no supermarkets, they were closed. it was like a warzone. the army was using the school ground for landing helicopters. and they were marching down the middle of our street, tanks were coming down our street, going to the worst part of the riot. we stayed there for a few weeks. it was maybe most impactful because you go from one very bleak, very bad situation, to something very bright, very promising. for a kid, six or seven, it was like disneyland, these big installations, big exhibition halls (in walmsley 1999). it is apparent that, for mills, these two wildly divergent experiences were and remain inextricably related in his mind, and if this episode was, as he says, formative for his development, it would appear to be so in the sense of suspending him between a dystopian sense of the real and a modernist utopian vision of technology. technology, in the foreboding form of tanks rolling down his street, was mills’ enemy, but it was also, as expo ’67 taught him, his means to, if not salvation, survival. to the extent that african american detroit techno artists ambivalently embraced a technological future, links have been drawn to the afrofuturist science fiction premises of dancecult 2(1)32 samuel delany and octavia butler. discussing afrofuturist themes within contemporaneous hip hop, tricia rose suggests, what afrika bambaataa and hip-hoppers like him saw in kraftwerk’s use of the robot was an understanding of themselves as already having been robots. adopting ‘the robot’ reflected a response to an existing condition: namely, that they were labor for capitalism, that they had very little value as people in this society. by taking on the robotic stance, one is ‘playing with the robot’. it’s like wearing body armor that identifies you as an alien: if it’s always on anyway, in some symbolic sense, perhaps you could master the wearing of this guise in order to use it against your interpolation (in dery 1994: 213–14. italics in original). of course, kraftwerk was also a foundational influence on early detroit techno producers. at the end of high tech soul (gary bredow, 2006), a film documentary about detroit techno, may muses that “when our shit was first heard it must have sounded like alien music ... which is why”, continues may as he looks at the camera, “we’re sitting here today”. likewise, on his hugely influential detroit radio show, charles johnson, better known as the electrifying mojo, theatrically and ritualistically began each show giving the impression, with the aid of sci-fi soundtracks and classical music, that he was arriving in his “mothership”. according to an afrofuturist outlook, detroit musicians reclaimed their outsider status to highlight the incongruities and injustices of world as they saw them. in a key essay that appeared in the wire in 1992, mark sinker observed that, the central fact in black science fiction—self-consciously so named or not—is an acknowledgement that apocalypse already happened. . . . black sf writers . . . write about worlds after catastrophic disaster; about the modalities of identity without hope of resolution. to the extent the apocalypse has already occurred, one cannot exist outside it and its resulting dystopia; there can be no purity of critique. in the place of bemoaning the technological advances of corporations and the military-industrial complex, one discerns ways, or tactics, to subvert them from within. although detroit techno has remained fiercely independent since its inception, this would become most explicit with underground resistance (ur), part of the second wave of detroit techno, whose overt militancy addressed the military-industrial complex to the extent the latter preceded and predetermined quotidian experience. while borrowing practices from established record labels, this militancy also led ur and submerge, detroit techno’s foremost record distributor, to vigorously fight a major record label, sony, when it tried to steal and mass market “knights of the jaguar” (see mccutcheon 2007). sinker’s argument should be affirmed against others arguing for the utopian character of detroit techno. in the most comprehensive text on the genre and its progenitors, techno rebels, dan sicko too casually suggests that techno is utopian in its aspiration for a future in which race is no longer an issue (2010: 12). while this suggests a modernist utopian pope | hooked on an affect 33 worldview, it could be observed that race necessarily becomes less visible in postmodern dystopian situations to the extent that in such situations looking past the colour of the other’s skin is less an ideal realized than an elementary requisite for survival. in detroit techno, the overwhelming affect remains that of dystopia; certainly, there are few moments in which a utopian reversal or sublation of the dystopian situation could be said to take place. when utopian affects do circulate, they are related to a survivalist disposition at odds with modernist utopian striving (though they are perhaps associated with a certain melancholia for the demise of the modern project, as in the experience of being moved by tracks like “strings of life” or “knights of the jaguar” surrounded by anonymous others in the prototypical dark of the techno party). utopian affects emerge here only upon recognition of the dystopian moment, when one is at once free and compelled to traverse the inertia of the present and the future onto which it “opens”. these are affects born of survivalism, of surviving the end of the world, of persisting within a worldless world, now. living in the expanded dystopian present and acoustic space of detroit, detroit techno artists respond by producing and playing music which further opens up this present and space to one’s experience (see frith 1996: 157); the result is that the impossible, unintrojectable dystopian real becomes minimally apprehended by an embodied consciousness. sharevari vs. alleys of your mind: breaking with history and subculture, or techno as art and truth-event techno was a musical thing. there wasn’t no culture—no whistles, no es.... —eddie fowlkes (in reynolds 1999: 71–2) there’s a very strong, individualistic mentality here in detroit. you develop it without noticing. i didn’t notice it until i went overseas, where everyone has several real close, dear friends. here it’s like vietnam—i’m not getting close to anybody. —mike banks, co-founder of underground resistance (in sicko 2010: 101) alleys of your mind paranoia right behind alleys of your mind out of sync out of rhyme —cybotron, “alleys of your mind” in addition to being associated with cyberpunk and afrofuturism, a certain historicization of detroit techno is often made with reference to the middle-class “preppy” social gatherings and parties that spread around detroit’s suburbs in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time, like many others, in which detroit youth had no other option than to creatively hold and promote their own parties. in techno rebels, sicko begins by discussing these high school dancecult 2(1)34 social parties in which early techno djs participated. although there is ongoing debate within the techno universe as to whether “sharevari”, by number of names, or “alleys of your mind”, by cybotron, is detroit techno’s first record, sicko discusses “sharevari” first since it came out of—and was oriented to—the social party scene. in contrast to “sharevari’s” lyrics promoting a consumerist paradise of designer sheets, porsches and fine wines, however, “alleys of your mind” involves such a paranoiac turn inward that the disjunct between the two tracks should be more explicitly considered. for, if “sharevari” and the high school party circuit involved scenes of dialectical recognition and consumerist aspiration,5 the worldview manifest in “alleys of your mind” points instead to a city of atomized individuals who could no longer recognize one another, but who could only trace the consequences of this demise (for instance, by following the voices/alleys in their head/minds). it is an entirely different sensibility, mobilizing affect along an alternate path. though the biographical histories of the artists who would become detroit’s well-known techno djs do undeniably overlap the high school party circuit, rather than draw a straight line from one to the other it seems more important, in any historical account of techno, to delimit techno’s break with this circuit. nevertheless, when arguments about detroit techno’s middle-class aspirational “origins” are made, it seems only logical to discuss the subculture in terms of “subcultural capital”. drawing from pierre bourdieu’s analysis of taste cultures in distinction (1984), sarah thornton argues that subcultures distinguish themselves by their particular taste formations, in which esoteric musical knowledge serves as a form of capital that can be used in the production of identity and, in some cases (for example, with producers, djs and promoters), actually translated into economic capital (1995: 11–12). from this perspective, middleclass detroit techno artists are said to have realized their “europhile fantasies”, piqued by kraftwerk and italian fashions, through their subcultural production (reynolds 1999: 14, 23, 114). while this path of analysis is entirely appropriate to the study of the fashionable and europhile social party circuit, it is not clear that it is the right one to follow in the analysis of the origination and initial development of detroit techno. as adorno would note, such historicization risks forcing identity across divergent phenomena, reducing different languages and events to the same currency (exchange-value). indeed, it seems more important to delineate, in our histories, those points at which a gap is introduced into the smooth flow of history, and in which, as consequence, the accumulation of subcultural capital is interrupted, the currency no longer recognized, or, at the very least, devalued. it goes without saying that, failing to do so, we render ourselves unable to discern the emergence of anything new; everything can only be the inevitable result of prior histories, existing links and mutual influences. rendering the scholar (the conduit, in lacan’s terms, of the discourse of the university [see žižek 2006]) infallible—she can never be caught unaware, always able to historicize any and all developments as having x, y and z influences without having to articulate and defend any radical truth-claim—this power is, ultimately, one of dissimulation; lurking below this veneer of false equivalences lies radical difference and negativity (non-identity, to use adorno’s term). pope | hooked on an affect 35 elsewhere, i argued that the commonplace focus of cultural studies on the meaning of the punk subcultural style elided a recognition of punk’s break with meaningful history, as manifest in the scene surrounding the sex pistols in 1976 (pope 2009). the subsequent focus of cultural studies on subcultural markers of identity, i argued, contradicted and finally elided the field’s initial apprehensions of the aggressive meaninglessness of this scene and what this aggressivity indexed: the demise of a sociopolitical order in which a meaningful statement might be addressed, made and finally recognized (thereby indexing the “demise of symbolic efficiency” [žižek 1999: 322]). for instance, in subculture: the meaning of style, a foundational text not only of the study of punk but of cultural studies as such, dick hebdige moves immediately from recognizing the meaninglessness of the punk style to discussing its potential polysemy (1991: 117–9). the future of cultural studies was informed by this gesture, even or especially as it elided the initial recognition; as cultural studies locked down the meaningfulness, the identity, of punk, it locked down its own, remaining haunted by what it originally sought to exclude. techno, i would argue, is even more demanding of a form of analysis that would not read it for the meaning of its style, for its desire. whereas punk, even before it evolved into a subculture and a uniform, involved dialectical scenes of recognition in which participants went to see, to be seen, and to be seen seeing, the techno scene is—however paradoxically— marked by the relative absence of such scenes of recognition. while there is no doubt that techno artists at times congregated around certain key locales, it is also evident that detroit artists have remained largely independent of one another, as banks suggests in the epigraph to this section.6 sicko himself notes that, in contrast to the global rave cultures which spawned from techno, detroit techno was free from the “trappings of subculture”—though he does not consider what this entails for his earlier attempt to place techno wit hin the quasi-subcultural trappings of the high school party circuit (2010: 91). put simply, predominant theories of subculture, rooted in a modernist paradigm, are inappropriate to the analysis of postmodern (or post-postmodern) cultural phenomena. within the modernist framework, youth, who cannot simply voice their frustrations and desires via the outlets operated and controlled by the “parent culture”, are seen to channel their plaints into stylistic markers of identity. for the subculture as for the critic reading the subculture, the youthful rebellion is ultimately a utopian striving which, far from undermining the parent culture, ultimately reaffirms modernity’s ethos and spirit. as such, the subculture is easily historicized, simply placed within a progressive history running parallel to official conservative culture. punk’s radical, insistent negativity, however, breaks with this; its repeated assertion of “no future” renders such analysis impotent. to put it tautologically, to the extent it announces—better: realizes—the end of history, it cannot be easily historicized. and in this regard, techno goes even further in initially accepting the end of history and moving on to consider the dystopian, retrofitted reality which is its consequence; where punk rails against the end of history, techno blips, bleeps and grooves. dancecult 2(1)36 there is no question, of course, that punk did form a recognizable subculture and identity; indeed, it could be argued that the music industry and the mainstream media were desperate to identify the contours of the 1976 punk scene, not only in the interests of repackaging the scene for profit but to sublate and attenuate its radical force of negativity, to turn early punk’s recognition of the social’s demise into merely another youth rebellion that had a rightful place within a larger social order. similarly, as detroit techno is now nearing thirty years of age, markers of its identity have been produced and continue to be circulated, though it nevertheless remains the case that there is no recognizable style for detroit techno fans (whereas one can detect ravers at a glance). moreover, detroit techno remains invisible within american culture, nonexistent for the “parent” culture, while the attention detroit techno received on the other side of the atlantic—first in the uk, but now predominantly in germany—was fortuitous and always subject to something being lost in translation. that detroit techno artists have always expressed puzzlement that their music could be so ignored at home and yet relatively well-received in europe indexes the inapplicability of the subculture model as the primary means by which to analyze the phenomenon. the lines of desire, when not confused and crossed, were and are nonexistent. it might be emphasized that it is common to hear detroit techno artists articulating their differences from the banalities of trance and popular music generally, as though to reproduce and affirm their particular taste culture and identities. however, in appropriating adorno’s aesthetic theory i would suggest that detroit techno is altogether more “serious” and artistic than a genre like trance. adorno’s aesthetic theory, formed through the admixture of the philosophies of kant, hegel and marx, stipulates that genuine art must enjoy formal autonomy from society (kant) while nevertheless remaining socially embedded (marx) and, thus, intellectually important (hegel). in this simultaneous necessity and illusoriness of the artwork’s autonomy, the artwork emerges as the “social antithesis of society” (1997: 9), expressing, through its form, the contradictions of society. this truth content of the artwork is neither unchanging nor simply a human construct. adorno writes, art can be understood only by its laws of movement, not according to any set of invariants. it is defined by its relation to what it is not. the specifically artistic in art must be derived concretely from its other; that alone would fulfill the demands of a materialistic-dialectical aesthetics. art acquires its specificity by separating itself from what it developed out of; its law of movement is its law of form. it exists only in relation to its other; it is the process that transpires with its other. nietzsche’s late insight, honed in opposition to traditional philosophy, that even what has become can be true, is axiomatic for a reoriented aesthetic. the traditional view, which he demolished, is to be turned on its head: truth exists exclusively as that which has become. (1997: 3) nevertheless, for adorno, popular music could not reach the level of art, being standardized in such a way that reception of the work could only focus, momentarily, on the fragment, and never the work as a whole (1941: 19);7 there could be no question, then, of the— pope | hooked on an affect 37 nonexistent—work giving body to the contradictions of society. needless to say, this position stands at some remove from the presentiment of art as a process of becoming; if a group of people delimit a work or body of works as—relative to the commercial mainstream—art, could that not make it so? when aficionados of detroit techno oppose it to popular music, i would suggest that they do so as the means to mark its difference as art; while this does inevitably serve to produce a distinguishable taste culture, the more fundamental dynamic involves a drive to secure the genre as art and as thereby expressing something of the contradictions of contemporary society. to be sure, they do not thereby mark the musical form as high art, but rather as semi-popular art. as simon frith rightfully observes, in rejecting high art and rushing to celebrate the popular (and in particular the reception of the popular), many works of cultural studies have eliminated the possibility of recognizing superior forms of popular culture, the “unpopular popular” that “challenge experience” and draw our attention to the contradictions of social life. such forms, frith continues, should be “taken seriously” on their own terms and not merely insofar as they are consumed by audiences according to a resistant modality (1996: 20).8 detroit techno is one such form. ultimately, the taste culture at work in this instance is not one whose primary logic is of producing and buttressing the self who states that detroit techno is “serious” music, but one in which the fundamental gesture is to produce and protect the music as art which itself expresses the demise of the individual articulating this difference. this is why detroit techno artists once studiously protected their incognitos. the music, and the affect around which it circulates, is—or at least was—meant to “speak” for itself, precisely to the extent that part of what it expressed was the demise of coherent identity in the fading of the modern project. adorno and badiou argue alongside one another: when contemporary artists express the ongoing differentiation of detroit techno from other forms of music, they are, in adorno’s sense, distinguishing the music as art while indexing the ways in which it expresses the truth of the contemporary social condition, while, in badiou’s sense, they are affirming their fidelity to the artistic truth-event of detroit techno while working through its consequences (2005: 12). the music, the lost funk and the post-human technify your mind... don’t let them robotize your behind. —cybotron, “enter” the techno sound, i observe in what follows, is marked by its relative absence of lyrics, its use of retrofitted equipment, its 4/4 beat, its repetitiveness, and its modulated industrial noises such as alarm bells or sirens, all of which combine to produce a post-human, though funky, musical form appropriate to a dystopian environment. for the most part, techno is a lyric-less form. techno’s first record, enter (in a 1990 re-release it was renamed clear) by cybotron, featuring “alleys of your mind”, is the only dancecult 2(1)38 record to have lyrics—and earnest ones at that—track after track. as such, it meaningfully points to the sorts of affects later techno would no longer require language to achieve; indeed, words would become superfluous, techno no longer requiring—a now in any case impotent and delusional, if no less dangerous and manipulable—logos. when later techno tracks do include “lyrics”, it is most often as single words repeated so many times that the signifier is considered as such, devoid of any signified. in this sense, then, techno’s first record was a “vanishing mediator” (žižek 1991), the consequences of which were worked through in all subsequent techno art. throughout its “history” techno warns of our technological future—a future which is felt, according to a dystopian outlook, to be already, irrevocably, “here”—while advocating a diy techno spirit in confrontation with this future. rather than using state-of-the-art technology, which they could not in any case afford, detroit techno producers relied on the often antiquated tools they had available at hand, typically using them in ways the creators did not and could not have imagined. the roland tr-303, tr-808 and tr-909, for instance, were initially developed to faithfully reproduce the sound of bass and drums, failing miserably in this function; they were quickly appropriated by techno producers for their synthetic sounds. furthermore, nearly all techno records were produced by the late ron murphy in his studio, sound enterprises; while most of his techniques remain secreted, he has suggested that the specificity of the detroit sound was mostly the result of antiquated and/or diy, retrofitted equipment: “the sound is a little different because i use a system that nobody else in the world uses... i’m the only one cutting ... so it’s tuned a certain way. also, the amp blew early on so we made our own amp modules, which changed the sound” (in sicko 2010: 111). according to a cyberpunk spirit, murphy at once indexes the importance of the unique, retrofitted equipment in his studio and his particular and subjective manner of cutting records. the most common musical element of techno, of course, is its four-on-the-floor beat, producing a contradictory sense of forward momentum and circularity, which is itself accentuated by the uninterrupted dj set lasting several hours. by contrast, a genre like drum ‘n’ bass produces, on account of its breakbeats, a sense of disjuncture allowing for a more definitive sense of forward progress, making it more amenable to narrative structuration and call-and-response devices. the differences between techno and a genre like trance are more subtle. trance, like techno, employs a 4/4 beat, but unlike techno the typical trance track develops more of a song structure with its escalating melodies and highs and lows, the effect of which is to produce a sense of—utopian, harmonious, transcendent—elation. generally speaking, the techno track remains grounded with its more minute differences (see butler 2006: 227–240). indeed, the ultimate techno invention may be the “locked groove”, created as an aid to techno djs in their live sets. murphy explains, i had been noticing that a lot of [techno] was very repetitive—i couldn’t help but notice! i kept thinking about that. jeff mills came in and said, ‘i got a thing here called ‘the rings of saturn’’. what can we do different? i said, ‘all your stuff is these loops, pope | hooked on an affect 39 right? i wonder if i can loop it on a record in one turn—like a ring’... i played the loop and jeff looked up ’cause he noticed that something was supposed to change. it was perfect. ‘that’s the loop i was telling you about’, i said. he jumped up and said, ‘do you know what this means?!’ (in sicko 2010: 110) what it meant, of course, was the total eclipse of the typical song structure, along with the meaning such narrative structuration implied and guaranteed—there being no better example of the shift towards a culture marked by the propulsions of drive than the locked groove and the discussion surrounding it.9 in adorno’s terms, in revolving around these minute differences the techno listener devotes attention to each fragment (e.g. industrial noises) in its integral relation with the whole of the individual track; in turn, each track “fragment” is perceived in relation to the whole of the dj set. by contrast, the listener of a genre like trance may tune out for the build-up of a track and only tune back in for those moments of transcendent elation. it is doubtless for this reason that trance is, relative to techno, an extremely popular form of electronic dance music, with its fragmented riffs exploding from the confines of rave culture to top 40 radio. detroit techno, as even its detractors index in their denouncements that “it all sounds the same”, is a more demanding form of music; if, for its critics, the music is insufficiently pseudo-individualized—it being, in their analysis, not individualized at all—this very repetition is what allows its proponents an “aha!” moment in which they recognize and reflexively apprehend the nuanced pattern of each track (typically in relation to the dj set), a moment in which the music is thereby imbued with soul and funk. of course, “techno” is often seen as a soulless form. many commentators have described a disjunct between detroit’s musical history and techno, often using one comment by juan atkins to back the claim: berry gordy built the motown sound on the same principles as the conveyor belt system at ford’s... today they use robots and computers to make the cars. i’m probably more interested in ford’s robots than berry gordy’s music. (in cosgrove 1998: 88) given the propensity with which this quote has circulated, atkins has suggested that he has been misinterpreted, implying that techno is in fact inherently soulful and funky. derrick may suggested as much when he famously quipped that techno “is just like detroit, a complete mistake. it’s like george clinton and kraftwerk stuck in an elevator” (in cosgrove 1998: 86). indeed, it is—at least in part—via its very repetition that the music becomes funky and soulful. this soulful/funky element becomes most evident in a variant of detroit techno known as “minimal techno”, part of detroit techno’s second wave. for the uninitiated, minimal techno sounds very repetitive; for its producers, djs and fans, however, this repetitiveness does not preclude the possibility of it being/becoming soulful—just the opposite. robert hood, one of detroit’s more well-known minimal producers, describes minimal techno’s raison d’être: dancecult 2(1)40 i think [daniel bell] and i both realized that something was missing—an element ... in what we both know as techno. it sounded great from a production standpoint, but there was a “jack” element in the [old] structure. people would complain that there’s no funk, no feeling in techno anymore, and the easy escape is to put a vocalist and some piano on top to fill that emotional gap. i thought it was time for a return to the original underground. (in sicko 2010: 140) for hood, typical signifiers of soul get in the way of genuine soul or funk. as he also intimates, minimal techno is not a new form of techno but a return to detroit techno’s roots, another back-to-the-future return from the technical perfection of contemporary production to the “’jack’ element” of detroit techno’s first wave. in creating new, future thinking techno, hood, and bell, another minimal techno producer, thereby affirm their fidelity to the retrofuturist imaginary—and reality—of techno’s funky beginnings. from a production standpoint, this “soul” or “jack” is, in addition to being a function of repetition, to some extent the result of this retrofitted retrofuturism, of working with and imaginatively reusing antiquated and accidental tools to remediate visions of the future. if detroit techno’s soul is partly the result of its repetitiveness and its imperfect recording technologies, it is also a function of what is perhaps the second most common element (next to the 4/4 beat) in techno: the modulated alarm bell, siren or sonar. it might seem perverse to think that one could find soul in the sound of alarms, but a great many techno tracks are marked by some form of repeated, modulated alarm/siren/sonar either taking the form of a melody and/or taking the place of what some would see as the place of the melody. it is as though, while one’s body is dancing (or at least being affected on a “virtual synaesthetic” level [massumi 1995: 96]) on account of the 4/4 beat, one is continually being warned, at the level of the (pseudo-)melody, of the danger that lies ahead. of course, this danger is never (or in any case rarely) specified or articulated as such; indeed, from one angle the warning, of the technological future, is a warning of itself qua techno track, a warning of that to which one is figuratively or literally dancing. and as such, one is always already surviving this dystopian situation; dancing, one is asserting one’s post-human “humanity”, glitching the matrix, in perfect parallel to the techno producer asserting her “humanity” by reproducing techno’s original “jack element” and to the animated dj “jacking” the highs, lows and mids behind the decks. this triangulation, however, does not produce a common humanity (a “whole”) anchored in consensual fantasy and desire; on the contrary, the three elements relate without relating in the circle—and, at times, in the reflexive apprehension of the circle—of drive. while largely overcoming the divide between producers and consumers typical of consumer capitalism, no humanism lurks in this relation. one only becomes or senses oneself as human, as alive, in the very moment one acknowledges one’s co-imbrication with technology; one only becomes human in this act of reflexive apprehension, in this testimony, not unlike the replicant roy batty (rutger hauer) in the penultimate scene of blade runner when he testifies to all the things us “people wouldn’t believe”, teaching the ostensible protagonist, deckard (harrison ford), what it “is” pope | hooked on an affect 41 to be—or continually become—human. the cyborg, of course, is technology as other and the other as technology, becoming human, in this reading, through the act of testimony, testifying to the impossible, the unknowable, the unbelievable—the patterns it has recognized and the alien within (pope 2008). as such, it is no surprise that detroit techno artists so often point to blade runner as a foundational influence; batty jacked the decks. it is a commonplace to suggest that detroit techno was developed as an impure form, incorporating elements from electro, italo disco, and chicago house, as well as that it has become even more so in its hybridizing global collaborations. but techno was not (like “electronica”) a form devised by music industry insiders to sell a pseudo-individualized product to unassuming and distracted masses; it was, and remains, a radically differentiated and largely unpopular form that expresses a wholly different sensibility than its many admitted influences, and one that, moreover, for many continues to express this different sensibility according to an adornian and badiouan logic. according to this logic, the form may, at some point, no longer be considered art; its relation to social contradiction may be diminished with its one-time followers abandoning it. perhaps this has already started to happen to the extent that many of detroit techno’s foremost proponents have left detroit and increasingly embraced celebrity dj culture, but the situation is, for the moment, undecidable, and as such open to ongoing intervention and retrofuturist gestures of “going back to the roots”. conclusion: politicizing the dystopian aesthetic it is sometimes said, of those who find enjoyment or something of their own experience reflected or refracted in detroit, that they are “trauma tourists”, taking pleasure, if not, quite, schadenfreude, in the misfortunes of others. romanticizing or elegizing a dystopian environment, for such critics, involves a diversion of attention from the immediate need to address and redress the city’s socioeconomic injustices. yet detroit, by its nature, is aestheticized. the city was a universally-recognized work of art when it was designed and realized as the modernist future of the western world, and it becomes even more aestheticized as this once utopian vision/realization flips over into its opposite, a realization and a vision of dystopia. it is the ultimate retrofuturist environment, upending our masterful powers of thought and vision and our attempts, in this sublime encounter, to finally sublate or overcome our initial amazement and bewilderment. detroit remains awesome, tremendous, terrifying, voiding the self who sought to understand and overcome. as one moves through detroit, one thus cannot but recall the many science fictional films that provide visions of the dystopian, retrofuturist future; while such remembrance occurs, in part, because many of these films themselves appear to reference detroit, it also marks an attempt to frame and frame-off one’s disjointed experience, to cohesively, and meaningfully, (re-)join/re-member it together. but detroit—like, as it happens, blade runner (see pope 2010)—cannot be meaningfully framed (off ), and, as such, it reminds one of the ontological oblivion of late capitalism while also revealing the subjective mode appropriate to this encounter: techno survivalism. rather than shy away from a consideration of one’s phenomenological encounter dancecult 2(1)42 with the real of detroit, under the pretension that one is thereby committing oneself to more “serious” intellectual labour, then, it should be explicitly negotiated, without guarantees. detroit’s immediate problems do need serious and immediate consideration, but attending to these issues should not detract our eyes and ears from recognizing detroit’s aesthetic, dystopian dimension, and what this dimension indexes for our precarious futures; doing so would mean missing out on detroit’s foremost cultural contribution since motown to the world. it is, in the end, a question of politicizing—without hoping to overcome—aesthetics and this sticky, implacable affect of the dystopian real, this revenant from the past from the future. acknowledgements i am grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their comments. notes 1 although the expression “late capitalism”, popularized by ernest mandel and fredric jameson (1991), has often been criticized given capitalism’s apparent persistence, it returns as the most apt term to describe a situation of capitalism’s paradoxical demise and persistence, its persistent demise and seemingly infinite regress. 2 as i edit a final draft of this essay, for the last two weeks television networks have been endlessly repeating how the uprising/revolution in egypt was preconditioned, even necessitated, by social media. 3 the affective stance of european techno, by contrast, seems to slip between being the result of a felt sense of the premature demise of the modern project and of a sense of modernity’s triumphant realization with the fall of the berlin wall and the reuniting of europe; in such aporetic con-fusion, participants cannot come to a recognition of underlying cultural dynamics. 4 this recognition marks a key scene in fight club (david fincher, 1999), a film that often looks like it takes place in detroit. tyler durden, for instance, appears to live, or squat, in the prototypical detroit “home”. 5 see, for instance, this video of “sharevari’s” debut on “the scene”, a local detroit dance television show, available at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhe-0idpkim> (accessed 20 december 2010). 6 it is worth remembering, in this context, that one defining element of techno parties is the absence of light and the consequent invisibility of one’s “fellow” party-goers; famously, the music institute, the detroit techno club for one short year between 1988 and 1989, had only one strobe light pulsating through the night, while hawtin’s renowned parties at the packard plant took place in near-total darkness. needless to say, dialectical recognition is stunted in such environments: while one can at moments see, and be seen, it becomes more difficult to be consistently seen seeing. it should thus not come as a surprise that the techno scene did not mutate into a recognizable subculture with its clearly-defined markers of identity. 7 to be sure, to employ adorno’s aesthetic theory in the analysis of detroit techno requires rejecting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhe-0idpkim pope | hooked on an affect 43 his dismissal of rhythmic music as expressing a “desire to obey”, a position that appears entirely superfluous to the core of his aesthetic theory. 8 in rehabilitating adorno’s aesthetic theory with regards to popular music, frith argues that there is a utopian element to such forms. in the case of detroit techno, it is a dystopian affect which dominates. 9 in another moment of prescient ingenuity, murphy also created a record that played inside out (sicko 2010: 110). references adorno, theodor. 1941. “on popular music”. in studies in philosophy and social science vol. 9, 17–48. cambridge: cambridge university press. ———. 1997. aesthetic theory. london and new york: continuum press. albiez, sean. 2005. “post-soul futurama: african american cultural politics and early detroit techno”. european journal of american culture 24, no. 2. badiou, alain. 2005. handbook of inaesthetics. stanford: stanford university press. benjamin, walter. 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http://www.autoblog.com/2010/07/10/detroit-still-hunting-for-packard-plant-owner/#comments http://www.johnbr.com/files/communicative_capita21d5bb.doc http://www.johnbr.com/files/communicative_capita21d5bb.doc http://detritus.net/contact/rumori/200211/0319.html http://detritus.net/contact/rumori/200211/0319.html dancecult 2(1)44 herron, jerry. 1993. afterculture: detroit and the humiliation of history. detroit: wayne state university press. jameson, fredric. 1991. postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of capitalism. durham: duke university press. massumi, brian. 1995. “the autonomy of affect”. cultural critique 31 (autumn): 83–109. mccutcheon, mark a. 2007. “techno, frankenstein and copyright”. popular music 26, no. 2: 259–280. mcluhan, marshall. 1966. understanding media: the extensions of man. toronto: mcgraw-hill. negri, antonio, and michael hardt. 2000. empire. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. pope, richard. 2008. “a cyborg’s testimonial: mourning blade runner’s cryptic images”. filmphilosophy 12, no. 2. ———. 2009. “realizing the scene: punk and meaning’s demise”. international journal of žižek studies 3, no. 1. ———. 2010. “affects of the gaze: post-oedipal desire and the traversal of fantasy in blade runner”. camera obscura 25, no. 1: 69–95. reynolds, simon. 1999. generation ecstasy. new york: routledge. sicko, dan. 2010. techno rebels: the renegades of electronic funk, 2nd. ed. detroit: painted turtle. sinker, mark. 1992. “loving the alien—black science fiction”. the wire 96 (february). <http:// www.thewire.co.uk/articles/218/print> (accessed 20 december 2010). thompson, paul. 2005. “foundation and empire: a critique of hardt and negri”. capital & class 86 (summer): 73–98. thornton, sarah. 1995. club cultures: music, media, and subcultural capital. cambridge: polity press. thrift, nigel. 2008. non-representational theory. london and new york: routledge. virilio, paul. 1983. pure war. new york: semiotext(e). walmsley, derek. 2009. “jeff mills interview”, the wire 300 (february). <http://www.thewire. co.uk/articles/2035/> (accessed 20 december 2010). žižek, slavoj. 1991. for they know not what they do. london and new york: verso books. ———. 1992. enjoy your symptom! new york and london: routledge. ———. 1999. the ticklish subject: the absent centre of political ontology. london and new york: verso. ———. 2004. iraq: the borrowed kettle. london: verso. ———. 2006. “jacques lacan’s four discourses”, lacan.com. <http://www.lacan.com/zizfour. htm> (accessed 22 january 2011). filmography bredow, gary. 2006. high tech soul. usa: plexi. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0877337/> scott, ridley. 1982. blade runner. usa: warner bros. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083658/> temple, julien. 2010. requiem for detroit. uk: bbc.<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1572190/> http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/218/print http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/218/print http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/2035/ http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/2035/ http://www.lacan.com/zizfour.htm http://www.lacan.com/zizfour.htm http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0877337/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083658/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1572190/ writing the vibe: arts of representation in electronic dance music culture graham st john griffith university (australia) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.01.11> i saw weird stuff in that place last night. weird, strange, sick, twisted, eerie, godless, evil stuff. and i want in.[1] has the craft of writing ossified in electronic dance music cultural studies? perhaps the craft has never been suitably honed in a field where text takes a back seat to sonic and body arts, where the artifice of music production and the technics of dj performance are championed, and where dance is an art form irreducible to the written word. but if researchers aren’t coached as writers—and thus as performers—then edm culture studies will (still) reek like your footwear after sustained punishment. and while edm culture studies remains a nascent field, debate on the methodology most suited to its domain is integral to its maturation. this impetus has given rise to the current edition of dancecult, with its contributions confirming the complexity of a field that has multidisciplinary inputs, multiple foci and enjoys varied methodological and representational approaches. it also demonstrates that edmc studies needs a research culture in which debates about appropriate methods transpire. in the spirit of this edition, this essay is intended to assist the growth of that endeavour. in particular, i pursue writing as a self-reflexive discipline that is not dismissive of sensory impressions. i invoke the participatory “research artist” whose work, as tamy spry (2001: 709) had it, is a “weave of performative autoethnographic poetry and theoretical prose”. it is recognised that the art forms of edm demand unique representational techniques in the formulation of an artifice not divorced from the field of sensations, where methodological solutions are literally forged on the floor, in the club, at the festival, inside the vibe. finally, i introduce an experimental approach, a sampledelic research adventure if you will, shaped in response to stale heuristics, and adopted as one strategy in my struggle to transpose the experience of psychedelic trance. in the autoethnographic tradition, researchers have grown accustomed to the phenomenal blurring of distinctions between the personal and the social, the self and other, the field and the non-field.[2] in a research field where the experience of dance music—involving the dissolution of boundaries between self and other—remains pivotal, these distinctions are routinely subject to annihilation. and yet researchers hold the responsibility of transposing what happens in the field (there) into academic discourse (here). how can we negotiate this transposition? in the self-reflexive approach, a researcher will adapt practices and techniques of representation in-situ. these techniques are often unlike or modified from those originally carried to the field. this process of revelation and adaptation is grounded in experience, and ways researchers transpose their experience from the field into scholarship offers a typical measure of acceptance (within academia and edm cultural industries) of the results. i do not wish to repeat the now recognised problem of researchers being hygienic and detached without offering solutions to endless abstraction. what do i mean by experience? i take heed from michael jackson (1989), who encouraged the lived experience of the researcher in dialogue with his/her subjects, an “epistemological openness” where none of the senses are to be excluded from ethnographic reportage, as in the strategic use of poetry, personal reflections and other perceptive methods. by experience, i also mean its absence or lack, the acknowledgement of failings, inadequacies, paucity in awareness or comprehension. can a single researcher, or team of researchers, hold sentience over an entire field, with multiple participants and a shifting terrain that is as global as it is local, as if possessing an all-seeing-eye? how might a radical empiricism of the vibe differ from journalism? in most print journalism, commentators are only briefly, if at all, immersed in the scenes about which they commit to write. their exposure to scenes is usually brisk, brushing up against artists and event-goers typically on assignment from editors or producers. they “break stories” on scenes in which they are not experienced and for which they care little. there are exceptions of course, with some reporters taking to scenes like a stylus to a groove, whose commentary shapes the very cultures to which they commit as scribes. while some, like nik cohn, whose fictive 1976 article for new york magazine inspired saturday night fever (see gilbert and pearson 1999: 7–12), effectively misrepresent entire scenes, others have offered genuine accounts of scenes in which they’re participants, fans, collectors, selectors, players, dancers. simon reynolds stands out here. in fact, he went a long way towards seeding edm cultural studies. it is reynolds to whom we‘re indebted, along with altered state author matthew collin (1997), for inspired translations of edm aesthetics and cultural context. we should not underestimate the value of these unwitting midwives, for left to academicians whose prose may be as opaque as it is derivative, the alternative too often lies somewhere between the torturous and the banal. there are clearly traditional methods (e.g. quantitative, musicological) useful to edmc studies, and those adopted should by necessity reflect the research inquiry. yet too often we find projects closed to interdisciplinary perspectives and new possibilities for percipience, a disciplinary myopia untenable in a world where illumination is merely “a few clicks away”. one also wonders about the benefits of short-range projects, such as, for example, research conducted on psytrance participants in western massachusetts by maira (2003). the position at the outset catches my attention. this paper does not include a standard confessional; however, underlying my research is a question about betrayal, or perhaps the risk of betrayal—not because of an anxiety about communicating an “empirical truth” gleaned from “being there” but rather, due to the risk of mis-translating the sensory, embodied experience of electronic music and dance culture into a medium that is unable to convey its rhythms and pleasures, of betraying the textures of the music and dance and the investments in it of the young people i interviewed (maira 2003: 3). there was to be no authoritative statement from inside the vibe, supposedly because this realm of the extraordinary cannot be translated via the “house” styles of cultural studies and related academic disciplines prioritizing the textual, verbal and visual elements of cultural products (desmond 1997: 30). this is not an uncommon problem, as i think many researchers, especially those who’ve dabbled in fields of study for short-range objectives, would agree. but the comments reveal an intellectual fallacy recognised by phenomenologists, among others: that symbolic expression can stand in equivalence to experience. as charles d. laughlin understands, it never can, and it’s a mistake to think that experience, especially non-ordinary or transpersonal states of consciousness that we might associate with transcendent dance states, or listening to music even, can ever be accurately transposed in symbolic media outside of direct experience. and yet, as laughlin writes, “it is a copout to science to take refuge in the claim of ineffability and attempt no description of experience whatsoever” (2012: 30). so while the gulf between lived experience and expression, the somatic and the semiotic, is essentially unbridgeable, researchers are nevertheless obliged, indeed compelled, to find creative rhetorical techniques to transpose their experience. such transposition is reliant upon ethnographic methods where both experience and its artful expression are central preoccupations. edmcs are far from structurally identifiable cultures possessing unique symbol systems—and thus possess their own unique perplexities for ethnographers. laughlin’s insights are nevertheless applicable: broaden the range of fieldwork experience and “become as clever as possible when creating modes of symbolic expression of experience” (2012: 31). since cultural studies emerged at a time when researchers of “youth subcultures” identified “ritual” through a cultural marxist lens, subsequent deficiencies in methodology might be accounted for. but while cultural studies, and perhaps more so sociology, cultural geography and cultural criminology, may be among those disciplines producing researchers ill-equipped to read and write the vibe, in discographies, gilbert and pearson (1999) had already shown how researchers could adequately convey the state of the floor in a discourse heavily inflected with the critical theory of kristeva, derrida and others. in disciplines such as anthropology, music, performance and queer studies, new multimodal methods have emerged that outmode approaches reliant upon critical distance (from the senses), and yet which enable critical engagement. as spry wrote: “coaxing the body from the shadows of academe and consciously integrating it into the process and production of knowledge requires that we view knowledge in the context of the body from which it is generated” (2001: 725). autoethnography, she further stated, “is a felt-text that does not occur without rhetorical and literary discipline, as well as the courage needed to be vulnerable in rendering scholarship . . . to step out from behind the curtain and reveal the individual at the controls of academic-oz” (ibid: 714). against the life-less discourses of academia where theses are defended like impenetrable fortresses, and where context takes a backseat to theory, reynolds gave us something close to a bible, in which whole aesthetics came to life on page after page. one thing was certain. scholars may jostle for recognition as experts, but when i read generation ecstasy i knew no greater authority on how to write about edm culture. and like many readers, i wanted in. generation ecstasy illustrated how the vibe, perplexing and ineffable, could be translated using the artifice of the written word. it provided insight on how the media-ecology of the edm event—in reynolds’ mission, hardcore—was accessible through the craft of immersive and absorbent individuals who mediate the experience with skill, enabling the reader to be literally transported inside the vibe. finally i understood ecstasy as a sonic science. and it became even clearer that the audience was the star: that bloke over there doing fishy-finger dancing was as much a part of the entertainment, the tableau, as the djs or bands. dance-moves spread through the crowd like superfast viruses. i was instantly entrained in a new kind of dancing—tics and spasms, twitches and jerks, the agitation of bodies broken into separate components then re-integrated at the level of the dancefloor as a whole. each sub-individual part (a limb, a hand cocked like a pistol) was a cog in a collective “desiring machine”, interlocking with the sound-system’s bass-throbs and sequencer riffs. unity and self-expression fused in a forcefield of pulsating, undulating euphoria (reynolds 1998: xvi). reynolds was all over it. in studies of edm shaped by a variety of disciplinary perspectives there are comparatively few successful efforts to translate the experience of the vibe, even though fields like anthropology have long undergone subjective turns. expertly conveying the “chemical intimacy” of the dance experience, phil jackson’s inside clubbing (2004) is a commendable effort. while jackson held a surprisingly dismissive attitude to religion and ritual, other ethnographers have recognised the religious character of mediated sensations in edm events. “sensing is what people come for”, writes irene stengs in her analysis of the dutch sensation white parties (2007: 237). articulation of the embodied self and sense-making came of age in edm research in the ethnography of fiona buckland (2002) whose study of “queer world-making” appears to offer as faithful a transposition of the dance floor experience—in her case, new york garage and hinrg clubs—as you’ll find. without formal attention to ritual theory, buckland’s impossible dance offers incisive detail on a rhythmic movement-scape “predicated on a balance of stability and novelty”, making careful observations of the “kinespheres” of dancers who “create their own dramas within the matrix of the soundscape” (2002: 73, 79). by contrast, adopting a direct approach to ritual, in trance formation (sylvan 2005), the author is largely absent in a faithful application of liminal heuristics derived from van gennep’s rite of passage model (1960 [1909]) by way of victor turner’s “liminality”, a processual contrivance inherited by researchers of contemporary cultural performances. ritual studies has a complex background, but efforts to conceptualize, classify and circumscribe “ritual” have routinely robbed life from cultural practice, which is why in the 1970s one of the most renowned ethnographic partnerships (victor and edith turner) became immersed in ritual process. as victor turner wrote, “deciphering ritual forms and discovering what generates symbolic actions may be more germane to our cultural growth than we have supposed. but we have to put ourselves in some way inside religious processes to obtain knowledge of them” (1975: 32). the turner’s elected catholic pilgrimage, a trajectory which would have a strong bearing on “communitas”, a concept which continues to be taken up by researchers without the critical attention it merits. that said, victor turner’s work, both the africanist material and that produced in his later career, bears a stamp of authority. despite the belaboured efforts to forge a theory of “comparative symbology” and a labyrinthine discourse on liminality, it offers unmistakable clarity on the subject matter of ritual, assisted by a vast analog language forged from a lifelong exposure to fiction, poetry and stage theatre—and thus to the quality and colour of lived experience as conveyed in performance arts. but while turner was a remarkable exponent of writing as method, perhaps best illustrated by his early monograph chihamba, the white spirit (turner 1962), he was not engaged in african ritual in the way that scholars of edm are engaged in their studied practice, as dj/producers, as dancers or contributing to the culture in other ways. the study of the ndembu healing ritual ihamba is among the most renowned in anthropological literature, as recounted in the drums of affliction (turner 1968). but edith turner has explained that her late husband had “practically analyzed away the true meaning” (engelke 2008: 291) of ihamba. returning to the ndembu following victor’s death some 30 years after their initial field research, and participating in the ritual herself, she claimed to have perceived a spirit in the form of “a large grey blob about six inches across” exorcised from the patient meru (e. turner 1992). while edith’s immersive approach might well be an extension of the “anthropology of experience” to which victor was contributing at the time of his death (turner and bruner 1986), the anthropology of extraordinary experience characterised by the work collected in young and goulet (1994) and goulet and miller (2007), may set us down nearer to the vibe proper. but having negotiated the long route to the party, we remain in the queue. the “anthropology of experience” was taken up directly by michael jackson, whose work serves as a reminder of the challenges and responsibilities of research. to refer to a public dance event of the kind with which we are familiar as “an event” or “the event” is inherently problematic. as jackson explained in existential anthropology (2005), events can hardly be disentangled from an individual’s experience, as each participant will have their own account of an event, and will have a unique relationship with it. the dance floor, as buckland (2002: 3) astutely observed in new york clubs, “is packed with stories all pulsating with their own experiences and needs”. yet, while experiencing an “event” in singular terms is disingenuous, and while liminality is hardly homogeneous, that to which participants seek to return, or commit, is so often reported using this language: the singularity of the vibe, the sensation of connectedness, of telepathic communication and other paranormal experiences, of states of awe shared with others, notably those who are strangers to one’s self. but unlike traditional anthropologies in which experiments are undertaken to get inside religious realities that belong to those who are culturally other to the ethnographer, in edm, regardless of stated purpose, methods have been sought to understand those who are not so different culturally from one’s self. which begs the questions: who are these people? and who, for that matter, am i? weird initiations my entry into edmc studies has been shaped by formative moments at outdoor events around melbourne—seasonal parties and festivals at which i’ve formed many of my closest relationships. my family. the experience of being altered together in strange, lush and exotic locations gave me motivation to chase the rabbit into the global warren of psychedelic trance. my first doof was during easter 1995, and it was unexpected. i was attending australia’s annual alternative lifestyle festival confest, near moama on the new south wales bank of the murray river. my doctoral anthropology research on confest, an event recurring annually (and then biannually) since 1976, had been underway for a year or so. i’d grown accustomed to the freakish all-night clothing-optional hand-drumming “tribal” dance explosions. but that year, it all went next level. my friends and i were exposed to an anarcho-psychedelic guerilla operation. in serious dreadlocks and wearing fluoro-camo gear, the conspirators of this insurgency unloaded sound equipment and rigged strobe and black lights in the branches of ghost gums. as the sounds were launched from what seemed like a home-made katyusha rocket truck, hundreds of decorated festivalgoers marshaled in a spontaneous flowering of energy, back-dropped by fire dance performances and foregrounded by an undergrowth of rare gesticulations. it was a crude rinky-dink sound system by today’s standards, but that night, my torso spiraled loose from its moorings as my bare feet stepped into a shimmering landscape of which i was at that time unaccustomed. the electronic sounds djed from cds were new to me for the most part, but the most arresting i later learned were releases on labels like dragonfly records, matsuri records and psy-harmonics—much of it labeled goa trance, although not exclusively. but i didn’t know any of that then, just that i appeared to be downloading an iridescent overture thick with the scent of kerosene—soaked on the kevlar wicks of fire staffs twirled by lissome feraliens in sync with the sonic whorls concatenating throughout the forest. this exposure seemed like the perfect segue to confest’s “tribal” scene, a palpably novel lens on a memory that was very old. in my recollections and that of my compatriots, then and since, it felt like we were co-conspirators in an anamnesiatic adventure—we were unforgetting. as the vooor, vooor, vooor, vooor propagated across the billabong and reverberated inside my head, and as i caught smiles, knowing nods and brilliant genuflections from familiar strangers, i knew implicitly that i’d come home. it was a strange homecoming. i vividly recall a jubilation that was not unanimous. that wonderland came over for many like a sinister racket hailing from sauron’s own bowels. what was liberatory for some was basic oppression to others. among the adversaries were yoga disciples, folk singers and raving technophobes kept from sleep throughout the forest—for whom these sounds were received as an abomination, more or less. the dispute manifested in the struggle for the control of the diesel generator powering the rebel hoedown. in the shadows, assailants disabled the genni, causing the power to fail, and the dance floor devolved as a haggard swarm hammered 44-gallon drums with tent pegs. despite resistance, doofs of a rebel and legitimate character became a frequent occurrence at subsequent confests through the 1990s.these intense self-optimizing outlands became contexts for diverse expressions and extreme states of abandonment. breaking into expert commentary, hallucinogen’s (simon posford) classic “demention” (the lone deranger, 1997) broadcasted the zeitgeist: there is an area of the mind which could be called unsane, beyond sanity, and yet not insane. . . . think of a circle with a fine split in it. at one end is insanity, you go around the circle to sanity, and on the other end of the circle close to insanity, but not insanity, is unsanity.[3] as sanity was challenged and decibel meters appeared, by the late 1990s, amplified music was prohibited at confest, which today features a “silent disco”.[4] over this period, i came to understand the vibe as contested terrain, a veritable leitmotif in world edm cultures, psychedelic trance or otherwise. who among raving raconteurs and dance ethnographers have not known an extraordinary encounter inside the dancescape? it’s no great secret that altered, even life re-evaluating, conditions, have given common inspiration to research careers in this field. while generally not undergoing classical rites of initiation, most researchers have undergone an initiation of some kind; a noetic interlude, an anomalous encounter on some enchanted evening, weird experiences through which one is vested with an unprecedented awareness. such may approximate what is commonly identified as “connectedness” (olaveson, 2004), but until research artists remove the cap and let the ink flow on their own felt motivations for getting involved and continuing to be involved in scenes as researchers and writers, it’s all academic. transitional experience is typical to entries to the field, or what may become “the field”. in contrast to traditional passage rites, the transit is not presided over by ritual specialists or cultural authorities, but is undertaken according to the imperatives of the self; according to the individual whose biography, networks, desires and emotional resources assist entrance to optimal states of liminal being and facilitate interpretation of incoming data associated with those states. this self-liminalisation is known in shared contexts, and indeed, contexts of shared intoxication. so while one’s status as insider is not conferred through official channels, one must be accepted nevertheless. for researchers, acceptance could be understood from at least three angles. firstly, there is the affirmation that is available to any participant among one’s immediate friend networks. as event-cultures, edmcs can cultivate deep and lasting affinities, in part because the social contexts encourage individuals to be genuine and honest, to be responsible for others, including those with which one forms intimate relationships. dance cultures, especially those involving long term commitments and seasonal outdoor festal environments in which one lives with others for up to a week at a time—and thus cannot accurately be circumscribed as “nightlife” cultures—are contexts in which one’s perceptions of self-inviolability are challenged through being altered together, and where affective communities revive their energies, harness resources and optimize events so as to revisit these conditions year after year. of course, given the need to be respectful and discrete in their methods of transposition, the responsibilities of researchers as opposed to non-researcher companions is considerable. secondly, there is the potential for acceptance (from loose tolerance to partnerships) among stakeholders within the edm industry, including artist/djs and event management. for instance, in addition to respectful methods of collecting research data, a researcher’s efforts as a music producer or performing dj may consolidate trust and assist accessibility, as would their capacity to promote club and festival culture in scene publications and other media. thirdly, legitimacy can be established within the edm research community, a circumstance figured through the presentation of research data and critical analyses in official fora or in the content of undergraduate curricula and course modules. not insignificantly, various factors such as a researcher’s age, gender, sexual orientation, race/ethnicity and music aesthetic preferences determine acceptance and in/accessibility across these areas. there are signs that the forms of acceptance, admission and legitimacy mentioned are converging—for instance, where researchers present ideas at edm events such as visionary arts festivals which host “speakers nodes” and “lifestyle villages” like the liminal village at portugal’s boom festival or the lifestyle village at australia’s rainbow serpent festival. this speaks to the formation of cultures in which academics play a keen role, as practitioners, brokers, critics, teachers, etc. we can look to hip-hop studies for a precursor development. as stated by murray forman in the introduction to the first edition of that’s the joint!: the hip-hop studies reader (2004: 3), whether journalistic or academic scholarship, writing about hip-hop is “cultural labor” integral to its formation. without embodied knowledge and exposure, most researchers would struggle to gain access to interlocutors requisite to conducting fieldwork of much value. while gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity hold determining influences with regard to accessibility, for many scholars these identifications are intimately tied to the passionate realm of the dance floor and the music that animates or enchants. these passions and those expressions are found in careers committed to dance worldwide, where the passion of producers of music and events derives from original highs, transgressive adventures, transfigured consciousness known within parties and among the communities forming in their wake. spontaneous, sensational and transformative experiences give life to a vast network of blogs, electronic fora and social networking pages. and many researchers are keepers of blogs that may be part fan-sites, part production hubs (if the researchers are also music producers for instance), and a platform for cultural commentary facilitating the cultivation of writing skills. for instance, my occasional blog,[5] has sometimes functioned like a field diary where the “notes”, once posted, are always live. this interactive platform has been an indispensable means for generating feedback from interlocutors, enabling the updating and refinement of narratives subsequently tuned for publication in books and other literary venues. this practice has been adopted, often unintentionally, by other researchers uploading their thoughts to the blogosphere. edm researchers recognize that in order to successfully mediate the vibe, one has to be there. we’ve travelled a long way from the work of sarah thornton, who in club cultures stated that she was “an outsider to the cultures in which i conducted research”, and who had “intents and purposes alien to the rest of the crowd” (1996: 2). the finest accounts are insider’s stories which in the case of “house music 101” (apollo n.d.), has been available on the net for well over a decade, and is among the most moving of narratives, all the more given the author’s proximity to his subject, and which is unrestricted in relating the pleasures and the pain in the evolution of house music club culture. while the pleasurable aspects of edmc have moved into research vogue by 2012, given the nature of state-sponsored research, much writing is guarded when it comes to psychoactivating compounds—for instance, psychedelics and other compounds subject to prohibition and control. most students writing about psychedelic dance culture, for instance, are boxed in and stifled by their obligation to follow “human ethics” protocols possessing debatable applicability to their research projects. the standard procedure is that students must colour within the lines such that innovation is minimised and graduate students, as a matter of survival, simply trot out their deadlined dissertations within the guidelines. given the gradual lifting of the 40–45 year moratorium on official research into the effects of psychedelic compounds, effectively led by rick doblin of maps—multidisciplinary association for psychedelic studies—(shaw 2008; sessa 2012), the coming years will be important, as relevant research groups, forums and conferences evolve worldwide. when i observe, for instance, the paucity of non-epidemiological and prevention oriented research on psychedelic edm culture in countries like israel, where psytrance became a popular music, there is a long road ahead (although see schmidt 2012). significant progress has been made in the face of an institutionalised taboo, for published research over the past fifteen years or more has added to our knowledge of edm cultures.[6] phil jackson’s (2004) account of underground clubs in the uk impresses since the researcher did not baulk at his own experience with a variety of drugs integral to what he regarded as the reconfiguration of the habitus performed by regular participation in dance clubs. but most ethnographic research on drugs has focused on usage in socially marginal and lower socio-economic environments—research dominated by epidemiological and pathology concerns. research into edmcs requires altered methodologies suited to its compounds, populations and locales. demonstrating in their comprehending drug use how the ethnography of drug use “produces both new areas of knowledge and new areas of inquiry”, bryan and singer’s (2010: 2) approach has far reaching implications, for it suggests that drug ethnography has a transformative effect on method as well as the understanding of drug use. that said, it’s rather pointed that their book pays little attention to “dance drugs”. while the latter is an evolving field of research that is beyond the scope of this commentary to assess, it is pertinent to state that in efforts to overcome the limitations of specific methods—i.e. quantitative, epidemiological, phenomenological—and to become sensitive to the practices of risk and pleasure within the consumer settings of edm events, researchers have begun to seek a distribution of cross-methodological approaches to make sense of their fields of study (e.g. hunt, moloney and evans 2010). as a global cultural phenomenon, edm is internally diverse, with a multitude of scenes inflected with class, race, gender, sexual and age variables, impacting the character of experimentation with diverse compounds the adoption of which has shaped music and culture in ways that are only beginning to be understood. screened on the uk’s channel 4, the 2012 documentary idris elba's how clubbing changed the world demonstrated that mdma stands out in neon across all of these variables. ecstasy was rated by those ostensibly surveyed as # 1 among twenty “defining moments of the greatest cultural phenomenon of our generation”. although expansive medical scientific studies abound, research on the experience and socio-cultural contexts of ecstasy-using populations remains disproportionate to its recognised status as defining.[7] focused investigations on the use of psychedelic compounds in edm communities are even thinner on the ground, although for rank disparagement in a “contact zone” see saldanha (2007). generally, we’ve needed to travel outside the halls of academia to largely unconventional formats like the liminal village at portugal’s boom festival, the entheon village at burning man, or australia’s entheogenesis australis, or in the activities of frankfurt’s alice-connecta project and other organisations who follow sasha shulgin’s wise council to “be informed, then choose” (1991: xiv). it is in these locales that we find appropriate fora for the discussion of themes crucial to event-goers, like cognitive liberty, harm reduction, entheogens, spirituality and “dance drugs”. but what are “dance drugs”? many researchers of edmcs have discovered music scenes and their events host to an assemblage of sensory technologies. these assemblages are never simply “chemical”, nor cultures commensurable to the psychoactive compounds (or “substances”) that circulate within them. in these environments, technics facilitating dance, or trance dance, such as sound design, amplification equipment and lighting, as well as dj techniques, are designed to enhance the sensory experience of participants in ways not dissimilar to “dance drugs”. research on the cross-media ecology of edm events is in its infancy, and finding a route past the “bouncers”—including institutional bouncers—is tricky. the solution, i suggest, will involve ethnographic intimacy in creative approaches that remain open-ended, such that models of analysis effectively derive from the field itself. while this may seem unconventional, and the results unexpected, there is nothing unconventional about cultivating method and theory in-situ. there are precedents. while newcombe (2008) expressed the merits of a “psychonautic” model in which the researcher observes his/her own subjective experience with psychoactive compounds, others (demant, signe and kirstine 2010) have suggested a “socionautic” approach which recognizes the social setting of edm contexts and incorporates ethnographically informed interviewing based on experiences shared by the researcher and the researched, including that which is informed by psychonautics. shared experience is crucial here, but what i would like to add to these immersive approaches is a required intimacy with cross-media practice; one which recognizes that assemblages of sensory technologies and popular cultural resources are programmed, synthesised and remixed to affect altered states of consciousness within the optimised design frameworks of edm events. a radical empiricism of the vibe therefore involves an intimate understanding of the effects of media assemblages, their sources of simulation and how they are experienced in situ. this perspective informs the remainder of this commentary. to rejoin my earlier discussion, the following is part of an effort to textualise the vibe, a subject to which i’ll contribute through an exploration of the differentially liminalised media-ecology of the psychedelic dance floor. the media ecology of the psychedelic dance floor it’s like you come on this planet with a crayon box. now you may get the 8 pack, you may get the 16 pack, but it’s all in what you do with the crayons—the colours—that you’re given. and don’t worry about drawing within the lines or colouring outside the lines. i say colour outside the lines, you know what i mean. colour right off the page. don’t box me in. we are in motion to the ocean. we are not landlocked, i’ll tell you that![8] laughing buddha & pogo’s “dragon wings” (pogo—wingmakers, 2004). waking life’s boat car guy is a popular resource plundered by producers within psychedelic trance and other styles. i distinctly recall his cameo in what i later learned was laughing buddha & pogo’s “dragon wings”, a track i first encountered over new year’s eve 2002/03 at exodus cybertribal gathering, bald rock bush retreat, nsw, australia (released on pogo—wingmakers, 2004). don’t box me in echoed over a well-stomped dance ground as wave upon wave of jubilant techno-ferals threw down under a new moon. leading with the exclamation, “you’ve all been exposed to a psychotropic compound”, the composition’s producers adopted a common technique by which hardware and software samplers are used to mediate advanced states of liminality. this is no place to embark upon a complete analysis, but this edm tradition draws inheritance from an esoteric cut-up heritage which has included dadaists, surrealists and discordians, as well as jamaican dub, hip-hop, break beat scientists and house and techno djs who have broken down, re-versioned and synthesised existing works to create new form. in electronica with a distinctively progressive accent inherited from psychedelic rock, the remixological synthesis is inflected with occultic revelations and romantic sentiments, and is intended to augment wholeness, often by way of charming kōans and reconfigured kernels of illumination. as sound alchemists in league with a host of artists right down to the dance floor habitués themselves, producers are sampledelic emissaries of altered states, mystical conditions and expressive individuation (see st john, forthcoming 2013a). as part of their stock-in-trade, producers adapt vocal material to encapsulate transcendent conditions such as those anticipated at convulsive sites of performance like bald rock. while such techniques are but one element of this transportative assemblage, what i call nanomedia consists of fragments sampled from various sources—e.g. cinema, tv, documentary film scripts, radio broadcasts, podcasts, etc.—and programmed into the music itself. fleeting, heavily edited sound-bytes, entire film scripts condensed into a few carefully chosen lines on eight minute tracks, and conveyed to habitués in those principal locales of reception: the dance floors of clubs, parties and festivals.[9] typically shorter than the clip from waking life, these fragments are programmed in productions like epigraphs, or dropped like audio-bombs detonating at the breakdowns and sometimes reignited throughout. scripted syntax from science fiction cinema, political speeches, psychonautical insights and vocal material from countless unknown sources are appropriated, détournéd and repurposed by producer/djs to amplify liminal conditions familiar and desired. like opening stanzas in poetry, captivating epigrams, or unexpected punch lines, these carefully selected fragments affect the vibe on dance floors across clubs, parties and festivals worldwide. enabling dialogue with non-ordinary states of consciousness, they hold the uncanny familiarity of an inner-voice. “as your attorney i advise you to take a hit out of the little brown bottle in my shaving kit. you won’t need much, just a tiny taste”. as the pace builds to a consistent thud and effects are used with an impact not unlike that of a slow tightening head clamp, a sonic billboard lights up: “that stuff makes pure mescaline seem like ginger beer, man”. the track by hungarian para halu (adam hohmann) is “adrenochrome” (from daksinamurti, shanti jatra ii: shamans and healers, 2012), named after a questionably psychoactive compound the use of which was mythologised in the fiction of h. s. thompson. but while some texts, such as the familiar voice of dr gonzo from fear and loathing in las vegas (gilliam, 1998) rewoven here by para halu are exploited to connote mythically transgressive states, others are deployed to invoke quests associated with compounds and decoctions revered as “entheogens” that ostensibly awaken the divine within. visionary artist, alex grey, for example, recalls “a kind of taunting voice in the back of my mind that was saying to me, ‘get in touch with the ayahuasca’”. here, on serbian act sideform’s progressive “santo diame” (santo diame, 2011), audio graffiti effectively promotes the mystical experience commonly associated with the amazonian brew ayahuasca. switching floors and venues, grey’s voice appears again and again. amid exotic wildlife and shamans’ song backed by a slow burning arrangement care of merkaba, he whispers in the ear of the entranced: “the plants are talking to us, we need to listen” (“hooked on jungle”, awaken, 2010). as reynolds illustrated with mdma, dance floors are testing grounds for psychoactive compounds, sensory technologies infusing digital soundscapes and visionary mindscapes. with a powerful impact on sensory perception and enhancing creativity, lsd deserves deep, intuitive and subtle cultural analysis. the potency of lsd, and its overt influence on style, music and aesthetics is in notorious contrast to its invisibility. while psytrance “conceptechnics”, to use eshun’s (1998: 00[-003]) phrase, are literally inked in psychedelics, the references are often coded, using triggers of varying subtlety and familiarity. at exodus in 2003, splashed with water descending from the stars like liquid mercury, absorbing the bass at a cellular level, joined by partners in the sublime, i was floored by the sanguine news: “welcome to you, the lucky finder of this golden ticket. . . . oompa loompa, oompa loompa, oompa loompa, doopity-doo”.[10] by contrast with colourand odour-free compounds, if you could smell the music at a host of open-air events in australia and elsewhere, it has become infused with the pungent aromas of consciousness altering compounds, noticeably dmt—dimethyltryptamine, a crucial ingredient in ayahuasca—often by way of blends like changa, which contains herbs infused with dmt containing alkaloids from various plant species. the effects of smoking dmt have been integral to psychedelic trance, as conveyed on the debut of popular ethnodelic act shpongle. “vapour rumours” (are you shpongled?, 1998) had broadcast the news: “it’s three o’clock on what may well be the most important afternoon of the history of this world. humanity’s first contact with an extraterrestrial species”. and later, having scrambled to check the condition your condition is in: “we’re receiving the transmission. . . . we’re seeing some sort of vapour. i don’t know, some sort of gas or something. . . . wait, something’s happening”. ten years later, pressed into psychedelic trance productions like a sonic imprimatur, vapourised at a high temperature and inhaled, dmt had become more than a rumour. with commentators endorsing “heavy doses of dimethyltryptamine” transporting users into “another fucking dimension”, as comedian joe rogan exhorted on quantize’s “dymethyltryptamine” (sic) (dj osho, borderline, 2009), the floodgates were opening. more recently, in a standard progressive arrangement, hypnoise programs a digital storyboard for the phenomenon: “. . . and then i noticed there is this woman off to my right with a real long nose, green skin. she was turning this dial and i realised she was turning the volume of lights up and down on the city in the distance. and as soon as i looked at her she noticed i was watching her and she said ‘what else do you want?’ i said, ‘what else do you have?’”[11] complementary to the remixing practices of producer/djs, and the sampling of psychoactive compounds among habitués, vocal samples are repurposed from their original media and intent to service different narratives. and they are typically received in a sensationally altered way than audiences in a cinema or seated before a tv screen. with re-mediated fragments from popular cultural and other sources programmed into the sound and media ecology of the dance floor, habitués embody, perform and respond to these remixed narratives in unique ways. while film and television have been recognised as popular media through which religious sensibilities are expressed and received (e.g. martin and ostwalt 1995; lyden 2003), how edm performs this function through the iteration and recomposition of media content (such as film scripts, or song lyrics) is little understood. a formative approach is offered by buckland observing the impact of lyrical samples—especially that of female african-american singers—in queer performance in house clubs in new york where this content “could prompt dramatic or generally representational gestures, facial expressions, or body attitudes from participants” (2002: 74). it is recognised that, performed in garage and hi-nrg clubs where “the girl gets to sing her song”, and where the range of movement is wider, the appropriated samples effectively enable personal and communal meaning. by contrast, within the more restricted confines of hard-house where these same voices are often cut-up and sampled in shorter bursts, “the samples were repeated to such an excess that the meaning became abstract, and the vocal primarily became another element of rhythm rather than the discursive or narrative performance of a subject with whom dancers forged an identification” (2002: 76). complex, interactive, polysemous and highly idiosyncratic contexts pose a challenge for researchers, not least because music aesthetics are diverse, shift rapidly and participants enter spaces with varying intent. the voices accumulate, nevertheless, channeled by music and scene producers complementing other sonic and visual media building to affect a blizzard of sensory impressions. as illustrated by shpongle, among countless others, common to the material sampled in goa/psytrance are extraterrestrial space travel narratives edited to mediate transpersonal experiences. cutting it up on the floor, half out of their minds, the receptive are offered garbled exegeses on momentous thresholds of ascension with which they may be distinctly familiar. carving obtuse shapes into the night, they’re audio flyer-dropped with imperfect maps charting uncertain and yet potentially transformative outcomes for the self.“the hour for which people have been waiting for centuries. . . . man is stepping into the unknown world with caution”.[12] enthusiasts have long grown familiar with redeployed scripts from space programs, science fiction cinema and other narratives, whether the voice of carl sagan (“the exploration of the cosmos is a voyage off self-discovery”)[13] or the enquiry from heywood floyd (“what’s going to happen?”) to which space avatar dave bowman responds (“something wonderful”).[14] reading between the lines, mediations evoking the journey into outer-space insinuate the inner journey of self-discovery. and in the cosmic liminality of space, contact with the alien other appears to allegorize the becoming of one’s divine self, consistent with progressive, transpersonal and evolutionary psycho-spiritual discourses. producers typically filter a litany of material relating to ancient astronauts, alien abductions, ufo visitations and transmissions that effectively blur the boundaries between self and other, consciousness and unconsciousness (see st john 2013b, forthcoming). while this artifice of self-discovery effectively translates the narratives of science fiction cinema and tv (see cowan 2010) onto the dance floor, the difference is that, in the edm event, psy or otherwise, transcendent otherness is a multisensorial design imperative. sound, video, décor, black-light and visionary art installations are configured such that events—especially those in the psychedelic continuum—appear like off-world contact zones, landing craft and motherships in which participants become abducted from their routine selfhood, in the company of others—fellow contactees—who are strangers (alien) to one’s self. this is complex terrain, of which vocal sampling is one aspect. many tracks and entire artist albums do not possess any vocal samples, many djs will not select tracks with vocal samples, and, perhaps due to textual polysemy, muted narrative or misrecognition, there is no guarantee that anyone will receive the material in ways intended by producers. popular cultural artifacts, as george lipsitz (2001: 13) argued, have no fixed meanings. consumers of popular culture “move in and out of subject positions in a way that allows the same message to have widely varying meanings at the point of reception”. each participant is exposed to the media-ecology of a dance floor carrying a unique set of knowledge, intentions and expectations. there is a veritable pharmacopeia of psychoactives to which participants are exposed, and not only is it the case that reactions vary in accordance with pharmacology, the same compound at the same dose can have dramatically different effects on users given standard variables of “set and setting”. and this is to say nothing of polydrug repertoires and abuse. and yet producers of “progressive”, “dark”, “psybient” and other psychedelic electronic styles, continue to poach lines from a variety of sources to evoke self-potentiality. in a not uncommon strategy, through remediated material from science fiction and horror cinema, spiritual teachers and altered statesmen, enthusiasts are offered guidance to follow their inner voice, to find the keys to unlock the mysteries within, and to achieve their potential. the persistent message is one of self-divinity, and more specifically what has been referred to as “entheogenic esotericism” (hanegraaff 2013), often with allusion to the gnostic effects of ingesting ayahuasca, dmt or hallucinogenic mushrooms, posing a challenge, for example, to christian exegesis on original sin. thus, israeli duo streamers project terence mckenna on “power and light” (power and light, 2012): “we have no idea what it would mean in our own lives if we could throw off the notion of ourselves as fallen beings. we are not fallen beings. when you take into your life the gnosis of the light-filled vegetable . . . the first thing that comes to you is: you are a divine being. you matter. you count. you come from realms of unimaginable power and light and you will return to those realms”. while such narratives reveal decidedly progressive and gnostic aptitudes, other tropes reverberate across these interstices that resemble carnivals as much as new age festivals. while many events host workshop areas with the practitioners of a range of disciplines of the mind and body promoting their styles, and while “chill” zones are popular spaces of gentle repose where music is curated to calm and relax, psychedelic electronic event culture is infused with the subversive, chaotic and liberatory mood of the carnival, amplified, with the assistance of samples from popular film detonated inside the mutant theatre of the dance floor. before breaking into a driving rattle, the prologue on canadian producer monkey machine’s “horned goddess” (neurotransmitter, 2011) projects the croaking of electronic frogs within a thick forest-scented atmosphere. and then: [janine melnitz]: i bet you like to read a lot too. [dr. egon spengler]: print is dead. [melnitz]: oh, that’s very fascinating to me. i read a lot myself. some people think i’m too intellectual, but i think it’s a fabulous way to spend your spare time. i also play racquetball. do you have any hobbies? [spengler]: i collect spores, molds and fungus. plundered from ghostbusters (reitman, 1984), the lines are syntactic audio decor strung up in the psychedelic carnivalesque, the parameters of which amplify and distort the “grotesque realism” mikhail bakhtin (1968) observed in popular carnival and literature. in bakhtin’s carnivalesque, that which is “low” (e.g. lower body strata) is exalted, and the high inverted and derided—a perennial source of amity. in the “second life of the people”, disorder, freakiness, the anomalous, hold sovereignty, a rollicking circumstance fuelled by mind-alterants such as the psychoactive compounds and research chemicals circulating within edm event cultures, like thc, 2c-i or methoxetamine. in the psychedelic carnivalesque, the excessive “violation of natural forms and proportions by exaggeration and hyperbolism” (vitos 2010: 166) is facilitated in experiments with psychoactives. dogmatism, rational control, propriety, the finished and the fixed are challenged through the effects of ingesting a variety of compounds and plants, the iconography of which, like that of psilocybin-containing (i.e. hallucinogenic) mushrooms—intonated in the repurposing of spengler’s statement—pervades event culture. redeployed media received by interactive audiences serve to make a mockery of sanity, subservience and inflexibility, and at the same time evoke, sometimes reverentially, other times stridently, the tools by which these conditions are subverted. when dance floor habitués are alerted to the realisation that “my mind is going, i can feel it”—the familiar voice of hal 9000 from 2001: a space odyssey—the open-ended and desirable consequences of surrendering control is burlesqued.[15] cultural datafacts may then be purposed to gnostic clarity, while at other times, on other dance floors, and under the direction of other djs, or perhaps within the same track, they may be purposed to subvert, confuse, mystify. the pursuit of a carnivalesque aesthetic can be observed across edm styles, and is not reliant upon nanomediations. recent work released by russian psy-artist kindzadza (leo greshilov) is characterised by a fast-paced cartoonscape that is decidedly nonsensical. material on nano ninja (2012) possesses a fusion of styles, from furious “psycore” to dub and jazz. thrust amid this torrent, dancers aren’t provided opportunity for contemplative pauses. in “way of the nano warrior”, a character from the animated science fiction sitcom futurama exhorts the massive to never look back: “if you stop partying for a single second, you’ll explode and kill everyone here in a fireball of melted gears and splattered bones. . . . keep dancing. keep whooping it up. you must burn off the doomsday energy as fast as it’s produced, or it will build to critical levels”. in “future true” a persistent heavy power trance-like buzz backgrounded by a bpm riding over 170 cuts into breaks and what sounds like a squealing electric kettle. in the unrelenting, convoluted and scatological soundscape sometimes referred to as “neurotrance”, such as that produced by psykovsky, fatal dischord or erofex, the effect is like brain surgery prizing loose a torrent of memories. though in this case, as multitudes cut sick, the effect pushes closer to psychosis more than anamnesis. much of what is today referred to as “night” music is designed to make as much sense as genius improv comedian reggie watts, who seems to cameo on “my little pony” by hallucinogenic horses,[16] before occupants of the floor are corralled by a spooked cacophony. sampledelic research rather than censor their senses, researchers of edm and its cultures need to get creative. as an experimental writing technique, in this essay i have resampled vocal material from audio compositions performed on psychedelic trance dance floors. undertaking a brief cultural archaeology of the electrosonic digital arts, these samples—constituting material drawn from a variety of sources—are textualised with the rather challenging goal of transcribing the vibe. in this brief montage, i have selected and reanimated vocal datafacts remixed to illuminate the superliminal sensibility producers/djs routinely augment in their sound-art practices, and to which dance floor habitués are exposed. as what i have been calling nanomediations represent one element in a liminal arts industry involving sound craft, stage design, fashion and textile, visionary art, research chemicals, etc., the treatment of this media offers one tactic of representation which would ideally be developed in conjunction with other methods, including conventional techniques like interviews and participant observation—indeed sampledelic techniques of this nature could hardly be conducted successfully without one’s exposure as a participant. this offers an example of a technique developed in situ, an experiment that has furthered understanding of the phenomenon under study, a phenomenon for which standard liminal heuristics were found insufficient. textual analysis of remixed media redeployed to different outcomes—e.g. augmenting gnosis / obliterating meaning—has assisted perception of the psytrance vibe as a realm of complex potentiality. in the end, the dilemma remains: how do we transpose the field into scholarly discourse? focusing on experience as a primary research asset, this essay can be considered as part of a process in an effort to resolve this problem. first hand sensory experience facilitates perceptive modification of existing heuristics enhancing modes of transposition. at least that’s the fiction. there is one thing clear: sensory technologies are integral to edm and its cultures. the reading and writing of that which is as scintillating and sensuous as the vibe demands appropriate research arts. an experimental artifice of scratching, remixing, repurposing draws influence from the practice of edm itself. as dj/producers and dancers are remixologists and bricoleurs, so are researchers of edm cultures. this interpretative method could be scrutinised via perspectives deriving insight from musicology, phenomenology, psychoanalysis and gender studies. the method outlined could be expanded through attention to the sampling of visual media like film and documentary sources by visual artists and vjs, often in montages of repeating images that are projected in sync with the dj performances to enhance the atmosphere and gestalt of the event. a comprehensive approach would offer comparisons with other edm scenes and aesthetics. it would also query producers and participants about the significance or otherwise of remediated fragments in the context of edm events. such analyses would further our comprehension of the media-ecology of edm. acknowledgments i thank the casts and crews of interactive dance floor theatres fragments from which i have attempted to transcribe in this piece. i thank guest editor luis-manuel garcia for comments on an earlier draft and haanumaan for incisive suggestions. author biography graham st john is author of six books including global tribe: spirituality, technology and psytrance (equinox 2012) and technomad: global raving countercultures (equinox 2009). he is adjunct research fellow at the griffith centre for cultural studies, griffith university, australia. he is executive editor of dancecult. his website is edgecentral. email:g.stjohn@warpmail.net references apollo, n.d “house music 101”: <http://www.livingart.com/raving/articles/housemusic101.htm> (accessed 20 december 2012). bakhtin, mikhail. 1968 [1944]. rabelais and his world. london: mit press. beck, jerome, and marsha rosenbaum. 1994. the pursuit of ecstasy. new york: state university of new york press. buckland, fiona. 2002. impossible dance: club culture and queer world-making. middletown, ca: wesleyan university press. conquergood, dwight. 1991. “rethinking ethnography: towards a critical cultural politics”. communication monographs 58: 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other psychedelic medicines make a comeback”. alternet: <http://www.alternet.org/story/90958/emerging_from_the_drug_war_dark_age%3a_lsd_and_other_psychedelic_medicines_make_a_comeback> (accessed 1 october 2012). shulgin, alexandra. 2001. “introduction: the philosophy behind the writing of pihkal”. in pihkal: a chemical love story, by alexander and anne shulgin, xiv–xxvii. berkeley: transform press. spry, tami. 2001. “performing autoethnography: an embodied methodological praxis”. qualitative inquiry 7(6): 706–32. stengs, irene. 2007. “the sensation of dance events: ritual and sensory experience in entertainment”. in wildness & sensation: anthropology of sinister and sensuous realms, eds. rob van ginkel and alex strating, 236–53. netherlands: het spinhuis. st john, graham. 2012a. global tribe: technology, spirituality and psytrance. sheffield and bristol. ct: equinox publishing. ———.2012b. freak media: vibe tribes, sampledelic outlaws and israeli psytrance”. continuum: journal of media and cultural studies 26(3): 437–47. ———.2013a. forthcoming. “sampling religion: electronic dance music events, media shamanism and superliminality”. in companion to religion and popular culture, eds. john lyden and eric michael mazur. new york: routledge. ———.2013b. forthcoming. “aliens are us: cosmic liminality, remixticism and alienation in psytrance”. journal of religion and popular culture 25(2). strassman, rick. 2001. dmt: the spirit molecule. a doctor’s revolutionary research into the biology of near-death and mystical experiences. rochester, vt: park street press. sylvan, robin. 2005. trance formation: the spiritual and religious dimensions of global rave culture. new york: routledge. tedlock, barbara. 2005. the woman in the shaman’s body: reclaiming the feminine in religion and medicine. bantam. thornton, sarah. 1996. club cultures: music, media and subcultural capital. middletown, ct: wesleyan university press. turner, edith, with william blodgett, singleton hakona and fideli benwa. 1992. experiencing ritual: a new interpretation of african healing. university of pennsylvania press: philadelphia. turner, victor. 1962. chihamba, the white spirit: ritual drama of the ndembu. rhodes-livingstone institute papers, 13. manchester: manchester university press for the rhodes-livingstone institute. ———. 1968. the drums of affliction: a study of religious processes among the ndembu of zambia. oxford: clarendon press. ———. 1975. revelation and divination in ndembu ritual. ithaca: cornell university press. turner, victor and edward m. bruner, eds. 1986. the anthropology of experience. champaigne: university of illinios press. vitos, botond. 2010. “demencze: psychedelic madhouse in the czech republic”. in the local scenes and global culture of psytrance. ed. graham st john, 151–69. new york: routledge. young, david earl, and jean-guy goulet, eds. 1994. being changed: the anthropology of extraordinary experience. toronto: university of toronto press. discography bom shankar & alexsoph. 2012. transmissions. bmss records (2 x cd, comp): bmss2cd007. <http://www.discogs.com/bom-shankar-alexsoph-transmissions/release/4065452>. cosmosis. 2002. contact. transient records (cd): tranr640cd. <http://www.discogs.com/cosmosis-contact/release/60489>. cosmosis. 2009. fumbling for the funky frequency. holophonic records (cd, album): holo 606. <http://www.discogs.com/cosmosis-fumbling-for-the-funky-frequency/release/1877292>. daksinamurti. 2012. shanti jatra vol. ii: shamans and healers. shanti jatra records (cd, comp): sjmcd002. <http://www.discogs.com/daksinamurti-shanti-jatra-vol-ii-shamans-and-healers/release/3568438>. djane malana & sunstryk. 2012. royal flush vol.4. plusquam records (2 x cd, comp): pq250. <http://www.discogs.com/djane-malana-sunstryk-royal-flush-vol4/release/3439567>. dj osho. 2009. borderline. echoes records (cd, comp): echocd-il006. <http://www.discogs.com/dj-osho-borderline/release/1766262>. hallucinogen. 1997. the lone deranger. twisted records (cd.): twscd1. <http://www.discogs.com/hallucinogen-the-lone-deranger/release/20583>. hallucinogenic horses. 2012. the golden years the very best of. lost theory records (cd, album): ltrcd003. <http://www.discogs.com/hallucinogenic-horses-the-golden-years-the-very-best-off/release/3632336>. kindzadza. 2012. nano ninja. osom music (cd, album): osomcd006. <http://www.discogs.com/kindzadza-nano-ninja/release/3679962>. liquid. 2001. tribe-adelic records (cd, comp): trb001. <http://www.discogs.com/various-liquid/release/60061>. merkaba. 2010. awaken. zenon records (cd, album): zencd024. <http://www.discogs.com/merkaba-awaken/release/2573378>. monkey machine. 2011. neurotransmitter. altar records (cd, album): arcdap01. <http://www.discogs.com/monkey-machine-neurotransmitter/release/3388772>. pogo. 2004. wingmakers. dragonfly records (cd, comp): bflcd 76. <http://www.discogs.com/various-wingmakers/release/343319>. psychedelic electronica 3. 2000. psychic deli (cd, comp, digipak): pdcd 011. <http://www.discogs.com/various-psychedelic-electronica-3/release/237265>. sandman. 1998. witchcraft. matsuri (cd, album): mptcd07. <http://www.discogs.com/sandman-witchcraft/release/66363>. sphera. 2011. wide open. echoes records (9 x file, wav, comp): echoep-il056. <http://www.discogs.com/sphera-wide-open/release/3747745>. shpongle. 1998. are you shpongled?, twisted records (cd, album): twscd4. <http://www.discogs.com/shpongle-are-you-shpongled/release/27195>. sideform. 2011. santo daime. tesseractstudio (single, mp3): tesd0013. <http://www.discogs.com/sideform-santo-daime/release/2820154>. something wonderful. 1999. ukajin. matsuri productions (cd, album): mp cd 23. <http://www.discogs.com/something-wonderful-ukajin/release/67168>. streamers. 2012. power and light. yellow sunshine explosion (3 x file, mp3, ep): ysedep001. <http://www.discogs.com/streamers-power-and-light/release/3836328>. filmography gilliam, terry. 1998. fear and loathing in las vegas. fear and loathing llc. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120669/>. hyams, peter. 1984. 2010: the year we make contact. mgm. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086837/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1>. idris elba's how clubbing changed the world. 2012. channel 4, uk. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2369722/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1>. kubrick, stanley. 1968. 2001: a space odyssey. mgm. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/?ref_=sr_1>. linklater, richard. 2001. waking life. fox searchlight. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0243017/>. reitman, ivan. 1984. ghostbusters. black rhino productions. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087332/>. sagan, carl. 1980–. cosmos. kcet, carl sagan productions, bbc. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081846/>. schultz, mitch. 2010. dmt: the spirit molecule. spectral alchemy, synthetic pictures. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1340425>. stuart, mel. 1971. willy wonka and the chocolate factory. warner bros. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067992/>. the beyond within: the rise and fall of lsd. 1987. bbc. <http://vimeo.com/18250185>. notes [1] homer simpson sampled on mumbo jumbo’s (bill halsey & mitch davies) “weird, sick, twisted” (psychedelic electronica 3, 2000). cosmosis’ remix, “weird, sick ‘n’ twisted” (contact, 2002) can be heard at: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkuyhr9ojma> (accessed 12 february 2013). [2] see conquergood (1991), ellis and flaherty (1992), spry (2001), and tedlock (2005). [3] the words are spoken by psychoanalyst sidney cohen and lifted from the bbc documentary the beyond within: the rise and fall of lsd (1987). [4] where music is a signal broadcast via fm-transmitter picked up by wireless headphones worn by participants. [5] <http://edgecentral.blogspot.com.au>. [6] there is a user-updatable list of scholarly edmc sources at: <http://www.dancecult.net/bibliography> [7] although see beck and rosenbaum (1994), malbon (1999) and leneghan (2011) who provides a useful literature survey. [8] bill wise, the boat car guy in richard linklater’s waking life (2001). [9] for an elaboration of nanomedia and its interpretation see st john (2012a), and for the role of nanomedia in producing the pretense of the outlaw vibe, see st john (2012b). [10] the lines are from willy wonka and the chocolate factory (stuart, 1971) sampled in mr. peculiar’s “charlies trip” (liquid, 2001). [11] hypnoize’s “demetrium” on bom shankar & alexsoph—transmissions (2012). the words are from mitch schultz’ documentary dmt: the spirit molecule, inspired by the book by that title (strassman 2001). [12] from meander & ridden’s “space navigators” (djane malana & sunstryk—royal flush vol 4, 2012). [13] from the tv series cosmos (sagan, 1980–) sampled on “self-discovery” by cosmosis (fumbling for the funky frequency, 2009). [14] from something wonderful’s ukajin (1999). the dialogue is from 2010: the year we make contact (hyams, 1984). [15] hal 9000 (from kubrick, 1968) as sampled, for instance, on sandman’s “bad news” (witchcraft, 1998). [16] released on debut the golden years the very best of mastered by tim schuldt (2012). nomads in sound vol. 1 anna gavanas (aka gavana) mutamassik, dr das, x.a.cute, aimnbreak, hakan ludvigson and doveshack visual interventions by m-op and martin borell. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.12> on my journey through dance floors, dj booths and sound scapes as a dj and electronic music producer i have come to the point where words, language and categories become dead ends. concepts can be expressed through sound that cannot be captured or iterated in text, like the wordless experience of community on the dancefloor. there are those who argue that electronic music is already immanently conceptual (eshun in goodman 2010: 160). this multimedia contribution, nomads in sound vol. 1, is an experiment in sound and vision that approaches electronic dance music culture from a dj/producer/musician/vj perspective, complementary to writing about it. contributing artists are all edm producers, musicians and djs as well as visual artists. as artists and specialised guides to musical worlds, djs/producers/musicians tell their stories through soundscapes, weaving together auditory elements and influencing the bodies, moods and emotions of dance crowds. inspired by graham st john's recent book on edm culture technomad: global raving countercultures (2009), nomads in sound vol. 1 is an attempt to illustrate visions in edm around collective experiences, struggles and vibes. electronic dance music operates at intellectual, political as well as spiritual levels despite common misunderstandings that it says nothing, and seeks to accomplish nothing, beyond itself. as opposed to styles like rock or pop, edm (with the exception of occasional vocal samples) does not usually contain or structure around lyrics, verses and refrains, but nevertheless inspires communities, conveys messages and mobilises struggles. in the words of producer/musician and dub legend dr das (founding member of the asian dub foundation and participant in nomads in sound): dance music is not inherently apolitical or non political, a prejudice that has existed for a long time and also applied to instrumental music in general. in fact, dance music is often directly political. not having lyrics does not mean music is devoid of political intent. [the legendary detroit techno label/ collective] underground resistance have been on this tip for years. their album interstellar fugitives i feel bristles with political tension without ever leaving the dancefloor and is a kind of template for me. muslimgauze too is a big influence, both sonically and in terms of how he conveyed and suggested political engagement in his music. since leaving asian dub foundation, i've encountered a kind of ignorance that somehow, because i no longer deal with lyrics (in my own work), that i somehow no longer have a political outlook.1 throughout the history of edm, traced through jamaican sound system culture in the 1950s, through nyc and chicago disco and house scenes in the 1970s and 1980s, to the afrofuturism of detroit techno, the sounds of edm are in and by themselves vehicles for struggle against oppression and injustice. as opposed to being inherently apolitical, edm scenes evolve, ignite and reinforce activism in the service of a wide range of causes (st john 2009). electronic dance music’s subversive and liberating potential is illustrated by a dynamic that is usually described as the “vibe“. in edm settings, it is crucial for participants (i.e. djs, vjs, live artists, sound technicians and dancers) to come together and be together in the “vibe”; in an atmosphere of spiritual communication mediated through bodies, sound, visuals and technology (gavanas 2008; 2009). as a participant in edm scenes, you know this phenomenon at a very palpable but unspeakable level. the “vibe” can be described as a collective energy in edm contexts. the “vibe” has also been identified through the concept of “communitas”, which describes the dissolution of social categories, boundaries and hierarchies on edm dance floors and beyond. st john argues that there are different types of “vibes”, or social aesthetics, since parties respond to different and multiple lifeworld conditions where participants seek different kinds of freedom. here the music, in all of its variety, crystallises different vibes, or may be a particular sonic expression of resistance that the vibe embodies. like “communitas”, the edm “vibe” can be a subversive experience that enables participants a measure of cultural autonomy within alien landscapes of segregation and oppression (st john 2009: 96). while it is true that edm communities may create and reinforce social boundaries as well as global inequalities, it is equally true that edm can be used to dissolve boundaries: socially, spiritually, physically and otherwise. although edm scenes may be underpinned by silencing exclusions and gendered/ sexual/ socio-economic/ ethnic/ racial hierarchies (gavanas 2008; 2009), edm can also carnivalize everyday life and become the soundtrack for the “temporary liberation from the established order” which marks “the suspension of all hierarchy, rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions” (st john 2009: 219). according to philosopher and electronic music producer steve goodman (kode9 / hyperdub), sound can become a site for affective collectivity and “affective tonality” can be felt as mood, ambience, or atmosphere (goodman 2010). writer and electronic musician tara rodgers (analog tara/ pink noises) (2010) argues that sound operates as a portal to private and collective memories and imaginations; sound creates and triggers emotions, personal experiences as well as political struggles (rodgers 2010: 5). furthermore, for rodgers, regarded as pressure and movements, sounds perform cultural work (2010: 18). in other words, rodgers conceives of (feminist) political movements (i.e. waves) in terms of sound waves that interact, intersect and reverbrate through space indefinitely: “how debates sound within and across these spaces depends upon one’s orientation toward an argument, how one listens selectively, and how some claims are masked or augmented by their relative power or position” (2010: 18). “sonic squatting” can be a way to reclaim sonic space (streicker in balliger 1995: 24). moreover, in edm culture, struggles for oppressed groups to claim sonic space as well as “struggles for the right to dance”, are crucial battles in contexts where authorities seek to regulate the activities of certain groups in specific areas (buckland 2002). the tracks below, composed for the current project nomads in sound vol. 1, approach the central themes in edm culture described above: resolution intent mind states struggle communitas belonging resistance 1. edm as resolution: “mawlid” by mutamassik there can be no political solution without spiritual resolution. somehow words and politics have been bound-up in one sterilizing, paralyzing tool. this classic track “mawlid”, and mutamassik's recent album that which death cannot destroy, illustrate that insurrection must be conducted in ways that have not been figured-out nor defined by “the man” (including “the woman” now). “mawlid” invests in sound as the unseen and generally what has not already been defined and prescribed as the proper way to conduct political activism. to mutamassik, waking people the fuck up and making them hear something is distinctly her job as an artist; protests and marches are not enough. right now, in our first world, materialist societies, believing in this unseen is just about the most threatening thing you can do. by means of sound, “mawlid” intends to introduce the “enemy” to the “enemy”. <http://meerkatrecordings.bandcamp.com/track/mawlid> 2. edm as intent: “undergrowth” by dr das dr das’ “undergrowth” is inspired by producing and remixing with the label indigenous resistance (ir) for several years. ir promotes the ongoing struggles and actions of indigenous people worldwide. in these struggles, dr das has remixed/reworked on contributions by underground resistance and sly & robbie amongst others. dr das dubs his musical approach “dubnoiz”, whereby percussion and noise move and fluctuate within a framework of drums and melodic basslines. percussion on its own is original, organic trance music. by feeding it through distortion pedals it becomes even more emotive. not only does percussion determine the tonic (key) of the tracks, but by distorting it, harmonics are released which imply melodies and basslines. the basslines, percussion loops and noise (“noiz”) convey emotion, be it joy or anger—or they indicate militant intent. <http://meerkatrecordings.bandcamp.com/track/undergrowth> 3. edm as mind states: “dub in noose” by x.a.cute i'm dancing, head in the noose... confusion is the tactic that they're using... the space between my ears is where i'm lost in... truth is sometimes a lie that's not provin'... edm culture influences mind states; individually and collectively the dj/performer takes participants on a journey. “dub in noose” illustrates the power of edm to affect mental states, dancing alone together. the x.a.cute sound system are long time activists of the berlin underground. as a duo, or with the help of a family of urban renegades, x.a.cute challenges limitations, expectations and generic boundaries with every next break. <http://meerkatrecordings.bandcamp.com/track/dub-in-noose> 4. edm as struggle: “can't fail” by aimnbreak djing is “like driving a plane during war. like the bombs are flying but you've still gotta drive the plane” (coleman in rodgers 2010: 90). edm can channel and amplify commitment to justice, a tradition that can be traced back to jamaican sound systems as vehicles by which racism and prejudice are opposed. in this cultural warfare, “the colonized of the empire strike back through rhythm and sound” (goodman 2010: 1). the track “can´t fail” is about frustration, anger and determination. the feeling you get when enough is enough. when the stakes are high but giving in is not an option. when you just can´t fail. <http://meerkatrecordings.bandcamp.com/track/can-t-fail> 5. edm as communitas: “technomad communitas” by gavana the revolutionary carnival may only last a few hours or days, but its taste lingers on. it is not simply a letting-off steam, a safety valve for society, enabling life to return to normal the next day. it is a moment of intensity unlike any other, which shapes and gives new meaning to every aspect of life (ainger et al. in st john 2009: 223). the track “technomad communitas” seeks to convey the especially carnivalesque character of experience on dance floors and outdoor festivals. it is influenced by the retro sounds of 1980s new wave, which trigger collective memories of “coming out” to the edm dance floor. the track conveys the chaos and determination, and the revolutionary, infectuous and irresistible build up of comm-uni-tas. <http://meerkatrecordings.bandcamp.com/track/technomad-communitas> 6. edm as belonging: “darkness” by håkan ludvigson people really find solace and a community in the clubs . . . people find, when they come to the city, their surrogate family. people find this connection where, they all left places around the country or they felt disenfranchised here or there. it was like a big family gathering or house party of like-minded souls linked through the energy of the music and in a more communal setting (dj jeannie hopper in rodgers 2010: 195). edm community can be a surrogate family within lonely and desolate urban existence. the track “darkness” is about berlin in 2010, the 21st century’s art capital of the world. the track “darkness” invokes the typical berlin club: an abandoned warehouse with little (minimalistic) decoration, the club is almost dark, only the occasional cold strobe light will reveal the art painted directly on the concrete walls and ceiling. static, hypnotic techno is thumping from the speakers. yet this cold place becomes warm, intimate and somehow cosy when filled with people. <http://meerkatrecordings.bandcamp.com/track/darkness> 7. edm as resistance: dark alleyways by doveshack protestivals are generally acts of civil disobedience, neither sanctioned nor tolerated by official culture . . . hardly sanctioned by the state nor becoming easily recuperable (st john 2009: 222f). claiming auditive space in squats, outdoor raves and abandoned warehouses, the track “dark alleyways” amplifies persistent techno subcultural resistance. proliferating in nocturnal alleyways, underground sounds of resistance defy the violence, policing and control of oppressive authorities. in these mobile and evasive strongholds, the dj is the ultimate outlaw and sound is the ultimate counterforce. <http://meerkatrecordings.bandcamp.com/track/dark-alleyways> 8. visual interpretations as a bonus, nomads in sound vol. 1 possesses an audiovisual dimension. below are visual interpretations of two of the tracks composed for the project by visual artists m-op and martin borell. m-op is a vj and edm producer who has toured edm festivals and events internationally for many years. in his own words, according to his approach as a visual artist: i never get attached to my output. being one with the moment, the present moment of creation is what it's all about—and it becomes multiplied if you can share it with someone else. like a bush fire spreading, raging through the african savanna. igniting, spreading rapidly only to die out as quickly as it started, leaving behind it what at a first glance seems like destruction, but in essence making way for the fertile, the new, the unborn, the seed of possibility to grow. over and over again... that is being alive—fully conscious that we are not dead. here is m-op's interpretation of håkan ludvigson's “darkness”: håkan ludvigson feat. coni darkness (video by m-op) from meerkat recordings on vimeo. martin borell is a visual artist currently making the lesbian action movie dyke hard. he works on special effects for feature films during days and graphics for friend’s projects by night. here is borell's interpretation of gavana's “technomad communitas”: gavana technomad communitas from meerkat recordings on vimeo. references balliger, robin. 1995. “the sound of resistance”. in sounding off! music as subversion/resistance/revolution, ed. saikolsky, ron and fred wei-han ho, 13–28. new york: autonomedia. buckland, fiona. 2002. impossible dance: club culture and queer world making. middletown: wesleyan university press. gavanas, anna. 2008. “grasping communitas”. ethnos 73(1): 127-133. ———. 2009. “‘you better be listening to my fucking musik you bastard!’ teknologi, genusifiering och andlighet bland djs på elektroniska dansmusikscener i berlin, london och stockholm”. in rundgång: genus och populärmusik, ed. ganetz, gavanas, huss och werner, 77–120. stockholm: makadam page. goodman, steve. 2010. sonic warfare. sound, affect, and the ecology of fear. london and cambridge: mit press. rodgers, tara. 2010. pink noises: women on electronic music and sound. durham and london: duke university press. st john, graham. 2009. technomad: global raving countercultures. london and oakville: equinox. notes 1. dec 6, 2010, personal communication. con2_typeset_ver1 “let’s have at it!” conversations with edm producers kate simko and dj denise rebekah farrugia oakland university this piece weaves together conversations with kate simko and dj denise to portray the two different, yet overlapping paths they have taken to establish themselves as electronic dance music (edm) producers. both women are pioneers in their own right. simko is best known as spectral sounds’ “first lady of techno”. dj denise, who first gained popularity as a san francisco bay area dj, has since become a prolific producer and the founder of the label mizomo music, which specializes in various forms of house music. relying on personal interviews with both producers, this essay describes their experiences in order to highlight their different approaches to music production and distribution. additionally, it considers how the increased accessibility and user friendliness of digital music production/distribution has changed the conditions for both women and men in the edm business. it is just after noon on a spring day when i arrive at the trendy café on chicago’s north side where kate simko and i have agreed to meet.1 i am eager to learn about simko’s edm trajectory, particularly what has enabled her to succeed in an environment that most women continue to experience as impermeable. how does a woman move from expressing an interest in producing edm to releasing tracks on an internationally recognized record label, and why aren’t there more of them doing so? after all, there are numerous female djs dedicated to spinning edm, yet tracks produced by women remain too few and far between. the gendered divisions within dance music culture mimic those found in other popular music genres such as punk and hip hop. in the 1980s, edm in the us evolved from disco in cities such as chicago and new york where it was strongly connected to local gay culture and ethnic minorities (fikentscher 2000: 11); however, by the height of its popularity in the late 1990s it had been co-opted by an industry predominantly run and consumed by white, heterosexual men. many of them became djs and producers whom the dance music industry used as marketing tools (reynolds 1999: 276). by this time djing had become a competitive sport and producing an even more guarded art form. simon reynolds accounts for the “homosocial nature of techno” in the following explanation: tricks of the trade are passed down from mentors to male acolytes. dj-ing and samplebased music also go hand in hand with an obsessive ‘trainspotter’ mentality: the amassing of huge collections of records, the accumulation of exhaustive and arcane information about labels, producers, and auteurs (reynolds 1999: 274). dance music’s failure to maintain a degree of interest in the us on par with many european countries rendered knowledge about the music and culture esoteric and dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(2) 2010, 87-93 issn 1947-5403 ©2010 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.06 conversations difficult to permeate. in turn, this situation made it especially difficult for women to break into these spaces, especially the production of techno. i first heard kate simko’s music on myspace. our profiles were linked by one degree of separation. in the past few years she has composed numerous edm tracks, most of which have been released by spectral sounds, the companion label to ghostly international, an independent record label based in ann arbor, michigan. since it was launched in 1999, ghostly has generated accolades from a range of music and media outlets worldwide, including rolling stone, billboard magazine and advertising age. spectral sounds is dedicated to more dance floor-oriented music compared to the ethereal electronic sounds released on ghostly. a quick glance at the label’s list of artists is testament to simko’s atypical success. of the 21 artists featured, she is the only woman, and hence, has been dubbed as the label’s “first lady of techno”, a title no doubt intended to honor simko for her talent and success. while she is not the first woman to produce techno music she was indeed the first – and remains the only – signed to the prestigious label. her status as spectral’s only female artist enables her “first lady” title to also function as public relations material. not only can spectral take credit for its anomalous discovery but simko’s presence is an element it can potentially use to differentiate itself from other edm labels, most of which do not have any women on their rosters. not only is she one of few women who produce edm, but her production of “dance floor friendly” beats such as those found on simko’s she said ep and the more recent track “dublake” make her even more of a rarity. many women djs i have interviewed over the years have expressed an interest in producing, a desire that is partly fueled by the scarcity of women-produced, dance floor friendly tracks. yet, few are able to overcome the technological and social obstacles related to composition and distribution. spectral’s public relations materials for simko include a video artist profile hosted on vimeo.com. in it, simko discusses everything from her earliest musical experiences growing up in evanston, illinois, to her future plans. in many ways, the short documentary presents her success and story as straightforward and logical, if not easy. we learn that she grew up in a musical family of middle class stature and was enrolled in piano lessons at the age of six from which time she learned a deep appreciation for music. though the video’s caption bills her as the label’s “first lady”, its narrative is gender neutral. during our interview i learn that simko’s first introduction to edm was as a high school student in illinois, but it was her exposure to idm (intelligent dance music) while studying piano as a freshman at the university of miami, florida, that sparked her interest in producing. she then had the self-realization that she wanted to make her own music. simko expressed her deep-rooted determination by saying, “i didn’t know how but i was going to try to figure it out and it took a long time”. after a year in miami she transferred to northwestern university and eventually graduated with a major in digital music production. she explained the arduous process as follows: i saw that they had a music technology program. i had to audition at the level of a piano major at northwestern and it’s one of the top three piano schools in the us. it took me a year just to prepare for the audition so i started taking classical piano again just to study for my audition. on top of that i had to study classical piano at the level of a freshman performance for one year. there were film students and really creative people who wanted to do stuff and they were like no, you have to be straight up virtuoso to study electronic 88 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 music…that’s where i was able to learn, to be nurtured and be given credit in school and have the time and the luxury to be getting credit through northwestern to figure out how to make electronic music. during her final year simko studied abroad in chile where she expanded her knowledge of spanish as well as her sonic horizons. while in chile she began experimenting with logic pro and completed her first album shapes of summer with chilean andres bucci under the moniker detalles. the german label traum schallplatten released the collection in 2003. she explained the experience of learning to use the software: that was 2001. at the time it wasn’t user friendly at all. it was much harder then. logic 7 with apple is much easier. the manual was a horrible translation from german to english. it was rough. i’m not gonna lie. i was there with the thick manual reading the paragraph over and over again. i couldn’t figure out how to start really. in 2005, her first solo track “houston skyline” – a philip glass remix – was released on the compilation album glass cuts: philip glass remixes. this success motivated simko to dedicate as much time as possible to producing while working as a real estate agent but not without some internal struggles. “honesty at the point ghostly said yes to me there was definitely a point in my head where i was like well maybe people just don’t like this music i’m doing. i knew in my heart i wasn’t there yet and didn’t know if i could tweak what i was doing into a dance floor realm. it was definitely hard”. since 2005, simko’s discography has grown to include six solo tracks plus three collaborative releases all on well known independent edm labels, as well as seven remixes of other artists’ music. she has had two of her tracks remixed by well-established techno producers. in 2008, simko toured her beats as she headlined a six-city tour sponsored by spectral that included stops in montreal, los angeles and chicago. besides compiling beats for the dance floor, simko has also scored the soundtrack to the science documentary the atom smashers which spectral has since made available as the digital release music from the atom smashers. it is important to note that the demanding process involved in becoming a major in a music technology program such as the one from which simko graduated is out of reach for most individuals, men and women alike, who have not had extensive musical training prior to college. additionally, the opportunities to learn to produce is even more limited for women who have less access to the informal, male-centered social networks through which tricks of the trade are often passed along. while simko was busy developing her production skills in chicago, dj denise was exercising her dj capital in the san francisco bay area for similar purposes. dj denise began her dj career in berkeley, california, in 1998. when we first met in 2003, she had recently decided that producing was her next logical career move since her high profile dj career had already led to valuable networking opportunities with producers. for denise, access to others with gear and knowledge proved invaluable. “i had a very strong network of dj friends and producers. i was able to pick other people’s brains, ask questions, [and] learn and exchange tips”.2 in particular, she has commented on the collaborative process she experienced with her first music partner aleks. “he would do the actual engineering of the song while i sat beside him and made comments and suggestions. he would teach me as we went along with each track”. denise and aleks completed the track “machines” in december 2003. “toward the end of 2004, i received help from two other producer friends of mine who passed farrugia • conversations with kate simko and dj denise 89 on some software for producing (cubase 2.0 and a slew of vsts, which are essentially computer-based synthesizers), and once i had the software set up on my computer, i started making electronic music on my own”.3 denise completed her first solo project, the trance track “simple reform”, in january 2005. by the end of that year she established her label, mizumo music. to further enhance her production skills denise enrolled in music production classes at diablo valley college where she earned a certificate in recording arts a year and a half later. since january 2006, she has released over seventy original collaborative and solo tracks and remixes. the accomplishments and processes described above highlight the ways in which both dj denise and kate simko have broken through edm’s gender barriers as producers; however, as women their success sometimes depends on proving more than just their artistic merit. the processes involved require them to actively interact with men at every level – from learning to create edm, to dealing with equipment store personnel, record label management and other artists. reflecting on her sex and gender simko explained her experiences by saying: i’ve never in my life used it as an advantage but i can see how it can be an advantage, being a woman. i think so. i think that if you’re good it’s not a disadvantage. if you’re unknown, maybe people won’t take you seriously. you have to prove yourself coolness wise. hanging out, i’ve had to prove myself way harder than guys do. some guys just don’t know how to hang out with me. it took a long time for me to prove myself. i feel like guys are a lot less prone to ripping on other guy djs, [it’s] much easier to rip on a girl like, dude she sucks. you feel like you have to be 200% prepared for every situation. if you’re a guy you can just roll in [to an equipment store] and you know you can ask and say hey what kind of drum machines do you have and they won’t be patronizing at all. they’ll show you all the drum machines. as a woman, all the time you feel like you want to be prepared. at the same time, why not? if every guy was 200% prepared maybe there wouldn’t be so many horrible guy djs. at first simko downplays the impact that gendered social constructions have had on her career because she has experienced success in despite of them, but as she continues to reflect on her experiences she notes having had to prove herself “way harder than guys do”. sadly, this situation is not unique to edm, but the degree to which edm remains a male-centered enterprise does exacerbate the matter. women’s relationships with independent record labels and the problems female artists encounter at the distribution level in particular have been well documented. as keith negus indicates, “the ‘intuitive’ assumptions that staff make when acquiring the most suitable new artists and pieces of music are based on beliefs informed by a series of gender, class and racialized divisions” (1999: 21). fortunately for simko, her hard work, dedication and knowledge led to a now long-standing relationship with her primary record label, spectral sounds. for dj denise, starting a record label enabled her to move into a position of power in the industry. as of december 2009, mizumo music has 39 releases featuring 100 artists; yet even though the label is female-owned it still has the typical roster of white men, which in itself demonstrates the scarcity of female producers. one way to bring women to the label has been through collaboration between denise and other female djs. the track “hearsay (part i)” is the work of drc + dj denise. denise also partnered with elz on the track “get back in the groove” (dj denise + elz remix) 90 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 on mizumo music’s release by homero esponosa and dj denise titled bridging the gap e.p. 2008-2009 remixes. the impact of these collaborative production projects should not be under estimated as similar strategies among women djs over the years have proven successful. in 1996, in response to what they felt was negative bias from other djs based on their sex and gender at the time a handful of women formed the women-centered dj collective sistersf.4 by 2004, sister had expanded its presence nationwide with chapters in portland, oregon, denver, colorado and new york city (sisternyc). while these collectives are no longer as dynamic as they once were, they actively promoted the talent of female djs for over a decade and served as role models for girls and women by opening up the possibility that they too could become djs. an increase in women-centered music making environments would similarly provide the social and cultural access to technology and knowledge needed to increase production opportunities for women. although historically collaboration has been important to women in edm, technological innovations present new opportunities for both collective activity and individual success. the ubiquity of the internet and other digital technologies are enabling female media artists to do two important things that should continue to be encouraged. the first is networking online via social network sites such as facebook and myspace. second, the convergence of video, audio and other digital media technologies have created new distribution networks enabling artists to bypass traditional record labels – and the politics implicit in these institutions – and independently release their music into the ether. kate simko described the importance of social network sites to her role as an edm artist by saying: [the internet] has helped a lot. a lot of people do [contact me via internet]. it’s really cool. over the weekend i met someone from berlin. i can so easily can go onto myspace and be like, hey nice to meet you. now we’re in touch. if i want to i can send him music or whatever. otherwise do you take the time and effort to try to figure out who knows him and get his email and really go out of your way? myspace is a really benign way to be in contact or have someone contact you and not feel like your space is invaded. dj denise spoke to the development of new distribution networks and how the internet and mp3 technologies have been instrumental to her success. the description of her process is insightful. i initially set up relationships with labels by good old fashion guerrilla tactics. i went on beatport.com, went to the genre of labels that i wanted to work with, copied down about 1,200 different label names, and started searching online (via google) for contact names & emails. (granted, i only got about 500 of those contacts successfully, and i still have about 700 to go! when i first contacted some of these labels (usually by myspace), i asked for their contact email & also mentioned that i was available for remix work. i was hired on the spot for about 10 jobs simply by asking – again, however, based on royalty agreements (usually 50%). now, when i am shopping out an original track, i send an mp3 link to the track to this list of 500 labels, and without fail, i get at least 10-15 replies from labels that are interested in signing the track.5 in 2002, npr cultural correspondent rick karr presented a six-part series on how technology has changed popular music. karr quotes famous chicago recording engineer and producer steve albini as saying that the rapidly falling price of professional recording equipment has led to “the triumph of the amateurs” as individuals can farrugia • conversations with kate simko and dj denise 91 now self-produce music on digital work stations and distribute their material online. in other words, the ability to create praiseworthy music is no longer confined to artists at the mercy of record labels with sizeable budgets for studio time, marketing and distribution. the increasing mainstream success of bedroom musicians at the end of the oughts continued to prove this point. laptop artists such as gregg gillis, aka girl talk, are destabilizing the notion that the “studio hero” is more knowledgeable or prestigious than his or her diy counterparts. primarily a sampling artist, girl talk’s success has enabled gillis to quit his day job as an engineer and pursue music as a career. his fourth album, feed the animals received four out of five stars in rolling stone (hoard 2008) and ranked fourth on time magazine’s top 10 albums of 2008 (tyrangiel 2008). as access to computers and music production software persists, the boundaries between studio and bedroom producers continue to dissolve. in addition to the economic factors involved, traditionally the social boundaries rooted in technical knowledge and language have exacerbated studio labor divisions (porcello 1991) and worked to keep both men and women outside this space for fear that demystifying the production process could damage the studio’s symbolic and/or use value (meintjes 2003; farrugia and swiss 2008). presently, countless online forums, websites and magazines – most notably remix – feature reviews, interviews and tutorials as part of their growing collections of information for electronic musicians. the possibilities brought on by these changes have repeatedly been hailed as democratizing, empowering, and valuable for all potential music producers, but only recently have we begun to witness women at the center of these triumphs. if one considers the success and productivity of kate simko and dj denise in tandem with the increase of digital networks and technologies, a future of dance floor friendly beats produced by women becomes much more than hopeful thinking. in dj denise’s words: “i don't think in this day and age we as women can feel intimidated by technology—as with anything in life, you just have to stand up to it & say ‘let's have at it!’”6 ••••••• acknowledgments the author wishes to thank dj denise and kate simko for their time and willingness to be interviewed, as well as kathleen battles for her astute comments during the preparation of this manuscript. references farrugia, rebekah and thom swiss. 2008. “producing producers: women and electronic/ dance music”. current musicology 86: 79-100. fikentscher, kai. 2000.“you better work!” underground dance music in new york city. hanover, nh: wesleyan university press. hoard, christian. “feed the animals by girl talk”. rolling stone magazine, july 2008. <http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/album/21457036/review/21463543/feed_the_ animal> (accessed 28 march 2010). meintjes, louise. 2003. sound of africa! making music zulu in a south african studio. durham, nc: duke university press. 92 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 negus, keith. 1999. music genres and corporate cultures. new york: routledge. porcello, tom. 1991. “speaking of sound: language and the professionalization of soundrecording engineers”. social studies of science 34 (5): 733-758. reynolds, simon. 1999. generation ecstasy: into the world of techno and rave culture. new york: routledge. tyrangiel, josh. “4. feed the animals by girl talk – the top 10 everything of 2008”. time magazine, december 2008. <http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/ 0,28804,1855948_1864324_1864335,00.html> (accessed 29 march 2010). mediography detalles. andreas bucc + kate simko. 2003. shapes of summer. traum schallplatten (cd): traum cd12. http://www.discogs.com/release/139352 dj denise + elz. 2009. get back in the groove from bridging the gap ep. 2008-2009 remixes. mizumo music (mp3): miz008d. http://www.mizumomusic.com/releases/releases.html drc + dj denise. 2009. hearsay. mizumo music (mp3): miz038. http://www.mizumomusic.com/releases/releases.html kate simko. 2005. houston skyline from glass cuts (philip glass: remixed). orange mountain music (cd): omm0023. http://www.discogs.com/release/876058 kate simko. 2008. she said ep. spectral sound (12-inch): spc57. http://www.discogs.com/release/1286778 kate simko. 2009. music from the atom smashers. ghostly international (mp3): gidg17. http://www.discogs.com/release/1950642 kate simko. 2009. dublake. ghostly international (mp3): catalog number not available. http://static.ghostly.com/media/mp3/full/simko_dublake_9918.mp3 brown, clayton and long ross, monica, and suprenant, andrew (dir.). 2007. the atom smashers. usa. 137 films. http://www.137films.org/films/theatomsmashers/ author biography rebekah farrugia is an assistant professor of media studies in the department of communication and journalism at oakland university whose research interests lie at the intersection of gender, technology and popular music. her work has most recently been published in current musicology, feminist media studies and popular music and society. notes farrugia • conversations with kate simko and dj denise 93 1 kate simko, interview with the author (dolce casa, chicago), 29 may 2008. 2 dj denise, interview with the author (42 dutton ave, san leandro, ca), 8 july 2003. 3 dj denise, email to author, 13 november 2008. 4 annie shaw, aka xjs, interview with the author (skylark bar, san francisco), 22 july 2003. 5 dj denise, email to author, 13 november 2008. 6 dj denise, email to author, 13 november 2008. dancecult 2.1 reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 2 (1): 90–114 issn 1947-5403 ©2011 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net hip hop underground: the integrity and ethics of racial identification anthony kwame harrison philadelphia: temple university press, 2009. isbn: 1-4399-0060-4 (hardcover), 1-4399-0061-2 (paperback) rrp: us$74.50 (hardcover), us$26.95 (paperback), us$74.50 (electronic) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.05 rebecca bodenheimer hamilton college, usa anthony kwame harrison’s book hip hop underground: the integrity and ethics of racial identification examines the racial dynamics of the san francisco bay area’s underground hip hop scene, with the larger goal of exploring processes of racial self-identification among american youth at a time in which the nation is growing more racially diverse and discourses on race increasingly revolve around an ideology of colorblindness. in his view, the bay area is a good case study for an elaboration of contemporary american racial dynamics because of its uniquely multiracial demographics, which are currently very similar to the projections of a non-white majority population in the u.s. by 2050. harrison’s research is strongly informed by the method of “critical ethnography”, which views the process of ethnography as intimately connected to the interpretation and representation of the findings. in this vein, he describes his decision to become an active participant in the bay area’s underground hip hop scene and to assume two identities, anthropologist and emcee (rapper), despite his initial misgivings that he might be received as an interloper. while critical ethnography is by no means a new method of anthropological research, the level of self-reflexivity here is arguably taken to the extreme with relatively large doses of “autoethnographic narrative” (58). harrison’s second chapter provides detailed accounts both about his personal history with hip hop and the ways he inserted himself into and moved through the bay area underground hip hop scene; however, his discussion of the hip hop group he helped to form, the forest fires collective, seems at times overindulgent. reviews reviews 91 harrison’s first chapter details the emergence of underground hip hop in the mid-to-late 1990s, highlighting the movement’s preoccupation with notions of authenticity, its goals of reclaiming hip hop from the mass corporatization following its crossover into the mainstream, and its contestation of commercial hip hop’s “ghettocentric” representations of blackness.1 he argues that the alternate representations of blackness offered by underground hip hop are accompanied by a more racially inclusive criteria regarding who can lay claim to the practice. nevertheless, despite his suggestions that this more inclusive vision is a progressive tendency, he frequently contests the stated ideologies of his fellow hip hoppers 2—that it is competency, rather than race, that matters in terms of underground hip hop authenticity—by asserting his own view that blackness is still privileged in hip hop and that non-black participants, especially whites, face a more arduous road to establish their legitimacy. harrison’s third chapter provides a good critical summary of the ways hip hop scholarship has articulated the relationship between race, authenticity and claims of ownership, detailing three principal approaches. the first frames hip hop as a distinctly black practice, despite recognizing that non-black youth, specifically puerto ricans, were involved in its emergence and is exemplified by tricia rose’s 1994 canonic work on hip hop black noise. as harrison notes, a host of scholars ( juan flores, raquel rivera) have argued strongly for inserting puerto ricans into hip hop origin narratives. harrison provocatively asks, if we can recognize the role of puerto ricans and other latinos in the formation of hip hop culture, should we not do the same with white b-boys who joined the movement only a few years later? the second approach views hip hop as one in a long line of afro-diasporic traditions in the americas and tends to draw direct links between hip hop and african and/or caribbean traditions. the final approach is an orientation toward contemporary manifestations of hip hop, and a recognition of its creative appropriation by youth across all continents. harrison concludes this review by asserting that the ongoing reification of hip hop as essentially black has obscured a more realistic and dynamic picture of the ways that youth of all colors engage with the practice and that underground hip hop challenges these essentialist notions. harrison’s principal goal is to examine and unpack the ways that underground hip hoppers articulate claims for their own hip hop legitimacy through racial performances of self. departing from sarah thornton’s theorization of subcultural capital and the boundary maintenance that is such an integral part of subcultural scenes, harrison critiques the hegemony of “authenticity”, viewing john l. jackson’s notion of “sincerity” as a better analytic. jackson’s notion “subverts the standard checklist of subcultural capital [markers “ sophisticated and innovative discussions about the racial politics of authenticity in underground hip hop” dancecult 2(1)92 of authenticity] in favor of a personal code of underground hip hop ethics and integrity… what matters most is the perceived sincerity of these racial performances... for the non-black hip hopper, an overzealous display of urban african american posturing, no matter how authentic, is under most circumstances suspected as insincere” (118). while i agree that the sincerity of a racial performance is an important element in the positive reception of a non-black emcee, i do not perceive a big difference between the notions of authenticity and sincerity. harrison’s position that a display of black posturing is authentic but not sincere is not entirely convincing—why would it not simply be considered inauthentic? chapter four puts the notion of racial sincerity to work, as harrison provides examples of white emcees who perform “sincere whiteness” (140). his primary example concerns a white emcee who, during a mos def 3 show, got on stage to freestyle (improvise rapped lyrics). although he was initially booed because of the audience’s assumptions about his competency based on his “bummy white guy” look, the emcee ultimately won over the crowd with his lyrical prowess. harrison astutely states, “had top r not been a sincere white guy…the entire story might have played out differently: no boos, no surprises, no turning of the crowd; perhaps just a great freestyle, which is hardly the kind of thing that gets talked about to any great extent days after the show” (140). while i find this analysis quite persuasive, harrison’s criteria for performing “sincere whiteness” is more problematic: in this and in other instances, he bases his characterization of racial sincerity on physical appearance and fashion choices, noting in particular the white emcees’ “dorky looks” and “bummy shirts” (140). he perceptively analyzes this mode of self-representation as a reaction against past white emcees’ “insincere” performances of racial identity, exemplified in the “wigger” persona,4 that claimed to fully understand the experience of black youth without recognizing their own white privilege. the issue is not only that harrison’s notion of white racial sincerity is fully based on the emcee’s physical appearance, but also the implication that “bummy clothes” are essentially a white fashion and that emcees cannot be racially sincere unless they are dressed in this manner. in his final chapter he provides what i believe is another problematic analysis, when he discusses the sound of an all-white underground hip hop group as “so sincere and self-assured in its whiteness”, precisely because people have described their music as “avant-garde hip hop”, “emo rap”, or “goth-hop” (161). harrison’s argument here seems to reproduce the same essentialist notions of race and culture that he has previously challenged and the reader is left to assume that he would only deem racially sincere those white emcees who mix rap with “white” musical styles or dress like “dorky white guys”. harrison’s final chapter continues elaborating the notion of racial sincerity, although here he offers a rather pessimistic commentary on racial politics in the underground hip hop scene. he recounts a party where the aforementioned white underground hip hop group performed a satire using an exaggerated style of black speech in order to parody the image of the hyper-violent, misogynist “gangsta” rapper that is so often promoted by the mainstream music industry. noting that the audience was predominantly white, harrison describes this performance as a form of “contemporary minstrelsy” (158). however, he reviews 93 then characterizes this analysis as too simplistic, asserting that the group was very aware of a history of white appropriation and racist imitation of black music. he states: i would contend that sole and the pedestrian saw themselves as crafting a tremendously ironic satire of the racial insincerity embodied by... wigger icons of the past. arguably, if we accept that this group... was engaged in a theatrical performance of past white hip hoppers’ exaggerated performances of blackness, this could be viewed as about a profound an expression of white racial sincerity as one might find. however, somewhere within this cauldron of sincerity, satire, and racial symbolism, for me, the circumstantial logic breaks down (160). the reason he gives for ultimately eschewing his own, quite sophisticated analysis and concluding that the performance was a “racial impersonation” (162), centers around the fact that these white emcees were performing for a mainly white audience. however, another perspective might view the performance as quite racially sincere precisely because, as stated by harrison, it was a parody. furthermore, it seems that the key to determining whether the performance reinforced stereotypes or not resides largely in its reception: how aware was the audience of the performers’ intentions to perform a satire? although harrison does not pursue this question, it is likely, following his own discussion of the blurred line between performers and audience in underground hip hop, that the spectators were “in the know” and viewed this performance with a critical perspective. ultimately harrison’s book offers some sophisticated and innovative discussions about the racial politics of authenticity in underground hip hop. however, while he presents various compelling analyses, his final conclusions are at times less nuanced and thus lessen the persuasiveness of his theoretical points. notes 1 the subgenre of “gangsta” rap, in which rappers frequently spin tales of violent and sexual pursuits, is most closely associated with a “ghettocentric” mentality. 2 harrison often refers to participants in the local scene as “hip hoppers”, which i understand to include anyone who engages with at least one of the four principle elements of hip hop culture— emceeing (rapping), dj’ing, break-dancing (b-boying), or graffiti art. 3 mos def is one of the most celebrated and visible emcees in underground hip hop, so much so, that some might not describe him as part of the underground scene anymore. his first album, mos def and talib kweli are black star (rawkus records 1998), was a collaboration with the highly respected emcee talib kweli and in many ways defined the terms of underground hip hop in its critique of the music industry and mainstream rappers who have “sold out”. 4 “wigger” was a derogatory term that emerged in the 1990s referring to white youth who fully adopted the fashion and speech of african american youth for the purposes of gaining subcultural capital, but who were ultimately perceived as having a superficial connection with blackness and not a true investment in the politics of racial equality. dancecult 2(1)94 the local scenes and global culture of psytrance graham st john new york/london: routledge, 2010. isbn: 978-0-415-87696-4 (hardcover) 978-0-203-84787-9 (electronic) rrp: $103.00 (hardcover), $103.00 (electronic) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.06 rupert till university of huddersfield, uk psytrance is not well known or widely understood. the local scenes and global culture of psytrance, edited by leading writer in the field of electronic dance music (edm) culture graham st. john, is the first book to cover this form in any detail. to many, psytrance is lumped together using ill-defined journalistic terms that have little meaning or substance such as “dance music”. this collected volume attempts to unpack the term and explore the field in a more rigorous fashion. st john bookends the volume; his introduction provides a useful assessment of writing on psytrance, whilst providing a contextual framework. he makes a strong case for the need for the collection and prepares the ground for the variety of different approaches that follow. the book is divided into three sections, the first dealing with the roots of the music in goa trance. this begins with luther elliott’s proto-trance history. it makes a strong case that musical roots of psytrance grew not principally from goa but originated in sixties counter-culture, ibiza, house music and acid house. its description of the development of goa trance is rather vague, lacking specific dates, names and interviews with key players. fortunately this is covered in the next two chapters and in any case this is an interesting and well-paced first chapter. anthony d’andrea next provides a spicy taste of the nature of the goa full moon party scene. like several sections of the collection, it prioritises the opinions of the ‘authentic’— the scenesters, the faces, the core members—and allows the flavour of the narrative to be determined by self-appointed spokespeople. indeed many of the writers can be accused of this, related it seems to their immersion in psytrance culture. in some cases the writers have led a psytrance lifestyle and have become interested in writing about their passion. this provides insider knowledge, without which this book would lack credibility, but inevitably means it sometimes becomes evangelical, treating internal psy-perspectives as “truth” and outsider perspectives as “false”. reviews 95 arun saldanha provides the final chapter in the goa section and manages to avoid this trap. his well-written account describes the myriad influences on the goa scene as a meeting point of multiple substreams, a developmental crossroads rather than a point of origin. his use of derrida’s ghost metaphor elegantly blends sociology and ethnography and embeds into psytrance the term ‘communitas’, which returns many times to form a key focus of the book. the sequel to the goa section discusses globalisation, bridging the gap between goa and the growth of psytrance in europe. in fact it is the well-defined and well-written specificity of this chapter by hillegonda rietveld that clarifies the origins of european psytrance and its relation to goa. it names specific recordings and artists, dates and places, building on the earlier chapters which were rather more freeform, reflecting perhaps a goa trance state of mind. in particular this mature chapter gives credit to various sources often overlooked in such histories, such as electro body music (ebm) and klf. charles de ledesma goes on to explore the growth of psytrance in london. there is strong data here and interviews with key players, but this is inevitably a very london-centric ethnography, rather more local than the claimed uk coverage. robin lindop casts a wider net, defining and discussing the music itself, as well as the culture surrounding it. however, without a use of technical musical terminology, this is rendered a little vague. de ledesma does critically engage with the ways in which edm sometimes defines itself as “authentic” in opposition to the “mainstream”, but then goes on to claim that “psytrance is exemplary”. it is similarly contradictory over the subject of genre purity. like the following chapter by joshua schmidt, lindop provides some paradoxes in his writing, but overall provides useful information to the emerging wider narrative. schmidt uses pairs of dichotomies to critically analyse israeli trance. again this is a view from the inside of a scene, shown when it condemns as “chronic” the media’s description of israeli desert trance mesibot as “drug parties”, although it is clear from an external perspective why that description might be used. however schmidt’s work is succinct, well structured and provides a convincing argument. the last of the trilogy of sections weaves in and out of a vague focus on liminal culture. botond vitos begins by providing a rare insight into czech psytrance, although his argument is a little circular, perhaps due to a closeness to interlocutors who had recently and regularly taken lsd, a proximity which he tries to stretch away from instead of embracing. the fact that some of his interviewees described their activities using his own theories of demencze shows a rather acid splintered blurring of boundary between the emic and etic. chiara baldini’s approach is far bolder and more successful, making her position as party organiser clear and embracing material and references with a voice clearly internal to her and to psytrance. she draws upon the psy-spirit of dionysus in an effective correlation with her own experiences. the next two chapters, by jenny ryan and alex lambert, discuss the relationship of the web to psytrance from the perspectives of san francisco’s tribe.net and australia’s oztrance dancecult 2(1)96 community. the difficulty with this work is the use of individual web-posts to represent the views of the group, as there is often inevitably an opposing view that contradicts any point. however the significance of the web to this scene merits such attention, which is especially well presented in lambert’s cultural circuit. the last dance is reserved for graham st. john, who applies his experience and skill as an edm commentator to both reference other chapters and make significant points of his own, providing an appropriate climax to the narrative. st. john’s final chapter is the strongest in the book. it largely focuses on festival culture and on those technomads who travel from festival to festival, making psy-trance a lifestyle choice rather than a part-time activity. this is a recurring feature of the book, which focuses on the intensely committed few, rather the many casual psytrancers. this focus on festival culture feels unbalanced. in many cases the authors show their partisan attitudes and don’t so much struggle to maintain an objective attitude to their subject, as willingly submit to a pro-psytrance attitude. it is unsurprising that some chapters are written by relatively inexperienced researchers, rather than late career researchers with several books under their belts. this gives the work a currency and directness and although one could criticise the text in terms of clarity of emic or etic approaches, this would ignore the benefits that the writers’ proximity to psytrance culture provides. there have been many studies that have pointed out the difficulties western society faces in a fractured world that struggles to resolve issues of community, identity, belonging, hope and the loss of popular rituals that address such issues. studies addressing cultures that seem to be orientated around solutions to these issues, or new approaches to them, inevitably raise difficulties, may be controversial or inconclusive and in a post-meta-narrative world, fail to provide simple answers. however this book’s approach to issues such as communitas provides an engaging and novel approach to such problems. overall then the local scenes and global cultures of psytrance provides a valuable insight into a world-wide movement which has had comparatively little study so far. i am no novice to the world of psytrance, but this book provided a wide range of interesting, thoughtprovoking and informative detail, and is one i can highly recommend as essential reading to any researchers interested in edm culture. “a valuable insight into a world-wide movement which has had comparatively little study” reviews 97 pink noises: women on electronic music and sound tara rodgers durham: duke university press, 2010. isbn: 978-0-8223-4661-6 (hardcover), 978-0-8223-4673-9 (paperback) rrp: us$84.955 (hardcover), us$23.95 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.07 anna gavanas independent researcher, electronic music producer and dj tara rodgers’ book pink noises is a long overdue feminist intervention in the historiography of electronic music. pink noises emphasizes the pioneering, substantial and diverse work that has been accomplished by women but so far remained largely invisible in previous accounts of electronic music development. thereby, tara rodgers starts to correct the century long lack of representation that profoundly underestimates the presence and diversity of expressions by women working with sound and electronic music. the title pink noises (which is also the name of the producer/musician/dj network pinknoises.com founded by the author in 2000) refers to pink in terms of a “marker of female difference”, and noise as a “site of disturbance and productive potential”. tara rodgers also refers to the term pink noises in physics and audio engineering, as “variations of white noise, or unstructured sound that contains every audible frequency”. moreover, tara rodgers introduces her interviews with women artists as pink noises in and by themselves: “sonic interventions from multiple sources, which destabilize dominant gendered discourses and work toward equal power distributions in the cultural arenas where sounds reverbrate” (2010:19). structured as a collection of interviews/ conversations, pink noises documents and explains ground breaking innovations and visions in electronic music production and technology from the perspectives of the pioneers themselves. ground breaking and legendary international artists are interviewed, like pauline oliveros, kaffe matthews, giulia loli (mutamassik) and chantal passamonte (mira calix). the book is structured into six themes in electronic music; time/memory; space/perspective; nature/synthetics; circulation/movements; language/machines/embodiment; and alone/together. from a variety of different angles, rodgers and her interviewees disentangle assumptions that cast technology and music—and electronic music in particular—as male domains while, most importantly, discussing the dimensions and meanings of sound, expression and representation. moreover, pink noises reflects upon the cultural and political potential of sound itself. tara rodgers conceives of the potentials of sound, as a category of critical and aesthetic analysis, to feminist concerns in particular, arguing that “sounds can be thought of as pressure and movements, doing cultural work” (2010:19). dancecult 2(1)98 pink noises is an extremely important contribution to the study and documentation of electronic music because, unlike previous literature on electronic music, tara rodgers refuses to stop at the “thresholds that have silenced women’s work in historical accounts”. tara rodgers thus looks beyond the commonplace observation where most standard accounts stop and conclude that women constitute a minority in electronic music—as if this observation would explain their absence in literature and media. with pink noises, tara rodgers challenges the normalization of male dominance in the patrilineal historiography of electronic music. against the grain of ideologies aligning women with normative modes of heterosexual and capitalist reproduction, tara rodgers makes the argument that sounds themselves are reproductive, “to account for reproductive sounds in all their temporal depth is to challenge the patrilineal lines of descent and the universalizing male claims to creation that have thus far characterized dominant discourses in electronic music” (2010:15). although the professional interventions of interviewed artists go as far back as the 1950s, it is striking that similar gendered issues and experiences seem to reoccur throughout the generations of women who work with sound and electronic music. however, it is encouraging to read about the ways interviewees have prevailed and ignored gendered biases in the business; only to cultivate their subversiveness, innovation and determination even further. to someone who is extremely interested in the technical aspects of working with sound and music production it is very instructive to read pink noises. however, to someone who does not have a specific interest for technical aspects it could be difficult to follow the very informed conversations between the author and her interviewees. helpfully there is a detailed glossary on technical concepts. it is apparent throughout the book that the author has had previous contacts and collaboration with many interviewees, presumably through her own professional activity as a musician and her work with pinknoises.com. many of the participants in the book are part of the same international and/or overlapping musical/ professional scenes. it would be interesting to read more about the ways the author is situated in her field of study and the ways in which this influences her selection of interviewees, her questions and the responses. although rodgers probably has many good reasons for her decision to let interviewees speak for themselves and make their own analysis i sometimes feel that additional concluding, contextualizing and comparative commentary would be helpful. also, it would have been great to have a chapter on tara rodgers herself, and her long standing experience, electronic music production and reflection as electronic musician analog tara. all in all, pink noises is an extremely well informed, informative and inspiring discussion of some of the most crucial aspects and developments in electronic music. the innovators and actors behind these developments happen to be women and pink noises thereby highlights the astounding male centeredness in standard accounts and representation in electronic music. “ rodgers challenges the normalization of male dominance” reviews 99 technomad: global raving countercultures graham st john london: equinox publishing, 2009. isbn: 9781845536251 (hardcover), 9781845536268 (paperback) rrp: uk£50.00 (hardcover), uk£15.00 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.08 phil kirby university of liverpool, uk graham st john is a cultural anthropologist whose latest publication explores “themes of counterculture and resistance” in global electronic dance music culture (edmc). previous publications by st john explore psytrance and the intersection of rave culture and religion, key themes in technomad. the book is the result of eight years of research and offers a utopian study of rave culture, one in which legislation such as the uk’s criminal justice act and the onset of corporate clubbing hasn’t stopped the development of the free party scene. it adds to the evolving canon of academic literature that explores edmc culture and demonstrates a rigorous level of research. in an echo of centre for contemporary cultural studies (cccs) theory, st john frames the global techno-countercultures explored in technomad as “resistant”. st john acknowledges that anthony d’andrea has also explored the intersection of rave culture and post-1960s new (age) spirituality. where d’andrea attends to the cultural economy of psytrance “neo-nomads”, st john makes use of a significant range of theoretical stances including bey’s concept of the temporary autonomous zone (taz) to unpack the “fleeting permanence of contemporary counterculture” (2). technomad provides a cultural history of diverse alternative global edmc formations, the techno-underground, whose mobility has been partially facilitated by new digital technologies. the book’s focus is mainly on the nexus between hippy culture and rave culture, which has resulted in the evolution of edm sub-genres such as psytrance. st john divides the book into eight chapters and in the course of the first chapter, which serves as an introduction, quotes from much of the academic literature that explores rave culture. key themes are introduced that are then explored in more depth throughout the book; these include digital technology—both in terms of facilitating diy music production, its role in enabling alternative modes of communication and in framing dance music as a form of resistance used by activists to oppose rampant capitalism; gender issues and environmental issues. a key argument of technomad is that non-commercial forms of edmc are directly politicised by restrictive regulation and subsequently offer alternative spaces for a liminal communitas to evolve. dancecult 2(1)100 the second chapter explores the proliferation of a specific form of rave culture practice, the uk free party scene. the intersection of post-hippy uk free festival traveller culture and acid house music was in part facilitated by the appropriation and subsequent growth of sound system culture, a concept originally developed in jamaica in the 1950s. this chapter explores the growth of mobile dance music sound systems and what st john refers to as ‘traveller circuses’ such as spiral tribe. this nascent free party culture eventually culminated in the festival at castlemorton common in 1992, the event that precipitated the uk’s criminal justice and public order act of 1994. subsequent police attention and legislation had the unintended effect of gradually spreading these cultural practices around europe and beyond. st john notes the influence of various sound system crews as they stage events outside the uk. the third chapter maps the development and proliferation of sound system based edmc scenes in america, canada and australia. the integral role of the sound system in both reggae and hip hop culture has been noted in numerous histories of those genres, but st john successfully explores the key role that sound system practices have played in the global dissemination of particular strands of rave culture. st john then seeks to define the elusive “vibe” of a successful dance music experience, tracing the origin of the popular usage of the term back to the 1967 “summer of love” in san francisco. the study explores the idea that the term may have afro-american origins and connotations of eastern mysticism, “…the term now legion within edmc is used to denote a spatial and temporal experience, a collective and individual happening where a profound sensation of connection and mystery transpires” (99). from this definition various tribal edmc subdivisions are discussed in terms of “vibe tribes”. these tribes are not framed as mutually exclusive but explored in terms of “…a spectrum upon which the vibe may be characterized as libratory and divine at one end, and militant and proactive at the other” (103). the straightforward hedonism and release sought and achieved by many participants in mainstream edmc isn’t explored, as the project of the book is concerned with utopian outlaw countercultures. the various shamanistic/spiritual and activist tribal standpoints are explored in some depth offering useful insights for researchers interested in contemporary cultural anthropology. the author then explores a wide-ranging history of carnivalesque counter-cultural tribal gatherings, from san francisco’s golden gate park to the burning man. these ‘temporary alternative zones’ (or taz’s) and countercultural dramas are framed as “alternative futures”. the themes of spirituality and activism mentioned above inform the next two chapters. in chapter five technomad explores the intersection of rave culture and spirituality through an analysis of psytrance culture. st john defines psytrance as “…a carrier of the 1960’s counterculture flowering in the present” (165). he mentions the commercial “progressive trance” scene very briefly, acknowledging that it has ‘significant exchange value’, although it seems unlikely that the concept of the technocult explored by st john would mean much to the denizens of gatecrasher (www.gatecrasher.com; see also moore 2010). the pantheistic values of psytrance culture are discussed and the various occultist manifestations of the “trance ritual” are investigated, “itself a network of deviant and hidden knowledge and practice, from magick, prophecies and shamanism to astrology, esoteric christianity, ufos, http://www.gatecrasher.com reviews 101 and alien abductions, psytrance constitutes a discernable field of contemporary occultism” (169). parts of this chapter would seem familiar territory to readers of shea and wilson’s the illuminatus! trilogy, mainly as st john explores some of the global psytrance events leading up to the millennium and also some bizarre examples of psytrance ideology. for students and researchers interested in the evolution of goa-trance and the cultural practices and beliefs of the psytrance community, this chapter will provide a useful resource. the next chapter explores the harnessing of electronic dance music to a variety of activist agendas. these include anti criminal justice bill protests and reclaim the streets events. st john notes that “official” culture seeks to limit the dangers of carnivalesque excess, whilst recognising that carnival has a role in maintaining the equilibrium necessary for capitalism to thrive (presdee 2000). activists in turn have noted the dissident energy within the insurrectional dance-carnival and utilised it as a feature of contemporary protest and direct action. the implication of edm in a wide range of progressive and occasionally militant courses of action are explored; st john uses the neologism “protestival” to categorise these events of “radical conviviality”. initially the protestival was concerned with the regulation of dance music culture, but has since been harnessed to a range of different causes. the protest-carnival template has proliferated globally, partially facilitated by the internet. this leads to an interesting exploration of the intersection of activism, theatre and carnival in australia, the techno-tribes and sound systems discussed are concerned with injustices to both the aboriginal population and the environment. australians refer to outdoor edm events that synthesise transgressive, anarchistic and ecological sensibilities as “doofs”. the mobile sound system counterculture or “doofscape” discussed in this chapter is concerned with establishing valid links with the aboriginal population and seeks a respectful relationship with both the indigenous population and the land. the final brief chapter summarises the project of the book, to unpack the cultural politics of electronic dance music scenes. in many ways technomad achieves this successfully, although the focus of the book on the “outlaw” aspect of edm omits a significant range of practices and participants in edmc. however, as a contribution to the understanding of globalised dance music culture technomad offers many useful insights, both in terms of cultural anthropology, neo-religion and spirituality and the potential for edm as a form of activism. this exhaustively researched and meticulously crafted book provides a significant resource for all those interested in contemporary popular culture. references bey, hakim. 1991. t.a.z. the temporary autonomous zone, ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism. brooklyn: autonomedia. d’andrea, anthony. 2007. global nomads: techno and new age as transnational countercultures. london/new york: routledge. moore, karenza. 2010. the british ‘mainstream’ post-rave trance scene: exploring emotional and spiritual expression amongst ‘crasher clubbers’. in s. collins-mayo and b. pink-dandelion (eds.) religion and youth. aldershot: ashgate. presdee, m. 2000. cultural criminology and the carnival of crime, london: routledge. shea, robert, & wilson, anton. 1998. the illuminatus! trilogy. london: constable and robinson. dancecult 2(1)102 sonic warfare: sound, affect and the ecology of fear steve goodman cambridge: the mit press, 2010. isbn: 0-262-01347-9 (hardcover), 978-0-262-01347-5 (paperback) rrp: us$96.95 (hardcover), us$35.00 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.09 tobias c. van veen mcgill university, canada rave culture has long known of the power of sound to seduce bodies into becoming particles of a movement. dancer and dj become but one conduit of a feedback loop that affects the physical and the psychic. ecstasy, fear, horror, awe and excitement, as well as melancholy, nostalgia and transcendance form the connective tissue of the event. focusing on the “politics of frequency”, sonic warfare seeks to outline how the limits of sound are deployed within “vibration ontology”. goodman overviews military-state and countercultural usages alike, from audio assault weaponry for crowd control to dub audio viruses that transmit the offworld heritage of afrofuturism. an earworm, for example, can operate as an afrodiasporic riff of black noise that functions “as an attractor in processes of group catalysis”(157), such as the mobilization of dance; or, as a preemptive strike by hypercapital that “sets up a structure of allure for products for which you had no desire… because they do not necessarily exist yet” (186). tracing these parallel developments to early 20th century futurism and its “art of noise in the art of war” goodman dismisses the avant-garde camps of noise and silence alike, choosing (wisely) to focus on an ecology of rhythm and to argue for a complex and—perhaps essentially—incomplete philosophical inventory of vibration ontology. as goodman briefs in the introduction, readers looking for a detailed, historical account of sonic warfare should turn elsewhere. it is also worth noting—as goodman himself warns of his “dense theorisation”—that readers looking for an exegesis or comparative study of the text’s many philosophical sources should come prepared for neither. prepare instead for a somewhat chaotic assemblage of theoretical trajectories that zoom in and out of zones “goodman’s development of affect remains indispensible to studies of soniculture” reviews 103 of inquiry, from the futurhythmachines of the black atlantic to the bass materialism of global ghettotech. if that’s an earful, listen and repeat until sedated, for goodman has well adopted the deleuzo-guattarian maxim of conjoining it all with an “and”. fear not radical empiricism! affect and ontology of vibration goodman’s development of affect remains indispensible to studies of soniculture. for goodman, affect is the vibration—the good or bad vibes—prior to organisation into organised feeling (prior to what phenomenology would call intentionality). sonic weaponry seeks to disrupt or enhance the vibrational flux; it is capable of provoking feelings such as fear, dread or ecstasy through its good or bad vibes. goodman details actual sonic weaponry as well as fantastical projects that have promised more than delivered. he also aligns particular electronic music genres with various sonic effects, noting in particular how bass heavy genres—such as dub—generate atmospheres of dread, quipping their bass materialism as the “subpolitical power of music to attract and congeal populations” (172). elements of these theses were developed in goodman’s 2004 article, “speed tribes”. goodman’s approach, which he groups with radical empiricism, mixes the realms of the material and physiological with their often hazy effects upon subjects and cultures—the contested realm of the social sciences and cultural studies. in this respect, goodman develops a materialist perspective for grasping the affective potential of sound, be it the marching drum of the military, sonic cannons fired on insurgent protesters, or wobbly subbass let loose on east london club-dwellers. radical empiricism does not so much eschew cause and effect as much as it claims that effects operate autonomously of cause in an “ecology” of interrelationships (or rhythms and anticipatory echoes). radical empiricism opens the material world to preconscious interpenetration by its bodies (which can be any population, as whitehead’s “actual occasion”), as well as prehensive temporality, where “such an occasion itself starts as an effect facing its past and ends as a cause facing its future” (whitehead, quoted in goodman 152). in short, goodman eschews the a priori claims of phenomenology, substituting the radical empiricism of ecology. this, of course, requires an epistemological claim concerning knowing that which is aphenomenal and asubjective to the world. what we call sound itself is merely the human heard of the spectrum; goodman delves beyond even the ultra, sub and infrasonic, developing philosophies of rhythmanalysis by bachelard, lefebvre and whitehead (though one wishes he had spent more time with lefebvre, who explores the political capacities of rhythmanalysis, and in general less time with deleuze and guattari’s toolbox of usual suspects). in this respect, goodman practices what deleuze and guattari call a “minor science”; he delves headfirst into claims concerning hard science and metaphysical inquiry while suspending their epistemological uncertainty, thereby granting this form of empiricism, for better or for worse, its radicalism. that said, goodman footnotes the moment where his radical empiricism and graham harman’s speculative realism depart, noting his adherence to whitehead’s theories of relation over harman’s insistence on the rigorous conception of the discrete object (ch. 17). yet speculative realism holds intriguing consequences for goodman’s ontology of vibration. could discrete objects mark a particular phase of whitehead’s eternal object? dancecult 2(1)104 here i’ll dive into one particular argument to give a sense of what is at stake in the thesis of vibration ontology. the eternal vibrator goodman does not note if his adoption of the eternal object—which ingresses from pure potential into the real potential of the actual as it vibrates out-of-phase with itself (whew)—departs or concords with alain badiou’s neo-platonism. this becomes all the more significant when goodman talks of whitehead’s “actual occasions”—which are bodies in the general sense—being able to select eternal objects, which is how affective encounters between “discrete actual entities” occur (98). not only does a shadow of the discrete return, drawing attention to how radical empiricism shadows speculative realism, but goodman often writes as if a rhythmic power underpins vibration ontology (he treats audio viruses, or earworms, in a similar fashion, granting them an undefined agency he nearly denies human subjects (149)). in this respect, his adoption of the eternal object approaches a quasi-idealism, or a transcendentalism he elsewhere seeks to avoid. goodman’s radical empiricism, not surprisingly given its theoretical ground, dances around the question of spinoza’s god, i.e., the eternal vibrator. this problem can be recast in terms of politics. while goodman critiques bachelard for seeking equilibrium between counterrhythms (107), he nonetheless accepts philip turetsky’s account of rhythmic synthesis that forms matter into a single body (111). what is the difference between the two? well, for one, it is one of politics, or as goodman sees it, the micropolitics of frequency. goodman conceives of the “ontological ground” as fundamentally turbulent, a rhythmic anarchitecture which: . . . does not dictate the orientation of such a micropolitics; it does not lay down a set of generalizable laws but rather throws up a series of engineering problems. as such, any micropolitics derivable from this base can be only tactical rather than strategic—a war without aims concerned more with disposition and potential movement than ideology, although certainly susceptible to abduction (107). the problem is, of course, with alien abduction. the other always swoops in, alien, capitalist, totalitarian or otherwise viral, an earworm “takeover of the body by an exterior entity” (150) that overcodes tactical movement with strategy, setting up a violent mechanism of control over heterogeneous rhythms, and ultimately, of the “actual occasion” that is the self. like deleuze and guattari’s war machine, the tactical micropolitics of frequency or turbulence remain fundamentally inculpable. of course, we have hit upon the ideology of this position, which is its first generalizable law. its second generalizable law is already expressed above: being concerned with disposition and potential movement precisely is the ideogram of the micropolitics of frequency, its unification or expressed ideology as the perceived good, pre-abduction, of rhythmic anarchitecture. elsewhere goodman writes that “a theory of sonic warfare is particularly fascinated by this turbulent boundary layer between dance and violence” (111). what i understand goodman as trying to argue is that while vibrational control reviews 105 techniques such as sonic weaponry (from dub viruses to military means) seek to control the crowd by unifying it through resonance, thereby dictating it to move as one, at the ontological level its rhythm remains turbulent and nonunified. one can also see dance as a similar assemblage, where the soundsystem unifies differentiated bodies into what kodwo eshun called a “futurhythmachine”. thus, unification is not, in itself, a bad thing, but can be wrought for different ends say that of the military state, on the one channel, or that of jouissance, such as rave culture, on the other. that we are talking of ends and means suggests strategy, however, rather than tactics. this argument is a strong one, and smartly counters adorno’s well-worn conservative moralisms against mass dancing and jazz music, or benjamin’s aestheticization of politics, as somehow fundamentally fascist, questioning whether “aesthetics need be sacrificed at the altar of a political cause” (175). yet, there is a strict problem here: the potential to be unified is evidently inherent to rhythm. more than potential, it is an incorporated possibility before the fact; it is de jure. one could argue just as well that rhythm is fundamentally unified, which is to say one, and that turbulence is an expression of mode. again, this is spinoza’s problem, of the monadic substance of god expressed in the many. it haunts goodman’s text throughout, significantly with the undefined agency of the audio virus or earworm and the supposedly uncontaminated and interiorized body it penetrates by communicating the instruction “record me!” (150). a more ecological sense of interior/exterior would be of use here, of the earworm within that would whisper the effects of consciousness, suggesting the always already incorporation of alterity. in short, to the question: what concept of memory is compatible with the illogic of affect, the virtuality of the past and the active immanence of futurity in the present? one could reply, différance, insofar as derrida speaks of an absolute past, force, and the technics of the sign—the trace—before the re-marking of intentionality. and/or the logic of the supplement, otherwise known as incorporation, of that which is extraneous but necessary (that which is added after to make the thing whole from the start). derrida’s work on husserl could bridge the divide to deleuze and forms the unthought (or unsound) to goodman’s investigations. the political question of unified rhythm is raised by lefebvre, as well as deleuze and guattari, the latter whom grasp the state as the superposition of waves, a wave that cancels itself out (see van veen 2010: 183). superposed waves become a flat line that masks their turbulence, posing an entire problematic of perception, as well as form/content, ecological or otherwise, within rhythmanalysis. to this end, in the production of space, lefebvre even cautions against overstating the parallelism between hydrodynamics and theory (184). of course, goodman adequately argues a radical empiricism that claims all as rhythmic; it is a materialist theory of rhythm through-and-through that charts sociopolitical effects from the axioms of vibration ontology. which is to say the critical objection to goodman remains here. utilising vibrational ontology to script (or prescript) the political will of populations—or rather rendering viral such will, and “mapping” populations as preconscious rhythmic assemblages—dovetails neatly with 20th century second-order cybernetics as well as hypercapitalist (and fascist) strategy. unquestionably, such strategies—strategies as they serve political endgames— dancecult 2(1)106 are powerful. goodman demonstrates how they work in the world. yet they also do not work so well; no population has yet been adequately controlled (or so we perceive…). and undoubtedly this is also goodman’s point: that turbulence is a priori, that turbulence remains, in short, as a “subpolitics,” as it cannot be prescripted, even as resistance (175). it could be “abducted” in any direction. and in this sense, i agree with goodman, for his rhythmanalysis leaves us with a population (and a universe) that is without content, much like paolo virno’s conception of the multitude, or lefebvre’s analysis of the urban as form. yet, the alien, as all the sci-fi nightmares of horrific innards warn us, is always within. abduction occurs from within this same ontos; we abduct ourselves, unknowingly, aliens to ourselves. which leaves the question hanging: what is this uncanniness of the alien, its strange eternal return as the virus of our becoming? in short there is always an untimely question to the absolute claims of radical empiricism. whereas the virus remains, the material strategies of its dissemination do not; they mutate and change with the technics of history. for a materialist ontology of vibration, is it not, by its own admission, a tactic and not strategy, a viral thought to the metaphysics of eternal ontology? wildstyle ecology in mu-mu land the telescoping rhythm of shifting in and out of this increasingly complex and at times bizarre inventory of sonic weapons, inventions and theories touches upon the wildstyle. at times one wishes goodman would pitch down the rhythm and pause, downsampling more time to his soundbytes. in a particularly captivating passage, goodman fast-forwards a discussion between william burroughs and led zeppelin guitarist jimmy page on the potential of infrasonics; shifts to industrial band and performance artists throbbing gristle and their “infrasonic emitters;” and skips on to discuss the klf’s “audio weapons system” as borrowed by techno duo panasonic (now pan sonic). all this on page 24. as goodman makes clear on several occasions, “a brief overview will have to suffice” (17). yet the overview can be stimulating and a scrappy shot of wake-up. goodman emphasizes the potential of sound, writing how “at the very least, the transduction of bad vibes into something more constructive suggests the need to probe more deeply into affective tonality and the vibrations of the environment” (73). most ravers would agree. references goodman, s. 2004. “speed tribes: netwar, affective hacking and the audio-social”. in franz liebl and thomas düllo (eds), cultural hacking: kunst des strategischen handelns, pp. 139-55. vienna: springer. lefebvre, henri. 1991. the production of space. trans. donald nicholson-smith. oxford: blackwell. van veen, tobias c. 2010. “cities of rhythm and revolution”. in alexandra boutros and will straw (eds), circulation and the city: essays on mobility and urban culture, pp. 155-192. montréal: mcgill-queens up. reviews 107 film music world: donk dir. andy capper vbs:tv (internet documentary), 2009. http://www.vbs.tv/en-gb/watch/music-world/donk phil kirby university of liverpool (uk) this review explores the vbs.tv documentary on the uk electronic dance music style known as “donk”. the genre is referred to by a number of names including scouse house, bouncy house, bouncy techno, bounce or donk. the term bounce will be used throughout the review as the term donk has a pejorative dimension. the style is an offshoot of hardcore techno, which has had a number of variants popular in the north of england. the tunes are around 150 bpm with a four-on-the-floor kick drum, whilst the eponymous “donk” itself is a layered sound or stab that occurs on the offbeat, or “and” of each beat. synthesised musical parts in the tunes are akin to european techno, a stylistic template that has more in common with the sonic palette of 2 unlimited than that of basic channel. some bounce releases feature vocals, or rapid-fire mc’ing in an unashamedly uk regional accent. the focus of the documentary is mainly the blackout crew, although other uk mcs and producers are featured. blackout crew’s 2008 single put a donk on it may have only reached number 91 in the uk charts, but the official video had well over five million hits on youtube, and consequently attracted “mainstream” media attention. the genre is little known outside of the north west and north east of england. indeed, in the north west of england the style is mainly popular in the satellite towns between liverpool and manchester such as st helens and wigan, and towns to the north of manchester such as bolton, burnley and blackburn. the documentary is on initial viewing quite funny, until the realisation sinks in that it is a heavily biased, stereotype-laden snipe at the leisure practices of the white northern working class. the documentary begins by exploring blackout crew’s origins in a bolton youth centre. notably, considering the multi-cultural makeup of most of the towns named above, the only representatives of ethnic minorities filmed in the documentary are the managers of the youth centre (and a promoter later in the video). northern hardcore and its sub-styles have never been of much interest to young black or asian clubbers. the black respondents’ comments in the video are subtitled despite being perfectly comprehensible; indeed this doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.10 http://www.vbs.tv/en-gb/watch/music-world/donk dancecult 2(1)108 patronising use of subtitles occurs randomly throughout the video. the next sequence takes place in burnley, introduced by a series of visual tropes intended to convey a sense of acute urban deprivation. the presenter briefly interviews an ex-mc and questions him on local drug use, this respondent seems to have been included solely as he has been to prison. after some more clichéd camera shots the next respondent offers a more positive view of the town than the earlier montage suggested, despite being repeatedly questioned on the area’s alleged propensity for violence. a bounce producer dj greenie is subsequently interviewed; he responds to questions about the scene’s drug use by coyly stating a comparison to the film human traffic, inferring the use of ecstasy. greenie is questioned on the centrality of steroids to the donk scene, to which he responds, “wigan pier’s full of big lads on steroids”. in the next sequence the documentaryfollows blackout crew to a gig in scarborough. the documentary crew film some sequences outside the venue, one is an interview with a promoter who discusses the problems of booking the band outside the style’s heartlands, describing the southern audience as “more urban, more sophisticated in a sense”. the narrative then returns to bolton, signified by a montage featuring a pie shop, a tanning salon, a tattoo studio and a barbershop. after more interviews the focus shifts to a blackout crew performance at wigan pier, but not before another montage including a camera shot of a local newspaper headline proclaiming wigan thug beats mum to be and yet more shots of fast food shops. footage of young males being checked for weapons with a hand-held metal detector is included to connote a threat of violence. the next sequence sums up the overall tone of the documentary, despite the friendly interviewees and carefree enthusiasm of the pier’s crowd, the documentary team can’t resist sniping at the provincial working class audience, “as the night went on hundreds more fake-tanned, steroid-pumped donk enthusiasts filled the floor, tongues blue from drinking wkd”. as the blackout crew perform, the presenter then comments that the music starts to sound like being trapped in a nail factory, before paraphrasing joseph conrad’s heart of darkness, “what you see here is the beating heart of donk, the heart of donkness, oh the horror, the horror”. to bookend the video the documentary team return to bolton the next day to interview one of the blackout crew mcs. as a product of the vice media group the documentary has a pre-ordained agenda to be mildly controversial and to come across as edgy gonzo journalism, hence the underlying fixation with drugs, violence and urban deprivation. this subtext is reinforced by the “quite funny, until the realisation sinks in that it is a heavily biased, stereotype-laden snipe at the leisure practices of the white northern working class” reviews 109 connotations supplied by the montage sequences and the chosen edits. the documentary team are given a consistently friendly welcome and open access to the scene by all whether practitioners or clubbers yet still choose to mock the northern working class whenever possible. this isn’t a highbrow dance music style, but then again neither are grime or funky (uk garage sub-styles), which are generally treated with some degree of reverence by the british media, possibly as these styles initially emanated from the south of england and have greater perceived (sub) cultural capital. other related media coverage demonstrates this bias. the guardian newspaper included a brief feature on donk in 2008 (by a vice contributor) which had the headline, “bouncy techno meets terrible rapping? welcome to donk. keen on sportswear? prone to taking your shirt off in clubs? donk is made for you” (mcdonnell 2008). in a promotional article in the metro newspaperthe producer discusses the making of the vbs documentary: the most shocking element was just how massive most of these dudes were. they all had their tops off and the drugs are paramount. they take ecstasy, steroids, a bit of cocaine and then blue or red alcopops. we’ve been making a load of films recently, including one about cannibals in liberia, but there were bits of donk that were just as scary—like being the only sober ones among 3,000 ravers on steroids and ecstasy (capper cited by day 2010). the documentary says much about the predominantly middle-class media’s attitude to white working class britain and specifically london-based media’s attitude to the north of england. the selection of material, the content of the montages and the editing reinforces entrenched stereotypes concerning the north of england and white working class leisure. the documentary is augmented by a vice article on the making of the programme, which is noticeably more scathing than the documentary. for example, in a passage describing burnley the writer states the following hyperbole: what used to be a prosperous cotton-mill town is now decimated by the terminal decline of industry, with entire square miles of housing steel-boarded-up, repossessed and marked for demolition by the local council. unemployment is all-consuming, violence is a popular pastime—as is the rampant theft of expensive copper pipes from condemned houses to sell as scrap to pay for heroin and crack. it’s practically a ghost town these days, but instead of headless cavaliers with chains clanging around their wrists and ankles, there are gaggles of toothless, skeletal smackheads waddling around in skid-mark-stained tracksuit bottoms. actually, scratch that—it’s more zombie town than ghost town (hodgson 2009). obviously, burnley isn’t that bad, although if you look for that kind of social deprivation it can be found in many urban centres. crack and heroin use are not exclusively northern pastimes and neither is violence. another example of tabloid journalism in the vice article is the following statement describing the crowd in wigan pier: the crowd was a mixture of skimpily dressed, emaciated rave bunnies and some of the most gruesome thugs you’d ever come across—blokes whose faces had been dancecult 2(1)110 permanently disfigured by a lifetime of being pummeled by fists every weekend, who’ve probably washed down massive doses of steroids with gallons of stella for breakfast every morning since they were 11 years old (hodgson 2009). although the vbs.tv documentary is aimed at popular consumption, it does raise issues of academic interest other than media representation. there is potential for further academic research on the various dance music subcultures that have blossomed in the north of england outside of the metropolitan centres. an example of an interesting piece of previously published work on northern dance music culture is ingham’s (1999) listening back from blackburn: virtual sound worlds and the creation of temporary autonomy. this is a brief but fascinating study of the warehouse party scene that blossomed in the blackburn area in 1989-1990. northern soul has now achieved a mythic status and has received some academic attention, but the audience demographic was very similar to that of bounce nowadays, as were the audience demographics for the other hardcore house and techno variants that preceded bounce in the same geographic area. linking these styles historically could be socially and culturally revealing. references day, james. 2010. “donk is the crazy dance sensation taking over the north-west of england”. metro, 31 march: <http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/819812-donk-is-the-crazy-dance-sensationtaking-over-the-north-west-of-england>. hodgson, jaimie. 2009. “put a donk on it”. vice. <http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n2/htdocs/ put-a-donk-518.php>. ingham, james. 1999. “listening back from blackburn: virtual sound worlds and the creation of temporary autonomy”. in living through pop, ed. a. blake, 112-128). london: routledge. mcdonnell. john. 2008. “bouncy techno meets terrible rapping? welcome to donk”. guardian online. 29 july: <http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2008/jul/29/ bouncytechnomeetsterribler>. “the crowd was a mixture of skimpily dressed, emaciated rave bunnies and some of the most gruesome thugs you’d ever come across—” http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/819812-donk-is-the-crazy-dance-sensation-taking-over-the-north-west-of-england http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/819812-donk-is-the-crazy-dance-sensation-taking-over-the-north-west-of-england http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n2/htdocs/put-a-donk-518.php http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n2/htdocs/put-a-donk-518.php http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2008/jul/29/bouncytechnomeetsterribler http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2008/jul/29/bouncytechnomeetsterribler reviews 111 speaking in code dir. amy grill usa: square productions, 2008. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1474864/ tobias c. van veen mcgill university, canada you can still smell the revolution a bit, you know. —modeselektor with the proliferation of digital film technologies, i’ve been waiting to witness a film that captures the obsession and exuberance of the worldwide technoculture. by techno i have a specific meaning in mind. with the collapse of north american rave culture thanks to 9/11—which, among other things, disrupted vinyl distribution as well as introduced draconian police powers that were deployed everywhere against autonomist enclaves—djs, producers and adherents of the house and techno sound fled the states. this remains an undocumented exodus of creative luminaries. though montréal served, for a few years, as a nexus of technoculture thanks to the mutek collective—many of my canadian comrades moved to montréal around 2002—it was berlin that soon overcame all comers. easy travel within a united europe, cheap living and the fierce protection of personal freedoms made berlin not just an inexpensive and convenient place to live, but made it (along with barcelona) the place to imagine collective cultural anarchism. the jouissance of deep, psychedelic, minimalist or maximalist techno betrays not only this yearning, but its reality, which is what few north americans realise. berlin and barcelona, though each fighting their battles against gentrification, are singularities of the way things could be. perhaps even should be. amy grill’s film captures something of the meaning of techno to berliners. techno is not just clubbing catharsis; it is the soundtrack to the fall of the wall. as a few interviews (and deleted scenes) explain, when the wall fell in 1989, the centre of berlin opened into unoccupied and stateless space. ravers crept in, setting up technoclubs in bunkers and buildings. the infamous tresor was such a space; today berghain upholds the tradition. signs of this sociocultural renaissance appear everywhere in this film, where modernistdoi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.11 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1474864/ dancecult 2(1)112 inflected graffiti, inside and out, signifies resistance to speculation in property values. already, there is much to film: the relation of a free europe to the policed urbanism of north america; a thorough updating of the afrogermanic detroit/berlin axis wrought back in 1990; and the development of the later cross-atlantic dialogue with montréal, diving south in this regard, with mutek’s mexico and chile editions. though digging into berlin, and touching upon barcelona, speaking in code falls somewhat short of investigating the planetary potential of this techno matrix. focusing on grill’s hometown of boston, and her ex-husband david day’s struggle to produce technoculture in a town that mostly doesn’t care (like the rest of the conservative us), the film often forgets to provide some much-needed context to this mini-cultural revolution. after a few starts, it settles down on german labels bpitch control and kompakt, as the personal lives and meteoric careers of modeselektor and the wighnomy brothers become central to the narrative. both duos have to deal with celebrity and stress, as they find themselves gigging constantly, with modeselektor playing to tens of thousands at barcelona’s sonar festival. the massive scale of sonar is well contrasted to david day’s burnt-out efforts in boston, where day eventually loses track of his community, driving his new afterhours loftspace into the ground (at one point, he talks of putting on events night after night after ‘getting everyone else [i.e. his fellow artists!] out of the building’). a few other technorati make appearances, including the ever eccentric and incredibly inventive monolake, a.k.a. robert henke, prime programmer of ableton live and dub techno composer, whose spartan, all-white loft matches, without irony, his all-white techno outfit. another memorable appearance is that of music journalist and dj philip sherburne, who strives to explain, in an incredibly touching moment—he breaks down on camera— the true significance of hearing and what it means to him, thanks to his relationship with his deaf father, who received a hearing implant a few years before his death in 2005. indeed, philip’s ever articulate and composed persona is a highlight of the film; one wishes there was more from this evocative american writer. likewise, the ever elusive wolfgang voigt—an acid house-era techno producer and owner/operator of the kompakt empire—appears in fine form, situating “cultural techno” as not only still a part of ecstatic rave culture, but as a step beyond—a form-of-life. you will find more years to say something without words. —modeselektor reviews 113 the artist set-pieces of speaking in code are beautifully composed. each taps deeply into the ups-and-downs of living-and-breathing technoculture. the wighnomy brothers are exceptional; they live in the six person “small communist collective” of freude-am-tanzen, sharing equally in profits and running their own label, work/live space and distribution out of the small, mostly rural town of jena in former east germany. yet one wishes that the film went deeper still. when the very lovable, teddy bear-like robag wruhme of the brothers decides to take a breather from the relentless touring schedule, his absence remains something of a mystery. as a former technoculture journalist, i can’t help but think of what to ask him. i’d ask him if he misses his commune—surely, because he has spent his life, up to that point, working and living in an autonomist collective? to be thrown headfirst into the hypercommercialism and opportunist corporatism of mainstream european techno-pop culture must have been a dilemma—if not a cultural shock to the system. at sonar, massive digital billboards advertise alcohol, as if by bastardized simile they have overcoded the absent artistic visuals (look closely during modeselektor’s set). i’d hypothesize that wruhme’s retreat signifies that not all are comfortable with what “successful” technoculture has become. yet, the film only glances over divided yet interconnected levels of technoculture in europe. some are quite literally underground; the incredible muna club in jena reclaims a wwii-era rocket factory. an entire dimension of the ritual denazification of this space through dance is left uncommented. then there are the arena festivals of cigarette sponsorship bound by chain-link fences. the very opening of the film, for reasons that are left unexplained, rolls with some rather uninspiring footage of a dutch techno festival. as the camera enters through the vip gate, a sea of garbage and burnt-out bodies meets the eye, everyone seemingly unaware of the destitution of their camp-like surroundings… this is a fenced-in wasteland of the wasted, yet it is presented, without critique, as a tease of what’s to come. is this wasteland symbolic for something else in this film? well, yes. the evident struggle between technoculture’s collectivism and its commercialism, its schizoid, yet symbiotic relationship with corporate entertainment, is sacrificed to amy grill’s focus on her disintegrating relationship with david day. choosing “speaking in code shows that technoculture can be a communal, lifelong adventure in art, music and living, achieving escape velocity, at least for the inventive, from its youthful escapism and burn-out hedonism” dancecult 2(1)114 to narrativise her failing relationship with an always-omniscient voice-over, grill never places herself before the camera, even as she captures day in all his darkest moments. the film’s gaze does not match its voice; the director indulges in a selective narcissism, revealing only a strangely affectless narration to what is left unseen. by the end of the film the pair are divorced and what begins as an aside becomes the film’s peroration. their disintegration into divorce eschews cinema verité, embracing instead the conventionality of reality tv. what is more intriguing is all that is left unsaid. for example, why is montréal only mentioned once and the mutek festival never mentioned at all? north america is depicted as the graveyard of electronic music, yet there is no mention of the cities where technoculture has survived. also absent are vancouver’s new forms festival and seattle’s decibel. and then there’s detroit—its festival and heritage left unheard and unmentioned. the same can be said for san francisco, chicago, nyc and the midwest. this not only leaves the average audience unawares of the states’ founding as well as continuing contribution to electronic music, but it also leaves the current depiction of berlin’s technoscene and boston’s lack of it—despite day’s valiant attempts at a brief flowering—as somewhat hollow and meaningless. the united states lost something with 9/11—the total expression of a generation, silenced off the airwaves, policed and beaten down, denied even the nostalgia granted to punk. rave culture was not only underground; it has now been buried in the us, as if it never existed, as if the blurring of gender and colour and dance never happened. which brings me to the inevitable but essential question of representation. though ellen allien appears as head of bpitch control, speaking wonderfully of the emotive aspect of techno and the supportive atmosphere she strives to create in her label collective, she remains the sole woman onscreen. but most embarassingly, there is not one single black person in the film. one would think techno was invented and played solely by white people in berlin. in fact, the only reference to techno’s heritage in black detroit is a symbol, worn as a badge of respect by modeselektor. during their massive but ad-ridden sonar concert, sebastian szary wears an underground resistance t-shirt. good for him. full disclosure. i like others am a ghost in this film. i saw it being filmed. i’ve djed in many of the same places. i know and love most everyone in it. i love the music. it is difficult, in this respect, to write critically, especially given the usual laudatory press. but ditch the melodramatic divorce narrative and you have a documentary of profound intimacy and insight into the fragility of collective creation. speaking in code is a snapshot of a radical soniculture attempting to achieve a strange kind of equilibrium in the 21c. both henke and voigt say the same thing: they don’t see the need for change. but it’s more than that. speaking in code shows that technoculture can be a communal, lifelong adventure in art, music and living, achieving escape velocity, at least for the inventive, from its youthful escapism and burn-out hedonism. sometimes divorce is necessary for radical togetherness. reviews1.2-typeset reviews 112 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 reviews reggaeton. raquel z. rivera, wayne marshall, and deborah pacini hernandez (eds). durham and london. duke university press, 2009. isbn: 978-0-8223-4360-8 (hardcover), 978-0-8223-4383-5 (paperback) rrp: us$89.95 (hardcover), us$24.95 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.09 alejandro l. madrid university of illinois at chicago (us) when certain products or practices attain a more secure place in a particular cultural landscape they tend to become naturalized in the minds of those who experience such landscapes; it is almost as if they had always been there, they become “authenticated”. this seems to be the case with reggaeton. as i sit down to write this review i ask myself when i heard about reggaeton for the first time and i cannot find an answer. when pushing myself to remember anything related to what i now believe belongs to the reggaeton performance complex, a number of fragmented images and sounds come to mind. i remember el general in local, low budget shows from the telemundo or univisión tv networks in new york city and boston in the early 1990s; then students asking me about the genre (and actually calling it reggaeton) almost ten years later in chicago; finally, its explosion into the mainstream media in 2005, and its pervasive presence in clubs in havana, cuba, that summer. although most of these memories are rather vague and patchy, what i do remember clearly is not being able to explain thoroughly what reggaeton was. the sounds and the images seemed to have always been there since the 1990s, but in fact, reggaeton was something relatively new, and as such, also somehow elusive. since the mid 2000s reggaeton has arguably become the most danced and talked about latin music genre. it is omnipresent in latin american and latin media in the u.s.; yet, with few exceptions and disregarding its artistic success and its importance as a marker of the transnationality that characterizes contemporary latino and latin american experiences of identity, reggaeton had largely remained absent from academic discussion. reggaeton, edited by raquel z. rivera, wayne marshall, and deborah pacini hernandez, is an appropriate, timely, and thorough response and reflection on the genre’s popularity. the volume is an impressive collection of academic essays and artistic statements that deals with reggaeton’s cultural significance and stylistic meaning, and the history of transnational migration, oppression, and racial struggle behind its production, consumption, and dissemination. the aesthetic, sociological, anthropological, and political complexity of the reggaeton phenomenon can only be seriously approached from a multidisciplinary perspective. reggaeton offers a multi-logic reading where several disciplines and fields of artistic expression come together to answer questions that no disciplinary field could comprehensively answer alone. the demonstrated expertise in the fields of sociology, ethnomusicology and anthropology of the editorial team, as well as their commitment to the study of music through a transnational lens almost guaranteed the extraordinary depth and variety that this collection of essays, interviews, poetry and visual arts offers. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(2) 2010, 113-127 issn 1947-5403 ©2010 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ the book is divided into six sections. in the first section, “mapping reggaeton”, wayne marshall offers a detailed study of the stylistic development of the genre. by focusing on the transformation of the sounds and rhythms that characterize today’s reggaeton as they traveled historically through a cultural circuit that included jamaica, panama, new york and puerto rico, marshall is able to explain the links between genres such as reggae, dancehall, rap, underground, and reggaeton, whilst shedding light on the discourses of “authenticity” behind them. the second part, “the panamanian connection”, presents articles by marshall and christoph twickel as well as interviews with singers renato and el general; the combination of academic and journalistic writings alongside the artists speaking about their experiences gives the reader a rich description of the history of reggae and dancehall in panama as well as the role of american culture in the slow development of a new style that would only be called reggaeton many years later. part three, “(trans)local studies and ethnographies”, is made out of articles that focus on specific issues related to local reggaeton scenes in puerto rico (raquel z. rivera), cuba (geoff baker), and miami ( jose davila), and a re-evaluation of the role of dominican musicians and producers in the development of the genre (deborah pacini hernandez). rivera’s chapter traces the transformation of underground into reggaeton in puerto rico in relation to questions of morality and censorship. this essay pays attention to the commercial notoriety of the genre and its transformation into a site for the continued struggles over the representation of racialised stereotypes about class and criminality, and social hierarchies of the island. baker’s essay on the political tensions between rap and reggaeton in cuba is a noteworthy contribution that analyzes how both genres play a central role in the current imagination of the national and the global in a socialist country. the fourth part of the book, “visualizing reggaeton”, offers a collection of pictures by miguel luciano and kacho lópez, and stills from a video project by carolina caycedo. this section shows readers the visual aspect of reggaeton culture as well as how artists engage that culture to reflect on issues of neocolonialism, consumerism, gender, sexuality, race, and “authenticity” that concern contemporary latino youth. caycedo’s reads the hypersexualized perreo dancing style that characterizes reggaeton as an example of a new form of feminism that allows women to reclaim their sexualized bodies and use them to accomplish their own goals. part five, gendering reggaeton, presents chapters by félix jiménez, alfredo nieves moreno, and jan fairley that explore the role of reggaeton in reproducing gender values as well as contesting gender hierarchies as the genre moves transnationally between new york city, puerto rico, and cuba. jiménez’s essay compares the figures of puerto rican singers glory and ivy queen to illustrate how different individuals might engage the gender stereotypes of reggaeton to solidify or question gender hierarchies in puerto rican society; while nieves moreno focuses on how the music and performance of calle 13 challenge the stereotypes of hypermasculinity often associated with reggaeton. fairley’s contribution centers on the sexualization of the bodies in perreo dancing within the particular context of cuba’s reggaeton scene. one of fairley’s wise moves is her comparative analysis of the transgressive character of perreo in relation to earlier black genres such as danzón, rumba, tango, or samba; thus interpreting reggaeton as part of the transnational cultural flow of african diasporic culture. the final section of the book is entitled “reggaeton poetics, politics, and aesthetics”, and combines poetry by gallego and reflections on the relationship 114 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 between hip hop and reaggeton and black pride by artists welmo e. romero joseph and tego calderón with analyses by alexandra t. vázquez and frances negrónmuntaner. noteworthy is vázquez’s provocative essay on racial and gender performativity and ivy queen, providing as it does an insight into how to deconstruct contradictory and problematic moments in performance as pedagogical articulations. reggaeton is a truly important contribution to our understanding of the most pervasive and perhaps most misunderstood latin musical genre at the turn of the 21st century. the blend of academic and journalistic writings with artistic statements, interviews and visual art offers the reader an extraordinary window into the complex landscape of reggaeton. as i was reading through the book i could not help thinking: “no wonder i thought reggaeton had always been here”. the rich discussions presented in this volume allows the reader to have a clearer idea of the continuities that make this genre part of a larger cultural complex while defining its particularities as a rather new type of musical expression. as i put the book down i feel confident i could finally somehow explain what reggaeton is; however, i also understand that the vibrant and shifting cultural flows that make it meaningful will most likely challenge this assumption sooner than later. with reggaeton, however, raquel z. rivera, wayne marshall, and deborah pacini hernadez have established the foundation for the rich and productive academic conversation that the genre will still generate. rave culture. the alteration and decline of a philadelphia music scene. tammy l. anderson. philadelphia, temple university press, 2009. isbn: 978-1-59213-934-7 (hardcover), 978-1-59213-934-7 (paperback) rrp: us$79.50 (hardcover), us$25.95 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.10 beate peter manchester metropolitan university (uk) in her book on the philadelphia electronic dance music (edm) scene, tammy anderson uses rave culture to reflect on why and how particular youth cultures decline. her ethnographic methodology, turning her into a participant-observer, is helpful as it provides invaluable insight into the organisation, production and marketing of electronic dance music. investigating the rave phenomenon from a cultural perspective, she places a scene primarily defined by its music consumption into a wider social, political and cultural context. this approach allows her not only to analyse the forces within the scene that led to its alteration and decline but also to look at external factors that might have affected the perception and development of the edm scene in philadelphia, usa. comparing the past raves with contemporary edm events, anderson traces the development of such events over time. her historical narrative of the genre opposes the notion that rave is a musical form of a particular time, commonly situated between reviews 115 1989 and 1992. she creates a rave-club culture continuum that categorises edm events according to their representation of commercial or rave-like values. by doing so, anderson successfully shows that the multi-faceted space at edm events abolishes the idea of authenticity and commercialism as a binary opposition. applying cultural markers, anderson locates several types of events within this continuum and promotes the idea of a spectrum of values that show how the identity of rave culture has changed. she also introduces six different types of participants, categorised according to their insider or outsider status. as entertaining as it is to read about the difference between loyalists, clubbers, pretenders or spillovers and their personal motivation to participate in an edm event, this model struggles to explain the interest in or absence of a collective identity. although the ethnographic data collected from interviewees gives an interesting insight into the upbringing of insiders and offers an explanation for the sense of belonging that some aim for on the dance floor, other participant categories are ignored, making a distinction between the ideal types of clubbers and their attitude towards the creation of a collective identity inappropriate. anderson’s analysis of the forces of cultural change is one of the most interesting aspects of this book, not just from the perspective of a musicologist but also because the alteration and decline of rave culture is presented as symbolising the general trend of youth cultures and scenes. first, the general schism between grassroots music enthusiasts on the one hand and younger fans on the other clearly shows how cultural and social values are embedded in a generation’s attitude towards the production, marketing, promotion and consumption of music. second, anderson’s investigation into the causes and effects of the commercialisation of raves relates back to rave-club culture continuum. furthermore, the empirical evidence from her fieldwork shows that such development appears to be innate to youth culture and music. thus, the mourning and resistance to change of original grassroots rave culture participants appears inappropriate, especially if it prevents a scene from surviving (new fans are not welcomed). third, the aspect of cultural otherness and hedonism is closely linked to rave culture’s prominent drug use. more interesting is the point anderson raises in her discussion of deviation over the extent to which the notion of otherness can still act as a recruitment factor for a specific culture and the question as to when deviance becomes self-destructive. again, anderson formulates her questions in such a way that a broader debate is encouraged. fourth, the aspect of formal social control includes an examination of the politics and policies in both the us and uk to provide a base from which to argue for a completely different attitude towards edm to that of club owners, promoters and fans. fifth, genre fragmentation is identified by anderson as a result of commercialisation. with the original rave ethos having all but vanished, special events prevent fans from being exposed to various musical genres or styles. considering some of the comments in the book, the fragmentation of the genre into a wealth of subgenres could also be interpreted as the escape from commercial exploitation, a move that might have been seen by some stakeholders as liberation from commercial restraints and expectations. the chapter dealing with cultural forces is one of the work’s strongest, since it puts rave culture’s alteration and decline into a wider perspective. moreover, anderson shows how these different forces are interdependent and how they are linked to a particular society’s understanding and appreciation of leisure time, music, and deviance: “simply put, a culture’s fate lies in attracting birth cohorts and demographic groups, the destruction in or diffusion of its elements and form, its exploitation via 116 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 industry, and its suppression by the state” (112). chapter five is similarly broad in approach, scope and applicability, dealing as it does with the types of cultural work that aim to produce both change and stability for a (musical) youth culture. anderson’s division of cultural work into restoration, preservation and adaptation makes it clear that the objectives of the various members of this youth culture differ to such a degree that the use of cultural markers on the rave-club culture continuum seems justified. furthermore, it highlights that this continuum is expandable in all directions and establishes a proof for the diversity within the culture. the comparative study between philadelphia, london and ibiza in chapter six, however, lacks the depth and critical analysis of previous chapters. it is unclear why those cities were chosen, what they represent or even what the results mean with regard to pan-european research (usa, spain, germany), global youth cultures (nomads), the aspect of nationality (britishness), or regionalism (lots of sunshine in ibiza, non-organic setting). nevertheless, this weakness does not damage my overall evaluation of anderson’s book as not only a well-written account of the philadelphia edm scene and its historical changes but also the importance of its emphasis on scenes in general. in doing so her achievements are threefold. first, anderson’s use of broad categories and cultural markers that do not over-emphasise the significance of music make her research applicable to other subject areas. her investigation of philadelphia’s rave culture is by no means exclusive in its articulation of factors internal and external to a scene. they are proof of the deep rootedness of youth culture in society regardless of levels of deviance. second, anderson’s analysis of cultural work shows that youth culture cannot be seen as a fixed and stable entity that vegetates aimlessly. instead, participants in a particular culture might be motivated for various reasons but they are very active in keeping their youth culture alive. third, according to anderson’s participant categorisation i am a loyalist and as such very protective of a scene with great emotional investment. reading a book about the decline of my favourite youth culture that, for many years, played a big role in my identity formation, meant i read anderson’s research with some scepticism. but, perhaps most important of all, her convincing arguments are refreshing precisely because they are free from the nostalgic longing for a grassroots rave culture. reviews 117 club cultures: boundaries, identities and otherness. silvia rief. new york and abingdon, routledge, 2009. isbn: 978-0-415-95853-0 (hardcover only) rrp: uk£70.00 (hardcover only) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.11 fiona hutton university of wellington (new zealand) in introducing her book silvia rief makes the point that clubbing has become a global phenomenon which takes place in diverse settings such as street parades and music festivals. whilst clubbing may have “gone global”, the local remains crucial when exploring such diversity. rief aims to examine club cultures and “particular modes of being and experience” in the shaping of cultural and social identities (8), and in so doing argues that the study of club cultures needs to be placed within broader contexts such as de-industrialisation, urban regeneration and the development of urban night time economies (ntes). the book reflects on the development of the ntes and the importance of clubbing in both london and istanbul. in addition rief utilises debates about authenticity, aestheticization, virtualization, reflexivity and otherness to develop her analysis. this is an ambitious project encompassing many diverse topics that reveal fascinating insights into contemporary club cultures. in chapter two rief compares london and istanbul and the urban regeneration that took place in both cities which contributed to the development and governance of the nte and in turn had a significant effect on club cultures. clubbing was actively encouraged in london’s urban redevelopment and the importance of nightlife in the tourism industry was recognised; in istanbul this emphasis on nightlife was not as explicit due to the islamist ruling government. this chapter contains an excellent discussion of the tensions in the development of the ntes of both cities. the explosion in british urban ntes and the issues surrounding so-called “binge drinking” have meant that nightlife has become re-problematised. a fascinating examination of the development of clubbing in istanbul is also put forward; rief notes for example that social divisions are very much in evidence, with clubbing more often than not associated with “upmarket events for wealthy middle-class and celebrity audiences” (51). following this discussion of urban renewal and its impact on the development of london’s and istanbul’s nightlife, rief turns to mapping the uk nte in chapter three, arguing that the role of clubbing and dance cultures has received little attention in such exercises. the difficulty in accurately mapping the uk nte and the cultural production industries involved is highlighted at the beginning of this chapter. these cultural production industries consist of micro-companies which do not appear on “established indicators” (58) and therefore often escape notice. writers such as chatterton and hollands (2003) are pessimistic about the domination of clubbing and nightlife by large companies and the corporatization of clubbing experiences. rief does not share their pessimism and while she recognises the power of large companies in this competitive sector she argues that even in global markets the local is still important, apparent in the diversity of club cultures within and between various 118 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 towns and cities. chapter three also charts the history of major uk club corporations such as the ministry of sound and discusses the rising costs of producing club spaces. rief also considers legislation such as the licensing act 2003 which affected the way club spaces are or can be produced. she concludes this chapter by stating that “the economic significance of the nightclub sector is considerable but not extraordinary” (76), again highlighting that the sector contains a large number of small independent companies. although i agree with rief that it is useful to consider club cultures in their broader social and cultural contexts, i did find myself wondering what these economic policies and issues meant for the consumers of club spaces. with this in mind i started chapter four with relish; here rief discusses the (clubbing) body and the organisation of clubbing experiences. she makes the point that clubbers immerse themselves in club cultures for different reasons and that many clubbers are still connected to the “everyday” (83). this challenges the idea that clubbers and clubbing experiences are always hedonistic and escapist. in addition rief highlights that ‘everyday’ values infuse clubbing spaces, which in a sense are similar to (some) “everyday” contexts. this affects “body and emotion work” (82) through for example controlling bodily appearance and managing impressions. nowhere is this more apparent than in the nightclub queue and during the rituals of “going out”. rief provides further discussion of clubbing communities as contested communities in which participants struggle for membership, partly through rituals of belonging and gaining access. chapter four focuses on the rules and conventions of clubbing where rief notes that fashion and dancing provide avenues through which bodies are accepted or rejected according to the conventions of the spaces they are in. she notes that even in club spaces that are more transgressive than the workplace or home, there remain social codes to be adhered to. chapter four contains a nuanced theoretical discussion centring on ideas such as aestheticization and prosthetic culture. this work theoretically frames the preceding discussion of the body and goes on to consider how these processes of aestheticization affect constructions of reality in clubbing environments. this is an ambitious project to situate clubbing in a broader theoretical framework. consequently it is often difficult to see how the experiences of clubbing as articulated by rief ’s respondents “fit” with this abstract discussion. perhaps better integration and linking of these theoretical points to clubbing would have helped the “fit” be more clearly identifiable. rief moves on in chapter five to a discussion of reality/realities of clubbing experiences and the “dance underworld” (110). the normalisation thesis is considered in the clubbing context in this chapter. rief puts forward the idea that drug use in clubs is not fully normalised as her interviewees still associated drug-taking with transgression and fear of dependency. although i am not sure that i agree with rief ’s interpretation here, it is helpful to see a “moving on” of key academic debates. attitudes towards drug use and the meanings of drug-taking experiences are also presented as profoundly gendered in this chapter. further consideration is given to clubbers’ meanings and experiences in chapter six. “identity projects” (132) frame clubbing experiences as a form of self development and self-realisation in relation to issues such as love and romance. the meanings of clubbing are classed, raced and gendered. theoretical and empirical material is more successfully integrated within this chapter. again, explicit linking of the narratives that run through chapters four to six may have helped the reader clearly identify how the debates being put forward relate specifically to clubbing. reviews 119 chapter seven focuses on images of sexuality or sexual scenarios in two prominent clubbing magazines; mixmag and ministry. rief points to the crucial role (154) that clubbing and nightlife play in the construction of sexual boundaries and also notes the blurring of sexual boundaries identified by earlier researchers (pini 2001; measham et al 2001; hutton 2006). the dominance of heterosexual identities and heteronormative structures are noted here, even though clubbing environments are often seen as more tolerant of diverse expressions of sexuality. rief argues that heteronormativity is not affected by the sexual scenarios she identifies in the two magazines under consideration; “naughty girls” and “hot lesbo action” (160-2), with such scenarios or images of transgressive femininities remaining firmly located within heterosexual feminine identities. rief extends this discussion of sexualities in chapter eight by considering the extent to which sexual boundaries are made or re-made in clubbing contexts. the tensions inherent in the commodification of gay and lesbian spaces are discussed and the idea that clubs are contested spaces is reinforced. controls on who gains entry through door management and judgements made about consumers within club spaces are f i l t e r e d t hr o u g h “h e t e r o n o r m a t i v e d i s c o ur s e s i n t h e r e a d i n g o f (hetero)sexuality” (183) deployed by gay and lesbian clubbers themselves. this dominance of heteronormativity is emphasised in chapter nine where rief concludes that “there is, therefore, no one-dimensional change of gender relations and sexual boundaries in club cultural spaces towards more equality and acceptance of diversity” (192). overall this ambitious book locates clubbing experiences within the broader economic, social and cultural contexts in which they are constructed. rief calls for a refocusing of clubbing research away from a concentration on clubbers’ experiences towards a more comparative, systematic approach. although at times this way of considering club cultures did not quite “work” for me, the moving forward of debates about club cultures and original insights and suggestions for further research are welcome. this book is suitable for any club researcher wishing to access an informed discussion about the nte, urban regeneration, bodies, sexuality and club spaces. references chatterton, paul and robert hollands. 2003. urban nightscapes: youth cultures, pleasure spaces and corporate power. london: routledge. hutton, fiona. 2006. risky pleasures: club cultures and feminine identities. aldershot: ashgate publishing. measham, fiona, judith aldridge and howard parker. 2001. dancing on drugs: risk, health and hedonism in the british club scene. london: free association books. pini, maria. 2001. club cultures and female subjectivity: the move from home to house. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. 120 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 run lola run. dir. tom tykwer. sony pictures (dvd), 2008 [1998]. berlin calling. dir. hannes stöhr. av visionen (dvd), 2008. doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.12 sean nye university of minnesota (us) the representation of berlin in music films has an extraordinary history, from the experimental depictions in berlin: symphony of a great city (1927), to hollywood’s homage to weimar-era berlin in cabaret (1972), to the queer-punk east berlin in hedwig and the angry inch (2001). while soundtracks of berlin urban life have often relied on classical, cabaret or punk-industrial scores, post-reunification berlin has seen a new musical genre operate as the city’s primary soundtrack – techno. this review examines two key berlin techno films, run lola run (1998) and berlin calling (2008), and addresses two intimately linked issues regarding these films: first, the nature of the film medium with respect to the now established subgenre of electronic dance music film (short: edm film), and second, the representation in film of berlin as a techno city. the potential for theoretical analysis offered by both these edm films points to a current lacuna in club culture scholarship – namely, the scarce critical-aesthetic engagement with filmic representations of edm culture, whether in music videos, documentaries, or in this case, feature films. one exception has been stan beeler’s dance, drugs and escape: the club scene in literature, film and television since the late 1980s,1 a book which unfortunately tends toward brief, journalistic glosses on its objects of study. however, the book is impressive in its breadth, proving that a rich history of artworks that incorporate club culture already exists. this is exemplified in run lola run and berlin calling, themselves separated by a period of ten years, a gap that points to the importance of the film medium as visual-historical material for study. run lola run has become an iconic film of 1990s berlin, a status that was secured by its highly innovative plot and unique combination of pop cultural references. the protagonist, lola, has a task – to collect 100,000 d-marks and reach her boyfriend, manni, on the other side of berlin within 20 minutes. manni will otherwise likely die in an attempt to rob a supermarket, because he lost the money needed to make a deal with some gangsters. the story is constructed around three alternative universes in a kind of classic atari arcade game where lola has three lives.2 the first two universes end in tragic “game over” scenarios (1. lola dies, 2. manni dies), but the final scenario completes the mission with bonus points. lola succeeds in obtaining the 100,000 d-marks by placing all her money on two consecutive bets at a roulette table. manni also solves his debts so that not only is he saved, but together they walk away rich. lola’s constant running through the city in search of manni and money is the basis for the film’s combination of urban life, cyberspace, youth culture and video game narrative. these themes have been the focus of much of the extensive secondary literature on the film.3 what is of more interest from the point of view of techno researchers, however, is the edm soundtrack, composed by director tom tykwer together with reinhold heil and johnny klimek and produced in the rather fateful year of 1998 during the height of berlin’s reputation as a techno city and reviews 121 edm’s popularity in europe. yet despite the centrality of music and techno culture to run lola run’s success, only one essay amidst the many publications on the film focuses on music: caryl flinn’s “the music that lola ran to”.4 similar to run lola run, berlin calling has become an iconic film of 2000s berlin, though primarily within the techno scene. it is not of the same artistic quality of run lola run, and has had a markedly smaller international reception. however, it offers important insights into changes in berlin techno since the 1990s. the film concerns the career and artistic creativity of the protagonist dj ickarus, played by the real-life berlin dj/producer paul kalkbrenner. the mythical figure, icarus, concerns the dream of flying. using the wings that his master-craftsman father, daedelus, gives him, icarus flies so close to the sun that his wings melt, and he plunges to his death. dj ickarus has similar problems of both recklessness and (psychedelic) flight in berlin calling. while his hedonist excesses are at their height, he nearly destroys his artistic and mental wings through the use of drugs. suffering a creative block and having conflicts with the label manager, he avoids his problems by partying and ends up taking an “evil pill” that almost kills him. though dj ickarus survives, the rest of the film is spent with him passing in and out of a psychiatric ward, wrestling with the symptoms of insanity in a rather unimaginative homage to one flew over the cuckoo’s nest. however, ickarus’s creative energies are released, and a new album takes shape in the psychiatric ward. both an artistic triumph of insanity and a means of psychological therapy, his new tracks are produced through the inspirational media of illegal drugs and prescribed antidepressants. and the resulting album, itself titled berlin calling, achieves high critical praise and the trappings of genius within the film’s narrative. yet berlin calling is also the real electro-trance soundtrack to the film by paul kalkbrenner. musical success is thus sealed, both in the film and in real life. ickarus heads off on another, presumably successful, world tour in the closing scene of the film. and at the moment this review is being written, kalkbrenner is on his “berlin calling tour 2010”, performing during march and april at massive concert venues in germany, austria and switzerland. the stark differences of these films at the level of plot highlight the diverse forms that edm film can take, making it debatable whether edm film is even a clearly definable genre. these differences elicit two initial questions. regarding run lola run, what can we learn about rave and club culture from a story in which no raves or clubs are present in the diegesis? regarding berlin calling, what is the state of discourses of authenticity and realism in a film that combines the success of a fictional character and an actual berlin dj/producer to such an intimate degree? run lola run and berlin calling arguably represent contrasting approaches to edm film. the first can be termed a techno culture film. it focuses on edm soundtracks as acoustic settings for narratives that do not directly explore edm party life in a mimetic-sociological fashion. the legacy of cyberpunk and gamer aesthetics obviously plays a major role in this tradition. important filmic examples are blade runner (1982), blade (1998), and the matrix (1999). since virtual reality and fantasy take precedence, these films are free from anxious debates regarding the authentic representation of club culture. in this respect, berlin calling represents a contrasting tradition of techno scene film, attempting a direct representation of edm life in terms of club and rave events, as well as musical production. this type thus acts like a sociological study of club scenes in film form. important works in this tradition are human traffic (1999), groove (2000), and it’s all gone pete tong (2004), though trainspotting (1996) stands as a defining influence on the genre.5 these scene films are 122 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 often caught between the limits of the film medium, narrative form and the desire to represent club culture “as it really is”. they further struggle with reaffirming the idealistic self-presentation of club culture and questioning these ideals as ideology. these tensions often result in satire and an experimental play with form in techno scene films themselves. berlin calling takes these challenges seriously – in fact, it answers with seriousness and not satire. kalkbrenner’s performance and that of the other main actors are admirable. hannes stöhr’s directing is likewise a quite subtle and impressive study in social interaction. however, stöhr’s script is only partially successful.6 the result is a bad mix between documentary realism, mythical references and a crisiscomeback narrative that occasionally approximates a vh1 “behind the music” biography. the clinical story, supposedly deadly serious, turns into comical poppsychology that ends with an absurd visit of prostitutes to the ward during ickarus’s farewell party. as a result, the film lacks an appropriate exploration of techno music production or berlin and becomes primarily a production of kalkbrenner as a berlin star. human traffic and it’s all gone pete tong offer in this respect more thoughtprovoking, satirical examples of the techno scene film and star power. similarly, tom tykwer produces a more interesting film by exploiting the freedoms offered by the techno culture film to the fullest. the playful plot is reflected in a kaleidoscope of film techniques and media from time-lapse photography to cartoons. in short, berlin calling’s goal is art, and what comes out is kitsch; run lola run’s goal is pop, and what comes out is pop. and great pop: so successful was tom tykwer’s edm film, like danny boyle’s trainspotting, it was a springboard for launching a successful career as a hollywood film director. nevertheless, berlin calling offers some interesting points for reflection on the state of edm film. as the story of an artist, the film explores the relation of techno culture to the legacy of german romantic associations of genius and melancholy. dj ickarus’s tension with but also rootedness in german high art plays out in scenes with his conservative pastor father, who performs works by johann sebastian bach. the high art themes are coupled with claims to authenticity in the merging of protagonist and dj-star, soundtrack and album. the relation of film/album/star has echoes in rock opera films like ken russell’s tommy (1975) and alan parker’s pink floyd the wall (1982), though the possibilities of narrative form certainly differ for rock-vocal versus edm-instrumental soundtracks. as a techno opera, berlin calling represents the full shift from the anonymous rave-dj culture to the dj-producer as artist. yet it also explores economic problems in a far more direct way than run lola run. the film highlights the pressures and suffering of a young east german dj in capitalist, reunited berlin, which still has the highest poverty rate in germany. only through the successful album is he able to overcome his economic plight and make his comeback as artistic hero. run lola run is also concerned with the relation between heroes, myth production and economic pressure. just as dj ickarus is the stuff of myth, lola is an iconic name in german cultural life, recalling marlene dietrich’s character lola lola in the blue angel (1930) and rainer werner fassbinder’s lola (1982). if dj ickarus is the hero as artist, lola is the hero as raver. as annegret mahler-bungers puts it rather humorously: lola is “a postmodern – or rather a post-postmodern – walkyrie” (2003: 91). the supermachine drive of lola, her inhuman ability to run, reflects the endurance of techno clubbers during their 48-hour pill-popping party weekends. yet lola does not take drugs. her strength seems to derive purely from her heart and will. reviews 123 we imagine, however, that the vitality represented by her fiery red hair has its basis in the amphetamines of generation chemical. but economic realism interrupts the fun of this hero world in the following form: she is not dancing at night but running in midday. lola and manni are twenty-something party-kids caught in adolescent pop dreams, and they are now confronted with the hard consequences of prosaic, everyday life. presumably having been able to brush off deadlines and appointments before, lola is suddenly confronted with a deadline she can’t ignore. literally, the time of her run is between 11:40am and noon; the terror that approaches should she fail in her mission is the terror of the ultimately prosaic afternoon. in this respect, when flinn remarks that berlin’s “streets are curiously depopulated” (2004: 208), i would argue the reason lies in that the rest of berlin is presumably at work, slaving away to save money legally. indeed, as a cyberpunk film, run lola run’s is realistic in a unique way – there are no flashy city lights or fancy pieces of technology. that techno music functions like a sonic walkman to her run invites the question whether the endurance, fitness, and discipline ravers have achieve in partying at night can also overcome the reality principle of the day. but what type of techno music is this exactly? for both films, electronic music is the soundtrack to the myth of berlin as a techno city. however, neither film chooses to musically represent rave culture through a compilation of rave hits as human traffic does. rather, both soundtracks are studies in different types of auteur, respectively featuring music by only one man or group: as previously noted, by tom tykwer as director, writer, vocalist, and composer with his team of heil and klimek (run lola run) and by paul kalkbrenner as the quintessential berlin techno star on the bpitch control label (berlin calling). despite the gap in ten years, both soundtracks bear resemblances in the use of trance music.7 the compositions from run lola run are techno-trance pieces. johnny klimek worked as producer on a number of projects by berlin trance star paul van dyk, and the soundtrack bears resemblances in its timbres and sleek production quality. the music is also schooled in the speech-rap of underworld’s “born slippy”, trainspotting’s most memorable track – this is especially clear in tom tykwer’s rapping in “running two”.8 likewise, paul kalkbrenner’s soundtrack has echoes of trance, perhaps surprisingly so, given berlin’s reputation today as a city that has banished trance and rave music for the sleek club culture of minimal techno and microhouse. yet, the tracks in berlin calling are best described as a kind of electro-trance, much slower and more melancholic than lola’s “run” music and reflecting the general trend in the 2000s away from the speed of the 1990s. trance anchors the various religious and romantic themes of the films. both are structured around heterosexual narratives and the possibility of heroic triumph through magic and inspiration. flinn insightfully remarks that run lola run positions music “as a form of emotional and economic esperanto or universal language, a romantic, heterosexual affair stamped with the imprint of humanism. that this is achieved through techno, usually considered an antihumanist form of music, makes the accomplishment all the more intriguing” (2004: 197). both soundtracks do sonic battle in the name of romanticism against economic exploitation and suffering – acknowledging the problem only in the end to deny its ultimate influence. dj ickarus triumphs through creativity and artistic discipline. recalling his father’s performance of bach, the slow and reserved themes in ickarus’s music are lutheran techno-hymns to help him persevere in his struggle. lola beats the modern world by relying on shamanic powers to win at the roulette table, reflected in her primal scream and the tribal-primitivist techno of the track “casino”. 124 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 these economic crises represent a threat to berlin as a techno club city and a place of youth and freedom. adam krims’ music and urban geography9 has highlighted the key role that both music and music films play in representing cities, from realistic depictions to the “abstract city of fantasy” (2007: 18). berlin also presents a variety of musical representations in film, though it is important here to recognize some commonalities within the larger history of the berlin music film, particularly in representing berlin as a city of dynamic change. indeed, change forms the basis for associated themes of youthful transgression, pop culture, and sexual liberation. berlin has long advertised itself as the “city always in change”, so much that it can become a self-fulfilling cliché. in musical terms, precisely by maintaining techno as a stable soundtrack of the city over the last twenty years, berlin has continually reinvented itself as the city of youth and pop transgression. both films offer interesting perspectives regarding this tradition, and urban geography plays an important element in this tradition. located primarily within the confines of the clinic, the melancholic slowness of berlin calling surprisingly challenges this reputation of change. in the film’s closing, dj ickarus returns to berlin’s airport for a world tour, but he does not look exactly joyful. one wonders whether he wishes to return to the sanctuary of the psychiatric clinic. however, the speed of techno city berlin is reinforced with shots of the tv tower at alexanderplatz, techno’s preferred counter-monument of modern berlin against the brandenburg gate. club scenes are shot at real locations on berlin’s new club mile – club maria, bar 25, and others – although berlin as advertisement and fantasy retains priority. during one party, youthful transgression is reinforced to utter cliché when mathilde, ickarus’s manager and bisexual girlfriend (what other sexuality could a berlin girlfriend possibly be?), while searching for ickarus, opens up a number of club doors – in the first she finds two circuit boys having anal sex and in the second a group of clubbers snorting some lines. alternative lifestyles remain spectacles to be seen rather than lives that are lived. more interesting is the presentation of berlin as a place dominated by women in business roles, which is alternatively threatening and nurturing for dj ickarus. after all, he comes from patriarchal, lutheran germany, and lacks a mother. mathilde leaves ickarus when he fails as a boyfriend and artist, returning to her ex-girlfriend corinna, a club bouncer who is problematically the token “ethnic” character in the film. corinna threatens ickarus’s masculinity to the point of throwing him out of her apartment when he tries to speak with mathilde, though they resolve their conflict in the end. mathilde never stops caring for ickarus and finally returns as his manager, though apparently not as his girlfriend. ickarus must also negotiate conflicts with the label owner, alice (an analogous figure to ellen allien, the head of kalkbrenner’s bpitch control label), and the head of the psychiatric ward, dr. petra paul. regarding run lola run, the secondary literature has pointed out repeatedly that the scenery of both east and west berlin is non-descript. manni’s and lola’s adventure represents the dream that a reunited germany will reflect neither the failed socialist state of the german democratic republic (gdr) nor the prosaic wirtschaftswunder of the federal republic of germany (frg). lola’s fantastic run reflects the hopes of generations x and y for the harmonious combination of east and west at the end of history (will there be a generation z, and if so, what would follow?). the histories and cultural differences of berlin thus remain veiled. however, many of the shots of the city – especially the intersection where manni waits – look much more like dull suburban germany than berlin’s impressive monuments and reviews 125 nightlife. caryl flinn emphasizes this geographic dialectic: “berlin becomes a somewhat nonessential, generic urban place, a reading tykwer encouraged from foreign audiences. is this berlin, or is this anywhere?” (2004: 208). tykwer refuses to allow lola to run by any berlin icons such as the reichstag, the brandenburg gate, and even the techno tv tower. what is recognizable in all the runs is the u-bahn, reinforcing berlin’s reputation as a city of change and movement. with the berlin wall having fallen in 1989, travel is a key marker of freedom in a berlin film of the 1990s. lola’s running through the open and past the u-bahn is a distinct display of this new freedom. in a way distinct from berlin calling, her run marks berlin as a feminized space – the image of the free western woman whose freedom is defined as a freedom of movement and public display.10 finally and crucially, what is also recognizable are the sites of construction. lola charges across a causeway in both the first and second run, surrounded by a vast construction site near the german reichstag. no such sites are present in berlin calling, and for viewers who experienced the reconstruction of berlin in the 1990s, these sites might suddenly call up an odd nostalgic recognition that some forms of change are not permanent. such a complex relation to the past returns me to the importance of film as a visual-historic, and indeed acoustic, medium of study. as works of art, these films demonstrate their important role as the explosive crossroads of ideological, aesthetic, political, social, and personal currents. berlin calling and run lola run are not just edm films and not just berlin films – they are both of these and more. the rich material they offer demonstrates that a continued study of feature films, both within and without the edm film genre, will be of great importance for grasping the challenges of representing edm scenes from both the past and the future. references ankum, katharina von, ed. 1997. women in the metropolis: gender and modernity in weimar culture. berkeley and los angeles: university of california press. beeler, stan. 2007. dance, drugs and escape: the club scene in literature, film and television since the late 1980s. jefferson, nc: mcfarland & co inc. flinn, caryl. 2004. “the music that lola ran to”. in nora m. alter and lutz koepnick (eds), sound matters: essay on the acoustics of modern german culture, pp. 197-213. oxford and new york: berghahn books. krims, adam. 2007. music and urban geography. new york and oxon: routledge. mahler-bungers, annegret. 2003. “a post-postmodern walkyrie: psychoanalytic considerations on tom tykwer’s run, lola, run (1998)”. in andrea sabbadini (ed), the couch and the silver screen: psychoanalytic reflections on european cinema, pp. 82-93. new york and hove, uk: brunner-routledge. mesch, claudia. "racing berlin: the games of run lola run”. m/c: a journal of media and culture 3, no. 3 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/speed.php> (accessed 23 january 2010) filmography blade. dir. stephen norrington. 1998. dvd. new line home video, 1998. blade runner. dir. ridley scott. 1982. dvd. warner home video, 2007. groove. dir. greg harrison. 2000. dvd. sony pictures, 2000. it’s all gone pete tong. dir. michael dowse. 2004. dvd. sony pictures, 2005. the matrix. dir. andy wachowski and larry wachowski. 1999. warner home video, 2009. trainspotting. dir. danny boyle. 1996. dvd. miramax home entertainment, 2004. 126 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 notes reviews 127 1 stan beeler, dance, drugs and escape: the club scene in literature, film and television since the late 1980s ( jefferson, nc: mcfarland & co inc, 2007). 2 the pop-existentialist announcement at the beginning, by the security guard, clearly presents the game structure of the film. in fact, he combines the supposed antipodal game cultures of football and video games: “the ball is round. the game lasts 90 minutes. so much is clear. everything else is just theory. and we’re off !” 3 claudia mesch, for example, describes berlin as “a cyberspace obstacle course or environment usually associated with video and computer games”. claudia mesch, "racing berlin: the games of run lola run”, m/c: a journal of media and culture 3, no. 3 (2000), <www.api-network.com/mc/0006/speed.php> (accessed january 23, 2010). 4 this essay offers an impressive analysis of the film’s soundtrack. i strongly recommend it to club culture researchers. caryl flinn, “the music that lola ran to”, in sound matters: essays on the acoustics of modern german culture, ed. nora m. alter and lutz koepnick (oxford and new york: berghahn books, 2004), 197-213. 5 while trainspotting is certainly a pioneering film, it surprisingly cannot be defined as a proper techno scene film. aside from renton’s short visit to a techno club, trainspotting deals almost entirely with an earlier generation of the scottish working class, crime, pub life, and heroine junkies. the film’s reputation as an edm film derives primarily from its electronic music selections, from brian eno to underworld. the hybrid nature of such films and the complexity of the soundtracks would obviously require more exploration and nuances regarding the various sub-branches of edm film than i have space to present here. trainspotting points to the need for a third element of techno music itself in the structures of my genre divisions. to explain, the analysis of any edm film could explore the tensions between techno culture, techno scene and techno music, or in other words, between cyber-aesthetics, club culture, and edm (or non-edm) soundtrack. 6 this is unfortunate since stöhr’s earlier film berlin is in germany (2001) offered an interesting examination of berlin life and the challenges of integration for an east german member of the working class. 7 it is important to keep in mind that there is other music present in both films besides the official soundtracks. in run lola run, the techno tracks are complemented by the use of dinah washington’s “what a difference a day makes” and charles ives’ the unanswered question; similarly, berlin calling includes pieces for organ by johann sebastian bach. these musics allow for the dialogic relationship between techno and music from other historical periods. 8 lola’s “i wish” and “i believe” monologues also deserve mention. the rhythms and repetition of the first two words in both monologues are comparable to mark renton’s “choose life” monologue in trainspotting. 9 adam krims, music and urban geography (new york and oxon: routledge, 2007). 10 there are limits to this freedom though. expectations regarding the place of women and men in the city still differ strongly. lola’s run seems odd to passers-by in a way that would not be equivalent were a man running. for a critical study on the “lolas” who came before her, specifically on modern women and the limits of urban public display and movement, see ankum 1997. dancecult 2.1 reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 2 (1): 90–114 issn 1947-5403 ©2011 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net hip hop underground: the integrity and ethics of racial identification anthony kwame harrison philadelphia: temple university press, 2009. isbn: 1-4399-0060-4 (hardcover), 1-4399-0061-2 (paperback) rrp: us$74.50 (hardcover), us$26.95 (paperback), us$74.50 (electronic) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.05 rebecca bodenheimer hamilton college, usa anthony kwame harrison’s book hip hop underground: the integrity and ethics of racial identification examines the racial dynamics of the san francisco bay area’s underground hip hop scene, with the larger goal of exploring processes of racial self-identification among american youth at a time in which the nation is growing more racially diverse and discourses on race increasingly revolve around an ideology of colorblindness. in his view, the bay area is a good case study for an elaboration of contemporary american racial dynamics because of its uniquely multiracial demographics, which are currently very similar to the projections of a non-white majority population in the u.s. by 2050. harrison’s research is strongly informed by the method of “critical ethnography”, which views the process of ethnography as intimately connected to the interpretation and representation of the findings. in this vein, he describes his decision to become an active participant in the bay area’s underground hip hop scene and to assume two identities, anthropologist and emcee (rapper), despite his initial misgivings that he might be received as an interloper. while critical ethnography is by no means a new method of anthropological research, the level of self-reflexivity here is arguably taken to the extreme with relatively large doses of “autoethnographic narrative” (58). harrison’s second chapter provides detailed accounts both about his personal history with hip hop and the ways he inserted himself into and moved through the bay area underground hip hop scene; however, his discussion of the hip hop group he helped to form, the forest fires collective, seems at times overindulgent. reviews reviews 91 harrison’s first chapter details the emergence of underground hip hop in the mid-to-late 1990s, highlighting the movement’s preoccupation with notions of authenticity, its goals of reclaiming hip hop from the mass corporatization following its crossover into the mainstream, and its contestation of commercial hip hop’s “ghettocentric” representations of blackness.1 he argues that the alternate representations of blackness offered by underground hip hop are accompanied by a more racially inclusive criteria regarding who can lay claim to the practice. nevertheless, despite his suggestions that this more inclusive vision is a progressive tendency, he frequently contests the stated ideologies of his fellow hip hoppers 2—that it is competency, rather than race, that matters in terms of underground hip hop authenticity—by asserting his own view that blackness is still privileged in hip hop and that non-black participants, especially whites, face a more arduous road to establish their legitimacy. harrison’s third chapter provides a good critical summary of the ways hip hop scholarship has articulated the relationship between race, authenticity and claims of ownership, detailing three principal approaches. the first frames hip hop as a distinctly black practice, despite recognizing that non-black youth, specifically puerto ricans, were involved in its emergence and is exemplified by tricia rose’s 1994 canonic work on hip hop black noise. as harrison notes, a host of scholars ( juan flores, raquel rivera) have argued strongly for inserting puerto ricans into hip hop origin narratives. harrison provocatively asks, if we can recognize the role of puerto ricans and other latinos in the formation of hip hop culture, should we not do the same with white b-boys who joined the movement only a few years later? the second approach views hip hop as one in a long line of afro-diasporic traditions in the americas and tends to draw direct links between hip hop and african and/or caribbean traditions. the final approach is an orientation toward contemporary manifestations of hip hop, and a recognition of its creative appropriation by youth across all continents. harrison concludes this review by asserting that the ongoing reification of hip hop as essentially black has obscured a more realistic and dynamic picture of the ways that youth of all colors engage with the practice and that underground hip hop challenges these essentialist notions. harrison’s principal goal is to examine and unpack the ways that underground hip hoppers articulate claims for their own hip hop legitimacy through racial performances of self. departing from sarah thornton’s theorization of subcultural capital and the boundary maintenance that is such an integral part of subcultural scenes, harrison critiques the hegemony of “authenticity”, viewing john l. jackson’s notion of “sincerity” as a better analytic. jackson’s notion “subverts the standard checklist of subcultural capital [markers “ sophisticated and innovative discussions about the racial politics of authenticity in underground hip hop” dancecult 2(1)92 of authenticity] in favor of a personal code of underground hip hop ethics and integrity… what matters most is the perceived sincerity of these racial performances... for the non-black hip hopper, an overzealous display of urban african american posturing, no matter how authentic, is under most circumstances suspected as insincere” (118). while i agree that the sincerity of a racial performance is an important element in the positive reception of a non-black emcee, i do not perceive a big difference between the notions of authenticity and sincerity. harrison’s position that a display of black posturing is authentic but not sincere is not entirely convincing—why would it not simply be considered inauthentic? chapter four puts the notion of racial sincerity to work, as harrison provides examples of white emcees who perform “sincere whiteness” (140). his primary example concerns a white emcee who, during a mos def 3 show, got on stage to freestyle (improvise rapped lyrics). although he was initially booed because of the audience’s assumptions about his competency based on his “bummy white guy” look, the emcee ultimately won over the crowd with his lyrical prowess. harrison astutely states, “had top r not been a sincere white guy…the entire story might have played out differently: no boos, no surprises, no turning of the crowd; perhaps just a great freestyle, which is hardly the kind of thing that gets talked about to any great extent days after the show” (140). while i find this analysis quite persuasive, harrison’s criteria for performing “sincere whiteness” is more problematic: in this and in other instances, he bases his characterization of racial sincerity on physical appearance and fashion choices, noting in particular the white emcees’ “dorky looks” and “bummy shirts” (140). he perceptively analyzes this mode of self-representation as a reaction against past white emcees’ “insincere” performances of racial identity, exemplified in the “wigger” persona,4 that claimed to fully understand the experience of black youth without recognizing their own white privilege. the issue is not only that harrison’s notion of white racial sincerity is fully based on the emcee’s physical appearance, but also the implication that “bummy clothes” are essentially a white fashion and that emcees cannot be racially sincere unless they are dressed in this manner. in his final chapter he provides what i believe is another problematic analysis, when he discusses the sound of an all-white underground hip hop group as “so sincere and self-assured in its whiteness”, precisely because people have described their music as “avant-garde hip hop”, “emo rap”, or “goth-hop” (161). harrison’s argument here seems to reproduce the same essentialist notions of race and culture that he has previously challenged and the reader is left to assume that he would only deem racially sincere those white emcees who mix rap with “white” musical styles or dress like “dorky white guys”. harrison’s final chapter continues elaborating the notion of racial sincerity, although here he offers a rather pessimistic commentary on racial politics in the underground hip hop scene. he recounts a party where the aforementioned white underground hip hop group performed a satire using an exaggerated style of black speech in order to parody the image of the hyper-violent, misogynist “gangsta” rapper that is so often promoted by the mainstream music industry. noting that the audience was predominantly white, harrison describes this performance as a form of “contemporary minstrelsy” (158). however, he reviews 93 then characterizes this analysis as too simplistic, asserting that the group was very aware of a history of white appropriation and racist imitation of black music. he states: i would contend that sole and the pedestrian saw themselves as crafting a tremendously ironic satire of the racial insincerity embodied by... wigger icons of the past. arguably, if we accept that this group... was engaged in a theatrical performance of past white hip hoppers’ exaggerated performances of blackness, this could be viewed as about a profound an expression of white racial sincerity as one might find. however, somewhere within this cauldron of sincerity, satire, and racial symbolism, for me, the circumstantial logic breaks down (160). the reason he gives for ultimately eschewing his own, quite sophisticated analysis and concluding that the performance was a “racial impersonation” (162), centers around the fact that these white emcees were performing for a mainly white audience. however, another perspective might view the performance as quite racially sincere precisely because, as stated by harrison, it was a parody. furthermore, it seems that the key to determining whether the performance reinforced stereotypes or not resides largely in its reception: how aware was the audience of the performers’ intentions to perform a satire? although harrison does not pursue this question, it is likely, following his own discussion of the blurred line between performers and audience in underground hip hop, that the spectators were “in the know” and viewed this performance with a critical perspective. ultimately harrison’s book offers some sophisticated and innovative discussions about the racial politics of authenticity in underground hip hop. however, while he presents various compelling analyses, his final conclusions are at times less nuanced and thus lessen the persuasiveness of his theoretical points. notes 1 the subgenre of “gangsta” rap, in which rappers frequently spin tales of violent and sexual pursuits, is most closely associated with a “ghettocentric” mentality. 2 harrison often refers to participants in the local scene as “hip hoppers”, which i understand to include anyone who engages with at least one of the four principle elements of hip hop culture— emceeing (rapping), dj’ing, break-dancing (b-boying), or graffiti art. 3 mos def is one of the most celebrated and visible emcees in underground hip hop, so much so, that some might not describe him as part of the underground scene anymore. his first album, mos def and talib kweli are black star (rawkus records 1998), was a collaboration with the highly respected emcee talib kweli and in many ways defined the terms of underground hip hop in its critique of the music industry and mainstream rappers who have “sold out”. 4 “wigger” was a derogatory term that emerged in the 1990s referring to white youth who fully adopted the fashion and speech of african american youth for the purposes of gaining subcultural capital, but who were ultimately perceived as having a superficial connection with blackness and not a true investment in the politics of racial equality. dancecult 2(1)94 the local scenes and global culture of psytrance graham st john new york/london: routledge, 2010. isbn: 978-0-415-87696-4 (hardcover) 978-0-203-84787-9 (electronic) rrp: $103.00 (hardcover), $103.00 (electronic) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.06 rupert till university of huddersfield, uk psytrance is not well known or widely understood. the local scenes and global culture of psytrance, edited by leading writer in the field of electronic dance music (edm) culture graham st. john, is the first book to cover this form in any detail. to many, psytrance is lumped together using ill-defined journalistic terms that have little meaning or substance such as “dance music”. this collected volume attempts to unpack the term and explore the field in a more rigorous fashion. st john bookends the volume; his introduction provides a useful assessment of writing on psytrance, whilst providing a contextual framework. he makes a strong case for the need for the collection and prepares the ground for the variety of different approaches that follow. the book is divided into three sections, the first dealing with the roots of the music in goa trance. this begins with luther elliott’s proto-trance history. it makes a strong case that musical roots of psytrance grew not principally from goa but originated in sixties counter-culture, ibiza, house music and acid house. its description of the development of goa trance is rather vague, lacking specific dates, names and interviews with key players. fortunately this is covered in the next two chapters and in any case this is an interesting and well-paced first chapter. anthony d’andrea next provides a spicy taste of the nature of the goa full moon party scene. like several sections of the collection, it prioritises the opinions of the ‘authentic’— the scenesters, the faces, the core members—and allows the flavour of the narrative to be determined by self-appointed spokespeople. indeed many of the writers can be accused of this, related it seems to their immersion in psytrance culture. in some cases the writers have led a psytrance lifestyle and have become interested in writing about their passion. this provides insider knowledge, without which this book would lack credibility, but inevitably means it sometimes becomes evangelical, treating internal psy-perspectives as “truth” and outsider perspectives as “false”. reviews 95 arun saldanha provides the final chapter in the goa section and manages to avoid this trap. his well-written account describes the myriad influences on the goa scene as a meeting point of multiple substreams, a developmental crossroads rather than a point of origin. his use of derrida’s ghost metaphor elegantly blends sociology and ethnography and embeds into psytrance the term ‘communitas’, which returns many times to form a key focus of the book. the sequel to the goa section discusses globalisation, bridging the gap between goa and the growth of psytrance in europe. in fact it is the well-defined and well-written specificity of this chapter by hillegonda rietveld that clarifies the origins of european psytrance and its relation to goa. it names specific recordings and artists, dates and places, building on the earlier chapters which were rather more freeform, reflecting perhaps a goa trance state of mind. in particular this mature chapter gives credit to various sources often overlooked in such histories, such as electro body music (ebm) and klf. charles de ledesma goes on to explore the growth of psytrance in london. there is strong data here and interviews with key players, but this is inevitably a very london-centric ethnography, rather more local than the claimed uk coverage. robin lindop casts a wider net, defining and discussing the music itself, as well as the culture surrounding it. however, without a use of technical musical terminology, this is rendered a little vague. de ledesma does critically engage with the ways in which edm sometimes defines itself as “authentic” in opposition to the “mainstream”, but then goes on to claim that “psytrance is exemplary”. it is similarly contradictory over the subject of genre purity. like the following chapter by joshua schmidt, lindop provides some paradoxes in his writing, but overall provides useful information to the emerging wider narrative. schmidt uses pairs of dichotomies to critically analyse israeli trance. again this is a view from the inside of a scene, shown when it condemns as “chronic” the media’s description of israeli desert trance mesibot as “drug parties”, although it is clear from an external perspective why that description might be used. however schmidt’s work is succinct, well structured and provides a convincing argument. the last of the trilogy of sections weaves in and out of a vague focus on liminal culture. botond vitos begins by providing a rare insight into czech psytrance, although his argument is a little circular, perhaps due to a closeness to interlocutors who had recently and regularly taken lsd, a proximity which he tries to stretch away from instead of embracing. the fact that some of his interviewees described their activities using his own theories of demencze shows a rather acid splintered blurring of boundary between the emic and etic. chiara baldini’s approach is far bolder and more successful, making her position as party organiser clear and embracing material and references with a voice clearly internal to her and to psytrance. she draws upon the psy-spirit of dionysus in an effective correlation with her own experiences. the next two chapters, by jenny ryan and alex lambert, discuss the relationship of the web to psytrance from the perspectives of san francisco’s tribe.net and australia’s oztrance dancecult 2(1)96 community. the difficulty with this work is the use of individual web-posts to represent the views of the group, as there is often inevitably an opposing view that contradicts any point. however the significance of the web to this scene merits such attention, which is especially well presented in lambert’s cultural circuit. the last dance is reserved for graham st. john, who applies his experience and skill as an edm commentator to both reference other chapters and make significant points of his own, providing an appropriate climax to the narrative. st. john’s final chapter is the strongest in the book. it largely focuses on festival culture and on those technomads who travel from festival to festival, making psy-trance a lifestyle choice rather than a part-time activity. this is a recurring feature of the book, which focuses on the intensely committed few, rather the many casual psytrancers. this focus on festival culture feels unbalanced. in many cases the authors show their partisan attitudes and don’t so much struggle to maintain an objective attitude to their subject, as willingly submit to a pro-psytrance attitude. it is unsurprising that some chapters are written by relatively inexperienced researchers, rather than late career researchers with several books under their belts. this gives the work a currency and directness and although one could criticise the text in terms of clarity of emic or etic approaches, this would ignore the benefits that the writers’ proximity to psytrance culture provides. there have been many studies that have pointed out the difficulties western society faces in a fractured world that struggles to resolve issues of community, identity, belonging, hope and the loss of popular rituals that address such issues. studies addressing cultures that seem to be orientated around solutions to these issues, or new approaches to them, inevitably raise difficulties, may be controversial or inconclusive and in a post-meta-narrative world, fail to provide simple answers. however this book’s approach to issues such as communitas provides an engaging and novel approach to such problems. overall then the local scenes and global cultures of psytrance provides a valuable insight into a world-wide movement which has had comparatively little study so far. i am no novice to the world of psytrance, but this book provided a wide range of interesting, thoughtprovoking and informative detail, and is one i can highly recommend as essential reading to any researchers interested in edm culture. “a valuable insight into a world-wide movement which has had comparatively little study” reviews 97 pink noises: women on electronic music and sound tara rodgers durham: duke university press, 2010. isbn: 978-0-8223-4661-6 (hardcover), 978-0-8223-4673-9 (paperback) rrp: us$84.955 (hardcover), us$23.95 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.07 anna gavanas independent researcher, electronic music producer and dj tara rodgers’ book pink noises is a long overdue feminist intervention in the historiography of electronic music. pink noises emphasizes the pioneering, substantial and diverse work that has been accomplished by women but so far remained largely invisible in previous accounts of electronic music development. thereby, tara rodgers starts to correct the century long lack of representation that profoundly underestimates the presence and diversity of expressions by women working with sound and electronic music. the title pink noises (which is also the name of the producer/musician/dj network pinknoises.com founded by the author in 2000) refers to pink in terms of a “marker of female difference”, and noise as a “site of disturbance and productive potential”. tara rodgers also refers to the term pink noises in physics and audio engineering, as “variations of white noise, or unstructured sound that contains every audible frequency”. moreover, tara rodgers introduces her interviews with women artists as pink noises in and by themselves: “sonic interventions from multiple sources, which destabilize dominant gendered discourses and work toward equal power distributions in the cultural arenas where sounds reverbrate” (2010:19). structured as a collection of interviews/ conversations, pink noises documents and explains ground breaking innovations and visions in electronic music production and technology from the perspectives of the pioneers themselves. ground breaking and legendary international artists are interviewed, like pauline oliveros, kaffe matthews, giulia loli (mutamassik) and chantal passamonte (mira calix). the book is structured into six themes in electronic music; time/memory; space/perspective; nature/synthetics; circulation/movements; language/machines/embodiment; and alone/together. from a variety of different angles, rodgers and her interviewees disentangle assumptions that cast technology and music—and electronic music in particular—as male domains while, most importantly, discussing the dimensions and meanings of sound, expression and representation. moreover, pink noises reflects upon the cultural and political potential of sound itself. tara rodgers conceives of the potentials of sound, as a category of critical and aesthetic analysis, to feminist concerns in particular, arguing that “sounds can be thought of as pressure and movements, doing cultural work” (2010:19). dancecult 2(1)98 pink noises is an extremely important contribution to the study and documentation of electronic music because, unlike previous literature on electronic music, tara rodgers refuses to stop at the “thresholds that have silenced women’s work in historical accounts”. tara rodgers thus looks beyond the commonplace observation where most standard accounts stop and conclude that women constitute a minority in electronic music—as if this observation would explain their absence in literature and media. with pink noises, tara rodgers challenges the normalization of male dominance in the patrilineal historiography of electronic music. against the grain of ideologies aligning women with normative modes of heterosexual and capitalist reproduction, tara rodgers makes the argument that sounds themselves are reproductive, “to account for reproductive sounds in all their temporal depth is to challenge the patrilineal lines of descent and the universalizing male claims to creation that have thus far characterized dominant discourses in electronic music” (2010:15). although the professional interventions of interviewed artists go as far back as the 1950s, it is striking that similar gendered issues and experiences seem to reoccur throughout the generations of women who work with sound and electronic music. however, it is encouraging to read about the ways interviewees have prevailed and ignored gendered biases in the business; only to cultivate their subversiveness, innovation and determination even further. to someone who is extremely interested in the technical aspects of working with sound and music production it is very instructive to read pink noises. however, to someone who does not have a specific interest for technical aspects it could be difficult to follow the very informed conversations between the author and her interviewees. helpfully there is a detailed glossary on technical concepts. it is apparent throughout the book that the author has had previous contacts and collaboration with many interviewees, presumably through her own professional activity as a musician and her work with pinknoises.com. many of the participants in the book are part of the same international and/or overlapping musical/ professional scenes. it would be interesting to read more about the ways the author is situated in her field of study and the ways in which this influences her selection of interviewees, her questions and the responses. although rodgers probably has many good reasons for her decision to let interviewees speak for themselves and make their own analysis i sometimes feel that additional concluding, contextualizing and comparative commentary would be helpful. also, it would have been great to have a chapter on tara rodgers herself, and her long standing experience, electronic music production and reflection as electronic musician analog tara. all in all, pink noises is an extremely well informed, informative and inspiring discussion of some of the most crucial aspects and developments in electronic music. the innovators and actors behind these developments happen to be women and pink noises thereby highlights the astounding male centeredness in standard accounts and representation in electronic music. “ rodgers challenges the normalization of male dominance” reviews 99 technomad: global raving countercultures graham st john london: equinox publishing, 2009. isbn: 9781845536251 (hardcover), 9781845536268 (paperback) rrp: uk£50.00 (hardcover), uk£15.00 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.08 phil kirby university of liverpool, uk graham st john is a cultural anthropologist whose latest publication explores “themes of counterculture and resistance” in global electronic dance music culture (edmc). previous publications by st john explore psytrance and the intersection of rave culture and religion, key themes in technomad. the book is the result of eight years of research and offers a utopian study of rave culture, one in which legislation such as the uk’s criminal justice act and the onset of corporate clubbing hasn’t stopped the development of the free party scene. it adds to the evolving canon of academic literature that explores edmc culture and demonstrates a rigorous level of research. in an echo of centre for contemporary cultural studies (cccs) theory, st john frames the global techno-countercultures explored in technomad as “resistant”. st john acknowledges that anthony d’andrea has also explored the intersection of rave culture and post-1960s new (age) spirituality. where d’andrea attends to the cultural economy of psytrance “neo-nomads”, st john makes use of a significant range of theoretical stances including bey’s concept of the temporary autonomous zone (taz) to unpack the “fleeting permanence of contemporary counterculture” (2). technomad provides a cultural history of diverse alternative global edmc formations, the techno-underground, whose mobility has been partially facilitated by new digital technologies. the book’s focus is mainly on the nexus between hippy culture and rave culture, which has resulted in the evolution of edm sub-genres such as psytrance. st john divides the book into eight chapters and in the course of the first chapter, which serves as an introduction, quotes from much of the academic literature that explores rave culture. key themes are introduced that are then explored in more depth throughout the book; these include digital technology—both in terms of facilitating diy music production, its role in enabling alternative modes of communication and in framing dance music as a form of resistance used by activists to oppose rampant capitalism; gender issues and environmental issues. a key argument of technomad is that non-commercial forms of edmc are directly politicised by restrictive regulation and subsequently offer alternative spaces for a liminal communitas to evolve. dancecult 2(1)100 the second chapter explores the proliferation of a specific form of rave culture practice, the uk free party scene. the intersection of post-hippy uk free festival traveller culture and acid house music was in part facilitated by the appropriation and subsequent growth of sound system culture, a concept originally developed in jamaica in the 1950s. this chapter explores the growth of mobile dance music sound systems and what st john refers to as ‘traveller circuses’ such as spiral tribe. this nascent free party culture eventually culminated in the festival at castlemorton common in 1992, the event that precipitated the uk’s criminal justice and public order act of 1994. subsequent police attention and legislation had the unintended effect of gradually spreading these cultural practices around europe and beyond. st john notes the influence of various sound system crews as they stage events outside the uk. the third chapter maps the development and proliferation of sound system based edmc scenes in america, canada and australia. the integral role of the sound system in both reggae and hip hop culture has been noted in numerous histories of those genres, but st john successfully explores the key role that sound system practices have played in the global dissemination of particular strands of rave culture. st john then seeks to define the elusive “vibe” of a successful dance music experience, tracing the origin of the popular usage of the term back to the 1967 “summer of love” in san francisco. the study explores the idea that the term may have afro-american origins and connotations of eastern mysticism, “…the term now legion within edmc is used to denote a spatial and temporal experience, a collective and individual happening where a profound sensation of connection and mystery transpires” (99). from this definition various tribal edmc subdivisions are discussed in terms of “vibe tribes”. these tribes are not framed as mutually exclusive but explored in terms of “…a spectrum upon which the vibe may be characterized as libratory and divine at one end, and militant and proactive at the other” (103). the straightforward hedonism and release sought and achieved by many participants in mainstream edmc isn’t explored, as the project of the book is concerned with utopian outlaw countercultures. the various shamanistic/spiritual and activist tribal standpoints are explored in some depth offering useful insights for researchers interested in contemporary cultural anthropology. the author then explores a wide-ranging history of carnivalesque counter-cultural tribal gatherings, from san francisco’s golden gate park to the burning man. these ‘temporary alternative zones’ (or taz’s) and countercultural dramas are framed as “alternative futures”. the themes of spirituality and activism mentioned above inform the next two chapters. in chapter five technomad explores the intersection of rave culture and spirituality through an analysis of psytrance culture. st john defines psytrance as “…a carrier of the 1960’s counterculture flowering in the present” (165). he mentions the commercial “progressive trance” scene very briefly, acknowledging that it has ‘significant exchange value’, although it seems unlikely that the concept of the technocult explored by st john would mean much to the denizens of gatecrasher (www.gatecrasher.com; see also moore 2010). the pantheistic values of psytrance culture are discussed and the various occultist manifestations of the “trance ritual” are investigated, “itself a network of deviant and hidden knowledge and practice, from magick, prophecies and shamanism to astrology, esoteric christianity, ufos, http://www.gatecrasher.com reviews 101 and alien abductions, psytrance constitutes a discernable field of contemporary occultism” (169). parts of this chapter would seem familiar territory to readers of shea and wilson’s the illuminatus! trilogy, mainly as st john explores some of the global psytrance events leading up to the millennium and also some bizarre examples of psytrance ideology. for students and researchers interested in the evolution of goa-trance and the cultural practices and beliefs of the psytrance community, this chapter will provide a useful resource. the next chapter explores the harnessing of electronic dance music to a variety of activist agendas. these include anti criminal justice bill protests and reclaim the streets events. st john notes that “official” culture seeks to limit the dangers of carnivalesque excess, whilst recognising that carnival has a role in maintaining the equilibrium necessary for capitalism to thrive (presdee 2000). activists in turn have noted the dissident energy within the insurrectional dance-carnival and utilised it as a feature of contemporary protest and direct action. the implication of edm in a wide range of progressive and occasionally militant courses of action are explored; st john uses the neologism “protestival” to categorise these events of “radical conviviality”. initially the protestival was concerned with the regulation of dance music culture, but has since been harnessed to a range of different causes. the protest-carnival template has proliferated globally, partially facilitated by the internet. this leads to an interesting exploration of the intersection of activism, theatre and carnival in australia, the techno-tribes and sound systems discussed are concerned with injustices to both the aboriginal population and the environment. australians refer to outdoor edm events that synthesise transgressive, anarchistic and ecological sensibilities as “doofs”. the mobile sound system counterculture or “doofscape” discussed in this chapter is concerned with establishing valid links with the aboriginal population and seeks a respectful relationship with both the indigenous population and the land. the final brief chapter summarises the project of the book, to unpack the cultural politics of electronic dance music scenes. in many ways technomad achieves this successfully, although the focus of the book on the “outlaw” aspect of edm omits a significant range of practices and participants in edmc. however, as a contribution to the understanding of globalised dance music culture technomad offers many useful insights, both in terms of cultural anthropology, neo-religion and spirituality and the potential for edm as a form of activism. this exhaustively researched and meticulously crafted book provides a significant resource for all those interested in contemporary popular culture. references bey, hakim. 1991. t.a.z. the temporary autonomous zone, ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism. brooklyn: autonomedia. d’andrea, anthony. 2007. global nomads: techno and new age as transnational countercultures. london/new york: routledge. moore, karenza. 2010. the british ‘mainstream’ post-rave trance scene: exploring emotional and spiritual expression amongst ‘crasher clubbers’. in s. collins-mayo and b. pink-dandelion (eds.) religion and youth. aldershot: ashgate. presdee, m. 2000. cultural criminology and the carnival of crime, london: routledge. shea, robert, & wilson, anton. 1998. the illuminatus! trilogy. london: constable and robinson. dancecult 2(1)102 sonic warfare: sound, affect and the ecology of fear steve goodman cambridge: the mit press, 2010. isbn: 0-262-01347-9 (hardcover), 978-0-262-01347-5 (paperback) rrp: us$96.95 (hardcover), us$35.00 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.09 tobias c. van veen mcgill university, canada rave culture has long known of the power of sound to seduce bodies into becoming particles of a movement. dancer and dj become but one conduit of a feedback loop that affects the physical and the psychic. ecstasy, fear, horror, awe and excitement, as well as melancholy, nostalgia and transcendance form the connective tissue of the event. focusing on the “politics of frequency”, sonic warfare seeks to outline how the limits of sound are deployed within “vibration ontology”. goodman overviews military-state and countercultural usages alike, from audio assault weaponry for crowd control to dub audio viruses that transmit the offworld heritage of afrofuturism. an earworm, for example, can operate as an afrodiasporic riff of black noise that functions “as an attractor in processes of group catalysis”(157), such as the mobilization of dance; or, as a preemptive strike by hypercapital that “sets up a structure of allure for products for which you had no desire… because they do not necessarily exist yet” (186). tracing these parallel developments to early 20th century futurism and its “art of noise in the art of war” goodman dismisses the avant-garde camps of noise and silence alike, choosing (wisely) to focus on an ecology of rhythm and to argue for a complex and—perhaps essentially—incomplete philosophical inventory of vibration ontology. as goodman briefs in the introduction, readers looking for a detailed, historical account of sonic warfare should turn elsewhere. it is also worth noting—as goodman himself warns of his “dense theorisation”—that readers looking for an exegesis or comparative study of the text’s many philosophical sources should come prepared for neither. prepare instead for a somewhat chaotic assemblage of theoretical trajectories that zoom in and out of zones “goodman’s development of affect remains indispensible to studies of soniculture” reviews 103 of inquiry, from the futurhythmachines of the black atlantic to the bass materialism of global ghettotech. if that’s an earful, listen and repeat until sedated, for goodman has well adopted the deleuzo-guattarian maxim of conjoining it all with an “and”. fear not radical empiricism! affect and ontology of vibration goodman’s development of affect remains indispensible to studies of soniculture. for goodman, affect is the vibration—the good or bad vibes—prior to organisation into organised feeling (prior to what phenomenology would call intentionality). sonic weaponry seeks to disrupt or enhance the vibrational flux; it is capable of provoking feelings such as fear, dread or ecstasy through its good or bad vibes. goodman details actual sonic weaponry as well as fantastical projects that have promised more than delivered. he also aligns particular electronic music genres with various sonic effects, noting in particular how bass heavy genres—such as dub—generate atmospheres of dread, quipping their bass materialism as the “subpolitical power of music to attract and congeal populations” (172). elements of these theses were developed in goodman’s 2004 article, “speed tribes”. goodman’s approach, which he groups with radical empiricism, mixes the realms of the material and physiological with their often hazy effects upon subjects and cultures—the contested realm of the social sciences and cultural studies. in this respect, goodman develops a materialist perspective for grasping the affective potential of sound, be it the marching drum of the military, sonic cannons fired on insurgent protesters, or wobbly subbass let loose on east london club-dwellers. radical empiricism does not so much eschew cause and effect as much as it claims that effects operate autonomously of cause in an “ecology” of interrelationships (or rhythms and anticipatory echoes). radical empiricism opens the material world to preconscious interpenetration by its bodies (which can be any population, as whitehead’s “actual occasion”), as well as prehensive temporality, where “such an occasion itself starts as an effect facing its past and ends as a cause facing its future” (whitehead, quoted in goodman 152). in short, goodman eschews the a priori claims of phenomenology, substituting the radical empiricism of ecology. this, of course, requires an epistemological claim concerning knowing that which is aphenomenal and asubjective to the world. what we call sound itself is merely the human heard of the spectrum; goodman delves beyond even the ultra, sub and infrasonic, developing philosophies of rhythmanalysis by bachelard, lefebvre and whitehead (though one wishes he had spent more time with lefebvre, who explores the political capacities of rhythmanalysis, and in general less time with deleuze and guattari’s toolbox of usual suspects). in this respect, goodman practices what deleuze and guattari call a “minor science”; he delves headfirst into claims concerning hard science and metaphysical inquiry while suspending their epistemological uncertainty, thereby granting this form of empiricism, for better or for worse, its radicalism. that said, goodman footnotes the moment where his radical empiricism and graham harman’s speculative realism depart, noting his adherence to whitehead’s theories of relation over harman’s insistence on the rigorous conception of the discrete object (ch. 17). yet speculative realism holds intriguing consequences for goodman’s ontology of vibration. could discrete objects mark a particular phase of whitehead’s eternal object? dancecult 2(1)104 here i’ll dive into one particular argument to give a sense of what is at stake in the thesis of vibration ontology. the eternal vibrator goodman does not note if his adoption of the eternal object—which ingresses from pure potential into the real potential of the actual as it vibrates out-of-phase with itself (whew)—departs or concords with alain badiou’s neo-platonism. this becomes all the more significant when goodman talks of whitehead’s “actual occasions”—which are bodies in the general sense—being able to select eternal objects, which is how affective encounters between “discrete actual entities” occur (98). not only does a shadow of the discrete return, drawing attention to how radical empiricism shadows speculative realism, but goodman often writes as if a rhythmic power underpins vibration ontology (he treats audio viruses, or earworms, in a similar fashion, granting them an undefined agency he nearly denies human subjects (149)). in this respect, his adoption of the eternal object approaches a quasi-idealism, or a transcendentalism he elsewhere seeks to avoid. goodman’s radical empiricism, not surprisingly given its theoretical ground, dances around the question of spinoza’s god, i.e., the eternal vibrator. this problem can be recast in terms of politics. while goodman critiques bachelard for seeking equilibrium between counterrhythms (107), he nonetheless accepts philip turetsky’s account of rhythmic synthesis that forms matter into a single body (111). what is the difference between the two? well, for one, it is one of politics, or as goodman sees it, the micropolitics of frequency. goodman conceives of the “ontological ground” as fundamentally turbulent, a rhythmic anarchitecture which: . . . does not dictate the orientation of such a micropolitics; it does not lay down a set of generalizable laws but rather throws up a series of engineering problems. as such, any micropolitics derivable from this base can be only tactical rather than strategic—a war without aims concerned more with disposition and potential movement than ideology, although certainly susceptible to abduction (107). the problem is, of course, with alien abduction. the other always swoops in, alien, capitalist, totalitarian or otherwise viral, an earworm “takeover of the body by an exterior entity” (150) that overcodes tactical movement with strategy, setting up a violent mechanism of control over heterogeneous rhythms, and ultimately, of the “actual occasion” that is the self. like deleuze and guattari’s war machine, the tactical micropolitics of frequency or turbulence remain fundamentally inculpable. of course, we have hit upon the ideology of this position, which is its first generalizable law. its second generalizable law is already expressed above: being concerned with disposition and potential movement precisely is the ideogram of the micropolitics of frequency, its unification or expressed ideology as the perceived good, pre-abduction, of rhythmic anarchitecture. elsewhere goodman writes that “a theory of sonic warfare is particularly fascinated by this turbulent boundary layer between dance and violence” (111). what i understand goodman as trying to argue is that while vibrational control reviews 105 techniques such as sonic weaponry (from dub viruses to military means) seek to control the crowd by unifying it through resonance, thereby dictating it to move as one, at the ontological level its rhythm remains turbulent and nonunified. one can also see dance as a similar assemblage, where the soundsystem unifies differentiated bodies into what kodwo eshun called a “futurhythmachine”. thus, unification is not, in itself, a bad thing, but can be wrought for different ends say that of the military state, on the one channel, or that of jouissance, such as rave culture, on the other. that we are talking of ends and means suggests strategy, however, rather than tactics. this argument is a strong one, and smartly counters adorno’s well-worn conservative moralisms against mass dancing and jazz music, or benjamin’s aestheticization of politics, as somehow fundamentally fascist, questioning whether “aesthetics need be sacrificed at the altar of a political cause” (175). yet, there is a strict problem here: the potential to be unified is evidently inherent to rhythm. more than potential, it is an incorporated possibility before the fact; it is de jure. one could argue just as well that rhythm is fundamentally unified, which is to say one, and that turbulence is an expression of mode. again, this is spinoza’s problem, of the monadic substance of god expressed in the many. it haunts goodman’s text throughout, significantly with the undefined agency of the audio virus or earworm and the supposedly uncontaminated and interiorized body it penetrates by communicating the instruction “record me!” (150). a more ecological sense of interior/exterior would be of use here, of the earworm within that would whisper the effects of consciousness, suggesting the always already incorporation of alterity. in short, to the question: what concept of memory is compatible with the illogic of affect, the virtuality of the past and the active immanence of futurity in the present? one could reply, différance, insofar as derrida speaks of an absolute past, force, and the technics of the sign—the trace—before the re-marking of intentionality. and/or the logic of the supplement, otherwise known as incorporation, of that which is extraneous but necessary (that which is added after to make the thing whole from the start). derrida’s work on husserl could bridge the divide to deleuze and forms the unthought (or unsound) to goodman’s investigations. the political question of unified rhythm is raised by lefebvre, as well as deleuze and guattari, the latter whom grasp the state as the superposition of waves, a wave that cancels itself out (see van veen 2010: 183). superposed waves become a flat line that masks their turbulence, posing an entire problematic of perception, as well as form/content, ecological or otherwise, within rhythmanalysis. to this end, in the production of space, lefebvre even cautions against overstating the parallelism between hydrodynamics and theory (184). of course, goodman adequately argues a radical empiricism that claims all as rhythmic; it is a materialist theory of rhythm through-and-through that charts sociopolitical effects from the axioms of vibration ontology. which is to say the critical objection to goodman remains here. utilising vibrational ontology to script (or prescript) the political will of populations—or rather rendering viral such will, and “mapping” populations as preconscious rhythmic assemblages—dovetails neatly with 20th century second-order cybernetics as well as hypercapitalist (and fascist) strategy. unquestionably, such strategies—strategies as they serve political endgames— dancecult 2(1)106 are powerful. goodman demonstrates how they work in the world. yet they also do not work so well; no population has yet been adequately controlled (or so we perceive…). and undoubtedly this is also goodman’s point: that turbulence is a priori, that turbulence remains, in short, as a “subpolitics,” as it cannot be prescripted, even as resistance (175). it could be “abducted” in any direction. and in this sense, i agree with goodman, for his rhythmanalysis leaves us with a population (and a universe) that is without content, much like paolo virno’s conception of the multitude, or lefebvre’s analysis of the urban as form. yet, the alien, as all the sci-fi nightmares of horrific innards warn us, is always within. abduction occurs from within this same ontos; we abduct ourselves, unknowingly, aliens to ourselves. which leaves the question hanging: what is this uncanniness of the alien, its strange eternal return as the virus of our becoming? in short there is always an untimely question to the absolute claims of radical empiricism. whereas the virus remains, the material strategies of its dissemination do not; they mutate and change with the technics of history. for a materialist ontology of vibration, is it not, by its own admission, a tactic and not strategy, a viral thought to the metaphysics of eternal ontology? wildstyle ecology in mu-mu land the telescoping rhythm of shifting in and out of this increasingly complex and at times bizarre inventory of sonic weapons, inventions and theories touches upon the wildstyle. at times one wishes goodman would pitch down the rhythm and pause, downsampling more time to his soundbytes. in a particularly captivating passage, goodman fast-forwards a discussion between william burroughs and led zeppelin guitarist jimmy page on the potential of infrasonics; shifts to industrial band and performance artists throbbing gristle and their “infrasonic emitters;” and skips on to discuss the klf’s “audio weapons system” as borrowed by techno duo panasonic (now pan sonic). all this on page 24. as goodman makes clear on several occasions, “a brief overview will have to suffice” (17). yet the overview can be stimulating and a scrappy shot of wake-up. goodman emphasizes the potential of sound, writing how “at the very least, the transduction of bad vibes into something more constructive suggests the need to probe more deeply into affective tonality and the vibrations of the environment” (73). most ravers would agree. references goodman, s. 2004. “speed tribes: netwar, affective hacking and the audio-social”. in franz liebl and thomas düllo (eds), cultural hacking: kunst des strategischen handelns, pp. 139-55. vienna: springer. lefebvre, henri. 1991. the production of space. trans. donald nicholson-smith. oxford: blackwell. van veen, tobias c. 2010. “cities of rhythm and revolution”. in alexandra boutros and will straw (eds), circulation and the city: essays on mobility and urban culture, pp. 155-192. montréal: mcgill-queens up. reviews 107 film music world: donk dir. andy capper vbs:tv (internet documentary), 2009. http://www.vbs.tv/en-gb/watch/music-world/donk phil kirby university of liverpool (uk) this review explores the vbs.tv documentary on the uk electronic dance music style known as “donk”. the genre is referred to by a number of names including scouse house, bouncy house, bouncy techno, bounce or donk. the term bounce will be used throughout the review as the term donk has a pejorative dimension. the style is an offshoot of hardcore techno, which has had a number of variants popular in the north of england. the tunes are around 150 bpm with a four-on-the-floor kick drum, whilst the eponymous “donk” itself is a layered sound or stab that occurs on the offbeat, or “and” of each beat. synthesised musical parts in the tunes are akin to european techno, a stylistic template that has more in common with the sonic palette of 2 unlimited than that of basic channel. some bounce releases feature vocals, or rapid-fire mc’ing in an unashamedly uk regional accent. the focus of the documentary is mainly the blackout crew, although other uk mcs and producers are featured. blackout crew’s 2008 single put a donk on it may have only reached number 91 in the uk charts, but the official video had well over five million hits on youtube, and consequently attracted “mainstream” media attention. the genre is little known outside of the north west and north east of england. indeed, in the north west of england the style is mainly popular in the satellite towns between liverpool and manchester such as st helens and wigan, and towns to the north of manchester such as bolton, burnley and blackburn. the documentary is on initial viewing quite funny, until the realisation sinks in that it is a heavily biased, stereotype-laden snipe at the leisure practices of the white northern working class. the documentary begins by exploring blackout crew’s origins in a bolton youth centre. notably, considering the multi-cultural makeup of most of the towns named above, the only representatives of ethnic minorities filmed in the documentary are the managers of the youth centre (and a promoter later in the video). northern hardcore and its sub-styles have never been of much interest to young black or asian clubbers. the black respondents’ comments in the video are subtitled despite being perfectly comprehensible; indeed this doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.10 http://www.vbs.tv/en-gb/watch/music-world/donk dancecult 2(1)108 patronising use of subtitles occurs randomly throughout the video. the next sequence takes place in burnley, introduced by a series of visual tropes intended to convey a sense of acute urban deprivation. the presenter briefly interviews an ex-mc and questions him on local drug use, this respondent seems to have been included solely as he has been to prison. after some more clichéd camera shots the next respondent offers a more positive view of the town than the earlier montage suggested, despite being repeatedly questioned on the area’s alleged propensity for violence. a bounce producer dj greenie is subsequently interviewed; he responds to questions about the scene’s drug use by coyly stating a comparison to the film human traffic, inferring the use of ecstasy. greenie is questioned on the centrality of steroids to the donk scene, to which he responds, “wigan pier’s full of big lads on steroids”. in the next sequence the documentaryfollows blackout crew to a gig in scarborough. the documentary crew film some sequences outside the venue, one is an interview with a promoter who discusses the problems of booking the band outside the style’s heartlands, describing the southern audience as “more urban, more sophisticated in a sense”. the narrative then returns to bolton, signified by a montage featuring a pie shop, a tanning salon, a tattoo studio and a barbershop. after more interviews the focus shifts to a blackout crew performance at wigan pier, but not before another montage including a camera shot of a local newspaper headline proclaiming wigan thug beats mum to be and yet more shots of fast food shops. footage of young males being checked for weapons with a hand-held metal detector is included to connote a threat of violence. the next sequence sums up the overall tone of the documentary, despite the friendly interviewees and carefree enthusiasm of the pier’s crowd, the documentary team can’t resist sniping at the provincial working class audience, “as the night went on hundreds more fake-tanned, steroid-pumped donk enthusiasts filled the floor, tongues blue from drinking wkd”. as the blackout crew perform, the presenter then comments that the music starts to sound like being trapped in a nail factory, before paraphrasing joseph conrad’s heart of darkness, “what you see here is the beating heart of donk, the heart of donkness, oh the horror, the horror”. to bookend the video the documentary team return to bolton the next day to interview one of the blackout crew mcs. as a product of the vice media group the documentary has a pre-ordained agenda to be mildly controversial and to come across as edgy gonzo journalism, hence the underlying fixation with drugs, violence and urban deprivation. this subtext is reinforced by the “quite funny, until the realisation sinks in that it is a heavily biased, stereotype-laden snipe at the leisure practices of the white northern working class” reviews 109 connotations supplied by the montage sequences and the chosen edits. the documentary team are given a consistently friendly welcome and open access to the scene by all whether practitioners or clubbers yet still choose to mock the northern working class whenever possible. this isn’t a highbrow dance music style, but then again neither are grime or funky (uk garage sub-styles), which are generally treated with some degree of reverence by the british media, possibly as these styles initially emanated from the south of england and have greater perceived (sub) cultural capital. other related media coverage demonstrates this bias. the guardian newspaper included a brief feature on donk in 2008 (by a vice contributor) which had the headline, “bouncy techno meets terrible rapping? welcome to donk. keen on sportswear? prone to taking your shirt off in clubs? donk is made for you” (mcdonnell 2008). in a promotional article in the metro newspaperthe producer discusses the making of the vbs documentary: the most shocking element was just how massive most of these dudes were. they all had their tops off and the drugs are paramount. they take ecstasy, steroids, a bit of cocaine and then blue or red alcopops. we’ve been making a load of films recently, including one about cannibals in liberia, but there were bits of donk that were just as scary—like being the only sober ones among 3,000 ravers on steroids and ecstasy (capper cited by day 2010). the documentary says much about the predominantly middle-class media’s attitude to white working class britain and specifically london-based media’s attitude to the north of england. the selection of material, the content of the montages and the editing reinforces entrenched stereotypes concerning the north of england and white working class leisure. the documentary is augmented by a vice article on the making of the programme, which is noticeably more scathing than the documentary. for example, in a passage describing burnley the writer states the following hyperbole: what used to be a prosperous cotton-mill town is now decimated by the terminal decline of industry, with entire square miles of housing steel-boarded-up, repossessed and marked for demolition by the local council. unemployment is all-consuming, violence is a popular pastime—as is the rampant theft of expensive copper pipes from condemned houses to sell as scrap to pay for heroin and crack. it’s practically a ghost town these days, but instead of headless cavaliers with chains clanging around their wrists and ankles, there are gaggles of toothless, skeletal smackheads waddling around in skid-mark-stained tracksuit bottoms. actually, scratch that—it’s more zombie town than ghost town (hodgson 2009). obviously, burnley isn’t that bad, although if you look for that kind of social deprivation it can be found in many urban centres. crack and heroin use are not exclusively northern pastimes and neither is violence. another example of tabloid journalism in the vice article is the following statement describing the crowd in wigan pier: the crowd was a mixture of skimpily dressed, emaciated rave bunnies and some of the most gruesome thugs you’d ever come across—blokes whose faces had been dancecult 2(1)110 permanently disfigured by a lifetime of being pummeled by fists every weekend, who’ve probably washed down massive doses of steroids with gallons of stella for breakfast every morning since they were 11 years old (hodgson 2009). although the vbs.tv documentary is aimed at popular consumption, it does raise issues of academic interest other than media representation. there is potential for further academic research on the various dance music subcultures that have blossomed in the north of england outside of the metropolitan centres. an example of an interesting piece of previously published work on northern dance music culture is ingham’s (1999) listening back from blackburn: virtual sound worlds and the creation of temporary autonomy. this is a brief but fascinating study of the warehouse party scene that blossomed in the blackburn area in 1989-1990. northern soul has now achieved a mythic status and has received some academic attention, but the audience demographic was very similar to that of bounce nowadays, as were the audience demographics for the other hardcore house and techno variants that preceded bounce in the same geographic area. linking these styles historically could be socially and culturally revealing. references day, james. 2010. “donk is the crazy dance sensation taking over the north-west of england”. metro, 31 march: <http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/819812-donk-is-the-crazy-dance-sensationtaking-over-the-north-west-of-england>. hodgson, jaimie. 2009. “put a donk on it”. vice. <http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n2/htdocs/ put-a-donk-518.php>. ingham, james. 1999. “listening back from blackburn: virtual sound worlds and the creation of temporary autonomy”. in living through pop, ed. a. blake, 112-128). london: routledge. mcdonnell. john. 2008. “bouncy techno meets terrible rapping? welcome to donk”. guardian online. 29 july: <http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2008/jul/29/ bouncytechnomeetsterribler>. “the crowd was a mixture of skimpily dressed, emaciated rave bunnies and some of the most gruesome thugs you’d ever come across—” http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/819812-donk-is-the-crazy-dance-sensation-taking-over-the-north-west-of-england http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/819812-donk-is-the-crazy-dance-sensation-taking-over-the-north-west-of-england http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n2/htdocs/put-a-donk-518.php http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n2/htdocs/put-a-donk-518.php http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2008/jul/29/bouncytechnomeetsterribler http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2008/jul/29/bouncytechnomeetsterribler reviews 111 speaking in code dir. amy grill usa: square productions, 2008. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1474864/ tobias c. van veen mcgill university, canada you can still smell the revolution a bit, you know. —modeselektor with the proliferation of digital film technologies, i’ve been waiting to witness a film that captures the obsession and exuberance of the worldwide technoculture. by techno i have a specific meaning in mind. with the collapse of north american rave culture thanks to 9/11—which, among other things, disrupted vinyl distribution as well as introduced draconian police powers that were deployed everywhere against autonomist enclaves—djs, producers and adherents of the house and techno sound fled the states. this remains an undocumented exodus of creative luminaries. though montréal served, for a few years, as a nexus of technoculture thanks to the mutek collective—many of my canadian comrades moved to montréal around 2002—it was berlin that soon overcame all comers. easy travel within a united europe, cheap living and the fierce protection of personal freedoms made berlin not just an inexpensive and convenient place to live, but made it (along with barcelona) the place to imagine collective cultural anarchism. the jouissance of deep, psychedelic, minimalist or maximalist techno betrays not only this yearning, but its reality, which is what few north americans realise. berlin and barcelona, though each fighting their battles against gentrification, are singularities of the way things could be. perhaps even should be. amy grill’s film captures something of the meaning of techno to berliners. techno is not just clubbing catharsis; it is the soundtrack to the fall of the wall. as a few interviews (and deleted scenes) explain, when the wall fell in 1989, the centre of berlin opened into unoccupied and stateless space. ravers crept in, setting up technoclubs in bunkers and buildings. the infamous tresor was such a space; today berghain upholds the tradition. signs of this sociocultural renaissance appear everywhere in this film, where modernistdoi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.11 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1474864/ dancecult 2(1)112 inflected graffiti, inside and out, signifies resistance to speculation in property values. already, there is much to film: the relation of a free europe to the policed urbanism of north america; a thorough updating of the afrogermanic detroit/berlin axis wrought back in 1990; and the development of the later cross-atlantic dialogue with montréal, diving south in this regard, with mutek’s mexico and chile editions. though digging into berlin, and touching upon barcelona, speaking in code falls somewhat short of investigating the planetary potential of this techno matrix. focusing on grill’s hometown of boston, and her ex-husband david day’s struggle to produce technoculture in a town that mostly doesn’t care (like the rest of the conservative us), the film often forgets to provide some much-needed context to this mini-cultural revolution. after a few starts, it settles down on german labels bpitch control and kompakt, as the personal lives and meteoric careers of modeselektor and the wighnomy brothers become central to the narrative. both duos have to deal with celebrity and stress, as they find themselves gigging constantly, with modeselektor playing to tens of thousands at barcelona’s sonar festival. the massive scale of sonar is well contrasted to david day’s burnt-out efforts in boston, where day eventually loses track of his community, driving his new afterhours loftspace into the ground (at one point, he talks of putting on events night after night after ‘getting everyone else [i.e. his fellow artists!] out of the building’). a few other technorati make appearances, including the ever eccentric and incredibly inventive monolake, a.k.a. robert henke, prime programmer of ableton live and dub techno composer, whose spartan, all-white loft matches, without irony, his all-white techno outfit. another memorable appearance is that of music journalist and dj philip sherburne, who strives to explain, in an incredibly touching moment—he breaks down on camera— the true significance of hearing and what it means to him, thanks to his relationship with his deaf father, who received a hearing implant a few years before his death in 2005. indeed, philip’s ever articulate and composed persona is a highlight of the film; one wishes there was more from this evocative american writer. likewise, the ever elusive wolfgang voigt—an acid house-era techno producer and owner/operator of the kompakt empire—appears in fine form, situating “cultural techno” as not only still a part of ecstatic rave culture, but as a step beyond—a form-of-life. you will find more years to say something without words. —modeselektor reviews 113 the artist set-pieces of speaking in code are beautifully composed. each taps deeply into the ups-and-downs of living-and-breathing technoculture. the wighnomy brothers are exceptional; they live in the six person “small communist collective” of freude-am-tanzen, sharing equally in profits and running their own label, work/live space and distribution out of the small, mostly rural town of jena in former east germany. yet one wishes that the film went deeper still. when the very lovable, teddy bear-like robag wruhme of the brothers decides to take a breather from the relentless touring schedule, his absence remains something of a mystery. as a former technoculture journalist, i can’t help but think of what to ask him. i’d ask him if he misses his commune—surely, because he has spent his life, up to that point, working and living in an autonomist collective? to be thrown headfirst into the hypercommercialism and opportunist corporatism of mainstream european techno-pop culture must have been a dilemma—if not a cultural shock to the system. at sonar, massive digital billboards advertise alcohol, as if by bastardized simile they have overcoded the absent artistic visuals (look closely during modeselektor’s set). i’d hypothesize that wruhme’s retreat signifies that not all are comfortable with what “successful” technoculture has become. yet, the film only glances over divided yet interconnected levels of technoculture in europe. some are quite literally underground; the incredible muna club in jena reclaims a wwii-era rocket factory. an entire dimension of the ritual denazification of this space through dance is left uncommented. then there are the arena festivals of cigarette sponsorship bound by chain-link fences. the very opening of the film, for reasons that are left unexplained, rolls with some rather uninspiring footage of a dutch techno festival. as the camera enters through the vip gate, a sea of garbage and burnt-out bodies meets the eye, everyone seemingly unaware of the destitution of their camp-like surroundings… this is a fenced-in wasteland of the wasted, yet it is presented, without critique, as a tease of what’s to come. is this wasteland symbolic for something else in this film? well, yes. the evident struggle between technoculture’s collectivism and its commercialism, its schizoid, yet symbiotic relationship with corporate entertainment, is sacrificed to amy grill’s focus on her disintegrating relationship with david day. choosing “speaking in code shows that technoculture can be a communal, lifelong adventure in art, music and living, achieving escape velocity, at least for the inventive, from its youthful escapism and burn-out hedonism” dancecult 2(1)114 to narrativise her failing relationship with an always-omniscient voice-over, grill never places herself before the camera, even as she captures day in all his darkest moments. the film’s gaze does not match its voice; the director indulges in a selective narcissism, revealing only a strangely affectless narration to what is left unseen. by the end of the film the pair are divorced and what begins as an aside becomes the film’s peroration. their disintegration into divorce eschews cinema verité, embracing instead the conventionality of reality tv. what is more intriguing is all that is left unsaid. for example, why is montréal only mentioned once and the mutek festival never mentioned at all? north america is depicted as the graveyard of electronic music, yet there is no mention of the cities where technoculture has survived. also absent are vancouver’s new forms festival and seattle’s decibel. and then there’s detroit—its festival and heritage left unheard and unmentioned. the same can be said for san francisco, chicago, nyc and the midwest. this not only leaves the average audience unawares of the states’ founding as well as continuing contribution to electronic music, but it also leaves the current depiction of berlin’s technoscene and boston’s lack of it—despite day’s valiant attempts at a brief flowering—as somewhat hollow and meaningless. the united states lost something with 9/11—the total expression of a generation, silenced off the airwaves, policed and beaten down, denied even the nostalgia granted to punk. rave culture was not only underground; it has now been buried in the us, as if it never existed, as if the blurring of gender and colour and dance never happened. which brings me to the inevitable but essential question of representation. though ellen allien appears as head of bpitch control, speaking wonderfully of the emotive aspect of techno and the supportive atmosphere she strives to create in her label collective, she remains the sole woman onscreen. but most embarassingly, there is not one single black person in the film. one would think techno was invented and played solely by white people in berlin. in fact, the only reference to techno’s heritage in black detroit is a symbol, worn as a badge of respect by modeselektor. during their massive but ad-ridden sonar concert, sebastian szary wears an underground resistance t-shirt. good for him. full disclosure. i like others am a ghost in this film. i saw it being filmed. i’ve djed in many of the same places. i know and love most everyone in it. i love the music. it is difficult, in this respect, to write critically, especially given the usual laudatory press. but ditch the melodramatic divorce narrative and you have a documentary of profound intimacy and insight into the fragility of collective creation. speaking in code is a snapshot of a radical soniculture attempting to achieve a strange kind of equilibrium in the 21c. both henke and voigt say the same thing: they don’t see the need for change. but it’s more than that. speaking in code shows that technoculture can be a communal, lifelong adventure in art, music and living, achieving escape velocity, at least for the inventive, from its youthful escapism and burn-out hedonism. sometimes divorce is necessary for radical togetherness. guest editor’s introduction: doing nightlife and edmc fieldwork dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 5(1): 3–17 issn 1947-5403 ©2013 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.01.01 doing nightlife and edmc fieldwork luis-manuel garcia max planck institute for human development (germany) luis-manuel garcia (phd ethnomusicology, u chicago, 2011) is a postdoctoral research fellow at the max planck institute for human development (berlin, germany), where he participates in the research group, “felt communities? emotions in musical life in europe”. he is currently working on a book manuscript, entitled together, somehow: music, affect and intimacy on the dance floor. he is also undertaking new fieldwork in berlin on “techno-tourism” and expatriate life in the city’s edm scenes. he writes for resident advisor, little white earbuds and his own blog, lmgmblog: <http://lmgmblog.wordpress.com>. he can be reached by e-mail at: <theluisgarcia@gmail.com>. the instructional guide to doing fieldwork in nightclubs and bars has yet to be written. but, considering the continued rise in scholarship of electronic dance music cultures (edmc), it seems that a critical examination of its fieldwork methods is well overdue. for more than twenty years now, young scholars of edmc have had to approach their fieldwork more or less on their own, adapting methods from their home disciplines and scavenging “tips and tricks” from those working in similar contexts. certainly, when i began my first project studying the house and techno scenes of paris, chicago and berlin, i wished that other nightlife-researchers were more open about their methods—and more generous about giving advice to new ethnographers of nocturnal scenes. but most edmc research to date remains taciturn or vague when it comes to the concrete details of fieldwork. admittedly, this may have something to do with the more salacious and illicit aspects of nightlife; perhaps scholars do not want to disclose what they did to get “insider” access. but perhaps they are hiding a more embarrassing secret, too: maybe they didn’t know what they were doing, either. this special issue of dancecult sets out to redress this lack of methodological guidance and reflection. the essays collected here do not form a comprehensive guide to fieldwork in guest editor’s introduction dancecult 5(1)4 edm scenes, but rather the beginning of a methodological discourse that will benefit both new and seasoned scholars in this field of study. the contributors to this volume recount their own fieldwork experiences, interrogate methodological conventions, highlight the particularities of nightlife fieldwork and propose new methods that are tailored to edm contexts. in doing so, they all show a great deal of courage and candor, laying bare their own fieldwork methods and disclosing both successes and failures in order to jump-start the discussion. in social science’s most prominent ethnographic disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology and folklore studies, there already exists a robust literature on fieldwork methods, from didactic to critical to experimental. but these “top-level” disciplines span a wide range of sites, scenes and themes, so the guidance they provide can often be too general, leaving the budding edmc researcher to adapt these models to nightlife contexts. furthermore, these disciplines have grown out of particular places and political contexts (e.g. current and former colonies, rural europe, indigenous communities), and thus many established methodological conventions assume field conditions that are not pertinent to edmc studies. one can nevertheless find valuable methodological insights in specific sub-disciplines and neighboring, thematically related fields. for example, one can find reflections on ethnographic methodology in popular music (maxwell 2002), ethnomusicology (barz and cooley 1997; myers 1992), dance studies (buckland 1999), and theater/performance studies (kershaw and nicholson 2011; smith 2009). across several disciplines, there are also instructive and critical interventions to be found on field-notes and the writing of ethnography (clifford and marcus 1986; emerson, fretz and shaw 2011; marcus 2002, 2012; markham 2005; van maanen 1988). certain fields have already developed a substantial discourse on nightlife fieldwork, such as youth studies (blackman 2007; hodkinson 2005; hunt, moloney and evans 2010; le breton 2004; lyng 2005) and public health / epidemiology / drug use studies (adler 1990; demant, ravn, and thorsen 2010; hunt, moloney and evans 2009; measham and moore 2006; moore 2002). the reflexive turn in the social sciences also produced important accounts of the impact of gender and sexuality on fieldwork methods (allison 1994; gurney 1985; perrone 2010; rambo ronai 1992; sanders 2006), although much more remains to be done on this topic as well as on race, class, ethnicity, ability and other identity-categories. finally, research on mobility and translocal networks has been producing a range of “mobile methods” that can prove useful for scholars of edm’s increasingly mobile scenes (büscher, urry and witchger 2011; marcus 1995, 1999). of course, researchers can always find guidance by following the example of alreadypublished edmc research. if present at all, however, descriptions of ethnographic methods in these publications are usually tucked away discreetly in an appendix or a section of the introductory chapter. for example, only a few edm-related monographs deal with fieldwork methods in substantial detail (anderson 2009; buckland 2002; malbon 1999), while another handful address it in an indirect or glancing way (amico 2006; butler 2006; garcia | doing nightlife and edmc fieldwork 5 d’andrea 2007; fikentscher 2000; st john 2010; thornton 1996). as is all too often the case with ethnography, these “methods” sections seem to be reluctantly written, reduced to terse and sometimes defensive prose. at any rate, these brief methodological reflections too often lack detail, do not interrogate their own methods critically and/or fail to engage critically with other edmc ethnographers. at present, there is a near-total lack of explicitly pedagogical materials on edmcspecific fieldwork, and even the descriptive or critical writing that takes such fieldwork as a central theme is scant and fragmented. as this field of study grows and matures, it is becoming increasingly problematic that we have not yet developed a collective notion of what “best practices” in edmc fieldwork would look like. this is an important ethical and disciplinary issue that we can hardly afford to ignore. one may rightly ask whether a unified pedagogy of fieldwork methods is desirable in such a diverse field, but there are nonetheless several practical, ethical and legal considerations particular to edmc fieldwork that both new and old ethnographers should not have to face alone. the challenges of nightlife fieldwork fieldwork in edm scenes requires new and adapted methods because nightlife contexts themselves pose challenges that conventional ethnographic methods are ill equipped to address. just a few of these are: respecting nightlives: one of the characteristic aspects of nightlife is that it provides a realm of activity that is at a remove from everyday, public, ordinary, “official” life. many participants in nightlife scenes take advantage of this social, physical and chronological distancing to develop a “nocturnal persona” (grazian 2005, 2008)—or, indeed, multiple personae—which can diverge sharply from one’s daytime identity. for some, the stakes of violating the boundaries between daylife and nightlife can be very high; and, with the continuing proliferation of hand-held technologies and wireless communications, these boundaries are becoming easier and easier to breach. people often allow themselves to do things at night (in clubs, bars, bathhouses, parks, etc.) that they would not or could not during the daytime. on the one hand, some of these revelers may care little if their employer, family, or friends knew that they dance, drink, use drugs, enjoy fetish play, engage in transgressive gender performances, and so on. on the other hand, others would be mortified. and this can go well beyond embarrassment: a breach of confidentiality has the potential to precipitate a loss of employment, social estrangement and even physical harm. so, how should the researcher respect the boundaries between participants’ various life-worlds? one of the primary challenges of nightlife fieldwork is thus to gain access, collect data, store sensitive information, and finally publish—to make public—information on a social world that relies on the avoidance of public scrutiny to sustain its experiments in living differently. establishing trust in “underground” scenes: if you are doing fieldwork, you need access— to people, to spaces, to information, to events, to personal archives—and access only comes dancecult 5(1)6 with trust. you need to know what is going on in the scene, you need people to open up to you and tell you their stories, you need to hear about and attend the events that make the scene what it is. and yet, participants in “underground” scenes have very good reasons to be wary of inquisitive scholars and journalists: part of underground scenes’ self-ascribed subcultural value is their low visibility, while increased visibility has historically been associated with some form of harm to the scene. what little information about underground scenes that does reach the general public—often through journalists and ethnographers—has a history of being distorted and damaging. for example, most rave scenes were hit with a “moral panic” (hier 2002; thornton 1996) at some point during the 1990s, much of which was facilitated by outsiders gaining access to the rave scene and then publishing reports that portrayed raves as teenaged drug-and-sex orgies. this had a very real and lasting impact on the rave scenes of the 90s, leading to police crackdowns, legislative bans, and the criminalization of rave promoters. along with journalists and social scientists in criminology, epidemiology and drug-use studies, ethnographers have played a significant role in producing the kind of institutionally backed knowledge that provided political fodder for anti-rave measures. how will partygoers know that you’ll be any different? no photos, please: during my training as an ethnomusicologist, one of the few explicit methodological directives i received was that ethnomusicologists should be creating their own research archive by recording as much as possible (e.g. myers 1992). photos, audio recordings and videos all have important talismanic value to the discipline as proof that what we are doing is “serious” and “scientific” fieldwork. moreover, recording would provide us with objects to analyze, while also providing “objective” evidence to support our own phenomenological descriptions of musical culture. this pressure to document is also present in most social sciences, and so it permeates the practice of fieldwork as well. but how do you get consent from a crowd of partygoers who may not want their drunk, high, and/or sweaty faces popping up in your next blog post, journal article, or conference presentation? how do you know that the dj/band/artists do not mind that you are recording their performance? some edm events are already saturated with camera-phones and other recording devices, while others enforce strict camera bans—both for reasons of privacy and intellectual property. and even when there is no explicit ban on recording, how socially acceptable will it be for you to whip out a camcorder at the next event? conversely, when is it more important to do something socially inappropriate in the name of “good data?” of what analytic and representative value will this data be if its collection is socially disruptive? some edm scenes are admittedly eager to document themselves, thus generating an ersatz archive of promotional videos, “user content” on social media, online event reviews, magazine photographs and even self-made documentaries. when available, these resources are indeed valuable—albeit often biased as self-promotional. but regardless of the local norms around recording media, the question remains: how do you collect “data” without alienating the people around you? respecting fun: interrupting fun is a genuine ethical problem when the fieldwork site is also a site of leisure for its participants. most edm-event participants go out to have fun, garcia | doing nightlife and edmc fieldwork 7 dance, enjoy music, drink, get high, get off, feel good, be spontaneous, be risky, cut loose, feel special, be weird, etc. one can assume that they do not go out to an edm event to complete a survey or engage in a probing interview. in a way, participants are busy having fun; how do you avoid interrupting that while you do your fieldwork? ethically, this is more important than the word “fun” may imply: partygoers invest time, effort, and resources into seeking out experiences that provide them with consolation, empowerment, validation, distraction, relief, ecstasy, or simply an escape from the difficulties of everyday life. is it right to interrupt their fun for our own curiosity (and professional career interests)? it would be undoubtedly problematic to interrupt participants in a religious ritual, a romantic encounter or an intimate conversation—regardless of how fun they may be—so why should we not show the same respect for participants’ immersion in edm events? working in noisy/chaotic environments: to put it lightly, most nightlife events entail less than optimal conditions for conducting and recording interviews, taking pictures, video and so on. but music events are the heart of most dance music scenes, bringing together performing, listening, dancing, curatorship/connoisseurship, face-to-face interactions and economic exchanges. if such events cannot be missed, which research methods can be conducted in a loud, dark, smoky place that is erratically lit by flashing lights? what do you have to offer? due to anthropology’s origins in colonialism (and sociology’s early involvement in the “management” of the lower classes), ethnographers have been able to take advantage of their relative wealth, intellectual prestige, institutional support and perceived connections to western modernity to attract interlocutors. for those working with underprivileged, poor and/or low-status groups, such asymmetries can work to their advantage—especially if group members also see an advantage in having their cultural practices studied as “culture” and “tradition”. but for ethnographers of edmcs— particularly young ethnographers who are still living on graduate/post-graduate income—it is often the case that their potential fieldwork consultants earn more money than they do, enjoy more social privileges, and have little concern for the academic validation of their nocturnal pursuits. as ethnographers, we take their time, their words and their experiences, and we make a (hopefully lucrative) career out of it; what can we offer our interlocutors in exchange? the costs of nightlife: most nighttime events (especially in urban centers) take place in bars, clubs, lounges, bathhouses, cafés, etc. these are all venues that make their profits by charging very high prices for beverages and usually charging a fee for entry. also, both making and maintaining fieldwork contacts often entails the ritualized gift-exchange of paying for drinks or other consumables. all of these expenses add up to a bill that may make fieldwork too costly to undertake with any intensity; this issue is particularly pressing for young edmc ethnographers, who most urgently need to establish their contact-networks through face-to-face socializing but also must subsist on graduate-student funding. sure, these costs may go down slightly as one establishes connections with event-organizers and receives the occasional guest-list spot, but sustained fieldwork in nightlife scenes will always be expensive. after all, nightlife is also an industry—one that is cost-intensive but dancecult 5(1)8 also potentially profitable. exhaustion: edm events are almost always very athletic events that take place at very odd hours. depending on the particularities of the local scene (available venues, liquor licenses, noise ordinances, closing times), an event may range from a 4-hour blast of focused dancing and rapid intoxication to a multi-day marathon with sporadic breaks for food and sleep. in almost every case, sleep patterns are disturbed and the body’s limits of endurance are pushed. the physical and mental cost of participant-observation thus takes its toll, and these exertions unavoidably impact one’s everyday, “normal” activities. this makes intensive fieldwork especially difficult to maintain when one also has responsibilities as an educator and/or scholar. how do you strike a balance? furthermore, our resilience to disturbed sleep patterns declines with age. how long until you are “too old for this?” what can we learn about edm cultures through our body’s efforts to keep up? unsurprisingly, most of the challenges listed above have to do with the circumstances of edm events themselves, which place particular demands on participation and limit certain activities. this leaves the edmc researcher with two options: conduct fieldwork away from music events or develop adapted, limited and/or innovative methods to gather data within the limits of these events. the contributors to this special issue reflect a broader pattern among edm scholars, who tend to combine both of these strategies in some way, conducting fieldwork both on and off the dance floor—albeit with very different procedures for each context. and this methodological bifurcation often follows the divide between the two pillars of conventional ethnographic fieldwork: participant-observation and focused interviews. doing nightlife fieldwork participant-observation at edm events participant-observation is already long established in the methodological repertoire of anthropology and sociology, and it has been increasingly adopted across a wide range of disciplines such as history, performance studies, epidemiology and music studies. participant-observation has come to be preferred over purely non-participant observation as a means of studying living musical traditions, particularly in the fields of anthropology and ethnomusicology, as well as in certain strands of sociology that emphasize ethnographic methods, such as the chicago school of sociology (bulmer 1984; deegan 2001). at its core, the concept is very simple: take part in a cultural activity, and—over time—learn things about that activity that one would not have discovered just by watching from a distance. there is a great deal more to it, of course: the participant-observer also builds social connections into the community, prompts pedagogical interactions where experts explain the group’s “unwritten rules”, and develops an expertise in that activity—all of which lends credibility to the ethnographer when presenting her work to other scholars. but ongoing participant-observation also creates a sort of “archive of experience”, from garcia | doing nightlife and edmc fieldwork 9 which one can draw in order to gain a more intuitive understanding of how things work, what is appropriate, what things mean, and so on. when i have conducted participant-observation in the field, my methodological decisions have been shaped by the axiom: “don’t mess with the vibe”. using an emic term such as “vibe” as guidance may be woefully vague, but this affective dimension is as essential to music events as it is difficult to describe. a great deal of the social interactions, gestures and performances in nightlife scenes are actually rather fragile, depending on the mood and atmosphere to be right in order to find expression. i became especially sensitive to this when i was conducting fieldwork for my first ethnographic project, which focused on strangerintimacy. many factors needed to be in just the right place in order for someone to reach out and open up to a stranger—and me pulling out a notepad or video camera certainly did not help. if event participants do not feel comfortable, they will not act as they usually do; and if one is violating norms of etiquette, privacy and/or personal space, these participants will not feel comfortable. there is a flow to every social gathering—with music playing an important role in how it flows—and a music ethnographer should know how to follow that flow without interrupting it. mostly, this involves learning what is socially appropriate in a particular community and respecting these norms and habits. in some scenes, this might mean being talkative, tactile and physically expressive in your dancing; in other scenes, this might mean being reserved, avoiding physical contact and showing quiet respect for the performer. one of the first tasks during the researcher’s early fieldwork phase is to figure out what works in these contexts. in response to these concerns, the principal fieldwork technique that i have developed for participant-observation at edm events could be described as “memory work”. during my time at an edm event, i focus on “being there”: taking note of and interacting with the music, the people and the environment. then, when i return home (or immediately after i wake up the next morning), i write down as much as i can recall from the event—including any details that i have retained, such as verbatim quotations, particular music tracks played, clothing, décor and so on. in the days following the event, i will return to these point-form notes and revise them into a smoother narrative. then, when i am in a writing phase, i can return to these notes and have a detailed archive of ethnographic data at my disposal. this sort of memory work was difficult at first, but i found that the depth and precision of my memory increased with practice: after my first three months of intensive fieldwork, i had developed the capacity to recall entire conversations. however, the chief disadvantage of this approach is that such detailed memory is rather volatile; if i did not write my notes within two or three days of the event, i found that i could not recall the small gestures, facial expressions, overheard comments, recognized tracks and other details that make ethnography come alive. this does not mean that i have completely avoided any form of note-taking, but i have strived to keep such activity as discreet and as brief as possible. after all, a musical event is something that happens in real time, and any time spent scribbling or recording is time lost from noticing what is happening around you. so-called “smart phones” (i.e., internet-enabled dancecult 5(1)10 phones that can run applications) have been particularly helpful in facilitating quick and discreet note-taking. most models have some sort of “notepad” function or program, and typing notes into such an application on one’s phone usually looks very similar to sending an sms message or checking one’s e-mail. smart phones and point-and-shoot cameras also provide a convenient means of taking photographs and recording short video clips, although i usually wait to see if other participants are taking pictures before bringing out my own camera. when i do take photos or video, i make sure to avoid framing anybody’s face in the image; instead, i usually try to get a “wide” shot of the whole crowd or the venue. as mentioned earlier, event-participants themselves will sometimes record and upload media from the event to social networking sites such as youtube, facebook, flickr, vimeo, twitter or instagram (to name a few). these can provide useful resources for research, although one should always consider whether the original footage/images were taken ethically and should ask for permission before reproducing them in one’s own published work. in summary, most of my methodology for “going out” as an ethnographer is based on a concern for not letting the observation of the event get in the way of the event itself. based on conversations with other edm researches, i do not seem to be alone in using this approach, but there also exist substantially different approaches that prioritize different issues and thus produce different kinds of knowledge. for example, i avoid formalized interviews at events, instead remaining open to more spontaneous discussions, relying on my memory to retain the gist of casual conversations, and conducting formal interviews off-site. but other researchers have strived to find ways to conduct more structured interviews on-site, often at the spatial (and sonic) margins of these events. these raise issues around consent, recording and conspicuousness that i did not have to deal with. such diversity in methodology is valuable and contributes to the robustness of this field of research, and so it is all the more crucial that we discuss and exchange ideas about how we work in these environments. interviewing party people in many ways, an off-site interview with an edm participant sufficiently resembles the conditions of conventional ethnographic fieldwork for “mainstream” guidebooks on interviewing to be immensely helpful. however, while ethnographic interviews may seem straightforward, interviewing within edm scenes also poses some particular challenges. these challenges become clearer when one considers some of the basic questions of preinterview preparation. considering that the interviewee’s time is limited, how many questions will you ask and which will take priority? how do you get interviewees in the first place? how will you protect the interviewee’s identity? will you record the interview, take handwritten notes, or both? where will you conduct the interview? will you ask uncomfortable questions? how will you analyze the interview afterwards? making connections and securing interviews—“recruiting”, as it is often termed in methodological discourse—can be especially challenging in edm scenes. due to most scenes’ self-image as an “underground” community and its frequent association with notentirely-legal activities, the ethnographer must contend with heightened concerns about garcia | doing nightlife and edmc fieldwork 11 confidentiality as well as doubts about the interviewer’s intentions. activities at nightlife events can be transgressive, scandalous, embarrassing, compromising and sometimes clearly illegal; the stakes of privacy and discretion are thus much higher than in everyday settings, and scene participants are justifiably concerned about what you are going to do with their information and how you will protect it. as a result, the researcher must find ways to address these concerns and overcome these barriers. in my own fieldwork, i have come rely on what i call a “trust network” to support my requests for interviews. this means making social connections first—often through the introduction of a mutual contact, but sometimes directly—and taking time to develop that connection into a relationship of trust. essentially, this is a form of kontaktpflege (german: cultivation of contacts), which allows the contact-person to become more familiar with me and to develop a sense that i am not likely to harm them in some way. this can take weeks and months, and often involves repeatedly meeting for coffee/drinks, attending music events together, attending her/his events if s/he is a performer or promoter, exchanging e-mails, maintaining contact through social networking sites, and revealing more about myself and my own relationship to the local music scene. this method of recruiting is obviously best suited to long research phases, as it may take months to establish a sufficient rapport to be certain for an interview. the advantage, however, is that one can often secure interviews with scene-actors who would otherwise be very reluctant to speak with a researcher. one of the other advantages to developing a trust network is that existing contacts in this network can assist me in making new fieldwork contacts by providing contact information, making introductions and vouching for my bona fides as a trustworthy person. in this sense, what i describe here is similar to the well-known recruiting method often called “snowball sampling”, wherein the researcher asks each interviewee to recommend other potential interviewees for the project. this method has been especially valuable in research that focuses on “hidden” and “hard to reach” populations, such as youth subcultures, drug users, sexual minorities and sex workers (adler 1990; biernacki and waldorf 1981; demant, ravn and thorsen 2010). and so, to the extent that a given edm scene avoids visibility and includes illicit activities and/or stigmatized identities, snowball sampling can be a powerful recruiting tool. this method also has its drawbacks, however, most of which have to do with the risk of skewed results. essentially, developing one’s pool of contacts through snowball sampling risks producing an ethnography of a particular social network, rather than of an entire community or scene; that is, one risks mistaking the quirks of a single, interconnected social group for the characteristic traits of an entire population. on the one hand, there is nothing inherently wrong with developing a richly-detailed account of an interrelated group of people; on the other hand, it limits the truth-claims that one can make about the larger world of nightlife. there is no simple solution to this issue. in my own work, i strive to mitigate this methodological weakness by working hard to develop contacts beyond the extended networks of those people i already know. this entails going out and meeting strangers, being outgoing, engaging in small talk, and becoming a “familiar face” at important venues and events—all of which require substantial time and effort. dancecult 5(1)12 finally, confidentiality is an especially important consideration for edm fieldwork, although these concerns do not differ greatly in their nature from those found in the ethnography of “hidden” populations, and so one can find a great deal of guidance in already-established practices. these include such practices as the preparation of an informed consent “script” (whether verbal or written), the use of pseudonyms, the storage of research files and interview recordings in locked cabinets and/or on encrypted digital media, and the consultation with interviewees during the writing process to ensure that quotations do not expose their identities or misrepresent them. nonetheless, one issue that may arise in edm fieldwork concerns scene-actors who are also publicly-known performers and/or promoters: on the one hand, it may become difficult to conceal their identities as they disclose details about their biography and musical practices; on the other hand, they may explicitly request that their real name or artist’s moniker be used in order to raise their own public profile. there are no simple solutions or guidelines for dealing with these issues; such blurring of the boundaries between public and private identities requires vigilance, diligence and deft writing. other modes of nightlife fieldwork certainly, attending edm events and conducting one-on-one interviews are not the only possible modes of doing fieldwork. scholars in the social sciences continue to develop new and experimental fieldwork methods, and this is also the case in this special issue. the contributions to this volume push fieldwork in new directions, such as in alice o’grady’s use of theatrical performances at edm events as a means to engage other partygoers through a mode of activity that is already indigenous to the scene, i.e., play. similarly, madison moore explores how organizing an event can also be a mode of ethnographic research, forcing the researcher to take a more holistic view of the dance event and to give more attention to its practical, organizational, promotional and “backstage” aspects. some contributors also adapt existing methods to nightlife contexts, such as bina bhardwa’s “shadowing” of fieldwork contacts during an edm event, which helps her process her own experiences as a female, south asian researcher in a male-dominated and heteronormative environment. sheena hyndman finds herself adapting her methods to sharply contrasting environments, as she moves the focus of her research away from the dance floor and out to gyms, schoolrooms and cafés. and, as nearly every essay in this volume shows, participantobservation can go well beyond the boundaries of the edm event: much can be learned about these music scenes through a sort of “deep hanging out” (geertz 2000) that can also take place during the more mundane hours of the week.1 in this issue the essays in this special issue of dancecult explore and address many of the concerns raised in this introduction. todd rosendahl, for example, contends with queer partygoers’ concerns about confidentiality and the boundaries between context-specific identities, reflecting on how his own sexuality may affect how he establishes trust with his interlocutors. garcia | doing nightlife and edmc fieldwork 13 similarly, bina bhardwa recounts how her multiple identities as young, female and south asian pose challenges to her ability to be taken seriously as a knowledgeable researcher— and yet these same identifications sometimes permit her moments of candid insight and solidarity with other minoritized partygoers. caitlin robinson, in her insightful analysis of local celebrity and wasta [social connectedness/influence] in beirut’s club scene, considers how her gender, body shape, skin tone, language skills, nationality, perceived ethnicity, dress and level of education all impact her fieldwork experience as well as the wasta of the local celebrity dj that she frequently accompanies on nights out. additionally, bhardwa and robinson both consider the question of reciprocity between ethnographers and their fieldwork consultants: what can they offer in exchange for information? what do their interlocutors think they are offering? many authors focus on developing new and adapted fieldwork methodologies better suited to edm settings. both o’grady and moore bring performance studies to bear on edm fieldwork, albeit with very different results. o’grady replaces static observation with dynamic play, preserving the “flow” of the edm festivals she studies by staging interactive performances with a team of co-researchers/co-performers. for moore, throwing a party is fieldwork method itself: he argues that the organization of edm events offers the researcher crucial and unique insights into how edm scenes work. looking back to the example of new york’s most famous disco-era club, studio 54, he shows how a theatrical lens can reveal the extent to which nightlife is staged and curated by subcultural impresarios. sheena hyndman explores edm fieldwork away from the dance floor and outside of “nightlife” proper, adapting conventional ethnographic methods to listening practices that are rarely given attention in edm studies. finally, in the first installment of the new translation series, “transcriptions”, jan-michael kühn adapts hubert knoblauch’s method of “focused ethnography” to the study of edm producers in their home-recording studios, presenting an approach that is suitable for short, intense periods of fieldwork in narrowly-focused fields—which is of particular interest to those scholars who cannot engage in long-term, sustained fieldwork (e.g. junior faculty, adjunct lecturers, graduate students, independent scholars). a final cluster of contributions to this issue focuses on the problem of documenting and representing the fieldwork experience. this is an issue for any kind of ethnography, but it is especially pressing for the intense, multisensory and socially-dense experiences within edmcs. tami gadir’s response to this problem is to combine spoken word, a mixed dj set, and field recordings to create a sound-collage that reflects on the nature of edm fieldwork while also powerfully evoking its sonic environments. graham st john’s essay on “writing the vibe” argues for a “radical empiricism of the vibe” in ethnographic writing, calling for a more creative, experimental and “sampladelic” approach that interweaves fragmentary representations (“nanomediations”) of various aspects of edmc experience. finally, lars nørr mikkelsen offers us a typology and genre-study of ethnographic field-notes, drawing from a pool of documents from a study of danish nightlife venues to show how researchers produce field-notes that follow certain narrative and stylistic conventions. dancecult 5(1)14 this special issue of dancecult is not intended to be an early draft of a handbook, guidebook or textbook. the goal here is not to be definitive, comprehensive or prescriptive. instead, it is the beginning of a conversation that we must sustain if edmc studies are to grow into the robust field of scholarship that these music scenes deserve. as scholars of various styles of electronic dance music, we have all experienced the frustration of finding our home discipline’s fieldwork methods impractical and sometimes impracticable for our ethnographic sites. individually and through informal conversations, edm scholars have been developing their own solutions to this gap in methodology; but there is no reason for us to continue struggling alone. it is long past time that we present our own methods, critically interrogate them, propose new ones and build something better together. acknowledgements i would like to thank the editorship of the iaspm-us blog (international association for the study of popular music, us chapter) for publishing my three-part essay series, “doing nightlife fieldwork” (garcia 2012). the response to that series provided the first impetus for this special issue of dancecult. this introductory essay is partially based on text from this earlier series. i would also like to thank the “berlin program for advanced german studies” at the free university of berlin—with special thanks to its coordinator, karin goihl—for their support during the preparation of this special issue. i am also grateful to the max planck institute for human development as well as the max-planck-gesellschaft for providing support during the final phase of this publication. many thanks go out to the scholars published in this issue for their valued contributions as well as their efforts during the editing process. and, of course, my heartfelt thanks to the dancecult editorial team for their tireless efforts in bringing this issue to publication. i am especially grateful to executive editor graham st john for taking a chance on this special issue. notes 1 however, one of the disadvantages of having a “fun” field of research is that it is often difficult to have such hanging out recognized as “serious” research by our colleagues (and grant-giving bodies). references 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“war on the dancefloor”: the reproduction of power and pleasure at the amphi festival in cologne johanna paulsson independent writer and music journalist <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.13> figure 1. heading for the battlefield (2010). photo: erik kjellman. in the summer of 2010, i find myself walking along some abandoned railway tracks by the river rhine. together with 16,000 other black-clad visitors from germany and countries worldwide, i’m heading for my second amphi festival in cologne: a gothic gathering similar to the larger predecessor wave-gotik-treffen in leipzig, sometimes described as the woodstock of “dark” music. the amphi festival got its name from the amphitheater in gelsenkirchen where the first festival took place in 2005. since 2006, cologne’s tanzbrunnen—a culture and leisure park created in 1928—has been the site of the two-day event for practical reasons. the festival features industrial, electronic body music (ebm), gothic rock and other subgenres within the darker electronic music field.[1] this year saw 37 artists on 3 stages, with more than 20 international djs taking command of the party-area in the evenings. bands like and one and vnv nation were the headliners on the open-air main stage, while the smaller stage inside the staatenhaus am rheinpark—a bowed building with huge portals and a red brick façade—presented the canadian electro-industrial legends skinny puppy and front line assembly. but the line-up also featured more controversial acts like the austrian solo project nachtmahr. the industrial club scene has often been criticized for flirting with political symbols, especially fascist imagery, as part of its aesthetics. this has sometimes led to misconceptions regarding bands working within this tradition, mostly from outside of the scene but also among fans and followers. as ada lovelace, for instance, comments on the blog the gothic imagination[2] (2009): “i’m always interested in finding new and challenging forms of music, but i have always steered away from stuff like nachtmahr because of their utilisation of nazism and fascism because i just don’t want to be associated with it”. my reason for using the amphi festival as a subject for this essay is not just because i’ve spent my holidays here for the past two years, but also because the festival is a microcosm of this dark music scene, and therefore an ideal place to examine how the relationship between power and pleasure is reproduced with the club as some sort of combat zone. the title of this essay, “war on the dancefloor”, is a song by nachtmahr (2009) who is featured in the article, but above all it illuminates the power relation between the dj and the crowd in combination with the militaristic aesthetics common in these genres. but let’s get back to that later. much has been written about the relationship between mass culture and the fascist spectacle. in walter benjamin and the aesthetics of power, lutz koepnick—professor of german, film and media studies at washington university in st. louis—puts what benjamin calls the “aestheticization of politics” (koepnick 1999: 4) in a postmodern context. noting that nazi aesthetics remains fascinating today “because postmodern culture similarly desires spectacles and mass-produced representations”, koepnick describes postmodernism as an “uncanny soulmate of the nazi spectacle”, that “incessantly recycles images of the third reich as it seeks in its own ways to break down modern boundaries between politics and aesthetics and to turn life into a fantastic work of art” (1999: 2). thus the fascist fascination seems to have more to do with the conception of power rather than political contents and is not unique for subcultures such as the industrial and electronic body music scene. yet susan sontag’s description of fascist aesthetics, as quoted by koepnick, could almost be mistaken for an account of a dance floor, where the dj takes on the role of “an all-powerful, hypnotic leader figure or force” and at the same time awakens a similar theme of domination and enslavement (1999: 32). sontag’s words remind me of the song “unbeugsam” where nachtmahr’s thomas rainer sings about conquering the world and letting die puppen (the puppets) dance according to his tune (2010b). another amphi act, faderhead, gives straight orders with the song “tanz zwo drei vier” (2010), and the atmosphere of course emphasizes the similarities. when i meet up with ronan harris, dj and singer of the british/irish duo vnv nation, in the vip area he describes the festival as “a fashion show”[3]—but perhaps more in the sense of a costume party than haute couture. so, imagine the desperation of the three amphi visitors from greece i met at the airport when they realised their luggage with more appropriate festival clothes was lost! among the more or less extraordinary outfits i spot everything from young girls in latex wear leading each other around in dog leashes to colourful cyber-goths and the usual ebm army with black clothes and combat boots. harris points out that not everybody dresses the same but still seem to connect: “they’re showing off or they’re just feeling comfortable but everybody tolerates each other for the most part. they don’t split themselves into groups, which is a good thing”. figure 2. more pleasure than power on the bank of rhine (2010). photo: erik kjellman. a certain part of the industrial scene has always had strong connections with the fetish scene, which has its element of uniform wearing. this is also where the fascination with military paraphernalia comes in, and with it the interplay with power. as harris explains: it’s like a man putting on a suit. i hate to say this but that’s actually the feeling that i get when i put on a suit. you walk differently. you feel differently about yourself. and the same thing happens when you wear a uniform. i used to wear british officer uniforms years ago just for fun. just to go to these parties. i think marilyn manson has had a big influence in his parodying of the uniform wearing thing. it’s like shock humour.[4] on the other hand, harris describes playing with metaphors or images of this kind as a bit dangerous, stating he has reservations with people dressing in certain uniforms: “if you’re wearing a uniform because you think uniforms are sexy—that’s fine, if you’re wearing something that gives a political statement—that’s wrong”. but the distinction between what is acceptable and what is offensive might not be so clear after all. uniforms are symbols of power that will always have different connotations for different people depending on their background and previous experiences. the styles of the dark scene have also differed slightly from country to country, as harris recounts: i remember we played in lund many years ago and the [german] band das ich was with us. i had a lot of swedish friends living in london. i mean, the english scene and the swedish scene were very similar, the bands they liked and how they liked music. . . germany was a very different place with a much more darker and a much more gothic kind of image. and it seems that all the styles from other countries have come in. . . i remember bruno [kramm] from das ich got really upset because somebody was wearing a luftwaffe jacket. third reich military paraphernalia is still highly taboo—especially in germany—and what is taboo is always provocative. at the same time, it’s worth noting that this element of transgression is also essential in the subversion of power. referring to the writings of michel foucault, who argued that modern western society is “a giant prison, where every structure and institution is there to tame and discipline us”, cultural philosopher paul hegarty describes industrial music as “a foucauldian take on power” (2007: 119–20). this might explain why the genre often replicates the structures of domination—hegarty mentions aggression, control and propaganda—in ambiguous ways. and perhaps gatherings like the amphi festival could also be seen as a critical staging of power relations comparable to the role-play in a sadomasochistic relationship, where the theme of power and pleasure is sometimes regarded as a way of taking control of the balance between dominance and submission within a wider sociocultural context. this perception is not very far from mikhail bakhtin’s ideas about carnival as a “temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from established order” (1984: 10) that have been frequently explored in relation to different expressions of popular culture: from 1970’s punk to industrial music and rave culture. it should also be taken into consideration that musicologists susan mcclary and robert walser have stated in more general terms that “pleasure frequently is the politics of music” (1988: 287). figure 3. vampires in the sun? the amphi audience chilling out at the beach club (2010). photo: erik kjellman. instead of a prison, the body rather becomes part of a symbolic battlefield. as ronan harris points out: we’ll wear prussian uniforms. we will dress in a dangerous liaisons-type style. . . .steampunk style[5] is very much based on this world war i image, which i actually think looks really fucking cool personally. but we all deal with our pasts in very different ways. when stating that followers of this scene are wearing these things “almost like a scrapbook of all of the pasts of europe”, and not because they are representing the symbolic implications of these uniforms or accessories, harris illustrates how meaning is produced in relation to collective, or cultural, memory. assorted recollections of the past seem to become myth as the dark scene tries to deal with both icons of power and european history in particular—although in a non-political way. this might explain the strong and often very anthemic nature of the music and why people sometimes get the wrong impression. combining sentimental synthpop melodies with heavier beats, the style of vnv nation is often described as futurepop, a club-oriented subgenre that is considered more danceable and upbeat than ebm. older lyrics, mainly on the album praise the fallen (1998/2000), use the image of the battlefield as a metaphor for the personal struggle within one’s self. however, according to harris, some people didn’t get it: “they only heard the fucking war reference”. avoiding such misinterpretations was the motivation behind a new version of the anti-war song “honour”, adding sound excerpts of franklin d. roosevelt’s “i hate war” speech and also quoting these words in the background projections at live shows. nachtmahr, on the other hand, use video technique in a more thought-provoking way. when we meet backstage, front man thomas rainer says he wants to set the stage for people to think about what they see and “to think twice about the imagery”.[6] with the visual side he provides a second layer of information to the band’s provocative image: for example i use anti-war quotes that are projected in the back. there are slogans like ‘war is not the answer’ and stuff like that. . . but still in germany there’s like this whole nazi prejudice going on so i always get: ‘why are you showing nazi soldiers in the visuals’ and it’s like: ‘it’s american soldiers’, so in germany people, if they see soldiers, they ultimately think nazi. but perhaps not only in germany, as aspasia stephanou—a research postgraduate student of gothic literature and arts at the university of stirling in scotland—has also addressed the subject on the blog the gothic imagination (2009), making a similar (mis)interpretation of nachtmahr: if the sensation of fast beats, at times resembling ‘industrial’ military marches, capture the modern subject through the momentary excitement of digitalized entertainment, this resembles no pleasurable activity, but a controlled productive process. thomas rainer... becomes the industrial master, the factory’s director who during the live show points to the screen. the audience needs to be reminded of the message war is not the answer, followed by nazi aeroplanes flying over fields with dead corpses. stephanou’s analysis is quite remarkable, in conflict with the ambitions of nachtmahr but still striking as an account of the dj—in this case rainer—as an authoritarian leader. the nachtmahr song “tanzdiktator” even transforms him into a “dance dictator” (2009). so let’s return to the “war on the dance floor”, or perhaps the “battlefield of sin” (nachtmahr, 2009), as nachtmahr puts the slogan “imperial austrian industrial” into action. the beat is pounding heavily in the former exhibition halls and among the props on stage are camouflage nets and four women in military attire with identical armbands (featuring nachtmahr’s emblem: the letter “n”[7]) and side caps. “if i have girls in uniform on stage it’s because i like uniforms, nothing more”, says rainer. the industrial and electronic body music scene is very male dominated on stage, although the audience is more diverse. it could also be noted that many male and female participants in this dark scene—regardless of sexuality—play around with gender roles or “male” and “female” attributes, for instance men wearing makeup or girls wearing ties, depending on which particular subculture you address. this means the relations of power work on several different levels. hence rainer’s fascination with “girls in uniform” seems to be quite a traditional “tits and ass” thing, where the women on stage are reduced to sexual objects: a decorative part of the nachtmahr stage design. on the other hand, they’re wearing ties and military attire, and through their authoritative uniforms become part of the dominant, dictatorial imagery, as opposed to the submissive crowd on the dance floor, once again reproducing the metaphor of the sadomasochistic relationship. whether we see the dance floor as a battlefield or not, the struggle continues, not least from a gendered perspective. the one-man project nachtmahr evolved out of rainer’s background as a dj, and the military image of the band was inspired by his past in the army. after national conscription rainer came close to entering military academy, but then a musical career with his other band developed and he decided to become a musician instead. however, he discovered many parallels between army service and being a musician: for example as a musician and a soldier you train, and train, and train, and train for one or two incidents that happen. sometimes you train for years for one single concert . . . or for one single conflict. . . . i found the similarities very appealing so i said: ‘why not use this imagery to present ourselves as soldiers of—warriors of—sound, who shoot with bass drums instead of machineguns’. lately, rainer has also incorporated the sexual component of military imagery, most prominently on the nachtmahr ep mädchen in uniform (2010a). the artwork[8] is a homage to the controversial film the night porter (1974) by italian director liliana cavani, where a concentration camp survivor (charlotte rampling) falls back into a sadomasochistic relationship with a former nazi ss officer (dirk bogarde). to rainer, the uniform is a simple but effective way of showing power and dominance because it’s authoritative: “you have to do what this person says and that’s where the sexual tension comes in. . . . and for the imagery of war i would say i use it to enforce the power of the music”. with its aggressive electro-industrial beat, “war on the dancefloor” explores the role of the dj in the lyrics on a metaphorical level (nachtmahr, 2009). on the dance floor, the people are the soldiers and the dj is the commander, according to rainer, “because he [the dj] can steer the people in the direction he wants”. for the band faderhead, the club correspondingly becomes a “bunker” where the dj is the “beatmaster” and where “the girls are wearing latex skirts” and “masks like there’s a bomb alert” (2010). these descriptions are somewhat similar to the more common recognition of the dj as a spiritual or religious leader.[9] the dj can make the crowd “happy, he can make them sad, he can make them sweat, he can make them relax. he has the power over the emotional situation of this group of people for the night”, as rainer concludes. but it’s also striking that he says that people “empower” the dj “to lead them through the night”, implying that this still is a commission of trust that is built on consent and can’t be conquered by force. in pop cult: religion and popular music,musicologist rupert till explores whether functions formerly served within society by religions are now being addressed by cults of popular music and observes that a feature common to electronic dance music culture “is its separation from mainstream culture. clubs are a place of escape, of transgression, of release” (2010: 141). a similar argument could be made about the industrial and electronic body music scene, incorporating the subject of both taboo and sexual fetishes to create a playground that both imitates and subverts the power relations and structures of the outside world. the elements of confusion and illusion are part of this dark scene. without the ambiguity, there would be no tension between power and pleasure. war images and uniforms are also part of the mainstream culture in everything from video games to the latest high street fashion, but the industrial scene takes fascist aesthetics to its extremes as a means of creating self-conscious and intellectual provocation. as the user aspr (2008), for instance, commented in a thread entitled “why do people think goths and rivetheads are racist?”[10] on the industrial music forum at side-line: “i believe it [the scene] should be highly abrasive, in all psychical contexts, while never manifesting itself in a negative physical way (ie [sic] violence, for example)”. figure 4. ready for combat. some obviously take the nachtmahr slogan “imperial austrian industrial” very literally... (2010). photo: erik kjellman. the tradition of playing with totalitarian imagery and symbols harks back to the industrial music of the late 1970s with controversial bands like throbbing gristle. the slovenian group laibach (who played at amphi in 2009) continued the confusion in the 1980s, with a newer song, “tanz mit laibach”, referring to both right wing and left wing totalitarianism in the lyrics by “dancing” with both fascismus und roter anarchie (wat, 2003). nevertheless, aspasia stephanou (2009) argues that: electronic body music and industrial bands have always flirted with right wing, fascistic symbols but in a different way than punk bands have incorporated in the late seventies swastikas and other totalitarian insignia, replaying the dadaists shocking and nihilistic tactics (hebdige reads this as a desire to shock). laibach have managed to confuse their audiences, but their agenda is specific. shock is created, but politics is there underneath the surface. walter benjamin would probably have agreed with stephanou, while others—as media researcher eva kingsepp illustrates—have shown that this is not necessarily the case (2008: 246–47). the artistic means used within subcultures of this kind can always be interpreted in several different ways, as till puts it: “within edmc there is no one author. the club is the text, and both the experience of it and its substance are different for each clubber” (2010: 132). the fact that the industrial and electronic body music scene is very big in central europe, with several larger festivals taking place in germany, makes the picture even more complex due to the country’s historical past. but contrary to the audience, for instance, at the nazi rallies, the visitors at gatherings such as the amphi festival do not only come here as spectators. in the spirit of bakhtin’s notion of carnival they come here to participate (1984). still, it seems important for some to make a distinction between what is acceptable (sexy, provocative or an expression of shock humour), and what is offensive or could be regarded as a political message. the desire to separate these different intentions is not only expressed by the artists interviewed in this article, but is also evident in discussions on web forums. the idea of creating certain—even frightening—atmospheres as a framework for something similar to a role-play, as opposed to actual political expressions and violence, seem crucial for the reproduction of power and pleasure. by becoming a metaphorical combat zone, the club also affects the role of the dj, who is given the status of a commander. and just as carnival and the grotesque are strategies to temporarily invert hierarchical structures, this dark electronic music scene changes the rules by using dangerous tools. author biography johanna paulsson is an independent writer and music journalist. she has a ba in musicology and literary studies from stockholm university and is currently a music critic for swedish newspaper dagens nyheter. her articles and reviews have appeared in magazines like nutida musik, axess, sonic and merge. references amy. 2011. “goth’s closest relative? rivetheads and the industrial subculture”. the ultimate goth guide. 16 january: <http://ultimategothguide.blogspot.com/2011/01/goths-closest-relative-rivetheads-and.html> (accessed 19 april 2011). aspr. 2008. “why do people think goths and rivetheads are racist?”. side-line. 4 september: <http://www.side-line.com/forum/threads.php?id=35105_0_20_0_c> (accessed 19 april 2011). bakhtin, mikhail. 1984 [1965]. rabelais and his world. trans. hélène iswolsky. bloomington: indiana university press. hegarty, paul. 2007. noise/music: a history. new york: continuum. kingsepp, eva. 2008. “nazityskland i populärkulturen: minne, myt, medier” [nazi germany in popular culture: memory, myth, media]. ph.d dissertation (journalism, media and communication), stockholm university. <http://su.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:199724/fulltext01> (accessed 19 april 2011). koepnick, lutz. 1999. walter benjamin and the aesthetics of power. lincoln: university of nebraska press. lovelace, ada. 2009. response to “nachtmahr: beware of the empty, vitreous and fascist bwo”. the gothic imagination. 5 december: <http://www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/blog/nachtmahr-beware-of-the-empty-vitreous-and-fascist-bwo/> (accessed 19 april 2011). mcclary, susan and robert walser. 1988. “start making sense! musicology wrestles with rock”. in on record: rock, pop, and the written word, eds. simon frith and andrew goodwin, 277–92. london: routledge. stephanou, aspasia. 2009. “nachtmahr: beware of the empty, vitreous and fascist bwo”. the gothic imagination. 4 december: <http://www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/blog/nachtmahr-beware-of-the-empty-vitreous-and-fascist-bwo/> (accessed 19 april 2011). till, rupert. 2010. pop cult: religion and popular music. london: continuum. discography faderhead. 2010. trilogy. l-tracks (cd): compilation. <http://www.discogs.com/faderhead-trilogy/release/2176740>. laibach. 2003. wat. mute records ltd. (cd): cdstumm223. <http://www.discogs.com/laibach-wat/release/184511>. nachtmahr. 2009. alle lust will ewigkeit. trisol (cd): tri 367 cd. <http://www.discogs.com/nachtmahr-alle-lust-will-ewigkeit/release/1901007>. nachtmahr. 2010a. mädchen in uniform. trisol (cd): tri 384 cd. <http://www.discogs.com/nachtmahr-mädchen-in-uniform/release/2113891>. nachtmahr. 2010b. semper fidelis. trisol (cd): tri 409 cd. <http://www.discogs.com/nachtmahr-semper-fidelis/release/2690951>. vnv nation. 1998/2000. praise the fallen. dependent records (cd): mind 014. <http://www.discogs.com/vnv-nation-praise-the-fallen/release/49770>. filmography cavani, liliana (dir). 1974. the night porter. italy. atlantic film. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071910/>. notes [1] when using the term “dark” (electronic music) scene in the article, i refer only to the genres represented at the amphi festival, and to industrial and electronic body music in particular. [2] the gothic imagination is a website based at the university of stirling, scotland, with the ambition to provide an interdisciplinary forum for lively discussion and critical debate concerning all manifestations of the gothic mode. [3] ronan harris (vnv nation), interview with the author (amphi festival, cologne) 24 july 2010. all subsequent harris quotes are from the same conversation. [4] when, for instance, german duo daf—deutsch amerikanische freundschaft—started adopting this kind of aesthetic in the early eighties, they basically took it from the gay scene: “the gay scene was always very interested in having strong male images: policemen, construction worker . . . let’s say the village people”, concludes gabriel “gabi” delgado-lópez with a laugh. interview with the author (hornstull strand, stockholm) 5 june 2010. [5] steampunk is a subculture glorifying the steam power and machines of the victorian era, often recombining old technology and accessories such as pilot goggles with modern styles. [6] thomas rainer (nachtmahr), interview with the author (amphi festival, cologne) 25 july 2010. all subsequent rainer quotes are from the same conversation. [7] nachtmahr doesn’t use any predefined symbols. consequently, a lot of the designed emblems used in this scene seem to have more to do with general archetypes of power than with political statements. as ronan harris explains about the logotype of vnv nation, he wanted something that became like a trademark, a corporate brand or an emblem for an organization: “because to be honest the whole idea of why i used the word ‘nation’ sarcastically is that we are a nation of individuals that will never be a nation but we find each other through this music...” [8] in the sleeve notes the artwork is referred to as “fine military erotica” (mädchen in uniform, 2010). [9] see for instance the comparisons made by rupert till in pop cult: religion and popular music, chapter 8 “god is a dj: possession trance cults of electronic dance music” (2010: 131–66). [10] the epithet “rivethead” is often used to describe a person associated with the industrial music scene. “industrial goth” is a somewhat simplified synonym but offers a hint about the style. for a comprehensive comparison see amy (2011). random steps through boom festival 2010 lisa diotalevi university of strasbourg <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.01.11> dance temple, boom festival, portugal (2010). from zalid on vimeo. a psytrance dance floor is a unique experience. as the night wears on, the ambiance grows ecstatic, and i become unburdened of my daily routine. surrounded by hundreds of people shaking on trance music, i feel powerful sensations from a multitude of unknown yet attractive bodies and faces. my mind is overwhelmed by audio-visual sensory input. millions of thoughts and images from yesterday, today and tomorrow travel through my mind, as i confront crucial questions about life, myself, and the world. i stare at the palms of my hands and the questions become answers. flash after flash, i recall none of these mindfields with any accuracy, and it seems that millions of instantaneous ideas disappear as quickly as the music, once switched off. we are the generation in which imagination, feelings and spirituality merge with multimedia, image and sound technologies. the present defines reality: whatever is felt now exists, and whatever exists should be felt now and here, in the collective trance, on the dance floor. step 1 / sensations figure 1. the boom festival 2010 site: lakeside in idanha-a-nova, portugal (2010). photo: lisa diotalevi. the landscape of the boom festival is magical: wonderful natural hills with the warm colours of the summer sky reflect off the surface of the lake. we crawl through the festival site like little animals swinging between amazing colour gradations. at night, blacklights underline a fluorescent universe. visual performances re-design perceptible space. my eyes linger on the movements of a bunch of lasers scanning space in all directions, creating moving waves of green light, inclining and turning horizons which divide the crowd. a new sensation emerges from that experience. these visual and spacial feelings combine with music and other auditory experiences. trance runs fast, high bpm merging with long and progressive samples, exploring the sound spectrum from infrabasses to ultra trebles. it is music that seems to explore humanity’s largest perceptual field. trance, like other electronic dance music genres, is designed to be experienced on a dance floor during a festival or a night party. actually, it is built by the dance floor, during years and decades of parties, as the reactions of the crowds influence the musical creations and inspiration of the artists. this kind of music is hardly accessible outside of this context. it is a collective, sensitive experience, shared with little verbal communication—the music’s volume on the dance floor doesn’t allow for it. people communicate with gestures and facial expressions. they share emotions, euphoria, joy, contemplation, exhaustion... music is the common denominator for thoughts, feelings and the individual states of mind of those gathering on the dance floor. every being who enters this zone enters a collective body—a temporary conglomeration of individuals, each in a state of fusion with their neighbours. step 2 / journey i travelled alone to the festival. that’s the best way to really free your mind, to really meet people, there or on the road. loneliness compels you toward meeting and discovery. i didn’t stay alone for long though, as i found new companions on a bus en route to the festival. when i reached the bus station in montpellier, france, i had a new friend, and a few minutes later, ten more. we shared wonderful moments together during the week of the festival, then everyone went back to his or her own town and life. what happens next doesn’t matter, because travelling, meeting and partying just makes you forget all about it. living in the absolute present is the essence of this event. being here and now, completely, through trance, dance and meditation. a cognitive and emotional fusion: of bodies dancing together, of minds perceiving the same meltdown of music and images, and feeling the collective ecstasy. “in the end, there is no more need for words”, states the description on the boom website. when you reach the apex of this experience, of this state of mind, you forget for a while where you’re from, who you are, and what you’re doing in life. in the festival you meet the hidden side of your self, discovering new tastes, ideas and projects. for those who decide—or are able—to pursue this lifestyle, the festival is like a ceremony of purification, of rebirth. is there something significant happening here, or are these people simply sellers and buyers of dreams? is boom simply a musical theme park, or is it a place to share something stronger? well, as the world sometimes looks like a huge battlefield, or a bomb ready to explode, i understand why people gather seeking love and peace through dancing, listening to music, yoga, meditation and other artistic expressions. boom participants are seeking what their crazy urban lives do not provide, stressed by labour practices, ecological disasters, the economic crisis and mediated threats of all kinds. “make change happen” it’s printed on the thin bracelet around my wrist, and is the slogan of boom’s 2010 festival. if any change is possible, it should be a positive change for a better human and global situation. in the depressive period of our western countries and culture, this may be the only place on earth where we can live and practice that change. step 3 / encounter i met a young woman at the festival, naama. she arrived with friends from israel, after hours and days of hazardous road travel. her eyes looked calm and her long blond dreadlocks evoked for me the taste of a cool and different way of life. but when i spoke with her, there was sadness in her voice. “i feel a little disappointed. it is not like i imagined it. people aren’t so magic, so crazy”, she said. and yet, she found the festival alluring and did not want it to end. “i’d like to live constantly that way. there are people who do so. they just wander from one festival to another, always applying for volunteer jobs, so they get food and don’t have to pay the entry tickets. they also have no rent to pay, and so they can stay ever in this way of life, never returning to the other world. i’d like to do that”. naama informed me about the archetype of the traveller who fires the imagination of many festival-goers. she had made such a great effort, spent so much money travelling to join the festival, that the seven days of the party were too short, and the idea of its ending was disappointing. a moment later, my friends and i were on “tripical beach”. it was toward the end of the afternoon and the sun was dropping behind the lake. some were sitting on the beach, others were playing, dancing and juggling. the ambient music from the playa bar began to lift us up. everybody stood and began dancing on the sand, with feet in the water, facing the sun’s setting course. it was a very powerful moment, with everybody shouting and whistling. as a strong feeling of joy spread upon us all, we were ready to return to the festival’s huge dance floors and sound systems. figure 2. tripical beach, boom festival 2010. photo: lisa diotalevi. step 4 / the trip after a night of dancing in different places with a friend, we stopped near the banks of the lake and slept. in the morning, i was awoken by a strange voice. it was a single phrase, repeated every twenty seconds. “whooh! forava! muchomucha. whooh!” i opened my eyes, intrigued by the strange tone. the same words were repeated again and again, for about half an hour. the voice was coming from the beach. a thin, naked man was creeping in the low water, sometimes throwing his arms in the air, splashing in the water, shouting “forava, whoooh!!”. around him were five or six people i recognised from kosmicare, boom’s harm reduction and risk minimisation outfit. the man was high. i watched him climbing the legs of the calm and patient caretakers. they held him down several times, when he had violent movements, even if he had only the urge to embrace and kiss his caretakers. patiently and respectfully, they took care of him. i wondered how long he would stay in that state of mind—maybe ten hours or more—and when he would recover. my friend did not believe the man had overdosed, and did not perceive this experience as i did—this tragic side of the scene we were witnessing. he simply felt that this was a great scene of joy: “hey, this man looks totally happy, don’t you think! he is really happy”, he said. well, maybe he was right. maybe too happy, i thought. what remains human in a mind that has gone into rapture? how can he remain part of the collective body, he who has reached alone such a distant place that he cannot communicate with anyone anymore, automatically repeating the same three words over and over. i felt it was like he was caught in some chemical ecstasis mechanical trap. this was the end of the trip, where the road didn’t seem to offer any more answers. on the one hand, i felt enlightened and empowered by my experiences at boom, the extraordinary feelings i had. on the other hand, exhausted, i felt happy it was over. but when i returned home to france, i felt disorientated, questioning my everyday life and work routines. immersed in the music, meeting travellers from different countries and cultures, discovering new ideas, practices and technologies, the festival enabled a clearer understanding of my habits. there, with time to contemplate the world, to perceive all possibilities, and to understand what we really need, we can find better solutions for tomorrow. figure 3. “new pioneers” by mark henson (featured in boom’s inner visions gallery). author biography during an undergraduate social and cultural anthropology course at the university of strasbourg, france (2007–2009), lisa diotalevi conducted fieldwork on the european underground techno movement. she is now exploring psychedelic trance parties and culture. website: <http://zalid.free.fr>. references boom festival concept: <http://www.boomfestival.org/boom2010/home-news/concept> (accessed 6 november 2011). filmography “dance temple – boom festival 2010”. vimeo: <http://vimeo.com/31789457> (accessed 6 may 2012). con1_typeset_ver1 the history of our world: the hardcore continuum debate simon reynolds early in 2009, i became embroiled in a vigorous and at times heated debate about the retroactive validity and future viability of a concept i came up with a decade earlier: the “hardcore continuum”. for a succinct explanation of what the term refers to and the background to the concept’s emergence, check this piece in the wire <www.thewire.co.uk/articles/2009/>; and for a much longer and more detailed account from me, check this: <energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/02/ hardcore-continuum-or-theory-and-its.html> at dancecult’s invitation, i am returning to historicize the concept and pinpoint what it refers to. i’ll also attempt to historicize the controversy itself and account for some of the heat of the exchanges. i want to start by taking slight issue with a comment of my esteemed colleague (and good friend) mark fisher in the first of this journal’s commentaries on the hardcore continuum debate last issue. he characterized the approach i took in my talk at fact in liverpoool february 2009 (which if it didn’t catalyze the proand antihardcore continuum debate, certainly raised it to a new pitch of intensity) as involving a strategic retreat from theory, which he regarded as a mistake. i take issue with this characterization. there’s been no retreat from theorizing towards the empirical: there has actually been, on my part, a consistency of approach. my theorizing about the hardcore continuum, including the coinage of the term itself, emerged from field research, in the sense that it was the byproduct of a long period of extensive scenereporting as a working music journalist of, combined with years of intense involvement as a fan in, the subculture. on the one hand, i was interviewing people involved in the scene, writing genre overviews, reviewing albums and compilations and dj performances, doing round-ups of new 12-inch releases. on the other hand, i was dancing at raves and clubs, going down the record store on a weekly basis to buy new tracks, tuning in to pirate radio stations and taping their broadcasts on the occasions i was in london, and then, when i was back in new york, importuning my london friends to tape the shows and mail them to me. but i didn’t really separate these activities, or consciously think of it as a form of participant-observer research: it was all one unified front of passion and evangelism. after coining the concept in 1999, its theorization as it developed through the noughties continued to be inseparable from the activities of journalism and fandom (with blogging falling somewhere in between the two), especially in the first half of the decade with grime, which was especially thought-provoking and fanaticism-catalyzing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwfikgc6vs4 lethal b featuring fumin, d double e, nappa, jamakabi, neeko, flow dan, ozzi b, forcer, demon & hotshot, “pow (forward)”, 2004 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(2) 2010, 69-76 issn 1947-5403 ©2010 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.05 conversations now i’m sure there are sound philosophical reasons for worrying away at the concept of the empirical, but i’m happily ignorant of them and for me it’s always been the case that the two activities – field research and theoretical speculation – are inseparable. fisher also made some interesting points about the abstract reality of the hardcore continuum, making an analogy with the credit crunch and the recession: “the reality of the hardcore continuum is not of the order of a physical fact, but of an abstract entity. the notion of an abstract-real materiality may cause commonsense to recoil, yet a moment’s reflection makes us realise, not only that abstract entities are real, but that there is nothing more real than them”. as fisher suggests, the “abstractreal” is possibly a difficult concept for most people to grasp. “abstract” seems like it is the opposite of “concrete”, and most people would place “reality” on the side of the concrete, the material, the experiential. but i think fisher is on to something here. one place to recognise where this apparent empirical/theoretical clash is resolved is within history itself. they are plenty of examples of social and economic phenomena that are real and material but are not necessarily consciously apprehended in their systemic totality by the subjects who constitute and sustain them. and it strikes me that the hardcore continuum could be usefully seen as a system: a structure, a set of relations, a means of musical production. although vastly smaller in scale and significance, it is analogous to socioeconomic and cultural-political formations such as imperialism, slavery, or manorialism (a.k.a. serfdom). all three of those things are at the same time historically existent entities and sites of theorization on the part of scholars. no one would deny the existence of the european empires (british, french, belgian, etc). at the same time there are numerous theories of imperialism, a fierce and long-running debate across a spectrum from marxist analysis and anti-colonialist critiques to revisionist defenders. now, the empires actually called themselves empires. with manorialism/serfdom, i don’t think people in that system necessarily conceived of their lived reality as a system, in the same way that it’s unlikely that any peasant declared, a la monty python’s holy grail, “now we see the violence inherent in the system!”. but that doesn’t mean that the systemicity didn’t exist, or that there wasn’t violence inherent in the system. manorialism/serfdom, then, i think makes a particularly good analogy with the hardcore continuum: these are specialist terms, used retrospectively by historians rather than the actual inhabitants of what they describe, for systems that, nonetheless, existed (in the case of manorialism, taking the form of relations of fealty, property rights, division of land, farming methods, inheri-tance customs, etc) as both an abstract structure and a lived reality. the manorial system had variations regionally and across europe; it evolved through time, rising and declining. it also co-existed with other kinds of socioeconomic activity and social relations, like the guild system and merchant trade, which evolved into the early forms of capitalism, and so forth. but the manorial or seigneurial system lingered in vestigial form, for a long time after its prime. what is the systemic “core” of the hardcore continuum then? it’s a particular set of relations based around pirate radio, dubplates, raves and rave-style clubs, along with certain kinds of music-making technology. the system coalesced gradually, enjoyed a prime, but now may well be fading away or disintegrating. i’ve argued that the hardcore continuum is a uk adaption of the jamaican system. instead of sound systems mutating into raves or clubs (the obvious adaption, you might have thought), i think what happened was that pirate radio stations took the place of sound systems: they were sounds on the air. another major uk mutation of the jamaican approach was 70 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 with dubplates. in jamaica and in the direct uk transplant of the jamaican approach in the form of uk reggae systems, dubplate specials were the unique property of a single sound system. in the uk hardcore raves scene, a more complicated system developed because of the guest dj circuit that sprang up from the late eighties onwards as a result of house music. this meant that djs, instead of being tied to a sound system or a club residency, became independent operators playing at different raves and clubs. dubplates then evolved into a kind of patronage system or symbiotic exchange relationship between a dj and a loose stable of producers. sometimes, with a really powerful dj, that becomes an exclusive relationship (grooverider’s “boys” would give only him their tracks; he would choose which ones out of many offered to make up as dubplates). sometimes it would be semi-exclusive (a name producer giving dubs to a select group of djs). and of course you had djs who were producers themselves and cut dubs of their own music. nowadays, as has been noted by some commentators, this particular system is eroding as terrestrial broadcast pirate radio wanes in importance, while djs increasingly move to digital formats and make a name for themselves with give-away mixes and podcasts on the web. similar to the emergence of merchant trade and early capitalism in parallel with a waning feudalism, a new system, fully integrated with the web, eclipses the older one. the fact that new modes of transmission and dissemination are emerging, though, does not somehow retroactively erase the existence of the preceding and formerly dominant system (which is the conclusion that some seem eager to jump to). it also seems likely that pirate radio will continue as a residual force for a good while yet, servicing local populations in particular urban areas. history is not a closed book, but it is not a completely open one either. interpretations are constantly changing; new information comes to light. for instance, when i studied history in the early eighties, i specialized in american history, including the civil war, slavery and reconstruction. at that point, relatively recent research had significantly expanded and altered the understanding of slavery as an institution and practice. as it turned out, the plantation system – everybody’s received idea of the deep south (the big house, the labor and cultural division between house servants and the field workers, etc) – was an incomplete picture of slavery. many slaves were actually owned by small farmers: a few slaves, sometimes just one, often lived in intimate proximity with their masters, who didn’t comport themselves as leisurely aristocrats in some walter scott-type dixie fantasy, but lived modest, hardworking lives. but there are limits to perspectivalism. slavery existed, imperialism existed, the manorial system existed. the hardcore continuum is an historical phenomenon of that kind. when you take into consideration the systemic infrastructure that underlies the hardcore continuum’s sonic evolution, it enables you to see how the macro-scene has remained coherent even when there’s been drastic mutations in sound, huge leaps or drops in tempo, significant differences in “vibe” between various micro-scenes within the larger continuum. it also enables you to see past superficial similarities of sound between hardcore continuum genres and others that are not, in any real historical sense, part of the continuum. a good example here is big beat. now this is a genre i happen to like a lot. in its prime, it produced some fantastic records and some of the best dancing nights of my life. i’ll always be fond of, and ready to defend, fatboy slim, chemical brothers, and various other figures in that area. now big beat actually had some resemblances to the reynolds • the history of our world 71 breakbeat hardcore sound of the early nineties, both sonically and in terms of attitude: the collision of hip hop and house, the riffy-ness, the hell-for-leather drugginess. but from an historical perspective, there is no link between big beat and the hardcore continuum. all those big beat people came out of the balearic/”madchester”/indiedance lineage. big beat was also organized around a completely different systemic infrastructure to the hardcore continuum. there were no big beat pirate stations. big beat was much more intimately connected with the mainstream record industry, there were relationships to certain major-league indie-rock bands (which, as britpop took off, became the biggest rock bands in the land), there was the connection with the power nexus of heavenly (the record label/publicity/management organization, who launched the key early big beat club, the heavenly social, in 1994). big beat was based around a different circuit of clubs and had a markedly different audience composition (much more white and middle class). there were different rituals. for instance, the role of the mc in hardcore continuum genres was not paralleled in big beat, nor was the rewind as derived from jamaican sound system culture, and as far as i’m aware, dubplates were not part of big beat. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g04lgcoijyg the chemical brothers, “loops of fury”, 1996 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5euppixp-4 fatboy slim, “song for lindy”, 1997 now, as i say, i have great affection for big beat as a moment. so it is no slight on big beat but just simple historical accuracy to say that it isn’t part of the continuum narrative. however, i would also venture to suggest that the reason big beat didn’t lead to anything much (in terms of subsequent genres or a legacy beyond itself ) is related to the fact that it wasn’t based around as radical and fertile a systemic structure as the econo-cultural engine that sustained hardcore/jungle/uk garage/grime/dubstep. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjfukl1ehpk phuture assassins, “roots 'n future”, 1992 if i was to attempt to boil the hardcore continuum debate down to a single exchange, it would go like this: anti-continuum: “you’ve mistaken the model for reality”. pro-continuum: “on the contrary, you’ve mistaken the reality for a model”. unpacking that last bit: the antipathy felt by some to the theory (and in a few cases, to the theory’s prominent exponents) has undergone a slippage, becoming a wishful hostility to the thing itself… a desire to wish away the historical reality of the connections between these genres: the family tree that runs hardcore/jungle /uk garage/grime/dubstep/funky. as a result, the whole debate about the continuum has been framed incorrectly. the doubter’s stance is: “do we still need this model, this way of looking at the recent musical past?” (the implication being that it’s optional, just one choice of prism from many). the right question is: “what actually happened back then?” from there, the 72 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 next questions are “what did it mean?” and “what, if anything, can we learn from it, in terms of how music and culture works?” i promised to historicize the controversy, and to account for the heat of the argument. the prominent participants have their own angles and motivations, i’m sure, but on a general level my sense is that there is a generational aspect to the dispute. and appropriately enough, this revolves around the issue of history itself. there are three facets to this. 1. history felt as burden/obstacle/impediment/shackle. the continuum has been “a game of two halves” and the storied glory of the first half of the match (the nineties) seems increasingly to be something from which many younger participants in this music culture no longer draw nourishment, but would much rather like to shrug off (and if you happen to be a historian of that history you might well come to be associated with this “thing in the way”). 2. the desire to turn the page in the book of history, start a fresh chapter. this is understandable and, in fact, something i feel myself. the strange and slightly morbid attachment that some young people have to genres like hip hop or house that have been around for three decades mystifies me (why aren’t they impatient to just sweep them aside?). while i empathize with the “turn the page”/“let’s push things forward” impulse, simple impatience won’t do it, not on its own. history will “move on” when it is ready to. totally new and unforeseen sounds and subcultures have emerged in the past – jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, disco, reggae, hip hop, rave, to name only the most obvious – and the previous formations of popular music have simply fallen away (without ever actually disappearing or dying out completely). but that happens through processes that are anonymous and collective, rather than willed and criticdriven. 3. hostility to historical thinking, to narrativization and grand récits per se. here i’m getting into a more speculative area, but the impression i have is that for many of the younger generation, historical thinking has grown foreign to the way they relate to music. the musical past has become spatialized: sounds from all the different eras of history are equally available to us, and, furthermore, they are just as available as the music of the present. in one sense the past is totally present, all of it, in a way that it’s never been before. but historical depth drops out, the original context or meaning of the music becomes steadily more irrelevant; music is just material to redeploy. if you’ve grown up, as anyone under the age of 30 really has, with a relationship to music based around total access, superabundance, and the erosion of a sense of sounds having placement within an historical or temporal scheme, then thinking about music in terms of causal links and development through time becomes ever more alien to your consciousness. the idea that jungle led to uk garage, or 2step evolved into grime (so crucial to those, like me, who lived through these transformations, thrilled to them and puzzled over them in real-time), becomes both irrecoverable and simply irrelevant to their practice as djs, or producers or consumers. leaps across the genrescape, through affinity of sound, seem more persuasive, even if there’s no actual historical connection there. reynolds • the history of our world 73 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h32wkef1uzm micky finn & mc prince at awol, paradise club, london 1992 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfcd8x1mtky awol, a way of life live, ministry of sound, london 1995 why should anyone care about history? why does it matter? for most people who are fans and participants in the dance culture, it doesn’t particularly. but i think if you actually have any interest in understanding how these scenes work and grow, then attempting to establish what actually happened, the how and the why, is invaluable. and that involves historical thinking. this is not about history as a monument, or a canon: something imposing, an imposition by the past upon the present. it is simply the acknowledgement of a rich area of lived culture that actually existed and that extended beyond the music to encompass how it was used, what kind of behavior and relations and social spaces the music made possible. it’s not just about the abstract, quasi-cybernetic model of the continuum as a machinery of “scenius” (brian eno’s term for anonymous and collectivized forms of creativity) but the scene-ness of it all: pirate radio, the business/micro-capitalist aspects of the culture, the dances, the slang, the mc catchphrases. it’s about the “a way of life” aspect (awol being the name of a famous jungle club). all those individual lives that transected the hardcore continuum, contributed to it, and were changed by it. a parallel here might be e. p. thompson or fernand braudel, their different initiatives to enlarge the proper domain of history to include everyday life, not just battles and elections and the succession of kings. in pop music terms, the equivalent would be focusing not just on top ten hits and megastar careers, but a minoritarian history, attending to the narratives of semipopular music and downright unpopular music. it’s about doing justice to what in the global sense of pop – even in the global sense of dance music, to be honest – was a backwater. this is perhaps a good point to register my bemusement at the fact that certain commentators seem to regard the “hardcore continuum” as some sort of dominant narrative oppressing the minds of modern youth. actually, it’s pretty marginal, looming large in the heads of a really small number of people. it’s the “history of our world”, to borrow the title of a 1994 jungle compilation. but that “us” and that “world” always were and still remain distinctly compact entities. afternote particular relationships to history – to the hardcore continuum’s own history – can be seen in the way the main continuum genres of the last five years have developed strategies of renewal for the music. strategy 1: keeping the faith/renewal through recombination dubstep is what happened when a degree of self-consciousness about its own history seeped into the hardcore continuum. in the last few years, though, dubstep has been recharged by an influx of ignorance, a new breed of historical know-nothing fans, and this suggests that something new may come out of it: the wobble sound (considered by cognoscenti to be a bastardization of true dubstep) has become a genuine hardcore, with a revived association with drug abuse and rowdy behavior. meanwhile the “true” dubstep fans – history boys and scholars of the continuum all – have veered off in a variety of post-dubstep directions, many of which involve reactivating nineties vibes. 74 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 kryptic minds, for instance, resurrect the era of photek/source direct/hidden agenda, that cinematic, atmospheric, exquisitely produced apex of drum ‘n’ bass in the second half of the nineties. elsewhere you have dubsteppers who are influenced by the dub-techno sounds of basic channel/chain reaction/pole, and so forth. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qleyr27fvgc coki, “spongebob”, 2007 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mhhazx0jmu caspa & the others, “well ’ard”, 2008 versus http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chc4zu2qrsm kryptic minds, “generation dub”, 2009 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-efa03rfqoi martyn, “little things”, 2009 strategy 2: drawing in new material from “outside” funky house, or as people now prefer to call it, funky, is a classic example of the strategy of assimilating fresh input from genres outside the hardcore continuum’s traditional range of sources (reggae, hip hop, techno, etc). funky draws on ideas and flavors from masters at work, dj gregory, afro house, soca, broken beats, tribal house, and more. so much stuff from outside has entered the mix that the music almost feels like it’s becoming something else altogether, a vibe different from anything we’ve heard from the hardcore continuum before. yet, of all the sounds of the last half-decade, funky is the one that remains closest to the infrastructural matrix, the systemic core, of the continuum (i.e. the pirates, the london demographic, etc). and the assimilation of outside material to enable the scene to move past a deadlock (grime) is itself an historical echo of the move made by speed garage and 2step in the late nineties (drawing on new york garage, todd edwards’s vocal cut-ups, timbaland-style r&b) in response to the apocalyptic noise of techstep drum‘n’bass. like funky, this was a move back towards pleasure and pleasantness, celebration and sexiness. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_v9chwswks donaeo, “party hard”, 2009 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hshqn7ggwfg kris baya, “heartbreaker (ill blu mix)”, 2009 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjgein47mym dva (a.k.a. scatcha a.k.a. soule power), “natty”, 2010 strategy 3: lines of flight here i’m talking primarily about the “wonky” operatives who are clearly coming out of dubstep (such as zomby) and grime (such as joker). sensing impending deadlock, impelled by the artistic instinct to have somewhere to go and the desire not to be bored, they’ve located lines of flight that extend across space (to american glitch hop and spacefunk), across genre (connecting with “the boom bap continuum” of dilla, flying lotus, et al, or to uk beat digger types like lucky me/hudson mohawke/ rustie et al) and back through time (to g-funk, eighties cartoon funk such as cameo, reynolds • the history of our world 75 videogame music). this relates to the notion i broached above of music history having become spatialized, splayed out like an atemporal smorgasbord. the question raised by this all-you-can-eat buffet, which tempts producers to stuff their music with too many influences and rich flavours, is whether genre-icity and (in a club situation) coherency of vibe can survive such bounty. for genres are defined by their exclusions and selflimitations as much by their positive choices. a music that tries to be everything risks becoming nothing in particular. so far, the artists in this emerging zone-withoutborders who have fared the best are those with some kind of relationship to the hardcore continuum (zomby, joker) whereas some of those who don’t have that background have come a cropper (hudson mohawke with his glutted/clotted debacle butter). coincidence? i doubt it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-beqvrs24s zomby, “kaliko”, 2008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzhodfshzgs joker, “digidesign”, 2009 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifh6nwpjsga hudson mohawke, “butter snips” (sampler/megamix from the album butter), 2009 ••••••• author biography simon reynolds is the author of energy flash: a journey through rave music and dance culture (a.k.a. generation ecstasy), originally published in 1998 and reissued in an expanded and updated edition in 2008 by picador. he maintains a number of blogs, including energy flash http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/ and blissblog http://blissout.blogspot.com/ 76 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 dancecult 2.1 cover, toc and editor's introduction volume 2 number 1 2011 executive editor graham st john (university of queensland, au) managing editor tobias c. van veen (mcgill university, ca) reviews editor karenza moore (lancaster university, uk) art director cato pulleyblank (fairy punk creative studio, ca) production director gary botts powell (texas a&m university, us) production assistants luis-manuel garcia (university of chicago, us) ed montano (rmit university, au) botond vitos (monash university, au) operations assistant neal thomas (mcgill university, ca) copyeditors catherine baker (university of southampton, uk) katrina loughrey (au) dancecult journal of electronic dance music culture issue 2 (1) 2011 issn 1947-5403 ©2011 dancecult published twice yearly at: <http://dj.dancecult.net> international advisory board eliot bates (university of maryland, college park, us), andy bennett (griffith university, au), mark j butler (northwestern university, us), anthony d’andrea (university of limerick, ie), rebekah farrugia (oakland university, us), kai fikentscher (de), françois gauthier (université du québec à montréal, ca), anna gavanas (institute for futures studies, se), chris gibson (university of new south wales, au), jeremy gilbert (university of east london, uk), ross harley (university of new south wales, au), david hesmondhalgh (university of leeds, uk), tim lawrence (university of east london, uk), geert lovink (university of amsterdam, nl), gordon lynch (birkbeck university of london, uk), rene lysloff (university of california, riverside, us), alejandro l. madrid (university of illinois, chicago, us), charity marsh (university of regina, ca), tony mitchell (university of technology sydney, au),karenza moore (lancaster university, uk), andrew murphie (university of new south wales, au), christopher partridge (lancaster university, uk), anne petiau (itsrs / université paris 5, fr), hillegonda c rietveld (london south bank university, uk), geoff stahl (victoria university of wellington, nz), sonjah nadine stanley-niaah (university of west indies, jm), graham st john (university of queensland, au), will straw (mcgill university, ca), rupert till (university of huddersfield, uk), tobias c. van veen (mcgill university, ca), michael veal (yale university, us) dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture is a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture (edmc). a platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on the shifting terrain of edmcs worldwide, the journal houses research exploring the sites, technologies, sounds and cultures of electronic music in historical and contemporary perspectives. playing host to studies of emergent forms of electronic music production, performance, distribution, and reception, as a portal for cutting-edge research on the relation between bodies, technologies, and cyberspace, as a medium through which the cultural politics of dance is critically investigated, and as a venue for innovative multimedia projects, dancecult is the forum for research on edmc. cover image: wolfgang sterneck http://dj.dancecult.net volume 2 number 1 2011 editor’s introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 01 graham st john feature articles disco’s revenge: house music’s nomadic memory. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 04 hillegonda c. rietveld hooked on an affect: detroit techno and dystopian digital culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 richard pope maintaining “synk” in detroit: two case studies in the remix aesthetic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 carleton s. gholz festival fever and international djs: the changing shape of dj culture. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 in sydney’s commercial electronic dance music scene ed montano from the floor – online nomads in sound vol. 1 anna gavanas special section on the love parade where is duisburg? an lp postscript ronald hitzler and sean nye party, love and profit: the rhythms of the love parade (interview with wolfgang sterneck) graham st john pathological crowds: affect and danger in responses to the love parade disaster at duisburg luis-manuel garcia reviews books hip hop underground: the integrity and ethics of racial identification (anthony kwame harrison) . . . . . 90 rebecca bodenheimer the local scenes and global culture of psytrance (graham st john) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 rupert till pink noises: women on electronic music and sound (tara rodgers) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 anna gavanas technomad: global raving countercultures (graham st john) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 phil kirby sonic warfare: sound, affect, and the ecology of fear (steve goodman) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .102 tobias c. van veen films music world: donk (andy capper) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .107 phil kirby speaking in code (amy grill) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .111 tobias c. van veen this issue has been some time in the making, given the departure of maestro and founding managing editor eliot bates who had tinkered for long hours down in the dark recesses of open journal systems producing results comparable to that consistently manifested by the chief on battlestar galactica. with eliot’s departure and a scheduled special edition that unfortunately did not reach fruition, wounds were being licking down at dancecult. then, arriving to gallantly perform a whole lot more than slack-taking was our new managing editor tobias c. van veen, followed by a production team including copyeditors catherine baker and katrina loughrey, art director cato pulleyblank (who has transformed our layout design and designed our great new logo!), production director gary botts powell, production assistants luis-manuel garcia, ed montano and botond vitos, along with operations assistant neal thomas. this team, who have joined reviews editor karenza moore and myself, have worked hard to produce this edition, working together for the first time and with our authors in what i feel has been a rewarding experience for all concerned. the issue features two strong themes. the first is detroit techno, the second the love parade. our feature articles section contains two contributions to the emergent study of the music and culture of detroit techno. a more than capable tour guide of the “real of detroit” and its progeny (“techno survivalism”), richard pope’s exploration of “radical pessimism” in his article “hooked on an affect: detroit techno and dystopian digital culture”, offers an engaging account of the dystopian aesthetic of detroit techno, mirroring the fate of the city’s industry. the article is complemented by carleton gholz’s “maintaining ‘synk’ in detroit: two case studies in the remix aesthetic”, a study of the cross-mediated artifice of detroit techno producers, namely the wizard himself jeff mills and richie hawtin. bookending this section are two further articles. the first is an intriguing contribution by hillegonda c. rietveld. in the previous edition of dancecult, simon reynolds defended and expanded his position on the “hardcore continuum”, that is the perceived continuity of uk hardcore styles through jungle to dubstep. in this edition, rietveld offers a study on what might be called the disco-ntinuum. in her article “disco’s revenge: house music’s nomadic memory”, she uses deleuze and guattari to explore chicago house music as a “nomadic disco memory machine” where house music is placed under the microscope as a “wandering institution”. rounding off our feature articles section is ed montano’s account of the changing shape of dj culture in sydney’s commercial edm scene: “festival fever and international djs”. editor’s introduction doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.00 st john | editor’s introduction 2 the dystopian theme continues in our special from the floor section, where three pieces address the disaster that became the love parade, once the pride of “techno kulture” and a global edm phenomenon. twenty one years from its founding in berlin (1989, just before the berlin wall came down), in 2010 the love parade died. although many argue the love parade expired long ago (having run its course before it was sold to the company mcfit), on 24 july 2010 what had become a travelling edm carnival, and a ghost of its former self, went down in grizzly fashion, taking 21 lives with it, and injuring 500 others. the scene of the tragedy was the ruhr valley city of duisburg, inside a heavily enclosed region of the former duisburg depot, an industrial site tellingly removed from the event’s glory days floating down the straße des 17. juni before berlin’s brandenburg gate. long gone was the passion for unification that had driven the initiative and fueled its former parades. indeed, at duisburg, the event was no longer a parade, but a spectacular pawn for regional municipalities jostling for culture and capital. those who danced in the ruins of the duisburg depot had reached the terminus of a movement that had emerged in a climate of hope and which once posed for the world aboard a vision splendid, but had been finally crushed under the weight of history. the first article, a collaboration between ronald hitzler and sean nye (instigated by nye, who translated hitzler’s work from the german), offers a detailed and rewarding introduction to the fate of the love parade, once a “symbol of a generation”. the article offers an incisive account by the authors, one of whom was “backstage” and the other observing “live” streaming from the tabloid website bild.de, positions from which they are able to begin assessing the compromises, the deception and the carnage in duisburg. the second piece is an electronic interview i conducted with activist and educator wolfgang sterneck. sterneck had an early involvement with the love parade, but has long viewed the event with studied contempt. the interview offers sterneck’s views on the siphoning of the love over the parade’s successive “phases” and the emergence of the fuck parade. the interview was translated from the german by luis-manuel garcia, who also contributed the final piece to this special section. garcia’s “pathological crowds” offers an intriguing analysis of the portrayal of the dangerous crowd in commentary of the duisburg disaster which he interprets by way of early studies of crowd psychology in which urban crowds were pathologised. additionally, from the floor is proud to host “nomads in sound vol. 1”, a compilation of original tracks and short films with commentaries compiled by anna gavanas (aka gavana), which was, i was surprised and delighted to discover, inspired by my recent book technomad: global raving countercultures. this volume of “nomads in sound” includes tracks by gavana, mutamassik, dr das, x.a.cute, aimnbreak, hakan ludvigson and doveshack, and film contributions by m-op and martin borell. this is the first of two volumes on this theme compiled by gavanas, with vol. 2 to be published in dancecult 2.2. finally, this edition features four book reviews and two film documentary reviews. the books reviewed are anthony kwame harrison’s hip hop underground: the integrity and ethics of racial identification (reviewed by rebecca bodenheimer); graham st john’s edited dancecult 2(1)3 collection the local scenes and global culture of psytrance (reviewed by rupert till); tara roger’s pink noises: women on electronic music and sound (reviewed by anna gavanas); graham st john’s technomad: global raving countercultures (edited by phil kirby); and steve goodman’s sonic warfare: sound, affect and the ecology of fear (reviewed by tobias c. van veen). the films reviewed are andy capper’s music world: donk (reviewed by phil kirby) and amy grill’s speaking in code (reviewed by tobias c. van veen). additionally, for those author’s seeking to publish material in our from the floor section, please note our updated description. the from the floor (ftf) section hosts: imaginative submissions reviewed by dancecult editors (that is, submissions are not typically subject to blind peer-review). submissions include field reports, miniethnographies, photo-essays and interviews. pieces for this section should be between 750–2500 words in length. rather than written in the style of an article with formal analysis and many citations, ftf pieces are more conversational or blog-like in style, and may consist of experimental and creative reportage styles across the field of edm. they may include substantive multimedia components. also, a reminder to anyone seeking to be involved in the forthcoming special edition of dancecult, “the exodus of psytrance?”, the deadline for abstracts is 1 may 2011 (with the deadline for full articles 1 november). for complete details, please see the announcements. a warm thank you to all of our contributors to this edition, to our valued reviewers, and to the members of our new team at dancecult for producing the edition. special thanks to tobias c. van veen who has been instrumental in revamping the journal’s production procedure and for his invaluable assistance formulating a new and improved dancecult style guide (the dsg) which better illustrates our multidisciplinary approach and outlines requirements associated with our cross-platform (html and pdf) approach. the dsg is now available for download and should be read thoroughly by all authors submitting to the journal. returned submissions are not unlikely if they do not conform to style. as the dsg illustrates, dancecult generally follows the chicago manual of style 16th ed. feedback is certainly welcome as we wish to make the submission process as painless as possible. from the sweet spot, graham st john executive editor http://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/journal/announcement/view/8 focused ethnography as research method: a case study of techno music producers in home-recording studios jan-michael kühn technische universität berlin / berlin mitte institut (germany) translation by luis-manuel garcia <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.01.10> translator’s introduction: jan-michael kühn’s essay introduces the reader to hubert knoblauch’s focused ethnography [fokussierte ethnographie] as an ethnographic fieldwork method. more than a decade after knoblauch’s first publications on this method, there are precious few guides to focused ethnography in the english language, save one (knoblauch 2005). at any rate, there are certainly no introductions to this methodology that also use edm scenes as a case study. kühn’s article was originally published in german in soziologie magazin, a student-run journal published from martin luther university in halle (saale) but operated by an editorial network that spans germany. as a result, kühn orients his writing towards an audience of junior researchers, post-docs and graduate students, highlighting the ways in which focused ethnography suits the circumstances of early research careers, where one may have difficulty securing long-term research stays for fieldwork of broader scope. in particular, he notes that knoblauch’s methods require a very narrow scope for the project (i.e., a “field sector” rather than the whole field), a reliance on the researcher’s previous knowledge of the field, and short bursts of intense ethnographic activity in order to create work that is tightly focused but still rigorous and generative of fresh knowledge and new concepts. introduction in this article, i would like to present the method of focused ethnography (fe) through the example of my current research on techno music producers working in home-recording studios. in my experience, fe is best suited to projects of very narrow scope, such as term papers, in which one can “pick out” small social phenomena and study them while maintaining a manageable workload for young scholars. as a fieldwork method, participant-observation combines exploratory and theoretically-productive fun with high methodological demands and scholarly interrogation. since fe presumes a close familiarity with the field as a precondition of its primary research phase, it is especially suited to subjecting the researcher’s already-existing fields of interest and knowledge to scholarly interrogation, thus producing interesting, ambitious and instructive research. it is particularly pertinent in a social context of increasing complexity, diversification and therefore pluralization, where constantly emerging forms of social practice can thus be developed as objects of research in the context of their fields and studied with the help of scholarly approaches. fe enables the description of sociologically relevant details of everyday life that take shape and stabilize under conditions of ongoing technological development and diffusion, providing a ground for the social development that increasingly takes place outside of large academic, business and political institutions (willis 1990). after first outlining fe as fieldwork method, i present my own research methods and experiences as an example.[1] a short introduction to hubert knoblauch’s focused ethnography hubert knoblauch (2001; 2002; 2005; knoblauch and tuma 2011) reports on a “blossoming” of ethnographic research not only in german-language sociology, but also in numerous other disciplines. according to knoblauch, this has been accompanied by a move to adopt new forms of ethnographic practice, which he gathers under the heading of “focused ethnography” [fokussierte ethnografie]. these forms of sociological ethnography differ from conventional ethnological ethnography in that they are practiced in one’s own culture, focusing on specific parts of it (i.e. “field sectors”).[2] field stays tend to be shorter, since researchers are not immersing themselves in entirely foreign cultures: they are already (more or less) familiar in the ethnographic field, having prior experience in this social and cultural milieu. instead of taking on an entire social field (e.g. the techno scene), one focuses on individual sectors of the field (e.g. music production using computers). rather than extending over long periods, data collection occurs in short, intensive survey phases, during which field-notes, videos, audio data and numerous other emergent modes of documentation are used for generating data. the goal of such data collection is no longer to reconstruct the entire field’s typical knowledge-repertoires, but rather to grasp background knowledge within a section of the field, to understand and describe social practices and “inside perspectives” (malinowski 1983). fe can thus be characterized as constructivist: “on the one hand, it reconstructs participants’ structures of knowledge and experience, which constructs the meaning of their actions. . . . and on the other hand, with its often minutely detailed analyses, it also attempts to trace the situated construction of reality in observed action” (knoblauch 2001: 135). fe takes as its object the contexts of action in which observed everyday life occurs. at the same time, it is also based on what researchers define and perceive as “actually experienced”, illustrated with statements from field participants. consequently, it does not rely exclusively on the self-reporting of research subjects, which would be the primary mode of data-collection in interviews and online surveys, for example. as method, fe does not verify already-existing theses (deduction), but rather constructs them in an interactive process of “theoretical sampling” between theorization and the analysis of field sectors / data (iteration) (strübing 2006:15). although fe may appear, at first glance, to be faster or easier to implement, one would be mistaken to assume that it neglects scholarly standards. on the contrary, a deep engagement with ethnographic method and ethnographic research-norms must take place before research commences. this entails, on the one hand, bearing in mind the still partially-unclear properties of new recording devices and their focus (oester 2007:15), and, on the other hand, understanding what a research method is and what it can accomplish—that is, how it is itself also a part of research and actively produces data on the basis of its properties and orientations, rather than simply “carving” data out of reality like a hard tool gouging yielding material. fe also requires further preparations and precautions in order to reduce personal bias and “blind spots”, such as constant self-observation and the explicit declaration of previous knowledge and expectations (knoblauch 2003). for these purposes, it is advisable to write down all field-related knowledge, value judgements, and personal preferences before beginning research (this can take several pages), so as to identify these during practical research and to deal with them as such. i use the expression “to deal with” [behandeln] deliberately, since researchers inevitably become part of the object of research over the course of participant-observation. they elicit statements and attitudes from observed parties—an active, participatory, and productive act; the observed parties respond to the researchers and assign certain roles to them, which they factor into their answers and actions [handeln]. productive norms of open-mindedness and bias-avoidance are also to be dealt with as such—not as cosmological final principles with a built-in guarantee—along with the willingness to constantly revise already-created knowledge and categories during the research process, inasmuch as they no longer apply to the field sector under study (kleining 2001). while involvement in the field can be an extraordinary resource for researchers, it hides the methodological risk of generalizing selected phenomena beyond their particular contexts and out over the entire field sector, as well as that of imbuing the political views of the field sector with a scientific “aura”. there exist ways to reduce these effects, such as: writing down and constantly checking everything that is deemed to be irrelevant to the research process; spreading the selection of research subjects as widely and diversely as possible; entering into the fieldwork process with fundamental openness (even against one’s own preferences!); and repeatedly accounting for oneself through self-observation. this is a matter of elucidating the field sector’s knowledge-structures, which also manifest in the conflicting attitudes of actors, outlining structural features in their disparity. thus, this is expressly not a matter of testing—in a normative sense—“right” or “better” beliefs for their validity, comparing them with each other, and possibly crowning a “winner” at the end. furthermore, the formulation of one’s research question must make it abundantly clear why the study of this field sector is of both scientific and social relevance. this naturally requires knowing and discussing relevant scientific literature as well as situating one’s own findings within this scholarship. one must also explain why the exploration of one’s chosen field sector using fe is relevant beyond one’s own academic career, addressing its relevance to society as a whole. in my case, the intellectual context of my research was the sociology of innovation [soziologie des neuen] (e.g. hauser 1988; joas 1992; groys 2004; jauß 2007). from this and my choice of empirical research field, i derived my research question (“how do new things arise in the production of electronic dance music in home-recording studios?”) and situated my fieldwork plan as an exploratory form of workplace study (knoblauch/heath 2006) and “technography” (rammert/schubert 2006). i argued for its broader social relevance by pointing to social-structural transformations (individualization, differentiation, technologization, etc.) and the resulting, increasingly compartmentalized lifeand work-worlds of niche economies—for which techno producers can serve as a case study. figure 1. music producer niko schwind, from the music label stil vor talent, in his home recording studio in neukölln, berlin, germany (2009). photo: jan-michael kühn. the selection of “ethno” and “focus”: the techno scene and music producers at the beginning of the 2000s, i began learning how to “spin” [auflegen; i.e. to mix tracks as a dj]. gigs and private engagements soon followed and, starting in 2005, so did nightclub bookings with increasing regularity. in 2006, i founded a web-tv and radio show, the positive response to which expanded my contact network. i also became a resident dj for various event-series. event-organizers outside of my social network began booking me for their events, and i, in turn, began selecting djs and “live pa” performers (i.e. booking) for them. since i had good “scene-knowledge” (and thus also “scene capital”; thornton 1995; otte 2008) of this techno scene as well as good contacts within the scene due to my high level of involvement therein, i was able to proceed on the assumption that i held enough field-related knowledge to make a sector of this field my object of study. while reading the scholarly and journalistic literature relevant to this project, it became apparent that the actual practice of music production was only rarely and mostly superficially addressed. scholarly literature reduced productive practice to “montage”, “bricolage” or “al-fresco” (meueler 1997; vogelsang 2001; essl 2007; friedrich 2010). instructional literature in the form of online videos, books, websites, or posts in internet forums transmitted established knowledge as “best practices”—such as the form of “tracks” (e.g. construction, elements), music-production strategies and practices—and informed readers of new technologies (e.g. blogs, “tech” magazines, etc.); in other words, they focused on technical matters of interest to producers. in analyzing this archive of instructional literature, it became clear that it primarily concerns purpose-rational exchange: for producers, the primary concern is what they can gain in exchange for their attention, that is to say, useful knowledge that they could potentially implement in their own tracks. by contrast, i found no coverage of actually-occurring musical production—particularly of electronic dance music, in the context of home-recording studios or even of a scene—as recorded dj-music for use at events in building communities through aesthetics (regarding scene coherence, see maffesoli 1996; meyer 2000; hitzler/niederbacher 2010). since a comprehensive search indicated that my particular research focus had yet to be studied, i had a legitimate academic starting-point for engaging with techno music-production as well as putting the background knowledge of production, practices of creativity and the connections between music production and music scenes under the “sociological microscope”. i chose as my field sector the site where primarily work-oriented producers make their house/techno music: the home-recording studio. i use “work-oriented” to describe those producers that actually engage intensively in music production, rather than playfully. the latter is not negligible for research results: it became clear that work-oriented producers ranked particular scene-specific production requirements as relevant, which differed from those ranked highly by those who produced music without substantial economic interests (i.e. so-called “hobby” producers). the former produce music first and foremost in order to sell their music and be booked as djs. this can result in situations, particularly in the case of early career producers working under mostly precarious conditions, where music is manufactured along aesthetic lines that appeal to the broadest audience possible within the scene—music that sells well, or exploits a current “hype” with which producers can expedite their careers and secure their income. by contrast, those who are economically independent in their music production often criticize these modes of production and point to a lack of innovation and insufficient authenticity (“selling out”)—in turn, other actors situate themselves between these standpoints and have an entirely different set of relevant needs, goals or bases for action. this example illustrates the aforementioned constructivist understanding of science (i.e. the sociology of knowledge) and points to the relationship between research design and results. method and experience from march to may 2009, i made appointments with producers and arranged for six sessions of participant-observation. lasting between two and six hours, these sessions took place in the home-recording studios of these artists, which were primarily located in the berlin districts of mitte, kreuzberg and friedrichshain. i presented myself as a student who intended to study modes of music-production in home-recording studios for my degree thesis. i assured them that i had little knowledge of music-production and no interest in pursuing it myself. producers often have particular musical “secret recipes” [geheimrezepte] that serve as an essential part of their public-commercial identity. they create a sound that only they can repeatedly produce in a specific manner, such that it becomes an economically-relevant trademark. i worked out a set of guidelines for these sessions, in order to monitor as many areas of production as possible, from entering the studio, turning on the computer, and opening music-studio software, to the individual elements of the software and the concrete production processes in their individual steps, all the way to submitting a completed track to a mastering studio or label. in addition, i was also interested in socio-demographic data, biography, and scene-specific careers. i had scheduled an exploratory session beforehand, in order to gain insight in this field sector, what i should not forget, which practical problems might be encountered during sessions (e.g. constantly high volume levels and concomitant communication and recording problems) and what i should expect to discover in a home recording studio. as a former (and amateur) home producer with a high level of affinity with computer technology, i did not find the first steps into production knowledge to be difficult. my greatest concern was the possibility that i might overlook important things or dismiss them as irrelevant. it proved helpful to consult the audio recording of the session afterwards and write down all technical terms that came up during conversation, later incorporating these into questions during future sessions with other producers. in this manner, i learned a great deal about the components of this field sector and their possible boundaries, the various value judgments in circulation, and how these assessments exerted an influence on music production. i made audio recordings of all sessions and prepared field-notes immediately afterwards; during the sessions, i took notes for myself. i first wrote down everything that remained in my memory and seemed interesting to me (and even what i perceived to be uninteresting!), after which i listened to the audio recording again, indexing/coding it with already-developed categories while also adding to them. i simultaneously drew up analytic memos out of which these categories gradually emerged, as i would later employ them in my degree thesis (kühn 2009, especially chapter 5). as a final step, i sequentially transcribed the audio recordings, during which the categories attained a final “fine-tuning”. strikingly, data-interpretation and theory-building often came about in contexts outside of the work process, such as at night while falling asleep, while strolling through the city or during observations in a club. for example, i would get up at 4:00 a.m. and attend edm events, in order to capture and elaborate differences in sound-, arrangementand track-design on the dance floor; the effects of “badly” produced music could be studied particularly well by noting the movements of the audience on the dance floor as well as the comments of producers i knew who were also in attendance. the process of knowledge-production was iterative: initial categories were collected from scientific literature and the first exploratory session. it became apparent during data-collection that these categories could not satisfactorily capture the complexity of the creative process. categories were discarded, distinguished and changed after each session and/or as soon as it no longer seemed sensible to combine empirical phenomena under the same category, due to such grouping blurring rather than sharpening structural typologies. observed patterns attained typological relevance when they did not only appear in one session as an isolated incident, but rather were traceable across all sessions and could thus be considered as structural for the field sector. through these continual category-adjustments, i gradually compiled a model of “constellative poiesis”. i began each field-session by requesting an explanation for everything, for what i saw and whatever seemed special to me in that setting (as distinct from a normal living space or a computer workstation). i asked about the computer and its peripherals (synthesizer, usb/midi controllers), the large monitor speakers, the foam matting on the walls and in corners, the t-shirts folded under the door, and so on. the producers then opened their all-in-one production software (e.g. ableton, logic, cubase) and the same questions were repeated for each component of the software. finally, i asked the producers to begin a new track and to explain what exactly they were doing. i would sometimes change an arrangement (e.g. changing a “straight” beat to a “broken” one as an elicitation) in a way in which all of them would disapprove. but precisely by doing so, i put producers in a position where they had to explain to me why their original arrangement was better, demonstrating their reasons with direct reference to this example. during sessions, i focused on the activities of viewing, listening and inquiring (knoblauch 2003). in each situation, numerous inquiries were made. what is going on here? what is the producer doing? what does it mean to him? how does he assess it and why does he assess it thus? the sessions were correspondingly question-intensive, which producers nonetheless took positively: they partly answered indulgently, and they also tolerated my constant, probing use of non-ethnographicand “dumb”-seeming questions—despite some snorts of laughter. nevertheless, the producers could not give any precise information about many processes, such as special forms of (implicit) auditory knowledge (horning 2004), how sounds sounded, or what expressions such as “fat” [fett], “groovy” [groovig] or “to go down behind” [hinten runter gehen] meant. it is here especially that the advantages of fe as research method come to the fore. nevertheless, that which cannot be talked about does not remain silent—it is demonstrated directly on the computer via a field-sector-specific knowledge-transfer of implicit knowledge. at the same time, seemingly banal statements were made that later proved to be of value during analysis: jmk: so, what’s the point of giving pieces more brilliance? cj: yeah, now you’re asking me things like: why should something sound better? because it should sound better. i mean, it’s self-explanatory, right? ... don’t you still also prefer good sound quality to bad? well, there are questions of taste that might pertain to sound-color, but there are also absolute values pertaining to the sound quality of a recording.[3] “don’t you still also prefer” is a clue to the relevance of scene-relations for the (re)production of a particular form of aesthetics—the “groove”, the “fat” sound, the dance floor-filling presence of tracks (“presence-aesthetics”, “technologized aesthetics”; kühn 2009: 65). these are overt expectations that find expression in these musical productions; they are also shared by producers who identify and endorse them as expectations that drive their creative work. they are strongly “naturalized” and translated into technological specifications, with the result that they obfuscate their aesthetic ideals and represent technological parameters as objective benchmarks. additionally, there are certain control mechanisms in individualized, market-structured community formations like the techno scene that ensure the reproduction of such aesthetics: tracks that sound bad (that exhibit less “groove”, less sound-presence on the dance floor) are less often bought and rarely played, and consequently their creators are rarely booked, develop a bad reputation regarding their skills, and slide down in the hierarchy of producers competing for performance opportunities—in other words, they lose scene-capital (kühn 2009, chapter 5.4.1). these observations on my own research project should serve interested researchers as a case study for the method of focused ethnography. it is meant to provide introductory information and provoke interest in further study—as a sort of “teaser”, in a sense. it nonetheless remains indispensible to conduct one’s own intensive engagement with ethnography. it is furthermore essential to engage with pertinent literature regarding the demands and properties of academic knowledge-production (e.g. knoblauch 2001, 2002, 2003; flick 2007; hirschauer, kalthoff and lindemann 2008). ultimately, the usability and significance of collected data always depends on how well researchers prepare themselves during their pre-fieldwork phase, exploring the methodological properties and research-norms of (focused) ethnography. author biography jan-michael kühn (dipl.-soz., 30) studied sociology with a focus in technology studies at the technische universität berlin and is currently working on his doctoral research project concerning productive labor in the berlin techno scene. he also works as a freelance dj in clubs and produces a web-tv show, the berlin mitte institut, about the structures of techno scenes (http://www.berlin-mitte-institut.de). his areas of scholarly interest include the sociology of knowledge, culture and music, along with individualization, technologization and post-materialism. references essl, karlheinz. 2007. “wandlungen der elektroakustischen musik”. in zwischen experiment und kommerz. zur ästhetik elektronischer musik, eds. thomas dézsy, stefan jena 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rammert, werner and cornelius schubert, eds. 2006. technografie: zur mikrosoziologie der technik. frankfurt am main: campus. strübing, jörg. 2006. “webnografie? zu den methodischen voraussetzungen einer ethnografischen erforschung des internet”. in technografie: zur mikrosoziologie der technik, eds. werner rammert and corenelius schubert, 247–274. frankfurt am main: campus. <http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/fileadmin/uni_tuebingen/fakultaeten/sozialverhalten/institut_fuer_soziologie/dokumente/pdf_dateien/struebing/js_2004_webnographie.pdf> (accessed 2 may 2011). thornton, sarah. 1995. club cultures: music, media and subcultural capital. cambridge, ma: blackwell. vogelsang, waldemar. 2001. “design-kultur ‚techno‘ ”. in techno-soziologie. erkundungen einer jugendkultur, eds. ronald hitzler and michaela pfadenhauer, 265–289. opladen: leske and budrich. weber, max. 1985. “die objektivität“ sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer erkenntnis.” gesammelte aufsätze zur wissenschaftslehre, ed. johannes winckelmann, 146–214. 6th ed. tübingen: mohr siebeck. willis, paul e. 1990. common culture: symbolic work at play in the everyday cultures of the young. boulder, co: westview press. notes [1] since all of the techno-producers that i surveyed were male-identified (i.e. no producers claiming other gender-identifications were available during fieldwork), i use masculine pronouns in the context of music production whenever i refer directly to the people i studied; for general statements, by contrast, i use gender-neutral phrasing. [2] [translator: kühn uses the term “field sector” [feldausschnitt] to designate that subsection of the cultural/social field to which focused ethnography limits its scope, as distinct from “the field” as a whole.] [3] cj, interview with the author (in person, berlin-mitte, germany), 30 april 2009. dancecult 2.1 reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 2 (1): 90–114 issn 1947-5403 ©2011 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net hip hop underground: the integrity and ethics of racial identification anthony kwame harrison philadelphia: temple university press, 2009. isbn: 1-4399-0060-4 (hardcover), 1-4399-0061-2 (paperback) rrp: us$74.50 (hardcover), us$26.95 (paperback), us$74.50 (electronic) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.05 rebecca bodenheimer hamilton college, usa anthony kwame harrison’s book hip hop underground: the integrity and ethics of racial identification examines the racial dynamics of the san francisco bay area’s underground hip hop scene, with the larger goal of exploring processes of racial self-identification among american youth at a time in which the nation is growing more racially diverse and discourses on race increasingly revolve around an ideology of colorblindness. in his view, the bay area is a good case study for an elaboration of contemporary american racial dynamics because of its uniquely multiracial demographics, which are currently very similar to the projections of a non-white majority population in the u.s. by 2050. harrison’s research is strongly informed by the method of “critical ethnography”, which views the process of ethnography as intimately connected to the interpretation and representation of the findings. in this vein, he describes his decision to become an active participant in the bay area’s underground hip hop scene and to assume two identities, anthropologist and emcee (rapper), despite his initial misgivings that he might be received as an interloper. while critical ethnography is by no means a new method of anthropological research, the level of self-reflexivity here is arguably taken to the extreme with relatively large doses of “autoethnographic narrative” (58). harrison’s second chapter provides detailed accounts both about his personal history with hip hop and the ways he inserted himself into and moved through the bay area underground hip hop scene; however, his discussion of the hip hop group he helped to form, the forest fires collective, seems at times overindulgent. reviews reviews 91 harrison’s first chapter details the emergence of underground hip hop in the mid-to-late 1990s, highlighting the movement’s preoccupation with notions of authenticity, its goals of reclaiming hip hop from the mass corporatization following its crossover into the mainstream, and its contestation of commercial hip hop’s “ghettocentric” representations of blackness.1 he argues that the alternate representations of blackness offered by underground hip hop are accompanied by a more racially inclusive criteria regarding who can lay claim to the practice. nevertheless, despite his suggestions that this more inclusive vision is a progressive tendency, he frequently contests the stated ideologies of his fellow hip hoppers 2—that it is competency, rather than race, that matters in terms of underground hip hop authenticity—by asserting his own view that blackness is still privileged in hip hop and that non-black participants, especially whites, face a more arduous road to establish their legitimacy. harrison’s third chapter provides a good critical summary of the ways hip hop scholarship has articulated the relationship between race, authenticity and claims of ownership, detailing three principal approaches. the first frames hip hop as a distinctly black practice, despite recognizing that non-black youth, specifically puerto ricans, were involved in its emergence and is exemplified by tricia rose’s 1994 canonic work on hip hop black noise. as harrison notes, a host of scholars ( juan flores, raquel rivera) have argued strongly for inserting puerto ricans into hip hop origin narratives. harrison provocatively asks, if we can recognize the role of puerto ricans and other latinos in the formation of hip hop culture, should we not do the same with white b-boys who joined the movement only a few years later? the second approach views hip hop as one in a long line of afro-diasporic traditions in the americas and tends to draw direct links between hip hop and african and/or caribbean traditions. the final approach is an orientation toward contemporary manifestations of hip hop, and a recognition of its creative appropriation by youth across all continents. harrison concludes this review by asserting that the ongoing reification of hip hop as essentially black has obscured a more realistic and dynamic picture of the ways that youth of all colors engage with the practice and that underground hip hop challenges these essentialist notions. harrison’s principal goal is to examine and unpack the ways that underground hip hoppers articulate claims for their own hip hop legitimacy through racial performances of self. departing from sarah thornton’s theorization of subcultural capital and the boundary maintenance that is such an integral part of subcultural scenes, harrison critiques the hegemony of “authenticity”, viewing john l. jackson’s notion of “sincerity” as a better analytic. jackson’s notion “subverts the standard checklist of subcultural capital [markers “ sophisticated and innovative discussions about the racial politics of authenticity in underground hip hop” dancecult 2(1)92 of authenticity] in favor of a personal code of underground hip hop ethics and integrity… what matters most is the perceived sincerity of these racial performances... for the non-black hip hopper, an overzealous display of urban african american posturing, no matter how authentic, is under most circumstances suspected as insincere” (118). while i agree that the sincerity of a racial performance is an important element in the positive reception of a non-black emcee, i do not perceive a big difference between the notions of authenticity and sincerity. harrison’s position that a display of black posturing is authentic but not sincere is not entirely convincing—why would it not simply be considered inauthentic? chapter four puts the notion of racial sincerity to work, as harrison provides examples of white emcees who perform “sincere whiteness” (140). his primary example concerns a white emcee who, during a mos def 3 show, got on stage to freestyle (improvise rapped lyrics). although he was initially booed because of the audience’s assumptions about his competency based on his “bummy white guy” look, the emcee ultimately won over the crowd with his lyrical prowess. harrison astutely states, “had top r not been a sincere white guy…the entire story might have played out differently: no boos, no surprises, no turning of the crowd; perhaps just a great freestyle, which is hardly the kind of thing that gets talked about to any great extent days after the show” (140). while i find this analysis quite persuasive, harrison’s criteria for performing “sincere whiteness” is more problematic: in this and in other instances, he bases his characterization of racial sincerity on physical appearance and fashion choices, noting in particular the white emcees’ “dorky looks” and “bummy shirts” (140). he perceptively analyzes this mode of self-representation as a reaction against past white emcees’ “insincere” performances of racial identity, exemplified in the “wigger” persona,4 that claimed to fully understand the experience of black youth without recognizing their own white privilege. the issue is not only that harrison’s notion of white racial sincerity is fully based on the emcee’s physical appearance, but also the implication that “bummy clothes” are essentially a white fashion and that emcees cannot be racially sincere unless they are dressed in this manner. in his final chapter he provides what i believe is another problematic analysis, when he discusses the sound of an all-white underground hip hop group as “so sincere and self-assured in its whiteness”, precisely because people have described their music as “avant-garde hip hop”, “emo rap”, or “goth-hop” (161). harrison’s argument here seems to reproduce the same essentialist notions of race and culture that he has previously challenged and the reader is left to assume that he would only deem racially sincere those white emcees who mix rap with “white” musical styles or dress like “dorky white guys”. harrison’s final chapter continues elaborating the notion of racial sincerity, although here he offers a rather pessimistic commentary on racial politics in the underground hip hop scene. he recounts a party where the aforementioned white underground hip hop group performed a satire using an exaggerated style of black speech in order to parody the image of the hyper-violent, misogynist “gangsta” rapper that is so often promoted by the mainstream music industry. noting that the audience was predominantly white, harrison describes this performance as a form of “contemporary minstrelsy” (158). however, he reviews 93 then characterizes this analysis as too simplistic, asserting that the group was very aware of a history of white appropriation and racist imitation of black music. he states: i would contend that sole and the pedestrian saw themselves as crafting a tremendously ironic satire of the racial insincerity embodied by... wigger icons of the past. arguably, if we accept that this group... was engaged in a theatrical performance of past white hip hoppers’ exaggerated performances of blackness, this could be viewed as about a profound an expression of white racial sincerity as one might find. however, somewhere within this cauldron of sincerity, satire, and racial symbolism, for me, the circumstantial logic breaks down (160). the reason he gives for ultimately eschewing his own, quite sophisticated analysis and concluding that the performance was a “racial impersonation” (162), centers around the fact that these white emcees were performing for a mainly white audience. however, another perspective might view the performance as quite racially sincere precisely because, as stated by harrison, it was a parody. furthermore, it seems that the key to determining whether the performance reinforced stereotypes or not resides largely in its reception: how aware was the audience of the performers’ intentions to perform a satire? although harrison does not pursue this question, it is likely, following his own discussion of the blurred line between performers and audience in underground hip hop, that the spectators were “in the know” and viewed this performance with a critical perspective. ultimately harrison’s book offers some sophisticated and innovative discussions about the racial politics of authenticity in underground hip hop. however, while he presents various compelling analyses, his final conclusions are at times less nuanced and thus lessen the persuasiveness of his theoretical points. notes 1 the subgenre of “gangsta” rap, in which rappers frequently spin tales of violent and sexual pursuits, is most closely associated with a “ghettocentric” mentality. 2 harrison often refers to participants in the local scene as “hip hoppers”, which i understand to include anyone who engages with at least one of the four principle elements of hip hop culture— emceeing (rapping), dj’ing, break-dancing (b-boying), or graffiti art. 3 mos def is one of the most celebrated and visible emcees in underground hip hop, so much so, that some might not describe him as part of the underground scene anymore. his first album, mos def and talib kweli are black star (rawkus records 1998), was a collaboration with the highly respected emcee talib kweli and in many ways defined the terms of underground hip hop in its critique of the music industry and mainstream rappers who have “sold out”. 4 “wigger” was a derogatory term that emerged in the 1990s referring to white youth who fully adopted the fashion and speech of african american youth for the purposes of gaining subcultural capital, but who were ultimately perceived as having a superficial connection with blackness and not a true investment in the politics of racial equality. dancecult 2(1)94 the local scenes and global culture of psytrance graham st john new york/london: routledge, 2010. isbn: 978-0-415-87696-4 (hardcover) 978-0-203-84787-9 (electronic) rrp: $103.00 (hardcover), $103.00 (electronic) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.06 rupert till university of huddersfield, uk psytrance is not well known or widely understood. the local scenes and global culture of psytrance, edited by leading writer in the field of electronic dance music (edm) culture graham st. john, is the first book to cover this form in any detail. to many, psytrance is lumped together using ill-defined journalistic terms that have little meaning or substance such as “dance music”. this collected volume attempts to unpack the term and explore the field in a more rigorous fashion. st john bookends the volume; his introduction provides a useful assessment of writing on psytrance, whilst providing a contextual framework. he makes a strong case for the need for the collection and prepares the ground for the variety of different approaches that follow. the book is divided into three sections, the first dealing with the roots of the music in goa trance. this begins with luther elliott’s proto-trance history. it makes a strong case that musical roots of psytrance grew not principally from goa but originated in sixties counter-culture, ibiza, house music and acid house. its description of the development of goa trance is rather vague, lacking specific dates, names and interviews with key players. fortunately this is covered in the next two chapters and in any case this is an interesting and well-paced first chapter. anthony d’andrea next provides a spicy taste of the nature of the goa full moon party scene. like several sections of the collection, it prioritises the opinions of the ‘authentic’— the scenesters, the faces, the core members—and allows the flavour of the narrative to be determined by self-appointed spokespeople. indeed many of the writers can be accused of this, related it seems to their immersion in psytrance culture. in some cases the writers have led a psytrance lifestyle and have become interested in writing about their passion. this provides insider knowledge, without which this book would lack credibility, but inevitably means it sometimes becomes evangelical, treating internal psy-perspectives as “truth” and outsider perspectives as “false”. reviews 95 arun saldanha provides the final chapter in the goa section and manages to avoid this trap. his well-written account describes the myriad influences on the goa scene as a meeting point of multiple substreams, a developmental crossroads rather than a point of origin. his use of derrida’s ghost metaphor elegantly blends sociology and ethnography and embeds into psytrance the term ‘communitas’, which returns many times to form a key focus of the book. the sequel to the goa section discusses globalisation, bridging the gap between goa and the growth of psytrance in europe. in fact it is the well-defined and well-written specificity of this chapter by hillegonda rietveld that clarifies the origins of european psytrance and its relation to goa. it names specific recordings and artists, dates and places, building on the earlier chapters which were rather more freeform, reflecting perhaps a goa trance state of mind. in particular this mature chapter gives credit to various sources often overlooked in such histories, such as electro body music (ebm) and klf. charles de ledesma goes on to explore the growth of psytrance in london. there is strong data here and interviews with key players, but this is inevitably a very london-centric ethnography, rather more local than the claimed uk coverage. robin lindop casts a wider net, defining and discussing the music itself, as well as the culture surrounding it. however, without a use of technical musical terminology, this is rendered a little vague. de ledesma does critically engage with the ways in which edm sometimes defines itself as “authentic” in opposition to the “mainstream”, but then goes on to claim that “psytrance is exemplary”. it is similarly contradictory over the subject of genre purity. like the following chapter by joshua schmidt, lindop provides some paradoxes in his writing, but overall provides useful information to the emerging wider narrative. schmidt uses pairs of dichotomies to critically analyse israeli trance. again this is a view from the inside of a scene, shown when it condemns as “chronic” the media’s description of israeli desert trance mesibot as “drug parties”, although it is clear from an external perspective why that description might be used. however schmidt’s work is succinct, well structured and provides a convincing argument. the last of the trilogy of sections weaves in and out of a vague focus on liminal culture. botond vitos begins by providing a rare insight into czech psytrance, although his argument is a little circular, perhaps due to a closeness to interlocutors who had recently and regularly taken lsd, a proximity which he tries to stretch away from instead of embracing. the fact that some of his interviewees described their activities using his own theories of demencze shows a rather acid splintered blurring of boundary between the emic and etic. chiara baldini’s approach is far bolder and more successful, making her position as party organiser clear and embracing material and references with a voice clearly internal to her and to psytrance. she draws upon the psy-spirit of dionysus in an effective correlation with her own experiences. the next two chapters, by jenny ryan and alex lambert, discuss the relationship of the web to psytrance from the perspectives of san francisco’s tribe.net and australia’s oztrance dancecult 2(1)96 community. the difficulty with this work is the use of individual web-posts to represent the views of the group, as there is often inevitably an opposing view that contradicts any point. however the significance of the web to this scene merits such attention, which is especially well presented in lambert’s cultural circuit. the last dance is reserved for graham st. john, who applies his experience and skill as an edm commentator to both reference other chapters and make significant points of his own, providing an appropriate climax to the narrative. st. john’s final chapter is the strongest in the book. it largely focuses on festival culture and on those technomads who travel from festival to festival, making psy-trance a lifestyle choice rather than a part-time activity. this is a recurring feature of the book, which focuses on the intensely committed few, rather the many casual psytrancers. this focus on festival culture feels unbalanced. in many cases the authors show their partisan attitudes and don’t so much struggle to maintain an objective attitude to their subject, as willingly submit to a pro-psytrance attitude. it is unsurprising that some chapters are written by relatively inexperienced researchers, rather than late career researchers with several books under their belts. this gives the work a currency and directness and although one could criticise the text in terms of clarity of emic or etic approaches, this would ignore the benefits that the writers’ proximity to psytrance culture provides. there have been many studies that have pointed out the difficulties western society faces in a fractured world that struggles to resolve issues of community, identity, belonging, hope and the loss of popular rituals that address such issues. studies addressing cultures that seem to be orientated around solutions to these issues, or new approaches to them, inevitably raise difficulties, may be controversial or inconclusive and in a post-meta-narrative world, fail to provide simple answers. however this book’s approach to issues such as communitas provides an engaging and novel approach to such problems. overall then the local scenes and global cultures of psytrance provides a valuable insight into a world-wide movement which has had comparatively little study so far. i am no novice to the world of psytrance, but this book provided a wide range of interesting, thoughtprovoking and informative detail, and is one i can highly recommend as essential reading to any researchers interested in edm culture. “a valuable insight into a world-wide movement which has had comparatively little study” reviews 97 pink noises: women on electronic music and sound tara rodgers durham: duke university press, 2010. isbn: 978-0-8223-4661-6 (hardcover), 978-0-8223-4673-9 (paperback) rrp: us$84.955 (hardcover), us$23.95 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.07 anna gavanas independent researcher, electronic music producer and dj tara rodgers’ book pink noises is a long overdue feminist intervention in the historiography of electronic music. pink noises emphasizes the pioneering, substantial and diverse work that has been accomplished by women but so far remained largely invisible in previous accounts of electronic music development. thereby, tara rodgers starts to correct the century long lack of representation that profoundly underestimates the presence and diversity of expressions by women working with sound and electronic music. the title pink noises (which is also the name of the producer/musician/dj network pinknoises.com founded by the author in 2000) refers to pink in terms of a “marker of female difference”, and noise as a “site of disturbance and productive potential”. tara rodgers also refers to the term pink noises in physics and audio engineering, as “variations of white noise, or unstructured sound that contains every audible frequency”. moreover, tara rodgers introduces her interviews with women artists as pink noises in and by themselves: “sonic interventions from multiple sources, which destabilize dominant gendered discourses and work toward equal power distributions in the cultural arenas where sounds reverbrate” (2010:19). structured as a collection of interviews/ conversations, pink noises documents and explains ground breaking innovations and visions in electronic music production and technology from the perspectives of the pioneers themselves. ground breaking and legendary international artists are interviewed, like pauline oliveros, kaffe matthews, giulia loli (mutamassik) and chantal passamonte (mira calix). the book is structured into six themes in electronic music; time/memory; space/perspective; nature/synthetics; circulation/movements; language/machines/embodiment; and alone/together. from a variety of different angles, rodgers and her interviewees disentangle assumptions that cast technology and music—and electronic music in particular—as male domains while, most importantly, discussing the dimensions and meanings of sound, expression and representation. moreover, pink noises reflects upon the cultural and political potential of sound itself. tara rodgers conceives of the potentials of sound, as a category of critical and aesthetic analysis, to feminist concerns in particular, arguing that “sounds can be thought of as pressure and movements, doing cultural work” (2010:19). dancecult 2(1)98 pink noises is an extremely important contribution to the study and documentation of electronic music because, unlike previous literature on electronic music, tara rodgers refuses to stop at the “thresholds that have silenced women’s work in historical accounts”. tara rodgers thus looks beyond the commonplace observation where most standard accounts stop and conclude that women constitute a minority in electronic music—as if this observation would explain their absence in literature and media. with pink noises, tara rodgers challenges the normalization of male dominance in the patrilineal historiography of electronic music. against the grain of ideologies aligning women with normative modes of heterosexual and capitalist reproduction, tara rodgers makes the argument that sounds themselves are reproductive, “to account for reproductive sounds in all their temporal depth is to challenge the patrilineal lines of descent and the universalizing male claims to creation that have thus far characterized dominant discourses in electronic music” (2010:15). although the professional interventions of interviewed artists go as far back as the 1950s, it is striking that similar gendered issues and experiences seem to reoccur throughout the generations of women who work with sound and electronic music. however, it is encouraging to read about the ways interviewees have prevailed and ignored gendered biases in the business; only to cultivate their subversiveness, innovation and determination even further. to someone who is extremely interested in the technical aspects of working with sound and music production it is very instructive to read pink noises. however, to someone who does not have a specific interest for technical aspects it could be difficult to follow the very informed conversations between the author and her interviewees. helpfully there is a detailed glossary on technical concepts. it is apparent throughout the book that the author has had previous contacts and collaboration with many interviewees, presumably through her own professional activity as a musician and her work with pinknoises.com. many of the participants in the book are part of the same international and/or overlapping musical/ professional scenes. it would be interesting to read more about the ways the author is situated in her field of study and the ways in which this influences her selection of interviewees, her questions and the responses. although rodgers probably has many good reasons for her decision to let interviewees speak for themselves and make their own analysis i sometimes feel that additional concluding, contextualizing and comparative commentary would be helpful. also, it would have been great to have a chapter on tara rodgers herself, and her long standing experience, electronic music production and reflection as electronic musician analog tara. all in all, pink noises is an extremely well informed, informative and inspiring discussion of some of the most crucial aspects and developments in electronic music. the innovators and actors behind these developments happen to be women and pink noises thereby highlights the astounding male centeredness in standard accounts and representation in electronic music. “ rodgers challenges the normalization of male dominance” reviews 99 technomad: global raving countercultures graham st john london: equinox publishing, 2009. isbn: 9781845536251 (hardcover), 9781845536268 (paperback) rrp: uk£50.00 (hardcover), uk£15.00 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.08 phil kirby university of liverpool, uk graham st john is a cultural anthropologist whose latest publication explores “themes of counterculture and resistance” in global electronic dance music culture (edmc). previous publications by st john explore psytrance and the intersection of rave culture and religion, key themes in technomad. the book is the result of eight years of research and offers a utopian study of rave culture, one in which legislation such as the uk’s criminal justice act and the onset of corporate clubbing hasn’t stopped the development of the free party scene. it adds to the evolving canon of academic literature that explores edmc culture and demonstrates a rigorous level of research. in an echo of centre for contemporary cultural studies (cccs) theory, st john frames the global techno-countercultures explored in technomad as “resistant”. st john acknowledges that anthony d’andrea has also explored the intersection of rave culture and post-1960s new (age) spirituality. where d’andrea attends to the cultural economy of psytrance “neo-nomads”, st john makes use of a significant range of theoretical stances including bey’s concept of the temporary autonomous zone (taz) to unpack the “fleeting permanence of contemporary counterculture” (2). technomad provides a cultural history of diverse alternative global edmc formations, the techno-underground, whose mobility has been partially facilitated by new digital technologies. the book’s focus is mainly on the nexus between hippy culture and rave culture, which has resulted in the evolution of edm sub-genres such as psytrance. st john divides the book into eight chapters and in the course of the first chapter, which serves as an introduction, quotes from much of the academic literature that explores rave culture. key themes are introduced that are then explored in more depth throughout the book; these include digital technology—both in terms of facilitating diy music production, its role in enabling alternative modes of communication and in framing dance music as a form of resistance used by activists to oppose rampant capitalism; gender issues and environmental issues. a key argument of technomad is that non-commercial forms of edmc are directly politicised by restrictive regulation and subsequently offer alternative spaces for a liminal communitas to evolve. dancecult 2(1)100 the second chapter explores the proliferation of a specific form of rave culture practice, the uk free party scene. the intersection of post-hippy uk free festival traveller culture and acid house music was in part facilitated by the appropriation and subsequent growth of sound system culture, a concept originally developed in jamaica in the 1950s. this chapter explores the growth of mobile dance music sound systems and what st john refers to as ‘traveller circuses’ such as spiral tribe. this nascent free party culture eventually culminated in the festival at castlemorton common in 1992, the event that precipitated the uk’s criminal justice and public order act of 1994. subsequent police attention and legislation had the unintended effect of gradually spreading these cultural practices around europe and beyond. st john notes the influence of various sound system crews as they stage events outside the uk. the third chapter maps the development and proliferation of sound system based edmc scenes in america, canada and australia. the integral role of the sound system in both reggae and hip hop culture has been noted in numerous histories of those genres, but st john successfully explores the key role that sound system practices have played in the global dissemination of particular strands of rave culture. st john then seeks to define the elusive “vibe” of a successful dance music experience, tracing the origin of the popular usage of the term back to the 1967 “summer of love” in san francisco. the study explores the idea that the term may have afro-american origins and connotations of eastern mysticism, “…the term now legion within edmc is used to denote a spatial and temporal experience, a collective and individual happening where a profound sensation of connection and mystery transpires” (99). from this definition various tribal edmc subdivisions are discussed in terms of “vibe tribes”. these tribes are not framed as mutually exclusive but explored in terms of “…a spectrum upon which the vibe may be characterized as libratory and divine at one end, and militant and proactive at the other” (103). the straightforward hedonism and release sought and achieved by many participants in mainstream edmc isn’t explored, as the project of the book is concerned with utopian outlaw countercultures. the various shamanistic/spiritual and activist tribal standpoints are explored in some depth offering useful insights for researchers interested in contemporary cultural anthropology. the author then explores a wide-ranging history of carnivalesque counter-cultural tribal gatherings, from san francisco’s golden gate park to the burning man. these ‘temporary alternative zones’ (or taz’s) and countercultural dramas are framed as “alternative futures”. the themes of spirituality and activism mentioned above inform the next two chapters. in chapter five technomad explores the intersection of rave culture and spirituality through an analysis of psytrance culture. st john defines psytrance as “…a carrier of the 1960’s counterculture flowering in the present” (165). he mentions the commercial “progressive trance” scene very briefly, acknowledging that it has ‘significant exchange value’, although it seems unlikely that the concept of the technocult explored by st john would mean much to the denizens of gatecrasher (www.gatecrasher.com; see also moore 2010). the pantheistic values of psytrance culture are discussed and the various occultist manifestations of the “trance ritual” are investigated, “itself a network of deviant and hidden knowledge and practice, from magick, prophecies and shamanism to astrology, esoteric christianity, ufos, http://www.gatecrasher.com reviews 101 and alien abductions, psytrance constitutes a discernable field of contemporary occultism” (169). parts of this chapter would seem familiar territory to readers of shea and wilson’s the illuminatus! trilogy, mainly as st john explores some of the global psytrance events leading up to the millennium and also some bizarre examples of psytrance ideology. for students and researchers interested in the evolution of goa-trance and the cultural practices and beliefs of the psytrance community, this chapter will provide a useful resource. the next chapter explores the harnessing of electronic dance music to a variety of activist agendas. these include anti criminal justice bill protests and reclaim the streets events. st john notes that “official” culture seeks to limit the dangers of carnivalesque excess, whilst recognising that carnival has a role in maintaining the equilibrium necessary for capitalism to thrive (presdee 2000). activists in turn have noted the dissident energy within the insurrectional dance-carnival and utilised it as a feature of contemporary protest and direct action. the implication of edm in a wide range of progressive and occasionally militant courses of action are explored; st john uses the neologism “protestival” to categorise these events of “radical conviviality”. initially the protestival was concerned with the regulation of dance music culture, but has since been harnessed to a range of different causes. the protest-carnival template has proliferated globally, partially facilitated by the internet. this leads to an interesting exploration of the intersection of activism, theatre and carnival in australia, the techno-tribes and sound systems discussed are concerned with injustices to both the aboriginal population and the environment. australians refer to outdoor edm events that synthesise transgressive, anarchistic and ecological sensibilities as “doofs”. the mobile sound system counterculture or “doofscape” discussed in this chapter is concerned with establishing valid links with the aboriginal population and seeks a respectful relationship with both the indigenous population and the land. the final brief chapter summarises the project of the book, to unpack the cultural politics of electronic dance music scenes. in many ways technomad achieves this successfully, although the focus of the book on the “outlaw” aspect of edm omits a significant range of practices and participants in edmc. however, as a contribution to the understanding of globalised dance music culture technomad offers many useful insights, both in terms of cultural anthropology, neo-religion and spirituality and the potential for edm as a form of activism. this exhaustively researched and meticulously crafted book provides a significant resource for all those interested in contemporary popular culture. references bey, hakim. 1991. t.a.z. the temporary autonomous zone, ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism. brooklyn: autonomedia. d’andrea, anthony. 2007. global nomads: techno and new age as transnational countercultures. london/new york: routledge. moore, karenza. 2010. the british ‘mainstream’ post-rave trance scene: exploring emotional and spiritual expression amongst ‘crasher clubbers’. in s. collins-mayo and b. pink-dandelion (eds.) religion and youth. aldershot: ashgate. presdee, m. 2000. cultural criminology and the carnival of crime, london: routledge. shea, robert, & wilson, anton. 1998. the illuminatus! trilogy. london: constable and robinson. dancecult 2(1)102 sonic warfare: sound, affect and the ecology of fear steve goodman cambridge: the mit press, 2010. isbn: 0-262-01347-9 (hardcover), 978-0-262-01347-5 (paperback) rrp: us$96.95 (hardcover), us$35.00 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.09 tobias c. van veen mcgill university, canada rave culture has long known of the power of sound to seduce bodies into becoming particles of a movement. dancer and dj become but one conduit of a feedback loop that affects the physical and the psychic. ecstasy, fear, horror, awe and excitement, as well as melancholy, nostalgia and transcendance form the connective tissue of the event. focusing on the “politics of frequency”, sonic warfare seeks to outline how the limits of sound are deployed within “vibration ontology”. goodman overviews military-state and countercultural usages alike, from audio assault weaponry for crowd control to dub audio viruses that transmit the offworld heritage of afrofuturism. an earworm, for example, can operate as an afrodiasporic riff of black noise that functions “as an attractor in processes of group catalysis”(157), such as the mobilization of dance; or, as a preemptive strike by hypercapital that “sets up a structure of allure for products for which you had no desire… because they do not necessarily exist yet” (186). tracing these parallel developments to early 20th century futurism and its “art of noise in the art of war” goodman dismisses the avant-garde camps of noise and silence alike, choosing (wisely) to focus on an ecology of rhythm and to argue for a complex and—perhaps essentially—incomplete philosophical inventory of vibration ontology. as goodman briefs in the introduction, readers looking for a detailed, historical account of sonic warfare should turn elsewhere. it is also worth noting—as goodman himself warns of his “dense theorisation”—that readers looking for an exegesis or comparative study of the text’s many philosophical sources should come prepared for neither. prepare instead for a somewhat chaotic assemblage of theoretical trajectories that zoom in and out of zones “goodman’s development of affect remains indispensible to studies of soniculture” reviews 103 of inquiry, from the futurhythmachines of the black atlantic to the bass materialism of global ghettotech. if that’s an earful, listen and repeat until sedated, for goodman has well adopted the deleuzo-guattarian maxim of conjoining it all with an “and”. fear not radical empiricism! affect and ontology of vibration goodman’s development of affect remains indispensible to studies of soniculture. for goodman, affect is the vibration—the good or bad vibes—prior to organisation into organised feeling (prior to what phenomenology would call intentionality). sonic weaponry seeks to disrupt or enhance the vibrational flux; it is capable of provoking feelings such as fear, dread or ecstasy through its good or bad vibes. goodman details actual sonic weaponry as well as fantastical projects that have promised more than delivered. he also aligns particular electronic music genres with various sonic effects, noting in particular how bass heavy genres—such as dub—generate atmospheres of dread, quipping their bass materialism as the “subpolitical power of music to attract and congeal populations” (172). elements of these theses were developed in goodman’s 2004 article, “speed tribes”. goodman’s approach, which he groups with radical empiricism, mixes the realms of the material and physiological with their often hazy effects upon subjects and cultures—the contested realm of the social sciences and cultural studies. in this respect, goodman develops a materialist perspective for grasping the affective potential of sound, be it the marching drum of the military, sonic cannons fired on insurgent protesters, or wobbly subbass let loose on east london club-dwellers. radical empiricism does not so much eschew cause and effect as much as it claims that effects operate autonomously of cause in an “ecology” of interrelationships (or rhythms and anticipatory echoes). radical empiricism opens the material world to preconscious interpenetration by its bodies (which can be any population, as whitehead’s “actual occasion”), as well as prehensive temporality, where “such an occasion itself starts as an effect facing its past and ends as a cause facing its future” (whitehead, quoted in goodman 152). in short, goodman eschews the a priori claims of phenomenology, substituting the radical empiricism of ecology. this, of course, requires an epistemological claim concerning knowing that which is aphenomenal and asubjective to the world. what we call sound itself is merely the human heard of the spectrum; goodman delves beyond even the ultra, sub and infrasonic, developing philosophies of rhythmanalysis by bachelard, lefebvre and whitehead (though one wishes he had spent more time with lefebvre, who explores the political capacities of rhythmanalysis, and in general less time with deleuze and guattari’s toolbox of usual suspects). in this respect, goodman practices what deleuze and guattari call a “minor science”; he delves headfirst into claims concerning hard science and metaphysical inquiry while suspending their epistemological uncertainty, thereby granting this form of empiricism, for better or for worse, its radicalism. that said, goodman footnotes the moment where his radical empiricism and graham harman’s speculative realism depart, noting his adherence to whitehead’s theories of relation over harman’s insistence on the rigorous conception of the discrete object (ch. 17). yet speculative realism holds intriguing consequences for goodman’s ontology of vibration. could discrete objects mark a particular phase of whitehead’s eternal object? dancecult 2(1)104 here i’ll dive into one particular argument to give a sense of what is at stake in the thesis of vibration ontology. the eternal vibrator goodman does not note if his adoption of the eternal object—which ingresses from pure potential into the real potential of the actual as it vibrates out-of-phase with itself (whew)—departs or concords with alain badiou’s neo-platonism. this becomes all the more significant when goodman talks of whitehead’s “actual occasions”—which are bodies in the general sense—being able to select eternal objects, which is how affective encounters between “discrete actual entities” occur (98). not only does a shadow of the discrete return, drawing attention to how radical empiricism shadows speculative realism, but goodman often writes as if a rhythmic power underpins vibration ontology (he treats audio viruses, or earworms, in a similar fashion, granting them an undefined agency he nearly denies human subjects (149)). in this respect, his adoption of the eternal object approaches a quasi-idealism, or a transcendentalism he elsewhere seeks to avoid. goodman’s radical empiricism, not surprisingly given its theoretical ground, dances around the question of spinoza’s god, i.e., the eternal vibrator. this problem can be recast in terms of politics. while goodman critiques bachelard for seeking equilibrium between counterrhythms (107), he nonetheless accepts philip turetsky’s account of rhythmic synthesis that forms matter into a single body (111). what is the difference between the two? well, for one, it is one of politics, or as goodman sees it, the micropolitics of frequency. goodman conceives of the “ontological ground” as fundamentally turbulent, a rhythmic anarchitecture which: . . . does not dictate the orientation of such a micropolitics; it does not lay down a set of generalizable laws but rather throws up a series of engineering problems. as such, any micropolitics derivable from this base can be only tactical rather than strategic—a war without aims concerned more with disposition and potential movement than ideology, although certainly susceptible to abduction (107). the problem is, of course, with alien abduction. the other always swoops in, alien, capitalist, totalitarian or otherwise viral, an earworm “takeover of the body by an exterior entity” (150) that overcodes tactical movement with strategy, setting up a violent mechanism of control over heterogeneous rhythms, and ultimately, of the “actual occasion” that is the self. like deleuze and guattari’s war machine, the tactical micropolitics of frequency or turbulence remain fundamentally inculpable. of course, we have hit upon the ideology of this position, which is its first generalizable law. its second generalizable law is already expressed above: being concerned with disposition and potential movement precisely is the ideogram of the micropolitics of frequency, its unification or expressed ideology as the perceived good, pre-abduction, of rhythmic anarchitecture. elsewhere goodman writes that “a theory of sonic warfare is particularly fascinated by this turbulent boundary layer between dance and violence” (111). what i understand goodman as trying to argue is that while vibrational control reviews 105 techniques such as sonic weaponry (from dub viruses to military means) seek to control the crowd by unifying it through resonance, thereby dictating it to move as one, at the ontological level its rhythm remains turbulent and nonunified. one can also see dance as a similar assemblage, where the soundsystem unifies differentiated bodies into what kodwo eshun called a “futurhythmachine”. thus, unification is not, in itself, a bad thing, but can be wrought for different ends say that of the military state, on the one channel, or that of jouissance, such as rave culture, on the other. that we are talking of ends and means suggests strategy, however, rather than tactics. this argument is a strong one, and smartly counters adorno’s well-worn conservative moralisms against mass dancing and jazz music, or benjamin’s aestheticization of politics, as somehow fundamentally fascist, questioning whether “aesthetics need be sacrificed at the altar of a political cause” (175). yet, there is a strict problem here: the potential to be unified is evidently inherent to rhythm. more than potential, it is an incorporated possibility before the fact; it is de jure. one could argue just as well that rhythm is fundamentally unified, which is to say one, and that turbulence is an expression of mode. again, this is spinoza’s problem, of the monadic substance of god expressed in the many. it haunts goodman’s text throughout, significantly with the undefined agency of the audio virus or earworm and the supposedly uncontaminated and interiorized body it penetrates by communicating the instruction “record me!” (150). a more ecological sense of interior/exterior would be of use here, of the earworm within that would whisper the effects of consciousness, suggesting the always already incorporation of alterity. in short, to the question: what concept of memory is compatible with the illogic of affect, the virtuality of the past and the active immanence of futurity in the present? one could reply, différance, insofar as derrida speaks of an absolute past, force, and the technics of the sign—the trace—before the re-marking of intentionality. and/or the logic of the supplement, otherwise known as incorporation, of that which is extraneous but necessary (that which is added after to make the thing whole from the start). derrida’s work on husserl could bridge the divide to deleuze and forms the unthought (or unsound) to goodman’s investigations. the political question of unified rhythm is raised by lefebvre, as well as deleuze and guattari, the latter whom grasp the state as the superposition of waves, a wave that cancels itself out (see van veen 2010: 183). superposed waves become a flat line that masks their turbulence, posing an entire problematic of perception, as well as form/content, ecological or otherwise, within rhythmanalysis. to this end, in the production of space, lefebvre even cautions against overstating the parallelism between hydrodynamics and theory (184). of course, goodman adequately argues a radical empiricism that claims all as rhythmic; it is a materialist theory of rhythm through-and-through that charts sociopolitical effects from the axioms of vibration ontology. which is to say the critical objection to goodman remains here. utilising vibrational ontology to script (or prescript) the political will of populations—or rather rendering viral such will, and “mapping” populations as preconscious rhythmic assemblages—dovetails neatly with 20th century second-order cybernetics as well as hypercapitalist (and fascist) strategy. unquestionably, such strategies—strategies as they serve political endgames— dancecult 2(1)106 are powerful. goodman demonstrates how they work in the world. yet they also do not work so well; no population has yet been adequately controlled (or so we perceive…). and undoubtedly this is also goodman’s point: that turbulence is a priori, that turbulence remains, in short, as a “subpolitics,” as it cannot be prescripted, even as resistance (175). it could be “abducted” in any direction. and in this sense, i agree with goodman, for his rhythmanalysis leaves us with a population (and a universe) that is without content, much like paolo virno’s conception of the multitude, or lefebvre’s analysis of the urban as form. yet, the alien, as all the sci-fi nightmares of horrific innards warn us, is always within. abduction occurs from within this same ontos; we abduct ourselves, unknowingly, aliens to ourselves. which leaves the question hanging: what is this uncanniness of the alien, its strange eternal return as the virus of our becoming? in short there is always an untimely question to the absolute claims of radical empiricism. whereas the virus remains, the material strategies of its dissemination do not; they mutate and change with the technics of history. for a materialist ontology of vibration, is it not, by its own admission, a tactic and not strategy, a viral thought to the metaphysics of eternal ontology? wildstyle ecology in mu-mu land the telescoping rhythm of shifting in and out of this increasingly complex and at times bizarre inventory of sonic weapons, inventions and theories touches upon the wildstyle. at times one wishes goodman would pitch down the rhythm and pause, downsampling more time to his soundbytes. in a particularly captivating passage, goodman fast-forwards a discussion between william burroughs and led zeppelin guitarist jimmy page on the potential of infrasonics; shifts to industrial band and performance artists throbbing gristle and their “infrasonic emitters;” and skips on to discuss the klf’s “audio weapons system” as borrowed by techno duo panasonic (now pan sonic). all this on page 24. as goodman makes clear on several occasions, “a brief overview will have to suffice” (17). yet the overview can be stimulating and a scrappy shot of wake-up. goodman emphasizes the potential of sound, writing how “at the very least, the transduction of bad vibes into something more constructive suggests the need to probe more deeply into affective tonality and the vibrations of the environment” (73). most ravers would agree. references goodman, s. 2004. “speed tribes: netwar, affective hacking and the audio-social”. in franz liebl and thomas düllo (eds), cultural hacking: kunst des strategischen handelns, pp. 139-55. vienna: springer. lefebvre, henri. 1991. the production of space. trans. donald nicholson-smith. oxford: blackwell. van veen, tobias c. 2010. “cities of rhythm and revolution”. in alexandra boutros and will straw (eds), circulation and the city: essays on mobility and urban culture, pp. 155-192. montréal: mcgill-queens up. reviews 107 film music world: donk dir. andy capper vbs:tv (internet documentary), 2009. http://www.vbs.tv/en-gb/watch/music-world/donk phil kirby university of liverpool (uk) this review explores the vbs.tv documentary on the uk electronic dance music style known as “donk”. the genre is referred to by a number of names including scouse house, bouncy house, bouncy techno, bounce or donk. the term bounce will be used throughout the review as the term donk has a pejorative dimension. the style is an offshoot of hardcore techno, which has had a number of variants popular in the north of england. the tunes are around 150 bpm with a four-on-the-floor kick drum, whilst the eponymous “donk” itself is a layered sound or stab that occurs on the offbeat, or “and” of each beat. synthesised musical parts in the tunes are akin to european techno, a stylistic template that has more in common with the sonic palette of 2 unlimited than that of basic channel. some bounce releases feature vocals, or rapid-fire mc’ing in an unashamedly uk regional accent. the focus of the documentary is mainly the blackout crew, although other uk mcs and producers are featured. blackout crew’s 2008 single put a donk on it may have only reached number 91 in the uk charts, but the official video had well over five million hits on youtube, and consequently attracted “mainstream” media attention. the genre is little known outside of the north west and north east of england. indeed, in the north west of england the style is mainly popular in the satellite towns between liverpool and manchester such as st helens and wigan, and towns to the north of manchester such as bolton, burnley and blackburn. the documentary is on initial viewing quite funny, until the realisation sinks in that it is a heavily biased, stereotype-laden snipe at the leisure practices of the white northern working class. the documentary begins by exploring blackout crew’s origins in a bolton youth centre. notably, considering the multi-cultural makeup of most of the towns named above, the only representatives of ethnic minorities filmed in the documentary are the managers of the youth centre (and a promoter later in the video). northern hardcore and its sub-styles have never been of much interest to young black or asian clubbers. the black respondents’ comments in the video are subtitled despite being perfectly comprehensible; indeed this doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.10 http://www.vbs.tv/en-gb/watch/music-world/donk dancecult 2(1)108 patronising use of subtitles occurs randomly throughout the video. the next sequence takes place in burnley, introduced by a series of visual tropes intended to convey a sense of acute urban deprivation. the presenter briefly interviews an ex-mc and questions him on local drug use, this respondent seems to have been included solely as he has been to prison. after some more clichéd camera shots the next respondent offers a more positive view of the town than the earlier montage suggested, despite being repeatedly questioned on the area’s alleged propensity for violence. a bounce producer dj greenie is subsequently interviewed; he responds to questions about the scene’s drug use by coyly stating a comparison to the film human traffic, inferring the use of ecstasy. greenie is questioned on the centrality of steroids to the donk scene, to which he responds, “wigan pier’s full of big lads on steroids”. in the next sequence the documentaryfollows blackout crew to a gig in scarborough. the documentary crew film some sequences outside the venue, one is an interview with a promoter who discusses the problems of booking the band outside the style’s heartlands, describing the southern audience as “more urban, more sophisticated in a sense”. the narrative then returns to bolton, signified by a montage featuring a pie shop, a tanning salon, a tattoo studio and a barbershop. after more interviews the focus shifts to a blackout crew performance at wigan pier, but not before another montage including a camera shot of a local newspaper headline proclaiming wigan thug beats mum to be and yet more shots of fast food shops. footage of young males being checked for weapons with a hand-held metal detector is included to connote a threat of violence. the next sequence sums up the overall tone of the documentary, despite the friendly interviewees and carefree enthusiasm of the pier’s crowd, the documentary team can’t resist sniping at the provincial working class audience, “as the night went on hundreds more fake-tanned, steroid-pumped donk enthusiasts filled the floor, tongues blue from drinking wkd”. as the blackout crew perform, the presenter then comments that the music starts to sound like being trapped in a nail factory, before paraphrasing joseph conrad’s heart of darkness, “what you see here is the beating heart of donk, the heart of donkness, oh the horror, the horror”. to bookend the video the documentary team return to bolton the next day to interview one of the blackout crew mcs. as a product of the vice media group the documentary has a pre-ordained agenda to be mildly controversial and to come across as edgy gonzo journalism, hence the underlying fixation with drugs, violence and urban deprivation. this subtext is reinforced by the “quite funny, until the realisation sinks in that it is a heavily biased, stereotype-laden snipe at the leisure practices of the white northern working class” reviews 109 connotations supplied by the montage sequences and the chosen edits. the documentary team are given a consistently friendly welcome and open access to the scene by all whether practitioners or clubbers yet still choose to mock the northern working class whenever possible. this isn’t a highbrow dance music style, but then again neither are grime or funky (uk garage sub-styles), which are generally treated with some degree of reverence by the british media, possibly as these styles initially emanated from the south of england and have greater perceived (sub) cultural capital. other related media coverage demonstrates this bias. the guardian newspaper included a brief feature on donk in 2008 (by a vice contributor) which had the headline, “bouncy techno meets terrible rapping? welcome to donk. keen on sportswear? prone to taking your shirt off in clubs? donk is made for you” (mcdonnell 2008). in a promotional article in the metro newspaperthe producer discusses the making of the vbs documentary: the most shocking element was just how massive most of these dudes were. they all had their tops off and the drugs are paramount. they take ecstasy, steroids, a bit of cocaine and then blue or red alcopops. we’ve been making a load of films recently, including one about cannibals in liberia, but there were bits of donk that were just as scary—like being the only sober ones among 3,000 ravers on steroids and ecstasy (capper cited by day 2010). the documentary says much about the predominantly middle-class media’s attitude to white working class britain and specifically london-based media’s attitude to the north of england. the selection of material, the content of the montages and the editing reinforces entrenched stereotypes concerning the north of england and white working class leisure. the documentary is augmented by a vice article on the making of the programme, which is noticeably more scathing than the documentary. for example, in a passage describing burnley the writer states the following hyperbole: what used to be a prosperous cotton-mill town is now decimated by the terminal decline of industry, with entire square miles of housing steel-boarded-up, repossessed and marked for demolition by the local council. unemployment is all-consuming, violence is a popular pastime—as is the rampant theft of expensive copper pipes from condemned houses to sell as scrap to pay for heroin and crack. it’s practically a ghost town these days, but instead of headless cavaliers with chains clanging around their wrists and ankles, there are gaggles of toothless, skeletal smackheads waddling around in skid-mark-stained tracksuit bottoms. actually, scratch that—it’s more zombie town than ghost town (hodgson 2009). obviously, burnley isn’t that bad, although if you look for that kind of social deprivation it can be found in many urban centres. crack and heroin use are not exclusively northern pastimes and neither is violence. another example of tabloid journalism in the vice article is the following statement describing the crowd in wigan pier: the crowd was a mixture of skimpily dressed, emaciated rave bunnies and some of the most gruesome thugs you’d ever come across—blokes whose faces had been dancecult 2(1)110 permanently disfigured by a lifetime of being pummeled by fists every weekend, who’ve probably washed down massive doses of steroids with gallons of stella for breakfast every morning since they were 11 years old (hodgson 2009). although the vbs.tv documentary is aimed at popular consumption, it does raise issues of academic interest other than media representation. there is potential for further academic research on the various dance music subcultures that have blossomed in the north of england outside of the metropolitan centres. an example of an interesting piece of previously published work on northern dance music culture is ingham’s (1999) listening back from blackburn: virtual sound worlds and the creation of temporary autonomy. this is a brief but fascinating study of the warehouse party scene that blossomed in the blackburn area in 1989-1990. northern soul has now achieved a mythic status and has received some academic attention, but the audience demographic was very similar to that of bounce nowadays, as were the audience demographics for the other hardcore house and techno variants that preceded bounce in the same geographic area. linking these styles historically could be socially and culturally revealing. references day, james. 2010. “donk is the crazy dance sensation taking over the north-west of england”. metro, 31 march: <http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/819812-donk-is-the-crazy-dance-sensationtaking-over-the-north-west-of-england>. hodgson, jaimie. 2009. “put a donk on it”. vice. <http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n2/htdocs/ put-a-donk-518.php>. ingham, james. 1999. “listening back from blackburn: virtual sound worlds and the creation of temporary autonomy”. in living through pop, ed. a. blake, 112-128). london: routledge. mcdonnell. john. 2008. “bouncy techno meets terrible rapping? welcome to donk”. guardian online. 29 july: <http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2008/jul/29/ bouncytechnomeetsterribler>. “the crowd was a mixture of skimpily dressed, emaciated rave bunnies and some of the most gruesome thugs you’d ever come across—” http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/819812-donk-is-the-crazy-dance-sensation-taking-over-the-north-west-of-england http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/819812-donk-is-the-crazy-dance-sensation-taking-over-the-north-west-of-england http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n2/htdocs/put-a-donk-518.php http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n2/htdocs/put-a-donk-518.php http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2008/jul/29/bouncytechnomeetsterribler http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2008/jul/29/bouncytechnomeetsterribler reviews 111 speaking in code dir. amy grill usa: square productions, 2008. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1474864/ tobias c. van veen mcgill university, canada you can still smell the revolution a bit, you know. —modeselektor with the proliferation of digital film technologies, i’ve been waiting to witness a film that captures the obsession and exuberance of the worldwide technoculture. by techno i have a specific meaning in mind. with the collapse of north american rave culture thanks to 9/11—which, among other things, disrupted vinyl distribution as well as introduced draconian police powers that were deployed everywhere against autonomist enclaves—djs, producers and adherents of the house and techno sound fled the states. this remains an undocumented exodus of creative luminaries. though montréal served, for a few years, as a nexus of technoculture thanks to the mutek collective—many of my canadian comrades moved to montréal around 2002—it was berlin that soon overcame all comers. easy travel within a united europe, cheap living and the fierce protection of personal freedoms made berlin not just an inexpensive and convenient place to live, but made it (along with barcelona) the place to imagine collective cultural anarchism. the jouissance of deep, psychedelic, minimalist or maximalist techno betrays not only this yearning, but its reality, which is what few north americans realise. berlin and barcelona, though each fighting their battles against gentrification, are singularities of the way things could be. perhaps even should be. amy grill’s film captures something of the meaning of techno to berliners. techno is not just clubbing catharsis; it is the soundtrack to the fall of the wall. as a few interviews (and deleted scenes) explain, when the wall fell in 1989, the centre of berlin opened into unoccupied and stateless space. ravers crept in, setting up technoclubs in bunkers and buildings. the infamous tresor was such a space; today berghain upholds the tradition. signs of this sociocultural renaissance appear everywhere in this film, where modernistdoi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.11 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1474864/ dancecult 2(1)112 inflected graffiti, inside and out, signifies resistance to speculation in property values. already, there is much to film: the relation of a free europe to the policed urbanism of north america; a thorough updating of the afrogermanic detroit/berlin axis wrought back in 1990; and the development of the later cross-atlantic dialogue with montréal, diving south in this regard, with mutek’s mexico and chile editions. though digging into berlin, and touching upon barcelona, speaking in code falls somewhat short of investigating the planetary potential of this techno matrix. focusing on grill’s hometown of boston, and her ex-husband david day’s struggle to produce technoculture in a town that mostly doesn’t care (like the rest of the conservative us), the film often forgets to provide some much-needed context to this mini-cultural revolution. after a few starts, it settles down on german labels bpitch control and kompakt, as the personal lives and meteoric careers of modeselektor and the wighnomy brothers become central to the narrative. both duos have to deal with celebrity and stress, as they find themselves gigging constantly, with modeselektor playing to tens of thousands at barcelona’s sonar festival. the massive scale of sonar is well contrasted to david day’s burnt-out efforts in boston, where day eventually loses track of his community, driving his new afterhours loftspace into the ground (at one point, he talks of putting on events night after night after ‘getting everyone else [i.e. his fellow artists!] out of the building’). a few other technorati make appearances, including the ever eccentric and incredibly inventive monolake, a.k.a. robert henke, prime programmer of ableton live and dub techno composer, whose spartan, all-white loft matches, without irony, his all-white techno outfit. another memorable appearance is that of music journalist and dj philip sherburne, who strives to explain, in an incredibly touching moment—he breaks down on camera— the true significance of hearing and what it means to him, thanks to his relationship with his deaf father, who received a hearing implant a few years before his death in 2005. indeed, philip’s ever articulate and composed persona is a highlight of the film; one wishes there was more from this evocative american writer. likewise, the ever elusive wolfgang voigt—an acid house-era techno producer and owner/operator of the kompakt empire—appears in fine form, situating “cultural techno” as not only still a part of ecstatic rave culture, but as a step beyond—a form-of-life. you will find more years to say something without words. —modeselektor reviews 113 the artist set-pieces of speaking in code are beautifully composed. each taps deeply into the ups-and-downs of living-and-breathing technoculture. the wighnomy brothers are exceptional; they live in the six person “small communist collective” of freude-am-tanzen, sharing equally in profits and running their own label, work/live space and distribution out of the small, mostly rural town of jena in former east germany. yet one wishes that the film went deeper still. when the very lovable, teddy bear-like robag wruhme of the brothers decides to take a breather from the relentless touring schedule, his absence remains something of a mystery. as a former technoculture journalist, i can’t help but think of what to ask him. i’d ask him if he misses his commune—surely, because he has spent his life, up to that point, working and living in an autonomist collective? to be thrown headfirst into the hypercommercialism and opportunist corporatism of mainstream european techno-pop culture must have been a dilemma—if not a cultural shock to the system. at sonar, massive digital billboards advertise alcohol, as if by bastardized simile they have overcoded the absent artistic visuals (look closely during modeselektor’s set). i’d hypothesize that wruhme’s retreat signifies that not all are comfortable with what “successful” technoculture has become. yet, the film only glances over divided yet interconnected levels of technoculture in europe. some are quite literally underground; the incredible muna club in jena reclaims a wwii-era rocket factory. an entire dimension of the ritual denazification of this space through dance is left uncommented. then there are the arena festivals of cigarette sponsorship bound by chain-link fences. the very opening of the film, for reasons that are left unexplained, rolls with some rather uninspiring footage of a dutch techno festival. as the camera enters through the vip gate, a sea of garbage and burnt-out bodies meets the eye, everyone seemingly unaware of the destitution of their camp-like surroundings… this is a fenced-in wasteland of the wasted, yet it is presented, without critique, as a tease of what’s to come. is this wasteland symbolic for something else in this film? well, yes. the evident struggle between technoculture’s collectivism and its commercialism, its schizoid, yet symbiotic relationship with corporate entertainment, is sacrificed to amy grill’s focus on her disintegrating relationship with david day. choosing “speaking in code shows that technoculture can be a communal, lifelong adventure in art, music and living, achieving escape velocity, at least for the inventive, from its youthful escapism and burn-out hedonism” dancecult 2(1)114 to narrativise her failing relationship with an always-omniscient voice-over, grill never places herself before the camera, even as she captures day in all his darkest moments. the film’s gaze does not match its voice; the director indulges in a selective narcissism, revealing only a strangely affectless narration to what is left unseen. by the end of the film the pair are divorced and what begins as an aside becomes the film’s peroration. their disintegration into divorce eschews cinema verité, embracing instead the conventionality of reality tv. what is more intriguing is all that is left unsaid. for example, why is montréal only mentioned once and the mutek festival never mentioned at all? north america is depicted as the graveyard of electronic music, yet there is no mention of the cities where technoculture has survived. also absent are vancouver’s new forms festival and seattle’s decibel. and then there’s detroit—its festival and heritage left unheard and unmentioned. the same can be said for san francisco, chicago, nyc and the midwest. this not only leaves the average audience unawares of the states’ founding as well as continuing contribution to electronic music, but it also leaves the current depiction of berlin’s technoscene and boston’s lack of it—despite day’s valiant attempts at a brief flowering—as somewhat hollow and meaningless. the united states lost something with 9/11—the total expression of a generation, silenced off the airwaves, policed and beaten down, denied even the nostalgia granted to punk. rave culture was not only underground; it has now been buried in the us, as if it never existed, as if the blurring of gender and colour and dance never happened. which brings me to the inevitable but essential question of representation. though ellen allien appears as head of bpitch control, speaking wonderfully of the emotive aspect of techno and the supportive atmosphere she strives to create in her label collective, she remains the sole woman onscreen. but most embarassingly, there is not one single black person in the film. one would think techno was invented and played solely by white people in berlin. in fact, the only reference to techno’s heritage in black detroit is a symbol, worn as a badge of respect by modeselektor. during their massive but ad-ridden sonar concert, sebastian szary wears an underground resistance t-shirt. good for him. full disclosure. i like others am a ghost in this film. i saw it being filmed. i’ve djed in many of the same places. i know and love most everyone in it. i love the music. it is difficult, in this respect, to write critically, especially given the usual laudatory press. but ditch the melodramatic divorce narrative and you have a documentary of profound intimacy and insight into the fragility of collective creation. speaking in code is a snapshot of a radical soniculture attempting to achieve a strange kind of equilibrium in the 21c. both henke and voigt say the same thing: they don’t see the need for change. but it’s more than that. speaking in code shows that technoculture can be a communal, lifelong adventure in art, music and living, achieving escape velocity, at least for the inventive, from its youthful escapism and burn-out hedonism. sometimes divorce is necessary for radical togetherness. 0. editorsintro-typeset vol. 1, no. 2 spring 2010 executive editor: graham st john managing editor: eliot bates reviews editor: karenza moore contributing editor: tobias c. van veen web design: todd thille iii editor's introduction featured articles 1 making a noise – making a difference: techno-punk and terra-ism graham st john 29 technics, precarity and exodus in rave culture tobias c. van veen 50 the aesthetics of protest in uk rave ramzy alwakeel 63 memory and nostalgia in youth music cultures: finding the vibe in the san francisco bay area rave scene, 2002-2004 eileen m. wu conversations 79 the history of our world: the hardcore continuum debate simon reynolds 87 “let’s have at it!” conversations with edm producers kate simko and dj denise rebekah farrugia from the floor 94 sound system nation: jamaica graham st john 105 capturing the vision at california’s symbiosis festival pascal querner reviews 113 reggaeton (rivera, marshall and hernandez) alejandro l. madrid 115 rave culture. the alteration and decline of a philadelphia music scene (anderson) beate peter 118 club cultures: boundaries, identities and otherness (rief) fiona hutton 121 run lola run (tykwer) and berlin calling (stöhr) sean nye cover image: symbiosis 2009. photo by pascal querner international advisory board andy bennett griffith university (australia) mark butler university of pennsylvania (us) anthony d'andrea university of limerick (ireland) rebekah farrugia oakland university (us) kai fikentscher hunter college (us) chris gibson university of new south wales (australia) jeremy gilbert university of east london (uk) françois gauthier université du québec à montréal (canada) ross harley university of new south wales (australia) david hesmondhalgh university of leeds (uk) tim lawrence university of east london (uk) gordon lynch birkbeck university of london (uk) rene lysloff university of california, riverside (us) alejandro l. madrid university of illinois, chicago (us) charity marsh university of regina (canada) tony mitchell university of technology sydney (australia) andrew murphie university of new south wales (australia) christopher partridge lancaster university (uk) anne petiau itsrs / université paris 5 (france) hillegonda c rietveld london south bank university (uk) geoff stahl victoria university of wellington (nz) sonjah nadine stanley-niaah university of west indies (jamaica) will straw mcgill university (canada) rupert till university of huddersfield (uk) tobias c. van veen mcgill university (canada) michael veal yale university (us) dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture is a peer-reviewed, open-access ejournal for the study of electronic dance music culture (edmc). a platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on the shifting terrain of edmcs worldwide, the journal houses research exploring the sites, technologies, sounds and cultures of electronic music in historical and contemporary perspectives. playing host to studies of emergent forms of electronic music production, performance, distribution, and reception, as a portal for cutting-edge research on the relation between bodies, technologies, and cyberspace, as a medium through which the cultural politics of dance is critically investigated, and as a venue for innovative multimedia projects, dancecult is the forum for research on edmcs. from dancehall to raving, club cultures to sound systems, disco to techno, breakbeat to psytrance, hip hop to dub-step, idm to noisecore, nortec to bloghouse, global edmcs are a shifting spectrum of scenes, genres, and aesthetics. what is the role of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, religion and spirituality in these formations? how have technologies, mind alterants, and popular culture conditioned this proliferation, and how has electronic music filtered into cinema, literature and everyday life? how does existing critical theory enable understanding of edmcs, and how might the latter challenge the assumptions of our inherited heuristics? what is the role of the dj in diverse genres, scenes, subcultures, and/or neotribes? as the journal of the international edmc research network, dancecult welcomes submissions from scholars addressing these and related inquiries across all disciplines. dancecult is published twice a year. ii dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 editor’s introduction halloweentek 2007. photo by alex canazei: www.alexcanazei.com these are not the easiest of times to be starting a journal, and we certainly have had our share of difficulties, but with pleasure, we release the second edition of dancecult, the flagship journal for research on electronic dance music culture. while not a special themed edition, there is, nevertheless, a strong aroma of cultural politics throughout this edition. that is, most of the articles address ways the cultures of edm intersect with activism, ethics, and politics more generally. first among the feature articles, my own contribution, “making a noise – making a difference: techno-punk and terraism”, addresses the emergence of the techno-punk sound system tradition in australia, formations committed to legitimate belonging in a post-settler nation, the investigation of which offers insight on the concept of “hardcore” adopted within these and other scenes. “hardcore” is a theme addressed directly by simon reynolds in his conversation piece, “the history of our world: the hardcore continuum debate”. recognising the presence of a persistent culture (i.e. “hardcore”) in uk edm, reynolds responds to from the floor commentaries published in our inaugural edition, clarifying his position with regard to the “hardcore continuum” in a conversation that is undoubtedly far from over. further feature articles from tobias c. van veen and ramzy alwakeel address what they posit are the uniquely political dimensions of rave culture (and thus edmc more generally). from the perspective of political philosophy, in “technics, precarity and exodus in rave culture”, van veen opens up a discussion of rave’s politics, unpacking what he sees are its integral components, offering particular insight on rave dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(2) 2010, iii-iv issn 1947-5403 ©2010 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.00 culture’s dissolution of the distinction between labour and leisure. in “the aesthetics of protest in uk rave”, alwakeel explores the work of autechre and the justified ancients of mu mu, discussing how their interventions contribute to an understanding of the aesthetic character of protest and of the performative politics of edm. closing up our feature article section, and lending assistance to the wider understanding of the culture of edm, with her piece “memory and nostalgia in youth music cultures: finding the vibe in the san francisco bay area rave scene, 2002-2004”, eileen m. wu explores the role of nostalgia in the continuing production and reproduction of rave culture. besides simon reynolds’ contribution, whose “continuum” is male dominated, this edition features another conversation piece “let’s have at it!” by rebekah farrugia, whose interviews with successful female dj/producers kate simko and dj denise offers insight on the difficulties faced by women seeking careers within the world of edm production. farrugia’s discussion points to the need for an increase in “women-centered music making environments” and to the importance of social networking technologies and new distribution platforms enabled by the internet which have increased production opportunities for women. in our from the floor section, my own piece, “sound system nation: jamaica”, is a report on dancehall and the sound system tradition inspired by my visit to jamaica in 2008 for the acs crossroads conference in kingston. that a significant part of what reynolds calls the uk “hardcore continuum” is rooted in jamaica and jamaican émigré developments in the uk, adds relevance to the inclusion of this piece here. pascal querner’s “capturing the vision at california’s symbiosis festival” is a short photo-essay on california’s 2009 symbiosis festival. finally this edition features three book reviews and a review of two films. the books reviewed are raquel z. rivera, wayne marshall, and deborah pacini hernandez (eds) reggaeton (reviewed by alexandro l. madrid); tammy l. anderson’s rave culture: the alteration and decline of a philadelphia music scene (reviewed by beate peter), and; silvia rief ’s club cultures: boundaries, identities and otherness (reviewed by fiona hutton). sean nye reviews the films run lola run and berlin calling. graham st john executive editor of dancecult 6 june 2010 iv dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 rumble in the jungle: city, place and uncanny bass dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 3(1): 44–63 issn 1947-5403 ©2011 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.03 rumble in the jungle city, place and uncanny bass chris christodoulou university of westminster abstract while bass powerfully resonates among the cultural discourses, lexicology and marketing of a range of electronic dance music (edm) styles, little popular music scholarship has paid attention to the subjective, phenomenological and psychophysiological significance of bass in its modulation of intense feelings of pleasure. this article examines the linking in jungle/drum ‘n’ bass culture of bass as a sonic space that produces a powerful sense of jouissance where identity can seem to unravel on the dance floor and an articulation of contemporary urban space as a place of subjective loss and regression. overlaying freud’s notion of the uncanny and kristeva’s signifying space of the chora, i discuss how this fetishisation of bass can be linked to the music’s cultural formation from deindustrialised regions in london and the south-east of england during the early-1990s; its accelerated break-beats and “dark” bass-lines can be seen to inscribe recent rapid social, cultural and environmental transformations in the urban metropolis. keywords: break-beat, city, drum ‘n’ bass, psychoanalysis, speed chris christodoulou is a lecturer in the school of media, arts and design at the university of westminster in london. his research is concerned with the relationship between speed, technology and urban experience in edm scenes and subcultures. he completed his phd, entitled renegade hardware: speed, pleasure and cultural practice in drum ‘n’ bass culture, undertaken at london south bank university, in 2009. feature article christodoulou | rumble in the jungle 45 “we’ve said all we can say and nobody listens anyway, so fuck ‘em, we just give ‘em bass! —goldie (in toop 1995: 92) introduction: bass is the place6 the popularity of bass-oriented edm styles like grime, dubstep and jungle/drum ‘n’ bass7 in the uk points to a link between psychological experiences of low-frequency sound and culturally inscribed discourses and desires of urban life. the sonic dominance of bass is transmitted via the womb-like environment of dark, hot and sweaty metropolitan dance clubs, framing the city as unhomely home through the summoning of the infant child’s primal memories of its original “home” within the mother’s body. given that the child’s first exposure to sound is through its proximity to the mother’s internal organs and a hearing range that is limited to low frequencies, it can be argued that bass partially reawakens both the pre-subjective state of comfortable bliss felt by the infant from inside the womb and the subjective collapse threatened by its failure to fully enter into subjectivity outside it. it is in this way that bass—often positively described by participants as being “dark”—can be seen to be a key sonic inscription for the uncanniness of urban space; the precariousness of the subject’s positioning to the mother’s bodily “home” is transferred onto the unhomeliness of contemporary urban space. the unstable conditions and frenetic pace of change of urban life seem to facilitate an intensified desire for bass-heavy music that stimulates primal memories of the rhythm of the mother’s womb and the sound of her heartbeat. i wish to discuss the genre as one prominent example of how bass articulates the postindustrial metropolis as both a “real” space—real, that is, in sociological, demographic and material terms—and one that is fetishised. in particular, the fast tempos of drum ‘n’ bass8 music allow it to articulate specific experiences of living and growing up in a postindustrial society where speed is a dominant condition.9 this paper will hereby use the term “uncanny” in its psychoanalytic sense, as adopted by anthony vidler (1992); the unsettling slippage between a place that is home and unhomely was the basis for freud’s view that the uncanny (unheimlich) is rooted in the familiar (heimlich). this concept will be applied to the local contexts from which drum ‘n’ bass has developed, before being revisited through a focus on the experience of bass as a sonic space on the dance floor, and on its articulation of anxieties relating to the crisis of masculinity in the context of post-industrial socioeconomic transformations. the urban uncanny adam f’s seminal drum ‘n’ bass track “metropolis” (metropolis, 1996) articulates a contemporary thematic framework regarding the post-industrial city, a theme inscribed in its title and in the period of its emergence. a derelict and dehumanised cityscape is suggested dancecult 3(1)46 by the use of abstracted, un-naturalistic sounds, sinister chords and indecipherable distress calls; humans and other forms of natural life no longer seem to inhabit this space or are menacingly hidden from view. blaring low-frequency bass stabs convey a sense of existing be-low, on or beneath the streets, where danger is ever-present. the pervasive menace generated by these deep rumblings is supplemented by familiar sounds like human voices and communications media in states of threatening unfamiliarity. rhythmic events are punctuated by fragments of emergency broadcasts, distorted and reversed to sound ominous and confusing. the overall effect of this scenario is that the city is felt deeply within our physical beings, as though the metropolis resides in our inner selves. the urban is thereby doubly textured; it is a space that is concrete and “real”, but also brutally fantastic. a similar double positioning can be found in the classic science fiction film by fritz lang that inspired adam f to produce the drum ‘n’ bass track of the same name. in the film metropolis, workers beneath the city toil on gigantic machines and endless assembly lines. hidden from view, the workforce takes on a primordial significance. the technology that serves to dehumanise the workers potentially serves as the basis for proletarian revolution; machine power can be harnessed to overthrow the capitalist class. the film redirects this power in terms of an unrestricted female sexuality, signified as a mechanical vamp that is built to lead the workers to rebellion and disaster (huyssen 1982). thereby, the metropolis as a double space containing a visible high or above-ground—the “rational” spaces of the established social order—and a hidden underground—the site of “irrational” and repressed energies—powerfully resonates in both adam f’s track and lang’s film. anthony vidler applies a similar duality to the post-industrial cityscape in terms of its simultaneously modern and pre-modern character: the contemporary sensibility that sees the uncanny erupt in empty parking lots around abandoned or run-down shopping malls . . . that is, the wasted margins and surface appearances of postindustrial culture, this sensibility has its roots and draws its commonplaces from a long but essentially modern tradition (1992: 3). for vidler, the post-industrial city is a magical and enchanted space that is paradoxically rooted in modernity. its uncanniness comes from both a rational network of social and economic priorities based on productivity and a site of the waste and the depletion of human and material resources. vidler claims that the fear of darkened spaces and the density of the social marked enlightenment conceptions of space; “it is in the intimate associations of the two, their uncanny ability to slip from one to the other, that the sublime as instrument of fear retains its hold—in that ambiguity that stages the presence of death in life, dark space in bright space” (1992: 172). in defining post-industrial, post-enlightenment urban space as “uncanny”, vidler draws on a freudian psychoanalytic context to show how the city permeates the conscious and subconscious spaces of urban subjectivity. the urban uncanny can be further examined with reference to sarah kember’s definition of the fetish (1995). by showing how the city is both a space onto which desire is projected,12 the uncanny city in drum ‘n’ bass culture will christodoulou | rumble in the jungle 47 be shown to be a fetishised space. kember argues that patriarchy combines the “female body with the fetish” to produce a “fantasy of unmediated access to reproduction and origin” (1995: 110). in freudian psychoanalysis, a fetish is a sexual or non-sexual part of the body or an object that is invested with sexual energy. it is a substitute for the mother’s penis that the little boy once believed in. the realisation that the mother does not have a penis gives rise to the child’s sexual theory that she once possessed one and has been deprived of it, and to the male child’s fear that he too might be castrated (freud 2001). thereby, it is possible to consider the fetishisation of any external space as “home” in terms of the projection of internal drives that emanate from the subject’s desire to “complete” the mother’s body and to recover a state of unity it once felt inside the womb. while the fetish allows for the denial of castration anxiety, for kember, the fetish is re-read in terms of the female body, including her reproductive ability (1995: 110). in this way, the projection of feelings of homeliness onto external space involves a process of fetishisation that is inscribed by infantile memories of the mother’s body as primary space. julia kristeva (1980) focuses on the developmental significance of the infant’s primary identification with the mother before entering into discrete subjectivity. she uses the greek term chora to refer to a sense of being or presence that belongs to each person before he or she develops clear borders of his or her own individual identity. the chora is the subject’s point of origin and the site of its dissolution. kristeva also uses the term “semiotic chora” to highlight the extra-verbal way in which bodily energy is inscribed in language, such as in the rhythms and intonations of an infant who does not yet know how to use language symbolically; that is, through the use of symbols, grammar and syntax.13 as such, the human desire to make and listen to music can be seen to have its origin in that moment when the child begins to acquire a capacity for verbal communication. later, we will see how the chora’s uncanniness is inscribed in the visual iconography of drum ‘n’ bass via the fetishised “dark space” of the post-industrial city and in musical terms through the deep, low-frequency murmurs of its bass-lines. dark city the thematic prominence of “darkness” within drum ‘n’ bass culture has been heavily informed by the post-industrial conditions of its development. although not all drum ‘n’ bass tracks feature dystopian atmospheres, the continued popularity among participants of “dark” sub-genres like techstep14 points to the difficult social conditions that preceded the formation of the genre during the uk’s deepest economic recession since the second world war in the early 1990s, as well as to events such as the global economic downturn of 2008, as their consequences are played out in the lives of the working-class young people that form the music’s core audience in london. examining the impact of deindustrialisation on east london, anthony giddens shows how the decline in shipbuilding and other related forms of industrial work have created a poor, undereducated and underemployed base of local residents, despite government policies since the 1980s to encourage private enterprise to play a key role in the regeneration dancecult 3(1)48 of its inner city regions (2006: 917). for many young people, all-night dancing at clubs and raves in and around inner city areas like hackney and peckham offered a form of ritualised working-class sociality that had declined with the loss of thousands of local manufacturing jobs. disused factories and warehouses were themselves occupied for the staging of drum ‘n’ bass events. in this way, urban spaces, which offered employment and social ties for working class people, were rendered “dark” before being reoccupied, often illegally, as leisure spaces. by suggesting that “difficult and often painful experiences are integral to urban living”, kevin robins and frank webster suggest that fatalism constitutes a main attitude to life in the post-industrial city (1999: 258). for many drum ‘n’ bass participants, the “difficult” conditions of urban living can generate a sense where locality is in fact inescapable destiny and where horizons of activity extend only as far as the boundaries of the “urban jungle”, facilitating an intensified desire for instant gratification. this outlook permeates the foreboding ambience of early tracks like “valley of the shadows” by origin unknown (1993), which places a female voice intoning “i felt that i was in this long dark tunnel” alongside a murmuring bass-line. during the early development of this burgeoning genre of up-tempo break-beat edm (between 1992 and 1994), “jungle” and “drum ‘n’ bass” were being used synonymously with “darkcore” and “dark”. in this context, the metropolis can be seen to constitute a form of subjective architecture; a “junglist” is someone who shows strong dedication and commitment to the “scene”, thereby asserting his or her ability to survive in the “urban jungle”. along with bass, the use of looped break-beats15—a creative practice drum ‘n’ bass shares with us hip hop music—suggests the music’s intimacy with urban space. a number of commentators have shown that hip hop has drawn part of its appeal from mysterious urban topographies enunciated by hip hop or “rap” lyrics. drum ‘n’ bass similarly draws on the uncanniness of city life, as indicated by track titles like “edge city” by kubiks and lomax (the big picture part 3, 2006) and “twisted city” by dom and keaton (back for the future, 2002). however, its largely instrumental musical framework makes it more difficult to ground the genre within a fixed space. accelerated rhythmic flows are typically combined with abstract soundscapes, avoiding the essentialist assertions of black cultural nationalism more commonly associated with us hip hop culture. alongside its use of break-beats, drum ‘n’ bass is informed by a myriad of african diasporic music styles, such as reggae, jazz, house and techno; the latter a mid-tempo form of edm whose formation out of the post-industrial conditions of detroit in the mid1980s—together with its post-humanist aesthetic—are comparable with the conditions informing the development of drum ‘n’ bass a decade later. in addition, while initially occurring in the definable geographical space of post-industrial london, drum ‘n’ bass can be seen to articulate the unstable pathways between the metropolitan and the regional, the global and the local, as shown by the popularity of the sambass sub-genre, exported to the dance clubs and pop charts of the uk by brazil’s dj marky in the mid-2000s, or the asian drum ‘n’ breaks scene, which draws on classical indian music, bhangra and bollywood film soundtracks. thereby, the development of drum ‘n’ bass can be closely linked to the christodoulou | rumble in the jungle 49 development in the 1990s of what manuel castells calls a “network society”, in which the speed of communications is entwined with the growing importance of “informationalism” as the main source of economic productivity (2000: 17). the role of london as a global nodal point for accelerated flows of commerce, information and migration can be seen to be inscribed in those parts of the city which have benefited from the shift to the network society. despite its largely working-class demographic and cultural links to reggae sound system culture—imported to the uk from jamaica in the 1970s—its formal emphasis on speed marks a crucial divergence between drum ‘n’ bass and preceding edm styles in the african diasporic continuum. while the ability of drum ‘n’ bass to attract new audiences has arguably diminished since the peak of its popularity in the late 1990s, the regular staging of events at inner city social dance venues at the time of writing ( july 2010)—together with its crashing out from specific points in the everyday urban landscape, such as car sound systems, workmen’s vans and the earphones of teenage tube commuters’ ipods—attests to its continued relevance to the lives of working-class young londoners. dezert rat—a dj for east london’s long-running drum ‘n’ bass pirate radio station kool fm—reinforces the connection between difficult material circumstances and the sonic structures of drum ‘n’ bass: “everyone’s rushing around in london. it’s such a fast-changing, chaotic place. . . . [drum ‘n’ bass] couldn’t have come out of anywhere else”.16 angela mcrobbie similarly claims that the “breakneck speed of [drum ‘n’ bass] describes the frenetic economic lifestyle of the musicians, producers and djs” (1999: x), many of whom “exist at the far end of the social scale” (1999: 17). these suggestions of a link between the fast tempos of drum ‘n’ bass and the desire of its participants to mitigate the harmful social effects of cultural acceleration and the fast-changing needs of the post-industrial economy can be supported by adrian c. north and david j. hargreaves (2007), who show that regular listeners of up-tempo dj-based styles tend to be based in cities and have the lowest level of access to financial resources among music consumers. the frenetic character of drum ‘n’ bass music seems to highlight its participants’ prioritisation of instantaneous pleasures over the future rewards that can come with deferred gratification; given the chaos of life in the present, the future may never come to pass. the interconnectedness between difficult economic circumstances and the preference of drum ‘n’ bass participants for fast and rhythmically “chaotic” music can be further illustrated by the findings of robert j. brym and gabriel rossman (2010). brym and rossman mapped the beats per minute of all the songs in the billboard hot 100 charts between 1955 and 2009 with dow jones industrial averages over the same period. their results showed that periods of economic growth are associated with slower music while periods of economic recession or stasis are associated with faster music. since these findings exclude the relatively small-scale business activity with which such styles are concerned, drawing deterministic conclusions about the preferences of members of a music-based youth subculture like drum ‘n’ bass from broad-based corporate data can be problematic. however, brym and rossman’s research does point to a revealing link between musical taste and wider economic circumstances: faster beats correlate with periods of financial dancecult 3(1)50 slowness. the specific socio-economic circumstances of inner city working-class youth in post-industrial london where drum ‘n’ bass initially developed in the early 1990s seems to support such a relationship between musical tempo and wider economic circumstances. the visual iconography of drum ‘n’ bass culture reconstitutes the post-industrial city as a trope for the future as a period of inevitable decline. such a fatalistic outlook is informed by the stratification of speed in a network society. zygmunt bauman (2006) goes even further than castells in arguing that the increasing speed with which information is transmitted via information and communications technologies (icts) itself facilitates the inscription of social power. for bauman, the transformation from “solid” to “liquid modernity” has accompanied the growth of a “nomadic and extraterritorial elite” that uses icts to generate “liquid capital” and a complex bureaucratic network to manage the lives of the “settled majority” (2006: 13).17 this imbalance of social power brought about by liquid capitalism has produced a scenario to rival the dystopian futures imagined by the great science fiction writers of the 20th century, a “dystopia made to the measure of liquid modernity—one fit to replace the fears recorded in orwellian and huxleyan-style nightmares” (2006: 15). “dark” futures are frequently depicted in drum ‘n’ bass promotional material. in a flyer for the monthly club run by the renegade hardware record label (fig. 1), a post-industrial cityscape—signified by brightly lit skyscrapers and corporate buildings—is overlooked from the sky by the renegade hardware logo, characterised as a floating metallic monolith. these looming structures indicate the extent to which the speed of icts gives control over social and environmental changes in the city to those with the highest levels of cultural and economic capital. they also show how the technocultural framework from which speed emanates exerts a powerful fascination for the relatively immobile urban and working class audiences of drum ‘n’ bass, addressing the subjective impact of the flows and impulses of deindustrialisation, globalisation and the growing economic importance of icts relative to heavy industry and manual labour. the multiple, luminescent lines of vertically scrolling numbers constitute the popular image for both digital code—as depicted in hollywood science fiction films such as pi and the matrix—and biological dna code. this dual definition points to jean baudrillard’s concept of genetic and digital code as a deterministic mode of biological and technological pre-programming in a condition of simulation (1994). for baudrillard, the dynamics of representation depend on a series of conventional and seemingly absolute divisions between reality and representation, medium and message, subject and object. these differences are rendered equivalent to the extent that they are seen to be extensions of one code: “a single model, whose efficacy is immediate, simultaneously generates the message, the medium and the real” (1994: 82). as such, the code is hegemonic; it is the one substance that underpins a number of different modalities, and, as a result, all the different modalities are rendered fundamentally the same. christodoulou | rumble in the jungle 51 figure 1: flyer for renegade hardware club night at the end, london, december 2000. throughout drum ‘n’ bass culture, the “future” is marked by the subject’s vulnerability to control by the code, where media technologies are also technologies of surveillance and social control. the hegemony of the code in the renegade hardware flyer is signified in terms of the extent to which all living and non-living activity in the post-industrial city is subject to its operation. as a medium of control—indicated by the monolith—the code is defined as immanent and all-powerful. phillip tagg’s view that low sounds in western dancecult 3(1)52 culture tend to connote space, darkness and fear, while high sounds are linked to activity and vitality (2000: 173-9), can be used to illustrate the stratification of speed in the sonic structures of drum ‘n’ bass. fast break-beats signify the imposition of speed from “on high”. conversely, drum ‘n’ bass bass-lines, which usually run at half the tempo of the break-beats, can be seen to convey a feeling of slowness and immobility “from below”. in the renegade hardware flyer, the code is reframed as the “renegade hardware” of accelerated information flows, whose effect is to negate the possibility of cultural resistance. joost van loon claims that the increasing desire for speed in a “technological culture” has created an intensified urge for control: “whilst being generated by a desire for speed and overcoming obstacles of time and space [communications technologies] have also engendered new forms of alienation” (2002: 153). van loon claims that an “assemblage of media technologies” has “started to pervade the military-industrial complex, large corporations, the state apparatuses, the culture industries and increasingly our private homes” (2002: 152). amidst the “speed and irreversibility” of this assemblage, media technologies have surpassed “our ability to master and control it and subject it to our programming of the future” (2002: 152). in these senses, the promotional context of the flyer and the image it contains allows for three interpretations linking the code, urban space and an attitude of fatalism towards the future. firstly, the hegemonic power of the code is linked to the cachet of the renegade hardware label in drum ‘n’ bass culture. secondly, technology itself as the medium of power in the post-industrial city has become “renegade” in the sense that it has been appropriated by those who are routinely oppressed, exploited and rendered surplus to requirements. thirdly, by listening and dancing to the club’s main soundtrack of techstep drum ‘n’ bass, the subject can adopt a post-humanist identity where cyberspace has surpassed the real space of the city as the dominant site of power in a post-industrial society. the acquisition of post-humanist identity in a condition dominated by the code acts as a key indicator of drum ‘n’ bass culture’s foregrounding of dark urban futures. in relation to science fiction film, scott bukatman argues that: in cyberspace, the density of the inner city became an analogy for the dispersed matrices of information circulation and overload, while cyberspace itself presented an urbanism stripped to its kinetic and monumental essentials. cyberspace exaggerated the disorienting vertigo of the city, but it also summoned a powerful controlling gaze (2002: 47–8). a similar anxiety of the inner city as the main site of “information circulation and overload” concerns the programming of human behaviour in cyberspace. in this scenario, the urbanite is trapped “inside the machine”, to borrow the title of an album by bad company (see fig. 2), suggesting that resistance to a post-industrial society dominated by global corporate power should be concerned with disrupting the networks through which its control is directed from within cyberspace. christodoulou | rumble in the jungle 53 figure 2: inside the machine by bad company (2000). in his sleeve notes for the prototype years lp (1997), dj and producer grooverider rhetorically asked, “it’s blade runner business, innit?” this question is intended to convey the album’s thematic affinity with the science fiction film based in a future los angeles characterised by social and subjective fragmentation. a number of the album’s track titles make explicit references to experiences of urban uncanniness, such as “city lights” by lemon d and “subway” by ed rush. in terms of musical content, their bleak, sinister soundscapes and heavy bass construct the post-industrial city as dense, confusing and overpowering; it is fetishised as a dark space. in particular, the “darkness” often ascribed to dancecult 3(1)54 bass by participants points to homi k. bhabha’s suggestion that, in wider cultural discourse, “[d]arkness signifies both birth and death; it is in all cases a desire to return to the fullness of the mother, a desire for an unbroken and undifferentiated line or origin” (2004: 68). similarly, dezert rat says, “bass is something you feel deep inside, you almost can’t explain it. . . . it’s like you’re connecting with mother nature, but it’s dark at the same time”. this framing of bass as having origins that are both maternal (“you’re connecting with mother nature”) and uncanny (“you almost can’t explain it”) can be linked to mary ann doane’s discussion of the freudian description of female sexuality as a “dark continent” (1991: 20912). for doane, the “dark continent trope is hence invoked in the context of a return to the motifs of castration, lack, and envy” (1991: 210). in other words, a sense of the uncanny is connected to desire through the signifying space of the mother’s body. according to jacques lacan (1977), desire is defined by absence; it is an appeal to receive from the other that which it lacks, forming out of the “darkness” that precedes selfhood. in drum ‘n’ bass culture, the darkness that characterises the unhomeliness of the urban uncanny is seemingly combined with the primary space of the mother’s body as fetish, thereby normalising the “dark city” as a homely space. bass is maternal the sonic dominance of bass can be considered a trace of crucial west indian musical and cultural practices. for dick hebdige, the bass-line provides “the basic background throb of reggae’s heartbeat” (1987: 82). within the history of reggae’s opposition to institutional and colonial authority, such a “heartbeat” has arguably evolved into a post-colonial signifier of political resistance (gilroy 2002). in particular, the importing of jamaica’s reggae sound systems to english cities in the mid-1970s helped to foster a sense of solidarity between “blacks” and “whites” on the basis of shared working-class experiences (hebdige 1987). this trace of resistance continues to resonate in the lexicology and sonic spaces of uk edm. in this way, drum ‘n’ bass articulates the material reality of paul gilroy’s (1993) model of the black atlantic that traces a continual cultural flow between the united states, the caribbean, and the united kingdom. references to “rebel bass” or the dread bass by dead dread (1994) signify the defiant sonority of bass-heavy music within black atlantic cultural discourse. julian henriques goes as far as to suggest that reggae sound system culture supplants vision as the “dominant sensory modality” of the post-enlightenment west (2003: 464). for henriques, bass frequencies galvanise participants into a complete whole within sonic space: “sound is everywhere, hardly even making the dualistic division between here and there” (2003: 459). in this context, low frequencies can also seem to animate the boundary-less bliss the child felt in the womb, its “original” home. ultrasound studies have shown that only the lowest sounds in the frequency spectrum of hearing audible to humans are the first to be heard by prenatal infants with normal inner ear development (gerhardt and abrams 1996).11 these suggest that primal memories of low-frequency sound are instilled while the infant is still in the womb, reinforcing a sense that, to use the title of an album by the bristol-based reggae and drum ‘n’ bass group smith and mighty, bass is christodoulou | rumble in the jungle 55 maternal (1995). hillegonda rietveld argues that the womb-like environment of the dance floor is re-imagined as a return to the mother’s body where the dancer is surrounded by the sound of her mechanical heartbeat (1998: 148–9).12 in a biological sense, low sounds also register powerfully in the lower regions of the body, such as the stomach where the child was nourished by the umbilical cord. thereby, it is arguably the mother’s heartbeat—heard as low-pitched murmuring and throbbing from within her body—that enables bass to convey a sense of jouissance13 on the dance floor, while allowing it to be read as an articulation of the post-colonial character of black atlantic culture. in this way, bass forms the sonic basis for boundary-less presence linking the cultural and geographic nodes of the african diaspora, where, as argued by iain chambers in reference to the work of poet linton kwesi johnson, “bass history is a hurting black story” (1985: 161). roland barthes (1977) draws heavily on kristeva’s notion of the chora to show how richly textured sound can offer access to unconscious drives as they organise and disrupt the subject and the experience of its body. for barthes, the role of sonic timbre, or “grain”, is to open up a pathway to the chora: “grain is . . . the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue; perhaps the letter, almost certainly significance . . . the space when significations germinate ‘from within language and in its very materiality’” (1977: 182). it can be argued that all richly-textured sounds have the capacity to stimulate a sense of non-differentiation with the mother. bass can be considered especially potent in this regard; its heavy sonority at hot, dark and crowded drum ‘n’ bass dance clubs (see fig. 3) can seem to summon primal memories of being in the womb. in addition, the frequent use by participants of fatalistic terminology like “dark” to describe bass indicates that the music is heavily informed by a western patriarchal discourse. barbara creed (1990) refers to the chora to claim that motherhood in a mythical form is present as the void, death and darkness in all texts that convey a sense of horror. on the dark drum ‘n’ bass dance floor, bass seems to have a maternal quality; she is “darkness”—the “big bad bass”, as one event is called (see fig. 4)—and hence can be linked to the horror evoked by the chora’s threat of dissolution (creed 1990). though blissful, regression to a womb-like, boundary-less state of jouissance initiated by the grain of low-frequency sound can also be accompanied by painful throes, given that, for kristeva, the chora is the site of the subject’s dissolution. barbara bradby’s claim of an “equation between rhythm, bass and masculinity” (1993: 168) can be supported by existing cultural and critical research into the changing meaning of male identity in a post-industrial context.14 in this regard, it might also be useful to examine the “hurting” quality of bass in terms of what yvonne tasker refers to as a crisis of masculinity linked to declining interactions with the heavy technologies of industrial production. for tasker, deindustrialisation has brought about a crisis of meaning for male bodies that were subjectively fortified by the need for physical strength and dexterity in the use of industrial machinery (2004: 110).15 she claims that, in the shift from an industrial society of production to a post-industrial society of consumption, technological development has been complicit in the “denaturalising of the supposed naturalness of male identity” (2004: 110). the “denaturalisation” of the maleness of technological culture now characterised dancecult 3(1)56 by cybernetics and the code is constructed by drum ‘n’ bass culture in terms of feminised hi-tech imagery drawn from popular science fiction film. for doane, the displacement of male labour by technology in post-industrial society is the basis for what she describes as the “technological fetishism” of science fiction imagery (1990: 174). such fetishism involves “issues of the maternal, reproduction, representation and history” (1990: 174). in alien, for example, the alien is a “monstrous mother-machine, incessantly manufacturing eggs in an awesome excess of reproduction” (1990: 174). in patriarchal discourse, maternal excess is managed through a feminisation of technology as fetish (kember 1995). in sonic terms, the womb-like “darkness” of bass—a sonic space dj dezert rat linked to “mother nature”—can be seen to carry a particular significance for the largely male and working class audience of drum ‘n’ bass; the power of technological reproduction is linked to the female body’s system of biological reproduction. in the originating and birthing space of the womb, the subject can acquire a sense of reproductive power while itself seeming to be reproducible. this feeling of reproducibility is linked to rebirthing, as suggested by kool fm dj lace’s comments that a “good bass-line makes you feel like you’re coming alive”.16 in this sense, the fetishisation of the maternal body within the sonic space of bass can seem to contain the denaturalisation of male identity’s relationship with technology as a result of deindustrialisation, even though feelings of power produced in and through bass are framed in terms of female identity and the mother’s body. figure 3: the dance floor at the world’s longest running drum ‘n’ bass club, a.w.o.l., march 2007. photo by james burns: <james.rawimages@gmail.com> christodoulou | rumble in the jungle 57 figure 4: flyer for the valve sound-system’s big bad bass event at plastic people, february 2004. throughout the visual iconography of drum ‘n’ bass, technological fetishisation often takes the form of a sexualised female cyborg, or “cybernetic organism” (see fig. 5). this fetishisation can be seen to belong to a long history of the eroticisation of technology as a response by male labour and cultural power to the threat of machines. for example, andreas huyssen describes the robot maria in fritz lang’s metropolis as the “vamp in the dancecult 3(1)58 machine”, designed to seduce the insurgent proletariat into submission (huyssen 1982). similarly, rietveld shows that maria’s purpose is to “normalise the male experience of new technology” (2004: 56). huyssen argues that the “fears and perceptual anxieties emanating from ever more powerful machines are recast and reconstituted in terms of the fear of female sexuality, reflecting, in the freudian account, the male’s castration anxiety” (1982: 226). thereby, technological fetishisation enables the social “castration” of male labour power to be mitigated by investing technological culture with the “naturalness” of female sexuality.17 in drum ‘n’ bass culture, technology is also often fetishised in terms of the female body’s urban uncanniness; she is imagined as a reproductive machine that has castrated male labour from its “natural” position of power in industrial society. on dance event flyers and record sleeves, mechanical vamps are often situated in post-apocalyptic imagery of the city derived from dystopian science fiction films like blade runner. in this way, she briefly resolves male castration anxiety—both in the immediate, post-industrial context and in the deeper, psychological sense—through a return to the fullness of the chora as the original “home”, thereby seeming to “complete” the mother’s own castrated body. figure 5: a “vamp in the machine” on a flyer for a dreamscape rave, may 2000. this article has proposed that bass functions as a sonic inscription of the urban uncanny in electronic dance music, especially in drum ‘n’ bass, where feelings of uncanniness are brought about by the uncontrollable speed of life for those who live and grow up in london, its place of origin. the pace of socio-economic change brought about by deindustrialisation and the displacement of traditional male labour by cybernetics and information and communications technologies since the 1980s has facilitated a contextualisation throughout drum ‘n’ bass christodoulou | rumble in the jungle 59 culture of the post-industrial city as a “dark” space that is both home and unhomely. the “darkness” of low-frequency sound as described by its mainly working class participants develops out of its framing within a general fatalistic attitude to life in the “urban jungle”. additionally, the embodied materiality in its sonority and loudness on the drum ‘n’ bass dance floor seems to stimulate primal memories of the original home, the womb. the womb is both a place of safety and danger, a duality that is combined with images of the “dark city” in the lexicology and visual iconography of drum ‘n’ bass culture. in a wider sense, the fetishisation of both the post-industrial city and technology involves their reconstitution as inescapable destiny—a destiny that can be linked to kristeva’s notion of the chora as a space of both birth and dissolution—and female sexuality respectively. this feminisation points to a desire on the part of its largely male and working-class participant base to normalise the uncanniness of seemingly uncontrollable techno-social changes in the urban landscape. while revealing the function of drum ‘n’ bass cultural production within a patriarchal discourse, it also illustrates the ability of exciting, if largely hidden, creative spaces to be fostered from the most precarious post-industrial circumstances. endnotes 1 this paper is drawn from the author’s phd research project into the politics of speed in drum ‘n’ bass culture (see author biography). participant comments referred to in this paper were taken from interviews conducted with djs and producers, along with club and rave audience members during this time. 2 i mainly use “drum ‘n’ bass” rather than “jungle”—the term with which it is used interchangeably—as “drum ‘n’ bass” is more frequently used by participants at the time of writing ( july 2010). 3 drum ‘n’ bass is a form of electronic dance music based on prominent bass sounds and breakbeats, or digitally sampled (recorded from existing musical recordings), accelerated and “looped” (repeated) rhythmic patterns. the bass-lines typically run at half the speed of the break-beats. typically, drum ‘n’ bass tracks have tempos in excess of 150 bpm, often reaching between 170 and 180 bpm. to provide some contextualisation of the speed of drum ‘n’ bass music, it is useful to note that most recordings from the genre are around 100 bpm faster than the african-american soul and funk records of the 1960s and 1970s from which break-beats are often sampled. 4 according to simon reynolds, “the speed aspect [of jungle/drum ‘n’ bass] is crucial. scene insiders offer platitudes like ‘jungle is a feeling’. but if you need a definition, the music’s core is the accelerated, chopped-up break-beat rhythms that create . . . a sound-picture of social disintegration and instability” (1998: 239). 5 vidler’s use of the uncanny can also be linked to another psychoanalytic concept, that of projection, where that which appears to manifest itself externally or from the outside can be the return of concealed material; manifestations drawn from a repository of repressed desires or memories. 6 according to kristeva, the semiotic chora signifies that which is below the surface of the speaking being: “discrete quantities of energy move through the body of the subject who is not yet constituted as such and, in the course of his development, they are arranged according to the dancecult 3(1)60 various constraints imposed on this body—always already involved in a semiotic process—by family and social structures. in this way the drives, which are ‘energy’ charges as well as ‘psychical’ marks, articulate what we call a chora: a non-expressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated” (1984: 25). by “motile”, kristeva means the quality of exhibiting or being capable of spontaneous movement. 7 techstep is a sub-genre of drum ‘n’ bass characterised by harsh noise, tonal dissonance and a discourse of sonic violence. pioneered in the mid-1990s by producers ed rush, dj trace and nico sykes at sykes’ west london-based no-u-turn record label, its defining feature is the distorted bass sound, achieved by feeding the pre-recorded bass notes into music equipment effects settings like distortion and overdrive. techstep incorporates within the drum ‘n’ bass paradigm aggressive elements and a dystopian science fiction aesthetic. 8 tricia rose (1994) shows how hip hop culture developed in the late-1970s as a response by young african-americans to the social and subjective effects of deindustrialisation, such as high levels of crime, unemployment, as well as being a reaction to a longer legacy of institutionalised racism in the united states. she highlights how traditional african diasporic impulses of rupture, repetition and circularity have informed hip hop’s break-beat aesthetic (1994: 67-74). 9 dj dezert rat, interview with the author (the end nightclub, central london), 19 september 2007. 10 it is notable that the “liquidity” bauman identifies as a key feature of light capitalism is also linked to the permeation in drum ‘n’ bass musical and linguistic discourses of liquidity, in the form of the sub-genre “liquid funk”, and in the colloquial use of the term “liquid”, meaning “progress” or “positive movement”. 11 according to kenneth j. gerhardt and robert m. abrams: “low-frequency sound energy easily penetrates to the fetal head, less than 5 db attenuation for frequencies below 500 hz, whereas higher frequencies are attenuated by up to 20 to 30 db. the sound energy in amniotic fluid stimulates fetal hearing through a bone conduction route rather than through the external and middle ear systems. during passage through the bones of the skull, sound energy is slightly diminished for frequencies less than 250 hz (10 to 20 db), yet significantly reduced for frequencies from 500 to 2,000 hz (40 to 50 db)” (1996: 11). 12 it is useful to note that rietveld is drawing on richard middleton’s argument that music can be considered a “primary semiotic practice”: “the initial connotations of sound-structures (the origins of which may go back beyond the repetitive ‘coos’ of the mother even into the womb: the (equally repetitive) sound/feel of maternal breathing and heartbeat) are prior to any emergence of a subject, locating itself in opposition to any external reality” (1990: 288). 13 central to the poststructuralist theories of roland barthes (1977) and julia kristeva (1984), jouissance refers to a type of extraordinary sensation which derives from the moment before the human child leaves its comfortable state of bliss associated with still having access to the mother’s breast. 14 while some female djs and producers like kemistry and dj rap have carved out successful drum ‘n’ bass careers, the style’s cultural production base remains heavily male in character, thereby resembling the gender balance within most other edm genres and the music industry as a whole. however, in the area of consumption, specifically on the drum ‘n’ bass dance floor, christodoulou | rumble in the jungle 61 female membership is more strongly represented. 15 as colin harbury and richard lipsey highlight, “the occupational structure in britain has been changing considerably in recent years. . . . [w]omen outnumber men as clerks, secretaries, nurses, teachers, shop assistants, and are increasingly taking managerial and administrative jobs. . . . technological advance has led to the replacement of an increasing number of manual jobs by machines; and growth of the service sector in the economy and professionalism of more and more skills has taken place” (1993: 113). 16 dj lace, interview with the author (the end nightclub, central london), 19 september 2007. 17 in this regard, my findings differ from those of maria pini, who uses the cyborg as a metaphor for the “ecstatic unfixing” of traditional gender boundaries in rave culture (2001: 170). pini argues that the embodiment of technology brought about by dancing to edm amounts to a deconstruction of the “enlightenment equation of women with nature” (2001: 170). in this vein, pini’s otherwise excellent research seems to overlook the visual culture involved in the promotion of edm. references barthes, roland. 1977. “the grain of the 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modern unhomely. cambridge, mass.: mit press. discography adam f. 1996. metropolis. metalheadz (12-inch): meth 023. <http://www.discogs.com/adam-f-metropolis-mother-earth/release/5560> bad company. 2000. inside the machine. bc recordings (12-inch): vd bcrlp 001. <http://www.discogs.com/bc-inside-the-machine/release/1475> dom and keaton. 2002. back for the future. dom and roland. moving shadow (cd): ashadow 28 cd. <http://www.discogs.com/dom-roland-back-for-the-future/ release/35728> dead dread. 1994. dread bass. moving shadow (12-inch): shadow 50. <http://www.discogs.com/dead-dred-dred-bass/release/6341> origin unknown. 1993. valley of the shadows. ram records (12-inch): ramm 004. <http://www.discogs.com/origin-unknown-the-touch-valley-of-the-shadows/ release/17714> smith and mighty. 1995. bass is maternal. more rockers (12-inch): zlpkr002. <http://www.discogs.com/smith-mighty-bass-is-maternal/release/794319> various artists. 1997. grooverider presents the prototype years. sony (12-inch): 4872191. <http://www.discogs.com/grooverider-the-prototype-years/release/24448> various artists. 2006. the big picture part 3. liquid v (12-inch): lqd 017. <http://www.discogs.com/various-liquid-v-club-sessions-vol-2-the-big-picture-ep-part-3/ release/789051> filmography aronovsky, david. 1998. pi. usa: artisan entertainment. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/> cameron, james. 1986. alien. usa: twentieth century fox. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090605/> lang, fritz. 1926. metropolis. germany: universum film ag. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017136/> scott, ridley. 1982. blade runner. usa: warner bros. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083658/> wachowski, andrew and wachowski, larry. 1999. the matrix. usa: warner bros. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/> off the record: turntablism and controllerism in the 21st century (part 2) tobias c. van veen mcgill university bernardo alexander attias california state university northridge <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.01.09> in part two of this conversation concerning the role of technology in dj performance and electroniculture, scholars and djs tobias c. van veen and bernardo alexander attias explore the ways in which various technologies change the means as well as the context of dj performance. by focusing on questions of tactility and technique, van veen and attias question how the automation of technological interfaces constructs not only cultural values but phenomenological limits concerning "authentic" performance. is risk inherent to the performance of an instrument? what constitutes risk—and an instrument—in an era of automated beatmatching and increased visualization of an aural art? to what degree is controllerism—and the advent of digital djing—more akin to videogaming than the technics of turntablism? tobias c. van veen: the question around which we've been rotating is that of beatmatching—insofar as i suggest that it constitutes the core of the turntablist skillset. yet perhaps this term, and its practice, deserves a deeper interrogation. bernardo alexander attias: what i've been trying to get at in much of the previous discussion is to identify where you are locating the essential skill of the dj. the main difference we keep coming to is beatmatching, but it seems to me that this explanation opens itself up all too easily to reductio ad absurdum. is a dj who uses any sort of assistance in beatmatching a fraud or failure, or only those who use computers? what if they used a handheld calculator, or simply wrote notes on their records to speed up the process? it seems to me that ultimately beatmatching is simply math, something that computers excel at. is a dj simply a mathematician? one who does math, by hand, in public? tv: ultimately, beatmatching is the art of imperfection that faces the temporal unfolding of what exceeds mathematical precision or certainty: the wavering of what is-to-come through the clash of two rhythmic assemblages. this wavering of the cyclic uncertainty is physically encoded in the circular repetition of the turntable's platter, and mathematically encoded in its expression of circumference, which is infinite: pi. beatmatching is the art of negotiating pi to the nth degree using fingers and ears that touch the moving surfaces of technics. with two limitless tracks, one would be beatmatching the technics of pi to eternity. so mathematically speaking, the entire physical dimension of turntablism insofar as it performs the rotating circular object is entirely significant here, and why the turntable, over button-pressing, is an entirely different interface with the mathematics of encoded sound. one interfaces with infinity with the turntable. ba: i think, then, that we are moving towards a notion of improvisation as the key to what is essentially "human" in the dj's performance. not beatmatching per se—beatmatching is one technique that allows the dj to demonstrate improvisation, but i would argue that one can improvise with computer-synced beats. again, i also think that one can mimic the illusion even of un-synced beats by manipulating the tempo in tiny ways. but if authentication plays a role as i believe it does, the point is not that you can mimic the sound of the imperfections of one specific task ("the art of negotiating pi to the nth degree," as you described it beautifully above), but rather that any human task that interacts with machines to produce sound can in the right circumstances be perceived by a specific audience as an authentic expression of musical virtuosity—whether it be beatmatching, cue point juggling with buttons, or playing with wii controllers to manipulate a set of african drums (as jazari has done). improvisation is certainly possible without beatmatching, but the improvisation might focus on other aspects of sound manipulation. in this respect, beatmatching is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for improvisation—one can be a fantastic technician in terms of seamless beatmatching, and yet still fall flat as a dj because the audience can hear that nothing is improvised. the difference is indeed audible, and it is clearly about something other than the practiced ability to line up tempos. all that said, i'm not trying to deploy an all-encompassing notion of "the cultural"—when i say anything could be authenticated in the right context, that doesn't mean that everything will be authenticated, and when i said the human controls the computer it doesn't mean that the human is therefore in control of the computer. as we've both emphasized, the tension between being in control of the machine and the machine escaping that control is palpable and tangible, and that it is what excites audiences about live performance. my point is more simply that audiences can adapt to performers having new things to lose control of—and demonstrate virtuosity with—besides the tempo. indeed, we can take the reductio ad absurdum even further here—electricity also makes beatmatching too easy for the dj. why shouldn't djs in competition be forced to use wind-up victrolas and beatmatch 78s? or to be less absurd, what's the point of all this when the music you're beatmatching is already quantized by computers (usually to nice whole numbers) to begin with? sure, you're showing your virtuosity with the spinning platters themselves, but arguably, machines have already done most of the hard work for you. i used to pride myself on beatmatching old funk tracks and other material played by live drummers for this very reason; you're forced to ride the pitch controls a lot more than with electronic music. the laptop dj lets the computer take care of the math problems so he or she can focus on practicing different techniques. the point is not to abdicate technique entirely but to focus on other techniques such as the weaving and layering of sound. in fact, the button-pushers often value other performance constraints on letting the computers do everything—the dj techtools website had a contest for cue-point jugglers, for example, and one of the requirements was that competitors had to have "snap" and "quantize" turned off in their software, in order to demonstrate their skills in timing their button pushes (something like the difference between a live drummer and a drum machine). while outsiders may not appreciate the difference, the skill of mashing buttons on time with fingers is being valued by controllerist subcultures in much the same way that beatmatching skills are valued by turntablists. but i think there is more to your position that the dj who uses a turntable "interfaces with infinity"­—in that sense of interacting with a moving circle it's a very different kind of physical skill than button mashing and slider/knob twiddling, and this is probably why so many midi controllers preserve the turntable symbolically in the jog wheel. it's not the same, of course—it's actually a notoriously unsatisfactory substitute—but it seems fundamental to a particular representation of the dj that is rooted in precisely the technics you describe. i also think another dimension of your argument is that the button-pushers are not directly playing music with their buttons—the buttons interface with the software which then plays the music. the button increases the distance between the performer and the sound, while the turntablist (whether playing vinyl or dvs) interfaces more directly with the sound with his/her hands. i believe this is another manifestation of the difference between digital and analog—not so much in terms of the recorded music itself (which in the case of dvs is digital too) but rather in terms of the tactile interaction with the sound. the spinning record allows infinite possibilities circumscribed by its circumference whereas the button allows two possibilities, "on" and "off". the turntablist interfaces with pi and infinity whereas the controllerist interfaces with 1 and 0. sure, the music itself is analog for everyone who hears it, but there is more separation between performer and sound than there is with vinyl. that's a bad thing in some senses for sure, and we experience it as a loss (i was actually extremely resistant to digital djing in the beginning, and i still get a thrill when i notice a dj is using actual vinyl at a club rather than dvs or cds). but it also opens up new performance possibilities that are simply not possible with vinyl. yes there is an immense beauty in seeing a performer do the impossible with vinyl—using four decks as you describe in techno, or turntablist tricks like looping, dropping samples, beat-walking, juggling, and scratching—but there are also sonic and performative possibilities available to those who go digital that aren't really possible or practical with vinyl—looping, cue point juggling, overlaying multiple effects on multiple decks, sampling, etc. the point is not to diminish the virtuosity of the turntablist but rather to understand that virtuosity, if it is perceived as virtuosity at all, has to be recognized and authenticated in a cultural context no matter what its physical dimensions. tv: we're both on similar wavelengths here, so best to clarify the intent of what are two strands, especially insofar as i am trying to articulate a division, or rather a rupture or schism, between what rancière (2006) would call two "aesthetic regimes". it is the shift from turntablism to controllerism that is at stake here; the question is not only how this shift changes the conditions of virtuosity and improvisation within performance—and certainly not that it has, and that new forms of "authentication" arise—but whether these new forms of technological automation eliminate, or rather ensure forgetfulness of, the practices of risk which previously upheld turntablism as an aesthetic regime of instrumentation (with its attendant virtuosity and improvisation). indeed, it is with the implementation of digital archives and controllerist devices in performance that this schism is manifested as between two regimes of technics, two regimes of aesthetic performance. in this respect: (1) beatmatching is a key skill to turntablism, which defines the art of djing and is the (historical, but also aesthetically minimal) bedrock for all that follows. all that follows should compare itself to the minimalist technics of turntablism and what it is capable of producing. if it can already be done on decks without digital automation or computers, then what follows is not aesthetically challenging: it is poor musicianship. turntablism should restrain its use of automated tools so as to pursue a strict aesthetics that retains learned skills articulated in the turntable-mixer setup as instrument. to this end, digital vinyl systems intensify the performativity of the archive, including looping and cue points that require the screen's visualization of auditory phenomena. insofar as dvs can be incorporated within turntablist practice, it is only up to the point where software automation "flips" turntablism into controllerism (to use mcluhan's term (1991)), which i pinpoint as the automation of beatmatching (indeed, what controllerism renders "obsolescent" is beatmatching) and of course the abdication of the turntables as the tactile interface with infinity. (2) improvisation is the key to developing further dj-arts, including controllerism and all that follows. with beatmatching receding in the art of djing in general, improvisation is the key to the tactile and impossible moment of manipulating conceptechnics (eshun 1999).[1] the further removed from tactile interface with material surfaces, the less improvisation can play key roles in auditory performance, and the more the system emulates or becomes the content of another medium—"audio videogaming". indeed, i think videogaming is a better framework to think controllerism than turntablism. with various forms of digital djing and controllerism one is playing a performative videogame with similar inherent risks, and the audience goes along with more of a videogaming mindset than one drawn from turntablism. has not the flip from turntablism to controllerism, in its obsolescence of beatmatching, enhanced the videogaming aesthetic, not only of djing but of all computerized devices? (3) indeed, djs, insofar as they strive to be skilled performers of the audio instruments of technics, don't need easy "solutions". djs needs challenges. otherwise djing will shift away from its possibilities as a performative instrument. carleton s. gholz talks about the changes in audience dynamics in his last dancecult piece in regards to mills/hawtin: fewer people dance (2011). everyone holding up cameras, absorbed in texting/tweeting, and recording it to watch through shared social networks. there is something disturbing going on here: a neurosis, engendered by technologies of reproduction, that what is happening is not real unless captured and remediated. the real is being reshaped through technics; so is the flow of time.... ba: the videogame comparison is fascinating. there is no question that many controllerists learned their button pushing in arcades, and in fact some of the more interesting ones (i mentioned golden and moldover) are obsessed with arcade button-based controllers. but i don't think it's that far removed from a "tactile interface with material surfaces"—it's a different tactile experience to be sure but that's not the point. i agree djing needs challenges, but surely they don't have to be the same challenges over and over again, do they? tv: indeed they do not—though in the performance of repetitive music, certain challenges return, and form the skillset of turntablism. like any instrument, one ought to repeat and reinterpret the limits of what came before. with new challenges wrought from new technologies, i think we need to ask what kind of temporal experience —what kind of dance floor matrix—is coming to the fore with controllerism. all the great dance-oriented turntablists weaved sonic narratives over marathon sets... this is why laurent garnier but also ricardo villalobos are excellent djs... so to this end it appears that controllerism, as an aesthetic regime, pursues a novel, 21st century add-technics of temporality in which one shortcuts directly to mash-up speeds without any sense of where one is going, how one got there, or more importantly, why.[2] it's a blitzkrieg of sound all at once, like a sped-up videogame at the nth level. in short, we need to ask whether controllerism has much to do with ritual dance culture. controllerism tends toward a different material-aesthetic matrix at this level and at the limit, the audiences respond accordingly by not dancing but watching. that controllerist devices can be used to "dj" with the style of a turntablist is, of course, already a given here (and in this sense, somewhat of a depleted automation of turntablism). what is more precisely the point is how controllerism forms its aesthetic regime, insofar as it constitutes its difference from turntablist rhythmic assemblages. to this end the aesthetic regime of controllerism perhaps owes more to the proliferation of popular videogaming software oriented toward music performance, such as guitar hero, rock band, and magix music maker. preceding these was a quite infamous sony playstation game called rez, with a soundtrack that built up in discrete elements correlative to one's success in the game.[3] the building-block sound was designed by japanese techno producer ken ishii, no less: listen to the gameplay on the above—it sounds like controllerism. the gameplay of rez sets the precedent for the new child of eden game developed for xbox kinect: with these videogames, music production is not tangential but integrated into the visual flow of the game. does this not articulate something of the new aesthetic regime of controllerism? gaming appears to imply a new relationship of the auditory to the visual. the visual cues matter as much as if not more than the rhythm assemblage. at the limit, screens have overtaken speakers. one is aiming to hit various buttons at the right cue points as graphically represented. many controllers react with colour and visual cues, which is perhaps why controllerists seem more interested in their boxes (as a videogaming experience for them) than the audience (which is watching them play, to a degree). certainly this is the case with any screen, which absorbs all eyeballs. everyone is absorbed in screens. restaurants and bars seemingly can't let people eat without having screens to watch. how many of us check their mobiles in the middle of discussions? this is a transcultural phenomenon. indeed, this aesthetic regime implies a new realm of visual seduction, to sample the baudrillard you deployed earlier; controllers seduce you with visual cues, demand that you watch them, such as the tenori-on: so i think the videogaming correlative is, perhaps, useful as a way to differentiate the aesthetic regime of controllerism. could it not be hyperthesized that controllerism is not borne from turntablism, but from videogaming as an aesthetic experience of interfacing with visual-sonic interfaces? have not cultural and music critics, insofar as they belong to the turntablist generation, mistaken controllerists for extending the performative apparatus and rules of engagement of turntablism, when controllerists have not; they come from elsewhere? their paradigm is entirely different. the videogaming paradigm explains, in my mind, the attitudinal difference between approaching turntables and controllers in regards to the goal of the performance. in turntablism one is forced to encounter the audience with sound and to, as the classic sample goes, take the dance floor "on a journey through sound". with controllerism, one is gaming with the controller itself, and playing by its encoded rules, as part of a visual experience for the performer where the sound is but the secondary effect of satisfying what is primarily a tactile-visual relationship.[4] thus much confusion arises when trying to think that turntablism and controllerism claim the same cultural values of authenticity. controllerism is an entirely different aesthetic regime. it ought to be recognised as such, and analysed as an entirely different lineage of technics (which is not to say that it does not share much with the technics of turntablism, but that a rupture has taken place). if one were to begin such an analysis, the first marker is, perhaps, the miniaturization of screens. when the visual screen overtook the sonic, a different aesthetic regime arose. this aesthetic regime has to do with videogaming as an operational aesthetic not only for djing, but for encountering being-with-others in general... from mobile phones to the explosion of screens in nearly every public/private place. ba: tobias—in between making revisions i've been spinning drum 'n' bass on vinyl today, thinking about infinity and pi.... a few more thoughts come to mind. it's interesting what you say about screens and watching. i think a big issue here has nothing to do with beatmatching but more to do with the introduction of the visual element into the performative interface. the screen in particular seems not just an information display or a visual cue; it "fabricates non-communication"; it stands in between individuals in a reciprocally alienating gesture.[5] the proliferation of screens in everyday life is in some ways a confirmation that guy debord (1995) was right all along. (for me there is still very much a question of authenticity here insofar as the spectacle makes the true "a moment of the false"). i'm not saying your whole thesis is about the spectacle, but i think there's important resonance with that idea. the video game comparison makes sense in that light. i still think the comparison is exaggerated—yes you make music in guitar hero but as i said it's a byproduct of killing dots. and while controllerist performances often sound quite awful if evaluated as musical pieces, the same is true of early turntablist performances, particularly those designed for competition. listen—without watching—to q-bert's 1991 dmc routine, for example, and tell me it's something you would dance to. that may be simply about the historical development of the medium and technique—compare c2c's 2006 dmc performance, which i could listen to again and again without even caring that it was performed exclusively on turntables. nevertheless your point is quite compelling—making music becomes something we do through our interaction with the screens rather than through our interaction with an audience. certainly there's more to "look" forward to in boxes like the tenori-on (i'm sure you know the monome as well, and the arc is beautiful) than in more computer screens. i think some of the most interesting controller work is trying to integrate feedback into the controllers themselves rather than relying on screen watching. but no question that video game culture and controllerism culture are intertwined... though the screen issue may simply be a magnification of the underlying issue of having any visual feedback at all—the idea of being able to play "blind" as a sign of virtuosity that you mentioned earlier. then again, before dvs, people still complained that djs were looking down at their records and mixers. could i dj with vinyl completely blindfolded? better than with controllers i imagine but maybe not; i shudder to think of how i would pick out a record, drop the needle in the right spot and hit all the right buttons and faders. and i think of all the other visual cues that i use when spinning vinyl—the grooves of the record tell me how much time i have before the breakdown; glancing at the position of the faders and knobs while my hands are on the record; etc. there are too many variables involved—no matter what, this isn't like picking up a violin or balalaika and being able to hit the right notes without opening your eyes. tv: indeed, the prevalence of the screen in social interactions and in mobile communications demonstrates how the screen has become the "subjectile," the surface of communications that permeates everyday life. the persistence of the screen—its pervasive or ubiquitous nature, in the sense of computing—signals a shift in the technical distribution of the senses. this technical shift affects the boundaries of the public/private, and what is proper to each sphere. this broader technological movement—ubicomp, ambient intelligence, pervasive computing, etc.—calls for a recognition of what might be called the "visual turn" in dj culture. controllerism is, like videogaming, a form of haptic computing. the reorganisation of auditory communications and practices into ubiquitous computing has, for the most part, subsumed the auditory to the visual, which is why we are facing a technical redistribution of the sense. pervasive computing ties together the thorny questions of authenticity, virtuosity, and visualization in the niche study of dj culture to questions concerning the technics of the senses in philosophy and communication/technology studies. in short, it's a valuable insight, and dj culture provides a unique point of departure. from the perspective of electronic music performance, it is the paradigm of the "live laptop performance" of the early 2000s which has converged with djing as a form of both performance and production (see cascone 2000 and van veen 2002). this convergence arises with the digitization of the archive, thus rendering it malleable (a possibility hawtin pointed out in 2001), along with the mashup and remix possibilities built into dvs and other dj software. djing has shifted from performing the analog archive through the techniques of the turntablist instrument to remixing digitally archived music "live" using computerized interfaces. this convergence finds its aesthetics with videogaming but also with an earlier conception of the dj, with software visually representing the mixing-desk consoles of dub music performance in the early 1980s (in particular with ableton live). so as controllerism renders beatmatching obsolescent, drawing its visual-tactile interface from videogaming, it can depict itself in the aesthetic form of an even older form: the dub performer's mixing desk. of course, it is the screen which is at stake here and not visuality per se. a screen signifies waveforms, track information, and so on. its role is to aesthetically represent the encoded activities of computing processes that translate tactile input into binary processes. touch screens combine the two fields of visual iterability and haptic interactivity, as the flat surface of the screen is also the haptic interface itself. an observation: while djs who beatmatch often close their eyes, hands on the controls like a pilot, and ride the mix, djs attached to the screen appear completely locked to its graphs and constant information, eyeballs and all, to the point where they do not object to the laptop being placed at head height, blocking their body from the audience. as the laptop screen occupies the eyeballs of the performer, it displaces the performer's interface with the audience. something of the sound system's feedback loop between performer/dance floor is thrown into disarray through an aesthetics of disinterest. in this respect, i am quite partial to debord, though i am not sure "spectacle" captures the complexity of technological integration that has come to pass. "spectacle" will have to be rethought to address the ubiquity of what has become banalized; it still remains identifiable qua spectacle whereas today what we are entering is its ambient aspect, its background effect. ba: to conclude this discussion all too briefly, i would suggest that much more work needs to be done in terms of teasing out the various aspects of dj technology and technique and their relationship to discourses of authenticity and virtuosity. your comments about screens and culture point in some fascinating directions, though i'd hesitate to argue for a strictly "visual turn" as there are so many other factors at play (aurally as well as visually). the ubiquity of the screen, in turn, is a problem of contemporary culture that goes far beyond djing. and of course i think we have to keep in mind the many different ways in which people experience dj cultures (and even musical cultures more generally). it is still too early to speculate where controllerist cultures will take us in terms of performance skills, but it seems that the way forward for the buttonistas (and the direction the most interesting ones are heading) is in terms of their interaction with sounds and not just with screens. controllerism allows for live remixing possibilities that are simply not available to turntablists. the lines between djing, producing, and live performance of electronic music seem to be blurring as a result. bernardo alexander attias (ph.d., university of iowa) is professor of communication studies at california state university, northridge. his research is primarily in cultural studies, performance studies, and critical theory; his current projects focus on the legal, aesthetic, and cultural implications of the phonograph. he has been a dj for over twenty years, spinning eclectic sets incorporating house, hip hop, and drum 'n' bass as well as funk, jazz, and swing. he occasionally blogs at <http://turntablepoetry.com>. tobias c. van veen, b. 1978, is doctoral candidate in philosophy & communication studies at mcgill university, managing editor at dancecult and a turntablist practitioner of the technology arts. since 1993 he has disseminated and exhibited work in sound, radio and net-art, performing and intervening with laptop and turntables, renegade sound systems and sonic rituals. his writing on philosophy of technology, afrofuturism and technoculture has been disseminated worldwide. his next publication, an edited volume tentatively titled other planes of there: afrofuturism collected, is forthcoming from wayne state up. he also mixes a mean absinthe martini. his research blog can be found at <fugitive.quadrantcrossing.org>. references baudrillard, jean. 1981 [1972]. "requiem for the media". trans. charles levin. in for a critique of the political economy of the sign. st. louis: telos press. cascone, kim. 2000. "post-digital tendencies in contemporary computer music". computer music journal 24 (4): 12–18. debord, guy. 1995 [1967]. society of the spectacle. trans. donald nicholson-smith. new york: zone books. eshun, kodwo. 1999. more brilliant than the sun: adventures in sonic fiction. london: quartet. gholz, carleton s. "maintaining 'synk' in detroit: two case studies in the remix aesthetic". dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 2 (1): 45–62. mcluhan, marshall and eric mcluhan. 1991. the laws of media: the new science. toronto: university of toronto press. rancière, jacques. 2006. politics of aesthetics. trans. gabriel rockhill. london: continuum impact. van veen, tobias c. 2001. "digital djing: richie hawtin and the final scratch". discorder (jancember). ———. 2002. "laptops & loops: the advent of new forms of experimentation and the question of technology in experimental music and performance". paper read at university art association of canada, calgary. notes [1] conceptechnics articulates well the way in which aesthetic regimes can be read through a materialist ontology of their implemented (as well as signified) discourses. [tv] [2] add, attention deficit disorder. (say again?). [tv] [3] this game was infamous insofar as an optional attachment resembled (and operated as) a small vibrator that pulsed with the assembled music. [tv] [4] of course controllerist performers do not think of their performance in this way; here the point is not what the subject believes to be the case, but what the technics of the medium undertakes regardless of the subject's "intentions". [tv] [5] i'm taking a cue here from baudrillard's (1981) analysis of television as a medium. [ba] dancecult 5(1) 2013: executive editor's introduction, masthead and table of contents volume 5 number 1 2013 doing nightlife and edmc fieldwork edited by luis-manuel garcia executive editor graham st john (griffith university, au) from the floor editors alice o’grady (university of leeds, uk) graham st john (griffith university, au) reviews editor ed montano (rmit university, au) foreign languages editor luis-manuel garcia (university of chicago, de) production editor botond vitos (monash university, au) operations director ed montano (rmit university, au) copyeditors luis-manuel garcia (university of chicago, de) jerome hansen (uk) sheena d. hyndman (york university, ca) katrina loughrey (au) kath o’donnell (au) production assistants martin koszolko (rmit university, au) marc kushin (goldsmiths, university of london, uk) garth sheridan (rmit university, au) dancecult journal of electronic dance music culture issue 5(1) 2013 issn 1947-5403 ©2013 dancecult published twice yearly at http://dj.dancecult.net international advisory board sean albiez (southampton solent university, uk), eliot bates (university of maryland, college park, us), andy bennett (griffith university, au), mark j butler (northwestern university, us), anthony d’andrea (university of limerick, ie), rebekah farrugia (oakland university, us), kai fikentscher (de), luis-manuel garcia, university of chicago (de), françois gauthier (université du québec à montréal, ca), anna gavanas (institute for futures studies, se), chris gibson (university of new south wales, au), jeremy gilbert (university of east london, uk), alice o’grady, university of leeds (uk), ross harley (university of new south wales, au), david hesmondhalgh (university of leeds, uk), tim lawrence (university of east london, uk), geert lovink (university of amsterdam, nl), gordon lynch (birkbeck university of london, uk), rene lysloff (university of california, riverside, us), alejandro l. madrid (university of illinois, chicago, us), charity marsh (university of regina, ca), tony mitchell (university of technology sydney, au), karenza moore (lancaster university, uk), andrew murphie (university of new south wales, au), christopher partridge (lancaster university, uk), anne petiau (itsrs / université paris 5, fr), hillegonda c rietveld (london south bank university, uk), geoff stahl (victoria university of wellington, nz), sonjah nadine stanley-niaah (university of west indies, jm), graham st john (griffith university, au), will straw (mcgill university, ca), rupert till (university of huddersfield, uk), tobias c. van veen (mcgill university, ca), michael veal (yale university, us), andrew whelan (university of wollongong, australia) dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture is a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture (edmc). a platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on the shifting terrain of edmcs worldwide, the journal houses research exploring the sites, technologies, sounds and cultures of electronic music in historical and contemporary perspectives. playing host to studies of emergent forms of electronic music production, performance, distribution, and reception, as a portal for cutting-edge research on the relation between bodies, technologies, and cyberspace, as a medium through which the cultural politics of dance is critically investigated, and as a venue for innovative multimedia projects, dancecult is the forum for research on edmc. cover image: © remysh (www.remysh.com) volume 5 number 1 2013 executive editor’s introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 01 graham st john guest editor’s introduction: doing nightlife and edmc fieldwork . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 03 luis-manuel garcia feature articles interrupting flow: researching play, performance and immersion in festival scenes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 alice o’grady alone, asian and female: the unspoken challenges of conducting fieldwork in dance settings . . . . . . 39 bina bhardwa looks: studio 54 and the production of fabulous nightlife . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 madison moore transpositions – online focused ethnography as research method: a case study of techno music producers in home-recording studios jan-michael kühn (trans. luis-manuel garcia) conversations – online writing the vibe: arts of representation in electronic dance music culture graham st john from the floor – online techno intersections: an aural account of research in edinburgh tami gadir wasta capital: ethnographic reflexivity at a rooftop nightclub in beirut caitlin robinson dance floors of the mind: performing nightlife research during the day sheena hyndman negotiating salient identities in queer edm spaces todd j. rosendahl describing experience: working actively with fieldnote genres in anthropological fieldwork lars nørr mikkelsen reviews books flashback: drugs and dealing in the golden age of the london rave scene (jennifer r. ward) . . . . . . . . . . . 75 sean leneghan the art of record production: an introductory reader for a new academic field (eds. simon frith and simon zagorski-thomas) . . . . . . . 78 pat o’grady the sound studies reader (ed. jonathan sterne) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 carlo nardi musical rhythm in the age of digital reproduction (ed. anne danielsen) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 stefanie alisch the international recording industries (ed. lee marshall) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 paul oldham issn 1947-5403 ©2013 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net the following are a few announcements concerning recent internal personnel changes at dancecult and the results of our recent crowdfunding initiative. for the introduction to this special edition, please see guest editor luis-manuel garcia’s introduction, which follows. since the last edition, there have been several changes in the editorial and production crew. in late 2012, tobias c. van veen stepped down as managing editor, a role he inhabited over four editions, with extraordinary results. between 2010 and 2012, tobias was instrumental in dancecult’s revisioned production, having formed an efficient production team, overseeing a server transfer, acting as ojs front man, redesigning the logo, overhauling the dancecult style guide, and producing several other key production guides giving his successors a comparatively cushion-bottomed ride. besides all that, he found the time to oversee the layout production with forensic attention to detail, with distinctly impressive results. tobias is among the most committed and multi-talented volunteers i’ve known, his rapid-response mentality sometimes giving me cause to wonder if i was communicating with a machine. beyond all the robotics, the ojs ordeal and the ongoing funding crisis, his tireless efforts advanced the cause of open access, cross platform publishing, and i personally wish tobias all the best as he migrates to more satisfying endeavours. we make fond farewell, also, to cato pulleyblank, stepping down as arts director. i thank her for redesigning, in collaboration with tobias, our logo, web banner and pdf layout. at the same time, i am pleased to welcome ed montano (also our reviews editor) to the position of operations director and botond vitos as production editor, new roles they have assumed with total professionalism. i’m also pleased to welcome alice o’grady who has joined the dancecult editorial board as a from the floor editor. i thank luis-manuel garcia who has worn several hats in the production of this edition. as guest editor, he has been responsible for the conception of this special edition doing nightlife on field methods in edm, an important and overdue addition to the growing field of edm cultural studies, the content of which should prompt debate and discussion among edm researchers. in this edition, luis has also translated the first article in transpositions, a new section featuring translations of existing foreign-language articles. we are likely to see at least one transpositions article per year in dancecult, and members of the international edm research community are very fortunate to be beneficiaries of luis’ painstaking commitment to dissolving the borders of scholarship. finally, thanks to our fine crews of copy editors and production assistants whose efforts have been essential to the continuing operations of the journal. executive editor’s introduction doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.01.00 dancecult 5(1)2 over jan–feb 2013, dancecult raised just over $4,500 usd (after fees) in our crowdfunding initiative. these funds are crucial to our ongoing operations and i sincerely thank all supporters who have enabled the survival of the journal. there were ninety separate funders and over two-dozen donors of materials (perks). see the <honours roll>. huge thanks to ed montano who co-ordinated mailing of the many donated perks. as a result of this funding, dancecult is registered with crossref. all current and back articles will be assigned and references linked with digital object identifiers (dois) by the end of 2013. i thank kath o’donnell for her assistance with this time-consuming project. finally, dancecult is currently in the process of migrating to a new server at griffith centre for cultural research, griffith university, brisbane. we hope to complete the migration by the end of june 2013. graham st john, executive editor reviews-typeset reviews we call it techno! a documentary about germany’s early techno scene and culture. maren sextro and holger wick. sense music & media, media atelier, germany, 2008. sensedvd02. rrp: £16.49 doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.11 hillegonda c. rietveld london south bank university (uk) the documentary we call it techno! provides a german perspective on the development of electronic dance music to both a german and english-speaking audience through subtitles and the choice of an english voice-over. based on interviews with key people in the scene, it tells the story from the definition of post-punk electronica from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. there are two parts. the main film is illustrated by rare archive material from private collections of participants and key people of the developing scene. the second part consists of interview excerpts and additional interview material. the following djs, party concept designers, club promoters, label managers and record shop workers, all male except one, took part: alex azary, andreas rossmann, armin johnert, ata, boris dlugosh, claus bachor, cosmic baby, dimitri hegermann, dr motte (of early love parade fame), elsa for toys, frank blümel, hell, jürgen laarmann, mark reeder, mike ink, mijk van dijk, ralf niemcyzk, sven väth, talla 2xlc, tanith, thomas koch, tobias lampe, triple r, upstart and wole xpd. the interviewees benefit from their maturity and their insights gained over decades, while the use of the german language produces a deeply reflective mode. in particular, mike ink places the scene’s idealism in a wider historical-materialist perspective, while azary observes that, “techno expresses the emotion of today’s times best of all, basically the blankness of society”. the resulting documentary is a serious self-searching narrative that demonstrates that the term techno was very much the electronic sound track of the millennium. the narrative starts with the introduction of the term techno as early as 1984 by talla in a frankfurt record shop called city music, to indicate “music created technologically”, such as “new order, depeche mode, kraftwerk, heaven 17, then later front 242. i actually filed everything under techno. and people liked it” (talla). this was followed by the techno club, set up by alex azary and talla, which hosted postpunk electronic bands, the neuewelle (new wave), like d.a.f. (deutsch amerikanischefreundschaft) and nitzer ebb. this club night became a hot spot for electronic body music (ebm), a sound that was led by the belgian front 424. it also inspired the establishment of specialist magazine frontpage that self-defined the merging techno scene. initially the club attracted suburban males, until djs like sven väth, who developed his career in this frankfurt scene, moved away from industrial and ebm to embrace american techno and acid house. berlin had been physically segregated from west germany, until the fall of the wall in 1989. according to tanith, the electronic experiments by german pioneers, dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(1) 2009, 142-56 issn 1947-5403 ©2009 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ such as klaus schulze, were effectively forgotten by a younger berliner generation that mainly listened to guitar rock. until the arrival of techno-house from the us that is, which sounded more fun than the aggression of ebm. acid house was introduced there via the radio shows of monika dietl, which were listened to on both sides of the berlin wall. when the wall came down, an extraordinary festive period emerged in berlin, which brought together creative talents from east and west germany. from this, the love parade emerged, in the summer of 1989, consisting of a sound system on a truck, playing acid house and detroit techno. the title of the documentary refers to a popular track of this period, “call it techno” (breaking bones 1989), an electro freestyle track by brooklyn-based dj frankie bones. its musical influences seem to cover a wide range of electronica, including kraftwerk, klf and afrika bambattaa, while an electronically treated vocal summarises a history of techno from an american perspective. the documentary’s version of techno’s story is different from the usual one, of how detroit dj producer derrick may and british entrepreneur neil rushton marketed detroit’s electronic dance music as distinct from the chicago house sound in 1988. it becomes quite clear that techno was indeed a concept, a sign of the times, which inspired people in europe and the us in parallel fashion. the documentary subsequently charts the experience of young people devoting their lives to the party scene, which went into overdrive during the early 1990s: its idealism, its creative energy, the flaunting of hegemonic common sense in terms of lifestyles and regulations and the sense that a revolution had occurred, a break in history. more women became involved and footage reveals a distinct difference in gender relations. 1980s footage from the technoclub shows an all male punk mob; while in footage from the early 1990s one sees boys and girls with happy grins, taking ecstasy pills, travelling from city to city to follow their favourite djs. each city seemed to have its own distinct approaches to this party phenomenon, some supporting the super star dj and others being much more about the music itself, the crowd and the experience. techno, in this version of events, accommodates a clear break in german history: pre1989 techno as post-punk electronica, angry, macho, full of fear and loathing; post1989 techno as fun, celebratory, camp and queer. from this melting-pot of ideas, eventually a german trance aesthetic emerged, again first in frankfurt, with dj dag and sven väth, which further developed in the techno-trance scene that revolved around the berlin love parade. in sum, this dvd corrects the anglo-american hegemony on the history of electronic dance music with a unique collection of images and interviews. it is therefore a must in the collection of anyone who studies and enjoys electronic dance music. references frankie bones. 1989. call it techno. breaking bones records (12-inch). bbr-400. usa. various. 1988. techno! the new dance sound of detroit. ten records ltd (10 records) uk // 303 322-406. dixg 75. virgin schallplatten gmbh. germany. reviews 143 lost and sound: berlin, techno, und der easyjetset. tobias rapp. suhrkamp, frankfurt am main, 2009. isbn: 3518460447 [german only] rrp: €9.50 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.12 sean nye university of minnesota (usa) “a new berlin is emerging – and nobody is noticing” (p.9). the first line of rapp’s lost and sound. berlin, techno und der easyjetset clearly states the motivation behind the book: the need for an update of berlin techno. rapp is well situated to write such an update. he reported on berlin nightlife for many years as the editor of one of berlin’s leading newspapers, die tageszeitung. the first line also indicates that techno is no longer the focus of the media, since most scholars and journalists associated the berlin techno-scene with the love parade. given this relative invisibility, it might come as a surprise that berlin has become a center of the international techno-scene like never before; from the concentration of print media to the conglomeration of expat musicians. can it be that techno is also the soundtrack of the zero years, as rapp calls this decade? rapp answers affirmatively – at least for berlin. however, the role of techno has changed. rapp aims to pinpoint exactly what these changes are. he asserts, “this is also not the east-berlin of the nineties, that adventurous playground forming the backdrop of the love parade, with its flamboyant dancers on walls that still bore the marks of history” (p.33). the book primarily concerns itself with the innovations of the zero years. four aspects form the core of his investigation: 1. the move of the scene’s locus from the friedrichstraße/leipziger straße club mile of the 1990s to the friedrichshain/kreuzberg club mile of the zero years. 2. the new mood of the scene in the post-love-parade age (after the love parade was canceled in 2004 and 2005 and definitively moved to the ruhr valley in 2007). the first techno generation is aging but remains active; simultaneously new generations of techno activists are emerging. 3. the development of a new form of techno tourism and club management through bargain airline travel such as easyjet. 4. the replacement of hard techno (tresor label) and pop techno (low spirit label) as the dominant berlin sound by minimal as the sound of the zero years. as his first focus, rapp describes berlin’s new club mile, which consists of a range of clubs, including berghain, watergate, maria, weekend, that in fact spread over five kilometers along the banks of the river spree. these banks form the border of berlin’s two famous countercultural districts, friedrichshain and kreuzberg, underscoring their continued importance for city nightlife. rapp emphasizes that in terms of style and location, the new clubs differ markedly from the old clubs, for example ewerk, bunker, and the old tresor and wmf. the old designs were innovative and playful, but also provisional. the owners knew the locations were likely to be bought out by developers. nevertheless, this club mile prepared the ground for the rise of 144 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 techno in berlin and for the exceptional success of the love parade. the route of the love parade in front of the brandenburg gate was not only of historical importance; it was also crucial for tourism. the parade drew masses of tourists, who also took part in the club events of the berlin love week surrounding the parade. the entrance fees were jacked up and the number of clubbers always overwhelming, guaranteeing big profits for the clubs. until 2003 the love parade and the associated love week were the most prominent examples of international club tourism. even without the profits of the love week, however, the new club scene is financially well situated. most clubs now have long-term rent contracts and are richly equipped with the latest sound systems, with, for example, the club berghain named as “best club in the world” in 2009 by the british magazine dj-mag. the scene is now even more international, considering the number of expat musicians living here, most prominently richie hawtin. yet without the media event of the love parade, this new scene remains relatively unknown. the diary of a typical club-week frames the book’s analyses and assists in presenting the mood of the new underground, which is rapp’s second point of focus. the club-week begins on a wednesday and ends (perhaps) the following monday. interviews with various protagonists – djs, youth hostel managers, rave mothers, and club owners – enliven rapp’s analysis. rapp’s journalistic reports are a diverse mix of cultural, sociological, and economic analysis. his third point of focus is the entanglement of the scene in international networks. he emphasizes this interdependence through the new economy of club tourism, made possible by bargain airlines. rapp writes, “the easyjet-raver is the definitive subject of european nightlife of the zero years. he came, without a grand announcement, and has developed into the most important subcultural figure of the present” (p.78-9). rapp explains how the combination of new bargain airlines on the one hand, and berlin’s economic crash after the optimism of the nineties, on the other, allowed for the emergence of this new european subject. the easyjet-raver could both fly on the cheap and visit an exceptionally cheap city. indeed, the failure of berlin’s plans for an economic revolution following reunification meant that, compared to cities like london or paris, berlin remains a bizarrely inexpensive metropolis. in short, what has been bad for berlin business has been good for the international underground. the first three foci of rapp’s analysis offer some considerable new insights. however, as an overview of the musical history of the berlin scene the book is less helpful. rapp’s investigation remains bound up with the minimal scene. what for him counts as the berlin sound of the zero years was actually only one of many trends. he does not explain that minimal only came to prominence in berlin during the middle of the decade through the establishment of labels liked perlon and m_nus. rapp dedicates an entire chapter to the minimal dj/producer ricardo villalobos (p.110-120), stating plainly “he is the biggest dj-star of the zero years” (p.110). with that he contradicts his earlier claim that the new scene has no stars, rather “the berlin clubs and their public” (p.12). indeed, throughout the book, rapp repeatedly mentions villalobos so much that he outs himself as a swooning fan and minimal-groupie. he thereby utilizes a trend that had already been purposefully hyped by him and other journalists. rapp even includes a berlin discography, which is a personal collection of minimal hits – beginning in 2003 with, again, a villalobos album. the book thus tends towards the genre of a travel guide and advertisement for minimal, instead of analyzing it as part of berlin techno. reviews 145 furthermore, an examination of the electro and electroclash trends is missing. for his topic, an analysis precisely of these scenes was needed because they played important roles in the first tourist waves during the zero years. if rapp decided villalobos was necessary to include, then an important “star” is missing: namely, ellen allien and her label b:pitch control. she is important precisely because of rapp’s focus on the easyjet-raver and club tourism. she has presented herself as a berlin-dj unlike any other, with her albums stadtkind (trans: city-child) and berlinette and, even more strikingly, through her dvd club-tour-guide of berlin for the time out series. indeed, the material of her musical productions is a crossover between techno and tourism. other equally influential stars during the zero years can also be listed: for example, monika kruse, t.raumschmiere and anja schneider, not to mention paul van dyk, whose continued international stardom resulted in him receiving the landesverdienstorden (land order of merit) from berlin in 2006. to be sure, rapp does examine other branches of the techno scene. there are interesting interviews addressing new media and technology with producers robert henke, philipp sollmann and ben clock. rapp analyzes the debates regarding urban renewal with the example of media spree, a construction project that could have a major impact on the new club mile. he also examines new online forum restrealitaet.de and internet fanzine resident adviser. nevertheless, one would expect a more diverse analysis of the many styles from electro to breakcore that make up the berlin sound. finally, the role of media needs more attention. many pop-cultural festivals and institutions have moved to berlin – print media like spex and groove, the music channels viva and mtv, the popkomm, etc. – a trend that has profited to the detriment of cologne, which in many respects was the pop media center of germany until 2000. such gaps demonstrate that rapp’s attempt to combine a personal diary with cultural analysis is not as successful as he perhaps wished. rapp loses himself in self-absorbed scene life and gossip. too much club jargon and name-dropping takes place, thus making some of the book comprehensible only to insiders. despite these faults, the book offers an important update on berlin techno history. the literature and media that defined the popular understanding of german techno was published more than ten years ago. the following titles appeared in the decisive year 1998: simon reynolds’ energy flash, rainald goetz’s rave, iara lee’s documentary modulations and tom tykwer’s run lola run. perhaps the most internationally well-known german book on electronic dance music, ulf poschardt’s dj culture, appeared even earlier, in 1995. for those whose knowledge of german techno is based on such literature, rapp’s lost and sound will be a helpful update. it makes clear that the history of techno is not over, and rapp is correct that the zero years are an important period in this history. 146 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 psychedelic white: goa trance and the viscosity of race. arun saldanha. minneapolis and london, university of minnesota press, 2007. isbn: 0816649936 (hardcover) 0816649944 (paperback) rrp: us$60.00 (hardcover), us$20 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.13 anthony d’andrea university of limerick (ireland), university of chicago (usa) chromatic variation in ethnographic analysis reflecting a deleuzian turn in social geography, psychedelic white: goa trance and the viscosity of race examines rave tourism in goa through the prism of a materialist theory of race and racial segregation. well-written, erudite and thought-provoking, the book opens with the observation that the mostly white psytrance music fans (also known as goa freaks) arrive at parties only after indian tourists have departed. the author arun saldanha, a belgian geographer of indian descent, expresses his discontentment, “i felt this segregation”, and adds, “this book wants to find out what sort of theoretical vocabulary is necessary to make sense of racism when it is not supposed to be there.” (p.5). the basic question it seeks to answer then is, “what makes white bodies stick together?” according to saldanha, racial segregation is a basic effect from the ethnic profile and profiling of white psytrance fans and backpackers in goa. the book provides a philosophically robust retheorization of race. opposing social constructionism, saldanha seeks to develop a materialist theory of race, centered on the deleuzian concept of viscosity, defined as resistance to flow and perforation. considered for its corporeality rather than representation, race is organized like a machinic assemblage, as instantiated in ritual experiences of the psytrance collective in goa. saldanha demonstrates familiarity with a wide range of philosophical work, including not only deleuze and guattari, but also levinas, goffman and fanon, among other thinkers in feminism and poststructuralism. psychedelic white has gained attention among geographers of race, as a number of book reviews have praised saldanha’s innovative theorization while also questioning its internal consistency at a philosophical level. this review, instead, highlights how this philosophical hypertrophy has created analytical problems in the study of psytrance. within a complex formulation of race materialism, psychedelic white discusses the more proximate notion of “psychedelics”, which saldanha defines as the dynamics of self-transformation enabled by travel, drugs and music. yet, these techniques are examined in relation to the racial background of westerners. in a series of refined reviews on the history of countercultures, orientalism, hippies and drugs, saldanha refers to the creative needs of “white men”, a term repeated ad nauseam throughout the first third of the book. this bias could have been moderated in the light of the anthropological truism that a wide variety of societies, and not only the white west, nurtures more or less complicated relationships with such techniques and devices of selftransformation. as such, the reader may be left wondering how whiteness and psychedelics are causally determined, and, if so, what is the significance and implication that saldanha attempts to address. reviews 147 based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in northern goa between 1996 and 2002 (and again in 2006), the empirical horizon of psychedelic white is constrained within a sharp racial angle, as organized across the book in three analytical sites: the shared experiences of goa freaks, the visual economy of rave tourism, and the politics of location in goa. the philosophical work so interestingly advanced by saldanha results in a racial determinism under which psytrance formations are forcefully examined. political economy is reduced to “phenotype and foreignness” (p.163). “goa freaks are microfascists” (p. 89). the book is permeated with “depressing conclusions”, as saldanha well puts it, following anecdotal analyses of white exploitation, segregation and indifference toward indians. psytrance formations, saldanha argues, have paradoxically thickened rather than transcended racial segregation in goa. the book is thus marked by a predominantly negative assessment of countercultural formations in india. in deleuzian words, psychedelic white focuses on the lines of death traced by this war machine, and says virtually nothing about the emancipatory potential of chromatic variation. some readers may even find that the impressive philosophical apparatus delivered by saldanha tends to lose connection with the empirical reality it seeks to explain. indeed, psytrance freaks are eccentric individuals, often elitist, arrogant and troubled. in a decadent and dystopic scene such as northern goa psytrance, most freaks and backpackers would likely feel more comfortable interacting with phenotypically similar peoples, whereas some individuals may express racist behavior at times. however, the argument that psytrance in goa is essentially reaffirmed through racial segregation would require stronger empirical testing and support. incredibly, important factual questions were overlooked in the book. firstly, psytrance insiders reject tourists – regardless of race – whether in goa or elsewhere. spatial segregation between insiders and outsiders is a basic feature of electronic dance scenes around the world, and goa is no different, for its members regularly attend other scenes interlinked across global countercultural circuits. in this connection, trance (ecstatic) experiences generally occur with no essential reference to issues of racial identity or segregation. internal bickering is pervasive within white psytrance subgroups in goa (p.152), and clashes involving national, generational and class difference are at least as common as those predicated on race. moreover, several indians (and other not exactly white individuals) occupy significant positions in the scene, as djs, party promoters and well-off diasporic fans. mating relationships across racial groups are common, even against india’s backdrop of patriarchy and sexual harassment, considering white females’ frequent complaints about native males. furthermore, saldanha does not account for the violence, exploitation and segregation that some indians explicitly perpetrate against third-world immigrants working in goa. likewise, he neglects that white travelers’ attitude of indifference towards indians is more often than not a simmelian response to the overwhelming demand incessantly posed by street vendors, beggars and sexual predators across india. all in all, edm studies indicate that class, gender and sexual orientation, alongside race, are all important factors in the makeup of electronic dance scenes. the psytrance scene in goa embodies complex multiplicities that cannot be easily explained by means of reduction to a single analytical category alone. as an ethnographic study, the claim that psytrance identity is founded on racial segregation is perplexing, particularly when argued on basis of empirically grounded evidence. no significant discrepancies can be found by cross-checking my fieldwork with saldanha’s ethnography at the level of observed behaviors. at a closer look, how148 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 ever, it becomes evident that saldanha has neglected the cultural point-of-view of psytrance people. in fact, he explicitly states that their representations on transcending prejudice would have misled him; and that he would not have been able to understand white identity in goa by approaching it discursively or psychologically (p.130). instead, saldanha chooses to observe their forms of sociability, at a distance, without ever addressing underlying meanings, intentions and desires. as such, the dismissal of native representations remits psychedelic white to a pre-geertzian moment, strangely resonating with classical british functional-structuralist anthropology. not by accident, in both british and deleuzian versions, subject interiorities become effects of larger social and material structures (machinic assemblages). as a possible remedy, what is the meaning of white bodies sticking together would have been a legitimate, even safer question. in other words, how problematic race actually is according to foreigners and natives in goa would be a question that largely defines the social and explanatory pertinence of a theoretical framework. however, goa freaks and goan villagers rarely speak in psychedelic white. in fact, they become largely incidental against the philosophical apparatus weaved across the book. in its appendix, saldanha correctly notes how difficult it is to interview psytrance freaks in goa, even though he seemed to possess a remarkable ability to socialize with them. conversely, saldanha provides a list of interviewees including a relative majority of indian authorities, intellectuals, journalists and activists, all of whom have been opposed to rave tourism. more widely, in a world of complexities, ethnographers ought to be supple in finding ways to engage, translate and interpret examined ways of life, initially in their own terms of sociability and intelligibility. concurring with saldanha, the locus of truth, as bourdieu puts it, rarely resides at the surface level of discursive representations alone. however, they provide critical clues towards a persuasive account that is both intellectually compelling and empirically accurate. in dismissing the voice of goa freaks, saldanha has paradoxically incurred an act of segregation by only allowing his own representations to speak and prevail. ultimately, the book fails to address a critical counter-hypothesis: psytrance fans reject indian tourists and beggars because they egregiously disrupt psytrance practices. “trance parties” are ritual practices of a quasi-sacred nature by which scene insiders can ritually express their anger and opposition to the modern self, morality and system. logically, those who don’t appear to share or respect the meanings entwined in such countercultural practices and ideologies are deemed unwelcome outsiders. in this light, the book’s main premise – that white freaks reject indian tourists because of their race – is empirically flawed. consequently, its main argument – that foreign countercultural formations in india are essentially reproduced on the basis of racial segregation – must be questioned.  the fact that these are “mostly white” formations struggling with native and alien majorities does not suffice to define them as founded, identified or reinforced by racial segregation. segregation and racism are not the same. psychedelic white must be commended for its philosophical ingenuity. nonetheless, in order to do justice to saldanha’s exquisite contribution to race studies, the book would have benefited from a more nuanced and cautious analysis of psytrance formations empirically and methodologically. it would have been more persuasive by better calibrating its racial determinism vis-à-vis the multiple, complex and polysemous injunctions of global psytrance locally, and particularly by means of a more direct dialogue with the scholarship on psytrance, travel and tourism in india and southeast asia. in battling against social constructionism, psychedelic white has lost sight of the empirical dimension it sought to explain, along with alternative philosophical explana reviews 149 tions. in their double folding, war machines are defined both for their lines of flight and death, as well as for their viscosity and chromatic variation. how to account for race as chromatic variation would have opened up a whole new range of empirical and theoretical possibilities. all along, the fixity of psytrance in northern goa (as in elsewhere) can be assessed as an ambivalent tactic of resistance for keeping the space of creative experimentation, one that is continuously threatened and reinforced by external formations, linkages, and power/knowledge arrangements. global nomads: techno and new age as transnational countercultures in ibiza and goa. anthony d’andrea. london and new york, routledge, 2007 isbn: 041542013x (hard) 0203962656 (ebook) 978-0-415-55376-4 (paper) rrp: $132 (hardbound), $28 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.14 charles de ledesma university of east london (uk) anthony d’andrea is a “transnationalist” researcher who has set out to explore the fissures and contradictions of twenty first century globalisation. global nomads is the end product of six years of field work in the bye ways of alternative cultures, and covers multiple visits to india and ibiza. it is a singular work and an indispensable contribution to a growing body of accessible academia on the curvature of globalisation, critical studies and counter cultures. as well it is an immensely readable ethnography of the lives, passion, habits and thoughts of overlapping sets of “expressive expatriates”, as d’andrea calls them. this label loosely corrals a colourful cast including djs at techno trance parties, traders in textiles at the hippie markets of goa and ibiza, artists, digital developers and international drug dealers. d’andrea defines “expressive expatriate” early on. “as a counterpoint in migration studies, the terms ‘expressive’ and ‘expatriate’ depart with the predominantly utilitarian and essentialized understanding of the mobile subject” (p.7). also weaving through the book is the concept, the global (neo) nomad, which d’andrea suggests is the philosophic base of the expressive expatriate. “many have abandoned metropolitan centres where they enjoyed a favourable material situation” (p.8). but, d’andrea cautions, his expressive, neo-nomadic, alternative subjects are not free of all the trapping of contemporary life nor do they wish to be. he applies foucault’s concept of bio power and judges that these peripheral, although not marginal, social vectors ride in tandem with neo liberal regimes. in the hands of a less radical, committed writer, a cynical edge – end of 1960s countercultural traditions; decimation of 1980s’ rave culture energies; creeping commoditisation of the global trade in goods and artefacts – could undermine such an analysis. but, thankfully, not; d’andrea remains steadfast in spirit and calling. global nomads is a resolutely optimistic work, theoretically fluent and empirically fascinating. divided into five main parts, d’andrea sets out his stall admirably in the opening chapter, “neo-nomadic”, which adds to the multiple voices in the graham st john150 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 edited collection, rave culture and religion, and in various work from robin sylvan and paul heelas, by connecting new spiritualities and techno dance culture with globalization. before nailing neo-nomadic as his defining meta-concept, d’andrea helpfully provides a short overview of critical work on the nomadic per se; using deluge’s famous epithet, “the nomad does not move” to clarify that the neo nomadic need be understood as a state of mind and being, not merely a state of movement. d’andrea begins his field report in la isla blanca – ibiza – with a colourful narrative spotlighting various neo-nomadic lifestyles encountered on the island during peak season. there is yoga teacher nora, clothes retailer rochelle, new age body practices seeker barbara and island long-stay kirk who, like d’andrea, is an anthropologist. a rather bucolic scenario builds of creative types running a busy clock of night time events, markets, yoga and “bio dance” classes, although the picture clouds in the ethnography’s next section with an exploration of the hippie and club scenes in the island’s resort, san antonio. d’andrea charts how conflicts develop in the increasingly commoditised spaces of package tourist density. he less successfully summarises field work conducted at the island’s largest nightclub, privilege, offering few surprises beyond a rather functional listing of expected details and views. we learn too of the antics of the highly extrovert couple who ran club night manumission, and how they ‘performed live’ sex acts during the night. d’andrea is revealing on the club industry economy, its army of bohemian workers who work the club season, and the party promoters behind club profitability. beyond its crass commerciality, he identifies that there are some opportunities where “exceptional parties were able to break through the nationalism that underlies mainstream clubbing in ibiza and become exciting references in the global club scene” (p.107). before heading for north goa, where sound system parties most resolutely weren’t in this mould, d’andrea stops off at point 2 in his transnational research, neospiritual guru osho’s “international meditation resort” in pune, south india. d’andrea is refreshing on this ashram turned “new age resort” as he holds centre ground between the osho supporters, sannyasins, and osho bashers, although the tone is largely one of a distanced disappointment with the commercial direction taken. this section ends with a reminder of the translocal connections between ibiza, pune and goa, three key nodes in a neo-nomadic, counter cultural lifestyle pattern which may take in goods trading, new age therapies, mind altering drug bouts and all night dancing at beachside full moon trance parties. it is goa that d’andrea travels to next and it is here that global nomads truly finds its pace and footing. after setting the scene with a brief history of the tiny, once portuguese-held, south india enclave, and western interest in it, d’andrea launches into a field report on “rebel sannyasins”, trance party promoters; backpackers after sun, parties and drugs; mornings sipping lattes and smoking hash chillums in the famous cafe, the german bakery, and attempts at elucidating information from the traveller freaks and hippy elders at the centre of the action. in an interesting ethnographic aside he finds that “at a methodological level, the politicized silence of freaks constituted a challenge to conventional methods of data collection” (p.189). but d’andrea, in exchanges parallel to those of arun saldanha in psychedelic white, beavers away patiently and soon finds his subjects full of views and stories. one, bojan, believes india to be a land “that is female, round, and the karma yoga instantaneous” (p.193). later in this masterly field report, d’andrea reaches a ravishing climax. the sub section “the techno trance assemblage: aesthetics of power and limit-experience” remains the strongest, most ethically powerful and revealing writing on the psyche reviews 151 delic trance party to date, certainly in an academic context, if not anywhere. so many nights and mornings spent searching for and, on occasions, finding, techno trance parties, has fully rubbed off on d’andrea and, unlike in the more extensive psychedelic white, the reader feels fully and disarmingly there, propelled into the vortex of chromatically varied digital beats aiming to upset and re-constitute subjectivities. locating the trance dance, first as a limit-experience which can ‘tear the subject from itself ’ (p.209), the writing collapses key elements – music, technology, raver psychology, bodily gesture and dance and potent chemical enhancers – into enchanting, hypnotic and critically consistent prose. “trance parties have been designed to engender a magic aura that remits participants into a cosmic temporality” (p.210). d’andrea’s use here of the deleuze and guattarian concept “assemblage” is judicious, not overstated, using a nomadological spirit to generate potency and mystique in the writing; attempting, successfully, to enact in words the process it sets out to describe. no matter, really, that there are one or two factual gaffs in this section. d’andrea, for example, states that the 1980s were a fallow period in the north goa party scene, picking up strength in the early 1990s. not so. djs goa gil and laurent played stupendous, night-long, tranceified electronic mixes at numerous parties in those years, with events attended by many hundreds of revellers. a stylistic weakness is the occasional repetition of phrases and sentences as d’andrea unveils his conceptual framework across various chapters. but this is no surprise given a keenness for publishing finished segments as the research project elapses. d’andrea has simply had a number of go’s at re-defining and re-casting his ideas. this doesn’t detract at all from a book which is thoughtfully crafted, stimulating, syntactically evocative and critically valuable. d’andrea’s study of neo-nomadism in expressive expatriates, his turnof-thecentury field work in multiple nodes where alternative cultures still flourish and, particularly, his sharp dissection of the trance party cosmos, is invaluable material for students of, well, just about any discipline you can imagine which touches ostensibly on globalization, cultural anthropology, neo-religious studies, cultural studies and popular music. feel free to add to the list. breakcore: identity and interaction on peer-to-peer. andrew whelan. newcastle upon tyne, cambridge scholars publishing, 2008. 337 pp. isbn: 1847186572 $60 us (hardcover) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.15 emily d. ferrigno yale university (usa) the study of virtual music communities is a fascinating and timely endeavor, given the widespread phenomenon of “bedroom production”. musical subcultures are often shaped by and mediated through online means, such as forums, chatrooms and list152 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 servs. virtual environments provide vital space in which musical practitioners share creative methods of musical production, define genre, hold aesthetic debates and socialize. virtual ethnographies are not yet numerous, and scholars interested in identity, gender and race as they exist in the virtual realm would do well to consult andrew whelan’s study. whelan’s book is an informative examination of virtual community from the chatrooms of soulseek, a file-sharing application used by electronic dance music producers. whelan focuses on users involved in breakcore, a breakbeat-centered genre influenced by jungle, industrial, and hardcore techno. whelan draws upon the theories and practices of his discipline (sociology), and illustrates concepts with robust sections of ethnographically-culled data, working with a 2100-page transcription of conversational text from soulseek chatrooms over a period of six months, as well as email interviews with producers. whelan’s analytical focal point is chatroom dialogue. he uses textual analysis to illustrate how the individuals in his study define themselves, how chatroom dialogue creates and ascribes musical meaning, and how soulseek users employ discursive cues to identify “insiders” and “outsiders.” in the introductory chapter, as well as in the concluding section of the book, whelan engages with the “rationalization/democratization” debate, a discourse central to his study. he confronts the hypothesis that technology serves to inhibit and ultimately dehumanize music, which stands in opposition to the utopian vision of technology as an agent of social change, allowing the voices of socially excluded groups to be heard (p.24). whelan provides a useful introduction to the peer-to-peer environment and file sharing protocol, and examines the mp3 file (the medium of exchange) as a “sociocultural fetish”. whelan describes how “rip crews” encode new music into mp3 format, “tag” the files, and distribute/disseminate them to the larger community. each mp3 is accompanied by an “nfo” file, which identifies the mp3 and its creator. these files are written in a source code that allows the creator to insert jokes, illustrations, and the like into the nfo. several examples of nfo files are provided in the text. whelan focuses on three practices that he describes as “shibboleths,” or “terms indicative of social location or origin, the use of which therefore serves to distinguish between groups” (p.14). these are the use of 1) nigga/nigger (chapter 5); 2) gay/ghey (chapter 7), and 3) the “amen break” (chapter 8), a widely sampled drum break from the winstons’ 1969 hit, “amen brother”. whelan provides lengthy analyses of textual exchanges in soulseek chat rooms, in which social boundaries are defined and redefined, and multiple conversations occur at once. the use of the terms “nigga/nigger” is presented in the context of “ritual insult exchange,” as well as flatly racist discourse. as whelan explains, “the term [nigga] is embedded within a matrix of ethnic and subcultural identity politics, and as such tells us much about the orientations of those who deploy it” (p.144). he bases his analysis on the use of “nigga” as a style-marker common among us youth, a characterization which is perhaps too superficial to provide the reader with sufficient context for virtual analysis. the verbal presence of “nigga/nigger” in american society is extremely complex, and quite different in its “real world” application, as opposed to the anonymous environment of virtual chatrooms. anonymity presents significant difficulties for social analysis, in that age, race, nationality, and even (spoken) english language fluency of chatroom users may be unknown. the second shibboleth “gay/ghey” is also examined within the context of chatroom discourse. whelan bases his analysis on the concept of “gay” as not only homo reviews 153 sexual, but also encompassing characteristics and ideals rejected by hegemonic masculinity (p.182). noting that, “the ‘joking’ exploration of the semantics of gay is a popular trope among young men” (p.200), whelan presents several examples of chatroom dialogue related to anal eroticism. he then explains the use of “ghey” in the chatrooms to describe something “lame” or “generic” (the homosexual connotation orthographically removed). the discussion concludes with an examination of masculinity, a frequent theme in whelan’s study, given the scarcity of participants identifying themselves as female in breakcore chatrooms. in chapter eight, “junglist,” whelan begins to focus on the music around which his study is centered. he discusses the aesthetics of breakcore via chatroom discourse, addressing polarities such as old school/new school and mainstream/underground. whelan regards the “amen break” as a third shibboleth, a time-honored (and wellworn) sample used in electronic dance music. however, he also highlights the debate within the breakcore community as to whether the use of the amen is creative, progressive, or even interesting. this problematizes the classification of the amen as a shibboleth; while the amen is well known in the breakcore community, its utilization is not a given. perhaps, then, the amen is a shibboleth used to distinguish subgroups from one another, rather than distinguishing the entire breakcore community from outsiders. whelan’s book ends with a lengthy “journey through the media” (p.319), covering a range of topics from sampling ethics and branding, to utopian visions of peer-to-peer culture. whelan characterizes his book as a “collage,” and, in fact, his theoretical discussions are dense, at times unfocused and difficult to follow. whelan’s own ideas are often obscured by his prose style and frequent quotation of others’ work. this also limits the accessibility of the text to specialists, which can be a serious shortcoming when writing to an interdisciplinary audience. in addition, whelan’s engagement with musical analysis is not a strong point of the book. he describes the amen break as embodying “polyrhythmic hesitancy”, the snares “sketching an idiosyncratic, irregular pattern”. like many drum breaks, the amen is characterized by syncopation, a basic feature of funk drumming–hardly idiosyncratic, and, in fact, very “regular”. the reader is not given a particularly clear description of what breakcore and its related genres sound like (beyond the discography). whelan does participate in the breakcore scene (as a chatroom member and perhaps a producer), but the reader is not privy to this information. the inclusion of reflexive ethnography would have added necessary transparency to his study, for when the reader is well acquainted with the author, ethnographic authority and agenda are made clear, and thus can become secondary to the voices of the observed. despite these shortcomings, whelan makes a rigorous contribution to the study of musical culture in the digital age. he delves into an examination of the sometimes crude nature of chatroom discourse, thoughtfully employing textual analysis to unpack the complexities of race, gender and social interaction. whelan’s discussion of the internet, society and identity is enlightening. he introduces the term “networked individualism” in which “identity is organised and expressed through consumption practices” (p.319), whereby participatory and collaborative consumption are encouraged, in opposition to the model of passive consumption set up by the music industry (p.305). this observation suggests that (somewhat problematically) whelan embraces a utopian (and democratic) vision of peer-to-peer file sharing, in which recorded sound is free and open to all–collected, utilized, manipulated and most importantly, shared. 154 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 the high life: club kids, harm and drug policy (qualitative studies in crime and justice volume 2). dina perrone. monsey (ny), criminal justice press, 2009. isbn: 978-1-881798-46-0 rrp: $35 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.16 lucy gibson university of manchester (uk) dina perrone’s study of “club kids” based in new york city presents an illuminating analysis of the cultural and situational context in which club drugs are used. while most literature on drug use tends to focus on users from impoverished communities and the harm they experience, the high life challenges the typical drug user stereotype by showing the “hidden” deviant behaviour of seemingly conformist, affluent and well-educated young adults. perrone opposes america’s war on drugs and argues that the focus of drugs policy should shift from a criminal justice approach (abstinenceonly strategy) to a more balanced response that includes principles from both the cultural and health fields and focuses on the well-being and lifestyles of drug users. the book begins by outlining two assumed flaws in america’s current drug war: that drug users have a pathology, which is the only factor leading to the “drug problem”; and that all illegal drug use leads to harm. perrone challenges these assumptions by asserting that the “...culture and capital of the user and the social environment in which the drugs are used greatly influence use, abuse, and harm” (p.2). chapter one builds on the introduction by providing an overview of how perrone met the club kids and offering initial insights into their lives. moreover, the chapter describes the ethnographic field methods deployed to study the participants’ use of club drugs such as mdma, methamphetamine (crystal meth), ketamine and ghb. the book is based on perrone’s observations, discussion with club kids during fifteen months of fieldwork and interviews with eighteen club kids aged between 22 and 33. the subsequent chapters are separated into two parts: (i) club kids’ dance culture and (ii) drug use among the club kids. the first part examines the club kids as a subcultural group by assessing how they correspond to subculture literature and earlier drug-using subcultural groups such as hippies, mods and skinheads. the book demonstrates that, in contrast to traditional subcultural groups, club kids do not wish to reject the dominant culture, but rather, they adhere to the consumerist norms of conventional american society. club kid culture and the clubbing experience are explored using theories of consumption, commercialisation and globalisation, and by situating the club kids within postmodern theories of the nature of late capitalism. throughout part one, perrone neatly uses the club kids’ perceptions of clubbing, its importance and the suitability of using drugs in club settings to illustrate the fantastical, “carnivalesque” and commodified nature of contemporary club culture. the second part of the book explores the club kids’ patterns of drug use. perrone shows how club kids maintain their jobs and uphold family responsibilities whilst using relatively large quantities of drugs. through their social and economic privileges, the club kids are able to avoid criminal justice sanctions and limit harm. the author employs a theoretical framework, which refers and adds to the prior work of norman reviews 155 zinberg, to describe how factors (drug, set, setting, timing and capital) in club kids’ lives allow controlled and safe drug use. perrone expands on zinberg’s (1984) framework of “drug, set and setting” by adding supplementary concepts of timing and capital drawn from primary data. timing and capital include both club kids’ resources and stages or transitions in the life course. the author demonstrates how a drug’s properties, the setting in which the drug is used, the user’s mood (set), resources (capital) and phase of life-trajectory (timing), shape drug using practices and impact on the relationship between drugs and harm. perrone uses rich and detailed quotations from her respondents to demonstrate how club kids negotiate drug use to minimise harm and avoid criminal justice penalties, while also revealing the larger contradictions in club kids’ lives. chapter seven provides a final discussion of the study’s findings and offers a wider examination of their implications for drug policy in the u.s. perrone pertinently argues that “...socially and economically privileged drug users, such as the club kids, are better equipped to manage their clubbing and drug-using behaviors than are less privileged users...the war on drugs is disproportionately a war on poor people. thus, white, middle-class users are more capable of concealing their drug use and escaping public and police detection than their lower-class counterparts” (p.205). for perrone, the war on drugs has been lost and future policy should de-stigmatise users and help to minimise the harm resulting from drug use rather than concentrate on arrest or punishment. perrone’s study offers a convincing account of the social, cultural and environmental factors that shape drug use among club kids. the book provides a fascinating insight into club kids’ lives and how regular drug users are able to occupy conventional social roles and sustain typical social relationships. however, two minor criticisms remain. although numerous references to relevant work are evident throughout the book, the statement “...cocaine can benefit those with asthma” (p.130) is not supported by academic evidence and readers may want to know the basis for such a claim. moreover, recent post-subcultural literature (e.g. bennett 1999; bennett and kahnharris 2004) has been omitted from the discussion. perrone states that club kids are not a subculture in the traditional sense of the term. yet, she continues to use this term to describe the club kids as a distinct social group. that aside, the book offers a stimulating analysis of club kids’ drug use by highlighting the reasons for clubbing, and exploring club kids’ motivations, and cultural practices. perrone provides a thought-provoking discussion that challenges the majority of literature on drug use. the study is invaluable for students of electronic dance music culture as it questions current failing policy in the u.s. and offers new ways of conceptualising the culture and context of drug use. references bennett, andy. 1999. subcultures or neo-tribes? rethinking the relationship between youth, style and musical taste. sociology, 33: 599-617. bennett, andy and kahn-harris, keith. 2004. after subculture: critical studies in contemporary youth culture. london: palgrave. zinberg, norman. 1984. drug, set, and setting: the basis for controlled intoxicant use. new haven: yale university press. 156 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 ff2_typeset_ver1 capturing the vision at california’s symbiosis festival text and photos by pascal querner 1. sculpture “twilight anima rising” by mardi storm.1 from 17-21 september 2009, california’s symbiosis gathering was held next to california’s yosemite national park. combining music, art, dance and performances, it was the ! rst time the event (in its fourth edition) was hosted in the sequoia forest of this region, a truly unique and site for a psychedelic festival. with trees as tall as buildings, a beautiful lake in yin-yang form, and a large open ! eld made this the perfect place for the four dance " oors combining music, art, people, love and nature over !ve days. 2. lake 3. field stage on sunday a!ernoon dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(2) 2010, 105-111 issn 1947-5403 ©2010 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.08 from the floor #e music performed was diverse, with djs and bands from the psytrance, progressive, dubstep and world music scenes. for much of the time, i could not distinguish between the performances on the stage and those on the dance " oor. every second person looked like a cirque de soleil artist. 4, 5 and 6. official performances 106 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 7. visitors as a photographer who travelled to the us in 2009 for burning man, symbiosis was the perfect a$er-burn party. compared to many other electronic music festivals, art, in the form of larger exhibitions, small galleries, dance and theater performances, and individuals selling self-made jewelry, represented a signi!cant component of the festival. i also had the chance to meet some of the best visionary artists i have known for many years from books and the internet. a dream came true watching allyson and alex grey2 painting live on stage with shpongle djing on sunday morning. other visionary artists, like luke brown,3 adam scott miller,4 xavi,5 carey #ompson6 and raul casillas romo,7 to name just a few, also painted, presented or discussed their work at the festival. 8. visionary artist luke brown 9. adam scott miller working querner • capturing the vision 107 10. visionary artist xavi 11. a visitor painting 12. visionary artist alex grey presenting his work in the forest 13 and 14. large sculptures at the main dance #oor (some previously exhibited at the burning man festival in the black rock desert, nevada) 108 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 as a self-identi!ed festivals of “art, music, and conscious living”, this is one of the true psychedelic festivals in the us and, alongside burning man, succeeds in combining music and art, while impressing a “leave no trace” awareness upon its participants. additionally, the friendliness and openness of participants, mainly americans, was wonderful for me as a visitor and photographer. 15. entrance to the main stage 16 and 17. lake stage querner • capturing the vision 109 18-21. participants 110 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 for more information’s to the festival see www.symbiosisgathering.com and the following video of the 2009 event: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvdoov7s2x4 ••••••• author biography pascal querner is a biologist and photographer living in berlin and vienna who loves documenting psychedelic festivals and uses his camera to capture the spirit and atmosphere of each moment.  notes querner • capturing the vision 111 1 www.mardistorm.com 2 www.alexgrey.com 3 www.spectraleyes.com 4 www.corpuscallosum.cc/ 5 podcollective.com/browse/ 6 www.galactivation.com/ 7 www.raulcasillas.com http://www.symbiosisgathering.com http://www.symbiosisgathering.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvdoov7s2x4&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvdoov7s2x4&feature=related http://www.mardistorm.com http://www.mardistorm.com http://www.alexgrey.com http://www.alexgrey.com http://www.spectraleyes.com http://www.spectraleyes.com http://www.corpuscallosum.cc/ http://www.corpuscallosum.cc/ http://podcollective.com/browse/ http://podcollective.com/browse/ http://www.galactivation.com/ http://www.galactivation.com/ http://www.raulcasillas.com http://www.raulcasillas.com 3. fisher-typeset the abstract reality of the “hardcore continuum” mark fisher goldsmiths, university of london (uk) the debate around whether the “hardcore continuum” (henceforth hcc) – see the previous article by jeremy gilbert for the background – should be classified as a “theory” or a “fact” has raised important issues about the relationship between music criticism and theory. what i propose to do here is offer a brief defence of both the hcc and of theory. put very schematically, the recent objections to the concept of the “hardcore continuum” culture seem to take two basic forms: (1) there never was such a thing as the hardcore continuum in the first place; and (2) there was such a thing as the hardcore continuum, but it is no longer relevant to today’s dance music. ironically, given the professed anti-theoretical intentions of many of the objectors to the hcc, both these objections cannot be resolved by appeal to facts, since both very quickly raise deeply philosophical questions – questions that, as it happens, are at the centre of intense current debates surrounding speculative realism and objectoriented philosophy. the reason that appeals to a supposedly direct, pre-theoretical “experience” must fail is that both the objections turn on the question of what a “thing” is, a question, which to say the very least, has philosophical implications. empiricism, even in a far more sophisticated form than the so-called “buffoon empiricism” espoused by dan hancox at the “hardcore continuum” symposium at the university of east london on 29th april 2009 precisely ran aground because it could give no convincing answer to this question. indeed, it is one of the problems on which british empiricism ran aground: far from being a flux of primary qualities and raw sensations that is cut up into objects only after the fact, the very “experience” that empiricists privilege is already impregnated with “thinghood”. once you subtract generalised concepts not given in immediate sensations, you don’t end up with the concrete certainties that buffoon empiricism appeals to. instead, as berkeley ingeniously demonstrated, the material world itself disappears (there is no sensation that corresponds to “matter”; it has to be inferred as the cause of those sensations). david hume found that the self and causality would also disintegrate, since they are not experienced as sensations either. thus, the appeal to direct sensation would not end up in a lumpen commonsense, but in a psychosis. the first objection must give an account of what a “thing” is, without assuming that such a definition is already given to us by unreflective experience. the hardcore continuum was something that simon reynolds identified in the 1990s, but named retrospectively. in his presentation at fact in liverpool,1 reynolds used what would come to be a controversial analogy, arguing that the hcc is a “fact” in the same way that australia – the land mass, with its flora and fauna, as opposed to the politically-constituted “nation” – is. i want to argue here that reynolds’ tactical retreat from theory is a mistake. however, i wouldn’t want to go as dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(1) 2009, 123-6 issn 1947-5403 ©2009 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.08 from the floor far as alex williams who argues that the hardcore continuum is a purely theoretical entity.2 williams ingeniously claims that the hcc is real, but only as a theory. in other words, the theory exists and has certain effects – how it influences other forms of production, how it adds to our own experiences of music. it is certainly related to a reality external to itself (a set of musics, clubs, people) but its role is not passive, but active. the act of naming is not a naturalistic or scientific act of description, but a creative act itself, an invention, not a discovery. part of the problem with williams’ “hyperstitional” account of the hcc is the fact that it has hardly fed back into production at all; its main impact has been upon the consumption and theorisation of music. i would argue that the name “hardcore continuum” (and the theorisation and discussion of the hcc) is irrelevant to the reality that the name designates. in that sense, the analogy with australia-the-landmass holds; the landmass retains the same features irrespective of the name that it is given. but there are obvious limits to the australia analogy – because the reality of the hardcore continuum is not of the order of a physical fact, but of an abstract entity. the notion of an abstract-real materiality may cause commonsense to recoil, yet a moment’s reflection makes us realise that, not only that abstract entities are real, but that there is nothing more real than them. unless we posit abstract entities, what sense can we make of the credit crunch and the recession we are currently living through? then there is the lacanian big other, the collective fiction which structures and makes consistent social reality itself. for me, the hardcore continuum is rather like capital: it cannot be experienced as such, but it has clearly identifiable effects. it is not a theoretical entity, but it can only be encountered via some kind of theoretical reflection. the same questions of agency come up when thinking about the continuum as thinking about capital. part of what was interesting about the concept of the hcc was that “it” rather than individual artists seemed to be the creative force in generating music. the hardcore continuum was an exuberant effacement of the author in a collective circuit which included producers, djs and dancers, but which displayed its own cybernetic intelligence not reducible to the intentions and objectives of individual human agents. the actions of producers, djs and dancers were both constrained and enabled by the vicissitudes of the continuum; they could not enforce a change in style by fiat. that is why appeals to biography establish nothing – the fact that individuals were also involved in producing other kinds of music alongside their hcc-related work tells us only that pseudonyms designate real differences. the defacialised names that producers and djs adopt are not neutral tags for an underlying biological-biographical being; rather they indicate really different entities with their own traits. take the example of goldie: when he started to believe that it was he the biographical-biological individual – as opposed to the fictive-real entities “rufige kru” or “metalheadz” – that was responsible for his productions, they became grossly self-indulgent follies. part of the reason that it is important to reflect on the hardcore continuum is that it was an example of a culture in which, to use archaic and perhaps misleading terms, “tradition” and the “individual talent” could interact. there was a system in place tight enough to ensure a kind of evolving consistency, but loose enough to enable innovation. here was a culture in which there was “interactivity” and “participation” but it happened at the right speed – the circuit in place didn’t flatten out into immediate access for everyone. unlike web 2.0, the time of the hcc was still a punctual time. it was still the time of dub plates, clubs and record releases, not the dissolute and dis124 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 tributed web 2.0 time of leaked mp3 downloads, play-anytime webcasts and instantaneous comment. the second objection raises questions which connect with broader debates about postmodernism and hauntology. this decade’s dance music is held to have moved beyond critical models established in response to the music of the 1990s, and the disputes here bring into play a certain generational antagonism, the devotees of this decade’s dance music arguing that those who continue to talk about the hcc are out-of-touch nostalgics. but there is something unusual about this generational antagonism. the complaint of the older generation here is not the familiar one that new music is incomprehensible. on the contrary – the problem is that the music being produced this decade is all too comprehensible. it arises from a sense of disappointment that we are still in the same sonic phase space established a decade and a half ago. the period from the 1960s to the 1990s in popular music was marked by future shock, by the arrival of new forms which were continually obsolescing pre-existing critical models, and which would have been sonically unimaginable only a few years – or even a few months – previously. the reason that the hardcore continuum is particularly significant is that, as simon reynolds puts it,3 it constitutes nothing less than modernism’s last stand, or unexpected comeback, long after the ideals of modernism had been abandoned, eroded, questioned, everywhere else (including in pop music). … amazingly it was able to evade the blight of postmodernity (irony, referentiality, citational aesthetics) even as it embraced and explored to the hilt the potential of what would on the surface seem to be the ultimate postmodern sound-machine, the sampler. the issue of whether funky house or wonky have the same modernist velocity as jungle, speed garage and 2-step is far more significant than the – still contentious and interesting – question of whether they can still be classified as belonging to the hardcore continuum. it is not as if either funky or wonky have fully succumbed to the conditions of nostalgia and pastiche which are elsewhere completely dominant in postmodern culture. and there is no doubt that these scenes produce “good records”. the problem, though, can be grasped by a little time travel thought experiment. imagine if it were possible to slip a wonky or a funky house track into a jungle set in 1993. likely as not, there would have been a sense of incongruity, but there wouldn’t be future shock. but jungle would have provoked a sense of future shock if it were played to ravers in 1990, never mind if it were played in 1977 (the same difference in time between 1993 and now). the deceleration implied by this thought experiment produces what i have called “past shock”. drawing upon the work of reza negarestani and felix guattari, alex williams has convincingly theorised wonky as “a kind of process, rather than a fixed endpoint, a liquidation rather than a fusion, a process which occurs to preexisting genres rather than being a genre itself.” like the hauntological music of ghost box or burial, but functioning via decay instead of spectrality, wonky emerges in this theorisation as an alternative to the postmodern “nostalgia mode” which nevertheless grants that a certain future-oriented velocity has been arrested. shadowing both objections is a hostility to theory itself. theory is cast in the role of a curmudgeon, preventing unreflective enjoyment. but no such enjoyment has ever been possible, and the role of criticism – especially a criticism formed and informed by the pulp modernism of something like the hcc – is evidently not simply to act as scenester cheerleading for whatever happens to be produced now. moreover, theory’s role fisher • e abstract reality of the “hardcore continuum” 125 is not opposed to that of dancing; in many respects, in fact, theory stands in the same relation to music as does dance. its function is to complicate and estrange music, not to simply “respond” or “assess” it, a particularly important role at this time, when so much writing about music is either breathless pr or dry consumer guides. ••••••• author biography mark fisher is a writer and theorist based in suffolk, uk. he is a visiting fellow at the centre for cultural studies at goldsmiths, university of london and he teaches philosophy at the city literary institute in london. his book capitalist realism will be published by zer0 books in november 2009. he has edited the resistible demise of michael jackson, a collection of essays on jackson by academics and music journalists, which will also be published by zer0 in november 2009. his weblog can be found at http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org. notes 126 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 1 <http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/02/hardcore-continuum-ortheory-and-its.html> (accessed 20 september 2009). 2 <http://splinteringboneashes.blogspot.com/2009/04/invention-or-discovery-or-whenis-genre.html> (accessed 20 september 2009). 3 <http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/05/nuum-and-itsdiscontents-4-party.html> (accessed 20 september 2009). http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/02/hardcore-continuum-or-theory-and-its.html http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/02/hardcore-continuum-or-theory-and-its.html http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/02/hardcore-continuum-or-theory-and-its.html http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/02/hardcore-continuum-or-theory-and-its.html http://splinteringboneashes.blogspot.com/2009/04/invention-or-discovery-or-when-is-genre.html http://splinteringboneashes.blogspot.com/2009/04/invention-or-discovery-or-when-is-genre.html http://splinteringboneashes.blogspot.com/2009/04/invention-or-discovery-or-when-is-genre.html http://splinteringboneashes.blogspot.com/2009/04/invention-or-discovery-or-when-is-genre.html http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/05/nuum-and-its-discontents-4-party.html http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/05/nuum-and-its-discontents-4-party.html http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/05/nuum-and-its-discontents-4-party.html http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/05/nuum-and-its-discontents-4-party.html looks: studio 54 and the production of fabulous nightlife dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 5(1): 61–74 issn 1947-5403 ©2013 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.01.04 looks: studio 54 and the production of fabulous nightlife madison moore university of richmond (united states) abstract this article combines my experience as a party-host and nightlife-creator with a close reading of studio 54 as a theatrical production. i call for a consideration of how the staging of nightlife functions as an art form, relying on the dual practices of creation and curation. i provide a close reading of the tightly-staged studio 54 experience, focusing on the club’s infamously tight door policy and production of fabulousness to reveal what scholars and ethnographers of nightlife can learn from approaching nightlife as an artistic production. this approach can also inform a nightlife-focused research agenda. keywords: studio 54; fashion; nightlife; andy warhol; relational aesthetics; ethnography; velvet rope; disco; new york madison moore is a staff writer at thought catalog and a post-doctoral fellow in the department of theater and dance at the university of richmond. in december 2012 madison earned the phd in american studies from yale university. he is the author of the thought catalog ebook how to be beyoncé and is at work on a book about fabulousness. email madison at <madison.moore@aya.yale. edu> or visit his website, <http://www.madisonmooreonline.com>. feature article mailto:madison.moore@aya.yale.edu mailto:madison.moore@aya.yale.edu http://www.madisonmooreonline.com dancecult 5(1)62 introduction my name is on the flyer underneath hers in bold, green letters. the letters of my name are smaller than hers, but i do not feel any less significant because of it. “party with the party people”, the flyer says, and i am given 5,000 postcard-sized invitations to leave in cool spots around new york, to hand out to people i see on the street and to take with me everywhere i go. this was the night i hosted a party with transsexual nightlife icon amanda lepore, and it was the night i discovered how to study nightlife. the party happened on 27 february 2012 at santos party house in new york city, the nightclub brainchild of legendary party monster andrew wk. as i danced to the hot beats of the vogue-ball and house-circuit dj vjuan allure in my ten-inch stilettos, black pvc pants and every piece of jewelry i could find in my apartment—far removed from critical readings on nightlife—i realized that the best approach to the study of night cultures is a deeply engaged one. this was not the first time i have hosted or been directly involved with creating a party environment. for three years i was the creative director of an art party in new haven, connecticut, that took place in a downtown art gallery, and i am currently in the process of planning a new one in richmond, virginia. but the party i hosted with amanda lepore represented both the practical and theoretical culmination of my experience as a doer of nightlife. the moments leading up to the event were especially revelatory: the back-andforth email conversations about which bands should play, which djs should spin, what people were planning on wearing, who was going to be on the guest list and what time everything should begin. in effect, this was all a process of staging nightlife not unlike the way a play is staged for the theater. when most of us go out to our favorite bars and clubs, we do not realize the amount of detail and work that goes into making the night actually come together. we do not think about how the promoters and hosts have spent a great deal of time imagining what the party should be. this indicates to me a fundamental tool in the study of nightlife: supplementing historical and ethnographic study with a view of nightlife as a form of social sculpture. indeed, if the question at the center of this volume is how to conduct nightlife-fieldwork, then hosting a party and understanding it as social sculpture offers an indispensible lens of critique that cannot be afforded through other means of analysis. a party is a loosely scripted work of art, and when we understand the party as an aesthetic proposition, nightlife becomes a cultural form, a unique relational space of creation and curation. i wish to explore here the value of approaching nightlife as an artistic installation, as an act of curation and creation. there is a long history, in new york especially, of “happenings” and other performance-art practices that involve staging events, such as fluxus or relational aesthetics. i situate my own work as a party-organizer within this historical lineage. i begin by describing what i mean by nightlife as a site of curation and creation before moving to an analysis of studio 54 that serves as a historical case study of curated nightlife experience. in the broader scheme of nightlife history and dance music culture, historians of nightlife, cultural theorists as well as prominent djs have long suggested that studio moore | looks 63 54 symbolized everything that went wrong with disco. in her revisionist history of disco culture, alice echols crafts a narrative that moves away from the saturday night fever, white-male heterosexualization of an underground culture that was largely black, latino and gay. she found that studio 54 “was reportedly meant to be a white, hollywood version of the fashionable black manhattan disco leviticus” (2010: 195). in richard dyer’s words, disco was fundamentally a black music because of the way it encouraged physicality, closeness, and rhythm: the use of insistent black rhythms in disco music, recognizable by the closeness of the style to soul and reinforced by such characteristic features of black music as the repeated changed phrase and the use of various african percussion instruments, means that it inescapably signifies physicality (dyer 1979: 22). the problem with using studio 54 as an example has less to do with the historical value or merit of the club itself and more with a lopsided and largely inaccurate depiction of studio 54 as the culmination of disco culture, when new york disco was already flourishing underground for years in places like david mancuso’s loft, the sanctuary, paradise garage and nicky siano’s gallery. “the thing is they added this other dimension”, siano once said in an interview. at studio 54, “it was about the body; it was about the look; it was about the drugs; it was about the sex. clubs before that, it really wasn’t the raison d’etre. and it fucked the whole thing up. it was so self-centered” (brewster and broughton 2010: 151). but when has nightlife not been about the body, controlling where bodies can go, which bodies can be gathered in particular spaces or what is appropriate to wear at night? for siano, in other words, studio 54 featured the superfluous and perhaps more commercialized aspects of nightlife culture, not necessarily the vibe, the music or even the djs. it was focused on the fleeting experience—the look, which “fucked the whole thing up”. but this, in fact, is my chief interest in studio 54: it was a culture of many and various kinds of looks—of seeing and being seen, a uniquely modern urban experience, of “working looks”, of getting dressed to experience nightlife. in my view, fashion and the culture of working a look must be seen as vital elements of the nightlife sensorium. i thus concur with fiona buckland’s analysis of queer night spaces in the 1990s, which highlights the importance of a “currency of fabulousness” for largely disenfranchised black and latino gay men, for whom being fabulous is not so much self-centered as it is a centering of the self—a minoritized self that uses nightlife as a space to claim a sense of agency (2002: 38). in the fall of 2011 i taught an advanced american studies junior seminar at yale university called “dance music and nightlife culture in new york city”. the goal was to introduce students to the study of popular culture more broadly, and to the study of the night more specifically. why do we party? how can studying nightlife illuminate american cultural history? making waves from “page six” of the new york post to guest of a guest, new york magazine and even npr, the course received a great deal of attention in the international media circuit, mostly due to the widely-held opinion that nightlife dancecult 5(1)64 is not an appropriate topic of academic study. to the untrained eye, nightlife can appear to be exclusively dedicated to decadence and the pursuit of pleasure. it is, of course, but not exclusively. when the post splashed the headline “yale meets the velvet rope” across “page six” on november 24th 2011, i immediately received a disgruntled email from a yale alum and self-described “major donor” who sought to shame me for “dragging yale’s name through the mud”. the reviews were mixed. some media outlets opined that it was a waste of an expensive ivy league education to study nightlife, while other, more curious people considered the course an exciting opportunity for students. methodologically, i was aware that the seriousness of the course may come into question, and so i was careful to include key historical and theoretical texts on the syllabus. we read historical texts such as lewis erenberg’s iconic steppin out: new york nightlife and the transformation of american culture, 1890–1930 (1981), which focuses on the shift from a victorian america to a more liberated, more sexually-free america, as well as the cultural implications of that shift. other texts included nightclub city: politics and amusement in manhattan (2007) bruce peretti’s study of the legal history of nightlife in the 20th century. the implications of peretti’s book in particular are vast, speaking directly to the ways in which the increasing pressures and restrictions on nightlife, such as curfews and cabaret laws, actually force nightlife promoters to be more creative in their nocturnal activities. david grazian’s fascinating ethnography, on the make: the hustle of urban nightlife (2011), focuses on the way university of pennsylvania students experience nightlife in philadelphia as a series of “hustles”. when we go out, we hustle to get digits from hot people, we use fake ids and we dress older than we should to hustle our ways into club environments. more than one student came to the course questioning the possibility of studying nightlife at all. but by the end of the term, students came to the realization that nightlife is not only an international, multi-billion dollar industry—a billion dollar industry in new york city alone—but that to talk about nightlife and why people pursue it is simultaneously to think through issues of race, class, sexuality, desire, escape and the law, to name a few. in any number of interviews i gave with curious journalists regarding the seminar, the one question that was repeatedly asked was how one could study nightlife while on the dance floor. we associate nightlife with the pursuit of pleasure, so how is it possible, then, for a scholar to approach the club space without disrupting the vibe? do i arrive at the club with a note pad, quickly interviewing people during the break beat? do i break out a recorder and start interviewing people right from the dance floor? in other words, how can you study nightlife without upsetting the natural rhythm of a party? nightlife as social sculpture from a methodological standpoint, i approach nightlife in two ways: nightlife as an aesthetic relational experience and nightlife as a site of curation and creation. approaching a party as a project of curation and creation expands the ethnographic repertoire with a unique and valuable way of knowing, one that transforms history, theory, and observation into real experience. i take my cue from dwight conquergood (1991), whose classic moore | looks 65 essay, “rethinking ethnography: towards a critical cultural politics”, suggests that the ethnographic method of participant-observation privileges the body as a unique site of knowing. for conquergood, “ethnography is an embodied practice; it is an intensely sensuous way of knowing. the embodied researcher is the instrument” (1991: 180). the problem, however, with a purely participant-observational approach to ethnography is that the published text becomes the key piece of evidence rather than the original experience of the ethnography itself. in this way, when presented in their scientific, highly specialized article format, ethnographies sacrifice the actual experience in favor of theory and critical analysis (1991: 181). drawing on the work of victor turner, conquergood concludes that performance offers an ideal remedy to ethnography’s shortcomings, in that it can largely reanimate and accompany an ethnographic text. ethnographic co-performance allows the ethnographer to change roles from a distanced observer to a deeply engaged, intimately involved co-author of the experience (1991: 188). although ethnography already privileges the body as a site of knowing, the articulation of that knowledge in words is not always effective, particularly since not all experiences and epistemologies are verbal ones (1991: 189). for conquergood, it is not so much that standard ethnography is insufficient—he is not interested in abolishing the text. instead, he encourages us to use co-performance to animate and decenter the text. in this way, performance is an alternative, a supplement to text, theory and history (1991: 191). conquergood’s emphasis on the importance of performance in making ethnography come alive, and my use of his terms for thinking about how to study nightlife cultures, are further animated when thought in relationship to nightlife as an aesthetic experience or “social sculpture”. by social sculpture, i mean the trajectory a party takes from a thought or idea to an actual situation that bodies can tangibly experience. this is, in other words, everything that goes into making the party real. to reach that point, a number of things need to happen: hosts, a venue, a dj, the décor, the dress code, performers and the door person; all of this needs to be decided beforehand. these are the sculptural elements of nightlife because the creative directors in charge of the party work to bring a specific vision to life; and yet, what they cannot anticipate is how exactly an audience will respond. nightlife is a social sculpture because the agents pulling the party together inject a number of elements and propositions into a dark space, with the goal of keeping a group of people entertained for hours. in my view, a party is always about how bodies have activated and responded to those sculptural propositions. when we approach nightlife as a social sculpture, when we are directly engaged with the creative experience of actually pulling a party together—throwing disparate elements into the room and waiting to see how people interact with them—we are introduced to a different, relational way of interpreting human behavior. as french art theorist nicolas bourriaud describes, a relational aesthetic endorses the view that to stage human encounters is already to stage a work of art (1998: 44). art itself is a state of encounter, one that demonstrates the features of a particular social world. for bourriaud, “in order to create a dancecult 5(1)66 world, this encounter must be a lasting one: the elements forming it must be joined together in a form, in other words, there must have been ‘a setting of elements on one another (the way ice ‘sets’)” (1998: 19, my emphasis). thus, this lasting encounter, or ability to keep audiences interested, becomes a kind of form, a critical proposition. this particular encounter can only be experienced in the dynamic relationship that arises when we are directly confronted with a series of artistic or philosophical propositions (1998: 21). the relational, creative and curatorial possibilities of nightlife are the artistic propositions that are introduced into the night space—the venue itself, the logo, the music played, the kinds of people targeted—and all of this serves not only to brand the party itself but also as a method of communicating to the targeted audience that this party is for them. sarah thornton has argued that club cultures are taste cultures, where fantasies of identity are placed on display for public consumption (1996: 3, 91). with much choice in terms of where to go after sunset in large urban centers, clubgoers automatically align themselves with the kinds of clubs and parties that they identify with most, clubs that promise to offer the particular experience they are after, whether that experience is a hook-up with a particular kind of person, a kind of drug, or a specific genre of music. through the use of flyers and publicity, by the time a clubgoer arrives at the door to a nightclub, they have already done the work of pre-selecting and sorting out the right environments for themselves (1996: 3, 96). i could not have arrived at the notion of nightlife as a social sculpture without having tied my historical studies of nightlife to my own experience as a party host. in the following section, i focus on studio 54 as merely one example of the party as social sculpture, an act of curation and creation, a process of curation that began with the infamously tight door to the nightclub. i have selected studio 54 specifically because of the indisputable role that the notions of “theatricality” and “casting” played in the experience there. i am interested in what happens when we think about nightlife as a production, as a type of theatrical space. door policies the brainchild of new york-bred nightlife entrepreneurs steve rubell and ian schrager, studio 54 flung its doors open for the first time on 26 april 1977 and, between its opening and a police raid that occurred on 14 december 1978, barely two years later, studio 54 would freeze in time to become the most gimmicky night club in new york history. clubs are frequently measured by their hotness, leading the sociologist david grazian to describe “hotness” as the way “consumers flock to the nightclubs deemed most fashionable”, where they “will suffer long queues and suffocating crowds to luxuriate in the places considered the hot spots of the moment, the epicenters of cool” (2011: 63). my primary interest in studio 54 has to do with how the club brokered its own hotness. as jim fouratt, the manager of the 1980s nightclub danceteria once said about studio 54, “looking fabulous was the only thing that got you past the door” (post 1992: 25). the fact that studio 54 was a nightclub in an old television studio is key for thinking moore | looks 67 about how the nightclub connected itself to theatricality. writing about le palace in paris, an old 17th century theater that was also rehabilitated into a night club in the wake of studio 54, roland barthes describes the club itself as a spectacle of lights, bodies and dancing. moreover, it is indeed a place devoted to seeing: you spend your time looking around the room, and, when you come back from dancing, you start looking again...you look at the lights, the shadows, the decor, but you also do something else at the same time (dance, talk, look at each other): a practice known in the ancient theater (barthes 2010: 120–4). for barthes it is no wonder that the spectacle of nightlife occurs in the reclaimed space of an old theater, which merely returns the building to its original intent as a space devoted to different lines of sight and practices of looking. though there were already hundreds of discotheques open in new york city at the time, studio 54 was perhaps the first to deliberately frame nightlife as an extension of the theater—not least because of its proximity to broadway. in the april 1977 issue of interview magazine, carmen d’alessio, who was hired to promote the new venue, offered readers a preview of a new discotheque set to open at the end of the month: you walk in under a big marquee. i would say that the opening night will be like going to a premier more than going to a discotheque. then you walk into this enormous hall with very, very high ceilings and art deco mirrors and crystal chandeliers and then into this enormous, enormous room where there are like 85-foot ceilings—it’s like five stories. it’s the backstage of a television set with the wires and the cords and you know the place where the cameraman sits? even that is there, too. the dance floor is 11,000 square feet. it’s very, very large. then upstairs is a theater with a seating arrangement (colacello 1977: 42). in her preview, d’alessio describes how the nightclub will offer a unique, curated experience. but most important is her characterization of the club’s architecture as the backstage of a television studio. this is telling, because studio 54 emerged as media saturation and celebrity culture reached a peak. in 1969, andy warhol launched interview, a magazine of unedited interviews with celebrities. according to warhol, at that time “everyone, absolutely everyone, was tape-recording everyone else. machinery had already taken over people’s sex lives—dildos and all kinds of vibrators—and now it was taking over their social lives, too, with tape recorders and polaroids” (2006: 367). realizing the possibilities for this new fad, warhol discovered that tapes introduced new possibilities for interviews with celebrities: since we were a long time between movies lately, i began to think about starting a magazine of nothing but taped interviews. then john wilcock dropped by one day and asked me if i would start a newspaper with him. together we brought out the first issue of interview magazine in the fall of ’69 (warhol 2006: 367–8). dancecult 5(1)68 perhaps more famous than the club itself are the well-publicized stories about who could not get into this tightly curated space. supposedly john kennedy, jr. and warren beatty at one point did not get in (los angeles times 1989: 26). andy warhol remembers being nervous about not getting in every time he went, despite being a regular guest (warhol 1980: 50). studio’s dictator-like door policy was so infamous that even taxi drivers, those overlooked yet key figures in nightlife, played the role of doorman. one driver confessed: “i tell people not to go there because i know they’re not going to get in. i know which ones will get in. i try to tell them they just aren’t dressed right” (capote et al 1979: 33). what in particular did the experience of studio 54 offer its patrons? moreover, if studio managed to craft and popularize an image of exclusivity and denial wherein patrons knew that admission could be next to impossible to achieve, why did they continue to show up every night? what is the power of the nightclub door? sometimes the most difficult aspect of going out is getting in, even when one is on the guest list. what interests me about exclusive nightlife settings and door culture is not that a space has an exclusive door policy, but that there is a market for spaces with exclusive door policies to begin with. in my experience, i have found that the more difficult it is to gain access to a place, the more fabulous it seems and thus the more desirable access to the venue becomes. in 1931, the actor jimmy durante described the door scene of an all-black revue starring the cabaret singer florence mills that used the impossible door to stir public interest. the show was conceptualized by broadway producer lew leslie, who had the novel idea to create a publicity stunt to attract an even larger audience to see mills perform, who was already a headlining talent in new york and paris. when excited fans approached the door of the plantation club, they could hear live music pouring out onto the sidewalk. but imposing, red velvet curtains were drawn over the club door, and a sizable bouncer stood on the outside explaining that he could not let anyone in. inevitably, the concertgoers would ask if they could come back tomorrow, and the bouncer told them that the reservation list was full then, too. this was despite the fact that there was no reservation list and that no one was actually on the inside of the club. this performance of rejection went on for weeks, after which the doorman started to let people in, and the show became a runaway success (durante 1931: 176). as durante observed, there is a certain “new york manner of flocking only to places where it’s hard to get in” (1931: 176). aside from illustrating a history of door policy, what emerges from this particular example is the fact that crowds attract crowds, and the more crowded a place appears, the more in-demand it becomes. rejection from the door of studio 54 reveals important theories about how the club’s own image and reputation was solidified: through the myth of the tight door. a tight door policy means that simply waiting in line and paying the fee to enter a club does not guarantee admittance. instead, bodies are read and subjected to intense scrutiny by a door person, who selects the “right” people to let in from a crowd of many. door cultures are thus image cultures as well as taste cultures that are managed by rites of self-selection, curation, and mixing that reinforce and establish belonging among disparate groups. this mixture of sexualities, styles of dress, backgrounds, class and levels of fame enforced by the tight door— moore | looks 69 what rubell often referred to as “making a salad”—was central to studio 54’s popularity. as clubgoers approached the door as a stylized, heightened version of themselves, doormen curated the right people from the crowd as a way to produce a site of belonging where bodies from diverse backgrounds could intersect intimately in a way that might not be possible outside of the club context (malbon 1999: 51). a tight door policy thus creates a site of curated bodies, where the curation relates to the specificity of what a given person will contribute to the party in order to sustain its energy. in archival footage of the door scene at studio filmed in 1979, hundreds of well-dressed people on narrow 54th street are herded behind a plush velvet rope, their arms held high in the air. their arms are held high because they are working to get the attention of marc benecke, the doorman at studio 54 and the last word on who may enter the space. commenting on how he selects people to enter, benecke said that he: would just zero in on somebody i knew was going to get in and frankly pretty much ignore people who i knew weren’t going to get in. and the funny thing was when i did change tactics and say to people, ‘i’m really sorry. you really don’t have a chance. maybe you should come back another night’ they would just stand there for two or three hours anyway. it was amazing to me that anyone would do that. but there was such a fervor. such a need to be inside (haden-guest 1997: 56–62). benecke is perched atop a red standpipe, peering over the crowd, combing through it with his eyes, pointing and waving forward those he wants to admit. as the audience fights for benecke’s attention, what becomes clear is that this door scene reveals in-the-middle-ofsomething-ness or the excitement around the-about-to-transpire. there are thus two scenes at studio 54—the activity on the inside of the club that is driven by heightened sensory experiences that drugs, music and dancing facilitate, and then there is the spectacle of street theater on the outside of the club where audiences wait in anticipation. in my reading, the door scene at studio functions as a site of intensified energy. by intensified energy, i mean that the aura of the space proposes potentiality and possibility. the audience realizes that it is on the cusp. this is what village voice columnist michael musto meant when he remembered that “we would just stand outside [of studio 54] for hours and hours, and that would be a full night’s entertainment, just watching the celebrities’ limousines pull up, and see who would come out of them. we didn’t even try to get in”(haden-guest 1997: 59). for musto, staying out amid the hype was where the critical event took place because the door scene was an event that fueled anticipation. studio 54 did not invent the tight door nor the velvet rope. nonetheless, studio’s strenuous door policy marks the beginning of the popularization as well as the mainstreaming of “door culture” in new york nightlife. on 31 august 1979, the new york times published a story entitled, “the last word at discos belongs to the doormen”, an in-depth article about the impact of door culture at the leading nightclubs in the city. despite what their job title suggests, the article opined, doormen “aren’t around to open and close doors; they’re around to decide whether the door is going to open at all for you, and you, and you” (nemy dancecult 5(1)70 1979). scholars of club cultures have theorized the door to these types of in-demand spaces as sites of control, exclusion and racism. as paul chatterton and robert hollands argue in a study on the political economy of urban nightlife, door cultures are used as a systematic “mechanism for distinction and exclusion” (2003: 59). importantly, these distinctions are class-based but they are also often rooted in subcultural capital and the legibility of hipness (thornton 1996: 11). each nightclub has its own set of discriminatory tools listed under the blanket of “entry requirements” as a way to facilitate entry or denial. in one field experience, i observed the door to a midtown manhattan nightclub and watched a young black man get thrown out of the line because he was wearing tennis shoes and baggy jeans. fashion and self-styling play a key role in impression-management and the legibility of bodies in socio-theatrical situations. what impression, exactly, did the combination of the man’s blackness, his tennis shoes and his baggy jeans communicate to the door person? the fear of certain kinds of styles raises important questions about the dialogue between fashion and the discriminatory social structures built into the club experience. in ben malbon’s words, “bouncers on ‘the door’ at clubs can also reinforce wider societal prejudices in respect of ethnicity, gender and ‘good looks’”(1999: 64). at the height of studio 54’s popularity, the increasing use of the tight door to promote exclusivity based on appearance led the head of the new york state liquor authority to caution club owners that their admission policies might infringe on individual constitutional rights. any rule “barring admission is a violation of rule 36 (d) of the rules of the state liquor authority, and could result in license revocation proceedings” (roth 1977). one new york restaurateur sued the exclusive nightspot régine’s for $2 million dollars in damages because he and his wife were barred entry (roth 1977). unless these stiff policies were relaxed, the commissioner warned that a club could be shut down. but it must also be noted that nightclub doors are sites of curation. in a profile of doormen that appeared in the new york times in 1979, charles yancy, the door person at the xenon, a popular off-broadway club that emerged after studio 54, remarked that every night he would “look around and see what i created—every night it’s different” (nemy 1979). here, curating an audience for the party has to do with the art of the mixture—that is, of insuring that people from a diversity of backgrounds are represented. shane vogel has shown how “intimacy” facilitates the art of the mixture by creating unique, intimate situations, or what i would call “social sculptures”, wherein disparate groups suddenly find themselves in a shared space with a unique set of commonalities linked to various subcultural tastes in fashion, music, or styles of dance. and, as sarah thornton describes, club cultures create—or curate—the right social sculpture by relying on tools of targeted promotion that include flyers, telecommunications, promoters and finally door policy, which she sees as the last resort to insure that the club has targeted the right audience. for thornton, the club audience is already pre-selected and pre-sorted, and door policy becomes a final measure to segregate the crowd from those who “belong” or fit the mix from those who do not (1996: 23–4). moore | looks 71 and yet, the process of curating bodies is also the process of casting. as one door person remarked in 1979, “i feel like i’m casting a show every night” (nemy 1979). if a tight door relates to the theatrical act of casting, then the logic behind studio 54’s tight door policy becomes especially clear. i have already shown how 54 built its image around the bald use of the media, paparazzi culture and the television studio, where the raised stage was the dance floor and where those admitted walked through a mirrored lobby with old cbs boom mics and television cameras still in place. the near-impenetrable door was therefore the curating of a group, but it was also very literally the filmic, televisual and theatrical casting of actors for the play of nightlife. as warhol remembered, “the key to the success of studio 54 is that it’s a dictatorship at the door and a democracy on the floor. it’s hard to get in, but once you’re in you could end up dancing with liza minnelli. at 54, the stars are nobody because everybody is a star. it’s the place where my prediction from the sixties finally came true: ‘in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes’” (1979: 48). the nightly act of casting, in the language of star-making, linked studio 54 to performance and celebrity culture. studio’s immense popularity was borne out of the way it brought the excitement of celebrity culture—typically experienced via a screen—to the masses and gave audiences a chance to participate in the spectacle. in the process, the club signaled key changes in american culture, media and the experience of celebrity. conclusion, or why the party is research in my own experience as a clubgoer, i have always been drawn to the kinds of glamorous, excessive parties where straight people, gay people and anybody in between inhabit the same space. in 2009 i was visiting a collection of fashion archives at ucla and found myself spending time in echo park in my downtime. i wandered into the echo park independent co-op, a fashion boutique that only carries clothes by local designers, and i told the boutique owner that i came to l.a. in search of fabulousness. her face instantly lit up. “you have to go to rhonda”, she told me. when i asked what rhonda was, she said that it was the stomping ground for l.a club kids, that it was “a fashion party. very studio 54. gay, straight, anything goes”. i was so excited. when i got to rhonda, which was held at the el cid restaurant that night, the queue stretched down the block. the party was full of people from varying ethnic backgrounds and sexualities, some dressed casually, others working serious looks. the door person was a drag queen, but it was not a gay party. in other words, the nightlife i find the most exciting is where it exists in a space of convergence, where people from a variety of backgrounds come together. going out is an occasion, an event, a special part of the week where we are free to fully express ourselves. if i am planning to spend hours in a club, i want to be excited and inspired by other people’s creativity. i want to have exchanges with people based on their creative output. this is not to say that every party needs to be a dress-up party, that non-dressup parties are no fun or that people who don’t dress up are doing it all wrong. nightlife dancecult 5(1)72 cultures are taste cultures, and my particular taste is for being in a space with different kinds of people who have a range of approaches to and expressions of their bodies. but even as i critique this more monochromatic form of nightlife, i should point out that people usually have a number of reasons for going out—for sex partners, for music, to be seen and to make friends, and each of these reasons has its own dedicated nightlife scene. curating a party is like tossing a salad, as steve rubell put it. and one of the things i have learned as a host is that a party loses its steam when the crowd is too monolithic. no matter how much i prefer transgressive dress up parties, every attendee does not need to be in a look because too much sameness actually makes things boring and destroys the element of surprise. when i hosted the party with amanda lepore at santos party house in new york, part of the goal was to use hosts to attract diverse audiences. party hosts are like brand names, and when a particular name is splashed on the face of a flyer or attached to the party in some way, that alone says a great deal about what kind of party it is going to be. every party host is plugged into a different set of subcultural universes. this particular party listed andrew wk as the “master of ceremonies”, but it also listed performances by cherie lily, amanda lepore and cazwell, three icons within the new york gay scene. moreover, it indicated that vjuan allure would be spinning, and he is one of the biggest dj names in the house/ ballroom circuit. in curating the names on the flyer for our party, we essentially sent signals to a number of subcultures at once. those who like andrew wk will come out to see him, but those who want to vogue will come because of vjuan allure. whoever is hosting a party or whatever performances are scheduled has a great deal to do with the kind of audience that eventually shows up. in my role as a nightlife host and creator of parties i have learned three key things about the culture of the night that have been instrumental in my research. first of all, scholars and ethnographers of nightlife can learn a great deal from the “tossing a salad” metaphor. we must talk to the party hosts and party promoters themselves, who are responsible for putting the “salad” together. we need to talk to them about their jobs, what they do, and how they approach a particular party. even though scholars of nightlife can learn a great deal by talking to the clubgoers themselves, it is the promoters who have created the sculptural elements and artistic propositions that clubgoers experience. ask them how they chose a particular venue and why. inquire about how they decided which performers to book or about how they design the flyers, where they put them, and how they are advertised. some promoters in large urban centers place flyers in record shops, cafes or boutiques, but others create more of a mystique by sending email blasts, text messages from disposable numbers or by building an aura of secrecy around the event by requiring a password to get in. aside from thinking through how the salad of nightlife is tossed together, or how the social sculpture is formalized, scholars and ethnographers of night cultures should explore how their work is animated when they approach a party as a theatrical production. in many ways, the promoter acts like a director who casts all the elements and brings a party to life. by thinking about a party as a theatrical production we are then forced to think thorough moore | looks 73 all of the technical issues involved in assembling an audience: the use of space, lighting, decoration and design, the kind of music played, whether people are dancing and how they are interacting with the space overall. but we should also consider how the audience interacts with the sculptural elements and relational propositions that have been placed before them. the final piece of the puzzle for any ethnographer studying nightlife as a cultural form is to assess one’s own relationship to the night world that one is studying. this entails an honest and blunt assessment of one’s own subcultural privilege and the potential impact of one’s study on this social world. my dissertation advisor once asked me whether or not i had any advantage in my work on exclusive spaces such as velvet-rope nightclubs and luxury boutiques because of the way i present myself. honestly, i had never thought about it that way before, but it is true that i do read in specific ways to given subcultures, and taking account for how we are either afforded or denied access based on how we read is a fascinating aspect of any ethnography. i have tried to connect the lines between nightlife as a social sculpture and nightlife as a process of casting and curation. as much as we can learn theories about space or read histories of night cultures, being responsible for your own parties adds new layers of understanding about how night worlds come together and what they mean. when we create our own parties or events, we stop thinking like scholars, at least temporarily, and begin thinking like innovators and creators with an aesthetic goal in mind. we realize that a party never simply happens, but rather that much creative work has gone into putting it together. acknowledgements thanks to simonez wolf and cody allen for showing me the way. i would also like to thank cherie lily, andrew wk, leo gugu, aleksey kernes, steve lewis, chris alker, gregory alexander, kayvon zand and gamal hennesey. and thanks to new york nightlife icon susanne bartsch for being fabulous. references boorstin, daniel. 1980. the image: a guide to pseudo events in america. new york: atheneum. bourriaud, nicolas. 1998. relational aesthetics. paris: les presses du réel. buckland, fiona. 2002. impossible dance: improvised social dance as queer world-making. middletown, ct: wesleyan university press. capote, truman andy warhol and bob colacello. 1979. “steve rubell: in the heat of the night”. interview, february: 30–36. chatterton, paul and robert hollands. 2003. urban nightscapes: youth cultures, pleasure spaces and corporate power. new york: routledge. colacello, bob. 1977. “oh carmen!” interview, april: 42. dancecult 5(1)74 conquergood, dwight. 1991. “rethinking ethnography: towards a critical cultural politics”. communication monographs 59: 179–94. dyer, richard. 1979. “in defense of disco”. gay left, summer: 20–23. erenberg, lewis. 1981. steppin’ out: new york nightlife and the transformation of american culture, 1890–1930. chicago: university of chicago press. fikentscher, kai. 2000. “you better work!”: underground dance music in new york city. hanover, nh: university press of new england. grazian, david. 2011. on the make: the hustle of urban nightlife. chicago: university of chicago press. haden-guest, anthony. 1997. the last party: studio 54, disco, and the culture of the night. new york: william morrow. lawrence, tim. 2003. love saves the day: a history of american dance music culture, 1970–1979. durham: duke university press. los angeles times. 1989. “steve rubell obituary”. 27 july. malbon, ben. 1999. clubbing: dancing, ecstasy and vitality. london: routledge. nemy, enid. 1979. “the last word at discos belongs to the doormen”. new york times, 31 august: a14. peretti, bruce. 2007. nightclub city: politics and amusement in manhattan. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. post, henry. 1982. “heart of darkness”. new york, 3 may: 24–30. roth, robert. 1977. “ny club scrutiny draws liquor board fire”. billboard, 17 december: 68. thornton, sarah. 1996. club cultures: music, media, and subcultural capital. hanover: university press of new england. vogel, shane. 2009. the scene of harlem cabaret: race, sexuality, performance. chicago: university of chicago press. warhol, andy and bob colacello. 1979. andy warhol’s exposures. new york: grosset & dunlap. warhol, andy and pat hackett. 1986. the andy warhol diaries. new york: grand central publishing. kindle edition. art3-typeset-ver1 the aesthetics of protest in uk rave ramzy alwakeel independent scholar abstract informed by the conceptualisation of an “aesthetic politics” around largely unlawful rave and dance scenes in britain between the late-1980s and mid-1990s, this article explores negotiations between these edmcs and the british parliamentary and legal establishments. two case studies will inform the argument that rave culture effects a “performative protest”. that is, autechre’s response to the 1994 criminal justice and public order act and the work of the justified ancients of mu mu in the late-1980s will be discussed in order to suggest that rave can be considered a speech-act that immediately communicates its own refusal to submit to authority. it will be suggested that rave’s responses to power structures derive from the internal dynamics of its own aesthetic politics. i shall conclude that rave has often functioned as a potent political vehicle on its own terms, but that the embrace of its own multiplicity safeguards it against exhaustion by any single agenda. keywords rave, politics, aesthetics, autechre, jams “music” includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats. criminal justice and public order act 1994: section 63, subsection 1b warning: lost and djarum contain repetitive beats. we advise you not to play these tracks if the criminal justice bill becomes law. flutter has been programmed in such a way that no bars contain identical beats and can therefore be played at both forty five and thirty three revolutions under the proposed new law. however, we advise djs to have a lawyer and a musicologist present at all times to confirm the non repetitive nature of the music in the event of police harassment. autechre, sleevenotes to the anti ep, 1994 the uk’s notorious criminal justice and public order act of 1994 furnished the british legal establishment with new powers to prevent people from playing dance music during the night at “gathering[s] on land in the open air of 100 or more persons”. autechre’s tongue-in-cheek response put its money where its mouth was: all dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(2) 2010, 50-62 issn 1947-5403 ©2010 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.03 proceeds from the record’s sales went to the national council for civil liberties, while a sticker on the 12-inch sleeve warned that the act sought “to outlaw diversity and dissent” and to target “specific groups of people in an unjust and discriminatory way”. despite the directness of these particular protestations, autechre’s usual public relations are determinedly opaque. nowhere else in their sizeable catalogue is there so much as a complete sentence: their album and track titles range from abstract to incomprehensible; their artwork eschews any visual representation of autechre themselves; their records are entirely instrumental. this absence of voice is not unusual amongst dance artists: subjectivity within edmcs is often shifting or multiple, more so than in the idealised brush strokes of rock music.1 jimmy cauty and bill drummond, for example, have established semi-distinct artistic identities as the justified ancients of mu mu, the klf and the timelords, all deeply critical of the process that generates marketable musical figureheads. elsewhere, under names such as the aphex twin, afx and polygon window, richard d. james has exploded conventional ideas about the creative subject through a complex manipulation of the artistic strands – name, appearance, voice, style – usually taken to signify the self. against this backdrop, autechre’s response to the criminal justice act is problematic: it looks like a statement of political protest, but who is making it, and on what grounds? to address these questions, the “political” itself must be appraised and defined. following this, the present work will focus upon the british rave and dance scenes between the late-1980s and the mid-1990s (for brevity, hereafter referred to as “rave”, although the shortcomings of the singular will be noted), assessing the applicability of each analysis to the edmcs in question. a further idea will be acknowledged: that these scenes were devoid of objective, only being perceived as subversive at all because the government treated their apparatus as such. it will be argued, however, that this lack of object does not silence rave on all counts; on the contrary, a specific political currency lies precisely in its very persistence in the face of regulation. to develop the argument, i will attempt to formulate an “aesthetic politics” of rave that derives from the culture’s internal relationships: those between subject and object, between content and form, especially where these divisions are shown to be problematic or inadequate. this will be used to inform an understanding of rave’s relationships to the external world. as a key component of these relationships, i will propose that rave’s response to external pressures is performative: that, as an effect of these aesthetic politics, rave’s very existence can be seen to function as a speech-act. this theory of performative protest will be explored within two case studies: the autechre ep mentioned above, whose active use contravenes the act to which it objects, and the justified ancients of mu mu, who use unlicensed samples to critique the notion that sound can be owned. protest and power popular music has made extensive comment on the relationships between government and citizens. musicians across a variety of disciplines frequently address issues such as war, human rights and the state through lyrics and sleevenotes. the role of  music within social and cultural movements has been considered at length by critics and journalists. peter doggett (2007) and reebee garofalo (1992), for example, refer to numerous examples of popular musicians committed to cultural politics through public speaking or lyrical content. while “protest music” in the context, for instance, of alwakeel • the aesthetics of protest in uk rave 51 rock is often characterised by vocal opposition to oppression through song, the acts of protest explored within this article take place through primarily non-verbal means. this is, in part, due to the music itself; edm is often either completely instrumental or laden with samples in such a way that it is difficult to differentiate “words” from “sounds”, or “voice” from “instrument”. music that does not contain explicitly oppositional lyrics might instead function as “protest” through projects and events: that is, through its use. such events might be aimed, for instance, to promote awareness, or raise funds. more fundamentally, however, it is argued that the very act of raving, or the very existence of rave events and music, can be considered a form of protest. in an attempt to understand “protest” in this context, i begin with the central argument in robin balliger’s piece “politics”: that music’s political currency lies not just in its lyrical content but in the modes of its use. integral to her study is a case for the expansion of the term “politics” to include “not only state and economic structures but also power relations in everyday life” (balliger 1999: 59). balliger suggests that social power structures may be reinforced or resisted by popular music, but that these cultural effects are determined by the process of consumption: music’s “meaning” is established through its use, not just its content. theodor adorno (1988, 2006) takes a different approach, but prefigures balliger’s position that music’s meaning and political function need not be determined through lyrics. rather, adorno suggests that the internal musical dynamics of a piece can and should function as a direct response to capitalism and war. that is, the power relations exercised between components of the musical material2 should respond abstractly to the power relations exercised between individuals and governance structures within the external world. although it is important to note that adorno’s analyses are specific to certain types of modernism, and that he judges the majority of modern music to fall short of an adequate response to the post-war zeitgeist, his work has foreshadowed a number of ideas that are relevant to edmcs. walter benjamin’s essay “the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction” considers the effects upon the artwork’s “aura” (briefly, its otherness) in light of the industrial processes associated with its production, mediation and consumption.3 benjamin concludes that, once art is stripped of this aura through technological interventions, its cultural work becomes necessarily a matter of politics (benjamin 1999: 235). that is, benjamin suggests that the commodification of art, and its resultant perception as the product of labour and therefore a component of the economic system, creates an aesthetic politics – art can be seen either to reinforce or to resist power, status and authority. simon frith brings benjamin’s argument into the realm of popular music by suggesting that “the technology of mass reproduction [is, after benjamin] a progressive force” (frith 1981: 47) and that “the development of socialized means of expression enabled the development of a socialist aesthetic” (frith 1981: 47). moreover, the process works both ways: jacques attali (1985) and william s. burroughs (2004) suggest that ideologies can be reproduced and propagated through recording technology, rendering sound a dangerous weapon in the hands of government. at the same time, music and sound are used to consolidate community: the organisation of sound “links a power center to its subjects” (attali 1985: 6) and asserts territory against chaos through refrain and rhythm (deleuze and guattari 2004: 343). “with music”, writes attali, “is born power and its opposite: subversion” (1985: 6). all this is to say that music need not contain explicit verbal references to political situations to be considered political. the way in which music is produced and used can be considered a political process in itself, reflecting and responding to the 52 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 power relationships between anything from large international structures to individuals and machines. this process is an “aesthetic politics”. this piece will explore the specific aesthetic politics of the edmcs identified above as “rave”. aesthetic politics: rave subject and rave object first, i wish to address the idea that an aesthetic politics derives from the relationships between what, for the moment, we will consider a distinct subject and object within art. by “subject”, we might initially understand a creative, performing or listening self; by “object”, we might mean that which the music treats or addresses, explicitly or otherwise, although these will be complicated as the argument progresses. as suggested above, the processes through which music reaches its audience have implications for its meaning. where subject and/or object can be identified within music or culture, these are also affected by the way in which the music or culture is created, mediated or propagated. whilst rock musicians are often highly forthcoming about their own lives and experiences, and about what they hope to achieve, it is difficult to see who, exactly, might be the creative subject within rave, especially if we are hoping to identify a particular sociological group, a typical rave artist. the argument that rave embraced anonymity is hardly new. haslam (1997: 177-9) and rietveld (1998: 265) note that the subjectivity of a track’s author is often subordinate to that of the dj, who is visible and responsive in a way that the creator of a record is not. poschardt suggests that the anonymity of the artists can be interpreted as “a transfer of authorship to music-generating technology” (1998: 286-7). with this in mind, it is not even clear at what point authorship actually occurs: popular rave tracks are often unlicensed remixes, made by djs themselves to satisfy the needs of a specific club night (rietveld 1997: 126), or an assembled array of illegal samples, with no marketable identity to the piece as a whole (poschardt: 262-3). the creative dance subject fails to reside in any single ideological process. in part, this is due to the failure on the part of any monocultural model to fit rave-goers: it is easier to decide who is speaking if we know to whom a voice is directed, and what it is saying, but poschardt points out that nothing in this music was designed to recall the ghettos or the bronx or the gay clubs in chicago and new york; it was the music of young djs who liked house and disco and hip-hop, but were infinitely far removed from the culture of reference (1998: 263). the suggestion that there is no ideal author or consumer within rave culture is illuminated by studies of the music itself. reynolds goes so far as to say that the rave experience is “intransitive” (reynolds 1997: 104), not directed to any end – rave communicates no “message” to or from any specific group of people. gilbert and pearson agree, arguing that attempts to narrativise or functionally explain the “non-verbal and nonrational structures of dance” have themselves been driven by an intellectual “fear of the irrational” (gilbert and pearson 1999: 16). rave, here, has no basis in reality, is not a response to anything. it has no message to communicate, pursuing instead the “creation of sensations without pretext or context” (reynolds 1997: 104; my emphasis). thus, the “acid test” for edm might be considered primarily to be its success on a sonic level, as its creation of sensations, as something that sustains and develops a “vibe” (rietveld 1998: 248; st john 2009: 97-100). the records and artists dubbed alwakeel • the aesthetics of protest in uk rave 53 “electronic listening music” in the years following the rave explosion represent a significant move away from the idea that dance is a prerequisite of dance music, but warehouse parties and dance clubs grew up because there was something to gain from experiencing a beat communally.4 where music is consumed in clubs and parties, there is no record sleeve to examine and rarely a vocalist or instrumentalist to watch: familiarity with certain tracks comes first through repeated exposure, not through promotional channels. authorship is established through direct experience of the music, not in advance of the work itself,5 and the shared goal of surrendering to the beat (rietveld 1998: 266) subordinates a record’s origins to its effects. all the same, identities are abstracted from the collective experience. the klf, the justified ancients of mu mu and the timelords, for example, can all be identified as the work of jimmy cauty and bill drummond: the three share a highly visible anarchic approach to the values that are expected of a professional musician. identity is problematised by the multiplicity of aliases; the navigation of the industry’s own terms is rendered absurd by the publication of “golden rules” to achieve a number one single (the timelords 1995); the klf’s doubling as a record label looks more like infiltration than complicity when it is observed that “klf” stands for “kopyright liberation front”. nonetheless, any author-identity that is established through dance music will be tempered by the constant redefinition and reinscription of that author’s work. this takes place not only through samples and remixes but within the rave party itself. as part of a dj set, music is chopped, changed and overdubbed to a utilitarian end: the best all-round experience, not the individual glory of a track. there is surely an element of competition between records, but a dance party is anything but a showcase: the identity of a track is blurred as soon as it is established. tracks in a continuous dj mix have no discernable beginning or end, and might be sped up, slowed down or pitch-shifted so that they are mixed seamlessly. individuality is often secondary to compatibility. the conclusion that the music’s utility is paramount recalls reynolds’ argument that rave music’s actual content does not convey any message beyond that of its own significance and signification. “the ‘you’ or ‘it’ in vocal samples refers not to a person, but to a sensation. in truth, these are love-songs to the drug… or in the case of baby d’s ‘let me be your fantasy’, a love-tribute to the rave scene/dream itself ” (reynolds 1997: 107). reynolds argues that the aesthetic politics of the rave record are static: subject and object are identified in the same place. accordingly, there is no model to be found within rave music for its response to the world outside itself. adorno demands that music make a response to the zeitgeist by its very internal relationships: his analyses speak of the specific musical “material” within a piece and of the dialectic between [s]ubject6 and object (adorno 2006). conversely, rave’s reflexivity and/or lack of object – the celebration of celebration itself – does not speak of negotiation or conflict, or even the response to stimulus. however, to analyse an edmc in terms of its musical texts alone is to neglect the politics of its usage: as we saw above, the records’ individuality can be considered subordinate to their utility within a wider context, and the aesthetic politics of rave’s wider context are anything but hermetic. poschardt argues the point succinctly, observing that “[w]ithstanding and thinking through differences, and allowing them to become part of the creative process is a fundamental idea in the dj aesthetic, in which difference is always reflected in the separateness of the two turntables” (poschardt 1998: 295-9). this observation allows the dialectic to re-enter the discussion. however, i suggest that the rave dialectic differs from adorno’s modernist dialectic in one 54 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 important respect: neither turntable is considered to have primacy over the other in the way that subject confronts object. records emerge from the mix as “crowdpleasers”; the work of one artist might become particularly well known; but these dominances are temporary. no sooner has one record been recognised than it is being mixed into another, filtered, looped, sped up or slowed down. the primacy of one record within a dj set is an eddy, not a current. in other words, neither is identified as subject or object: the turntables are in dialogue as equals, whereas the struggle between subject and object is based on a fundamental inequality.7 reynolds suggests that the dissolution of inequality in the rave aesthetic is driven by the deposition of freudian hetero-normative sexual hierarchy: one of the few truly new and “subversive” aspects of rave is that it’s the first youth subculture that’s not based around the notion that sex is transgressive… recoiling from our sex-saturated popular culture, rave instead locates jouissance in pre-pubescent childhood or pre-oedipal infancy (reynolds 1997: 106). this is perhaps a half-truth. reynolds’ ontology is messy: the idea that the rejection of conventional sexual difference is a childlike trait suggests that adults are in fact objectively, pre-discursively sexed. gilbert and pearson devote some space to arguing the opposite, after butler and foucault: gendered and sexual norms are a product of the reproduction of discursive statements (gilbert and pearson 1999: 48-51), not of any “material” distinction – or, rather, there is no difference between these methods of construction. by suggesting that rave represents merely a temporary relief from an inescapable, objectively sexed adult reality, reynolds’ argument makes reference to the very degenerate ontology that the rave experience rejects. rather, as gilbert and pearson go on to argue, “jouissance is a regressive experience, related to a moment in the pre-history of the subject before gendered identity is assumed” (gilbert and pearson 1999: 67). although their analysis is sympathetic to reynolds’ work, the temporal language of their argument relates to the development of the idea of the [s]ubject, and not to any sexual development of the human individual. either way, it is a point of agreement that rave aesthetics do not discursively reproduce predetermined difference. aided by the chemical effects of ecstasy, social and political boundaries are broken down. wright (1998: 233) suggests that communication on the dancefloor is non-verbal, an idea echoed by rietveld’s identification of the tactile-acoustic value of collective raving (1998: 258-9). her subsequent protest that “you could lose yourself to the beat, but this does not question the foundations of society” (rietveld 1998: 266) might in fact be too cautious: the conceptualisation of “oneself ” is precisely the foundation of society. granted, dancing does not “question” anything, but this is because to question is to engage in discourse. gilbert and pearson note that “dance seems to reject discourse” (1999: 6), and it is in this quality that the rave experience offers a liberation from sexual hierarchy: not through the offer of a means to forget it, but through the refusal to accept that it is necessary at all. the dance is temporary, but there is not necessarily any limit to its psychological effects. i therefore argue that rave’s aesthetic politics are dialectical, but that the dialectic does not recognise subject as privileged over object: indeed, the internal dynamics of rave records do not recognise the two as distinct at all. rather, rave’s aesthetic politics are fluid. in rejecting the notion that difference is territorial, rave embraces the multiplicity of perspectives and cultures to which it appeals and from which it draws. indeed, this rejection also proscribes any concrete theorisation of what rave itself is (and alwakeel • the aesthetics of protest in uk rave 55 therefore what it is not), what its core beliefs might be or who its agents are. what effect, then, does this have upon rave as a site for resistance? how can something so fluid have a “voice” in protest against something so material as an act of parliament? autechre and the criminal justice act http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4ovhldnri8 autechre – “flutter” (anti ep) what is notable about the example of anti is that the situation against which it protests is a challenge to rave itself. the criminal justice act, for all its sloppy wording, intended to prohibit open-air dance parties. it made sense, then, that the associated music should have had something to say about it. rupa huq notes that “rave had never in its wildest… dreams come to dabble in what we have come conventionally to recognise as politics until the criminal justice bill” (1999: 16). this “dabbling” represents not a (conventional) politicisation of rave itself, but rather the use of rave to a political end. the distinction might at first appear trivial but it is this resistance to becoming a point on the political spectrum that allows rave its continued utility as a political vehicle. the overt political voices that rave supplied in the period surrounding the act were only necessary because the culture’s performativity had not been a clear enough means of communication for the mass media to decode. “rave has always been seen as primarily hedonistic, and this is reflected in its politics,” suggests huq (1999: 24). “in the face of the bill/act the continuation of free parties has become highly charged political rhetoric in itself ” (huq 1999: 25). the notion that these edmcs are performative is not uncomplicated, and requires a great deal more work than can be undertaken here, but i would suggest that we begin by identifying rave as a communication: not communication by an artist to a listener, but communication by a culture regarding itself. in being its own object, rave culture itself says “rave sounds like this” or “rave makes you feel like this” or, more generally, “rave is”. a rave party, or a dance record, immediately communicates its own existence to those who experience it. where this existence is challenged, the immediate communication “rave is” becomes “rave still is”.8 anti’s protest, then, is its very existence. the letters “aep” are all that is printed on the front cover; on the sleeve’s sticker, they are decoded as “agigate. educate. protest.”9 the verbs are imperative but self-directed, like the dalek chant of “exterminate!” throughout doctor who: the pervasive “rave is” is attached to “aep” such that rave is redefined in the case of this particular record as an act of agitation, education and protest, and the record automatically passes into the realm of these concepts by virtue of their having been stated. the first two tracks, “lost” and “djarum”, are identified as the “repetitive beats” targeted by the act.10 their very existence (at least insofar as music has to be played to exist) breaks the law – a peaceful protest, although raves are not actually “peaceful”. the power of this gesture lies precisely in the fact that rave itself, and not its authorship, is the subject of the protest: authors have to do in order to break the law, whereas this music can simply be. in communicating “rave is protest”, anti protests. in this case, the fact that rave communicates its protest “in itself ” leaves its audience unaffected: the raver-subject is not drawn into the statement. illegality does not necessarily politicise the very rave experience – rietveld notes that “losing one’s ego to relentless machine rhythms… does not seem to create a strong counter-political force” 56 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 (1998: 259) – but is sufficient to enable it to be read politically. even after it is placed into the political spectrum, it fails to be bound there. it can be used but never used up. autechre’s commentary reflects this. “autechre is politically non-aligned,” read the anti sleevenotes. “this is about personal freedom”. the suggestion here is not that sean booth and rob brown have no political leanings. rather, anti asserts that autechre as an artistic vehicle cannot be politically aligned because edmcs are multiple and the music is constantly anonymised, reclaimed and reinscribed. electronic dance music, suggests anti, does not and cannot adhere to a party political manifesto. it is important to note that the ep does not claim to be non-political. the overall impression of the project is quite the opposite. rather, what is rejected by this particular sleevenote is a politics that locates personal freedom on a left/right scale, or by which music is circumscribed by its motivation.11 the analysis begins to look almost anarchic – not so much “after” politics as “before” them, with personal freedom a precondition of political reasoning. autechre’s assertions are a little problematic in respect of the performativity argument because it is not the music’s authors who are performing the illegal speech-act but the music itself. by invoking their own authorship, autechre in fact link anti to a much older creator/created binary that seems a little at odds with rave culture’s relentless refusal to be authored – either way, it remains that anti’s very existence as “repetitive beats” rejects the terms upon which the legal system tries to regulate the use of music. the justified ancients of mu mu and the politics of sound http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eqca5rngum the justified ancients of mu mu – “all you need is love” (1987) jimmy cauty and bill drummond’s records are characterised by an intensive examination of the conventions and restrictions associated with music, and a focus on the difficulty of resisting them. in 1987, they issued an album (1987: what the fuck’s going on?) whose samples were all unlicensed. in treating the original texts in such a way that they were not only decontextualised but made to look absurd, they turned violent the rave aesthetic of inclusiveness. in a move almost reminiscent of christ’s sermon on the mount, they made it clear that neither the beatles nor abba nor dave brubeck was any more “important” than the scottish voice shouting “shag! shag! shag!”. the idea that cutting up recorded sound is a means to redistribute power owes much to burroughs. in the ticket that exploded, he suggests that the news media (and, by implication, any other filtration of information) influences the wider world more through its treatment of “sounds” and “voices” than through the actual content of these sounds and voices themselves: look around you look at a control machine programmed to select the ugliest stupidest most vulgar and degraded sounds for recording and playback which provokes uglier stupider more vulgar and degraded sounds to be recorded and play back inexorable degradation… look forward to ugly vulgar playback tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow what are newspapers doing but selecting the ugliest sounds for playback by and large if it’s ugly it’s news (burroughs 2004: 339) at the same time, he proposes a reclaiming of language through the revealing and reversal of these techniques: alwakeel • the aesthetics of protest in uk rave 57 only way to break the inexorable down spiral of ugly uglier ugliest recording and playback is with counterrecording and playback… the more you run the tapes through and cut them up the less power they will have cut the prerecordings into air into thin air (burroughs 2004: 340) the “voices” can be overcome by wresting control away from the controllers. to manipulate the artefacts of a dominant culture (“speed up slow down play backwards inch the tape”) is to turn these artefacts against their creators: cutting up language reveals that the “control machine” can never fully control it at all. this is not only true of words. the jams appropriated not just the recordings of other artists, but also their very artistry itself: through the same process by which abba and the beatles had constructed identity, it was dispersed and reassigned. “we hereby liberate these sounds from all copyright restrictions, without prejudice”, read the centre label of the 1987 lp. that they could be liberated in this way at all questions whether they were ever truly bound by copyright legislation: the jams successfully challenged the ownership of these sounds for long enough for the challenge to enter collective memory (some 23 years later, we are still writing about it), and they did so with no opposition until after the horse had bolted. without totally prohibiting access to all of their recordings in any form, there is no way that abba could have controlled the usage of these recordings – but to prohibit access in this way would be to erase the music completely, because even its existence in memory would enable its later appropriation (through covering, writing down, discussion, and so on). by existing on vinyl, the sounds were quite literally there for the taking. as deleuze and guattari reflect on the idea that music does not remain objectively linked to its stimulus but enters into continuous variation and becomes autonomous (deleuze and guattari 2004: 353), the jams made an aesthetic-political gesture by asserting that sound could never be “owned”. the gesture was not well received: the legal system was quickly on hand to reassert the older values on behalf of those whose “property” had not been licensed through the correct channels. an injunction from abba’s lawyers ordered the recall of all unsold copies of 1987. the eventuality for which the legal system did not appear to have planned was that rave’s anti-commercial aesthetic would be quite so well served by its oppression (hemment 1997: 213). by attempting to smother the jams’ protest against artistic norms, the legal system made these norms look totalitarian and desperate. the jams’ success should not be evaluated by their susceptibility to the power structures they challenged, but by their invocation of the power of sound itself. not all copies of 1987 were destroyed, and, either way, the point had already been made to the “control machine”.12 not only this: their later issue of an ep-length version of 1987 that lacked all the illegal samples politicised the very absence of sound. in short, the jams made the protest that sound was power by using sound itself; the truth of their argument was manifest and immediate. it is undeniably awkward to describe as a “speech-act” something that seems by its very constitution to deny order, but i propose that the model of a performative protest is useful here, too. although 1987 was, in fact, authored, my suggestion is not that the jams performed a speechact through its creation but that 1987 communicates its own disruptive influence. that is, the album itself exerts a political force. by communicating that “sound cannot be owned” through the recordings of other people, it substantiates its own point: ownership is flux, because it relies upon the assertion of power, and power is necessarily in constant flux. abba’s injunction did not mean that abba did, in fact, “own” the 58 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 music after all; it meant that they had more financial and legal power than the jams. however, these factors are changeable: were abba, for example, to lose all their money – or to die – they would no longer be able to exert such power. accordingly, the power would remain in the hands of the recording, deterritorialising “dancing queen” and the word “shag” indefinitely. once it is revealed that authorship is contingent, not absolute, the ownership of sound becomes moot. any action asserts power at one particular time, but sound betrays its creators the moment it is created (barthes, of course, made this point): to continue to assert control over its use after this moment, as is currently privileged by legislation, is not a right but a contingency. what implications does this have for rave? it might be suggested that anti performs a similar function to 1987: it fails to submit to regulation, and by so doing reveals that power can be resisted or reclaimed by an action so seemingly apolitical as dancing or making abstract electronic music. by its internal dynamics, rave recognises power relationships as flux, not hierarchy. the assertion of absolute dominance is antithetical and meaningless. conclusion: the aesthetics of the rave protest the central argument of this study has been that rave’s very existence is an automatic, even a pre-emptive protest against anything that tries to restrict it. i have suggested, firstly, that rave rejects attempts to categorise or dominate it because its aesthetic politics are fluid. there is no model within its internal dynamics for subordination, only for dialogue on equal terms, so it is not ideologically equipped to be “beaten”. secondly, i have argued that, by using its own apparatus – the production and use of music – as the currency of its protest (as opposed, for example, to writing a letter, or committing acts of terrorism), rave squares up to power structures on its own terms. through artefacts such as 1987, or the continuation of unlawful dance parties, it communicates that it does not recognise attempts to control it. it refuses to cease and desist. it has been concluded that, by so doing, rave reveals power to be just as fluid and impermanent as its own aesthetics: this party can be broken up, that record can be banned, but neither party nor record can actually un-happen, and no power structure can be truly omnipotent, so new gestures will (or, rather, could) always be forthcoming. the use of actual or threatened physical force is enough to disperse specific rave gatherings on a physical level, but a culture that does not recognise absolute concepts can never be permanently defused. similarly, as noted at the beginning of this piece, “rave” is amorphous, referring to any number of edmcs in constant flux – and so “it” can never be conquered. attempts to regulate it only prove the point: regulation is temporary and the right to exert it is contingent. one is reminded of the child who signs an offensive graffito with the words “if destroyed, forever true”. attempts to silence rave have only made it louder. ••••••• acknowledgments i am grateful to graham st john, whose patient, constructive feedback was invaluable to the development of this article. thanks are also due to simon warner at the university of leeds for his support with the original version of the piece. alwakeel • the aesthetics of protest in uk rave 59 references adorno, theodor w. 1988 [1955]. “the aging of the new music.” trans. robert hullotkentor. telos 77: 95-116. ––––. 2006 [1949]. philosophy of new music. trans. robert hullot-kentor. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. attali, jacques. 1985 [1977]. noise: the political economy of music. trans. brian massuimi. manchester: manchester university 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sound effects. new york: pantheon. garofalo, reebee (ed). 1992. rockin’ the boat: mass music and mass movements. cambridge, ma: south end press. gilbert, jeremy and ewan pearson. 1999. discographies: dance music, culture and the politics of sound. london: routledge. haslam, dave. 1997. “dj culture”. in steve redhead et al. (eds), the clubcultures reader, pp. 169-79. oxford: blackwell. hemment, drew. 1998. “dangerous dancing and disco riots: the northern warehouse parties”. in george mckay (ed), diy culture: party and protest in nineties britain, pp. 20827. london: verso. house of commons. 1994. criminal justice and public order act.  <http://www.opsi.gov.uk/ acts/acts1994/ukpga_19940033_en_1.htm> (accessed 15 march 2008). huq, rupa. 1999. “the right to rave: opposition to the criminal justice and public order act 1994”. in tim jordan and adam lent (eds), storming the millennium: the new politics of change, pp. 15-33. london: lawrence & wishart. porschardt, ulf. 1998. dj culture. london: quartet. reynolds, simon. 1997. “rave culture: living dream or living death?” in steve redhead, derek wynne and justin o’connor (eds), the clubcultures reader, pp. 102-11. oxford: blackwell. rietveld, hillegonda. 1997. “the house sound of chicago”. in steve redhead, derek wynne and justin o’connor (eds), the clubcultures reader, pp. 124-36. oxford: blackwell. ––––. 1998. “the politics of contemporary diy dance culture”. in george mckay (ed), diy culture: party and protest in nineties britain, pp. 243-67. london: verso. st john, graham. 2009. technomad: global raving countercultures. london: equinox. timelords, the. 1995 [1988]. “the golden rules”. in hanif kureishi and jon savage (eds), the faber book of pop, pp. 273-7. london and boston: faber and faber. wright, mary anna. 1998. “the great british ecstasy revolution”. in george mckay (ed), diy culture: party and protest in nineties britain, pp. 228-42. london: verso. 60 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 mediography autechre. 1994. anti ep. warp records (12-inch): wap 54. http://discogs.com/release/157 justified ancients of mu mu, the. 1987. 1987: what the fuck’s going on? the sound of mu(sic)/klf communications (lp): jams lp1. http://discogs.com/release/140785 ––––. 1987. 1987: the jams 45 edits. the sound of mu(sic)/klf communications (12inch): jams 025t. http://discogs.com/release/55367 justified ancients of mu mu, the, disco 2000 and the timelords. 1988. shag times. the sound of mu(sic)/klf communications (2xlp): jams dlp3. http://discogs.com/release/160230 author biography ramzy alwakeel was born in 1988 in the east midlands of england. he holds a bachelor’s degree in music from the university of leeds, and will begin a master’s in newspaper journalism later this year. his article “idm as a ‘minor’ literature” appeared in the inaugural issue of dancecult in september 2009. notes alwakeel • the aesthetics of protest in uk rave 61 1 see gilbert and pearson (1999: 54-83); “voice” is of particular significance to their examination of the alleged split between rock music and dance music. 2 this is particularly pertinent to the analysis of serialism (especially integral serialism), within which parameters such as tone row, duration, dynamics and form are “generated” by parallel mathematical processes. 3 the essay primarily addresses silent cinema, but benjamin’s argument can be extrapolated in light of the technologies and industries that have developed since. this is problematic, since benjamin considers the medium of silent film utterly distinct in its effects from that of film with a recorded soundtrack, so we should not be too quick to assume that the work is applicable to anything that is reproducible. nonetheless, as frith points out (see below), the limitations that benjamin himself imposes need not be considered absolute given that so much has changed about the culture industry since 1935. 4 see rietveld (1998: 258-9), who makes reference to the “tactile-acoustic” component of edmc, for example. 5 artists will sometimes produce “white-label” records that bear no written details whatsoever, making this effect even more explicit. to some extent, the use of an alias also enables this focus away from authorship, but it is equally the case that debate around the “true” identity of an artist can become central to a record’s publicity. one is reminded of the debate in 2008 around rephlex records’ “new” dance artist the tuss, which is almost certainly richard d. james. 6 adorno refers to “the subject”, where the capital “s” denotes a much wider-reaching selfhood that is common to, or arises from, collective humanity. the concept differs from that of “the first person”, which refers only to the individual, although the two are related by their invocation of the “i”. it might be suggested that the subject is the protagonist in his/her own life, while the subject is the collective protagonist in the world. 62 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 7 the dj, of course, might be considered subject to the music’s object, but we are primarily concerned here with auditory relationships between the records themselves. nonetheless, in a different analysis, the dj is the primary subjective figure within the rave experience, manipulating recorded music as an instrumentalist manipulates the instrument. all the same, this dj/dj-ed power relationship is perhaps less central to the rave experience than that of the instrumentalist over the instrument for the reason that the dj is not the focus of the rave experience, even if s/he might be one of its architects. as noted elsewhere, rave celebrates the rave experience itself: sensations, not their causes, are its primary interest. see evans (2001: 75), who describes rave as “the ultimate short cut to happiness”. the language of short cuts and immediacy suggests that end (sensations derived from the rave experience) is more important than means (dj, discs, drugs, event organisers, etc.). 8 bearing in mind that rave does not embrace any absolute theorisation of its own unique selfhood, it might be more accurate to suggest that the communication is in fact “right now, to you, rave sounds/feels/is like this”. for brevity, i will continue to refer to the shorter version. 9 elsewhere in autechre’s catalogue, “ae” abbreviates autechre, with “aep” reflecting the recurring production credit on autechre’s artwork: “autechre production” appears at the beginning of the label copy for anti itself. by tri repetae the following year, the phrase had in fact decayed into “ae production”, in which form it has appeared on every release since. 10 obviously, autechre will have been under no illusions about the legal impotence of the musicology argument regarding “flutter”: all three of the tracks on the ep would have been perceived as contravening the act. 11 to experience anti as music is not necessarily to engage with the political implications of its use in 1994; to be physically allowed to experience anti at all, however, is a prerequisite for its use in any context. 12 beadle muses that “i wonder now whether the jams really cared about saving the album – after all, they’d done it and that was that” (1993: 111). bassweight dir. suridh hussan. produced by ryo sanad uk: srk, 2008. http://www.thesrk.com/#313607 phil kirby university of liverpool (uk) bassweight is a dvd documentary on the electronic dance music genre dubstep. the documentary is produced by srk, who describe themselves as “a creative studio that flows between the epicentres of london and jakarta”. their website reveals a diverse array of global media projects, some corporate and some art driven. the studio’s high production values are evident in the documentary and the global overview of dubstep’s impact. the footage is slick, highly stylised, and utilises an array of post-production tricks. the audio content is also of a high quality in keeping with the often-pristine production values evident in many dubstep tracks. dubstep is a fairly recent manifestation of what author and journalist simon reynolds (2009) refers to as the hardcore continuum. although this concept has been critiqued, it provides a useful insight into the evolution and mutation of a key strand of uk electronic dance music. the documentary commences with time-lapse footage of crowds at dubstep raves and shots of the urban environment over the initial credits. the narrative thread begins with a tour of croydon, with dj and producer plastician (chris reed) as the tour guide and former big apple record shop (now home of the shop, mixing records) as the destination. in dubstep mythology, croydon has become the equivalent of clarksdale in the history of the blues, whilst big apple assumes the role of the mythical crossroads. reed takes the camera crew around the area pointing out small unassuming local venues that hosted early dubstep club nights. he comments on the negative police attitude to an early dubstep night which had a predominantly male audience; the scene was apparently heavily gendered at its inception. in fact, the only female included in the documentary (apart from shots of a few girls dancing at club nights) is bbc radio one’s mary anne hobbs. reed infers the genre started in croydon but struggles to note many sites of historical interest. the documentary then includes various producers and mcs noting the centrality of big apple to the early dubstep scene. the shop and its clientele are referred to as a community. producers skream and benga are then interviewed (in black and white for some reason) after a sound bite from mary anne hobbs explaining the genre’s focus on sub bass. this leads neatly into skream discussing the genre’s focus on low frequencies, ascribing this in part to the bass-heavy sound system in big apple and the sub bass capabilities of sound systems in influential dubstep venues. benga and skream explore the development of a strand of uk garage into dubstep and acknowledge that although they initially tried to make garage tunes, their lack of ability to reproduce the style precisely led them to focus on the exploration of sonic avenues opened up by their production mistakes. the narrative then progresses to pirate radio station sub fm. the focus is on the boomnoise and sgt pokes show which features interviews with producers and guest mixes, unlike the standard pirate radio show format. mary anne hobbs discusses her initial discovery of the genre and her subsequent exploration of the style’s origins. she notes that the style emerged slowly out of the “dark garage” made by producers zed bias, lb, oris jay and steve gurley in 2001. this variant was championed by the club night fwd at the velvet rooms in london. dubstep gradually developed from this stylistic template. skream comments on horsepower productions as a key influence on his music; they are noted as playing an important role in the genre’s inception. benny ill from horsepower productions is then interviewed and mentions their sound system roots. dj and producer n-type is the next interviewee. he recounts his dj career from bedroom dj at the age of 14 to pirate radio station stalwart on delight fm and rinse fm, from where he has established himself as an international dubstep dj. deopah—who ran the now defunct dubstep website barefiles and label baredubs—discusses dubplates, arguing that a mastered track on vinyl is preferable to an unmastered cd for dj purposes. there is then a brief discussion of analogue versus digital, which is fairly pointless given that dubstep is resolutely digital in its production. why not a mastered cd? vinyl is often valorised and fetishised and this debate is worth a thesis in itself. the next segment takes us to transition mastering where the proprietor jason explains what mastering entails. transition is a key mastering facility in the dubstep genre having traded since 1998. it occupies a role that the (also london-based) mastering facility music house played for drum ‘n’ bass, acting as a key facility for cutting dub plates. jason demonstrates the cutting lathe and explains that transition has a dialogue with its customers in terms of trying to assist their clients to produce professional sounding productions. he explores the exclusivity a dubplate offers, noting how dubplates were initially prevalent in reggae sound system culture and highlighting how this aesthetic has made its way into uk electronic dance music culture. after this tour of london’s dubstep landscape, bassweight’s footage shifts to amsterdam for a deep medi (digital mystikz) showcase at the melkweg, with an appearance from goth-trad (takeaki maruyama), a japanese dj and producer. this segment begins to explore the genre’s dissemination internationally. in common with jungle/drum ‘n’ bass and unlike uk garage and grime, dubstep has been embraced by global audiences. from this point onwards bassweight jumps around somewhat hyperactively in terms of geographical location. we return to the flat in croydon for more pirate radio footage. goth trad features again, followed by a brief interview with the bug (kevin martin) who explains how steve goodman sparked his interest in the genre. the film cuts to shots of denmark, from where kraken recordings dj and producer 2000f demonstrates his detailed knowledge of the uk music scene. he delivers a concise reynoldsesque chronological synopsis of uk urban music: “1988 acid house, hardcore, early breakbeat, jungle, speed garage, 2-step, grime, dubstep, sub-low etc”. 2000f also notes how various uk bass music styles have spread internationally, with producers in other countries creating their own music using uk genres as production templates. this is one of the interesting points about dubstep. its production aesthetics have filtered through to other genres in a similar way to jungle production techniques some years earlier. bassweight’s focus then shifts to finland and dj tes la rock, and from here briefly visits russia where kode 9 is being interviewed. the film revisits kode 9’s studio again, where steve goodman provides a more thoughtful and coherent interviewee than many of the other protagonists, commenting on how dubstep is becoming “generic” and centred on the wobble bass trope. this documentary adds to what could loosely be termed an emerging canon of films that explore dubstep. dubfiles was released in 2008 and in common with bassweight focuses on dubstep and its international dissemination. soul jazz released bruno natal’s dub echoes in 2009 and whilst this film does not solely focus on dubstep, it includes the genre in its discussion of cultural and production practices linked to dub reggae. herein lays one of bassweight’s weaknesses. whilst well produced and fairly informative to the uninitiated, apart from 2000f’s comments it makes no links to any styles earlier than garage, omitting any exploration of the genre’s influences from jamaican musical practices and aesthetics. it is this lack of contextual focus that reduces the usefulness of the film as an educational resource, although my students certainly enjoyed watching it. references reynolds, simon. 2009. simon reynolds on the hardcore continuum, available at: <http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/2009/> (accessed 8th april 2012). srk. n.d. “about us”. available at: <http://www.thesrk.com/313607> (accessed 8th april 2012). filmography jugdeese, gary and troy miller. 2008. dub files. uk. static media/media gang. natal, bruno. 2009. dub echoes. uk. soul jazz films. party, love and profit: the rhythms of the love parade (interview with wolfgang sterneck) graham st john interview with wolfgang sterneck, october 2010. translated by luis-manuel garcia. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.14> love parade poster (1994). photo: alice x. the love parade came to be the foremost event of the 1990s techno movement. it stood for a new and diverse culture, whose core cultivated ecstatic and creative parties, but which came also to embody their commercialization. wolfgang sterneck danced numerous times on the streets of berlin at the love parade. but he also kept himself separate from and repeatedly critical of the event's development, such as in his book cybertribe-visionen; early on, he predicted the extreme commercialization as well as the movement away from original ideals. to this day, he remains committed to the project of combining parties and politics. in the following interview, sterneck looks back over nearly twenty years of the love parade. in doing so, he combines personal experiences with the placement of the love parade's development in a social and political context. the city as dancefloor graham st john: wolfgang, let's begin with a rather personal question: which of your experiences during the love parades of the 1990s has stayed with you as a particularly positive memory? wolfgang sterneck: it isn't reducible to one experience. off the top of my head, it was especially the feeling of dancing in the streets with thousands of other people to thrilling music. as diverse as this was at the surface, at its core it was always connected to another approach to life: leaving the chains of the everyday behind and unwinding in a positive way—and this not only in the enclosed spaces of a club, but also in the middle of the main streets of a global city. at one point, i wished that the "acid sound" pumping straight out of the speakers at a love parade party would flow through the streets every day. an endless rhythmic beat, instead of the urban barrage of noise that otherwise surrounds us. and, at the same time, people stepping out of the proverbial line instead of going to work every day, stony-faced, to serve as a cog in a giant machine. this was undoubtedly a psychedelic vision, but it was also the image of a social utopia that became—at least at certain moments—a reality, without those dancing being aware of this potential. now we're getting to the heart of the matter. but this also leads to the question of a negative experience that has remained prominent in your memory until today. i'm not going to commit myself here to just one experience, either; nonetheless, a negative feeling that accompanied me on many occasions at the love parades was a sense of tightness. this sense was almost never conveyed by the media, and it fades from memory in comparison to the ecstatic moments, but tightness is also part of the basic experience of the love parade. tightness along particularly popular parts of the route, tightness in the special-event trains, tightness in the crush in front of the clubs, tightness in the utterly overcrowded clubs, tightness in the lines for the toilets.... also negative, to my recollection, were the mountains of flyers that piled up in the streets after the love parade. every promoter thought that they had to inundate people with their party flyers, but hardly anyone really looked at them and they mostly landed straight on the asphalt. you could've probably filled a small library with all that paper, but ecological issues were never a serious topic at the love parade. all the sponsors also left a negative memory with me, with their innumerable leaflets, give-aways and logo banners. and the politicians, who suddenly materialized at the love parade because they thought that it was good for their image, even though their fellow party members had condemned the love parade just beforehand. i criticize this not just at a theoretical level; for me, it was also always tightly bound up with the sense that they did not really belong there, that they only wanted to exploit, capitalize, and co-opt something. the dance of the new freedom it is said today that the love parade made berlin into a single, vast dance floor, upon which everything was possible. was that actually the case? sterneck: a lot was indeed possible right in berlin during the early years. the beat of a new culture was increasing in volume and some parts of the city resembled a dance floor—not only during the parade, but also at night. for many, there was this general feeling that, along with this emerging techno culture, something fresh and ground-breaking was finding its way out. and this was reflected in the energy of the love parade in the early years: partying, developing and organizing. new forms of musical expression, the endless beat at parties and after-hours, the rethinking of day and night. positive energy, a new community and, later, diverse cybertribes like pulsating organisms instead of authoritarian, ossified structures. the combination of smoke, mind-bending, and ecstasy. the renunciation of the conventions of both bourgeois establishment and culture industry, including the total rejection of the dust-covered rock music of that time.... all of these characterized the period and the love parade. especially in the early 1990s, berlin offered space for that sort of development, free space being physically available in the empty buildings and warehouses—above all in the eastern part of berlin, which was no longer in use after the fall of the german democratic republic (east germany). in addition to this, there was also a certain psychic freedom and a sense of new possibilities seemingly at all levels. at one level, there's the original and fairly open dance style, at another level the occupation of an empty warehouse or the experimentation with new forms of expression. free psychic space was also used in order to unfold oneself, to plunge into the self as a psychonaut or to paint the external world in somewhat different colors. the conquest of the eastern bloc dictatorships led to a defining sense of new possibilities and new freedom in berlin. admittedly, it was a freedom that, in terms of the conquering economic order, led not infrequently to an ego trip, which in turn was also reflected in techno culture and, more specifically, the love parade. one felt and experienced a new energy of freedom, which would soon find itself again relegated to those realms that were not compliant or did not allow themselves to be exploited profitably enough. ecstatic appearances indeed, at least some small parts of techno culture certainly had the hope of changing society for the better. also, the love parade not only saw itself as a huge party, but also had a rather clear message—not least of all through the explicit emphasis on "love". sterneck: there were different approaches within techno culture and its offshoots. there was the concept of the raving society, which rather flatly asserted the expectation that techno culture, as a youth movement, would positively change society from within. society would thus become inevitably more open, more peaceful, more tolerant, more creative. at its base, however, it was just a superficial marketing concept, which served the purpose of increasing sales and ultimately challenged nothing fundamental, instead strengthening it. then there was the hope that the mass use of ecstasy would, through an "e-volution", transform society. one started from the premise that the feelings of happiness and openness associated with ecstasy would expand further and further. the original communal "we are one family" feeling of parties was thus to become a basic social principle. this was also an illusion. same thing for terence mckenna's theory of an "archaic revival", which was supposed to change all of society for the better. most party-people were not interested in such concepts, anyway. they went out on weekends to party, especially on ecstasy, and functioned during the weekdays as salespeople, bankers, or even soldiers. taking a consciousness-expanding substance or dancing in a trance is not enough to effect a genuine change. it requires coming to grips with experience as well as a closer examination of oneself and one's surrounding conditions. in this sense, the simple question, "why is the weekend so colorful and the everyday so gray?" can already lead to this, such that one sees one's own life—the frequently alienated daily job routine, but also the often so superficial appearance of parties—in a different light and perhaps even change something. nevertheless, the prerequisite is reflection, which was and is far too rare in the colorful world of partying at the personal level and, for example, the development of the scene itself. what is decisive is the readiness and the will not only to scratch the surface but also to change something essential in oneself and in society. and it is well known that this is not an easy path. it involves dealing with a daily, subtle pressure to conform and to fit in. the love parade had the carried the call for "love" around the world. when one looks back, however, one now remembers first of all the fatalities of the last love parade, who were sacrificed on the altar of profit and greed. the love parades of the early and middle 1990s certainly produced an important cultural impulse and made diverse experiences personally possible. but the social and political potential remained largely unused. one can imagine 100,000 party-people blocking the government offices and dancing for a different politics. as far as i'm concerned, it would've been great if, in keeping with the love parade's "politics of love", they had filled the concept with some sort of content. if "love" had been connected in concrete terms to a peaceful, solidary and equitable collective life—without the exploitation and destruction of people and nature—then the whole thing would've opened up a new dimension. but then the sponsors would've mostly cancelled, too.... only in the underground does there exist a genuine will to change that goes beyond the scope of ecstatic party-weekends, improved self-marketing opportunities and empty phrases about "love, peace and unity". i'm thinking of, for example, the early manifestos of underground resistance, spiral tribe and praxis-records. it went beyond theory and, in doing so, was committed to the practical implementation of such ideals for the purposes of idealistic non-commercial parties, "reclaim the streets" campaigns and projects that effectively bound "parties and politics" together. also entirely crucial was the special development of communal forms of collective life, such as the nomadic tribalism of spiral tribe or the free spaces of autonomous cultural centers and occupied buildings. panel discussion on "party and politics" at the "gathering of the tribes" in frankfurt am main (germany), 7th april 2007. left to right: wolfgang sterneck (gathering of the tribes), dr. motte (loveparade/fuckparade), trauma xp (fuckparade), hans cousto (sonics-network) (2007). photo: alice x. the symbol of party culture in retrospect, how do you reckon the meaning of the love parade? sterneck: one must distinguish between the 1990s and the following decade. from around 2000 to 2010 the love parade was increasingly not just a swan song, but a fully commercialized remix of an initially good idea that was already commercialized. in the 1990s, the love parade was an event of world-wide prominence in "techno-kultur", as the movement was labeled in the german-speaking world—or "electronic dance music culture", to put it in international terms. (back then, "techno" was a meta-concept that included streams such as trance, house, and hardcore.) the love parade amounted to a dancing network. it was the event that brought together diverse projects and streams. it bundled together newly emergent and pulsating energies coming from all over the place and at the same time increased them exponentially. it drew them inwards to a focal point and also radiated them outwards, all the while conveying an attitude towards life and becoming the leading image of a new culture. something happened that nobody could've foreseen at the beginning, to which nobody at the first or second or third love parade gave thought. this playful, colorful, rhythmic, partly frenzied and ecstatic, partly naïve but also winking parade, which was dedicated to the new party culture under an overloaded mission statement of "love", struck a timely nerve. within few years, the number of participants increased from around 150 (1989) to 200,000 to 1,000,000 or more, according to estimates (1999). the love parade symbolized the development of techno culture from a small underground scene to the most important youth movement of this era, at least in western europe. what woodstock was for hippie culture, love parade was for techno-kultur: a point of crystallization for key elements. at its core stood, notably, the indeed fuzzy but nonetheless solid ideals of communal, ecstatic partying and free development, held together by a new music. these ideals corresponded to a deep longing, but in certain moments also to a concrete, live praxis. in the end, the capitalist machinery of exploitation swallowed up the love parade and once more made "love" an empty marketing slogan. dancing with yourself you see a few parallels with woodstock. "love" was also used there as a concept and symbol. are there shared roots between the love parade and the hippy culture of the late 1960s? sterneck: when you take a close look at the development of electronic dance music in the last fifteen years or so, there are without a doubt numerous points of reference. the peak of the acid-house era around 1988 was named "the second summer of love" after the hippies' "summer of love". also, the initial ethos of plur (peace, love, unity, respect) in techno culture was at least similar to that of the hippies; in particular, psychedelic trance (the goa scene, to be more precise) clearly remains within the tradition of hippie culture in both values and expressive forms. one must not overload these connections, however. love is the principal emotional need of human beings. and every person also has the need for free development and community, the need for transcendence and flow, the need for a free life without the repressive norms of parents, society and system. these characteristics can be found in every alternative culture as well as at the core of every music scene, even if the expressive forms no doubt change and, to some extent, these needs and ideals are only recognizable at second or third glance. thus, for example, the writings of early punk culture corresponded to exactly these needs, despite being in most cases rather aggressive and provocative. likewise, punk was a trenchantly formulated expression of the yearning for love on an entirely personal level while also, in a social context, the yearning for community in opposition to exclusion and competitive thinking. in this sense, the love parade is part of a long tradition and thus affords to some extent the drawing of references to the late 1960s. mind you, there are also fundamental differences. a new youth movement or music culture does not randomly emerge out of nothing. on the contrary, it is always a consequence of specific social and political conditions that are reflected in people's everyday realities. their experiences, needs and longings shape the outcome. it was only against this backdrop, for example, that hip-hop could emerge out of african-american ghettos with its expressive musical forms and themes, or punk out of the english suburbs. these, in turn, formed manifold interrelationships in which, if nothing else, the music industry had a particular influence; but the surrounding circumstances shaped the outcome. also, the love parade and its development is the result of prevailing social-cultural conditions. and here is where it diverges fundamentally from the late 1960s, wherein a fundamental collective transformation was a self-evident goal, even for the decidedly apolitical hippies. with the love parade, however, one must look long and hard for these sorts of goals and—excepting a few empty slogans—is to be found at best on subliminal and unconscious levels. the love parade actually amounted to a renunciation of clearly collective goals; it was an expression of de-politicization. thus, in the federal german republic (west germany) of the 1980s, there were numerous strong non-government movements. but the peace and anti-nuclear movements as well as the autonomist movement could not accomplish their goals, given the power relations at hand, and they largely lost momentum. later, the fall of the pseudo-socialist dictatorships of eastern europe led not to the creation of a new, actually free social form, but rather to the blind adoption of capitalism with all of its accompanying effects. these social developments were also reflected as a basic tendency at the personal level. generally speaking, there was in many ways a resigned political indifference. meanwhile, each person was increasingly looking to him/herself, to entirely private happiness and success as well as personal fun, development, and entertainment above all else. under the banner of prevailing neoliberalism, the perspective was increasingly narrowed to the ego, to consumption and career—and not to the common good or even a new social perspective. the love parade reflected all of this. it was about a vague "love" as primal longing and about ecstatic partying as an escape from the everyday, but all of this at an entirely de-politicized and consumerist level for the purposes of an increasingly commercialized mega-event. the politics of empty phrases the question of whether the love parade is a political demonstration or a commercialized parade was time and again put to the organizers. but they emphatically defined the love parade as a political demonstration. sterneck: yes, that's right, this issue always played a central role. in the corresponding discussions, it was not really about the political alignment or the ideals of the love parade. the background was economic. in berlin, there is a regulation that the city should finance and undertake waste disposal after a demonstration. the organizers of commercial events, however, must take care of it themselves. that's why, almost yearly during the 1990s, there was this debate: the municipal agencies would deny them permission as a demonstration, then the love parade would complain about it and threaten cancellation. in the end, permission would come from the city, certainly with high tax revenues and public image playing a decisive role. with what arguments did the love parade portray itself as a "political demonstration"? sterneck: dr. motte, the founder of the love parade, always said that the foundational motto was "peace, joy, and pancakes". "peace, joy, and pancakes" is actually a germany-wide figure of speech that describes a carefree state, albeit usually with an ironic undertone suggesting that it is only superficial. motte reinterpreted this turn of phrase as a political claim. he repeatedly stressed that the "peace" stood for disarmament in the context of the political love parade, "joy" for music as a medium for popular understanding and "pancakes" for equitable food production. at the same time, this certainly resonated with an ironic take on bureaucratic protocols as well as the dogmatic phrasing of left-wing groups. on the other hand, motte was and is a person who really did espouse these sorts of goals, as seemingly naïve and formulaic as they are. from dr. motte's perspective on the inside, these were not classically political stances of a central platform, but rather his buddhist convictions. it was in this sense that he once spoke with me about this around the middle of the 1990s, saying that the love parade was his spiritual contribution to multiplying love and happiness on the earth. indeed, dr. motte himself gave a political speech at some of the love parades. sterneck: well, yes. dr. motte's speeches were indeed legendary, it's just that hardly anyone could catch a word of it. even if you wanted to listen to it, the acoustics were usually too bad. those who did manage to catch some of it spoke mostly of shallow, spiritually glorified world enlightenment. it wasn't even possible to read the speeches somewhere after the fact. in around the year 2000, i once wrote to the love parade and asked for the text of the speeches. the succinct answer was that they were constantly receiving these sorts of requests, but they lacked the capacities to take care of it. i was directed to the "history-facts" section of the homepage, where i found nothing substantial, aside from a few dates and numbers. this was very characteristic. the love parade team had no time for these allegedly central issues. they were presumably busy all day with sponsoring and promotion. you couldn't better describe the eager evacuation of meaning of the love parade by its organizers. the loops of music cultures in your writings and talks you've described the love parade repeatedly as a symbol for the commercialization of music cultures. where do you see the parallels? sterneck: if one looks directly at the development of beat-music, hippie rock, punk, hip-hop, techno or another large music culture of recent decades, again and again the same mechanisms are clearly seen. they inevitably arise from capitalist market dynamics and are susceptible to being structurally and even foundationally overpowered by these forces. the dynamics of co-optation and exploitation are so strong, that capitalism even succeeded in bringing its own antithesis to the market, as can be seen in the example of che guevara products over the past decades. from emergence in the underground to commercialization and fragmentation, it has repeatedly followed the same sequence, which i divide into eight phases: phase one: rooted in socio-cultural conditions, a new and growing (music) culture emerges with idealistic beginnings. two: it faces rejection and repression by the establishment. three: the (music) culture becomes increasingly co-opted by the industry. four: the (music) culture becomes the mainstream. phase five: counter-movements arise from the underground. six: the (music) culture splits into discrete sub-cultures. seven: interest in the (music) culture fades over the course of new socio-cultural developments. eight: this turns to revivals and museumification. these developmental stages can be applied to techno culture as well as to the love parade in particular: in 1989, the love parade began as dr. motte's small underground party on the streets of berlin. around 150 people took part. this love parade had something subversive in its combination of a new, groundbreaking music with an idealistic diy (do it yourself) mindset and a groundbreaking appreciation of the streets as dance floor. the parade hit upon the spirit of the times and the number of participants increased steadily (phase 1). afterwards, the parade initially remained unnoticed in the broader public sphere, and it was increasingly vilified by the bourgeois media as a "drug-" and "sex-parade" while techno was continually denied any musical qualities (phase 2). along with the growing importance of the love parade grew the interest of corporations such as music, drink, clothing, and cigarette industries, who sponsored the love parade—that is, co-opted and used for profit the spirit of the love parade through their products and advertising (phase 3). in the latter half of the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of people took part in the love parade every time. the estimates sometimes surpassed the million-mark. techno had become mass culture. by then, the djs were partying at the love parade like stars, despite all of their original ideals. numerous politicians from parties that had initially spoken against the love parade in entirely pejorative terms hurried to the love parade, in order to present a youth-friendly image of themselves on the live-broadcasts of the tv networks (phase 4). the development of the love parade was sharply criticized by those parts of the scene that were oriented towards the original counter-cultural ideals of techno culture. this brought about the founding of the fuckparade as an expressly non-commercial, explicitly political counter-event (phase 5). techno culture split into an increasing number of subcultures that looked back towards the same roots, but were starkly different with respect to musical development as well as ideas and codes of conduct. only a portion of these still associated themselves with the love parade (phase 6). at the beginning of the new millennium, techno culture had passed its peak. the love parade was certainly still a mega-event, but a decrease in attendance was clear, as was a clear loss of the love parade's significance. due to tightened constraints and steeply declining revenues from sponsors, the previously yearly love parade was cancelled a number of times (phase 7). a revival of the love parade came about over the course of a renewed interest in electronic dance music or, more specifically, party culture. the purported modernization of the event, however, led to a complete commercialization, which in turn led to multiple fatalities in 2010 due to catastrophic organizational failures. the organizer subsequently explained that there would be no further love parades. it is nonetheless foreseeable that in a few years there will be an extensive revisiting of the love parade's history, while a proper recognition of its significance remains to be done (phase 8). marketed/sold beats how have you personally experienced this commercialization and, more precisely, the turning away from original ideals that you had mentioned? sterneck: in hindsight, the individual phases can be made out rather clearly. as a direct participant, one experiences most of this more as flowing transition. two examples cross my mind at the moment. marc spoon was, at the time, one of the most successful djs and producers in germany. like all famous djs of that time, he took part in the love parade. i can still see it clearly, how he was standing on a truck. totally drunk, he yelled repeatedly into a microphone: "why are you all so fucking quiet?!" and the people around the truck cheered him on. that effectively became his trademark and he repeated it innumerable times at the following love parades. and again and again people gathered around marc spoon's float to yell with him. for me, this behavior was antithetical to techno. or, in other words, it was the symbolic resurrection of that which techno-kultur had wanted to defeat in its early years. it was the rebirth of the lowbrow, egocentric rock star. in its underground origins, techno means: no stars, but rather a party community in which there are various tasks, none of them ultimately more important than the other. techno stands for a collective trance experience and not for following a dj in the most literal sense of the word, cheering whatever it is he does, no matter how stupid it may be. i felt reminded by these scenes of the writer george orwell. in his brilliant animal farm, he depicted the russian revolution in parables. the animals rose up successfully against the tyranny of the humans. but then, they made the pigs into the new leaders, and at the end there was no difference between the old and the new regime—or, that is to say, in the recognition of leading figures. another example: this new musical style was only narrowly marketable. sure, people danced to it for nights on end on dance floors, but large profits are only possible when the track is at the top of the mainstream charts. and then, suddenly, there was marusha, topping the charts with "somewhere over the rainbow". it was the perfect marketing ploy. the track's foundation was a stupid "techno-beat", upon which a few melodious elements were laid down as well as the catchy chorus from the title, "over the rainbow", a universally loved number from the classic musical film, the wizard of oz. the track wasn't released by a major multinational music corporation, but instead by "low spirit", a label that had emerged out of the scene. new distribution and production structures coupled with a neoliberal stance made it possible for techno culture to market itself more strongly than all of the previous music movements that had been bought out by major music corporations. you repeatedly criticize the commercialization of music, but isn't it understandable that a musician would want to make a living from his/her music? sterneck: that is obviously fair enough. we all have to look at how we finance our lives under the given conditions. i have no problem with someone, as a member of a scene, being dedicated to it through particular activities and living within reason from these activities. but there are also limits, such as when it is only about profit. or when party guests are only defined in terms of profits. or when one sells one's knowledge about a scene to a corporation. these are not about any "spirit of the scene", but rather about an optimal marketing strategy. to put it in other words, for example, you can also use a portion of the revenues from parties to buy a sound-system that will be made available to idealistic projects. or you could support groups that work to inform the scene about drugs or take a stance against right-wing political trends. or you could use your popularity by publicly endorsing a good project. there are good examples of this in the most diverse music scenes. the fundamental question is whether it is just about an ego-trip, or whether issues of responsibility and solidarity play an essential role. love parade posters (1994). photo: alice x. the parade of drugs what role do drugs play in the love parade? sterneck: the love parade is tantamount to a gigantic demonstration for the legalization of psychoactive substances. the organizers have never planned this or framed it in this way, but in this respect the love parade has nonetheless taken its own direction. at least half of the participants at the love parade took illegal substances. at some parties in the early morning, this proportion was certainly closer to a hundred percent. when people in such groups defy a legal prohibition, it takes on a political dimension, even if it isn't articulated explicitly by the participants. the most widespread were cannabis, ecstasy and speed, as well as—depending on the party and the scene—cocaine, lsd and a slew of other substances. obviously, legal drugs like alcohol and cigarettes were also part of this. alcohol played no role in the early years. for a long time, beer was totally unfashionable as a dull drug of the old rock generation. then came the discovery that ecstasy combined with alcohol in large amounts created a rather sloppy high. then, the beverage industries managed to put new alcoholic drinks on the market and to re-brand beer as a party drink. the establishment of "energy drinks" happened in this time, too. they were distributed at the love parade, at times for free. the strategy was to instill in consumers of these drinks a connection between a positive party experience and the drink itself. so then they would drink the energy drink in their everyday lives and be unconsciously reminded that feeling. among the lead sponsors there were always companies from the tobacco industry that wanted to provide their cigarette brands with a modern, youth-oriented image. and so things came to a totally absurd situation, although it was legal in terms of the dominant regime. massive amounts of alcoholic drinks and cigarettes were being distributed freely as part of a promotional campaign. again and again, you would run into people who drunkenly fell all over the place or who became aggressive while plastered, and you would be dancing in an unhealthy cloud of cigarette smoke. at the same time, people were getting busted for a couple grams of pot or a few pills of ecstasy. drug policies never really had to do with just health issues; it was rather first and foremost about economic considerations as well as power and control. drugs have nonetheless already been with humanity for thousands of years. prohibitions couldn't change anything about that; instead, they have often indirectly exacerbated the harmful aspects. also, techno culture (or party culture), with all of its subcultures, wouldn't have been thinkable without ecstasy and lsd. these substances contributed substantially to its creative development, as well as to the development of a particular sense of collectivity at parties during the early years. ecstasy admittedly was and is directly connected to health risks, all the more so with the conditions of the black market, where numerous extremely harmful substances are being falsely traded as ecstasy. ecstasy was also very much associated with superficiality and appearances. on e, everybody is part of a big family, the dj is simply godlike and the overpriced entrance fee is somehow reasonable. in everyday sober life, people often couldn't get as involved with each other. this was ok, if you were able and willing to keep the frenzied world of partying separate from the realities of everyday life. those who wanted to establish a closer connection often met with disappointment or had to come to grips with something more profound within these connections. a small few did this and so techno culture fell ill—and the love parade with it. the new responsibility certain substances certainly have had an important impact, time and again. one can think of acid house, for example, where the connection was made in the genre-label itself. but there were also a lot of problems in connection to drugs. sterneck: without a doubt, there were numerous problems. there was too little objective information, there were impure and adulterated substances, there were people who couldn't handle certain substances or who would fly off into a fantasy world. but the answer can't be: demonization, prohibition and repression. the answer lies in the strengthening of individual people by means of the development of drug-responsibility (drogenmündigkeit, similar to "harm reduction" or "responsible drug use" in anglophone discourse). responsible drug use involves objective information as well as the recognition and respect of one's own potentials and limits. and it also aims towards a community in which each person can freely and knowingly decide whether or not to take a psychoactive substance by any means. anti-drug campaigns like "no power to drugs" (‘keine macht den drogen') are at best met with laughter inside techno culture. also, more accepting drug-assistance projects will get no footing inside the techno scene, so long as they only want to bring something into the scene from the outside, rather than be anchored in the scene or have some common point of reference. in contrast, extremely successful projects have been those that emerged from the scene and provided information about drugs without demonizing or condescending—in other words, they furthered responsible drug use. the first such project in the german-speaking world was the 1994 eve & rave, and then later came eclipse, drug scouts, and alice-project, among others. even & rave was always at the love parade with chill, on-site info-areas, thus combining education and counseling with a culturally-open approach. eve & rave also initiated the first networking meetings at the yearly love parade weekends, which led to the 1999 founding of the still-existing sonics-netzwerk (sonics network). sonics brings together those projects that are active in the party-world and have an idealistic approach, most of them having a focus on "parties and drugs". these projects, by the way, withdrew from the love parade over the course of its flattening out and some of them got involved with the fuckparade, which continues to have an explicitly non-commercial and political alignment. in the media, there was often not just talk of a "drug parade", but also at times of a "sex parade". sterneck: there were, at times, scantily clad women and men dancing on the floats. even topless, every now and then. these pictures found their way into the media and created the image of a libertine love parade. certainly, the vast majority of the participants were by all means colorfully and sometimes even extravagantly dressed, but otherwise absolutely in keeping with current norms. but such a conventional outfit pales in comparison to scantily clad, sexy beauties—and so these were accordingly photographed and shown in the media. sex, in a narrow sense, played no role for the most part. there were definitely other cultures that were more open. this doesn't mean that techno folk were prudes. on the contrary, the experience of a good party, merging in ecstasy, sound and trance, was occasionally such a deeply sensual experience that the need for sex lost importance and only slowly reasserted itself at chilled-out after-hours parties. the fuckparade the fuckparade formed in 1997 as counterweight to the commercialized love parade. was it really an alternative or just the grandstanding of frustrated djs whose sound was no longer current at the love parade? sterneck: in the early years, the fuckparade took place as a counter-parade on the same day as the love parade. at that time, it actually defined itself in terms of the love parade—or rather, in terms of a critique of it: against commerce, against hierarchies, against flattening out and against the exclusion of harder music styles like hardcore and gabber. at the love parade, the idealistic and subversive spirit of the "free tekno" scene no longer had a place between ad banners for cigarettes, mobile phone contracts, or even, in one year, a new tv soap opera. the fuckparade was initially important as both concrete critique and lively opposition. in the long run, however, it would've become a pure negation of the love parade that was always also dependent on it, thus becoming uninteresting in the process. but, over the years, the fuckparade managed to become an independent event that no longer made reference to the love parade, but instead pursued its own course for a long time. for all intents and purposes, it was even closer to the original ideals of the love parade in certain respects than the love parade itself. the fuckparade continues to take place in berlin, usually once during the summer. it is generally organized through direct democracy, expressly eschewing sponsorship and positioning itself clearly and unequivocally with left-wing politics. it continues to take cultural abuses, club closures and raids as central themes, but it also maintains a broader view of party scenes. in speeches and on banners, there is an especially intense engagement with the fight for social and cultural free space, that is, taking a stand against increasing gentrification. taking center stage, furthermore, are antifascist positions and a critique of state surveillance and repression. the fuckparade is part of a tradition of reclaim the streets campaigns. these are not only about dancing on the streets for a few hours and having fun, like at the love parade. on the contrary, partying and politics are closely intertwined. this reclaiming of the streets is understood as both an expression of a life-affirming culture and of a fundamental transformation of organized political praxis. due to its alignment and influences as well as its history, regularity, and size, the fuckparade is probably the most significant reclaim the streets campaign worldwide. the end of the love parade the history of the love parade came to a tragic end in 2010. it went from a parade of love to a parade of death. how did it come to this? sterneck: since about 2000, interest in techno culture, parties and also the love parade has been waning. this was still a mega-event with six-digit attendance figures, but the sponsor companies were withdrawing and the love parade was denied its classification as political demonstration. as a result, it had to cover the massive cleaning costs on its own. at the same time, it had long ago lost its preeminent relevance and resembled instead a gigantic, exuberant folk festival dominated by drugs and alcohol. after the love parade had been cancelled a number of times due to financial and organizational problems, rainer schaller entered the picture. his company, mcfit, is considered the biggest fitness chain in germany, known for its comparably low fees but also for its reduced offerings and minimal services. at first, mcfit was the main sponsor of the love parade, then schaller bought the marketing rights—or, more precisely, the entire love parade enterprise (loveparade gmbh)—and carried on the love parade under his own management. it was obvious from the beginning that schaller had no connection to techno culture or to the spirit of the love parade; instead, he saw the love parade as a huge advertising space for mcfit. in the course of an alleged "modernization" of the love parade, it was opened up to other styles and offered to other cities. dr. motte had in the meantime resigned from the development project in protest and sold his shares in the love parade. schaller then decided on a departure from berlin. starting in 2007, the love parade was to take place in the ruhr valley, moving from year to year between five cities. the love parade was carried out in essen and then dortmund with heavy media coverage, but in bochum it was cancelled by the city due to fears of overloading the city's infrastructure. the 2010 event in duisburg, a mid-sized city, was controversial due to similar concerns and financial problems. the love parade was not carried out in the streets of a city, as was usually the case. it was located instead on the property of an old, disused freight station that, in contrast to all previous love parades, was enclosed by a fence. the reason was allegedly for safety measures. in fact, it was probably more about controlling drink sales. with that, the event broke with a broad and essential aspect of the love parade: full and open access to space. the only openly accessible point of entry to the love parade property was a tunnel that also simultaneously served as the only exit. given the tens of thousands of visitors streaming in both directions through one tunnel, it was obvious to any layperson during the run-up to the event that this could lead to big problems. all the more surprising, then, that the responsible authorities of the city of duisburg approved the event after examining the security measures. and so a catastrophe took place in this tunnel. numerous photos and videos show that an intolerable crush reigned in the tunnel, that the streams of visitors were mutually blocking each other and the barely-visible security forces were entirely overwhelmed. a panicked state developed in the throng of people. numerous people were injured, twenty-one people died. the next day, there was a disgusting press conference, where the organizers and the city denied blame. at first, the word was that all security measures had been observed and the guests themselves had caused the disaster. at the same time, schaller declared the end of the love parade. in the meanwhile, there was an array of explanations in which the organizers, the city and, in particular, the responsible authorities and the police forces laid the blame on each other. years of lawsuits are to follow. the forensic clarification of which organizational error caused the fatalities is one thing. but in addition to that there is still a fundamental, overarching responsibility. ultimately, greed for profit and fame formed the root cause of the duisburg love parade catastrophe. on the one hand, rainer schaller (or, rather, his company, lopavent gmbh) wanted to see this through as cost-efficiently as possible. on the other hand, adolf sauerland, the conservative mayor of duisburg, also desperately wanted the love parade, in order to improve the image of the city and undoubtedly his own image as well. revealingly, both organizer and mayor would later admit that the total attendance figures that were made public were in fact seriously inaccurate. during the planning stages, the mayor had been informed that the published data on the number of attendees at the previous love parades in essen and dortmund (officially 1.2 and 1.6 million, respectively) were many times higher than the actual turn-out. the published data allegedly served only as media promotion, while those inside the planning circles worked with substantially smaller numbers. only on the day of the love parade, and just before the tragedy, did the organizer and mayor speak of 1.4 million attendees in duisburg. and when, after the disaster, the security measures and the corresponding authorizations were put into question, the number of reported attendees suddenly dropped to 200,000 at the most, obviously in accordance with the authorizations. here also, all previously-published numbers were just promotional. the mayor should've already resigned due to these false numbers, but with the support of his party (the christian democratic union), which overrode an impeachment motion, he is still in office. the rhythms of chance is it true that dr. motte, founder of the love parade, is now active in the fuckparade, which originally sprang up as a counter-event to the love parade itself? sterneck: yes, motte is now running with the fuckparade. he has already given a speech at one of them and this year he took part in the minute of silence at the beginning of the fuckparade, in memory of the casualties that took place at the love parade in duisburg. in interviews, motte has repeatedly criticized the selling-out of the love parade. but certainly this selling-out didn't first begin with the mcfit takeover, but rather well before under the leadership of motte in the 1990s. dancing in the streets of berlin at the love parade was something new, partially a symbolic breaking of taboo, sometimes also a breaking out from the bonds of ossified structures. it was an amazing feeling, bound up with diverse possibilities of development and organization. but, despite all of its positive energies, the love parade has shown that it is also susceptible to rather fast assimilation. from the groundbreaking, ecstatic revelry of a new culture, it became a conformist, commercialized mass parade. the history of the love parade shows once more that detached partying and a few neat slogans are not enough if you want to really change something. what is remarkable is the variety of connections between partying and politics, between rhythm and change—not just at particular events, but also in our everyday lives. references sterneck, wolfgang. 1999. cybertribe visionen. komsta and nachtschatten-verlag. reviews-typeset reviews we call it techno! a documentary about germany’s early techno scene and culture. maren sextro and holger wick. sense music & media, media atelier, germany, 2008. sensedvd02. rrp: £16.49 doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.11 hillegonda c. rietveld london south bank university (uk) the documentary we call it techno! provides a german perspective on the development of electronic dance music to both a german and english-speaking audience through subtitles and the choice of an english voice-over. based on interviews with key people in the scene, it tells the story from the definition of post-punk electronica from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. there are two parts. the main film is illustrated by rare archive material from private collections of participants and key people of the developing scene. the second part consists of interview excerpts and additional interview material. the following djs, party concept designers, club promoters, label managers and record shop workers, all male except one, took part: alex azary, andreas rossmann, armin johnert, ata, boris dlugosh, claus bachor, cosmic baby, dimitri hegermann, dr motte (of early love parade fame), elsa for toys, frank blümel, hell, jürgen laarmann, mark reeder, mike ink, mijk van dijk, ralf niemcyzk, sven väth, talla 2xlc, tanith, thomas koch, tobias lampe, triple r, upstart and wole xpd. the interviewees benefit from their maturity and their insights gained over decades, while the use of the german language produces a deeply reflective mode. in particular, mike ink places the scene’s idealism in a wider historical-materialist perspective, while azary observes that, “techno expresses the emotion of today’s times best of all, basically the blankness of society”. the resulting documentary is a serious self-searching narrative that demonstrates that the term techno was very much the electronic sound track of the millennium. the narrative starts with the introduction of the term techno as early as 1984 by talla in a frankfurt record shop called city music, to indicate “music created technologically”, such as “new order, depeche mode, kraftwerk, heaven 17, then later front 242. i actually filed everything under techno. and people liked it” (talla). this was followed by the techno club, set up by alex azary and talla, which hosted postpunk electronic bands, the neuewelle (new wave), like d.a.f. (deutsch amerikanischefreundschaft) and nitzer ebb. this club night became a hot spot for electronic body music (ebm), a sound that was led by the belgian front 424. it also inspired the establishment of specialist magazine frontpage that self-defined the merging techno scene. initially the club attracted suburban males, until djs like sven väth, who developed his career in this frankfurt scene, moved away from industrial and ebm to embrace american techno and acid house. berlin had been physically segregated from west germany, until the fall of the wall in 1989. according to tanith, the electronic experiments by german pioneers, dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(1) 2009, 142-56 issn 1947-5403 ©2009 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ such as klaus schulze, were effectively forgotten by a younger berliner generation that mainly listened to guitar rock. until the arrival of techno-house from the us that is, which sounded more fun than the aggression of ebm. acid house was introduced there via the radio shows of monika dietl, which were listened to on both sides of the berlin wall. when the wall came down, an extraordinary festive period emerged in berlin, which brought together creative talents from east and west germany. from this, the love parade emerged, in the summer of 1989, consisting of a sound system on a truck, playing acid house and detroit techno. the title of the documentary refers to a popular track of this period, “call it techno” (breaking bones 1989), an electro freestyle track by brooklyn-based dj frankie bones. its musical influences seem to cover a wide range of electronica, including kraftwerk, klf and afrika bambattaa, while an electronically treated vocal summarises a history of techno from an american perspective. the documentary’s version of techno’s story is different from the usual one, of how detroit dj producer derrick may and british entrepreneur neil rushton marketed detroit’s electronic dance music as distinct from the chicago house sound in 1988. it becomes quite clear that techno was indeed a concept, a sign of the times, which inspired people in europe and the us in parallel fashion. the documentary subsequently charts the experience of young people devoting their lives to the party scene, which went into overdrive during the early 1990s: its idealism, its creative energy, the flaunting of hegemonic common sense in terms of lifestyles and regulations and the sense that a revolution had occurred, a break in history. more women became involved and footage reveals a distinct difference in gender relations. 1980s footage from the technoclub shows an all male punk mob; while in footage from the early 1990s one sees boys and girls with happy grins, taking ecstasy pills, travelling from city to city to follow their favourite djs. each city seemed to have its own distinct approaches to this party phenomenon, some supporting the super star dj and others being much more about the music itself, the crowd and the experience. techno, in this version of events, accommodates a clear break in german history: pre1989 techno as post-punk electronica, angry, macho, full of fear and loathing; post1989 techno as fun, celebratory, camp and queer. from this melting-pot of ideas, eventually a german trance aesthetic emerged, again first in frankfurt, with dj dag and sven väth, which further developed in the techno-trance scene that revolved around the berlin love parade. in sum, this dvd corrects the anglo-american hegemony on the history of electronic dance music with a unique collection of images and interviews. it is therefore a must in the collection of anyone who studies and enjoys electronic dance music. references frankie bones. 1989. call it techno. breaking bones records (12-inch). bbr-400. usa. various. 1988. techno! the new dance sound of detroit. ten records ltd (10 records) uk // 303 322-406. dixg 75. virgin schallplatten gmbh. germany. reviews 143 lost and sound: berlin, techno, und der easyjetset. tobias rapp. suhrkamp, frankfurt am main, 2009. isbn: 3518460447 [german only] rrp: €9.50 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.12 sean nye university of minnesota (usa) “a new berlin is emerging – and nobody is noticing” (p.9). the first line of rapp’s lost and sound. berlin, techno und der easyjetset clearly states the motivation behind the book: the need for an update of berlin techno. rapp is well situated to write such an update. he reported on berlin nightlife for many years as the editor of one of berlin’s leading newspapers, die tageszeitung. the first line also indicates that techno is no longer the focus of the media, since most scholars and journalists associated the berlin techno-scene with the love parade. given this relative invisibility, it might come as a surprise that berlin has become a center of the international techno-scene like never before; from the concentration of print media to the conglomeration of expat musicians. can it be that techno is also the soundtrack of the zero years, as rapp calls this decade? rapp answers affirmatively – at least for berlin. however, the role of techno has changed. rapp aims to pinpoint exactly what these changes are. he asserts, “this is also not the east-berlin of the nineties, that adventurous playground forming the backdrop of the love parade, with its flamboyant dancers on walls that still bore the marks of history” (p.33). the book primarily concerns itself with the innovations of the zero years. four aspects form the core of his investigation: 1. the move of the scene’s locus from the friedrichstraße/leipziger straße club mile of the 1990s to the friedrichshain/kreuzberg club mile of the zero years. 2. the new mood of the scene in the post-love-parade age (after the love parade was canceled in 2004 and 2005 and definitively moved to the ruhr valley in 2007). the first techno generation is aging but remains active; simultaneously new generations of techno activists are emerging. 3. the development of a new form of techno tourism and club management through bargain airline travel such as easyjet. 4. the replacement of hard techno (tresor label) and pop techno (low spirit label) as the dominant berlin sound by minimal as the sound of the zero years. as his first focus, rapp describes berlin’s new club mile, which consists of a range of clubs, including berghain, watergate, maria, weekend, that in fact spread over five kilometers along the banks of the river spree. these banks form the border of berlin’s two famous countercultural districts, friedrichshain and kreuzberg, underscoring their continued importance for city nightlife. rapp emphasizes that in terms of style and location, the new clubs differ markedly from the old clubs, for example ewerk, bunker, and the old tresor and wmf. the old designs were innovative and playful, but also provisional. the owners knew the locations were likely to be bought out by developers. nevertheless, this club mile prepared the ground for the rise of 144 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 techno in berlin and for the exceptional success of the love parade. the route of the love parade in front of the brandenburg gate was not only of historical importance; it was also crucial for tourism. the parade drew masses of tourists, who also took part in the club events of the berlin love week surrounding the parade. the entrance fees were jacked up and the number of clubbers always overwhelming, guaranteeing big profits for the clubs. until 2003 the love parade and the associated love week were the most prominent examples of international club tourism. even without the profits of the love week, however, the new club scene is financially well situated. most clubs now have long-term rent contracts and are richly equipped with the latest sound systems, with, for example, the club berghain named as “best club in the world” in 2009 by the british magazine dj-mag. the scene is now even more international, considering the number of expat musicians living here, most prominently richie hawtin. yet without the media event of the love parade, this new scene remains relatively unknown. the diary of a typical club-week frames the book’s analyses and assists in presenting the mood of the new underground, which is rapp’s second point of focus. the club-week begins on a wednesday and ends (perhaps) the following monday. interviews with various protagonists – djs, youth hostel managers, rave mothers, and club owners – enliven rapp’s analysis. rapp’s journalistic reports are a diverse mix of cultural, sociological, and economic analysis. his third point of focus is the entanglement of the scene in international networks. he emphasizes this interdependence through the new economy of club tourism, made possible by bargain airlines. rapp writes, “the easyjet-raver is the definitive subject of european nightlife of the zero years. he came, without a grand announcement, and has developed into the most important subcultural figure of the present” (p.78-9). rapp explains how the combination of new bargain airlines on the one hand, and berlin’s economic crash after the optimism of the nineties, on the other, allowed for the emergence of this new european subject. the easyjet-raver could both fly on the cheap and visit an exceptionally cheap city. indeed, the failure of berlin’s plans for an economic revolution following reunification meant that, compared to cities like london or paris, berlin remains a bizarrely inexpensive metropolis. in short, what has been bad for berlin business has been good for the international underground. the first three foci of rapp’s analysis offer some considerable new insights. however, as an overview of the musical history of the berlin scene the book is less helpful. rapp’s investigation remains bound up with the minimal scene. what for him counts as the berlin sound of the zero years was actually only one of many trends. he does not explain that minimal only came to prominence in berlin during the middle of the decade through the establishment of labels liked perlon and m_nus. rapp dedicates an entire chapter to the minimal dj/producer ricardo villalobos (p.110-120), stating plainly “he is the biggest dj-star of the zero years” (p.110). with that he contradicts his earlier claim that the new scene has no stars, rather “the berlin clubs and their public” (p.12). indeed, throughout the book, rapp repeatedly mentions villalobos so much that he outs himself as a swooning fan and minimal-groupie. he thereby utilizes a trend that had already been purposefully hyped by him and other journalists. rapp even includes a berlin discography, which is a personal collection of minimal hits – beginning in 2003 with, again, a villalobos album. the book thus tends towards the genre of a travel guide and advertisement for minimal, instead of analyzing it as part of berlin techno. reviews 145 furthermore, an examination of the electro and electroclash trends is missing. for his topic, an analysis precisely of these scenes was needed because they played important roles in the first tourist waves during the zero years. if rapp decided villalobos was necessary to include, then an important “star” is missing: namely, ellen allien and her label b:pitch control. she is important precisely because of rapp’s focus on the easyjet-raver and club tourism. she has presented herself as a berlin-dj unlike any other, with her albums stadtkind (trans: city-child) and berlinette and, even more strikingly, through her dvd club-tour-guide of berlin for the time out series. indeed, the material of her musical productions is a crossover between techno and tourism. other equally influential stars during the zero years can also be listed: for example, monika kruse, t.raumschmiere and anja schneider, not to mention paul van dyk, whose continued international stardom resulted in him receiving the landesverdienstorden (land order of merit) from berlin in 2006. to be sure, rapp does examine other branches of the techno scene. there are interesting interviews addressing new media and technology with producers robert henke, philipp sollmann and ben clock. rapp analyzes the debates regarding urban renewal with the example of media spree, a construction project that could have a major impact on the new club mile. he also examines new online forum restrealitaet.de and internet fanzine resident adviser. nevertheless, one would expect a more diverse analysis of the many styles from electro to breakcore that make up the berlin sound. finally, the role of media needs more attention. many pop-cultural festivals and institutions have moved to berlin – print media like spex and groove, the music channels viva and mtv, the popkomm, etc. – a trend that has profited to the detriment of cologne, which in many respects was the pop media center of germany until 2000. such gaps demonstrate that rapp’s attempt to combine a personal diary with cultural analysis is not as successful as he perhaps wished. rapp loses himself in self-absorbed scene life and gossip. too much club jargon and name-dropping takes place, thus making some of the book comprehensible only to insiders. despite these faults, the book offers an important update on berlin techno history. the literature and media that defined the popular understanding of german techno was published more than ten years ago. the following titles appeared in the decisive year 1998: simon reynolds’ energy flash, rainald goetz’s rave, iara lee’s documentary modulations and tom tykwer’s run lola run. perhaps the most internationally well-known german book on electronic dance music, ulf poschardt’s dj culture, appeared even earlier, in 1995. for those whose knowledge of german techno is based on such literature, rapp’s lost and sound will be a helpful update. it makes clear that the history of techno is not over, and rapp is correct that the zero years are an important period in this history. 146 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 psychedelic white: goa trance and the viscosity of race. arun saldanha. minneapolis and london, university of minnesota press, 2007. isbn: 0816649936 (hardcover) 0816649944 (paperback) rrp: us$60.00 (hardcover), us$20 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.13 anthony d’andrea university of limerick (ireland), university of chicago (usa) chromatic variation in ethnographic analysis reflecting a deleuzian turn in social geography, psychedelic white: goa trance and the viscosity of race examines rave tourism in goa through the prism of a materialist theory of race and racial segregation. well-written, erudite and thought-provoking, the book opens with the observation that the mostly white psytrance music fans (also known as goa freaks) arrive at parties only after indian tourists have departed. the author arun saldanha, a belgian geographer of indian descent, expresses his discontentment, “i felt this segregation”, and adds, “this book wants to find out what sort of theoretical vocabulary is necessary to make sense of racism when it is not supposed to be there.” (p.5). the basic question it seeks to answer then is, “what makes white bodies stick together?” according to saldanha, racial segregation is a basic effect from the ethnic profile and profiling of white psytrance fans and backpackers in goa. the book provides a philosophically robust retheorization of race. opposing social constructionism, saldanha seeks to develop a materialist theory of race, centered on the deleuzian concept of viscosity, defined as resistance to flow and perforation. considered for its corporeality rather than representation, race is organized like a machinic assemblage, as instantiated in ritual experiences of the psytrance collective in goa. saldanha demonstrates familiarity with a wide range of philosophical work, including not only deleuze and guattari, but also levinas, goffman and fanon, among other thinkers in feminism and poststructuralism. psychedelic white has gained attention among geographers of race, as a number of book reviews have praised saldanha’s innovative theorization while also questioning its internal consistency at a philosophical level. this review, instead, highlights how this philosophical hypertrophy has created analytical problems in the study of psytrance. within a complex formulation of race materialism, psychedelic white discusses the more proximate notion of “psychedelics”, which saldanha defines as the dynamics of self-transformation enabled by travel, drugs and music. yet, these techniques are examined in relation to the racial background of westerners. in a series of refined reviews on the history of countercultures, orientalism, hippies and drugs, saldanha refers to the creative needs of “white men”, a term repeated ad nauseam throughout the first third of the book. this bias could have been moderated in the light of the anthropological truism that a wide variety of societies, and not only the white west, nurtures more or less complicated relationships with such techniques and devices of selftransformation. as such, the reader may be left wondering how whiteness and psychedelics are causally determined, and, if so, what is the significance and implication that saldanha attempts to address. reviews 147 based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in northern goa between 1996 and 2002 (and again in 2006), the empirical horizon of psychedelic white is constrained within a sharp racial angle, as organized across the book in three analytical sites: the shared experiences of goa freaks, the visual economy of rave tourism, and the politics of location in goa. the philosophical work so interestingly advanced by saldanha results in a racial determinism under which psytrance formations are forcefully examined. political economy is reduced to “phenotype and foreignness” (p.163). “goa freaks are microfascists” (p. 89). the book is permeated with “depressing conclusions”, as saldanha well puts it, following anecdotal analyses of white exploitation, segregation and indifference toward indians. psytrance formations, saldanha argues, have paradoxically thickened rather than transcended racial segregation in goa. the book is thus marked by a predominantly negative assessment of countercultural formations in india. in deleuzian words, psychedelic white focuses on the lines of death traced by this war machine, and says virtually nothing about the emancipatory potential of chromatic variation. some readers may even find that the impressive philosophical apparatus delivered by saldanha tends to lose connection with the empirical reality it seeks to explain. indeed, psytrance freaks are eccentric individuals, often elitist, arrogant and troubled. in a decadent and dystopic scene such as northern goa psytrance, most freaks and backpackers would likely feel more comfortable interacting with phenotypically similar peoples, whereas some individuals may express racist behavior at times. however, the argument that psytrance in goa is essentially reaffirmed through racial segregation would require stronger empirical testing and support. incredibly, important factual questions were overlooked in the book. firstly, psytrance insiders reject tourists – regardless of race – whether in goa or elsewhere. spatial segregation between insiders and outsiders is a basic feature of electronic dance scenes around the world, and goa is no different, for its members regularly attend other scenes interlinked across global countercultural circuits. in this connection, trance (ecstatic) experiences generally occur with no essential reference to issues of racial identity or segregation. internal bickering is pervasive within white psytrance subgroups in goa (p.152), and clashes involving national, generational and class difference are at least as common as those predicated on race. moreover, several indians (and other not exactly white individuals) occupy significant positions in the scene, as djs, party promoters and well-off diasporic fans. mating relationships across racial groups are common, even against india’s backdrop of patriarchy and sexual harassment, considering white females’ frequent complaints about native males. furthermore, saldanha does not account for the violence, exploitation and segregation that some indians explicitly perpetrate against third-world immigrants working in goa. likewise, he neglects that white travelers’ attitude of indifference towards indians is more often than not a simmelian response to the overwhelming demand incessantly posed by street vendors, beggars and sexual predators across india. all in all, edm studies indicate that class, gender and sexual orientation, alongside race, are all important factors in the makeup of electronic dance scenes. the psytrance scene in goa embodies complex multiplicities that cannot be easily explained by means of reduction to a single analytical category alone. as an ethnographic study, the claim that psytrance identity is founded on racial segregation is perplexing, particularly when argued on basis of empirically grounded evidence. no significant discrepancies can be found by cross-checking my fieldwork with saldanha’s ethnography at the level of observed behaviors. at a closer look, how148 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 ever, it becomes evident that saldanha has neglected the cultural point-of-view of psytrance people. in fact, he explicitly states that their representations on transcending prejudice would have misled him; and that he would not have been able to understand white identity in goa by approaching it discursively or psychologically (p.130). instead, saldanha chooses to observe their forms of sociability, at a distance, without ever addressing underlying meanings, intentions and desires. as such, the dismissal of native representations remits psychedelic white to a pre-geertzian moment, strangely resonating with classical british functional-structuralist anthropology. not by accident, in both british and deleuzian versions, subject interiorities become effects of larger social and material structures (machinic assemblages). as a possible remedy, what is the meaning of white bodies sticking together would have been a legitimate, even safer question. in other words, how problematic race actually is according to foreigners and natives in goa would be a question that largely defines the social and explanatory pertinence of a theoretical framework. however, goa freaks and goan villagers rarely speak in psychedelic white. in fact, they become largely incidental against the philosophical apparatus weaved across the book. in its appendix, saldanha correctly notes how difficult it is to interview psytrance freaks in goa, even though he seemed to possess a remarkable ability to socialize with them. conversely, saldanha provides a list of interviewees including a relative majority of indian authorities, intellectuals, journalists and activists, all of whom have been opposed to rave tourism. more widely, in a world of complexities, ethnographers ought to be supple in finding ways to engage, translate and interpret examined ways of life, initially in their own terms of sociability and intelligibility. concurring with saldanha, the locus of truth, as bourdieu puts it, rarely resides at the surface level of discursive representations alone. however, they provide critical clues towards a persuasive account that is both intellectually compelling and empirically accurate. in dismissing the voice of goa freaks, saldanha has paradoxically incurred an act of segregation by only allowing his own representations to speak and prevail. ultimately, the book fails to address a critical counter-hypothesis: psytrance fans reject indian tourists and beggars because they egregiously disrupt psytrance practices. “trance parties” are ritual practices of a quasi-sacred nature by which scene insiders can ritually express their anger and opposition to the modern self, morality and system. logically, those who don’t appear to share or respect the meanings entwined in such countercultural practices and ideologies are deemed unwelcome outsiders. in this light, the book’s main premise – that white freaks reject indian tourists because of their race – is empirically flawed. consequently, its main argument – that foreign countercultural formations in india are essentially reproduced on the basis of racial segregation – must be questioned.  the fact that these are “mostly white” formations struggling with native and alien majorities does not suffice to define them as founded, identified or reinforced by racial segregation. segregation and racism are not the same. psychedelic white must be commended for its philosophical ingenuity. nonetheless, in order to do justice to saldanha’s exquisite contribution to race studies, the book would have benefited from a more nuanced and cautious analysis of psytrance formations empirically and methodologically. it would have been more persuasive by better calibrating its racial determinism vis-à-vis the multiple, complex and polysemous injunctions of global psytrance locally, and particularly by means of a more direct dialogue with the scholarship on psytrance, travel and tourism in india and southeast asia. in battling against social constructionism, psychedelic white has lost sight of the empirical dimension it sought to explain, along with alternative philosophical explana reviews 149 tions. in their double folding, war machines are defined both for their lines of flight and death, as well as for their viscosity and chromatic variation. how to account for race as chromatic variation would have opened up a whole new range of empirical and theoretical possibilities. all along, the fixity of psytrance in northern goa (as in elsewhere) can be assessed as an ambivalent tactic of resistance for keeping the space of creative experimentation, one that is continuously threatened and reinforced by external formations, linkages, and power/knowledge arrangements. global nomads: techno and new age as transnational countercultures in ibiza and goa. anthony d’andrea. london and new york, routledge, 2007 isbn: 041542013x (hard) 0203962656 (ebook) 978-0-415-55376-4 (paper) rrp: $132 (hardbound), $28 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.14 charles de ledesma university of east london (uk) anthony d’andrea is a “transnationalist” researcher who has set out to explore the fissures and contradictions of twenty first century globalisation. global nomads is the end product of six years of field work in the bye ways of alternative cultures, and covers multiple visits to india and ibiza. it is a singular work and an indispensable contribution to a growing body of accessible academia on the curvature of globalisation, critical studies and counter cultures. as well it is an immensely readable ethnography of the lives, passion, habits and thoughts of overlapping sets of “expressive expatriates”, as d’andrea calls them. this label loosely corrals a colourful cast including djs at techno trance parties, traders in textiles at the hippie markets of goa and ibiza, artists, digital developers and international drug dealers. d’andrea defines “expressive expatriate” early on. “as a counterpoint in migration studies, the terms ‘expressive’ and ‘expatriate’ depart with the predominantly utilitarian and essentialized understanding of the mobile subject” (p.7). also weaving through the book is the concept, the global (neo) nomad, which d’andrea suggests is the philosophic base of the expressive expatriate. “many have abandoned metropolitan centres where they enjoyed a favourable material situation” (p.8). but, d’andrea cautions, his expressive, neo-nomadic, alternative subjects are not free of all the trapping of contemporary life nor do they wish to be. he applies foucault’s concept of bio power and judges that these peripheral, although not marginal, social vectors ride in tandem with neo liberal regimes. in the hands of a less radical, committed writer, a cynical edge – end of 1960s countercultural traditions; decimation of 1980s’ rave culture energies; creeping commoditisation of the global trade in goods and artefacts – could undermine such an analysis. but, thankfully, not; d’andrea remains steadfast in spirit and calling. global nomads is a resolutely optimistic work, theoretically fluent and empirically fascinating. divided into five main parts, d’andrea sets out his stall admirably in the opening chapter, “neo-nomadic”, which adds to the multiple voices in the graham st john150 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 edited collection, rave culture and religion, and in various work from robin sylvan and paul heelas, by connecting new spiritualities and techno dance culture with globalization. before nailing neo-nomadic as his defining meta-concept, d’andrea helpfully provides a short overview of critical work on the nomadic per se; using deluge’s famous epithet, “the nomad does not move” to clarify that the neo nomadic need be understood as a state of mind and being, not merely a state of movement. d’andrea begins his field report in la isla blanca – ibiza – with a colourful narrative spotlighting various neo-nomadic lifestyles encountered on the island during peak season. there is yoga teacher nora, clothes retailer rochelle, new age body practices seeker barbara and island long-stay kirk who, like d’andrea, is an anthropologist. a rather bucolic scenario builds of creative types running a busy clock of night time events, markets, yoga and “bio dance” classes, although the picture clouds in the ethnography’s next section with an exploration of the hippie and club scenes in the island’s resort, san antonio. d’andrea charts how conflicts develop in the increasingly commoditised spaces of package tourist density. he less successfully summarises field work conducted at the island’s largest nightclub, privilege, offering few surprises beyond a rather functional listing of expected details and views. we learn too of the antics of the highly extrovert couple who ran club night manumission, and how they ‘performed live’ sex acts during the night. d’andrea is revealing on the club industry economy, its army of bohemian workers who work the club season, and the party promoters behind club profitability. beyond its crass commerciality, he identifies that there are some opportunities where “exceptional parties were able to break through the nationalism that underlies mainstream clubbing in ibiza and become exciting references in the global club scene” (p.107). before heading for north goa, where sound system parties most resolutely weren’t in this mould, d’andrea stops off at point 2 in his transnational research, neospiritual guru osho’s “international meditation resort” in pune, south india. d’andrea is refreshing on this ashram turned “new age resort” as he holds centre ground between the osho supporters, sannyasins, and osho bashers, although the tone is largely one of a distanced disappointment with the commercial direction taken. this section ends with a reminder of the translocal connections between ibiza, pune and goa, three key nodes in a neo-nomadic, counter cultural lifestyle pattern which may take in goods trading, new age therapies, mind altering drug bouts and all night dancing at beachside full moon trance parties. it is goa that d’andrea travels to next and it is here that global nomads truly finds its pace and footing. after setting the scene with a brief history of the tiny, once portuguese-held, south india enclave, and western interest in it, d’andrea launches into a field report on “rebel sannyasins”, trance party promoters; backpackers after sun, parties and drugs; mornings sipping lattes and smoking hash chillums in the famous cafe, the german bakery, and attempts at elucidating information from the traveller freaks and hippy elders at the centre of the action. in an interesting ethnographic aside he finds that “at a methodological level, the politicized silence of freaks constituted a challenge to conventional methods of data collection” (p.189). but d’andrea, in exchanges parallel to those of arun saldanha in psychedelic white, beavers away patiently and soon finds his subjects full of views and stories. one, bojan, believes india to be a land “that is female, round, and the karma yoga instantaneous” (p.193). later in this masterly field report, d’andrea reaches a ravishing climax. the sub section “the techno trance assemblage: aesthetics of power and limit-experience” remains the strongest, most ethically powerful and revealing writing on the psyche reviews 151 delic trance party to date, certainly in an academic context, if not anywhere. so many nights and mornings spent searching for and, on occasions, finding, techno trance parties, has fully rubbed off on d’andrea and, unlike in the more extensive psychedelic white, the reader feels fully and disarmingly there, propelled into the vortex of chromatically varied digital beats aiming to upset and re-constitute subjectivities. locating the trance dance, first as a limit-experience which can ‘tear the subject from itself ’ (p.209), the writing collapses key elements – music, technology, raver psychology, bodily gesture and dance and potent chemical enhancers – into enchanting, hypnotic and critically consistent prose. “trance parties have been designed to engender a magic aura that remits participants into a cosmic temporality” (p.210). d’andrea’s use here of the deleuze and guattarian concept “assemblage” is judicious, not overstated, using a nomadological spirit to generate potency and mystique in the writing; attempting, successfully, to enact in words the process it sets out to describe. no matter, really, that there are one or two factual gaffs in this section. d’andrea, for example, states that the 1980s were a fallow period in the north goa party scene, picking up strength in the early 1990s. not so. djs goa gil and laurent played stupendous, night-long, tranceified electronic mixes at numerous parties in those years, with events attended by many hundreds of revellers. a stylistic weakness is the occasional repetition of phrases and sentences as d’andrea unveils his conceptual framework across various chapters. but this is no surprise given a keenness for publishing finished segments as the research project elapses. d’andrea has simply had a number of go’s at re-defining and re-casting his ideas. this doesn’t detract at all from a book which is thoughtfully crafted, stimulating, syntactically evocative and critically valuable. d’andrea’s study of neo-nomadism in expressive expatriates, his turnof-thecentury field work in multiple nodes where alternative cultures still flourish and, particularly, his sharp dissection of the trance party cosmos, is invaluable material for students of, well, just about any discipline you can imagine which touches ostensibly on globalization, cultural anthropology, neo-religious studies, cultural studies and popular music. feel free to add to the list. breakcore: identity and interaction on peer-to-peer. andrew whelan. newcastle upon tyne, cambridge scholars publishing, 2008. 337 pp. isbn: 1847186572 $60 us (hardcover) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.15 emily d. ferrigno yale university (usa) the study of virtual music communities is a fascinating and timely endeavor, given the widespread phenomenon of “bedroom production”. musical subcultures are often shaped by and mediated through online means, such as forums, chatrooms and list152 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 servs. virtual environments provide vital space in which musical practitioners share creative methods of musical production, define genre, hold aesthetic debates and socialize. virtual ethnographies are not yet numerous, and scholars interested in identity, gender and race as they exist in the virtual realm would do well to consult andrew whelan’s study. whelan’s book is an informative examination of virtual community from the chatrooms of soulseek, a file-sharing application used by electronic dance music producers. whelan focuses on users involved in breakcore, a breakbeat-centered genre influenced by jungle, industrial, and hardcore techno. whelan draws upon the theories and practices of his discipline (sociology), and illustrates concepts with robust sections of ethnographically-culled data, working with a 2100-page transcription of conversational text from soulseek chatrooms over a period of six months, as well as email interviews with producers. whelan’s analytical focal point is chatroom dialogue. he uses textual analysis to illustrate how the individuals in his study define themselves, how chatroom dialogue creates and ascribes musical meaning, and how soulseek users employ discursive cues to identify “insiders” and “outsiders.” in the introductory chapter, as well as in the concluding section of the book, whelan engages with the “rationalization/democratization” debate, a discourse central to his study. he confronts the hypothesis that technology serves to inhibit and ultimately dehumanize music, which stands in opposition to the utopian vision of technology as an agent of social change, allowing the voices of socially excluded groups to be heard (p.24). whelan provides a useful introduction to the peer-to-peer environment and file sharing protocol, and examines the mp3 file (the medium of exchange) as a “sociocultural fetish”. whelan describes how “rip crews” encode new music into mp3 format, “tag” the files, and distribute/disseminate them to the larger community. each mp3 is accompanied by an “nfo” file, which identifies the mp3 and its creator. these files are written in a source code that allows the creator to insert jokes, illustrations, and the like into the nfo. several examples of nfo files are provided in the text. whelan focuses on three practices that he describes as “shibboleths,” or “terms indicative of social location or origin, the use of which therefore serves to distinguish between groups” (p.14). these are the use of 1) nigga/nigger (chapter 5); 2) gay/ghey (chapter 7), and 3) the “amen break” (chapter 8), a widely sampled drum break from the winstons’ 1969 hit, “amen brother”. whelan provides lengthy analyses of textual exchanges in soulseek chat rooms, in which social boundaries are defined and redefined, and multiple conversations occur at once. the use of the terms “nigga/nigger” is presented in the context of “ritual insult exchange,” as well as flatly racist discourse. as whelan explains, “the term [nigga] is embedded within a matrix of ethnic and subcultural identity politics, and as such tells us much about the orientations of those who deploy it” (p.144). he bases his analysis on the use of “nigga” as a style-marker common among us youth, a characterization which is perhaps too superficial to provide the reader with sufficient context for virtual analysis. the verbal presence of “nigga/nigger” in american society is extremely complex, and quite different in its “real world” application, as opposed to the anonymous environment of virtual chatrooms. anonymity presents significant difficulties for social analysis, in that age, race, nationality, and even (spoken) english language fluency of chatroom users may be unknown. the second shibboleth “gay/ghey” is also examined within the context of chatroom discourse. whelan bases his analysis on the concept of “gay” as not only homo reviews 153 sexual, but also encompassing characteristics and ideals rejected by hegemonic masculinity (p.182). noting that, “the ‘joking’ exploration of the semantics of gay is a popular trope among young men” (p.200), whelan presents several examples of chatroom dialogue related to anal eroticism. he then explains the use of “ghey” in the chatrooms to describe something “lame” or “generic” (the homosexual connotation orthographically removed). the discussion concludes with an examination of masculinity, a frequent theme in whelan’s study, given the scarcity of participants identifying themselves as female in breakcore chatrooms. in chapter eight, “junglist,” whelan begins to focus on the music around which his study is centered. he discusses the aesthetics of breakcore via chatroom discourse, addressing polarities such as old school/new school and mainstream/underground. whelan regards the “amen break” as a third shibboleth, a time-honored (and wellworn) sample used in electronic dance music. however, he also highlights the debate within the breakcore community as to whether the use of the amen is creative, progressive, or even interesting. this problematizes the classification of the amen as a shibboleth; while the amen is well known in the breakcore community, its utilization is not a given. perhaps, then, the amen is a shibboleth used to distinguish subgroups from one another, rather than distinguishing the entire breakcore community from outsiders. whelan’s book ends with a lengthy “journey through the media” (p.319), covering a range of topics from sampling ethics and branding, to utopian visions of peer-to-peer culture. whelan characterizes his book as a “collage,” and, in fact, his theoretical discussions are dense, at times unfocused and difficult to follow. whelan’s own ideas are often obscured by his prose style and frequent quotation of others’ work. this also limits the accessibility of the text to specialists, which can be a serious shortcoming when writing to an interdisciplinary audience. in addition, whelan’s engagement with musical analysis is not a strong point of the book. he describes the amen break as embodying “polyrhythmic hesitancy”, the snares “sketching an idiosyncratic, irregular pattern”. like many drum breaks, the amen is characterized by syncopation, a basic feature of funk drumming–hardly idiosyncratic, and, in fact, very “regular”. the reader is not given a particularly clear description of what breakcore and its related genres sound like (beyond the discography). whelan does participate in the breakcore scene (as a chatroom member and perhaps a producer), but the reader is not privy to this information. the inclusion of reflexive ethnography would have added necessary transparency to his study, for when the reader is well acquainted with the author, ethnographic authority and agenda are made clear, and thus can become secondary to the voices of the observed. despite these shortcomings, whelan makes a rigorous contribution to the study of musical culture in the digital age. he delves into an examination of the sometimes crude nature of chatroom discourse, thoughtfully employing textual analysis to unpack the complexities of race, gender and social interaction. whelan’s discussion of the internet, society and identity is enlightening. he introduces the term “networked individualism” in which “identity is organised and expressed through consumption practices” (p.319), whereby participatory and collaborative consumption are encouraged, in opposition to the model of passive consumption set up by the music industry (p.305). this observation suggests that (somewhat problematically) whelan embraces a utopian (and democratic) vision of peer-to-peer file sharing, in which recorded sound is free and open to all–collected, utilized, manipulated and most importantly, shared. 154 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 the high life: club kids, harm and drug policy (qualitative studies in crime and justice volume 2). dina perrone. monsey (ny), criminal justice press, 2009. isbn: 978-1-881798-46-0 rrp: $35 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.16 lucy gibson university of manchester (uk) dina perrone’s study of “club kids” based in new york city presents an illuminating analysis of the cultural and situational context in which club drugs are used. while most literature on drug use tends to focus on users from impoverished communities and the harm they experience, the high life challenges the typical drug user stereotype by showing the “hidden” deviant behaviour of seemingly conformist, affluent and well-educated young adults. perrone opposes america’s war on drugs and argues that the focus of drugs policy should shift from a criminal justice approach (abstinenceonly strategy) to a more balanced response that includes principles from both the cultural and health fields and focuses on the well-being and lifestyles of drug users. the book begins by outlining two assumed flaws in america’s current drug war: that drug users have a pathology, which is the only factor leading to the “drug problem”; and that all illegal drug use leads to harm. perrone challenges these assumptions by asserting that the “...culture and capital of the user and the social environment in which the drugs are used greatly influence use, abuse, and harm” (p.2). chapter one builds on the introduction by providing an overview of how perrone met the club kids and offering initial insights into their lives. moreover, the chapter describes the ethnographic field methods deployed to study the participants’ use of club drugs such as mdma, methamphetamine (crystal meth), ketamine and ghb. the book is based on perrone’s observations, discussion with club kids during fifteen months of fieldwork and interviews with eighteen club kids aged between 22 and 33. the subsequent chapters are separated into two parts: (i) club kids’ dance culture and (ii) drug use among the club kids. the first part examines the club kids as a subcultural group by assessing how they correspond to subculture literature and earlier drug-using subcultural groups such as hippies, mods and skinheads. the book demonstrates that, in contrast to traditional subcultural groups, club kids do not wish to reject the dominant culture, but rather, they adhere to the consumerist norms of conventional american society. club kid culture and the clubbing experience are explored using theories of consumption, commercialisation and globalisation, and by situating the club kids within postmodern theories of the nature of late capitalism. throughout part one, perrone neatly uses the club kids’ perceptions of clubbing, its importance and the suitability of using drugs in club settings to illustrate the fantastical, “carnivalesque” and commodified nature of contemporary club culture. the second part of the book explores the club kids’ patterns of drug use. perrone shows how club kids maintain their jobs and uphold family responsibilities whilst using relatively large quantities of drugs. through their social and economic privileges, the club kids are able to avoid criminal justice sanctions and limit harm. the author employs a theoretical framework, which refers and adds to the prior work of norman reviews 155 zinberg, to describe how factors (drug, set, setting, timing and capital) in club kids’ lives allow controlled and safe drug use. perrone expands on zinberg’s (1984) framework of “drug, set and setting” by adding supplementary concepts of timing and capital drawn from primary data. timing and capital include both club kids’ resources and stages or transitions in the life course. the author demonstrates how a drug’s properties, the setting in which the drug is used, the user’s mood (set), resources (capital) and phase of life-trajectory (timing), shape drug using practices and impact on the relationship between drugs and harm. perrone uses rich and detailed quotations from her respondents to demonstrate how club kids negotiate drug use to minimise harm and avoid criminal justice penalties, while also revealing the larger contradictions in club kids’ lives. chapter seven provides a final discussion of the study’s findings and offers a wider examination of their implications for drug policy in the u.s. perrone pertinently argues that “...socially and economically privileged drug users, such as the club kids, are better equipped to manage their clubbing and drug-using behaviors than are less privileged users...the war on drugs is disproportionately a war on poor people. thus, white, middle-class users are more capable of concealing their drug use and escaping public and police detection than their lower-class counterparts” (p.205). for perrone, the war on drugs has been lost and future policy should de-stigmatise users and help to minimise the harm resulting from drug use rather than concentrate on arrest or punishment. perrone’s study offers a convincing account of the social, cultural and environmental factors that shape drug use among club kids. the book provides a fascinating insight into club kids’ lives and how regular drug users are able to occupy conventional social roles and sustain typical social relationships. however, two minor criticisms remain. although numerous references to relevant work are evident throughout the book, the statement “...cocaine can benefit those with asthma” (p.130) is not supported by academic evidence and readers may want to know the basis for such a claim. moreover, recent post-subcultural literature (e.g. bennett 1999; bennett and kahnharris 2004) has been omitted from the discussion. perrone states that club kids are not a subculture in the traditional sense of the term. yet, she continues to use this term to describe the club kids as a distinct social group. that aside, the book offers a stimulating analysis of club kids’ drug use by highlighting the reasons for clubbing, and exploring club kids’ motivations, and cultural practices. perrone provides a thought-provoking discussion that challenges the majority of literature on drug use. the study is invaluable for students of electronic dance music culture as it questions current failing policy in the u.s. and offers new ways of conceptualising the culture and context of drug use. references bennett, andy. 1999. subcultures or neo-tribes? rethinking the relationship between youth, style and musical taste. sociology, 33: 599-617. bennett, andy and kahn-harris, keith. 2004. after subculture: critical studies in contemporary youth culture. london: palgrave. zinberg, norman. 1984. drug, set, and setting: the basis for controlled intoxicant use. new haven: yale university press. 156 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 reviews-typeset reviews we call it techno! a documentary about germany’s early techno scene and culture. maren sextro and holger wick. sense music & media, media atelier, germany, 2008. sensedvd02. rrp: £16.49 doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.11 hillegonda c. rietveld london south bank university (uk) the documentary we call it techno! provides a german perspective on the development of electronic dance music to both a german and english-speaking audience through subtitles and the choice of an english voice-over. based on interviews with key people in the scene, it tells the story from the definition of post-punk electronica from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. there are two parts. the main film is illustrated by rare archive material from private collections of participants and key people of the developing scene. the second part consists of interview excerpts and additional interview material. the following djs, party concept designers, club promoters, label managers and record shop workers, all male except one, took part: alex azary, andreas rossmann, armin johnert, ata, boris dlugosh, claus bachor, cosmic baby, dimitri hegermann, dr motte (of early love parade fame), elsa for toys, frank blümel, hell, jürgen laarmann, mark reeder, mike ink, mijk van dijk, ralf niemcyzk, sven väth, talla 2xlc, tanith, thomas koch, tobias lampe, triple r, upstart and wole xpd. the interviewees benefit from their maturity and their insights gained over decades, while the use of the german language produces a deeply reflective mode. in particular, mike ink places the scene’s idealism in a wider historical-materialist perspective, while azary observes that, “techno expresses the emotion of today’s times best of all, basically the blankness of society”. the resulting documentary is a serious self-searching narrative that demonstrates that the term techno was very much the electronic sound track of the millennium. the narrative starts with the introduction of the term techno as early as 1984 by talla in a frankfurt record shop called city music, to indicate “music created technologically”, such as “new order, depeche mode, kraftwerk, heaven 17, then later front 242. i actually filed everything under techno. and people liked it” (talla). this was followed by the techno club, set up by alex azary and talla, which hosted postpunk electronic bands, the neuewelle (new wave), like d.a.f. (deutsch amerikanischefreundschaft) and nitzer ebb. this club night became a hot spot for electronic body music (ebm), a sound that was led by the belgian front 424. it also inspired the establishment of specialist magazine frontpage that self-defined the merging techno scene. initially the club attracted suburban males, until djs like sven väth, who developed his career in this frankfurt scene, moved away from industrial and ebm to embrace american techno and acid house. berlin had been physically segregated from west germany, until the fall of the wall in 1989. according to tanith, the electronic experiments by german pioneers, dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(1) 2009, 142-56 issn 1947-5403 ©2009 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ such as klaus schulze, were effectively forgotten by a younger berliner generation that mainly listened to guitar rock. until the arrival of techno-house from the us that is, which sounded more fun than the aggression of ebm. acid house was introduced there via the radio shows of monika dietl, which were listened to on both sides of the berlin wall. when the wall came down, an extraordinary festive period emerged in berlin, which brought together creative talents from east and west germany. from this, the love parade emerged, in the summer of 1989, consisting of a sound system on a truck, playing acid house and detroit techno. the title of the documentary refers to a popular track of this period, “call it techno” (breaking bones 1989), an electro freestyle track by brooklyn-based dj frankie bones. its musical influences seem to cover a wide range of electronica, including kraftwerk, klf and afrika bambattaa, while an electronically treated vocal summarises a history of techno from an american perspective. the documentary’s version of techno’s story is different from the usual one, of how detroit dj producer derrick may and british entrepreneur neil rushton marketed detroit’s electronic dance music as distinct from the chicago house sound in 1988. it becomes quite clear that techno was indeed a concept, a sign of the times, which inspired people in europe and the us in parallel fashion. the documentary subsequently charts the experience of young people devoting their lives to the party scene, which went into overdrive during the early 1990s: its idealism, its creative energy, the flaunting of hegemonic common sense in terms of lifestyles and regulations and the sense that a revolution had occurred, a break in history. more women became involved and footage reveals a distinct difference in gender relations. 1980s footage from the technoclub shows an all male punk mob; while in footage from the early 1990s one sees boys and girls with happy grins, taking ecstasy pills, travelling from city to city to follow their favourite djs. each city seemed to have its own distinct approaches to this party phenomenon, some supporting the super star dj and others being much more about the music itself, the crowd and the experience. techno, in this version of events, accommodates a clear break in german history: pre1989 techno as post-punk electronica, angry, macho, full of fear and loathing; post1989 techno as fun, celebratory, camp and queer. from this melting-pot of ideas, eventually a german trance aesthetic emerged, again first in frankfurt, with dj dag and sven väth, which further developed in the techno-trance scene that revolved around the berlin love parade. in sum, this dvd corrects the anglo-american hegemony on the history of electronic dance music with a unique collection of images and interviews. it is therefore a must in the collection of anyone who studies and enjoys electronic dance music. references frankie bones. 1989. call it techno. breaking bones records (12-inch). bbr-400. usa. various. 1988. techno! the new dance sound of detroit. ten records ltd (10 records) uk // 303 322-406. dixg 75. virgin schallplatten gmbh. germany. reviews 143 lost and sound: berlin, techno, und der easyjetset. tobias rapp. suhrkamp, frankfurt am main, 2009. isbn: 3518460447 [german only] rrp: €9.50 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.12 sean nye university of minnesota (usa) “a new berlin is emerging – and nobody is noticing” (p.9). the first line of rapp’s lost and sound. berlin, techno und der easyjetset clearly states the motivation behind the book: the need for an update of berlin techno. rapp is well situated to write such an update. he reported on berlin nightlife for many years as the editor of one of berlin’s leading newspapers, die tageszeitung. the first line also indicates that techno is no longer the focus of the media, since most scholars and journalists associated the berlin techno-scene with the love parade. given this relative invisibility, it might come as a surprise that berlin has become a center of the international techno-scene like never before; from the concentration of print media to the conglomeration of expat musicians. can it be that techno is also the soundtrack of the zero years, as rapp calls this decade? rapp answers affirmatively – at least for berlin. however, the role of techno has changed. rapp aims to pinpoint exactly what these changes are. he asserts, “this is also not the east-berlin of the nineties, that adventurous playground forming the backdrop of the love parade, with its flamboyant dancers on walls that still bore the marks of history” (p.33). the book primarily concerns itself with the innovations of the zero years. four aspects form the core of his investigation: 1. the move of the scene’s locus from the friedrichstraße/leipziger straße club mile of the 1990s to the friedrichshain/kreuzberg club mile of the zero years. 2. the new mood of the scene in the post-love-parade age (after the love parade was canceled in 2004 and 2005 and definitively moved to the ruhr valley in 2007). the first techno generation is aging but remains active; simultaneously new generations of techno activists are emerging. 3. the development of a new form of techno tourism and club management through bargain airline travel such as easyjet. 4. the replacement of hard techno (tresor label) and pop techno (low spirit label) as the dominant berlin sound by minimal as the sound of the zero years. as his first focus, rapp describes berlin’s new club mile, which consists of a range of clubs, including berghain, watergate, maria, weekend, that in fact spread over five kilometers along the banks of the river spree. these banks form the border of berlin’s two famous countercultural districts, friedrichshain and kreuzberg, underscoring their continued importance for city nightlife. rapp emphasizes that in terms of style and location, the new clubs differ markedly from the old clubs, for example ewerk, bunker, and the old tresor and wmf. the old designs were innovative and playful, but also provisional. the owners knew the locations were likely to be bought out by developers. nevertheless, this club mile prepared the ground for the rise of 144 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 techno in berlin and for the exceptional success of the love parade. the route of the love parade in front of the brandenburg gate was not only of historical importance; it was also crucial for tourism. the parade drew masses of tourists, who also took part in the club events of the berlin love week surrounding the parade. the entrance fees were jacked up and the number of clubbers always overwhelming, guaranteeing big profits for the clubs. until 2003 the love parade and the associated love week were the most prominent examples of international club tourism. even without the profits of the love week, however, the new club scene is financially well situated. most clubs now have long-term rent contracts and are richly equipped with the latest sound systems, with, for example, the club berghain named as “best club in the world” in 2009 by the british magazine dj-mag. the scene is now even more international, considering the number of expat musicians living here, most prominently richie hawtin. yet without the media event of the love parade, this new scene remains relatively unknown. the diary of a typical club-week frames the book’s analyses and assists in presenting the mood of the new underground, which is rapp’s second point of focus. the club-week begins on a wednesday and ends (perhaps) the following monday. interviews with various protagonists – djs, youth hostel managers, rave mothers, and club owners – enliven rapp’s analysis. rapp’s journalistic reports are a diverse mix of cultural, sociological, and economic analysis. his third point of focus is the entanglement of the scene in international networks. he emphasizes this interdependence through the new economy of club tourism, made possible by bargain airlines. rapp writes, “the easyjet-raver is the definitive subject of european nightlife of the zero years. he came, without a grand announcement, and has developed into the most important subcultural figure of the present” (p.78-9). rapp explains how the combination of new bargain airlines on the one hand, and berlin’s economic crash after the optimism of the nineties, on the other, allowed for the emergence of this new european subject. the easyjet-raver could both fly on the cheap and visit an exceptionally cheap city. indeed, the failure of berlin’s plans for an economic revolution following reunification meant that, compared to cities like london or paris, berlin remains a bizarrely inexpensive metropolis. in short, what has been bad for berlin business has been good for the international underground. the first three foci of rapp’s analysis offer some considerable new insights. however, as an overview of the musical history of the berlin scene the book is less helpful. rapp’s investigation remains bound up with the minimal scene. what for him counts as the berlin sound of the zero years was actually only one of many trends. he does not explain that minimal only came to prominence in berlin during the middle of the decade through the establishment of labels liked perlon and m_nus. rapp dedicates an entire chapter to the minimal dj/producer ricardo villalobos (p.110-120), stating plainly “he is the biggest dj-star of the zero years” (p.110). with that he contradicts his earlier claim that the new scene has no stars, rather “the berlin clubs and their public” (p.12). indeed, throughout the book, rapp repeatedly mentions villalobos so much that he outs himself as a swooning fan and minimal-groupie. he thereby utilizes a trend that had already been purposefully hyped by him and other journalists. rapp even includes a berlin discography, which is a personal collection of minimal hits – beginning in 2003 with, again, a villalobos album. the book thus tends towards the genre of a travel guide and advertisement for minimal, instead of analyzing it as part of berlin techno. reviews 145 furthermore, an examination of the electro and electroclash trends is missing. for his topic, an analysis precisely of these scenes was needed because they played important roles in the first tourist waves during the zero years. if rapp decided villalobos was necessary to include, then an important “star” is missing: namely, ellen allien and her label b:pitch control. she is important precisely because of rapp’s focus on the easyjet-raver and club tourism. she has presented herself as a berlin-dj unlike any other, with her albums stadtkind (trans: city-child) and berlinette and, even more strikingly, through her dvd club-tour-guide of berlin for the time out series. indeed, the material of her musical productions is a crossover between techno and tourism. other equally influential stars during the zero years can also be listed: for example, monika kruse, t.raumschmiere and anja schneider, not to mention paul van dyk, whose continued international stardom resulted in him receiving the landesverdienstorden (land order of merit) from berlin in 2006. to be sure, rapp does examine other branches of the techno scene. there are interesting interviews addressing new media and technology with producers robert henke, philipp sollmann and ben clock. rapp analyzes the debates regarding urban renewal with the example of media spree, a construction project that could have a major impact on the new club mile. he also examines new online forum restrealitaet.de and internet fanzine resident adviser. nevertheless, one would expect a more diverse analysis of the many styles from electro to breakcore that make up the berlin sound. finally, the role of media needs more attention. many pop-cultural festivals and institutions have moved to berlin – print media like spex and groove, the music channels viva and mtv, the popkomm, etc. – a trend that has profited to the detriment of cologne, which in many respects was the pop media center of germany until 2000. such gaps demonstrate that rapp’s attempt to combine a personal diary with cultural analysis is not as successful as he perhaps wished. rapp loses himself in self-absorbed scene life and gossip. too much club jargon and name-dropping takes place, thus making some of the book comprehensible only to insiders. despite these faults, the book offers an important update on berlin techno history. the literature and media that defined the popular understanding of german techno was published more than ten years ago. the following titles appeared in the decisive year 1998: simon reynolds’ energy flash, rainald goetz’s rave, iara lee’s documentary modulations and tom tykwer’s run lola run. perhaps the most internationally well-known german book on electronic dance music, ulf poschardt’s dj culture, appeared even earlier, in 1995. for those whose knowledge of german techno is based on such literature, rapp’s lost and sound will be a helpful update. it makes clear that the history of techno is not over, and rapp is correct that the zero years are an important period in this history. 146 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 psychedelic white: goa trance and the viscosity of race. arun saldanha. minneapolis and london, university of minnesota press, 2007. isbn: 0816649936 (hardcover) 0816649944 (paperback) rrp: us$60.00 (hardcover), us$20 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.13 anthony d’andrea university of limerick (ireland), university of chicago (usa) chromatic variation in ethnographic analysis reflecting a deleuzian turn in social geography, psychedelic white: goa trance and the viscosity of race examines rave tourism in goa through the prism of a materialist theory of race and racial segregation. well-written, erudite and thought-provoking, the book opens with the observation that the mostly white psytrance music fans (also known as goa freaks) arrive at parties only after indian tourists have departed. the author arun saldanha, a belgian geographer of indian descent, expresses his discontentment, “i felt this segregation”, and adds, “this book wants to find out what sort of theoretical vocabulary is necessary to make sense of racism when it is not supposed to be there.” (p.5). the basic question it seeks to answer then is, “what makes white bodies stick together?” according to saldanha, racial segregation is a basic effect from the ethnic profile and profiling of white psytrance fans and backpackers in goa. the book provides a philosophically robust retheorization of race. opposing social constructionism, saldanha seeks to develop a materialist theory of race, centered on the deleuzian concept of viscosity, defined as resistance to flow and perforation. considered for its corporeality rather than representation, race is organized like a machinic assemblage, as instantiated in ritual experiences of the psytrance collective in goa. saldanha demonstrates familiarity with a wide range of philosophical work, including not only deleuze and guattari, but also levinas, goffman and fanon, among other thinkers in feminism and poststructuralism. psychedelic white has gained attention among geographers of race, as a number of book reviews have praised saldanha’s innovative theorization while also questioning its internal consistency at a philosophical level. this review, instead, highlights how this philosophical hypertrophy has created analytical problems in the study of psytrance. within a complex formulation of race materialism, psychedelic white discusses the more proximate notion of “psychedelics”, which saldanha defines as the dynamics of self-transformation enabled by travel, drugs and music. yet, these techniques are examined in relation to the racial background of westerners. in a series of refined reviews on the history of countercultures, orientalism, hippies and drugs, saldanha refers to the creative needs of “white men”, a term repeated ad nauseam throughout the first third of the book. this bias could have been moderated in the light of the anthropological truism that a wide variety of societies, and not only the white west, nurtures more or less complicated relationships with such techniques and devices of selftransformation. as such, the reader may be left wondering how whiteness and psychedelics are causally determined, and, if so, what is the significance and implication that saldanha attempts to address. reviews 147 based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in northern goa between 1996 and 2002 (and again in 2006), the empirical horizon of psychedelic white is constrained within a sharp racial angle, as organized across the book in three analytical sites: the shared experiences of goa freaks, the visual economy of rave tourism, and the politics of location in goa. the philosophical work so interestingly advanced by saldanha results in a racial determinism under which psytrance formations are forcefully examined. political economy is reduced to “phenotype and foreignness” (p.163). “goa freaks are microfascists” (p. 89). the book is permeated with “depressing conclusions”, as saldanha well puts it, following anecdotal analyses of white exploitation, segregation and indifference toward indians. psytrance formations, saldanha argues, have paradoxically thickened rather than transcended racial segregation in goa. the book is thus marked by a predominantly negative assessment of countercultural formations in india. in deleuzian words, psychedelic white focuses on the lines of death traced by this war machine, and says virtually nothing about the emancipatory potential of chromatic variation. some readers may even find that the impressive philosophical apparatus delivered by saldanha tends to lose connection with the empirical reality it seeks to explain. indeed, psytrance freaks are eccentric individuals, often elitist, arrogant and troubled. in a decadent and dystopic scene such as northern goa psytrance, most freaks and backpackers would likely feel more comfortable interacting with phenotypically similar peoples, whereas some individuals may express racist behavior at times. however, the argument that psytrance in goa is essentially reaffirmed through racial segregation would require stronger empirical testing and support. incredibly, important factual questions were overlooked in the book. firstly, psytrance insiders reject tourists – regardless of race – whether in goa or elsewhere. spatial segregation between insiders and outsiders is a basic feature of electronic dance scenes around the world, and goa is no different, for its members regularly attend other scenes interlinked across global countercultural circuits. in this connection, trance (ecstatic) experiences generally occur with no essential reference to issues of racial identity or segregation. internal bickering is pervasive within white psytrance subgroups in goa (p.152), and clashes involving national, generational and class difference are at least as common as those predicated on race. moreover, several indians (and other not exactly white individuals) occupy significant positions in the scene, as djs, party promoters and well-off diasporic fans. mating relationships across racial groups are common, even against india’s backdrop of patriarchy and sexual harassment, considering white females’ frequent complaints about native males. furthermore, saldanha does not account for the violence, exploitation and segregation that some indians explicitly perpetrate against third-world immigrants working in goa. likewise, he neglects that white travelers’ attitude of indifference towards indians is more often than not a simmelian response to the overwhelming demand incessantly posed by street vendors, beggars and sexual predators across india. all in all, edm studies indicate that class, gender and sexual orientation, alongside race, are all important factors in the makeup of electronic dance scenes. the psytrance scene in goa embodies complex multiplicities that cannot be easily explained by means of reduction to a single analytical category alone. as an ethnographic study, the claim that psytrance identity is founded on racial segregation is perplexing, particularly when argued on basis of empirically grounded evidence. no significant discrepancies can be found by cross-checking my fieldwork with saldanha’s ethnography at the level of observed behaviors. at a closer look, how148 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 ever, it becomes evident that saldanha has neglected the cultural point-of-view of psytrance people. in fact, he explicitly states that their representations on transcending prejudice would have misled him; and that he would not have been able to understand white identity in goa by approaching it discursively or psychologically (p.130). instead, saldanha chooses to observe their forms of sociability, at a distance, without ever addressing underlying meanings, intentions and desires. as such, the dismissal of native representations remits psychedelic white to a pre-geertzian moment, strangely resonating with classical british functional-structuralist anthropology. not by accident, in both british and deleuzian versions, subject interiorities become effects of larger social and material structures (machinic assemblages). as a possible remedy, what is the meaning of white bodies sticking together would have been a legitimate, even safer question. in other words, how problematic race actually is according to foreigners and natives in goa would be a question that largely defines the social and explanatory pertinence of a theoretical framework. however, goa freaks and goan villagers rarely speak in psychedelic white. in fact, they become largely incidental against the philosophical apparatus weaved across the book. in its appendix, saldanha correctly notes how difficult it is to interview psytrance freaks in goa, even though he seemed to possess a remarkable ability to socialize with them. conversely, saldanha provides a list of interviewees including a relative majority of indian authorities, intellectuals, journalists and activists, all of whom have been opposed to rave tourism. more widely, in a world of complexities, ethnographers ought to be supple in finding ways to engage, translate and interpret examined ways of life, initially in their own terms of sociability and intelligibility. concurring with saldanha, the locus of truth, as bourdieu puts it, rarely resides at the surface level of discursive representations alone. however, they provide critical clues towards a persuasive account that is both intellectually compelling and empirically accurate. in dismissing the voice of goa freaks, saldanha has paradoxically incurred an act of segregation by only allowing his own representations to speak and prevail. ultimately, the book fails to address a critical counter-hypothesis: psytrance fans reject indian tourists and beggars because they egregiously disrupt psytrance practices. “trance parties” are ritual practices of a quasi-sacred nature by which scene insiders can ritually express their anger and opposition to the modern self, morality and system. logically, those who don’t appear to share or respect the meanings entwined in such countercultural practices and ideologies are deemed unwelcome outsiders. in this light, the book’s main premise – that white freaks reject indian tourists because of their race – is empirically flawed. consequently, its main argument – that foreign countercultural formations in india are essentially reproduced on the basis of racial segregation – must be questioned.  the fact that these are “mostly white” formations struggling with native and alien majorities does not suffice to define them as founded, identified or reinforced by racial segregation. segregation and racism are not the same. psychedelic white must be commended for its philosophical ingenuity. nonetheless, in order to do justice to saldanha’s exquisite contribution to race studies, the book would have benefited from a more nuanced and cautious analysis of psytrance formations empirically and methodologically. it would have been more persuasive by better calibrating its racial determinism vis-à-vis the multiple, complex and polysemous injunctions of global psytrance locally, and particularly by means of a more direct dialogue with the scholarship on psytrance, travel and tourism in india and southeast asia. in battling against social constructionism, psychedelic white has lost sight of the empirical dimension it sought to explain, along with alternative philosophical explana reviews 149 tions. in their double folding, war machines are defined both for their lines of flight and death, as well as for their viscosity and chromatic variation. how to account for race as chromatic variation would have opened up a whole new range of empirical and theoretical possibilities. all along, the fixity of psytrance in northern goa (as in elsewhere) can be assessed as an ambivalent tactic of resistance for keeping the space of creative experimentation, one that is continuously threatened and reinforced by external formations, linkages, and power/knowledge arrangements. global nomads: techno and new age as transnational countercultures in ibiza and goa. anthony d’andrea. london and new york, routledge, 2007 isbn: 041542013x (hard) 0203962656 (ebook) 978-0-415-55376-4 (paper) rrp: $132 (hardbound), $28 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.14 charles de ledesma university of east london (uk) anthony d’andrea is a “transnationalist” researcher who has set out to explore the fissures and contradictions of twenty first century globalisation. global nomads is the end product of six years of field work in the bye ways of alternative cultures, and covers multiple visits to india and ibiza. it is a singular work and an indispensable contribution to a growing body of accessible academia on the curvature of globalisation, critical studies and counter cultures. as well it is an immensely readable ethnography of the lives, passion, habits and thoughts of overlapping sets of “expressive expatriates”, as d’andrea calls them. this label loosely corrals a colourful cast including djs at techno trance parties, traders in textiles at the hippie markets of goa and ibiza, artists, digital developers and international drug dealers. d’andrea defines “expressive expatriate” early on. “as a counterpoint in migration studies, the terms ‘expressive’ and ‘expatriate’ depart with the predominantly utilitarian and essentialized understanding of the mobile subject” (p.7). also weaving through the book is the concept, the global (neo) nomad, which d’andrea suggests is the philosophic base of the expressive expatriate. “many have abandoned metropolitan centres where they enjoyed a favourable material situation” (p.8). but, d’andrea cautions, his expressive, neo-nomadic, alternative subjects are not free of all the trapping of contemporary life nor do they wish to be. he applies foucault’s concept of bio power and judges that these peripheral, although not marginal, social vectors ride in tandem with neo liberal regimes. in the hands of a less radical, committed writer, a cynical edge – end of 1960s countercultural traditions; decimation of 1980s’ rave culture energies; creeping commoditisation of the global trade in goods and artefacts – could undermine such an analysis. but, thankfully, not; d’andrea remains steadfast in spirit and calling. global nomads is a resolutely optimistic work, theoretically fluent and empirically fascinating. divided into five main parts, d’andrea sets out his stall admirably in the opening chapter, “neo-nomadic”, which adds to the multiple voices in the graham st john150 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 edited collection, rave culture and religion, and in various work from robin sylvan and paul heelas, by connecting new spiritualities and techno dance culture with globalization. before nailing neo-nomadic as his defining meta-concept, d’andrea helpfully provides a short overview of critical work on the nomadic per se; using deluge’s famous epithet, “the nomad does not move” to clarify that the neo nomadic need be understood as a state of mind and being, not merely a state of movement. d’andrea begins his field report in la isla blanca – ibiza – with a colourful narrative spotlighting various neo-nomadic lifestyles encountered on the island during peak season. there is yoga teacher nora, clothes retailer rochelle, new age body practices seeker barbara and island long-stay kirk who, like d’andrea, is an anthropologist. a rather bucolic scenario builds of creative types running a busy clock of night time events, markets, yoga and “bio dance” classes, although the picture clouds in the ethnography’s next section with an exploration of the hippie and club scenes in the island’s resort, san antonio. d’andrea charts how conflicts develop in the increasingly commoditised spaces of package tourist density. he less successfully summarises field work conducted at the island’s largest nightclub, privilege, offering few surprises beyond a rather functional listing of expected details and views. we learn too of the antics of the highly extrovert couple who ran club night manumission, and how they ‘performed live’ sex acts during the night. d’andrea is revealing on the club industry economy, its army of bohemian workers who work the club season, and the party promoters behind club profitability. beyond its crass commerciality, he identifies that there are some opportunities where “exceptional parties were able to break through the nationalism that underlies mainstream clubbing in ibiza and become exciting references in the global club scene” (p.107). before heading for north goa, where sound system parties most resolutely weren’t in this mould, d’andrea stops off at point 2 in his transnational research, neospiritual guru osho’s “international meditation resort” in pune, south india. d’andrea is refreshing on this ashram turned “new age resort” as he holds centre ground between the osho supporters, sannyasins, and osho bashers, although the tone is largely one of a distanced disappointment with the commercial direction taken. this section ends with a reminder of the translocal connections between ibiza, pune and goa, three key nodes in a neo-nomadic, counter cultural lifestyle pattern which may take in goods trading, new age therapies, mind altering drug bouts and all night dancing at beachside full moon trance parties. it is goa that d’andrea travels to next and it is here that global nomads truly finds its pace and footing. after setting the scene with a brief history of the tiny, once portuguese-held, south india enclave, and western interest in it, d’andrea launches into a field report on “rebel sannyasins”, trance party promoters; backpackers after sun, parties and drugs; mornings sipping lattes and smoking hash chillums in the famous cafe, the german bakery, and attempts at elucidating information from the traveller freaks and hippy elders at the centre of the action. in an interesting ethnographic aside he finds that “at a methodological level, the politicized silence of freaks constituted a challenge to conventional methods of data collection” (p.189). but d’andrea, in exchanges parallel to those of arun saldanha in psychedelic white, beavers away patiently and soon finds his subjects full of views and stories. one, bojan, believes india to be a land “that is female, round, and the karma yoga instantaneous” (p.193). later in this masterly field report, d’andrea reaches a ravishing climax. the sub section “the techno trance assemblage: aesthetics of power and limit-experience” remains the strongest, most ethically powerful and revealing writing on the psyche reviews 151 delic trance party to date, certainly in an academic context, if not anywhere. so many nights and mornings spent searching for and, on occasions, finding, techno trance parties, has fully rubbed off on d’andrea and, unlike in the more extensive psychedelic white, the reader feels fully and disarmingly there, propelled into the vortex of chromatically varied digital beats aiming to upset and re-constitute subjectivities. locating the trance dance, first as a limit-experience which can ‘tear the subject from itself ’ (p.209), the writing collapses key elements – music, technology, raver psychology, bodily gesture and dance and potent chemical enhancers – into enchanting, hypnotic and critically consistent prose. “trance parties have been designed to engender a magic aura that remits participants into a cosmic temporality” (p.210). d’andrea’s use here of the deleuze and guattarian concept “assemblage” is judicious, not overstated, using a nomadological spirit to generate potency and mystique in the writing; attempting, successfully, to enact in words the process it sets out to describe. no matter, really, that there are one or two factual gaffs in this section. d’andrea, for example, states that the 1980s were a fallow period in the north goa party scene, picking up strength in the early 1990s. not so. djs goa gil and laurent played stupendous, night-long, tranceified electronic mixes at numerous parties in those years, with events attended by many hundreds of revellers. a stylistic weakness is the occasional repetition of phrases and sentences as d’andrea unveils his conceptual framework across various chapters. but this is no surprise given a keenness for publishing finished segments as the research project elapses. d’andrea has simply had a number of go’s at re-defining and re-casting his ideas. this doesn’t detract at all from a book which is thoughtfully crafted, stimulating, syntactically evocative and critically valuable. d’andrea’s study of neo-nomadism in expressive expatriates, his turnof-thecentury field work in multiple nodes where alternative cultures still flourish and, particularly, his sharp dissection of the trance party cosmos, is invaluable material for students of, well, just about any discipline you can imagine which touches ostensibly on globalization, cultural anthropology, neo-religious studies, cultural studies and popular music. feel free to add to the list. breakcore: identity and interaction on peer-to-peer. andrew whelan. newcastle upon tyne, cambridge scholars publishing, 2008. 337 pp. isbn: 1847186572 $60 us (hardcover) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.15 emily d. ferrigno yale university (usa) the study of virtual music communities is a fascinating and timely endeavor, given the widespread phenomenon of “bedroom production”. musical subcultures are often shaped by and mediated through online means, such as forums, chatrooms and list152 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 servs. virtual environments provide vital space in which musical practitioners share creative methods of musical production, define genre, hold aesthetic debates and socialize. virtual ethnographies are not yet numerous, and scholars interested in identity, gender and race as they exist in the virtual realm would do well to consult andrew whelan’s study. whelan’s book is an informative examination of virtual community from the chatrooms of soulseek, a file-sharing application used by electronic dance music producers. whelan focuses on users involved in breakcore, a breakbeat-centered genre influenced by jungle, industrial, and hardcore techno. whelan draws upon the theories and practices of his discipline (sociology), and illustrates concepts with robust sections of ethnographically-culled data, working with a 2100-page transcription of conversational text from soulseek chatrooms over a period of six months, as well as email interviews with producers. whelan’s analytical focal point is chatroom dialogue. he uses textual analysis to illustrate how the individuals in his study define themselves, how chatroom dialogue creates and ascribes musical meaning, and how soulseek users employ discursive cues to identify “insiders” and “outsiders.” in the introductory chapter, as well as in the concluding section of the book, whelan engages with the “rationalization/democratization” debate, a discourse central to his study. he confronts the hypothesis that technology serves to inhibit and ultimately dehumanize music, which stands in opposition to the utopian vision of technology as an agent of social change, allowing the voices of socially excluded groups to be heard (p.24). whelan provides a useful introduction to the peer-to-peer environment and file sharing protocol, and examines the mp3 file (the medium of exchange) as a “sociocultural fetish”. whelan describes how “rip crews” encode new music into mp3 format, “tag” the files, and distribute/disseminate them to the larger community. each mp3 is accompanied by an “nfo” file, which identifies the mp3 and its creator. these files are written in a source code that allows the creator to insert jokes, illustrations, and the like into the nfo. several examples of nfo files are provided in the text. whelan focuses on three practices that he describes as “shibboleths,” or “terms indicative of social location or origin, the use of which therefore serves to distinguish between groups” (p.14). these are the use of 1) nigga/nigger (chapter 5); 2) gay/ghey (chapter 7), and 3) the “amen break” (chapter 8), a widely sampled drum break from the winstons’ 1969 hit, “amen brother”. whelan provides lengthy analyses of textual exchanges in soulseek chat rooms, in which social boundaries are defined and redefined, and multiple conversations occur at once. the use of the terms “nigga/nigger” is presented in the context of “ritual insult exchange,” as well as flatly racist discourse. as whelan explains, “the term [nigga] is embedded within a matrix of ethnic and subcultural identity politics, and as such tells us much about the orientations of those who deploy it” (p.144). he bases his analysis on the use of “nigga” as a style-marker common among us youth, a characterization which is perhaps too superficial to provide the reader with sufficient context for virtual analysis. the verbal presence of “nigga/nigger” in american society is extremely complex, and quite different in its “real world” application, as opposed to the anonymous environment of virtual chatrooms. anonymity presents significant difficulties for social analysis, in that age, race, nationality, and even (spoken) english language fluency of chatroom users may be unknown. the second shibboleth “gay/ghey” is also examined within the context of chatroom discourse. whelan bases his analysis on the concept of “gay” as not only homo reviews 153 sexual, but also encompassing characteristics and ideals rejected by hegemonic masculinity (p.182). noting that, “the ‘joking’ exploration of the semantics of gay is a popular trope among young men” (p.200), whelan presents several examples of chatroom dialogue related to anal eroticism. he then explains the use of “ghey” in the chatrooms to describe something “lame” or “generic” (the homosexual connotation orthographically removed). the discussion concludes with an examination of masculinity, a frequent theme in whelan’s study, given the scarcity of participants identifying themselves as female in breakcore chatrooms. in chapter eight, “junglist,” whelan begins to focus on the music around which his study is centered. he discusses the aesthetics of breakcore via chatroom discourse, addressing polarities such as old school/new school and mainstream/underground. whelan regards the “amen break” as a third shibboleth, a time-honored (and wellworn) sample used in electronic dance music. however, he also highlights the debate within the breakcore community as to whether the use of the amen is creative, progressive, or even interesting. this problematizes the classification of the amen as a shibboleth; while the amen is well known in the breakcore community, its utilization is not a given. perhaps, then, the amen is a shibboleth used to distinguish subgroups from one another, rather than distinguishing the entire breakcore community from outsiders. whelan’s book ends with a lengthy “journey through the media” (p.319), covering a range of topics from sampling ethics and branding, to utopian visions of peer-to-peer culture. whelan characterizes his book as a “collage,” and, in fact, his theoretical discussions are dense, at times unfocused and difficult to follow. whelan’s own ideas are often obscured by his prose style and frequent quotation of others’ work. this also limits the accessibility of the text to specialists, which can be a serious shortcoming when writing to an interdisciplinary audience. in addition, whelan’s engagement with musical analysis is not a strong point of the book. he describes the amen break as embodying “polyrhythmic hesitancy”, the snares “sketching an idiosyncratic, irregular pattern”. like many drum breaks, the amen is characterized by syncopation, a basic feature of funk drumming–hardly idiosyncratic, and, in fact, very “regular”. the reader is not given a particularly clear description of what breakcore and its related genres sound like (beyond the discography). whelan does participate in the breakcore scene (as a chatroom member and perhaps a producer), but the reader is not privy to this information. the inclusion of reflexive ethnography would have added necessary transparency to his study, for when the reader is well acquainted with the author, ethnographic authority and agenda are made clear, and thus can become secondary to the voices of the observed. despite these shortcomings, whelan makes a rigorous contribution to the study of musical culture in the digital age. he delves into an examination of the sometimes crude nature of chatroom discourse, thoughtfully employing textual analysis to unpack the complexities of race, gender and social interaction. whelan’s discussion of the internet, society and identity is enlightening. he introduces the term “networked individualism” in which “identity is organised and expressed through consumption practices” (p.319), whereby participatory and collaborative consumption are encouraged, in opposition to the model of passive consumption set up by the music industry (p.305). this observation suggests that (somewhat problematically) whelan embraces a utopian (and democratic) vision of peer-to-peer file sharing, in which recorded sound is free and open to all–collected, utilized, manipulated and most importantly, shared. 154 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 the high life: club kids, harm and drug policy (qualitative studies in crime and justice volume 2). dina perrone. monsey (ny), criminal justice press, 2009. isbn: 978-1-881798-46-0 rrp: $35 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.16 lucy gibson university of manchester (uk) dina perrone’s study of “club kids” based in new york city presents an illuminating analysis of the cultural and situational context in which club drugs are used. while most literature on drug use tends to focus on users from impoverished communities and the harm they experience, the high life challenges the typical drug user stereotype by showing the “hidden” deviant behaviour of seemingly conformist, affluent and well-educated young adults. perrone opposes america’s war on drugs and argues that the focus of drugs policy should shift from a criminal justice approach (abstinenceonly strategy) to a more balanced response that includes principles from both the cultural and health fields and focuses on the well-being and lifestyles of drug users. the book begins by outlining two assumed flaws in america’s current drug war: that drug users have a pathology, which is the only factor leading to the “drug problem”; and that all illegal drug use leads to harm. perrone challenges these assumptions by asserting that the “...culture and capital of the user and the social environment in which the drugs are used greatly influence use, abuse, and harm” (p.2). chapter one builds on the introduction by providing an overview of how perrone met the club kids and offering initial insights into their lives. moreover, the chapter describes the ethnographic field methods deployed to study the participants’ use of club drugs such as mdma, methamphetamine (crystal meth), ketamine and ghb. the book is based on perrone’s observations, discussion with club kids during fifteen months of fieldwork and interviews with eighteen club kids aged between 22 and 33. the subsequent chapters are separated into two parts: (i) club kids’ dance culture and (ii) drug use among the club kids. the first part examines the club kids as a subcultural group by assessing how they correspond to subculture literature and earlier drug-using subcultural groups such as hippies, mods and skinheads. the book demonstrates that, in contrast to traditional subcultural groups, club kids do not wish to reject the dominant culture, but rather, they adhere to the consumerist norms of conventional american society. club kid culture and the clubbing experience are explored using theories of consumption, commercialisation and globalisation, and by situating the club kids within postmodern theories of the nature of late capitalism. throughout part one, perrone neatly uses the club kids’ perceptions of clubbing, its importance and the suitability of using drugs in club settings to illustrate the fantastical, “carnivalesque” and commodified nature of contemporary club culture. the second part of the book explores the club kids’ patterns of drug use. perrone shows how club kids maintain their jobs and uphold family responsibilities whilst using relatively large quantities of drugs. through their social and economic privileges, the club kids are able to avoid criminal justice sanctions and limit harm. the author employs a theoretical framework, which refers and adds to the prior work of norman reviews 155 zinberg, to describe how factors (drug, set, setting, timing and capital) in club kids’ lives allow controlled and safe drug use. perrone expands on zinberg’s (1984) framework of “drug, set and setting” by adding supplementary concepts of timing and capital drawn from primary data. timing and capital include both club kids’ resources and stages or transitions in the life course. the author demonstrates how a drug’s properties, the setting in which the drug is used, the user’s mood (set), resources (capital) and phase of life-trajectory (timing), shape drug using practices and impact on the relationship between drugs and harm. perrone uses rich and detailed quotations from her respondents to demonstrate how club kids negotiate drug use to minimise harm and avoid criminal justice penalties, while also revealing the larger contradictions in club kids’ lives. chapter seven provides a final discussion of the study’s findings and offers a wider examination of their implications for drug policy in the u.s. perrone pertinently argues that “...socially and economically privileged drug users, such as the club kids, are better equipped to manage their clubbing and drug-using behaviors than are less privileged users...the war on drugs is disproportionately a war on poor people. thus, white, middle-class users are more capable of concealing their drug use and escaping public and police detection than their lower-class counterparts” (p.205). for perrone, the war on drugs has been lost and future policy should de-stigmatise users and help to minimise the harm resulting from drug use rather than concentrate on arrest or punishment. perrone’s study offers a convincing account of the social, cultural and environmental factors that shape drug use among club kids. the book provides a fascinating insight into club kids’ lives and how regular drug users are able to occupy conventional social roles and sustain typical social relationships. however, two minor criticisms remain. although numerous references to relevant work are evident throughout the book, the statement “...cocaine can benefit those with asthma” (p.130) is not supported by academic evidence and readers may want to know the basis for such a claim. moreover, recent post-subcultural literature (e.g. bennett 1999; bennett and kahnharris 2004) has been omitted from the discussion. perrone states that club kids are not a subculture in the traditional sense of the term. yet, she continues to use this term to describe the club kids as a distinct social group. that aside, the book offers a stimulating analysis of club kids’ drug use by highlighting the reasons for clubbing, and exploring club kids’ motivations, and cultural practices. perrone provides a thought-provoking discussion that challenges the majority of literature on drug use. the study is invaluable for students of electronic dance music culture as it questions current failing policy in the u.s. and offers new ways of conceptualising the culture and context of drug use. references bennett, andy. 1999. subcultures or neo-tribes? rethinking the relationship between youth, style and musical taste. sociology, 33: 599-617. bennett, andy and kahn-harris, keith. 2004. after subculture: critical studies in contemporary youth culture. london: palgrave. zinberg, norman. 1984. drug, set, and setting: the basis for controlled intoxicant use. new haven: yale university press. 156 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 1. vanveen-typeset from the floor dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(1) 2009 issn 1947-5403 ©2009 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ convergence and soniculture: 10 years of mutek tobias c. van veen mcgill university (canada) when considering electronic dance music culture (edmc) – not as an object of study in the world, but as a description, a concept itself – the variables of the phrase come under some pressure. need edmc be electronic, as if electrons alone define the production aesthetic, “made by electricity”? or need the electron signal the sound, as the 1990s defined quasi-genre “electronica” suggests by way of its inaccuracy (what recorded music isn’t electronic in the 21c)?1 and need edmc be dance music, insofar as such a distinction would exclude prone modes of body listening found everywhere, in ambient music chill rooms, as well as the focused attention of the elongated ear to be found at contemporary experimental music performances from microsound to noise? and, in the case of noise, or other frequency experimentation, including the use of all-sound or silence – and one thinks here of the lasting influence of john cage in experimental electronic music from embracing percussion as the means to all-sound to random chance operations to improvisation2 – can we say that sonic experimentation need be conceptualised as music? in what sense? finally, what bounds the three signifiers above into a culture? dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(1) 2009, 95-117 issn 1947-5403 ©2009 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.06 from the floor the seated & the danced: moderat @ mutek x (2009). photo: tobias c. van veen in short, if an event combines both prone postures and dancing dervishes, as well as two forms of nonmusic, rhythmic and arhythmic, noise and silence, in an approximation that is only “electronic” insofar as everything amplified and recorded is electronic (and thus the signifier is banal), is there an electronic dance music culture if “dance” and “music” remain as secondary to the diversity of approaches such an event would attempt to contain? or would not contain, nor constrain – would not the culture exist only in its inversion, turning itself inside-out, a culture of its outsides? and can we analyse such an event under the descriptive “alphabet talk” – to sample william gibson3 – of edmc? all of which would be a way to introduce mutek,4 which in 2009 celebrated its 10th anniversary. mutek takes place in montréal, a city that has branded itself in the worldwide tourism industry as the “city of festivals”,5 with its jazz festival, just for laughs comedy festival, and so on.6 and so mutek came into being under the operating paradigm of tourism montréal’s annual barrage of festivities: a multi-day extravaganza exploring the nether reaches of electronic but also experimental dance and sometimes not dance music (nor sometimes even music), and if need be appended, culture (but also just a lot of ridiculous partying, writhing, scenestering, mulling around and drinking – the culture of the urban electronite). http://vimeo.com/4929374 mutek 10 en 1 minute from anne-marie bergeron mutek was conceived by media arts curators alain mongeau and eric mattson in 1999 as a way to address what they saw as a soniculture no longer that of rave culture, yet distinct from the new media arts they curated at the time for the montreal international festival of new cinema and new media (fcmm).7 the operational portmanteau of soniculture – a convergence of aesthetic explorations in sonics that, through its convergence, establishes a social network – works well to describe the impetus behind mutek. what mongeau and mattson observed was a post-rave, van veen • 10 years of mutek 96 http://vimeo.com/4929374 http://vimeo.com/4929374 http://vimeo.com/user442116 http://vimeo.com/user442116 post-new media scene exploring the sonics of experimental electronic music without need to either subject it to the functionalism required of rave-era electronic music, on the one channel, nor the strict historicist confines of an aesthetically straight-jacketed institutional arts practice on the other, thus developing avenues of sonic and visual production in which the potential for a convergence, a culture, began to flower.8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khsxr6dw6be xlr8r tv ep. 67: mutek grows older & wiser. video: tobias c. van veen and ken taylor since its inception in 2000, mutek has showcased variants of electronic music that were, for the most part, outside the club and rave circuits as well as those of media arts, and as one would expect, focused on experimental directions in beatless approaches such as ambient, microsound, noise and other abstract compositional strategies, always on the verge of academic, institutional electro-acoustic or acousmatic music but maintaining the urgency of non-institutional diy aesthetics. yet what set mutek apart from the point-of-view of the new media arts scene was its dedication to hearing rhythmic, beat-punctuated and percussive electronic music as a serious art form. mutek provided a space that was neither rave nor club, neither new media lounge nor electro-acoustic concert. its early events in unseated, open-spaces such as the society for arts and technology (sat)9 and ex-centris’s salle10 were notorious for eschewing seating as well as any traditional sense of flow, at least in the rave-era expectation of a sonic trajectory leading up to the climax and dénouement, insofar as the evening might shift from beats to noise, microsound to dub, with no particular aesthetic order governing the lineup (though early editions focused on label showcases, and certain themes, the timing of the artists remained unconventional). to this extent, the early editions often challenged the audience’s sense of direction, and in response, rarely did an audience get up (or get down) and dance. in fact, at some events an odd mixture of standing / sitting / dancing / mixing took place, a subtle but characteristic confusion of bodies unsettled by space and sound. standing room only: atom heart plays sat, mutek x (2009). photo: tobias c. van veen 97 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khsxr6dw6be http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khsxr6dw6be to this extent, mutek developed a reputation as a straightlaced festival, even (wrongly) an academic one, a representation which persisted even as mutek strove to embrace a sonic aesthetic of hedonist and ecstatic release (and ironically, later embracing artists with academic credentials). mongeau commented upon the self-generated gravitas of mutek in 2008: we kind of perceived the festival as a digital culture festival. the way the festival was established was perceived as such a serious event. and i think that’s a bit our fault – or it’s actually an achievement, as we wanted to distinguish the festival from the club and the rave culture, so we had to give it kind of an envelope of being something that could be taken seriously. and we managed so well that actually we scared a lot of people away.11 this all-too-serious representation was still at play in 2008, as evident in the surprised reaction of sampladelic turntablist and producer kid koala to playing a friday night mutek gig at metropolis: “i was under the impression it was a very, yah, sort of academic crowd, but that night it was just a big party, really, y’know...”.12 dancefloor detritus: all that is left after mala destroys the crowd with dubstep, mutek x (2009). photo: tobias c. van veen but in the distant past of 2002, only on the sunday and last night of the festival would the curtains drop and the beats repeat until dawn, embracing the euphoria of letting loose to endless hours of repetitive rhythm, as something of mutek’s attempt to play at being serious was dropped like the strangely absent needle on the turntable – as at the time mutek rarely acknowledged the role of the techno-turntablist in edmc, choosing to focus near exclusively on non-turntablist performance. it was something of the absence of the turntablist that led to the lack of the festival’s flow.13 yet, at this hazy moment of persistent rhythm, the serious came through in the fray of the music’s relentlessness: a new flow was being pioneered in the improvisation of electronic gear. van veen • 10 years of mutek 98 as philip sherburne observed at the time, this moment where the “crowd heaved in unison” as the “brushed aluminum and bubble wrap” of “aerated minimalism” dropped away, the “cushioned” and “lacking bite” microhouse giving itself over to a music that “was so aggressively present that it became possible to forget it was there at all – it simply was” (sherburne 2002). and i know – i was there at the time, writing furiously on a notepad under the gear table as ricardo villalobos, dandy jack and atom heart jammed above me, only to realise someone else had crawled into this mess of wires and bass reverberations – it was philip, who goes on: for an hour, two, more, they played groove off of groove, wrapping disparate rhythms around each other, sparking a magnetic field that held the entire audience spellbound. this – now this was something. something i’d never heard before, a whole new kind of electronic music. but there was no time to think about it then. this tidal ebb and flow went on for hours, literally hours, building an impossible tension. the crowd was enraptured, lost in one of those moments of total communion. the club, which was supposed to close at 3 a.m., kept going until 5, drawing black velvet curtains against the sunrise outside. the birth of minimal: ricardo villalobos, atom heart, dandy jack in the old sat, mutek 2002. photo: tobias c. van veen to resample philip’s observation – which i also made at the time14 – a new electronic music sound had been birthed as atom heart, dandy jack and ricardo villalobos manually synchronized their gear without midi, a raw minimalism in which “the rhythm swirled around and around in a self-canceling moment of equatorial confusion where clockwise and counterclockwise collide”. in short, when mutek dropped its pants and lost itself, it birthed a new genre: what was to become known as minimal or k-house (we’ll get to this below). 99 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 dandy jack sweating out a new sound @ mutek 2002. photo: tobias c. van veen mutek was integral during this period of 2000-2005 in generating a community of producers within the city of montréal, consisting of artists who gravitated to the city from elsewhere, in part because of mutek (such as mike shannon, the mole, mitchell akiyama, deadbeat, tim hecker and jeff milligan, among others) as well as supporting the locally raised (such as vincent lemieux, skoltz_kolgen, martin tétreault, akufen, ghislain poirier and egg – among many others). the festival provided an atmosphere in which the continuing evolution of techno, house, electro and dub in its aesthetically complex forms, including those that are complex by way of their reductive strategies in sampling, tonality and rhythm, such as trends in minimalism (minimal techno, microhouse, glitch, etc), were given the time and space in which to germinate. in this respect, we can imagine that mutek’s inception resonates with the programming activities of the kitchen in nyc under avant-garde composer and leftfield disco producer arthur russell (1974-1975), who much to the chagrin of the “serious” downtown minimalists, invited in bands such as the talking heads and modern lovers. unfortunately, and unlike nyc, montréal remained unable to sustain a thriving electronic music scene year round. from 2004 onwards, many of the city’s talents moved on to the global focal point of berlin. at some point, nearly inaudible between 2006 and 2008, mutek had shifted its focus from a “festival for producers by producers” to an extended shindig that embraced both moments of sober sonic contemplation and dance floor jouissance. in short, by the time 2009 rolled around, mutek realised it no longer had to prove itself; its sonics and visual aesthetics had become successful as both art and revelry. and the same thing was happening elsewhere, with the minimalist and new sounds mutek championed – as we heard in 2002 on a bleary monday morning – now branded “minimal”, coinciding with the post-raver generation’s rediscovery of hedonism. mutek became a full-on festival of van veen • 10 years of mutek 100 psychedelic technohipsters. nowhere was this more vibrant than at the outdoor collaboration with picnik electronic in parc jean drapeau, which, by the standards of north american cities, is a veritable sonic insurrection, temporary autonomous zone or at least immoderate and public gathering of dance floor hedonists (see this video of picnik to get a sense of mutek’s soniculture). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bya-yfwk1gc the axes of mutek: global invention & psychedelic accelerant the outlook of mutek has been inventively global. as mongeau has recounted,15 the festival developed along two geographic axes, one north-south, between south america and montréal (specifically chile), and one east-west, between montréal and berlin (the club transmediale festival in particular). satellite mutek festivals were established in mexico, china and chile, with events now taking place in southern america and tours throughout europe. perhaps the one artist that embodies something of these axes, as well as the range of sonic styles noted above – though on the rhythmic, beat side of the spectrum – is that of chilean-born, german-raised ricardo villalobos, whose particular experiments in house and techno minimalism accelerated the genre precisely at the moment when its dry abstraction risked aesthetic collapse. villalobos – along with other artists on the playhouse label and rougher experiments taking place with “schaffle” rhythms over at label kompakt extra (aka speicher) – shifted minimalism from the play of cyclic and one-bar looped samples that defined detroit’s stamp on minimalist techno into a complex interplay of long-play, linear sonic events set against micro-edits in continuously evolving, looping rhythms, earning the unfortunate nickname (for a while) of “ketamine house.” k-house, named for its k-hole style properties of deep meditative sonics laden with subtle yet psychedelic inflections (after the recreational use of the heavy tranquilizer that is known to knock users off their feet into a psychedelic near-coma) is best described by music critic philip sherburne who wrote at the time (2005) that “well, for one thing, techno is getting weirder. ok, so full-on experimental freakouts are few and far between – this is ‘dance music’, after all, with an emphasis on functionalism – but woozy rhythms, psychedelic detailing, and discombobulating effects are permeating track after track, leaving clubbers’ heads spinning like a leslie”. contemporary minimalism perhaps starts with villalobos’ alcachofa (2003), which as sherburne wrote at the time, “was the first indication that minimal techno and microhouse were going psychedelic”. indeed, not only was techno going psychedelic but its dreamy, k-hole psychedelia signalled a massive resurgence in the sound, to the point where “minimal” became a distinct genre from techno (say, circa 2005). minimal, eschewing its dry severity and abstract patterns, began to open itself through an aesthetic collage with the genre of trance. or perhaps it finally opened itself to the “interstellar jazz” and “psychedelic offworld techno” of detroit's red planet series crafted by underground resistance’s the martian back in the early 1990s.16 though psytrance and other speed-addicted genres remain quite distinct from minimal’s psychedelia, this descendent of the time when techno and trance were indistinct has embraced something of the psychedelia as well as the hedonism of the trance aesthetic, while retaining a distinctly slower bpm, deeper (and for the most part) more inventively sampled sonic palette and cross-genre borrowings with house, dubstep and dub.17 101 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bya-yfwk1gc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bya-yfwk1gc psychedelic k-house: mathew jonson & dandy jack @ mutek x (2009). photo: tobias c. van veen minimalism goes psychedelic: mathew jonson & dandy jack @ mutek x (2009). photo: tobias c. van veen van veen • 10 years of mutek 102 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otikeychsps and so i think it can be said that one axis of mutek, despite its reputation as an urban festival, a gathering of bourgeois techno-hipsters, of the post-net-art digerati, of the geeks who don’t dance, of those into the very furthest reaches of the (un)listenable, as a festival where producers watch other producers hit play on a laptop – and it is all these things as well – mutek is also, if not first and foremost these days, a strangely hedonist and psychedelic gathering. a breed of urban psychedelic culture, too aging to be young hipster, too cynical to be new age post-raver, too educated to be anything else. which is where we get to culture, and where we arrive at in 2009, and the question i have been posing to myself in regards to the c – culture – in edmc: if psytrance currently has the edge on other forms of electronic music culture insofar as psytrance festivals remain the largest, if not most intriguing, gatherings of dance music culture – insofar as trance comprises a supranational, willing-to-travel supranetwork of dedicated participants, with larger goals within the gathering, from transcendental dance experience to the healing arts and permaculture as integral aspects of its culture (such as portugal’s boom festival) – techno’s movement into psychedelic minimalism, and willingness to embrace radically divergent strains of sonic listening, from noise to silence, keeps the edge in pushing sonico-aesthetic boundaries. but with a common denominator of psychedelia – and this remains to be thought, what, precisely psychedelia has come to mean in this context, for it can neither be reduced to the biotechnology of ingested substances nor to clichéd cultural references of tie-dye and the 1960s, and certainly not to variants of new age mysticism, as the urban technoheads demonstrate – the chance of techno and trance converging comes to the fore. and if this moment comes about, would it not approach something more apt to be signified as a culture, if such a convergence took place, at a time and place? such a convergence would indeed be something of the mix that brought about acid house and rave culture in the first place, when the gay house circuit began to dance to the harderedged sonic experimentation of acieed, thus attracting white disenfranchised postpunks high on afrofuturist technomythos willing to embrace the nomadic lifestyle 103 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otikeychsps http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otikeychsps of uk travellers (and so on): this kind of crossbreeding is what brings about fertile cultural convergences. mutek converges with public art: picnik electronic, mutek 2005. photo: tobias c. van veen back to mutek. at mutek multiple variables are at play within this question as to whether its festival – which now attracts thousands of worldwide participants, takes place in multiple venues and runs for over seven days – can become a cultural convergence. as a preliminary remark on mutek's ability to crosspollinate cultural niches and attract audiences from outside its established scene, the festival has increasingly expanded its public media arts installations and performances, generating a noticeable intervention within the urban fabric of the city with light and sound. van veen • 10 years of mutek 104 in 2009, mutek’s mark was left on the city in the form of public performances and projections: dominique skoltz (photo animation) on st. laurent, mutek x (2009). photo: tobias c. van veen the role of technology in a possible cultural convergence affects all aspects of psychedelic soniculture – insofar as technology concerns the nature of performance itself, of the sonic content, of the ways in which psychedelic soniculture communicates, networks, appreciates art and moves to it. developments in computing technology have largely overcome the limitations of laptop performance, allowing for expressive gesture in the (re)production of performance. debates circa 2000 through 105 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 2004 concerning the nature of the “live” have all but been surpassed insofar as technological development has allowed for more expressive intervention in the (re)production of performance.18 moreover the context of performance has changed insofar as its signifiers of authenticity have shifted to embrace laptop performativity, sonic reproduction and the aesthetics of playback. on the one channel, the old signifiers of performative authenticity inherent to pop (such as gesture and the connection between movement and sound) have become banalized as pop embraces the role of electronic reproduction and laptop performance – while oft giving in to ventriloquism – while on the other channel, signifiers of the performer’s bodily authenticity have seen their resurgence in electronic performance, as witnessed here in the case of nôze, who recode rock’s authenticity into a drunken stupor of sexual ambiguity much to the crowd’s delight at mutek’s picnik electronic in 2008: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4yys0cujew yet again, the general concert, such as in rock, pop music and hip hop, as well as classical, have all born witness to the entrance of the laptop and the onstage performance of the laptop itself, from radiohead’s kid a (2000) to björk’s vespertine tour and album (2001), with production by experimental house music artists matmos and mathew herbert. and of course, we do not even mention that the question of performative authenticity rarely dogs the prerecorded and prerehearsed performances of contemporary pop music, such as britney spears. only in a contracultural dimension of “real” music, such as indie or techno, is the question of authenticity at all contemplated – at least since milli vanilli. beware the artists: strobe noise @ mutek x (2009). photo: tobias c. van veen the second variable to a cultural convergence is that of the performative geography of the festival itself. in what kind of venues does mutek take place? the parc jean drapeau gatherings of picnik electronic held under a giant alexander calder statue entitled “man” (built for expo ‘67) and the open-concept events at the society for van veen • 10 years of mutek 106 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4yys0cujew http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4yys0cujew arts and technology allow for self-made, participative audiences that get-in on the event, becoming part of a festival ritual, an upending carnival and a downright shindig. likewise, the experimental music venues that embrace noise or lo-fi performance – the aesthetic domain of curator eric mattson – are often laid out in such a way that the “audience” must self-arrange bodies and ears around the sometimes flailing antics of performers. noise performers & crowded becoming-ears at mutek x (2009). photo: tobias c. van veen still, seated performance areas have also claimed their own space, as work that cultural elites would deem more “serious” require a focused listening environment where no-body moves (and it is just as elite to critique such listening environments on these grounds). to this effect, audiovisual performances such as gas, burnt friedman and artificiel took place in a multimedia theater venue of the monument nationale: monument national, mutek x (2009). photo: tobias c. van veen 107 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 thus allowing the presentation of work such as that of artificiel’s investigation of a tesla coil: artificiel @ mutek x (2009). photo: tobias c. van veen van veen • 10 years of mutek 108 still, the most intimate and barrier breaking of spaces is always the afterparty, here with surprise guest, chicago house legend dj sneak. dj sneak, 5am-ish, monday morning, mutek x (2009). photo: tobias c. van veen yet surprises can also arrive with the most intriguing of experimental performance, where stillness encompasses the performer, here new york’s o.blaat who works with room performance dynamics. walking into the alternative room at large-scale concert venue metropolis, this open-unorganised space (save for a low-riser for the performers) allows interactions such as this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6i4wtwy1su and performers such as kode 9 and spaceape, through their sonic force of low-end dubstep, performed by way of turntablism and incantation mcing, allow darkness to 109 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6i4wtwy1su http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6i4wtwy1su descend upon an open spatial reconfiguration of the sat, opening alternative performative mythologies not only onstage but off: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0myajfs3uq yet even with seated venues, the investigation of gesture-based performativity by the artist can generate a new experience, often categorised as “live cinema”, insofar as the interpretation of audio-visual events is made apparent, like jazz, and to be found prominently in the work of skoltz_kolgen (http://www.skoltzkolgen.com). with audio-visual composer randy jones, psychedelia once again comes to the fore, this time in a visual motif that recalls yet hyperaccelerates the liquid oil-based projections of the 1960s alongside sounds closer to max neuhaus than acid rock: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrn_pozxbwa van veen • 10 years of mutek 110 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0myajfs3uq http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0myajfs3uq http://www.skoltzkolgen.com/ http://www.skoltzkolgen.com/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrn_pozxbwa http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrn_pozxbwa deep ambient composer clinker traces psychedelia in not only composition and performance, but in the art of the interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj-ffuohvza in all of these spaces, sounds and sights reconfigure the audience into either experiencing coordinates in listening and seeing that are far from the everyday – or refract the everyday into a focused environment. whether this audience is seated in a mesmerised sonic trance or joyously whooping it up at picnik (even going strong in the rain these past few years), the conditions for a shared experience exists – a convergence of otherwise unmet bodies. and – or at least it is my loose hyperthesis – that a form of psychedelia, technological in nature, is providing the impetus for all of this happening. where the everyday is already permeated with an intense level of technological substrate, of interconnective messaging, cellular telephonic activity, and the forever-online world of the urbanite, it has become near banal that the psychedelic experience of fractal distraction in perception is commonplace (at least in the busyness of urban centres; yet all computerised life subsists in this fashion). taking sonics and visual arts that embrace and investigate the (a)rhythmic interplay of this technoworld is part of the underlying soniculture’s contribution to aesthetically enjoying the world as well as providing the models and means of communitas for this kind of world experience to take place. and this taking place is embracing an undercurrent of psychedelia.19 psychedelic minimalism: carsten nicolai @ mutek x (2009). photo: tobias c. van veen 111 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj-ffuohvza http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj-ffuohvza nowhere was this celebratory psychedelia felt more than through the exemplary visual projections at the metropolis venue. metropolis, a classic two-level theater retrofitted to concert venue and dance haven, holds several thousand people with a full wooden dance floor, professional bass-laden sound system and upper balcony level, thereby allowing an interplay between rest and dance, spectatorship and participatory circulation. with the near church-like atmosphere created during carl craig’s set, psychedelia took hold from the first sounds of detroit’s second wave: van veen • 10 years of mutek 112 carl craig proclaiming the reign of psychedelia by way of afrofuturist sonics @ mutek x (2009). photo: tobias c. van veen carl craig @ mutek x (2009). photo: tobias c. van veen http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocx0hvt06bi leading audiences into a purple haze atmospherics of sonic immersion and bodily proximity that can only be emphasized as the basis for peaceful coexistence amongst an antagonistic species: the purple haze, mutek x (2009). photo: tobias c. van veen 113 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocx0hvt06bi http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocx0hvt06bi to return to our first question, can mutek’s soniculture be considered an edmc? only insofar as the terms are placed under a certain erasure and remixed to what has become of soniculture in the 21c: psychedelia. and it is psychedelia that offers the potential for a cultural convergence, for an unmet interplay between sonics and aesthetics, bodies and trajectories of travel. would the electron-culture converge once again into a diverse massification capable of the energies unleashed in the late 1980s, perhaps a startling connected and as of yet unheard constellation will come into play within this world, one in which a connection / convergence to its history, yet also to its selves, remixes the ancient motifs of psychedelia and ritual. cobblestone jazz adds colin the mole to become the modern deep left quartet: canadian techno minimalism has always been psychedelic, indeed. mutek x (2009). photo: tobias c. van veen http://vimeo.com/205146 cobblestone jazz & the mole @ mutek 07, from slacker mind van veen • 10 years of mutek 114 http://vimeo.com/205146 http://vimeo.com/205146 http://vimeo.com/slacker http://vimeo.com/slacker references cage, john. 1973. “the future of music: credo”. in silence: lectures and writings by john cage, pp. 3-7. hanover: wesleyan university press. cascone, kim. 2002. “laptop music – counterfeiting aura in the age of infinite reproduction”. parachute: electrosons_electrosounds 107: 52-60. gibson, william. 2008. spook country. new york: berkley. sherburne, philip. 2002. “finding a new genre at mutek”. needle drops june 7, 2002: < http://www.neumu.net/needledrops/data/00040_needledrops.shtml>. accessed 20 august 2009. ––––. 2005. “the month in techno”. pitchfork 27 september, 2005: <http://pitchfork.com/features/techno/6153-the-month-in-techno/>. accessed 20 august 2009. van veen, tobias c. 2002. “a fine marriage of madness and the margins at mutek 2002”. the wire 222 (august). archived at: <http://quadrantcrossing.org/papers/mutek2002-wire-tv.pdf>. accessed 20 august 2009. ––––. 2002a. “bleeps in the heart of the beast – mutek 2002 in montreal”. discorder ( july). archived at: <http://quadrantcrossing.org/papers/mutek2002-discorder-tobiasv.pdf>. accessed 20 august 2009. ––––. 2006. "kompakt & recycle", kompakt 6: 54-6. <http://quadrantcrossing.org/papers/ei6_kompakt-tv.pdf> (accessed 13 september 2009). ––––. 2009. forthcoming. “10 glitches in the failure of microsound”. which was to be published in kim cascone (ed) vague terrain: microsound 15: <http://vagueterrain.net>. as cascone made last minute changes without consulting the authors, now we’ll see. discography minilogue. animals. 2008. cocoon (lp, cd): cor lp 016, cor cd 016. http://www.discogs.com/minilogue-animals/master/33266 villalobos, ricardo. 2003. alcachofa. playhouse (lp, cd): play083, playhouse cd08. http://www.discogs.com/villalobos-alcachofa/master/11385 author biography tobias c. van veen is a renegade theorist & practitioner of the technology arts. a techno-turntablist and instigator of sonic interventions since 1993, tobias is doctoral candidate in philosophy & communication studies at mcgill university. his next publication, an edited volume tentatively titled afrofuturism: interstellar transmissions from remix culture is forthcoming from wayne state up, 2010. he also mixes a mean absynthe martini. his research blog can be found at: <http://fugitive.quadrantcrossing.org/> 115 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 http://www.neumu.net/needledrops/data/00040_needledrops.shtml http://www.neumu.net/needledrops/data/00040_needledrops.shtml http://pitchfork.com/features/techno/6153-the-month-in-techno/ http://pitchfork.com/features/techno/6153-the-month-in-techno/ http://quadrantcrossing.org/papers/mutek2002-wire-tv.pdf http://quadrantcrossing.org/papers/mutek2002-wire-tv.pdf http://quadrantcrossing.org/papers/mutek2002-discorder-tobiasv.pdf http://quadrantcrossing.org/papers/mutek2002-discorder-tobiasv.pdf http://quadrantcrossing.org/papers/ei6_kompakt-tv.pdf http://quadrantcrossing.org/papers/ei6_kompakt-tv.pdf http://vagueterrain.net http://vagueterrain.net http://www.discogs.com/minilogue-animals/master/33266 http://www.discogs.com/minilogue-animals/master/33266 http://www.discogs.com/villalobos-alcachofa/master/11385 http://www.discogs.com/villalobos-alcachofa/master/11385 http://fugitive.quadrantcrossing.org http://fugitive.quadrantcrossing.org notes van veen • 10 years of mutek 116 1 i write “21c” as the century is more or less encoded in bits and bytes. 2 as i write elsewhere (van veen 2009, forthcoming), let us grant cage his due with his realisation, as early as 1937 – though “early” only by virtue of a white modernist history – that rhythm and percussion, in the deconstruction of tones and scripts, “explores the academically forbidden ‘non-musical’ field of sound,” and that an afro-american tradition of “hot jazz,” if not one of “oriental cultures” in general, where “any sound is acceptable,” has already “transitioned” from “keyboard-influenced music” to “the all-sound music of the future” (5). 3 specifically, in spook country (2008). 4 see mutek: <http://mutek.org/> (accessed 20 august 2009). 5 see “an endless urban festival” at tourism montréal: <http://www.tourisme-montreal.org/press/itineraries-by-theme/events-and-entertainm ent> (accessed 20 august 2009). 6 one is reminded of the way in which the world's cities have signified their essence: paris is the city of light, chicago the windy city, philadelphia the city of brotherly love, new york the city that never sleeps (and perhaps london is, with some resignation, simply the grey and rainy one). montréal, as the city of festivals, is perhaps among the first to brand its essence by way of a tourism organisation. 7 fcm(m) has since dropped the ‘new media’ component. see “fcmm”: <http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?numpage=114> and <http://www.nouveaucinema.ca/ > (accessed 20 august 2009). 8 for a visual analysis and conference comments concerning mutek’s changes circa 2006, see “mutek 2006: velvet panda meets tobias c. van veen”, posted to youtube.com, may 31st 2006: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11gy2du5d9u> (accessed 20 august 2009). 9 see “the society for arts and technology (sat)”: <http://sat.qc.ca/> (accessed 20 august 2009). 10 see “ex-centris”: <http://www.ex-centris.com/> (accessed 20 august 2009). 11 see “mutek grows older and wiser”, posted to xlr8r tv on august 5th, 2008: <http://www.xlr8r.com/tv/67> (accessed 20 august 2009), 2:20 2:50. 12 see “mutek grows older and wiser”, posted to xlr8r tv on august 5th, 2008: <http://www.xlr8r.com/tv/67> (accessed 20 august 2009), 3:00 3:10. 13 save for, of course, resolute experimentalists such as janek schaefer and martin tétreault, who use the turntable as a performance object rather than a mixillogical tool. see van veen (2002; 2002a). notably: “it was the final sunday performance that served as an apostrophe for the question of the live and the absence of a member of electronic music’s history up to this point: the dj. […] the dj, as a purveyor and selector of musical memories and a distinct link to electronic music’s afro-american histories, is a distinct component that could well combat experimental electronic music’s current sense of stagnation […]. it was not through the dj that this musical critique was carried out; instead, it was through the dj-gesture of the sadomasochistic jam-session between ricardo villalobos, dandy jack, and atom heart that revisited the core elements of repetitious dance music in the territory of the mix, exploring territories of techno, electro, and the dark heart of minimalism. […] it was a supremely disjointed moment when mutek not only felt (and once again) out-of-time and in conflict with its representation, but pursuing perforated points of sonic ecstasy”. http://mutek.org http://mutek.org http://www.tourisme-montreal.org/press/itineraries-by-theme/events-and-entertainment http://www.tourisme-montreal.org/press/itineraries-by-theme/events-and-entertainment http://www.tourisme-montreal.org/press/itineraries-by-theme/events-and-entertainment http://www.tourisme-montreal.org/press/itineraries-by-theme/events-and-entertainment http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?numpage=114 http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?numpage=114 http://www.nouveaucinema.ca http://www.nouveaucinema.ca http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11gy2du5d9u http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11gy2du5d9u http://sat.qc.ca http://sat.qc.ca http://www.ex-centris.com http://www.ex-centris.com http://www.xlr8r.com/tv/67 http://www.xlr8r.com/tv/67 http://www.xlr8r.com/tv/67 http://www.xlr8r.com/tv/67 117 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 14 see van veen (2002a): “the whole thing was only to be topped with the mindfuck that followed: a gear-jam between dandy, atom, and villalobos...starting at 2am thereabouts, it moved into the pounding and one-bar loops of hard techno, but always with this strange funked edge, cutting into electro, and then building back into the 4/4...somewhere along the way it became relentless, and vicious. sadomasochistic. suddenly mutek made sense. it all became clear again. i pulled out my notebook and began to write […] mr. baphomet tells me that he has not seen anything like this since richie hawtin and jeff mill’s sickness party. this is where we are at. an un-named journalist from san francisco has just offered me a bowl and we are going to lie back and listen as our minds and bodies and legs are too tired to do anything else...”. 15 in various interviews with the author, 2001 2009. in particular see “mutek grows older and wiser”, posted to xlr8r tv on august 5th, 2008: <http://www.xlr8r.com/tv/67> (accessed 20 august 2009). 16 see the martian: <http://www.discogs.com/artist/martian%2c+the> (accessed 20 august 2009). 17 for more on the relation between techno and trance, insofar as trance remains in some respects the final frontier of techno, see van veen 2006; for an exemplary act that crosses trance and minimal, see minilogue’s 2008 release, animals 18 concerning such debates, see cascone (2002). 19 it’s worth watching these 2007 videos of richie hawtin, djing at terrace / weekend club in berlin, and listening to the psychedelic detail of minimalism’s sound design, all at a heartrate bpm and without need of clichéd build-ups or overplayed, romantic harmonics. see “hawtin@weekend”, posted on youtube.com july 9th 2007: < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owriodqtuxq&nr=1> (accessed 20 august 2009); and “richie hawtin @ terrace, berlin 07.07.2007”, posted on youtube.com july 10th 2007: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sewgdnpp9bk> (accessed 20 august 2009). and all this despite the rain. http://www.xlr8r.com/tv/67 http://www.xlr8r.com/tv/67 http://www.discogs.com/artist/martian%2c+the http://www.discogs.com/artist/martian%2c+the http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owriodqtuxq&nr=1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owriodqtuxq&nr=1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sewgdnpp9bk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sewgdnpp9bk dancecult 2.1 reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 2 (1): 90–114 issn 1947-5403 ©2011 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net hip hop underground: the integrity and ethics of racial identification anthony kwame harrison philadelphia: temple university press, 2009. isbn: 1-4399-0060-4 (hardcover), 1-4399-0061-2 (paperback) rrp: us$74.50 (hardcover), us$26.95 (paperback), us$74.50 (electronic) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.05 rebecca bodenheimer hamilton college, usa anthony kwame harrison’s book hip hop underground: the integrity and ethics of racial identification examines the racial dynamics of the san francisco bay area’s underground hip hop scene, with the larger goal of exploring processes of racial self-identification among american youth at a time in which the nation is growing more racially diverse and discourses on race increasingly revolve around an ideology of colorblindness. in his view, the bay area is a good case study for an elaboration of contemporary american racial dynamics because of its uniquely multiracial demographics, which are currently very similar to the projections of a non-white majority population in the u.s. by 2050. harrison’s research is strongly informed by the method of “critical ethnography”, which views the process of ethnography as intimately connected to the interpretation and representation of the findings. in this vein, he describes his decision to become an active participant in the bay area’s underground hip hop scene and to assume two identities, anthropologist and emcee (rapper), despite his initial misgivings that he might be received as an interloper. while critical ethnography is by no means a new method of anthropological research, the level of self-reflexivity here is arguably taken to the extreme with relatively large doses of “autoethnographic narrative” (58). harrison’s second chapter provides detailed accounts both about his personal history with hip hop and the ways he inserted himself into and moved through the bay area underground hip hop scene; however, his discussion of the hip hop group he helped to form, the forest fires collective, seems at times overindulgent. reviews reviews 91 harrison’s first chapter details the emergence of underground hip hop in the mid-to-late 1990s, highlighting the movement’s preoccupation with notions of authenticity, its goals of reclaiming hip hop from the mass corporatization following its crossover into the mainstream, and its contestation of commercial hip hop’s “ghettocentric” representations of blackness.1 he argues that the alternate representations of blackness offered by underground hip hop are accompanied by a more racially inclusive criteria regarding who can lay claim to the practice. nevertheless, despite his suggestions that this more inclusive vision is a progressive tendency, he frequently contests the stated ideologies of his fellow hip hoppers 2—that it is competency, rather than race, that matters in terms of underground hip hop authenticity—by asserting his own view that blackness is still privileged in hip hop and that non-black participants, especially whites, face a more arduous road to establish their legitimacy. harrison’s third chapter provides a good critical summary of the ways hip hop scholarship has articulated the relationship between race, authenticity and claims of ownership, detailing three principal approaches. the first frames hip hop as a distinctly black practice, despite recognizing that non-black youth, specifically puerto ricans, were involved in its emergence and is exemplified by tricia rose’s 1994 canonic work on hip hop black noise. as harrison notes, a host of scholars ( juan flores, raquel rivera) have argued strongly for inserting puerto ricans into hip hop origin narratives. harrison provocatively asks, if we can recognize the role of puerto ricans and other latinos in the formation of hip hop culture, should we not do the same with white b-boys who joined the movement only a few years later? the second approach views hip hop as one in a long line of afro-diasporic traditions in the americas and tends to draw direct links between hip hop and african and/or caribbean traditions. the final approach is an orientation toward contemporary manifestations of hip hop, and a recognition of its creative appropriation by youth across all continents. harrison concludes this review by asserting that the ongoing reification of hip hop as essentially black has obscured a more realistic and dynamic picture of the ways that youth of all colors engage with the practice and that underground hip hop challenges these essentialist notions. harrison’s principal goal is to examine and unpack the ways that underground hip hoppers articulate claims for their own hip hop legitimacy through racial performances of self. departing from sarah thornton’s theorization of subcultural capital and the boundary maintenance that is such an integral part of subcultural scenes, harrison critiques the hegemony of “authenticity”, viewing john l. jackson’s notion of “sincerity” as a better analytic. jackson’s notion “subverts the standard checklist of subcultural capital [markers “ sophisticated and innovative discussions about the racial politics of authenticity in underground hip hop” dancecult 2(1)92 of authenticity] in favor of a personal code of underground hip hop ethics and integrity… what matters most is the perceived sincerity of these racial performances... for the non-black hip hopper, an overzealous display of urban african american posturing, no matter how authentic, is under most circumstances suspected as insincere” (118). while i agree that the sincerity of a racial performance is an important element in the positive reception of a non-black emcee, i do not perceive a big difference between the notions of authenticity and sincerity. harrison’s position that a display of black posturing is authentic but not sincere is not entirely convincing—why would it not simply be considered inauthentic? chapter four puts the notion of racial sincerity to work, as harrison provides examples of white emcees who perform “sincere whiteness” (140). his primary example concerns a white emcee who, during a mos def 3 show, got on stage to freestyle (improvise rapped lyrics). although he was initially booed because of the audience’s assumptions about his competency based on his “bummy white guy” look, the emcee ultimately won over the crowd with his lyrical prowess. harrison astutely states, “had top r not been a sincere white guy…the entire story might have played out differently: no boos, no surprises, no turning of the crowd; perhaps just a great freestyle, which is hardly the kind of thing that gets talked about to any great extent days after the show” (140). while i find this analysis quite persuasive, harrison’s criteria for performing “sincere whiteness” is more problematic: in this and in other instances, he bases his characterization of racial sincerity on physical appearance and fashion choices, noting in particular the white emcees’ “dorky looks” and “bummy shirts” (140). he perceptively analyzes this mode of self-representation as a reaction against past white emcees’ “insincere” performances of racial identity, exemplified in the “wigger” persona,4 that claimed to fully understand the experience of black youth without recognizing their own white privilege. the issue is not only that harrison’s notion of white racial sincerity is fully based on the emcee’s physical appearance, but also the implication that “bummy clothes” are essentially a white fashion and that emcees cannot be racially sincere unless they are dressed in this manner. in his final chapter he provides what i believe is another problematic analysis, when he discusses the sound of an all-white underground hip hop group as “so sincere and self-assured in its whiteness”, precisely because people have described their music as “avant-garde hip hop”, “emo rap”, or “goth-hop” (161). harrison’s argument here seems to reproduce the same essentialist notions of race and culture that he has previously challenged and the reader is left to assume that he would only deem racially sincere those white emcees who mix rap with “white” musical styles or dress like “dorky white guys”. harrison’s final chapter continues elaborating the notion of racial sincerity, although here he offers a rather pessimistic commentary on racial politics in the underground hip hop scene. he recounts a party where the aforementioned white underground hip hop group performed a satire using an exaggerated style of black speech in order to parody the image of the hyper-violent, misogynist “gangsta” rapper that is so often promoted by the mainstream music industry. noting that the audience was predominantly white, harrison describes this performance as a form of “contemporary minstrelsy” (158). however, he reviews 93 then characterizes this analysis as too simplistic, asserting that the group was very aware of a history of white appropriation and racist imitation of black music. he states: i would contend that sole and the pedestrian saw themselves as crafting a tremendously ironic satire of the racial insincerity embodied by... wigger icons of the past. arguably, if we accept that this group... was engaged in a theatrical performance of past white hip hoppers’ exaggerated performances of blackness, this could be viewed as about a profound an expression of white racial sincerity as one might find. however, somewhere within this cauldron of sincerity, satire, and racial symbolism, for me, the circumstantial logic breaks down (160). the reason he gives for ultimately eschewing his own, quite sophisticated analysis and concluding that the performance was a “racial impersonation” (162), centers around the fact that these white emcees were performing for a mainly white audience. however, another perspective might view the performance as quite racially sincere precisely because, as stated by harrison, it was a parody. furthermore, it seems that the key to determining whether the performance reinforced stereotypes or not resides largely in its reception: how aware was the audience of the performers’ intentions to perform a satire? although harrison does not pursue this question, it is likely, following his own discussion of the blurred line between performers and audience in underground hip hop, that the spectators were “in the know” and viewed this performance with a critical perspective. ultimately harrison’s book offers some sophisticated and innovative discussions about the racial politics of authenticity in underground hip hop. however, while he presents various compelling analyses, his final conclusions are at times less nuanced and thus lessen the persuasiveness of his theoretical points. notes 1 the subgenre of “gangsta” rap, in which rappers frequently spin tales of violent and sexual pursuits, is most closely associated with a “ghettocentric” mentality. 2 harrison often refers to participants in the local scene as “hip hoppers”, which i understand to include anyone who engages with at least one of the four principle elements of hip hop culture— emceeing (rapping), dj’ing, break-dancing (b-boying), or graffiti art. 3 mos def is one of the most celebrated and visible emcees in underground hip hop, so much so, that some might not describe him as part of the underground scene anymore. his first album, mos def and talib kweli are black star (rawkus records 1998), was a collaboration with the highly respected emcee talib kweli and in many ways defined the terms of underground hip hop in its critique of the music industry and mainstream rappers who have “sold out”. 4 “wigger” was a derogatory term that emerged in the 1990s referring to white youth who fully adopted the fashion and speech of african american youth for the purposes of gaining subcultural capital, but who were ultimately perceived as having a superficial connection with blackness and not a true investment in the politics of racial equality. dancecult 2(1)94 the local scenes and global culture of psytrance graham st john new york/london: routledge, 2010. isbn: 978-0-415-87696-4 (hardcover) 978-0-203-84787-9 (electronic) rrp: $103.00 (hardcover), $103.00 (electronic) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.06 rupert till university of huddersfield, uk psytrance is not well known or widely understood. the local scenes and global culture of psytrance, edited by leading writer in the field of electronic dance music (edm) culture graham st. john, is the first book to cover this form in any detail. to many, psytrance is lumped together using ill-defined journalistic terms that have little meaning or substance such as “dance music”. this collected volume attempts to unpack the term and explore the field in a more rigorous fashion. st john bookends the volume; his introduction provides a useful assessment of writing on psytrance, whilst providing a contextual framework. he makes a strong case for the need for the collection and prepares the ground for the variety of different approaches that follow. the book is divided into three sections, the first dealing with the roots of the music in goa trance. this begins with luther elliott’s proto-trance history. it makes a strong case that musical roots of psytrance grew not principally from goa but originated in sixties counter-culture, ibiza, house music and acid house. its description of the development of goa trance is rather vague, lacking specific dates, names and interviews with key players. fortunately this is covered in the next two chapters and in any case this is an interesting and well-paced first chapter. anthony d’andrea next provides a spicy taste of the nature of the goa full moon party scene. like several sections of the collection, it prioritises the opinions of the ‘authentic’— the scenesters, the faces, the core members—and allows the flavour of the narrative to be determined by self-appointed spokespeople. indeed many of the writers can be accused of this, related it seems to their immersion in psytrance culture. in some cases the writers have led a psytrance lifestyle and have become interested in writing about their passion. this provides insider knowledge, without which this book would lack credibility, but inevitably means it sometimes becomes evangelical, treating internal psy-perspectives as “truth” and outsider perspectives as “false”. reviews 95 arun saldanha provides the final chapter in the goa section and manages to avoid this trap. his well-written account describes the myriad influences on the goa scene as a meeting point of multiple substreams, a developmental crossroads rather than a point of origin. his use of derrida’s ghost metaphor elegantly blends sociology and ethnography and embeds into psytrance the term ‘communitas’, which returns many times to form a key focus of the book. the sequel to the goa section discusses globalisation, bridging the gap between goa and the growth of psytrance in europe. in fact it is the well-defined and well-written specificity of this chapter by hillegonda rietveld that clarifies the origins of european psytrance and its relation to goa. it names specific recordings and artists, dates and places, building on the earlier chapters which were rather more freeform, reflecting perhaps a goa trance state of mind. in particular this mature chapter gives credit to various sources often overlooked in such histories, such as electro body music (ebm) and klf. charles de ledesma goes on to explore the growth of psytrance in london. there is strong data here and interviews with key players, but this is inevitably a very london-centric ethnography, rather more local than the claimed uk coverage. robin lindop casts a wider net, defining and discussing the music itself, as well as the culture surrounding it. however, without a use of technical musical terminology, this is rendered a little vague. de ledesma does critically engage with the ways in which edm sometimes defines itself as “authentic” in opposition to the “mainstream”, but then goes on to claim that “psytrance is exemplary”. it is similarly contradictory over the subject of genre purity. like the following chapter by joshua schmidt, lindop provides some paradoxes in his writing, but overall provides useful information to the emerging wider narrative. schmidt uses pairs of dichotomies to critically analyse israeli trance. again this is a view from the inside of a scene, shown when it condemns as “chronic” the media’s description of israeli desert trance mesibot as “drug parties”, although it is clear from an external perspective why that description might be used. however schmidt’s work is succinct, well structured and provides a convincing argument. the last of the trilogy of sections weaves in and out of a vague focus on liminal culture. botond vitos begins by providing a rare insight into czech psytrance, although his argument is a little circular, perhaps due to a closeness to interlocutors who had recently and regularly taken lsd, a proximity which he tries to stretch away from instead of embracing. the fact that some of his interviewees described their activities using his own theories of demencze shows a rather acid splintered blurring of boundary between the emic and etic. chiara baldini’s approach is far bolder and more successful, making her position as party organiser clear and embracing material and references with a voice clearly internal to her and to psytrance. she draws upon the psy-spirit of dionysus in an effective correlation with her own experiences. the next two chapters, by jenny ryan and alex lambert, discuss the relationship of the web to psytrance from the perspectives of san francisco’s tribe.net and australia’s oztrance dancecult 2(1)96 community. the difficulty with this work is the use of individual web-posts to represent the views of the group, as there is often inevitably an opposing view that contradicts any point. however the significance of the web to this scene merits such attention, which is especially well presented in lambert’s cultural circuit. the last dance is reserved for graham st. john, who applies his experience and skill as an edm commentator to both reference other chapters and make significant points of his own, providing an appropriate climax to the narrative. st. john’s final chapter is the strongest in the book. it largely focuses on festival culture and on those technomads who travel from festival to festival, making psy-trance a lifestyle choice rather than a part-time activity. this is a recurring feature of the book, which focuses on the intensely committed few, rather the many casual psytrancers. this focus on festival culture feels unbalanced. in many cases the authors show their partisan attitudes and don’t so much struggle to maintain an objective attitude to their subject, as willingly submit to a pro-psytrance attitude. it is unsurprising that some chapters are written by relatively inexperienced researchers, rather than late career researchers with several books under their belts. this gives the work a currency and directness and although one could criticise the text in terms of clarity of emic or etic approaches, this would ignore the benefits that the writers’ proximity to psytrance culture provides. there have been many studies that have pointed out the difficulties western society faces in a fractured world that struggles to resolve issues of community, identity, belonging, hope and the loss of popular rituals that address such issues. studies addressing cultures that seem to be orientated around solutions to these issues, or new approaches to them, inevitably raise difficulties, may be controversial or inconclusive and in a post-meta-narrative world, fail to provide simple answers. however this book’s approach to issues such as communitas provides an engaging and novel approach to such problems. overall then the local scenes and global cultures of psytrance provides a valuable insight into a world-wide movement which has had comparatively little study so far. i am no novice to the world of psytrance, but this book provided a wide range of interesting, thoughtprovoking and informative detail, and is one i can highly recommend as essential reading to any researchers interested in edm culture. “a valuable insight into a world-wide movement which has had comparatively little study” reviews 97 pink noises: women on electronic music and sound tara rodgers durham: duke university press, 2010. isbn: 978-0-8223-4661-6 (hardcover), 978-0-8223-4673-9 (paperback) rrp: us$84.955 (hardcover), us$23.95 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.07 anna gavanas independent researcher, electronic music producer and dj tara rodgers’ book pink noises is a long overdue feminist intervention in the historiography of electronic music. pink noises emphasizes the pioneering, substantial and diverse work that has been accomplished by women but so far remained largely invisible in previous accounts of electronic music development. thereby, tara rodgers starts to correct the century long lack of representation that profoundly underestimates the presence and diversity of expressions by women working with sound and electronic music. the title pink noises (which is also the name of the producer/musician/dj network pinknoises.com founded by the author in 2000) refers to pink in terms of a “marker of female difference”, and noise as a “site of disturbance and productive potential”. tara rodgers also refers to the term pink noises in physics and audio engineering, as “variations of white noise, or unstructured sound that contains every audible frequency”. moreover, tara rodgers introduces her interviews with women artists as pink noises in and by themselves: “sonic interventions from multiple sources, which destabilize dominant gendered discourses and work toward equal power distributions in the cultural arenas where sounds reverbrate” (2010:19). structured as a collection of interviews/ conversations, pink noises documents and explains ground breaking innovations and visions in electronic music production and technology from the perspectives of the pioneers themselves. ground breaking and legendary international artists are interviewed, like pauline oliveros, kaffe matthews, giulia loli (mutamassik) and chantal passamonte (mira calix). the book is structured into six themes in electronic music; time/memory; space/perspective; nature/synthetics; circulation/movements; language/machines/embodiment; and alone/together. from a variety of different angles, rodgers and her interviewees disentangle assumptions that cast technology and music—and electronic music in particular—as male domains while, most importantly, discussing the dimensions and meanings of sound, expression and representation. moreover, pink noises reflects upon the cultural and political potential of sound itself. tara rodgers conceives of the potentials of sound, as a category of critical and aesthetic analysis, to feminist concerns in particular, arguing that “sounds can be thought of as pressure and movements, doing cultural work” (2010:19). dancecult 2(1)98 pink noises is an extremely important contribution to the study and documentation of electronic music because, unlike previous literature on electronic music, tara rodgers refuses to stop at the “thresholds that have silenced women’s work in historical accounts”. tara rodgers thus looks beyond the commonplace observation where most standard accounts stop and conclude that women constitute a minority in electronic music—as if this observation would explain their absence in literature and media. with pink noises, tara rodgers challenges the normalization of male dominance in the patrilineal historiography of electronic music. against the grain of ideologies aligning women with normative modes of heterosexual and capitalist reproduction, tara rodgers makes the argument that sounds themselves are reproductive, “to account for reproductive sounds in all their temporal depth is to challenge the patrilineal lines of descent and the universalizing male claims to creation that have thus far characterized dominant discourses in electronic music” (2010:15). although the professional interventions of interviewed artists go as far back as the 1950s, it is striking that similar gendered issues and experiences seem to reoccur throughout the generations of women who work with sound and electronic music. however, it is encouraging to read about the ways interviewees have prevailed and ignored gendered biases in the business; only to cultivate their subversiveness, innovation and determination even further. to someone who is extremely interested in the technical aspects of working with sound and music production it is very instructive to read pink noises. however, to someone who does not have a specific interest for technical aspects it could be difficult to follow the very informed conversations between the author and her interviewees. helpfully there is a detailed glossary on technical concepts. it is apparent throughout the book that the author has had previous contacts and collaboration with many interviewees, presumably through her own professional activity as a musician and her work with pinknoises.com. many of the participants in the book are part of the same international and/or overlapping musical/ professional scenes. it would be interesting to read more about the ways the author is situated in her field of study and the ways in which this influences her selection of interviewees, her questions and the responses. although rodgers probably has many good reasons for her decision to let interviewees speak for themselves and make their own analysis i sometimes feel that additional concluding, contextualizing and comparative commentary would be helpful. also, it would have been great to have a chapter on tara rodgers herself, and her long standing experience, electronic music production and reflection as electronic musician analog tara. all in all, pink noises is an extremely well informed, informative and inspiring discussion of some of the most crucial aspects and developments in electronic music. the innovators and actors behind these developments happen to be women and pink noises thereby highlights the astounding male centeredness in standard accounts and representation in electronic music. “ rodgers challenges the normalization of male dominance” reviews 99 technomad: global raving countercultures graham st john london: equinox publishing, 2009. isbn: 9781845536251 (hardcover), 9781845536268 (paperback) rrp: uk£50.00 (hardcover), uk£15.00 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.08 phil kirby university of liverpool, uk graham st john is a cultural anthropologist whose latest publication explores “themes of counterculture and resistance” in global electronic dance music culture (edmc). previous publications by st john explore psytrance and the intersection of rave culture and religion, key themes in technomad. the book is the result of eight years of research and offers a utopian study of rave culture, one in which legislation such as the uk’s criminal justice act and the onset of corporate clubbing hasn’t stopped the development of the free party scene. it adds to the evolving canon of academic literature that explores edmc culture and demonstrates a rigorous level of research. in an echo of centre for contemporary cultural studies (cccs) theory, st john frames the global techno-countercultures explored in technomad as “resistant”. st john acknowledges that anthony d’andrea has also explored the intersection of rave culture and post-1960s new (age) spirituality. where d’andrea attends to the cultural economy of psytrance “neo-nomads”, st john makes use of a significant range of theoretical stances including bey’s concept of the temporary autonomous zone (taz) to unpack the “fleeting permanence of contemporary counterculture” (2). technomad provides a cultural history of diverse alternative global edmc formations, the techno-underground, whose mobility has been partially facilitated by new digital technologies. the book’s focus is mainly on the nexus between hippy culture and rave culture, which has resulted in the evolution of edm sub-genres such as psytrance. st john divides the book into eight chapters and in the course of the first chapter, which serves as an introduction, quotes from much of the academic literature that explores rave culture. key themes are introduced that are then explored in more depth throughout the book; these include digital technology—both in terms of facilitating diy music production, its role in enabling alternative modes of communication and in framing dance music as a form of resistance used by activists to oppose rampant capitalism; gender issues and environmental issues. a key argument of technomad is that non-commercial forms of edmc are directly politicised by restrictive regulation and subsequently offer alternative spaces for a liminal communitas to evolve. dancecult 2(1)100 the second chapter explores the proliferation of a specific form of rave culture practice, the uk free party scene. the intersection of post-hippy uk free festival traveller culture and acid house music was in part facilitated by the appropriation and subsequent growth of sound system culture, a concept originally developed in jamaica in the 1950s. this chapter explores the growth of mobile dance music sound systems and what st john refers to as ‘traveller circuses’ such as spiral tribe. this nascent free party culture eventually culminated in the festival at castlemorton common in 1992, the event that precipitated the uk’s criminal justice and public order act of 1994. subsequent police attention and legislation had the unintended effect of gradually spreading these cultural practices around europe and beyond. st john notes the influence of various sound system crews as they stage events outside the uk. the third chapter maps the development and proliferation of sound system based edmc scenes in america, canada and australia. the integral role of the sound system in both reggae and hip hop culture has been noted in numerous histories of those genres, but st john successfully explores the key role that sound system practices have played in the global dissemination of particular strands of rave culture. st john then seeks to define the elusive “vibe” of a successful dance music experience, tracing the origin of the popular usage of the term back to the 1967 “summer of love” in san francisco. the study explores the idea that the term may have afro-american origins and connotations of eastern mysticism, “…the term now legion within edmc is used to denote a spatial and temporal experience, a collective and individual happening where a profound sensation of connection and mystery transpires” (99). from this definition various tribal edmc subdivisions are discussed in terms of “vibe tribes”. these tribes are not framed as mutually exclusive but explored in terms of “…a spectrum upon which the vibe may be characterized as libratory and divine at one end, and militant and proactive at the other” (103). the straightforward hedonism and release sought and achieved by many participants in mainstream edmc isn’t explored, as the project of the book is concerned with utopian outlaw countercultures. the various shamanistic/spiritual and activist tribal standpoints are explored in some depth offering useful insights for researchers interested in contemporary cultural anthropology. the author then explores a wide-ranging history of carnivalesque counter-cultural tribal gatherings, from san francisco’s golden gate park to the burning man. these ‘temporary alternative zones’ (or taz’s) and countercultural dramas are framed as “alternative futures”. the themes of spirituality and activism mentioned above inform the next two chapters. in chapter five technomad explores the intersection of rave culture and spirituality through an analysis of psytrance culture. st john defines psytrance as “…a carrier of the 1960’s counterculture flowering in the present” (165). he mentions the commercial “progressive trance” scene very briefly, acknowledging that it has ‘significant exchange value’, although it seems unlikely that the concept of the technocult explored by st john would mean much to the denizens of gatecrasher (www.gatecrasher.com; see also moore 2010). the pantheistic values of psytrance culture are discussed and the various occultist manifestations of the “trance ritual” are investigated, “itself a network of deviant and hidden knowledge and practice, from magick, prophecies and shamanism to astrology, esoteric christianity, ufos, http://www.gatecrasher.com reviews 101 and alien abductions, psytrance constitutes a discernable field of contemporary occultism” (169). parts of this chapter would seem familiar territory to readers of shea and wilson’s the illuminatus! trilogy, mainly as st john explores some of the global psytrance events leading up to the millennium and also some bizarre examples of psytrance ideology. for students and researchers interested in the evolution of goa-trance and the cultural practices and beliefs of the psytrance community, this chapter will provide a useful resource. the next chapter explores the harnessing of electronic dance music to a variety of activist agendas. these include anti criminal justice bill protests and reclaim the streets events. st john notes that “official” culture seeks to limit the dangers of carnivalesque excess, whilst recognising that carnival has a role in maintaining the equilibrium necessary for capitalism to thrive (presdee 2000). activists in turn have noted the dissident energy within the insurrectional dance-carnival and utilised it as a feature of contemporary protest and direct action. the implication of edm in a wide range of progressive and occasionally militant courses of action are explored; st john uses the neologism “protestival” to categorise these events of “radical conviviality”. initially the protestival was concerned with the regulation of dance music culture, but has since been harnessed to a range of different causes. the protest-carnival template has proliferated globally, partially facilitated by the internet. this leads to an interesting exploration of the intersection of activism, theatre and carnival in australia, the techno-tribes and sound systems discussed are concerned with injustices to both the aboriginal population and the environment. australians refer to outdoor edm events that synthesise transgressive, anarchistic and ecological sensibilities as “doofs”. the mobile sound system counterculture or “doofscape” discussed in this chapter is concerned with establishing valid links with the aboriginal population and seeks a respectful relationship with both the indigenous population and the land. the final brief chapter summarises the project of the book, to unpack the cultural politics of electronic dance music scenes. in many ways technomad achieves this successfully, although the focus of the book on the “outlaw” aspect of edm omits a significant range of practices and participants in edmc. however, as a contribution to the understanding of globalised dance music culture technomad offers many useful insights, both in terms of cultural anthropology, neo-religion and spirituality and the potential for edm as a form of activism. this exhaustively researched and meticulously crafted book provides a significant resource for all those interested in contemporary popular culture. references bey, hakim. 1991. t.a.z. the temporary autonomous zone, ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism. brooklyn: autonomedia. d’andrea, anthony. 2007. global nomads: techno and new age as transnational countercultures. london/new york: routledge. moore, karenza. 2010. the british ‘mainstream’ post-rave trance scene: exploring emotional and spiritual expression amongst ‘crasher clubbers’. in s. collins-mayo and b. pink-dandelion (eds.) religion and youth. aldershot: ashgate. presdee, m. 2000. cultural criminology and the carnival of crime, london: routledge. shea, robert, & wilson, anton. 1998. the illuminatus! trilogy. london: constable and robinson. dancecult 2(1)102 sonic warfare: sound, affect and the ecology of fear steve goodman cambridge: the mit press, 2010. isbn: 0-262-01347-9 (hardcover), 978-0-262-01347-5 (paperback) rrp: us$96.95 (hardcover), us$35.00 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.09 tobias c. van veen mcgill university, canada rave culture has long known of the power of sound to seduce bodies into becoming particles of a movement. dancer and dj become but one conduit of a feedback loop that affects the physical and the psychic. ecstasy, fear, horror, awe and excitement, as well as melancholy, nostalgia and transcendance form the connective tissue of the event. focusing on the “politics of frequency”, sonic warfare seeks to outline how the limits of sound are deployed within “vibration ontology”. goodman overviews military-state and countercultural usages alike, from audio assault weaponry for crowd control to dub audio viruses that transmit the offworld heritage of afrofuturism. an earworm, for example, can operate as an afrodiasporic riff of black noise that functions “as an attractor in processes of group catalysis”(157), such as the mobilization of dance; or, as a preemptive strike by hypercapital that “sets up a structure of allure for products for which you had no desire… because they do not necessarily exist yet” (186). tracing these parallel developments to early 20th century futurism and its “art of noise in the art of war” goodman dismisses the avant-garde camps of noise and silence alike, choosing (wisely) to focus on an ecology of rhythm and to argue for a complex and—perhaps essentially—incomplete philosophical inventory of vibration ontology. as goodman briefs in the introduction, readers looking for a detailed, historical account of sonic warfare should turn elsewhere. it is also worth noting—as goodman himself warns of his “dense theorisation”—that readers looking for an exegesis or comparative study of the text’s many philosophical sources should come prepared for neither. prepare instead for a somewhat chaotic assemblage of theoretical trajectories that zoom in and out of zones “goodman’s development of affect remains indispensible to studies of soniculture” reviews 103 of inquiry, from the futurhythmachines of the black atlantic to the bass materialism of global ghettotech. if that’s an earful, listen and repeat until sedated, for goodman has well adopted the deleuzo-guattarian maxim of conjoining it all with an “and”. fear not radical empiricism! affect and ontology of vibration goodman’s development of affect remains indispensible to studies of soniculture. for goodman, affect is the vibration—the good or bad vibes—prior to organisation into organised feeling (prior to what phenomenology would call intentionality). sonic weaponry seeks to disrupt or enhance the vibrational flux; it is capable of provoking feelings such as fear, dread or ecstasy through its good or bad vibes. goodman details actual sonic weaponry as well as fantastical projects that have promised more than delivered. he also aligns particular electronic music genres with various sonic effects, noting in particular how bass heavy genres—such as dub—generate atmospheres of dread, quipping their bass materialism as the “subpolitical power of music to attract and congeal populations” (172). elements of these theses were developed in goodman’s 2004 article, “speed tribes”. goodman’s approach, which he groups with radical empiricism, mixes the realms of the material and physiological with their often hazy effects upon subjects and cultures—the contested realm of the social sciences and cultural studies. in this respect, goodman develops a materialist perspective for grasping the affective potential of sound, be it the marching drum of the military, sonic cannons fired on insurgent protesters, or wobbly subbass let loose on east london club-dwellers. radical empiricism does not so much eschew cause and effect as much as it claims that effects operate autonomously of cause in an “ecology” of interrelationships (or rhythms and anticipatory echoes). radical empiricism opens the material world to preconscious interpenetration by its bodies (which can be any population, as whitehead’s “actual occasion”), as well as prehensive temporality, where “such an occasion itself starts as an effect facing its past and ends as a cause facing its future” (whitehead, quoted in goodman 152). in short, goodman eschews the a priori claims of phenomenology, substituting the radical empiricism of ecology. this, of course, requires an epistemological claim concerning knowing that which is aphenomenal and asubjective to the world. what we call sound itself is merely the human heard of the spectrum; goodman delves beyond even the ultra, sub and infrasonic, developing philosophies of rhythmanalysis by bachelard, lefebvre and whitehead (though one wishes he had spent more time with lefebvre, who explores the political capacities of rhythmanalysis, and in general less time with deleuze and guattari’s toolbox of usual suspects). in this respect, goodman practices what deleuze and guattari call a “minor science”; he delves headfirst into claims concerning hard science and metaphysical inquiry while suspending their epistemological uncertainty, thereby granting this form of empiricism, for better or for worse, its radicalism. that said, goodman footnotes the moment where his radical empiricism and graham harman’s speculative realism depart, noting his adherence to whitehead’s theories of relation over harman’s insistence on the rigorous conception of the discrete object (ch. 17). yet speculative realism holds intriguing consequences for goodman’s ontology of vibration. could discrete objects mark a particular phase of whitehead’s eternal object? dancecult 2(1)104 here i’ll dive into one particular argument to give a sense of what is at stake in the thesis of vibration ontology. the eternal vibrator goodman does not note if his adoption of the eternal object—which ingresses from pure potential into the real potential of the actual as it vibrates out-of-phase with itself (whew)—departs or concords with alain badiou’s neo-platonism. this becomes all the more significant when goodman talks of whitehead’s “actual occasions”—which are bodies in the general sense—being able to select eternal objects, which is how affective encounters between “discrete actual entities” occur (98). not only does a shadow of the discrete return, drawing attention to how radical empiricism shadows speculative realism, but goodman often writes as if a rhythmic power underpins vibration ontology (he treats audio viruses, or earworms, in a similar fashion, granting them an undefined agency he nearly denies human subjects (149)). in this respect, his adoption of the eternal object approaches a quasi-idealism, or a transcendentalism he elsewhere seeks to avoid. goodman’s radical empiricism, not surprisingly given its theoretical ground, dances around the question of spinoza’s god, i.e., the eternal vibrator. this problem can be recast in terms of politics. while goodman critiques bachelard for seeking equilibrium between counterrhythms (107), he nonetheless accepts philip turetsky’s account of rhythmic synthesis that forms matter into a single body (111). what is the difference between the two? well, for one, it is one of politics, or as goodman sees it, the micropolitics of frequency. goodman conceives of the “ontological ground” as fundamentally turbulent, a rhythmic anarchitecture which: . . . does not dictate the orientation of such a micropolitics; it does not lay down a set of generalizable laws but rather throws up a series of engineering problems. as such, any micropolitics derivable from this base can be only tactical rather than strategic—a war without aims concerned more with disposition and potential movement than ideology, although certainly susceptible to abduction (107). the problem is, of course, with alien abduction. the other always swoops in, alien, capitalist, totalitarian or otherwise viral, an earworm “takeover of the body by an exterior entity” (150) that overcodes tactical movement with strategy, setting up a violent mechanism of control over heterogeneous rhythms, and ultimately, of the “actual occasion” that is the self. like deleuze and guattari’s war machine, the tactical micropolitics of frequency or turbulence remain fundamentally inculpable. of course, we have hit upon the ideology of this position, which is its first generalizable law. its second generalizable law is already expressed above: being concerned with disposition and potential movement precisely is the ideogram of the micropolitics of frequency, its unification or expressed ideology as the perceived good, pre-abduction, of rhythmic anarchitecture. elsewhere goodman writes that “a theory of sonic warfare is particularly fascinated by this turbulent boundary layer between dance and violence” (111). what i understand goodman as trying to argue is that while vibrational control reviews 105 techniques such as sonic weaponry (from dub viruses to military means) seek to control the crowd by unifying it through resonance, thereby dictating it to move as one, at the ontological level its rhythm remains turbulent and nonunified. one can also see dance as a similar assemblage, where the soundsystem unifies differentiated bodies into what kodwo eshun called a “futurhythmachine”. thus, unification is not, in itself, a bad thing, but can be wrought for different ends say that of the military state, on the one channel, or that of jouissance, such as rave culture, on the other. that we are talking of ends and means suggests strategy, however, rather than tactics. this argument is a strong one, and smartly counters adorno’s well-worn conservative moralisms against mass dancing and jazz music, or benjamin’s aestheticization of politics, as somehow fundamentally fascist, questioning whether “aesthetics need be sacrificed at the altar of a political cause” (175). yet, there is a strict problem here: the potential to be unified is evidently inherent to rhythm. more than potential, it is an incorporated possibility before the fact; it is de jure. one could argue just as well that rhythm is fundamentally unified, which is to say one, and that turbulence is an expression of mode. again, this is spinoza’s problem, of the monadic substance of god expressed in the many. it haunts goodman’s text throughout, significantly with the undefined agency of the audio virus or earworm and the supposedly uncontaminated and interiorized body it penetrates by communicating the instruction “record me!” (150). a more ecological sense of interior/exterior would be of use here, of the earworm within that would whisper the effects of consciousness, suggesting the always already incorporation of alterity. in short, to the question: what concept of memory is compatible with the illogic of affect, the virtuality of the past and the active immanence of futurity in the present? one could reply, différance, insofar as derrida speaks of an absolute past, force, and the technics of the sign—the trace—before the re-marking of intentionality. and/or the logic of the supplement, otherwise known as incorporation, of that which is extraneous but necessary (that which is added after to make the thing whole from the start). derrida’s work on husserl could bridge the divide to deleuze and forms the unthought (or unsound) to goodman’s investigations. the political question of unified rhythm is raised by lefebvre, as well as deleuze and guattari, the latter whom grasp the state as the superposition of waves, a wave that cancels itself out (see van veen 2010: 183). superposed waves become a flat line that masks their turbulence, posing an entire problematic of perception, as well as form/content, ecological or otherwise, within rhythmanalysis. to this end, in the production of space, lefebvre even cautions against overstating the parallelism between hydrodynamics and theory (184). of course, goodman adequately argues a radical empiricism that claims all as rhythmic; it is a materialist theory of rhythm through-and-through that charts sociopolitical effects from the axioms of vibration ontology. which is to say the critical objection to goodman remains here. utilising vibrational ontology to script (or prescript) the political will of populations—or rather rendering viral such will, and “mapping” populations as preconscious rhythmic assemblages—dovetails neatly with 20th century second-order cybernetics as well as hypercapitalist (and fascist) strategy. unquestionably, such strategies—strategies as they serve political endgames— dancecult 2(1)106 are powerful. goodman demonstrates how they work in the world. yet they also do not work so well; no population has yet been adequately controlled (or so we perceive…). and undoubtedly this is also goodman’s point: that turbulence is a priori, that turbulence remains, in short, as a “subpolitics,” as it cannot be prescripted, even as resistance (175). it could be “abducted” in any direction. and in this sense, i agree with goodman, for his rhythmanalysis leaves us with a population (and a universe) that is without content, much like paolo virno’s conception of the multitude, or lefebvre’s analysis of the urban as form. yet, the alien, as all the sci-fi nightmares of horrific innards warn us, is always within. abduction occurs from within this same ontos; we abduct ourselves, unknowingly, aliens to ourselves. which leaves the question hanging: what is this uncanniness of the alien, its strange eternal return as the virus of our becoming? in short there is always an untimely question to the absolute claims of radical empiricism. whereas the virus remains, the material strategies of its dissemination do not; they mutate and change with the technics of history. for a materialist ontology of vibration, is it not, by its own admission, a tactic and not strategy, a viral thought to the metaphysics of eternal ontology? wildstyle ecology in mu-mu land the telescoping rhythm of shifting in and out of this increasingly complex and at times bizarre inventory of sonic weapons, inventions and theories touches upon the wildstyle. at times one wishes goodman would pitch down the rhythm and pause, downsampling more time to his soundbytes. in a particularly captivating passage, goodman fast-forwards a discussion between william burroughs and led zeppelin guitarist jimmy page on the potential of infrasonics; shifts to industrial band and performance artists throbbing gristle and their “infrasonic emitters;” and skips on to discuss the klf’s “audio weapons system” as borrowed by techno duo panasonic (now pan sonic). all this on page 24. as goodman makes clear on several occasions, “a brief overview will have to suffice” (17). yet the overview can be stimulating and a scrappy shot of wake-up. goodman emphasizes the potential of sound, writing how “at the very least, the transduction of bad vibes into something more constructive suggests the need to probe more deeply into affective tonality and the vibrations of the environment” (73). most ravers would agree. references goodman, s. 2004. “speed tribes: netwar, affective hacking and the audio-social”. in franz liebl and thomas düllo (eds), cultural hacking: kunst des strategischen handelns, pp. 139-55. vienna: springer. lefebvre, henri. 1991. the production of space. trans. donald nicholson-smith. oxford: blackwell. van veen, tobias c. 2010. “cities of rhythm and revolution”. in alexandra boutros and will straw (eds), circulation and the city: essays on mobility and urban culture, pp. 155-192. montréal: mcgill-queens up. reviews 107 film music world: donk dir. andy capper vbs:tv (internet documentary), 2009. http://www.vbs.tv/en-gb/watch/music-world/donk phil kirby university of liverpool (uk) this review explores the vbs.tv documentary on the uk electronic dance music style known as “donk”. the genre is referred to by a number of names including scouse house, bouncy house, bouncy techno, bounce or donk. the term bounce will be used throughout the review as the term donk has a pejorative dimension. the style is an offshoot of hardcore techno, which has had a number of variants popular in the north of england. the tunes are around 150 bpm with a four-on-the-floor kick drum, whilst the eponymous “donk” itself is a layered sound or stab that occurs on the offbeat, or “and” of each beat. synthesised musical parts in the tunes are akin to european techno, a stylistic template that has more in common with the sonic palette of 2 unlimited than that of basic channel. some bounce releases feature vocals, or rapid-fire mc’ing in an unashamedly uk regional accent. the focus of the documentary is mainly the blackout crew, although other uk mcs and producers are featured. blackout crew’s 2008 single put a donk on it may have only reached number 91 in the uk charts, but the official video had well over five million hits on youtube, and consequently attracted “mainstream” media attention. the genre is little known outside of the north west and north east of england. indeed, in the north west of england the style is mainly popular in the satellite towns between liverpool and manchester such as st helens and wigan, and towns to the north of manchester such as bolton, burnley and blackburn. the documentary is on initial viewing quite funny, until the realisation sinks in that it is a heavily biased, stereotype-laden snipe at the leisure practices of the white northern working class. the documentary begins by exploring blackout crew’s origins in a bolton youth centre. notably, considering the multi-cultural makeup of most of the towns named above, the only representatives of ethnic minorities filmed in the documentary are the managers of the youth centre (and a promoter later in the video). northern hardcore and its sub-styles have never been of much interest to young black or asian clubbers. the black respondents’ comments in the video are subtitled despite being perfectly comprehensible; indeed this doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.10 http://www.vbs.tv/en-gb/watch/music-world/donk dancecult 2(1)108 patronising use of subtitles occurs randomly throughout the video. the next sequence takes place in burnley, introduced by a series of visual tropes intended to convey a sense of acute urban deprivation. the presenter briefly interviews an ex-mc and questions him on local drug use, this respondent seems to have been included solely as he has been to prison. after some more clichéd camera shots the next respondent offers a more positive view of the town than the earlier montage suggested, despite being repeatedly questioned on the area’s alleged propensity for violence. a bounce producer dj greenie is subsequently interviewed; he responds to questions about the scene’s drug use by coyly stating a comparison to the film human traffic, inferring the use of ecstasy. greenie is questioned on the centrality of steroids to the donk scene, to which he responds, “wigan pier’s full of big lads on steroids”. in the next sequence the documentaryfollows blackout crew to a gig in scarborough. the documentary crew film some sequences outside the venue, one is an interview with a promoter who discusses the problems of booking the band outside the style’s heartlands, describing the southern audience as “more urban, more sophisticated in a sense”. the narrative then returns to bolton, signified by a montage featuring a pie shop, a tanning salon, a tattoo studio and a barbershop. after more interviews the focus shifts to a blackout crew performance at wigan pier, but not before another montage including a camera shot of a local newspaper headline proclaiming wigan thug beats mum to be and yet more shots of fast food shops. footage of young males being checked for weapons with a hand-held metal detector is included to connote a threat of violence. the next sequence sums up the overall tone of the documentary, despite the friendly interviewees and carefree enthusiasm of the pier’s crowd, the documentary team can’t resist sniping at the provincial working class audience, “as the night went on hundreds more fake-tanned, steroid-pumped donk enthusiasts filled the floor, tongues blue from drinking wkd”. as the blackout crew perform, the presenter then comments that the music starts to sound like being trapped in a nail factory, before paraphrasing joseph conrad’s heart of darkness, “what you see here is the beating heart of donk, the heart of donkness, oh the horror, the horror”. to bookend the video the documentary team return to bolton the next day to interview one of the blackout crew mcs. as a product of the vice media group the documentary has a pre-ordained agenda to be mildly controversial and to come across as edgy gonzo journalism, hence the underlying fixation with drugs, violence and urban deprivation. this subtext is reinforced by the “quite funny, until the realisation sinks in that it is a heavily biased, stereotype-laden snipe at the leisure practices of the white northern working class” reviews 109 connotations supplied by the montage sequences and the chosen edits. the documentary team are given a consistently friendly welcome and open access to the scene by all whether practitioners or clubbers yet still choose to mock the northern working class whenever possible. this isn’t a highbrow dance music style, but then again neither are grime or funky (uk garage sub-styles), which are generally treated with some degree of reverence by the british media, possibly as these styles initially emanated from the south of england and have greater perceived (sub) cultural capital. other related media coverage demonstrates this bias. the guardian newspaper included a brief feature on donk in 2008 (by a vice contributor) which had the headline, “bouncy techno meets terrible rapping? welcome to donk. keen on sportswear? prone to taking your shirt off in clubs? donk is made for you” (mcdonnell 2008). in a promotional article in the metro newspaperthe producer discusses the making of the vbs documentary: the most shocking element was just how massive most of these dudes were. they all had their tops off and the drugs are paramount. they take ecstasy, steroids, a bit of cocaine and then blue or red alcopops. we’ve been making a load of films recently, including one about cannibals in liberia, but there were bits of donk that were just as scary—like being the only sober ones among 3,000 ravers on steroids and ecstasy (capper cited by day 2010). the documentary says much about the predominantly middle-class media’s attitude to white working class britain and specifically london-based media’s attitude to the north of england. the selection of material, the content of the montages and the editing reinforces entrenched stereotypes concerning the north of england and white working class leisure. the documentary is augmented by a vice article on the making of the programme, which is noticeably more scathing than the documentary. for example, in a passage describing burnley the writer states the following hyperbole: what used to be a prosperous cotton-mill town is now decimated by the terminal decline of industry, with entire square miles of housing steel-boarded-up, repossessed and marked for demolition by the local council. unemployment is all-consuming, violence is a popular pastime—as is the rampant theft of expensive copper pipes from condemned houses to sell as scrap to pay for heroin and crack. it’s practically a ghost town these days, but instead of headless cavaliers with chains clanging around their wrists and ankles, there are gaggles of toothless, skeletal smackheads waddling around in skid-mark-stained tracksuit bottoms. actually, scratch that—it’s more zombie town than ghost town (hodgson 2009). obviously, burnley isn’t that bad, although if you look for that kind of social deprivation it can be found in many urban centres. crack and heroin use are not exclusively northern pastimes and neither is violence. another example of tabloid journalism in the vice article is the following statement describing the crowd in wigan pier: the crowd was a mixture of skimpily dressed, emaciated rave bunnies and some of the most gruesome thugs you’d ever come across—blokes whose faces had been dancecult 2(1)110 permanently disfigured by a lifetime of being pummeled by fists every weekend, who’ve probably washed down massive doses of steroids with gallons of stella for breakfast every morning since they were 11 years old (hodgson 2009). although the vbs.tv documentary is aimed at popular consumption, it does raise issues of academic interest other than media representation. there is potential for further academic research on the various dance music subcultures that have blossomed in the north of england outside of the metropolitan centres. an example of an interesting piece of previously published work on northern dance music culture is ingham’s (1999) listening back from blackburn: virtual sound worlds and the creation of temporary autonomy. this is a brief but fascinating study of the warehouse party scene that blossomed in the blackburn area in 1989-1990. northern soul has now achieved a mythic status and has received some academic attention, but the audience demographic was very similar to that of bounce nowadays, as were the audience demographics for the other hardcore house and techno variants that preceded bounce in the same geographic area. linking these styles historically could be socially and culturally revealing. references day, james. 2010. “donk is the crazy dance sensation taking over the north-west of england”. metro, 31 march: <http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/819812-donk-is-the-crazy-dance-sensationtaking-over-the-north-west-of-england>. hodgson, jaimie. 2009. “put a donk on it”. vice. <http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n2/htdocs/ put-a-donk-518.php>. ingham, james. 1999. “listening back from blackburn: virtual sound worlds and the creation of temporary autonomy”. in living through pop, ed. a. blake, 112-128). london: routledge. mcdonnell. john. 2008. “bouncy techno meets terrible rapping? welcome to donk”. guardian online. 29 july: <http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2008/jul/29/ bouncytechnomeetsterribler>. “the crowd was a mixture of skimpily dressed, emaciated rave bunnies and some of the most gruesome thugs you’d ever come across—” http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/819812-donk-is-the-crazy-dance-sensation-taking-over-the-north-west-of-england http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/819812-donk-is-the-crazy-dance-sensation-taking-over-the-north-west-of-england http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n2/htdocs/put-a-donk-518.php http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n2/htdocs/put-a-donk-518.php http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2008/jul/29/bouncytechnomeetsterribler http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2008/jul/29/bouncytechnomeetsterribler reviews 111 speaking in code dir. amy grill usa: square productions, 2008. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1474864/ tobias c. van veen mcgill university, canada you can still smell the revolution a bit, you know. —modeselektor with the proliferation of digital film technologies, i’ve been waiting to witness a film that captures the obsession and exuberance of the worldwide technoculture. by techno i have a specific meaning in mind. with the collapse of north american rave culture thanks to 9/11—which, among other things, disrupted vinyl distribution as well as introduced draconian police powers that were deployed everywhere against autonomist enclaves—djs, producers and adherents of the house and techno sound fled the states. this remains an undocumented exodus of creative luminaries. though montréal served, for a few years, as a nexus of technoculture thanks to the mutek collective—many of my canadian comrades moved to montréal around 2002—it was berlin that soon overcame all comers. easy travel within a united europe, cheap living and the fierce protection of personal freedoms made berlin not just an inexpensive and convenient place to live, but made it (along with barcelona) the place to imagine collective cultural anarchism. the jouissance of deep, psychedelic, minimalist or maximalist techno betrays not only this yearning, but its reality, which is what few north americans realise. berlin and barcelona, though each fighting their battles against gentrification, are singularities of the way things could be. perhaps even should be. amy grill’s film captures something of the meaning of techno to berliners. techno is not just clubbing catharsis; it is the soundtrack to the fall of the wall. as a few interviews (and deleted scenes) explain, when the wall fell in 1989, the centre of berlin opened into unoccupied and stateless space. ravers crept in, setting up technoclubs in bunkers and buildings. the infamous tresor was such a space; today berghain upholds the tradition. signs of this sociocultural renaissance appear everywhere in this film, where modernistdoi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.11 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1474864/ dancecult 2(1)112 inflected graffiti, inside and out, signifies resistance to speculation in property values. already, there is much to film: the relation of a free europe to the policed urbanism of north america; a thorough updating of the afrogermanic detroit/berlin axis wrought back in 1990; and the development of the later cross-atlantic dialogue with montréal, diving south in this regard, with mutek’s mexico and chile editions. though digging into berlin, and touching upon barcelona, speaking in code falls somewhat short of investigating the planetary potential of this techno matrix. focusing on grill’s hometown of boston, and her ex-husband david day’s struggle to produce technoculture in a town that mostly doesn’t care (like the rest of the conservative us), the film often forgets to provide some much-needed context to this mini-cultural revolution. after a few starts, it settles down on german labels bpitch control and kompakt, as the personal lives and meteoric careers of modeselektor and the wighnomy brothers become central to the narrative. both duos have to deal with celebrity and stress, as they find themselves gigging constantly, with modeselektor playing to tens of thousands at barcelona’s sonar festival. the massive scale of sonar is well contrasted to david day’s burnt-out efforts in boston, where day eventually loses track of his community, driving his new afterhours loftspace into the ground (at one point, he talks of putting on events night after night after ‘getting everyone else [i.e. his fellow artists!] out of the building’). a few other technorati make appearances, including the ever eccentric and incredibly inventive monolake, a.k.a. robert henke, prime programmer of ableton live and dub techno composer, whose spartan, all-white loft matches, without irony, his all-white techno outfit. another memorable appearance is that of music journalist and dj philip sherburne, who strives to explain, in an incredibly touching moment—he breaks down on camera— the true significance of hearing and what it means to him, thanks to his relationship with his deaf father, who received a hearing implant a few years before his death in 2005. indeed, philip’s ever articulate and composed persona is a highlight of the film; one wishes there was more from this evocative american writer. likewise, the ever elusive wolfgang voigt—an acid house-era techno producer and owner/operator of the kompakt empire—appears in fine form, situating “cultural techno” as not only still a part of ecstatic rave culture, but as a step beyond—a form-of-life. you will find more years to say something without words. —modeselektor reviews 113 the artist set-pieces of speaking in code are beautifully composed. each taps deeply into the ups-and-downs of living-and-breathing technoculture. the wighnomy brothers are exceptional; they live in the six person “small communist collective” of freude-am-tanzen, sharing equally in profits and running their own label, work/live space and distribution out of the small, mostly rural town of jena in former east germany. yet one wishes that the film went deeper still. when the very lovable, teddy bear-like robag wruhme of the brothers decides to take a breather from the relentless touring schedule, his absence remains something of a mystery. as a former technoculture journalist, i can’t help but think of what to ask him. i’d ask him if he misses his commune—surely, because he has spent his life, up to that point, working and living in an autonomist collective? to be thrown headfirst into the hypercommercialism and opportunist corporatism of mainstream european techno-pop culture must have been a dilemma—if not a cultural shock to the system. at sonar, massive digital billboards advertise alcohol, as if by bastardized simile they have overcoded the absent artistic visuals (look closely during modeselektor’s set). i’d hypothesize that wruhme’s retreat signifies that not all are comfortable with what “successful” technoculture has become. yet, the film only glances over divided yet interconnected levels of technoculture in europe. some are quite literally underground; the incredible muna club in jena reclaims a wwii-era rocket factory. an entire dimension of the ritual denazification of this space through dance is left uncommented. then there are the arena festivals of cigarette sponsorship bound by chain-link fences. the very opening of the film, for reasons that are left unexplained, rolls with some rather uninspiring footage of a dutch techno festival. as the camera enters through the vip gate, a sea of garbage and burnt-out bodies meets the eye, everyone seemingly unaware of the destitution of their camp-like surroundings… this is a fenced-in wasteland of the wasted, yet it is presented, without critique, as a tease of what’s to come. is this wasteland symbolic for something else in this film? well, yes. the evident struggle between technoculture’s collectivism and its commercialism, its schizoid, yet symbiotic relationship with corporate entertainment, is sacrificed to amy grill’s focus on her disintegrating relationship with david day. choosing “speaking in code shows that technoculture can be a communal, lifelong adventure in art, music and living, achieving escape velocity, at least for the inventive, from its youthful escapism and burn-out hedonism” dancecult 2(1)114 to narrativise her failing relationship with an always-omniscient voice-over, grill never places herself before the camera, even as she captures day in all his darkest moments. the film’s gaze does not match its voice; the director indulges in a selective narcissism, revealing only a strangely affectless narration to what is left unseen. by the end of the film the pair are divorced and what begins as an aside becomes the film’s peroration. their disintegration into divorce eschews cinema verité, embracing instead the conventionality of reality tv. what is more intriguing is all that is left unsaid. for example, why is montréal only mentioned once and the mutek festival never mentioned at all? north america is depicted as the graveyard of electronic music, yet there is no mention of the cities where technoculture has survived. also absent are vancouver’s new forms festival and seattle’s decibel. and then there’s detroit—its festival and heritage left unheard and unmentioned. the same can be said for san francisco, chicago, nyc and the midwest. this not only leaves the average audience unawares of the states’ founding as well as continuing contribution to electronic music, but it also leaves the current depiction of berlin’s technoscene and boston’s lack of it—despite day’s valiant attempts at a brief flowering—as somewhat hollow and meaningless. the united states lost something with 9/11—the total expression of a generation, silenced off the airwaves, policed and beaten down, denied even the nostalgia granted to punk. rave culture was not only underground; it has now been buried in the us, as if it never existed, as if the blurring of gender and colour and dance never happened. which brings me to the inevitable but essential question of representation. though ellen allien appears as head of bpitch control, speaking wonderfully of the emotive aspect of techno and the supportive atmosphere she strives to create in her label collective, she remains the sole woman onscreen. but most embarassingly, there is not one single black person in the film. one would think techno was invented and played solely by white people in berlin. in fact, the only reference to techno’s heritage in black detroit is a symbol, worn as a badge of respect by modeselektor. during their massive but ad-ridden sonar concert, sebastian szary wears an underground resistance t-shirt. good for him. full disclosure. i like others am a ghost in this film. i saw it being filmed. i’ve djed in many of the same places. i know and love most everyone in it. i love the music. it is difficult, in this respect, to write critically, especially given the usual laudatory press. but ditch the melodramatic divorce narrative and you have a documentary of profound intimacy and insight into the fragility of collective creation. speaking in code is a snapshot of a radical soniculture attempting to achieve a strange kind of equilibrium in the 21c. both henke and voigt say the same thing: they don’t see the need for change. but it’s more than that. speaking in code shows that technoculture can be a communal, lifelong adventure in art, music and living, achieving escape velocity, at least for the inventive, from its youthful escapism and burn-out hedonism. sometimes divorce is necessary for radical togetherness. alone, asian and female: the unspoken challenges of conducting fieldwork in dance settings dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 5(1): 39–60 issn 1947-5403 ©2013 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.01.03 alone, asian and female: the unspoken challenges of conducting fieldwork in dance settings bina bhardwa lancaster univeristy (uk) abstract this article explores the methodological and emotional challenges of conducting a multi-sited and multi-method ethnography in three diverse dance settings: sweaty dance clubs in the northwest of england, the muddy grounds of a festival site and the sands of playa den bossa, ibiza. despite overlapping academic and personal interests in these dance spaces, my connection to the field did not equip me for the fieldwork task. in plotting the transition from dance consumer to field researcher, i reflexively analyse how my personal anxieties about entering the field as a novice, lone female researcher have come to shape the research process. in addition to gender, the impact of less prominent facets of my identity, including my ethnicity and social class, are also considered. the article concludes by evaluating some of the retrospective advantages of entering the field as a lone researcher. keywords: hidden ethnography; emotions; reflexivity; lone research; bonding capital i am currently in the 3rd year of my phd at lancaster university based in the department of applied social science, looking at the use of legal and illegal substances in different recreational settings. i am also interested in the place of digital technologies and the role of control within these spaces. prior to coming to lancaster university, i worked at the institute for criminal policy research (icpr), as a research assistant where i was involved in various projects in areas including alcohol-related offending, youth justice, probation and prison drug treatment. i studied ma criminology and criminal justice at king’s college london and graduated from royal holloway, university of london with a ba in sociology. feature article dancecult 5(1)40 introduction the messy realities of conducting fieldwork are often absent from published research.1 couched in this undisclosed mess are the unanticipated methodological, personal and emotional challenges that accompany ethnographic work. silenced by the historical influence of positivism and its quest for “objectivity” (ryan-flood and gill 2010), these unspoken words have come to form what blackman (2007) terms the “hidden ethnography”. with the aim of exposing these hidden aspects of ethnographic fieldwork, this essay traces my transition from dance consumer to field researcher in three dance settings, recounting the unforeseen methodological and emotional challenges that unfolded along the way. drawing on vignettes from my fieldwork conducted from june 2011 to september 2012, my reflexive tales from the field provide a window into the complexities that accompany ethnographic fieldwork. there are a wide range of spaces and scenes in which legal and illegal psychoactive substances are consumed as part of leisure “time out”. however, it has been suggested that the distinctions between these spaces are “blurring, even disintegrating and reformulating” (measham et al. 2001: pp. 4–5). against this shifting backdrop of homogenisation on the one hand and the continuing diversification of dance culture on the other (rief 2009), my research, focusing on electronic dance music (edm) spaces, aims to explore the relationship between psychoactive substance use and the diverse recreational settings in which it takes place. in addition, my research looks at the role of control (formal and informal)2 alongside the use of digital technologies, such as mobile phones and digital cameras, in shaping the experiences of consumers within these spaces. these recreational dance settings are often viewed as “backstage[s]” (goffman 1959: 132), where deviance is temporarily legitimated and in which, as ravenscroft and gilchrist assert, “people can present their ‘secret self ’ relatively secure in the knowledge that this ‘secret’ will remain invisible to wider society” (2009: 43). ethnographic methods were adopted to elicit the socially situated meanings that people attach to their substance use and wider time out experiences within these settings. i conducted a multi-sited ethnography (see falzon 2009; marcus 1995) in club spaces and festival sites in the uk alongside ibiza in the summers of 2011 and 2012. the clubbing and dance festival sites for this project were concentrated in the northwest of england, while ibiza as a fieldwork site added a comparative european dimension to the research. when engaged in “identity work” (coffey 1999: 1), ethnographers present multiple identities in the field. conducting fieldwork in male-dominated settings resulted in heightened awareness (at least initially) of my gender and sexual identity and this forms the focus of this article. yet as my research journey progressed, the interaction of other unconsidered facets of my identity, such as my ethnicity and social class, were made visible as they came to shape the research process. a detailed discussion about the methodological complexities of conducting fieldwork in the three dance settings is beyond the remit of this essay (see bhardwa, forthcoming), however i discuss here how the intellectual project became a reflection of the emotional and personal challenges i faced. i argue that the vast bhardwa | alone, asian and female 41 array of emotions experienced during the course of fieldwork do not have to be sieved out from one’s research, but can instead be deployed as an “interpretive resource” (wilkins 1993: 98) to produce reflexive insights. drawing on feminist and postmodern critiques of positivist models of social science research (see coffey 1999; roberts 1981; ryan-flood and gill 2010), it has been argued that a preoccupation with what was found during the course of research—the intellectual project—has directed attention away from how it was found and the active role of the researcher in shaping the process (cohen 2000; england 1994). for example, in her critique of qualitative method “cookbooks”, coffey (1999) argues that only marginal attention has been paid to the self as a unit of analysis in research, which in turn has created a “silent space” in the literature. ryan-flood and gill (2010: 5) assert that: too often papers start with what seems to be little more than a ritual incantation of the identities occupied by the author with little or no attempt to reflect on the significance of those positions for the research. it is as if simply ‘acknowledging’ one’s location is enough to eradicate its effects. the acknowledgment of the researcher’s multiple identities in the field and how they shape the research task forms the premise of this article. the recognition that emotions form an integral part in the research process has been met with academic reluctance over the years (e.g. hubbard et al. 2010; punch 2012; wilkins 1993). increased ethical regulation of social science research via the “managerialist” arm of university ethics committees (winlow and hall 2012: 400) has produced an unequal focus on the potential emotional impact of research on the research participants, with incommensurable attention paid to the emotional impact of the research on the researcher (holland 2007; hubbard et al. 2010). emotions are to be managed in social research through “emotional labour” (hochschild 1983), and, as coffey notes, “the emotional aspects of fieldwork are considered as issues to be acknowledged and if possible dealt with, rather than seen as epistemologically productive in the analysis of fieldwork and the fieldworker self ” (1999: 6). however, with the “reflexive turn” in the social sciences has come the recognition that the researcher is central to the research process (o’reilly 2005) and that “fieldwork is personal” (england 1994: 85). this has legitimated the articulation of emotions in sociological research (bendelow and williams 1998; kleinman 2002). in critiquing existing theories of reflexivity, some writers have called for the “emotionalization of reflexivity”, which places emotions at the centre of the reflexive project (burkitt 2012; holmes 2010). the mud, the sand and the dance floor: researching dance settings with the exception of a few studies (e.g., anderson 2009; briggs et al. 2011; briggs and turner 2011), there is a paucity of ethnographic research looking at leisure experiences in ibiza. existing literature tends to be based on quantitative survey data, with a public health, harm and risk-reduction focus dominating the field (bellis et al. 2000, 2003; hughes et al. 2004). a similar picture emerges when looking at the literature on outdoor music festivals, dancecult 5(1)42 where, again, much of what is known in this area is based on quantitative research at the expense of consumer experiences (holloway et al. 2010) and only a handful of studies draw specifically on the british music festival scene (gelder and robinson 2009; jaimangaljones et al. 2010; thomas 2008). in contrast, there are several ethnographic examples to emerge from the field of club studies3 academic interest in the uk rave scene from the late 1980s, stemming from the observational work of russell newcombe and the rave research bureau, later translated into club research in the early 1990s (measham and moore 2006). however, writing the self into textual accounts of ethnographic fieldwork has received peripheral attention in the field of club studies. for example, thornton (1995) admitted to using ecstasy while conducting her club research yet, beyond this disclosure, failed to critically reflect on her experience and the impact of drug use on her subsequent research. similarly, the work of hutton (2006) has been criticized for the lack of attention given to her positionality within the manchester club scene and in relation to those she studied (moore 2007). measham and moore argue that, although club research is often implicitly shaped by partial insider knowledge, club researchers, constrained by ethics and politics are reluctant to produce autobiographical, reflexive narratives, leaving evident gaps in the ethnographic literature (2006: 22). in tracing the ethnographic journeys of those who travel through the varied plains of dance culture, i used participant observation and in-situ interviews of varying lengths with dance consumers in order to understand the interaction between leisure setting, substance use and time out in the three dance settings. away from traditional static methods, recent developments in mobile (e.g., büscher et al. 2010) and visual methods (e.g., pink 2001) were deployed to chart the movement of participants within and across different leisure scenes and spaces. i had initially envisaged a sequential four-staged4 research plan to plot the stories of those i shadowed. however, the linear research plan failed to capture the complexities of conducting ethnographic fieldwork using multiple methods across multiple dance settings. this disjuncture from the proposed research plan was made apparent as early on as my first fieldwork trip to ibiza in june 2011, with the four research stages collapsing into two: 1) an in-situ interview and 2) the prospect of a follow-up interview. the reconfiguration of the research plan was prompted by the methodological difficulties with conducting live in-situ recruitment. success in recruiting participants for the initial mobile interview was not mirrored in recruitment for the subsequent follow-up stage, with initial enthusiasm of participants to take part in the follow-up stages not materialising. while such attrition rates are not uncommon in club research (e.g., moore and measham 2008), the methodological challenges with retaining participants for follow-up stages casted doubt on my research ideas. with implicit academic pressure to prove myself as a competent early career researcher (see billo and hiemstra 2012), the research task centred on clocking up participant numbers as a marker of fieldwork success.5 bhardwa | alone, asian and female 43 the journey to lone researcher there was a time in anthropology’s not so distant past when we strove to emulate the brave and solitary adventurer conjured up by malinowski’s descriptions of his fieldwork (cohen 2000: 318). one of the greatest unanticipated challenges for me was the transition from dance consumer to field researcher in dance settings usually attended in the company of friends. there were several reasons why i decided to sacrifice the company of my friends in order to conduct my fieldwork. as a “partial insider” (measham and moore 2006: 16), adoption of a lone researcher status, was an attempt to make the familiar strange, creating distance between my academic and personal interests in the dance spaces i studied. partly in response to comments that i received from participants, friends and academics, such as “you’re going to ibiza to ‘work’? yeah right!”, in which the academic worth and subject matter of my research was questioned and often viewed as inferior to “real” academic research, i wished to separate work from leisure. echoing the malinowskian model,6 i believed that the ability to enter the field alone as a novice researcher was a test of competence. as my journey to lone researcher progressed, however, i soon realised that this was an idealistic view of what conducting research involves. my existing social connection to the field did not equip me for the emotional rollercoaster of conducting fieldwork in these dance settings. whilst grappling with the ambiguity of my clubber/researcher status, i was simultaneously engaged in what deutsch describes as the “the outward process of research but also the inward process of developing [my] own identity as a researcher” (2004: 885). figure 1 plots my journey to becoming a lone researcher. following the period shown in figure 1, from january 2012 to december 2012, there were twelve further fieldwork occasions where i conducted lone fieldwork. this included repeat visits to the spaces cited above, along with new sites in the northwest of england, including a trance night, a non-camping weekend dance-festival and monthly drum and bass nights, and culminating in a solo trip to ibiza. new spaces threw up new apprehensions. unlike traditional ethnographies, where researchers often spend long periods of time residing in the field, the “step-in-step-out” (madden 2010: 94) nature of my multi-sited fieldwork produced a sense of detachment and, with this detachment, the threat of reliving the same emotions and conquering the same fears each time i re-entered the field. as stets suggests, “emotions are not always created anew in each situation. . . . there is often a ‘carry-over’ effect from previous encounters”; likewise, my fieldwork task became a case of managing these so-called “emotion flows” (stets 2010: 267). dancecult 5(1)44 figure 1: the journey to lone researcher my first taste of lone research the anxieties of being a novice researcher alone in the field were brought to the fore during fieldwork at a weekend dance festival in the northwest of england. these feelings were not apparent during my first fieldwork stop in ibiza ( june 2011), where my trip had tied in with the holiday plans of two of my friends and where my previous visits to the island provided a sense of familiarity. the task of conducting fieldwork independently in different spaces (i.e. on the beach and in club spaces) was cushioned, knowing that my friends were nearby if i needed them. in contrast, at the festival i was confronted with unfamiliar territory and the daunting task of camping alone. bhardwa | alone, asian and female 45 while some writers (e.g. punch 2012) suggest keeping field notes and field diaries separate, the vignettes presented in this article are an amalgam of observations and reflections that were jotted down in-situ and then written up after exiting the field. field note: entering the campsite (30 aug 2011). on entering the campsite the guy who had helped me carry my tent left to find his friends as they were pitched up in the opposite direction. i was grateful that he had helped me that far but pretty sad when he left me facing a muddy campsite on my own. it looked like utter chaos. i wasn’t too sure where i was supposed to park up. there were back-to-back tents as far as i could see. so i continued to walk further down, making my way through the knee-high mud, in the hope that there would be a nice patch of green grass that all the other campers had missed! i walked past a chinese take-away van, and started to slow down, thinking that i should stop and set up camp soon as the row of food vans would be good landmarks to remember late at night, when trying to get back to my tent. a girl who had seen me looking rather lost shouted from her tent “you can put your tent here, near ours”. relief ! she kicked some litter out of the way and helped me with my bags. she introduced me to her two very drunk friends, ‘we’re local girls’ and started taking charge of setting up my tent. ‘have you got a sleeping bag? a pillow? do it all now.... ’cos when you’re fucked later you can just crawl in’. within 10 minutes of meeting her, i had had a crash course in ‘the virgin-camper’s guide to survival’, which seemed to temporarily alleviate my anxieties about camping alone. i told her that i didn’t think the different coloured areas of the campsite were very well sign posted and she told me that we were in the red campsite and not to rely on the chinese food van because later it turns into a coffee and cake van. i pulled out my padlock and key to lock my tent before heading into the main arena and she said ‘trust me, later on you’re not going to want to unlock that, no-one’s going to take anything’. i was advised that ‘bog roll and a torch’ was all i needed with me and to leave everything else in the tent. i don’t think i could have asked for a better tent neighbour! the above account highlights the emergent advantages of being alone in such settings. my fears and insecurities about being alone in the field were interspersed with positive encounters, in which i, as an “acceptable incompetent” (lumsden 2009: 509) was able to meet potential participants and experience the kindness of strangers. nonetheless, my discomfort with being alone was a definite distraction from the fieldwork task. knowing that my supervisor and her friends were attending the dance festival on the saturday offered temporary solace. exploring the festival site from the trance tent base where my supervisor and her friends spent most of their time provided a sense of security. however, when they left in the early hours of sunday morning and with them this fixed base, my dormant fears of being alone at a festival were reawakened. i was left with the vulnerability of being alone in an unknown space, on the one hand, and open to serendipity on the other. dancecult 5(1)46 field note: what am i doing here? (30 aug 2011). i left my supervisor and her two male friends who were queuing for the portaloos as we left the trance tent. i had overheard two girls asking someone which direction the campsite was and so grabbed the opportunity to tag along with them. i didn’t like the thought of trekking back through the mud to my tent alone in the dark. the temperature had dropped. it was cold and wet. everyone had retreated into their tents with the exception of a few campers struggling through the muddy floodlit path. i got back to my orange tiger-print tent at about 4: 00 am, grateful that i had listened to the advice of my camp neighbour as there was no way i would have managed to look for my padlock key in my bag whilst shivering and trying to hold a torch. i climbed into my tent after wrestling my wellies off. it was freezing! the additional layer of clothing i piled made little difference. i climbed into my sleeping bag and put my head down on my inflatable pillow. just as i managed to get comfortable, i heard girls screaming: ‘get out of my tent! get out of my fucking tent! we don’t even fucking know you!’ the sudden screams coming from the tent opposite mine in the relatively calm campsite terrified me! i didn’t have a clue what was going on outside and i was too scared to look. i lay in my sleeping bag thinking ‘what am i doing here? i just want to go home!’ the girls were explaining to someone that they didn’t know who he was and they had just returned to their tent to find him crashed out in it. i was relieved in some ways to learn that it wasn’t someone who had tried to break into their tent whilst they were in it but nonetheless, the morning couldn’t come fast enough! when i woke up the next morning after a few hours of broken sleep, the fears from the night before had diminished and were replaced by a sense of achievement, which had previously been suppressed by the physical and emotional toll of lone research. the emotional ebbs and flows that characterised my fieldwork are echoed by stets, who suggests, “emotions can take any number of different turns. they can move from negative to positive, and back again to negative, in rapid succession and within a matter of minutes” (2010: 267). as i opened the zip of my tent and peered out, two women who were in the tent next to mine yelled, “morning!”. they were sitting in their tents with cups of tea and bacon butties. they later took part in a tent interview along with two of their female friends, who they knew from university. the interview took place in their warm and cosy tent whilst the women put make-up on. conversational drift about make-up products and student life—discussions i could relate to—closed the gap between me, as the researcher, and the women, as the researched. in producing a “more equitable identity” (lavis 2010: 322), feeling alone in the field was temporarily forgotten. my gendered identity became a form of bonding social capital (halpern 2005) facilitating access to a physical and metaphorical “backstage” space (goffman 1959), a space that may have been closed off to male researchers. because the young women had initiated contact that morning, i did not have to pluck up the courage to ask for an interview, and this contributed to a sense of renewed confidence i felt in the field. similarly, while discussing her work with british migrant lap dancers in tenerife, bott bhardwa | alone, asian and female 47 states, “my first experiences of data collecting inside lap dance clubs were characterized by discomfort, a self-conscious awareness of my lack of experience, and of my conspicuousness as a lone woman” (2010: 163). however, she continues, “after the initial sensation of awkwardness inside the lap dance clubs had subsided, i was able to relax slightly into the setting and feel more confident in my ‘skin’” (bott 2010: 166). the other end of the continuum: overt adventures in clubland all but one fieldwork site in the period under discussion in this article was accessed without gaining the permission from the relevant club owners/managers or event promoters. my fieldwork has been principally covert to those in producer positions within these dance settings, covert to those i observed but overt to the dance consumers i interviewed. calvey argues, “overt and covert research is a moral continuum, where the boundaries can become blurred in the doing” (2008: 908). on one occasion i was able to access a sold-out manchester dance event through one of my supervisor’s contacts. this meant unlike previous fieldwork episodes, i was granted overt access as a researcher to the venue and management were aware of my presence that evening. arriving equipped with my “professional armour” (england 1994: 81) of a university id card, a notebook, pen and digital recorder—items i had not always carried with me during fieldwork due to the fear of having them confiscated by club security during routine bag searches—helped resolve some of the issues relating to my ambiguous status as clubber and researcher: as an official researcher, the research props legitimated my presence in the club space. this was in contrast to previous fieldwork occasions where my presence was covert and my consciousness of being alone diverted attention away from the real task of research. in dance settings, where the presence of friendship groups is the social norm, my lone status was understood as being incongruent to the setting. my fears centred around how others perceived me. with typical reactions such as “oh my god! you’re here alone?”, my loner identity was made conspicuous and at odds with a cultural context that marks being alone as undesirable and, therefore, me as unpopular. drawing on the work of cooley, burkitt argues “it is not the attitude of the other, taken on board in a direct and unmediated way, that influences the way we feel about ourselves: instead, it is how we imagine the other is looking at us and our interpretation of their judgement that is a crucial factor” (2012: 465, author’s emphasis). having seen my id card pinned to my top, many clubbers at this event were intrigued about what i was doing and approached me, which took the pressure off of me to actively seek research participants. while “self-selection” was welcomed (hammersley and atkinson 2007: 104), with several consumers nominating themselves to be interviewed, on reflection, this may have occurred at the expense of approaching a broader range of clubbers. nonetheless, my overt status as researcher had a direct, positive and measurable effect on in-situ recruitment, boosting my confidence in the field. dancecult 5(1)48 female in the field the body of literature exploring the presence of women in dance settings, namely clubland, has grown over the years7 gendered perspectives on club culture have shown the liberating potential of club spaces, in which conventional stereotypes of female passivity have been challenged (hutton 2004; pini 2001). however, only limited attention has been paid to the gendered presence of the researcher in these accounts (e.g., perrone 2010; pini 2001;). the literature suggests that being young, petite and female are attributes equated with being nonthreatening and, therefore, conducive to gaining rapport with research participants.8 this largely echoes my experiences conducting fieldwork in three dance settings. for many research participants, my identity as a researcher was displaced by my presence as a female in the field. drawing on her research in highly sexualised club spaces, perrone states that it was difficult to “maintain a genderless and asexual self ” (2010: 717), highlighting both the challenges and advantages of presenting as “a young, petite female researching drug users in dance club settings” (730). while perrone was confronted with unwanted sexual advances and concerns of safety, her gendered identity also allowed her to gain access to participants and to forge friendships. an implicit trade-off was noted when i conducted fieldwork at a trance event in leeds. a male interviewee started touching my bottom as the interview came to a close. although i brushed it off as part-and-parcel of conducting research in a male-dominated setting, my discomfort and disappointment knowing that he was not genuinely interested in helping me with my research made me want to discount the entire interview altogether. in box 3 i recall a similar exchange with a male interviewee at a trance night in manchester. field note: you can study me, if i can study you (28 oct 2011). we walked over to the bar in the smaller room as he was struggling to hear what i was saying in the main room. perched on the bar, he offered to buy me a drink as he bought himself a beer. he seemed happy to answer my questions and told me he was a regular dj at a bar in town. as the interview drew to a close, i asked him whether he would be interested in taking part in a further follow-up interview when he was next out, to which he replied, “you can study me, if i can study you”. although i was disheartened by his comment, i just laughed it off; not allowing it to interfere with what was otherwise a fruitful interview. while the instructional literature in the social sciences focuses on how women should interview women (burman et al. 2001; oakley 1981), an absence of guidance discussing how women should conduct interviews with men has been noted (e.g., green et al. 1993). feeling indebted to research participants for taking part in an interview often means that, to some extent, the unwanted sexual by-products of that interaction have to be tolerated.9 as warren observes “the pervasive gratitude often felt by researchers toward those who have allowed access to their worlds can hamper a more militant response” (1988: 38). similarly, bhardwa | alone, asian and female 49 while performing research in a male-dominated prosecutor’s office, gurney writes, that she “tolerated things which made me uncomfortable, but convinced myself they were part of the sacrifices a researcher must make” (1985: 56). bott (2010: 169) argues “one cannot make oneself genderless”, however, one strategy of “impression management” i used to lessen the visibility of my gendered self and to iron out my ambiguous status involved considerations about what to wear. as perrone remarks, in “dance clubs, it was very difficult to dress genderless and asexual when acceptance in the field warranted gendered and sexual fashions” (2010: 727). while i did not want to be dressed in formal clothing in a club setting, i needed to present myself as a researcher there to do a job and not as a clubber on a night out, thereby reinforcing the dichotomy between work and leisure. i would usually wear a brightly coloured skirt, a vest top, a small jacket and flat shoes. this distinction between my professional identity and presence as a dance consumer was not always easy to sustain, especially in settings where my presence was covert and visible research props such as my university id card were absent. in retrospect, the research props offered nothing more than the outward appearance of officialdom which translated into confidence, but this did little to reduce the visibility of my gender identity in these dance settings. “friendship” in the field a number of studies have examined the merits and challenges of friends-turnedinformants in the field, an approach often utilised by insider researchers to study the social world they are already a part of (e.g., taylor 2011; ward 2008). however, my research is aligned with traditional concerns related to emergent friendships during the course of fieldwork. making new friendships in the field can lead to a blurring of the boundary between researcher and participant. others have characterized researcher-participant relations as “‘fleeting’ friendships” (bott 2010: 169). in discussing his covert role as a bouncer working a manchester club door, calvey writes, “the paradox was getting close to them without them getting close to me” (2008: 911-12). at the other end of the spectrum, feminist readings encourage “minimal social distance between feminist researchers and research subjects” to facilitate an egalitarian exchange (ryen 2011: 429). questions of friendship entered the equation during an incident that occurred at a trance night in manchester. the events that evening highlighted the extent to which i had come to rely on my key informant india10 and her group of friends for access into their social world and for their emotional support during lone fieldwork; further blurring the fuzzy boundary between researcher and research participant. field note: when things turn nasty (14 may 2012). my interview was interrupted by a man who had come over and repeatedly asked what we were talking about. i explained what i was doing and he kept insisting that he was interviewed ‘now’. my interviewee gave in and walked off. the interaction was awkward from the very beginning. he chose to sit very close to me, invading my personal space which made me feel uncomfortable. he told me that he didn’t touch drugs and that dancecult 5(1)50 he was really into trance. he then began to quiz my knowledge of trance. he asked what other trance nights i had been to and which djs i knew at this event, to which i responded that i only really knew noel (a research participant) who was coming on shortly. he said if i didn’t know them why was i there? i explained that i was interested in the dance space and speaking to clubbers about their experiences. the awkward questioning about my presence made me want to wrap up the interview as soon as possible. at this point, a young, white female in a short blue dress came round the booth and sat on my left. i thought she was a bit odd earlier as she had aggressively snatched her handbag away which was on the sofa next to me. i had smiled when she caught my eye but she returned with a dirty look. speaking over the male interviewee she asked, ‘what is it you’re doing?’ i explained briefly and said i was just in the middle of talking to someone and i would talk to her in a few minutes. i then realised they were both friends and so talking to both at the same time didn’t matter. she asked ‘tell me again what you’re doing. . . . i don’t get it’. i asked her which part she didn’t get, sensing her hostile tone. she kept saying ‘but i don’t get it’. her male friend added, ‘we just don’t think you’re genuine’. i was shocked that he had turned on me given his insistence on being interviewed. she continued with, ‘it looks to me as if you’re just using whatever you say you’re doing [pointing at my notebook] to pick up men!’ at this point she was standing up, towering over me, shouting ‘i think you should leave!’ i told her that i had not chosen to speak to her male friend and that he’d insisted on being interviewed to which she responded ‘i think you should fucking leave!’ i was more than happy to leave! the male interviewee continued being awkward and when i asked him to let me pass he barely nudged, blocking my path. i managed to push my way past him and went to find india. i ended up bursting into tears in front of noel’s housemate who i had met earlier and then ran into the toilets. i was shocked and intimidated by the pair. why had she reacted so aggressively? india found me in the toilets and i explained what had happened. i had to stop her from going over to ‘have a word’; the situation would only blow up further. she was genuinely shocked that someone would act like that at a trance night and described the girl as ‘disrespectful to clubbers’. deflated by what had happened i cleaned up the mascara running down my face, and eventually went back outside. i stayed close to india and her friends the remainder of the night, consciously avoiding the back of the room where the incident happened. as punch remarked in field notes, “i wonder how much i should be prepared to risk for the sake of good data” (punch 2012: 88). upset, intimidated and alone, i too questioned the lengths i was willing to go in my quest for good data. i was exposed yet again to the fears of lone research; emotions that were magnified in the confines of a small bar setting. “the romance of the lone researcher . . . facilitates an ethos of self-reliance which can make it difficult for researchers to ask for help or envisage ways in which they could be supported bhardwa | alone, asian and female 51 by others” (linkogle in punch 2012: 88). as others have pointed out, being viewed with suspicion and mistrust are often part of the dilemmas researchers face in gaining entry and acceptance in the field (cohen 2000; hammersley and atkinson 2007; perrone 2009). my lack of local trance knowledge, as indicated above, marked me out as an outsider, raising further questions about my presence in the field and provoking a hostile response. the degree to which i participated in the culture of those i was studying may have also influenced the participant reactions i received. while others (i.e., thornton 1995; tunnell 1998) have disclosed their use of illegal drugs during fieldwork in the name of “criminal verstehen”11 (ferrell 1998: 27), i did not participate in the consumption of illegal drugs during my time in the field. however, as a participant observer, i danced, socialised and consumed a small amount of alcohol (usually a drink or two) as a way of blending in and participating in the social setting. as palmer noted during fieldwork with an alcoholcentred subculture of football fans, “while drinking enabled me to develop good rapport with my respondents, i also needed to position myself as an academic who was there to do a job” (2010: 427). sobriety added to my professional armour in the field as well as ensuring my safety as a lone researcher. as the sober researcher in the midst of intoxicated dance consumers i occupied an “active”, but never “complete”, membership role (adler and adler 1987). however, measham and moore, in their critique of absolutist insider perspectives, contend that researchers can at best attain “partial insider” status, arguing that “the fluidity of contemporary identities may mean that researchers cannot claim absolute proximity to research participants” (2006: 16). furthermore, some of the hostility and suspicion i experienced while conducting research in dance settings may be symptomatic of historical “misrepresentation” by journalists and researchers that has spawned negative press coverage of dance culture in the uk (mcrobbie and thornton 1995; thornton 1995). the incident described above illustrated how female researchers may struggle to be taken seriously by male counterparts in the field, whilst other females may view the female researcher with suspicion and hostility (hammersley and atkinson 2007: 74). furthermore, the episode reinforced what i had noted at the start of my fieldwork journey about the difficulties in recruiting women to take part in my research. it was easier in most cases speaking to men (warren 1988) and in male-dominated spaces, such as trance nights, there would only be a few women available to recruit. field note: fake friendship (14 june 2012). i got chatting to a friend of noel’s after he had finished his set. the male asked if i was a friend of noel’s. i replied ‘yes’ at first then explained that he was actually one of my ‘research participants’. we discussed what my research was about and he asked ‘so what happens next year when you finish your research?’ he was very sceptical about the ‘friendship’. ‘do they know that you’re making notes about them? i find it all a little creepy; it’s like a fake friendship’. i told him that this wasn’t the first time i was out with them and that i’d been on several other nights out with noel and india and that they were aware of what i was doing and had both been very helpful. dancecult 5(1)52 given the occurrences that night and my reliance on india for comfort, i struggled to articulate how much i valued her friendship; there was nothing fake about it. despite, the caveats about becoming too close to research participants, maintaining an objective distance from my research participants under such circumstances was evidently compromised. it has been suggested (moore 2004; rief 2009) that making friends is an integral part of the experience in the context of clubbing (and extending to the other two dance settings). as moore puts it, clubbing “is about smiling at strangers, making friends with ‘randoms’ that you meet on the night” (2004: 461). there are three broad types of field relations i have experienced whilst conducting research in dance settings. first, in most field sites i would meet people who would learn about my research but were non-participants (e.g., noel’s housemate). second, there were those who were recruited to take part in my research and there has been limited or no contact beyond the first interview. thirdly, there are the existing research participants who over regular online/offline contact have evolved into “friends”, blurring the relationship between researcher and participant. in both scenarios outlined above, i was faced with the need to defend my intentions and presence in the field. hammersley and atkinson observe that it is not uncommon for the research and the researcher to be met with some resistance, where “people may challenge the legitimacy of the research and the credentials of the researcher” (2007: 65). blurring boundaries between researcher and participant have been compounded with the use of mobile phones and social networking sites such as facebook, which adds another dimension to friendship in the field (see bhardwa forthcoming). the “afterthoughts”: ethnicity and social class as “bonding” capital much of my fieldwork journey has centred on negotiating the influence of my gender identity on the research process. contending with such issues has meant that other aspects of my identity, such as my ethnicity and social class, did not receive the same degree of reflexive attention, to which the discussion now turns. while there are a number of studies exploring the broader themes of exclusion, racism and criminalisation of groups in the night time economy (e.g., böse 2005; measham and hadfield 2009; talbot and böse 2007) ethnicity remains an underexplored concept in dance culture. in particular, the place of british asians as researchers or as participants in dance culture has received limited academic attention. huq (2003) argues that british asians have been marginalised in studies of youth culture, subject to othering or victimisation. in the us context, hunt et al. suggest that, despite a growing presence of asians active in the club scene in san francisco, their invisibility in the club studies literature stems from cultural stereotypes in which “asian americans cannot be drug users” (2010: 211). unlike my gender identity, my ethnic identity as a british indian was largely considered a non-issue in the field throughout my fieldwork journey, with only a few exceptions. the visibility of my non-white ethnic identity was noted during my first fieldwork trip to bhardwa | alone, asian and female 53 ibiza whilst interviewing a white male in his 30s by the poolside, who used the interview platform to air his openly racist views about african prostitutes in san antonio, ibiza’s second-largest city. while his derogatory comments were not directed at me, they made me more conscious of my own ethnic/ racial identity. possibly sensing my discomfort yet seeking reaffirmation of his views, he remarked, “sorry, no disrespect but they’re scum, do you know what i mean?” i put off transcribing this interview when i returned home, which highlighted the implicit ways in which such field encounters can impact the research process beyond the interaction. explicit attention was drawn to my ethnic identity when i started attending a monthly drum ‘n’ bass night in manchester. in contrast to the trance nights i had attended, which attracted a predominantly white crowd, this night was ethnically mixed, making my own ethnicity more conspicuous in some ways. mirroring the way in which my gendered identity occasionally permitted access to participants and spaces, my ethnic identity too worked in positive ways, moving from a non-issue in the field to “bonding capital” (halpern 2005: 19)12 with other asians within this club space. on my first visit to the drum ‘n’ bass night,13 i met an asian couple ( jay and sonia), both in their late 20s, waiting in the door queue, whom i later interviewed inside the club. they told me that they had “been coming to [the night] since its birth” ( jay) and thought that it was the sort of event where “you can have a good time, even if you’re not that into the music. . . . it’s chilled out; no one judges you or what you’re wearing” (sonia). discussions about ethnicity were explicit from the start of the interview, with sonia declaring, “we’re not very asian”. it was a statement aimed at rebutting the perceived asian stereotype that all asians are into bhangra: as huq argues, “[to] equate ‘asians’ and even ‘asianness’ with bhangra is as much of a falsehood as compounding all african-caribbeans with reggae tastes” (2003: 34). this “disidentification”, which set the couple apart from other asian groups, has also been noted by hunt et al. (2010) in their research on asian american youth (see also muñoz 1999). like me, the man was a british gujarati and the woman was a british punjabi.14 the male participant and i joked about how difficult it was to pick up the punjabi language and we exchanged the few punjabi words we knew. this off-topic interlude helped to dissolve the rigidities between myself as the researcher and my participants as the researched. in another interview with a punjabi female the same night, our intersecting asian and gender identities soon led the interview into a conversation about men and relationships—“you know what it’s like for us asian girls”. moving away from the research-centred conversation, i was offered insights into the participant’s personal life based on our shared ethnic background, which in turn alleviated my self-consciousness about being alone. comparatively, the influence of my social class and that of others in shaping the research process remained largely inconspicuous throughout my fieldwork. the tacit impact of my class identity became apparent in my post-fieldwork reflections and by unpacking some of the decisions made whilst conducting lone research in the dance spaces. during fieldwork at the weekend dance festival (august 2011), i felt i could identify with the middle class dancecult 5(1)54 group of female university students i interviewed, but then distanced myself from, and lacked rapport with, the local “scallies”15 who told me that they had been robbing tents and fold-up chairs in the campsite. similarly, my decision to conduct research and stay in playa den bossa, ibiza, away from the excesses of san antonio, highlighted how my personal preferences, implicitly shaped by classed stereotypes (nayak 2006) directed my fieldwork choices. these stereotypes were prevalent in research participant accounts, with comments such as, “i think san an[tonio] is quite chavvy16 and lower class” (male interviewee). located east of ibiza town¸ san antonio is heavily marketed by packaged youth tour operators such as club 18–30s (sellars 1998). known for its main drinking strip—the “west end”17—san antonio takes on a similar form to other european party islands such as kos and magaluf. it is home to the clubs eden and es paradis and is more famously known for its sunset bar, mambos. in contrast, playa den bossa, southeast of the island, is the known location for super club space and the famous bora bora beach bar. the resort attracts a diverse, older crowd and tied to notions of authenticity, it is perceived to be the “real” ibiza (lozanski 2010). on both fieldwork trips i chose to stay in playa den bossa, which i perceived to be a safer environment to conduct field research, away from the alcohol-fuelled crowds of san antonio. conclusion drawing on vignettes from my own field research in dance settings, this article has aimed to expose the often unspoken challenges of conducting fieldwork. methods textbooks do not always equip the novice researcher for the messy and unpredictable realities of the field. moreover, a preoccupation with academic outputs and displays of academic competence obscures the process of fieldwork in research publications, a process that is as much personal as it is academic. by negotiating my way through the impact of the multiple identities i brought to the field, methodological complexities and personal challenges that were presented on the ground, i have produced detailed, reflexive and critical accounts of the culture under investigation. different contexts pushed certain facets of my identity to the fore while relegating others. overcoming the emotional turmoil that followed the transition from dance consumer to field researcher has formed an integral part of my fieldwork journey. the process of becoming a lone researcher culminated in my solo-fieldwork trip to ibiza in september 2012, a trip centred on shadowing the ethnographic journey of my key informant, india, and her friends. while my fears of being alone had not been completely dispelled, lone research presented access to backstage spaces, field friendships and ethnographic insight that may have been otherwise closed off. postmodern and feminist works have carved an academic space for greater reflexivity and transparency within the research process and by articulating these challenges, a realistic picture of what constitutes ethnographic fieldwork can be painted. bhardwa | alone, asian and female 55 notes 1 see barz and cooley (2008), billo and hiemstra (2012), law (2003), punch (2012) and ryanflood and gill (2010). 2 experience within dance settings is shaped by various mechanisms of formal and informal control. firstly, control is achieved formally through legislation. examples of this include the criminal justice and public order act (1994) which criminalised raves and more recently, the wave of legislation banning “legal highs” such as mephedrone. secondly, control is sustained by a combination of formal and informal processes such as increased surveillance (cctv), the club door queue and the searches before entry. 3 see anderson (2009), hutton (2005), malbon (1999), rief (2009) and thornton (1995). 4 in stage 1 of the research process, i proposed to conduct short in-situ mobile interviews. the mobile component of the interview would enable “participation-while-interviewing” (büscher et al. 2010: 9) while causing minimal disruption to participants’ leisure time. during this initial interview, i would ask participants whether they used cameras (digital mobile phone) to take photos/videos of their nights out and, if so, whether they’d like to actively do so as part of my research project (stage 2). i planned to use these participant-generated visual images in a followup elicitation interview (stage 3). i would then ask participants if they would be willing to participate in a similar follow-up interview in other leisure settings they attend (stage 4). while recognising that the willingness of participants to engage in the research may decline along the way, i hoped that most participants recruited during stage 1 of the research would maintain a level of commitment to participate in the subsequent three stages. 5 for a detailed description of the research design, sampling and methods see bhardwa (forthcoming). 6 the malinowskian model refers to the work of social anthropologist bronislaw malinowski, who proposed that entering the field alone and immersing oneself in the culture of the natives could produce contextual, cultural insight (o’reilly 2005: 10). 7 see gregory (2009), hutton (2004), perrone (2010), pini (2001), rief (2009). 8 gurney (1985), lumsden (2009), perrone (2010), warren (1988). 9 although post-feminist writers would challenge this passivity and “inferiorized femininity” (see mcrobbie 2004; wearing 1998 144). 10 pseudonyms were used for all research participants. 11 “as formulated by max weber and developed by later theorists, verstehen denotes a process of subjective interpretation on part of the social researcher, a degree of sympathetic understanding between social researcher and subjects of study, whereby the researcher comes to share, in part, the situated meanings and experiences of those under scrutiny” (ferrell 1998: 27). 12 “bonding social capital” is a concept developed from the ideas of putnam (2000) which defines the networks created among individuals in homogenous groups, i.e. ethnic groups, club memberships. 13 i first visited the monthly drum ‘n’ bass night on 25 may 2012 14 despite a shared british and asian background between myself and the research participants, there were noted were regional variations which became topic of discussion. my family are from dancecult 5(1)56 the western state of gujarat in india and the local language is gujarati (this was also the case for the male participant). the female participant told me that her parents were from the punjab, in north-west india where the local spoken language is punjabi. 15 a derogatory term used to describe the working-class from the north-west, usually liverpudlians (see nayak 2003). 16 a derogatory term used to describe the white working-class (see nayak 2006). 17 see briggs et al. 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sociological research online 13 (1). warren, carol. 1988. gender issues in field research. qualitative research methods. california: sage publications wearing, betsy. 1998. leisure and feminist theory. london; thousand oaks, california: sage. wilkins, ruth. 1993. “taking it personally: a note on emotion and autobiography”. sociology 27: 93–100. winlow, simon and steve hall. 2012. “what is an ‘ethics committee’? academic governance in an epoch of belief and incredulity”. british journal of criminology 52: 400 –16. laevorotation at boom 2012 reba manuel independent researcher doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.01.15 to descend into suffering and its opposite, the journey from underworld to victory; on the path of the eighty-eight, beyond training for death on the train beyond death; the levorotatory loop spins inward. time dissolves during the weeklong gathering of boom 2012 in the steppes near the portuguese-spanish border. i clock much of this endless now on the floor of the dance temple between the towering central pillar and the leviathan tail of one of two dragons riding the heights above. in celebratory darkness, the heinous malfeasance of onkel dunkel thunders relentlessly. “psychedelic dance temple”. video credit: omananda (2012). a green laser burns silently into the center of the god design marking the stage helm of the mothership (thompson 2012). figure 1. carey thompson’s god design and do lab’s structure meets oskar and gaspar’s video mapping, android jones’ visuals and edmt’s leds. photo credit: jakob kolar (2012). cacti distillations transform the dayglo pillar’s intake fans into desert eyes as the hexahedron of the ship’s helm burns into my vision. as the dawn’s sky transforms the surrounding hills into a sage and purple bowl, dark becomes light and fresh reinforcements begin arriving to support the waning endurance of the watchers of the night. as the sun rises, these new arrivals come in waves as giuseppe’s steady captainship (2012) draws joyful hordes to plates of light on the earth. figure 2. sunrise on one of the quetzaldragons sculpted by daniel popper and painted by carin dickson. photo credit: jakob kolar (2012). on this hallowed dance ground, e-clip (2012) crafts more light from pure sound. i encountered the names of these headphoned deckhands only through online reflection. at the time, i knew only that these mystechnicians wielded glorious effluences upon which all could ride. that day, when the speakers finally fell dormant on the party at the end of time, i was clearly present at the psychedelic hoedown of the ages. figure 3. the fully operational dance temple. photo credit: jakob kolar (2012). this event was packed with human vibrations so pure that a sense of beautiful exoticism, eroticism and fortune pervaded those present. retracing that day—nearly fifteen consecutive hours of revelry from moonrise, moonset, sunrise and into the bright beauty beyond noon—the will to maximize the party’s sirensong rose again. over the week, sleep was interrupted by endless sunshine, spiny leaves, blitzkrieg ants, or, in a serendipitous moment, the fire rites for pachamama that opened the festival in the bluffs above lake idanha-a-nova. during the brief hours of audial void, i sought shelter between the speaker stacks in the alchemy circle’s hexagonal shade. knowing the low frequency capacity of this “secondary” sound system, i was prone but poised, resting on the shoulders of a sleeping beast that could, at any moment, wake and devour us all. figure 4. alchemy circle. photo credit: jér'ૐ.s. (2012). at some point back at my tent, my quest for rest was finally answered, and after several hours sleep i woke to the infectious throbbing of hedflux at the circle stage. now in transit, i watch the full moon set from a rock perch on the lake’s western shore, roll hash cigarettes and attempt triage operations on my blistering feet over pebbles and sand. my temporal pursuit accelerates at the cusp of the moment where an ostensibly endless event will peak, festival time will compress and, tragically, it will be over. in this anticipatory moment, i put my daytime kit together. today will require the weird belt. this sage-colored braided elastic rope resembles an alien wind instrument and was previously part of a makeshift jesus christ superstar costume. i stow this artifact for later use to protect it from the dust and elements. i plot the day’s strategy while making a beeline to the main stage, some twenty minutes trekking through hundreds of freakish scenes in the high noon heat. i will attempt to find colleagues and psychoactive substances after locating relatively crowdless toilets. the plywood facilities between the rocky scrub in the direction of the “healing area” are nearly always empty, and once again they provide a welcoming refuge. i overhear an experienced looking character with an entheogenic manbag asking two people if they want acid. tracking the long-haired traveler through the hilly brush, i ask if he could spare some lysergic, and he responds with bemusement, “how much do you want”? “just a tab or so”, i say. prices and amounts are discussed, but i am determined to settle on whatever amount i can get for fifteen euro, the currency i separated away from other cash supplies after encountering the presence of this mobile drug merchant. “one tab is twenty—how much are you planning on taking”? “i think about that much. how’s fifteen”? “hmmm...fifteen....let’s see...uh”... confusion temporarily hijacks the deal, which resumes when the intrepid entrepreneur realizes i don’t want fifteen tabs. “fifteen...sure. let’s sit over there for a second”. we sit by a nearby shady rock engaging in the small talk of congenial inquiries. “what’s the comedown like on this”? “it’s very clean: california sunshine”. he smiles, tearing a small perforated square away from the technicolor blotter paper that contains the technology in question. “i’ve had people come up to me later and thank me for this stuff. it’s powerful and pure”. i put the paper in my mouth. “chew on it a bit”, he says, “you can taste the acid”. it is as he says. the taste is accompanied by a slightly pinched feeling at the base of my tongue. he asks me my name and where i am from. he tells me his name, and we go our separate ways into the insanity. my ego has roughly an hour and a half to reach a minimum safe distance for implosion. i am ready. figure 5. dance temple from orbital ground. photo credit: ricardo fortuny (2012). i circle the main stage counter-clockwise, following the path of the moon around the planet, and the planets around our star. as above so below. sinusoidal waves of bodily and psychic experience suggest that my corporeal reality is in flux. shifting beat rates and cavorting bodies conspire to accelerate this experience, and every few minutes a sense of abnormal shifting passes through me. these waves increase in intensity, merely hinting at the quality of the chemicals now looping through my bloodstream. i will ride this particular lysergic escalator slightly out of sonic peak range of the dance floor, preferably from a seated position. after completing a counterclockwise circuit on the outer fringes of the stage’s shady boundaries, i scan the area beyond the wall of speakers stage left. time is accelerating as the chemical pulses grow stronger with shorter valleys of normalcy between suggestive peaks. where will my ego make its last stand? in the harsh conditions created by the mid-afternoon sun on this high portuguese scrub, the smallest pockets of shade become premium territory. in one such spot, a yellow tent with a blanket out front is pitched beneath a single tree. three or four nomads stand outside or sit at the tent’s open door, and i ask one of them, a shirtless guy wearing a keffiyeh, if i can sit in the corner of the shade that remains. behind mirrored sunglasses, he projects a demeanor of an apostle with a good-natured smile. “of course”, he says, as i sit just outside the blanket’s boundary. thankfully, the small area where i sit is free of the hard spiked leaves strewn throughout the landscape. several fast-moving inch-long ants, ubiquitous on the hard dirt, run madly across my feet and folded legs. i take stock of my new neighbors in this temporary oasis from the relentless sun. another sunglassed guy with shorter hair stands near the blanket, with an orange kromah around his neck that makes him a twin counterpart to the seated one in the keffiyeh. he is talking to a shirtless dude with long brown hair and dark ragged shorts, who puffs on a joint. they both gesture wildly and speak another language which could be hebrew or arabic. then again, maybe it is aramaic. we talk temporal shop, and i learn that this is the afternoon i thought happened yesterday: shane gobi will soon provide a three-hour opening conclusion. time is a wheel. plates of sound morph around my head and body, merging with subtle flashes at the periphery of my senses. one hundred yards away, the dance temple throbs with cavorting revelers. the wave is swelling now, i am paddling out and there is no choice whether or not i want to ride. boarding has begun. whatever happens, i will try to ride it from here. “oohh kaayyy, i’m going to be sitting here, in the shade, but it also appears that i am coming onto some extremely strong acid”, i say. my longhaired neighbor asks, “what kind”? “the california sunshine”. “i know it”! a woman arrives, smiling at this simple revelation, her green eyes projecting gnostic understanding. “you know”? i pause and smile. we watch the ongoing good time in progress and listen to the rolling pulse of the main stage; the sounds of a living machine accompanying visions of sky-high humanity. i sit in indian style wearing shorts filled with survival trinkets and tobacco. remembering that the jc superstar belt is in one of the pockets, i locate it and began threading it through belt loops. “permit me one last accessory of the ego”, i say, knotting the stretchy ends together. she smiles, amused at this accoutrement. i tie as intricate a knot as i can muster. jc’s belt donning acquires an association of blasphemy and celebration. i am ready to be launched on a rocket cross into the groove of destiny. there is a dawning awareness that there are plenty of people walking around higher than i am and a mask of sober normalcy is unnecessary. “since you are experienced in these matters, perhaps you know how long this particular escalator plays out”? i ask for the first time. other repetitions and recitations of this question would follow. “oh there’s nothing you can do”, brother longhair smiles, kneeling towards me now. with his right eye closer to me, i can see that it is surrounded with illuminated skin patterns that shift and suggest trails of gold-yellow scales. he knows exactly where i am headed, because he already pitched camp there. in this holy moment, we commune in the shared experience of a particular chemical state in a resonating environment. there you are, over and over. we could be anywhere. “no matter where you are or what you do, you’re just on acid”, he explains, his arms and outstretched palms posing upwards in the international signal for “what can you do”? “do you know how long it takes to, you know, level out a bit”? “see”, he says, “you can’t escape once you are on that train. you can do whatever. you can dance. you can sit. you can walk to the lake. but no matter what you do, you’re just on acid”. with this fundamental truth proclaimed, the spiraling loop begins. the spiral begins as a suggestion, an altered perception that i am boarding a slowly moving walkway curving anti-clockwise and moving inward. it begins at a glacial pace, but this spiraling conveyor belt cannot be stopped. then a sudden dark understanding: my entire life culminates in the simple choice of buying a single tab of acid from a total stranger, eschewing the company and drugs of my friends. that choice merges with the entrance band around my wrist, with an “all in one” inscription on the interior that indicates my willing acceptance of the beast’s mark. succumbing to this deception, i am eternally doomed and infernally damned to ride the inward spiral to its inevitable conclusion. i have made the choice, and now they have me. the spiraling can accelerate or decelerate, but my destiny is processed: i am now, and forever, one of the acid people. the acid people are a global underclass, occupying cities, wastelands and gutters. they are the seething ranks of the hooded, slumped and shambling. they wear blackened sweatshirts emblazoned with dark red pentagrams that proclaim denials of the future. they know there is no escape. on society’s fringes, they are outcasts by both personal choice and cosmic mandate. each perennial drifter and dropout took this very same acid. the fabled brown batch. and now i am irrevocably one of them. the process of degeneration might take years, but there is no escape. figure 6. bamboo golgotha. photo credit: author (2012). my future plays out as a spiral incursion, an unstoppable force of events which can be slowed down or sped up. i can fast forward these events or watch them unfold over hours and years, but my destiny is certain. my family and friends will uncover my fate, my life long since abandoned. losing everything, i will become a shambling denizen of the streets. this cascading narrative is anchored in an immediate realization: brother longhair leads the acid people, and i am marked to serve as a sacrificial element in the grand ritual playing out on this psychedelic golgotha. in half-lotus posture on arid ground, i sit underneath the tree facing forward while attempting to negotiate the terms of my fate. they murmur outside of my vision, indicating that my new realization is not unnoticed. the ritual has begun. the gnostic spellcaster crouches close. “you could take a swim”, she says. the lake is the destined endpoint in my evolving sacrifice. several hours before at breakfast, a midwestern festival friend prophesied it by suggestion: “i could see it going really bad in a few years”, he said. he looked at me intensely, possessed by his conjecture, “all it would take is someone flipping out or someone drowning”. at the time, i was struck by the negativity of this statement. there at the breakfast table, i inadvertently gathered material for set and setting. my friend’s doom-laden pronouncement was my set, and the pervasive dirt, the crawling ants and the relentless sun, the setting, a stage backdrop for later revelations of the lake’s horror. the drama would take the form of a crucifixion, followed by a ritual drowning and a psychic implosion. a suppressed image emerged from the depths of my memories of the festival’s first days. i passed a seated and raving man surrounded by festival security units. the policia circled their target with loud inquiries and mirrored glass stares. they were onto him. his detention was assured, and now they are on to me as another ensemble character in a violent staged narrative. in this shadow play, i can make the spiraling conveyer belt move faster or slower, but it will all end in the lake. i can engage in the cosmic theatrics of apocalyptic combat with brother longhair and increase the size of my etheric body in a full-scale martial display of galactic proportions. this, too, is part of the ritual narrative. i am to fight, and in the end, i will be defeated. whether this narrative is to play out from beneath the tree or in worlds beyond, i follow its potential paths. with my previous life abandoned, and my possessions lost, stolen or sold, i will eek out an existence on the streets, subway stations and train platforms. i will be transformed into one of the acid people. the tragedy beyond all of this is that the soundtrack will never change: it is to play out like the scrawling on the back of a satanic sweatshirt. sludge metal and no future hardcore until the end of time. the acid people know the betrayal of never being able to change the music and suffering the same tunes for eternity. ants move ceaselessly across my legs and spiked leaves cut into my body. no escape. the belt spirals into the lake, the ritual center. my inverted crucifixion by the policia is only part of it. drowning is only the second part. the third part is a psychic dirty bomb. or a murder suicide. or a virus. or all of these in one. boom. in my futile final grasps of ego, i return to thoughts of my paternal grandmother. her compassionate selfless example stands in shining contrast to my dismal choices. her memory and other images of my family are now torn from my direct experience. they are revered pictures on a wall and my memories detach into a proto-fictional vortex. life mirrors the anti-truman show as all of my experiences were a set up for the california sunshine purchase, a reverse judas moment where i traded a few coppers and my soul for a scrap of paper near a makeshift desert toilet. i shouldn’t have listened to all of that black sabbath in the previous months. these were the gateway experiences preparing my soul for the trade and betrayal of this final devil’s bargain. figure 7. rotating art in darkness. photo credit: author (2012). thoughts of submission and escape turn over and over as i progress further, spiraling ever inward. perhaps my final destiny within this doomed journey is also illusory. at certain points, it seems that i still sit in half-lotus silence under the tree’s shadow. i center my awareness inward and grow to massive size, readying for cosmic combat. this attempted conscious escape from inevitable submission and hopelessness is noticed immediately. the forces around me bristle at this reversal of the spiral, which i attempt to rewind and move further away from the bottom of the lake. i grow at will, assuming a sky-size pose of combative dominance, one hand towards the heavens in eternal resistance against demonic legions, one hand towards the earth in grounded defense. but perhaps this is not the way. perhaps the way lies through submission, after all. surrendering to physical experience, and, through that, to all experience. yet this solution is merely another aspect of the trap: the cosmic battle can go on for millennia, but its outcome is still inevitable. there truly will be no escape. “why don’t you take a swim”? “there’s nothing you can do”. “doesn’t matter”. months later, meditating in the late summer’s darkness, i try to remember the moment the trip switched. a single degree of separation made all the difference in babylon on the cusp of the apocalypse. the transition was imperceptible, and i do not recall it clearly. but after spiraling downward and downward, seemingly forever, finding no end, no bottom in the abyss, somehow i found the other side. figure 8. light breaks through. photo credit: author (2012). transitionless, i found myself on the spiral, still moving anti-clockwise, but the movement was accompanied by an instant realization, another trumanesque moment when the joke was revealed to me. encoded in this moment, the message was that the drama with the acid people was a necessary final training scenario revealing the infinite depths of the dark dirty pit and the sublime potential of physical matter. without my life and choices, leading up to and including my encounter with california sunshine, it wouldn’t be possible for me to understand the possibilities and perfections of this new state. it was a solo armageddon, a judgment day for one. i immediately realize and psychically proclaim, “i knew i wasn’t that bad”. it begins in near complete darkness, but i am surrounded by a feeling of presence in all directions and dimensions. i have no corporeal form, but am framed by the feeling of potential: limbs will be available when needed. i am surrounded by hundreds or thousands of conscious entities who deeply understand millions of human experiences. the underlying feeling sent to me from many simultaneous directions by this cosmic crew is, cousin, we’ve been there. they are going to welcome me at my own pace. there are conversations, revelations and understandings. i am there, experiencing a feeling of relief so palpable that i sit in it like a warm bubble. after dwelling there for joyous moments, curiosity compels me to move forward through the spiral only slightly, or if i so desire, at speeds beyond light. but for now, i am content to take the slow ride, and to ease into the possibilities. the party circles around me, and i can choose to experience it at any level of intensity or ethereality. i expand myself into a bodily form of the same half-lotus posture i assumed under the tree. the æther surrounds me, warm cosmic dust illuminates all directions and i can manifest anything. i choose to begin by manifesting grains of sand, dancing with them between my projected thumbs and forefingers. the tactile sensation is unparalleled, as i toss the sand and manifest new grains after each toss. i transform the sand into wisps of sparkling light and cast them into infinity. from this seated position, i move forward through this interspace. there is an ethereal geography here, although it can be changed at will. there is also an understanding that i am progressing through an introductory training program. i am learning to manifest thought, with absolute freedom to create more complex thought forms at any pace. the beat progresses endlessly forward, and i follow. my spectral spine sways to the thrumming at the eternal spiral center. i abide in this metaphysical joyride, a meditation accompanied by a lightshow beyond time, and know that i have arrived. i have won. figure 9. rotating light art. photo credit: jakob kolar (2012). the ethereal presences begin assuming bodily forms, and the geography assumes closer resemblance to a physical locality. no movement from my seat under the tree occurs, but now i am on the dance floor. the dance temple in parallel, but proximal reality, and why wouldn’t i be here now? this is a place beyond earth, beyond malkuth, a fully configurable environment and i am simultaneously poised in this universal center. hundreds of people surround me, a non-egocentric hub. the presences smile at me, transforming and unfolding into human dancers, the daytime dance tribe. they exist beyond time, patiently inviting me to explore the configurable experiences of hyperspace. accepting the invitation, i want to perform a victory dance. this party at the end of time mirrors the locus point where i departed physical and temporal reality. it takes the form of this festival as i experience it on day four that was three. and so it is. the party at the end of time. as i move to sit on disembodied knees, dancing with grains of sand falling from my fingertips, i conjure one of the many dance floor islands of water bottles, shoes, inflatable toys and other celebratory detritus in front of me. i begin to dance, rotating my light body in a slow complete spin. as people dance around me, they face me, and as i spin they shift and become a new group of people with each rotation. they look at me intently, each new face smiling in recognition. with conscious telepathy, they inform me that anything is possible. there is a slight preciousness to the proceedings and the unspoken psychic declaration, “boom”! is ubiquitous. then, in submission to this preciousness, my repeated response remains, “why not”? in service to the beauty of this constantly morphing cast of evolving and revolving characters, i surrender. movement and freedom intensify. with no lust for result, i pilot my light-body in triumphant exultation, knowing that these movements are beyond representation of this victory, they are an embodiment of victory itself. libidinous communication is unassumingly possible. sexual limitation is obliterated, and thus its expression is unnecessary. this union is so totalizing that it encapsulates and eclipses physicality. we are riding the waves of our own luminosity, hundreds of pairs of seduced and seducing eyes. and we dance. the parade ebbs and flows forward and backwards on a glorious spinning wheel. i revel in mutual waves of adulation with the understanding that the party can be endless. perhaps after hours, days and weeks, the party will morph into more complex playgrounds. the dance floor’s grand cavorting craft can be piloted and transformed into infinite vistas. these denizens of dance will share endless creation and adulation in eternity, morphing into new scenes and revelations, transforming forever. assured of this infinite timeframe, i decide to navigate further into the dream country outside of the dance craft. i wander into the sunlight, onto a bright landscape of rock and scrub brush. on this blazing path, i encounter open-hearted others in dreamlike montages. these people shine with inner purity and radiance, make compassionate offerings and ask flattering questions. there is intense kinship on that path, but it fades slowly, transforming into a carnival version of itself, a hyperreal pleasure garden. i am returning to the physical dimension and am not to remain in the endless party. walking again in three spatial dimensions within the perceptual confines of linear time, i am pleasantly disappointed in this gentle letdown. figure 10. navigational aid. photo credit: pedro branco (2012). as the overwhelming heat leads me again to search for puddles of shade, the recommended healing area offers no space in the shadows among hundreds of others. i hunker briefly outside, vomiting discretely into a coffee cup. retreating from this meditational mirage, i seek refuge in spiny bushes and engage in more discreet vomiting. i follow the path further around the lake anti-clockwise. always in laevorotation. navigating the rocky heights slowly, i find a shallow outcropping, unsure whether to go back or forward. my condition seems to stabilize. i make my way down the steep cliffs to the water. small groups of people swim in the crags and shoals of the deep lake valley. i pause on the rocks to remove my shoes and to make a lakeside bundle of my small possessions. and i swim. figure 11. empire of love on lake idanha-a-nova. photo credit: pedro branco (2012). hours later, after undertaking a psychic debriefing, and animatedly asserting a fractured preliminary account on festival friends, the reverse transference process to physical dimensions completes itself. the next morning, after semi-normal sleep, i return to the main stage and almost immediately encounter brother longhair and the gnostic spellcaster between speaker banks. i am hugged and told i am beautiful. i smile and attempt to indicate with my expressions the stratospheric highs achieved. i ask, “if you don’t mind, i would be interested in your perspective of what i did yesterday in physical reality”. brother longhair lifts his hands upward and smiles, “you danced”! figure 12. the party at the end of time. photo credit: maximiliano allendes medeiros (2012). “the alchemy of spirit”, part 1. video credit: droid id (2013). “the alchemy of spirit”, part 2. video credit: droid id (2013) figure 13. moonrise. photo credit: esweb (2012). author biography reba manuel is an artist, musician and entheo-ethnographer who occasionally documents esoteric encounters with psytrance, synchronicity and media alchemy at the “universal laevorotation” blog: <http://laevorotation.blogspot.com>. email: <rebatek8@gmail.com> references thompson, carey. 2012. “dance temple: boom festival 2012 carey thompson”. pod collective. 24 october: < http://podcollective.com/portal/portals-main-stage-boom-festival-and-burning-man> (accessed 16 january 2014). discography e-clip. 2012. live set at boom festival, portugal 2012. < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzaxpvhlukq>(accessed 17 january 2014). gobi, shane. 2012. dj set at boom 2012—podcast 14. < http://www.boomfestival.org/boom2014/webtvradio/boom-radio/boom-2012-sets/podcast-14/> (accessed 17 march 2014). guiseppe. 2012. dj set at the dance temple (boom festival 2012 podcast). parvati records. <http://www.mixcloud.com/boomfestivalhq/boom-festival-2012-podcast-15-by-giuseppe/> (accessed 16 january 2014). filmography droid i.d. 2013. the alchemy of spirit. lisbon, portugal: boom team.part 1: < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztrsenzgjcq> and part 2: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_ilhssivac> (accessed 17 january 2014). klimmer, torsten (a.k.a. omananda; liquid crystal vision). “psychedelic dance temple boom-festival 2012”. 2012. youtube, 2:52. < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3kbboa4dnw> (accessed 16 january 2014). reviews1.2-typeset reviews 112 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 reviews reggaeton. raquel z. rivera, wayne marshall, and deborah pacini hernandez (eds). durham and london. duke university press, 2009. isbn: 978-0-8223-4360-8 (hardcover), 978-0-8223-4383-5 (paperback) rrp: us$89.95 (hardcover), us$24.95 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.09 alejandro l. madrid university of illinois at chicago (us) when certain products or practices attain a more secure place in a particular cultural landscape they tend to become naturalized in the minds of those who experience such landscapes; it is almost as if they had always been there, they become “authenticated”. this seems to be the case with reggaeton. as i sit down to write this review i ask myself when i heard about reggaeton for the first time and i cannot find an answer. when pushing myself to remember anything related to what i now believe belongs to the reggaeton performance complex, a number of fragmented images and sounds come to mind. i remember el general in local, low budget shows from the telemundo or univisión tv networks in new york city and boston in the early 1990s; then students asking me about the genre (and actually calling it reggaeton) almost ten years later in chicago; finally, its explosion into the mainstream media in 2005, and its pervasive presence in clubs in havana, cuba, that summer. although most of these memories are rather vague and patchy, what i do remember clearly is not being able to explain thoroughly what reggaeton was. the sounds and the images seemed to have always been there since the 1990s, but in fact, reggaeton was something relatively new, and as such, also somehow elusive. since the mid 2000s reggaeton has arguably become the most danced and talked about latin music genre. it is omnipresent in latin american and latin media in the u.s.; yet, with few exceptions and disregarding its artistic success and its importance as a marker of the transnationality that characterizes contemporary latino and latin american experiences of identity, reggaeton had largely remained absent from academic discussion. reggaeton, edited by raquel z. rivera, wayne marshall, and deborah pacini hernandez, is an appropriate, timely, and thorough response and reflection on the genre’s popularity. the volume is an impressive collection of academic essays and artistic statements that deals with reggaeton’s cultural significance and stylistic meaning, and the history of transnational migration, oppression, and racial struggle behind its production, consumption, and dissemination. the aesthetic, sociological, anthropological, and political complexity of the reggaeton phenomenon can only be seriously approached from a multidisciplinary perspective. reggaeton offers a multi-logic reading where several disciplines and fields of artistic expression come together to answer questions that no disciplinary field could comprehensively answer alone. the demonstrated expertise in the fields of sociology, ethnomusicology and anthropology of the editorial team, as well as their commitment to the study of music through a transnational lens almost guaranteed the extraordinary depth and variety that this collection of essays, interviews, poetry and visual arts offers. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(2) 2010, 113-127 issn 1947-5403 ©2010 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ the book is divided into six sections. in the first section, “mapping reggaeton”, wayne marshall offers a detailed study of the stylistic development of the genre. by focusing on the transformation of the sounds and rhythms that characterize today’s reggaeton as they traveled historically through a cultural circuit that included jamaica, panama, new york and puerto rico, marshall is able to explain the links between genres such as reggae, dancehall, rap, underground, and reggaeton, whilst shedding light on the discourses of “authenticity” behind them. the second part, “the panamanian connection”, presents articles by marshall and christoph twickel as well as interviews with singers renato and el general; the combination of academic and journalistic writings alongside the artists speaking about their experiences gives the reader a rich description of the history of reggae and dancehall in panama as well as the role of american culture in the slow development of a new style that would only be called reggaeton many years later. part three, “(trans)local studies and ethnographies”, is made out of articles that focus on specific issues related to local reggaeton scenes in puerto rico (raquel z. rivera), cuba (geoff baker), and miami ( jose davila), and a re-evaluation of the role of dominican musicians and producers in the development of the genre (deborah pacini hernandez). rivera’s chapter traces the transformation of underground into reggaeton in puerto rico in relation to questions of morality and censorship. this essay pays attention to the commercial notoriety of the genre and its transformation into a site for the continued struggles over the representation of racialised stereotypes about class and criminality, and social hierarchies of the island. baker’s essay on the political tensions between rap and reggaeton in cuba is a noteworthy contribution that analyzes how both genres play a central role in the current imagination of the national and the global in a socialist country. the fourth part of the book, “visualizing reggaeton”, offers a collection of pictures by miguel luciano and kacho lópez, and stills from a video project by carolina caycedo. this section shows readers the visual aspect of reggaeton culture as well as how artists engage that culture to reflect on issues of neocolonialism, consumerism, gender, sexuality, race, and “authenticity” that concern contemporary latino youth. caycedo’s reads the hypersexualized perreo dancing style that characterizes reggaeton as an example of a new form of feminism that allows women to reclaim their sexualized bodies and use them to accomplish their own goals. part five, gendering reggaeton, presents chapters by félix jiménez, alfredo nieves moreno, and jan fairley that explore the role of reggaeton in reproducing gender values as well as contesting gender hierarchies as the genre moves transnationally between new york city, puerto rico, and cuba. jiménez’s essay compares the figures of puerto rican singers glory and ivy queen to illustrate how different individuals might engage the gender stereotypes of reggaeton to solidify or question gender hierarchies in puerto rican society; while nieves moreno focuses on how the music and performance of calle 13 challenge the stereotypes of hypermasculinity often associated with reggaeton. fairley’s contribution centers on the sexualization of the bodies in perreo dancing within the particular context of cuba’s reggaeton scene. one of fairley’s wise moves is her comparative analysis of the transgressive character of perreo in relation to earlier black genres such as danzón, rumba, tango, or samba; thus interpreting reggaeton as part of the transnational cultural flow of african diasporic culture. the final section of the book is entitled “reggaeton poetics, politics, and aesthetics”, and combines poetry by gallego and reflections on the relationship 114 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 between hip hop and reaggeton and black pride by artists welmo e. romero joseph and tego calderón with analyses by alexandra t. vázquez and frances negrónmuntaner. noteworthy is vázquez’s provocative essay on racial and gender performativity and ivy queen, providing as it does an insight into how to deconstruct contradictory and problematic moments in performance as pedagogical articulations. reggaeton is a truly important contribution to our understanding of the most pervasive and perhaps most misunderstood latin musical genre at the turn of the 21st century. the blend of academic and journalistic writings with artistic statements, interviews and visual art offers the reader an extraordinary window into the complex landscape of reggaeton. as i was reading through the book i could not help thinking: “no wonder i thought reggaeton had always been here”. the rich discussions presented in this volume allows the reader to have a clearer idea of the continuities that make this genre part of a larger cultural complex while defining its particularities as a rather new type of musical expression. as i put the book down i feel confident i could finally somehow explain what reggaeton is; however, i also understand that the vibrant and shifting cultural flows that make it meaningful will most likely challenge this assumption sooner than later. with reggaeton, however, raquel z. rivera, wayne marshall, and deborah pacini hernadez have established the foundation for the rich and productive academic conversation that the genre will still generate. rave culture. the alteration and decline of a philadelphia music scene. tammy l. anderson. philadelphia, temple university press, 2009. isbn: 978-1-59213-934-7 (hardcover), 978-1-59213-934-7 (paperback) rrp: us$79.50 (hardcover), us$25.95 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.10 beate peter manchester metropolitan university (uk) in her book on the philadelphia electronic dance music (edm) scene, tammy anderson uses rave culture to reflect on why and how particular youth cultures decline. her ethnographic methodology, turning her into a participant-observer, is helpful as it provides invaluable insight into the organisation, production and marketing of electronic dance music. investigating the rave phenomenon from a cultural perspective, she places a scene primarily defined by its music consumption into a wider social, political and cultural context. this approach allows her not only to analyse the forces within the scene that led to its alteration and decline but also to look at external factors that might have affected the perception and development of the edm scene in philadelphia, usa. comparing the past raves with contemporary edm events, anderson traces the development of such events over time. her historical narrative of the genre opposes the notion that rave is a musical form of a particular time, commonly situated between reviews 115 1989 and 1992. she creates a rave-club culture continuum that categorises edm events according to their representation of commercial or rave-like values. by doing so, anderson successfully shows that the multi-faceted space at edm events abolishes the idea of authenticity and commercialism as a binary opposition. applying cultural markers, anderson locates several types of events within this continuum and promotes the idea of a spectrum of values that show how the identity of rave culture has changed. she also introduces six different types of participants, categorised according to their insider or outsider status. as entertaining as it is to read about the difference between loyalists, clubbers, pretenders or spillovers and their personal motivation to participate in an edm event, this model struggles to explain the interest in or absence of a collective identity. although the ethnographic data collected from interviewees gives an interesting insight into the upbringing of insiders and offers an explanation for the sense of belonging that some aim for on the dance floor, other participant categories are ignored, making a distinction between the ideal types of clubbers and their attitude towards the creation of a collective identity inappropriate. anderson’s analysis of the forces of cultural change is one of the most interesting aspects of this book, not just from the perspective of a musicologist but also because the alteration and decline of rave culture is presented as symbolising the general trend of youth cultures and scenes. first, the general schism between grassroots music enthusiasts on the one hand and younger fans on the other clearly shows how cultural and social values are embedded in a generation’s attitude towards the production, marketing, promotion and consumption of music. second, anderson’s investigation into the causes and effects of the commercialisation of raves relates back to rave-club culture continuum. furthermore, the empirical evidence from her fieldwork shows that such development appears to be innate to youth culture and music. thus, the mourning and resistance to change of original grassroots rave culture participants appears inappropriate, especially if it prevents a scene from surviving (new fans are not welcomed). third, the aspect of cultural otherness and hedonism is closely linked to rave culture’s prominent drug use. more interesting is the point anderson raises in her discussion of deviation over the extent to which the notion of otherness can still act as a recruitment factor for a specific culture and the question as to when deviance becomes self-destructive. again, anderson formulates her questions in such a way that a broader debate is encouraged. fourth, the aspect of formal social control includes an examination of the politics and policies in both the us and uk to provide a base from which to argue for a completely different attitude towards edm to that of club owners, promoters and fans. fifth, genre fragmentation is identified by anderson as a result of commercialisation. with the original rave ethos having all but vanished, special events prevent fans from being exposed to various musical genres or styles. considering some of the comments in the book, the fragmentation of the genre into a wealth of subgenres could also be interpreted as the escape from commercial exploitation, a move that might have been seen by some stakeholders as liberation from commercial restraints and expectations. the chapter dealing with cultural forces is one of the work’s strongest, since it puts rave culture’s alteration and decline into a wider perspective. moreover, anderson shows how these different forces are interdependent and how they are linked to a particular society’s understanding and appreciation of leisure time, music, and deviance: “simply put, a culture’s fate lies in attracting birth cohorts and demographic groups, the destruction in or diffusion of its elements and form, its exploitation via 116 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 industry, and its suppression by the state” (112). chapter five is similarly broad in approach, scope and applicability, dealing as it does with the types of cultural work that aim to produce both change and stability for a (musical) youth culture. anderson’s division of cultural work into restoration, preservation and adaptation makes it clear that the objectives of the various members of this youth culture differ to such a degree that the use of cultural markers on the rave-club culture continuum seems justified. furthermore, it highlights that this continuum is expandable in all directions and establishes a proof for the diversity within the culture. the comparative study between philadelphia, london and ibiza in chapter six, however, lacks the depth and critical analysis of previous chapters. it is unclear why those cities were chosen, what they represent or even what the results mean with regard to pan-european research (usa, spain, germany), global youth cultures (nomads), the aspect of nationality (britishness), or regionalism (lots of sunshine in ibiza, non-organic setting). nevertheless, this weakness does not damage my overall evaluation of anderson’s book as not only a well-written account of the philadelphia edm scene and its historical changes but also the importance of its emphasis on scenes in general. in doing so her achievements are threefold. first, anderson’s use of broad categories and cultural markers that do not over-emphasise the significance of music make her research applicable to other subject areas. her investigation of philadelphia’s rave culture is by no means exclusive in its articulation of factors internal and external to a scene. they are proof of the deep rootedness of youth culture in society regardless of levels of deviance. second, anderson’s analysis of cultural work shows that youth culture cannot be seen as a fixed and stable entity that vegetates aimlessly. instead, participants in a particular culture might be motivated for various reasons but they are very active in keeping their youth culture alive. third, according to anderson’s participant categorisation i am a loyalist and as such very protective of a scene with great emotional investment. reading a book about the decline of my favourite youth culture that, for many years, played a big role in my identity formation, meant i read anderson’s research with some scepticism. but, perhaps most important of all, her convincing arguments are refreshing precisely because they are free from the nostalgic longing for a grassroots rave culture. reviews 117 club cultures: boundaries, identities and otherness. silvia rief. new york and abingdon, routledge, 2009. isbn: 978-0-415-95853-0 (hardcover only) rrp: uk£70.00 (hardcover only) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.11 fiona hutton university of wellington (new zealand) in introducing her book silvia rief makes the point that clubbing has become a global phenomenon which takes place in diverse settings such as street parades and music festivals. whilst clubbing may have “gone global”, the local remains crucial when exploring such diversity. rief aims to examine club cultures and “particular modes of being and experience” in the shaping of cultural and social identities (8), and in so doing argues that the study of club cultures needs to be placed within broader contexts such as de-industrialisation, urban regeneration and the development of urban night time economies (ntes). the book reflects on the development of the ntes and the importance of clubbing in both london and istanbul. in addition rief utilises debates about authenticity, aestheticization, virtualization, reflexivity and otherness to develop her analysis. this is an ambitious project encompassing many diverse topics that reveal fascinating insights into contemporary club cultures. in chapter two rief compares london and istanbul and the urban regeneration that took place in both cities which contributed to the development and governance of the nte and in turn had a significant effect on club cultures. clubbing was actively encouraged in london’s urban redevelopment and the importance of nightlife in the tourism industry was recognised; in istanbul this emphasis on nightlife was not as explicit due to the islamist ruling government. this chapter contains an excellent discussion of the tensions in the development of the ntes of both cities. the explosion in british urban ntes and the issues surrounding so-called “binge drinking” have meant that nightlife has become re-problematised. a fascinating examination of the development of clubbing in istanbul is also put forward; rief notes for example that social divisions are very much in evidence, with clubbing more often than not associated with “upmarket events for wealthy middle-class and celebrity audiences” (51). following this discussion of urban renewal and its impact on the development of london’s and istanbul’s nightlife, rief turns to mapping the uk nte in chapter three, arguing that the role of clubbing and dance cultures has received little attention in such exercises. the difficulty in accurately mapping the uk nte and the cultural production industries involved is highlighted at the beginning of this chapter. these cultural production industries consist of micro-companies which do not appear on “established indicators” (58) and therefore often escape notice. writers such as chatterton and hollands (2003) are pessimistic about the domination of clubbing and nightlife by large companies and the corporatization of clubbing experiences. rief does not share their pessimism and while she recognises the power of large companies in this competitive sector she argues that even in global markets the local is still important, apparent in the diversity of club cultures within and between various 118 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 towns and cities. chapter three also charts the history of major uk club corporations such as the ministry of sound and discusses the rising costs of producing club spaces. rief also considers legislation such as the licensing act 2003 which affected the way club spaces are or can be produced. she concludes this chapter by stating that “the economic significance of the nightclub sector is considerable but not extraordinary” (76), again highlighting that the sector contains a large number of small independent companies. although i agree with rief that it is useful to consider club cultures in their broader social and cultural contexts, i did find myself wondering what these economic policies and issues meant for the consumers of club spaces. with this in mind i started chapter four with relish; here rief discusses the (clubbing) body and the organisation of clubbing experiences. she makes the point that clubbers immerse themselves in club cultures for different reasons and that many clubbers are still connected to the “everyday” (83). this challenges the idea that clubbers and clubbing experiences are always hedonistic and escapist. in addition rief highlights that ‘everyday’ values infuse clubbing spaces, which in a sense are similar to (some) “everyday” contexts. this affects “body and emotion work” (82) through for example controlling bodily appearance and managing impressions. nowhere is this more apparent than in the nightclub queue and during the rituals of “going out”. rief provides further discussion of clubbing communities as contested communities in which participants struggle for membership, partly through rituals of belonging and gaining access. chapter four focuses on the rules and conventions of clubbing where rief notes that fashion and dancing provide avenues through which bodies are accepted or rejected according to the conventions of the spaces they are in. she notes that even in club spaces that are more transgressive than the workplace or home, there remain social codes to be adhered to. chapter four contains a nuanced theoretical discussion centring on ideas such as aestheticization and prosthetic culture. this work theoretically frames the preceding discussion of the body and goes on to consider how these processes of aestheticization affect constructions of reality in clubbing environments. this is an ambitious project to situate clubbing in a broader theoretical framework. consequently it is often difficult to see how the experiences of clubbing as articulated by rief ’s respondents “fit” with this abstract discussion. perhaps better integration and linking of these theoretical points to clubbing would have helped the “fit” be more clearly identifiable. rief moves on in chapter five to a discussion of reality/realities of clubbing experiences and the “dance underworld” (110). the normalisation thesis is considered in the clubbing context in this chapter. rief puts forward the idea that drug use in clubs is not fully normalised as her interviewees still associated drug-taking with transgression and fear of dependency. although i am not sure that i agree with rief ’s interpretation here, it is helpful to see a “moving on” of key academic debates. attitudes towards drug use and the meanings of drug-taking experiences are also presented as profoundly gendered in this chapter. further consideration is given to clubbers’ meanings and experiences in chapter six. “identity projects” (132) frame clubbing experiences as a form of self development and self-realisation in relation to issues such as love and romance. the meanings of clubbing are classed, raced and gendered. theoretical and empirical material is more successfully integrated within this chapter. again, explicit linking of the narratives that run through chapters four to six may have helped the reader clearly identify how the debates being put forward relate specifically to clubbing. reviews 119 chapter seven focuses on images of sexuality or sexual scenarios in two prominent clubbing magazines; mixmag and ministry. rief points to the crucial role (154) that clubbing and nightlife play in the construction of sexual boundaries and also notes the blurring of sexual boundaries identified by earlier researchers (pini 2001; measham et al 2001; hutton 2006). the dominance of heterosexual identities and heteronormative structures are noted here, even though clubbing environments are often seen as more tolerant of diverse expressions of sexuality. rief argues that heteronormativity is not affected by the sexual scenarios she identifies in the two magazines under consideration; “naughty girls” and “hot lesbo action” (160-2), with such scenarios or images of transgressive femininities remaining firmly located within heterosexual feminine identities. rief extends this discussion of sexualities in chapter eight by considering the extent to which sexual boundaries are made or re-made in clubbing contexts. the tensions inherent in the commodification of gay and lesbian spaces are discussed and the idea that clubs are contested spaces is reinforced. controls on who gains entry through door management and judgements made about consumers within club spaces are f i l t e r e d t hr o u g h “h e t e r o n o r m a t i v e d i s c o ur s e s i n t h e r e a d i n g o f (hetero)sexuality” (183) deployed by gay and lesbian clubbers themselves. this dominance of heteronormativity is emphasised in chapter nine where rief concludes that “there is, therefore, no one-dimensional change of gender relations and sexual boundaries in club cultural spaces towards more equality and acceptance of diversity” (192). overall this ambitious book locates clubbing experiences within the broader economic, social and cultural contexts in which they are constructed. rief calls for a refocusing of clubbing research away from a concentration on clubbers’ experiences towards a more comparative, systematic approach. although at times this way of considering club cultures did not quite “work” for me, the moving forward of debates about club cultures and original insights and suggestions for further research are welcome. this book is suitable for any club researcher wishing to access an informed discussion about the nte, urban regeneration, bodies, sexuality and club spaces. references chatterton, paul and robert hollands. 2003. urban nightscapes: youth cultures, pleasure spaces and corporate power. london: routledge. hutton, fiona. 2006. risky pleasures: club cultures and feminine identities. aldershot: ashgate publishing. measham, fiona, judith aldridge and howard parker. 2001. dancing on drugs: risk, health and hedonism in the british club scene. london: free association books. pini, maria. 2001. club cultures and female subjectivity: the move from home to house. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. 120 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 run lola run. dir. tom tykwer. sony pictures (dvd), 2008 [1998]. berlin calling. dir. hannes stöhr. av visionen (dvd), 2008. doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.12 sean nye university of minnesota (us) the representation of berlin in music films has an extraordinary history, from the experimental depictions in berlin: symphony of a great city (1927), to hollywood’s homage to weimar-era berlin in cabaret (1972), to the queer-punk east berlin in hedwig and the angry inch (2001). while soundtracks of berlin urban life have often relied on classical, cabaret or punk-industrial scores, post-reunification berlin has seen a new musical genre operate as the city’s primary soundtrack – techno. this review examines two key berlin techno films, run lola run (1998) and berlin calling (2008), and addresses two intimately linked issues regarding these films: first, the nature of the film medium with respect to the now established subgenre of electronic dance music film (short: edm film), and second, the representation in film of berlin as a techno city. the potential for theoretical analysis offered by both these edm films points to a current lacuna in club culture scholarship – namely, the scarce critical-aesthetic engagement with filmic representations of edm culture, whether in music videos, documentaries, or in this case, feature films. one exception has been stan beeler’s dance, drugs and escape: the club scene in literature, film and television since the late 1980s,1 a book which unfortunately tends toward brief, journalistic glosses on its objects of study. however, the book is impressive in its breadth, proving that a rich history of artworks that incorporate club culture already exists. this is exemplified in run lola run and berlin calling, themselves separated by a period of ten years, a gap that points to the importance of the film medium as visual-historical material for study. run lola run has become an iconic film of 1990s berlin, a status that was secured by its highly innovative plot and unique combination of pop cultural references. the protagonist, lola, has a task – to collect 100,000 d-marks and reach her boyfriend, manni, on the other side of berlin within 20 minutes. manni will otherwise likely die in an attempt to rob a supermarket, because he lost the money needed to make a deal with some gangsters. the story is constructed around three alternative universes in a kind of classic atari arcade game where lola has three lives.2 the first two universes end in tragic “game over” scenarios (1. lola dies, 2. manni dies), but the final scenario completes the mission with bonus points. lola succeeds in obtaining the 100,000 d-marks by placing all her money on two consecutive bets at a roulette table. manni also solves his debts so that not only is he saved, but together they walk away rich. lola’s constant running through the city in search of manni and money is the basis for the film’s combination of urban life, cyberspace, youth culture and video game narrative. these themes have been the focus of much of the extensive secondary literature on the film.3 what is of more interest from the point of view of techno researchers, however, is the edm soundtrack, composed by director tom tykwer together with reinhold heil and johnny klimek and produced in the rather fateful year of 1998 during the height of berlin’s reputation as a techno city and reviews 121 edm’s popularity in europe. yet despite the centrality of music and techno culture to run lola run’s success, only one essay amidst the many publications on the film focuses on music: caryl flinn’s “the music that lola ran to”.4 similar to run lola run, berlin calling has become an iconic film of 2000s berlin, though primarily within the techno scene. it is not of the same artistic quality of run lola run, and has had a markedly smaller international reception. however, it offers important insights into changes in berlin techno since the 1990s. the film concerns the career and artistic creativity of the protagonist dj ickarus, played by the real-life berlin dj/producer paul kalkbrenner. the mythical figure, icarus, concerns the dream of flying. using the wings that his master-craftsman father, daedelus, gives him, icarus flies so close to the sun that his wings melt, and he plunges to his death. dj ickarus has similar problems of both recklessness and (psychedelic) flight in berlin calling. while his hedonist excesses are at their height, he nearly destroys his artistic and mental wings through the use of drugs. suffering a creative block and having conflicts with the label manager, he avoids his problems by partying and ends up taking an “evil pill” that almost kills him. though dj ickarus survives, the rest of the film is spent with him passing in and out of a psychiatric ward, wrestling with the symptoms of insanity in a rather unimaginative homage to one flew over the cuckoo’s nest. however, ickarus’s creative energies are released, and a new album takes shape in the psychiatric ward. both an artistic triumph of insanity and a means of psychological therapy, his new tracks are produced through the inspirational media of illegal drugs and prescribed antidepressants. and the resulting album, itself titled berlin calling, achieves high critical praise and the trappings of genius within the film’s narrative. yet berlin calling is also the real electro-trance soundtrack to the film by paul kalkbrenner. musical success is thus sealed, both in the film and in real life. ickarus heads off on another, presumably successful, world tour in the closing scene of the film. and at the moment this review is being written, kalkbrenner is on his “berlin calling tour 2010”, performing during march and april at massive concert venues in germany, austria and switzerland. the stark differences of these films at the level of plot highlight the diverse forms that edm film can take, making it debatable whether edm film is even a clearly definable genre. these differences elicit two initial questions. regarding run lola run, what can we learn about rave and club culture from a story in which no raves or clubs are present in the diegesis? regarding berlin calling, what is the state of discourses of authenticity and realism in a film that combines the success of a fictional character and an actual berlin dj/producer to such an intimate degree? run lola run and berlin calling arguably represent contrasting approaches to edm film. the first can be termed a techno culture film. it focuses on edm soundtracks as acoustic settings for narratives that do not directly explore edm party life in a mimetic-sociological fashion. the legacy of cyberpunk and gamer aesthetics obviously plays a major role in this tradition. important filmic examples are blade runner (1982), blade (1998), and the matrix (1999). since virtual reality and fantasy take precedence, these films are free from anxious debates regarding the authentic representation of club culture. in this respect, berlin calling represents a contrasting tradition of techno scene film, attempting a direct representation of edm life in terms of club and rave events, as well as musical production. this type thus acts like a sociological study of club scenes in film form. important works in this tradition are human traffic (1999), groove (2000), and it’s all gone pete tong (2004), though trainspotting (1996) stands as a defining influence on the genre.5 these scene films are 122 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 often caught between the limits of the film medium, narrative form and the desire to represent club culture “as it really is”. they further struggle with reaffirming the idealistic self-presentation of club culture and questioning these ideals as ideology. these tensions often result in satire and an experimental play with form in techno scene films themselves. berlin calling takes these challenges seriously – in fact, it answers with seriousness and not satire. kalkbrenner’s performance and that of the other main actors are admirable. hannes stöhr’s directing is likewise a quite subtle and impressive study in social interaction. however, stöhr’s script is only partially successful.6 the result is a bad mix between documentary realism, mythical references and a crisiscomeback narrative that occasionally approximates a vh1 “behind the music” biography. the clinical story, supposedly deadly serious, turns into comical poppsychology that ends with an absurd visit of prostitutes to the ward during ickarus’s farewell party. as a result, the film lacks an appropriate exploration of techno music production or berlin and becomes primarily a production of kalkbrenner as a berlin star. human traffic and it’s all gone pete tong offer in this respect more thoughtprovoking, satirical examples of the techno scene film and star power. similarly, tom tykwer produces a more interesting film by exploiting the freedoms offered by the techno culture film to the fullest. the playful plot is reflected in a kaleidoscope of film techniques and media from time-lapse photography to cartoons. in short, berlin calling’s goal is art, and what comes out is kitsch; run lola run’s goal is pop, and what comes out is pop. and great pop: so successful was tom tykwer’s edm film, like danny boyle’s trainspotting, it was a springboard for launching a successful career as a hollywood film director. nevertheless, berlin calling offers some interesting points for reflection on the state of edm film. as the story of an artist, the film explores the relation of techno culture to the legacy of german romantic associations of genius and melancholy. dj ickarus’s tension with but also rootedness in german high art plays out in scenes with his conservative pastor father, who performs works by johann sebastian bach. the high art themes are coupled with claims to authenticity in the merging of protagonist and dj-star, soundtrack and album. the relation of film/album/star has echoes in rock opera films like ken russell’s tommy (1975) and alan parker’s pink floyd the wall (1982), though the possibilities of narrative form certainly differ for rock-vocal versus edm-instrumental soundtracks. as a techno opera, berlin calling represents the full shift from the anonymous rave-dj culture to the dj-producer as artist. yet it also explores economic problems in a far more direct way than run lola run. the film highlights the pressures and suffering of a young east german dj in capitalist, reunited berlin, which still has the highest poverty rate in germany. only through the successful album is he able to overcome his economic plight and make his comeback as artistic hero. run lola run is also concerned with the relation between heroes, myth production and economic pressure. just as dj ickarus is the stuff of myth, lola is an iconic name in german cultural life, recalling marlene dietrich’s character lola lola in the blue angel (1930) and rainer werner fassbinder’s lola (1982). if dj ickarus is the hero as artist, lola is the hero as raver. as annegret mahler-bungers puts it rather humorously: lola is “a postmodern – or rather a post-postmodern – walkyrie” (2003: 91). the supermachine drive of lola, her inhuman ability to run, reflects the endurance of techno clubbers during their 48-hour pill-popping party weekends. yet lola does not take drugs. her strength seems to derive purely from her heart and will. reviews 123 we imagine, however, that the vitality represented by her fiery red hair has its basis in the amphetamines of generation chemical. but economic realism interrupts the fun of this hero world in the following form: she is not dancing at night but running in midday. lola and manni are twenty-something party-kids caught in adolescent pop dreams, and they are now confronted with the hard consequences of prosaic, everyday life. presumably having been able to brush off deadlines and appointments before, lola is suddenly confronted with a deadline she can’t ignore. literally, the time of her run is between 11:40am and noon; the terror that approaches should she fail in her mission is the terror of the ultimately prosaic afternoon. in this respect, when flinn remarks that berlin’s “streets are curiously depopulated” (2004: 208), i would argue the reason lies in that the rest of berlin is presumably at work, slaving away to save money legally. indeed, as a cyberpunk film, run lola run’s is realistic in a unique way – there are no flashy city lights or fancy pieces of technology. that techno music functions like a sonic walkman to her run invites the question whether the endurance, fitness, and discipline ravers have achieve in partying at night can also overcome the reality principle of the day. but what type of techno music is this exactly? for both films, electronic music is the soundtrack to the myth of berlin as a techno city. however, neither film chooses to musically represent rave culture through a compilation of rave hits as human traffic does. rather, both soundtracks are studies in different types of auteur, respectively featuring music by only one man or group: as previously noted, by tom tykwer as director, writer, vocalist, and composer with his team of heil and klimek (run lola run) and by paul kalkbrenner as the quintessential berlin techno star on the bpitch control label (berlin calling). despite the gap in ten years, both soundtracks bear resemblances in the use of trance music.7 the compositions from run lola run are techno-trance pieces. johnny klimek worked as producer on a number of projects by berlin trance star paul van dyk, and the soundtrack bears resemblances in its timbres and sleek production quality. the music is also schooled in the speech-rap of underworld’s “born slippy”, trainspotting’s most memorable track – this is especially clear in tom tykwer’s rapping in “running two”.8 likewise, paul kalkbrenner’s soundtrack has echoes of trance, perhaps surprisingly so, given berlin’s reputation today as a city that has banished trance and rave music for the sleek club culture of minimal techno and microhouse. yet, the tracks in berlin calling are best described as a kind of electro-trance, much slower and more melancholic than lola’s “run” music and reflecting the general trend in the 2000s away from the speed of the 1990s. trance anchors the various religious and romantic themes of the films. both are structured around heterosexual narratives and the possibility of heroic triumph through magic and inspiration. flinn insightfully remarks that run lola run positions music “as a form of emotional and economic esperanto or universal language, a romantic, heterosexual affair stamped with the imprint of humanism. that this is achieved through techno, usually considered an antihumanist form of music, makes the accomplishment all the more intriguing” (2004: 197). both soundtracks do sonic battle in the name of romanticism against economic exploitation and suffering – acknowledging the problem only in the end to deny its ultimate influence. dj ickarus triumphs through creativity and artistic discipline. recalling his father’s performance of bach, the slow and reserved themes in ickarus’s music are lutheran techno-hymns to help him persevere in his struggle. lola beats the modern world by relying on shamanic powers to win at the roulette table, reflected in her primal scream and the tribal-primitivist techno of the track “casino”. 124 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 these economic crises represent a threat to berlin as a techno club city and a place of youth and freedom. adam krims’ music and urban geography9 has highlighted the key role that both music and music films play in representing cities, from realistic depictions to the “abstract city of fantasy” (2007: 18). berlin also presents a variety of musical representations in film, though it is important here to recognize some commonalities within the larger history of the berlin music film, particularly in representing berlin as a city of dynamic change. indeed, change forms the basis for associated themes of youthful transgression, pop culture, and sexual liberation. berlin has long advertised itself as the “city always in change”, so much that it can become a self-fulfilling cliché. in musical terms, precisely by maintaining techno as a stable soundtrack of the city over the last twenty years, berlin has continually reinvented itself as the city of youth and pop transgression. both films offer interesting perspectives regarding this tradition, and urban geography plays an important element in this tradition. located primarily within the confines of the clinic, the melancholic slowness of berlin calling surprisingly challenges this reputation of change. in the film’s closing, dj ickarus returns to berlin’s airport for a world tour, but he does not look exactly joyful. one wonders whether he wishes to return to the sanctuary of the psychiatric clinic. however, the speed of techno city berlin is reinforced with shots of the tv tower at alexanderplatz, techno’s preferred counter-monument of modern berlin against the brandenburg gate. club scenes are shot at real locations on berlin’s new club mile – club maria, bar 25, and others – although berlin as advertisement and fantasy retains priority. during one party, youthful transgression is reinforced to utter cliché when mathilde, ickarus’s manager and bisexual girlfriend (what other sexuality could a berlin girlfriend possibly be?), while searching for ickarus, opens up a number of club doors – in the first she finds two circuit boys having anal sex and in the second a group of clubbers snorting some lines. alternative lifestyles remain spectacles to be seen rather than lives that are lived. more interesting is the presentation of berlin as a place dominated by women in business roles, which is alternatively threatening and nurturing for dj ickarus. after all, he comes from patriarchal, lutheran germany, and lacks a mother. mathilde leaves ickarus when he fails as a boyfriend and artist, returning to her ex-girlfriend corinna, a club bouncer who is problematically the token “ethnic” character in the film. corinna threatens ickarus’s masculinity to the point of throwing him out of her apartment when he tries to speak with mathilde, though they resolve their conflict in the end. mathilde never stops caring for ickarus and finally returns as his manager, though apparently not as his girlfriend. ickarus must also negotiate conflicts with the label owner, alice (an analogous figure to ellen allien, the head of kalkbrenner’s bpitch control label), and the head of the psychiatric ward, dr. petra paul. regarding run lola run, the secondary literature has pointed out repeatedly that the scenery of both east and west berlin is non-descript. manni’s and lola’s adventure represents the dream that a reunited germany will reflect neither the failed socialist state of the german democratic republic (gdr) nor the prosaic wirtschaftswunder of the federal republic of germany (frg). lola’s fantastic run reflects the hopes of generations x and y for the harmonious combination of east and west at the end of history (will there be a generation z, and if so, what would follow?). the histories and cultural differences of berlin thus remain veiled. however, many of the shots of the city – especially the intersection where manni waits – look much more like dull suburban germany than berlin’s impressive monuments and reviews 125 nightlife. caryl flinn emphasizes this geographic dialectic: “berlin becomes a somewhat nonessential, generic urban place, a reading tykwer encouraged from foreign audiences. is this berlin, or is this anywhere?” (2004: 208). tykwer refuses to allow lola to run by any berlin icons such as the reichstag, the brandenburg gate, and even the techno tv tower. what is recognizable in all the runs is the u-bahn, reinforcing berlin’s reputation as a city of change and movement. with the berlin wall having fallen in 1989, travel is a key marker of freedom in a berlin film of the 1990s. lola’s running through the open and past the u-bahn is a distinct display of this new freedom. in a way distinct from berlin calling, her run marks berlin as a feminized space – the image of the free western woman whose freedom is defined as a freedom of movement and public display.10 finally and crucially, what is also recognizable are the sites of construction. lola charges across a causeway in both the first and second run, surrounded by a vast construction site near the german reichstag. no such sites are present in berlin calling, and for viewers who experienced the reconstruction of berlin in the 1990s, these sites might suddenly call up an odd nostalgic recognition that some forms of change are not permanent. such a complex relation to the past returns me to the importance of film as a visual-historic, and indeed acoustic, medium of study. as works of art, these films demonstrate their important role as the explosive crossroads of ideological, aesthetic, political, social, and personal currents. berlin calling and run lola run are not just edm films and not just berlin films – they are both of these and more. the rich material they offer demonstrates that a continued study of feature films, both within and without the edm film genre, will be of great importance for grasping the challenges of representing edm scenes from both the past and the future. references ankum, katharina von, ed. 1997. women in the metropolis: gender and modernity in weimar culture. berkeley and los angeles: university of california press. beeler, stan. 2007. dance, drugs and escape: the club scene in literature, film and television since the late 1980s. jefferson, nc: mcfarland & co inc. flinn, caryl. 2004. “the music that lola ran to”. in nora m. alter and lutz koepnick (eds), sound matters: essay on the acoustics of modern german culture, pp. 197-213. oxford and new york: berghahn books. krims, adam. 2007. music and urban geography. new york and oxon: routledge. mahler-bungers, annegret. 2003. “a post-postmodern walkyrie: psychoanalytic considerations on tom tykwer’s run, lola, run (1998)”. in andrea sabbadini (ed), the couch and the silver screen: psychoanalytic reflections on european cinema, pp. 82-93. new york and hove, uk: brunner-routledge. mesch, claudia. "racing berlin: the games of run lola run”. m/c: a journal of media and culture 3, no. 3 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/speed.php> (accessed 23 january 2010) filmography blade. dir. stephen norrington. 1998. dvd. new line home video, 1998. blade runner. dir. ridley scott. 1982. dvd. warner home video, 2007. groove. dir. greg harrison. 2000. dvd. sony pictures, 2000. it’s all gone pete tong. dir. michael dowse. 2004. dvd. sony pictures, 2005. the matrix. dir. andy wachowski and larry wachowski. 1999. warner home video, 2009. trainspotting. dir. danny boyle. 1996. dvd. miramax home entertainment, 2004. 126 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 notes reviews 127 1 stan beeler, dance, drugs and escape: the club scene in literature, film and television since the late 1980s ( jefferson, nc: mcfarland & co inc, 2007). 2 the pop-existentialist announcement at the beginning, by the security guard, clearly presents the game structure of the film. in fact, he combines the supposed antipodal game cultures of football and video games: “the ball is round. the game lasts 90 minutes. so much is clear. everything else is just theory. and we’re off !” 3 claudia mesch, for example, describes berlin as “a cyberspace obstacle course or environment usually associated with video and computer games”. claudia mesch, "racing berlin: the games of run lola run”, m/c: a journal of media and culture 3, no. 3 (2000), <www.api-network.com/mc/0006/speed.php> (accessed january 23, 2010). 4 this essay offers an impressive analysis of the film’s soundtrack. i strongly recommend it to club culture researchers. caryl flinn, “the music that lola ran to”, in sound matters: essays on the acoustics of modern german culture, ed. nora m. alter and lutz koepnick (oxford and new york: berghahn books, 2004), 197-213. 5 while trainspotting is certainly a pioneering film, it surprisingly cannot be defined as a proper techno scene film. aside from renton’s short visit to a techno club, trainspotting deals almost entirely with an earlier generation of the scottish working class, crime, pub life, and heroine junkies. the film’s reputation as an edm film derives primarily from its electronic music selections, from brian eno to underworld. the hybrid nature of such films and the complexity of the soundtracks would obviously require more exploration and nuances regarding the various sub-branches of edm film than i have space to present here. trainspotting points to the need for a third element of techno music itself in the structures of my genre divisions. to explain, the analysis of any edm film could explore the tensions between techno culture, techno scene and techno music, or in other words, between cyber-aesthetics, club culture, and edm (or non-edm) soundtrack. 6 this is unfortunate since stöhr’s earlier film berlin is in germany (2001) offered an interesting examination of berlin life and the challenges of integration for an east german member of the working class. 7 it is important to keep in mind that there is other music present in both films besides the official soundtracks. in run lola run, the techno tracks are complemented by the use of dinah washington’s “what a difference a day makes” and charles ives’ the unanswered question; similarly, berlin calling includes pieces for organ by johann sebastian bach. these musics allow for the dialogic relationship between techno and music from other historical periods. 8 lola’s “i wish” and “i believe” monologues also deserve mention. the rhythms and repetition of the first two words in both monologues are comparable to mark renton’s “choose life” monologue in trainspotting. 9 adam krims, music and urban geography (new york and oxon: routledge, 2007). 10 there are limits to this freedom though. expectations regarding the place of women and men in the city still differ strongly. lola’s run seems odd to passers-by in a way that would not be equivalent were a man running. for a critical study on the “lolas” who came before her, specifically on modern women and the limits of urban public display and movement, see ankum 1997. nomads in sound vol 2.0 anna gavanas (aka gavana) aimnbreak, dj aroma, bass trolls djplaneten, foona, jgb, kutterfugel nuphlo and ombudsman <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.09> figure 1. nomads in sound vol 2.0. photo: anna gavanas. design: peter ericsson. djs have developed sub/super human capabilities. music journalist/scholar kodwo eshun predicts that “in the future . . . djs will have extremely developed fingertips, because they’re super-sensitive, like lily pads, like frogs. their heads will be fused to their necks, and i think in about twenty years’ time their legs may well have withered away, ‘cause they never dance” (2006: 293). djs are infrasensual cyborgs whose bodies meld with, and extend by, their technologies. the senses of djs are transformed by sound and they modulate the bodies, minds and emotions of dancers. dj/producers develop their “ear” to perceive that which everyday listeners do not; they differentiate simultaneous beat patterns, they discern textures and “moods” of soundscapes and crowds. in other words, dj/producers possess something like a sixth sense, but it is difficult to capture their capabilities in words. a dj i met in berlin tried to describe the sensual capabilites of djs as follows: i do react to people a lot, but it’s not something that i show. i do very much go by ear, or by feeling, or try to feel what they want to hear, but this you could also do without looking at them. you can feel the atmosphere . . . i don’t know what it is actually, it’s not feeling, it’s not seeing, it’s something between seeing and hearing, you know. it’s more like you’re more concentrated on what you hear than what you see actually (anonymous berlin dj in gavanas 2009a: 93–4). it is difficult, if not impossible, to capture the art of djing and the work of sound in electronic dance music (edm) culture by means of text. as scholars and writers, we approach the world of sound through theoretical tools and attempt to nail music down with words; “like a headmaster, theory teaches today’s music a thing or 2 about life. it subdues music’s ambition, reins it in, restores it to its proper place” (eshun 1998: 4). while cultural studies scholars even go to great lengths to rename non-textual phenomena (like music and visuals) as text, to be decoded as text, they do not perform the reverse: to rename text and visuals and call it music. instead, i would like to suggest that sound can teach things to the mind and body that text cannot touch (goodman 2010: 82). you’ve heard of the funk band funkadelic’s message inscribed in the title of their 1970 album free your mind and your ass will follow. i am suggesting the inverse here: “let music free your ass, and your mind will follow”. in this multimedia contribution, together with a group of fellow dj/producers, i address by means of sound the inseparable and subversive sensory/ sensual dimensions of edm. as producer/musician and dub legend dr das (founding member of the asian dub foundation and participant in nomads in sound vol 1) has pointed out (gavanas 2011) the politics of music tends to be reduced to what is (or can be) written. according to philosopher / producer steve goodman, music’s content, meaning and narrative is superimposed on its form, or assessed based on the extent to which it represents an exterior political reality (goodman 2010: 172). however, as opposed to styles like rock or pop, edm (with the exception of occasional vocal samples) does not usually contain, nor is structured around, lyrics, verses and refrains. nevertheless, the sounds of edm operate at multiple levels within and beyond language: sound operates by forming links, groupings, and conjunctions that accentuate individual identity as a relational project. the flows of surrounding sonority can be heard to weave an individual into a larger social fabric, filling relations with local sound, sonic culture, auditory memories, and the noises that move between, contributing to the making of shared spaces. this associative and connective process of sound comes to reconfigure the spatial distinctions of inside and outside, to foster confrontations between one and another, and to infuse language with degrees of immediacy (labelle 2010: xxi). in his ground breaking book technomad: global raving countercultures (2009), cultural anthropologist graham st john demonstrates the ways the edm cultures may in and by themselves be vehicles for struggle against oppression and injustice and evolve, ignite and reinforce activism in the service of a wide range of causes. st john illustrates a range of interrelated modes of resistance in edm culture which he names dionysian, outlaw, exile, avant, spiritual, reclaiming, safety, reactionary and activist (2009). st john documents these nodes of experience in edm cultures in global and historical contexts and illustrates, for example, edm scenes that react to state interventions, and others campaigning for diverse causes (2009: 194). conversely, edm culture can also serve dominant commercial interests and reinforce social and economic hierarchies (balliger 1995: 25). st john, for instance, writes about “corporate clubbing” in this context (2009: 19). ironically, the music/club industry tends to market commercial edm events as “underground” and politically subversive in order to underscore participants’ “authenticity” (see ganetz et al. 2009; gavanas 2009a). there is money to be made in edm scenes by cultivating myths of rebellion, authenticity and originality free from commercial interest (thornton 2005). if an artist, or an event, is cast as having a politically subversive purpose beyond entertainment, they are considered serious and meaningful (as opposed to superficial and fake). but just because something is framed as “political” it is not necessarily “transgressive” or “progressive” in st john’s terms. for instance, swedish artist christina kjellson once pointed out that commercial pop music can be seen as “political”, but in a neoliberal and heteronormative sense (gavanas 2009b: 49). in st john’s words: “in a world where the charismatic rebel is a desired commodity, the outlaw rides onto the set of a fruitopia commercial” (2009: 108). according to eshun, music does not necessarily entail “big p politics, it’s not like marching and protesting politics. that’s sensual/ sensory politics. it’s just as crucial if not more so, because your hands are you” (2006: 294). djs/producers therefore possess capabilities beyond politics in the traditional sense of party politics, social movements or identity politics. for instance, dj/producer mutamassik sees it as her mission to “wake people the fuck up and make them feel something. protests and marches are not enough” (in gavanas 2011). i am not arguing that edm cultures necessarily have to exist for the sake of anything beyond commercial interests, hedonistic “dionysian” pleasures (st john 2009: 104), or beyond participants’ desires of being (alone) together (st john 2009: 101). nor am i attempting to assert that the pleasures and aesthetics of sound cultures need be “sacrificed at the altar of a political cause” (goodman 2010: 175). in the following exercise in cultural politics, “nomads in sound vol 2.0”, our purpose is rather to explore the indivisibility of concepts and practices like politics, pleasure, aesthetics and subversion. for instance, as st john points out in the case of proto-disco’s “homoerotic tribalism”, its pleasure is its politics (2009: 105). or in the words of media scholar fiona buckland, in her study of club culture and queer “world-making” in new york, “any queer world-making was part oppositional, part pleasure, and—of course—part the pleasure of opposition” (2002: 144). the point of our multimedia contribution, “nomads in sound vol 2.0”, is to demonstrate the capabilities of edm dj/producers within and beyond language and politics (by any definition of the term). we have created sounds and compositions that illustrate the inseparability and multidimensionality of edm culture from a dj/producer perspective—by means of dj/producer capabilities. though each of the tracks presented below are introduced with lines by the artist her or himself, the tracks in the compilation approach edm culture from a dj/producer perspective, complementary to writing about it. when it comes to the multiple and inseparable dimensions of edm scenes, words and text are not enough. as artists and specialised guides to musical worlds, we tell our stories through soundscapes, weaving together auditory elements and influencing the bodies, moods and emotions of dance crowds. inspired by st john’s technomad, “nomads in sound vol 2.0” illustrates visions in edm around individual and collective experiences. many contributions in this volume are on the dubby side of the edm continuum. in line with our mission in nomads in sound, we have founded the not-for-profit record label meerkat recordings <http://meerkatrecordings.bandcamp.com/>). like meerkats in the kalahari desert we fiercely promote subversive dubs from underground headquarters constantly relocated in the world. following the jamaican sound system tradition, meerkat recordings is a platform for artists with a purpose beyond the music industry. like sound system culture, meerkat recordings is dedicated to the power of bass as a voice of the people. the compilation will be released digitally on juno and in addition as a vinyl ep featuring four of the tracks. nuphlo: “atma” figure 2. nuphlo. photo: manjinder sandhu. “the name of the song ‘atma’ translates as ‘soul’ in hindi. the tune is my translation of that word and its meaning”. <http://meerkatrecordings.bandcamp.com/track/atma> nuphlo's (aka mannie sandhu) style is a delicate balance of eastern melodies, innovative beats and low subs. this tightrope approach to production has led to a string of vinyl, cd and mp3 releases on record labels on both sides of the cultural spectrum. in short, nuphlo's music represents multicultural cohesion. it all started in leeds, uk in 2001 where nuphlo had a mix show on local radio station fever fm. he played asian underground and drum ‘n’ bass. with the desire to play more exclusive material, production was the next logical step. bass trolls: “gnomes unite” figure 3. bass trolls. design: stinky. “this track conveys the power of dub as a positive unifying force, as platforms for social mobilization that allow communities to come together and be together. this is a righteous anthem for standing or dancing together against kingdoms that seek to divide and conquer”. <http://meerkatrecordings.bandcamp.com/track/gnomes-unite-2> bass trolls is a live/producer collective of shady characters featuring mutated guitars, hypnotic voices, shady horns, analog synthesizers, plenty of vintage delays and reverbs together with chopped up oldschool breaks. we call it “all-out, full contact dub!” we are dedicated to the bass as the ultimate all-encompassing and multidimensional force. foona: “my brain waves transformed into music” figure 4. foona. photo: linda hutton. design: jakob haq. “if i could transform my brainwaves into a tune, it would sound something like this. music is a direct form of communication between minds and bodies. when you translate your mental states into words, so much is lost in the coding and decoding”. <http://meerkatrecordings.bandcamp.com/track/my-brain-waves-transformed-into-music> foona is a 1-man band/artist and producer with all of his extremities buried into all genres that concern him. with a background in reggae and rocksteady in his small but well crafted backpack, he traversed the sonic road for over a decade to gather inspiration from genres such as world music, hip hop, jungle, drum ‘n’ bass, techno, rock and even pop. djplaneten: “to be lost” figure 5. djplaneten. photo/design: djplaneten. “this contribution illustrates the potential use of music as unsettling and confusing mind control; music is not necessarily used for progressive or transgressive purposes. it can also be used in sonic warfare against bodies and minds”. <http://meerkatrecordings.bandcamp.com/track/to-be-lost> djplaneten is a dj/producer duo consisting of gavana and aimnbreak. we produce genre transgressive music heavily influenced by dub, dubstep, jungle, jazz, hillbilly blues, hip hop and dancehall: all faced with a full-on headbutt. kutterfugel: “new nights” figure 6. kutterfugel. artwork: anna giertz. “this track takes you on a walk in sound, filtered through memories of big cities, small towns and electric dreams. through a collage of sound grows a landscape where a new rhetoric can take place”. <http://meerkatrecordings.bandcamp.com/track/new-nights> kutterfugel aka anna giertz has among other things made music for the radio program fulradio which is a part of the publication ful, performed at arts birthday 2011, hbt-festival in gothenburg, stockholm pride and various clubs in stockholm. gavana: “café zenit” figure 7. gavana. photo: anna gavanas. one of the greatest magics about music is that it enables your mind to travel in time and space. i tend to make music that depicts places i have visited, imaginary or real. last winter i went to visit my sister in the carribean and found this one spot on the island of st maarten that became my mental reference for paradise. this track reflects visions and memories from café zenit in crand case and brings me there whenever i listen to it. <http://meerkatrecordings.bandcamp.com/track/caf-zenit> coming from a musical background as a vinylist, dj and club promoter, gavana is committed to sound as the ultimately powerful means of communication. this is despite, or perhaps because of, her background as a social anthropologist working by means of the written word. aimnbreak: “safe haven” figure 8. aimnbreak. photo: peter ericsson. “this track illustrates how music scenes can be a refuge from the intensity and invasiveness of everyday life. music scenes can be havens from a racist, homophobic and sexist world. this track is made to provide such a safe sonic space”. <http://meerkatrecordings.bandcamp.com/track/safe-haven-2> aimnbreak is a former hardcore drummer, now a dj and producer. raised in a musical home he began exploring music at a very early age. a life changing year in botswana africa in the late eighties introduced aimnbreak into the hip hop/rap movement. these musical approaches and experiences gave aimnbreak a renewed critical perspective on life and the injustice of the world. still very much influenced by his experiences, he is on a lifelong musical and political journey, searching for the roots and culture of music. aimnbreak moves between many different genres in his music; from dub to dubstep, hip hop to jungle and jazz to drum ‘n’ bass. ombudsman: “if i die in this place, raise a stone and say ‘he was . . .’” figure 9. ombudsman. photo: rasmus borgström. “this track is intended to portray the individuals of a collective movement, whether musical or political, impulsive or planned. those who can stand and say ‘i was there when. . .’ and in uttering this show belonging and pride. those who acheived something, anything, have not done so as individuals, but as a part of a greater movement”. <http://meerkatrecordings.bandcamp.com/track/if-i-die-in-this-place-raise-a-stone-and-say-he-was> ombudsman produces idm and has released several self named albums. he currently works at the electroacoustic center ems in stockholm. jgb: “nosdub” figure 10. jgb. photo: elin wästlund. “when i’m down and weary, mother music speaks to me. this track tries to convey the feeling of being taken care of when needed, and provided comfort/warmth/energy at the same time. like the closeness of a partner or true friend, providing solace in dire times”. <http://meerkatrecordings.bandcamp.com/track/nosdub> jgb creates music using various hardware machines: drum machines, synths (analogue and digital alike), tape echoes, filters, delays, reverbs etc. everything is recorded in one take, no overdubs nor anything else are added afterwards except for a quick and dirty mastering of the tracks. dj aroma: “peaceful sharks” figure 11. dj aroma. photo: rajele. “i came from a hip hop/acid jazz background before spending more than a decade in techhouse. when i started djing, i would always make compilations for myself to have the right music at hand when i was in that strange movie called my life. ever since i had those self-made soundtracks, my life became more happy and intense, i started to have more control on the plot of the movie. the track is called peaceful sharks because i made it for a ride to the beach where i sometimes live. the sharks are not there in those waters, but they were in my mind when i finished the track”. <http://meerkatrecordings.bandcamp.com/track/peaceful-sharks> dj aroma is a dj/producer with an issue and a philosophy. she dislikes functional music; she is a real artist creating a mood and a flavoured vibe. it’s like cooking a five star luxury dinner for your ears. references balliger, robin. 1995. “sounds of resistance”. in sounding off! music as subversion/resistance/revolution, eds. ron saikolsky and fred wei-han ho, 13–28. new york: autonomedia. buckland, fiona. 2002. impossible dance: club culture and queer world making. middletown: wesleyan university press. eshun, kodwo. 1998. more brilliant than the sun. london: quartet. ——— .2006. “futurhythmachine”. in the popular music studies reader, eds. andy bennett, barry shank and jason toynbee, 292–94. london and new york: routledge. ganetz, hillevi, anna gavanas, hasse huss and ann werner eds. 2009. rundgång: genus och populärmusik. stockholm: makadam. gavanas, anna. 2009a. “you better be listening to my fucking musik you bastard!” teknologi, genusifiering och andlighet bland djs på elektroniska dansmusikscener i berlin, london och stockholm”. in rundgång: genus och populärmusik, eds. hillevi ganetz, anna gavanas, hasse huss and ann werner, 77–120. stockholm: makadam ———. 2009b. “drömmen om musiken”. arena 4: 46–50. ———. 2011. “nomads in sound vol 1”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 2(1). <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.12>. goodman, steve. 2010. sonic warfare: sound, affect, and the ecology of fear. london and cambridge: mit press. labelle, brandon. 2010. acoustic territories: sound culture and everyday life. new york: continuum. rietveld, hillegonda. 1998. this is our house: house music, cultural spaces and technologies. london: ashgate. st john, graham. 2009. technomad: global raving countercultures. london and oakville: equinox. thornton, sarah. 2005. “the media development of ‘subcultures’ (or the sensational story of ‘acid house’)”. in popular culture: a reader, eds. raiford guins and omayra zaragoza cruz, 383–400. london: sage. art2-typeset-ver1 technics, precarity and exodus in rave culture tobias c. van veen mcgill university abstract without a doubt, the question of rave culture’s politics – or lack thereof – has polarized debate concerning the cultural, social and political value of rave culture not only within electronic dance music culture (edmc) studies, but in disciplines that look to various manifestations of subculture and counterculture for political innovation. it is time for the groundwork of this debate to be rethought. ask not what rave culture’s politics can do for you; nor even what you can do for it. rather, ask what the unexamined account of politics has ever done for anyone; then question all that rave culture has interrogated – from its embodied and technological practices to its production of ecstatic and collective subjectivities – and begin to trace how it has complicated the very question of the political, the communal and the ethical. this complication begins with the dissolution of the boundaries of labour and leisure and the always-already co-optation of culture. to the negation of ethics, community and politics, this tracing calls for the hauntology of technics, precarity and exodus. and it ends with a list of impossible demands demonstrating the parallax gap of rave culture’s politics. keywords exodus, precarity, technics, multitude, workplay he [randy] predicted the [rave] parties will eventually disappear under the combined pressure of police, city and fire officials. “in the next year and a half it’s going to vanish”, he said. “then, when they think it’s gone, it will come back, becoming more underground again”. parsons (1994: b3) while the raves finally did disappear, dance culture did not. when the uk’s restrictive club regulations were relaxed in the mid 1990s, the clubs filled to capacity and the free party movement declined, leading gilbert and pearson to suggest that “it might be as accurate to see [the free party movement] and its diy ethos as the ultimate example of consumer protest” (1999: 181). now that the outlaw rhythms of electronic dance music could be consumed in state-sanctioned space, there was nothing left to stand up for; all that mattered, apparently, was a place to get down. the clubs became the 29 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(2) 2010, 29-49 issn 1947-5403 ©2010 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.02 “pleasure prisons” (reynolds 2008: 424) of a generation too young to have participated in the occupations and interventions of collective sonic insurgency – and the pleasure palace of a generation too exhausted from the undertaking, trading in autonomy and rebellion for the comforts of clubculture and a respite from the collective fatigue of counterculture logistics. the restoration of corporate dance meant its pacification. rave culture, cut off at last from the dangerous rhetoric of diy collectivism and the even more suspect impulses of an-archic desire, and carefully severed frofm the greater social body of travelers, hippies, anarchist enclaves, punks, hackers and freaks, was safe for public consumption once again. so goes the received wisdom – witness the rise and fall of rave culture as riotous carnival declines into packaged hedonism. precise dates vary from place to place across the globe, though most place rave’s demise at the fin de siecle of the long twentieth century.1 but to scholars who saw in acid house and rave culture not only its complicity with entrepreneurial capitalism and the neoliberalisation of work, but its influence upon the “unstable” labour of the “new culture industries”, the “transferrable skills” of rave culture – the multi-faceted events producer, designer, producer, dj – have popularised the insecurity of precarious labour (mcrobbie 2002: 518-19). although liberating some aspects of work in regards to self-fulfillment and independence, rave’s “network sociality” dissolved the boundaries of labour from leisure, emphasizing the liberating aspects of speed and mobility while downplaying the dissolution of privacy within nonlabouring life. network sociality has desituated labour from a fixed workplace and fragmented the spatiotemporal unanimity necessary for a labour politics. the consequence of rave culture’s transformation from the communitarian production of counterculture into the cognitive capitalism of the culture industries has been to emphasize that “speed and risk negate ethics, community and politics” (mcrobbie 2002: 519, 523; cf. van veen 2003: 93-94). this provocative claim calls for its analysis. indeed, it would appear that the consequence of rave culture’s relentless destabilization of the division of labour from leisure has been to render indistinct what were once distinct existential spheres – ethics, community and politics, but also, and certainly not least, labour and leisure. an introductory, though necessary, aside: the complexities of this socioeconomic analysis are such that one must ensure that correlation is not mistaken for causation. what mcrobbie’s research suggests, and contrary to the myths of every counterculture, is that rave culture was not co-opted by the new culture industries; rather, its modus operandi developed in parallel to, if not in symbiosis with, cognitive capital and precarious labour (the conditions of unstable and increasingly mobile, as well as computerized, networked and always-on-call labour that came to dominate the arts and culture “sectors” by the late 1990s – hence mcrobbie’s use of the term “new culture industries”). indeed, what appears in mcrobbie’s work is the discovery of a new ideological formation. rave culture’s destabilization of labour and leisure demands the enjoyment of precarity (as zizek often notes, obedience demands the fantasy of liberty, mobility and self-fulfillment as part of its ideological constellation). by blurring the roles between participation and organisation, rave culture provided the constitutive elements for an ontological subjectivity in which labour and leisure were no longer distinct modes of activity. within the pleasurable labour of the rave collective, such as the uk’s spiral tribe and exodus (see st john 2009; malyon 1998), the us midwest’s dropbass network (see champion 1998; silcott 1999) or toronto, canada’s transcendance (see mccall 2001), not only do members develop multiple labour skills in the organisation of leisure (dj, doorperson, dancer, designer, etc.), but 30 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 the fluidity from labour to leisure constitutes the totality of a lifeworld. glenn jenkins from exodus collective writes that “we’re a possible solution to to things we’ve never dreamed of. i mean, you start with entertainment, and you end up with the world, a rave new world” (malyon 1998: 202). yet one need not organise a rave to partake in the participatory labour of pleasure. rave culture abounds with participatory microeconomies of sharing, gift-giving and performance, from dancing to exchanging massages (see mccall 2001: 78-98; wilson 2006: 104-105, 122-124). likewise, what blends within blends without. transferrable skills infiltrate and develop new microeconomies of cultural production – from fashion to graphic design, music to marketing – as a means of precarious existence (see chapman 2003: 3; mcrobbie 1999: 25-30). raving as activity blurs the line between work and play. it puts into motion the excess and expenditure of a general economy that is nonetheless operating within the limits of capital (see bataille 1991), in which gift-giving is always an accursed exchange, in which leisure is always made up of labour. rather than working for the means to enjoy life, one is now meant to consume life as permanently precarious work. rather than organising the workplace as a means to change the political (if not economic) system, the system changed itself so that no such organisation could (easily) take place. moreover, work was now like leisure, so the grievances of labour (exploitation, worker’s control over production, a living wage) lost their specificity. the imperative to enjoy the hybridity of precarious workplay comes with its corollary: with everyone working (and playing) for themselves, only you are to blame if you fail. the rave-era social networks of leisure (based around the imperative toward ecstatic enjoyment) and implementation of mobile labour (the deployment of temporary autonomous zones) provided network sociality’s “professional” axis. from the genesis of mcrobbie’s critical negation, this missive seeks to rethink the question of rave culture and the political. it will even end with a list of impossible demands. without a doubt, the question of rave culture’s politics – or lack thereof – has polarized debate concerning the cultural, social and political value of rave culture not only within electronic dance music culture (edmc) studies, but in disciplines that look to various manifestations of subculture and counterculture for political innovation. it is time for the groundwork of this debate to be rethought. ask not what rave culture’s politics can do for you; nor even what you can do for it. rather, ask what the unexamined account of politics has ever done for anyone; then question all that rave culture has interrogated – from its embodied and technological practices to its production of ecstatic and collective subjectivies – and begin to trace how it has complicated the very question of the political, the communal and the ethical. this complication begins with the dissolution of labour from leisure which today takes the figure of a negation. if mcrobbie is correct, the shadow of their negation would be etched across the planet, as their shared meanings, articulated in systems of governance, sovereignty, labour, law, hospitality and play, would recompose the conditions of subjectivity. what is meant by negation? negation, in the figure of a catastrophe, signals an absolute erasure – an absolute past without remembrance, the scorched earth of unmemory. if this negation has taken place, we cannot know it: without cinders, there are no signs left to decipher. yet if by negation, we mean that some-thing remains – a memory, a ghost-effect, an inheritance – then the negation of ethics, community and politics is also its remembering. has not the negation of these signs always been brought to bear whenever and wherever their historical end – which is always an end of history – is announced? van veen • technics, precarity and exodus in rave culture 31 indeed, preceeding models of ethics, community and politics have undergone transformations correlative to the technological mutations of material conditions and practices of labour. from this thought, it will be necessary to investigate the effects and constitution of the unstable, or better, precarious, character of creative, cognitive labour in relation to rave culture’s spatiotemporal mobility – and its drive toward disappearance and exodus. from this reconceptualization of labour, the question can be posed as to how the political operates in the discourse and socioeconomic practices of rave’s cultural technics – the global networks and media of rhythm and sound. to ethics, community and politics i will counterpose the following three figures of technics, precarity and exodus. but we must begin with an analysis of their conditions. a damaging and depressing outcome: the withdrawal from politics the trouble is that multitudinous actions rooted in artistic, anarchist, and spiritual movements will invariably be revealed as failures, ineffectual and futile when gauged by the parameters of conventional contestorial politics (st john 2009: 17). it wouldn’t be difficult to assess rave culture’s antics as the sum result of a narcissist generation without agenda save for the liberty of its own consumer desires. the disappearance of collective sonic insurgency into the containers of clubbing has signaled for many the failure of dance culture itself to articulate a representative politics.2 nowhere is this writ more precisely than by gilbert and pearson, who, in their seminal assessment of edmc, discographies, emphasize the contradictory aspects of rave culture’s political inheritance. i quote here at length: if dance culture encourages a collective and individual withdrawal from “mainstream” political society, then its participants are not likely to be able to effect any serious political or social change. it might have been hoped ten years ago that rave culture’s refusal of the work ethic and the entire framework of puritan values would result in a clearly articulated set of basic political demands, such as for a shorter working week and higher wages (i.e., more money for less work), that its celebration of community would encourage a return to collectivist politics. instead it seems to have encouraged an outlook which sees the realms of “work” and “leisure” as entirely separate and unrelated, the latter a site in which to invest all of our energies and interest, the former an unreformable region of wholly negative experience. dance culture and its experiences have thus been articulated with a libertarianism which is so anti-political as to be self-defeating, to have no real sense of what it is that actually curtails most people’s freedoms in a capitalist society. this would be a damaging and depressing outcome, but it would not take much to change it (gilbert and pearson 1999: 182). where mcrobbie discovers the hybridity of labour and leisure, gilbert and pearson claim their nonrelation; where mcrobbie sees rave culture as feeding the precarious labour of the “new culture industries,” gilbert and pearson witness the refusal of work. how can it be that gilbert and pearson conclude discographies with near antithetical findings to those of mcrobbie? the historian will note they are writing several years apart; yet surely the socioeconomic gestalt would be identifiable? on the level of political expression – the articulation of clear demands – mcrobbie and gilbert and pearson concur: there are none. without space for antagonism – where, traditionally, the site of labour or leisure is articulated to the demand – the expression of politics disappears. as mcrobbie notes, there is “no space 32 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 for expression” in networked club sociality; antagonisms must be “carefully concealed” (2002: 523). there is no longer the communitarian space formed within a common workplace that guards the organisation of political activity. rather, every space (which must be distinguished from place), from club to computer, is a site of hybrid workplay, and challenging this nonspace means risking access to, and inclusion within, the network. it is not only one’s career (or job) that is at stake, but the very inscription of one’s ontology within increasingly entwined technological, economic and social networks. for gilbert and pearson, rave culture’s lack of expressive politics is the consequence of a withdrawal from “mainstream” political society, which in this context implies the procedures of representative politics. even if a “collectivist politics” would appear to be the logical outcome of communitarian practices, it is at the level of representative politics that gilbert and pearson assess the efficacy of rave culture. rave culture should produce “basic political demands,” much like the unionist politics to which mcrobbie implicitly alludes. from these conflicting socioeconomic observations we can demonstrate, nonetheless, the coherence to their dissensus. that rave culture withdraws from representative politics follows from its symbiotic relationship to precarious labour and cognitive capital, which has dissolved the workplace as site of political activity in the hybridity of labour and leisure. nonetheless, it is this hybrid form of workplay which now becomes the general category of labour. that it appears “unreformable” is all the more understandable given that work is simply no longer work, but a constitutive element of enjoyment (leisure). capitalist workplay, as its hybridity suggests (and as deleuze and guattari noted in the subtitle to anti-oedipus), is an entirely schizophrenic experience, simultaneously and irreducibly negative and positive. against this schizophrenic experience of everyday worklife is projected the fantasy of a perfected leisure which never entirely was. the parallax gap between these dissensual modes of experiencing precarious labour engender (consumer) desire. yet, it is this incompleteness (or dissensus) of the socioeconomic totality which makes possible its change, and that articulates the re-moved site of the political. necessary, then, is a strategic and categorical shift from politics – to which are ascribed the expressive and representative functions of a space – to the political. this shift is not determinate nor total, as the parallax gap of socioeconomic conditions demonstrates. nonetheless, it has become prevalent, and thus imbued with power. to sample and scratch the french revolution, parallax is the order of the day. while, on the one channel, work no longer comes to ontologically define a subject that desires its political representation, on the other channel it is work that now shapes even leisure. where rave culture provided refuge from work, it only did so through mass expenditures of labour. and where rave culture appeared to withdraw from workplace politics, failing to even stand up for itself, it nonetheless did so through the direct action of intervention and occupation. the parallax of rave culture’s “politics”, then, is that it operates through withdrawal from representative and expressive modes due to its constitutive adaptation of the hybridity of labour and leisure. there is a word for this hybridity: culture. in this sense, what rave culture embodies – and enacts worldwide – is the autonomy of a culture, not from the simplism of socioeconomics (from which escape is consumed as ideological fantasy), but to be culture. by being culture, it enacts the only autonomous position possible within network socioeconomics. van veen • technics, precarity and exodus in rave culture 33 thus it is not withdrawal, escape or exodus which leaves in its wake the detritus of community, ethics and politics. these modes of intersubjectivity – of being-amongothers – are “negated” only insofar as they are consumed in the fantasy of their impotence. the geist of community, ethics and politics lives-on as the fantasy of mourning for a past truth that never quite was. to this mourning of fantasies now devoured, rave culture has undertaken the exploration of operative movements on the level of the political, engaging exodus, technics and precarity as the means of its sonic warfare. i. precarity let us shift perspectives. if rave culture presents itself without an adequate representative politics, then the question must be posed in its reverse: is representative politics at all adequate to rave culture? there can be no return to a collectivist politics – unionist, collectivist representation and so on – if, as mcrobbie suggests, rave culture’s recomposition of labour and leisure through speed and risk negates politics, ethics and community. that there is no return to politics-as-usual signals not a failure in the particular, but a caesura in general that severs labour in general – and rave culture in particular – from the preceding historical composition of production. what is at stake is a caesura in the “the modes of subjectification” from which politics arrives in its antagonism (see rancière 1999: 35). antonio negri identifies this caesura as the schism between the fordist era, which more or less demarcated work from leisure, and the post-fordist condition wherein “‘work’ refers to the entirety of social activity” (2008: 19).3 unevenly distributed across the globe, this caesura – or rather, technological transformation of the conditions of labour from workplace to network – is also unevenly dispersed throughout the twentieth century. nonetheless, the speed of its adoption (and thus its risks), has accentuated the stratification of multiple forms of production. multiple forms transact at the global limits of time and space, reflecting an overall ascendancy of the network – and it is this recombinant aspect of labour that complicates the sociopolitical milieu of culture. culture, like production, is no longer a distinct category of raw content, but a recombinant function of multiple activities: metaproduction (np. deleuze 1995: 181). one can also reverse the line of causality. network metaproduction (otherwise known as globalisation) has followed from not only the effects of global telecommunications and transportation, effectively reducing the thickness of time and space, but from the increasing demands of labour for an end to the disciplinary factory regime. labour demanded control over flexible conditions of employment, notably with italian operaismo and autonomia of the 1970s but also (in different forms) with the uk miner’s strikes of the 1980s. in all cases, rather than procuring collective control over the temporality, equality and locality of work – flexibility, equity and mobility – these demands were answered with the deregulation of capital on a global scale. global outsourcing and on-demand production, made possible by tele-technological networks and the deregulation of human labour provided the conditions for the subsequent regime of precarious labour (see berardi 2009: 75-77; virno 2004: 56-59; negri 2008: 40-45). the demand for control over flexibility and mobility was answered with a new regime of modular control (or as deleuze puts it, from the disciplinary to the control society, from confinement to codes of network access [1995]). as berardi writes, 34 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 freedom from state regulation has become economic despotism over the social fabric. workers demanded freedom from the life-time prison of the industrial factory. deregulation responded with the flexibilization and the fractalization of labour (berardi 2009: 76). it is from within this global socioeconomic network of precarity that rave culture emerged only to balance, precariously, on the verge of its disappearance. the stuff of precarity had been shaped into the tools of its autonomy. the precarious jouissance of the multitude: de-scripting disappearance contract work, competitive employee-of-the-month contests, spec-work submissions, academic sessionalization, get-rich-quick seminars, one-offs, self-publishing – for the many that seek relief from the uncertainty, debt and stress of precarious labour, there are, of course, approved forms of temporary desertion, from antidepressants and pharmaceuticals to consumer fetishism and crack cocaine (berardi 2009: 37-39). to compensate for the deficiencies of precarious labour, temporary strains of individualist pleasure are granted privilege. is not rave culture such a temporary privilege? what distinguishes rave culture from the temporary pleasures of consumer culture? to consider this question is not to claim that rave culture is, in fact, nontemporary, aconsumptive, nonaddictive and unprivileged. the network sociality in which rave culture traffics means that rave culture exists because it is networked, temporary and precarious. it does not oppose these conditions; moreover it cannot, as they are constitutive. rave culture could not invent the novel foundation of a counterculture ex nihilio. i would rather pose the alternative hypothesis: that rave culture learned to manipulate – or better: remix – the constitutive scripts contained within the conditions of its becoming. akrich describes scripts as revealing their constitutive behaviours at the point in which the projected use of an object contrasts with its mis-use: its repurposing, remixing, or “de-scripting” (akrich 1992). precarity is such a script revealed in the contrast between projected socioeconomic outcome (liberty of global capital rendering organised labour powerless) and de-scription (the emergence of radical, precarious workplay). rave culture reinvented the world inscribed within its constitutive network scripts by exceeding their pre-scription (see akrich 1992: 209). precarity is descriptive of a socioeconomic condition; moreover it exists as a script within a state of things. things in general – the materiel of rave culture – are prescripted to replicate a world in which community, ethics, politics and workplay are (yet again) “negated” in their collective radicality by being re-scripted as objects of consumption. the world of things is “inscribed” with the fantasies of individual liberty, freedom, self-fulfillment and mobility at the same time that their precarity and consumption undermine the radical actualization of their scripts. rave culture repurposed these scripts not against the totality of their socioeconomic conditions (i.e., by opposing precarity with stability, or temporariness with permanence), but by embracing the strategy of hypertrophy. it furthered them through their excess, intensified to the point of jouissance, which is to say, the obscenity of its hedonist abandon to pleasure. what had been done was the unthinkable in an era of globalized control: the collective emergence of a culture of jouissance that existed wholly through the metaproduction of its autonomous precarity, which is to say, on the verge of its disappearance from the projected script. if rave culture de-scripted the world which was projected to arrive from the socioeconomics of precarity, it did so in the following ways: van veen • technics, precarity and exodus in rave culture 35 first, rave culture operated unapproved as a cultural assemblage of exodus in which its pleasures were not supplementary but constitutive (we shall turn to exodus below), “an exceptionally conducive space for decadent, indulgent ‘partying’” (wilson 2006: 85). unlike the dialectic of the cycle of consumption, rave culture opened toward a radical precarity in which its disappearance acted as a foundational leavetaking. it operated within a post-fordist disintegration of regulated times and forms of work (see hardt and virno 1996) as well as contributing toward the further deconstruction of the material and social categories of labour and leisure (the use of maffesoli’s “neo-tribes” within “post-subcultural” research gestures toward this reconfiguration of the socioeconomic assemblage [see st john 2001; ueno 2003]). second, the xanadu dreams of jouissance took part in a collective pursuit of general conditions of existence, from experimental modes of communitas to “spiritual connectedness” (olaveson 2004). these general conditions – which i will later articulate as impossible demands that transgress not only dance culture but representative politics – exceed the limited determination of “rave culture” not only as a dance culture, but as one limited to the precarious spatiotemporality of the dance event itself. all that proceeds and follows from the event needs to be taken into account, from the “extraordinary organizational capacity” (mcrobbie 2002: 520) of rave culture to what negri identifies as the material ability, as “living work,” for rave culture, as a creative workplay, to produce de-scripted subjectivities (negri 2008: 26). third, here again the limits of a representative politics are reached, as according to paolo virno (and negri), radically precarious subjects do not coalesce into a people which would be unified by representation under the one sovereign, but “disintegrate into multitude, or into a plurality of individuals who resist the preliminary bond of obedience” (virno 2008: 31). though this plurality infamously coalesces into the experience of the “collective organism” (douglas rushkoff quoted in landau 2004: 107), “interconnected ecstasy” occurs under the aegis of participatory disobedience and the collective labour of love. rave’s micro-economies of sharing produce what negri and hardt would call the “experience of the common” that breaks the impasse of the universal to the particular through love (2009: 120, 181). precarious workplay itself is a labour of love inasmuch as it is love’s corruption. it is this plurality or hybridity that reflects the energy of the multitude. that rave culture apparently lacked a politics, had no demands, disintegrated the boundaries between work and leisure and retreated into a nonrepresentational hedonism all reflect the observation that the multitude, “by not transferring its own rights to the sovereign, escapes from the political unit. the multitude is anti-state, but, exactly for this reason, it is also antipeople” (virno 2008: 31). fourth, if, as gilbert and pearson emphasize, dance culture “achieves a great deal by simply existing” (1999: 179), then the question shifts to the technics of its ontology in light of rave culture’s disappearance, precarity and exodus. ii. technics technics of disappearance (hauntology) to ethics, community, and politics i have counterposed the following three questions: technics, precarity and exodus. i undertake this operation neither as a negation (though this double negation hinges precisely upon the question of “tarrying with the negative”), nor as a transformation in which ethics, community and politics would be 36 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 superseded by new forms of collective enunciation (though this may account for the onticological difference). counterposition (and correlation) partakes of a hauntology wherein spectrality is constitutive of the novelty of the event. by thinking hauntology, the parameters that determine ontology as a metaphysics of presence (and all that follows, from theology to politics, community to ethics) are subject to the technico-symbolic network of delays and relays, differals and deferrals, in which the compartmentalized distinctions of time (past, present and future) as well as spacing (presence and absence) are interwoven with differentiated though cyclic returns. introduced by derrida to deconstruct systemic absolutism within ontology and political theory, hauntology names the living-dead or spectral effects of a wide array of tele-technical forms (texts, technologies, symbolic systems) that displace the frontier of the onto-political by affecting the temporal and spatial boundaries of the res publica (1994: 51). in this respect, hauntology specifies the “techno-tele-discursivity” of historical différance (51). it also aptly describes the challenge that rave culture poses to critical attempts of its total anthropology, political theorisation and historicisation. for rave culture is certainly a spectral event – global, uncontainable, a caesura with previous collective forms through its embrace of technological performativity that at the same time resurrects, reiterates and repeats ritual forms of timeless gathering.4 hence the revenance of rave – its spectral recurrence, ritual and heterogeneous, as a chronic cultural revenant. with rave, practices of technosonic carnival both esoteric and neoteric intertwine in the event. the portmanteau of technosonic combines this revenance of practices recurring yet singular, marking rave in general as a technologically constructed gathering of embodied engagement with amplified, rhythmic sound. as a cultural trope, rave is more spectral than it is an ‘idealtype’, though if one accepts the condition of spectral quasi-ideality it could be read as instituant (gauthier 2004: 65). as marx realised, from the german ideology to capital, spectrality is but a recurring effect of economic relations of labour, capital and technology. in this sense, the revenance of rave would be but (yet another, though exemplary) effect of always-late capitalism – mere catharsis at the end-of-the-millenium, the spurious spectacle of collective action and the ghosts of insurrection. following marx’s attempt to differentiate the geist of capital (exchange value) from its real body (use value), too often the critical question becomes one of how to put such ghosts to death, or, how to exorcise the spectral, a question that “knows no limit: without fail, it becomes ontological, ethical, political” (derrida 1994: 132). this question is often articulated in multiple disciplines: how to judge, critique, or exorcise (rave) culture, to differentiate its true body from its capitalist ghost? the entire genesis of this essay has been to disrupt this question by interrogating its conditions in all their complexity. i will continue with this theme. hauntology disrupts critical finitude by emphasizing the constitutive role of spectral technics. derrida argues that spectrality cannot be exorcised without risking the boomerang effect of catastrophic violence – in short, the absolute judgements of totalitarianism (1994: 105, 128, 131, 141). it is the krinein of ontology – the decisive attempt to make things real, exorcise the specters, set the record straight – that attempts to conjure away spectrality. rave not only participates in spectral economy – the precarious hybridity of use/exchange value embodied in the hauntology of workplay – but furthers it to the obscene excess of jouissance. in the moment of ek-stasis (see hemment 1996), there is nothing uncommon about the spectral, wherein “the loss of singularity as the experience of singularity itself ” (derrida 1994: 161) marks the spec van veen • technics, precarity and exodus in rave culture 37 trotechnics of subjectivity. through and through, spectrality is a technical and constitutive operation. one cannot purify that which is constitutive; to do so calls for the killing fields and the guillotine. the twentieth century is, of course, marked by the naked ascension of technology. this would also imply the historical expansion of spectrality – a point derrida makes when he writes of “the increasingly powerful historical expansion of a general writing” (2000: 20). rave culture existed as such an effect of the ascendancy of spectral technics. it was perhaps even exemplary in this respect. the effect of derrida’s work – and its relevance to our theme – has been to complexify, by way of spectralization, arguments that remain polarized between technological determination on the one channel and constructivist agency on the other by proposing a non-linear mutability of differentiated recursivity (différance) for thinking the technical conditions of spatiotemporality. here, technics operates at the junction between words and things, as the mutable condition upon which formations of the political, ethical and communal take shape (and time). technics, then, forms a condition of the political. rave as technosonic laboratory of time and space rave culture, infused with rhythm, emerged from within a mutual relationship with technology as it attempted to expand the experiential horizon of time (one precarious night an autonomous lifetime). these rhythmic returns are inscribed through technical means, applied throughout complex interstices of technoglobalization, from telecommunications in general to rave culture’s amplification of technosonic ritual. as hauntology categorizes the technological condition, in which time and space are subject to rhythms, speeds, accelerations and delays, jet lag and peak time, it provides the general framework for thinking through the historico-temporality of not only rave culture, but all that it participates in and affects. through spectral effects, we must interrogate what the shifting and globalized frontiers of the res publica (and the polis) effectively means to a technologically-infused cultural politics of sound, setting the stage for the return of the politics of exodus, and the precarity of global labour in the “new culture industries”. it may be that the institutionalized terms of politics, ethics and community underwent metamorphosis in the experimental cultural laboratory of the rave. michel gaillot raises these questions when he asks if rave’s “new forms of sharing” do not devolve “factual belonging to state, nation, or ideology”, giving way to a “multiplicity of elective communities which no longer repose on some meaning or truth to be represented, appropriated, or prophesized” (1999: 15). certainly ethnographies of edmc have aptly demonstrated that a circulation of meanings and truths have saturated rave’s semantics and practices, from religious motifs to anarcho-politics (see st john 2004, 2009). yet gaillot implicitly approaches rave culture not as a delimited object of study (through ethnography or otherwise), but as a question of approach, in which rave is re-composed through gaillot’s subtitle as “an artistic and political laboratory of the present”, which names his philosophical métissage inasmuch as it attempts to give meaning to the culture of “techno”. for gaillot, rave is sub specie tekhne, or under the aspect of technics, a technics that is a priori to politics, culture and the system of representation itself. technics, in this reading indebted to not only heidegger but marcuse’s reading of technics as the creative engine of life, is “the means through which man [l’homme] becomes a work of his own” 38 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 (gaillot 1999: 33). because humanity is without essence and empty of meaning (a vacuum in the heart of being), technics, as the labour of self-constitution, is the “proper” world activity of humanity. dwelling within the world means dwelling within technics as the finitude of meaning (gaillot 1999: 41). rave culture renders explicit this relation of humanity to technics. but to what end? for gaillot, techno is the culture of ecstatic sharing made possible by machines (33), in which the festive is both the means and the ends to dwelling within the (technical) world (28). to do so requires “mastering” technics (33).5 rave culture is nothing less than the “will to appropriation of technics” in which intimacy and freedom are reclaimed from utilitarian and economic uses and in which expenditure and technics are reconciled, “effecting an opening for an existence made whole again within the ‘machinic’ world” (gaillot 1999: 33). even as gaillot embraces rave culture’s techno-utopianism with theoretical certainty (effectively dosing heidegger with mdma), gaillot marks out the architecture of rave’s symbolic order – the way in which its apparently meaningless and empty core of obscene hedonism is not merely a symptom of rave culture, but marks the condition of humanity itself. rave culture, as the laboratory of tekhne, has radicalized (workplay) practices that have come to reposition the very axioms of what being-human means. with a different approach, it is in this sense too that mcrobbie extrapolates from rave culture to rethink the patterns and consequences of workplay hybridity. by shifting the angle through which the object is composed, the object of study becomes not an object at all, but a network of practices, each of which claims different accounts of what is fundamental to genesis in general. that said, that tekhne has shifted the conditions under which genesis itself is composed is a pervasive argument of twenty-first century philosophy of technology. by positioning technics as axiomatic to sociopolitical conditions of community (and thus politics and ethics), gaillot argues that rave is generative of new communal practices that shift from a logic of representation to participation, or from being an audience or spectator to a participant. yet, even if technics might be seen as axiomatic to the human condition, and even if one accepts that there is a manifest culture of technics that embodies participation, does it follow that participation negates representation? in this sense, and as we shall turn to shortly, the question is a political one; for representation still coordinates the basic structure of sovereign politics as a pro-ject (whether democratic or totalitarian), as that which is placed before us all to embody us all. representation operates through the logic of synecdoche, of the part for the whole, in which the part is representative of the whole, whether that part is the individual sovereign (who ontologically and in his corps embodies the whole of the state) or the elected assembly (who re-present the many of the citizenry through the will of the majority). in conversation with gaillot, jean-luc nancy questions whether techno replaces representational logic with a participatory one, noting the mise-en-scène of festivity (1999: 100). maffesoli, though he acknowledges, like mcrobbie, an implosion of philosophical and political representation – “a growing lack of interest in politics or in labour causes” – nonetheless also notes a slippage between presentation and representation in musical gatherings (gaillot 1999: 111). to this question of representation/ participation must be posed the question of exodus. van veen • technics, precarity and exodus in rave culture 39 iii. exodus withdrawal and disappearance the contemporary world is riddled with such anarchic spaces, and the more successful they are, the less likely we are to hear about them (graeber 2004: 34). exodus, though always open as the “lines of flight” constitutive to any blockage,6 becomes an activity of the many only when the material conditions of existence approach levels of near pathology. exodus, withdrawal or disappearance is often negated by critics only because it is thought as a withdrawal from effective strategies (mainstream politics) rather than an “engaged withdrawal” toward a place in which the terms and processes of belonging can be reaffirmed in light of drastic upheaval to the conditions of labour, leisure and politics. what exodus proposes, as a movement, and as a thesis, is that if there is a “politics” of rave culture, then it takes place in this “founding leave-taking” of a “new republic” (virno 1996b: 197). rave culture is a movement of exodus; it strains through its obscene excess at the limits of a constrained world by “reappropriating the common” (hardt and negri 2009: 164). exemplary for their occupationist “sonic warfare” (goodman 2009), spiral tribe have starkly expressed exodus as the battleground for the common: actively resisting the rightwing regime built upon violence, private ownership of land and profiteering, the spirals aligned their artistic and musical spirit with a relentless campaign of events that for brief (yet intense) moments took back the land into the realms of common shared experience (schnews 2003, quoted in st john 2009: 37). exodus marks not the politics of rave culture; rather exodus is the condition of rave as a culture of the common. exodus is the condition of the political opening of rave. why? the first reason is evident in the failure of rave’s political representation: exodus presupposes that representative politics is inadequate, not only to rave culture but to precarity in general. moreover, it is effaced within the dialectic of labour/leisure. the occlusion of representative politics unveils exodus, that “forbidden moment, an unforgiveable denial of the dialectic” (bey 1991: 100). the second reason follows from rave culture’s generative role in hybrid forms of cultural labour: that rave culture anticipates the disintegation of representative politics. its modes of workplay engender subjects (and forms of workplay) that are scarcely representable within the current schemas of “legitimate” political expression. this is not because they exceed the capabilities of the political, but because “politics” remains encapsulated in forms of sovereignty, representative or totalitarian, that no longer reflect network sociality and metaproduction. in this respect, exodus offers a means to retreat from normative politics, and to re-treat the terrain upon which forms of politics arise. the terrain itself, though it remains and if not accelerates the convergence of the commons (see negri 2008), is no longer bound to the historical forms of centralization found in the polis (which raises questions as to the abdication of the oikos, the hearth, and the altar of the sacred, upon which sacrifice retains its ritual value of ensuring the spatiotemporal coherence of the polis). the political terrain has become that of the network: discontinuous yet common, connected yet vast. likewise, it is through exodus that nonrepresentable subjects are able to find a common bond for their obscene excess. exodus is a praxis “without content” as it investigates the possibility of reinvent40 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 ing content itself. in this sense, exodus is a passage through the deconstruction of politics. with many different possible modes, exodus explores alternative unfoldings of being-with-others. not simply flight, “an uprising must be for something as well” (bey 1991: 103). exodus is the means to articulate this for with the belonging of the whom in the reconstruction of the how (what, when, and where). the why has already been demonstrated. exodus, though flight, is not to be mislabeled as a phantasmatic escape from a de facto reality. if anything, the ideological imperatives to enjoy and consume are precisely such an escape, serving as the cathartic performance of approved excess that maintain, through consumption and exhaustion, the economic imbalances of the social order. if anything, it is the belief that sovereign forms of political order represent the precarious subject that is fantasy (see dean 2006; debord 1992; zizek 2006: 308317). from exodus then, is posed the question, or rather the distinction, between politics and the political (see lacoue-labarthe and nancy 1997). the passage through exodus enacts a defection or disappearance from politics (and its logic of representation) to the political, to that open, endless night in which the activity of subjectification continually reconstitutes an “‘accustomed place’ that never preexists the experience that determines its location” (virno 1996a: 33). we might introduce hakim bey’s notion of the temporary autonomous zone (taz) as an “encampment of guerilla ontologists,” where the “best and most radical tactic will be to refuse to engage in spectacular violence, to withdraw from the area of simulation, to disappear” (1991: 102). rancière in particular has described this moment: “political activity is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes a place’s destination” (1999: 30). exodus abandons assigned destinations; it errs away from wherever it should be; it ends up customizing its place with new customs. being where it shouldn’t, exodus announces not the disappearance of politics, but its return. indeed, this is why politics is “antagonistic to policing” of every sort (1999: 29) – and which is why the politics of rave culture combats, evades or undermines policing actions with every desertion into darkness and disappearance. exodus, then, performs the encounter with reconstituting politics as such, that is, an often shocking encounter with the “ultimate equality” of the social (rancière 1999: 16). the gap (qua violence) between the empty freedom of the many and the ultimate equality upon which all politics draws its force sets into motion the desertion of exodus. engaged withdrawal begins with the perception that politics-as-usual began “with a major wrong” (rancière 1999: 19). but exodus is not one form among many. the passage through the political risks – in the catastrophic sense that mcrobbie implies, for it “demonstrates the sheer contingency of the order” (rancière 1999: 30) – redress of this inequality at the heart of politics itself. exodus is the name for the pathway of reconstituting politics. as we have seen, it renders existential categories of activity indistinct. in doing so, it potentially risks everything. wherever subordinated subjects excluded from the representation (and control) of the whole remain, nonetheless, necessary for its constitution (as its essential excess), and wherever “a part of those who have no part” is demonstrated (rancière 1999: 230), there lies the path of desertion and defection toward a reconstitution of politics itself.7 if, as gilbert and pearson implicitly suggest, only a “mainstream” politics is politics at all, then under these conditions it is a politics without politics, for it excludes the possibility of dissensus concerning political process. any imperative that presupposes the proper mode of effective politics does so only by negating the irruption of antagonism (between policing and equality) that opens the heterogeneous terrain of the political – van veen • technics, precarity and exodus in rave culture 41 that moment when the subject calls into question its re-presentation, identification or otherwise interpellation within existing processes of subjectification. disappearance: exodus as the absence of signs ...the taz is in some sense a tactic of disappearance (bey 1991: 128). exodus appears in its absence of signs. compared to punk’s semiotics of rebellion that proudly displayed the symbols of its anticapitalist subculture (see hebdige 2007), rave culture slipped away into the night, dowsing its fleeting incarnation of ecstatic defection through the praxis of the taz, a “guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/ elsewhen, before the state can crush it” (bey 1991: 101). written in the 1980s and virally disseminated by the 1990s net culture, bey’s broadsheets of ontological anarchism and manifesto of the temporary autonomous zone outlined various procedures for exodus with remarkable prescience. such a politics would appear as a disappearance of politics itself, an “anti-politics”, defection or desertion from acceptable modes of collective and individual responsibility. within the logic of representation, it is only when rave emerged into the light in 1995 with the urban sound system occupations of reclaim the streets (rts) and its “unrehearsed, informal, illegal ‘guerilla’ street festivals” (luckman 2001: 207) – to pinpoint one particular example – that rave culture appeared as a properly “political” movement. but had not rave culture emerged from somewhere? was rave not operating, in this moment, not as a protest politics attempting to re-present a set of demands (in the only way it would know how), but as a participatory carnival of alternatives to the remnants of the political order of representation? the complexity of exodus has been identified (in so many words) by rodrigo nunes, who in conversation with benj gerdjes and gavin grindon, discusses the tension between prefigurative politics (being the change you want to see) and the politics of the carnivalesque (subverting the social order to achieve insurrection or upheaval through the accumulation of historical ruptures) (gerdjes et al. 2010: 3). both are forms of nonrepresentative praxis that arise from exodus. and as rodrigo points out, both forms have their failings. prefigurative politics has been critiqued for leading to a depoliticized lifestylism that reduces social change to a matter of individual, if not consumer “choice” (itself oblivious to socioeconomic determination of choice), while carnival risks its subsumption by way of catharsis, as the energy of revolt is mitigated back into existing sociopolitical orders. from their conversation, the suggestion arises that the difficulties with these two forms of nonrepresentative praxis arise not from a lack of representative politics, but possibly because too much of it remains. attempting to exorcise the remainder, however, risks reinstituting the catastrophic violence of every tribunal of purification (see derrida 1994). the challenges of exodus are that of living-with, and learning-from, the spectral inheritance of the past, of negotiating the stratification of coexisting heterogenous processes wherein “the very movement of withdrawal bears features of what it negates” (adorno 2002: 26). it is precisely this activity of re-membering the political body (rather than its complete dismemberment, which every revolution exemplifies) that guards exodus from returning as a new state of policing. and yet a further difficulty arises, fundamental to politics itself. though politics is heterogeneous to policing, it is bound up with it (rancière 1999: 31). this is because politics has no object of 42 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 its own; politics is a form of encounter between heterogeneous forces (it has no content). and in this encounter, not everything is political. rather, politics is specifically (though in general) the encounter between the logics of policing and equality, between constrained imperatives (such as representative politics) and the transformative open of the political. the challenge of exodus is such that “there is no outside to our world of real subsumption of society under capital” (negri 2008: 25). nonrepresentative forms of exodus and desertion are correlative to, in a wholly integrated manner, socioeconomic shifts in the global fabric of capital and technology. exodus cannot achieve escape velocity from the systems within which it defects. though heterogeneous, exodus remains a passage of excess within a network that recuperates its incident before the fact. if this is the case, then what precisely can exodus offer? nothing less than the time and place for an experimental laboratory of subjectivity; an examination of the prevailing modes of politics; and the reconstitution of the passages of encounter – which is to say, sufficiently more than the constraints of representative politics. exodus remains a passage. though negri argues for the autonomy of puissance (freedom as potency) in catalysing new forms of being and resistance to capital (2008: 26), the integration of the telematics, technologies and techniques of the control society with the passage of exile appears unstoppable – if not complete. yet, as the passage through ontological freedom, exodus mines deep within a stratified world: it unearths autonomy, pirate havens, viral strategies. there can be no absolute containment of all that every passage through exodus returns from the night. conclusion: the parallax gap of political demands quivering in front of a thundering soundsystem, captive in the deafening blur, it is without a doubt that the experience of jouissance, in particular rave ek-stasis (hemment 1996) – the ritual, sonic engagement with embodied transcendance – affords few, if any, places from which to build a platform and vocalize a list of demands. though a tennis court might make a good space for an all-night taz, it is unlikely that revolutionary oaths will be sworn in classic fashion – though they may be enacted, and alliances formed.8 in the sonic maelstrom of the rave, all that holds court also upholds the overwhelming rhythmic crush of the embodied milieu and its repetitive release of jouissance. all of which leaves the question as to where and when rave culture might engage in the representation of its interests, at least to organise and sign a petition or two – to please sir, let us dance some more. though rave culture and representative politics appear antithetical, in gilbert and pearson their demands are summarized in terms of unionized labour: to shorten the work week and raise wages (one can imagine the outcome: more money for pills and parties – is this the limit of an imaginable politics of rave culture?). insofar as any representative class aims to universalize its own conditions of existence, what would rave culture re-present save for its own interests in ritual sonic release? would not such a representative framework only serve to constrain rave culture’s force, narrow its demands, enframe in limited ways its creative capacities? and indeed, if rave culture’s force, by way of its integration within what mcrobbie calls creative labour, is enough to negate not only ethics and community but politics itself, then its containment by representation appears as the last ditch effort to constrain its boundaries and restrain its effects, lest it bring about utter social catastrophe. van veen • technics, precarity and exodus in rave culture 43 the impasse reached by mcrobbie and gilbert and pearson have gestured respectively toward the need for an alternative theory of work and leisure – and thus of “politics” – in respect to the “creative industries” of rave culture. yet, such an alternative must operate without reducing rave to a sanitized dance culture lacking any demands whatsoever, just as much as it must account for rave’s global dissemination, obscene hedonism, spectral technics, precarity and exodus. what proceeds from rave culture exceeds the distinctions of work and leisure, politics and pleasure, even as its effects – its resistant and subversive capacity, its disruptive dismantling of site, place, space, time – are by no means exterior to what negri calls the “postmodern caesura” in which all resistance is recuperated (2008). rave’s “always, already” commodification does not render its force impotent. rather, it reveals that its containment is fragile, insofar as rave culture incorporates itself into the belly of the beast, infiltrating global mechanisms of control as one of many such unassimilable artifacts of puissance. rave is a cultural technics, an invented and inventive force in contrast to institutional power [pouvoir], an undigestible other within the fabric of capital (see derrida 1986). as such it is possibly an “invention of a new ‘use value’ inside power” (negri 2008: 26). any demands that follow will always appear impossible, viewed as they are at the parallax gap between politics and the political. but if one were to concede a short list of demands, then so be it, in conclusion, though not conclusively: i) that rave culture implicitly – and at many points explicitly – undermines the enclosure of public space (see st john 2009).9 as hebdige writes, rave culture “reaffirmed the right to congregate in public” (2008: 86). rave culture struggles for the selforganised determination of spatiotemporality in general, whether technically regarded as private or public (such as in the case of squats, occupations, and repurposing of abandoned land); ii) that rave culture, by practice of the free exchange of digital samples and remix practices in the production and dissemination of music, art and culture, and in its deployment of internet technologies facilitating worldwide sharing and gift economies, undermines the prevailing regime of copyright10 – as can be heard in the sampladelia (and witnessed in the resulting media hysteria) of the jam’s plundering of abba, the beatles and others on 1987 – what the fuck is going on? (klf communications, 1987) and the orb’s transformation of a rickie lee jones interview on “fluffy little clouds” into an ambient house anthem (big life, 1990) – challenging what jonathan lethem samples as imperial plagiarism – “the enclosure of commonwealth culture for the benefit of a sole or corporate owner” (2008: 37);11 iii) that rave culture, by espousing an atmosphere of autonomy in regards to criminalized psychoactive substances, and other technics of ritual displacement, openly flouts prohibition, emphasizing knowledge as the prerequisite for choice, balanced by the self-organisation of harm reduction initiatives and distribution of scientific literature, in short, a culture that demands “stop the hypocrisy [...] let’s work toward reducing the harm that can result” (saunders and doblin 1996: 18) and recognises that “drugs saturate all facets of western civilization” (mccall 2001: 101); iv) that rave culture embraces liberated gender and sexuality in all of its forms by way of its creation of nonsexist spaces of encounter, contributing to the “feminization” of culture (see gilbert and pearson 1999: 181; pini 1997: 154-55; mcrobbie 1990); 44 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 v) that rave culture demonstrates the capacity of the throng to self (dis)organise without police or state intervention, calling for the unhindered passage of assembly, but also for the lived praxis of continuous and collective re-invention in the ongoing encounter between policing and equality. this is by no means an exhaustive list. the parallax of its object leaves it ultimately inexhaustible. to what extent can representative politics account for such demands? even if rave culture were to propose constitutional amendments that would address fundamental questions of property, space, personal liberty, collective power and limitations on state power, the depth of such a challenge would unsettle the basis of representative politics itself. at the very 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christopher cox and daniel warner (eds), audio culture: readings in modern music, pp. 131-38. 46 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 new york city: continuum. parsons, charlotte. 1994. “city police, fire officials aim to curb rave parties”. the vancouver sun, 23 june: b3. pini, maria. 1997. “women and the early british rave scene”. in angela mcrobbie (ed), back to reality: social experience and cultural studies, pp. 152-70. manchester: manchester university press. rancière, jacques. 1999. disagreement: politics and philosophy. trans. julie rose. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. reynolds, simon. 2008. energy flash: a journey through rave music and dance culture. 20th anniversary ed. london: picador. saunders, nicholas and rick doblin. 1996. ecstasy: dance, trance & transformation. oakland: quick american archives. silcott, mireille. 1999. rave america: new school dancescapes. toronto: ecw. st john, graham. 2001. “doof ! australian post-rave culture”. in graham st john (ed), freenrg: notes from the edge of the dance floor, pp. 9-36. altona: common ground. ––––. (ed.) 2004. rave culture and religion. london: routledge. ––––. 2009. technomad: global raving countercultures. london: equinox. sylvan, robin. 2005. trance formation: the spiritual and religious dimensions of global rave culture. new york: routledge. ueno, toshiya. 2003. “unlearning to raver: techno-party as the contact zone in trans-local formations”. in david muggleton and rupert weinzierl (eds),the post-subcultures reader, pp. 101-18. oxford: berg. van veen, tobias c. 2003. “it’s not a rave [2.0]”. graduate researcher (1)2: 90-96. virno, paola. 1996a. “the ambivalence of disenchantment”. in michael hardt and paola virno (eds), radical thought in italy, pp. 13-36. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. ––––. 1996b. “virtuosity and revolution: the political theory of exodus”. in paola virno and michael hardt (eds), radical thought in italy, pp. 189-212. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. ––––. 2004. a grammar of the multitude. trans. isabella bertoletti, james cascaito and andrea casson. los angeles: semiotext(e). ––––. 2008. multitude: between innovation and negation. trans. isabella bertoletti, james cascaito and andrea casson. los angeles: semiotext(e). wilson, brian. 2006. fight, flight, or chill: subcultures, youth, and rave into the twenty-first century. montreal: mcgill queen’s university press. zizek, slavoj. 2006. the parallax view. cambridge: mit press. author biography tobias c. van veen. b. 1978, is doctoral candidate in philosophy & communication studies at mcgill university, a turntablist, renegade practitioner of the technology arts and director of sonic interventions since 1993. his next publication, afrofuturism: interstellar transmissions from remix culture, is forthcoming from wayne state university press in 2011. http://fugitive.quadrantcrossing.org notes van veen • technics, precarity and exodus in rave culture 47 48 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 1 see, for example, the cbc radio 3 documentary “the death of north american rave culture” by eric szeto, at <http://radio3.cbc.ca/#/blogs/2008/11/the-death-of north-american-rave-culture> (accessed 11 february 2010). through interventionist research in vancouver’s technoculture and rave scene, i place the mark of its particular demise, the point when its energies peaked, and then dramatically receded, with the violent police assault upon the 1997 prime time rave, which splintered the rave scene into oppositional and conformist elements (see st john 2009: 197-98). 2 of course, representative politics is not equivocal to the politics of representation. what is meant by the former will be investigated in relation to what are often assumptions concerning the latter. whereas the former is a system of hierarchical mediation in which the diverse desires of the many are ultimately unified in the one will of the sovereign, the latter defines what kinds of bodies – in their re-presentation, their identification, their privilege – may become valued members of the many. 3 post-fordism has perhaps met its demise with the 2007/2008 economic collapse that seals the transition to a “war economy” characterized by the “network power” of nonstate actors (see marazzi 2008: 14: 86; negri 2008: 20-21; hardt and negri 2009: 205). under these “other powers” falls the “global spread of insubordination” (negri 2008: 21). 4 for the “religious” aspects of rave ritual, see essays in (st john 2004). that rave participates in what françois gauthier names “instituant experiences of the sacred” (2004: 67) calls into perspective the relationship between theos and tekhne, or what might be called theotechnics. that applied technologies might amplify encounters with (divine) alterity is a path of thought no longer confined to the millenarial cults of y2k, but affects the (often violent) negotiation of theocultural difference today – which is to say, in the ongoing futurity of technosapiens. 5 a crucial proposition, one that is all the more problematic given the dialectic of technics, in which the master of creative technics is all too often a slave to technology. 6 exodus, as a line of flight in deleuzean terminology, opens itself by way of becoming, and is by definition inexhaustible (deleuze and guattari 2000: 103). deleuze and guattari write that “power centers are defined much more by what escapes them or by their impotence than by their zone of power” (217). 7 the general form of this necessary inclusion of the necessarily excluded is to be found in derrida as the “strange” structure of the supplement (here in temporal terms): “by delayed reaction, a possibility produces that to which it is said to be added on” (1973: 89). 8 though i say unlikely. for certainly the activities of soundsystems and other rave-era anarcho-enclaves dispell this myth (see st john 2009). oaths have indeed been sworn, in ritual fashion. the rave has served as the site for weddings, celebrations of age, birth and death, as well as ritual inductions into alliances and collectives. networks have been formed, plans hatched. and as robin sylvan’s research has indicated, “spiritual” raves use language to signify religious commitments (2005). do any of these practices conform to an articulated agenda of representative politics? at points, yes (such as organising against the rave act in the us, the cja in britain, etc). but naked oaths cannot be contained within representative politics. for such demands exceed the capabilities of sovereign power to address them; the constitution of power itself must change in order to articulate what is already-lived. 9 see, for example, “blm issues a 5-year permit to burning man” at <http://www.burningman.com/news/060621_blmpermit.html> (accessed 11 february 2010), and by contrast, new land restrictions issued by the blm in 2009: <http://www.blm.gov/nv/st/en/fo/wfo/blm_information/newsroom/2009/august/blm _issues_temporary.html> (accessed 11 february 2010). van veen • technics, precarity and exodus in rave culture 49 10 for a meditation upon djing as “the forefront art form of the late 20th century” as it questions “intellectual property and copyright law” by way of “sonic... alchemy,” see miller (2005); for a reflection upon the role of the turntable that “marks the real rupture in the mode or method of the forms [between live or electronic music and replaying music]”, see mudede (2004); for a historically informed defense of a “state of music without fences, but where, as in scholarship, acknowledgement is insisted upon”, see oswald (2005). 11 in his remix notes to the essay – wherein lethem demonstrates how his text is constructed with remixed phrases – lethem writes that imperial plagiarism is the title of an essay by marilyn randall (2008: 48). maintaining "synk" in detroit: two case studies in the remix aesthetic dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 2 (1): 45–62 issn 1947-5403 ©2011 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net m!"#$!"#"#% “s&#'” "# d($)*"$: two case studies in the remix aesthetic c!)+($*# s. g,*+ u#".()/"$& *0 p"$$/12)%, a!"#$%&# advances in audio-visual remixing technologies have produced a signi!cant, largely unintended, consequence: audiences at edm performances are dancing less—if at all. instead, utilizing digital mobile devices, audiences have increasingly become interactive media producers within an environment encouraged by savvy, former djs. drawing from the !elds of edm studies, sound studies and !lm studies, i outline the historical arc of the remix aesthetic by comparing and contrasting recent work by two long-time edm artists from the detroit-windsor region, je" mills and richie hawtin. #ese two artists were central to the global proliferation of edm culture during its mass-communication phase. however, in an era of heightened media convergence what scholars have traditionally understood as edm has irreparably changed. mills and hawtin have much to contribute to this apparent impasse. k'()*$+": edm, !lm studies, !lm sound, remix aesthetic, soundscape, media convergence, je" mills, richie hawtin, plastikman carleton s. gholz is a cultural studies fellow and doctoral candidate in the department of communication at the university of pittsburgh. in 2010 his !rst academic publication, “‘welcome to tha d’: making and remaking hip hop culture in post-motown detroit”, was published in represent where i’m from: !e greenwood guide to american regional hip hop” (greenwood press, 2009). he will defend his dissertation, “start dancing! communicative spark and sustainability in postmotown detroit”, this spring. see <http://csgholz.org>. f(!$2)( a)$"3+( http://csgholz.org d!#3(32+$ 4(5)67 i#$)*823$"*# i, % 2004 -$*.*#/*,%0 1/+'* 2*$ #3' t*4(* &05! w*.!, then resident je" mills stirs up the crowd by manipulating a video of chic performing their 1978 disco hit “le freak” on the famous dance tv show, “soul train”, projected behind his elevated dj booth.1 for the !rst half of the video the distinctive expression “freak out!” is delivered again and again—along with the band’s distinctive chicken-scratch guitar—interlaced with a heavy electronic rhythm track by dk-8 entitled “murder was #e bass”.2 only three minutes long, the womb clip is both tantalizing and complex. multiple shots of the crowd, splitscreen shots of mills and video images on the huge screen behind and above mills’ multiple pieces of equipment, not to mention the huge mirror ball, made the space di$cult for the viewer—and we presume the club-goer—to navigate. mills not only controls the sound but also the images. je" mills is not a !lmmaker and womb is not a movie theater but a world famous super-club opened in 2000 to tap into the global dj and club market revitalized in the 1990s rave era. for one night at least, mills is both sound and lighting man. for the most part, from the 1960s until the late 1990s, in the club division of labor lighting and djing have been separate roles, with the lighting technician reacting to the music coming from the club sound system. but now mills—taking his cue from a growing tradition of artists working with new technologies to deliver video and sound—maintains both capabilities.3 with one hand he drops the bass of the techno track almost to silence, ampli!es the chic sample, with the projected video screening the group’s singers repeat the same line and clap the same beat again and again as mills weaves physically between di"erent e"ects mixers, cd turntables and his own set of video monitors. eventually he turns the techno track’s volume up—the crowd screams as mills lets them have it—a laser-like rhythm pounding through the club’s world-class sound system. a%er pummeling his audience for about thirty seconds, he cuts the bass down again and focuses on cutting the audio-visual sample even faster. with just a repetitive motion of his !nger, mills transforms “freak out!” into “ou! ou-ou-ou-ou!” a split screen shows the screen light up with a strobe e"ect every time he hits the button. #e crowd hollers more, li%ing their arms in recognition, as mills hits the button several times over, the strobes lighting up the crowd. discussions of the “remix aesthetic”, theorized by scholars across multiple disciplines, have provided an opening to bring together the insights of !lm studies, sound studies and electronic dance music (edm) studies, to build a more comprehensive and suggestive understanding of performances like mills’s womb appearance, in which djs utilize advances in digital technologies to exceed their sonic mandate. jumping o" a recent historical intervention within !lm sound studies and drawing from creative work by detroitwindsor edm artists je" mills and richie hawtin, i will provide a description of the state of the remix aesthetic and address what is at stake for djs and their audiences within this increasingly “convergent” culture (see jenkins 2008). g,*+| m!"#$!"#"#% “s&#'” "# d($)*"$ 69 “r(:"; r(82;” i, 3'$ '""%( “r'./6 r'+56: i, #3' s/0',# f/0. e$%, #3' r**#" *2 #3' dj”, emily #ompson argues that for a brief moment in the late 1920s the !lm projectionist became a dj. during warner bros’ attempt to create sound pictures—!lms planned with their image and sound synced—a%er the emergence of the phonograph in the late 1920s, “vitaphone” companies began to market technologies that allowed for !lm projectionists to cue !lm dialogue and music with the moving image. #e technologies, generally wooden cabinets with two phonographs installed in them, look unmistakably like the two turntables that have been the club dj standard for decades.4 #rough archival research, #ompson uncovers that the makers of these machines were concerned that projectionists might jeopardize the machine’s purpose to standardize the playback of image and sound throughout movie theatres. #ese companies had been entrusted with delivering a viewing experience for consumers without distractions and therefore dedicated to the production of story. accordingly, machines were shipped with elaborate directions for projectionists. among these was a warning not to rescue records that had fallen out of sync with the !lm but to start the next reel instead. however, #ompson discovered that some projectionists ignored their orders, using their hands to re-sync records and in some cases, especially for silent !lms not yet produced for phonographically supplied sound, improvise program music for movies. given !re laws, #ompson argues that these projectionist-djs might have even conducted themselves in front of the screen in the place normally reserved for the more variable, and from the point of view of the company more disruptive, !lm orchestra or pianist. #e projectionist had become a performer.5 #e moment did not last. intensely fearful of the rupture caused by inconsistent playback, vitaphone producers created elaborate accessories to ensure projectionists would not make mistakes, planned or otherwise. for instance, they included cardboard cutouts to be placed on records so that projectionists would know exactly where and when to sync the needle and record. finally, with the coming of optical recording, the experimental period came to an end when technologies allowed !lm and sound to be synced to the same piece of celluloid, in e"ect cutting out the “middle man” (though #ompson remarks that these projectionists were just as likely women as men), increasing the standardization of playback. in her concluding thoughts, #ompson (2009: 28) remarks that: non-sync turntables could have allowed a new kind of sonic artistry to develop in 1929; they could have enabled a new musical creativity to be expressed through the personal selection and juxtaposition of recorded sounds. but within an industry and musical culture where standardization was the goal, the creative potential of this technology would not be ful!lled at this time. #e musical possibilities of two turntables would remain latent for decades, awaiting a culture less captivated by top-down directives, an audience less enamored of master narratives. near the end of the essay, #ompson explicitly states that the audience she is imagining is that which emerged with hip hop culture in the 1970s, a cultural movement that, for d!#3(32+$ 4(5)6< #ompson, was able to take advantage of the possibility that “history itself is ultimately a remix, a reworking of old ideas into new contexts, a constantly changing juxtaposition of old and new” (2009: 28). #ompson’s concern with the history of the sound environment and its contemporary possibilities is not new. in her book !e soundscape of modernity (2002), #ompson examined the emergence of modern acoustics to understand how public expectations of sound had shi%ed over the course of the 20th century. she argued that audiences began expecting spaces where sound would be heard authentically and consistently, without reverberation or distraction. however, #ompson argued that this modern set of expectations gave way in the 1970s to a desire for a variety of resonant spaces (2002: 324). if #ompson is correct and the modern soundscape was focused on providing an “aural anchor” (2002: 321) in the midst of tremendous technological and societal change, then it follows that the postmodern soundscape is a potentially dizzying, sensuous place. #ompson’s nod to hip hop, djing and the “remix aesthetic” within the history of soundcapes provides a suggestive atmosphere in which to think through the recent work of je" mills. a dj and electronic music producer, mills’ early career was inspired by the emerging mixing aesthetic of the 1970s pioneered by both disco and hip hop djs. entranced and apprenticed by an older generation of djs and party promoters, his numerous residencies and dj appearances at one-o" events put him in the right place at the right time, as the execs of a struggling wdrq—then a top 40/urban station—heard salvation in mills’ live mixes. within days of a live broadcast, mills was asked to join wdrq as “the wizard”, a name he’d called himself when one of the station’s on-air personalities asked him for a dj name. immediately mills was thrown on the air to compete with the popular electrifyin’ mojo on wdrq’s urban opponent, wjlb. #ough the two djs respected one another and were on a !rst-name basis, their competitive spirit created a sonic backdrop for 1980s detroit. from the beginning of his career, mills was connected to a wide-ranging mass-communication network in the detroit-windsor region that included rental halls (or cabarets) and clubs, spaces that interacted with the sonic productions of radio and recording studios. however, the visual elements within the clubs, from the way strobes &ashed to the visual style of dance fashion and movements were highly mediated by tv shows like “#e scene” on local, black-owned tv station wgpr.6 in a recent interview, mills commented on this sonic and visual network which relied as much on his ears as his eyes: yeah of course [i watched “#e scene”]. yeah who didn’t? i think everyone did, looking to see what the people were listening to how they were getting on. i mean it was all connected, i mean we all knew each other. we were pushing music back and forth. #ey were listening to what i was doing [and] i was certainly watching what nat [morris, the host of “#e scene”] and all those guys were doing and we were pushing information back, back and forth, between them [the electrifying] mojo myself in certain clubs and record stores we were all very much communicating because we . . . i guess we sensed—we knew it was a very special time and we were all maybe a little bit… i g,*+| m!"#$!"#"#% “s&#'” "# d($)*"$ 6= think most of the guys were a little bit older so they knew the di"erence between what it was and what had happened when mojo and i began to really get aggressive with the music. everybody was connected and everybody made money, everything progressed, all the clubs were packed, djs were working, people were drinking [laughs]. it was a very interesting time and you know record sales, record stores were selling records, a lot of records at that time and people were listening to the radio and just on and on and on... 7 however, according to mills, that initial network shi%ed signi!cantly in the late 1980s as hip hop culture outpaced detroit’s earlier electro-based tastes and “detroit techno” began to become popular globally. mills, both as a live, turntable-based dj, and then as a producer of electronic music, emerged as one of the premier techno artists of global dance culture. #ough not a mainstream star he is a legend amongst the thousands of fans that &ocked to his club dates around the world, from berlin to japan. regarded as a key innovator in the formation of “minimal techno” (sherburne 2004: 321, 324), mills continues to produce music and tour globally.8 in his fourth decade as an artist and performer, mills began to engage silent !lm, !rst with fritz lang’s metropolis (in 2000) and then buster keaton’s !ree ages (in 2004), creating new soundtracks for these silent !lms.9 however, for the latter !lm, mills also released video remixes. at the time, these creative engagements for !ree ages were made possible by the pioneer dvj-x110 which allowed djs to mix and scratch digital videos in the same way that they had been blending, mixing and, eventually, scratching vinyl records since the early 1970s. unlike contemporary artists who create scores for silent !lm and pay close attention to the image in an attempt to maintain synchronicity (and, through analog instruments, authenticity), like the alloy orchestra,11 mills’ accompaniments in !ree ages vary from allegiance to the image in normal playback to playful audio-visual engagement when remixed. new digital technologies, speci!cally the dvd turntable mentioned above, have allowed mills to present audiences with an un-nostalgic re-imagining of buster keaton based on the dominant interplay of sound over image. mills is not the only, or even perhaps the most unique, example of a contemporary dj remixing silent !lm.12 however, mills’ !ree ages remixes, and his accompanying commentaries, are fecund in terms of the remix scenario highlighted by #ompson. where once there had been a !lm projectionist and a pit orchestra, with artists like mills there emerges what one might call a “sound projectionist”. building upon #ompson’s unique discovery in sound !lm history, it is this sound projectionist “revenge” scenario that i am interested in exploring. !ree ages, released in 1923, features buster keaton in one of his early feature-length !lms. keaton plays, according to an intertitle, the “faithful worshipper at beauty’s shrine”, the young male lover who pursues actress margaret leahy through three historical periods, the “stone age”, “roman times” and “modern times”. confounded by a stronger, richer and more conniving competitor, played by wallace berry, keaton stumbles through each historical age until love—and keaton’s haphazard willfulness—wins out. parodically based d!#3(32+$ 4(5)>? on d. w. gri$th’s multi-period !lm, intolerance: lo"e’s struggle !roughout the ages (1916), !ree ages received supportive reviews from the los angeles times at the time, in which it was praised for its fresh visual gags and its verisimilitude in the roman sequences.13 in “making the remix”, a short !lm accompanying his !ree ages release, mills says that he uses the dvd turntable in order to create “a much more abstract, much more organic !lm”. he then walks the audience through the editing process, demonstrating how he manipulates the image and accompanying sound using one hand on the circular tablet of the dvd player, his !ngers on the myriad buttons along the edge of the machine, and then, later, both hands on an external visual controller, an edirol v-414 made by roland, which splits, distorts and replicates the image on a small video screen. while his hand is able to manipulate the forward progress of the !lm, the buttons allow him to create loops or samples of the image and music that he can then repeat at will. motioning towards the repeating image of leahy bringing food to her mouth at a restaurant with keaton nearby, mills states that “it’s very easy to loop something like that, then with the turntable it’s possible to a"ect it, so it’s a very interactive feel that you have . . . using this machine”. repeating the word “organic”, he argues that the edirol controller’s strobe light e"ects and visual inversions allow the vj to manipulate the presentation, giving it a much more organic feel and also allowing the viewer to focus in on particular things that maybe would have been missed if watching the !lm at normal rate in the theater or watching it on tv. so it’s possible then to . . . to see this gesture that [the screen shows the product of mills manipulating keaton’s eyes at the same restaurant table with leahy] that happens so quickly, like his eyes, what he’s looking at or exactly what she’s touching on her face [back to full screen with mills pointing and looking at video controller and screen]. it’s these things that are o%en missed when watching at a regular speed. so, i can, very easy [sic] loop [back to screen] and focus on that gesture [shows the image looping and repeating a roll of keaton’s eyes] and you actually have time to actually see exactly what he’s doing to get much more out of the dialogue and the script of it. why manipulate the image in this way? why this focus on gesture as a way of getting more out of the dialogue when, except for a few rare intertitles in the whole !lm, there is no written dialogue? why this aversion to “normal” playback conditions? does he think that keaton watchers have missed the humor and theatrical skill of keaton rolling his eyes before? what strikes me most as i re&ect on mills’ own interest in having his audience focus on gestures that are o%en missed in the viewing of the !lm is his lack of focus on story. mills’ remix of !ree ages seems uninterested in narrative. instead he seems compelled by the interaction between sound and image for its own sake. #is interest seems to be con!rmed in the interview about the remix itself. #e track is seven minutes long, yet, a%er the quote mentioned above, mills laughs, shrugs his shoulders and thanks us for listening to him talk. #ere are three minutes le%. so the director of the documentary shows mills at work in montage with the videos he is manipulating. g,*+| m!"#$!"#"#% “s&#'” "# d($)*"$ >5 what we see is mills, concentrating on the movement of his own hands, his eyes &ipping between the machines at his disposal and the images &ickering on the screen. despite the apparent ease of the technology, mills’ interactions with the turntable and mixer seem highly choreographed, the motions of a body deeply practiced in fast-paced hand-eye coordination. he taps the side of the turntable before hitting a button, and then hits it again. and again. he has found a rhythm he likes. again. he bobs his head with the music, carefully winding and unwinding the circular platter at his !ngertips. #e remixes show the results: a magical series of visual gags on top of gags, keaton’s physical surprises and movements repeated, elongated, smeared, blurred and repeated again, all in service of mills’ musical accompaniment. it is as if keaton, instead of landing on his behind a%er &opping down a !re pole because of his own ridiculous movements—due to his own comedic agency—is being pushed, pulled and tormented by repeated bass or bell-like synthesizer noises. instead of being asked to comment or react to one fall, one preposterous movement of the head or arms, the audience is persuaded to stop thinking that it knows what the right reaction should be to the !lm’s movements and instead take pleasure in the insistent tricks forcing the images to jump, slip back or stutter. mills seems to be a perfect candidate for !lm scholar tom gunning’s “showman exhibitor” (1993: 10). instead of o"ering narrative ful!llment, the dj presents his audience with something lying dormant, according to gunning, within the history of !lmmaking: cinema as an attraction is that other purpose. by its reference to the curiosity-arousing devices of the fairground, the term denoted early cinema’s fascination with novelty and its foregrounding of the act of display. viewed from this perspective, early cinema did not simply seek to neutrally record previously existing acts or events. rather, even the seemingly stylistically neutral !lm consisting of a single shot without camera tricks involved a cinematic gesture of presenting for view, of displaying. #e objects of this display varied among current events (parades, funerals, sporting events); scenes of everyday life (street scenes, children playing, laborers at work); arranged scenes (slapstick gags, a highlight from a well-known play, a romantic tableau); vaudeville performances (juggling, acrobatics, dances); or even camera tricks (melies-like magic transformations). but all such events were absorbed by a cinematic gesture of presentation, and it was this technological means of representation that constituted the initial fascination of cinema (1993: 4). by watching mills’ remixes we can con!rm his absorption in projecting and displaying images, as well as delighting in gags and, through dances and transformations, the carnivalesque. but, importantly, mills is also projecting sound. #e dj is the (sound) projectionist returned from a cinematic space that, according to emily #ompson, only existed in potential for a few years in the late 1920s. like buster keaton himself in sherlock jr. (1924), the projectionist (mills) has fallen asleep only to walk into the screen and reimagine the performance from his vantage point. but, instead of stitching himself into an already closed narrative, mills has stopped the story in its tracks. he freezes its characters’ d!#3(32+$ 4(5)>4 gestures until he lets them go—or not—understanding that it is the “here it is!” moment within the cinema of attractions that might inspire the dancers below. herein lies the ambivalence in mills’ own career. #e sound projectionist can manipulate !gures on a screen to suit his whim; he cannot do the same for dancers in a club. in his seminal work, generation ecstasy (1999: 225), simon reynolds took mills to task for “conceptual overkill”. in the 1990s—from reynolds’ dance-friendly, populist, perspective—mills spent far too much time imagining grand “afro-futurist” visions than creating compelling, danceable music. mills has not stopped thinking about space or the future.15 however, he has, from time to time, revived his identity as #e wizard. why would mills return to a dj persona that arguably peaked in the late 1980s? f"%2)( 5. j(00 m"++/ "# @()0*):!#3( "# d($)*"$, o3$*1() 4?5? | p,*$* 1& a#%"( l"#8(). http://www.flickr.com/technochick g,*+| m!"#$!"#"#% “s&#'” "# d($)*"$ >a in an interview, conducted for the local detroit alternative press paper metro times for an october 2010 performance by #e wizard, mills acknowledged why he might be interested in performing a potentially older mix of records with turntables by showing concern for the state of dance music culture’s musicians and audiences. when asked about the di"erence between the act of performing in a club versus executing a set for a radio show in the 1980s—in other words, whether actually seeing an audience mattered to his creative process as a dj—mills said: it was little bit di"erent back then because people used to dance more... so i could very easily imagine the type of dances from the “schoolcra%” to all the kinds of things people were doing back then and try to imagine how they would be reacting to it. but now it’s a little bit more di"erent. #e people are kind of dancing less or it’s not really structured type of dancing so . . . so i use other factors to kind of decide how the music should be shaped, what the tempo should be, the texture, what things should be heard as the main component and things like that. but i am still a dj . . . so in my mind i have a particular type of person wanting to hear a particular type of thing ... [i]t was easy to imagine how the people would react to those things because their dances were so in&uential it was really kind of directing the music in a certain way . . . it was easy to imagine when i was on the radio at night playing this stu". according to mills, both nationally and globally audiences are no longer dancing or, perhaps more accurately, no longer dancing in the particular way they did in 1980s as mills began to hone his cra%. in those days, dancers improvised using a complex yet recognizable set of gestures and dance moves—some with well-known local names, like the “schoolcra%”, named a%er a detroit west side street—that mills could and would recognize and react to during his sets and imagine later as he created music for radio and, eventually, his own recordings. he continues: when people are dancing and you can clearly see that there is a certain type of art that’s going behind what they’re doing with their body to the music. . . . #e dj or the producer while watching it—you have to assume that the people are adjusting to it so well that they are beginning to relate to it [the music] physically and that you have to also assume that at some point they are going to feel so comfortable moving that they are going to modify what they are doing to modify their body to the music and that is what you’re looking for if you’re a dj, if you are a producer, that’s the stu" you’re looking for, you’re looking for the talkback from the music that you made or the music that you’re playing and that gives you information of what to do next.16 when the people stop dancing you lose a large part of that communication. if they’re just standing there and they’re putting their hands in the air like they do now with hip-hop—and a lot of techno parties for one reason or another—the dj can’t see very clearly how the people are really reacting to it, if you can’t see the legs move. it’s that language that’s been created for many, many, years that seems to be slowly dissolving away. of course producers will begin to make music that will only get the hands up in d!#3(32+$ 4(5)>6 the air and not necessarily make the people move because that’s the information that he’s getting. it’s a two-way street and it’s all connected. if i had to think whether the music was more interesting back then as opposed to now i would say “yes” and that’s mainly because the people were dancing and there were structured dance moves that the people did to it which let you knew how the people were hearing it. when djs can’t “read” their audiences—when the sounds they make do not conjure particular gestures of bodies in motion—then it is almost impossible, as mills describes, to take them somewhere new. if this potentially tragic circumstance is juxtaposed with mills’ focus on gesture in the apparent comedic !ree ages remixes, the dark irony of this contemporary situation—its existential stakes—become more apparent. in the remixes, mills is helping to create “spontaneous” gestures that are slowly disappearing in the clubs that he plays in. why are these gestures disappearing? one problem, mills argues, is when audiences consist primarily of young fans. mills contends that multigenerational, racially and sexually diverse, audiences tend to educate their dancers and even djs into the rituals of the dance. however, this mentoring process has become rare in mills’ estimation. another reason mills cites for the lack of dancing is that digital dj technology has removed the risk of making mistakes—and the potential to build up mixing skills to make mistakes creatively. djs, no longer forced to touch records to keep them synced, have lost part of their own creative practice.17 #ompson’s remix aesthetic appears theoretically responsive enough to jump from 1920s movie houses, to 1970s hip hop djs, to silent !lm remixes as mills has created them. however, the overall conundrum of the remix aesthetic for the dj that mills has outlined remains. #e “sound projectionist” vj may be able to capture and manipulate images—especially human !gures in motion—in a pedagogic gesture meant, as it seems to be in mills’ case, to remind audiences of the possibilities of edm. when mills performs for seated audiences, as he sometimes does when performing new soundtracks, this highly didactic audio-visual opportunity made possible by advances in digital technologies seems wholly appropriate. however, the sound projectionist is not a dj in the edm sense of that term. #e demise of djing as an analog process utilizing turntables and vinyl records is inextricably linked to the cessation of dancing as mills has understood it through his career. dj mixing with technics 1200s, vinyl records and a mixer—as consciously taught and circulated by a core group of djs across the us and jamaica, eventually !nding a global mass audience of dancers—has proven to be a minority movement, a minor practice that, though in&uential, according to one of its most profound practitioners, has failed to maintain the appeal of its central, vibrating, creative dynamic: the discourse of the dance. h!b$"#: r(/$*)"#% “s&#'” o, f$/+%( ,/73# !'2*$' #3' 2010 m*1'.',# f'"#/1%0—the tenth anniversary of detroit’s electronic dance music festival in hart plaza—festival co-creator and “creative director”, carl craig, hosted an evening of !lms about, and inspired by, detroit musicians. g,*+| m!"#$!"#"#% “s&#'” "# d($)*"$ >> #e event, “2010: a detroit odyssey”, featured the !rst showing of the festival documentary !e drive home, a french-made !lm cycles of the mental machine that followed the voice and ideas of former radio dj the electrifying mojo, and a video recording of a symphonic concert dedicated to the late detroit-born hip hop producer j dilla (born james yancey) called timeless suite for ma dukes. #ese apparently realistic representations of detroit music and culture were shown amidst the 1920s science !ction !lm metropolis, originally directed by fritz lang, and, as we have seen, “remixed” by je" mills. f"%2)( 4. f+&() 0*) “4?5?: a d($)*"$ o8&//(&”. d!#3(32+$ 4(5)>7 despite the free admission and the rare lineup of !lmic texts, the music hall event was sparsely attended. however, anyone who stayed for the festival would have recognized that this night of !lms was not the only “screen”-based moment of the weekend. on the festival’s opening night, richard hawtin, performing as long-time moniker and live performance alter-ego plastikman, brought a cutting-edge, hour-long performance to hart plaza’s main stage that featured him performing surrounded by a screen consisting of light-emitting diodes (leds), an updated version of “#e cube” developed for the 2008 “contakt” tour by visual artist ali demeril for hawtin and other artists from the windsorite’s m_nus record label. #is spectacular sonic performance was fully intertwined with its carefully cra%ed visual elements conducted on the screen. in fact, it was clear from the beginning of the performance, when a voice began speaking and a line of light began &uctuating along with it, as in a spectrogram, that considerable care had been taken to make sure sound and light were in sync.18 #e hour-long performance featured all the startling loud bass pulses and crisp, crackling drum patterns, as well as the obligatory ups-and-downs, and the now-you-hear-it, nowyou-don’t deliveries, that seem to be crucial to the execution of contemporary edm performance. however, it was the visual cues that helped to explicitly center the audience’s attention. except for a handful of key moments where hawtin’s shadow was shown to the audience to be within the curtain of leds, the artist himself was not the apparent center of the performance. instead eyes were on the screen. first, it was the sine wave reacting as both mouth and spectrogram to a deep voice familiar to plastikman fans, a voice that i imagine is the superego of the artist himself—or perhaps better, the audience’s collective superego— telling us what not to think or do. #e voice has featured in many hawtin performances over the years, and in his plastikman full-length album, closer (2003). #e spoken word lyrics captured the migraine-slowness of a bad acid trip, telling the audience not to ask him but to “ask yourself ”. plastikman, through sound and image, seemed to channel #e wizard of oz, annoyed at our presence yet at least sympathetic enough to deliver the sulfur and fake thunder that the audience demands / wants / expects. #e images generated by the thousands of led dots on the screen &ickered !ercely at times, simulating eclectic spinning patterns, while at others stayed static. shapes, repeating, shi%ing, blinked with the music. some of the visuals changed with the beginning of a new track and therefore seem pre-programmed, more like music videos then visual patterns created by the sounds. instead of an itunes visualizer reacting to a set list, the e"ect seemed more didactic, meant to be a direct visual commentary on, for instance, the computer code script we are so familiar with from the matrix !lms. in red and orange, black and white, and “computer” green, the images moved with the sound, manipulated by the triggers inside hawtin’s cocoon-like enclosure via wireless networks and hundreds of carefully hidden cords. it is unclear what the best seat in the house is at a performance like this when the screen is circular and speakers are seemingly positioned everywhere within a cement bowl—though the sight-lines of audience members behind the stage were restricted by the sca"olding that surrounded hawtin’s circular command center. at times the emitting visuals made the circular “cube” appear like it was levitating just above the stage. g,*+| m!"#$!"#"#% “s&#'” "# d($)*"$ >9 f"%2)( a. p+!/$"':!# +".(, *@(#"#% #"%,$ *0 $,( 4?5? m*.(:(#$ f(/$".!+ "# d($)*"$. p,*$*: c!)+($*# g,*+-. #e “screen” did not end with the scrim of on-stage led projectors. instead, the audience members themselves, many with iphones, turned their own screens towards the stage—and not merely to take pictures or video of the spectacle. instead, through an iphone application called “synk”, the “users” were able to “participate in an experiment in audience-performer interaction aiming to blur the lines of perception and participation”. #e description continues on the plastikman website: #ey [the audience] will connect to the plastikman wi-fi network available at each show, and a%er being noti!ed by a vibration triggered by certain moments in the performance, be able to contribute and interact by reorganizing word samples, viewing the venue from the plastikman perspective, and seeing the real-time programming of the drum and percussive elements and e"ects. in between the performances, the application is in sleeper mode and functions as a plastikman atmospheric location shi%er. using the iphone’s built in microphone and accelerometer, users will be immersed in a plastikman environment. for best results, use headphones.19 i did not have an iphone during the performance so cannot comment from experience on the “logikal”, “kamera”, “synkotik” and “konsole” options within the iphone “synk” application itself. however, drawing from the video clips o"ered in the “watch” section of the plastikman live web site, i can point out two things that seem important for performance and the remix aesthetic that i have been discussing. first, hawtin as plastikman d!#3(32+$ 4(5)>< has moved far beyond turntable-like controllers in order to manipulate sound and image and embraced touch-pad technologies like griid (via http://liine.net/griid/en/index.html) to navigate both the macro (the overall shape and contour of sounds) and micro moments (speci!c notes, passages, rhythms) of the performance. i can already sense, in my attempt at describing this shi%, the utilization of metaphors from architecture and sculpture—“shape and contour”—and therefore a potential break from the circular, repetitive, (re)mix metaphors o"ered by #ompson. second, the number of people (and the !nances) required for such a performance continues to grow, even from the complete “club” experience that hawtin has classically o"ered whenever he comes “home” to detroit (hawtin now lives full-time in berlin), hearkening back to his earlier career djing at elaborately staged parties in spaces as varied as warehouses to country !elds. in this way, the club or rave experience seems to have dissolved into a larger concert experience, comparable to witnessing pink floyd’s “#e wall”.20 however, it is from the audience perspective where hawtin’s rupture within the remix aesthetic can be understood acutely. from the millsian perspective o"ered earlier, the audience is not dancing in any recognizable way—i saw no one doing the “schoolcra%”— and, even if they had been, hawtin as plastikman could not have seen them within the stage-sized screen that enveloped him. arguably, hawtin had the audience’s attention but the feedback between instrument and musician, sound and body, dj and audience / dancer, was not the only, or primary, means of syncing with them. whether it is by tweeting the tracks he plays when he djs to non-dancing audiences thousands of miles away (via http:// twitter.com/rhawtin_live) or, at movement, by providing a way for audiences to “synk” with his performance both inside and outside of the club, hawtin is holding himself open to what is new and possible in the convergence of various technologies of performance. in the process, he has kept himself at, or at least near, the cutting edge of what it means to “interact” with a crowd in the di"used, digital way that social networking and wireless technologies have made possible. #e revenge of the sound projectionist is complete—we have only to throw our hands in the air to celebrate. c*#3+2/"*# i, 2001, j*3, a&85%1/1% %,+ r/&3/' h%)#/,, cofounders of the plus 8 record label and longtime creative collaborators, introduced final scratch, a combination so%warehardware package then capable of allowing djs to manipulate digital music !les on their laptops via analog turntables.21 #e technology made it possible for a dj to leave their record collection at home when they toured but did not, according to acquaviva, eliminate the joy of touch. speaking to mtv germany at the time, acquaviva said: “i told you, you have to touch it. once you touch it, it’s like falling in love”.22 however, in 2008, a%er the purchase of final scratch by native instruments and the increasing e$ciencies of so%ware and hardware, hawtin, acquaviva’s partner, disconnected his turntables completely.23 #e result is a situation in which the computer has completely taken over what was once regarded as the key dj talent—the hand-ear-eye gesture required to forge the mix. http://liine.net/griid/en/index.html http://twitter.com/rhawtin_live http://twitter.com/rhawtin_live g,*+| m!"#$!"#"#% “s&#'” "# d($)*"$ >= now—eyes committed to the computer screen, ears tuned to the invariant loop, and hands ready to push, turn, twist and clap—the so-called dj reorganizes his senses to intensify “the desire for the beat” (butler 2006: 92). hawtin’s response in 2008 was not melancholic though: “allowing the computer to do one thing is only boring”, hawtin said in a youtube clip showcasing his setup at the time, “if you don’t use the time the computer saves you to do something else”. for hawtin, that something else is the ability to focus on loops and e"ects. hawtin continues to experiment with this “something else”.24 for now, richie hawtin will continue to be a “dj”, albeit a digital one, if only because of the expense and systematized planning required for plastikman performances. drawing from the !elds of !lm studies and club culture studies, i have argued that a transitional moment has been reached where a set of musical practices and expectations with respect to dance music has been displaced—perhaps permanently—by a sonic environment that more persistently engages the possibilities of digital music-making and social networking. #e result, for djs like mills, is the impending death of an art form that worked, more or less continuously, since the 1960s. for others, interpreting hawtin’s performance and web presence, the shi% is merely another example of change within an entertainment environment that emerged from technological innovation and complex, sometimes ambiguous, audience feedback. mills, via vjing and !lm remixes, as well as online via his facebook page, has shown that he can engage his audience similarly to hawtin; though there is none as yet, i will not be surprised if axis records, mills’ label, rolls out an iphone application. however, mills clearly regrets the disappearance of dancers who, through their own agency, collaborated with him in the mix. in hawtin’s performance as plastikman it seemed that technological progress might override such losses. nonetheless, the crowd seemed to be enraptured. at the end of the plastikman movement performance, however, hawtin, the man not the scientist, came out from behind the screen for an encore, perhaps hinting nostalgically to an earlier remix moment. an analog drum machine on a stand was produced from below the stage and hawtin began to “perform” his most famous early 1990s track, “spastik”. #e gesture was anti-climatic and highly personal. as dan sicko discussed in techno rebels, hawtin had been shocked at how certain european audiences had synced with the aggressiveness of his productions of the early 1990s, at times shouting anti-semitic chants during dj performances (2010: 89–90). detroit producers, according to hawtin, were “not making hard music just for the sake of it… we weren’t slamming people over the head just for the sake of it” (quoted in sicko 90). #e gesture of coming out from the screen brings this perspective home. hawtin, a%er pummeling his audience sonically and visually, still wants to sense their reaction directly—he does want what mills calls “feedback.” if this is true, then perhaps dance critics like beverly may (2000) are correct, that indeed the ideal of edm, as practiced by hawtin, is not to sideline sonic-thinking through distraction but instead to produce the possibility for “uni!ed concentration” and “collective focus”. however, mills’ observations are still cogent. a particular form of creative, imaginative, dance called forth by a dj immersed in the remix aesthetic has ended. #is does not d!#3(32+$ 4(5)7? necessarily mean that dancing has ended or that music no longer propels humans to create new gestures or arm them with, as kenneth burke (1973: 304) might have said if he had ever attended a disco, “equipment for living”. however, it does mean that a particular mode of aural/visual production—the province of the dj—has become unhinged from its audience. what has emerged are performances where the sound projectionist is confronted not with a seated audience of !lm-goers, as in the 1920s, but with a sea of savvy digital producers, hands !lled with interactive, audio-visual devices, their attention not focused on their feet but themselves. n!"#$ 1 “je" mills: time sensitive 2004”: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8wvltubydw> (accessed 12 february 2011). 2 i am indebted to comments on the aforementioned youtube video identifying this track. a version of the track is available on youtube: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96agoqqo1q4> (accessed 6 february 2011). 3 je" mills is not the !rst artist to appropriate or remix video and sound together. for a brief overview of the “remix era” that includes a discussion of trends in audio and visual remixing throughout the 20th century, see lev manovich, “what comes a%er remix?” (winter 2007). available on “lev manovich: articles” <http://manovich.net/articles/> (accessed 31 january 2011). 4 an image of this “co$n” can be seen in the online edition of #ompson’s article, available via cabnet: <http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/35/thompson.php> (accessed 6 february 2011). 5 for a history of this era from the point of view of pit orchestras and musician, see kelley (2001). 6 a brief history of “#e scene” was reported on local detroit tv station upn50 in 2006. see “detroit jit (#e scene)” <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fdzdkp4eo4> (accessed 6 october 2010). 7 je" mills, interview with the author (online via skype), 20 september 2010. 8 for an updated overview of mills’ current work see the axis records website <http://www. axisrecords.com> and mills’ facebook page <http://www.facebook.com/je"mills>. 9 mills’ version of metropolis is not yet available on dvd, though it has been released on cd. a promo video for his soundtrack is available on youtube: <http://video.google.com/videoplay? docid=304126598864842695&q=je"+mills+metropolis&total=3&start=0&num=10&so= 0&type=search&plindex=0> (accessed 19 february 2010). based on my memory of watching metropolis with mills’ soundtrack in detroit during the 2010 movement festival, it would seem that it was mills’ intention to sync his music with the !lm. according to a reviewer of this article, the “live” performance by mills of metropolis at the 2004 sonar festival in barcelona was also faithful to the !lm. #ough i do not discuss it here, in 2009 mills performed a new soundtrack for cecil b. demille’s !e cheat and this year has produced a soundtrack for sergei eisenstein’s october (see picard 2011). 10 “dvj-x1—pioneer product archive”, <http://www.pioneer.co.uk/uk/products/archive/ dvj-x1/index.html > (accessed 19 february 2010). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8wvltubydw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96agoqqo1q4 http://manovich.net/articles/ http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/35/thompson.php http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fdzdkp4eo4 http://www.axisrecords.com http://www.axisrecords.com http://www.facebook.com/jeffmills http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=304126598864842695&q=jeff+mills+metropolis&total=3&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=304126598864842695&q=jeff+mills+metropolis&total=3&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=304126598864842695&q=jeff+mills+metropolis&total=3&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0 http://www.pioneer.co.uk/uk/products/archive/dvj-x1/index.html http://www.pioneer.co.uk/uk/products/archive/dvj-x1/index.html g,*+| m!"#$!"#"#% “s&#'” "# d($)*"$ 75 11 see “alloy orchestra”, <http://www.alloyorchestra.com>. see also “#e hayseed (silent, 1919)— fatty arbuckle, buster keaton 1/3”: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo2urf7elum> for an example of their work (accessed 19 february 2010). 12 see, for instance, paul d. miller a.k.a. dj spooky that subliminal kid, “notes for paul d. miller’s ‘rebirth of a nation’—remix of d.w. gri$th’s 1915 !lm ‘birth of a nation’” <http:// www.djspooky.com/articles/rebirth.php> (accessed december 2007). 13 “buster in costume stu" ”, los angeles times, 18 july 1923: wf10 and “recalls days of old rome in photoplay”, los angeles times, 2 march 1923: ii 11. 14 “#e v-4 is a 4-channel video mixer made for portable or !xed installation use. it is ideal for use in nightclubs, places of worship, theatres, and other live performances. #e compact design of the v-4 gives you the freedom to make your video sources come alive”. 'uoted in “roland systems group u.s.—product: v–4”, <http://www.rolandsystemsgroup.com/products/100004> (accessed 12 february 2011). 15 for instance, on 19 june 2010, mills returned to detroit for a performance called “something in the sky” in which he played new tracks via two cd-dj turntables while images of supposed ufos and ufo sightings played on a screen. see <http://www.residentadvisor.net/event. aspx?164048> (accessed 31 january 2011). 16 #is description of edm dance by mills is consonant with work by ethnomusicologists (see butler 2006: 72–5). 17 mills has attempted to address this situation through vinyl-only releases like “#e drummer” on his purposemaker imprint in 2009 which he explained are designed to be manipulated by djs—not played straight through without engagement. see <http://www.axisrecords.com/>. 18 for a technical description of hawtin’s performance, see amanda connon-unda, “plastikman live transforms detroit” <http://www.musingsonspace.com/2010/08/04/plastikman-livetransforms-detroit/> (accessed 4 august 2010). 19 all quotes from the “synk iphone application” portion of the “plastikman” website <http:// plastikman.com> as accessed on 15 october 2010. 20 roger waters, quoted from “roger waters: #e wall live: o$cial site”: “i recently came across this quote of mine from 22 years ago: ‘what it comes down to for me is this: will the technologies of communication in our culture, serve to enlighten us and help us to understand one another better, or will they deceive us and keep us apart?’ i believe this is still a supremely relevant question”. 'uote from 11 april 2010 on <http://www.roger-waters.com> (accessed 20 october 2010). 21 see “10 years of digital djing with richie hawtin” from urb <http://www.urb. com/2011/01/25/10-years-of-digital-djing-with-richie-hawtin/> (accessed 31 january 2011). 22 “john acquaviva demonstrates finalscratch @ mtv germany” via <http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=zfyojgvlbdo> (accessed 31 january 2011). 23 “richie hawtin on his traktor scratch dj setup—pt 1” via <http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=j1h9w_il"0> (accessed 31 january 2011). 24 “ean goldne interview’s [sic] richie hawtin at namm 2011 (future of digital djing)” via <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vokslpuj1kk> (accessed 31 january 2011). http://www.alloyorchestra.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo2urf7elum http://www.djspooky.com/articles/rebirth.php http://www.djspooky.com/articles/rebirth.php http://www.rolandsystemsgroup.com/products/100004 http://www.residentadvisor.net/event.aspx?164048 http://www.residentadvisor.net/event.aspx?164048 http://www.axisrecords.com/ http://www.musingsonspace.com/2010/08/04/plastikman-live-transforms-detroit/ http://www.musingsonspace.com/2010/08/04/plastikman-live-transforms-detroit/ http://plastikman.com http://plastikman.com http://www.roger-waters.com http://www.urb.com/2011/01/25/10-years-of-digital-djing-with-richie-hawtin/ http://www.urb.com/2011/01/25/10-years-of-digital-djing-with-richie-hawtin/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfyojgvlbdo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfyojgvlbdo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1h9w_ilff0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1h9w_ilff0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vokslpuj1kk d!#3(32+$ 4(5)74 r#%#&#'(#$ burke, kenneth. 1973. !e philosophy of literary form. los angeles: university of california press. butler, mark. 2006. unlocking the groo"e: rhythm, meter, and musical design in electronic dance music. bloomington: indiana university press. connon-unda, amanda. 2010. “plastikman live transforms detroit”. musings on space. 4 august: <http://www.musingsonspace.com/2010/08/04/plastikman-live-transforms-detroit/> (accessed 16 january 2011). gunning, tom. 1993. “‘now you see it, now you don’t’: #e temporality of the cinema of attractions”. vel"et light trap, no. 32 (fall): 3–12. jenkins, henry. 2008. con"ergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york: new york university press. kelley, robin d. g. 2001. “without a song: new york musicians strike out against technology”. in !ree strikes: miners, musicians, salesgirls, and the fighting spirit of labor’s last century, ed. howard zinn, dana frank, and robin d.g. kelley, 119–55. boston: beacon press. may, beverly. 2000. “participatory #eatre: #e experiential construct of house and techno music events”. canadian !eatre review, no. 103 (summer): 9–13. pavlik, john v., and shawn mcintosh. 2011. con"erging media: a new introduction to mass communication. 2nd ed. new york: oxford university press. picard, grégory. 2011. “techno experimentalist je" mills puts a new spin on an eisenstein film,” artinfo france (4 january). <http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/36680/technoexperimentalist-je"-mills-puts-a-new-musical-spin-on-an-eisenstein-!lm/> (accessed 7 february 2011). reynolds, simon. 1998. generation ecstasy: into the world of techno and rave culture. boston: little, brown and company. sherburne, philip. 2004. “digital discipline: minimalism in house and techno”. in audio culture: readings in modern music, ed. christoph cox and daniel warner, 319–26. new york: continuum. sicko, dan. 2010. techno rebels: !e renegades of electronic funk. 2nd ed. detroit: wayne state university press. #ompson, emily. 2002. !e soundscape of modernity: architectural acoustics and the culture of listening in america, 1900–1933. cambridge: mit press. ———. 2009. “remix redux: in the silent film era, the roots of the dj”. cabinet, no. 35 (fall): 23–28. http://www.musingsonspace.com/2010/08/04/plastikman-live-transforms-detroit/ http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/36680/techno-experimentalist-jeff-mills-puts-a-new-musical-spin-on-an-eisenstein-film/ http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/36680/techno-experimentalist-jeff-mills-puts-a-new-musical-spin-on-an-eisenstein-film/ acid house night at cuckoo cathy adamek university of south australia <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.02.10> fig 1. the researcher cuts loose to joey negro new year's eve (2012). photo: lol_2012. went out for cam's (dj hmc) set at 12:00 am. knew i could wear more dance friendly gear to cuckoo (underground club in red-light hindley st), unlike sugar (a rundle st club, in the upmarket east end) where i always have to negotiate men on the pull. very similar to clothes i would wear to dance class. pulled on my friend lesley's abyss weirdo jacket that she bought for an exorbitant price from sym choon (iconic alternative clothing shop on rundle st) in 1990. this is now a collectable item according to razak (sym choon's designer). one of the deja-vu experiences of this study is that gen y fashion is having an early nineties moment, so out come the hotpants and shorts over tights while i worry slightly that i may look like a sad nineties reject who has worn nothing else for 20 years. i stomp past lots of young and very drunk people outside red square and what used to be the royal admiral. seems to me nothing has changed much—just more people queuing. at cuckoo, suss out dance floor—best position and sound in the middle, and sugar at the front near the dj box. feel a bit cautious at first—only know cam here, oh and eugene earning his club stripes working behind the bar and as a glassy. lots of young people too. first time here on my own, not quite at home like sugar. however, i already feel safe—the vibe is a respectful "we are here for the music" atmosphere. cam ramps the next few hours through the early days of acid house including his re-edits—a wonderful hallucinatory build. it's trance like but also highly energised. i really feel the roots of the sound in funk unlike a lot of new music that seems to lack soul. part of cam's detroit legacy maybe? slowly older dancers join the floor—more men than women. i start slow. i've learnt not to hit too hard, but build with the music when i'm entering a new dynamic on the floor. keep abyss weirdo on for as long as possible until i get too hot. find floor a bit sticky (where spilled drinks have dried) but it seems to improve as we go. nice light effects towards end of the set that are lovely to respond to with hands. i have a couple of rests over the 3 hours. loved bouncing off the walls and the trance effect of the music built wildly by cam into full old skool house breaks by which stage there is no holding back—although trying to mix in new styles again, so not to appear like i haven't gone out in 20 years, the repertory of 20 years ago is perfectly suited to the music and impossible to repress; acid dancing and loads of jumping and footwork. again the wildness of the music reminds me of charismatic christian church meets voodoo. the percolator comes out, a new move learnt from youtube and perfected while writing a paper in my postgrad office and ideally suited to the feel by this stage which has broken out of the austerity of man as machine music, minimalist and techy best served by a contemporary dance style. i watch this one as i don't want to sit too obviously on one style and strangely feel more conscious of being judged in a more discerning environment. but as i said when i break loose as cam does anything goes—hooray! total abandon, hair everywhere. want to try a new spot on floor and would like to try in front of dj box, very uninspiring group of young'uns have been holding court for hours doing very little. prime dancing position of course so think i'll muscle in a bit because there's plenty of room or at least get them working it a bit—you have to earn your spots. they seem slightly uncomfortable but tolerate my presence yet are resolute about their reserved places. there are some polite but unconvincing attempts to ramp it. have discussion later with lady from the day who laments the loss of the hippy vibe on the floor. one agenda i want to bring to floor after observing in rest break is to feminise the male flavour created by tech style of music (there has been some comment that women don't go out to techno nights) again does cam respond musically when i bring this in? he appears to, but always like mind and body reading magic. want to express feminine energy of music without being obviously sexy, use all of body—arm extensions, back bends... this is not the music for tease, burlesque or ballet. it is elemental. talk to cam and friends after. i told him i didn't know where it was going to go when i came out. he says he didn't know either—of course it's a story that gets made on the night. he tells me his record collection is in disarray—10,000 or more—as he moves back to his parents. cam has always had one of the most sensual relationships with the dance floor i have experienced. crowd by this stage is mostly old! it's also taken this long for my eyes to adjust—always a problem identifying people in the dark. lots of familiar faces now. cam has a fan come up and congratulate, and so do i... "michael" comes up and shakes my hand i get a cheek kiss "it was a pleasure"... i am gracious, as is he and of course he does not outstay his welcome. talk to cam and friends outside—some old acquaintances from times past including one who was good friends with the original owner of my jacket. we are all the same age. they haven't made the choice to have families other than their club ones. easier to go out at 12 and be home at 5! i am sore and aching, sweat dissolved by icy early morning outside and i don't stay for the carter bros live set. commentary an important part of the research within my phd, adelaide dance music culture late 80s-early 90s, is the relationship played between my artistic practice and the dance floor over a 20 year period. this piece is part of a journal that documents my dance journey and other observations over the course of a night out, generally to listen to an artist that is relevant in some way to my study. the researcher now has a family so fieldwork is conducted within the demands of early mornings and early nights. this has created a very different context to my clubbing as a singleton or partnered with no young children. i actually feel quite proud that what was viewed suspiciously by some (such as parents) as i was growing up now has an aura of legitimacy about it. as my father put it, "your miss-spent youth has paid off".[1] there is a certain incredulous admiration from my buddies that i have managed to turn going out and dancing—always a consistent occupation throughout my life—into paid research. this has also allowed me a continued involvement with the dance music scene, at a time when most friends have put aside this part of their lives associated with youthful pursuits, as one would place a relic into a memento box. however i have come to question these divisions between youth and adulthood particularly as i have met many fellow generation xers (most of us in our late 30s to late 40s) who still go out to listen to artists (who are roughly the same age as ourselves) despite the circulating media discourses that tend to perpetrate such dance scenes as "youth" activities. the youth/adult dichotomy was particularly pronounced that evening, as it was an acid house set (a late 80s electronic genre defined by the 303 synth, currently in revival) played by techno exponent dj hmc in a contemporary environment. it is common to find groups of young iphone wielding fans forming an impenetrable static front-line army at many of the gigs of older well-known artists such as derrick may and hmc.[2] their disengaged participation (standing and texting in this instance) or rock style air pumping, demonstrates to me that they appreciate the superficial aura of the event and artist. however they appear unable to engage in the moment, by interpreting through their bodies, the call and response that occurs between dj and dancer. it is this fundamental relationship, i would argue, that has made these artists leaders in their field and the dance floor one of the most exciting arenas of contemporary performance art. being seen and being watched is as important as performing for oneself in this context, where clothes and dance style are gifts you bring to make the night special. as a result of this ongoing methodology, i have come to see the importance of music and dance as a unifying, energizing and spiritual practice that is surely central to our continuing identity rather than something shed or lost as the trappings of youth. this is particularly so for those of us who experienced the second summer of love (c.1988) first hand. author biography cathy adamek trained as a classical dancer and actor and has performed with many companies including state opera south australia and the state theatre company of south australia. film and tv credits include the feature film cut, mcleod's daughters, chuck finn and here's humphrey which she went on to produce, also a presenter on out of the ordinary for nws 9. she choreographed and performed original dance theatre at the sydney opera house, adelaide festival and the award winning polecats for the 2007 adelaide fringe. since the birth of her son, she continues to work as a leading voice over artist and currently tutors and lectures at the university of south australia as a phd candidate with an apa scholarship. email: <catherine.adamek@unisa.edu.au>. notes [1] an unfair assessment on my father's part; my parents were of the "tiger" kind, and i spent my days as a late teen and into my 20s either slogging it out at the ballet barre, at drama school or at university. [2] the author also wields an iphone and appreciates the technological mediation can connect a space in new ways, but i believe, quite passionately (dogmatic assertion it may be) that a dance floor is predominantly for dancing and bodily communication. its very soul is based on present time (as opposed to virtual) body-to-body interaction. popular music: topics, trends & trajectories tara brabazon london: sage publications, 2012. isbn: 978-1-84787-435-1 (hardcover), 978-1-84787-436-8 (paperback) rrp: us$108.00 (hardcover), us$43.00 (paperback) ed montano rmit university (aus) for students of popular music there is no shortage of books, with the field now firmly established in the corridors of academia and interpreted through a body of literature as diverse and as vibrant as the music itself. the most engaging and stimulating reading is more often than not to be found in the writing that has a specific focus, whether that be on singer, subculture, style or scene. by contrast, you rarely seek out a textbook for reading pleasure outside of the classroom context. with this diversity of literature, it is questionable whether the world actually needs another textbook on popular music, given that between monographs and journals it is relatively easy to compile a list of required readings for any course on the subject. that said, having introductory material in the one easy-to-digest form is particularly convenient, and therein is the appeal of tara brabazon’s popular music: topics, trends & trajectories. the book is promoted as “the first text book on pop music to be completely researched and written after the arrival of the ipod”. while i can’t be sure of the veracity of such a claim, it allows space for brabazon to explore and interrogate the many changes to music production and consumption that have occurred with recent developments in technology, explaining in the introduction that “digitization” was one of the propelling factors behind the writing of the book (4). the text is structured into five key sections (approaches, music spaces, instruments of/for study, genre and community, debates), each of which is subdivided into short chapters. these chapters feature four “key questions” at the end to stimulate student discussion, testing not just comprehension of the chapter content but also of broader debates and issues around that content. in relation specifically to electronic dance music culture, brabazon provides a handful of interesting discussions. in the section on music spaces, attention is given to the centrality of clubs and pubs in the flowering of particular music scenes, with the warehouse in chicago and the hacienda in manchester receiving detailed descriptions, together with passing reference to london’s shoom, spectrum and the trip as clubs that “were not only located in a precise geographical location but also in a distinct moment in history” (69). elsewhere, there are references to rave culture and the rise and fall of acid house, the genres of disco and house (the latter located alongside a discussion of “post-house musics”), and the flourishing of remixing and mash-up culture facilitated by digitization and user generated content. brabazon certainly takes a broad perspective throughout the book, demonstrating an appealing open-mindedness. in the section on instruments, one chapter is devoted solely to turntablism, with references to not only hip hop and its pioneering djs but also the shifts from analogue to digital that have given rise to software such as final scratch and the practice of controllerism. while all of this is nothing new for the scholar of edm, the attention given to dance music and club culture is an acknowledgement of edm’s standing in the development of popular music, brabazon going beyond the rock-centred orientation of much popular music writing. as she notes in the introduction, one motivation for the book’s creation was “a desire to construct a more complex and contemporary musical history that is post-rock and post-genre” (6). at the conclusion of the book i’m still unclear as to what “post-genre” could possibly refer to, but brabazon certainly succeeds in outlining a history of popular music that accounts for style and genre complexity and that shifts away from any infatuation with the sound of the guitar. the breadth and scope of the book is impressive. brabazon displays a thorough knowledge of popular music history, technologies, debates and theories. while any book is ultimately defined as much by what is excluded as what is included, brabazon certainly cannot be accused of omitting the essential facts. this is perhaps the most impressive aspect of the book. while the array of topics covered dictates that each chapter runs to no more than a few pages, you never feel that brabazon has failed to mention important information. her ability to speak with equal authority on subjects as diverse as, for example, metal, sonic architecture, and race, appropriation and commodification lends the book an integrity that will ensure its relevance for a number of years. obsolescence is the destiny of all textbooks, and while the reference to the ipod in the promotional blurb already seems somewhat anachronistic (perhaps “iphone” or “apple’s dominance” would have been more appropriate), there’s an intellectual rigour and comprehensiveness embedded within the book that ensures it transcends its year of publication. no doubt this will be one of those texts that gets republished very few years in an updated edition. a colleague and i used this book as the prescribed text for an introductory undergraduate course on popular music earlier this year, and we both found it highly effective as a starter book for students to initially consult before moving on to more theoretically detailed journal articles and topic-specific books. feedback from students was that brabazon’s writing style is accessible and engaging, and that the variety of sources listed at the end of each chapter (further reading, sonic sources, visual sources, web sources) is useful for anyone seeking to pursue a particular topic in more detail. the broad coverage of the book means that it will comfortably fit in to most popular music courses. brabazon has crafted an essential textbook that balances historical outlines with contemporary debates, meaning that it is comprehensive enough to engage not just students studying popular music for the first time but also those with more sustained involvement in the field. fusing discussions of key artists, styles and moments in the development of popular music with acknowledgement of the work of key academics, theorists and journalists, brabazon demonstrates how popular music is both a diverse and intriguing cultural phenomenon that demands continued research and investigation, and a complex and challenging area of study surrounded by a variety of theoretical debates. textbooks rarely provide a stimulating cover-to-cover read, but popular music: topics, trends & trajectories breaks that tradition, and will be at home equally in the hands of students as it will on the shelves of their lecturers. reviews1.2-typeset reviews 112 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 reviews reggaeton. raquel z. rivera, wayne marshall, and deborah pacini hernandez (eds). durham and london. duke university press, 2009. isbn: 978-0-8223-4360-8 (hardcover), 978-0-8223-4383-5 (paperback) rrp: us$89.95 (hardcover), us$24.95 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.09 alejandro l. madrid university of illinois at chicago (us) when certain products or practices attain a more secure place in a particular cultural landscape they tend to become naturalized in the minds of those who experience such landscapes; it is almost as if they had always been there, they become “authenticated”. this seems to be the case with reggaeton. as i sit down to write this review i ask myself when i heard about reggaeton for the first time and i cannot find an answer. when pushing myself to remember anything related to what i now believe belongs to the reggaeton performance complex, a number of fragmented images and sounds come to mind. i remember el general in local, low budget shows from the telemundo or univisión tv networks in new york city and boston in the early 1990s; then students asking me about the genre (and actually calling it reggaeton) almost ten years later in chicago; finally, its explosion into the mainstream media in 2005, and its pervasive presence in clubs in havana, cuba, that summer. although most of these memories are rather vague and patchy, what i do remember clearly is not being able to explain thoroughly what reggaeton was. the sounds and the images seemed to have always been there since the 1990s, but in fact, reggaeton was something relatively new, and as such, also somehow elusive. since the mid 2000s reggaeton has arguably become the most danced and talked about latin music genre. it is omnipresent in latin american and latin media in the u.s.; yet, with few exceptions and disregarding its artistic success and its importance as a marker of the transnationality that characterizes contemporary latino and latin american experiences of identity, reggaeton had largely remained absent from academic discussion. reggaeton, edited by raquel z. rivera, wayne marshall, and deborah pacini hernandez, is an appropriate, timely, and thorough response and reflection on the genre’s popularity. the volume is an impressive collection of academic essays and artistic statements that deals with reggaeton’s cultural significance and stylistic meaning, and the history of transnational migration, oppression, and racial struggle behind its production, consumption, and dissemination. the aesthetic, sociological, anthropological, and political complexity of the reggaeton phenomenon can only be seriously approached from a multidisciplinary perspective. reggaeton offers a multi-logic reading where several disciplines and fields of artistic expression come together to answer questions that no disciplinary field could comprehensively answer alone. the demonstrated expertise in the fields of sociology, ethnomusicology and anthropology of the editorial team, as well as their commitment to the study of music through a transnational lens almost guaranteed the extraordinary depth and variety that this collection of essays, interviews, poetry and visual arts offers. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(2) 2010, 113-127 issn 1947-5403 ©2010 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ the book is divided into six sections. in the first section, “mapping reggaeton”, wayne marshall offers a detailed study of the stylistic development of the genre. by focusing on the transformation of the sounds and rhythms that characterize today’s reggaeton as they traveled historically through a cultural circuit that included jamaica, panama, new york and puerto rico, marshall is able to explain the links between genres such as reggae, dancehall, rap, underground, and reggaeton, whilst shedding light on the discourses of “authenticity” behind them. the second part, “the panamanian connection”, presents articles by marshall and christoph twickel as well as interviews with singers renato and el general; the combination of academic and journalistic writings alongside the artists speaking about their experiences gives the reader a rich description of the history of reggae and dancehall in panama as well as the role of american culture in the slow development of a new style that would only be called reggaeton many years later. part three, “(trans)local studies and ethnographies”, is made out of articles that focus on specific issues related to local reggaeton scenes in puerto rico (raquel z. rivera), cuba (geoff baker), and miami ( jose davila), and a re-evaluation of the role of dominican musicians and producers in the development of the genre (deborah pacini hernandez). rivera’s chapter traces the transformation of underground into reggaeton in puerto rico in relation to questions of morality and censorship. this essay pays attention to the commercial notoriety of the genre and its transformation into a site for the continued struggles over the representation of racialised stereotypes about class and criminality, and social hierarchies of the island. baker’s essay on the political tensions between rap and reggaeton in cuba is a noteworthy contribution that analyzes how both genres play a central role in the current imagination of the national and the global in a socialist country. the fourth part of the book, “visualizing reggaeton”, offers a collection of pictures by miguel luciano and kacho lópez, and stills from a video project by carolina caycedo. this section shows readers the visual aspect of reggaeton culture as well as how artists engage that culture to reflect on issues of neocolonialism, consumerism, gender, sexuality, race, and “authenticity” that concern contemporary latino youth. caycedo’s reads the hypersexualized perreo dancing style that characterizes reggaeton as an example of a new form of feminism that allows women to reclaim their sexualized bodies and use them to accomplish their own goals. part five, gendering reggaeton, presents chapters by félix jiménez, alfredo nieves moreno, and jan fairley that explore the role of reggaeton in reproducing gender values as well as contesting gender hierarchies as the genre moves transnationally between new york city, puerto rico, and cuba. jiménez’s essay compares the figures of puerto rican singers glory and ivy queen to illustrate how different individuals might engage the gender stereotypes of reggaeton to solidify or question gender hierarchies in puerto rican society; while nieves moreno focuses on how the music and performance of calle 13 challenge the stereotypes of hypermasculinity often associated with reggaeton. fairley’s contribution centers on the sexualization of the bodies in perreo dancing within the particular context of cuba’s reggaeton scene. one of fairley’s wise moves is her comparative analysis of the transgressive character of perreo in relation to earlier black genres such as danzón, rumba, tango, or samba; thus interpreting reggaeton as part of the transnational cultural flow of african diasporic culture. the final section of the book is entitled “reggaeton poetics, politics, and aesthetics”, and combines poetry by gallego and reflections on the relationship 114 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 between hip hop and reaggeton and black pride by artists welmo e. romero joseph and tego calderón with analyses by alexandra t. vázquez and frances negrónmuntaner. noteworthy is vázquez’s provocative essay on racial and gender performativity and ivy queen, providing as it does an insight into how to deconstruct contradictory and problematic moments in performance as pedagogical articulations. reggaeton is a truly important contribution to our understanding of the most pervasive and perhaps most misunderstood latin musical genre at the turn of the 21st century. the blend of academic and journalistic writings with artistic statements, interviews and visual art offers the reader an extraordinary window into the complex landscape of reggaeton. as i was reading through the book i could not help thinking: “no wonder i thought reggaeton had always been here”. the rich discussions presented in this volume allows the reader to have a clearer idea of the continuities that make this genre part of a larger cultural complex while defining its particularities as a rather new type of musical expression. as i put the book down i feel confident i could finally somehow explain what reggaeton is; however, i also understand that the vibrant and shifting cultural flows that make it meaningful will most likely challenge this assumption sooner than later. with reggaeton, however, raquel z. rivera, wayne marshall, and deborah pacini hernadez have established the foundation for the rich and productive academic conversation that the genre will still generate. rave culture. the alteration and decline of a philadelphia music scene. tammy l. anderson. philadelphia, temple university press, 2009. isbn: 978-1-59213-934-7 (hardcover), 978-1-59213-934-7 (paperback) rrp: us$79.50 (hardcover), us$25.95 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.10 beate peter manchester metropolitan university (uk) in her book on the philadelphia electronic dance music (edm) scene, tammy anderson uses rave culture to reflect on why and how particular youth cultures decline. her ethnographic methodology, turning her into a participant-observer, is helpful as it provides invaluable insight into the organisation, production and marketing of electronic dance music. investigating the rave phenomenon from a cultural perspective, she places a scene primarily defined by its music consumption into a wider social, political and cultural context. this approach allows her not only to analyse the forces within the scene that led to its alteration and decline but also to look at external factors that might have affected the perception and development of the edm scene in philadelphia, usa. comparing the past raves with contemporary edm events, anderson traces the development of such events over time. her historical narrative of the genre opposes the notion that rave is a musical form of a particular time, commonly situated between reviews 115 1989 and 1992. she creates a rave-club culture continuum that categorises edm events according to their representation of commercial or rave-like values. by doing so, anderson successfully shows that the multi-faceted space at edm events abolishes the idea of authenticity and commercialism as a binary opposition. applying cultural markers, anderson locates several types of events within this continuum and promotes the idea of a spectrum of values that show how the identity of rave culture has changed. she also introduces six different types of participants, categorised according to their insider or outsider status. as entertaining as it is to read about the difference between loyalists, clubbers, pretenders or spillovers and their personal motivation to participate in an edm event, this model struggles to explain the interest in or absence of a collective identity. although the ethnographic data collected from interviewees gives an interesting insight into the upbringing of insiders and offers an explanation for the sense of belonging that some aim for on the dance floor, other participant categories are ignored, making a distinction between the ideal types of clubbers and their attitude towards the creation of a collective identity inappropriate. anderson’s analysis of the forces of cultural change is one of the most interesting aspects of this book, not just from the perspective of a musicologist but also because the alteration and decline of rave culture is presented as symbolising the general trend of youth cultures and scenes. first, the general schism between grassroots music enthusiasts on the one hand and younger fans on the other clearly shows how cultural and social values are embedded in a generation’s attitude towards the production, marketing, promotion and consumption of music. second, anderson’s investigation into the causes and effects of the commercialisation of raves relates back to rave-club culture continuum. furthermore, the empirical evidence from her fieldwork shows that such development appears to be innate to youth culture and music. thus, the mourning and resistance to change of original grassroots rave culture participants appears inappropriate, especially if it prevents a scene from surviving (new fans are not welcomed). third, the aspect of cultural otherness and hedonism is closely linked to rave culture’s prominent drug use. more interesting is the point anderson raises in her discussion of deviation over the extent to which the notion of otherness can still act as a recruitment factor for a specific culture and the question as to when deviance becomes self-destructive. again, anderson formulates her questions in such a way that a broader debate is encouraged. fourth, the aspect of formal social control includes an examination of the politics and policies in both the us and uk to provide a base from which to argue for a completely different attitude towards edm to that of club owners, promoters and fans. fifth, genre fragmentation is identified by anderson as a result of commercialisation. with the original rave ethos having all but vanished, special events prevent fans from being exposed to various musical genres or styles. considering some of the comments in the book, the fragmentation of the genre into a wealth of subgenres could also be interpreted as the escape from commercial exploitation, a move that might have been seen by some stakeholders as liberation from commercial restraints and expectations. the chapter dealing with cultural forces is one of the work’s strongest, since it puts rave culture’s alteration and decline into a wider perspective. moreover, anderson shows how these different forces are interdependent and how they are linked to a particular society’s understanding and appreciation of leisure time, music, and deviance: “simply put, a culture’s fate lies in attracting birth cohorts and demographic groups, the destruction in or diffusion of its elements and form, its exploitation via 116 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 industry, and its suppression by the state” (112). chapter five is similarly broad in approach, scope and applicability, dealing as it does with the types of cultural work that aim to produce both change and stability for a (musical) youth culture. anderson’s division of cultural work into restoration, preservation and adaptation makes it clear that the objectives of the various members of this youth culture differ to such a degree that the use of cultural markers on the rave-club culture continuum seems justified. furthermore, it highlights that this continuum is expandable in all directions and establishes a proof for the diversity within the culture. the comparative study between philadelphia, london and ibiza in chapter six, however, lacks the depth and critical analysis of previous chapters. it is unclear why those cities were chosen, what they represent or even what the results mean with regard to pan-european research (usa, spain, germany), global youth cultures (nomads), the aspect of nationality (britishness), or regionalism (lots of sunshine in ibiza, non-organic setting). nevertheless, this weakness does not damage my overall evaluation of anderson’s book as not only a well-written account of the philadelphia edm scene and its historical changes but also the importance of its emphasis on scenes in general. in doing so her achievements are threefold. first, anderson’s use of broad categories and cultural markers that do not over-emphasise the significance of music make her research applicable to other subject areas. her investigation of philadelphia’s rave culture is by no means exclusive in its articulation of factors internal and external to a scene. they are proof of the deep rootedness of youth culture in society regardless of levels of deviance. second, anderson’s analysis of cultural work shows that youth culture cannot be seen as a fixed and stable entity that vegetates aimlessly. instead, participants in a particular culture might be motivated for various reasons but they are very active in keeping their youth culture alive. third, according to anderson’s participant categorisation i am a loyalist and as such very protective of a scene with great emotional investment. reading a book about the decline of my favourite youth culture that, for many years, played a big role in my identity formation, meant i read anderson’s research with some scepticism. but, perhaps most important of all, her convincing arguments are refreshing precisely because they are free from the nostalgic longing for a grassroots rave culture. reviews 117 club cultures: boundaries, identities and otherness. silvia rief. new york and abingdon, routledge, 2009. isbn: 978-0-415-95853-0 (hardcover only) rrp: uk£70.00 (hardcover only) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.11 fiona hutton university of wellington (new zealand) in introducing her book silvia rief makes the point that clubbing has become a global phenomenon which takes place in diverse settings such as street parades and music festivals. whilst clubbing may have “gone global”, the local remains crucial when exploring such diversity. rief aims to examine club cultures and “particular modes of being and experience” in the shaping of cultural and social identities (8), and in so doing argues that the study of club cultures needs to be placed within broader contexts such as de-industrialisation, urban regeneration and the development of urban night time economies (ntes). the book reflects on the development of the ntes and the importance of clubbing in both london and istanbul. in addition rief utilises debates about authenticity, aestheticization, virtualization, reflexivity and otherness to develop her analysis. this is an ambitious project encompassing many diverse topics that reveal fascinating insights into contemporary club cultures. in chapter two rief compares london and istanbul and the urban regeneration that took place in both cities which contributed to the development and governance of the nte and in turn had a significant effect on club cultures. clubbing was actively encouraged in london’s urban redevelopment and the importance of nightlife in the tourism industry was recognised; in istanbul this emphasis on nightlife was not as explicit due to the islamist ruling government. this chapter contains an excellent discussion of the tensions in the development of the ntes of both cities. the explosion in british urban ntes and the issues surrounding so-called “binge drinking” have meant that nightlife has become re-problematised. a fascinating examination of the development of clubbing in istanbul is also put forward; rief notes for example that social divisions are very much in evidence, with clubbing more often than not associated with “upmarket events for wealthy middle-class and celebrity audiences” (51). following this discussion of urban renewal and its impact on the development of london’s and istanbul’s nightlife, rief turns to mapping the uk nte in chapter three, arguing that the role of clubbing and dance cultures has received little attention in such exercises. the difficulty in accurately mapping the uk nte and the cultural production industries involved is highlighted at the beginning of this chapter. these cultural production industries consist of micro-companies which do not appear on “established indicators” (58) and therefore often escape notice. writers such as chatterton and hollands (2003) are pessimistic about the domination of clubbing and nightlife by large companies and the corporatization of clubbing experiences. rief does not share their pessimism and while she recognises the power of large companies in this competitive sector she argues that even in global markets the local is still important, apparent in the diversity of club cultures within and between various 118 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 towns and cities. chapter three also charts the history of major uk club corporations such as the ministry of sound and discusses the rising costs of producing club spaces. rief also considers legislation such as the licensing act 2003 which affected the way club spaces are or can be produced. she concludes this chapter by stating that “the economic significance of the nightclub sector is considerable but not extraordinary” (76), again highlighting that the sector contains a large number of small independent companies. although i agree with rief that it is useful to consider club cultures in their broader social and cultural contexts, i did find myself wondering what these economic policies and issues meant for the consumers of club spaces. with this in mind i started chapter four with relish; here rief discusses the (clubbing) body and the organisation of clubbing experiences. she makes the point that clubbers immerse themselves in club cultures for different reasons and that many clubbers are still connected to the “everyday” (83). this challenges the idea that clubbers and clubbing experiences are always hedonistic and escapist. in addition rief highlights that ‘everyday’ values infuse clubbing spaces, which in a sense are similar to (some) “everyday” contexts. this affects “body and emotion work” (82) through for example controlling bodily appearance and managing impressions. nowhere is this more apparent than in the nightclub queue and during the rituals of “going out”. rief provides further discussion of clubbing communities as contested communities in which participants struggle for membership, partly through rituals of belonging and gaining access. chapter four focuses on the rules and conventions of clubbing where rief notes that fashion and dancing provide avenues through which bodies are accepted or rejected according to the conventions of the spaces they are in. she notes that even in club spaces that are more transgressive than the workplace or home, there remain social codes to be adhered to. chapter four contains a nuanced theoretical discussion centring on ideas such as aestheticization and prosthetic culture. this work theoretically frames the preceding discussion of the body and goes on to consider how these processes of aestheticization affect constructions of reality in clubbing environments. this is an ambitious project to situate clubbing in a broader theoretical framework. consequently it is often difficult to see how the experiences of clubbing as articulated by rief ’s respondents “fit” with this abstract discussion. perhaps better integration and linking of these theoretical points to clubbing would have helped the “fit” be more clearly identifiable. rief moves on in chapter five to a discussion of reality/realities of clubbing experiences and the “dance underworld” (110). the normalisation thesis is considered in the clubbing context in this chapter. rief puts forward the idea that drug use in clubs is not fully normalised as her interviewees still associated drug-taking with transgression and fear of dependency. although i am not sure that i agree with rief ’s interpretation here, it is helpful to see a “moving on” of key academic debates. attitudes towards drug use and the meanings of drug-taking experiences are also presented as profoundly gendered in this chapter. further consideration is given to clubbers’ meanings and experiences in chapter six. “identity projects” (132) frame clubbing experiences as a form of self development and self-realisation in relation to issues such as love and romance. the meanings of clubbing are classed, raced and gendered. theoretical and empirical material is more successfully integrated within this chapter. again, explicit linking of the narratives that run through chapters four to six may have helped the reader clearly identify how the debates being put forward relate specifically to clubbing. reviews 119 chapter seven focuses on images of sexuality or sexual scenarios in two prominent clubbing magazines; mixmag and ministry. rief points to the crucial role (154) that clubbing and nightlife play in the construction of sexual boundaries and also notes the blurring of sexual boundaries identified by earlier researchers (pini 2001; measham et al 2001; hutton 2006). the dominance of heterosexual identities and heteronormative structures are noted here, even though clubbing environments are often seen as more tolerant of diverse expressions of sexuality. rief argues that heteronormativity is not affected by the sexual scenarios she identifies in the two magazines under consideration; “naughty girls” and “hot lesbo action” (160-2), with such scenarios or images of transgressive femininities remaining firmly located within heterosexual feminine identities. rief extends this discussion of sexualities in chapter eight by considering the extent to which sexual boundaries are made or re-made in clubbing contexts. the tensions inherent in the commodification of gay and lesbian spaces are discussed and the idea that clubs are contested spaces is reinforced. controls on who gains entry through door management and judgements made about consumers within club spaces are f i l t e r e d t hr o u g h “h e t e r o n o r m a t i v e d i s c o ur s e s i n t h e r e a d i n g o f (hetero)sexuality” (183) deployed by gay and lesbian clubbers themselves. this dominance of heteronormativity is emphasised in chapter nine where rief concludes that “there is, therefore, no one-dimensional change of gender relations and sexual boundaries in club cultural spaces towards more equality and acceptance of diversity” (192). overall this ambitious book locates clubbing experiences within the broader economic, social and cultural contexts in which they are constructed. rief calls for a refocusing of clubbing research away from a concentration on clubbers’ experiences towards a more comparative, systematic approach. although at times this way of considering club cultures did not quite “work” for me, the moving forward of debates about club cultures and original insights and suggestions for further research are welcome. this book is suitable for any club researcher wishing to access an informed discussion about the nte, urban regeneration, bodies, sexuality and club spaces. references chatterton, paul and robert hollands. 2003. urban nightscapes: youth cultures, pleasure spaces and corporate power. london: routledge. hutton, fiona. 2006. risky pleasures: club cultures and feminine identities. aldershot: ashgate publishing. measham, fiona, judith aldridge and howard parker. 2001. dancing on drugs: risk, health and hedonism in the british club scene. london: free association books. pini, maria. 2001. club cultures and female subjectivity: the move from home to house. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. 120 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 run lola run. dir. tom tykwer. sony pictures (dvd), 2008 [1998]. berlin calling. dir. hannes stöhr. av visionen (dvd), 2008. doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.12 sean nye university of minnesota (us) the representation of berlin in music films has an extraordinary history, from the experimental depictions in berlin: symphony of a great city (1927), to hollywood’s homage to weimar-era berlin in cabaret (1972), to the queer-punk east berlin in hedwig and the angry inch (2001). while soundtracks of berlin urban life have often relied on classical, cabaret or punk-industrial scores, post-reunification berlin has seen a new musical genre operate as the city’s primary soundtrack – techno. this review examines two key berlin techno films, run lola run (1998) and berlin calling (2008), and addresses two intimately linked issues regarding these films: first, the nature of the film medium with respect to the now established subgenre of electronic dance music film (short: edm film), and second, the representation in film of berlin as a techno city. the potential for theoretical analysis offered by both these edm films points to a current lacuna in club culture scholarship – namely, the scarce critical-aesthetic engagement with filmic representations of edm culture, whether in music videos, documentaries, or in this case, feature films. one exception has been stan beeler’s dance, drugs and escape: the club scene in literature, film and television since the late 1980s,1 a book which unfortunately tends toward brief, journalistic glosses on its objects of study. however, the book is impressive in its breadth, proving that a rich history of artworks that incorporate club culture already exists. this is exemplified in run lola run and berlin calling, themselves separated by a period of ten years, a gap that points to the importance of the film medium as visual-historical material for study. run lola run has become an iconic film of 1990s berlin, a status that was secured by its highly innovative plot and unique combination of pop cultural references. the protagonist, lola, has a task – to collect 100,000 d-marks and reach her boyfriend, manni, on the other side of berlin within 20 minutes. manni will otherwise likely die in an attempt to rob a supermarket, because he lost the money needed to make a deal with some gangsters. the story is constructed around three alternative universes in a kind of classic atari arcade game where lola has three lives.2 the first two universes end in tragic “game over” scenarios (1. lola dies, 2. manni dies), but the final scenario completes the mission with bonus points. lola succeeds in obtaining the 100,000 d-marks by placing all her money on two consecutive bets at a roulette table. manni also solves his debts so that not only is he saved, but together they walk away rich. lola’s constant running through the city in search of manni and money is the basis for the film’s combination of urban life, cyberspace, youth culture and video game narrative. these themes have been the focus of much of the extensive secondary literature on the film.3 what is of more interest from the point of view of techno researchers, however, is the edm soundtrack, composed by director tom tykwer together with reinhold heil and johnny klimek and produced in the rather fateful year of 1998 during the height of berlin’s reputation as a techno city and reviews 121 edm’s popularity in europe. yet despite the centrality of music and techno culture to run lola run’s success, only one essay amidst the many publications on the film focuses on music: caryl flinn’s “the music that lola ran to”.4 similar to run lola run, berlin calling has become an iconic film of 2000s berlin, though primarily within the techno scene. it is not of the same artistic quality of run lola run, and has had a markedly smaller international reception. however, it offers important insights into changes in berlin techno since the 1990s. the film concerns the career and artistic creativity of the protagonist dj ickarus, played by the real-life berlin dj/producer paul kalkbrenner. the mythical figure, icarus, concerns the dream of flying. using the wings that his master-craftsman father, daedelus, gives him, icarus flies so close to the sun that his wings melt, and he plunges to his death. dj ickarus has similar problems of both recklessness and (psychedelic) flight in berlin calling. while his hedonist excesses are at their height, he nearly destroys his artistic and mental wings through the use of drugs. suffering a creative block and having conflicts with the label manager, he avoids his problems by partying and ends up taking an “evil pill” that almost kills him. though dj ickarus survives, the rest of the film is spent with him passing in and out of a psychiatric ward, wrestling with the symptoms of insanity in a rather unimaginative homage to one flew over the cuckoo’s nest. however, ickarus’s creative energies are released, and a new album takes shape in the psychiatric ward. both an artistic triumph of insanity and a means of psychological therapy, his new tracks are produced through the inspirational media of illegal drugs and prescribed antidepressants. and the resulting album, itself titled berlin calling, achieves high critical praise and the trappings of genius within the film’s narrative. yet berlin calling is also the real electro-trance soundtrack to the film by paul kalkbrenner. musical success is thus sealed, both in the film and in real life. ickarus heads off on another, presumably successful, world tour in the closing scene of the film. and at the moment this review is being written, kalkbrenner is on his “berlin calling tour 2010”, performing during march and april at massive concert venues in germany, austria and switzerland. the stark differences of these films at the level of plot highlight the diverse forms that edm film can take, making it debatable whether edm film is even a clearly definable genre. these differences elicit two initial questions. regarding run lola run, what can we learn about rave and club culture from a story in which no raves or clubs are present in the diegesis? regarding berlin calling, what is the state of discourses of authenticity and realism in a film that combines the success of a fictional character and an actual berlin dj/producer to such an intimate degree? run lola run and berlin calling arguably represent contrasting approaches to edm film. the first can be termed a techno culture film. it focuses on edm soundtracks as acoustic settings for narratives that do not directly explore edm party life in a mimetic-sociological fashion. the legacy of cyberpunk and gamer aesthetics obviously plays a major role in this tradition. important filmic examples are blade runner (1982), blade (1998), and the matrix (1999). since virtual reality and fantasy take precedence, these films are free from anxious debates regarding the authentic representation of club culture. in this respect, berlin calling represents a contrasting tradition of techno scene film, attempting a direct representation of edm life in terms of club and rave events, as well as musical production. this type thus acts like a sociological study of club scenes in film form. important works in this tradition are human traffic (1999), groove (2000), and it’s all gone pete tong (2004), though trainspotting (1996) stands as a defining influence on the genre.5 these scene films are 122 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 often caught between the limits of the film medium, narrative form and the desire to represent club culture “as it really is”. they further struggle with reaffirming the idealistic self-presentation of club culture and questioning these ideals as ideology. these tensions often result in satire and an experimental play with form in techno scene films themselves. berlin calling takes these challenges seriously – in fact, it answers with seriousness and not satire. kalkbrenner’s performance and that of the other main actors are admirable. hannes stöhr’s directing is likewise a quite subtle and impressive study in social interaction. however, stöhr’s script is only partially successful.6 the result is a bad mix between documentary realism, mythical references and a crisiscomeback narrative that occasionally approximates a vh1 “behind the music” biography. the clinical story, supposedly deadly serious, turns into comical poppsychology that ends with an absurd visit of prostitutes to the ward during ickarus’s farewell party. as a result, the film lacks an appropriate exploration of techno music production or berlin and becomes primarily a production of kalkbrenner as a berlin star. human traffic and it’s all gone pete tong offer in this respect more thoughtprovoking, satirical examples of the techno scene film and star power. similarly, tom tykwer produces a more interesting film by exploiting the freedoms offered by the techno culture film to the fullest. the playful plot is reflected in a kaleidoscope of film techniques and media from time-lapse photography to cartoons. in short, berlin calling’s goal is art, and what comes out is kitsch; run lola run’s goal is pop, and what comes out is pop. and great pop: so successful was tom tykwer’s edm film, like danny boyle’s trainspotting, it was a springboard for launching a successful career as a hollywood film director. nevertheless, berlin calling offers some interesting points for reflection on the state of edm film. as the story of an artist, the film explores the relation of techno culture to the legacy of german romantic associations of genius and melancholy. dj ickarus’s tension with but also rootedness in german high art plays out in scenes with his conservative pastor father, who performs works by johann sebastian bach. the high art themes are coupled with claims to authenticity in the merging of protagonist and dj-star, soundtrack and album. the relation of film/album/star has echoes in rock opera films like ken russell’s tommy (1975) and alan parker’s pink floyd the wall (1982), though the possibilities of narrative form certainly differ for rock-vocal versus edm-instrumental soundtracks. as a techno opera, berlin calling represents the full shift from the anonymous rave-dj culture to the dj-producer as artist. yet it also explores economic problems in a far more direct way than run lola run. the film highlights the pressures and suffering of a young east german dj in capitalist, reunited berlin, which still has the highest poverty rate in germany. only through the successful album is he able to overcome his economic plight and make his comeback as artistic hero. run lola run is also concerned with the relation between heroes, myth production and economic pressure. just as dj ickarus is the stuff of myth, lola is an iconic name in german cultural life, recalling marlene dietrich’s character lola lola in the blue angel (1930) and rainer werner fassbinder’s lola (1982). if dj ickarus is the hero as artist, lola is the hero as raver. as annegret mahler-bungers puts it rather humorously: lola is “a postmodern – or rather a post-postmodern – walkyrie” (2003: 91). the supermachine drive of lola, her inhuman ability to run, reflects the endurance of techno clubbers during their 48-hour pill-popping party weekends. yet lola does not take drugs. her strength seems to derive purely from her heart and will. reviews 123 we imagine, however, that the vitality represented by her fiery red hair has its basis in the amphetamines of generation chemical. but economic realism interrupts the fun of this hero world in the following form: she is not dancing at night but running in midday. lola and manni are twenty-something party-kids caught in adolescent pop dreams, and they are now confronted with the hard consequences of prosaic, everyday life. presumably having been able to brush off deadlines and appointments before, lola is suddenly confronted with a deadline she can’t ignore. literally, the time of her run is between 11:40am and noon; the terror that approaches should she fail in her mission is the terror of the ultimately prosaic afternoon. in this respect, when flinn remarks that berlin’s “streets are curiously depopulated” (2004: 208), i would argue the reason lies in that the rest of berlin is presumably at work, slaving away to save money legally. indeed, as a cyberpunk film, run lola run’s is realistic in a unique way – there are no flashy city lights or fancy pieces of technology. that techno music functions like a sonic walkman to her run invites the question whether the endurance, fitness, and discipline ravers have achieve in partying at night can also overcome the reality principle of the day. but what type of techno music is this exactly? for both films, electronic music is the soundtrack to the myth of berlin as a techno city. however, neither film chooses to musically represent rave culture through a compilation of rave hits as human traffic does. rather, both soundtracks are studies in different types of auteur, respectively featuring music by only one man or group: as previously noted, by tom tykwer as director, writer, vocalist, and composer with his team of heil and klimek (run lola run) and by paul kalkbrenner as the quintessential berlin techno star on the bpitch control label (berlin calling). despite the gap in ten years, both soundtracks bear resemblances in the use of trance music.7 the compositions from run lola run are techno-trance pieces. johnny klimek worked as producer on a number of projects by berlin trance star paul van dyk, and the soundtrack bears resemblances in its timbres and sleek production quality. the music is also schooled in the speech-rap of underworld’s “born slippy”, trainspotting’s most memorable track – this is especially clear in tom tykwer’s rapping in “running two”.8 likewise, paul kalkbrenner’s soundtrack has echoes of trance, perhaps surprisingly so, given berlin’s reputation today as a city that has banished trance and rave music for the sleek club culture of minimal techno and microhouse. yet, the tracks in berlin calling are best described as a kind of electro-trance, much slower and more melancholic than lola’s “run” music and reflecting the general trend in the 2000s away from the speed of the 1990s. trance anchors the various religious and romantic themes of the films. both are structured around heterosexual narratives and the possibility of heroic triumph through magic and inspiration. flinn insightfully remarks that run lola run positions music “as a form of emotional and economic esperanto or universal language, a romantic, heterosexual affair stamped with the imprint of humanism. that this is achieved through techno, usually considered an antihumanist form of music, makes the accomplishment all the more intriguing” (2004: 197). both soundtracks do sonic battle in the name of romanticism against economic exploitation and suffering – acknowledging the problem only in the end to deny its ultimate influence. dj ickarus triumphs through creativity and artistic discipline. recalling his father’s performance of bach, the slow and reserved themes in ickarus’s music are lutheran techno-hymns to help him persevere in his struggle. lola beats the modern world by relying on shamanic powers to win at the roulette table, reflected in her primal scream and the tribal-primitivist techno of the track “casino”. 124 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 these economic crises represent a threat to berlin as a techno club city and a place of youth and freedom. adam krims’ music and urban geography9 has highlighted the key role that both music and music films play in representing cities, from realistic depictions to the “abstract city of fantasy” (2007: 18). berlin also presents a variety of musical representations in film, though it is important here to recognize some commonalities within the larger history of the berlin music film, particularly in representing berlin as a city of dynamic change. indeed, change forms the basis for associated themes of youthful transgression, pop culture, and sexual liberation. berlin has long advertised itself as the “city always in change”, so much that it can become a self-fulfilling cliché. in musical terms, precisely by maintaining techno as a stable soundtrack of the city over the last twenty years, berlin has continually reinvented itself as the city of youth and pop transgression. both films offer interesting perspectives regarding this tradition, and urban geography plays an important element in this tradition. located primarily within the confines of the clinic, the melancholic slowness of berlin calling surprisingly challenges this reputation of change. in the film’s closing, dj ickarus returns to berlin’s airport for a world tour, but he does not look exactly joyful. one wonders whether he wishes to return to the sanctuary of the psychiatric clinic. however, the speed of techno city berlin is reinforced with shots of the tv tower at alexanderplatz, techno’s preferred counter-monument of modern berlin against the brandenburg gate. club scenes are shot at real locations on berlin’s new club mile – club maria, bar 25, and others – although berlin as advertisement and fantasy retains priority. during one party, youthful transgression is reinforced to utter cliché when mathilde, ickarus’s manager and bisexual girlfriend (what other sexuality could a berlin girlfriend possibly be?), while searching for ickarus, opens up a number of club doors – in the first she finds two circuit boys having anal sex and in the second a group of clubbers snorting some lines. alternative lifestyles remain spectacles to be seen rather than lives that are lived. more interesting is the presentation of berlin as a place dominated by women in business roles, which is alternatively threatening and nurturing for dj ickarus. after all, he comes from patriarchal, lutheran germany, and lacks a mother. mathilde leaves ickarus when he fails as a boyfriend and artist, returning to her ex-girlfriend corinna, a club bouncer who is problematically the token “ethnic” character in the film. corinna threatens ickarus’s masculinity to the point of throwing him out of her apartment when he tries to speak with mathilde, though they resolve their conflict in the end. mathilde never stops caring for ickarus and finally returns as his manager, though apparently not as his girlfriend. ickarus must also negotiate conflicts with the label owner, alice (an analogous figure to ellen allien, the head of kalkbrenner’s bpitch control label), and the head of the psychiatric ward, dr. petra paul. regarding run lola run, the secondary literature has pointed out repeatedly that the scenery of both east and west berlin is non-descript. manni’s and lola’s adventure represents the dream that a reunited germany will reflect neither the failed socialist state of the german democratic republic (gdr) nor the prosaic wirtschaftswunder of the federal republic of germany (frg). lola’s fantastic run reflects the hopes of generations x and y for the harmonious combination of east and west at the end of history (will there be a generation z, and if so, what would follow?). the histories and cultural differences of berlin thus remain veiled. however, many of the shots of the city – especially the intersection where manni waits – look much more like dull suburban germany than berlin’s impressive monuments and reviews 125 nightlife. caryl flinn emphasizes this geographic dialectic: “berlin becomes a somewhat nonessential, generic urban place, a reading tykwer encouraged from foreign audiences. is this berlin, or is this anywhere?” (2004: 208). tykwer refuses to allow lola to run by any berlin icons such as the reichstag, the brandenburg gate, and even the techno tv tower. what is recognizable in all the runs is the u-bahn, reinforcing berlin’s reputation as a city of change and movement. with the berlin wall having fallen in 1989, travel is a key marker of freedom in a berlin film of the 1990s. lola’s running through the open and past the u-bahn is a distinct display of this new freedom. in a way distinct from berlin calling, her run marks berlin as a feminized space – the image of the free western woman whose freedom is defined as a freedom of movement and public display.10 finally and crucially, what is also recognizable are the sites of construction. lola charges across a causeway in both the first and second run, surrounded by a vast construction site near the german reichstag. no such sites are present in berlin calling, and for viewers who experienced the reconstruction of berlin in the 1990s, these sites might suddenly call up an odd nostalgic recognition that some forms of change are not permanent. such a complex relation to the past returns me to the importance of film as a visual-historic, and indeed acoustic, medium of study. as works of art, these films demonstrate their important role as the explosive crossroads of ideological, aesthetic, political, social, and personal currents. berlin calling and run lola run are not just edm films and not just berlin films – they are both of these and more. the rich material they offer demonstrates that a continued study of feature films, both within and without the edm film genre, will be of great importance for grasping the challenges of representing edm scenes from both the past and the future. references ankum, katharina von, ed. 1997. women in the metropolis: gender and modernity in weimar culture. berkeley and los angeles: university of california press. beeler, stan. 2007. dance, drugs and escape: the club scene in literature, film and television since the late 1980s. jefferson, nc: mcfarland & co inc. flinn, caryl. 2004. “the music that lola ran to”. in nora m. alter and lutz koepnick (eds), sound matters: essay on the acoustics of modern german culture, pp. 197-213. oxford and new york: berghahn books. krims, adam. 2007. music and urban geography. new york and oxon: routledge. mahler-bungers, annegret. 2003. “a post-postmodern walkyrie: psychoanalytic considerations on tom tykwer’s run, lola, run (1998)”. in andrea sabbadini (ed), the couch and the silver screen: psychoanalytic reflections on european cinema, pp. 82-93. new york and hove, uk: brunner-routledge. mesch, claudia. "racing berlin: the games of run lola run”. m/c: a journal of media and culture 3, no. 3 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/speed.php> (accessed 23 january 2010) filmography blade. dir. stephen norrington. 1998. dvd. new line home video, 1998. blade runner. dir. ridley scott. 1982. dvd. warner home video, 2007. groove. dir. greg harrison. 2000. dvd. sony pictures, 2000. it’s all gone pete tong. dir. michael dowse. 2004. dvd. sony pictures, 2005. the matrix. dir. andy wachowski and larry wachowski. 1999. warner home video, 2009. trainspotting. dir. danny boyle. 1996. dvd. miramax home entertainment, 2004. 126 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 notes reviews 127 1 stan beeler, dance, drugs and escape: the club scene in literature, film and television since the late 1980s ( jefferson, nc: mcfarland & co inc, 2007). 2 the pop-existentialist announcement at the beginning, by the security guard, clearly presents the game structure of the film. in fact, he combines the supposed antipodal game cultures of football and video games: “the ball is round. the game lasts 90 minutes. so much is clear. everything else is just theory. and we’re off !” 3 claudia mesch, for example, describes berlin as “a cyberspace obstacle course or environment usually associated with video and computer games”. claudia mesch, "racing berlin: the games of run lola run”, m/c: a journal of media and culture 3, no. 3 (2000), <www.api-network.com/mc/0006/speed.php> (accessed january 23, 2010). 4 this essay offers an impressive analysis of the film’s soundtrack. i strongly recommend it to club culture researchers. caryl flinn, “the music that lola ran to”, in sound matters: essays on the acoustics of modern german culture, ed. nora m. alter and lutz koepnick (oxford and new york: berghahn books, 2004), 197-213. 5 while trainspotting is certainly a pioneering film, it surprisingly cannot be defined as a proper techno scene film. aside from renton’s short visit to a techno club, trainspotting deals almost entirely with an earlier generation of the scottish working class, crime, pub life, and heroine junkies. the film’s reputation as an edm film derives primarily from its electronic music selections, from brian eno to underworld. the hybrid nature of such films and the complexity of the soundtracks would obviously require more exploration and nuances regarding the various sub-branches of edm film than i have space to present here. trainspotting points to the need for a third element of techno music itself in the structures of my genre divisions. to explain, the analysis of any edm film could explore the tensions between techno culture, techno scene and techno music, or in other words, between cyber-aesthetics, club culture, and edm (or non-edm) soundtrack. 6 this is unfortunate since stöhr’s earlier film berlin is in germany (2001) offered an interesting examination of berlin life and the challenges of integration for an east german member of the working class. 7 it is important to keep in mind that there is other music present in both films besides the official soundtracks. in run lola run, the techno tracks are complemented by the use of dinah washington’s “what a difference a day makes” and charles ives’ the unanswered question; similarly, berlin calling includes pieces for organ by johann sebastian bach. these musics allow for the dialogic relationship between techno and music from other historical periods. 8 lola’s “i wish” and “i believe” monologues also deserve mention. the rhythms and repetition of the first two words in both monologues are comparable to mark renton’s “choose life” monologue in trainspotting. 9 adam krims, music and urban geography (new york and oxon: routledge, 2007). 10 there are limits to this freedom though. expectations regarding the place of women and men in the city still differ strongly. lola’s run seems odd to passers-by in a way that would not be equivalent were a man running. for a critical study on the “lolas” who came before her, specifically on modern women and the limits of urban public display and movement, see ankum 1997. stjohn-typesetv1 neotrance and the psychedelic festival graham st john university of regina, university of queensland abstract !is article explores the religio-spiritual characteristics of psytrance (psychedelic trance), attending speci"cally to the characteristics of what i call neotrance apparent within the contemporary trance event, the countercultural inheritance of the “tribal” psytrance festival, and the dramatizing of participants’ “ultimate concerns” within the festival framework. an exploration of the psychedelic festival offers insights on ecstatic (selftranscendent), performative (self-expressive) and re!exive (conscious alternative) trajectories within psytrance music culture. i address this dynamic with reference to portugal’s boom festival. keywords psytrance, neotrance, psychedelic festival, trance states, religion, new spirituality, liminality, neotribe figure 1: main floor, boom festival 2008, portugal – photo by jakob kolar www.jacomedia.net as electronic dance music cultures (edmcs) flourish in the global present, their religious and/or spiritual character have become common subjects of exploration for scholars of religion, music and culture.1 this article addresses the religio-spiritual dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(1) 2009, 35-64 issn 1947-5403 ©2009 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.03 dc + – dc dc + – dancecult journal of electronic dance music culture http://www.jacomedia.net http://www.jacomedia.net characteristics of psytrance (psychedelic trance), attending specifically to the characteristics of the contemporary trance event which i call neotrance, the countercultural inheritance of the “tribal” psytrance festival, and the dramatizing of participants’ “ultimate concerns” within the framework of the “visionary” music festival. discussion of these characteristics within the psychedelic festival offers insight on ecstatic (selftranscendent), performative (self-expressive) and reflexive (conscious alternative) trajectories within psytrance music culture. insight is gained on these tendencies through attention to portugal’s boom festival, the premier event in the international psytrance calendar. initiated in 1997, and held on lake idanha-a-nova near the village by that name in the mountainous portuguese beira baixa province, the biennial boom festival has become a pilgrimage centre for the global psytrance community. i conducted field research at boom in august 2006 and again in august 2008, when, on both occasions, some 25,0002 psytrance enthusiasts from an estimated eighty-five countries camped out for up to seven days on the festival site in sweltering conditions. promoted by its organising body, good mood productions, as a week long “visionary arts festival”, a “harmonic convergence of people, energy, information and philosophies from around the planet earth and beyond”, and commanding “a balance of the organic and the cyber-technologic”,3 boom accommodates diverse countercultural strands drawn towards ecstatic trance and visionary culture. the event features multiple edm sound stages. operating for twenty-three hours a day for six days, and catering for around 5,000 people at any one time, the main floor features high-performance audio, lighting and water misting systems designed for enhancing expressive/transcendent states.4 over 100 djs from many different countries perform a range of electronic trance genres in the main arena, including “progressive psychedelic”, “full on” and “darkpsy”. the former style (sometimes called “morning trance”) typically incorporates soaring melodies around persistent and seductive bass lines (a distinctive stream of sixteenth notes over a 4/4 rhythm, and usually 135-145 bpm). traceable to israel and the hommega label, “full on” features productions possessing a typically relentless rolling bass line, which, while at 140-150 bpm, usually holds two or three short bass notes between each 4/4 note. crystalising in germany and russia with influences from industrial styles, the increasingly popular darkpsy (or “night trance”) adopts a faster, sometimes furious, pace (150-170+ bpm) typically lifting audio dialogue from horror cinema. derivative of the “chillout” development within edmc, the ambient stage (a balinese pagoda in 2006, and called the ambient forest in 2008) features a central dj performance area where artists play down-tempo ambient musics (sometimes called “psybient”, and often possessing world music or “ethnodelic” samples) to an audience reclining on the surrounding cushioned matting. at the groovy beach stage, which was upgraded significantly in 2008, the dance floor is subjected to an eclectic fusion of sounds (including techno, glitch and dub step), with a funky “electro” aesthetic predominating. in addition to the three edm stages, boom hosts a world music stage, also referred to as the “sacred fire” area given the presence of a fire pit constructed according to principles derived from world rainbow gatherings.5 here bands from several continents typically perform world music styles (for example, using djembe, gamelan, didjeridu) and techno-acoustic fusion styles.6 other significant features of the boom environment are a market area (featuring chai tents, food stalls with many natural and vegetarian options, clothing and jewelry shops shifting imported goods from india and sometimes local designs, and art and music stalls), the eco village (with displays and workshops on the ecological sustainability projects undertaken by 36 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 boom), and the liminal village (an area for workshops and presentations, as discussed below). figure 2: dj tristan at boom festival main floor 2008: photo by alex canezei www.alexcanazei.com i will return to boom (and psytrance) following a review of approaches to edmc and religion. the growing interest in the religious dimensions of edmc is characterised by a diversity of analysis and debate. for instance, while the abuse and misuse of popular dance drugs (such as mdma or “ecstasy”, and methamphetamine or “speed”) may be considered to have precipitated the “darkside” of one of edmc’s most popular developments, rave (reynolds 1997), others call to attention ecstasy’s ostensible ability to “foster spirituality, personal development and life change” (takahashi 2004: 151; see also saunders and doblin 1996; saunders, saunders and pauli 2000). in the popular works of irvine welsh, ecstasy constitutes a “spiritual technology” offering the potential to “shift consciousness towards the transcendental goal of better communications with one’s spiritual self ” (stephenson 2003:154). while psychoactive mind-alterants circulate at a rate faster than the ability of researchers to keep up, anthony d’andrea’s (2004: 249) remarks that the “limit experience” precipitated by psychedelics in particular (such as lsd or “acid”) may be “sublime or traumatic”, seem sanguine. that edmcs contextualise collective alterations of consciousness, especially among youth, has triggered a range of passions: from moral panics and hysteria such as that expressed by christian fundamentalists,7 to statements of self-awakening,8 and other material produced by rave-evangelists (see fritz 1999) and enthused filmmakers like torsten kilmmer (omananda) and billy rood (tantric demon), who produced the film popular among psytrance enthusiasts liquid crystal vision (2002). while dance, as ann wagner (1997) conveys in her adversaries of dance, has been the subject of dispute throughout the centuries, ecstatic/erotic trance dance has experienced acute marginalisation (ehrenreich 2006; jackson 2004). in spite of this, in recent decades ecstatic dance cultures have flourished as clubbing, raving, trance, hip hop, etc, have proliferated around the world. despite the slow and lukewarm reaction st john • neotrance and the psychedelic festival 37 http://www.alexcanazei.com http://www.alexcanazei.com of various academic disciplines, especially cultural studies (see st john 2006), to the presence and significance of edmc, over the last decade there have been considerable research developments across a range of disciplines. amid insights revealed, for example, about ritual (sylvan 2002: 136-48), festal transgression and the sacred (gauthier 2004; gerard 2004) millenarianism and revitalisation (olaveson 2004; st john 2004b), the turn to “spiritualities of life” (lynch and badger 2006), and new age and alternative spirituality (beck and lynch 2009; d’andrea 2006; partridge 2006; st john 2004c; taylor 2001), research consistently identifies contemporary dance cultures as contexts enabling an immediate and sensational sociality approximating a religious or spiritual experience for its participants. vibe tribes a common lens within edmc studies is provided by the anthropologist of comparative ritual and symbolism victor turner. akin to ndembu ritual, religious pilgrimage and hippy “happenings”, raves and dance parties are thought to facilitate “spontaneous communitas”. this is where individuals, often strangers to one another, in contexts that are in-between (or liminal) to their routine daily round, and perhaps also collectively undergoing physical ordeals, may experience a spontaneous “flash of mutual understanding on the existential level, and a ‘gut’ understanding of synchronicity” (turner 1982: 48). several commentators have argued that communitas assists explanation for the optimum social dance music experience regarded by participants as the vibe (see gerard 2004: 178-79; olaveson 2004: 90; rill 2006; siokou 2002; sommer 2001/02: 73; st john 2008, 2009, 2010a forthcoming; takahashi and olaveson 2003: 81; taylor 2001). in its capacity to “synchronize” music as sound with dancing as movement, kai fikentscher maintains that “rhythm” constitutes a critical characteristic of that “energy” underground clubbers regard as “the vibe” (2000: 80), and which is shaped by variables like location, fellow patrons, lighting, décor, costumes and time of night or day, alongside the style of music, volume and tempo.9 this sensation of “nowness” is repeatedly recognised and interpreted by commentators using a variety of conceptual tools, and thus variously identified as: the “communion” of “trance dance” (ott and herman 2003), the “playful vitality” of clubbing (malbon 1999), the sacrificial consumption of bataille’s “general economy” (gauthier 2004), the “unity in difference” among german “technoids” (hitzler and pfadenhauer 2002), the “psychedelic communitas” of australian “doofs” (tramacchi 2000), the deleuzian “smooth space” of rave’s “becoming” ( jordan 1995), its “connectedness” (olaveson 2004), or indeed its “vibrancy” (schütze 2001). while the vibe might approximate a religious experience for participants, it is of the kind one seeks to reproduce without necessarily being “religious” in the way this is commonly understood (i.e. as institutionalised). the experience is perhaps more precisely spiritual in the sense of the “spiritualities of life” which paul heelas (see heelas and seel 2003) observes downstream from the turn to subjective or “expressive life” of the 1960s associated with what thomas luckmann identified as “secondary institutions” (see lynch and badger 2006), and away from the “dictated life” of primary institutions. but while heelas is preoccupied with a spirituality in which the self has assumed divine authority, what is curious about the spirituality of the vibe is that it is inter-subjective/inter-corporeal. revealingly, within edmcs (especially psytrance) this spiritual experience is commonly translated by participants as “tribal”, which appears to signify a desire for a sacred sociality, a social warmth howsoever temporary, 38 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 perceived to have been lost or forgotten in the contemporary world of separation, privatisation and isolation. not the lonely, cold and calculating “crowds” methodically articulated by elias canetti (1962), many of the above approaches offer variant updates on the sacred collective effervescence circumscribed by emile durkheim. while the romanticisation of particular indigenous tribal models is indicative to this process (see newton 1984; luckman 2003) and while “communitas” may actually be a site for the amplification of divisions based on subculture, class, gender, ethnicity and race – see, for instance, thornton (1995) and saldhana (2007) – it nevertheless appears to be adopted as a generic signifier, as indicated by manifold examples within edmc such as spiral tribe, moksha tribe, moontribe, and tribal records. figure 3: the shushman / ninja dj. designed by spiral mark. whatever the precise character of the “vibe”, it appears to have become a subject of popular desire, located at the heart of a flourishing social dance movement apparent across multiple genres, and an experience which micro-communities commit to re/ producing globally. of relevance here is michel maffesoli’s (1996) theory of “deindividualisation”, a model of contemporary social life which attempts to explain the dionysian commitment among europeans for assembling and reassembling in passionate “neo-tribes” complementary to, or in place of, crumbling traditional institutions (e.g. church, nuclear-family, clan, etc). the production and reproduction of st john • neotrance and the psychedelic festival 39 moments of being together is considered to be a primary commitment of neo-tribes. according to this view, individuals groove between ephemeral sites of empathetic and amplified sociality, with multiple sites existing like portals in a shimmering galaxy. it is little wonder that dance researchers (e.g. bennett 1999; gaillot 1999; gore 1997: 567; malbon 1998; st john 2009) have found value in this interpretative lens, since, as a contemporary site of belonging and identification, the dance club, party or festival is legion. figure 4: karnival 2009. photo by alex canezei www.alexcanazei.com within pervasive techno-tribes the being together endogenous to the dance vibe is associated with a desire to be united, a coming together of variant and disparate tribes. bubbling up out of cosmopolitan centres, dance gatherings are convergences of diverse sonic and stylistic universes, sound alliances, fusions of dance tribes and their variant vibes. from the gay african american, latino disco and house scenes in new york and chicago, to the ecstatic communions of acid house in london and manchester, and from the raving diaspora which in north america developed the mythos of peace, 40 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 http://www.alexcanazei.com http://www.alexcanazei.com love, unity and respect (plur), to a litany of post-rave genre shards, the tolerance for difference (or at least its ideal) has evolved in a multitude of dancescapes. while enthusiasts would describe the early 1990s san francisco rave community as a movement ostensibly founding “a new form of liberation theology” (hill 1999: 97), it appeared that this “rave new world” was inhabited almost exclusively by young, white, participants. the utopic character of dance parties and clubs would nevertheless gain legendary momentum not least since dance floors were understood to be sites of “spectacular disappearance” (rietveld 1998: 204) permitting the expression of gender, sexual and racial difference shielded from media misrepresentation, prejudice and oppression. in mid-1990s sydney park, for instance, australian “doofs” were events “in which people of all races, sexualities and cultural backgrounds can come together” (strong 2001: 74), a circumstance providing the precedent for intercultural reconciliation events such as the exodus cyber-tribal festival and earthdream 2000 (see st john 2005). in vancouver, the early rave milieu was marked by the “coming together” of stylistic and aesthetic scenes: “queers, goths, electro and new wave freaks, cyberpunks, anarchists, activists, s&m scenesters, tattoo and body modification lovers and dancers” (van veen 2003: 92). in other cases, senior rave neophytes like fritz (1999) have articulated epiphanies of acceptance. one critical aspect of the “tribalism” of the present is that it is characterised by divergent trajectories: designating both the expression of difference and the obliteration of such distinctions. when participants recognise their experience as “tribal” they appear to be fluctuating between these experiences. thus within dancescapes “tribal” may refer to a particular aesthetic, technique or language by which an individual or group distinguish themselves from an other, or it may refer to the dissolution of such differences. in the first instance, one claims to be affiliated with this or that scene, sensibility, fashion, drug, language, music, etc, with the association and aesthetic infusing one’s identity. in the second, “tribal” signifies a dance orgiasm in which such distinctions are transcended in an apocalypse of subjectivity. more likely and more frequently, it designates some conflation of both tendencies, especially since individuals from different “tribes” will already share some aesthetic discourse and practice in common. event organisations hosting festal environs in which diverse lifestyle affiliates are accommodated, hold a particular dedication to optimising the conditions for their convergence and exchange. in this sense, within the context of the edm event, “tribal” designates a mode of being together which both accentuates and liquidates difference, albeit temporarily. figure 5: fusion festival 2007. photo by sam rowelsky st john • neotrance and the psychedelic festival 41 psytrance: spiritual techno psytrance is characterised by specific techno-tribal associations committed to (re)producing a distinct vibe. the genre is unique in that its public events are likely the most culturally/nationally diverse dance music events worldwide. it is also of interest here since elements within this movement hold conscious religio-spiritual pretentions. while there is a paucity of published ethnographies configuring the religious and spiritual characteristics of this global movement, anthony d’andrea’s study (2007) of “global nomads” who are mobile in a freak-diaspora characterised as a digital new age began to correct this.10 psytrance evolved from goa trance, which had emerged as a reproducible and sought-after style of electronic dance music by the mid-1990s. with roots in the psychedelic counterculture and edm developments of the 1980s and 1990s, psytrance is characterised by a diversity of subgenres, scenes, and concomitant aesthetics. with post-goa scenes evolving across europe, israel, north america, australia, japan, south africa, brazil, and elsewhere, public events range from smallscale parties to large international festivals, the latter typically accommodating a diversity of sub-scenes and styles. lasting over-night or perhaps during week-long campouts, events are favourably held in open-air locations where dance floors may be positioned in bushland, forest, beach or deserts, where participants will often celebrate celestial events (e.g. the full moon or a total solar eclipse) or hold parties to mark seasonal transitions. psytrance is replete with the characteristics of an alternative spirituality, which has flourished since the 1960s. according to linda woodhead, advocates of the “new spirituality” would express commitment to: a spiritual relativism which sees a profusion of religions and symbol systems adopted in the belief that they offer access to similar divine truths; a “new age” of unity, peace and spiritual enlightenment; the understanding that everyday reality manifests “a deep and unifying spirit or life-force” recognisable in the holistic/ecological mantra “all is one”; and an expressive “radical immanence” which sees participants accessing this underlying “life force” or “energy” through direct experience (woodhead 2001: 81-2). psytrance carries this cultural continuity of relativism, hope, holism and experience, the latter commitment certainly not the least as detected in the reworking of the hendrixian question in the title of the debut album of the chief act in the goa/psytrance movement, shpongle: are you shpongled? (1998). it should also be recognised that psytrance is infused with the reflexive-utilitarian (visionary) and expressive-dionysian (ecstatic) dimensions of the counterculture that frank musgrove had identified as “the dialectics of utopia” (1974: 16). as a vehicle for developments in responsive alternatives to dominant practices and for collective self-abandonment, psytrance constitutes a musical and cultural movement that embraces principal aspects of the 1960s-inspired new spirituality. festivals like the global earthdance phenomenon, san francisco’s synergenesis, or the uk’s turaya gathering (promoted as a “holistic world fusion arts gathering”), along with australia’s rainbow serpent festival, or intention and other events operated by british columbia’s tribal harmonix, among other international events and global sites accommodating a host of therapeutic, artistic and ecstatic pursuits, illustrate that the milieu inhabited by psytrance participants is one in which conscious alternatives and transgressive commitments have recombined. it is more than apparent that psytrance accommodates an eclectic alternative spiritualism featuring occultic characteristics. christopher partridge initiated the discussion on psychedelic trance’s role in the history of the popular occult or “occulture” 42 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 and, more broadly, the re-enchantment of the west (2004: 166-75; 2006). drawing on ernst troeltsch’s and colin campbell’s understandings of “mystical religion”, partridge holds that an occultism has pervaded contemporary western culture. this prolific “cultic spirituality” is “self-oriented, eclectic and epistemologically individualistic”, while at the same time possessing a tendency to coalesce in networks and organisations which campbell identified as “the mystic collectivity” (campbell 1977 in partridge 2004: 63). possessing some resemblance to what i have referred to as “tribal”, the cultic involves those who, while not forming organised religions (i.e. churches or sects), nevertheless participate in groups and networks forming around shared beliefs. the immediate occultural character of psytrance is illustrated by its proponents’ interest in a check-list offered by partridge (2004: 69): “direct experience of the divine, in secret gnosis, in alchemy, in theurgy, in a philosophia perennis, and in ancient religion and mythical figures, texts and civilizations”, along with ufos, alien abduction and dark romantic narratives. enthusiasts adopt a fusion of alternative and popular cultural artifacts and symbolism. psytrance is thus not only pervaded with buddhism, hinduism and other oriental religious motifs (as a result of an eastern inflected heritage as seen in tapestry décor, websites and cd covers featuring lord shiva, the elephant headed divinity ganesha or, frequently, the om symbol) or with indigenous, mystery and esoteric traditions (as inflected in amerindian prophecy and cosmology), but is suffused with science-futurist and off-planetary narratives. in the “sampladelic” cut-npaste fashion characteristic of the technoccult, the symbolism of traditional tribal groups (native american, australian aboriginal; tepees, didjeridu etc), is mixed with imagined cyborgian mutations, alien encounters and upgrades to galactic citizenship commonly referenced in music samples and fashion. these elements combine to augment personal growth, enlightenment, status, and credibility, complicating the “tribal” identification within the psytrance-imaginary, and rendering rather futile simplified efforts to dismiss formations through critiques of cultural appropriation. figure 6: shrine at rainbow serpent festival, australia, 2009. photo by johanna hobbs www.flickr.com/photos/johannahobbs st john • neotrance and the psychedelic festival 43 http://www.flickr.com/photos/johannahobbs http://www.flickr.com/photos/johannahobbs while the psytrance movement descends from the holistic human potential movement, participants, like their trailblazing countercultural forebears, are “children of technique”, heir to many pathways towards the truth, oneness, eternity, belonging. they are what d’andrea calls “neo-nomads” whose identity is fashioned from a unique dialogue between those clusters of experience and meaning he calls “new age” and “techno”. that is, identity is formed at the intersecting lines of two different yet complementary “styles of subjectivity formation” under flexible capitalism. thus, “new agers cultivate the self as an inner substance to be shaped within holistic ideals, whereas techno freaks implode the ego during pounding rituals of gothic digitalism” (d’andrea 2007: 6, 225). as a decidedly technologically mediated spirituality, psytrance also possesses something of what erik davis (1998) calls the “techgnostic” sensibility, where the potential for self-liberation and awakening drives technological development. davis documents how the techno-liberationist flame, reignited throughout western history, has conflagrated with the advent of the digital age. the modern millenarian belief that new technologies promise a better future here and now may explain why psytrance, a most technologically sophisticated dance culture evolving in conjunction with advances in audio, cyber and communication technologies throughout the 1990s and into the 21st century, has become implicated in revitalisation movements and “new edge” narratives of re-awakening, notably that associated with 2012 and the mayan calendar (see st john 2004b). as is common to revitalisation movements, formations and narratives emerge in response to recognised global crises (ie. humanitarian and ecological), with participants defining themselves against dominant modes of thought and practice. thus psytrance music and culture becomes a repository for experimental knowledge, unorthodox science, heretical religion, and progressive movements. the psy-festival and neotrance earlier i discussed the vibe, which can be characterised as a context for tribalism, meaning both the expression of difference and its transcendence. as an evolved expression of this dynamic, psytrance festivals enable participants from diverse national, cultural and stylistic backgrounds to give expression to their difference while at the same time potentiating the experience of singularity. in the west, the expression and dissolution of difference is a circumstance traditionally conditioned by the festival of carnival. it is not my intention here to discuss the complex history of this pre-lenten catholic festival, its suspected precursors, nor its afrodiasporic and latin and south american developments, but more to draw attention to the “carnivalesque” praxis understood by mikhail bakhtin. while bakhtin observed the carnivalesque condition passing into literature and popular culture, from small free dance parties to larger commercial festivals, the global proliferation of dance cultural events evinces an apparent resurgence of the carnivalesque. as understood in rabelais and his world, carnival is the people’s “second world”, an effervescent subterranean enclave including fairs and popular feasts, mummery, dancing, far-out novelties and open-air amusements evident since antiquity. for bakhtin, “while carnival lasts there is no other life outside it. during carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom” (1968: 7). this is a world of spontaneity, laughter and outrageous fun, a licentious landscape of play and immediacy in which habitués become “an indissoluble part of the collectivity”, becoming quite literally the body of the people. amidst the “archaic grotesque” of the dance festival where the body-in-dance outgrows itself, trans44 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 gresses its own limits, becomes mutable, “the individual body ceases to a certain extent to be itself ... [as] the people become aware of their sensual, material bodily unity and community” (bakhtin 1968: 255). figure 7: fusion festival, germany 2007. sam rowelsky st john • neotrance and the psychedelic festival 45 it should be recognised, however, that here is a festal culture heavily reliant on the use and repurposing of media technology, audio-visual tools, and remixological practice. in comparing rave with the bahian carnival in brazil, bernard schütze (2001: 158) observes that in “carnivalizing the technologies of a command and control society”, the rave is positively “technophagic”. that is, where the carnival’s “anthropophagic principle is based on an incorporation of the other in terms of a cultural cut-n-mix producing hybridity, the technophagic seizes technological means (electronic, pharmaceutical, logistic) and inverts their control and productive function into one of unleashing energies that modulate the vibratory body” (schütze 2001: 161– 62). and, like traditional carnival, the “joyous intermingling, bodily expression, eccentric behaviour and dress” of the techno-rave festival operates an “open transmutation of subjectivities that tears asunder normative modes of subjectivation and permits the experimentation of novel forms of subjectivity”. these days, bahians are not unfamiliar with the beat-matching of carnival with rave. with the advent, for example, of the universo parallelo festival de arte e cultura alternativa near ituberá, bahia, a popular international psytrance and “alternative culture” festival in its eighth year over the new year week 2008–9, the “vibratory body” was heavily modulated by audio, visual, and chemical technologies. in brazil and worldwide, we might witness, as hillegonda rietveld (2004: 53) postulates, a transit to “cyborg-like subjectivity”, the product of a postindustrial sacrificial repetitive-beat ritual offering a temporary-yetrelived homeland for the alienated. invoking georges bataille, she writes: “[t]he peak experience is a trip into the void: time, space and sensory input fragmenting and collapsing, yet held together by the repetitive beat; suspended, the spiritual hedonist is rendered speechless and unable to articulate, being everything and nothing; part of all; complete yet empty.” it is indeed instructive to briefly turn to bataille’s theory of religion, for attention to excess, consumption and the sacred offers insight on the psytrance vibe – and that associated with other edm cultures – as temporary communities reproduced via personal and collective acts of transgression. that is, as communities reproduced through the routine expenditure of excess energy, and through self-sacrifice in acts of abandonment involving ecstatic dancing often fuelled by chemical cocktails (like lsd and mdma) and “entheogens”11 (such as charas, fly agaric mushrooms, mescaline, ayahuasca, dmt and salvia divinorum), obtained and prepared for this very purpose. in a batallian “general economy”, the burning up in potlatch-like proportions of that which had been translated as society’s “accursed share” constitutes a path towards obtaining a sacred otherness in which formerly separated individuals may share intimately as they “consume profitlessly”. “if i thus consume immoderately”, states bataille in the accursed share (1988), “i reveal to my fellow beings that which i am intimately: consumption is the way in which separate beings communicate. everything shows through, everything is open and infinite between those who consume intensely” (in gauthier 2004: 76). a dance festival is an exemplary site for this form of communication – especially as dance floor occupants exchange drinks, pass chillum and are subject to sustained bass pressure, a shared chemical and sonorous experience softening the boundaries that may otherwise separate individual participants. with at least 25,000 bodies from over eighty countries connected through persistent rhythms, intense consumption, and self-abandonment on one of the planet’s largest edm dance floors, boom orchestrates intense moments of communication and a profound sense of belonging to a diverse “psychedelic” community. with the billboarded message “we are one” backgrounded by lake idanha-a-nova, and with participants wearing 46 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 the same message on their wrist-bands (as provided upon entrance), boom 2006 may be said to have constituted a subterranean body of the people. that is, at least, the mythology. for while this is indeed the view of organisers and great many event participants, the presence of anti-boom, a “teknival” (a freefestival featuring techno sound systems with a distinctive hardcore – and thus not psytrance – aesthetic) operating simultaneously across the lake from boom, challenges this universalism. additionally, a considerable number who were refused entry (due to the event reaching capacity) or who complained about entrance fees or deficiencies in services and sanitation in 2008 might very well question this narrative. this contrast is important since, without a gate charge, anti-boom might more readily claim the status of a “temporary autonomous zone” (bey 1991), even though boom actively promote and support the idea of a “taz”. to be fair, there is no question that good mood/boom have desired to remain an ethical commercial festival, given, for example, their long standing commitment to remain free of corporate sponsorship, as clearly expressed in the boom book (good mood 2007). while the psy-festival is a context for self-immolation in the furnace of dance, it is, at the same time, a context for the performance of the self, the presentation or staging of a persona, which, exceeding that of the routine self, quite literally becomes an other self: indeed, the freaky self. in countercultural history, the freak is never straight, stationary or complete, always somewhere in-between and entirely ambiguous with regard to moral rules, dress codes, gender regulations, disciplined embodiment and legal mind states. transgressing categories, trespassing psychic limits, seeking forbidden knowledge and drifting between marginal sites, as ontological and territorial nomads, freaks are characterised by movement and uncertainty. accommodating the creative recombination of aesthetics, undisciplined embodiment and psycho-somatic states, boom is a freak theatre, a staging-ground for what turner had called the “subjunctive mood” (turner 1984: 21), an experimental state or atmosphere where occupants – wearing outfits with theriomorphic (animal-like), anime, superhero, mythical and extraterrestrial themes, adopting stylised (e.g. fractalised and uv reactive) glyphs printed on clothing, badges, and personalised patches, and through innovative dance moves – indulge in alternate personas. the queering of gender, is also not uncommon, with females perfecting androgynous appearances and males adopting effeminate styles. on the dance floor and around the festival site, illuminated under uv lights, caught in lasers, distorted by hypnagogic projections and other advanced lighting techniques, in dreadlocked and shaven hair aesthetics, dermal anchors, tattoos and other body modifications, amid the acrobatics of fire staff and glow poi twirling, club and globe ball juggling, and in spectacularly-altered states of consciousness, participants become freaks on display. while public nudity does not typically extend beyond the clothing-optional lake and its foreshore areas, for an unknown but small percentage of the population, with daily temperatures soaring, dance floor habitués are notably under-dressed, accentuating lithe and queer bodies striking lascivious poses especially down at the groovy beach stage. st john • neotrance and the psychedelic festival 47 figure 8: boom 2008. photo by alex canezei. http://www.alexcanazei.com the psy-festival, therefore, allows its inhabitants multiple freedoms, including the freedom to join one’s flame to the conflagration, and to hold self-promotions on and off the dance floor. exemplifying the festal-life returning in the contemporary, boom affords this commotion of singularity and freakiness, the dissolution and presentation of self-hood. energised in rare fashion, across this spectrum one shifts between spectacular states of self(less)ness. evincing the complex character of the “tribal” within this movement, participants may experience fusion with, or autonomy from, others in extraordinary states of altered consciousness.12 organisers of boom, in collaboration with djs, producers, sound engineers, visual and décor artists, optimise space, time, art and other resources to realise the dynamic i have dubbed neotrance. this concept derives from the suspicion that traditional conceptions of “trance”, particularly “possession trance”, and especially the analogy with what emma cohen (2008) calls “executive possession”, are ill-suited to recognise the experiential complexity of dance festal behaviour, and in particular the experience of “trance” endemic to the psychedelic festival, its music, and its dance. in various cultural contexts deriving from west african traditions in particular, patterns of animation identified as “possession” (by gods and spirits), such as those agents associated with vodu and orisha possession complexes, 48 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 http://www.alexcanazei.com http://www.alexcanazei.com typically serve therapeutic and divinatory purposes in communities where religious specialists, cults and shrines are devotional vehicles for deities and spirits, where altered states are interpreted via inherited religious frameworks, and are integral to the life of communities where human and spirit worlds are intricately interwoven (see friedson 2005; keller 2001; lewis 1971). while the psycho-physiological impact of percussive and rhythmic music (rouget 1985) may hold across traditional and contemporary trance performance (see sylvan 2002; takahashi 2005; till 2009), and while djs (and scholars) invoke loose folk-theories of divine guidance, conventional understandings of “spirit possession” tend to offer overstated, unfair and misleading frameworks for understanding “trance” dance cultures associated with contemporary popular music. loose contrasts make for an easy dismissal of edm cultures as comparatively meaningless. commenting on raves, goergina gore (1995: 137-38) claims that, compared with possession trance within cults of the southern nigerian bini, rave is “a rite of passage leading nowhere.… it is a ritual without content, ecstatic, solitary and narcissistic. it is a game of chance; its trance is aleatory and dizzying”. rave might apparently exemplify the zombification of modern life, a disappearance from meaning, the “zone” entered by ravers perhaps as pathological as that ascribed to the world of gamblers and casinos, an observation which partly explains the poaching from baudrillard in early rave studies. illustrating the results of an ethnographic approach to raves which would deliver us closer to the “trance” in question, melanie takahashi (2005) seeks to understand the alternative states of consciousness endogenous to these events. she argues that through dj techniques, optimised audio-visual production and performance, and participant expectations at raves, “technological advancements may compensate for the lack of coherent cultural signifiers” vis-à-vis “the sophisticated scripted process of initiation observed in ceremonial possession” (takahashi 2005: 253). ravers remain “horses”, only now they are ridden by the spirit of the optimised audio-visual assemblage channelled by the “shaman” dj. through these techniques and sound-art strategies, which morgan gerard (2004) calls “liminal techniques”, by comparison to other popular music forms/techniques, djs are arguably better able to “control the means of perception” (takahashi 2005: 254). but while it makes sense to hold inquiry about the capabilities of newer and adapted technologies and chemicals to animate and energise participants, and indeed communities of sound in raves and other edmc events, persistent analogical modelling with spirit possession becomes somewhat burdensome in itself. with the objective of revealing the sacred terrain of raving, gauthier harbours no such intellectual burden. he argues that rave “is not a possession trance, unless perhaps possession by ‘nothing’”. ravers “do not feel ‘something’ (or indeed ‘nothing’) is overcoming them. on the contrary, it seems this overwhelming feeling originates from within, only they cannot say how or where” (gauthier 2004: 78). further, the experience is “unhinged from a defined and institutionalised – and therefore – explicit religious system that could explicate its meaning. by contrast to a mystical experience, the techno trance is sought in itself and for itself, detached from any defined meaning, aim or purpose”. “this trance”, gauthier continues (2004: 79), “is the desire for pure instituancy, pure experimentation with an otherness that remains confused and diffuse – a pure gratuitous act, or a simple gesture of revolt”. this argument, i suggest, may be more accurate for “rave” as opposed to psytrance, since the latter is more typically a repository for those practising and experimenting with alternative spiritual dispositions who are open to traverse human/spirit world boundaries outside mainstream st john • neotrance and the psychedelic festival 49 religious practice and faith (principally that associated with christianity). this is why organisers, such as those who orchestrated morocco’s rhythms of peace psytrance festival, sought to associate their events, in that instance, with master practitioners of moroccan gnawa, or why sufi dancers were billed for the opening ceremony at soulclipse total solar eclipse festival in turkey in march 2006, or why ceremonial dance is performed to didjeridu performed by aboriginal custodians in the opening ceremony at australia’s annual rainbow serpent festival. in these and other more exemplary cases whereby the edm assemblage is configured as a rite of passage (see mcateer on goa gil 2002; the work of dj krusty [2008], or the more intentional “tribes” like the oracle in seattle and california’s moontribe), the “trance” experience may be said to hold a function. but while there is a strong will to claim connections with traditional cultures and continuity with (imagined or real) forebears, and while movement insiders readily adopt anthropological concepts, such as those associated with “trance”, to make sense of their own activities, such appropriations are not unproblematic. here i simply want to reiterate the view that in “psytrance” dance floor participants oscillate between the performative edge, where participants enact fantastic and erotic personas often drawn from composite influences, and an experience approximate to dispossession, where trancers find release from a troubled and dispiriting lifeworld. the development of intentional replicated trance ritual techniques with clear cathartic objectives is uncommon. but while there are no master healers, as in moroccan gnawa, nor consensual frameworks through which states of animation are interpreted and performed within psychedelic culture (davis 2001), performative devices do circulate. as i discuss elsewhere (st john 2010a forthcoming, 2010c forthcoming), as carnivalesque figures amounting to folk-tropes, the figures of the alien and the “living dead” zombie allegorise and indeed burlesque the unpredictably transcendent condition of the trance dance floor. thus, while the neotrance dynamic seems to possess as many and varying manifestations as there are events, trends, narratives and tropes are apparent. arun saldanha (2007) weighs in here arguing that the elimination of difference, or more to the point, racially different differences, at parties evolving (or perhaps more accurately, devolving) in the originary site of psytrance (goa, india) leads to a “viscosity” of white bodies on the dance floor during the morning session in a third world contact zone. here, the desirable state of dispossession is possible only when elements preventing the attainment of this condition are absent, or eliminated. in this case, in his analysis, brown skinned domestic tourists. here is a viscous white tribalism, perhaps even a freak “crowd crystal” in canetti’s (1962) view, in which the liquidation of difference relies upon its accentuation, where the maffesolian “being together” is cut with a heavy dose of deleuzian “striation”. it should be recognised, however, that, in evidence across global psytrance events, multiple elements jeopardise the “vibe”, where freak concentration is not essentially racial or phenotypical. in a realm of competing expectations, perennial bogeymen (eg. tourists, authorities, “straights”) imperil the conditions of self-dissolution, queer performance and “instituant” desire. there are indeed considerable differences in the desires of participants, as has already been stated. broadly speaking, many who promote an alternative health and ecological lifestyle ethos within the grounds of the larger psytrance event such as boom rail against excesses associated with dance and drug use, especially the abusive consumption of ketamine and what passes as “ecstasy”. there is little space to relate these internal controversies here, but it is important to add that it is the nature of an “alternative cultural heterotopia” (st john 2001) to seek resolution to such contestations through optimi50 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 sations over successive events. given the range of motivations and possible divisions, the goal of inclusivity (of unity in diversity) is a challenging task for good mood, with their event effectively brokering the unstable coexistence of the carnivalesque and conscious cause (st john 2010b forthcoming). nevertheless, the festival is the stage, the laboratory, and the building-site for these optimisations. unlike the ultimate conservatism of “carnival” praxis in bakhtin’s theory of temporary authorised anarchy (see also stallybrass and white 1986), the psychedelic festival harnesses a desire to break its own boundaries. as lived utopia, a hedged universe, it holds the potential to exceed its borders, and in certain circumstances is adopted with this purpose in mind. such might be stated for all festivals, yet the tribal carnival holds a unique intention – as the clearinghouse for a movement which seeks to export its liminality into the everyday. i will now offer explanation for how this came about. freak nation: new tribal gatherings while psytrance and its culture can be understood by way of the theory of carnival, sacrifice and theatre, the particular characteristics of its festal culture have been shaped within a specific assemblage of technics, orgiastics and revitalising tendencies. that is, it is indebted to the ecstatic/idealistic events of the 1960s, which challenged traditional judeo-christian mores, and responded to international humanitarian and ecological crises. emerging out of the impulse toward cultural transformation building in san francisco’s haight-ashbury district in the mid-1960s, a momentous event called the “gathering of the tribes for a human be-in” was held in golden gate park on 14 january 1967. it was the nadir of the summer of love and the event in which over 20,000 people participated had been preceded by new york’s usco technotribal media “happenings” in the early 1960s and their disco be-ins of 1966, along with ken kesey’s and stuart brand’s trips festival and the love pageant rally on october 6, 1966, in the golden gate park panhandle. editor of the san francisco oracle (1966-1968), allen cohen, promoted the gathering of the tribes as a “meeting-of-the-minds”, namely the berkeley radicals and the haight-ashbury hippies (perry 1984: 122). the watershed event involved, among others, timothy leary, allen ginsberg, gary snyder, richard (ram dass) alpert, and jerry ruben, along with numerous acid rock bands including, of course, the grateful dead. owsley stanley distributed “white lightning” lsd, outlawed in california in 1966. it appears that the ecstatic communitas in which thousands participated overflowed in the berkeley barb the next day: “the spiritual revolution will be manifest and proven. in unity we shall shower the country with waves of ecstasy and purification. fear will be washed away; ignorance will be exposed to sunlight; profits and empire will lie drying on deserted beaches; violence will be submerged and transmuted in rhythm and dance” (perry 1984: 122). with the gathering of the tribes and later events, the hippie nation desired no borders, and it wanted to change the world. fuelled by psychedelics, and a compulsion to create an alternative society, the 1960s constituted a cultural revolution in the west generating an unprecedented population of counter-culturalists seeking, as leary inveighed, to “find the others”. within the us and uk in particular, alternative enclaves sprouted up in which fellow seekers could manifest utopian visions, conduct experiments with the mind, body and spirit, exchange knowledge, trade goods and live alternative lifestyles. a new “nation” was being imagined from manhattan to haightashbury to london where, on april 29 1967, 10,000 trippers experienced the epochal st john • neotrance and the psychedelic festival 51 “14 hour technicolor dream”, an “all night rave” at the ufo club in the cavernous alexandra palace featuring 40 bands, poets, artists, dancers and a massive central light gantry (palacios 2001). there was a soundtrack to this postnational “nation”: the psychedelic rock of the grateful dead and the pink floyd in particular. and a disenchanted middle-class youth population – from the idealistic to the deranged – were making a mass exodus to this ostensible “nation” without borders. in the post-1960s period, participants in the freak-nation were emigrating from metropolitan centres and college campuses, with countercultural brokers and seekers transporting their freak show to rural regions. in the uk, hippies discovered ancient trails and established a free festival circuit merging psychedelic folk-rock with medieval faryes and markets. from festival to festival, these travellers of “albion”, craftspeople, musicians, performers, healers, traders, were nomadic communards living on site for at least half the year (mckay 1996). “freak” became a mobile nation with nodes, temporary and often seasonal, proliferating around the world. the freak nation would establish enduring enclaves (communes, squats and multiple occupancy communities), but its generative fonts were temporary autonomous zones and bohemian enclaves mushrooming the world over. this is the story of the heterotopian stonehenge free festival (hetherington 2000), as it is of the early glastonbury festival (mckay 2000), australia’s confest (st john 2001), and the seasonal rainbow gatherings (niman 1997) which would become a global phenomenon from the early 1980s, with an event transpiring somewhere on the planet at any given time. it is also the story of burning man, the annual freak epicentre in nevada’s black rock desert (see gilmore and van proyen 2005). but during the same period, as a no boundaries philosophy was pursued (see buenfil 1991; dearling 1998) and national borders trespassed – with national identities even discarded – freak travellers had been transporting their “state of mind” (elliott 2010 forthcoming) abroad. the former portuguese colony of goa was a significant enclave in the global circuit, particularly important given its location on the coast of india, long imagined in the west as a source of spiritual growth and enlightenment bequeathing that which became goa trance and subsequent developments with what partridge calls “suboccultural capital” (2004: 132). free-form psychedelic full moon parties were thrown on the beaches of anjuna and vagator villages in goa populated by self-exiled travelers, and spearheaded by goa gil. from california’s marin county where he was involved with chet helm’s family dog productions, gil arrived in goa in 1970 and would later become a sadhu “re-defining”, as he has it, “ancient tribal ritual for the 21st century”.13 these parties would flourish on an international circuit growing increasingly popular as the cost of travel declined. 52 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 figure 9: goa gil at his 57th birthday party, october 2008. photo by ariane www.goagil.com infused with rapid developments in electronic music production and performance, there developed a network of techno festivals linked in a matrix of alternative sites laid out within and across nations. goa was thus connected to ibiza, to the stonehenge free, glastonbury and other festivals of albion, to san francisco, thailand’s koh phangan, australia’s byron bay, bali, brazil’s bahia and other emergent countercarnivalesque environs in what anthony d’andrea calls a global “freak-ethnoscape” (2004: 240), inclusive of a host of global cosmopoles (de ledesma 2010 forthcoming; rietveld 2010 forthcoming). whether through trade in services (e.g. workshops and therapies) goods (e.g. food, clothing and drugs) or performance (e.g. djs, vjs sound engineers, décor artists), festivals, clubs and parties within and beyond these zones have become critical hubs for new micro-industries. becoming sources of income for expatriates and local inhabitants alike, they precipitated tourism and entertainment industries (d’andrea 2007: 223). following the success of goa trance in the mid1990s, the genre exploded into various subgenres and scenes. this international growth was concomitant with the widely proclaimed demise of goa as a site for authentic experimental trance culture as a result of persistent police, gang and tourist interventions, and media attention (see saldanha 2007; d’andrea 2010 forthcoming). by the mid-1990s, the internet – websites, filesharing platforms, social networking sites, electronic forums etc – would become a critical tool deployed in the service of building labels, operating events and shifting a psytrance sensibility. by the late 1990s, the psytrance underground was flourishing in global events whose form and commitments owed much to the model provided by the psychedelic gathering of the tribes. this is the case with early european festivals like germany’s voov experience and with international total solar eclipse festivals, which had emerged in the mid 1990s. but of the regular calendar festivals, boom is a significant site in the alternative matrix, a periodic zone in the freak nation. promoted as a weeklong “harmonic convergence of people, energy, information and philosophies from around the planet earth and beyond”, boom features a diverse range of psytrance musics manifesting in dozens of countries. in this inclusive spirit, as boom’s artur soares da silva indicated to me: “we want to show the full variety, interconnecting different subgenres and to include people from all of the trance countries, so all the countries are represented”, a theme which is amplified in the pages of the boom book published in 2007 and in a series of dvds produced on the boom festival.14 in 2006 and 2008, st john • neotrance and the psychedelic festival 53 http://www.goagil.com http://www.goagil.com along with the mix of “ambient”, “psychedelic progressive”, “darkpsy” and “electro” styles introduced earlier, another cross-pollination occurred on an unprecedented scale. with its world music (or “sacred fire”) stage accommodating a range of traditional trance acts from africa, brazil and japan, boom contextualised the convergence of countercultural traditions, from the atavistic to the more techno-oriented. according to co-ordinator of the sacred fire, pedro, boom 2006 was an ideal location for the rainbow and trance “tribes”, each possessing divergent countercultural trajectories, to converge in a fruitful and creative dialogue. such is the kind of interfacing facilitated by the gathering that accommodates a cornucopia of difference within its precincts. in this disparate sonicity, different kinds of “noise” accumulate in two diverse arenas, that represent rather polar sites the festival. the main stage, which, as i pointed out earlier, must be one of the largest and most sophisticated open-air dance floors planet-wide. this is the principal site for self-performance and dispossession. if the main stage is the centre of pleasurable discharge for the week-long event, the fulcrum for symposia concerned with events post-orgy is the liminal village, which the final section will now address. figure 10: eco centre and liminal village, boom festival 2008, portugal. photo by jakob kolar www.jacomedia.net 54 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 http://www.jacomedia.net http://www.jacomedia.net the liminal village and the visionary festival alongside a host of public events studied by cultural anthropologists, and in addition to its ecstatic characteristics, boom can also recognised as a “cultural drama” (turner 1982); an event contextualising the transmission of popular cultural values, the ampli"cation of a population’s “ultimate concerns”15 surfacing in response to emergent and ongoing crises. as liminal periods of uncertainty, ambiguity and potency, movement events are vehicles for the display, performance and dramatisation of a people’s cherished symbols, beliefs and causes upon which various performance genres and media effect inquiry, re$ection and possible resolution. in this thinking, an individual’s engagement with or contemplation of his or her culture’s ultimate concerns, its sacred values and beliefs – its sacra (turner 1967: 102) – is thought to be ampli"ed in such spaces since they are temporarily transported beyond their routines to a space both inbetween and outside day-to-day life. as a “visionary arts” festival responding to crises in the present, boom offers an intentional rupture of prevailing practice as it transports participants into an alternate space in which divergent pathways are envisioned, explored and lived. by contrast to that which don handelman (1990) referred to as “events that model” official sacra, boom thus attempts to puncture day-to-day life with a reality-"eld consistent with an alternative future. offering competing models, alongside other alternative events in various countries, boom enhances, magni"es or mediates the lifestyles and objectives of its participants, who impregnate the festal interzone with their artistic and political visions, becoming experimental theatres of change, or perhaps in turner’s language, “realms of pure possibility” (turner 1967: 97). with an ecological sensibility foremost among its concerns, the boom festival should then be understood in the context of commitments (spiritual, political, cultural) arising in response to an ecological crisis, with responses consistent with the broader perception that an ecological consciousness is an ethical responsibility – as found in the objectives of proliferating “sustainability” events such as the uk’s sunrise celebration and waveform festivals and !e symbiosis festival in california’s sierra nevada mountains and australia’s maitreya festival. !ese, and many other eventorganisations, illustrate that dance practice is integrated with broader movement concerns, an understanding which suggests that the dance “tribe” is rather more proactive than maffesoli’s acquiescent tribalism. consistent with these events, boom has become a vehicle for redressive ecological practice. in 2006, boom featured an ecovillage with displays and workshops promoting sustainability practices, in addition to experimentation with bio-toilets, showers and site-wide recycling. according to lucy legan, co-founder of the brazilian based ecocentro ipec (instituto de permacultura e ecovilas do cerrado) who was contracted to construct bio-toilets and initiate a reforestation process whereby human feces is transformed into rich soil, these efforts were part of a transit towards an “ecological festival”. in 2008, boom evolved its commitment to provide solutions to the challenges presented by the over consumption of energy, food and water on site, undertaking massive composting, fertilizing, organic waste and water treatment projects, and powering the festival from used vegetable oil, projects for which boom received a 2008 greener festivals award.16 st john • neotrance and the psychedelic festival 55 figure 11: liminal village, boom festival 2006, portugal. photo by jakob kolar www.jacomedia.net designed in 2008 using principles adapted from the whole systems approach of permaculture, boom’s liminal village is a core site for the articulation of an ecological sensibility. downstream from earlier models such as london’s mid-1990s festi-club megatripolis, and ultimately san francisco’s gathering of the tribes, the liminal village has more immediate roots in a convention area introduced at boom in 2000. emerging as the dynamic mythologies tent in 2002 the space evolved into its present named “village” in 2004 when it included the dynamic mythologies tent, a visionary art gallery, healing zone, dreamspell school and the multidisciplinary association for psychedelic studies (maps) sanctuary. promoted as a “dynamic con$uence of people, traditions, energy and information”, taking its place among festivals emerging as “concentrated hubs of exchange and transformation – open systems interzones between the conventional bounds of time and space”,17 the liminal village is the culmination of the work of interchill records manager, naasko wripple, in alliance with a global network of visionary groups. !e space is something of “novelty” machine downstream from the interventions of philosopher, ethnobotanist and novelty theorist, terence mckenna, who was a direct in$uence on naasko (as he has been for many others within the psytrance movement). intentionally harnessing that which organisers understand as the universal experience of ritual liminality – the potent threshold "rst articulated by arnold van gennep in his study of rites of passage where “liminal” 56 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 http://www.jacomedia.net http://www.jacomedia.net comes from “limen”, the latin for “threshold” (1960) – in promoting this space, boom makes a concerted effort to mobilise liminality and potentiate novelty in the service of a spectrum of causes. !us, further from pathways 01: in this unique historical moment, liminality holds within it an evolutionary potency…. as we journey together into the liminal, know that this is where art is born. this is where the universal data streams of language, design, spiritual practice and entheogenic experience cross-pollinate and merge into a practical imaginal realm where we can speak, dance, listen and learn. it is here that life becomes a collaborative art project, and life becomes evidence of our evolutionary creativity manifest (eve the ladyapples 2006: 5). described as a “real-time, open source, visionary experience”, and a “global hub of visionary arts and culture”, in 2006 the liminal village featured several zones including a solar powered bamboo temple, the “omniplex”, the central structure in an alternative educational zone, its “interactive curriculum spotlighting emergent mythologies, integrative philosophies, and techniques for sustainable and holistic living”.18 with workshops, presentations and “metacine” cinema zone, the complex was devoted to the transmission of ecological principles (as demonstrated by permaculture workshops), but a range of other sacra, including: self-healing modalities, psychedelic consciousness, shamanism (including presentations from graham hancock and daniel pinchbeck, and a “visionary art” gallery called the “innervisions gallery”). organisers desired to transport the temporary citizens of this large bamboo complex to, as promotions had it, “the outer limits of consciousness” recognizing that travelers must depart “the liminal space back into the material, everyday world of our immediate locale”, the integration with which is “both a personal and a community function of re-evaluation and re-contextualization”. finally, from “our collective experiences at the edge of everything we can begin to make sense of our unique place in history and to take the important steps towards implementing the evolutionary changes required if humanity and our biosphere are to survive” (pathways 2006: 9). in 2008, boom gave considerable attention to "guring technology within its growing ecological agenda. in his observations on the festival, one of that year’s liminal village speakers, erik davis, described the festival as “an incubator of novelty … a petri dish of possibility where the future forms of community and consciousness are explored”. in its efforts to bridge “ritual and party” (davis 2008: 54), the boom festival is identi"ed at the leading edge of conscious festival design, a theme i take up elsewhere in a discussion of the complementarity of ceremonial and carnivalesque behavioural patterns among psytrance enthusiasts (see st john 2010b forthcoming). ••••••• boom’s liminal village performs like a novelty-machine processing the concerns of populations drawn to psytrance culture; a context within which re$exive practice, ecstatic experience and expressive arts have co-evolved. in its festal architectonics, good mood have adopted the power of the “liminal” in their response to the troubled present. in doing so, they ferment ethics, practices and arts sceptical of official narratives and incubate desire echoing the relativist, hopeful, holistic, and experiential characteristics of post-1960s alternative cultural and spiritual movements. !e sometimes uncertain partnership comprising the liminal village’s conscious performances and st john • neotrance and the psychedelic festival 57 the dionysian experience on its various dance $oors is a festal dynamic traceable to the 1960s model of the “gathering”. as a “gathering of the tribes” some forty years from its precedent, demonstrating inheritance from the tradition of carnival modulated by developments in alternative and electronic dance music culture over several decades, boom is a psychedelic festival facilitating the simultaneity of fusion and difference i have called neotrance, while at the same time hosting the transgressive/re$exive dynamic implicit to its movement. figure 12: boom festival, portugal, 2006. photo by graham st. john ••••••• acknowledgements many thanks to the photographers and designers whose work i have reproduced in 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[dvd]. ––––. boom festival 08: we are all, 2008. [dvd]. rood, billy and torsten kilmmer. 2002. liquid crystal vision. us. [dvd] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0385839/#comment discography shpongle. 1998. are you shpongled? twisted records (cd, album) twscd4 uk. http://www.discogs.com/shpongle-are-you-shpongled/release/27195 author biography graham st john is a research associate at the centre for critical and cultural studies at the university of queensland and was recently a postdoctoral research fellow in interactive media and performance at the university of regina, saskatchewan. his latest book technomad: global raving countercultures (equinox) will be published in september 2009. he is the executive editor of dancecult. see: www.edgecentral.net notes st john • neotrance and the psychedelic festival 63 1 employing a diverse range of theoretical and methodological approaches. see st john (2004a, 2006 and the other contributions to that special edition of culture and religion). for other accounts speci"cally addressing the religiosity of edmc, see d’andrea (2007), gauthier (2005), hutson (2000), sylvan (2002, 2005), takahashi (2005), takahashi and olaveson (2003), and tramacchi (2000). see also the recent edition of culture and religion edited by pinn and miller (2009) on hip hop and religion. 2 !e official "gure on both occasions. 3 <http://www.boomfestival.org> (accessed 9 june 2008). 4 in 2006, most of the main structures, including the sound $oors, manifested a balinese design in$uence. !e main floor, for instance, was a tall a bamboo pagoda. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0385839/#comment http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0385839/#comment http://www.discogs.com/shpongle-are-you-shpongled/release/27195 http://www.discogs.com/shpongle-are-you-shpongled/release/27195 http://www.edgecentral.net http://www.edgecentral.net http://www.boomfestival.org/ http://www.boomfestival.org/ 64 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 5 <http://www.welcomehome.org/rainbow/index.html> (accessed 12 june february 2009). 6 all of the styles mentioned are subsumed within what robin lindop (2010 forthcoming) indenti"es as the psytrance “meta-genre”, which is rooted in goa trance. for a musicological analysis of “goa trance” see cole and hannan (1997), and for a detailed description of psytrance musical structure see the online article by kenny easwaran “psytrance and the spirituality of electronics”: <http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/ ~easwaran/papers/psytrance.html> (accessed 9 february 2009). 7 for example, the fundamentalist christian website “www.truthaboutrave.com”, which was active between 2004-06 when it proclaimed to reveal the awful truth about raving, appeared to resurrect the puritan tracts of the likes of increase mather, for whom the heat of the rave dance $oor would undoubtedly have signi"ed one’s proximity to the devil. yet, this was not penned in the 17th century: “raves are a means of the devil to solicit worship. !e raver who commits himself to ingest drugs and dance the night away is unsuspectingly presenting his entire body as an instrument to express worship to demons and satan.” 8 see richard spurgeon’s “rave – !e awakening”: <http://www.rave-theawakening.com> (accessed 13 may 2006). 9 while fikentscher’s valuable assessment is based on the dj-dancer interaction, and the role of rhythm as a “synchronizing” force, as i elsewhere demonstrate, motivation and intention modulate the “collective energy” (st john 2009). 10 for further work speci"cally addressing the religio-spiritual dimensions of goa/ psytrance, see mcateer (2002), davis (2004), d’andrea (2004, 2006), (st john 2004b, 2010b forthcoming) and beck and lynch (2009). 11 “entheogen” refers to psychoactive compounds which ostensibly “evoke the divine within”. as jonathon ott describes “entheogen[ic] was proposed as a name for a subclass of psychotropic or psychoactive plants (and, by extension, their active principles and derivatives ‘both natural and arti"cial’), as a broad term to describe the cultural context of use, not speci"c chemistry or pharmacology; as an efficient substitute for cumbersome terms like shamanic inebriant, visionary drug, plant-sacrament, and plant-teacher” (ott, 1996: 205 in tramacchi 2006: 20. ott’s italics). 12 between these states, and indeed outside the dance $oor, yet within the precincts of the trance event, one encounters more ordinary conditions which may involve watching others dancing, conversations between friends (perhaps reviewing past events), or planning and logistics for the near future. !at such are also part of the “trance” experience, further complicates this subject. 13 <http://www.goagil.com/> (accessed 22 march 2009). 14 !e dvds include: boom festival 04: a timeless psydocumentary, 2005; boom festival 06: we are one, 2006; boom festival 08: we are all, 2008. 15 a phrase used by paul tillich (and cited in macaloon, 1984: 250-54, and lewis and dowsey-magog 1993). 16 all projects are documented in short "lms on the boom festival 08: we are all dvd. 17 from the "rst edition of the in-village publication, the “liminal zine” pathways. 18 “transmissions from the edge”: <http://boomfestival.org/> (accessed 9 february 2008). http://www.welcomehome.org/rainbow/index.html http://www.welcomehome.org/rainbow/index.html http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~easwaran/papers/psytrance.html http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~easwaran/papers/psytrance.html http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~easwaran/papers/psytrance.html http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~easwaran/papers/psytrance.html http://www.rave-theawakening.com/ http://www.rave-theawakening.com/ http://www.goagil.com/ http://www.goagil.com/ http://boomfestival.org/ http://boomfestival.org/ the diy careers of techno and drum 'n' bass djs in vienna dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 4(1): 4–37 issn 1947-5403 ©2012 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.01.01 seasoned exodus the exile mosaic of psyculture graham st john university of queensland (australia) abstract psychedelic trance music and culture (psyculture) is explored as a culture of exodus rooted in the seasonal dance party culture evolving in goa, india, over the 1970s/1980s, and revealing a heterogeneous exile sensibility shaping goa trance and psyculture from the 1990s/2000s. that is, diverse transgressive and transcendent expatriations would shape the music and aesthetics of goa/psytrance. thus, resisting circumscription under singular heuristic formulas, goa trance and its progeny are shown to be internally diverse. this freak mosaic was seasoned by expatriates and bohemians in exile from many countries, experienced in world cosmopolitan conurbations, with the seasonal dj-led trance dance culture of goa absorbing innovations in edm productions, performance and aesthetics throughout the 1980s before the goa sound and subsequent festival culture emerged in the mid-1990s. rooted in an experimental freak community host to the conscious realisation and ecstatic abandonment of the self, psyculture is heir to this diverse exile experience. keywords: goa trance, psytrance, psyculture, exodus, cultural exile, counterculture, festival graham st john is an honorary research fellow at the centre for critical and cultural studies at the university of queensland. his book forthcoming with equinox in 2012 is global tribe: spirituality, technology and psytrance. other recent books include technomad: global raving countercultures (equinox, 2009) and the edited collection the local scenes and global culture of psytrance (routledge, 2010). he is the executive editor of dancecult. see: <http://www.edgecentral. net>. email: <mailto:g.stjohn@warpmail.net> feature article http://www.edgecentral.net http://www.edgecentral.net mailto:g.stjohn@warpmail.net 5st john | seasoned exodus introduction psychedelic trance was born from winter (november–april) experiments on anjuna and surrounding beaches in goa, the former portuguese colony of india. from the late 1960s, cultural exiles from the west sought refuge in goa, and during the following decades forged a cultural movement exported back to the world. what became “goa trance” was a cultural industry indebted to the seasonal dj-led traveller dance music culture in goa, which, subsequent to genre-canonisation in the mid-1990s, was transposed to world psytrance, and absorbed by regional party organisations romancing the traveller sensibility that today infuses a global event-culture. goa trance and its progeny derived from the repeated seasonal influx of aesthetics, performance techniques and drugs imported by transnational travellers experienced in bohemian enclaves, world cosmopolitan centres and clubbing capitals, and who sought newer, exotic and protected plateaus of experimentation. during the 1980s, these expatriate traveller-djs transported and mixed techniques and music styles from these locales to cultivate a unique, experimental, open-air trance-dance culture relatively isolated from elements suppressing and regulating cultures of conviviality elsewhere. drawing upon ongoing research conducted on psyculture—psychedelic trance history, culture and music—this article illustrates that psyculture is heir to an experiential complexity embodied in the realisation and abandonment of the self cultivated in this seasonal freak community.1 figure 1. mandrem beach, goa, 1991/92 season. photo: luc pliot. dancecult 4(1)6 seasonal discommunitas goa trance emerged as a recognised marketable genre between 1994–1997, initially as a result of the interventions of producers and label managers martin glover, raja ram and simon posford. yet, its principal gestation period was during the late 1980s–early 1990s, a period of international optimism which saw the collapse of the soviet union and the end of the cold war, the dismantling of apartheid, the popularisation of mdma and the birth of the world wide web. at this premillennial juncture, which also saw the emergence of acid house rave culture in the uk and elsewhere, a transnational electronic dance movement was born whose chief expression was open-air trance dance parties, the inspiration for communities, crews and festivals dedicated to reproducing the goa experience. while this cultural movement was inspired by india, the “essence” of which became integral to the “traveller” and exile sensibility of psyculture, the latter has also been heavily impacted by the native shamanic practices of the central and south americas, among whom are derived the use of various popular shamanic plants and psychoactive decoctions—e.g. psilocybincontaining mushrooms, ayahuasca, dmt2 and other brews and blends—popular among participants. the exile sensibility was achieved as individuals travelled physically from “home” locations and mentally from normative mind states, freedoms of movement enabled by relative disposable wealth and assisted by transpersonalising digital, chemical and virtual media. in anthony d’andrea’s (2007) study of “nomadic spirituality” and expressive expatriation, alternative travellers are experienced across exoteric sites and transcendent states—a psychogeography of experience which positions freak travellers at the crossroads of “horizontal” (geo-spatial) and “vertical” (metaphysical, psychedelic) “trips”. as this freak psychogeography facilitated efforts to obliterate and expand subjectivity, goa was never simply an enclave of strident optimism, a theme amplified in the “progressive” progeny that typically courts philosophies of unity, wholeness and becoming. the perplexity of psytrance culture was compounded in the post-iraq invasion period by the emergence of dark trance (or “darkpsy”), whose rapid-paced formulation, gothic horror sensibility and dark carnival atmospherics amplified elements of self-annihilation extant in the pioneering exodus. exodus is then a practice integral to the emergence of goa trance, and subsequently psytrance, which accommodates and commodifies the exile experience within its eventculture. moreover, this is not a homogenous, linear, nor predictable process. scholars have begun articulating the significance of exodus within edm, an expanded view of which recognises not only experimental modes of “workplay” (see van veen 2010), but diy practices and cultural activism (rietveld 1998; st john 2001), “queer world-making” (buckland 2002), “instituant” religious experience (gauthier 2004) and challenges to the habitus born from the “chemical intimacy” of the dance floor ( jackson 2004). most importantly, it acknowledges the artifice of the exile infusing the socio-aesthetic (dubbed the “vibe”) of world edmcs (e.g. fikentscher 2000; st john 2009). psyculture offers one of the most overt examples of a culture born in exile, whose transnational participants have cultivated a vibe of the exiles, a techno-liberationalism flushed with a sensibility of 7st john | seasoned exodus transit which poaches from various traditions of resistance, transgression and esoterica, yet is innovative and original all the same. the goa “vibe” is then integral to a countercultural and patently psychedelic movement responsive to parent cultures since the 1960s/1970s, and which now carries the memory, even fantasy, of exodus into the present. but this psychedelic vibe is as multidimensional as the exodus performed. as the freaks landing in goa sought exotic lands, local patronage, altered states of mind and looser modes of embodiment, and as they desired respectful relationships with the locals while embracing “the ‘global’ as the new home and reference” (d’andrea 2004: 244), the diaspora shaping the goa aesthetic is populated by exiles with manifold motivations and expectations. “visionaries” and “plastic hippies” (howard 1969: 43), “settlers” and “conquerors” (maoz 2005: 176), activists and outlaws, electro goths and cosmic cowboys, dubmeisters and techno-heads have settled, and mixed, in this outland. during the 1980s, the electronic music played in goa was diverse. new wave, dub, electro, synth-pop, new beat, techno and acid house provided the perennially shifting and updated sound of the discommunitas evolving, or indeed devolving, in goa. one of the recurring motifs not uncommon to the legacy of “communitas” outlined by victor turner (1974), is that the parties were always “better last year”, in the previous “magic” era, or before so and so showed up with such and such. it is a common perception among older djs and freaks that goa declined as its sound was standardised and marketed as a definable genre—among numerous grievances d’andrea (2010) identifies in the gulfstream of complex globalisation.3 new zealander ray castle, who first djed in goa in 1989, and had co-organised “the first goa style parties in europe” (pagan production, at ruigoord, amsterdam, 1988–1991),4 has been among the most vociferous of those criticising the aftermath of goa trance. castle opposes the normalising of psychedelia codified into its own nomos, whose “fundamentalism” is anathema to the fusional and genre-defying roots of psychedelia, which became “like a religion with rules and codes of vibrational resonance, form, structure, regulated rites”.5 normalisation is difficult if not impossible to isolate, however, given the multiplicity of processes—e.g. aesthetic and economic, liberational and regulatory, local and global—effecting any given crew, party, scene or music. scholars of psytrance dredge the profligate organic metaphors of deleuze and guattari (1987) to identify the “rhizomatic” network seen in operation (e.g. d’andrea 2010; de ledesma 2010; rietveld 2010), offering something of a heuristic contrast to, for instance, the complex structural processes independently outlined by turner (1974) and bastide (1975, see gauthier 2004). following the heuristics of these latter theorists, the attenuation of the “religious experience” associated with an epochal moment of spontaneity, synchronicity and togetherness inspires periodic (e.g. seasonal) normative frameworks which professionalise and codify the formative liminality, with subsequent objections triggering a renewed vibe and instances of as-yet-undefined socio-aesthetics. in psyculture, this cyclical modeling may account for cultural and event-industry strategies of party optimisation and commodification inciting counter-movements, splinter crews and protean events, as well as new music aesthetics, the establishment of which causes further break-away movements responding to the perceived dancecult 4(1)8 threat to the “vibe”. but this cyclical pattern, if it can be identified, is affected by multiple inputs, including other implicated cycles. the complexity grows as we recognise that the seasonal destination that endured, arguably, for over 25 years, was shaped by wave upon wave of arrivals, with each discerning cohort reckoning how new waves portended the “vibe’s” ebb. here, i simply want to point out that the historical and ongoing identification of multiple elements counterproductive to the goa “vibe” has been integral to psyculture. figure 2. arambol lake 1990/1991. photo: luc pliot. no formal research had been conducted on the seasoned discommunitas of goa during its formative periods, i.e. in the 25 years before goa trance. the only ethnographies are those conducted following the emergence of goa trance as a genre and the widely reported demise of the scene in goa. among these, arun saldanha (2007) provides the most dedicated analysis, excoriating the “microfascist” potential in freak “lines of flight” and finding a tendency towards “viscosity” among white freaks in goa as indians (locals and domestic tourists) are subject to exclusions within/from parties. while an exposé of the chimerical characteristics of freak transcendence in goa is laudable, reliant on a materialist theory of race, saldanha charges psychedelic trance in goa as racially prejudiced, a conclusion which, despite its deleuzian inspiration, illustrates a surprisingly one-dimensional rendering of the politics of experience in goa. exclusivity is a long-standing feature of the goa movement. hidden away in the second last issue of the stoned pig6 was a reminder of the responsibilities implicit to a scene seeking to connect with others while at the same time desiring clandestinity. “we must be discreet, we must have a countenance that projects all we know & respect in the subtlest way. . . . a system that reveals all its secrets is bound 9st john | seasoned exodus to collapse. as don juan said, ‘you must become a man of mystery with no past and no ties, for until you do this, you can be tracked, hunted, killed’” (snydly 1975: 6). as the secret was exposed, numerous conditions threatened the goa party vibe, including rank journalism, domestic tourists predating upon mythically “loose” white women, rampant commercialism, police corruption and concerns about “conqueror” backpackers from israel and elsewhere.7 echoing the complex nature of the exiled sensibility cultivated in goa, the exclusivity that enabled the perpetuation of the culture and its migration to locations worldwide, and which informs various emergent subgenres, is itself multidimensional, shaped by class, gender, sexuality, as well as race matters, but reductionism to any single determination is disingenuous.8 these observations, then, shed light on the complexity of freedom at the progenitor-site of psyculture, to which the concept of “heterotopia” (see foucault 1986; st john 2001b) appears strongly applicable. as hetherington (1997: 41) conveys, “heterotopia” has been used to denote “sites constituted as incongruous or paradoxical, through socially transgressive practices; sites that are ambivalent and uncertain due the multiplicity of meanings attached to them; sites that have an aura of mystery, danger or transgression about them; sites defined by their absolute perfection; marginalised sites, and; incongruous forms of writing”. goa’s formative events were “free”, meaning not simply free admission (or entrance with a donation9) but facilitating freedoms from labour practices, organised religion, media industries, state surveillance and normative modes of subjectivity. as a successful autonomous zone, goa’s existence was dependent upon its relative isolation from tourists, journalists, gangs and police; an experimentalism jeopardised and subject to optimisation throughout the history of psytrance. luther elliott (2010: 25–6) recognised “prurient media attention” among the incentives for exiles from haight-ashbury in the late 1960s. and as d’andrea conveys, in goa, freaks cultivated parties where those disrupting efforts to maintain “the smooth space of creativity and experimentation” were deemed outsiders regardless of race/ethnicity (2010: 45–6). scorning the “packaged” commodification of experience associated with conventional tourism, freaks “present a pragmatic engagement with native cultures, and more closely emulate the skeptical, romantic and elitist gaze of the ‘post-tourist’” (d’andrea 2007: 177). the identification of, and response to, such scenethreatening behaviour remains consistent in the many places of emergence of psyculture (see schmidt 2010). as these recent accounts illustrate, there are considerable complications behind the distinctions that normally fall in the wake of scene exposure. internal distinctions within this culture grow apparent as one pays attention to differential expectations and aesthetics motivating the exodus that shaped goa trance in its place of birth. not unlike other key edm developments that play host to a medley of cultural brokers, well-travelled djs and producers, pioneers and genuine remixers of sound and traditions typically estranged from the cultural popstream, goa’s formative scene was diverse. the beach paradise was a peerless harbour for cultural expatriation, its profusion only now beginning to be properly understood. but understanding does not come easy for prospective cultural historians of goa. as veteran swedish anders informed me, i have myself entered dancecult 4(1)10 “a hornet’s nest”.10 since the 1960s/1970s, exiles from a multitude of nations cultivating distrust towards inherited religious, scientific, political and economic institutions, sought escape from the nuclear family and a possible nuclear winter through the 1970s and 1980s. they desired liberation from the staged freedoms of consumer lifestyles, departures from social and kinship structures and educational institutions reckoned to inhibit spiritual growth, and from the repressive society that outlawed their own lifestyles—with these departures shaping the cultural movement to come. in goa, freaks beached themselves in a state of departure, sometimes disingenuously, other times spectacularly, from manifold lifeworld conditions. while the mobility was, for some, greased by “trust funds” and opportunities unavailable to those outside the moneyed classes, for others, goa was literally the “end of the world”. and while this celebrated location at the terminus of the “hippie trail” through turkey and afghanistan was for some an idyllic context to expand consciousness, for others it was the perfect locale to enact one’s own personal apocalypse. from the bon vivant to the wretched outcast, the freak exiles and their cultural progeny are “neonomads” (d’andrea 2007), mobile across physical sites (alternative regions, enclaves, markets and festivals in local and global circuits) and psychical terrain (the journey into the unconscious via the use of charas, psychedelics and “entheogens”). while this is the transnational and transpersonal world of the trance dancer, the freedoms sought and achieved are as multiple as the conditions of risk, constraint and oppression in the lifeworld. the liminality of the exile discommunitas was not, therefore, driven by any singular promise of “freedom”. figure 3. party at palmgrove, 1991. photo: anders tillman. 11st john | seasoned exodus “all wiped out on being”: the arts of nothing the self-exiled sensibility in goa relies on an experiential complex, which, while at no time easy to describe, pivots upon commitments towards the conscious realisation and ecstatic abandonment of the self. these sometimes radically disparate pathways for the self are undertaken in a time when the “immediacy of personal experience . . . is understood as epistemologically crucial” (partridge 1999: 86). the radical immanence, improvisation and sensuality championed by the beats and their rootless predecessors in bohemian enclaves and romantic and transcendentalist traditions over the last 150 years or more, was inherited by those who sought goa in the 1960s and 1970s. psychedelic trance is rooted in a movement of east-bound seekers who had exhausted their prospects for the awareness or apocalypse of the self obtainable in the west. iconic figures like the beatles and timothy leary were of course influential. and, following the examples of ginsberg, kerouac and ram dass, there were those who sought to be like wandering mendicants, channelling the meditative grace and wisdom of eastern religious traditions, a romance resonating with goa trance artists adopting the concept of “bodhisattva” (the wandering buddha), or evolving and promoting personalised modes of continuity with the brahmanic “cosmic spirit”. a full understanding of goa trance and its progeny would expose the orientalist dispositions in music and associated aesthetics shifted under this rubric.11 yet such developments do not circumscribe the phenomenological experience to which eastern religion, philosophy and practice offered meaning. yoga warriors, audio magicians and ritual syncretists have cultivated lifestyles embodying how, as allen watts announced in his 1960 “nature of consciousness” seminar broadcast on ksan radio, “a wave is continuous with the ocean”. indeed, on “no such thing” (psychedelica melodica, 2007), the uk’s cosmosis (bill halsey) takes notes from the same seminar, sampling, “the basic problem is to understand that there are no such things as things. that is to say separate things, separate events. what do you mean by a thing? a thing is a noun. a noun isn’t a part of nature, it’s a part of speech. there are no nouns in the physical world”. the commentary invokes a message apparent in goa trance at its inception, with, for instance, the title track of the infinity project’s seminal mystical experiences (1995) featuring watts meditating on that condition to which travellers, wayfarers and trance dancers have aspired down through the ages: nothing. “imagine nothing. no thing. no me. no you. no world. nothing”. today, the experienced trance traveller continues to elicit the feeling. thus, “i know nothing, and in that nothing is all. all!”, states an enraptured woman caught in some revelatory moment on “all is nothing”, the only sample on boris blenn’s eleventh album, as electric universe (higher modes, 2011). these sampled commentaries are the compiled sound-bites of hypermobile “spiritual virtuosi” (sutcliffe 2000) and those norman mailer caricatured as “frontiersmen in the wild west of american nightlife” (1957: 277), who have assayed experience with the assistance of new tools in mind-manifesting, whispering to us via the digital song-lines of the turn of the 21st century the sweet nothings discovered riding out on those frontiers. while the modern dancecult 4(1)12 appearance of an esoteric seekership may have commenced with the theosophists, it would later flourish in the years between the world wars as a “seeker culture” emerged whose participants searched for hidden truths via occult practices (sutcliffe 2007). it proliferated in the 1960s and 1970s with the turn to oriental metaphysical praxis, including yoga and tantra alongside a plethora of other body-arts facilitating the deification of the flesh and the enlightenment of the body (kripal 2007). disciplinary approaches to higher states of consciousness and embodied enlightenment exercised in this period were complemented — some would argue, overshadowed—by other routes to nowhere, where an abandonment of one’s past could be performed; where identity, nation and tradition were exorcised in the uncompromising embrace of chaos, of wild human nature, a rawness known and expressed by poets, artists and dancers, a madness cultivated on the margins of history. here was the innocence, truth and love that r. d. laing, in the politics of experience (1967: 136), thought could be achieved by unlearning that “appalling state of alienation called normality”, a liberation through regression paralleling the “voyage” of psychosis. for growing numbers, the transcendental catharsis could be experienced in transgressive leisure, erotic arts and other voluntary risk-taking activities. since the 1960s, these routes to experience coalesced in new forms of art, leisure, sexuality and sociality, and in the subversive sites in which these were cultivated, where, in what erik davis identifies as “spiritual hedonism” (2004), “edgemen” (turner 1969: 128) sought an immediacy enabled by new media of transcendence: psychosomatic technologies, personal computers, electronic synthesizers, virtual instruments and other “machines of loving grace”, facilitating an independent cultural economy whose radically reflexive participants possess unprecedented control over the means of perception. as “children of technique”, forebears of psychedelic trance were altering consciousness on a scale previously unknown, using meditation, acid rock, psychoactive compounds and other technics in experiments with nameless paths and unknowable destinations—the fierce independence of antagonists matched by a savage indeterminacy where what mattered most was one’s embrace of a radical immanence removed from the past and the future. to be a freak was to trek multiple paths and experience heteroclite travails. “freak” was an acceptable designation for the evolutionary (or indeed revolutionary) mutation from alienation, a break from a failed existence, a counterpoint to the recognised separation from source-spirit-nature to which one “returns”. the transit native to this rupture has typically implied a movement from a condition of alienation implicit to monotheism, possessive materialism, patriarchy and patriotism, and a corresponding movement toward a resolve. those who joined the exodus in 1960s/70s modelled themselves as a generation in transit, anxious to assume the role of the “new man” and “new woman” via the adoption of dietary techniques, occult sexuality, new architecture, meditation, psychedelics and the return to childhood. a post-humanism was notable, according to tom wolfe in the electric kool-aid acid test (1971, see also dery 1996: 45), among ken kesey and the merry pranksters, who were influenced by, among other things, arthur c. clarke’s childhood’s end. at the end of clarke’s 1953 novel, which depicts the merger of the human species with the 13st john | seasoned exodus cosmic overmind, the last generation of (telekinetically enhanced) children on earth are dancing, a motif picked up by billy in the stoned pig: “the last generation of man are dancing blissfully, ecstatically through the forest and jungles. some move in groups, others alone, all wiped out on being. they are hardly sensible to the physicality of this world, their consciousness is expanding into higher levels of being. their hair is matted, their clothes rags, they care hardly for food or shelter, eating wild fruits, sleeping in the open, dancing, eternally dancing”. as billy concluded, that’s “not too far from what happens on anjuna” (billy 1975/76: 7). figure 4. dawn after full moon party, anjuna beach, late 1970s. photo: tarot ray. the optimism inhering in such views was implicit to the prevailing logic of meditative individuation and the holism embodied in the teachings of the human potential movement. while meditation became integral to westerners seeking higher states of consciousness, another popular technique of selfhood was trance dance, or what osho (bhagwan shree rajneesh) deemed “dynamic meditation”. but while osho offered a route to remembering and reenchantment via his nietzschean buddhist charismatic cult, others arriving in india were simply compelled to forget. on anjuna beach, wrote english-australian steve dancecult 4(1)14 “madras” devas (2004), “we had suntans. we didn’t need history . . . because the only past thing was a chillum”. devas’ tribute to fellow goa freak, amsterdam dave, “our only story is the beach”, is a tale about a culture of amnesia as much as it is story about liberation. on his journey overland to india, devas recalls that “the first letter from my dad waiting for me in poste restante, kabul, contained a cutting from the times of london, headlined ‘hippies begging like dogs in afghanistan’. there was no letter with the article; there didn’t need to be. the inference was clear. you have become hippy trash”. abandoning their pasts, devas and his companions who reached anjuna in the 1970s were dwelling “in a hermetic world of falsity, garbled phone calls and hollowed out lifestyles. false ids, false bottoms, false passports . . . there was so much to not talk about”. our history safely out of reach our only story is the beach on the full moon party we are born we who from our story torn are busy lying on the beach (devas 2004). devas clarifies with cutting detail the worlds those from a multitude of western countries were deliberately leaving behind. “the trauma of being wasp, catholic or pentecostal, the trauma of vietnam, the trauma of being american . . . the trauma of class, race or nationality, the trauma of being french, italian or british or german”. for most, he continued, being from somewhere was at best uncomfortable and often unbearable. how else could you explain the french junkies who plagued the beach, a bewildered generation withered by class hatred, who turned to heroin to dress their wounds? the italians? what was their stone? the unbearable lightness of religion? and the germans, not one of my german friends ever talked about the war and the welts of pain lacerating the german psyche. the awful g word hanging over them like a black cloud, emasculating joy, castrating self expression, no colours anymore, i want them to turn black, i want to see the sun—blotted out from the sky, i want to see it painted, painted . . . painted black (devas 2004). although being a “freak” presupposed the journey of transformation integral to spiritual awakenings fomenting in the 1960s and 1970s, it also signalled the desire to discard the past in an apocalypse of subjectivity fuelled not only by lsd, but cocaine and heroin. cleo odzer’s (1995) well-known account of addiction, excess and depravity includes an incident in which a “french junkie” fell down and died in a village well. you can feel the bones crunch and taste the rotten effluence down through the years as the protean music and scenes to come amplified fecklessness at the same time as they attempted a meaningful resolution. the parties surfacing in the wake of this freak tsunami would become host to these disparate roads to nowhere, enabling unravelings and inaugurating becomings—junctures remote from places of origin and yet designed to welcome travellers “home”. 15st john | seasoned exodus the homecomings were celebrated as far back as the late 1960s, though according to goa veteran peter thomas (aka blond peter)—who published an alternative goa newsletter in 1973/74 called pigs & palms—seminal among the early goa parties were those held in the palm-leaf compound at blue’s place just back from south anjuna beach (now called curlies). thomas recalls the period: blue was the only openly gay sadhu hippie on the india scene at that time, into jewellery, est, people, parties, local goan motorcycle boys and giving elaborate presents to people he liked. his parties were always ‘the cream of the cream’ and the music may have started out as acoustic folk rock, but there was already a trance element with everyone singing, drumming, hand-jiving and generally getting into it. on a full moon, the pre-party at blue’s was the best preparation for a looooong night. we had bathing facilities prepared, good food and a candle-lit environment—it was also a refuge when things got too intense. sadly, i heard blue died of an aids-related disease some years later. he challenged the macho hippie raj ethos, because he had solid overland credentials, and he brought a new expectation of tolerance and a unique personal majesty to the scene.12 gathering at the terminus of the hippie trail at the edge of the world, parties were the pinnacle achievement of a community that, as thomas further relates, “was not based on any sect, but rather on a mutual unspoken decision to encourage harmony”. but, he added, “we all knew that it could not last” (thomas 2011). in the heyday of freak settlement, before the vein of experience itself collapsed, the uninhibited, exclusive and unmediated parties at blue’s c1973, and countless other refuges established off and on the beach, were laboratories for a barely definable state of being other shared by the swarms washing up on anjuna and other beaches. sampling a line from psychiatrist and early lsd researcher sidney cohen speaking on the bbc documentary, the beyond within: the rise and fall of lsd (1987), shpongle co-founder simon posford (as hallucinogen) offered further clarity on the desired-yet-inexpressible state on “demention”, the opener on the lone deranger (1997): “there is an area of the mind that could be called unsane, beyond sanity, and yet not insane. think of a circle with a fine split in it. at one end there’s insanity. you go around the circle to sanity, and on the other end of the circle, close to insanity, but not insanity, is unsanity”. the well-known sample strikes a note on the goa party which, as a context for becoming mind-less in trance, carried the legacy of blue and other architects of the goa tradition. it references a state of mind that, while immeasurable and indefinable, is that which one desires to revisit. and revisit it they did, in greater frequency, in greater numbers, and with more and more kit. wouter thomassen (aka zen mechanics) appears to highlight the circumstance on “psychotropical nights” (universo paralello, 2008) where francis ford coppola—interviewed in hearts of darkness: a filmmaker’s apocalypse, about the making of apocalypse now!—reveals: “we were in the jungle….there were too many of us.…we had access to too much money...too much equipment…and little by little we went insane”. and lsd, the most prolific manufacturer dancecult 4(1)16 figure 5. monkey house. photo: luc pliot. 17st john | seasoned exodus of which (bear owsley) was rumoured to have arrived in goa in 1974 “bearing gifts”,13 was integral to sending protagonists in the goa story way “up river”, far from history, and out of their minds. as bromell (2000: 88) wrote, “the person who has seen the mysteries, or just tripped, can never return to the world as it used to be. he, or she, is an exile forever now, cut off from the simple comfort and complacence in which those who have never glimpsed another reality dwell”. those who got off the world and arrived in goa in the 1970s, often by long and circuitous route, had achieved the ultimate party destination, where they would continuously get off together. figure 6. eight finger eddie, mid-1970s. photo: anders tillman. full moon at the edge of the world as a result of the diverse influences and the commitment to celebrate in seasons often imagined to be the last, goa travellers would “party like there was no tomorrow”. from around 1966/1967, freaks like the noted eight finger eddie, began descending on goa, which after 450 years of portuguese rule, held a reputation as one of the most hospitable locations on the subcontinent, and in the east. in elliott’s (2010: 28) estimation, “whether it was intrinsic affability or economic hardship that motivated the amicable relations, most accounts of the 1970s in goa cast the villagers of calangute, baga, anjuna, vagator as friends and business partners”. goa was among the most permissive and tolerant locations in india, where charas (hashish) was legal until the mid to late 1970s and was (and remains) cheap. dancecult 4(1)18 figure 7. swedish anders (anders tillman) late 1980s. photo: carlos. 19st john | seasoned exodus while various goa beaches had been host to ecstatic dance gatherings from the late 1960s, anjuna became the location for the famed full-moon gatherings. these foundational events were sumptuous and extravagant occasions encouraging the most spectacular individual style among participants. as swedish anders (anders tillman) recalls, “in the seventies, we were the deco . . . and we spent the whole month creating our dressup”.14 by the mid-1970s, the full-moon parties were an experimental showcase for what devas called the “cosmo rock movement”.15 by the mid-1980s, electronic music had completely dominated what by then had become a dj-led scene in anjuna. most accounts of the culture make reference to dj goa gil and dj laurent as principal pioneers,16 but there were various other unsung pioneers who shaped the movement. arriving in february 1970, anders djed at private parties from 1976/77, and in that season worked at the rose garden in anjuna playing music from tapes all night “creating a story” for the crowd. while introducing styles like brazilian soul funk, his most memorable achievement was introducing disco, explaining that donna summer’s “love to love you baby” was “the first trance song”, with its producer giorgio moroder regarded as “the grandfather of trance”.17 figure 8. mixing hut, full moon party, anjuna beach, 1979. photo: gilbert garcia. dancecult 4(1)20 another notable early dj was german paoli, paoli münchenbach, who arrived in 1975 and played rock including captain beefheart, zappa, tyla gang, along with “krautrock” material from can, neu! and faust, and by 1978 was playing afrobeat, afro psycho rock, jùjú, latin and funk. also that year, he claims he played the first 12-inch records on cassette in goa, reeling out reggae and heavy dub over the next two years, including material from the likes of keith hudson, the detonators, dr. alimantado and specifically reggae regular’s 12-inch extended version of “the black star liner” (which ran to 9:25 minutes).18 arriving from paris in 1979 and often performing in a sparkling gold outfit, fred disko was the pioneer of electronic soundscapes in goa. while electronic music had been introduced to goa dance crowds before, disko experimented with full sets of mostly german punk new wave electronic music from the 1979/80 season. cutting out lyrics on cassette tapes at the saint tropez french house outside chapora from 1980/81, disko played experimental splices of yello, joy division, throbbing gristle, a certain ratio, the residents, lene lovich, nina hagen and tuxedomoon, among others, throughout the period of transition from rock to electronic.19 this was not an easy transition, but from its inception, the music performed was diverse, and as anders explained, distinct scenes evolved on different goa beaches: “we had our different strata, partially based on where we went to live, candolim, wealthy, baga, the oldest, who didn’t move along to anjuna, where we were more progressive, and vagator, where they wanted to distance themselves, from the rest, also the latest comers, and arambol, the hippies, they still play acoustic music there”.20 but while these artists and showmen were instrumental in shaping the destination, it was laurent’s contribution that is commonly recognised as legendary, with one recent commentator, dave mothersole (2010), identifying him as “the real father of trance. a true legend . . . just as chicago had ron hardy and detroit had the electrifying mojo, goa had a dj called laurent”.21 having played parties on a rented barge on the seine, laurent arrived in vagator in early march 1984. maintaining harvest of a steady supply of fresh audio-cargo from europe and the us, he used tape cut-up techniques—working with the same sony devices he used for mixing—and blending new wave, italo-disco, ebm, new beat, goth, electro, hi-nrg, synth-pop and house to create mesmerising sets through the 1980s, shaping the sound of goa. one can imagine front 242’s post-apocalyptic “commando mix” (1984) and the quavering siren and thump of neon’s “voices” (1988) echoing down the beach and out to sea, or the instrumental version of poésie noire’s electro “timber” (1987) cutting swathes through even the hardened among jungle ravers, or otherwise becoming set adrift to jean-michel jarre’s “zoolookologie” (1985). right through the decade, the reedited work of blancmange, cabaret voltaire, a split second, daf, konzept, microchip league, revolting cocks, shriekback, signal aout 42, trilithon and other outfits favoured by laurent were stitched together sans the vocals to animate the proto-trance massive for up to 10 hours at a time. laurent’s style simply resisted categorisation.22 “real psy”, for castle, “is beyond genre”. according to castle, the distinctive feature of the collision of styles in goa in the late 1980s was its “plural diversity”. “each track had narrative personality and character. goa, 80s–94, wasn’t driven by labels and music industry. travellers and collectors 21st john | seasoned exodus exchanged music. the best tracks were distilled down over the party season and played in the parties by discerning djs”. and it was laurent who “had the sharpest perception of which music cut it for the emerging goa atmos-logos, drawing from access to the most discerning collector sources. these sound nuggets he was able to weave, using tape player decks, into seamless, empowering, marathon mosaic mixes for tripped out dancers”. as he further recalls, “the 80s techno/acid house/neu beat/electronic body music” of which laurent was the lead conductor, was generally under 130 bpm, which gave dancers “more space for expressive movement”(castle as genkigroove 2010). figure 9. dj laurent. photo: teresa sconfienza. by the mid-1980s, entering this mosaic was “like stepping into another world”, writes mothersole, a former south london soul-boy who, in 1986, reportedly failed to “show these hippies what it’s all about” (2010). mothersole and other commentators have favourably recalled the wild diversity of those gathering in free clandestine parties hosting barely a few hundred people, possessed by an animated spirit unknown anywhere else. karin silenzi de stagni cherishes the experience of never knowing or caring who the dj was. for me, coming from drumming parties in the jungle of brazil, this was the international update of a ritual celebration. at the beginning, i felt it was too electronic for my taste, but after few sips of [acid] eric’s punch and some good basic earthy beats dancecult 4(1)22 weaved with melodic samples from diverse cultural backgrounds it worked the magic on me and couldn’t stop dancing... even now!! i didn’t like when the music were only synthesizers. . . . [i wanted] some south american carnavalito, some arabic singing, some african drumming or other ethnic spices to touch me deep.23 by the late 1980s at parties of under 500 people, castle recalls how speaker stacks were “predominantly set up in a circle formation so that dancers were not just facing a dj on a stage with typical two speaker stacks flanking. dancers moved around the dance floor 360 degrees, interactively, holophonic, circular, within jungle/palm tree fields of sound”. the dj was secondary and obscure, he continued in typical flourish, “this was not celeb idolatry music biz. it was luminous, participatory, transpersonal, communal. underground in an exceptionally, exotic, obtuse, mystical dance dharma zone, where cows would appear within the dusty gusto of dance floor ignition frenzy frequency feasts” (castle as genkigroove 2010). figure 10. vagator beach, goa, 1991. photo: christine le voyer. 23st john | seasoned exodus “no one can know about this. you understand? no one.” the diversity of sounds propagating across the beaches and thumping within the jungle hinterlands of goa were resounding echoes of the scene’s roots in a complex global network of cosmopolitan centres and a consequential profusion of 1980s electronica: industrial, ebm, acid house, techno and trance sounds. the circulation of mdma had become a crucial factor by the end of the 1980s, fuelling formative domestic dance scenes like the acid house scene in the uk, and the acid techno/house scene in spain described as la ruta del bacalao. as anders pointed out, in 1987/88 “people spent the whole weekend driving between valencia and madrid, the parties were made in discos, parking lots of supermarkets, and wherever they’d get away with it. . . . chimo bayo was one of the main artists, and we did play some of that music”.24 under the influence of the frankfurt techno-trance sound, detroit techno and acid house from chicago, and with the intense repurposing of the sounds of “acid” programmed on roland tb-303 bass synthesizers and tr-808 drum machines, there were seasonal anthems, such as the klf’s 1988 release “what time is love (pure trance version)” (1988) (see rietveld 2010: 74–5). by the turn of the 1990s, the goa sound was carrying what rietveld (2010: 79) calls a “psychedelic motorik” amplified in the trance or hard trance coming out of germany. amid the noise of influences, precise origins and transition points are difficult, if not impossible, to determine. therefore, while the technotrance music that was known as the “frankfurt sound” had a bearing on the goa sound, goa trance did not strictly evolve from music denoted as “trance”, but simply absorbed 1980s styles into an evolving aesthetic flourishing within an enduring experimental dance scene, which, by the turn of the 1990s, gained word-of-mouth recognition as a “trance dance” culture. what then came to be known as “trance” developed into various commercially successful genres including “progressive trance”; the latter influencing the sound of what had become recognised as “psytrance (and especially “progressive psychedelic”) by the end of the 1990s. replying to a thread on the discogs discussion group “goa/psy-trance”, meltdown23 (2010) offers insight on the early 1990s development: the music was from all over europe and elsewhere, ebm, new beat, italia house, spanish ebm, the odd english track, all spliced and diced by the then djs. for me in goa 1990 it was mainly the last remnants of new beat being played there, but to those who were there in 91 and 92 that was the start of what we called trance dance, as a way of collectively describing the music we heard, but its true to say, that if one of these songs was isolated on its own it could only be called techno or ebm, (or nowadays old school) but once played in a set with similar music and edited and chopped it became goa trance dance, well to us at least, and 92 was no different really apart from the music becoming even more melodic, and to be honest artists were not making music specifically for goa at that time, it was of course a dj led scene the same commentator adds further insight on the birth of the goa sound: “from 93 onwards the music was produced specifically for goa in mind, all these early goa producers dancecult 4(1)24 were just trying to mimic what they had heard from the pioneering djs and extend it musically, its then that the music changed into the genre we now know … after 92 djs from england and elsewhere started arriving in goa to play their take on the goa sound, this is when it changed” (meltdown23 2010, mistakes in original). while objections have been raised about the formulation of genre implicit to those efforts to refine and define the seasonal mixes in tracks released on eps and albums, others have warranted that this process enabled excellence. this is, not unsurprisingly, the position of martin glover, who made seasons in goa for ten years and founded the first goa trance label, dragonfly records, in 1993.25 signing the early the infinity project, hallucinogen, man with no name, doof, total eclipse, pleiadians, shakta and others, dragonfly rapidly became the engine-house of the london (and global) psychedelic trance scene. “as it became more and more popular and the sound followed this evolutionary curve into high-octane trance”, glover confirms that “the bandwidth of expression” suddenly became narrow. “but in some ways”, he adds, “that was good. it did cut out a lot of chaff from the wheat. it had to be really good to fit into that bandwidth and some artists really redefined it because of that and took it even further like simon posford and x-dream” (in photon 2005). dragonfly operated from the studio of glover’s butterfly records where posford worked as a studio engineer. as hallucinogen (co-founder of shpongle and member of many other acts and collaborations), posford pushed the boundaries of the possible, becoming instrumental in the psychedelic trance emergence. yet, a host of dj-producers stamped their influence on the coming sound. dane ian johansson (ian ion) was another goa convert, perfectionist and powerhouse, who had led 1980s punk synth-pop act russia heat and produced one of the first popular anthems specifically made for goa, “sundown” (the overlords, 1991), later forming projects koxbox and saiko-pod with frank kiehn madsen (frank e). and there were many other principal artist-travellers who would capture and translate the sound of the exile psychedelic motorik to global domestic settings.26 with backgrounds in diverse styles and scenes, these artists became members of an emergent global psychedelic trance network. by the early 1990s, goa had attracted attention from djs, freaks, tourists and authorities alike, with its popularity becoming the cause of its own decline. by then, the population of international visitors had grown dramatically, as had police corruption and the presence of the local mafia. by 1991/92, there was a massive influx of travellers from the world over as parties grew from near 200 to 1,500 per event and were forced further afield, like maharashtra. by 1995, goa trance had registered as a marketable genre, by the winter months of 1997, tourists would outnumber goans, and by 2000, club tourism had become rife (saldanha 2002: 45). there is no simple pathway through this story, as different releases produced during the peak period convey. take, for instance, paul oakenfold’s a voyage into trance (dragonfly, 1995) which offered a vision splendid: “imagine yourself in a 4000 year old ruined temple, somewhere half buried in the jungle, fluro painted vines and trees, a 20k turbo charged rig, burning fire sculptures, and a few hundred wildly painted, crazy party people dancing non-stop for three days”. the cover features a mendicant in head-dress whose message-board has been replaced with an advertisement for dragonfly’s previous 25st john | seasoned exodus figure 11. party at maharashtra fort, early 1990s. photo: anders tillman. release, the seminal order odonata vol. 1 (1994). but while new releases were being distributed like exotic sonic travel brochures, others were hesitant to divulge the secret. another 1995 release, technossomy’s “germination (huge rant mix)” (timepiece ep), repeated the lines: “no one can know about this. you understand? no one”. precisely when goa ended as a scene destination is the subject of considerable debate. it depends on who you talk to, what criteria they base their assertions upon and what interests they have at stake. as davis (1995) reported, the scene was already declared an historical subject by 1993/94. castle witnessed the loss of the “magic” back in 1989, stating that “this once, secret, dance-dharma-zone, became much publicised and the parties more difficult to make and less magical”.27 in the following year, police stepped-up their interventions, shutting down and preventing parties over that season, and demanded higher “protection” overheads (baksheesh). if we listen to devas, the death knell sounded c1978, with original freaks outraged by the public trashing of the beach signalled by the sounds of electronica. and if we read veteran bombay brian (2011), who coined the phrase “hippy raj”, paradise was lost c1973 with the advent of the garbage bazar (the flea market) on goonball beach. it seems more useful to surmise that goa was scuttled by a series of detonations throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s whereby shifting musical aesthetics/ dancecult 4(1)26 figure 12. bamboo forest 1991/92. photo: luc pliot. technics, drug trafficking, media exposures and increased flows of commercial, law enforcement and other state interests saw the irreversible alteration of the original site of attraction (see saldanha 2002; d’andrea 2010). for many commentators, the “mystery” would be tracked, hunted and killed by swarms of backpackers, journalists, investors, traders, dealers, police, foreign and domestic tourists, promoters, cokeheads, cultural geographers and anthropologists descending upon the scene of the sublime since the 1970s. but what is the end of an era for some may for others be the start of a “golden time”. take timur mamedov (aka xp voodoo), the russian dj-producer who first appeared in goa in 1994, began djing there in 1996, and would become a party promoter (van 2003). while goa might have served as a doormat upon which countless patrons left their scuffmarks, for goa gil, mamedov and others, goa became a doorstep to the world. for mediators and entrepreneurs, the goa aesthetic was transposed worldwide, even while goa trance was being interred at its site of origin. 27st john | seasoned exodus figure 13. goa 1991/92 season. photo: luc pliot. schizoid “state of mind” while goa’s seed was distributed on the winds, it has not been my intention to explore this distribution in detail here (see st john 2010; rom and querner 2011), but to demonstrate the heterogeneous roots of psyculture. much remains to be understood of the decades in goa that shaped the psytrance movement, and the emergence of psyculture in locations worldwide from the 1990s, but by way of conclusion, i note ways in which contemporary psyculture carries the goa heritage. this culture and its music derive from the interchanges of those carrying multiple motives and leaving no singular impression. since the late 1960s, beaches, headlands and inland jungle on the coast of goa became home to a diverse mix of expatriates and experimentalists who, over successive seasons and through waves of innovation, technique and artifice smuggled in by countless enthusiasts, fashioned the party scene from which transnational psyculture was born. according to common understanding, goa is not a place, but a “state of mind” (see elliott 2010), a sentiment extolled by, among others, goa gil. while one of the great exponents of the transposability of this condition worldwide, gil is among many ambassadors of the seasonal mind state evolving in goa whose interventions (e.g. parties, releases, labels) have shaped the movement that followed. there have been many sites of origin and efflorescence of this “state of mind” cultivated by cultural exiles (i.e. haight-ashbury, laguna beach, maui, ibiza), but goa is the central island in a dancecult 4(1)28 transnational archipelago of experimentation. historically, the seasonal experimental zone has been connected to bohemian enclaves, autonomous zones and frontier art colonies, including free festivals and cosmopolitan edm scenes flourishing around the world from the 1970s and 1980s. harbouring itinerant populations of visionaries and outlaws, dreamers and psychotics, deadheads and discoheads, over the many years of dance party evolution, and especially during the formative period of edm performance of the mid-1980s to early 1990s, goa provisioned for the obliteration of meaning and the discovery of the self in the company of fellow wayfarers. like the freak enclaves in which it was networked, this trance dance discommunitas grew, perhaps more accurately, as a schizoid “state of mind”, and, as such, echoed its origins in multitudinous expatriate convulsions. the emergence of goa trance and the demise of goa as a traveller’s scene, are often recognised to be interrelated. the impact on goa itself has been discussed by others, but in terms of psychedelic trance music genre and culture, a common understanding is that the “plural diversity” that was unique and integral to the parent scene and early trance-dance developments was lost to tightening aesthetic codes and music formulas, industry standards and professionalisation.28 while we are currently lacking detailed studies of the cultural economy of the psytrance industry—an industry supporting a great many livelihoods in a global network of scenes with distinct regional and historical influences—such studies will undoubtedly shed light on these claims. here, i wish to point out that the musical formulas and event cultures downstream from the goa tradition, which are designed to mirror that tradition, show signs of inheriting its multiplicity. from the annihilation of memories, ethnonational identities and personal biographies (through the ab/use of drugs), to the transformation of one’s self and personal relationships as a prerequisite for making desirable changes in the world (through therapeutic, entheogenic and ecological practices), psyculture is impacted by the transgressive and transcendent extremes of expatriate practice. for example, in scenes worldwide, the quest for obliteration enabled on cocktails of an ever-widening range of substances, from cocaine to dmt, and from ketamine to lsd, and a plethora of “research chemicals”, dances alongside ambitious exercises among participants to “be the change”, the promotion of holism, renewable energies and sustainable lifestyle choices within the context of goa-derived psyculture. as there is considerable internal controversy enveloping genre categories, community debate over energy use practices, the impact of specific psychoactive substances, and around the concept of “psychedelic” itself, and that event-culture continues to absorb new sounds while retaining a “psychedelic” heritage, rather than being a stifled behemoth, psyculture is a continuing source of creative tension and renewal. while most research on psytrance evades anything other than the most rudimentary of analyses of the music itself, in a welcome entry on the continuing musical diversity in uk psytrance, charles de ledesma (2010: 107) argues that the uk scene retains the “psychedelic trance rhizome”. said to be “founded on collaborative working practices, a sensual, adventurous and serendipitous approach to sonic construction and a healthy disrespect for convention”, uk psyculture appears to channel the goa mind state as much in the way it has established aesthetic protocols and hybrid formulas to facilitate a functional dance format, as in its refusal 29st john | seasoned exodus to take itself too seriously. globally, disparate sensibilities extant throughout the formative seasonal party culture are especially memorialised in music productions, as evidenced by vocal samples programmed into tracks like sonic billboards, echoing and effecting the motivations of participants. for instance, polish-born and hamburg-based partnership lightsphere’s (aga and waldek biskup) “progressive” anthem “intersession” (oneness, 2011) samples the view that “there’s a voice in the universe, entreating us to remember our purpose, our reason for being here now, in this world of impermanence. the voice whispers, shouts and sings to us, that this experience . . . of being in form, in space, and time, has meaning”. the optimistic narrative promises a resolution repeated in countless productions and conscious “projects” (e.g. initiatives like the infinity project, akasha project, the original etnica project, and antaris project) which sample from science fiction cinema to offer keys to unlock the mysteries within, inaugurate “cosmic consciousness” and facilitate the re-integration of the self. at the darker edge of the psychedelic trance continuum, however, there lies an abiding nihilism, a penchant for disintegration, often relying on samples from horror cinema. on “aknofobia” (contagion vol. 1, 2008), demonizz bursts out with “do i look like someone who cares what god thinks”? (delivered by pinhead in hellraiser: bloodline, 2006). in audio narratives like this, one abandons the search for meaning under a maudlin mood at accelerated bpm. thus, “save the planet” (baphomet engine 2, 2009) hosts the sampled rejoinder: “for what”? and with narcosis’ decidedly paranoid “cosmic fear” (exploding madness, 2007), which evokes the epic peril of being alive, or in furious psychedelia drawing influence from power and noise music like that found on terror lab industries’ extreme noise terror vol. 1 (2010), we are remote from the cosmic wholesomeness of goa trance.29 but then, are we far removed from sites of origin when these developments echo the goal of parties mounted at “the end of the world”: to blur, if not obliterate, the essentially whole self ? finally, the seasoned festival communities of contemporary psyculture worldwide are heirs to the seasonal alternative cultural heterotopia that evolved in northern goa on the shores of the arabian sea. disparate liminalities—transgressive and proactive—long established within countercultural scenes like that in goa are extant within these temporary communities. eventcultures dramatise “logics of sacrifice” performed by actors possessing varying motivations who may be in disagreement over the meaning of events, disputes that are the legacy of a heterogeneous counterculture (st john and baldini 2012; st john 2012a, 2012b). facilitating the joyful excesses of abandonment and ethical risk-avoidance practice, events like portugal’s boom festival, itself inspired by goa, accommodate imperatives—including the pleasurable and conscientious—integral to the global psytrance movement. while these imperatives may be in dispute, they are not incompatible, as festal industries orchestrate compromises in hybrid events facilitated by management techniques and by a psychedelic sensibility that ensures the liquidation of differences. while there remains much to be understood about psytrance, and transnational psyculture more widely, its survival is indebted to the diverse cultural resources to which it is heir, its strange prosperity apparently reliant upon a longstanding psychedelic sensibility as much as economic necessity, interconnected elements ensuring the continued establishment and destabilising of authorised versions. dancecult 4(1)30 figure 14. “keynote” by michael christian. boom festival 2010, portugal. photo: rémy-pierre ribiere <http://www.ruyphoto.net>. http://www.ruyphoto.net 31st john | seasoned exodus acknowledgements deep bows to those who assisted me in my search for information for this article, the subject of which is expanded upon in my forthcoming book global tribe. among the luminaries to whom i am grateful are peter thomas, steve devas, anders tillman, goa gil, pauli münchenbach, fred disko, dj laurent, ray castle, karin silenzi de stagni and dave mothersole. i thank all of the photographers for the use of their fabulous work: luc pliot, gilbert garcia, anders tillman, goa gil, teresa sconfienza, tarot ray, carlos, christine le voyer and rémy-pierre ribiere. finally big ups to the fine copyeditors at dancecult. notes 1 see st john (2012a), the content of which expands upon the position taken here. 2 ayahuasca refers to psychoactive infusions or decoctions prepared from the banisteriopsis caapi vine typically mixed with the leaves of dimethyltryptamine (dmt) containing species. 3 scene decline is a common subject of analysis among edm researchers today. following from reynolds’ (1998: 86) criticism of the “darkside” within edm scenes whose regulated clubbing environments are populated by “dead souls, zombie-eyed and prematurely haggard”, an emerging literature observes scene fragmentation and decline as a result of dissipating “solidarity” or wayward vision identified as consequential to excesses in the consumption of drugs such as mdma, cocaine and ketamine, and to commercialisation, sexual predatorial behavior, regulatory strictures and other factors. for example, see kavanaugh and anderson (2008), anderson (2009) and d’andrea (2010). 4 ray castle, email to the author, 7 march 2011. 5 ray castle, email to the author, 12 november 2010. 6 the stoned pig was produced by tarot ray in six issues over the year 1975/76. issues were distributed at full-moon beach parties on anjuna beach. 7 although maoz (2005) identifies various types of israeli backpackers including the “conquerors”, the “manalis” and the “settlers”. 8 see d’andrea (2009) for a detailed critique of saldanha’s thesis. 9 funds have been routinely necessary in order to “tip” police—i.e. pay “baksheesh”, customary to party organisation in “contact zones” where protection is a chief consideration of party organisers. 10 anders tillman, email to the author, 21 december 2011. 11 i offer details on this elsewhere (st john 2012a), but here i simply want to convey some thoughts about the nature and form of the spiritual technologies adopted and practiced without being constrained by scornful and prejudiced discourses which will dismiss complex practice as evincing “cultural appropriation”, as “orientalist”, “primitivist” or simply “new age”, etc (e.g. bizzell 2008)—discourses invariably set at a comfortable remove from their subject matter. 12 peter thomas, email to the author, 14 july 2011. 13 peter thomas, email to the author, 25 july 2011. dancecult 4(1)32 14 motioning towards the beginnings of the trance textile fashion industry, anders stated that afterwards “lots of us then made more copies, and brought to europe to sell” (email to the author, 21 december 2011). 15 steve “madras” devas, email to the author, 10 march 2011. 16 gil’s efforts are legendary (see mcateer 2002; st john 2011). for the only extant interview with laurent, see davis (1995). 17 anders tillman, emails to the author, 21 november and 5 december 2011. today anders performs sometimes as missinginka. 18 paoli münchenbach, emails to the author, 20 and 27 december 2011. in 2011 paoli was resident dj at bambuddha, ibiza and still played in goa at 9 bar, saturday night market and elsewhere. this is not intended to be a comprehensive document on early goa djs, but others included zaki, an israeli from baga, peggy, a reggae dj, and german blonde thilo. 19 fred disko, communication with the author on facebook, 4 october 2011. for a fuller account of the 1970s/1980s dj scene in goa and the uneasy transition from rock to electronic music, see st john (2011, 2012a). 20 anders tillman, email to the author, 5 december 2011. 21 mothersole’s article is reproduced in this edition of dancecult. 22 most of these artists and tracks turned up in lists that laurent himself provided on a discogs discussion thread, as further detailed in st john (2012a). laurent can be seen performing in this rare video, “goa party (maharashtra)” from 1992. 23 karin silenzi de stagni, communication with the author on facebook, 12 october 2011. 24 anders tillman, email to the author, 21 november 2011. 25 glover had been bass player in killing joke, wrote, produced for and performed bass with the orb, worked with ben watkins ( juno reactor) and alex and jimmy cauty (of the klf). he has also produced for kate bush, crowded house, the verve, kylie, and u2. as youth, glover became a crucial dub-influenced experimentalist (see partridge 2010: 196) who effectively guided the sound into electronic psychedelia as heard on releases on sub-label liquid sound design. 26 including raja ram (the infinity project, shpongle and owner of tip world / tip records), martin freeland (man with no name), tsuyoshi suzuki (member of prana and founder of matsuri records), jan müller and marcus c. maichel (x-dream), mark allen (member of mindfield and owner of phantasm records), james monro (member of technossomy and cofounder of flying rhino records), ben watkins ( juno reactor), chris deckker (member of medicine drum, founder of return to the source label/club, and founder of earthdance), avi nissim, lior perlmutter, and yaniv haviv (members of israel’s astral projection and founders of the label trust in trance), and olli wisdom (aka space tribe and organiser of the saga parties). 27 ray castle entry at fusion anomaly: <http://fusionanomaly.net/raycastle.html> (accessed 23 may 2010). 28 see, for example, grover smith (aka ott)’s, humorous declamation in de ledesma (2010: 104). 29 the contested realities presented by “progressive” and “dark” sensibilities are discussed in st john (2012a). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0fzuhqxwa0 http://fusionanomaly.net/raycastle.html 33st john | seasoned exodus references anderson, tammy l. 2009. rave culture: the alteration and decline of a philadelphia music scene. philadelphia: temple university press. bastide, roger. 1975. le sacré sauvage et autres essais. paris: stock. billy. 1975/76. “dance for dance sake”. the stoned pig. issue 5: 7. <http://www.goaheadspace. com/stonedpig/album/issue 5/index.html> (accessed 4 july 2011). bizzell, 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paradise. london: penguin. laurent. 2010. post in reader comments to dave mothersole’s “unveiling the secret—the roots of trance”. bleep43. 28 april: <http://www.bleep43.com/bleep43/2010/4/14/ unveiling-the-secret-the-roots-of-trance.html> (accessed 25 june 2011). maoz, darya. 2005. “young adult israeli backpackers in india”. in israeli backpackers: from tourism to rite of passage, eds. chaim noy and erik cohen, 159–88. albany: state university of new york. mailer, norman. 1957. “the white negro: reflections on the hipster”. dissent 4: 276–93. meltdown23. 2010. reply to the thread “goa trance dj´s from back in the days??...” in discussion group “goa /psy-trance”. discogs. july: <http://www.discogs.com/groups/topic/168381> (accessed 25 june 2011). mothersole, dave. 2010. “unveiling the secret—the roots of trance”. bleep43. 14 april: <http://www.bleep43.com/bleep43/2010/4/14/unveiling-the-secret-the-roots-of-trance. html> (accessed 21 january 2011). odzer, cleo. 1995. goa freaks: my 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john | seasoned exodus mckay, 243–68. london: verso. ———. 2010. “infinite noise spirals: psytrance as cosmopolitan emotion”. in the local scenes and global culture of psytrance, ed. graham st john, 69–88. new york: routledge. rom, tom and pascal querner. 2011. goa: 20 years of psychedelic trance. solothurn/switzerland: nachtschatten verlag. roszak, theodore. 1995. [1968]. the making of a counter culture: reflections on the technocratic society and its youthful opposition. berkeley: university of california press. saldanha, arun. 2002. “music tourism and factions of bodies in goa”. tourist studies 2(1): 43–62. ———. 2007. psychedelic white: goa trance and the viscosity of race. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. schmidt, joshua i. 2010. “(en)countering the beat: paradox in israeli psytrance”. in the local scenes and global culture of psytrance, ed. graham st john, 131–48. new york: routledge. snydly. 1975. “the connection”. the stoned pig. issue 6: 6 –7. <http://www.goaheadspace.com/ stonedpig/album/issue%206/index.html> (accessed 21 september 2011). st john, graham. 2001a. ed. freenrg: notes from the edge of the dance floor. melbourne: common ground. download available at: <http://undergrowth.org/freenrg_notes_from_the_edge_of_the_dancefloor> (accessed 12 march 2012). ———. 2001b. “alternative cultural heterotopia and the liminoid body: beyond turner at confest”. the australian journal of anthropology 12(1): 47–66. ———. 2009. technomad: global raving countercultures. london; oakville, ct: equinox. ———. 2010. ed. the local scenes and global culture of psytrance. new york: routledge. ———. 2011. “dj goa gil: kalifornian exile, dark yogi and dreaded anomaly”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 3(1): 97–128. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/ 1947-5403.2011.03.01.05>. ———. 2012a, forthcoming. global tribe: technology, spirituality and psytrance. london: equinox. ———. 2012b, forthcoming. “the logics of sacrifice at visionary arts festivals”. in the festivalisation of culture: place, identity and politics, eds. andy bennett, jodie taylor and ian woodward. aldershot: ashgate. st john, graham and chiara baldini. 2012. “dancing at the crossroads of consciousness: techno-mysticism, visionary arts and portugal’s boom festival”. in handbook of new religions and cultural production, eds. carole m. cusack and alex norman, 521–52. leiden: brill. sutcliffe, steven. 2000. “‘wandering stars’: seekers and gurus in the modern world”. in beyond new age: exploring alternative spirituality, eds. steven sutcliffe and marion bowman, 17–36. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. ———. 2007. “the origins of ‘new age’ religion between the two world wars”. in handbook of new age, eds. daren kemp and james r lewis, 51–76. leiden: brill. thomas, peter (aka blond peter). 2011. “goa: some origins”, extracted from his work in progress originally. the flower raj blog: escapers, seekers, travellers in the land of the gods: india revisited. 30 march: <http://blog.theflowerraj.org/?p=1050> (accessed 20 september 2011). http://www.goaheadspace.com/stonedpig/album/issue 6/index.html http://www.goaheadspace.com/stonedpig/album/issue 6/index.html http://undergrowth.org/freenrg_notes_from_the_edge_of_the_dancefloor http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.05 http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.05 http://blog.theflowerraj.org/?p=1050 dancecult 4(1)36 turner, victor. 1969. the ritual process: structure and anti-structure. chicago: aldine. ———. 1974. dramas, fields, and metaphors: symbolic action in human society. ithaca: cornell university press. van. 2003. “interview xp spun records aerodance”. 27 september: <http://www.chaishop. com/article/985> (accessed 3 october 2011). van veen, tobias c. 2010. “technics, precarity and exodus in rave culture”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(2): 29–49. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/ 1947-5403.2010.01.02.02>. wolfe, tom. 1971. the electric kool-aid acid test. new york: bantam. discography baphomet engine. 2009. baphomet engine 2. manic dragon records (cd): mdrec14. <http://www.discogs.com/baphomet-engine-baphomet-engine-2/release/2004797>. cosmosis. 2007. psychedelica melodica. phantasm records (cd): ptmcd163. <http://www.discogs.com/cosmosis-psychedelica-melodica/release/991922>. dj transgenic. 2010. extreme noise terror vol. 1. terror lab industries (cd comp): tlicd001. <http://www.discogs.com/dj-transgenic-extreme-noise-terror-vol1/release/2346051> electric universe. 2011. higher modes. electric universe records (cd): elu1cd004. <http://www.discogs.com/electric-universe-higher-modes/release/2799283>. infinity project, the. 1995. mystical experiences. blue room released (cd): br005cd. <http://www.discogs.com/infinity-project-mystical-experiences/release/33087>. hallucinogen. 1997. the lone deranger. twisted records (cd): twscd1. <http://www.discogs.com/hallucinogen-the-lone-deranger/release/20583>. lightsphere. 2011. oneness. audioload music (cd): alm1cd003. <http://www.discogs.com/lightsphere-oneness/release/2886962>. narcosis. 2007. exploding madness. moonsun records (cd): msucd002. <http://www.discogs.com/narcosis-exploding-madness/release/913610>. overlords, the. 1991. sundown. antler-subway (cd, maxi-single): as 5051cd. <http://www.discogs.com/overlords-sundown/release/176853>. paul oakenfold—a voyage into trance. 1995. dragonfly (cd, mixed): bflcd14. <http://www.discogs.com/paul-oakenfold-a-voyage-into-trance/release/12454>. reggae regular. 1978. the black star liner. greensleeves records (7-inch): gre004. <http://www.discogs.com/reggae-regular-the-black-star-liner/release/1610235>. technossomy. 1995. timepiece. symbiosis records (vinyl): symb005. <http://www.discogs.com/technossomy-timepiece/release/1706087>. various. contagion vol. 1. 2008. dead tree productions (file): dtp002. <http://www.discogs.com/various-contagion-vol-1/release/1430838>. various. let it rip. 1997. matsuri productions (vinyl): mplp10. <http://www.discogs.com/various-let-it-rip/release/55700>. http://www.chaishop.com/article/985 http://www.chaishop.com/article/985 http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.02 http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.02 http://www.discogs.com/baphomet-engine-baphomet-engine-2/release/2004797 http://www.discogs.com/cosmosis-psychedelica-melodica/release/991922 http://www.discogs.com/dj-transgenic-extreme-noise-terror-vol1/release/2346051 http://www.discogs.com/electric-universe-higher-modes/release/2799283 http://www.discogs.com/infinity-project-mystical-experiences/release/33087 http://www.discogs.com/hallucinogen-the-lone-deranger/release/20583 http://www.discogs.com/lightsphere-oneness/release/2886962 http://www.discogs.com/narcosis-exploding-madness/release/913610 http://www.discogs.com/overlords-sundown/release/176853 http://www.discogs.com/paul-oakenfold-a-voyage-into-trance/release/12454 http://www.discogs.com/reggae-regular-the-black-star-liner/release/1610235 http://www.discogs.com/technossomy-timepiece/release/1706087 http://www.discogs.com/various-contagion-vol-1/release/1430838 http://www.discogs.com/various-let-it-rip/release/55700 37st john | seasoned exodus various. order odonata vol. 1. 1994. dragonfly records (cd): bflcd 13. <http://www.discogs.com/various-order-odonata-vol-1/release/50425>. various. universo paralello. 2008. vagalume records (cd): vglcd005. <http://www.discogs.com/various-universo-paralello/release/1240784>. filmography bahr, fax, george hickenlooper and eleanor coppola. hearts of darkness: a filmmaker’s apocalypse. 1991. usa: american zoetrope. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102015/>. “goa party (maharashtra)”. 1992. youtube, 24:05. <http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=q0fzuhqxwa0>. the beyond within: the rise and fall of lsd. 1987. bbc. http://www.discogs.com/various-order-odonata-vol-1/release/50425 http://www.discogs.com/various-universo-paralello/release/1240784 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102015/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0fzuhqxwa0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0fzuhqxwa0 fabulous: sylvester james, black queer afrofuturism and the black fantastic reynaldo anderson harris-stowe state university (us) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.02.15 although in some circles disco singers like donna summer or gloria gaynor would be remembered as the “queens of disco”, these views obscure the impact of sylvester james. born in 1947 in the los angeles community of watts, disco performer sylvester’s influence on disco and present day electronic dance music is incalculable. sylvester james emerged in the wake of a confluence of forces that would shape popular music and culture for the remainder of the 20th century. in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, the emerging women’s movement and gay liberation movement, sylvester was influenced by african american blues, women of the church, hippies, drag queens and other members of the gay community (gamson 2005). sylvester’s hits such as “dance (disco heat)”, “you make me feel (mighty real)” and “do you wanna funk” became anthems of disco aficionados for a generation. sylvester personified the excesses of the 1970s and the experimentation that characterized changing social norms. however, what is less understood is how sylvester, his androgynous lifestyle, and gay identity contributed to the notion and formation of “the black fantastic” or the “sensibilities generated from the experiences of the underground, the vagabond, and those constituencies marked as deviant . . . [that are] inevitably aligned within, in conversation with, against, and articulated beyond the boundaries of the modern (iton 2008: 16). moreover, how did the performance of sylvester stand at the intersection of afrofuturism, black queer politics, and disco as an antecedent to electronic dance music? this essay will use an afrofuturist hermeneutic informed by a black queer subjectivity to examine the aesthetic sensibilities and political significance of sylvester james in relation to the rise and decline of disco in popular culture. disco’s emergence as a popular music was the result of a convergence of historical currents within american popular culture that would later go global after the civil unrest and discontent of the 1960s. disco’s roots or pre-history originate with the sounds of motown, and before that with african-american blues, jazz and r&b, and parallels the emergence of funk music in the 1970s. early disk jockeys such as walter gibbons, dj kool herc, frankie knuckles and others revolutionized the use of then contemporary technology, breaks, beats, sound systems and turntables to influence the energy and erotic expression of dancers in nightclubs that catered to african-americans, gays, latinos and others (lawrence 2008). sylvester’s early influence in music was the black pentecostal church along with his participation in gospel choirs, although he would leave due to homophobic bias and ultimately relocate to san francisco (gamson 2005). san francisco’s countercultural community was fertile ground for sylvester’s lifestyle due to its high concentration of members of the gay community, experimental secular movements like vegan and ecological based organizations, intellectual or literary institutions, and faith traditions ranging from asian influences such as zen and hare krishna to spiritual organizations devoted to satanism (glock, bellah and alfred 1976). moreover, radical organizations for gay liberation were headquartered in the bay area along with others such as the black panther party whose leader huey newton mandated recognition of gay rights. soon after his arrival, sylvester joined avant-garde performance art group the cockettes and participated in performances in the palace theatre performing parodies of popular culture (gamson 2005). sylvester would later form the group the hot band and the four as, both of which had limited commercial success. it was with his formation of the group two tons of fun, with singers martha wash and izora rhodes, that he would gain widespread acclaim and commercial success during the mid-to-late 1970s, especially with the hit song “you make me feel”. according to the popular narrative, the popularity of disco began to wane during the advent of the reagan and thatcher administrations of the 1980s. the rise of the new right, in reaction to the liberation movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, sought to reassert patriarchal norms of white heterosexual cultural “values”, opposing the too black, too gay, too female culture of disco that culminated with the anti-disco movement launched by rock dj steve dahl (lawrence 2003). also, by the end of the 1970s african-american youth culture was moving away from disco and its perceived white pop makeover especially illustrated by the movie saturday night fever, despite the fact that most of disco’s top acts were black performers such as sylvester, the disco act chic and many others (lawrence, 2003). moreover, the new right’s fixation with disco as representative of the corruption of capitalism, coupled with the institutional left’s ignorance of the relation between politics, the body and pleasure, and the genre’s seeming disengagement with class stratification, all contributed to the music’s decline in popularity (lawrence 2003). yet it was the aids epidemic that was initially articulated as the “gay” disease that closed the final chapter on disco’s demise in the late 1980s. in spite of this seemingly apparent collapse of disco and its transmutation into other forms such as northeastern us house and techno music, with its dystopian futuristic themes, it was during this period that the seeds for contemporary afrofuturism and its accompanying aesthetic perspective in relation to a digital turn in culture that was reflected in the growing influence of networked software, database logic, technological influence, deep remixability, and neurosciences that began to emerge in the 1970s and 1980s (manovich 2013, negroponte 1995, pisters 2012). however, previous analyses of dance music culture tended to privilege other institutional forms of critique such as that provided by cultural studies. for example, the discipline of cultural studies was perhaps the first to analyze dance culture. yet, as angela mcrobbie (1990) has noted, the study of dance culture was primarily undertaken from the vantage point of the heroic-tragic frame of analysis and tended to support the predominantly heterosexual male researcher’s class models at the birmingham centre for contemporary cultural studies. also, the tendency by scholars to criticize utopian frameworks as escapist, arguing that such escapism is ultimately restrictive of individual freedom and thus leading to totalitarian governance, ignored the need and desire for peoples to share states of being in forms of interchange and expression that seek to recover an impulse or longing in various cultural forms (brown 2010). for example, performers like sylvester and other disco artists frequently articulated and experienced what could be referred to as an emotional experience similar to that of religion in their performances, and this behavior would be replicated a generation later with rave and techno performances (gamson 2005; gauthier 2005). furthermore, within the framework of the black fantastic, there is need for more analysis of the relationship between race, sexuality, gender, technology and the utopian impulses of those individuals marked as “deviant” pertaining to cultural artifacts or performances that correspond to what is now understood as afrofuturism. what is presently called afrofuturism was originally a philosophical techno-cultural vernacular perspective that was engaged in a heterodox form of cultural production originating in socio-spatial temporal practices of black urban dwellers in north america after world war ii. the recently popularized term “afrofuturism” was coined in the early 1990s by writers mark dery, kodwo eshun and mark sinker; however, their early articulation of the phenomenon was limited largely to music, art and speculative fiction. in the 21st century, current expressions of afrofuturism are emerging in the area of metaphysics such as cosmogony (origin of the universe), cosmology (structure of the universe), speculative philosophy and philosophy of science (eglash 2002; gaskins 2011). previously, in the 1950s, herman blount (aka sun ra) and his business partner alton abraham engaged in a critical urban utopianism via the vehicle of black experimental music that drew upon a distinct black cosmology and “traditionally black affiliated musical forms (such as spirituals and the blues) to instrumental choices that combine[d] african folk percussion and electronic sounds . . . directed both backward and forward to suggest a radical break from the tyranny of an oppressive present” (sites 2012: 576). although performers like alice and john coltrane, cecil taylor and others would parallel and contribute to the experimental expression of black music of the time, it was ra’s critical heterodox form of extraterrestrial utopianism that would later aesthetically influence musical groups like earth, wind & fire, george clinton and his groups parliament and funkadelic in the 1970s. traditionally afrofuturism is largely identified with black speculative fiction, music traditions and utopian or dystopian impulses (zuberi 2004). a dominant expression of afrofuturism lies in its aesthetic expression and appropriation of technological and or african cultural artifacts, to reimagine or reinterpret the past present or future. moreover, the musical, literary and poetic works of sun ra, ishmael reed, octavia butler, amiri baraka and samuel r. delany, among others, are considered foundational artifacts to afrofuturist discourse. furthermore, the previous works of scholars like w. e. b. dubois serve as forerunners and contributors to an afrofuturist perspective to assemble concepts to interrogate the “double-consciousness” or structural and psychological alienation experienced by the “souls of black folk” and a multiplicity of forms related to futurity (dubois 1903; eshun 2003). finally, an afrofuturist “uses extraterrestriality as a hyperbolic trope to explore the historical terms, the everyday implications of forcibly imposed dislocation”, and how african/diasporic subjectivities “are constituted from slave to negro to colored to black to african to african american” and afro-latin to afro-caribbean or afro-european (eshun 298–99). however, what is less understood is how afrofuturism is related to the cultural production of one of the musical genres that afrofuturism engages with: disco music. mcleod writes that “music, in general, connects listeners to fantasy, pleasure and an ever elusive future. . . . music takes us outside of our bodies and place while simultaneously reminding us of our location and what it means to live there” (2003: 337). moreover, previous afrofuturist scholarship lacks analyses on black queer performance. although there is some analysis of the speculative fiction of samuel r. delany, there is a dearth of scholarship in relation to black queer performance in disco or electronic dance music culture, in particular analyzing the former as a response to the processes of urban cultural practices, techno-genesis or the co-evolution of humans and technology, in a politically contested public sphere. by “black queer” performance i am suggesting an identity, understood as a sexuality that does not conform to western notions of heterosexual expression. black queer identity rejects binary assumptions concerning gendered-identity metanarratives that are primarily composed of desire for the opposite sex, as encoded in heteronormative gender performances and sexed bodies (butler 1989; wilchins 2004). figure 1. sylvester as an egyptian princess. cover artwork for do ya wanna funk by mark amerika. sylvester appropriated contemporary music technology and theatrical production techniques, initially reinventing his persona via jazz and blues, performing briefly under the pseudonym ruby blue with the avant-garde group cockettes, and later adopting parodies of noted personalities like coretta scott king. at one point, sylvester appeared as an egyptian princess on the cover of his 1982 album “all i need”. additionally, as sylvester embraced disco and it’s technological, futuristic liminality or rituals of imagined identity and dance performance he moved away from androgynous appearance to secure a more commercial recording contract. sylvester’s ability to reimagine or reinvent himself extended to the range of his voice, which he could perform in falsetto or baritone. his vocal dexterity allowed sylvester to move away from disco, partnering with jeanie tracy and maurice long as the c.o.g.i.c singers to record ballads, soul, and gospel influenced music. the partnership reflected a similar religious background expressed through the african-american musical tradition. sylvester’s friendship with san francisco’s first openly gay elected official harvey milk further demonstrated that his performance was consistent with the notion of “the black fantastic”, by participating in deterritorializing political and cultural arenas that disrupted and blurred the distinction between segregation and integration and that would sow the seed of remixing the largely heterosexual post-civil rights black public sphere by defying assumptions of the racist white gaze. the black queer futuristic performance of sylvester james not only demonstrated the ability of the artist to reimagine and influence popular culture and the political sphere, impacting internal and external communities, but simultaneously created new discursive spaces. however, despite the fact that performers like sylvester and other black artists contributed to the notion of a “black fantastic” and can subversively impact the political, cultural and social aspects of the public sphere, they are still functioning within the context of the “new politics of containment”, that ultimately relies on the visible representation of african americans to “generate the invisibility of exclusionary practices” (collins 1998). author biography dr. reynaldo anderson currently serves as a member of the executive board for the missouri arts council and as an assistant professor of humanities and teacher education at harris-stowe state university. he was recognized by gov. jay nixon of missouri in 2010 for his leadership in the saint louis community. finally, reynaldo publishes research in regard to several dimensions of the african american experience, social media, rhetoric and the african diaspora and recently participated as a visiting lecturer at the ghana institute of management and public administration (gimpa) in accra, ghana. references brown, jayna. 2010. “buzz and rumble: global pop music and utopian impulse”. social text 28 (1): 125–146. butler, judith. 1989. gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. london. routledge. collins, patricia h. 1998. fighting words: black women and the search for justice. new york. routledge. dubois, w.e.b. 1903. the souls of black folk. new york. bantam classic. eglash, ron. 2002. “race, sex, and nerds: from black geeks to asian american hipsters”. social text 71 20(2): 49–64. eshun, kodwo. 2003. “further considerations on afrofuturism”. the centennial review 3(2): 287–302. gamson, joshua. 2005. the fabulous sylvester: the legend, the music, the 70s in san francisco. new york. henry holt and co. gaskins, nettrice. 2011. “cybism and decoding the letter building: afro-futurist styled game layers on top of the world”. the 17th international symposium on electronic art. istanbul, turkey. gauthier, francois. 2005. “orpheus and the underground: raves and implicit religion, a critical analysis”. journal for the implicit study of religion 8(3): 217–65. glock, charles, robert bellah and randy alfred, eds. 1976. “the new religious consciousness”. berkeley: university of california press. iton, richard. 2008. in search of the black fantastic: politics and popular culture in the post-civil rights era. new york. oxford university press. lawrence, tim. 2003. love saves the day: a history of american dance music culture 1970–1979. durham. duke university press. manovich, lev. 2013. software takes command. new york. bloomsbury academic. mcleod, ken. 2003. “space oddities: aliens, futurism and meanings in popular music”. popular music 22(3): 337–55. mcrobbie, angela. 1990. “settling accounts with subcultures: a feminist critique”. in on record: rock, pop, and the written word, ed. simon frith and andrew goodwin, 56–65. new york: pantheon. negroponte, nicholas. 1995. being digital. new york. alfred knopf. pisters, patricia. 2012. the neuro-image: a deleuzian film philosophy of digital screen culture. stanford. stanford university press. sites, william. 2012. “radical culture in black necropolis: sun ra, alton abraham and postwar chicago”. journal of urban history, 38: 687–719. wilchins, riki. 2004. queer theory, gender theory: an instant primer. los angeles. alyson books. zuberi, nabeel. 2004. “the transmolecularization of [black] folk space is the place, sun ra and afrofuturism”. in off the planet: music sound and science fiction cinema, ed. phillip hayward, 77–95. london. john libbey. discography sylvester. 1978. dance (disco heat). fantasy (12-inch): d-102. <http://www.discogs.com/sylvester-dance-disco-heat-/release/99073>. sylvester. 1978. you make me feel (mighty real). fantasy (12-inch): k052z-61678. <http://www.discogs.com/sylvester-you-make-me-feel-mighty-real/release/96011>. sylvester. 1982. all i need. megatone (lp). m 1005. <http://www.discogs.com/sylvester-all-i-need/master/94597>. sylvester. 1982. do you wanna funk. megatone (12-inch): mt 102. <http://www.discogs.com/sylvester-do-you-wanna-funk/release/3486896>. art1-typeset-ver1 making a noise – making a difference: techno-punk and terra-ism graham st john university of queensland abstract this article charts the convergence of post-punk/post-settler logics in the techno-punk development in australia. exploring how punk would become implicated in the cultural politics of a settler society struggling for legitimacy, it maps the ground out of which labrats sound system (and their hybrid outfit combat wombat) arose. it provides an entry to punk through an analysis of the concept of hardcore in the context of cultural mobilisations which, following more than two centuries of european colonisation, evince desires to make reparations and forge alliances with indigenous people and landscape. to achieve this, the article traces the contours and investigates the implications of sydney’s techno-punk emergence (as seen in the jellyheads, non bossy posse, vibe tribe and ohms not bombs), tracking the mobile and media savvy exploits of 1990s diy sound systems and techno terra-ists, aesthetes and activists adopting intimate and tactical media technologies, committing to independent and decentralised edm creativity, and implicated in a movement for legitimate presence. keywords techno, anarcho-punk, hardcore, sound systems, postcolonialism, sydney techno-punk scene figure 1: outback stack. photo by pete strong dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(2) 2010, 1-28 issn 1947-5403 ©2010 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.01 making a difference “why do they keep calling our generation, generation x, when actually we’re generation y?... why? because we’re the one’s asking the questions”. reproduced in sydney zine sporadical (2001: 21), monkey marc’s statement underscored an inquisitive and compassionate momentum building within an alternative milieu in late 1990s australia. it registered a desire to find solutions to the rise of market fundamentalism and the persistence of colonisation – a desire to “make a difference”.1 spurred by ecological imperatives and responding to the plight of indigenous custodians, “monkey” marc peckham co-founded alternative energy and multimedia sound system labrats. while displaying contempt for the spectacular self-obsessions of a “cliché repressed species stuck in the 80s”,2 the labrats intervention possessed the hallmarks of the directed anger and productive independence characteristic of post-punk anarchism. yet, here, the motivation was less class war than ecology and justice for aboriginal people. according to a post-punk/post-settler logic, the spectacular contempt for authority displayed by forebears was eclipsed by deference to that felt to constitute the “proper authority”: the country and its traditional custodians. this independent countercolonial trajectory should be understood within the context of postcolonising gestures and legitimacy practices mounting through the 1990s, the so-called “decade of reconciliation”, and subsequently. in response to anxieties over settler-complicity in a wounded country, and ignited by the howard government’s apparent contempt for indigenous australia, a compendium of redressive actions would emerge. but while landcare initiatives, the performances of “sorry people” (gooder and jacobs 2000), and the sydney olympics opening ceremony (cohen et al. 2008) illustrated official responses to the identity crisis, independent, empathetic and intercultural initiatives to “care” and “fight” for country were taking place in which indigenous and indigenised authorities were compelling nascent custodial sensibilities, ecological sensitivities and redemptive strategies (see st john 2000, 2001a, 2006). labrats would strike a curious pose in this climate. elements of a “loose assemblage of guerrilla militias” emerging in the late 1990s, they illustrated dylan clark’s (2003: 234) observation that “punk can be hidden even to itself ”. in exploring how punk would become implicated in the cultural politics of a settler society struggling towards legitimacy, this article maps the ground out of which labrats (and their hybrid outfit combat wombat) arose. it thus provides an entry to punk through an analysis of the concept of “hardcore” in the context of cultural mobilisations which, following more than two centuries of european colonisation, evince desires to make reparations and forge alliances with indigenous people and landscape. to achieve this, i chart the contours and implications of sydney’s3 techno-punk emergence. exploring sydney’s jellyheads and the vibe tribe, and tracking the mobile and media savvy exploits of 1990s diy sound systems and techno terra-ists emerging in their wake (from non bossy posse to ohms not bombs and the labrats), i provide illustration of the counter-colonial trajectory of punk. hardcore: intimate and tactical i begin this essay, then, with a discussion of hardcore. it should be understood at the outset that the concept of hardcore under scrutiny is not exhausted by a musical aesthetic dubbed “hardcore” – typically, and originally, an aesthetic belonging to north american and uk hardcore punk rock scenes. moreover, the essay is less an investiga2 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 tion of “hardcore” music than of climates of response to conditions of adversity, inequality and injustice that contextualise the embrace of, and identification with, this term. the commitment to survival strategies necessitated by material disadvantage, inequality and discrimination, and the resistance to such crises, hold much in common. while perhaps respectively characterising futility and hope, these dispositions equally disclose a “street wiseness”, rawness, anger, struggle. and it seems that to be “hardcore” is to be empirically proximate to such socioeconomic pressures – inheriting the prospect of having “no future” or undertaking to “reclaim the future” from those who would have it clear-felled. in the 1970s, researchers at birmingham’s centre for contemporary and cultural studies began to circumscribe the, until then, largely neglected cultural character of such responses, finding that within post-war working class youth subcultures, the solutions to such exigencies would be mediated increasingly and dramatically through their translations and appropriations of popular culture – through style. an angry aesthetic – hostile, disruptive, excessive and ironic – was particularly evident in punk. to perform contempt for private property and public propriety – especially through a dissonant music with screaming vocals – was demonstrative of an authentic, or hardcore, punk sensibility: it expressed a hard edge, the raw immediacy of the street. with punk’s commodification and a subsequent resurgence of anarchist diy networks,4 anarcho-punk and direct action would come to hold particular authenticity since such were “harder” (and thus “truer”) than a merely stylistic, and thus commodifiable, punk sensibility. while i make no pretence at capturing the essence of punk, i have to assume that those who identify as/with punk in large part believe that they are approximating its truth by performing, promoting, living its assumed character. thus “hardcore” becomes a most curious label, the unraveling of which facilitates understanding of punk developments. while my description of “hardcore” encompasses that understood as a continuous punk practice, this conceptual development allows for an understanding of its affinity and contiguity with other subcultural and music scenes (pre and post-punk), some of which, are felt to have been, at least initially, irreconcilable to punk. in particular, i am thinking of electronic dance music. thus, my discussion is less motivated to explicate punk’s hardcore scene/s and music/s than it is to comprehend the affinity between punk and edm, whose cultures – from disco to jungle, and from hip hop to psytrance – illustrate “hardcore” dispositions and “vibes” (see st john 2009). while analysis of “hardcore” music is not critical to this investigation, simon reynolds pronouncements on what he calls the “hardcore continuum” (hcc) within uk edm (not to be confused with the european “hardcore” tradition of “gabba”, which has evolved into “terrorcore”), are important.5 according to reynolds, from breakbeat hardcore (or “ardcore”) to jungle and uk garage, to grime, dubstep and bassline, a continuum can be observed in which pirate radio, dub plates, mcing, multiculturalism, populations of enthusiasts not exclusively centered in london, and a continuity of sound and attitude (in which he includes a “cheekiness”, blissful female vocals, and stylistic faithlessness) are crucial. between 1990 and 1993, uk “hardcore” was rife and diverse. reynolds (1998: 96-7) has described how the term referred “by turns to the northern bleep-and-bass sound of warp and unique 3, to the hip-house and ragga-techno sounds of the shut up and dance label, to the anthemic pop-rave of acts like n-joi, and shades of rhythm, to belgian and german brutalist tekno, and, finally, to the breakbeat-driven furore of hardcore jungle”. he also notes how all such music supplied “the rave audience’s demand for a soundtrack to going mental and getting fucked up” (1998: xvii), a process that he has pursued via a dystopian pharma st john • making a noise, making a difference 3 cological “come down” narrative. but, this music, he claims, has been the british “equivalent to hip hop and our equivalent to reggae... a musical system that endures while evolving at an insane rate”. in his distinctive ebullience, reynolds offers insight on the continuity: the basic coordinates of hardcore in [the] defining year of 1992 are a four way collision of hip hop and techno, reggae and house... it’s like a multiple pile-up at a crossroads. and the big bang releases this surge of energy: you have this crazy-fast evolution of hardcore into jungle, the development of breakbeat science and bass science – the breaks get sped up, edited, processed, fantastically complex yet jagged yet groovy rhythms – the bass gets more strange and peculiar, molded and gloopy, yet also punishing, and yet also heavy in a rootical sense, the dub reggae sense, there’s a skanking feel in there too.6 what i wish to draw attention to here is the importance of continuity at the very heart of “hardcore”, as a concept. in my view, there are two, sometimes conflicting and other times mutual, propensities from which the concept hardcore appears to derive its vitality, and in which it expresses continuity (in punk, edm and other scenes). on the one hand, it appears that a hardcore scene is characterised by secrecy, obscurity and an almost cultic disposition. events are communicated by word-of-mouth and on subtle flyers distributed through local channels. efforts to maintain an independent “tribal” identity, an “empathetic sociality” (maffesoli 1996: 11), through commitment to genre and to an almost universal envelope-pushing esoterica, evidence a refusal, an aloofness, an invisibility thought to secure scenes from the long entwined arms of state administrations and corporate entertainment industries. responding to that which cccs researcher and author of subculture: the meaning of style, dick hebdige, identified as (inevitable) incorporation, punks engage in “a refusal of meaning, a blankness which resists any complete and final decoding” (beezer 1992: 114). such illegibility and incomprehensibility may (re)affirm an “underground centrality” that is guardedly unco-opted. on the other hand, hardcore evokes a desire to “step up”, “get the message out”, be comprehended. employing direct action techniques and repurposing media technologies to broadcast the “truth”, it generates often quite public spectacles in the service of causes other than simply its own reproduction. and in its desire to transgress boundaries, to reach a critical mass, it demonstrates that “we are everywhere”. so while the former tendency finds refuge within the guarded boundaries of its own traditions, amidst a resurgent diy politics, the latter seeks to open its borders, clarify an ethos and make a spectacle – of itself and the corporate and colonial structures against which it fashions its cultural resistance. these insular and activist propensities may characterise different punk scenes. in annual defiance of melbourne’s largest sporting event, the punk pub crawl during the australian football league’s grand final day represents a critical moment of selfvalidation and sociality for that city’s scenes (lentini 2002: 191). in tempe, arizona, economically marginal gutter punks, skate punks and others disrupt “the aggressive regulation of open public interaction” affected by community ordinances and unsettle the sanitised “landscapes of suspicion and exclusion” consequent to the disneyfication of the american city (ferrell 2001: 12, 13). as such, “their worlds throw uncertainty up against predictability and order, offer moments of autonomous pleasure in the face of orchestrated entertainment, celebrate a sort of shambling marginality in counterpoint to an emerging economy and aesthetics of middle-class life” (ferrell 2001: 87). 4 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 affecting a confronting aesthetic that developed global appeal since the emergence of punk in the late 1970s, a refusal of consumer capital’s disciplined body is expressed via facial tattoos and piercings, outrageous hedonism and a decadent warming towards the apocalypse. by contrast with nihilists identifying with an exclusively shocking and anti-authoritarian aesthetic which would itself be subject to consumerist normalization, diy milieus exemplified by the anarcho-punk band crass and the free food “distro” activists food not bombs would demonstrate commitment towards voluntarism, social justice, human rights and ecological sustainability (mckay 1998).7 implying an historical trajectory, dylan clark (2003: 233) argues that with post-punk “the performance of anarchy” found in early punk would be replaced by “the practice of anarchism”. while i feel it is useful to identify these hardcore dispositions, they are often difficult to isolate in practice. as pete lentini (2002: 188) suggests, punk signifies a “politics of difference” where hegemonic dissidents pursue new sites within which to develop networks of “cultural citizenship”. in this sense, acts of refusal, defiant rituals and sites of sociality – bands, squats, boycotts, body modifications and punk picnics – are contexts for the performance of counter-narratives. in punk, as with other spectacular subcultures, style, appearance and performance are employed as media of identification and as expressions of difference. yet, deployed to expose and intervene in state and corporate affairs, these aesthetics, this noise, assists in rupturing existing sites, institutions and corporations, to create an opening to heterogeneity, to generate dialogue with others, to make a difference. diy milieus adopt, share and repurpose media to communicate their difference amongst themselves (to reaffirm marginal identity) and to others (to alter social and political circumstance).8 in accordance with this, diy adherents became adepts of a range of media used in intimate and tactical endeavors. while that which influential anarcholibertarian philosopher hakim bey called “intimate media”9 could enable a fluid and sensuous neo-tribal present – could make, or remake, the social – this same media is potentially provocative and tactical. it could be deployed to make a spectacle – of the state, militarism, consumer capitalism, the nuclear family, patriarchy, racism, etc. and punk sociality (on the street, at the venue, in the collective), while orgiastic in the maffesolian sense (1993) of a fluid and sensuous neo-tribalism offering its fullest expression in the climactic festal, tends also towards the organic. decentralised structures encouraging mutual responsibility and consensual outcomes, anarcho-punk “temporary autonomous zones” (or taz: bey 1991a) nurture the kind of immediate experiments-of-the-self bey embraced as “radical conviviality”.10 furthermore, the orgiastic-organicism of the taz can be a context for intervention. contextualising reclamations, direct action and culture jamming (from reclaim the streets to j18 and other “protestivals”, see figure 2),11 a temporary “orgiasm” potentiates more enduring subversions. reclamational tactics, which tim jordan (2002: 26) claims “draw on the future to create the future”, may be working examples of “future-presence” or “futures in the present”. paraphrasing the preamble to the constitution of the iww, jeff shantz (1999: 60-61) suggests that such tactics “attempt to form the structure of the new world in the shell of the old”. as such, these tactics evince the renewed popularity of anarchist and autonomist politics manifest in a vast network of collectives and in proglobal justice events and world social forums. where punk heirs act out the future in the present, co-opting media to their own goals, they appear to be cognizant that “the ultimate authenticity lies in political action” (clark 2003: 234) rather than in a preoccupation with unmarketable purity. st john • making a noise, making a difference 5 figure 2: reclaim the streets, newtown, sydney, 1999. photo by pete strong knowing the score: edm and tactical dance in the early 1990s, post-rave electronic dance music came to hold a strong bearing on punk. while punk’s common response to rave – like rock’s reaction to disco and house before it12 – was that it “sucked”, as electronic dance music was adopted in the quest to realise the “future-presence”, the sight, sound and experience of edmc would become more appealing. from the late 1980s uk, a techno-cultural accretion incorporating electronic music, psychotropic lighting, chemical alterants and all night dancing possessed a libertarian sensibility integral to a rapidly escalating millenarianism. the techno-rave experience was recognised to possess greater potential than other popular music forms, especially rock, in the gathering carnival of resistance throughout the 1990s. jeremy gilbert noted that “whereas rock music corresponds more closely with representational politics”, the immediacy of contemporary dance music made it ideal as a medium for direct-action – for direct democracy (1997, in huq 2002: 93). making manifest a “hidden future inside the present”, the ecstatic intimacy of rave shares a “radical indeterminacy” ( jordan 2002: 46) with non-violent direct action – a condition of uncertainty powerful in its potential to unite disparate parties. a transgressive and decentralised “pleasure-politics” would thus be recruited from its secret nocturnal domains for causes external to itself. with the ekstasis (see hemment 1996) of the early rave scene suited to the tactics of direct action, or more precisely, “direct theatre” (schechner 1992: 104), tactical dance became implicated in anti-corporate globalisation protests and opposition to us aggression in the aftermath of 9-11.13 as intimated, there is considerable contiguity between the hardcores of punk and electronica (whether uk “ardkore” or european “tekno” sound system scenes), with an examination of these “cores” promising insights on global music cultures. those identifying with “hardcore” electronica, like their punk predecessors (and contemporaries), appear to have been in possession of a “privileged knowledge” (see fitzgerald 1998: 47) revealed by the popular phrase “ardkore, you know the score”. here, being hardcore means being committed to – knowing – the style (music, drugs, 6 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 language, gestures, history, attitude), and being proximate to – knowing – the streets (social injustice, racism, discrimination, etc). as with punk, commitment to “ardkore” or “tekno” style was an expression of one’s proximity to an authentic life. and, like hardcore punk, and with the assistance of the ever-alert corporate entertainment industry and its advertising arms, such style could be affected by those with little experience of, or concern for, poverty, racism or the environment. but by the mid 1990s, there were proponents of hardcore and other post-rave styles who were mobilising in response to ongoing social and political causes and effectively distinguishing themselves from those committed to a corporate defined and controlled rebellion. edm also afforded a new medium, a politics of production enabled by new accessible technologies. through the acquisition of relatively inexpensive digital technology that facilitated the establishment of bedroom studios, pirate radio, fanzines, micro-labels etc, post-house dance musicians were enjoying the kind of decentralised anti-mainstream approaches unheard of in previous underground dance music cultures (hesmondhalgh 1998: 237). and, in a disruption of the authorship categories of earlier popular music scenes, dance also represented an (often thwarted) attempt to collapse the passive spectator/genius performer role of rock and punk. indeed its challenge to the music industry’s “star system” (replicating such challenges made by countercultural and punk forebears) was regarded by early music press commentators as a distinctive feature of the genre: “there was a strong implication... that the star system represented fetishization of certain individuals, and dance music culture, like many youth music movements, was based on a celebration of collectivism” (hesmondhalgh 1998: 239). of course, this represented an ideal perspective contradicted by the emergence of the dj as “star”, who, as the artist in an arena of performance downstream from the western concert tradition, and most clearly apparent at mega-rave festivals, is separated from the audience. also, as david hesmondhalgh (1998: 246) further demonstrates, using their subsidiary record labels to “buy credibility” from independent labels, entertainment corporations like polygram and emi had “worked to assimilate as rapidly as possible the symbolic resonances attached to independent record production”. such offered nothing more than “pseudo-indification” challenging inflated claims of “democratisation”. from new analogue and digital audio technologies, bedroom studios and the dance party itself, electronic dance media constitutes a technical aesthetic harnessed by post-punk/post-rave actors not only in the interests of being different (making noise) – but in the effort to make a difference (make a noise). throughout the 1990s, electronic media (along with computer mediated technologies) would enable cosmopolitan counter-tribes to mount a range of challenges in the reclamation of the global commons. in australia, diy techno-activism would enable counter-colonial mobilisations amidst a mounting crisis of legitimacy. variously critical of the state and corporate greed, advocating indigenous justice, human rights and ecological sustainability, australian post-punk culture would become fertile terrain for the development of a post-settler ethos. and it was a techno-punk convergence that would prove particularly momentous, a complex junction that can be grasped via a discussion of the production aesthetic of electronic music and the dance party (or doof ). “improtopia”: sydney techno-punk by the late 1980s, a cut & paste sensibility that had evolved in the visual arts though cubism, futurism, dadaism and punk, in electronic music practice through dub plating st john • making a noise, making a difference 7 and through noise art and digital recording, would be adapted by musicians adopting new equipment (e.g. digital samplers and synthesisers) and techniques (e.g. dubbing, the live mix, turntable techniques). in particular, samplers proved to be very useful devices/instruments through which to pirate and rewrite sonic artifacts. as was explained by two principal instigators of the australian underground techno development, john jacobs and peter strong (1995/96), in a production with diverse influences from punk to hip hop, “sounds themselves can be liberated”. with akai x7000s, a “lively bleep once held prisoner by an oppressive track is free to dance to a different beat. evil lyrics of consumption, fear and greed can be detourned and mutated into statements of joyful resistance”.14 thus the unsolicited duplication and creative recombining of the sonic detritus of popular media – distinctive stamps of dub, hip hop, house and techno – would be performed to incite opposition and ignite alternatives. strong (aka morphism or mashy p) had a name for this referential sonic bricolage, this audio-culture-jamming. “agit-house” would form the basis of protest techno, which itself belongs to a lineage of musical improvisation involved in “the struggle for a new culture” (balliger 1995: 14). agit-house was a product of a recognition made by musicians in early 1990s sydney that the liberationist messages expressed in their punk acts could be laid down relatively seamlessly with the assistance of samplers, tr808 drum machines, an amplifier and some good bass bins. exploiting the means by which new audio technologies could effect cut & paste techniques, appropriated and remixed for new purposes and amplified through a pa, punks were programming their dissent to a new rhythm. and since the rhythm was ideally seamless, as multiple artists played long live sets or beatmatched their tracks, bodies were propelled on and on. thus, unlike punk, this would become a certifiable dance culture – one which, via the rave and with the assistance of mdma – inherited the palpably non aggressive and non-heterosexualist legacies of house, garage and disco, and the kinesthetic maelstrom of a love-in. but if it was tactile and empathetic, it was also conducive to anarchism – and could remain so as long as a compulsion to bottle the experience and shift it for a tidy sum was kept in check. if this was punk, the exterior would become un-leathered and furrier, accoutrements fluoro and that which enhance the senses, and while alcohol remained present it was no longer dominant. figure 3: non bossy posse at the graffiti hall of fame. photo by peter strong 8 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 amplifying issue-driven samples over breaks to rally the massive around a cause or to provide a soundtrack to public demonstrations, non bossy posse (nbp) were probably the earliest exponents of australian agit-house. they were a techno collective producing music in which voice samples like “people before profits”, “old growth – fuckin oath” and “we are everywhere” could be discerned over a driving squall of bleeps and breaks.15 their performances were live, originally using finger synching techniques, and involved multiple musicians locking into a designated bpm, with each participant dropping freshly garnered or long favoured vocal samples into the jam. with multiple artists working simultaneously – rather than the solo dj most common to electronic music performance – such constituted a true techno collective. since these artists operated within an environment where experimentation and chance encounters with new audio technologies produced a reservoir of sounds and techniques shared by a growing techno underground, they approximated what brian eno identified as the collective “scenius” more than the “heroic auteur” of avant-garde traditions (reynolds 1998: 127). while reynolds was referring to techno’s hardcore, nbps derivations are diverse. punk-traveler crossover band crass (thought to have kick-started the uk anarcho-punk movement), adrian sherwood’s jamaican roots reggae on u sound system, and uk techno, house, break beat collectives like diy sound system and zero gravity (sporadical # 1, oct 1994; murray 2001: 65) were inspirations. there was also substantial influence from message rap legends public enemy, who, like those associated with one of nbps formative arrangements, mahatma propagandhi (mp), and fellow sydney techno-artists sub bass snarl, started out working on community radio shows. activist beats were early recorded on nbp’s tape saboteurs of the big daddy mind fuck (1993). adopting and repurposing increasingly accessible audio hardware, these activists instigated a tradition of promoting local political issues in the context of cutting edge music performances. sampling the commentary of political leaders and activists from news reports, advertisements and sites of conflict, and mixing these with preprogrammed rhythms, they would provide an “alternative newscast” (daly 1999: 9). these “freebooting sonic agitators” amplified issues of concern like police brutality, the arms trade, the drug war, indigenous justice, forest mismanagement, union matters and uranium mining. and with the assistance of experimental analogue video performance group subvertigo (formed in 1992 by john jacobs), activist filmic montage would accompany the sonic manifesto, such that the idea of “dance parties as multimedia political platforms” was born.16 figure 4: subvertigo. photo by john jacobs st john • making a noise, making a difference 9 non bossy posse was formed in the spring of 1992 by members of sydney bands mahatma propagandhi (electronic/instrumental) and the fred nihilists (anarcho pop punk), who were regulars at live gigs in newtown and redfern, and were associated with the jellyheads anarcho-punk collective. forming in late 1989, the jellyheads turned out to be one of australia’s most progressive punk developments. motivated by “the idea of taking back control of our music, our lifestyle and our lives” (jellyheads blurb # 6 april 1992), the jellyheads “alternative venue project” drew inspiration from international initiatives like north berkeley’s 924 gilman street project (aka the “alternative music foundation”) (see edge 2004), belfast’s warzone collective, and others with whom they shared a commitment to decision making through consensus and “a desire to create a cultural space free from sexism, racism and homophobia”.17 members were closely associated with local collectives and co-ops like redfern’s black rose anarchist bookshop, alfalfa house food cooperative, and radio skid row.18 the collective held numerous fundraising gigs, video nights and feasts to generate funds for a community pa (acquired in september 1992).19 punk bands like frenzal rhomb and nitocris would play there, but it was bands such as fred nihilist, tutti parze, subliminal pressure, repeat offenders and deviant kickback which were instrumental in raising funds to seed and maintain the jellyheads initiative, and who themselves drew inspiration from the likes of crass, conflict, chumbawamba and other uk anarchist punk bands raising funds for progressive causes. in some cases reluctantly, the jellyheads were also receptive to developments within edm, and came to host regular dance parties. grant focus regards the first such event, jellignite, held at regent st hotel redfern on february 20 1992, as one of the earliest moments in a punk-techno convergence: there was punks and doofers and oxford street gay crew and chippo queer crew. there were punk/industrial djs as well as electro stuff. mohatma propagandhi played and did a set with percussion and a sampler set up all over the dance floor so the crowd could also make the music with us. it was fun till the outdoor pool collapsed and we all got booted out! these rapprochements continued and would trigger novel experiments. on may 16 1992, the “propagandi sound system” played at a celebration of the la uprising, act your rage, in the newly occupied jellyheads warehouse in chippendale. this and other events at the time were contextualising something of a transition from band to sound system. according to “radical technician” and idea jockey john jacobs, “we were a bunch of folks being acted on by contemporary cultural forces. we were using the tools at hand to put out a message in what we saw as the most effective and fun way”. like forebears who railed against the “star system” of late 1960s and early 1970s rock music, in a musical rebellion of simplification, amateurism and noise, mahatma propagandhi were also collectivising the performance – in their case not just through their aversion to rock, but in their objection to the idea of “the band” itself.20 for jacobs, the band model was outmoded, possessing “limited active roles and outputs”. by contrast: the sound system model sat so much more comfortably with our way of working jellyheads as a non-hierarchical collective. it had the flexibility to include more active participants in the co-creation of cultural situations including bringing the spectators (audience) into the creative loop. and had a more morphable output that was easily able to be scaled in intensity and duration to suit ad-hoc community gatherings.21 10 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 figure 5: john jacobs. photo by dan seeking to take music “back to the centre of social change action”, mahatma propagandhi, and later non bossy posse, would carry this sound system shift. jacobs suggested that “if a utopia is defined as a no place, an imagined idyllic future society that doesn’t (can’t) exist, then that is hardly enough to aim for. we can live in improtopia right now”. thus the impromptu and immediate sociality favored by anarchists would be consistent with, and even modulated by, new approaches to musical production. and while such an aesthetic insurrection had parallels with the first wave of detroit techno artists who likened themselves to “techno-rebels” (after toffler, see sicko 1999), mp and nbp saw new audio-visual technologies adopted in accordance with organic anarchist principles. reflective of a cut & paste sensibility running through surrealism, jazz, beat art, punk and 1990 culture jamming, jacobs holds a proactive aesthetic: “remix reality. work with what ever social elements are to hand. listen or be sensitive to what is going on around you and start jamming with it. add a little bit of your song to push the good parts of life’s melody or rhythm along. surprise your self and others every now and then with some dissonance or break beat”.22 while this period (1990-1993) saw a transition from acoustic punk rock to the seamless aesthetic of live techno mixed by djs, the new aesthetic was not adopted without opposition. as strong recalls, the music was “mistrusted by some of the punk contingent”. reactions to early sydney park events saw graffiti in the park: “kill non bossy raver scum, techno = disco” (strong 2001: 73). grant focus explains how a “great tension” had mounted “between the punk and techno crowds”, and that punks held a general distrust of the motives of those who many thought “were non-political middle class dickheads”. the antipathy emerged “between the people who thought everyone should do everything for free and those who wanted to get paid or pay some people”. rave promoter mike j of the early 1990s industrial club cybernaut and later virtual bass (who also ran a rave called primitive) earned “a lot of ill feeling” from punks.23 “the idea that the djs would get paid but not the people who worked on the door or who cleaned up or did the recycling was not well received by most of us”. as live rock and punk aficionados have long expressed contempt for “disc cultures” (thornton 1995: 8) and the non-vocal textural prioritisations of “dance” music (gilbert and pearson 1999: 68-72), it is also likely that the distrust of techno reflected a perception that pre-recorded and non-vocal sound is not “raw”, and is thus inauthentic. but anarcho-techno artists would demonstrate that their sonic assemblage was raw, st john • making a noise, making a difference 11 vocal and authentic. while many punks, recounts jacobs, regarded techno as “a middle class dance floor distraction”, dismissed it as “mindless drug music”,24 and/or, i would imagine, object to its presumed inauthenticity, nbp and their immediate precedents exploited the creative potential of new recording technologies to facilitate radical dance floors. this was achieved in the sense that their work illustrated plunderphonic artist john oswald’s assertion that “recorded sound is always raw – even when it is cooked” (cutler 1995: 68),25 and that, employing vocal samples with or without irony, their sampladelic sensibility was indeed “vocal”. furthermore, they retained their noncommercial anarchist principles. according to jacobs: there were plenty of other people doing rave parties in sydney. from the rat parties in marrickville to the gay parties at the hordern. it was all illegal. but we were anarchists first and artists second. with us there was no one dude with a mobile – we were about people sitting in a circle and trying to do consensus decision-making. putting the politics up front. when we sat down with our community to organise a gig, we were doing it as a political action first and art second (in murray 2001: 66). party-machine: vibe tribe when the likes of the propagandhi sound system amplified punk’s liberationist message under the roof of acid house, a bridge was said to have been built “from fullon punk power to more balearic rhythms and dance grooves” (strong 2001: 73). while the jellyheads folded in early 1993 after the south sydney council placed an injunction on their fortnightly (and unlicensed) acid techno parties (wobble),26 “dissonance and breakbeat” would sound in the parks and repeat off the walls of st peters and newtown. audio-bombers non bossy posse would create the sonic graffiti for circus vibe tribe, a party machine that virtually rose from the ashes of jellyheads. like the jellyheads, vibe tribe were opposed to the commercial exploitation of electronic music and the privatisation of inner city space. the collective attracted alternative thinking people from far and wide. there were queer-anarchists disenchanted with the sydney gay scene’s commercial directions. a psychedelic trance aesthetic would circulate following kol dimond (fatty acidz) and jeh kaelin’s (formerly drummer for the fred nihilists and later dj jackieonnasid) inspirational visit to goa in 1990. present also were “bush punks” or “ferals” who, since the turn of the decade, had been committing to direct actions to save “old growth” forest (see st john 1999). vibe tribers knew “the score”. they possessed a wide range of musical influences (including punk and hard techno, or, later, breakcore). attitudinally their knowledge of local social and political issues may have been privileged but it was not exclusive: they wanted everyone else to “know the score” too. in the first edition of their zine sporadical, vibe tribe identified themselves as “a non-hierarchical collective pooling skills and resources with the aim of promoting collectivism strengthening community unity and reclaiming space to live alternative culture” (sporadical # 1 oct 1994). using the community sound system purchased through jellyheads fundraising, vibe tribe were committed to orchestrating free dance parties, non-hierarchical sites of radical conviviality.27 as they “reclaimed the beach” at congwong bay, la perouse, and squatted empty warehouses, vibe tribe would “highlight the problem of diminishing useable public space” (chan 1999: 68). and as they opposed transport developments, such as the m2 motorway in carmegeddon ( july 1995), they performed the groundwork for the rapid translation of the uk reclaim the streets phenomenon. austra12 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 lians had a name for dance events evincing the crosspollination of anarchistic (inclusive and co-operative) ecological (conscientious and disciplined), digital (looped and optimistic), and transgressive (playful and carnivalesque) sensibilities: “doofs” (see st john 2001b; strong 2001: 72; luckman 2003). anarcho-liminal events “in which people of all races, sexualities and cultural backgrounds can come together”, vibe tribe’s free doofs in sydney park combined music, art, video, performance, circus skills and interactive installations (strong 2001: 74). their first party, a-may-zing, on may day 1993 in sydney park, saw “an anarchist picnic mutate into a full on free party allnighter” (strong 2001: 74). posters promoted the event as a “celebration of resistance” which involved sub bass snarl, gemma, ming d and non bossy posse. on that night, as strong recalls: “a huge banner emblazoned with the words ‘fuck the rave hierarchy’ was strung aloft”. figure 6: fuck the rave hierarchy. photo by peter strong jacobs recalls the period: it was exciting and a lot of people were into it and very soon up to 1000 people were turning up at sydney park. and there was no venue, as in no walls or bouncers, so it had to be free. the bucket would go around so it was forced into being a political thing. anyone that came along could feel that something special was happening. ravers and homeys, punks and down and outs. it was a good mixed thing (from murray 2001: 31). and anarchist principles would inform the entire process from performance through to eventual distribution with the organarchy sound systems label set up to distribute material, some of which – following the widespread adoption of digital formats (such as mp3) – would later be made available as freeware. establishing non-commercial autonomous spaces and employing de-centralized production and distribution technologies, according to strong, “the spirit of punk was sustained and painted fluro as the teckno seismic shift sent its tremors across australian dancefloors” (sporadical 1997: 3).28 the jellyheads/vibe tribe, punk/techno combination reflected a new wave of self-valorisation for anarcho-punk. under a diy ethos, punks would become occupied outside or adjacent to the labour market – making music, producing zines and running workshops. at the same time, they were participating in an emergent outdoor party culture. “in a spirit of adventure”, during the mid 1990s “all these people got st john • making a noise, making a difference 13 themselves out of their apathetic moment and had gone out to these beautiful bush settings, to the country or to the desert or to the beach”.29 and the reclaimed sites, squatted buildings and bush-doof trajectory would enable initiatives with a proactive counter-colonial character. as direct anti-corporate activism was gathering strength globally through the 1990s, post-punk elements were acting locally. techno circus and desert punks vibe tribe’s ambition was to mobilise a non-profit, non-waged traveling circus incorporating performance art, installations and music. so motivated, they were inspired by uk sound systems and european “circus tribes” who had “embraced the rise of electronic music fusing liberationist politics with technology” (strong, sporadical # 1 1994). spiral tribe and other techno tribes like bedlam and desert storm were the product of a techno-traveller-punk moot in the late eighties which would see punk take to the road in a post-apocalyptic – mad max meets judge dread inflected – revision of the new age traveler lifestyle and festival. in europe, techno-punk “teknivals” gained popularity by the mid-1990s. in the wake of the salvage-situationist adventures of london’s mutoid waste co (see cooke 2001), and the uk acid house explosion, the disenchanted and disenfranchised were seceding from the parent culture. yearning for more than the temporary escapade of the taz, they would satiate their desire for difference by escaping the confines of britain (where, by 1994, the notorious criminal justice bill had been enacted). forming in 1991 under the slogan “make some fucking noise”, london’s spiral tribe were the trailblazers of an international techno-circus, whose sites contextualised techno-culture’s performance to itself – reaffirming a techno-punk identity. describing their relentless performance, one observer saw the spirals “promising something and then screaming ultrasonic violent chaos... rhythms careering forward piling into the future, bellowing into the sky, and then a voice sampled you don’t know what you’re dealing with” (stroud 1994).30 figure 7: oms not bombs (later called ohms not bombs) 14 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 while vibe tribe were similarly drawn to the road – a compulsion assisted by south sydney council’s hostility to their inner city presence – the australian technomadic adventure would await the arrival of ohms not bombs. a direct result of the techno-punk experiments discussed above, ohms was also an extraordinary fusion of anarcho-punk and the “rave-olutionary” technophile counterculture of early 1990s san francisco.31 initially consisting of around 20 musicians, artists and activists, ohms was formed (in 1995) to catalyse a movement for a nuclear free future and sovereignty for indigenous australians. figure 8, 9: oms not bombs (later called ohms not bombs) – photo by peter strong the collective emerged amid outrage at french nuclear weapons testing in the pacific. they were originally “oms not bombs”, the name inspired by food not bombs where the “om” ( ) substitute “represents universal peace in the ancient sanskrit symbology”. they would later become known as “ohms not bombs”.32 the st john • making a noise, making a difference 15 brainchild of expatriate londoner strong, ohms renovated an old state transit bus and drove it around australia on their 1998 dig the sounds not uranium tour. figure 10: dig the sounds not uranium. photo by pete strong the tour involved 30 events (doofs, actions, music workshops) held over four months before ohms reached jabiluka uranium mine in the northern territory’s kakadu national park.33 dig the sounds was a traveling multi-media sound system, a “mobile autonomous zone”, motivated by a desire to “promote grassroots reconciliation respecting the original people of the land” and to “catalyse further actions and ideas about breaking the nuclear cycle locally and globally” (sporadical 5 1998: 8). while commentators recalled the american transcontinental ramblings of the protohippy electro-tribal merry pranksters three decades prior (daly 1999: 9), with a syncopated audio-visual apparatus and information stalls communicating anti-nuclear and other ecological and indigenous justice issues, this was no “acid test” but a mobile tactical media assemblage strong labeled a “doofumentary”. undertaking an independent initiative within a “reconciliatory” climate,34 ohms was driven by strong’s vision of tapping the party “vibe” for extra-party purposes: “unity is strength, together we can dismantle oppression, lets have the nrg we have developed on the dancefloor and use it to mutate the state, derail the earth destroying system. by tuning our funky technology to the cycles of our earth’s ecology we can crossfade towards a brighter future for all” (strong and strong 2000). and with an improtopian mission to the outback, the ohms movie became “a noughties version of ken kesey’s merry pranksters meets a russian revolution propaganda train meets priscilla, queen of the desert!” (murray 2001: 67).35 16 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 figure 11: ohms not bombs – peace bus. photo by peter strong figure 12: ohms not bombs – peace bus. photo by peter strong st john • making a noise, making a difference 17 the “doofumentary” provided an inspiration for the labrats alternative energy sound system. with a solar powered pa and a wind-powered cinema hauled by a van with an engine converted to run on vegetable oil, labrats were an innovative sound system presence. street performer, cartoonist and “human techno beat-box”, izzy brown, and trained geologist, funk, reggae and dub selector-producer marc peckham, met in 1998 at jabiluka where they were exposed to the ohms road show and combined to entertain and enthuse fellow campaigners. with brown and peckham subsequently responding to arabunna elder kevin buzzacott’s call for assistance, the labrats would mobilise to support his opposition to western mining corporation (wmc) in outback south australia – joining the keepers of lake eyre, 180km north of roxby downs.36 adopting a direct dance-activism and jacking into sustainable power sources, they would constitute the soundest system yet seen. as they asserted, the solar powered sound system pulled “the party scene back to its roots as a revolutionary force of beats and breaks, bleeps and squeaks in the face of an authority that is destroying our environment and the people that depend on it for their survival” (brown and peckham 2001: 92). developing a multimedia assemblage inflected with techno, message rap, funk and reggae traditions, and participating in reclaim the streets and alternative media festivals, the labrats communicated their antagonism with mining companies and promoted their living alternative to audiences in outback locations and metropolitan centres australia-wide.37 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7qvwzlx7-y tunin’ technology to ecology part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w86qouulbwc tunin’ technology to ecology part 2 figure 13: labrats sound system at the claypan, alice springs, june 2000. photo by graham st john 18 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 the message was principally amplified via their band combat wombat, which marc informed me is “punk hop” in orientation – the term denoting inheritance from both anarcho-punk and the message rap of the likes of public enemy. including dj monkey marc, mc izzy, mc elf transporter, and dj wasabi (and occasionally miranda mutanta, mc anna, and dj atom13, combat wombat gained national underground notoriety with their second album unsound $ystem (2005), especially with the track “qwest”. figure 14: combat wombat. photo by andrew kelly: andrewkelly.com.au figure 15: mc izzy and elf transporter at the northcote social club. photo by peter halasz: flickr.com/photos/pengo-au http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nttjxl8mizg combat wombat: qwest st john • making a noise, making a difference 19 one of the most compelling features of labrats/combat wombat was the remarkable level of playback immediacy in their performances. the issues of moment – especially the impact of the uranium industry on aboriginal communities – have been articulated via vocal samples and live mcing born from direct experience in desert regions of south and central australia from 1999.38 as marc stated, “it’s first hand information… it just comes straight from our mouths which has just come directly from what we’ve seen. we record it and that’s it. it’s an adulterated, uncensored version”.39 their music is thus consistent with a punk (and blues, folk, hip hop) tradition conscious of transmitting a rawer and “truer” version of events (issues) through proximity to the streets (social marginality). and while the language of the “streets” to which labrats were versed derives from middle class self-marginality, they nevertheless make claim to a genuine intimacy with the margins enabling a highly respected interpretation of events. unlike early sound system models, labrats “noise” was determined as much by a compulsion to “make a difference” as to be different (noisy). in choosing a marginal life, combat wombat/labrats subordinated themselves to possibility – to a possible future. committed to “make things right”, their effort has been one of living the future in the present. responding to the “call” of custodians, the “future-presence” consists of intimate reconciliation, support for aboriginal sovereignty and a connection with threatened country. and using an assemblage of sonic, visual and alternative media, these terra-ists embarked upon a mission to unite a scene in a “fight for country”. figure 16: mc izzy. photo by andrew kelly: andrewkelly.com.au 20 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 figure 17: monkey mark and dj wasabi. photo by damon rao: flickr.com/photos/urbanbicyclist figure 18: mc izzy at northcote social club. photo by damon rao: flickr.com/photos/ urbanbicyclist st john • making a noise, making a difference 21 conclusion in an effort to comprehend trajectories downstream from punk, exploring the boundaries crossed between punk, techno and hip hop, this article has travelled to the conceptual heart of “hardcore”. the discussion of what it means to be authentically hardcore, a theme appropriated by punks to define their own scene, albeit a process not unique to punk, assists our understanding of how and why scenes cross over, and why new scenes emerge in the first place. the discussion of musicians and activists mobilising within a settler society struggling for legitimacy has provided the context for these observations. labrats/ combat wombat and other agitators influenced by diy experimental music and activist traditions have emerged in a period influenced by the anti-corporate challenge from anarcho-punk. the 1990s saw the explosion of simultaneous aesthetic and activist dispositions characteristic of that which i have identified as “hardcore”. adopting new music technologies, methods and aesthetics, post-punk actors intervened to express difference and/or make a difference in varied responses to conditions of inequality, injustice and despoliation. a punk trajectory would be sustained through proximity to the “streets” and commitment to a “cause” (outside of conventional artistic and political frameworks) – a cause which in australia developed a strong counter-colonial character. ohms not bombs and labrats were likened to “stormtroopers spearheading a generation’s demands” that their continent’s ecosystems be safeguarded from the radioactive perils of the nuclear industry (daly 1999: 9). but as the interventions of these techno-protagonists conveyed, more than a nuclear-free future was at stake. they would be implicated in a movement for legitimate presence, which relied on the adoption of intimate and tactical audio technologies. in sydney in the early 1990s, a collective sound system model was adopted in the wake of a dynamic punk-techno convergence associated with the jellyheads alternative music project. at that time, new audio digital technologies enabled adherence to a politics of difference involving independent and decentralized musical creativity. using these new technologies and techniques, anarcho-techno musicians (exemplified by non bossy posse) amplified anti-corporate and non-authoritarian liberationist messages at autonomous “improtopias” facilitated by the vibe tribe, a collective providing stimulus for mobile initiatives responding to the threat to “country”. not an inflection of the mad max “road warrior” who knows no future, and who respects no authority other than the road itself, post-punk techno terra-ists would mount creative solutions in a post-settler becoming. while there can be little doubt that this local momentum shifted as a result of competing commitments associated with the late-1990s alter-globalisation movement and the antiwar movement of the 2000s, sustained comparison with more contemporary technoactivist developments in australia and elsewhere should prove rewarding. ••••••• references balliger, robin. 1995. “the sound of resistance”. in ron sakolsky and fred wei-han ho (eds.), sounding off: music as subversion/resistance/revolution, pp. 13-26. new york: autonomedia. beezer, anne. 1992. “dick hebdige, subculture: the meaning of style”. in martin barker and anne beezer (eds.), reading into cultural studies, pp. 101-18. london: routledge. 22 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 bey, hakim. 1991a. taz: the temporary autonomous zone – ontological anarchy and poetic terrorism. new york: autonomedia. ––––. 1991b. “the lemonade ocean and modern times: a position paper”. <www.spunk.org/ texts/writers/bey/sp000917.txt> (accessed 8 october 2009). ––––. 1994. immediatism. edinburgh: ak press. brown, izzy and mark peckham. 2001. “tuning technology to ecology: labrats sola powered sound system”. in graham st john (ed.), freenrg: notes from the edge of the dance floor , pp. 91-107. melbourne : common ground. <undergrowth.org/ freenrg_notes_from_the_edge_of_the_dancefloor> (accessed 8 october 2009). chan, seb. 1997. ‘the cops are jammin' the frequency’: critical moments for the sydney free party scene. unpublished manuscript. <www.cia.com.au/peril/youth/index.htm> (accessed 13 june 2007). ––––. 1999. “bubbling acid: sydney's techno underground”. in rob white (ed.), australian youth subcultures: on the margins and in the mainstream, pp. 65-73. hobart: acys publications. clark, dylan. 2003. “the death and life of punk: the last subculture”. in david muggleton and rupert weinzierl (eds.), the post-subcultures reader, pp. 223-36. oxford: berg. cohen, michael, paul dwyer, and laura ginters. 2008. “performing ‘sorry business’: reconciliation and redressive action”. in graham st john (ed) victor turner and contemporary cultural performance, pp. 76-93. new york: berghahn. cooke, robin. 2001. “mutoid waste recycledelia and earthdream”. in graham st john (ed.), freenrg: notes from the edge of the dance floor, pp. 131-156. altona: common ground. <undergrowth.org/freenrg_notes_from_the_edge_of_the_dancefloor> (accessed 8 october 2009). cutler, chris. 1995. “plunderphonics”. in ron sakolsky and fred wei-han ho (eds.), sounding off: music as subversion/resistance/revolution, pp. 13-26. new york: autonomedia. daly, mick. 1999. “doof warriors: turning protests into parties”. sydney city hub, 9. june 17. deleuze, giles, and felix guattari. 1986. nomadology : the war machine. new york: semiotext(e). edge, brian. (ed). 2004. 924 gilman: the story so far. san francisco: maximumrocknroll. ferrell, jeff. 2001. tearing down the streets: adventures in urban anarchy. new york: palgrave. fitzgerald, john. 1998. “an assemblage of desire, drugs and techno”. angelaki: journal of the theoretical humanities 3(2): 41-57 gilbert, jeremy, and ewan pearson. 1999. discographies: dance music, culture and the politics of sound. london: routledge. gooder, h and j jacobs. 2000. “‘on the border of the unsayable’: the apology in postcolonizing australia”, interventions 2(2): 229-247. hemment, drew. 1996. “e is for ekstasis”. new formations 31: 23-38. hesmondhalgh, david. 1998. “the british dance music industry: a case study of independent cultural production”. british journal of sociology 49(2): 234-51. huq, rupa. 2002. “raving, not drowning: authenticity, pleasure and politics in the electronic dance music scene”. in david hesmondhalgh and keith negus (eds.), popular music studies, pp. 90-102. london: arnold. jacobs, john and pete strong. 1995/96. is this r@ve olution? <sysx.org/vsv/ideas.html> (accessed 21 march 2007). jordan, john. 1998. “the art of necessity: the subversive imagination of anti-road protest and reclaim the streets”. in george mckay (ed.), diy culture: party and protest in nineties britain, pp. 129-51. london: verso. jordan, tim. 2002. activism! direct action, hacktivism and the future of society. london: reaktion books. keir, milburn. punk and autonomia. <www.uncarved.org/music/apunk/autonomia.html> (accessed 8 october 2009). st john • making a noise, making a difference 23 lawrence, tim. 2003. love saves the day: a history of american dance music culture, 1970-1979. durham and london: duke university press. lentini, pete. 2002. “melbourne punk: a ‘banal’ politics of difference”. paper presented at the 8th iaspm, university of technology, sydney. luckman, susan. 2003. “going bush and finding one’s ‘tribe’: raving, escape and the bush doof ”. continuum: journal of media and cultural studies 17(3): 315-30. maffesoli, michelle. 1993 [1982]. the shadow of dionysus: a contribution to the sociology of the orgy. albany: state university of new york press. ––––. 1996 [1988]. the time of the tribes: the decline of individualism in mass society. london; thousand oaks, california: sage. mckay, george (ed.). 1998. diy culture: party and protest in nineties britain. london: verso. murray, enda. 2001. “sound systems and australian diy culture: folk music for the dot com generation”. in graham st john (ed.), freenrg: notes from the edge of the dance floor, p p . 5 7 7 0 . a l t o n a : c o m m o n g r o u n d . < u n d e r g r o w t h . o r g / freenrg_notes_from_the_edge_of_the_dancefloor> (accessed 8 october 2009). o’neill, shannon. 2009. “‘copyright doesn’t mean shit to me’: sampling and appropriation in australian experimental music and sound art.” in gale priest (ed), experimental music: audio explorations in australia, pp. 75-93. sydney: unsw press. reynolds, simon. 1998. energy flash: a journey through rave music and dance culture. london: picador. schechner, richard. 1992. “invasions friendly and unfriendly: the dramaturgy of direct theatre”. in janelle reinelt and joseph roach (eds.), critical theory and performance. ann arbor: university of michigan. shantz, jeff. 1999. “the new world in the shell of the old”. arachne 6(2): 59-75. shapiro, peter. 2005. turn the beat around: the secret history of disco. new york: faber and faber. sicko, dan. 1999. techno rebels: the renegades of electronic funk: billboard books. st john, graham. 1999. “ferality: a life of grime”. the uts review – cultural studies and new writing 5(2): 101-13. ––––. 2000. “ferals: terra-ism and radical ecology in australia”. journal of australian studies, 64: 208-16. ––––. 2001a. “australian (alter)natives: cultural drama and indigeneity”. social analysis, 45(1): 122-40. ––––. 2001b. “doof ! australian post rave culture”. in graham st john (ed.), freenrg: notes from the edge of the dance floor, pp. 9-36. altona: common ground. <undergrowth.org/freenrg_notes_from_the_edge_of_the_dancefloor> (accessed 8 october 2009). ––––. 2001c. “techno terra-ism: feral systems and sound futures”. in graham st john (ed.), freenrg: notes from the edge of the dance floor, pp. 109-27. melbourne: common ground. <undergrowth.org/freenrg_notes_from_the_edge_of_the_dancefloor> (accessed 8 october 2009). ––––. 2004. “counter tribes, global protests and carnivals of reclamation”. peace review: a journal of social justice 16(4): 421-28. ––––. 2005. “outback vibes: sound systems on the road to legitimacy”. postcolonial studies: culture, politics, economy 8(3): 321-36. ––––. 2006. “reclaiming the future: going feral and becoming native at goolengook”. in lynne hume and kathleen mcphillips (eds) popular spiritualities: the politics of contemporary enchantment, pp. 187-196. aldershot: ashgate. ––––. 2008. “protestival: global days of action and carnivalized politics in the present”. social movement studies: journal of social, cultural and political protest. 7(2): 167-90. ––––. 2009. technomad: global raving countercultures. london: equinox. stephens, julie. 1998. anti-disciplinary protest: sixties radicalism and postmodernism. cambridge; new york: cambridge university press. 24 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 strong, peter. 2001. “doofstory: sydney park to the desert”. in graham st john (ed.), freenrg: notes from the edge of the dance floor, pp. 9-36. altona: common ground. <undergrowth.org/freenrg_notes_from_the_edge_of_the_dancefloor> (accessed 8 october 2009). strong, peter and faith strong. 2000. “oms not bombs”. in alan dearling and brendan handley (eds), alternative australia: celebrating cultural diversity, pp. 144. dorset: enabler. thornton, sarah. 1995. club cultures: music, media and subcultural capital. cambridge: polity press. filmography labrats. tunin’ technology to ecology. 2003. youtube: part one <www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7qvwzlx7-y> part two <www.youtube.com/watch?v=w86qouulbwc> discography combat wombat. 2002. labrats solar powered sound system (cd). combat wombat. 2005. unsound $ystem. elefant traks (cd). monkey marc. 2003. western desert mob. warumpi studio (cd). ––––. 2009. as the market crashed. omelette records (cd). non bossy posse. 1993. saboteurs of the big daddy mind fuck (cassette tape). organarchy. 1998. filthy jabilucre (cd). organarchy. 2001. activista (lp). author biography graham st john is a research associate at the centre for critical and cultural studies at the university of queensland. his latest books include technomad: global raving countercultures (equinox, 2009) and the edited collection the local scenes and global culture of psytrance (routledge, 2010). he is the executive editor of dancecult. see: www.edgecentral.net notes st john • making a noise, making a difference 25 1 from a line in the song “white australia” on labrats (combat wombat’s) debut album labrats solar powered sound system (2002). 2 on “punk is” from labrats solar powered sound system (2002). 3 the article focuses almost exclusively on developments in sydney (and i make no claim to providing a comprehensive coverage of scenes in that city). the contribution of scenes elsewhere in australia could not be adequately addressed in this article. this is not an exploration of australian hardcore punk. 4 or that which george mckay (1998) recognises, perhaps more accurately, as a “do it ourselves” approach, which was inherited from the industrial workers of the world (iww or wobblies) and other anarchist precedents through countercultural forebears. it is of course curious that, often misrepresented and dismissed as apathetic, gullible and naïve in popular media throughout the 1970s and 1980s (see stephens 1998: 79), the sixties counterculture (hippies) were generally despised by earlier punks. 5 see reynolds in this edition of dancecult, and articles by jeremy gilbert and mark fisher in dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture volume 1 issue 1. 26 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 6 from a presentation delivered at fact, liverpool (11th february 2009). text at: <energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/02/hardcore-continuum-or-theory-a nd-its.html> (accessed 10 october 2009). 7 not only inheriting the “anti-disciplinary protest” of countercultural formations (like the diggers and the up against the wall motherfuckers), anarcho-punk would derive stimulus from dutch squatters and german autonomes, themselves inheriting something of the italian autonomia movement. the latter is regarded as a pragmatic anti-capitalist movement where “the ultimate resort is not to the claim of authenticity but to one of efficacy” (keir). 8 commitments resonating with deleuze and guattari’s (1986: 4) nomad who might “deterritorialize oneself by renouncing, by going elsewhere” or “deterritorialize the enemy by shattering his territory from within”. 9 in the early 1990s bey was referring to small press, community radio, and the possibilities of the internet. e-forums and email lists along with audio and video technology could certainly be added to this list. “intimate media” is discussed in bey’s “media hex: the occult assault on institutions” <www.t0.or.at/hakimbey/hex.htm> and in “media creed for the fin de siecle” <www.left-bank.org/bey/mediacr1.htm> (both accessed 8 october 2009). by the mid 1990s, bey’s net-disseminated work, particularly his poetic tract the taz (1991a), was becoming widely read and debated within anarcho-punk, rave and other alternative circles globally. 10 the conceptual architecture of the taz was imagined to expose “the enemy” (“separation” and “sameness” via mediation and commodification) and incite “the cause” (“the new autonomy” of “presence” and “difference”) (bey 1994). while elements of post-punk are sympathetic to the idea of a “free association of individuals” who “depend neither on capital nor any other form of representation”, others veer widely from bey’s sophisticated and non-ideological “individualist anarchism” (bey 1991b). 11 for reclaim the streets see jordan (1998). the june 18 1999 global street party coincided with the g8 summit in cologne. for a discussion of the “protestival” see st john (2008). 12 for good coverage of the rock industry’s (and middle america’s) reaction to disco, see peter shapiro (2005) and tim lawrence (2003: 376) 13 see st john (2004, 2009) for a discussion of the role of rave and reclaim the streets in the gathering carnival of protest. 14 adopted by guy debord and the situationists, détournement was an early term for “culture jamming”, a set of progressive aesthetic tactics performed initially in the urban streetscape designed to expose the desires and relationships which the capitalist “spectacle”, particularly through the machinations of the advertising industry, routinely renders “natural”. 15 the last two samples are from “plan it” on the activista lp (2001). 16 jeh kealin, email correspondence, 16 june 2004. 17 grant “zippy” focus, email correspondence, 13 june 2004. 18 radio skid row provided the context and resources for many in the punk and independent scenes to develop their talents. for instance, seb chan (yellow peril) and luke darnley (lex luther), who formed their live hardcore industrial project sub bass snarl in 1991 and later ran the cryogenesis chillout project and the frigid club nights, ran various dance and experimental shows in the early 1990s including one following the activist punk program oxford babylon (seb chan, email correspondence, 6 july 2004). st john • making a noise, making a difference 27 19 the anarchist cultural centre ran a variety of fundraising events including jellyvision video nights by subvertigo, jellywomen feasts, the eat the rich cafe and performances by the unknown theatre company. it was also a breeding ground for cat@lyst (community action technology), a collective who would make the internet available to community activists, and who were responsible for creating the open-source self-publishing software used by indymedia. 20 mahatma propagandhi formed in 1989-1990 and originally consisted of john jacobs, tony collins and craig domarski (all of whom worked on a triple j program called “the works” which was a “a live freewheeling mix”, an experimental lab for later developments). the band had a previous incarnation as the kgb stooges, who performed a cover of crass’ “do they owe us a living?”, and, as the media liberation front, played an antimedia oligarchy performance at the sydney stock exchange in 1988. pete strong, who had performed gigs with his sound anti-system, and who did screen printing for the university of new south wales, met jacobs at a gulf war rally on palm sunday at circular quay in 1991, joining mahatma propagandhi soon afterwards. 21 john jacobs, email correspondence, 9 june 2004. 22 john jacobs, email correspondence, 9 june 2004. 23 mike j gained particular notoriety when failing to pay those he hired for a meat beat manifesto party in redfern in 1994. this climate triggered the popular graffiti “virtual basstards”. 24 john jacobs, interview with the author, abc studios, sydney, 31 march 2004. 25 nbp productions would subvert the status of art as an “original” or “individual” work, and by implication threaten the idea of property rights. this was the case for audio as much for text and image (especially with regard to event posters, the zine sporadical and photomontaging). for a discussion of appropriation and anti-copyright practices in australian experimental music see shannon o’niell (2009). 26 nbp played their first gigs at the wobble parties – named after the wobblies. 27 sites where, much like bey’s taz, the artist is not a special sort of person, but every person is a special sort of artist (1991: 70). 28 by 1995, vibe tribe’s unlicensed party culture would generate a malicious response from the south sydney council. on the april 11 that year, several hundred people at a sydney park event (freequency) were violently dispersed by police (see chan 1997; strong 2001: 77-8). 29 vibe triber and founder of the sydney breakcore collective, system corrupt, kirilli (aka dj zeitgeist) indicates how hardcore artists have been surfing the edge of techno music and activism. breakcore indicates the effort to “distort the hell out of... classic tribal breaks”, to “cut them up and just infuse them in radical yet somehow rhythmical ways”. at system corrupt events “what we’re attempting to do”, she says, “is invite people to just hack at their rigid thought forms and open up their minds to new ideas there and then”. in stating that “we are inherently connected to the land and politics and... we’re connected with [indigenous] people because the land issues are just so important”, kirilli reveals what these “new ideas” might entail. “our party system”, she stated, “has got a point” (interview conducted with the author, newtown, sydney, 1st may 2004). 30 making the exodus from the uk, these sound systems would travel widely (e.g. europe, the us and australia) inspiring organisations such as san francisco’s spaz (semi permanent autonomous zone). 31 for example, the first edition of strong’s sporadical ran an article on “cyber-tribe rising” which referred to technologically enhanced cooperatives evincing “a new breed of individuals [who] have a unique chance to make a difference in the world we live in”. 28 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 32 according to strong, “ohms” is “a symbol of resistance [which]... can apply to sound or the mass of people power needed in our non-violent war against the enemies of the earth” (strong 2001: 82, 87). 33 in 1997 energy resources of australia ltd (era) received howard government approval to build a uranium mine at jabiluka in the world heritage listed kakadu. in 1998, representatives of the mirrar traditional owners called on supporters to join their struggle to protect the area’s cultural and environmental values. after a lengthy blockade, further construction of the mine ceased in 1999, and rio tinto (majority shareholders of era) began rehabilitating the mine site in october 2003. 34 it was known as the “decade of reconciliation” after the setting up of the council for aboriginal reconciliation in 1992. 35 for more detail on the origins of this tour and its outcomes such as organarchy’s filthy jabilucre cd (1998), see st john (2001c). 36 representing a threat to the physical and cultural survival of arabunna, wmc had been mining and milling one of the world’s largest uranium ore deposits at olympic dam, roxby downs since 1988. wmc’s growing demands on underground water sources in one of planet’s driest regions had a devastating impact on arabunna and kokatha peoples since such sources feed the precious springs around the lake eyre region essential for their cultural survival. bhp billiton acquired wmc resources in 2005. 37 labrats towed a caravan housing a solar/wind/vegetable oil powered recording studio and computer with video editing software. in 2003, their film documentary tunin’ technology to ecology won a new filmmakers award at the wild spaces environmental and social justice film festival. 38 marc travelled outback and top-end locations throughout the decade working with indigenous children creating socially conscious hip hop, conducting cultural preservation workshops and oral history recordings (see st john 2009: chapter 7). this work resulted in the album western desert mob (2003), a cd produced at warumpi studio compiled from music workshops with the tracks consisting of sounds made by kintore and papunya children sampled and sequenced, with children singing in traditional language over the beats. marc built a solar powered recording studio in melbourne in 2006/07, and began a solo project in 2008 releasing as the market crashed in 2009 <www.monkeymarc.com>. in 2010, monkey marc released “rock hop” featuring raps by kevin buzzacott (aka mc buzz wappa). donations for downloading this track in support of buzzacott can be made at: <monkeymarc.bandcamp.com/track/rok-hop-by-buzz-wapper-2?auto=mp3-320> also in recent years, izzy brown began working in kenya, the results of which can be seen in the video for the song “bowdown no way”: <www.youtube.com/watch?v=fft9v7lzqg0> 39 mark peckham, interview with the author, fungaia festival, southern tasmania, 14 february 2004. reviews1.2-typeset reviews 112 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 reviews reggaeton. raquel z. rivera, wayne marshall, and deborah pacini hernandez (eds). durham and london. duke university press, 2009. isbn: 978-0-8223-4360-8 (hardcover), 978-0-8223-4383-5 (paperback) rrp: us$89.95 (hardcover), us$24.95 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.09 alejandro l. madrid university of illinois at chicago (us) when certain products or practices attain a more secure place in a particular cultural landscape they tend to become naturalized in the minds of those who experience such landscapes; it is almost as if they had always been there, they become “authenticated”. this seems to be the case with reggaeton. as i sit down to write this review i ask myself when i heard about reggaeton for the first time and i cannot find an answer. when pushing myself to remember anything related to what i now believe belongs to the reggaeton performance complex, a number of fragmented images and sounds come to mind. i remember el general in local, low budget shows from the telemundo or univisión tv networks in new york city and boston in the early 1990s; then students asking me about the genre (and actually calling it reggaeton) almost ten years later in chicago; finally, its explosion into the mainstream media in 2005, and its pervasive presence in clubs in havana, cuba, that summer. although most of these memories are rather vague and patchy, what i do remember clearly is not being able to explain thoroughly what reggaeton was. the sounds and the images seemed to have always been there since the 1990s, but in fact, reggaeton was something relatively new, and as such, also somehow elusive. since the mid 2000s reggaeton has arguably become the most danced and talked about latin music genre. it is omnipresent in latin american and latin media in the u.s.; yet, with few exceptions and disregarding its artistic success and its importance as a marker of the transnationality that characterizes contemporary latino and latin american experiences of identity, reggaeton had largely remained absent from academic discussion. reggaeton, edited by raquel z. rivera, wayne marshall, and deborah pacini hernandez, is an appropriate, timely, and thorough response and reflection on the genre’s popularity. the volume is an impressive collection of academic essays and artistic statements that deals with reggaeton’s cultural significance and stylistic meaning, and the history of transnational migration, oppression, and racial struggle behind its production, consumption, and dissemination. the aesthetic, sociological, anthropological, and political complexity of the reggaeton phenomenon can only be seriously approached from a multidisciplinary perspective. reggaeton offers a multi-logic reading where several disciplines and fields of artistic expression come together to answer questions that no disciplinary field could comprehensively answer alone. the demonstrated expertise in the fields of sociology, ethnomusicology and anthropology of the editorial team, as well as their commitment to the study of music through a transnational lens almost guaranteed the extraordinary depth and variety that this collection of essays, interviews, poetry and visual arts offers. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(2) 2010, 113-127 issn 1947-5403 ©2010 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ the book is divided into six sections. in the first section, “mapping reggaeton”, wayne marshall offers a detailed study of the stylistic development of the genre. by focusing on the transformation of the sounds and rhythms that characterize today’s reggaeton as they traveled historically through a cultural circuit that included jamaica, panama, new york and puerto rico, marshall is able to explain the links between genres such as reggae, dancehall, rap, underground, and reggaeton, whilst shedding light on the discourses of “authenticity” behind them. the second part, “the panamanian connection”, presents articles by marshall and christoph twickel as well as interviews with singers renato and el general; the combination of academic and journalistic writings alongside the artists speaking about their experiences gives the reader a rich description of the history of reggae and dancehall in panama as well as the role of american culture in the slow development of a new style that would only be called reggaeton many years later. part three, “(trans)local studies and ethnographies”, is made out of articles that focus on specific issues related to local reggaeton scenes in puerto rico (raquel z. rivera), cuba (geoff baker), and miami ( jose davila), and a re-evaluation of the role of dominican musicians and producers in the development of the genre (deborah pacini hernandez). rivera’s chapter traces the transformation of underground into reggaeton in puerto rico in relation to questions of morality and censorship. this essay pays attention to the commercial notoriety of the genre and its transformation into a site for the continued struggles over the representation of racialised stereotypes about class and criminality, and social hierarchies of the island. baker’s essay on the political tensions between rap and reggaeton in cuba is a noteworthy contribution that analyzes how both genres play a central role in the current imagination of the national and the global in a socialist country. the fourth part of the book, “visualizing reggaeton”, offers a collection of pictures by miguel luciano and kacho lópez, and stills from a video project by carolina caycedo. this section shows readers the visual aspect of reggaeton culture as well as how artists engage that culture to reflect on issues of neocolonialism, consumerism, gender, sexuality, race, and “authenticity” that concern contemporary latino youth. caycedo’s reads the hypersexualized perreo dancing style that characterizes reggaeton as an example of a new form of feminism that allows women to reclaim their sexualized bodies and use them to accomplish their own goals. part five, gendering reggaeton, presents chapters by félix jiménez, alfredo nieves moreno, and jan fairley that explore the role of reggaeton in reproducing gender values as well as contesting gender hierarchies as the genre moves transnationally between new york city, puerto rico, and cuba. jiménez’s essay compares the figures of puerto rican singers glory and ivy queen to illustrate how different individuals might engage the gender stereotypes of reggaeton to solidify or question gender hierarchies in puerto rican society; while nieves moreno focuses on how the music and performance of calle 13 challenge the stereotypes of hypermasculinity often associated with reggaeton. fairley’s contribution centers on the sexualization of the bodies in perreo dancing within the particular context of cuba’s reggaeton scene. one of fairley’s wise moves is her comparative analysis of the transgressive character of perreo in relation to earlier black genres such as danzón, rumba, tango, or samba; thus interpreting reggaeton as part of the transnational cultural flow of african diasporic culture. the final section of the book is entitled “reggaeton poetics, politics, and aesthetics”, and combines poetry by gallego and reflections on the relationship 114 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 between hip hop and reaggeton and black pride by artists welmo e. romero joseph and tego calderón with analyses by alexandra t. vázquez and frances negrónmuntaner. noteworthy is vázquez’s provocative essay on racial and gender performativity and ivy queen, providing as it does an insight into how to deconstruct contradictory and problematic moments in performance as pedagogical articulations. reggaeton is a truly important contribution to our understanding of the most pervasive and perhaps most misunderstood latin musical genre at the turn of the 21st century. the blend of academic and journalistic writings with artistic statements, interviews and visual art offers the reader an extraordinary window into the complex landscape of reggaeton. as i was reading through the book i could not help thinking: “no wonder i thought reggaeton had always been here”. the rich discussions presented in this volume allows the reader to have a clearer idea of the continuities that make this genre part of a larger cultural complex while defining its particularities as a rather new type of musical expression. as i put the book down i feel confident i could finally somehow explain what reggaeton is; however, i also understand that the vibrant and shifting cultural flows that make it meaningful will most likely challenge this assumption sooner than later. with reggaeton, however, raquel z. rivera, wayne marshall, and deborah pacini hernadez have established the foundation for the rich and productive academic conversation that the genre will still generate. rave culture. the alteration and decline of a philadelphia music scene. tammy l. anderson. philadelphia, temple university press, 2009. isbn: 978-1-59213-934-7 (hardcover), 978-1-59213-934-7 (paperback) rrp: us$79.50 (hardcover), us$25.95 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.10 beate peter manchester metropolitan university (uk) in her book on the philadelphia electronic dance music (edm) scene, tammy anderson uses rave culture to reflect on why and how particular youth cultures decline. her ethnographic methodology, turning her into a participant-observer, is helpful as it provides invaluable insight into the organisation, production and marketing of electronic dance music. investigating the rave phenomenon from a cultural perspective, she places a scene primarily defined by its music consumption into a wider social, political and cultural context. this approach allows her not only to analyse the forces within the scene that led to its alteration and decline but also to look at external factors that might have affected the perception and development of the edm scene in philadelphia, usa. comparing the past raves with contemporary edm events, anderson traces the development of such events over time. her historical narrative of the genre opposes the notion that rave is a musical form of a particular time, commonly situated between reviews 115 1989 and 1992. she creates a rave-club culture continuum that categorises edm events according to their representation of commercial or rave-like values. by doing so, anderson successfully shows that the multi-faceted space at edm events abolishes the idea of authenticity and commercialism as a binary opposition. applying cultural markers, anderson locates several types of events within this continuum and promotes the idea of a spectrum of values that show how the identity of rave culture has changed. she also introduces six different types of participants, categorised according to their insider or outsider status. as entertaining as it is to read about the difference between loyalists, clubbers, pretenders or spillovers and their personal motivation to participate in an edm event, this model struggles to explain the interest in or absence of a collective identity. although the ethnographic data collected from interviewees gives an interesting insight into the upbringing of insiders and offers an explanation for the sense of belonging that some aim for on the dance floor, other participant categories are ignored, making a distinction between the ideal types of clubbers and their attitude towards the creation of a collective identity inappropriate. anderson’s analysis of the forces of cultural change is one of the most interesting aspects of this book, not just from the perspective of a musicologist but also because the alteration and decline of rave culture is presented as symbolising the general trend of youth cultures and scenes. first, the general schism between grassroots music enthusiasts on the one hand and younger fans on the other clearly shows how cultural and social values are embedded in a generation’s attitude towards the production, marketing, promotion and consumption of music. second, anderson’s investigation into the causes and effects of the commercialisation of raves relates back to rave-club culture continuum. furthermore, the empirical evidence from her fieldwork shows that such development appears to be innate to youth culture and music. thus, the mourning and resistance to change of original grassroots rave culture participants appears inappropriate, especially if it prevents a scene from surviving (new fans are not welcomed). third, the aspect of cultural otherness and hedonism is closely linked to rave culture’s prominent drug use. more interesting is the point anderson raises in her discussion of deviation over the extent to which the notion of otherness can still act as a recruitment factor for a specific culture and the question as to when deviance becomes self-destructive. again, anderson formulates her questions in such a way that a broader debate is encouraged. fourth, the aspect of formal social control includes an examination of the politics and policies in both the us and uk to provide a base from which to argue for a completely different attitude towards edm to that of club owners, promoters and fans. fifth, genre fragmentation is identified by anderson as a result of commercialisation. with the original rave ethos having all but vanished, special events prevent fans from being exposed to various musical genres or styles. considering some of the comments in the book, the fragmentation of the genre into a wealth of subgenres could also be interpreted as the escape from commercial exploitation, a move that might have been seen by some stakeholders as liberation from commercial restraints and expectations. the chapter dealing with cultural forces is one of the work’s strongest, since it puts rave culture’s alteration and decline into a wider perspective. moreover, anderson shows how these different forces are interdependent and how they are linked to a particular society’s understanding and appreciation of leisure time, music, and deviance: “simply put, a culture’s fate lies in attracting birth cohorts and demographic groups, the destruction in or diffusion of its elements and form, its exploitation via 116 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 industry, and its suppression by the state” (112). chapter five is similarly broad in approach, scope and applicability, dealing as it does with the types of cultural work that aim to produce both change and stability for a (musical) youth culture. anderson’s division of cultural work into restoration, preservation and adaptation makes it clear that the objectives of the various members of this youth culture differ to such a degree that the use of cultural markers on the rave-club culture continuum seems justified. furthermore, it highlights that this continuum is expandable in all directions and establishes a proof for the diversity within the culture. the comparative study between philadelphia, london and ibiza in chapter six, however, lacks the depth and critical analysis of previous chapters. it is unclear why those cities were chosen, what they represent or even what the results mean with regard to pan-european research (usa, spain, germany), global youth cultures (nomads), the aspect of nationality (britishness), or regionalism (lots of sunshine in ibiza, non-organic setting). nevertheless, this weakness does not damage my overall evaluation of anderson’s book as not only a well-written account of the philadelphia edm scene and its historical changes but also the importance of its emphasis on scenes in general. in doing so her achievements are threefold. first, anderson’s use of broad categories and cultural markers that do not over-emphasise the significance of music make her research applicable to other subject areas. her investigation of philadelphia’s rave culture is by no means exclusive in its articulation of factors internal and external to a scene. they are proof of the deep rootedness of youth culture in society regardless of levels of deviance. second, anderson’s analysis of cultural work shows that youth culture cannot be seen as a fixed and stable entity that vegetates aimlessly. instead, participants in a particular culture might be motivated for various reasons but they are very active in keeping their youth culture alive. third, according to anderson’s participant categorisation i am a loyalist and as such very protective of a scene with great emotional investment. reading a book about the decline of my favourite youth culture that, for many years, played a big role in my identity formation, meant i read anderson’s research with some scepticism. but, perhaps most important of all, her convincing arguments are refreshing precisely because they are free from the nostalgic longing for a grassroots rave culture. reviews 117 club cultures: boundaries, identities and otherness. silvia rief. new york and abingdon, routledge, 2009. isbn: 978-0-415-95853-0 (hardcover only) rrp: uk£70.00 (hardcover only) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.11 fiona hutton university of wellington (new zealand) in introducing her book silvia rief makes the point that clubbing has become a global phenomenon which takes place in diverse settings such as street parades and music festivals. whilst clubbing may have “gone global”, the local remains crucial when exploring such diversity. rief aims to examine club cultures and “particular modes of being and experience” in the shaping of cultural and social identities (8), and in so doing argues that the study of club cultures needs to be placed within broader contexts such as de-industrialisation, urban regeneration and the development of urban night time economies (ntes). the book reflects on the development of the ntes and the importance of clubbing in both london and istanbul. in addition rief utilises debates about authenticity, aestheticization, virtualization, reflexivity and otherness to develop her analysis. this is an ambitious project encompassing many diverse topics that reveal fascinating insights into contemporary club cultures. in chapter two rief compares london and istanbul and the urban regeneration that took place in both cities which contributed to the development and governance of the nte and in turn had a significant effect on club cultures. clubbing was actively encouraged in london’s urban redevelopment and the importance of nightlife in the tourism industry was recognised; in istanbul this emphasis on nightlife was not as explicit due to the islamist ruling government. this chapter contains an excellent discussion of the tensions in the development of the ntes of both cities. the explosion in british urban ntes and the issues surrounding so-called “binge drinking” have meant that nightlife has become re-problematised. a fascinating examination of the development of clubbing in istanbul is also put forward; rief notes for example that social divisions are very much in evidence, with clubbing more often than not associated with “upmarket events for wealthy middle-class and celebrity audiences” (51). following this discussion of urban renewal and its impact on the development of london’s and istanbul’s nightlife, rief turns to mapping the uk nte in chapter three, arguing that the role of clubbing and dance cultures has received little attention in such exercises. the difficulty in accurately mapping the uk nte and the cultural production industries involved is highlighted at the beginning of this chapter. these cultural production industries consist of micro-companies which do not appear on “established indicators” (58) and therefore often escape notice. writers such as chatterton and hollands (2003) are pessimistic about the domination of clubbing and nightlife by large companies and the corporatization of clubbing experiences. rief does not share their pessimism and while she recognises the power of large companies in this competitive sector she argues that even in global markets the local is still important, apparent in the diversity of club cultures within and between various 118 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 towns and cities. chapter three also charts the history of major uk club corporations such as the ministry of sound and discusses the rising costs of producing club spaces. rief also considers legislation such as the licensing act 2003 which affected the way club spaces are or can be produced. she concludes this chapter by stating that “the economic significance of the nightclub sector is considerable but not extraordinary” (76), again highlighting that the sector contains a large number of small independent companies. although i agree with rief that it is useful to consider club cultures in their broader social and cultural contexts, i did find myself wondering what these economic policies and issues meant for the consumers of club spaces. with this in mind i started chapter four with relish; here rief discusses the (clubbing) body and the organisation of clubbing experiences. she makes the point that clubbers immerse themselves in club cultures for different reasons and that many clubbers are still connected to the “everyday” (83). this challenges the idea that clubbers and clubbing experiences are always hedonistic and escapist. in addition rief highlights that ‘everyday’ values infuse clubbing spaces, which in a sense are similar to (some) “everyday” contexts. this affects “body and emotion work” (82) through for example controlling bodily appearance and managing impressions. nowhere is this more apparent than in the nightclub queue and during the rituals of “going out”. rief provides further discussion of clubbing communities as contested communities in which participants struggle for membership, partly through rituals of belonging and gaining access. chapter four focuses on the rules and conventions of clubbing where rief notes that fashion and dancing provide avenues through which bodies are accepted or rejected according to the conventions of the spaces they are in. she notes that even in club spaces that are more transgressive than the workplace or home, there remain social codes to be adhered to. chapter four contains a nuanced theoretical discussion centring on ideas such as aestheticization and prosthetic culture. this work theoretically frames the preceding discussion of the body and goes on to consider how these processes of aestheticization affect constructions of reality in clubbing environments. this is an ambitious project to situate clubbing in a broader theoretical framework. consequently it is often difficult to see how the experiences of clubbing as articulated by rief ’s respondents “fit” with this abstract discussion. perhaps better integration and linking of these theoretical points to clubbing would have helped the “fit” be more clearly identifiable. rief moves on in chapter five to a discussion of reality/realities of clubbing experiences and the “dance underworld” (110). the normalisation thesis is considered in the clubbing context in this chapter. rief puts forward the idea that drug use in clubs is not fully normalised as her interviewees still associated drug-taking with transgression and fear of dependency. although i am not sure that i agree with rief ’s interpretation here, it is helpful to see a “moving on” of key academic debates. attitudes towards drug use and the meanings of drug-taking experiences are also presented as profoundly gendered in this chapter. further consideration is given to clubbers’ meanings and experiences in chapter six. “identity projects” (132) frame clubbing experiences as a form of self development and self-realisation in relation to issues such as love and romance. the meanings of clubbing are classed, raced and gendered. theoretical and empirical material is more successfully integrated within this chapter. again, explicit linking of the narratives that run through chapters four to six may have helped the reader clearly identify how the debates being put forward relate specifically to clubbing. reviews 119 chapter seven focuses on images of sexuality or sexual scenarios in two prominent clubbing magazines; mixmag and ministry. rief points to the crucial role (154) that clubbing and nightlife play in the construction of sexual boundaries and also notes the blurring of sexual boundaries identified by earlier researchers (pini 2001; measham et al 2001; hutton 2006). the dominance of heterosexual identities and heteronormative structures are noted here, even though clubbing environments are often seen as more tolerant of diverse expressions of sexuality. rief argues that heteronormativity is not affected by the sexual scenarios she identifies in the two magazines under consideration; “naughty girls” and “hot lesbo action” (160-2), with such scenarios or images of transgressive femininities remaining firmly located within heterosexual feminine identities. rief extends this discussion of sexualities in chapter eight by considering the extent to which sexual boundaries are made or re-made in clubbing contexts. the tensions inherent in the commodification of gay and lesbian spaces are discussed and the idea that clubs are contested spaces is reinforced. controls on who gains entry through door management and judgements made about consumers within club spaces are f i l t e r e d t hr o u g h “h e t e r o n o r m a t i v e d i s c o ur s e s i n t h e r e a d i n g o f (hetero)sexuality” (183) deployed by gay and lesbian clubbers themselves. this dominance of heteronormativity is emphasised in chapter nine where rief concludes that “there is, therefore, no one-dimensional change of gender relations and sexual boundaries in club cultural spaces towards more equality and acceptance of diversity” (192). overall this ambitious book locates clubbing experiences within the broader economic, social and cultural contexts in which they are constructed. rief calls for a refocusing of clubbing research away from a concentration on clubbers’ experiences towards a more comparative, systematic approach. although at times this way of considering club cultures did not quite “work” for me, the moving forward of debates about club cultures and original insights and suggestions for further research are welcome. this book is suitable for any club researcher wishing to access an informed discussion about the nte, urban regeneration, bodies, sexuality and club spaces. references chatterton, paul and robert hollands. 2003. urban nightscapes: youth cultures, pleasure spaces and corporate power. london: routledge. hutton, fiona. 2006. risky pleasures: club cultures and feminine identities. aldershot: ashgate publishing. measham, fiona, judith aldridge and howard parker. 2001. dancing on drugs: risk, health and hedonism in the british club scene. london: free association books. pini, maria. 2001. club cultures and female subjectivity: the move from home to house. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. 120 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 run lola run. dir. tom tykwer. sony pictures (dvd), 2008 [1998]. berlin calling. dir. hannes stöhr. av visionen (dvd), 2008. doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.12 sean nye university of minnesota (us) the representation of berlin in music films has an extraordinary history, from the experimental depictions in berlin: symphony of a great city (1927), to hollywood’s homage to weimar-era berlin in cabaret (1972), to the queer-punk east berlin in hedwig and the angry inch (2001). while soundtracks of berlin urban life have often relied on classical, cabaret or punk-industrial scores, post-reunification berlin has seen a new musical genre operate as the city’s primary soundtrack – techno. this review examines two key berlin techno films, run lola run (1998) and berlin calling (2008), and addresses two intimately linked issues regarding these films: first, the nature of the film medium with respect to the now established subgenre of electronic dance music film (short: edm film), and second, the representation in film of berlin as a techno city. the potential for theoretical analysis offered by both these edm films points to a current lacuna in club culture scholarship – namely, the scarce critical-aesthetic engagement with filmic representations of edm culture, whether in music videos, documentaries, or in this case, feature films. one exception has been stan beeler’s dance, drugs and escape: the club scene in literature, film and television since the late 1980s,1 a book which unfortunately tends toward brief, journalistic glosses on its objects of study. however, the book is impressive in its breadth, proving that a rich history of artworks that incorporate club culture already exists. this is exemplified in run lola run and berlin calling, themselves separated by a period of ten years, a gap that points to the importance of the film medium as visual-historical material for study. run lola run has become an iconic film of 1990s berlin, a status that was secured by its highly innovative plot and unique combination of pop cultural references. the protagonist, lola, has a task – to collect 100,000 d-marks and reach her boyfriend, manni, on the other side of berlin within 20 minutes. manni will otherwise likely die in an attempt to rob a supermarket, because he lost the money needed to make a deal with some gangsters. the story is constructed around three alternative universes in a kind of classic atari arcade game where lola has three lives.2 the first two universes end in tragic “game over” scenarios (1. lola dies, 2. manni dies), but the final scenario completes the mission with bonus points. lola succeeds in obtaining the 100,000 d-marks by placing all her money on two consecutive bets at a roulette table. manni also solves his debts so that not only is he saved, but together they walk away rich. lola’s constant running through the city in search of manni and money is the basis for the film’s combination of urban life, cyberspace, youth culture and video game narrative. these themes have been the focus of much of the extensive secondary literature on the film.3 what is of more interest from the point of view of techno researchers, however, is the edm soundtrack, composed by director tom tykwer together with reinhold heil and johnny klimek and produced in the rather fateful year of 1998 during the height of berlin’s reputation as a techno city and reviews 121 edm’s popularity in europe. yet despite the centrality of music and techno culture to run lola run’s success, only one essay amidst the many publications on the film focuses on music: caryl flinn’s “the music that lola ran to”.4 similar to run lola run, berlin calling has become an iconic film of 2000s berlin, though primarily within the techno scene. it is not of the same artistic quality of run lola run, and has had a markedly smaller international reception. however, it offers important insights into changes in berlin techno since the 1990s. the film concerns the career and artistic creativity of the protagonist dj ickarus, played by the real-life berlin dj/producer paul kalkbrenner. the mythical figure, icarus, concerns the dream of flying. using the wings that his master-craftsman father, daedelus, gives him, icarus flies so close to the sun that his wings melt, and he plunges to his death. dj ickarus has similar problems of both recklessness and (psychedelic) flight in berlin calling. while his hedonist excesses are at their height, he nearly destroys his artistic and mental wings through the use of drugs. suffering a creative block and having conflicts with the label manager, he avoids his problems by partying and ends up taking an “evil pill” that almost kills him. though dj ickarus survives, the rest of the film is spent with him passing in and out of a psychiatric ward, wrestling with the symptoms of insanity in a rather unimaginative homage to one flew over the cuckoo’s nest. however, ickarus’s creative energies are released, and a new album takes shape in the psychiatric ward. both an artistic triumph of insanity and a means of psychological therapy, his new tracks are produced through the inspirational media of illegal drugs and prescribed antidepressants. and the resulting album, itself titled berlin calling, achieves high critical praise and the trappings of genius within the film’s narrative. yet berlin calling is also the real electro-trance soundtrack to the film by paul kalkbrenner. musical success is thus sealed, both in the film and in real life. ickarus heads off on another, presumably successful, world tour in the closing scene of the film. and at the moment this review is being written, kalkbrenner is on his “berlin calling tour 2010”, performing during march and april at massive concert venues in germany, austria and switzerland. the stark differences of these films at the level of plot highlight the diverse forms that edm film can take, making it debatable whether edm film is even a clearly definable genre. these differences elicit two initial questions. regarding run lola run, what can we learn about rave and club culture from a story in which no raves or clubs are present in the diegesis? regarding berlin calling, what is the state of discourses of authenticity and realism in a film that combines the success of a fictional character and an actual berlin dj/producer to such an intimate degree? run lola run and berlin calling arguably represent contrasting approaches to edm film. the first can be termed a techno culture film. it focuses on edm soundtracks as acoustic settings for narratives that do not directly explore edm party life in a mimetic-sociological fashion. the legacy of cyberpunk and gamer aesthetics obviously plays a major role in this tradition. important filmic examples are blade runner (1982), blade (1998), and the matrix (1999). since virtual reality and fantasy take precedence, these films are free from anxious debates regarding the authentic representation of club culture. in this respect, berlin calling represents a contrasting tradition of techno scene film, attempting a direct representation of edm life in terms of club and rave events, as well as musical production. this type thus acts like a sociological study of club scenes in film form. important works in this tradition are human traffic (1999), groove (2000), and it’s all gone pete tong (2004), though trainspotting (1996) stands as a defining influence on the genre.5 these scene films are 122 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 often caught between the limits of the film medium, narrative form and the desire to represent club culture “as it really is”. they further struggle with reaffirming the idealistic self-presentation of club culture and questioning these ideals as ideology. these tensions often result in satire and an experimental play with form in techno scene films themselves. berlin calling takes these challenges seriously – in fact, it answers with seriousness and not satire. kalkbrenner’s performance and that of the other main actors are admirable. hannes stöhr’s directing is likewise a quite subtle and impressive study in social interaction. however, stöhr’s script is only partially successful.6 the result is a bad mix between documentary realism, mythical references and a crisiscomeback narrative that occasionally approximates a vh1 “behind the music” biography. the clinical story, supposedly deadly serious, turns into comical poppsychology that ends with an absurd visit of prostitutes to the ward during ickarus’s farewell party. as a result, the film lacks an appropriate exploration of techno music production or berlin and becomes primarily a production of kalkbrenner as a berlin star. human traffic and it’s all gone pete tong offer in this respect more thoughtprovoking, satirical examples of the techno scene film and star power. similarly, tom tykwer produces a more interesting film by exploiting the freedoms offered by the techno culture film to the fullest. the playful plot is reflected in a kaleidoscope of film techniques and media from time-lapse photography to cartoons. in short, berlin calling’s goal is art, and what comes out is kitsch; run lola run’s goal is pop, and what comes out is pop. and great pop: so successful was tom tykwer’s edm film, like danny boyle’s trainspotting, it was a springboard for launching a successful career as a hollywood film director. nevertheless, berlin calling offers some interesting points for reflection on the state of edm film. as the story of an artist, the film explores the relation of techno culture to the legacy of german romantic associations of genius and melancholy. dj ickarus’s tension with but also rootedness in german high art plays out in scenes with his conservative pastor father, who performs works by johann sebastian bach. the high art themes are coupled with claims to authenticity in the merging of protagonist and dj-star, soundtrack and album. the relation of film/album/star has echoes in rock opera films like ken russell’s tommy (1975) and alan parker’s pink floyd the wall (1982), though the possibilities of narrative form certainly differ for rock-vocal versus edm-instrumental soundtracks. as a techno opera, berlin calling represents the full shift from the anonymous rave-dj culture to the dj-producer as artist. yet it also explores economic problems in a far more direct way than run lola run. the film highlights the pressures and suffering of a young east german dj in capitalist, reunited berlin, which still has the highest poverty rate in germany. only through the successful album is he able to overcome his economic plight and make his comeback as artistic hero. run lola run is also concerned with the relation between heroes, myth production and economic pressure. just as dj ickarus is the stuff of myth, lola is an iconic name in german cultural life, recalling marlene dietrich’s character lola lola in the blue angel (1930) and rainer werner fassbinder’s lola (1982). if dj ickarus is the hero as artist, lola is the hero as raver. as annegret mahler-bungers puts it rather humorously: lola is “a postmodern – or rather a post-postmodern – walkyrie” (2003: 91). the supermachine drive of lola, her inhuman ability to run, reflects the endurance of techno clubbers during their 48-hour pill-popping party weekends. yet lola does not take drugs. her strength seems to derive purely from her heart and will. reviews 123 we imagine, however, that the vitality represented by her fiery red hair has its basis in the amphetamines of generation chemical. but economic realism interrupts the fun of this hero world in the following form: she is not dancing at night but running in midday. lola and manni are twenty-something party-kids caught in adolescent pop dreams, and they are now confronted with the hard consequences of prosaic, everyday life. presumably having been able to brush off deadlines and appointments before, lola is suddenly confronted with a deadline she can’t ignore. literally, the time of her run is between 11:40am and noon; the terror that approaches should she fail in her mission is the terror of the ultimately prosaic afternoon. in this respect, when flinn remarks that berlin’s “streets are curiously depopulated” (2004: 208), i would argue the reason lies in that the rest of berlin is presumably at work, slaving away to save money legally. indeed, as a cyberpunk film, run lola run’s is realistic in a unique way – there are no flashy city lights or fancy pieces of technology. that techno music functions like a sonic walkman to her run invites the question whether the endurance, fitness, and discipline ravers have achieve in partying at night can also overcome the reality principle of the day. but what type of techno music is this exactly? for both films, electronic music is the soundtrack to the myth of berlin as a techno city. however, neither film chooses to musically represent rave culture through a compilation of rave hits as human traffic does. rather, both soundtracks are studies in different types of auteur, respectively featuring music by only one man or group: as previously noted, by tom tykwer as director, writer, vocalist, and composer with his team of heil and klimek (run lola run) and by paul kalkbrenner as the quintessential berlin techno star on the bpitch control label (berlin calling). despite the gap in ten years, both soundtracks bear resemblances in the use of trance music.7 the compositions from run lola run are techno-trance pieces. johnny klimek worked as producer on a number of projects by berlin trance star paul van dyk, and the soundtrack bears resemblances in its timbres and sleek production quality. the music is also schooled in the speech-rap of underworld’s “born slippy”, trainspotting’s most memorable track – this is especially clear in tom tykwer’s rapping in “running two”.8 likewise, paul kalkbrenner’s soundtrack has echoes of trance, perhaps surprisingly so, given berlin’s reputation today as a city that has banished trance and rave music for the sleek club culture of minimal techno and microhouse. yet, the tracks in berlin calling are best described as a kind of electro-trance, much slower and more melancholic than lola’s “run” music and reflecting the general trend in the 2000s away from the speed of the 1990s. trance anchors the various religious and romantic themes of the films. both are structured around heterosexual narratives and the possibility of heroic triumph through magic and inspiration. flinn insightfully remarks that run lola run positions music “as a form of emotional and economic esperanto or universal language, a romantic, heterosexual affair stamped with the imprint of humanism. that this is achieved through techno, usually considered an antihumanist form of music, makes the accomplishment all the more intriguing” (2004: 197). both soundtracks do sonic battle in the name of romanticism against economic exploitation and suffering – acknowledging the problem only in the end to deny its ultimate influence. dj ickarus triumphs through creativity and artistic discipline. recalling his father’s performance of bach, the slow and reserved themes in ickarus’s music are lutheran techno-hymns to help him persevere in his struggle. lola beats the modern world by relying on shamanic powers to win at the roulette table, reflected in her primal scream and the tribal-primitivist techno of the track “casino”. 124 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 these economic crises represent a threat to berlin as a techno club city and a place of youth and freedom. adam krims’ music and urban geography9 has highlighted the key role that both music and music films play in representing cities, from realistic depictions to the “abstract city of fantasy” (2007: 18). berlin also presents a variety of musical representations in film, though it is important here to recognize some commonalities within the larger history of the berlin music film, particularly in representing berlin as a city of dynamic change. indeed, change forms the basis for associated themes of youthful transgression, pop culture, and sexual liberation. berlin has long advertised itself as the “city always in change”, so much that it can become a self-fulfilling cliché. in musical terms, precisely by maintaining techno as a stable soundtrack of the city over the last twenty years, berlin has continually reinvented itself as the city of youth and pop transgression. both films offer interesting perspectives regarding this tradition, and urban geography plays an important element in this tradition. located primarily within the confines of the clinic, the melancholic slowness of berlin calling surprisingly challenges this reputation of change. in the film’s closing, dj ickarus returns to berlin’s airport for a world tour, but he does not look exactly joyful. one wonders whether he wishes to return to the sanctuary of the psychiatric clinic. however, the speed of techno city berlin is reinforced with shots of the tv tower at alexanderplatz, techno’s preferred counter-monument of modern berlin against the brandenburg gate. club scenes are shot at real locations on berlin’s new club mile – club maria, bar 25, and others – although berlin as advertisement and fantasy retains priority. during one party, youthful transgression is reinforced to utter cliché when mathilde, ickarus’s manager and bisexual girlfriend (what other sexuality could a berlin girlfriend possibly be?), while searching for ickarus, opens up a number of club doors – in the first she finds two circuit boys having anal sex and in the second a group of clubbers snorting some lines. alternative lifestyles remain spectacles to be seen rather than lives that are lived. more interesting is the presentation of berlin as a place dominated by women in business roles, which is alternatively threatening and nurturing for dj ickarus. after all, he comes from patriarchal, lutheran germany, and lacks a mother. mathilde leaves ickarus when he fails as a boyfriend and artist, returning to her ex-girlfriend corinna, a club bouncer who is problematically the token “ethnic” character in the film. corinna threatens ickarus’s masculinity to the point of throwing him out of her apartment when he tries to speak with mathilde, though they resolve their conflict in the end. mathilde never stops caring for ickarus and finally returns as his manager, though apparently not as his girlfriend. ickarus must also negotiate conflicts with the label owner, alice (an analogous figure to ellen allien, the head of kalkbrenner’s bpitch control label), and the head of the psychiatric ward, dr. petra paul. regarding run lola run, the secondary literature has pointed out repeatedly that the scenery of both east and west berlin is non-descript. manni’s and lola’s adventure represents the dream that a reunited germany will reflect neither the failed socialist state of the german democratic republic (gdr) nor the prosaic wirtschaftswunder of the federal republic of germany (frg). lola’s fantastic run reflects the hopes of generations x and y for the harmonious combination of east and west at the end of history (will there be a generation z, and if so, what would follow?). the histories and cultural differences of berlin thus remain veiled. however, many of the shots of the city – especially the intersection where manni waits – look much more like dull suburban germany than berlin’s impressive monuments and reviews 125 nightlife. caryl flinn emphasizes this geographic dialectic: “berlin becomes a somewhat nonessential, generic urban place, a reading tykwer encouraged from foreign audiences. is this berlin, or is this anywhere?” (2004: 208). tykwer refuses to allow lola to run by any berlin icons such as the reichstag, the brandenburg gate, and even the techno tv tower. what is recognizable in all the runs is the u-bahn, reinforcing berlin’s reputation as a city of change and movement. with the berlin wall having fallen in 1989, travel is a key marker of freedom in a berlin film of the 1990s. lola’s running through the open and past the u-bahn is a distinct display of this new freedom. in a way distinct from berlin calling, her run marks berlin as a feminized space – the image of the free western woman whose freedom is defined as a freedom of movement and public display.10 finally and crucially, what is also recognizable are the sites of construction. lola charges across a causeway in both the first and second run, surrounded by a vast construction site near the german reichstag. no such sites are present in berlin calling, and for viewers who experienced the reconstruction of berlin in the 1990s, these sites might suddenly call up an odd nostalgic recognition that some forms of change are not permanent. such a complex relation to the past returns me to the importance of film as a visual-historic, and indeed acoustic, medium of study. as works of art, these films demonstrate their important role as the explosive crossroads of ideological, aesthetic, political, social, and personal currents. berlin calling and run lola run are not just edm films and not just berlin films – they are both of these and more. the rich material they offer demonstrates that a continued study of feature films, both within and without the edm film genre, will be of great importance for grasping the challenges of representing edm scenes from both the past and the future. references ankum, katharina von, ed. 1997. women in the metropolis: gender and modernity in weimar culture. berkeley and los angeles: university of california press. beeler, stan. 2007. dance, drugs and escape: the club scene in literature, film and television since the late 1980s. jefferson, nc: mcfarland & co inc. flinn, caryl. 2004. “the music that lola ran to”. in nora m. alter and lutz koepnick (eds), sound matters: essay on the acoustics of modern german culture, pp. 197-213. oxford and new york: berghahn books. krims, adam. 2007. music and urban geography. new york and oxon: routledge. mahler-bungers, annegret. 2003. “a post-postmodern walkyrie: psychoanalytic considerations on tom tykwer’s run, lola, run (1998)”. in andrea sabbadini (ed), the couch and the silver screen: psychoanalytic reflections on european cinema, pp. 82-93. new york and hove, uk: brunner-routledge. mesch, claudia. "racing berlin: the games of run lola run”. m/c: a journal of media and culture 3, no. 3 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/speed.php> (accessed 23 january 2010) filmography blade. dir. stephen norrington. 1998. dvd. new line home video, 1998. blade runner. dir. ridley scott. 1982. dvd. warner home video, 2007. groove. dir. greg harrison. 2000. dvd. sony pictures, 2000. it’s all gone pete tong. dir. michael dowse. 2004. dvd. sony pictures, 2005. the matrix. dir. andy wachowski and larry wachowski. 1999. warner home video, 2009. trainspotting. dir. danny boyle. 1996. dvd. miramax home entertainment, 2004. 126 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 notes reviews 127 1 stan beeler, dance, drugs and escape: the club scene in literature, film and television since the late 1980s ( jefferson, nc: mcfarland & co inc, 2007). 2 the pop-existentialist announcement at the beginning, by the security guard, clearly presents the game structure of the film. in fact, he combines the supposed antipodal game cultures of football and video games: “the ball is round. the game lasts 90 minutes. so much is clear. everything else is just theory. and we’re off !” 3 claudia mesch, for example, describes berlin as “a cyberspace obstacle course or environment usually associated with video and computer games”. claudia mesch, "racing berlin: the games of run lola run”, m/c: a journal of media and culture 3, no. 3 (2000), <www.api-network.com/mc/0006/speed.php> (accessed january 23, 2010). 4 this essay offers an impressive analysis of the film’s soundtrack. i strongly recommend it to club culture researchers. caryl flinn, “the music that lola ran to”, in sound matters: essays on the acoustics of modern german culture, ed. nora m. alter and lutz koepnick (oxford and new york: berghahn books, 2004), 197-213. 5 while trainspotting is certainly a pioneering film, it surprisingly cannot be defined as a proper techno scene film. aside from renton’s short visit to a techno club, trainspotting deals almost entirely with an earlier generation of the scottish working class, crime, pub life, and heroine junkies. the film’s reputation as an edm film derives primarily from its electronic music selections, from brian eno to underworld. the hybrid nature of such films and the complexity of the soundtracks would obviously require more exploration and nuances regarding the various sub-branches of edm film than i have space to present here. trainspotting points to the need for a third element of techno music itself in the structures of my genre divisions. to explain, the analysis of any edm film could explore the tensions between techno culture, techno scene and techno music, or in other words, between cyber-aesthetics, club culture, and edm (or non-edm) soundtrack. 6 this is unfortunate since stöhr’s earlier film berlin is in germany (2001) offered an interesting examination of berlin life and the challenges of integration for an east german member of the working class. 7 it is important to keep in mind that there is other music present in both films besides the official soundtracks. in run lola run, the techno tracks are complemented by the use of dinah washington’s “what a difference a day makes” and charles ives’ the unanswered question; similarly, berlin calling includes pieces for organ by johann sebastian bach. these musics allow for the dialogic relationship between techno and music from other historical periods. 8 lola’s “i wish” and “i believe” monologues also deserve mention. the rhythms and repetition of the first two words in both monologues are comparable to mark renton’s “choose life” monologue in trainspotting. 9 adam krims, music and urban geography (new york and oxon: routledge, 2007). 10 there are limits to this freedom though. expectations regarding the place of women and men in the city still differ strongly. lola’s run seems odd to passers-by in a way that would not be equivalent were a man running. for a critical study on the “lolas” who came before her, specifically on modern women and the limits of urban public display and movement, see ankum 1997. gregory_typeset_v2 too young to drink, too old to dance: the influences of age and gender on (non) rave participation julie gregory queen’s university (canada) abstract in this article i argue that rave participation is best understood as a form of accommodative resistance. such a framework, it is maintained, helps highlight the nuanced influences of normative social discourses in relation to people’s experiences and descriptions of moving in, through and past active rave participation. specifically, the research findings presented herein are based on ten women’s narratives about their participation within toronto’s rave scene circa 1994 to 2000. as such, this research represents an effort to make these women’s particular – yet conspicuously absent – experiences central to analyses of rave participation. more generally, it is an argument for the importance of engaging various interlocking social discourses – including, but not limited to age and gender – vis-à-vis people’s (sub)cultural experiences. keywords accommodative resistance, age, feminist epistemology, hate, gender, toronto, plur the purpose of this article is to argue that if we are to offer valid representations of (sub)cultural activities, we must analyze the “internal complexity” of these experiences (wilson 2002: 376).1 to support this claim, i explore some of the ways age and gender emerged as influential factors with regard to ten women’s past active “rave” participation in toronto.2 more specifically, i discuss the importance of these social discourses in relation to interviewees’ descriptions of their introductions to, sustained participation within and eventual disengagements from this scene. it is important to note that these divisions are made, not because they necessarily represent discrete phases in interviewees’ rave-related trajectories, but because they draw out aspects of the particularly aged and gendered nature of interviewees’ (non) rave participation. the structure of this discussion is as follows. first, i introduce the epistemological rationales and research sample upon which the findings presented in this article are based (gregory 2006). second, a relational understanding of resistance is offered as a way of framing these findings. third, the importance of age and gender a propos interviewees’ past active rave participation is discussed.3 finally, a review of the research findings and theoretically-informed suggestions for future research are offered. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(1) 2009, 65-80 issn 1947-5403 ©2009 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.04 http://www.dancecult.net http://www.dancecult.net methodology epistemology long ago, mcrobbie and garber (1991 [1975]) noted that women’s experiences are often omitted from studies of youth cultures and that this under-representation both leads to partial understandings of these phenomena and reflects women’s continued subordination in these (and other) cultural spaces. more recently, pini has argued that it is not enough to point out that contemporary (sub)cultural activities continue to be male-centered; as she states, failure to go beyond the levels of production and organization, to say more about other levels of event participation and other experiential sites, amounts to a failure to address the significance of club cultural involvement for the hundreds of thousands of women who regularly participate in dance cultures, and who claim that such participation is central to their lives, their friendships and their identities (2001: 7, original emphasis). put differently, overly structural representations of rave and club cultures tend to lead scholars to miss and/or gloss over female participants’ specifically-located experiences. one claim which can be read into these assertions is that women – by virtue of identifying and/or being read as such – tend to experience their social surroundings differently than those who are (read as) men/male. as such, scholars who relegate women’s voices to the margins of their studies are implicated in the construction of partial knowledge(s) (see also, smith 1987). in this sense, and contrary to some critiques of this “feminist standpoint” position (see, harding 2004), focusing on their experiences is “not about exploring women’s club cultural experiences simply for the sake of it, or simply because we do not hear enough about such experiences” (pini 2001: 15, emphasis in original). on the contrary, the epistemological claim here is that “the stories raving women tell say a lot about available and emerging fictions of femininity” (pini 2001:15; see also, hutton 2004; mcrobbie 1993; pini 1997a). to adopt a “feminist standpoint” in relation to raving practices, then, is not to claim to offer a definitively “female” account of rave; instead, it is to involve oneself with (re)writing individual experiences into the stories we tell about (sub)cultural life. more specifically, it is to highlight similarities and differences in the ways similarlylocated people experience their social worlds and to consider possible reasons for such experiences. according to this view, “it is not only that we can, but – as feminists – we must find ways of connecting ‘theoretical’ insights to popular cultural practice and discourse” (pini 2001: 61, emphasis in original). research sample as suggested above, scholars continually argue that women’s experiences and voices are pushed to the margins of modern-day rave and club cultures and representations thereof (see also, bradby 1993; pini 1997b; tomlinson 2002). this insight inspired me to conduct semi-structured, face-to-face interviews with women over the age of twenty-five years who actively participated in toronto’s rave scene for at least one year between 1994 and 2000, but who no longer considered themselves active rave enthusiasts.4 more specifically, i sought to explore some women’s introductions to, sustained participation within and eventual disengagements from toronto’s rave scene. 66 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 to achieve this goal, i employed opportunistic sampling methods. logistically, this meant contacting women in my social circle who fit the study criteria. after asking these women if they would be willing to participate in my study, i requested that they pass along a letter of invitation to other women they felt may also be interested. this process generated six interviews. to recruit more interviewees, a mass e-mail describing the research was sent to everyone on my e-mail contact list. responses were received from twelve women. for various time and geographical reasons, only four of these e-mails translated into interviews. in total, the preceding findings are based on ten interviews which took place between early january and late april 2006. as such, the following findings should be understood as exploratory in nature. it is important to note that in addition to identifying as female, this research sample is quite homogenous in terms of interviewees’ social locations – at the time of their interviews – in relation to age, race, ethnicity, sexuality, martial status and level of education. in terms of their past rave participation, however, interviewees’ ages and geographical locations varied. for example, although all identified as once actively involved in toronto’s rave scene, only three (penelope, mystic, princess) interviewees were living in toronto when they were first introduced to rave. in addition, while some interviewees had been attending rave events for well over ten years at the time of their interviews, the timeframes and ages discussed by each woman ranged considerably, with kickin’ attending her first event in 1995 at the age of fifteen and serendipity going to her first rave in 2000 at the age of thirty-three. similarly, there was a great deal of variation in terms of the length of each woman’s active participation, with four women actively attending raves for one year (kickin’, curious, molly and penelope), three women for two years (princess, serendipity and grrrl), two women for four years (pink and mystic) and one woman for six years (cosmic).5 interviews ranged in duration from one to three hours. each interview took place in a location interviewees chose because it was considered a safe space to meet with me (in most cases a stranger) to discuss potentially sensitive topics. during their respective interviews, participants were asked about their movements into, through and out of toronto’s rave scene. with participants’ permission, interviews were taperecorded. age and gender emerged as significant influences in relation to these women’s stories about becoming, being and ceasing to be active rave participants. for example, and as will be discussed, attending rave events was something many interviewees did with their closest female peers and something that they described as connecting them both to these friends and to their (often older) male partners. following these conversations, however, it would be irresponsible of me to focus solely on these more positive descriptions of their past rave participation, thereby omitting discussion of the ways ageand gender-related discourses emerged in interviewees’ narrations of who “does” and “does not” belong in rave spaces, for example. arguably, while these less idealistic readings of rave rarely figure into academic analyses, they are important because they demonstrate that rave participation is understood and experienced as both liberating and constraining; as one interviewee explained, “there is a dark side to it [rave participation] but there’s also so much positive” (grrrl; see also, hutton 2006). gregory • too young to drink, too old to dance 67 theory leblanc’s (2001) review of the related subcultural literature leads her to two conclusions which are in keeping with the above discussion. first, she maintains, scholars rarely include female participants’ voices in their accounts of subcultural activities. secondly, she argues that it is not enough to acknowledge women’s presence in these arenas; scholars must explore the reproduction of gender norms in these spaces and “young women’s resistance to and reformulation of these norms” (8). leblanc writes: girls’ subcultural participation has [usually] been described in primarily sexualized terms, with their constructions of deviance assumed to be sexual and conducted primarily through affiliation with a male member. and yet it is hard to imagine why girls would join, and remain, if they were only accepted as toys for the boys … when researchers focus specifically on gathering first-hand accounts of girls’ and women’s positions in maledominated subcultures, they find that [their motives] are much more complex and central than was previously thought (2001: 68). again, if taken seriously, these insights require scholars to think critically about the ways socially-embedded stereotypes and power relations shape the stories we (and others) tell about (sub)cultures. this latter point speaks to a major debate that emerges in discussions about (sub)cultural resistance: how is one to measure and delineate acts as “resistant” and/or “political” and to what extent is intention necessary (raby 2005)? according to butz and ripmeester (1999: 2), a significant result of this controversy has been to polarize “resistant acts” into two camps: “struggle[s] geared specifically towards transcendental social change on the one hand, [and] everyday forms of evading the effects of power on the other” (2). clearly, however, these are difficult questions, ones that continue to evoke ongoing debate. for example, efforts to interrogate the (non) political (which tends to be conflated with “resistant”) significance of toronto’s rave scene, parallel these debates. on the one hand, claims have been made that ravers’ political activism is “subconscious” insofar as their styles of dress, music, dance and drugs may be interpreted as evidence of a rejection of, and resistance to, dominant social norms (mccall 2001). on the other hand, scholars have asked if rave-goers have ever organized in ways that have directly challenged governmental policies (wilson 2002, 2006) and/or if rave can be understood as a social movement (see also, carrington and wilson 2001). and while there are documented examples of toronto-area ravers rallying against proposed laws that would restrict their rights to dance in particular time/spaces (see, hier 2002; marsh 2006), in keeping with these latter analyses, i maintain that if we are to offer valid representations of rave participation and if we are to draw out raves’ political and/or resistant importance, we must examine the ways power and oppression, subjugation and resistance, intersect and shape both these spaces and people’s related affiliations, experiences and stories (see also, marsh 2005). that said, the present study is informed by a relational – not political with a capital “p” – understanding of resistance. in other words, underlying this exploration of the ways age and gender emerged as significant factors in interviewees’ rave-related stories is acceptance of claims that “to limit our conceptualization of resistance to that which is confrontational or direct is to deny the more nuanced and creative ways in which subordinate peoples engage power” (butz and ripmeester 1999: 4). according 68 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 to this understanding, power and resistance are present in all social interactions, structures and experiences. thus, to call “resistant” only those acts that attempt to usurp power from those who are understood as “holding” it is to misunderstand both power and resistance (see also, foucault 1990 [1978]). in the context of the present study, this understanding of resistance/politics suggests that what is significant is not how likely dance culture is to bring down capitalism or patriarchy, but at what precise points it succeeds [and] fails in negotiating new spaces. in particular, it is not a simple question of dance culture being ‘for’ or ‘against’ the dominant culture, but of how far its articulations with other discourses and cultures – dominant or otherwise – result in democratizations of the cultural field, how far they successfully break down existing concentrations of power, and how far they fail to do so (gilbert and pearson 1999: 160). following this argument, then, rave (and post-rave) scholars must acknowledge that “resistant” acts are always also implicated in power, and vice versa; we must, in other words, recognize that “power and resistance are ontologically inseparable … [and thus] exist as conditions of possibility each for the other” (butz and ripmeester 1999: 2). following this discussion, interviewees’ descriptions of their experiences moving into, through and out of toronto’s rave scene are conceptualized as examples of accommodative resistance insofar as they can be read simultaneously as responses and challenges to normative ageand gender-related discourses.6 findings moving in a number of interviewees constructed their introductions to toronto’s rave scene as an extension of their female-dominated social circles and accompanying activities. for example, curious explained that she began attending events at the age of sixteen after she and a female friend re-united: in grade nine [this friend] came back to the same high school as i … we started talking a little bit, realizing that we had interests. she was friends with these girls [who] went to raves and i wasn’t. and then her and i started doing drugs together, and we both got invited [to a rave event] through her other friends. here, curious describes common drug-use practices as that which connected her both to this girlfriend and to other female peers who eventually invited her to her first rave event. similarly, kickin’ described her introduction to the scene in the context of her past participation in music-related activities, female-dominated social circle and previous drug-use: kickin’: i first started going to clubs young, twelve. i remember [this roller rink in my hometown] had a dance night, so i started doing that when i was twelve years old … then i met up with [another girl] in high school and she took me to my first rave. julie: was she older, younger? gregory • too young to drink, too old to dance 69 kickin’: she was a year older … i was in grade ten [and fifteen years old]. she was in [grade] eleven. it was in toronto … it was a syrous party … i remember that it was some guy who drove that was a friend of hers … i honestly don’t remember if it was my first time doing e[cstasy] or not, but i had done acid and stuff before. as these findings suggest, despite some claims that drug-use is of peripheral importance to rave participation (for example, hutson 2000), the majority of interviewees described drug-taking as a highly social activity, one that figured prominently in their initial attractions to rave. indeed, this finding should not be surprising in light of other studies which (a) represent participation in toronto’s rave scene as intimately linked with drug-taking activities (see, barrett, gross, garand and pihl 2005; weber 1999; wilson 2002). with regard to some of the ways age and gender figured into their first rave experiences, it is interesting to point out that nine out of ten interviewees described being invited to their first event either by female friends who were connected to the scene by older males or by older male rave-goers themselves.7 in particular, interviewees who lived outside of the city (all except penelope, mystic, princess) and/or who began attending raves before they could legally drive (curious and kickin’), narrated being dependant on male connections to physically get to events. in this context, recall, kickin’s above description of being driven to her first event by “some guy” who was a friend of a (older female) friend. while geographical location seems to have played a significant role in determining both the size and gendered nature of the group of people with whom interviewees attended rave events, and while being “under-age” seems to have compounded one’s dependent position, this is not to say that the experiences of interviewees who were older and/or living in toronto were not patterned in particular – even similar – ways (see, gregory 2006). for instance, princess lived in toronto and went to her first event at the age of seventeen. unlike her non-torontonian counterparts, however, she traveled to the event on a shuttle bus with a co-ed group of friends. nevertheless, like other interviewees, princess described herself and her female companions as neophytes who went to these events with their more seasoned male friends and/or partners.8 there are many possible explanations for this finding. for example, given the timeframe about which interviewees spoke (1994-2000), it is likely that the changing nature of toronto’s rave scene was a factor in this trend; this was a period during which toronto’s rave scene was in a state of flux and change, purportedly becoming less “underground” (and male-dominated) and more “mainstream” (see, hier 2002; marsh 2005, 2006; wilson 2002; weber 1999; silcott 1999). given these claims, then, it is not entirely surprising that young, suburban women were learning about and being initiated into the scene by more “seasoned” men.9 another tendency which might help explain this trend it that a number of interviewees constructed rave participation as an opportunity to solidify and/or pursue romantic, heterosexual relationships (see, gregory 2006).10 serendipity, molly and penelope, for example, described their introductions to rave in the context of their respective relationships with men already in toronto’s scene. serendipity even candidly labeled her past active rave participation as “following the boy … to toronto.” these possible explanations notwithstanding, the above analysis suggests that in addition to age and gender, sexuality, geography and time intersected in ways that similarly shaped these ten women’s introductions to toronto’s rave scene (see also, marsh 2005). 70 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 staying in in addition to figuring into their introductions to the toronto’s rave scene, age emerged as an influential factor in several interviewees’ explanations for why they began attending these events. for example, eight interviewees (all except penelope and serendipity) went to their first rave events (both from inside and outside of toronto) when they were younger than nineteen years old. of these eight women, five (cosmic, molly, kickin’, curious and mystic) constructed their active rave participation as a direct response to being under legal drinking age; they could not legally get into bars and clubs, but they could go to all-aged rave events and experiment with drugs. in the context of the above-discussed accommodative resistance framework, and contrary – or in addition – to possible readings that these women were “toys for the boys” (leblanc 2001: 68), there is at least one other reading of these findings: interviewees were asserting their independence by finding ways of doing what they wanted (i.e. using their often older male acquaintances as means to achieve their desires to attend rave events). indeed, many interviewees represented their initial and sustained rave participation as ways to resist normative social conventions that told them that because of their (predominantly young) ages, they could not experiment with mind-altering substances (including alcohol) and because they were (mostly young) women, they should not st(r)ay far from home, especially late at night. not only did interviewees construct rave participation as a means of challenging social conventions that constrained their particularly aged and gendered bodies, they also described active rave-going as a way to participate in – and feel part of – a community that is separate from, and resistant to, mundane “mainstream” life. this argument led at least two women to suggest that rave-goers are more likely to become addicted to the sense of belonging facilitated by such participation than to any associated drug-use: curious: i think that if you have anyone [who] loves to dance, [who] likes to do drugs, and you put them in a room full of people [who also enjoy those things], you feel like it’s your family, that you belong there. kickin’: i didn’t really know anybody who was addicted to e[cstasy]. i think people were addicted to the feeling of e[cstasy] and i think people were addicted to … the acceptance and … having fun and feeling like they belong[ed] somewhere. by representing rave-going within the context of feelings of alienation outside these spaces, these (and other) interviewees problematized and resisted what they understood as overly-condemning media representations of rave(r)s that were so prevalent at the time they were active participants. paradoxically, in relation to this latter point, all ten women also described divisions within toronto’s rave scene – divisions which revolved around musical styles, but which were further divided according to people’s drug choices, clothing styles, age, gender, ethnicity and, to a lesser degree, sexual orientation (see, gregory 2006; weber 1999; wilson 2002; see also, hutton 2006; mccaughan, carlson, falck and siegal 2005; reynolds 1999). in fact, all ten interviewees identified themselves not only as once “active ravers”, but also as particular kinds of ravers: as junglists, fans of house music and “meth babies”, for example. and, in many instances, interviewees rejected and criticized other rave participants’ specific identifications as strongly as they embraced “their own”. gregory • too young to drink, too old to dance 71 consider, for example, that several interviewees evoked normative ageand gender-related discourses to construct themselves as different from “candy ravers”. in these instances, interviewees drew on language that suggested that – unlike themselves and as evidenced by their clothing, dance and musical choices – candy ravers are “juvenile”: kickin’: candy ravers were the ones who were completely dressed up … they were the ones who made it mainstream i think.11 molly: the clothes were probably the biggest thing for me. i got way into the fashion and started dressing like a raver and wanted a piercing of course. plus you always distinguish different groups of ravers and, you know, you identified yourself. i identified myself with the hard-house ravers, the real dancers that liked to get out and move, hated the candy ravers, hated them – couldn’t stand them. mystic: you’d see people [candy ravers] wearing all these multi-coloured bracelets and lots of fun fur and – very childish stuff … like they would carry a toy, like a doll with them or whatever. they were … more into happy hardcore music and [had] lots of jewellery on, and bright colours [and] really big, baggy pants. princess: well there’s candy ravers who often wear brighter colors and had pacifiers and wore fuzzy pants and liked glow sticks and stuff and they were more often listening to house or trance, or happy hardcore and our friends definitely never liked trance or happy hardcore, maybe some house. so, those people were over here and we were over here. as evidenced above, molly was the most vocal and passionate of interviewees with regard to this sub-group of rave-goers. indeed, more strongly than any other interviewee, molly represented age and gender as defining discourses with vis-à-vis who “does” and “does not” belong at rave events. for example, consider molly’s explanation about why she “couldn’t stand” candy ravers: they were just so young and so fragile and i found it sad that they got into so many drugs so early in their life. i don’t know why. we were all into the drugs, but they were such lost innocence. [they were] so young and should’ve been home playing with their barbies, not snorting co[caine] and taking e[cstasy]. the particularly aged and gendered nature of molly’s above comments is made apparent by her reference to “barbies” a quintessential – though not necessarily – young girls’ toy. indeed, like molly, most interviewees rationalized their negative attitudes towards candy ravers by insisting that they were simply too young to be taking drugs. there are at least three important points to be made in relation to this justification. first, there is the ironic contradiction that of the four women (curious, mystic, grrrl and kickin’) who began participating in the scene at the age of sixteen or younger, all narrated concerns about the (perceived) young-ness of other rave-goers. one woman (grrrl) even expressed immense concern about the possibility that one day she may have a daughter who will join a similar (sub)culture at a similar age. secondly, there was unanimous consensus amongst the six other interviewees who began attending when they were older than sixteen years of age that drug-taking is okay when one is older than nineteen years of age – which, perhaps not coincidentally, is the legal drinking age in ontario. thus, despite repeated stories of their own 72 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 and friends’ (all of whom were over the age of nineteen) occasional problematic “overuse” of drugs, these interviewees claimed that people tend to be more responsible drug-users when they are in their late teens. in this way, interviewees drew on normative discourses of (ir)responsibility and age-appropriate behaviour to condemn candy ravers. the third point to which i draw readers’ attention is more theoretical: interviewees projected a particularly young age onto candy ravers. unless they spoke to individuals they understood as constituting this category of rave-goers, this is to say, interviewees could not be sure of the actual age of any particular candy raver; they could not “know” this person’s age simply based on her/his physical appearance. consequently, it can be argued that interviewees discursively constructed candy ravers as especially young and this construction flowed partly out of the symbolic value attributed to certain aspects of their appearance: brightly coloured, androgynous, baggy clothes, pigtails, toys, glow sticks and/or candy. from this reading, at the same time as it is important to note that gender is a shaky concept, too often equated with biological sex and/or exterior physical appearance, it is equally significant to acknowledge that conceptions of youth often are restricted to one’s (perceived) age. in other words, age – like gender – is a discursive concept, often used to marginalize certain activities and/or identities as immoral and/or “deviant”. ironically, and as suggested above, in other contexts, interviewees represented rave participation as attractive because it evoked certain aspects of childhood: senses of carelessness, pleasure and safety, for example (see also, henderson 1993, 1994; mcelrath 2005). in these instances, rave-going was described as a way to symbolically return to childhood. when juxtaposed with interviewees’ depictions of candy ravers, however, it becomes clear that when rave-goers are understood not as symbolic children, but as actual children, their rave attendance is viewed by some people as a social problem and they become the objects of moral repugnance. moving out as foreshadowed above, a number of interviewees contextualized their cessation of active rave participation within the context of increasing “adult” responsibilities. more specifically, many of them felt unable to reconcile active rave-going with their (present and/or future) roles as friends, daughters, mothers, students, employees, etc. and while my intention is not to belittle this explanation, it is interesting to point out that age and gender (again) figured prominently in these rationalizations. consider, for example, pink’s claim that as she got older, she began thinking: ‘what if i can’t have kids because of what i’ve done,’ you know what i mean? like, i think women tend to start thinking about those things a lot more. i think they can only take so much. i think women at some point are like, ‘ok, i’ve got to think about the rest of my life here’. men, it takes them a lot longer … to think that way. according to this account, men are not necessarily exempt from having to think about responsibilities outside and/or beyond rave, but they are more likely than women to remain active in rave scenes – even as they age. one explanation for this is that men have better chances of moving up the “rave hierarchy” (hutson 2000). cosmic, princess, pink, penelope and grrrl substantiated this claim when they explained that they have numerous male friends and acquaintances who hold positions “behind the scenes”. rather than using these findings as a gregory • too young to drink, too old to dance 73 starting point to acknowledge and/or critique the male-centered nature of toronto’s rave scene, however, interviewees tended to reproduce explanations which value women based on their physical appearance.12 according to cosmic, for example, “the women fall by the wayside because women age terribly bad in the scene”. she continued, i think that drugs have a more ageing effect on women and prettier women come and the guys get older and they bring in the young pretty girls … women don’t look good older in the scene. the men can age because they can always attract the pretty girls, who brought us into the scene and it just goes like that. certainly, discourses which construct women as particularly misplaced as rave promoters, djs and participants must be read as more than highlighting the conclusion that men have better chances than women of moving up the rave hierarchy; they also can be understood as emanating from and reinforcing dominant ageist and patriarchal power relations. in this context, one of the stories offered by a woman in pini’s (2001) sample emerges as particularly fascinating. amy is described as a 32-year-old woman who constructs rave participation as the only thing that brings her pleasure. as such, amy is torn by wanting to remain an active rave participant despite knowledge that people tend to understand rave participation as “juvenile”. notwithstanding the gratification she receives from rave, amy rationalizes that to avoid looking like a “saddie”, she knows she will soon have to quit raving (100).13 within this same context, consider pink’s explanation as to why she ceased to be an active rave-goer: i came home from a party and i looked in the mirror and i thought i was … an old lady – i had gray and green hair. i just looked at myself and that was when i made a decision to not do it anymore and if i did, it was going to happen very, very rarely, which it has since then. when probed further, pink explained: i didn’t have a boyfriend throughout the whole thing and i was twenty-three, twenty-four coming out of it … i just wanted to find somebody who i was going to fall in love with and start thinking about my future and being in that scene i didn’t think i was capable of moving on with the rest of my life. i thought that if i continued on anymore… i would end up lonely and [have] a sad life. (emphasis added) not only do these comments construct older female rave-goers as misguided; they also resonate with, and highlight the importance of, claims made by other interviewees. first, interviewees tended to construct rave participation (likely because of its links with drug-use) as not conducive with parenthood (often described as the goal of adulthood). for example, penelope stated that “there were a few people that we knew who did have kids and would still go out and party and we never thought it was a responsible thing to do; so i think it’s just one of those things that ends when you have kids”. a second, and clearly related, argument interviewees made is that rave participation must be understood and experienced as a phase; as pink said, “i think that you should get out of the scene at a certain age … i think that it should be a phase”. a third argument emerging from these discussions is that although rave participation (and 74 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 related activities) may be more appropriate for older, more mature participants than for younger ones (recall above discussion regarding candy ravers), there nevertheless comes a time when participants – especially women – become too old for rave participation. again, the claim here is not that interviewees’ understandings that they will eventually have to relinquish their (active) rave participation are necessarily invalid; instead the point is to problematize findings that interviewees see their situated identities as aging women – as eventual mothers, wives and/or partners – as necessarily incongruent with rave participation.14 this so-called “necessity” gets called into question by findings that some women can, do and will, balance their rave and non-rave activities. for instance, analyzing interviews with two women in her sample who are mothers, pini finds, one aspect of these women’s self-management in relation to drug use becomes clear in their descriptions of how their time (their weekends) is organised so as to allow an appropriate period during which to ‘come-down’. the management of ‘come-down’ is most clearly manifest in their negotiations of the cross-overs between raving and motherhood (1998: 175). according to this analysis, while maintaining a rave-related social world and/or identity can require – perhaps especially for mothers – “rigorous management of time, energy, money and pain”, some women understand these as acceptable trade-offs for the pleasure with which rave-going provides them (pini 1998: 172). turning to interview data from the current study, serendipity was the only interviewee who had both children and a full time career during her period of active rave participation. in keeping with pini’s (2001) argument that rave participation can offer women a much needed move from home (i.e. the domestic sphere) to house (a reference to house music, a genre of “rave” music), for serendipity rave participation provided a break from her “home” life – a chance to evade the responsibilities associated with motherhood, even if only temporarily. this is not to say, however, that as a mother and a relatively older raver, her rave attendance was not a source of serious concern. in fact, because when she began attending raves (panicked) media representations were her only source of knowledge, serendipity described constantly feeling concerned about what she understood as her conflicting roles as a mother and a “raver” – an identity she conflated with “drug-user”. despite these concerns, however, rave-going provided serendipity – and other interviewees – with intense “spiritual” feelings of being connected with herself and the people around her (see also, hutson 2000; malbon 2005; takahashi and olaveson 2003; st john 2004). for these reasons, serendipity strove to manage these “conflicting” aspects of her life and, for the most part, she found that being a mother and an active rave participant were not necessarily incongruent (see also, gregory forthcoming). looking ahead in summary, what i found as i spoke with interviewees about their rave-related trajectories is that while women do participate in rave and post-rave scenes, many of them continue to do so in “marginal or at least highly patterned ways” (mcrobbie and garber 1991 [1975]: 211).213). again, this is not to say these women do not – or cannot – derive immense pleasure from their rave-related experiences and/or identities. on the contrary, the purpose of this article is to highlight the finding that as interviewees gregory • too young to drink, too old to dance 75 reflected on their movements through toronto’s rave scene, they drew on and reproduced ageand gender-related discourses which were simultaneously liberating and constraining (see also, gotfrit 1991). recall, for example, that interviewees constructed their rave participation as both a way to resist normative discourses that raving (and related activities) is inappropriate, especially for young women and as – at least initially – contingent on having (mostly) older male friends. in addition, when representing candy ravers and when rationalizing the “necessary relinquishment” of their active rave participation, the overwhelming majority of interviewees discursively constructed older and younger female rave-goers – including themselves – as particularly misplaced within rave. in this way, just as age and gender were major factors in terms of interviewees’ initial involvement and subsequent active participation in toronto’s rave scene, so too did their intersections influence interviewees’ decisions to cease that same participation. given these findings, while it may be fair to claim that rave-going fosters and is fostered by feeling of peace, love, unity and respect (plur) (see, hutson 2000; martin 1999; weber 1999), analyses must not end here; following the above discussion, rave scenes and related experiences also must be understood as embedded in historical, political and discursive processes of exclusion and discrimination (see also, saldanha 2000) – or what i term “hate” (hostility, antagonism, tension and elitism).15 it is in this sense that interviewees’ past rave participation might best be understood as a form of accommodative resistance insofar as it both facilitated and challenged discursive representations of age and gender. what this finding suggests is that while some interviewees understood their past rave participation as allowing their youthful selves to explore different/changing forms of femininity (see also, bradby 1993), many of them also reproduced and internalized dominant discourses about what it means to be a “socially responsible” adult (see also, pini 2001). arguably, this inability for some women to imagine and/or accomplish a lasting, alternative “adult femininity” within rave should not be surprising; as numerous scholars have sought to illustrate, rave participants and their corresponding scenes are not cut-off from “outside” power relations (see also, measham 2002; thornton 1995). in keeping with these analyses, the findings presented herein suggest that once outside – and oftentimes inside – the rave and related spaces, women have to contend with the social meanings attributed to their specifically aged, gendered, sexualized and drugged bodies. clearly, however, because (like all of us) rave participants embody numerous social locations, the present discussion suggests a number of fruitful future research avenues: how, for example, do older women who continue to attend rave events negotiate these socially constructed discourses; in what ways might men be understood as experiencing rave spaces in similar and/or different ways from women; what roles might categories/discourses such as able-bodiedness, race and/or social class play in who does and does not participate in raves? regardless of whether or not these particular questions are taken up, the present findings suggest that when studying rave and post-rave practices, scholars must continue to delve beyond romantic readings of raves spaces as pockets of time/space within which social differences are “eliminated through dance, drugs, and other rituals that transform structures of subcultural capital into anti-structure” (hutson 2000: 44; see also, redhead 1990; rietveld 1998); they must also, this is to say, engage the numerous ways in which various interlocking social discourses – including, but not limited to age and gender – shape people’s (sub)cultural experiences and affinities and the stories they tell about them. 76 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 ••••••• acknowledgements i would like to thank dr david butz and dr rebecca raby for their supervisory support with the master’s thesis upon which this article is based. thank you also to samah sabra, graham st john and two anonymous reviewers for their extensive feedback and suggestions. references barrett, sean, samantha gross, isabelle garand and robert pihl. 2005. “patterns of simultaneous polysubstance use in canadian rave attendees”. substance use & misuse 40(9-10): 1525-37. bradby, barbara. 1993. “sampling sexuality: gender, technology and the body in dance music”. popular music 12(2): 155-76. butz, david and michael ripmeester. 1999. “finding space for resistant subcultures.” invisible culture: an electronic journal for visual studies 2(winter): 1-19. <http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue2/butz.htm>. carrington, ben and brian wilson. 2001. “one continent under a groove: rethinking the politics of youth subcultural theory.” soundscapes: on-line journal of media culture 4: 1-8. <http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/volume04/one_continent.shtml>. foucault, michel. 1990 [1978]. the history of sexuality: an introduction, volume 1. trans. robert hurley. new york: random house. gilbert, jeremy and ewan pearson. 1999. discographies: dance music, culture and the politics of sound. london: routledge. gotfrit, leslie. 1991. “women dancing back: disruption and the politics of pleasure”. in henry giroux (ed.), postmodernism, feminism and cultural politics, pp. 174-290. new york: university press, 174-290. gregory, julie. 2006. “dancing politics: connecting women’s experiences of rave in toronto to ageism and patriarchy”. m.a. thesis (social justice and equity studies), brock university. ––––. forthcoming. “‘'i’ve spent my whole life preparing to raise teenagers’: links between mothering and raving”. in elizabeth podneiks (ed.) mediated moms: mothering in popular culture. 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youth culture and the rave phenomenon”. in jonathan epstein (ed.), youth culture: identity in a postmodren world, pp. 195-211. oxford: blakwell. weber, timothy. 1999. “raving in toronto: peace, love, unity and respect in transition.” journal of youth studies 2(3): 317-36. wilson, brain. 2002. “the canadian rave scene and five theses on youth resistance”. canadian journal of sociology 27(3): 373-412. ––––. 2006. fight, flight or chill: subcultures, youth and rave in the twenty-first century. montreal: mcgill-queen’s university press. author biography julie gregory is a phd candidate in the sociology department at queen’s university in kingston, ontario, canada. her research interests continue to lie at the intersections of the sociology of knowledge, feminism and the social construction of “youth”. notes gregory • too young to drink, too old to dance 79 1 use of “(sub)culture” throughout this article is meant to highlight the position that it is naïve to understand any social phenomenon – including rave – as completely detached from “mainstream” culture. 2 i am aware that the term “rave” may appear dated to some readers. nevertheless, i use this terminology because it situates this analysis within a particular time/place (toronto’s electronic dance music scene circa 1994-2000) and because it is the term used both by interviewees and the canadian scholars to whom i refer. 3 herein, active rave participation is taken to mean that interviewees both attended raves on what they understood as a regular basis (at least once a month) and began to identify themselves, to varying degrees, as “ravers”. 4 notably, each woman’s understanding of “no longer active” varied from not attending a rave event in the last eight years to still going to “rave-type” events, but on a much less regular basis than in the past. 5 cleary, these names are pseudonyms, which were chosen by interviewees for reasons including that they are the names they always wished they had, they are their past “raver/dj name,” was and the are the designations they felt best described their past active rave participation. in cases where interviewees found it difficult to decide on pseudonyms, these names were assigned by the researcher. 6 david butz, personal communication with the author (st. catharines, ontario). 7 in serendipity’s case the men with whom she attended her first event were significantly younger than her. 8 this trend is not explored in the literature, with the exception of wilson (1999) who alludes to this finding when he explains that amongst the reasons interviewees gave for their initial participation in toronto’s rave scene was the claim that “a boyfriend or girlfriend was already involved and influenced the decision to try it” (126). significantly, wilson does not pursue this finding, however, except to say that in every interview he conducted “it was always a male who was involved first” (126, emphasis added). 9 thank you to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting that, according to this logic, this may mean that the experiences of women getting into the scene today are less likely to be gendered in the same ways described herein. 80 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 10 thank you to another anonymous reviewer for asking me to draw out the finding that interviewees’ sexual orientations may have been a major influential factor explaining their introductions to the scene by (older) men. 11 it is important to note that here kickin’ is drawing on an arguably elitist ethos common amongst some rave-goers that to be(come) “mainstream” is to lose the subversive edge which is a subculture’s raison d'être. in this sense she, clearly, is snubbing candy ravers. 12 grrrl’s comments about being a dj within the scene are an exception here. when asked about this experience, for example, she explained that in addition to feelings of empowerment, this experience provided “an awakening for how much of a struggle women still have” within and outside the scene. 13 pini (2001) does not define “saddie”, but i venture to argue that this is a slang term for “pathetic”, “pitiable” and/or “useless”. 14 interestingly, and contrary to the suggestion that older women’s bodies just cannot handle the same amount of drugs as they once could, ter bogt and engels (2005: 1492) find that in terms of women’s drug-use, “age was a relevant factor, with older women experiencing less negative outcomes”. 15 i devised this acronym to encapsulate arguments that raves do not escape dominant discriminatory practices and discourses as suggested by (overly optimistic) readings of rave as epitomized by peace, love, unity and respect (plur) (see, gregory 2006). off the record: turntablism and controllerism in the 21st century (part 1) tobias c. van veen mcgill university bernardo alexander attias california state university, northridge <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.08> what constitutes the “art” of turntablism? if it is an art, how has it changed with the advent of digital formats and the discontinuation of the longstanding technics sl 1200 turntable? what changes are occurring to the performativity, tactility and improvisation inherent to djing with the introduction of the laptop, digital music files, and software organisation and visualisation of dj processes, either with digital vinyl systems (dvs) such as traktor and serato to entirely other performative interfaces? how significant is it for a dj to beatmatch “live”, and what is the significance of automated sync functions in djing software? where and how does one situate the paradigm shift occuring with the use of controller interfaces, from drumpads to various loop-and-knob boxes, leading to the development of “controllerism”, and possibly an entirely new set of cultural aesthetics and values of “authenticity”? how are audiences and djs alike responding to and crafting these changes? in this exchange, los angeles electronic dance music dj and communications studies professor bernardo attias (aka dj professor ben) discusses the question of turntablism in the 21st century with tobias c. van veen, techno-turntablist and scholar in philosophy and communication studies. we begin with a back-and-forth that expands, like a mix, into various questions and ideas concerning authenticity, performance, virtuosity, the instrument, risk, tactility, feedback, interface.... tobias c. van veen: i'd love to hear more about what constitutes the art of djing, especially in relation to learned and acquired skills. the dmcs are now allowing digital vinyl systems (dvs), but this is still a competitive performance of virtuosity. if you showed up with a laptop and pressed the spacebar so that “autoscratch” and “autobeatmatch” do all the work while waving your hands in the air, or perhaps using an integrated touchpad unit while, still, the laptop does the dirty work, you wouldn't even be allowed to compete—however i now see such “performances” all the time at clubs with little or no distinction made between such “software performance” and a turntablist who is performing learned and acquired skills that constitute the virtuosity of playing an instrument (which for me, is primarily defined by risk-enabled practices), whether dvs or vinyl (the format is now, i think, somewhat an irrelevance and a red herring; what is at stake here are fundamental skills such as beatmatching, scratching, eqing, record selection, long mixes, cuts, etc., all without being prompted, automated, visually represented, or cued by a “cheat sheet” computer program). so this has little to do with “authenticity” and a lot more to do with the difference between playing an instrument and pressing play on a glorified software jukebox—unless you want to take the “authenticity” argument all the way down and glory in the old postmodernism of a constructivist approach to the cultural core of technics, which ultimately leads us to a kind of banal cultural nihilism (why give respect to the talented at all then, as evidently various cultures do, as evidently the dmc is designed to do, etc?). yet this latter path is implicitly what is at stake, i believe, with the commodification of “dj culture” as it loses touch not with the vinyl format, but with what constitutes the virtuosity of playing an inventive instrument—risk. without risk of fucking-up (trainwrecking, skipping the needle, a bad mix, etc), there is no need for the human whatsoever. why not just “play” itunes genius? this is, afterall, how clearchannel radio operates—the role of the dj as human agent of music selection has been removed completely now in commercial/corporate contexts in favour of algorithmic-based programming designed to sell consumer objects, the first and foremost that of music itself and the advertising that supports it. i see this attitudinal adjustment to invasive consumerism hitting dj culture in more ways than one. so i think a lot more is at stake here in losing the performativity of an instrument than just switching from analog to digital. it's something else that has happened, almost under the radar: losing an instrument which was, in itself, a radical device of archive exappropriation, around which a culture grew that created its own performative inventions of risk, thus enabling the cultural development of a new technological performativity.[1] controllerism offers more possibilities here as a way forward (rather than just a reactionary stance), by which i mean controllerism also entertains virtuosity.... ben attias: i totally agree about the idea of risk and virtuosity, though i think you overstate the importance of the risk involved in the beatmatching piece of it—for anyone who practices regularly, beatmatching records/cds you know is only slightly more difficult than pressing “sync”. sure, there's still a risk of trainwrecking but there's also a risk of pushing sync on the wrong beat or of making other mistakes with computers. (in fact, even pressing sync is harder than it looks, as the dj usually has to create beatgrids that require similar attention to the music as beatmatching requires, though of course that's a different issue since they presumably don't beatgrid during live performances.) and as you say, a new generation of controllerists really shake this question up as they do some incredibly complicated things with arrays of buttons and knobs even if they aren't beatmatching live—the dynamism and the sense of risk is still very much there, especially if they're adding layered effects and toying with loops, samples, etc. in this sense the computer isn't just a “cheat sheet”—it enables the performer to do things that are completely impossible with vinyl or cds. but it all brings up another question entirely, which is the difference between a dj and a performer (or between a dj and a dj-as-performer)—as you say, there are many djs out there who do very little of interest in terms of showing skills, and frankly this is true whatever format they are using. i've heard and seen plenty of vinyl-only djs with uninspired song selections and little if any mixing and beatmatching skills. this annoys the crap out of other djs but more often than not the majority of the audience couldn’t care less. van veen: indeed, in the rave-era there were plenty of “djs” who couldn't mix their way out of a cocktail lounge.... however, i would differ insofar as beatmatching is much more of a skill inherent to techno/house/dance oriented music when pushing mixes into minutes of seamless matches, on hopefully more than two decks. i've been djing since 1993, and beatmatching in foreign set-ups to a full floor of hundreds/thousands and holding a mix for minutes on end is still a thrilling and dangerous experience, as correcting the record in-the-mix while eqing, slicing & dicing and preparing the next record is a skill indeed. doing so without the audience noticing corrections is quite an art. as many djs only ever hold a mix for two bars, whether beatmatching or not, the entire point drives to the heart of the matter: when you can beatmatch well, and for a long time, and are willing to do so, the overall mix is a much more driving experience for the dancefloor too. though not all dancers might understand what is happening, i would argue that dancefloors instinctively respond to longer-held mixes as the affect of blended sounds creates heightened tension as the tracks play off each other. and once dancers realise you are mixing, bringing a record in and out repeatedly, and building the two records together to a mutual climax, the audience, well, err.. comes along with you.... for hip-hop, beatmatching is much less of a defined skill, insofar as rarely in hip-hop does one hold a mix, which leads me to another avenue of thought: that controllerism favours hip-hop slice & dice methods. the art of techno-turntablism or house music mixing, i think, is falling by the wayside in this respect, as it appears easily replaced by automated solutions. where is the new jeff mills? richie hawtin? algorithm? etc. all of these djs perfected the art of long mixes while performing turntablist tricks (mills) or overlaying other elements (hawtin, and mills—drum machines etc). point being, beatmatching enters a whole other level when it's part of an extended mix, and when it extends to 3 decks, beatmatching becomes a three-dimensional sonic skill.... so i wouldn't be so quick to write off beatmatching. i think it's the fundamental skill of associating two rhythms to each other and finding their pitch by ear, without visual indicators. i took suzuki violin for 7 years and this is the same way they taught it: you played back what you heard without notation (no visual script). nonvisual aural repetition is the basis of teaching instrumentality for orchestral improvisation using stringed instruments. with computerization allowing the use of a screen to tell you bpms and/or grids and/or software that beatmatches for you, the basic skill of an auditory instrument is lost. quite simply, new dj-performers without this auditory skill would be lost without the screen telling them if their records are in sync... which means that, fundamentally, their hearing, and their fingers as intuitive adjusters, is not as developed in regards to picking up subtle rhythm/pitch cues. much to think about there in this respect, insofar as a privileging of the visual over the aural in a fundamentally sonic culture (or what was a soniculture) is now at stake with the invasive presence of the (laptop) screen—or screens otherwise (indeed clubs/bars can't seem to exist now without the distraction not of abstracted “visuals” but representational “screens”). as for controllerism creating new genres of tactile interface performativity, yes, i am with you, precisely with your comment that it must further the art, pushing past previous impossibilities, thereby freeing up the hands/ears/eyes to do something else. in this respect, controllerism shifts from turntablism entirely and is closer to the “live” performativity of an electronic musician (or at least a good one) which has been the case since akai released pressure-sensitive drum samplers and even, one could argue, since stage synths. the main difference is that instead of playing one's own compositions, one is re/mixing the work of others, and the hybridity between the two is now the de facto state of many mash-up djs (most digital djs i know play-out their own remixes of mainstream music tracks/dubstep/fidget etc. as “original remixes”—this is what hawtin envisioned in 2000 when i interviewed him and he talked about the digitization of music furthering remix possibilities for djing as an artform (see van veen 2002)). attias: quickly, on beatmatching, of course you're right, but you're describing beatmatching skills that go well beyond what 90% or so of even house/techno/trance djs do regularly. and of course the beatmatching skills come in handy whether or not you push a “sync” button on your software—as you point out it's really about learning to listen and learning to let your body interact physically with the music; what richie hawtin can do during a mix even with the computer doing the beatmatching—and what a dj who never beatmatched by ear simply cannot do—is due in part to years of training his ears to distinguish subtle differences in rhythm and pitch that make some mixes work and others fail even when the tempos are technically matched. you make a good point about visual input as well—i sometimes find myself explaining to traktor djs that they aren't really “beatmatching by ear” just because they turned off the sync button—although of course one doesn't dj blind with vinyl either; the appearance of the grooves of the record give important cues to the dj about upcoming breakdowns, and i know i'm not the only one who writes notes down on record labels such as bpm, number of bars for intro, etc. but, yeah, it's a far cry from seeing a line on every transient, heh.... van veen: in the technoculture i'm from (west coast canada, but through toronto/windsor/detroit), if you couldn't hold a mix for the entire length of two records, you sucked and were subject to getting deckjumped & dissed. ditto with all detroit/chicago/nyc djs i knew who played techno & house (though especially techno). jungle djs also had high expectations in regards to innovative cutting. with techno one had to beatmatch fast, especially with the mills tracks which were routinely under 3 minutes and repetitive, as the floor would demand fast & furious mixing (which inevitably got rougher as its own aesthetic of “collision engineering”). that said, the technoculture was a minority one amongst vancouver/west coast rave culture where djs lacking abilities abounded. they were the gatekeepers and “hometown heroes” as we called them, who had all the connections (usually as suppliers of the party favours), and of course for the most part kept anyone with talent out of the clubs as it would upset the dancefloor expectations of what a dj could do. detroit is very different in this respect. you couldn't get away with bullshit there and, for the most part, still can't. the history of radio plays large there, with mills as the wizard on one radio station and the electrifyin’ mojo on the other, hosting mixes by other djs (derrick may etc.). point being people heard what could be done and the bar was set very, very high. jeff mills aka the wizard wjlb radio detroit 1985 by r_co this sense of pushing the skillz of djing has been somewhat lost, i feel, to an increasing reliance on technological gimmickry which, moreover, absorbs the dj in the screen and disconnects the affective feedback relay with the dancefloor. everyone is absorbed in screens: the dancefloor with their mobile phones, texting each other, with no one really dancing; the dj in their laptop, which in the worst case scenario is placed directly in front of their head, so they don't see the dancefloor and we don't even see them. i hate the laptop screen and bring a long extension cable to put it all behind me, like i would with a record crate. thus when i am mixing, i don't see the dvs. so yes, these days, without distribution nor record stores, i use traktor scratch pro now for the most part. even without sync, as you mention, it aids with beatmatching although the dvs system is slower than my ear is, and sometimes wrong, showing incorrect bpms. so i beatmatch first and then inevitably glance at it, like some kind of addiction. it's handy in clubs as i can check what's going on, especially in cases of feedback, and it saves the ears as i don't have to rely upon overblown headphones in bad monitoring situations. but i never press sync—it's an ethical call, really, like plagiarism in my books. i do however use the slight gain to do other things, and so i've purchased an x1 controller and gone heavier into effects and looping (as well as a mackie d4 pro mixer). that said, most effective dj turntablism for techno is still based around effective eqing and texture layering with drop-outs corresponding to innovative cutting over a long, sustained mix of two to three very well chosen records that are, to a degree, nonetheless improvised throughout the night (the old aesthetic was complete improv with harder techno: we would often hand each other records at random during sets, challenging each other to mix in—with flair—whatever was given over). to this end, one can pursue longer and more sustained effects—effects are affectively invigorating with dub-style rimshots and long breakdowns with echo drop-outs. to switch thoughts for a second, i think one could argue with some force that, from a deleuzean perspective where affect is correlated to different sensory modes, in short, a materialist phenomenology corresponding to different modes-of-being, learning to hear and beatmatch by ear as a tactile art of manipulating physical objects lends itself to an entirely different affective register being transmitted through the speakers. i can hear when a dj is mixing-by-ear versus a sync'ed mix, each and every time, as the slight imperfections are precisely what renders the risk of the mix and its tension aurally palpable. now, a trained ear is not necessary here to hear this tension. the affective resonance of this tension is felt and heard—as subliminal affect—in the slight imperfections of mismatched soundwaves through the speakers and direct to the dancefloor collective's bodymind. when the mix is riding through a beatmatch, even if seamless, the risk of failure is transferred as tension-affect through the soundsystem's relays. this tension in turn generates feedback for the dj who feels it from the dancefloor as the intensity of the room increases, leading to heightened mixing, etc. when this feedback loop is in place it is, i would argue, a quasi-cybernetic stimulus-response of affect engendered by the phenomenology of slightly imperfect rhythms—what henri lefebvre called arrhythmia but with a strong overmasked standing rhythm (i’m thinking of his later work on rhythmanalysis (see van veen 2010)). i strongly believe that, from a philosophical background in phenomenology of affect, that non-computer assisted mixing translates into a more focused, ritual dancefloor experience insofar as it heightens the affect of tension and release necessary for the long arcs and releases of the dancefloor's jouissance journey. this would have to be developed but i throw it out here, as it ties into similar and much earlier research pursued by michel gaillot on ritual and technics (1999). the point being that the digital/analog distinction is somewhat irrelevant here in regards to affect—indeed in all cases the soundwaves from the speakers are always analog and the body is always analog (see massumi 2002)—and what matters entirely is the transmission of imperfection. kim cascone called this the “aesthetics of failure” and circa 2000 it became the centrepiece of discussions surrounding discussions of laptop performance in experimental electronic music (notably around the mutek festival and carried on in leonardo music journal). so i believe there is a phenomenological basis—drawn from radical empiricism—for arguing in favour of imperfect instrumentality and its virtuosity over machine-made sync'ed mixes, and that this argument overrides “cultural construction” arguments on the one channel, and what would be the simplism of technological determinism on the other (as this isn't merely nor mainly about the technology per se, but whether it enables what engenders humanity as-such: imperfection). attias: i think translating the “aesthetics of failure” into materially perceivable tension through which the dj interacts with the dancefloor is right on. my own dj background is quite different from yours; i first started djing long before i understood much about genres per se, but i was most influenced by the chicago acid house scene in the late 1980s (where i first learned an appreciation for beatmatching) and southern california turntablist subcultures in the late 1990s and early 2000s (where i began to understand and practice turntable tricks like scratching and juggling, which i’m still not very good at). needless to say, your point about a phenomenological basis for performance on the brink of failure rings true in these subcultures as well, though in very different ways. however, i am still going to argue with you on your conclusion—at the very least, i don't think i understand the assumption that an aesthetics of failure is impossible when software makes sync easier. beatmatching isn't the only point of failure in djing, and the computer actually introduces a host of new possibilities for screwup. it will certainly sound different than a vinyl aesthetic of failure—just like a cd skipping sounds different than a vinyl record skipping (and no question i will agree with you about which one of those i'd rather hear). you can trainwreck disastrously with software too, of course—try pushing the wrong button in traktor sometimes, heh. improperly gridded tracks will beatclash horribly with sync depressed, and you can clash keys while mixing, improperly phrase a perfectly gridded mix, and you can overdo the effects to the point of nausea—as the joke goes, to err is human, but to really fuck things up requires a computer. though perhaps stated like that it only supports your point insofar as the difference between “human” and “computer” fuckups can be perceived in sound—but honestly i think there we are back to the issue of authentication and cultural factors rather than sound per se; in fact, it's trivial to mimic the feeling of tension from a slightly off vinyl mix using slight tempo adjustments from a “perfectly” sync'd beat (and perhaps it won't be long before it's included in dj software as an effect, just like the plugins that exist for ableton live currently to mimic the rhythms of a human drummer by inserting tiny tempo alterations). now admittedly i'm making arguments based on technologies and techniques that are not in widespread use—there are a few people using sync as i described but it's not common practice among digital djs by any means, and i'm suggesting software plugins that don't even exist yet for dj software. but the point is there is nothing inherently grounded in the technology itself that prevents audible human imperfection from manifesting itself, deliberately or accidentally, or from skill sets being developed around such imperfection (or dancing around to avoid it) that could be authenticated by particular audiences in specific contexts, and there's nothing inherently impossible about a controllerist culture surrounding button pushers and knob twiddlers, however tedious that might be to watch for many of us who grew up appreciating vinyl. in fact such subcultures already exist. that doesn't mean it's widespread—the subcultures you describe around techno may be small and aging but they're still far larger than the subcultures surrounding the moldovers and ean goldens out there—but i'm not convinced there's anything inherent in the sound of sync-enabled musical performance that makes such subcultures impossible. and yeah, it probably wouldn't fly in detroit—then again, even vinyl dj culture has a hard time flying in new orleans or memphis, cities with musical cultures even stronger than detroit's, where if you can't play an instrument that doesn't have to be plugged in, you're wasting everyone's time. this brings me back to my argument about authenticity and authentication—and as much as you say authenticity is a side issue, i think it plays a pretty central role in your argument, to the point of drawing a line between “real djs” and the other 90% or so. the tension that you describe here and the dj's ability to ride that tension is the signature of the “true” artist. in that light, it's an interesting choice to ignore a button on your computer screen on ethical grounds—particularly interesting that you consider it like plagiarism, an act that is unethical precisely because one represents oneself dishonestly; one lays claim to originality using someone else's work. it's exactly the charge that is often raised against mashup/sample artists and remixers as well as djs more generally by many guitar-rock types—you guys are just playing other people's records, and claiming to be original by doing so! it appears that we are talking about authenticity all along here. as an aside, the fact that your computer screen sometimes shows incorrect bpm for a song helps illustrate my point—the computer can only do what humans tell it to do. the imperfection (and it is particularly imperfect for more syncopated genres; my dubstep and dnb tracks are auto-beatgridded incorrectly at least 5-10% of the time) requires human intervention, which is why traktor has beatgrids and most dj software has a “tap” button. the same way a vinyl dj needs to know his or her records, a digital dj (or a sync-dj to focus on your main distinction) needs to know their tracks, and you can tell by ear whether or not they do when they mix them together. the tech may make it easier for them to get lucky and produce a mix that will work, but it will become clear pretty quickly if they haven't listened to their tracks. of course serato—which is by far the most popular dj software in la and probably in the entire us save detroit (and miami-in-march)—has no sync button so the same aesthetics you attach to vinyl mixing apply there too; although of course your earlier point about the visual cues still applies. serato actually makes it pretty easy to mix visually, and i've tested it by mixing two songs only visually (kind of the opposite of what you do by hiding your computer screen). let me ask this—for you is the sync capability the tragic flaw in the computer for all of this? and is the human ability to beat match then the core of the dj's virtuosity? are cd djs still considered djs under a strict definition? does it matter what kind of cd players they use? would a cdj that could detect and sync bpms be an illegitimate tool from this perspective? what about a mixer with such functionality? it may not beatsync for you but there's a host of recent mixers with digital effects that include beat counters; should one put duct tape over the leds to cripple the machines' ability to help the dj beatmatch? would software be acceptable that crippled any kind of sync functionality or beatmatching assistance? what if it was just bad at it intentionally; is my cheapo behringer ddm4000 actually a better mixer than the pioneer djm 800 because the behringer's bpm readout is far less reliable? and how much assistance beatmatching is too much—would it be cool if a dj played on vinyl but had mapped their set out ahead of time and calculated bpm and wrote down a list of numbers so that every single transition is completely canned to the decimal point? what about writing bpm values on record sleeves like i used to do? what if they bring a handheld calculator to a gig to help them decide where to put the pitch fader? absurd, of course, but what i'm trying to say is this—ultimately, beatmatching is just math, something that computers excel at. so it seems strange to me to base an argument that the true humanity of the dj is exposed in their ability to do math by hand in public. i'm not saying it's not an amazing musical skill set, but it troubles me to place it at the core of the human aspect of djing when in fact it's the part that is most easily handled by a machine. meanwhile, i would suggest that mixing music can still be a human skill with beat syncing—in fact, even with key recognition software and pandora-like algorithms, computers still won't be able to read a crowd and respond the way a human dj can. hrm, i may have to rethink that last bit—i recall someone working on software to do exactly that, based on cameras tracking movement and facial expressions, and i could even imagine such software scanning people's clothes and making reasonably accurate determinations about what old chestnuts could be tossed in to make them go wild... (see gates 2006). even then though i think i would say that song selection could not completely be imitated by machine because there are so many factors that go into it. and i would say it's there that the risk of failure is most palpable, far more so than the subtle but important rhythmic variations that you're talking about. i think we also have to acknowledge that there are many different dj subcultures even within vinyl/cd-only djs—many who couldn't give a rat's ass about beatmatching for more than a few bars if at all. i was amazed when i went to kingston that i was hearing dj after dj sloppily slamming one song into another, usually with a tell tale backspin. it was annoying as hell to me, but the crowds loved it; when they heard that backspin they just knew the banger was coming. ultimately i think i absolutely agree with you that there's an audible and tangible tension created by the sense of a human riding a machine in such a way as to illustrate virtuosity and that virtuosity depends in part in the performer practicing a particular technique to the point that it becomes a physical memory and then demonstrating that physical memory in a public practice that risks failure. but i think that can be true whether that machine is a turntable, a guitar, a drum set, or an unholy combination of midi controllers and screens. i think what is cultural is our expectation of being able to perceive that kind of virtuosity with specific machines and not with others—and indeed for the phonograph the expectation was quite the opposite until very recently; in the 1970s and early 1980s there were precious few people who would have truly considered the turntable a musical instrument in this way (and john philip sousa’s notorious condemnation of “the menace of mechanical music” at the turn of the 20th century sounds similar in some ways to the arguments against computers (sousa 1906)). part 2 to follow in the next issue of dancecult. author biographies bernardo alexander attias (ph.d., university of iowa) is professor of communication studies at california state university, northridge. his research is primarily in cultural studies, performance studies, and critical theory; his current projects focus on the legal, aesthetic, and cultural implications of the phonograph. he has been a dj for over twenty years, spinning eclectic sets incorporating house, hip-hop, and drum ‘n’ bass as well as funk, jazz, and swing. he occasionally blogs at http://turntablepoetry.com. tobias c. van veen, b. 1978, is doctoral candidate in philosophy & communication studies at mcgill university, managing editor at dancecult and a turntablist practitioner of the technology arts. since 1993 he has disseminated and exhibited work in sound, radio and net-art, performing and intervening with laptop and turntables, renegade soundsystems and sonic rituals. his writing on philosophy of technology, afrofuturism and technoculture has been disseminated worldwide. his next publication, an edited volume tentatively titled afrofuturism: interstellar transmissions from remix culture, is forthcoming from wayne state up. he also mixes a mean absynthe martini. his research blog can be found at [fugitive.quadrantcrossing.org]. references burns, todd l. 2009. “jeff mills: the wizard”. residentadvisor. 3 june: <http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?1056> (accessed 25 may 2011). cascone, kim. 2000. “post-digital tendencies in contemporary computer music”. computer music journal 24 (4): 12–18. gaillot, michel. 1999. multiple meaning: techno, an artistic and political laboratory of the present. trans. warren niesluchowski. paris: éditions dis voir. gates, carrie, sriram subramanian and carl gutwin. 2006. “dj's perspectives on interaction and awareness in nightclubs”. proceedings of the acm conference on designing interactive systems (dis'06): 70-79. <http://hci.usask.ca/publications/view.php?id=44> (accessed 25 may 2011). massumi, brian. 2002. parables for the virtual: movement, affect, sensation. durham and london: duke up. sousa, john philip. 1906. “the menace of mechanical music”. appleton’s magazine 8, 278–284. <http://www.phonozoic.net/n0155.htm> (accessed 25 may 2011). thompson, clive. 2008. “if you like this, you’re sure to like that”. new york times magazine. 21 november: <https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/magazine/23netflix-t.html?_r=1&_r=1&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink> (accessed 20 april 2011). tokyoreporter.com. 2010. “dead spin: panasonic discontinues technics analog turntables”. tokyo reporter. 28 october: <http://www.tokyoreporter.com/2010/10/28/dead-spin-panasonic-discontinues-technics-analog-turntables> (accessed 20 april 2011). van veen, tobias c. 2002. “digital djing: richie hawtin and (the) final scratch”. discorder (jancember): <http://quadrantcrossing.org/papers/digitaldjing(hawtin)02-disc-van veen.pdf> (accessed 19 april 2011). ———. 2010. “cities of rhythm and revolution”. circulation and the city: essays on mobility and urban culture. ed. alexandra boutros and will straw. montréal: mcgill-queens up,153–192. notes [1] exappropriation has particular relevance to discussions of technology. a neologism coined by jacques derrida, it is used specifically in echographies of television to trace another “logic” at work in teletechnology—all the technical movements of an arkhe-writing, or writing-in-general—which refuses the opposition between property/expropriation, mastery/nonmastery. from this other “logic” of an “original expropriation” one is faced with a “‘choice’ between multiple configurations of mastery without mastery”, which derrida has called exappropriation (2002: 37). here i deploy exappropriation as neither the expropriation of a technology nor its appropriation; rather, it constitutes a double movement, a movement away-from an appropriation (which would signify a possession, a taking for one’s own use, a mastery of a property), as well as the simplex of an expropriation (in which possession-taking disposseses an-other, and overtakes the proprietary aspects of a property from the other). nonetheless one propriates—though without depossessing; one takes—without stealing. this mastery without mastery, or taking without taking, possessing without possessing, can be expressed as the rendering other of the otherwise proper (and what is proper to it; its structures of the proprietary, property, etc.). dancecult 2.1 reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 2 (1): 90–114 issn 1947-5403 ©2011 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net hip hop underground: the integrity and ethics of racial identification anthony kwame harrison philadelphia: temple university press, 2009. isbn: 1-4399-0060-4 (hardcover), 1-4399-0061-2 (paperback) rrp: us$74.50 (hardcover), us$26.95 (paperback), us$74.50 (electronic) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.05 rebecca bodenheimer hamilton college, usa anthony kwame harrison’s book hip hop underground: the integrity and ethics of racial identification examines the racial dynamics of the san francisco bay area’s underground hip hop scene, with the larger goal of exploring processes of racial self-identification among american youth at a time in which the nation is growing more racially diverse and discourses on race increasingly revolve around an ideology of colorblindness. in his view, the bay area is a good case study for an elaboration of contemporary american racial dynamics because of its uniquely multiracial demographics, which are currently very similar to the projections of a non-white majority population in the u.s. by 2050. harrison’s research is strongly informed by the method of “critical ethnography”, which views the process of ethnography as intimately connected to the interpretation and representation of the findings. in this vein, he describes his decision to become an active participant in the bay area’s underground hip hop scene and to assume two identities, anthropologist and emcee (rapper), despite his initial misgivings that he might be received as an interloper. while critical ethnography is by no means a new method of anthropological research, the level of self-reflexivity here is arguably taken to the extreme with relatively large doses of “autoethnographic narrative” (58). harrison’s second chapter provides detailed accounts both about his personal history with hip hop and the ways he inserted himself into and moved through the bay area underground hip hop scene; however, his discussion of the hip hop group he helped to form, the forest fires collective, seems at times overindulgent. reviews reviews 91 harrison’s first chapter details the emergence of underground hip hop in the mid-to-late 1990s, highlighting the movement’s preoccupation with notions of authenticity, its goals of reclaiming hip hop from the mass corporatization following its crossover into the mainstream, and its contestation of commercial hip hop’s “ghettocentric” representations of blackness.1 he argues that the alternate representations of blackness offered by underground hip hop are accompanied by a more racially inclusive criteria regarding who can lay claim to the practice. nevertheless, despite his suggestions that this more inclusive vision is a progressive tendency, he frequently contests the stated ideologies of his fellow hip hoppers 2—that it is competency, rather than race, that matters in terms of underground hip hop authenticity—by asserting his own view that blackness is still privileged in hip hop and that non-black participants, especially whites, face a more arduous road to establish their legitimacy. harrison’s third chapter provides a good critical summary of the ways hip hop scholarship has articulated the relationship between race, authenticity and claims of ownership, detailing three principal approaches. the first frames hip hop as a distinctly black practice, despite recognizing that non-black youth, specifically puerto ricans, were involved in its emergence and is exemplified by tricia rose’s 1994 canonic work on hip hop black noise. as harrison notes, a host of scholars ( juan flores, raquel rivera) have argued strongly for inserting puerto ricans into hip hop origin narratives. harrison provocatively asks, if we can recognize the role of puerto ricans and other latinos in the formation of hip hop culture, should we not do the same with white b-boys who joined the movement only a few years later? the second approach views hip hop as one in a long line of afro-diasporic traditions in the americas and tends to draw direct links between hip hop and african and/or caribbean traditions. the final approach is an orientation toward contemporary manifestations of hip hop, and a recognition of its creative appropriation by youth across all continents. harrison concludes this review by asserting that the ongoing reification of hip hop as essentially black has obscured a more realistic and dynamic picture of the ways that youth of all colors engage with the practice and that underground hip hop challenges these essentialist notions. harrison’s principal goal is to examine and unpack the ways that underground hip hoppers articulate claims for their own hip hop legitimacy through racial performances of self. departing from sarah thornton’s theorization of subcultural capital and the boundary maintenance that is such an integral part of subcultural scenes, harrison critiques the hegemony of “authenticity”, viewing john l. jackson’s notion of “sincerity” as a better analytic. jackson’s notion “subverts the standard checklist of subcultural capital [markers “ sophisticated and innovative discussions about the racial politics of authenticity in underground hip hop” dancecult 2(1)92 of authenticity] in favor of a personal code of underground hip hop ethics and integrity… what matters most is the perceived sincerity of these racial performances... for the non-black hip hopper, an overzealous display of urban african american posturing, no matter how authentic, is under most circumstances suspected as insincere” (118). while i agree that the sincerity of a racial performance is an important element in the positive reception of a non-black emcee, i do not perceive a big difference between the notions of authenticity and sincerity. harrison’s position that a display of black posturing is authentic but not sincere is not entirely convincing—why would it not simply be considered inauthentic? chapter four puts the notion of racial sincerity to work, as harrison provides examples of white emcees who perform “sincere whiteness” (140). his primary example concerns a white emcee who, during a mos def 3 show, got on stage to freestyle (improvise rapped lyrics). although he was initially booed because of the audience’s assumptions about his competency based on his “bummy white guy” look, the emcee ultimately won over the crowd with his lyrical prowess. harrison astutely states, “had top r not been a sincere white guy…the entire story might have played out differently: no boos, no surprises, no turning of the crowd; perhaps just a great freestyle, which is hardly the kind of thing that gets talked about to any great extent days after the show” (140). while i find this analysis quite persuasive, harrison’s criteria for performing “sincere whiteness” is more problematic: in this and in other instances, he bases his characterization of racial sincerity on physical appearance and fashion choices, noting in particular the white emcees’ “dorky looks” and “bummy shirts” (140). he perceptively analyzes this mode of self-representation as a reaction against past white emcees’ “insincere” performances of racial identity, exemplified in the “wigger” persona,4 that claimed to fully understand the experience of black youth without recognizing their own white privilege. the issue is not only that harrison’s notion of white racial sincerity is fully based on the emcee’s physical appearance, but also the implication that “bummy clothes” are essentially a white fashion and that emcees cannot be racially sincere unless they are dressed in this manner. in his final chapter he provides what i believe is another problematic analysis, when he discusses the sound of an all-white underground hip hop group as “so sincere and self-assured in its whiteness”, precisely because people have described their music as “avant-garde hip hop”, “emo rap”, or “goth-hop” (161). harrison’s argument here seems to reproduce the same essentialist notions of race and culture that he has previously challenged and the reader is left to assume that he would only deem racially sincere those white emcees who mix rap with “white” musical styles or dress like “dorky white guys”. harrison’s final chapter continues elaborating the notion of racial sincerity, although here he offers a rather pessimistic commentary on racial politics in the underground hip hop scene. he recounts a party where the aforementioned white underground hip hop group performed a satire using an exaggerated style of black speech in order to parody the image of the hyper-violent, misogynist “gangsta” rapper that is so often promoted by the mainstream music industry. noting that the audience was predominantly white, harrison describes this performance as a form of “contemporary minstrelsy” (158). however, he reviews 93 then characterizes this analysis as too simplistic, asserting that the group was very aware of a history of white appropriation and racist imitation of black music. he states: i would contend that sole and the pedestrian saw themselves as crafting a tremendously ironic satire of the racial insincerity embodied by... wigger icons of the past. arguably, if we accept that this group... was engaged in a theatrical performance of past white hip hoppers’ exaggerated performances of blackness, this could be viewed as about a profound an expression of white racial sincerity as one might find. however, somewhere within this cauldron of sincerity, satire, and racial symbolism, for me, the circumstantial logic breaks down (160). the reason he gives for ultimately eschewing his own, quite sophisticated analysis and concluding that the performance was a “racial impersonation” (162), centers around the fact that these white emcees were performing for a mainly white audience. however, another perspective might view the performance as quite racially sincere precisely because, as stated by harrison, it was a parody. furthermore, it seems that the key to determining whether the performance reinforced stereotypes or not resides largely in its reception: how aware was the audience of the performers’ intentions to perform a satire? although harrison does not pursue this question, it is likely, following his own discussion of the blurred line between performers and audience in underground hip hop, that the spectators were “in the know” and viewed this performance with a critical perspective. ultimately harrison’s book offers some sophisticated and innovative discussions about the racial politics of authenticity in underground hip hop. however, while he presents various compelling analyses, his final conclusions are at times less nuanced and thus lessen the persuasiveness of his theoretical points. notes 1 the subgenre of “gangsta” rap, in which rappers frequently spin tales of violent and sexual pursuits, is most closely associated with a “ghettocentric” mentality. 2 harrison often refers to participants in the local scene as “hip hoppers”, which i understand to include anyone who engages with at least one of the four principle elements of hip hop culture— emceeing (rapping), dj’ing, break-dancing (b-boying), or graffiti art. 3 mos def is one of the most celebrated and visible emcees in underground hip hop, so much so, that some might not describe him as part of the underground scene anymore. his first album, mos def and talib kweli are black star (rawkus records 1998), was a collaboration with the highly respected emcee talib kweli and in many ways defined the terms of underground hip hop in its critique of the music industry and mainstream rappers who have “sold out”. 4 “wigger” was a derogatory term that emerged in the 1990s referring to white youth who fully adopted the fashion and speech of african american youth for the purposes of gaining subcultural capital, but who were ultimately perceived as having a superficial connection with blackness and not a true investment in the politics of racial equality. dancecult 2(1)94 the local scenes and global culture of psytrance graham st john new york/london: routledge, 2010. isbn: 978-0-415-87696-4 (hardcover) 978-0-203-84787-9 (electronic) rrp: $103.00 (hardcover), $103.00 (electronic) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.06 rupert till university of huddersfield, uk psytrance is not well known or widely understood. the local scenes and global culture of psytrance, edited by leading writer in the field of electronic dance music (edm) culture graham st. john, is the first book to cover this form in any detail. to many, psytrance is lumped together using ill-defined journalistic terms that have little meaning or substance such as “dance music”. this collected volume attempts to unpack the term and explore the field in a more rigorous fashion. st john bookends the volume; his introduction provides a useful assessment of writing on psytrance, whilst providing a contextual framework. he makes a strong case for the need for the collection and prepares the ground for the variety of different approaches that follow. the book is divided into three sections, the first dealing with the roots of the music in goa trance. this begins with luther elliott’s proto-trance history. it makes a strong case that musical roots of psytrance grew not principally from goa but originated in sixties counter-culture, ibiza, house music and acid house. its description of the development of goa trance is rather vague, lacking specific dates, names and interviews with key players. fortunately this is covered in the next two chapters and in any case this is an interesting and well-paced first chapter. anthony d’andrea next provides a spicy taste of the nature of the goa full moon party scene. like several sections of the collection, it prioritises the opinions of the ‘authentic’— the scenesters, the faces, the core members—and allows the flavour of the narrative to be determined by self-appointed spokespeople. indeed many of the writers can be accused of this, related it seems to their immersion in psytrance culture. in some cases the writers have led a psytrance lifestyle and have become interested in writing about their passion. this provides insider knowledge, without which this book would lack credibility, but inevitably means it sometimes becomes evangelical, treating internal psy-perspectives as “truth” and outsider perspectives as “false”. reviews 95 arun saldanha provides the final chapter in the goa section and manages to avoid this trap. his well-written account describes the myriad influences on the goa scene as a meeting point of multiple substreams, a developmental crossroads rather than a point of origin. his use of derrida’s ghost metaphor elegantly blends sociology and ethnography and embeds into psytrance the term ‘communitas’, which returns many times to form a key focus of the book. the sequel to the goa section discusses globalisation, bridging the gap between goa and the growth of psytrance in europe. in fact it is the well-defined and well-written specificity of this chapter by hillegonda rietveld that clarifies the origins of european psytrance and its relation to goa. it names specific recordings and artists, dates and places, building on the earlier chapters which were rather more freeform, reflecting perhaps a goa trance state of mind. in particular this mature chapter gives credit to various sources often overlooked in such histories, such as electro body music (ebm) and klf. charles de ledesma goes on to explore the growth of psytrance in london. there is strong data here and interviews with key players, but this is inevitably a very london-centric ethnography, rather more local than the claimed uk coverage. robin lindop casts a wider net, defining and discussing the music itself, as well as the culture surrounding it. however, without a use of technical musical terminology, this is rendered a little vague. de ledesma does critically engage with the ways in which edm sometimes defines itself as “authentic” in opposition to the “mainstream”, but then goes on to claim that “psytrance is exemplary”. it is similarly contradictory over the subject of genre purity. like the following chapter by joshua schmidt, lindop provides some paradoxes in his writing, but overall provides useful information to the emerging wider narrative. schmidt uses pairs of dichotomies to critically analyse israeli trance. again this is a view from the inside of a scene, shown when it condemns as “chronic” the media’s description of israeli desert trance mesibot as “drug parties”, although it is clear from an external perspective why that description might be used. however schmidt’s work is succinct, well structured and provides a convincing argument. the last of the trilogy of sections weaves in and out of a vague focus on liminal culture. botond vitos begins by providing a rare insight into czech psytrance, although his argument is a little circular, perhaps due to a closeness to interlocutors who had recently and regularly taken lsd, a proximity which he tries to stretch away from instead of embracing. the fact that some of his interviewees described their activities using his own theories of demencze shows a rather acid splintered blurring of boundary between the emic and etic. chiara baldini’s approach is far bolder and more successful, making her position as party organiser clear and embracing material and references with a voice clearly internal to her and to psytrance. she draws upon the psy-spirit of dionysus in an effective correlation with her own experiences. the next two chapters, by jenny ryan and alex lambert, discuss the relationship of the web to psytrance from the perspectives of san francisco’s tribe.net and australia’s oztrance dancecult 2(1)96 community. the difficulty with this work is the use of individual web-posts to represent the views of the group, as there is often inevitably an opposing view that contradicts any point. however the significance of the web to this scene merits such attention, which is especially well presented in lambert’s cultural circuit. the last dance is reserved for graham st. john, who applies his experience and skill as an edm commentator to both reference other chapters and make significant points of his own, providing an appropriate climax to the narrative. st. john’s final chapter is the strongest in the book. it largely focuses on festival culture and on those technomads who travel from festival to festival, making psy-trance a lifestyle choice rather than a part-time activity. this is a recurring feature of the book, which focuses on the intensely committed few, rather the many casual psytrancers. this focus on festival culture feels unbalanced. in many cases the authors show their partisan attitudes and don’t so much struggle to maintain an objective attitude to their subject, as willingly submit to a pro-psytrance attitude. it is unsurprising that some chapters are written by relatively inexperienced researchers, rather than late career researchers with several books under their belts. this gives the work a currency and directness and although one could criticise the text in terms of clarity of emic or etic approaches, this would ignore the benefits that the writers’ proximity to psytrance culture provides. there have been many studies that have pointed out the difficulties western society faces in a fractured world that struggles to resolve issues of community, identity, belonging, hope and the loss of popular rituals that address such issues. studies addressing cultures that seem to be orientated around solutions to these issues, or new approaches to them, inevitably raise difficulties, may be controversial or inconclusive and in a post-meta-narrative world, fail to provide simple answers. however this book’s approach to issues such as communitas provides an engaging and novel approach to such problems. overall then the local scenes and global cultures of psytrance provides a valuable insight into a world-wide movement which has had comparatively little study so far. i am no novice to the world of psytrance, but this book provided a wide range of interesting, thoughtprovoking and informative detail, and is one i can highly recommend as essential reading to any researchers interested in edm culture. “a valuable insight into a world-wide movement which has had comparatively little study” reviews 97 pink noises: women on electronic music and sound tara rodgers durham: duke university press, 2010. isbn: 978-0-8223-4661-6 (hardcover), 978-0-8223-4673-9 (paperback) rrp: us$84.955 (hardcover), us$23.95 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.07 anna gavanas independent researcher, electronic music producer and dj tara rodgers’ book pink noises is a long overdue feminist intervention in the historiography of electronic music. pink noises emphasizes the pioneering, substantial and diverse work that has been accomplished by women but so far remained largely invisible in previous accounts of electronic music development. thereby, tara rodgers starts to correct the century long lack of representation that profoundly underestimates the presence and diversity of expressions by women working with sound and electronic music. the title pink noises (which is also the name of the producer/musician/dj network pinknoises.com founded by the author in 2000) refers to pink in terms of a “marker of female difference”, and noise as a “site of disturbance and productive potential”. tara rodgers also refers to the term pink noises in physics and audio engineering, as “variations of white noise, or unstructured sound that contains every audible frequency”. moreover, tara rodgers introduces her interviews with women artists as pink noises in and by themselves: “sonic interventions from multiple sources, which destabilize dominant gendered discourses and work toward equal power distributions in the cultural arenas where sounds reverbrate” (2010:19). structured as a collection of interviews/ conversations, pink noises documents and explains ground breaking innovations and visions in electronic music production and technology from the perspectives of the pioneers themselves. ground breaking and legendary international artists are interviewed, like pauline oliveros, kaffe matthews, giulia loli (mutamassik) and chantal passamonte (mira calix). the book is structured into six themes in electronic music; time/memory; space/perspective; nature/synthetics; circulation/movements; language/machines/embodiment; and alone/together. from a variety of different angles, rodgers and her interviewees disentangle assumptions that cast technology and music—and electronic music in particular—as male domains while, most importantly, discussing the dimensions and meanings of sound, expression and representation. moreover, pink noises reflects upon the cultural and political potential of sound itself. tara rodgers conceives of the potentials of sound, as a category of critical and aesthetic analysis, to feminist concerns in particular, arguing that “sounds can be thought of as pressure and movements, doing cultural work” (2010:19). dancecult 2(1)98 pink noises is an extremely important contribution to the study and documentation of electronic music because, unlike previous literature on electronic music, tara rodgers refuses to stop at the “thresholds that have silenced women’s work in historical accounts”. tara rodgers thus looks beyond the commonplace observation where most standard accounts stop and conclude that women constitute a minority in electronic music—as if this observation would explain their absence in literature and media. with pink noises, tara rodgers challenges the normalization of male dominance in the patrilineal historiography of electronic music. against the grain of ideologies aligning women with normative modes of heterosexual and capitalist reproduction, tara rodgers makes the argument that sounds themselves are reproductive, “to account for reproductive sounds in all their temporal depth is to challenge the patrilineal lines of descent and the universalizing male claims to creation that have thus far characterized dominant discourses in electronic music” (2010:15). although the professional interventions of interviewed artists go as far back as the 1950s, it is striking that similar gendered issues and experiences seem to reoccur throughout the generations of women who work with sound and electronic music. however, it is encouraging to read about the ways interviewees have prevailed and ignored gendered biases in the business; only to cultivate their subversiveness, innovation and determination even further. to someone who is extremely interested in the technical aspects of working with sound and music production it is very instructive to read pink noises. however, to someone who does not have a specific interest for technical aspects it could be difficult to follow the very informed conversations between the author and her interviewees. helpfully there is a detailed glossary on technical concepts. it is apparent throughout the book that the author has had previous contacts and collaboration with many interviewees, presumably through her own professional activity as a musician and her work with pinknoises.com. many of the participants in the book are part of the same international and/or overlapping musical/ professional scenes. it would be interesting to read more about the ways the author is situated in her field of study and the ways in which this influences her selection of interviewees, her questions and the responses. although rodgers probably has many good reasons for her decision to let interviewees speak for themselves and make their own analysis i sometimes feel that additional concluding, contextualizing and comparative commentary would be helpful. also, it would have been great to have a chapter on tara rodgers herself, and her long standing experience, electronic music production and reflection as electronic musician analog tara. all in all, pink noises is an extremely well informed, informative and inspiring discussion of some of the most crucial aspects and developments in electronic music. the innovators and actors behind these developments happen to be women and pink noises thereby highlights the astounding male centeredness in standard accounts and representation in electronic music. “ rodgers challenges the normalization of male dominance” reviews 99 technomad: global raving countercultures graham st john london: equinox publishing, 2009. isbn: 9781845536251 (hardcover), 9781845536268 (paperback) rrp: uk£50.00 (hardcover), uk£15.00 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.08 phil kirby university of liverpool, uk graham st john is a cultural anthropologist whose latest publication explores “themes of counterculture and resistance” in global electronic dance music culture (edmc). previous publications by st john explore psytrance and the intersection of rave culture and religion, key themes in technomad. the book is the result of eight years of research and offers a utopian study of rave culture, one in which legislation such as the uk’s criminal justice act and the onset of corporate clubbing hasn’t stopped the development of the free party scene. it adds to the evolving canon of academic literature that explores edmc culture and demonstrates a rigorous level of research. in an echo of centre for contemporary cultural studies (cccs) theory, st john frames the global techno-countercultures explored in technomad as “resistant”. st john acknowledges that anthony d’andrea has also explored the intersection of rave culture and post-1960s new (age) spirituality. where d’andrea attends to the cultural economy of psytrance “neo-nomads”, st john makes use of a significant range of theoretical stances including bey’s concept of the temporary autonomous zone (taz) to unpack the “fleeting permanence of contemporary counterculture” (2). technomad provides a cultural history of diverse alternative global edmc formations, the techno-underground, whose mobility has been partially facilitated by new digital technologies. the book’s focus is mainly on the nexus between hippy culture and rave culture, which has resulted in the evolution of edm sub-genres such as psytrance. st john divides the book into eight chapters and in the course of the first chapter, which serves as an introduction, quotes from much of the academic literature that explores rave culture. key themes are introduced that are then explored in more depth throughout the book; these include digital technology—both in terms of facilitating diy music production, its role in enabling alternative modes of communication and in framing dance music as a form of resistance used by activists to oppose rampant capitalism; gender issues and environmental issues. a key argument of technomad is that non-commercial forms of edmc are directly politicised by restrictive regulation and subsequently offer alternative spaces for a liminal communitas to evolve. dancecult 2(1)100 the second chapter explores the proliferation of a specific form of rave culture practice, the uk free party scene. the intersection of post-hippy uk free festival traveller culture and acid house music was in part facilitated by the appropriation and subsequent growth of sound system culture, a concept originally developed in jamaica in the 1950s. this chapter explores the growth of mobile dance music sound systems and what st john refers to as ‘traveller circuses’ such as spiral tribe. this nascent free party culture eventually culminated in the festival at castlemorton common in 1992, the event that precipitated the uk’s criminal justice and public order act of 1994. subsequent police attention and legislation had the unintended effect of gradually spreading these cultural practices around europe and beyond. st john notes the influence of various sound system crews as they stage events outside the uk. the third chapter maps the development and proliferation of sound system based edmc scenes in america, canada and australia. the integral role of the sound system in both reggae and hip hop culture has been noted in numerous histories of those genres, but st john successfully explores the key role that sound system practices have played in the global dissemination of particular strands of rave culture. st john then seeks to define the elusive “vibe” of a successful dance music experience, tracing the origin of the popular usage of the term back to the 1967 “summer of love” in san francisco. the study explores the idea that the term may have afro-american origins and connotations of eastern mysticism, “…the term now legion within edmc is used to denote a spatial and temporal experience, a collective and individual happening where a profound sensation of connection and mystery transpires” (99). from this definition various tribal edmc subdivisions are discussed in terms of “vibe tribes”. these tribes are not framed as mutually exclusive but explored in terms of “…a spectrum upon which the vibe may be characterized as libratory and divine at one end, and militant and proactive at the other” (103). the straightforward hedonism and release sought and achieved by many participants in mainstream edmc isn’t explored, as the project of the book is concerned with utopian outlaw countercultures. the various shamanistic/spiritual and activist tribal standpoints are explored in some depth offering useful insights for researchers interested in contemporary cultural anthropology. the author then explores a wide-ranging history of carnivalesque counter-cultural tribal gatherings, from san francisco’s golden gate park to the burning man. these ‘temporary alternative zones’ (or taz’s) and countercultural dramas are framed as “alternative futures”. the themes of spirituality and activism mentioned above inform the next two chapters. in chapter five technomad explores the intersection of rave culture and spirituality through an analysis of psytrance culture. st john defines psytrance as “…a carrier of the 1960’s counterculture flowering in the present” (165). he mentions the commercial “progressive trance” scene very briefly, acknowledging that it has ‘significant exchange value’, although it seems unlikely that the concept of the technocult explored by st john would mean much to the denizens of gatecrasher (www.gatecrasher.com; see also moore 2010). the pantheistic values of psytrance culture are discussed and the various occultist manifestations of the “trance ritual” are investigated, “itself a network of deviant and hidden knowledge and practice, from magick, prophecies and shamanism to astrology, esoteric christianity, ufos, http://www.gatecrasher.com reviews 101 and alien abductions, psytrance constitutes a discernable field of contemporary occultism” (169). parts of this chapter would seem familiar territory to readers of shea and wilson’s the illuminatus! trilogy, mainly as st john explores some of the global psytrance events leading up to the millennium and also some bizarre examples of psytrance ideology. for students and researchers interested in the evolution of goa-trance and the cultural practices and beliefs of the psytrance community, this chapter will provide a useful resource. the next chapter explores the harnessing of electronic dance music to a variety of activist agendas. these include anti criminal justice bill protests and reclaim the streets events. st john notes that “official” culture seeks to limit the dangers of carnivalesque excess, whilst recognising that carnival has a role in maintaining the equilibrium necessary for capitalism to thrive (presdee 2000). activists in turn have noted the dissident energy within the insurrectional dance-carnival and utilised it as a feature of contemporary protest and direct action. the implication of edm in a wide range of progressive and occasionally militant courses of action are explored; st john uses the neologism “protestival” to categorise these events of “radical conviviality”. initially the protestival was concerned with the regulation of dance music culture, but has since been harnessed to a range of different causes. the protest-carnival template has proliferated globally, partially facilitated by the internet. this leads to an interesting exploration of the intersection of activism, theatre and carnival in australia, the techno-tribes and sound systems discussed are concerned with injustices to both the aboriginal population and the environment. australians refer to outdoor edm events that synthesise transgressive, anarchistic and ecological sensibilities as “doofs”. the mobile sound system counterculture or “doofscape” discussed in this chapter is concerned with establishing valid links with the aboriginal population and seeks a respectful relationship with both the indigenous population and the land. the final brief chapter summarises the project of the book, to unpack the cultural politics of electronic dance music scenes. in many ways technomad achieves this successfully, although the focus of the book on the “outlaw” aspect of edm omits a significant range of practices and participants in edmc. however, as a contribution to the understanding of globalised dance music culture technomad offers many useful insights, both in terms of cultural anthropology, neo-religion and spirituality and the potential for edm as a form of activism. this exhaustively researched and meticulously crafted book provides a significant resource for all those interested in contemporary popular culture. references bey, hakim. 1991. t.a.z. the temporary autonomous zone, ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism. brooklyn: autonomedia. d’andrea, anthony. 2007. global nomads: techno and new age as transnational countercultures. london/new york: routledge. moore, karenza. 2010. the british ‘mainstream’ post-rave trance scene: exploring emotional and spiritual expression amongst ‘crasher clubbers’. in s. collins-mayo and b. pink-dandelion (eds.) religion and youth. aldershot: ashgate. presdee, m. 2000. cultural criminology and the carnival of crime, london: routledge. shea, robert, & wilson, anton. 1998. the illuminatus! trilogy. london: constable and robinson. dancecult 2(1)102 sonic warfare: sound, affect and the ecology of fear steve goodman cambridge: the mit press, 2010. isbn: 0-262-01347-9 (hardcover), 978-0-262-01347-5 (paperback) rrp: us$96.95 (hardcover), us$35.00 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.09 tobias c. van veen mcgill university, canada rave culture has long known of the power of sound to seduce bodies into becoming particles of a movement. dancer and dj become but one conduit of a feedback loop that affects the physical and the psychic. ecstasy, fear, horror, awe and excitement, as well as melancholy, nostalgia and transcendance form the connective tissue of the event. focusing on the “politics of frequency”, sonic warfare seeks to outline how the limits of sound are deployed within “vibration ontology”. goodman overviews military-state and countercultural usages alike, from audio assault weaponry for crowd control to dub audio viruses that transmit the offworld heritage of afrofuturism. an earworm, for example, can operate as an afrodiasporic riff of black noise that functions “as an attractor in processes of group catalysis”(157), such as the mobilization of dance; or, as a preemptive strike by hypercapital that “sets up a structure of allure for products for which you had no desire… because they do not necessarily exist yet” (186). tracing these parallel developments to early 20th century futurism and its “art of noise in the art of war” goodman dismisses the avant-garde camps of noise and silence alike, choosing (wisely) to focus on an ecology of rhythm and to argue for a complex and—perhaps essentially—incomplete philosophical inventory of vibration ontology. as goodman briefs in the introduction, readers looking for a detailed, historical account of sonic warfare should turn elsewhere. it is also worth noting—as goodman himself warns of his “dense theorisation”—that readers looking for an exegesis or comparative study of the text’s many philosophical sources should come prepared for neither. prepare instead for a somewhat chaotic assemblage of theoretical trajectories that zoom in and out of zones “goodman’s development of affect remains indispensible to studies of soniculture” reviews 103 of inquiry, from the futurhythmachines of the black atlantic to the bass materialism of global ghettotech. if that’s an earful, listen and repeat until sedated, for goodman has well adopted the deleuzo-guattarian maxim of conjoining it all with an “and”. fear not radical empiricism! affect and ontology of vibration goodman’s development of affect remains indispensible to studies of soniculture. for goodman, affect is the vibration—the good or bad vibes—prior to organisation into organised feeling (prior to what phenomenology would call intentionality). sonic weaponry seeks to disrupt or enhance the vibrational flux; it is capable of provoking feelings such as fear, dread or ecstasy through its good or bad vibes. goodman details actual sonic weaponry as well as fantastical projects that have promised more than delivered. he also aligns particular electronic music genres with various sonic effects, noting in particular how bass heavy genres—such as dub—generate atmospheres of dread, quipping their bass materialism as the “subpolitical power of music to attract and congeal populations” (172). elements of these theses were developed in goodman’s 2004 article, “speed tribes”. goodman’s approach, which he groups with radical empiricism, mixes the realms of the material and physiological with their often hazy effects upon subjects and cultures—the contested realm of the social sciences and cultural studies. in this respect, goodman develops a materialist perspective for grasping the affective potential of sound, be it the marching drum of the military, sonic cannons fired on insurgent protesters, or wobbly subbass let loose on east london club-dwellers. radical empiricism does not so much eschew cause and effect as much as it claims that effects operate autonomously of cause in an “ecology” of interrelationships (or rhythms and anticipatory echoes). radical empiricism opens the material world to preconscious interpenetration by its bodies (which can be any population, as whitehead’s “actual occasion”), as well as prehensive temporality, where “such an occasion itself starts as an effect facing its past and ends as a cause facing its future” (whitehead, quoted in goodman 152). in short, goodman eschews the a priori claims of phenomenology, substituting the radical empiricism of ecology. this, of course, requires an epistemological claim concerning knowing that which is aphenomenal and asubjective to the world. what we call sound itself is merely the human heard of the spectrum; goodman delves beyond even the ultra, sub and infrasonic, developing philosophies of rhythmanalysis by bachelard, lefebvre and whitehead (though one wishes he had spent more time with lefebvre, who explores the political capacities of rhythmanalysis, and in general less time with deleuze and guattari’s toolbox of usual suspects). in this respect, goodman practices what deleuze and guattari call a “minor science”; he delves headfirst into claims concerning hard science and metaphysical inquiry while suspending their epistemological uncertainty, thereby granting this form of empiricism, for better or for worse, its radicalism. that said, goodman footnotes the moment where his radical empiricism and graham harman’s speculative realism depart, noting his adherence to whitehead’s theories of relation over harman’s insistence on the rigorous conception of the discrete object (ch. 17). yet speculative realism holds intriguing consequences for goodman’s ontology of vibration. could discrete objects mark a particular phase of whitehead’s eternal object? dancecult 2(1)104 here i’ll dive into one particular argument to give a sense of what is at stake in the thesis of vibration ontology. the eternal vibrator goodman does not note if his adoption of the eternal object—which ingresses from pure potential into the real potential of the actual as it vibrates out-of-phase with itself (whew)—departs or concords with alain badiou’s neo-platonism. this becomes all the more significant when goodman talks of whitehead’s “actual occasions”—which are bodies in the general sense—being able to select eternal objects, which is how affective encounters between “discrete actual entities” occur (98). not only does a shadow of the discrete return, drawing attention to how radical empiricism shadows speculative realism, but goodman often writes as if a rhythmic power underpins vibration ontology (he treats audio viruses, or earworms, in a similar fashion, granting them an undefined agency he nearly denies human subjects (149)). in this respect, his adoption of the eternal object approaches a quasi-idealism, or a transcendentalism he elsewhere seeks to avoid. goodman’s radical empiricism, not surprisingly given its theoretical ground, dances around the question of spinoza’s god, i.e., the eternal vibrator. this problem can be recast in terms of politics. while goodman critiques bachelard for seeking equilibrium between counterrhythms (107), he nonetheless accepts philip turetsky’s account of rhythmic synthesis that forms matter into a single body (111). what is the difference between the two? well, for one, it is one of politics, or as goodman sees it, the micropolitics of frequency. goodman conceives of the “ontological ground” as fundamentally turbulent, a rhythmic anarchitecture which: . . . does not dictate the orientation of such a micropolitics; it does not lay down a set of generalizable laws but rather throws up a series of engineering problems. as such, any micropolitics derivable from this base can be only tactical rather than strategic—a war without aims concerned more with disposition and potential movement than ideology, although certainly susceptible to abduction (107). the problem is, of course, with alien abduction. the other always swoops in, alien, capitalist, totalitarian or otherwise viral, an earworm “takeover of the body by an exterior entity” (150) that overcodes tactical movement with strategy, setting up a violent mechanism of control over heterogeneous rhythms, and ultimately, of the “actual occasion” that is the self. like deleuze and guattari’s war machine, the tactical micropolitics of frequency or turbulence remain fundamentally inculpable. of course, we have hit upon the ideology of this position, which is its first generalizable law. its second generalizable law is already expressed above: being concerned with disposition and potential movement precisely is the ideogram of the micropolitics of frequency, its unification or expressed ideology as the perceived good, pre-abduction, of rhythmic anarchitecture. elsewhere goodman writes that “a theory of sonic warfare is particularly fascinated by this turbulent boundary layer between dance and violence” (111). what i understand goodman as trying to argue is that while vibrational control reviews 105 techniques such as sonic weaponry (from dub viruses to military means) seek to control the crowd by unifying it through resonance, thereby dictating it to move as one, at the ontological level its rhythm remains turbulent and nonunified. one can also see dance as a similar assemblage, where the soundsystem unifies differentiated bodies into what kodwo eshun called a “futurhythmachine”. thus, unification is not, in itself, a bad thing, but can be wrought for different ends say that of the military state, on the one channel, or that of jouissance, such as rave culture, on the other. that we are talking of ends and means suggests strategy, however, rather than tactics. this argument is a strong one, and smartly counters adorno’s well-worn conservative moralisms against mass dancing and jazz music, or benjamin’s aestheticization of politics, as somehow fundamentally fascist, questioning whether “aesthetics need be sacrificed at the altar of a political cause” (175). yet, there is a strict problem here: the potential to be unified is evidently inherent to rhythm. more than potential, it is an incorporated possibility before the fact; it is de jure. one could argue just as well that rhythm is fundamentally unified, which is to say one, and that turbulence is an expression of mode. again, this is spinoza’s problem, of the monadic substance of god expressed in the many. it haunts goodman’s text throughout, significantly with the undefined agency of the audio virus or earworm and the supposedly uncontaminated and interiorized body it penetrates by communicating the instruction “record me!” (150). a more ecological sense of interior/exterior would be of use here, of the earworm within that would whisper the effects of consciousness, suggesting the always already incorporation of alterity. in short, to the question: what concept of memory is compatible with the illogic of affect, the virtuality of the past and the active immanence of futurity in the present? one could reply, différance, insofar as derrida speaks of an absolute past, force, and the technics of the sign—the trace—before the re-marking of intentionality. and/or the logic of the supplement, otherwise known as incorporation, of that which is extraneous but necessary (that which is added after to make the thing whole from the start). derrida’s work on husserl could bridge the divide to deleuze and forms the unthought (or unsound) to goodman’s investigations. the political question of unified rhythm is raised by lefebvre, as well as deleuze and guattari, the latter whom grasp the state as the superposition of waves, a wave that cancels itself out (see van veen 2010: 183). superposed waves become a flat line that masks their turbulence, posing an entire problematic of perception, as well as form/content, ecological or otherwise, within rhythmanalysis. to this end, in the production of space, lefebvre even cautions against overstating the parallelism between hydrodynamics and theory (184). of course, goodman adequately argues a radical empiricism that claims all as rhythmic; it is a materialist theory of rhythm through-and-through that charts sociopolitical effects from the axioms of vibration ontology. which is to say the critical objection to goodman remains here. utilising vibrational ontology to script (or prescript) the political will of populations—or rather rendering viral such will, and “mapping” populations as preconscious rhythmic assemblages—dovetails neatly with 20th century second-order cybernetics as well as hypercapitalist (and fascist) strategy. unquestionably, such strategies—strategies as they serve political endgames— dancecult 2(1)106 are powerful. goodman demonstrates how they work in the world. yet they also do not work so well; no population has yet been adequately controlled (or so we perceive…). and undoubtedly this is also goodman’s point: that turbulence is a priori, that turbulence remains, in short, as a “subpolitics,” as it cannot be prescripted, even as resistance (175). it could be “abducted” in any direction. and in this sense, i agree with goodman, for his rhythmanalysis leaves us with a population (and a universe) that is without content, much like paolo virno’s conception of the multitude, or lefebvre’s analysis of the urban as form. yet, the alien, as all the sci-fi nightmares of horrific innards warn us, is always within. abduction occurs from within this same ontos; we abduct ourselves, unknowingly, aliens to ourselves. which leaves the question hanging: what is this uncanniness of the alien, its strange eternal return as the virus of our becoming? in short there is always an untimely question to the absolute claims of radical empiricism. whereas the virus remains, the material strategies of its dissemination do not; they mutate and change with the technics of history. for a materialist ontology of vibration, is it not, by its own admission, a tactic and not strategy, a viral thought to the metaphysics of eternal ontology? wildstyle ecology in mu-mu land the telescoping rhythm of shifting in and out of this increasingly complex and at times bizarre inventory of sonic weapons, inventions and theories touches upon the wildstyle. at times one wishes goodman would pitch down the rhythm and pause, downsampling more time to his soundbytes. in a particularly captivating passage, goodman fast-forwards a discussion between william burroughs and led zeppelin guitarist jimmy page on the potential of infrasonics; shifts to industrial band and performance artists throbbing gristle and their “infrasonic emitters;” and skips on to discuss the klf’s “audio weapons system” as borrowed by techno duo panasonic (now pan sonic). all this on page 24. as goodman makes clear on several occasions, “a brief overview will have to suffice” (17). yet the overview can be stimulating and a scrappy shot of wake-up. goodman emphasizes the potential of sound, writing how “at the very least, the transduction of bad vibes into something more constructive suggests the need to probe more deeply into affective tonality and the vibrations of the environment” (73). most ravers would agree. references goodman, s. 2004. “speed tribes: netwar, affective hacking and the audio-social”. in franz liebl and thomas düllo (eds), cultural hacking: kunst des strategischen handelns, pp. 139-55. vienna: springer. lefebvre, henri. 1991. the production of space. trans. donald nicholson-smith. oxford: blackwell. van veen, tobias c. 2010. “cities of rhythm and revolution”. in alexandra boutros and will straw (eds), circulation and the city: essays on mobility and urban culture, pp. 155-192. montréal: mcgill-queens up. reviews 107 film music world: donk dir. andy capper vbs:tv (internet documentary), 2009. http://www.vbs.tv/en-gb/watch/music-world/donk phil kirby university of liverpool (uk) this review explores the vbs.tv documentary on the uk electronic dance music style known as “donk”. the genre is referred to by a number of names including scouse house, bouncy house, bouncy techno, bounce or donk. the term bounce will be used throughout the review as the term donk has a pejorative dimension. the style is an offshoot of hardcore techno, which has had a number of variants popular in the north of england. the tunes are around 150 bpm with a four-on-the-floor kick drum, whilst the eponymous “donk” itself is a layered sound or stab that occurs on the offbeat, or “and” of each beat. synthesised musical parts in the tunes are akin to european techno, a stylistic template that has more in common with the sonic palette of 2 unlimited than that of basic channel. some bounce releases feature vocals, or rapid-fire mc’ing in an unashamedly uk regional accent. the focus of the documentary is mainly the blackout crew, although other uk mcs and producers are featured. blackout crew’s 2008 single put a donk on it may have only reached number 91 in the uk charts, but the official video had well over five million hits on youtube, and consequently attracted “mainstream” media attention. the genre is little known outside of the north west and north east of england. indeed, in the north west of england the style is mainly popular in the satellite towns between liverpool and manchester such as st helens and wigan, and towns to the north of manchester such as bolton, burnley and blackburn. the documentary is on initial viewing quite funny, until the realisation sinks in that it is a heavily biased, stereotype-laden snipe at the leisure practices of the white northern working class. the documentary begins by exploring blackout crew’s origins in a bolton youth centre. notably, considering the multi-cultural makeup of most of the towns named above, the only representatives of ethnic minorities filmed in the documentary are the managers of the youth centre (and a promoter later in the video). northern hardcore and its sub-styles have never been of much interest to young black or asian clubbers. the black respondents’ comments in the video are subtitled despite being perfectly comprehensible; indeed this doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.10 http://www.vbs.tv/en-gb/watch/music-world/donk dancecult 2(1)108 patronising use of subtitles occurs randomly throughout the video. the next sequence takes place in burnley, introduced by a series of visual tropes intended to convey a sense of acute urban deprivation. the presenter briefly interviews an ex-mc and questions him on local drug use, this respondent seems to have been included solely as he has been to prison. after some more clichéd camera shots the next respondent offers a more positive view of the town than the earlier montage suggested, despite being repeatedly questioned on the area’s alleged propensity for violence. a bounce producer dj greenie is subsequently interviewed; he responds to questions about the scene’s drug use by coyly stating a comparison to the film human traffic, inferring the use of ecstasy. greenie is questioned on the centrality of steroids to the donk scene, to which he responds, “wigan pier’s full of big lads on steroids”. in the next sequence the documentaryfollows blackout crew to a gig in scarborough. the documentary crew film some sequences outside the venue, one is an interview with a promoter who discusses the problems of booking the band outside the style’s heartlands, describing the southern audience as “more urban, more sophisticated in a sense”. the narrative then returns to bolton, signified by a montage featuring a pie shop, a tanning salon, a tattoo studio and a barbershop. after more interviews the focus shifts to a blackout crew performance at wigan pier, but not before another montage including a camera shot of a local newspaper headline proclaiming wigan thug beats mum to be and yet more shots of fast food shops. footage of young males being checked for weapons with a hand-held metal detector is included to connote a threat of violence. the next sequence sums up the overall tone of the documentary, despite the friendly interviewees and carefree enthusiasm of the pier’s crowd, the documentary team can’t resist sniping at the provincial working class audience, “as the night went on hundreds more fake-tanned, steroid-pumped donk enthusiasts filled the floor, tongues blue from drinking wkd”. as the blackout crew perform, the presenter then comments that the music starts to sound like being trapped in a nail factory, before paraphrasing joseph conrad’s heart of darkness, “what you see here is the beating heart of donk, the heart of donkness, oh the horror, the horror”. to bookend the video the documentary team return to bolton the next day to interview one of the blackout crew mcs. as a product of the vice media group the documentary has a pre-ordained agenda to be mildly controversial and to come across as edgy gonzo journalism, hence the underlying fixation with drugs, violence and urban deprivation. this subtext is reinforced by the “quite funny, until the realisation sinks in that it is a heavily biased, stereotype-laden snipe at the leisure practices of the white northern working class” reviews 109 connotations supplied by the montage sequences and the chosen edits. the documentary team are given a consistently friendly welcome and open access to the scene by all whether practitioners or clubbers yet still choose to mock the northern working class whenever possible. this isn’t a highbrow dance music style, but then again neither are grime or funky (uk garage sub-styles), which are generally treated with some degree of reverence by the british media, possibly as these styles initially emanated from the south of england and have greater perceived (sub) cultural capital. other related media coverage demonstrates this bias. the guardian newspaper included a brief feature on donk in 2008 (by a vice contributor) which had the headline, “bouncy techno meets terrible rapping? welcome to donk. keen on sportswear? prone to taking your shirt off in clubs? donk is made for you” (mcdonnell 2008). in a promotional article in the metro newspaperthe producer discusses the making of the vbs documentary: the most shocking element was just how massive most of these dudes were. they all had their tops off and the drugs are paramount. they take ecstasy, steroids, a bit of cocaine and then blue or red alcopops. we’ve been making a load of films recently, including one about cannibals in liberia, but there were bits of donk that were just as scary—like being the only sober ones among 3,000 ravers on steroids and ecstasy (capper cited by day 2010). the documentary says much about the predominantly middle-class media’s attitude to white working class britain and specifically london-based media’s attitude to the north of england. the selection of material, the content of the montages and the editing reinforces entrenched stereotypes concerning the north of england and white working class leisure. the documentary is augmented by a vice article on the making of the programme, which is noticeably more scathing than the documentary. for example, in a passage describing burnley the writer states the following hyperbole: what used to be a prosperous cotton-mill town is now decimated by the terminal decline of industry, with entire square miles of housing steel-boarded-up, repossessed and marked for demolition by the local council. unemployment is all-consuming, violence is a popular pastime—as is the rampant theft of expensive copper pipes from condemned houses to sell as scrap to pay for heroin and crack. it’s practically a ghost town these days, but instead of headless cavaliers with chains clanging around their wrists and ankles, there are gaggles of toothless, skeletal smackheads waddling around in skid-mark-stained tracksuit bottoms. actually, scratch that—it’s more zombie town than ghost town (hodgson 2009). obviously, burnley isn’t that bad, although if you look for that kind of social deprivation it can be found in many urban centres. crack and heroin use are not exclusively northern pastimes and neither is violence. another example of tabloid journalism in the vice article is the following statement describing the crowd in wigan pier: the crowd was a mixture of skimpily dressed, emaciated rave bunnies and some of the most gruesome thugs you’d ever come across—blokes whose faces had been dancecult 2(1)110 permanently disfigured by a lifetime of being pummeled by fists every weekend, who’ve probably washed down massive doses of steroids with gallons of stella for breakfast every morning since they were 11 years old (hodgson 2009). although the vbs.tv documentary is aimed at popular consumption, it does raise issues of academic interest other than media representation. there is potential for further academic research on the various dance music subcultures that have blossomed in the north of england outside of the metropolitan centres. an example of an interesting piece of previously published work on northern dance music culture is ingham’s (1999) listening back from blackburn: virtual sound worlds and the creation of temporary autonomy. this is a brief but fascinating study of the warehouse party scene that blossomed in the blackburn area in 1989-1990. northern soul has now achieved a mythic status and has received some academic attention, but the audience demographic was very similar to that of bounce nowadays, as were the audience demographics for the other hardcore house and techno variants that preceded bounce in the same geographic area. linking these styles historically could be socially and culturally revealing. references day, james. 2010. “donk is the crazy dance sensation taking over the north-west of england”. metro, 31 march: <http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/819812-donk-is-the-crazy-dance-sensationtaking-over-the-north-west-of-england>. hodgson, jaimie. 2009. “put a donk on it”. vice. <http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n2/htdocs/ put-a-donk-518.php>. ingham, james. 1999. “listening back from blackburn: virtual sound worlds and the creation of temporary autonomy”. in living through pop, ed. a. blake, 112-128). london: routledge. mcdonnell. john. 2008. “bouncy techno meets terrible rapping? welcome to donk”. guardian online. 29 july: <http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2008/jul/29/ bouncytechnomeetsterribler>. “the crowd was a mixture of skimpily dressed, emaciated rave bunnies and some of the most gruesome thugs you’d ever come across—” http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/819812-donk-is-the-crazy-dance-sensation-taking-over-the-north-west-of-england http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/819812-donk-is-the-crazy-dance-sensation-taking-over-the-north-west-of-england http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n2/htdocs/put-a-donk-518.php http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n2/htdocs/put-a-donk-518.php http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2008/jul/29/bouncytechnomeetsterribler http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2008/jul/29/bouncytechnomeetsterribler reviews 111 speaking in code dir. amy grill usa: square productions, 2008. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1474864/ tobias c. van veen mcgill university, canada you can still smell the revolution a bit, you know. —modeselektor with the proliferation of digital film technologies, i’ve been waiting to witness a film that captures the obsession and exuberance of the worldwide technoculture. by techno i have a specific meaning in mind. with the collapse of north american rave culture thanks to 9/11—which, among other things, disrupted vinyl distribution as well as introduced draconian police powers that were deployed everywhere against autonomist enclaves—djs, producers and adherents of the house and techno sound fled the states. this remains an undocumented exodus of creative luminaries. though montréal served, for a few years, as a nexus of technoculture thanks to the mutek collective—many of my canadian comrades moved to montréal around 2002—it was berlin that soon overcame all comers. easy travel within a united europe, cheap living and the fierce protection of personal freedoms made berlin not just an inexpensive and convenient place to live, but made it (along with barcelona) the place to imagine collective cultural anarchism. the jouissance of deep, psychedelic, minimalist or maximalist techno betrays not only this yearning, but its reality, which is what few north americans realise. berlin and barcelona, though each fighting their battles against gentrification, are singularities of the way things could be. perhaps even should be. amy grill’s film captures something of the meaning of techno to berliners. techno is not just clubbing catharsis; it is the soundtrack to the fall of the wall. as a few interviews (and deleted scenes) explain, when the wall fell in 1989, the centre of berlin opened into unoccupied and stateless space. ravers crept in, setting up technoclubs in bunkers and buildings. the infamous tresor was such a space; today berghain upholds the tradition. signs of this sociocultural renaissance appear everywhere in this film, where modernistdoi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.11 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1474864/ dancecult 2(1)112 inflected graffiti, inside and out, signifies resistance to speculation in property values. already, there is much to film: the relation of a free europe to the policed urbanism of north america; a thorough updating of the afrogermanic detroit/berlin axis wrought back in 1990; and the development of the later cross-atlantic dialogue with montréal, diving south in this regard, with mutek’s mexico and chile editions. though digging into berlin, and touching upon barcelona, speaking in code falls somewhat short of investigating the planetary potential of this techno matrix. focusing on grill’s hometown of boston, and her ex-husband david day’s struggle to produce technoculture in a town that mostly doesn’t care (like the rest of the conservative us), the film often forgets to provide some much-needed context to this mini-cultural revolution. after a few starts, it settles down on german labels bpitch control and kompakt, as the personal lives and meteoric careers of modeselektor and the wighnomy brothers become central to the narrative. both duos have to deal with celebrity and stress, as they find themselves gigging constantly, with modeselektor playing to tens of thousands at barcelona’s sonar festival. the massive scale of sonar is well contrasted to david day’s burnt-out efforts in boston, where day eventually loses track of his community, driving his new afterhours loftspace into the ground (at one point, he talks of putting on events night after night after ‘getting everyone else [i.e. his fellow artists!] out of the building’). a few other technorati make appearances, including the ever eccentric and incredibly inventive monolake, a.k.a. robert henke, prime programmer of ableton live and dub techno composer, whose spartan, all-white loft matches, without irony, his all-white techno outfit. another memorable appearance is that of music journalist and dj philip sherburne, who strives to explain, in an incredibly touching moment—he breaks down on camera— the true significance of hearing and what it means to him, thanks to his relationship with his deaf father, who received a hearing implant a few years before his death in 2005. indeed, philip’s ever articulate and composed persona is a highlight of the film; one wishes there was more from this evocative american writer. likewise, the ever elusive wolfgang voigt—an acid house-era techno producer and owner/operator of the kompakt empire—appears in fine form, situating “cultural techno” as not only still a part of ecstatic rave culture, but as a step beyond—a form-of-life. you will find more years to say something without words. —modeselektor reviews 113 the artist set-pieces of speaking in code are beautifully composed. each taps deeply into the ups-and-downs of living-and-breathing technoculture. the wighnomy brothers are exceptional; they live in the six person “small communist collective” of freude-am-tanzen, sharing equally in profits and running their own label, work/live space and distribution out of the small, mostly rural town of jena in former east germany. yet one wishes that the film went deeper still. when the very lovable, teddy bear-like robag wruhme of the brothers decides to take a breather from the relentless touring schedule, his absence remains something of a mystery. as a former technoculture journalist, i can’t help but think of what to ask him. i’d ask him if he misses his commune—surely, because he has spent his life, up to that point, working and living in an autonomist collective? to be thrown headfirst into the hypercommercialism and opportunist corporatism of mainstream european techno-pop culture must have been a dilemma—if not a cultural shock to the system. at sonar, massive digital billboards advertise alcohol, as if by bastardized simile they have overcoded the absent artistic visuals (look closely during modeselektor’s set). i’d hypothesize that wruhme’s retreat signifies that not all are comfortable with what “successful” technoculture has become. yet, the film only glances over divided yet interconnected levels of technoculture in europe. some are quite literally underground; the incredible muna club in jena reclaims a wwii-era rocket factory. an entire dimension of the ritual denazification of this space through dance is left uncommented. then there are the arena festivals of cigarette sponsorship bound by chain-link fences. the very opening of the film, for reasons that are left unexplained, rolls with some rather uninspiring footage of a dutch techno festival. as the camera enters through the vip gate, a sea of garbage and burnt-out bodies meets the eye, everyone seemingly unaware of the destitution of their camp-like surroundings… this is a fenced-in wasteland of the wasted, yet it is presented, without critique, as a tease of what’s to come. is this wasteland symbolic for something else in this film? well, yes. the evident struggle between technoculture’s collectivism and its commercialism, its schizoid, yet symbiotic relationship with corporate entertainment, is sacrificed to amy grill’s focus on her disintegrating relationship with david day. choosing “speaking in code shows that technoculture can be a communal, lifelong adventure in art, music and living, achieving escape velocity, at least for the inventive, from its youthful escapism and burn-out hedonism” dancecult 2(1)114 to narrativise her failing relationship with an always-omniscient voice-over, grill never places herself before the camera, even as she captures day in all his darkest moments. the film’s gaze does not match its voice; the director indulges in a selective narcissism, revealing only a strangely affectless narration to what is left unseen. by the end of the film the pair are divorced and what begins as an aside becomes the film’s peroration. their disintegration into divorce eschews cinema verité, embracing instead the conventionality of reality tv. what is more intriguing is all that is left unsaid. for example, why is montréal only mentioned once and the mutek festival never mentioned at all? north america is depicted as the graveyard of electronic music, yet there is no mention of the cities where technoculture has survived. also absent are vancouver’s new forms festival and seattle’s decibel. and then there’s detroit—its festival and heritage left unheard and unmentioned. the same can be said for san francisco, chicago, nyc and the midwest. this not only leaves the average audience unawares of the states’ founding as well as continuing contribution to electronic music, but it also leaves the current depiction of berlin’s technoscene and boston’s lack of it—despite day’s valiant attempts at a brief flowering—as somewhat hollow and meaningless. the united states lost something with 9/11—the total expression of a generation, silenced off the airwaves, policed and beaten down, denied even the nostalgia granted to punk. rave culture was not only underground; it has now been buried in the us, as if it never existed, as if the blurring of gender and colour and dance never happened. which brings me to the inevitable but essential question of representation. though ellen allien appears as head of bpitch control, speaking wonderfully of the emotive aspect of techno and the supportive atmosphere she strives to create in her label collective, she remains the sole woman onscreen. but most embarassingly, there is not one single black person in the film. one would think techno was invented and played solely by white people in berlin. in fact, the only reference to techno’s heritage in black detroit is a symbol, worn as a badge of respect by modeselektor. during their massive but ad-ridden sonar concert, sebastian szary wears an underground resistance t-shirt. good for him. full disclosure. i like others am a ghost in this film. i saw it being filmed. i’ve djed in many of the same places. i know and love most everyone in it. i love the music. it is difficult, in this respect, to write critically, especially given the usual laudatory press. but ditch the melodramatic divorce narrative and you have a documentary of profound intimacy and insight into the fragility of collective creation. speaking in code is a snapshot of a radical soniculture attempting to achieve a strange kind of equilibrium in the 21c. both henke and voigt say the same thing: they don’t see the need for change. but it’s more than that. speaking in code shows that technoculture can be a communal, lifelong adventure in art, music and living, achieving escape velocity, at least for the inventive, from its youthful escapism and burn-out hedonism. sometimes divorce is necessary for radical togetherness. reviews-typeset reviews we call it techno! a documentary about germany’s early techno scene and culture. maren sextro and holger wick. sense music & media, media atelier, germany, 2008. sensedvd02. rrp: £16.49 doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.11 hillegonda c. rietveld london south bank university (uk) the documentary we call it techno! provides a german perspective on the development of electronic dance music to both a german and english-speaking audience through subtitles and the choice of an english voice-over. based on interviews with key people in the scene, it tells the story from the definition of post-punk electronica from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. there are two parts. the main film is illustrated by rare archive material from private collections of participants and key people of the developing scene. the second part consists of interview excerpts and additional interview material. the following djs, party concept designers, club promoters, label managers and record shop workers, all male except one, took part: alex azary, andreas rossmann, armin johnert, ata, boris dlugosh, claus bachor, cosmic baby, dimitri hegermann, dr motte (of early love parade fame), elsa for toys, frank blümel, hell, jürgen laarmann, mark reeder, mike ink, mijk van dijk, ralf niemcyzk, sven väth, talla 2xlc, tanith, thomas koch, tobias lampe, triple r, upstart and wole xpd. the interviewees benefit from their maturity and their insights gained over decades, while the use of the german language produces a deeply reflective mode. in particular, mike ink places the scene’s idealism in a wider historical-materialist perspective, while azary observes that, “techno expresses the emotion of today’s times best of all, basically the blankness of society”. the resulting documentary is a serious self-searching narrative that demonstrates that the term techno was very much the electronic sound track of the millennium. the narrative starts with the introduction of the term techno as early as 1984 by talla in a frankfurt record shop called city music, to indicate “music created technologically”, such as “new order, depeche mode, kraftwerk, heaven 17, then later front 242. i actually filed everything under techno. and people liked it” (talla). this was followed by the techno club, set up by alex azary and talla, which hosted postpunk electronic bands, the neuewelle (new wave), like d.a.f. (deutsch amerikanischefreundschaft) and nitzer ebb. this club night became a hot spot for electronic body music (ebm), a sound that was led by the belgian front 424. it also inspired the establishment of specialist magazine frontpage that self-defined the merging techno scene. initially the club attracted suburban males, until djs like sven väth, who developed his career in this frankfurt scene, moved away from industrial and ebm to embrace american techno and acid house. berlin had been physically segregated from west germany, until the fall of the wall in 1989. according to tanith, the electronic experiments by german pioneers, dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(1) 2009, 142-56 issn 1947-5403 ©2009 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ such as klaus schulze, were effectively forgotten by a younger berliner generation that mainly listened to guitar rock. until the arrival of techno-house from the us that is, which sounded more fun than the aggression of ebm. acid house was introduced there via the radio shows of monika dietl, which were listened to on both sides of the berlin wall. when the wall came down, an extraordinary festive period emerged in berlin, which brought together creative talents from east and west germany. from this, the love parade emerged, in the summer of 1989, consisting of a sound system on a truck, playing acid house and detroit techno. the title of the documentary refers to a popular track of this period, “call it techno” (breaking bones 1989), an electro freestyle track by brooklyn-based dj frankie bones. its musical influences seem to cover a wide range of electronica, including kraftwerk, klf and afrika bambattaa, while an electronically treated vocal summarises a history of techno from an american perspective. the documentary’s version of techno’s story is different from the usual one, of how detroit dj producer derrick may and british entrepreneur neil rushton marketed detroit’s electronic dance music as distinct from the chicago house sound in 1988. it becomes quite clear that techno was indeed a concept, a sign of the times, which inspired people in europe and the us in parallel fashion. the documentary subsequently charts the experience of young people devoting their lives to the party scene, which went into overdrive during the early 1990s: its idealism, its creative energy, the flaunting of hegemonic common sense in terms of lifestyles and regulations and the sense that a revolution had occurred, a break in history. more women became involved and footage reveals a distinct difference in gender relations. 1980s footage from the technoclub shows an all male punk mob; while in footage from the early 1990s one sees boys and girls with happy grins, taking ecstasy pills, travelling from city to city to follow their favourite djs. each city seemed to have its own distinct approaches to this party phenomenon, some supporting the super star dj and others being much more about the music itself, the crowd and the experience. techno, in this version of events, accommodates a clear break in german history: pre1989 techno as post-punk electronica, angry, macho, full of fear and loathing; post1989 techno as fun, celebratory, camp and queer. from this melting-pot of ideas, eventually a german trance aesthetic emerged, again first in frankfurt, with dj dag and sven väth, which further developed in the techno-trance scene that revolved around the berlin love parade. in sum, this dvd corrects the anglo-american hegemony on the history of electronic dance music with a unique collection of images and interviews. it is therefore a must in the collection of anyone who studies and enjoys electronic dance music. references frankie bones. 1989. call it techno. breaking bones records (12-inch). bbr-400. usa. various. 1988. techno! the new dance sound of detroit. ten records ltd (10 records) uk // 303 322-406. dixg 75. virgin schallplatten gmbh. germany. reviews 143 lost and sound: berlin, techno, und der easyjetset. tobias rapp. suhrkamp, frankfurt am main, 2009. isbn: 3518460447 [german only] rrp: €9.50 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.12 sean nye university of minnesota (usa) “a new berlin is emerging – and nobody is noticing” (p.9). the first line of rapp’s lost and sound. berlin, techno und der easyjetset clearly states the motivation behind the book: the need for an update of berlin techno. rapp is well situated to write such an update. he reported on berlin nightlife for many years as the editor of one of berlin’s leading newspapers, die tageszeitung. the first line also indicates that techno is no longer the focus of the media, since most scholars and journalists associated the berlin techno-scene with the love parade. given this relative invisibility, it might come as a surprise that berlin has become a center of the international techno-scene like never before; from the concentration of print media to the conglomeration of expat musicians. can it be that techno is also the soundtrack of the zero years, as rapp calls this decade? rapp answers affirmatively – at least for berlin. however, the role of techno has changed. rapp aims to pinpoint exactly what these changes are. he asserts, “this is also not the east-berlin of the nineties, that adventurous playground forming the backdrop of the love parade, with its flamboyant dancers on walls that still bore the marks of history” (p.33). the book primarily concerns itself with the innovations of the zero years. four aspects form the core of his investigation: 1. the move of the scene’s locus from the friedrichstraße/leipziger straße club mile of the 1990s to the friedrichshain/kreuzberg club mile of the zero years. 2. the new mood of the scene in the post-love-parade age (after the love parade was canceled in 2004 and 2005 and definitively moved to the ruhr valley in 2007). the first techno generation is aging but remains active; simultaneously new generations of techno activists are emerging. 3. the development of a new form of techno tourism and club management through bargain airline travel such as easyjet. 4. the replacement of hard techno (tresor label) and pop techno (low spirit label) as the dominant berlin sound by minimal as the sound of the zero years. as his first focus, rapp describes berlin’s new club mile, which consists of a range of clubs, including berghain, watergate, maria, weekend, that in fact spread over five kilometers along the banks of the river spree. these banks form the border of berlin’s two famous countercultural districts, friedrichshain and kreuzberg, underscoring their continued importance for city nightlife. rapp emphasizes that in terms of style and location, the new clubs differ markedly from the old clubs, for example ewerk, bunker, and the old tresor and wmf. the old designs were innovative and playful, but also provisional. the owners knew the locations were likely to be bought out by developers. nevertheless, this club mile prepared the ground for the rise of 144 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 techno in berlin and for the exceptional success of the love parade. the route of the love parade in front of the brandenburg gate was not only of historical importance; it was also crucial for tourism. the parade drew masses of tourists, who also took part in the club events of the berlin love week surrounding the parade. the entrance fees were jacked up and the number of clubbers always overwhelming, guaranteeing big profits for the clubs. until 2003 the love parade and the associated love week were the most prominent examples of international club tourism. even without the profits of the love week, however, the new club scene is financially well situated. most clubs now have long-term rent contracts and are richly equipped with the latest sound systems, with, for example, the club berghain named as “best club in the world” in 2009 by the british magazine dj-mag. the scene is now even more international, considering the number of expat musicians living here, most prominently richie hawtin. yet without the media event of the love parade, this new scene remains relatively unknown. the diary of a typical club-week frames the book’s analyses and assists in presenting the mood of the new underground, which is rapp’s second point of focus. the club-week begins on a wednesday and ends (perhaps) the following monday. interviews with various protagonists – djs, youth hostel managers, rave mothers, and club owners – enliven rapp’s analysis. rapp’s journalistic reports are a diverse mix of cultural, sociological, and economic analysis. his third point of focus is the entanglement of the scene in international networks. he emphasizes this interdependence through the new economy of club tourism, made possible by bargain airlines. rapp writes, “the easyjet-raver is the definitive subject of european nightlife of the zero years. he came, without a grand announcement, and has developed into the most important subcultural figure of the present” (p.78-9). rapp explains how the combination of new bargain airlines on the one hand, and berlin’s economic crash after the optimism of the nineties, on the other, allowed for the emergence of this new european subject. the easyjet-raver could both fly on the cheap and visit an exceptionally cheap city. indeed, the failure of berlin’s plans for an economic revolution following reunification meant that, compared to cities like london or paris, berlin remains a bizarrely inexpensive metropolis. in short, what has been bad for berlin business has been good for the international underground. the first three foci of rapp’s analysis offer some considerable new insights. however, as an overview of the musical history of the berlin scene the book is less helpful. rapp’s investigation remains bound up with the minimal scene. what for him counts as the berlin sound of the zero years was actually only one of many trends. he does not explain that minimal only came to prominence in berlin during the middle of the decade through the establishment of labels liked perlon and m_nus. rapp dedicates an entire chapter to the minimal dj/producer ricardo villalobos (p.110-120), stating plainly “he is the biggest dj-star of the zero years” (p.110). with that he contradicts his earlier claim that the new scene has no stars, rather “the berlin clubs and their public” (p.12). indeed, throughout the book, rapp repeatedly mentions villalobos so much that he outs himself as a swooning fan and minimal-groupie. he thereby utilizes a trend that had already been purposefully hyped by him and other journalists. rapp even includes a berlin discography, which is a personal collection of minimal hits – beginning in 2003 with, again, a villalobos album. the book thus tends towards the genre of a travel guide and advertisement for minimal, instead of analyzing it as part of berlin techno. reviews 145 furthermore, an examination of the electro and electroclash trends is missing. for his topic, an analysis precisely of these scenes was needed because they played important roles in the first tourist waves during the zero years. if rapp decided villalobos was necessary to include, then an important “star” is missing: namely, ellen allien and her label b:pitch control. she is important precisely because of rapp’s focus on the easyjet-raver and club tourism. she has presented herself as a berlin-dj unlike any other, with her albums stadtkind (trans: city-child) and berlinette and, even more strikingly, through her dvd club-tour-guide of berlin for the time out series. indeed, the material of her musical productions is a crossover between techno and tourism. other equally influential stars during the zero years can also be listed: for example, monika kruse, t.raumschmiere and anja schneider, not to mention paul van dyk, whose continued international stardom resulted in him receiving the landesverdienstorden (land order of merit) from berlin in 2006. to be sure, rapp does examine other branches of the techno scene. there are interesting interviews addressing new media and technology with producers robert henke, philipp sollmann and ben clock. rapp analyzes the debates regarding urban renewal with the example of media spree, a construction project that could have a major impact on the new club mile. he also examines new online forum restrealitaet.de and internet fanzine resident adviser. nevertheless, one would expect a more diverse analysis of the many styles from electro to breakcore that make up the berlin sound. finally, the role of media needs more attention. many pop-cultural festivals and institutions have moved to berlin – print media like spex and groove, the music channels viva and mtv, the popkomm, etc. – a trend that has profited to the detriment of cologne, which in many respects was the pop media center of germany until 2000. such gaps demonstrate that rapp’s attempt to combine a personal diary with cultural analysis is not as successful as he perhaps wished. rapp loses himself in self-absorbed scene life and gossip. too much club jargon and name-dropping takes place, thus making some of the book comprehensible only to insiders. despite these faults, the book offers an important update on berlin techno history. the literature and media that defined the popular understanding of german techno was published more than ten years ago. the following titles appeared in the decisive year 1998: simon reynolds’ energy flash, rainald goetz’s rave, iara lee’s documentary modulations and tom tykwer’s run lola run. perhaps the most internationally well-known german book on electronic dance music, ulf poschardt’s dj culture, appeared even earlier, in 1995. for those whose knowledge of german techno is based on such literature, rapp’s lost and sound will be a helpful update. it makes clear that the history of techno is not over, and rapp is correct that the zero years are an important period in this history. 146 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 psychedelic white: goa trance and the viscosity of race. arun saldanha. minneapolis and london, university of minnesota press, 2007. isbn: 0816649936 (hardcover) 0816649944 (paperback) rrp: us$60.00 (hardcover), us$20 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.13 anthony d’andrea university of limerick (ireland), university of chicago (usa) chromatic variation in ethnographic analysis reflecting a deleuzian turn in social geography, psychedelic white: goa trance and the viscosity of race examines rave tourism in goa through the prism of a materialist theory of race and racial segregation. well-written, erudite and thought-provoking, the book opens with the observation that the mostly white psytrance music fans (also known as goa freaks) arrive at parties only after indian tourists have departed. the author arun saldanha, a belgian geographer of indian descent, expresses his discontentment, “i felt this segregation”, and adds, “this book wants to find out what sort of theoretical vocabulary is necessary to make sense of racism when it is not supposed to be there.” (p.5). the basic question it seeks to answer then is, “what makes white bodies stick together?” according to saldanha, racial segregation is a basic effect from the ethnic profile and profiling of white psytrance fans and backpackers in goa. the book provides a philosophically robust retheorization of race. opposing social constructionism, saldanha seeks to develop a materialist theory of race, centered on the deleuzian concept of viscosity, defined as resistance to flow and perforation. considered for its corporeality rather than representation, race is organized like a machinic assemblage, as instantiated in ritual experiences of the psytrance collective in goa. saldanha demonstrates familiarity with a wide range of philosophical work, including not only deleuze and guattari, but also levinas, goffman and fanon, among other thinkers in feminism and poststructuralism. psychedelic white has gained attention among geographers of race, as a number of book reviews have praised saldanha’s innovative theorization while also questioning its internal consistency at a philosophical level. this review, instead, highlights how this philosophical hypertrophy has created analytical problems in the study of psytrance. within a complex formulation of race materialism, psychedelic white discusses the more proximate notion of “psychedelics”, which saldanha defines as the dynamics of self-transformation enabled by travel, drugs and music. yet, these techniques are examined in relation to the racial background of westerners. in a series of refined reviews on the history of countercultures, orientalism, hippies and drugs, saldanha refers to the creative needs of “white men”, a term repeated ad nauseam throughout the first third of the book. this bias could have been moderated in the light of the anthropological truism that a wide variety of societies, and not only the white west, nurtures more or less complicated relationships with such techniques and devices of selftransformation. as such, the reader may be left wondering how whiteness and psychedelics are causally determined, and, if so, what is the significance and implication that saldanha attempts to address. reviews 147 based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in northern goa between 1996 and 2002 (and again in 2006), the empirical horizon of psychedelic white is constrained within a sharp racial angle, as organized across the book in three analytical sites: the shared experiences of goa freaks, the visual economy of rave tourism, and the politics of location in goa. the philosophical work so interestingly advanced by saldanha results in a racial determinism under which psytrance formations are forcefully examined. political economy is reduced to “phenotype and foreignness” (p.163). “goa freaks are microfascists” (p. 89). the book is permeated with “depressing conclusions”, as saldanha well puts it, following anecdotal analyses of white exploitation, segregation and indifference toward indians. psytrance formations, saldanha argues, have paradoxically thickened rather than transcended racial segregation in goa. the book is thus marked by a predominantly negative assessment of countercultural formations in india. in deleuzian words, psychedelic white focuses on the lines of death traced by this war machine, and says virtually nothing about the emancipatory potential of chromatic variation. some readers may even find that the impressive philosophical apparatus delivered by saldanha tends to lose connection with the empirical reality it seeks to explain. indeed, psytrance freaks are eccentric individuals, often elitist, arrogant and troubled. in a decadent and dystopic scene such as northern goa psytrance, most freaks and backpackers would likely feel more comfortable interacting with phenotypically similar peoples, whereas some individuals may express racist behavior at times. however, the argument that psytrance in goa is essentially reaffirmed through racial segregation would require stronger empirical testing and support. incredibly, important factual questions were overlooked in the book. firstly, psytrance insiders reject tourists – regardless of race – whether in goa or elsewhere. spatial segregation between insiders and outsiders is a basic feature of electronic dance scenes around the world, and goa is no different, for its members regularly attend other scenes interlinked across global countercultural circuits. in this connection, trance (ecstatic) experiences generally occur with no essential reference to issues of racial identity or segregation. internal bickering is pervasive within white psytrance subgroups in goa (p.152), and clashes involving national, generational and class difference are at least as common as those predicated on race. moreover, several indians (and other not exactly white individuals) occupy significant positions in the scene, as djs, party promoters and well-off diasporic fans. mating relationships across racial groups are common, even against india’s backdrop of patriarchy and sexual harassment, considering white females’ frequent complaints about native males. furthermore, saldanha does not account for the violence, exploitation and segregation that some indians explicitly perpetrate against third-world immigrants working in goa. likewise, he neglects that white travelers’ attitude of indifference towards indians is more often than not a simmelian response to the overwhelming demand incessantly posed by street vendors, beggars and sexual predators across india. all in all, edm studies indicate that class, gender and sexual orientation, alongside race, are all important factors in the makeup of electronic dance scenes. the psytrance scene in goa embodies complex multiplicities that cannot be easily explained by means of reduction to a single analytical category alone. as an ethnographic study, the claim that psytrance identity is founded on racial segregation is perplexing, particularly when argued on basis of empirically grounded evidence. no significant discrepancies can be found by cross-checking my fieldwork with saldanha’s ethnography at the level of observed behaviors. at a closer look, how148 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 ever, it becomes evident that saldanha has neglected the cultural point-of-view of psytrance people. in fact, he explicitly states that their representations on transcending prejudice would have misled him; and that he would not have been able to understand white identity in goa by approaching it discursively or psychologically (p.130). instead, saldanha chooses to observe their forms of sociability, at a distance, without ever addressing underlying meanings, intentions and desires. as such, the dismissal of native representations remits psychedelic white to a pre-geertzian moment, strangely resonating with classical british functional-structuralist anthropology. not by accident, in both british and deleuzian versions, subject interiorities become effects of larger social and material structures (machinic assemblages). as a possible remedy, what is the meaning of white bodies sticking together would have been a legitimate, even safer question. in other words, how problematic race actually is according to foreigners and natives in goa would be a question that largely defines the social and explanatory pertinence of a theoretical framework. however, goa freaks and goan villagers rarely speak in psychedelic white. in fact, they become largely incidental against the philosophical apparatus weaved across the book. in its appendix, saldanha correctly notes how difficult it is to interview psytrance freaks in goa, even though he seemed to possess a remarkable ability to socialize with them. conversely, saldanha provides a list of interviewees including a relative majority of indian authorities, intellectuals, journalists and activists, all of whom have been opposed to rave tourism. more widely, in a world of complexities, ethnographers ought to be supple in finding ways to engage, translate and interpret examined ways of life, initially in their own terms of sociability and intelligibility. concurring with saldanha, the locus of truth, as bourdieu puts it, rarely resides at the surface level of discursive representations alone. however, they provide critical clues towards a persuasive account that is both intellectually compelling and empirically accurate. in dismissing the voice of goa freaks, saldanha has paradoxically incurred an act of segregation by only allowing his own representations to speak and prevail. ultimately, the book fails to address a critical counter-hypothesis: psytrance fans reject indian tourists and beggars because they egregiously disrupt psytrance practices. “trance parties” are ritual practices of a quasi-sacred nature by which scene insiders can ritually express their anger and opposition to the modern self, morality and system. logically, those who don’t appear to share or respect the meanings entwined in such countercultural practices and ideologies are deemed unwelcome outsiders. in this light, the book’s main premise – that white freaks reject indian tourists because of their race – is empirically flawed. consequently, its main argument – that foreign countercultural formations in india are essentially reproduced on the basis of racial segregation – must be questioned.  the fact that these are “mostly white” formations struggling with native and alien majorities does not suffice to define them as founded, identified or reinforced by racial segregation. segregation and racism are not the same. psychedelic white must be commended for its philosophical ingenuity. nonetheless, in order to do justice to saldanha’s exquisite contribution to race studies, the book would have benefited from a more nuanced and cautious analysis of psytrance formations empirically and methodologically. it would have been more persuasive by better calibrating its racial determinism vis-à-vis the multiple, complex and polysemous injunctions of global psytrance locally, and particularly by means of a more direct dialogue with the scholarship on psytrance, travel and tourism in india and southeast asia. in battling against social constructionism, psychedelic white has lost sight of the empirical dimension it sought to explain, along with alternative philosophical explana reviews 149 tions. in their double folding, war machines are defined both for their lines of flight and death, as well as for their viscosity and chromatic variation. how to account for race as chromatic variation would have opened up a whole new range of empirical and theoretical possibilities. all along, the fixity of psytrance in northern goa (as in elsewhere) can be assessed as an ambivalent tactic of resistance for keeping the space of creative experimentation, one that is continuously threatened and reinforced by external formations, linkages, and power/knowledge arrangements. global nomads: techno and new age as transnational countercultures in ibiza and goa. anthony d’andrea. london and new york, routledge, 2007 isbn: 041542013x (hard) 0203962656 (ebook) 978-0-415-55376-4 (paper) rrp: $132 (hardbound), $28 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.14 charles de ledesma university of east london (uk) anthony d’andrea is a “transnationalist” researcher who has set out to explore the fissures and contradictions of twenty first century globalisation. global nomads is the end product of six years of field work in the bye ways of alternative cultures, and covers multiple visits to india and ibiza. it is a singular work and an indispensable contribution to a growing body of accessible academia on the curvature of globalisation, critical studies and counter cultures. as well it is an immensely readable ethnography of the lives, passion, habits and thoughts of overlapping sets of “expressive expatriates”, as d’andrea calls them. this label loosely corrals a colourful cast including djs at techno trance parties, traders in textiles at the hippie markets of goa and ibiza, artists, digital developers and international drug dealers. d’andrea defines “expressive expatriate” early on. “as a counterpoint in migration studies, the terms ‘expressive’ and ‘expatriate’ depart with the predominantly utilitarian and essentialized understanding of the mobile subject” (p.7). also weaving through the book is the concept, the global (neo) nomad, which d’andrea suggests is the philosophic base of the expressive expatriate. “many have abandoned metropolitan centres where they enjoyed a favourable material situation” (p.8). but, d’andrea cautions, his expressive, neo-nomadic, alternative subjects are not free of all the trapping of contemporary life nor do they wish to be. he applies foucault’s concept of bio power and judges that these peripheral, although not marginal, social vectors ride in tandem with neo liberal regimes. in the hands of a less radical, committed writer, a cynical edge – end of 1960s countercultural traditions; decimation of 1980s’ rave culture energies; creeping commoditisation of the global trade in goods and artefacts – could undermine such an analysis. but, thankfully, not; d’andrea remains steadfast in spirit and calling. global nomads is a resolutely optimistic work, theoretically fluent and empirically fascinating. divided into five main parts, d’andrea sets out his stall admirably in the opening chapter, “neo-nomadic”, which adds to the multiple voices in the graham st john150 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 edited collection, rave culture and religion, and in various work from robin sylvan and paul heelas, by connecting new spiritualities and techno dance culture with globalization. before nailing neo-nomadic as his defining meta-concept, d’andrea helpfully provides a short overview of critical work on the nomadic per se; using deluge’s famous epithet, “the nomad does not move” to clarify that the neo nomadic need be understood as a state of mind and being, not merely a state of movement. d’andrea begins his field report in la isla blanca – ibiza – with a colourful narrative spotlighting various neo-nomadic lifestyles encountered on the island during peak season. there is yoga teacher nora, clothes retailer rochelle, new age body practices seeker barbara and island long-stay kirk who, like d’andrea, is an anthropologist. a rather bucolic scenario builds of creative types running a busy clock of night time events, markets, yoga and “bio dance” classes, although the picture clouds in the ethnography’s next section with an exploration of the hippie and club scenes in the island’s resort, san antonio. d’andrea charts how conflicts develop in the increasingly commoditised spaces of package tourist density. he less successfully summarises field work conducted at the island’s largest nightclub, privilege, offering few surprises beyond a rather functional listing of expected details and views. we learn too of the antics of the highly extrovert couple who ran club night manumission, and how they ‘performed live’ sex acts during the night. d’andrea is revealing on the club industry economy, its army of bohemian workers who work the club season, and the party promoters behind club profitability. beyond its crass commerciality, he identifies that there are some opportunities where “exceptional parties were able to break through the nationalism that underlies mainstream clubbing in ibiza and become exciting references in the global club scene” (p.107). before heading for north goa, where sound system parties most resolutely weren’t in this mould, d’andrea stops off at point 2 in his transnational research, neospiritual guru osho’s “international meditation resort” in pune, south india. d’andrea is refreshing on this ashram turned “new age resort” as he holds centre ground between the osho supporters, sannyasins, and osho bashers, although the tone is largely one of a distanced disappointment with the commercial direction taken. this section ends with a reminder of the translocal connections between ibiza, pune and goa, three key nodes in a neo-nomadic, counter cultural lifestyle pattern which may take in goods trading, new age therapies, mind altering drug bouts and all night dancing at beachside full moon trance parties. it is goa that d’andrea travels to next and it is here that global nomads truly finds its pace and footing. after setting the scene with a brief history of the tiny, once portuguese-held, south india enclave, and western interest in it, d’andrea launches into a field report on “rebel sannyasins”, trance party promoters; backpackers after sun, parties and drugs; mornings sipping lattes and smoking hash chillums in the famous cafe, the german bakery, and attempts at elucidating information from the traveller freaks and hippy elders at the centre of the action. in an interesting ethnographic aside he finds that “at a methodological level, the politicized silence of freaks constituted a challenge to conventional methods of data collection” (p.189). but d’andrea, in exchanges parallel to those of arun saldanha in psychedelic white, beavers away patiently and soon finds his subjects full of views and stories. one, bojan, believes india to be a land “that is female, round, and the karma yoga instantaneous” (p.193). later in this masterly field report, d’andrea reaches a ravishing climax. the sub section “the techno trance assemblage: aesthetics of power and limit-experience” remains the strongest, most ethically powerful and revealing writing on the psyche reviews 151 delic trance party to date, certainly in an academic context, if not anywhere. so many nights and mornings spent searching for and, on occasions, finding, techno trance parties, has fully rubbed off on d’andrea and, unlike in the more extensive psychedelic white, the reader feels fully and disarmingly there, propelled into the vortex of chromatically varied digital beats aiming to upset and re-constitute subjectivities. locating the trance dance, first as a limit-experience which can ‘tear the subject from itself ’ (p.209), the writing collapses key elements – music, technology, raver psychology, bodily gesture and dance and potent chemical enhancers – into enchanting, hypnotic and critically consistent prose. “trance parties have been designed to engender a magic aura that remits participants into a cosmic temporality” (p.210). d’andrea’s use here of the deleuze and guattarian concept “assemblage” is judicious, not overstated, using a nomadological spirit to generate potency and mystique in the writing; attempting, successfully, to enact in words the process it sets out to describe. no matter, really, that there are one or two factual gaffs in this section. d’andrea, for example, states that the 1980s were a fallow period in the north goa party scene, picking up strength in the early 1990s. not so. djs goa gil and laurent played stupendous, night-long, tranceified electronic mixes at numerous parties in those years, with events attended by many hundreds of revellers. a stylistic weakness is the occasional repetition of phrases and sentences as d’andrea unveils his conceptual framework across various chapters. but this is no surprise given a keenness for publishing finished segments as the research project elapses. d’andrea has simply had a number of go’s at re-defining and re-casting his ideas. this doesn’t detract at all from a book which is thoughtfully crafted, stimulating, syntactically evocative and critically valuable. d’andrea’s study of neo-nomadism in expressive expatriates, his turnof-thecentury field work in multiple nodes where alternative cultures still flourish and, particularly, his sharp dissection of the trance party cosmos, is invaluable material for students of, well, just about any discipline you can imagine which touches ostensibly on globalization, cultural anthropology, neo-religious studies, cultural studies and popular music. feel free to add to the list. breakcore: identity and interaction on peer-to-peer. andrew whelan. newcastle upon tyne, cambridge scholars publishing, 2008. 337 pp. isbn: 1847186572 $60 us (hardcover) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.15 emily d. ferrigno yale university (usa) the study of virtual music communities is a fascinating and timely endeavor, given the widespread phenomenon of “bedroom production”. musical subcultures are often shaped by and mediated through online means, such as forums, chatrooms and list152 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 servs. virtual environments provide vital space in which musical practitioners share creative methods of musical production, define genre, hold aesthetic debates and socialize. virtual ethnographies are not yet numerous, and scholars interested in identity, gender and race as they exist in the virtual realm would do well to consult andrew whelan’s study. whelan’s book is an informative examination of virtual community from the chatrooms of soulseek, a file-sharing application used by electronic dance music producers. whelan focuses on users involved in breakcore, a breakbeat-centered genre influenced by jungle, industrial, and hardcore techno. whelan draws upon the theories and practices of his discipline (sociology), and illustrates concepts with robust sections of ethnographically-culled data, working with a 2100-page transcription of conversational text from soulseek chatrooms over a period of six months, as well as email interviews with producers. whelan’s analytical focal point is chatroom dialogue. he uses textual analysis to illustrate how the individuals in his study define themselves, how chatroom dialogue creates and ascribes musical meaning, and how soulseek users employ discursive cues to identify “insiders” and “outsiders.” in the introductory chapter, as well as in the concluding section of the book, whelan engages with the “rationalization/democratization” debate, a discourse central to his study. he confronts the hypothesis that technology serves to inhibit and ultimately dehumanize music, which stands in opposition to the utopian vision of technology as an agent of social change, allowing the voices of socially excluded groups to be heard (p.24). whelan provides a useful introduction to the peer-to-peer environment and file sharing protocol, and examines the mp3 file (the medium of exchange) as a “sociocultural fetish”. whelan describes how “rip crews” encode new music into mp3 format, “tag” the files, and distribute/disseminate them to the larger community. each mp3 is accompanied by an “nfo” file, which identifies the mp3 and its creator. these files are written in a source code that allows the creator to insert jokes, illustrations, and the like into the nfo. several examples of nfo files are provided in the text. whelan focuses on three practices that he describes as “shibboleths,” or “terms indicative of social location or origin, the use of which therefore serves to distinguish between groups” (p.14). these are the use of 1) nigga/nigger (chapter 5); 2) gay/ghey (chapter 7), and 3) the “amen break” (chapter 8), a widely sampled drum break from the winstons’ 1969 hit, “amen brother”. whelan provides lengthy analyses of textual exchanges in soulseek chat rooms, in which social boundaries are defined and redefined, and multiple conversations occur at once. the use of the terms “nigga/nigger” is presented in the context of “ritual insult exchange,” as well as flatly racist discourse. as whelan explains, “the term [nigga] is embedded within a matrix of ethnic and subcultural identity politics, and as such tells us much about the orientations of those who deploy it” (p.144). he bases his analysis on the use of “nigga” as a style-marker common among us youth, a characterization which is perhaps too superficial to provide the reader with sufficient context for virtual analysis. the verbal presence of “nigga/nigger” in american society is extremely complex, and quite different in its “real world” application, as opposed to the anonymous environment of virtual chatrooms. anonymity presents significant difficulties for social analysis, in that age, race, nationality, and even (spoken) english language fluency of chatroom users may be unknown. the second shibboleth “gay/ghey” is also examined within the context of chatroom discourse. whelan bases his analysis on the concept of “gay” as not only homo reviews 153 sexual, but also encompassing characteristics and ideals rejected by hegemonic masculinity (p.182). noting that, “the ‘joking’ exploration of the semantics of gay is a popular trope among young men” (p.200), whelan presents several examples of chatroom dialogue related to anal eroticism. he then explains the use of “ghey” in the chatrooms to describe something “lame” or “generic” (the homosexual connotation orthographically removed). the discussion concludes with an examination of masculinity, a frequent theme in whelan’s study, given the scarcity of participants identifying themselves as female in breakcore chatrooms. in chapter eight, “junglist,” whelan begins to focus on the music around which his study is centered. he discusses the aesthetics of breakcore via chatroom discourse, addressing polarities such as old school/new school and mainstream/underground. whelan regards the “amen break” as a third shibboleth, a time-honored (and wellworn) sample used in electronic dance music. however, he also highlights the debate within the breakcore community as to whether the use of the amen is creative, progressive, or even interesting. this problematizes the classification of the amen as a shibboleth; while the amen is well known in the breakcore community, its utilization is not a given. perhaps, then, the amen is a shibboleth used to distinguish subgroups from one another, rather than distinguishing the entire breakcore community from outsiders. whelan’s book ends with a lengthy “journey through the media” (p.319), covering a range of topics from sampling ethics and branding, to utopian visions of peer-to-peer culture. whelan characterizes his book as a “collage,” and, in fact, his theoretical discussions are dense, at times unfocused and difficult to follow. whelan’s own ideas are often obscured by his prose style and frequent quotation of others’ work. this also limits the accessibility of the text to specialists, which can be a serious shortcoming when writing to an interdisciplinary audience. in addition, whelan’s engagement with musical analysis is not a strong point of the book. he describes the amen break as embodying “polyrhythmic hesitancy”, the snares “sketching an idiosyncratic, irregular pattern”. like many drum breaks, the amen is characterized by syncopation, a basic feature of funk drumming–hardly idiosyncratic, and, in fact, very “regular”. the reader is not given a particularly clear description of what breakcore and its related genres sound like (beyond the discography). whelan does participate in the breakcore scene (as a chatroom member and perhaps a producer), but the reader is not privy to this information. the inclusion of reflexive ethnography would have added necessary transparency to his study, for when the reader is well acquainted with the author, ethnographic authority and agenda are made clear, and thus can become secondary to the voices of the observed. despite these shortcomings, whelan makes a rigorous contribution to the study of musical culture in the digital age. he delves into an examination of the sometimes crude nature of chatroom discourse, thoughtfully employing textual analysis to unpack the complexities of race, gender and social interaction. whelan’s discussion of the internet, society and identity is enlightening. he introduces the term “networked individualism” in which “identity is organised and expressed through consumption practices” (p.319), whereby participatory and collaborative consumption are encouraged, in opposition to the model of passive consumption set up by the music industry (p.305). this observation suggests that (somewhat problematically) whelan embraces a utopian (and democratic) vision of peer-to-peer file sharing, in which recorded sound is free and open to all–collected, utilized, manipulated and most importantly, shared. 154 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 the high life: club kids, harm and drug policy (qualitative studies in crime and justice volume 2). dina perrone. monsey (ny), criminal justice press, 2009. isbn: 978-1-881798-46-0 rrp: $35 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.16 lucy gibson university of manchester (uk) dina perrone’s study of “club kids” based in new york city presents an illuminating analysis of the cultural and situational context in which club drugs are used. while most literature on drug use tends to focus on users from impoverished communities and the harm they experience, the high life challenges the typical drug user stereotype by showing the “hidden” deviant behaviour of seemingly conformist, affluent and well-educated young adults. perrone opposes america’s war on drugs and argues that the focus of drugs policy should shift from a criminal justice approach (abstinenceonly strategy) to a more balanced response that includes principles from both the cultural and health fields and focuses on the well-being and lifestyles of drug users. the book begins by outlining two assumed flaws in america’s current drug war: that drug users have a pathology, which is the only factor leading to the “drug problem”; and that all illegal drug use leads to harm. perrone challenges these assumptions by asserting that the “...culture and capital of the user and the social environment in which the drugs are used greatly influence use, abuse, and harm” (p.2). chapter one builds on the introduction by providing an overview of how perrone met the club kids and offering initial insights into their lives. moreover, the chapter describes the ethnographic field methods deployed to study the participants’ use of club drugs such as mdma, methamphetamine (crystal meth), ketamine and ghb. the book is based on perrone’s observations, discussion with club kids during fifteen months of fieldwork and interviews with eighteen club kids aged between 22 and 33. the subsequent chapters are separated into two parts: (i) club kids’ dance culture and (ii) drug use among the club kids. the first part examines the club kids as a subcultural group by assessing how they correspond to subculture literature and earlier drug-using subcultural groups such as hippies, mods and skinheads. the book demonstrates that, in contrast to traditional subcultural groups, club kids do not wish to reject the dominant culture, but rather, they adhere to the consumerist norms of conventional american society. club kid culture and the clubbing experience are explored using theories of consumption, commercialisation and globalisation, and by situating the club kids within postmodern theories of the nature of late capitalism. throughout part one, perrone neatly uses the club kids’ perceptions of clubbing, its importance and the suitability of using drugs in club settings to illustrate the fantastical, “carnivalesque” and commodified nature of contemporary club culture. the second part of the book explores the club kids’ patterns of drug use. perrone shows how club kids maintain their jobs and uphold family responsibilities whilst using relatively large quantities of drugs. through their social and economic privileges, the club kids are able to avoid criminal justice sanctions and limit harm. the author employs a theoretical framework, which refers and adds to the prior work of norman reviews 155 zinberg, to describe how factors (drug, set, setting, timing and capital) in club kids’ lives allow controlled and safe drug use. perrone expands on zinberg’s (1984) framework of “drug, set and setting” by adding supplementary concepts of timing and capital drawn from primary data. timing and capital include both club kids’ resources and stages or transitions in the life course. the author demonstrates how a drug’s properties, the setting in which the drug is used, the user’s mood (set), resources (capital) and phase of life-trajectory (timing), shape drug using practices and impact on the relationship between drugs and harm. perrone uses rich and detailed quotations from her respondents to demonstrate how club kids negotiate drug use to minimise harm and avoid criminal justice penalties, while also revealing the larger contradictions in club kids’ lives. chapter seven provides a final discussion of the study’s findings and offers a wider examination of their implications for drug policy in the u.s. perrone pertinently argues that “...socially and economically privileged drug users, such as the club kids, are better equipped to manage their clubbing and drug-using behaviors than are less privileged users...the war on drugs is disproportionately a war on poor people. thus, white, middle-class users are more capable of concealing their drug use and escaping public and police detection than their lower-class counterparts” (p.205). for perrone, the war on drugs has been lost and future policy should de-stigmatise users and help to minimise the harm resulting from drug use rather than concentrate on arrest or punishment. perrone’s study offers a convincing account of the social, cultural and environmental factors that shape drug use among club kids. the book provides a fascinating insight into club kids’ lives and how regular drug users are able to occupy conventional social roles and sustain typical social relationships. however, two minor criticisms remain. although numerous references to relevant work are evident throughout the book, the statement “...cocaine can benefit those with asthma” (p.130) is not supported by academic evidence and readers may want to know the basis for such a claim. moreover, recent post-subcultural literature (e.g. bennett 1999; bennett and kahnharris 2004) has been omitted from the discussion. perrone states that club kids are not a subculture in the traditional sense of the term. yet, she continues to use this term to describe the club kids as a distinct social group. that aside, the book offers a stimulating analysis of club kids’ drug use by highlighting the reasons for clubbing, and exploring club kids’ motivations, and cultural practices. perrone provides a thought-provoking discussion that challenges the majority of literature on drug use. the study is invaluable for students of electronic dance music culture as it questions current failing policy in the u.s. and offers new ways of conceptualising the culture and context of drug use. references bennett, andy. 1999. subcultures or neo-tribes? rethinking the relationship between youth, style and musical taste. sociology, 33: 599-617. bennett, andy and kahn-harris, keith. 2004. after subculture: critical studies in contemporary youth culture. london: palgrave. zinberg, norman. 1984. drug, set, and setting: the basis for controlled intoxicant use. new haven: yale university press. 156 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 dancecult 2.1 reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 2 (1): 90–114 issn 1947-5403 ©2011 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net hip hop underground: the integrity and ethics of racial identification anthony kwame harrison philadelphia: temple university press, 2009. isbn: 1-4399-0060-4 (hardcover), 1-4399-0061-2 (paperback) rrp: us$74.50 (hardcover), us$26.95 (paperback), us$74.50 (electronic) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.05 rebecca bodenheimer hamilton college, usa anthony kwame harrison’s book hip hop underground: the integrity and ethics of racial identification examines the racial dynamics of the san francisco bay area’s underground hip hop scene, with the larger goal of exploring processes of racial self-identification among american youth at a time in which the nation is growing more racially diverse and discourses on race increasingly revolve around an ideology of colorblindness. in his view, the bay area is a good case study for an elaboration of contemporary american racial dynamics because of its uniquely multiracial demographics, which are currently very similar to the projections of a non-white majority population in the u.s. by 2050. harrison’s research is strongly informed by the method of “critical ethnography”, which views the process of ethnography as intimately connected to the interpretation and representation of the findings. in this vein, he describes his decision to become an active participant in the bay area’s underground hip hop scene and to assume two identities, anthropologist and emcee (rapper), despite his initial misgivings that he might be received as an interloper. while critical ethnography is by no means a new method of anthropological research, the level of self-reflexivity here is arguably taken to the extreme with relatively large doses of “autoethnographic narrative” (58). harrison’s second chapter provides detailed accounts both about his personal history with hip hop and the ways he inserted himself into and moved through the bay area underground hip hop scene; however, his discussion of the hip hop group he helped to form, the forest fires collective, seems at times overindulgent. reviews reviews 91 harrison’s first chapter details the emergence of underground hip hop in the mid-to-late 1990s, highlighting the movement’s preoccupation with notions of authenticity, its goals of reclaiming hip hop from the mass corporatization following its crossover into the mainstream, and its contestation of commercial hip hop’s “ghettocentric” representations of blackness.1 he argues that the alternate representations of blackness offered by underground hip hop are accompanied by a more racially inclusive criteria regarding who can lay claim to the practice. nevertheless, despite his suggestions that this more inclusive vision is a progressive tendency, he frequently contests the stated ideologies of his fellow hip hoppers 2—that it is competency, rather than race, that matters in terms of underground hip hop authenticity—by asserting his own view that blackness is still privileged in hip hop and that non-black participants, especially whites, face a more arduous road to establish their legitimacy. harrison’s third chapter provides a good critical summary of the ways hip hop scholarship has articulated the relationship between race, authenticity and claims of ownership, detailing three principal approaches. the first frames hip hop as a distinctly black practice, despite recognizing that non-black youth, specifically puerto ricans, were involved in its emergence and is exemplified by tricia rose’s 1994 canonic work on hip hop black noise. as harrison notes, a host of scholars ( juan flores, raquel rivera) have argued strongly for inserting puerto ricans into hip hop origin narratives. harrison provocatively asks, if we can recognize the role of puerto ricans and other latinos in the formation of hip hop culture, should we not do the same with white b-boys who joined the movement only a few years later? the second approach views hip hop as one in a long line of afro-diasporic traditions in the americas and tends to draw direct links between hip hop and african and/or caribbean traditions. the final approach is an orientation toward contemporary manifestations of hip hop, and a recognition of its creative appropriation by youth across all continents. harrison concludes this review by asserting that the ongoing reification of hip hop as essentially black has obscured a more realistic and dynamic picture of the ways that youth of all colors engage with the practice and that underground hip hop challenges these essentialist notions. harrison’s principal goal is to examine and unpack the ways that underground hip hoppers articulate claims for their own hip hop legitimacy through racial performances of self. departing from sarah thornton’s theorization of subcultural capital and the boundary maintenance that is such an integral part of subcultural scenes, harrison critiques the hegemony of “authenticity”, viewing john l. jackson’s notion of “sincerity” as a better analytic. jackson’s notion “subverts the standard checklist of subcultural capital [markers “ sophisticated and innovative discussions about the racial politics of authenticity in underground hip hop” dancecult 2(1)92 of authenticity] in favor of a personal code of underground hip hop ethics and integrity… what matters most is the perceived sincerity of these racial performances... for the non-black hip hopper, an overzealous display of urban african american posturing, no matter how authentic, is under most circumstances suspected as insincere” (118). while i agree that the sincerity of a racial performance is an important element in the positive reception of a non-black emcee, i do not perceive a big difference between the notions of authenticity and sincerity. harrison’s position that a display of black posturing is authentic but not sincere is not entirely convincing—why would it not simply be considered inauthentic? chapter four puts the notion of racial sincerity to work, as harrison provides examples of white emcees who perform “sincere whiteness” (140). his primary example concerns a white emcee who, during a mos def 3 show, got on stage to freestyle (improvise rapped lyrics). although he was initially booed because of the audience’s assumptions about his competency based on his “bummy white guy” look, the emcee ultimately won over the crowd with his lyrical prowess. harrison astutely states, “had top r not been a sincere white guy…the entire story might have played out differently: no boos, no surprises, no turning of the crowd; perhaps just a great freestyle, which is hardly the kind of thing that gets talked about to any great extent days after the show” (140). while i find this analysis quite persuasive, harrison’s criteria for performing “sincere whiteness” is more problematic: in this and in other instances, he bases his characterization of racial sincerity on physical appearance and fashion choices, noting in particular the white emcees’ “dorky looks” and “bummy shirts” (140). he perceptively analyzes this mode of self-representation as a reaction against past white emcees’ “insincere” performances of racial identity, exemplified in the “wigger” persona,4 that claimed to fully understand the experience of black youth without recognizing their own white privilege. the issue is not only that harrison’s notion of white racial sincerity is fully based on the emcee’s physical appearance, but also the implication that “bummy clothes” are essentially a white fashion and that emcees cannot be racially sincere unless they are dressed in this manner. in his final chapter he provides what i believe is another problematic analysis, when he discusses the sound of an all-white underground hip hop group as “so sincere and self-assured in its whiteness”, precisely because people have described their music as “avant-garde hip hop”, “emo rap”, or “goth-hop” (161). harrison’s argument here seems to reproduce the same essentialist notions of race and culture that he has previously challenged and the reader is left to assume that he would only deem racially sincere those white emcees who mix rap with “white” musical styles or dress like “dorky white guys”. harrison’s final chapter continues elaborating the notion of racial sincerity, although here he offers a rather pessimistic commentary on racial politics in the underground hip hop scene. he recounts a party where the aforementioned white underground hip hop group performed a satire using an exaggerated style of black speech in order to parody the image of the hyper-violent, misogynist “gangsta” rapper that is so often promoted by the mainstream music industry. noting that the audience was predominantly white, harrison describes this performance as a form of “contemporary minstrelsy” (158). however, he reviews 93 then characterizes this analysis as too simplistic, asserting that the group was very aware of a history of white appropriation and racist imitation of black music. he states: i would contend that sole and the pedestrian saw themselves as crafting a tremendously ironic satire of the racial insincerity embodied by... wigger icons of the past. arguably, if we accept that this group... was engaged in a theatrical performance of past white hip hoppers’ exaggerated performances of blackness, this could be viewed as about a profound an expression of white racial sincerity as one might find. however, somewhere within this cauldron of sincerity, satire, and racial symbolism, for me, the circumstantial logic breaks down (160). the reason he gives for ultimately eschewing his own, quite sophisticated analysis and concluding that the performance was a “racial impersonation” (162), centers around the fact that these white emcees were performing for a mainly white audience. however, another perspective might view the performance as quite racially sincere precisely because, as stated by harrison, it was a parody. furthermore, it seems that the key to determining whether the performance reinforced stereotypes or not resides largely in its reception: how aware was the audience of the performers’ intentions to perform a satire? although harrison does not pursue this question, it is likely, following his own discussion of the blurred line between performers and audience in underground hip hop, that the spectators were “in the know” and viewed this performance with a critical perspective. ultimately harrison’s book offers some sophisticated and innovative discussions about the racial politics of authenticity in underground hip hop. however, while he presents various compelling analyses, his final conclusions are at times less nuanced and thus lessen the persuasiveness of his theoretical points. notes 1 the subgenre of “gangsta” rap, in which rappers frequently spin tales of violent and sexual pursuits, is most closely associated with a “ghettocentric” mentality. 2 harrison often refers to participants in the local scene as “hip hoppers”, which i understand to include anyone who engages with at least one of the four principle elements of hip hop culture— emceeing (rapping), dj’ing, break-dancing (b-boying), or graffiti art. 3 mos def is one of the most celebrated and visible emcees in underground hip hop, so much so, that some might not describe him as part of the underground scene anymore. his first album, mos def and talib kweli are black star (rawkus records 1998), was a collaboration with the highly respected emcee talib kweli and in many ways defined the terms of underground hip hop in its critique of the music industry and mainstream rappers who have “sold out”. 4 “wigger” was a derogatory term that emerged in the 1990s referring to white youth who fully adopted the fashion and speech of african american youth for the purposes of gaining subcultural capital, but who were ultimately perceived as having a superficial connection with blackness and not a true investment in the politics of racial equality. dancecult 2(1)94 the local scenes and global culture of psytrance graham st john new york/london: routledge, 2010. isbn: 978-0-415-87696-4 (hardcover) 978-0-203-84787-9 (electronic) rrp: $103.00 (hardcover), $103.00 (electronic) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.06 rupert till university of huddersfield, uk psytrance is not well known or widely understood. the local scenes and global culture of psytrance, edited by leading writer in the field of electronic dance music (edm) culture graham st. john, is the first book to cover this form in any detail. to many, psytrance is lumped together using ill-defined journalistic terms that have little meaning or substance such as “dance music”. this collected volume attempts to unpack the term and explore the field in a more rigorous fashion. st john bookends the volume; his introduction provides a useful assessment of writing on psytrance, whilst providing a contextual framework. he makes a strong case for the need for the collection and prepares the ground for the variety of different approaches that follow. the book is divided into three sections, the first dealing with the roots of the music in goa trance. this begins with luther elliott’s proto-trance history. it makes a strong case that musical roots of psytrance grew not principally from goa but originated in sixties counter-culture, ibiza, house music and acid house. its description of the development of goa trance is rather vague, lacking specific dates, names and interviews with key players. fortunately this is covered in the next two chapters and in any case this is an interesting and well-paced first chapter. anthony d’andrea next provides a spicy taste of the nature of the goa full moon party scene. like several sections of the collection, it prioritises the opinions of the ‘authentic’— the scenesters, the faces, the core members—and allows the flavour of the narrative to be determined by self-appointed spokespeople. indeed many of the writers can be accused of this, related it seems to their immersion in psytrance culture. in some cases the writers have led a psytrance lifestyle and have become interested in writing about their passion. this provides insider knowledge, without which this book would lack credibility, but inevitably means it sometimes becomes evangelical, treating internal psy-perspectives as “truth” and outsider perspectives as “false”. reviews 95 arun saldanha provides the final chapter in the goa section and manages to avoid this trap. his well-written account describes the myriad influences on the goa scene as a meeting point of multiple substreams, a developmental crossroads rather than a point of origin. his use of derrida’s ghost metaphor elegantly blends sociology and ethnography and embeds into psytrance the term ‘communitas’, which returns many times to form a key focus of the book. the sequel to the goa section discusses globalisation, bridging the gap between goa and the growth of psytrance in europe. in fact it is the well-defined and well-written specificity of this chapter by hillegonda rietveld that clarifies the origins of european psytrance and its relation to goa. it names specific recordings and artists, dates and places, building on the earlier chapters which were rather more freeform, reflecting perhaps a goa trance state of mind. in particular this mature chapter gives credit to various sources often overlooked in such histories, such as electro body music (ebm) and klf. charles de ledesma goes on to explore the growth of psytrance in london. there is strong data here and interviews with key players, but this is inevitably a very london-centric ethnography, rather more local than the claimed uk coverage. robin lindop casts a wider net, defining and discussing the music itself, as well as the culture surrounding it. however, without a use of technical musical terminology, this is rendered a little vague. de ledesma does critically engage with the ways in which edm sometimes defines itself as “authentic” in opposition to the “mainstream”, but then goes on to claim that “psytrance is exemplary”. it is similarly contradictory over the subject of genre purity. like the following chapter by joshua schmidt, lindop provides some paradoxes in his writing, but overall provides useful information to the emerging wider narrative. schmidt uses pairs of dichotomies to critically analyse israeli trance. again this is a view from the inside of a scene, shown when it condemns as “chronic” the media’s description of israeli desert trance mesibot as “drug parties”, although it is clear from an external perspective why that description might be used. however schmidt’s work is succinct, well structured and provides a convincing argument. the last of the trilogy of sections weaves in and out of a vague focus on liminal culture. botond vitos begins by providing a rare insight into czech psytrance, although his argument is a little circular, perhaps due to a closeness to interlocutors who had recently and regularly taken lsd, a proximity which he tries to stretch away from instead of embracing. the fact that some of his interviewees described their activities using his own theories of demencze shows a rather acid splintered blurring of boundary between the emic and etic. chiara baldini’s approach is far bolder and more successful, making her position as party organiser clear and embracing material and references with a voice clearly internal to her and to psytrance. she draws upon the psy-spirit of dionysus in an effective correlation with her own experiences. the next two chapters, by jenny ryan and alex lambert, discuss the relationship of the web to psytrance from the perspectives of san francisco’s tribe.net and australia’s oztrance dancecult 2(1)96 community. the difficulty with this work is the use of individual web-posts to represent the views of the group, as there is often inevitably an opposing view that contradicts any point. however the significance of the web to this scene merits such attention, which is especially well presented in lambert’s cultural circuit. the last dance is reserved for graham st. john, who applies his experience and skill as an edm commentator to both reference other chapters and make significant points of his own, providing an appropriate climax to the narrative. st. john’s final chapter is the strongest in the book. it largely focuses on festival culture and on those technomads who travel from festival to festival, making psy-trance a lifestyle choice rather than a part-time activity. this is a recurring feature of the book, which focuses on the intensely committed few, rather the many casual psytrancers. this focus on festival culture feels unbalanced. in many cases the authors show their partisan attitudes and don’t so much struggle to maintain an objective attitude to their subject, as willingly submit to a pro-psytrance attitude. it is unsurprising that some chapters are written by relatively inexperienced researchers, rather than late career researchers with several books under their belts. this gives the work a currency and directness and although one could criticise the text in terms of clarity of emic or etic approaches, this would ignore the benefits that the writers’ proximity to psytrance culture provides. there have been many studies that have pointed out the difficulties western society faces in a fractured world that struggles to resolve issues of community, identity, belonging, hope and the loss of popular rituals that address such issues. studies addressing cultures that seem to be orientated around solutions to these issues, or new approaches to them, inevitably raise difficulties, may be controversial or inconclusive and in a post-meta-narrative world, fail to provide simple answers. however this book’s approach to issues such as communitas provides an engaging and novel approach to such problems. overall then the local scenes and global cultures of psytrance provides a valuable insight into a world-wide movement which has had comparatively little study so far. i am no novice to the world of psytrance, but this book provided a wide range of interesting, thoughtprovoking and informative detail, and is one i can highly recommend as essential reading to any researchers interested in edm culture. “a valuable insight into a world-wide movement which has had comparatively little study” reviews 97 pink noises: women on electronic music and sound tara rodgers durham: duke university press, 2010. isbn: 978-0-8223-4661-6 (hardcover), 978-0-8223-4673-9 (paperback) rrp: us$84.955 (hardcover), us$23.95 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.07 anna gavanas independent researcher, electronic music producer and dj tara rodgers’ book pink noises is a long overdue feminist intervention in the historiography of electronic music. pink noises emphasizes the pioneering, substantial and diverse work that has been accomplished by women but so far remained largely invisible in previous accounts of electronic music development. thereby, tara rodgers starts to correct the century long lack of representation that profoundly underestimates the presence and diversity of expressions by women working with sound and electronic music. the title pink noises (which is also the name of the producer/musician/dj network pinknoises.com founded by the author in 2000) refers to pink in terms of a “marker of female difference”, and noise as a “site of disturbance and productive potential”. tara rodgers also refers to the term pink noises in physics and audio engineering, as “variations of white noise, or unstructured sound that contains every audible frequency”. moreover, tara rodgers introduces her interviews with women artists as pink noises in and by themselves: “sonic interventions from multiple sources, which destabilize dominant gendered discourses and work toward equal power distributions in the cultural arenas where sounds reverbrate” (2010:19). structured as a collection of interviews/ conversations, pink noises documents and explains ground breaking innovations and visions in electronic music production and technology from the perspectives of the pioneers themselves. ground breaking and legendary international artists are interviewed, like pauline oliveros, kaffe matthews, giulia loli (mutamassik) and chantal passamonte (mira calix). the book is structured into six themes in electronic music; time/memory; space/perspective; nature/synthetics; circulation/movements; language/machines/embodiment; and alone/together. from a variety of different angles, rodgers and her interviewees disentangle assumptions that cast technology and music—and electronic music in particular—as male domains while, most importantly, discussing the dimensions and meanings of sound, expression and representation. moreover, pink noises reflects upon the cultural and political potential of sound itself. tara rodgers conceives of the potentials of sound, as a category of critical and aesthetic analysis, to feminist concerns in particular, arguing that “sounds can be thought of as pressure and movements, doing cultural work” (2010:19). dancecult 2(1)98 pink noises is an extremely important contribution to the study and documentation of electronic music because, unlike previous literature on electronic music, tara rodgers refuses to stop at the “thresholds that have silenced women’s work in historical accounts”. tara rodgers thus looks beyond the commonplace observation where most standard accounts stop and conclude that women constitute a minority in electronic music—as if this observation would explain their absence in literature and media. with pink noises, tara rodgers challenges the normalization of male dominance in the patrilineal historiography of electronic music. against the grain of ideologies aligning women with normative modes of heterosexual and capitalist reproduction, tara rodgers makes the argument that sounds themselves are reproductive, “to account for reproductive sounds in all their temporal depth is to challenge the patrilineal lines of descent and the universalizing male claims to creation that have thus far characterized dominant discourses in electronic music” (2010:15). although the professional interventions of interviewed artists go as far back as the 1950s, it is striking that similar gendered issues and experiences seem to reoccur throughout the generations of women who work with sound and electronic music. however, it is encouraging to read about the ways interviewees have prevailed and ignored gendered biases in the business; only to cultivate their subversiveness, innovation and determination even further. to someone who is extremely interested in the technical aspects of working with sound and music production it is very instructive to read pink noises. however, to someone who does not have a specific interest for technical aspects it could be difficult to follow the very informed conversations between the author and her interviewees. helpfully there is a detailed glossary on technical concepts. it is apparent throughout the book that the author has had previous contacts and collaboration with many interviewees, presumably through her own professional activity as a musician and her work with pinknoises.com. many of the participants in the book are part of the same international and/or overlapping musical/ professional scenes. it would be interesting to read more about the ways the author is situated in her field of study and the ways in which this influences her selection of interviewees, her questions and the responses. although rodgers probably has many good reasons for her decision to let interviewees speak for themselves and make their own analysis i sometimes feel that additional concluding, contextualizing and comparative commentary would be helpful. also, it would have been great to have a chapter on tara rodgers herself, and her long standing experience, electronic music production and reflection as electronic musician analog tara. all in all, pink noises is an extremely well informed, informative and inspiring discussion of some of the most crucial aspects and developments in electronic music. the innovators and actors behind these developments happen to be women and pink noises thereby highlights the astounding male centeredness in standard accounts and representation in electronic music. “ rodgers challenges the normalization of male dominance” reviews 99 technomad: global raving countercultures graham st john london: equinox publishing, 2009. isbn: 9781845536251 (hardcover), 9781845536268 (paperback) rrp: uk£50.00 (hardcover), uk£15.00 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.08 phil kirby university of liverpool, uk graham st john is a cultural anthropologist whose latest publication explores “themes of counterculture and resistance” in global electronic dance music culture (edmc). previous publications by st john explore psytrance and the intersection of rave culture and religion, key themes in technomad. the book is the result of eight years of research and offers a utopian study of rave culture, one in which legislation such as the uk’s criminal justice act and the onset of corporate clubbing hasn’t stopped the development of the free party scene. it adds to the evolving canon of academic literature that explores edmc culture and demonstrates a rigorous level of research. in an echo of centre for contemporary cultural studies (cccs) theory, st john frames the global techno-countercultures explored in technomad as “resistant”. st john acknowledges that anthony d’andrea has also explored the intersection of rave culture and post-1960s new (age) spirituality. where d’andrea attends to the cultural economy of psytrance “neo-nomads”, st john makes use of a significant range of theoretical stances including bey’s concept of the temporary autonomous zone (taz) to unpack the “fleeting permanence of contemporary counterculture” (2). technomad provides a cultural history of diverse alternative global edmc formations, the techno-underground, whose mobility has been partially facilitated by new digital technologies. the book’s focus is mainly on the nexus between hippy culture and rave culture, which has resulted in the evolution of edm sub-genres such as psytrance. st john divides the book into eight chapters and in the course of the first chapter, which serves as an introduction, quotes from much of the academic literature that explores rave culture. key themes are introduced that are then explored in more depth throughout the book; these include digital technology—both in terms of facilitating diy music production, its role in enabling alternative modes of communication and in framing dance music as a form of resistance used by activists to oppose rampant capitalism; gender issues and environmental issues. a key argument of technomad is that non-commercial forms of edmc are directly politicised by restrictive regulation and subsequently offer alternative spaces for a liminal communitas to evolve. dancecult 2(1)100 the second chapter explores the proliferation of a specific form of rave culture practice, the uk free party scene. the intersection of post-hippy uk free festival traveller culture and acid house music was in part facilitated by the appropriation and subsequent growth of sound system culture, a concept originally developed in jamaica in the 1950s. this chapter explores the growth of mobile dance music sound systems and what st john refers to as ‘traveller circuses’ such as spiral tribe. this nascent free party culture eventually culminated in the festival at castlemorton common in 1992, the event that precipitated the uk’s criminal justice and public order act of 1994. subsequent police attention and legislation had the unintended effect of gradually spreading these cultural practices around europe and beyond. st john notes the influence of various sound system crews as they stage events outside the uk. the third chapter maps the development and proliferation of sound system based edmc scenes in america, canada and australia. the integral role of the sound system in both reggae and hip hop culture has been noted in numerous histories of those genres, but st john successfully explores the key role that sound system practices have played in the global dissemination of particular strands of rave culture. st john then seeks to define the elusive “vibe” of a successful dance music experience, tracing the origin of the popular usage of the term back to the 1967 “summer of love” in san francisco. the study explores the idea that the term may have afro-american origins and connotations of eastern mysticism, “…the term now legion within edmc is used to denote a spatial and temporal experience, a collective and individual happening where a profound sensation of connection and mystery transpires” (99). from this definition various tribal edmc subdivisions are discussed in terms of “vibe tribes”. these tribes are not framed as mutually exclusive but explored in terms of “…a spectrum upon which the vibe may be characterized as libratory and divine at one end, and militant and proactive at the other” (103). the straightforward hedonism and release sought and achieved by many participants in mainstream edmc isn’t explored, as the project of the book is concerned with utopian outlaw countercultures. the various shamanistic/spiritual and activist tribal standpoints are explored in some depth offering useful insights for researchers interested in contemporary cultural anthropology. the author then explores a wide-ranging history of carnivalesque counter-cultural tribal gatherings, from san francisco’s golden gate park to the burning man. these ‘temporary alternative zones’ (or taz’s) and countercultural dramas are framed as “alternative futures”. the themes of spirituality and activism mentioned above inform the next two chapters. in chapter five technomad explores the intersection of rave culture and spirituality through an analysis of psytrance culture. st john defines psytrance as “…a carrier of the 1960’s counterculture flowering in the present” (165). he mentions the commercial “progressive trance” scene very briefly, acknowledging that it has ‘significant exchange value’, although it seems unlikely that the concept of the technocult explored by st john would mean much to the denizens of gatecrasher (www.gatecrasher.com; see also moore 2010). the pantheistic values of psytrance culture are discussed and the various occultist manifestations of the “trance ritual” are investigated, “itself a network of deviant and hidden knowledge and practice, from magick, prophecies and shamanism to astrology, esoteric christianity, ufos, http://www.gatecrasher.com reviews 101 and alien abductions, psytrance constitutes a discernable field of contemporary occultism” (169). parts of this chapter would seem familiar territory to readers of shea and wilson’s the illuminatus! trilogy, mainly as st john explores some of the global psytrance events leading up to the millennium and also some bizarre examples of psytrance ideology. for students and researchers interested in the evolution of goa-trance and the cultural practices and beliefs of the psytrance community, this chapter will provide a useful resource. the next chapter explores the harnessing of electronic dance music to a variety of activist agendas. these include anti criminal justice bill protests and reclaim the streets events. st john notes that “official” culture seeks to limit the dangers of carnivalesque excess, whilst recognising that carnival has a role in maintaining the equilibrium necessary for capitalism to thrive (presdee 2000). activists in turn have noted the dissident energy within the insurrectional dance-carnival and utilised it as a feature of contemporary protest and direct action. the implication of edm in a wide range of progressive and occasionally militant courses of action are explored; st john uses the neologism “protestival” to categorise these events of “radical conviviality”. initially the protestival was concerned with the regulation of dance music culture, but has since been harnessed to a range of different causes. the protest-carnival template has proliferated globally, partially facilitated by the internet. this leads to an interesting exploration of the intersection of activism, theatre and carnival in australia, the techno-tribes and sound systems discussed are concerned with injustices to both the aboriginal population and the environment. australians refer to outdoor edm events that synthesise transgressive, anarchistic and ecological sensibilities as “doofs”. the mobile sound system counterculture or “doofscape” discussed in this chapter is concerned with establishing valid links with the aboriginal population and seeks a respectful relationship with both the indigenous population and the land. the final brief chapter summarises the project of the book, to unpack the cultural politics of electronic dance music scenes. in many ways technomad achieves this successfully, although the focus of the book on the “outlaw” aspect of edm omits a significant range of practices and participants in edmc. however, as a contribution to the understanding of globalised dance music culture technomad offers many useful insights, both in terms of cultural anthropology, neo-religion and spirituality and the potential for edm as a form of activism. this exhaustively researched and meticulously crafted book provides a significant resource for all those interested in contemporary popular culture. references bey, hakim. 1991. t.a.z. the temporary autonomous zone, ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism. brooklyn: autonomedia. d’andrea, anthony. 2007. global nomads: techno and new age as transnational countercultures. london/new york: routledge. moore, karenza. 2010. the british ‘mainstream’ post-rave trance scene: exploring emotional and spiritual expression amongst ‘crasher clubbers’. in s. collins-mayo and b. pink-dandelion (eds.) religion and youth. aldershot: ashgate. presdee, m. 2000. cultural criminology and the carnival of crime, london: routledge. shea, robert, & wilson, anton. 1998. the illuminatus! trilogy. london: constable and robinson. dancecult 2(1)102 sonic warfare: sound, affect and the ecology of fear steve goodman cambridge: the mit press, 2010. isbn: 0-262-01347-9 (hardcover), 978-0-262-01347-5 (paperback) rrp: us$96.95 (hardcover), us$35.00 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.09 tobias c. van veen mcgill university, canada rave culture has long known of the power of sound to seduce bodies into becoming particles of a movement. dancer and dj become but one conduit of a feedback loop that affects the physical and the psychic. ecstasy, fear, horror, awe and excitement, as well as melancholy, nostalgia and transcendance form the connective tissue of the event. focusing on the “politics of frequency”, sonic warfare seeks to outline how the limits of sound are deployed within “vibration ontology”. goodman overviews military-state and countercultural usages alike, from audio assault weaponry for crowd control to dub audio viruses that transmit the offworld heritage of afrofuturism. an earworm, for example, can operate as an afrodiasporic riff of black noise that functions “as an attractor in processes of group catalysis”(157), such as the mobilization of dance; or, as a preemptive strike by hypercapital that “sets up a structure of allure for products for which you had no desire… because they do not necessarily exist yet” (186). tracing these parallel developments to early 20th century futurism and its “art of noise in the art of war” goodman dismisses the avant-garde camps of noise and silence alike, choosing (wisely) to focus on an ecology of rhythm and to argue for a complex and—perhaps essentially—incomplete philosophical inventory of vibration ontology. as goodman briefs in the introduction, readers looking for a detailed, historical account of sonic warfare should turn elsewhere. it is also worth noting—as goodman himself warns of his “dense theorisation”—that readers looking for an exegesis or comparative study of the text’s many philosophical sources should come prepared for neither. prepare instead for a somewhat chaotic assemblage of theoretical trajectories that zoom in and out of zones “goodman’s development of affect remains indispensible to studies of soniculture” reviews 103 of inquiry, from the futurhythmachines of the black atlantic to the bass materialism of global ghettotech. if that’s an earful, listen and repeat until sedated, for goodman has well adopted the deleuzo-guattarian maxim of conjoining it all with an “and”. fear not radical empiricism! affect and ontology of vibration goodman’s development of affect remains indispensible to studies of soniculture. for goodman, affect is the vibration—the good or bad vibes—prior to organisation into organised feeling (prior to what phenomenology would call intentionality). sonic weaponry seeks to disrupt or enhance the vibrational flux; it is capable of provoking feelings such as fear, dread or ecstasy through its good or bad vibes. goodman details actual sonic weaponry as well as fantastical projects that have promised more than delivered. he also aligns particular electronic music genres with various sonic effects, noting in particular how bass heavy genres—such as dub—generate atmospheres of dread, quipping their bass materialism as the “subpolitical power of music to attract and congeal populations” (172). elements of these theses were developed in goodman’s 2004 article, “speed tribes”. goodman’s approach, which he groups with radical empiricism, mixes the realms of the material and physiological with their often hazy effects upon subjects and cultures—the contested realm of the social sciences and cultural studies. in this respect, goodman develops a materialist perspective for grasping the affective potential of sound, be it the marching drum of the military, sonic cannons fired on insurgent protesters, or wobbly subbass let loose on east london club-dwellers. radical empiricism does not so much eschew cause and effect as much as it claims that effects operate autonomously of cause in an “ecology” of interrelationships (or rhythms and anticipatory echoes). radical empiricism opens the material world to preconscious interpenetration by its bodies (which can be any population, as whitehead’s “actual occasion”), as well as prehensive temporality, where “such an occasion itself starts as an effect facing its past and ends as a cause facing its future” (whitehead, quoted in goodman 152). in short, goodman eschews the a priori claims of phenomenology, substituting the radical empiricism of ecology. this, of course, requires an epistemological claim concerning knowing that which is aphenomenal and asubjective to the world. what we call sound itself is merely the human heard of the spectrum; goodman delves beyond even the ultra, sub and infrasonic, developing philosophies of rhythmanalysis by bachelard, lefebvre and whitehead (though one wishes he had spent more time with lefebvre, who explores the political capacities of rhythmanalysis, and in general less time with deleuze and guattari’s toolbox of usual suspects). in this respect, goodman practices what deleuze and guattari call a “minor science”; he delves headfirst into claims concerning hard science and metaphysical inquiry while suspending their epistemological uncertainty, thereby granting this form of empiricism, for better or for worse, its radicalism. that said, goodman footnotes the moment where his radical empiricism and graham harman’s speculative realism depart, noting his adherence to whitehead’s theories of relation over harman’s insistence on the rigorous conception of the discrete object (ch. 17). yet speculative realism holds intriguing consequences for goodman’s ontology of vibration. could discrete objects mark a particular phase of whitehead’s eternal object? dancecult 2(1)104 here i’ll dive into one particular argument to give a sense of what is at stake in the thesis of vibration ontology. the eternal vibrator goodman does not note if his adoption of the eternal object—which ingresses from pure potential into the real potential of the actual as it vibrates out-of-phase with itself (whew)—departs or concords with alain badiou’s neo-platonism. this becomes all the more significant when goodman talks of whitehead’s “actual occasions”—which are bodies in the general sense—being able to select eternal objects, which is how affective encounters between “discrete actual entities” occur (98). not only does a shadow of the discrete return, drawing attention to how radical empiricism shadows speculative realism, but goodman often writes as if a rhythmic power underpins vibration ontology (he treats audio viruses, or earworms, in a similar fashion, granting them an undefined agency he nearly denies human subjects (149)). in this respect, his adoption of the eternal object approaches a quasi-idealism, or a transcendentalism he elsewhere seeks to avoid. goodman’s radical empiricism, not surprisingly given its theoretical ground, dances around the question of spinoza’s god, i.e., the eternal vibrator. this problem can be recast in terms of politics. while goodman critiques bachelard for seeking equilibrium between counterrhythms (107), he nonetheless accepts philip turetsky’s account of rhythmic synthesis that forms matter into a single body (111). what is the difference between the two? well, for one, it is one of politics, or as goodman sees it, the micropolitics of frequency. goodman conceives of the “ontological ground” as fundamentally turbulent, a rhythmic anarchitecture which: . . . does not dictate the orientation of such a micropolitics; it does not lay down a set of generalizable laws but rather throws up a series of engineering problems. as such, any micropolitics derivable from this base can be only tactical rather than strategic—a war without aims concerned more with disposition and potential movement than ideology, although certainly susceptible to abduction (107). the problem is, of course, with alien abduction. the other always swoops in, alien, capitalist, totalitarian or otherwise viral, an earworm “takeover of the body by an exterior entity” (150) that overcodes tactical movement with strategy, setting up a violent mechanism of control over heterogeneous rhythms, and ultimately, of the “actual occasion” that is the self. like deleuze and guattari’s war machine, the tactical micropolitics of frequency or turbulence remain fundamentally inculpable. of course, we have hit upon the ideology of this position, which is its first generalizable law. its second generalizable law is already expressed above: being concerned with disposition and potential movement precisely is the ideogram of the micropolitics of frequency, its unification or expressed ideology as the perceived good, pre-abduction, of rhythmic anarchitecture. elsewhere goodman writes that “a theory of sonic warfare is particularly fascinated by this turbulent boundary layer between dance and violence” (111). what i understand goodman as trying to argue is that while vibrational control reviews 105 techniques such as sonic weaponry (from dub viruses to military means) seek to control the crowd by unifying it through resonance, thereby dictating it to move as one, at the ontological level its rhythm remains turbulent and nonunified. one can also see dance as a similar assemblage, where the soundsystem unifies differentiated bodies into what kodwo eshun called a “futurhythmachine”. thus, unification is not, in itself, a bad thing, but can be wrought for different ends say that of the military state, on the one channel, or that of jouissance, such as rave culture, on the other. that we are talking of ends and means suggests strategy, however, rather than tactics. this argument is a strong one, and smartly counters adorno’s well-worn conservative moralisms against mass dancing and jazz music, or benjamin’s aestheticization of politics, as somehow fundamentally fascist, questioning whether “aesthetics need be sacrificed at the altar of a political cause” (175). yet, there is a strict problem here: the potential to be unified is evidently inherent to rhythm. more than potential, it is an incorporated possibility before the fact; it is de jure. one could argue just as well that rhythm is fundamentally unified, which is to say one, and that turbulence is an expression of mode. again, this is spinoza’s problem, of the monadic substance of god expressed in the many. it haunts goodman’s text throughout, significantly with the undefined agency of the audio virus or earworm and the supposedly uncontaminated and interiorized body it penetrates by communicating the instruction “record me!” (150). a more ecological sense of interior/exterior would be of use here, of the earworm within that would whisper the effects of consciousness, suggesting the always already incorporation of alterity. in short, to the question: what concept of memory is compatible with the illogic of affect, the virtuality of the past and the active immanence of futurity in the present? one could reply, différance, insofar as derrida speaks of an absolute past, force, and the technics of the sign—the trace—before the re-marking of intentionality. and/or the logic of the supplement, otherwise known as incorporation, of that which is extraneous but necessary (that which is added after to make the thing whole from the start). derrida’s work on husserl could bridge the divide to deleuze and forms the unthought (or unsound) to goodman’s investigations. the political question of unified rhythm is raised by lefebvre, as well as deleuze and guattari, the latter whom grasp the state as the superposition of waves, a wave that cancels itself out (see van veen 2010: 183). superposed waves become a flat line that masks their turbulence, posing an entire problematic of perception, as well as form/content, ecological or otherwise, within rhythmanalysis. to this end, in the production of space, lefebvre even cautions against overstating the parallelism between hydrodynamics and theory (184). of course, goodman adequately argues a radical empiricism that claims all as rhythmic; it is a materialist theory of rhythm through-and-through that charts sociopolitical effects from the axioms of vibration ontology. which is to say the critical objection to goodman remains here. utilising vibrational ontology to script (or prescript) the political will of populations—or rather rendering viral such will, and “mapping” populations as preconscious rhythmic assemblages—dovetails neatly with 20th century second-order cybernetics as well as hypercapitalist (and fascist) strategy. unquestionably, such strategies—strategies as they serve political endgames— dancecult 2(1)106 are powerful. goodman demonstrates how they work in the world. yet they also do not work so well; no population has yet been adequately controlled (or so we perceive…). and undoubtedly this is also goodman’s point: that turbulence is a priori, that turbulence remains, in short, as a “subpolitics,” as it cannot be prescripted, even as resistance (175). it could be “abducted” in any direction. and in this sense, i agree with goodman, for his rhythmanalysis leaves us with a population (and a universe) that is without content, much like paolo virno’s conception of the multitude, or lefebvre’s analysis of the urban as form. yet, the alien, as all the sci-fi nightmares of horrific innards warn us, is always within. abduction occurs from within this same ontos; we abduct ourselves, unknowingly, aliens to ourselves. which leaves the question hanging: what is this uncanniness of the alien, its strange eternal return as the virus of our becoming? in short there is always an untimely question to the absolute claims of radical empiricism. whereas the virus remains, the material strategies of its dissemination do not; they mutate and change with the technics of history. for a materialist ontology of vibration, is it not, by its own admission, a tactic and not strategy, a viral thought to the metaphysics of eternal ontology? wildstyle ecology in mu-mu land the telescoping rhythm of shifting in and out of this increasingly complex and at times bizarre inventory of sonic weapons, inventions and theories touches upon the wildstyle. at times one wishes goodman would pitch down the rhythm and pause, downsampling more time to his soundbytes. in a particularly captivating passage, goodman fast-forwards a discussion between william burroughs and led zeppelin guitarist jimmy page on the potential of infrasonics; shifts to industrial band and performance artists throbbing gristle and their “infrasonic emitters;” and skips on to discuss the klf’s “audio weapons system” as borrowed by techno duo panasonic (now pan sonic). all this on page 24. as goodman makes clear on several occasions, “a brief overview will have to suffice” (17). yet the overview can be stimulating and a scrappy shot of wake-up. goodman emphasizes the potential of sound, writing how “at the very least, the transduction of bad vibes into something more constructive suggests the need to probe more deeply into affective tonality and the vibrations of the environment” (73). most ravers would agree. references goodman, s. 2004. “speed tribes: netwar, affective hacking and the audio-social”. in franz liebl and thomas düllo (eds), cultural hacking: kunst des strategischen handelns, pp. 139-55. vienna: springer. lefebvre, henri. 1991. the production of space. trans. donald nicholson-smith. oxford: blackwell. van veen, tobias c. 2010. “cities of rhythm and revolution”. in alexandra boutros and will straw (eds), circulation and the city: essays on mobility and urban culture, pp. 155-192. montréal: mcgill-queens up. reviews 107 film music world: donk dir. andy capper vbs:tv (internet documentary), 2009. http://www.vbs.tv/en-gb/watch/music-world/donk phil kirby university of liverpool (uk) this review explores the vbs.tv documentary on the uk electronic dance music style known as “donk”. the genre is referred to by a number of names including scouse house, bouncy house, bouncy techno, bounce or donk. the term bounce will be used throughout the review as the term donk has a pejorative dimension. the style is an offshoot of hardcore techno, which has had a number of variants popular in the north of england. the tunes are around 150 bpm with a four-on-the-floor kick drum, whilst the eponymous “donk” itself is a layered sound or stab that occurs on the offbeat, or “and” of each beat. synthesised musical parts in the tunes are akin to european techno, a stylistic template that has more in common with the sonic palette of 2 unlimited than that of basic channel. some bounce releases feature vocals, or rapid-fire mc’ing in an unashamedly uk regional accent. the focus of the documentary is mainly the blackout crew, although other uk mcs and producers are featured. blackout crew’s 2008 single put a donk on it may have only reached number 91 in the uk charts, but the official video had well over five million hits on youtube, and consequently attracted “mainstream” media attention. the genre is little known outside of the north west and north east of england. indeed, in the north west of england the style is mainly popular in the satellite towns between liverpool and manchester such as st helens and wigan, and towns to the north of manchester such as bolton, burnley and blackburn. the documentary is on initial viewing quite funny, until the realisation sinks in that it is a heavily biased, stereotype-laden snipe at the leisure practices of the white northern working class. the documentary begins by exploring blackout crew’s origins in a bolton youth centre. notably, considering the multi-cultural makeup of most of the towns named above, the only representatives of ethnic minorities filmed in the documentary are the managers of the youth centre (and a promoter later in the video). northern hardcore and its sub-styles have never been of much interest to young black or asian clubbers. the black respondents’ comments in the video are subtitled despite being perfectly comprehensible; indeed this doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.10 http://www.vbs.tv/en-gb/watch/music-world/donk dancecult 2(1)108 patronising use of subtitles occurs randomly throughout the video. the next sequence takes place in burnley, introduced by a series of visual tropes intended to convey a sense of acute urban deprivation. the presenter briefly interviews an ex-mc and questions him on local drug use, this respondent seems to have been included solely as he has been to prison. after some more clichéd camera shots the next respondent offers a more positive view of the town than the earlier montage suggested, despite being repeatedly questioned on the area’s alleged propensity for violence. a bounce producer dj greenie is subsequently interviewed; he responds to questions about the scene’s drug use by coyly stating a comparison to the film human traffic, inferring the use of ecstasy. greenie is questioned on the centrality of steroids to the donk scene, to which he responds, “wigan pier’s full of big lads on steroids”. in the next sequence the documentaryfollows blackout crew to a gig in scarborough. the documentary crew film some sequences outside the venue, one is an interview with a promoter who discusses the problems of booking the band outside the style’s heartlands, describing the southern audience as “more urban, more sophisticated in a sense”. the narrative then returns to bolton, signified by a montage featuring a pie shop, a tanning salon, a tattoo studio and a barbershop. after more interviews the focus shifts to a blackout crew performance at wigan pier, but not before another montage including a camera shot of a local newspaper headline proclaiming wigan thug beats mum to be and yet more shots of fast food shops. footage of young males being checked for weapons with a hand-held metal detector is included to connote a threat of violence. the next sequence sums up the overall tone of the documentary, despite the friendly interviewees and carefree enthusiasm of the pier’s crowd, the documentary team can’t resist sniping at the provincial working class audience, “as the night went on hundreds more fake-tanned, steroid-pumped donk enthusiasts filled the floor, tongues blue from drinking wkd”. as the blackout crew perform, the presenter then comments that the music starts to sound like being trapped in a nail factory, before paraphrasing joseph conrad’s heart of darkness, “what you see here is the beating heart of donk, the heart of donkness, oh the horror, the horror”. to bookend the video the documentary team return to bolton the next day to interview one of the blackout crew mcs. as a product of the vice media group the documentary has a pre-ordained agenda to be mildly controversial and to come across as edgy gonzo journalism, hence the underlying fixation with drugs, violence and urban deprivation. this subtext is reinforced by the “quite funny, until the realisation sinks in that it is a heavily biased, stereotype-laden snipe at the leisure practices of the white northern working class” reviews 109 connotations supplied by the montage sequences and the chosen edits. the documentary team are given a consistently friendly welcome and open access to the scene by all whether practitioners or clubbers yet still choose to mock the northern working class whenever possible. this isn’t a highbrow dance music style, but then again neither are grime or funky (uk garage sub-styles), which are generally treated with some degree of reverence by the british media, possibly as these styles initially emanated from the south of england and have greater perceived (sub) cultural capital. other related media coverage demonstrates this bias. the guardian newspaper included a brief feature on donk in 2008 (by a vice contributor) which had the headline, “bouncy techno meets terrible rapping? welcome to donk. keen on sportswear? prone to taking your shirt off in clubs? donk is made for you” (mcdonnell 2008). in a promotional article in the metro newspaperthe producer discusses the making of the vbs documentary: the most shocking element was just how massive most of these dudes were. they all had their tops off and the drugs are paramount. they take ecstasy, steroids, a bit of cocaine and then blue or red alcopops. we’ve been making a load of films recently, including one about cannibals in liberia, but there were bits of donk that were just as scary—like being the only sober ones among 3,000 ravers on steroids and ecstasy (capper cited by day 2010). the documentary says much about the predominantly middle-class media’s attitude to white working class britain and specifically london-based media’s attitude to the north of england. the selection of material, the content of the montages and the editing reinforces entrenched stereotypes concerning the north of england and white working class leisure. the documentary is augmented by a vice article on the making of the programme, which is noticeably more scathing than the documentary. for example, in a passage describing burnley the writer states the following hyperbole: what used to be a prosperous cotton-mill town is now decimated by the terminal decline of industry, with entire square miles of housing steel-boarded-up, repossessed and marked for demolition by the local council. unemployment is all-consuming, violence is a popular pastime—as is the rampant theft of expensive copper pipes from condemned houses to sell as scrap to pay for heroin and crack. it’s practically a ghost town these days, but instead of headless cavaliers with chains clanging around their wrists and ankles, there are gaggles of toothless, skeletal smackheads waddling around in skid-mark-stained tracksuit bottoms. actually, scratch that—it’s more zombie town than ghost town (hodgson 2009). obviously, burnley isn’t that bad, although if you look for that kind of social deprivation it can be found in many urban centres. crack and heroin use are not exclusively northern pastimes and neither is violence. another example of tabloid journalism in the vice article is the following statement describing the crowd in wigan pier: the crowd was a mixture of skimpily dressed, emaciated rave bunnies and some of the most gruesome thugs you’d ever come across—blokes whose faces had been dancecult 2(1)110 permanently disfigured by a lifetime of being pummeled by fists every weekend, who’ve probably washed down massive doses of steroids with gallons of stella for breakfast every morning since they were 11 years old (hodgson 2009). although the vbs.tv documentary is aimed at popular consumption, it does raise issues of academic interest other than media representation. there is potential for further academic research on the various dance music subcultures that have blossomed in the north of england outside of the metropolitan centres. an example of an interesting piece of previously published work on northern dance music culture is ingham’s (1999) listening back from blackburn: virtual sound worlds and the creation of temporary autonomy. this is a brief but fascinating study of the warehouse party scene that blossomed in the blackburn area in 1989-1990. northern soul has now achieved a mythic status and has received some academic attention, but the audience demographic was very similar to that of bounce nowadays, as were the audience demographics for the other hardcore house and techno variants that preceded bounce in the same geographic area. linking these styles historically could be socially and culturally revealing. references day, james. 2010. “donk is the crazy dance sensation taking over the north-west of england”. metro, 31 march: <http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/819812-donk-is-the-crazy-dance-sensationtaking-over-the-north-west-of-england>. hodgson, jaimie. 2009. “put a donk on it”. vice. <http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n2/htdocs/ put-a-donk-518.php>. ingham, james. 1999. “listening back from blackburn: virtual sound worlds and the creation of temporary autonomy”. in living through pop, ed. a. blake, 112-128). london: routledge. mcdonnell. john. 2008. “bouncy techno meets terrible rapping? welcome to donk”. guardian online. 29 july: <http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2008/jul/29/ bouncytechnomeetsterribler>. “the crowd was a mixture of skimpily dressed, emaciated rave bunnies and some of the most gruesome thugs you’d ever come across—” http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/819812-donk-is-the-crazy-dance-sensation-taking-over-the-north-west-of-england http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/819812-donk-is-the-crazy-dance-sensation-taking-over-the-north-west-of-england http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n2/htdocs/put-a-donk-518.php http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n2/htdocs/put-a-donk-518.php http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2008/jul/29/bouncytechnomeetsterribler http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2008/jul/29/bouncytechnomeetsterribler reviews 111 speaking in code dir. amy grill usa: square productions, 2008. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1474864/ tobias c. van veen mcgill university, canada you can still smell the revolution a bit, you know. —modeselektor with the proliferation of digital film technologies, i’ve been waiting to witness a film that captures the obsession and exuberance of the worldwide technoculture. by techno i have a specific meaning in mind. with the collapse of north american rave culture thanks to 9/11—which, among other things, disrupted vinyl distribution as well as introduced draconian police powers that were deployed everywhere against autonomist enclaves—djs, producers and adherents of the house and techno sound fled the states. this remains an undocumented exodus of creative luminaries. though montréal served, for a few years, as a nexus of technoculture thanks to the mutek collective—many of my canadian comrades moved to montréal around 2002—it was berlin that soon overcame all comers. easy travel within a united europe, cheap living and the fierce protection of personal freedoms made berlin not just an inexpensive and convenient place to live, but made it (along with barcelona) the place to imagine collective cultural anarchism. the jouissance of deep, psychedelic, minimalist or maximalist techno betrays not only this yearning, but its reality, which is what few north americans realise. berlin and barcelona, though each fighting their battles against gentrification, are singularities of the way things could be. perhaps even should be. amy grill’s film captures something of the meaning of techno to berliners. techno is not just clubbing catharsis; it is the soundtrack to the fall of the wall. as a few interviews (and deleted scenes) explain, when the wall fell in 1989, the centre of berlin opened into unoccupied and stateless space. ravers crept in, setting up technoclubs in bunkers and buildings. the infamous tresor was such a space; today berghain upholds the tradition. signs of this sociocultural renaissance appear everywhere in this film, where modernistdoi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.11 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1474864/ dancecult 2(1)112 inflected graffiti, inside and out, signifies resistance to speculation in property values. already, there is much to film: the relation of a free europe to the policed urbanism of north america; a thorough updating of the afrogermanic detroit/berlin axis wrought back in 1990; and the development of the later cross-atlantic dialogue with montréal, diving south in this regard, with mutek’s mexico and chile editions. though digging into berlin, and touching upon barcelona, speaking in code falls somewhat short of investigating the planetary potential of this techno matrix. focusing on grill’s hometown of boston, and her ex-husband david day’s struggle to produce technoculture in a town that mostly doesn’t care (like the rest of the conservative us), the film often forgets to provide some much-needed context to this mini-cultural revolution. after a few starts, it settles down on german labels bpitch control and kompakt, as the personal lives and meteoric careers of modeselektor and the wighnomy brothers become central to the narrative. both duos have to deal with celebrity and stress, as they find themselves gigging constantly, with modeselektor playing to tens of thousands at barcelona’s sonar festival. the massive scale of sonar is well contrasted to david day’s burnt-out efforts in boston, where day eventually loses track of his community, driving his new afterhours loftspace into the ground (at one point, he talks of putting on events night after night after ‘getting everyone else [i.e. his fellow artists!] out of the building’). a few other technorati make appearances, including the ever eccentric and incredibly inventive monolake, a.k.a. robert henke, prime programmer of ableton live and dub techno composer, whose spartan, all-white loft matches, without irony, his all-white techno outfit. another memorable appearance is that of music journalist and dj philip sherburne, who strives to explain, in an incredibly touching moment—he breaks down on camera— the true significance of hearing and what it means to him, thanks to his relationship with his deaf father, who received a hearing implant a few years before his death in 2005. indeed, philip’s ever articulate and composed persona is a highlight of the film; one wishes there was more from this evocative american writer. likewise, the ever elusive wolfgang voigt—an acid house-era techno producer and owner/operator of the kompakt empire—appears in fine form, situating “cultural techno” as not only still a part of ecstatic rave culture, but as a step beyond—a form-of-life. you will find more years to say something without words. —modeselektor reviews 113 the artist set-pieces of speaking in code are beautifully composed. each taps deeply into the ups-and-downs of living-and-breathing technoculture. the wighnomy brothers are exceptional; they live in the six person “small communist collective” of freude-am-tanzen, sharing equally in profits and running their own label, work/live space and distribution out of the small, mostly rural town of jena in former east germany. yet one wishes that the film went deeper still. when the very lovable, teddy bear-like robag wruhme of the brothers decides to take a breather from the relentless touring schedule, his absence remains something of a mystery. as a former technoculture journalist, i can’t help but think of what to ask him. i’d ask him if he misses his commune—surely, because he has spent his life, up to that point, working and living in an autonomist collective? to be thrown headfirst into the hypercommercialism and opportunist corporatism of mainstream european techno-pop culture must have been a dilemma—if not a cultural shock to the system. at sonar, massive digital billboards advertise alcohol, as if by bastardized simile they have overcoded the absent artistic visuals (look closely during modeselektor’s set). i’d hypothesize that wruhme’s retreat signifies that not all are comfortable with what “successful” technoculture has become. yet, the film only glances over divided yet interconnected levels of technoculture in europe. some are quite literally underground; the incredible muna club in jena reclaims a wwii-era rocket factory. an entire dimension of the ritual denazification of this space through dance is left uncommented. then there are the arena festivals of cigarette sponsorship bound by chain-link fences. the very opening of the film, for reasons that are left unexplained, rolls with some rather uninspiring footage of a dutch techno festival. as the camera enters through the vip gate, a sea of garbage and burnt-out bodies meets the eye, everyone seemingly unaware of the destitution of their camp-like surroundings… this is a fenced-in wasteland of the wasted, yet it is presented, without critique, as a tease of what’s to come. is this wasteland symbolic for something else in this film? well, yes. the evident struggle between technoculture’s collectivism and its commercialism, its schizoid, yet symbiotic relationship with corporate entertainment, is sacrificed to amy grill’s focus on her disintegrating relationship with david day. choosing “speaking in code shows that technoculture can be a communal, lifelong adventure in art, music and living, achieving escape velocity, at least for the inventive, from its youthful escapism and burn-out hedonism” dancecult 2(1)114 to narrativise her failing relationship with an always-omniscient voice-over, grill never places herself before the camera, even as she captures day in all his darkest moments. the film’s gaze does not match its voice; the director indulges in a selective narcissism, revealing only a strangely affectless narration to what is left unseen. by the end of the film the pair are divorced and what begins as an aside becomes the film’s peroration. their disintegration into divorce eschews cinema verité, embracing instead the conventionality of reality tv. what is more intriguing is all that is left unsaid. for example, why is montréal only mentioned once and the mutek festival never mentioned at all? north america is depicted as the graveyard of electronic music, yet there is no mention of the cities where technoculture has survived. also absent are vancouver’s new forms festival and seattle’s decibel. and then there’s detroit—its festival and heritage left unheard and unmentioned. the same can be said for san francisco, chicago, nyc and the midwest. this not only leaves the average audience unawares of the states’ founding as well as continuing contribution to electronic music, but it also leaves the current depiction of berlin’s technoscene and boston’s lack of it—despite day’s valiant attempts at a brief flowering—as somewhat hollow and meaningless. the united states lost something with 9/11—the total expression of a generation, silenced off the airwaves, policed and beaten down, denied even the nostalgia granted to punk. rave culture was not only underground; it has now been buried in the us, as if it never existed, as if the blurring of gender and colour and dance never happened. which brings me to the inevitable but essential question of representation. though ellen allien appears as head of bpitch control, speaking wonderfully of the emotive aspect of techno and the supportive atmosphere she strives to create in her label collective, she remains the sole woman onscreen. but most embarassingly, there is not one single black person in the film. one would think techno was invented and played solely by white people in berlin. in fact, the only reference to techno’s heritage in black detroit is a symbol, worn as a badge of respect by modeselektor. during their massive but ad-ridden sonar concert, sebastian szary wears an underground resistance t-shirt. good for him. full disclosure. i like others am a ghost in this film. i saw it being filmed. i’ve djed in many of the same places. i know and love most everyone in it. i love the music. it is difficult, in this respect, to write critically, especially given the usual laudatory press. but ditch the melodramatic divorce narrative and you have a documentary of profound intimacy and insight into the fragility of collective creation. speaking in code is a snapshot of a radical soniculture attempting to achieve a strange kind of equilibrium in the 21c. both henke and voigt say the same thing: they don’t see the need for change. but it’s more than that. speaking in code shows that technoculture can be a communal, lifelong adventure in art, music and living, achieving escape velocity, at least for the inventive, from its youthful escapism and burn-out hedonism. sometimes divorce is necessary for radical togetherness. dancecult 2.1 reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 2 (1): 90–114 issn 1947-5403 ©2011 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net hip hop underground: the integrity and ethics of racial identification anthony kwame harrison philadelphia: temple university press, 2009. isbn: 1-4399-0060-4 (hardcover), 1-4399-0061-2 (paperback) rrp: us$74.50 (hardcover), us$26.95 (paperback), us$74.50 (electronic) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.05 rebecca bodenheimer hamilton college, usa anthony kwame harrison’s book hip hop underground: the integrity and ethics of racial identification examines the racial dynamics of the san francisco bay area’s underground hip hop scene, with the larger goal of exploring processes of racial self-identification among american youth at a time in which the nation is growing more racially diverse and discourses on race increasingly revolve around an ideology of colorblindness. in his view, the bay area is a good case study for an elaboration of contemporary american racial dynamics because of its uniquely multiracial demographics, which are currently very similar to the projections of a non-white majority population in the u.s. by 2050. harrison’s research is strongly informed by the method of “critical ethnography”, which views the process of ethnography as intimately connected to the interpretation and representation of the findings. in this vein, he describes his decision to become an active participant in the bay area’s underground hip hop scene and to assume two identities, anthropologist and emcee (rapper), despite his initial misgivings that he might be received as an interloper. while critical ethnography is by no means a new method of anthropological research, the level of self-reflexivity here is arguably taken to the extreme with relatively large doses of “autoethnographic narrative” (58). harrison’s second chapter provides detailed accounts both about his personal history with hip hop and the ways he inserted himself into and moved through the bay area underground hip hop scene; however, his discussion of the hip hop group he helped to form, the forest fires collective, seems at times overindulgent. reviews reviews 91 harrison’s first chapter details the emergence of underground hip hop in the mid-to-late 1990s, highlighting the movement’s preoccupation with notions of authenticity, its goals of reclaiming hip hop from the mass corporatization following its crossover into the mainstream, and its contestation of commercial hip hop’s “ghettocentric” representations of blackness.1 he argues that the alternate representations of blackness offered by underground hip hop are accompanied by a more racially inclusive criteria regarding who can lay claim to the practice. nevertheless, despite his suggestions that this more inclusive vision is a progressive tendency, he frequently contests the stated ideologies of his fellow hip hoppers 2—that it is competency, rather than race, that matters in terms of underground hip hop authenticity—by asserting his own view that blackness is still privileged in hip hop and that non-black participants, especially whites, face a more arduous road to establish their legitimacy. harrison’s third chapter provides a good critical summary of the ways hip hop scholarship has articulated the relationship between race, authenticity and claims of ownership, detailing three principal approaches. the first frames hip hop as a distinctly black practice, despite recognizing that non-black youth, specifically puerto ricans, were involved in its emergence and is exemplified by tricia rose’s 1994 canonic work on hip hop black noise. as harrison notes, a host of scholars ( juan flores, raquel rivera) have argued strongly for inserting puerto ricans into hip hop origin narratives. harrison provocatively asks, if we can recognize the role of puerto ricans and other latinos in the formation of hip hop culture, should we not do the same with white b-boys who joined the movement only a few years later? the second approach views hip hop as one in a long line of afro-diasporic traditions in the americas and tends to draw direct links between hip hop and african and/or caribbean traditions. the final approach is an orientation toward contemporary manifestations of hip hop, and a recognition of its creative appropriation by youth across all continents. harrison concludes this review by asserting that the ongoing reification of hip hop as essentially black has obscured a more realistic and dynamic picture of the ways that youth of all colors engage with the practice and that underground hip hop challenges these essentialist notions. harrison’s principal goal is to examine and unpack the ways that underground hip hoppers articulate claims for their own hip hop legitimacy through racial performances of self. departing from sarah thornton’s theorization of subcultural capital and the boundary maintenance that is such an integral part of subcultural scenes, harrison critiques the hegemony of “authenticity”, viewing john l. jackson’s notion of “sincerity” as a better analytic. jackson’s notion “subverts the standard checklist of subcultural capital [markers “ sophisticated and innovative discussions about the racial politics of authenticity in underground hip hop” dancecult 2(1)92 of authenticity] in favor of a personal code of underground hip hop ethics and integrity… what matters most is the perceived sincerity of these racial performances... for the non-black hip hopper, an overzealous display of urban african american posturing, no matter how authentic, is under most circumstances suspected as insincere” (118). while i agree that the sincerity of a racial performance is an important element in the positive reception of a non-black emcee, i do not perceive a big difference between the notions of authenticity and sincerity. harrison’s position that a display of black posturing is authentic but not sincere is not entirely convincing—why would it not simply be considered inauthentic? chapter four puts the notion of racial sincerity to work, as harrison provides examples of white emcees who perform “sincere whiteness” (140). his primary example concerns a white emcee who, during a mos def 3 show, got on stage to freestyle (improvise rapped lyrics). although he was initially booed because of the audience’s assumptions about his competency based on his “bummy white guy” look, the emcee ultimately won over the crowd with his lyrical prowess. harrison astutely states, “had top r not been a sincere white guy…the entire story might have played out differently: no boos, no surprises, no turning of the crowd; perhaps just a great freestyle, which is hardly the kind of thing that gets talked about to any great extent days after the show” (140). while i find this analysis quite persuasive, harrison’s criteria for performing “sincere whiteness” is more problematic: in this and in other instances, he bases his characterization of racial sincerity on physical appearance and fashion choices, noting in particular the white emcees’ “dorky looks” and “bummy shirts” (140). he perceptively analyzes this mode of self-representation as a reaction against past white emcees’ “insincere” performances of racial identity, exemplified in the “wigger” persona,4 that claimed to fully understand the experience of black youth without recognizing their own white privilege. the issue is not only that harrison’s notion of white racial sincerity is fully based on the emcee’s physical appearance, but also the implication that “bummy clothes” are essentially a white fashion and that emcees cannot be racially sincere unless they are dressed in this manner. in his final chapter he provides what i believe is another problematic analysis, when he discusses the sound of an all-white underground hip hop group as “so sincere and self-assured in its whiteness”, precisely because people have described their music as “avant-garde hip hop”, “emo rap”, or “goth-hop” (161). harrison’s argument here seems to reproduce the same essentialist notions of race and culture that he has previously challenged and the reader is left to assume that he would only deem racially sincere those white emcees who mix rap with “white” musical styles or dress like “dorky white guys”. harrison’s final chapter continues elaborating the notion of racial sincerity, although here he offers a rather pessimistic commentary on racial politics in the underground hip hop scene. he recounts a party where the aforementioned white underground hip hop group performed a satire using an exaggerated style of black speech in order to parody the image of the hyper-violent, misogynist “gangsta” rapper that is so often promoted by the mainstream music industry. noting that the audience was predominantly white, harrison describes this performance as a form of “contemporary minstrelsy” (158). however, he reviews 93 then characterizes this analysis as too simplistic, asserting that the group was very aware of a history of white appropriation and racist imitation of black music. he states: i would contend that sole and the pedestrian saw themselves as crafting a tremendously ironic satire of the racial insincerity embodied by... wigger icons of the past. arguably, if we accept that this group... was engaged in a theatrical performance of past white hip hoppers’ exaggerated performances of blackness, this could be viewed as about a profound an expression of white racial sincerity as one might find. however, somewhere within this cauldron of sincerity, satire, and racial symbolism, for me, the circumstantial logic breaks down (160). the reason he gives for ultimately eschewing his own, quite sophisticated analysis and concluding that the performance was a “racial impersonation” (162), centers around the fact that these white emcees were performing for a mainly white audience. however, another perspective might view the performance as quite racially sincere precisely because, as stated by harrison, it was a parody. furthermore, it seems that the key to determining whether the performance reinforced stereotypes or not resides largely in its reception: how aware was the audience of the performers’ intentions to perform a satire? although harrison does not pursue this question, it is likely, following his own discussion of the blurred line between performers and audience in underground hip hop, that the spectators were “in the know” and viewed this performance with a critical perspective. ultimately harrison’s book offers some sophisticated and innovative discussions about the racial politics of authenticity in underground hip hop. however, while he presents various compelling analyses, his final conclusions are at times less nuanced and thus lessen the persuasiveness of his theoretical points. notes 1 the subgenre of “gangsta” rap, in which rappers frequently spin tales of violent and sexual pursuits, is most closely associated with a “ghettocentric” mentality. 2 harrison often refers to participants in the local scene as “hip hoppers”, which i understand to include anyone who engages with at least one of the four principle elements of hip hop culture— emceeing (rapping), dj’ing, break-dancing (b-boying), or graffiti art. 3 mos def is one of the most celebrated and visible emcees in underground hip hop, so much so, that some might not describe him as part of the underground scene anymore. his first album, mos def and talib kweli are black star (rawkus records 1998), was a collaboration with the highly respected emcee talib kweli and in many ways defined the terms of underground hip hop in its critique of the music industry and mainstream rappers who have “sold out”. 4 “wigger” was a derogatory term that emerged in the 1990s referring to white youth who fully adopted the fashion and speech of african american youth for the purposes of gaining subcultural capital, but who were ultimately perceived as having a superficial connection with blackness and not a true investment in the politics of racial equality. dancecult 2(1)94 the local scenes and global culture of psytrance graham st john new york/london: routledge, 2010. isbn: 978-0-415-87696-4 (hardcover) 978-0-203-84787-9 (electronic) rrp: $103.00 (hardcover), $103.00 (electronic) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.06 rupert till university of huddersfield, uk psytrance is not well known or widely understood. the local scenes and global culture of psytrance, edited by leading writer in the field of electronic dance music (edm) culture graham st. john, is the first book to cover this form in any detail. to many, psytrance is lumped together using ill-defined journalistic terms that have little meaning or substance such as “dance music”. this collected volume attempts to unpack the term and explore the field in a more rigorous fashion. st john bookends the volume; his introduction provides a useful assessment of writing on psytrance, whilst providing a contextual framework. he makes a strong case for the need for the collection and prepares the ground for the variety of different approaches that follow. the book is divided into three sections, the first dealing with the roots of the music in goa trance. this begins with luther elliott’s proto-trance history. it makes a strong case that musical roots of psytrance grew not principally from goa but originated in sixties counter-culture, ibiza, house music and acid house. its description of the development of goa trance is rather vague, lacking specific dates, names and interviews with key players. fortunately this is covered in the next two chapters and in any case this is an interesting and well-paced first chapter. anthony d’andrea next provides a spicy taste of the nature of the goa full moon party scene. like several sections of the collection, it prioritises the opinions of the ‘authentic’— the scenesters, the faces, the core members—and allows the flavour of the narrative to be determined by self-appointed spokespeople. indeed many of the writers can be accused of this, related it seems to their immersion in psytrance culture. in some cases the writers have led a psytrance lifestyle and have become interested in writing about their passion. this provides insider knowledge, without which this book would lack credibility, but inevitably means it sometimes becomes evangelical, treating internal psy-perspectives as “truth” and outsider perspectives as “false”. reviews 95 arun saldanha provides the final chapter in the goa section and manages to avoid this trap. his well-written account describes the myriad influences on the goa scene as a meeting point of multiple substreams, a developmental crossroads rather than a point of origin. his use of derrida’s ghost metaphor elegantly blends sociology and ethnography and embeds into psytrance the term ‘communitas’, which returns many times to form a key focus of the book. the sequel to the goa section discusses globalisation, bridging the gap between goa and the growth of psytrance in europe. in fact it is the well-defined and well-written specificity of this chapter by hillegonda rietveld that clarifies the origins of european psytrance and its relation to goa. it names specific recordings and artists, dates and places, building on the earlier chapters which were rather more freeform, reflecting perhaps a goa trance state of mind. in particular this mature chapter gives credit to various sources often overlooked in such histories, such as electro body music (ebm) and klf. charles de ledesma goes on to explore the growth of psytrance in london. there is strong data here and interviews with key players, but this is inevitably a very london-centric ethnography, rather more local than the claimed uk coverage. robin lindop casts a wider net, defining and discussing the music itself, as well as the culture surrounding it. however, without a use of technical musical terminology, this is rendered a little vague. de ledesma does critically engage with the ways in which edm sometimes defines itself as “authentic” in opposition to the “mainstream”, but then goes on to claim that “psytrance is exemplary”. it is similarly contradictory over the subject of genre purity. like the following chapter by joshua schmidt, lindop provides some paradoxes in his writing, but overall provides useful information to the emerging wider narrative. schmidt uses pairs of dichotomies to critically analyse israeli trance. again this is a view from the inside of a scene, shown when it condemns as “chronic” the media’s description of israeli desert trance mesibot as “drug parties”, although it is clear from an external perspective why that description might be used. however schmidt’s work is succinct, well structured and provides a convincing argument. the last of the trilogy of sections weaves in and out of a vague focus on liminal culture. botond vitos begins by providing a rare insight into czech psytrance, although his argument is a little circular, perhaps due to a closeness to interlocutors who had recently and regularly taken lsd, a proximity which he tries to stretch away from instead of embracing. the fact that some of his interviewees described their activities using his own theories of demencze shows a rather acid splintered blurring of boundary between the emic and etic. chiara baldini’s approach is far bolder and more successful, making her position as party organiser clear and embracing material and references with a voice clearly internal to her and to psytrance. she draws upon the psy-spirit of dionysus in an effective correlation with her own experiences. the next two chapters, by jenny ryan and alex lambert, discuss the relationship of the web to psytrance from the perspectives of san francisco’s tribe.net and australia’s oztrance dancecult 2(1)96 community. the difficulty with this work is the use of individual web-posts to represent the views of the group, as there is often inevitably an opposing view that contradicts any point. however the significance of the web to this scene merits such attention, which is especially well presented in lambert’s cultural circuit. the last dance is reserved for graham st. john, who applies his experience and skill as an edm commentator to both reference other chapters and make significant points of his own, providing an appropriate climax to the narrative. st. john’s final chapter is the strongest in the book. it largely focuses on festival culture and on those technomads who travel from festival to festival, making psy-trance a lifestyle choice rather than a part-time activity. this is a recurring feature of the book, which focuses on the intensely committed few, rather the many casual psytrancers. this focus on festival culture feels unbalanced. in many cases the authors show their partisan attitudes and don’t so much struggle to maintain an objective attitude to their subject, as willingly submit to a pro-psytrance attitude. it is unsurprising that some chapters are written by relatively inexperienced researchers, rather than late career researchers with several books under their belts. this gives the work a currency and directness and although one could criticise the text in terms of clarity of emic or etic approaches, this would ignore the benefits that the writers’ proximity to psytrance culture provides. there have been many studies that have pointed out the difficulties western society faces in a fractured world that struggles to resolve issues of community, identity, belonging, hope and the loss of popular rituals that address such issues. studies addressing cultures that seem to be orientated around solutions to these issues, or new approaches to them, inevitably raise difficulties, may be controversial or inconclusive and in a post-meta-narrative world, fail to provide simple answers. however this book’s approach to issues such as communitas provides an engaging and novel approach to such problems. overall then the local scenes and global cultures of psytrance provides a valuable insight into a world-wide movement which has had comparatively little study so far. i am no novice to the world of psytrance, but this book provided a wide range of interesting, thoughtprovoking and informative detail, and is one i can highly recommend as essential reading to any researchers interested in edm culture. “a valuable insight into a world-wide movement which has had comparatively little study” reviews 97 pink noises: women on electronic music and sound tara rodgers durham: duke university press, 2010. isbn: 978-0-8223-4661-6 (hardcover), 978-0-8223-4673-9 (paperback) rrp: us$84.955 (hardcover), us$23.95 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.07 anna gavanas independent researcher, electronic music producer and dj tara rodgers’ book pink noises is a long overdue feminist intervention in the historiography of electronic music. pink noises emphasizes the pioneering, substantial and diverse work that has been accomplished by women but so far remained largely invisible in previous accounts of electronic music development. thereby, tara rodgers starts to correct the century long lack of representation that profoundly underestimates the presence and diversity of expressions by women working with sound and electronic music. the title pink noises (which is also the name of the producer/musician/dj network pinknoises.com founded by the author in 2000) refers to pink in terms of a “marker of female difference”, and noise as a “site of disturbance and productive potential”. tara rodgers also refers to the term pink noises in physics and audio engineering, as “variations of white noise, or unstructured sound that contains every audible frequency”. moreover, tara rodgers introduces her interviews with women artists as pink noises in and by themselves: “sonic interventions from multiple sources, which destabilize dominant gendered discourses and work toward equal power distributions in the cultural arenas where sounds reverbrate” (2010:19). structured as a collection of interviews/ conversations, pink noises documents and explains ground breaking innovations and visions in electronic music production and technology from the perspectives of the pioneers themselves. ground breaking and legendary international artists are interviewed, like pauline oliveros, kaffe matthews, giulia loli (mutamassik) and chantal passamonte (mira calix). the book is structured into six themes in electronic music; time/memory; space/perspective; nature/synthetics; circulation/movements; language/machines/embodiment; and alone/together. from a variety of different angles, rodgers and her interviewees disentangle assumptions that cast technology and music—and electronic music in particular—as male domains while, most importantly, discussing the dimensions and meanings of sound, expression and representation. moreover, pink noises reflects upon the cultural and political potential of sound itself. tara rodgers conceives of the potentials of sound, as a category of critical and aesthetic analysis, to feminist concerns in particular, arguing that “sounds can be thought of as pressure and movements, doing cultural work” (2010:19). dancecult 2(1)98 pink noises is an extremely important contribution to the study and documentation of electronic music because, unlike previous literature on electronic music, tara rodgers refuses to stop at the “thresholds that have silenced women’s work in historical accounts”. tara rodgers thus looks beyond the commonplace observation where most standard accounts stop and conclude that women constitute a minority in electronic music—as if this observation would explain their absence in literature and media. with pink noises, tara rodgers challenges the normalization of male dominance in the patrilineal historiography of electronic music. against the grain of ideologies aligning women with normative modes of heterosexual and capitalist reproduction, tara rodgers makes the argument that sounds themselves are reproductive, “to account for reproductive sounds in all their temporal depth is to challenge the patrilineal lines of descent and the universalizing male claims to creation that have thus far characterized dominant discourses in electronic music” (2010:15). although the professional interventions of interviewed artists go as far back as the 1950s, it is striking that similar gendered issues and experiences seem to reoccur throughout the generations of women who work with sound and electronic music. however, it is encouraging to read about the ways interviewees have prevailed and ignored gendered biases in the business; only to cultivate their subversiveness, innovation and determination even further. to someone who is extremely interested in the technical aspects of working with sound and music production it is very instructive to read pink noises. however, to someone who does not have a specific interest for technical aspects it could be difficult to follow the very informed conversations between the author and her interviewees. helpfully there is a detailed glossary on technical concepts. it is apparent throughout the book that the author has had previous contacts and collaboration with many interviewees, presumably through her own professional activity as a musician and her work with pinknoises.com. many of the participants in the book are part of the same international and/or overlapping musical/ professional scenes. it would be interesting to read more about the ways the author is situated in her field of study and the ways in which this influences her selection of interviewees, her questions and the responses. although rodgers probably has many good reasons for her decision to let interviewees speak for themselves and make their own analysis i sometimes feel that additional concluding, contextualizing and comparative commentary would be helpful. also, it would have been great to have a chapter on tara rodgers herself, and her long standing experience, electronic music production and reflection as electronic musician analog tara. all in all, pink noises is an extremely well informed, informative and inspiring discussion of some of the most crucial aspects and developments in electronic music. the innovators and actors behind these developments happen to be women and pink noises thereby highlights the astounding male centeredness in standard accounts and representation in electronic music. “ rodgers challenges the normalization of male dominance” reviews 99 technomad: global raving countercultures graham st john london: equinox publishing, 2009. isbn: 9781845536251 (hardcover), 9781845536268 (paperback) rrp: uk£50.00 (hardcover), uk£15.00 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.08 phil kirby university of liverpool, uk graham st john is a cultural anthropologist whose latest publication explores “themes of counterculture and resistance” in global electronic dance music culture (edmc). previous publications by st john explore psytrance and the intersection of rave culture and religion, key themes in technomad. the book is the result of eight years of research and offers a utopian study of rave culture, one in which legislation such as the uk’s criminal justice act and the onset of corporate clubbing hasn’t stopped the development of the free party scene. it adds to the evolving canon of academic literature that explores edmc culture and demonstrates a rigorous level of research. in an echo of centre for contemporary cultural studies (cccs) theory, st john frames the global techno-countercultures explored in technomad as “resistant”. st john acknowledges that anthony d’andrea has also explored the intersection of rave culture and post-1960s new (age) spirituality. where d’andrea attends to the cultural economy of psytrance “neo-nomads”, st john makes use of a significant range of theoretical stances including bey’s concept of the temporary autonomous zone (taz) to unpack the “fleeting permanence of contemporary counterculture” (2). technomad provides a cultural history of diverse alternative global edmc formations, the techno-underground, whose mobility has been partially facilitated by new digital technologies. the book’s focus is mainly on the nexus between hippy culture and rave culture, which has resulted in the evolution of edm sub-genres such as psytrance. st john divides the book into eight chapters and in the course of the first chapter, which serves as an introduction, quotes from much of the academic literature that explores rave culture. key themes are introduced that are then explored in more depth throughout the book; these include digital technology—both in terms of facilitating diy music production, its role in enabling alternative modes of communication and in framing dance music as a form of resistance used by activists to oppose rampant capitalism; gender issues and environmental issues. a key argument of technomad is that non-commercial forms of edmc are directly politicised by restrictive regulation and subsequently offer alternative spaces for a liminal communitas to evolve. dancecult 2(1)100 the second chapter explores the proliferation of a specific form of rave culture practice, the uk free party scene. the intersection of post-hippy uk free festival traveller culture and acid house music was in part facilitated by the appropriation and subsequent growth of sound system culture, a concept originally developed in jamaica in the 1950s. this chapter explores the growth of mobile dance music sound systems and what st john refers to as ‘traveller circuses’ such as spiral tribe. this nascent free party culture eventually culminated in the festival at castlemorton common in 1992, the event that precipitated the uk’s criminal justice and public order act of 1994. subsequent police attention and legislation had the unintended effect of gradually spreading these cultural practices around europe and beyond. st john notes the influence of various sound system crews as they stage events outside the uk. the third chapter maps the development and proliferation of sound system based edmc scenes in america, canada and australia. the integral role of the sound system in both reggae and hip hop culture has been noted in numerous histories of those genres, but st john successfully explores the key role that sound system practices have played in the global dissemination of particular strands of rave culture. st john then seeks to define the elusive “vibe” of a successful dance music experience, tracing the origin of the popular usage of the term back to the 1967 “summer of love” in san francisco. the study explores the idea that the term may have afro-american origins and connotations of eastern mysticism, “…the term now legion within edmc is used to denote a spatial and temporal experience, a collective and individual happening where a profound sensation of connection and mystery transpires” (99). from this definition various tribal edmc subdivisions are discussed in terms of “vibe tribes”. these tribes are not framed as mutually exclusive but explored in terms of “…a spectrum upon which the vibe may be characterized as libratory and divine at one end, and militant and proactive at the other” (103). the straightforward hedonism and release sought and achieved by many participants in mainstream edmc isn’t explored, as the project of the book is concerned with utopian outlaw countercultures. the various shamanistic/spiritual and activist tribal standpoints are explored in some depth offering useful insights for researchers interested in contemporary cultural anthropology. the author then explores a wide-ranging history of carnivalesque counter-cultural tribal gatherings, from san francisco’s golden gate park to the burning man. these ‘temporary alternative zones’ (or taz’s) and countercultural dramas are framed as “alternative futures”. the themes of spirituality and activism mentioned above inform the next two chapters. in chapter five technomad explores the intersection of rave culture and spirituality through an analysis of psytrance culture. st john defines psytrance as “…a carrier of the 1960’s counterculture flowering in the present” (165). he mentions the commercial “progressive trance” scene very briefly, acknowledging that it has ‘significant exchange value’, although it seems unlikely that the concept of the technocult explored by st john would mean much to the denizens of gatecrasher (www.gatecrasher.com; see also moore 2010). the pantheistic values of psytrance culture are discussed and the various occultist manifestations of the “trance ritual” are investigated, “itself a network of deviant and hidden knowledge and practice, from magick, prophecies and shamanism to astrology, esoteric christianity, ufos, http://www.gatecrasher.com reviews 101 and alien abductions, psytrance constitutes a discernable field of contemporary occultism” (169). parts of this chapter would seem familiar territory to readers of shea and wilson’s the illuminatus! trilogy, mainly as st john explores some of the global psytrance events leading up to the millennium and also some bizarre examples of psytrance ideology. for students and researchers interested in the evolution of goa-trance and the cultural practices and beliefs of the psytrance community, this chapter will provide a useful resource. the next chapter explores the harnessing of electronic dance music to a variety of activist agendas. these include anti criminal justice bill protests and reclaim the streets events. st john notes that “official” culture seeks to limit the dangers of carnivalesque excess, whilst recognising that carnival has a role in maintaining the equilibrium necessary for capitalism to thrive (presdee 2000). activists in turn have noted the dissident energy within the insurrectional dance-carnival and utilised it as a feature of contemporary protest and direct action. the implication of edm in a wide range of progressive and occasionally militant courses of action are explored; st john uses the neologism “protestival” to categorise these events of “radical conviviality”. initially the protestival was concerned with the regulation of dance music culture, but has since been harnessed to a range of different causes. the protest-carnival template has proliferated globally, partially facilitated by the internet. this leads to an interesting exploration of the intersection of activism, theatre and carnival in australia, the techno-tribes and sound systems discussed are concerned with injustices to both the aboriginal population and the environment. australians refer to outdoor edm events that synthesise transgressive, anarchistic and ecological sensibilities as “doofs”. the mobile sound system counterculture or “doofscape” discussed in this chapter is concerned with establishing valid links with the aboriginal population and seeks a respectful relationship with both the indigenous population and the land. the final brief chapter summarises the project of the book, to unpack the cultural politics of electronic dance music scenes. in many ways technomad achieves this successfully, although the focus of the book on the “outlaw” aspect of edm omits a significant range of practices and participants in edmc. however, as a contribution to the understanding of globalised dance music culture technomad offers many useful insights, both in terms of cultural anthropology, neo-religion and spirituality and the potential for edm as a form of activism. this exhaustively researched and meticulously crafted book provides a significant resource for all those interested in contemporary popular culture. references bey, hakim. 1991. t.a.z. the temporary autonomous zone, ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism. brooklyn: autonomedia. d’andrea, anthony. 2007. global nomads: techno and new age as transnational countercultures. london/new york: routledge. moore, karenza. 2010. the british ‘mainstream’ post-rave trance scene: exploring emotional and spiritual expression amongst ‘crasher clubbers’. in s. collins-mayo and b. pink-dandelion (eds.) religion and youth. aldershot: ashgate. presdee, m. 2000. cultural criminology and the carnival of crime, london: routledge. shea, robert, & wilson, anton. 1998. the illuminatus! trilogy. london: constable and robinson. dancecult 2(1)102 sonic warfare: sound, affect and the ecology of fear steve goodman cambridge: the mit press, 2010. isbn: 0-262-01347-9 (hardcover), 978-0-262-01347-5 (paperback) rrp: us$96.95 (hardcover), us$35.00 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.09 tobias c. van veen mcgill university, canada rave culture has long known of the power of sound to seduce bodies into becoming particles of a movement. dancer and dj become but one conduit of a feedback loop that affects the physical and the psychic. ecstasy, fear, horror, awe and excitement, as well as melancholy, nostalgia and transcendance form the connective tissue of the event. focusing on the “politics of frequency”, sonic warfare seeks to outline how the limits of sound are deployed within “vibration ontology”. goodman overviews military-state and countercultural usages alike, from audio assault weaponry for crowd control to dub audio viruses that transmit the offworld heritage of afrofuturism. an earworm, for example, can operate as an afrodiasporic riff of black noise that functions “as an attractor in processes of group catalysis”(157), such as the mobilization of dance; or, as a preemptive strike by hypercapital that “sets up a structure of allure for products for which you had no desire… because they do not necessarily exist yet” (186). tracing these parallel developments to early 20th century futurism and its “art of noise in the art of war” goodman dismisses the avant-garde camps of noise and silence alike, choosing (wisely) to focus on an ecology of rhythm and to argue for a complex and—perhaps essentially—incomplete philosophical inventory of vibration ontology. as goodman briefs in the introduction, readers looking for a detailed, historical account of sonic warfare should turn elsewhere. it is also worth noting—as goodman himself warns of his “dense theorisation”—that readers looking for an exegesis or comparative study of the text’s many philosophical sources should come prepared for neither. prepare instead for a somewhat chaotic assemblage of theoretical trajectories that zoom in and out of zones “goodman’s development of affect remains indispensible to studies of soniculture” reviews 103 of inquiry, from the futurhythmachines of the black atlantic to the bass materialism of global ghettotech. if that’s an earful, listen and repeat until sedated, for goodman has well adopted the deleuzo-guattarian maxim of conjoining it all with an “and”. fear not radical empiricism! affect and ontology of vibration goodman’s development of affect remains indispensible to studies of soniculture. for goodman, affect is the vibration—the good or bad vibes—prior to organisation into organised feeling (prior to what phenomenology would call intentionality). sonic weaponry seeks to disrupt or enhance the vibrational flux; it is capable of provoking feelings such as fear, dread or ecstasy through its good or bad vibes. goodman details actual sonic weaponry as well as fantastical projects that have promised more than delivered. he also aligns particular electronic music genres with various sonic effects, noting in particular how bass heavy genres—such as dub—generate atmospheres of dread, quipping their bass materialism as the “subpolitical power of music to attract and congeal populations” (172). elements of these theses were developed in goodman’s 2004 article, “speed tribes”. goodman’s approach, which he groups with radical empiricism, mixes the realms of the material and physiological with their often hazy effects upon subjects and cultures—the contested realm of the social sciences and cultural studies. in this respect, goodman develops a materialist perspective for grasping the affective potential of sound, be it the marching drum of the military, sonic cannons fired on insurgent protesters, or wobbly subbass let loose on east london club-dwellers. radical empiricism does not so much eschew cause and effect as much as it claims that effects operate autonomously of cause in an “ecology” of interrelationships (or rhythms and anticipatory echoes). radical empiricism opens the material world to preconscious interpenetration by its bodies (which can be any population, as whitehead’s “actual occasion”), as well as prehensive temporality, where “such an occasion itself starts as an effect facing its past and ends as a cause facing its future” (whitehead, quoted in goodman 152). in short, goodman eschews the a priori claims of phenomenology, substituting the radical empiricism of ecology. this, of course, requires an epistemological claim concerning knowing that which is aphenomenal and asubjective to the world. what we call sound itself is merely the human heard of the spectrum; goodman delves beyond even the ultra, sub and infrasonic, developing philosophies of rhythmanalysis by bachelard, lefebvre and whitehead (though one wishes he had spent more time with lefebvre, who explores the political capacities of rhythmanalysis, and in general less time with deleuze and guattari’s toolbox of usual suspects). in this respect, goodman practices what deleuze and guattari call a “minor science”; he delves headfirst into claims concerning hard science and metaphysical inquiry while suspending their epistemological uncertainty, thereby granting this form of empiricism, for better or for worse, its radicalism. that said, goodman footnotes the moment where his radical empiricism and graham harman’s speculative realism depart, noting his adherence to whitehead’s theories of relation over harman’s insistence on the rigorous conception of the discrete object (ch. 17). yet speculative realism holds intriguing consequences for goodman’s ontology of vibration. could discrete objects mark a particular phase of whitehead’s eternal object? dancecult 2(1)104 here i’ll dive into one particular argument to give a sense of what is at stake in the thesis of vibration ontology. the eternal vibrator goodman does not note if his adoption of the eternal object—which ingresses from pure potential into the real potential of the actual as it vibrates out-of-phase with itself (whew)—departs or concords with alain badiou’s neo-platonism. this becomes all the more significant when goodman talks of whitehead’s “actual occasions”—which are bodies in the general sense—being able to select eternal objects, which is how affective encounters between “discrete actual entities” occur (98). not only does a shadow of the discrete return, drawing attention to how radical empiricism shadows speculative realism, but goodman often writes as if a rhythmic power underpins vibration ontology (he treats audio viruses, or earworms, in a similar fashion, granting them an undefined agency he nearly denies human subjects (149)). in this respect, his adoption of the eternal object approaches a quasi-idealism, or a transcendentalism he elsewhere seeks to avoid. goodman’s radical empiricism, not surprisingly given its theoretical ground, dances around the question of spinoza’s god, i.e., the eternal vibrator. this problem can be recast in terms of politics. while goodman critiques bachelard for seeking equilibrium between counterrhythms (107), he nonetheless accepts philip turetsky’s account of rhythmic synthesis that forms matter into a single body (111). what is the difference between the two? well, for one, it is one of politics, or as goodman sees it, the micropolitics of frequency. goodman conceives of the “ontological ground” as fundamentally turbulent, a rhythmic anarchitecture which: . . . does not dictate the orientation of such a micropolitics; it does not lay down a set of generalizable laws but rather throws up a series of engineering problems. as such, any micropolitics derivable from this base can be only tactical rather than strategic—a war without aims concerned more with disposition and potential movement than ideology, although certainly susceptible to abduction (107). the problem is, of course, with alien abduction. the other always swoops in, alien, capitalist, totalitarian or otherwise viral, an earworm “takeover of the body by an exterior entity” (150) that overcodes tactical movement with strategy, setting up a violent mechanism of control over heterogeneous rhythms, and ultimately, of the “actual occasion” that is the self. like deleuze and guattari’s war machine, the tactical micropolitics of frequency or turbulence remain fundamentally inculpable. of course, we have hit upon the ideology of this position, which is its first generalizable law. its second generalizable law is already expressed above: being concerned with disposition and potential movement precisely is the ideogram of the micropolitics of frequency, its unification or expressed ideology as the perceived good, pre-abduction, of rhythmic anarchitecture. elsewhere goodman writes that “a theory of sonic warfare is particularly fascinated by this turbulent boundary layer between dance and violence” (111). what i understand goodman as trying to argue is that while vibrational control reviews 105 techniques such as sonic weaponry (from dub viruses to military means) seek to control the crowd by unifying it through resonance, thereby dictating it to move as one, at the ontological level its rhythm remains turbulent and nonunified. one can also see dance as a similar assemblage, where the soundsystem unifies differentiated bodies into what kodwo eshun called a “futurhythmachine”. thus, unification is not, in itself, a bad thing, but can be wrought for different ends say that of the military state, on the one channel, or that of jouissance, such as rave culture, on the other. that we are talking of ends and means suggests strategy, however, rather than tactics. this argument is a strong one, and smartly counters adorno’s well-worn conservative moralisms against mass dancing and jazz music, or benjamin’s aestheticization of politics, as somehow fundamentally fascist, questioning whether “aesthetics need be sacrificed at the altar of a political cause” (175). yet, there is a strict problem here: the potential to be unified is evidently inherent to rhythm. more than potential, it is an incorporated possibility before the fact; it is de jure. one could argue just as well that rhythm is fundamentally unified, which is to say one, and that turbulence is an expression of mode. again, this is spinoza’s problem, of the monadic substance of god expressed in the many. it haunts goodman’s text throughout, significantly with the undefined agency of the audio virus or earworm and the supposedly uncontaminated and interiorized body it penetrates by communicating the instruction “record me!” (150). a more ecological sense of interior/exterior would be of use here, of the earworm within that would whisper the effects of consciousness, suggesting the always already incorporation of alterity. in short, to the question: what concept of memory is compatible with the illogic of affect, the virtuality of the past and the active immanence of futurity in the present? one could reply, différance, insofar as derrida speaks of an absolute past, force, and the technics of the sign—the trace—before the re-marking of intentionality. and/or the logic of the supplement, otherwise known as incorporation, of that which is extraneous but necessary (that which is added after to make the thing whole from the start). derrida’s work on husserl could bridge the divide to deleuze and forms the unthought (or unsound) to goodman’s investigations. the political question of unified rhythm is raised by lefebvre, as well as deleuze and guattari, the latter whom grasp the state as the superposition of waves, a wave that cancels itself out (see van veen 2010: 183). superposed waves become a flat line that masks their turbulence, posing an entire problematic of perception, as well as form/content, ecological or otherwise, within rhythmanalysis. to this end, in the production of space, lefebvre even cautions against overstating the parallelism between hydrodynamics and theory (184). of course, goodman adequately argues a radical empiricism that claims all as rhythmic; it is a materialist theory of rhythm through-and-through that charts sociopolitical effects from the axioms of vibration ontology. which is to say the critical objection to goodman remains here. utilising vibrational ontology to script (or prescript) the political will of populations—or rather rendering viral such will, and “mapping” populations as preconscious rhythmic assemblages—dovetails neatly with 20th century second-order cybernetics as well as hypercapitalist (and fascist) strategy. unquestionably, such strategies—strategies as they serve political endgames— dancecult 2(1)106 are powerful. goodman demonstrates how they work in the world. yet they also do not work so well; no population has yet been adequately controlled (or so we perceive…). and undoubtedly this is also goodman’s point: that turbulence is a priori, that turbulence remains, in short, as a “subpolitics,” as it cannot be prescripted, even as resistance (175). it could be “abducted” in any direction. and in this sense, i agree with goodman, for his rhythmanalysis leaves us with a population (and a universe) that is without content, much like paolo virno’s conception of the multitude, or lefebvre’s analysis of the urban as form. yet, the alien, as all the sci-fi nightmares of horrific innards warn us, is always within. abduction occurs from within this same ontos; we abduct ourselves, unknowingly, aliens to ourselves. which leaves the question hanging: what is this uncanniness of the alien, its strange eternal return as the virus of our becoming? in short there is always an untimely question to the absolute claims of radical empiricism. whereas the virus remains, the material strategies of its dissemination do not; they mutate and change with the technics of history. for a materialist ontology of vibration, is it not, by its own admission, a tactic and not strategy, a viral thought to the metaphysics of eternal ontology? wildstyle ecology in mu-mu land the telescoping rhythm of shifting in and out of this increasingly complex and at times bizarre inventory of sonic weapons, inventions and theories touches upon the wildstyle. at times one wishes goodman would pitch down the rhythm and pause, downsampling more time to his soundbytes. in a particularly captivating passage, goodman fast-forwards a discussion between william burroughs and led zeppelin guitarist jimmy page on the potential of infrasonics; shifts to industrial band and performance artists throbbing gristle and their “infrasonic emitters;” and skips on to discuss the klf’s “audio weapons system” as borrowed by techno duo panasonic (now pan sonic). all this on page 24. as goodman makes clear on several occasions, “a brief overview will have to suffice” (17). yet the overview can be stimulating and a scrappy shot of wake-up. goodman emphasizes the potential of sound, writing how “at the very least, the transduction of bad vibes into something more constructive suggests the need to probe more deeply into affective tonality and the vibrations of the environment” (73). most ravers would agree. references goodman, s. 2004. “speed tribes: netwar, affective hacking and the audio-social”. in franz liebl and thomas düllo (eds), cultural hacking: kunst des strategischen handelns, pp. 139-55. vienna: springer. lefebvre, henri. 1991. the production of space. trans. donald nicholson-smith. oxford: blackwell. van veen, tobias c. 2010. “cities of rhythm and revolution”. in alexandra boutros and will straw (eds), circulation and the city: essays on mobility and urban culture, pp. 155-192. montréal: mcgill-queens up. reviews 107 film music world: donk dir. andy capper vbs:tv (internet documentary), 2009. http://www.vbs.tv/en-gb/watch/music-world/donk phil kirby university of liverpool (uk) this review explores the vbs.tv documentary on the uk electronic dance music style known as “donk”. the genre is referred to by a number of names including scouse house, bouncy house, bouncy techno, bounce or donk. the term bounce will be used throughout the review as the term donk has a pejorative dimension. the style is an offshoot of hardcore techno, which has had a number of variants popular in the north of england. the tunes are around 150 bpm with a four-on-the-floor kick drum, whilst the eponymous “donk” itself is a layered sound or stab that occurs on the offbeat, or “and” of each beat. synthesised musical parts in the tunes are akin to european techno, a stylistic template that has more in common with the sonic palette of 2 unlimited than that of basic channel. some bounce releases feature vocals, or rapid-fire mc’ing in an unashamedly uk regional accent. the focus of the documentary is mainly the blackout crew, although other uk mcs and producers are featured. blackout crew’s 2008 single put a donk on it may have only reached number 91 in the uk charts, but the official video had well over five million hits on youtube, and consequently attracted “mainstream” media attention. the genre is little known outside of the north west and north east of england. indeed, in the north west of england the style is mainly popular in the satellite towns between liverpool and manchester such as st helens and wigan, and towns to the north of manchester such as bolton, burnley and blackburn. the documentary is on initial viewing quite funny, until the realisation sinks in that it is a heavily biased, stereotype-laden snipe at the leisure practices of the white northern working class. the documentary begins by exploring blackout crew’s origins in a bolton youth centre. notably, considering the multi-cultural makeup of most of the towns named above, the only representatives of ethnic minorities filmed in the documentary are the managers of the youth centre (and a promoter later in the video). northern hardcore and its sub-styles have never been of much interest to young black or asian clubbers. the black respondents’ comments in the video are subtitled despite being perfectly comprehensible; indeed this doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.10 http://www.vbs.tv/en-gb/watch/music-world/donk dancecult 2(1)108 patronising use of subtitles occurs randomly throughout the video. the next sequence takes place in burnley, introduced by a series of visual tropes intended to convey a sense of acute urban deprivation. the presenter briefly interviews an ex-mc and questions him on local drug use, this respondent seems to have been included solely as he has been to prison. after some more clichéd camera shots the next respondent offers a more positive view of the town than the earlier montage suggested, despite being repeatedly questioned on the area’s alleged propensity for violence. a bounce producer dj greenie is subsequently interviewed; he responds to questions about the scene’s drug use by coyly stating a comparison to the film human traffic, inferring the use of ecstasy. greenie is questioned on the centrality of steroids to the donk scene, to which he responds, “wigan pier’s full of big lads on steroids”. in the next sequence the documentaryfollows blackout crew to a gig in scarborough. the documentary crew film some sequences outside the venue, one is an interview with a promoter who discusses the problems of booking the band outside the style’s heartlands, describing the southern audience as “more urban, more sophisticated in a sense”. the narrative then returns to bolton, signified by a montage featuring a pie shop, a tanning salon, a tattoo studio and a barbershop. after more interviews the focus shifts to a blackout crew performance at wigan pier, but not before another montage including a camera shot of a local newspaper headline proclaiming wigan thug beats mum to be and yet more shots of fast food shops. footage of young males being checked for weapons with a hand-held metal detector is included to connote a threat of violence. the next sequence sums up the overall tone of the documentary, despite the friendly interviewees and carefree enthusiasm of the pier’s crowd, the documentary team can’t resist sniping at the provincial working class audience, “as the night went on hundreds more fake-tanned, steroid-pumped donk enthusiasts filled the floor, tongues blue from drinking wkd”. as the blackout crew perform, the presenter then comments that the music starts to sound like being trapped in a nail factory, before paraphrasing joseph conrad’s heart of darkness, “what you see here is the beating heart of donk, the heart of donkness, oh the horror, the horror”. to bookend the video the documentary team return to bolton the next day to interview one of the blackout crew mcs. as a product of the vice media group the documentary has a pre-ordained agenda to be mildly controversial and to come across as edgy gonzo journalism, hence the underlying fixation with drugs, violence and urban deprivation. this subtext is reinforced by the “quite funny, until the realisation sinks in that it is a heavily biased, stereotype-laden snipe at the leisure practices of the white northern working class” reviews 109 connotations supplied by the montage sequences and the chosen edits. the documentary team are given a consistently friendly welcome and open access to the scene by all whether practitioners or clubbers yet still choose to mock the northern working class whenever possible. this isn’t a highbrow dance music style, but then again neither are grime or funky (uk garage sub-styles), which are generally treated with some degree of reverence by the british media, possibly as these styles initially emanated from the south of england and have greater perceived (sub) cultural capital. other related media coverage demonstrates this bias. the guardian newspaper included a brief feature on donk in 2008 (by a vice contributor) which had the headline, “bouncy techno meets terrible rapping? welcome to donk. keen on sportswear? prone to taking your shirt off in clubs? donk is made for you” (mcdonnell 2008). in a promotional article in the metro newspaperthe producer discusses the making of the vbs documentary: the most shocking element was just how massive most of these dudes were. they all had their tops off and the drugs are paramount. they take ecstasy, steroids, a bit of cocaine and then blue or red alcopops. we’ve been making a load of films recently, including one about cannibals in liberia, but there were bits of donk that were just as scary—like being the only sober ones among 3,000 ravers on steroids and ecstasy (capper cited by day 2010). the documentary says much about the predominantly middle-class media’s attitude to white working class britain and specifically london-based media’s attitude to the north of england. the selection of material, the content of the montages and the editing reinforces entrenched stereotypes concerning the north of england and white working class leisure. the documentary is augmented by a vice article on the making of the programme, which is noticeably more scathing than the documentary. for example, in a passage describing burnley the writer states the following hyperbole: what used to be a prosperous cotton-mill town is now decimated by the terminal decline of industry, with entire square miles of housing steel-boarded-up, repossessed and marked for demolition by the local council. unemployment is all-consuming, violence is a popular pastime—as is the rampant theft of expensive copper pipes from condemned houses to sell as scrap to pay for heroin and crack. it’s practically a ghost town these days, but instead of headless cavaliers with chains clanging around their wrists and ankles, there are gaggles of toothless, skeletal smackheads waddling around in skid-mark-stained tracksuit bottoms. actually, scratch that—it’s more zombie town than ghost town (hodgson 2009). obviously, burnley isn’t that bad, although if you look for that kind of social deprivation it can be found in many urban centres. crack and heroin use are not exclusively northern pastimes and neither is violence. another example of tabloid journalism in the vice article is the following statement describing the crowd in wigan pier: the crowd was a mixture of skimpily dressed, emaciated rave bunnies and some of the most gruesome thugs you’d ever come across—blokes whose faces had been dancecult 2(1)110 permanently disfigured by a lifetime of being pummeled by fists every weekend, who’ve probably washed down massive doses of steroids with gallons of stella for breakfast every morning since they were 11 years old (hodgson 2009). although the vbs.tv documentary is aimed at popular consumption, it does raise issues of academic interest other than media representation. there is potential for further academic research on the various dance music subcultures that have blossomed in the north of england outside of the metropolitan centres. an example of an interesting piece of previously published work on northern dance music culture is ingham’s (1999) listening back from blackburn: virtual sound worlds and the creation of temporary autonomy. this is a brief but fascinating study of the warehouse party scene that blossomed in the blackburn area in 1989-1990. northern soul has now achieved a mythic status and has received some academic attention, but the audience demographic was very similar to that of bounce nowadays, as were the audience demographics for the other hardcore house and techno variants that preceded bounce in the same geographic area. linking these styles historically could be socially and culturally revealing. references day, james. 2010. “donk is the crazy dance sensation taking over the north-west of england”. metro, 31 march: <http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/819812-donk-is-the-crazy-dance-sensationtaking-over-the-north-west-of-england>. hodgson, jaimie. 2009. “put a donk on it”. vice. <http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n2/htdocs/ put-a-donk-518.php>. ingham, james. 1999. “listening back from blackburn: virtual sound worlds and the creation of temporary autonomy”. in living through pop, ed. a. blake, 112-128). london: routledge. mcdonnell. john. 2008. “bouncy techno meets terrible rapping? welcome to donk”. guardian online. 29 july: <http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2008/jul/29/ bouncytechnomeetsterribler>. “the crowd was a mixture of skimpily dressed, emaciated rave bunnies and some of the most gruesome thugs you’d ever come across—” http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/819812-donk-is-the-crazy-dance-sensation-taking-over-the-north-west-of-england http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/819812-donk-is-the-crazy-dance-sensation-taking-over-the-north-west-of-england http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n2/htdocs/put-a-donk-518.php http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n2/htdocs/put-a-donk-518.php http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2008/jul/29/bouncytechnomeetsterribler http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2008/jul/29/bouncytechnomeetsterribler reviews 111 speaking in code dir. amy grill usa: square productions, 2008. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1474864/ tobias c. van veen mcgill university, canada you can still smell the revolution a bit, you know. —modeselektor with the proliferation of digital film technologies, i’ve been waiting to witness a film that captures the obsession and exuberance of the worldwide technoculture. by techno i have a specific meaning in mind. with the collapse of north american rave culture thanks to 9/11—which, among other things, disrupted vinyl distribution as well as introduced draconian police powers that were deployed everywhere against autonomist enclaves—djs, producers and adherents of the house and techno sound fled the states. this remains an undocumented exodus of creative luminaries. though montréal served, for a few years, as a nexus of technoculture thanks to the mutek collective—many of my canadian comrades moved to montréal around 2002—it was berlin that soon overcame all comers. easy travel within a united europe, cheap living and the fierce protection of personal freedoms made berlin not just an inexpensive and convenient place to live, but made it (along with barcelona) the place to imagine collective cultural anarchism. the jouissance of deep, psychedelic, minimalist or maximalist techno betrays not only this yearning, but its reality, which is what few north americans realise. berlin and barcelona, though each fighting their battles against gentrification, are singularities of the way things could be. perhaps even should be. amy grill’s film captures something of the meaning of techno to berliners. techno is not just clubbing catharsis; it is the soundtrack to the fall of the wall. as a few interviews (and deleted scenes) explain, when the wall fell in 1989, the centre of berlin opened into unoccupied and stateless space. ravers crept in, setting up technoclubs in bunkers and buildings. the infamous tresor was such a space; today berghain upholds the tradition. signs of this sociocultural renaissance appear everywhere in this film, where modernistdoi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.11 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1474864/ dancecult 2(1)112 inflected graffiti, inside and out, signifies resistance to speculation in property values. already, there is much to film: the relation of a free europe to the policed urbanism of north america; a thorough updating of the afrogermanic detroit/berlin axis wrought back in 1990; and the development of the later cross-atlantic dialogue with montréal, diving south in this regard, with mutek’s mexico and chile editions. though digging into berlin, and touching upon barcelona, speaking in code falls somewhat short of investigating the planetary potential of this techno matrix. focusing on grill’s hometown of boston, and her ex-husband david day’s struggle to produce technoculture in a town that mostly doesn’t care (like the rest of the conservative us), the film often forgets to provide some much-needed context to this mini-cultural revolution. after a few starts, it settles down on german labels bpitch control and kompakt, as the personal lives and meteoric careers of modeselektor and the wighnomy brothers become central to the narrative. both duos have to deal with celebrity and stress, as they find themselves gigging constantly, with modeselektor playing to tens of thousands at barcelona’s sonar festival. the massive scale of sonar is well contrasted to david day’s burnt-out efforts in boston, where day eventually loses track of his community, driving his new afterhours loftspace into the ground (at one point, he talks of putting on events night after night after ‘getting everyone else [i.e. his fellow artists!] out of the building’). a few other technorati make appearances, including the ever eccentric and incredibly inventive monolake, a.k.a. robert henke, prime programmer of ableton live and dub techno composer, whose spartan, all-white loft matches, without irony, his all-white techno outfit. another memorable appearance is that of music journalist and dj philip sherburne, who strives to explain, in an incredibly touching moment—he breaks down on camera— the true significance of hearing and what it means to him, thanks to his relationship with his deaf father, who received a hearing implant a few years before his death in 2005. indeed, philip’s ever articulate and composed persona is a highlight of the film; one wishes there was more from this evocative american writer. likewise, the ever elusive wolfgang voigt—an acid house-era techno producer and owner/operator of the kompakt empire—appears in fine form, situating “cultural techno” as not only still a part of ecstatic rave culture, but as a step beyond—a form-of-life. you will find more years to say something without words. —modeselektor reviews 113 the artist set-pieces of speaking in code are beautifully composed. each taps deeply into the ups-and-downs of living-and-breathing technoculture. the wighnomy brothers are exceptional; they live in the six person “small communist collective” of freude-am-tanzen, sharing equally in profits and running their own label, work/live space and distribution out of the small, mostly rural town of jena in former east germany. yet one wishes that the film went deeper still. when the very lovable, teddy bear-like robag wruhme of the brothers decides to take a breather from the relentless touring schedule, his absence remains something of a mystery. as a former technoculture journalist, i can’t help but think of what to ask him. i’d ask him if he misses his commune—surely, because he has spent his life, up to that point, working and living in an autonomist collective? to be thrown headfirst into the hypercommercialism and opportunist corporatism of mainstream european techno-pop culture must have been a dilemma—if not a cultural shock to the system. at sonar, massive digital billboards advertise alcohol, as if by bastardized simile they have overcoded the absent artistic visuals (look closely during modeselektor’s set). i’d hypothesize that wruhme’s retreat signifies that not all are comfortable with what “successful” technoculture has become. yet, the film only glances over divided yet interconnected levels of technoculture in europe. some are quite literally underground; the incredible muna club in jena reclaims a wwii-era rocket factory. an entire dimension of the ritual denazification of this space through dance is left uncommented. then there are the arena festivals of cigarette sponsorship bound by chain-link fences. the very opening of the film, for reasons that are left unexplained, rolls with some rather uninspiring footage of a dutch techno festival. as the camera enters through the vip gate, a sea of garbage and burnt-out bodies meets the eye, everyone seemingly unaware of the destitution of their camp-like surroundings… this is a fenced-in wasteland of the wasted, yet it is presented, without critique, as a tease of what’s to come. is this wasteland symbolic for something else in this film? well, yes. the evident struggle between technoculture’s collectivism and its commercialism, its schizoid, yet symbiotic relationship with corporate entertainment, is sacrificed to amy grill’s focus on her disintegrating relationship with david day. choosing “speaking in code shows that technoculture can be a communal, lifelong adventure in art, music and living, achieving escape velocity, at least for the inventive, from its youthful escapism and burn-out hedonism” dancecult 2(1)114 to narrativise her failing relationship with an always-omniscient voice-over, grill never places herself before the camera, even as she captures day in all his darkest moments. the film’s gaze does not match its voice; the director indulges in a selective narcissism, revealing only a strangely affectless narration to what is left unseen. by the end of the film the pair are divorced and what begins as an aside becomes the film’s peroration. their disintegration into divorce eschews cinema verité, embracing instead the conventionality of reality tv. what is more intriguing is all that is left unsaid. for example, why is montréal only mentioned once and the mutek festival never mentioned at all? north america is depicted as the graveyard of electronic music, yet there is no mention of the cities where technoculture has survived. also absent are vancouver’s new forms festival and seattle’s decibel. and then there’s detroit—its festival and heritage left unheard and unmentioned. the same can be said for san francisco, chicago, nyc and the midwest. this not only leaves the average audience unawares of the states’ founding as well as continuing contribution to electronic music, but it also leaves the current depiction of berlin’s technoscene and boston’s lack of it—despite day’s valiant attempts at a brief flowering—as somewhat hollow and meaningless. the united states lost something with 9/11—the total expression of a generation, silenced off the airwaves, policed and beaten down, denied even the nostalgia granted to punk. rave culture was not only underground; it has now been buried in the us, as if it never existed, as if the blurring of gender and colour and dance never happened. which brings me to the inevitable but essential question of representation. though ellen allien appears as head of bpitch control, speaking wonderfully of the emotive aspect of techno and the supportive atmosphere she strives to create in her label collective, she remains the sole woman onscreen. but most embarassingly, there is not one single black person in the film. one would think techno was invented and played solely by white people in berlin. in fact, the only reference to techno’s heritage in black detroit is a symbol, worn as a badge of respect by modeselektor. during their massive but ad-ridden sonar concert, sebastian szary wears an underground resistance t-shirt. good for him. full disclosure. i like others am a ghost in this film. i saw it being filmed. i’ve djed in many of the same places. i know and love most everyone in it. i love the music. it is difficult, in this respect, to write critically, especially given the usual laudatory press. but ditch the melodramatic divorce narrative and you have a documentary of profound intimacy and insight into the fragility of collective creation. speaking in code is a snapshot of a radical soniculture attempting to achieve a strange kind of equilibrium in the 21c. both henke and voigt say the same thing: they don’t see the need for change. but it’s more than that. speaking in code shows that technoculture can be a communal, lifelong adventure in art, music and living, achieving escape velocity, at least for the inventive, from its youthful escapism and burn-out hedonism. sometimes divorce is necessary for radical togetherness. showtime dir. rollo jackson uk: heatwave, 2011. http://www.theheatwave.co.uk/ http://boomkat.com/dvds/478181-the-heatwave-rollo-jackson-the-heatwave-presents-showtime-the-history-of-uk-dancehall-live-on-stage http://vimeo.com/45444078 philip kirby university of liverpool (uk) showtime is a documentary record of a dancehall based club night in london that took place in june 2011. the event was hosted by the heatwave crew who regularly promote reggae dancehall events and also present a show on london's rinse fm. the dvd sleeve notes explain that the event was intended to be an "explosion of uk dancehall history, bringing together legends from every era of uk rave music to share the mic and spit lyrics over classic dancehall riddims" (jackson 2011). in common with the 2008 soul jazz records release an england story (also compiled by heatwave) the event sets out to showcase the evolution of the uk mc from '80s uk reggae to the current generation of grime mcs. simon reynolds identifies a range of jamaican musical practices that have been integrated into uk dance music from hardcore onwards in his book energy flash, but in this documentary the mc is the focus. a potentially confusing point for the non-aficionado is that in reggae sound system parlance mcs are called djs. so, textual references to reggae artists that rap (or chat) will often refer to them as djs. i'll use the term mc throughout this review. early uk hip-hop was often hindered by the mc's clumsy attempts at adopting an american accent, derek b's 1988 hit "good groove" being one example of this phenomenon. uk mcs subsequently found their voice by incorporating influences from jamaican culture. jamaican street style has been influential in the uk for many years, and patois has gradually been incorporated into uk street vernacular. the integration and incorporation of jamaican culture into british youth culture is well documented by academics such as les back, who has explored black music, youth culture and syncretism in the uk. the dvd is dedicated to uk reggae artist smiley culture, who died in questionable circumstances in 2011. the origins of the uk mc style lie in the "fast chat" vocal style popularized by smiley culture and his associates. this style is considered to have originated from vocalists associated with the uk's saxon sound system in the 1980s. there was a rapid development in the credibility of uk "urban" music once uk-based mcs looked to their (or their peers') jamaican ancestry and started to base their style on a hybrid british/jamaican syncretic template that was informed by dancehall reggae. mcs became an integral part of the uk's rave scene in the late 1980s, and this continued in the 1990s, as the mc became a key feature of jungle and drum and bass clubbing. interestingly, this was despite drum and bass releases generally being instrumentals, or using sampled vocals, as the producer was the focal point in most drum and bass recordings. in a live scenario the sound system ethos held sway, and the interaction between the dj, mc and the crowd was of central importance. the centrality of the live mc in a club environment continued as uk garage and its sub-styles evolved. although grime is often seen as a form of hip-hop it owes a greater cultural debt to reggae, and this film offers a useful and entertaining visual and aural lesson on the influence of jamaican culture on the contemporary uk bass music scene. simon reynolds has coined the term "hardcore continuum" to explain the chronological influence of jamaican musical practices on uk dance music: "i've argued that the hardcore continuum is a uk adaption of the jamaican system". (reynolds 2010: 70). this film reinforces the validity of his observations. showtime mainly consists of live footage mixed with short interview segments with a number of the featured mcs. the performers range from '80s uk reggae artist asher senator to grime mcs such as wiley and flow dan. jungle, uk garage and dancehall mcs are also featured. the backing tracks are predominantly oriented towards dancehall, although there are also grime instrumentals incorporated into the set, such as wiley's "ice rink". the show incorporates sound system practices, notably numerous "rewinds", and, unlike the dj practices of other genres, seamless multi-deck mixing isn't the objective. from the brief interview segments the centrality of sound system culture and pirate radio to the emergence of uk bass music styles becomes clear. early in the dvd lady chann comments that with out smiley culture there wouldn't be grime mcs, and wiley also acknowledges the influence of dancehall on his own performance practice. djs chris goldfinger and david rodigan are identified as particularly influential in popularizing jamaican music in recent years. various interviewees acknowledge key uk sound systems like saxon and coxsone as having had a considerable influence on the evolution of the uk scene, as well as acknowledging pirate radio's impact. refreshingly, female dancehall mcs are featured in the show and interviewed at some length. essentially, this film offers an oral history that validates many aspects of simon reynolds' hardcore continuum: "it's a particular set of relations based around pirate radio, dubplates, raves and rave-style clubs, along with certain kinds of music-making technology" (reynolds 2010: 70). the film also illustrates the syncretic nature of the uk bass music scene. the dvd could be useful as a teaching resource to explore syncretic culture, or to anyone interested in the various jamaican-inflected strands of uk dance music. the film makes clear the links between reggae-influenced contemporary dance music styles and their precursors, which can be helpful when trying to explain to students the formative influences that paved the way for dubstep. a notable omission from the event's line up is that there weren't any mcs representing the uk hip-hop scene, as artists such as blak twang and roots manuva also demonstrate a clear jamaican influence in their work. the logistics of booking the sixteen featured mcs would have been challenging enough i'm sure, without covering every possible base. an interesting point that can be gleaned from the audience shots on the dvd and from photographs on heatwave's website is the demographic at the events they promote. in contrast to dancehall's "traditional" core jamaican audience, heatwave's audiences demonstrate a crossover into a young multicultural demographic. coincidentally, in june 2013 uk dancehall artist stylo g achieved a top twenty chart position demonstrating that the impact of jamaican music on the uk's popular music landscape continues. if we consider that this process started with millie small's "my boy lollipop", this is a cultural dialogue that has lasted almost half a century. references back, les. 1996. new ethnicities and urban culture: social identity and racism in the lives of young people. london: routledge. reynolds, simon. 1998. energy flash. london: picador. reynolds, simon. 2010. "the history of our world: the hardcore continuum debate". dancecult 1(2): 69–76. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.05> (accessed 12 july 2013). discography derek b. 1988. good groove. music of life (7-inch): 7 note 12. <http://www.discogs.com/derek-b-good-groove/release/230258>. millie small. 1964. my boy lollipop. fontana (7-inch): 267 331 tf. <http://www.discogs.com/millie-my-boy-lollipop/release/763685>. various. 2008. an england story. soul jazz records (cd comp): sjr cd 177. <http://www.discogs.com/various-an-england-story/release/1990379>. wiley kat. 2003. eskiboy/ice rink. wiley kat records (12-inch): wk015. <http://www.discogs.com/wiley-kat-eskiboy-ice-rink/release/692408>. dancecult 3(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 3(1): 129–134 issn 1947-5403 ©2011 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net man vibes: masculinities in the jamaican dancehall donna p. hope kingston: ian randle publishers, 2010 isbn: 978-976-637-407-5 (paperback only) rrp: us$24.95 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.06 marvin d. sterling indiana university (usa) given the predominance of men as djs, sound system crew, promoters and industry executives in jamaican dancehall, many social observers have noted the ways in which this subculture reflects a strong privileging of male sensibilities, anxieties and desires. this acknowledgement, however, often gives way to more generalized discussions of the subculture or, where gender does indeed become the focus, to commentary on its manifestations in the erotic dress and dance of female dancers. while these are certainly crucial to an understanding of dancehall subculture, the more complex sociohistorical, political and economic nuances of jamaican masculinity as expressed in this space have remained largely unexplored. this has been the case at least until the publication of donna p. hope’s man vibes: masculinities in the jamaican dancehall, a critical contribution to the growing corpus of scholarship on this subculture. hope employs a range of methodologies in her research. these include interviews with inner-city dancehall practitioners and lyrical analysis of the many songs, past and present, that speak to the multivalent construction of masculinity in contemporary dancehall. hope, a lecturer in reggae studies at the institute of caribbean studies at the university of the west indies, begins by articulating her principal concern with how dancehall culture, viewed by many jamaican social critics as variously hostile to the values of the jamaican middle class, is in fact engaged in a deep conversation with it. in the first chapter, hope mobilizes the gramscian concept of hegemony to define that particular manifestation of masculinity—strong, straight, financially secure, and sexually promiscuous—which is considered normative in much of jamaican society. she explores the literature on the colonial reviews dancecult 2(1)130 and capitalist terms in which black masculinities have historically been circumscribed throughout jamaica and the caribbean. hope is interested in a tension whereby poor afrojamaican men engage in extreme performances of a subcultural masculinity that is at the peripheries of the jamaican middle class experience, even as these performances in many ways reinscribe the hegemonic masculinity of that middle class. in each of the next five chapters, hope focuses on a key term in which this process manifests itself. in chapter two, she focuses on promiscuity as one such term. male dancehall practitioners’ emphatic declarations of their sexual prowess and conquests would appear distasteful by monogamous, christian, middle-class standards. however, hope notes that many middle-class men, too, secretly engage in this behavior; the ability to father and financially provide for many children in and out of wedlock is a measure of manhood for many jamaican men across classes. in the third chapter, hope focuses on gun violence as another aspect of hardcore dancehall masculinity; as is true in many other societies plagued by such violence, those who bear the guns are often only the desperate proxies of more powerful individuals higher up in the social order. the fourth chapter focuses on an intense homophobia as one of the more notorious expressions of masculinity in dancehall culture. hope notes that here again, such expressions are not confined to the dancehall but rather reflect a sentiment more generally felt throughout much of jamaican society. hope frames dancehall homophobia in relation to the mainstream in a range of ways: as “arguably a radical and extreme variant to jamaican masculine paranoia of the feminine where in many instances, male homosexuals are deemed gender traitors who violate the accepted rules of gender identity and/or gender performance” (69-70); as legally normative; as partly a product of religious fundamentalism; and as an attitude whose effects are socioeconomically inflected, whereby gay men who happen to be relatively privileged bear a degree of insulation that comes with class-based respectability. the fifth chapter focuses on conspicuous consumption as another prominent aspect of dancehall masculinity. hope chronicles the range of brand name commodities—from luxury cars to cell phones to alcoholic beverages—that have been in vogue throughout the history of contemporary jamaican dancehall. in her discussion of the british link-up crew, an especially extravagant group of men who have promoted dancehall events in jamaica, britain and the united states, hope notes that dancehall as an expression of desire to escape poverty is significantly situated not only in local terms, but also vis-à-vis jamaican migration to the colonial mother country and the geographically proximal superpower of the united states. “a scholar with an extraordinarily close ear to the ground of jamaican dancehall culture” reviews 131 in light of the strident homophobia of the dancehall, the sixth chapter of man vibes is perhaps the most intriguing. here, hope identifies what she sees as a recent shift in expressions of dancehall masculinity towards a “feminized aesthetic”, one which includes “regular visits even by the most hardened ghetto youth to cosmetologists for facials, manicures and pedicures . . . regular visits to salons for hair care . . . conspicuous and intricate hair styles (e.g. intricate cornrows), and plucked, trimmed and fashioned eyebrows” (125). skin bleaching, conventionally associated with women but also now evidenced among men (allegedly including the superstar dj, vybz kartel), is a further manifestation of this trend. the recent popularity of dance—again, conventionally the province of women or heterosexual dance partners—among individual as well as groups of men is for hope another indication of the emergence of this “‘softened’ variant of dancehall masculinity” (ibid.), one whose homosociality verges ambiguously on the homosexual. hope astutely notes that homosexuality—despite this trend toward a softened masculinity—remains marginalized in the jamaican dancehall, and discusses a subsequent backlash in which several dancehall artists have criticized this development in their songs. still, she views the trend as potentially transgressive. she writes that “this radically transgressive variant to dancehall masculinity . . . raises questions about the current constitution of hegemonic masculinity from which dancehall culture ultimately draws its strength” (142), and suggests that this development might be seen as an extension of a narcissistically embodied commodity aesthetic drawn from such transnational sources as western high fashion. while there may quite possibly be latent homosexuality in the feverish homophobia of the jamaican dancehall, hope’s suggestion above leads one to wonder how much this development is really about the feminization or homosexualization of dancehall masculinity. this is as opposed, or relative to what may more immediately be a local and transnational commodity aesthetic whose aspects of gender and sexual orientation are secondary (which is not to say unimportant). hope rightly abstains from facile social psychological observations about the meanings of this trend toward the feminization of dancehall masculinity, but concerning the quote above, on which this chapter ends, it would have been interesting if she had more extensively addressed the “questions” she believes this development raises about hegemonic masculinity in jamaica. indeed, i would have liked to have heard a bit more about what precisely hope believes are the challenges dancehall masculinities pose to hegemonic jamaican masculinity, beyond its status as something apart from the middle-class. the book contains some editorial infelicities which, smoothed over, would have given greater force to hope’s otherwise lucid writing. but this aside, what one garners from this book is the sense of hope as a scholar with an extraordinarily close ear to the ground of jamaican dancehall culture, and a sense of gratitude that she has taken on the fraught but important topic of masculinity in the dancehall in the systematic, sustained and sensitive way she has. man vibes is a welcome work that will advance the national, and international, conversation on this topic, hopefully, as its author writes in closing, in ways that will disclose more direct and socially beneficial “routes to empowerment for jamaica’s future men and women” (168). dancecult 2(1)132 hold on to your dreams: arthur russell and the downtown music scene, 1973–92 tim lawrence durham and london: duke university press, 2009 isbn: 9780822344858 (paperback only) rrp: £15.99 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.07 charles de ledesma university of east london (uk) a musical pioneer from new york’s golden downtown period: arthur russell and the infinite mix hold on to your dreams, on deceased new york musician arthur russell, is tim lawrence’s second book and follows 2003’s love saves the day (lstd). whereas the social and musical backgrounds of both are broadly similar authorial purpose and the resulting tone are markedly different. whereas the earlier book tells a straightforward history of disco, though varying from other accounts as lawrence argues that loft party supremo david mancuso’s role remained pivotal from first to last, hold on to your dreams is primarily an unswervingly intimate portrait of an unclassifiable, restless musician who “skipped between sounds and scenes with the nonchalant ease of a kid playing hopscotch” (2). in the preface, lawrence is clear about his endeavour: “along with the topography of russell’s choices, the testimonies of russell’s family, friends and collaborators have heavily shaped this book” (xix). he explains that, if alive, russell might have hindered the biography as the cellist, singer, songwriter and quixotic producer was “often cryptic and cagey when interviewed” (ibid.). intrigued when a leading light in the 70s disco scene told him that russell’s “mutant disco” tracks like “go bang!” and “it’s all over my face” are quite simply sublime, and that the quietly-spoken, obstinate man from the us mid-west was an unsung era from the golden days of downtown, lawrence set out to “combine the burrowing mentality of the archaeologist with the presentational outlook of the museum curator and the emotional sensitivity of a diarist” (xx). the word definitive is not strong enough for lawrence’s deep excavation of russell’s life. with clearly no stone unturned, the text might have been plodding and over-worthy. but lawrence repeats the trick of lstd: whenever he senses that a gossipy tale, music description or cultural analysis may start to tire, he shifts the beam to something else, confident enough to begin a new section sometimes unconnected from the one before. reviews 133 the chapters in hold on to your dreams tend to start with a contextualising section such as chapter four’s “intensities”, on how the experimental music scene took shape in downtown spaces like the kitchen. chapter five’s “variations” explores the time when disco had passed its creative and progressive peak. lawrence suggests that performance spaces integrated “all kinds of avant manifestations” (179) while generic distinctions blurred. this was russell’s time, a period when pop, new wave, experimental, jazz, funk and mutant disco rubbed shoulders, if not always easily or amicably. russell epitomised downtown’s wildly creative aesthetic in the way he always worked across genres and was quintessentially community-minded. but, for lawrence, russell’s gift reached beyond this time period too. he pre-figured the post modern, multi-mix where music would be re-invented in an infinite number of ways. however, early on lawrence identifies this renaissance man’s achilles heel (5). (he) spread himself across too many scenes and worked with too many musicians to build up a major reputation in a single genre, yet his lack of commercial success cannot be attributed solely to the music industry’s distrust of eclecticism. russell’s perfectionism was peppered with obstinacy—on one occasion he spent the whole day fine-tuning a kick drum while his co-musicians waited to begin. however, lawrence goes on to argue consistently and persuasively that “there was something beautiful about russell’s reluctance to decide on a final mix of many of his works” (ibid.). in a moving passage, lawrence explains how, towards the end, and to the immense sadness of his many friends, russell was just too sick to comment on how his multitude of mixes could be better dissected and reconstructed. there are many light hearted and frankly amusing stories on russellian disapproval. he complained loudly to all about heavyweight dance music producers larry levan and francois kevorkian’s remixes—which garnered significant scene-approval. russell had fulminated that the versions of “go bang!”, played to thousands of ecstatic gay dancers in clubs the saint and paradise garage, were too obvious and under-subtle, preferring his own complex, loopy takes, which strung a dizzying array of sonic ideas together as if out to confuse the dance floor. and when remix genius walter gibbons worked with russell in re-designing the beautiful “let’s go swimming”, an observer later offered lawrence an insight into the all-night studio sessions (262). “the word definitive is not strong enough for lawrence’s deep excavation of russell’s life.” dancecult 2(1)134 there were incredible scenes of screaming and fights... arthur was shrieking and tearing his hair out, raging around the studio like a psychotic bat, while walter was calmly snipping and pasting the tape as if it was macramé. arthur would say, ‘you’re ruining my fucking vision!’ and walter would reply, ‘arthur, arthur, calm down!’ (ibid.) if russell comes across as an obstinate perfectionist—and just a little “queeny”—then the reader is adroitly pulled into agreeing that moves to commercialise his, and downtown’s, singularly creative flow of music were (sort of ) unethical although clearly successful and worthwhile in cases like talking heads and laurie anderson. as lawrence reminds, russell’s view was that “music’s will to freedom was hard to contain, and each recording was capable of being re-born—played differently and experienced differently—in a unquantifiable range of settings” (190). lawrence remains an unashamed fan and a sensitive portrayer throughout but hold on to your dreams exemplifies the same kind of minor weaknesses apparent in lstd. sometimes his urgency at getting inside russell’s head, to better understand motivation, psychology, or just to aid a smoother chronological flow, comes over as a little strained. after lawrence declares that russell “embodied radical change” (189), he feels the need to add, “it’s possible that arthur struggled to grasp the full range of his activity” (ibid.). and throughout, lawrence feels irresistibly drawn to lists, the longer the better, where many authors consider such blocks of text prettier when shunted to a footnote, or endnote. small misgivings aside, hold on to your dreams is an exquisitely moving, comprehensive and impressive work of human forensics which helps unlock the numerous edges, seams, schisms and passions of the 1970s and 1980s downtown eras. rarely for works on nonart music—rather, popular music—cultures, it exalts in a uniquely detailed, satisfying and unswerving portrait of someone who, lawrence convinces, was a great yet largely unsung musician, composer and arranger. in addition, and with a keen eye on cultural milieu interchanges, lawrence identifies a profound effect of the russell aesthetic. whenever he could, russell . . . established the framework for an egalitarian, cooperative practice. he created music within a range of collaborative networks, and emphasized the group over his own individual presence (345). in what must have been a trying test, lawrence doesn’t shirk the final, tragic moment in april 1992 when russell died from aids-related complications, obscure, angry and frustrated, although surrounded by loved ones. he ends with a reflection from russell’s long term partner, tom lee, who tells lawrence that “he should have realized the end was coming when arthur stopped listening to his (sony) walkman, comparing side a and side b of the same recording” (333). in a postscript, lawrence tells how, since 2004, much of russell’s best work has been released, some even re-mixed, and a little of the many hours of dusty studio tape given the light of day for the first time. lawrence leaves us with the firm impression that his subject’s “ethic of pluralistic openness . . . has been embraced” (354). dancecult 3(1) 2011: guest editor's introduction to special issue on the dj, masthead and table of contents volume 4 number 1 2012 executive editor graham st john (university of queensland, au) managing editor tobias c. van veen (mcgill university, ca) reviews editor karenza moore (lancaster university, uk) art director cato pulleyblank (fairy punk creative studio, ca) copyeditors catherine baker (university of southampton, (uk) jerome hansen (uk) sheena hyndman (york university, ca) katrina loughrey (au) kath o’donnell (au) production director gary botts powell (texas a&m university us) production assistants luis-manuel garcia (university of chicago, de) martin koszolko (rmit university, au) ed montano (rmit university, au) botond vitos (monash university, au) operations assistant neal thomas (unc chapel hill, us) dancecult journal of electronic dance music culture issue 4(1) 2012 issn 1947-5403 ©2012 dancecult published twice yearly at http://dj.dancecult.net international advisory board sean albiez (southampton solent university, uk), eliot bates (university of maryland, college park, us), andy bennett (griffith university, au), mark j butler (northwestern university, us), anthony d’andrea (university of limerick, ie), rebekah farrugia (oakland university, us), kai fikentscher (de), françois gauthier (université du québec à montréal, ca), anna gavanas (institute for futures studies, se), chris gibson (university of new south wales, au), jeremy gilbert (university of east london, uk), ross harley (university of new south wales, au), david hesmondhalgh (university of leeds, uk), tim lawrence (university of east london, uk), geert lovink (university of amsterdam, nl), gordon lynch (birkbeck university of london, uk), rene lysloff (university of california, riverside, us), alejandro l. madrid (university of illinois, chicago, us), charity marsh (university of regina, ca), tony mitchell (university of technology sydney, au), karenza moore (lancaster university, uk), andrew murphie (university of new south wales, au), christopher partridge (lancaster university, uk), anne petiau (itsrs / université paris 5, fr), hillegonda c rietveld (london south bank university, uk), geoff stahl (victoria university of wellington, nz), sonjah nadine stanley-niaah (university of west indies, jm), graham st john (university of queensland, au), will straw (mcgill university, ca), rupert till (university of huddersfield, uk), tobias c. van veen (mcgill university, ca), michael veal (yale university, us) dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture is a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture (edmc). a platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on the shifting terrain of edmcs worldwide, the journal houses research exploring the sites, technologies, sounds and cultures of electronic music in historical and contemporary perspectives. playing host to studies of emergent forms of electronic music production, performance, distribution, and reception, as a portal for cutting-edge research on the relation between bodies, technologies, and cyberspace, as a medium through which the cultural politics of dance is critically investigated, and as a venue for innovative multimedia projects, dancecult is the forum for research on edmc. cover image. keynote by michael christian, boom festival 2010. photo: rémy-pierre ribiere <http://ruyphoto.net>. http://dj.dancecult.net http://ruyphoto.net volume 4 number 1 2012 guest editor’s introduction: the exodus of psytrance? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 01 graham st john feature articles seasoned exodus: the exile mosaic of psyculture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 04 graham st john full penetration: the integration of psychedelic electronic dance music and culture into the israeli mainstream . . . . . . 38 joshua i. schmidt “what are we doing here?” nostalgic desires for a cosmopolitan sensory aesthetic in the amsterdam-based psytrance scene . . . . 65 eva-maria alexandra van straaten spaces of play: the spatial dimensions of underground club culture and locating the subjunctive . . . . 86 alice o’grady conversations – online off the record: turntablism and controllerism in the 21st century, part 2 tobias c. van veen and bernardo alexander attias from the floor – online unveiling the secret: the roots of trance dave mothersole random steps through boom festival 2010 lisa diotalevi aurora festival and the sacred rituals of samothraki: past, present... what future? chiara baldini reviews books tribal revival: west coast festival culture (kyer wiltshire and erik davis) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .107 tobias c. van veen the tribes of burning man:how an experimental city in the desert is shaping the new american counterculture (steven t. jones) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .110 susan luckman discombobulated: dispatches from the wrong side (simon a. morrison) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .112 bina bhardwar film bassweight (dir. suridh hussan) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .115 phil kirby welcome to this special issue of dancecult. in the original call, i fielded comments from one scene spokesperson whose concerns about the fate of psytrance—published in the 2008 edition of psychedelic traveller (sam 2008)—were partly responsive to the impact of the late 2000s global financial crisis. apprehensiveness about the future of an edm movement is not unexpected when its heritage stretches over more than four decades and with a more immediate cultural investment of some 20 years. yet, as a short document on complex anxieties, the commentary revealed agitation toward the pace, growth and character of the cultural economy of psychedelic trance, concerns long preoccupying scene insiders. while it was stated that “the exodus of artists and dancers is clearly visible” within psytrance, the listing of parties at the web-portal <http://www.chaishop.com> was nevertheless reported to expand from 1207 in 1999 to 6731 in 2008. and while expressing concern over the “dilution” of the psychedelic scene and the concurrent bankruptcy of labels, event organisations and cultural media, a “third generation” of psytrance enthusiasts was reported to have appeared. indeed, as evidenced by the recent anthology goa: 20 years of psychedelic trance (rom and querner 2011), which documents the development of psytrance in national scenes from germany to brazil and transnational events from portugal to australia, and in the popularity of web-portals and netlabel aggregators like <http://www.ektoplazm. com>, which is promoted as “the world’s largest distributor of free (and legal) psytrance music”, psychedelic trance music and culture has flourished globally. despite this proliferation, and indeed consequent to it, psytrance is fiercely disputed. during the course of my own extensive transnational research on the psytrance movement, i have sweated it out inside a hothouse of disapprobation and triumphalism, with longterm participants maturing into keen critics and genre loyalists, becoming disputers of, and apologists for, style, fielding opinions on a variety of economic and aesthetic issues, and building expertise on technical and chemical matters, competence enabled by participation in web-forums and social media. indeed, as i’ve transited in and out of various edm circles, with disparate style publics sometimes congressing at the same events in globalised contexts where edm festivals have diversified to accommodate a host of genres—some named, others as yet unlabeled—i have come to recognise that psychedelic trance is among the most closely scrutinised and hotly contested music styles and cultures. psyculture is animated and builds self-definition through the boundary marking activities consistently performed by scene insiders and subgenre specialists, just as psytrance itself provides a boundary marker for the proponents of other edm genres, or metagenres, like techno or dubstep. guest editor’s introduction doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.01.00 http://www.chaishop.com http://www.ektoplazm.com http://www.ektoplazm.com st john | guest editor’s introduction 2 cosmopolitan, transnational and psychedelic, psytrance is a culture in a perpetual state of optimisation driven by aesthetic challenges, internal disparities and cultural campaigns facilitating continuing innovations in music and event-culture modified often through the voracious absorption of music styles. these optimising tendencies are evident in scenes the world-over where psychedelic trance has been locally translated and modified by enthusiastic pioneers, traveller-djs and cultural brokers experienced in the diverse seasonal scene from which this movement derived. “exodus” prevails within this movement, though perhaps not in the formulation set out by sam. in fact, anxious assessments tend to reveal a dedication to the culture of psychedelic trance in which habitués have made considerable personal investment. further, estimations echo the quest(ion)ing implicit to psyculture, born of exodus in the seasonal parties of goa populated by self-exiled intrepids. a long series of complaints have been lodged by veterans of “paradise lost”, of the vanishing golden age of goa, of the vibe said to have dissipated over the years. eulogies have been written, the last track faded out, and the final party interred, time and again. yet, despite economic downturns, austerity measures, distribution collapses and failures to “break even”, psytrance is marked by a vitality that continues to draw participants in their teens through fifties to an event-culture whose dance floors are among the most ethnonationally diverse on the planet. to twist the meaning of the psychedelic traveller article title, psyculture is literally a culture of exodus. if exodus is a theme underpinning psyculture, from the emergence of goa trance to the development of dark, progressive, and other genre-styles, then today’s developments worldwide cultivate the exile sensibility in its multifarious formulations. trance is notoriously difficult to think and write about. if “talking about music is like dancing about architecture” then writing about trance—i.e. unstructured modes of freeform dance—is even more perplexing. this stands among the reasons why some twelve projects with which i was originally approached for this collection did not eventuate. while much remains to be conveyed about psychedelic trance—its history, dj-production culture, music aesthetics and industry, cultural economy, national translations and regional developments, scene repression, as well as the psychedelic character of the music and culture—authored by writers hailing from half a dozen countries, the articles published in this issue offer diverse entry points to the phenomenon of psytrance. my article, “seasoned exodus: the exile mosaic of psyculture”, offers an account of the diverse seasonal exodus from which goa trance and psytrance emerged. joshua i. schmidt follows up with “full penetration: the integration of psychedelic electronic dance music and culture into the israeli mainstream”, which examines disparate uses of psytrance among secular and religious youth in israel where psytrance is a popular music. in “‘what are we doing here?’ nostalgic desires for a cosmopolitan sensory aesthetic in the amsterdam-based psytrance scene”, eva-maria van straaten critically examines the desire for a cosmopolitan sensory aesthetic perceived lost within the amsterdam psytrance scene. and, in “spaces of play: the spatial dimensions of underground club culture and locating the subjunctive”, alice o’grady examines play and performativity in the underground club spaces in the uk. down in our from the floor department, dave mothersole takes us back to goa, 1986, lisa diotalevi dancecult 4(1)3 steps into the 2010 edition of portugal’s boom festival, and chiara baldini visits aurora, a psytrance festival on the greek island of samothraki in 2011. in part two of their conversation begun in the previous edition of dancecult, tobias c. van veen and bernardo alexander attias continue their exchange on the plications of controllerism for dj performance in “off the record: turntablism and controllerism in the 21st century.” book and film reviews in this edition include kyer wiltshire and erik davis’ tribal revival: west coast festival culture (reviewed by tobias c. van veen), steven t. jones’ the tribes of burning man: how an experimental city in the desert is shaping the new american counterculture (reviewed by susan luckman), simon a. morrison’s discombobulated: dispatches from the wrong side (reviewed by bina bhardwa), and bassweight (reviewed by phil kirby). finally, as this is the final edition (of five) founding reviews editor karenza moore has produced for dancecult, i commend her for her first class performance in this role since 2009. we look forward to ed montano assuming the role of reviews editor in future editions (who at the same time steps down from his role as production assistant). last but certainly not least, i also thank outgoing production director gary powell for his superb efforts over the last three editions. graham st john guest editor, special issue on the exodus of psytrance references rom, tom and pascal querner. 2011. goa: 20 years of psychedelic trance. solothurn/switzerland: nachtschatten verlag. sam. 2008. “the exodus of psytrance”. psychedelic traveller. <http://psytraveller.net/ the_exodus_of_psytrance> (accessed 12 april 2012). http://psytraveller.net/the_exodus_of_psytrance http://psytraveller.net/the_exodus_of_psytrance fruity batidas: the technologies and aesthetics of kuduro dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 6(1): 83–96 issn 1947-5403 ©2014 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.01.05 fruity batidas: the technologies and aesthetics of kuduro garth sheridan rmit university (australia) abstract the interconnectedness of music technologies, studio innovation and dancing bodies is a key feature of electronic music cultures. an emerging scholarship by writers such as butler and tjora has bridged these studio and performance spaces, revealing the relationship between machine, music and party. this article considers the centrality of studio and performance technologies and techniques in the developing aesthetics of kuduro, a hybrid musical genre that draws on house, techno, soca and regional styles. i use interviews and observation of studio and performance practices to illustrate shifts within the genre and examine musical examples to highlight transitions. i argue that the increased availability of digital musical technologies in angola shaped the development of kuduro through the 1990s and into the 2000s.  furthermore, i argue that kuduro producers and performers have developed a range of aesthetic and performative practices that reflect material, technological and social restraints common to life in contemporary angola. by examining interviews with kuduro practitioners and musical examples, this article sheds new light on the under examined aesthetics of kuduro. keywords: kuduro, hybridity, aesthetics, lusophone, technology, studio practice garth sheridan is a phd candidate at rmit university. he has further publications on kuduro forthcoming. garth has produced various forms of electronic music, including kuduro, under the moniker unsoundbwoy. email: <garth.sheridan@rmit.edu.au> feature article mailto:garth.sheridan@rmit.edu.au dancecult 6(1)84 introduction the use of aesthetics has been established since the 1980s as an analytical tool for the discussion of popular music. while a body of scholarship that discusses electronic dance music (edm) cultures in these terms is emerging, the musical output of communities outside of north america and europe require more scholarly attention. kuduro is an electronic music and dance style that developed in angola through the 1990s. kuduro music and dance are hybrid styles that draw on local and global influences and filter these sounds and movements through personal and collective experiences, leaving sonic and gestural residues. while musicians in portugal and beyond began to dj, compose and innovate kuduro, this article will focus on the centrality of studio and performance technologies and techniques in angolan kuduro. as kuduro developed in the 1990s, angola experienced periods of war, repression and occasional phases of relative calm. the producers, vocalists, djs and dancers that created and performed kuduro lived in a nation that was either at war or under the post-war authoritarian government. the experiences of social upheaval resulting from the war have shaped the music. following anti-colonial resistance and the portuguese revolution, the colonial government was forced to relinquish control to a local transitional government. power struggles within the transitional government led to the angolan civil war shortly after portuguese withdrawal. the war became a flashpoint for cold war politics as the independence movement fractured. while the two major parties both espoused socialist rhetoric, they formed allegiances with opposing cold war powers. the people’s movement for the liberation of angola (mpla) received economic, military and social assistance from cuba, while the national union for the total independence of angola (unita) received support from south africa and the united states. the struggle between mpla and unita would go on to outlive the struggle between the soviet union and the usa. the displacement of millions of rural angolans during the civil war and the ongoing lack of political, social and economic inequality under mpla rule continue to shape angola. as the war drew to a close, popular forms of music and dance, including kuduro, became important channels for national healing and the development of post-war individual and collective identity. alisch and siegert (2011) have argued that a two-way relationship between kuduro and angolan identity is evident. kuduro practitioners also have this perspective. mc sacerdote suggests, “kuduro is really influenced by the energy of the angolan nation”,1 while coréon du has argued further, “the angolanness in kuduro is one that subverts stereotypes of africanness expected by the western mind” (dos santos 2012). by the late 1980s, clubs in luanda were playing techno and house alongside american pop music and locally produced genres including kizomba and zouk. cyclic patterns of immigration of middle-class2 angolan youth between portugal and angola increased the availability of imported music and musical instruments. as angola transitioned toward a multi-party political system in the early 1990s, a number of short-lived ceasefires came into effect, and a range of newly available music inspired youth. this included recordings sheridan | the fruity batidas 85 available from street-side markets, local parties and club nights, and raves in europe for those with international mobility. as this music became available, angolan youths began to make electronic music. these early compositions became known as batida, a genre that utilised house and soca rhythms. batida translates to “beats” in english and, though the genre is less common now, the term batida is still used to refer to the instrumental component of kuduro tracks. batida gradually developed into kuduro as the tempo increased, incorporating regional rhythms and sounds. kuduro became the soundtrack to the last years of the civil war. the lyrical content of many early kuduro tracks reflects hope for the future of angola and the development of a less fractured national identity. as angola was de-militarising in 1997, tvedten argued that “expectations of what civilian life will bring are high and clearly unrealistic” and that “disillusioned, demobilized soldiers already represent a threat in many communities” (1997: 109). the hope that tvedten recognises dwindled as the mpla consolidated political power, cancelled democratic elections and resumed war with unita. as discussed by krug (2011) and moorman (2008a), popular musicians were co-opted by government and military figures for political purposes. young working-class luandans took kuduro and began making a harder and faster interpretation of the genre with lyrics that reflected and connected with experiences of life in the musseques (luanda’s informal, unpaved and marginal neighbourhoods). this article details how the emergent practices and technologies have impacted the development of kuduro, and argues for a relationship between these developments and the expressive intent of the music. i show ways that the genre and its aesthetic qualities can be seen as a response to globalisation. i describe the compositional processes of kuduro and look at the role of studio technologies in the development of kuduro’s aesthetics from the 1990s to the present. through discussion of musical practices, the article highlights creative and expressive ways that predominantly self-taught producers have used limited production and communication technologies to create and share music. while musical practice is the central focus of this article, compositional processes and technologies are discussed in the context of angola’s developing political, social and cultural landscape. by providing this context, i present the evolution of kuduro as a response to local, domestic and international politics, including the personal and collective experience of post-war reconstruction. scope and methodology kuduro itself is an emerging subject of enquiry, with little material published at this time. works on this subject have tended to focus on social practices and contexts of the genre, including the potential for kuduro as an element of collective trauma recovery (alisch and siegert 2013), kuduro as utopianism (brown 2011), government intervention (moorman 2008b), and the ongoing relevance of lusotropicalismo (krug 2011).3 while musical practice is the central theme of this article, i will nevertheless consider social context, and engage with the developing discourse on kuduro. the international consumption of kuduro within a “global bass”4 context highlights that kuduro is one of many electronic music genres produced in the global south. discourse surrounding global bass genres such as nortek dancecult 6(1)86 (madrid 2008), kwaito (steingo 2005), and reggaeton (rivera et al 2009) provide a broader and more established critical field. this body of work has shown how listeners interpret meanings and messages from music that is criticised for being vapid or without aesthetic value (dennis 2010). in addition to context provided by global bass, kuduro’s situation within the broader frame of edm provides insight into issues such as the role of technology in developing genres (sicko 2010), studio and performance practices (butler 2006), and imaginative and transgressive ways musicians can repurpose technology (tjora 2009). while experienced internationally within diasporic communities and niche subcultures, kuduro is currently the most popular music in angola, finding listeners across a wide range of age and social groups. discussions on the role of the aesthetics of popular music (gracyk 1996) and rock music (wicke 1990) in shaping social interaction and subcultural values further inform this work. the article builds on field-based research conducted in angola and portugal in 2012. i travelled to luanda for the first international conference on kuduro, an interdisciplinary conference attended by local and international practitioners, academics and cultural figures. the central theme of the conference was how technology, global citizenship, intercultural commmunication and exchange impacted on the genesis and performance of kuduro. conducting fieldwork, i interviewed kuduro producers, vocalists and dancers. participants were recruited partly through an open call out during the conference, while others were approached through established networks. utilising participant observation methods, i attended a range of events from small club nights through to larger scale outdoor events, including the career celebration for fofando. i also employed practice-based research through studio collaboration, improvisational location recording and performance as a dj for live vocal acts. the collaborative approach was integral to its usefulness as a research methodology in this instance, as a wide range of processes, issues and the usage of technologies could be discussed whilst composing or recording. studio practices there are three generations of kuduro practitioners that have each lasted roughly a decade. the first generation of kuduro producers is predominantly comprised of middle-class youth and includes sebem, rei helder and tony amado. second-generation artists including os lambas, fofando and kilamu greatly expanded the audience for kuduro and built a kuduro industry while establishing the musseques as the centre of production. these producers favour the lo-fidelity diy aesthetic that still guides much kuduro production. the third generation has again broadened the class composition of kuduristas (kuduro performers). producers such as ivm beatz and hochi fu represent a globally connected middle class with a transmedia approach to production and distribution, while performers like os namayer, cabo snoop and titica maintain kuduro’s links to the musseques. although these categories risk glossing over diversity within each generation and downplay intergenerational crossover, they provide a fundamental chronology of social and music practices. sheridan | the fruity batidas 87 these generations are each afforded respect by listeners and kuduristas of the other generations, and the evolving nature of the genre continues to be valued by listeners and artists . the first generation made kuduro at around 128–135 beats per minute (bpm) and drew heavily from influences that led to the genre’s creation. these artists experimented with making a localised version of techno or house, which would fit with other music being played in local clubs. at this time, kuduro was composed on all-in-one sequencer/sampler keyboards and workstations. this equipment was brought back to angola by middle-class youth after time spent in europe. many young people with the means to do so left to receive education, thus avoiding the worst of the civil war. the sequencers had limited memory, so early productions were arrangements based on short loops. the scarcity of multi-track recording technology meant these arrangements were recorded direct to tape or cd writers without the option of overdubs. the use of vocals was limited in kuduro productions of this generation as there was a lack of studios with the capability to record vocals in angola in the early 1990s. however, the loop-based and instrumental composition of early kuduro echoes the house and techno that had inspired early producers, so these aesthetic choices result from both technical limitations and creative decisions. for example, tony amado recorded his debut release in boston, where vocal recording facilities were available, but eschewed the use of vocals until later releases. while studios in angola were rudimentary in the mid 1990s, rei helder’s angola me leva pais do futuro (1995) and virgilio fire’s “angola sempre a subir” (2001) both featured full vocal production that included international production. tracks of this time favoured lighter timbres than kuduro of later years. though shaped by instrument tone, timbre incorporates and is affected by how studio processes and processors such as equalisation, reverb, amplitude and envelope are manipulated to change perceptions of rhythm, melody, harmony and mood. meintjes contends, “feeling is crucially captured in and transported through timbre”, arguing further that timbre “matters because it houses debates that are articulated as feelings about things—a “zulu” guitar, a “ballsy” drum sound” (2003: 254). the connection that meintjes draws between timbral characteristics and emotive qualities can be heard in the evolving soundscape of kuduro. rather than exploring sound design possibilities offered by synthesisers, first-generation producers generally favoured synthesised reproductions of acoustic instruments, such as the horns and bass guitar sounds in virgilio fire’s “sempre a subir” (2001). while the use of samples reflects the limited functionality of keyboard workstations, these representational instruments also reinforce the aesthetic of the emerging genre. returning to “sempre a subir”, the melody played on bass synth is a clean fm sound that imitates a fretless bass and is sculpted with equalisation to emphasise higher harmonics, giving the bass a brighter tone. this leading bass line is coupled with a rhythm section that features a kick and snare rhythm that became a feature of many kuduro productions. however, “sempre a subir” uses clean, dry, dynamic drum samples that have a lightness to them. these production choices add to the overall celebratory atmosphere of the track and stand out from the saturated sounds that later came to dominate the genre during the second generation. this positivity is also http://www.amazon.com/angola-sempre-a-subir/dp/b007u2jqme dancecult 6(1)88 prominent in other productions of the time, including rei helder’s “felicidade” (felicidade 1996). sebem’s vocal intones, “the happiness we all want! / the happiness we all felt!” over a backing track that features an upbeat riff with melodic and timbral qualities that echo early-1990s house and eurodance acts such as technotronic and n-trance. the thematic and stylistic tendencies of early kuduro coincided with a scaling down of the civil war and the emergence of a coalition government between unita and the mpla. subsequently, the angolan economy liberalised, and imported personal computers gradually became available to a wider section of the community. using these computers, a number of small studios developed in the musseques, and people began to produce kuduro in a diy capacity. by the early 2000s, many home studios were based around fruity loops, a pattern-based software sequencer that incorporates its own range of samples and synthesisers. the fruity loops interface is centred on a row of on/off controls for each sound, known as the step sequencer, that resemble the user interface of the roland tr series of drum machines. in the default 4/4 setting these 16 controls represent 4 bars of quarter notes. drums, samples and software synthesisers are controlled using the step sequencer and, in later versions, also a digital piano roll. these loops could then be arranged and burned onto cd or recorded to tape. the increasing availability of computers and pirated copies of fruity loops began to democratise the production of kuduro. those without their own computer could keep a copy of the software and their projects on disks or usb thumb drives and use friends’ or family computers. though the middle class had instigated kuduro, the growing availability of music production-ready computers shifted the output of kuduro to the working class of luanda’s musseques. the movement towards the musseques and fruity loops resulted in some fundamental shifts in the music. the frequent use of fruity loops drum samples and synthesiser preset patches typify the sound of the second generation of kuduro production. many productions feature the default drum sounds in combination with other drum samples from fruity loops. these samples are processed with equalisation, distortion, chorus and delay to personalise and sculpt the sound. prior to using computers for music production, adding so many and varied effects was beyond the capabilities of most producers and studios. the increased processing power and ease of use facilitated more complex and layered beat structures, resulting in drum samples switching throughout tracks and the soon to be ubiquitous pitched tom rolls. the switch to computer-based production allowed more producers to use synthesisers, as fruity loops was bundled with a selection of software synthesisers. although many producers used the preset sounds, the range of sounds possible gradually expanded the sonic palette. as producers switched to making beats in fruity loops, most tracks increased in tempo and were now being produced at 140 bpm. while some attribute the shift to 140 being the default tempo of the sequencer, the faster tempo also suited the increasing intensity of the music. as kuduro was developing, vocal recordings reflected lineage to dancehall toasting and rave rap from eurodance and hip-house, as the style had developed from live events. sheridan | the fruity batidas 89 figure 1. an example of one kuduro rhythm. the rhythm and flow of sebem’s performance on “felicidade” (helder 1996) particularly represents this sound, utilising a percussive delivery and minimal melody. by the early 2000s the genre had solidified and moved further away from its antecedent genres. producers using fruity loops had created the archetypal kuduro rhythms (see fig. 1) and timbres, while the vocal style had moved further from early rave and the quintessential kuduro vocal delivery emerged. the intersection between creative developments and the evolution of software and technology is evident in the changes in vocal performance in kuduro. the vocal style of the second generation of performers such as puto lilas and noite e dia was more urgent and aggressive than those that came before them. typically, the mc competed against the backing tracks and utilised pauses for extra effect. this newly developing sound emerged in part because of a lack of monitoring systems, in a process referred to as cantar na coluna (alisch 2012) or “singing with the loudspeaker”. recording equipment was set up so that the instrumental track could be played back on a hi-fi speaker, with one microphone recording the output, while the vocalist used another microphone. this meant the mc had to sing loudly to overcome the speakers in the room. over the next two years, emerging artists tuga agressiva, fofando, os turbantes and os lambas developed this more distinct vocal style, harnessing the rhythmic variation and frenetic energy. two examples demonstrate how a technique and aesthetic that emerged as a response to technological limitations outlived these limitations. in “ngueva” (kome todas 2001), the vocalist can be heard delivering his rap in this style, with room reverberation prevalent on the backing track and the vocal. os lambas’ “se disfio” (2005) from four years later features a similar delivery style, but with greater definition in both the backing and the vocal and no obvious room reverberation. the popularity of os lambas and other acts inspired many youths to become vocalists and producers. the rapidly accelerating output of production saw kuduro become angola’s most popular music. as artists and producers came increasingly from the musseques, the residents of the musseques increasingly identified with the music and performers, which further increased participatory musical activity. as the genre became more prominent, the government moved to censor the perceived violence in the music, and repeated statements from the ministry of culture at the time suggested that kuduro should promote only positive messages. the ministry’s suggestion was, however, of limited success. pointing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qk0mb1i-rb4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgirhhcxl90 dancecult 6(1)90 to the popularity of os turbantes’ “de faia” (2004), angolan cultural critic antónio fernandes claims, “this was a big hit … no radio brodcast (sic), due to the violent lyrics, no tv exposure, but everybody knew and sung the words” (fernandes 2009). kuduro continued to develop a broad fan base across all ages, and live performances took place everywhere, from neighbourhood dances to stadium shows in addition to national television and radio. this growing popularity in turn inspired many more youths based in the neighbourhoods to turn to production and mcing. contemporary vocalist dama linda looks to this period for inspiration, suggesting that “os lambas renewed kuduro and showed us that kuduro could become more than what it already was”.5 this increasingly participatory era also started to open up performance opportunities for women. dama linda continues, “previously there were only men and we were just lurking in from the sidelines, until my colleague fofando exploded. when she exploded all the other women were also looking to feature. if she could do it so could we”.6 the release of version four of fruity loops in 2003 saw the product rebranded as fl studio. critically, this was the first version of the program to allow the direct recording of audio into a project. this allowed home producers and singers to record with basic equipment such as a pair of headphones plugged into the computer microphone port in place of a microphone. while the fidelity of these vocal recordings was low, this was of little concern because finished tracks were generally shared as low bitrate mp3 and played on lo-fi sound systems, such as in shared mini-bus taxis, where audiophile concerns become less relevant. this incorporation of multi-track recording into fruity loops led to further expansion of kuduro production, as producers including kilamu and dj buda opened new studios in the musseques. as fl studio could now perform multi-track recording, producers were able to isolate the vocal recording more effectively, which allowed the use of plug-in reverberation and delay. the use of short “slap” delays similar to those used in many hip-hop recordings can be heard in many recordings from this period. this short delay, added distortion and the acoustic imprint of the recording environments increased the energetic sound of these recordings at the expense of clarity. some producers, such as dj devictor, started experimenting with extreme pitch shifting and doubling for effect, and with creating tags or sonic branding to ensure that their names were publicised along with the vocalist. however, the dominant aesthetic for vocal production at this time was for moderate processing that could be replicated in live performance. the availability of recording-enabled computers encouraged the organisation of very localised scenes. acts that developed their own style at neighbourhood parties recorded music for distribution predominantly within their own neighbourhoods. while locallybased identity increased the possibility of divisions between neighbourhoods,7 the use of emerging technology to strengthen community bonds reinforces winner’s assertion that “what matters is not technology itself, but the social and economic systems in which it is embedded” (winner 1980: 20). in angola, computers imported for business and repurposed as creative tools challenged economic structures by strengthening local cultural participation and building creative communities that served as support networks in a http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugikc49j1xk sheridan | the fruity batidas 91 country with negligible social services and disrupted family networks. the studio as a site of social cohesion and support was common amongst musically active luandans, with one producer suggesting that the construction of their studio was “a synonym of humanity, an act of revolution”.8 the dominant methods developed and shared between users impacts on the creative output, as certain production techniques become more common than others. while many methods utilised by kuduro producers conform to the program designer’s design, techniques such as deliberately overloading busses to create digital (un)musical distortion creatively misuse technology for effect. kuduro producers used this hard, sharp, clipped distortion to reinforce notions of hardness and of surviving hard times that young (2012) argues are important themes within kuduro. repurposing elements within the software in this way may be considered an implicit “de-scription” (akrich 1992: 209) of the software. many studios in luanda’s musseques remain somewhat rudimentary, while inconsistent electricity supplies disrupt production and can lead to hardware failure or data loss. for most, the construction of a studio is an ongoing process. sacerdote, a member of music collective circuito fechado based in luanda’s sambizanga district, recalls the initial beginnings of their studio: “i took a computer which my mother assisted me in acquiring, added some accessories to it … i then started recording some kids on a microphone which i bought for 300 kwanzas [au$3.50] and i started producing”.9 for circuito fechado, the impetus is to have a more participatory relationship with the music, to intially record some young people from the neighbourhood and to gradually learn production. having seen the studio in the film clip for “falaste o que” (circuito fechado 2012), i visited the studio in 2012 and saw the continuing evolution of the space as members were rendering internal walls and performing maintainence on the electrical systems. this diy ethos is central to many studios across luanda’s musseques, as sacerdote continues:“i wasn’t bothered about the conditions or its quality and all that crap. we were just enjoying ourselves, so we just produced it according to the little resources we had”.10 while the studio now has a vocal booth and space for mixing, the social aspect of the studio as a space to gather is as important to members as the effectiveness of the space acoustically and technologically. sacerdote suggests, “the actions we take are more important than the words we speak … i am trying to create a cultural centre, a centre where people may come to do new things”.11 through making music and other cultural activities, centres like circuito fechado provide spaces and support that are otherwise absent for the local community. while the increased availability of recording technologies at the turn of the century potentially encouraged kuduro producers to develop a more explicitly critical political or cultural stance, many were not likely to be receptive to such a movement in the repressive political climate. in february 2002 the armed forces with mpla backing killed unita leader jonas savimbi in battle. this effectively ended the armed conflict that had claimed in excess of five hundred thousand lives and displaced some four and a half million people. while the end of the civil war may have resulted in a reduction in the level of disruption, murder and torture, these remain ever-present threats and tactics used to stifle political http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m110x-d3xgc dancecult 6(1)92 and cultural dissent. while recent pro-democracy protests and an emerging critical media provide hope that this may be changing, the reality of contemporary and past repression holds a grip over political discourse in angola. accordingly, kuduro lyrics have remained predominantly apolitical, and in many cases are secondary to the beat and dance. gracyk (1996) argues for the reduced importance of lyrics in rock music and suggests deliberate performance and production methods employed by vocalists and engineers can further mask their intentions. similar practices can be heard in the speedy delivery and lo-fidelity aesthetic of kuduro recordings in which many vocals blend with, rather than lead, the track, the effect of which is compounded by mp3 compression. such a reading reinforces alisch and siegert’s assertion that “kuduro’s musical and bodily-performative practices relate to real-life and media events and images and that engaging in these practices on a non-verbal level allows for negotiating topics that may otherwise be impossible to discuss” (alisch and siegert 2012: 52). the authors argue that, through music and dance, kuduro participants negotiate challenges faced in daily social, political and working life that cannot be expressed in words. more recently, producers from middle-class families have turned back to kuduro production. performers have adopted elements of a wider range of genres and developed working methods to incorporate new studio technologies. two of the styles drawn into kuduro from 2008 are n’dombolo and afrohouse. n’dombolo is a congolese style of music and dance that emerged at the same time as kuduro. n’dombolo shares some stylistic similarities with kuduro in the rhythm and vocal delivery but is performed at slower tempos than contemporary kuduro, at around 125 bpm. n’dombolo also features greater emphasis on melody and widespread use of non-synthesised instruments, particularly guitar. the inclusion of such instrumentation into kuduro was facilitated by increased international trade that re-introduced instruments, including the guitar, that had been absent from the angolan musical landscape for much of the previous thirty years. furthermore, the influence of n’dombolo reflects contemporary social and cultural politics, as a large population of congolese asylum seekers resided in angola, while a large population of angolan refugees lived in the democratic republic of congo. the most widespread influence of n’dombolo occurred from 2009 through to 2011 as tens of thousands of congolese in angola suffered human rights abuses and were expelled from the country. while a number of artists incorporated n’dombolo, its influence was to be short lived. the n’dombolo-infused hooks on “kusi de pole” and “essa é a tkny” from titica’s 2011 album chão were two of the most popular tracks to incorporate n’dombolo, but also signalled a decline in the genre’s influence. the adoption of traits of afrohouse is more widespread, and has the potential for longer lasting influence. afrohouse bears many stylistic similarities with more established forms of house, but draws particularly from deep south african house. afrohouse features prominent bass lines, regional instrumentation, the sparse use of vocals, and ranges from 120 to 130bpm. afrohouse tends to have clean production with distinct bands of sound, minimal distortion and a greater emphasis on space, through the arrangement and use of sheridan | the fruity batidas 93 reverbs. the productions of luanda-based powerhouse entertainment particularly reflect the melding of afrohouse and kuduro. in cabo snoop’s “windeck” (2010), producer ivm beatz utilises a slower tempo of 130 bpm and strips back the beat. this modified kuduro beat is paired with minimal lead and bass lines that swell around the beat. the spacious arrangement and clean production in “windeck” is typical of afrohouse and lacks the overdriven distorted aesthetic of much kuduro. snoop uses his voice minimally and rhythmically to create off beats and cross rhythms, performing full lines of lyrics only during breakdowns, in which the beat has dropped out. for some producers, the use of afrohouse elements has accompanied a shift away from loop-based fl studio to sequence-based software, such as cubase and logic pro. while recent versions of fl studio have the option to compose drums in a sequencer layout similar to other software packages, many producers continue to use the step sequencer to attain the rigidly quantised beats common to kuduro, and utilise volume automation to create a perception of swing. the more advanced sampler and midi implementation found in logic pro favour music that features micro-rhythmic manipulation, and effects that evolve over longer periods, as is more common in afrohouse. i visited the studio of producer and dj guerito in 2012 shortly after his releases with os lambas and bruno m as he was in the process of switching software platforms from fl studio to logic pro and expanding his repertoire. he suggested that to develop in angola’s evolving music industry, he “had to firstly professionalize myself with some recent software, basically play all genres although they are mostly focused on afrohouse and most of the electronic genres without singing”.12 for guerito and other producers, such changes need to be balanced, “i already have a good reputation in terms of kuduro, so i would not like to do anything that might mess my good reputation”.13 conclusion the generations of angolan youth that experimented first with making techno, and later developing and frequently reimagining kuduro, have been crucial to the development of collective identity in a nation that is young, urban, fractured and healing. though freedom of expression is curtailed in angola, kuduro has created a space and performative languages for discussing the concerns of youth in a nation where over sixty percent of the population is under twenty-five years old. these languages take the form of musical signifiers, aesthetic developments and dance moves that can be heard and seen in the hard drumbeats, distorted rapping and hyper-athleticism central to kuduro. kuduro’s producers have used music technologies as media for self-expression, and to reflect collective narratives, as the music has become a site for the representation and negotiation of identity. as kuduro has developed and the political atmosphere has shifted from hope for a warfree egalitarian angola to a realisation that the political and economic conditions for most angolans would see little improvement, the aesthetic of the music has grown harder and more timbrally distorted. studio and performance practices that have emerged within http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcjr-3xdx5s dancecult 6(1)94 kuduro are embedded with social and economic conditions of groups that have made and listened to kuduro, including the workingand middle-class angolans and immigrant communities. the relationship between composer, technology and message can be heard in the evolving sounds, technologies and lyrics of kuduro, as the centre of production shifted from middle-class inner-luandan producers to the residents of the musseques and back. while reflecting and challenging local and national social hierarchies, the evolving aesthetics of kuduro respond also to artistic impulse and bridge the communities that make, perform, listen and dance to the music. acknowledgments thanks to frederick moehn, stefanie alisch, paula santana, sotero caio, jó kindanje, sérgio guerra, sacerdote and dog murras for their help in angola. thanks also to ananya kabir and kipps horn. lastly, thanks to benjamin lebrave for his relentless work at akwaaba music and elsewhere. notes 1 mc sacerdote, interview with the author (sambizanga, angola), 28 may 2012. 2 while the terms “middle class” and “working class” will be used throughout this article, i recognise that a range of factors further complicate notions of social class in angola. these forces include the dominance of an intergenerational elite politico-military class, rapid mass urbanisation, recent transition to a market economy, a large informal economy and widespread structural unemployment. my own usage of these terms situates the residents of the musseques, whether employed in the city, in the informal economy or unemployed, as working class, and those living downtown or in recently established outer urban estates as middle class. for further discussion of the developing nature of class in angola, see rodrigues 2007. 3 lusotropicalismo is a reading of portuguese colonialism developed by gilberto freyre. freyre argues that the nature of portuguese colonialism was more humane and adaptable than other colonial powers due to portugal’s history as a colonised nation, the tropical climate and geographical proximity to africa. for further discussion of lusotropicalismo, see freyere (1964). 4 this meta-genre includes a range of genres such as kwaito and tecno brega that developed in the global south and are typified by the use of elements of north american and european electronic music with local influences, mediated through technology. 5 dama linda, interview with the author (sambizanga, angola), 01 may 2012. 6 dama linda, interview with the author (sambizanga, angola), 01 may 2012. 7 antagonism between os lambas from sambizanga and os vagabanda of rangel is a notable example, with the dispute being featured in a number of feature films including assoltos em luanda (2007). 8 mc sacerdote, interview with the author (sambizanga, angola), 28 may 2012. 9 mc sacerdote, interview with the author (sambizanga, angola), 28 may 2012. 10 mc sacerdote, interview with the author (sambizanga, angola), 28 may 2012. sheridan | the fruity batidas 95 11 mc sacerdote, interview 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(mp3). <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugikc49j1xk> (accessed 03 february 2014). power boyz. 2012. “tchuna baby”. powerhouse entertainment (cd). <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odb5lsovdmk> (accessed 03 february 2014). titica. 2012. chão. ls produções (cd). <http://www.discogs.com/titica-ch%c3%a3o/release/4039786> virgilio fire. 2001. projecto da banda. vidisco (cd reissue). <http://www.amazon.com/angola-sempre-a-subir/dp/b007u2jqme> filmography narciso, henrique. 2007. assoltos em luanda. http://kellogg.nd.edu/projects/flad/pdfs/moorman, marissa.pdf http://kellogg.nd.edu/projects/flad/pdfs/moorman, marissa.pdf http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057070701292566 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057070701292566 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007760500105172 http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/20024652 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcjr-3xdx5s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m110x-d3xgc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaa3dfhlmwu http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qk0mb1i-rb4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgirhhcxl90 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugikc49j1xk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odb5lsovdmk http://www.discogs.com/titica-ch�o/release/4039786 http://www.amazon.com/angola-sempre-a-subir/dp/b007u2jqme interrupting flow: researching play, performance and immersion in festival scenes dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 5(1): 18–38 issn 1947-5403 ©2013 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.01.02 interrupting flow: researching play, performance and immersion in festival scenes alice o’grady university of leeds (uk) abstract this article explores some of the challenges of conducting research associated with play within the context of edmcs, with particular reference to the complex social and spatial dynamics of popular music festivals. the essential premise is that clubbing can be conceived as a form of play and, as such, can offer access to the experience of flow. the article considers the epistemological complexities of the researcher’s own immersion within the play event and adopts practice-based research methodologies developed in performance studies as a way of acknowledging and critiquing the significance of felt experiences and embodied knowledge. it considers the practical and ethical challenges of researching a phenomenon where intrusion is not only inconvenient and impractical but effectively collapses and destroys the very object of attention. the article introduces the concept of autoethnographic flow and argues that, whilst such immersion is often viewed with suspicion by other disciplines, it is particularly pertinent to edmc scholarship as the research stance offered here intentionally embeds the researcher within the research context and uses this positioning as a key element of research design. keywords: festival; play; performance; practice as research; flow; autoethnography; immersion alice o’grady is associate professor in applied performance at the school of performance and cultural industries, university of leeds, uk. her research deals with interactive performance and play theory, particularly within underground club culture and contemporary music festivals. much of her work is site-sensitive and examines the relationship between space, context and identity. she is a member of the international advisory board for dancecult and has recently joined graham st john as section editor for from the floor. email: <a.ogrady@leeds.ac.uk> feature article o’grady | interrupting flow 19 introduction those of us who choose to research nightlife are, i suspect, asked to justify our research interests and our methodologies rather more than colleagues in other subjects. “researching play” can, at times, be confused with “playing at research”. conventional wisdom would say that academic research is, by its very nature, serious business. it attracts public money: it must be measurable, accountable and, increasingly, able to deliver impact. what, then, if the very focus of the research appears to be a challenge to all that is serious? what if it resists measurement and playfully slips through the cracks of categorisation as “the joker in the neuroanthropological pack” (turner 1983: 233)? how does one write about fun seriously and how does one embark upon play with a view to turning it into “valuable” research that demands to be taken seriously? undoubtedly my own fieldwork visits to places such as ibiza, goa and numerous clubs and uk festivals over the past years have elicited a few raised eyebrows among fellow academics and even members of my own clubbing community, who often find it hard to reconcile what they consider to be my opposing work/play identities. my fieldwork often seems to be discussed by others (friends and colleagues alike) as if it resides permanently within inverted commas. for them, my weekends are often spent “doing research” rather than doing research. my aim here is not to attempt to justify my approach or my working practices but to unpack some of the epistemological issues relating to conducting fieldwork in spaces of play, and to explore how methodologies deployed in performance studies chime with those adopted by scholars of edmc who have long since recognised the significance of embodied participation and the importance of the immersed body as a way of gaining new insights into nightlife experiences. over the past decade, my research has considered how play and participatory performance might provide key lenses to understanding ecstatic experiences in underground dance scenes and has investigated how performance might be deployed to augment the latent creativity, collectivism and communality that is often cited by participants as a central part of the clubbing experience. to pursue this, i conduct fieldwork at clubs, parties and festivals and situate myself as a participant within those environments as an intentional research strategy. my relationship with festivals, and the psytrance scene in particular, pre-dates my life as a researcher quite considerably. for many years these spaces functioned primarily for me as a type of adult playground, a work free zone that i inhabited purely for pleasure. now, as someone whose professional life is tied up with the underground dance scene, the distinction is far less clearly drawn. having conducted fieldwork in this context over a prolonged time, my investigations have produced in me a curious and largely unresolved tension where my work and my play are inextricably linked. indeed i operate in a context that exemplifies the widely acknowledged collapse of the work-play binary and which characterises the notion of “new cultural work” as explored by angela mcrobbie (2002). in my own context, whilst admittedly no longer in direct opposition, work and play do still have unique, and sometimes competing, voices that both require my attention at different dancecult 5(1)20 times and in different ways. for me, work and play are in constant dialogue and result in an often tiresome, but undoubtedly productive, conversation that i have since come to accept as being at the nexus of my research. as early as 1932, english educator and philosopher l.p. jacks suggests that the division between work and play is not insurmountable and that a merging of the two activities is preferable: a master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play, his labour and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation. he hardly knows which is which. he simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. to himself he always seems to be doing both. enough for him that he does it well ( jacks 1932: 1). i cannot claim to be “a master in the art of living”, but there are indeed times when my labour and my leisure merge and a state of equilibrium is achieved, an experience that can then be reflected upon and put to use at a later date for research purposes. to resist slipping into any deep chasm that might separate work and play, i find the better option is to attempt to elude definitions and categorisation and instead accept a plurality of intentions and identities where work and play can co-exist and interweave. in research terms, what does this mean, how might it be achieved and what new insights might work/play hybridity afford? research methodologies in the field of performance studies might provide an answer insofar as they offer “performative-sensitive ways of knowing” (conquergood 1998: 26) that contribute to an epistemological pluralism. these ways of knowing pose a challenge to conventional methods of knowledge production and yet, over time and with considerable effort from pioneers in the field, have become accepted as valid processes of inquiry that take into account the vagaries of the subject matter and its particularities. researchers of contemporary performance and researchers of edmc find commonality in their commitment to notions of liveness and bodily presence,1 the primacy of “being there”, or what james thompson calls a “horizontal method for researching” (2009: 134). in this model, the researcher is situated alongside colleagues, participants and audience members, acknowledging that they are part of the transaction that is under investigation. the gap between researcher and researched is diminished and relations are distributed along a horizontal axis rather than a vertical one. many of us conducting nightlife fieldwork would subscribe to this concept of horizontality and recognise it as a means of validating and harnessing our own felt responses to the events we experience. research methods in performance: an overview the discipline of performance studies has long since recognised that performance does not only occur within theatre buildings. the work of richard schechner from the 1960s onwards has been particularly influential in demonstrating the interdisciplinary scope of performance. starting with a continuum that encompasses play-games-theatre-ritual o’grady | interrupting flow 21 (schechner 1969: 85), it is now widely understood that the category of performance can be conceived as a web that incorporates rites, ceremonies, shamanism, popular entertainment, art-making processes and, for our purposes here, festival (schechner 1977). whilst most would agree that not everything is performance, most things can be studied as performance (schechner 2002: 30) and it is the knotty paradox of is/as performance that characterises my own research territory. my fieldwork is conducted along two routes. first, with my company …floorspace… i devise work for both festival and club spaces that is performance, recognised as such by virtue of its deliberate scenography, dramaturgy and choreography (see figure 1).2 as well figure 1. …floorspace… perform tea party at shamania festival, uk. photo credit: alice o’grady (2008). dancecult 5(1)22 as devising and directing this work, i also occasionally perform with the company as a way of understanding the practice from within. with much of the material being improvised and the work co-authored between performers and festivalgoers, the opportunities for play within this framework are vast. adopting the role of player-performer becomes a critical research tool and a way of generating embodied knowledge about how play and performance operate on the dance floor. the second arm of my research involves me considering what goes on in festival and club spaces as performance; displays of behaviour that provide insight into how cultural codes and conventions are constructed, shaped and negotiated. dwelling within the in-betweeness of performance studies calls for a suitably diverse set of research methods that need to be sufficiently flexible to accommodate its range. to take this into account, there has been a surge of creative approaches to research practices that challenge conventional research imperatives. as baz kershaw and helen nicholson point out, there has been an attempt in performance studies to develop imaginative methodologies that “trouble the boundaries between creative practice and critical analysis, between epistemology and ontology” (2011: 2). as part of a broader international trend known as “the practice turn” in the 1960s, performance studies has witnessed a paradigm shift where the “scholar-poet” re-emerges as the “practitioner-researcher” (kershaw et al. 2011: 63). towards the end of the 2000s, “practice as research” (par) became an established and widely recognised method of enquiry both at doctoral and post-doctoral level (see parip 2008), with a number of scholarly texts published on the subject within a short time.3 the discipline is now awash with terms such as “practice as research”, “practice-based research”, “practice-led research” and “research-led practice”. with slightly different inflections, they all indicate the “radical dis-location of ways of knowing” (kershaw 2009: 107) that mirror the shift away from logocentric and modernist paradigms and towards practice and action-based investigation (kershaw 2009). practice as research has a tendency to be collaborative and is characteristically diverse (kershaw 2011). in line with much edmc research, it engages with notions of space and identity, spectatorship and participation, bodies and technology. it can involve a mixture of processes and outputs including live performance, writing, online material, video, dvd, observation, participation, intervention and site-specific work. in line with this diversity and as previously outlined, my own fieldwork combines two distinct but complementary approaches, namely making performance work for festival spaces and inhabiting the festival space as a participant in order to reflect on the experience of it from within. here, play is used both as the focus of my research and as a research methodology. the methodology involves me being at play in order to better understand it and also uses play strategies for performance pieces that operate in a more formal, structural sense for onlookers and participants. as kershaw and nicholson point out, in performance research it is common for relationships between the researcher and the researched to be “fluid, improvised and responsive” (2011: 2). roles, functions and distinctions become blurry and subject to change. this is a situation that all edmc scholars would readily recognise, operating as they do within settings that prioritise relationships, friendships and networks. as a festival o’grady | interrupting flow 23 player-practitioner-researcher i occupy both the role of researcher and of the researched, oscillating between these two positions and, at times, situating myself within them contemporaneously. my embodied experience of festivals is a critical tool for informing and shaping the manner in which i subsequently devise playful performances that are created to augment the festivalesque experience for others. first hand sensations of thrill, excitement, risk, transcendence, flow, connectivity, unity and so on are reflective experiences from which to build new creative work. this pluralistic approach, whilst not without its challenges and pitfalls, offers a complex and nuanced understanding of festival play and performance and the sense of personal enjoyment and fulfilment it can provoke. dwelling in the play mode and revelling in its immersive properties is an indispensible tool for understanding how the innate qualities of play are harnessed through performance and offer a potential route for promoting social well-being and cohesion. the shift towards “performative research” (haseman 2006), which presents an alternative to qualitative and quantitative paradigms, indicates a post-binary approach where process, action, creativity and reflexivity are key components to generating flexible understandings in the world (as opposed to fixed knowledge of the world). this again reflects a similar stance and approach taken within the field of edmc scholarship. practice as research (par) in the performing arts “pursues hybrid enquiries combining creative doing with reflexive being” (kershaw 2011: 64). it presents fundamental challenges to established processes of knowledge-making in the academe by placing creativity at the heart of its research methods and by allowing those creative acts to embrace contradictions. in my own practice with …floorspace…, being immersed in the creative moment generates new knowledge about the processes of playful engagement that cannot be gathered from observation alone. new insights concerning the role of intuition, instinct, non-verbal signals, the dynamics of group behaviour, the psychical dimensions of space, all come about through practice. to agree with barbara bolt, out of creative practice comes “a very specific sort of knowing, a knowing that arises through handling materials in practice” (2007: 29). theory arising from practice where emergent knowledge enters into dialogue with existing practical and theoretical paradigms—what bolt calls “praxical knowledge” (2007: 34)—is particularly useful for scholars like myself straddling the domains of performance studies and edmc. the textures, sounds, colours, smells, spaces, feelings, conversations and encounters experienced during a festival (and during a festival performance) constitute an intimate and personal “handling of material” from which my own theorising emerges in conjunction with existing frameworks and previous experiences. personal and intimate knowledge of play can only be achieved by placing oneself firmly within the play frame. in researching play one must be prepared to allow play to take its course and to embrace the risks, emotions and primary experiences that ensue. in 2008 at shamania, a small-scale psytrance festival in the north of the uk, i took the decision to conduct fieldwork from a position of player-performer. having devised a walkabout performance piece with …floorspace… entitled way to make a living, my understanding of how the show operated within the festival space was predicated predominantly on external dancecult 5(1)24 figure 2. …floorspace… perform way to make a living at shamania festival, uk. a piece of practice led research that involved the author as performer (centre) as well as artistic director. photo credit: alice o’grady (2008). observation. on several occasions i followed the company as they performed, documenting the work using still image and video, and recording reactions from the crowd. i watched performers closely as they interacted with festivalgoers, and subsequently developed ideas about how particular strategies for engagement operated and how effectively they had been applied in practice. a key element of the company’s work was to develop a sense of complicité within the ensemble—a shared understanding of practice that develops between company members when they work and play together from within the performance and negotiate ways forward through an implicit appreciation of each other’s physical presence. full appreciation of how this worked in practice from the performer’s perspective could not be gained by observation alone. nor could it be achieved by interviewing the performers and participants or by analysing the video documentation and still imagery (although all of those methods were adopted as well). the handling of this material could only be done through embodied practice, a type of knowing that is held by the body. it was not until i performed with the company myself and became a playing/working part of the ensemble o’grady | interrupting flow 25 that i was able then to truly understand what the research “felt” like. my appreciation of how strategies for engagement might be deployed developed, as did my implicit understanding of what playing through performance might mean and how it was achieved through affect. at shamania, we headed out as an ensemble into the dark fields and dance tents of the festival site dressed in sharp suits and armed with brief cases, fake id cards, toy phones and a range of tightly choreographed set pieces intended to baffle, amaze and engage the dancing crowds. the intensity of performing demanding physical work in a festival site where people’s expectations, interpretations and responses can be wildly unpredictable was exhilarating to say the least. i experienced at first hand the considerable risk performers are exposed to working in this environment, managing a range of audience responses in role without breaking stride and coping with the practical challenges of performing in deep mud, darkness and limited space. as well as giving me invaluable insight into the mechanics of complicité, the experience was also enormous fun and cemented some very special relationships—a common outcome from both edmc scholarship and performance studies that is rarely discussed in writing—in case having fun in some way invalidates or trivialises the research. acknowledging the presence of the affective researcher allows the play of imagination to inform and shape the research design and alters both the process of research and its outcomes. binaries that separate intuition and intellectualism, emotional experiences and scholarly knowledge are effectively dismantled. there were elements of way to make a living that i came to “know” primarily through the body rather than through the distillation of language. this knowing later informed much more ambitious creative projects that took greater risks in terms of audience engagement and processes of interaction. as kershaw and nicholson suggest, “dwelling in the ambiguous space between binaries invites inventiveness” (2011: 2), and it is this inventiveness that characterises fieldwork conducted in performance and edmc studies as both require from the researcher flexibility, responsiveness, adaptability and an ability to improvise as the ebb and flow of the event, performance or festival develops. research in this vein mirrors the paradigm shift “between modernism and postmodernism, between a world organised around the (apparent) stability of binaries and one in which multiplicity, complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity rule” (kershaw 2011: 84). it can be understood as analogous with the deleuzian rhizome in which any point can be linked and where there are “multiple entryways and exits” (deleuze and guattari 1987: 21). the rhizome is “an interstitial space, open and vulnerable where meanings and understandings are interrogated and ruptured” (irwin and springgay in cahnmann-taylor 2008: 106). in a similar way, underground festivals operate as spaces of play where meanings are malleable, liminal zones that offer the promise of subjunctivity and alterity (o’grady 2012). they are ambiguous spaces where codes and binaries break down and people playfully adapt conventions of identity, dress and behaviour to construct new spaces of radical conviviality. the multitude of options, possibilities and outcomes this presents offers a fluctuating terrain for the researcher that resists precise capture but offers tantalising potentiality. dancecult 5(1)26 the messiness of researching play play is never straightforward; night time play even less so. it twists and turns, slipping through the cracks of experience, eluding fixity and confinement. it is an inveterate shape-shifter. play can mutate from light to dark in an instant. play can be highly visible, consensual and mutually defined or it can lurk in the shadows, making mischief and overturning rules as soon as they are made. play does not always announce itself and players don’t always come clean about how and why they are playing. researching play, therefore, requires a suitably malleable set of strategies that can cope with such slipperiness and deal with play’s innate ambiguities. to research play we have to accept that the process is likely to be messy and that, as researchers, we are likely to, and should, find ourselves embroiled in the chaos and confusion that play can provoke. we should embrace the sense of embodied immersion that play demands and deploy it as a fundamental research tool. pedro rebelo and franziska schroeder suggest that performance technologies reclaim the messiness rejected by modernism as they deliberately set out to subvert order and celebrate deviance. for them, performers function as the instigators of the “messiness” of play (2006: 6-8). subversion, deviance and messiness are terms that hover close to any study of nightlife and are unavoidable components of thinking about how we might research play in this context. in the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground where practitioners can make effective use of research-based theory and technique, and there is a swampy lowland where situations are confusing ‘messes’ incapable of technical solution. . . . in the swamp are the areas of greatest human concern (schön 1983: 42). my practice falls under the umbrella term of applied performance, that is performance work that is applied to a specific context or group of participants to achieve a particular outcome or shift in attitude, belief or behaviour. as it is people-centred and context-specific, applied performance practice and research operates in inherently unstable, messy, uncertain and complex settings (hughes et al. 2011: 193). this is particularly true in the swampy lowlands and muddy fields of the uk festival scene. traditionally, applied performance is participatory and involves members of the public or specified groups as constituent parts of the research. the participation is normally predicated on a set of agreed parameters and shared outcomes but applied performance in a festival setting is very different. audiences are usually accidental, perhaps randomly wandering past or becoming part of the performance piece without knowing its underlying intentions or status as a research project. participants are self-selecting and diverse, their input unpredictable and their responses difficult to capture. in work devised specially for festival spaces, passers-by choose to become physically involved for a host of different reasons—exhibitionism, curiosity and sheer exuberance included. their reasons for participating are as varied as the behaviours they display. sometimes they become involved unintentionally, failing to automatically place or “read” the work, placed as it is outside the framing architecture of conventional theatre space. this was certainly true for the heavenly court of madame fantaisiste, a performance made for o’grady | interrupting flow 27 the environments for encounter project and funded by the ahrc (arts and humanities research council, uk) as part of the beyond text strategic programme.4 here we created a piece of relational performance that was predicated on playful improvisation and the trading of secrets in return for treats.5 the opulent space was created as a deliberate contrast to the festival site. festivalgoers were invited to step into the play world, to interact with the courtly characters and to join them in the quest to find madame fantaisiste for whom they had been waiting for over 300 years. during the heavenly court of madame fantaisiste, the two girls seen in figure 3 had been walking through the festival and unwittingly found themselves embroiled in an interactive, durational performance lasting for well over an hour as their bemused and reluctant friends watched from a distance, convinced that the two had been “chosen” on the strength of their appearance. in reality, the girls were initially drawn in by the performers and enticed onto the stage area where they became enveloped by the fictive world that had been created for them. their involvement was instinctual and playful. they grabbed at grapes that were gently dangled out of reach just above their heads by a performer suspended in the trees. they coyly gave away snippets of information about themselves in return for luxurious figure 3. urban angels circus engaging festival-goers in the heavenly court of madame fantaisiste at kendal calling, uk. the piece was commissioned for the “environments for encounter” project for beyond text. photo credit: caroline bonser, copyright beyond text (2010). dancecult 5(1)28 chocolates and were encouraged to divulge secrets in return for more. they allowed themselves to be teased, to be treated and to take part in an elaborate game of willing make believe. their participation was not shaped by the research agenda as they did not notice any of the extended research team who were engaged in note-taking, photographing, filming and interviewing their friends about what was unfolding. the two participants were made aware of its status as a research project once their participation was over and, with some embarrassment, gave rather guarded responses to a follow up interview that ultimately failed to capture the rich and sustained engagement they had had with the piece. the manner in which they responded in interview not only underlines the limitations of such data collection in these environments but also reminds us of the need to find methods that articulate lived experience more effectively. the girls’ actual, embodied play revealed more than their self-conscious answers to pre-formulated questions could ever hope to. while unpredictability is a crucial quality of all theatre and performance research, it is particularly apparent in work involving participants. instability and randomness is accentuated within festival spaces, as they are largely unscripted, improvised and subject to fluctuation due to the way they are populated spaces where high jinx and hedonistic behaviour is the lingua franca and where people’s behaviour may be significantly altered due to the influence of intoxicants. to deal with these potential fluctuations, improvisation becomes a research tactic as well as a building block of performance practice that constitutes the research. considering the role of “decomposition” as a key principle of applied performance research, hughes et al. describe the point at which moments of practice and research “disintegrate or are unmade as part of an encounter with exceptional experience, and positions these moments as a troubling and potentially enriching part of a research process” (hughes et al. 2011: 188). decomposition in this instance connotes processes of regeneration where, in effect, the project as originally conceived may dissolve, thereby potentiating new and unanticipated directions. for cognitive psychologist jerome bruner, “knowing is a process not a product” (1966: 72). processes are by their nature intuitive and exploratory and do not always follow simple linear directions. practice as research is “innovative process” in action (kershaw 2011: 64). in par, it is usual to move through cycles of doing and reflecting on doing that, in turn, create a “hermeneutic spiral” of progress and understanding (trimingham 2001: 42). this spiralling model became an intrinsic part of the fieldwork conducted for environments for encounter. the heavenly court was toured to three different festivals (kendal calling 2010, bestival 2010 and cactus 2011) and went through a number of iterations over the course of two years, following the hermeneutic spiral of understanding that trimingham describes. the cycle of doing and reflecting happened not only within each festival site, with the show being performed usually three times over the course of the weekend, but also between festivals as the work responded to changing environments, locations and cultural contexts. reflections, both group and individual, were filmed on site immediately before and after each performance and during rehearsal sessions between events that were often booked months apart. participants who had engaged with the performance were selected o’grady | interrupting flow 29 figure 4. filming participation in the heavenly court of madame fantaisiste at bestival, environments for encounter project for beyond text. photo credit: michael seymour, copyright beyond text (2010). for interview in situ and their responses digitally recorded. to meet the demands and rigours of ethical review, participants were given information sheets detailing the purpose and intention of the research. they were required to sign consent forms and to respond to questions around anonymity and confidentiality—all necessary processes but hardly conducive to the lively atmosphere of a music festival. as we did not want the research imperative to interfere with their participation, consent was gained after participants had left the performance space. if they agreed to the interview, we could use their responses as case study material. if they declined, then we were left with still imagery and our own interpretations of their engagement. conversations that emerged informally at the festival once the adrenalin of performing had subsided were transcribed retrospectively. meetings were held under canvas and around camp fires, footage was reviewed and uploaded onto extra rugged hard drives, notes were scribbled, photographs taken, stories shared and added to the mix. this process was far from linear. we became immersed in a constant cycle of what became known as “re-hearse/ searching”: revisiting what we thought we knew, narrating to each other what had occurred during each show, how we felt about what had taken place and how these insights might bring to life new ideas for subsequent performances. dancecult 5(1)30 reflexivity can be understood as one of those “artist-like processes” (steier 1991: 4), where there is continual looping and iteration between the research material and the new responses it generates, which is then fed back into the practice, and this was certainly the case within our project. when we began environments for encounter, the research imperative was to investigate how changes in festival context and culture might alter participant behaviour and the performed outcome of the piece. however, as the project developed, it became apparent that other factors played a much greater role in determining how the piece was received. where the performance was located within the festival site profoundly influenced how people responded. located under a vast oak tree at kendal calling gave the piece a magical feel and invested the characters with ethereal qualities, which in turn gave the ensuing interactions a mischievous, spritely flavour. by contrast, being located on a busy thoroughfare between the main arena and the campsite at bestival made for more raucous and robust exchanges with larger crowds gathering, who demanded greater spectacle from performers and participants alike. other factors including prevailing weather conditions, the time of day and whether the show took place at the very start or towards the end of the festival when tiredness and festival fatigue have set in, all altered significantly the way participants took part. an acceptance of the inherent messiness of play drove this project. we knew that our findings would only come about through allowing play to happen in an organic, unfettered fashion with participating individuals who brought their own play agendas into the play world. the ensemble improvised at various times with exhibitionists and introverts, hordes of young children and groups of over-excited teenagers, intoxicated adults in various states of altered consciousness, festival virgins and festival veterans. each encounter provided a moment of decomposition and regeneration that has seen the performance develop into quite new and unanticipated areas. what became apparent through practice was that the performance offered bespoke opportunities for human intimacy and one-to-one exchange within an environment constructed intentionally to stimulate the imagination. at this point the therapeutic potential of the performance began to take seed. the heavenly court has since been used by urban angels circus as a vehicle for working with mental health patients to facilitate their communication skills and to provide them with a safe environment in which to play creatively. now that the performance piece exists as a commercial product, the company is able to explore new outlets for the work and can seek to maximize its capacity for personal, bespoke experience that began within the festival context. twelve months after the final performance the iterative process continued as the new understandings generated in those fields across the uk and the european mainland spiralled off into new directions and found new applications. festivals, play and the experience of flow edmc scholars have established that clubbing can be read as a form of play (malbon 1999; o’grady 2012) and argue this form of play offers a route through which the sensation of flow might be experienced. spanning the course of a weekend, festivals frame themselves as hedonistic playgrounds where the carnivalesque attitude predominates. they offer an o’grady | interrupting flow 31 extended period of play for participants and often provide activities such as roller discos, fair ground attractions, mazes, face painting, fancy dress opportunities and so on to heighten this aspect. being at play, letting loose, cutting free are all sensations central to the experience of festival. reaching the point at which a festivalgoer feels they are able to experience a sense of flow in the dance space is perhaps the ultimate goal. ecstatic experiences on the dance floor can feel “oceanic” (malbon 1999: 106) and clubbers can feel swept up by the swell of the crowd as they relinquish their sense of individuality and allow themselves “to go with the flow” and lose themselves in the intensity of the moment. as flow theorist mihalyi csikzentmihalyi states, those experiencing flow, concentrate their attention on a limited stimulus field, forget personal problems, lose their sense of time and of themselves, feel competent and in control, and have a sense of harmony and union with their surroundings. . . . some people emphasise the movement of their bodies; others try to maximise emotional communication; still others respond to the social dimensions of the activity (1975: 182-3). whilst a sense of control and competence is emphasised within his modelling of flow, an alternative interpretation of the oceanic flow of the club experience is the category of play known as “illinx” (caillois 2001). illinx is experienced as vertigo, dizziness or euphoria and is produced by certain types of games that induce a temporary disruption of perception and “inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind” (caillois 2001: 23). this form of flow is associated with being out of control, of revelling in the very sensation of letting go. as with play, true understanding of the flow state comes from our direct experience of it. being fully immersed and losing our sense of self, either through harmonious concentration or through relinquishing control, provides a route through which flow might be achieved. however, the experience of flow in any context is far from automatic. as an ethnographer of the flow experience, the frustrating reality is that i often find myself anxious or edgy at the point where those around me are experiencing the opposite feelings of immersion, pleasure and play. at the start of any edm event i can find myself locked into an internal dialogue that sets about analysing what is occurring to the extent that i can find myself psychically dis-located, an external observer rather than a fully engaged part of the dancing community. scrutinising how the space has been laid out, assessing the quality of the aesthetics, noting the interaction between sonic and visual elements, identifying prevalent styles of dress or changes in musical structure—all useful activities in “scientific” research terms perhaps but hardly conducive to immersing in play and achieving a state of flow. this intense period of close attention does ease as the night unfolds and i allow the physical sensations of being part of the dancing crowd to draw me in. however, it is perhaps an inevitable consequence of researching play and flow that a set of questions begin to interrupt my participation precisely at the time when i should be “going with the flow”. do i belong anymore? if i do belong, on whose terms is that belonging constructed? on what grounds is my belonging predicated? do i belong as a researcher or as a participant and to what extent are people dancecult 5(1)32 aware of this potentially troubling duality? rather than allowing this difficulty to blight the research, acknowledging it and finding ways around and through it are critical. buckland’s (2002) approach in impossible dance: club culture and queer world making is useful here, as she teases out some of the issues in conducting ethnographic research in gay clubs in downtown manhattan when she herself had used these types of clubs as the site of her own world-making before they became the object of her research. she states “the only way to begin to get to grips with any physical practice is to do it” (2002: 9-10) and thus immerses herself in the culture and engages all her senses to experience it holistically. the lens of performance is particularly useful in that it allows her “to zoom in on what these social actors do and zoom out to explore its effects” (buckland 2002: 9). whilst buckland’s method suggests an optical narrowing and broadening of focus, my own approach is predicated more on physical embodiment. rather than zooming in and out, it is perhaps better described through processes of characterisation. in performance terms, the idea that an actor can embody dual identities through characterisation is common. as an actor, when i take on a role and “become” a character i am both “not me” and “not not me” simultaneously (schechner 1985). the double negative here indicates that, whilst we may be adopting the voice, physicality and emotional register of a fictional someone else, we are still “us” at the core. whilst there may be some personal sense of regret that i can never entirely switch off my internal critical dialogue, there is a different sense of flow that can be achieved when cognition, physicality and experience work collectively. flow is not only achievable during play activities. it can emanate from an interweaving of labour-leisure that is easily identified by those of us conducting nightlife fieldwork. to return to jacks for a moment and ignoring the gendered specifications of his narrative whilst we do so, what is important is not the category of activity but the idea that the individual “pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing” ( jacks 1932: 1). researcher’s body: immersion and interruption we find a living body that inhabits situations intimately; it interweaves the realms as a matter of being, and is often lost out there in the textures, the senses, the flesh, the histories and the meanings that come from the flowing excesses of the lifeworld. yet it also carries personal history and prereflective sediments of historical meanings that shape its openness. one could say that embodying is where being and knowing meet (todres 2007: 20). in the discipline of performance studies, the body adopts a central and critical role in terms of how we understand performing, spectating and making meaning. where conventional philosophy established itself on “a profound somatophobia” (grosz 1994: 5), performance research prioritises embodied knowing and a “noetic sense of the immediate, the intuitive and the bodily” (freeman 2010: xiv). if we are to understand festival as performance then we cannot ignore the researcher’s body in relation to these processes. for parkero’grady | interrupting flow 33 starbuck “the researcher’s body becomes a conduit through which ideas are discovered and presented” (2011: 223). buckland describes the body (both hers and that of others in the club with her) as “the prime reference point” (2002: 10). for her, the body is the “location of experience and knowledge” (2002: 10). it offers her snapshots of experience rather than conclusive analyses. as a researcher who is quite literally out in the field, acknowledging the significance of my own bodily experience of an event is critical. whilst immersed in the festival as participant, i deploy a type of mindfulness that takes into account my own bodily engagement with my surroundings, internally noting how my senses are responding to unfolding events. as a performer-player-researcher, how images, sounds, spaces, people, ideas are encountered first hand forms a dynamic narrative that is later recorded either digitally using a flip cam or in written form during the festival itself. this autoethnographic approach incorporates drawings, notes, sketches, snippets of dialogue as well as more conventional prose-based accounts of what was experienced and is accompanied, where possible, by still image and video footage. in certain situations where documentation of this kind is either prohibited or inappropriate, it is always the primary experience of each event and the multi-perspectival reflections that emerge from it that provide the critical data. creative responses to the lifeworld of the festival space provide a type of research documentation that is rich, nuanced, layered and takes into account the rhizomatic nature of the event itself, where deleuzian creative lines of flight might bring about new ideas, new concepts and new modes of understanding. immersion in play produces a particular type of knowing that is personalised, intimate and unmediated. it offers a type of knowing from within, a practical handling of lived experience that cannot be achieved by other means. however, for the fieldworker there exists a tension between doing and reflecting that is common in other fields where knowledge is developed through practice. paul allain advises against any attempt at simultaneity in this respect and instead favours total immersion with a mindfulness of the processes of reflection that must, by necessity, come later. talking primarily about performer training, he considers how the practitioner-researcher must be able to navigate and negotiate different modes of being in the work as it unfolds or being able to stand back from it when one has emerged on the other side. we need to be able to train with conviction and practise without inhibiting analysis, so that when we emerge the other side, when we stand back and judge we can speak with embodied insights. reflection can barely be done within the flow of the work, because it is always enough just to do. we need to allow ourselves to be immersed, and yet also to know when and how to reflect (allain 2006: 24). similarly, the internal processes of knowing when to immerse and when to reflect are pivotal in festival research. unlike other nightlife research, where participation in an event may last approximately 6 to 8 hours and reflection can be done relatively soon after the event has ended, festivals occur over a longer period of time, even up to a week. arguably, to be immersed for this length of time means opportunities for in situ reflection may be dancecult 5(1)34 lost. on the other hand, periodically interrupting immersion in the event in order to adopt a reflective stance fundamentally alters how the festival is experienced. again, in relation to performance practice, according to pitches (2011: 143), what is “paramount is that the dialectical tension between strategic thinking and experiential engagement is managed both with consciousness and care”. the careful and conscious management of engagement and reflection characterises my own fieldwork and yet these two processes are rarely so neatly divisible. in the messy, unpredictable, hedonistic, contingent playing space of the festival, doing, being and reflecting tend to merge, blend and fold in on each other in new and surprising ways. navigating this shifting territory and making productive use of that journey becomes synonymous with the task of conducting research in this context. as many edmc scholars identify with the culture they research and situate themselves as participants of a particular scene, tacit knowledge becomes an integral part of the research experience. tacit knowledge is developed through experience where “we know more than we can tell” (polanyi 1983: 4). when we know something tacitly we are unconsciously aware of things before we can consciously attend to them (mckinney and iball 2011: 119), and this unconscious knowing shapes how we behave, think and feel in the club or festival environment and filters our experience in particular ways that must then be deconstructed. schön states that skilled practitioners habitually move between modes of tacit “knowing in action” and “reflection in action” to develop their practice (schön 1983: 49,54). what is critical is how we make that tacit knowledge accessible to others for the purpose of research. for robin nelson, testimony of witnesses or “experiencers” is key (2006: 113), although clearly insufficient as a stand-alone methodology. for him, embodied knowledge must be brought into dynamic dialogue with other forms of knowledge that arise from critical reflection on the practice and its conceptual framework (2006: 114). the conscious triangulation between embodied or tacit knowledge, reflection on practice and reconsideration of existing theoretical frameworks would seem to provide a particularly secure underpinning to such fieldwork and addresses the concerns of those who doubt the validity of “doing research” in parties, clubs and festivals. undoubtedly tacit knowledge raises the problem of what freeman calls “ineffable content” (2010: 2), that is those feelings, concepts or experiences that cannot be adequately explained in words and can only be known internally by individuals. as he points out, “in the context of practice based research ineffability is premised on the notion of embodiment as an existential condition; one in which the researcher’s performing (doing) body is the subjective source for experience” (freeman 2010: 3). and here lies the tension. whilst the felt experience may well be a valuable aspect of research, it does not necessarily provide us with a straightforward or linear method of articulating and disseminating our findings. instead it entangles us in creative processes of being, doing and reflecting on being and doing that can be complex, affective and inherently messy. in a changing research environment where new methodologies, practices and approaches are becoming recognised and validated, it becomes imperative that the most appropriate methods of articulating new knowledge are found. in our postmodern world of mashups and multimedia, interactivity o’grady | interrupting flow 35 and interdisciplinarity, a variety of platforms, methods and media need to be put to use. as researchers it is our responsibility to make explicit that which is implicit, to reveal our experiences and to make them accessible in the pursuit of developing future understanding however partial, pluralistic and unstable that might be. conclusion the epistemological, practical and ethical challenges of researching play within the context of festivals are varied. festivals are dynamic spaces that are unpredictable, chaotic at times and framed as temporary zones of licensed carnival, hedonism and heightened behaviour. people at play generally do not want that play disturbed and do not want to be confronted with questionnaires, cameras and voice recorders. interrupting play in order to reflect upon it destabilises it and threatens to collapse it entirely. this presents a challenge for the researcher whose task it is to gather data and come back from the field with “evidence”, and so new tactics are required that implicate the researcher’s body profoundly. traditional research methods are largely inappropriate in festival settings and alternative approaches are required that challenge conventional ideas of knowledge production. methods developed in performance studies research help close the gap between the researcher and the researched, placing emphasis on embodied knowledge, participation and praxis. these approaches are pertinent for edmc scholarship, where the researcher is often deeply embedded in the context and communities in question and grappling with ideas of space, identity and co-presence. performative research and practice-based methodologies locate the researcher firmly within the research frame and acknowledge embodiment as a legitimate and insightful way of generating new knowledge. using play as both my research focus and as my methodology provides a unique perspective on the lived experience of festival play and the role it currently has in contemporary culture. however, this approach is not without its difficulties and, in the festival context, problems around immersion and flow come into sharp focus. conducting fieldwork in these contexts, one must constantly negotiate the shifting sands of the physical and psychical terrain and embrace the questions it throws up around identity, identification and participation. rather than treating these issues as distinct, impermeable categories that result in the creation of unhelpful binaries such as work and play, immersion and interruption, order and chaos, what is preferable is that we treat them as organic processes that may fluctuate over the course of the festival. furthermore, just as the festival can provide a space for the playful reworking of identities, it is possible to see how playing betwixt and between states can be an effective research strategy that invites creativity and imagination and one which is fit for purpose. acknowledgements thanks to all the many contributors on the environments for encounter project for beyond text, especially my co-investigator dr rebekka kill of leeds metropolitan university and to deborah sanderson of urban angels circus. to everyone who filmed, photographed, dancecult 5(1)36 performed, interviewed, carried, lifted, rigged and drove vans, motorhomes and cars —a massive thanks. it was a huge undertaking but it was worth it. heartfelt gratitude goes to all the members of the …floorspace… family old and new who have contributed to my research into participatory performance since 2006. we started this work in a field in lancashire and it continues to grow many years later. and finally a thank you to my very special festival family, who put up with me thinking too much when i should be dancing. notes 1 philip auslander’s work (2008) is useful here, as is peggy phelan’s (1993). 2 since 2006, i have been making performances for festivals with my performance company … floorspace… the company is comprised of a fluctuating ensemble of undergraduate students from the school of performance and cultural industries, university of leeds, uk. performances devised by the company are mobile, walkabout shows that are highly participatory and coimprovised with festivalgoers. the company has performed at a range of small-scale uk festivals including shamania, beatherder, nozstock, magic loungeabout and kendal calling. 3 alleque et al. (2009), riley and hunter (2009), smith and dean (2009), freeman (2010) and kershaw and nicholson (2011). 4 further information on the beyond text strategic programme can be found at <www. beyondtext.ac.uk>. a short documentary of the environments for encounter project can be viewed at <http://youtube.com/watch?v=addla252vv4> 5 the concept of relational performance draws heavily on the work of nicholas bourriard and his idea of relational aesthetics (2002). this concept was developed as part of the activities of the beyond text research network festival performance as a state of encounter that ran between 2008–2010 and was a precursor to the environments for encounter project. references allain, paul. 2006. “the nature and culture of performance”. in a performance cosmology: testimony from the future, evidence of the past, ed. judie christie, richard gough, daniel watt, 23–4. oxford: routledge. alleque, ludivine, simon jones, baz kershaw and angela piccini, eds. 2009. practice-as-research in performance and screen. hampshire: palgrave. auslander, philip. 2008. liveness: performance in a mediatized culture. london: routledge. bolt, barbara. 2007. “the exegesis as meme”. in practice as research: approaches to creative arts enquiry, ed. estelle barrett and barbara bolt. london and new york: i.b. tauris. bourriard, nicholas. 2002. relational aesthetics. dijon : les presses du réel. bruner, jerome s. 1966. toward a theory of instruction. cambridge, ma: belknap press. buckland, fiona. 2002. impossible dance: club culture and queer world-making. middletown, conn.: wesleyan university press. o’grady | interrupting flow 37 cahnmann-taylor melisa and richard siegesmund, eds. 2008. arts-based research in education: foundations in practice. london and new york: routledge. caillois, roger. 2001. man, play and games. urbana: university of illinois press. conquergood, dwight. 2002. “performance studies: interventions and radical research”. tdr: the drama review 46(2): 145 –56. csikszentmihalyi, mihaly. 1975. beyond boredom and anxiety: the experience of play in work and games. jossey-bass: san francisco. deleuze, gilles and felix guattari. 1987. a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. minneapolis, mn and london: university of minnesota press. freeman, john. 2010. blood, sweat and theory. london: libri publishing. garner, stanton b. 1994. bodied spaces: phenomenology and performance in contemporary drama. ithaca, ny and london: cornell university press. grosz, elizabeth. 1994. volatile bodies. toward a corporeal feminism. australia: allen and unwin. haseman, bradley c. 2006. “a manifesto for performative research”. media international australia, incorporating culture and policy. 118: 98–106. <http://eprints.qut.edu.au/3999/1/3999_1. pdf> (accessed 10 july 2012). haseman, bradley c. and daniel mafe. 2009. “acquiring know-how: research training for practice-led researchers”. in practice-led research, research-led practice in the creative arts, ed. hazel smith and roger t. dean, 211–28. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. hughes, jenny, jenny kidd and catherine mcnamara. 2011. “the usefulness of mess: artistry, improvisation and decomposition in the practice of research in applied theatre”. in research methods in theatre and performance, ed. baz kershaw and helen nicholson, 186–209. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. jacks, lawrence pearsall. 1932. education through recreation. london: london university press. kerhsaw, baz. 2009. “practice as research through performance”. in practice-led research, researchled practice in the creative arts, ed. hazel smith and roger t. dean, 104–25. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. kershaw, baz and helen nicholson, eds. 2011. research methods in theatre and performance. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. kerhsaw, baz with lee miller/joanne “bob” whalley and rosemary lee/niki pollard. 2011. “practice as research: transdisciplinary innovation in action”. in research methods in theatre and performance, ed. baz kershaw and helen nicholson, 63–85. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. malbon, ben. 1999. clubbing: dancing, ecstasy and vitality. london: routledge. mckinney, joslin and helen, iball. 2011. “researching scenography”. in research methods in theatre and performance, ed. baz kershaw and helen nicholson, 111–36. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. mcrobbie, angela. 2002. “clubs to companies: notes on the decline of political culture in speeded up creative worlds”. cultural studies 16(4): 516–31. moneta, giovanni b. and mihaly csikentmihalyi. 1996. “the effect of perceived challenges and skills on the quality of subjective experience”. journal of personality 64(2): 275–310. nelson, robin. 2006. “practice-as-research and the problem of knowledge”, performance research 11(4): 105–16. dancecult 5(1)38 o’grady, a. 2012. “spaces of play: the spatial dimensions of underground club culture and locating the subjunctive”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 4(1): 86–106. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.01.04> (accessed 3 april 2013). parip. practice as research in performance 2000–2006. <http://www.bris.ac.uk/parip/> (accessed 10 july 2012). parker-starbuck, jennifer and roberta mock. 2011. “researching the body in/as performance”. in research methods in theatre and performance, ed. baz kershaw and helen nicholson, 210–35. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. pedro, robelo and franziska schroeder. 2006. “performing the order: the messiness of play”. performance research: a journal of the performing arts 11(1): 3–8. phelan, peggy. 1993. unmarked: the politics of performance. london: routledge. pitches, jonathan, simon murray, helen poynor, libby worth, david richmond and jules dorey richmond. 2011. “performer training: researching practice in the theatre laboratory”. in research methods in theatre and performance, ed. baz kershaw and helen nicholson, 137–61. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. polyani, michael. 1983 [1966]. the tacit dimension. gloucester, ma: peter smith. riley, shannon rose and lynette hunter. 2009. mapping landscapes for performance as research: scholarly acts and creative cartographies. hampshire: palgrave. schechner, richard. 1969. public domain. new york: avon books. ———. 1977. “drama, script, theatre and performance”. drama review, 17(3): 5–36. ———. 1985. between theatre and anthropology. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. ———. 2002. performance studies: an introduction. london: routledge. schön, donald a. 1983. the reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action. new york: basic books. smith, hazel and roger, t. dean, eds. 2009. practice-led research, research-led practice in the creative arts. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. steier, frederick. 1991. “introduction: research as self-reflexivity, self-reflexivity as social process”. in research and reflexivity, ed. frederick steier, 1–11. newbury park, ca: sage. sullivan, graeme. 2006. “artefacts as evidence within changing contexts”. working papers in art and design 4, <http://www.herts.ac.uk/artdes/research/papers/wpades/vol4/gsfull.html> (accessed: 10 july 2012). thompson, james. 2009. performance affects: applied theatre and the end of effect. basingstoke, uk: palgrave macmillan. todres, les. 2007. embodied enquiry: phenomenological touchstones for research, psychotherapy and spirituality. basingstoke, uk: palgrave macmillan. trimingham, melissa. 2001. “the practical application of principles underlying the work of oskar schlemmer at the dessau bauhaus 1926–1929”. ph.d dissertation (performance studies), university of leeds. turner, victor. 1983. “body, brain and culture”. zygon 18(3): 221–45. free parties and teknivals: gift-exchange and participation on the margins of the market and the state dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 7(1): 116–128 issn 1947-5403 ©2015 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.01.06 free parties and teknivals: gift-exchange and participation on the margins of the market and the state.1 anne petiau institute of social work and social studies (france) translation by luis-manuel garcia university of groningen (netherlands) and max planck institute for human development (germany) abstract through raves and then subsequently through “free parties” and “teknivals”, french fans of electronic music have developed festive practices at the margins of the market and the state. in france, these events—especially so-called free parties—are often associated with free-access events or inversely with settings for parallel economies. and yet, these parties operate under a logic of gift-exchange, playing on its symbolic dimensions. the free party is experienced as a collective production, in the sense that the organizers of these sound systems expect an investment, an active participation from the audience, and also in that the participants, faced with the party-as-gift made by these collectives, are drawn into an obligation to contribute to the event in their own way. this participation can take the financial form of a donation, but can also be made by helping to set up or clean the event location, enlivening the festive space through spectacular street-theater, and also simply by dancing. this organization through gift-exchange is thus directly connected to the kind of participatory experience sought by the audience. the party-as-gift also prompts other collectives to offer their own festive gifts in turn; this entails a degree of emulation between sound systems. they acquire prestige and renown within this social world according to their capacity to provide both music and parties as gifts.2 a reading in terms of the gift makes it possible to capture how the pleasures of giving and spontaneity can coexist with economic interests and prestige. keywords: free party, teknival, gift-exchange, participation, amateur practices, marginality after completing a phd in sociology on electronic music (“musiques et musiciens électroniques. contribution à une sociologie des musiques populaires”. university of paris 5, 2006), anne petiau has conducted research in the fields of youth, cultural marginality and deviance. her most recent work engages with youth cultures, digital practices and squatting, leading to the publication of two books (technomedia. jeunes, musique et blogosphere, éditions mélanie séteun, 2011; vivre en squat. une bohème populaire au xxième siècle, éditions du cnrs, 2014). she is currently an instructor and research coordinator at the institute of social work and social studies (itsrs) as well as a research fellow at the interdisciplinary laboratory for economic sociology (lise), which is associated with the national conservatory of arts and design (cnam) and the national centre of scientific research (cnrs). transposition http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.01.06 petiau | free parties and teknivals 117 translator’s introduction: anne petiau’s essay provides an analysis of the many dimensions of participation [to participate, but also to contribute materially] in france’s “free parties” and “teknivals”. working both historically and ethnographically, she develops this analysis using the theoretical framework of reciprocal gift-exchange, first conceptualized in the gift [le don] by marcel mauss (1997 [1950]) but also further developed by noted french anthropologists alain caillé (2000) and jacques t. godbout (2000). petiau notes that free parties are understood by organizers and attendees to be “free” in both senses of the term—freedom [liberté] as well as “for free” [gratuité]— while nonetheless relying on various forms of financial and in-kind donations from attendees. notably, the free party itself is characterized by organizers as a gift offered freely to participants. and yet, as studies of gift-exchange suggest, gifts come with “strings attached”, with obligations and expectations of reciprocity. and so, petiau argues that participants’ donations may not be as optional and freely given as they seem, illustrating how the actors involved in free parties articulate these expectations while reconciling them with the open-access ethos of these events. in addition to this insightful analysis, the essay provides a useful introduction both to the french free party/teknival scene as well as to the anthropology of gift-exchange. anne petiau’s article first appeared in french in 2012 as “free-parties et teknivals. dans les marges du marché et de l’etat, système de don et participation”, in festivals, raves parties, free parties. histoire des rencontres musicales en france et à l’étranger, n. bénard (ed.), 587–610. paris: camion blanc. at first through raves and then “free parties” and “teknivals”, electronic music has developed at the margins of the professionalized and institutionalized networks of music and live spectacle.3 this preference for alternative (read: clandestine) practices is one way that fans can avoid the administrative, legislative and financial constraints that hinder the development of activities and the organization of festive events. also at stake in keeping oneself on the margins of institutionalized networks is the ability to develop logics foreign to both the market and the state. free parties—and to a lesser degree raves—operate under a logic of gift-exchange, playing on its symbolic dimensions. this approach offers a perspective on the diverse practices in these festive spaces, ranging from the principle of donation that prevails over access to parties up to and including the ordinary sociability of participants. alternative electronic festivities: from raves to free parties in england, raves emerged as a result of new regulations passed by the thatcher regime in 1988, forcing london clubs to close at two o’clock in the morning. wild parties were organized in the countryside or in suburban warehouses; these warehouse parties and later acid parties grew explosively to the sound of house music (garnier and brun-lambert 2003: 28–29, 55). in france, despite the different legal context, the principle of organizing parties outside of venues intended for such purposes began to gain currency. even if promoters, concert halls and nightclubs did not hesitate to convert themselves to these new sounds, dancecult 7(1)118 the emancipation from sites dedicated to music events gave rise to a new festive format: the “rave” party. this created an opening for fans and amateur event-promoters, who could thereafter organize parties outside of conventional venues and without observing applicable laws, thus simplifying matters to a great extent. thus, along with larger events organized by professionals came a proliferation of more or less large-scale raves, often clandestine and semi-legal,4 organized by amateurs in varying degrees of formal association. one accelerating factor in the development of raves was in fact its growing repression. in the middle of the 1990s, it became very difficult for individuals and amateurs to organize a rave party in france. requests for permits were almost always refused when electronic music was involved. police interventions become more frequent, based on the recommendations of a 1995 inter-ministerial circular.5 the intensifying repression of raves together with the near-systematic refusal of permits served to make completely clandestine operations the more attractive choice, thus contributing to the growing development of “free parties”, also inspired by developments in england. at the end of the 1980s, the world of uk “new age travellers” (delorme 2001: 107–123) came into contact with the acid party scene, which was experiencing explosive growth at the time. some of these travellers converted to these new sounds; equipped with sound systems, they punctuated their movements with the organization of parties. the repression of prime minister margaret thatcher and her government pushed some of them to emigrate to france—notably spiral tribe,6 under the threat of a conviction against them in england. thus was the “free party model” imported into france at the beginning of the 1990s where, following the example of the english tribes, sound systems such as les teknocrates, les nomades, les psychiatrik and d’oqp were establishing themselves. “teknivals”, gigantic techno-festivals open to any sound system that wanted to play their music, also made an appearance (grynszpan 1999: 25–26, 38). with the second inter-ministerial circular of 1998, the repression of free parties hardened,7 finally crystalizing in 2002, when a public-safety law came into effect, targeting “certain festive gatherings with a musical character”. this mandated that the organization of a free party be declared in advance, which could then be prohibited if the venue does not fulfill legal requirements, while also sanctioning the seizure of sound equipment, the levying of fines, and legal action in the case of a failure to declare or the violation of an injunction. this new legal context together with numerous seizures of sound equipment halted the development of free parties. they did not disappear entirely, in any case, but they have become more discreet. negotiations between organizers and local authorities allowed for teknivals to take place legally.8 some of these—such as one in chambley in may of 2004— attracted a crowd of up to 80,000. between 2003 and 2013, both legal and illegal teknivals were organized, with some clandestine events followed by seizures of sound equipment, such as occurred at the teknival at bouafles in 2009 and at saint-martin de crau in 2011 (kosmicki 2010: 654–670). the transition from raves to free parties can be seen on several fronts as the radicalization of the principles adopted by raves. on the one hand, there was a radicalization in terms of their relation to the law, since they ignored the legal contingencies of organizing live petiau | free parties and teknivals 119 events. free parties, which managed themselves financially as well as technically and artistically, eliminated the remuneration of employees and the need for professionals. they also eliminated admission fees, in favor of a principle of voluntary donation. participants were thus not required to provide a fixed entrance fee, but rather were invited to make a contribution—financial or material—to the organizing collective. on the other hand, free parties radicalized the organizational form of collectives. these involved an affective investment and a larger staff, since their members often collectively owned the sound equipment that enabled amplified music playback—sometimes along with the bus or truck necessary for its transportation—at times even living together as a commune. and finally, free parties radicalized musical and artistic expression. raves opened up a marginal position for a time, where actors developed events in parallel to professionalized musical and festive milieus—at least until some of these protagonists became professionals in turn. the return to clandestine and amateur operations achieved by free parties reopened this marginal position. once again, actors bypassed judiciary structures, avoiding administrative, legislative and financial obstacles. once again, they invented ways of being together, spaces of congregation, and mechanisms of sonic transmission. in this sense, one could see the historical transition from raves to free parties as a reopening of participative space. respecting the legislative framework for live entertainment entails expenses (e.g., venue rental, security, licensing fees to the performing rights organization sacem), and the establishment of a parallel network for music and parties provides a means of engaging in musical and organizational activities while avoiding the constraints that would otherwise limit access to these activities. at the same time, since they avoided professional networks, since they avoided recourse to state institutions and freed themselves of their regulations and, in short, since they developed on the margins of the market and the state, these young actors were able to develop practices in relation to different logics. in these alternative festive practices, one can recognize the means by which individuals constantly reestablish social ties relevant to a system of gift-exchange, whether outside the systems of market and state or in their interstices (godbout 2000 [1992]: 235, 237). the donation principle for participants, a “free party” is free in every sense of the term. exploiting the double meaning of “free” in english, they refer both to the freedom of action within these events as well as their free-of-charge admission [gratuité]. in reality, however, free parties are based on a donation principle, and a donation is not “for free”, per se. as mauss has demonstrated (1997: 143–279), the gift is a system composed of giving, receiving and reciprocation, entailing elements of obligation and interest. at a free party, in fact, donation takes on an obligatory character; obligation exists in the sense that failing to make a donation is frowned upon, while the donation itself—even a specific level of donation—may be demanded. bertrand: certainly, if someone arrives to the entrance in a bmw, an audi, or even a nicely polished [peugeot] 405, five guys sitting inside wearing fifteen hundred francs dancecult 7(1)120 worth of clothing, and they want to give a donation of only five francs each, you tell them, “guys, please, make an effort; we’re busting our ass for you, so do something now or help us out.” so, it sometimes happens that we’re a bit blunt with people like that, with the obvious slackers, but we appreciate the work of all of those people who show goodwill and come to lend a hand. free parties are nonetheless defined by their free admission, as much by the collectives that value offering the party-as-gift as by the participants who value contributing to a freeof-charge party. here one can recognize the “rule of the implicit” that is characteristic of systems of reciprocal gift-exchange, where “there is no ignorance, but rather an active and conscious refusal by both parties to be explicit, a double and symmetrical hypocrisy, thus normally absurd and pointless. and furthermore: not only does one refuse to make the rules explicit, one seems to wish to articulate other ones that affirm the opposite of what happens ‘in reality’. one affirms the absence of an expectation of reciprocity, all the while expecting the gift to be returned. one proclaims gift-giving while being engaged in reciprocity” (godbout 2000 [1992]: 262–3). the printing of the abbreviation “paf” [participer aux frais: contribute to expenses] on rave flyers was characteristic of this tension in relation to the gift, in the sense that it was an invitation to contribute [participer] to defraying the costs of the party rather than paying a fee in order to attend. at free parties, partygoers are invited to “participate” in the defraying of expenses, but the rule remains implicit. a donation in the form of a financial contribution is only one mode of counter-gift among many: participants can also donate cigarettes, hash, gas, etc. besides, the party-as-gift calls for participation in a more general sense: helping to set up or clean the event location, enlivening the festive space through spectacular street theater, and also simply by dancing. after all, what’s the use in “giving” a party if the participants don’t fulfill it through dance? olivier: it’s that there’s really lots of energy for making things and offering things to people. maybe offering things to people is a way of nourishing one’s own ego, but still, there are people who dance, people who juggle, for our viewing pleasure… i mean to say that, regardless of what you do, it’s also for the crowd; you also offer it to the crowd. i mean to say that even just one person dancing to the music, you’ll always have someone who will dig it, who’ll say, “oh yeah, his dancing cracks me up,” or something. so, there’s this kind of exchange between the people who dance, also the people who sell—because there’s a lot of business, as much for water as for drugs and beer, sandwiches and all that—but everyone offers their little thing that makes things work. and, without one or the other, it won’t work. to begin with, the sound systems [collectives] give their sound to the crowd for free, without anyone having to do anything; you’re not buying a ticket so that you can watch. ultimately, that’s really the free-party spirit, that’s what’s beautiful about it and that’s what we all love about it. it’s the fact that there are people who give this, and considering that it’s the people who organize (so to speak) who are giving this, well then the people who received it are also obliged to give a minimum amount. petiau | free parties and teknivals 121 the rule of gift-exchange, if it functions implicitly in actu, is clearly formulated here. faced with the party-as-gift offered by these collectives, participants are also prompted to contribute to the maintenance of the festive event. the party’s financial, artistic and technical self-management implies that all help is welcome, and that it can take multiple forms. jeremy: you have some guys with vans, and what do they do? well, they’ll park their vans all around, making a dance floor. i mean, if there weren’t any vans, there wouldn’t be a dance floor, so there you go. i mean, with the means that we have, we couldn’t do otherwise, in any case. they’re even helping us out, really.9 and as for what we bring, well i’ll tell you that we’re just an “engine”, but still, when you stick an engine in a car with no wheels, no steering wheel, no whatever, you’re not going anywhere. so, that’s what i like about it. free parties are experienced as a collective production, in the sense that the sound systems expect an investment, an active contribution [fr. participation] from the audience, and also in the sense that the participants, faced with the collective’s party-as-gift, are drawn into the obligation to contribute to the collective event in their own fashion. both groups derive pleasure from their engagement in this system of gift-exchange: for the former, pleasure in giving the party-as-gift, and for the latter, pleasure in making a contribution to it. this participatory dimension and the importance of mutual aid are both emphasized by certain ravers as well, which is notably the case in parties devoted to the “psytrance” genre of electronic music. these sometimes offer free admission when they are held in developing and emerging nations (india, thailand, south africa, etc.), and the participants can contribute to the party not only by dancing, but also by performing amusements of various sorts (juggling, fire-dancing, decoration) and providing support in organizational tasks.10 at the largest of festivals, which charge an admission fee but take place outdoors (europe during the summer season, the southern hemisphere during the european winter), participants also find a liberty of movement and a participatory dimension that they deem to be absent from more traditional party venues such as clubs. jocelyn: for me, an ideal trance party would be one where people will look after and help each other; that’s a part of the pleasure. yesterday afternoon, i was bored at the party because it was the afternoon and there’s nobody around at that time, so i instinctively started helping the organizers, who were having trouble, and i got a great deal out of it, personally. i completely understand why mother theresa dedicated her life to helping others. that’s present at an ideal party, this desire to help one another… there are lots of people who offer to help with the decoration, and such. participants and collectives thus highlight the importance of mutual aid within the festive space. in a particular way, this involves “giving back”, contributing in one’s own way to the party’s fulfillment, even if one is giving back to others. dancecult 7(1)122 jeremy: there’s also the problem of trash. if you manage to raise awareness about it, and if in the morning you get there and you see big heaps of garbage bags neatly arranged, well then, you’re happy. what’s more, you see, that means people really wanted to contribute [fr. participer], and that’s also what lends a bit of magic to the free party, since everyone lends a hand; it’ll be the bottle of water you give to some guy, a bandage you give to someone else. everyone helps each other out that way, it’s autonomous. and there you go, that’s a good free party to me. ultimately, the “ideal” free party as it is represented by actors—an ideal rarely reached, to be sure, and just as mythical and real as collective effervescence—would achieve the “total reciprocity” described by mauss, where the entanglement of (direct, indirect, alternating, delayed) reciprocities would engender mutual engagement while also bringing the group itself into being (cited in papilloud 2002: 96). not all participants are sensitized to this participatory dimension, which operates in the symbolic register. various modes of engagement exist within the party, whether it be rave or free party. participatory experience and the experience of festive effervescence are two distinct modalities, two aspects of the party’s lived experience. some participants come simply in search of collective musical experience, the loss of self on the dancefloor, as well as a moment of conviviality. free parties thus gain much of their attractiveness from the breadth of the festive rupture that they generate. some seek both of these dimensions, each reinforcing the other. if it is ultimately the members of the organizing sound systems who address this theme most directly, it is undoubtedly because they have been sensitized to this dimension, the participatory experience of partying having led to giving one’s own party-asgift in turn. indeed, lionel pourtau (2009: 61–2) emphasizes that putting together a sound system and throwing a party are ways of paying back the debt of initiation in a transitive manner; we return to others the fact of having been initiated ourselves. this manifests as a contemporary mode of gift-exchange, in that it is turned towards strangers. system of gift-exchange or parallel economy? commercial exchanges take place at the heart of the free party: the sale of records, cassettes, clothing, drinks, food and drugs. donations, drink stalls and stands all represent a source of revenue for organizing sound systems. these exchanges constitute a parallel economy, since they escape taxation by the state (grynszpan 1998: 28–30). for some authors, the affirmation and demand of free admission to free parties merely functions to mask the real interests of the actors and to obfuscate the circulation of money (liogier 2004: 143–4): de facto, the practice of donation provides a glimpse of how the party is a zone ruled by both commercial and non-commercial exchanges. in fact, this generous contribution by each and every one appears in reality to be a tithe. the participant is not free to give whatever he likes, despite the organizers claims to the contrary. in this way, the latter make use of a symbolic act of giving (the gift of oneself, participation) in order to force the individual to obey an obligatory practice of the commercial order. not petiau | free parties and teknivals 123 offering any money—or offering too little—exposes one to forceful expulsion from the party (sometimes including physical brutality). the average donation amounts to around 20 francs. if one cannot contribute money, the individual is called upon to donate cigarettes, a piece of hashish or something else. the exchange thus becomes non-commercial and the financial profit is replaced by payment in-kind. here, the gift hides lucrative activities (queudrus 2000: 27). it seems difficult to concede that organizing collectives would have financial gain as their primary goal in throwing a party. if this were the case, one might justifiably ask, on the one hand, why they organize parties instead of simply engaging in clandestine activities, and on the other hand, why they resort to the language of gift-exchange and free-of-charge participation. it would also seem much simpler, if indeed they had nothing more than lucrative activity in mind, to substitute the donation principle with a fixed admission fee. it should be noted that queudrus enumerates in fact all of the characteristics of the gift: its characterization as free in theory but obligatory in reality (to paraphrase marcel mauss); monetary non-equivalence; the “rule of the implicit and unsaid”, where one proclaims rules that diverge from what actually happens; the entanglement among participants of disinterest and interest. as godbout notes, “if modernity refuses to believe in the existence of the gift, it is because it represents the gift as the inverse of egoistic material interest. in their eyes, a ‘real’ gift could only be free of costs [gratuit]. and since freedom from cost [gratuité] is impossible […], the gift, the real gift, is just as impossible” (godbout 2000 [1992]: 14). this approach evacuates the specificity of the donation and the importance of the notions of gift and freedom from charge [gratuité] for actors, as well as the significance that these actors ascribe to their practices. and yet, the pursuit of material interest or prestige is not incompatible with gift-exchange. in fact, it is precisely in the gift itself that the pursuit of such interests, generosity, spontaneity and the pleasure of giving mix together (caillé 2000: 126). one could risk making a comparison and say that, somewhat like the kula,11 these commercial exchanges take place at the margins of the gift-exchange. mauss attests that commercial exchanges are indeed carried out in parallel to the ceremonial exchanges of the trobriand islands. the maritime voyages organized in connection with the kula can also be an opportunity to carry out commercial exchanges, but these are carefully distinguished from the ceremonial exchanges, which are the only ones considered “noble” (mauss 1997: 176). in a way, these commercial exchanges are also contained within the margins of the free party, since they do not affect the donation principle that governs access to parties. in other words, the presence of commercial exchange does not affect the symbolic dimension of the gift. the free party is experienced as a party-as-gift by both collectives and participants, even if commercial exchanges take place within. and, like in the case of the kula, it is those exchanges operating under a logic of gift-exchange that are considered the most noble. for a few, free parties are undoubtedly an ideal context for conducting remunerative practices that are illegal or part of a parallel economy. it seems nonetheless simplistic to dancecult 7(1)124 reduce the entirety of the free party down to a space conducive to the development of remunerative activities, thus rendering abstract the passionate dimension claimed by participants while also ignoring the specificity of the donation principle along with its concomitant participatory dimension. where giving becomes virtue at the heart of the free party, the capacity to give comes to be established as a virtue. in part, this governs ordinary sociability: both sharing one’s food, drinks, drugs and offering one’s (mechanical, technical, etc.) expertise constitute a well-appreciated behavior in this festive space. for collectives and musicians, this also has to do with knowing how to “give” a party and music. if the party-as-gift prompts one and all to participate in the collective event, it also prompts other collectives to make a gift of their parties in turn. there is a certain degree of emulation between sound systems. the principles of honor and competition identified by mauss in the potlatch12 find expression to a certain degree in the free party. the goal here is not to establish the equivalence of two social phenomena so culturally estranged as potlatches and free parties. we should recall that, for mauss, the potlatch represented an exemplary expression of the system of gift-exchange, in that certain elements are “exaggerated” (to use his phrasing) and thus more intelligible (mauss 1997: 209–212). in fact, the party-as-gift given by a collective functions like a provocation, in the sense that it challenges other collectives to offer their own party-as-gift in turn as well as to do it better and to give more, whenever possible. this challenge incites some collectives to greater and greater logistical feats in the organization of their parties, within the limits of their resources: enormous walls of sound, certainly, but also light shows, lasers and decorations. this orgy of expenditure elicits admiration, but also at times critique (“throwing away cash to have a techno disneyland”, as one participant puts it in a discussion forum on the internet),13 seeing in it a spectacularization far afield from initial ideals. collectives garner prestige and renown within this social world according to their capacity to provide both parties and music as gifts (see also pourtau 2009: 158). one should also note that some among them see a deviation from their ideals in the accumulation of renown and prestige through the party-as-gift. in their eyes, the only motivation for organizing a partyas-gift should be “to advance the movement”, that is, to give without any interest other than contributing to the festive phenomenon of free parties. furthermore, the prestige attached to tribes and sound systems appear to them to contradict the principles of free access and anonymity that they endorse. olivier: i think that techno did not originally mean, “ooh, spiral tribe! ah les teknokrates! oh, les thc…”14 in the beginning we fought against that, i think. but unfortunately people need to go, “oh, the dj!” “ah, they’re better than them”, presumably because they prefer the sound of one or the other. as a result, you’re less connected to the festive side and the message that it delivers. there is always this contradictory element in all things; we want lots of things but at the same time we petiau | free parties and teknivals 125 are no less attached to our social values, our culture, our upbringing, and capitalism itself, which tells you, “you must be better than others”. it’s a milieu that is really so contradictory that it’s difficult to achieve anything, in the end. if the gift is to be held up as a virtue, it must be completely disinterested for its actors. and yet, as we have already seen, the gift is always torn between two poles, pulled along two axes: on the one hand, that of disinterest and interest and, on the other, that of freedom and constraint (caillé 2000). incontestably—and despite the fact that certain actors would like it to be otherwise, in order to preserve the ideal of purity that enfolds the notions of gift and free access in our society, which seem to be completely opposed to notions of interest and profit—the party-as-gift and the gift of music also generate social superiority and contribute to the development of social hierarchy. but if presenting oneself as generous incontestably “reaps rewards” in these terms, the criticisms generated when certain collectives gain fame and renown—which is deplored as a reproduction of the “star system” that they oppose, where the collective comes to play the role of the star—demonstrate that the gift cannot be reduced to the logics of interest and profit. in other words, there is also a certain pleasure to be found in giving the party-as-gift, a generosity which makes sense in itself. self-organisation, gift-exchange and participation both raves and free parties show us the self-organizing capacities of social groups—that is, their capacity to invent forms of collectivity, spaces of congregation and mechanisms of musical transmission—at the margins of institutions. some authors have highlighted the pertinence of taz (“temporary autonomous zones”) to understanding free parties (e.g., grynszpan 1998: 30–1). developed by hakim bey, this concept shares a certain genealogy with maffesoli’s “interstitial liberties” (1992: 85–98) and de certeau’s “arts of doing” (1990). what these authors have in common is the attention they give to the way in which popular categories and ordinary people react to the constraints of order instituted by practices of resistance, subversion, reappropriation and disappearance. their focus of attention is displaced away from the institution and its modalities of imposing order towards the analysis of those procedures through which consumers and users either subvert products and spaces, turning passive consumption into active production, or invent for themselves spaces of autonomy and liberty within the interstices of the status quo (dosse 2002). individuals mobilize practices resistant to the logics of market and state, thus also avoiding being reduced to the roles of consumer of goods or user of services. at stake in this avoidance is the constitution of the subject itself (de certeau 1990: 52–3). the development of raves and free parties in the gaps of institutions, the resistance on the part of free party participants to professionalization as well as the legislative framework dictated by the state all serve as means for participants to preserve their complete investment in organization and musical practices. to clarify, it is not the intention here to mount a critique of the market and the state, but rather to grasp the stakes for actors involved in gathering together, undertaking and developing activities in an autonomous manner. this dancecult 7(1)126 also enables these actors to deploy alternate logics. the party-as-gift, the gift of music, makes demands: it calls on each one to contribute and commit oneself to the collective event. the gift of oneself (of time, music, art) calls for reciprocity and, in festive contexts, takes the form of a contribution [fr. participation]. here we encounter the notion of the wager, consubstantial with the gift. the gift relies on the uncertainty of reciprocity; even though organizers reduce this by instituting a donation principle, the success of a party nonetheless depends on the goodwill of its participants—for example, for site cleanup and waste management. this participatory dimension constitutes one of the specificities of the festive experience of raves and free parties. raves and above all free parties operate to a certain degree under a logic of gift-exchange, playing on its symbolic dimensions. for godbout, the gift represents a link: its efficacy lies in its capacity to engender relationality, to create social ties, and to make relations last (godbout 2000: 244–247). to this definition we can now add that the gift also represents a form of participation. organization based on a system of gift-exchange has its limits. it should be noted that the wager made by organizers does not always pay off, especially when the parties elicit growing attendance. the growing enthusiasm for raves and free parties calls for the professionalization of organizers or state involvement in management. for example, the state’s involvement in the organization of teknivals—which drew tens of thousands of attendees—has proven to be indispensible. collective formation based on a system of gift-exchange also runs up against its limits in the multiple modalities of festive participation. many attendees come simply to seek out trance, effervescence and conviviality, rather than participatory experience, which cannot bear any rupture between promoters and their audience. notes 1 original publication: anne petiau. 2012. “free-parties et teknivals. dans les marges du marché et de l’etat, système de don et participation”. in festivals, raves parties, free parties. histoire des rencontres musicales en france et à l’étranger, n. bénard (ed.), 587–610. paris: camion blanc. 2 [translator: it should be noted that, in french, one common expression for throwing a party, donner une fête, includes the verb donner [to give], which itself takes as its root the word for “gift” [le don]. this enables the author to more frequently and idiomatically cast the organization of a festive event as a gift. this word-choice cannot be retained in english without excessive awkwardness, and so variations on the expression “party-as-gift” will be used in its place, when this emphasis on gift-giving is contextually important.] 3 this article picks up on several conclusions from my thesis in sociology, “musiques et musiciens électroniques. contribution à une sociologie des musiques populaires [music and electronic musicians. contribution to a sociology of popular music]” (defended in 2006 at the university of paris 5 under the supervision of michel maffesoli), for which a survey was conducted in conjunction with direct observation and comprehensive interviews with thirtyseven musicians and fans. quotations from interviews included here have also been drawn from this thesis. petiau | free parties and teknivals 127 4 that is, respecting certain conditions necessary for the organization of a live event. the organization of a live event requires the possession of an event-promoter’s license. individuals or associations can nonetheless organize up to six live events per year without a license [at the time of original publication, 2012], but only in accordance with applicable regulations, including: requesting a permit from city hall, declaring the event at the local police station, obtaining a temporary license to serve alcohol, requesting permission from sacem [france’s rights-management society for music] for the public playback of musical works registered in their catalogues as well as paying the corresponding licensing fees. 5 entitled, “raves, high-risk events”, this memo lists infractions that agents of law-enforcement can mobilize in order to interrupt a party and pursue its organizers. it advocates refusing permit requests in cases that involve a rave party. for more on the history of french raves, see fontaine and fontana (1996) and racine (2002). 6 [tr.: see also: st. john, graham. 2009. technomad: global raving countercultures. london: equinox publishing ltd.] 7 this distinguished between gatherings having obtained a permit and clandestine gatherings. it advocated accompanying the former and treating them along the lines of similar types of gatherings with regards to permit requests (the example given is that of rock concerts), provided that they fulfill all of the conditions stipulated by law; but it reiterated existing repressive orders towards the latter. 8 the first legal teknivals were nicknamed “sarkovals”, referencing the name of the minister of the interior at the time, nicolas sarkozy. these were followed by other authorized teknivals arising from negotiations with public authorities, followed in turn by a new event-concept called “multisons,” authorized at the district/regional level [départements]. 9 free parties take place in locations not normally dedicated to musical gatherings, and so the festive space is not delimited in the same manner as in a concert hall or a discothèque. vans and trucks parked by participants can thus contribute to the delimitation of the dance floor. 10 psytrance parties are generally not self-managed, however. in some cases, they are managed by local actors (for example, in goa or on the southern islands of thailand) who have found in western festive tourism the basis for a flourishing economy. the parties may offer free admission, but the organizers can, for example, reap substantial profits from the bar, where prices are up to ten times more expensive than local standards. other parties and festivals are organized by promoters (in south africa, portugal, france, etc.), charging admission fees that can sometimes be quite high. 11 the kula is a system of tribal and inter-tribal gift-exchange of symbolic goods, practiced by the inhabitants of the trobriand islands and new guinea. this was studied by b. malinowski in argonauts of the western pacific (1922), to which mauss refers (1997). 12 potlatch is a gift-exchange system practiced in numerous ancient societies, notably indigenous tribes of the american northwest. potlatch has a festive dimension, but also religious, economic and political ones. it is notable for its agonistic character: in the course of ceremonies, goods may be not only given but destroyed. 13 see: <http://3boom.net>. 14 sound systems that have organized free parties. http://3boom.net dancecult 7(1)128 references bataille, georges. 1995. la part maudite. paris: les editions de minuit. bey, hakim. 2000. taz: zone autonome temporaire. paris: editions de l’eclat. caille, alain. 2000 anthropologie du don: le tiers paradigme. paris: desclée de brouwer. ———. 2003. critique de la raison utilitaire. manifeste du mauss. paris: la découverte. de certeau, michel. 1990. l’invention du quotidien. vol. 1: arts de faire. paris: gallimard. delorme, annick. 2001. “les new age travellers: une tentative d’individualisation dans la société du risque”. sociétés 72: 107–23. dosse, françois. 2002. “l’art du détournement: michel de certeau entre stratégies et tactiques”. esprit 283. douglas, mary. 2004. “il n’y a pas de don gratuit”. in comment pensent les institutions. paris: la découverte. fontaine, astrid and caroline fontana. 1996. raver. paris: economica. garnier, laurent and david brun-lambert. 2003. electrochoc. paris: flammarion. gauthier, françois. 2001. “consumation: la religiosité des raves”. religiologiques 24: 175–200. godbout, jacques t. (with alain caillé). 2000. l’esprit du don. paris: la découverte. godbout, jacques t. 2000. le don, la dette et l’identité: homo donator vs homo œconomicus. paris: la découverte. grynzspan, emmanuel. 1990. bruyante techno: réflexion sur le son de la free party. nantes: mélanie séteun. guibert, gérôme. 2005. “les musiques populaires: commerce, loisir, underground ou tierssecteur?” les c@hiers de psychologie politique 7. liogier, raphaël. 2004. “entre marginalité magnifiée et récupération ‘postindustrielle’ ”. autrement 231: 141–158. lourau, rené. 1969. l’instituant contre l’institué. paris: anthropos. kosmicki, guillaume. 2010. free party. une histoire, des histoires. paris: les mots et le reste. maffesoli, michel. la transfiguration du politique. paris: grasset et fasquelle. mauss, marcel. 1997 [1950]. sociologie et anthropologie. paris: puf. papilloud, christian. 2002. le don de relation: georg simmel – marcel mauss. paris: l’harmattan. petiau, anne. 2006. “marginalité et musiques électroniques”. agora débats/jeunesses 42: 128–139. petiau, anne. 2004. “l’expérience techno, des raves aux free parties”. in special issue, “la fête techno. tout seul et tous ensemble”, ed. béatrice mabilon-bonfils. autrement 231: 28–42. pourtau, lionel. 2009. techno: voyage au cœur des nouvelles communautés festives. paris: cnrs editions. pourtau, lionel. 2005. “les interactions entre raves et législations censées les contrôler”. déviance et société 29(2): 127–139. queudrus, sandy. 2000. un maquis techno: modes d’engagement et pratiques sociales dans la freeparty. nantes: mélanie séteun. racine, etienne. 2002. le phénomène techno: clubs, raves, free-parties. paris: imago. dj goa gil: kalifornian exile, dark yogi and dreaded anomoly dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 3(1): 97–128 issn 1947-5403 ©2011 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.05 feature article dj goa gil kalifornian exile, dark yogi and dreaded anomaly graham st john university of queensland abstract connecting three generations of music enthusiasts, goa gil is an imposing figure in the world of psychedelic trance. if the title of his 2007 compilation registers intent, he is a worldbridger. bristling with motifs of world sacred sites and appropriated “tribal” icons, with gil seated cross-legged upon the apex of a mayan temple, the album’s cover artwork confabulates the physical, spiritual and cultural worlds he professes to bridge. leading world-wide “trance dance rituals” goa gil operates under the guise of a “techno-shaman”, a “cyber-baba” and a selector/mixer of traditions whose rituals are reputedly timeless and universal. but this intent is performed amid a highly mobile lifestyle spread across diverse psychedelic music cultures, scenes and sensibilities in discrete times and places. from the 1960s haight-ashbury psychedelic rock scene, to the psychedelic jam band scene on anjuna beach, goa, india, in the 1970s, to the adoption of electronic music in a dj-led scene in the 1980s, to the birth of “goa trance” in the 1990s, to his selection, production and performance of dark psychedelic trance from the 1990s onwards, dj goa gil’s life spans a breathtaking panorama of this-worldly psychedelic scenes. gil is a freak bricoleur, an anomalous figure who evades modest circumscription. a californian exile and sanctioned shaivite practitioner with a professional hankering for darkpsy (as a dj-producer), a hippie broker of the “cosmic spirit” and a post-apocalyptic punk, he is a spiritual authority and cultural outlaw touring the planet with an improbable mix of semiotic and sonic baggage. what’s more, celebrated as a champion of the “goa vibe” or derogated as an accomplice to its demise, gil is a controversial figure who is the embodiment of considerable ambivalence. this article explores this holiest of anomalies in the world of djing. keywords: goa trance, goa gil, psytrance, techno-shaman, nomos/anomalous, ecstatic dance, cultural exile dancecult 3(1)98 angel’s camp, near santa cruz, california, 11–12 october 2006. it’s well past midnight, as psychedelic savants and nouveau freaks amass under redwoods. overhead, the cosmos is vast and the stars are blinking back on those gathered in the clearing, soon to be buried under an avalanche of “killah” bass-patterns. goa gil is wreaking his usual havoc on those who’ve arrived to celebrate his 55th birthday. the “godfather of trance” performs within a makeshift shrine, pushing darkpsy from a pair of sony tcd-d8 dat walkmans,1 under tibetan flags, over a statue of ganesh with a buddha decorated in plastic lotus flowers seated nearby. behind dark shades and with grey dreadlocks knotted back, gil is back-dropped by a fluorescent shiva-shakti mandala tapestry and another featuring lord shiva in the form of nataraja, the cosmic dancer, all illuminated under black light. next to his dat players, gil burns incense, has placed framed photographs of his gurujis, and controls a device with a red pulsing, the devanagari sign for om, the sacred syllable in the indian religions. as a hallmark of gil’s parties, the rate of the flashing is synched with the beats, which may range in excess of 180 bpm through the night and into the day. behind the shrine-stage is gil’s porta-potty. at the helm, and without relent, he will punish this freak congregation for 24 hours. figure 1. goa gil’s dj altar, moscow 2010. photo: goa gil. graham st john is an honorary research fellow at the centre for critical and cultural studies at the university of queensland. his latest books include technomad: global raving countercultures (equinox, 2009) and the edited collection the local scenes and global culture of psytrance (routledge, 2010). his forthcoming book with equinox is global tribe: spirituality, technology and psytrance. he is the executive editor of dancecult. see: <http://www.edgecentral.net>. email: <g.stjohn@warpmail.net>. 99st john | dj goa gil goa gil has had an integral role in the evolution of psychedelic trance (psytrance) from its roots in goa, india, to its adoption in scenes around the world. having arrived in goa in 1970 fresh from san francisco’s acid rock scene, gil would, 40 years hence, become a renowned selector and producer of dark psychedelic trance music, promulgating this genre in his trance dance “rituals” performed at locations around the world at least a decade before “darkpsy” became a recognized genre. he has also formed, with his wife, african dance instructor, percussionist and producer ariane macavoy (and for some time peter ziegelmeier, aka kode iv), the outfit the nommos. in 2010, gil performed some 22 gigs, many over 24 hours, at venues in india, greece, portugal, russia, japan, israel, mexico, chile and other locations. having led approximately 500 trance dance rituals,2 gil is a spiritual authority for freaks in the world psychedelic diaspora, with michael mcateer, who produced a devotional ba thesis on gil, casting him as a “mystagogue” (2002). the prestige he holds within the goa/psytrance community is apparent in the collection goa: 20 years of psychedelic trance (rom and querner 2010) where gil writes the first of 36 chapters. but while many owe gratitude to gil’s interventions, he attracts considerable controversy. in victoria bizzell’s analysis, gil is couched as the leading advocate of a “transnational neotribalism”, whose “world without borders” is “an extension of a western neo-colonialist mentality that sees the often-fabricated spiritual and ontological mythologies of ‘other’ cultures as ripe products for semiotic appropriation” (2008: 290). recognizing that goa trance and its progeny neither possess nor are possessed by a single figurehead, aesthetic or tribalism, this article addresses the ambivalence embodied by dj goa gil; a man who is revered and reproved with equivalent passion. but then, gil’s practice is notoriously aberrant for this profession. for goa gil is not simply a dj (and some will argue that he is not a “dj” at all), but a religious specialist, an initiate in the shaivite sect juna akhara, a cultural exile, a spiritual activist and a phenomenal anomaly. being ambiguous with regard to the law is the province of the electronic musician and performer, who hustles and mixes found sound as an art form, and who provides the soundtrack for dancescapes inhabited by those who enter experimental (and often unlawful) states of consciousness. in chiara baldini’s (2010) view, this ambiguity is embodied by the goa dj, who, with charismatic dreadlocks, exotic tattoos and strange piercings, may be a target of desire and enmity, drawing diverse responses not unlike that met by dionysus, the personification of cultic ambivalence. destructive/creative, trickster-like, queer, a freak, a transgressor of rules, codes and boundaries, the dj cuts an ambiguous figure and draws disparate yet extreme emotive responses across the community of transgressors/transgressed; with the ambivalence amplified if the dj is a figure who, not unlike the shaman or the mystic, is reputedly mobile across transpersonal frontiers. in addition to being an embodiment of transgression, the dj is integral to independent musical cultural movements. there has been very little scholarly attention given to the dj as cultural activist, although it is implicitly recognized that djs are, from jamaican dancehall to hip hop, detroit techno, psychedelic trance and dubstep, promoters and champions of a variety of causes and concerns, both unique to their communities of origin and integral to horizon campaigns (see beck and dancecult 3(1)100 lynch 2009). elsewhere (st john 2012, forthcoming), i explore the psytrance dj as an outlaw figure, and have also factored the role of dj performances into the arts of protest (st john 2009a). psytrance is a potent liminal arena for the recombination of the outlaw and the activist, in no small part due to the exile sensibility inhering in the goa tradition. psytrance has emerged from a tradition inhabited by the cultural exile who made his/ her departure from untenable conditions occasioned by the impossibilities of the “nuclear” family and the possibilities of “nuclear” war, that effected a notable impact on 1960s and 1970s forebears. though it was not exclusively the case among proto-freak émigrés settling in goa (consider eight finger eddie’s background as the child of armenian immigrants in depression-era boston—see below), for the most part it was their privileged backgrounds that permitted goa freaks to choose their exodus, that enabled their responses to outlawed practice, existential despair, disenchantment and cognitive dissonance already experienced as a product of middle-class lifestyles. however, the exodus was not simply the fulfillment of “advanced needs”, but a reaction to inherited social, cultural and historical conditions. this is the career of the freak, the liberated man and woman, who, as opposed to the “political” exile—who is forced to vacate home/nation and may even become associated with a “government in exile” which desires a return to power—is a self-elected exile, driven by circumstance to dwell in a permanent state of departure from the maladies of modern life. of course, the self-exile is also a political exile, in the sense that tobias c. van veen (2010) has outlined for rave. as a “desertion from acceptable modes of collective and individual responsibility” and a participatory “absence of signs”, rave’s “passage through exodus enacts a defection or disappearance from politics (and its logic of representation) to the political” (van veen 2010: 42; 41), which, in the dissolution of the distinction between labour and leisure, is recognized as a space of potential. the self-exile is a connoisseur of experience; of freedoms which rupture the conditions of self-hood associated with possessive materialism, nationalism and monotheism (although see schmidt 2010). s/he shares this precarious liminal status with other expatriates, bohemians and mystics; mutants whose artifice flourishes in alternative enclaves where liberties sought are as multiple as the oppressive conditions in the lifeworlds from which they have made exodus. seasons in goa echoed a diversity of intent, and a concomitant medley of experience. there were those who simply underwent a decadent wasting of their selves in orgiastic abandonment at year’s end. this predictable annihilation of familiarity is typical to the turn of the year, where new year’s eve is among the pinnacle celebrations in the lives of westerners, with this transit featuring prominently among those vacating in goa. here paradisical goa, perhaps now more than ever, might be considered in the light of the “zone of indistinction between the human and the animal” (agamben 1998: 105) that diken and laustsen argue characterizes tourist “camps” of naked excess and licensed transgression like ibiza, the clubbers paradise defined by dance music, cheap drugs and casual sex (2004: 2). by comparison to the seasonal trippers as ravenous homo sacer making camp with no thought for tomorrow, others sought expatriation from occidental subjectivity in an enduring career of seekership, or channeled their insouciance into projects fueling the goa “state of mind” (elliott 2010) shipped to 101st john | dj goa gil regions outside goa, sometimes remaining true to principles that attracted exiles in the beginning, other times reinhabiting modes of practice once abhorred. a prominent figure among the cultural fugitives and antinomians who made it to goa, and then made “goa” a cultural phenomenon beyond “the beach”, gil is a liminal exemplar whose heteroclite dharma-punk rhetoric has been eulogized and excoriated in equivalent intensity. gil is foremost an exponent of ritual transition, who professes to adopt the trance dance assemblage as a revitalizing spiritual technology. his millenarian repertoire is consequent to the intentional ritualization inhering in goa trance and inherited by psychedelic trance. these reflexive practices appropriate and repurpose functional elements of dance/music events throughout recorded history, european and otherwise. such practices absorb the semiotic cachet of traditional ritual sampled and remixed by producers, and under this romanticism, goa is seen, at least in bizzell’s (2008: 288) distant gaze, as “a screen upon which to project the desires and utopian fantasies of a western generation in the midst of a spiritual and ontological crisis”. in gil’s rhetoric, ritual practice is appropriated and remixed from a generally unidentified primordial stock to which we are all apparently heirs. gil, whose repeated mantra is “redefining ancient ritual for the 21st century”,3 has his thoughts sampled on lalith k. rao’s (aka alien mental) track “ritual” (mind hack, 2007): i think that my concept can fit with every culture because it draws inspiration and direction from a time of humanity when, no matter where you went, people were in touch with the earth and the spirits of nature, the sun and the moon and all the elements. and so we’re delving to the same place and trying to bring the same thing forth but with the technology of the 21st century, and in a way to appeal to the youth of the 21st century. figure 2. poster for goa gil party, chile, 13 november 2010. dancecult 3(1)102 goa, gil and trance anjuna, goa, provided the beach setting for spontaneous hippy dance and music manifests since about 1968, with anjuna, calangute and vagator beaches host to ecstatic dance gatherings from the early 1970s. many acknowledge the important role of the “original freak”, the magnetic jazz bassist and existentialist writer eight finger eddie as an instigator of this scene. making a notable break from the prison with imperceptible bars known as “life” in the united states, and drawing others to his unique style of unpretentious enlightenment, eddie arrived in goa in 1966 where he rented a house (which eventually became vince’s bar) on colva beach, and later had a free house on vagator beach.4 it was eddie whom gil arrived looking for in 1970. gil (who was widely known as “goa gil” by the late 1980s) departed san francisco in 1969, where he’d been involved with chet helm’s family dog collective and had travelled with the early sons of champlin rock band as a roadie, before heading to amsterdam, and subsequently taking the overland route to goa. as jeff 604 (n.d.) recalls, between november and april (winter; i.e. the party season) through the 1970s, eastern-trekking hippies would rendezvous at the beach paradise at which eddie had already become well known. arriving overland, with many enduring hardships and ordeals or otherwise encountering epiphanies and life-changing experiences at spectacular junctures along the “hippie trail”, goa was cherished as an off-world paradise for travellers, a place where arrivals could share stories with fellow freaks, long before expatriation became a packaged tour-option and “raving” a desirable experiential commodity for foreign and domestic tourists alike. as former anjuna resident and co-founder of california’s turtle creek sanctuary swami chaitanya explained, being a “psychonaut”, an explorer on “the frontiers of consciousness”, was the logical option for cultural exiles of the 1960s unable to physically travel further west having obtained the edge of continental north america. according to chaitanya, who first travelled to india in 1970 working as a cameraman shooting the fred cohn filmdocumentary about hindu holy men sunseed (1973), and later, as an initiate of inana yoga, raja yoga and sri vidya, became himself a holyman and a recognized presence at goa and psychedelic trance gatherings, “we thought we were going to places that people hadn’t gone before, and that was for many of us the higher purpose of the trip”.5 when gil arrived in goa, there were ad hoc parties over the christmas and new year period where hippies strummed acoustic guitars, played flute, hand-drums and sung around campfires on the beach. gil himself played a repertoire of his own original songs, including “god’s children are everywhere” (which was written en route to india in 1969), “song to krishna” and “welcome in the dawn of the new day”, on his acoustic guitar in the period before electricity came to anjuna (1975). while the scene was originally acoustic, even prior to the arrival of electricity, car and bike batteries and generators were used to power small house sound systems. gil recalls that it was during the 1973–74 season that he first djed playing tape cassettes “off the porch of some house” in anjuna and then, in the following season (1974–75), played on anjuna 103st john | dj goa gil figure 3. gil, acid eric and friends at a love-in in san francisco in 1967. photo: goa gil dancecult 3(1)104 beach after the flea market on a “little fender pa system with generator owned by a friend”. it was in 1973–74 too that malcolm and davina showed up in their bus having exited the uk hauling marshall amps and other equipment gifted by pete townsend.6 according to english-australian steve “madras” devas, the “band’s worth of gear” with which they departed england had dwindled to a single amp over the long passage to anjuna beach via en eventful stopover in kabul,7 although in gil’s recollections the equipment included a couple of loudspeakers that had been the who’s monitor speakers. regardless of what equipment survived the journey, subsequent rumours that the who played goa were rife. gil recalls that this system provided the sound for the “teenage wasteland” parties in middle anjuna beach in 1973–74, adding that these were “possibly some of the first parties where music on tapes was played at the beach on amplified speakers”.8 in this period, gil carried a suitcase loaded with an arsenal of cassette tapes, a collection which included not only the psychedelic rock of the beatles, the rolling stones, jimi hendrix, santana, the grateful dead and all the bands of the san francisco sound, but “soul classics that i had grown up with like otis redding, james brown, ike and tina turner, bobby blue bland, chuck berry, little richard etc etc etc as well as many other  styles like the jazz of john coltrane, miles davis, and others, sometimes blues, rhythm & blues, and even reefer songs from the 40s”.9 gil was thus already one of goa’s proto-selectors in a period where he, as he informed me, “started to try to use music to create a story or storyline, reflecting the world, the things we were experiencing, and the times we were living in”.10 throughout the early 1970s, spontaneous dance jams on the beach were evolving into the regular full moon gatherings. while this is a story this article can only broach, the involvement of steve devas is crucial since, in his own assessment to me, he “founded the goa live band music scene on anjuna beach on 10 november 1974” after returning from the tsang fook music store in hong kong (and successfully negotiating customs at bombay airport) with “two stratocasters, fender bass guitar, two fender amps, bass amp, mics and bits and pieces”. the equipment was taken to the stage at south anjuna beach for “the first live party”. devas continues: friends and well wishers built the stage, others donated a keyboard and drum kit and then, as if by magic, amazing musicians appeared and anjuna began its passionate love affair with serenading the stars and dancing wildly under the moonlight. for three seasons i managed the rock and roll bands that played on full moons and at other parties, including, in march 1975, a memorable gig at the goa carnival in honour of king momo. with some good friends, i rented a large goan portuguese mansion at the back of anjuna where i kept the music gear and this, the ‘italian house’, was the first music house. we jammed and had some rehearsals there but for the most part all the parties were on the beach.11 at this time, gil co-wrote original work, played guitar and performed vocals for the freak ensemble the anjuna jam band, and later played bass in the big dipper band, which was, according to devas, “the longest running and arguably most successful goa hippy band to 105st john | dj goa gil come out of the seventies music scene. . . . it lasted all through gil’s tenure of party manager and music house operator”. while this was “decent rock ‘n roll,”12 devas remarked that “the dancing and parties reached sublime heights never seen again” when the funky french rock trio he dubbed “patrick & co” appeared in the 1974–75 season.13 by 1976, anjuna was becoming a thriving seasonal freak music scene. in march 1977, devas sold the equipment to gil who kept it in a house near chopora which was also dubbed the “music house”. in this new “music house”, musicians, stated gil, “could meet other musicians, form proper bands, and have a place to rehearse”.14 at this time, gil travelled back to the us and returned with “a proper stereo pa  mixer with multiple inputs, guitar and bass stings, drumsticks, microphones, effects units, tubes for the amplifiers” and other accessories required to maintain a live music scene. he had a large pa built by a sound technician in bombay, and built another stage on the beach at south anjuna. the period between 1977 through 1980 “became very organised with live bands, djs between the bands, parties every saturday at the music house, and full moons, christmas and new years at our stage on the beach”.15 figure 4. goa gil djing on tape recorder between the bands, 1977–78. photo: gilbert garcia. impressed by the scene’s live psychedelic “jam band” environment, austrian peter ziegelmeier stated that “we jammed all night to break away from the three minute pop dancecult 3(1)106 song”. ziegelmeier had studied musicology at banaras university, varanasi, from 1972– 1974, learned the sarod (a stringed instrument) and later formed (with hans schiller) the techno-trance outfit kode iv (in which gil and ariane would contribute). he was part of an expat milieu of artists who seasonally commuted between goa and european cosmopolises where they were exposed to underground scenes and sounds, developing tape cut-up techniques deleting lyrics obsessed with “whether the girl likes me or dislikes me”, with the deliberate omission of signifiers of attachment and desire better enabling the expansion of consciousness.16 these frontier editors created “special mix” tapes using obscure material spliced from the b-sides of diverse 12-inch records, performing and remixing these mixes in an evolving environment of creative exchange. spokespersons from the period recall the sheer diversity of music being played in goa, and it was an environment in which the dj, as a seasoned carrier of fresh and diverse sound would gain prominence (over the band). at first playing from cassette, then digital audio tape (dat) and later cd—though not vinyl since records warped in the heat and proved difficult to transport—djing would become the prominent mode of performance in goa. under pressures to perform all through the night, perhaps several nights a week, in a remote region, djing proved to be the most costeffective and efficient technique of performance delivery. instruments like drum kits were onerous and expensive to transport, and the stamina of band members waned well before sunrise. as had been discovered in jamaica and in the proto-discos of new york at the turn of the 1970s, powered machines under the control of the autonomous dj, or team of djs, proved to be the perfect devices to sustain the all-night party (together with an assortment of psychoactive substances). by the 1980s, the parties had expanded in size as a reflection of the growing numbers of foreign visitors to goa: increasing from 17,234 arrivals in 1977 to 33,430 in 1980 and 97,533 in 1986, over which period a younger traveller population imported new stylistic identifications, including punk, reggae and soul (elliott 2010: 30). as this expat party enclave was infused with rapid developments in electronic music production and performance in the 1980s, a “goa” sound emerged, the eclecticism of which held comparison with the balearic sound of ibiza. australian dj fred disko recalls spectacular beach-front conflagrations with, according to his estimate, “5,000 people on acid” (in devas 2010a).. while the accuracy of this statement may be called into question, as auckland-based dj, astrologer and documentary film-maker ray castle remembers, there was “a copious supply of acid and other hallucinogens always free at most parties” (in enrg 2001: 253). a dj of early funk, disco, ska and industrial rock in the late 1970s/early 1980s auckland, who first landed in goa in 1987 where he began djing in 1989, partnering with gil over the 1991 season (i.e. between january and april 1991), castle is integral to this story. as the 1970s came to a close, the birthing cries of a new dance music movement (and the death throes of the old) were heard in the music of tangerine dream, kraftwerk and yellow magic orchestra drifting across the beaches of goa. but while there was always keen reception to ambient electronica within this scene (remaining so throughout the psychedelic trance development), what was decried as “techno” was met with resistance as older freaks poured scorn on the new electronic sounds. in an interview for the documentary 107st john | dj goa gil figure 5. party at south anjuna beach, 1991. photo: goa gil. project goa hippy tribe (a 30-year facebook-enabled reunion of goa freaks directed by his son darius), steve devas was clear that “something changed”. from around 1978, younger freaks returning from european summers in the underground disco scenes of berlin, london, paris and elsewhere, brought back these new mixed sounds. “a whole group of new people. they brought out new amplifiers. very powerful amplifiers. so they set up a party and they had the best equipment, and they had all this music, which seemed to flip from the high hippie music to techno” (in devas 2010b). devas recalled the “defining moment”. it happened around the turn of the 1980s. a gentle hippie known as “homeopathic peter” gained sudden fame on the beach when word went round that he’d “punched out” a canadian dj, a financier known as dr bobby, at a private house party in calangute. the canadian had a powerful amplifier and was “instrumental in setting up these new parties”. for devas, this incident provided the soundtrack for “the end. . . . it was a loss. the music lost some essence of what hippyism was about” (in devas 2010b). in his correspondence with me, the period is identified by devas as “a coup d’etat. a musical putsch by the noir partyites. lyrical hippyism was dead in the water. it left no traces”. he gave no quarter: “techno music and these deejays were a disaster for the beach”.17 of course, gil and castle, who later rode the crest of this eclectic-electric tsunami, held different views. though he would himself become a vociferous critic of the “fundamentalist psytrance” of the 1990s which saw the codification of unregimented psychedelia into a “deity enshrined product” with “strict aesthetic rules”, castle relays a story from the 1981–82 season, when fred disko djed goa “disco parties”. though castle wasn’t present, he is reminded of the reaction to dylan when he went electric: “all the hardcore anjuna traditional hippies rebelled and dancecult 3(1)108 freaked and tried to prevent them playing techno, disco and saying ‘this is not psychedelic, this is not the real thing man. we’re into psychedelic rock and its gotta be live music’. and they actually attacked the sound system and stopped djs like fred disko”.18 for devas, who was at the front lines of this cultural standoff, such a narrative affords those he regarded as “techno-tyrants”, and “ego fuelled late-night cocaine swingers with no interest in what the audience wanted”,19 with an undeserving heroism. castle passed comment on another figure involved in this debacle—goa gil, who, he says, “was one of the people who blocked or resisted the techno” which, castle figured, stole attention from gil’s band.20 lamenting the loss of an authentic “live” music scene, devas stated that “after gil sold the equipment, there was no longer a live music scene in goa with the original hippy generation. the parties turned to psy, doof, techno etc, but that’s another story”.21 but this was a story in which gil, who grew interested in electronic body music (ebm) and recognized where the crowds were headed, would become engaged. indeed, although met with considerable antagonism from his freak rock brethren, gil spanned a bridge across this cultural and generational chasm. during the 1983–84 season, the newly arrived frenchman laurent teamed up with fred disko, and with swiss rudi, gil and others, performed all-night sets laying down an explosive mix of new sounds, including the first european post-punk experimental music, the neue deutsche welle, and ebm acts like front 242, nitzer ebb and canadian industrial outfit skinny puppy. soon synth-pop, electro, new beat and italo-disco styles were worked into the mix of this dj-led scene. by 1986, the music played at parties on the shores of the arabian sea and in the jungle hinterlands was exclusively electronic. by the end of the decade, under the influence of the frankfurt techno-trance sound, detroit techno and acid house from chicago (rietveld 2010: 75), there were seasonal anthems, notably the klf’s “what time is love?” (1988). but it was in the early 1990s that the first “goa” tracks began circulating, such as jungle high’s ( johann bley and ben watkins) “jungle high” on their self-titled release (1992). at this time, artists of various styles (from punk to techno and hard trance) inspired by the goa experience were producing material with long instrumental or ambient sections allowing for easier mixing (using dat players). notably, various mixes of the overlords’ “sundown” (sundown, 1991) featured the crashing surf at either end of the track. from the mid-1980s, pioneer djs had been exporting the goa vibe to various locations, including ibiza, which had been a constant site of absorption/innovation (d’andea 2007). fred disko threw parties in nepal in 1985 and thailand in 1987 (see cole and hannan 1997), and with friends from goa, ray castle held the first pagan production party at ruigoord, amsterdam, in 1988, and again in 1990 and 1991, parties which he claims were “the first goa style parties in europe”.22 in 1988, gil started formulating his ritual in northern california, where a hardcore fan-base grew. altared states in an interview with freeze magazine in 2001, gil offered the often-repeated view that “the party is holy! it is the old time religion”, and that “since the beginning of time 109st john | dj goa gil figure 6. party at arambol, 1991. photo: goa gil. mankind has used music and dance to commune with the spirit of nature and the spirit of the universe”. within the goa trance dance which gil fashions as a “ritual” more than a “party”, “we go beyond thought, beyond mind, and beyond our own individuality, become one in the divine ecstasy of union with the cosmic spirit”. under gil’s guidance, dance ecstasy is purposeful, initiatory. for gil, and his many followers the world over, dance is regarded as a technique of “active meditation”, enabling actors to access the divine truth, revealing their own relationship with the cosmos (freeze magazine 2001). interviewed by mcateer (2002: 47), gil stated that as an outcome of this experience it becomes evident that “all life forms are existing from this spirit, and, you know, we’re a part of that thing and we have to protect that thing”. in an echo of perennial mystical idealism, the trance dance experience is fantasised to assist participants to “become more sensitive and aware of themselves, their surroundings, the crossroads of humanity and the needs of the planet. with that awareness comes understanding and compassion. that is the need of the hour and the true goa spirit”. while the mission he took on the road in the 1990s has appealed to a great many, gil has been spurned by spiritual anarchists and secular minded antagonists alike. at his events, it is not uncommon for devotees to set up altars at the front of the dance floor, which grow over the course of the event as dancers smudge sage and place candles, flowers and other offerings. with the entire dance floor facing gil overnight, as mcateer (2002: 51) notes, gil is himself an “enshrined object”. it is an intriguing circumstance in a culture with antinomian roots. on the one hand, so enshrined, gil may embody ego-dissolution, the guru who through his shaktipat23 and the jungle of symbols in which he is nested, guides dancers into the condition of samādhi,24 provided they make the sacrifice (of their egos). he may then be a pure exemplar of the neo-mystical union with the “cosmic spirit” which, the dancecult 3(1)110 further gil travels from the goa vibe of the 1970s/’80s/’90s, becomes an object of intrigue among urban psytrance participants for whom gil acts as a kind of yogic mascot, a redeemer for their own psychedelic praxis. on the other, he may rather be an icon of ego-inflation and self-aggrandizement, a view not uncommon among those who point out that gil refuses to perform with other artists or play at festivals where he must share the limelight with other djs with whom he must compete for the sacrificial attentions of event-goers. from this perspective, gil stands out not as a flattened ego but as an inflated persona. for those who are warmer to the anarcho-shamanism of “psychonaut” terence mckenna—whose wisdom has arguably penetrated psytrance more that any other individual (judging by the voice samples found in productions)—gil’s methods constitute a comparatively ecclesiastical route to cosmic consciousness. goa gil’s roadshow is an incongruous circumstance in a scene which emerged pursuing a communitarian ethos and is ridiculed by those who’ve little truck with authorities, be they political, religious or celebrity. “i remember setting up the dj table with the locals”, castle stated recalling a gig in anjuna in the 1991 season. “i had it tucked away by the palm tree out of the way, and gil said ‘oh no, it’s got to be over here so everybody can see us”. castle does not shy from phrases like “priest”, “megalomaniac” and “tyrannical” when it comes to describing gil, and all in one flourish. articulating his grievances further, castle measures gil as “a clever mystical cabaret act. . . . he has basically cast himself as a sort of messiah prophet using goa and his music to propagate and proselytize his own agenda as a cult leader. it’s just entertainment in the end. . . . it’s great theatre, dramatising and mytho-characterising himself within the context of india and the hippie romanticism of goa”.25 furthermore, “full of hierarchical hubris . . . , the ram das of techno” is charged to have contradicted what goa was once about: a “feeling of collectivism, of family, shared resources, where people would exchange music, and different djs would play parties and play together”. but where the theatre of the dance floor was once central, in the 1990s “goa trance” became a vehicle for “celebrity djs”, artist as brand names projecting “an aura of personality”, a process which castle sees replicating standard music industry practices where the artist becomes the “product”, where “everybody’s facing the same direction”, and giving their energy to inflated stage personalities. pursuing an ostentatious and largely solo26 act in a scene with countercultural roots, gil is considered to be symptomatic of this trajectory. castle added that, although he collected great music in the early 1990s, gil was “never popular in goa, as a dj”. by contrast to the spectacle of goa gil, who has been scorned for possessing questionable mixing skills, the uncompromising castle holds respect for laurent, the lionized frenchman who djed in goa from 1984–93, who gil “saddled up” (djed) with for the 1992 season (and with whom he remains good friends) and whose skillful cut-ups and mixes of ebm, new beat, electro, italo-disco and hi-nrg and other sounds on pitch-controlled sony walkman professional wm-d6cs shaped the sound of goa. 111st john | dj goa gil figure 7. gil and laurent at a party on south anjuna beach, 1991. photo: goa gil. spiritual and cultural exile not long after arriving in goa in 1970, gil hitch-hiked south along the coast visiting temples and smoking chillum with sadhus, the hindu term for mystic, which he called “the other guys who had long hair and smoked dope” (time wave zero 2006). he soon travelled with a sadhu who took him to puri, calcutta, benares, delhi and finally kashmir, where in the mountains at the age of 18, he became disciple to sri swami nirmalanand saraswati maharaj, a guru in the shaivite order juna akhara.27 eventually gil became swami mangalanand saraswati (mangalanandji), and was subsequently recognized as a sadhu, and at the haridwar kumb mela in 2010 was proclaimed shri mahant (antahrashtriya mandal ka shri mahant)28 becoming one of the first foreigners to hold a seat at the akhara council, which oversees 200,000 sadhus. the honorary title signifies recognition that, at least since the early 1990s (but possibly as far back as the 1970s), gil has effectively channeled the yogic lessons of direct gurudisciple initiations celebrated to be rooted in the “enlightened source” guru dattatreya, 4,000 years ago (mcateer 2002: 25). an undercurrent of possibility among those exposed to yogic practice is that the next link in the chain could be… you. gil points this out himself. while acknowledging that the constant travel associated with his professional lifestyle and religious duties renders it impossible to train disciples appropriately, “in some sense”, he states, “many of the participants of my events are not only my fans but disciples”.29 gil understands that through his official role he is “programmed” to fulfill a divine “mission”, to become “a pure instrument of god’s will” (mcateer 2002: 96). this is intriguing enough, dancecult 3(1)112 figure 8. mangalanand (gil) with first guruji, mahant nirmalanand saraswati ji maharaj, in srinagar, kashmir, july 1970. photo: goa gil. but gil is not simply following a “duty” conferred upon him as a “pure” initiate of a sect (if that indeed can be called “simple”), but has been performing a role consistent with the approach of an artist-in-exile, a californian rebel, whose anarchic dissidence and stage performance is sanctioned by his holy credentials. 113st john | dj goa gil figure 9. gil with guruji and sadhu family at ram mandir, srinagar, kashmir 1972. photo: goa gil. for gil, “art reflects the time and culture we exist in”,30 nodding towards his embrace of the kali yuga, the last phase of the hindu “age of conflicts”. the theme holds correspondence with the emergence of the goa movement, whose extreme freakish elements, ecstatic dance and radical connections with nature are expressive of the desire for revitalization and renewal in times of crisis long associated with shaivite and dionysian cults (baldini 2010). whatever valence we attribute to this interpretation, goa trance grew as a movement uniquely responsive to its time. as gil stated in a 1997 interview with michael gosney: sixty-nine, nixon was president, reagan was governor of california, altamont, kent state. the negative side came down. they said ‘we have to stop this thing’. . . . so then many people decided, just with the timing, cosmic timing, many people from many different countries decided to split [from the west],. . . and headed for india on a spiritual journey, seeking spirituality and some sort of enlightenment. . . . all these people who met overland became a kind of tribe. the jetset gypsies or the nomads (in gosney 1997). between the 1960s and 1990s, goa became a destination for cultural exiles, those “displaced peoples with displaced minds” (d’andrea 2007: 9) who, following the promotions of leary dancecult 3(1)114 and the lead of allen ginsberg and ram das, were “dropping out”, and even embracing a psychedelic manual to assist the process (leary et al. 1964). rather than mounting a direct confrontation, freak dissidents opposed to conditions in their homelands, abnegated, absconded and renounced, migrating to regions more conducive to their lifeways. many of those who made goa via the long overland route through greece, turkey, iran and afghanistan between 1969 and 1971 sensed world war iii on the horizon. following a popular emergent folk theory with its roots in the ideas of aldous huxley, many regarded psychedelic substances, especially lsd, as the antidote to nuclear annihilation. by the 1980s, reagan was president and the arms race had escalated. gil passes comment on that early 1980s climate in which he began formulating his ritual. for me parties have always been a kind of reprogramming session . . . so you just go with the beat, no matter what happens whether it’s dark or light or it’s the apocalypse. no matter what happens, you’re just like dancing through it. . . . when these parties first started to happen and when that electronic body music was happening it was like nuclear disaster could have been around the corner and that was a big theme at that time . . . it was like an apocalypse culture in a way. it looked like an apocalyptic event could be 20 minutes around the corner, and so through the dance, and through going through sound vibration and so many experiences and different pictures which came up in the mind through the course of going from the dark into the light we like to hope that . . . it kind of helped us be prepared for anything that might happen and be able to deal with it (time wave zero 2006). as we’ll find, the recurrent symbolic and symphonic visitation of the apocalypse is central to gil’s operation. while the effects of the reagan doctrine were being felt globally in the early 1980s, in the uk, the thatcher government had a devastating impact on england’s free festival circuit, causing an exodus of cultural refugees throughout the decade. while goa scholars and devotees may want to assign value to the goa party as a sacred “ritual” experience (see mcateer 2002), or make vague connection with ancestral “tribes” whose roles enthusiasts believe they are fulfilling in the present, the expatriate cult of goa was an outland-ish response to oppressive conditions in countries of origin, and indeed a statement on the human condition. this is what gil means when stating that the goa trance dance experience was always “more than just a disco under the coconut trees”. as he stated, “we are using trance music and the trance dance experience to set off a chain reaction in consciousness” (freeze magazine 2001). never exclusively hipster experimentalism, brazenfaced primitivism, nor reckless selfdemolition, goa exiles sought alternatives to a world devoid of consciousness, to the alienation from nature deemed symptomatic of the modern era. alert to the endemic crises of family and nation flaming domestic and international aggression, and to the disastrous impact of unchecked plundering of what had become recognized as the earth’s finite resources, this generation adopted a distrust for inherited religious, scientific, political and economic institutions. some sought to annihilate their memories, national identities, 115st john | dj goa gil figure 10. goa gil and naga baba amar bharti at the kumbh mela, haridwar, india, 2010. photo: goa gil. biographies, in the reckless abuse of drugs, most tragically heroin, although charas might have helped too. others became fixed on metamorphosing their “whole” identities. adopting the view that change “starts within”, or that one should “be the change you want to see in the world”, many turned to healing arts, yoga, wellbeing and ecological practices designed to effect transformation of one’s self and personal relationships as a prerequisite for making desirable changes in the world beyond. dance, or trance dance, which is incorporated within, for example, the “dynamic meditation” practiced by the disciples (sannyasins) of osho (bhagwan shree rajneesh), was never far removed from the repertoire of therapies adopted in the quest for growth and responsible living. with the popularisation of lsd, the dance event developed the aesthetic of an epic journey, the experience replete with risks to the stability of conventional values and commitments, and enabling serious re-evaluations of one’s life and relationships. within optimized contexts, the experience enabled lasting connections with others/otherness, and indeed facilitating, as many spokespersons have offered, a mystical experience. existing art forms were modified and artifice invented to cultivate the experience, typically at a considerable remove from conventional society, with dancecult 3(1)116 traveller enclaves becoming de rigueur settings. under gil’s guidance, in goa the party became an initiation ritual, an ostensible site of passage from spirit-less-ness and cosmic alienation, towards time-less-ness and cosmic union. a cavalcade of the outraged and the outrageous convened and committed to resolve the condition of separation through the mystical experience enabled by the trance party, which by the mid-1990s was developing an international reputation as artists who had been inspired by the goa experience were importing its transposable “state of mind” back to their home countries in the form of “psychedelic trance” festivals such as voov in germany (started by osho disciple antaro), boom in portugal (initiated by diogo ruivo and pedro carvalho who met as children in goa in the 1980s, see st john 2009b; st john and baldini 2011, forthcoming) and ozora in hungary. dark yogi, trance dance and the apocalypse tao dramatising challenges faced, sacrifices made and lessons gained on the path to higher consciousness, gil’s epic journeys are in part shaped by the yogic practice integral to his own background. according to gil, the “spiritual fight” is to go “beyond ego” and “realizing the self and the spirit” (in mcateer 2002: 94). it is with such a struggle in mind that he has committed to the trance dance event, where participants are exposed to egoshattering practice, from which nascent modes of identification are potentiated. in the context of overnight open-air events, the “death” of ego precipitates “rebirth”. indeed, the cycle of death/birth and the corresponding daily transit of the moon/sun through night/dawn are universal symbolic resources adopted to furnish initiatory experiences with meaning, and the goa trance party is no exception. most agree that the ideal party must be open to the stars, commencing before dusk and finishing after dawn. the passage from the closed recesses of the night into the open light of day provides a diurnal analogue for the yogic path to illumination—a path paved with perils and pitfalls for the wayfarer. such is the experience of the generic initiate, who ordinarily suffers ordeals, faces tests and experiences fear and pain on the path towards obtaining a new post-liminal identity. taking his cues from world initiatory ritual practice, “in the beginning” states gil, “i play stuff just to get everybody dancing, and slowly, slowly it becomes more intense . . . until like 5 o’clock, you know the last dark of the night, then it’s like the apocalypse in one kind of way and very intense. and then when the light comes . . . everyone’s surrendered and become one with the dance and one with the vibe” (in mcateer 2002: 31). and so the trance ritual is structured to this end, often kicking off with a djembe jam with ariane, who performs an hour “ethno/tribal” opening dj set at most of his parties. as noted earlier, gil is an adherent of dark psychedelic trance, a field in which he would become established as a leading selector, and renowned for his “divine dozen”, the name for his updated list of 12 favoured tracks and/or albums which he has posted on the internet since 1996 (and these days posted about three times a year).31 a decade downstream from the ebm explosion, gil was surfing point-break on the dark wave, with proto-dark goa producers and pacesetters like germany’s xenomorph (mark petrick) and russia’s parasense 117st john | dj goa gil (alexey kurkin and viktor zolotarenko) looking on with interest and successfully gaining his attention. in petrick’s own assessment, “being the kind of traveller that he is, [gil] was the only guy that you could listen to (in 1997) and not know 80% of the tracks he played, because the artists gave him the dats in goa and the record industry was lagging behind with the actual releases”. impressed by the marathon sets, petrick recalls that gil: blew me away at that time and inspired me to change my style from the hardtrance 160 bpm stuff more in the direction of goa sound. when he played the next time in berlin in 1996, i gave him a promo dat that i named “horror trance” a term that was previously unheard of in the otherwise spiritually monolateral trance scene of that time. he liked the tracks a lot. one of them was “obscure spectre (horror trip rmx)” and i think “carnage vision” was also on there.32 indeed you can imagine gil channeling petrick’s post-apocalyptic vision as he reeled out “carnage vision” (obscure spectre, 1997) on which the mad prophet john trent from john carpenter’s in the mouth of madness commentates: “every species can smell its own extinction. the last ones left won’t have a pretty time of it”. in the long prelude to “darkpsy”—which emerged in the post-iraq invasion period as a distinctly faster and darker style of psychedelic trance—gil selected the sounds of the coming “night music”, curating soundscapes echoing sine waves of struggle and sounding out notes of despair sampled from horror cinema. with the advent of “darkpsy”, producers sought to convey states of inner chaos, fear and hopelessness, most often associated with those terrifying moments when tormented and distraught screen actors are confronted with their own demise or when serial killers and other domestic monsters kettle the vulnerable inside grindhouse storylines. much of this material is produced by goa artists experimenting with moods of the kind that gil exploits to his own designs: demolishing the self in a ritual of transformation. in the strategic manipulation of the sounds of despair by gil and other djs, these productions sonify the impending annihilation of ego. thus the fate of cinematic victims allegorizes the fate of the ego in sympathy with the metaphysical pretense of gil and his ilk. among the earlier, pre-darkpsy tracks to connote this mood, and included in the first “divine dozen” listed online, was the mind-bending “plutonica” by the ray castle and nick taylor outfit rhythmystec (e.p. cathexis, 1996),33 which launched an arsenal of vocal samples from joseph campbell ready-made for gil’s divine mission: “the god of death is the lord of the dance”, “it’s a good day to die” and “from death comes life”. here, gil is apparently fulfilling his duty as “god’s instrument”, a spiritual warrior who implements a sonic dramatization of the dark age, the degenerative age of the kali yuga. take a selection from gil’s jarringly mixed album kali yuga (2009), “crucial night” by fatal discord, where death-rattle bass-lines smother hopeless cries ripped from saw iv, with a shrieking that might be the siren of your own demise. russian artist enichkin’s furious “visit to eternity” summons hell’s own legions. and by the time we arrive at “kali does the dance” by the nommos, descent into chaos is near complete. dancecult 3(1)118 in a curious break in the fury, and signaling gil’s “worldbridging” efforts, the track samples lines from the anjuna jam band (in which gil played guitar, circa 1975–76): “ kali does the dance, the dance of destruction. shiva lays down, to watch the action. figure 11. cover artwork on goa gil’s compilation kali yuga (2009). 119st john | dj goa gil kali is said to be “the destroyer of false consciousness” and the “goddess of protection”. on the album cover (see fig. 11), blue skinned, hair disheveled, tongue lolling, in a necklace of human skulls, kali grasps a decapitated demon’s head in one of her eight hands and wields a bloodied sword in another. while for gil, kali’s mythic fury is a means to a revitalizing possibility, for many dark trance producers, madness, schizoid tendencies and mind-altering excesses fuel the disturbing possibilities of the liminal mind, the darker recesses of which were early explored by, for instance, neuromotor (neuro damage, 2001), psychotic micro and azax syndrome collaborating on voices of madness (2003), and scatterbrain (notably infernal angel, 2003), all pre-rabid bpm excursions into the shadowlands without obvious ritual objective. in his study of darkpsy, a “characteristically demented atmosphere” which he states is preoccupied with the “continuous transgression of its own perverted boundaries”, botond vitos (2009: 137) contends that, fuelled by psychedelics, the darkpsy dance floor embraces “the immensity of otherness out ‘there’, without transferring it ‘here’ (without integrating it into the self, thus dissolving or understanding it)”. though darkpsy producers and other inhabitants of the night may become bent on an “inverted sublime”, dwell in the discord of the gothic liminal, squat the post-apocalypse, or even embrace death as a lifestyle thematic, this is not the stated goal and persistently staged performance of gil, for whom death is a threshold of transition for rebirthing neophytes. far from reveling in the terror residing in a secularised universe in which the divine order has lost its significance—the source of discomfort of the greatest magnitude according to douglas e. cowan (2008) in his study of religiously-oriented horror films—gil ultimately pursues an order which he is instructed (by the “cosmic spirit”) to implement. and so, in recent years, gil’s own productivity appears to have escalated mirroring the inclement times. amid the unforgiving pace of the nommos’ “hate killer” (ten reasons to eat dust, 2010), cinematic samples from horror cinema—“nightmares, heart palpitations, terrors”—prefigure the response as party-goers are subject to an apocalyptic sound-bath. is it coincidental that the name for gil and ariane’s outfit34 bears striking resemblance to the greek word for law, rules, codes and forms—nomos—which, incidentally, in the sociology of peter berger, means the social order that is projected and internalised (taken for granted) within a socially constructed universe? indeed, the bergerian understanding of the socially established nomos “as a shield against terror” (1967: 22) appears to reveal the purpose of gil’s own religious mission: the provision of stability and connectedness in a world of chaos, separation and anomy. it might be postulated that gil’s highly regulated rituals actually hypostasize the anomalous with the objective of producing its opposite: nomisation. under this logic, divinity and morality follow heavy doses of apocalyptic liminality. but the net-effect of gil’s will on new generations of psychedelic trance enthusiasts who’ve never set foot in goa (at least, in its heyday) remains uncertain. detailed ethnographic attention to the motivations and outcomes of participants—their nomisation, or otherwise— would be required. yet, it might be suggested that urban trancers living in depressing social and political conditions and intimate with a state of emergency (e.g. israelis), who achieve the “exile vibe” with the aid of a maddening catalogue of psychochemical substances, and dancecult 3(1)120 figure 12. recent party photo. mexico, 2010. photo: goa gil. who syncopate increased doses with accelerated beats, may simply be carving wild shapes to aggressive soundtracks which, according to steve goodman (2004), “sonically enact the demise of babylon”. nevertheless, gil’s popularity among those he once referred to as “the children of babylon” continues. according to historian of ecstatic dance chiara baldini, for these neo-trancers he is a “grandfather figure”. in italy, she says, “they call him il nonno. . . . he is one of the original goa freaks, so these kids who are too poor to travel and whose life is too ‘normal’ to be freaks they love him! . . . for these kids he is really a redeemer and his sets are really a powerful experience”.35 at angel’s camp in october 2006, gil served up a ruinous, unrelenting barrage of white label dark matter, amplified well past dawn. soaring melodies typical to the goa tradition were absent, as were the uplifting “progressive psychedelic” motifs consistent with outdoor psytrance events where the sun’s emergence signals a shift from frenetic to softer, slower burning arrangements, ostensibly marking a corresponding elevation in consciousness. there was little variation in style at angel’s camp, nor apparently anywhere gil plays his dat, including venues in fresh regions holding the possibility of visiting armageddon (or perhaps karmageddon, the title of his 2005 compilation) upon the psyches of dilettantes. but while i personally felt no redemption, a persistent legacy is performed: the apocalyptic remit to re/animate young neophytes, and to push them under the wheels of a rolling furor. the sonic sadhu is himself like a psy’ed-piper of the zombie whose shambling ekstasis is not far removed from the goal of meditative traditions: the dissolution of subjectivity and the potentiation of mystical states of consciousness. as i explain elsewhere (st john 2011), embodying the hyper-anomalous condition of living-death, the zombie is a cardinal trope within psytrance and is something of a parodic mascot for the dark carnival. there, it holds court as a powerfully ambiguous device, loaded with potential. passing into (ego) death and 121st john | dj goa gil yet (charged) alive, the zombie is a liminal figure emblematic of the altered conditions of mind and flesh experienced as “trance”. anaesthetized yet mobilized all the same, the zombie embodies the unpredictable yet potentially transcendent and revitalizing conditions of the dance floor. figure 13. goa gil party. portugal, 2008. photo: ketamina mestre. with beard blazing grey, rocking from side to side, bearing a wide grin, gil makes himself heard under this aberrant aesthetic. sadhu punk and servile master of a brutal exercise in zombification, he assumes his staged position as head mutant in this “apocalypse culture”, his interventions straddling inchoate purposes: the annihilation of subjectivity and social re-animation. like a faithful servant of the apocalypse, gil casts his shadow over the dance floor. and exercising a kind of sonic homeopathic logic, he submits all to his abominable symphony. as the snap shots and videos he routinely captures of the “children of babylon” from his dj position illustrate, massives willingly surrender to gil’s will.36 but the ritual has given cause to considerable unease, upsetting especially to those for whom the sun’s rising is the singular transition towards consciousness expansion, “dawning” or “awakening”—a transition that is apparently abused by gil, whose “apocalypse now” appears to know no bounds. at least this is the view of castle, who last heard gil play in 2005 at the foot of mt fuji, japan. “this dark monotonous moronic dirge bleak psychotic sound continued into the sun rise”, he lamented.37 “it was dreadful, just like this dark tunnel all night and into the morning, and it was just nothing like i remember from when i used to dj with dancecult 3(1)122 him together in 1991 in goa. he’d completely lost the plot. . . . i think he undermines any vestige of idealised spirituality or healer facilitator that he may have tried to project”.38 in a final rebuke, his “diabolical dark trance” has “self-defeated his philosophy of making the journey from dark into light”. castle is not alone in his criticism. while pavel (2010), for instance, argues that “the music that he plays today is depressing, violent and completely random”, others crave for the good old days: “bring back the music that made us love goa gil. today’s goa gil sets drive us away, and splinter the already fragmented scene. let us all gather together again as one goa trance family and dance like we did in the good old days. we’ll trade his newer, smooth mixing style and nails-on-chalkboard music for the preferred goa music and dat mixing” (phil g 2008). the “sux / rox polarity” from the self-exiles who inhabited the freak vibe on goa beaches in the 1970s/1980s, to today’s domestic enthusiasts immersed in the dark psychedelic trance that he has adopted as his sonic signature, gil has traversed diverse scenes. as gil reflects on goa, “we came here so long ago, to the end of a dirt road and a deserted beach. it was like the end of the world. and now the whole world is at our doorstep” (davis 1995). as the transposable assemblage was transported to audiences world-wide after parties grew increasingly untenable at their place of genesis, and as “goa trance” emerged as an international returned-traveller phenomenon and marketable genre, gil became a global smuggler of “the end of the world”, commanding a sustained sonic broadside into the solar plexus of the devoted and bemused alike. but gil’s is far from being the undisputed aesthetic uniting the psytrance massive. victoria bizzell holds that gil is as “extremely palatable, and transportable . . . charismatic representative of rave culture’s transnational neo-tribal ideology”. but while she finds it noteworthy that “gil’s party concept and the goa trance party in general have struck such an emphatic chord in a globally dispersed audience” (2008: 289), as i’ve attempted to illustrate, while continuing to attract devotees, gil strikes considerable discord among descendants of psychedelic trance, which i would argue echoes the fact that “neo-tribalism” is not uniform, that it accommodates disparate positions and conflicting publics including those who will embrace and reject gil, along with those who are indifferent to his agendas. elsewhere i have argued that “tribalism” resonates with edm communities precisely because it signifies “one” and “many”, the dissolution and performance of difference (see st john 2009a: 93–164). while his current impact may be overstated, there is no denying that when the subject of goa gil is raised within goa/psytrance circles, opinions aren’t hard to come by, and they quickly fall into polarized camps. the isratrance.com web-portal offers evidence of the controversy. the posting of a link to a video of goa gil interviewed in berlin in 2007 where he answers inquiries about his religious background, his initiation and spiritual practice, triggered a 22-page thread (at the time of writing) in which one can find torrents of veneration and vitriol. while there are respectful endorsements of the “godfather” of the scene with “superhuman” capabilities, and enthusiastic young trancers are enamored with 123st john | dj goa gil gil whether they “get” his missionary intent or not, others take exception to any hagiolatry; the practice of “worshipping” and idolizing performed by supporters.39 on 17 may 2007, the discussion compelled one poster, “v.v2”, to inquire: “why does everyone get so riled up at the mention of gil? why is the house always divided, and vehemently so?”. reasonable questions, and although “maine coon”, contributing to the thread more than three years later, called attention to the “sux / rox polarity”, the explanation for such disparity had hardly been addressed. this article has shown that goa gil manifests as a polyvalent symbol for participants in the psychedelic diaspora and is iconic among proponents and detractors of “psytrance” and “darkpsy” alike. for those initiates who have regarded psychedelic trance as a vehicle of hope and peace, gil—who is heir not only to the haight-ashbury psychedelic scene of the 1960s, but to ancient mystical and ecstatic cults, the connections with which are both sanctioned and nebulous—possesses the right stuff. for others, the failure of goa trance to meet its millenarian promise has generated heated reactions, both from within and outside of the scene, with detractors charging psytrance as a hubristic behemoth that has collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. gil is ultimately iconic of tensions within a diverse movement, tensions which i expand upon elsewhere (see st john, forthcoming). loved as a champion of the goa vibe, and loathed as symbol of the contradictions that have befallen it, gil pitches like a weather balloon in a storm. but gil, who will turn 60 in 2011, stands fast over 40 years since he first set foot on anjuna beach. and the question of whether he is venerable or reproachable may never be finally settled—for that is the fate of anomalies. figure 14. goa gil party, chile, 13 november 2010. photo: lautaro salinas.40 dancecult 3(1)124 acknowledgments many thanks especially to goa gil, ray castle, swami chaitanya, peter ziegelmeier and steve “madras” devas, with whom i conducted interviews, had email communications and otherwise berated with questions for this article, and who commented on section drafts. thanks also to chiara baldini and joshua schmidt who read and offered insights on previous drafts, to one of the reviewers for useful suggestions and insights, and to jérôme hansen for his expert copyediting. appreciations to goa gil, gilbert garcia, ketamina mestre and lautaro salinas for permitting my reproduction of their photographs. and thank you too to jay, michael and jen with whom i travelled to angel’s camp back in october 2006. endnotes 1 the dat (digital audio tape) recorder/player has been gil’s instrument of choice since he used the sony d3 model (produced in 1991). 2 while gil informed me by email on 24 november 2010 that he had “no idea” how many 24hour events he has played (or rituals he has performed), my guestimate is about 500 (though the number of events at which he has djed will be considerably more). 3 <http://www.goagil.com/> (accessed 10 march 2011). 4 as documented in his unpublished autobiography (eight finger eddie, n.d.). eddie died in goa on 18 october 2010. 5 swami chaitanya, interview with the author, san francisco, 19 november 2006. 6 as steve “madras” devas recounted: “as is well known, the who used marshall amps and had begun to smash them at the end of gigs. marshall co. saw this as promotional, an advertising stunt, and promised them free gear if they continued the practice. consequently, the who had lots of spare gear on their hands (it’s hard work destroying a marshall amp, the novelty wears off, ‘hey, let’s keep some of it. . .’)” (email to the author, 11 march 2011). 7 steve “madras” devas, email to the author, 11 march 2011. 8 goa gil, email to the author, 9 march 2011. 9 goa gil, email to the author, 9 march 2011. 10 but gil was not the only dj pioneer. crucial were those like anders, a swedish film-maker and dj whose early footage of anjuna parties offers one of the only extant collections of early 1970s lifestyle. according to devas (email to the author, 27 march 2011), “anders brought a jazz funk flavour to the parties playing herbie hancock, brazilian soul funk and the like”. space does not permit mention of several other early dj pioneers who were also prominent in developing what devas calls the early anjuna “cosmo rock” sound. 11 steve “madras” devas, email to the author, 10 march 2011. 12 steve “madras” devas, email to the author, 13 march 2011. 13 steve “madras” devas, email to the author, 10 march 2011. 14 goa gil, email to the author, 9 march 2011. 15 goa gil, email to the author, 14 january 2011. 125st john | dj goa gil 16 peter ziegelmeier, interviewed at ceiba records, haight st, san francisco, 27 november 2006. 17 steve “madras” devas, email to the author, 10 march 2011. 18 ray castle, interview with the author (online via skype), 7 february 2011. 19 steve “madras” devas, email to the author, 27 march 2011. 20 ray castle, interview with the author (online via skype), 7 february 2011. 21 steve “madras” devas, email to the author, 10 march 2011. 22 ray castle, email to the author, 7 march 2011. 23 shaktipat is a sanskrit term referring to the conferring of spiritual “energy” upon one person by another. 24 referring to a higher level of concentrated meditation. 25 ray castle, interview with the author (online via skype), 7 february 2011. 26 not exclusively, since ariane also performs. 27 michael mcateer (2002: 25) adds some insight here, stating that goa gil “held the seat of his deceased guru within the compound of the juna akara in the 2001 maha kumbha mela. the juna akara is the largest brotherhood of sadhus in india, particularly known for their fearsome roughness. the fact of gil’s holding the seat of his guru at the maha kumbha mela, is testament to his sanctioned status within the traditional hindu world”. 28 along with vasudev puri and baba rampuri, the author of baba: autobiography of a blueeyed yogi (2005). 29 goa gil, email to the author, 6 january 2011. 30 goa gil, email to the author, 6 january 2011. 31 divine dozen: <http://www.goagil.com/chart.html> (accessed 10 march 2011). 32 mark petrick (aka xenomorph), email to the author, 15 november 2010. 33 the ep is included on gil’s first divine dozen he listed online. 34 the nommos is the name and a dogon word referring to amphibious beings and guardians “from somewhere in the vicinity of the star we call sirius b” (as described on the inlay of debut album digitaria, 2004). their first track release (on spiritual trance vol. 2, 1995), “po tolo” (the dogon name for the star sirius b), features the sample “we have watched the skies and waited”, along with what gil informed me are samples from a dogon death ceremony. goa gil, email to the author, 10 may 2009. 35 chiara baldini, email to the author, 10 march 2011. 36 since october 2004, gil and ariane have kept a vast archive of photographs and videos mostly shot from gils’ dj-position. at: <http://www.goagil.com/photogallery>. for examples of gil and ariane’s videos, see gil-vision (2005, 2007). 37 ray castle, email to the author, 12 november 2010. 38 ray castle, interview with the author (online via skype), 7 february 2011. 39 see thread, “video interview with goa gil”, at <http://forum.isratrance.com/videointerview-with-goa-gil/> (accessed 10 march 2011). for the video interview conducted in berlin in 2006, see time wave zero (2006). 40 <www.flickr.com/photos/unaqueotraalucinacion>. dancecult 3(1)126 references agamben, giorgio. 1998. homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life. stanford: stanford university press. baldini, chiara. 2010. “dionysus returns: tuscan trancers and euripides’ the bacchae”. in the local scenes and global culture of psytrance, ed. graham st john, 170–85. new york: routledge. beck, giles and gordon lynch. 2009. “‘we are all one, we are all gods’: negotiating spirituality in the conscious partying movement”. journal of contemporary religion 24(3): 339–55. berger, peter l. 1967. the sacred canopy: elements of a sociology of religion. new york: anchor books. bizzell, victoria. 2008. “‘ancient + future = now’: goa gil and transnational neo-tribalism in global rave culture”. comparative american studies 6(3): 281–94. cole, fred, and michael hannan. 1997. “goa trance”. perfect beat 3(3): 1–14. cowan, douglas e. 2008. sacred terror: religion and horror on the silver screen. waco, tx: baylor university press. d’andrea, anthony. 2007. global nomads: techno and new age as transnational countercultures in ibiza and goa. new york: routledge. davis, erik. 1995. “sampling paradise: the technofreak legacy of golden goa”. option 61. available at: <http://www.techgnosis.com/index_paradise.html> (accessed 10 march 2011). diken, bülent and carsten bagge laustsen. 2004. “sea, sun, sex … and biopolitics”. lancaster university, dept sociology, online papers: <http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/papers/ diken-laustsen-sea-sun-sex-biopolitics.pdf> (accessed 10 march 2011). eight finger eddie. n.d. my rise to relative obscurity: 1924–1972. available at: <http:// www.8fingereddie.com/downloads.html> (accessed 10 march 2011). elliott, luther. 2010. “goa is a state of mind: on the ephemerality of psychedelic social emplacements”. in the local scenes and global culture of psytrance, ed. graham st john, 21–39. new york: routledge. enrg, eugene (dj krusty) interviews ray castle. 2001. “psychic sonics: tribadelic dance trance-formation”. in freenrg: notes from the edge of the dance floor, ed. graham st john, 157–69. melbourne: common ground. available at: <http://undergrowth.org/ freenrg_notes_from_the_edge_of_the_dancefloor> (accessed 10 march 2011). freeze magazine. 2001 (aug). interview with goa gil. issue #14: <http://www.goagil.com/ freezeinterview1.html> (accessed 10 march 2011). goodman, steve. 2004. “speed tribes: netwar, affective hacking and the audio-social”. in cultural hacking, ed. franz liebl, 139–56. vienna: springer. gosney, michael. 1997 (oct). interview with goa gil. radio v: <http://radiov.com/main/ beam/innerviews/goagil> (accessed 10 march 2011). jeff 604. n.d. “a decade of psychedelic trance”: <http://pagesperso-orange.fr/psychedelic_ trance/> (accessed 10 march 2011). mcateer, michael. 2002. “‘redefining the ancient tribal ritual for the 21st century’: goa gil and the trance dance experience”. ba thesis (philosophy, religion, and psychology), reed college. available at: <http://www.goagil.com/thesis.html> (accessed 10 march 2011). pavel. 2010. posting to thread “video interview with goa gil”. isratrance. 3 september <http://forum.isratrance.com/video-interview-with-goa-gil/> (accessed 10 march 2011). 127st john | dj goa gil phil g. 2008. “the goa gil petition: play those dats!” beatportal. 24 january: <http://www. beatportal.com/feed/item/the-goa-gil-petition-play-those-dats/> (accessed 10 march 2011). rampuri, baba. 2005. baba: autobiography of a blue-eyed yogi. new york: bell tower. rietveld, hillegonda. 2010. “infinite noise spirals: psytrance as cosmopolitan emotion”. in the local scenes and global culture of psytrance, ed. graham st john, 69–88. new york: routledge. rom, tom and pascal querner. 2010. goa: 20 years of psychedelic trance. solothurn, switzerland: nachtschatten verlag. schmidt, joshua i. 2010. “(en)countering the beat: paradox in israeli psytrance”. in the local scenes and global culture of psytrance, ed. graham st john, 131–48. new york: routledge. st john, graham. 2009a. technomad: global raving countercultures. london: equinox. ———. 2009b. “neotrance and the psychedelic festival”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(1): 35–64. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.03>. ———. 2011, forthcoming. “rave from the grave: dark trance and the return of the dead”. in zombies are us: essays on the humanity of the walking dead, ed. cory james rushton and christopher m. moreman. mcfarland. ———. 2012, forthcoming. “freak media: vibe tribes, sampledelic outlaws and israeli psytrance”. continuum: journal of media and cultural studies. ———. forthcoming. global tribe: technology, spirituality and psytrance. london: equinox. st john, graham and chiara baldini. 2011, forthcoming. “dancing at the crossroads of consciousness: techno-mysticism, visionary arts and portugal’s boom festival”. in handbook of new religions and cultural production, ed. carole m. cusack and alex norman. leiden: brill. time wave zero (aka tina). 2007. posting to thread “video interview with goa gil”. isratrance. 10 may <http://forum.isratrance.com/video-interview-with-goa-gil/> (accessed 10 march 2011). van veen, tobias, c. 2010. “technics, precarity and exodus in rave culture”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(2): 29–49. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/ 1947-5403.2010.01.02.02>. vitos, botond. 2009. “the inverted sublimity of the dark psytrance dance floor”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(1): 137–41. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/ 1947-5403.2009.01.01.10>. discography alien mental. 2007. mind hack. insomnia records (cd): insocd10. <www.discogs.com/alien-mental-mind-hack/release/1153306>. goa gil. 1995. spiritual trance vol. 2. javelin (cd, comp, mixed): 3014572. <www.discogs.com/goa-gil-spiritual-trance-vol-2/release/127984>. ———. 2005. karmageddon. avatar (cd, comp, mixed): ava029. < http://www.discogs.com/goa-gil-karmageddon/release/448510>. ———. 2007. worldbridger. avatar (cd, comp, mixed): ava042 <http://www.discogs.com/goa-gil-worldbridger/release/1013929>. dancecult 3(1)128 ———. 2009. kali yuga. avatar (cd, comp, mixed): ava057. <www.discogs.com/goa-gil-kali-yuga/release/1846310>. jungle high. 1992. jungle high. logic records (12-inch): luk011. <www.discogs.com/jungle-high-jungle-high/release/177016>. klf, the. 1988. what time is love? (pure trance 1). klf communications (vinyl, 12inch): klf 004t. <http://www.discogs.com/klf-what-time-is-love-pure-trance-1/ release/92768>. neuromotor. 2001. neuro damage. acid dance records (cd): acidcd003. <www.discogs.com/neuromotor-neuro-damage/release/94891>. nommos, the. 2004. digitaria. avatar (cd): ava0203302282. <www.discogs.com/nommos-digitaria/release/223921>. overlords, the. 1991. sundown. antler-subway (cd, maxi-single): as 5051cd. <http://www.discogs.com/overlords-sundown/release/176853>. psychotic micro and azax syndrom. 2003. voices of madness. parvati (cd, comp): prvcd04. <http://www.discogs.com/psychotic-micro-azax-syndrom-voices-of-madness/ release/240188>. rhythmystec. 1996. cathexis. matsuri (12-inch): mp18. <www.discogs.com/rhythmystec-cathexis-ep/release/141215>. scatterbrain. 2003. infernal angel. digital psionics (cd): dpsicd07. <www.discogs.com/scatterbrain-infernal-angel/release/215319>. ten reasons to eat dust (compiled by umbra). 2010. 5th element records (cd, various artists): 5thcd005. <http://www.discogs.com/umbra-ten-reasons-to-eat-dust/release/2318995>. xenomorph. 1997. obscure spectre. koyote (cd, single): kr013scd. <www.discogs.com/xenomorph-obscure-spectre/release/183952>. filmography cohn, fred. 1973. sunseed. usa: new age productions and ram films inc. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0948127>. devas, darius. 2010a. “eight finger eddie”. a segment of the sbs multimedia documentary goa hippy tribe filmed and directed by darius devas on anjuna beach, goa, january 2010. <http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/video/video.php?v=10150167845795322> (accessed 10 march 2011). ———. 2010b. steve “madras” devas. a segment of the sbs multimedia documentary goa hippy tribe filmed and directed by darius devas on anjuna beach, goa, january 2010. <http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10150163765975322> (accessed 10 march 2011). gil-vision. 2005. video shot by gil at a party in chile in 2005. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvkyjoryrsc&feature=player_embedded>. ———. 2007. video shot by gil at a party in mexico in 2007. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up7znierzr8&feature=player_embedded>. time wave zero. 2006. goa gil: the godfather of goa trance. <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1339500396225064783&#035>. festival fever and international djs: the changing shape of dj culture in sydney's commerical electronic dance music scene dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 2 (1): 63–89 issn 1947-5403 ©2011 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net festival fever and international djs: the changing shape of dj culture in sydney’s commercial electronic dance music scene ed montano rmit university abstract in recent years there has been an increase in the number of electronic dance music festivals in sydney. this has served to shift the clubbing landscape in the city from night to daytime, taking dance music out of clubs and into parks and other public spaces. with its roots in imported versions and local interpretations of overseas dance culture, the dance scene in the city has always been heavily dependent on international sounds and fashions. with the dominance of these festivals, such as field day, parklife, harbourlife, future music, creamfields, good vibrations and stereosonic, this dependence is further emphasised through the high billing of international djs in promotional material. drawing on a decade of ethnographic research and participant-observation in the commercial electronic dance music scene in sydney, this article explores how this festival fever is changing the shape of dj and dance music culture in the city. keywords: sydney, djs, club culture, festivals, mainstream, underground ed montano is a lecturer in music industry at rmit university. he has an ma in popular music studies from the institute of popular music at the university of liverpool and a phd on the commercial sydney dance music scene from macquarie university. feature article doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.04 dancecult 2(1)64 introduction during the past decade, the commercial sydney electronic dance music (edm1) scene has become dominated by annual festivals. the early 2000s saw the rise in popularity of a select few events such as field day and parklife, alongside which the regular club scene continued to prosper. in recent years, however, there has been a marked increase in the number of festivals taking place throughout the year, and this has seemingly had a detrimental effect on the popularity of regular club nights, with the suggestion that there is now an over-saturation of festivals. extensive discussion within the scene and the local edm media currently circulates around this topic, framing this explosion of festivals in both positive and negative perspectives.2 it is clearly an issue of concern for the scene’s participants (djs, promoters, clubbers), and in the way it is changing the shape and constitution of the city’s club culture, it warrants further consideration. the research and fieldwork that underpins this article has been conducted over the past ten years and is ongoing. i draw on interviews i have conducted with djs, promoters and other industry personnel during this time, as well as a variety of local media sources such as street-press and websites and my work in dance music retail. during this research, i have witnessed the increasing dominance of festivals, several of which i have attended, and so my observations are partially based in personal participation. one recurring motif in the discussion that surrounds the scene that has continually caught my attention centres on the concepts of the “underground” and the “mainstream”. it is this motif that i wish to use in this article as a way of framing my consideration of the impact of edm festivals in sydney. i would suggest that the development of these festivals makes evident the way edm is now firmly located within the mainstream and that the people responsible for staging these festivals have made a deliberate attempt to draw mainstream audiences into what, at least initially, was an underground phenomenon. the artist line-ups for these festivals also bring into play these divisions, in the way they fuse the obscure with the well-known, presenting underground music to mainstream crowds and mainstream sounds to underground audiences. in doing so, it seems that the barriers that previously existed between underground scenes and mainstream audiences are collapsing. any consideration of the notions of underground and mainstream within a contemporary edm context needs to be supported with an awareness of the historical relevance of the terms. the music has a history that dates back to the late 1960s and the initial stirrings of disco in the african-american and gay communities of new york. this history has been traced by a number of writers, most thoroughly by brewster and broughton in their comprehensive history of the dj (2000), by poschardt in his exhaustive work on dj culture (1998), and by fikentscher in his detailed exploration of post-disco underground dance music in new york (2000). similarly, the uk’s engagement with underground dance culture has been discussed by collin in his work on ecstasy culture and acid house (1998), by haslam in his history of british dj culture (2001), and by phillips in his account of dance music in the 1990s with the rise of superstar djs and superclubs (2009). bidder’s text merges montano | festival fever and international djs 65 the two countries, working its way through both american and british developments in dance music and club culture (2001; written as an accompaniment to the british three-part television series pump up the volume [hindmarch 2001]), as does reynolds’ history of house, techno and rave (1999). below is a summary of this historical progression of dance music, which is intended to map the development of dance music from underground to mainstream phenomenon, as a way of providing a contextual background for my analysis of the scene in sydney. it is my argument that the festivals that now dominate the city’s edm culture represent the apotheosis of dance music’s filtering into the mainstream. disco prior to becoming commercialised at the hands of a music industry seeking to make a quick profit, disco referred to a diverse culture and music grounded in the concepts of dancing, partying and escapism. by the end of the 1970s, the term had become shorthand for a glossy, rhythmic style of music, with a solid four/four beat, layers of sweeping strings and dramatic vocals, with wider socio-cultural associations of fame, glamour, hedonism, celebrity and exclusivity (fikentscher 2000: 22). all of this contradicted what disco had initially been about, in its fusion of a variety of music styles and its ideals of unity and inclusion. in the charged social and cultural context of a post-civil rights america and a post-stonewall riots new york, disco brought together the gay and african-american undergrounds around a sense of freedom and liberation. while disco may now be indelibly linked to the music of the village people, the bee gees and the saturday night fever soundtrack, and glitzy venues like the infamous studio 54 (poschardt 1998), in its original incarnation it was about music that was “funky and soulful”, within a scene that was “small, gritty and underground” (brewster and broughton 2000: 138). the underground disco scene in new york also gave rise to the now-familiar figure of the dance music dj. pioneers such as francis grasso, david mancuso and nicky siano turned djing into a creative practice and carved out loyal underground followings at their respective clubs (the sanctuary, the loft, the gallery), laying the foundations for the contemporary dj and the modern club scene. they made the dj the central focus of the dance club and someone who could shape the emotional mood of the dancer through a particular selection and sequencing of music. the idea of mixing this music into a continuous flow developed through the work of grasso, and remains to this day one of the founding principles of djing (albeit to widely varying degrees, depending on the dance music sub-genre the dj operates within). as this underground music and culture gathered momentum and popularity, disco began its brief flirtation with the mainstream (gilbert and pearson 1999: 9). the pioneering work of djs and producers such as walter gibbons and tom moulton, and their embracing of the concept of the remix and the 12-inch format, set the musical parameters for contemporary dance music production. independent record labels like philadelphia international and salsoul released many of the records that would come to epitomise the disco sound. yet this dancecult 2(1)66 was a sound that became commercialised by the major labels. as with many of the other fads and phases that have characterised the development of popular music, disco’s time in the mainstream was relatively brief. house music in the underground succumbing to the exploitative tendencies of the music industry’s major labels, disco as a mainstream phenomenon collapsed almost as quickly as it had appeared. in subsequent years, the use of the term disco had certain disparaging and negative aspects, resulting in the re-framing of the styles that flowered from disco as “dance music”. with its roots in the african-american and gay communities, there were undercurrents of racism and homophobia behind disco’s dismissal, exemplified by american radio dj steve dahl’s “disco sucks” campaign (fikentscher 2000: 11). yet while the mainstream may have been quick to dismiss disco as a passing fad, djs and clubbers continued to explore dance music, hidden away again in the underground. with the development of new technologies such as drum machines and synthesisers, producers in chicago and detroit took dance music in completely new directions, inventing house and techno in the process (gilbert and pearson 1999: 73–6). taking inspiration from the rhythms of disco and the energies of the dance floor, as well as from their surrounding urban environment, frankie knuckles became a pioneering figure in the development of house music at the now legendary warehouse in chicago, while derrick may and juan atkins mirrored the industrial landscape of detroit in their machine-driven techno. new york also remained central in the development of this underground dance culture during the late 1970s and 1980s, with larry levan establishing the paradise garage as one of the scene’s most important and influential venues, in the process inspiring many of the djs who have since become some of dance music’s most well-known figures, including danny tenaglia, david morales and junior vasquez. in reference to the paradise garage, fikentscher notes how “many members in the underground dance scene consider it to have constituted the epitome of social dancing as a celebration of individuality and community at the same time” (2000: 61). all of these developments in the us became core components of the historical progression of dance music, and demonstrate how the foundations set in place by disco continued to be built upon by those in the underground, despite the fact the scene was still suffering from the disco backlash and had also been worn down by the impact of aids.3 yet these developments did find commercial acceptance in the uk with the rise of the “acid house” phenomenon, the term having originally been applied to the electronic music being produced in chicago. while american djs and producers laid the groundwork, it was british djs who took the music to a wider audience. montano | festival fever and international djs 67 acid house in the uk the phenomenon of acid house essentially birthed the commercial, mainstream club culture of today. the underground developments in the uk’s dance scene of the late 1980s centred on manchester’s hacienda, and the work of its djs graeme park and mike pickering, and on the ibiza-inspired london clubs such as shoom and spectrum, set up by danny rampling and paul oakenfold. reflecting the wider cultural impact of the us house music that was being imported into the uk and played at the hacienda, indie bands such as the happy mondays and the stone roses incorporated dance rhythms into their music, tapping into the euphoria of the developing ecstasy culture. for a few years at the end of the 1980s and the start of the 1990s, manchester became a musical melting pot of hybrid rock-dance bands. in london, club culture was taking shape with the ventures of rampling and oakenfold, the latter now one of the most famous djs in the world. combining chicago house and detroit techno with the new sounds of british dance music, these djs initiated the phenomenon of acid house. with its links to ecstasy and young people having a good time, a moral panic engulfed the mainstream, ensuring this new culture received attention from most of the media. warehouse parties developed in its wake, and then outdoor raves, with many dance music fans latching on to the entrepreneurial spirit of thatcher’s ’80s britain and setting themselves up as rave promoters, albeit in a blatantly illegal manner. while disco and house had been about experiencing the music in the confines of an established venue, raves represented something more unknown, held mostly in fields and therefore outside of the urban environment that had always contained this culture (see gilbert and pearson 1999: 29–31). yet with the introduction of government legislation that increased fines for rave organisers, making it financially unviable to risk staging a rave, the majority of those involved in dance music returned indoors. this was compounded by the implementation of the 1994 criminal justice act, which was intended to suppress the free party scene and curtail the activities of the country’s alternative culture of “travellers, squatters and protesters” (brewster and broughton 2000: 402; see also collin 1998; gilbert and pearson 1999; st john 2009). superclubs, superstar djs and the mainstreaming of dance music if disco represented the mainstream’s first engagement with dj-based dance music, then the 1990s and the rise of superclubs perhaps constitutes some kind of second coming for dance music and djs as a commercial force. after the uk government crackdown on rave culture, some of the more business-oriented minds in dance music took the culture back into clubs, developing a scene of branded nightclubs and big-name djs, or as reynolds describes, “a highly controlled and controlling leisure system” (1999: 382). in the process, the free-party scene of rave culture and the urban club scene became separated (collin 1998: 228). the commercial potential of this music and its associated culture had been recognised. while companies such as london’s ministry of sound and liverpool’s cream dancecult 2(1)68 have been criticised for their brash commercialism, it cannot be denied that they took dance music and club culture to a previously unattained level of mainstream popularity. for “underground elitists and acid house nostalgists” (gilbert and pearson 1999: 180), this may have represented a compromise of the anti-commercial ideologies of edm culture, but the contemporary global prominence of these superclubs is a testament to their huge cultural impact. placing the dj squarely at the centre of its marketing efforts, the music industry seemed to have learnt from the promotional errors it made in the days of disco. by making the dj the star, the audiences had a figure to identify with, a recognisable face to link to the music, haslam noting how “club culture is no respecter of artists, but it needed something to sell, a viable commodity” (2001: xxi). the dj was now a brand, a signifier of a particular style of music, as well as a star worshipped in the same way as a rock or pop performer (reynolds 1999: 275). alongside this, the release of dj mix-cds, branded with the name of the dj, enabled the industry to compile and package in album-form the individual, faceless tracks that characterise edm. sasha and john digweed’s mix for renaissance in 1994 proved that such albums could sell in mass quantities (phillips 2009: 124), establishing the template that ministry of sound, fabric, global underground and several other companies have capitalised upon. furthering this commerciality, some of these companies diversified their interests, spinning out from their brands such things as clothing, magazines, festivals, radio stations, record labels and more. djs aligning with this explosion of mainstream club culture, and who have achieved this superstar status, becoming figureheads for the global spread of house music, include pete tong, fatboy slim, dave seaman, roger sanchez, carl cox and danny tenaglia, amongst many others. although this intensely commercial “super” bubble ultimately burst at the dawn of the new millennium amid criticisms of inflated club entry prices and dj fees (phillips 2009), club culture and dance music remains very much within the mainstream. the current ubiquity in the global pop music world of edm producers david guetta and stuart price exemplifies this, their services having been employed by artists such as madonna, black eyed peas, the killers, seal, scissor sisters and take that. the mainstreaming of this music has a social, cultural and industrial significance, and what i find interesting are the processes and mechanisms in place in particular scenes that have facilitated this mainstreaming. one area where these can be seen is in the prominence of edm festivals in sydney. the history of edm culture in sydney the historical development of dance music culture in sydney is intrinsically linked to the acid house phenomenon and warehouse party culture that developed in the uk in the late 1980s. murphie and scheer (1992) outline some of this history, while also raising certain issues in relation to the position of the australian dance scene within global dance culture (see also harley and murphie 2007). describing the dance scene in both cultural and economic terms, their chapter provides a background context which aids in understanding montano | festival fever and international djs 69 the contemporary scene. reference is made to the role of sydney’s gay community in popularising dance music in the city and the way “a lot of the values of gay dance were to follow through into inner city dance party cultures” (1992: 174). the decline of sydney’s pub scene is also noted as helping to further this popularisation of dance music. in sketching a brief history of sydney’s dance scene, and then discussing the tension between the “local” and the “global”, and how “in the broadest sense sydney dance parties are simulated after a notion of euro-american antecedents” (1992: 180), the chapter stands as a model on which to base an ethnographic study of sydney’s edm culture. murphie and scheer suggest that at the turn of the 1990s australian dance culture became more of a “mainstream” concern, describing how “1990 was the year in which the market took over the last vestiges of lived cultural specificity in dance culture” (1992: 177). dance music began to filter into the commercial pop charts, and numerous clubs and record stores catered for an increased consumer demand. in turn, this cultural shift by the music into the mainstream led to an eradication of the “dance parties’ power to signify as radical, or even as avant garde fashion” (1992: 178; authors’ italics). writing in regard to australia’s adoption of dance music, they suggest that “what may have functioned as subcultural ‘noise’ in manchester or new york, was often already reconstituted as mainstream ‘signal’ by the time” (1992: 172) it reached australia. therefore, murphie and scheer “characterise this appropriation of subcultural meanings from the uk dance scene as aesthetic and affective” (gibson and pagan 2000: 10), rather than involving any kind of explicit political ideology of protest or subversion. this appropriation can be seen in the example of the early dance parties that took place in sydney and that developed out of the gay dance events held at the hordern pavilion,4 in that they were based on uk models of the warehouse party and as such formed a connection with dance culture outside of australia, although in their legal nature “the parties themselves were not the equivalent of the illegal english events they were supposed to be modelled on” (murphie and scheer 1992: 175). sydney dj goodwill acknowledges the impact british dance culture had on the development of australian dance culture, explaining how “english people used to have a massive influence on the australian scene … they brought it here pretty much”.5 this is not to say, however, that those within the sydney scene simply imported and copied a foreign culture, for, as collin explains, “as the acid house formula was exported overseas, it began to assume local characteristics and cultural influences” (1998: 277). while warehouse raves and parties represent a separate scene to club nights and festivals, the commercial house music cultures that developed in both the uk and australia during the 1990s have their roots in these raves. companies such as ministry of sound, cream and renaissance took the musical and cultural foundations of rave culture and built ultracommercial enterprises around the concept of dance music culture as a lifestyle choice. while originating in the uk, these brands of dance music have had an impact in australian edm culture, releasing cds, staging club nights and festivals, and in the case of ministry of sound, establishing a local arm of the record label. the posters below demonstrate how these overseas brands are used to market edm events in sydney (see figs. 1–4). dancecult 2(1)70 figure 1. promotional poster for new year’s eve 2010 at ivy nightclub montano | festival fever and international djs 71 figure 2. promotional poster for new year’s day 2011 at ivy nightclub dancecult 2(1)72 figure 3. promotional poster for space ibiza festival new year’s day 2011 montano | festival fever and international djs 73 figure 4. promotional poster for creamfields 2010 dancecult 2(1)74 the “mainstream” and the “underground” the terms “mainstream” and “underground” are used extensively within edm as part of the way participants ideologically construct and make sense of the scenes and culture in which they are involved. indeed, the terms have a rich history in the wider scheme of social and cultural expression and rebellion (fikentscher 2000: 9–10), and more specifically in relation to subcultures, music and youth activity. as such, the terms have received rigorous interrogation, critique and analysis. one of the most detailed considerations in relation to edm can be found in thornton’s text on club cultures (1995), while more specifically fikentscher provides a rich and detailed socio-cultural study of underground dance music in new york during the late 1980s and 1990s (2000). in many of the interviews i have conducted with djs in sydney, the “underground” is seen to have less emphasis on commerciality and as providing a platform for playing more obscure music. some djs linked the role of the underground dj to “educating”, and suggested that contrasts with the role of the more commercial dj who has to “entertain”. of course, the events, scenes and styles that represent the underground and the mainstream are diverse, and cannot simply be separated into two opposing camps. those involved in the underground are not totally divorced from commercial concerns, while those in the mainstream are not necessarily chasing large audiences and financial reward. yet typically, within the discourse that surrounds edm culture, the “mainstream” club scene is positioned as an over-exposed and musically non-inventive element of this culture, and as consisting of a stagnant, uncreative and unchanging “mass” (thornton 1995: 94), while the “underground” scene is described as providing a “fertile breeding ground for new house music’s diversification and regeneration” (bidder 2001: 245). fikentscher provides a succinct definition of the latter term, noting how activities of the underground “can be said to take place in a limited space, inhabited by a limited number of participants who may establish various mechanisms to further the longevity of their activities” (2000: 10). he goes on to explain how one crucial aspect of this is the circulation of insider knowledge, and that participation in the underground is determined by one’s “musical connoisseurship” (fikentscher 2000: 10). it is generally assumed that the mainstream draws its musical and stylistic content from the underground, giving wider exposure to that which has a degree of proven popularity. inherent within such a view are the beliefs that “powerful new sounds emerge from the margins and challenge existing musical conventions” (negus 1996: 28) and that “where commercial interests are involved, a sense of the innovative in music scenes is lost” (connell and gibson 2003: 102). thus, the invention and progression of dance music is situated as occurring out of the view of most of its participants. sydney dj goodwill acknowledges that there is an identifiable divide between underground and mainstream dance culture, and makes reference to how “there is a large amount of cynicism from the underground criticising the overground djs who will play anything”,6 and, as sydney dj trent rackus suggests in regard to the negative views and attitudes that exist towards commercial dance culture, montano | festival fever and international djs 75 “no one wants to be mainstream, do they?”.7 such negative perceptions of the mainstream and commerciality are a constant feature of underground cultures, and permeate much of the discourse surrounding the development of edm. in the same way that the concept of the underground is often aligned with a less commercial approach, the current mainstream popularity of dance music is perceived as having negatively affected the quality and cultural value of this music. indeed, the perceptions and ideals that surround popular music culture as a whole typically equate increased commercial success with decreased artistic worth, and feed into the well-worn debates around authenticity and the dichotomies between major labels and independent labels, live performance and miming, and rock and pop music (shuker 2002: 20). the suggestion here is that the culture has been compromised in some way by its gradual increase in popularity, and also that prior to this commercialisation it was somehow a “pure”, “original” and non-commodified art form. collin argues that, as dance culture “became part of the pop mainstream, some of its unique mystery – the special secret – had been lost forever as it entered the public domain” (1998: 276), while haslam suggests that the dance music infrastructure of superclubs, media, promoters and trade fairs that underpins contemporary club culture “is as much about money-making opportunities as anything else … once money moved in, dance culture became compromised” (2001: 205). st john describes superclubs as representative of “corporate clubbing”, and makes reference to how, by the mid-1990s, dance music had become “a hyper-commercial global phenomenon bursting with brand recognition” (2009: 11). edm festivals in sydney in the way they are staged during the day, in public spaces such as parks and cultural quarters, festivals make evident the increased mainstream acceptance of edm. with its associations with night-time and therefore the dark and seedy territory of the club, the music and culture always had a slightly rebellious edge that made them seemingly unfit for mainstream consumption, amplified by their associations with illegal drug taking. yet the abundance of these festivals in the sydney cbd and immediate surrounding suburbs certainly situates the edm scene within the wider cultural mainstream of the city. promotional posters for the festivals adorn lampposts, telegraph poles and billboards all around the city, the mainstream media carry advertisements for the events, and when the festivals eventually take place, their sounds can be heard drifting around the city’s eastern suburbs. below are brief descriptions of sydney’s major commercial edm festivals. parklife / field day / harbourlife these festivals are staged by john wall under the corporate banner of fuzzy, and are three of the most popular annual dance music events in sydney. establishing the company in 1996, wall was well placed to capitalise on the commercial boom in dance culture that occurred with the development of the superclubs and the superstar dj phenomenon. dancecult 2(1)76 parklife is currently held at kippax lake in moore park, a few kilometres outside the city’s cbd, on the first sunday of october. since 2007 the festival has also travelled interstate to adelaide, brisbane, melbourne and perth, playing to a combined crowd of over 100,000. after several years promoting successful club nights and events, wall and business partners ming gan and adelle robinson decided to stage an outdoor clubbing-based event, with the first parklife taking place in march 2000. as smoking was still permitted in clubs in the time, the idea was to stage a smoke-free club-like party in an outdoor context that would potentially benefit from australia’s warm climate. while the first event was by no means a commercial success, with approximately 700 tickets out of 2000 sold, and with torrential rain for most of the day, it set in place the template that has now become the standard for many daytime dance music parties in sydney. discussing the first parklife and subsequent parties he has staged, wall describes how, because we had sold so few tickets, we had a tent and everyone that went easily fitted in the tent, so it didn’t matter that it was raining, they had a great time! so it wasn’t a dead loss, because the next year did alright, started making back the money and improving the whole thing, and now parklife has been getting bigger every year. this year looks like being fifteen thousand people. then, because we had done parklife and managed to impress centennial park, we’d been hassling the botanic gardens to let us do parties there for years, and they’d said “no, no, no”. but then after we did parklife, and we hassled them even harder, finally they said “alright” to our proposal for a new year’s day party, which became field day, and that did much better than we expected.8 field day is an annual dance music event held in sydney’s domain park area in the cbd on new year’s day, and is one of the key events in the sydney edm calendar, with a capacity of 25,000. first taking place in 2002, the event regularly sells out weeks in advance, and has become something of an iconic event for sydney clubbers, attending at least one field day being a rite of passage. harbourlife is held annually at sydney’s fleet steps area at mrs macquarie’s point, adjacent to the botanic gardens and overlooking the harbour. it typically takes place on the last saturday in november, and has been staged every year since 2003. with a capacity of only 5,000, the event is usually a sell-out. good vibrations this annual festival is staged by jam music, which is part of justin hemmes’ merivale group, a sydney-based hospitality company that operates various bars, clubs and restaurants around the city, such as establishment, slip inn and tank. held in february, the event developed out of another festival called vibes on a summer’s day, with the first good vibrations taking place in 2004. in sydney, the festival is held in centennial park, and also travels interstate to melbourne, perth and the gold coast. the capacity of the event in sydney is approximately 35,000. montano | festival fever and international djs 77 we love sounds held in the venues that are part of the entertainment quarter on the fox studios site, a few kilometres outside of the cbd, this festival is staged on the saturday of the queen’s birthday long weekend in june, originating out of an event in 2004. it is therefore the only edm festival to take place in winter. in 2010, the festival was also scheduled to take place in adelaide, auckland, brisbane, canberra, melbourne and perth, although the perth event was cancelled due to lack of interest,9 while the auckland leg took place with a reduced line-up. future music staged by mark james’ future entertainment company, this annual festival takes place in adelaide, brisbane, melbourne, perth and sydney during the first two weekends of march. in sydney it is held at randwick racecourse, the first future music being staged in 2006, and it has quickly established itself as one of the most popular edm festivals in australia. stereosonic commencing in 2008, this is a relative newcomer to the australian festival calendar, and is another national event that stops at adelaide, brisbane, melbourne, perth and sydney during the last weekend of november and the first weekend of december. in 2010 the sydney event took place at the sydney showground site at olympic park at homebush, having previously been staged in the entertainment quarter of fox studios, the move being a response to criticisms of over-crowding. the festival is operated by the two major australian edm promoters hardware and onelove, the latter name also established as a well-known brand of australian club culture with associated club nights and mix-cds. creamfields also staged by hardware and onelove, this festival was a new addition to the australian scene in 2010, although the name has a much wider history within edm culture. the name is licensed from the uk company behind the annual creamfields festival in the uk, which grew out of the famous liverpool-based superclub cream. while the uk version is held over an entire weekend, the sydney event is only staged on one day, although the festival also travelled to brisbane, melbourne and perth. again, the sydney site used was the entertainment quarter at fox studios. the use of the name represents the branding that dominates contemporary edm culture, the cream brand having immense cultural value in the perceptions of clubbers. by utilising the brand for the festival, the onelove group are instantly tapping into that value. this guarantees an audience for the event, and reduces the work associated with building a festival from the ground up. while a line-up of reasonable quality needs to be provided, the name itself works to lure edm participants. dancecult 2(1)78 pushing dance music into sydney’s mainstream the progression of sydney’s dance music culture into the mainstream has been facilitated by a number of different factors, including djs, promoters, industry support, legislation and media. festivals are another factor that can be thrown into this mix. as john wall acknowledges, the large dance festivals he has put on in sydney have, in part, been responsible for furthering this mainstreaming of the city’s dance scene: yes, to an extent [the fuzzy parties have helped to push dance music into the mainstream] . . . i think you can’t deny us doing a party as big as field day [has had an effect]. the first year it was all dance crowd [sic], but inevitably other people are going to notice it because it’s so conspicuous. so that kind of thing would be making some difference. you get all these djs who once upon a time would have been considered pretty underground, playing in front of people who are not necessarily underground, and i think it’s good to expand people’s horizons in that way, even if it does make a scene more commercial.10 while festivals in themselves are nothing new, it is obvious that in sydney festivals have become an important part of the edm scene in the past decade. i would suggest this stems from a number of factors, one being the scene’s infatuation with international djs. these djs dominate the festival line-ups and are used as a central marketing strategy in the promotional material for the events, with discussion on the value of international djs constantly circulating within the scene.11 the festivals also represent a continuation of the branding that has dominated commercial club culture over the past fifteen years, with the names of established festivals such as parklife and future music becoming branded representations of edm culture in sydney and australia. as part of this, i would suggest the festivals reflect the commercialism of the scene, as well as an increased professionalism in the way the scene operates. all of this has served to broaden the appeal of the scene, making the music and culture seemingly more mainstream and attracting bigger audiences. also of interest is the growing diversity of the line-ups of these festivals. events such as field day, parklife, good vibrations and harbourlife were established as edm festivals, and previous headline acts have included djs such as felix da housecat, fatboy slim, martin solveig and roger sanchez. in 2010, this focus on exclusively edm artists has shifted. as can be seen in the posters below, the line-up for parklife featured hip-hop legend missy elliott, alongside indierock bands the dandy warhols and the wombats, while harbourlife was headlined by the temper trap, an australian indie-rock band from melbourne currently making inroads on the international market. thus, some of the stylistic barriers that previously distinguished edm festivals in sydney are breaking down. australian music festivals such as the big day out have for many years accommodated both rock and dance acts, with the boiler room stage hosting djs and acts such as sasha, carl cox and underworld, and many other festivals have eclectic and diverse line-ups. yet festivals in sydney such as parklife that have always been associated solely with edm have rarely crossed over into other, non-edm genres. this represents a further significant shift in the shape of dance music culture in sydney (see figs. 5–6). montano | festival fever and international djs 79 figure 5. promotional poster for parklife 2010 dancecult 2(1)80 figure 6. promotional poster for harbourlife 2010 montano | festival fever and international djs 81 adding stylistically diverse acts to a festival has the potential to broaden its appeal and attract a greater audience, yet at the same time it runs the risk of alienating and confusing the festival’s traditional audience who view the event as dance music oriented. the cancellation of a planned leg of harbourlife on the gold coast on the last weekend of november suggests that the audience were not quite willing to accept the idea of an indie-rock band headlining a house music festival.12 the announcement of the line-up for field day 2011 was promoted with an initial teaser quote on the fuzzy website13 that described the “ever-merging worlds of electronic, indie rock and hip hop”. in regard to this, john wall remarks that: people’s tastes are very diverse these days. it’s not like when we first started promoting in the ’90s where you picked your side—rock or dance—and you thought everyone on the other side was an idiot. people don’t think about music that way anymore. we’ve noticed our customers don’t make that distinction between a dj or a live band.14 this perception of “merging worlds” and “diverse tastes” can be seen in the artists selected to play field day 2011, with the line-up featuring more band-based acts than ever before (see fig. 7). the selection of acts for field day 2011 continues the broadening out of the music focus of the key fuzzy events. for the first few years of its life, field day was a solely edmfocused festival, with a line-up featuring nothing but djs. as the poster demonstrates, the event has now developed into something with a greater musical diversity, with the inclusion of hip-hop stalwarts public enemy, australian psychedelic rock band tame impala and british pop singer marina and the diamonds. all of these festivals are competing for the disposable income of sydney’s edm fans. in a crowded festival market, every promoter has to ensure their event stands out. while the line-up is obviously the most important aspect here, other factors such as location and time of year can attract or deter potential audiences. fuzzy perhaps take the most idiosyncratic approach with their line-ups, combining a selection of big ticket acts with more obscure artists. with fuzzy, an educational ethic is embedded within their festival music policy. explaining how he tries to make his events unique, john wall states, musically we don’t try to be all things to all people... we put on artists who are big names that people have heard of but more importantly pushing the sounds that we like and new artists that we like. right from when we started fuzzy in the mid ‘90s we were always about not simply preaching to the converted, we like to actually convert people.15 this approach became most apparent in the first half of the 2000s, when breaks became popular among clubbing crowds in the city. wall’s initial breaks parties lost money, but he persisted with eventually successful attempts to take this music to a wider audience in sydney. dancecult 2(1)82 figure 7. promotional poster for field day 2011 montano | festival fever and international djs 83 sydney breaks dj kid kenobi became the most popular dj in the scene, being voted number one in the inthemix top 50 dj poll in 2003, 2004 and 2005, while international breaks djs and producers such as krafty kuts and the plump djs headlined various festivals, and ministry of sound released a selection of breaks compilations. through the fuzzy parties he staged early in the decade, wall is considered to be a key figure in popularising breaks within sydney: in early ’96 i felt like there were a lot of gaps in the market. very few people were doing breaks, which was something that i was really into, and i thought that, particularly given that there were things coming out like the chemical brothers, that sound ought to be much more popular than it was. so i just started promoting. i actually didn’t do breaks first because i thought we needed to do something that would get a decent number of people, otherwise we’d be out of business in a week. so our first party was seventy per cent house, and then thirty per cent breaks and trip-hop and whatever else was around at the time. that was in august ’96, and it went really well and sold out, so it was a pretty good start... we focused everything we did on trying to make that happen... i’m not trying to take sole credit for it, but we did just decide we are going to see if we can make breaks bigger, and we just kept going and kept going and kept going until it was.16 due to the fast pace at which edm culture moves, breaks eventually lost its wide appeal in sydney, with electro taking its place as the sub-genre of the moment during the mid2000s. yet, its brief period of popularity demonstrates how promotional efforts can shape a scene. without the deliberate attempts by fuzzy to push this style through staging parties dominated by breaks-related artists, it is doubtful to have garnered such acceptance within the scene. in presenting the music to a wider audience, fuzzy facilitated the development of the breaks scene in sydney. more broadly, this reflects how festivals in the scene can create and shape tastes and audiences. the effect of festivals there has been extensive discussion in the local edm media on the variable impact of festivals on australian club culture. the australian dance music website inthemix.com.au (itm)17 recently posted a five-part feature on the current state of the edm scene in sydney and australia, based around interviews with various local djs and promoters.18 together with the user comments posted in response, the feature made for particularly interesting reading, and included some reflections on the impact of the big festivals that are worthy of further consideration. observing responses on itm from various industry personnel to questions regarding the current state of edm scenes in sydney and australia, it becomes clear that festivals are perceived as causing a decline in the number of clubbers attending club nights. in the mid-2000s, the sydney scene bustled with regular weekly nights such as together at home and kink at the arthouse, the latter held in such high esteem by clubbers in the city that dancecult 2(1)84 a recent facebook campaign successfully persuaded kink promoter scott robertson to organise a one-off reunion night. yet he refused to take this as a sign that kink could make a permanent comeback: the kink reunion facebook group that started came as a big surprise to me and all our old residents and was very humbling. it really is testament to how special the family atmosphere was at kink. does this make me think there is a gap in the market for kink to return to the weekly club scene? in all honesty, no. will this be the last we see of kink? probably not.19 this hints at a future for the kink clubbing brand that is based around irregular, one-off special events, rather than weekly clubbing nights, an outcome that can partially be ascribed to the dominance of festivals in the scene. robertson also puts this down to a shift in the way clubbers engage with the culture of the scene: the new generation of kids that have come through seem to be a lot less loyal to club nights and venues, making it harder for promoters to sustain their nights. sydney as a whole has become more and more motivated by free entry and cheap drinks and is a lot less motivated by music. furthermore, every man and his dog seems to think he is a dj and as long as they can bring mates, they will get booked by the new breed of young promoters who don’t really care about programming, building a brand or music policy. and so the downward spiral continues.20 there are now no weekly events that compare to the success kink enjoyed, although the recently launched saturday night pure ivy at justin hemmes’ the ivy in the cbd represents an attempt to reorient the mainstream sydney house scene back to weekly club nights. the long-running saturday night chinese laundry (held at slip inn in the cbd and regularly featured in dj mag’s top 100 clubs in the world poll),21 with performances from a broad range of both big-name djs and more underground djs, is also managing to weather the storm of festivals. still, the perception that the weekly club scene is in dire straits remains, as made evident in the following quote from sydney promoter, dj and co-founder of the we love sounds festival ben korbel, in response to being questioned on the changes in the australian dance music scene during the past ten years and the current state of weekly clubbing: one of the major changes for me is the shift from a smaller subculture and a club scene with more of an independent flavour to a very strong festival scene across the whole year. it’s like clubbing on steroids... it has certainly meant that clubs shrink back into their cave. that’s not to say there are not good things that happen in clubs, but they’re probably one-off events or monthly parties. there’s much less of a culture of people partying every saturday night, or if they do, it might be at a bar with a dj… i think everything is cyclical. the festival market will correct itself. as that happens, people will have had too much of a good thing. things will move back into smaller venues. it’s already happened with live music, people will still go out to small venues. the problem is specific to electronic music at the moment.22 montano | festival fever and international djs 85 it is interesting to note here korbel’s framing of the dominance of festivals as a “problem”, as if it is something that needs rectifying and correcting in order to rejuvenate the local scene. this comment seems even more surprising when one considers korbel is a festival promoter himself. in light of recent events, however, it is clear that korbel and his team have struggled to compete in the crowded festival market, with the perth leg of 2010’s we love sounds cancelled due to low ticket sales, and the company behind the festival going into liquidation due to losses incurred during the run of festivals this year. in response to the liquidation, korbel comments: the biggest festivals, for the most part, are selling out, however much more slowly, and some major players are barely breaking even now on their usually multi-million dollar events. when we love sounds launched, there was a relevant place for it in the market, however as new festival after festival entered the market, ticket buyers have become saturated with large-scale events with large-scale line-ups. in order to survive as a business, we went with ‘bigger is better’, even though our core philosophy was not aligned with this in any way. sadly business health and artist vision do not always align.23 while multiple factors contribute to the collapse of a business, one of the major problems is the over-abundance of festivals available for clubbing audiences in sydney and australia as a whole. the rise in popularity of these events is not unique to edm culture, with several music-related festivals promoted around the city and the country, although with some struggling to sell tickets and some being cancelled.24 this has led to suggestions of an “over-saturation” of festivals, and that there are simply too many festivals for the market to sustain. this smorgasbord of festivals has also driven up artist fees. in a scene with numerous promoters fighting for the services of a handful of big-name international acts, these acts have been able to demand an increase in their appearance fees. as fuzzy promoter john wall explains: it’s definitely an over-saturated market at the moment, but we’re just doing everything we can to make sure parklife is as good as you’d expect, but hopefully even better. the cost of a line-up has gotten crazy because there’s five times as many promoters trying to get artists. there aren’t magically five times more artists in the world. prices have gone up enormously and everyone is fighting to get the best line-up. this year’s line-up will be costing us five times as much as the line-up two years ago and double that of last year’s. we’re expanding slightly but mainly it’s all the competition. we have a joke with agents overseas that when they get a phone call or email from an australian promoter, it’s like ‘ka-ching!’.25 this increase in line-up costs is also highlighted by wall’s business partner and fuzzy cofounder ming gan, who references the electro-heavy line-up for parklife 2007 that featured justice, digitalism and mstrkrft, to emphasise the pricing effects of the mass of festivals: dancecult 2(1)86 with more festivals and less artists that sell tickets, artist fees have gone through the roof... something is going to give. if you’ve got a festival that’s paying a ridiculous amount of money for one artist they think they need to survive, but they don’t achieve that, it’s going to fall apart... if we were to price that line-up now, we’d be paying four times the amount.26 conclusion i began this article by tracing some of the historical development of dance music, identifying the moments where this essentially underground style became absorbed into the mainstream. this history provides a wider context in which to place the recent developments in edm culture in sydney, with an emphasis on mainstream, branded club events and festivals. these developments, i believe, represent a breaking down of the barriers between the underground and the mainstream. these festivals, with their expansive line-ups, draw diverse crowds. in addition, the number of edm day festivals represents a shift in the activities of clubbers in sydney away from the traditional edm environment of the night-time club. while the effect they are having on regular club nights in the city is a justifiable concern for some, it is surely a positive for the scene in the way the festivals have embedded edm within the city’s mainstream cultural landscape. djs, promoters and clubbers have taken their lifestyle to a much wider audience through these events. furthermore, the growing musical diversity of the line-ups of some of the festivals is significant. in an attempt to distinguish its events in a crowded festival marketplace, fuzzy has broadened its music policy, bringing in indie-rock and hip-hop live acts. of course, many edm fans do not only listen to edm music, and so the line-ups make sense. at the same time, this diversity is something new for festivals in the city that have developed within edm culture. it would seem that the boundaries between styles and audiences are becoming increasingly blurred, or perhaps more appropriately, increasingly fuzzy (fikentscher 2000: 51). the sydney edm scene may have shifted permanently to a scene dominated by festivals rather than clubs. the fast-moving and ever-changing shape of edm culture suggests that these festivals simply represent one in a long line of trends. perhaps clubbers will rediscover the long-term familiarity provided by regular weekly nights. the festivals certainly represent a significant shift in the orientation of edm crowds in the city, and i believe are reflective of the way edm culture has become increasingly mainstream during the past decade. the festivals are perhaps representative of broader cultural shifts in audience engagements with popular music. in a world of itunes and ipods, instant access to a huge range of individual tracks (as opposed to albums) has become the norm. festivals similarly provide their audiences with a “pick ‘n’ mix” selection. with their multiple stages, venues or arenas, with day-long line-ups, festivals provide a variety of music that is simply not available at a club night. their success has taken the music to a wider audience, while at the same time providing this audience with a more professionally organised scene and ultimately contributing to the continued existence of edm culture in sydney. montano | festival fever and international djs 87 notes 1 while “edm” includes a variety of different styles and scenes, i use it in this article in reference to “commercial” dance music and club culture specifically in the city of sydney, and to describe festivals that feature djs of house, trance, electro, techno and breaks all on the same line-up. in using the term “commercial”, i am referring to club nights, festivals and events that are promoted through extensive advertising and staged with the primary goal of profit margins. by contrast, events in sydney’s alternative edm scenes are less visible to the general public and are motivated by a variety of causes other than self-promotion and financial success. 2 jackt, “clubs special, part three: the festival effect”, 21 may 2010, <http://www.inthemix. com.au/features/46835/clubs_special_part_three_the_festival_effect> (accessed 21 may 2010). 3 see fikentscher (2000) for a discussion of the impact aids had on the underground dance scene in new york during the 1980s. 4 luckman notes that the hordern is “a large barn-like venue located within the agricultural showgrounds, not far from the city’s cbd” (2002: 48). it most typically now acts as a venue for rock concerts, while some dance festivals (we love sounds, space) are held there and in surrounding venues. the area is now part of the fox studios entertainment quarter. 5 goodwill, interview with the author (sydney), 8 september 2004. 6 goodwill, interview with the author (sydney), 8 september 2004. 7 trent rackus, interview with the author (sydney), 27 september 2004. 8 john wall, interview with the author (sydney), 16 september 2005. 9 jackt, “we love sounds perth cancelled”, 26 may 2010, <http://www.inthemix.com.au/news/ aust/46909/we_love_sounds_perth_cancelled> (accessed 26 may 2010). 10 john wall, interview with the author (sydney), 16 september 2005. 11 jackt, “what’s an international worth?”, 22 september 2010, <http://www.inthemix.com.au/ features/48103/whats_an_international_worth> (accessed 22 september 2010). 12 daverh, “harbourlife gold coast gets ‘postponed’”, 27 october 2010, <http://www.inthemix. com.au/news/aust/48417/harbourlife_gold_coast_gets_postponed> (accessed 27 october 2010). 13 <http://www.fuzzy.com.au> 14 <http://www.themusicnetwork.com/music-features/industry/2010/06/14/the-hot-seatfuzzys-john-wall> (accessed 14 june 2010). 15 swales, kris. 2010. “jonathan wall: icon”. 3d world. 15 june: 26–7. 3d world is a free weekly street-press publication that focuses on edm culture. 16 john wall, interview with the author (sydney), 16 september 2005. 17 <http://www.inthemix.com.au> is a website dedicated to dance music culture in australia, which features news, reviews, forums, photo galleries, online ticket sales and club listings, and with each state capital city within australia (adelaide, brisbane, canberra, melbourne, perth and sydney) receiving focus, so that the site caters specifically for the scenes at the local urban level as well as the national level. since its inception in 2000 by andre lackmann, neil ackland and libby clark, the site has grown from a small platform for news and photographs http://www.inthemix.com.au/features/46835/clubs_special_part_three_the_festival_effect http://www.inthemix.com.au/features/46835/clubs_special_part_three_the_festival_effect http://www.inthemix.com.au/news/aust/46909/we_love_sounds_perth_cancelled http://www.inthemix.com.au/news/aust/46909/we_love_sounds_perth_cancelled http://www.inthemix.com.au/features/48103/whats_an_international_worth http://www.inthemix.com.au/features/48103/whats_an_international_worth http://www.inthemix.com.au/news/aust/48417/harbourlife_gold_coast_gets_postponed http://www.inthemix.com.au/news/aust/48417/harbourlife_gold_coast_gets_postponed http://www.fuzzy.com.au/ http://www.themusicnetwork.com/music-features/industry/2010/06/14/the-hot-seat-fuzzys-john-wall http://www.themusicnetwork.com/music-features/industry/2010/06/14/the-hot-seat-fuzzys-john-wall http://www.inthemix.com.au/ dancecult 2(1)88 to a company (sound alliance: see <http://www.thesoundalliance.net>) with other websites (such as the rock-based <http://www.fasterlouder.com.au>), an associated record label, touring division and radio station. with its recent tenth anniversary, itm underwent a complete redesign. 18 jackt, “clubs special, part one: the state of clubs in 2010”, 19 may 2010, <http://www. inthemix.com.au/features/46833/clubs_special_part_one_the_state_of_clubs_in_2010> (accessed 19 may 2010). 19 jackt, “clubs special, part five: the forecast for the future”, 23 may 2010, <http://www. inthemix.com.au/features/46837/clubs_special_part_five_the_forecast_for_the_future> (accessed 23 may 2010). 20 jackt, “clubs special, part two: what has become of weekly clubbing”, 20 may 2010, <http:// www.inthemix.com.au/features/46834/clubs_special_part_two_what_has_become_of_ weekly_clubbing> (accessed 20 may 2010). 21 <http://www.djmag.com/top100clubs/?op=detail&start=&page=7&year=2009&id=167> (accessed 6 december 2010). 22 jackt, “turning 10 with inthemix: we love sounds”, 10 may 2010, <http://www.inthemix. com.au/features/46725/turning_10_with_inthemix_we_love_sounds> (accessed 10 may 2010). 23 jackt, “we love sounds goes into liquidation”, 28 october 2010, <http://www.inthemix.com. au/news/aust/48434/we_love_sounds_goes_into_liquidation> (accessed 28 october 2010). 24 <http://www.themusicnetwork.com/music-features/industry/2010/10/06/festival-overloadhave-we-reached-critical-mass> (accessed 6 october 2010) and <http://www.themusicnetwork. com/music-news/industry/2010/12/15/2010-the-year-in-music-news/> (accessed 15 december 2010). 25 <http://www.themusicnetwork.com/music-features/industry/2010/06/14/the-hot-seatfuzzys-john-wall> (accessed 14 june 2010). 26 jackt, “what’s an international worth?”, 22 september 2010, <http://www.inthemix.com.au/ features/48103/whats_an_international_worth> (accessed 22 september 2010). http://www.thesoundalliance.net/ http://www.fasterlouder.com.au/ http://www.inthemix.com.au/features/46833/clubs_special_part_one_the_state_of_clubs_in_2010 http://www.inthemix.com.au/features/46833/clubs_special_part_one_the_state_of_clubs_in_2010 http://www.inthemix.com.au/features/46837/clubs_special_part_five_the_forecast_for_the_future http://www.inthemix.com.au/features/46837/clubs_special_part_five_the_forecast_for_the_future http://www.inthemix.com.au/features/46834/clubs_special_part_two_what_has_become_of_weekly_clubbing http://www.inthemix.com.au/features/46834/clubs_special_part_two_what_has_become_of_weekly_clubbing http://www.inthemix.com.au/features/46834/clubs_special_part_two_what_has_become_of_weekly_clubbing http://www.djmag.com/top100clubs/?op=detail&start=&page=7&year=2009&id=167 http://www.inthemix.com.au/features/46725/turning_10_with_inthemix_we_love_sounds http://www.inthemix.com.au/features/46725/turning_10_with_inthemix_we_love_sounds http://www.inthemix.com.au/news/aust/48434/we_love_sounds_goes_into_liquidation http://www.inthemix.com.au/news/aust/48434/we_love_sounds_goes_into_liquidation http://www.themusicnetwork.com/music-features/industry/2010/10/06/festival-overload-have-we-reached-critical-mass http://www.themusicnetwork.com/music-features/industry/2010/10/06/festival-overload-have-we-reached-critical-mass http://www.themusicnetwork.com/music-news/industry/2010/12/15/2010-the-year-in-music-news/ http://www.themusicnetwork.com/music-news/industry/2010/12/15/2010-the-year-in-music-news/ http://www.themusicnetwork.com/music-features/industry/2010/06/14/the-hot-seat-fuzzys-john-wall http://www.themusicnetwork.com/music-features/industry/2010/06/14/the-hot-seat-fuzzys-john-wall http://www.inthemix.com.au/features/48103/whats_an_international_worth http://www.inthemix.com.au/features/48103/whats_an_international_worth montano | festival fever and international djs 89 references bidder, sean. 2001. pump up the volume: a history of house. london: channel 4 books. brewster, bill and frank broughton. 2000. last night a dj saved my life: the history of the disc jockey. london: headline. collin, matthew. 1998. altered state: the story of ecstasy culture and acid house. 2nd ed. london: serpent’s tail. connell, john and chris gibson. 2003. sound tracks: popular music, identity and place. london: routledge. fikentscher, kai. 2000. “you better work!” underground dance music in new york city. hanover: university press of new england. gibson, chris and rebecca pagan. 2000. “rave culture in sydney, australia: mapping youth spaces in media discourse”. <http://www.snarl.org/youth/chrispagan2.pdf> (accessed 15 august 2003). gilbert, jeremy and ewan pearson. 1999. discographies: dance music, culture and the politics of sound. london: routledge. harley, ross and andrew murphie. 2007. “australian electronica: a brief history”. in sounds of then, sounds of now: popular music in australia, ed. shane homan and tony mitchell, 93–113. hobart: acys. haslam, dave. 2001. adventures on the wheels of steel: the rise of the superstar djs. london: fourth estate. luckman, susan. 2002. “party people: mapping contemporary dance music cultures in australia”. ph.d. dissertation, university of queensland, brisbane. murphie, andrew and edward scheer. 1992. “dance parties: capital, culture and simulation”. in from pop to punk to postmodernism, ed. philip hayward, 172–84. sydney: allen & unwin. negus, keith. 1996. popular music in theory: an introduction. cambridge: polity. phillips, dom. 2009. superstar djs: here we go! london: ebury press. poschardt, ulf. 1998. dj culture. london: quartet books. reynolds, simon. 1999. generation ecstasy: into the world of techno and rave culture. new york: routledge. shuker, roy. 2002. popular music: the key concepts. london: routledge. st john, graham. 2009. technomad: global raving countercultures. london: equinox. thornton, sarah. 1995. club cultures: music, media and subcultural capital. cambridge: polity. filmography hindmarch, carl. 2001. pump up the volume. uk: channel 4. http://www.snarl.org/youth/chrispagan2.pdf conscious sounds: encountering jah shaka christopher partridge lancaster university (uk) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.02.13> in 2012 i was invited by david katz to be a member of a panel at the rototom sunsplash international reggae festival in benicàssim, spain. the purpose of the panel, which also included jah shaka and neil perch of zion train, was to discuss dub reggae and sound system culture in britain. while david obviously thought that i might have something vaguely interesting to contribute to the discussion, as it turned out, my relationship with rototom was an uneven one. that is to say, while i can’t help feeling that i contributed little that was illuminating, i left benicàssim with more than my fair share of inspiration and good memories. firstly, what’s not to like about a reggae festival? if you enjoy reggae, as i do, rototom is the place to be. secondly, i learned a lot from my conversations with people at the event and particularly enjoyed my journey back to manchester with the warm-hearted singer, dub dadda. thirdly, it was wonderful to discover that, as some measure of the seriousness with which the organizers at rototom are keen to engage with social issues, they had also invited the sociologists zygmunt bauman and aleksandra jasinska-kania. while i criticize nobody for their obsessive devotion to reggae, it was uplifting to witness the crowd of young festival goers who had chosen to forgo the music in order to spend time listening to bauman, jasinska-kania and ignacio ramonet discuss “crisis and democracy”. finally, while i tend not to be distracted by celebrity (although, at some level, who isn’t?), i was particularly pleased to learn, not only that shaka was playing at the festival, but (as noted above) that he would also be on the panel. spending a little time with an artist i had never met before, but whose music i had been listening to for over three decades, was clearly going to be an affecting moment. as it turned out, the impact of shaka was greater than i had anticipated. for those few readers who haven’t heard of jah shaka, he was born in clarendon, jamaica, moved to london in the early 1960s, and became a seminal figure within british sound system culture. everyone i knew who was interested in dub during the 1970s and 1980s had jah shaka on their radar. his name seemed to signify everything that was serious and sacred about uk sound system culture. shaka played down to earth, heavyweight, “warrior style” dub that conveyed a certain charismatic integrity. although i have no doubt that there are a number of sociological and musicological reasons for this perception of integrity, it seems to me that it has always had something to do with his approach to dub. shaman-like, he seemed to operate at the nexus of this world and some other elusive, rastafarian reality. like a worshipper before an icon, his focus was not on the art as such, but on that which lay beyond it. dub was a gateway to the sacred; a window on zion; a channel of the divine. consistently articulating his vocation in terms of consciousness raising, he has always been clear about his desire to increase the general level of “overstanding” about rastafari, social justice, education, the promotion of peace and the celebration of unity. the fact that listening to his music happens to be a pleasurable experience is important, not only because he genuinely wants people to enjoy themselves, but, more significantly, because this makes it an effective medium for the message of jah. his music is, therefore, integral to his mission. having borrowed the name shaka from a revolutionary, early nineteenth century zulu warrior, he developed an understanding of dub as a weapon in the service of rastafari, of africans (particularly the african diaspora), and, finally, of all humanity. whereas other media can be suppressed and controlled by babylon, shaka’s sound system is direct action against oppression, misinformation and ignorance. powerful stepper’s riddims and sonorous floor-shaking bass call for revolution—peaceful revolution. at rototom, prior to the panel, i was taken to a small enclosure where artists were relaxing in the hot spanish sun and a cordial atmosphere. although shaka clearly preferred to spend time alone or with nicky ezer, his manager, david interrupted his solitude to introduce me. a quiet, softly spoken man emerged from a small tented area and greeted me. i immediately warmed to his unassuming and kindly manner. we chatted briefly, before being directed to a waiting minibus to be driven through the festival to the rather grand “reggae university” marquee. it was almost full by the time we arrived and, as we made our way to the front, the eyes of the crowd turned to shaka. the high priest of dub had arrived. we took our places and david began the conversation with a general question about the roots of british sound system culture. while i gave a general overview of the culture of colonialism and oppression out of which roots reggae emerged, from the outset, shaka’s personal engagement with the issues was conspicuously evident. i don’t think i have ever been as conscious of the gulf between “head knowledge” and “heart knowledge” as i was then, sitting next to shaka and listening to him share his deeply held convictions. a question about sound systems received an answer about how to live a more loving and responsible life or how to change an unjust society. it wasn’t that he refused to talk about his music detached from theology and social issues, but more that he could not. for shaka, dub and ideology are inseparable. although he has been central to british sound system culture since the early 1970s, owns a record label (jah shaka music), and has produced numerous important dub albums, he spoke far less about his music than he did about the importance of being a good member of the human race. three years later, i still remember shaka’s passionate encouragement to his audience—his congregation—to build their lives around faith, truth, love, honesty and kindness. as he spoke, people smiled, nodded and visibly absorbed his gentle wisdom. i left that session moved and inspired by shaka. the ground was prepared for a powerful experience of the sacred art of dub later in the day. as evening fell, i made my way over to dub station, an area of the festival devoted to sound systems. shaka was already there, studiously flicking through his vinyls and checking his solitary deck, which was, as always, placed at head height on top of his small tower of sound equipment. there is an admirable simplicity to shaka’s sound system. shunning ostentatious displays of technology, he brings exactly what he needs to practice the sacred art of dub—no more, no less. behind him, reminding us all of the principal focus of what was about to take place, hung a picture of h.i.m.—his imperial majesty, haile selassie, the conquering lion of judah. as always, for shaka, this was not going to be just another gig, but something more profound and devotional. as the needle dropped into the first groove, everything changed. the loud, sonorous bass pushed back the warm evening air, creating a space in which the trance-inducing dub could begin its journey within: “rastafari... rastafari... rastafari... let jah rise ...”, declared shaka. “jah... the power of the trinity ... the gates of zion are open wide...” the deep warrior dub seemed to pulse through my personal universe. this was an experience shaka clearly shared. although he is by no means a young man, he nimbly danced, enchanted by the spell his music was weaving. there is, again, something particularly appealing about an encounter with shaka’s sound system. he seems to be just as susceptible to the power of his music as those who go to listen to him. it was as if he had summoned up the spirit of rastafari, which now flowed through the bass, animated the riddims, inhabited the echoes and effects, filled the air, and possessed the high priest, moving him to dance and urging him to prophesy. even though, initially, there were only a few people gathered at dub station, it mattered little to shaka. worship had begun. that said, by the end of the evening, it felt as though the spirit of rastafari had drawn half of the festival to shaka’s sonic temple of dub. shaka had managed to create an affective space for which the term “sacred” seemed peculiarly appropriate. that evening, dub mattered. as the heavy bass, the echo and reverb, the idiosyncratic sounds he sporadically introduced, and the pounding stepper’s riddims altered whatever state i had been in before, it felt as though that small piece of benicàssim had been lifted out of the world. of course, in my academic work, i have made much of the fact that the affective spaces evoked by music often create a perception of detachment from everyday life and encourage reflection on a range of existentially important issues, but, without wanting to claim more for the experience than can be accounted for by emotion, the music communicated something i hadn’t quite felt before, something more important and life affirming. author biography christopher partridge is professor of religious studies in the department of politics, philosophy and religion at lancaster university, uk. his research and writing focuses on alternative spiritual currents, countercultures, and popular music. he is the author of a number of books, including mortality and music: popular music and the awareness of death (2015), the lyre of orpheus: popular music, the sacred, and the profane (2013), dub in babylon (2010), and the re-enchantment of the west: alternative spiritualities, sacralization, popular culture and occulture, 2 vols (2004, 2005). he is also co-editor of the series “studies in popular music” (equinox) and “studies in religion and popular music” (bloomsbury). the tribes of burning man: how an experimental city in the desert is shaping the new american counterculture steven t. jones san francisco: consortium of collective consciousness (ccc) publishing, 2011 isbn: 978-1888729290 (paperback) rrp: us$17.95 (paperback) susan luckman university of south australia (au) steven t. jones’ book is in many ways summed up by the signs marking the entry to the festival site identified by larry harvey—event founder and general king pin—as his favourite: “what happens in vegas stays in vegas. what happens in black rock city goes everywhere” (175). the tribes of burning man follows steven jones (aka. playa name scribe) own personal journey on and off the playa from around 2004–2010 as a central participant in san francisco’s contemporary counter-culture. as a journalist and editor for the local san francisco bay guardian, this book grows out of being a voice not so much for but from the burner community. jones offers us excellent coverage of the event’s history, such as the growing pains around the “ten principles” and other significant changes in the level of organisation underpinning the event following the death of a burner in 2004. however rather than being a dry chronological narrative, the tribes of burning man emerges contextually embedded in both a rich discussion of contemporary debates around the event’s nature and future and even richer accounts of scribe’s own immersions in the world of burning man. although the vaguely maffesolian metaphor of the “tribe” is tinged at times with elements of tribe quatraditional peoples—at least when it comes to the “feather and leather” (14) look popular on the playa—jones offers a counter-perspective to critiques of burning man. critiques, such as that offered by noted us cyberlibertarian and long-time burner john perry barlow, who called for a boycott of the event, rejecting it for “leeching” the creative and political energies of the community (23). however, in jones’ book, burning man is clearly framed as more than a “weekend warrior” experience offering up a bakhtinian pressure valve release of resistant energies. rather in its focus on the active and lively san francisco scene and its year-round preparation, jones explores how the annual festival on the playa is for many burners simply the culmination and focal point which recharges batteries for an all consuming commitment to a different way of being in the world. here we see how the sometimes life-changing epiphanies experienced on the playa have been turned by some participants into beyond-the-event personal missions and where the renewal of the temporary autonomous zone (taz) experience afforded by the time of the playa is transmuted into bigger and wider commitments to collective organisation and social movements. jones particularly emphasises the work of burners without borders, formed in 2005 when groups of burners went straight from nevada to mississippi to help clean up after hurricane katrina. this spin-off collective has become for some a long-term commitment to bring the skills borne of planning, building, improvising and breaking down a city in the desert, to relief efforts. jones also discusses black rock solar which installs solar panels for community groups at a highly subsidised cost enabled by volunteer labour. the art versus rave dichotomy which seems to underpin much of what’s been written on burning man is manifest here; not surprising given the “barely concealed hostility of larry and the borg” (27) to dance camps. however, dancecult readers will be happy to hear that this book, while open—as a good journalist should be—to all sides of the debate, is written by an enthusiastic dance tribe central player. in this way, the book is a refreshing counter-point to bowditch’s (2010) more anti-rave and more scholarly-focused book on the edge of utopia. as a committed raver and member of those tribes behind the playa’s most iconic rave camps (e.g. opulent temple), jones instead offers a raver’s perspective on the playa experience, not to mention the gossip on which big name djs are divas versus those who really get burning man and thrive on its energy. jones is also keen to put on record the important off-playa fundraising role played by the tribes in raising money to fund the on-playa art. a particular focus too is jones’ own embedded journalism or participant observations as a member of the flaming lotus girls; this provides valuable insight on the art funding structures facilitated by burning man. the rave versus the rest lines in the dust are here explored given they remain at the heart of key debates and factionalism in the event’s recent organisational history, as played out among community leaders in san francisco during the period jones spent most closely researching this book (129). the particular strength and value of the tribes of burning man lies in its insider point of view which offers an open account of the world of the festival not only on the playa but also during the annual life cycle of preparations, fund-raising, planning, design, building, transport, not to mention organisational and scene politics and egos, which, after all, are the behind the scenes’ life and soul of any event on this scale. references bowditch, rachel. 2010. on the edge of utopia: performance and ritual at burning man. london, new york and calcutta: seagull books. this place is my place. sunrise [total recall], west indian centre, leeds, uk. saturday 22nd march 2014 alice o’grady university of leeds (uk) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.02.09 it has been nearly three full months since the gathering of the sunrise tribe and anticipation builds for the coming of this event—a celebration of spring equinox and the start of something new. we stand here on the cusp of lighter nights, brighter days and the promise of good things to come. we have survived the winter and the summer now lies within our reach. sunrise is, and always will be, an event. it is marked on our calendars, both the ones on our desks and the ones we carry in our heads and hearts, as a special occasion like a birthday, a wedding or a christening. other commitments are moved and rearranged to ensure the path is clear either side of that 9 hour slot in which we invest so much. in readiness we make our preparations. we liaise with friends. we determine our travel plans and discuss the sleeping arrangements for post-party rejuvenations. we decide what to wear; what to take with us; what to eat during the day before and what to have stocked in the house ready for our return. we plot and we hatch and we conspire to make this... the best one yet. and that’s why those 3 hours before the start are so damn hard for me. as a child i never dealt well with big occasions. the heightened expectation and towering hopes for greatness crippled me with anxiety to the point where it became easier to check out emotionally than bear the brunt of crushing disappointment. these days, before every big event, the same feelings threaten to overwhelm me. the black dog sits by my side staring me down. the pattern is the same but now i have learnt to ride it (just about) and go through my pre-party rituals safe in the knowledge that this sensation will pass, in time. the clock ticks on and brings us closer to mission blast off—expectancy rises, heart beats faster, everything in place, check face in the mirror, music to get us in the swing, not long now, tick tock, tick tock. doorbell—we’re off! friends arrive, drinks flow, glasses chink together. laughter. stories. more laughter. sitting swapping tales together, catching up quickly as the time approaches when we leave the house and the time for talk will be over. taxi arrives. front door slams shut. cold night air—it’s not summer yet, remember. the heating’s on full in the cab as we race through the suburbs of leeds towards the west indian centre, a community centre a couple of miles north of the city but home tonight to one of the uk’s longest running psytrance nights, sunrise. we arrive, and       things       slow       down. i relax. the flat roofed, red brick building and its desolate car park that sits amidst the run down, urban sprawl of this industrial northern city is hardly awe inspiring and yet arriving at its doors never fails to excite. for what is contained within is extraordinary. sunrise is special. it’s a pulsating, diverse, underground world that opens its arms to anyone who wants to come along for the ride and sets itself apart from daily routine, convention and restriction. this is the north’s very own brand of psychedelic alchemy. it’s not a club where anything goes—far from it. this party has its own codes of courtesy, where people’s behaviour matters, where dancing is an expression of being part of a body of people who look out for each other. this is an event curated by a team of people who have nurtured this creation over the course of eighteen years. sunrise has come of age and we are here to celebrate. the first hour at sunrise is always magical and tonight is no different. it’s a whirlwind of greetings, hugs, hellos, smiles, catch-ups. familiar faces everywhere i look. the space, beautifully decorated with such attention to detail, setting the scene of our play as we begin to shed the stresses and strains of the week just past. this is our reimagining of the community centre, a psychedelic playground for over excited grown ups who want to kick loose—no wonder we don’t want to give this up any time soon! that’s not to say the party is populated only by people of “a certain age”. sunrise is truly intergenerational. you only need to do a quick scan of the crowd to see that. its commitment to moving forward and keeping things fresh is an ethos that keeps the youngsters coming through the door whilst the veterans renew their season ticket and cash in their frequent flier tokens. this place is my place. a deep breath in, a strong surge of belonging and a smile from ear to ear as i survey the dance floor from the raised spot at the back of the main room—a perfect vantage point from which to appreciate the network of friends that we see sporadically but in magnificent intensity. in this 9 hours we pack in a lot of living, squeezing as much out of these fleeting moments as we can before the morning air sucks us back outside and into our taxis. stop. don’t think that far ahead. come back to now. big claps on the back and heartfelt embraces that nearly squeeze the life out of me. a burst of conversation carried out quickly at the start of the night in the first flurry of reconnecting. not much in the words themselves, but lurking behind in the shadows, a whole tapestry of meaning, a shared story and a friendship that started on a dance floor some 6 years ago and takes another step forward every time we meet on this stage. no need to say more, not for now. and anyway, the tunes of mr chukkel drown us out and prevent us from going further. tonight we are here with new friends who have already become part of our story. they’re all seasoned party-goers but it’s been many years since they visited the west indian centre, or a club like it. without a minute’s hesitation two of them take to the dance floor with another staying back, watching from a distance as he tries to remember the times when he was in the thick of it all. the thrill of hearing that familiar sound transports the first two back to parties gone by and pulls them by an invisible uv thread skipping to the centre of the cavernous room like kids. arms raised, hips loose, smiles so wide that the years fall away. they look over their shoulders at me and we share a look that says, this feels like home. and before we know it, the night moves into its next phase. the music takes hold and the hours slip by as the event unfolds and the crowd meld together, constant motion that is raw energy at the front, and in the centre, where we all take our turn and put our shift in. the music drives us on and we drive the party. forwards and forever. this space, this time, our time. shining beams of light pick out fragments of faces and the night becomes pixelated, grasped as tiny chunks of information, and reassembled somewhere in another part of my brain. kaleidoscopic patterns break the night into a thousand colours that dance and swirl before my eyes, making me dizzy but enjoying the ride. tonight my skin is warm. my bare arms and shoulders feel the glow of the room, heat generated by dancing and laughing and moving together. i am utterly alone in my dance and, at the same time, bonded to the rest in rhythm and tempo and heart beat. tonight there is reason to dance. hard times require furious dancing, so the saying goes. close friends talk to me briefly about illness, diagnosis, recovery, relapse and the possibility of future tragedy that casts a long and constant shadow over day-to-day living. we share these stories fleetingly before losing ourselves back in the music, moving off with a wave of the hand before the emotion bubbles over and swamps us all. for some of us, this is why we are here, to wrap ourselves up in the warmth of a patchwork crowd as if it were a well worn and much loved blanket. we move to the music so that we don’t have to stop for more than a minute to remind ourselves of what lies waiting for us when reality bites and we bump back down to earth with some crumpled fliers in our pocket and a set of half formed memories. this is musical respite for some, a chance to be immersed in a world where talk is not the primary mode of communication, where we can let our bodies take over and tell us what to do. this is a place where we can take a holiday from ourselves, allowing music and dance to patch up our wounds before going back into battle again. i realise i’m staring into space. i’ve stopped smiling. a woman dancing near me catches my eye, throws her arms around me and hugs me hard. her touch is like a lightning bolt that powers straight through me. i wonder if she knows what precision timing energy she casts and how generous she is in the giving of it. i think about telling her but she is back to dancing, arms thrust straight into the air, eyes up to the ceiling and she is spinning with pure joy, like a child running down a steep hill squealing with delight as the momentum takes her feet. suddenly i’m restless. the noise and thrust of the full on psytrance in the main room becomes too much for me. the sheer volume of people oppresses me and the smell of sweating bodies is overpowering. so i set off in search of new tunes in the back room, the “multidimensional mashup” of the beats bizarre. the shift of gear to something altogether more funky makes me smile and i find my rhythm again. here the atmosphere is lighter, the music less industrial, the faces less fixed, the dancing less relentless. i’m happier here but can’t help feeling half of me has been left in the main room and i feel a constant pull, deep in my gut, back to the vortex next door. i stick with it for a while and, here in the beats bizarre, i jig around with old mates, share life histories with new ones and slot together the pieces of a friendship jigsaw that has been slowly forming in this place for over ten years. the set is never complete. there will always be missing pieces, some parts of the puzzle carry more meaning than others, but you can still make out the full picture if you squint hard enough. before i know it, it’s approaching 4 am and only two hours to go before the end. and so the slide into the third phase. a final chance to squeeze all i can into those last two hours. tired now but i need to experience all that is on offer as this particular sunrise marks the last indoor club night for us before the start of the festival season. with that thought, the outdoor beckons. i grab my coat and go in search of sustenance, a cup of sweet tea from the psychedelic breakfast, a covered marquee that sits in the yard outside offering a welcome chill out space for smokers, loungers and talkers. picking my way through the tangle of bodies, i find a bench to sit on and realise just how sore my feet are from endurance dancing over the past 6 hours. i rest and lean on my partner, chat to the friendly faces either side, hunt out lost tobacco for a stranger, snuggle into my coat and recharge my batteries ready for that final push through to dawn. when 6 o’clock strikes, i’m ready for home. the shutters are down. goodbyes are brief. we head out from the main room towards the front door and, like an unannounced house guest, the grey chill of the morning greets us. it’s daylight. i didn’t expect it but it marks a turning point in our party calendar. no more leaving a club in darkness. from now on we dance until daylight. thankfully, the taxi arrives in minutes to stop our shivers and, as we ride home in reverse order through the empty streets of sunday morning, i think about the story of our night, our motley patchwork of friendships brought together in this place once more to dance furiously for all our own reasons and none. and as we climb higher out of the city, there it is—the strongest, deepest, most orange sunrise over leeds you will ever see, the prize that reminds us momentous new beginnings happen every day. acknowledgements thanks to ed tangent and the rest of the sunrise crew for putting together such a special place for us to come together. gratitude to the staff at the west indian centre for keeping the door with such grace. thanks also to my friends for sharing the party with me and for letting me write about our experiences. you know who you are. author biography alice o’grady is associate professor in applied performance at the school of performance and cultural industries, university of leeds, uk. her specialism lies within the field of interactive performance, underground club cultures, festivals and play. she has worked on a number of collaborative, interdisciplinary projects that investigate varying modes of participation and engagement within a variety of social and playful contexts. she is section editor for dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture. where is duisburg? an lp postscript ronald hitzler technical university, dortmund sean nye university of minnesota <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.13> the love parade was both the first "techno parade" of its kind in europe, and the most famous, or notorious, techno parade over the course of its 21-year history. techno parades are a special form of festival. they consist of a caravan of trucks that drive through the main streets of a major metropolitan area; these trucks are equipped with sound systems, from which djs play electronic dance music (edm). the aesthetics of techno parades, while displaying raver or cyber imagery, borrow from the aesthetics and structures within the larger history of festival parades, such as pride parades and carnival. yet the love parade also became its own "original". the many techno parades that followed in the wake of the love parade, both parades within germany, such as generation move in hamburg and reincarnation in hannover, and internationally, such as the street parade in zürich and the techno parade in paris, borrowed extensively from the love parade's aesthetics and structures. the love parade thus became the symbolic originator of a specific form of edm party, primarily based in europe, that saw its rise in the 1990s and decline in the 2000s. the love parade began on a nice summer's day in the fortuitous year of 1989, just a few months before 9 november, the date when the berlin wall came down. its original site was along the kurfürstendamm, the main shopping street in west berlin. in germany, the love parade was established during the musical-historical crossroads following the 1987-88 acid house trend in west germany and prior to the early-90s techno-rave popular explosion in a newly united germany. its idea derived from dr. motte, a berlin acid house dj who wanted to have a free and open party on the streets where people could gather and "be themselves" through dance, fun and spectacle. approximately 150 partiers gathered on the kurfürstendamm in 1989 for an underground festival, demonstrating that year with the rather ironic slogan, "friede, freude, eierkuchen" (peace, love, pancakes). it was little expected during this inauspicious beginning that the parade would develop already by 1992 into the flagship event for the german techno scene. in this year, the regional edm scenes from across germany gathered at a single event for the first time: the love parade.[1] it grew rapidly from 15,000 participants in 1992 to 750,000 in 1996, which was the year the love parade transferred from the kurfürstendamm in west berlin to the straße des 17. juni, a major thoroughfare which, while still located in west berlin, led to the brandenburg gate, a monument along the former east-west border.[2] on the other side of the brandenburg gate, the thoroughfare continues in former east berlin as the famous unter den linden. this move to the former border reflected in urban geography the symbolic development of the parade into pop symbol of a newly united berlin and a newly united germany (nye 2009a). it eventually grew to become the largest techno festival in the world for a number of years, with a peak attendance of 1.5 million in 1999. it was even reputed to be the "symbol of a generation".[3] the berlin history of the love parade lasted between 1989 and 2006.[4] its period in the ruhr valley was considerably shorter (2007 to 2010), and, we know now, far more tragic. with a 21-year long history that ended in the deaths of 21 people and the injuring of hundreds more at the 2010 love parade, a shadow has been cast across the love parade's legacy. it now already stands in the popular imagination as exemplary for an annual event whose existence was perpetually in crisis and whose future was never certain, but which, in the end, lived beyond its time. like a badly scratched lp, the love parade played out for far too long. when the duisburg tragedy occurred on 24 july 2010 and the definitive cancelling of any future love parade was announced by its de facto owner, rainer schaller,[5] the wheels of interpretation began to roll on the love parade's ultimate meaning for our time. the legal procedures regarding accountability and criminal actions occurring around the panic in duisburg are still developing,[6] and we do not wish to participate in the deluge of accusations. as authors who have both experienced the love parade and lived in or visited the ruhr valley, we felt it incumbent to contribute an appropriate piece to this timely special issue that focuses on how the love parade came to a place called duisburg and our reception of the media and social institutions associated with the event during this year. this article is divided into three sections. we begin by offering a thorough introduction to the ruhr valley and the rhine-ruhr metropolitan region more generally. we explain the significance of both the ruhr to the love parade and of the love parade to the ruhr. second, we discuss the city of duisburg and its geographic, economic and cultural position within the ruhr and in germany. the investigation seeks to explain the interests involved in seeing duisburg host the love parade and the challenges that duisburg as a host city posed. this section includes our "eye-witness" accounts of the love parade duisburg. in this part, we split our authorship and focus on our respective reports of the love parade duisburg; an account by hitzler is given from backstage at the love parade duisburg itself, while nye reports from berlin about the "live" on-line streaming by the tabloid website bild.de during the love parade. we believe this split position will help explain the complexity of receiving this catastrophe in the current structures of "event" organization (gebhardt, hitzler and pfadenhauer, 2000), wireless media and breaking news. finally, we offer some conclusions regarding the love parade's history in the ruhr valley and incorporate further the sociological concept of "events" to contextualize the role that mass gatherings such as the love parade play in marketing cities and regions with cultural capital and tourism in the hopes of attracting investment and new talent. the turn of the ruhr for a variety of reasons, the history of the love parade in berlin had come to a definitive end. after 2006, a berlin love parade was no longer an option. the new organizer of the event, the lopavent gmbh, a "daughter" of the fitness chain mcfit, began to search for a new site. mcfit's owner, rainer schaller, had set up the lopavent after he bought the love parade name in 2006. thereafter, the love parade became an event organized by lopavent in order to promote the mcfit brand. as a new site, lopavent became attracted to the ruhr valley, an industrial region of germany and part of the greater "metropolitan region"[7] known as the "rhine-ruhr". the name "rhine-ruhr" refers to the rhine and ruhr rivers, around which the various cities of this region conglomerate. consisting of roughly 11 million people, the rhine-ruhr is unquestionably the largest metropolitan region in germany, roughly double the size of the berlin metropolitan region. however, this region poses different challenges to urban life since it is polycentric rather than monocentric. indeed, the rhine-ruhr consists of an extraordinary web of larger and smaller cities, with twisting and winding freeways and railroads. it is a metropolitan maze comparable to the polycentric los angeles metropolitan region, though there are considerable structural differences. figure 1. map of germany. shows the borders of germany's sixteen states and the locations of its eleven major metropolitan regions. region 1 is the berlin metropolitan region. region 9 is the rhine-ruhr metropolitan region. the rhine-ruhr is located in the state of north rhine-westphalia, highlighted in yellow. figure 2. rhine-ruhr metropolitan region. with regard to the distribution of resources in this region, düsseldorf (pop. 586,000) and cologne (pop. 998,000) are, respectively, the wealthiest and largest cities of the rhine-ruhr, with greater international profiles and more impressive cultural capital. this cultural legacy includes considerable postwar musical histories. düsseldorf boasts renowned electronic bands including kraftwerk and deutschamerikanische freundschaft, while cologne boasts an exceptional history that stretches from karlheinz stockhausen's elektronische musik to the label kompakt. the ruhr valley has a comparatively scarce musical tradition to promote itself, especially as regards electronic music. moreover, düsseldorf is the financial, telecommunications and fashion capital of the rhine-ruhr, while cologne is its insurance and media center, among others. in fact, düsseldorf is so wealthy that, since 2007, along with dresden, it has been the only major city in germany whose city government has no financial debt.[8] finally, and significantly, both cities have a population growth that has stabilized due to good possibilities for employment and quality of life. the prognostics for both their futures in terms of economics, culture and population also look bright. this leaves the other cities, many of considerable size, competing for both economic and cultural attention. as cities on the rhine, düsseldorf and cologne prove that of the rhine-ruhr, the rhine has had the dominant edge, especially in terms of cultural prestige, while the ruhr has usually had to play a supporting role. indeed, the ruhr cities have been beset by declining populations and struggling economies, with an average unemployment rate of 12 percent. figure 3. map of the ruhr valley yet the ruhr is also a considerable metropolitan area whose collective population is significantly larger than berlin: at roughly 7.5 million inhabitants versus greater berlin's 4.5 million inhabitants. moreover, the population of 7.5 million clearly shows that the ruhr holds the bulk of the population of the rhine-ruhr itself. along the ruhr, four primary city centers stretch out from west to east, around which smaller cities conglomerate: duisburg (pop. 490,000), essen (pop. 575,000), bochum (pop. 375,000) and dortmund (pop. 580,000). the other cities of note on the ruhr, in order of population, are gelsenkirchen (pop. 260,000), oberhausen (pop 210,000), hagen (pop. 190,000), hamm (pop. 180,000), mühlheim an der ruhr (pop. 165,000), and herne (pop. 165,000). as we shall see, gelsenkirchen assumed considerable importance in the context of the love parade. when the lopavent gmbh decided to move to the ruhr, it had to contend with a polycentric structure in which a city the size of gelsenkirchen could also assert its claim to hosting the love parade. gelsenkirchen was, indeed, successful during these negotiations. this structure, however, points to the benefits that the ruhr valley offered to the lopavent gmhh's plans for both transforming and securing the love parade's future. first, this polycentric region is so different in terms of structure from berlin that it required the love parade take place in various cities within the ruhr valley. it appeared more like a "travelling carnival" than a berlin parade. as a result, there would be little suspicion that the lopavent gmbh had been forced to leave berlin unwillingly and merely settle into the second-largest or third-largest city, etc. in germany (hamburg, munich, etc). the move to the ruhr valley thus appeared like a conscious decision to fundamentally transform the love parade into something radically new. second, the negotiations demonstrated that the managers from business, the media, politics and culture were quite interested in, indeed enthusiastic about, bringing the love parade to the ruhr valley. third, the ruhr region had already gained considerable cultural prestige because on 11 april 2006 the city of essen had been successfully nominated from a pool of 18 applicants as the "european capital of culture" for 2010. the nomination of essen was, in effect, the occasion for promoting the entire region as a "ruhr metropolis" of culture. by pooling their resources and embracing a marketing strategy of symbolic monocentrism, these cities might thus finally be able to trump the dominance of cologne and düsseldorf. finally, it seemed as though the "ruhrzeit"[9] had arrived. the idea that had now been manifested, "the ruhr metropolis", seemed to be the ideal surroundings for the love parade. however, as previously stated, the polycentric structure of the ruhr required that the love parade be constantly on the move. thus, a five-year plan was set up to both secure the cultural promotion of the ruhr valley and, finally, secure the future of the love parade. after all, the love parade had been in various stages of annual crisis regarding its future during its time in berlin. these crises included actual cancellations of the parade in 2004 and 2005, which almost terminated the event. the following cities were thus chosen as the future sites of the love parade: essen (2007), dortmund (2008), bochum (2009), duisburg (2010), and gelsenkirchen (2011). these plans were consciously made for the love parade to be an event that would garner anticipation and awareness for the grand-finale of the cultural year of "ruhr 2010". on 25 august 2007, with the certainty that "love is everywhere", the parade train's advance through "the ruhr metropolis" began: first in the cultural capital of essen. as had happened in previous years, the official figures of the love parade were shifted and exaggerated. indeed, with pressure for greater success and marketing sensations, the love parade figures became exaggerated to the point of systematic falsification during the ruhr years.[10] it reverberated in the media reports that approximately 1.2 million party people attended the love parade in essen (unofficial statistics of 400,000 are more reasonable). the "floats", also known as "love mobiles", headed through the city to the main rallying square. the closing party held at the extraordinary and prize-winning main stage helped to quickly banish the painful and longing memories for the parties at the berlin victory column (siegessäule), where the former love parades had taken place. by the end of the parade and the closing party in essen, all the worries that had been so prominent in the media—e.g., that the parade in the ruhr valley could be a quantitative disaster in terms of attendees, a qualitative debacle in terms of party organization, or that there would be either traffic chaos or street fights—proved unfounded. completely enthused by the precedent that essen established in 2007, the dortmund city authorities began to plan their own parade and to make the seemingly impossible possible once again: for the love parade 2008, the "highway of love", they blocked an entire section of the highway b1/a40. on the day of the event, the 19 july 2008, it was pouring rain. the start was delayed considerably, but when the parade finally began, a resounding sound-exhaust was emitted from the love trucks along the ruhr highway. the masses of partying people seemed endless, both on the freeway and in front of the two-story main stage. to top it off, a major player in dortmund city politics, ullrich sierau, who was elected mayor of dortmund just a year later, counted from his helicopter roughly the same number as was concluded by dortmund police: the love parade in dortmund had 1.6 million participants and had thereby achieved the all-time record for love parade participants. as with the previous year, this count later proved to be highly exaggerated. indeed, the count was suspiciously and conveniently 100,000 more than the record of 1.5 million set by the 1999 love parade. the pr announcements to be achieved with this estimate were obvious. whatever the actual number (later estimates claimed that it was "only" 500,000), the enthusiasm of the participants, ruhr authorities and lopavent gmbh was certainly boundless at this time. thus, everyone looked with anticipation toward bochum, which was to hold the love parade the following year, in 2009, as had been agreed in 2006. bochum seemed to be the logical continuation of what had already by this time become an established tradition of the love parade in the ruhr. however, the political bigwigs and cliques in the city of bochum demonstrated unexpectedly, and thus even more clearly and painfully, that there was no such thing as a "ruhr metropolis" in which there are collective interests. in january 2009, the announcement came that the love parade could not take place in bochum.[11] for many, the ruhr metropolis suddenly seemed to split apart again into its amalgam of 53 regional "ruhrgebietsgemeinden" (or ruhr valley municipalities). the polycentric structure apparently showed its ugly side. the case of bochum, according to the love parade protagonists, proved that the ruhr municipalities were nothing but groveling, self-absorbed, and unimaginative mini-centers. bochum knew about the love parade plans for three years; indeed, the city had insisted on a place in the five-year-plan of the love parade. however, just several months prior to the parade event, bochum concluded that its little downtown unfortunately could not handle the size of the love parade. the size of the train station and issues of safety were cited as primary concerns. it was at a point when the preparation by the lopavent gmbh had already been long set in motion. it proved too late to find an alternate site for the love parade in either essen, dortmund, or any other city in the ruhr. so just when it seemed the love parade's future had finally been secured with the five-year plan for the ruhr valley, the love parade 2009 was cancelled. for the numerous supporters of the love parade in the ruhr valley, including the organizers of the european cultural capital 2010 and those with a vision of the "ruhr metropolis", this blow was shocking, infuriating and viewed as the "bochum breach of promise" (bochumer wortbruch). thus, both the pressure on and thanks to the city of duisburg were considerable when the city confirmed it would carry out its "promise" to hold the love parade 2010, even though it also did not appear to have the capacity to handle the love parade. duisburg was immediately swept up by supportive and powerful interests, so that at least the ruhr valley would not suffer the disgrace of rejecting one of the largest pop festivals in europe during the very same year that the region was officially celebrated as the "cultural capital of europe". to do so would have confirmed the image of the "disgrace of renewed provincial self-aggrandizement" ("blamage erneuter provinzieller selbstüberschätzung"). in the following months, the organization, technical, logistical and financial wheels were set in motion to transform duisburg, in particular the ruins of the "duisburger güterbahnhof" (the duisburg depot). this large industrial field, about a mile south of the actual duisburg train station, was to be developed into a usable site for the "art of love", the love parade duisburg 2010. many observers and fans of the love parade were at first irritated that no actual parade was planned through the streets of the downtown itself—but rather, that a considerably reduced number of floats would drive in a circle around the massive industrial fields of the freight depot, which was itself to be fenced-in due to a range of security and technical reasons. in this structure, it appeared the love parade had devolved from badly scratched lp to a "stuck" lp, with the mere façade of a parade going around in circles. the official justification as to why a parade in the conventional sense was not possible was that the compact urban structure of duisburg did not allow for any other alternative. the güterbahnhof was the only site large enough to accommodate the love parade masses. duisburg's image and duisburg's tragedy after bochum, duisburg was both the smallest and least recognizable city that organizers had ever attempted to send the love parade caravan through. the compact urban structure and relative lack of administrative resources thus presented considerable challenges and new risks for the love parade. as had been indicated, the love parade went smoothly in the two "capitals" of the ruhr valley: essen and dortmund, each of which are comparable in size and population. in other words, if cologne and düsseldorf operate as capitals of the rhine-ruhr metropolitan region, then dortmund and essen function as the capitals of the ruhr valley itself. dortmund, especially, had by this time already developed a reputation for electronic music events that made its hosting of the love parade seem both logical and practical. since 1995, dortmund's westfalenhallen, or the westphalia halls, have hosted the oldest annual mega-rave in germany, the mayday. similarly, the electronic music festival juicy beats has occurred annually in the westfalenpark since 1996. indeed, both of these sites, the westfalenhallen and the westfalenpark, proved to be optimal places for after hour parties during the love parade 2008. duisburg, however, has been beset by considerable challenges. the entire region has suffered from a declining population since the respective ruhr cities reached their definitive heights in the early 1960s (recall that cologne and düsseldorf have stable and, indeed, growing populations). duisburg has been particularly hard hit. even with considerable redistricting, the city has had a shrinking population for decades: between 1961 and 1974 the city population declined from roughly 504,000 to 428,000 inhabitants. while the incorporation of surrounding metropolitan areas saw the official city total increase to 590,000 in 1974, this population declined to 490,000 by 2009. these struggles aside, the importance of duisburg as a logistic and industrial area should not be discounted. though it is arguably the antithesis of a tourist destination, it holds a considerably rich cultural and, especially, industrial, history. duisburg is the center of thyssen-krupp and was the top steel-producing city in the world until it was superseded by shanghai. situated at the confluence of the rhine and ruhr rivers, it also boasts the largest inland harbor in all of europe. the city's industrial heritage is further apparent in the landschaftspark-duisburg nord, one of the most beautiful industrial parks in europe and a center of cultural events and concerts. nevertheless, duisburg provided challenges not present in the larger cities of essen and dortmund, not to mention berlin. the love parade still had to prove it could function in a city the size and structure of duisburg. for a city with such economic and cultural challenges, it was also of utmost importance to duisburg that the love parade be successful. first, the event was a marketing platform in the effort to attract "youth culture" to the ageing city. second, there would be considerable economic profits to be gained from the thousands of "tourists" visiting a city that itself had little tourism industry to speak of. third, this event was to take place in the year of the ruhr 2010, which represented the opportunity for duisburg to become fully integrated into the new vision of a "ruhr metropolis", while proving that it could steal the spotlight from its larger and more prominent neighbors, essen and dortmund. thus, the pressures were great on all involved to see it as a success. in the early afternoon of the 24 july 2010, the arrival of the expected party masses began. shortly after 4 pm, there was an official announcement that 1.4 million visitors were expected at the love parade duisburg. it was an extraordinary triumph for the city and ruhr region. the realistic figures are now estimated at around 300,000; nevertheless, until the moment of the panic at approximately 4:40 pm, the jubilation of duisburg seemed readily apparent. what followed was a chaotic unfolding of events and reports that were deeply troubling, even traumatic, for all who were personally involved in some capacity. this video "documentation" by lopavent contains images of the location and timeline of the events leading up to the panic. however, the "documentation" should also be viewed in the knowledge that it serves lopavent's explicit legal interests of assigning the blame to the actions of the police.[12] at this point, the authors would like to split the narrative into the respective experiences and perspectives of hitzler and nye regarding the afternoon and evening of the love parade duisburg, 2010. as stated, the chaos of information and reporting that was to follow was disorienting, and we hope our respective reports convey something of both the human complexity and shock with which the day was received. hitzler's account as a sociologist of youth cultures, i have been researching the techno scene since 1995. i have visited the love parade every year since 1997. my contacts with the managerial staff evolved to the point where i had the privilege to observe the developments of the love parade from backstage over its many years of existence. my particular involvement with the love parade is derived from a special interest in the logistics, marketing and management involved in organizing mass events on the scale of the love parade. furthermore, as a professor located in the ruhr valley and with a special project, financed by the dfg (deutsche forschungsgemeinschaft, or german research foundation) to examine the developments of the "ruhr 2010", i had a special interest in the role that the love parade would play in the years leading up to the year of culture. the events in essen and dortmund in 2007 and 2008 i had followed with enthusiasm. at this time, i strongly believed that bringing the love parade to the ruhr valley had been the right decision. it appeared to have provided the needed economic benefits as well as popular and media interest to the ruhr that would prepare the region for a successful year of culture in 2010. i thus belonged to the interest groups in the ruhr valley who felt that the breach of promise by bochum in 2009 was a deeply unfortunate, even treacherous, blow to the ruhr valley's plans. when duisburg reaffirmed its commitment to the love parade, i must admit that i, like many, was thankful to the city administration that the popular event would be carried out during ruhr 2010. it seemed a crucial component to the evolving vision of the "ruhr metropolis". i thus arrived backstage in the morning of the 24 july to watch the organizational developments with great interest. i observed how the main stage and "south stage", located as far away as possible on the other side of the train depot, were organized and prepared. their locations were apparently designed to "equalize" the expected crowds across the entirety of the festival grounds. the stages included the elaborate light shows and sound systems that lopavent gmbh had become famous for. nevertheless, it struck me how the site of the train depot was completely different from anything i had observed before at the love parade. something entirely new was being attempted here, since there was no traditional parade through the main streets or traditional split between parade and main stage. though the fields around the train depot had been appropriately prepared, the entire site was clearly a rather bleak industrial ruin that was not nearly as inviting as former love parades. during the initial hours backstage, i observed the partying masses arrive, yet at no time did i notice that the festival grounds were over capacity. the plan to use the two stages to distribute the crowd seemed to be working fine. i remained backstage at the main stage throughout the course of the day. however, there was no visual evidence from where we were located of the crisis occurring at the main entrance. this entrance was located on the other side of the party grounds. it was only from journalist's video footage and reports from visitors that i could observe and draw conclusions about what had happened in the main entrance to the love parade grounds. these films and reports showed that a "turbulent stampede" had developed in the place where visitors were either trying to enter and leave. in this main entrance at around 4:40 pm, panic broke out, claiming the first victims. from my position backstage, the information received was chaotic. at the facilities where the djs, staff and organization were stationed (including the many people who worked in supportive capacities), the first reports came at 5:45 pm. these took the form of questions via cell phones to people backstage regarding what had happened. these inquiries came from friends and colleagues who were either watching the news on television or reading via the internet, where the first reports emerged in the form of "breaking news". this was the first information of any kind that came backstage. at around 6:15 pm the staff found out, again entirely via cell phone contacts, that reports of deaths just 200 meters away had been confirmed. the first impulse of most people at hearing this news was to immediately turn off the music and end the party. however, a crisis management group in an office at another part of the city sent an immediate message stating that the music on the festival grounds must continue in order to prevent another mass panic. the situation backstage, which continued until 11 pm, was, in my observations, extremely distressing for all involved. the knowledge that in front of the stage there were masses of probably unsuspecting "ravers" who just wanted to dance and party, while just two hundred meters away there were numerous dead and injured who needed care, marked the faces of those involved with horror, shock and despair. some djs and musicians broke into tears. many djs declared that they were not in any capacity to play music. others spontaneously declared themselves ready to help, so that the party could end in some sense in peace and order. staff members did their best to keep the many technical problems under control. they improvised professionally in reaction to the constantly changing information. necessary changes included quickly altering the line-up based on the remaining djs who could play. according to reports from colleagues, the situation at the "south" stage was beset with similar distress and shock for both the musicians and staff. however, there was enormous relief for both stages when the crisis management teams finally agreed, over five hours after the stampede, that the music could be turned off. nye's account in my berlin apartment, i observed developments primarily from a "live" video stream and news updates from europe's largest tabloid newspaper, bild.[13] these were broadcasted and posted on their official website, bild.de. the live-steaming show was planned for three hours, starting at 3 pm and ending at 6 pm and hosted by comedian oliver pocher and moderator sandy meyer-wölden. bild was an official media partner of the love parade, and it already declared proudly on 17 june: "bild.de broadcasts the biggest techno-party in the world!"[14] in fact, though i was considering attending the love parade, i became quite concerned and cynical regarding this latest media partnership by the love parade with bild, which is germany's most notorious tabloid newspaper. with no idea as to how the day would unfold, i decided to observe the love parade through how bild presented it. as a media partner, there were no critical reports from bild on possible safety issues prior to the love parade; bild's job was to encourage as many readers as possible to visit the party. this included a series of reports that doubled as advertisements, in which bild declared itself the celebratory presenter of the love parade party. bild's image of the love parade included a long series of cheap photographs in which the techno party essentially consisted of women with exposed breasts, which is consistent with bild's tradition as a soft-porn tabloid newspaper.[15] it also included such strange events as an exciting "meet and greet" with a boxing champion.[16] these reports were eventually collected by bild.de into a special feature page of the love parade that doubled as a soft-porn site, which again was plastered with as many photos of topless female ravers that bild.de could gather. it declared proudly, "bild.de presents the love parade!" and included announcements like, "the love parade is this wild!" as the 3-hours of planned live streaming commenced, bild again declared itself a proud "presenter" of the love parade. ironic poses by host oliver pocher followed, which freely acknowledged that any tradition left of "love" or devotion to music at the event was not to be taken seriously. the interviews that followed showed djs and sponsors happy to have a career opportunity that, at the very least, could bring important economic benefits to duisburg, but which had little substantive meaning beyond this. this was demonstrated especially when the head of mcfit and lopavent gmbh, rainer schaller, and the mayor of duisburg, adolf sauerland, were interviewed. this interview was heartening to the extent that it showed two individuals who had worked a great deal to bring the love parade to duisburg, and all the painful compromises and bad taste left aside (including the partnership with bild.de), one could celebrate that a city with major troubles would take considerable benefits from the event. this interview took place just minutes prior to the tragedies that were to follow. in the course of the tragedies, i observed with considerable shock the impressive tactics that bild.de used to distance itself from the events. once the panic occurred, the reports from oliver pocher and sandy meyer-wöldern, or any other commentator, suddenly ended. the live streaming of the love parade music, with camera shots mostly from the main stage, continued until the planned 6 pm end, but with no explanation or commentary as to what was unfolding. within the next hour, i followed how the online presence of bild.de was completely transformed from media partner to investigative reporter. within minutes of the live-streaming ending at 6 pm, bild's first official report came at 6:07pm: "deaths from a mass panic; dozens of ravers injured".[17] the exclusive page of "bild.de presents!" that included the soft-porn images was immediately closed and all celebratory articles of the love parade "archived" so that now, anyone who came to bild.de's website would have to make a considerable search to even know that, just hours prior, bild.de has been an official media partner. in this sense, bild.de presented the brutal logic of tabloid reporting in its most pure form; in short, all events are strictly understood as sensations. the sensation was originally supposed to be the love parade as a decadent festival presented by bild.de, but now bild.de realized the sensation to be reported had shifted to the catastrophe. a rapid series of reports on the stampede followed with graphic images, and these reports were quickly assembled by bild.de to become its new feature page on the love parade, which can still be viewed today: "mass panic and deaths in duisburg: the love parade drama: all the info, all the pictures, all the videos".[18] from a tabloid partner who never investigated safety issues, bild.de turned to moralistic accuser: "city, organizers, police: you all made mistakes".[19] the english version of bild now includes their harsh, "investigative" report of rainer schaller, "love parade boss grilled by bild", in which bild's first two questions are: "can you still sleep well?" and "did you neglect safety over greed?"[20] this followed with sensationalist reports of sadness: "the sorrow still tears at our hearts".[21] to be sure, bild was not the only outlet with questionable media practices following the parade. other media platforms during the days that followed included repeated images of duisburg-mayor sauerland and loveparade-organizer schaller, with videos of them often put in slow motion. this had an effect of simplifying and personalizing the guilt, as was argued by christian schicha in an interview with the taz.[22] i must admit that i have never witnessed anything like bild.de's transformation from trashy media partner to exploitative catastrophe reporter. it represented for me a symbol of the horrible compromises and partnerships that the love parade had made in previous years. in short, i saw the tragedy on, unfortunately, a manifold level: a tragedy of meaningless loss of life which was set in the context of media and market systems that had already eliminated nearly all senses of human dignity, praising the party while ironically objectifying and implicitly ridiculing and cheapening all involved. fortunately, this was not without consequences for bild. approximately 140 official complaints were reported to the journalistic council (presserat) following the love parade catastrophe; only three of these were not directed at bild.[23] the love parade and the vision of a "ruhr metropolis" the catastrophe of such a horrible and prematurely (or alternatively, far too late) end to the "history" of the love parade in the ruhr valley has already resulted in a plethora of interpretations. it was later linked by many, including the original founder of the love parade, dr. motte,[24] to the gradual distancing of a cult-event from its original "idealistic" implications and connotations. it was transformed and reorganized to suite the complex "materialistic" calculations of entrepreneurs, media organizations and city politicians. for those who remained committed to the love parade's future, this appeared to be the only alternative. at the same time, these compromises meant the end of the love parade as it has been originally conceived. the primary aim of the love parade in the ruhr valley was to economically benefit the respective cities and the mcfit fitness chain, while promoting the notion of the "ruhr metropolis". in 2007 and 2008, and into the late afternoon of the 24 july 2010, the love parade had been the exemplary pop event representing this vision of the "ruhr metropolis". this vision utilized the conception of the love parade, following its internationalization in 2001, as an event mounted in premier global metropoles around the world (berlin, mexico city, santiago de chile, tel aviv, vienna, capetown, san francisco). the love parade had, indeed, taken place on different urban stretches and in different cities through the ruhr valley. this history brought many observers, even those who had nothing to do with the love parade, into contact with the vision of the "ruhr-metropolis". however, the ruhr city officials and media organizations were also fooling themselves if they believed that the love parade would bring the ruhr valley the cultural capital and prestige it desired. unfortunately for the ruhr, the love parade's move to the ruhr valley was at once an economic benefit and a cultural liability. the cultural prestige of the love parade had already more than run its course by the time the ruhr valley was able to host it. in fact, that the ruhr valley wished to host the parade would only increase charges of provinciality, since the event, by then, had become the object of ridicule among large segments of the so-called "creative classes". yet the love parade, all criticisms aside, remained one of the few mass events of such social-political dimensions, and arguably the only techno event, that was seen to represent an entire community (whether city, region or nation) and with it an entire generation. that it became representative of the "techno scene", especially in germany, during the 1990s was both its achievement and its scourge. along with the raving masses flowed massive finances into the cities the love parade passed through. this was the case not just for the berlin love parades, but for the love parades that took place in the ruhr valley and across the world. with its extraordinary media presence, the love parade was seen as a champion for these various cities. thus, even the most egregious media representations and partnerships, as nye describes in the experience of bild, were seen as a necessary price to ensure the masses continued to flow to the parade and to maintain the necessary attention for the ruhr valley in its build up to the grand vision of the cultural capital of europe, "ruhr 2010". one does not need to be involved in techno to comprehend what an immense role the love parade played for the ruhr valley. one should also consider what role it could have had in the mission of transforming the region into the globally-relevant "ruhr metropolis" had the love parade not ended in catastrophe. from the very beginning of the love parade's ruhr history, the organizers of the event clearly communicated that it was the economic benefits and media attention that the parade provided which were the main criteria in the decisions regarding the parade's future. musically, it remained a "techno event" to the extent that edm remained the only music played. the musical representatives included not only star djs but local djs, who usually played music from the "love mobiles". yet the music continued to be edm only as long as the visitor numbers remained impressive. many branches of the techno scene no longer identified the love parade as a relevant symbol of "techno" in germany or europe by the time it moved to the ruhr. media attention became focused on berlin club culture and its new international scene of "easyjetset" tourism as the most important and relevant developments of techno culture in the 2000s (rapp 2009; see nye 2009b). with the capital city's media relevance in germany, major techno magazines located in berlin, primarily groove and de:bug, had virtually no reports on the love parade following 2003, while other major techno magazines, such as the rhine-ruhr-based raveline, continued to feature the love parade prominently. the love parade was an event with far greater potential for visitors than the "techno scene" offered. indeed, in virtually every economic aspect and media practice, the love parade had been transformed into a "public event". to be sure, aside from its early period (1989 to 1992), the love parade had always been a "public event". it transformed within a few short years from a totally unobserved, small and alternative techno parade to a mass event that was reported the world over, both months prior to and months after the actual day of the event. even if it changed its motto each year, it kept its basic neoliberal idea: individuals from all corners of the world gather in a single place to party, dance and have "fun". the only limitation was that the dancing was to a specific type of music. this propagated an utterly universal sense of what a "participant" at this event could be. the love parade charged no entrance fee and had no door policy. in this sense, it was in its conception a "public event" in a truly fundamentalist form, although it maintained important links to the techno scene. for example, in berlin, there was always a "love week" of techno events that accompanied the love parade. this week attracted considerable financial rewards for the local techno clubs and promoters. in its later years, a gradual alienation occurred between the love parade and the techno scene. this alienation happened even to the pop branch of the berlin techno scene, in particular when the original owners and representatives of the event, which included dr. motte and westbam, finally sold the organization and its name to mcfit. dr. motte, the founder of the love parade, even transformed into one of its most outspoken and controversial critics. the love parade became an event supported by strong economic and political interests connected to the ruhr valley in particular, who were interested in establishing a future ruhr culture aimed at 2010, and beyond. it was also clearly servicing the business interests of its "sponsor" and de facto owner, the fitness-chain mcfit. for mcfit, the love parade was a marketing event with multiple aspects. it appeared perfectly suited for the chain—combining the twin-functionality of edm as a music for rave freaks and fitness freaks—while offering the "normal masses" some relaxing summer fun. this aura of the love parade deceived those who were the protagonists and sympathizers of the event. since the catastrophe, in which 21 people died, the question of the love parade's deceptive aura has been heightened to included issues of self-deception in relation to both moral and legal responsibility. this deception was carried forth in the casual trust that, with a juvenile thrill for risk-taking, the protagonists and organizers thought that all organizational, logistic and security issues regarding the parade would somehow take care of themselves. still, for 21 years and 23 days, it seemed almost miraculous that an annual event of this size could be carried out without a hitch. but now the unspeakable has occurred. many are now realizing that something of this magnitude could have happened at past love parades. ultimately, it was the transformation of the love parade into a "travelling carnival" that posed new risks. the promise of constant geographic novelty meant that the love parade would be mounted upon untested grounds and sites every single year. for an event of this size, this presented challenges with logistical planning which, in the end, resulted in grave mistakes at the love parade duisburg. the moral and legal responsibilities of the parties involved are currently being processed and discussed by the courts, in the press and among individual citizens, and recriminations will likely continue for the foreseeable future. and so on? placed in the larger context of popular culture at the turn of the millennium, the love parade should be considered within the structure of "events". an event, understood sociologically, pertains to social gatherings that are systematically marketed as necessary for people to attend in order to have a unique "experience". entertainment industries, of which the love parade is a part, offer an "experience" consisting of profane "fun" that is marketed as self-expression free from specific rituals and political ties (gebhardt 2000). mass events like the love parade also operate on a double marketing strategy of connecting to specific scenes and traditions while promising the event will be a unique experience for all (consider the 2000 motto "one world, one loveparade). in whatever way the event is marketed, it is "not to be missed". cities and regions thus view events as ideal ways in which to attract both media attention and visitors. at mass events, there is always the potential that panic or other catastrophes can occur. a catastrophe on the scale of duisburg might lead one to expect major changes in event planning. after all, the trust that city and local authorities place in events would be shaken, especially the assumption that events are the best option for promoting economic growth and cultural attention. however, it is likely that the only changes the duisburg tragedy will cause in the near future are that the general security and organizational measures for future events will be tightened. while the love parade has been canceled, techno parades of similar size continue, such as the street parade in zürich. new forms of events will surely arise since the techno parade as a popular event in europe has declined throughout the 2000s. for officials and local authorities, mass events appear to remain the only alternative because every-day-life in late modern society has already become "eventized". indeed, eventization has turned into a routine aspect of modernity similar to pluralization (berger and luckmann 1995), individualization (beck and beck-gernsheim 2002), optionalization (gross 1994), commercialization (prisching 2006), globalization (beck 2007) and mediatization (krotz 2007). eventization is, in other words, the strongest manifestation of what the bamberg sociologist gerhard schulze has called our "experience rationality" (schulze 1992), and which he later analyzes under the notion of an "event culture" (schulze 1999). in the german context, this has led to repeated critiques against the perceived problem of the hedonist "fun-society" (spaßgesellschaft) (hepp and vogelsang 2003). these critiques against the amoral sale and consumption of abstract "fun" arise, however, within a context in which events are the primary basis by which cities and regions market their worth and quality of life to their customer-citizens. this "experience rationality" even continues to function both during and after catastrophes. with catastrophes, and the media presentation of the catastrophe of duisburg has been yet another exemplary case, the catastrophe becomes something to "experience" as with bild's "drama" page that promises: "all the infos; all the pictures; all the videos". through images and commentary, it will become a tragic event. as has already been shown, the rapid shift of the bild newspaper from media partner to investigative reporter follows the brutal logic of events, which in this case are strictly defined as sensations. the love parade itself, especially in its later history in berlin and both in its internationalization and transfer to the ruhr, followed this brutal logic. it defined its event as the most general notion of "fun" that can be offered to anyone at anywhere at anytime. we apply this "logic" of the cultural autonomy of eventization to the love parade. in other contexts outside of the academy, the logic of eventization is itself wrestled with in the assigning of guilt for the love parade catastrophe. for example, techno protagonists are calling to bring the event back "into the scene" and revive its "authentic spirit".[25] some of these arguments, which include elements of blatant berlin elitism, blame the ruhr region, and duisburg in particular, for ruining the love parade "spirit". in contrast, those with little sympathy for the techno scene express different ideals regarding the return of an "authentic spirit". for example, domradio (cathedral radio) in cologne, reported on the world youth day in cologne, which had 400,000 participants, with the following moralistic tone: "experts gave the organization of the cologne cathedral their praise for doing an excellent job—considering the dead and injured at the duisburg 'love parade', this can't be taken for granted". they even stated that the organizers and participants should continue to put "values into the character of their events".[26] still others, concerned with the future of the ruhr more than the future or moral judgment of the love parade, such as the westdeutsche allgemeine zeitung, report, "the dead in the ruhr valley are to be mourned, but also the [european] capital of culture has to suffer with this. it will never again be able to celebrate so joyously like it did on the highway a40. the main task now for the region is to recreate itself anew. therefore, the culture festival has to continue: somber and grieving. but devoted to life. the ruhr valley can do it" (norbisrath 2010). the love parade has been banned; however, the logic of eventization continues. for cities that continue to suffer debt and economic challenges, such as duisburg, the lure of the event's promise feels like the only option—for better or for worse. author biographies ronald hitzler is professor of sociology at the technical university, dortmund. he studied sociology, political science, and philosophy at the university of konstanz and later researched at the universities of konstanz, bamberg, cologne and munich. his research specializes in youth scenes, events and the marketing of cities, as well as the sociology of culture and modernization as a "problem of management". his books include a co-edited volume with micheala pfadenhauer on the techno scene: techno-soziologie: erkundungen einer jugendkultur (leske + budrich, 2001) (techno sociology: investigations of a youth culture) and more recently, the third-revised edition, co-authored with arne niederbacher, of leben in szenen: formen juveniler vergemeinschaftung heute (vs-verlag, 2010) (living in scenes: current forms of juvenile socialization). sean nye is a phd-student in the comparative studies in discourse and society program at the university of minnesota, twin cities. he has been a daad-scholar at the humboldt university, berlin and a fellow of the berlin program for advanced german and european studies at the free university, berlin. his dissertation project concerns constructions of german identity in electronic music between 1968 and 2009. his articles, reviews, and translations have appeared in dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture, new literary critique, cultural critique, journal der jugendkulturen, and echo: a music-centered journal. the authors have spent time together experiencing and researching the love parade in berlin 2003 and in dortmund 2008. hitzler has personally experienced every love parade since 1997, and nye, who attended parades in 2003 and 2008, first visited the love parade in 1999. references beck, ulrich. 1999. what is globalization? cambridge: polity press. beck, ulrich & elisabeth berk-gernsheim. 2002. individualization. london: sage. berger, peter l. & thomas luckmann. 1995. modernity, pluralism, and the crisis of meaning: the orientation of modern man. gütersloh: bertelsmann. beyer, susanne, nikolaus von festenberg, & reinhard mohr. 1999. "die jungen milden." der spiegel, 12 july: 94-7, 101, 103. <http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13950835.html> (accessed 4 february 2011). gebhardt, winfried, ronald hitzler, & michaela pfadenhauer (eds). 2000. events: soziologie des außergewöhnlichen. opladen: leske + budrich. gebhardt, winfried. 2000. "feste, feiern und events: zur soziologie des außergewöhnlichen." in winfried gebhardt, ronald hitzler, & michaela pfadenhauer (eds), events: soziologie des außergewöhnlichen, pp. 17-31. opladen: leske + budrich. gross, peter. 1994. die multioptionsgesellschaft. frankfurt a.m.: suhrkamp, hepp, andreas & waldemar vogelgesang. 2003. populäre events: medienevents, spielevents, spaßevents. opladen: leske + budrich. krotz, friedrich. 2007. mediatisierung: fallsstudien zum wandel von kommunikation. wiesbaden: vs. meyer, erik. 2001. "zwischen parties, paraden und protest." in ronald hitzler and michaela pfadenhauer (eds), techno-soziologie: erkundungen einer jugendkultur, pp. 51-68. opladen: leske + budrich. norbisrath, gudrun. 2010. "ruhr 2010 nach der loveparade—gedämpftes fest". westdeutsche allgemeine zeitung, 4 sept. <http://www.fair-news.de/news/waz+ruhr+2010+nach+der+loveparade++gedaempftes+fest++kommentar+von+gudrun+norbisrath-121938.html> (accessed 4 february 2011). novy, tom. 2010. "novys shattenwelt." raveline. 209, august: 5. nye, sean. 2009a. "love parade, please not again: a berlin cultural history". echo: a music-centered journal. 9 (1): <http://www.echo.ucla.edu/volume9-issue1/nye/nye1.html> (accessed 4 february 2011). ———. 2009b. review of lost and sound: berlin, techno, und der easyjetset. in dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture. 1(1): 144-6. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.12> (accessed 4 february 2011). prisching, manfred. 2006. die zweidimensionale gesellschaft. wiesbaden: vs. rapp, tobias. 2009. berlin, techno, und der easyjetset. frankfurt a.m.: suhrkamp. schäfer, sven. 2010. "lovepar-adé?" raveline. 209, august: 5. schulze, gerhard. 1992. die erlebnisgesellschaft. frankfurt a.m. and new york: campus. ———. 1999. kulissen des glücks. streifzüge durch die eventkultur. frankfurt a.m. and new york: campus. filmography loveparade. 2003. loveparade: masses in motion. germany: bmg (ariola media gmbh). sextro, maren and holger wick. 2008. we call it techno: a documentary about germany's early techno scene and culture. germany: sense music and media. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1698597> notes [1] a thorough documentary of the early developments of the german techno scene exists. it includes vintage film footage and music (see sextro and wick 2008). [2] for images and interviews regarding the development of the love parade over this period, see bmg (2003). [3] see the german magazine der spiegel's feature article (beyer, von festenberg and mohr 1999) in an issue with the title of "die 99er: jugend der jahrtausendwende" (the 99ers: youth at the turn of the millennium). the article discusses the love parade as a symbol of "generation 99". both the cover of the issue and the article, which is available as a pdf download in the link provided in the references, feature images from the love parade. [4] for an account of the love parade's berlin history, as well as the role it played in berlin cultural and musical life, see nye (2009a) and meyer (2001). for images and interviews, see bmg (2003). [5] <http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,708525,00.html> (accessed 4 february 2011). [6] <http://www.badische-zeitung.de/panorama/loveparade-katastrophe-16-personen-im-visier--40204959.html> (accessed 4 february 2011). [7] the metropolitan region is a designation for urban planning purposes applied in germany to 11 regions that contain the most significant cities in germany. see the following site: <http://www.deutsche-metropolregionen.org> (accessed 28 january 2011) or the page on wikipedia, which contains an appropriate overview: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/metropolitan_regions_in_germany> (accessed 28 january 2011). [8] <http://www.rp-online.de/wirtschaft/news/duesseldorf-die-schuldenfreie-landeshauptstadt_aid_478973.html> (accessed 28 january 2011). [9] "ruhrzeit" means "ruhr time", which is a variation on "uhrzeit", or "clock time". [10] <http://www.rp-online.de/niederrheinnord/duisburg/loveparade/alle-loveparade-zahlen-gefaelscht_aid_887726.html> (accessed 4 february 2011). a 34-page report was released following the duisburg catastrophe that officially acknowledged the systematic exaggeration of visitor results during the ruhr years of the love parade. [11] <http://www.derwesten.de/staedte/bochum/loveparade-in-bochum-abgesagt-id1345976.html> (accessed 4 february 2011). [12] for more information on lopavent's official position regarding the course of events, see <http://www.dokumentation-loveparade.com/english/> (accessed 10 february 2011). [13] bild's history and political-social role in german and european popular culture is long, complicated and notorious. in an academic-literary context, it is best known for the heated conflict it was engaged in with nobel-prize winning author, heinrich böll, who published a scathing satire of bild in his novel, the lost honor of katharina blum (1974). [14] <http://www.bild.de/bild/unterhaltung/topics/loveparade/2010/06/17/techno-party-loveparade-2010/bild-de-uebertragt-live-aus-duisburg-oliver-pocher.html> (accessed 4 february 2011). [15] <http://www.bild.de/bild/regional/ruhrgebiet/aktuell/2010/04/16/innen-ministerium-gibt-gruenes-licht-fuer/die-loveparade-in-duisburg.html> (accessed 4 february 2011). [16] <http://www.bild.de/bild/unterhaltung/topics/loveparade/2010/07/12/loveparade/einsendungen-foto-wettbewerb-wladimir-klitschko-treffen.html> (accessed 4 february 2011). [17] <http://www.bild.de/bild/news/2010/07/24/love-parade-tote/und-verletzte-bei-massenpanik.html> (accessed 4 february 2011). [18] <http://www.bild.de/bild/news/topics/loveparade/duisburg-massenpanik-tote-verletzte.html> (accessed 4 february 2011). one can still see a trace of this former, exclusive site on the page in which bild announces the media partnership linked in endnote 14. there is a link with an image of two women kissing each other and the statement: "all the info for the love parade 2010". however, it now leads to the catastrophe site. [19] <http://www.bild.de/bild/news/2010/08/01/loveparade-stadt/veranstalter-polizei-schuld-duisburg.html> (accessed 4 february 2011). [20] <http://www.bild.de/bild/news/bild-english/world-news/2010/07/28/love-parade-boss-grilled-by-bild/rainer-schaller-we-fulfilled-all-obligations-100-per-cent.html> (accessed 4 february 2011). [21] <http://www.bild.de/bild/news/2010/08/02/loveparade-duisburg-trauer/zerreisst-uns-immer-noch-das-herz.html> (accessed 4 february 2011). [22] <http://www.taz.de/1/leben/medien/artikel/1/so-entsteht-regelrechter-hass/> (accessed 4 february 2011). [23] <http://www.sueddeutsche.de/medien/loveparade-fall-fuer-presserat-bild-des-grauens-proteste-gegen-presse-1.980328> (accessed 4 february 2011). [24] <http://www.thelocal.de/national/20100725-28727.html> (accessed 4 february 2011). [25] for examples of such calls, see the commentaries in the techno magazine raveline (novy 2010; schäfer 2010). [26] <http://www.domradio.de/includesdev/eactions/eactions_print.asp?id=66617> (accessed 4 february 2011). ethnoforgery and outsider afrofuturism dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 5(2): 88–112 issn 1947-5403 ©2013 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.02.05 ethnoforgery and outsider afrofuturism trace reddell university of denver (us) abstract this essay detours from afrofuturism proper into ethnological forgery and outsider practices, foregrounding the issues of authenticity, authorship and identity which measure afrofuturism’s ongoing relevance to technocultural conditions and the globally-scaled speculative imagination. the ethnological forgeries of the german rock group can, the work of david byrne and brian eno, and trumpeter jon hassell’s fourth world volumes posit an “hybridity-at-the-origin” of afrofuturism that deconstructs racial myths of identity and appropriation/exploitation. the self-reflective and critical nature of these projects foregrounds issues of origination through production strategies that combine ethnic instrumentation and techniques, voices sampled from radio and tv broadcast, and genre-mashing hybrids of rock and funk along with unconventional styles like ambient drone, minimalism, noise, free jazz, field recordings, and musique concrète. with original recordings and major statements of afrofuturist theory in mind, i orchestrate a deliberately ill-fitting mixture of slavoj žižek’s critique of multiculturalism, félix guattari’s concept of “polyphonic subjectivity,” and marcus boon’s idea of shamanic “ethnopsychedelic montage” in order to argue for an outsider afrofuturism that works along the lines of an alternative modernity at the seam of subject identity and technocultural hybridization. in tune with the fatherless sensibilities that first united black youth in detroit (funk, techno) and the bronx (hip-hop) with germany’s post-wwii generation (can’s krautrock, kraftwerk’s electro), outsider afrofuturism opens up alternative routes toward understanding subjectivity and culture—through speculative sonic practices in particular—while maintaining social behaviors that reject multiculturalism’s artificial paternal origins, boundaries and lineages. keywords: afrofuturism; ethnoforgery; outsider music; appropriation; technoculture; multiculturalism; speculative imagination feature article reddell | ethnoforgery and outsider afrofuturism 89 trace reddell is a writer, theorist and artist exploring the interactions of sound and the cosmological imagination. his publications include articles in leonardo music journal, the contemporary music review, the electronic book review, cybersounds: essays on virtual music culture (peter lang publishing, 2006), “cyborg ritual and sentic technology in the vortex concerts” in the poetics of space: spatial explorations in art, science, music & technology (sonic acts press, paradiso, 2010). his first book, sonic science fiction, is forthcoming from the university of minnesota press. trace is an associate professor at the university of denver, where he teaches in the emergent digital practices program. unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness. . . . such a lot the gods gave to me—to me, the dazed, the disappointed; the barren, the broken. and yet i am strangely content and cling desperately to those sere memories, when my mind momentarily threatens to reach beyond to the other. —h. p. lovecraft, “the outsider”, weird tales, april 1926 i’d say that anything i’m doing is simply my misunderstanding of black music. —brian eno, sounds, 7th march 1981 the story of ethnoforgery in popular music is full of imitations, re-creations, studies and rip-offs that trace the troubled history of so-called race relations in popular music. elvis presley, robert plant, george harrison, eminem and michael jackson are some of the more high-profile cases that have all been charged with ethnological forgery of one sort or another. these popular identities exist on the threshold of sonic expression and racial coding, and they are often described as violators of race-based assumptions about what the proper place is, and who the proper person, for which proper and appropriate sonic behaviors. ethnological forgery suggests an extreme end of the scale by which we might measure how different cultures borrow the stuff of sounds and music from each other. this “stuff ” could include anything from unique vocal styles, dialects, accents or other languages altogether, to particular instruments, compositional practices, performance styles, or studio production and sound engineering techniques. what makes the forgery a forgery is the degree to which the fake claims its authenticity and whether it attempts to pass as a legitimate documentation or representation of another culture; the forgery fails to earn that distinction of authenticity because of a fundamental dispute over authorship. i begin with questions of authenticity, authorship and race to get at some of the problems surrounding the kind of racial identification of music and sound cultures that tend to shape conceptualizations of afrofuturism. a typical playlist would consist of selections from first generation musicians like sun ra, parliament and funkadelic, lee “scratch” perry and scientist; second generation cuts from tricky, cybotron, larry heard, a guy called gerald, dancecult 5(2)90 afrika bambaataa, jeff mills and juan atkins; and more contemporary tracks from dbridge, the spaceape, hydroponic sound system, sbtrkt, heavyweight dub champion, and janelle monae. this consigns afrofuturism to history, treating it as evidence of a specific cultural moment, a phase that black musicians went through and continue to go through with varying levels of awareness of their own lineage. but what if we add to our playlist a few misfits typically absent from the afrofuturist discography? these could include the “ethnological forgeries” of the german experimental rock group can; the independent work of david byrne and brian eno, and their work with the talking heads; trumpeter jon hassell’s fourth world volumes; the first wave of uk dub by adrian sherwood (creation rebel, dub syndicate) and richard h. kirk’s deeply dub-inflected sandoz albums; and ambient dub and dubstep cuts from noiseshaper, beat pharmacy, kode9 and burial. should these artists also be classified as afrofuturist (a category that has mostly come down to the cataloging of black musicians) simply by their adoption of afrofuturist themes and sonic signifiers? this may make the more salient features of afrofuturism so ubiquitous that it becomes a pointless signifier, subsequently losing its effectiveness as both a meme (a mutating genetic-like structure for transfer of ideas, styles, slang, etc.) and a trope (a pose that can be mobilized, affected, turned on, dropped, and so on). this playlist expansion prompts us to consider whether afrofuturism can include works and artists influenced by africa though not of african descent, and if so, are these artists properly afrofuturist or part of what we might call an outsider afrofuturism? and could the existence of such outsider practices shape our understanding of afrofuturism in new ways, particularly regarding the roles that africa might play in a globally-scaled speculative imagination? at stake are the ways in which their inclusion problematizes the afrofuturist playlist altogether. i will concentrate on the examples of jon hassell, can, and byrne and eno.1 these outsider afrofuturist projects do some similar things. they incorporate new and interesting sounds from islamic north africa, asia, zimbabwe, south africa, jamaica, african-american hip-hop and elsewhere. these artists also share certain production and compositional strategies, combining ethnic instrumentation and techniques with sampled voices, environmental noises, and other recorded sounds. the compositions themselves tend toward rather unconventional, genre-mashing hybrids of styles like ambient drone, noise, free jazz, field recordings, minimalism and musique concrète. and when this music approaches popular forms like rock or funk, as it does frequently in all but hassell’s catalog, the musicians push popular sounds into dialogue with avant-garde forms and outsider voices without progressive rock’s move toward classical structures and romantic recuperation. but it is not that hassell, can, or byrne and eno sound that much alike. rather, what links them together is a shared self-awareness and critically reflective nature, which foregrounds issues of ethnology and authenticity, appropriation, identity, technology and culture—all themes that operate as meta-concepts in these works just as surely as they do in albums by afrika bambaataa and janelle monae. when detoured into ethnological forgeries (announced as such, rather than hidden) and outsider practices, afrofuturism reddell | ethnoforgery and outsider afrofuturism 91 is understood less as a matter of racial identification than a technocultural strategy that deconstructs racial myths of identity, appropriation and exploitation. i posit a kind of “hybridity at the point of origin”, a deliberately ill mix of slavoj žižek’s critique of multiculturalism, félix guattari’s concept of “polyphonic subjectivity”, and marcus boon’s construction of shamanic “ethnopsychedelic montage” as a form of alternative modernity. the notion of the ill mix comes from paul d. miller (dj spooky aka that subliminal kid), who used the term “illbient” both to highlight the multicultural nature of manhattan’s digital arts scene in the early 1990s and describe a style of mixing reflected in spooky’s own work as well as that of dj olive, we, and the subharmonic and asphodel record labels. here, international, “world groove” beats and bass-heavy loops jump across styles and bpm’s alike, combined within spacey soundscapes and snippets of spoken word that barely hold together a mix always already on the verge of falling to pieces. this strikes me as an appropriate way to describe the current critical project and its schizophonic tendencies to avoid clean conclusions and, in the words of david byrne, to stop making sense. this discussion attempts to mobilize a concept of poorly combined multiple identities residing in multiple worlds in order to jettison the universal singularity of the multiculturalist author. despite his critique of multiculturalism’s soft, liberal alterity, this is a move that žižek would reject. žižek embraces the author/other of the father’s law as a way to mete out and measure both subject identity and social boundaries, founded on the casting (out) of outsiders, and even as these hegemonies swap between minority and majority positions. tempering žižek’s patriarchal subject, i have introduced ideas about multi-modalities of subjectivity and approach technocultural hybridization in ways more attuned to the fatherless sensibilities and experiences that united black youth in detroit (funk, techno) and the bronx (hip-hop) with germany’s post-wwii generation (can’s krautrock, kraftwerk’s early electro). fatherless cultures reject the otherness that wwii generated along national and racial lines, and which žižek’s cultural theories reinstate. i follow guattari and boon’s alternative routes toward understanding authorial subjectivity and culture—through sonic practices in particular—while maintaining social behaviors that reject multiculturalism’s reinforced boundaries and lineages. this radically spatialized (rather than temporal) arrangement of hybrid subjectivities suggests that, more than a point in time, more than a genre even, afrofuturism is a way of thinking and feeling one’s way through the world. and like science fiction more generally, afrofuturism reveals history to be contingent rather than teleological, always open to new interpretations, critical speculations and novel sensations.2 inside afrofuturism the definition of afrofuturism that mark dery offers in “black to the future” doesn’t hinge on the race of the author, but rather refers to the written work itself. specifically, afrofuturism indicates “speculative fiction that treats african-american themes and addresses african-american concerns in the context of 20th century technoculture—and, dancecult 5(2)92 more generally, african-american signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically-enhanced future” (1994: 180). dery’s shift toward the cyborg strikes me as more specific than general but is in keeping with the broader inquiries into “cyberculture” collected in flame wars (1994). nonetheless the language of this definition is open enough to apply to works by writers of any skin color, and it may be that we have no reason to postulate an outsider afrofuturism. we could even conclude that the national identity imposed by dery’s language need not apply, as long as speculation around african-american concerns and themes are articulated in the work. but this changes when dery considers actual artistic process, where his emphasis on “african-american voices” narrows the practical application of the concept by racial and national indices considerably (182). dery’s definition of afrofuturism evolves from a simple but poignant question. why are there so few african-american science fiction writers? he names four novelists in all— octavia butler, samuel r. delany, steve barnes and charles saunders, as well as forerunner ralph ellison, for invisible man (1947)—and pretty much exhausts the pool. this is indeed a perplexing absence because science fiction, dery remarks, is “a genre whose close encounters with the other—the stranger in a strange land—would seem uniquely suited to the concerns of african-american novelists” (1994: 179–80). perhaps, though, this is exactly the reason why it doesn’t work for many african-americans. the resonance is set too high, and we experience something like the masking encountered in sound mixing when two opposing frequencies cancel each other out. dery thinks that the african-american writer should naturally gravitate toward science fiction because “the sublegitimate status of science fiction as a pulp genre in western literature mirrors the subaltern position to which blacks have been relegated throughout american history” (180). he sets up this dynamic using a few different metaphors, though his initial formulation of afrofuturism in terms of parallel ghettos is unappealing.3 but in an interview with dery, african-american cultural critic greg tate suggests something more like my idea of masking and cancellation when he claims that science fiction fails to appeal to african-americans because they “live the estrangement that science-fiction writers imagine” (cited in dery 1995: 208).4 tate presents us with the question of access to technology as well as to the future—two terms frequently conflated in science fiction. because a sense of access to the future is at the core of the speculative imaginary, it may be that blockage at these two points of access has prohibited many african-americans from finding science fiction a compelling textual or literary form. at the same time, it is an awareness of this blockage that will account for the general turn of the afrofuturist imagination toward music and sound production. while shifting specifically to racial concerns, both dery and tate echo earlier proclamations by j. g. ballard regarding the ubiquitous science fiction landscape of the latter 20th century. in this “future of the past” that we inhabit, ballard suggests, reality is dystopic and violent, disaffecting and pornographic. it is also deeply unreal. “we live inside an enormous novel”, ballard writes in the introduction to the 1974 french edition of crash. “for the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. the fiction is already there. the writer’s task is to invent the reality” reddell | ethnoforgery and outsider afrofuturism 93 (1974: 5). this sentiment plays out as afrofuturist artists turn not toward fiction and its representations of the future, much less representations of blackness in the future, but rather toward the actual sound technologies of musical production. this turn embodies the kind of technological access that tate describes. afrofuturism evades or displaces questions of representation in favor of creating the future itself. in dery’s article, we experience this evasion and displacement through a shift into other forms of “signification” and “images” than writing, and dery’s catalog of major afrofuturists grows to include film makers, painters, graffiti artists, theorists, and comic book creators.5 but it is in music of some form or another that we find dery’s most extensive survey of afrofuturist practitioners.6 dery knew very well that he was riding on a shared wave of mounting afrofuturist rhythms, and that his essay was meant to be neither comprehensive nor exclusive.7 kodwo eshun’s more brilliant than the sun (1998) significantly extends the afrofuturist canon by pushing past the almost exclusively american borders of dery’s original construction. but the conceptual push that eshun achieves is even more significant. a critical hybrid of deleuzian post-structuralist philosophy, weird science, music history, and the atmosphere and attitudes of the uk jungle music scene, eshun’s theoretical work reveals the strategic, toolkit-like nature of afrofuturism as a critical practice. that is, eshun shows afrofuturism to be a way of thinking capable of transferring strategies across radically different modes of media production (say, from jungle vinyl distribution to academic publishing). not a genre then, but a set of conceptual tools and models to put into motion, afrofuturism comes to signify how music provides ways to “technologize” the self along with the future, and to participate in the “future-fication” of culture, as it were. afrofuturism by-passes established strategies of representation in favor of embodiment as the outsiders, aliens, and cyborgs of science fiction. detroit techno producer juan atkins lives up to the technologizing part by proliferating his work through a number of pseudonyms such as m500, x-ray, channel one frequency, audiotech and cybtotron, an electro outfit with the similarly technified 3070 (richard davis) and jon-5 ( john housely).8 the multiple 12-inch cybotron cuts released throughout the 1980s and finally collected on the clear lp (1990) gather several threads of influential media from the early 1980s that celebrated, commented on and enabled this arrival of the future into the present of digitized technoculture: tron, blade runner, mad max, video games and the personal computer world of kraftwerk. cybotron dedicate clear “to the people of the detroit metroplex” with a word of advice: “to survive we must technofy and save the biosphere” (cited in eshun 07[103]). atkin’s variously technologized pseudonyms and multiple project identities resonate with the notion of “the production of polyphonic subjectivity” that guattari discusses in chaosmosis (1995). not only does atkins recognize that subjectivity is produced, but multiple subjectivities can be assembled and arrayed in a single instant— what guattari calls “resingularisation” throughout his work. this concept lets us get at the nature of identity formation in the afrofuturist practice of juan atkins. guattari plugs identity formation directly into the technocultural mix through the highly conceptual language of machinery and the arts, and he frequently measures partial subjectivities in dancecult 5(2)94 terms of musical properties: “harmonies, polyphonies, counterpoints, rhythms, and existential orchestrations, until now unheard and unknown” (1995: 18-9). guattari’s shared emphasis on the machinic and the musical is wholly sympathetic to the detroit techno scene and afrofuturism more generally, suggesting what eshun finally splices into the hybrid neologism, “futurhythmachine”. associating identity with rhythm in technocultural assemblages is particularly useful as we seek to understand how subjectivity forms in highly saturated media environments. atkin’s multiple machinic identities—each associated with a distinct, often microscopically distinguished, rhythmic sub-genre or piece of gear—play out the heterogeneity of subjectivity in terms of rhythmic productivity, exploiting what guattari calls the “machinic dimensions of subjectivation” (1995: 4). atkins’ machinic identifiers set aside race markers for technological signifiers. that subjectivity should emerge and resingularise as a machinic array—which is automatable and repeatable through the sequence and loop of electronic production—is what leads guattari, eshun and atkins alike to rhythmic song as a way of understanding multiversal territory within the collective sonic ecology of a mediascape. the hypermedia landscape to which guattari alludes situates “partial fragments of enunciation operating as ‘shifters’ of subjectivation. . . . what does matter is the mutant rhythmic impetus of a temporalisation able to hold together the heterogeneous components of a new existential edifice” (1995: 20). rhythm holds the media fragments together while also providing vehicles for transfer and exchange, making these media fragments the source of potential, polyphonic subjectivities that emerge, in the case of cybotron (and the bronx’s afrika bambaataa, as well), from an unlikely mixture of german electronic groups (kraftwerk and tangerine dream), spaghetti western and sci-fi soundtracks, gary numan, european and american industrial music, metal and hip-hop. atkins mobilizes “himself ” into multiple identities for the same reason that guattari comes back to song again and again—multipartite, multilayered song forms in particular. guattari valorizes song as the expressive form of “partial subjectivity”, which is “prepersonal, polyphonic, collective and machinic” (1995: 21). the cybotron album plays this out as a cyberpunk narrative of identity formation in which subjectivity is measured in terms of the alterities contained within it and that bound it in the form of existential territories to be borrowed from. atkins’ multiple subjective alterities might lead us to suspect that this outsider exists at the heart of afrofuturism, and we wouldn’t be far off the point. but we might not yet understand what this means for traditional notions of race and nationality that privilege lines of influence, heredity and allegiance to source over what guattari calls the “ensemble of conditions which render possible the emergence of individual and/or collective instances as self-referential existential territories, adjacent, or in a delimiting relation, to an alterity that is itself subjective” (9). i am interested in how the triad of “ensemble”, “emergence” and the “existential” contribute to future-oriented models of subjectivity. in order to address head-on the relationship between black music and white music, eshun’s discussion of cybotron stages “futurity” as an overflow of the production of reddell | ethnoforgery and outsider afrofuturism 95 polyphonic subjectivities. of course, the future has to come from somewhere. juan atkins, who first becomes cyborgized with the label version of model 500, describes hearing the mannikin-white, german electronic band kraftwerk the first time: “it was the answer. it was the future for me” (cited in eshun 1999: 07[105]). “futurity” frustrates the accounts of sequential lineages—that is, of parentage and heritage—that typically inform and frame discussions of influence among and across black and white musicians. without citing anyone in particular, eshun describes the perplexed response by white journalists to the fact that an archetypically white group like kraftwerk had influenced musicians like grandmaster flash, afrika bambaataa and juan atkins. how could these black guys even like such an archetypically white group as kraftwerk? eshun’s response shifts the question of influence to one of “attractions:” “bambaataa is attracted to an alien euro sound, bored with and indifferent to familiar [african-american] sound. but at the same time, white sound isn’t alien at all. nothing that attracts is alien. bambaataa wants to artificialize himself. . . . the futurist moves carelessly past a polarization which was never there” (07[105]). the problem with the question is that there should even be a question of the influence of “this whitest of groups” over “black music”. it is a flawed question, and it epitomizes the post-colonial perspective targeted by slavoj žižek’s critique of multiculturalism—to which we now turn. an outsider afrofuturism as narratives of africa and the afrodiaspora infuse the technological and speculative imagination, we have an opportunity to reflect on the notion of the outsider as an ethical and philosophical figure. i adopt this term as distinct from “the other” partly in order to position a category for framing racial and national phenomena in ways different than that of multiculturalism. why is this move necessary? as žižek argues in “multiculturalism, or the cultural logic of multinational capitalism” (1997), the respect for the identity of the other that is at the heart of multiculturalism is itself “a disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism” disguised as respect and sustained by distance. perceiving the other as a member of “a self-enclosed ‘authentic’ community”, the multiculturalist maintains distance from the other, occupying instead “the privileged empty point of universality” (žižek, 1997: 44). multiculturalism provides “the ideal form of ideology” for post-colonial capitalism because it too acts “from a kind of empty global position” and “treats each local culture the way the colonizer treats colonized people—as ‘natives’ whose mores are to be carefully studied and ‘respected’” (44). as global capitalist self-colonization follows from traditional imperialist colonialism, multiculturalism follows from western cultural imperialism—a postcolonial culturalism that “involves patronizing eurocentrist distance and/or respect for local cultures without roots in one’s own particular culture” (44). by this argument, distance maintains control, though žižek’s language does not entirely account for the role that media fragments serve, as attractors and shifters, to circumvent the distance meant to prevent cross-cultural exchange and contamination. let’s see how these ideas might provide a way to measure some recent afrofuturist criticism. dancecult 5(2)96 in fear of music: why people get rothko but don’t get stockhausen (2009), david stubbs treats afrofuturism as the ubiquitous and primary thread of all “black music” since jazz, which “from armstrong to coleman, hendrix to george clinton, from hiphop through to dubstep, has always been futuristic, and as such a reflection of black experience. on the one hand, black music is constantly obliged to stay one step ahead of its white imitators (and in so doing, provides a perpetual supply for said imitators). however, it’s also because the black dream is largely one of tomorrow, not yesterday or even today, which aren’t generally times on which black people would particularly want to dwell” (57–8). rejection of both a painful past and present realities is posited as the key to embracing the future, which holds for black musicians “the possibility, at least, of improved circumstances” (116). the futurism that stubbs posits at the heart of “black music” comes of the fact that this music “has never been overly weighed down by any great wistful retrospection” (116). stubbs’s assessment is simultaneously compelling and deeply problematic, even stifling in its over-generalization of the one-way relationship between “black” and “white” music. for stubbs, “black music” invariably takes the lead, is always primary to the secondary of “white music”, especially in terms of popular formats. “black music” innovates, stubbs tells us, while “white music” imitates. at the same time, stubbs situates the black musician at a strangely vacated or even evacuated point of culture and history, adrift without a past, and lost without a present. this notion is so awfully out of touch with much of the greatest “black music” ever recorded as to be absurd.9 further, even if “yesterday” as history may be avoided, “yesterday” as myth emerges consistently throughout afrofuturism since the 1950s in the works of artists as diverse as sun ra, george clinton and drexciya. sun ra combines egyptian mythology with ufology to create an alternative to the race and nation-based politics of the american black power movement and inner-city youth and values instead mythic, divine and cosmic perspectives. george clinton’s p-funk projects brew up his own pantheon of recurring, mythically cast characters like the star child, sir nose devoid of funk, and the brides of dr. funkenstein. drexciya’s, well, drexciyans, are a race of afronauts evolved from the unborn children of pregnant africans thrown from slave ships; they resemble something inbetween aquaman’s african-american nemesis, black manta, h.p. lovecraft’s deep ones, and the creature from the black lagoon. in each case, these pop myths emphasize the role of the advanced sound technologies by which the outsider—sun ra’s arkestra, clinton’s funkanauts, drexciya’s drexciyans—transports listeners beyond familiar earthly perspectives into neighboring alternate realities. near the conclusion of his book, stubbs reasserts a basic distinction between an inherently futuristic “black music” and popular “white music”, the latter of which, stubbs argues, is caught up in the episodic recasting and recombination of its own histories when it is not stealing from black music. this recasts žižek’s take on multiculturalism through an onerous account of white music’s “respect” for black music, which tends to distance the source behind a veil of respect and so enables theft to occur in the name of a more generally touted influence—say, that bit at earl’s court in 1975, when robert plant attributes authorship of “in my time of dying” to “the deep south of america” that has “made it’s reddell | ethnoforgery and outsider afrofuturism 97 way into earl’s court. if you can believe”.10 plant’s spoken introduction to the sprawling jam that takes off from the traditional gospel blues of “in my time of dying” is meant as a kind of self-bestowing of the uncanny, an evocation of something so old, shaggy and black that it is nameless. it comes across, however, like a textbook example of the imitation and appropriation encountered throughout the history of rock music, exasperated further by the fact that on record, “in my time of dying”, is one of very few zeppelin tracks credited to all four members of the band rather than to blind willie johnson, to whom most ‘60s artists, beginning with bob dylan, attributed the song. to complicate things, however, this account is also emblematic of the oversimplification enacted by purely racialized accounts of the history of music and how technology facilitates the transfer of music from one culture to another. in many ways, plant’s attribution of the song’s authorship to a fundamentally anonymous source is entirely appropriate. blind willie johnson wasn’t the first to compose but rather the first to record “in my time of dying”, a song widely covered throughout the south before migrating to chicago and new york. and though johnson’s song is clearly “in my time of dying”, he recorded the cut as “jesus make up my dying bed”. how one reads these obscurities of authorship has much to do with one’s sense of influence, repetition, imitation and forgery. these same uncertainties should complicate rather than strengthen the impulse behind racial and ethnological codings. as with dery’s early afrofuturist roster, stubbs makes no room for works that might dissolve the tight binary dynamic of the racial and historical codes that keep black and white music in their places, and so not only can his thesis not account for the works of can or byrne and eno or other outsider afrofuturists, it doesn’t account for the borrowings of led zeppelin, bob dylan or blind willie johnson. § “simultaneously smug and incredulous, it tells you”, eshun writes, “over and over, that kraftwerk are techno’s precursors, its routes-rockers” (1999: 07[104]). the futurists that eshun describes—bambaataa with his white slitscan shades, juan atkins with his proliferation of machinic identities—are in fact creating outsider identities that frustrate the implied value of the other. they jettison altogether the value of a core identity assumed to be present behind a mask, a singularity and not a resingularisation, a note and not a polyphonic arrangement, a proper name and not a pseudonym. eshun suggests an alternative to the pseudonym, which he calls “a heteronym, a many-name, one in a series of parallel names which distributes and disperses you into the public secrecy of open anonymity” (07[106]). for eshun, juan atkins’ multiple identities avoid the pitfalls of the pseudo-heteronymity of artists like david bowie, bob dylan or madonna, who made a career of rather dramatic shifts in persona and presence. eshun calls these “serial heteronyms”, and these are ultimately failed attempts to disperse the self through public anonymity (07[106]). bowie shifts from ziggy stardust to alladin sane to the thin dancecult 5(2)98 white duke. dylan morphs from guthrie-esque folk singer to electrified beat rocker to mime to born again christian. madonna shifts from material girl to vogue cover girl to kabbalistic mystic. but bowie and dylan and madonna are not about parallel identities, eshun concludes. beginning with the official retirement of ziggy stardust and the spiders from mars, each new bowie album or so was marked by a new persona for much of his career. each new persona, what guattari calls “the ‘extraction’ and ‘separation’ of aesthetic subjectivities or partial objects” (1995: 19), stands in for a spark of renewed creativity; the whole project, it announces, has been recast. and yet we are also always made aware of the fact that it is david bowie or, for that matter, bob dylan or madonna, behind the masks. look at how they’ve changed, we are told, or more acutely, look at how they’ve aged, caught up in the linear tug toward their own time of dying. though bowie, dylan and madonna play out the “essentially precarious, deterritorialising complexification” of heteronymity as a social phenomenon in the spotlight, they fall victim to the constant threat of “a reterritorialising subsidence” (1995: 19), invariably collapsing back to the aging identity of david bowie, bob dylan or madonna.11 in these cases, the assertion of the subject identity as an aging actor is a universalised, rather than resingularised, resolution of the production of alternate modalities of the self. and it is something that is jettisoned in afrofuturist practice. distinctions between serial and parallel modes of heteronymity are crucial. the heteronyms of the afrofuturist are unique because they exist in parallel, and were once frequently anonymous at the core.12 in eshun’s words, “the futurist producer is always greater than one, always multiplying into omni-duos, simultaneously diverging selves that never converge into knowledge of self. instead of disciplining others through the despotic standard of keeping it real, staying true to the game, representing or staying black, alien music proliferates mindstates which never amount to mind. to unify the self is to amputate the self ” (1999: 07[106-7]). eshun’s notion of parallel heteronymity rejects historical timelines and meta-narratives of linear influences and sequenced copies. it is valuable to pull this rejection of cultural fathers closer to guattari’s discovery of plural subjectivities in the domain of infant psychology. guattari cites the research of the psychoanalytic theorist, daniel stern, whose the interpersonal world of the infant (1985) posits that infant development is not about freudian stages, laid out sequentially; rather, infanthood arranges the “levels of subjectivation which maintain themselves in parallel throughout life” (guattari 1995: 6). stern’s understanding of “the inherently trans-subjective character of an infant’s early experiences, which do not dissociate the feeling of self from the feeling of the other”, coincides with guattari’s own clinical practice. guattari approaches the treatment of psychosis and schizophrenia not in terms of retrieving a subjectivity that existed pre-crisis, but by encouraging instead the active production of new subjectivities and development of what guattari describes as “universes [that] had been unknown” to the patient. the “universes” to which guattari frequently refers function in collectives or complexes of subjectivation—stern himself describes the “mother constellation”—that “offer people diverse possibilities for recomposing their existential corporeality, to get out reddell | ethnoforgery and outsider afrofuturism 99 of their repetitive impasses and, in a certain way, to resingularise themselves” (1995: 7). i am interested in how the process of resingularisation explains the phenomena of the outsider afrofuturist, who shifts among channels for cross-technocultural transfer and identity mutation rather than operating by sequenced chains of influence, heredity and history. resingularisation is not integration, racial or otherwise, and it is not about the retrieval of a lost, prior state of selfhood or even selflessness. but this just tells us what it is not. guattari speaks more positively, describing “grafts of transference [that] operate in this way, not issuing from ready-made dimensions of subjectivity crystallised into structural complexes, but from a creation which itself indicates a kind of aesthetic paradigm. one creates new modalities of subjectivity in the same way that an artist creates new forms from the palette” (1995: 7). subjectivity is contingent. it is artistic, aesthetic and experimentally modal. as žižek notes, the problem with multiculturalism consists of its attempts to unify the larger units of self, culture and race into an essential, single core that can be set aside, analyzed and evaluated from the “despotic standard” of the universal value, the real that we are meant to keep representing. the privileging of the universality of the multiculturalist actually enacts a profound separation, however, and reinforces cultural amputation and isolation. the outsider puts this to use. serial ethnoforgery in the fourth world typically, an ethnological recording will involve authentic instruments of a particular culture, playing traditional music of that culture, and ideally enlisting the performances of players from the given culture.13 the combination of these borrowed factors are intended to lend a pop album like paul simon’s graceland (1986) its air of authenticity despite its middle-of-the-road gloss of afro-pop and south african styles. perhaps the album’s most pronounced stamp of authenticity was awarded when the united nations anti-apartheid committee deemed the album a worthy showcase of talented black south african musicians and singers despite the fact that simon broke the boycott against south african apartheid to employ them. he did pay session musicians well, even giving a few of them co-writing and production credits, and the album’s popularity increased the exposure of artists like ladysmith black mambazo to a significant us market. the authenticity of simon’s intent behind the project was touted in terms of global multiculturalism as it joined artists from south africa to ghana, though never at the same time. the album’s multicultural credibility was also measured in terms of its worldwide success, selling over 16 million copies and placing consistently high in the music press and charts of many countries. but a more troubling yardstick of the project’s authenticity is simon’s failure to credit the majority of his collaborators, including the american chicano band, los lobos (see bemis 2008). reportedly, simon did not come to sessions prepared with songs but asked his collaborators to jam out in the studio, a process apparently involving simon and his recording engineer prompting session players through an abbreviated repertoire of traditional songs and their own compositions, played in the distinctive style of dancecult 5(2)100 their culture (songs that sounded too mainstream and western were canned from the getgo), until simon could impose his own song structure onto their “authentic” jam. by mixing different segments of multiple songs, simon and his mixing engineer cribbed together their own amalgamation, with simon finally putting his lyrics over the top. at any rate, with the number of highly distinctive, ethnic music styles that simon visits over the course of graceland, it is hard not to hear the album as a document of ethno-musical tourism and cultural appropriation (see zuckerman 2009). this anecdote establishes some of the questions of intent, influence, collaboration, and honesty at the heart of the issue of ethnological forgery. but i want to consider more specifically the relationship of ethnoforgery to afrofuturism, focusing on the concept of the “fourth world” articulated by jon hassell. produced with brian eno, hassell’s fourth world volumes were vehicles for what hassell called the “future primitive”, which he explored by combining contemporary technologies for sound treatment with ancient playing styles and instrumentation techniques, many adopted for his own trumpet. hassell’s unique horn style is most notably a variation of the vocal techniques of the indian singer, pandit pran nath, with whom hassell studied indian classical music. surrounding the minimal, microtonal trumpet phrasing, hassell and eno built ambient environments out of delays, reverb, echo and other electronic effects of a mostly atmospheric nature. tape loops, digital effects, human voice, congas, ghatan and synthesizers sit side by side on this record, and it is altogether weirder—like the almost uncomfortable loop that runs throughout the track, “rising thermal”—than what would come to be known as “world music” (and contemporary new age, for that matter). in hassell’s work, the ethnological sound functions as a vehicle for the imagination and speculation, and many of the inspirations came to hassell indirectly. dream theory in malaya was inspired after hassell read a 1935 paper by ethnologist kilton stewart on the aboriginal senoi tribe of the malaysian highlands. the accounts of dreamlife as musical expression directly inspired hassell’s approach to this album, as did a bbc recording of the swamp-dwelling semelai, who splash water in order to make rhythmic music. but it was ultimately an original synthesis of multiple world musics that hassell was after. hassell’s “fourth world” occupies a pivot in the history of ethnological forgery as a sophisticated meta-concept deployed specifically as a way to challenge received notions of national, racial and ethnic identities. hassell’s work suggests how a sense of world is assembled out of multiple technocultural identities. hassell was prepped for these queries by studying under karlheinz stockhausen with both holger czukay and irmin schmidt of can. certainly, hassell’s fourth world project extends stockhausen’s hymnen (1966–7), the first major example of ethnological forgery in art music after world war ii. over the course of four “regions”, hymnen depicts the mixing, dissolution and transcendence of the nation state through the deconstruction of recorded national anthems, which combine and mutate into new polyphonies, both harmonious and discordant. contrasted against often startling electronic outbursts and radio tunings, this powerful work provides a cosmic vantage on the earth, rendered here as radio waves that not only broadcast out from reddell | ethnoforgery and outsider afrofuturism 101 the planet but mix into new cultural amalgamations of music, sound and rhythm in the cosmos. the sonic deconstruction of the nation state leads to the final electronic new world anthem, represented as “region four”, and concludes with stockhausen’s own exhalations. with this unique and significantly empty signature appended to the massive composition, stockhausen inverts the field of hearing entirely, turning it inside out and making the whole thing somehow a cosmic identity trip, the sonic equivalent of kubrick’s star child. hassell inherits the post-national world of stockhausen’s hymnen, drifting more toward the signature sounds of particular ethnological groups than anthemic recordings of the world’s nations. hassell doesn’t strive for authentic representation but uses signature sounds as points of speculative departure and transfer of technique, style and dialect from one media base to another—from voice to trumpet, percussion to tape loops and processed guitar, water drum to keyboards. hassell explains that his “aim was to make a music that was vertically integrated in such a way that at any cross-sectional moment you were not able to pick a single element out as being from a particular country or genre of music” (cited in prendergast, 1991). hassell’s evocative description of the vertical stack of multiple cultural influences and sound signatures, operating polyphonically rather than sequentially, is symptomatic of the “alternative modernities” described by dilip parameshwar gaonkar (2001). gaonkar uses the term to distinguish the equally but differently modern cultures of the postcolonial period, an idea that marcus boon also uses to frame his analysis of montage in shamanism and contemporary ethnographic recording practices (2006). for boon, the history of contemporary music demonstrates not only montage practices shared across the arts but is also the product of larger cultural montages: one of the most interesting trends in contemporary music has been the fusion of these two kinds of montage—the “traditional” folk musical forms, with their various uses of appropriation and montage, and new technological means of creating montage effects, from turntablism, to laptop cut and paste and sampling, to the various techniques employed by the avant-gardes. this fusion of ethnic and avant-garde forms can be traced back as far back as the dadaists, who stole many of their techniques from traditional african arts, and then mixed them with print media; or the work of the minimalists, who mixed tape music with ethnomusicological theories and practices. or bob dylan going electric, mixing rimbaud with appalachian folk song. or jamaican dub, itself a distorted echo of new orleans music heard on far off radio stations across the gulf of mexico. or hip hop, emerging out of the b-boys’ taste for african polyrhythms purloined from old vinyl reshaped and engineered on turntables and mixers for block parties in the bronx (boon 2006). the alternative modernities of contemporary music appear to be products of ubiquitous ethnological copying and adaptation. but more significant for our understanding of outsider afrofuturism is the way in which the strategies of appropriation and montage push identity formation from national and racial into technological and cultural frames. this is an ethnological move, in fact, that recognizes and explores its own constructed, dancecult 5(2)102 imaginary, or forged nature, which is what boon, i think, means by “ethnopsychedelic”. hassell’s “fourth world”, then—the vertical stack of multiple, polyphonic cultural sound signatures—may in fact be symptomatic of the multiple cultural layerings, mixings and transfers encountered throughout contemporary music, but he engages this process at a more self-referential level. the german band can likewise demonstrates this kind of approach to multiple cultural influences on compositional and performance techniques, achieving synthesis in a “future primitive” aesthetic very different from hassell’s throughout their own “ethnological forgery series”. can’s outsider afrofuturist sound morphs out of a minimal, repetitive electric rock style cut from the mold of velvet underground—or the monks, a tense tribal garage band of american ex-pat gis who played edgy, itchy proto-punk songs like “constipation” and “i hate you” throughout germany in the mid 1960s. following the brief but high volume birth of can as an afrofuturist project proper—when they were fronted by african-american sculptor and drifter, malcolm mooney—can’s outsider afrofuturist project went further into ethno-pop forgery territory, first with another cultural transplant, damo suzuki, a former cologne street-preacher from japan, and second with czukay’s shortwave recordings. can’s ethnological forgeries depict an outsider african voice drawn from afro-asian and north african sources unfamiliar to most western ears accustomed to the black voices of american blues, soul, r&b and funk. the result, at least as it plays out through most of can’s discography, is a globally scaled montage of ancient instruments and strange tonal vocabularies that result in new cultural hybrids and intentional sonic anomalies. a forgery that announces it’s a forgery, like can’s numbered “ethnological forgery series”, is not a very good forgery. but it does conduct a serious inquiry into the constructed nature of the ethnological and makes it the stuff of a significant, speculative exercise. i want to get at this general impulse as i close this section with reflections on byrne and eno’s afrofuturist work together. byrne and eno sustained their afrofuturist explorations over the course of a number of weird dance albums—bush of ghosts (1980) as well as the talking heads albums fear of music (1979) and remain in light (1980). these are very self-conscious projects, beginning with the cover of hugo ball’s faux primitive dada enthnoforgery, “i zimbra”, on fear of music (1979). inspired by a binge on jon hassell’s african pop and afrobeat library, the original plans for bush of ghosts included hassell himself and called for a “series of recordings based on an imaginary culture”, which they would then try to pass off as the real thing. “in our imaginings”, byrne recalls, “we’d release a record with detailed liner notes explaining the way music functioned in that culture and how it was produced—the kind of extensive notes common on those kinds of records” (byrne 2006: 13–4). this didn’t quite happen as imagined when byrne and eno started adding “dance music” into the mix, ruining the project in hassell’s estimation. the dance element came in somewhat accidentally as byrne and eno’s recording sessions were briefly influenced by an opportunity to record the score for a tv special with the singer and choreographer toni basil’s dance troupe, the electric boogaloos. ultimately, byrne and eno didn’t so much reddell | ethnoforgery and outsider afrofuturism 103 create convincing ethnographic forgeries as much as artifacts from a borgesian duplicate reality, a weird cultural variation of our own world broadcast through the spaces between radio stations. the convergence of dance music with the ethnological recordings eventually mutated and combined in the byrne and eno project as something that ultimately resides in the airwaves, as in stockhausen’s hymnen, though this time in a deeply terrestrial-bound, bodily and haptic way rather than the cosmological perspectives and airy voids that bring hymnen to a close. the ghosts in the bushes of byrne and eno are disco-funk, north african arabic music, west african polyrhythms, as well as those of emerging hip-hop culture, especially the visible rhythms of breakdancers. the snapping, pop-locking bodies made for a powerful synchronization with the voices of american radio that byrne and eno were starting to record: preachers, evangelists, healers, finger-wavers and exorcists. there were buried oppositions there, ecstasies and hypocrisies that flittered through the spazzing body of evangelical revival. ethnopsychedelic outsider sound systems beginning with bush of ghosts, eno plays out a speculative future of global media that deploys the concept of “africa” as a pre-emptive attack on the forces of digitization. he would rail against these forces and tendencies openly to kevin kelly in wired magazine in 1995: the problem with computers is that there is not enough africa in them. this is why i can’t use them for very long. do you know what a nerd is? a nerd is a human being without enough africa in him or her. . . . what’s pissing me off is that it uses so little of my body. you’re just sitting there, and it’s quite boring. you’ve got this stupid little mouse that requires one hand, and your eyes. that’s it. what about the rest of you? no african would stand for a computer like that. it’s imprisoning (eno, quoted in kelly 1995). eno approaches african polyrhythms as a regimen of ancient haptic movement and affect poised against the docility of mainstream interfaces to digital culture. we have seen that this strategy seamlessly conflates with byrne’s persona of the herky-jerky white nerd possessed by deeply funky black grooves—the ecstatic fits and full body prayers—that byrne would continue to explore with the talking heads, but it remains to be seen how deeply and to what significance this plays out in eno’s afrofuturist work. eno’s assessment and discussion of his own solo career repeatedly refer to africa—the future of africa in particular—and eno has made notions of african sound, bodies and rhythm the crux of his critique of digital culture, especially in terms of human-computer interface design.14 eno describes a desire for resingularisation in terms of “a vision that understands that we are creatures of intellect and of body, and that there isn’t a strict separation between them” (quoted in robinson 1981). he recalibrates the tensions between the ancient and the primitive, technology and ritual, intellect and body, as part of a polyphonic subjectivity that plays out through globally distributed and hypermediated dancecult 5(2)104 forms. eno hears these specifically as a “tremendously exciting . . . collision of vernacular western music with african music” (quoted in kelly 1995). this media collision marks the moment of afrofuturism’s emergence as a unique strategy for engaging technologies across media not only to achieve ethico-aesthetic contact with the cultural flux—that is, “the collective assemblages of enunciation” that have the potential to yield “new universes of reference” (guattari 1995: 19)—but also as a strategy for new modalities of polyphonic subjectivity: african music underlies practically everything i do—even ambient, since it arose directly out of wanting to see what happened if you ‘unlocked’ the sounds in a piece of music, gave them their freedom, and didn’t tie them all to the same clock. that kind of free float—these peculiar mixtures of independence and interdependence, and the oscillation between them—is a characteristic of west african drumming patterns. i want to go into the future to see this sensibility i find in african culture, to see it freed from the catastrophic situation that africa’s in at the moment. i don’t know how they’re going to get freed from that, but i desperately want to see this next stage when african culture begins once again to strongly impact ours (eno, quoted in kelly 1995). eno associates afrofuturism—literally by announcing his desire to go into the future and witness a liberated africa—with strategies that give sounds their freedom. for eno, the blend of electronics and tribal instruments challenges “the old theory of the modern giving way to the post-modern”, because it emphasizes the generation of new ideas by “the primitive, meaning the unchanged aspects of the old world” (quoted in robertson 1981). eno dismisses the value and usefulness of the “linear progression” of such historicisms, which collapse at the point of the “interface between primitive and futuristic”. the collision of the future, embodied in eno’s discussion as “electronics”, with the primitive, meaning “ethnological recordings and instrumentation”, is at the heart of eno’s sense of the social, which functions in global culture under highly technological, specifically digital constraints. eno’s work necessarily involves an emphasis on tape editing and audio mixing, digital sampling and manipulation, in order to create the strange amalgamation of global influences that he refers to as his “vision of a psychedelic africa”. eno’s vision shares with marcus boon’s formulation a dual emphasis on ethnological exchange and montage as strategies for identity formation in an era of global media. boon describes this kind of montage in terms of breaking the boundaries that multiculturalism, with its emphasis on the authenticity of the other, puts in place. boon suggests instead a position relevant to the outsider aesthetics valued here: more specifically, there is a range of performers and composers from around the world who have consciously worked to blur lines between traditional and contemporary methods of creating montage, making their montage in fact precisely by breaking the boundaries, cultural, disciplinary and otherwise, which appear to separate us and them (boon 2006). reddell | ethnoforgery and outsider afrofuturism 105 boon’s approach to montage is rooted in terms of the rough and tumble practice of ethnological field recordings, typically recordings of shamanist events, trances and other altered states of consciousness. boon’s major points of reference are important, not academically sanctioned sources of ethnological field recordings but the work of outsider ethnomusicologists like henry flynt and harry smith, as well as the more contemporary sublime frequencies label. these particular artists “share an interest in breaking through consensus reality, producing a direct transformation of consciousness, either in the listener or performer” (boon 2006). the consciousness-changing “ethnopsychedelic music” described by boon and recorded by eno enacts žižek’s rejection of multiculturalism in compositional terms by opposing the totalizing and universalist agenda of both the distanced, impartial recordings encountered in the smithsonian archives as much as the “smooth fusions” of so-called new age world music. instead, the ethnopsychedelic is “a music of strange jumps, juxtapositions and alliances that are not situated easily on either side of the modern/traditional divide” (boon 2006). the technological and cultural dimension of this collision, “the cacophony of modernity”, involves complex sound worlds that support resingularisation and resist reterritorialisation into racial and nationalistic models. boon’s opposition between “ethnopsychedelic music” and “smooth fusion world music” suggests a large-scale version of eshun’s heteronymic identity. the so-called globe, or even more sweetened up, the global village, of multiculturalism collapses through what the comic books call an infinite crisis on multiple earths. similar distinctions between the ethnopsychedelic and smooth fusion approaches to world music are found in eno’s statements about africa, music and digitization. when interviewed by sandy robertson for sounds magazine in 1981, eno was asked to explain why he had been making so many comments about africa and its increasing importance “not just musically but to all aspects of life” (robertson 1981). eno launches into an anecdote about tuning in, just that morning, to a new york radio program about the african influence on contemporary music and being amazed at the number of “records by people using electronics and basically tribal instruments, and doing it very successfully on a lot of occasions”. unfortunately, eno doesn’t mention any particular artists or cuts that he heard that morning,15 but his point is that he wasn’t the only one to experience this “african psychedelic vision”. to the contrary, “there were clearly a lot of other people tuning in to it at the same time”, and eno hoped that this pointed to a general shift away from the excessive technology-fetishism of much synthesizer music as well as both popular and academic strains of electronic music toward more radically hybrid forms (eno, quoted in robertson 1981). what eno’s people were tuning into was a kind of rhythmic technocultural subjectivity, new subject formations patterned by the velocities of those living outside, the heterogeneic, the polyphonic and the partial. where hassell drew on ethnomusicology and anthropology for sources of speculation, byrne and eno turned the techniques of the ethnomusicologist back onto american media, particularly the charismatic end of evangelical radio and conservative talk shows. in his dancecult 5(2)106 notes to the 2006 re-issue of bush of ghosts, paul morley suggests that the extrapolation of different pop histories and a “new kind of hybrid” america informed eno and byrne’s work together: they wondered what it would be like if pop music had not been so american, or so european, or so disconnected from the rhythms and textures that first inspired the music that first inspired pop. they imagined a future, or even a present, where pop music might sound like this—might in fact sound like it was music that was the pop music of an imaginary society. their imagining of an imaginary society that was familiar with music like this has helped actually create that world—it’s one of those things that makes certain records have lasting stature, that, by taking forward the ideas and thoughts of others, and shaping them into a new identity and image, they actually do make a difference to the sound, and often the appearance, of the world (morely 2005). upon its release, bush of ghosts was met by more confusion and derision than morley’s reflections on the re-issue, twenty-five years down the road, would suggest. the album was rejected as overly intellectual, and the use of sampled voices in place of the artists’ own frustrated many listeners. in his review of the album for rolling stone in august 1981, jon pareles accuses byrne and eno of “cultural imperialism”. he recognizes that as the treatment of a newly emerging global culture of hypermedia, bush of ghosts is deeply mcluhanesque in its strategy of sampling “the global media blitz”: “edit, add polyethnic rhythm tracks, name the results after a novel by nigerian author amos tutuolo and recycle them into the blitz” (pareles 1981). pareles is suspicious of such cross-cultural, appropriative “found art”. but the concerns that he raises about the ways in which the experience, voice and soundscape of the other is appropriated without credit being given, much less financial remuneration, and with no respect for original context, seem more relevant to paul simon’s graceland than byrne and eno’s bush of ghosts. paul simon subsumed the creative labors of living musicians into the idealized past of the american father, elvis and his home, graceland; more practically, all sounds become unified by simon’s lyrics and voice. and this marks the biggest difference between simon’s graceland and byrne and eno’s bush of ghosts. on bush of ghosts, the use of vocal samples undermines the presence of the lead singer. voices are looped and sequenced and otherwise reconstructed from snippets of a preacher’s sermon, an exorcism, or a talk radio rant until they resemble the lyrical delivery of a pop song. the sample is the auditory equivalent for the possession of the body by the extreme, exaggerated and even fitful rhythms of polyphonic subjectivity that byrne and eno unleash. on stage with the talking heads,16 byrne’s body becomes the vehicle of what guattari calls “poetic-existential catalysis” (1995: 19). the construction of imaginary ethnographies through a cross-pollinating mixture of multiple cultural and ethnological sources ultimately catalyzes byrne’s body as a vehicle for global polyphonic subjectivity. as we will see, this bodily response to the intense technological and cultural montage is at the heart of eno and byrne’s project and would continue to shape eno’s assessment of the need for africa in digitized environments. reddell | ethnoforgery and outsider afrofuturism 107 the multiculturalist tendency that žižek describes and pareles maintains requires the specificity of the other in order to allow the multiculturalist to measure and maintain the universal values of multiculturalism—the other, under scrutiny, may be appreciated or depreciated in this process. in either case, the measuring distance, which maintains the superiority of the multiculturalist vantage, is really an empty point. the universal values of multiculturalism fail to invert (unlike stockhausen’s breathy black hole of artificial closure, first breath or last breath, we’ll never know) and never become part of a self-referential and critically reflective process that turns back on the inquiring subject—which is precisely what byrne and eno sought to do when they scanned the fringes of american radio as though strangers in their own land, looking for new voices and imagining the bodies that went with them. a bit punkish in attitude, byrne and eno did not approach any of their subjects with the carefully studied and respectful poise of the liberal multiculturalist ethnographer that pareles advocates. they hadn’t even read amos tutuolo’s book when they nicked his title, and since there were few channels for “world music” at the time, much of the pair’s impressions of africa came from reading the works of cultural anthropologists and ethnomusicologists and then imagining how this music might sound. in fact, byrne and eno were drawn to tutuolo’s title along sympathetic channels just as the talking heads were drawn to imitate joy division’s atmospheric sound in “the overload”, a sound they imagined based entirely on their reading reviews of, rather than actually listening to, anything by joy division (reynolds 2005: 139). this strategy of projecting an imaginary double—or a whole land of imagined doubles—whose sound the band then attempts to duplicate is precisely what we encounter in bush of ghosts. byrne and eno seek a kind of possession by unknown voices and rhythms, not just of “primitive africa” but of white evangelical outsiders who imagine themselves at the center of the spiritual universe, of the demonically possessed and their exorcists—all manner of outsiders, the outsiders on the inside, even outsiders to the outsiders. notes 1 specifically, i am listening here to hassell’s two fourth world albums, possible worlds (1980) and dream theory in malaya (1981), can’s numbered “ethnological forgery series” and soon over babaluma (1974), byrne and eno’s my life in the bush of ghosts (1980), and talking heads’ fear of music (1979) and remain in light (1980). 2 see istvan csicsery-ronay, jr., the seven beauties of science fiction (2008: 11–12). 3 dery suggests that as a literary, critical, and publishing market subaltern—dery cites both gibson, who calls science fiction a “golden ghetto” (cited in dery 1994: 180) and norman spinrad, who once suggested that a science fiction writer adopted by the literati is merely their “token nigger” (1990: 9)—science fiction would seem to be a perfect fit for the africanamerican artist. 4 the disenfranchisement of the african-american during the space age is well-documented dancecult 5(2)108 and frequently the stuff of major afrofuturist cuts, like gil-scott heron’s rant “whitey on the moon” (1970), which plays out a ghetto drama shaped by the apotheosis of the media, technology, the future, and white american culture that was the apollo moon landings, the first globally televised event. 5 john sayles’s the brother from another planet (1984) and lizzie borden’s born in flames (1983); milestone media’s hardware and icon (1993); visual artists basquiat and rammellzee. 6 dery zooms in on the science fiction elements of jimi hendrix, miles davis, herbie hancock’s headhunters (and solo work), bernie worrell, and george clinton. dery also sketches several afrofuturist subgenres and a few representatives, including electro (planet patrol, warp 9), detroit techno (cybotron, juan atkins, kevin saunderson, derrick may), dub (lee “scratch” perry, the sole international artist on the list), and new york hip-hop (afrika bambaataa). 7 it is still surprising how many major artists are actually missing from dery’s early roster. sun ra is name-checked but the later cosmic works of both john and alice coltrane are overlooked. missing too are the dub stylings of scientist, detroit techno legend jeff mills’s x-102 discovers the rings of saturn (tresor.004, 1992), the earliest recordings of detroit electro outfit drexciya, “deep sea dweller” (1992) and “drexciya 2: bubble metropolis” (1993), and the original uk dub album, creation rebel’s starship africa (recorded 1978, released 1980), with adrian sherwood producing. it is also amazing how many afrofuturist works, american or otherwise, were on the cusp of emerging on the scene shortly after dery’s flame wars was published, including a guy called gerald’s black secret technology (1995), larry heard’s alien (1996), and the increasingly complex aqua-afro cosmology of drexciya that unfolded on albums like the quest (1997), neptune’s lair (tresor.129, 1999) and the shifted phases sideproject, the cosmic memoirs of rosinthrope (tresor.196, 2002). also to note here in hip-hop would be outkast’s atliens (1996) and the wu-tang clan’s 36 chambers (1993). 8 with their deft mix of break beats, synthesizers, robotic voices, hair-metal guitar and sequenced bass lines, cybotron’s early singles, “cosmic cars” (1982) and “clear” (1983) are frequently cited as the genre-defining progenitors of detroit techno and electro. 9 just listen to billie holiday’s “strange fruit”, especially and unexpectedly terrifyingly paired with “fine and mellow”, released in 1939; classic 1970s socially-conscious soul like stevie wonder’s songs in the key of life (1976) and marvin gaye’s what’s going on? (1971)—or almost anything recorded by gil-scott heron. 10 seen on the led zeppelin dvd (2003). 11 dylan may have successfully voided this root identity entirely, evacuating the subject behind the name. see seeburger (2006). 12 though this has admittedly changed in the current age of techno superstars and big-name producers. 13 for example, as carried out in the work of john lomax, the musicologist and folklorist who pioneered the field of recording ethnological subcultures, finally curating the archive of american folk song. some of the major recording labels releasing more traditional ethnological recordings include rough guide and the world music network, smithsonian folkways, nonesuch explorer, unesco and chant du monde. 14 see the list of interviews and articles reprinted at hyperreal’s enoweb: <http://music. hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/interviews/intindex.html>. reddell | ethnoforgery and outsider afrofuturism 109 15 candidates might include xtc’s “it’s nearly africa”, peter gabriel’s “across the river”, and the english beat’s “mirror in the bathroom”, all cuts included on the best of music and rhythm lp that benefitted gabriel’s womad (a world of music arts and dance) festival. 16 see jonathan demme’s concert film stop making sense (1984). references ballard, j. g. 1985. “introduction to the french edition” (1974). crash. new york: vintage. bemis, alec hanley. 2008. “los lobos on paul simon: ‘do you mean zydeco when you say zy decko?’” la weekly. <http://blogs.laweekly.com/westcoastsound/teenage-kicks/los-lobos-onpaul-simon-do-you-1> (accessed 19th october 2009). boon, marcus. 2006. “sublime frequencies’ ethnopsychedelic montages”. electronic book review. <http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/musicsoundnoise/ethnopsyche>. 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<http://www.discogs.com/burial-burial/master/11767>. ———. 2007. untrue. hyberdub (uk): hdbcd002. <http://www.discogs.com/burial-untrue/master/11772>. byrne, david and brian eno. 1980/2006. my life in the bush of ghosts. nonesuch (us): 798941. <http://www.discogs.com/brian-eno--david-byrne-my-life-in-the-bush-of-ghosts/ master/6392>. can. 1974. limited edition. united artists (uk): usp 103. <http://www.discogs.com/can-limited-edition/master/17054>. ———. 1974. soon over babaluma. united artists (uk): uag 29673. <http://www.discogs.com/can-soon-over-babaluma/master/11485>. creation rebel. 1981. starship africa. on-u sound (uk): on-u lp 08. <http://www.discogs.com/creation-rebel-starship-africa/master/19386>. cybotron. 1990. clear. fantasy (us): fcd-4537-2. <http://www.discogs.com/cybotron-clear/master/134>. dbridge. 2008. the gemini principle. exit records (uk): exitcd002. <http://www.discogs.com/dbridge-the-gemini-principle/master/60158>. dub syndicate. 2001. acres of space. lion and roots (germany): lion & roots 05. <http://www.discogs.com/dub-syndicate-acres-of-space/master/19207>. gaye, marvin. 1971. what’s going on. tamla (us): ts 310. <http://www.discogs.com/marvin-gaye-whats-going-on/master/66631>. hassell, jon. 1981. dream theory in malaya / fourth world volume two. editions eg (uk): eged 13. <http://www.discogs.com/ jon-hassell-dream-theory-in-malaya-fourth-world-volume-two/master/33904>. hassell, jon and brian eno. 1980. fourth world vol. 1: possible musics. editions eg (uk): eged 7. <http://www.discogs.com/ jon-hassell-brian-eno-fourth-world-vol-1-possible-musics/master/12068>. heavyweight dub champion. 2002. survival guide for the end of time. champion nation recordings (us): cn70002. <http://www.discogs.com/ heavyweight-dub-champion-survival-guide-for-the-end-of-time/release/871898>. heron, gil-scott. 1971. small talk at 125th and lenox. flying dutchman (us): fd 10131. <http://www.discogs.com/gil-scott-heron-small-talk-at-125th-and-lenox/master/7675>. holiday, billie. “strange fruit/fine and mellow”. 1939. commodore (us): 526. <http://www.discogs.com/billie-holiday-and-her-orchestra-strange-fruit-fine-andmellow/release/1634405>. hydroponic sound system. 2000. routine insanity. blackheart (us): b00004ywvr. <http://www.alt-take.com/discography.asp>. kode9 and the spaceape. 2006. memories of the future. hyperdub (uk): hypcd001. <http://www.discogs.com/kode9-spaceape-the-memories-of-the-future/master/103371>. noiseshaper. 2006. real to reel. echo beach (germany): eb059. <http://www.discogs.com/ noiseshaper-real-to-reel/release/813431>. dancecult 5(2)112 perry, lee “scratch” and dub syndicate. 1987. time boom x de devil dead. on-u sound (uk): on-u lp 43c. <http://www.discogs.com/ lee-scratch-perry-dub-syndicate-time-boom-x-de-devil-dead/master/19344>. radio palestine: sounds of the eastern mediterranean. 2004. sublime frequencies (us): sf008. <http://www.discogs.com/various-radio-palestine-sounds-of-the-eastern-mediterranean/ release/1115970>. radio pyongyang: commie funk and agit pop from the hermit kingdom. 2005. sublime frequencies (us): sf023. <http://www.discogs.com/variousradio-pyongyang-commie-funk-and-agit-pop-from-the-hermit-kingdom/ release/820378>. sandoz. 1993. digital lifeforms. touch (uk): to:21. <http://www.discogs.com/sandoz-digital-lifeforms/release/47103>. ———. 1996. dark continent. touch (uk): tone 4cd. <http://www.discogs.com/sandoz-dark-continent/release/145312>. ———. 2001. afrocentris. intone (uk): intonecd001. <http://www.discogs.com/sandoz-afrocentris/release/108442>. ———. 2006. live in the earth: sandoz in dub (chapter 2). soul jazz records (uk): sjr cd 130. <http://www.discogs.com/sandoz-live-in-the-earth-sandoz-in-dub-chapter-2/ master/70369> simon, paul. 1986. graceland. warner bros. records (us): 9 25447-2. <http://www.discogs.com/paul-simon-graceland/master/55658>. stockhausen, karlheinz. 1995 (1967–8). hymnen. stockhausen-verlag (germany): stockhausen 10. <http://www.discogs.com/stockhausen-hymnen/release/730162>. talking heads. 1979. fear of music. sire records (us): srk 6076. <http://www.discogs.com/talking-heads-fear-of-music/master/39260>. ———. 1980. remain in light. sire records (us): srk 6095. <http://www.discogs.com/talking-heads-remain-in-light/master/25688>. wonder, stevie. 1976. songs in the key of life. tamla (us): t13-340c2. <http://www.discogs.com/stevie-wonder-songs-in-the-key-of-life/master/87440>. filmography borden, lizzie. 1983. born in flames. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085267>. carruthers, dick. 2003. led zeppelin dvd. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0366707>. coney, john. 1974. space is the place. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072195>. demme, jonathan. 1984. stop making sense. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088178>. sayles, john. 1984. the brother from another planet. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087004>. the metaphysics of crackle: afrofuturism and hauntology dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 5(2): 42–55 issn 1947-5403 ©2013 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.02.03 the metaphysics of crackle: afrofuturism and hauntology mark fisher goldsmiths, university of london / university of east london (uk) abstract there has always been an intrinsically “hauntological” dimension to recorded music. but derrida’s concept of hauntology has gained a new currency in the 21st century, when music has lost its sense of futurism, and succumbed to the pasticheand retrotime of postmodernity. the emergence of a 21st century sonic hauntology is a sign that “white” culture can no longer escape the temporal disjunctions that have been constitutive of the afrodiasporic experience since africans were first abducted by slavers and projected from their own lifeworld into the abstract space-time of capital. time was always-already out of joint for the slave, and afrofuturism and hauntology can now be heard as two versions of the same condition. keywords: hauntology, afrofuturism, dub, phonography, rockism mark fisher is the author of capitalist realism (2009) and the forthcoming ghosts of my life: writings on depression, hauntology and lost futures. his writing has appeared in many publications, including the wire, frieze, the guardian and film quarterly. he is programme leader of the ma in aural and visual cultures at goldsmiths, university of london and a lecturer at the university of east london. feature article fisher | the metaphysics of crackle 43 [in] “phonograph blues” . . . johnson sings, with too much emotion it seems, about his broken record player. “what evil have i done . . . what evil has the poor girl heard”. that one line tells you how far he is trying to go. the poor girl is the phonograph, softly personified; she refuses to play johnson’s wicked records and breaks down. —greil marcus (1977: 26) for techno, dusseldorf is the mississippi delta. —kodwo eshun (1998: 07[100]) the way that tricky works—fucking around with sounds on the sampler until his sources are unrecognisable wraiths, ghosts of their former selves; composing music and words spontaneously in the studio; mixing tracks live as they’re recorded; retaining the glitches and inspired errors, the hiss and crackle—all this is strikingly akin to early seventies dubmeisters like king tubby. —simon reynolds (1995) dub messes big time with . . . notions of uncorrupted temporality. wearing a dubble face, neither future nor past, dub is simultaneously a past and future trace: of music as both memory or futurity, authentic emotion and technological parasitism. —ian penman (1995) in his landmark 1995 piece on tricky, “[the phantoms of ] tricknology [versus a politics of authenticity]”, ian penman expressed some misgivings about the work of rock journalist greil marcus. “much as i love his writing”, penman wrote, “the objects of his adoration often baffle me, especially when it comes to his attempted negotiation of ‘politics’ in music, specifically a certain strain of worthy, invariably english avatar (mekons, gang of four, strummer, costello; also bruce springsteen): a certain strain of spokesperson that some of us have never been swayed by, distrusted as being way literal in its approach, texturally meagre”. what marcus’ work, for all its merits, consistently fails to encounter is production. references to producers—or production techniques—in marcus are, at best, fleeting. is marcus’s writing—with its privileging of voice, live performance, spontaneity—rock writing’s version of what derrida calls the “metaphysics of presence” (see derrida 1976)? for derrida, the metaphysics of presence rested in part on the notion that meaning could be secured and settled via an anchoring to a body. writing, by contrast, was construed as something inauthentic, deferred, absent. what concerns us here is not, though, the opposition between the voice and writing, but the (equally deconstructible) opposition between two ways of hearing (or treating) the voice: the voice as (authorised and authentic) dancecult 5(2)44 embodied presence versus the voice as recorded revenant.1 what is repressed here is not writing, but phonography. it is perhaps in the idea of a rock “metaphysics of presence” that we are getting to what is fundamentally at stake in the deeply contested term “rockism”. rockist criticism always prefers the authentic to the synthetic, the live to the recorded. without using the term, kodwo eshun identified the principal characteristics of rockism in a broadside at the beginning of his more brilliant than the sun (1998), railing against a default emphasis, in certain critical quarters, on “the live show, the proper album, the real song, the real voice, the mature, the musical, the pure, the true, the proper, the intelligent” (1998: 01[006]). what is repressed in the emphasis on liveness and authenticity is the very condition of our access to these performances: the technology of recording, something which comes to the fore in dub (which is why penman treats dub—the afrofuturist sonic science par excellence—as the anti-type of marcus’ “measured humanism which leaves little room for the uncanny in music”). “dub”, penman wrote, “was a breakthrough because the seam of its recording was turned inside out for us to hear and exult in; when we had been used to the ‘re’ of recording being repressed, recessed, as though it really were just a re-presentation of something that already existed in its own right” (1995). now this isn’t to say that marcus doesn’t like or write about dub. dub, in fact, is exactly the sort of thing marcus will refer to in reverential terms, but his encounter with it is only ever glancing. ironically, it may be marcus’ debt to literary criticism—to a theory based in texts—which impedes marcus from focusing on texture: on the grainy materiality of sound, sound as a medium in itself rather than as a carrier for meaning. the point here is not to upbraid marcus, but rather to treat his writing as symptomatic of a certain tendency in rock writing to avoid engagement with texture... and spectrality. texture is central to both afrofuturism and what i and others have been calling “sonic hauntology”. the concept of hauntology was derived—it would probably be better to say sampled—from derrida’s specters of marx (originally published in english in 1994; 2006). in derrida’s work, “hauntology” was a play on “ontology”. the concept of hauntology was in part a restatement of the key deconstructive claim that “being” is not equivalent to presence. since there is no point of pure origin, only the time of the “always-already”, then haunting is the state proper to being as such. as peter buse and andrew stott explain: ghosts arrive from the past and appear in the present. however, the ghost cannot be properly said to belong to the past. . . . does then the ‘historical’ person who is identified with the ghost properly belong to the present? surely not, as the idea of a return from death fractures all traditional conceptions of temporality. the temporality to which the ghost is subject is therefore paradoxical, at once they ‘return’ and make their apparitional debut. derrida has been pleased to call this dual movement of return and inauguration a ‘hauntology’, a coinage that suggests a spectrally deferred non-origin within grounding metaphysical terms such as history and identity. this idea will be familiar from other derridean discussions of event and causality in essays fisher | the metaphysics of crackle 45 such as “before the law”, and “signature event context”. . . . such an idea also informs the well-known discussion of the origin of language in of grammatology, where . . . any attempt to isolate the origin of language will find its inaugural moment already dependent upon a system of linguistic differences that have been installed prior to the ‘originary’ moment (buse and scott 1999: 11). around 2006, writers such as simon reynolds and myself turned to the concept of hauntology when spectrality started to emerge as a theme—and a practice—in the work of producers from a range of backgrounds, including experimental rocker ariel pink, composer william basinski, turntablist philip jeck, and the dubstepper burial. “hauntology” also suggested itself as the most fitting classificatory label for some producers who did not obviously belong to an existing genre, such as the caretaker and the artists on the ghost box label. the work of the caretaker was bound up with spectrality from the very beginning: the name “the caretaker” was a reference to the role that the jack nicholson character ends up—or perhaps was always-already—playing in stanley kubrick’s the shining (1980), and the caretaker’s slowed down and reverbed samplings of english pop from the 1930s and 40s were originally conceived of as the kind of music that could be played in kubrick’s overlook hotel. the ghost box label, meanwhile, is based on a kind of “re-dreaming” of british media culture between 1958 and 1978. its music and covert art constitute an oneiric conflation of weird fiction, the music of the bbc radiophonic workshop and the lost public spaces of the so-called postwar consensus (a consensus that was terminated with the election of margaret thatcher in 1979). sonic hauntology is exercised by the problem of memory and its imperfect recovery; a familiar enough theme, but one given an extra piquancy in the context of electronic music, which was for so long treated as a herald and signifier of the future. here we confront the temporal crisis around which sonic hauntology is continually circling. the problem is that the electronic sounds produced between the 1950s and the 1990s remain sonic signifiers of the future—and, as such, they are signs that the anticipated future never actually arrived. the music of burial and of ghost box is haunted by a paradoxical nostalgia: a nostalgia for all the futures that were lost when culture’s modernist impetus succumbed to the terminal temporality of postmodernity. there is a certain irony here, because, if fredric jameson is to believed, then postmodernism is itself dominated by “the nostalgia mode”. it is important to be clear about what jameson means by the “nostalgia mode” (1991). he does not mean psychological nostalgia—indeed, the nostalgia mode as jameson theorises it might preclude psychological nostalgia, since it arises only when a coherent sense of historical time breaks down. postmodernism’s nostalgia mode is not defined by a yearning for the past. the kind of figure capable of exhibiting and expressing such longing belongs to a paradigmatically modernist moment—think, for instance, of proust’s and joyce’s ingenious exercises in recovering lost time. jameson’s nostalgia mode is better understood in terms of a formal attachment to the techniques and formulas of the past, a consequence of a retreat from the modernist challenge of innovating cultural forms adequate to contemporary experience. jameson’s example is lawrence kasdan’s film body heat (1981), which, although it was officially set in the 1980s, feels as if dancecult 5(2)46 it belongs to the 1940s. “everything in the film”, jameson writes, conspires to blur its official contemporaneity and make it possible for the viewer to receive the narrative as though it were set in some eternal thirties, beyond historical time. this approach to the present by way of the art language of the simulacrum, or of the pastiche of the historical past, endows present reality and the openness of present history with the spell and distance of some glossy mirage. yet his mesmerizing new aesthetic mode itself emerged as an elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way. it cannot therefore be said to produce this strange occultation of the present by its own formal power, but rather merely to demonstrate, through these inner contradictions, the enormity of the situation in which we seem increasingly incapable of fashioning representations of our current cultural experience ( jameson 1991: 21). sonic hauntology similarly “blurs contemporaneity” with elements from the past, but, whereas postmodernism glosses over the temporal disjunctures, the hauntological artists foreground them. the caretaker’s 2005 six cd box set was entitled theoretically pure anterograde amnesia, in reference to the neurological disorder which makes sufferers incapable of encoding new experiences in their long-term memory. an abstract soundscape of crackle, fizz and noise which is interrupted only occasionally by the traces of familiar old tunes, theoretically pure anterograde amnesia simulates the condition of anterograde amnesia, providing what is in effect a new diagnosis of the pathology of postmodernity. our problem, for the caretaker as much as jameson, is not so much that we are seduced by our memories of long ago, but that we cannot produce new memories. what has all this to do with afrofuturism? put bluntly, we might say that postmodernity and hauntology confront “white” culture with the kind of temporal disjunction that has been constitutive of the afrodiasporic experience since africans were first abducted by slavers and projected from their own lifeworld into the abstract space-time of capital. far from being archaic relics of the past, slaves were thus already in the future. as žižek put it recently, haiti’s “slave plantations (mostly sugarcane) were not a remainder of premodern societies, but models of efficient capitalist production; the discipline to which slaves were submitted served as an example for the discipline to which wage-laborers were later submitted in capitalist metropolises” (žižek 2009: 124). forcibly deprived of their history, the black slaves encountered “postmodernity” three hundred years ago: “the idea of slavery itself as an alien abduction . . . means that we’ve all been living in an alien-nation since the 18th century” (eshun 1998: a[192]). without using either term, penman’s 1995 essay showed that afrofuturism and hauntology are two sides of the same double-faced phenomenon. the concept of afrofuturism has always done double work. first, it liberates futurism from the master narratives of white modernity, which positioned africa as origin, at the furthest remove from the terminus of history projected in euro-american science fictional visions of the future: “the shape of things to come—a world without war, hurt or hunger (also, tactless enough, without fisher | the metaphysics of crackle 47 black folks)”, as mark sinker sarcastically summarised these supposed utopias in his crucial 1992 essay “loving the alien—black science fiction”. second, afrofuturism unravels any linear model of the future, disrupting the idea that the future will be a simple supersession of the past. time in afrofuturism is plastic, stretchable and prophetic—it is, in other words, a technologised time, in which past and future are subject to ceaseless deand recompostion. hip-hop depended on the turntable and the mixer, which converted pre-recorded material from an inert museum into an infinite archive, ripe for recombination; jungle could only happen when samplers allowed breakbeats to be timestretched, maintaining pitch but increasing tempo and producing the vortical, implosive whorls of sound that prompted kodwo eshun to call it “rhythmic psychedelia” (1999: 05[070]). the fact that penman’s 1995 essay centred on tricky—the uk artist too “dysfunktional” (eshun 1998: 03[059]) to be a rapper, too ill to be illbient—was no accident. for tricky always belonged to a time that was out of joint, a time—to use the neologism simon reynolds innovated to deal with sonic hauntology’s temporal displacements—that is dyschronic (reynolds 2006). dyschronia is reynolds’ name for the broken-time proper to hauntology, in which it is no longer possible to securely delimit the present from the past, in which the traces of lost futures unpredictably bubble up to unsettle the pastiche-time of postmodernity. when tricky began, everything had already ended. “aftermath”, his 1993 first single, is set in a catatonic, post-apocalyptic psycho-geographic undead zone in which personal disaster is indistinguishable from planetary catastrophe. “my first lyric ever on a song was ‘your eyes resemble mine, you’ll see as no others can’”, tricky said when i interviewed him in 2008. “i didn’t have any kids then . . . so what am i talking about? who am i talking about? my mother. my mother, i found out when i was making a tv documentary, used to write poetry but in her time she couldn’t have done anything with that, there wasn’t any opportunity. it’s almost like she killed herself to give me the opportunity” (fisher 2008). the spectral voices come like schizo-radio signal down telepathic lines: the cross-dressing tricky standing in the empty place where the absent father’s law would have been, ventriloquising his dead mother’s voice. so writing songs, tricky says, is not a question of writing at all. it’s more like allowing himself to be possessed—which is to say, dispossessed of his conscious self: it’s like meditation, speaking in tongues. my grandmother used to keep me at home because my step-grandfather used to be out working and she used to watch all these black and white horror movies, vampire movies and it was like growing up in a movie and she used to sit me in the middle of the floor, because she lost my mum, her daughter. she’d be playing billie holiday, smoking a cigarette and would say things like, you look like your mum, watching me, i was always my mum’s ghost (tricky, in fisher 2008). yet tricky was a revenant in other ways too. like everyone else, he originated nothing; instead, he is thrown into a multiply mediated world, a televisual bush of ghosts, a “cyberjunky spiritworld” (sinker 1992). “cyberpunk—white sf, or anyway its radical dancecult 5(2)48 leading edge”, sinker argues in “loving the alien”, “is arguing that the planet, already turned black, must embrace rather than resist this: that back-to-nature pastoralism is intrinsically reactionary, that only ways of technological interaction inherited from the jazz and now the rap avant garde can reintegrate humanity with the runaway machine age”. tricky’s afrofuturism, accordingly, is not a question of asserting a purified blackness against a monolithic whiteness, but of maintaining fidelity with his lack of origin. rather than faking authenticity, tricky lives liminality; he doesn’t resolve the tensions of being mixed race by artificially choosing one side of a racial either/or: instead, his records are a slurred re-dreaming of musics—facilitated by dub and hip-hop methodology—that already blurred white and black: a condensation of psychedelic soul (marvin gaye, sly stone) and two-tone post-punk (the specials, mark stewart, japan). tricky’s “aftermath”, this communion with the dead, is also a labyrinth of (re)citations: it includes quotes from japan’s “ghosts” (“just when i thought i was winning...”) and a sample of blade runner (1982) dialogue (replicant leon’s anti-oedipal blast: “let me tell you about my mother”). yet it’s in these “staged reverberations” (penman 1995) that we can hear the difference between hauntology and postmodernism, its zombie twin. “aftermath” is no exhausted meta-discourse, no display of self-satisfied self-awareness; the quotations don’t suggest a last man channel-hop, but a montage, by turns sinister and seductive, in which the cyberpunk near future and the psychoanalytic past echo one another. “is it merely coincidence that the sylvian quote and the blade runner lift converge in the same song?”, penman asks. “‘ghosts’... replicants? electricity has made us all angels. technology (from psychoanalysis to surveillance) has made us all ghosts. the replicant (‘your eyes resemble mine...’) is a speaking void. the scary thing about ‘aftermath’ is that it suggests that nowadays we all are. speaking voids, made up only of scraps and citations... contaminated by other people’s memories... adrift…” (penman 1995). modernity was built upon “technologies that made us all ghosts”, and postmodernity could be defined as the succumbing of historical time to the spectral time of recording devices. postmodern time presupposes ubiquitous recording technology, but postmodernity screens out the spectrality, naturalising the uncanniness of the recording apparatuses. hauntology restores the uncanniness of recording by making the recorded surface audible again. one of the things that the 21st century’s hauntological artists—burial, ghost box, the caretaker—share with tricky is the foregrounding of the sound of vinyl crackle. there is no attempt to smooth away the textural discrepancy between the crackly sample and the rest of the recording. if the metaphysics of presence rests on the privileging of speech and the here-and-now, then the metaphysics of crackle is about dyschronia and disembodiment. crackle unsettles the very distinction between surface and depth, between background and foreground. in sonic hauntology, we hear that time is out of joint. the joins are audible in the crackles, the hiss... the surface noise of the sample unsettles the illusion of presence in at least two ways: first, temporally, by alerting us to the fact that what we are listening to is a phonographic revenant; and second, ontologically, by introducing the technical frame, the material prefisher | the metaphysics of crackle 49 condition of the recording, on the level of content. we are suddenly made aware again of what the first listeners to phonograph recordings were acutely conscious: that we are witnessing a captured slice of the past irrupting into the present. the crackle, meanwhile, reminds us of the technological means by which this capturing of time was made possible. “‘speech has become, as it were, immortal’, scientific american pronounced immediately after edison’s invention [of the phonograph]” (kittler 1999: 72). rock’s prehistory has only ever been available to us through a haze of crackle. owen hatherley has observed that “there’s surely no music more utterly dominated by its recording technology than 1930s blues. listening to robert johnson you have, rather than the expected in yr [sic] face earthiness and presence, layers upon layers of fizz, crackle, hiss, white noise, as if its [sic] been remixed by basic channel rather than recorded in a room in some mythologised deep south” (2006). all that needs to be added to this is the idea that the “mythologized deep south” arises from the “layers of fizz, crackle, hiss, white noise;” there is no presence except mythologically, no myth without a recording surface which both refers to a (lost) presence and blocks us from attaining it. rockism could be defined as the quest to eliminate surface noise, to “return” to a presence which, needless to say, was never there in the first place; hauntology is a coming to terms with the permanence of our (dis) possession, the inevitability of dyschronia. whether or not robert johnson really did strike a faustian bargain, the gothic dimension of the recording process could not have escaped the imagination of the man who wrote “phonograph blues” (1970). what cinema had commented upon and instantiated in films like the student of prague (1913)—the uncanny presence of the double—johnson confronted in the encounter with his recorded voice: the part (object) of himself which would achieve immortality, and returning, buried beneath crackle and hiss, as a phonodoppelgänger. “in the phonographic realm of the dead, spirits are always present” (kittler 1999: 72). it’s no accident that johnson was recording at around the same time as al bowlly (1964), the prewar tearoom crooner whose songs were used by dennis potter in pennies from heaven (1981) and the singing detective (1986), and by kubrick in the shining (1980), both of which inspired the caretaker’s music from the haunted ballroom. both bowlly and johnson made records at a time when recording technology had developed sufficiently to achieve a kind of sepia effect but not well enough that the audio simulation had become convincing, life-like. the ellipses in robert johnson’s life—only a handful of facts are known about him for sure—are another kind of “hiss” that adds to his mystique. it is as if history never happens; either there are too many gaps, which have to be filled with rumours, supposition and fantasy; or there is an excessive, exhaustive record, so complete as to render the narration of history redundant. we live in a time when the past is present, and the present is saturated with the past. hauntology emerges as a crucial—cultural and political—alternative both to linear history and to postmodernism’s permanent revival. what is mourned most keeningly in hauntological records, it often seems, is the very possibility of loss. with ubiquitous recording and playback, nothing escapes, everything can return. dancecult 5(2)50 this notion of the end or failure of history is one reason that derrida’s neologism of hauntology has been so resonant in the 21st century. over ten years ago, when kodwo eshun published his afrofuturist manifesto, more brilliant than the sun (1998), jungle, hip-hop and techno were still consistently generating “future shock”. alvin toffler coined the term “future shock” in 1965 to refer to “the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in a short time” (toffler 1981: 2). who were the first victims of future shock if not the african slaves (and the proletariat)? yet eshun refused the standard narratives of redemption and damaged wholeness, and instead understood future shock in a positive way. “change is the process by which the future invades our lives”, toffler had written (1981: 1), and afrofuturists were those who could identify with the invader, transforming stress into enjoyment. “[y]our fear-flight thresholds are screaming, it’s like your whole body’s turned into this giant series of alarm bells, like your organs want to run away from you. it’s like your leg wants to head north and your arm wants to head south, and your feet want to take off somewhere else. it’s like your entire body would like to vacate. . . . basically, you want to go awol from yourself. but you can’t, so you stay and enjoy it” (eshun 1996). faced with the mutational acceleration of 1990s afrofuturist musics, eshun turned to theoretical components from deleuze and guattari and mcluhan in order to combat what he identified as the “futureshock absorbing” tendencies of journalism (1998: 01[02]). but as the rate of innovation has slackened, as the failure of the future has spread from white postmodernity (even) into the musics of the black atlantic, suddenly it is derrida’s work on spectrality which has a new fit with these out-of-joint times. in addition to being derrida’s book on marx and marxism, specters of marx can also be read as his engagement with postmodernism. postmodernism only achieved full-spectrum dominance after 1989, when “apparently victorious” capitalism thought itself in a position to declare the end of history. derrida’s spectres of marx is in part about the “end of history” thesis then being propounded by francis fukuyama (see fukuyama 1992). derrida’s title, needless to say, was a play on all of the ghostly imagery in marx—most notably, of course, the opening line of the communist manifesto: “a spectre is haunting europe—the spectre of communism”. part of the point was: if communism has always been spectral, what does it mean to say that it is now dead? derrida’s other major reference-plex is hamlet, especially the line, “the time is out of joint”. here we are back with dyschronia or temporal disjuncture as the principal characteristic of hauntology. it’s no accident that sonic hauntology begins with the afrofuturist sonic sciences of dub and hip-hop, for time being out of joint is the defining feature of the black atlantic experience. as mark sinker wrote, the “central fact in black science fiction—self-consciously so named or not—is an acknowledgement that apocalypse already happened: that (in [public enemy’s] phrase) ‘armageddon been in effect’” (sinker 1992). in this disjunctive time, it makes perfect sense for terminator x to juxtapose samples of helicopters with discussions about the slave trade, as he does on “can’t truss it” on public enemy’s apocalypse...91 (1991). there is no way in which a trauma on the scale of slavery—“the holocaust still going fisher | the metaphysics of crackle 51 on” as chuck d had it on “can’t truss it”—can be incorporated into history, american or otherwise. it must remain a series of gaps, lost names, screen memories, a hauntology. x marks the spot... a termination of family lineage, a destruction of narrativised time. compare octavia butler’s kindred (1988)—in which a black woman from the bicentennial year of 1976 is abducted back to the time of slavery, and has to protect her slave-owner ancestor—with toni morrison’s beloved (1987), in which sethe kills one of her children in order to save it from the horrors of slavery. projected into the looped time of afrofuturist trauma, kindred’s dana becomes “like a ghost”—“‘disappeared? you mean like smoke?’ fear crept into his expression. ‘like a ghost?’” (butler 1988: 23)—a spectre-from-the-future whose intervention in the past allows that future to happen. the deep, unbearable ache in kindred arises from the horrible realisation that, for contemporary black america, to wish for the erasure of slavery is to call for the erasure of itself. what to do if the precondition for your being is the abduction, murder and rape of your ancestors? morrison’s beloved reminds us that america, with its anxious hankerings after an “innocence” it can never give up on, is haunted by haunting itself. if there are ghosts, then what was supposed to be a new beginning, a clean break, turns out to be a repetition, the same old story. the ghosts were meant to have been left in the old world... but here they are. whereas kubrick’s film of the shining digs beneath the hauntological structure of the american family and finds an indian burial ground, beloved pitches us right into the atrocious heart of america’s other genocide: slavery and its aftermath. jonathan demme’s astonishing film of morrison’s novel (1999) was a commercial failure in part due to the fact that the wounds are too raw, the ghosts too real. when you leave the cinema, there is no escape from these spectres, these apparitions of a real which will not go away but which cannot be faced. some viewers complained that beloved should have been reclassified as horror... well, so should american history.... the time-slips in beloved and kindred often come to mind when you listen to the music of american dub-blues artist little axe. little axe started releasing records at around the same time as tricky, and there are certain textual and temperamental between the wolf that house built (1994), slow fuse (1996) and tricky’s maxinquaye (1995); and the haunted bayous of stone cold ohio (2006) take their place alongside burial’s phantom-stalked south london and ghost box’s abandoned television channels in hauntological now.2 like tricky’s, little axe’s world is entrancing, vivid, often harrowing; it’s easy to get lost in these thickets and fogs, these phantom plantations built on casual cruelty, these makeshift churches that nurtured collective dreams of escape... also like tricky’s world, the landscape that little axe conjure is a religious terrain, by turns infernal, purgatorial, and paradisal. shepherds... do you hear the lambs are crying? —“victims” from stone cold ohio (2006) dancecult 5(2)52 built up out of palimpsests of samples and live playing, little axe’s records are wracked with collective grief. spectral harmonicas resemble howling wolves; echoes linger like wounds that will never heal; the voices of the living harmonise with the voices of the dead in songs thick with reproach, recrimination and the hunger for redemption. yet utopian longings also stir in the fetid swamps and unmarked graveyards; there are moments of unbowed defiance and fugitive joy here too. i know my name is written in the kingdom... —“rockin’ shoes” from stone cold ohio (2006) little axe is skip mcdonald’s project. through his involvement with the likes of the sugarhill gang and mark stewart, mcdonald has always been associated with future-orientated funk. if little axe appears at first sight to be a retreat from full-on future shock—mcdonald returning to his first encounter with music, when he learned blues on his father’s guitar—we are not dealing here with the familiar, tiresome story of a “mature” disavowal of modernism in the name of a re-treading of trad form. in fact, little axe’s anachronistic temporality can be seen as yet another rendering of future shock; except that this time, it is the vast unassimilable trauma, the sf catastrophe, of slavery that is being confronted, but in a more direct way than tended to be the case in jungle or techno. even though little axe are liable to be described as “updating the blues for the 21st century” they could equally be seen as downdating the 21st century into the early 20th. their dyschronia is reminiscent of those moments in stephen king’s it (1986) where old photographs come to (a kind of ) life, and there is a hallucinatory suspension of historical sequentiality. there is no doubt that the blues has a privileged position in pop’s metaphysics of presence: the image of the singer-songwriter alone with his guitar provides rockism with its emblem of authenticity and authorship. but little axe’s return to the supposed beginnings unsettles rockism by showing that there were ghosts at the origin. hauntology is the proper temporal mode for a history made up of gaps, erased names and sudden abductions. the traces of gospel, spirituals and blues out of which little axe’s stone cold ohio (2006) is assembled are not the relics of a lost presence, but the fragments of a time permanently out of joint. these musics were vast collective works of mourning and melancholia. little axe confront american history as a single “empire of crime”, where the war on terror decried on stone cold ohio’s opening track—a post 9/11 re-channeling of blind willie johnson’s “if i had my way” (1957)— is continuous with the terrordome of slavery. mcdonald has described before the anachronizing methodology he uses to transport himself into the past: “i like to surf time. what i like to do is study time-periods—get right in to ‘em, so deep it gets real heavy in there” (real world 2009). mcdonald’s deep immersion in old music allows him to travel back in time and the ghosts to move forward. much like tricky’s working methods, it involves a kind of possession. little axe’s records skilfully mystify questions of authorship and attribution, origination and repetition. it is fisher | the metaphysics of crackle 53 difficult to disentangle sampling from songwriting, impossible to draw firm lines between a cover version and an original song. songs are texturally dense palimpsests, accreted rather than authored. mcdonald’s own vocals, by turns doleful, quietly enraged and affirmatory, are often doubled as well as dubbed. they and the modern instrumentation repeatedly sink into grainy sepia and misty trails of reverb, falling into a dyschronic contemporeanity with the crackly samples. part of the reason little axe are intriguing is that their use of dub makes it possible for us to encounter blues as uncanny and untimely again. pierre schaeffer calls sounds that are detached from a source acousmatic (schaeffer 1966). the dub producer is an acousmatician, a manipulator of sonic phantoms detached from live bodies. “separated from its cause, the echoplex creates an ominousness without an object, an all-pervasive feeling of force undefined...” (eshun 1998: 04[064]). dub time is unlive, and the producer’s necromantic role—his raising of the dead—is doubled by his treating of the living as if dead, the way that he transforms the voice of the living into the “ghosts of ghosts of effects” (eshun 1998: 04[064]). for little axe, as for the bluesmen and the jamaican singers and players they channel, hauntology is a political gesture: a sign that the dead will not be silenced. i’m a prisoner somehow i will be free —“prisoner” from stone cold ohio (2006) at a time of political reaction and restoration, when cultural innovation has stalled and even gone backwards, when “power . . . operates predictively as much as retrospectively” (eshun 2003: 289), one function of hauntology is to keep insisting that there are futures beyond postmodernity’s terminal time. when the present has given up on the future, we must listen for the relics of the future in the unactivated potentials of the past. notes 1 this opposition can be deconstructed because, as mladen dolar establishes in a voice and nothing more (2006), the voice is never other than partly disembodied. the idea that the voice was the guarantor of presence and logos was only ever a fantasy, as dolar shows, by uncovering a metaphysical history of voice very different to the one received from deconstruction. here, far from being the safeguard of presence, the voice was considered to be dangerous, threatening and possibly ruinous. dolar’s argument is that law-logos has always sought to differentiate itself from a voice conceived of as feminine and chaotic, but logos cannot extirpate the voice, and indeed depends upon it: what is the fundamental expression of the law if not the voice of the father? 2 see burial’s debut—and hyperdub’s first release—south london boroughs (2005). dancecult 5(2)54 references butler, octavia. 1988. kindred. london: the women’s press. buse, 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2006. “well, that was actually more in the ragtime idiom”. sit down man, you’re a bloody tragedy. 9 october: <http://nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com/2006/10/wellthat-was-actually-more-in-ragtime.html> (accessed 11 august 2009). jameson, fredric. 1991. postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism. london: verso. king, stephen. it. 1987. sevenoaks: hodder and stoughton. kittler, friedrich. 1999. gramophone, film, typewriter. stanford: stanford university press. marcus, greil. 1977. mystery train: images of america in rock ‘n’ roll music. london: omnibus press. morrison, toni. 1987. beloved. london: chatto and windus. penman, ian. 1995. “[the phantoms of ] tricknology [versus a politics of authenticity]”. the wire 133 (march). <http://www.rocksbackpages.com/article.html?articleid=4025> (accessed 11 august 2009). real world. little axe. <http://www.realworldrecords.com/artists/little-axe/> (accessed 12 august 2009). reynolds, simon. 1995. “interview with tricky”. melody maker, 24 june: <http://www. rocksbackpages.com/article.html?articleid=988> (accessed 11 august 2009). ———. 2006. “haunted audio”. the wire 273 (november): 26–33. schaeffer, pierre. 1966. traité des objets musicaux. paris: le seuil. sinker, mark. 1992. “loving the alien—black science fiction”. the wire 96 (february). <http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/218/> (accessed 10 august 2009). toffler, alvin. 1981. future shock. toronto, new york and london: bantam. žižek, slavoj. 2009. first as tragedy, then as farce. london and new york: verso. fisher | the metaphysics of crackle 55 discography bowlly, al. 1964. al bowlly sings again. ace of clubs (lp): acl 1162. <http://www.discogs.com/al-bowlly-al-bowlly-sings-again/release/678663>. burial. 2005. south london boroughs. hyperdub (12-inch): hdb001. <http://www.discogs.com/burial-south-london-boroughs/master/102146>. ———. 2006. burial. hyperdub (cd): hdbcd001. <http://www.discogs.com/burial-burial/master/11767>. caretaker, the. 2005. theoretically pure anterograde amnesia. v/vm test records (mp3): vvmtcd25. <http://www.discogs.com/ caretaker-theoretically-pure-anterograde-amnesia/master/18444>. ghost box (label). 2004–. <http://www.discogs.com/label/ghost+box>. little axe. 1994. the wolf that house built. wired recordings (cd): wired 27. <http://www.discogs.com/little-axe-the-wolf-that-house-built/master/142594>. ———. 1996. slow fuse. wired recordings (cd): wired 0233. <http://www.discogs.com/little-axe-slow-fuse/master/15876>. ———. 2006. stone cold ohio. real world records (cd): uscdrw140. <http://www.discogs.com/little-axe-stone-cold-ohio/master/15880>. johnson, blind willie. 1957. his story. folkways records (lp): fg 3585. <http://www.discogs.com/blind-willie-johnson-his-story/release/748067>. johnson, robert. 1970. king of the delta blues volume ii. columbia (lp): c 30034. <http:// www.discogs.com/robert-johnson-king-of-the-delta-blues-vol-ii/master/150637>. public enemy. 1991. apocalypse 91… the enemy strikes back. def jam recordings (cd): 523 479-2. <http://www.discogs.com/public-enemy-apocalypse-91-the-enemy-strikes-black/ master/30225>. tricky. 1993. aftermath. fourth & broadway (cd): 12 brw 288. <http://www.discogs.com/tricky-aftermath/master/50201>. ———. 1995. maxinquaye. fourth & broadway (cd): brcd 610. <http://www.discogs.com/tricky-maxinquaye/master/50297>. filmography kasdan, lawrence. 1981. body heat. usa: the ladd company. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082089/>. kubrick, stanley. 1980. the shining. uk-usa: warner bros. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081505/>. potter, dennis. 1986. the singing detective. uk-australia: bbc-abc <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090521/>. ross, herbert. 1981. pennies from heaven. usa: mgm. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082894/>. rye, stellan and paul wegener. 1913. der student von prag (the student of prague). germany: deutsche bioscop gmbh. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0003419/>. scott, ridley. 1982. blade runner. usa-hong kong-uk: warner bros. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083658/>. wasta capital: ethnographic reflexivity at a rooftop nightclub in beirut caitlin robinson soas, university of london (uk) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.01.13> over the course of my year-long fieldwork in beirut, i often joked with ali, a prominent lebanese dj and electronic music producer, about how he would make an excellent anthropologist.[1] his ability to read social situations and adjust his behaviour immediately in order to make people comfortable in his presence was remarkable. i met ali by chance at a nightclub about a month after arriving in beirut, where i was researching beauty practices and the local cosmetic surgery industry. he quickly became not only a friend, but also a useful informant and gatekeeper for my research. not knowing at first his status as a local celebrity, i was surprised by how many people ali seemed to know wherever we went in the city. he was often stopped on the street and greeted by fans that had seen him being interviewed on television or recognized him from the nightclub scene. interested in the ways in which ideal beauty is imagined, created and performed, doing fieldwork at nightclubs became an essential extension of my ethnographic research. as fieldwork progressed, i learned the importance of nightclubs as platforms for the performance of wasta, a word in arabic that refers to how one is able to use and exhibit one's social connections to exert influence and get things done. these spaces allow for this enactment of "who's-who", where everyone knows everyone else, if only by virtue of facial recognition in a vast and yet intimately interconnected social web. accordingly, these nightclub venues also reveal uneven fields of power and embedded networks of prestige. whereas nightlife locales in other contexts, usually western, are understood as spaces where people can come together to relax and let go, in beirut these spaces are perhaps better understood in terms of how they are integrated crucially with the notion of keeping up appearances and cultivating social status.[2] for example, the demarcation of space according to private tables, reserved annually by wealthy individuals from prominent families, both mimics and reproduces social realities in everyday city life.[3] for those individuals lacking wasta connections derived from prestigious familial, sectarian and monetary ties, knowing how to manipulate one's social and perhaps erotic capital (bourdieu 2008) is of the utmost importance. for separate reasons, both ali and i found ourselves implicated in this project. coming from humble beginnings, by age eight ali was working in a carpentry shop to help support his family after losing his father at age three. although shy as a child, during his teenage years ali gained confidence by selling keyboards in music shops and beginning to dj at his friend's parties and neighbourhood bars. as his career progressed, he found himself playing gigs around the region, making music videos and spending time working in new york. having tired of this chaotic routine, he now prefers to focus on producing music for arab singers and collaborating with international artists who come to beirut to perform. he splits his time between the recording studio and socializing at different nightlife venues, sometimes visiting as many as three during the course of an evening. in many ways, ali stands out as a distinct character on the nightlife scene. his carefully groomed aesthetic style compliments his aura of confident hyper-masculinity and impish proclivity for fun and living in the moment. his self-confidence is particularly apparent when it comes to his rapport with women. we often spoke of his reputation as a "ladies man", and although he admits to enjoying this attention, he prefers to be known for his other qualities and career achievements. ali's aspirations for increased fame and social recognition are set against the backdrop of insecurity associated with sectarian political fragmentation and the weak lebanese state.[4] his professional life working as a dj and in music production has allowed him to further develop his wasta connections, complimented by the manner in which he has successfully manipulated his self-image. personally, i faced the task of securing a position as a relevant social actor in the nightlife scene in order to gain access to an important group of interlocutors. essentially, i had to develop and display my wasta as an ethnographic method to the fullest extent possible. with no hereditary ties to lebanon, and having initially only a handful of personal connections, i quickly came to see the importance of manipulating my "foreign" status and appearance as a methodological technique. my power as an ethnographer in this context was derived from my status as a canadian studying in london. because wasta works according to another's perception of how you might return their social favours, as a westerner i was someone of value because i could be used as a point of contact for those wishing to travel, work or move abroad. lebanese who do not hold foreign passports often run into a number of restrictions on their movement across borders, and accordingly one's international wasta connections are invaluable. attention also shifted to my appearance as a "western" beauty when doing nightlife ethnography, and my physical appearance was a key factor in legitimizing my presence in these settings. this orientation had both positive and negative aspects; especially in light of the way i was viewed as a young, secular, unmarried female usually found in the company of older local men.[5] nevertheless, my positionality as an outsider allowed many of my interlocutors to open up and share insecurities they would otherwise remain rather guarded about with members of their own society. in many ways, and stemming from the trust established over several months of friendship, ali and i came to play off one another in these spaces in order to achieve our own larger social aims. when ali approached me and introduced himself on the occasion of our first meeting, we positioned one another initially in categories based upon our first impressions of one another. i viewed him as a typical beirut party guy, and he imagined me to be a young western woman on vacation seeking to experience the famed beiruti nightlife. as the months progressed and our friendship deepened, these initial perceptions changed as we discovered the importance of these nightlife spaces to our separate professional projects. as a result, in different and yet complimentary ways, we developed skill sets that proved invaluable in terms of securing my access to elite circles and continuing his status as a local celebrity. whereas ali was already adept at utilizing his own physical capital as a confident lebanese male in this context, he supported me in developing and employing my own version as a visiting foreign female. the ethnographic vignette that follows comments upon not only my own methodological use of wasta to access these kinds of spaces, but also the way in which i came to understand myself as an actor through which wasta was activated and performed. one friday evening in august, i received a telephone call from ali telling me that we were invited to party that evening at the vip table of a "high-rolling" acquaintance and government official whom i had not yet met. when i asked how they knew each other, ali said that tareq had seen him out a number of times and, thinking he was "a cool guy", invited him to join his table whenever he liked in the future. after agreeing to join him, i searched my closet for a suitable dress and high-heels and began the long, yet admittedly pleasurable, process of creating the appropriate hair and make-up style for the nightclub venue we would be attending. at around eleven o'clock ali picked me up and we made our way down towards the beirut waterfront from my neighbourhood of achrafieh. sitting next to me in the back of the taxi, ali was dressed in his usual uniform: a tight black t-shirt, distressed diesel jeans, and silver puma sneakers. driving through the pristine and completely modernized downtown core, we chatted about who we expected to see that evening. we turned out onto the reclaimed spit of land where, alongside a number of warehouse buildings, an exhibition centre, and a newly opened waterfront promenade, beirut's most famous nightclub, skybar, is located. opened in 2007, the nightclub was ranked the best bar in the world by 2009. each summer it continues to attract international performers as well as consistent crowds of well-heeled lebanese and international glitterati. instead of allowing the taxi to drop us off directly outside the nightclub, ali asked the driver to stop just around the corner. after he paid the driver we walked the short distance to the entrance, giving the impression that we had parked in the neighbouring lot. patrons who frequent these nightclubs regularly place a high value on how rare and expensive their cars are, especially as men tend to view their vehicles as an extension of their own success and masculinity. ali neither owns a car, nor displays any interest in driving through the hectic streets of beirut. as we approached the entrance, about thirty on-duty valets were on hand to park the long line-up of flashy cars, the most expensive of which were positioned directly in front of the nightclub, providing a hassle-free exit for those clientele willing to pay the price. in front of us two lines were formed, one for the vip entrance of those guests claiming the most prestigious and well-situated tables, and the other for those with reservations at the remaining tables, the bar, or perhaps those finding themselves in the unhappy position of trying their luck without having access to a booking. we approached the former line, skipping the queue of guests and moving directly to the front. ali greeted the doorman warmly by name, they shook hands, and the bouncer who had been watching from close by unclipped the red velvet rope and allowed us to pass through towards the elevator. "that bouncer doesn't like me, i have no idea why, but he can't do anything about it, i know everyone here", ali explained with his characteristic playful smirk. as we squeezed into the mirrored elevator with the evening's other partygoers, ali turned to me and continued his previous thought, smiling as he told me that tonight, like all nights, "we are the kings and queens". while i was perplexed at first by ali's comment, i came to associate it with his feeling of professional success and self-awareness of how his charismatic persona as a local celebrity in the nightlife sphere was received by others. it is the combination of these factors that allowed him to call upon his wasta so successfully in this setting.[6] this is remarkable in beirut's elite social circles given his lack of entrenched familial prestige and moneyed pedigree. going up four floors with the pulsing of the dance music growing louder and louder, we emerged onto the open-air rooftop of the nightclub. we stopped briefly to chat with the three door-girls, polished and manicured in every aspect of their appearance. one of them confirmed the name under which our table was booked and chatted amicably with ali, having recognized him immediately upon our arrival. finally, we turned the corner to the main terrace of the nightclub, its flashing lights and digital video screens coordinated with the occasional burst of pyrotechnic flames from atop the pillars framing the venue. we moved in the direction of the predominant triangle-shaped bar, crowned by a dj booth, and set against the glittering lights of the city suburbs and mountain villages across the bay. finding our table, ali indicated that our host had not yet arrived and began to introduce me to the group while exchanging his own handshakes, hugs and kisses of welcome. i seated myself at the edge of the table closest to the bar, as i knew that ali preferred to stand so that he could be free to move around as he liked. this was a personal as well as pragmatic choice. because of his notoriety and the usual social customs, ali was often interrupted by an unending stream of passers-by, greeting one another as friends and exchanging brief pleasantries in rapid mixed arabic, english and french before clinking glasses and moving onwards towards their own tables. drinks were mixed and served to us by a personal bartender who had our table's number printed on the back of his nightclub logo t-shirt. we took turns in answering our tablemate's questions about where and how we had met, with whom ali had been collaborating musically and what my impressions were as a foreigner of lebanon and the lebanese. i was never asked anything about my own interests or research aims, and the only further comments i received were directed at my physical appearance. i came to understand that i was invited to share the evening with this group not only because of my connection to ali, but because of the cachet i brought to the table as a western woman visiting from abroad, having a style and beauty they described as "international". ali himself was not immune to this fact, being fully aware of the status i brought to him as a friend. to my initial amazement, my own beauty practices were often assessed as a subject of critique in these situations. for example, while my blue eyes and tall stature were seen positively, my fair skin and fine hair were suggested as features to be worked upon at local beaches and beauty salons. as a result, i became well versed in learning to mobilize my own physical capital in order to present myself appropriately as a respectable and yet sexually alluring female. i came to view these techniques of beauty work and self-presentation as a useful ethnographic method and a necessary and yet uncomfortable evil. meanwhile, tareq, our host for the evening, had arrived just before midnight. after greetings and introductions, he asked our bartender to move his chair to the head of our table, affording him a better view of the rest of the rooftop patrons. during the taxi ride ali described that tareq held a high-ranking position in a department of the lebanese government, and that a number of his subordinates would likely join him at the table with their girlfriends. by the time he had arrived, we were at least ten people, only one other of which was a woman. despite greeting me warmly, she proceeded to regard me suspiciously from the other end of the table for the rest of the evening. i had encountered the same watchful gaze from women previously, and when i questioned local friends about this behaviour they suggested that perhaps in these circumstances my presence could be understood as a threat. as a foreigner, although i stood outside the usual family politicking and posturing around securing a good marriage, i could not expect to escape becoming the subject of rumour and gossip like everyone else. assumptions about my morals were made according to longstanding ideas of western women, and these were only intensified when i was seen out with ali. while this experience was infuriating and uncomfortable at times, i began to eventually confront the impossibility of conducting ethnographic research in these spaces while maintaining my privacy and anonymity. as ali continued to remind me with an air of sarcasm, "everyone's a celebrity in beirut", and discussions with respect to one's appearance and reputation, however harmless, are commonplace. i can remember vividly my own discomfort when a nightlife acquaintance referred to me as a "socialite". when i joked with him about the negative connotation i associated with the word, he suggested that perhaps i would prefer being called a "social butterfly" instead. with this in mind, nightclubs represent spaces of social risk. they can engender downward social mobility if one is not vigilant in acting with decorum as a respectable female. judgements about one's character can solidify obstacles or grant opportunities of ethnographic access in equal measure. as the drinks continued to flow, i asked ali whether he knew the dj who was playing, now joined by a number of partygoers dancing alongside him and waving to their friends. he explained that everyone in the industry knows of one another, and in some cases success created rivalries due to jealousy and competition for regular employment at the hottest clubs. our conversation was interrupted by tareq, gesturing in the direction of two pretty girls dancing beside the bar, and yelling over the music to ali that he should, "go talk to those girls, and bring them to our table". as the night moved on and this pattern began to repeat itself, the reciprocal nature of the relationship between the two men began to crystallize in my mind. ali's fame as a local nightlife celebrity, coupled with his charisma and well defined personal style, were understood as a method of accessing previously untapped pools of women for the enjoyment of the men sitting around the table. in each case, and with no hesitation, ali greeted the girls in question, many of whom he knew personally, and invited them to have drinks at our vip table. in a few cases the girls joined our table briefly, preferring usually to continue their one-on-one conversations with ali before heading back to their own groups. as the night wore on it became clearer to me that my role was not only to play the part of the intriguing foreign beauty. i began to field the same question from a number of men at the table: "where are your girlfriends? when are they coming?" in their eyes, and i believe because i was associated with ali, i too could be mobilized as an intermediary with the potential to deliver access to new and desirable female companions. having realized this, i made my excuses, knowing full well that my girlfriends had no intention of joining the group that evening. i could tell this disappointed our host, and i worried how his negative reaction would affect ali. over the loud music, which by this point had turned from popular dance hits to r & b and house, ali told me not to worry about it, and that the men were just getting impatient with their lack of success that evening as far as women were concerned. not unlike allison's (1994) own findings while working in a japanese hostess bar, i learned that the role of the beautiful female in these settings is powerful and necessary in order to shore up masculine heterosexual performances and legitimate expenditures. furthermore, at nightclubs like skybar, it is uncommon for local women to book tables or contribute to any associated costs of the evening. feeling uncomfortable with this discrepancy, i questioned my male companions about these practices. they pointed to the fact that women contributed in their own way by spending time and money "preparing their beauty", from getting weekly manicures to shopping for an outfit. noticing the thinning crowd, and confident in his own interactions with tareq that evening, ali and i decided not to linger. we said our goodbyes and slid away into the night, breezing past the remaining partygoers, many of whom by this hour took no notice of our passing. as i reflected on the evening during the drive home, i realized that although my own positionality as an ethnographer seemed particularly well suited to beirut's nightlife, i was particularly lucky to have ali show me how to make the rules work in my favour. while almost anyone could learn to play the game, there are undoubtedly hard limits restricting those who may gain access to these social circles. certainly, my success in infiltrating these venues would have been compromised had i occupied any socially sanctioned minority position, from ethnicity to sexual orientation and class. although some nightlife ethnographers may demonstrate their knowledge of the rules, they may still be excluded from joining in the game. author biography caitlin robinson is a social anthropologist and phd candidate at soas, university of london. she is conducting a broad based ethnography of the cosmetic surgery industry and its players in beirut, lebanon using innovative methods and approaches to investigate spaces where beauty and self-making occur in the city. a canadian by birth, she holds a bah in political studies from queen's university, canada and an mphil in social and cultural anthropology from the university of oxford. she can be contacted at: <caitlin_robinson@soas.ac.uk> references allison, anne. 1994. nightwork sexuality, pleasure, and corporate masculinity in a tokyo hostess club. chicago: university of chicago press. bourdieu, pierre. 2008. "the forms of capital". in readings in economic sociology, ed. nicole woolsey biggart, 46–58. oxford: blackwell. notes [1] all names have been changed to protect the identities of my interlocuters. [2] a similar case would likely be found in the nightlife settings of most other arab capitals in the middle east. [3] this embedded framework for acceptable social interaction also complicates the manner in which beirut has been marketed by the media and tourism industries as the ultimate hedonistic pleasure capital. [4] although there is not space enough in this article to further develop this line of analysis, ali's sectarian identity as a shi'a has specific implications in light of the political power sharing between religious sects in lebanon. [5] this point will be elaborated upon further in the ethnographic vignette that follows. [6] while i argue that hierarchies experienced during the daytime tend to mimic those found in elite nightclub settings in beirut, the latter are, to a certain extent, more flexible and reassuring for those actors occupying more marginal social positions. ethnography from the inside: industry-based research in the commercial sydney edm scene dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 5(2): 113–130 issn 1947-5403 ©2013 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.02.06 ethnography from the inside: industry-based research in the commercial sydney edm scene ed montano rmit university (australia) abstract drawing on a decade of ethnographic research and participant observation in the sydney commercial electronic dance music (edm) scene, this article explores some of the issues and tensions in conducting industry-based fieldwork in edm culture. through interviews with some of the scene’s key djs, promoters, media workers and other industry personnel, consideration is given to designing a set of guiding principles for researchers undertaking “behind-the-scenes”, localised edm research. the starting point for my discussion is my work in dance music retail, specifically at central station records between 2002 and 2005. the level of access this work granted me to particular industry workers and the subsequent networks i was able to establish proved invaluable to my research not only when seeking out interviewees but also when seeking entry to clubs and events. however, while insider knowledge has numerous benefits, convincing contacts of the relevance of research can be problematic, as can maintaining a critical distance. keywords: djs; ethnography; sydney; insider research; participant observation ed montano is lecturer in music industry at rmit university, australia, and writes for the australian dance music website <www.inthemix.com.au>. he is reviews editor for dancecult and is on the executive committee of the international association for the study of popular music. email: <ed.montano@rmit.edu.au>. feature article dancecult 5(2)114 introduction this article considers some of the issues i have negotiated during ten years researching the commercial club scene in sydney (see, for example, montano 2009 and 2010). taking cues from hodkinson’s analysis of insider research (2005) and lau’s discussion of ethnography and reflexivity (2012: 18–25), i believe it is essential to discuss, critically analyse and reflect upon one’s role as an ethnographer as well as how one’s position in relation to the field impacts research. such analysis is crucial, given that “holding a degree of insider status clearly can have implications for the achievement of successful and productive interactions with participants” (hodkinson 2005: 136), while being an insider researcher presents both advantages and challenges (lau 2012: 18). through detailing my reflections on my fieldwork of the past ten years, my intention here is to offer guidance for those commencing research in similar contexts, specifically industry-based analysis in urban edm scenes. my research has involved numerous interviews (together with more informal conversations) with djs, promoters, media workers and other industry personnel. i took this approach in an attempt to distinguish my work from the focus on audiences/clubbers that dominated the academic literature on edm culture at the commencement of my research in 2002,1 and from “the literature on dance club cultures which situate youth as not only a central but almost an exclusive condition of participation” (bennett and taylor 2012: 238). i identify the three areas of “reflection”, “transition” and “integration” that need to be taken into consideration when undertaking fieldwork research as an insider. i spent the years between 2002 and 2005 working as a retail assistant on the cd counter at central station records (and subsequent years working at other music retail stores). at the time, this was sydney’s main independent edm store and was part of the central station records group that included other stores around australia and a record label that has had a significant role in the popularisation of edm in australia. the industry-related benefits of working in the store allowed me to further my research on sydney’s clubbing landscape. i took full advantage of the opportunities for free entry into most of the city’s clubs that working alongside djs provides. all those employed to work behind the store’s vinyl counter were professional djs, while dance party promoters would often visit the store to leave flyers or posters for their events, typically offering guest-list places or free tickets for any staff. i was thus able to form a network of contacts that proved beneficial not only when seeking out interviewees but also when seeking entry to clubs and events. while i was always careful not to appear to be exploiting a friendship for personal gain, i certainly enjoyed the benefits of being placed on a guest-list, and i certainly went out clubbing more often than i would have had i been required to part with my own money to gain entry. my work at the store also enabled me to gauge the dimensions of the sydney scene, through cd, vinyl and ticket sales. the job took on a degree of schooling, in that i was constantly being educated about the styles of music that were popular with sydney clubbers, the venues that were pulling the biggest crowds, and the discourses and value judgements that circulated within the scene. this work informed my ethnographic research montano | ethnography from the inside 115 in numerous ways, establishing boundaries, generating ideas and providing directions. the conclusions i have drawn about the edm industry in sydney are rooted firmly within the experiences and encounters i had while working at the store. the job afforded me an insight into the city’s club culture that could not have come from any other source or method of investigation, and allowed for an intensity of participation within the scene that acted as a solid foundation for my subsequent analysis. as a method of research into music scenes, ethnography has been, and remains, a useful and productive approach. extending and deepening this method, participant observation is frequently thrown into the mix, with researchers drawing upon their own personal involvement with the music and its associated cultural field. despite the overlap between the two approaches, it is important to note that a distinction can be made between insider ethnography and participant observation. an insider can employ an ethnographic methodology that is not necessarily participatory, while an outsider can engage in participant observation. for the researcher who engages in insider-based participation, negotiating their own involvement in the scene under study is crucial for a successful project. yet there has been very little consideration and interrogation in music-scene discussion of the processes of such research tactics. while many studies of edm cultures are grounded in detailed and extensive fieldwork,2 these rarely engage with critical analysis of fieldwork. alongside these studies there is a growing body of australian-focused and sydney-specific research on edm.3 more broadly, there is a range of popular music ethnographies that have been particularly useful for understanding the methods that are most appropriate for studying a specific scene in a particular cultural context.4 this article is intended to complement this existing work. inside and outside during the course of my research i occupied multiple positions. i made a deliberate effort to remain an active participant in the scene, as an “insider”, while being conscious to step back and critically analyse my research findings as an “outsider”. this separation allows for a distinction to be made between the different roles that can be adopted during the research process. furthermore, it demonstrates a critical awareness of the tensions and porous boundaries that reside between these roles. a deconstruction of insider participatory activity and its impact on research is facilitated by stepping back from one’s own involvement (cummings 2006: 70), avoiding what taylor describes as “insider myopia” (2011: 16). yet this is complicated by personal investment in the music and the scene. it was my own knowledge of and passion for dance music and club culture that drove me to investigate the scene in sydney. my enthusiasm remained strong throughout my research activity, compromising the objectivity of my analysis. however, it was this passion that enabled me to secure employment at central station records, which i combined with my album and gig reviewing contributions to australian dance music website www.inthemix. com.au (itm).5 together with my regular clubbing adventures, i was able to look at the scene from multiple vantage points. dancecult 5(2)116 this integration into the scene allowed me to establish relationships with scene actors that subsequently generated opportunities for interviews. similarly, my writing work for itm opened a select few doors when it came to seeking contacts. conducting research in record stores raises certain issues. firstly, the gender balance (of both the workforce and customer base) is typically skewed in favour of men (or at least it was at central station records and at other independent edm stores in sydney), and usually young men. this was reflected in the male bias of my selection of interviewees (although this selection was dictated by circumstance, not choice, with a notable lack of female djs, promoters and industry workers in sydney). secondly, as salespeople, store workers can influence a dj’s choice of music by making recommendations. my colleagues and i would receive enquiries from several djs on a weekly basis about having “anything good in the orders”. store workers therefore have a central role in shaping the musical landscape of particular scenes. thirdly, these workers can influence the networking structures of the scene by introducing djs, promoters and other industry personnel to one another. in light of all this, the insider researcher who works in a record store is a pivotal scene participant, capable of influencing the actions of other scene members. my fieldwork also involved interviewing djs, clubbers, promoters, journalists and other industry practitioners about their participation in dance music culture in sydney; in-depth analysis of local street press (free) publications and other local dance music media such as itm; and visiting clubs and festivals. the findings generated from this fieldwork formed the roots of my study. fieldwork is central to the ethnographic process, and my immersion in my chosen scene facilitated a research project that was embedded within the day-today working practices of many of the scene’s key “social agents” (maxwell 2002: 110). as well as providing contacts and networks, my fieldwork enabled fluency in the discourse of the scene. i made a deliberate effort to become involved in different working capacities, believing that these would enhance my reputation within the scene as an active participant and outside the scene as an engaged researcher. routine interactions with customers and colleagues at the record store not only enhanced my understanding of the scene but also granted me access to high-profile scene actors. in this sense, my research has involved much more than the collection of data. in an article on music radio and the record industry in the uk, percival acknowledges how his own status as a radio insider proved invaluable for his research, arguing that empirical researchers should have expertise in their chosen field of study (2011: 460). given the importance of incorporating a degree of self-reflection in the methodological approaches taken by researchers, relevant to any project is the history of the researcher within their chosen field. while there is certainly some validity to tutenges’ claim that “the position of ‘the stranger’ can help sharpen one’s eyes for behaviours and assumptions that may go unnoticed for the ‘culture members’ themselves” (2011: 4), experience and familiarity are crucial to the performance of fieldwork that is accurate and convincing. however, experience in the field does not automatically elevate the researcher to a position more authoritative than the inexperienced researcher. overplaying the role of montano | ethnography from the inside 117 insider, or privileging the perspective of the insider, runs the risk of failing to illuminate the multiple perspectives that research can, and should, generate. it should be noted that just as outsider views can be numerous and varied, there can also be multiple insider views (hodkinson 2005: 141). the researcher as insider may be able to negotiate exclusive access and to source exclusive insights, yet this does not mean they “have privileged access to a singular insider truth” (hodkinson 2005: 142), nor does it mean they are able to present “an absolute or correct way of seeing and/or reading the culture under investigation” (taylor 2011: 6). ultimately, there needs to be a balance between insider and outsider experiences and perspectives (brewer 2000: 59–60; hodkinson 2005: 145). ethnography with my emphasis on qualitative rather than quantitative data, and on my own participation in and observation of the scene, my work is grounded in the tradition of ethnography. investigating the culture of a particular group of people is central to ethnographic research (patton 1990: 67). directly observing people in their social settings assists in understanding their experiences and how they make sense of these experiences (watts 1993: 54). for popular music studies, ethnography has become a key research methodology in the investigation of the role of music in everyday life and the way music shapes the construction of personal identities, local communities and national and international scenes. as with all popular music, edm culture has a significant role in everyday life. for this reason, ethnographic methodology is an ideal way in which to study local scenes. my chief concern has been to obtain detailed perspectives from those involved in the commercial dance music industry in sydney, primarily djs, but also record store owners and workers, promoters and local media. my research has been part of an attempt to map the terrain of the sydney scene and to explore the significance of dance music in a specific urban context. i chose not to conduct brief interviews with the greatest number of participants possible, but rather to speak in detail with selected key figures in the scene. these interviews were semi-structured, open-ended and frequently in-depth, and like malbon’s were “very much ‘conversational’ in style” (1999: 33). i made contact with most interviewees through my work at central station records, either directly as customers with whom i had regular contact, or indirectly through networks i established during my work there. other methods of contacting potential interviewees included telephone and email (numbers and email addresses sourced from colleagues at the store). all interviews were conducted “one-onone” and took place in locations such as bars, coffee shops and respondents’ homes (weber 1999: 321). my selection and analysis of interview material was influenced by an overriding concern to lend voice to the scene workers who had devoted their valuable time to participating in my research. i have consistently employed direct quotation in my writing. using interviews as primary research material foregrounds the views and experiences of those involved in the research field (alasuutari 1995: 57; lau 2012: 18). direct quotations, however, are dancecult 5(2)118 meaningless without any theoretical context, for as bennett warns, “there is little to be gained from privileging empirical research over theory simply on the basis that it is somehow ‘more in touch’ with the object of study” (2002: 464). interviews are inherently personal, subjective interpretations of events, experiences and developments, and, when being interpreted, need to be situated within their organizational, historical, social and geographical contexts (negus 1999: 11). hodkinson suggests that being an insider “may enhance the quality and effectiveness of qualitative interviews” (2005: 138). this insider status can help to create a relaxed interview atmosphere in which interviewees are willing to disclose information that they would not share with an outsider. the existing relationships i had with most of my interviewees allowed for open and detailed discussion. while my interviews always started off in a structured question-and-answer format, they typically transformed into more informal conversations and exchanges. ultimately, i would suggest that the more informal the interview, the more relaxed the interviewee, and thus the more potential for discussion of topics that perhaps would not arise in a more formal, structured interview, with increased trust and conversational flow facilitated through the informality (hodkinson 2005: 139). sydney was chosen for this research because of the city’s history of involvement in dance music, paralleling cohen’s decision to focus on liverpool in her study of rock culture in a local context (1991: 4). furthermore, when i started my research, little attention had been given to commercial dance music culture in sydney, paralleling bennett’s decision to study dance music in newcastle upon tyne (2000: 3). sydney is generally perceived to be “the dance capital of australia” (park and northwood 1996: 2), while the city’s djs, clubs and festivals reflect the global diffusion of contemporary edm culture. located on the periphery of the dominant stream of anglo-american music industry production, australian scenes balance their own specific local inflections with imported music, styles and fashions. during my research i observed tensions in fan and media discussions of the local and the global, with numerous debates in the press and online forums on the value of local djs versus international djs and local production versus international production. these tensions are highlighted by sydney dj and producer goodwill when he explains how international djs are often perceived by clubbers within the scene as being superior to their local counterparts: one thing that annoys me these days is how much people look up to international djs. quite often it will take an international dj to come out here and play a record for kids to think it’s good. they’ll play a big tune that i’ve been playing for three months and everyone will go, “oh, what’s that?”. the other thing is the changing of technology. i’ve been playing cds for ages and copping a bit of flak for it at regional gigs, but then erick morillo will come out and play all cds, and no one will say anything. it’s just because they’re from overseas people automatically assume that it’s a good thing, although at the same time they pack out dance floors and turn people on to music, so there’s pros and cons to it.6 montano | ethnography from the inside 119 local ethnography in global contexts when i commenced my research there was little material that related directly to the ethnographic research of dance music and club cultures, malbon highlighting just a few years earlier how “ethnographies of clubbing are especially scarce” (1999: 180). ethnography seemed the most suitable methodology for the industry-based analysis i wanted to undertake, although at the same time i remained aware of kirschner’s criticism that territorially-bound ethnographies, such as cohen’s, finnegan’s and shank’s, “fail to link intimate accounts of local practices to the bigger picture, reducing complex flows of popular culture to a sort of local determinism” (1998: 258). thus, i attempted to situate my study of the sydney scene within a wider transnational context of global edm culture. for kirschner, the boundaries or territorial limits of ethnography (as defined by the field being researched) make it difficult for the ethnographer to make connections between their findings and wider global influences (1998: 259). however, through my research i aimed to challenge this. ethnographic study, rather than privileging the local as kirschner argues, can be applied to a wider context and can thus enhance our understanding of a global industry and culture. ethnography that focuses solely on the micro-level ignores macro-level phenomena such as transnational flows.7 one response to these flows is the development of “multi-sited ethnography” (marcus 1995), an example specific to edm being d’andrea’s “macro-ethnography” of ibiza and goa (2007). contemporary music scenes develop through the interweaving of local and global resources (bennett and taylor 2012: 234). thus, to contextualise the sydney commercial edm scene, i have considered not only the thoughts and actions of those involved in the scene but also the scene’s global environment. i have conducted work on a particular locality with a view to its articulations within broader cultural and economic systems (straw 1991). my work is not multi-sited in the sense that i physically travelled to different geographical locations to conduct comparative research, but it is grounded in my background as a british citizen. my knowledge and experience of edm culture in england informed my research on a variety of levels, and i would argue enabled me to situate my discussions in a broader, multi-sited, global framework. like the british backpackers who staged dance parties and raves in sydney in the late 1980s and early 1990s based on english models of the warehouse party, i too was an “expat” combining my homegrown knowledge with a cultural activity in a foreign land. my understanding of the uk dance scene, when placed alongside and in contrast to my exploration of the sydney scene, granted me an increased sense of the fluidity and interaction between dance music scenes around the world. my initial involvement in the commercial sydney edm scene took place during the six months i spent in the city as part of my twelve-month working holiday in australia between 1999 and 2000. both prior and subsequent to this holiday, i undertook undergraduate and postgraduate study in liverpool. alongside its rich rock music heritage, the city gave rise during the 1990s to cream nightclub, and cream’s subsequent development into a global brand of club culture meant that liverpool became a cultural epicentre for dance music, dancecult 5(2)120 “with the rampant hedonism of dance fans paralleling the prevailing politics of self-interest” (nehring 2007: 3). it was this vibrant and increasingly commercial scene i fell into when i commenced university life during the latter half of the 1990s, and so did many others, with one of the reasons often cited for cream’s success being the city’s bustling student population. moving to sydney in 2002, i found that the change in location led to a shift in my edm tastes. at the time, the city’s commercial scene was dominated by the deep and funky end of the house music spectrum, which contrasted to the more progressive sounds i had been used to hearing in liverpool. through both my fieldwork and my job at central station records, i developed an intense appreciation of deep, soulful house. venues in the city such as home, tank, yu and the arthouse catered widely to fans of this music, providing many memorable nights out during the course of my research. my own passion for house music, combined with the centrality of this music to dance culture in sydney, led to my research engaging mainly with djs who played in the commercial house music scene in the city.8 many of my conclusions regarding the place of sydney within global edm culture are informed by my experience of club culture outside of australia. of course, not all researchers are able to draw on direct experience of other scenes. this does not mean, however, that local research cannot be situated in a global context. the development of communication technology has made it easier to establish contact with participants in scenes all over the world. as well as utilising the wide array of international media now circulating through global edm space, researchers can draw on local scene djs who work internationally. such people can have an intimate knowledge of scenes elsewhere and of the global terrain of edm culture. similarly, researchers can consult international djs who pass through their scene (although gaining access is not straightforward), as well as tourists who temporarily participate in the scene. discussing the emphasis that is placed on international djs by promoters within the sydney scene, dj and producer seb chan acknowledges the demands of tourists: sydney is a big tourist city. we get more tourists than any other city in australia. the sydney scene, by that measure, will have more people coming from other countries than, say, perth or melbourne. . . . who are the people who are in a place to party? generally backpackers and tourists. your general workers go out maybe once a month, twice a month, unless they are particular ages. the olympics [in 2000] made us much more [of ] a tourist city, and i think subsequent to the olympics, we’ve had a lot more focus on [how] your core audience is going to be maybe thirty per cent, forty per cent tourists. so what are tourists going to know? they know the big names from back home. that’s my general vibe. the tourists aren’t here enough to realise necessarily that the local [djs] are as good or better. tourists are a very different demographic because, by their nature, they are freed up from the restrictions or rules of their other life back home, so as a tourist you do things you wouldn’t otherwise do, and that’s the lifeblood of commercial clubs for sure.9 montano | ethnography from the inside 121 research on local music scenes needs to be connected to the broader transnational processes that facilitate the global spread of culture. the written histories of edm may emphasise the role of place in the music’s development, as with chicago and detroit for example, but in the contemporary context there is an impression of globalism, as sydney dj alan thompson10 acknowledges: i think the dance music scene as it is today is completely imported, all around the world, from the uk. i do really believe that. having djed since 1990 and travelled all over the world, i’ve seen various countries change over the years, and what is predominant in that change is that the clubs themselves are marketing themselves, and their music policies, and the djs, to what the uk does. you could stand in a club in tokyo, in montreal, in new york, or singapore, or even sydney, close your eyes and without knowing what is going on you could be in a club in england. . . . the dance scene has a worldwide identity. i really believe that dance music is a world phenomenon, and we are all dancing to the same beat, but in different countries.11 thompson’s british background could possibly be an influencing factor on this characterisation. the anglo-centricity of his perspective creates the impression of a centreperiphery model where all dance music activity radiates out of the uk. this would be an over-simplification of the complex circulatory patterns of transnational cultural flow that exist between different scenes. thompson also overlooks australia’s historically shaped commonwealth political and cultural ties with the uk, meaning that the influence of uk edm culture in australia mirrors a broader and longer pattern of australian cultural activity developing in the shadow of britain. as such, it is unlikely that thompson’s analysis would apply to scenes in non-commonwealth states. conducting contemporary site-specific ethnography is complicated by the shifting and continually evolving scenes that arise out of the global flow of culture. during the course of my own fieldwork there has been a mainstreaming of edm culture in australia that has generated particular changes in the sydney scene, notably the increased prominence of daytime festivals and the partial disappearance of regular club nights. this shift to the mainstream is highlighted by sydney promoter and dj john wall: when we started promoting, [the sydney dance scene] was small. there weren’t that many venues that people could use for dance things. i’m talking about [the] mid-’90s. there was underground café, which is currently candy’s apartment, and they had a regular deep house night every friday which did alright, and people like derrick carter and mark farina had their first sydney gigs there, and then there were lots of small one-offs and things. . . . then over the last few years of the ’90s, up to about 2002, it stayed similar, but we were growing, and a couple of the other promoters got sick of it and lost interest a bit. it was still the thing where there was a fairly obvious division between the dance crowd and the mainstream, where even dance music that i wouldn’t consider even remotely underground at all, like groove armada or something, was still not fully mainstream, and if you went to some mainstream bar dancecult 5(2)122 or pub or club, that would be top forty [music] and it would be different kind of people and a different kind of vibe, and everyone in the dance scene would look kind of scruffy, nobody would be wearing high-heels, and it had a very different vibe. now, i don’t think there’s any clear division at all, it’s much more spread, there’s a lot more middle ground. what goes on week-to-week, there aren’t that many underground nights where it’s just all about the music. there aren’t that many regular nights where everyone is there for the music and not for the fashion.12 any scene study represents a snapshot of a moment in time. a scene’s ever-changing shape immediately renders any writing historical. thus, as fikentscher suggests, “any sound ethnographic methodology should come to terms with the time dimension of its topic” (2000: 17). indeed, throughout the course of my own research i have negotiated a continually metamorphosing sydney commercial edm scene, the constantly shifting cultural terrain of dance music making itself evident in the way various clubs, events, djs, promoters, record stores, media and music have come and gone. such changes are by no means unique to sydney, and i believe that acknowledging cultural shifts is an integral part of the ethnographic process. maintaining an awareness of scene change is crucial in negotiating the inherent temporal boundaries of any ethnographic project. this awareness can be enhanced if the researcher reflects continually on their progress, considers the politics of their transition from insider to insider-ethnographer, and makes an explicit attempt to become an integrated part of their scene. i now turn to these three areas of reflection, transition and integration, and how i perceive them as intrinsic components of conducting insider research. reflection being able to reflect critically on one’s position as a researcher is an essential part of conducting an informed project. during my own research i regularly assessed how i portrayed myself within the scene as an insider, alongside a consideration of my ability to detach myself from the fan perspective. reflection is a crucial element of fieldwork methodology, as it allows the researcher to uncover and interrogate their biases. bennett (2002) discusses the necessity for self-reflection in the methodological techniques employed by researchers studying youth culture and popular music, and emphasises the extent to which researcher familiarity with the field can influence findings and subsequent theorisation. he summarises the absence of empirical research in early approaches to the study of youth culture, and suggests that the emphasis on theory in these approaches has resulted in a lack of concern for detailed ethnographic work which has, in turn, generated a lack of engagement with “methodological issues such as negotiating access to the field, management of field relations and ethical codes” (2002: 451). bennett goes on to outline an approach to researching youth culture in which the researcher incorporates a degree of selfreflection. qualitative research methodologies, he argues, should display a critical analysis of the relationship the researcher has to the field being studied. i believe my position as a montano | ethnography from the inside 123 “fan” of dance music and as an active participant in edm culture allowed me to pursue a more detailed and informed analysis of the sydney scene. bennett suggests “there may be much to learn about the social significance of contemporary youth cultures and musics using an approach which combines critical reflexivity with an intimate knowledge of fan discourse” (2002: 462). similarly, i believe there is much to learn when using the same approach to analyse music industry discourses and practices. transition hodkinson describes the shift in positioning he experienced after deciding to research the goth scene in which he had been an active participant. moving from an insider to the dual role of insider and ethnographer, involvement as a fan was now balanced with “observing, interviewing and analysing the goth scene and its participants in relation to continual reading, writing and academic discussion” (2005: 136). thus, when deciding to research a field in which they are actively involved, the ethnographer makes the transition from insider to insider researcher. it is important to be aware of how this transition is managed, and of how any involvement at the fan level is impacted by the practice of research and analysis. one issue i negotiated in my own transition involved explaining to contacts why i wanted to interview them and convincing them of the relevance of my research. while most were happy to spare an hour or more of their time, a select few proved somewhat more reluctant to speak to me, and these were often the people i was particularly keen to speak to. this may have been related to their higher profile within the scene, and thus they perhaps felt speaking to someone who was not going to provide them with direct promotion (as a music journalist would) was not an efficient use of their time. despite my attempts to convince them otherwise, usually through stating “i work at central station records”, my insider status did not always prove to be the access key i hoped it would. on more than one occasion i was left standing on a street corner or sitting in a café waiting for interviewees who ultimately never turned up and never bothered to notify me that they could not make our appointment. perhaps naively, i had assumed that my position as an active scene worker would grant me a degree of authority and would open all doors to all participants. thus, i think it is important not to paint insider research as opening a gateway that cannot be opened by the outsider. indeed, in some cases i believe it may have been more effective for me to not mention my work at the record store, and instead to emphasise my detachment as an outside researcher seeking to investigate the working practices of the scene’s key figures. in retrospect, i would suggest i perhaps over-emphasised or over-played my status as an insider, which possibly translated to an undermining of the purpose and relevance of my research. transitioning into scene-insider status can potentially be affected by scene politics. the researcher should be aware of how the alliances they make with particular people may inhibit access to others, due to antagonisms between artists, disagreements between promoters, or other conflicts. as such, while being an insider can remove certain boundaries, it can also dancecult 5(2)124 create new ones. that said, while there is certainly a healthy level of competition amongst some of the djs and promoters in sydney, i did not uncover any hostility or distrust. furthermore, my role at central station seemingly had no impact on the willingness of workers at other record stores to speak with me. yet even though there were no explicit boundaries that prevented me from accessing particular people, i still had to be aware of how the connections i made as an insider, and the communication i had with various scene actors, could potentially impact on further networking and interaction. related to this, it was important to ensure certain interview material remained confidential. for example, one dj was particularly critical of the managers of a club at which he played, attacking them for imposing guidelines and recommendations for the type of music he should play during his sets. while i did not interview the managers, i felt it would have been inappropriate to include the dj’s comments in published work. i could have incorporated them as an anonymous response, but i was reluctant to present material that could potentially cause problems between scene participants and for my own future research. in this regard, my decisions on what to include and what to exclude have been partially influenced by my transitioning to the role of insider researcher and my desire to protect my image and reputation within the scene. fortunately, on occasions where potentially sensitive observations were being made, most interviewees were careful enough to withhold any identifying information, as the following quote from sydney dj john devecchis demonstrates, when discussing the role of the warm-up dj: you know the track “so much love to give”?13 i saw one of the warm-up djs at home nightclub once, i won’t mention his name, a few years ago when the track was massive. he warmed up for an international, and he was doing a good job, and as his last track before the international came in he played “so much love to give”. i’ve never in my life questioned a dj doing something before as much as i did that. he played the biggest tune of the moment as the very last track before an international came on. he peaked the crowd to the biggest they were going to get peaked all night, just as this poor international was coming on to play. it was the most unprofessional thing i’ve ever seen in my life. it was stupid. what’s the point of booking an international if your warm-up dj is going to outdo him? the job of a warm-up dj is to get the crowd warmed up, get a groove, and get people on the dance floor. the ones who try to steal the limelight shouldn’t be warming up for internationals, basically.14 aside from the scene specifics that relate to the transition process, the journey of the insider researcher is also bound up in the broader scientific community surrounding their scholarly work. research results are discussed critically through conference presentations, interaction with other researchers and the publication of journal articles and other texts. through these endeavours, the insider researcher transitions into the edm research community. the transition process thus involves both the culture of the scene and the culture of academia. montano | ethnography from the inside 125 integration through my employment at central station records, the degree of integration into the scene that i achieved was arguably higher than had i been merely a clubber and listener. there was a certain amount of luck and good fortune in my obtaining the job, and such employment opportunities are rare in edm scenes, particularly when you have no contacts or networks in the scene. furthermore, the disappearance of record stores has meant the loss of one of the key sites of employment and social interaction in edm culture. this sociality of record shopping was highlighted by alan thompson prior to the closure of most of sydney’s dj record stores: from a dj’s point of view, one of the parts of my job that i absolutely love is going to a record shop and listening to music and buying the music. going record shopping on a thursday or a friday can be a social thing. you’ll see other djs there, well not so much in sydney, but in london for instance you’d bump into producers and they would pass on their new tune, so it’s much more of a social gathering for djs as well. it’s a meeting point. we only get to see each other on a very rare occasion that we might be playing at the same club, whereas on a friday afternoon at black market in london you can guarantee that most of the top djs in london will be in there at some point in the day.15 at the time of our first interview in 2005 dj mark murphy was co-owner of sydney’s spank records (which finally succumbed to the pressures of digital downloading in 2011), and understandably held out hope for the continued existence of record stores: i hope record stores will still be around in future. either that or i’ve sold it for a fortune! people do still like the contact and the feeling of coming into a store and listening to vinyl and getting good customer service. i think people still enjoy that. i’d like to think that [the record store] is very important [to dance culture], just for the fact that i co-own one. it is a very social factor. you sort of promote the local scene more when you have a store because it becomes a focal point. you’re selling tickets to parties. i think it is very important. i think it would be sad if there was no dance music store and everyone was buying off the internet. it brings the local scene a little bit more together.16 eight years later, and with the six record stores that used to be located in the inner-city suburb of darlinghurst all now out of business (including central station), it is clear that the easier accessibility and wider variety of music online has seen most djs shun the social experience facilitated by record stores in favour of digital files. this has arguably made it harder for researchers to stake out key dance music sites.17 nonetheless, the concept of integration remains useful when planning fieldwork. i’m not suggesting that such integration needs to take the form of paid employment but rather that research is validated by any kind of immersion in the scene. such immersion can take many forms. my experience suggests participation, integration and immersion generates insights, contacts and friendships that dancecult 5(2)126 impact positively upon research. had i not worked at central station records i’m sure i would have found other avenues to pursue potential interviewees and to uncover research topics. however, i am also sure that any interview responses would have been less detailed and less open. i believe my integration into the scene made interviewees more willing to disclose certain information and more willing to be interviewed in the first place. through my work i was able to establish a rapport with some of the scene’s key players (cummings 2006: 70; lau 2012: 21; taylor 2011: 6). conclusion specific geographical contexts are rich in ethnographic detail. those who participate in a particular culture on a regular basis are well positioned to explore and assess the operational logics of that culture. discussing the aims and intentions of ethnographic studies of dance music culture, seb chan emphasises the importance of uncovering the local particularities of any one scene that serve to distinguish it from scenes elsewhere. he also goes on to suggest that the commercial structure that underpins contemporary edm makes the scene itself a more detailed and complex, although at the same time more easily accessible, field of study than it was fifteen years ago when he was researching a thesis on edm culture: i think any research on this sort of culture needs to reveal the local specificities that make things happen here rather than somewhere else. that’s always what i’ve been excited about. i’ve always been curious as to why does ‘this sound’ work in sydney, but not work ‘there’. why is that? why is my audience generally ‘this’ age and not ‘that’ age? what is it about the music? is it about the music? is it about the marketing? is it about a combination of the two? i think it’s become really complicated now. there’s a lot more capital involved, and so you get the flow of things like marketing impacting upon it in a big way, and perhaps you didn’t before. you get companies buying up clubs, like the merivale group, justin hemmes18 and all these people who have very particular strategies, and they have teams of marketers working with them to make sure that ‘this’ venue feeds people to ‘this other’ venue, that you track people across time. when they grow out of one club, like sublime, where are they going to go next? it’s a lot more grand-scale than it was when i was writing about it. i was writing about those formative stages. i think now it’s probably a bit easier to write because you can look at those grand plans and you can speak to those people. [now] it’s both more complicated but more accessible too.19 the commercial dance music scene in sydney provided me with a rich and fertile site for study. rather than focus on audiences, i situated the dj at the centre of my research. through exploring the ways in which certain djs in sydney discuss their work, it is possible to see how these djs interpret their role within the city’s dance scene and the way they perceive and understand this scene. more broadly, working through issues related to dj practice in a specific setting helps to construct a more informed understanding of contemporary edm culture, in both local and global contexts. as edm cultures continue to expand globally, montano | ethnography from the inside 127 it is necessary to adopt methodological approaches that are rooted in the local and at the same time engage with the global. such approaches would be more fruitful and would offer a more accurate picture than focussing on one specific site of research. conducting future ethnographic research into edm cultures using research designs imbued with this global perspective could help overturn the euro-/anglo-centrism characterising existing research (my own included) on edm scenes. acknowledgments thanks to luis-manuel garcia, graham st john and the anonymous reviewer for their feedback on earlier drafts of this article. notes 1 in the journalistic/non-academic literature on edm, the opposite has tended to be the case (e.g. brewster and broughton 2000; reynolds 1999). a rather classic “great artists and their works” historiography is also present in these more historical accounts. 2 ahmed, benford and crabtree 2012; d’andrea 2007; fikentscher 2000; gibson and mcgregor 2011; malbon 1999; olszanowski 2012; reitsamer 2011; thornton 1995. 3 brennan-horley 2007; brookman 2001; chan 1999; gibson and pagan 2003; luckman 2002; murphie and scheer 1992; park and northwood 1996. 4 bennett 2000; cohen 1991; fikentscher 2000; finnegan 1989; malbon 1999; rietveld 1998; shank 1994. 5 see <http://www.inthemix.com.au/people/e_j_montano/portfolio/articles> (accessed 15 september 2013) for my portfolio of reviews. 6 goodwill, interview with the author (sydney), 8 september 2004. 7 appadurai 1996; connell and gibson 2003; ho 2003; kong et al. 2006; negus 1996. 8 see gibson and mcgregor (2011) for a discussion of the development of the dunedin house music scene between 2002 and 2008. this development closely paralleled what took place in sydney during the same time, at least in terms of shifts in audience preferences for particular styles of dance music. mcgregor’s sydney-based girlfriend would send him monthly packages of records bought from central station, so that his “record box echoed with the beats that were popular at the time in sydney” (2011: 209). 9 seb chan, interview with the author (sydney), 25 august 2005. 10 prior to moving to australia in 2004, thompson lived and worked in the uk and therefore is particularly well placed to comment on the international scope of dance culture. 11 alan thompson, interview with the author (sydney), 15 june 2006. 12 john wall, interview with the author (sydney), 20 july 2008. 13 “so much love to give” was a hugely popular track in the sydney dance scene during 2002 and 2003. credited to together, it was composed and produced by dj falcon and thomas bangalter, and was initially released on roulé music in 2002. 14 john devecchis, interview with the author (sydney), 24 september 2006. dancecult 5(2)128 15 alan thompson, interview with the author (sydney), 15 june 2006. 16 mark murphy, interview with the author (sydney), 23 june 2005. 17 the development of online spaces as providing networking opportunities perhaps demonstrates how industry workers have responded to the disappearance of record stores. see, for example, reitsamer (2012) for an analysis of the female pressure network. 18 justin hemmes is head of the merivale group, a sydney-based hospitality company that operates various bars, clubs and restaurants in the city such as establishment, slip inn and ivy. in previous years, the company also operated iconic sydney house music venue tank, as well as staging the annual good vibrations festival between 2004 and 2011. i made contact with the company on five separate occasions to request an interview with hemmes, and after having been re-directed to several different people, no replies to these requests were forthcoming. i probably would have been more successful had i posed as a journalist from an ultra-chic style magazine. 19 seb chan, interview with the author (sydney), 25 august 2005. references ahmed, ahmed y., steve benford and andy crabtree. 2012. “digging in the crates: an ethnographic study of djs’ work”. chi 2012 proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems: 1805–14. <http://dl.acm.org/citation. cfm?id=2208314> (accessed 02 december 2012). alasuutari, pertti. 1995. researching culture: qualitative method and cultural 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popular music”. cultural studies 5(3): 368–88. taylor, jodie. 2011. “the intimate insider: negotiating the ethics of friendship when doing insider research”. qualitative research 11(1): 3–22. thornton, sarah. 1995. club cultures: music, media and subcultural capital. cambridge: polity. tutenges, sébastien. 2011. “stirring up effervescence: an ethnographic study of youth at a nightlife resort”. leisure studies 32(3): 233–48. watts, rob. 1993. “doing ethnography with young people: how and why?” in youth subcultures: theory, history and the australian experience, ed. rob white, 54–60. hobart: national clearinghouse for youth studies. weber, timothy. 1999. “raving in toronto: peace, love, unity and respect in transition”. journal of youth studies 2(3): 317–36. discography together. 2002. so much love to give. roulé music (12-inch): roule together 2. <http://www.discogs.com/together-so-much-love-to-give/release/95130>. alwakeel idm as a 'minor' literature typeset idm as a “minor” literature: the treatment of cultural and musical norms by “intelligent dance music” ramzy alwakeel university of leeds (uk) abstract this piece opens with a consideration of the etymology and application of the term “idm”, before examining the treatment of normative standards by the work associated therewith. three areas in particular will be focused upon: identity, tradition, and morphology. the discussion will be illuminated by three case studies, the first of which will consider warp records’ relationship to narrative; the two remaining will explore the work of autechre and aphex twin with some reference to the areas outlined above. the writing of deleuze and guattari will inform the ideas presented, with particular focus being made upon the notions of “minority”, “deterritorialisation”, and “continuous variation”. based upon the interaction of the wider idm “text” with existing “constants”, and its treatment of itself, the present work will conclude with the suggestion that idm be read as a “minor” literature. keywords idm, deleuze, minority, genre, morphology, subjectivity, autechre, aphex twin, warp can you really kiss the sky with your tongue in cheek? simon reynolds (1999: 193) why have we kept our own names? out of habit, purely out of habit. […] also because it’s nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it’s only a matter of speaking. to reach, not the point where one no longer says i, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says i. deleuze and guattari (2004: 3-4) dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(1) 2009, 1-21 issn 1947-5403 ©2009 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.01 introduction etymologically, an attempt to determine what “idm” actually signifies is problematic. in august 1993, advertising a new group on the alt.rave usenet mailing list, alan michael parry suggested that idm (intelligent dance music) is a forum for the discussion of what has been termed ‘intelligent’ music – that is music that moves the mind, not just the body. there is no specific defintion [sic] of intelligence in music, however, artists that i see as appropriate are fsol, orb, orbital, richard james (aka aphex twin), blackdog [sic], b12, and various others from warps [sic] artificial intelligence series. artificial intelligence describes eight lps released between 1992 and 1994 by sheffield’s warp records, billed in the sleevenotes to the first disc as “a series of ‘listening albums’” and “electronic music for the mind”. the post does not clarify by whom this music “has been termed ‘intelligent’” but the reference to these releases suggests that the word’s application may have been derived therefrom. awkwardly, though, the word “artificial” in the appropriated computer science term contests the intelligence in question. further exploration of warp’s marketing accordingly reveals something of an ironic inconsistency to the series title. in the sleevenotes to the first album, the words “artificial intelligence” appear atop a consideration of the record’s content that stipulates that “the atmosphere + emotion both come from the musicians”, and that “their machines are merely the means to a human end”. on the cover of the eighth release, however, the expression heads a far more transparent technical definition from the encyclopaedia of microcomputer terminology that seems somewhat at odds with the first album’s humanist dedication. rather than simply declaring the music’s relationship to intelligence to be real as opposed to “artificial” (or the other way around), these texts challenge the validity of the artifice/authenticity binary itself. the role of the word “intelligence” in the alt.rave post becomes dubious: warp’s assertions that the music is “for the mind” and that “you weren’t supposed to dance to it” (reynolds 1999: 193) hardly justify an attempt to evaluate the level of intellect found therein. indeed, when one studies the press material surrounding 1994’s artificial intelligence ii, it becomes clear that the word’s employment by the usenet group hinges upon something of a misreading. “artificial intelligence […] was never intended to be aimed at ‘intelligent’ people (whatever they are),” it explains. “[it] was supposed to be a bit of a tongue-in-cheek dig at the people who said it was music made by computers that had no soul” (young 2006: 62). artificial intelligence thus appears to constitute something of a socratic irony. its title invites a reconsideration of the values attached to authenticity, intellect, and humanity, while the literature surrounding it challenges the assumption that these concepts should be either sacrosanct or central to its constitution. in this article i will argue that, contrary to assertions by simon reynolds and others, the work associated with the term “idm” bears no immediate relationship to hierarchical standards – neither those of delimited genres nor any of its own. indeed, i will suggest not only that this work resists the term itself, but that, by so doing, it rejects the very notion of genre at all. i will conclude with a consideration of idm in linguistic terms, with reference to deleuze and guattari’s explorations of minority and majority. i will critique the idea that idm affirms any sort of identity – even an ironic one – and suggest that, through its relationships with “the voice and law of tradition” (colebrook 2002: 120), it can be read in some sense as a “minor” literature. 2 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 canon whilst not uncomplicated, it is clear that there exists some relationship between idm and the forms and values of “tradition”. i propose that this relationship is neither a straightforward embrace nor a straightforwardly ironic one that affirms the norms by throwing them into relief. rather, in the next three subsections, i will consider idm’s treatment of canon as appropriative. genre a minor literature does not write to express what it is (as though it had an identity to repeat or re-produce). […] a literature would become majoritarian when its past examples are read as signs of some underlying essence (colebrook 2002: 118). minority will return later. at this stage, i merely wish to open the debate about the applicability of deleuze and guattari’s literary theory to our discussion by considering what we might understand in an idm context by “past examples” being “read as signs of some underlying essence”. the original 1992 artificial intelligence sleeve depicts a robot, reclined in an armchair, facing a stereo system. on the floor are strewn three records: pink floyd’s progressive classic the dark side of the moon, kraftwerk’s groundbreaking krautrock opus autobahn, and warp’s first album release, a 1991 compilation entitled pioneers of the hypnotic groove. it will be taken that the floyd and kraftwerk lps signify a cultural “moment” in the context of the overall image; our focus now is the relationship of the third album cover to this moment, and to artificial intelligence itself. the ideological effect of the appearance of the pioneers sleeve on the ai cover is not immediately clear. in a sense, it would seem to identify the former with the moment to which the other lps allude, to construct pioneers as influential, groundbreaking, canonical, and so forth. in isolation, this is awkwardly paradoxical: dark side and autobahn predate both compilations by two decades. one possible response is to downplay the exclusive moment that supposedly connects pink floyd and kraftwerk, but this removes their ability to function as a joint signifier, and invalidates any point made by their juxtaposition with pioneers. if, alternatively, we ascribe to pioneers the same level of groundbreaking influence as autobahn and dark side, then any point made on the ai cover becomes moot: its influences are of no interest or significance, because it is out-of-date: the idm “moment” has already occurred. we will see shortly that warp’s justification for the two older lps’ placement into the ai text relates to their nature as records intended for listening purposes. however, warp only introduced the “electronic listening music” epigram with ai itself, whereas pioneers of the hypnotic groove makes no attempt to align itself in this direction: most of its tracks are less rhythmically complex, more repetitive than those featured on ai, while “hypnotic” has easily as many connotations of trance music or of drug use at raves as it does of static listening. a degree of humour could be contended here: we might subscribe to the idea that warp is affirming its own debt to such “important” recordings by integrating itself ironically into their moment, as if to prove the absurdity of so doing. this, however, is inconsistent with the more academic self-awareness of the tone of the sleevenotes. any irony remains socratic: the viewer is confronted by a visual “problem” (this absurdity) that can only be “solved” by the critique of his or her own preconceptions (an examination of why the image is absurd). artificial intelligence’s treatment of pioneers calls alwakeel • idm as a “minor” literature 3 into question the validity of distinction between pieces of music on the basis of any ascribed cultural significance, including that of perceived genre or “moment”. we are invited instead to interrogate the ways in which the four albums – the three on its sleeve, plus its own fourth wall – are and are not related. the artwork challenges the notion that temporal proximity (between pioneers and ai, the latter of which is surely the most representationally isolated of the four albums, since its invocation can only be reflexive) is any more valid a basis for equation than function (“listening music”). rather than subscribing to a causal chain, the four records form interrelationships. the sleeve presents its viewer with an unpicking of the value system imposed by the idea of a canon of classics or of listening music (what is pioneers doing in there?), or of an idm canon itself (what are floyd and kraftwerk doing in there?). not only is the music’s involvement in any distinct genre resisted; interpreting the sleeve in light of the idea of a canon actually obscures its significance. “[h]umans organise or territorialise themselves through language. language can then become inhuman or deterritorialised in art: no longer meaningful, controllable or recognisable” (colebrook 2002: 59). the artificial intelligence artwork deterritorialises its own constituent signifiers. genre and moment, inviolate in the language of the historical process, are seen no longer to be concrete, but to bear instead fluid relationships to a changing body of work – as with the addition of the warp material, as equal, to floyd and kraftwerk. this decentralisation is further demonstrated on warp’s second full-length release. lfo (whose eponymous first single appears on pioneers) ask, in the sleevenotes to 1991’s frequencies, what is house? technotronic, klf or something you live in. to me house is phuture pierre fingers adonis etc the pioneers of the hypnotic groove, brian eno, tangerine dream, kraftwerk, depeche mode and the yellow magic orchestra the use of phrases like “what is house?” and “to me” indicate a strong emphasis upon democracy and discourse, formulating the delimitation of different “types” of music as arbitrary. furthermore, the inclusion of kraftwerk and pioneers in the same list further blurs the distinction between “classic” albums and warp’s new output, especially given that lfo are effectively citing themselves in the latter. artificial intelligence ii strikes a further blow against closed definition. within the album’s gatefold is a quantity of text taken from an internet discussion thread about the ai series’ perceived similarity to and derivation from detroit techno. no particular narrative or conclusion predominates, but two effects should be noted. firstly, the inclusion of the thread itself elevates ai’s consumers to the level of ai itself: the subtitle “more electronic listening music from warp” appears on the same artwork as a public dissection of this very music. the argument about idm’s origins is thus seen to be democratic. secondly, each successive post in the thread contains as much internal quotation as it does response; the emphasis is upon not exposition but dialogue. the argument about idm’s origins is thus seen to lack solution or authority – to be, in deleuze and guattari’s terms, rhizomatic (deleuze and guattari 2004: 3-28). these texts, then, are perhaps more usefully considered outside of the conventional framework of genre the notion of genre is thus revealed to be incomplete: idm cannot be hermetically sealed because it rejects authority and conclusion. it refuses to read “past examples […] as signs of some underlying essence”, because there is shown to be no unchanging ideal to which each successive release endeavours. 4 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 progressive rock reynolds makes several references to a connection between “intelligent techno” and the value systems surrounding the progressive rock of the 1970s. he identifies in various locations the “recast[ing of ] progressive rock’s cartesian split between head and body as the struggle between atmospheric mind food (ambient) and thoughtless rhythmic compulsion (hardcore)” (reynolds 1999: 184), “the unsightly flowering of the ‘new progressive rock’ that was always latent within the concept of electronic listening music” (reynolds 1999: 200), and “a resurgence of rock notions like the ‘concept album’” (reynolds 1999: 182). elsewhere, he invokes the ai packaging as a zone for the dance/don’t dance binary. the initial 1992 compilation was presented in a gatefold sleeve – “a deliberate prog rock echo”, he suggests (reynolds 1999: 181) – whose design is outlined above. to illustrate his point, reynolds (1999: 183) refers to steve beckett’s statement that “we put [autobahn and dark side] on the cover of artificial intelligence […] to get it into people’s heads that you weren’t supposed to dance to it!” the semantics of the comment, however, are debatable. in the context of beckett’s earlier remark that warp had largely grown out of his own experience of “realis[ing] [that certain tracks] weren’t meant for twelve-inches, it was just that this was the only outlet for that kind of music” (reynolds 1999: 183) it looks as though “you weren’t supposed to dance to it” is less an instruction than the removal of one: music that does not require its consumers to dance if they choose not to. not only does this set up a difficulty between idm and its supposed genealogy as a type of dance music: it resists any unmediated incorporation into idm of the progressive rock “text”. this is but is not dance music: the locus of idm lies neither in the dance lexicon nor in the rock lexicon, but in the tension between the two. the argument around the music’s use maps onto its definition. by resisting the prescription of its function, idm is debarred from being theorised as a concrete genre. when they turned their backs on the dance floor (“i see the term ‘dance’ as really restrictive for us”, sniffed [future sound of london] member brian dougans) and dedicated themselves to concept albums, fsol’s pop instincts withered (reynolds 1999: 200). reynolds’ rejection of this lack of terminological complicity is highlighted by the connotations of pretension, pallor, even drug use in the word “sniffed”, but it should be noted that the language of turning backs resides in the argument itself, and not future sound of london or their music: the identification of something as “restrictive” hardly necessitates the restriction of oneself to its other. reynolds’ attempt to incorporate idm’s resistance to definition back into the dualism he sets up is archaic: the texts challenge the value system itself, such that meaning now resides in the mediation of the rejection and embrace of “the term ‘dance’”. to assert that idm (via future sound of london) has lost sight of its function as dance music is to attempt to close the linguistic sign after the horse has bolted. perhaps more pressing is the reference to a “split between mind and body”, and the invocation of the auteur-subject. “for all its rhetoric of ‘progression’, intelligent techno involved a full-scale retreat from the most radically posthuman […] aspects of rave music towards more traditional ideas about creativity, namely the auteur theory of the solitary genius who humanizes technology rather than subordinating himself to the drug-tech interface” (reynolds 1999: 182). these concerns must be considered in light of the relationship, highlighted by the ai rhetoric, between idm and mecha alwakeel • idm as a “minor” literature 5 nism, and the implications upon subjectivity of the simultaneous mappings of mind and body onto “machine”. it is to these that i will now turn. humanism/mechanism; the mechanical subject-object a variety of idm texts explore the meshing of human and mechanism, often by the location of “mechanical” forms within the human or of “subjective” forms within machinery. a thorough study of the interactions between idm and posthumanism is clearly beyond the scope of the present work, but i nonetheless intend to provide a brief outline of some of the ways in which these texts approach the debate. below the definition of “artificial intelligence” taken from the encyclopaedia of microcomputer terminology, the artificial intelligence ii sleevenotes describe electronic music itself as “one bulletin board” upon which can be “posted” such questions as “do we still find mechanisation and commerce ugly?” and “is spirituality crushed beneath them?” not only does this explicitly link a series that had seemingly claimed to be humanist in its conception (consider the quotations above from the ai sleevenotes) with more progressive ideas about machinery; it democratises the debate by posing the problems as questions, not statements, and by the employment of the language of “bulletin boards” and “posting”. this approach to the “problem” in turn hints at its mediation: by encouraging discussion rather than issuing an exposition, the sleevenotes invite dialectics into the conflict of ideology, and thus into the idm text itself. the debate is fleshed out, in part, by the explorations of “humanism” and “nature” that inform some of the work surrounding the notion of idm. distinctions are blurred as vocals are “spoken” by synthesised “robot” voices, as on the first track of lfo’s frequencies. initially, this gesture suggests a distance between lyrics (taken from the album’s sleevenotes quoted above) and author. simultaneously, however, it sets up a unity between listener, author, and the machinic voice. all three are participating in the debate, but the author has lost authority, as the meeting is being chaired by the machine – which affirms its own subjectivity (using words like “me”) and confronts the listener with its inauthenticity (it did not write the lyrics) in the same “breath”. conversely, the location of authorship within mechanism is also posited: lfo’s very name – an abbreviation of low frequency oscillator, a component in sound synthesis – identifies the music’s human origins with its technological ones, while a similar effect is exacted by harmonic 3131 – an alias of mark pritchard, who appears as part of global communication on artificial intelligence ii. the latter band name likewise connects a typically “human” value (that of communication) to its technological means (the “global” phenomenon is unthinkable without the existence of telecommunications, high-speed transport, and so on). harmonic 313’s album when machines exceed human intelligence might be considered, even with tongue in cheek, to re-establish a divide between “machines” and “human”, but it should be noted that the latter is now being used as an adjective to describe one form of intelligence, and not an epithet that sets up machinic intellect as “artificial”. the title can be seen as reference to an archaic projection founded upon such a divide: in being so titled, the record seems to immanentise this particular eschaton, but the album itself is in no tangible way “more” the work of machines than previous electronic releases. when machines… again invokes the dialectic: it simultaneously affirms and denies the human/machine binary, refusing to locate authoritative value in either. 6 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 humanity is thus identified as both the object and the subject of technological development (compare lfo’s robot/human blurring, and the resultant treatment of authorship, with ai’s rhetoric of human mastery over machines, or the complicity of when machines exceed human intelligence). this invalidates the pro-mind, prohuman agenda that reynolds argues to be idm’s own, overturning both binaries through the introduction of a dialectical treatment of machine-subject and machineobject. warp versus its records: negative identity and dialectics will straw notes that disco labels throughout the 1970s had little interest in developing long-term cumulative loyalty toward performers, and less still in building up back catalogues. […] while the album had become, for the record industry, the dominant form through which a performer’s identity found expression and assumed value, the lengthy periods normally required for its production and promotion were at odds with disco’s rapid turnover and development (straw 1999: 205). although not until 1989, it was to this commercial backdrop that warp as a record label came together. explaining its move to “foster […] brand loyalty” (reynolds 1999: 193) in an attempt to stay afloat, reynolds cites steve beckett’s observation that, around the period of warp’s formation, “dance labels had about a year of being on top. the only way to avoid that fate was to get more artist-oriented and album-oriented” (reynolds 1999: 183). artificial intelligence responded to this demand, showcasing six single-artist albums and reinforcing the brand with two bookending compilations upon which all of the six artists again appeared. the notion of a series at all inscribes the music – often presented as the work of oblique aliases or behind ambiguous album and track titles – with more continuity of marketing than of content. indeed, warp’s short films, generic purple record covers, and even television adverts might be seen to coalesce into a label identity stronger and more consistent than those of its individual records. nonetheless, warp’s roster never had any single overarching sonic agenda, encompassing both abstract electronic artists and guitar-oriented bands as early as 1990 (young 2006: 14-16). the artificial intelligence debate around electronic music constituted just one of its “faces”; rob young cites blech, a 1996 clubnight/ compilation complement, as part of “a distinguishable new phase” characterised by “a more human, fun side of electronica”, a statement somewhat removed from the humanist politics surrounding ai. “by the late 90s”, observes young, “it was no longer possible to talk about a ‘warp sound’ – it was more about a warp state of mind” (young 2006: 17). however, even if warp’s identity is performed as a “state of mind” connecting elements of its output, the significance of these connections is in part negatively defined. “[w]e might consider brian eno’s claim that creativity now operates at the macro-level of whole genres, not at the micro-levels of individual artists. […] [t]he entire scene […] is the creative force, producing collective movement in particular directions and leaving individual contributions to that movement to be seen as minor and transitory” (straw 1999: 205-206). warp’s methods, then, are alien to much of the music in its catalogue, focusing not upon “scene” but upon albums and artists. at the same time, these artists have highly complex relationships to their own artistry, frequently engaging themselves discursively with identity politics. warp’s “state of mind” alwakeel • idm as a “minor” literature 7 hinges upon its constituent artists and artworks, but the label refuses to conclusively brand anything under its umbrella, stylistically, canonically, or otherwise. a dialectical tension exists between the abstraction of the label’s identity from its output and the very means to that output. the case for any concrete relationships between texts in the warp landscape is blown open by its tenth anniversary compilation series warp 10, which comprises three collections: 10+1 influences, 10+2 classics 89-92 and 10+3 remixes. rob young proposes that the albums demonstrate “a new self-awareness of the label as a participant in a specific music continuum and history” (young 2006: 17), but this is only one side of the coin. as suggested above, warp has already rejected specific history; “continuum” may, admittedly, be closer to the mark, but it is crucial that the three subtitles are seen not as fully constituted, distinct points in a narrative, but as potentials. the sticker on the front of 10+1 influences describes the record’s content as “early house and techno”, but this is far from the only area in which music released on warp locates influence, as suggested by the diverse catalogue and the rejection elsewhere of the straightforward terminology of dance (consider the ai debate). meanwhile, 10+2 classics 89-92 compiles the label’s first few single releases, but with a contradictory new subtext. the term “classics” seems to embrace the notion of canon, but this notion is precisely the one called into question by pioneers of the hypnotic groove in the discussion above, even though both compilations repackage many of the same singles. indeed, it is significant that the latter two albums, despite bearing essentially the same tracklist, should perform two so different ideological functions – one disruptive and deterritorialising, the other operating within the language of hierarchy and precedent. this disjuncture reveals the tension from which warp’s “state of mind” is abstracted: once canon has been overturned, it can be used as a basis for the further dialectical exploration of artistic traditions and of the ways in which the texts might be read. we are invited to consider warp’s anarchic approach to linearity simultaneously with a text that claims identity precisely in this lack of identity. “[t]he more a language has or acquires the characteristics of a major language”, write deleuze and guattari – in this instance, the more idm texts threaten to affirm their identity negatively – “the more it is affected by continuous variations that transpose it into a ‘minor’ language” (deleuze and guattari 2004: 113). the 1999 compilations do not, in fact, suggest any of the “underlying essence” denied by minor literature. rather, by associating warp with some of the values against which it was founded (recall the focus of the music identified by 10+1 as “influence” upon singles over albums, and producers over artists (straw 1999: 203-205)), warp 10 places negative identity in “continuous variation”. it is, however, perhaps 10+3 remixes that reveals most explicitly the dialectical fragmentation of warp’s attitudes towards itself. having branded – with whatever degree of irony – its first few pre-ai singles “classics”, warp 10 concludes not with a retrospective covering its ascent into a significant portion of the alternative music market, but with an album of new remixes, all of whose source tracks come from warp’s back catalogue but many of whose remixers have never been associated with warp at all. a shift of focus takes place across these three albums. both of the first two in fact feature 12-inch versions rather than album or 7-inch mixes, even branding the tracks as such on the promotional stickers on their sleeves. in short, the fact that the tracks exist in different mixes (for example, the eponymous track by lfo appears in a version little over three minutes on the frequencies lp and on its 7-inch release, but the 10+2 8 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 version is nearly six) is immaterial to the presence of the song texts themselves, in whatever form.2 however, the subtitle of the third collection, remixes, brings the mixes rather than their originals into the foreground. the verb “to remix” is transitive: the original warp catalogue becomes the object of these remixes, whose subjects are accordingly the non-warp artists. by spotlighting the remixed artists in the first two instances, but the remixing artists in the third, warp 10 makes the point that authorship is an interplay of context, not a singular concrete significance. the effect of this is to downplay the connections that warp 10 appears, upon first glance, to spin between points in warp’s continuum. blurring the distinction between remixer and remixed (is the artwork located in the sound product such that the remixing subject is the artist, or in the creation of textual or notated “material” such that the object of the remix is the “real” artist?) dismisses the significance of warp’s back catalogue and history in precisely the same gesture by which it is celebrated – or, in fact, constructed. in the first track on 10+3 remixes, an lfo track and an aphex twin track are “remixed” into a single piece of music. aphex twin’s 1994 album selected ambient works volume ii features symbols in place of track names, and so a code appears on the 10+3 tracklisting to identify the piece used: “saw 2 cd1 trk 7”. saw2’s original lack of english titles is not read as a “[sign] of some underlying essence”, but is treated as is most useful in the specific instance: nothing in the original text, even its extramusical elements, is sacrosanct. elsewhere, a track “by” autechre, “remixed” by bogdan raczynski, appears on disc two of 10+3, bearing the title “ep7/envane”. ep7 is in fact a collection of 12 tracks released by autechre earlier the same year, totalling over an hour: formal distinctions are obscured by the presentation of ideas from across ep7’s tracklist in a single piece of music. envane, likewise, is a four-track collection from 1997. no autechre-authored track entitled either “ep7” or “envane” exists. the blurring of “ep” and “track” shows the forms of the original material to be protean; by appropriating its own constituent texts in this manner, warp denies any component of its identity contingent upon these texts being immutable. minor languages are characterized […] by a sobriety and variation that are like a minor treatment of the standard language, a becoming-minor of the major language. the problem is not the distinction between major and minor language; it is one of a becoming. it is a question not of reterritorializing oneself on a dialect or a patois but of deterritorializing the major language. (deleuze and guattari 2004: 116) it is not sufficient that warp perform the rejections of hegemony outlined above; for it then to read identity in the very process of so doing would demolish the texts’ ability to deterritorialise anything. “majority”, write deleuze and guattari, “implies a constant, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure by which to evaluate it” (deleuze and guattari 2004: 116). to posit warp’s deterritorialising texts – such as the ep7 text that, we shall see below, itself calls into question the traditional distinctions between album and ep – as bearing an identity therein would be to territorialise them. in response, warp 10’s apparent celebration of identity deterritorialises that very identity. the process can only be dialectic: warp rejects the formation of an identity consisting in the lack thereof but, at the same time, identity is re-appropriated and placed into continuous variation. alwakeel • idm as a “minor” literature 9 fold4,wrap5: autechre versus morphological and linguistic convention3 format because of the industry within which autechre operates, certain conventions of form are assumed. catalogue numbers presuppose distinctions between albums and singles, as well as differences of physical format (7-inch, 12-inch, lp, cassette, cd, and so forth). certain industry rules do not allow sound recordings to fall outside of these formal conventions: if a release is too long, it ceases to be eligible for the singles chart, for instance, while the british phonographic industry’s barcoding guidelines allocate specific digits to different physical media (“1” for lp and “2” for cd, for instance). there is no option for a barcode not to feature exactly one of these digits (official uk charts company 2009). autechre’s approach to these physical conventions is inconsistent. 1999’s ep7, by being so titled, allies its effects directly with those of the distinctions between formats: the “ep” affix suggests that the release is just this, while “7” identifies six of their previous releases in similar terms. however, counting its unlisted “hidden” track, the release features 12 pieces of music and totals nearly 67 minutes – greater in both respects than 1998’s lp5.4 this inconsistency can be read in at least two ways. autechre’s treatment of the album/ep division might be seen to recommend music’s liberation from the morphology of record format altogether. the fact that ep7 has “ep” in its title does not make it shorter or less valuable than lp5. the use of the terminology could also be interpreted as its placement in “continuous variation”. a distinction between album and ep on the basis of length is shown to be reductive; the various relativities and signifiers of which the distinction of “ep” is an aggregate do not function concretely. demarcating an ep and an lp in spite of length when length is the industry’s conventional discriminant detaches the terms from any absolute definition and subjugates them to the musicians’ aesthetic decisions, deterritorialising them for use to signify whatever autechre choose, in however abstract terms. this treatment of format “frees [it] from its actual origins” (colebrook 2002: 58) (in this case, physical distinctions) so that it can be newly inscribed to whatever end its artists choose. format itself is not uniquely unstable: any artistic norm can be used in opposition to its original sense. deleuze and guattari identify “minorities” as “seeds […] whose value is to trigger uncontrollable movements and deterritorializations of the mean or majority” (deleuze and guattari 2004: 117). as regards record format, ep7 is minor but, by so being, it reveals lp5 – despite its apparent complicity with the standard “major” definitions – to be no less so, subverting the notion of concrete distinction that constructs ep7 as deviant in the first place. elsewhere, the 1997 cichlisuite ep blurs the “remix of ”/”different song from” distinction by deriving its moniker from a track (“cichli”) that makes no clear connection to any of the ep’s five parts – in terms either of title or of sonic content. the “cichli” text is read subjectively: cichlisuite’s relationship to “cichli” does not have to take the form of motivic or literary resemblance. a more recent way in which autechre’s relationship to product challenges normative expectations can be identified in the release of the quaristice album to digital download six weeks ahead of the physical lp and cd issues. “our plan has never been to produce cds – it’s always been about making music. […] the actual product is the flac file” (park 2008a). the identification of “the product” at the point of the sonic 10 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 material, not a physical object, draws attention to the transient quality of music; although this quotation refers specifically to the commercial, market download of quaristice, the equation of product with data calls into question the abstraction of ownership from experience (of music). although legal downloads have been accepted as a “format” for some time, it is unusual for their deployment to be primary – many catalogue numbers still identify a vinyl release as the “main” version of an album, denoting other formats by affixes.5 identification of the musical text as far as phonographic copyright is concerned, the musical text occurs at the point of those elements with the potential to be notated by conventional western means: lyrics, melodies, chord progressions, and so forth. in short, these elements are taken to be “signs of some underlying essence” of the musical text as a whole, such that remixing or covering them does not detract from the cohesion of this text. it has already been seen that warp’s attitude to remixing challenges these norms by reading different mixes as constitutive of new texts (as on 10+3 remixes). the effect of this challenge is a play with the hierarchy of notation over sound. for now, i wish to consider one example of autechre’s treatment of this hierarchy. the 1995 garbage ep contains four tracks whose titles all end with a two-digit number. upon closer inspection, the numbers denote the percentage of the ep’s running time that each particular track makes up: “vletrmx21”, for instance, is 21 percent of garbage’s 40 minutes. this identification of the music’s “visual” elements – track titles can surely be notated – with the broader sonic text serves to destabilise the hierarchy that discrete notation requires. autechre directly links song title to the music’s function not as a reduced set of “musical” signifiers but as a track, as the presence of recorded sound for a set number of minutes and seconds. the role that each track plays within the ep’s running time is placed above the track’s “notated” content – sound in the purely spectrographic sense becomes central to the ep text, while any melodic, harmonic, or lyrical features are subordinated. by working within such conventions as opus title, garbage presents the listenerviewer with a challenge to the way in which musical texts are traditionally reduced. replacing “garbagemx36” with a remix that had a different running time but broadly the same “musical” content would transform the text in a way that remixing might not conventionally be considered to do. this elevates the mix, even the master, of a track to the same level as its more “visual” elements: the hierarchy is deposed. literature autechre might appear maddeningly cryptic, [with] titles [of tracks] like “pen expers” and “bine” […] sean booth [believes] their music is about evading all forms of “meaning”, signification or representation (stubbs 2003: 29). the majority of autechre’s output has been identified by distorted technical terms, typographical errors, nonsense, or random selections of words. we might theorise an according relationship between opaque formations like “sonderemawe”, “90101-5l-l”, or “p.:ntil” and the liberation of the letter from the word that drove, for instance, the work of the lettrists in mid-20th century france. the lettriste statement asserted that “the use of words in poetry is antiquated” (cowley 2002: 199), a notion somewhat more forceful than autechre’s suggestion that “it was important for alwakeel • idm as a “minor” literature 11 us not to pin down [quaristice] to something too literal. […] we’re so into the music [that we] try not to colour it with any other ideas” (park 2008b: 73), but the ideological work is related: both examples investigate the potential for operating outside of the sea of reference generated by the use of conventional words. it is, of course, impossible to designate a linguistic space at zero potential, but the autechre project is complicit with this: sean booth makes the point that “we quite like the ambiguity of the whole thing […] people will always try and find meaning in something, so we let them” (park 2008b: 73). what is of significance here is autechre’s awareness of the inefficacy of the attempt to circumscribe music using lexical reductions. the fact that autechre use quasi-meaningless track titles is surely its own text, but it is a text that invites the listener-viewer to critique the role and value of title as reduction, much in the same way as garbage’s equation of title with spectrographic proportion calls into question what is expected from the literary component of a musical product. we recall that “humans […] territorialise themselves through language”, and that “[l]anguage can then become inhuman or deterritorialised in art: no longer meaningful, controllable or recognisable” (colebrook 2002: 59). although “language” and literature should not be equated – colebrook’s paraphrase does not deal specifically with the deterritorialisation of the letter itself – the rendering of written communication “no longer meaningful, controllable or recognisable” is certainly achieved by autechre’s quasi-“cut-up” approach to track titling. deterritorialisation of a sort thus occurs at the intersections between the autechre project and the conventions of morphology that surround the production of musical texts – form, format, title. without specifically denying any of the effects of these values, autechre’s treatment thereof invites a consideration of the extent to which such values are normally assumed to inform or be informed by the related music: the texts invoke debates around the relationship between form and content. subjectivity whether consisting abstractly in the text itself or in the fingerprints of an author, the location of the subject in music is necessarily a normative process. the abstraction of a subject at all requires a specific reading of certain textual elements in order to generate the text’s relationship to distinct selves. thus, adorno’s complaints about mass culture’s treatment of subjectivity can be seen as analogous to, for example, reynolds’ identification of “the absence of heart and humanity” (reynolds 1999: 185) in autechre’s work (although it is important to note that the quality of “emotional connection” of which reynolds asserts autechre’s lack is far from what adorno would consider an adequate relationship to the geist). simon frith (frith 1988: 120) and john shepherd (shepherd 1999: 173) observe that the music industry responds particularly to music that bears “direct signs” of an authoring or performing subject (mediated, in these particular studies, through song lyrics, although this is not my focus here). this stage of the investigation will consider idm’s approach to such norms, with specific focus upon aphex twin’s presentation of both product and identity. as frith and shepherd argue, popular music routinely transgresses the fourth wall in its dealings with subjectivity in such a way as to generate relationships between the author/performer and the listening subject. i propose that aphex twin’s work breaks the fourth wall but affirms neither, revealing the space on both sides of the rupture to be awkwardly empty. i will suggest that the texts reveal a dialectical tension between aphex twin’s location and absence in his 12 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 own output, and, in so doing, discourage the placement of the subject atop any artistic hierarchy. visual and acoustic space and subjectivity marshall mcluhan and erik davis posit “‘visual space’ [as] the dominant mode of western consciousness following the italian renaissance” (davis 2008: 53). this space is characterised with relation to a “visual self ” (davis 2008: 54) abstracted from such euclidean thought processes (mcluhan 2007: 68) as “the power to create a distinct, single point of view that organizes thought and perception along linear lines” (davis 2008: 54). this power derives from, for instance, perspective painting, print technologies, and the linearity of ordering language into a “phonetic” alphabet – a “mode of representation having neither visual nor semantic meaning” (mcluhan 2007: 71) that “promotes the illusion of removing oneself from the object” (mcluhan 2007: 69). davis identifies a key feature of this visual mode of consciousness as “the axiom of assumption that ‘different’ objects, vectors or points are not and cannot be superimposed [such that] the world is perceived as a linear grid organized along strictly causal lines” (davis 2008: 54). mcluhan contrasts visual space with an “acoustic space” that “emphasizes simultaneity” and is “multidimensional, resonant, invisibly tactile, ‘a total and simultaneous field of relations’” (davis 2008: 54). referring to studies by edmund carpenter, bronislaw malinowski and dorothy lee, he suggests that the perception of causality is a product of western literacy and visual subjectivity (mcluhan 2007: 70), a hierarchy weighted unreasonably in favour of “the very physiology of the eye” that seems to debar any two things being in the same place at once, and instead “promotes the idea that everything is in sequence” (mcluhan 2007: 69). acoustic space, however, “unlike visual space, where points either fuse or remain distinct”, permits “blocks of sound [to] overlap and interpenetrate without necessarily collapsing into a harmonic unity or consonance, thereby maintaining the paradox of ‘simultaneous difference’” (davis 2008: 54). it is not necessarily the case that every acoustic phenomenon automatically subscribes to an acoustic mode of conceptualisation: mcluhan’s analysis of the “phonetic” alphabet firmly roots it in a visually generated distance from the object, while the subject-relationships described by frith and shepherd separate the author and listener from the text and from each other. i now wish to demonstrate that idm is insufficiently accounted for by the traditional value bestowed upon visual modes of thinking. “acoustic” treatment of the subject in time i wish [aphex twin, plastikman, scanner and daniel pemberton] would not allow themselves any repetitions, and would go faster in developing their ideas or their findings, because i don’t appreciate at all this permanent repetitive language. it is like someone who is stuttering all the time, and can’t get words out of his mouth (stockhausen, in stockhausen et al. 2007: 382). i disagree about repetition: i think, as john cage said, repetition is a form of change (scanner (robin rimbaud), in stockhausen et al. 2007: 384). putting to one side the linguistic component of stockhausen’s point – “stuttering” is certainly an image to which deleuze refers – i shall consider, briefly, some of the subjective values attached to repetition and change. alwakeel • idm as a “minor” literature 13 “change” implies narrative; narrative implies abstraction: for something to be identified as changing, it must possess a component that is perceived to be constant, or its different states would simply be different things. to say that something has “changed into” something else is to link the two together. stockhausen’s response to idm is visual: it values linearity and development, both of which presuppose a musically mediated subject in the sense that schopenhauer identifies: in melody, in the high, singing, principal part, which dominates the whole and progresses freely in a single, uninterrupted, coherent and meaningful idea from start to finish, a complete entity in itself, i recognise […] the conscious life and strife of man (schopenhauer 1988: 221). the isolation of this “idea from start to finish” accords with stockhausen’s observation that the work of idm artists engenders a lack of “progression” – indeed, both writers make use of the term. the attachment to “the conscious life and strife of man” suggests that removing or transfiguring this “single, uninterrupted, coherent and meaningful idea” might also remove or transfigure the music’s subjectivity. the equation of the two goes some way to illuminating stockhausen’s image of a person stuttering, unable to communicate: stockhausen’s subject is single and linear, so repetition or development is recorded against a single, linear axis. this stuttering is only communicative failure if we are looking to music to provide us with a narrative. alternatively, we can relate repetition to idm’s potential use as dance music: “i think [stockhausen] should listen to a couple of tracks of mine […] then he’d stop making abstract, random patterns you can’t dance to” (aphex twin (richard d. james), in stockhausen et al. 2007: 383). this is not to say that aphex twin’s work affirms the identity of “dance music” and therefore operates under its own normative system – many aphex twin tracks are not, in fact, particularly repetitive, and the debate about dance/listening as function has already been addressed. rather, richard d. james’ point juxtaposes dance norms with a type of music that is identified later in the same interview as inappropriate to this function. exclusively functional and exclusively subjective analyses are both rejected; theoretical “canon” carries no weight, so stockhausen’s music is necessarily open to constant re-assessment in light of new or evolving modes of use. adorno asserts that repetition of material is not repetition of its effect (adorno 1988: 103). this relies for its truth upon the designation of a continuous, unidirectional time axis, allied with the experience of the visual subject. repetition, in this language, cannot be total, because the time value will always be different: an event, in four-dimensional spacetime, can never be replicated. in aphex twin’s language, however, repetition need not connote lack of fulfilment. cycling units do not have to be seen as an undeveloping sequence documenting the subject’s movement in time through the music, but might be devoid of a linear subject altogether, and therefore exist to some degree outside time; stockhausen’s assertion that “using music like a drug is stupid” (stockhausen et al. 2007: 382) betrays a refusal to think outside of the values from which drugs might be a removal, of which conventional attitudes to time and self could easily be an element. repetition is only identified as such if the music is experienced in a single, linear dimension. scanner’s point that “repetition is a form of change”, far from agreeing with adorno, suggests that the experience of music from the perspective of a visual subject unreasonably precludes alternative modes of its perception and use. 14 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 “acoustic” treatment of the subject in space by “space”, i refer to voicing, to what in notational terms is described by “vertical”: simultaneity. essentially, all recorded sound is the object of mcluhan’s “simultaneous difference” because of the equivalence of a single, complex waveform to the overlaying of a number of simpler ones, and the nature of sound vibrations as periodic and vector: it is possible to hear, as mcluhan points out, more than one sound distinctly and simultaneously – indeed, rarely if ever are we not doing so. nonetheless, like mcluhan’s phonetic alphabet, there are traditions that eliminate this efficacy by identifying the musical text at the point of, for instance, notation itself. linking notes to distinct instruments on a score prematurely resolves the paradox of simultaneous difference by spatially separating the different instrumental parts. recordings of scored music, where they are identified as such, subscribe to the same system: regardless of the simultaneous difference in the waveform, what is represented is notational distance. schopenhauer’s reference to a “principal part” is one result of this visual mode of hearing. his analysis renders time merely another spatial dimension: the parts are no more simultaneous than events that occur on the same axis of height, width or depth. for music to emphasise simultaneous difference, then, it must resist its reduction into visually distinct parts, especially parts arranged in a hierarchy (with a “principal”). idm’s rejection of reduced “material” has already been discussed. clearly, i wish to avoid theorising any canon of technique around idm for the reasons outlined above, but much of the music discussed in this article can be openly analysed in acoustic terms: nothing even contentiously associated with the term “idm” has ever been published and marketed in sheet music form. it is dangerous, at this stage, to distinguish between material and technique, between content and form, but the emphasis of much of the music away from part-writing means that its reduction into distinct lines for distinct instruments – even distinct synthesiser patches – would often be virtually impossible.6 given these conditions, the sonic presence of what could be identified as a melody or a bass line does not automatically demarcate them as such. when an artist who has at some stage worked with what seems to be melody creates a track consisting entirely of what seem to be percussion samples (such as polygon window’s “quoth”) then the purpose of defining either in concrete terms becomes unclear. the frequency of such irregularities of “focus” in idm necessitates the reconsideration of vertical hierarchy and disables visual subjectivity, reliant in schopenhauer’s terms as it is upon the distinction between “parts”. the speaking subject is called strongly into question – even apart from the treatment of actual vocal samples, which are few and far between, and whose looping and processing firmly distances them from any reading as signifiers of unmediated subjectivity. aphex twin and the fourth wall it is not, however, necessarily the case that the authoring subject is absent from the idm text altogether, merely that “visual” analyses thereof are insufficient. in this subsection, i will look at the ways in which aphex twin’s subjectivity – in the form of, or distinct from, that of richard d. james – is treated by the employment of humour and irony in his work. i wish to focus primarily on the way that the aphex twin material is packaged and presented but, first, a brief look at one of the vocal samples to which i allude above will be illuminating. alwakeel • idm as a “minor” literature 15 “to cure a weakling child”, from 1996’s richard d. james album, contains a sample of james himself, processed to sound like the voice of a child, speaking a list of body parts ( james and weidenbaum 2001). what is the effect of this use of the human voice? certainly, the sample’s semantic content does not mark james’ subjectivity any more immediately than the “instrumental” material that surrounds it, and its processing makes it difficult to read as a signifier of the human artist. if anything, it might appear to locate humanity’s role in the music as subordinate to the technology surrounding it; at the very least, it begins to “deterritorialise” the voice, to subject it to what the situationists referred to as “détournement” (poschardt 1998: 263-264). it is, however, possible to locate subjectivity here, albeit dialectically. “to cure a weakling child” features james’ voice, but it might as well be an actual child, or a synthesis. james makes use of his own body not to master his equipment and techniques but to provide them with material – to become their object. at the same time, james himself undertakes the processing of this material, and chooses not to reference the voice of the author. his subjectivity is negatively defined: the vocal treatment shatters the illusion that vocals are a direct communiqué between vocalist and listener and, in so doing, opens up other areas for james to perform or distort his identity. i now wish to look at some of the literature and artwork surrounding james’ recorded output. as mediator between the music and the consumer, much of aphex twin’s packaging has a complicated relationship to the music industry. the “come to daddy” single, for example, presents an intricate play between the multiple layers of representation upon which the reproducible work of art must simultaneously operate. the track was launched off the back of its use in an orange tv advert, but the product’s relationship to this fact is complex, endorsing and distancing the brand simultaneously (“the future is bright, the future is a registered trademark”, notes the back of the 12-inch sleeve). a promotional edition of the single replaces all the artwork of the commercial formats with written descriptions: the line “a picture of school children with my face superimposed over their own” adorns the inner sleeve, for instance. the artwork for richard d. james album invokes a similar tension between industry and subjectivity: the back cover replicates a tracklist hastily scribbled by hand, the proportions poorly thought out and a couple of crossings-out remaining. the front bears a weirdly processed photograph of james himself. an extreme close-up of the handwritten tracklist appears on the side b centre label, with only a couple of words legible. the album title itself, meanwhile, locates the musical content around james’ own subjectivity, but the album is anything but straightforwardly personal – “to cure a weakling child” opens the second side, while other tracks have such opaque titles as “goongumpas” and “peek 8245452,01”. both artwork and title make a case for aphex twin’s dialectical subjectivity. the seemingly “personal” attitude that suffuses the use of his “real” name and the incorporation of his handwriting is presented simultaneously with the lack of subjectivity therein: the distance between author and listener is highlighted by the elevation of the mechanical means to their mediation, as with the pixellation of the blown up handwriting on the record label, or the processing of james’ voice in the recording. at the same time, james himself has subjective control over these means: he himself has chosen to bring out the impersonal mediations. we are again confronted by the mechanical subject-object. there is no “message” behind literary affect and becoming; any sense of a message or an underlying meaning is an effect of specific styles. it is the mask that produces the effect of a 16 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 speaker behind the mask, but one can only speak because there are masks or personae (colebrook 2002: 120-121, italics in original). james breaks the fourth wall by drawing attention to these masks – the irrelevance of titling this particular album with his own name, the computer processes that render his handwriting and voice available to the listener-viewer, the knowing transgression of representational layers effected by the written descriptions on the “come to daddy” promo artwork. however, in so doing, he suggests that there may in fact be nothing more than the masks. by his status as the object of pixellation or vocal processing, james’ own subjectivity is aligned with the non-subjective elements of his art. he “speaks” by ordering these masks, but we deduce this only by their presence, not by any underlying action on his part: the computer processing that mediates every element of the richard d. james album text creates the semblance of subjectivity, but there is no computer “self ”. by making the listener-viewer aware of this illusion, the aphex twin project invites speculation around where the machinery might end and the “real world” begin: james’ handwriting, for example, is produced as the result of a pencil and muscular activity, which might be seen as machines in their own right. conclusion [sic] once again, the objection will be raised that music is not a language, that the components of sound are not pertinent features of language, that there is no correspondence between the two. […] we keep asking that the issue be left open, that any presupposed distinction be rejected (deleuze and guattari 2004: 106). i do not suggest that idm is a language or a literature. nonetheless, i wish to show that such a reading is more useful than attempts to see it purely as heir or constituent of existing musical traditions. likewise, the incorporation of dialectical gestures into the argument should be seen as parallel to, rather than a component of, the deleuzian methodology, although the two can be seen to mutually reinforce at certain points. “majority”, write deleuze and guattari, “implies a constant, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure by which to evaluate it” (deleuze and guattari 2004: 116). idm’s treatment of this “standard measure” allows it to be seen as a “becoming-minor” of the majorities of intelligence, of dance, even of music: idm does not resist these concepts in favour of others, but places in “continuous variation” (deleuze and guattari 2004: 116) elements of music and the music industry such that genre, subjectivity, canon, notation, and so forth are seen to be potentials, not constants. there are not, therefore, two kinds of languages but two possible treatments of the same language. either the variables are treated in such a way as to extract from them constants and constant relations or in such a way as to place them in continuous variation (deleuze and guattari 2004: 116). in the present discussion, these “variables” extend to function, record format, the subject, and the relationship between remixer and remixed. as i have argued, idm’s treatment of these variables is not to see them as tendencies towards a particular norm but to maintain their variation. the examples of idm that constitute deviations from musical value systems reveal such systems to be circular and arbitrary. ep7, in being longer than lp5, is not simply identified as transgressive: rather, artistic form is placed alwakeel • idm as a “minor” literature 17 in continuous variation such that no single distinction between ep and lp can be “correct”. furthermore, instead of treating these potentials ironically – for instance, by assigning ep7 a long-playing catalogue number – the literature surrounding the musical texts challenges the listener-viewer to evaluate such normative systems on the basis of utility, as opposed to any “underlying essence” from which they purport to derive authority. artistry is located in the recording artist one moment, in the remixer the next, in the technical means to the product a third time. none of these is dominant; no locus for the author is treated as a constant by which the other loci are evaluated as deviant. idm is not isolated: its texts are frequently appropriative. what affords it its minority is its refusal to read the significance of the appropriated values (identity, subjectivity, function) normatively: the texts that apparently conform to them do so for no reason beyond their own ends. richard d. james album introduces its author’s name to inform the play around subjectivity, to place authorship in “continuous variation”, not to appeal to authority. warp 10 appears to locate warp in a narrative, but its contents are deterritorialising, not affirmative. deleuze and guattari (2004: 106-107) prefigure mcluhan’s suggestion that all sound has at least the potential to operate in “acoustic” space. this acoustic potential is indexed by idm’s inconsistent, non-hierarchical location of the musical text: the treatments of language and form by idm’s “authors” are such that any constants temporarily abstracted have no overall significance because there is no authority to sanction them (for which reason it makes no sense to speak of idm “as a whole”). by “authors”, i refer not just to the people whose names appear on the record sleeves; record labels, journalists, and theorists can all be seen to author the idm “text”. as cox and warner note in the introduction to 2004’s audio culture anthology, the “heterogeneity [of the book’s sources] reflects the fact that the new audio culture is a discourse, a loose collection of terms, concepts, and statements gathered from across the cultural field” (cox and warner 2007: xv). in deleuzian terms, idm’s authors are “foreigners in their own tongue” (deleuze and guattari 2004: 116) – dance artists who make records that do not have to be danced to, artists whose artistry is in a state of flux with relation to those who remix their songs, labels operating against the tendency to keep catalogue, draw constants, or reference canon. the effect of this work is to place the “major language” – the language of intelligence, of dance, of music, of form, of subjectivity, of canon – into continuous variation so that, for example, the mechanical subject and the mechanical object can exist on equal terms, neither of them claiming any single essence of what idm is or is not. one must find the minor language […] on the basis of which one can make one’s own major language minor. that is the strength of authors termed “minor,” who are in fact the greatest, the only greats; having to conquer one’s own language […] in order to place it in a state of continuous variation (deleuze and guattari 2004: 116). it is in the nature of these propositions that reduction or conclusion is not entirely appropriate, so i wish to end instead with the suggestion that the present work might be usefully continued by further studies of idm’s interactions with posthumanism and the s/subject, and by the examination of a far greater number of individual texts than has here been possible. finally, it is important that these points themselves do not 18 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 appear to construct a “true” idm identity, even negatively. as deleuze and guattari (2004: 113) point out, it is difficult to see how the upholders of a minor language can operate if not by giving it (if only by writing in it) a constancy and homogeneity making it a locally major language […] but the opposite argument seems more compelling: the more a language has or acquires the characteristics of a major language, the more it is affected by continuous variations that transpose it into a “minor” language. above all, there can be no superstructure to which to appeal for idm’s conclusive inscription. the discussion neither begins nor ends here. ••••••• references adorno, theodor w. 1988 [1955]. “the aging of the new music.” trans. robert hullotkentor. telos 77: 95-116. balliger, robin. 1999. “politics.” in bruce horner and thomas swiss (eds), key terms in popular music and culture, pp. 57-70. oxford: blackwell. colebrook, claire. 2002. gilles deleuze. london: routledge. cowley, julian. 2002. “the limits of language.” in rob young (ed), undercurrents: the hidden wiring of modern music, pp. 193-208. london: continuum. davis, erik. 2008. “‘roots and wires’ remix: polyrhythmic tricks and the black electronic.” in paul d. miller aka dj spooky that subliminal kid (ed), sound unbound, pp. 53-72. london: the mit press. deleuze, gilles and félix guattari. 2004 [1980]. a thousand plateaus. trans. brian massumi. london: continuum. james, richard d. and marc weidenbaum. 2001. “eponymous rex interview.” http://www.aphextwin.nu/learn/98136333384401.shtml (accessed 25 february 2009). mcluhan, marshall. 2007. “visual and acoustic space.” in christoph cox and daniel warner (eds), audio culture: readings in modern music, pp. 67-72. london: continuum. official uk charts company, the. 2009. “chart rules.” http://theofficialcharts.com/chart_rules.php (accessed 7march 2009). park, adam. 2008a. “autechre – quaristice.” clash music, 6 february 2008. http://www.clashmusic.com/feature/autechre-quaristice (accessed 23 november 2008). ––––. 2008b. “autechre.” clash 25, april: 72-73. parry, alan michael, posting on alt.rave on 8 august 1993: http://groups.google.com/group/alt.rave/browse_thread/thread/b8592fef4a3a14b4/af70a963a500 2ddd#af70a963a5002ddd (accessed 8 november 2008). porschardt, ulf. 1998. dj culture. london: quartet. reynolds, simon. 1999. generation ecstasy. new york: routledge. schopenhauer, arthur. 1988 [1818]. extract from die welt als wille und vorstellung. trans. in peter le huray and james day (eds), music and aesthetics in the eighteenth and earlynineteenth centuries, pp. 217-224. cambridge: cambridge university press. shapiro, peter. “automating the beat.” in rob young (ed) undercurrents: the hidden wiring of modern music, pp. 131-140. london: continuum. shepherd, john. 1999. “text.” in bruce horner and thomas swiss (eds), key terms in popular music and culture, pp. 156-177. oxford: blackwell. alwakeel • idm as a “minor” literature 19 http://www.aphextwin.nu/learn/98136333384401.shtml http://www.aphextwin.nu/learn/98136333384401.shtml http://theofficialcharts.com/chart_rules.php http://theofficialcharts.com/chart_rules.php http://www.clashmusic.com/feature/autechre-quaristice http://www.clashmusic.com/feature/autechre-quaristice http://groups.google.com/group/alt.rave/browse_thread/thread/b8592fef4a3a14b4/af70a963a5002ddd#af70a963a5002ddd http://groups.google.com/group/alt.rave/browse_thread/thread/b8592fef4a3a14b4/af70a963a5002ddd#af70a963a5002ddd http://groups.google.com/group/alt.rave/browse_thread/thread/b8592fef4a3a14b4/af70a963a5002ddd#af70a963a5002ddd http://groups.google.com/group/alt.rave/browse_thread/thread/b8592fef4a3a14b4/af70a963a5002ddd#af70a963a5002ddd stockhausen, karlheinz, et al. 2007. “stockhausen vs. the ‘technocrats.’” in christoph cox and daniel warner (eds), audio culture: readings in modern music, pp. 381-385. london: continuum. straw, will. 1999. “authorship.” in bruce horner and thomas swiss (eds), key terms in popular music and culture, pp. 199-208. oxford: blackwell. stubbs, david. 2003. “autechre: the futurologists.” the wire 230, april: 28-33. young, rob. 2006. warp: labels unlimited. london: black dog publishing. discography where the discussion has referred to a release in general rather than any of its specific formats, i have defaulted below to the details of its commercial british lp or 12-inch version. details of other formats appear when the formats themselves are discussed in the main text (as with “come to daddy”). superscripts 1 to 8 mark the original artificial intelligence series in order of release. aphex twin. 1994. selected ambient works volume ii. warp (2xlp): warp lp21. http://www.discogs.com/aphex-twin-selected-ambient-works-volume-ii/release/704310 ––––. 1996. “come to daddy”. warp (12-inch): wap 94. http://www.discogs.com/aphex-twin-come-to-daddy/release/3662 ––––. 1996. “come to daddy”. warp (2x12-inch promo): wap 94rp, wap 94p. http://www.discogs.com/aphex-twin-come-to-daddy/release/28699 ––––. 1996. richard d. james album. warp (lp): warp lp43. http://www.discogs.com/aphex-twin-richard-d-james-album/release/30849 autechre. 1993. incunabula. warp (2xlp): warp lp17. http://www.discogs.com/autechre-incunabula/release/29900 ––––. 1995. garbage. warp (12-inch): warp 58. http://www.discogs.com/autechre-garbage/release/2498 ––––. 1997. chiastic slide. warp (2xlp): warp lp49 http://www.discogs.com/autechre-chiastic-slide/release/19628 ––––. 1997. cichlisuite. warp (2x12-inch): wap 96, wap 96r. http://www.discogs.com/autechre-cichlisuite/release/28703 http://www.discogs.com/autechre-cichlisuite/release/28704 ––––. 1998. lp5. warp (2xlp): warp lp66. http://www.discogs.com/autechre-lp5/release/30811 ––––. 1999. ep7. warp (2x12-inch): wap ep7.1, wap ep7.2. http://www.discogs.com/autechre-ep71/release/24545 http://www.discogs.com/autechre-ep72/release/24544 ––––. 2008. quaristice. warp (2xlp): warp lp333. http://www.discogs.com/autechre-quaristice/release/1257383 ––––. 2008. quaristice. warp (flac download): warp cdd333f. http://www.discogs.com/autechre-quaristice/release/1864034 b12. 1993. electro-soma. warp (2xlp): warp lp9. http://www.discogs.com/b12-electro-soma/release/29889 black dog productions. 1993. bytes. warp (2xlp): warp lp8. http://www.discogs.com/black-dog-productions-bytes/release/4663 fuse. 1993. dimension intrusion. warp (2xlp): warp lp12. http://www.discogs.com/fuse-dimension-intrusion/release/38940 future sound of london, the. 1994. lifeforms. virgin (2xlp): v 2722. http://www.discogs.com/future-sound-of-london-lifeforms/release/83318 20 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 http://www.discogs.com/aphex-twin-selected-ambient-works-volume-ii/release/704310 http://www.discogs.com/aphex-twin-selected-ambient-works-volume-ii/release/704310 http://www.discogs.com/aphex-twin-come-to-daddy/release/3662 http://www.discogs.com/aphex-twin-come-to-daddy/release/3662 http://www.discogs.com/aphex-twin-come-to-daddy/release/28699 http://www.discogs.com/aphex-twin-come-to-daddy/release/28699 http://www.discogs.com/aphex-twin-richard-d-james-album/release/30849 http://www.discogs.com/aphex-twin-richard-d-james-album/release/30849 http://www.discogs.com/autechre-incunabula/release/29900 http://www.discogs.com/autechre-incunabula/release/29900 http://www.discogs.com/autechre-garbage/release/2498 http://www.discogs.com/autechre-garbage/release/2498 http://www.discogs.com/autechre-chiastic-slide/release/19628 http://www.discogs.com/autechre-chiastic-slide/release/19628 http://www.discogs.com/autechre-cichlisuite/release/28703 http://www.discogs.com/autechre-cichlisuite/release/28703 http://www.discogs.com/autechre-cichlisuite/release/28704 http://www.discogs.com/autechre-cichlisuite/release/28704 http://www.discogs.com/autechre-lp5/release/30811 http://www.discogs.com/autechre-lp5/release/30811 http://www.discogs.com/autechre-ep71/release/24545 http://www.discogs.com/autechre-ep71/release/24545 http://www.discogs.com/autechre-ep72/release/24544 http://www.discogs.com/autechre-ep72/release/24544 http://www.discogs.com/autechre-quaristice/release/1257383 http://www.discogs.com/autechre-quaristice/release/1257383 http://www.discogs.com/autechre-quaristice/release/1864034 http://www.discogs.com/autechre-quaristice/release/1864034 http://www.discogs.com/b12-electro-soma/release/29889 http://www.discogs.com/b12-electro-soma/release/29889 http://www.discogs.com/black-dog-productions-bytes/release/4663 http://www.discogs.com/black-dog-productions-bytes/release/4663 http://www.discogs.com/fuse-dimension-intrusion/release/38940 http://www.discogs.com/fuse-dimension-intrusion/release/38940 http://www.discogs.com/future-sound-of-london-lifeforms/release/83318 http://www.discogs.com/future-sound-of-london-lifeforms/release/83318 harmonic 313. 2009. when machines exceed human intelligence. warp (2xlp): warp lp175.http://www.discogs.com/harmonic-313-when-machines-exceed-human-intelligence/rele ase/1773959 kraftwerk. 1974. autobahn. vertigo (lp): 6360 620. http://www.discogs.com/kraftwerk-autobahn/release/63961 lfo. 1991. frequencies. warp (lp): warp lp3. http://www.discogs.com/lfo-frequencies/release/29366 pink floyd. 1973. the dark side of the moon. harvest (lp): shvl 804. http://www.discogs.com/pink-floyd-the-dark-side-of-the-moon/release/371269 polygon window. 1993. surfing on sine waves. warp (2xlp): warp lp7. http://www.discogs.com/polygon-window-surfing-on-sine-waves/release/18360 speedy j. 1993. pepper. warp (2xlp): warp lp14. http://www.discogs.com/speedy-j-ginger/release/29894 various. 1991. pioneers of the hypnotic groove. warp (lp): warp lp2. http://www.discogs.com/various-pioneers-of-the-hypnotic-groove/release/29365 various. 1992. artificial intelligence. warp (lp): warp lp6. http://www.discogs.com/various-artificial-intelligence/release/29372 various. 1994. artificial intelligence ii. warp (2xlp): warp lp23. http://www.discogs.com/various-artificial-intelligence-ii/release/2966 various. 1999. warp 10+1 influences. warp (4xlp): warp lp67. http://www.discogs.com/various-warp-101-influences/release/30833 various. 1999. warp 10+2 classics 89-92. warp (4xlp): warp lp68. http://www.discogs.com/various-warp-102-classics-89-92/release/6551 various. 1999. warp 10+3 remixes. warp (4xlp): warp lp69. http://www.discogs.com/various-warp-103-remixes/release/30834 author biography ramzy alwakeel was born in 1988 in leicester in the east midlands of england.  he graduated from the university of leeds in july 2009 with a first class honours degree in music, and currently lives and works in manchester. notes alwakeel • idm as a “minor” literature 21 1 “313” bears more than a passing resemblance to [tb] “303”, the roland bass synth that essentially revolutionised dance music; 313 is also detroit’s dialling code, which identifies artist with mechanical mediation in a further sense. 2 a further effect is performed by the designation of the 12-inch, not the 7-inch or the lp, as the locus of these tracks’ identities, despite the focus on albums over singles outlined above. 3 “fold4,wrap5” is a track on lp5 whose shifts in rhythmic focus and constant deceleration rather give it the effect of a sonic escher painting. 4 lp5 itself is so called by convention: nowhere on the artwork is a title other than the word “autechre” given. warp, however, lists the release as lp5 on their official website under “albums”. the catalogue number warp lp66 further indicates that lp5 is to be specifically read as an album. 5 mute records, for example, issue their lps with the code stumm xxx, and add prefixes to catalogue other formats. 6 “idm” puts easily as much sonic focus upon timbre, parameters and envelopes as upon the “parts” that might be identified by a more classical analysis. http://www.discogs.com/harmonic-313-when-machines-exceed-human-intelligence/release/1773959 http://www.discogs.com/harmonic-313-when-machines-exceed-human-intelligence/release/1773959 http://www.discogs.com/harmonic-313-when-machines-exceed-human-intelligence/release/1773959 http://www.discogs.com/harmonic-313-when-machines-exceed-human-intelligence/release/1773959 http://www.discogs.com/kraftwerk-autobahn/release/63961 http://www.discogs.com/kraftwerk-autobahn/release/63961 http://www.discogs.com/lfo-frequencies/release/29366 http://www.discogs.com/lfo-frequencies/release/29366 http://www.discogs.com/pink-floyd-the-dark-side-of-the-moon/release/371269 http://www.discogs.com/pink-floyd-the-dark-side-of-the-moon/release/371269 http://www.discogs.com/polygon-window-surfing-on-sine-waves/release/18360 http://www.discogs.com/polygon-window-surfing-on-sine-waves/release/18360 http://www.discogs.com/speedy-j-ginger/release/29894 http://www.discogs.com/speedy-j-ginger/release/29894 http://www.discogs.com/various-pioneers-of-the-hypnotic-groove/release/29365 http://www.discogs.com/various-pioneers-of-the-hypnotic-groove/release/29365 http://www.discogs.com/various-artificial-intelligence/release/29372 http://www.discogs.com/various-artificial-intelligence/release/29372 http://www.discogs.com/various-artificial-intelligence-ii/release/2966 http://www.discogs.com/various-artificial-intelligence-ii/release/2966 http://www.discogs.com/various-warp-101-influences/release/30833 http://www.discogs.com/various-warp-101-influences/release/30833 http://www.discogs.com/various-warp-102-classics-89-92/release/6551 http://www.discogs.com/various-warp-102-classics-89-92/release/6551 http://www.discogs.com/various-warp-103-remixes/release/30834 http://www.discogs.com/various-warp-103-remixes/release/30834 techno intersections: an aural account of research in edinburgh tami gadir university of edinburgh (uk) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.01.12> techno intersections is an audio essay presented in the form of an mp3 file on soundcloud.[1] it is comprised of my spoken voice interspersed with a small number of audio clips extracted from video recordings, in addition to excerpts of music that i have performed (as a dj) at the club nights in which i conducted most of my field work. a complete transcription of the audio essay is provided below. in the piece, i reflect upon some of my doctoral research experiences of participant observation in edinburgh techno club nights. while i am wary of turning too far inward, to the point that the “boundaries between subject and object” might be negated (davies 1999: 5), exploring a phenomenological aspect of ethnographic research has not only allowed me to better engage with experiences of my participants, but also to understand more profoundly that which i observe (barz and cooley 2008: 68–9). given that the nightclub is a sound-centred space, the medium of sound for the form of the essay may reveal some additional facets of this research experience. during the process of re-reading my written notes, i tend to remember how the night sounded—including the overwhelmingly loud music, the people i spoke to and the fluctuation of sound according to where i stood or danced in the venue. this aural memory of events allows me to gain further meaning from the words on the page. i find it difficult to relate to others’ accounts of field work in club spaces because i cannot hear the same sounds that they could. by way of compensation, i often attempt to superimpose music from my mind’s ear into the text, however i find myself somehow resistant to this imposition on another researcher’s personal experiences. thus, the written accounts of what is an embodied series of interactions seem disappointingly flat when devoid of the aural bombardment that is an essential component of clubbing. by presenting through sound i am not aiming to capture a complete sense of what it is like to research in a club; i am still only providing an impression, as would a written account. however, my method hints more directly at the sensory aspect of the encounters, that are probably quite familiar to many who do research in nightclubs. the use of my spoken voice as a mode of exploring these experiences allows an unbroken flow to the essay, that might not be realised by switching back and forth between writing and sound (and consequently between sensory modes and different tempos of thought). the “intersections” explored in this piece are based on my view of differently directed paths—whether people, philosophies, ideologies, events—encountering each other during the course of participant observation. the literal analogy of various vehicles meeting at intersecting roads is useful to bring to mind. this does not necessarily suggest conflict. intersecting in the nightclub as a researcher can happen in the form of a gentle nudge, such as a meeting between two friends or acquaintances, or it can, at the other extreme, occur in the form of a collision, such as a struggle between “the ethics of friendship” and academic rigour (see taylor 2011), or dealing with unwanted sexual advances. if used in the purely conceptual sense, it can be understood as a process of negotiation of two contrasting or problematic ideas, such as the way in which a desire to be a non-gendered, neutral researcher contradicts the socially constructed and embodied reality (see, for example, gurney 1985; perrone 2010). one example of an intersection that is taken for granted is the preor intra-dancing “banter”—a word that i learned since moving to edinburgh to mean “chatter”—that occurs near the bar, on the dance floor, in the rest rooms, in queues for the door, at the door with the bouncers, behind the dj booth, and during outdoor smoke breaks in the wind-chilled, rain-soaked streets. banter acts as an essential social lubricant ingredient as much as drugs or alcohol, and it was this realisation which transformed its status for me, from being unworthy of my attention, to being among the more illuminating and meaningful interactions in which i participated. techno intersections is made up of eight short “intersections” that are entitled as follows: 1. homely techno comforts 2. invasion 3. thinking about dance, or dancing to think? 4. interruption 5. “as a woman” 6. intuitive versus intellectual 7. ethical shades of grey 8. alienation the first intersection depicts the habitual patterns of my attendance at techno club nights, and introduces the possibility that these patterns can be perceived as problematic for research. the second, fourth and sixth intersections deal with encounters with people, in addition to conflicting or contrasting notions that i attempt to reconcile or confront. these include my invasion of people’s personal space, the interruption of my own habitual patterns and comforts through switching to a researcher “hat”, and what i perceived for some time to be the impossibility of using intellect as a researcher while using intuition during djing. the third intersection deals with coming to terms with researching while dancing, and the fifth reluctantly but necessarily exposes the reality of sexism in, and around the field. finally, the concluding episode returns to the theme of comfort and familiarity as a techno participant, if only to note its breakdown when that role is combined with that of researcher. my overriding intention for techno intersections is to contribute to conversations on a complex set of challenges which are unique to researching in nightclubs. i wish, above all, to highlight the possibility that these tensions, and more specifically, the search for the equilibrium between closeness to and distance from, are irresolvable in any given moment. this impasse—which implies that insider researchers are always in flux between states—is one of many challenges which add nuance and fascination to the task of researching in this setting. transcription of techno intersections[2] [audio. pig & dan, “on a train (big room dub)”. 5:20–5:50. from on a train. mixed with audio fieldwork, october 2012.] techno intersections: an aural account of research in edinburgh 1. homely techno comforts at an edinburgh techno night, i feel immediately at home. at home, because of the familiarity of this environment, the bodies, the rhythms, the intersections between those bodies and mine, and between their rhythms and mine. one of the key things i have learned to do during field research is to listen not only to the music, but to the people for whom this music means something. [audio fieldwork, april 2012.] i am at home here, because these rhythms are a part of my own rhythms. i am at home, because the moment i am engulfed by sounds with which my muscles immediately fall into rhythm, i am cocooned in this blanket of floor-shifting sound. i strive to be invisible to anyone outside of myself, in my fantasy of disappearance. i feel at home, because the moment i close my eyes, i can reverse this fantasy to the notion of not my own disappearance, but of everybody else’s. that is, i am attempting to engage almost wholly with my senses, while disengaging from people around me. my goal is disconnection. this fantasy, while it lasts, is the mental place from which i think i must remove myself, in order to learn anything, in order to label what i am doing as research. how wrong i am. [audio. back pack poets, “objective t”. 4:00–4:30. from objective.] 2. invasion april 2012, edinburgh. i am doing something a bit different tonight—i am filming a club night that i periodically play at and always attend. i have undertaken various fieldwork exercises at these events, but never in the form of filming, as i generally do not have access to a camera, and this form of observation has its limits, practically speaking. i notice a number of things that make tonight different to other fieldwork nights. on the one hand, the presence of the camera is making my activities visible, which is, i feel, a way of ensuring that people know what i am up to—although not necessarily what i am using the video for. most of them, after all, would assume it’s for promotional purposes. on the other hand, it’s a blatant and unusual invasion into people’s personal space—the only filming that tends to happen at this club night is by clubbers for sharing with their friends. i did not anticipate the extent to which this camera would alter people’s behaviour now that they are realising its presence. oddly though, there are some people who appear not to react, acknowledge, or respond to the object in my hand at all, as if they cannot see it. the following banter arose from my camera’s apparent invisibility to this clubber: [audio fieldwork, april 2012.] on most nights i cannot hear more than half of what is said to me. tonight however, we are far enough from the speakers to be able to hear each other. i yell back into my friend’s ear under no illusions that he can hear too much of what i say, unconsciously altering the way i would normally pronounce words (that is, like an australian), in order to be better understood. i also talk louder than i should because i am wearing earplugs and cannot hear myself properly. in this conversation i am assessing whether the beginner dj playing his first public set is doing a “good job”—what right do i have to judge him on this? when i leave these nights as hoarse as ever, i always vouch to talk less at the next event, feeling that talking is a waste of time and energy in these spaces, particularly as i recall what i have said as being embarrassingly redundant. yet, my regular vocal injuries and cringing recollections rarely stop me from trying; it is an automated process for me when researching at events, a part of my philosophy of being with people as i would on a normal, non-research-related night out. this philosophy, in its essence, is to behave as a participant because insight can be gained by, what james clifford (2004: 386) refers to as “indigenous ethnographers”, or “insiders studying their own cultures”. at any rate, my effort at talking to people at the start of an event is critical to the social make-up of the night, despite its being at odds with the sound system, whose voice inevitably triumphs over my own. [audio. bart skils, “observer”. 4:20–4:55. from walking at my girl.] 3. thinking about dance or dancing to think? edinburgh, april 2012. i am acutely aware of as much of my environment as i can perceptually digest, but not like the fly-on-the-wall role which i naively thought i might be able to occupy before actually embarking on field work in club nights. if this fly-on-the-wall role were possible, it would be significantly less stressful, and might give me insight into certain things that i could not get from being stuck on metaphorical and literal ground level. however, it would also remove me from the very essence of clubbing experience, and from the most meaningful and significant insights into the world of people who dance to dance music, one such being that banter is a reliable way through which these techno nights maintain their sense of community, togetherness and familiarity. it could be helpful to conceive of the abstract and theoretical nature of dance while not dancing, but as i begin to move again to the music, i find myself observing, understanding, appreciating. this focused, brow-furrowing struggle of thinking whilst listening whilst standing seems like a futile attempt at being objective. the standard reflexive paradox for me, tends to take the following course: i might notice the effect of a particular sound on my body. immediately upon re-emerging from this inward world, i remind myself of what i think i am supposed to be paying attention to, that is, how phenomena are impacting everyone else. at this point, i then have to, in turn, remind myself that i am one of the participants, and thus it is artificial to ignore how phenomena affect me. this zooming in and zooming out continues periodically throughout the night. it is not only important to observe what happens between and amongst people, and people and the music, but also between people and myself, and the music and myself. [audio. anton x, “klubnacht”. 4:25–4:45. from klubnacht.] 4. interruption edinburgh, april 2012. this feeling of being at home, after all this zooming in and out, has now been replaced with the perpetual discomfort and over-consciousness of being a researcher in quite an anti-intellectual environment. the discomfort sets in for the remainder of the night and again, my response is to interrupt my automatised flow of behaviour, and disconnect from the other clubbers. again i have the fanciful notion that in some way the zoomed out researcher lens will allow me to see a life-changing phenomenon, a panoramic view of the dance event—that fly-on-the-wall view. however again i am blinded almost entirely to the occurrences directly in front of my nose, or indeed, behind it. i have extracted myself from my fantasy of disappearance, although the fantasy is frequently interrupted and far from utopian. [audio. gary beck, “before the crash”. 3:00–3:30. from before the crash/hopkin.] 5. “as a woman” january 1, 2011. i am on my way to work in a nightclub. i am in berlin. i am walking the streets at eleven at night on my own, and carrying a map—the latter rendering me even more vulnerable as a foreigner or someone who does not know my way around, and i am acutely aware of this vulnerability. i am followed out of a train station and attacked by two men, and i never make it to the club night. [audio. nicole moudaber and victor calderone, “the journey begins”. 4:30–5:00. from the journey begins.] the before and after—the getting to and from a nightclub—is a hazard of nightlife fieldwork that i have not heard discussed or read about in ethnographic accounts by women ethnographers such as gurney, perrone or davies. [audio. nicole moudaber and victor calderone, “the journey begins”. 5:00–5:30. from the journey begins.] edinburgh, april 2012 again. i am dancing, but i decide to withdraw from myself, back out into the room, and i stop dancing for a moment to try to gather my thoughts, watch, concentrate. i am focused on watching the dj, then on one particular dancer, then on the whole room. this focus is suddenly interrupted by a man who is using my relative stillness as an excuse to harass me. go. away. one of the key reasons i choose to stick mostly to one particular club night is that it is a reliably inclusive and respectful environment, compared with other events that i have attended. this may be because clubbers increasingly recognise me as one of the djs of this club night. the personal space that i am afforded might result from the respect that being a dj has earned me. [audio. jeff mills, “late night”—10 second excerpt. from late night.] being a female researcher in environments which can range from very inclusive to highly misogynist, can also, logically, vary from being no issue at all, to rendering my research practice impossible. garcia does this topic concise justice in his blog, observing that the club is an environment in which outside world norms are somewhat relaxed, or at the very least shifted. thus, what can already be hazy understandings of boundaries regarding intimacy become even more confused. in my view, the only difference between the sexism experienced when i am attending a club night as a participant and that experienced when i am researching, is that the irritation is augmented. interruptions of my work seem somehow so much more insulting than interruptions of my leisure time. sexism has affected my observational research profoundly. doing ethnography in a discriminatory or threatening environment is disabling and exhausting for anyone who is perceived as a potential victim. these issues necessarily and unfortunately impact upon the breadth and quality of research that happens. [audio. art bleek, “dweep”. 2:20–2:55. from other lane.] 6. intuitive versus intellectual for some time i was convinced that because i was intensely focused both inwardly, on the musical and technical aspects of my dj set, and outwardly, on the responses of the crowd dancing to my music, all my attention was “used up”. i did not allow for the possibility that i could be analytical or intellectual whilst djing, and thus did not include anything about my dj sets in my writing. however i soon realised that i devote a very large proportion of my energy and attention to being behind the dj booth, and because of the intensity of my focus, i recall my dj sets in great detail. thus, at an unfortunately late stage of my research, the question of what exactly constitutes this djing “intuition”, creeps into my writing. i begin to reflect more on the process and routines i undertake and undergo in order to achieve what i deem to be a successful dj set. being situated behind the decks, therefore becomes an integral component of the object of my inquiry. [audio. stanny franssen & soren aalberg, “i’ve been lucid”. 3:15–3:40. from my air space.] 7. ethical shades of grey i am partaking in an endless tug of war, between trying to be the most rigorous researcher on the one hand, and the most ethical researcher on the other. i always have permission from the promoter of the night, and their friends and associated crew in advance of the night. i always guarantee participants anonymity, yet not everyone who enters the room knows they are being observed and there is no practical way for me to tell them in advance. through informing participants when i am researching as opposed to when i am only participating, there are signs that they become self-conscious in my presence. in the instance of the video camera, this is at its most visible, when participants move from immersion in musical and physical pleasure-seeking, to acting, performing for the lens. their movements go from being loose and undefined to being actual “moves”, sometimes mocking, at other times self-consciously nonchalant. however given that the alternative would be at the expense of honesty, it would not even qualify as better research. harming the participants even if only to break their trust, is not an option. [audio fieldwork, october 2012.] 8. alienation edinburgh, april 2012 again. i am here, in the space that i know, djing, or dancing to music i love, around people i love. and yet, because this process of researching demands of me a hyper-awareness and hyper-analysis right now, i am displaced from my comfort—i do not belong, i am stuck between being an insider and my attempts to step outside of my usual roles. i feel ex-communicated from a space that i would normally claim as my own. these moments of estrangement allow me to better appreciate those moments of familiarity and cosiness. those moments of comfort which ultimately deserve to be researched as much as what i can observe during my alienation routine. and then the breakdown starts, and the build-up happens, and the bass drops, and before i realise anything, my objective researching has been interrupted, and i have retreated yet again into my sensual, aurally-driven, non-thinking disappearance... [audio. pig & dan, “on a train (big room dub)”. 2:30–3:00. from on a train.] author biography i am a phd student at the university of edinburgh, studying under the supervision of simon frith. using ethnographic research and musical analysis, my thesis explores musical and social triggers for dance movement, focusing on edinburgh techno scenes. i am also founder of the edinburgh university dance music society, tutor in music at the university of edinburgh, and am in my tenth year of teaching piano. in my spare time i dj for the edinburgh-based techno collective animal hospital. <t.e.gadir@sms.ed.ac.uk>. references davies, charlotte aull. 1999. “reflexivity and ethnographic research”. in reflexive ethnography, 3–25. london and new york: routledge. barz, gregory and cooley, timothy j. 2008. “phenomenology and the ethnography of popular music”. in shadows in the field: new perspectives for fieldwork in ethnomusicology. 2nd ed., 62–75. new york: oxford university press. clifford, james. 2004. “partial truths”. in social research methods: a reader, ed. clive seale, 384–8. london: routledge. garcia, luis-manuel. 2011. “chapter 2, part 2: gender, sexual touch, and rethinking intimacy”. lmgmblog. 17 july 2011: <http://lmgmblog.wordpress.com/2011/07/17/touching-strangers-part-2/> (accessed 2 october 2012). gurney, joan neff. 1985. “not one of the guys: the female researcher in a male-dominated setting”. qualitative sociology 8(1): 42–62 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&an=10868648&site=ehost-live> (accessed 15 october 2012). perrone, dina. 2010. “gender and sexuality in the field: a female ethnographer’s experience researching drug use in dance clubs”. substance use and misuse 45(5): 717–35 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=s3h&an=48491009&site=ehost-live> (accessed 15 october 2012). taylor, jodie. 2011. “the intimate insider: negotiating the ethics of friendship when doing insider research”. qualitative research 11(1): 3–22 <http://qrj.sagepub.com/content/11/1/3> (accessed 30 october 2012). discography anton x. 2012. klubnacht. freshin records (mp3). freshin029. <http://www.discogs.com/anton-x-klubnacht/release/3865898>. art bleek. 2011. other lane. eevonext (mp3). next29. audio from original fieldwork. april 2012; october 2012 (mp3). edinburgh. back pack poets. 2011. objective. electric deluxe (mp3). edlx019. <http://www.discogs.com/mp3/back-pack-poets-objective-ep/1839225>. bart skils. 2012. walking at my girl. tronic (mp3). tr84. <http://www.discogs.com/bart-skils-walking-at-my-girl/release/3610407>. gary beck. 2012. before the crash/hopkin. soma (mp3). soma 344d. <http://www.discogs.com/gary-beck-before-the-crash-hopkin/release/3843749>. jeff mills. 2010. late night. tresor (mp3). tre10183. <http://www.discogs.com/jeff-mills-archiv04/release/3250789>. nicole moudaber and victor calderone. 2012. the journey begins. drumcode (mp3). dc98. <http://www.discogs.com/nicole-moudaber-victor-calderone-the-journey-begins/release/3826346>. pig & dan. 2010. on a train. boxer recordings (mp3). boxer 079. <http://www.discogs.com/pig-dan-on-a-train/release/3880875>. stanny franssen and soren aalberg. 2012. my air space. rhythm converted (mp3). rc 042. technical notes i recorded my narration of the audio essay using a zoom h2 digital recorder. the audio footage derives from two club nights that i filmed using a sony hard drive dcr-sr55 camcorder, handheld in the first of the two sessions and mounted on a tripod for the second. the video files, which had been uploaded to a windows pc hard drive, were converted to the a file format that allowed editing in windows movie maker, were cropped in windows movie maker to an appropriate length, and then converted into an audio format using zamzar. i then used the software audacity to edit and mix my narration with my fieldwork audio files and short sections of tracks purchased from beatport during 2010–2012. notes [1] techno intersections on soundcloud: <http://soundcloud.com/tgadir/techno-intersections-an-aural>. [2] this is a full transcription of the audio essay that is available for listening on the soundcloud link above. negotiating salient identities in queer edm spaces todd j. rosendahl the florida state university (us) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.01.15> establishing trust with participants in electronic dance music (edm) settings such as dance clubs and festivals catering to the queer community can be challenging for ethnographers doing fieldwork in these spaces due to a history of marginalization, misrepresentation and hypersexualization of this diverse group of people. for decades these queer spaces have provided opportunities for members of this community to openly express aspects of their identities that may not be accepted by the larger, heteronormative society in which they live their daily lives. in many locations, dance clubs and pride festivals have been, and often still are, the only public spaces where queer individuals can gather, socialize, find significant others and show public displays of affection. given the importance of these spaces to many people, they may be closed off to researchers who wish to study them. the acceptance of the researcher into the social fabric of these scenes often hinges on aspects of his or her identity, which can include sexual orientation, biological sex, gender identity, race, ethnicity, age, education level, profession or numerous other factors. a challenge for the researcher is to understand which aspect of his or her identity is most salient for the participant group or individual being interviewed and will thus be the most useful tool for establishing trust in the situation. there is a complex connection between social identity and fieldwork for researchers, one that reveals how the “insider vs. outsider” concept in ethnography is not a simple dichotomy, but rather a complex web of partial insider/outsider statuses that must be negotiated on a case-by-case basis on the dance floor. i have conducted fieldwork in dance club and pride festival settings, and throughout my research experiences i have encountered varied and sometimes conflicting responses by potential participants to interview requests. for example, research for my master’s thesis (rosendahl 2009) involved interviewing patrons at a local straight dance club in tallahassee, florida, about their motivations for attending the weekly “metro night”, an event aimed primarily at the gay and lesbian community. for many years tallahassee had one queer dance club establishment, but when it closed the weekly metro night was one of the only scheduled events in the area specifically targeting the local queer community. as such, it became an important part of the social fabric for many queer individuals and straight allies in tallahassee. while describing my research project to potential participants attending metro night, i would also include information about myself, such as my level of education, my program of study in graduate school, my interest in queer studies and politics, my own sexual orientation, as well as other traits. initially the body language and dismissive responses of some individuals would indicate that they were not interested in taking part in the study. this would often change suddenly when one aspect of my own identity caught their attention. after hearing that i was a graduate student, one individual wanted to learn more about ethnomusicology (a term he had never heard), and he was curious how i was able to convince my thesis committee to allow me to conduct research in a dance club. he thought it was unbelievable, and very exciting, that someone in academia would be interested in dance club cultures. another individual seemed unimpressed, even skeptical, that i was an academic looking at this culture. he was only interested in participating when i brought up the names of a few friends i had in the club that evening. it seemed that if those men and women were my friends and they were willing to participate, then he was more than happy to be interviewed. i conducted a more extensive research project for my dissertation that examined musical discourse and intragroup marginalization at pride toronto (rosendahl 2012). with over one million participants and more than three hundred musical acts per year, pride toronto is currently the largest pride festival in north america. this festival has a large organizing body with a board of directors and numerous full-time and part-time staff members and volunteers. it was chosen as a case study due to its focus on musical entertainment and because it can be seen as representative of other large-scale pride festivals around the globe (such as those in new york city, san francisco and sydney, australia). during an interview with an important staff member in 2010, i began the conversation discussing my credentials as a doctoral student with experience conducting research projects in other queer dance spaces, assuming it would be important in this case. i was surprised when i got little to no response from any of this information and only short answers to my initial questions. it was not until i mentioned my partner, david, about ten minutes into the interview that the participant opened up and began talking freely about the festival. for him, my credentials meant very little, as i am sure that many people have interviewed him for stories in local and national publications. it was the fact that i am a member of the queer community that encouraged him to talk openly about the festival. my membership in the community provided a sense of trust for him because he viewed me as an insider to the situation. this was despite the fact that, at the time, i knew very little about pride toronto or the dynamics of toronto’s queer community. there are a number of important scholarly publications that explore the topic discussed here and other issues involved in conducting research in queer edm cultures. gordon isaacs and brian mckendrick’s work in south africa in the early 1990s examines the role of underground dance clubs in queer identity creation (1992). this individual and group identity formation, along with community building and celebration of queer culture within the context of dance club settings, is also the focus of more recent publications by ethnomusicologists and performance studies scholars (fikentscher 2000, buckland 2002). songs in black and lavender (2010) by ethnomusicologist eileen hayes is an important recent addition to this literature. her description of fieldwork at lesbian music festivals, including building trust with participants, is discussed at length in this book, which serves as a valuable resource for other ethnographers conducting research in similar queer music spaces. for researchers conducting fieldwork in edm cultures, these examples reveal the importance of negotiating aspects of their own identities with participants. while it may be tempting to reveal as little as possible to keep oneself out of the story, participant-observation ethnographic fieldwork requires the involvement of the researcher in the larger story. and, given the importance of these spaces for many members of the queer community, admittance and acceptance of scholars for the purpose of research may be more challenging than in other similar edm settings. it requires scholars to be open about many aspects of their own identities and to understand and respect the importance of queer public spaces in the lives of these community members. a researcher conducting fieldwork must pay close attention to the verbal feedback and body language of potential participants and highlight aspects of his or her identity that are most relevant to those individuals. this connection between the researcher and participant can help provide a foundation to build a trusting relationship and, in some cases, a friendship that allows greater insights into the queer edm culture being studied. author biography todd j. rosendahl’s research examines the intersections of music, gender, sexuality and marginalization in north america. he has degrees from the university of iowa (bachelor of music, 2006) and the florida state university (master of music in musicology, 2009; ph.d. in musicology, 2012). he holds leadership positions in the society for ethnomusicology’s gender and sexualities taskforce. he can be contacted via email at: <todd.rosendahl@gmail.com>. references buckland, fionna. 2002. impossible dance: club culture and queer world-making. middletown: wesleyan university press. fikentscher, kai. 2000. “you better work!” underground dance music in new york city. middletown: wesleyan university press. hayes, eileen m. 2010. songs in black and lavender: race, sexual politics, and women’s music. urbana: the university of illinois press. isaacs, gordon, and brian mckendrick. 1992. male homosexuality in south africa: identity formation, culture, and crisis. cape town: oxford university press. rosendahl, todd. 2009. “working it out on the dance floor: the role of music and dance clubs in an emerging pansexual culture”. mm (musicology), the florida state university. rosendahl, todd. 2012. “music and queer culture: negotiating marginality through musical discourse at pride toronto”. ph.d. dissertation (musicology), the florida state university. apocalypso disco: la rave-o-luzione della post techno riccardo balli milan: agenzia x, 2013. isbn: 978-88-95029-69-6 rrp: €14.00 andrea mubi brighenti university of trento (italy) an absolute insider of the international underground electronic music scene for 20 years or so, riccardo balli is the best conceivable charon for those who weren't there and want to get at least a flavour of what it was—and still is—all about. but beware, balli is neither a music critic nor a music historian. rather, a dj, label owner, composer, novelist, live performer and, above all, a relentless experimenter in every domain of cultural production, balli has now released a book whose main aim is to resist historification—a process which, as anyone acquainted with the situationists knows, is inherently akin to museification and death (or, worse, sell out). apocalypso disco mixes fiction, autobiographic memories, interviews, recipe books, alchemical hints, sci-fi scenes and philosophical-anthropological asides to cheer up the reader during an intense, disorderly yet coherent promenade to the netherworld of unconventional electronics. one additional clarification: the subtitle of apocalypso disco, which reads "the rave-o-lution of post-techno", is best understood as not implying that there is something inherently revolutionary about rave music. far from that. indeed, the whole of balli's book can be read as a call to bring the revolution into conventional rave and hardcore dance music, which are but the mirror of the zombie culture in which we currently live. the quintessential embodiment of décadence and "postindustrial alienation", these genres still carry with them a dormant potential of resistance, which can only be shaken by the nietzschean cry that cuts across the pages of apocalypso disco: "noize is politics!". in a philip k. dick-inspired pastiche, "folly for seven ghettoblasters", with reference to the short novel clans of the alphane moon, balli fictionally stages such a deadly meeting of styles, where delegates from different music tribes—house, gabber, goa trance, minimal, hip-hop, dub/ragga, jungle—need to face jointly an illegal entry into their territories by a mysterious dr snorri sturlason, former researcher at the rhythm department and currently suspected of being involved with the no less mysterious fulcanelli records. all the tribes are quite aware that, with his load of illicit mixadelic substances, sturlason poses a grave threat to their society of "psychic release" . . . such is the allure of the anti-historification exercise entertained by balli in apocalypso disco. contrary to other genres of underground music, balli claims, electronic music has the potential to directly set "the brainframe" of the dancer—yes, a mind-control talk that comes straight out of a 1950s sci-fi movie. yet balli's emphasis on the directly affective experience of the electronic dance floor is well understandable by anyone who has ever attended one of his sulphurous dj sets: with joyful irreverence, parody, prankish attitude, and a certain nerdish citationist goût for obscure trash-pop references appositely mixed with occultist and high-brow sources, dj balli routinely serves his mash-up of sounds, a hotchpotch that is the essential counterpart to the theory and analyses outlined in the pages of his book. so, apocalypso disco is really a book that comes straight out of lived experience—as the funny slice-of-life sketch about vinyl self-distribution in central-eastern europe makes clear. this is also why a large chunk of the book, nearly half of it, is left to the voices of balli's "comrades in arms", including musicians, machine builders, party organizers, turntablists, innovators of all sorts, who are the undisputed protagonists of the underground electronic music scene since the dead by dawn parties at the anarchist 121 centre in early-1990s brixton, london. with names such as christoph fringeli, aphasic, slepcy, eitherherd and sansculotte, it is difficult to resist the temptation of historification, yet balli manages to actually have them talk a lot about music at the technical level and, ça va sans dire, at the political level. how to wreck a nice beach: the vocoder from world war ii to hip-hop—the machine speaks dave tompkins brooklyn: melville house, 2010. isbn: 978-1-933633-88-6 (hardcover), 978-1612190-92-1 (paperback) rrp: us$35.00 (hardcover), us$22.95 (paperback) tobias c. van veen mcgill university (canada) never mind the robots: what’s more human than wanting to be something else, altogether?—dave tompkins never mind the robots. electronic music has always entertained the trajectory of becoming someone—or something—slightly if not entirely other. when the jonzun crew performed “pack jam” live in 1983, they took the stage in a strange blend of interstellar outerwear and 18th century clothing modelled from the french aristocracy. who were these afrofuturists aliens? the jonzun crew’s blend of hip-hop and electro announced a unique, offworld status to black electronic music: we are not from this planet! with electronic sound ideas seem to fly at different speeds; we all dream of other planets and speaking in alien tongues. thus it should come as no surprise that if there is a voicing to the intergalactic tendencies in electronic music—the sci-fi sounds of sonic fiction—it is thoroughly alien. the device to achieve this is known, of course, as the vocoder. in order to write this review, i put on a greatest hits compilation of zapp & roger’s early ’80s electro-funk, followed by the rammellzee’s 2004 album of duck-intoned and raspy panzerist rap. first the sexy, silky tones of the vocoder lulled me into the ever-so-slightly alien funk of zapp and roger. i was on an easy-lounge spaceship leading me into deep space... inside all was warm and fuzz, shag carpet and slo-motion gravity. as rammellzee came on, i was thrown into a different universe entirely; the vocoder was now an interface device communicating the hidden mathematics of slanguage. ‘zee’s voice intoned growls and wheezes through alien harmonics as the vocoder became more or less menacing in the vocal chords of the garbage god. for researchers in edmc, the vocoder is likely more known for its use in the earliest recordings of everything from electro to hip-hop, from kraftwerk’s “pocket calculator” through afrika bambaata’s planet rock, cybotron’s enter through the jonzun crew’s pack jam. roger troutman. scorpio. laurie anderson. can. the vocoder has a storied history in the history of edmc; it is the alien-enabling device, one of the few direct means of altering the human signature in sound to speak in alien-tongues. dave tompkins provides an evocative history of the vocoder in how to wreck a nice beach, digging deep into the archives of the vocoder’s buried past, unearthing rare stories of its invention, its origins as a secret scrambling device for allied communication during world war ii, and its creative misuse by legions of electronic musicians worldwide. written in a provocative style that makes use of the vocoder’s infamous ability to blur signifiers into sonic scrambles and strange sibilances, tompkins’ writing seeks to perform, in a way, the weirdness of the content it explores. as he recounts the strange history of the vocoder, tompkins demonstrates an uncanny ability to cobble together seemingly incongruous observations into bite-sized slices that are as absurd as they are penetrating. or as he puts it: “one man’s rubbish is another man’s theory” (271). thus the title how to wreck a nice beach is a vocoded mishearing of how to recognize speech. academic readers seeking a closely footnoted, dry and logical text take note: though tompkins’ volume contains many closely researched sources that tell the story of the vocoder’s use and origin, it steams along without a scholarly apparatus. it is writ like a letter to a long lost robot lover: somewhat dense, crowded with conceptual metaphor, and enraptured with the rhyme and rhythm of its text. this makes sense, and i couldn’t ask for more; there are enough dry tomes out there. like kodwo eshun, tompkins demonstrates that a hybridity of research, critical thought and immersive approach, impecabbly researched, can always teach a thing or 2 to academia when it comes to communicating its content through style. metaphor is not superfluous here, but the outcome of a text vocoded. this is candy for the ears. when tompkins described the painstaking effort afrika bambaataa went through when to vocode “uh huh” in planet rock, i came to realise that nothing passes by his ears—this is a writer who is a raptured listener. besides its use in music, how to wreck a nice beach discusses in some detail its invention. like many such technologies exappropriated by a myriad of performers during the 20th century to form the strange culture of electronic music, the vocoder’s history is military in origin. invented by bell labs, it served as an encoding device for phonecalls between none other than the likes of winston churchill and franklin roosevelt. the vocoder is basically a bandwidth compressor and a scrambler. it slices the source into specific frequencies which can then be cut-up and rearranged across the scale. when combined with a randomized channel of noise, the result is a transmission that sounds a little like background hiss over the radio. what is thoroughly intriguing about the vocoder’s earliest incarnations—along with its massive, vacuum-tubed room size—is that two turntables were used to synchronize the scramble platters. one-off vinyl records were recorded with the signals necessary for encoding/decoding the encrypted signal. these records, by the way, were made by the muzak company (72). with the calls connected through the vocoder, say from washington to london, the turntables on either end would have to be matched in perfect sync for the conversation to properly decode. in short, both beatmatching and the alien vocoder were invented to get the allies talking. who knew? during the war the russians were working on a vocoder as well. well-known dissident author alexsandr solzhenitsyn, a zek or prisoner in a sharashka—a gulag for inmates with some technical skills—worked on the design of a soviet vocoder in the moscow suburbs. his experience is documented in his book the first circle (1968), which tompkins weaves into the cold war narrative of the vocoder’s use as an encryption/compression device for communications. what is interesting is how tompkins unfolds the fate of the vocoder during its early days. in 1939, vocoder inventor homer dudley (of bell labs) offered the vocoder to mgm studios in hollywood as a “scientific aid to movie stars,” a kind of autofix for bad voicing, possibly for use in overdubbing (49). a large-scale, art-deco voder was presented to the public at the world’s fair the same year, as a marvel of modern telecommunications; the public could have their voice mangled in front of the crowd. the war, however, intervened, and the vocoder went more-or-less underground until its resurrection in public life by—who else—the bbc radiophonic workshop, which managed to get its hand on the costly ems 5000 vocoder in 1976 (90). still in use as a mobile communications encryptor during the vietnam war—in a convenient suitcase size—the vocoder found its way into the hands of musicians, who immediately began to misuse it as a strange kind of signal processor. though analogue vocoders had been built after the war by the likes of siemens, it was robert moog (and wendy carlos) who built one of the first solid-state vocoders in 1970. carlos went on to score kubrick’s a clockwork orange; from then on the vocoder popped up everywhere in prog rock: tomita, styx, pink floyd, alan parsons project and elo. but for tompkins, the paradigm shift is michael jonzun, afrofuturist hip-hop and electro innovator, who used a roland svc-350 to create an entirely vocoded identity (111). it didn’t take long for it to fall into the hands of the likes of kraftwerk, can and afrika bambaata. along the way, tompkins clears up several misconceptions concerning what is and is not a vocoder. roger & zapp, for example, used a talkbox, as did peter frampton (notably on his best-selling frampton comes alive (1976)). likewise, t-pain does not use a vocoder but rather more-or-less “is” (at least sonically) the software program auto-tune. in fact, tompkins’ reflections on the confusing technico-ontology of being an application make a fascinating postscript to the book: as the voice of pop-radio, auto-tune is there for the confusing identity siege that is junior high. faheem rasheed najm is t-pain. t-pain is auto-tune. auto-tune is a vocoder. (t-pain said so.) i am t-pain is an app. you are t-pain. t-pain is a brand. no sooner did jay-z call for auto-tune’s head after seeing wendy’s use it to sell a frosty, than apple made the i am t-pain app available for $2.99. as demonstrated on the champion dj track, “baako,” babies can now be auto-tuned before reaching intelligibility (303). marshal mcluhan would be impressed—which is actually not a bad point of comparison for this book, save that tompkins, on many occasions, does it better. there are no embarrassing “tribal man” motifs and tompkins’ in-depth knowledge of his subject allows him to forge connections between technics and concept at a level perhaps best compared to a funky mix of friedrich kittler and kodwo eshun. indeed, this is how i tend to read tompkins when, on the same page as his reflections on auto-tune, he writes: “robotic is the world in which everyone sings perfectly without even knowing it” (303). the consequences of always-already technico-ontology could not have been stated more succinctly. the question is: has it already happened? perhaps. the vocoder finally saw the widespread adoption of its intended use as a bandwidth compressor when the world began gossiping on digital cellphones. yes, the pcm band (pulse code modulation) is a vocoder. the voice is scrambled down into harmonic particles and reassembled, which is why we all sound just a bit like robots on the mobile. i am unclear if this remains the case once we all switch over to data networks, but this shows again how the vocoder has become oddly ubiquitous in modern society’s use of audio communications, both for alien effect and as its means of cost-effective efficiency, which is where the whole story began. discography bambaata, afrika and the soulsonic force. 1982. planet rock. tommy boy (us): tb 823. <http://www.discogs.com/afrika-bambaataa-soulsonic-force-planet-rock/master/19152>. cybotron. 1983. enter. fantasy (us): f-9625. <http://www.discogs.com/cybotron-enter/master/133>. frampton, peter. 1976. frampton comes alive! a&m (us): sp-3703. <http://www.discogs.com/peter-frampton-frampton-comes-alive/release/401512. jonzun crew, the. 1982. pack jam (look out for the ovc). tommy boy (us): tb 826. <http://www.discogs.com/jonzun-crew-pack-jam-look-out-for-the-ovc/master/128146>. rammellzee, the. 2004. the bi-conicals of the rammellzee. gomma (germany): gomma044. <http://www.discogs.com/rammellzee-bi-conicals-of-the-rammellzee/master/80142>. roger and zapp. 1996. the compilation—greatest hits ii and more. reprise (us): 9 46243-2. <http://www.discogs.com/roger-zapp-the-compilation-greatest-hits-ii-and-more/release/2761961>. the diy careers of techno and drum 'n' bass djs in vienna dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 3(1): 28–43 issn 1947-5403 ©2011 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.02 the diy careers of techno and drum ‘n’ bass djs in vienna rosa reitsamer university of vienna abstract this article is based on empirical research into electronic dance music scenes in vienna, austria, and explores an area of cultural production that unites the ideology of creativity with the aspirations of social networks and individual entrepreneurship. it demonstrates how the role of a dj can extend beyond merely playing records in public to embodying a hybrid of inspired musician, compelling performer, marketing genius and business strategist. an economically successful career does not depend only on performing in clubs. djs are also involved in making music on computers, releasing records, marketing themselves through the media, organising club nights and running record labels. social and cultural capital is invested in creative freedom, a diy ethos and collective enjoyment, yet these djs tend to promote the neoliberal economic ideal of an autonomous cultural entrepreneur, combining self-organisation and self-marketing with unregulated labour and gendered constructions of artistic identity. taking bourdieu’s work on the field of cultural production as a theoretical framework, the analysis of modes of self-(re)presentation employed by viennese techno and drum ‘n’ bass djs suggests that the distinction of art from commerce, as proposed by bourdieu (1993, 1996), tends to dissolve. keywords: diy careers, djs, techno, drum ‘n’ bass, music scenes, vienna, bourdieu dr. rosa reitsamer is a lecturer in sociology at the university of vienna where she teaches courses in youth culture and ethnography. she has co-edited the book “they say i am different…” popularmusik, szenen und ihre akteure (2011, löcker), and her monograph when will i be famous? the do-it-yourself careers of djs will be published in 2011. her publications address the questions of how agency is achieved in youth cultures and music scenes and how gender and ethnicity are negotiated by cultural producers. feature article 29reitsamer | the diy careers of techno and drum ‘n’ bass djs in vienna introduction in this study of the diy careers of techno and drum ‘n’ bass djs in vienna, pierre bourdieu’s work will be applied to explain the internal dynamics of the cultural fields. i will describe the techno and drum ‘n’ bass scenes in vienna as subfields of restricted cultural production (bourdieu 1996) within a supportive do-it-yourself industry (peterson and bennett 2004). i analyse the self-(re)presentation of eighteen djs who are working in these two music scenes to show how these djs define their creative roles and career development. this paper illustrates the importance that these djs ascribe to scene networks (hitzler and niederbacher 2010) and their strategies for self-marketing to achieve regular performances at club nights, as well as the role of music production and the release of records in helping to make a dj’s career economically successful. in describing the techno and drum ‘n’ bass scenes in vienna and through an analysis of the self-(re)presentations of the djs in my study, i will also demonstrate that bourdieu’s theory of cultural fields and the separation of these fields due to the opposition between art and commerce are only partially applicable to the context of these particular music scenes. bourdieu (1993, 1996) introduces this opposition to separate the cultural fields into the subfield of mass production and the subfield of restricted cultural production: in the former, the production and sale of commercial cultural goods takes place and, as a result, the cultural producers are commercially successful because their aim is to make “the trade in cultural goods just another trade” (bourdieu 1996: 42); this subfield is characterised by its heteronomous position in relation to economic and political fields of power which result in high concentrations of economic capital, yet gain low levels of cultural and symbolic capital. however, the latter subfield, that of restricted production, has a relatively autonomous position in relation to the field of power and an inverted distribution of capital; here, the cultural producers follow a logic of “anti-‘economic’ economy” (bourdieu 1996: 142), which manifests itself in the disavowal of economics and the accumulation of cultural and symbolic capital. the “opposition between art and money” (bourdieu 1996: 162), therefore, is based on the different logics that are followed in the two cultural fields as well as the degree to which the fields of cultural production are autonomous or heteronomous from the broader field of power. my analysis of interviews with viennese techno and drum ‘n’ bass djs shows how the opposition between art and money has been eroded. the changing relations between culture and society, and between art and money, associated with neoliberal economics and post-fordist models of industry increasingly force cultural producers to adopt an entrepreneurial position. this position is reflected in the self-(re)presentations of the djs. their habitus—the link between objective social structures and the individual—seems to embody post-fordist social structures, while the illusio—a discursively-produced sense of absolute truth that develops with the habitus—marks a break with anti-commercial notions of creative activities. redefining work, the djs unite enjoyment, self-realisation and economic interest. the djs interviewed for my study use the term “me inc.” to describe dancecult 3(1)30 their self-employed status and link this status with social networking and self-marketing, as well as with an ideology of autonomous creativity, thus promoting the neoliberal economic ideal of an autonomous cultural entrepreneur. i will draw upon the conception of network sociality (wittel 2001) and analysis of new patterns of self-employment (bröckling 2007; bologna 2006; mcrobbie 2002) to demonstrate that the modes of self-(re)presentation of djs in vienna share numerous characteristics with the entrepreneurial self (bröckling 2007) and the new autonomy (bologna 2006). additionally, this study will also provide insights into the gender-specific self-(re)presentations of the djs and the gendered construction of artistic identity. an important part of the empirical basis for this analysis are eighteen qualitative face-to-face interviews with djs from vienna’s techno and drum ‘n’ bass scene, who provided information about their own self-(re)presentations and the shared, field-specific requirements for an economically successful dj career in vienna. the interviews were complemented by a virtual ethnography (hine 2000), exploring the use by these djs of social networking platforms such as myspace. the main selection criterion for djs to be interviewed for this study was that they make their living from their dj activities and music production. the majority of the interviewees also supplement this work by organising club nights. the interviews focused on these djs’ entry into the music field as fluid transition from music fan to dj; and from dj-ing to music production; and their entrepreneurial networks and strategies of self-promotion. the djs were between 18 and 42 years old at the time of my study and included eight women and ten men. all interviews were conducted in german. i have translated the quoted passages from german to english and the names of all the djs have been changed to preserve their anonymity. the description of the techno and drum ‘n’ bass scenes is based on my research in the archives of the viennese weekly magazine falter, the two music magazines skug: journal für musik and resident: drum & bass magazine, and sixteen interviews with music journalists, club owners and musicians in vienna. vienna’s techno and drum ‘n’ bass scene in vienna, the capital of austria and a city with approximately two million inhabitants, the techno and drum ‘n’ bass scenes have received scarcely any media or political attention. vienna’s historical lack of interest in contemporary popular music, including rock, pop and electronic genres, is rooted, to a large extent, in the more marketable image of vienna as the city of music, that is to say classical music (horak and mattl 2001; nussbaumer 2007). the relative importance of classical for the city authorities can be seen in, among other things, the low level of subsidies to pop-cultural fields compared with those granted to “high culture” endeavours (mokre 2007: 93). however, the relationship between political representatives and the fields of popular culture is changing with the growing influence of the creative industries in europe, whose artistic and innovative content is expected to make a significant contribution to the economic boom of post-industrial cities (e.g. florida 2002; howkins 2001). in vienna, the government’s promotion of creative industries1 since 2000 has connected the demand for 31reitsamer | the diy careers of techno and drum ‘n’ bass djs in vienna the commercialisation of art and high culture to the “festivalisation of the culture industry” in the 1980s2 and to the opening of high culture to broader, partially disadvantaged and young audiences in the 1990s (mokre 2007: 92). the techno and drum ‘n’ bass scenes in vienna are influenced by these restructuring processes: as subfields of restricted cultural production, they relate to the broader local, national and global fields of culture, politics and economy (webb 2007: 34–35) and operate in the transitional spaces between difference and homogeneity, locality and global networks (peterson and bennett 2004: 3). these scenes are, therefore, not autonomous, either from the dominance of large-scale institutions within the subfield of mass production or from the larger field of power (hesmondhalgh 2006; strachan 2007). however, the supporting diy industry of both the drum ‘n’ bass and techno scenes contrasts with the subfield of mass production, because the former is largely “the domain of small collectives, fans turned entrepreneurs and volunteer labour” (peterson and bennett 2004: 5) while the latter is based on a globally-operated music industry dominated by a few media conglomerates. how did the diy industry of the techno and drum ‘n’ bass scenes in vienna develop in this context? the viennese techno scene formed at the beginning of the 1990s with (partly illegal) raves in parking lots and abandoned warehouses on the outskirts of the city. its diy industry reached its first economic peak between 1995 and 2000, with an estimated 45,000 visitors to the free parade in 1997, the opening of more than thirty clubs and bars for electronic music, and the music festivals wien soundsphere in 1995 and phonotaktik in 1995 and 1999. this was also the time when new independent techno labels (e.g. cheap records, g-stone records, mego) appeared in vienna. during this period, municipal policy in vienna developed a stronger interest in rock, pop and electronic music and embedded the opening of numerous bars and clubs into the urban wien gürtel plus gentrification project (1995–2000), which was aimed at restructuring a part of the vienna gürtel—a wall construction supporting an elevated train which divides the inner city districts from the outer suburban districts. the vienna techno scene gained international attention in the late 1990s through such djs, music producers and label owners as pulsinger & tunakan, kruder & dorfmeister and dzihan & kamien (reynolds [1998] 2008: 385), who were marketed together with other exclusively male djs as vienna electronica (astner 2006). in the view of many long-time scene actors, vienna electronica, along with austropop (larkey 1993), formed a counterpoint to classical music—and, thus, to the image of vienna as the city of music. the vienna tourist board, meanwhile, integrated rock, pop and electronic music into the image of vienna as the city of music and began promoting relevant venues on its website.3 the drum ‘n’ bass scene in vienna came into being in the mid-1990s, a few years after the techno scene, and until just before the turn of the millennium remained small. only through the weekly trife life club nights (from 1999) and the radio show dog’s bollocks, on the state youth radio station fm4, has a diy industry formed to strengthen and expand this music scene. after trife life came to an end in 2005, many new dj crews and event organising groups appeared, including the urban art forms music festival. with the sponsorship of banks, breweries, distilleries and telecommunications firms, the urban art dancecult 3(1)32 forms festival is able to invite international drum ‘n’ bass and techno djs to perform, and the festival draws about 40,000 music fans annually. moreover, djs and music producers have founded their own record labels (e.g. ill.skillz, high tension recordings) and committed drum ‘n’ bass fans operate numerous internet forums (e.g. http://www.drumandbass.at) as well as the magazine resident (in print 2005–08, online only since 2009). these cultural and social practices of scene actors form an essential part of the diy industry of the music scenes through which symbolic, social and cultural capital, as well as commodified goods, are circulated, invested and exchanged. according to bourdieu’s definition of cultural fields, scene actors are players who struggle for the best possible position in the cultural field by accumulating the kinds of capital favourable to them. for bourdieu (1993, 1996) the only legitimate accumulation in the subfield of restricted production is symbolic and cultural capital; for djs, this, i argue, means making a name through dj performances and related activities, such as releasing recordings and/or programming music events. access to dj performances at club nights all of the djs who were interviewed for this study began their careers by playing records to entertain groups of people in clubs and bars of the local music scene. once their careers advanced, most found work at clubs, dance events and international music festivals outside austria, whereby they gradually became known within the scene and started to earn a living from their dj appearances.4 the interview subjects describe how they got their first and subsequent appearances at clubs in vienna. they comment on the importance of scene networks—including dj crews, organisational elites and music production associations— and self-marketing for getting performances and making a name as a dj. the interviews also show the gender-specific self-(re)presentations of the djs. sebastian, a techno dj, entered the business in the early 1990s. he got his first gig by organising club nights: i started spinning records in ’91. that was at the time that techno had taken off so extremely, and i was there, because we had made the first techno parties in vienna, where i dj-ed. it was enormous luck that i was at the right place at the right time, and then everything totally took off.5 this dj presents himself as a co-founder of the viennese techno scene, which formed slowly in the early 1990s and, within a few years, experienced a tremendous increase in cultural, symbolic and economic capital. that he profited from the increasing popularity of the viennese techno scene and became known at the beginning of his dj activities through performances at self-organised club nights—and as a consequence could increase the number of his appearances—he attributes to chance, to being at the right place at the right time. thus, he conveys the impression that a successful dj career cannot be planned, because his own career flourished as a result of good fortune. paul, a drum ‘n’ bass dj, pursued a different path to getting appearances at club nights at the beginning of his career. 33reitsamer | the diy careers of techno and drum ‘n’ bass djs in vienna his self-presentation resembles that of sebastian; however, he notes that: i always went to the trife life parties, where i also got to know the guys from trife life. we were on the same wavelength and since i was already pretty good at spinning records at the time, they took me in. they let me play at their parties and whoever could dj with trife life was immediately in demand. you have to be at the right place at the right time to get a chance. the rest is just practice, practice, practice, persevere and then get lucky too.6 paul came to dj performance first as a spectator, by regularly attending trife life club nights; not long after this time, he was admitted as a member into the trife life crew. this membership marked a turning point in his career, which seems again to deny any planning, because his success was due to the seemingly coincidental opportunity of working with an established dj crew and impressing his colleagues and the audience with his dj performance. the willingness to practice dj-ing intensively at home and to demonstrate perseverance are defined as a prerequisites in order to be able to take advantage of the invitation to perform at club nights. paul seems to have fulfilled these prerequisites, as he describes himself already starting a career as a “good” dj, allowing him to accumulate crucial social capital— membership in dj and event crews—in order to gain dj appearances at club nights. clearly evident in this narrative is the fact that dj crews and organisational elites can exert considerable influence over the careers of unknown djs, as the actors in these informal scene networks can extend invitations to perform at their club nights or not. this kind of inclusion or exclusion is instrumental in the definition and distribution of symbolic capital in music scenes—capital that djs can obtain only through the recognition and valuation of their colleagues and other scene actors. the recognition and valuation of others was defined by bourdieu as a feature of the cultural fields: few people depend as much as artists . . . do for their self-image upon the image others, and particularly other artists and writers, have of them. ‘there are,’ writes jeanpaul sartre, ‘qualities that we acquire only through the judgement of others’. this is especially so for the quality of a writer, artist or scientist, which is so difficult to define because it exists only in, and through, co-optation, understood as the circular relations of reciprocal recognition among peers. any act of cultural production implies an affirmation of its claim to cultural legitimacy (bourdieu 1993: 16). while paul and sebastian received this recognition from the scene networks, all of my female interviewees described how, especially in the beginning, the informal scene networks ignored their dj activities. as dj sara explains: i always notice that i cannot gain access to the male networks. the guys don’t want to have anything to do with you as a woman, and certainly not when you’re starting out. they mutually invite one another, regardless of whether they have a good selection and can mix or not, and they sit and talk about music as if it were a science, and make collaborative music. and then i had the idea to develop my own structures, and even make my own club. this way, i got more bookings, but it was hard work.7 dancecult 3(1)34 sara locates her lack of integration into “male networks”, with closed borders and firmly defined membership, not as an isolated social phenomenon that only she had experienced. fundamentally, unknown female djs have difficulty in securing a legitimate position in music scenes because of their gender (farrugia 2004: 244–246), and their exclusion from scene networks means that they can accumulate neither social nor symbolic capital. sara argues that even the social capital of unknown male djs at the start of their careers, which is expressed in their membership in a “male network”, is more important in successfully starting their careers than their “subcultural capital” (thornton 1996: 11),8 such as an appealing choice of music (“selection”) and beat mixing technique, which actually affects their performance as a dj (montano 2009: 83–87). sara compensated for her exclusion from male-dominated scene networks by organising her own regular club nights, to which she invited other djs and where she herself performed. in contrast to paul and sebastian, her self-presentation is based not on chance or luck, the way that the two male djs justified their performances at club nights at the beginning of their careers, nor does she present herself as a co-founder of the techno scene or as a good dj. sara views the turning point in launching her career as labour-intensive event organisation, which gave her the advantage of starting her own informal scene network in which to gain the recognition of colleagues and club audiences. self-organisation and work on the one hand, chance and luck on the other; these are the central concepts of genderspecific self-(re)presentations that result from inclusion into or exclusion from informal scene networks. regardless of these gender-specific aspects in their self-presentations, the stories of these three djs illustrate that they got performances at club nights by supplementing their dj work with organisational activities. with the exception of one techno dj, all the interviewees took on this dual function of dj and club host at the start of their careers.9 they occupy a decision-making position in the music scenes, which allows them to participate in the game of recognition and power, thereby affecting the career progression of the next generation of djs significantly. sara, a successful techno dj and club promoter, explains her criteria for inviting djs to play at the club nights she runs: young djs who want to play—there are so many. the question is: should you give them the opportunity or not? i say probably not, because the risk is too great. at my club, the quality and seriousness of the djs is in the foreground. they have to be not only djs but also music producers, and they must make it their full-time job and live by it. my club is in the avant-garde of techno culture and i cannot afford to have people suddenly stay away.10 the granting of opportunities to up-and-coming djs hinges on the quality of the djs. for sara, this also means that djs must be active as music producers and be able to live entirely on their dj work and music production. her standard links quality and seriousness with economic success in a way that suggests not only that quality leads necessarily to success but 35reitsamer | the diy careers of techno and drum ‘n’ bass djs in vienna also that success can be taken as a sign of quality. quality, therefore, takes on a dual role in sara’s invitation policy: it serves as a “difference marker” between established and up-andcoming djs, while at the same time, using a particular economic yardstick for determining quality (i.e., whoever earns enough money is good), the invitation policy’s ostensible focus on quality becomes market orientation. with this specific definition of quality, sara blurs the opposition between art and money. the “avant-garde” status to which she lays claim is associated with high quality and serves to distinguish her club from the so-called mainstream of techno music. in this case, a “strategy of distinction”, as bourdieu (1984) would put it, manifests itself not by a rejection of economic logic, as he would expect; instead, in the process of accumulating cultural, social and symbolic capital, established economic status is a prerequisite. this policy in artist programming ultimately makes it impossible to invite unknown djs to perform at club nights. these djs seem to pose the “risk” that their lack of popularity would make them attract too few music fans, thereby reducing the revenue from the event, not to mention its intangible credibility. my interviewees all say that they constantly have to intensify their efforts at getting dj gigs, and not only at the start of their careers. they are preoccupied with self-promotion to increase their performances at club nights and music festivals. for this purpose, all of the djs interviewed use, in addition to local scene networks, the internet social networking platform myspace to present and promote their musical activities and to socialise with scene members, especially with other djs and club hosts, and to arrange appearances at club nights in music scenes outside austria. dj paul even explained that his extensive use of myspace allowed him to cancel his contract with a booking agent because he can now easily manage his own self-promotion and organise his club night appearances using the internet. dj pia also talks of self-promotion in conjunction with the acquisition of dj performances: i need a lot of time for my self-promotion because i go out often to meet people and i must update my websites regularly and do all that stuff on the internet. that’s really time-consuming but it’s very, very important that you have your networks. but i also need a lot of time to train myself artistically to improve my dj-ing and music making takes also a lot of time and also all the gigs, especially if you go abroad. but i am selfemployed and i can decide for myself when i want to do what and how big or small my business is. i make all decisions according to my personal energy and my time and my resources. as a me inc., i can control this very well.11 for this dj, self-marketing means maintaining and expanding her (trans-)local and online networks by using new media technologies and meeting people at parties. hence, as well as places to meet friends, parties become networking events to build co-operation with other djs, music producers, club hosts. they symbolise the perfect symbiosis of work and leisure whereby dj pia can scarcely distinguish between friends and work colleagues. such onand off-line networking practices aimed at producing intensive, short-term relationships, along with the blurring of the boundaries between work and leisure and between friends and dancecult 3(1)36 colleagues, amount to what andreas wittel (2001) calls network sociality. this sociality is regarded as essential for an economically successful career (wittel 2001: 65–66; mcrobbie 2002: 519). for pia, network sociality is, in addition to all her other activities, timeintensive. through the continuous overlapping of dj-ing, music production, networking, the acquisition of dj performances and self-marketing, she performs an “intensification of working hours” (bologna 2006: 21) in which her working time normally exceeds an eight-hour day. pia describes her employment status, which allows her to combine all the different activities and determine the size and scope of the business according to her personal resources, with the term “me inc.”. this expression is used in self-help literature for the propagation of the entrepreneurial self (bröckling 2007) and the new autonomy (bologna 2006), which suggests an understanding of one’s own work no longer as cultural and social practices but as services and goods. djs tend to embody this theoretical proposal in their habitus (bourdieu 1996). pia’s self-image is that of an autonomous cultural entrepreneur. this neoliberal economic ideal, based on the idea of controlling one’s own career path through self-organisation, self-marketing and social networking, is, in practice, associated with unregulated labour and gendered constructions of artistic identity. but how important are producing music and releasing records for an economically successful diy career? making music—producing records my interview subjects have all expanded their dj activities at different times to include the related creative activity of music production by making original music compositions as well as remixes of existing songs. the majority of the male djs, however, began performing as djs while simultaneously making music on computers and, at the time of my study, had already released many more recordings than their female colleagues. nonetheless, they all describe the learning of music production as a time-consuming and difficult process. as drum ‘n’ bass dj peter puts it: i bought all the equipment and started making music and i immediately thought, i can’t do it (laughs). i didn’t get it, because it has so much to do with facts and figures, and i nearly lost hope more than once. . . . and as i got halfway decent at it, it still took two years before i released my first track, because you also have to find a label. that’s also not so easy.12 in addition to learning music production on the computer,13 the search for a record label provides many djs with a new hurdle, which they commonly attribute to the “crisis of the music industry” and the lack of distribution networks for rock, pop and electronic music in austria (gebesmaier 2001). seven of the eighteen djs interviewed for this study circumvented this hurdle by starting their own record labels, on which they release primarily their own music and co-operate with smaller distributors in germany (for techno recordings) and the uk (for drum ‘n’ bass recordings). but the economic payoff for the djs after the release of their disc—following heavy investments of time, effort and money—is small. according to the information provided by the djs interviewed, the sales of their 37reitsamer | the diy careers of techno and drum ‘n’ bass djs in vienna recordings range from 100 to a maximum of 3,000 units (including mp3 downloads), and there is normally no profit after covering costs of production and promotion. this raises the question of why djs still pursue music production and (want to) release their music on record labels. dj perry gives an answer: of course it gets djs bookings if they’ve brought out a record. it shows you’re not just some dj who spins vinyl, but you’ve made some good tracks and been released on a label. then there’s no longer the question if you belong on the scene. it’s just clear. i’m ok with this.14 perry cites three reasons why djs make music and release records. firstly, with the release of a record, djs secure their status as a cultural producer in the music scene while transforming their (sub)cultural capital into a commodity. secondly, they can increase their chances of being booked for gigs more often by club organisers because of the recognition they get from their released records. finally, with a record release djs can produce distinctions because they can distinguish themselves from all those djs who do not follow this cultural practice. dj perry seems to be referring to a consensus in the viennese electronic dance music scene that sets up an additional key requirement for an economically successful dj career: the release of a record on one of the more prestigious record labels.15 none of the djs interviewed for this study actually earned enough from their record sales or royalties to make a living. their performances at club nights are, therefore, their primary source of income. samira, a female techno dj who started spinning records in the early 1990s and released her first records three years later, asserts this fact once again by addressing the increasing requirements of djs for an economically successful career: just being a good dj is no longer sufficient today. in the time of the older generation, this was not the case. but the successful djs of today have all produced a super record that was accepted internationally. they can then earn really good money by djing because they can get lots of bookings and raise their fees. of course, it also means that you can dj really well, because there are ridiculously, really ridiculously many good djs that are just not known.16 samira distinguishes between two generations of djs in the application of different criteria for success: for the first generation of djs from the early days of the viennese techno scene, to which she belongs, being a good dj was enough to develop an economically successful career. producing music and releasing recordings was an option but not a requirement for success. the second, current generation has come to djing at a time when the diy industry of the vienna music scene is already thriving and a greater number of young people are discovering this activity as a potential career option. this generation is required to be both a dj and a music producer. they have to make a name for themselves not only by winning over the club audience with good dj performances, but also by releasing recordings of international standard. by this, samira means that the music and, specifically, the records of those djs are purchased, discussed in music magazines (e.g. de:bug, spex, dj mag, the wire) dancecult 3(1)38 and played on radio broadcasts and at dj performances. this field-specific recognition, which can extend far beyond the boundaries of the local music scene, is the dj’s (sub) cultural capital through which they make an international name for themselves as music producers. djs can use this popularity to increase their number of appearances at club nights along with their fees. samira, therefore, assumes that the investments of second generation djs might be worthwhile because at least a few earn their living from their dj performances and music production work. with this assumption, she expresses her illusio (bourdieu 1996), which describes the dj’s “faith” in the “game” of recognition and her interest in participating in this game, which puts the djs in competition with one another in the struggle for a legitimate position in the music scenes. for bourdieu, the illusio of cultural producers in the subfield of restricted cultural production is characterised by an economic disinterest. the djs interviewed, at first glance, share this lack of interest in an economically successful career. without exception, they all emphasised that they had come to dj-ing and music production because these activities were fun: i am often asked by people how to be successful. that is, as a principle, misguided. you should spin records and make music in order to play what you like and because it’s fun. then you will also be successful.17 the illusio that can be recognised in paolo’s self-presentation as a successful dj does not preclude his economic interests. rather, he combines fun and self-realisation with economic interests. the prerequisite for paolo’s illusio is his strong personal identification with his cultural practices. this identification flows into a redefinition of work and, on this basis, is supposed no longer to lead to heteronomy and alienation but rather to a self-realisation that makes it possible to have fun while making a living (mcrobbie 2002: 518). such an illusio may explain why the interviewed djs are convinced that, with the release of good records and the achievement of good dj performances, the corresponding self-marketing and membership in scene networks is achieved and inevitably leads to an economically successful diy career. dj tina has fulfilled most of these field-specific requirements, but blames her lack of career success on the fact she has not yet released a well-received record: i have to date only released one track [an original composition], and that disappeared pretty quickly, unfortunately. but i need just one good record. i don’t have it. i should tackle that urgently and immediately, because otherwise i won’t make it.18 unlike tina, peter and his colleagues have released successful records. he views the decisive criterion for their success as the “ideas” that they implement in music production: we have a track called [name of song] that appeared on [name of british drum ‘n’ base record label]. through this, we became known worldwide, by drum ‘n’ bass standards. then our market value suddenly increased and we were in all the sales charts, download charts, magazines, anything. we’ve really made something new and pushed the boundaries of drum ‘n’ bass. there had previously been attempts at making such a thing, but we really implemented the idea.19 39reitsamer | the diy careers of techno and drum ‘n’ bass djs in vienna john howkins (2007: 118) defines creativity as “having a new idea” that should fulfil the four criteria of “personal, original, meaningful and useful (pomu)” so that it leads to innovation and receives an economic value. this definition of creativity is part of a series of powerful economic discourses that aim to establish a new relationship between culture and the economy through the growing emphasis on creative industries. as a result, creativity in post-fordist capitalism has become what “efficiency” was to the bureaucratic corporations of the twentieth century (e.g. boltanski and chiapello 2007): that mysterious individual and collective quality which distinguishes the successful from the unsuccessful (gilbert 2011: 78). it is, therefore, no surprise that dj peter refers to innovating ideas in music production to explain his success. the techno and drum ‘n’ bass djs i have interviewed rarely develop their music production ideas alone. they co-operate with musicians, singers, instrumentalists and music producers, by learning music production from each other, lending one another equipment, exchanging music software and making music together. dj florian has been working with two other djs for several years. they share a music studio and invite other artists for the realisation of different music projects. in his interview, he talks about the payment of his partners: we [florian and his two colleagues] are working with many, many different musicians and singers. if we get subsidies for the releases, we will pay the artists but many of them say: okay, i will sing for your track and you produce a few beats for me. that’s family business where one says: i look after you and you look after me—be it money or a different kind of exchange. and that works really well because we are all friends and we have ideas.20 in using the term “family business”, the dj wants to express his responsibilities to the artists involved, and their desire to be rewarded appropriately for their finished work, at least through the exchange of benefits, in order to bridge the period until they receive subsidies, for instance from departure, the viennese creative industries funding institution. the non-monetary exchange of benefits is based on the friendship of the musicians, on mutual support and trust, and this exchange can be defined as a part of the diy industry of the music scenes. in music production, do-it-yourself therefore always also means do-ittogether, whereby musical creativity becomes a product of collaboration and co-operation between musicians, djs, producers, technicians and others (toynbee 2000). in these djs’ self-image, creativity is a highly individual (sub)cultural capital that, as with their symbolic capital, they (want to) convert into money through their dj performances at club nights – albeit in a roundabout way through the release of records. the illusio that these djs develop is expressed in their ideas about success and failure as well as in the use of economic terminology, whereby their collaboration in music production becomes a “business” (dj florian), the release of “good” records contributes to an increase in their economic “market value” (dj peter) and economic standards help determine the quality of dj performances (dj sara). these aspects of the shared illusio, which link anti-economic with economic logic, form the basis of the djs’ self-image as autonomous cultural entrepreneurs. dancecult 3(1)40 conclusion in this article, i have presented my exploration of the diy careers of techno and drum ‘n’ bass djs in vienna in the context of neoliberal developments in the music scenes. bourdieu’s notions of capital, habitus and field were valuable tools both in the analysis of the empirical data and in showing that the conclusions bourdieu himself drew from the detailed investigation of the genesis and the structure of the last century’s literary field require some modifications in the light of the new relations between (youth) culture, the arts and economics and the corresponding new patterns of self-employment. the above study of the experiences of cultural producers such as electronic music djs has shown that the distinctions between the subfield of restricted cultural production and the subfield of mass production that bourdieu drew according to the opposition between art and money do not hold for electronic dance music scenes. during the 1990s, the techno and drum ‘n’ bass scenes in vienna were already becoming economically potent youth cultural fields, exhibiting numerous interconnections with the institutions in the field of power. these music scenes are, thus, not elite cultural fields that represent the taste of a distinguished social group, nor do the musical activities of the djs comply with cultural and social practices of an elitist group of artists. the dj’s habitus (me inc.) and their network sociality corresponds, rather, with what is expected of all workers under a neoliberal economic regime—namely to demonstrate responsibility for one’s own life and to prove creativity in the organisation of the work/life balance through self-organisation, self-marketing and intensive strategies of social networking. the djs seem to embody these post-fordist social structures and, therefore, they call into questions certain assumptions about “creative” professions, such as the disavowal of commerce and the supposed autonomy of cultural producers. however, despite the erosion of the opposition between art and money, traditional assumptions about the life of the artist still survive in the illusio of the djs and apparently do not contradict their economic and social habitus. my interview subjects defined themselves as “avant-garde” djs, music producers and club hosts, and distanced themselves from the mainstream—in bourdieu’s terminology, the subfield of mass production. the djs’ narratives, moreover, gave the impression that their notions of being “free” cultural producers still embody gendered constructions of artistic identity. such self-(re)presentations ultimately result in an intensification of the neoliberal competitive entrepreneurial model, especially for women who wish to enter the field and make a living with their creative activities. this reproduction of social gender inequalities is one of the central problems with the creative industries model and the new patterns of self-employment that are being popularised today. or, in conclusion, to say it in angela mcrobbie’s words: “what we see . . . is the emergence of working practices which reproduce older patterns of marginalization (of women and people from different ethnic backgrounds), while also disallowing any space or time for such issues to reach articulation” (2002: 523). 41reitsamer | the diy careers of techno and drum ‘n’ bass djs in vienna acknowledgements i would like to thank anthony auerbach for valuable discussions during the preparation of this article. in addition, i am also grateful for the suggestions made by both anonymous peer reviewers. endnotes 1 the state promotion of creative industries in vienna can be seen in, among other things, the establishment of the departure funding institution for “creative professionals” <http://www.departure.at> or the opening of museumsquartier (quartier 21), a culturalindustry cluster consisting of museums, restaurants, clubs and bars. 2 for the fields of popular culture, this “festivalisation” manifests itself with the first music festivals organized by institutions of high culture with a focus on rock music: in the 1980s, as part of the wiener festwochen, the music festivals töne und gegentöne (1983), junge festwochen (1987), cosmo-kinetical theatre red pilot (1988) and big beat (1989) took place. 3 vienna tourist board <www.wien.info/de/lifestyle-szene/nightlife>. 4 the djs indicated the following for their fees: drum ‘n’ bass djs will make up to €300 for their performances in austria; outside of austria, they can make €500 to €1,000 and in rare cases up to €3,000. the fees for techno djs range from €300 for performances in austria to up to €5,000—and in rare cases, more—for appearances in other european cities. 5 dj, techno, male, interview with the author (vienna), 26 may 2008. 6 dj, drum ‘n’ bass, male, interview with the author (vienna), 27 january 2008. 7 dj, techno, female, interview with the author (vienna), 16 may 2008. 8 thornton defines subcultural capital as a specific form of bourdieu’s cultural capital (2004), which is not acquired through formal education and depends on notions of hipness. 9 the techno dj who was not involved in organising club nights started her dj activities while working as a record shop assistant. she was able to increase her appearances at club nights significantly because she met other djs and club hosts in the course of her job. 10 dj, techno, female, interview with the author (vienna), 16 may 2008. 11 dj, techno, female, interview with the author (vienna), 26 september 2007. 12 dj, drum ‘n’ bass, male, interview with the author (vienna), 10 may 2008. 13 the overwhelming majority of the djs interviewed have dispensed with the use of devices such as synthesisers or drum machines and produce their music only on the computer. 14 dj, techno, male, interview with the author (vienna), 23 august 2008. 15 the djs interviewed rejected the possibility of publishing music exclusively on the internet. they use digital download platforms only for the promotion and supplemental sale of their music. 16 dj, techno, female, interview with the author (vienna), 9 february 2008. 17 dj, drum ‘n’ bass, male, interview with the author (vienna), 27 january 2008. 18 dj, techno, female, interview with the author (vienna), 10 march 2008. 19 dj, drum ‘n’ bass, male, interview with the author (vienna), 10 may 2008. 20 dj, drum ‘n’ bass, male, interview with the author (vienna), 10 november 2007. dancecult 3(1)42 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hannover and london: wesleyan university press. toynbee, jason. 2000. making popular music. london: arnold. webb, peter. 2007. exploring the networked worlds of popular music: milieu cultures. new york: routledge. wien info (vienna tourist board): <www.wien.info/de/lifestyle-szene/nightlife> (accessed december 2010). wittel, andreas. 2001. “towards a network sociality”. theory, culture & society 18 (6): 51–76. towards a granular study of scenes at vancouver’s new forms festival tobias c. van veen université de montréal (canada) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.02.11 over the past fourteen years, vancouver has slowly come of age, shifting from a relatively inexpensive and obscure, industrialised settler port on the west coast of canada—home to cult sci-fi from stargate sg:1 to the x-files, writers douglas coupland and william gibson, industrial pioneers skinny puppy and an early and influential acid house scene—to its newfound identity as an overdeveloped and increasingly unaffordable bling city. but vancouver’s economic transformation into a seafront sequester for the wealthy has also had its cultural upswing, of sorts. for years vancouver was parroted as “no fun city” thanks to overzealous and culturally conservative bylaws blocking entertainment and the arts. for the most part, and even with the loosening of provincial liquor laws, little has changed. various arts venues continue to be squashed by the interests of developers building uninhabited investment condos. yet this broader conflict over affordable housing in general has nonetheless catalysed action in the arts community, sprouting something of an internationally-recognised edmc festival scene, in no small part thanks to the hardy efforts of the new forms festival. figure 1. setting-up glitch & granular at the 2002 new forms festival. olo j. milkman’s projected line-art is visible behind triina linde’s ceiling-hung installations. photo credit: olo j. milkman. new forms initially launched in 2001 as a small street festival focusing on hip-hop, post-rock, and other “new forms” of music—surprisingly for festival-goers today, it featured nearly everything save for electronic music. this was to change, however, as with the 2002 edition—and under my curatorial efforts—nff launched its first electronic music showcase entitled “glitch & granular”. taking place at the video-in (vivo) media arts centre on main street, the showcase featured mitchell akiyama, joshua kit clayton with sue costabile, local artists ben nevile and ssiess, video artists camille baker and owen j. milburn, and myself. the space was transformed with light-refracting installation art from triina linde and line-art projections by olo j. milkman (visual gallery here). figure 2. left to right: camille baker, owen j. milburn, tobias c. van veen, ssiess. owen and camille ran interactive visual max/nato patches using tobias and ssiess’ audio as parameter input. photo credit: olo j. milkman (2002). it is worth revisiting the scene of nff’s first electronic showcase in lieu of the “timeline” as presented on the festival’s website. although festival co-founder malcolm levy suggests that it was his 2003 visit to transmediale in berlin that introduced him to the multi-purpose format of a media arts festival [1], it is worth pointing out that vancouver had already explored transgressive and immersive media arts during its preceding decade of events that intersected rave culture. i raise this point precisely because these interstitial events subsisted liminally on the boundaries of both rave culture and the (increasingly) institutionalised festivals that followed. neither a rave nor an arts-council-funded festival, neither a shindig nor a showcase, a spectacle show nor a gallery exhibition, such events and their organising collectives often fall into historical neglect, omitted from a scene’s historical trajectory, precisely because they were neither mass rave events nor sponsored and government-funded festivals. often anarchic though organised, but always underfunded (usually by student loans and credit cards) and driven by desire alone, such events—in the true sense of the word—pose an important site of edmc research, precisely because they defy both their high-and-low art designations, and as a result, are often excluded from the storylines of both because of their refusal to abide by the narratives of either. figure 3. video-artist merlyn chipman performing at unclassifiable, techno-anarchist performance event musikal resistance, held during mayworks 2000, a collaboration of <st> collective and the marginalized workers action league (mwal). photo credit: tanya goehring. mixed-media installations and electronic performances in multi-day-and-night formats were central to vancouver’s technoculture underground that mixed media arts, hacktivist and rave scenes through ad-hoc organisational efforts in unsanctioned spaces. with the aging-out of rave culture around the year 2000, this nascent, mixed and unconstituted scene resituated itself on the fringes of vancouver’s artist-run centres, universities, club, rave and contemporary art crowds, with several independent events and performance-oriented conferences taking place thanks to the efforts of ad-hoc collectives, such as refrains: music politics aesthetics (2001), in collaboration with vancouver new music. figure 4. kim cascone performing at refrains: music politics aesthetics. photo credit: tanya goehring (2001). unconventional spaces such as the butchershop, open studios, and memelab, featuring organisational efforts of renegade media arts curators such as jesse scott, ssiess, and olo j. milkman—among others whom i apologise for not mentioning here—but also soon-to-be-closed media arts venues the blinding light and the beloved sugar refinery, were integral to developing mixed-media aesthetics outside of the constraints of both club culture and gallery settings. indeed, it is because of the collective productions i had undertaken—with others—in vancouver’s otherwise nonexistent “media arts” scene that i had been tapped by the nff to curate the first electronic component of its 2002 edition.[2] drawing from rave culture lineups and interventionist media and performance arts, the radical, mixillogical style of blending electronic music, performance, installation and conferencing—of, in short, mixing high-brow with low-brow, exhibit-gazing with ritual dance, theory with techno, in what was to become the template for the nff as a whole—was prototyped at glitch & granular. the intense lineup of electronic artists exploring diverse performance modes, from interactive installation to live cinema, evidently influenced many—including the festival’s entire mission, in a one-night happening-styled event.[3] what i want to emphasise, however, is that glitch & granular was the culmination of a long trajectory of experimentation that had already charted a radical mixing of sonic/politics/aesthetics in immersive as well as interventionist environments, indeed far in excess of what was staged at nff that year. figure 5. the author djing at musikal resistance. photo credit: tanya goehring (2000). the nff’s autobiographical timeline is worth revisiting, in part because i believe the recurring tale of vancouver’s collective unconscious—which is to say that of any metropolitan city that thinks itself as the “global periphery” and belittles itself accordingly—is that it feels the need to officially import its inspiration from elsewhere instead of recognising (and respecting) the energies of its own. yet neither berlin, nor montréal, were necessary for developing the city’s immersive media arts that combined electronic music with live cinema and avant-garde performance. it is here that an undocumented project remains, and one i have scarcely begun in my own efforts towards scholarly publication: that of telling the tales of vancouver’s acid house, industrial, techno and post-rave media arts scenes, as well as tracing their influence upon global rave and media arts networks. this story cannot be confined to vancouver alone; it is already a narrative of global affiliations, from robert shea’s early representation of harthouse records on the west coast and the artistic exchanges brought by skinny puppy’s success with vancouver-based nettwerk records. but it also includes quieter tales, such as dj and producer exchanges instigated through toronto’s techno.ca email list with vancouver’s techno scene; and the significant cultural force that was the northwestraves (nwr) email list, hosted by hyperreal.org, and the many events produced by its online/offline community that connected various soundsystem collectives and ravers along the west coast from vancouver and seattle through portland. figure 6. the chill room at northwestraves event <de.lurk>, seattle. photo credit: hyperreal.org (1999). in vancouver, many industrial, techno and acid house djs and crews had been exploring mixed-media events since the 1980s, with skinny puppy but also ambient pop group perfume tree pioneering mixed-media electronic music performances. in the 1990s, underground collectives such as teamlounge, b-side, hq communications and <st> collaborated on numerous events exploring what lay beyond the simple pleasures of hedonistic rave culture, suggesting links between collectivist, ecological and anarchist politics at soundsystem events. several artist-run centres were likewise at the forefront of establishing mixed-media arts, including the western front, with its origins as a west coast outpost of the fluxus network. in particular during the late 1990s and early ‘aughts, citr 101.9fm and cjsf 90.1fm campus and community radio, along with discorder magazine, formed a hub for such activities. citr’s influential “art’s birthday” radio-art broadcast, coordinated by sound artist anna friz in partnership with the western front and austria’s kunstradio, became a meeting ground for radio-art and transmission arts in the city, resulting in performances linking media artists across canada and beyond (such as this silophone performance conducted with [the user]). likewise, citr’s radio-art djs were local catalysts, such as brady marks, who founded the open circuits festival of experimental electronic music around 2001, drawing from events of the intermission artist’s society founded in 1999. figure 7. immersive audiovisual environment at teamlounge ambient event xmas ii. photo credit: teamlounge (1998). though in an already internet-saturated era all of vancouver’s media artists were influenced by the world at-large—and of course through the distribution networks of vinyl records and the travels of artists themselves—the process was more of an exchange and mutation of concepts than simply copycatting what went on elsewhere. the nff didn’t invent the media arts festival in vancouver, nor did it import it from transmediale. thanks to various collective efforts that i can only hope to outline briefly here, its curators built upon the efforts of numerous others who have mostly toiled away in obscurity. it is an unfortunate sign when local efforts, collaborators and precursors remain unacknowledged in any festival’s timeline. this is as unfortunate for the veracity of the festival’s history as it is for the future of the community it situates itself within. author biography tobias c. van veen is sshrc postdoctoral fellow in the department of communications at the université de montréal and visiting tutor at quest university. writing in both popular and academic publications, tobias explores political imaginaries of becoming, indigenous and afrofuturisms, practices of exodus in electronic dance music cultures and alien phenomenologies. tobias is editor of the afrofuturism special issue of dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture (2013) and co-editor with hillegonda rietveld of the forthcoming special issue “echoes from the dub diaspora” (2015). a techno-turntablist and practitioner of interventionist media arts since 1993, tobias is also creative director of the iosound.ca music label and resident dj of ion storm podcast at djtobias.com. tobias has collaborated with festivals and media arts centres worldwide as founding director of upgrademtl.org and concept engineer at the society for art and technology (sat) in montréal. tobias holds an ad personam phd in philosophy and communication studies from mcgill university. he tweets @fugitivephilo and blogs at fugitive.philosophy. [1] “in early 2003, malcolm levy was invited to the international media art festival transmediale. there, he got to see the reality of what nff was trying to create playing out, with club nights, exhibitions, and conferences all happening cohesively. with this experience, levy felt the solidification of nff’s vision”. [2] see olo j. milkman’s archive for images of the previous events held at video-in (vivo) before the nff’s glitch & granular. [3] also a note on the timeline: i was the moderator and a presenter at the panel with dj spooky at vancouver’s sonar club that year. art4-typeset-ver1 memory and nostalgia in youth music cultures: finding the vibe in the san francisco bay area rave scene, 2002-2004 eileen m. wu independent scholar abstract in the wake of the major commercial success of rave scenes in the san francisco bay area, accompanied by an increasing crackdown on venues and promoters in the electronic dance music scene, this article follows the “death” of a rave scene and looks at some of the ways young people imagined and engaged with rave culture during that time. looking specifically at how young people utilized remembrances and nostalgia to imbue their experiences with social meaning, the author provides a tentative case study on youth cultural formation in the late modern era. the article draws upon fieldwork and interviews conducted in the san francisco bay area between 2002-2004. keywords nostalgia, youth studies, cultural studies, rave scenes, san francisco bay area introduction 2002. while explaining to friends and acquaintances what exactly i was doing as a post undergraduate – conducting interviews and fieldwork on rave and club cultures in the san francisco bay area – i typically got one of two responses: an excited, “wow… so do you get to go to raves and drop e?” or, a slightly incredulous, “really? i mean… do people still go to raves?” though these were informal exchanges, they were nonetheless quite telling. the first remark conflated raving and the use of illicit drugs, mirroring media coverage and government scrutiny that culminated in the 2003 passage of the illicit drug anti-proliferation act, formerly known as the rave (reducing americans’ vulnerability to ecstasy) act (s. 2633, 107th).1 the second comment is more indicative of the varying beliefs around the social and cultural meaning of raves. for those no longer involved, the idea that the rave scene could still exist seemed strangely impossible. a note of disdain sometimes marked these comments, pointing to a tacit indictment of rave scenes as a flash in the pop-cultural pan; what could be understood as the now-passé hedonistic bliss-fests of 1990s neo-hippies and cyber-gurus. others went on to recall their experiences at raves fondly – relating the extent to which they imagined raves as an exciting and transgressive movement, one whose moment had nonetheless passed. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(2) 2010, 63-78 issn 1947-5403 ©2010 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.04 yet, a different story emerges from the point of view of those who were still involved. in the bay area, large commercial events, or “massives”, were held regularly, attracting thousands of attendees. medium-sized licensed raves that highlighted local talent, organized by small promotion groups and crews, and underground events taking place in quasi-legal spaces, continued to happen every weekend, though with less frequency than years previous (hunt, moloney and evans 2010: 90-4). the rave scene survived, but in a peculiar way: where on the one hand we had witnessed the proliferation of rave and club cultures across the globe and into various arenas of popular cultural life (carrington and wilson 2002), on the other hand, “venues for hearing dance music (not to mention actually dancing to it)” had been subject to increased regulation under the rubric of “the war on drugs and the gentrification of multi-use neighborhoods” (nicholson 2001; see also moloney et al. 2009). that is to say, the rave scene, as it existed in the early 2000s, occupied both mainstream and marginalized physical space, where the deregulation of a branded rave culture accompanied a re-regulation of the marginal, the deviant, and the supposed immoral aspects of rave culture (chatterton and hollands 2003: 56). and so it would seem that the metaphorical language of rave as dead was only partly accurate. yet, as a familiar refrain (reminiscent of the “punk is dead” and “disco sucks” pop-cultural slogans of the past), it had become, and still is, part of a commonsense vernacular that people use to describe youth cultures in relation to late modern society. using the example of the rave scene, with specific reference to the san francisco bay area, i would like to turn my attention to the question of a “dying” culture based on the narratives and perspectives of those who were involved at the time. the research for this paper draws upon fieldwork and interviews conducted by the author from 2002-2004.2 the remnants of rave and cultural transformation if, for a moment, we imagine that rave is dead (or more accurately, dead to some and not to others; see anderson 2009: 20-1), where shall we find its in memoriam? throughout our interviews, nostalgia and remembrance of times past emerged as a prominent narrative theme. nostalgic talk tended to present itself without cue, and converged most clearly when respondents were required to negotiate their lived experience and personal attachments with the perceived dissolution of the scene. the invocation of nostalgia is certainly not unique, nor new to rave cultures. during the early years of rave in san francisco, one rave-goer issued a missive to his peers that read, “the so-called ravers today show only some sense of community… the house movement is not the latest trend and it’s not supposed to be like this” (raver rick 1994). nor are mentions of nostalgia in early 1990s club and rave cultures new (see fikentscher 76-8; reynolds 1998: 305; thornton 1996: 140). yet, for the most part, nostalgia and how raves are remembered – as a significant part of the vocabulary and imaginary of rave scenes – has received scattered attention as a topic on its own in the literature on rave and club cultures, subcultures, neo-tribes and scenes. nostalgia is curious because it links the temporal dimensions of lived experience – encapsulating notions of the past, present and future. in the plainest sense, nostalgia, from the greek nostos, refers to a longing to return home to a physical place, a past period, or an irrecoverable condition. some authors in the cultural studies literature, however, have noted that the dislocation, fragmentation and fluidity characteristic of the late modern era have produced a type of nostalgia with no physical or experi64 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 ential reference point. it is instead predicated on an absence and a longing for a “cultural anchor that is both missing and missed” (maira 2002, 2005: 203; see also appadurai 1996). in our interviews, nostalgia for what used to be (idealized raves of yore) pointed to a slippery memory that was based on both the authenticity of lived experience, and upon a collectively imagined, or socially created, past. what follows then, is a preliminary case study into the imagination, experience and performance of rave, in relation to narratives of memory and nostalgia that appeared in discussions with respondents and other texts relating to the rave scene. i would like to unpack each of these texts to show how borders of cultural formation are drawn and redrawn in the performance of rave. i begin with a summary of the respondents, and turn to a reading of selected “in memoriam” that touch upon the following issues: (1) nostalgia and change in the scene; (2) remembering the social and temporal space of raves; and (3) consuming nostalgia and the marketing of memory. the respondents between 2002-2004, i conducted seventy-four interviews and analyzed approximately forty additional interviews as part of a larger study on the san francisco bay area electronic dance music scene and club drugs (see hunt, moloney and evans 2010). interviews were qualitative and in-depth, lasting three to five hours on average, and focused heavily on perceptions and experiences within the rave and club scenes and the social contexts of drug use. respondents varied in terms of age, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, their drug use and their involvement in the electronic dance music scene, i.e., what types of events they went to, and to what extent they were involved in the scene over time. given the size and diversity of the interviews, and the purpose of this article, i have focused primarily on the experiences of thirty-eight respondents who were still involved in the rave scene in the bay area, and who tended to go to a similar mix of events from commercial large-scale events, to smaller, semi-permitted parties in warehouses and other converted venues. what follows is a summary of the timing and extent of their involvement, within the context of a long-standing and diverse electronic dance music scene (moloney et al. 2009; nowinski 1999, 2000, 2001; pratt 2000; reynolds 1998; silcott 1999; thompson 2002). question range median how old were they when they attended their first rave? 13 to 39 16.5 in what year did they start attending raves? 1999-2003 1999 how long had they been involved? < 1 to 9 years 4 years how old were they at the time of the interview? 16 to 44 20 table 1: scope of involvement of respondents, 2002-2004 (n=38) the respondents were on average in their early adulthood – thirteen percent were under eighteen, and fifty-three percent were eighteen-twenty years old. they had also been involved in the scene for several years; only five had been involved for less than two years. but their cultural starting point – when they first started attending events around 1999 – followed nearly a decade after the beginnings of the rave scene in san francisco, which has been attached to parties thrown by the wicked collective, toon wu • memory and nostalgia in youth music cultures 65 town raves, the gathering and come-unity parties that happened with frequency in the early 1990s. by the mid 1990s, as growing police interventions pressured those throwing parties to find new venues (silcott 1999: 47-74), the underground scene had begun to transmogrify. it was not until the tail end of the dot-com boom of the late 1990s – during the massive take off and upsurge in popularity of commercial raves, and a growing struggle over regulation in the nighttime economy (hunt, moloney and evans 87-9; pratt 2000a) – that most of these respondents attended their first events. most reported going to their first rave in oakland, about thirty minutes outside of the city, in warehouses and abandoned storefronts; and a smaller number attended raves for the first time at licensed events held in stadiums and arenas like the cow palace, 3com park, and bill graham auditorium in and near the city. at the time of the interviews, these respondents were involved in overlapping scenes – they found out about events through specific websites and record stores (notably skills and frequency 8), and chose events based on a similar set of djs they followed, and promotion crews they liked (skills, unity, happy kids, feel good, elektrosorcery and audio metamorphosis, came up numerous times, for example). despite these similarities, they had diverse views on the scene, where they stood in it, its personal significance and their reasons for attending. only about a quarter went to clubs regularly, and younger respondents cited their age as a barrier. compared to raves, clubs were not as personally significant to them, and they would usually attend to see a particular dj perform.3 snapshot one: nostalgia and change in the scene nostalgic narratives emerged throughout our interviews, and they often did so in a peculiarly collapsed and often self-contradictory manner. that is, a respondent would often wax nostalgic when describing the present in relation to the past (on any topic from music, drug use, types of behavior and dress, to perceived changes in the scene) – yet, this authentic past was often in direct contradiction with their own lived experience; self-admittedly in reference to a past they had not taken part in (spanning on average four-six years); or in reference to an arbitrarily demarcated generational past (sometimes in reference to the 1970s counter-cultural generation, other times in reference to the ever-appalling “little kid”, more specifically, the “thirteen-year-old on drugs”). the following quote from jamie, who had been involved in the rave and club scene since 1999, touches on a number of these points: what’s so good about the rave scene is that it’s just so open to anyone… but it is a really sad thing when you see thirteen-year-olds, fourteen-year-olds who are there. and they’re just doing drugs first of all. and who knows, they might have a really deep appreciation for the music, but… if you’re gonna be here you should know who’s spinning. you should be educated about the rave scene… you shouldn’t be here because you know this is trendy and this is the new thing to do… last year or the year before… it got really exploited. it was on the news – 20/20… [it was] so frustrating for me because when i tell… my family or anyone that i’m going to a party and they see that it’s just associated with drugs, cuz that’s what they see on television, it’s like i have to prove myself… so many people go there for the music and for the culture… you gain so many friends… and just… feel like part of something… i don’t really condemn anyone… but… if you’re gonna do drugs, you know, i don’t know… do drugs responsibly… it was such an underground thing. i mean, i 66 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 didn’t party when it was really underground. and how people say the parties were back in those days… it wasn’t exploited, and parties weren’t getting broken up. and people were responsible. and people were there for the ‘right’ reason… sometimes it’s like these etards are just here doing drugs… setting such a bad example. but other times, i’m like – you know what – people are just gonna do what they’re gonna do. they wanna experiment. they wanna have fun.4 the prevalence of self-contradiction in this case has to do with the internalized belief that the rave scene should exist as a cohesive whole (“what’s so good about the rave scene is that it’s just so open to anyone” or, the oft-cited rave ethos of “plur”, which stands for “peace, love, unity, and respect” and invokes a sort of unity-in-diversity logic), and the fact that the rave event depends on diverse individuals coming together to experience a collective energy. this sentiment becomes increasingly contradictory given the ever-changing nature of the rave scene. jamie does not want to condemn the thirteen-year-olds or “e-tards” for ruining raves (blame is deflected to popular media, other faceless abstractions, ignorance, or exploitation), because being judgmental toward other rave participants is contrary to the rave experience as it has been learned, imagined, experienced and internalized. an emotional dilemma arises when those outside of the scene are unable to view the positive aspects of her experience, including a deep appreciation for the music at raves and a strong sense of belonging and inclusiveness. she is put into a defensive position and feels frustrated, indignant and misunderstood by family and peers. other respondents were far less forgiving, and placed the blame of a ruined vibe squarely on the influx of “others”: people who used drugs irresponsibly, acted violently or in an overtly sexual manner, to name a few. throughout our interviews, discussions about the irresponsible drug user tended to illicit the most ire and the most selfcontradiction. in the most extreme cases, these accounts included a revised personal history that neglected the crucial role drug use played in their own early experiences of the scene. for the most part, however, respondents criticized the way drugs were used, not drug use in itself. this was something that had to be learned, as ryan’s description of his first time using mdma (“ecstasy” or “e”) at a rave demonstrates: i was like, ‘you know, i don’t feel anything’. and my friends looked at me and they were like, ‘your eyes are huge’. and i was like, ‘really?’ and it was like, ‘yeah, your eyes are huge’. and then all of a sudden… he’s like, ‘well… come dance with me’. and i was like, ‘uh, all right. but you know, i feel like sitting down’. and i guess i sat down in the middle of the dance floor, cuz i didn’t know how to feel, and he started kicking me, and he’s like, ‘you are my best friend. you are not doing this to me. get up’. and i was like, ‘why are you kicking me?’ you know. and he’s like, ‘get up… you will not be an e-tard’. and, you know, that’s what we call people who are on e who just like, they sit on the floor, and they give massages to each other and, you know, cuz we think they’re retards, you know, we call them e-tards.5 certainly, idealized rave attendees do not arrive in a spontaneous vacuum. appropriate drug using behavior is learned from friends, or from the lived experience of raving. nostalgic narratives around a time when “people were responsible” and “were there for the right reason” inform the social practices and cultural norms of raving. in the above example, the physical instantiation of “no-no” behavior (privileging drug use above dancing, music and social cohesion, by sitting on the floor), is quite literally embodied, and dispersed across the subjective experience of the event itself.6 the annoyance with wu • memory and nostalgia in youth music cultures 67 drug using “others” (not to mention all the other “others”) comes from a perception that they are unable or unwilling to learn particular codes of behavior. siokou and moore (2008), in an article on the commercialized rave scene in melbourne, argue that the prevalence of nostalgia for raves of the past can “be read as claims to subcultural capital, to the possession of an ‘authentic’ rave identity” (51; drawing on thornton 1996). while nostalgia may be used as a claim to “cool” in some cases, i found that for most respondents, nostalgia was simply an interpretive tool to give coherence to an increasingly incoherent cultural experience. nostalgia, in such a case, manifests itself around dissatisfaction in the present, and on the assumption of “an earlier time of cultural wholeness that is now at risk of fragmentation” (maira 2005: 203; see also chase and shaw 1989). in particular, harking to imagined raves of the past gave meaning to the itinerant space they occupied, between underground-commercial, authentic-fake, unifiedfragmented (anderson 2009; also maira 2002). the prevalence of nostalgia around drug use, in particular, reflects a profound emotional and localized response to the perceived vilification (the rave act loomed on the horizon) of a scene they identified strongly with. it also points to a profound disappointment that their lived experiences – overwhelmingly pointing to the fact that drugs can be used responsibly, and that the pleasures of the rave scene extend beyond drug use itself – were not taken seriously.7 every single respondent i spoke with felt that the media unfairly portrayed raves, clubs and drug use. finally, there are times when nostalgia is associated less with perceived changes in the scene and more with changes in the person who perceives them. as examined in the next section, the pursuit of an “authentic experience” is associated with capturing a particular temporality, not just within an event or scene, but also in one’s life. paul, who was involved in earlier iterations of the scene, says: i mean the scene is different certainly now than it was then. i don’t know if it’s any worse. it probably is in some ways. it’s probably worse for me in some ways, because, you know, i can’t do some of the things that i used to be able to do… ‘kids these days will dance to anything’. you know, like [that’s] my problem and not theirs… one starts to sound like… some fifty-year-old deadhead, who still listens to his, you know, fucking grateful dead tapes over and over again and mourns jerry’s death. you know. or something. the techno version of that.8 snapshot two: remembering the rave beneath the imbrications of thirteen-year-olds on drugs, clueless trend seekers and other signifiers of a ruined experience resonates an earnest, and difficult to ignore, sense of longing and loss for a lived experience. the following is an excerpt from a message board discussion upon the news that home base (a favorite east bay warehouse venue that housed massive raves from the mid 1990s until it was shut down by the city of oakland at the end of 1999; see pratt 2000; see image below), had burned down in october 2005. futureisnow141 commented in a thread called “remembering home base”, and the post reads like a eulogy, a memoriam of a youth past: it hurts but the memories live on i discoverd mars and mystre there, something that to this day has changed my life. i remember the first time i herd save the rave. i remember the vibe being the best thing that 68 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 could be. the huge out side area was awsome. i remember the international trade center sign being turned into the international rave center. i remember talking to people from all over the united states coming to what was known as the best place to attend for a rave in the united states. i remember the first time i walked into the building, i guess what i am trying to say is, that was a place where i shared some of my fondest memories, i was born into this culture at the building. i have missed it for the 5 years it has been gone. the last event i attended there was spirit of giving 1999. my heart was broken that night and some things have never been the same. skills does a good job of bringing back the old school vibe but they can never bring back home base.9 figure 1: at home base in 1999. the oakland international rave (trade) center. (used with permission from le sheng liu, www.leshengliu.com) in this text, memories of times past are folded into physical space and a sense of generational ownership. there is something about the temporality of youth as a psychosocial and historical construct that lends a specific valence to such sorrowful talk. to juxtapose two adages: one can be “young at heart”, but “you can never be young again”. and similarly, while lamenting the end of his or her time at home base in 1999, futureisnow141 notes that “skills does a good job of bringing back the old school vibe but they can never bring back home base”. he or she is not literally asking for home base back – as if the physical building would somehow offer solace for a broken heart (perhaps it would, this is discussed in the third snapshot later in the article) – but more importantly, the subjective temporality that home base represented. the idea of being “born into”, or as some of our respondents said, “growing up” with others in the rave scene, was a significant aspect of the rave as an experience: an encapsulation of youth, maturation and coming into the world. and though this usually coincided with biological age – most of our respondents were exiting adolescence and entering their twenties – it also had much to do with a maturation process within the scene itself. josh, who went to his first rave at age thirty-nine, says he was very naïve when he first started attending, and recalled getting scolded by a wu • memory and nostalgia in youth music cultures 69 sixteen-year-old for not knowing enough about the drugs he was taking. the common experience, regardless of biological age, according to him, was having a space to experience youthfulness: you have someone who’s maybe like an eighteen-year-old guy with like colorful, fuzzy things like hanging off of his clothes… with a sesame street backpack, you know, they’re not acting their age either, so they’re seeing it like, ‘oh, i’m eighteen, i’m a successful college student, i have a future, but there’s still that part of me that i treasure from when i was eleven years old’. and they’re just closer to it than i am, but, i don’t think i’m reaching back to eleven myself, i’m reaching back more to like seventeen (laughs).10 on the opposite side of that continuum, many cited their age as the reason their interest in attending events was declining, saying they had started to “feel too old”, or that they had “grown up” and needed to deal with the responsibilities of school work, making money and adult life. besides the experience of youthfulness and growing up, the other “remembering” of the scene was related to the social and temporal space of the rave event itself. our respondents described raves as a place to have fun, “a happy place on earth”, a place to belong, “my second home”, a place to feel safe and free, a place to escape and let go, “my utopia”, a place that gives “faith in humanity”. almost uniformly, however, when recalling what was/is good about raves, our respondents talked about raves as a place to “feel the vibe” – as futureisnow141 commented, “i remember the vibe being the best thing that could be”. when asked to define what the “vibe” entailed, i often received very truncated answers, no matter how talkative a respondent had been earlier in the interview. according to our respondents, a good vibe amounted to good music, friendly people and everyone dancing together. much of the rich literature around rave and club cultures has devoted itself to capturing the tangible emotional atmosphere of events in words, examining the peculiar combination of music, crowds, dancing and sometimes drug use that amounts to much more than the sum of its parts (fikentscher 2000; gilbert and pearson 1999; malbon 1999; reynolds 1998; st john 2004). describing what he meant by “feeling ecstatic” at raves, daniel, who attends raves sober, said: i find i have those… ecstatic moments when i am listening and dancing to music that i am really getting into, and more importantly… it has to be really energetic and… like if i look back [into the crowd] and just see everyone dancing away and full of energy and… not really caring about much else other than dancing, that’s when i feel, i guess, the most ecstatic, like those are the best parts of partying for me, is really feeling the music and seeing that other people are too. and not just other people, but like the whole room, for example.11 this description points to the ways in which such an atmosphere is imagined, felt and perceived on a personal basis, but also experienced within a creative and social site of reception, through the collective participation and energy of the crowd. jamie, describing the joy of dancing at raves, put it this way: that’s what’s cool too about the rave scene is that you can go there and you can dance however you want and however you feel the music. and it’s not like a club where you’re being looked at and scrutinized… but it’s hard to describe it. people really let loose. and 70 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 you’re in your own world. you’re zoned into yourself and your body and your mind. and you’re just like listening and taking in the music. and whatever comes out your body just reacts to that.12 for jamie, dancing to music at raves is the body’s physical interaction with music in a particular environment, where you’re not “being looked at and scrutinized”, allowing her to be “zoned into… [her] body and mind”. though daniel and jamie frame their ecstatic experiences in slightly different ways, they both talk about capturing an existence in the moment itself – “feeling the music” – within the dancing crowd. this phenomenon is related to the interactivity and simultaneity involved in creating a vibe, a “collective energy that can be experienced on an individual basis” (fikentscher 2000: 81; see also malbon 1999) and a distinct sensation of “being alone together” (st john 2004: 31, quoting moore 1995). figure 2 (left): dancing at “eridanus”, a party thrown by the preserve crew, 22 february 2003 (used with permission from deciblast, www.deciblast.org) figure 3 (right): giving and receiving a light show with photon lights, date unknown (used with permission from deciblast, www.deciblast.org) not to ignore the experience of drug use as another component in the textural space of rave, the psychological effects of ecstasy that most respondents cited were feelings of openness toward other people, and closeness with others around them. characterized as a life affirming experience, ecstasy use made some feel “like a little kid” by recreating a sense of amazement, while it made others feel more open-minded or at ease with themselves and others. malbon (1999) describes ecstasy use as a means to initiate, prolong, or intensify the effusive and emotional environment at clubs and raves. brett, who attended raves for about two years before trying ecstasy at a rave, describes his first experience using: [simon apex] plays like happy hardcore or something. it’s like headache music when you’re like sober. but… they announced that he was playing a set next, and so he started off the set, and it was very bright and happy and bouncy, and i was like, oh, shit. so i stumbled my way up to the front and i was just jumping up and down, hooting and hollering, and i grabbed somebody’s whistle and started blowing it. i don’t know. i got very… very captured in the moment. we stayed there well until the end. i started to feel like i was coming down. it was sorta depressing, knowing that everybody was starting to leave the party. it was sorta like, that mysticism, that magic is gone now. you know, the lights were on, the music stopped. you can see people cleaning up, people saying bye, giving hugs and stuff. but, you know, i sat there and i was like, ‘i don’t wanna move. i don’t wanna go anywhere. i feel safe, comfortable, and happy here. this is where i wanna be’.13 wu • memory and nostalgia in youth music cultures 71 brett not only experiences a collapsed sense of time (note the lapse between “i don’t know. i got very… very captured in the moment” and “we stayed there well until the end”), and a strong sense of belonging (“i feel safe, comfortable, and happy here”), but also an immediate reflection upon and longing for the experience he just had (“i don’t wanna move…”). reveling in the “afterglow” of the moment (malbon 1999), and the desire to “go back” figured into a good number of interviews describing positive rave experiences. in all of the cases above, capturing a particularly ecstatic and ephemeral moment was what made raving poignant for our respondents. the pleasure of those moments can “endure well after their temporal and far beyond their spatial epicenters” (malbon 1999), living on in memories of times past. nostalgia for raves past – as in the opening passage of this section – manifests in the demand for a shared present (st john 2004; see also fikentscher 2000). it is nostalgia for a particular time (within a developmental frame of experiencing youthfulness or being born into a culture), and for the temporal and experiential moment of rave itself. snapshot three: consuming nostalgia and the marketing of memory while nostalgia is sometimes dismissed as a lazy reaction to a changing world, it can also help orient one’s gaze upon the future. as chase and shaw (1989) point out, the imagination of an ideal past can only happen after an ideal future has been conceptualized (9). when asked what could be done to improve the rave scene, respondents usually offered one of two responses: go “underground”, outside the purview of nightlife regulation, to help revive the scene. or, bring the positive experience of raving into the world of permitted clubs and venues to help preserve the scene. either solution, they said, would need to “bring back the vibe”. below, i will look at two promoters who decided to do just this – what tammy anderson (2009) terms cultural “restoration” or “preservation” in her adept analysis on the decline of rave culture in philadelphia. in doing so, these bay area promoters attempted to invoke the past in the present through collective reenactment. the berkeley promotion company, skills, did this quite literally in june 2004 when they organized a party dubbed “1998”. tickets sold out so quickly that they decided to hold a second party that weekend called “1999”. the flier declared that “all dj’s [would] be spinning sets from the 1999 era (’98-’00)”. mars and mystre, two djs credited for a specific brand of san francisco trance, would be reunited on the decks, three years after they had split ways. the following summer, san francisco ravers were invited to travel back in time once more. the destination was 2000 – the “year of the rave”. the following is an excerpt from the “imagine 2000” party flier (see image below): imagine 2000 is being thrown in tribute to one of the bay area’s most historic dance years 2000!!! in the year 2000, the bay area dance scene was faced with a difficult challenge, anti-dance legislation had recently been passed and many of the bay area’s landmark venues had been closed; namely home base and 2nd & jackson. despite an onslaught of public pressure the bay area dance scene did not collapse. instead it responded with a message of peace, love, unity and respect. it was during this time of hope and determination that skills and unity created two of san francisco’s most positive and successful events: popsicle & imagine. 72 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 bringing back unity: to help bring back the vibe & energy of 2000, skills has enlisted the help of the legendary crew, unity. best known for throwing the only (rave/party/late night dance event) to be held inside san francisco city hall, unity had an unequalled reputation for creating an environment of positivity, creativity and community. together, skills and unity plan on making imagine 2000 the most magical event in bay area history!!! figure 4: flier for “imagine 2000: the year of the rave” party, thrown by skills and unity on july 30 2005 (used with permission from le sheng liu, www.leshengliu.com) if it is not already obvious, the sense of time denoted in these fliers is uncanny, and marks the life span of a raver at far less than five years. the “era” spans only three years. this curious aspect of the event was not noted by respondents planning to attend the party. for many, 1998, 1999 and 2000 operated as significant marking points, either denoting the beginning of their involvement in the rave scene, or years they had mythologized. these years, as the flier points out, were also marked by increasing antidance legislation that drastically changed the bay area dance scene (see moloney et al. 2009). in some ways, skills, a small commercial enterprise founded by two bay area djs, with its roots in the mid-1990s bay area rave scene, went “back to the future” of 1998, 1999 and 2000 in an attempt to capture something about that particular past in the present. many of the respondents i interviewed cited skills parties among their favorites because they captured the “mood” and “old school vibe” of parties past. the unity crew, who organized parties to raise funds for local charitable organizations, was almost universally loved by our respondents, and had not thrown an event in a couple of years. from the advertisement, it is also clear that an ersatz version of the past was being marketed: attendees were encouraged to arrive early, in order to receive “vintage gear” from four-six years prior. they were encouraged to “feel the vibe” by wearing their “craziest, funkiest & sexiest party outfits” – getting the chance to “dance on stage with the sexy skills sirens and beautiful unity glow girls”. the idea of sexy sirens on a stage might seem quite appalling to those who were involved in the scene around 1999 or 2000, and was probably more akin to the club than the rave scene at the time. this particular reworking of the past, in order to make a successful event in the present, is not entirely surprising.14 it is also no surprise that skills parties were usually advertised as “100% permitted events” with a “zero-tolerance drug policy”, ostensibly erasing two aspects of the rave that had so characterized its beginnings. the mid-2000s saw the continued wu • memory and nostalgia in youth music cultures 73 regulation of venues and an increasing influence of the private sector over nightlife (hunt, moloney and evans 2010: 90). promoters seeking a “legitimate” stake in the nightlife economy were likewise required to adopt its rules and regulations. this is not to say that “legitimate” raves were the only raves in the bay area at the time. as i noted earlier, electronic music dance events continued in a variety of places. rey, who worked with preserve (whose slogan was “preserve the vibe”), a newly formed promotion crew, described throwing an illegal “renegade” party at home base in november 2004. the warehouse was initially supposed to serve as a “map point” (a place where attendees would go to receive directions to the actual rave). but after dismissing the risks of throwing a party in an illegal space – losing equipment, jail time and a substantial fine – the crew decided to throw the party there in order to revive the “good memories”, and to do “something everyone wanted”. we actually weren’t planning to throw the party there. that was actually supposed to be the map point for another location. and we kinda checked it out three days before, and we found out the front gate was open, and we thought it would be fun to just walk around. then we found out the door was open, so we went in and spent a couple hours there, and we figured that like nobody was coming around and so, you know, that night we just decided we’re gonna throw it here and just surprise everybody. and it was kind of a mess throwing it, just because like you know, the whole fear factor like… if cops come at any time, we’re just completely screwed, and we’re all going to jail pretty much (laughs)… there was this hole in the gate that people had to go through to get in, and it was just… it was definitely an experience, but at the same time… you had people that went to the party that were crying the second they walked in, they were just like so amazed that they could actually go there again… we were only charging like $5 and people were… trying to give us money at the end of the party saying like, you know, this was definitely worth it and we wanna give you more, cuz you guys deserve it. i mean, we didn’t really lose money on the party, but you know, like all the djs that we had were you know, preserve djs or audio metamorphosis djs, so didn’t really have a budget for anything. but there was just that fact that you know, we just tried to do something to you know, have something that everybody wanted.15 would the brokenhearted gain solace by returning to home base? it seems that some would. their feeling of amazement, as rey described it, derived from the reclamation of space that represented a particular time in their lives, and a particular moment in the bay area rave scene. rey’s sense of gratification, it seemed, drew from his crew’s reenactment of the past. breaking into a space, squeezing through holes in chain-link fences, being on watch for police, and a disregard for getting caught, were all part of the imagined past of “renegade” raves. conclusion it is clear that, from 2002-2004, people still attended raves and rave-like events, but in an increasingly regulated environment that saw the decline of the lived-experience of raving. nostalgia had become a predominant way of experiencing and giving meaning to an imagined and remembered past that was both missed and missing (maira 2005). in the case of the bay area rave scene in the early 2000s, nostalgia operated at a few different levels, and pointed to a slippery memory based on collectively imagined, as well as lived, pasts. 74 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 first, it functioned as a powerful trope for young people to make emotional sense of a culture under perceived threat of dissolution. nostalgia also became embedded in the cultural vocabulary that young people used to perceive their experiences of rave culture and how it had changed over time, regardless of “historical accuracy”. second, it reflected a legitimate longing for a particular concatenation of youthfulness, and an overriding desire to recapture the emotional aura and vibe of raves. for these young people, who began attending raves in 1999, memories of youthfulness and the vibe were connected to a particular moment in the history of the bay area rave scene – what could be categorized as its second wave of widespread popularity. third, nostalgic renderings of the past were used to both market and mobilize the rave scene into the future.16 in the vignettes above, the young people involved in the bay area rave scene took on a variety of nostalgic subjectivities that strongly informed the remembrance and re-imagining of a particular space and time that had fallen out of reach, had become increasingly difficult to find, or had ceased to exist. the intensity and prevalence of nostalgia in this late-modern youth culture, however, indicates a continued desire to seek out such spaces, irrespective of regulatory structures within the nighttime economy (see measham 2004). in re-imagining the past, these young people drew and redrew the lines of a “dying” culture, and positioned themselves toward the future.17 ••••••• acknowledgements i would like to thank dr geoffrey hunt for the opportunity to work on this project and for supporting me in my endeavours. thank you to graham st john and two anonymous reviewers who offered their insight. and my utmost gratitude goes to the diverse and always fascinating group of people who shared their imaginations and experiences with us. references anderson, tammy l. 2009. rave culture: the alteration and decline of a philadelphia music scene. philadelphia: temple university press. appadurai, arjun. 1996. modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. carrington, ben and brian wilson. 2002. “global clubcultures: cultural flows and late modern dance music culture”. in mark cieslik and gary pollock (eds), young people in risk society: the restructuring of youth identities and transitions in late modernity, pp. 74-99. burlington: ashgate. chase, malcom and christopher shaw. 1989. “the dimensions of nostalgia”. in christopher shaw and malcom chase (eds), the imagined past: history and nostalgia, pp. 1-17. manchester: manchester university press. chatterton, paul and robert hollands. 2003. making urban nightscapes: youth cultures, pleasure spaces and corporate power. london: 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<www.sfbg.com/aande/electric/3522.html> (accessed december 2005). pratt, rob. 2000. “raves get local”. metroactive, 5 april. <www.metroactive.com/papers/cruz/04.05.00/undergroundbeats-0014.html> (accessed december 2005). raver rick. 1994. “wake up!” xlr8r 9. <media.hyperreal.org/zines/xlr8r/guest.editorial> (accessed december 2005). redhead, steve. 1990. the end of the century party: youth and pop toward 2000. manchester: manchester university press. reynolds, simon. 1998. generation ecstasy. boston: little, brown and co. silcott, mireille. 1999. rave america: new school dancescapes. quebec: ecw press. siokou, christine and david moore. 2008. “‘this is not a rave!’ changes in the commercialised melbourne rave/dance party scene”. youth studies australia 27(3): 50-7. stahl, geoff. 2003. “tastefully renovating subcultural theory: making space for a new model”. in david muggleton and rupert weinzierl (eds), the post-subcultures reader, pp. 27-40. oxford: berg. st john, graham. 2004. “the difference engine: liberation and the rave imaginary”. in graham st john (ed), rave culture and religion, pp. 19-45. london: routledge. thompson, a.c. 2002. “life during wartime – operation: get the ravers”. san francisco bay guardian, 24 july. <www.sfbg.com/36/43/x_new_war.html> (accessed december 2005). thornton, sarah. 1996. club cultures: music, media and subcultural capital. cambridge: polity. wilson, brian. 2006. fight, flight or chill: subcultures, youth, and rave in the twenty-first century. kingston, ontario: mcgill-queen's university press. 76 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 author biography eileen m. wu received her ba in political economy from the university of california, berkeley, and her ma in sociology from the new school for social research in new york. she is a former fieldworker for the institute for scientific analysis, san francisco. for the past several years, she has worked as a consultant in international development, with a focus on youth and the global aids epidemic. notes wu • memory and nostalgia in youth music cultures 77 1. signed into law by george w. bush on 30 april 2003 as a tag-along on the amber alert bill, and initiated by then senator joe biden (delaware, democrat), the illicit drug antiproliferation act extended the scope of federal anti-crack house laws of the 1980s to club and rave promoters, making it easier to prosecute them for failing to prevent illicit substance use at their events – subsequently criminalizing a “contemporary and highly popular youthful activity” (hunt, moloney and evans 2010: 84). 2. collection of data for this article was made possible by funding from the national institute on drug abuse (r01 da14317), principal investigator dr. geoffrey hunt. for a comprehensive summary of the respondents and methodology of the study, see hunt, moloney and evans (2010: 27-50). additional information on the pulse of the electronic dance music scene was gathered through print fliers and electronic sources such as bayraves.com, ravelinks.com, sfraves.org, the fnf mailing list and the dj denise mailing list. 3. though issues of gender and ethnicity are not discussed in this article, i would like to give the following demographic information: the respondents were 58% female, 42% male. ethnic breakdown was reflective of the diversity in our overall sample: 42% white; 32% asian/pacific islander; 11% african american; with the remainder of the respondents identifying as native american, latina and primarily of mixed ethnicity. 4. jamie, age 23, interview with author (institute for scientific analysis [isa], san francisco), 12 april 2003. pseudonyms have been used for all respondents. 5. ryan, age 19, interview with author (isa, alameda), 22 july 2003. 6. malbon (1999) notes that the ecstatic experience is littered with these moments of selfconscious obligation to monitor ones behavior, removing the dancer from their momentary reverie (111). see also thornton (1996) who might understand this as an enculturation of authenticities and “authentic” behaviors. 7. a minority (two) of the respondents i focused on for this article reported prolonged problematic use with ecstasy. 8. paul, age 33, interview with author (isa, san francisco), 23 january 2004. 9. futureisnow141, posting on skills message board on 16 october 2005: <p073.ezboard.com/fskills69311frm2.showmessage?topicid=1779.topic> (accessed 1 december 2005). a few explanatory notes on the names and places mentioned in the post: mars and mystre are djs, and “save the rave” is one of their rave anthems. the crews throwing parties at home base would convert the sign at the front of the building to read “international rave center”, and skills is a local promotion crew started by two local djs. 10. josh, age 44, interview with author (isa, alameda), 21 march 2004. 11. daniel, age 21, interview with author (isa, san francisco), 1 august 2003. 12. jamie, age 23, interview with author (isa, san francisco), 12 april 2003. 78 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 13. brett, age 20, interview with author (isa, alameda), 18 september 2003. 14. the role of consumption and nostalgia in dance music scenes has been contested – some have argued that nostalgic styles, images and music are marketed to further exploit and commercialize raves (wilson 2006). others in the literature have noted how the consumption and recycling of past styles, as well as pastiche and parody in music cultures, have played an integral role in the making of new music cultures (huq 2006: 108; redhead 1990: 94; see also mcrobbie 1994: 174). 15. rey, age 21, interview with author (isa, alameda), 17 march 2004. 16. as a postscript, many of the small-scale promoters that were discussed in this article no longer appear to be throwing parties, pointing to the many difficulties involved in preserving and restoring cultural elements of past raves (anderson 2009: 133-4). skills is one of the only commercial (rave) promoters founded in the midto late 1990s that is still throwing parties. they continue to throw “imagine 2000” parties with profits going to local charities. 17. i am drawing upon stahl’s (2003) discussion of space, imagination and agency (31-35); see also appadurai (1996). the diy careers of techno and drum 'n' bass djs in vienna dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 4(1): 38–64 issn 1947-5403 ©2012 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.01.02 full penetration the integration of psychedelic electronic dance music and culture into the israeli mainstream joshua i. schmidt ben-gurion university of the negev (israel) abstract although psychedelic electronic dance music and culture (pedmc) networks exist across the planet, in israel this subculture has attained a high degree of mainstream national/cultural prominence. based on an ongoing ethnographic project, this article discusses israeli (p)edmc by comparing and contrasting the multi-functional roles that this music culture plays for two generally non-related local populations—secular and orthodox youth. it examines the way these communities utilize trance-dance parties to serve their community and their specific needs, and how, in turn, these uses reflect the current socio-cultural circumstances and conditions particular to each group. keywords: psytrance, israel, youth, secular, religion, mesibot, dosibot, post-zionism, paradox joshua schmidt earned his phd in cultural anthropology from ben-gurion university of the negev, israel. a world traveler, dj and video-ethnographer, his research interests include popular music, alternative youth culture and societal transformation within shifting global contexts. email: <schmidt@bgu.ac.il>. feature article mailto:schmidt@bgu.ac.il 39schmidt | full penetration introduction although electronic dance music culture (edmc) networks exist across the world, in israel its expression has attained a high degree of national and cultural prominence rather than remaining “underground” or as a “subculture”. electronic music culture (edm) in general and psytrance (short for psychedelic trance) electronic dance music culture in particular (pedmc), have notably permeated the israeli cultural fabric, with participation in psytrance parties growing from an avant-garde subcultural activity to a widespread, although not entirely legitimate, leisure pursuit (schmidt 2011). focusing on the consumption of (p)edmc within contemporary israel, this article compares and contrasts the manner in which two local populations, secular and religious israeli youth, utilize trance-dance parties to serve their specific individual and community needs. edm and its adjoining cultural forms have mutated into a myriad of genres and subgenres. this essay generally associates pedmc with secular israeli youth and edmc with their religious counterparts. the article draws from personal observations gathered during extended periods of (p)edmcoriented ethnographic field research undertaken between 1995–2011 both in israel and abroad. the major finding is that, although these two party scenes differ in scale, focus, form and function, in their own way each is imbued with, paradoxical—contrastive, selfcontradictory and ironic—elements that reflect current socio-cultural circumstances and conditions particular to secular and religious israeli youth respectively. trancistim and mesibot: general notes on secular pedmc secular, or xiloni (xilonim in plural), israelis enjoy many styles of edm—for example, house, techno, minimal, progressive—but bear a specific attachment to the hard-hitting, full-on psytrance genre (140 –45 bpm). israeli psytrance djs, record labels and party promoters are highly active in the intercontinental pedmc party movement, while local psytrance parties are considered by participants to be on par—and sometimes even more intense—than their european, anglo and asian equivalents. moreover, trancistim, the term israeli pedmc affiliates use to refer to themselves, are notorious both for their animated behavior on the dance floor and for their brazen and often audacious drug use. additionally, globetrotting israelis have taken over a sizeable portion of the illegal substances trade enveloping psytrance culture and are widely considered, both in and beyond the pedmc realm, to be reliable and resourceful drug dealers (haviv 2005). thus, trancistim enthusiasm for key pedmc attributes—music, dance, drugs and travel—has earned them international prominence, and the global trance community deems israel a prominent “trance power” (regev and seroussi 2004: 182). the primary manifestation of secular israeli pedmc are outdoor trance-dance parties officially called mesibot acid (hebrew for “acid parties”) but normally referred to by trancistim simply as mesibot. initially, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was the privileged ashkenazi middle-classes—the grandchildren of the founders of the country who also serve in the most exclusive army units and continue to hold sway over local socio-cultural dancecult 4(1)40 memes (almog, 2000)—who brought trance parties back to israel from goa (india) and koh phangan (thailand) after having been exposed to psychedelics and psychedelic dance culture while on their post-military trips abroad. as the enthusiasm of these initial neophytes spread throughout the country, pedmc garnered a massive following, with full-on trance becoming the soundtrack for an evolving movement of neo-zionist israeli leisurists (sagiv 2000). emerging during the same period that israel was moving away from traditional zionist ideologies that stress collectivism and towards globally impacted practices that encourage individualism, the hypnotic, beat-centered wordless universalism at the core of psytrance and its associated no-holds-barred gatherings struck an alluring chord among an exceptionally wide representation of the population and made for a synergetic fit with the country’s socio-cultural advancement into the 21st century (senor and singer 2009). figure 1. moses on acid: psytrance party, israel. photo: j. schmidt (2011). mesibot come in many sizes and social configurations and can happen anywhere, at any time, especially on weekends and holidays. overall, the majority of mesibot are produced by and for local “psytribes”—loosely affiliated groups of trancistim who periodically assemble at events organized by certain party crews. even as they attract a heterogeneous mix of participants from a broad range of age, gender, social, economic, political, ethnic and 41schmidt | full penetration linguistic backgrounds, in the main, mesibot constituents are young (between the ages of 20 and 45) secular jewish israelis with diverse attitudes towards organized religion and institutionalized ritual. although israeli psytribes seem reasonably heterogeneous, for the most part they are composed of jewish youth and do not include israeli arabs (nearly 20% of the overall israeli population), as these two societies barely intermingle on an economic or civic level, much less a social or leisure one. preliminary inquiries, however, reveal that electronic dance music is likewise popular among certain israeli arab communities. indeed, given the proximity in which israeli jews and arabs live, it seems plausible that local arab youth are likewise implicated in the fervor of the israeli trance nation. yet, additional research is necessary in order to determine how and for what purpose israeli arabs are utilizing (p)edmc. in any case, the paradoxical nature of israeli pedmc “heterogeneity” is discussed in greater detail in the next section. mesibot are usually unlicensed and staged illegally, as organizers generally fail to comply with the complicated and expensive official registration process required for holding large public events in israel. as such, psytribes purposefully skirt mainstream advertising channels and instead promote their parties via private email lists and members-only web-based social networks. these groups—some have been operating for over a decade and include several thousand members—normally throw invitation only all night dance events in secluded rural settings, such as isolated desert river-beds, beaches, forests, private villas and hotel resorts. when staging mesibot, trancistim commonly disregard a number of basic civic laws, such as laws pertaining to the use of illegal drugs or those forbidding unauthorized assembly on public land. on the other hand, they continue to honor and hold in high regard certain aspects of customary national/israeli conduct which seem to bear more relevance to the daily lives of secular trancistim than the mores stemming from religious/jewish based sources. for instance, it would be unthinkable to hold a party on memorial or holocaust commemoration day, but entirely possible to stage a party on yom kippur—the annual jewish day of atonement and the holiest day of the year in the jewish-hebrew calendar—a day traditionally set aside for repentance, achieved through fasting and intense prayer sessions held during the day in synagogues throughout the country. while many secular israelis do not attend synagogue services, yom kippur is nonetheless deemed a day of religious awe and public behavior is generally subdued, discontinued or altogether banned. mesibot staged on yom kippur are thus held out of practicality because police vigilance is low and it is easier for illegal parties to go undetected. at the same time, these parties are also ideologically motivated since they blatantly defy state supported institutionalized religion, which continually inconveniences xilonim—clearly apparent on yom kippur when, by law, all forms of public entertainment are halted and it is prohibited to drive motorized vehicles on public roads. accordingly, mesibot attendance paradoxically combines transgressive behavior with continued adherence to conventional behavioral norms. although more mesibot take place in the warm summer rather than during the cold winter, israeli pedmc gatherings occur year round. beyond the weather, mesibot are also contingent dancecult 4(1)42 upon the erratic state of local geopolitics and the swiftness with which events in the volatile middle east unfurl. consequently, the heightening of political tensions—particularly after a terrorist attack, especially on a civilian target, or during military operations in the west bank or southern lebanon—will commonly cast a somber mood over the country, deeming the staging of celebratory leisure events such as mesibot inappropriate. parties are cancelled during these trying times since many trancistim are also soldiers or military reservists who are otherwise preoccupied during these tense moments—possibly knowing (or knowing people who know) persons injured or dead from the violence. coined by ontological anarchist hakim bey (1991), the expression taz, short for temporary autonomous zone, has been wielded by a variety of edm theorists in their efforts to contextualize the psytrance party environment (e.g., st john 2001, 2004, 2010). akin to turner’s “liminality” (1969), bakhtin’s “carnivalesque” (1941/84) and goffman’s “back spaces” (1963), the behavioral codes and social etiquette within a pedmc taz are unique to their immediate context. this is evident in the manner in which trancistim utilize mesibot to disengage from their daily lives. since mesibot create their own unique reality, talk of politics, money, gossip and scandal or, in fact, all subjects beyond the immediate situational setting, issues and concerns pertaining to life outside the party framework are avoided. this rule is predominantly observed with regard to conversations on the subject of unending regional tensions and the fraught condition of israeli homeland security known as ha’matzav (literally, ‘the situation’). both are taboo to mention within the mesibot taz. yet pressure from this trying and unrelenting state of affairs is omnipresent and difficult to avoid. occasionally it even ruptures the self-imposed pedmc bubble and mesibot can become terrorist targets in themselves. in july 2010, for example, a pedmc enthused couple decided to celebrate their wedding by throwing a non-licensed trance party on zikim beach, which is near the port city of ashkelon on the mediterranean seaside. being israel’s most southwestern public beach, zikim is only a few kilometers away from the gaza strip, which is fairly visible from its shores. although they only invited their closest friends and intended to keep the party a secret, somehow the local police got wind of the event and decided to pay a visit. arriving in plain clothes in a feeble attempt to go undetected, the party’s quick-thinking dj promptly recognized the lawmen and lowering the volume of the music he matter-of-factly announced to the dancing crowd: “good people, the police are here. whoever has anything on them [drugs], throw it away or hide it in the sand”. his warning, however, arrived too late to help the unfortunate groom who was caught with a small amount of hashish in his possession. taken to the local precinct and his offense written up, the affronted groom was later discharged and immediately returned to the party that, despite the interruption, persisted until well after sunrise. the newlyweds’ tale, however, did not end there. while relaxing on the beach later that afternoon, the partying wedding group was startled by something even more alarming than a surprise visit from local law enforcement agents: a barrage of kasam rockets hailed down on the beach near where they lay sunbathing, fired by hamas militants from abandoned orchards lining the not-too-distant border between israel and gaza. luckily these rockets 43schmidt | full penetration missed their mark and no one was injured (suissa 2010). this providential outcome was unfortunately not the case in june 2001 when a palestinian suicide bomber attacked the dolphinarium, a crowded (mostly with young russian-israelis) tel-aviv dance club, killing 21 people and injuring an additional 120 party goers. the incident was so horrific that it did much to integrate and lend legitimacy to israel’s half a million russian citizens who emigrated en-masse to israel in the early 1990s from countries in the former soviet union and, prior to the dolphanarium attack, were still considered fresh immigrants with large portions of the public questioning the authenticity of some of these newcomers’ claims to their jewish heritage. oddly enough, the high number of casualties among these newcomers—who today regularly serve in the army and are highly active within the country’s universities and high-tech industries—became an unlikely catalyst for their assimilation into israeli society. with incidents like these being a constant threat in present-day israel, it is entirely understandable why so many young people are plugging into the pedmc enterprise with expectations of being transported to realities beyond their contentious life conditions. this also explains why mesibot are seldom staged in response to pressing political or social issues, with rave against the occupation (2002) and rave for legalization [of marijuana] (2003) being two notable exceptions. the “occupation” in this case refers to the continued control/settlement of judea and samaria (also known as the west bank) by the israeli military/government. filmmaker noam kaplan’s blue white collar criminal (2004) is a clever israeli mockumentary that uses the rave against the occupation protest party, held in the courtyard of the tel-aviv museum of art in the summer of 2001, to comment on the absurdity that often taints israeli-arab relations. since trancistim tend to be apolitical, while at parties they concentrate on the immediate enjoyment derived from the event and, in accordance with mesibot etiquette, keep their daily affairs separate from the levity of the party environment. trancistim/mesibot: paradox among secular israeli youth inspired by their ancestral comrades-in-arms, the beats and hippies of the 1950s and 1960s, the most consistent philosophy prevalent among many global psytrancers is condensed into the acronym plur (peace, love, unity and respect), a mindset which serves as the (un) official guide for customary pedmc conduct. the local version of this behavioral code is summarized on the website isratrance.com, which promotes itself as “the ultimate source on israeli trance”, and whose guidelines address potential mesibot hindrances by requesting that “no politics. no violence. no disrespect” enters the party zone. both in israel and abroad, there appears to be an implicit endorsement of the plur standard and trancistim seem to recognize that acceptable conduct at mesibot entails a culturally liberal and socially tolerant attitude towards others—which, in fact, is the antithesis of middle-eastern socio-politics in general and of israeli public behavior in particular. although it would be inaccurate to claim that all participants at mesibot fully adhere to these lofty principles on either an idealistic or http://www.isratrance.com dancecult 4(1)44 spiritual level, many are aware of this acronym and, when questioned, support the notion that pedmc gatherings aim to create a non-threatening pluralistic environment. with that said, closer scrutiny of israeli trance culture exposes a profound disparity between its egalitarian self-image and the actual behavior of trancistim. the following segment, therefore, discusses the inconsistencies in trancistim conduct by suggesting how dichotomic idiosyncrasies found within israel pedmc may be grouped into a series of contradictory paradoxes. trancistim behavior contains multiple paradoxes and contradictions. categorized in a range of dichotomous pairs and fused through conceptual opposition, they are readily located in trancistim attitudes and conduct. from a close reading, it appears that many of trancistim behavioral contradictions stem from issues, concerns and dilemmas facing post-millennial israel. in other words, the contrasts at the base of israeli pedmc are actually expressions of conflicting attitudes and contradictory value systems located within broader israeli socio-cultural norms. this ironic pattern contains an additional degree of complexity since trancistim tend to relate to their behavior at mesibot as purposefully nonconventional and since, by and large, many members of the israeli public are skeptical of pedmc activities (meadan 2001). some of the key israeli pedmc dichotomies are insider/outsider, global/local, and secular/ traditional. since the underlying motivation for these oppositional categories are dynamic, interconnected and multilayered, these examples do not constitute an exhaustive list, but rather suggest the principal channels through which paradox presents itself within secular israeli psytrance culture. thus, the remainder of this section outlines some of the ways in which these antonymous pairs paradoxically manifest within trancistim attitudes and practices. insider/outsider the insider/outsider dichotomy is a fundamental paradox in israeli pedmc and regularly surfaces in trancistim performance. because mesibot attendance is by invitation only and parties are purposefully hard to locate, organizers normally manage to keep them a secret. thus, a division exists between those who are informed of where and when mesibot will happen and those who don’t, won’t, or can’t know. moreover, in their promotional emails, many psytribes instruct members to keep prior knowledge of mesibot to themselves as a precaution against attracting undesirable elements. although they never clearly state who these undesirable individuals are, and even though trancistim usually don’t openly discuss this issue, there seems to be a shared recognition of their identity and collaborated acknowledgment of why these so-called undesirables are so unwelcome. during conversations, trancistim allude to the notion that these people are generally not connected to pedmc on an ostensibly idealistic or spiritual level and instead utilize mesibot for more hedonistic purposes or attend parties to hunt for sexual partners. for this reason, to guarantee their patrons a top notch setting similar to exclusive nightclubs—one that is both convivial and cohesive—mesibot organizers place bouncers, known to transistim as selectorim, at the entrance of parties with the task of deterring 45schmidt | full penetration interlopers from intruding upon the event and spoiling its mood. sometimes undesirables are referred to as arsim (punks) or shimonim, which makes them distinguishable from anashim yafim (nice/beautiful people). arse is an arabic word that literally means “pimp” and in israeli slang implies “a thug”; and shimon is a name trancistim stereotypically use to identify eidot-hamizrax, that is, jews of north african or middle eastern descent. in contrast, anashim yafim refers to a typical, well behaved, bourgeois trancist of european/ashkenazi descent. within the psytrance context, the terms shimonim and arsim designate people whose conduct does not conform to conventional pedmc modes of behavior and make spectacles of themselves on the dance floor by fighting, damaging property or talking rudely to women, for example. figure 2. anashim exuti’im. photo: j. schmidt (2011). while not everyone who misbehaves at mesibot is from the eidot-hamizrax, shimonim by definition belong to this ethnic category. thus even if someone causing trouble at a pedmc event is ashkenazi, they will be called a shimon or arse and thereby affiliated with the eidot-hamizrax. ironically, instead of using the term yoramim, the proper slang equivalent of shimonim for middle-class ashkenazim, trancistim prefer to call themselves anashim yafim or anashim exuti’im (quality people). this seems to imply that ashkenazim dancecult 4(1)46 are the group responsible for ranking israeli pedmc’s subcategories and that the pejorative classifications, cultural prejudices and social elitism which exists within mainstream israel are, in fact, unexpectedly reconstructed within this bizarre environment (almog 2000). it is not surprising, therefore, that the anashim yafim/yoram/ashkenazi paradigm stands counter to the arse/shimon/eidot-hamizrax prototype, or that trancistim often claim that part of what contributes to the success of a party is the predominance of anashim exuti’im and the noted absence of shimonim. consequently, despite trancistim rhetorical adherence to plur-driven egalitarianism, it appears that, paradoxically, the social structure at mesibot duplicates—rather than confronts or dismisses—many of the deep-seated discriminatory divisions found in the everyday lives of trancistim. global/local a number of the features from the insider/outsider paradox merge with the global/local dichotomy. for example, although hebrew is the native language of jewish israel, the majority of trancistim digital communication, much of the slang trancistim use in their verbal discourse and most of the samples in israeli trance music is in english. in general, foreign language use among trancistim, along with the fact that mesibot are furtive events held secretly in secluded locations, leads to a purposeful separation between pedmc and conventional society. more specifically, the use of a foreign language, especially english—a language or lingua franca associated with academic, international financial and commercial institutions—appears to be a way for trancistim to distinguish themselves from both nontrancistim and shimonim and therefore is both in opposition and contradictory to the tenet of “unity” allegedly aspired for at pedmc gatherings. since english is the language of advertisement minded capitalism, it also represents international business culture and acts as an indicator for those who attend mesibot that they are “globalized israelis” (regev and seroussi 2004: 19). the exclusivity entailed in trancistim use of english connects israeli pedmc with other worldwide scenes and enables trancistim to classify themselves as israelis who construct their identities “as a local extension of contemporary world culture” (regev and seroussi 2004: 19). additionally, the specific use of english enables a form of escapism by helping trancistim legitimize their multiple identities as local israelis and as worldwide pedmc adherents. similarly, israeli sociologist uri ram (2000: 225–6) points out that, “in many cases, if not all, store names [in large retail shopping malls in israel] appear in english”. akin to trancistim employment of english, ram relates to the use of foreign languages within the israeli market place by noting how israeli shopping malls “offer sterile zones, isolated from the humid and belligerent middle eastern environment. they create an illusion of being ‘here’ and feeling ‘there’—as any proper globalist simulation should” (ram 2000: 226). it should be made clear that not only do psytrance gatherings separate trancistim both physically and mentally from their customary social settings, but mesibot in general, and the intense energy derived from the collective hallucinatory experience in particular, offer 47schmidt | full penetration participants the impression that what takes place inside these “other worlds” is qualitatively different from the goings-on within their ordinary everyday domains. hence, even if the parties ironically replicate rather than alleviate societal discord, they nonetheless appear to offer opportunities wherein change can occur, at least superficially. accordingly, a local pedmc adage advises trancistim (in english, of course) to trust in trance as a means for coping with their assumed disenchantment with life in tension-filled israel. figure 3. mesiba in the negev desert. photo: j. schmidt (2011). the phrase “trust in trance” first emerged as the title of a groundbreaking 1994 israeli psytrance compilation and was subsequently the name of a local record label. trust in trance records released a number of key israeli trance albums, most notably of the group astral projection, whose best-selling albums dancing galaxy (1997) and another world (1999) contain track titles such as “flying into a star”, “cosmic ascension”, “life on mars”, “still on mars”, “searching for ufos” and “visions of nasca”, an ancient incan civilization, which correspond with many of the concepts underlying the global vs. local dichotomy. thus, in this instance a global subculture (pedmc) provides remedial support within a local setting (mesibot) by contributing to the reputed notion among trancistim that “out there” (overseas/the foreign/the transnational) is qualitatively better than “in here” dancecult 4(1)48 (israel/the established/the local). yet, ultimately, even as trancistim escape from their daily lives into presumably more agreeable—far-off and momentarily idyllic—circumstances, paradoxically, their attitudes and practices replicate, rather than improve or challenge, the reality they are attempting to evade. secular/traditional another fundamental dichotomy, the tension between secular and traditional values, emerges in the way trancistim combine their secular (leisure) and traditional (family) cultural spheres. mesibot are mostly held on the (holy) sabbath (shabbat in hebrew) or in tandem with annual jewish or state holidays, something that endows them with an air of quasi-sanctity. in much the same manner that shabbat functions as a process of renewal for orthodox jews, mesibot enable trancistim to remedially disconnect from their quotidian life circumstances. mesibot are therefore viewed as an extension of these celebrations and trancistim often dress up for parties and decorate the party venues with a mixture of neotraditional jewish/zionist holiday motifs such as incandescent chanukah candelabras, dayglo fluorescent stars of david for israel independence day, multicolored sheaths of wheat signifying shavuot/the festival of weeks, and various clichéd strands of new age/ neopagan or far eastern iconography like indian oms, celtic inspired symbols, firebreathing dragons and chinese ideograms. both for xiloni and traditionally observant jewish families, in israel friday night/shabbat and holiday dinners are considered important and even obligatory rituals. since mesibot often take place on the heels of these meals, they typically trigger confrontation with what is sometimes perceived as one of the last bastions of traditional jewish mainstream sociality within contemporary israel. taking this conflict into account, party organizers normally schedule mesibot from midnight to midday and thereby accommodate the prior involvement of participants with these widely sanctioned nationwide family celebrations. in fact, these meals are such a deep-rooted cultural phenomenon that friends will often bring leftovers (a taste of shabbat) to the party sites and distribute them to the production staff, who may have missed dinner. or, prior to the beginning of a party, secular crew members may pause from their preparations to reenact this weekly ritual at the party venue by convening for a shabbat dinner, complete with sacramental blessings on the candles, wine and bread, in an impromptu eating space set up alongside the yet-unused dance floor. the secular/traditional dichotomy is paradoxical since even as trancistim replace traditionally sanctioned family dinners with alternative countercultural mesibot, their unorthodox performance remains affixed to mainstream behavioral norms. moreover, as psytrance gatherings are held outside the confines of conventional society, they are both a challenge to established rituals and an apparently tolerated alternative to fading traditions. in israel this tension is further complicated since these seemingly contradictory behavioral constructs—institutionalized ethno-religious observance and nonconformist hedonistic celebration—are actually directed towards apparently similar aims: both shabbat/jewish 49schmidt | full penetration holidays and mesibot afford their practitioners invaluable realms of relaxation, rejuvenation and communion apart from their frequently hectic quotidian life circumstances. this dialectic assumes an additional level of intricacy, since one of the by-products of the move from collectivity to individuality in post-zionist israel is a growing detachment from religious values. many secular israelis—including most trancistim—have an ambiguous relationship with organized religion and take issue with the way it operates in israel. this is because they both define and relate to religious practice as part of israeli culture, and because jewish tradition and religious customs are cumbersomely intertwined with state politics and policy (cohen and susser 2000). figure 4. contemporary israeli traditionalists. photo: j. schmidt (2011). the clash between secular and traditional value systems, however, is not an exclusively pedmc phenomenon. for instance, aphek and tobin (1989) note in their study of fortune telling in israel that many clients of fortune tellers seek them out in addition to, or as a replacement for, traditional spiritual and religious organizations. this pattern appears indicative of a broader cultural transformation occurring more generally within israel, which is “today the site of an ongoing and at times violent competition over ‘tradition,’ that is, a set of meaningful and worthwhile guidelines for people’s lives” (paine 1989: 123). it likewise dancecult 4(1)50 appears analogous to simon reynolds’ claim that youth are turning “to rave culture for the meaning and sense of belonging they once derived from religion” (1998: 288). likewise, it supports heelas and woodhead’s (2005) observation that “outer directed religion” is being replaced by “inner directed spirituality” which has led to a “dual process of secularization with regard to religious observance and sacralization with regard to everyday life” (18).1 with secular israeli pedmc clearly infused with paradox, the second half of the article broadens the discussion of trance culture in israel by focusing on a separate but parallel edmc-related youth activity—trance parties for religious israelis. the reasons why young religious israelis are drawn to trance-dance gatherings are first discussed with regard to certain socio-cultural processes impacting upon their communities. afterwards, there is a description of edmc parties for religious israelis that compares and contrasts them with trance parties for secular israelis by relating to the uniquely paradoxical functions these disparate events fulfill for their respective adherents. dosistim and dosibot: edmc amid orthodox israeli youth as illustrated above, the central paradox among trancistim is that, despite appearances to the contrary, their unconventional behavior, attitudes and mannerisms actually reproduce many of the core values and characteristic practices of mainstream xiloni israel. in an equivalent manner, the following explains how the seemingly errant conduct-cumparadoxical behavior demonstrated by religious israelis who attend edmc parties is actually a stop-gap measure primarily intended to facilitate religious directives pertaining to marriage and pre-nuptial inter-gender relationships. trance-dance events for religious israelis (dati, dati’im in plural) have been taking place for roughly a decade and are known to their patrons as dosibot. this term blends dos, which is contemporary hebrew slang for “orthodox jew”, and the feminine plural suffix bot, as in mesibot. “dos” is a projection of the word dat, the hebrew word for religion, which some ashkenazi jews pronounce with a vowel that sounds like /o/ and they spirantize the “t” which sounds like an “s” as in das or dos. among secular israelis, dos is often used as an all-inclusive and somewhat derogatory way of referring to dati’im, that is, orthodox or oldfashioned jews, while its usage among dati’im is one of fondness and intimacy. this usage is comparable with the manner which other social groups entitle themselves to affectionately address members in ways that would otherwise be considered offensive if done by individuals outside their group (for example “nigger”, “faggot”, “spic”, “shlep”, “chink”). in israel, to be dati or religious—that is, theologically, but also politically and culturally aligned with orthodox jewry—largely refers to an individual’s concern for and fulfillment of institutionalized halaxa ( jewish religious law) as overseen by the israeli chief rabbinate. dati’im adhere to a traditionally based system of standardized orthodox observance and are also referred to as dati’im leumi’im (national religious; dati leumi in singular)—the suffix leumi (or, national) links their formalized religious orthodoxy with their neo-nationalist politics. in fact, a staunch conviction in the continued significance of the historical jewish 51schmidt | full penetration narrative is embedded within the dati identity and motivates a great deal of this sector’s sociopolitical principles, practices and ideologies. thus, dati’im leumi’im are also labeled t’ziyonim dati’im (religious zionists), a designation that further illustrates the vital nationalist/ zionist component implicit in their theologically directed doctrines and lifestyle. recently, social commentators are discussing how dati communities are currently undergoing a “relationship crisis” (mashber zugiyut) wrought in part by the fact that orthodox youth are basically raised in mono-gender environments and therefore seldom receive opportunities to fraternize with members of the opposite sex (engelberg 2009). among orthodox communities, public displays of affection between the sexes are socially improper and deemed blatantly immoral; hence, dati’im rarely express overtly seductive or sexually aggressive behavior. in order to preserve this state of affairs, orthodox youth are segregated into mono-gendered educational environments via primary schools, youth movements, torah academies, and military and national service, and throughout their young-adult lives are discouraged from developing “inappropriate” or sexually charged thoughts and habits. however, beyond the completion of their education and army/service track—when dati’im are in their early twenties—the institutionalized dati mechanism breaks down and fails to offer its younger generations workable strategies for navigating the transition between singlehood and matrimony. young dati’im find this period confusing since, for the first time in their lives, they are without the explicit supervision, guidance and support of their community-centered orthodox frameworks. moreover, this life phase inevitably occurs within non-religious socio-cultural contexts—for example at universities, in various employment scenarios, in zones of consumerism, leisure and entertainment—whereupon singlehood is a customary social category and dati’im must confront a multitude of formidable issues under what are frequently alienating circumstances. at the same time, the first mitzvah (or, divine commandment; mitzvot in plural) listed in the torah is to “be fruitful and multiply,” a celestial call for human procreation that implicitly entails marrying at a young age, which according to orthodox conventions means no later than thirty. this perceived deadline heightens the anxieties of unwed dati’im, who feel compelled to conform to this expectation but are obliged to do so within the context of their mainstream israeli (globally impacted, market driven, post-traditionalist) daily surroundings. the resulting dissonance—left largely unaddressed by dati educators and the religious establishment—has plunged young dati’im, particularly females, into a socio-cultural void whereupon they are without sufficient guidelines and/or first-hand experience of how to initiate or enact mating rituals which will correspond to halaxa while being compatible with their late-modern, secular-impacted everyday lives. to resolve this awkward condition, many young dati’im are literally, if somewhat cautiously, taking matters into their own hands by efficiently enlisting external cultural styles and systems—such as dosibot and other western-modeled unorthodox late-night leisure activities—in an effort to fulfill their anticipated community-specific religious duties. dancecult 4(1)52 dosistim—my term for dati’im who attend trance-dance parties (dosist in singular)—are orthodox youth whose communal identities are largely informed by their commitment to a religious, rather than a secular, value system and lifestyle. paradigmatically, dosistim are typical dati’im both in terms of their level of religious observance as well as their general mid-income socio-economic standing. since their lives largely revolve around the yearly cycles of religious observance, dosistim are neither aware of, interested in, nor involved with pedmc tenets for which they have no spiritual, intellectual or social need. moreover, as their ideology-cum-behavior is fashioned from a dual sense of obligation to fulfill their religious and civic responsibilities, dati’im lead jam-packed daily routines. in consequence, they lack the time and incentive to add further obligations and/or additional schemes of belief to their already full schedules. dosistim disregard of pedmc philosophies, principles and practices matches this sector’s comparatively hesitant integration of various other globalized mechanisms into their faith-based routines and rituals. conversely, this pattern compares and contrasts with the ways in which trancistim appropriation of pedmc dogma is an extension of a more general secular-israeli embracement of global culture. while my intention is not to paint a monolithic portrait of the perennially upright and sincere dosist, frequently this seems to be the situation; dati’im are earnest in their aims and rarely attend dosibot for longer than it takes them to find an appropriate match. nevertheless, due to a combination of factors beyond the scope of this article, some dati’im —particularly those who flirt with leaving the dati leumi fold—appear to enjoy the quasiautonomy that this phase offers them and, in result, may remain in the marriage market for extended periods. yet, due to the all-encompassing nature of their connection to their communities, most of these lingerers transition forward and, either through dosibot or by some other means, eventually proceed onward with their anticipated life course (marriage/ children/family). dosibot vs. mesibot: paradox in a parallel israeli edmc setting even as dosistim and trancistim similarly engage edmc in a response to external conditions, their rendering is neither uniform nor entirely analogous. for trancistim pedmc provides a departure from the tension of their daily lives, while dosistim employ edmc as a means for countering their relationship crises. in order to better understand the motives behind these divergent uses, they need be scrutinized with regard to the specific socio-cultural circumstances under which they occur. the following ethnographic-based review of dosibot focuses on the common and contrastive features of dosibot/dosistim versus mesibot/trancistim. dosibot mostly occur in metropolitan areas in proximity to where the majority of dosistim live, work and study. dosibot are often staged in dati-oriented public spaces such as neighborhood civic centers, synagogue reception halls and, lately, kosher pubs. a relatively recent phenomenon, kosher pubs primarily cater to dati youth and operate much like ordinary secular pubs by offering patrons music, food, alcohol and a favorable environment 53schmidt | full penetration in which to congregate. since they ordinarily cater to dati customers, these establishments serve certified kosher food and drink at fair prices and may offer separate seating for men and women. marketed as restaurants yet de-facto functioning within a libidinous late-night leisure culture context, this duplicity goes overlooked in much the same manner that dati leadership abides by a “see no evil, hear no evil” policy in their (in)active response to dosibot. operating on the fringes of the orthodox establishment, kosher pubs provide a framework for semitolerated irregular dati youth activity and have thus become a favorite dosibot staging ground. as opposed to mesibot, dosibot are held with the proper permits intact. as such, they are openly advertised via fliers, posters, web-forums and word of mouth. since dosibot organizers promote their events to a very specific segment of the population, they try to appeal to as large a crowd as possible, an approach which runs counter to the selection process implemented by the gatekeepers/organizers of most mesibot. while attendance varies from party to party, dosibot attract, on average, several hundred participants per event. due to the dynamic nature of this subculture, it is tough to accurately gauge exactly how many dati’im attend dosibot on a regular basis; however, an assessment of the key dosibot associated web forums suggests that their numbers are well into the thousands and that this phenomenon is growing. at the same time, because these events are a means to an end—finding a life-partner— dati’im tend to grow disinterested in dosibot if they realize their objective or if they repeatedly fail in their efforts. while mesibot essentially revolve around music and dance, dosibot feature a selection of other entertainment segments prior to the straightforward dj-dance part of the evening. for instance, dosibot normally begin with a short lecture pertaining to the contemporary socio-historical-theological significance of the specific holiday being celebrated. this often leads into a collective toast (l’chaim!) and various entertainers— magicians, stand-up comedians, live bands/song leaders—may perform on a main stage. normally, dosibot are hosted by an emcee or a team of emcees who are generally the (orthodox) male and/or female organizers of the party. assuming the role of host, they make announcements, joke with the crowd and introduce the evening’s various segments. the music, which is loud but not overstated, also contributes to a congenial ambiance by permitting verbal intercourse to occur among participants. thus, dosibot are replete with verbal communication and loquacious dosistim, in contrast to wordless mesibot and reticent trancistim. to be sure, at secular pedmc events the organizers remain in the background and announcements or introductions are practically non-existent. moreover, the deafening volume of the music together with the potentially numbing effects of certain psychoactive drugs can sometimes make even the most basic conversation at mesibot difficult. as the djs’ sets of nonstop music flow into one another, they effectively eliminate all breaks—silent, music-less moments—during which participants might potentially socialize verbally which, on the contrary, is the very point of dosibot. similar to trancistim, dosistim hail from a mixture of ashkenazi and eidot ha’mizrax backgrounds. yet, while trancistim come from a variety of socio-economic sectors and live in both urban and rural areas in a range of domestic circumstances, typically, dosistim are single, dancecult 4(1)54 middle-class (sub)urbanites living with or near their parents. dosibot appear to attract this kind of homogeneous crowd since its uniformity reflects the primary motivation dati’im have for attending these gatherings. this demographic consistency affords participants a secure and familiar setting for pursuing their marriage goals. this demographic consistency, at least on the surface, is reversed at mesibot, whereupon the intended otherworldliness of these events implicitly evokes an alluring sense of danger and encourages participants’ atypical behavior. akin to mesibot, dosibot generally coincide with jewish/state holidays. yet, unlike mesibot, dosibot are typically held on thursday or saturday nights and never on friday nights, which is the beginning of the jewish day of rest (the holy sabbath) and a time when orthodox jews refrain from traveling, working and consumerism. dosibot last for approximately six hours (20:30–02:00), or occasionally a bit longer, but never all night and into the early afternoon as is expected at mesibot. contrary to mesibot, where trancistim are of all ages, dosistim are mainly in their twenties and early thirties. whereas mesibot normally attract more men than women, dosibot comprise a higher female-to-male ratio (roughly 60/40). this is likely due to the fact that single dati females feel the pressure from the relationship crisis more acutely than their male counterparts. unlike their westernized secular female counterparts, single dati women—especially those who have reached their thirties—are culturally limited both on a social/stigmatic and a religious/spiritual level, since non-married females are unable to perform a number of crucial mitzvot (in particular, those pertaining to menstruation rites and candle lighting rituals). while by the letter of the law women may perform these ceremonies without being married, this goes against the spirit of the law and is therefore not the accepted practice. traditionally, jewish women are recognized as fully-grown only after they have attained a husband and household. thus, regardless of the independent lives many single dati females may or may not lead while transitioning through this stage, their families and communities continue to regard them as a part of their father’s house until they are married. consequently, women are more desperate than men to wed, since, as sociologist hagit bartuv (2004) writes: “within dati society, a woman who is not connected to a family unit, disrupts the social order, the sexual order and the religious order and is thus perceived as a threat to social harmony”(29; trans. mine). shmirat einayim (guarding one’s eyes) is an elementary orthodox edict which forbids men from staring at women and, ideally, dati’im should try and limit their interactions with the opposite sex lest these lead to potentially compromising scenarios. moreover, dati’im are instructed to avoid situations that might cause them to disobey the laws of n’giah (touching, that is, any physical contact with members of the opposite sex) and thus young men and women are generally discouraged from congregating together. in accordance with these rules and following a common practice at orthodox synagogues and other religious public events (for example, weddings, bar-mitzvas, circumcision rites), dosibot routinely 55schmidt | full penetration provide men and women with separate areas of assembly. yet, despite these measures, the gender divisions at dosibot are frequently ignored and dosistim mix openly, if somewhat diffidently, in all areas of the party. dosibot elicit a far more sociable ambiance than mesibot in the sense that they feature a greater degree of interpersonal communication both among the participants themselves and between the participants and the organizers. one explanation for this is that dosibot are held in enclosed settings, while mesibot are held outdoors. hence, dosistim assemble in one concentrated area, whereas trancistim haphazardly camp with their close friends at various points on the land surrounding the dance floor and, therefore, have less reason or opportunity to make new acquaintances. moreover, if and when they meet on the dance floor, non-verbal trancistim are generally quite high and can be insular and self-absorbed to the point wherein they may even avoid making eye contact with fellow dancers. dati’im typically arrive at dosibot in mono-gendered clusters and strategically use their companions in attempts to meet members of the opposite sex. since dosistim are unaware of (secular) trance party protocol, they may disregard the party’s music and dancing segments— the fundamental elements of mesibot—and instead spend the evening engrossed in animated small talk with friends and newly found acquaintances. flirtatious banter of this sort seldom occurs at mesibot where trancistim may converse with one another, although rarely with so much persistence or with such pragmatically suggestive and/or coquettish undertones. moreover, these conversations primarily occur over food and drinks—a standard feature of dosibot but one that is oftentimes sidelined at mesibot, as most trancistim consume drugs rather than nourishment and fraternize with their immediate circle of friends rather than engage with both familiar and unfamiliar potential life partners. throughout the evening, groups of dosistim withdraw to impromptu single-sex areas of the party, such as particular sets of tables or certain parts of the bar. this retreat, however, is not performed in order to conform to halaxic directives. rather, it is intended to allow dosistim, primarily females, an opportunity to take a breather from the night’s activities and compare notes on prospective matches. as opposed to the precise areas sanctioned off by the mexitza (partition between the sexes) in orthodox synagogues and other customary dati functions, these more spontaneous divisions largely serve a functional rather than a dutiful/religious purpose. being both rational minded as well as accustomed to segregated co-habitation, dosistim favor this method of fraternizing because it allows them to remain at ease in these unusual surroundings even as they continue to view and be viewed by potential suitors. this arrangement is a far cry from the concealed socializing perpetrated at mesibot where participants withdraw from the main event to obscured locations—vip areas, private tents, special bathroom stalls—in order to partake in drug-taking and other nefarious activities. the lighting at dosibot is consistently muted, lending them a romantic ambiance. this low lighting enables what might be described as shadow play wherein beneath the cover of near darkness dosistim cruise the parties searching l’hitxaber (to hook-up), which, within dancecult 4(1)56 the context of dosibot, implies meeting a potential marriage partner. indeed, softly lit dosibot are especially fitting for shy and sexually reserved dosistim since this allows them to pursue their less-than-orthodox activities without becoming inordinately self-conscious. at the same time, the shadowy atmosphere facilitates the observance of the marit ayin prescript (literally, within eyeshot)—an orthodox ordinance requiring dati’im to avoid exhibiting religiously questionable behavior in public for fear they could inadvertently mislead fellow jews to interpret their actions as halaxically permissible. even as dosistim rarely express feral conduct, dosibot possess a far more sexually charged atmosphere than mesibot and, at times, curiously resemble israel’s quasi-licentious (and non-pedmc affiliated) xiloni pick-up bars. growing in popularity and legitimacy in the past ten or so years, israeli pick-up bars are urban pubs with faint lighting, inexpensive alcohol and a randy atmosphere. the bars are set up with large serving areas surrounded by interlocking bar stools, which allow customers to easily encounter one another. generally operating throughout the night, these venues are notoriously considered by their xiloni patrons to be legitimate hunting grounds for casual and even sometimes onsite sexual encounters (taub 2009). one explanation for the similarity between these venues is that orthodox law explicitly forbids physical relations or any other activity leading to an “(in)voluntary discharge” prior to marriage. as dosistim endeavor to comply with this restriction, their search for prospective marriage partners inevitably leads to a buildup of sexual tension. as a result, and contrary to mesibot etiquette, they convey their sexuality via flirtatious conversation and suggestive dancing, ironically both expressing and repressing their urges simultaneously. oddly enough, dati’im resolve to remain within the bounds of the religious mores of their communities is what ultimately also prompts their sexually suggestive behavior at dosibot. the music at dosibot blends a combination of edmc genres and israeli pop tunes remixed with electronic beats. much of this music contains fragments of popular lyrics and/ or melodies; dosistim may recognize the songs and will often sing along as they dance. this conduct is contrary to mesibot, where djs play unreleased or unrecognized tracks and the music is virtually wordless. mesibot djs are specialists who stick to their particular genres— such as psy-prog, deep house, minimal techno or goa—and purposefully play fresh or hardto-find tracks in a continuing effort to satisfy their music-savvy fans. in contrast, dosibot djs apply a more free style to their music selection by mixing an easily digested hodge-podge of electrified dance tunes for their mostly non-musically versed audiences. as opposed to the wordless and frequently elitist atmosphere engendered by class conscious and taste-sensitive trancistim, at these non-pedmc related events, the dancers’ sense of fellowship is manifested not through drugs and/or a shared sense of privileged deviance, but rather via the audience’s collective recognition/appreciation of the lyrics/tunes of these well-known hebrew songs. since dati’im are only mildly concerned with the particulars of the music they dance to, in contrast to mesibot, dosibot rarely, if ever, feature famous djs or special music acts from abroad. thus, dosibot djs do not possess the same status and cult of personality affixed to many of their celebrated xiloni counterparts. moreover, performers at mesibot do not 57schmidt | full penetration figure 5. dosistim in action: landen pub, tel-aviv. photo: j. schmidt (2009). masquerade behind imaginary aliases or neologistic soubriquets, but instead prefer to be identified by their ordinary—and overtly jewish-israeli—names (for example, dj avi maimon, dj nir, dj roy fliner, dj kobi, dj menachem). this approach is typical of dati leumi aesthetic sensibilities, which are characterized by their matter-of-fact practicality, a straightforwardness that pervades this sector’s religious performance, consumption practices and leisure habits, and characterizes their overall sense of style and temperament (taub 2008). dosistim do not have one fixed manner of dancing and may separate into gendered clusters or dance in tandem with same-sex partners. unaccustomed to dancing to this type of music, when attending edm parties dosistim enthusiastically rock-out by performing steps borrowed from popular folk and traditional wedding-style line dances such as the hora and the dabke. these communal dance styles enable dosistim to remain less conspicuous, deter n’giah and permit unwieldy or shy participants to go undetected. in comparison, trancistim introverted manner of dancing is abstract and highly personalized and solo dancers hardly ever face one another or come into deliberate physical contact. dosistim attire could best be described as bar-mitzva chic, which translates into dati casual such as jeans and button down/polo shirts for men and dresses and blouses for women. traditionally and for reasons of modesty, the halaxa requires dati women to wear dresses rather than trousers. even so, female dosistim seem to make larger efforts at dressing up, frequently wearing colorful shanti, cotton garments of indian origin, which, due to their flowing and modest cut, neatly conform with dati dress codes. it is interesting to note that, while trancistim also dress in shanti clothing, theirs is typically purchased in the dancecult 4(1)58 countries where the garments were made and thereby act as an assertion of their subcultural identities by indicating to other trancistim that they are well-versed world travelers. in distinction, dosistim tend to shop locally and will often buy their shanti wear in stores that specifically cater to the needs and tastes of young dati’im. hence, they view this manner of dress as prudently compliant to halaxic restrictions rather than as favorably underground or fashionably cosmopolitan. in general, dosistim clothing is neither outlandish nor exceptional both by dati and xiloni standards and, to the degree that it exists, material investment among dati’im is predominantly directed towards embellishing the various mitzvot connected with the celebration of shabbat and other seasonal religious festivals—a virtuous act that is considered a mitzva in itself. additionally, lavish dati consumption is curtailed by the ethic of t’zniyut (humility, modesty), an orthodox ideal that stipulates that god-fearing jews should strive to be modest by leading chaste and self-effacing lives. the fliers used to advertise dosibot retain a narrow visual scope, appropriating their themes from the jewish-israeli holidays connected with the parties. consequently, they are unassuming, contain ordinary looking imagery and are bereft of the outlandish graphics and bizarre artwork typifying mesibot fliers. moreover, dosibot adverts are normally written in standard hebrew fonts, conveying an abundance of information and always clearly listing the proper names and personal phone numbers of the party organizers, something that lends them and the parties they advertise a valid approachability. like mesibot fliers, dosibot fliers are cleverly worded, yet invites to religious dance parties are comparatively self-explanatory and welcoming. this candid approach differs from the enigmatic nature of most mesibot communiqués—a subcultural art form in itself—whose fantastic illustrations and cryptic english phrasing are only comprehensible to initiated insiders and, even then, are shrouded in nuance and routinely fail to furnish exact details such as the precise location of an event or the actual names of its producers. despite their often racy conduct at parties, dosistim nomenclature is free of profanity, vulgarity or sexual allusion. moreover, as their interaction with the dosibot milieu is limited, unlike trancistim, dosistim have little concern for or inclination to develop specialized, context specific, coded vocabularies, and instead converse as they would under normal conditions. this linguistic sincerity is also responsible for the ordinary wording on dosibot fliers and their routine use of religious/jewish terminology. it also explains why, unlike most mesibot invites, the majority of dosibot fliers are in hebrew rather than in english. to be sure, dosistim language remains straightforwardly ‘dati’ because they believe that the functional aspects of dosibot (locating potential life mates) justifies their paradoxical means (behaving out-of-character) for achieving their goals, but need not necessarily impinge or otherwise alter other facets of their personalities, like styles of dress or language use, which remain largely unaffected by their abnormally suggestive conduct at dosibot. reflecting the candid and forthright sensibilities of its users, in contrast to trancistim, dosistim utilize hyper-practical “strategies of communication” (aphek and tobin 1989:46) to converse in an explicit manner—their wording is overt, direct and straightforward, their phrasing coherent 59schmidt | full penetration and their overall language use might best be termed sensible. in other words, the objective of the dosibot encounter—to attract an appropriate spouse— actually encourages dosistim to maintain, emphasize and even over-exaggerate the religious aspects of their linguistic discourse in order to impress their audience within this particular situational context. in consequence, dosistim language is replete with orthodox themes and religious terminology as a selling point to attract prospective partners. thus, while dosistim conduct is paradoxical, both their printed language and verbal discourse remain inordinately dati and, in contrast to trancistim ironic use of language, is purposefully conforming and free of paradox. figure 6. getting her number. photo: j. schmidt (2009). the vivid images projected by mesibot vjs and the psychedelic self-expressive art installations that adorn pedmc dance floors, contrast with the muted and rather sober visuals found at dosibot. thrifty-minded dosibot organizers cut their production costs by skimping on decorations and rarely are parties bedecked with anything more than the most elementary, store-bought decorations, such as balloons, streamers, confetti, tissue-paper garlands. additionally, since they are normally organized by inexperienced party crews and without commercial sponsorship, dosibot are devoid of bannered logos and promotional materials (upcoming party fliers, cds, stickers and t-shirts, for example) that are regularly on offer dancecult 4(1)60 at pedmc events. twenty-three year old netanel, who studies computer science at a technological college in beer-sheva and has staged a number of dosibot in southern israel, rationalized this approach by telling me: “decorations really aren’t necessary. they cost money, take time to put up and don’t really add that much [to the party atmosphere]”.2 despite their potential for generating revenue, dosibot are seldom staged in conjunction with financial backers because party producers view these events primarily as a community service rather than a moneymaking enterprise. thus, they hire relatively unknown and inexpensive djs, charge low or no entrance fees and sell drinks and snacks at affordable prices. in some ways, this situation is reminiscent of the initial commercial-less pedmc parties in the early 1990s that were held without ostentation and basically attempted to connect between what was then a limited number of intrepid trancistim (shor 2008). yet, the absence of mainstream commerciality at dosibot is not necessarily ideologically driven in the diy sense of the term. rather, since they are fairly novel, perhaps dosibot have yet to be capitalized to their full market potential. it is possible that prospective orthodox sponsors are staying away because they recognize that it would be inappropriate for their companies to publically endorse these problematic events. or perhaps this lack of commercialization can be linked to the principled disinclination of orthodox jews to overexploit material culture at the expense of their fellow man, as the torah forbids exploitative conduct and expressly prohibits the defrauding or deceiving of jews and non-jews alike (e.g., exodus 26:20; leviticus 25:14; deuteronomy 6:18). in any case, dogma-less dosibot seem far less consumer-oriented than ideal-laden mesibot. for instance, while gung-ho trancistim commonly spend a great deal of money at parties (on drugs, drinks, apparel, transportation and entrance fees), frugal-minded dosistim “religiously” avoid frivolous purchases, drink considerably less alcohol and practically never attend parties wearing flashy clothing or touting trendy accessories. additionally, psychedelics and other illegal and generally expensive mind/body stimulants are neither sold nor normally used at dosibot. in contrast, drugs are quite central to mesibot culture, both fueling their micro-economies and perpetuating their spiritual aura by producing a collective hallucinatory experience. hence, in spite of a passing resemblance to utopian notions of pedmc self-reliance, dosibot grassroots can be attributed to dosistim characteristically prudent, no-frills, aesthetic tendencies—a common dati character trait and one that instills religious dance parties with their distinctive mood and flavor. in short, although few dati’im participate in dosibot while still actively enrolled in torah seminaries or other jewish study programs, many are graduates of these institutions and therefore even if they attend dosibot, they continue to conduct their lives in accordance with the ideals and customs of religious orthodoxy. hence, the manifestly secular activities related to dosibot (mixed dancing, suggestive flirting and risqué conduct) are at odds with the virtuous behavioral standards and restrained social norms upon which dati’im were reared. yet, unlike xilonim, dati’im attend dosibot for a very specific purpose and are therefore uninterested in pedmc as a cultural form. for this reason, their consumption of edm is short-lived and devoid of ideological undercurrents, declarative rhetoric and/ 61schmidt | full penetration or a sense of belonging to an alternative community. this also explains why dosistim do not take (illicit) drugs but instead, when they choose to use stimulants, consume caffeinated energy drinks and alcohol, mainly beer and arak, an inexpensive local liquor made from anise. nonetheless, as they occur beyond the confines of their customary dati habitus, ultimately dosistim conduct—characterized by its immoderate gaiety and sexually charged connotations—is wholly inconsistent with their orthodox upbringings and, despite their reasonably valid intentions, their behavior at dosibot is blatantly paradoxical. trance-zion: israel as an edmc inundated nation overall, the differences between mesibot and dosibot reflect the varied uses that these two edm scenes serve for their particular adherents. while mesibot provide globally enamored xilonim with a method for momentarily eluding their intense daily realities, dosibot fulfill a clearly defined socio-pragmatic function for unsettled dati’im by furnishing them with a viable forum for procuring suitable (orthodox) marriage partners. unlike secular trancistim whose subcultural identities are constructed from an emphatic and often spiritual association to pedmc, religious dosistim have an ongoing and fulfilling relationship with judaism and therefore view dosibot more as a means-to-an-end rather than as an ideological, philosophical or spiritual pursuit. it should be made clear that the pressure and stress caused by the contentious israeli/ middle-eastern political arena—effectively the underlying factor responsible for the tremendous popularity of edmc in israel—equally affects both xilonim and dati’im. yet, as opposed to xilonim, dati’im perceive this condition in an affirmative manner since they consider this struggle as a harbinger for the preordained and fast arriving “messianic moment”. fortified with ideology and faith, in contrast to many xilonim who have appropriated westernized thought and culture in addition to and/or as a replacement for zionist agendas that are regarded as outmoded and obsolete, dati’im are more upbeat in their interpretation of local current events, viewing their severity as part of the divine path the jewish nation must follow to achieve its appointed objective. in conclusion, beyond the roles edmc plays for xilonim and dati’im, further studies can investigate the uses of trance among israel’s many other “traditional versus secular” communities. besides for dati’im leumi’im, some of the traditionalized israeli social groups who consume trance include the ultra-orthodox and the bedouin. from my brief involvement, bedouin youth have their own versions of clandestine mesibot though it is yet unclear what motivates them and what functions they fulfill for their respective communities. likewise, a novel phenomenon (experienced first-hand) among the ultraorthodox communities is the staging of secreted licentious co-ed dance parties. curiously geared towards young married couples, these unlikely pedmc affiliates seem representative of a budding and scantly researched deviant xaredi middle-class. on a larger scale, the russian immigrant communities hold edm-centered parties that are known as rusibot. these events are imbued with russian inspired cultural sensibilities, dancecult 4(1)62 mannerisms and behavioral codes and generally feature bands, djs, alcohol and styles of dress imported by emigrants to israel from the former soviet union. initial research suggests that rusibot are likewise inundated with paradox as participants—who hail from the gamut of cultures that once made up the soviet union and arrived in israel in the early 1990s as youngsters—(re)create this russified environment in order to celebrate an imagined shared heritage, that is, a russia which they never knew and most likely no longer exists. in another instance, edmc is extremely popular among israel’s vibrant and outspoken lgbt (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) communities and has been instrumental in helping to soften the stigma attached to their sexual orientation. notably evident is the case of singer dana international—an internationally celebrated transsexual who represented israel and won the 1998 eurovision song contest by singing the trance-fused pop hit “diva”—in the past decade and a half edmc provided an effective mechanism via which the israeli lgbt dance scene attained worldwide repute and, in turn, wider acceptance within mainstream israel. an examination of the reasons and means by which edmc is being incorporated into these diverse communities can uncover facets of israeli society that may have been previously overlooked and/or untouched by cultural researchers. moreover, a contrastive analysis of how similar global-based alternative/atypical social configurations are interacting with established israeli cultural tropes will likely help clarify the manner in which this country is contending with its current state of socio-economic-ideological transformation and the roles and functions which popular music and culture are assuming within this dynamic. the present article, therefore, constitutes a humble beginning in the mapping of multifarious local edmc scenes and the numerous—undoubtedly paradoxical—ways in which this music and culture are in tune with the rhythms of contemporary israel. notes 1 see also lynch and badger (2006). 2 netanel weiss, interview with the author (beer-sheva, israel), 5 may 2007. references almog, oz. 2000 [1997]. the sabra: the creation of the new jew. trans. haim watzman, berkeley: university of california press. aphek, edna and yishai tobin. 1989/1990. the semiotics of fortune-telling. amsterdam and philadelphia: john benjamins publishing company. bakhtin, mikhail, m. 1984 [1941]. rabelais and his world. trans. hèléne iswolsky. bloomington, indiana: indiana university press. bartuv, hagit. 2004. “etgar haravakut: ha’im hagdarat tofaot haravakut ‘k’ba’aya’ ona al tzorex xevrati? [the challenge of being a single female: does designating the female singles phenomenon as ‘problematic’ respond to a social need?]”. deot 17: 28–30. 63schmidt | full penetration bey, hakim. 1991 [1985]. t.a.z.: the temporary autonomous zones, ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism. new york: autonomedia. cohen, asher and bernard susser. 2000. israel and the politics of jewish identity: the secular religious impasse. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press. engelberg, ari. 2009. ksh’ha’ahava mekalkelet et ha’shura: ha’tzionut ha’datit v’ba’ayat ha’ravakut ha’mitmashexet [when loves spoils integrity: religious zionism and the problem of continuing singlehood]”. ti’uriya u’vikoret. 35 (autumn): 280–91. goffman, erving. 1963. stigma: notes on the management of spoiled identity. new jersey: prentice-hall. haviv, shira ayana. 2005. “next year in kathmandu: israeli backpackers and the formation of new israeli society”. in israeli backpackers: from tourism to rite of passage, ed. chaim noy and eric cohen, 45–86. albany: state university of new york press. heelas, paul and linda woodhead. 2005. the spiritual revolution: why religion is giving way to spirituality. oxford, uk and malden, ma: blackwell publishing. lynch, gordon and emily badger. 2006. “the mainstream post-rave club scene as a secondary institution: a british perspective”. culture and religion 7(1): 27–40. meadan, bryan. 2001. trancenational alienation: trance music culture, moral panics and transnational identity in israel. lulu. paine, robert. 1989. “israel: jewish identity and competition over ‘tradition’”. in history and ethnicity, ed. elizabeth tonkin, maryon mcdonald and malcolm chapman. 121–36. london: routledge. ram, uri. 2000. “the promised land of business opportunities: liberal post-zionism and the glocal age”. in the new israel: peacemaking and liberalization, ed. gershon shafir and yoav peled, 217–42. boulder: westview press. regev, moti and edwin seroussi. 2004. popular music and national culture in israel. berkeley: university of california press. reynolds, simon. 1998. generation ecstasy: into the world of techno and rave culture. boston: little, brown. sagiv, assaf. 2000. “dionysus in zion”. azure: ideas for the jewish nation 9 (spring): 155–78. schmidt, joshua i. 2011. “fused by paradox: a contrastive analysis of secular and religious trance dance parties in israel”. ph.d. dissertation. (anthropology), ben-gurion university of the negev. shor, nissan. 2008. lerkod im dma’ot ba’eynayim: ha’historia shel tarbut ha’moadonim v’ha’discotekim b’yisrael [dancing with tears in their eyes: the history of club and discotheque culture in israel]. tel-aviv: resling publishing. senor, dan and singer, saul. 2009. start-up nation: the story of israel’s economic miracle. new york: twelve. st john, graham. ed. 2001. free nrg: notes from the edge of the dance floor. altona: common ground. ———. ed. 2004. rave culture and religion. london & new york: routledge. ———. ed. 2010. the local scenes and global culture of psytrance. london and new york: routledge. dancecult 4(1)64 suissa, yoram. 2010. radio darom [“southern radio”], 25 july. taub, amiad. 2008. “the new dati leumi bourgeois”. matzav ruax: xinux, tarbut v’xevra ben ha’dati’im ha’leumim [state of mind: education, culture and society among the dati leumi populations] 5 (october): taub, gadi. 2009. alenbi. tel-aviv: yediot ahronot publishing. turner, victor. 1982 [1969]. the ritual process: structure and anti-structure. london: routledge and kegan paul. discography astral projection. 1997. dancing galaxy. trust in trance records (cd): tit cd012. <http://www.discogs.com/astral-projection-dancing-galaxy/release/20570>. ———. 1999. another world. trust in trance records (cd): t.i.t. cd019. <http://www.discogs.com/astral-projection-another-world/release/2607044>. filmography kaplan, noam. 2004. blue white collar criminal. israel: sam spiegel film & television school. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0428061/>. http://www.discogs.com/astral-projection-dancing-galaxy/release/20570 http://www.discogs.com/astral-projection-another-world/release/2607044 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0428061/ 2. gilbert-typeset2 the hardcore continuum? a report on the “the hardcore continuum?” symposium held at the university of east london, april 29th 2009 jeremy gilbert university of east london (uk) the “the hardcore continuum?” seminar at uel came about through an appropriately accelerated and unauthored process of contagion, given the nature of the phenomenon it set out to debate. a month or so after simon reynolds had given his widely-publicised talk on the subject in liverpool, organised by the foundation for art and creative technology (february 25th 2009), 1 a series of posts on blogs regularly linked to reynolds’ had created a feverish sense of controversy and possible intergenerational conflict amongst a small but impressively articulate coterie of music bloggers, journalists and critics. the controversy turned both on reynolds’ concept of a “hardcore continuum” (or “the nuum” as it is sometimes known), and on the validity of the critical judgements that he has tended to make on its later manifestations. put simply, reynolds has argued for the existence of an identifiable continuity between the producers of and audiences for a sequence of dance music forms to have emerged from urban london since the early 1990s, and has argued for the extraordinary vitality of the creative matrix which has produced “hardcore” techno, jungle, drum & bass, uk garage, grime, dubstep and “funky”. the increasing attenuation of the communicative links between crowds, producers and critics within this context has, reynolds generally seems to feel, led to a progressive decrease in its capacity to produce exciting, urgent, innovative yet popular dance sounds: an opinion which is hotly contested by younger advocates of these more recent sonic experiments. having become aware of just a little of this controversy, i suggested to my colleague steve goodman (who happens to be one of the doyens of the london dubstep scene, producing and djing as kode 9 while running the influential hyperdub label) that we organise a small, low-key event at which some of these issues could be thrashed out face to face. i didn’t imagine that it would attract the interest of more than a dozen or so participants, but then i hadn’t realised the extent or density of the networks which sustained this cultural micro-climate. my own musical priorities and activities had parted company with “the nuum” very early in its history, although i had retained a fond interest in it, having been a fan of the music in its earliest moment, having danced at clubs that i only now realise have apparently become legendary, and having consistently argued for the formal radicalism and importance of its legacy, even when it didn’t inspire much subjective enthusiasm in me as a listener. steve, however, is a critical node in the networks that have emerged from that context, and within a few hours, his texting-messaging, e-mailing and mobile phone calls had assembled a brilliant team of enthusiastic commentators all keen for the chance to make public their views on reynolds’ concept of a “hardcore continuum”, and had secured the support of the wire: adventures in modern music, the uk’s leading monthly magazine of exdancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(1) 2009, 118-22 issn 1947-5403 ©2009 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.07 from the floor perimental music. the wire’s lisa blanning joined a panel comprising steve and kodwo eshun (who gave a joint presentation), journalists joe muggs and dan hancox, producer and blogger martin clark,2 blogger alex williams,3 critic, writer, journalist and über-blogger mark fisher (who also contributed to this edition of dancecult), 4 and me. simon himself, only having been invited once the dust had settled and the arrangements firmed-up, sadly wasn’t able to join us; although all concerned (simon included) felt that his liverpool talk – freely available online in video form at the fact link above – was a sufficiently lucid and comprehensive account of his views to stand as his major contribution to the discussion. coming to the debate somewhat from the outside, i was surprised both at the size of the turn-out (over 60 attendees, mostly white men in their 20s, and so too young to remember the golden age of “hardcore” which had had east london as its epicentre when i was an undergraduate myself ) and at the hostility expressed by most of the speakers to reynolds’ position. the contributions varied greatly in tone and approach, but all were, one way or another, responding not only to reynolds’ general hypothesis of a social and musical continuity linking early 90s “hardcore techno” (or just “hardcore” as it would soon be known, any association with detroit or frankfurt having been quickly forgotten), jungle, drum & bass, uk garage, grime, dubstep and “funky”; but also to his increasing scepticism about the later elements in this series. most strikingly, the debate over “wonky” – the name sometimes given to the experimental beat music associated with british producers such as joker and zomby, but also with california’s flying lotus – brought out some of the key fault-lines. where reynolds and fisher, members of the original hardcore generation, don’t hear the vitality of an organic urban music culture in this myspace-era music, those producers and commentators who have come to maturity or prominence under the dispersed and digitised conditions of the current millennium understandably resent their apparent condescension, and hear wonky as a vital contribution to the self-renewal of dance-derived forms. eshun and goodman – the same age as fisher and reynolds, but inspired by different commitments – offered a presentation which, through some very close listening and highly tentative theorising, seemed to locate wonky in a different, less historically or geographically-bounded continuum: the (anti-)tradition of afrofuturism. apart from fisher, the other contributors all took the opportunity to take issue with reynolds for the critical positions which his particular deployment of the “nuum” concept tends to lead him to: increasingly dismissive of those developments such as dubstep and funky which, while seeming to come from the continuum, appear to reynolds to retain none of is characteristic energy, its unique capacity to combine breathtaking sonic avant-gardism with a genuinely dancefloor-driven party culture. most of the session was recorded and although we chose not to make it publicly available, most of the contributions found their ways onto the blogs of their respective authors, and i supplied a copy to simon who wrote several very long posts on the energy flash section of his blog in reply.5 having lived in east london throughout the history of the “nuum”, and having some distance from the debates, there seemed to me to be a fairly obvious way of accommodating these different perspectives within a singular account. on the one hand, the remarkable ecology of dance parties, clubs, pirate radio stations and record shops which sustained the hardcore, jungle and garage scenes in the 1990s clearly did produce not just a music but a culture characterised by incredible creative intensity and breathtaking levels of sonic innovation on an almost daily basis. the deterritorialisation of that ecology under exactly the same pressures which have seen so gilbert • the hardcore continuum? 119 much of everyday culture digitised, globalised, fragmented and specialised in recent years inevitably disrupted it, intensifying some elements, creating new connections and new opportunities, while inevitably rendering impossible the organic and immediate sense of community which had characterised some of its regions and nodes at their most successful. the london dubstep scene, for example, is accessible and welcoming to participants from a wide range of social backgrounds in a way that the “underground” jungle scene never was, but it is also characterised by a certain self-consciousness which is inevitably somewhat embarrassing to those who can remember what the jungle scene felt like “back in the day”. dubstep is an internationally-successful genre whose devotees desperately want to belong to a “scene” and to listen to avant-garde music with its roots in reggae, jungle and grime. jungle, on the other hand, was essentially a local music – a seemingly spontaneous bricolage of reggae, hip-hop, dancehall, house and techno which nonetheless sounded entirely new and entirely unique – made for local dance crowds. it took most intellectuals, critics, audiences and producers from outside of that milieu several years to stop dismissing it as meaningless proletarian noise and to realise its musical importance, despite the efforts of early advocates such as reynolds himself. the crucial historical pivot between these two phases was probably the early grime scene, which was a truly strange phenomenon: a weird point of convergence between a handful of teenage producers coming from some of the poorest parts of london and an international network of online intellectuals who were amazed and inspired by the energetic inventiveness of their music, even while it proved too abrasive for most of their peers. inevitably, the different sets of relationships characterising these different contexts generate very different musics, affects and experiences. naturally enough, those who missed the urgency of the 1990s scenes feel some resentment towards critics who had the luxury of that experience, and who now seem to be dismissing the different forms of musical creativity which the world of web 2.0 enables. i’m trying to be impartial here, but perhaps this is disingenuous. in my view, fisher’s argument that none of the music emerging from this contemporary context has the capacity to shock and amaze listeners as did the sequence of new genres which emerged from london and bristol in the 1990s is surely valid, with little coming out of the dubstep or wonky matrices which would have much surprised any aficionado of warp records’ “intelligent dance music” in 1995. anybody who disputes this just isn’t familiar enough with the kind of experimental electronica which was being produced by groups like black dog and plaid at the time. it’s not as if these musics sound exactly the same as today’s. the point here is rather that all of the ingredients for wonky and dubstep were easily available and could easily have been imagined in their present configurations by the middle of the last decade. at the same time, i have to confess that the apparent desperation of dubstep’s self-conscious will-to-scenehood is often rather painful to observe, despite the evident quality of the best music that it has produced. what this tells us about the relationships between “authentic” community, sonic creativity and the social dynamics of artistic innovation i’m not entirely sure: but reynolds and fisher are both clearly right in their suspicion that it problematises a number of classically “postmodern” hypotheses about the simple unimportance of these issues. like it or not, the flattened-out relationships of the digital universe just don’t produce musics which carry the same affective charge as those emerging from dense locales of shared lived experience. rather than disputing this observation, it might be more important to consider what it means and what it might tell us about our own possible futures... 120 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 my own contribution to the seminar took a slightly different tack to the others. trying to take a deliberately provocative position, i asked what would happen if we were to acknowledge the case for the extraordinary creativity of the “hardcore continuum”, especially in its “high” moment in the 1990s, but were to question its overall historical significance nonetheless. despite the formal radicalism of these musics, the scenes associated with them were notorious for the aggression, sexism and homophobia which characterised them, and at a time when black radicalism was in apparent crisis, these largely black-derived musics seemed to be entirely divorced from the political legacies of soul, reggae and hip-hop. indeed, given the social and political radicalism characterising most of their immediate antecedents (acid house, with its origins in the black gay clubs of chicago; hip-hop, only recently having left its “golden age” of political consciousness; reggae, with its history of anti-capitalism and anti-racism), as well as the traditional radicalism of their core constituency – the multiracial poor of urban london – the music scenes of the “nuum” were notable for their detachment from any kind of politics, their embrace of competitive entrepreneurial values, and their defence of masculinist and heterosexist norms which other dance cultures were busily and visibly deconstructing at just that moment. of course, it is important to note that the much-vaunted cosmopolitanism of everyday culture in london surely has been one of the reasons that the far right has found it so difficult to find a foothold there over the past 20 years, unlike in many european cities that have witnessed similar social changes and a similar decline of the traditional left. the hardcore continuum has clearly played a positive role in helping to inoculate london and the wider uk against the fascist virus, by creating shared modes of corporeal intensity which transfigure elements previously felt to be “black” or “white” into musical and dance forms which move beyond these categories altogether. however, this role has been enacted only at a very subtle level. compared to other musical forms which have been characterised by either an obvious exchange between different ethnic cultures or the extraordinary formal avant-gardism which typified jungle, garage and grime, the most notable thing about those forms has been their inability to connect with any wider social forces. might this not be one of the reasons why they have seemed to be so difficult to sustain? although producers have carried on making all of these musics, the general critical consensus has been that the innovative energy went out of each of these scenes after just a few years and a handful of really classic records. compare this to the longer histories of jazz, rock, funk, reggae, disco or soul, and one has to ask if the story of the hardcore continuum is not a story of fantastic creativity being repeatedly forestalled, trapped in the cultural ghettos of “underground” raves and amateur radio stations, and thereby neutralised before it could connect with any wider social forces, or even construct a culture for itself which could enable it properly to grow. the white-hot intensity of those sonic innovations may well stand as a legacy to the extraordinary creative potential immanent to groups outside the ordinary networks of capital circulation and “official” culture; but it might also stand as a legacy to the fragility and impotence of such creativity – its inability to avoid capture and reterritorialisation by capital and reactive patriarchy – when it is divorced from any wider struggle for autonomy or democracy. ••••••• gilbert • the hardcore continuum? 121 author biography jeremy gilbert teaches cultural studies at the university of east london, and has written widely on music, politics and cultural theory. his publications include discographies: dance music culture and the politics of sound  (routledge 1999) and anticapitalism and culture: radical theory and popular politics (berg 2008).  notes 122 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 1 <http://www.factmagazine.co.uk/index.php? option=com_content&task=view&id=2028&itemid=101> (accessed 30 august 2009). 2 <http://blackdownsoundboy.blogspot.com/> (accessed 30 august 2009). 3 <http://splinteringboneashes.blogspot.com/> (accessed 30 august 2009). 4 <http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/> (accessed 30 august 2009). 5 <http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/search?updatedmax=2009-06-17t17%3a55%3a00-07%3a00&max-results=7> (accessed 30 august 2009). << /ascii85encodepages false 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/hrv (za stvaranje adobe pdf dokumenata najpogodnijih za visokokvalitetni ispis prije tiskanja koristite ove postavke. stvoreni pdf dokumenti mogu se otvoriti acrobat i adobe reader 5.0 i kasnijim verzijama.) /hun 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<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> /enu (use these settings to create adobe pdf documents best suited for high-quality prepress printing. created pdf documents can be opened with acrobat and adobe reader 5.0 and later.) >> /namespace [ (adobe) (common) (1.0) ] /othernamespaces [ << /asreaderspreads false /cropimagestoframes true /errorcontrol /warnandcontinue /flattenerignorespreadoverrides false /includeguidesgrids false /includenonprinting false /includeslug false /namespace [ (adobe) (indesign) (4.0) ] /omitplacedbitmaps false /omitplacedeps false /omitplacedpdf false /simulateoverprint /legacy >> << /addbleedmarks false /addcolorbars false /addcropmarks false /addpageinfo false /addregmarks false /convertcolors /converttocmyk /destinationprofilename () /destinationprofileselector /documentcmyk /downsample16bitimages true /flattenerpreset << /presetselector /mediumresolution >> /formelements false /generatestructure false /includebookmarks false /includehyperlinks false /includeinteractive false /includelayers false /includeprofiles false /multimediahandling /useobjectsettings /namespace [ (adobe) (creativesuite) (2.0) ] /pdfxoutputintentprofileselector /documentcmyk /preserveediting true /untaggedcmykhandling /leaveuntagged /untaggedrgbhandling /usedocumentprofile /usedocumentbleed false >> ] >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [2400 2400] /pagesize [612.000 792.000] >> setpagedevice big fun in the big town dir. bram van splunteren holland: vpro, 1986. http://fivedayweekend.co.uk/ philip kirby university of liverpool (uk) this documentary was originally commissioned by dutch broadcaster vpro and was filmed and broadcast in 1986; it finally gained commercial release on dvd in 2012. the director originally hoped to explore the origins and culture of hip hop with the aim of educating the dutch tv viewer whose perception of the style may have been tainted by exposure to novelty material such as dutch act mc miker g and deejay sven’s 1986 hit “holiday rap”. the braggadocio and materialism of american hip hop also left some european listeners with the impression that the style had little substance and was merely a passing fad, a viewpoint the film-maker hoped to change. the film commences with an initial sequence that sets the scene, including shots of new york and studio footage of hip hop dj mr magic’s radio show. after a brief sequence of live concert footage we see the director on the phone in the hotel setting up interviews, the first of which is with grandmaster flash. english subtitles explain that they meet in the south bronx, “one of the most poor and dangerous parts of town but also the place where in the second half of the ’70s the first rappers and scratchers appeared”. although this film was made relatively early in hip hop history, it was shot thirteen years after herc’s (now mythical) first party in sedgwick avenue, a period from which little archival material survives. so, although the film leaves the impression it offers a snapshot of an emerging style, there was a significant period of development that is not explored in the documentary. flash initially shows the film crew the site of a bronx venue where he played as the style emerged. he then demonstrates his skills as a turntablist (in his living room) by beat juggling two copies of bob james’ “take me to the mardi gras”. flash explains that his key innovation as a dj was to loop the strongest part of a record by using two record decks to extend the break section (conveniently ignoring that this technique was kool herc’s innovation). flash found that by using a crew of mcs to accompany his djing it turned the overall performance into a show and made it less like a technical demonstration of his turntable skills. again, this is essentially a jamaican sound system performance practice introduced by herc, which was developed further by flash and other dj-led crews. possibly due to the footage being shot in only a week, and the researcher being based on another continent, numerous hip hop innovators such as herc are not interviewed or even mentioned, which could be considered a notable omission. the film then cuts to harry truman high school in the north bronx, where we see clean-cut happy looking kids singing and rapping in the playground. the students’ (white) music teacher dennis bell explains that the style developed in the bronx, and that in many new york schools the music programmes were cut for budgetary reasons, and that due to the relative poverty of families in the bronx private music lessons were not an option for most young people. bell then states that as there was no musical outlet for young people, “in the bronx what happened was they figured out a new form of music that didn’t take any music lessons, and that is using poetry and a rhythm, which has a lot of roots in african stuff”. he states that programming a drum computer doesn’t require music lessons. this is true, but a drum machine wasn’t a particularly affordable item in 1986, which somewhat negates the argument that poverty reduced the available opportunities to develop “traditional” instrument skills. explaining the origin of the style entirely on educational cutbacks somewhat over-simplifies the origins of hip hop. this notion that the style resulted directly from a lack of access to “real” instruments is also repeated (by lord jamar of brand nubian) in ice-t and andy baybutt’s film something from nothing: the art of rap (2012). the socio-economic and cultural influences that impact the origins of hip hop culture are obviously unpacked in far greater depth in the work of hip hop scholars such as rose (1994), george (1998), toop (2000), forman (2002) and chang (2005). the next sequence is in harlem with doug e. fresh, a pioneer of the practice of human beatboxing. the director states that from the introduction of beatboxing the street kids were self-supporting, as they didn’t need to rely on a rhythm machine anymore to supply a beat to rap over. fresh compares rap music’s status to that of rock and roll when it initially emerged to critical opprobrium, and its subsequent acceptance into the mainstream. he then contrasts the “street tough” image of rap artists to some of the more androgynous black pop stars of the period. their names aren’t mentioned, but rick james and prince (amongst others) spring to mind as the probable targets of this comment. the documentary includes footage of a hopeful crew from chicago rapping and beatboxing outside def jam’s offices in an attempt to gain russell simmons’ attention. they deliver a slick routine critiquing gang culture after the director asks if there are street gangs in chicago. the director evidently has a fascination with gang culture and this topic is the focus of attention at a number of points in the narrative. the film features a cameo from dmc (of run dmc), who shows off his new cadillac and its sound system and raps to the camera whilst on the street outside def jam. an edit introduces an incredibly focused and business-like simmons in the def jam office, explaining the market for hip hop and his intention to sell his acts without resorting to gimmicks. this comment is possibly a veiled reference to “holiday rap’s” european success. simmons demonstrates a paternal pride, noting that his artists write their own material and he states that they have more commercial talent than most pop stars. then the film takes the viewer to queens to l.l. cool j’s grandmother’s house for an interview with l.l., her home located in an apparently pleasant residential neighbourhood, a striking contrast to the footage of urban dereliction in the bronx that is standard fare in hip hop documentaries. suliaman el hadi from the last poets is introduced and provides an opportunity to contrast the older generation of black artists with the new. he offers a critique of hip hop, as he considers the style is not addressing the realities of black life such as poverty, powerlessness and economic decline. he disparagingly refers to the average hip hop mc’s raps as “nursery rhymes”. the footage is cleverly edited back to l.l. explaining that he doesn’t rap about ghetto problems, as he wants his audience to be able to forget day-to-day reality and have fun when they attend his concerts. when asked if it is necessary for rap to have a message, l.l. replies, “why would a kid want to pay for a ticket to hear how bad life is?” the footage then cuts back to suliaman, who is now accompanied by one of his teenaged sons, and although his son is obviously respectful of his father and aware of the power of his thought and poetry, he admits to liking rap music. the boy says, “i do admit what i be listening to is garbage, but i still love it, i still like it, it makes me dance, you know, it gets me up!”. he comments that his father’s music “brings education” and then his father delivers an impassioned performance of last poets’ material to the camera. the film finally cuts to concert footage which shows schoolly d performing live with his dj operating a drum machine as the sole accompaniment to schoolly’s lyrics. when interviewed backstage, schoolly states that his sound is raw and that he can address topics other mcs cannot as he has his own independent label. again, rock and roll is mentioned in comparison to rap. schoolly worries that rap will be made too “pretty” as it becomes more commercialised, a fate that he considers has happened to rock and roll. obviously, hip hop has evolved considerably since 1986 and has had a remarkable global impact, musically, commercially and culturally, in the almost forty years since kool herc’s first party in the bronx. big fun in the big town is mainly notable for offering a snapshot of the genre in a more innocent (pre-crack epidemic) era, before the emergence of gangster rap and hip hop’s overt commercialisation. one of the most interesting aspects of this documentary is the original footage that had languished in vpro’s archives for a quarter of a century before this dvd release. anyone who watches a wide range of music documentaries will begin to recognise the same segments appearing repeatedly in different films; however, the footage used here is refreshingly unfamiliar to the jaded eye. the film doesn’t offer any unique insights and can be criticised for a lack of historical rigour, but it is nevertheless an entertaining addition to the available material exploring early hip hop. references chang, jeff. 2005. can’t stop won’t stop. london: ebury press. forman, murray. 2002. the ’hood comes first: race, space, and place in rap and hip-hop. middletown: wesleyan university press. george, nelson. 1998. hip hop america. new york: penguin. rose, tricia. 1994. black noise: rap music and black culture in contemporary america. middletown: wesleyan university press. toop, david. 2000. rap attack. london: serpent’s tail. discography mc miker g and deejay sven. 1986. holiday rap. dureco records (12-inch): ms 227. <http://www.discogs.com/mcmikerg-deejay-sven-holiday-rap/release/187821>. bob james. 1973. take me to the mardi gras. cti (7-inch): cti 304. <http://www.discogs.com/bob-james-take-me-to-the-mardi-gras-dream-journey/release/1900453 >. filmography ice-t and andy baybutt. 2012. something from nothing: the art of rap. usa: indomina films. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2062996/>. popular music in evangelical youth culture stella sai-chun lau new york: routledge, 2012. isbn: 978-0-415-88821-9 (hardcover) rrp: us$125.00 (hardcover) mark evans macquarie university (australia) popular music in evangelical youth culture is part of the routledge studies in religion series, and in it, author stella sai-chun lau sets out to “study the relationship between popular music and evangelical christianity” (1). more specifically she is interested in how “electronic dance music is assimilated into christian practices and how the use of such music is justified and legitimized by discourses and individuals’ beliefs” (2). this is an important topic and certainly little attention has been paid to the use of edm within christian, especially evangelical, liturgies. moreover, even the role of “secular” music within christian liturgy remains sadly neglected, and here lau has succeeded in broadening the scope of academic inquiry in this area. that said, the volume is uneven in approach and tends to open up dialogue more than it contributes solid, verifiable arguments. one of the biggest issues with the book, coming as it does from lau’s doctoral studies, is that it still presents largely as a doctoral thesis. the early pages are bogged down in brief definitional work that, while important, could have been rephrased and worked through the flow of the argument. perhaps it has been stripped back for publication, but it also leads to short, often cursory definitions that needed to be fleshed out more fully. definitions lead to research context leads to literature review material in a predictable template. some of the latter sections work better than others: “christianity and popular music” begins with a small list from the available literature, but then finds its straps in mapping out relevant writings on contemporary christian music, while “the emerging church” is quite sparse and tends to merely direct the reader to later chapters—a good indication that the material could have waited until then. other sections like “inter-disciplinarity” could have been deleted all together. perhaps the biggest issue underpinning the book is the methodology that was used to develop the research. to be clear, there is nothing wrong with the approaches chosen, merely the scope of the research itself. lau is most forthcoming in this: “the data about this christian group was mainly collected over a period of a few days . . . . therefore, the research data that is used . . . could have been more thorough if i had been able to spend a longer time with the christian groups” (24). other chapters/sections are based on one night of research, while the bulk of the book is built on a more substantial two-week stint in ibiza. the problem with the latter, as honestly laid out by the author, is that she was part of a short-term ministry team there to evangelise to people in the edm scene. as lau notes, her dual purpose “created a certain level of tension” (108) that she clearly tried to resolve, but when lau states that she “was not treated differently as a result of my research agenda based on my observations within the team” (108), it remains hard to see how that was the case. lau clearly feels she has walked this tightrope, though to the objective reader, especially in light of some of the subjective (christian) language that creeps in, it is difficult to believe. the volume clearly needed a stronger edit in terms of structure and language. phrases such as “i had some good conversations with four different people outside the team” (115)”, “i could sense that they were having a somewhat blissful time” (117) and “the rise of importance of personal relationships” (132) do little to help the cause of studies in contemporary christian music and its various incarnations, which are already marginalized by the academy. i am a little surprised that routledge did not pick up on these (easily fixable) problems, or that they didn’t resolve to improve the resolution of what could have been most useful fieldwork photographs. as noted at the outset, this is an uneven volume with some sections padded with details well-known already, while others contribute useful, innovate insights to the discipline. chapter one discusses the historical uses of popular music in christian contexts with lau choosing to start her conversation with the jesus people movement. this is a perfectly apt place to begin, despite there being many historical instances she could have claimed prior. yet this section is too long relative to the rest of the volume and doesn’t provide any new material, and merely brings together the story once more from limited sources. likewise, the discussion of “alterative worship” in chapter two brings together some useful ideas on how alternative worship is being constructed in a musical sense (including a great section on the nine o’clock service—one of the pioneering alternative worship spaces in the world) before moving into a web-based survey of alterative worship groups around the world. i know from the australian examples cited that little (or no) edm is part of them, and nor is the information particularly up-to-date (even allowing for publishing lags). chapter three is by far the strongest of the volume, providing a compelling discussion of the christian music ministry organization new generation ministries (ngm) in bristol. despite the methodological concerns raised above, here lau usefully makes the connection between the use of popular (and we might add secular) music and the emerging church. chapter four, the ibiza chapter, needed to focus more on the sonic qualities of the music and include deeper analysis of particular tracks in order to deepen the reader’s understanding. the author is clearly capable of this and future research would certainly benefit from strengthening this area. more analytical depth would have helped negate the small, subjective nature of the fieldwork. much of chapter five, which considers various encounters of alternative worship and edm in new york, presents standard material that is well-removed from popular music studies. when lau finally arrives at the study of new york church tribe, however, there are important points made, particularly in light of denora’s (2000) work. lau provides excellent examples to prove that contemporary christian worship “has prized music experience over the content in music” (157). her conclusions about predominantly wordless edm being important in alternative worship settings (162) needs to be followed up by other researchers. what lau manages to achieve in this volume is to open up the discussion on the intersection of popular music and contemporary christian music (and liturgy). based on her research she suggests that “the ideologies about certain genres of music being more ‘religious’ than others also affect the ways in which the academic debate on popular music and religion are formed” (170). this is an important point, and well-made through her study of edm in alternative worship settings. she goes on to conclude that “whether a genre is ‘authorised’ or not, it hinges on the openness of those in mainstream christian leadership to new music genres that are of interest to young people” (170), and so too, the academic discipline of contemporary christian music is bettered by those willing to pursue music at the margins of the field. references denora, tia. 2000. music in everyday life. cambridge: cambridge university press. the forging of a white gay aesthetic at the saint, 1980–84 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 3(1): 4–27 issn 1947-5403 ©2011 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.01 the forging of a white gay aesthetic at the saint, 1980–84 tim lawrence university of east london abstract an influential private party for white gay men that opened in downtown new york in 1980 and closed in 1988, the saint was a prolific employer of high-profile djs, yet their work has gone largely unanalysed. this article describes and contextualises the aesthetic of these djs, paying particular attention to the way they initially embraced music recorded by african american musicians, yet shifted to a notably “whiter” sound across 1982 and 1983, during which time new wave and hi-nrg recordings were heard much more regularly at the spot. the piece argues that this shift took place as a result of a number of factors, including the introduction of a consumer ethos at the venue, the deepening influence of identity politics and the encroaching impact of aids, which decimated the venue’s membership. these developments led saint djs to place an ever-greater emphasis on the creation of a smooth and seamless aesthetic that enhanced the crowd’s embrace of a synchronized dancing style. djs working in electronic dance music scenes would go on to adopt important elements of this approach. keywords: the saint, djing, whiteness, neoliberalism, aids tim lawrence is the author of love saves the day: a history of dance music culture (1970–79) (duke, 2003) and hold on to your dreams: arthur russell and the downtown music scene, 1973–92 (duke, 2009). he is currently writing a book on new york club culture, 1980–84, again for duke, and leads the music culture: theory and production programme at the university of east london. he is a founding member of lucky cloud sound system, which has been staging parties with david mancuso in london since 2003, and also of the centre for cultural studies research at the university of east london. for more information visit www.timlawrence.info or email tlawrence1@mac.com. feature article http://www.timlawrence.info mailto:tlawrence1@mac.com lawrence | the forging of a white gay aesthetic at the saint, 1980–84 5 introduction attracting an affluent white gay crowd of 4,000-plus on peak nights, the saint was probably the most prolific employer of djs in new york city between 1980 and 1988, when it closed before opening for a much briefer run. only the paradise garage, another private party that pulled in a predominantly ethnic gay crowd of 3,000-plus on peak weekend nights, rivalled the reach of the saint during its 1977–87 run. however, whereas historians of dance culture have hailed the garage’s larry levan to be the most influential dj in the city during the 1980s, the shifting roster of selectors who worked at the saint have merited barely a single mention—an unlikely scenario given that privileged white groups often receive more attention than disadvantaged subaltern groups.3 based on numerous interviews with key protagonists, documentary material held in the saint’s archive and recordings of dj sets from the saint, this article redresses the imbalance by outlining the contributions of jim burgess, alan dodd and roy thode, the saint’s principal djs during the opening 1980–81 season, as well as shaun buchanan, george cadenas, michael fierman, robbie leslie, howard merritt, chuck parsons, terry sherman and sharon white, who appeared regularly in subsequent seasons.6 thanks to their numerousness, none could come close to controlling the turntables at the saint as the singular levan did at the garage, but their collective impact was considerable, even if their very collectivity also meant that each was ultimately disposable. the article positions the saint djs not as isolated artists who developed their style in privacy before performing in front of a crowd, but instead as mediators of a taste culture who combined an expertise in music with a recognition of the need to satisfy the often complex and potentially contradictory desires of the saint membership. if that need ran through 1970s dance culture in general, and has also defined many subsequent scenes, it took on a particularly pronounced character at the saint, where a significant number of dancers came to express their opinions with unusual force thanks to the rise of an individualized consumer-is-right ethos that accompanied the high cost of entry, as well as the enormous value a certain cadre of gay men started to place on the enjoyability of their saturday night. convinced of the superiority of their own taste, these dancers practiced a form of critical connoisseurship that both strengthened their own elite status while establishing distance between the saint and parallel scenes that were framed as being less discerning. in particular, dissatisfied dancers started to write letters of complaint to the management, and in so doing reframed the dancer (at least in those instances) as an individual consumer rather than a participant in a collective practice. pressured by the management, the venue’s djs were compelled to respond, often by selecting more conservative records, and in an ironic twist, the saint began to relinquish its cutting-edge status as a result. paying attention to the historical juncture, which witnessed the emergence of neoliberal economics, the intensification of identity politics and the onset of the aids epidemic, the article also traces the various ways the saint djs sought to please the crowd, as well as the related circumstances that led to the emergence and entrenchment of a white gay dancecult 3(1)6 male aesthetic across the first four seasons of the venue’s operation. the article also notes that although saint djs were nearly unanimous in their rejection of house music across the 1985–88 period, they helped pioneer an aesthetic that emphasized smooth blending and the matching of texturally similar tracks across an extended period of time, and therefore anticipated the sensibility that would later inform a significant proportion of dj mixing in clubs that supported electronic dance music. indeed once they acclimatized to the rougher, harder textures of early house, ex-saint dancers were able to make a smooth transition to the sound factory, where junior vasquez, who declared levan to be his primary influence, developed a trance-oriented repetitive style from 1989 onwards. the setting opened by theatre designer and st. mark’s baths owner bruce mailman at 105 second avenue on the site of the old fillmore east, the saint surpassed the architectural ambitions of earlier private party venues that had attracted a near-homogeneous white gay crowd. whereas the tenth floor and flamingo added minimal design touches to the ex-industrial buildings in which they were located, the saint’s architectural aesthetic was rigorously futuristic and featured a hi-tech electronic coat check system, while the interior of the downstairs lounge area and the stairs that led up to the dance floor and the third-floor balcony area were built from concrete and steel. lacking angles, the circular floor encouraged dancers to lose their bearings and open themselves to the unfamiliar. above, a vast planetarium hood dominated the venue’s stunning infrastructure, with the lighting operator able to draw on a vast array of effects that could transport dancers into different virtual environments. although the saint was located in the heart of the multicultural east village, the vast majority of its members were white, gay men who were comparatively well-off, which they had to be, because members paid $125 for their cards and then $10 per party, while guests had to be invited by a member and pay $18 per party.11 the nucleus of the group formed first on fire island when revellers congregated at the sandpiper, a discotheque located in the upmarket pines, and they reconvened in manhattan at the tenth floor, where the limited capacity led members to refer to themselves as “the 500”, or the 500 most desirable (creative, stylish, attractive, successful, knowing, etc.) gay men in new york. after the sheer stress of managing the door contributed to the closure of the tenth floor, the growing contingent switched its allegiance to michael fesco’s flamingo, where they came to number more than a thousand and began to self-identify as “the a-list”. mailman then courted the group in the summer of 1980 and closed his membership list of 2,000 before opening night on 20 september. flamingo regulars would recount that they had no choice but to switch allegiances when the new venue rose like a mirage. the crowd might have been as racially homogeneous as any in new york. “the saint was 95 percent white gay men”, notes sharon white, a dj at the pavilion on fire island as well as the saint, and one of the tiny number of women to receive membership status. “everything else fell into the remaining five percent, whether it be women, blacks or latinos”.12 the lawrence | the forging of a white gay aesthetic at the saint, 1980–84 7 absence of black, latino and asian men was in fact less pronounced than it had been at the tenth floor and flamingo. terry sherman, a saint dj, notes that a black friend of his called duane was “one of bruce’s regular dancing partners”, and adds that during the period he had three black boyfriends, all of whom would head to the saint, irrespective of whether he was djing that night or not.13 “it was a bigger club, so there was more room, so of course you saw more blacks”, says the peruvian-born jorge la torre, a regular at the tenth floor and flamingo before he defected to the saint. “i think black men also felt more welcome, and you began to see white men with black lovers. but if you saw a handful of black people that was a lot”.14 if the low turnout indicates that many black men still didn’t feel welcome, it remained the case that to a significant extent the saint and the garage subdivided according to a combination of sexual attraction and musical preference (with black and latino gay men heading to the garage if their sexual preference was for black and latino men, etc.). moreover, the hierarchies that kept poorer black and latino dancers out of the saint can in part be attributed to what sherman calls “societal racism”, and not mailman’s need to introduce a business model that would enable him to repay the approximate $3–6m cost of opening the venue.15 “should bruce have initiated an affirmative action policy like ‘white males $10, african americans free’ and put on chartered buses from 125th street, bed stuy [bedford-stuyvesant, brooklyn] and the bronx  to the lower east side?” asks sherman, who struck up a strong friendship with mailman. “maybe. but bruce didn’t care who came and  there was no racial profiling [or membership policy that excluded black and latino men] specific to the saint”.16 there was, however, sex profiling, with women excluded on the grounds that they would compromise the gay male dance ritual if they were allowed to occupy anything more than the very outer margins of the venue. according to leslie, who previously djed at 12 west, a comparatively mixed gay private party located underneath the westbound highway on west twelfth street, the policy grew out of mailman’s belief that “gay men danced well together” and that women would disrupt this collective energy because they used their bodies differently.17 in contrast to the plurality of expressive styles that could be witnessed at the loft and the paradise garage, the resulting dance dynamic forged a form of locked-in conformity that evokes walter hughes’ description of the depersonalised white gay disco dancer as “becoming an extension of the machine that generates the beat” (1994: 151). “the saint seemed almost synchronized”, comments la torre. “if someone was doing a certain move, the others would start to follow. they would go along with whatever it was that was going on”. creating an interconnected, amoeba-like organism that mutated in barely perceptible ways, dancers moved within constrictions set not only by the disciplinary injunctions of the beat, as suggested by hughes, but also within a general social code that discouraged men who came from a white, anglo-saxon, protestant background from expressing themselves physically, irrespective of their sexuality. added to that, saint dancers also contended with a more specific macho code that gained currency in new york in the late 1970s that led gay men to rein in the way they would use their bodies. “the goal was dancecult 3(1)8 the moment of unity, the moment when everything disappeared, when time and space disappeared”, explains la torre, who would also head to the garage on a fairly regular basis, and notes that dancers there were significantly more expressive. “it was just pure energy. it was extremely welcoming and extremely powerful. within it everything seemed possible”.20 djing whereas david mancuso was inseparable from the loft because the party was situated in his own home, and larry levan was all but inextricably tied to the paradise garage because michael brody built the venue around his appeal, mailman concluded that it made better business sense for him to encourage his dancers to form an attachment to the venue rather than any single dj. as a result, he introduced a revolving roster of djs from the outset, and established a broader framework that positioned djs as hired entertainers whose primary function was to serve the community and the setting. the break with previous employment practice, in which djs would seek out residencies where they would play on a regular basis until they fell out of favour with the dancers or the management, was marked, with mailman instituting a framework in which they could expect to play once or twice a month if they were lucky. as such, their status as freelancers was embedded ahead of the more general shift towards one-off, flexible contracts—a shift that would become one of the hallmarks of market-driven neoliberalism. “after flamingo closed things really changed”, comments howard merritt, a flamingo resident who went on to play regularly at the saint. “none of the big clubs had an in-house disc jockey. you had your calendar and you’d get called by the clubs, and gradually you would fill in the nights”.21 if the development threatened to undermine the ability of the saint roster to form a deep bond with the dance floor, that possible consequence was countered by the fact that mailman’s djs played ten-hour-plus sets that encouraged emotive ties to be formed. while mailman also believed that the huge cost of his venture required him to institute a system that guaranteed his dancers wouldn’t become bored by a single in-house dj, he also drew regularly on a delineated pool of principal djs, as well as a secondary pool of up-and-coming selectors to perform on weekdays and sometimes on sundays, which were less busy. for their part, the djs acquired the aura of orchestra conductors; their names would be advertised in advance, and it became established practice for a spinner to pause at around six o’clock in the morning, at the peak of the night, in order to receive applause from an audience that was largely familiar with the ovation rituals of new york’s theatres and concert halls. after that, the dj got to stretch out during an extended encore that would often last for four hours or more. within the core roster, a consensus emerged that the saint wasn’t necessarily the nicest or warmest environment in which they could work, but performing there nevertheless marked a career pinnacle, and also bestowed them with the kind of cachet that could lead to further job offers elsewhere. of the principal djs who played the opening season—all three were members of judy weinstein’s for the record, the most prestigious record pool in the city—alan dodd lawrence | the forging of a white gay aesthetic at the saint, 1980–84 9 was the smoothest, and “could play a whole night like glass”, says leslie. for his part, roy thode was a busier, trickier mixer who liked to cut back and forth between two back-beated copies of the same record to generate an echo effect, execute extended mixes using two separate recordings and introduce reverb effects. “roy could take apart and restructure it better than anyone”, comments marsha stern, a close friend of thode and one of the few women to hold a saint membership card. “we would tease him and say he was getting too knobby, but the rearranging was part of the art form. he had an innate sense of magic making and a real rapport with the crowd. people would come up to the booth and say, ‘it’s just a wonderful party’”.22 jim burgess, a prolific studio hand who mixed records such as “i love the nightlife (disco ‘round)” by alicia bridges, “a lover’s holiday” by change, “runaway love” by linda clifford, “secret love affair” by madleen kane, “the beat goes on and on” by ripple and “da ya think i’m sexy” by rod stewart, was more mercurial than dodd and thode. “jim burgess was probably the most talented mixologist”, comments leslie. “sometimes he was on and sometimes not. but when he asserted himself nobody could touch him for technique”. signalling his retirement in advance, burgess played his last party on 31 january 1981, yet instead of letting the night run its regular course, he walked out of the booth in high style at 6:00 am with the crowd in a state of rapture and nowhere else to go. near to the booth at the time, white was called on to step in, and after grabbing some records from the on-site apartment of the principal lighting designer and operator mark ackerman, she approached the turntables like a boxer moving through a parting crowd, and proceeded to rescue the party. her performance vindicated the earlier decision of ackerman (a close friend) to schedule her to play in march; mailman had opposed the move, but backed down when ackerman, a hugely influential figure, told him he would resign if he overruled the booking. proud of her ability to play “outside of the box”, white joined a roster that included leslie, a consummate professional and hugely popular figure whose style emphasised smoothness and tonality, as well as chuck parsons, who favoured a harder, faster aesthetic. “chuck was never a favourite with the crowd, but bruce loved what he played and he got almost all of the big parties from 1982 to 1986”, comments sherman. “it also helped that he was a brilliant technician and almost never had a bad mix”.25 all of the saint djs sought to forge an arc that resembled the affective flows enjoyed in other clubs, yet was more precisely calibrated in terms of tempo and energy. often beginning with an orchestral recording, which would enable them to “tune” the room while making a statement about their sophistication and tastefulness, they would go on to play bright mid-tempo songs to invite people onto the floor and set a positive tone. from there the djs would build to the peak period that ran from about 2:00–6:00 am, and involved them selecting higher-tempo tracks that scampered along at 125 bpm upwards. “there would be a series of peaks”, comments michael fierman, who got his break through the hot new talent night, which mailman inaugurated on 12 may 1982, and went on to become one of the venue’s most influential spinners. “but you couldn’t play 100 hits in a row, each one an increment better than the other, so to build the excitement one had to pull back to get dancecult 3(1)10 to another peak”.26 at around 6:00 am, in a ritual that was not replicated in other venues, the dj would let the final record of the peak set fade, accept applause from the crowd and acknowledge the work of the lighting person and the generosity of the crowd (if indeed the applause was enthusiastic, which wasn’t always the case). after that, the dj would take the tempo right down and play a set that was commonly referred to as “sleaze” or “morning music”. more than other crowds, saint dancers demanded that their djs generate “a very smooth flow” (in the words of leslie) as well as turn to certain records during peak of the night.27 “it’s not like the djs were clones of each other, but we were expected to play the things that were popular with the crowd at that particular moment”, comments white. “i used to say that we all played the same records, but in a different order”.28 while the taste of some saint djs might have coincided seamlessly with what the crowd wanted to hear, white maintains that the crowd’s preference would take precedence when there was a discrepancy, and she felt compelled to play “filler” tracks that were beyond her “scope of appreciation” between the hours of 2:00–6:00 am. evoked as being equal when leslie talked about the existence of a “third-person consciousness” in a 1983 interview (park 1983: 37), the dancing crowd was in fact more powerful than the dj during the middle part of the night, after which the initiative reverted back to the dj during the elongated “sleaze” or “morning” session, because the crowd had been satiated by then. “you were expected to take a left turn because you’d given them all they expected”, adds white. “we shined as individuals after 6:00 am. before that, anybody could have been playing”. saint djs also had to operate in the conditions that characterised the post-disco sucks era. as has been described in detail elsewhere, the overproduction of disco music in the aftermath of the success of saturday night fever combined with the onset of a deep recession that enabled right-wingers to link the perceived decline of the united states with the advances made by the countercultural coalition of the late 1960s, led to a homophobic, racist and sexist backlash against disco that positioned the culture as the overdetermined source of the crisis facing white straight men.29 felt most keenly in suburban areas and the boardrooms of major record companies, where executives were demographically inclined to favour rock above disco, the backlash resulted in the “disco” nomenclature falling into disuse and the dramatic cutting back of production. but in urban centres such as new york and san francisco public clubs and private parties continued to attract significant numbers of dancers, and this vibrant network provided independent record companies with a core market that was focused, enthusiastic and hungry for innovation. along with venues such as bond’s and danceteria, the saint opened shortly after the majors (with the partial exception of warner brothers) decided to withdraw from the disco market. as a result, its djs turned with renewed interest to the release schedules of new york’s and san francisco’s independent sector, as well as the import recordings that could be found in specialist stores such as vinyl mania. the saint djs played us synth pop tracks such as “gloria” by laura branigan and “stormy weather” by viola wills. they drew on the rich seam of high energy music that was being lawrence | the forging of a white gay aesthetic at the saint, 1980–84 11 released by west coast labels such as megatone and moby dick, many of them recorded by patrick cowley, sylvester and the weather girls, with “do you wanna funk” and “it’s raining men” two of the most popular tracks (at one point during 1982, brian chin [1982: 48], the dance columnist for billboard, went so far as to wonder if eurodisco had “emigrated” to san francisco). they turned to up-tempo r&b-oriented tracks including sharon redd’s “can you handle it?” they looked towards europe and canada (where the backlash against disco was less severe) and integrated cuts from abba’s album the visitors as well as recordings such as “hit ‘n run lover” by carol jiani, “step by step” by peter griffin, “feels like i’m in love” by kelly marie, “don’t stop the train” by phyllis nelson, “hot leather” by the passengers and “the hills of katmandu” by tantra. conscious that they were the progeny of the white gay djs and dancers who helped popularise disco, they also continued to play a significant proportion of disco and late disco classics, including cut glass’s “without your love”, jimmy ruffin’s “hold on to my love”, marlena shaw’s “touch me in the morning” and voyage’s “souvenirs” among the most popular. the mix grew out of the matrix of 1970s new york dance, which foregrounded sonically polycultural sounds, even in settings that were tightly defined demographically. that applied to the tenth floor, where the african american dj ray yeates drew on cuts by outfits such as the equals and the staple singers, and also flamingo, where michael fesco employed the puerto rican richie rivera to offset howard merritt’s sweeter, more melodic selections with rumbling rhythm sections, esoteric jazz progressions and angular synthesizer workouts. at the saint, white along with steve williams maintained an ethnic presence in the booth—they were joined by the alternate lighting operator richard tucker, who was also black—and along with burgess, dodd and thode, white drew liberally on music recorded by african american musicians. thode was particularly notable for his embrace of jazz and r&b oriented selections, and in his personalised notepad of favourite records, titled “the bpm (beats per minute) bible”, listed groups such as donald byrd, chic, manu dibango, earth, wind & fire, first choice, aretha franklin, instant funk, taana gardner, gwen guthrie, isaac hayes, herbie hancock, nona hendrix, loleatta holloway, grace jones, chaka khan, gladys knight, kool & the gang, stefanie mills, northend, the pointer sisters, sharon redd, sister sledge and sparque, along with more obvious choices such as donna summer, sylvester and two tons o’ fun. all of these artists were just as likely to be heard in an ethnically mixed venue.18 the tastes of the djs were related to their cultural experiences, and thode along with white were grounded in the disco era, when r&b and funk were prominent influences, and when clubs and sounds were more likely to be both racially and sexually mixed than would prove to be the case in the more sedimented decade of the 1980s. at the annual black party (effectively a leather party) held in early 1981, thode demonstrated that his taste remained rooted in the ethos of the 1970s when he opened his set with records such as ozo’s mystical percussion-chant “anambra”, taana gardner’s heavy r&b groove “heartbeat” and sharon redd’s optimistic r&b workout “can you handle it?”, which he juxtaposed with “passion” by rod stewart and “magic” by olivia newton-john. dancecult 3(1)12 figure 1. roy thode djs at the saint’s halloween party, 31 october 1981. courtesy of stephen pevner. lawrence | the forging of a white gay aesthetic at the saint, 1980–84 13 maintaining the mix throughout the night, thode opened the fourth hour of his set with a rapped version of “walk the night” (by the bent boys), the talking heads’ africanist “i zimbra” and karen young’s r&b disco anthem “hot shot”, which he followed with the playful, bubbly “feels like i’m in love” by kelly marie.19 the extent to which thode’s selections overlapped with those of levan and mancuso is elided by buckland (2002: 68) and shapiro (2005: 74-6), who note that the saint’s soundtrack consisted of hi-nrg and new wave tracks, while brewster and broughton’s (1999: 312) argument that the saint djs “favoured a very particular sound, playing melody-soaked songs with a heavy kick-drum, richly orchestrated strings and sentimental lyrics” also underestimates the range of the venue’s early djs. pressures dramatic shifts in the makeup of the saint roster nevertheless augured an increased emphasis on the sounds of eurodisco, new wave and hi-nrg, which were associated with the historically contingent preferences of a subsection of white musicians and listeners. first, shockingly, thode died of a drug overdose in may 1982, and while nobody can be sure if he committed suicide, he had attempted to take his life previously and was feeling particularly low before the incident. thode’s close friend marsha stern, very possibly the last person to see him alive, notes that the dj had had a major argument with his boyfriend shortly before the overdose, and confirms the opinion of some of thode’s dj peers that he was also highly sensitive to the opinions of dancers.20 “being the dj made him the butt of everyone’s comments”, remarks stern. “he might have played brilliantly, but if the guy writing the editorial page in a magazine happened to have a lousy time, maybe because he had some bad drugs, he could be quick to hand out a lashing. there were also some nasty-ass queens who would write letters. roy even received hate mail. these people are nuts, but if you’re a little too sensitive, you can let that get to you”.21 mailman organised a tribute party, and then appears to have told leslie and white separately that he expected them to assume thode’s mantle as the main attraction at the saint (meaning the dj who would draw in the biggest crowds, and also provide the venue with a sense of aesthetic direction). both djs were given prominent roles when the club opened for its third season in the autumn, but the equilibrium was short-lived: leslie was handed a contract that secured his commitment to the saint, while white was told that her services were no longer required around the spring of 1983. “bruce just didn’t feel that i was doing my best”, she recalls. “i don’t know whether it was because i was playing what i wanted to play, or whether he thought i was lazy. he just fired me”. she adds: “the responsibility got to be too large for the reward. it got to be a pain in the ass. so i was more than willing to say, ‘whatever’”. the pressure was intense, not simply because of the size of the crowd, but also because individuals and clusters of individuals became increasingly ready to criticise specific dj performances by writing to mailman, or if they were part of the core group that knew dancecult 3(1)14 mailman personally and were the first to sign up to his membership scheme, speaking with him directly. “people measured success by how satisfied they were at the end of the night”, comments la torre. “had they had a peak experience? if they had, they went home happy. if they didn’t then they blamed the dj. i am not certain people actually meant it; they were not critical enough or observant enough of why sometimes it happened and why sometimes it didn’t. but i heard it from everybody. it was just the thing to say”. mailman respected his djs, but depended on the financial support of his heavily mythologized a-list membership, and having benefited from the critical judgement that the saint was superior to flamingo, he began to present letters of complaint to djs who were perceived to have had an off-night and asked for an explanation in order to protect his venue’s status. as long as the saint came out “smelling like a rose”, mailman would back the dj, comments white. but repeated complaints could lead to a dj being struck off the roster, and before mailman sacked white he asked her to monitor wayne scott, who was judged to be unpredictable; at the end of his final set, scott played the resonant “town without pity” by gene pitney. george cadenas experienced an even more abrupt ending when he played “white rabbit” by grace slick and the great society at the peak of a party and witnessed the record to fall flat. “it didn’t happen, and that was the end of him”, recalls merritt, who concluded that playing to the best of his ability was no longer sufficient, and took to calling up drug dealers to find out what had been selling in the run-up to the weekend so he could tailor his selections accordingly. “if you had a bad night you never got asked back”, adds merritt. “one disk jockey might play two saturdays, and if the second night wasn’t so good, the inner circle would go to bruce, and the dj wouldn’t be booked the next month”. leslie and sherman insist that mailman didn’t want his djs to play a narrower and safer range of records, and although merritt perceived him to be clamping down on artistic freedom when he asked them to start preparing playlists in advance, the owner apparently believed the strategy would encourage the introduction of a broader range of sounds than might have been the case if djs responded only to the immediate demands of the crowd. the favour shown to someone like shaun buchanan supports leslie’s position, as do off-the-record conversations in which the owner would rally against the relative conservatism of some of his djs. nevertheless, the value attributed to the letters of complaint could encourage djs to frame their risks within a specific horizon, and the unceremonious sacking of cadenas, scott and white increased the impression that performances were being surveilled. the precise relationship between thode’s death and the letters of complaint must remain unknown, yet across 1983 and 1984, djs tailored their selections with increasing precision to the expectations of a crowd, which hankered for an arc of seamless intensification, and favoured sounds that were heavily electronic, rhythmically monosyllabic, harmonically adventurous and high tempo because those elements enhanced their perceived journey into a collective parallel consciousness. lawrence | the forging of a white gay aesthetic at the saint, 1980–84 15 figure 2. poster for the white party, 20 february 1983, featuring robbie leslie. courtesy of stephen pevner. dancecult 3(1)16 aesthetic of whiteness “after roy, new djs came in with new flavours”, notes stern. “michael fierman didn’t have as much of an r&b flavour to his music, and nor did michael jorba. michael would play omd, more rockish stuff, more heady stuff, and so there was a different complexion to the music”. she adds: “alan dodd, howard merritt, robbie [leslie] and to a certain extent jim burgess were known for being more white-sounding compared to richie rivera and roy [thode]. but all of those djs played a lot more r&b than some of the newer djs”.22according to sherman, buchanan and parsons pioneered the playing of ultra-fast dance tracks that were rock rather than disco-tinged, including “that’s good” by devo, “white wedding” by billy idol, “now you’re mine” by giorgio moroder with helen terry, “twist of fate” by olivia newton-john, “city of night” by rational youth, “dancing in the dark” by bruce springsteen, “jump” by van halen and “holding out for a hero” by bonnie tyler, along with new wave tracks by the associates, blancmange, china crisis, the comateens, a flock of seagulls, the lotus eaters, orchestral manoeuvres in the dark and spandau ballet. other popular import tracks included “la noche (the night)” by azul y negro and “come and get your love” by lime. from 1983 onwards, saint djs also started to play european hi-nrg tracks such as “so many men, so little time” by miquel brown and “high energy” by evelyn thomas (the death of patrick cowley from aids in 1982 having slowed the output on the west coast). the point wasn’t that these records were “white” so much as they weren’t counter-balanced by records that suggested a complementary set of cultural allegiances, and across 1983 and 1984 saint djs played very few if any records that could be heard at the garage. if that also confirms that levan selected equally few tracks that could be heard at the saint, the garage was nevertheless less isolated than its second avenue counterpart because levan’s tastemaking role extended beyond the black gay network, whereas saint spinners didn’t appeal beyond the white gay scene. for sure, elements of the narrowing saint aesthetic could be heard outside of the white gay network, and english new wave was played heavily at spots such as danceteria, which were inappropriately labelled rock-dance clubs. however, djs such as mark kamins (perhaps the most influential selector at danceteria) weren’t taking their cues from the saint, and they also steered clear of the high tempo selections that saint djs would play between 2:00–6:00 am. an increasingly prominent figure during 1983, fierman maintains the “unification of the room” was his “main goal”, and along with other spinners he would maintain a steady energy until, usually around two or three in the morning, he would introduce the first of a series of anthems that would generate a mini-surge from the basement and the peripheral areas onto the floor. after that, he would punctuate his selections with additional “anthems” that would generate “evanescent convergences” in which everyone would “feel connected”.23 barry walters, a mudd club and danceteria regular who went to the saint as well as the paradise garage for the first time in 1983, was struck by the uniformity of the aesthetic. “larry and mark kamins and justin strauss and anita sarko didn’t mix smoothly and they lawrence | the forging of a white gay aesthetic at the saint, 1980–84 17 also brought a lot of different styles into the mix”, he recalls. “at the saint the mixes were much smoother and the variations between the records were almost infinitesimal. it was the first time i encountered a style of djing where one record was only slightly different from the record i’d just heard”.24 la torre was keenly aware of the reason for the manicured smoothness of the style. “even though the records might sound repetitive, that was just because the dj wanted to make the moment last”, comments the dancer. “the djs would drag the same beat for what seemed like a very long time, just to maintain that feeling, that peak experience”. however, la torre adds that by 1986 the sound had become “so white” and “defined” it began to turn him off. “i was not pleased with the music, and the vibe was becoming just a little too chemical”, he recalls. “it was not really soulful and it didn’t have that latin or black beat. they had distilled it so much the sound became boring by 1986”. the distillation process assumed its shape across 1983 and 1984, and when mario z (1984) interviewed leslie for the new york native in march 1984, the dj acknowledged that the saint sound had indeed started to congeal. “music has evolved but new york’s gay market has faithfully held on to the romantic period of disco, which was 1978 through 1980”, the dj commented (z 1984: 21, 24). “while we’ve all been dancing to that, we haven’t noticed that there are a lot of records being produced that over the past couple of years we’ve ignored because they haven’t fit into the mold that the audience has demanded”. by this point, leslie had emerged as the venue’s pre-eminent draw, and in a june 1983 interview with the spinner the saint cashier jan carl park (park 1983: 36) made much of his pre-eminent appeal. strangely reticent in his interview with z, leslie emphasised the need for aesthetic renewal, and argued he couldn’t “remain stationary”, even though some members resented his “pushing ahead”, because if he did “everyone is going to wake up and find that they’re terribly bored”. having started to play at the saint during the 1983–84 season, sherman drew on records that were deemed to be funky, including “padlock” by gwen guthrie, “clouds” by chaka khan, “square biz” by tina marie, “white lines” by melle mel, “you don’t know” by serious intention and “no favors” by tempers, and he also pitched down anything that ran at 136 bpm+ because “it made some of the records that were really bad sound a bit less cheesy”. “it’s sort of a myth that all anybody wanted to hear were things like ‘heaven must have sent you’ by bonnie pointer or ‘tripping on the moon’ by cerrone”, he argues. then again, sherman notes that he owed his position to the fact that mailman “liked the fact i was not afraid to play ‘unusual things’, even though some of the crowd might not like them”.25 leslie, meanwhile, sought to renew the saint’s aesthetic by introducing new wave tracks alongside the more refined end of hi-nrg and italian dance imports, which he continued to pepper with classic disco. but looking back, he notes: “overall we were walking on a cliff edge musically at the saint and product was running scarcer by the week. i felt a feeling of imminent disaster”.26 the shift towards a white-identified aesthetic coincided with wider shifts in identity politics, which proposed that marginalised citizens should act not as self-interested individuals but instead within like-minded groups. growing out of the countercultural dancecult 3(1)18 movements of the 1960s, and refined when the black lesbian feminist group the combahee river collective (1977) published a statement of aims that reflected on their common material experiences and objectives in 1977, identity politics challenged the idea that history should be driven by internally cohesive nations. immanuel wallerstein (1983: 159) drew attention to the shift when he remarked on the way people were beginning to seek the protection of groups that were deemed to be both equal in status yet also particular in composition, and his argument sheds light on the saint. after all, the poster for the opening night party featured a cyborg-like figure of st. sebastian with lasers shooting out of his fingertips and eyes, and therefore depicted the saint dancer as a figure of persecution, righteousness and beauty who could experience redemption and transcendence through the assertion of his homosexual identity on the dance floor (and this before aids was reported in the media). following the turbulence of the 1982–83 season, the 1983–84 season might have marked the moment when the membership acquired a settled sense of itself. and over time, the infrastructure of the venue also appears to have exerted a cumulative influence on the contours of the music, with djs increasingly tuned to the ease with which smooth, shiny, futuristic sounds complemented the contours of the building. dancers and spinners proceeded to coalesce around a sound that was so distinctive it couldn’t be heard in any parallel dance milieu. figure 3. liberation at the saint, as depicted in a publicity poster, 3 july 1983. courtesy of stephen pevner. lawrence | the forging of a white gay aesthetic at the saint, 1980–84 19 consumer culture and aids the marked acceleration of consumer culture during the 1980s—which culminated in “hyperconsumption” (ritzer 1999)—also enabled people who enjoyed relatively easy access to cash or credit to experience and shape their identity through the practice of buying objects or experiences in a way that was historically unprecedented. this articulation of consumer-identity was particularly marked at the saint, where the enormous investment that went into the development necessitated high entry prices. the saint was therefore characteristic of what arjun appadurai (1996: 115) describes as the 1980s rupture with the preceding decade, inasmuch as mailman’s venue embodied a dramatic break in terms of scope, expense, ambition, infrastructure and price with flamingo and 12 west. consequently the saint suggested an at least partial shift in the framework of the dance floor experience from one of participation to one of consumption, for while venues needed to cover their costs, the much higher entry price at the saint brought this relationship to the fore. the dance experience shifted accordingly from a communal activity that relied on a necessary financial contribution to one that raised a series of customer expectations. when those expectations were not met—because, perhaps, a dj didn’t play the right record at the right moment—complaints were raised in the register of the consumer who believes that money should be able to purchase an object or experience that is of equivalent value, and that some form of redress should follow disappointment. in response, mailman introduced a range of strategies that, whether intended or not, had the effect of defining the saint product more rigorously. the fragmentation and commodification of the wider music scene in new york accentuated the uniqueness-bordering-on-isolation of mailman’s venue. across the period saint spinners received fewer and fewer offers to play in alternative spots, and leslie expressed his regret at this development in his interview with the new york native (park 1983: 37) in june 1983. “gay music is a very specialized sound, and once you become fluent with it you lose contact with all the other things that are going on musically”, he noted. “you tend to get a little too narrow. that is the benefit of playing at a black club or a straight club: broadening yourself ”. in fact “gay music” could coincide with music recorded by african americans, as levan demonstrated on a weekly basis at the paradise garage, and leslie had himself drawn regularly on the kind of music that was being played in black and latin clubs when he started djing in the late 1970s. in addition to playing records by the likes of ashford & simpson, first choice, gloria gaynor, loleatta holloway, grace jones, eddie kendricks, love unlimited orchestra, the o’jays, harold melvin & the bluenotes, diana ross, sister sledge, the three degrees, the trammps, two tons o’ fun and barry white regularly, leslie made jimmy ruffin’s “hold on to my love” his signature anthem. yet leslie was less drawn to post-disco african american music, which sounded funkier, rougher and relatively downtempo, and the rupture became marked across 1983. “we resisted the format change in the new york market”, he comments. “the boys liked their r&b, but preferred it to be more soulful and philly-influenced. with the exception of just dancecult 3(1)20 a few isolated tracks, the new sound just wasn’t ‘pretty’ enough for them. it was too ‘raw’ and stripped down”. 27 convinced that the garage was a much more promising place to test new music, and also that hi-nrg would never sell domestically, record company promoters who had besieged flamingo and 12 west during the 1970s disengaged with the saint. in turn, billboard calculated that hi-nrg didn’t deserve a great deal of coverage, and dance chart compiler and reporter brian chin proceeded to take his cues from “black djs” and a “token representation of fire island gay djs” because the latter group was “playing to no discernible effect to the rest of the industry”. he adds: “i had a very retrograde attitude of saint music, and i was wrong not to recognize it. but i was fighting to create a context in which club music still had a place in the music industry”.28 the foreign location of the record companies that were releasing hi-nrg also meant that in contrast to dj-remixers such as jim burgess and tom savarese, who stamped their imprint on an array of high profile domestic disco releases during the 1970s, and also junior vasquez, who would go on to become an influential house remixer in the early 1990s, leslie and his peers weren’t able to establish an equivalent studio foothold from which they could reshape the sound of music. the acceleration of the aids epidemic across the early 1980s entrenched the saint crowd’s sense of its own specificity and isolation still further. identified in 1981, named in 1982, categorised as an epidemic in 1983, and linked to the virus that would be named hiv in 1984, aids hit the saint more intensely than any other dance venue because a high proportion of its dancers engaged in unprotected promiscuous sex. the promiscuity had been allowed if not encouraged by the venue, where dancers would elope to an unpoliced upstairs balcony to engage in sex. aids was even nicknamed “saint’s disease” (shilts 1987: 149) early on because of the marked proliferation of the disease among mailman’s membership. initially the saint crowd carried on as if the disease was an unpleasant mutation of other pernicious but usually non-fatal sexually-transmitted diseases that had circulated in the gay male community with increasing preponderance across the 1970s, and an early fundraiser held at the venue was criticised for directing the bulk of the proceeds to the cost of staging the event. but across the 1983–84 season the threat of the disease became better understood, dancers started to change their habits, and a siege mentality began to take hold when gay campaigners criticised the governmental response to the crisis for being too slow while attempting to deflect the rise in homophobic hate on the part of moral majority representatives.29 within this context, the pre-aids sound of disco came to embody a nostalgic moment in which unprotected sex didn’t carry the threat of death, even if its recycling added force to the argument that the saint was trapped in time. for these and other reasons, music industry reps might have disengaged even more than they would have done in other circumstances. “because all the early victims of aids were gay, white males, it was no longer considered ‘cool’ by straight people in the domestic record industry to dance in gay, white clubs”, argues sherman. “it was definitely homophobia, although perfectly understandable since nobody knew what it was, where it came from, or how you could ‘catch’ it, and there was a bit of reverse-racism thrown in for good measure. lawrence | the forging of a white gay aesthetic at the saint, 1980–84 21 hanging with white gay males was definitely not sexy by 1983”.30 if the white gay community’s disengagement from the concerns of other groups in the countercultural coalition left it more isolated politically than would have been the case if those early affiliations had been maintained, responsibility for the drift also lies elsewhere, for while white gay men might have been slow to engage with civil rights and the concerns of black gay men across the 1970s, the leaders of the african american community were also reluctant to address the problem of black homophobia along with the wider need to campaign for gay civil rights. the saint remained the most homogeneous of all of new york’s clubbing communities of the early 1980s, and the venue’s lack of engagement with sonic and social diversity in the post-1983 period left its membership more vulnerable and stranded than it might have been when the aids crisis spiralled. several factors led to the weakening of the demographic and aesthetic convergence around whiteness, gayness and masculinity that had been forged across the 1983–84 season. first, the decimation of his membership by aids across the second half of the 1980s prompted mailman to reduce the cost of entry in order to boost numbers, and as a result a younger, less economically privileged group of dancers who had less of an affinity with classic disco and were more open to new sounds started to head to the venue. second, mailman closed the saint in 1988 not only because it had become much more difficult to fill the floor, but also because inflation in the real estate market (which paralleled the rise of the stock market) meant that this was the best way for him to pay off his investors. third, the diminution of the crowd along with the added cost of opening a new venue prompted future owners to develop less expensive, less tightly controlled clubs, which in turn undermined the likelihood that the remainder of the “a-list” would find an equivalent home. finally, saint djs (aside from sherman) had ignored the flow of house music from chicago to new york across 1985–88 because they judged the sound to be “too rough” or “too black”, but across those four years the sound established itself as the irrefutable successor-genre to disco in new york as well as many european cities, and when junior vasquez championed a hard, tribal variation of the sound at the sound factory between 1989–95, he carried a significant proportion of the surviving saint membership with him. influence the shifting contours of the white gay dance milieu across the post-1988 period shouldn’t be allowed to obscure the originality, power and influence of the saint. moreover, while house music would go on to become the dominant sound of dance in many countries during the 1990s, the genre failed to break out of the club milieu with anything like the force of 1970s disco in the us, whereas the hi-nrg sound popularized at the saint was picked up much more readily. the commercial success of hi-nrg might have weakened the cultural capital of the saint, yet the popularity of the sound remains an indicator of the venue’s capacity to, if not generate new trends, then at least align itself with their emergence. in addition, while the infrastructure of mailman’s venue was effectively irreproducible, the saint attracted notable numbers of dancers from other states in the us as well as europe, dancecult 3(1)22 and ian levine (to quote one example) has gone on to recount (brewster 1999) how he attempted to replicate the saint’s musical agenda at heaven, which was arguably the leading gay nightspot in london during the 1980s and 1990s (in a tangential move, the owners of the ministry of sound would model their venue on the paradise garage). more broadly, saint djs were among the first to prioritize a style of djing that emphasized the seamless linking of tracks that differed only slightly in terms of their aesthetic content, and this style would become the dominant practice in house culture, in which djs broke with the practice of levan and mancuso, as well as figures such as afrika bambaataa (the roxy) and jellybean benitez (the funhouse), who developed a pluralistic style that could lead them to juxtapose contrasting tracks. even if the saint djs didn’t directly inspire the broader shift to the infinite aesthetic of “house music all night long”—and their early disengagement from house indicates that they didn’t—their forging of a milieu that brought together sonic repetition, smooth mixing and drug consumption was anticipatory if not visionary. that the saint helped establish an early version of the kind of trance-oriented seamlessness that would become so popular in club and rave circuits also indicates that the assumed influence of levan on contemporary dance culture requires a more nuanced analysis. as it is, the saint djs have for the most part drifted into historical anonymity, with the part exception of robbie leslie. if their profile might have been higher had they matched levan’s partial embrace of house, the coincidence of a complex range of contingent circumstances explains why such a move was always unlikely. endnotes 1 see bill brewster and frank broughton (1999), fiona buckland (2002), matthew collin with john godfrey (1997), kai fikentscher (2000), sheryl garratt (1998), ulf poschardt (1998), simon reynolds (1998) and peter shapiro (2005). brewster and broughton, buckland and shapiro devote some space to the saint, but restrict their account of the djs to a paragraph at most. the historians of us gay culture clendinen and nagourney (1999) provide a rare reference to the saint (1999: 446-7) yet focus on the club’s infrastructure and membership regulations. charles kaiser (1997: 283) references the saint (but not its djs) in passing. i chart larry levan’s playing career in detail in my first monograph, love saves the day: a history of american dance music culture, 1970–79. i pick up the story in my third monograph, which is provisionally titled life and death on the new york dance floor: a history, 1980–84, forthcoming with duke university press. see also mel cheren (2000) for a personal recollection of levan’s life. 2 although not all are quoted directly, i am grateful to brian chin, michael fesco, john giove, stuart lee, jorge la torre, robbie leslie, howard merritt, mann parrish, terry sherman, marsha stern, barry walters and sharon white for agreeing to be interviewed, some of them several times over. i’d also like to thank stephen pevner of the saint-at-large for providing access to the saint archive’s collection of posters, dj schedules, in-house journals and digital files of dj sets by shaun buchanan, jim burgess, robbie leslie, howard merritt, terry sherman and roy thode, which informed much of this article. i’m also grateful to marsha lawrence | the forging of a white gay aesthetic at the saint, 1980–84 23 stern for providing additional recordings of roy thode’s dj sets, and to conor lynch for providing additional information on his own collection of recorded dj sets from the saint. 3 according to inflationdata.com, inflation from october 1980 to october 2010 totals 157.91%, so the $125 membership would have cost $322.38 in 2010, the $10 entry for members $25.79, and the $18 charge for non-members $46.42. the cost of a new (rather than a renewed) membership rose to $200 for the 1981–82 season. 4 author telephone interview with sharon white, 16 march 2009. 5 author email interview with terry sherman, 4 december 2010. 6 author interview with jorge la torre, new york, 18 february 2009. all subsequent quotes from la torre are drawn from this interview. 7 a range of figures are quoted in claudia cohen and cyndi stivers (1980), nathan fain (1980) and jan hodenfield (1980). the quote is drawn from an author interview with terry sherman, 4 december 2010. 8 author email interview with terry sherman, 4 december 2010. 9 author telephone interview with robbie leslie, 23 october 2008. 10 although her focus isn’t the dance floor dynamic, fiona buckland (2002) provides a useful account of the saint as a space of queer affirmation through an interview with a member called tito. 11 author telephone interview with howard merritt, 21 january 2009. all subsequent quotes from merritt are drawn from this interview. 12 author telephone interview with marsha stern, 19 november 2008. 13 sherman notes that parsons was regularly asked to play big parties including “opening night”, “halloween”, “new year’s eve”, the “black party” and “closing night”. leslie was the regular dj at the “white party”. a range of djs would step in for “night people”, “christmas”, “land of make believe”, “disco day”, “summer opening”, “summer closing” and the memorial day party, which took on different titles. 14 jeff dupre unpublished interview with michael fierman, no date. courtesy of stephen pevner. minor edits introduced. 15 author telephone interview with robbie leslie, 23 october 2008. 16 author telephone interview with sharon white, 30 april 2009. all subsequent quotes from white are drawn from this interview. 17 a detailed analytical account of the disco sucks movement can be found in lawrence (2003: 363-401). see also, shapiro (2005: 226-32). 18 marsha stern holds the original copy of roy thode’s “the bpm (beats per minute) bible”. 19 roy thode set at the black party, the saint, held in early 1981. mp3 recording provided by marsha stern. 20 thode appealed for dancers to be more tolerant of the saint djs in an article he published (thode 1982) in the first edition of stardust, the saint’s in-house journal. 21 author telephone interview with marsha stern, 15 december 2008. 22 author telephone interview with marsha stern, 19 november 2008. 23 michael fierman interview with dupre for an unfinished documentary about the saint, undated. the original transcript is held by stephen pevner. a copy of the transcript is held by the author. dancecult 3(1)24 24 author telephone interview with barry walters, 29 september 2009. 25 author email interview with terry sherman, 20 april 2009. 26 author email interview with robbie leslie, 7 april 2009. 27 author email interview with robbie leslie, 15 march 2006. 28 author interview with brian chin, new york city, 9 february 1998. 29 see, for example, larry kramer’s article “1,112 and counting” in the new york native, 14 march 1983. while some aids activists in the gay men’s health crisis deemed kramer too contentious, in part because of his repeated critique of what he perceived to be excessive gay hedonism, the article is also seen as a key moment in the raising of aids awareness. 30 author email interview with terry sherman, 8 april 2009. references appadurai, arjun. 1996. 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“heartbeat”. west end records (vinyl): wes-22132. <http://www.discogs.com/taana-gardner-heartbeat/release/77606> cut glass. 1980. “without your love”. 20th century fox records (vinyl): tcd-103-dj. <http://www.discogs.com/cut-glass-without-your-love/release/411974> grandmaster and melle mel. 1983. “white lines”. sugar hill records (vinyl): sh 465. <http://www.discogs.com/grandmaster-melle-mel-white-lines-dont-dont-do-it/ release/940478> griffin, peter. 1980. “step by step”. electrola (vinyl): 1c 052-46 249 yz. <http://www.discogs.com/peter-griffin-step-by-step/release/1339959> guthrie, gwen. 1983. “padlock”. garage records (vinyl): itg 2001. <http://www.discogs.com/gwen-guthrie-padlock/release/29296> idol, billy. 1982. “white wedding”. chrysalis (vinyl): as 1699. <http://www.discogs.com/billy-idol-white-wedding-live/release/2237068> jiani, carol. 1981. “hit ‘n run lover”. matra records (vinyl): w-12044. <http://www.discogs.com/carol-jiani-hit-n-run-lover-all-the-people-of-the-world/ release/1621693> kane, madleen. 1979. “secret love affair”. pye records (vinyl): 12p 5007. <http://www.discogs.com/madleen-kane-secret-love-affair/release/695138> khan, chaka. 1980. “clouds”. warner bros. records (vinyl): k 17617t. <http://www.discogs.com/chaka-khan-clouds/release/328334> lime. 1982. “come and get your love”. unidisc (vinyl): spec-1206. <http://www.discogs.com/lime-come-and-get-your-love/release/2764582> marie, kelly. 1979. “feels like i’m in love”. calibre + plus! (vinyl): plusl 1. <http://www.discogs.com/kelly-marie-feels-like-im-in-love/release/399509> marie, tina. 1981. “square biz”. motown (vinyl): 12tmg 1236. <http://www.discogs.com/teena-marie-square-biz/release/211302> moroder, giorgio, with helen terry. 1984. “now you’re mine”. virgin (vinyl): vs 710-12. <http://www.discogs.com/giorgio-moroder-with-helen-terry-now-youre-mine/ release/447459> nelson, phyllis. 1981. “don’t stop the train”. tropique records (vinyl): td 104. <http://www.discogs.com/phyllis-nelson-dont-stop-the-train/release/437668> newton-john, olivia. 1980. “magic”. jet records (vinyl): jet p 196. <http://www.discogs.com/olivia-newton-john-magic/release/977732> ———. 1983. “twist of fate”. mca records (vinyl): l33-1150. <http://www.discogs.com/olivia-newton-john-twist-of-fate/release/1093193> ozo. 1976. “anambra”. djm records (vinyl): djt 10764. <http://www.discogs.com/ozo-anambra/release/318739> passengers. 1981. “hot leather”. moby dick records (vinyl): mdr-1206. <http://www.discogs.com/passengers-hot-leather/release/173698> pitney, gene. 1961. “town without pity”. his master’s voice (vinyl): 45-pop 952. <http://www.discogs.com/gene-pitney-town-without-pity-air-mail-special-delivery/ release/1756713> http://www.discogs.com/taana-gardner-heartbeat/release/77606 http://www.discogs.com/cut-glass-without-your-love/release/411974 http://www.discogs.com/grandmaster-melle-mel-white-lines-dont-dont-do-it/release/940478 http://www.discogs.com/grandmaster-melle-mel-white-lines-dont-dont-do-it/release/940478 http://www.discogs.com/gwen-guthrie-padlock/release/29296 http://www.discogs.com/billy-idol-white-wedding-live/release/2237068 http://www.discogs.com/carol-jiani-hit-n-run-lover-all-the-people-of-the-world/release/1621693 http://www.discogs.com/carol-jiani-hit-n-run-lover-all-the-people-of-the-world/release/1621693 http://www.discogs.com/madleen-kane-secret-love-affair/release/695138 http://www.discogs.com/chaka-khan-clouds/release/328334 http://www.discogs.com/lime-come-and-get-your-love/release/2764582 http://www.discogs.com/kelly-marie-feels-like-im-in-love/release/399509 http://www.discogs.com/teena-marie-square-biz/release/211302 http://www.discogs.com/phyllis-nelson-dont-stop-the-train/release/437668 http://www.discogs.com/olivia-newton-john-twist-of-fate/release/1093193 http://www.discogs.com/ozo-anambra/release/318739 http://www.discogs.com/passengers-hot-leather/release/173698 http://www.discogs.com/gene-pitney-town-without-pity-air-mail-special-delivery/release/1756713 http://www.discogs.com/gene-pitney-town-without-pity-air-mail-special-delivery/release/1756713 lawrence | the forging of a white gay aesthetic at the saint, 1980–84 27 pointer, bonnie. 1979. “heaven must have sent you”. motown (vinyl): m 00020 d1. <http://www.discogs.com/bonnie-pointer-heaven-must-have-sent-you/release/424445> rational youth. 1983. “city of night”. rams horn records (vinyl): ramsh 12-3187. <http://www.discogs.com/rational-youth-city-of-night/release/226105> redd, sharon. 1981. “can you handle it?” prelude records (vinyl): prl d 611-bs. <http://www.discogs.com/sharon-redd-you-got-my-love-can-you-handle-it/ master/118211> ripple. 1977. “the beat goes on and on”. salsoul records (vinyl): sg 2057. <http://www.discogs.com/ripple-the-beat-goes-on-and-on-facts-of-life/release/7473> ruffin, jimmy. 1980. “hold on to my love”. rso records (vinyl): 2394 258. <http://www.discogs.com/jimmy-ruffin-sunrise/release/1355589> serious intention. 1984. “you don’t know”. easy street records (vinyl): ezs-7512. <http://www.discogs.com/serious-intention-you-dont-know/release/605355> shaw, marlena. 1979. “touch me in the morning”. columbia (vinyl): as 678. <http://www.discogs.com/marlena-shaw-touch-me-in-the-morning/release/879538> springsteen, bruce. 1984. “dancing in the dark”. columbia (vinyl): 44 05028. <http://www.discogs.com/bruce-springsteen-dancing-in-the-dark/release/921430> stewart, rod. 1978 “da ya think i’m sexy? (special disco mix)”. warner bros. records (vinyl): wbsd 8727.<http://www.discogs.com/ rod-stewart-da-ya-think-im-sexy-special-disco-mix/release/2193304> ———. 1980. “passion”. warner bros. records (vinyl): pro-a-921. <http://www.discogs.com/rod-stewart-passion/release/412030> talking heads. 1979. “i zimbra”. sire records company (vinyl): pro-a-846. <http://www.discogs.com/talking-heads-i-zimbra/release/791875> tantra. 1979. “the hills of katmandu”. philips (vinyl): 9198 334. <http://www.discogs.com/tantra-hills-of-katmandu-wishbone/release/212461> tempers. 1984. “no favors”. mca records (vinyl): mca-23506. <http://www.discogs.com/temper-no-favors/release/485753> thomas, evelyn. 1984. “high energy”. record shack records (vinyl): sohot 18. <http://www.discogs.com/evelyn-thomas-high-energy/release/137040> tyler, bonnie. 1984. “holding out for a hero”. cbs (vinyl): ta 4251. <http://www.discogs.com/bonnie-tyler-holding-out-for-a-hero/release/645293> van halen. 1983. “jump”. warner bros. records (vinyl): w 9384 (t). <http://www.discogs.com/van-halen-jump/release/503048> voyage. 1978. “souvenirs”. t.k. disco (vinyl): 117. <http://www.discogs.com/voyage-souvenirs-tahiti-tahiti/release/180896> weather girls. 1982. “it’s raining men”. columbia (vinyl): 44-03181. <http://www.discogs.com/weather-girls-its-raining-men/release/352519> wills, viola. 1982. “stormy weather”. sunergy (vinyl): sng-0001. <http://www.discogs.com/viola-wills-stormy-weather/release/345337> young, karen. 1978. “hot shot”. west end records (vinyl): wes 12111. <http://www.discogs.com/karen-young-hot-shot/release/79289> http://www.discogs.com/bonnie-pointer-heaven-must-have-sent-you/release/424445 http://www.discogs.com/rational-youth-city-of-night/release/226105 http://www.discogs.com/sharon-redd-you-got-my-love-can-you-handle-it/master/118211 http://www.discogs.com/sharon-redd-you-got-my-love-can-you-handle-it/master/118211 http://www.discogs.com/ripple-the-beat-goes-on-and-on-facts-of-life/release/7473 http://www.discogs.com/jimmy-ruffin-sunrise/release/1355589 http://www.discogs.com/serious-intention-you-dont-know/release/605355 http://www.discogs.com/marlena-shaw-touch-me-in-the-morning/release/879538 http://www.discogs.com/bruce-springsteen-dancing-in-the-dark/release/921430 http://www.discogs.com/rod-stewart-da-ya-think-im-sexy-special-disco-mix/release/2193304 http://www.discogs.com/rod-stewart-da-ya-think-im-sexy-special-disco-mix/release/2193304 http://www.discogs.com/rod-stewart-passion/release/412030 http://www.discogs.com/tantra-hills-of-katmandu-wishbone/release/212461 http://www.discogs.com/temper-no-favors/release/485753 http://www.discogs.com/evelyn-thomas-high-energy/release/137040 http://www.discogs.com/bonnie-tyler-holding-out-for-a-hero/release/645293 http://www.discogs.com/van-halen-jump/release/503048 http://www.discogs.com/voyage-souvenirs-tahiti-tahiti/release/180896 http://www.discogs.com/weather-girls-its-raining-men/release/352519 http://www.discogs.com/viola-wills-stormy-weather/release/345337 http://www.discogs.com/karen-young-hot-shot/release/79289 the diy careers of techno and drum 'n' bass djs in vienna dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 4(2): 48–66 issn 1947-5403 ©2011 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.02.03 “clubs aren’t like that”: discos, deviance and diegetics in club culture cinema simon a. morrison university of leeds (uk) abstract this article considers ways in which filmmakers have attempted to address the subject of electronic dance music culture on the big screen. in what ways have directors tried to visually represent edmc in fictional narratives? and to what extent have they been capable of capturing the recognisable elements of this phenomenon, by expressing its tropes and spirit in a plausible and credible fashion? is it possible to distil the energy of the dance floor and represent the actions, practices and attitudes of its participants for an arguably passive cinema audience? how, for instance, can a key component of this subcultural terrain—drug consumption—be effectively illustrated through the devices of the movie director? by providing textual analysis of two recent, and similarly titled, north american productions—ecstasy (dir. lux 2011) and irvine welsh’s ecstasy (dir. rob heydon 2012)—this account aims to describe, and critique, both the creative approaches and technical devices adopted to solve this artistic problem. with attention to the work of sarah thornton, stan beeler and simon reynolds, this study will also raise questions about authenticity and verisimilitude in an intermediary field in which the dance floor becomes the subject of the non-documentary storyteller and the focus of the camera lens. the article concludes that when a primarily sonic and social medium is re-configured in a visual format, the results, while superficially engaging and entertaining, struggle to capture the charged excitement of the nightclub, the inspirational potency of its soundtrack and, ultimately, the genuine experience of the individual clubgoer. keywords: edmc, cinema, rave, popularisation, diegesis, irvine welsh, house music, ecstasy, cult fiction, soundtrack feature article 49morrison | “clubs aren’t like that” simon morrison is currently researching a phd within the school of music at leeds university, looking at the way edmc has been represented in film, literature and the media. he has presented this research at a number of conferences and a chapter on the literary representation of djs will appear in the upcoming bloomsbury book, dj cultures in the mix. simon has reported on the nightclub scene for magazines such as mixmag and dj everywhere from beijing to kosovo, stories published as discombobulated in the uk and us by headpress. email: <samorrison70@gmail.com>. web: <http://www.padcom.co.uk>. introduction: horizontal dance floors and vertical screens the uk’s second summer of love in 1988 and associated rave culture created, according to matthew collin (2009: vii), “the most extraordinary entertainment form yet invented”. for many, raves seemed secret, magical places, devoted to the intensity—and perhaps the illusion—of the moment. so how, therefore, might you mediate that visceral experience, in terms of cinema or literature? how do you make objective sense of it all, when the chaos and beauty of the moment resists further reflection or contemplation? crucially, how might you capture the energy and movement of a nightclub for an (arguably) passive cinema audience? it is only now, with the benefits of time, hindsight and an expanding canon of both academic works, and cult film and literary texts, that serious attempts can be made to understand the last great subcultural movement of the 20th century, and the secondary cultural forms that seek to tell its story. i explore these questions by focusing on the transformation of a subculture—in this case, rave culture—from the apparent organic moment of its genesis to its development into something wholly other by way of this cultural production and distribution of knowledge. the mechanics of this process form a kind of creeping cultural osmosis, from niche to popular worlds. sarah thornton refers to this trajectory as the journey from “the private to the public sphere” (1995: 34), as rave culture emerges from the dark corners of the underground to the bright, projected lights (in this instance) of the high street multiplex, where the tropes and modes of this culture become more widely translated. although there have been many studies on the history of edmc and the subcultural implications of the rave scene in particular, there has been little consideration of its wider cultural implications. beeler’s dance, drugs and escape (2007) was a welcome attempt to address this issue, but suffers from the restrictions of a descriptive approach which does not allow for deeper, critical consideration. my research therefore seeks to address what sean nye (2011) has identified in dancecult as “a current lacuna in club culture scholarship—namely, the scarce critical-aesthetic engagement with filmic representations of edm culture”.1 in terms of methodology, this article will identify and then address the problems inherent in making filmic representations of edm culture by focusing on two films—both titled ecstasy. these films use club culture as context and therefore can be usefully compared and mailto:samorrison70@gmail.com http://www.padcom.co.uk dancecult 4(2)50 contrasted. both are principally canadian productions appearing over 2011–2012. for the sake of clarity, each film will be identified by reference to its director. the film based on an irvine welsh story will therefore be referenced as “heydon”,2 the other as “lux”.3 in terms of verisimilitude and diegesis, textual analysis will reveal a great deal about the tropes and modes of edmc film discourse. however, there are also challenges inherent to a purely textual approach and therefore in order to respond to the problems highlighted, the article also holds these cultural artifacts up against the interpretations of sarah thornton and simon reynolds to outline the gap beeler defines as “the dialectic relationship between the phenomenon and its artistic representations” (2007: 182). further, i use material from key personnel involved with both films to deconstruct the filmmaking process. everything begins with an e the warm throb of an electronic beat could be felt long before the second summer of love, and one need only consider saturday night fever (dir. john badham, 1977) to appreciate how club culture had already formed a suitable context for film. however, my research contends that in its nascent rave form, it formed the last of sociologist dick hebdige’s “spectacular subcultures” (1983: 97), with a latent homology formed of attitude and argot, music and fashion, dancing and drug consumption. from a basis of research and participant observation, the rave scene contained an implicit cultural and political agenda more evolved than that allowed by simon reynolds who argues, reductively, for the scene’s “sensations rather than truths, fascination rather than meaning” (reynolds in redhead, 1998: 91). the rebellion may have largely been a transcendental blending of the solipsistic and the hedonistic, and contained wholly within the parameters of the weekend, but in political terms… to party was the point. further, the homology of that party held together well enough to form a cohesive context for viable secondary representation. cinema has always been preoccupied with contemporaneous concerns, seeking to project our subconscious fears and desires. beyond these broader articulations of the subconscious, however, cinema is also interested in telling stories of the apparently nefarious, unknowable world of the subcultural underground. it follows, then, that the bright light of this spectacular subculture should, in turn, attract filmmakers—all keen, as indicated, to locate their narratives within the popular cultural landscape. and indeed, as the socio-cultural impact of this rave scene became clear, then edmc did indeed come onto the radar of both fiction and documentary filmmakers keen to use contemporary preoccupations as source material for their discourse, ultimately forming a recognised subgenre, a cult canon of “edmc films”. although undeniably a broad church, to roughly outline this topos it includes such films as human traffic (1999), groove (2000), sorted (2000), 51st state (2001), 24 hour party people (2002), berlin calling (2008), beyond the rave (2008) and weekender (2011). edmc encompasses a wide range of cultures and musical styles, however these films— from both sides of the atlantic, and from both the uk and continental europe—choose to centre broadly on the house music sound and architectural environment more associated with the rave scene. although the boundaries of these rather baggy edm cultures are quite 51morrison | “clubs aren’t like that” porous, taken together these film texts highlight the ongoing permeation of edmc itself, as a transnational, subcultural phenomenon. indeed, one might even argue for a subset of ibiza-based texts, including the comedic vehicle kevin & perry go large (2000), morvern callar (2002), it’s all gone pete tong (2004) and the as yet unreleased documentaries from puff daddy, and british actor jimi mistry’s and the beat goes on. to establish a starting position by which to consider the function of these film texts, let us turn to beeler, who argues: “club fictions have two important functions with regard to club culture and its aficionados; the first is to describe the subculture to the mainstream and the second is to allow the members of the subculture to celebrate their participation in ways other than clubbing” (2007: 25); in essence, a polarity between the subcultural voyeurs, and those already entrenched within the scene. for clarity let us refer to these two functions of film texts as beeler’s 1st and 2nd law. it is, i would argue, beeler’s 1st law that is the more pertinent. it is natural that clubbing films will be of interest to clubbers themselves, involved as they are in the primary activity. but it is this mechanic of cultural dissemination that contributes more broadly to the production of knowledge around edmc—not only cinematic, but literary and media-focused—extending to those outside inner circles. from scene to screen we have now outlined the subcultural environment with which this paper is concerned, and identified some examples of cinematic texts that use such terrain as their context. now let us focus a little more closely, to consider some of the problems that arise when making cinematic vehicles from club culture—that laudable, if loaded, desire to capture the loose energy of clubland in celluloid—before focusing even more closely on the two ecstasy films. analytically, there are really two approaches one might take. firstly, one might pull back to examine more broadly ideas of cultural production, and the context of the production of these film texts. although i do make arguments for the socio-historical importance of these films, and discuss their production and soundtrack budgets, i am unable within the scope of this article to analyse both the film texts, and their audience. in choosing an approach, therefore, i felt it more productive to focus on particular scenes, and let a deconstruction of those scenes tell the wider story. equally, my interest derives from the perspective of the dancefloor, of the cinema auditorium, and is therefore intuitive and empirical, rather than a more technical viewpoint that may have been obtained from behind the decks, or behind the camera. club culture itself very much represents a striving for that most problematic and elastic of concepts: authenticity. sarah thornton is particularly successful in defining the micro politics of authenticity in club cultures: music, media and subcultural capital. she explains: “i’ve come to conceive of ‘hipness’ as a form of subcultural capital” (1995: 11, emphasis in original) and to adopt this financial model in cultural terms, clubbers would certainly consider their subcultural bank accounts flush with such capital which, according to muggleton, is “obtained through being ‘in the know’ about what is ‘in’ or ‘out’ on the dancecult 4(2)52 subcultural scene” (thornton via muggleton, 2003: 9). in his article “authenticity as authentication”, allan moore moves this discourse forwards by incorporating the notion of subjectivity, arguing that authenticity is “interpreted by an engaged audience as investing authenticity in those acts and gestures” (2002: 214). in essence, it is the audience, not the text itself, that confers authenticity, and that is very much a mutable gift, dependent on the cognisance of the audience, whether participant or voyeur, in beeler’s terms. in essence, everyone’s perceptions of the scene are always mediated in some way, whether through flyers and magazine adverts, or indeed through these “secondary artistic phenomena” (beeler 2007: 153). as a direct consequence, for any film to succeed in terms of authenticity for a participatory audience—beeler’s 2nd law—it must render a particularly believable environment, notably in its key nightclub scenes. conversely, any slight divergence will quickly leave the film unbelievable, and therefore a failure, at least in terms of beeler’s 2nd law: a choice between agony or ecstasy for a participant-cognisant audience. in conversation, the haçienda dj graeme park—someone with a quarter of a century of experience in clubland—comments on the plurality of the club experience in his comments about the presentation of the new york nightclub studio 54, in the film 54 (dir. mark christopher 1998), as “amongst the worst club scenes i’ve ever seen in my life. you watch it thinking, clubs aren’t like that”.4 some of the more axiomatic issues inherent in rendering a clubbing scene in cinematic form are very helpfully highlighted by the director of the american film groove, greg harrison.5 in his dvd commentary, harrison pulls back the magic movie curtain to reveal himself in the more mundane robes of the wizard of oz, working the controls. there were, for instance, only 50 extras filmed for the club scenes, which take place over one night at a rave in san francisco, and although the director carefully blends different shots, their sparse numbers create issues in terms of a naturalistic representation of a warehouse rave scenario. to divert attention, harrison employs speed changes from 24 frames per second (fps) to 48fps to give a stylised, slowed down impression of the dancing and focuses on individuals, rather than groups. this technique was achieved manually, with the assistant camera personnel changing the camera aperture accordingly, to allow for more light. harrison created a so-called “spritz team”, on hand to add sweat to the extras, to give them the look of the glistening raver. most interestingly, harrison explains the need to stop the music entirely to allow for dialogue. to counter the disruption to the flow of the scene, a “sync dancer” was employed out of shot, listening to music through headphones, to keep a beat that the extras could follow in silence, almost as a kinetic metronome. next we must abandon all tenets of naturalism and instead move into a world of supernaturalism to consider the film beyond the rave (dir. matthias hoene 2008). beyond the rave is british horror company hammer’s take on the rave scene, which some might argue cashes in as drugsploitation, but actually stands as a statement about the ubiquity of the culture. the film details an illegal rave promoted by the undead—vampire promoters and blood-sucking djs. here, nightclub becomes abattoir, playing on the subcultural connectives of rave underground and supernatural underworld, both cultures concerned 53morrison | “clubs aren’t like that” principally with life after dark. the arrival of dawn means the end of party for the ravers; the end of immortality for the vampires. despite this rather preposterous proposal, the club scenes themselves are amongst the most successful and accomplished of any of the films listed, largely down to the efficacy of the art director chris rosewell and production designer alex lowde. the setting for the party scene is a warehouse in plumstead, east london, playing the part of a rural barn. however in terms of mise-en-scene, to turn the vacuous space into a believable rave, a dj booth is constructed from scaffolding, as well as podiums and the fixtures and fittings of a rave environment. in terms of the key club scene itself, the use of green lasers, firebreathers and the visual projections of the film’s visual jockey, are points of detail with which a clubbing audience would feel familiar, reinforcing the cinematic presentation of the rave experience. director matthias hoene employs wide shots to establish the context of the rave, along with pull backs and camera swoops to engender a sense of activity. in addition, hand-held cameras weave amongst the crowd to allow viewers to become immersed in the dance floor milieu. cremona (2004) usefully distinguishes between ludic and paidian styles of cultural performance, where a ludic performance is defined by an onstage activity, and paidian is much more an immersive, participatory event. the dance floor of a rave is a decidedly paidian, chaotic formation, something dj dave haslam describes as the “reaction between the music and the crowd” (in redhead 1998: 160); where, for thornton, the “‘liveness’ in club culture is displaced from the stage to the dancefloor” (1995: 29). to successfully translate that experience in visual terms, a director needs to enter that world, to get amongst the tangle of bodies and pile-up the shots in order to disentangle the linear and disorientate the viewer. perhaps more than anything, for the rave scenes to succeed their soundtrack must register. in beyond the rave, the beat of the music matches the pulse of the vein, blood flowing through the body like the mellifluous movement of dancers across the floor. to further engender this reach for an apparent authenticity, the producers turned to pete tong, a dj, producer and record label executive with great heritage in the music industry (his own name, in fact, is cockney rhyming slang for “wrong”, referenced for comic effect in the film it’s all gone pete tong). tong recalls the request from the film’s producers as a call for “really dark, cutting edge, electronic music”.6 in the judicious supply of hard, dark, techno beats, his choices—channeled via the actor playing the dj within the rave scenes—undoubtedly contributes to their overall effectiveness. as he goes on to detail in his explanation: “the wonderful thing about electronic music is that so much of it is filmic, and so much of it is crying out to be married to footage in a film”. the need for extras to populate these fictional dance floors is also foregrounded as an issue within this film. from the perspective of participant observation, this is an aspect i find especially interesting. i was an extra in the filming of the michael winterbottom film 24 hour party people (dir. michael winterbottom 2002) which, in part, details the rise of the rave scene in the northern english city of manchester, and i therefore enjoyed the rather peculiar ethnographic position of researching edmc in a club that was actually a film set; fictional fieldwork in the very insides of the movie machine.7 the actual haçienda dancecult 4(2)54 nightclub at the heart of the film had been only recently knocked down. in a sense, its demolition represents in architectural terms what subcultural theorists like reynolds refer to as a “post-rave fragment” (in redhead 1998: 85)—the dissolution of the homogenous and spectacular into the disjointed and postmodern—as the club was sold off, brick by brick. as a consequence of this architectural deconstruction, the film’s producers reconstructed the cavernous nightclub in a nearby warehouse. in the winterbottom film, details of architectural verisimilitude are used as rivets with which to construct the physical set. almost on a 1–1 scale, nearly everything was in the right place: the alcove seating, the balcony and perhaps most importantly… the bar, which was serving alcohol and certainly contributed to the “naturalistic” flow of the evening. the soundtrack to the party was supplied by actual haçienda djs—mike pickering and dave haslam—to further engender this sense of authenticity. as graeme park explained in our interview: “tv and film, i think, are generally not very good at getting club scenes done and that’s because people have to pretend they’re dancing to music, whereas in those 24hour party people scenes everyone was dancing to music”. the good, the bad and the ecstasy having used these previous films to identify some of the key problems inherent in the production of edmc cinematic discourse, let us now move on to consider, together, the ecstasy film texts. the fact that both films are canadian-financed productions and either in part (heydon) or entirely (lux) filmed in canada, highlights the very strange coincidence of their concurrent release.8 certainly, the connections highlight the on-going penetration of club culture within more dominant culture/s, servicing what redhead describes as “a young, cinema-going audience’s experience of the weekend” (2000: xxii), and this connection is only accentuated when you note the decidedly similar urls for the websites of the two films: http://www.ecstasymovie.com (heydon) and http://www.ecstasyfilm. com (lux). indeed in conversation with rob heydon, he explains that copyright conflicts with the lux project meant they ultimately had to change the name of their final project to irvine welsh’s ecstasy. 9 in narrative terms, both films demonstrate the discursive traits that haunt many edmc texts—the same parabolic storyline arc that carves the trajectory thomas pynchon famously described as gravity’s rainbow, in reference to v2 rockets. this arc maps the genesis, zenith and the nadir of the narrative: the anticipation… the actuality… the aftermath that orientates us through the story of the film. however, in itself this structure is also the journey of a night-out: going out… coming up… coming down. indeed, it is the story of club culture itself: the first flowering of the rave scene up to 1992… through the vainglorious commercial mutations of the 1990s… to a demise dom phillips (2009) very precisely pinpoints as 31 december 1999—the commercial club scene now bloated, solipsistic, mired in money and violence. kembrew mcloed, as with other commentators, links this parabolic journey with that of the (first) summer of love as “the subcultures of the rave scene (and their music) http://www.ecstasymovie.com http://www.ecstasyfilm.com http://www.ecstasyfilm.com 55morrison | “clubs aren’t like that” grew darker and more negative as the initial drug-enhanced utopianism wore off and the drugs and relations between ravers became more harsh” (2001: 64). although these films take place in an indistinct near-present they are certainly not focused, like weekender, on the pre-1992 nascent rave scene form, the “genesis” (a word that itself gave the name to one of the original main raves). however, as narratives moored in a post-rave context and located in legal nightclubs rather than illegal warehouses, they are nevertheless mindful that, to function as subcultural narratives, they have to cohere to certain cultural signifiers—what middleton refers to, in rather reductive terms, as the “different elements making up a socio-cultural whole” (1990: 9) that can be quickly understood as signposts by both audience and filmmaker. hebdige discusses “subcultural stylistic ensembles”—subcultural clusters—formed of “those empathetic combinations of dress, dance, argot, music, etc” (1983: 101) that provide what middleton refers to (again reductively) as “structural resonances” (1990: 9). consider the titles of the films highlighted previously—groove, sorted, weekender—all of these phrases lifted directly from clubland, utilising the argot of the dance floor to allow for what saussure describes as language that “blends with the life of society” (in hebdige, 1983: 90) or, for thornton, “cryptic shorthand, innuendo and careful omission” (1995: 146). clubbers are used to linguistic nods, to semiotic winks. in the film sorted, for instance, the “straight” character carl has to divine, then define, what is even meant by the word “sorted”. as he drifts further into the world of the nightclub and its sleazy semiotics he begins to understand, as his stock of subcultural capital rises. in semiotic terms therefore, even the titles of these two ecstasy films build bridges of experience and understanding between creator and consumer, and it must be assumed there is an agenda—at turns both provocative and promotional—behind the choice of the word “ecstasy” as the title for a film. first patented as methylenedioxymethamphetamine (mdma), street level marketers realised they needed a more immediate and powerful street name and settled on, in the words of collin, “a seductive new brand name—the word ecstasy” (2009: 28). such is the ubiquity of edmc that the potential audience for these two films—the so-called “chemical generation” (redhead 2000: xxi)—would be well aware of this connotation of the word, beyond its dictionary definition. there is therefore a level of assumption that to even pay your money and enter the cinema we are “in the know”, in thornton’s terms, the title functioning as codified shorthand for that audience, a signifier of the film’s subcultural content and intent. however, if we now return to the two films, the use of the word “ecstasy” becomes somewhat problematic. in the case of the lux text, the red pills that form the focus for the film’s drug consumption are pharmaceutical rather than recreational, and stolen from a mental hospital, and are therefore not mdma. in the case of the heydon film, the issue is less to do with acuity of pharmaceutical verisimilitude and more broadly to do with the marketing of the film itself. the film is based on an irvine welsh short story entitled “the undefeated” and subtitled “an acid house romance”. the film, therefore, appropriates the title of the actual collection, ecstasy, rather than the novella within. as argued above, one dancecult 4(2)56 might assume that this is for the greater marketing impact of the final product, only further reinforced by incorporating the name “irvine welsh”, an author collin argues is “the most extraordinary literary phenomenon of ecstasy culture” (2009: 302) becoming “its icon and its bard” (2009: 303); the author beeler calls “the most prominent writer of the chemical generation” (2007: 56). the novel trainspotting (1993) and subsequent film adaptation (dir. danny boyle 1996) provided welsh with immediate and substantial credibility. his name, therefore, remains a guarantor of a certain countercultural intent, in terms of content, soundtrack and cinematic style, and that cachet is transferable, as evidenced in the marketing poster for irvine welsh’s ecstasy, which echoes trainspotting’s own poster: fig. 1. marketing poster for irvine welsh’s ecstasy by heydon (2012). both films subscribe to what film critic mark cousins, in his work the story of film, refers to as “closed romantic realism”. in other words, the fourth wall is very much in place and the drama is contained entirely within the construct of the film. cousins references the word romance as “emotions in such films tend to be heightened” and realism because 57morrison | “clubs aren’t like that” fig. 2. marketing poster for ecstasy by lux (2011). “people in such movies are recognisably human and the societies depicted have problems similar to our own” (2004: 494). within the realistic construct of the nightclub, emotions certainly are heightened when accelerated artificially by drug consumption. there are, of course, humans within these texts, and love stories at the heart of both films. however, it could be argued that the most intriguing character in both narratives is the drug itself; dancecult 4(2)58 the most interesting relationship being that which unfolds between the characters and the drug. in the heydon film, a voiceover towards the beginning of the film recounts the various street names for mdma: “eccies, disco biscuits, white doves, the club drug, a love drug, x, mdma, 100% pure ecstasy”, almost assembling argot like the mountain of white pills that forms the marketing poster for the lux film, on top of which stands a girl in her school uniform (see fig. 2). elsewhere in the heydon film, white pills fall through the air, in slow motion, like chemical confetti, suggesting oversupply and overconsumption, that the underlying driver of both films’ narrative is excess, as the characters imbibe, indulge, od. the diegesis of the dance floor a closer reading of particular scenes from these two texts will reveal structural issues particular to edmc film discourse. as hebdige remarks, music (in film terms, the soundtrack) is of paramount importance to subcultures, and therefore the films that fall within the edmc film canon, and have music itself at their core. so let us now consider the use of diegetic codes within the lux film, pausing first to define what is meant by diegesis, a key element of film grammar. diegetic and non-diegetic music can broadly be defined as follows: diegetic music is that which occurs within the environment of the film—for instance a car stereo, a radio or, more pertinently, the music a dj is playing in a nightclub, what gorbman describes as “music originating from the narratively implied spatio temporal world of actions and characters” (1987: 21). this is set against non-diegetic music, likely to be the underscore or incidental music to the piece, designed to be detected by the audience in the cinema but not the actors within the narrative. in one of the early foundation scenes of the lux film, the four principal female leads are in the nightclub where one of them works as a dj. all consume the red pills that one girl, dianna meyer, has stolen from her mother alison, a nurse at the aforementioned mental facility. to convey the impression of the drug taking hold, the director makes sharp cuts in the edit to denote excitement and heightened sensation: eyes are dazed, sweat drips, heads are thrown back in a sexualised display of ecstatic rapture. however, perhaps even more important than the director’s schema is how the transformative effect of the drug is conveyed acoustically. as monaco remarks, our eyes choose what we see, whilst our ears have no such choice (2000: 155). thus, in diegetic terms, the music bulks up and throbs, sounds melt, voices are distorted and there is a ringing in the ears. this is a key signifier of edmc film texts as we, as viewer, share the muffled tones of the beat perceived subjectively by dianna’s sister, chantel, mediated through a soundsystem and then through the pharmaceutical filter of her drug consumption. therefore the ringing sound might be said to cross the diegetic divide—not only diegetic but metadiagetic—a bridge of shared, subjective experience that links audience with action, to build this connection. in this scene, we not only share chantel’s point of view, but also her auditory equipment. this is the key scene for the drama that follows; however it also reflects an essential and peculiar issue in edmc films: how 59morrison | “clubs aren’t like that” to convey the transformative effects of a powerful drug for a passive film audience. it is not simply a matter of mise-en-scene as geometrics: in the process of rotating a horizontal dance floor onto a vertical cinema screen, it seems heuristically that the intensity of the experience dissipates, and an uneasy tension appears between the audience’s desire for a good time, set against cinematic representations of other peoples’ good time. this dislocation is illustrated by consideration of the film’s soundtrack. the composer of the film’s diegetic underscore, nick hussey, had to retrospectively fit his music to the movements in this club scene; for instance, to the tempo of the dancing and the movements of the dj, to give the impression that her physical actions have sonic consequences. hussey was given time-coded scenes in isolation and without any postproduction sound, to then imagine and compose the music that might have been played in the club at that time. different takes of the same shot would use different dummy tracks and therefore hussey had to write to the rhythm of the movement he saw, which results in music ranging from 126–140 beats per minute. in an interview, he explains: you have to make it fit—you have to find the certain tempo of the scene and work it out so there’s no singing where there’s any talking and vice versa. when you’re writing a song that’s easy—there’s two verses, the chorus and outro, all in a set order. but when you’re doing a film you can’t. you’ve got to cram it in when you can—get the best bits from the scene, not necessarily the best bits from the song. it’s challenging. 10 in a subsequent interview, hussey remarked that the process was further complicated by subsequent re-edits of the film. such edits have re-cut certain scenes and therefore further thrown out the synergy between the mise-en-scene and diegetic soundtrack. moving onto the heydon film, these issues of authenticity and mise-en-scene also come to the fore. here, the clubbing scenes fall into two distinct categories. firstly, there are the principal club scenes portraying the edinburgh nightclub at the centre of the piece, the sanctuary, which were filmed on a set in northern ontario. in conversation, heydon agrees that for the film to translate, “you have to make it as authentic as possible”; in other words, the audience has to buy into both the story and the situation. principal male lead adam sinclair, who plays lloyd, agrees that it is hard to convey the energy from the dance floor and still “capture that club element”.11 a film set can be an unnaturally artificial environment, with long pauses between moments of high activity. sinclair explains: “i’ve danced for four hours before but it’s very rarely that i’ve danced for 20 hours”. this is an environment where you very quickly have to find your way to “the moment”, whilst the director must bear in mind very practical issues, for instance the fact that the bass from a speaker may be enough to make the camera shake. in one of these set-based club scenes, the two protagonists meet on the dance floor and fall in love. to convey this process, heydon incorporates circular dolly shots as the dance floor beyond the two dissipates. the music, which up until this moment throbs and pulses, now cuts as they approach one another, other dancers melting out of focus as we centre on their connection and the chemical reaction between them. whether the effect of actual love, dancecult 4(2)60 or merely the love drug, the objective for the director is to convey this intense experience in visual terms. as heydon himself questions in our conversation: “how do you show visually what happens internally—with your brain, your cerebral cortex—everything glowing and lighting up? we tried to do it with the music, with the editing. but then pouring water over someone’s head in a club really just showed this overwhelming emotion of coming up, of melting”. as opposed to these more staged scenes—a northern ontario set doubling up as an edinburgh nightclub—heydon also employed guerilla tactics, taking his actors undercover into the liquid rooms nightclub in edinburgh, and filming clandestinely with canon 5dmkii cameras, fitted with prime lenses. essentially a hand-held camera and therefore relatively inconspicuous, heydon describes such cameras as “technology that would be able to capture the essence of that scene”. these scenes are undoubtedly more successful in terms of the more aggressive machinations of cinéma vérité, taking the dramatic action into a working nightclub, and overlaying fiction upon a genuine, and therefore automatically authentic, club experience. the diegetic soundtrack is key—and must connect both sides of the cinema screen—if the audience is to buy into the scene, be part of the party and feel the effect of the beat. gorbman accurately takes issue with the term “incidental music”, arguing “the moment we recognise to what degree film music shapes our perception of a narrative, we can no longer consider it incidental or innocent” (1987: 11). with films that focus on the tropes of electronic dance music as narrative focus, the importance of the soundtrack is even less “incidental”. here creativity and artistry can be reduced to numbers, where the commercial imperative is keenly felt. heydon secured 51 tracks for the soundtrack for under $20,000 which, as he himself points out, compares rather favourably to a single episode of american tv series csi, where the budget is more likely to be $30,000 per track. it took eight months to secure permissions for the music used and even then, some pieces that were used as dummy tracks for the club scenes were not ultimately secured, causing, once again, slight discordance between diegetic soundtrack and the kinetic flow of the scene. heydon explains that their solution to this issue lay, quite simply, in: “the magic of filmmaking—editing and lighting and having them dancing to a certain bpm and finding something with a similar bpm that we do have permission to use and just cutting so that it works”. the club scenes in the heydon film detail a coherent homology of effects that mark that film out as an edmc text. indeed, the character lloyd himself describes life’s cocktail, comprised as it is of “the clubs, the drugs, the music”. it is for directors like heydon to mediate, in order to turn the loose homology of this primary phenomenon into beeler’s commercially-viable “secondary artistic phenomena”. once again, the energy is lost the further removed we are from the white-hot heart of the dance floor itself. the fecund mind of irvine welsh, for instance, had to impose a structure in order to turn club myth into the story “the undefeated”. as monaco remarks, “the great thing about literature is you can imagine; the great thing about film is that you can’t” (2000: 158) and director rob heydon therefore imposes further order, not only visually but in terms of narrative—for instance making the principal male character lloyd an international drug dealer—to create a more 61morrison | “clubs aren’t like that” dynamic story, in keeping with other tropes of the neo-gangster genre (the nightclub milieu, it seems, is as natural habitat for the criminal as it is for the vampire). as such texts evolve, they become more coherent narratives, rather than impressionist renderings of a chaotic subcultural scene. in that process, however, it might be argued that heydon’s film suffers from being too ordered, the romantic realism too neatly “closed off ”, in cousins’ terms. in conversation, meanwhile, the author of the piece, irvine welsh, luxuriates in the abject, the ugly detritus of the dance floor, revealed once a nightclub’s illusory glitter glow dissolves and reality’s lights come back on. that world is undeniably hard to capture in cinema. even welsh remarks: “there’s nothing you can do in fiction that does justice to the experience of going to a club”.12 and the beat goes on aside from these very practical issues in conveying the club culture experience to a movie viewer, there are also more broader, moral issues to consider, in terms of both content and context. some theorists take umbrage at the cultural colonialism that such films represent. for instance, beeler remarks such cultural products mark a “selling out to the established entertainment industry” (2007: 49), as the quotidian world seeks to take ownership (and thereby profit), in telling stories about its darker, nefarious underbelly. in such terms, “the idea of deviance becomes just another marketing tool” (calcutt and shephard 1998: xvi), beset by “the contaminating processes of commercialization, commodification and diffusion” (muggleton in redhead 1998: 91). muggleton differentiates between the superficial and the subcutaneous. club culture locates itself in a cultural, often physical (and, some might say, mythologised) underground—a bank vault stacked with bullion bars of subcultural capital. some would argue that to render that world in two-dimensional celluloid is the ultimate betrayal, where the cinema screen represents the very height of superficiality. at this point, club culture becomes a subcultural carnival where, for the price of a ticket, the overground world can gawp at the underground, as though at an exhibit in a freakshow. moore remarks “this commercial/authentic polarity is illusory, since all mass-mediated music is subject to commercial imperatives” (2002: 218). nevertheless, it is hard to counter this viewpoint, especially when, as detailed in this article, the representation is inauthentic or flawed, in which case the text fails both of beeler’s laws: unable to either educate the noncognate, or entertain the initiated. equally, edmc films fail when the morality of the narrative is unconvincing and overwrought, for instance in the lux text, which adopts the rather reactionary standpoint of establishing a nightclub (saturday) in counterpoint to a church (sunday)—the one nocturnal, the other diurnal. such films reinforce a moral panic—“so prevalent around ‘ecstasy’ and dance culture in britain in the 1990s” (redhead 1998: 3)—in cultural terms. thornton describes this as “a form of hype orchestrated by culture industries that target the youth market” (1995: 136). it must be assumed that the ecstasy films, in their representation of recreational drug consumption, diegetic and non-diegetic music codes, reference to clubs, and especially in dancecult 4(2)62 their provocative referencing of mdma in their title, are indeed placing themselves centrally within the edmc film canon. taken together, aside from the coincidence of their title, the release of the two films demonstrates the on-going cultural penetration of club culture and its relevance as a subject matter for a contemporary cinema audience. furthermore, it might be argued that the texts mirror the recent resurgence of edmc in both canada and the usa. it is commonly understood that, despite the fundamental importance of cities like detroit, chicago and new york in the early evolution of house music and club culture, it remained more a fringe subculture on that side of the atlantic as compared to the uk, where it took a very deep hold. however, ubiquitous stories in british media such as simon reynolds’ recent article in the guardian,13 and luke bainbridge in the observer, are now quick to detail how america has fallen back in love with a scene it no longer calls “house”, but “edm”, reinforcing mcleod’s notion that “the ongoing, accelerated process of genre naming speaks volumes about group identity formations” (2001: 59).14 the narratives of these two films might therefore feel more vibrant and contemporary in north america, compared to other territories, where they may conversely seem dated. a continually shapeshifting, evolving construct, edmc has arguably enjoyed a deeper, and certainly longer, impact than any culture since the late 1960s—for thornton “bigger than punk and akin to the hippie revolution” (1995: 136)—although some theorists will be quick to resist thornton’s standpoint. certainly in terms of longevity, many in the audience for either ecstasy film, even with an 18 certificate, will not have been born during the flowering of the second summer of love in 1988 and yet will be cognisant of the tropes and modes of club culture referenced within the discourse. the role of film has contributed—and will continue to contribute—hugely to the popularisation of edmc. uk rave culture began very much as a scene for a cognisant 1980s in-crowd, emerging then quickly evolving in key cities like london, manchester and nottingham, mediated through style magazines such as id and the face. by the end of the 20th century, however, the scene had burrowed deep enough into cultural consciousness to form a viable subject matter for mainstream uk tv series such as morse and men behaving badly, as well as comedic vehicles such as kevin & perry go large (dir. ed bye 2000).15 “we are djs”, says kevin, early on in that film. “and where do djs go for the summer?” what once was the inside secret of ibiza has become an in-joke, and it’s a joke everyone can get in on. perry knows the answer and by 2000, so did everyone in the audience. for many participants congregating around beeler’s 1st law, these films will stand as unreliable narratives. in a sense, however, the subjective, qualitative question of whether these texts are accurate and authentic as subcultural artifacts is less important than the central truth that they exist. indeed, when something is parodied, it actually says a great deal about the subject of parody, as well as the execution itself. for it is within these fictional ethnographies that the landscape of the nightclub is revealed, as well as the habits of casual and recreational drug consumption and the hitherto secret, almost magical machinations of the dj; revealed not merely for a restricted number of participant clubbers, but a potentially infinite crowd of global cinema goers. their interest is piqued, i would contend, because 63morrison | “clubs aren’t like that” such cult film texts afford a glimpse over “the edge”, a position backed up by calcutt and shephard who argue such films allow us to enjoy “the experience of extremes vicariously without having to leave our mundane mainstream experience” (1998: xi). thus, in the darkness of a cinema auditorium, such cult cinematic texts provide a voyeuristic glimpse at the abject, without having to get one’s own hands dirty. in conclusion, therefore, i would contend that we need these film texts, in order for edmc to fully register in the broader cultural sphere. although the key texts under consideration in this paper are restricted releases and undeniably minor films (as edmc films, and indeed many cult films, tend to be); whatever the limitations of their cultural or box-office impact; whether documentary or fiction; whether good, in fact, or bad; such films will ultimately combine to form a cohesive, evolving, visual-historic edmc archive. moving forwards, the discussion of such a canon may inform a fresh rubric by which we can decode other subcultural scenes, via reference to such secondary artistic representations; these films and books, that orbit a scene like cultural satellites. in terms of verisimilitude, this paper has demonstrated that it is difficult to replicate the nuanced tropes of the dance floor in film form; a difficulty further complicated by the fact that audiences are likely to be seated in a quiet, dark cinema, far removed from the heightened emotions of a club experience. a cinema audience is expected to be quiet and still; a complete anathema to the vibrancy and movement of a club dance floor. as discussed, edmc is a paidian construct and therefore also not suited to the style of documentation that, for instance, the rock scene enjoyed. instead, some participants may prefer to close their eyes and project personal clubland memories onto the screen of their own unconscious. however for the majority, it is the projection of the films discussed within this article that functions as an invitation from across the symbolic, though fragile, divide of the movie screen. despite their failings, such films provide the keys to the underground for voyeuristic non-participants, subcultural tourists and neophytes of beeler’s 1st law. for in the warmth of the cinema, we are invited to exchange our tokens of subcultural capital for drinks at the bar; to step onto an imagined dance floor, built of celluloid. acknowledgements many thanks to those who contributed their time and thoughts to the production of this paper, notably rob heydon and adam sinclair from irvine welsh’s ecstasy; and elisa king and nick hussey from the lux movie. thanks also to a figure who looms large in edmc literature, irvine welsh, for sharing the bar of molly malone’s, and then the back of a glasgow cab. special thanks to my supervisor, dr simon warner, for his patience and ever helpful input. more broadly, thanks to the creatives still committed to film and literary evocations of edmc, and finally to those on the dance floor who continue to make the scene such a fertile source of characters and stories. dancecult 4(2)64 notes 1 in his review of berlin calling and run lola run. 2 in terms of the heydon film, my journalism work led to invitations to two screenings prior to distribution (one in london and one at the glasgow film festival) as well as the opportunity to spend time with the author of the source material, irvine welsh, the film’s director rob heydon and principal male lead, adam sinclair. 3 the lux film has had a limited release in north america, via dvd and streaming methods. i need also point out that, although the copy i have is marked as a final cut and will be the one i refer to, it appears the film has subsequently been re-edited. 4 graeme park, interviewed at the home of the author, 23 march 2011. 5 this interview can be found in the dvd extra entitled “behind the scenes featurette”. 6 in the documentary extra to the dvd, entitled “from script to screen”. 7 this experience was recounted in a chapter in my book, discombobulated (morrison 2010). 8 although in terms of heydon’s film, one must also remember the importance of irvine welsh’s source text, and the central role of edinburgh and edinburgh characters. 9 rob heydon, in conversation with the author for a feature for the uk music magazine, mixmag, in the novotel hotel, glasgow, 19 february 2012. 10 nick hussey, film score composer, interviewed by the author, all bar none, manchester, 25 march 2011. 11 adam sinclair, actor, interviewed by the author for a feature for mixmag, in the novotel hotel, glasgow, 19 february 2012. 12 in conversation with irvine welsh, molly malone’s, glasgow, 19 february 2012. 13 “how rave music conquered america”, 2 august 2012 14 the 22 april 2012 edition of the observer magazine carried luke bainbridge’s cover story about the dj david guetta and the penetration of edm in the usa. 15 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london: bfi publishing. haslam, dave. 2001. adventures on the wheels of steel: the rise of superstar djs. london: fourth estate. hebdige, dick. 1983. subculture: the meaning of style. london: methuen. mcleod, kembrew. 2001. “genres, subgenres, sub-subgenres and more: musical and social differentiation within electronic/dance music communities”. journal of popular music studies, 13: 59–75. middleton, richard. 1997. studying popular music. milton keynes: open university press. monaco, james. 2000. how to read a film: movies, media, multimedia – 3rd edition. oxford: oxford university press. moore, allan. 2002. “authenticity as authentication”. popular music, 21 (2): 209–223. morrison, simon. 2010. discombobulated: dispatches from the wrong side. london: headpress. muggleton, david and rupert weinzierl, eds. 2003. the post-subcultures reader. oxford: berg. phillips, dom. 2009. superstar djs here we go!: the incredible rise of clubland’s finest. ebury press. redhead, steve. 2000. repetitive beat generation. edinburgh: canongate. redhead, steve, ed. 1998. the clubcultures reader: readings in popular cultural studies. oxford: blackwell. reynolds, simon. 2012. “how rave music conquered america”. the guardian. 2 august. thornton, sarah. 1995. club cultures: music, media and subcultural capital. cambridge: polity. welsh, irvine. 1996. ecstasy. london: jonathan cape. filmography badham, john. 1977. saturday night fever. usa: rso. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076666/> boyle, danny. 1996. trainspotting. uk: channel 4 films. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117951/> bye, ed. 2000. kevin & perry go large. uk: icon. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0205177> christopher, mark. 1998. 54. usa: dollface. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120577> dowse, michael it’s all gone pete tong. 2004. uk: vertigo. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0388139> golden, karl. 2001. weekender. uk: benchmark films. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1706470> harrison, greg. 2000. groove. usa: sony pictures. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0212974/> heydon, rob. 2012. irvine welsh’s ecstasy. canada: silver reel. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1809287/> hoene, matthias. 2008. beyond the rave. uk: hammer films. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1104731/> http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076666/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117951/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0205177 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120577 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0388139 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1706470 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0212974/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1809287/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1104731/ dancecult 4(2)66 jovy, alexander. 2000. sorted. uk: jovy junior enterprises. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0221563/> kerrigan, justin. 1999. human traffic. uk: fruit salad films. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0188674/> lux. 2011. ecstasy. canada: dolce cielo. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1552221/> ramsay, lynne. 2002. morvern callar. uk: scottish screen. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0300214/> stöhr, hannes. 2008. berlin calling. germany: sabotage films. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1213019/> tykwer, tom. 1998. run lola run. germany: arte. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0130827/> yu, ronny. 2001. the 51st state. uk: alliance atlantis communications. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0227984/> winterbottom, michael. 2002. 24 hour party people. uk: pathe. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0274309/> http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0221563/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0188674/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1552221/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0300214/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1213019/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0130827/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0227984/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0274309/ pop-rock music: aesthetic cosmopolitanism in late modernity motti regev cambridge: polity press, 2013. isbn: 978-0-7456-6172-8 (hardcover), 978-0-7456-6173-5 (paperback) rrp: us$69.95 (hardcover), us$24.95 (paperback) catherine strong monash university (australia) this ambitious monograph sees motti regev taking a global approach to the analysis of what he is calling “pop-rock music” in order to explore how and why this music has become so ubiquitous, and what this means on a social level. the book develops a number of new concepts, and regev has also adapted key sociological concepts to the study of music in a way that yields valuable new insights. each chapter in the book is dedicated to applying and developing one such concept. to begin with, in chapter 1 regev explains his use of the term “pop-rock” to describe the music that he is discussing, rather than “rock” or “pop” or “popular music”. pop-rock is a term that encompasses everything that has developed as a result of the eruption of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s, particularly as a result of the growth of new amplified and technology-based sounds. as such, “pop-rock” includes a huge array of genres from metal to reggae to commercial pop to edm that have developed from the same sonic palette and conventions, despite the variations between them. regev notes, however, that “popular music” covers a wider array of styles than “pop-rock”, as popular music includes folk and traditional musics also. this use of terminology may not be entirely satisfactory to all readers, but in the context of the arguments of this book is very effective and the reader is left with a clear sense of exactly what it is regev is discussing. another important concept which is developed in chapter 1 is that of “aesthetic cosmopolitanism”, “a process in which the expressive forms and cultural practices used by nations . . . and by groupings within them, to signify and perform their sense of uniqueness, growingly comes to share large portions of aesthetic common ground” (3). the argument that ultimately emerges from regev’s work in this book is that pop-rock music plays a fundamental role in creating aesthetic cosmopolitanism, and in doing so has reconfigured everything from the sonic landscapes of the world to the very bodies of the people inhabiting it. in pursuing this argument, he demonstrates how pop-rock has shifted from being an oppositional, outsider art form to being a common referent for music globally, but also shows how this change has not happened smoothly or in the same way in every country. as this shift has occurred, pop-rock has become the music form through which actors express their sense of belonging to, or their wish to belong to, the global flows and future-directedness of late modern capitalism. in chapter 2, regev develops the concept of expressive isomorphism, or the processes whereby culture in different places around the world comes to take on the same forms and adapt the same structures while still expressing local identity. regev demonstrates how around the world not only the musical forms, but also the discourses around them including how music is assessed and how it is legitimated, including genre-specific practices, have come to resemble those developed in anglo-american contexts. in chapter 3, he looks to the history of pop-rock, and to bourdieu’s work on fields of cultural practice, to explain how these now globally adopted forms came to take the shape that they have. this chapter involves some re-treading of well-worn paths in pop music academia, such as the development of popular music criticism and the use of authenticity versus commercialism as a way of ascribing value to music and artists. however, the way regev ties these ideas back to the now global nature of pop-rock makes this an important contribution to the overall arguments presented in the book. in chapter 4 regev develops the idea that “pop-rockization” can be thought of as an “event”, in the sense that the incorporation of pop-rock music as a legitimate part of national culture—even though this generally takes decades (and hence is a “long term event”)—has “long lasting effects on the subsequent history of social relations” (93). he demonstrates how such events have occurred around the world, but in somewhat different ways and on different time-lines, since the 1960s. the focus shifts to audiences in chapter 5, using the key concept of “aesthetic cultures”, or “a cluster of practices, arrangements, and mechanisms” (129) that bind fans together and shape how they relate to music. audiences engage with these cultures in different ways and with different levels of intensity, but increasingly these cultures also exist on a global level through the internet. in the final chapter of the book, regev turns to a closer examination of the music itself, and the way a common understanding of the meaning of the sounds produced in pop-rock—its “sonic vocabularies”—that has developed produces changes to “listeners’ styles of consciousness and caused individuals to experience their bodies in new ways” (161). that these experiences are becoming convergent around the world intensifies aesthetic cosmopolitanism. in pop-rock music, regev has taken a number of concepts that will be familiar to most popular music scholars, but has used them as building blocks on a foundation of innovative theory to create a cohesive account of how pop-rock music has come to hold such a dominant position globally, and explore the effects of this dominance. one of the strengths of the book is the many and varied case studies, drawn from outside the commonly analysed anglo-american music centres. these show over and over again the parallels that exist in the way pop-rock music has been adopted and adapted in even the most ostensibly different cultures, while not minimising or ignoring the still obvious differences that continue to give national cultures their own flavour. regev also skilfully walks the line between privileging either structure or agency; he gives convincing accounts of how pop-rock has become a part of powerful social structures while still highlighting how individuals, including musicians, critics and audiences, have played a part in this process, and still have the ability to affect change. the complexity of the arguments regev has developed in this book, and the number of theoretical contributions he has to offer (most of which cannot be covered in a short review), means that most scholars working in this area would benefit from engaging with this rich and insightful work. riddims & routes dub diaspora dj mix tobias c. van veen, a.k.a. tobias.dj université de montréal / http://djtobias.com <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.02.15> the sonic archives of the dub diaspora are as vast and unfathomable as the depths of the black atlantic from whence they came. thousands upon thousands of hours of audiowaves converse with a multitude of genres. this mix traverses but two routes: jamaica to berlin by way of detroit, in the ecstatic decade of the 1990s; and through london’s expatriate burroughs, in the dreadnought ‘00s. sails are set. depth charges at the ready. haunted vinyl resurrected. for this dj mix, i selected a few archival cuts of dub techno, dubstep, and dub riddims, replete with all the clicks, pops, and hisses of wax that is, in some cases, over 20 odd years old. mixed entirely on vinyl in one take, with the crystalline sun setting behind snow capped mountains, and with the aid of a roland re-201 space echo to sound-out the seaborne soundwaves, riddims & routesis a two hour journey into the echoes, reverbs, and haunted spaces of dub. may this sound beckon, call you into the routes & riddims of the bass culture that has crossed genres and styles as well as continents and countries. // tobias.dj // november 2015 technical note on the mix — vinyl is but an echo of itself, always dissolving and degrading: and my vinyl, as well as my technics sl1200s, re-201 space echo, and dj mixer, are in some state of disrepair. one could say the analog equipment plays itself in the mix. listen for the solos — uneven channels, strange collapses of left to right, scratches and skips, cut-outs in volume. all attest to the autonomy of the analog machine. tracklisting arjen schat – stream version ii – mountain / stream – silent season (2013) loscil – lake orchard – endless falls – kranky (2009) the bug feat. spaceape – at war with time – hyperdub (2015) kit clayton – nuchu – nek sanalet – ~scape (1999) kit clayton – purpakana – nek purpalet – ~scape (1999) pole – streit – 2 – ~scape (1999) swayzak w/ benjamin zephaniah – illegal (poem version) – swayzak recordings (2000) cyrus – inversion – basic channel (1994) maurizio – m4 – maurizio (1995) paperclip people – the climax (basic reshape) – planet e (1994) monolake – static – monolake (1999) rhythm & sound w/ tikiman – music a fe rule (part 1) – rhythm & sound studio 1 – lila – studio 1 (1996) maurizio – domina (maurizio mix) – maurizio (1993) round three feat. tikiman – acting crazy (club vocal) – main street records (1996) studio 1 – silber – studio 1 (1996) basic channel – phylyps trak ii – basic channel (1994) maurizio – m5 – maurizio (1995) rhythm & sound w/ tikiman – why – burial mix (1997) deadbeat – a joyful noise pt1 – something borrowed, something blue – blkrtz (2004/2014) burial – raver – untrue – hyperdub (2007) basic channel – octagon – basic channel (1994) basic channel – phylyps trak – basic channel (1993) vainquer – lyot – maurizio (1992) kode9 – 9 samurai – hyperdub (2006) skream – midnight request line – tempa (2005) kode9 + the spaceape – backward – memories of the future – hyperdub (2006) king tubby – invasion – dub from the roots – clocktower records (1974/2013) marcia griffiths – feel like jumping pt. 2 – studio one dub vol. 2 – soul jazz (?/2007) the orb – slvg dvb – orbvs terrervm – island records (1995) dj spooky – soon forward – incursions in illbient – asphodel (1996) burnt friedman & the nu dub players – consider a bigger wallet – nonplace (2002) watershell – we – northern circuits – interchill (1997) twilight circus dub soundsystem – binshaker dub – m records (1997) kode9 & the spaceape – ghost town – hyperdub (2015) headphone-headset-jetset: dj culture, mobility and science fictions of listening dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 3(1): 64–96 issn 1947-5403 ©2011 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.04 headphone-headset-jetset dj culture, mobility and science fictions of listening sean nye university of minnesota abstract this article explores the practice of dj performance through the use of headphones as opposed to the preferred instruments of analysis: vinyl, turntables and mixers. it focuses on the dj as a performer who uses headphones on stage, which complicates the traditional construction of “headphone culture” as tending toward exclusively private listening. the experience of the public and private tension of headphones on stage leads to a larger examination of the post-world war ii dialectic of mobility, radio communications and recorded music, which is expressed in the constellation “headphone-headset-jetset”. in this history, headphones intersect with cultures of command-and-control, aviation and broadcasting. these intersections help to trace the history of the cyborg figure. keywords: dj, headphones, club culture, science fiction, radio, cyborg, mobile media sean nye is a phd student in the comparative studies in discourse and society program at the university of minnesota, twin cities. his dissertation project concerns constructions of german identity in popular electronic music between 1968 and 2009. his articles, reviews and translations have appeared in dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture, new literary critique, cultural critique, journal der jugendkulturen, and echo: a music-centered journal. email: <nyex0021@umn.edu> feature article mailto:nyex0021@umn.edu nye | headphone-headset-jetset 65 introduction “the dj’s role is to intensify estrangement, to transmit the currents of the alien. but the dj doesn’t know what she wants until she hears it. the futurist is helpless in the face of fascination. yesterday this track was unknown, unheard, undreamt. today you follow it like a sleepwalker. —kodwo eshun (1998: 104) vinyl records, mixers and turntables have long been the preferred instruments through which to explore the dj as a musical practitioner and performer. in the current moment, however, the questions of what the dj as performer will become and what dj tools will be involved are wide open. the discontinuation of the technics 1200 turntable was announced in 2010 (tokyo reporter 2010). we thus find ourselves at a historical and media crossroads, whose moment has in fact been evolving across the last digital decade. symbolically, the long history of the technics 1200 (1972–2010) marks the long history of club culture and its close kinship with electronic dance music (edm) culture from disco to dubstep. what new forms djing might take, and whether the name “dj” will be sufficient as a description, are still uncertain. the “dj” as vinyl mixer, however, already has the aura of the past. a popular example of the new practices of digital djing is the work of chris liebing and speedy j, who use four laptops and mix with traktor by native instruments. in this sense, the periodization of an era of the dj within the longer history of disc jockeys is being marked off as i write. this article is inspired by the openness of the current moment. in particular, the openness of the future in terms of the structures of musical production and reception leads me to reexamine this long period of club culture, roughly 1972–2010, under a larger political matrix. i want to open up the political-social field of dj club culture toward the future and the past as well as reassess its own era. two ideas present themselves in establishing this open matrix of the “dj”. first, i wish to shift the political-aesthetic role of the dj away from the practice of mixing and toward the question of listening. this move is achieved by diverting attention away from the musical instruments of vinyl, turntables and mixers. my attention is directed rather toward the gadget1 so often overlooked in the examination of djs: the headphone. the question of mixing becomes truly extraordinary on a macro socio-historical level when one considers the enormous shifts in cultures of listening that have occurred over the last fifty years. mixing, after all, is a demonstration of the mastery of listening in terms of recorded sound, with its associated practices of digging, scratching and sampling. since the rise of mobile media and the postulating of a global headphone culture2 of listening, the modern anthropological figure of the human with headphones has become a ubiquitous image. the examples are numerous. in 1987, sony released a classic image of the primate with headphones for its walkman commercial in japan. the 1997 music video of “sonic http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhplfpmintm http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhplfpmintm http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slhiqyd-qag&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iy5ejus6kgc dancecult 3(1)66 empire”, a german chart hit by members of mayday, is an important representative of the headphone video. headphone-style products, from t-shirts to skateboards, number in the thousands. more recently, the popularity of headphones led dr. dre to release in 2008 his own line of headphones, beats by dr. dre, which includes celebrity-sponsored headphones by stars such as lady gaga and justin bieber. this shift in headphone focus from sound to fashion product has, however, caused intense discussion and critique from audiophile communities.3 figure 1: headphones around the globe. source: nasa images. the image of headphones as a technological extension of hearing symbolizes the electric listening of recorded/transmitted sound and electronic music. electric listening, as an aesthetic-political concept, expands upon avital ronell’s analysis of the “electric speech” of telephones.4 it is key to this article’s analysis of the dj’s social significance, for the club dj stands as a significant figure in headphone culture: the club dj is the human with http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iy5ejus6kgc http://www.zazzle.com/headphones+gifts http://beatsbydre.com/ nye | headphone-headset-jetset 67 headphones on stage. this performative role places the dj in an important polemical position. it challenges the assumption that “headphone culture” from the 1970s to the present signifies a tendency exclusively toward private listening (levy 2006: 66–70). rather, headphones mark a distinctly late modern dialectic of public and private listening, which this article will explore. the dialectic is reflected in the three primary musical uses of headphones to be examined here: music consumption, studio production/sound mixing and dj performance. figure 2: dj rush at the “empire” hall, mayday, dortmund 2011. photo by sean nye. second, i shift our understanding of headphones themselves to consider the headphone within the larger social history of the headset, by which i mean any combination of headphones/earpieces with microphones. to contextualize the history of edm culture and technics 1200s from 1972 to 2010, i enact a double move. first, i place the dj back “on the air” of broadcast history; second, i place the dj back “in the air” of aviation history. the political geography of the club dj with “headphones” is thereby considered alongside the long history of the “headset” broadcast disc jockey (from radio to internet) and the dancecult 3(1)68 “headset” pilot. these figures become a way by which to explore the political geography, technologies and labor history of djs from the cold war to the war on terror. more specifically, the long political arc covers the last fifty years from the cold war politics of the space age and radioactivity to the current dialectics of internet hyperconnectivity and earbud culture in the war on terror. broadcasting is important to questions of geography and the demarcation of territory while marking the prehistory of the dj’s facelessness. after all, what political “body” is behind the voices on the airwaves? finally, edm club culture is considered within the long history of jetset culture, which has consequences for both club travel and the ideological association of djs with mobility and modernity. figure 3: germany’s oldest mega-rave, the mayday, takes place annually at the westfallenhallen in dortmund. it boasts a massive jet-rocket insignia, its logo since 1992. the insignia resides every year above the djs in the main hall, the “arena,” creating a virtual headset-jetset altar. the 20-year anniversary occurred on 1 may 2011, which saw 27,000 visitors attend and the jet-rocket logo again prominently on display. photo by sean nye (during dj performance by sander van doorn). http://www.nature-one.de/events/mayday/index.htm?/events/mayday/deutsch/_livezone.htm nye | headphone-headset-jetset 69 to highlight issues of listening, the following article operates within a matrix of artistic works, primarily concerning science fiction, that demonstrate the explosive shifts in dj and headphone understanding. it is a mix of travel literature, cultural theory and media constellations. as we shall see, the politics of edm’s liberatory pleasure, while inspiring, are also humbled before the political and economic challenges of headset culture. my concern is not a detailed media analysis of the models, designs and technological developments of headphones, though such issues are important and will be addressed on occasion. rather, the concern is to highlight the political and social interpretations and cultural iconography of headphones. while high-speed travel marks our times, regional distinctions and local organizations of headphone culture remain strongly present. the historical constellation of “headphone-headset-jetset” thus begins in medias res with a journey from the californian coast to a symbolic city of edm club culture: detroit. occurring in the pivotal year of 2001, this trip explores a moment in the post-cold war height of edm popular culture and the star dj system, immediately prior to the dialectic of terrorism and internet communications marking the 2000s. based on this trip, i investigate the theoretical debates about headphone culture and the privacy and poverty of listening which have existed since the 1970s. by questioning such debates, i am led further back in time to the beginnings of the headphone, headset and jetset constellations surrounding the cold war conflicts at the dawn of club culture. using donna haraway’s figure of the cyborg, i make a dialectical case study of two borders of the “west”, west germany and california. they are examined under the rubric of laurence a. rickels’ analysis of these regions as “coasts”,5 which prove to be key sites of postwar techno culture and science fiction. this historical retreat to the 1960s dawn of club and jetset culture leads me to return, in the final section, to an assessment of dj headphone performance in my experience in detroit and the late history of star djs. detroit 2001: edm on the cusp the weekend of 25–26 august 2001 was a symbolic moment for edm culture, and a significant and tragic weekend in the history of music from detroit. here is the background: a few months prior, a friend named gabe came to me with a proposal. madonna was on her drowned world tour, promoting her edm-inflected albums ray of light and music, produced by european trance stars william orbit and mirwais ahmadzaï. gabe went online the moment tickets went on sale. within hours, the only good tickets remaining were for madonna’s concert on 26 august in her hometown of detroit, each costing $120. gabe offered me his second ticket for free if i paid for my flight from san francisco to detroit, a truly generous offer for someone who was a techno enthusiast and who had never been to detroit. we flew with american airlines on 24 august. on the flight, i put on the headphones provided by the airline and listened to the radio and inflight programs. i also listened to music on my sony discman with my personal headphones. arriving in the evening, we dancecult 3(1)70 travelled the following day, as dystopian “trauma tourists” (pope 2011: 41-2), around the post-industrial emptiness of downtown detroit. while driving, gabe would wear a headset when he needed to talk on his cell phone. we also had a mix of madonna tracks burned onto a blank cd. after walking around the renaissance center and discussing lee iacocca and the late history of the detroit auto industry, we headed across the detroit river and over to windsor, canada. this was the occasion for an extraordinary stroke of luck. i had assumed no major edm events were happening in detroit, since the detroit electronic music festival (demf) had already taken place in may. seeing madonna seemed more than enough. but as we travelled through downtown windsor in the mild afternoon, i spied some raveresque kids sporting visors and kick-pants. i immediately asked gabe to stop the car and asked what they were up to. they responded in disbelief, “you don’t know? it’s life fest: windsor’s answer to demf. richie hawtin, juan atkins, kevin saunderson, carl craig, gene farris, and tons of other djs are playing.” i was in shock, and we changed plans accordingly. suddenly, within hours of arriving in detroit and with no plan, i was on the windsor plaza waterfront from roughly 3:00 pm until 2:00 am, participating in one of the most significant regional edm events of 2001. with around 4,000 people in attendance, the party was quite intimate. however, with its location in windsor, the excessive focus on hawtin over the african-american djs was evident (keene 2001). i talked to some drugged-out raver kids and bedroom-dj enthusiasts as they celebrated each new dj on stage. dj followed dj; the long hours tested the endurance of the techno tourists, and the sun went down across the detroit river with the cityscape of detroit in perfect view. as the sounds and sights of dystopia (pope 2011), both the techno music and the cityscape evoked an experience that resisted traditional jetset tourism. the experience was similar to how cybotron’s classic track, techno city, critiques the voice of the tour guide in experiencing detroit: “ooh, techno city, hope you enjoy your stay; welcome to techno city, you will never want to go away”. the various djs were on a raised stage and at a distance from the audience. the main action the audience could see was their placing of headphones in different positions. indeed, the variety of headphone poses that djs can make is impressive, especially if they are performing on a raised stage. after the sun had gone down, the backlit lasers caused a silhouette effect, with only the outlines of headphone-skulls present. the experience is common to many club-goers: at edm-events across the world, the headphone-skull is the primary object seen on stage. the next morning, gabe and i headed back across the border. the american authorities knew about life fest, so our car was searched for drugs, but we were allowed back into the usa. we proceeded to the vast suburbs of detroit’s immense sprawl late sunday afternoon, arriving at the promised place: the palace of auburn hills. there we would see the next icon from detroit: madonna. life fest put in perspective the economic differences between edm events and pop http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3owc4lv6ce nye | headphone-headset-jetset 71 events: $30 for multiple djs’ performances of “recorded” music between 3:00 pm–2:00 am versus $120+ for madonna’s one-and-a-half hour “live” show. her first appearance on stage alone, however, was worth the price of admission. the moment she emerged, every member of the 20,000+ audience of primarily women and gay men let out her/his madonna diva in an eruption of hands in the air and ear-piercing screams. the entire stadium underwent a transformation into a micro-climate of diva steam—a hothouse of house-inflected pop music. soon madonna was singing “ray of light”. the performance included images from her music video, with its distinctive use of time-lapse photography as a marker of highpaced modern life and world travel. in the video, madonna eventually arrives “home” on a disco dance floor complete with vinyl turntable. this time-lapse effect borrowed from the aesthetics of the distinctly jetset film that, to the tune of philip glass’ minimalist soundtrack, pioneered such effects with aerial shots: koyaanisqatsi (1982). “faster than the speeding light she’s flying; trying to remember where it all began”. paradoxically, madonna’s jetset song was introduced with her only acknowledgement to her hometown: “give it up detroit!” madonna concluded with “music”, mixing in samples from kraftwerk’s “trans europe express”. whereas great dj icons had performed the day before, here was the most iconic pop diva of late modernity making her final request: “hey mr. dj, put a record on”. dancers, all wearing headphones, accompanied her on stage. however, these “headphones” were “unreal” in so far as they were specifically designed as stage props. with no actual brand, the props represented the headphone as idea and fetish. madonna sang atop a turning wheel representing vinyl; the headphones were, however, the primary sign that dj culture was on stage. the dancers made eroticized poses with their headphones, auto-erotic to the extent that the headphones made them appear as though they were performing in private. “music” was metaphorically received into the headphones of the dancers, overwhelming their ears and bodies. here was hearing—on the brink. on stage, the headphones were many things: modern fashion fetish; signifier of the consumer as queen (not king); and the link of club, disco and pop lives in the concert stadium. this was a symbolic moment in dj culture at its height of pop myth in fin de millenium postmodernity, embraced by madonna at the same time that the rave massives were achieving their height of popular success. gabe and i finished the concert and made our way back to the hotel after midnight. we needed to catch a 7:00 am flight on monday, so we collapsed in the hotel near the airport, listening to some soothing music on our discmans. finally, early the next morning, we caught up on the news. in the airport, i put on my simple on-ear sony headphones to listen to the radio news. it was then that we learned of the tragedy that had clouded the weekend. detroit’s greatest new musical talent, aaliyah, had died aged 22 on that saturday, roughly at the same time as life fest. she had died in a plane crash while returning from a music video shoot in the bahamas. her self-named album had taken the 2001 airwaves by storm, with the timbaland-produced track “try again” described as providing “a missing link between hip-hop and electronica” (cinquemani 2001). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7uoo5mwe_k&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klfmutaje0q http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nef_-icnqc4 dancecult 3(1)72 as we landed in san francisco on the morning of 27 august 2001, we were thinking about the dangers of flying with reference to aaliyah. little did we know that this would be our last trip of relatively carefree jet travel. 11 september 2001 was a couple of weeks away. the decade of war and security threats to follow would see ramifications for the transatlantic jetset communication between dj cultures.6 yet, as the world worried about the “openness” of the west in the face of terrorism in 2001, the dialectical side of increased mobility and networking was very shortly to be announced in a ground-breaking event a few weeks later. on 23 october 2001, steve jobs introduced a portable gadget called the “ipod”. the video presentation concludes with jobs’ remark: “this amazing little device holds 1000 songs, and it goes right in my pocket”. a week later, across the atlantic, a key piece of software for musicians and djs, ableton live, was also introduced. the new media of the decade for both headphones and dj culture were spreading rapidly in fall 2001. thought trip: privacy and mobility this tale of a “headphone-headset-jetset” weekend represents musical currents on the cusp of the 21st century and at the height of edm’s popular success. the deluge of music and information poses important implications for dj culture as a historical practice. the currents of three great traditions of club culture all intersected in this detroit weekend—not just edm but also pop-disco and hip-hop/r&b. yet the presence of headphones throughout the weekend demonstrated the complexity of headphone culture. indeed, whatever equipment might be present on stage, in the car or in the airplane—from turntables to radios to discmans to laptops to cellphones—what remained constant throughout were the headphones, in different sizes and forms, and put to various uses. these headphone uses lead me to consider the dialectic that has, in fact, existed between dj culture and headphone culture since the 1920s, when gramophones and the radio first achieved mass-market success (brewster and broughton 2000: 22–4). the 1970s marked some important technological changes; the production of the technics 1200s, as index of club culture, took place across a broad arc in which both dj and headphone culture were transformed by new media and practices of mobility. the introduction of the ipod and ableton live, mentioned in the 2001 trip, were late manifestations. the following dates should be considered as part of the long media arc of dj club culture: 1972 technics 1200 1976 vhs tapes 1979 walkman 1982 compact disc 1984 discman and apple macintosh 1993 mp3 1994 pioneer cdj 500 1995 dvd 2000 traktor 2001 ipod / ableton live 2010 discontinuation of technics 1200 and walkman.7 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn0svbcjqls nye | headphone-headset-jetset 73 this post-1960s dialectic of dj and headphone culture was heightened by the coining of the latter phrase in the 1970s to mean a very specific practice: that of, if not isolated listening, then individual or private listening. the implications of this overemphasis in the age of mobile media are difficult to overestimate. the theorization of “headphone culture” will remain limited if it only constructs the headphone listener as private and solitary and traces its understanding only back to the late 1970s. this focus has been popularly developed with walkmans and ipods in mind. in fact, marketing campaigns by sony, and later apple (gunn and hall 2008: 147–8) that portray the consumer as an autonomous individual seemed to extend their success even as far as the academy’s reception of the headphone. the theoretical critiques in which headphones are imagined as the privatized poverty of listening can be traced into the present. it has been paralleled by the perceived miniaturization of headphone culture from the 1970s to the present, with the quantitative storage of sound in inverse proportion to miniaturization: from the circumaural headphones of stereos, to the on-ear headphones of the walkman, to the in-ear headphones (earbuds) of ipods. in-ear headphones have themselves been refined into in-ear-monitors (iems), with ear canal seals that allow for optimal sound isolation and acoustic experience. to be sure, this mobile miniaturization has been paralleled by the continual refinement of audiophile circumaural headphones. figure 4: sennheiser hd 650 circumaural headphones. image courtesy of sennheiser. dancecult 3(1)74 figure 5: walkman and on-ear headphones. image courtesy of technology updates. it should be pointed out that these interpretations of headphone privatization bear a longer history. they can be traced as far back as the 1880s. in the most reflective and extended discussion of headphones in recent academic literature, jonathan sterne (2003: 154–77) analyzes how images of headphones in advertisements and other print media between the 1880s and 1920s formed the initial basis for constructing private acoustic space. he argues: “the auditory field produced through technicized listening (whether by convention or prosthesis) becomes a kind of personal space. the individual with headphones is perhaps the most obvious example of the phenomenon” (2003: 158). sterne makes clear the consequences for capitalism: “put simply, acoustic space modeled on the form of private property allows for the commodification of sound” (2003: 162). this representation of commodification was heightened in the 1970s with the popularization of audiocassettes and mobile media. in the early 1970s, while acknowledging the importance of stadium sound systems, r. murray schafer succinctly argued: “headphone listening is isolating the listener in a private acoustic space. messages on earphones are always private property” (schafer 1973: 35). following the introduction of the walkman, and in a more conservative context, allan bloom used the final line of his chapter “music” from the closing of the american mind to sum up the commodified nature of the device: “but as long as [youths] have the walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition has to say. and, after its prolonged use, when they take it off, they find they are deaf ” (1987: 81). nye | headphone-headset-jetset 75 figure 6: ipod and earbuds. image courtesy of apple. he also accuses youth of indulging in a media spectacle that is a “nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy” (1987: 75). this form of accusation, which amounts to a charge of public masturbation, has been shown by gunn and hall to have continued with connections to blindness and what i will term the “earbud culture” of the ipod: “related to this caricature of the ipod user is a warning analogous to going blind, but a valid one nonetheless: frequent and prolonged use of the ipod causes hearing loss” (2008: 136). thus, headphones signify both “private” masturbatory space and the closing off of intersubjective communication when worn in public. the comparison to blindness is significant. i would argue that, in the context of constructions of postmodernism, the debates on mediation and headphones can be seen as the acoustic counterpart of reflector sunglasses and wayfarers, which saw a rebirth in popularity at the same time as the rise of walkman culture. sunglasses, like headphones, cause anxieties about intersubjective dancecult 3(1)76 communication. sunglasses represent the mediation of the gaze between two subjects. in fact, it cuts off the interlocutor’s ability to read the eyes. fredric jameson discusses this issue in reference to the bonaventure hotel as symbol of postmodernity: now one would want rather to stress the way in which the glass skin [of the bonaventure] repels the city outside, a repulsion for which we have analogies in those reflector sunglasses which make it impossible for your interlocutor to see your own eyes and thereby achieve a certain aggressivity toward and power over the other ( jameson 1991: 42). the reflector glasses are the sign of the eyes gone inward and egotistical at the same time as they achieve domination over what one is looking at. figure 7: sennheiser ie-8 in-ear-monitors. image courtesy of sennheiser. the chief postmodern novel to notice the role of sunglasses in the context of recording media, mtv and electric speech was bret easton ellis’s 1985 debut, less than zero. in this novel of 195 pages, sunglasses are mentioned specifically 49 times. in fact, sunglasses are first mentioned in a musical context. the protagonist–narrator, clay, stares at his bedroom poster of elvis costello, whose song “less than zero” gave the book its title: elvis looks past me, with this wry, ironic smile on his lips, staring out the window. the word “trust” hovering over his head, and his sunglasses, one lens red, the other blue, pushed down past the ridge of his nose so that you can see his eyes, which are slightly off center (ellis 2010: 3). less than zero proves to be saturated with musical references to primarily new wave bands, radio-stereo playlists and mtv to the point where it could itself be considered a key literary nye | headphone-headset-jetset 77 work of electric listening. the sunglasses, as visual equivalents to headphones, reflect the inundation with media, fame and pleasure that is the content of the vapid conversations in the book, often performed through the electric speech of telephones. this inundation comes to literal, sexual climax towards the middle of the book when clay meets a girl with whom he has sex. however, they do not touch each other. rather, they stare at each other while each masturbates using bain de soleil suntan lotion as lube and while clay wears wayfarer sunglasses: i take the sunglasses off and she tells me to put them back on and i put them back on and it stings when i come and then i guess she comes too. bowie’s on the stereo and she gets up, flushed, and turns the stereo off and turns on mtv. i lie there naked, sunglasses still on, and she hands me a box of kleenex (ellis 2010: 110–1). communication in the age of electronic media is here a study either in total self-absorption or passive-aggressivity. like sunglasses, headphones indicate that you are not interested in a conversation and make it impossible for a potential interlocutor to know what you are hearing.8 the dialectic of sunglasses and headphones, as mediation of sight and sound, later achieved total synthesis in the extraordinary science fiction of the ispec. a sci-fi advertisement to earbud culture, the 2003 commercial by tron: legacy director joseph kosinski imagines what the future ipod will become. his sci-fi gadget, the ispec, is a fusion of ipod and 3-d/virtual reality glasses (the logical update of walkman and wayfarers), along with hand-motion sensors as an update to the joystick. with the ispec, one can select any world, film or musical experience one likes. the result: the ispec envisions the total absorption into a solipsistic techno-world of the 21st century. disc jockeys and the cold war amidst the perceived history of the tendency toward the private, however, the disc jockey announces itself as a strange figure. in this context, sarah thornton’s 1995 book, club cultures, offers an outstanding analysis of edm cultures and recording technologies. she argues dialectically against the singular tendency of individuation with reference to recorded music. thornton states: “recorded music is as much a feature of public houses, shops, factories, lifts, restaurants and karaoke bars as it is an attribute of the private home” (1995: 34). tracing the battles between the recording industry and musicians’ unions, thornton uncovers recorded music’s “progressive colonization of public spaces” (1995: 35). headphone debates can thus be seen as a subset of larger debates regarding listening to recorded music, whose dominance of public space by the 1960s proves to be the precondition for debates on total headphone isolation. the miniaturization of mobile media is a subset of debates on global integration and mobility with reference to headset and jetset culture, as was exemplified in my detroit trip. whereas the headphones emphasize electric listening, headset command-and-control emphasizes the electronic communication of both electric listening and electric speech. ships, bases, airports and other command-and-control centers during the world wars http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apqwfkvwfxe&feature=related dancecult 3(1)78 rapidly became famous loci of headset communication. before the dj became the stage star, the club dj was located as standard in a specially enclosed “dj booth” that invoked this headset heritage of radio and command-and-control centers. off to the side and away from the public’s attention, the dj booth recalls the sound mixer who is usually located behind the audience.9 this aesthetic heritage of the dj booth was most recently exemplified in the cyborg performance by daft punk in tron: legacy (kosinski 2010). the duo performs their “soundtrack” in an exclusive club atop the main tower of tron city as techno-disneyland. figure 8: nasa control room, apollo 11 mission, johnson space center, houston 1969. source: nasa images. in this sense, the framing of headphone culture as only tending in the direction of the private does not examine the constant dialectical exposition of the private through electric speech—whether through espionage, market research, the posting of playlists or radio dj announcements between recorded songs. desires for headphone isolation might thus be seen as the desperate search for private moments within headset exposition, rather than the excess of isolated autonomy. furthermore, in terms of command-and-control centers, the headset is usually coded with practices of labor while the headphone is placed in the context of leisure. the headset nye | headphone-headset-jetset 79 thus stands as a reminder that the advertisements regarding headphones as promising a life of total relaxation and leisure are just that: advertisements. in other words, the older history of “headset” radio-djs and telecommunication points to a larger “headset” culture of labor. as a result of the spread of cell phones, pagers and blackberries, the division of work and leisure, and as already mentioned, public and private, was becoming undone by a culture of mobile flexibility. this collapse was augmented by the media convergence of walkman and cell phone in the figure of the multimedia handset (goggin 2011: 63–73). worries also proliferated regarding the inability to escape contact with others due to the omnipresence of cell phone culture (goggin 2006: 36). this culture, based primarily on electric speech aimed at the prosaic life of work, is the material base of both headphone culture and dj “club culture”, which are primarily coded as leisure cultures aimed at the poetic life of electric music. in the context of the headphone and headset, i employ the notion of the jetset in a triple sense. first, it is the supposed glamor of jetset disco travel and concert tours, exemplified in the present by the mass jetsets of edm club tourism in 21st century europe (rapp 2009). second, it is also the material base of labor, trade and transport that supports musical communication between regional scenes. analyzed by marc dierikx, the economies of jetset travel rapidly expanded between the cold war and the war on terror: 1945: 8.2 million 1950: 27 million 1960: 106 million 1970: 301 million 1977: 517 million 1989: 1,119 million 2001: 1,640 million 2005: 2,022 million —air travel by passengers: figures provided by the international civil aviation organization (dierikx 2008: 145–9). the glamor and labor, as well as danger, of jetset travel as necessary for the music industry has existed throughout this period. the dawn of the mass jetset age saw one of the most iconic tragedies in connection with the air travel of music stars, a tragic history to which aaliyah’s death contributed. on 3 february 1959, buddy holly, ritchie valens and the big bopper died in a plane crash, later made legendary in don mclean’s 1971 hit of nostalgic schmaltz, “american pie”. nevertheless, five years later, the beatles 1964 jetset tour would already stand as the pinnacle of the glamorous links of air travel and modern musical life (dierikx 2008: 95–6). third, the jetset signifies the communications, acoustics and entertainment of the airplane and airport as sonic environments exemplary of the dialectics of sound in modernity. friedrich kittler emphasizes the role of pilots in transforming understandings of sound. in dancecult 3(1)80 the “gramophone” section of gramophone, film, typewriter, kittler writes: “long before the headphone adventures of rock’n’roll or original radio plays, heinkel and messerschmitt pilots entered the new age of soundspace. . . . historically, [the pilot] had become the first consumer of headphone stereophony that today controls us all” (1999: 100). the idea that headphones “isolate” listeners in a negative sense, as argued by schafer and bloom, does not move beyond the micro-examples of home stereos and mobile gadgets. jetset mobility proves to be a macro-example of mobile media communications, represented in the literal form of the jumbo-jet and the 1970 introduction of the boeing 747 amidst the rise of disco culture (dierikx 2008: 76–8). this link is further exemplified by the audio firm sennheiser, which has both lines of aviation and business headsets to complement its production of studio and dj headphones. figure 9: pilot with sennheiser hmec-26 aviation headset. image courtesy of sennheiser. it is likewise indicative that, while the walkman was designed and marketed in 1978 and 1979, on 24 october 1978 the american congress passed the airline deregulation act, which ushered in a new era of tourism and market competition in air travel (dierikx 2008: 121–2). jetset music and sonic associations existed in edm culture throughout, such as jam & spoon’s 1993 classic, “follow me” and paul van dyk’s 2003 global tour, important examples reflecting the jet engine flanging effects common to the trance genre. where pilots were concerned, headphones were also designed and refined with the aim to isolate sound in order to hear in loud environments. moreover, headsets were developed in order to receive messages over long distances and, as opposed to telephones, to keep the hands free while traveling or working. thus, before their close association with the walkman culture of leisure, headphones operated within a longer history of headset aviation and labor. this history stretches from the original headsets of pilots in world war i biplanes, to http://www.sennheiser.com/sennheiser/home_en.nsf/root/professional-audio http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfpq4rtgtpm nye | headphone-headset-jetset 81 the pilots described by kittler, to the plantronics of astronauts during the space race. the first open headphones, the sennheiser hd 414 released in 1968, were likewise acquired by nasa for use in space flights while paving the way for the headphone design of the walkman. headphones, while offering a means to isolate hearing, are part and parcel of the most advanced technologies today that are “connecting the world”. that headphones allow dj listening to take place in similarly loud environments is an analogous practice. figure 10. neil armstrong wearing plantronics headset. source: nasa images. placing thornton’s discussion of the postwar conquest of public space into the context of headset and jetset technologies, i am led back in time to the radically different associations that disc jockeys evoked in the context of the cold war politics of the 1960s and early 1970s, during the inception of edm disco culture. questions of mobility are at this time augmented by images of ubiquity. specifically, the cold war link between headset communications and jetset pilots brings the dj into the realm of a specific figure of the cold war era: the cyborg. since the coinage of the term cyborg in 1960, the rapid development of cyborg theory has focused on its consequences for anthropology in a global context. originally coined by manfred clynes and nathan kline, the cyborg was the notion of the pilot carried to its extreme in the form of the astronaut. it referred to “the enhanced man who could survive in extraterrestrial environments” (haraway 1995: xv). the cyborg clearly emerged from the 1950s military-industrial complex yet also presented utopian dreams of flight. in donna haraway’s 1985 analysis, “a cyborg manifesto”, a similar tension in the text, of which she is well aware, disturbs popular perceptions of her manifesto as a blankly technophilic celebration of the progressive potential of technology to undo gender binaries and national-imperial allegiances. the persistence of the dialectic of technology haunts her affirmation of the progressive potential of cyborgs. as she states: dancecult 3(1)82 figure 11. woman with sennheiser hd-414. image courtesy of sennheiser. “the main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. but illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. their fathers, after all, are inessential. —donna haraway (1991: 151) nye | headphone-headset-jetset 83 the disc jockey can be understood as an ambivalent figure similar to the pilot and the astronaut: disc jockeys are symbols of music mobility and communication across borders yet emerge from technologies of command-and-control that can be harnessed toward diverse ends, which both kittler and haraway clearly emphasize. to highlight this dialectic, i turn to a series of examples from california and west germany, as two cold war “coasts” of techno culture and science fiction in which the figure of the disc jockey was explored with particular intensity. the examples, dating from 1965 to 1975, trace the disc jockey in the course of its transformation as representative of public broadcasting to club dj. in the context of the space race, a prescient work of literature that clearly saw the disc jockey in a cyborg context was the 1965 science fiction novel the three stigmata of palmer eldritch by philip k. dick. the disc jockey as commander of the radio airwaves demonstrates recorded music as a ubiquitous presence established through satellite communications. in part, the novel concerns the lives of colonists on mars who survive by chewing the drug can-d while playing with plastic dolls called perky pat and toy objects. these objects are set in miniature worlds called “layouts” that remind the colonists of earth. the miniature worlds induce a 3-d experience of earth when can-d is chewed. both the dolls and the drugs are supplied by an international company called perky pat layouts. in order to advertise the latest editions for the layouts, the company has “disc jockeys”, located in satellites that circle mars. the disc jockeys operate as advertisers, beaming down the latest news regarding products to purchase in service of the hallucinatory trips. dick thus blends plastic pop objects, radio communications and the “turn on, tune in, drop out” practices of west coast counterculture in his imagining of a future world. arguably, this absurdist future bears some comic resemblance to pop-plastic rave culture, illustrating rave as a late example in the long cold war history of psychedelic countercultures since the 1950s. this dialectic between headset and dj culture on the west coast is expanded a number of years later in the first two feature films by none other than george lucas. thx-1138 (1971) envisions a future headset society, and, as a “nostalgia film” ( jameson 1991: 18–9), american graffiti (1973) remembers an idealized radio dj society of rock ‘n’ roll and “cruising”. the central importance of these films is demonstrated precisely by comparing them in terms of technological media; they anticipate lucas’s later iconic position as head of skywalker sound, a major innovator in the sound of blockbuster cinema. thx-1138 features headsets worn by managers in the command-and-control center, workers in the cyborg laboratory and pilots in jetcars. the original trailer features the shaved heads and signature telefunken and pioneer headphones that mark the headphone-skulls of the future society. the use of headsets considers the mediation as well as the total lack of private lives, in stark contrast to the 1980s coding of headphones as private. when subjects open private medicine cabinets in their homes, there is always an answer from the command tower, viewing the subject through a hidden cam: “what’s wrong?” along with the jetcars, the context of jetset aviation is clear if one further considers that lucas’s award winning student film upon which thx-1138 is based, electronic labyrinth: thx-1138 4 eb (1967), was http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dns4zukfskg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5paepoximim dancecult 3(1)84 filmed primarily at los angeles international airport and features a similar headset society. this dystopia is set against the lost utopia of white teenagers in american graffiti, who listen to the benevolent and liberatory electric speech of wolfman jack, the radio persona of bob smith, a famous “white negro disc jockey” of the 1950s (brewster and broughton 2000: 34). the original trailer is narrated in part by wolfman jack, and it features introductions of the various main characters, the final of which is dj wolfman jack himself. in the film’s disc jockey scene, the protagonist curt henderson meets wolfman jack at the radio station. emphasizing occult media, the radio tower resembles a church steeple; the “religious” music of sonny till and the orioles’ “crying in the chapel” plays as curt arrives. this music is followed by the song “a thousand miles away” by the heartbeats, which represents both curt’s longing for a distant love and the dispersed “body” of the radio dj as omnipresent god. this founding presence in the radio dj society is confirmed when wolfman jack insists: “the wolfman is everywhere.” like thx-1138, american graffiti was anticipated in another student film by lucas, the emperor (1967). this short documentary concerns a los angeles radio dj, bob hudson, who had a radio persona called the emperor. the engagement with technology in this context of disc jockey and car culture is portrayed as positive and humanistic in american graffiti, by comparison to the headset future of thx 1138. in short, here we have a clear demarcation between headset work and headphone-radio leisure. the mobility in american graffiti is also the idealistic, social mobility of car cruising. to be sure, the film also ends with a “jetset” (though in a propeller plane, immediately prior to the rapid expansion of jet travel). curt henderson flies away from the idealistic californian home, never to return. the film concludes with an announcement of the diverse fates of the four male characters, some of which are tragic and end the innocent era of teenage cruising. the ubiquity of the radio dj as understood by dick and lucas is later explored in an explicitly musical context on the other “coast”: namely in kraftwerk’s album radio-activity (1975). interestingly, this album was initially inspired by a jetset itself, kraftwerk’s 1975 tour through the united states, which included many college radio interviews (bussy 2001: 69). on the flight home, “suddenly, there was a theme in the air, the activities of radio stations” (flür 2000: 77). radio-activity evolved as a concept album to the cold war radio dj, exploring radio’s interaction with radioactivity and the history of bicoastal electronic/ recorded music. the album consists of “radio music” that mixes the songs and the single “radio-activity” with tracks using radio samples or announcements. three relatively short tracks appear in succession: “sendepause” [intermission]; “nachrichten” [news]; “die stimme der energie” [the voice of energy]. the practice of radio disc jockeys in staking out territory is represented here in the more direct context of cold war conflict than appears in american graffiti. hütter and schneider listened extensively to the electronic music programs of westdeutscher rundfunk (wdr) in the 1950s and 1960s, listening which is subtly addressed in their engagement with the radio works by werner meyer-eppler (brocker 2011: 106). these programs were in part sponsored by the cia and understood as propaganda to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syuc9e3expi&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1vbkoi3xqk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1vbkoi3xqk nye | headphone-headset-jetset 85 establish a specific postwar west german identity. the key roles also played by the military radio stations of both british and american forces networks and munich-based radio free europe (see johnson 2008) in the reception of music and news in the two germanies and europe demonstrate the intertwining of the military–industrial complex and radio. the cold war context of atomic energy and radio transmission is expressed in the lyrics to the title track. it exploits the multiple meanings of “radio-activity” in german and english as well as in the third “language” of morse code. the ubiquity of radio and radioactivity is plainly stated: “radio-activity is in the air for you and me”. the dialectic of occult media, technological media and questions of atomic apocalypse is expressed sonically. the choir drone produced by a vako orchestron synthesizer is a kind of synthetic-religious drone, an occult counterpart to the promethean potentials of technological media and atomic energy represented in the geiger counter and distorted morse code. among the radio announcement tracks, “die stimme der energie” gives a unique account of modern media, headsets and religious transcendence. “die stimme der energie” takes the form of a disc jockey announcement rather than a radio hit. it begins with rustling and distorted radio static and white noise, followed by the distinctly distorted baritone of the “voice of energy,” a variation of a text by the phoneticist and vocoder acoustician meyer-eppler (brocker 2011: 106). in this context, it is the voice of the radio dj as robogod the father. the immaterial ubiquity of the radio, combined with nuclear radioactivity, is transformed into an electronic deity. the german language is a mix of lutheran biblical allusions and romantic-poetic genius, contrasting with the benevolent disc jockey wolfman jack of american graffiti. translation: hier spricht die stimme der energie this is the voice of energy ich bin ein riesiger elektrischer generator i am a giant electric generator ich liefere ihnen licht und kraft i supply you with light and power und ermögliche es ihnen sprache, musik und bild and make it possible to send and durch den äther auszusenden und zu empfangen receive speech, music and image through the ether ich bin ihr diener und ihr herr zugleich i am both your servant and master deshalb hütet mich gut therefore guard me well mich, den genius der energie. i, the genius of energy kraftwerk also explores the musical potential of radio and recorded music. one can observe this structure in “radioland”, a unique track that simultaneously represents both artistic creation and reception. listener and producer collapse in this song of “recorded music”. the track consists of hütter and schneider expressing in duet the various actions one performs on electronic instruments in the form of listening to shortwave radio. after each lyric, a corresponding sound indexes the act of sound creation. at the end, a final response is heard of a vocoder voice from “radioland,” somewhere between disneyland and deutschland. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjibvb_8vaq dancecult 3(1)86 telecommunications and radio are further exemplified in the track “antenna”, which delights in a techno-sensual “i-you” dialogue through radio: “i’m the antenna, catching vibration; you’re the transmitter, give information!” “antenna”, along with tracks such as “airwaves” and “radio stars”, focuses on a headset mix of radio and the space age as index of nato pop culture in the cold war. the disc jockey world of radio-activity can here be juxtaposed with kraftwerk’s 1981 album computer world, which reveals a shift to the private and isolated associations of “headphone culture”. kraftwerk’s theory of composition and collective reception in “radioland” shifts to personalization and miniaturization in “pocket calculator”. composed in 1981, “pocket calculator” presents the musical practices of mobile media culture. the “we” of radioland reception becomes the “i” of pocket calculator composition: “i’m the operator with my pocket calculator”. the ongoing fetishization of miniaturization has made this track far more famous than the comparatively forgotten “radioland”, though it can be argued “radioland” is just as important. even before the official end of the cold war, computer world anticipates an age of neo-liberalism and globalization. there are no explicit references to cold war themes. kraftwerk is undoubtedly a symbol of edm dj culture even though none of its members were djs; rather, their concept albums and practices as sound technicians or “operators” help to contextualize the dj’s relation to recorded music and sound studios. indeed, it highlights the dialectical relation of edm “headphone culture” between those of sound producers and djs. in dj culture, it is usually the double role of the dj–producer that garners more attention than the solitary dj. the attraction of dj headphone performance is dependent upon the sound creations of music producers through studio headphones and the club sound systems. headphones here recall the triple use of headphones i emphasized in the introduction: musical consumption, studio production and dj performance. to be sure, the production of electronic music has its own promethean associations on a par with the omnipresence of the radio dj or the performance of the club dj. at the same moment that philip k. dick was imagining satellite disc jockeys on the other coast, one of the great experimental films to deal with electronic music and technology was made: mauricio kagel’s antithese (1965). it concerns a solitary studio engineer who produces sound both by tape and by operating various instruments, including using gramophones like a dj. he is experiencing the slow dissolving of his identity amidst the studio equipment. though the male experimental scientist remains isolated, the technological devices ultimately relinquish him from the construction and domination of sound as private possession. he is manipulated by his instruments while he manipulates them. like kraftwerk in “radioland”, he listens as much as produces. at one point, he climbs atop a building and puts on headphones. he then throws down various headphones, televisions and radios for the passersby, yet this does not break his isolation. antithese concludes in a schizophrenic episode in which his “double” is wrapped in magnetic tape and set out to sea. this dialectic of promethean technology and the dissolving of subjectivity raises issues of gender, race and politics of labor, also highlighted in haraway’s concept of the cyborg. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbgvvzvvnsi http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzt64_xoflk http://www.ubu.com/film/kagel_antithese.html nye | headphone-headset-jetset 87 her manifesto rubs against the grain of anthropological and scientific “man” and deals with the consequences of cyborg technology for relations of race, gender and class. as she states, her concept is “a blasphemous anti-racist feminist figure” (haraway 1995: xvi). her modern cyborg figure, as applied to the dj, runs against the grain of the primarily neo-primitive understandings of dj roles that have been received in popular culture. these understandings are exemplified by brewster and broughton who describe the dj as “the witchdoctor, the shaman, the priest” (2000: 4). such categories of occult media need to be complicated by technological media as the historically grounded practice of late modernity. furthermore, haraway’s cyborg figure is constructed amidst 1980s mobile media but highlights the cold war history explored in these sci-fi examples. it emphasizes the ambiguous stature of the dj figure within market forces and class-gendered structures of technology. unfortunately, the human with headphones and the popular silhouette of the cyborg head have primarily been the “man with headphones”, often taking the form of the white male cyborg as pilot or astronaut. the long history of male djs is also admitted by brewster and broughton: “throughout this book the dj is ‘he’ and this is not just a matter of grammatical simplicity. in djing’s 94 years, women have been largely frozen out of the picture, with precious exceptions” (2000: 377).10 the promise of dj “facelessness” in the history of broadcasting was all too often undermined by other negative potentials of the dj. as operator of technology, djs became not only males but the single male on stage, operating as a kind of command-and-control figure over the audience: the boy with his toys. thus, the club dj is implicated in the male-dominated headset and jetset cultures traced in this larger history of technological media. djs in performance: public and private headphones this digging back in time through media and mobility to the origins of postwar “headphone culture” helps to view the 2001 moment of dj performances on stage with new eyes and ears. in this final section, i explore the precise significance of headphones to club dj performance, the role of dj listening as headset labor and finally the late history of the cyborg figure and the jetset in the 21st century. the historical sedimentation of club djs as humans with headphones on stage can now be read within the specific context of the post-1960s dialectic of mobile listening as both individuation and conquest of public space. the constant shifting of headphone positions, as i observed in detroit, marks the dj as a specific form of listener. unlike any other figure, the club dj highlights the dialectical tension of public and private headphones through performance. the positions include placing the headphones on both ears, on one ear, or on neither ear, in which the headphones become a fetishized stereo necklace. the headphones mark that private listening is occurring on stage. however, this private listening is key to the suspense of the public performance. as the dj constantly listens between monitors and headphones in order to prepare a track, the audience watches in suspense, because it does not know what new track will be played or sampled. it knows that listening is occurring, dancecult 3(1)88 but not to what. it only knows that the new track has been carefully selected, whether for aesthetic or promotional reasons. thus, the dj’s headphone listening primarily involves the establishing of a private listening space on stage, resulting in the mix’s suspense. a return to the notion of headset culture as the primary source of communication is helpful here. like the dialogic mix that occurs between two turntables, the headphone listening of the dj is opened out onto the crowd in a constant dialogue of musical telecommunication. the headphones in a club context want to become a headset that communicates through music. it is because the dj is flirting with traditions of private listening that the crowd desires an intimate dialogue with the dj. this explains the socio-aesthetic reasons behind the attraction of star djs; the crowd recognizes its own practices of electric listening in the headphones of the dj, while publicly celebrating the pleasures of stereophonic technology. in other words, the dj headphone performance transmits the sonic potentials of studio headphone production and audiophile consumption. this constant shift of headphone positions during the mix also signifies the practice of listening as labor. the headphones need to be moved swiftly and easily as the dj performs multitask-hearing to various registers of sound: the headphones, the monitors, the sound system, the crowd noise, etc. the dj understands the headphones not as an end in itself but as a tool. this is indicative of the fact that dj culture is only partially related to the most dedicated audiophile communities within headphone culture. the use of headphones is always in the service of the mix. djs select headphones on a functional basis: maneuverability, comfort and appropriate bass levels so that beat matching and other mixing practices can take place. the social role of djs is thus in some respects contradictory. they are the main popular symbol of headphone listening on stage, but they are not primarily headphone listeners themselves. evidence for this can be found in the relative absence of djs in the headphone and audiophile community, such as head-fi.org. founded in june 2001, head-fi.org consists of over 100,000 members whose primary devotion is to the history, technology and quality control of headphones. it provides a forum for the industry and for listeners to test new equipment and provide “sound” advice. there is comparatively little dj presence on this site, however, because for djs, as stated, headphone listening is primarily dedicated to the mix. the main headphone issues of concern to djs are their role in club performance and their ability to help preserve hearing. the specific design and marketing of dj headphones came relatively late in history, starting in the late-1990s and popularized with the release of the sony mdr-v700. since then, dj headphones have been continuously refined and expanded, including industry standards such as the allen & heath xone-xd-53 and the sennheiser hd 25-1 ii, worn by speedy j and chris liebing respectively in the native instruments traktor performance. in terms of headphone labor, the “private” listening of club djs causes suspicion. the audience often asks: what is the dj actually doing? labor can be performed in different ways. some djs make a paradoxically “scientific” performance, with few expressive gestures and total focus on the set. the success of the performance is demonstrated in “the music http://www.head-fi.org nye | headphone-headset-jetset 89 figure 12: sennheiser hd 25-1 ii. winner of the djmag tech awards for “best headphones”, 2006–2009. image courtesy of sennheiser. itself ”, which drives the crowd into frenzies that contrast with the dj’s private and focused space. in fact, the “scientific” posture of some djs recalls the traditions of command-andcontrol in a number of respects. in the command of individual musical choice and skill, djs keep calm and collected in the face of enormous expectations and stressful environments. the antithesis of the scientific dj performer is the one who gestures constantly, sometimes to the point of overcompensation, to prove to the audience that he or she is doing something. the dj becomes a conductor: specifically, an electric conductor of crowd responses. yet how the dj presents the actions of the performance on stage becomes a challenge when compared with bands and traditional instruments. though a fetish, the headphones as a gadget are more limited than, for example, the electric guitar in demonstrating one’s star quality and music abilities. the electric guitar is quite obviously a phallic symbol with great stage presence, marking male prowess (waksman 2001). rather than the virtuosic performance of the guitar, the dj’s dancing and the subtle movements of the headphone focus on the pleasures of electric listening. the ear becomes the erogenous zone—as opposed to the lips of the singer or the hands and crotch of the guitarist. to be sure, kissing ears can be quite arousing. at these moments, the dj appears more open and queer than the rock guitarist, though as we have seen, the ideal of dj-queerness has in some respects proven to be a feint. this is because, along with the vinyl, turntables and mixers, the headphones represent technology, which is supposed to be confined to the realm of man. yet it remains the dj, both club and radio dj, who makes explicit the pleasures of electric listening in our time. in the moment dancecult 3(1)90 figure 13. jeff mills, wearing sony mdr-v700 headphones, performing the mix scientist, mayday 2011. photo by sean nye. nye | headphone-headset-jetset 91 of performance, djs are primarily the listeners who listen for us. the dj functions as the expert of the “stockpiling of use-time” (attali 1985: 124–32)11 that is the result of recorded sound collecting; in terms of labor time, the mix is prepared from many hours of listening at home, in the studio, in the club and on the streets. the headphones mark the central political-aesthetic role that listening plays within and through recording and phonography. the fact that most djs have been male might thus be used to recode popular understandings regarding listening and, in this context, electric listening. in the west, listening is usually thought of as a passive, vulnerable and even feminine practice. the existence of the dj, whether male or not, places this non-sovereign notion of listening in doubt. indeed, the very existence of the dj is a threat to the traditional western division between listening and performing, already explored by kraftwerk in “radioland” and kagel in antithese. like the blackberries and cell phones that collapse public and private, home and work (goggin 2006, 2011), the dj collapses consumption and production. finally, the commitment to listening as labor, and at the extreme of loudness, marks the dj as a suffering listener. the dj’s hearing in the context of the club suffers as much as the clubbers’ if the proper ear protection is not employed. the desire for rapture at the limits of loudness leads to a suffering yet ecstatic listener and performer. though the dj during the last 30 years has symbolized the mastery of listening, such issues indicate the care of electric listening is still abused. by way of conclusion, then, i turn to the question of listening at the limits of loudness. the great contribution of the “techno scene film” (nye 2010) it’s all gone pete tong (2004) is that it puts listening at the forefront of the dj’s career. the film tells the story of the fictional eurotrash dj, frankie wilde, as the banal male chauvinist downfall of cyborg dreams. originally from england, he has relocated to the commercial jetset clubs of ibiza to establish his career. the headset economy of cheap tourism and the music business is represented by his manager, max, whose cell phone earpiece is virtually a part of his body. wilde’s constant excess—the alcohol, drugs and the fortissimo sound systems of the ibiza clubs—results in tinnitus. the film places the beethoven myth of deafness (we hear the “moonlight sonata” as wilde goes deaf ) into the context of eurotrash club culture. deafness, however, is not an accident of illness but the consequence of excess and stupidity. wilde must face deafness as symbolic of his abuse of the technological means to create a false stardom and a false society. it’s all gone pete tong shows the lack of care for electric listening’s pleasures at maximum volume, where not even the culture of the deaf is understood. frankie wilde must come to terms with these limits and solve his challenges, though leaving the club and embracing his new life as a deaf man is his final redemption. it’s all gone pete tong signifies the changed structures of labor and transport in the 2000s, which meant a subsequent banalization of jetset and cyborg figures in the popular mind. to an extent, the rise and fall of the dj star has paralleled the rise and fall of jetset glamor. the jetset later turned into the “easyjetset” (rapp 2009; nye 2009) due to the rise of bargain airlines and the ubiquitousness of air travel today (dierikx 2008): by 2005, the number of air passengers per year had already exceeded 2 billion. djs are here recognized dancecult 3(1)92 as laborers, suffering in an open economy of music downloading, file-sharing and ringtone culture (goggin 2011: 55–79) and in a technoculture of rampant debt. at the moment that digital technology allowed beat-matching to go on auto-pilot, headset associations became increasingly transferred from pilots to less “glamorous” jobs as taxi drivers, office workers and fast-food servers. as has been indicated throughout this article, however, headset labor was always a part of this culture, placing the cyborg into everyday context. in terms of science fiction, it lands the space opera pilots in the cyberpunk problems of the dystopian present, which was highlighted in my encounter with the dystopian politics of detroit techno (pope 2011). despite these grave problems, the current moment of the technics 1200 discontinuation can hopefully also be seen as a moment for shifting attention towards an open future of new media technologies and practices while harnessing the revolutionary potential from past science fictions and sonic fictions (eshun 1998). after all, the cyborg testing of volume and practice of phonography remain both the musical echoes and critiques of the headset pilots and astronauts, who broke the sound barrier and headed to outer space, all the while making sure the headphones were in their proper place so communication would not cease. acknowledgements many thanks to elliott de aratanha, luis-manuel garcia, sumanth gopinath, joshua gunn, mirko hall, graham st john and erik wijnands, as well as the guest editors and peer reviewers of this issue, for their advice and reviews of this article. special thanks to erik wijnands for the headphone discussions and audiophile advice. thanks to i-motion and the crew of mayday for their support and guidance, as well as to sennheiser for the media support. and many thanks to gabriel rodriguez for the trip to detroit. endnotes 1 for a thorough social and psychoanalytic theory of the gadget, see gunn and hall (2008), who consider gadgets as “devises fabricated expressly for stimulating various human desires or ‘drives’” (2008: 136). in terms of technology, the gadget is a “tool or mechanism that is fetishized because of its novelty” (2008: 136). gunn and hall analyze the ipod as the primary gadget of the economy of earbud culture in the 2000s. the insertion of earbuds into the ear canals represents the achievement of the “sonorous envelope” (2008: 144-53), an experience of subjective absorption in music resulting in controversies associated with social and erotic issues. the teleology of headphone miniaturization and refinement, which i will explore later in the article, corresponds with this aim of the sonorous envelope. 2 “headphones” and headphone culture are here understood under the general definition of an electroacoustic transducer for receiving sounds. the forms range from in-ear headphones (earbuds/in-ear-monitors) and on-ear headphones (earphones) to circumaural headphones (headphones with ear-encompassing pads). “headphones” are often associated strictly with the last form. nye | headphone-headset-jetset 93 3 see, for example, discussions on head-fi.org. 4 though electric listening is here metaphoric compared to bell’s invention of electric speech, it does emphasize the question of reception and listening discussed in ronell’s telephone book. electronic music received through headphones emphasizes total electric mediation; music and medium reflect each other. for ronell, though the telephone undermines the simple notion of “organ extension”, she acknowledges: “let us, for the sake of clarity, condense the telephone into a single supplementary organ, the mouth-ear” (1989: 104). if the telephone is the mouth-ear, two similarly condensed notions of supplementary organ might be considered: the double-ear of the headphones and the mouth-double-ear of the headset. in terms of media history, headphones are not “ear extensions” in the same way as devices such as hearing aids or earplugs. yet, to the extent that they block out unwanted noise and enable “hearing” over long distances, they certainly represent a crucial form of “ear extensions”. electric listening thus registers the double anxiety of ear extensions: schizophonic and stereophonic. 5 rickels offers an insightful analysis of german cultural theory regarding california as a “philosopheme” (1991: 6). in his comparative study, the “bicoastal” logic in the analysis of technological media and popular culture of the “teen age” is thoroughly explored. 6 one important example is the official refusal of dj star ricardo villalobos to ever play in the united states while the republicans were in power (daily swarm 2009). 7 see sandoval (2010) and technology updates (2010). the sony walkman trademark continues in mp3 player formats. however, the walkman name remains virtually synonymous with the portable cassette player version, whose 1979 introduction marked a revolution in mobile music. that the long production histories of the technics 1200 and walkman run in parallel and end in the same year is another indication of the dialectic of dj culture and mobile media. 8 there are many gradations to this argument. for example, the volume can be up so loud that the sort of music one is listening to is audible to the other. the sheer loudness at once indicates indifference to the other and advertises one’s private death drive to deafness. just as some headphones contain sound poorly, so do shades of sunglasses allow for an interlocutor to see the eyes to varying degrees. for critics of modernity like schafer and bloom, the implicit threat of headphones was also the incursion of the other through the aggressive use of boom boxes in public places. in our current situation, the constant interference of personalized ringtones disturbs public places. this assertion and presentation of personal taste on the streets continually interrupts the private “isolated” worlds of others. 9 the sound mixer in the back versus the performers in front recall the allegory of plato’s cave; the audience is focused on the shining light on the stage of the performing musicians, though these are in fact prepared by the lighting and sound designers. the audience is faced away from them as in a psychoanalytic session. 10 the case of broughton and brewster is overstated, because their book neglects to examine significant female djs, especially since the late 1980s. some important examples would include miss djax, marusha, ellen allien and miss kittin. 11 in 1977, jacques attali critiqued the recording industry and the stockpiling of use-time as the onset of the “repetitive society” (1985: 87–132) in what he saw as the total commodification of public space by the industrial products of recorded music. while the various practices of stockpiling offer an innovative analysis of late modernity, the poverty of attali’s critique lies perhaps in the failure to mention the subject of the dj throughout this chapter. http://head-fi.org dancecult 3(1)94 references attali, jacques. 1985 [1977]. noise: the political economy of music. trans. brian massumi. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. bloom, allan. 1987. the closing of the american mind: how higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of 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<http://www.discogs.com/madonna-music/master/34721> van dyk, paul. 2003. global. mute (cd): 9201-2. <http://www.discogs.com/paul-van-dyk-global/release/120026> various. 1973. american graffiti: original soundtrack. mca records (cassette): mcldc 617. <http://www.discogs.com/various-american-graffiti-original-soundtrack/ release/2590770> filmography “apple music event 2001: the first ever ipod introduction.” usa: apple <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn0svbcjqls> (accessed 24 may 2011) dowse, michael. 2004. it’s all gone pete tong. uk: lionsgate. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0388139/> isham, wayne. 2000. aaliyah feat. timbaland: try again. usa: hollywood center studios. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nef_-icnqc4> (accessed 15 may 2011) kagel, mauricio. 1965. antithese. germany: <http://www.ubu.com/film/kagel_antithese.html> (accessed 24 may 2011) kosinski, joseph. 2003. ispec. usa: kdlab. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apqwfkvwfxe&feature=related> (accessed 24 may 2011) ———. 2010. tron: legacy. usa: disney. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1104001/> liebing, chris and speedy j. 2009. “ni traktor pro session.” germany: native instruments. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhplfpmintm> (accessed 24 may 2011) lucas, george. 1967a. the emperor. usa: university of southern california. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061621/> ———. 1967b. electronic labyrinth: thx 1138 4 eb. usa: university of southern california. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062331/> ———. 1971. thx 1138. usa: american zoetrope. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066434/> ———. 1973. american graffiti. usa: universal pictures. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069704/> madonna. 2001. drowned world tour. usa: warner bros. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0294696/> reggio, godfrey. 1983. koyaanisqatsi. usa: metro goldwyn mayer. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085809/> http://www.discogs.com/madonna-music/master/34721 http://www.discogs.com/paul-van-dyk-global/release/120026 http://www.discogs.com/various-american-graffiti-original-soundtrack/release/2590770 http://www.discogs.com/various-american-graffiti-original-soundtrack/release/2590770 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn0svbcjqls http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0388139/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nef_-icnqc4 http://www.ubu.com/film/kagel_antithese.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apqwfkvwfxe&feature=related http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1104001/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061621/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062331/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066434/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069704/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0294696/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085809/ the varieties of ecstasy experience: an exploration of person, mind and body in sydney's club culture sean leneghan saarbrücken: lambert academic publishing, 2011. isbn: 978-3-8454-1634-2 rrp: us$114.92 daniel schnee medicine hat college (canada) this monograph is a reprint of sean leneghan's doctoral thesis in anthropology, an ethnography of those that consume 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, an illegal amphetamine sold under the name mdma, or ecstasy. the thesis examines narratives by ecstasy users concerning its effects and role in their participation in sydney, australia's underground club culture. in the process, leneghan questions standard bio-medical and bio-psychological studies of ecstasy, arguing that the standard methodology is overly mechanistic and/or materialistic, and ignores the lived experience of ecstasy-altered consciousness. instead, leneghan thoroughly documents firsthand narratives of the ecstasy lifestyle in the participants' own idiomatic language, allowing him to take a "holistic organismic" approach to analyzing the overall, lived processes which inform their language. this is termed "processual morphology". leneghan situates this process within a methodological framework informed by existential phenomenology, with the work of philosopher edmund husserl (1859–1938) as the foundation for his analysis, asserting that the husserlian lebenswelt (ger: life-world or 'lived experience') concept should be considered when discussing his subjects. more specifically, leneghan suggests that stephen strasser's conception of the lebenswelt, and how a "world arises in dialogue" (37), should be considered in bio-medical investigations of amphetamine-influenced consciousness. failing to do so essentially reinforces the academic status quo. this current state of affairs, to leneghan, amounts to a refusal to critically examine bio-medical/psychological pre-suppositions and foundations of the lebenswelt, reinforcing frameworks that "reify the living subject" (210). more specifically, leneghan argues that the experience of actually using ecstasy and modifying one's own stream of consciousness is a unique reality, which should be investigated as another lived world, rather than an altered or non-ordinary state of consciousness (209). the language of describing the ecstasy-induced state has, to leneghan, been ignored or dismissed. in one sense i would agree with that dismissal, as leneghan's subjects describe this "lived world" after the fact. none are interviewed while actually on ecstasy, and thus their language is not truly based in the actual lived world of ecstasy intoxication, ergo the real language of ecstasy is missing. regardless, leneghan seeks to create a "dialogal ethnography", which would allow him to "faithfully bring to light and clarify the direct experiential stream of consciousness of ecstasy consumers [sic] mode of being-in-the-world" (209–10). his reportage consists of several themes organized under the rubrics: initial reactions, the rush, plur (peace, love, understanding, respect), unificatory experiences, and so on. this context-specific approach to phenomenological ethnography, leneghan suggests, can make a significant contribution to australian and international drug research. leneghan's phenomenology is admittedly husserlian in that experience is considered significant knowledge, though not science in itself. through the act of "bracketing", the phenomenologist puts aside noumena (things) for the analysis of phenomena (how we experience things), isolating objects in order to know what we think they are, and thus understand how we feel while experiencing them. this creates an ontology of experience-as-reality, and not what one might call the "objectively real"; we separate the physical facts of the tree from the experience of sitting underneath it. the potential problem with this, though, is that one can treat what is noumenal as a parergon: a supplement, framed out and away from experience, an accessory to experience. the greek meaning of parergon (πάρεργου) is "subordination", or "what is of secondary importance". in early greek philosophy, parerga (pl.) are that which have nothing to do with philosophy proper, things that are "not subject to rigorous philosophical investigation" (krell 2000: 27). bracketing and separating the material or mechanistic perspective would seem to remove it from the dialectic of ecstasy research, the continuum in which a full dialogue is possible. but leneghan vigorously argues that bio-medical research brackets the language and lebenswelt of the ecstasy user, discounting its role in a thorough sociological and/or psychological investigation of ecstasy use in sydney. in this sense, the materialist parergon takes on the kantian definition; what is not "an intrinsic constituent in the complete representation" of an object (kant 2007: 57), e.g. the frame on a painting or drapery on a statue. though kant's argument was within the realm of aesthetic judgment, the line of reasoning could also be used to justify ecstasy language not belonging in academic dialogue for aesthetic reasons, that such "aestheticism" has no empirical value in academic research. indeed, leneghan states that the two aesthetic reports of ecstasy experience contained in the book are "an example of the user's imagination augmenting what sense perception takes as given in the empirical world" (115). but are such augmentations true? do they have epistemological value? such augmentation is also at the heart of debate about ontological truth in aesthetics. at the core of the debate is a dialectic that places a romantic view of art, e.g. august schlegel (essential truths are known through art, not science), at odds with the post-aesthetics of martin heidegger and his assertion aesthetic qualities obscure, not elucidate, fundamental truths. how then do the users augment "what sense perception takes as a given in the empirical world"? in this case, the augmentation comes in the form of the research participants' language, how they describe their experiences. leneghan documents, for example, one user's experience of the negative effects of ecstasy (121). he states "reactions through the digestive system can sometime lead to nausea, cramps, and vomiting", and quotes the user "hel" who says: it's like my stomach! it's just so empty... 'oohhh... and you get 'chemi-guts;' like you haven't eaten in a day an [sic] a half, except for pills and base and things like that; and all your stomach is doing is turning in those drugs and stomach acids and things like that. you just go "arrrgg – i feel sick, need to eat – but can't." cause food is not right – right now (121). the description does not speak to a unique ecstasy reality though, but rather the common effects of adverse gastrointestinal reaction. thus leneghan is utilizing bio-medical analysis, albeit with the user's less than scientific description as a result. as leneghan is dismissive of the bio-medical status quo, does the user's account then enhance sociological understanding of ecstasy cramps accurately? the answer, in this case, would seem to be no. the ethnography does read well as a narrative, or set of narratives, if not a typical academic anthropological work. as much as it is a work of research, its usage of extensive interview material and a glossary of ecstasy slang provide a solid bridge between ethnographic analysis and the lived conditions of ecstasy use, club culture and meaning making in real time. as such, it could be argued that its contents challenge current bio-medical paradigms through leneghan's decision to include such narratives in academia in the first place. thus it is an act of merging or "transculturating" his own existential phenomenology by "un-bracketing" it, and updating its status from paragon to ergon: a work or act that also accomplishes the goals of medical and psychological ethnography via lived narratives of non-ordinary consciousness. unfortunately, though, leneghan's work may be disregarded for reasons other than his methodology. upon further investigation it turns out that the book's publisher lap (lambert academic publishing) is owned by vdm verlag, both of which are considered by some to behave unethically, due to such practices as selling works created entirely from (free) wikipedia content. also, there seems to be no editorial process in place, as leneghan's acknowledgements section credits photographer darren hart for work that does not actually appear in the book (17). thus, the fact that leneghan's work is affiliated with lambert at all might raise questions as to its veracity. but, if the work is epistemologically sound, one could argue that it does not matter who publishes it. leneghan's work is an interesting contribution to his field; a well-documented ethnography that will hopefully engender debate about phenomenology, if not non-ordinary consciousness. references kant, immanuel. 2007. critique of judgement. oxford: oxford university press. krell, david farrell. 2000. the purest of bastards: works of mourning, art, and affirmation in the thought of jacque derrida. university park: pennsylvania state university press. competitive remix practice and networks of support in electronic dance music economies dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 6(2): 22–41 issn 1947-5403 ©2014 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.02.02 competitive remix practice and networks of support in electronic dance music economies jonathan karpetz mcgill university (canada) abstract the rapid development and dissemination of social media fueled competition platforms has led to immediate shifts in the practices of creative workers in fields related to contest offerings. in electronic dance music (edm), crowdsourced competitive remix platforms have reoriented certain practices into networks of competition, where winning distinction is often only part of a larger process of further enmeshing djs, music producers and their supporters in the social media fueled ecosystems that these websites have created. in order to begin to analyze the impact of remix competitions on producers and their personal and professional networks, i intend to trace a line of recent history and debate to reveal the connections linking edm websites, labels, marketers, djs, producers and supporters and their engagement with remix competition platforms. i will examine the call for support that is involved in so much of socially networked edm communication between contestants and their peers surrounding these remix contests. keywords: creative economies, crowdsourcing, competitive labour, remix, dj, producer jonathan karpetz is a first year phd student in communications at mcgill university. he also is a “working” dj with expertise in house and top 40. jonathankarpetz.com. twitter: @jonathankarpetz feature article karpetz | competitive remix practice and networks of support 23 introduction the contemporary remix contest finds its origins in the social media fueled club and bar networks that have grown around the introduction and adoption of low cost digital music production, performance and distribution technologies since the early to mid-2000s.1 creative competition platforms emerged out of crowdsourcing and social media practices and technologies that began to mediate creative competitions by offering forums for the dissemination and tracking of remix contests for brands, labels, clubs, promoters, djs and producers (howe 2008; brabham 2013).2 websites including indaba music, talenthouse. com, wavo.me along with beatport play all aimed to engage “creative communities” in competition for opportunities to collaborate with major artists and brands and win prizes or employment.3 these platforms were fueled by the connections enabled through the highly developed social media apis and protocols provided by facebook, amongst others.4 competitions appearing on these sites ranged from opportunities to make official videos for major artists, including moby, afrojack and the flaming lips, to an opportunity to photograph for the thomson reuters foundation and nokia, or remix a track for tegan & sara to be released by warner music (beatport 2013c; genero.tv 2013; talenthouse inc. 2013). while these platforms continue to invite a wide range of creative workers to submit to various competitions, my focus here is on the remix contests offered by these sites. these contests are aimed at djs and producers and engage their personal and professional networks in regular competitions to rework provided audio samples or stems with the promise that the winner will be able gain a release of their remix on the contest provider’s label and/or gain a chance to perform as an opening act for a major artist.5 contemporary remix competition websites match established crowdsourcing practices of providing a platform for forming a crowd to solve creative problems, while also pushing the undercurrent of competition that drives most crowdsourcing initiatives to the forefront. they do this by encouraging the crowd’s crowd to interact with their websites through social media by allowing the sharing, liking and voting of these contests by anyone who wishes to participate. while creative crowdsourcing is nothing new and creative contests were attempted in the early days of web-based crowdsourcing, these companies have developed neutral platforms that do not aim to solve significant creative or technical problems.6 instead the sites offer creative competitions for partner corporations and related brands in the hopes of engaging a crowd of emerging artists and their audiences to produce creativity under the promise of prizes and exposure. by providing the solution the crowdsourcing platforms also help their partner brands achieve a wider reach via social media websites by transmitting competitions and integrating the submission, voting and judging processes across major social media websites. by facilitating competitions, creative platforms produce not only crowdsourced creativity but a deeper engagement sponsoring brands and creative networks with every like, share, or vote. i will pursue my research guided by the following questions. 1. how has the introduction of music remix competitions, facilitated by web platforms through partnerships with major dancecult 6(2)24 electronic dance music (edm) labels, producers and brands, affected local dj and producer communities and their organizing and performance practices? 2. further, how are creative contests enabled through tensions between the dual roles many djs and producers inhabit as both entertainers and artists? 3. finally, how do discourses of support serve to drive engagement with these contests? i will study social media fueled remix competitions through the prism of contemporary scholarship on issues of labour and precarity in creative and “do it yourself ” economies (ross 2009; standing 2011; stahl 2012; baker and hesmondhalgh 2013; mcrobbie forthcoming). as i will show, contemporary djs and producers are continually asked to engage with various remix contest platforms and their stakeholders as part of their day to day practice. it is the hidden nature of competitive crowdsourced remix labour, despite the very public nature of the calls for support that accompany the practice, that makes these practices a distinct case of work that needs to be addressed on its own terms. in order to analyze the impact of remix competitions on producers and their personal and professional networks, it is important to trace a line from recent history and debate to reveal the connections linking local edm networks and their engagement with social media fueled contest websites and their backers. in order to find these connections i intend to follow remix producers and their web of socially networked connections. specifically, i examine the call for support that is involved in so much of socially networked edm communication. by following notions of support i will begin to reveal the ideologies and discourses that bubble beneath the surface of professional dance music practices and how they allow for and rationalize these competitive remix practices. my investigation of contemporary remix contests enabled through crowdsourced competition platforms grew out of a program of “insider ethnography” undertaken between august 2012 and march 2014. i drew guidance from ed montano’s “industry based analysis” in sydney’s commercial club scene, situating the dj and producer at the centre of my research (2009, 2010, 2011, 2013: 114). as a working dj and as a participant in club and web based creative competitions, i was able to gain critical insight into systems of ideas and discourses that motivate local clubs, labels, djs and producers to engage with remix competition platforms. the analysis that follows taps into my own networks of people, places and technologies that inform my dj practice. any discussion of these networks then is informed by some level of reflexivity about my work in nighttime economies, my interactions with other dj actors, and my own entrance into the proliferation of social media-based contests that have arisen over the last many years. as with montano, i occupied multiple positions in my research as both an “insider” dj and as an “outsider” researcher (montano 2013: 115). my engagement with these contests stemmed from both scholarly pursuits and creative interests, understanding full well i would confront and have to manage many of the issues and debates that have evolved out of contemporary competitions that i detail below. if claims about contemporary dj contests seem vague, i hope that my situation within current dj networks will develop productive knowledge of the issues at hand to lend voice to those most affected in hopes of an eventual escape from labour precarity.7 karpetz | competitive remix practice and networks of support 25 contemporary dj and producer labour the engagement of djs and producers on social media fueled competition platforms has grown out of the many crises creatives in edm networks have had to confront in their everyday practice. traditional distinctions between the performative practice of djing and the activities of bedroom or studio production has blurred with the rapid adoption of dvs and midi based performance and production equipment that encourages live production and remix.8 while djing and music production are in many ways distinct practices, club owners and promoters often expect djs to produce as a way of promoting their live performances, while edm producers are expected to be competent djs as their main access to stable income is through touring clubs and festivals as performers. competition platforms have accelerated the merging of production and dj practices, often offering performance-based rewards for competition winners. success as a producer on these platforms is associated with becoming the next “superstar dj”, while djs are encouraged to produce as a way of gaining access to exciting performances offered by the contests. what matters in contemporary creative networks is that contemporary djs and producers are often engaged in competition platforms either as a way of gaining exposure for their original music productions or remixes or for promoting their roles as performers in local scenes. in contemporary dance music economies the production of original edm recordings and remixes are the result of a complex mode of production, often involving local producers and clubs, as well as local or internationally run labels. for established producers remix opportunities might be handed down from larger labels, either as paid work or as opportunities for “exposure”, with promises of residual compensation depending on how the remix sells. working producers circulate between smaller and more established labels, either as featured artists or as label owners themselves, often providing remixes for other producers, who themselves may be label owners or manager, with the promise that those artists will someday collaborate or remix in return. across the music industry, labels and established artists turn to remixes as a way of promoting or expanding the reach of the original single. with the expansion of labels and releases on edm focused download sites, such as beatport, tracksource and trackitdown, in recent years remixes by established producers are no longer any guarantee that a track will reach the level of desired exposure, while the costs of inviting working producers to remix tracks may cost more than it is worth. as a result, clubs, labels and established producers have turned to a new form of remix production, the contemporary crowdsourced remix contest, as a way of enlisting young and enthusiastic producers in remixing their products but also in marketing their releases through the tools provided by competition platforms. djs or producers looking for work are often directed to create mixes, remixes or produce new edm tracks, which are then uploaded to these platforms as a showcase of their “unique” talent. these practitioners are then asked and often required to pass their creativity through their socially networked connections to gain likes or votes, which directly impact their chances of winning contests and finding work either as local djs or as edm producers. dancecult 6(2)26 the rise of competitive labour in creative industries is a result of developments in technological and work related practices that have resulted in new sorts of creative subservience. andrew ross has observed that changes in labour practices invite a “condition of social and economic insecurity… which not only gives employers leeway to hire and fire workers at will, but also glorifies part-time contingent work as ‘free agency’, liberated from the stifling constraints of contractual regulations” (2009: 40). angela mcrobbie argues, “the flamboyantly auteur relation to creative work that has long been the mark of being a writer, artist, film director or fashion designer is now being extended to much wider section of a highly ‘individuated’ workforce” (2002: 517). free agency and individuation has rolled into notions of “me inc”., or what alison hearn describes as the “branded self ”: “a distinct kind of labour; involving an outer-directed process of highly stylized self-construction, directly tied to the promotional mechanisms of the post-fordist market” (2008: 201). notions of self-branding also are tied to what joshua gamson observes as the rise of the “ordinary celebrity” (2011: 1062). exhibits of ordinary celebrity can be found in all forms of media, from reality and talent television shows, such as american idol and the voice, to the introduction of web-generated celebrity production platforms (gamson 2011: 1065). the introduction of crowdsourced platforms for contestation is a further development of the externalization of labour costs by requiring participants to fund their creative projects in the hopes that they will win the contest and the attached prizes, which are often lump sum honorariums or vague promises of exposure. while performance-based competitions such as battle of the bands, star search and american idol are not new, the contemporary mode of dj contests, which include local contests and web-based remix contests, have produced and reflected a new form of work that asks djs and producers to continually “labour to compete”. the effect is a turning inwards of creative rhetoric and practice where djs and producers continually compete with each other over what precious little work is available, while also providing libraries of free music remix content and networks of engaged fans to crowdsourced contest platforms instead of contesting the overriding labour practices maintained by club, music distribution and remix platforms that have challenged traditional practice. rhetoric and ideology research into how entertainers and artists deploy certain ideologies in their rhetoric has revealed that many working in creative economies are reluctant to implicate themselves in market practices despite their explicit association with capital in their day to day activities. rosa reitsamer’s empirical research of djs in vienna, austria in the late 2000s noted that “changing relations between culture and society and between art and money, associated with neoliberal economics and post-fordist models of industry increasingly force cultural producers to adopt an entrepreneurial position”, a position “reflected in the self-(re) presentations of the djs” (2011: 29). for reitsamer, the djs operate with art and money in karpetz | competitive remix practice and networks of support 27 opposition, “which manifests itself in the disavowal of economics and the accumulation of cultural and symbolic capital”. she sees djs as having been forced to adopt an entrepreneurial position which “marks a break with anti-commercial notions of creative activities”. in invoking bordieu’s concept of illusio, reitsamer observes that “djs’ faith in the ‘game’ of recognition… puts the djs in competition with one another in the struggle for a legitimate position in the music scenes” (2011: 38). while acknowledging that, for bordieu, illusio was characterized by economic disinterest, reitsamer posited that djs none the less saw creative success as a path to economic success, which was exhibited in the work dedicated to original music productions, remixing and label creation amongst the djs she interviewed. in a revealing study of local rock musicians in the late 1980s, stephen b. groce employed qualitative sociology to examine how the actors had “developed a complex ideology to rationalize and justify what they [were] doing” (1989: 405-6). in defining ideology as a set of “interdependent ideas, held by a social group…, which reflects, rationalizes and defends its particular social, moral..., political and economic institutional interests and commitments”, groce revealed that copy musicians (or cover bands) saw their role as workers, who show up to do their work at a club with an orientation to customer satisfaction and an expectation of appropriate compensation, while original musicians were far less willing to classify their role in relation to performance and their music, repeatedly explaining that the creative process was more important than live performance or generating income. groce saw these local performers as operating in situations where they have little to no control so they found “a system of definitions and assumptions which organize lived experience”. he summarized that “in addition to providing individual musicians with a system of definitions and assumptions which organize lived experience, ideologies function to organize and give meaning to collective social experience as well” (groce 1989: 393–4, 406–7). the contemporary dj or producer is asked to be at once both an entertainer and artist. these dual demands of their practice confuse and conflate traditional entertainer/artist distinctions. in practically and rhetorically merging these practices djs and producers have privileged their roles as artists over their function as entertainers first. more, they have defined their new relation to practice with terminologies that enforce and perpetuate their precarious position in the creative economy while at the same time giving away the value of their personal and professional networks, fueled through crowdsourced remix competition platforms, to companies and their marketers in the pursuit of both tangible and emotional responses from their audience and peers. clubs, companies and marketers encourage and demand producers’ labour on social media to enlist their personal and professional networks in creative practice through remix competition platforms. in doing so, the businesses engaged with edm communities gain recognition, an audience and income of their own on the backs of largely free remixing labour provided by the producers. seeing themselves primarily as artists, djs and producers engage others with their practice in calls for “support”, a word that masks and reveals so much of the current ideology that operates in dance music practice. dancecult 6(2)28 discourses of support in examining the discursive legacy of support in relation to “support the troops” movements, patrick g. coy, lynne m. woehrle and gregory m. maney define discursive legacies “as well-established, repetitive, restrictive, and culturally recognized ways of talking and writing about a particular issue over time” (2008: 163). for the authors these discourses “have triumphed in the contention over the terms of public debate on a recurring issue”, which “often roughly reflect existing power relations” (coy, woehrle and maney 2008: 163–4). roger stahl observes that the notion of support has two major functions: deflection, “which is the redefinition of war from a struggle to attain an external objective to an internal struggle to save the soldier”, and disassociation, “a discourse that conditions the image of the proper wartime citizen” (2009: 535). stahl concludes that notions of support are used to “foreclose debate” rather than encourage its citizens to question a state’s involvement in conflict (stahl 2009: 535–36). the investigation into notions of support by these authors shows that the term has a legacy that deflects and disassociates rhetoric from a criticism of those in power toward a language that leaves no room to debate. the ongoing use of support in relation to the troops has transformed the term from that of lifting others up or bearing an expense to a word that forecloses debate and enforces stable power relations and legitimate particular agendas. for these researchers the antidote to foreclosed support rhetoric is to bypass these rhetorical devices and engage directly with those in power, to “valorize civic deliberation”, and to direct attention back to questions of legitimacy (stahl 2009: 559). these investigations and proposals for change lie at the heart of my investigation of producers and their calls for support in relation to remix contests and competition platforms. while the stakes may not be as high as those of the military and armed conflict, support has none the less come to deflect and disassociate critical debates among creative workers from the structures of power that continue to exploit their creative labour from competition to competition. although scholars have not examined links between the use of support in the militaristic sense and the use of the term in the creative sense, my experience in creative communities reveals that discourses of support among creatives and their networks reproduce the very same discursive legacy. in examining the language of edm networks it is clear the term “support” has gained significant currency in socially networked communications. support is invoked by club owners, promoters, djs, marketers and audiences on the ground and in social media to reflect their desire or need for assistance in relation to their participation in edm. at a practical level rhetoric of support that surrounds creative practice is a key device in which artists and their stakeholders enroll each other in each other’s creative networks. calls for support that are involved in so much of creative rhetoric elegantly enlist other creatives in networks of practice but also serve to orient artistic practice outside structures of power that define their relation to labour in creative economies. support, as a rhetorical device, both affirms membership in creative networks while also excluding others who choose to confront the real creative economy. if you do not support us we do not support karpetz | competitive remix practice and networks of support 29 you. we cannot support your push for financial reward, which necessarily sacrifices your creative integrity. further these devices allow members of creative communities to engage with creative platform providers and aligned marketers while still justifying their position outside the precarious reality of contemporary creative economies. calls for support are often invoked to encourage other members of a participant’s network to engage with her interests in advancing their creative careers. for club owners support is used to ask other djs, producers and their audiences to engage with their club, through attending club nights or telling their networks about upcoming events. promoters ask djs and producers to support their night through participating as performers or through cross promoting each other’s nights. djs and producers will ask their audiences to support their performances at events, or support their productions or remixes by following links to media. established producers support label releases in ongoing exchanges of branded marketing. friends and fans of these owners, promoters and performers cast support nets even wider, invoking their own networks of friends and families to consider aiding their friends of colleagues. if the language in describing these various relations seems strained it is because the term and language of support has come to replace individuals in these circles. owners become supporters of promoters and djs. promoters support the clubs with their talent, the djs they support. djs are surrounded with support and supporters. while there are clearly structures of power in edm, in these associations the rhetoric of relations are made horizontal, all under the rubric of support. contemporary remix contests contemporary competitive remix practices among creatives in edm is almost entirely facilitate by crowdsourced competition platforms. these platforms both facilitate and encourage competition with and among creative networks on the web and in local venues. by developing neutral platforms that integrate deeply with social media to provide creative competition these websites represent a significant evolution in crowdsourcing development that threatens the definitional and ethical boundaries of the practice. where traditional crowdsourcing platforms transmit a problem to the crowd for a solution that usually results in the manufacturing of a product or idea these competition platforms crowdsource creativity and creative networks in the service of enmeshing those individuals and their audiences with the contest brands, while often providing little reward other than nominal compensation and vague promises of exposure. further, these platforms and related marketers usually require that remix producers sign away the rights to their work when entering the contests, while generally discarding the vast majority of submitted creativity and rarely doing much with winning entries beyond the limited terms set out in the call for submissions. for these platforms and their partners creativity only matters as long as it leads to another share or another like. as a result remixes are often reduced on these platforms to a vector for generating a few extra twitter followers and a few more hits on a brand’s youtube channel.9 dancecult 6(2)30 despite these developments djs and producers and their networks seem all too eager to engage with remix contest platforms as a chance to find exposure for their creativity. rather than examine their role in these contests and the vast exploitation involved in the process of these competitions, remix producers are all too willing to join in on the contest as a path to creative success. further djs and producers are driven to do so by institutions that surround them who often lean on crowdsourcing platforms to provide the most talent at the lowest possible cost, with local labels and clubs often demanding that their workers engage with crowdsourcing platforms to help expose their local brands to the socially-networked communication these contests platforms provide. while competitions would not necessarily be harmful if smaller practitioners were partners in these exchanges, the entire practice of djing and remixing has shifted toward free competition and labour as a way of producing marketable exchange rather than through investment and development that factors in the basic rights and necessities of creative workers. rather than making demands of these remix contest websites or turning away from these large marketers and labels, local djs and producers are creating more and more for those powerful actors in the hopes of making it big. to be clear, for many, if not a majority, of these performers working in contemporary club networks, “making it big” is analogous to being rich and famous as a music producer and dj, though this notion is rarely expressed in terms beyond those of reaching a certain creative potential as an individual artist. the drive to make it big through remix competitions is aided by established edm celebrities who often partner with labels and marketers on various competition platforms to encourage the continued competing of local djs and producers with the promise that they too could be the next superstar dj. afrojack, a popular dj and producer who has found commercial success in edm circles, serves as an example of how celebrity aids in popularizing remix contests while also mystifying their own role and the role of marketers in the creation and distribution of competition on crowdsourcing platforms. throughout afrojack’s career he has enlisted the term “support” to propel his music career, his brand and related businesses while mystifying his relation to edm and labour. afrojack regularly expresses his gratitude for support from friends and colleagues through his social media presence on twitter and facebook. in an interview with rolling stone in the lead up to his october, 2013 release of the spark, afrojack reflected on his association with david guetta, a french producer and major edm mover and shaker: “support like this is everything to an artist on the way up and he inspired me to want to give back in the same way to others… i worked hard for it, but it can happen to you if you really want it” (luerssen 2013). afrojack often uses the term support to indicate he will play forthcoming tracks of other music producers, a common practice among djs at local and international levels (spinnin records 2013). support is often invoked by afrojack to indicate other djs and producers that are performing alongside him at various clubs and festivals (afrojack 2013a). his label has offered remix and video production contests through beatport and genero. tv, claiming to support creative communities and find unique talent (beatport 2011). the calls for support often engage local producers and their audiences who are directed toward karpetz | competitive remix practice and networks of support 31 afrojack’s associated websites to engage with the performer in echoing his calls for support or by entering related remix contests. nowhere in afrojack’s social media presence and related media are there explicit references to structures of money and power that flow through edm practices. calls for support in these cases often mask the very real relations to capital that flow through afrojack and his brands. instead of being supported by other producers, such as david guetta, afrojack had entered creative partnerships where he was initially and likely remains, an unequal member (afrojack 2013b; gensler 2013). these partnerships produce creative works that are bought and sold among major and minor labels as real exchanges for real money. afrojack has leveraged his relative power in dance music economies to sign producers and remixed productions to his label, amassing a portfolio of creative works that he markets and sells. invoking support in relation to releases on partnered labels is a cross-promotional practice that associates various producer brands with releases similar to the way major corporations have a portfolio of starts they use for promotion of their brands. by lending his name to these releases, afrojack invites his fans, venues, producers and labels to engage with other producers and brands along with the marketers of various labels and the platforms that are ready and willing to sell these tracks to enthusiastic audiences. enlisting ideas of support in relation to other performers at his live events masks an entire range of complex negotiations that are involved in most major performance contracts. are these supporting djs and producers part of afrojack’s requirements to perform; do they include local talent, or perhaps a contest winner? in supporting afrojack, are these supporting artists being paid to perform or do they give away their labour in the hope of gaining notoriety, through association with afrojack and his networks, as a reward? clearly in many of these situations the relations operate barely under notions of support, but it is the continued reluctance to acknowledge these associations by djs and producers across edm that is so striking. multiplied by the thousands of notable djs and producers currently working in edm and their expansive networks, which includes their audiences, labels, marketers and countless websites, it reveals a striking separation from the reality of economy and creative labour that are at the heart of their day-to-day practices. for the hundreds of thousands of djs working across local networks, notions of support mystify and exploit creative practice across edm. local engagement with remix competition platforms: a case study my case study of a 2013 beatport play remix competition and the discourses of support that mobilized local djs and producers to engage with the contest website is a direct result of my own participation in an earlier club competition in the spring of that same year. my placement in that club competition in montreal, quebec “won” me access to regular meetings at the venue, which were assembled to engage local djs and promoters in the promotion of future events. what i witnessed in these meetings and what is detailed below was a confirmation of similar discussions and actions surrounding remix competitions that i witnessed as a working dj in calgary, alberta. dancecult 6(2)32 on thursday, december 5th, 2013, a monthly dj meeting was held at circus afterhours to discuss recent developments at the club and talk over upcoming events. circus, a montreal afterhours club and oft-rated number one dance venue in the province of quebec by industry magazines and websites, was preparing to host the biggest event in its history, the circus maximus new year’s party that was planned for december 31st. the party would use all available club space to pack 1600 revelers into the venue with tickets for entrance priced anywhere from $65 up front to $95 at the door. the meeting of djs at circus centred on issues of promotion and sales for the event. of the forty resident djs —that is, djs who perform at circus approximately once a month—twenty arrived to hear the pitch. twenty three djs were scheduled to play between three rooms on new year’s eve. of those, some were circus residents while others were national or international djs and producers flown in for the night. the remaining djs were asked to sell tickets for the event in support of the club. the justification was that by supporting the club’s promotion of the biggest event of the year all djs engaged in some way with circus would benefit in key ways. first, the event’s success would help sustain the club and allow them to bring in more acts. second, it would allow circus afterhours to further support local djs through increased notoriety and the opening of secondary rooms on a regular basis. “support us as we support you” was an oft-repeated refrain from the primary promoter and many young and enthusiastic resident djs, who insisted that, by freely promoting ticket sales for the event, all djs would benefit. in addition, the promoter encouraged all djs to produce and remix music with the goal of spreading the productions across music hosting and promotion websites and social media. the idea was that if circus djs were exposed and recognized in wider edm markets, then circus afterhours would benefit similarly. in asking for support through production and remix, the promoter, as an employee of circus, was asking for a significant amount of free labour, from a precarious workforce of tangentially connected djs and producers, to promote for shows that many were not working as performers or entertainers. further, petitions for support came with a warning that if these djs did not respond to the request, their status as a resident could be in jeopardy. rather than explicit communication over expectations of work at the club and remuneration, the promoter chose instead to speak in vague terms of growing communities of djs and producers. while circus spent lavishly on promotional banners, print and web advertising for the new year’s event, a far cheaper, more personal and efficient promotion machine was engaged when the resident djs of circus and their networks of friends and fans took to facebook, twitter and beatport to market circus afterhours and the new year’s event. most made individual posts on their personal pages and fan pages—a common practice amongst local djs and producers, which is used to provide information to a wider audience about their shows and releases—along with engaging twitter to spread information about the event. the local djs enlisted for one hour sets at the new year’s event, with the agreement they would be paid a nominal amount of money, were sent special digital posters and banners to replace their facebook/twitter profile pictures and cover photos. similar generic graphics karpetz | competitive remix practice and networks of support 33 were sent out to individuals closely associated with circus, encouraging them to support the club by promoting alongside them. calls for support rang out on social media, promoting circus and the new year’s eve party. resident djs asked for support by having their audience attend their performance on the night, while other unscheduled djs asked for their friend and fans to attend the event in support of their club. many resident djs took up the second promoter request and either began or searched out new remix opportunities in the hopes of engaging and growing their own professional network along with the clubs. while producers associated with circus released tracks on a regular basis, either for free on social media or through various local labels on beatport, a particular remix contest, hosted on beatport play, enrolled a number of circus dj/producers into a competition that translated the support of local edm networks into web impressions and revenue for the competition platform and its related labels and marketers. the remix contest for tiga vs. audion, let’s go dancing, appeared in early november following the original’s release to beatport and itunes in mid-september 2013 (beatport 2013e). beatport news released contest details asking djs to “join the ranks of hot-hand producers like maya jane coles, breach and solomun, among others, who’ve been tipped to remix tiga vs. audion’s single, let’s go dancing, on turbo recordings” (black 2013). beatport news encouraged djs and producers to imagine themselves “alongside like-minded label artists like duke dumont, azari & iii and clouds” (black 2013). the website offered audio stems for download and asked djs to upload their remix to play.beatport.com for a chance to win various dj related technologies along with a “bonus” release of the track on the contest’s host label. by the submission deadline on december 8th, 2013, 560 remixes of let’s go dancing had been uploaded to beatport’s servers. remixes ranged in style, length and production quality, but all were represented through beatport play’s algorithms as greyscale rectangles sorted on a list down the webpage with a voting button, comment section and hot linking to the producer’s dj page that contained a history of their activity on the site. the website translated the character and quality of individual creative productions into a bar of exchange that could be moved up and down as if they were entries on an accounting ledger. as the contest progressed votes slowly rolled in, moving entries up and down the list as producers enlisted their audiences to visit the beatport site and vote. comments were left on the website in support or in critique of the various entries, which were often closely monitored and responded to by the entrants and their fans. despite a lack of guarantees that top entries would be even considered for the grand prize, with the contest offering only a smaller prize to the entry with the most votes, djs enthusiastically spread the remix contest links and information around their social media pages and contacts. even with the lack of guarantees it is generally accepted in edm contest networks that only the top few vote-getting entries will be considered, as the number of people producers are able to send to these contest sites are a major factor in the selection dancecult 6(2)34 process. the potential to have those votes translated into music sales for the label through beatport is very persuasive for labels that rely on the sale of digital files as a major source of income. no less than four circus residents submitted remixes as part of the let’s go dancing contest. throughout the submission and voting process calls for support rang out on facebook and twitter. scott james, a house dj at circus, posted his remix to both his facebook personal and facebook fan page. his call for votes was in relation to a number of posts he curated attempting to position him as a serious producer. many posts were made over successive days attempting to engage his supporters to vote for his submission. scott james’s contest page was shared on social media no fewer than 98 times over a two month period (beatport 2013a). despite the considerable number of links james’s submission was listened to only 185 times, garnering 13 votes. marc luciano, a deep house specialist at circus, regularly posted his contest link with calls for support; “our track is chilling on the first page right under the tracks of the people who have been spamming to get votes. if you haven’t voted, check out the track and if you like it, your support would mean so much! represent mtl” (beatport 2013b). luciano was nominally successful, garnering over 500 plays of his remix along with 48 votes, despite sharing his link far fewer times than other circus residents. joe mesmar, a resident techno dj at circus, submitted to the contest and engaged his web of social media contacts a number of times with calls for support. “take a listen & vote for me if i deserve it! thanks to every person who’s supporting me! not asking for more” (beatport 2013d).10 mesmar was able to translate calls for support into a significant number of votes and by contest end had well over 1300 plays, 120 comments and critiques and the most votes in the contest. for circus afterhours, the exposure of its djs and producers through social media and contest platforms is a vector for free promotion and sales of new year’s eve tickets in addition to other events. for the producers involved in the contest, it is a way of promoting their own brand while engaging their audiences, the club promoters and beatport labels in cross networking and promotion. while goals of wider exposure and more performances at circus are more immediate, the aim for fame and improved economic status operate beneath every facebook share or tweet. turbo recordings and the label owner tiga, have been provided with over 500 remix submissions, which represent hundreds of hours of work, thousands of dollars of sunken technology costs and the emotional and intellectual engagement of hundreds of producers and thousands of individuals in their personal and professional networks. despite the costs in hours, money and promotion involved in these contests and the eventual expectation of creative or economic reward, the dialogue in and amongst those involved remains couched in notions of charity and support. while afrojack continues to recall his humble beginnings and encourages anyone who will listen that we all have the spark, beatport and its partners gather up competitive exchanges and package them into content portfolios that add to their parent company’s, sfx entertainment, bottom line. karpetz | competitive remix practice and networks of support 35 conclusion the rapid development and dissemination of remix competition platforms have led to immediate shifts in the practices of djs and producers online and on the ground. for professional djs and producers these remix contest websites have had a significant impact on how they practice their craft. contest websites have reoriented certain practices into networks of competition, where creatives and their audiences are asked to engage with these platforms and their partners for a chance to sign away their work if they happen to be “lucky” or “talented” enough to win a remix contest. winning distinction in these contests is often only part of a larger process of further enmeshing djs and producers and their networks of supporters in the ecosystems that these platforms have created. having rationalized competition as a largely positive phenomenon, the contemporary edm producer and her web of connections is ready and available to serve remix contest after remix contest as required, as competition is the fuel that sustains it. extrapolating these remix competition processes across the enormous and expanding numbers of talent contests available points to a significant exploitation of creative labour. these competition and marketing platforms have moved to exploit the relatively high number of djs and producers willing to compete in contests by selling the notion that competing is one of the few ways to gain exposure, while the participating labels also benefit from receiving a competition product they can promote and exploit for their own gain, which also ensures competitors conform to a relatively rigid set of remix production expectations. frequent and widespread competitions are supplied by large reservoirs of free labour. music download sites then sell these remixed products back to the producers and their networks, expecting that their audiences will buy a product that includes their friend’s creativity. while a producer may benefit from the chance to perform or have their remix released commercially in some ways, the costs and expectations of these contests, especially when multiplied by the manifold contestants involved, often far exceed the value gained by producers as individuals or as a whole. with relatively little to gain by individual djs and producers competition to competition, event to event, platform to platform, a stable supply of regenerating contesting labour will be available for subsequent remix contests, which often ask the same workers to compete once more for a chance to show their “unique” talent. in examining the rise of competitive practices in creative economies through the lens of djs, producers and the remix contest platforms they compete on, i have sought to reveal the web of relations that produces the precarious reality of contemporary creative workers. it is an examination that seeks to be part of a larger discussion of the reconfiguration of labour in contemporary creative economies driven by evolutions in technologies and fueled by shifts in discourse that seek to rationalize and valorize competitive practice as the best way for artists to unlock their hidden talents and become another productive member of “me inc” (hearn 2008). in the precariat, guy standing notes that, through the encouragement of competitive practices, businesses were deliberately transferring risk to the worker under “fictitious dancecult 6(2)36 decommodification” (2011: 41). the transfer of risk “means an advantage for employers and increased risk and insecurity for wage earners” (standing 2011: 43). in doing so these companies were making the lives of workers more precarious. by following the discourses of local djs and producers and stripping away the mysticism that surrounds their competitive practice, it is clear that clubs, labels, web platforms and partner brands are transferring many of the risks of operating in contemporary creative economies onto their workers. in promoting, assembling and performing competition after competition, djs and producers, along with artists in many creative fields were left to do most of the work with very little compensation. despite their exploitation, artists seem to generally revel in the opportunity to create for the opportunity for exposure and a chance at fame. there is a turning inwards of rhetoric and practice where creatives continually compete with each other over what precious little work is available instead of contesting the overriding labour practices maintained by local venues and online platforms that have gutted traditional creative employment opportunities. furthermore creatives are often encouraged to bring their networks to the table in a cyclical generation of competitive practices. having rationalized competition as a largely positive phenomenon, contemporary creative networks are ready and available to serve contest after contest as required, as competition is the fuel that sustains it. by providing competitive venues for marketers to exploit social media communications these platforms are more advertising agencies than talent scouts. as marketing forces these companies are taking advantage of a largely unregulated marketing space, the contemporary social media connected web, to promote their brand partners on the backs of precarious creative labour. in injecting brands into creative communication these companies are breaking a number of principles and best practices that marketers are required to adhere to in traditional marketing space. they are able to bypass these regulations by shrewdly masking their branded exploitations behind discourses of creative exposure and support. their promises are not backed up by reality as the vast majority of remix producers engaged in competition receive little benefit. brand partnerships and their objectives are masked behind throw-away prizes and promises of celebrity to attract many artists as possible. by not disclosing their role as marketer first these platforms are extremely unethical. it is my hope that by paying increased attention to these sites that the majority of their practices will eventually require greater disclosure if not a complete reworking. there is no sign that these competitions will enter into decline in the near future. there is a virtually endless stream of young and influential talent that will continue to enter various contests in the hopes of breaking into full-time dj work. venues and marketers will continue to mobilize and mediate these networks then drop them once they stop providing enough value to their businesses. major competition networks across the globe will continue to legitimize competitive practice through a filter of sponsorships that will continue to encourage certain practices over others in the interest of their branding. the creative worker will continue to struggle from contest to contest expending large physical and mental energies producing and promoting enough networked value to gain a foothold in a small part of the creative economy. karpetz | competitive remix practice and networks of support 37 for djs and producers there is solace in the performative aspect of their craft. despite the expansion of web-based practices djs and producers are in greater demand than ever before. even though their creative practices increasingly include web platforms, a great deal of what makes a edm network tick is still in the material reality of local spaces and peer-to-peer communication. as the rapid expansion of edm practices cools, my hope is that increased attention will be paid to the material and historical connections that make creative practice what it is, as well as the problematic discourses that activate and enable exploitation in dance music economies. acknowledgments i would like to thank dr. will straw for helping guide and translate my passion for djing into scholarly terms. i would also like to thank dr. darin barney, dr. jonathan sterne and matt stahl for their advice. further i would like to thank anne pasek, a fellow mcgill student. she is both a brilliant scholar and a wonderful person. notes 1 see farrugia (2010), montano (2010), reynolds (2010), attias (2011), attias and veen (2011, 2012), ahmed, benford and crabtree (2012). 2 crowdsourcing is a way of describing the rise of web-based practices in the last fifteen years whereby organizations began to outsource labour to the open market (the crowd) through web based platforms, in hopes of tapping a vast network of talent and ingenuity to provide solutions to their organizational problems (brabham 2008a; geiger et al. 2011; guittard and schenk and 2011). 3 creative competition platforms centre their businesses on the use of social media to leverage the work of painters, designers, filmmakers, music producers, photographers and programmers. these are all part of a group of workers i will describe as creatives or the creative class (florida 2002; peck 2005). 4 facebook connect was launched in 2008 and was quickly adopted by thousands of websites to provide a login service that could be used to easily connect to other websites using facebook credentials ( jefferson 2009). 5 remix contests in edm often involve the release of ‘stems,’ that are samples used in the production of a track. in remix competitions audio segments used in an original recording, often including, percussion, vocal tracks and synths, are made available on contest hosting websites for download by competitors. these audio pieces or “stems” are offered so that they dancecult 6(2)38 can be remixed by music producers into alternative versions of the original song. while most competitions provides these audio pieces for free, some contest websites charge nominal fees for their download. 6 an early failed example was a chevy marketing campaign (bosman 2006). 7 a significant amount of qualitative interview-based research has been done on edm networks. this research has often involved questioning djs, producers, promoters, club owners and audiences. further, interview-based researched has also been used to examine social media communities and participants on crowdsourcing websites. despite the extensive use of interviews by many of the researchers, papers and books that inform my own research on competitive labour, this method is not sufficient to get at the heart of the issues surrounding these new competition practices. primarily my research attempts to examine and give voice to the thousands of djs and producers entering creative contests globally. most of the available interview data suggests that the winners are often the only ones available or sought out to be consulted in studies of these platforms, despite their specificity as high-profile members of the networks and a minority of total contest participants (heinrich 2014). 8 dvs stands for digital vinyl system. major players in the dvs market are serato, with their rane hardware based scratch live software and native instruments, with the traktor hardware and software solutions. many competitors sell a range of midi solutions, ranging from small controllers that compliment dvs systems to entire performance setups in a box. midi, or musical instrument digital interface is a protocol that allows electronic music instruments and computers to communicate with each other. 9 almost every scholar who has written about crowdsourcing has examined it effect on workers who participate or who might have worked in related industries before their development. as an example, brabham has examined how istockphoto and related sites has virtually wiped out traditional stock photography businesses (brabham 2008b; howe 2006). 10 post made to joe mesmar’s fan page (mesmar 2013). references afrojack. 2013a. “afrojack facebook”. facebook. 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(accessed december 22 2013). <http://instagram.com/p/frhwfsitbm>. ahmed, ahmed, steve benford and andy crabtree. 2012. “digging in the crates: an ethnographic study of djs’ work “. austin (texas): association for computing machinery special interest group on computer-human interaction conference. attias, bernardo alexander. 2011. “meditations on the death of vinyl”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 3(1). <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.10>. https://www.facebook.com/djafrojack https://www.facebook.com/djafrojack http://instagram.com/p/frhwfsitbm http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.10 karpetz | competitive remix practice and networks of support 39 attias, bernardo alexander, and tobias c. van veen. 2011. “off the record: turntablism and controllerism in the 21st century, (part 1)”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 3(1). <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.08>. ———. 2012. “off the record: turntablism and controllerism in the 21st century (part 2)”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 4(1). <https://dj.dancecult.net/index. php/dancecult/article/view/332/328>. baker, sarah, and david hesmondhalgh. 2013. creative labour: media work in three cultural industries. new york: routledge. beatport. 2011. “announcing afrojack and quintino’s selecta remix contest”. beatport. 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(accessed december 28 2013). <http://play.beatport.com/contests/tiga-vs-audion-lets-go-dancing>. black, jason. 2013. “this week on play: win dj gear from novation and get released on turbo recordings in tiga vs. audion’s ‘let’s go dancing’ remix contest “. beatport. 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(accessed december 21 2013). <http://www.talenthouse.com/ photograph-for-thomson-reuters-foundation-and-click-4-change>. http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.05 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143010000449 http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.04 http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.02.06 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2005.00620.x http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.02 http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.05 https://www.facebook.com/spinninrecords/posts/682305188462055 https://www.facebook.com/spinninrecords/posts/682305188462055 http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/rap.0.0121 http://www.talenthouse.com/photograph-for-thomson-reuters-foundation-and-click-4-change http://www.talenthouse.com/photograph-for-thomson-reuters-foundation-and-click-4-change turntables of doom kath o’donnell (aliak) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.11> at an mf doom gig on friday, 1st april 2011, dj sheep led a turntablist battle revival in brisbane. prior to this gig, there’d been words exchanged—djbutcher had posted “dude… u know i’ll beat you on the decks… ur an idiot… [sic]” on oz hip hop (2011). dj sheep, following the hip hop code he lives by, issued a challenge to battle on the decks at the next gig he was playing at. the challenge was turned down as butcher didn’t attend the gig, so spectators only saw one side of the battle, but they left charged. i wasn’t there to see it in person, but i saw the video the following day. three days later, dj sheep wrote on ozhiphop.com, “i’ve never felt better in years after a gig, i [sic] got so many daps, and props from people, it felt like the old days again for once” (2011), so it sounds like it was a night to remember. the only way i can imagine it being better (in my head), is if there had been a battle, or if there had been two sounds (sound systems) on opposite sides of a fenced off outdoor basketball court or a jamaican dance hall, like back in the early days of hip hop dj battles. in his book more brilliant than the sun, kodwo eshun coined the term “sonic fiction” when writing about one of the pioneers of hip hop djing, grandmaster flash, and his album the amazing adventures of grandmaster flash on the wheels of steel (1998: 14). i suggest that turntablist battles could also be thought of as sonic fiction on multiple levels—in the sounds produced and performances of the actual turntablist set, for example, as well as in the stories behind the battles; in some case they’re personal and in other cases they’re for competition and showcase. in all cases, they are related to the dj’s career and reputation. the rules of dj battles are the opposite to rule one and rule two of fight club (fincher 1999) since everybody in the dj community talks about the battle before and afterwards. as dj sheep commented, “the hip–hop code is that when you call someone out, or get called out, you either step up or admit defeat. if you say you’re better and back out, you’re [sic] reputation goes down the drain, that’s hip–hop. it’s been like that since the inception”.[i] now, back to the set—in traditional style, sheep gave props to the fallen, shouting out rip–s to angus, jeeps (750 crew) and sabre (bwp crew) before he started. then he got down to business with his message, explaining to the crowd that djs use real records. “in the history of beef, it’s usually the butcher that slaughters the sheep, but today we’re going to see the sheep slaughter the mutherfuckin’ butcher” (djbutcher 2011). sheep then launched into his set, which featured beat juggling, chirps, transform moves such as flares and orbits, and the crab. from the video, you can see a brick and a sandbag on the table—dj sheep and brisbane beat–maker tigermoth pointed out the large springs on the legs of the table which caused the needles to skip during sheep’s set as the table swayed. i think the crowd probably wouldn’t have noticed this had it not been pointed out to them. in any case, sheep took advantage of the moments and paused, giving space to his set and acknowledging the crowd. they gave him plenty of love in return. figure 1. springs on the dj table. photo: tigermoth (2011) it’s plain to see the passion with which sheep performed his set, and from his practice set video—recorded at home prior to the gig (2011)—you can see the ease with which he performs; it’s second nature to him. he has mastered the decks—that is, two turntables and a dj mixer—as his instrument of choice and can manipulate them to create the sounds he wants. his work on the decks personifies what is called “conceptechnics”, a term coined by eshun, who writes that “the decks have become a state of mind for the dj… the turntable becomes a machine for building and melding mindstates from your record collection” (1999:14). sheep’s been djing for the past 16 years or so and has won multiple queensland state dj championships in the past (specifically, the dmc three times, the technics ultimate dj showdown, and the stanton and central station dj competition). his bio on djsheep.com is impressive. he travels regularly and plays to large crowds outside australia, and is likely brisbane’s only “international dj” now that kazu kimura has moved overseas (or “one of” at the very least… i am not sure of the djing passport statuses of freestyle and matt kitshon these days). sheep has also kept the tradition of digging alive by finding records to sell for his vinyl sales business. as bill brewster and frank broughton mention in their book last night a dj saved my life, “digging goes back to the noble role of the dj as a record promoter and musical evangelist, rescuing forgotten songs by never–heard artists or long–forgotten producers” (2006: 285). dj shadow considers digging an “urban archaeology” (brewster and broughton 2006: 286). it is crucial for the dj and turntablist to find the records and breaks that will give them an edge over other djs. digging seems easier these days with the rise of mp3s and internet search engines—almost anyone can do it, and the factors of time and place have been almost completely removed. this makes the traditional vinyl junkie getting “dusty in the crates” a rare and special creature—the limitations of place and availability of suitable records in nearby record stores and fairs means they need to be more creative with and knowledgeable about their selections than the modern internet digger, who has website curators and search engines to help find and filter their music. there are also comparisons to the slow movement with digging in the crates—giving time and personal energy to the exploration of sounds, and allowing synchronicity and the wonder and pleasure of physical discovery to come through and be acted upon. digging on the internet can be more efficient, time–wise, for the busy post–modern hip hop dj, who is, according to brewster and broughton, both “consumer and producer” (2006: 23). the internet can assist in researching artists and music, but it doesn’t allow for the spaces between thoughts and contemplation that the physicality of digging adds to the process. i think a combination of the two methods makes for a well–rounded dj these days. following the search for sounds, djs can add textures to the music in their sets and leave the crowds in awe, trainspotting to work out where that sound came from. brisbane’s been known for dj battles in the past, with two other legends, dj angus/bribe and the master (the masta), often battling each other on the decks at various turntablist competitions in the 1990s and early 2000s. turntablism seems to have waned a bit since the mid 2000s, which i, for one, think is a shame. the technology has changed—there’s now serato and similar digital djing technologies being used in the clubs, and even in the online dmc turntablist competition started in early 2011. so, there seems to be two camps: the ones who’d like to keep the craft pure and use vinyl–only for dj battles, showcases and competitions, and others who are ok with allowing the new technology to be used. it will be interesting to see how things pan out. eventually, every system has to evolve in order to continue—life being one example. but there’s also the revivalist movements that bring back the original skills and systems and continue the original craft. as hip hop, and rap specifically, moved from the dance floor and the streets to stadiums in the usa, some countries, such as australia, have maintained the street feel with a regional flavour. in a way, this was a revivalist movement of “keeping it real” and pure. the original heads started pure and remained pure. as new generations join the hip hop community, some stay true to the roots of the culture—learning from their elders and maintaining the same ideals and methods—while others change things and take advantage of new technologies. perhaps it’s time for the local turntablists to hit the decks again and start practising their skills with records—we might see some more local battles in the future, albeit vegetarian style, with less beef. we may even see some innovation creeping in again, with the combination of the two styles of performance. from all reports, the crowds are definitely keen to see some battles. there was a lot of talk about the proposed battle leading up to it. brisbane’s dj kieron c said, “looking forward to doom & an old school battle royale tonight! why can’t we have more battles at hip hop gigs?” which led to much agreement (2011). it would be great to see a new batch of djs learning from the original crews. let’s see where this leads... author biography kath o’donnell is usually known as aliak when online. in her spare time she works on an archive of brisbane dance parties, hip hop and sound art communities (1987–2001). this article was also published as part of the #turntabletag—<http://turntabletag.com>—project documenting the current state of play of australian turntablism. references brewster, bill and frank broughton. 2006. last night a dj saved my life: the history of the disc jockey. london: headline book publishing. djbutcher. 2011. “mf doom // lazy grey ft. jake biz // dj sheep // tigermoth! april fools day!”. ozhiphop. 24 march. <http://ozhiphop.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid=121359> (accessed 24 march 2011). djsheep. 2011. “mf doom // lazy grey ft. jake biz // dj sheep // tigermoth! april fools day!”. ozhiphop. 4 april. <http://ozhiphop.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid=121359&page=2> (accessed 4 april 2011). dj kieron c. 2011. “facebook status message, 1 april 16:40”. <https://www.facebook.com/kieronsee/posts/10150144482316836>. (accessed 5 april 2011). eshun, kodwo. 1998. more brilliant than the sun: adventures in sonic fiction. london: quartet books limited. filmography djsheep. 2011. “mf doom – dj sheep vs. dj butcher / showcase – april 1st, 2011 (brisbane, australia).” 1 april. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wu3g9gkwdo> (accessed 4 april 2011). ———. 2011. “practice for doom show”, 28 march. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2ly1j2wkpm> (accessed 4 april 2011). fincher, david. 1999. fight club. fox 2000 pictures and regency enterprises. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0137523/>. notes [i] dj sheep, email to the author, 5 april 2011. <http://djsheep.com> "waiting for the bass to drop”:correlations between intense emotional experiences and production techniques in build-up and drop sections of electronic dance music dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 6(1): 61–82 issn 1947-5403 ©2014 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.01.04 “waiting for the bass to drop”: correlations between intense emotional experiences and production techniques in build-up and drop sections of electronic dance music ragnhild torvanger solberg university of agder (norway) abstract this study investigates the correlations between theories of intense emotional experiences and production techniques used in electronic dance music (edm), commonly known as “build-up” and “drop”, which are designed to create tension and a heightened emotional intensity among clubbers. this is done by descriptive and interpretive music analysis, where spectrograms and a schematic model visually represent the dominant production techniques. through a theoretical framework consisting of musical expectancy and gravity, an analysis of two recently produced edm tracks suggests that i) extensive use of uplifters, ii) the “drum roll effect”, iii) large frequency changes, iv) removal and reintroduction of bass and bass drum, and v) a contrasting “breakdown” cause tension and anticipation, which seem to correlate with a possible intensification of emotional experience. this is furthermore discussed and more broadly related to the club experience, drawing on the psychological concepts of peak experience, strong experiences with music and absorption. keywords: emotional responses, edm production, club experience, musical expectancy, gravity ragnhild torvanger solberg is a phd research fellow at department of music, university of agder. her primary research interest is the interrelation between edm, emotions and movements, and through empirical studies solberg examines how edm induces and correlates with intense emotional and bodily experiences. she has a master’s degree in musicology from the university of oslo, where she also has worked as research assistant on the research project “music, motion and emotion”, and lecturer in groove-based music production. email: <ragnhild.t.solberg@uia.no> feature article mailto:ragnhild.t.solberg@uia.no dancecult 6(1)62 introduction music has the capacity to induce intense emotional and bodily experiences, and these experiences can occur when we are listening and dancing to music both in everyday life and on special occasions. for decades, scholars from a vast number of academic disciplines— philosophy, psychology, anthropology, sociology, musicology—have sought to find out why music evokes such reactions in us. the psychological approach to music and emotions seeks for an explanation to whether, when, how and why individuals experience emotional responses to music, and how, why and where we experience music as expressing or inducing emotions (see, for instance, juslin and sloboda 2001; juslin and västfjell 2008; hallam, cross and thaut 2009; juslin and sloboda 2010). the studies on how music can shape emotional peaks and intense experiences are many, and several academics have coined a number of related notions to describe these types of experiences. a point of departure for many of the scholars concerned with the phenomenology of musical listening has been the humanistic psychologist maslow’s term peak experience, defined as “the most wonderful experience of your life: happiest moments, ecstatic moments . . . from listening to music, or suddenly ‘being hit’ by a book or a painting, or from some great creative moment” (1968: 71). gabrielsson, a pioneer within music psychology, continued this research by collecting and systematizing interviews and self-reports of strong experiences with music, with the primary purpose to “describe what reactions may occur in particularly strong experience with music, to explore which factors can elicit such reactions, and to consider what consequences the experience may have for the individual” (gabrielsson 2011b: 547). others have further developed this line of work; for instance, herbert (2011) with the term absorption. this notion refers to an effortless engagement that is not directed to any particular goal, but rather describes “a particular mode of engagement – one that is less pragmatic, often spontaneous and unconcerned with task completion per se” (2011: 86). the scope of this article is solely focused on intense experiences in the club context, but obviously a range of desirable experiences may occur in this setting, and clubbers’ motivations and reasons for seeking out this arena are manifold (see, for instance, malbon 1999; jackson 2004; st john 2004; garcia 2011). i am, furthermore, familiar with similar notions of extreme experiences such as “limit experience”, applied by, for instance, bataille and foucault ( jay 1995), where the state of ecstasy and euphoria is not present. however, in this article the psychological concepts of maslow (1968), gabrielsson (2011a, 2011b) and hurbert (2011) serve well as holistic and overall categories to describe and discuss intense pleasurable musical experiences taking place in the club context. scholars have often tended to theorise musical affect as an emotional “response”, but using these latter psychological concepts as a basis, i conceptualise this as an emotional “experience”, thus underlining the role of the culturally situated listener who is contributing, rather than merely responding, in the shaping of musical and emotional experiences. solberg | waiting for the bass to drop 63 these kinds of strong emotional experiences are accompanied by physiological responses. recent studies within music psychology show that certain musical features and musical passages seem to correlate and further intensify emotional experiences. for instance, increases in heart rate and galvanic skin response, experienced as goosebumps, chills, thrills or shivers, can be triggered when perceiving music.1 studies suggest that changes or expansions in, for instance, dynamics, texture, structure and volume are associated with these types of physiological responses (see, for instance, rickard 2004; gomez and danuser 2007; guhn, hamm and zentner 2007; dibben and witek 2009; grewe, kopiez and altenmüller 2009). musical tension and expectancy can furthermore shape one’s musical experience (meyer 1956; huron 2006). in emotion and meaning (1956), music theorist meyer develops his theory on how musical expectation and tension shape musical meaning by evoking emotional reactions, thus marking the starting point of studies concerned with positive and negative emotional responses to musical structures. the correlation between musical expectations and emotional responses has been further investigated and refined by huron (2006), who coined the itpra theory of expectation, which attempts to explain how expectation is a source of musical pleasure. this theory consists of five physiological and expectation-related emotion response systems—imagination, tension, prediction, reaction and appraisal— and each response is related to physiological and psychological changes, and may cause changes in attention, arousal and motor movements. these responses subsequently follow each other, and can be grouped into “pre-outcome responses” and “post-outcome responses”. the imagination response is the ability to feel an outcome as if the outcome has already taken place. the feeling we get by imagining possible outcomes motivates us to act in certain ways to increase the possibility for favourable outcomes. the aim of the tension response is to prepare us for an approaching event by “tailoring arousal and attention to match the level of uncertainty and importance of an impending outcome” (2006: 15). the next level, the prediction response, deals with humans’ ability to have an accurate prediction of what is to come; motor responses will come more rapidly and be more accurate if one can manage to predict the outcome, and it will also convey positive emotional responses if one succeeds in predicting the outcome (2006: 12–13). the reaction response has a fast onset and establishes if the outcome is pleasant or unpleasant. the function of this unconscious response is protective, typically activating either reflexes or learned behaviour schemas. while the reaction response constitutes a raw evaluation of the event, the appraisal response provides a conscious appraisal and a slower and complex evaluation of the event often drawing on a compound interrelation consisting of both social and contextual factors (2006: 15). the club experience stands out as a culturally dependent phenomenon and experience, and even though huron both implies and includes cultural influence and significance, some critical remarks can be made about the theory’s heavy reliance on biological processes, thus leading to a misunderstanding as huron reduces complex musical emotion to a simple “cause and effect” pattern for musicians, producers and composers to use. nonetheless, the responses huron describes are applicable to edm and serve as a pertinent explanation model of the dancecult 6(1)64 musical devices in “build-up” and “drop”, which i find largely related to musical expectancy and biological and cultural processes combined. a flourishing branch within music psychology, which is concerned with the role of the body when perceiving music, is embodied music cognition. one field of interest is how acoustic features afford certain kinds of bodily movements and also emotional experiences (lakoff and johnson 1999, 2003; leman 2008; godøy and leman 2010; larson 2012). lakoff and johnson have approached this by using metaphors (1999; 2003), and one of their metaphor concepts is orientation metaphors. this gives a concept spatial orientation and has basis in the body’s experience with both the physical and cultural world around us (2003: 14), and they argue that: since there are systematic correlates between our emotions (like happiness) and our sensory-motor experiences (like erect posture), these form the basis of orientation metaphorical concepts (such as happy is up). such metaphors allow us to conceptualize our emotions in more sharply defined terms and also to relate them to other concepts having to do with general well being (2003: 58). larson (2012) expands on this and explores how musical meaning is shaped and both bodily and emotionally experienced through musical metaphors, movements and forces such as gravity, magnetism and inertia. musical expectancy and the orientation metaphor gravity constitute this article’s theoretical framework, and the connection between these can be established by using huron’s itpra theory (2006). my suggestion is that we have an auditive expectancy based on gravity of what will happen when something ascends, descends and becomes intensified. through repetitive encounters with objects reaching their maximum energy potential, we can imagine and predict the process and the outcome. furthermore, we have expectations about how we emotionally and bodily experience gravity and auditive stimuli related to this. for instance, when sitting on a plane ready for take-off, we will have a clear expectancy of the further movements and accompanied sounds of the plane and how the movement and sounds will go in an upward direction to reach its maximum energy potential. we can at an early stage imagine and predict the outcome based on our experience with gravity and spatial orientation; objects that go up eventually come down. elements and passages related to orientation metaphors and musical expectancy can to a great extent be found in newer electronic dance music (edm) tracks, and particularly in the sections “build-up” and “drop”. these sections are filled with intensifying features, and djs and producers are highly attuned to what production techniques “move the crowd”, as in causing pleasurable states such as euphoria and ecstasy. however, studies on edm and the club experience have primarily been concerned with sociological and anthropological aspects of clubbing (see thornton 1995; collin and godfrey 1997; reynolds 1998; rietveld 1998; fikentscher 2000; jackson 2004), even though an awareness of the intense musical and emotional experience occurring in the club context is clearly stated in many of the abovementioned works. some thorough contributions regarding analysis of the musical design and aesthetics of edm exist, with special focus on rhythm, sound, meter and structure solberg | waiting for the bass to drop 65 (see, for instance, hawkins 2003, 2008; butler 2006; snoman 2009; zeiner-henriksen 2010), but generally edm has not been subject to much music analysis of its production techniques, and especially not the production techniques in the sections “build-up” and “drop”. when it comes to issues regarding correlations between musical features in edm and emotional responses, they have not been explored in depth despite clubbers’ utterances about clubbing being an activity causing intense emotional responses and the music being a powerful agent offering these experiences (malbon 1999; garcia 2011). the club experience is a multisensory experience marked by an intricate intertwining of musical, personal and contextual aspects. as i will argue, the music has the strongest position, and the genre name reveals the primary objective: to trigger movement and make people move their bodies to the music in ways they find pleasurable. thus, the music is one of the main reasons why most clubbers go out clubbing; to listen and to respond to the music presented to them in this arena. this article investigates and theorizes how the dominant production techniques used in “build-up” and “drop” can potentially induce and intensify emotional responses in the two recently-produced edm tracks “body” by cinnamon chasers (2013) and “icarus (extended version)” by madeon (2012).2 there are several possible approaches to this, but my focus is on the role of musical expectancy in peak emotional and bodily experiences in edm, and i use gravity as an explanatory musical force and orientation metaphor to underline this. i have chosen to limit the analysis to this theoretical framework since my assumption is that they will offer a closer mapping of musical passages of edm, but musicinduced emotions are always a result of the complex interplay between contextual, personal and musical factors. as previously indicated, not much of the research on edm gives a detailed account of the musical features. however, the moments of building affective intensity are addressed by several of the scholars concerned with the music-theoretical aspect of edm (fikentscher 2000; butler 2006; montano 2009; snoman 2009; zeiner-henriksen 2010; garcia 2011), and especially the terms “breakdown” and “build-up” seem quite established within this literature. however, there is less consistency around the terms used to describe the section following the breakdown and build-up. terms characterizing what the dj does, such as “peaking the floor” (fikentscher 2000), “peaking the crowd” (montano 2009) “dropping (down) the bass” (garcia 2011) and “dropping (down) the beat” (butler 2006), occur frequently in this literature, but not a specific term defining the section as a whole. i therefore choose to refer to this section as “the drop”, after its most prominent and audible feature, namely the reintroduction of the bass and bass drum. this way of producing edm has expanded post-2010 in newer edm genres such as dubstep, trap and electro-house, and can also be found in edm-inspired pop music, but nonetheless the previous literature review gives indications of these ways of building tension as not an entirely new phenomenon. other metaphors have also been used to describe this intense experience, for example comparing it to a sexual climax (fikentscher 2000: 41). however, my suggestion is that the production techniques relate to the feeling of being lifted, held in suspense, then dropped dancecult 6(1)66 down and grounded. a peak and a drop may be considered an antagonism, but i argue that the clubbers’ affective intensity peaks when they experience being dropped back down into the anticipated and rewarding steady framework. musical expectancy and tension in edm several perspectives on djing have been offered and examined (see, for instance, langlois 1992; brewster and broughton 2000; butler 2005, 2006; montano 2009; greasley and prior 2013), and there is widespread agreement that one of the dj’s and edm producer’s main roles is to create a dynamic dance night for the dancing crowd.3 the dj’s interplay with the dancers is characterized by her/his awareness of and ability to both adjust to and move the clubbing crowd. my claim is that the dj and edm producer have a whole set of production techniques and methods explicitly intended to build emotional peaks, thus intensifying the clubbers’ emotional and bodily responses. however, these correlations between musical features in edm and emotional responses have, as previously mentioned, not been given much scholarly attention. musical structures in edm are often characterized as highly repetitive, and edm tracks follow an anti-teleological formal principle where the basic unit, often consisting of 2 or 4 bars, is repeated and developed throughout the track. the musical elements are built layer upon layer, and are most often introduced, changed and removed after 2, 4, 8, 16 or 32 bars. the groove consequently expands in textural density rather than length. with its repetitive grooves consisting of a complex web of rhythmic and melodic structures built layer upon layer—with variation, but not too much—one experiences how one can evolve with the groove and inside the groove. several focus points are offered through the complex grooves, and one can shift focus by picking and choosing from the rich musical stimuli that are presented in addition to the obvious and gradual breaks and builds of tension; an issue further explored in butler’s article (2005) focusing on rhythmical and metrical qualities of edm. my assumption is that this formal principle, by repetitive exposure, is well known to most clubbers. butler (2006) and snoman (2009) identify structural conventions in edm, which they associate to temporal changes in affective experience (fig. 1). according to this analysis, an edm track consists of two build-ups and drops, where the second pair of build-up and drop is even more intense than the first pair. due to repeated experience with edm tracks and dj sets in the club setting, clubbers predict and expect change after a certain amount of time, and they also anticipate tension-building with regard to breakdowns, build-ups and drops throughout the track. however, a dj cannot just carry out this “cliché” the whole club night through without listening to and interacting with the clubbing crowd. djing is highly complex, spontaneous and creative, and seldom does the dj use a prearranged playing order because “such practice is frowned upon within dj culture, and seen as contradicting the very notion of spontaneity that underpins djing” (montano 2009: 86). creating emotional peaks and building musical tension is essential to the dj or edm producer, and solberg | waiting for the bass to drop 67 to the clubbing crowd; the clubbers know they will receive their build-ups and drops, but the uncertainty and the surprising element lies within the questions of precisely when and how it will be done. the dj can toy with and excite the crowd by playing on elements of expectation and uncertainty, but has to be in tune with the crowd or else negative emotional responses can also occur, such as disappointment or loss of interest. the dj interacts rather than dictating, and there is an “intense interaction between dj and audience, a push-andpull of desire, control, and pacing” (garcia 2011: 189). a range of techniques can be used to shape musical expectation, tension and intense reactions in edm, but for the purpose of this article i narrow my investigation to some dominant production techniques in the build-up and the drop, and how these sections are significant when it comes to affecting the clubbers’ movements and emotions. the names of the sections breakdown, build-up and drop are related to their function and intention; first the breakdown section breaks down the groove and intensity of the track, then the buildup section builds it up to a peak which is symbolised by dropping down the bass and bass drum. a breakdown is characterized by the track’s texture becoming considerably thinner or even being entirely changed. several instrument layers are removed, most importantly the bass and the bass drum—the foundation and steady beat upon and after which the dancers rely and coordinate themselves. the build-up gives strong indications of a massive musical, but also emotional and bodily peak ahead. the different instrument layers are built up one after one, layer upon layer, the rhythmic structures being constantly compressed, with the clubbers both hearing and sensing many upward and uplifting movements. figure 1. left: rick snoman’s (2009: 225) example of a typical song map including the development of the track and the intensity in the clubbers’ emotional level. right: dj stanley’s formal prototype of edm tracks (butler 2006: 222). the drop occurs where the graphs peak, meaning that the affective intensity of the clubbers peaks when they experience being dropped down into the beat again. dancecult 6(1)68 this continues until the dance floor is bursting with anticipation and seemingly cannot tolerate this any longer. yet, the dj plays with them and pushes their boundaries of patience just a little further, before giving them the timely tension-resolving part. the bass and bass drum are dropped down, and the main groove returns with its regular rhythmic and melodic structures, ideally leaving the dance floor more ecstatic than ever. this tension and these sorts of peaks in dance tracks seem obvious, both for the dancers and the producer, but how can the emotional correlations with the music be explored and explained? why are these production techniques so frequently and intentionally applied recently by both djs and edm producers, and what are the reasons for the clubbers’ reactions? one way to examine this is to analyse an example of this feature in relation to theories of musical expectancy (meyer 1956; huron 2006; juslin and västfjäll 2008) and the orientation metaphor gravity (lakoff and johnson 1999, 2003; larson 2012). case studies: “body” by cinnamon chasers and “icarus (extended version)” by madeon method the edm tracks “body” (2013) by cinnamon chasers and “icarus (extended version)” (2012) by madeon are two tracks with rather similar structures, which include both an intensified build-up and drop. these tracks are chosen as case studies because they both follow the formal scheme suggested by butler (2006: 222) and snoman (2009: 225), and also consist of typical edm features such as sequenced groove element building, lack of complete vocal line, few harmonic shifts, and a steady and quantized rhythmic framework, in addition to an average dance tempo between 120–130 bpm (butler 2006; snoman 2009; solberg 2011). the build-up and drop techniques used in these two tracks are, based on my knowledge of newer edm, representative for how a broad number of djs and edm producers produce and create build-ups and drops. the production techniques are used in slightly different fashion in “body” and “icarus (extended version)”, but turn out to be effective each in their own way. remixed versions of these tracks can be found in clubs as part of a dj set, but i have chosen to use these two fixed and available versions of “body” and “icarus (extended version)”. the analyses are limited to some of the dominant production techniques present in a build-up and drop, but these features are always in interaction with other features in the track and the experience of them cannot be isolated from each other. for the analysis, i have chosen an auditive and interpretive music analysis approach. in addition to this, a schematic model of each of the tracks is presented. this schematic model is my own development and consists of the track’s amplitude graph and an overview of the track’s different sections. there is also a drawn intensity curve present in these models, and this curve represents a possible perceived intensity of the music marked as a continuous line; a hypothesised phenomenology of the music which possibly may correspond with a measured “arousal” response.4 this curve is derived from the formal prototypes suggested solberg | waiting for the bass to drop 69 by snoman (2009) and butler (2006) (see fig. 1), and my own interpretation of the tracks, in addition to information gathered from the amplitude graph. it also refers to the groove building where my suggestion is that sections with more layers afford more tension than sections with few layers. a further vital element in the analysis is spectrograms of parts of the tracks. spectrogram is a beneficial method that visualizes the frequency spectrum in a given cut of music, and the darker the area, the more activity there is. the horizontal axis indicates the time, while the vertical axis shows the frequencies. the lower frequency area indicates the bass and the bass drum, while higher pitched instruments are visible in the higher areas of the frequency spectrum. the software program amadeus pro has been used to present the spectrograms and amplitude graphs. “body” (2013) by cinnamon chasers the first case study, “body” (2013) by the british producer cinnamon chasers, follows the formal prototype presented by butler (2006: 222) and snoman (2009: 225) (fig. 1). as seen in the illustration below (fig. 2), this melodic electro house track starts with two introgrooves (00:00–01:20) contributing with a rather flat, but slowly increasing intensity, and these grooves consist of a small number of dominant elements: a typical four-to-the-floor drum pattern including bass drum, claps, hi-hat with additional percussion instruments, a synth pad and piano chords gradually being mixed louder into the soundscape, and a short melodic synth structure, in addition to occasional sound effects. these elements constitute the simple foundation onto which tension is gradually built, and by which, i would suggest, emotional peaks are created throughout the track. figure 2. a schematic model of “body” by cinnamon chasers (2013) with an overview of the track’s sections combined with the track’s amplitude graph. the blue line marks my interpretation of the intensity curve throughout the track, while the orange arrow indicates the drop. dancecult 6(1)70 electronic dance music can be said to have one primary function and goal which is revealed in the name itself, namely to create pleasurable grooves to which the clubbers wish to respond by moving their bodies, or stated in a more simplistic manner—to make people dance. as mentioned previously, the names of the sections—breakdown, build-up and drop—also indicate their intentions, and these names relate strongly to movements and aspects of intensity and dynamics. through these ways of creating a variation in the intensity, tension and interest are shaped. in other words, and leaning on the work of meyer (1956) and huron (2006), tension affords interest, and interest affords the music perceiver to be kept in the groove and the musical chain of events. this is also the case throughout the track “body”, and therefore the drawn intensity curve (see fig. 2) is highly pertinent in addition to its correlation with the amplitude graph. as seen in the figure above, the tension gradually builds towards the section “breakdown 2” (02:56–03:12), where the intensity breaks before yet again being built against the highest intensity point in the track, namely the drop. the “core” section is the track’s main groove, representing the core of the track. the build-up and drop in “body” consist of four dominant features and techniques to peak the tension: the extensive use of uplifters, the “drum roll effect”, and the removal and reintroduction of the bass and the bass drum, in addition to large frequency changes. the use of uplifters in both the sections “build-up 1” (03:12–03:44) and “build-up 2” (03:44–04:00) affords apparent upward movements. an uplifter is a sound being gradually pitched further and further in an upward direction, indicating that the section is headed towards “something”, and the effect is, as the name points out, to lift the intensity in the section higher. the use of uplifters in “build-up 2” in “body” is quite extensive, and consists of several long synth sounds being pitched upwards in addition to the typical white noise uplifter. together with uplifters, the “drum roll effect”, as i describe it, is a frequently used technique in newer edm where the prominent rhythmical pattern, often the snare drum, becomes increasingly divided until the return of the core, starting out with quarter notes and culminating in a drum roll right before the bass drops and the bass drum returns. in “body”, this technique is clearly present in the four last bars of the build-up. there is also an increase in volume on the drum fill that in consequence makes us more aware of the element as it more clearly stands out in the soundscape. the “drum roll effect” is perhaps the element that expresses the intensity building the clearest. in edm, tempo changes are seldom made; the dancers needs a steady and predictable framework on which they can rely and improvise within, but by constantly dividing the note value, the dj or edm producer gives the illusion and the effect of a tempo increase, affording a greater intensity without the dancer being uncertain about the beat. in addition to the use of uplifters and the “drum roll effect”, i have identified the removal and reintroduction of the bass and bass drum as the third dominant up-building feature in the build-up and drop of “body” which coincides with the fourth technique—large frequency changes. after “breakdown 2”, both the bass line and the bass drum are removed, disregarding “build-up 2” where a simplified bass line characterized by syncopated half solberg | waiting for the bass to drop 71 notes occur. in addition to this, the sound of the bass drum is quite higher pitched with lesser punch, which also is mixed quite lower in the soundscape, making it less noticeable compared to the bass drum found in the core sections. in “build-up 2 v 2”, the bass line and bass drum are completely absent and, together with the rest of the soundscape being increasingly pitched up, the frequency dominance and focus lies in the higher frequency area. the difference between the high-pitched uplifters and the reintroduction of the bass and bass drum becomes rather obvious and creates a greater peak; the return of the bass and bass drum signify the return of their foundation and grounding. elsewhere it has been shown that sudden and great changes in dynamic, harmonic and structural features in certain musical passages of classical music—namely the chill passage—appeared to affect and correlate with the informants’ heart rate and galvanic skin response (guhn, hamm and zentner 2007: 473). one could therefore hypothesise that these devices, which also are found within genres of edm, will elicit similar “chill” or peak responses, measurable through galvanic skin response. figure 3. spectrogram and amplitude graph of “build-up 2” and “core 2 v 1” in “body” by cinnamon chasers. the orange arrows follow the uplifters while the rectangle shows the removal of the bass drum and bass. the blue arrow indicates the drop. dancecult 6(1)72 using musical forces as a point of departure for interpreting both the musical and emotional peaks experienced in the build-up and drop of “body”, gravity stands out as a pertinent force where the feeling of being grounded is a profound emotional and bodily experience for the dancers and listeners when the core section yet again returns. gravity is a possible approach to explore the clubbers’ feeling and expectation of first being built up, then held in complete suspense, before subsequently being dropped and experiencing relief and grounding, or as larson suggests: the meanings that listeners attribute to tumbling melodies may draw on . . . their resemblance to the behaviour of physical objects in motions – and that the widespread popularity of this pattern of upward leaps and downward steps is consistent with the idea of musical gravity (2012: 86). furthermore, with reference to lakoff and johnson (1999, 2003), this relates to a systematic correlation where certain movements are associated with certain emotions, such as up as happy. thus, certain physical movements created by the musical structures may afford the same actual body movements and concurrent feelings of going up and going down. as mentioned before, clubbers have, after repetitive exposure, grown accustomed to the sections build-up and drop; they expect them to come and they expect being lifted, held and dropped, but the element of uncertainty is also included in this, regarding the questions how and when will it be done. “icarus (extended version)” by madeon (2012) the dominant production techniques in the french dj and edm producer madeon’s major electro house hit from 2012, “icarus (extended version)”, are the contrasting breakdown and the reintroduction of the bass and bass drum as represented through a micro vacuum moment occurring just before the drop. in addition to these aspects, the same techniques presented in the analysis of “body”, namely uplifters, the “drum roll effect” and large frequency changes, are also found here, even though the techniques are being slightly differently managed by madeon. “icarus (extended version)” shares to a great extent the same overall form principle and course of development as the track “body” (2013), which also coincides with both butler (2006) and snoman’s (2009) form suggestions (see fig. 1). the breakdown section, however, is of a somewhat different character than the breakdown in “body” (2013), and especially when it comes to the breakdown’s further influence on the build-up section and the effect of the drop.5 to achieve a heightened emotional impact when the core is reintroduced, it is necessary to break down the already existing structure and intensity, to create “an ambient feel” (butler 2006: 92) to subsequently heighten the impact of the drop’s arrival and the return to the core section. solberg | waiting for the bass to drop 73 figure 4. schematic model of “icarus” by madeon (2012) with an overview of the track’s sections over an amplitude graph. the blue line marks my interpretation of the intensity curve throughout the track, while the orange arrow indicates the drop. while the “breakdown 2” section in “body” is mainly just reduced to its core rhythmic structures and conveys the same musical mood by the same sort of harmonic language, madeon’s “breakdown” (02:06–02:21) in “icarus (extended version)” contrasts largely to the track’s overall feel, taking an ambient turn as in creating a floating and swaying atmosphere in this section. with its sustained harmonic stretches, a suspended string sample, a spacious synth pad and a whole note bass line, in addition to lacking rhythmic and percussive patterns, the breakdown section contrasts to the core section’s punchy, rich and fully exploited soundscape with its persistent and steady drum groove. when the floating breakdown sets in, the clubbers will, with the expected and predicted drop in mind and speaking in terms of gravity and spatial orientation, have a potential longer way to go. i argue that this large contrast contributes to a greater intensified feeling when the core section eventually returns. “build-up 2” (02:21–02:36) sets in with a clap on every second and fourth beat, a long bass note and diverse “screaming” synths which are gradually being pitched up in addition to the usual white noise uplifter. the “drum roll effect” is also found in this build-up, but instead of constantly dividing the note value, as cinnamon chasers does in “body”, madeon gradually turns the volume up on the drum roll and eventually it culminates in five syncopated snare drum hits, as shown in the orange rectangle in fig. 5, strongly accentuating the off-beats and by this indicating the arrival of drop. these syncopated snare hits also create a slight rhythmical ambiguity, and drawing on meyer’s work (1956) and huron’s (2006) tension response, this short ambiguity creates uncertainty of what will happen next with reference to the break in expectation, and it also leads to a brief challenge in matching one’s arousal and attention to the level of uncertainty and the possible outcome (2006: 15). in turn, this creates musical tension and strong positive emotional responses when recognizing that the expected drop eventually does occur and the core’s regular groove returns. dancecult 6(1)74 figure 5. spectrogram and amplitude graph of “build-up 2” and “core 2 v 1” in “icarus (extended version)” by madeon. the three orange arrows indicate the uplifters and ascending bass, while the orange rectangle frames the five syncopated snare drum hits. the blue rectangle marks the drop as in the downward sliding bass, and the blue arrow shows the second beat where the rest of the musical features set in after the brief micro vacuum moment. after the five syncopated snare drum hits, the drop is signified by a powerful declining bass slide being pitched down during the first beat of the next bar, and it is compressed quite evenly and sidechained to the bass drum to create a pumping effect and a more coherent and intense interplay between these elements.6 the sliding bass sound together with the bass drum creates a slight micro vacuum moment where only these two elements are audible before the return to the core on the second beat, which in turn contributes with a new contrast to the rich and large soundscape at the end of the build-up. the bass slides down to the first beat, but madeon yet again creates tension and uncertainty by withholding the rest of the groove elements just for a brief moment, thus finally arriving on and accentuating the second beat. discussion the analyses highlight some of the dominant production techniques djs and edm producers use in the sections build-up and drop with a heightened and intensified emotional experience as one of their goals, which i suggest are i) extensive use of uplifters, ii) the “drum roll effect”, iii) large frequency changes, iv) the removal and reintroduction of the bass and the bass drum, and v) a contrasting breakdown. solberg | waiting for the bass to drop 75 when it comes to extensive use of uplifters, they afford, with reference to lakoff and johnson (1999; 2003), apparent upward movements, and the term itself refers to a metaphor used to describe an emotional state: to feel uplifted. this can, for instance, be seen in the comments made by users of the online social audio platform soundcloud on the track “icarus (extended version)”. many of the comments relate in different ways to the direction up—the feeling of being lifted, uplifted or flying, as the six following comments exemplify. the user adanocm writes: “totally awesome and uplifting beats!” (2013), while edmond the grovyle says: “i feel like im flying” (2013), and mireille.d comments: “love your music, it’s so uplifting and invigorating” (2013). another user andrikkos writes: “beauty i’m flying” (2012), while user613937110 comments: “hands up! praise god!” (2013), and fitrahmunir claims that: “this song make me feel flying high!” (2012). another clear reference to the notion of flying is presented in madeon’s track title itself, namely the story from greek mythology about icarus who tried to escape from crete with wings constructed of feather and wax. icarus soon became ecstatic and overwhelmed by the thrill of flying and went higher and higher, and subsequently his attempt to conquer the skies turned into his death by falling into the ocean (graves 2012: 301–309). while this story from greek mythology has an underlying moral, i read it as a metaphor of the structure in madeon’s track and also his wish regarding the track’s ability to lift or drop down its listeners throughout the track. based on repeated exposure to the use of uplifters in edm, and with reference to huron’s (2006) imagination response and prediction response, i suggest that the clubbers predict the uplifters to reach their maximum energy potential, and the uplifters to subsequently end in a drop. to make this even more powerful, the dj/edm producer makes use of the whole frequency spectrum, and replaces the high-pitched uplifter with a deep-sounding bass to set in the core. the drops in “body” and “icarus (extended version)” both relate to gravity and the feeling of being pushed in an upward direction, being further held in suspense before subsequently being dropped down again and grounded in the steady rhythmical framework. both madeon and cinnamon chasers evaluate the return of the bass and the bass drum as a vital production technique, but while cinnamon chasers illuminates the feeling of grounding by first minimizing the frequency spectrum in the lower area before massively expanding it again, madeon does this in a slightly different and perhaps more intense manner. one might argue that he holds the clubbers longer in suspense through the creation of rhythmic ambiguity and the micro vacuum moment before dropping them down in company with the powerful descending bass slide. in addition to this, the withholding of the rest of the groove features until the second beat might in turn affect the listeners more intensely because this symbolizes a starker return to the track’s regular rhythmical and melodic character. after the drop, one might claim that the reaction response and appraisal response sets in (huron 2006), the removing or changing of the bass and the bass drum, and reintroduction of them through the drop, can be interpreted as the return of the foundation for the clubbers, leading to a feeling of being grounded. dancecult 6(1)76 as the spectrograms below show, the return to the main groove—the core of the track— is done in two different ways. in “body”, the textural density becomes considerately thinner, as marked by an almost empty space in the lower frequency, before the bass and bass drum set in again and provide the clubbers with their secure rhythmical framework. in “icarus”, the drop is a more obvious and long-lasting downward movement, and at the same time the sliding bass postpones the return to the core to the second beat of the bar. the build-up leads towards the drop and the return of the main groove, and there is no doubt for the clubbers that this will happen; the build-up will at some point reach its maximum energy potential, thus the drop is inevitable. to be held in suspense at this maximum point and wait for the groove to return may afford great emotional tension, and is an effective way for the producer and dj to excite the crowd. however, i propose that for the clubbers to get their reward as represented by the drop and return to the core of the track affords an even greater emotional experience. as gravity teaches us: what goes up must go down, and we know we cannot stay up there. the drop takes us back home, and as much as we enjoy flying and floating, it is my argument that after experiencing this, we enjoy the steady framework even more. figure 6. left: close-up spectrogram of the drop in “body” by cinnamon chasers, showing the difference in the lower frequencies before and after the drop where the blue arrow indicates the reintroduction of the bass and the bass drum. right: close-up spectrogram of the drop in “icarus (extended version)” by madeon, where the circle marks the sliding bass and the arrow indicates the second strong beat where the rest of the musical features set in after the brief micro vacuum moment. solberg | waiting for the bass to drop 77 the awareness, expectation and moreover experience of gravity is also highly dependent on its context; walking on the edge of a cliff affords a greater awareness of gravity and experience of being pulled down versus lying still on the ground, or as in this particular case, listening to an intensifying build-up and being held in complete suspense before the bass drops makes us more aware of the force of gravity than when listening to, as an example, a meditative and static minimalistic piece. the feeling of being lifted, held in suspense and grounded can, with reference to gabrielsson (2011a, 2011b), be defined as a quasi-physical feeling. regarding the contrasting breakdown, the clubbers will, with the expected and predicted drop in mind and speaking in terms of gravity and spatial orientation, have a potential longer time to build, and i suggest that this large contrast contributes to a greater intensified feeling when the core section eventually returns. referring to huron’s tension response (2006: 9), the clubbers’ preparation to the expected drop includes arousal in the motoric and perceptual preparation, where the aim is to match and synchronise these levels to the expected drop, so that they reach their maximum energy potential just in time for the return to the core section. to conclude, i have focused on how certain musical structures and production techniques in these sections relate to a theorization of emotional experiences. my analysis in this article has provided a detailed account of musical structures and a hypothesised phenomenology of those moments. taking on a meta-perspective, these sections are central tension building parts of the club experience as a whole. these particular emotional peak experiences in the build-up and drop cannot be seen in isolation from the movements and dance of the clubbers and the other complex factors at play in the club setting. the club experience can be comprehended as a highly multisensory experience, and the contextual, bodily and emotional elements of this holistic experience are, of course, of great importance. as gabrielsson points out, strong experiences with music are not only elicited by the music itself, thus suggesting the following division of influential factors: musical, emotional and situational (2011a, 2011b). both the build-up and drop in “body” and “icarus (extended version)” include many vital production techniques for the clubbing crowd’s emotions and movements to be synchronized. these sections can also be understood as unifying, where a synchronization of a collective state occurs. garcia (2011) touches upon this, and underlines the collective state and excitement in addition to the individual and intimate aspect of this experience. his interviewees report an intense musical and emotional experience when out clubbing, where “[t]his intensification is both driven and expressed by dancing, rhythmic entrainment, crossed glances, altered bodily states and the edm that serves as a vortex for affect and the event itself ” (garcia 2011: 174). often the clubbers become fully engaged in the factors presented to them in the club context, and become one with the experience, the music and the crowd, in addition to losing the sense of time and self-awareness, as in a removal from individuality to a collective state (malbon 1999; garcia 2011). thus, the club experience represents a timeless state where you dancecult 6(1)78 focus on being here and now, and with reference to herbert’s notion (2011), the clubbers become entirely absorbed in the clubbing activity. the notion of peak experience also accentuates some of the same attributes found in the club experience, for instance, changes in our attentional focus and how we perceive time, and often a loss of self-consciousness can be experienced in addition to feelings of fulfilment, ecstasy and euphoria (maslow 1968). moreover, the club is constructed to make dancing the main activity and music the main focus. moving one’s body to the music may affect and strengthen the emotional aspects of the experience. as studies by blood and zatorre (2001), salimpoor et al. (2011) and gebauer, kringelback and vuust (2012) suggest, moving one’s body to music releases dopamine, explaining why we may experience pleasure and well-being when perceiving aesthetic expressions. the club dance is characterized by being one amongst a crowd, as opposed to dancing one on one. it is both an individual and a social act at the same time, where the clubbers wish to dance and, as ben malbon describes it, “to interact with the clubbing crowd as a crowd” (1999: 45). read with maslow’s eyes, this can be described as a peak experience because of its inclusion of the transpersonal and interconnectedness; the dance floor becomes one organism where every individual musical experience eventually becomes one collective experience. the clubbers are both “out-of-body” and “in-the-body” at the same time, and they are a part of something bigger, bearing a resemblance of spiritual and religious experiences (st john 2004). summary and further research there are several factors at play in the club context, and many reasons why edm in this setting can lead to ecstatic and fully engaging pleasurable states. this article has taken a theoretical approach and focused on the musical features occurring in edm tracks, with special emphasis on how production techniques seem to affect us and correlate with emotional peaks. it is possible to examine these features and experiences of edm in terms of different sources of emotional, physiological or bodily responses, but i have in the analysis of “body” and “icarus (extended version)” focused on two potential theoretical approaches, namely musical expectancy and orientation metaphors. my claim is that emotional experiences coincide with the production techniques, and one of the reasons for this might be how the listeners can experience being physically pushed in a clear upward direction, being held in suspense, before being dropped, and musical expectancy and gravity serve as theoretical gateways into how these experiences can be comprehended and explained. my hypothesis is that the musical features in these parts affect us to such a great extent that they can contribute to intense musical experience, and placed in a broader club context, provide the clubbers with peak experiences. the study described in this article constitutes the preliminary stage of a phd project that includes both qualitative and quantitative research to examine the correlations between musical structures in edm and emotional and bodily responses. to further investigate and support these presented claims and hypotheses, experiments with measurement of clubbers’ solberg | waiting for the bass to drop 79 physiological responses and movements to different build-up and drop sections are to be carried out. acknowledgements i want to express my gratitude to my supervisor professor nicola dibben at the university of sheffield for contributing with motivating feedback and constructive suggestions on this article. also great thanks to torgeir kristiansen for sharing his production insights and discussing the tracks with me, and to the guest editors ed montano and simon zargoski-thomas and the anonymous reviewer for thorough comments. notes 1 galvanic skin response, skin conductance or psychogalvanic reflex is “a change in the electrical properties of the body . . . following noxious stimulation, stimulation that produces emotional reaction, and, to some extent, stimulation that attracts the subject’s attention and leads to an aroused alertness” (encyclopaedia britannica online 2013). 2 cinnamon chasers is one edm producer. he is therefore referred to in singular and not plural form. 3 my distinction between a dj and an edm producer is that the dj remixes live in the club setting, often from a dj set or mix consisting of pre-produced edm tracks, while the edm producer produces tracks that can be used in the club setting. 4 as in arousal in physiological responses such as galvanic skin response or heart rate. 5 “icarus (extended version)” includes two build-ups, but the analysis only investigates the second build-up because it lasts longer, and includes a contrasting breakdown and uplifters. 6 sidechaining is a compression technique where one sound source decides the compression pattern to another sound or sound group. often this is used to create a pumping effect or to create a more coherent interaction between, for instance, the bass and the bass drum. references adanocm. 2013. “madeon – icarus”. soundcloud. <https://soundcloud.com/madeon/madeonicarus/comments> (accessed 3 march 2014). andrikkos. 2012. “madeon – icarus”. soundcloud. <https://soundcloud.com/madeon/madeonicarus/comments> (accessed 3 march 2014). blood, anne j., and robert j. zatorre, 2001. “intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions implicated in reward and emotion”. proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america 98: 11818–23. <http://dx.doi. 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marc. 2008. embodied music cognition and mediation technology. cambridge, mass.: mit press. malbon, ben. 1999. clubbing: dancing, ecstasy and vitality. london: routledge. maslow, abraham h. 1968 [1962]. toward a psychology of being. new york: d. van nostrand. meyer, leonard b. 1956. emotion and meaning in music. chicago: university of chicago press. mireille.d. 2013. “madeon – icarus”. soundcloud. <https://soundcloud.com/madeon/madeonicarus/comments> (accessed 3 march 2014). montano, ed. 2009. “dj culture in the commercial sydney dance music scene”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(1): 81–93. <http://dx.doi. org/10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.05>. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8675.1995.tb00025.x http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x08005293 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143000005031 https://soundcloud.com/madeon/madeon-icarus/comments https://soundcloud.com/madeon/madeon-icarus/comments http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.05 http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.05 dancecult 6(1)82 reynolds, simon. 1998. energy flash: a journey through rave music and dance culture. london: picador. rickard, nikki s. 2004. “intense emotional responses to music: a test of the psychological arousal hypothesis”. psychology of music 32(4): 371–88. <http://dx.doi. org/10.1177/0305735604046096>. rietveld, hillegonda c. 1998. this is our house: house music, cultural spaces and technologies. aldershot: ashgate. salimpoor, valorie n., mitchel benovoy, kevin larcher, alain dagher and robert j. zatorre. 2011. “anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music”. nature neuroscience 14: 257–62. snoman, rick. 2009 [2004]. the dance music manual: tools, toys and techniques. oxford: focal press. solberg, ragnhild torvanger. 2011. feeling, grooving and moving in timelessness: ein studie av tidsoppleving knytt til elektronisk dansemusikk a study of temporal experience in electronic 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https://soundcloud.com/madeon/madeon-icarus/comments http://www.discogs.com/cinnamon-chasers-timebodytears/release/5113116 http://www.discogs.com/madeon-icarus/release/3434482 ff1_typeset_ver1 sound system nation: jamaica graham st john university of queensland 1. photo by author several years ago, i started gathering interest in mobile initiatives committed to social and political causes in australia called “sound systems”. the likes of labrats and other vehicles for the performance of postcolonial desires had been rallying the disaffected to wild and weird frontlines, pursuing, as techno-activist mover and shaker pete strong (aka mashy p) once said, “a sound system for all”. back then, i’d become excited by these proactive and convivial mobilisations. responding to local ecological and humanitarian issues, and fed by developments in electronic music culture, a groovement was afoot. becoming interested in the roots of these developments, one path took me in the direction of the original spinners, the uk’s spiral tribe, whose anarchist antics appealed to thousands of tekno-travelers and sonic squatters, attracting the law in the form of a four month and £4 million trial in 1994 that eventually saw spiral tribe participants acquitted of the charge of “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance”. the spirals then kicked off the european and worldwide freetekno movement – whose chief cultural expression is the teknival. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(2) 2010, 94-104 issn 1947-5403 ©2010 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.07 from the floor 2. simon spiral with 303. photo by stefan debatsalier, from new music express, 9 january 1993 3. out of system free party, italy, july 2008. photo by alex canazei (www.alexcanazei.com) st john • sound system nation: jamaica 95 4. pasquatek 2007. photo by alex canazei (www.alexcanazei.com) although influenced by music and carnival traditions transferred from the caribbean to the uk with the flows of immigrants from the 1960s, the non-jamaican uk sound systems were generally vehicles for different “freedoms” than those pursued by participants in the african diaspora. while simon jones (1995) and enda murray (2001) write about the appearance of these collectively owned cultural and technological resources in the uk and australia, respectably capturing the transposition of ja to non-ja sound systems culture, the comparative study of the jamaican and nonjamaican sound systems in europe and elsewhere is mostly untouched territory. this research lacuna calls out for an understanding of the nature of “freedoms” sought, alongside the variant meanings of the phrase “sound system” which could certainly help by comparison with the traditional jamaican dub sound culture as conveyed in michael veal’s dub: soundscapes and shattered songs in jamaican reggae (2007). tracing the evolution of dub reggae from jamaica to london, it is anticipated that christopher partridge’s book forthcoming with equinox, dub in babylon, will help fill this cavernous gap. another path, then, took me to jamaica where i knew lay the origins of the sound system development in europe and around the world. featuring the extemporaneous microphone controller or “toaster” (initially, also the “selector” or deejay), sound-reinforcement systems had been amplifying local concerns in jamaica since the 1950s. so i quite readily jumped at the opportunity to travel to the land of riddim offered by the crossroads in cultural studies conference held at the mona campus of the university of west indies in kingston in early july 2008. amid the dry heat and fugue triggered by sleep-interrupted nights in thin-walled campus apartments, i ran a panel on tension and change within electronic dance music cultures called “uncertain vibes”. the panel attracted adventurous international scholars of edmc. they were individuals seeking more from jamaica than the cultural events laid on for conference delegates, which included a garden party reception at the prime minister’s residence, and the performance from ja’s number one sound system – stone love – in the tightly secured grounds of the university towards the end of the conference. 96 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 unlike most delegates who were bussed in daily from their plush hotel suites in kingston, the panelists, along with many student delegates, occupied the cheaper gender-segregated on-campus lodgings in a compound patrolled by a legion of security personnel. walking to the conference venue out of the compound each day, i was buffeted by the diverse sounds drifting across campus. the music seemed to be emanating from distant sports grounds and student residences. i recall the breeze carrying the refrain in puff daddy’s “i’ll be missing you” from a distant, yet remarkably audible, amplification system. mixed with cricket commentary booming from portable radios belonging to maintenance crews, the music lifted me towards mona campus cultural centre. i had the distinct impression that parties were happening all around me, and a desire grew for contact, immersion and exposure beyond the campus compound. during that week the uwi campus became a launching-pad for forays into kingston. prior to my arrival, larisa mann (aka dj ripley), a graduate student in law at berkeley who’d traveled and worked in kingston in 2007 (and kept a blog where, among other things, she offers her analysis of club dj techniques and local dance culture) gave me the contact for andrea lewis, artist manager and chilled operator of beat ‘n track tours who, with her rasta friend bear, trucked a small group of us out to trenchtown to bob marley’s yard, the boystown sportclub, then lee “scratch” perry’s house, and downtown kingston to the marcus garvey museum and nearby off orange st, famed for its record shops, for a steamed fish feast. 5. trenchtown murals. photo by author some of us (including anna gavana, a dubstep dj who, with djplaneten, subsequently produced the dancehall influenced track “natty maaga” using a chopped up voice sample from a 7-inch record acquired in kingston) went on a night-rider with a young gang of chaperones to a black prince bashment in a carpark downtown. st john • sound system nation: jamaica 97 6. bob marley’s kombi at his yard in trenchtown. photo by author 7. kingston en route to black prince with damien and another of our guides at the sherrif hq. photo by author it was my first direct experience with the quality of the jamaican sound systems. there were two walls of cabinets stacked high. warmups included toto’s “africa”, startling to hear, and even more surprising was how good it sounded. i was broadsided by toto, and enjoyed it. our group (of four) were the only white people present, our chaperones looking after us. and we “looked after” them. drinking red stripe, stones, appleton’s, and rolling spliffs, the crowd grew but no one yet occupied the centre of the carpark. since some of us were presenting the next day we had to leave before 1 am – i.e. before all the action started. a couple of nights later, others disappeared into west kingston to a party at the stone love hq and a street party operated by the mo’ money sound system, returning with wild reports of “daggering” and “dutty wine”. the following night, our local friend bradley, whose mother held a stall at the conference, took us out to his favourite club and then the all-night rooftop venue at cookies across the harbour from port royal. there, i got a sudden education. no, my 98 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 friends hadn’t been introduced to home grown wine. the dutty wine is a dance performed by women bent at the knees, with a rapid winding of legs and neck, body lshaped and orchestrating all that rotation from their toes like ballerina seductresses. the place was dripping with it. what struck me most was the way young women were making themselves available for simulated gang-banging, willingly taken and publically pseudo-drilled by men in their cohort, or by total strangers, all fully-clothed, smiling and thrusting hips in close quarters, animated by the most powerful bass anywhere. indeed the bass was the penetrative agent. perhaps my confusion had something to do with ignorance – the song “dutty wine” had catapulted dancehall artist tony matterhorn into fame a few years back, and even beyoncé made a variation of this dance… anyway, the athleticism wasn’t exclusive to females poom-pooming their neighbours, as groups of young men would appear performing carefully rehearsed maneuvers, like what i later learned is called the “nuh linga”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gfifvjtmhs wearing smooth soled shoes, they swept around the floor with incredible precision. these and a host of other dances evolve and circulate widely, perfected and modified every night across the country, including the popular “scooby doo”, and even one intriguingly named the “myspace”. and all this occurred under lights and on film. video operators stalked the venue with their lights on high beam offering everyone the opportunity to vogue their moves (projected live on screens in the venue) for the benefit of all present, and presumably those absent – i.e. those viewing versions circulating on dvds around the country. the shoots were directed by the mcs whose explicit and lurid encouragements were launched throughout the night in quickfire patois – setting up romances and other tales of “pussy stabbing”, from slow grinds to frenetic encounters, as when, like vulturous vixens, girls in hot shorts circle and attack their target like this guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyb8zho9nia the entire performance seemed like a standoff between the microphone controllers and the booty controllers. it was a steep learning curve. i knew of dancehall through passing mediators like steve bedlam (bedlam sound system) and founder of reggae roots sound negusa negast, “bashment” bish, whose collaborative rig was imported from the uk to australia for the earthdream convoyage in 2000. i traveled with bish and others like jason from new york’s blackkat sound system to east timor one year after the referendum, firing off embedded freak reports from the field including this piece from dili. all of these guys were heavily influenced by the sound system tradition in kingston, where, by the 1950s, “sound men” were using record players, amplifiers, and rare black american records, and when the “sound system” became the principal conduit for a subversive sphere of performance rooted in slave-era country dances and percolating in lowerclass black communities. taking cues from post–wwii american r&b, and early infused with dub-reggae and rastafarianism, what became known as “dancehall” was a distinct jamaican style by the 1980s, attracting controversy for its association with homophobia, bling and violence. st john • sound system nation: jamaica 99 after 2000, i poured over works like norman stolzoff’s wake the town and tell the people: dancehall culture in jamaica, in which dancehall/sound system events are described as “the centre of the ghetto youth’s lifeworld—a place for enjoyment, cultural expression and creativity, and spiritual renewal” (7). later i came across carolyn cooper’s sound clash: jamaican dancehall culture at large. focusing on more than just the music and the djs, cooper conveys how dancehall is a vehicle for the lyrical and embodied articulation of what she identifies as “slackness”, constituting, she writes, a “radical, underground confrontation with the patriarchal gender ideology and duplicitous morality of fundamentalist jamaican society”. dancehall achieves this, cooper argues, in great part through dance performance in an “erogenous zone in which the celebration of female sexuality and fertility is ritualized” (3, 17). with her new book dancehall: from slave ship to ghetto, crossroads conference organiser sonjah stanley niaah has made an important contribution to this study, exploring the critical role of dancehall as a complex space for ritualised performance across jamaican society. but now i dropped the books and found myself deep in rhythm. having left kingston, i caught a small bus with a couple of israeli friends joshua and frank to the 8. sulphur river gorge near bath. photo by author 100 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 province of st thomas in the east. after enjoying an ital meal at a rastafarian restaurant in port morant, we arranged a taxi ride up through the village of bath to the sulphur river gorge, the site of a hot springs renowned in jamaica for its healing properties and rumoured to have been discovered by a runaway slave 400 years ago. we’d planned to stay for a night before hitting the east coast, but the region proved too captivating for a short visit. the bath fountain hotel was built right on the creek in the gorge, with roman bathhouses downstairs and surrounded by luscious visions. a back gate opened onto a path leading up to the magic place where hot water poured out near the base of a cottonwood tree, one of two such trees in the immediate area: “one in tree … tree in one”, as i was educated by a local farmer. outside the hotel, we met lena, a friendly and outgoing sugar cane farmer who introduces us to buster who, in his late 60s, shifted a roots tonic concocted from local herbs, performing such from his roadside stall for decades, as his father had before him. a genuine health tonic, but bitter tasting. buster, who cut us a few jellies (coconuts), presided over a rock pool in the creek below. featuring a natural water slide, it was full of kids and a welcome respite from the heat. 9. buster’s water hole. photo by author temperatures weren’t about to grow cooler, though, as we traveled to a couple of diverse bashments, including a smaller party towards golden grove in a yard at the wheeler field booster station on the edge of the sugarcane fields. earlier that day, lena took us on a tour of her farm, her brother fire lion sitting outside his shack threading laces in his new white sneakers. he’d be wearing them that night. i also met latoya, a waitress and short order cook at the hotel, who, as it turns out, is a member of local female dance posse the trend setters. mild mannered waitress by day, voluptuous queen of the cane by night. st john • sound system nation: jamaica 101 10. party at wheeler field. photo by author the following night, lena and her friends drove us to a party down in morant bay. our driver, beres, ran low on fuel, and wouldn’t deviate for anything, including the dog he collected en route. the bone crunching shriek never warranted so much as a blink from the man at the wheel. sailing out of the hills into the late evening with the engine turned off to preserve fuel, the car came to a rest in a town where we refueled and warded off an aggressive crack addict. the party attracted a more sophisticated crowd – many women in satin bustieres and fedoras with everything cropped for the eye, men in swanky suits and hats, crates of beer and the locally produced tia maria at their feet. perhaps some had come from the funeral celebrations next door. by comparison to the cane fields party, where the pa fell out a few times and the mc competed with the music, the morant bay gig had quality sound and excellent toasters. at these all-night parties, drawn out and fatigued, i ventured to a crossroads in electronic dance music culture, the home of the rave, if not the term “rave” itself, a possibility entertained by helen evans in “out of sight, out of mind: an analysis of rave culture”. but unlike words like “rave” or “jungle”, “dancehall” is a fairly innocuous term for a dance music phenomenon, a term that struggles to capture the event it signifies, or the music and dance performed there, its concupiscence and promiscuity incomparable with dance practices in developed countries associated with rave, techno, psytrance and so on. while what became known as “jazz” and “rock & roll” might have started in the dancehalls that had been the venues at which one’s parents performed orthodox dance, what has become one of jamaica’s most notorious exports retains the moniker as a self-identifying label, self-perpetuating in its ambiguous relationship with tradition. (as an aside, at least according to the wikipedia entry for “dancehall”,1 apparently the “dance hall” was the term adopted for the cells adjacent to the electric chair at sing sing prison where inmates condemned to death awaited their execution). 102 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 dancehall music has had a mixed reception in jamaica. perhaps the levels of shock, disdain and contempt issuing from some local elites is a reaction to the threat to moral certainties and tradition inscribed in the term “dancehall” itself. at the same time, proponents of dancehall might have received mileage from their subversion of orthodoxy (from toppling the hall of dance) even while instituting another. speaking of such. by the end of my second week i was nearing montego bay for sumfest having taken a detour on the beach at runaway bay on the north coast over several days. 11. the hotel nadine at runaway bay. photo by author billed as “the greatest reggae show on earth”, the week long sumfest was in its 16th year. it was the culmination of my travels on the island and a celebration of the country’s musical exports. i made it along to the dancehall night, a platform for dozens of national heroes who’ve made it, and are busy making it, into the dancehall of fame. we had it all, from anthony b’s strident homophobia to the goddess d’angel who stole the show. but here, where mc superstars are so removed from the audience, where performers are separated from spectators by two vip corrals, and viewers are cornered by rampant advertising, the concertised sumfest is a spectacular illustration of how far dancehall may have strayed from its roots (i can’t comment on the reggae performances as i did not attend sumfest on the other nights). at sumfest, dancehall was performed on the national stage. it was dancehall’s night of the year, a performance for the networks and international audience, but my mind was turned from the 15,000 spectators, and the huge tv audience, to the nightworld of kingston and beyond, to the events in the streets, yards, canefields and clubs where i’d encountered a people committed to the compulsion of giving it up like everybody’s watching. st john • sound system nation: jamaica 103 12. d’angel at sumfest’s dancehall night. photo by author i’d only touched the surface, but it was time to go... ••••••• references cooper, carolyn. 2004. sound clash: jamaican dancehall culture at large. palgrave macmillan. jones, simon. 1995. “rocking the house: sound system cultures and the politics of space.” journal of popular music studies 7: 1–24. murray, enda. 2001. “sound systems and australian diy culture: folk music for the dot com generation”. in graham st john (ed), freenrg: notes from the edge of the dance floor, pp 57-70. common ground press: melbourne. available as a free downloadable ebook: http://www.edgecentral.net/freenrg.htm. partridge, christopher. 2010. dub in babylon. london: equinox (forthcoming). stanley niaah, sonjah. 2010. dancehall: from slave ship to ghetto. university of ottawa press. stolzoff, norman. 2000. wake the town and tell the people: dancehall culture in jamaica. duke university press. veal, michael. 2007. dub: soundscapes and shattered songs in jamaican reggae. middletown, ct: wesleyan university press. acknowledgements thanks to ripley, andrea lewis, all the participants in the uncertain vibes panel (hillegonda rietveld, anna gavanas, joshua schmidt and rob lindop) along with frank, bradley, sophia, lena. thanks and congratulations to sonjah stanley niaah for organising the 2008 crossroads in cultural studies conference and luring us all to jamaica. thanks also to my generous hosts “coach” ted edwards and barbara rose johnston, dallas and erin in venice beach, jay walsh who maintains san francisco’s best couch, and kathleen williamson who maintains the flight deck at rose rd. notes 104 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 2 1 accessed 29 november 2009. goa: 20 years of psychedelic trance tom rom and pascal querner solothurn: nachtschatten verlag ag, 2011. isbn: 978-3-03788-189-7 rrp: €49.80 joshua schmidt dead sea and arava science center; ben-gurion university of the negev (israel) a few years ago i was in thailand to give a talk at a conference in bangkok on the “post-zionist performance of israeliness” among israeli psytrancers in thailand. i had the pleasure of meeting robert a. leonard, an american professor of forensic linguistics, who turned out to be an old friend of my doctoral advisor as well as a founding member and bassist of sha na na, the rock and roll doo-wop group who (wearing satin gold sweat suits) opened for jimi hendrix at woodstock. when i asked leonard “how does it feel when you’re making history?”, he responded that when people “make history”, they are usually too busy doing it to fully notice the magnitude of what they are achieving. afterwards, what one recalls often overlaps and gets filtered through the authorized account of the event. this notion came to mind after reading goa: 20 years of psychedelic trance. this coffee table book, elegantly published and stylishly edited, ventures to capture and convey the romance and excitement that accompanied the expansions of goa psytrance music and culture in the past few decades. goa is an engaging book, lavished with original artwork and vivid photography depicting psychedelic trance events from across the globe and offering readers a portrayal of life in full hd. the forty-two chapters, over 500 color photos and a companion dvd featuring an “unreleased” montage of goa music and parties provide a well-informed account of the phenomenal goa psychedelic trance social movement from its early days in goa to its (r)evolutionary proliferation “right across the planet, going through every culture and social class as well as every spiritual, religious, political, sexual, musical, philosophical and economic orientation”(14). the period indicated in the sub-title (1990–2010) does not refer to specific dates or precise events, nor does it entirely account for ‘the story of psytrance’. rather, during these two decades, the goa movement underwent a process of formalization with parties transitioning from being a kind of casual “family” (87) activity involving goa-based hippy-freak-new-age-hedonist-global travelers, into a quasi-legitimate and internationally recognized brand of music entertainment catering to hundreds of thousands of people across the globe. golden goa of the 1990s is stereotypically depicted in idyllic retrospect—the drugs were pure and abundant and intended for mind expansion, the parties bastions of free love, raw creativity and cosmic union. the novelty of digitally tempered bass lines running at the speed of 145 bpm meant that psytrance commanded a kind of devotional aura among its listeners, particularly when consumed in cozy post-colonial locales and enhanced with chemically induced altered states of consciousness. hardcore scene affiliates professed to be channeling “stone-age shamanism” (65) into a redefined “ancient tribal ritual” (20) whose goal was no less than to unify the planet. uncertain as to how far and wide the music and culture would eventually develop, proponents envisioned the power of the “goa spirit” ultimately affecting all humankind. as the movement took off, it extended beyond goa to other neo-nomadic tourist enclaves (manali, pune, kopha ngan, bali) and urban centers (london, san francisco, cape town, tokyo, tel-aviv). the millennium came and went and as psytrance and its related activities became more well-known, they drew the attention of state and local authorities who sought to control, regulate and profit from them. in the course of its trajectory, goa psytrance was gradually engulfed by capitalist economies and underwent a process of commodification and subdivision. with the growth of the movement, its more seasoned core either adapted to the new conditions or dropped out, thus creating the need for this book—partly to pay tribute to past feats and partly to “officially” record goa psytrance genealogies, traditions and weltanschauung before they mutate beyond recognition and memory. the two austrian authors are scene veterans who initially published goa in german (2010), followed a year later by the english edition, with additional languages in the works. the first sections of the book sketch the heyday of the goa psytrance scene and offer explanations of some of the central cultural and performative expressions to have emerged from this period. the following sections report on psytrance festivals and provide snapshots and a storyline for the goa movement in thirteen countries. taken as a whole, the book is a highly selective ‘his-tory’ of past events, mostly written from the point of view of privileged middle-class white anglo-european men whose lifestyles and livelihoods are apparently tied to the goa enterprise. as appropriate to the genre, the book’s discussion of psytrance history and culture is steeped in psychedelia and peppered with fantastic language and anecdotal cosmic interventions. the colorful imagery enhances this sentiment and geometric fractals appear in various forms on nearly every page. while many of the chapters are in easy to read prose, only four of them contain bibliographic citations. in the absence of other methods of verification, some of the details come across as travelers’ yarns rather than genuine fact. universal mottos like “love, drugs and psychedelic trance” (13) and “we are one” (back cover), and sweeping pronouncements that at parties “the openness that is lived makes racism, nationalism, sexual preferences and religious hate appear totally obsolete” (40), are oblivious to life outside the goa bubble and seem indulgent and overstated. for instance, missing are the local native actors, who are found in the background of a few of the pictures, but whose role within the insular goa narrative is essentially overlooked. by and large, the book seldom delves into self-critique apart from a brief final chapter where, among other recommended improvements, are suggestions that the scene would benefit from more spiritually directed drug taking, nudity and “sexual play” (284). the chapter foresees the future of psytrance manifesting in a “‘one stop shop’” (285) integrated party where the various goa psytrance attributes combine to become “the main hub for human needs”. unsure what to make of this lofty prediction, i lent the book to a friend who lived in goa in the 1990s to get his feedback. pouring over the glossy photos in the hopes of finding a familiar face among the beaming goa-heads, my friend recognized a few past acquaintances. parts of the book, he noted, felt like a caricature and, at least for him—a once-upon-a-time insider—failed to fully convey his goa experience. “if one had no prior knowledge on the matter, [the book] could look a little cheesy—bunch of westerners (japanese incl.) going around having ‘cool’ parties in exotic far-away places” (personal communication 2015). recognizing that its founding mothers and fathers have aged, the chapter ends with a concerned plea that “psytrance and our goa movement must not be forgotten, as they are part of the cultural evolutionary history of mankind” (285). following the contributor and photographer bios and credits, the last pages are advertisements for upcoming festivals, smartshops and cannabis seed banks. these products presumably represent the current maturation of the goa scene whose elder members, a recent survey on drug use trends in britain discovered, have gone a bit soft. “drugs are now taken principally at home, suggesting that the ravers, techno-heads and trance fiends are now cutting up their drugs on coffee-table books, rather than boshing them on sweaty dancefloors” (preston 2014). this hefty, nearly two-kilo, volume is an admirable undertaking which, despite its limitations and glossy presentation of the psytrance habitat, boldly presents a subject matter that generally circumvents customary media exposure. the book makes for a stimulating conversation piece both for past and present participants as well as for people who are unacquainted with, or uncertain about, the profound and ongoing impact the goa psytrance milieu is having on contemporary reality. references preston, alex. 2014. “drug-taking fortysomethings with one foot in the rave”. the guardian. 5 october. <http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/oct/05/-sp-drug-taking-fortysomethings-rave-middle-aged> (accessed 18 may 2015). the diy careers of techno and drum 'n' bass djs in vienna dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 4(1): 65–85 issn 1947-5403 ©2012 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.01.03 “what are we doing here?” nostalgic desires for a cosmopolitan sensory aesthetic in the amsterdam-based psytrance scene eva-maria alexandra van straaten georg-august university, göttingen (germany) abstract in amsterdam, complaints about the apparent commercialization of psytrance parties are articulated in terms of the demise of a cosmopolitan sensory aesthetic that was ostensibly inherent to the dutch psytrance scene. this article critically explores how, in the context of the perceived decline of this aesthetic in the scene, nostalgic narratives about psytrance parties of the past fuel a desire for the return of the cosmopolitan psytrance party. it is argued that the nostalgic desires for parties that aspire to a cosmopolitan aesthetic can be understood as an ethical rhetoric that plays out a postcolonial subconscious. this ethical rhetoric enables participants to construct themselves as ethically responsible subjects and thereby assuage feelings of guilt produced by the persisting defects of colonial power relations. i will suggest that this ethical rhetoric, while camouflaged in positive discourses, can also paralyze the need for the actual subversion of remaining deficiencies in an increasingly globalized world. keywords: psytrance, nostalgia, desire, cosmopolitanism, sensational forms, postcolonial critique, subjectivity eva-maria van straaten completed her master’s in cultural analysis at the university of amsterdam with an ma thesis on psytrance and cosmopolitanism in the netherlands (august 2011). in addition to preparing a phd in cultural musicology, she is currently working as a research assistant and lecturer at the cultural musicology department of the georg-august university göttingen, germany. email: <eva-maria.van-straaten@phil.uni-goettingen.de>. feature article mailto:eva-maria.van-straaten@phil.uni-goettingen.de dancecult 4(1)66 petra: de hele experience van naar een psytrance feest gaan en de mensen met van die indiase stippen op hun hoofd en hoe het eruit ziet, decoraties en de muziek, als dat allemaal mooi en flowing is, ja dan krijg je inderdaad zo’n geheel. dan heb ik ook echt de mooiste ervaring en dat blijft ook heel erg sterk bij me. want, ja er kan wel hele goeie muziek zijn, maar als de mensen wat minder zijn of de decoraties zijn er niet echt ofzo, ja dan kan je wel gaan dansen maar dan heb je niet, die hele sensory experience. het is niet alleen wat je hoort qua muziek, maar ook wat je ziet, en wat je voelt en wat er om je heen is . . . en dan ruik je opeens wierook . . . de feesten waren een beetje oosters of niet-westers zeg maar, dat vond ik echt heel erg fijn. mooi en exotisch . . . tijdens een goed feestje, en zeker weten in combinatie met psychedelische drugs, kon je dat voelen en zien en aanraken.1 the whole experience of going to a psytrance party and the people with those indian dots on their forehead, and atmosphere, decorations and the music, when all those aspects are beautiful and flowing, then, yeah, then you indeed get a feeling of completeness. these moments are the best experiences, and i strongly remember them afterwards. because yeah, they can play very good music, but when the type of people attending the party is bad or there are no decorations, then you can dance but you don’t have the full sensory experience. it is not just what you hear in the music, but also what you see, what you feel and what is surrounding you . . . and then all of a sudden you smell incense . . . the parties were a bit eastern or well, non-western, i really liked that. beautiful and exotic . . . during a party, and especially in combination with the imbibing of psychedelic drugs, one could feel, see and touch this.2 introduction with the ongoing political decolonization of the former european colonies, the world seems to have entered the postcolonial era. in spite of this shift in political power relations, the “ambiguities and defects of past colonial relations persist” (gilroy 2004: 2). attempts to assuage feelings of guilt produced by this colonial history and its persisting effects have resulted in a postcolonial european desire to reconcile with the former colonial other (barrett 1996: 242). the active practice of the ethical ideology of cosmopolitanism is one of the ways in which postcolonial subjects can deal with the need to fulfill this postcolonial desire. by being open toward divergent aesthetic experiences, tolerantly searching for heterogeneity rather than uniformity and actively devoting oneself to the interest of humanity as a whole (hannerz 1996: 103; robbins 1998: 1), postcolonial subjects can construct themselves as ethically responsible cosmopolitans and thereby appease their feelings of guilt over prevailing deficiencies in the world. in this article, i propose that facets of the cosmopolitan ideology are present in the “global cultural flows” (appadurai 1996: 33) of people, media and ideologies comprising psytrance parties in amsterdam.3 as a result, cosmopolitanism is present in the psytrance party’s sensory aesthetic. in its conforming to the cosmopolitan aesthetic, the dutch psytrance party is therefore understood in my investigation as a space in which participants can 67van straaten | “what are we doing here?” imagine themselves to be cosmopolitan and, as a consequence, ethically responsible, subjects who seek reconciliation with the former colonial other. this cosmopolitan identity is experienced as authentic exactly because it is embodied “in the concrete lived environment” (meyer 2009: 5) of the practices, materialities and ideas that constitute the party’s cosmopolitan sensory aesthetic; during the psytrance party, participants can experience the cosmopolitan through their senses and feel it in their bones. since approximately 2006, the omnipresence of this cosmopolitan sensory aesthetic in the amsterdam-based psytrance scene has reportedly diminished. participants have purportedly experienced this demise in association with the commercialization of the psytrance scene, and they frame articulations of this demise with nostalgic narratives that express a desire for the return of parties that adhere to the cosmopolitan sensory aesthetic. the complex tension between a desired future and a nostalgically narrated past is not unique to the psytrance scene in amsterdam. thomas notices a similar tension in her account on clubbing in the united states; clubbers are “at once enthralled by the ‘futuristic’, while displaying a nostalgic longing for the past ‘underground house’” (2003: 193). in his ethnography of nor-tec music in mexico, madrid notices a similarly multifaceted relationship between a nostalgically remembered past and a desired future (2008: 172). in attempting to understand the tensions between future and past, and desire and nostalgia in the psytrance scene in amsterdam, i follow stewart’s (1988) conceptualization of nostalgia as a cultural practice that resurrects “time and place, and a subject in time and place” (227). in positing a party that “‘once was’ in relation to a ‘now’”, participants create a space in which they can negotiate their identities and give meaning to their lives. my position here is that the narratives of desire articulated on the psytrance dance floor create such an interpretive framework and thereby provide participants with a space for what varul calls “ethical selving”. this argument acknowledges that people experience ethical obligation and selfhood as integrated (varul 2009: 183). cultural practices that implicitly confirm psytrance participants’ adherence to the ethical desire for reconciliation with the former colonial other, such as articulations of a nostalgic desire for a return to a cosmopolitan psytrance experience, can enable participants to constitute themselves as ethical subjects. i critically explore these processes of ethical selving through the lens of the lacanian distinction between need, demand and desire as read by žižek (1992). this leads to the conclusion that, although apparently aiming to overcome the structural inequalities and uncertainties resulting from colonial power relations, the nostalgic articulations of a desire to return to the cosmopolitan psytrance party can actually paralyze the need to subvert these persisting inequities. in my attention to the apparent demise of the psytrance parties in amsterdam in terms of participants’ nostalgic narratives intentionally, i do not here address other facets of this multifarious and fluid phenomenon, namely the perspective and agency of djs, producers and party crews and the relationship between transformations in the amsterdam scene and alterations in the global psytrance scene. also, i do not attend to the perspectives of (new) participants, djs and party crews who do not experience the lack of a cosmopolitan sensory dancecult 4(1)68 aesthetic in contemporary parties as a demise of the psytrance scene. rather than providing an all-encompassing description of recent changes in the psytrance scene in amsterdam and the freedoms lost or gained during this process, the focus here is on the relationship between embodied forms of cosmopolitanism, nostalgia and the remaining inequities in the world resulting from past colonial power relations. with this focus, a critical note is provided on the ideology and practice of cosmopolitanism. this critical attention will emphasize that a desire for cultural practices, which enable a space to experience the self as authentically cosmopolitan, may feed the illusion that europe, and inherently those living in europe, “can be disconnected from its imperial past” (gilroy 2004: 2) and its lasting inequalities in a postcolonial era. this rather paralyzing illusion will be critically assessed in the following discussion of the amsterdam psytrance scene. imagining cosmopolitanism recent publications on the psytrance phenomenon have emphasized its global character (st john 2010a). in analyzing psytrance in its global context, a central aim is to gain an understanding of its “diversity, flows and flexibility”, a task that includes an examination of these cosmopolitan characteristics of the global psytrance phenomenon (st john 2010b: 2). analyses that attend to these cosmopolitan features often understand psytrance communities in terms of countercultures; these communities are conceptualized as “self-marginalized formations that, in various forms of experimentalism and contestation, seek to foster a critique that revises modernity within modernity” (d’andrea 2007: 3). psytrance’s growth and success as a counterculture is then understood as “rooted in utopian visions of a vast, interconnected global community free of the iniquities of neoliberalism, defined instead by a return to communality and the gift economy” (ryan 2010: 186). while it will become clear from my analysis that i question the conceptualization of psytrance as countercultural, cosmopolitanism is present in the psytrance parties in amsterdam and, therefore, plays a major role in the construction of participants’ individual as well as collective identities during these parties. i understand the relationship between cosmopolitanism and processes of identity construction in the light of appadurai’s suggestion that the imagination plays a crucial role in the constitution of subjectivities and experiences of belonging in an increasingly globalized world. feelings of belonging are no longer necessarily related to geographic locations and face-to-face interactions, but rather have to be understood in terms of imaginings induced by the movement of media, technologies, ideologies, people and finances around the world (appadurai 1996: 33). an analysis of these “cultural flows” present in global phenomena such as the psytrance party can therefore give us insights on the processes of identity construction that can take place during these parties. the well-documented emergence of psytrance from the constant movement of people between goa and the rest of the world inextricably links the psytrance party in amsterdam to the “ethnoscape” (appadurai 1996: 33); the increased movement of people around the globe (e.g., saldanha 2007, 2010; d’andrea 2010; elliott 2010). this link is strengthened by the presence of international and “neo-nomadic” audiences (d’andrea 2007: 6), as 69van straaten | “what are we doing here?” well as by the international line-up of djs playing at the parties. during an amsterdambased psytrance party, my interlocutors experience these “buitenlanders” (foreigners)4 as multiple others, with their otherness emphasized through the use of english in party announcements and the explicit reference to the country of origin of the various djs. the dynamics of this ethnoscape holds a dramatic effect over the production of subjectivities at these parties; these multiple others confront the visitors with the possibility of movement, deterritorialization and, inherently, with a multiplicity of others. the ethnoscape may therefore be understood as “a space where the own is constantly being renegotiated: it provides a relational context, which is never unilateral and always interactive; it is in a constant state of flux” (abels 2008: 6). extrapolating from this suggestion, i propose that the complex ethnoscape of the psytrance party provides participants with a relational context; the psytrance party is explicitly a space in which visitors can engage with these multiple others. one of the characteristics of cosmopolitanism is exactly this willingness to engage with and negotiate the conception of the other. therefore, the multiple explicit references to this ethnoscape construct the psytrance party as a space in which participants can imagine themselves to be cosmopolitans. in addition to the dynamics of the ethnoscape, multiple narratives of the place and time of psytrance’s origin must be considered. these narratives are invoked by a mediascape that includes visual imagery from documentaries, movies and interviews on goa, india, in relation to the emergence of psytrance. an example is last hippie standing (robbin 2002), a popular documentary among psytrancers. the film provides a romanticized image of goa and the processes through which it ostensibly became a hippie paradise. it describes the psytrance scene in goa as a “melting pot of the west and the east”, “very diversified” and “sharing”, and shows the well-known dj goa gil articulating ideas based on the yoga philosophy of nondualism (advaita). in addition, references to places, names, religions and philosophies related to india often appear in the names of (dutch) psytrance tracks, djs, party crews and parties.5 furthermore, psytrance cd leaflets and party flyers carry images of shiva, om and other hindu religious symbols. all of these references to india produce the psytrance party as a typically oriental other, as petra’s view on the relation between india and psytrance parties illustrates: petra: dat je toch als westers zijnde, ja precies, dat je daar kan heen gaan om zeg maar, niet westers te zijn, qua muziek en omgeving en ja dat spirituele inderdaad . . . ik ben zelf niet naar india geweest nog, maar ik denk dat er een hele sterke link is, het heeft ook met india zelf te maken en het geloof daar natuurlijk, ja, dat is heel erg gelinked, weetjewel, wij hebben hier ook van die indiase doeken hangen en geisha, uh hoe noem je ganesh . . . dat trekt me heel erg aan. while being western, you can still go there to, well, be non-western, in terms of music, in terms of surroundings and yes, the spiritual part. . . . i haven’t been to india myself, but i do think there is a strong link, psytrance is connected with india and the religion over there of course, yes, it is very much linked, you know, we also have indian decorations and geisha, uh, what’s his name, ganesh . . . this really attracts me. 6 dancecult 4(1)70 additionally, the internet plays an important role in the formation of psytrance as transnational music (ryan 2010). websites such as <www.goatrance.net> and <www. goabase.de> provide narratives and images of psytrance parties organized in amsterdam, as well as similar parties held at often unspecified locations elsewhere on the planet. like the ethnoscape, this multifarious mediascape contributes to the establishment of the psytrance party as a space in which the other can be encountered, which adds to its cosmopolitan character. finally, the already mentioned references to facets of the yoga philosophy advaita (nondualism) seem to have been transported by those travelling between goa and the netherlands. these aspects are incorporated in psytrance’s four ideological pillars: peace, love, unity and respect (plur) and reflect the cosmopolitan interest for humanity as a whole. as such, the ideoscape— concatenations of ideas and images that are often directly political and frequently related to (counter)ideologies of the state (appadurai 1996: 36)— fosters the cosmopolitan ideology that “in the end, we are all the same”7 and “iedereen is altijd welkom” (everybody is always welcome).8 as such, the ideoscape further adds to the multiple facets of the psytrance party in amsterdam that enable the participants to imagine themselves as cosmopolitans. cosmopolitan sensations in order to explore the processes through which these cosmopolitan identities can come to be experienced as an authentic truth, i will attend to the multisensorial aesthetic experience the amsterdam-based psytrance party offers its participants. i perceive aesthetic experience as rooted in “aisthesis”, defined as “our corporeal capability on the basis of a power given in our psyche to perceive . . . the world via our five different sensorial modes . . . and at the same time a specific constellation of sensations as a whole” (meyer and verrips 2008: 21). as such, aesthetic experiences enable a “shared sensory mode of perceiving and experiencing the world” (meyer 2009:9) that can be induced by “sensational forms” (meyer 2006). these forms are a combination of practices, attitudes and ideas that are inherent in the psytrance aesthetic as understood by my interlocutors,9 and generate particular sensations to which participants attach meaning. this meaning is experienced as authentic exactly because it is embodied, it is taken for granted because it is anchored in common sense (meyer 2009: 7). it should be understood that the music played at the parties constitutes a sensational form while recognizing that psytrance is not a homogeneous genre. during the last two decades, a multiplicity of sub-subgenres has developed, each with its own characteristic sound (lindop 2010: 114).10 the type of music played on the dance floors in amsterdam depends upon many factors, including but not limited to the dj’s preferences, the party crew, the time of the night, the audience’s response to the dj’s performance and the party space. instead of seeking to identify what would therefore be an inherently problematic definition of psytrance in amsterdam, in my exploration of musical characteristics i seek to understand how the development and popularization of particular subgenres (i.e., “progressive” and http://www.goatrance.net http://www.goabase.de http://www.goabase.de 71van straaten | “what are we doing here?” “full-on”), is mobilized through complaints about the demise of the psytrance scene that will be addressed in more detail in the section below. this first necessitates an analysis of my interlocutors’ articulations about what a good night on the psytrance dance floor should sound like; that is, what participants understand to be the psytrance aesthetic. i concentrate on three levels of aesthetic evaluation: the individual track, the dj set and the overall night. these should not be understood as three separate experiences, but rather as multiple— though for analytical purposes isolated—components of one experience. regarding the aesthetic qualities of individual psytrance tracks, the most important aspect mentioned is that they should always contain “psychedelic” elements: karel: een kraak en piepjes en van die, ja, een bepaald soort geluiden die je inderdaad ook als je als je aan het trippen bent aan de lsd, die dan zo heel scherp binnen kunnen komen . . . gewoon het meeste van die psychedelische, beetje freaky gewoon, beetje raar . . . ja ik vind dat geweldig . . . en dan, als die geluiden goed zijn, dan kun je ook echt je, ja dan sluit je jezelf ook helemaal af van de wereld eigenlijk, dan probeer je in die muziek te zitten of dan ga je in die muziek zitten en als, ja, als die geluiden saai zijn zeg maar, of voorspelbaar, dan zit je maar een beetje om je heen te kijken. a squeak and a peep and those, yeah, just a certain type of sounds that when you are tripping on lsd you can hear them crystal clear. . . . just the most psychedelic, a little freaky, a bit weird. . . . yeah, i love that . . . when those sounds are right, then you can really shut yourself off from the rest of the world, then you try to be in the music or you go into the music and if, yes, if the sounds are boring or predictable, you are just looking around. these very subjective characteristics of psychedelic sounds as “surprising”, “freaky” and “weird” are often produced synthetically with the help of specific sound effects that are mostly digital. the pan pot11 assigns stereo direction to the mix so that, for example, sounds seemingly travel between stereo speakers; the reverb makes a sudden scream resonate; and the phaser filters audio signals in order to produce multiple frequency sweeps in the bass lines and melodies. all of these rather unrecognizable “geluidjes en bliepjes en dingen” (sounds and bleeps and things) are recognized as “psychedelic”.12 additionally, the psychedelic is attributed to sounds that are recognized as originating in the “not here”, as the following excerpt illustrates: hans: sowieso is het ook altijd best wel melodisch, tenminste vroeger wel meer, dat is nu misschien iets minder, ja echt gewoon die frygische muziek zeg maar, dus van die uh, ja zeg maar, noem het maar arabisch of oosters of wat je het wil noemen, frygisch zeg ik altijd, en dat vind ik gewoon ook het leuke . . . echt wel psychedelisch ik weet niet precies waar dat aan ligt, maar misschien, ja van die sweeps zeg maar, van die frequency sweeps, van hoog naar laag en van laag naar hoog, . . . de melodie maakt het vaak wel, een beetje mystiek, een beetje spiritueel, op een best wel authentieke manier. dancecult 4(1)72 it [psytrance] is always very melodic, at least, it used to be, maybe currently this is a bit less, and yes also phrygian music you know, so like those uh, yeah like, call it arabic or eastern or whatever you like to call it, i always call it phrygian, and that is something i also like very much . . . really psychedelic, i don’t exactly know why it is like that, but maybe, yeah, those sweeps you know, those frequency sweeps, from high to low, and low to high . . . the melody often makes it a bit mystical, a bit spiritual, in a kind of an authentic manner.13 sounds are thus experienced as psychedelic when they originate in an often unspecified location outside europe, somewhere “exotisch” (exotic),14 in “outer space”15 and when its origin is “totaal onherkenbaar” (completely unrecognizable).16 it follows that the attribution of “psychedelic” to a particular sound in a psytrance track can be related to the lack of a specific place and/or instrument of origin; these sounds can be characterized as “schizophonic sounds”, or sounds split from their source (schafer 1977). to be more precise, the “psychedelic” as described by my interlocutors refers to a split of a sound from its source in such a manner that the source becomes ambiguous or even completely unrecognizable. as such, the illustrated appreciation for “psychedelic” sounds in tracks can be conceptualized as an aesthetic of otherness, an aesthetic that apparently “gets you in the trance feeling, with other music this does not happen, only for example from tribes in africa or from tribes all over the world you can come in this trance but not with everyday music”.17 this (neo)orientalist notion of the “psychedelic” links psytrance to a long tradition of european interest in, and (neo)colonial desire for, the musical other. the “psychedelic” sounds and melodies of psytrance are often repeated in two, four, eight, or sixteen beats, and are thereby constitutive of the four-to-the-floor rhythm produced by the kick drum. this four-to-the-floor electronic dance music beat is, depending on the genre, between 130–160 bpm. both the bpm and the specific sound of the synthetically produced kick drum are characteristic of the overarching psytrance genre. my interlocutors experience these characteristics as comparable to the beat of other transnational edm styles such as techno, trance and house. they emphasize that this beat should be continuous; while most tracks contain at least one break, usually approximately halfway through the track, such breaks should not occur too frequently: sandra: het verassende is belangrijk, maar het is niet verrassend als djs gewoon om de halve minuut stoppen en dan weer gewoon opnieuw beginnen, want dan denk je dat het verassend is, maar dat is gewoon heel standaard en dan. eva-maria: wordt het irritant? ja, gewoon de hele tijd heb je na een halve minuut weer opbouw, en die gaat door en dan stopt het weer . . . maar voor mijn gevoel is het gewoon vaak als het een slechte dj is, dat ie dan gewoon heel veel platen probeert te draaien. 73van straaten | “what are we doing here?” the surprising element is important, but it is not surprising if the dj just stops every half a minute, and then starts all over again, because you might think that is surprising, but it is very standard actually and then. then it becomes annoying? yeah, just the whole time building up the tension, and then it stops again. . . . i feel that if a dj tries to play as many tracks as possible, he is simply a bad dj.18 most interviewees emphasize the importance of this tension in the music. although surprising and unrecognizable sounds are appreciated and breaks are considered to be an important part of the experience because the overall dj set should create an experience of a “flow”.19. this experience of flow is invoked by a relatively continuous beat and by continuity in style within and between sets, in which changes should occur gradually rather than abruptly. the aesthetic of “flow” additionally relates to the idea that each part of the night has a different function during the party. the music played during specific parts of the night should seemingly facilitate this: jan: the parties were starting a bit progressive, a bit trippy, they were going a bit hard at the peak of the night, like three o’clock four o’clock, then softening it, softening it, but it was always in a flow, all of it, and at the end, in the morning, you have the morning music they call it. more soft sounds and more melodic, sounds that take you away, dream you away. for me it’s like, you go to a party, especially if you take drugs, you come to a liftoff, you leave this planet, you leave this universe, the way of life that we have here, you go to your special place, and slowly the dj has to bring you back in a safe way, back to the civilized world.20 apparently, if the type of music does not correspond to the mood of the moment, the flow of the experience is disturbed. as jan suggests, this flow is not solely produced by the music, but is induced by multiple facets of the psytrance aesthetic to which i attend below. both the aesthetic of otherness and the aesthetic of flow attributed to “good” psytrance induce particular sensations. the aesthetic of otherness offers participants the possibility of sensory engagement with an imagined musical other. in addition, the universal fourto-the-floor kick drum and bpm, both important constituents of the aesthetic of flow, offer the dancing participants a kinesthetic experience of this universal aspect of the music. psytrance can therefore be conceptualized as “cosmopolitan in its shared transnational electronic musical aesthetic” (rietveld 2010: 70) and in its aesthetic of otherness. in this way, as a sensational form, psytrance literally makes the cosmopolitan sense-able. particular elements characteristic of the party spaces in amsterdam can similarly be understood as sensational forms. the geographic locations of dance parties, usually at the outskirts of amsterdam, necessitate bicycle commutes that differ from regular bicycle rides in terms of duration, geographic location and goal. these rides can be conceptualized as a dancecult 4(1)74 kinesthetic transition phase from everyday life to the party situation; each physical movement taking participants closer to the party and further from everyday life. this experience of transition is enhanced by the fact that, once close enough to the party location, the increase in music volume seems directly correlated to the increase in distance from everyday life. the party spaces themselves typically consist of a dj table and speakers situated either in grazing land, in a small forest or in a large, often squatted, factory building or hangar. in all circumstances, participants can wander around freely, which they emphasize to be highly important for the party experience: renate: ja gewoon die lucht en buiten en de natuur en weetje gewoon . . . dat je niet vastzit aan een bepaalde ruimte. en als het dan ook binnen is, dan vind ik het ook wel fijn als je meerdere ruimtes hebt, omdat je dan ook een beetje kan kiezen, dat je een beetje kan rondlopen en ja, dat vind ik wel heel fijn, trapjes, gangetjes ook, dat soort dingen, op onderzoek uitgaan just that air and out in a natural environment and you know . . . you are not stuck in one room. and that is also the case when the party is inside, i really like the spaces with multiple rooms, because then you can choose a bit, you can walk around and i really like that, small stairs, small passages, those kind of things, i can examine the spaces.21 besides the aesthetic features mentioned by renate, the virtual absence of material boundaries such as high entrance fees, professional bouncers, and even walls in the case of outdoor parties, is claimed to produce an intense physical experience of freedom of movement. additionally, the extensive decoration of party spaces in the form of fluorescent paintings of elves, trolls, aliens, hindu gods, om signs and fabrics hanging from the ceiling are important aesthetic elements, that give participants a feeling of being in an other world: “ze kleden ook die hele ruimte aan, je heb het gevoel echt in een soort van andere wereld te zijn” (and they decorate the whole space, you really have the feeling of being in a different world).22 finally, a space-related sensational form that ostensibly adds to the party “vibe”23 is the smell of hash and incense that fills the party spaces. these produce olfactory sensations that participants associate with countries such as nepal, india and morocco and thereby add to the sensational experience of the party as other. all facets of these space related sensational forms render the cosmopolitan character of the psytrance party sense-able. the bicycle commute to party venues can be conceived of as a transition from everyday life to the other experience one has at the party, and as such facilitates a kinesthetic experience of the willingness to engage with the other. during the party, hash and incense fragrances facilitate an experience of engagement with others through the sense of smell, while the decorations trigger a similar experience by way of the sense of sight. in addition, a perceived lack of material boundaries seemingly enhances inclusivity, thereby enabling participants to achieve a kinesthetic experience that validates their cosmopolitan commitment to believing in the unity of humankind. 75van straaten | “what are we doing here?” the consumption of psychoactive substances is crucial to the psychedelic experience in psytrance parties in amsterdam. hallucinogenic substances such as lsd, 2c-b, psilocybin and cannabis affect perception when ingested. although their effects are substance specific, these substances characteristically “alter consciousness, often in dramatic and unpredictable ways” (nichols 2004: 132). so consumed, psychoactive substances enable a multisensorial experience of the world as different from our everyday perception. the act of imbibing psychoactive substances can therefore be understood as signaling a willingness to experience the world as other. because these psychedelic substances have an influence on our sensory perception of the world, the consumption of psychoactive substances can be understood as a sensory experience of the cosmopolitan willingness to engage with the other. in particular, the consumption of mdma, the psychoactive substance most commonly used during psytrance parties in amsterdam, enhances the ability to empathize with—and be open to— the complex ethnoscape present at the psytrance party, which can be related to the fact that “mdma induces the release of oxytocin” (dumont et al. 2009: 359) in participants’ bodies. furthermore, mdma consumption produces a pansexual and entactogenic desire to touch (passie et al. 2005: 900) both friends and strangers, which psytrance participants seem to interpret as the experience of the universality of humankind through the sense of touch. these very physical experiences of cosmopolitanism change participants’ “relationship to oneself, one’s body, one’s place in society and the world” (saldanha 2007: 12). in this, psychoactive substances are crucial sensational forms that “gewoon je hele, belevenis van het feest grandioos veranderen” (change your whole experience of the party).24 they are a central constituent of the psytrance party as cosmopolitan and thereby assist in the construction of the party as a space in which a “conscious project of reinventing oneself ” (saldanha 2007: 32) can take shape. as will become clear, the apparent lack of these substances at contemporary psytrance parties is mobilized in complaints from participants regarding the commercialization of the scene. to recapitulate, i propose that the aforementioned sensational forms inherent in psytrance’s sensory aesthetic induce sensations that can be interpreted as cosmopolitan. in this manner, the psytrance party that conforms to this aesthetic recruits the entire body to make the cosmopolitan sense-able; the party is structured in such a way that it enables participants to experience the cosmopolitan in and through their bodies. it is a space in which participants can ethically realign themselves by realizing an authentically felt grounding to the cultural constructions that make up their lives. the nostalgic desire to return to the roots but what happens when the psytrance party no longer seems to adhere to these sensory cosmopolitan aesthetics? in this section, i explore the apparent commercialization of the parties in terms of participants’ nostalgic comments on this shift from the non-commercial and its effects on the scene, as illustrated in the following statement: dancecult 4(1)76 helena: ik vraag me af of de muziek meer mainstream wordt of dat het hele thema psytrance meer mainstream wordt. ik denk eigenlijk het laatste, dat steeds meer mensen ervan horen en dat het steeds populairder wordt, zeg maar, omdat het misschien dat alternatieve karakter heeft dat misschien mensen steeds meer gaat aantrekken. maar ik mis bijvoorbeeld in het begin dat ik echt naar die feesten ging die echt ergens bijvoorbeeld in een bos of op een dijk ofzo, en dat ze van die lampjes en dingetjes hadden opgehangen, en daar moest je echt van horen zeg maar, niet zomaar lezen op een flyer ofzo. i am wondering whether the music is becoming more mainstream lately or that the whole theme of psytrance is becoming more mainstream, i actually think the latter, that an increasing amount of people hear about it and that it becomes more popular, you know, maybe because it has this alternative character that may attract people. but i really miss, for example, in the beginning, i just went to those parties that were somewhere in a forest or on a dike or something, and they had those lamps and decorations hanging there and you would only be there because you knew somebody, not because you just read the announcement on a flyer or something.25 as this excerpt demonstrates, nostalgic articulations for past psytrance party aesthetics express a desire to return to parties that offered the cosmopolitan sensory aesthetic as discussed in the previous section. such nostalgic utterances may be understood as cultural practices that frame the cultural present and a desire for a future that is based on an imagined past. a central question here is how participants mobilize such nostalgia to renegotiate their experience of the self in the present. the particular framings of nostalgia seem to construct a space in which participants can imagine themselves as disconnected from inequalities that are remnants of (post)colonial power relations. the most widely vocalized complaint about the ostensible demise of the scene is the apparent “depsychedelization” of music that can be heard at contemporary psytrance parties. the tracks played at these parties apparently lack the above-conceptualized “psychedelic” sounds: vincent: ik ben heel erg van de melodische psytrance, aan het eind van de avond wil ik best wel een uurtje van die keiharde full on psytrance horen, maar het liefst gewoon melodisch, anders ben je de hele tijd een beetje aan het luisteren naar hard techno ofzoiets. vooral de laaste tijd horen we dat veel teveel, dan ben je naar snoeiharde psytrance aan het luisteren en dan denk ik van ja, het lijkt meer op techno ofzoiets dan op psytrance, waar is de psychedelica in dit liedje, in deze set? . . . dat vind ik een van de belangrijkste dingen van de psytrance, het moet wel psychedelisch zijn. i am very much into melodic psytrance, at the end of the evening i am okay with listening to that abrasive, full-on psytrance, but preferably melodic, otherwise you seem to be listening to hard techno the whole time. especially lately, we hear that way too much, you are listening to abrasive psytrance and then i am thinking like, this sounds more like techno than like psytrance, where is the psychedelic in this track, in 77van straaten | “what are we doing here?” this set? . . . this is one of the most important characteristics of psytrance, it has to be psychedelic.26 vincent’s use of the term “lately” signals that he experiences this lack of psychedelic sounds and the overuse of the “abrasive” full-on sounds as a recent development. his comments establish a mythical moment in psytrance history when the music retained the psychedelic aesthetic as characterized in the section above. in addition, the current lack of the “psychedelic” aesthetic of otherness in psytrance is associated with genres perceived of as commercial and mainstream such as house, techno and electro-minimal: sandra: ik merkte wel dat het ongeveer twee jaar geleden, toen begon het gewoon echt heel erg houserig te worden allemaal, en dat het heel erg mee ging met dat minimal opkwam en dat er opeens ook heel veel mensen die dan [psy] trance draaiden opeens ook een beetje de minimal of heel erg housig gingen draaien en dat er daardoor ook allemaal mainstream mensen naar de feestjes kwamen. i did notice that about two years ago it became really house-ish, all of it, and that it really went along with the popularization of minimal, and that a lot of people who played [psy] trance all of a sudden also a played minimal or really house-like music [progressive psytrance], which caused a lot of mainstream people to come to the parties.27 the indication of a timeframe beginning “about two years ago” and the use of the expression “all of a sudden” suggest transformation; sandra nostalgically recollects a moment in the past when the psytrance party did not sound “minimal” or “house-like”. similar complaints are often framed by nostalgic desires for psytrance parties of the past: sandra: ik heb het idee dat het nu juist weer terug gaat naar hoe het was in het begin, dat de djs weer terug komen die toen draaiden en die dan ook nu weer gewoon keiharde goa draaien en heel veel vage vaagheid erdoor heen gooien. wat echt ook super fijn is trouwens, daar ben ik echt super blij mee, ja ik weet niet het gaat, het was effetjes, het was wel echt twee jaar dat ik vaak dacht van ja, wat doen we hier gewoon? at this moment it is going back to how it used to be in the beginning, that djs are coming back who were playing back then, who just play real goa and who mix in lots of weird sounds. which is really nice by the way, i am really happy about that, for some time, for two years, i really thought like, what are we doing here?28 here, sandra expresses her desire for parties that conform to the aesthetic of otherness inherent in the music she perceives as “real” psytrance. in addition to many similar comments, critics observe that contemporary djs are unable to keep to the aesthetic of flow; lacking mixing skills, their sets contain too many breaks and djs do not interact with the audience. nostalgic narratives of good djs playing at parties of the past frame these criticisms, contributing to the idea that these parties corresponded to the above-described aspects of the sensory cosmopolitan psytrance aesthetic. dancecult 4(1)78 another factor supposedly exemplifying the scene’s demise is the growing difficulty in finding suitable party spaces. this problem was increased by the recent change in the squatting and vacancy law (october 2010)29, which criminalizes squatting in the netherlands. the difficulty in finding suitable spaces has resulted in the organization of parties in legal club venues, which are generally not considered suitable for psytrance parties because participants are required to conform to club rules that often conflict with the sensory psytrance aesthetic: renate: festivals op ruigoord, ja dat is gewoon heel leuk, gewoon inderdaad die vrijheid die je hebt om daar lekker overal rond te scharrelen. clubs ben ik niet zo’n fan van, vooral als het dan allemaal een beetje gecontroleerd wordt een beetje met zo’n beveiliger en dat soort dingen. the festivals at ruigoord, yeah they are just very nice, just that freedom that you have to just wander around. i am not a big fan of clubs, especially when it is a bit controlled, with a bouncer and that kind of things.30 besides the presence of financial and physical boundaries in the form of a high entrance fee and bouncers, the kinesthetic experience of freedom of movement is further prevented by the regulated opening times of official clubs. in addition, smoking is only allowed in “smokers areas”,31 which means that participants cannot smoke cigarettes and joints on the dance floor. finally, the prohibition of the possession and consumption of psychoactive substances is actively implemented in club venues. this curbs the sensory experience of otherness induced by the consumption of these substances, and therefore has a dramatic influence on party experience of participants. in sum, complaints about contemporary party spaces are articulated in terms of their lack of the cosmopolitan sensory psytrance aesthetic. similar to complaints about the de-psychedelization of psytrance music, critiques of psytrance party venues are framed by nostalgic narratives about the party spaces in the early days: karel: die loodsen, echt helemaal in het begin toen ik naar die trance feestjes ging toen had je gewoon drie of vier van die panden daar achter bij sloterdijk, en er was altijd wel een van die, eigenlijk ging dat het hele weekend door ook, je ging vaak gewoon van de ene naar de andere. those hangars, in the beginning when i went to those trance parties, there were three or four of those buildings behind sloterdijk,32 and there was always one that, actually it just went on all weekend, you often just went from one to the other.33 here, karel recalls the freedom of movement one could physically experience at these psytrance parties of the cosmopolitan past. similar narratives about parties in the meadows surrounding amsterdam possessing beautiful, extensive decorations frame complaints about contemporary party spaces: 79van straaten | “what are we doing here?” helena: terwijl die goa feesten moeten voor mij juist warm en vol en ja, dat mis ik de laatste tijd wel heel erg. ik denk dat het ook komt omdat als er nu een feest wordt georganiseerd, dan is het gelijk zo bomvol met mensen, ja een beetje dat commerciële . . . terwijl daarvoor had ik wel het idee dat het een soort van subcultuur was, die allemaal met elkaar hetzelfde idee hadden . . . ik weet ook nog wel een keer dat we naar een bos waren gegaan . . . dat alternatieve, dat het gewoon in een bosje naast een industrie terrein was. those goa parties for me they have to be warm and full and yeah, lately i really miss that. i think that also has to do with the fact that now, when a party is organized, immediately it’s so crowded, and yeah, a bit commercial . . . whereas before, i really had the idea that it was some kind of a subculture, who all together had the idea. . . . i remember that time we went to the forest . . . it was alternative, just in a small forest next to an industrial area.34 besides multiple comparable nostalgic complaints about the lack of a sensory cosmopolitan aesthetic in contemporary party spaces, a change in the type of psychoactive substances used during the parties ostensibly marks the demise of the scene. this change is thought to correlate with a transformation in the party announcement system: announcements are no longer solely made through semi-secret mailing lists or through phone calls via friends, but can be found online and on flyers in bars all around amsterdam. consequently, the type of people who visit psytrance parties appear to have changed, as have the type of psychoactive substances that are associated with these events: karel: ik zie gewoon aan mensen dat ze er alleen maar heengaan om, ja ik weet niet, met hun coole kleertjes en hun zonnebrilletje. ze hebben nog nooit lsd gebruikt zeg maar, je voelt het gewoon aan ze, en ze gaan het nooit doen ook. ik vind dat dan wel een beetje jammer, het hoort er voor mij toch wel een beetje bij, dat je echt wel een bepaalde voorliefde hebt voor psychedelica . . . ja zoals gisteren, ik bedoel, ze dragen gewoon merkkleding . . . terwijl die echt trancehippies allemaal, wat dat bij mekaar houdt, ja voorliefde voor psychedelica sowieso, maar daar mee samenhangend ook een bepaalde spiritualiteit. i just see when people, they just go there to, yes i don’t know, with their cool clothes and their sunglasses. they have never used lsd you know, you can just feel it, and they will never do it. that is really a pity, for me it’s kind of part of the thing, that you have this liking for psychedelics. . . . like yesterday, you see people with designer clothes . . . while those real trance hippies, what keeps them together is a love for psychedelics and interrelated a certain level of spirituality.35 in contrast with this love for cosmopolitan hallucinogens, the mainstream visitors display a preference for amphetamines and cocaine: dancecult 4(1)80 petra: die gast was heel opgefokt en echt aan de speed zeg maar, en dat zijn nou de drugs waarvan ik denk van nee, dat hoort niet bij goa, tenminste dat vind ik persoonlijk, dat hoort weer echt bij die techno house muziek. that guy was really worked up, really on speed you know, and this is the type of drug that does not belong to goa, at least that is how i personally feel, it belongs more to techno house music.36 the association of amphetamines and cocaine with more popular edm genres such as techno and house leads to the idea that the growing numbers of visitors who consume these substances, rather than cosmopolitan substances such as mdma and hallucinogens, signals the commercialization, and hence demise, of the scene. finally, explicitly orientalist articulations of nostalgia for the roots of psytrance in india are also more than apparent in the scene. an example can be found on the website of a dj collective organizing goa classics parties from the beginning of 2011. in their blog, dj tameesh (2011) describes these parties as follows: what happens if you bring together crazy hippies, psychedelic techno music and acid on a beautiful beach in spiritual india? right! you get goa trance! . . . the first pioneers cranked the volume up, made their own loops and filled the sonic spectrum with their own weird and wonderful sounds . . . now we bring these sounds to amsterdam in 2011. this desire to return to the “weird and wonderful” roots of psytrance is not limited to discourse; it is actively implemented at the party. dj sets contain a range of “psychedelic” elements37 that are much appreciated by the participants. for an interpretation of these multiple nostalgic articulations of a desire for the cosmopolitan sensibilities in psytrance parties, i will an elaborate here on the concept of desire, following žižek’s reading of the “lacanian distinction between need, demand and desire” (žižek 1992: 5). this reading suggests that the way an experience is “destined to satisfy our needs, undergoes a kind of transubstantiation as soon as it is caught in the dialectic of demand and ends up producing desire” (žižek 1992: 5). in the moment that we express a demand for an experience we need —in this case the multisensory experience of cosmopolitanism—the value of the experience itself “becomes a form of expression of its ‘exchange value’” (žižek 1992: 5). as the demand for the cosmopolitan sensibilities starts to function “as an index of a network of intersubjective relations” (žižek 1992: 5), the act of demanding already indexes participants as ethical subjects. this change in the function of the cosmopolitan psytrance experience, from a desired experience to an index in a network of intersubjective relations, leads to a situation in which we no longer seek to satisfy the need attached to the experience, but rather want to confirm the “other’s attitude towards us” (žižek 1992: 5). in this process, the need for the actual multisensory experience of cosmopolitanism during a psytrance party is replaced by the need to reproduce the context in which this experience can be demanded and the other’s attitude towards the self can be confirmed. 81van straaten | “what are we doing here?” this understanding of desire leads to a critical appraisal of the stated desire to return to the cosmopolitan roots of psytrance. as i proposed in the introduction, the ethical desire for reconciliation with the former colonial other manifests itself in the form of cosmopolitanism. through the articulation of a yearning for the return to cosmopolitan psytrance parties of the past, participants therefore implicitly express a desire for a means to reconceptualize the relationship with the former colonial other. nostalgic articulations of a desire for parties that conform to the sensory cosmopolitan aesthetic can in this light be understood as strategies of ethical selving. the act of expressing a willingness to reconceptualize the relationship with the former colonial other and thereby overcome the lasting deficiencies of the colonial past indexes psytrancers as ethically responsible citizens of a global postcolonial world. as such, the nostalgic articulations of the desire to return to psytrance’s cosmopolitan roots can be understood as a strategy of self-representation through which the amsterdam-based participants “secure their innocence” (pratt 1992: 7) about the deficiencies in the world resulting from colonial power relations of the past, by drawing “on a long western tradition of orientalism” ( johnston 2002: 50). although articulations of such desires are usually interpreted as positive, the above conceptualization of desire problematizes a solely celebratory interpretation of these narratives. the moment that the need for a cosmopolitan experience, and inherently the need to overcome the still prevailing defects of the colonial past, is articulated, this need is replaced by the desire to reproduce the context in which an articulation of such desire produces intersubjectivity. thus, since the articulation of the desire for cosmopolitanism only allows for the production of intersubjectivity in a context in which the cosmopolitan ideals have not yet become a reality, these verbalizations implicitly evoke a paradoxical need to reproduce the deficiencies and ambiguities resulting from colonial power relations of the past this ideology explicitly attempts to overcome. additionally, the sole expression of the desire to return to the cosmopolitan roots of psytrance positions participants as ethical subjects, which alleviates the need to actually practice the ideals that cosmopolitanism adheres to. summarizing, it seems that the expressions of nostalgic desires for a cosmopolitan psytrance party seem rather “thin ethical precepts” (gilroy 2004: 4); they are rhetorics of ethical responsibility that disguise their own circular libidinal foundation. these rhetorics mobilize a postcolonial subconscious in processes of ethical selving, thereby enabling participants to assuage feelings of guilt over persisting ambiguities and defects in the world. at the same time, these rhetorics camouflage the fact that psytrance participants can alleviate this guilt without actually practicing the cosmopolitan ideals they adhere to. such rather paralyzing rhetorics should be reflected on in a critical manner. concluding remarks based on the analysis of the cultural flows and sensational forms that define the psytrance party in amsterdam, i have argued that the cosmopolitan sensibilities inherent in the psytrance aesthetic provide its participants with a space for ethical selving. this space allows dancecult 4(1)82 participants to construct their cosmopolitan identities as “not something purely cognitive but . . . rooted in the experience of the body in its entirety, as a complex of culturally and historically honed sensory modalities” (hirschkind 2006: 101). i propose that complaints about the commercialization of the psytrance scene are articulated in terms of a lack of the sensory cosmopolitan psytrance aesthetic, a deficiency that apparently signals the demise of the amsterdam-based psytrance scene. as i asseverated, these expressions are framed within nostalgic narratives of past parties that seemed to conform to psytrance’s cosmopolitan sensory aesthetic. the expression of a desire to return to psytrance’s cosmopolitan roots is understood as a rhetoric that camouflages the fact that the mere expression of this desire already indexes participants as ethical subjects, which releases them of the need to take action against the persisting defects and ambiguities of past colonial relations they aspire to overcome. with this critical insight, i would emphasize that the uncritical celebration of, and nostalgic desires for, cosmopolitanism could paralyze attempts to practice the critical ideologies it advocates. acknowledgements i would like to thank graham st john, birgit abels, rik adriaans, charissa granger, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments, suggestions and corrections during the various stages of writing this paper. notes 1 my informants prefer to be anonymous. in order to guarantee their anonymity, i have given all informants a pseudonym. any resemblance in names to a real person is a coincidence. most conversations were conducted in dutch. in this article, i provide the reader with the original dutch quotation, followed by an english translation. any mistakes in the translation are mine. the dutch-english code-switching in some of the excerpts are original. the informal interviews took place in either my interlocutors’ or my house, and were conducted between february 1st 2011 and march 30th 2011. at the time of the interviews, the age of the interviewees was between 22 and 30, and they had been attending psytrance parties as dancers for between two and twelve years. 2 petra, interview in amsterdam, 15th march 2011. 3 this article is based on research performed for my ma thesis (straaten 2011). my five years of experience in the dutch psytrance scene also contributes to the formulation of this text. fieldwork was conducted in the form of participant observation within the psytrance scene in amsterdam between january and july 2011 and in conversational interviews with amsterdambased psytrancers. 4 hans, interview in amsterdam, 20th february 2011. 5 for example, tameesh, the name of one of the most popular dutch psytrance djs, means “lord of the night” in hindi. the word namasté, which means “hello” in hindi, is the name of a popular party crew in the amsterdam area, and the monthly psytrance party organized at cultural freeport ruigoord is called “trance orient express”. 83van straaten | “what are we doing here?” 6 petra, interview in amsterdam, 15th march 2011. 7 jan, interview in amsterdam, 19th march 2011. 8 karel, interview in amsterdam, 28th march 2011. 9 by interlocutors, i refer to both my interviewees and to dancers i conversed with in chill-outs and on the dance floors of parties during my research. there were regular complaints about the demise of the scene among these participants. 10 subgenres include “suomisaundi” (literally finnish sound), “morning goa”, “progressive”, “full-on”, “darkpsy”, “psybreaks” and “psybient”. the latter is usually played in chillout rooms. 11 the pan pot or panoramic potentiometer (also known as pan control) determines the spread of the sound signal into multi-channelled sound fields. 12 renate, interview in amsterdam, 16th february 2011. 13 hans, interview in amsterdam, 20th february 2011. 14 petra, interview in amsterdam, 15th march 2011. 15 hendrika, interview in amsterdam, 4th march 2011. 16 petra, interview in amsterdam, 15th march 2011. 17 jan, interview in amsterdam, 19th march 2011. 18 sandra, interview in amsterdam, 23rd february 2011. 19 petra, interview in amsterdam, 15th march 2011. 20 jan, interview in amsterdam, 19th march 2011. 21 renate, interview in amsterdam, 16th february 2011. 22 helena, interview in amsterdam, 9th february 2011. 23 for an overview of publications on the “vibe”, see st john 2009. 24 vincent, interview in amsterdam, 8th march 2011. 25 helena, interview in amsterdam, 9th february 2011. 26 vincent, interview in amsterdam, 8th march 2011. 27 sandra, interview in amsterdam, 23rd february 2011. 28 sandra, interview in amsterdam, 23rd february 2011. 29 wet kraken en leegstand, which prohibits the squatting of empty buildings in the netherlands. 30 renate, interview in amsterdam, 16th february 2011. 31 rook ruimtes. 32 industrial area in the west of amsterdam. 33 karel, interview in amsterdam, 28th march 2011. 34 helena, interview in amsterdam, 9th february 2011. 35 karel, interview in amsterdam, 28th march 2011. 36 petra, interview in amsterdam, 15th march 2011. 37 an example of such a set can be found at goaclassics amsterdam: <http://www.mixcloud. com/goaclassics-amsterdam/>. http://www.mixcloud.com/goaclassics-amsterdam/ http://www.mixcloud.com/goaclassics-amsterdam/ dancecult 4(1)84 references abels, birgit. 2008. sounds of articulating identity: tradition and transition in the music of palau, micronesia. berlin: logos verlag berlin gmbh. appadurai, arjun. 1996. modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. barrett, james. 1996. “world music, nation and postcolonialism”. cultural studies 10(2): 237–47. d’andrea, anthony. 2007. global nomads: techno and new age as transnational countercultures in ibiza and goa. new york: routledge. ———. 2010. “the decline of electronic dance scenes: the case of psytrance in goa”. in the local scenes and global culture of psytrance, ed. graham st john, 40–54. new york: routledge. dj tameesh. 2011. “what is goa classics?”. goa classics collective. 14 march: <http:// goaclassics.wordpress.com/page/18/> (accessed 15 april 2011). dumont, g. j. h, f. c. g. j. sweep, r. van der steen, r. hermsen, a. r. t. donders, d. j. touw, j. m. a. van gerven, j. k. buitelaar & r. j. verkes. 2009. “increased oxytocin concentrations and prosocial feelings in humans after ecstasy (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine) administration”. social neuroscience 4(4): 359–66. elliott, luther. 2010. “goa is a state of mind: on the ephemerality of psychedelic social emplacements”. in the local scenes and global culture of psytrance, ed. graham st john, 21–39. new york: routledge. gilroy, paul. 2004. after empire: melancholia or convivial culture? oxon: routledge. goatrance. party base. <www.goatrance.net> (accessed 24 october 2011). hannerz, ulf. 1996. transnational connections: culture, people, places. london: routledge. hirschkind, charles. 2006. the ethical soundscape: cassette sermons and islamic counterpublics. new york: columbia university press. johnston, josée. 2002. “consuming global justice”. in protest and globalisation: prospects for transnational solidarity, ed. james goodman, 38–56. annandale: pluto press australia. lindop, robin. 2010. “re-evaluating musical genre in uk psytrance”. in the local scenes and global culture of psytrance, ed. graham st john, 114–30. new york: routledge. meyer, birgit. 2006. religious sensations: why media, aesthetics and power matter in the study of contemporary religion. amsterdam: vrije universiteit. ———. 2009. “introduction: from imagined communities to aesthetic formations: religious mediations, sensational forms and styles of binding”. in aesthetic formations: media, religion, and the senses, ed. birgit meyer, 1–30. new york: palgrave macmillan. meyer, birgit & jojada verrips. 2008. “aesthetics”. in key words in religion, media and culture, ed. david morgan, 20–30. new york: routledge. nichols, david e. 2004. “hallucinogens”. pharmacology & therapeutics 101: 131–81. passie, torsten, uwe hartmann, udo schneider, hinderk m. emrich and tillmann h.c. krüger. 2005. “ecstasy (mdma) mimics the post-orgasmic state: impairment of sexual drive and function during acute mdma-effects may be due to increased prolactin secretion”. medical hypotheses 64(5): 899–903. http://goaclassics.wordpress.com/page/18/ http://goaclassics.wordpress.com/page/18/ http://www.goatrance.net 85van straaten | “what are we doing here?” pratt, marie louise. 1992. imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation. london: routledge. rietveld, hillegonda. 2010. “infinite noise spirals: the musical cosmopolitanism of psytrance”. in the local scenes and global culture of psytrance, ed. graham st john, 69–88. new york: routledge. robbins, bruce. 1998. “introduction part i: actually existing cosmopolitanism”. in cosmopolitics: thinking and feeling beyond the nation, ed. pheng cheah and bruce robbins, 1–19. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. ryan, jenny. 2010. “weaving the underground web: neo-tribalism and psytrance on tribe.net”. in the local scenes and global culture of psytrance, ed. graham st john, 186–202. new york: routledge. saldanha, arun. 2007. pyschedelic white: goa trance and the viscosity of race. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. ———. 2010. “the ghost of goa trance; a retrospective”. in the local scenes and global culture of psytrance, ed. graham st john, 55–64. new york: routledge. schafer, r. murray. 1977. the tuning of the world: toward a theory of soundscape design. new york: random house. stewart, kathleen. 1988. “nostalgia: a polemic”. cultural anthropology 3(3): 227–24. st john, graham. 2009. “neotrance and the psychedelic festival”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(1): 35–64. available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/ 1947-5403.2009.01.01.03. ———. ed. 2010a. the local scenes and global culture of psytrance. new york: routledge. ———. 2010b. “psytrance: an introduction”. in the local scenes and global culture of psytrance, ed. graham st john, 1–17. new york: routledge. van straaten, eva-maria alexandra. 2011. “sensational forms and flows of sensation: goatrance as an experience of belonging to an imagined cosmopolitan world”. m.a. thesis (cultural analysis), universiteit van amsterdam. thomas, helen. 2003. the body, dance and cultural theory. new york: palgrave macmillan. varul, matthias zick. 2009. “ethical selving in cultural contexts: fairtrade consumption as an everyday ethical practice in the uk and germany”. international journal of consumer studies 33: 183–89. žižek, slavoj. 1992 [1991]. looking awry: an introduction to jacques lacan through popular culture. cambridge: mit press. filmography robbin, marcus. 2002. last hippie standing. germany: tangiji film. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0385048/> http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.03 http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.03 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0385048/ electronic awakening dir. andrew johner usa: federation of earth, 2011. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2038260/ us$10 garth sheridan rmit university (au) in the midst of the growing mainstream acceptance and corporatization of edm cultures in north america, electronic awakening is a welcome glance into independent gatherings that have been ongoing since the early 1990s. though touching on earlier events, the film focuses on the contemporary outdoor electronic dance music scene, and was shot between 2006 and 2011 at parties including burning man, earthdance, shambala and lovefest. alongside festival footage, the film interviews a wide range of djs, promoters, religious figures, journalists and academics including terrence mckenna, robin sylvan, anthony d'andrea, graham st john and members of moontribe, wicked and tribal harmonix. the primary emphasis of the documentary is the deeply spiritual basis of the cultures and practices that have developed around these parties, particularly trance music and the possibilities this spirituality might offer for ravers and the world in general. the interviewees suggest that for people organizing and attending these events, the raves are 21st century "tribal gatherings", where one can experience connectivity to the other ravers and the land, while experiencing states of ecstasy and participating in cleansing through collective dance. executive producer julian reyes sees the experience as rooted in contemporary culture, while building upon older knowledge and belief systems, suggesting that "electronic music is modern shamanism; it is the evolution of ritualized drum circles" (cronshey 2011). arguably, the experience of attending raves and participating in spiritual activities potentially offers an alternative to organized religion and a more intuitive connection to divinity. the development of america's outdoor rave scene is framed as a reaction to increasingly restrictive anti-rave legislation that pushed promoters outside of traditional club spaces, either into larger commercial dance parties, or underground to the limits of the city and into the desert. san francisco house pioneer dj garth explains the motivation for the early outdoor parties thrown by wicked crew to be a move away from the restrictions placed on downtown clubs, and a chance to get in touch with nature with the freedom to dance on the beach at full moon. the full moon parties are considered a cornerstone of the outdoor scene in america, and led to the wicked tour over the summers of 1994 and 1995, which saw the group travel across america in an old bus with a sound system. this tour was instrumental in spreading the outdoor rave culture across america and culminated in burning man festival. director andrew johner returns to burning man throughout the film, and positions the festival as an experiment in an alternate, utopian organization of society based around community, spirituality, support and self-expression, devoid of judgment and capitalist exploitation. in this sense, burning man is representative of the values of the scene as a whole. through the interweaving of footage filmed at festivals and interviews, outdoor parties are presented as religious gatherings. festival-goers are shown to establish spontaneous altars to a diverse range of deities, take part in handholding circles and enter altered, ecstatic states. the festival footage used in the film captures the ritualistic, spiritual nature of collective dance that participants experience. many of those interviewed suggest that dancing to repetitive rhythms induces a state of bliss and transcendence, which opens the mind to positivity and reprogramming. neo-pagan author starhawk draws parallels between the outdoor party movement and earth-based religions, in that they prioritize experience over specific belief systems or dogma. while the personal and non-prescriptive journey of festival spirituality is emphasized, moments where participants reflect on specific rituals, such as goa gil spreading ganga water and building altars to prepare festival sites, ground the discussion and may be more accessible to those outside the movement. the film presents outdoor raves as a global movement, with people all around the world organizing festivals and engaging in spiritual communion. the footage of portugal's boom festival visually reflects this global dimension, however interviews with attendees and organizers could have been used to make these links explicit. for example, the interview with dj garth could have delved into the historical and global context of the outdoor party scene due to his background in london's acid house scene and role in developing uk-style, jamaican-influenced sound system culture in america. similarly, goa gil is a sadhu and was predominantly based in the indian state of goa through the 1980s and 1990s and was a key figure in the development of goa trance. developing strong counter cultural and religious components, goa trance bound the musical and spiritual together in a significant way, laying the foundation for contemporary gatherings. conceived as part of a larger work including the production of a book, the development of the project into other formats may provide possibilities for greater detail and a deeper, critical analysis of the varied manifestation of spirituality in electronic dance music cultures. electronic awakening is aimed at a wider audience than those actively participating in the outdoor trance scene, but this is where the documentary is likely to find the most resonance. indeed, the film has been screening at outdoor parties and chill out spaces globally to great response since 2011. references cronshey, terra. 2011. "dancing to the digital shamans". catalyst magazine. 30 november: <http://www.catalystmagazine.net/component/k2/item/1818-dancing-to-the-digital-shamans>(accessed 23 june 2013). the diy careers of techno and drum 'n' bass djs in vienna dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 4(1): 86–106 issn 1947-5403 ©2012 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.01.04 spaces of play the spatial dimensions of underground club culture and locating the subjunctive alice o’grady university of leeds (uk) abstract this article examines the interrelated concepts of space, play and performativity in relation to the underground club scene in the uk. grounded in the discipline of performance studies, this article uses the lens of play to identify how the spatial characteristics of underground dance culture provide a fertile terrain for performative acts of collectivity and expression. resonating with previous edmc scholarship that invokes concepts of liminality and the social dimensions of “spontaneous communitas”, the physical and psychical dimensions of play will be considered. applying turner’s work on subjunctivity (1982) and jill dolan’s concept of “utopian performatives” (2005) in relation to the psytrance scene, the article positions the underground party as a playful arena, a spatial construct that offers a context for moments of individual and collective transformation that are expressed and experienced performatively. keywords: psytrance, play, performance, playful arena, subjunctivity, liminality, festival, protest, transformation alice o’grady is senior lecturer in applied theatre at the school of performance and cultural industries, university of leeds, uk. her research deals with interactive performance and play theory, particularly within underground club culture and contemporary music festivals. much of her work is site-sensitive and examines the relationship between space, context and identity. email: a.ogrady@leeds.ac.uk feature article mailto:a.ogrady@leeds.ac.uk 87o’grady | spaces of play introduction this article examines the interrelated concepts of space, play and performativity in relation to the underground club scene in the uk.1 although its application is not confined to one musical genre only, this research has developed with particular interest in the performative aspects of psytrance, an edmc that has at its roots a commitment to countercultural ideology and spiritual expansion (partridge 2006; st john 2004, 2009a, 2009b, 2010). the work under discussion here represents one aspect of extended practice-based research on interactivity and underground club culture with my performance company …floorspace….2 this work was conducted at shamania, one of the uk’s alternative psytrance festivals, during the period between 2006 and 2009 (see o’grady 2009). this research involved devising a series of bespoke performances that were participatory in nature and that were designed to augment the innate playfulness of the festival space and its inhabitants by engaging them in interactive performance in and around the dance floors and the festival’s open spaces. in parallel to this practice, participant-observation took place at a range of club nights within the north of england. these events were characterised predominantly by psytrance and a crossgenre blend of acid techno, hard techno, hard trance and minimal techno. they included well-established nights such as riff raff, cabbage, planet zogg and sunrise, all of which have been running for more than 10 years. the demographic of these events largely reflects that longevity, with many attendees being into their 40s and beyond. many of these older psytrancers have families, careers and significant professional responsibilities but remain committed to the scene and its overarching ethic of mindfulness and creative communication. the djs, artists and crews driving this scene feed also into the alternative festival circuit with considerable cross-pollination of aesthetic tastes and ideology between events. the series of bespoke performances created between 2006 and 2009 are not the focus of the discussion here, although my argument is informed by those experiences and my participation in the events listed above.3 rather, it is the (sub)cultural formation and spatial dimensions of the context in which these occurrences took place that are under consideration. grounded in the discipline of performance studies, this article uses the lens of play to identify how the spatial characteristics of underground dance culture provide a fertile terrain for performative acts of collectivity and expression. resonating with previous edmc scholarship that invokes concepts of liminality (gauthier 2004, 2005; gerard 2004; malbon 1999; st john 2009a, 2009b, 2010; sylvan 2005) and the social dimensions of “spontaneous communitas” (olaveson 2004; rill 2006; tramacchi 2000), the physical and psychical dimensions of play as it manifests in the underground party scene will be considered. underground spaces will be positioned as sites that offer a context for individual and collective play that is expressed performatively. as an important marker of identity (bourdieu 1979) and as an active player in the formation of expressive identities (hetherington 1998), play space and how it is constructed, shaped and aestheticised for the purposes of the party will offer another perspective on the conceptual relevance of underground performativity. dancecult 4(1)88 the latent performativity of club culture has been a topic of scholarly debate since the emergence of rave culture in the late 1980s. buckland (2002) addresses the role club culture plays in the construction and expression of identity, particularly gender, and situates involvement in the scene as a form of queer world-making. jackson (2004) explores the social and sensual knowledge that arises out of clubbing. he examines the affective register of participation in a variety of different scenes and suggests ways in which these experiences spill over into the everyday to influence the structure of people’s lives even after the party is over. malbon (1999) looks at the expressive nature of club culture, the bodily and emotional experiences of going clubbing and how those experiences are produced. he is explicit in his reading of clubbing as a form of play. rooted in social geography and anthropology, he provides a deft summary of the various cultural definitions of play and how these map onto the club experience as well as providing insight into the experience of “flow” in this context (see malbon 1999: 136–49). my own perspective owes much to this rich and comprehensive scholarship but goes slightly further in making a direct link between participation in the underground scene and the spatial dimensions of play as a mode of behaviour and as an attitudinal stance. examining how socio-cultural attitudes to play are formulated and how they shift across generations and geographies (both political and environmental) gives insight into how dance culture (as a form of play) is embraced, sanctioned or marginalised by various groups of people, institutions or organisations who seek to minimise its potency or harness its potential. the cultural positioning of play (rather than the state of “flow” that might arise from it) and the ambivalence that often surrounds it, particularly when authorities seek to control or regulate it, is of concern here. to that end, my intention is to use the frame of play as a way of “reading” the underground dance experience but also to draw attention to the notion that playing in the underground has deep socio-cultural implications. it provides a space for and a potential pathway towards a way of “being in the world” that resists fixity, embraces possibilities and offers the promise of mutuality. the personal, social and educational benefits of engaging in play are well documented (gardner 1982; piaget 1951; sutton-smith 1997; vygotsky 1978; winnicott 1971). the instrumental value of play has become such an accepted paradigm in contemporary culture that the point hardly needs to be reiterated here. if we accept that the rave might be conceived as an adult playground, a space that gives license to certain types of playful behaviour and one which offers fun, excitement, social engagement and interaction, then we can assume that those participating in it must benefit from it in some way, however problematic that might be to demonstrate in concrete terms. rather than trying to measure the “success” of play in this context, i intend to offer an analysis of what i call the “playful arena of the underground” (o’grady 2009). without forgetting the importance of fun and sheer exuberance that infuses clubbing, i will examine how play can be deployed to fulfil functionalist imperatives. using jill dolan’s concept of “utopian performatives”, i will trace how theatrical notions of efficacy provide a framework for understanding “the fleeting intimations of a better world” (2005: 2) that run through the multi-perspectival narratives of underground dance culture and rave. 89o’grady | spaces of play play as a modus operandi has been used by artists and activists for decades, particularly since the “performative turn” of the 1960s (fischer-lichte 2008), and has likewise been mobilised by various underground collectives and sound systems for creative, aesthetic and political ends. the playful realm of the temporary autonomous zone, or taz (bey 2003), provides a space for transgressive radicalism. from this, there emerges a performative repertoire that is perhaps best characterised by the direct action movement in the uk of the early 1990s and has since developed into a recognised underground aesthetic that is global in its distribution. it is the transformative quality of play and how that has become embedded in the aesthetics of the underground that is of particular interest to performance practitioners like myself who are creating work that has co-presence, social engagement and embodied participation as its core ethic. when dealing with the possibility of performative transformation, one cannot bypass the work of victor turner, and in that respect this article follows the same trajectory. the explicit focus on play here orientates his work in a slightly different way. my attention is on his notion of subjunctivity, the “what if ?” of the liminal space that corresponds closely to the experiments of theatre director and playwright bertolt brecht (see mumford 2009), the brazilian performance practitioner augusto boal (see cohen-cruz and shutzman 2006) and other artists who have sought to use the fictive realm of the playworld as a means of questioning how the world might be conceived differently. by dwelling in the realm of the subjunctive, i will argue that play and performance in the underground provide a potential route towards creativity and social critique that can be individually experienced and collectively expressed, in turn lending it a potency that extends beyond the physical time and space of the party. the playful arena of the underground play is very hard to pin down or define. it is a mood, an activity, an eruption of liberty; sometimes it is rule-bound, sometimes very free. it is pervasive. it is something everyone does as well as watch others engage in—either formally . . . or casually. . . . play can subvert the powers-that-be, as in parody or carnival, or it can be cruel, absolute power (schechner 2006: 79). often couched in positive terms by educationalists, psychologists and sociologists, the function of play is usually linked to learning, development and socialisation (sutton-smith 1999) and as such is “useful” to us in a number of contexts. play infiltrates and infuses our lives to such an extent that it becomes implicated in all spheres of human activity, from the cultural to the spiritual, from the sacred to the profane (huizinga 1949). as such, it is pertinent to the analysis of edmcs, particularly those that have the ethos of spirituality, transformation and transcendence embedded within their aesthetic. as a device of the imagination, the play mood affords the pursuit of turnerian subjunctivity (1982). play revels in the “what if ?”, and by operating in this rhetorical mode it remains improvisatory, malleable and open to the processes of imagination. as well as dancecult 4(1)90 being inherently slippery as a term, play is also ambivalent in its application. play can be frivolous and useful, trivial and meaningful, progressive and regressive simultaneously. the same ambivalence is inherent in underground club culture. playing and raving can function simultaneously as escape from daily life and as confrontation of reality. play in the context of the underground party can often be light, theatrical, spectacular, fun and socially engaging. at the same time it can be dark, subversive, disturbing, disorientating and potentially fatal, particularly in relation to the risks associated with drug experimentation, sleep deprivation, heat exhaustion and so on. in this instance i have drawn polar extremes of light and dark, positive and negative characteristics that sit in apparent opposition to each other, but play does not sit comfortably in neat binaries such as these. like the “joker in the neuroanthropological pack” (turner 1983: 233), play slides between categories and has no difficulty adopting dual positions. for example, play can be both fun and dangerous simultaneously. indeed, the fun is often in the danger. within the underground dance scene, it could be argued, play is ultimately characterised by the co-presence and intertwining of light and dark. play recognises and revels in the inbetweenness of things. figure 1. festivalgoer in mud at shamania 2008. photo : ian m. palmer, madsnapper <http://www.madsnapperphotos.com>. http://www.madsnapperphotos.com 91o’grady | spaces of play figure 2. masked festivalgoers at shamania 2008. photo: ian m. palmer. whatever form play takes, my premise is that the underground club space functions, in part, as an adult playground where people are afforded the opportunity to engage in free, voluntary activity in spaces that are symbolically separated from the world of the everyday and marked out as “special”. in this subterranean environment, conventional codes of behaviour are more relaxed, binaries begin to collapse (for example, divisions between day and night, spectator and spectacle, reality and illusion) and participants are thus able to experiment with ideas, identities and (re)constructions of self in a characteristically supportive atmosphere (buckland 2002: 108). the “nowhere/nowhen” space of the underground party (reynolds 1999: 55) is a curiously floating context that is not necessarily rooted to the precise geographical location in which it takes place but can be inhabited as a place of transience and impermanence that, in turn, imbues it with a certain looseness and freedom. with such a strong visual identity, the psytrance party looks familiar wherever it finds its home. however, unlike augé’s concept of non-lieu where any emotional engagement with place is lost and individual identity swallowed up (1995: 48), the “nowhere/nowhen” space of the underground is often charged with emotion and memory. it can provoke intimate connections with place that are predicated more on the bodily co-presence of participants than they are on localised specificity. here, participants are able to imagine alternative ways dancecult 4(1)92 of being and doing and are able to develop the means by which those alternatives may be expressed and played out on the dance floor, in the warehouse or within the parameters of the festival. play provides the vehicle for this expression and gives rise to performative behaviour and performed outcomes that constitute a type of underground repertoire that is highly visual, exuberant and draws heavily on interdisciplinary modes such as community arts, installation, processional performance and carnival. commitment to play and performance can be seen most visibly at events such as glade, an underground electronic dance music festival that is held annually in the uk. the 2011 event that i attended, described as “a playground for grown up kids” (moore 2011), offered a number of opportunities for gaming, theatricality and participatory performance that augmented the playfulness of the festival space and encouraged people to experience the party through the mode of play. fancy dress was encouraged and a number of stalls were set up to facilitate this. there was walkabout performance, a micro-rave on a bicycle, handmade art vehicles, a mobile hula hoop stall and zorbing.4 one of the most popular attractions was the dance off saloon where contestants competed against each other in a boxing ring in various states of fancy dress whilst the compere whipped up the crowd and generally added to the atmosphere of comic mayhem.5 another opportunity for play was the rabbit hole, an alice in wonderland installation where participants (if they were lucky enough to discover it) were made to answer a riddle at the entrance and given a carrot in return. at this point they had to crawl on hands and knees through a tunnel lit by fairy lights before emerging into a secret underground club complete with an under-lit dance floor, dj booths, flamboyantly-dressed characters and a party in full swing but out of sight of the main festival. the attention paid to play and performance in this context undoubtedly plays a big part in the advertising of festival events as crews compete to secure ticket sales in an increasingly saturated market. however, there is significant bleed between relatively large-scale edm events such as glade and the smaller-scale underground party scene. participatory performance and play has become a recognisable feature of both, not only as part of the scheduled programme but also as a personal repertoire for individuals and groups that shape their own play as the party unfolds. in order to theorise more broadly from the specific examples given above, it is useful to think of these activities as being arranged along the continuum of play as suggested by roger caillois (2001: 13). in his model, the way people play can be situated between two opposite poles. at one extreme is paidia, a type of uncontrolled fantasy where free improvisation, turbulence, diversion and carefree gaiety are dominant. at the other end of the spectrum is ludus, characterised by more rule-bound activity that requires greater effort, patience, skill or ingenuity. ludus sits in contrast to the anarchic spirit of paidia. whilst one might assume that the playful arena of the underground subscribes more to the ethos of paidia, it is interesting to note that both categories are well represented and that playful activity associated with circus performance is a notable feature of many psytrance parties. in this context formal game-playing that has a spectacular or theatrical edge and requires some measure of skill and mastery from the player may include juggling, poi twirling, fire staff, hoop play, aerial work, 93o’grady | spaces of play figure 3. hoop play at shamania 2008. photo: ian m. palmer. walkabout performance or finely-rehearsed stage shows that all contribute to the highly visual terrain of the party. instances of play associated with improvisation, looseness, and freewheeling include more inclusive forms of social and ecstatic dancing, trance, the play of multiple social interactions and bey’s notion of “radical conviviality” (1994). other forms of play more associated with the theatrical world can be seen in participants’ use of dancecult 4(1)94 playful costuming, disguise and parody. on the psytrance scene in particular, fairies, angels, aliens, insects and other fantastical or other-worldly forms of dress are all fairly common and represent forms of display often associated with carnivalesque inversion and grotesque realism (bakhtin 1998). less visible but still noteworthy are the instances of what might be classed as “deep play” (or even dark play), where the stakes of the game are so high that one might question the rationale for participating in the first place (geertz 1973). in the underground, this might include experimentation and risk-taking along and across the edges of experience involving the use of psychedelics and other substances to achieve a sense of transportation and reconfiguring of self. it might also include playful experiments with sex, sexuality, gender and identity. to a certain extent, the space of the party offers a play zone that protects its players from the outside world. by adopting a party persona, individuals can achieve a degree of distance from self that affords them certain freedoms. the seemingly inert phrase, “i’m only playing”, is in fact invested with great potency and sanctions behaviour that would not otherwise be acceptable. whilst this stance can have positive outcomes in that it loosens the strictures that govern daily convention, it becomes more problematic when considered as a form of power play between individuals or groups, particularly if those relations are governed by distinctions of class, gender or race. whilst it is certainly possible to identify recurring instances of playful behaviour that span the spectrum of paidia to ludus and to detail moments of risky play that take on an altogether darker edge, what is more interesting to consider are the topological characteristics of the playing space and how that formulation of space is constructed, maintained and utilised by its occupants. in a similar way to the theatre space, the temple, the courtroom and other spaces imbued with the symbolic registers of play and ritual, the playful arena of the underground party is framed, hedged or separated from the world of the everyday in order to keep it “special”. the performance practitioner and director of interactive theatre garry izzo uses the greek word “temenos” to denote a sense of the sacred circle that wraps play and its players in order to keep it safe and separate from the routine world. he suggests this sacred circle can exist both in the physical world as well as in the mind of the players (1997: 9) lending it a psychical dimension as well as a material one. in the underground context, the sacred circle may manifest as a physical building but might also be strengthened by the physical positioning of the event (with parties often occurring in out-of-the-way places, disused or appropriated buildings or rural locations). this might also be achieved by temporal frameworks or through the use of devices such as tickets, wristbands, perimeter fences and security personnel (in the case of many festivals) to identify “insiders” and to exclude or keep at bay the “outside” or “outsiders” for the duration of play. needless to say, these practices of protection that maintain the playing space and keep it safe from interference can also involve the active exclusion of certain people or groups. this aspect is much heightened in the free party scene where issues of legality and license mean that only those “in the know” can access the space at all. regardless of what threshold devices are in place, as a floating space that exists in the minds and memories of the participants long after the event has finished, the playful 95o’grady | spaces of play arena is porous. what is felt and experienced within the event cannot be “unfelt” and thus transforms its participants as they take their experience with them back into their daily lives. this notion of porosity is echoed by st john who suggests that, as a lived utopia, the vibe of the underground dance space always holds the potential to exceed its borders (2009a: 121). the sacred circle may be bounded by time (the length of the party) and space (its physical location), but what is experienced within its parameters bleeds into quotidian existence. as spaces of play, experimentation, and imagination playful arenas provide an opportunity to consider the “what if ?” of existence. underground events therefore can be conceived as “festal interzones” or “experimental theatres of change” (st john 2009a: 147) where processes of transformation, however small, may be put into train using play as its engine. underground play, efficacy and utopian performatives like the concept of play, the notion of performativity is often associated with function, efficacy and transformation (see fischer-lichte 2008). as play in the underground context gives rise to opportunities for performative behaviour and, indeed, more structured devised acts of performance, the two concepts are intimately intertwined. it has previously been established that participation in clubbing can be seen as a performative act (buckland 2002; malbon 1999; muñoz 2006; o’grady 2009). however, the spatial, structural and attitudinal qualities of play that help to achieve this have largely been unexplored. the modelling of the playful arena attempts to address this and allows us to draw parallels across the distinct but complementary territories of performance studies and edmc scholarship. in the austinian sense of the word, performative utterances perform actions; they bring forth an altered social reality (austin 1963). put simply, speech acts and bodily acts of performativity change things. the extent of this or its potential impact is clearly much harder to pin down. clubbing and playing are two experiential, embodied modes of activity that are open to deeply personal intersubjectivities and are inherently ephemeral and resistant to capture, making any attempt to measure efficacy or transformation fraught with difficulty. despite this, it is possible to identify structural similarities in the way the two activities are framed and function in temporary communities that prioritise co-presence, participation and radical conviviality that, in turn, allow for the possibility of transformation to occur. perhaps the most well-documented example of this that has an explicit link to political transformation is the series of events that took place during the free party/protest movement of the 1990s in the uk. here, activists sought to combine their desire to dance with an ideology to win back space in the form of large-scale road protests and ecological demonstrations, for example those organised by reclaim the streets, rinky dink and the exodus collective.6 the latent performativity of these protests took the form of “ephemeral festivals of resistance” (mckay 1998: 139), were expressed as “participatory ritual theatre” ( jordan 1998: 141) and were broadcast widely on national television.7 activists in this instance deployed music, dance and visual art as well as physical acts of endurance and hardship to help articulate explicit political aims. occupying contested spaces that sat literally between existence and destruction (in the case of claremont road in london dancecult 4(1)96 during the 1994 protests against the development of the m11 link road), protestors created a liminal aesthetics that used sculpture, banners, visual art, puppets, stilt walkers and bassheavy techno music to underscore its point. whilst these moments of performative resistance did not ultimately achieve comprehensive political u-turns, occupying a radical space of play did allow protestors, and the rest of the world seeing scenes unfold on television, to enact and embody the question “what if ?”, albeit for a limited period of time. whilst the example above sought to achieve political transformation on a relatively large scale, the performance academic jill dolan’s concept of “utopian performatives” is particularly useful here in helping to identify the smaller instances of personal shift that might be experienced through underground play. adopting her perspective, the utopian narratives and the quest for plur that continue to infuse the underground can be understood as ongoing processes, modes of behaviour, rather than a singular project that is ultimately doomed to failure.8 dolan argues that live performance provides a place where people come together to share experiences of meaning making and imagination that can grasp towards the realisation of a better world (2005: 2). with an investment of energy in a better future, audiences feel allied with each other and connected to a wider public where social discourse articulates the possible rather than dwelling on perceived obstacles. in her modelling, “utopian performatives” are small but profound moments where performance calls the attention of the audience and lifts everyone slightly above the present. they provide an insight into what our lives would be like if every moment was “as emotionally voluminous, generous, aesthetically striking, and intersubjectively intense” (dolan 2005: 5), sensations that clearly resonate with experiences on the dance floor. these theatrical moments are described as being akin to “a fleeting epiphany” (dolan 2005: 5). they can be likened to that moment of optimal experience in the rave that st john calls “the vibe” (2009a: 94) and which comes close to turner’s concept of “spontaneous communitas”, a state that offers a “direct, immediate and total confrontation of human identities” (1982: 47). achieving “the vibe” and experiencing the “flash of lucid mutual understanding” (turner 1982: 48) is one of the key components of what i call “clubbing communitas” (o’grady 2009) or what others have called “psychedelic communitas” (tramacchi 2001: 184) or “hallucinatory communitas” (schmidt 2009: 138). dolan herself uses the term “communitas” to describe the moment at which “spectators’ individuality becomes finely attuned to those around them, and a cohesive if fleeting feeling of belonging to the group bathes the audience” (2005: 11), another sentiment that finds its parallel in testimonies from the underground as detailed by malbon (1999). the strong sense of belonging and identification with others is facilitated by the presence of the sacred circle of the playful arena where play, ritual and imagination collide and can be allowed to flourish for a period of time. the space allows participants to try out and embody alternative ways of being in the world. it allows temporary communities to come together to envisage and practice versions of a better world. in this sense, the utopian enterprise is an action or a process rather than a fixed point in space and time that is either reached or not. as dolan points out, although many commentators conceive utopia as a destination, performance (and, i 97o’grady | spaces of play would argue, play) allows us to see utopia as a process of spending time (2005: 13) that integrates social, political and aesthetic concerns. the playful arena of the club space is not merely a protected environment where what might be perceived as sheer childishness and latent hedonism reign for a pre-determined length of time (although, conversely, it can be that too and is not without its own rewards). with this in mind the underground party can be repositioned as a space where spending time on playful pursuits may be read as the exploration of potentiality and possibility that then, due to its porosity, infiltrates and influences the shape of daily life. the liminal paradigm, subjunctivity and rehearsal whilst acknowledging the limitations of what has become known as “the liminal norm” (mckenzie 2001: 49–53) and being wary of applying an unmodified application of turnerian theory (st john 2010: 225), the concept is still useful in this context. the inbetweenness it represents is exemplified by the spatial-temporal characteristics of the underground party as well as the (sub)cultural position it adopts, resting as it does at times in the grey margins of legality, license and sometimes “black market” economies. as turner states: i sometimes talk about the liminal phase being dominantly in the “subjunctive mood” of culture, the mood of maybe, might be, as if, hypothesis, fantasy, conjecture, desire— depending on which of the trinity of cognition, affect and connation is situationally dominant. . . . liminality can perhaps be described as a fructile chaos, a storehouse of possibilities, not a random assemblage but a striving after new forms and structures (turner 1986: 42). here, turner talks of the liminal phase as being in the subjunctive mood of culture. it operates as a separate slice of existence that allows individuals to inhabit the realm of “what might be” for a limited period of time. the underground party can indeed be understood in this way, as it offers a temporary space of fun, fantasy and escape that in itself is restorative, energising and palliative. however, in my formulation rave not only revels in subjunctivity as a parallel to, or flight from, dominant culture. rather, it provides a type of training ground, or rehearsal space, for developing a particular way of thinking about the culture and our place within it. like the fictive world of the stage or the realm of fantasy associated with child’s play, the underground space operates in a permanent state of maybe and thus can operate as a tool for questioning the way things are or seem to be. over time it becomes a familiar place to inhabit. it offers both the comfort of familiarity and the promise of alterity simultaneously. this “storehouse of possibilities” is a space for imagination, reconfiguration and playful experimentation. as such, it offers the opportunity for a type of proxemic pedagogy, in other words a development that is based on the inhabitation of a certain type of psychical space that offers the potential for personal and collective expansion. as st john (2009a: 147) argues, rather than offering any kind of “passage” or “transit” to a postliminal state, many edm events offer instead access to a “liminal culture” where tactical dramas may be enacted that are expositional, reclamational, and pedagogical in nature. dancecult 4(1)98 rather than functioning as a ritual stage of transition where initiands move from one social status to another, the liminal culture of psytrance offers an in-between space of permanent impermanence (st john 2010: 228) which one can revisit and inhabit at will as a diversion, a pastime or a socio-cultural tactic that might have “real world” applications. figure 4. costumed dancer at shamania 2008. photo: ian m. palmer. 99o’grady | spaces of play figure 5. the psytrance dance floor at sunrise, leeds 2010. photo: ian m. palmer. the subjunctive mood of psytrance is expressed most visibly in terms of its aesthetic. stemming from the goan trance scene of the late 1980s and mutating over the past three decades, the liminal culture of psytrance has developed its own visual identity, largely borrowed from hippie psychedelia and eastern mysticism, making its spaces of play instantly recognisable to fellow “psychonauts” across the globe. in performance studies discourse, dancecult 4(1)100 susan broadhurst suggests that a key trait of liminality is the centrality of non-linguistic modes of signification such as the visual, the kinetic, the gravitational, the proxemic and the aural (1999: 12–13). at the psytrance party, environmental elements such as tranceinducing music, spatial organisation, elaborate uv decoration and disorienting light shows are clear examples of non-linguistic signification and add to the sense of “disruption, immediacy and excess” (broadhurst 1999: 13) that is characteristic of the “core psytrance aesthetic” (lindop 2009: 115) and of liminality itself. this is the scenography of the playful arena and provides the backdrop for the kind of embodied play participants may engage in. psytrance parties and festivals are well known for their attention to detail, and considerable time and effort goes into decorating the physical environment as a means of emphasising “other-worldliness” and imagination.9 as davis suggests, the festival is “an incubator of novelty. a petri dish of possibility where the future forms of community and consciousness are explored” (2008: 50). these spaces of play provide opportunities for individual and collective experimentation and give rise to the co-construction of new meaning, an activity that is normally the preserve of the artist. st john situates the psytrance festival as a “visionary arts festival” because of its heritage and structural affiliation to carnival and ceremony (2009b). for him, the psytrance festival “facilitates the performance of risk and discipline, accommodates the outlaw and the in-lore, is a stage for poetics and politics” (st john 2010: 242). as such, it occupies a significant cultural position in terms of its potential function for staging “dramaturgy of the margins” (mullaney 1991: 22). collective protests of the early 1990s, such as the ones discussed earlier, placed marginal dramaturgy right in the heart of england’s capital city and represented a close approximation of hakim bey’s vision of the temporary autonomous zone (taz), which seeks to move people beyond what he calls the “cartography of control” (2003: 103). for van veen (2002), the taz can be read as a pragmatic and psychotopological crack or liminal space, the likes of which have been investigated and made manifest by sound systems and art collectives such as spiral tribe, <st> and the klf. it is in these liminal “cracks” that experimental performance occurs, not only within the underground context but in other domains where liminality sets in train a “blurring of set boundaries” (broadhurst 1999: 13) and a questioning of “accepted ideas and belief systems” (broadhurst 1999: 59). if we read the underground club space as providing the spatial and temporary frame for liminal cracks to be occupied, then it becomes a significant site of alterity, a possible “seedbed of cultural creativity” (turner 1982: 28) where normative structures are suspended and experimentation can flourish. this seam of alterity and resistance has a rather more complex relationship with dominant discourse and social norms now that the lines between play and work, sacred and profane, virtual and real are less fixed and more open to (re)negotiation and mediation. the liminal space of the taz does not function as a clearly demarcated zone of transgression that returns people to regular, dominant social practices, as in the small-scale communities of turner’s original modelling. relinquished from functioning solely as a “rite of passage” (see van gennep 1960), the liminal play space of the rave exists 101o’grady | spaces of play as an “elective place” (hetherington 1998: 106) in which performative acts of imagination can be executed and new identities formed that then infuse and shape daily life. in other words, “the tribal carnival holds a unique intention—as the clearing house for a movement which seeks to export its liminality into the everyday” (st john 2009b: 51). borrowing terminology from performance studies, this clearing house may also be conceived as a laboratory studio for the “rehearsal for reality” ( jackson in boal 1992: xxi) where what has been felt, experienced and tried out in the safety of the play zone might inform and shape how we act and take action in the world of the everyday. conclusion whilst play is invoked in this article as a frame through which to view certain activities associated with underground club culture, my intention has been to draw together strands of common interest and concern across edmc scholarship and performance studies in order to clarify the role of subjunctivity and the dynamic possibilities represented by play in this context. to this end i have suggested how play can be deployed to fulfil functionalist imperatives and how it can be mobilised for transgressive radicalism and provide a route towards expressivity that can be both individually and collectively embodied. the intention of this article has been to position the club space as a site of play and to highlight some of the dichotomies of that positioning. the dualities inherent in theorising about play are mirrored in the contradictions surrounding the clubbing experience. this article has not attempted to resolve those tensions, but instead brings into focus the multi-perspectival approach required when considering the club space as a potential seedbed where new models, symbols and paradigms may emerge (turner 1982: 28). the taz of the underground party is an “imaginal geography” (st john 2003: 74) that subscribes to a “horizontality of participation” (gaillot 1999: 60). it offers a rhizomatic networked structure that promises access to a more creative world by basking “in multiplicities, lines of flight and becomings” (de ledesma 2010: 90). as st john demonstrates, “as a contemporary site of belonging and identification, the dance club, party or festival is legion” (2009b: 40) and it is perhaps its “eventness” that lies at the heart of this and ties it so intimately to the world of play and performance where bodily copresence is paramount. the event is the locus of a play between identity and identification. as hetherington suggests, these groupings and identity positions offer a distinct “structure of feeling” (1998: 16) where support, friendship, solidarity and community are established through the significance of “the occasion” (see schmitt 1986). by providing a context for the performance of self and a presentation of persona that exceeds that of the routine self, individuals are given the license to embrace the “freaky self ” (st john 2009b: 47) or, in my model, the “ludic self ”. where gaillot positions the community of the techno-rave as a “laboratory of the present” (1999: 23–24) that offers a mode of being together that celebrates the sensation of “now-ness” (st john 2009a: 95), we might also understand it as a playground of the present. dancecult 4(1)102 to experience play, or indeed “the vibe”, fully, you cannot be located outside of it. you have to participate in it rather than observe it from a distance. the experience of it is located within the rhythmic body and is a result of the confluence of four core components—time, space, people and technologies. constructing a space for pure play and maintaining the play state for prolonged periods might represent tactics of keeping the world of the everyday at bay, a childlike escape into the nowhere/nowhen land of utopia (reynolds 1999). however, it might also be a reprioritisation and reclamation of the play state that mirrors a poetics of the threshold. artists play in the limen in order to imagine alternative modes of being and doing, to make new meanings and to find expressive forms to articulate it. by playing collectively in the margins of meaning and by embracing liminal aesthetics as a lingua franca, participants recognise each other and find a communality that can transcend age, nationality and language. they find mutuality and play together as a rehearsal for reality. not only do players learn about themselves, their own capacities and those of fellow players. by residing within the subjunctive mood, there also exists the potential to ask perhaps the most potent political question of all—“what if we did things differently?” acknowledgements many thanks to all the festival organisers, sound systems, djs and party people who have engaged so generously with my research over the past five years and continue to do so. thanks also to colleagues from the school of performance and cultural industries for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this work and to ian m. palmer of madsnapper photos for generously supplying images of shamania 2008. notes 1 for the purposes of this article, i will be referring to the broad category of “underground club culture”. whilst acknowledging the huge variations in what might be understood as ‘underground’, here i mean those events that are characterised predominantly by techno and psytrance music and that owe their heritage to the rave movement of the late 1980s and 1990s. similarly, although i use the term “club” throughout the article, i use this term to denote events that may take place in outdoor locations as well as indoor venues. indeed, much of my research refers to the context of the psytrance festival and to the free party scene that still exists in parts of the uk. the word “club” denotes the type of gathering rather than the physical architecture of a nightclub. 2 …floorspace… is an ensemble company created and developed by alice o’grady for the purposes of conducting practice-based research into interactive performance at festivals and underground clubs. performers in the company were initially drawn from the undergraduate cohort at the university of leeds and, after the initial period of research at shamania, went on to perform and conduct research at other uk festivals including kendal calling, nozstock, magic loungeabout and beatherder. 3 detailed description and analysis of the …floorspace… performances can be found in o’grady (2009). 103o’grady | spaces of play 4 zorbing is a recreation activity where plastic, inflatable spheres that are big enough to hold people are rolled downhill on a gentle slope. orbs are approximately three metres in diameter and can hold up to three people. they can also be used on a level surface, as was the case at glade 2011. 5 images of the dance off saloon at glade 2011 can be seen at <http://thedanceoffcrew.tumblr. com/> (goroboto 2010). 6 see mckay (1998) for a full discussion. 7 footage of the reclaim the streets protest that took place in london in 1994 can be seen on “spiral tribe reclaim the streets 1994 uk cjb protest” (2009). a channel one news report on the 1994 road protest against the m11 link and the clearance of claremont road is available as “c1 claremont rd pt1” (2009). two reporters from channel one, a local tv cable station for london, were the only broadcasters allowed to remain behind the defences of what had become known as “leytonstonia” once the police had cleared all other journalists off the site before the arrival of the bailiffs. a comprehensive documentary detailing police intervention in the exodus collective’s activities in the early 1990s can be seen at “exodus from babylon part1” (2008). 8 plur stands for peace love unity respect and is an adage associated with the principles of the rave scene during the late 1980s and into the 1990s. 9 sunrise, the uk’s longest-running psytrance event that takes place at the west indian centre in leeds, is noted for this aspect in particular. a recent review of sunrise by agnes klos (2011) for harderfaster features a description of the décor. references augé, mark. 1995. non-places: introduction to 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york: routledge. schmidt, joshua i. 2009. “(en)countering the beat: paradox in israeli psytrance”. in the local scenes and global culture of psytrance, ed. graham st john, 131–48. london and new york: routledge. schmitt, carl. 1986. political theology. cambridge, mass.: mit press. st john, graham. 2003. “post-rave technotribalism and the carnival of protest”. in the postsubcultures reader, ed. david muggleton and rupert weinzierl, 65–82. london: berg. ———. 2004. “the difference engine: liberation and the rave imaginary”. in rave culture and religion, ed. graham st john, 19–45. london: routledge. ———. 2009a. technomad: global raving countercultures. london: equinox. ———. 2009b. “neotrance and the psychedelic festival”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(1): 35–64. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.03> (accessed 23 november 2011). ———. 2010. “liminal culture and global movement: the transitional world of psytrance”. in the local scenes and global 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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stdkshyhvem http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0-wew3r48a http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0-wew3r48a http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peytmbi1ieu http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peytmbi1ieu why music matters david hesmondhalgh malden: wiley-blackwell, 2013. isbn: 978-1-4051-9242-2 (hardcover), 978-1-4051-9241-5 (paperback), 978-1-118-53581-3 (e-book) rrp: us$ 87.95 (hardcover), us$32.95 (paperback), us$26.99 (e-book) kat nelligan university of melbourne (australia) i don’t often find myself needing to justify the social value of popular music. those in my social circle include popular music scholars, songwriters, musicians and gig-goers. the idea that music plays an important role in both individual and collective social life is a commonly held belief amongst my peers. sometimes, though, i am reminded that many question music’s role and value in society, as this comment which recently appeared in my newsfeed on facebook indicates: “uni students who study music or arts need to stop sucking on the taxpayer’s teat and start contributing to society – if you want to be an artist, fund it yourself”. this comment encapsulates an attitude that does not value music or the arts in everyday life. it is a stark reminder that conservative economic values continue to shape current debates around popular music and its importance in society, despite rhetoric that promotes the cultural economy and the value of the creative industries. the social value of music at the level of both individuals and communities is the central theme of david hesmondhalgh’s why music matters, and he explores this theme by “offering a critical defense of music” (3). hesmondhalgh poses the question: “why on earth, you might ask, does music need defending?” (3); the example described above of my own experience provides a justification. the use of the term “critical” is significant here as it signals the way in which hesmondhalgh engages with the ambivalences of music’s role in everyday life and society. while he celebrates music and its social value, discussing at length how music “has the potential to enrich people’s lives, and enrich societies” (1), the arguments he presents also take into account how music is not free of social forces and social inequalities. his book is therefore not a utopian celebration of music in everyday life, but a critical discussion about the way in which music’s role in society is both liberating and limiting at the level of both individuals and communities. hesmondhalgh’s primary objective—to conduct an exploration into the social value of music—is considered throughout the book via “two contrasting yet complementary” ideas: “that music often feels intensely and emotionally linked to the private self” (1), and “that music is often the basis of collective, public experience” (1–2). chapter one introduces these ideas and explains why a “critical defense of music” is necessary in today’s cultural climate. chapter two focuses on music’s affective capabilities—“emotions, feelings, and moods” (11)—and discusses how, at the level of the individual, it enriches people’s lives by contributing to “human flourishing”, a concept that hesmondhalgh defines as “living a good life” (17). that popular music resonates emotionally with individuals is his primary point here. he looks to 1970s disco, more specifically candi staton’s “young hearts run free”, to examine the way in which music encourages individuals to explore their own emotions and connect with their inner selves. this is followed by a discussion of how dance music enriches people’s lives through the bodily experience of dancing. dancing, he argues, is a form of self-expression, a way of losing oneself and of achieving “flow” (31). he goes on, however, to discuss the limitations of music’s relationship with the self, arguing that music’s role in self-cultivation and individual identity encourages “competitive individualism” and provides the basis for “status battles” within society (50). he shows how music can be harnessed to perpetuate middle-class snobbery and social exclusion, and he substantiates this claim by drawing on interview material. chapter three provides a historical and chronological account of popular music, from the post-wwii era to twenty-first century pop. hesmondhalgh explores popular music’s capacity “for enhancing human experiences of love and sex” (58). he traces music’s changing relations to sex and sexuality, discussing themes of love and emotion in post-wwii pop music; notions of sexual freedom and the sexual politics of countercultural rock music; sex and love in relation to dance music and the dance floor; punk music’s rejection of romantic love and its embracing of gay politics; alternative rock’s hyper masculinity; and the sexual explicitness and racialised sexualities of twenty-first century pop and hip-hop. while hesmondhalgh’s overview of popular music’s relations to sex and sexuality is extensive and informative, his arguments in this chapter are brief, leaving much unsaid about the nuances of such a broad and complex topic. for example, he makes fleeting references to early dance genres, such as disco, house and hi-energy, commenting on the “hedonistic sexuality of queer dance spaces” (68), but his comments are brief, limiting his examples to frankie knuckles’ “baby wants to ride” (68) and the o’jays’ “love train” (69). he does not mention the detroit techno scene or the british acid house scene, both of which would have further illustrated his point. he also defends the sexual explicitness of shakira’s “she wolf” music video by arguing that her dance moves are more aligned with “acrobatic dancing” than erotic porn, and so he finds it difficult to view the video as female objectification. however, the video still portrays women in a hypersexualised manner, and what hesmondhalgh does not consider here is the way in which such videos perpetuate a white ideal of feminine beauty and sexuality, a point that is further complicated, in this particular example, by shakira’s transnational identity. chapters four and five focus on notions of collectivity and community to consider how, through music, we might “flourish together” (84, original italics) (an extension of the concept of “human flourishing” explored in chapter two). for hesmondhalgh, the benefits and problems of collective “flourishing” manifest in “sociable publicness”, which refers to gatherings of strangers who share the same experience, for example at festivals, dance clubs, concerts or sporting competitions. hesmondhalgh further divides this into “co-present” and “mediated” forms (86). in chapter four, he discusses music’s relationship with “co-present sociable publicness”, exploring music’s capacity to enhance feelings of solidarity and collectivity through musical participation, more specifically when people “sing together, dance together, and play music together” (8). here he discusses how public dancing gives rise to positive feelings of community and commonality. he refers specifically to electronic dance music and rave culture, arguing that people gain pleasure from the collective feelings of unity that arise on the dance floor. in chapter five, hesmondhalgh focuses on “mediated commonality” and “deliberative publicness” whilst addressing the question of “how might musical experience bring people together across different communities, groupings, and places?” (130). he discusses music and the value of aesthetic experience from a philosophical and sociological perspective, surveying and critiquing the work of immanuel kant, pierre bourdieu, jacques rancisre, nicholas garnham and simon frith. this provides a context for his own line of inquiry, which considers how “might music enhance human life by transcending or containing social difference” (130). he investigates music’s ability to articulate various feelings and emotions, and attempts to show how music can provide some insight into the social world of others, or rather, how music can be “used to envisage what it is like to be other people, even though they are different” (137). at the same time, however, he notes the limitations of this idea, pointing out that aesthetic experience and discourse still have the capacity to reinforce social divisions. the idea of music as a “life-affirming commonality” is also considered (166). here, hesmondhalgh focuses on music and politics, subcultures and shared music tastes, and music’s relationship to nationalism and cosmopolitanism. he looks to the music of afghanistan, latin america and turkey to show how music can be viewed as a “valuable binding force across social difference” (171); however, he also acknowledges and discusses in detail the extent to which music and national identity is a complex and troubling issue. why music matters is an important contribution to sociology and music, but it also delves into philosophy, anthropology, musicology, ethnomusicology, psychology, political theory and music history. hesmondhalgh’s critiques of these research areas are particularly informative and useful. the book’s core theme—the social value of music—is a provocative topic that evokes contrasting yet complementary ideas, an ambivalence which hesmondhalgh handles with grace and dexterity. as he demonstrates throughout the book, music does have the capacity to enrich people’s lives, to encourage and nurture sociability, and to evoke commonality, but it also simultaneously exploits and divides individuals, and it reinforces social inequalities. why music matters is, nevertheless, a comforting reminder “of why freedom, solidarity, and love matter” (171). indeed, it reminds us that music plays an important and valuable role in the lives of individuals and in society, and it shows us why music will continue to matter, despite ongoing conservative views that attempt to devalue it. how to cure a gabba riccardo balli independent researcher (italy) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.02.12 the following is a chapter translation from my book apocalypso disco: la rave-o-luzione della post techno (published in italian in 2013 by agenzia x), a collection of non-fiction, “literary remix”, fiction and interviews featuring key post-rave scenes: from break-core, to speed-core, to mash-up, to mutant dance floor, to psytrance, to 8 bit and to, of course, gabba, as you can read below. figure 1. cover of apocalypso disco: la rave-o-luzione della post techno by riccardo balli. such crude exhibitionism, machismo and warmongering spirit is, at the end of the day, absolutely consistent with the tender affection of the bear: the more ferocious it appears on the outside, the more sweet and squishy it is on the inside (at least in relation to the other members of the thunderdome gang). this is actually the root of the term gabber (pronounced gabba), which comes from the dutch slang equivalent for “mate”, “geezer” or even better, “oaf”—a big friendly giant who’s a little bit stupid. on the subject of stupidity, i believe that idiocy for its own sake is the cornerstone of every subculture, since idiocy creates a rupture within the dominant culture. all of those rituals typically performed amongst people who belong, ideologically, to a certain scene or subculture employ an element of tribal stupidity (the punk moshpit, the hardcore stagedive, the metal headbang, to name a few). but at the same time these rituals represent fantastic, revolutionary possibilities. gabber, with its international hakken dance and the specifically italian phenomenon of the hardcore warrior human pyramid, has granted humanity with some of the most distinctive and exceptional idiots that any counterculture can recall. figure 2. gabber pyramid. photo credit: number one (2014). the hardcore warriors are a stylistic variation (still dancing to 180bpm!) that emerged exclusively in italy, distinguished by crazy coloured mohawks instead of shaven heads, by cyber apparel such as studded collars, fluorescent leggings, flashy tight tank-tops and face painting, colliding, even physically, with the gabba mother-culture. the human pyramid is specifically their ritual. it started at the end of the night in sala 2, a room originally dedicated to metal, at number one, a club in cortefranca (brescia). after the locals had converted to techno, the heavy-metal moshpit continued and by 2000 the ritual had transformed into a human tangle in which hardcore warriors clambered on top of each other to construct a monolith: the first to climb to the top of the pyramid and touch the ceiling was crowned emperor of the gabba kingdom. the gabber dance, called “hakken”, is characterized by a series of rapid movements and jittery leg kicks to the pulse of the speakers, which could reach up to speeds of 190bpm. the origin of this dance is unknown. possibly, it is a distorted version of the dancing performed in the prodigy’s out of space, whilst the name might come from the slogan “hakkûh!”, coined by one of the pioneers of the genre, dark raver. in this dance, the moves hit every beat in quick succession, without cease; arms and hips are less important and respond to other musical elements. hardly anything has been written, said or debated about gabber, especially in italy. however, in holland, the birthplace of this phenomenon, they even have a weekly radio show dedicated to it called hakkuuuh!?! on the network tmf, the dutch version of mtv. yet outside of the netherlands gabba has been snubbed for its superficiality and machismo. these latter, undoubtedly, essential components of this nihilistic subcultural movement which has no ideological vision other than londsale sweatshirts, australian tracksuits, nike classics and extreme facial piercings. but let’s be clear: the gabber look is truly beyond fashion, not because it is beautiful or ugly, but because it shows a synthetic posthuman aesthetic that looks even more extreme on women. in fact, watching a cute teenage girl with a platinum-blonde spiky fringe, fluorescent yellow zip-up bsa hoodie, furry woolen legwarmers on her ankles and purple buffalos, goosestepping a nazi salute at 200bpm on the dancefloor is undoubtedly weird. but this has little to do with politics, at least in the traditional sense. fascism, if exposed (and this is not something you can take for granted, as someone might think when talking about hardcore techno), is exemplified by dance moves and behavior in the same way in which a new piercing between the eyeballs is exhibited. what remains is an immense ignorance (and this is where the subject becomes political) as a result of post-industrial alienation which reveals, especially during their spare time, aspects of total phallocentric control by the market. radical hedonistic apathy and a no-future mindset encapsulate the movement, meaning that there’s a real risk that someone might kick the bucket during global hardcore nation from too much reckless pill-taking. the first wave of gabber rose from the ashes of hard house, in the early nineties, in rotterdam, around den hag and partially in amsterdam, from a sound inspired by hedonistic elements, distinguished by a 4/4 tempo at 140bpm with melodic contrapuntal synth-leads accompanied by soul vocal samples, in which their only purpose was to find the most effective form of entertainment. such simplicity was certainly one of the seeds planted by the nazis to let their ideology take root, as wilhelm reich observed highlighting elementarity as one of its main features: “speeches in national socialist meetings were indeed characterized by very clever manipulations of the emotions of the mass individuals and by strict avoidance of objective argumentation” (1946: 28). similarly, the gabba of neophyte or paul elstak is churned out for the superficial hedonism of the dutch crowds of the 80s and 90s, a mecca of illegality (prostitution, free drugs, etc.) and, of course, avoids any kind of complex or experimental sonic reasoning. sticking with this comparison, the indissoluble bond between blood and the dance floor is the indispensable precondition for the life of the gabber nation. 4/4 at 180bpm is an inalienable hereditary right of the thunderdome rural lineage. and we could continue down this road of dystopian analogy, but this will leave us with nothing more than the intellectual pleasure of hyperbolic comparison, an exaggerated provocation for its own sake—just like the warmongering and xenophobic posturing of the gabbers. pointless to pigeonhole them with something other than a generic youthful deviance fueled by the ignorance and apathy of a eurotechnocentric banlieue. at the end of the day, some seminal producers of the genre are black, like the previously mentioned dark raver, not to mention the english loftgroover. sticking to the realm of speedcore, there is also a german historical project active from 1993 called anc (anti nazi core) and the techno hardcore label, mokum, famous for the slogan: hardcore united against racism and fascism. figure 3. hardcore united, from mokum 12” sleeve. photo credit: mokum (1997). the list could go on, but i think it’s enough to dispel the stereotype. certainly there are some militant neo-fascists. but who knows the self-declared dutch national socialist panzerfaust? has anyone heard the spineless anthems white revolution 2009/whitecore 2009, radical islam plague of the world or aryan techno, in which the usual bumbum beat is cut with vintage recordings of nazi hierarchs? originality is not the driving force even in ah ah ah de antifa or in his vindictive comeback gabber united against antifa. this is music of staggering banality, not known in the gabba scene. returning to our history, gabber, springing from the hedonistic sound of the phallocentric market, has since faced, particularly in the city of rotterdam with producers like speriminator and euromasters, a process of lumpenproletarianization, much like oi! in the punk scene. eliminate the melodic synth lines and certain hardcore vocalisms and you’re left with frenetic beats at 190bpm, recalling the alienating repetition of the machines on an assembly line. according to the australian label-owner mark newlands from the legendary bloody fist records: “in newcastle most of the people involved there are related to someone who works in industry or something like that, maybe that a subconscious effect on their material” (datacide magazine 1997). techno hardcore, topped up with urban noise, industrial sounds and dark atmospherics, also carves out a sonic profile of revolutionary agitprop, becoming a soundtrack for the most deviant underclasses of europe and australia. but beware: if the accusations of nazism make little sense, the same applies to possible militant components of the sound. a gabber mohawk, spiked or dyed, will never be comparable to a traditional punk mohawk: the gabba mohawk is in fact nothing more than a gadget, like a fred perry shirt. they have no ideological connotations. in a tragically indifferent sense it is simply a decoration, full stop. if i had referred earlier to how weird it is to see a little 17 year old gabber chick working on her hakken dance, it is no less frustrating to see an attribute of a member of another subculture, like the mohawk of a hardcore warrior, cracking out the thunderdome dance at high velocity, without pause, kicking every beat! figure 4. hardcore warrior. photo credit: number one (2014). this is pure gabba-emptied-of-content, under the banner of a hedonism for sale at the merch-stall at a mega rave. in this sense, the contribution of labels like hangar liquides records and praxis records or artists like ilsa gold and laurent ho should be considered as an experimental virus in the vast sea of techno hardcore, a more engagé incarnation of the genre. i realize that i am leading into types of music, such as speedcore, fleshcore and extratone, which have developed identities of their own. let’s return instead to gabber and its nihilists, stubborn followers and social deviants who should not be ghettoized or labeled with any ideological definition, but critically discussed and reterritorialized from the inside. i have played at gabber/industrial events (the boundary between the two is often blurred in italy) in which my hyperkinetic breaks and distorted frequencies were enthusiastically welcomed by the shaven heads with wild moshpits or complements like: “nice one mate, tuuuuuuunnnne!” such pure ignorance has much subversive potential. maybe it's a matter of adapting it to the right channel. if dancing by the decks there's a 4/4 “duce” freaking out to speedcore beats, instead of following antifa orthodoxy and smashing his head by default, another revolutionary strategy can be considered: find an extreme music connection with him in order to subvert his mind. the alleged gabber-fascism in italy is, in fact, a chauvinistic behaviour disorder, a symptom of gang ignorance and late-capitalist alienation. it can be treated as a psychopathology on the dance floor. help them redirect their transgressive energy into the right channel, look them in the eye, as close as their eyebrow piercings, and whisper into their ears words that might reawaken their critical faculties. our task is to develop paradoxical rhythmic strategies of music therapy that will puncture their arrogant security, as well as free the gabba imaginary from the prisons of lonsdale, australian etc. in reality, i am not sure if such a cure is possible on such a grand scale, allopathically confronting melodic synth-lines with postindustrial distortion or hardhouse vocal samples with samples from extreme films and so on. the “audio cure” can only be divisive, contagious and homeopathic. divisive: the physician should actually experiment with his curative models of behaviour on himself first. he should not enter into an oppositional game. in practice this means completely absorbing himself into the gabber sonic universe, getting through the complete discography of marc acardipane aka pcp from frankfurt, through to the uk hardcore of the deathchant rec. rooster, the happy hardcore of scooter, distinguished by his lyrics that are beyond insanity, and the japanese gabber by dj sharpnel, in order to decode the audio dynamics of the thunderdome brain. contagious in the sense of being able to modify other cells through imitation and not imposition. transferring this to music would mean implanting the virus through listening to a variety of extreme genres from speedcore to breakcore, in order to propagate the infection within the gabba organism. break it up the beat has to be as broken up as much as possible: we must create an alchemy of rhythm and a backbeat that favors hyperkinetic, multidirectional movements. developing this paradoxical motor technique will make it easier to question the dogma and intellectual sclerosis consolidated by many years of 4/4 beats and 180bpm. the gabber engaged in hakken footwork will wreck the floor hampered by breaks, maintaining balance by establishing a schizo-motor state, as if taken by a sudden epileptic seizure. eventually, after this necessary exercise, the detoxified gabba will enjoy black africa and broken beats! produce gastric bass bass is gastroenterological music. it speaks directly to the intestine, duodenum, pancreas, colon and rectum. the digestive system is in fact most receptive to bass cut-off frequencies that churn through the stomach like a cyst. the gabber, after the first inevitable esophageal reaction to an unconventional bass line, will start to appreciate its succulent flow and wobble until he discards his perennial constipation medication and no longer expels bass from his arse. add white, pink, brown, grey and purple noise as a novice watercolorist, the gabber in a beret, palette in one hand, brush in the other, will, blowing on his vuvuzela, paint still life images: industrial landscapes, garbage dumps and mutants. deftly applying a little bit of grey (noise) and then a bit of pink (noise) will bring a bit of industrial chromatic sensitivity to the canvas-track. departing from the black and white of 4/4 kicks will help him discover a whole new world in which white (noise), brown (noise) and purple (noise) are the protagonists. distort the frequencies we have already discussed[1] the synesthetic affects of music and how through the use of a wide range of possible frequencies you can create feelings that move beyond the audible and arrive at the tactile. with certain high-pitched synth-lines from the most extreme drum’n’bass, these dynamics become imperceptible. sounds get beneath the skin. hearing no longer perceives these high-pitches so that sound makes the skin listen. you feel those goosebumps as it gets cold. the music is actually cold, since the skin has lowered its temperature by at least one degree due to the radical distortion of the frequencies. velocity time in music is radically different from time in the late-capitalist metropolis, which consumes everyday life. musical duration is only measurable in terms of sensibility, tension and emotion. as noted for the first time by benjamin, the attempt to blow up the continuum of history is a typical revolutionary act: every revolution begins with a transformation of time. during the french revolution, when night fell on the first day of battle, the revolutionaries independently shot all the clocks of the bell towers across paris simultaneously. use subversive sampling the intelligence of the gabber must be tested through complex concepts, like sonic déjà vu. this term refers to a sonorous experience of memoire involontaire. it involves enriching tracks with samples that are buried in the collective-media-consciousness, which, once awake, like zombies on the march, begin to operate the gabber brain, (previously) inactive from too many chemicals. of particular use might be old tv jingles or theme songs we’ve heard hundreds of times that won’t leave us alone until we can identify them: audio-proustian madeleines that open up worlds through involuntary memory. create sound blobs through mixing with the most absurd genres we can instill a serious identity crisis in the gabber, who will end up with an ineluctable emancipatory schizo-rhythm against all the psychopathological problems of the subject. it’s always him, the hardcore warrior, storming the middle of the dance foor with the rage that only a shaven skull can provide. when you first overlay the usual bum bum bum in the beatmix and cut it with the melody of an hawaiian ukulele, recalling a dreamy maritime eden with flower necklaces, there he is: the moshing tiki-gabber. this is only a clinical example of the fracturing of the musical-behavioural brainframe. we might also mention other medical literature on the subject, such as the famous afro-ebm, a rather simplified drum machine which contaminates industrial rhythms with intricate percussive sounds from the black continent, and so on, forever, breaking the water-tight compartments of psycho-musical genres. author biography riccardo balli is a dj/producer, active in the label sonic belligeranza <http://belligeranza.c8.com>. he is the author of several books in italian about countercultures, including anche tu astronauta (castelvecchi, 1998) and apocalypso disco (agenzia x, 2013). he contributes to datacide magazine. references benjamin, walter. 1968. illuminations. trans. h. zohn. new york : schocken books. berardi, franco. 1993. come si cura il nazi. roma: castelvecchi. datacide magazine. 1997. london. “interview with mark newlands / bloody-fist”. <http://datacide.c8.com/interview-with-mark-newlands-bloody-fist/>. reich, wilhelm. 1946 [1933]. the mass psychology of fascism. trans. t.p. wolfe. new york : orgone institute press. acknowledgements thanks to roberta bononi for the gabba vision, oliver evans and alessandro ceccarelli. note [1] earlier in the book from which this chapter was translated i discussed the synesthetic affects of music and how through the use of a wide range of possible frequencies you can create feelings that move beyond the audible and arrive at the tactile. reviews-typeset reviews we call it techno! a documentary about germany’s early techno scene and culture. maren sextro and holger wick. sense music & media, media atelier, germany, 2008. sensedvd02. rrp: £16.49 doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.11 hillegonda c. rietveld london south bank university (uk) the documentary we call it techno! provides a german perspective on the development of electronic dance music to both a german and english-speaking audience through subtitles and the choice of an english voice-over. based on interviews with key people in the scene, it tells the story from the definition of post-punk electronica from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. there are two parts. the main film is illustrated by rare archive material from private collections of participants and key people of the developing scene. the second part consists of interview excerpts and additional interview material. the following djs, party concept designers, club promoters, label managers and record shop workers, all male except one, took part: alex azary, andreas rossmann, armin johnert, ata, boris dlugosh, claus bachor, cosmic baby, dimitri hegermann, dr motte (of early love parade fame), elsa for toys, frank blümel, hell, jürgen laarmann, mark reeder, mike ink, mijk van dijk, ralf niemcyzk, sven väth, talla 2xlc, tanith, thomas koch, tobias lampe, triple r, upstart and wole xpd. the interviewees benefit from their maturity and their insights gained over decades, while the use of the german language produces a deeply reflective mode. in particular, mike ink places the scene’s idealism in a wider historical-materialist perspective, while azary observes that, “techno expresses the emotion of today’s times best of all, basically the blankness of society”. the resulting documentary is a serious self-searching narrative that demonstrates that the term techno was very much the electronic sound track of the millennium. the narrative starts with the introduction of the term techno as early as 1984 by talla in a frankfurt record shop called city music, to indicate “music created technologically”, such as “new order, depeche mode, kraftwerk, heaven 17, then later front 242. i actually filed everything under techno. and people liked it” (talla). this was followed by the techno club, set up by alex azary and talla, which hosted postpunk electronic bands, the neuewelle (new wave), like d.a.f. (deutsch amerikanischefreundschaft) and nitzer ebb. this club night became a hot spot for electronic body music (ebm), a sound that was led by the belgian front 424. it also inspired the establishment of specialist magazine frontpage that self-defined the merging techno scene. initially the club attracted suburban males, until djs like sven väth, who developed his career in this frankfurt scene, moved away from industrial and ebm to embrace american techno and acid house. berlin had been physically segregated from west germany, until the fall of the wall in 1989. according to tanith, the electronic experiments by german pioneers, dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(1) 2009, 142-56 issn 1947-5403 ©2009 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ such as klaus schulze, were effectively forgotten by a younger berliner generation that mainly listened to guitar rock. until the arrival of techno-house from the us that is, which sounded more fun than the aggression of ebm. acid house was introduced there via the radio shows of monika dietl, which were listened to on both sides of the berlin wall. when the wall came down, an extraordinary festive period emerged in berlin, which brought together creative talents from east and west germany. from this, the love parade emerged, in the summer of 1989, consisting of a sound system on a truck, playing acid house and detroit techno. the title of the documentary refers to a popular track of this period, “call it techno” (breaking bones 1989), an electro freestyle track by brooklyn-based dj frankie bones. its musical influences seem to cover a wide range of electronica, including kraftwerk, klf and afrika bambattaa, while an electronically treated vocal summarises a history of techno from an american perspective. the documentary’s version of techno’s story is different from the usual one, of how detroit dj producer derrick may and british entrepreneur neil rushton marketed detroit’s electronic dance music as distinct from the chicago house sound in 1988. it becomes quite clear that techno was indeed a concept, a sign of the times, which inspired people in europe and the us in parallel fashion. the documentary subsequently charts the experience of young people devoting their lives to the party scene, which went into overdrive during the early 1990s: its idealism, its creative energy, the flaunting of hegemonic common sense in terms of lifestyles and regulations and the sense that a revolution had occurred, a break in history. more women became involved and footage reveals a distinct difference in gender relations. 1980s footage from the technoclub shows an all male punk mob; while in footage from the early 1990s one sees boys and girls with happy grins, taking ecstasy pills, travelling from city to city to follow their favourite djs. each city seemed to have its own distinct approaches to this party phenomenon, some supporting the super star dj and others being much more about the music itself, the crowd and the experience. techno, in this version of events, accommodates a clear break in german history: pre1989 techno as post-punk electronica, angry, macho, full of fear and loathing; post1989 techno as fun, celebratory, camp and queer. from this melting-pot of ideas, eventually a german trance aesthetic emerged, again first in frankfurt, with dj dag and sven väth, which further developed in the techno-trance scene that revolved around the berlin love parade. in sum, this dvd corrects the anglo-american hegemony on the history of electronic dance music with a unique collection of images and interviews. it is therefore a must in the collection of anyone who studies and enjoys electronic dance music. references frankie bones. 1989. call it techno. breaking bones records (12-inch). bbr-400. usa. various. 1988. techno! the new dance sound of detroit. ten records ltd (10 records) uk // 303 322-406. dixg 75. virgin schallplatten gmbh. germany. reviews 143 lost and sound: berlin, techno, und der easyjetset. tobias rapp. suhrkamp, frankfurt am main, 2009. isbn: 3518460447 [german only] rrp: €9.50 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.12 sean nye university of minnesota (usa) “a new berlin is emerging – and nobody is noticing” (p.9). the first line of rapp’s lost and sound. berlin, techno und der easyjetset clearly states the motivation behind the book: the need for an update of berlin techno. rapp is well situated to write such an update. he reported on berlin nightlife for many years as the editor of one of berlin’s leading newspapers, die tageszeitung. the first line also indicates that techno is no longer the focus of the media, since most scholars and journalists associated the berlin techno-scene with the love parade. given this relative invisibility, it might come as a surprise that berlin has become a center of the international techno-scene like never before; from the concentration of print media to the conglomeration of expat musicians. can it be that techno is also the soundtrack of the zero years, as rapp calls this decade? rapp answers affirmatively – at least for berlin. however, the role of techno has changed. rapp aims to pinpoint exactly what these changes are. he asserts, “this is also not the east-berlin of the nineties, that adventurous playground forming the backdrop of the love parade, with its flamboyant dancers on walls that still bore the marks of history” (p.33). the book primarily concerns itself with the innovations of the zero years. four aspects form the core of his investigation: 1. the move of the scene’s locus from the friedrichstraße/leipziger straße club mile of the 1990s to the friedrichshain/kreuzberg club mile of the zero years. 2. the new mood of the scene in the post-love-parade age (after the love parade was canceled in 2004 and 2005 and definitively moved to the ruhr valley in 2007). the first techno generation is aging but remains active; simultaneously new generations of techno activists are emerging. 3. the development of a new form of techno tourism and club management through bargain airline travel such as easyjet. 4. the replacement of hard techno (tresor label) and pop techno (low spirit label) as the dominant berlin sound by minimal as the sound of the zero years. as his first focus, rapp describes berlin’s new club mile, which consists of a range of clubs, including berghain, watergate, maria, weekend, that in fact spread over five kilometers along the banks of the river spree. these banks form the border of berlin’s two famous countercultural districts, friedrichshain and kreuzberg, underscoring their continued importance for city nightlife. rapp emphasizes that in terms of style and location, the new clubs differ markedly from the old clubs, for example ewerk, bunker, and the old tresor and wmf. the old designs were innovative and playful, but also provisional. the owners knew the locations were likely to be bought out by developers. nevertheless, this club mile prepared the ground for the rise of 144 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 techno in berlin and for the exceptional success of the love parade. the route of the love parade in front of the brandenburg gate was not only of historical importance; it was also crucial for tourism. the parade drew masses of tourists, who also took part in the club events of the berlin love week surrounding the parade. the entrance fees were jacked up and the number of clubbers always overwhelming, guaranteeing big profits for the clubs. until 2003 the love parade and the associated love week were the most prominent examples of international club tourism. even without the profits of the love week, however, the new club scene is financially well situated. most clubs now have long-term rent contracts and are richly equipped with the latest sound systems, with, for example, the club berghain named as “best club in the world” in 2009 by the british magazine dj-mag. the scene is now even more international, considering the number of expat musicians living here, most prominently richie hawtin. yet without the media event of the love parade, this new scene remains relatively unknown. the diary of a typical club-week frames the book’s analyses and assists in presenting the mood of the new underground, which is rapp’s second point of focus. the club-week begins on a wednesday and ends (perhaps) the following monday. interviews with various protagonists – djs, youth hostel managers, rave mothers, and club owners – enliven rapp’s analysis. rapp’s journalistic reports are a diverse mix of cultural, sociological, and economic analysis. his third point of focus is the entanglement of the scene in international networks. he emphasizes this interdependence through the new economy of club tourism, made possible by bargain airlines. rapp writes, “the easyjet-raver is the definitive subject of european nightlife of the zero years. he came, without a grand announcement, and has developed into the most important subcultural figure of the present” (p.78-9). rapp explains how the combination of new bargain airlines on the one hand, and berlin’s economic crash after the optimism of the nineties, on the other, allowed for the emergence of this new european subject. the easyjet-raver could both fly on the cheap and visit an exceptionally cheap city. indeed, the failure of berlin’s plans for an economic revolution following reunification meant that, compared to cities like london or paris, berlin remains a bizarrely inexpensive metropolis. in short, what has been bad for berlin business has been good for the international underground. the first three foci of rapp’s analysis offer some considerable new insights. however, as an overview of the musical history of the berlin scene the book is less helpful. rapp’s investigation remains bound up with the minimal scene. what for him counts as the berlin sound of the zero years was actually only one of many trends. he does not explain that minimal only came to prominence in berlin during the middle of the decade through the establishment of labels liked perlon and m_nus. rapp dedicates an entire chapter to the minimal dj/producer ricardo villalobos (p.110-120), stating plainly “he is the biggest dj-star of the zero years” (p.110). with that he contradicts his earlier claim that the new scene has no stars, rather “the berlin clubs and their public” (p.12). indeed, throughout the book, rapp repeatedly mentions villalobos so much that he outs himself as a swooning fan and minimal-groupie. he thereby utilizes a trend that had already been purposefully hyped by him and other journalists. rapp even includes a berlin discography, which is a personal collection of minimal hits – beginning in 2003 with, again, a villalobos album. the book thus tends towards the genre of a travel guide and advertisement for minimal, instead of analyzing it as part of berlin techno. reviews 145 furthermore, an examination of the electro and electroclash trends is missing. for his topic, an analysis precisely of these scenes was needed because they played important roles in the first tourist waves during the zero years. if rapp decided villalobos was necessary to include, then an important “star” is missing: namely, ellen allien and her label b:pitch control. she is important precisely because of rapp’s focus on the easyjet-raver and club tourism. she has presented herself as a berlin-dj unlike any other, with her albums stadtkind (trans: city-child) and berlinette and, even more strikingly, through her dvd club-tour-guide of berlin for the time out series. indeed, the material of her musical productions is a crossover between techno and tourism. other equally influential stars during the zero years can also be listed: for example, monika kruse, t.raumschmiere and anja schneider, not to mention paul van dyk, whose continued international stardom resulted in him receiving the landesverdienstorden (land order of merit) from berlin in 2006. to be sure, rapp does examine other branches of the techno scene. there are interesting interviews addressing new media and technology with producers robert henke, philipp sollmann and ben clock. rapp analyzes the debates regarding urban renewal with the example of media spree, a construction project that could have a major impact on the new club mile. he also examines new online forum restrealitaet.de and internet fanzine resident adviser. nevertheless, one would expect a more diverse analysis of the many styles from electro to breakcore that make up the berlin sound. finally, the role of media needs more attention. many pop-cultural festivals and institutions have moved to berlin – print media like spex and groove, the music channels viva and mtv, the popkomm, etc. – a trend that has profited to the detriment of cologne, which in many respects was the pop media center of germany until 2000. such gaps demonstrate that rapp’s attempt to combine a personal diary with cultural analysis is not as successful as he perhaps wished. rapp loses himself in self-absorbed scene life and gossip. too much club jargon and name-dropping takes place, thus making some of the book comprehensible only to insiders. despite these faults, the book offers an important update on berlin techno history. the literature and media that defined the popular understanding of german techno was published more than ten years ago. the following titles appeared in the decisive year 1998: simon reynolds’ energy flash, rainald goetz’s rave, iara lee’s documentary modulations and tom tykwer’s run lola run. perhaps the most internationally well-known german book on electronic dance music, ulf poschardt’s dj culture, appeared even earlier, in 1995. for those whose knowledge of german techno is based on such literature, rapp’s lost and sound will be a helpful update. it makes clear that the history of techno is not over, and rapp is correct that the zero years are an important period in this history. 146 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 psychedelic white: goa trance and the viscosity of race. arun saldanha. minneapolis and london, university of minnesota press, 2007. isbn: 0816649936 (hardcover) 0816649944 (paperback) rrp: us$60.00 (hardcover), us$20 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.13 anthony d’andrea university of limerick (ireland), university of chicago (usa) chromatic variation in ethnographic analysis reflecting a deleuzian turn in social geography, psychedelic white: goa trance and the viscosity of race examines rave tourism in goa through the prism of a materialist theory of race and racial segregation. well-written, erudite and thought-provoking, the book opens with the observation that the mostly white psytrance music fans (also known as goa freaks) arrive at parties only after indian tourists have departed. the author arun saldanha, a belgian geographer of indian descent, expresses his discontentment, “i felt this segregation”, and adds, “this book wants to find out what sort of theoretical vocabulary is necessary to make sense of racism when it is not supposed to be there.” (p.5). the basic question it seeks to answer then is, “what makes white bodies stick together?” according to saldanha, racial segregation is a basic effect from the ethnic profile and profiling of white psytrance fans and backpackers in goa. the book provides a philosophically robust retheorization of race. opposing social constructionism, saldanha seeks to develop a materialist theory of race, centered on the deleuzian concept of viscosity, defined as resistance to flow and perforation. considered for its corporeality rather than representation, race is organized like a machinic assemblage, as instantiated in ritual experiences of the psytrance collective in goa. saldanha demonstrates familiarity with a wide range of philosophical work, including not only deleuze and guattari, but also levinas, goffman and fanon, among other thinkers in feminism and poststructuralism. psychedelic white has gained attention among geographers of race, as a number of book reviews have praised saldanha’s innovative theorization while also questioning its internal consistency at a philosophical level. this review, instead, highlights how this philosophical hypertrophy has created analytical problems in the study of psytrance. within a complex formulation of race materialism, psychedelic white discusses the more proximate notion of “psychedelics”, which saldanha defines as the dynamics of self-transformation enabled by travel, drugs and music. yet, these techniques are examined in relation to the racial background of westerners. in a series of refined reviews on the history of countercultures, orientalism, hippies and drugs, saldanha refers to the creative needs of “white men”, a term repeated ad nauseam throughout the first third of the book. this bias could have been moderated in the light of the anthropological truism that a wide variety of societies, and not only the white west, nurtures more or less complicated relationships with such techniques and devices of selftransformation. as such, the reader may be left wondering how whiteness and psychedelics are causally determined, and, if so, what is the significance and implication that saldanha attempts to address. reviews 147 based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in northern goa between 1996 and 2002 (and again in 2006), the empirical horizon of psychedelic white is constrained within a sharp racial angle, as organized across the book in three analytical sites: the shared experiences of goa freaks, the visual economy of rave tourism, and the politics of location in goa. the philosophical work so interestingly advanced by saldanha results in a racial determinism under which psytrance formations are forcefully examined. political economy is reduced to “phenotype and foreignness” (p.163). “goa freaks are microfascists” (p. 89). the book is permeated with “depressing conclusions”, as saldanha well puts it, following anecdotal analyses of white exploitation, segregation and indifference toward indians. psytrance formations, saldanha argues, have paradoxically thickened rather than transcended racial segregation in goa. the book is thus marked by a predominantly negative assessment of countercultural formations in india. in deleuzian words, psychedelic white focuses on the lines of death traced by this war machine, and says virtually nothing about the emancipatory potential of chromatic variation. some readers may even find that the impressive philosophical apparatus delivered by saldanha tends to lose connection with the empirical reality it seeks to explain. indeed, psytrance freaks are eccentric individuals, often elitist, arrogant and troubled. in a decadent and dystopic scene such as northern goa psytrance, most freaks and backpackers would likely feel more comfortable interacting with phenotypically similar peoples, whereas some individuals may express racist behavior at times. however, the argument that psytrance in goa is essentially reaffirmed through racial segregation would require stronger empirical testing and support. incredibly, important factual questions were overlooked in the book. firstly, psytrance insiders reject tourists – regardless of race – whether in goa or elsewhere. spatial segregation between insiders and outsiders is a basic feature of electronic dance scenes around the world, and goa is no different, for its members regularly attend other scenes interlinked across global countercultural circuits. in this connection, trance (ecstatic) experiences generally occur with no essential reference to issues of racial identity or segregation. internal bickering is pervasive within white psytrance subgroups in goa (p.152), and clashes involving national, generational and class difference are at least as common as those predicated on race. moreover, several indians (and other not exactly white individuals) occupy significant positions in the scene, as djs, party promoters and well-off diasporic fans. mating relationships across racial groups are common, even against india’s backdrop of patriarchy and sexual harassment, considering white females’ frequent complaints about native males. furthermore, saldanha does not account for the violence, exploitation and segregation that some indians explicitly perpetrate against third-world immigrants working in goa. likewise, he neglects that white travelers’ attitude of indifference towards indians is more often than not a simmelian response to the overwhelming demand incessantly posed by street vendors, beggars and sexual predators across india. all in all, edm studies indicate that class, gender and sexual orientation, alongside race, are all important factors in the makeup of electronic dance scenes. the psytrance scene in goa embodies complex multiplicities that cannot be easily explained by means of reduction to a single analytical category alone. as an ethnographic study, the claim that psytrance identity is founded on racial segregation is perplexing, particularly when argued on basis of empirically grounded evidence. no significant discrepancies can be found by cross-checking my fieldwork with saldanha’s ethnography at the level of observed behaviors. at a closer look, how148 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 ever, it becomes evident that saldanha has neglected the cultural point-of-view of psytrance people. in fact, he explicitly states that their representations on transcending prejudice would have misled him; and that he would not have been able to understand white identity in goa by approaching it discursively or psychologically (p.130). instead, saldanha chooses to observe their forms of sociability, at a distance, without ever addressing underlying meanings, intentions and desires. as such, the dismissal of native representations remits psychedelic white to a pre-geertzian moment, strangely resonating with classical british functional-structuralist anthropology. not by accident, in both british and deleuzian versions, subject interiorities become effects of larger social and material structures (machinic assemblages). as a possible remedy, what is the meaning of white bodies sticking together would have been a legitimate, even safer question. in other words, how problematic race actually is according to foreigners and natives in goa would be a question that largely defines the social and explanatory pertinence of a theoretical framework. however, goa freaks and goan villagers rarely speak in psychedelic white. in fact, they become largely incidental against the philosophical apparatus weaved across the book. in its appendix, saldanha correctly notes how difficult it is to interview psytrance freaks in goa, even though he seemed to possess a remarkable ability to socialize with them. conversely, saldanha provides a list of interviewees including a relative majority of indian authorities, intellectuals, journalists and activists, all of whom have been opposed to rave tourism. more widely, in a world of complexities, ethnographers ought to be supple in finding ways to engage, translate and interpret examined ways of life, initially in their own terms of sociability and intelligibility. concurring with saldanha, the locus of truth, as bourdieu puts it, rarely resides at the surface level of discursive representations alone. however, they provide critical clues towards a persuasive account that is both intellectually compelling and empirically accurate. in dismissing the voice of goa freaks, saldanha has paradoxically incurred an act of segregation by only allowing his own representations to speak and prevail. ultimately, the book fails to address a critical counter-hypothesis: psytrance fans reject indian tourists and beggars because they egregiously disrupt psytrance practices. “trance parties” are ritual practices of a quasi-sacred nature by which scene insiders can ritually express their anger and opposition to the modern self, morality and system. logically, those who don’t appear to share or respect the meanings entwined in such countercultural practices and ideologies are deemed unwelcome outsiders. in this light, the book’s main premise – that white freaks reject indian tourists because of their race – is empirically flawed. consequently, its main argument – that foreign countercultural formations in india are essentially reproduced on the basis of racial segregation – must be questioned.  the fact that these are “mostly white” formations struggling with native and alien majorities does not suffice to define them as founded, identified or reinforced by racial segregation. segregation and racism are not the same. psychedelic white must be commended for its philosophical ingenuity. nonetheless, in order to do justice to saldanha’s exquisite contribution to race studies, the book would have benefited from a more nuanced and cautious analysis of psytrance formations empirically and methodologically. it would have been more persuasive by better calibrating its racial determinism vis-à-vis the multiple, complex and polysemous injunctions of global psytrance locally, and particularly by means of a more direct dialogue with the scholarship on psytrance, travel and tourism in india and southeast asia. in battling against social constructionism, psychedelic white has lost sight of the empirical dimension it sought to explain, along with alternative philosophical explana reviews 149 tions. in their double folding, war machines are defined both for their lines of flight and death, as well as for their viscosity and chromatic variation. how to account for race as chromatic variation would have opened up a whole new range of empirical and theoretical possibilities. all along, the fixity of psytrance in northern goa (as in elsewhere) can be assessed as an ambivalent tactic of resistance for keeping the space of creative experimentation, one that is continuously threatened and reinforced by external formations, linkages, and power/knowledge arrangements. global nomads: techno and new age as transnational countercultures in ibiza and goa. anthony d’andrea. london and new york, routledge, 2007 isbn: 041542013x (hard) 0203962656 (ebook) 978-0-415-55376-4 (paper) rrp: $132 (hardbound), $28 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.14 charles de ledesma university of east london (uk) anthony d’andrea is a “transnationalist” researcher who has set out to explore the fissures and contradictions of twenty first century globalisation. global nomads is the end product of six years of field work in the bye ways of alternative cultures, and covers multiple visits to india and ibiza. it is a singular work and an indispensable contribution to a growing body of accessible academia on the curvature of globalisation, critical studies and counter cultures. as well it is an immensely readable ethnography of the lives, passion, habits and thoughts of overlapping sets of “expressive expatriates”, as d’andrea calls them. this label loosely corrals a colourful cast including djs at techno trance parties, traders in textiles at the hippie markets of goa and ibiza, artists, digital developers and international drug dealers. d’andrea defines “expressive expatriate” early on. “as a counterpoint in migration studies, the terms ‘expressive’ and ‘expatriate’ depart with the predominantly utilitarian and essentialized understanding of the mobile subject” (p.7). also weaving through the book is the concept, the global (neo) nomad, which d’andrea suggests is the philosophic base of the expressive expatriate. “many have abandoned metropolitan centres where they enjoyed a favourable material situation” (p.8). but, d’andrea cautions, his expressive, neo-nomadic, alternative subjects are not free of all the trapping of contemporary life nor do they wish to be. he applies foucault’s concept of bio power and judges that these peripheral, although not marginal, social vectors ride in tandem with neo liberal regimes. in the hands of a less radical, committed writer, a cynical edge – end of 1960s countercultural traditions; decimation of 1980s’ rave culture energies; creeping commoditisation of the global trade in goods and artefacts – could undermine such an analysis. but, thankfully, not; d’andrea remains steadfast in spirit and calling. global nomads is a resolutely optimistic work, theoretically fluent and empirically fascinating. divided into five main parts, d’andrea sets out his stall admirably in the opening chapter, “neo-nomadic”, which adds to the multiple voices in the graham st john150 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 edited collection, rave culture and religion, and in various work from robin sylvan and paul heelas, by connecting new spiritualities and techno dance culture with globalization. before nailing neo-nomadic as his defining meta-concept, d’andrea helpfully provides a short overview of critical work on the nomadic per se; using deluge’s famous epithet, “the nomad does not move” to clarify that the neo nomadic need be understood as a state of mind and being, not merely a state of movement. d’andrea begins his field report in la isla blanca – ibiza – with a colourful narrative spotlighting various neo-nomadic lifestyles encountered on the island during peak season. there is yoga teacher nora, clothes retailer rochelle, new age body practices seeker barbara and island long-stay kirk who, like d’andrea, is an anthropologist. a rather bucolic scenario builds of creative types running a busy clock of night time events, markets, yoga and “bio dance” classes, although the picture clouds in the ethnography’s next section with an exploration of the hippie and club scenes in the island’s resort, san antonio. d’andrea charts how conflicts develop in the increasingly commoditised spaces of package tourist density. he less successfully summarises field work conducted at the island’s largest nightclub, privilege, offering few surprises beyond a rather functional listing of expected details and views. we learn too of the antics of the highly extrovert couple who ran club night manumission, and how they ‘performed live’ sex acts during the night. d’andrea is revealing on the club industry economy, its army of bohemian workers who work the club season, and the party promoters behind club profitability. beyond its crass commerciality, he identifies that there are some opportunities where “exceptional parties were able to break through the nationalism that underlies mainstream clubbing in ibiza and become exciting references in the global club scene” (p.107). before heading for north goa, where sound system parties most resolutely weren’t in this mould, d’andrea stops off at point 2 in his transnational research, neospiritual guru osho’s “international meditation resort” in pune, south india. d’andrea is refreshing on this ashram turned “new age resort” as he holds centre ground between the osho supporters, sannyasins, and osho bashers, although the tone is largely one of a distanced disappointment with the commercial direction taken. this section ends with a reminder of the translocal connections between ibiza, pune and goa, three key nodes in a neo-nomadic, counter cultural lifestyle pattern which may take in goods trading, new age therapies, mind altering drug bouts and all night dancing at beachside full moon trance parties. it is goa that d’andrea travels to next and it is here that global nomads truly finds its pace and footing. after setting the scene with a brief history of the tiny, once portuguese-held, south india enclave, and western interest in it, d’andrea launches into a field report on “rebel sannyasins”, trance party promoters; backpackers after sun, parties and drugs; mornings sipping lattes and smoking hash chillums in the famous cafe, the german bakery, and attempts at elucidating information from the traveller freaks and hippy elders at the centre of the action. in an interesting ethnographic aside he finds that “at a methodological level, the politicized silence of freaks constituted a challenge to conventional methods of data collection” (p.189). but d’andrea, in exchanges parallel to those of arun saldanha in psychedelic white, beavers away patiently and soon finds his subjects full of views and stories. one, bojan, believes india to be a land “that is female, round, and the karma yoga instantaneous” (p.193). later in this masterly field report, d’andrea reaches a ravishing climax. the sub section “the techno trance assemblage: aesthetics of power and limit-experience” remains the strongest, most ethically powerful and revealing writing on the psyche reviews 151 delic trance party to date, certainly in an academic context, if not anywhere. so many nights and mornings spent searching for and, on occasions, finding, techno trance parties, has fully rubbed off on d’andrea and, unlike in the more extensive psychedelic white, the reader feels fully and disarmingly there, propelled into the vortex of chromatically varied digital beats aiming to upset and re-constitute subjectivities. locating the trance dance, first as a limit-experience which can ‘tear the subject from itself ’ (p.209), the writing collapses key elements – music, technology, raver psychology, bodily gesture and dance and potent chemical enhancers – into enchanting, hypnotic and critically consistent prose. “trance parties have been designed to engender a magic aura that remits participants into a cosmic temporality” (p.210). d’andrea’s use here of the deleuze and guattarian concept “assemblage” is judicious, not overstated, using a nomadological spirit to generate potency and mystique in the writing; attempting, successfully, to enact in words the process it sets out to describe. no matter, really, that there are one or two factual gaffs in this section. d’andrea, for example, states that the 1980s were a fallow period in the north goa party scene, picking up strength in the early 1990s. not so. djs goa gil and laurent played stupendous, night-long, tranceified electronic mixes at numerous parties in those years, with events attended by many hundreds of revellers. a stylistic weakness is the occasional repetition of phrases and sentences as d’andrea unveils his conceptual framework across various chapters. but this is no surprise given a keenness for publishing finished segments as the research project elapses. d’andrea has simply had a number of go’s at re-defining and re-casting his ideas. this doesn’t detract at all from a book which is thoughtfully crafted, stimulating, syntactically evocative and critically valuable. d’andrea’s study of neo-nomadism in expressive expatriates, his turnof-thecentury field work in multiple nodes where alternative cultures still flourish and, particularly, his sharp dissection of the trance party cosmos, is invaluable material for students of, well, just about any discipline you can imagine which touches ostensibly on globalization, cultural anthropology, neo-religious studies, cultural studies and popular music. feel free to add to the list. breakcore: identity and interaction on peer-to-peer. andrew whelan. newcastle upon tyne, cambridge scholars publishing, 2008. 337 pp. isbn: 1847186572 $60 us (hardcover) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.15 emily d. ferrigno yale university (usa) the study of virtual music communities is a fascinating and timely endeavor, given the widespread phenomenon of “bedroom production”. musical subcultures are often shaped by and mediated through online means, such as forums, chatrooms and list152 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 servs. virtual environments provide vital space in which musical practitioners share creative methods of musical production, define genre, hold aesthetic debates and socialize. virtual ethnographies are not yet numerous, and scholars interested in identity, gender and race as they exist in the virtual realm would do well to consult andrew whelan’s study. whelan’s book is an informative examination of virtual community from the chatrooms of soulseek, a file-sharing application used by electronic dance music producers. whelan focuses on users involved in breakcore, a breakbeat-centered genre influenced by jungle, industrial, and hardcore techno. whelan draws upon the theories and practices of his discipline (sociology), and illustrates concepts with robust sections of ethnographically-culled data, working with a 2100-page transcription of conversational text from soulseek chatrooms over a period of six months, as well as email interviews with producers. whelan’s analytical focal point is chatroom dialogue. he uses textual analysis to illustrate how the individuals in his study define themselves, how chatroom dialogue creates and ascribes musical meaning, and how soulseek users employ discursive cues to identify “insiders” and “outsiders.” in the introductory chapter, as well as in the concluding section of the book, whelan engages with the “rationalization/democratization” debate, a discourse central to his study. he confronts the hypothesis that technology serves to inhibit and ultimately dehumanize music, which stands in opposition to the utopian vision of technology as an agent of social change, allowing the voices of socially excluded groups to be heard (p.24). whelan provides a useful introduction to the peer-to-peer environment and file sharing protocol, and examines the mp3 file (the medium of exchange) as a “sociocultural fetish”. whelan describes how “rip crews” encode new music into mp3 format, “tag” the files, and distribute/disseminate them to the larger community. each mp3 is accompanied by an “nfo” file, which identifies the mp3 and its creator. these files are written in a source code that allows the creator to insert jokes, illustrations, and the like into the nfo. several examples of nfo files are provided in the text. whelan focuses on three practices that he describes as “shibboleths,” or “terms indicative of social location or origin, the use of which therefore serves to distinguish between groups” (p.14). these are the use of 1) nigga/nigger (chapter 5); 2) gay/ghey (chapter 7), and 3) the “amen break” (chapter 8), a widely sampled drum break from the winstons’ 1969 hit, “amen brother”. whelan provides lengthy analyses of textual exchanges in soulseek chat rooms, in which social boundaries are defined and redefined, and multiple conversations occur at once. the use of the terms “nigga/nigger” is presented in the context of “ritual insult exchange,” as well as flatly racist discourse. as whelan explains, “the term [nigga] is embedded within a matrix of ethnic and subcultural identity politics, and as such tells us much about the orientations of those who deploy it” (p.144). he bases his analysis on the use of “nigga” as a style-marker common among us youth, a characterization which is perhaps too superficial to provide the reader with sufficient context for virtual analysis. the verbal presence of “nigga/nigger” in american society is extremely complex, and quite different in its “real world” application, as opposed to the anonymous environment of virtual chatrooms. anonymity presents significant difficulties for social analysis, in that age, race, nationality, and even (spoken) english language fluency of chatroom users may be unknown. the second shibboleth “gay/ghey” is also examined within the context of chatroom discourse. whelan bases his analysis on the concept of “gay” as not only homo reviews 153 sexual, but also encompassing characteristics and ideals rejected by hegemonic masculinity (p.182). noting that, “the ‘joking’ exploration of the semantics of gay is a popular trope among young men” (p.200), whelan presents several examples of chatroom dialogue related to anal eroticism. he then explains the use of “ghey” in the chatrooms to describe something “lame” or “generic” (the homosexual connotation orthographically removed). the discussion concludes with an examination of masculinity, a frequent theme in whelan’s study, given the scarcity of participants identifying themselves as female in breakcore chatrooms. in chapter eight, “junglist,” whelan begins to focus on the music around which his study is centered. he discusses the aesthetics of breakcore via chatroom discourse, addressing polarities such as old school/new school and mainstream/underground. whelan regards the “amen break” as a third shibboleth, a time-honored (and wellworn) sample used in electronic dance music. however, he also highlights the debate within the breakcore community as to whether the use of the amen is creative, progressive, or even interesting. this problematizes the classification of the amen as a shibboleth; while the amen is well known in the breakcore community, its utilization is not a given. perhaps, then, the amen is a shibboleth used to distinguish subgroups from one another, rather than distinguishing the entire breakcore community from outsiders. whelan’s book ends with a lengthy “journey through the media” (p.319), covering a range of topics from sampling ethics and branding, to utopian visions of peer-to-peer culture. whelan characterizes his book as a “collage,” and, in fact, his theoretical discussions are dense, at times unfocused and difficult to follow. whelan’s own ideas are often obscured by his prose style and frequent quotation of others’ work. this also limits the accessibility of the text to specialists, which can be a serious shortcoming when writing to an interdisciplinary audience. in addition, whelan’s engagement with musical analysis is not a strong point of the book. he describes the amen break as embodying “polyrhythmic hesitancy”, the snares “sketching an idiosyncratic, irregular pattern”. like many drum breaks, the amen is characterized by syncopation, a basic feature of funk drumming–hardly idiosyncratic, and, in fact, very “regular”. the reader is not given a particularly clear description of what breakcore and its related genres sound like (beyond the discography). whelan does participate in the breakcore scene (as a chatroom member and perhaps a producer), but the reader is not privy to this information. the inclusion of reflexive ethnography would have added necessary transparency to his study, for when the reader is well acquainted with the author, ethnographic authority and agenda are made clear, and thus can become secondary to the voices of the observed. despite these shortcomings, whelan makes a rigorous contribution to the study of musical culture in the digital age. he delves into an examination of the sometimes crude nature of chatroom discourse, thoughtfully employing textual analysis to unpack the complexities of race, gender and social interaction. whelan’s discussion of the internet, society and identity is enlightening. he introduces the term “networked individualism” in which “identity is organised and expressed through consumption practices” (p.319), whereby participatory and collaborative consumption are encouraged, in opposition to the model of passive consumption set up by the music industry (p.305). this observation suggests that (somewhat problematically) whelan embraces a utopian (and democratic) vision of peer-to-peer file sharing, in which recorded sound is free and open to all–collected, utilized, manipulated and most importantly, shared. 154 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 the high life: club kids, harm and drug policy (qualitative studies in crime and justice volume 2). dina perrone. monsey (ny), criminal justice press, 2009. isbn: 978-1-881798-46-0 rrp: $35 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.16 lucy gibson university of manchester (uk) dina perrone’s study of “club kids” based in new york city presents an illuminating analysis of the cultural and situational context in which club drugs are used. while most literature on drug use tends to focus on users from impoverished communities and the harm they experience, the high life challenges the typical drug user stereotype by showing the “hidden” deviant behaviour of seemingly conformist, affluent and well-educated young adults. perrone opposes america’s war on drugs and argues that the focus of drugs policy should shift from a criminal justice approach (abstinenceonly strategy) to a more balanced response that includes principles from both the cultural and health fields and focuses on the well-being and lifestyles of drug users. the book begins by outlining two assumed flaws in america’s current drug war: that drug users have a pathology, which is the only factor leading to the “drug problem”; and that all illegal drug use leads to harm. perrone challenges these assumptions by asserting that the “...culture and capital of the user and the social environment in which the drugs are used greatly influence use, abuse, and harm” (p.2). chapter one builds on the introduction by providing an overview of how perrone met the club kids and offering initial insights into their lives. moreover, the chapter describes the ethnographic field methods deployed to study the participants’ use of club drugs such as mdma, methamphetamine (crystal meth), ketamine and ghb. the book is based on perrone’s observations, discussion with club kids during fifteen months of fieldwork and interviews with eighteen club kids aged between 22 and 33. the subsequent chapters are separated into two parts: (i) club kids’ dance culture and (ii) drug use among the club kids. the first part examines the club kids as a subcultural group by assessing how they correspond to subculture literature and earlier drug-using subcultural groups such as hippies, mods and skinheads. the book demonstrates that, in contrast to traditional subcultural groups, club kids do not wish to reject the dominant culture, but rather, they adhere to the consumerist norms of conventional american society. club kid culture and the clubbing experience are explored using theories of consumption, commercialisation and globalisation, and by situating the club kids within postmodern theories of the nature of late capitalism. throughout part one, perrone neatly uses the club kids’ perceptions of clubbing, its importance and the suitability of using drugs in club settings to illustrate the fantastical, “carnivalesque” and commodified nature of contemporary club culture. the second part of the book explores the club kids’ patterns of drug use. perrone shows how club kids maintain their jobs and uphold family responsibilities whilst using relatively large quantities of drugs. through their social and economic privileges, the club kids are able to avoid criminal justice sanctions and limit harm. the author employs a theoretical framework, which refers and adds to the prior work of norman reviews 155 zinberg, to describe how factors (drug, set, setting, timing and capital) in club kids’ lives allow controlled and safe drug use. perrone expands on zinberg’s (1984) framework of “drug, set and setting” by adding supplementary concepts of timing and capital drawn from primary data. timing and capital include both club kids’ resources and stages or transitions in the life course. the author demonstrates how a drug’s properties, the setting in which the drug is used, the user’s mood (set), resources (capital) and phase of life-trajectory (timing), shape drug using practices and impact on the relationship between drugs and harm. perrone uses rich and detailed quotations from her respondents to demonstrate how club kids negotiate drug use to minimise harm and avoid criminal justice penalties, while also revealing the larger contradictions in club kids’ lives. chapter seven provides a final discussion of the study’s findings and offers a wider examination of their implications for drug policy in the u.s. perrone pertinently argues that “...socially and economically privileged drug users, such as the club kids, are better equipped to manage their clubbing and drug-using behaviors than are less privileged users...the war on drugs is disproportionately a war on poor people. thus, white, middle-class users are more capable of concealing their drug use and escaping public and police detection than their lower-class counterparts” (p.205). for perrone, the war on drugs has been lost and future policy should de-stigmatise users and help to minimise the harm resulting from drug use rather than concentrate on arrest or punishment. perrone’s study offers a convincing account of the social, cultural and environmental factors that shape drug use among club kids. the book provides a fascinating insight into club kids’ lives and how regular drug users are able to occupy conventional social roles and sustain typical social relationships. however, two minor criticisms remain. although numerous references to relevant work are evident throughout the book, the statement “...cocaine can benefit those with asthma” (p.130) is not supported by academic evidence and readers may want to know the basis for such a claim. moreover, recent post-subcultural literature (e.g. bennett 1999; bennett and kahnharris 2004) has been omitted from the discussion. perrone states that club kids are not a subculture in the traditional sense of the term. yet, she continues to use this term to describe the club kids as a distinct social group. that aside, the book offers a stimulating analysis of club kids’ drug use by highlighting the reasons for clubbing, and exploring club kids’ motivations, and cultural practices. perrone provides a thought-provoking discussion that challenges the majority of literature on drug use. the study is invaluable for students of electronic dance music culture as it questions current failing policy in the u.s. and offers new ways of conceptualising the culture and context of drug use. references bennett, andy. 1999. subcultures or neo-tribes? rethinking the relationship between youth, style and musical taste. sociology, 33: 599-617. bennett, andy and kahn-harris, keith. 2004. after subculture: critical studies in contemporary youth culture. london: palgrave. zinberg, norman. 1984. drug, set, and setting: the basis for controlled intoxicant use. new haven: yale university press. 156 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 meditations on the death of vinyl bernardo alexander attias california state university, northridge <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.10> and vinyl is dead; it's dead. it's gonna be a special item for collectors, and probably will exist forever in that way, but that's it. it's over. you can really count on two hands who's carrying vinyl bags around the world. it's dinosaurs like sven vath or ricardo villalobos, and for them it's great because that also makes them special. but at the same time, no one really gives a shit anymore. you have to feel comfortable with what you use, whether it's vinyl, cds or any digital gadget (dj ali schwarz of tiefschwarz, quoted in golden 2010). while this was definitely not the first time that the "death of vinyl" had been announced in the history of recorded music, there is little question that 2010 marked an important technological crisis in electronic dance music history, particularly for the dj. vinyl dj culture had already been taking a beating from the increasing popularity among djs of compact discs and computer-based systems, and at the end of 2009, pioneer announced the release of the cdj-2000, a fancy (and overpriced) cd player that many speculated would sound the final death knell for turntables in club installations. twice that year rumors surfaced on the internet, finally confirmed in october, that panasonic would cease production of the technics series of turntables, including the iconic sl 1200 line that had become so emblematic of dj culture. panasonic made the announcement official at the 2010 dmc world dj championships, and the dmc, for its part, announced that this would be the last year its competition would be strictly vinyl-based: for the first time, this bedrock of analog culture was opening its doors to users of digital vinyl systems (dvs) like serato scratch live and traktor scratch pro (samoglou 2011; tokyo reporter 2010). and "controllerism" emerged into the mainstream as music conferences and trade shows that year showcased a dizzying array of new devices that allowed laptop performers to manipulate sounds with neither turntables nor cd players. indeed, it was also in 2010 that one company announced that it would press vinyl records out of recently deceased customers' cremated remains (solon 2010)—as if to confirm with chiastic cruelty that not only was vinyl now dead; death was now on vinyl. pioneer cdj-2000 official promo rip technics 1200 turntable and yet, even as dj culture began to grapple with the pace and meaning of technological change, the music industry was celebrating a huge spike in vinyl record sales (green 2010). schwarz's interview, in fact, took place only three days before record store day, which saw significant increases in vinyl records purchases worldwide (cardew 2010). but as djs are well aware, this recent surge in vinyl enthusiasm was driven far more by hipsters and audiophiles than edm audiences. even turntablism subcultures within hip hop—only very recently hailed for remaining "resolutely analog in a digital age" (katz 2010: 130)—have moved away from vinyl recordings, if not yet from the turntables on which they spin. dj hideo sugano, recognized in the los angeles hip hop scene as "the hardest working dj on the west coast", passed away from cancer on 24 april 2010. i knew hideo from the los angeles branch of scratch dj academy, where i had taken a number of classes and been part of an emerging community of hip hop djs and turntablists since 2005. scratch dj academy had for me epitomized the ideals of vinyl culture; aspiring djs were taught how to handle records first and foremost before mixing skills were addressed. instructors and students alike prided themselves on their ability to manipulate wax and their almost fanatical devotion to collecting it; nevertheless, one of the last times i saw hideo playing, he, like most of my scratch academy colleagues, was using serato's dvs technology, and he had even demonstrated controllerist techniques on a vestax midi controller at a major trade show in 2009. dj hideo with vci-300 @ vestax booth namm2009 i informally polled several djs about the issue at one of hideo's memorial events and their responses were the same—they still carried a handful of records to gigs for backup, but when they played out they consistently turned to dvs rather than actual vinyl records. this was usually admitted in a tone of shame and loss, as if confessing a fraud, as well as a reaffirmation of their preference for wax. they used dvs for the convenience of not having to schlep around bags of records and the ability to access large libraries instantly (though some begrudgingly acknowledged the advantage of being able to more extensively manipulate sounds in the digital realm with loops and cue points and the like), but made clear that they preferred the sound, feel and physical virtuosity of the older format.[1] such reactions were manifestations of a crisis in the relationship between technology and identity that had for some time been mediated by discourses of authenticity and virtuosity rooted in the vinyl format. in edm culture outside of hip hop, a similar crisis had passed some years earlier with the wide acceptance of cd players designed for djs. hip hop djs, on the other hand, emerged into the digital world somewhat surreptitiously—dvs technologies allowed them to spin music from digital collections without giving up the tactile dimensions of the performance interface—dvs djs play digital music using vinyl records and turntables as their primary interface.[2] it is clear from the expressions of anxiety surrounding the shift (not to mention the vehement denunciations among the vocal minority who hadn't made the leap to digital technologies of any sort) that within perceptions of the format lay an as yet unexamined crisis of identity. music technologies have always been cathected with discourses of authenticity and virtuosity. of course, these discourses are intertwined: a "real" dj is defined in part by his or her technical proficiency with the instrument. what is at issue, however, is the "instrument" itself: both the format of the musical recording and the interface through which that recording is manipulated. sarah thornton's studies of club cultures have shown that the dynamic of authenticity and technology is fluid rather than fixed; new musical technologies are first perceived as phony and threatening to the "truth" of musical virtuosity. they may be skeptically incorporated into musical subcultures in the beginning but they carry audible traces of inauthenticity in the sounds they produce, sounds that audiences find unnatural, even unsettling. "once absorbed into culture", however, "they seem indigenous and organic". underlying this movement is "the fact that technological developments make new concepts of authenticity possible" (1996: 29). new technologies, in other words, undergo a process of authentication that is tied to the emergence and consolidation of new subcultural communities. these communities—kenney (1999), following paul valéry, calls them "circles of resonance"—legitimize new conditions and standards for what is considered musical expression and skill. eventually, as the new technology is incorporated into larger circles of resonance, it no longer sounds artificial and unsettling at all. this sequence of events has accompanied developments in music technology at least since the invention of the phonograph (kenney 1999). the only thing new about the current crisis is the speed of technological change. vinyl djs had been frowned upon by mainstream musical culture until the turntable could be authenticated as a performance instrument in the 1980s (schloss 2004). these same djs, threatened by digital technologies in the 1990s, looked down upon cd-djs and decried their efforts as inauthentic and unoriginal. dvs technologies emerged in the early 21st century, with many djs, both vinyl and digital, expressing disdain for this latest innovation. in just a few years, dvs has been authenticated in some communities, with some of its users now questioning the authenticity of a new generation of performers increasingly known as "controllerists". and even these new button-pushers were outraged seeing their own authenticities under attack when in april 2010, rana june sobhany, a "social media maven" with no dj experience at all, suddenly went viral with a youtube video declaring herself "the world's first ipad dj", and proceeded to book gigs at major venues thanks to the backing of shrewd publicists in the technology industry. the ipad dj the phenomenon of the ipad dj in particular seemed to take the question of authenticity to its most absurd extreme. here was a young woman with rudimentary dj skills at best (but plenty of marketing savvy) generating a storm of press (and landing coveted gigs) for djing with nothing but a couple of video screens.[3] many djs and controllerists alike felt her sudden popularity made a mockery of the skills a dj was supposed to have. some blamed the technology—of all the instruments one could be known for playing, sobhany had perhaps picked the one most symbolic of the increasing technological mediation of everyday life—while others pointed the finger at her skillset and criticized what they perceived as her arrogant appropriation of the "dj" title without the requisite proficiency. don't blame the tools, some argued; in the hands of a true virtuoso, the ipad could be a very effective dj instrument: dj dab ipad dj rig first build whatever the skills of this or that performer, the history of recorded music generally and dj technology in particular confirms that nobody holds the corner on authenticity—new technologies appear deceptive at first but they can be authenticated within particular circles of resonance. nevertheless, this authentication takes place within a material physical context. while we can dispense with the idea that one technology is inherently more "truthful" than another, we can perhaps say that it can be ineluctably so. the materiality of recorded sound as physical reality is often missed in academic discussions of digital dj technology in perhaps too quick a rush to avoid technological determinism. for analog and digital recording technologies are materially quite different, and the notions of authenticity that emerge from the different subcultures involved are tied to these differences. as rothenbuhler and peters (1997) argued in a remarkable essay on "phonography", the physical traces of sound required in vinyl recording have a direct and non-arbitrary relationship to the reproduced sounds themselves. farrugia and swiss (2009: 42) write off rothenbuhler and peters' analysis as a value judgment against cds, misapprehending the material basis of their argument. for the vinyl record, the relationship between the sound being reproduced and the technology of reproduction is a relationship governed by the laws of cause and effect—the grooves of the record press were carved by a needle vibrating to the frequencies of the sounds being recorded. how vinyl records are made this relationship is in some ways the shadow of the physical dimension of visual art that walter benjamin (1968) once described as the "aura" of the work of art, an aura that allegedly had been lost in an era of mechanical reproduction. benjamin, too, has been misread as arguing for the inauthenticity of film and photography; such readings ignore the fact that his idea of the "aura" is explicitly tied to physical processes, as well the ways in which the work of art's liberation from this aura opens up new possibilities for art as a vehicle of social change. rothenbuhler and peters (1997: 246) explain that in the world of recorded music, digital technology stores numbers: these numbers are related to waveforms by a convention arrived at in intercorporate negotiations and established as an industry standard, but they could be anything. . . . by contrast, the phonograph record and the analog magnetic tape do contain physical traces of the music. . . . the hills and valleys of those grooves are physical analogs of the vibrations of the music. . . . when we buy a record we buy music, and when we buy a cd we buy data. if that key claim is true, then the end of the age of phonography will be marked by the spread of attitudes and practices that take advantage of that difference (emphasis added). their essay was written in the 1990s, when cd distribution had become very widespread and a very different "death of vinyl" had been announced. while it's clear that vinyl never really "died", the "spread of attitudes and practices that take advantage" of the new technologies have clearly been embodied in the practices of digital djs. while digitization of recorded music separated it from the material conditions of the production of sound, it also opened up possibilities for musical expression that could only be dreamed of by vinyl djs. dmc champion dj rafik performs on traktor scratch pro traktor turntable tricknology with dj shiftee the fact that a vinyl recording is indelibly linked by natural physical processes to a specific moment in space and time makes the phonograph a medium in the spiritual sense: vinyl records are literally a window into another world. vinyl may not be dead, but the dead speak to us through vinyl. indeed, it is telling that among the earliest suggested uses of the phonograph was the preservation of the voices of deceased loved ones (new york times 1889). "the phonograph speaks from 'the other side,' as if in a séance" (rothenbuhler 1997: 245). the dj is an interpreter of the past, and when s/he works with vinyl recordings, s/he works with literal reproductions of past events. as jeff chang (2010: 119) writes, djs are "historians of the future. who knows better the possibilities of the past than the one who will plunge a needle into it blind?" on the other hand, to work with digital media—whether cds or mp3s—is to work with reconstructions rather than reproductions of past events (rothenbuhler 1997: 252). the digital medium cannot physically hold a piece of the past the way a vinyl record does; it can only hold symbols that have an arbitrary relationship to that past. while one is tempted to mourn the loss of the reproduction and declare digital media inauthentic, it bears emphasizing that while a reconstruction is not necessarily a reproduction, a reproduction is always a reconstruction. in other words, the vinyl recording is also an approximation of reality rather than reality itself; it's just a different kind of approximation, one connected by physics rather than symbolics. one can just as easily read digital technology not as the "death of vinyl" but rather as liberation from the physical limitations of the natural world. this liberation allows for the manipulation of sound in ways that simply aren't possible with vinyl. it wasn't very long at all after the invention of the phonograph that george prescott (1878: 858) mused about the possibility of developing from it a "musical kaleidoscope, by means of which an infinite variety of new combinations may be produced from the musical compositions now in existence". while the phonograph may have opened the door to thinking about such possibilities, digital technology offered tools with which to implement them. electronic musicians have explored the possibilities of the synthesizer and digital sampler for many years now; dj culture, in many ways, is perhaps finally taking stock of these developments. for the vinyl dj formatist, of course, there is another discourse at work here that concerns not just the medium but the interface between the medium and the performer. part of the vinyl dj's virtuosity lies in the way that s/he negotiates the risk of "trainwrecking"—of failing to match beats accurately and destroying the energy on the dance floor. but a lot of the computer software available to djs today eliminates this negotiation, or, more precisely, removes it from the performance situation. the notorious "sync" button allows djs to match tempos perfectly, without having "paid their dues" with the months of practice it generally takes to learn beatmatching by ear (golden 2008a). some argue that the sync button eliminates the one technical skill that constitutes the dj's virtuosity (van veen 2002); others say that if that's all there is to the dj in the first place, then good riddance. dj lorin (aka bassnectar) said as much in an interview, after declaring beatmatching "obsolete": although i can beat match as instantaneously as the next dj, i don't give an at's rass about doing it and making people watch me do it. i'm rather much more interested in creating and collecting awesome sounds, and layering, combining and broadcasting them as a means to conjur [sic] up an energetically cathartic experience for other humans (golden 2008b). while the debate over such software will likely continue, it is worth reminding ourselves that new instruments have always been viewed with skepticism in the world of music. jim samson reminds us in his study of liszt that "our puritanism echoes plato, who regarded instruments as an excess". he continues: instrumental music deals with a material base that needs to be penetrated and transformed by 'collective human action,' to be purposefully humanized and socialized, before it can become music. however it can also resist that process, allowing the mechanical to stand in opposition not just to the natural but to the human, notably through a reification of instrumental technique (samson 2003: 85). the sync button is of course the ultimate reification of instrumental technique, and many would argue that it functions precisely in this manner—the antithesis of musical experience. but for controllerists, new techniques and ultimately new virtuosities are developing around the new tools, "humanizing and socializing" them so they can be considered instruments for musical performance. ultimately, when we focus on authenticity in relation to technologies we tend to ask the wrong questions. new technologies will always face a dynamic of authentication within circles of resonance, and old technologies will never really disappear. it behooves both the scholar and the dj to consider the possibilities of new technologies without getting caught up in taking sides and choosing weapons. i was not close to dj hideo, but i count myself among those touched and influenced by his spirit. when he died, the people around him made a conscious decision to celebrate his life rather than dwell on what the world lost. the qualities that he brought to the world were not buried with him; his friends and family made those qualities a part of themselves as they celebrated his memory. similarly, rather than mourning the death of vinyl, we should celebrate its life even as we explore new technologies and new possibilities. dj hideo tribute q-bert, ean golden improv jam acknowledgements i am grateful to vinyl junkies anna gavanas and tobias c. van veen for pressing me on the arguments in this essay as well as for constantly reminding me to take heed of the physical dimensions of the art. i'm also grateful to the teachers and community at scratch dj academy in los angeles for continuing to promote the values and skills of vinyl dj culture while preparing students for the digital age in which we live. this piece is dedicated to one of those teachers, dj hideo sugano.   author biography bernardo alexander attias (ph.d., university of iowa) is professor of communication studies at california state university, northridge. his research is primarily in cultural studies, performance studies, and critical theory; his current projects focus on the legal, aesthetic and cultural implications of the phonograph. he has been a dj for over twenty years, spinning eclectic sets incorporating house, hip hop and drum 'n' bass as well as funk, jazz and swing. he occasionally blogs at <http://turntablepoetry.com>. references benjamin, walter. 1968. "the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction". in illuminations. trans. harry zohn. new york: harcourt brace & world, inc. bottomley, andrew. 2010. "record store day, or vinyl record day?" antenna: responses to media and culture. 17 april: <http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2010/04/17/record-store-day-or-vinyl-record-day/> (accessed 20 april 2011). cardew, ben. 2010. "record store day hailed success as indie takings rocket". music week, 1 may: 3. chang, jeff. 2010. "needle into the groove: snippets from an omnidirectional history". in the record: contemporary art and vinyl, ed. trevor schoonmaker. durham: duke university press. farrugia, rebekah and thomas swiss. 2009. "tracking the djs: vinyl records, work, and the debate over new technologies". journal of popular music studies 17(1): 30–44. golden, ean. 2008a. "bassnectar extended interview". dj tech tools. 11 may: <http://www.djtechtools.com/2008/05/11/bassnectar-extended-interview/> (accessed 6 may 2011). ———. 2008b. "to sync or not to sync". dj tech tools. 18 may: <http://www.djtechtools.com/2008/05/18/to-sync-or-not-to-sync/> (accessed 8 may 2011). ———. 2010. "tiefschwarz interview: the death of vinyl and big labels". dj tech tools. 14 april: <http://www.djtechtools.com/2010/04/14/tiefschwarz-interview-the-death-of-vinyl-and-big-labels> (accessed 14 april 2010). green, kathleen. 2010. "vinyl record sales are surging". dallas morning news, 18 february: <http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/music/headlines/20100218-vinyl-record-sales-are-surging-5090.ece> (accessed 23 march 2011). katz, mark. 2010. capturing sound: how technology has changed music. revised edition. berkeley: university of california press. kenney, william howland. 1999. recorded music in american life: the phonograph and popular memory, 1890–1945. new york: oxford university press. kirn, peter. 2008. "ni ends legal dispute over traktor scratch; digital vinyl's twisty, turny history". create digital music. 28 april: < http://createdigitalmusic.com/2008/04/ni-ends-legal-dispute-over-traktor-scratch-digital-vinyls-twisty-turny-history/> (accessed 14 april 2009). montano, ed. 2010. "'how do you know he's not playing pac-man while he's supposed to be djing?': technology, formats and the digital future of dj culture". popular music 29(3): 397–416. new york times. 1889. "a phonograph in a death chamber". 25 november: 4. prescott, george c. 1878. "the telephone and the phonograph". scribner's monthly, 15(6). rothenbuhler, eric w. and john durham peters. 1997. "defining phonography: an experiment in theory". the musical quarterly 81(2): 242-264. samoglou, emmanuel. 2011. "turntables: a piece of music history winds down". thestar.com, 28 january: <http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/music/article/929746--turntables-a-piece-of-music-history-winds-down> (accessed 20 april 2011). samson, jim. 2003. virtuosity and the musical work: the transcendental studies of liszt. cambridge: cambridge university press. schloss, joseph g. 2004. making beats: the art of sample-based hip-hop. middletown: wesleyan university press. solon, olivia. 2010. "and vinyly presses your ashes into vinyl when you die". wired uk, 30 august: <http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/08/vinyl-ashes/> (accessed 22 april 2011). thornton, sarah. 1996. club cultures: music, media, and subcultural capital. middletown: wesleyan university press. tokyo reporter. 2010. "dead spin: panasonic discontinues technics analog turntables". 28 october: <http://www.tokyoreporter.com/2010/10/28/dead-spin-panasonic-discontinues-technics-analog-turntables/> (accessed 20 april 2011). van veen, tobias c. 2002. "vinyauralism: the art and the craft of turntablism. the dj school". discorder march: <http://www.scribd.com/doc/55035776/vinyauralism-the-art-and-the-craft-of-turntablism-the-dj-school> (accessed 9 may 2011). notes [1] the evidence here is anecdotal, to be sure, but these assertions are quite consistent with published research on the issue; see, for example, montano (2010), ferguson (2009) and katz (2010). [2] digital vinyl systems work through standard turntables and special "timecode" vinyl records that are played as one plays any other record. instead of music, however, the record contains a high-pitched sound that can be read by computer software in order to determine the position of the needle, its direction, and its speed on the record. this gives the dj to manipulate the sound of a digital file housed on a hard drive with virtually the same physical actions as playing or scratching an actual record (see kirn 2008 generally). [3] technically, she used a mixer as well, though as is evident from some significant gaffes in the youtube video, the mixer is hardly an instrument she is familiar with. beyond the dance floor: female djs, technology and electronic dance music culture rebekah farrugia bristol and chicago: intellect, 2012. isbn: 978-1-84150-566-4 (paperback) rrp: us$28.50 / uk£20 hillegonda c. rietveld london south bank university (uk) rebekah farrugia provides a timely ethnographic investigation into how young women in the us engage with edmc in the dj profession and related music production. as hutton (2006) and rodgers (2010) note in the uk and us respectively, over the last 25 years the number of women in the dj profession has increased significantly. still, although as dancers women are the crucial participants at edm events, women still have significantly less opportunities than men to lead in music production beyond the dance floor. roughly around 10 percent of djs are female, and they are confronted with a range of personal and social obstacles in acquiring relevant know-how in essential social networks to build a successful dj career. dj mag's influential 2013 dj top 100 includes just one female dj, tenashar, who presents herself in a highly sexualized manner, illustrating well how gendered differentiation takes place in the populist realm. women, it seems, are given more opportunities as singing, dancing and objectified participants than as the lead in public musical proceedings—politics that are also evidenced in the anonymized production of the sampled, deconstructed and sexualized female voice in edm (bradby 1993). the step from performing dj to music producer is even tougher, even though the transition from mixing records to the remix may seem quite smooth. this seems partly due to a significant experiential difference between the sociability of dj performance and a sense of isolation in studio production. with regards sound engineers, smaill found in the north-west of the uk that around 2 to 5 percent are female, and are “mostly concentrated in live sound engineering” (cited in leonard 2007: 52) rather than in studio-based music production. although an example of female-male collaboration is addressed as an enabling experience, often studios are male-dominated spaces, where masculinised in-jokes and the mystification of technology can work to exclude women. to evade the usual studio apprenticeships and informal male networks, education could bridge this gap. yet, even in this context, armstrong (2011) shows that lack of an understanding of the gendered discourses that construct how we understand music production technologies can hamper the progress of girls and women into the world of music production. similarly, in their research of gender politics in the dj world in europe, gavanas and reitsamer (2013) have found that dj technology has been gendered as a male tool kit; this is partly addressed through supportive female dj networks, such as female:pressure. here, relevant technical know-how to work the home music studio is shared, as well as inormation about productions and dj gigs. an online network cannot solve unequal access to equipment, however, especially if one is not part of a local production network in which (mainly male) producers share equipment and skills. farrugia first addresses “male-centricity” (21) in edm through a comparison with gender politics in other areas of the popular music industry. the sense of self-effacing equality one may have experienced on the rave dance floor of the early 1990s does not necessarily translate into the hierarchical politics of the dj booth. patriarchal politics are active in the journalistic exscription of female dj pioneers from historical accounts. sicko's unique study of detroit techno (1999) is cited as an example of edm history in which the contribution of women to that scene, such as kelli hand and dj minx, is ignored. farrugia also shows that exclusion is achieved discursively by presenting djs as heroic leaders, as is the case in brewster and broughton’s extensive dj history, last night a dj saved my life (2000), in which the dj is consistently described in the male third-person singular. in addition, the “homosociality of record collecting” (28), especially in the dance record shops that mushroomed during the 1990s, provided the male dj with the necessary (sub)cultural capital and with the social networks necessary to build a dj career, as the shopkeeper and record collecting dj gained positions of power and control as public gatekeepers. this contrasts to the early 20th century, when record buying was first considered to be an exclusive feminine pursuit, an extension of the purchase of piano sheet music. this was because, at that time, the phonograph was part of the private sphere, a relatively passive form of domestic entertainment. this shift in how record buying is gendered shows “the extent to which such practices are socially constructed [in] a given time period” (29). as marketable commodities, djs engage in visual branding, which intensified during the late 1990s. through staging a dj spectacle, visual differentiation is enhanced (rietveld 2013). female djs negotiate this performative dimension of their profession through self-conscious use of dress codes. farrugia identifies at least two dress types in her ethnographic study of us-based west-coast djs. firstly, the “sex-kitten” heightens and celebrates gendered difference, offering “eye-candy” (53); this works well in the commercial edm scene but ironically this strategy also undermines their authenticity as dj. secondly, the “t-shirt dj” dresses similarly to her male counterparts in order to be taken seriously as a dj, yet in the hegemonic mass cultural domain this does not guarantee a commercially successful dj career. in addition, there is the “dyke dj”, who is likely to gain the support of male djs as they can “embody the roles of both the objectified and the objectifier” (63). the individual decisions that women make to construct and represent their dj identity do not necessarily address the systemic issues that confront women in the edmc industry. to achieve this, various collective alternative responses have been initiated by and for women. in the us, this includes online forums, similar to female:pressure, and e-zines, such as shejay, as well as potlucks at which female djs gather to exchange technical skills and musical knowledge. the resulting social networks also provide the necessary opportunities to get dj work. farrugia concludes that “[c]ontrary to popular discourse that presents feminism as passé, this . . . demonstrates a continued need for feminist politics and action” (89). san franscisco's dj network sister sf is presented as a specific case study of a successful female dj network. they rejected “the label ‘feminist’ even as it embodied feminist practices” (94). such a paradoxical attitude is commonly heard across borders amongst female djs who wish to connect but are afraid of ghettoization. between 1997 and 2008, this successful online network developed various sister branches, or chapters, across the us, keeping tight control over its memorable logo and visual image in order to maintain strong brand identity. in the end, “sister usa and all its chapters had become inactive” (111) mainly because they had achieved their goal to increase the visibility of professional female djs. some of the leading figures retired, the sister nyc branch deviated from the shared brand image and, significantly, personal sister websites were replaced by myspace pages where it was harder to maintain control over the sister brand image. although such tight brand control may seem contrary to earlier feminist collective ideologies, this case study shows that it may be a successful strategy in a society that thrives on logos and trademarks. it may be easy to feel angry at the gender inequalities that exist beyond the dance floor. instead, farrugia coolly presents her ethnographic findings in relation to comprehensive insights from research literature on gender and the world of popular music. beyond the dance floor provides not only a measured critique, but also optimistically shows various individual and collective strategies that women can adopt in the struggle to gain relevant social and (sub)cultural capital in order to develop a successful dj and production career in edmc. one day, it is hoped, we may simply speak of the creative practices of djs and music producers, without a need to qualify gender. references armstrong, victoria. 2011. technology and the gendering of music education. farnham and burlington vt: ashgate. bradby, barbara. 1993. “sampling sexuality: gender, technology and the body in dance music”. popular music 12(2): 155-176. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143000005535>. brewster, bill and frank broughton. 2000. last night a dj saved my life: the history of the disc jockey. new york: grove press. dj mag. 2013. “top 100 djs”. <http://www.djmag.com/top100> (accessed 6 may 2014). female:pressure. 2014. “about female:pressure”. <http://www.femalepressure.net/fempress.html> (accessed 6 may 2014). gavanas, anna and rosa reitsamer. 2013. “dj technologies, social networks and gendered trajectories in european dj cultures”. in dj culture in the mix: power, technology, and social change in electronic dance music, eds. bernardo alexander attias, anna gavanas and hillegonda c. rietveld, 51-77. new york and london: bloomsbury. hutton, fiona. 2006. risky pleasures? club cultures and feminine identities. aldershot and burlington vt: ashgate. leonard, marion. 2007. gender in the music industry: rock, discourse and girl power. aldershot and burlington vt: ashgate. rietveld, hillegonda c. 2013. “journey to the light? immersion, spectacle and mediation”. in dj culture in the mix: power, technology, and social change in electronic dance music, eds. bernardo alexander attias, anna gavanas and hillegonda c. rietveld, 79-102. new york and london: bloomsbury academic. rodgers, tara. 2010. pink noises: women on electronic music and sound. durham nc: duke university press. sicko, dan. 1999. techno rebels: a unique narrative of the evolution and revolution of techno music. new york: billboard books. aurora festival and the sacred rituals of samothraki: past, present... what future? chiara baldini independent researcher <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.01.12> it is the summer of 2011 and i am travelling to the 4th edition of the aurora festival, taking place for the first time on the island of samothraki, greece. i have been invited to give a presentation on the ancient initiation rituals native to this remote island for many centuries. this is my second visit to samothraki; my first visit was to attend the samothraki dance festival in 2002. while i knew little about psytrance back then, i grew to like this scene more than anything i had experienced before. two years later, under the geodesic dome at boom festival 2004, i started considering the possibility that these events were a spontaneous resurfacing of ancient ecstatic practices and subsequently researched the western traditions of such practices, which appear to have included the so-called “mysteries of samothraki”. today, i’m thrilled to return to this island and thankful to the “aurorians” for reviving a trance party at this magic location after a police raid led to the dramatic end of the samothraki dance festival in 2003. with my travel companion, i board the boat in alexandropolis one week before the festival begins. for hundreds of years this port has been the gateway for thousands of pilgrims who came to be initiated in the cult of the mysterious kabeiroi, or great gods, of samothraki. as we arrive at the ticket office, i can’t help thinking about all those who have made this journey before us: men and women, the free and the enslaved, greek and foreigners, as testified by the preserved lists of initiates engraved on marble. they came from far away, maybe travelling for the first and only time in their lives, full of expectations and excitement. for these travellers, to be initiated gave them the chance to meet the kabeiroi personally, and to be reborn among the glorious ranks of samothraki initiates, respected and honored all around the ancient world as exceptionally trustworthy, fearless, helpful and generous people. the man at the ticket office asks for our names and types them in the computer. considering what we are led to expect on the island— “a colorful initiation into the cosmic secrets of the sacred island of samothraki” (aurora festival 2011)—i feel that we are now part of those lists. these modern times are crazy indeed if i feel entitled to compare one of the most revered and sacred greek rituals, where alexander the great was said to have been conceived, to a “rave”! samothraki (2011). photo: chiara baldini. from afar, the island, a volcano of 1,611m, looks like an old grandma who knows a lot. the mountain was the home of the great goddess, the lady of the mountain, the mother of the kabeiroi, and after all these years it seems like she’s still there, welcoming those who visit her, guarding her secrets from some while revealing them to the chosen ones... once on the island, we arrive at the party site a short drive along the coast. we drive in to the camping ground without being checked: the men at the door appear to observe a sort of don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy. we comply. the whole site is still under construction: big fluoro shapes are yet to be hung from the beautiful shady trees, cables are still to be laid, workers and campers mingle. between the trees i can see a pebble beach and the deep blue of the aegean sea. i’m happy to notice that this site—where the festival was held ten years prior—remains a paradise. we meet our friends amala, pedro and leo, who are building the temple of gnosis where, according to the festival’s website, “philosophers, thinkers, academics, practitioners and wise men will merge knowledge from different parts of the world and scientifically explore the mystical and sacred relationship between the human being as a creator and its environment, mother gaia”. it’s a very optimistic name for an ambitious project, and i feel proud that my presentation will be given here. the area looks spectacular. there are natural decorations of carefully piled stones, wooden sculptures of dragons and butterflies and other leafy installations, which show that much love was involved in the setting up of this place. but this picture of beauty and harmony soon fades with revelations of the disorganized state of production: no food for the workers, nor the tools and materials promised. yet, despite the quite tense situation, the island is marvellous and the workers seem to be giving their best, in her honor. dance floor (2011). photo: chiara baldini. we continue exploring, walking on the pebbled beach and soon reach a blaze of black, orange and yellow lycra—the dance floor. this brightly colored plastic fabric seems to me a bit out of place between the green trees and the blue sea, even if the original idea, as stated on the website, was to create a beehive-like structure in homage to the “sacred hexagon, nature’s perfect shape”. here, we meet greek maria, the area manager of the temple of gnosis, who tells us about the organiser’s optimistic expectations to host 7,000 people. she introduces us to teo, the main promoter of the festival, a greek in his late twenties with a ponytail and long, almost asian, eyes, which gives him the appearance of an ancient minoan from crete. while on the phone, he lifts his long eyes and whispers “welcome to greece”, quickly returning to his own language and worries. the minoan eyes are sad. it seems like he wishes to be anywhere else but where he is and i feel sympathetic, since event production is doubtlessly a multidimensional responsibility. he must be sitting on hot coals. i hope he knows what he’s doing. in the following days, we take time out to visit the sanctuary of the great gods where the ancient initiations were celebrated.[1] the sanctuary is strategically located between two (now dry) rivers and consists of many marble buildings built in phases starting from the sixth century bc: the hall of choral dances, where the sacred dances were performed; the rotunda, the biggest circular building in ancient greece whose purpose remains unknown; the hall of votive gifts, where those who sought special protection left offerings to the gods; the stoa, where initiates slept; the theatre; the dining rooms... today, very little remains. the sanctuary (2011). photo: chiara baldini. earthquakes, a series of wars, looting and human misery have turned the site into a pile of stones now painstakingly examined by greek archaeologists financed by the eu. but what happened here was so uncommon and epoch-making that even today the place is spellbinding and attracts a varied crowd of visitors among whom you can find the casual tourist, the school teacher of classic letters and the expert esotericist, walking side by side and scrutinising the piles of stones. the forest (2011). photo: chiara baldini. actually, besides the sanctuary, the whole island is rich with sites of mystery and magnetism: fairy-tale scenarios of green waterfalls surrounded by huge sycamore trees with volcanic stones embedded in their roots, mythological rock landscapes dotted with wild goats, ancient fountains with enigmatic symbols, hidden neolithic sites... as my friend tells me: “here the goddess is full power!” finally the day comes and the gates, now efficiently patrolled by the mega sprint guards, open and people start to flow in. i sit down to look at them, the new “initiates”: dusty rastas, giggling young girls, psy-cyber-techno-nerds, plain greek couples enjoying an alternative end of summer, seventh generation german freaks with way-too-cool caravans, hardcore eastern guys with their backpacks full of alcohol, and mysterious unidentifiable types (always my favorite). being the end of august, many arrive from a full season of parties, their arms encrusted with wristbands. while most are greek, many come from eastern and western europe, and there are a few americans, japanese and brazilians. while observing these new arrivals, the different stages of initiation in ancient times come to mind. the first stage is open to everyone while the second and third stages are only accessible to those who had reached a higher level of self-realisation and are proven to possess high moral standards. i imagine the team of priests and priestesses in the sanctuary, who had developed an “eye” to see those who could go further in the initiation and had devised a ritualised experience, the initiation, allowing a real development in the personalities of the initiates, so that they could go back home “better in every respect” (an often quoted passage by greek historian diodorus siculus) to function as models, sources of inspiration, mature enough within themselves to offer a support to others. this concept has fired my imagination. in the psytrance scene, i have always found exceptionally good hearted, “connected” or “evolved” people, who have motivated my return to parties over the years, inspiring my participation in the scene. is a similar kind of “selection” now occurring without the interventions of a class of priests? after all, isn’t it “grandma” (i.e. nature) who selects? i indulge these thoughts as excited partygoers greet old friends, hug strangers, and share food and drinks among one another. happiness is palpable and highly contagious while greek tv channels report stories on the opening of the infamous gathering of drug abusers and perverts. when i am exposed to the derogatory clichés used by media reporting on electronic music gatherings, i often think of the strictly observed ancient tradition, which forbade any disclosure to the uninitiated regarding what happened during the initiation. finally the music starts and a hand made bulgarian sound system plays powerfully stirring rhythm patterns, while big plastic bees and huge drops of plastic honey hover above blissed-out dancers. the line-up is actually impressive, mainly progressive and full on, with some good old goa. sometimes it sounds even a bit too slow for the night, but still, for me, it is much better than the ultra dark necro-trance often played at night in many parties. too bad that, even in aurora, the female presence behind the decks is depressingly non-existent. among over 80 acts performing on the main stage the only female dj is brazilian ekanta. it is sad to notice that, after 20 years of european psytrance festivals, it is still very difficult for women to break the “glass ceiling” separating the dance floor from the dj booth. i don’t think grandma would appreciate this. dj with his daughter (2011). photo: robsen. even back in the day music seemed to have been a major element in the ancient rituals. music and wine mixed with herbs were used to induce a state of divine possession, which was seen as a means to get in touch with the kabeiroi and with the goddess. and it is on the dance floor where i feel we find the link with the past. for it is in this space where people genuinely release repressed energy, break physical boundaries, embark on multidimensional travels and have their own mostly un-coded, un-deciphered encounters with the mysterious powers of nature, even if they very rarely describe it in these terms. rather, they will declare with bright eyes that it was “fucking awesome”, and you will see them cry in desperation when the music stops. yet, this enthusiasmos, this willingness to let go of one’s self and to venture into the mysterious realms and the irrational forces of nature is what remains, 2,000 years later, compelling thousands of people to come from the farthest lands to dance at the feet of the sacred mountain—likely feeling her healing presence at a deeper level than many of those who today live on samothraki breaking physical boundaries (2011). photo: murdoc. enthusiastic dancer (2011). photo: robsen. transcending (2011). photo: murdoc. actually, talking about numbers, i begin to realize that, even though it is pumping, the dance floor seems to be... half empty. the next day there are rumors that only 2,000 tickets had been sold and by the third night, the “big djs” stop coming and the most updated line up ceases to have any connection to reality. as a result, greek djs start performing repeatedly, the same tracks are heard over and over again and the quality of the music lowers significantly. as i take in other areas of the festival i gain a better picture of what is happening. the chill out space never really takes off: despite the blue balls hanging from the trees, the area is unwelcoming, uncomfortable, and for the most part empty. meanwhile, in the temple of gnosis, the program is drastically reduced to a few workshops and talks by those speakers (like me) who have managed to reach the island independently—as it turns out, most of these guests have been sent false flight reservations! even if no one from management communicates it to me, it is now clear that the promised reimbursement for my travelling expenses will not materialize. the situation is getting heated. those who have spent weeks working their asses off to build the festival (including the british team who created the dance floor and our friends of the gnosis area), those who have been contracted to shoot videos of the party, or to make projections in the different areas, all become nervous about getting paid. in many cases, this money is needed for workers to return home! by day three, teo is nowhere to be found. he only answers the phone to his greek collaborators and refuses to meet anyone, even if only to admit that he doesn’t have the money and to deal with the situation responsibly. rumors circulate about unpaid workers and djs at previous aurora editions, rumors now matching the many negative comments i had read about the “aurorians” in online trance forums. back in the glorious days of samothraki, those with such dubious ethics were unlikely to have occupied such a paramount position in the ceremony! my presentation is repeatedly postponed, but after three days, it finally happens. before a crowd of about 30–40 people, i explain how a prehistoric cult of nature worship arriving from the near east and involving shamanic practices of ecstasy has managed to survive through the millennia, adapting to cultural transformations without losing its integrity and power. this was possible thanks to an always honored connection to the roots of the cult; to its integration within the more intellectually evolved hellenic culture, and to the exceptional honesty and trustworthiness of those celebrating the initiations. and of course thanks to an extraordinary location, whose magic cannot be described, only experienced directly. on the festival website, i read that the aurora production team consider themselves “loyal followers of the psychedelic trance scene”, while, amidst the avalanche of criticism on a thread on the isratrance forum, i read max-k’s (2011) comment that “the organizers are fully committed to the tribe’s spiritual experience”. i ponder the meaning of these statements, for they reveal an awareness that organizing a psytrance party involves much more than logistics. but if being part of this scene is simply about liking a specific kind of music, then psytrance is destined to have an expiry date like any other fashion. if this scene is about creating spaces to evolve into higher levels of awareness, which inherently involves acting with integrity and honor, as it used to be for the samothraki initiates, then perhaps there is hope for psytrance to survive and mature, as the mysteries did for many centuries... but in this case, the minoan promoter and his crew will have to engage in a good talk with grandma. author biography chiara baldini graduated from the university of florence, italy, in english linguistics. she has been attending psytrance parties since the late 1990s, joining festivals all around the world. since 2004, she has conducted independent research on the historical and mythological roots of psytrance parties and the evolution of the “cult of ecstasy”. she has participated in the boom festival as a guest speaker both in 2008 (as part of the “what is trance?” panel, highlighting the parallels between trance parties and greek mystery cults), and in 2010 with a presentation focusing on a comparison between the boom festival and the mysteries of eleusis. she writes for the boom festival website and is a contributor to the anthology the local scenes and global culture of psytrance (routledge 2010) edited by graham st john. email: chiara_baldini at yahoo dot com references aurora festival. 2011. <http://www.aurorafestival.gr> (accessed 15 december 2011). max-k. 2011. “aurora festival 2011-samothraki island”. isratrance. 26 august <http://forum.isratrance.com/aurora-festival-11-samothraki-island/page6/> (accessed 20 january 2012). lehmann, k. 1966. samothrace: a guide to the excavations and the museum. new york university press: new york. notes [1] for a detailed description of the sanctuary of the great gods, see lehmann (1966). the vibe of the exiles: aliens, afropsychedelia and psyculture dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 5(2): 56–87 issn 1947-5403 ©2013 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.02.04 the vibe of the exiles: aliens, afropsychedelia and psyculture graham st john griffith university (australia) abstract this article offers detailed comment on the vibe of the exiles, a socio-sonic aesthetic infused with the sensibility of the exile, of compatriotism in expatriation, a characteristic of psychedelic electronica from goatrance to psytrance and beyond (i.e. psyculture). the commentary focuses on an emancipatory artifice which sees participants in the psyculture continuum adopt the figure of the alien in transpersonal and utopian projects. decaled with the cosmic liminality of space exploration, alien encounter and abduction repurposed from science fiction, psychedelic event-culture cultivates posthumanist pretentions resembling afrofuturist sensibilities that are identified with, appropriated and reassembled by participants. offering a range of examples, among them israeli psychedelic artists bent on entering another world, the article explores the interface of psyculture and afrofuturism. sharing a theme central to cosmic jazz, funk, rock, dub, electro, hip-hop and techno, from the earliest productions, israeli and otherwise, goatrance, assumed an off-world trajectory, and a concomitant celebration of difference, a potent otherness signified by the alien encounter, where contact and abduction become driving narratives for increasingly popular social aesthetics. exploring the different orbits from which mystics and ecstatics transmit visions of another world, the article, then, focuses on the sociosonic aesthetics of the dance floor, that orgiastic domain in which a multitude of “freedoms” are performed, mutant utopias propagated, and alien identities danced into being. keywords: alien-ation; psyculture; afrofuturism; posthumanism; psytrance; exiles; aliens; vibe graham st john is a cultural anthropologist and researcher of electronic dance music cultures and festivals. he is the author of six books including global tribe: spirituality, technology and psytrance (equinox 2012) and technomad: global raving countercultures (equinox 2009), adjunct research fellow at the griffith centre for cultural studies, griffith university, australia, and executive editor of dancecult. his website is <www.edgecentral.net>. feature article st john | the vibe of the exiles 57 power source’s (1996) hypnotic “goaway” features the line: “music is different here, the vibrations are different, not like planet earth”. and later, amid the driving rhythm, “we will effect the vibrations”. sampling sun ra from the 1974 afropsychedelic feature film space is the place, this mid-1990s israeli goatrance production evokes the desire among practitioners and enthusiasts of the psychedelic aesthetic to build a marginal and expatriate lifestyle in exile from the maligned parent culture; to fashion a difference that is pressed into the social aesthetic, the vibe, of the psychedelic trance dance party. from all-night party to week-long festival, appealing to those hailing from many nations and speaking a multitude of languages, the vibe of the exiles reverberates in the present with the proliferation of global psyculture. with its diverse musicological roots, the psychedelic electronic dance music counterculture emerging in goa, india, in the late 1980s known as “goatrance” was the wellspring for the flourishing of psychedelic trance (or “psytrance”) around the world from the mid-1990s (see st john 2012a). psytrance shares music production technologies and dj techniques with other electronic dance music cultures (edmcs), including “detroit techno”. with its distinct psychedelic sonic and visual aesthetics, organisations and parties, psytrance is distinguishable from that which is popularly marketed as “trance” (e.g. progressive trance, eurotrance, hard trance). while producers and participants are predominantly, but by no means exclusively, white, psytrance shares a largely unrecognised psychedelic aesthetic heritage with afrodiasporic musics. decaled with space exploration motifs, resounding with ascensionist discourse and alien encounters lifted and repurposed from science fiction cinema, psychedelic eventculture is richly inscribed with an off-planetary utopianism holding much in common with afrofuturist becomings. the article explores the interfacing of psyculture and afrofuturism, dissecting freak counterculturalist and afrodiasporic imaginations, offering commentary on the appropriation and remixing of the aesthetics of alienation. the meaning of “alienation” i use requires unpacking here. in standard psycho-sociological conceptualisations, “alienation” refers to the effects of disenfranchisement, exclusion, an absence of authenticity. it is the disenchantment cumulating from oppressive social systems, power’s limits on freedom, and the denials of humanity, from slavery to bureaucracy. but the study of alienation has typically addressed the cultural artifice propagating in the face of power. and thus we observe the communities and artists in exile forming in response to oppression, as can be observed in the posthumanist interventions of black science fiction authors, hip-hop artists and detroit techno musicians. neither definitively utopian nor dystopian, here, the “alien nation” is decidedly heterotopian, if mark sinker’s (1992) original whirlwind of digressions is any chart to navigate. in sinker’s postulations, the chief characteristic of these artforms is, nevertheless, “survival; by syncretism, by bricolage, by a day-to-day programme of appropriation and adaptation as resourcefully broad-minded as any in history”. such strategies are integral to the remixological praxis of edm cultures, not the least of all psychedelic electronica. in the language i adopt, where usage connotes the alien dancecult 5(2)58 of extraterrestrial or interdimensional infamy, to be alienated is to access a potentially emancipatory liminality not dissimilar to that identified by sinker. i identify two notunrelated modes. in the first, the figure of the alien is appropriated to gnostic objectives, embodying an otherness the adoption of which may be integral to self-discovery. the alien, typically but certainly not exclusively benevolent, is adopted within psycho-cultural arts as a vehicle of re-enchantment. alienation is then a performance of self-virtualisation, where the journey (intergalactic or otherwise) is a narrative of self-metamorphosis and the alien a transpersonalising device, enabling a self-transcendence achievable with the assistance of a spectrum of sensory technologies (see st john 2013a). with the second mode that will figure prominently in this article, and which is differentiated here as alien-ation, we turn the original meaning on its head. the figure of the alien, as a symbol of ultimate difference, collapses all distinctions, becoming a utopian (or indeed dystopian) signifier, holding appeal to the excluded, to the dislocated, to the alienated. here we find the practice of alien-ation as a possible architectonic of salvation, where sensory technologies are adopted to effect altered social conditions; a socio-sonic aesthetic, or vibe, the optimised aesthetics of abduction, propagating the conditions of freedom desired in contradistinction to those beyond the event. it is little wonder that israelis, as we’ll observe, find truck with afrofuturisms, and will deploy and appropriate such utopian constructs, despite the very different histories of oppression. the vibe electronic dance music culture is a product of the interfacing of european and afrodiasporic cultural aesthetics, social practices and sonic techniques. over some four decades, a techno-liberationism has animated edm genres, scenes and movements (and indeed other popular music forms). edmcs are futurist technocultures whose post/ humanist forms are embellished with dramatic quests for freedom born from estrangement, and flushed with a sensibility of transit, of movement, albeit so often a “movement” without objective, a revelation without content, and which is nevertheless potent, archetypally liminal, which derives from the latin “limen”, meaning threshold. cults of expectancy have arisen in which a contingent technics is venerated by disaffected populations in the faithful application of a mechanics of transcendence enabling rupture from the past, and an escalation into the future that is lived in an ongoing and dramatic present. with hermetic and afrofuturist inspiration, these dance cultures are fashioned according to repurposed design and chance arrangements, with sonic artifice, computer technology and sci-fi cinema appropriated in pursuit of the raceless ascension, cyborgian mutation, the alien nation. although variously expressed, the ultimate compulsion here is an expatriation into universality, a merger with the divine, with electronic synthesizers the hallmark instrumentation through which the ascension is sought and obtained. but while synthesis orchestrates cosmic contact, it also facilitates contact with one’s fellow travellers. thus, while prosthetically enhanced fantasies may enable disembodiment or out-of-bodiment, this synthetic-millenarianism is not removed from the domain of ecstatic sociality and st john | the vibe of the exiles 59 embodied experience—from dance. indeed, often conceptualized as the mothership, pulsating womblike, the dance floor remains integral, pregnant with possibility. thus, the appropriate place to begin here is with the socio-sonic fusional aesthetic that would come to signify an optimum dance-music experience: the vibe. according to sally sommer (2001–02: 73), who attempts to define the experience in underground house clubs, the vibe is “an active communal force, a feeling, a rhythm that is created by the mix of dancers, the balance of loud music, the effects of darkness and light, the energy. everything interlocks to produce a powerful sense of liberation. the vibe is an active, exhilarating feeling of ‘now-ness’ that everything is coming together”. and edmcs have historically evolved technics to optimize the vibe. the oxford english dictionary (3rd ed.) indicates that the vibe entered popular literature in 1967, more-than-likely a result of the “happenings” and the psychedelic jouissance of the so-called summer of love. but the experience inherited by contemporary edm and other popular music cultures has had a convoluted history. for one thing, the vibe appears rooted in african american dance music culture, particularly jazz. but the roots of collective altered states in african american dance music are much deeper; if we are to follow shapiro (2005: 90), who traces the “capitulation” to “machine rhythms” back through funk and new orleans swing to late 19th century brass bands composed of freed slaves and immigrants from haiti and cuba congregating in new orleans’ congo square; or if we are to follow robin sylvan (2002), who attempts to trace the “spirit” observed in popular music and dance forms to west african possession cults. with the advent of underground dance music in new york in the 1970s, the “vibe” would become especially “meaningful”, claims kai fikentscher in you better work! (2000: 82), “for culture bearers of the african american tradition and those who have learned its idiom”, the word becoming a likely carrier of the “subversive intelligence”, which john leland suggests, in his hip: the history (2004: 6), was cultivated by transplanted (slave) outsiders and their descendants, and lies at the roots of “hip”.1 with this history in mind, the “vibe” is inherently a subversive dance music experience, a virtual world enabling a measure of cultural autonomy and even integration within an oppressive, alien, world. yet, in a parallel development, the term “vibration”, of which “vibe” is a contraction, has been in currency since at least the mid-nineteenth century, according to the oed, designating an “intuitive signal” that may be picked up from other people and the atmosphere. while the oed shows no connection, vibration is likely to have gained popular usage in connection with the eastern-inspired theosophical society and varying “spiritualist” traditions purporting to gauge, measure, reflect, channel and translate “vibrations”, to offer readings of energy, the soul, spirit, nature, universe, god. received traditions hold varying recognition that divinity inheres in a “universal sound” or “undertone”, commonly represented in the hindu sacred syllable “om”. recognition that the self is realized, obtains potential and maintains balance, through techniques such as meditating, channeling, divining or amplifying vibration (or god) has been integral to the holistic-health and newspirituality movement, as well as “new age” music. but notably, the idea that vibrations dancecult 5(2)60 can be distorted or re-directed, are integral to musique concrète, noise artists and pioneering musicians who have worked to “effect the vibrations”, which sun ra associated with a utopian “transmolecularization” to “another world”. in what erik davis (2002) calls the “electromagnetic imaginary” from the late nineteenth century, inventions like the telephone, phonograph, radio and theremin (and later synthesizers and samplers) were transmuting sound vibrations into information with “technologies of perception” enabling new modes of self-expression and social interaction. in the long prelude to the summer of love, it is likely that the vibe thus entered the countercultural lexicon via the complex intersecting lines of african and european trajectories. white hipsters, beats and their antecedents who had found the alienated sensibility of jazz and bebop scenes appealing, and may have been among those norman mailer (1957) admonished as “white negroes”, slouched into this groove. from cosmic jazz artists, among whom sun ra and his galactic research arkestra were meteoric, to cosmic rock experimentalists the grateful dead, musicians manipulated oscillators and produced feedback to simulate and enhance altered states appealing to participants in an emergent psychedelic culture. tim leary and stewart brand (and thus eastern mysticism and cybernetics) were most influential. with coauthors ralph metzner and richard alpert, leary deliberated on source “wave-vibrations” at some length in the psychedelic experience: a manual based on the tibetan book of the dead (1964). by 1966, whole earth catalogue founder, brand, along with ken kesey, the merry pranksters and house band the grateful dead, were organizing the setting for the “freak-out” at the trips festival on january 21-23 at san francisco’s longshoreman’s hall. by sharp contrast to the soulless world of bureaucracy and the military they railed against, in the “acid tests”, brand had constructed “a world in which he and the dancers on the floor were part of a single, leveled social system”. in the experimental, multi-media happening, “stereo gear, slide projectors, strobe lights, and, of course, lsd, all had the power to transform the mind-set of an individual and to link him or her through invisible ‘vibes’ to others” (turner 2006: 76, 240). at this time, the vibrations had also been raised in new york, where, with direct influence from leary, david mancuso operated proto-disco deprogramming rituals at the loft at 647 broadway (see lawrence 2003: 9–10) where afro-american (and later legendary) djs larry levan and frankie knuckles (among others) hung out. levan would become a radical-remixer known for keeping the dance floor at the paradise garage in thrall like no other, and knuckles is a technical innovator who worked with reel-to-reel tape and manned the decks at the warehouse in chicago. while the dj-dancer interaction and the role of rhythm as a “synchronizing” force have been observed as integral to the “collective energy”, or vibe, of new york underground clubs (see fikentscher 2000), as we scan the horizons of edmc it becomes apparent that motivation and intention modulate this “energy”. that is, additional to music programming and response, and avant-garde technique, the vibe is conditioned by manifold freedoms sought and obtained within its domain (see st john 2009). the aesthetic that is explored here is that of the exile. st john | the vibe of the exiles 61 disctopia: the vibe of the exiles edmcs have long been considered sanctuaries from oppression and prejudice for marginal and excluded populations. one of the earliest new york dance clubs was indeed called the sanctuary, the converted german baptist church where the inventor of slip-queuing and beat-matching, francis grasso, worked the turntables. in the secret history of disco, peter shapiro documents how a clandestine mood, a flight from fascism, influenced the style and architectonic of underground dance clubs long after the nazis outlawed the hamburg “swing kids” or sent the occupants of parisian discothèques to labour camps (shapiro 2005: 14–15). that is not to say that the queer disco and house scenes in new york and chicago in the 1970s and 1980s weren’t oases from oppression, for they indeed enabled young men, many of whom were both gay and african-american, italianamerican or latino, opportunities to explore their identities and their sexuality beyond the homophobic world of “straights”. fikentscher notes that in venues like the paradise garage and the warehouse, “the idea of ‘paradise’ has been repeatedly invoked or pursued in song and dance, to contrast it with that other nonparadise, the world outside, with its persistent social inequalities and violent conflicts” (2000: 62). the kinaesthetic maelstrom of the dance floor provides a ritualized space for relatively uninhibited expression and re-inscriptions, the spectacular performance and re-mastering of the self, the performance of difference maligned, scorned and censured outside. in this club culture, excluded populations could “jack the groove” under metronomic rhythms, the machine sensibility purposed to “process rather than result (procreation)” (shapiro 2005: 111). as tim lawrence (2003: 233) points out, in the “denaturalized sexual environment” of the temporary androgynous zone, “trancesexuals” came to flourish. from early-1980s house clubs through early-1990s raves mounted across continents (mckay 1996, 1998; silcott 1999; st john 2001), dance floor habitués in exile from the occupation, babylon, straights, the law, disenchantment, cheese, held sovereignty over mini free-states—an altered state. this state of virtual secession in which liberty was experienced in the sovereign realm of the dance floor demonstrates evidence of an evolved longing, a disctopianism raised and sustained from an assemblage of scenes, drugs, musics, technologies and mythologies; a cultural timbre resonating with afrodiasporic futurism and romantic asenscionism. this discultural utopia would be fueled by lsd liquefying the edges of jazz, rock, soul, funk, disco, electro, techno and ambient musics holding pastoral (see reynolds 1997), cosmic, and/or hybrid pretentions. it has received considerable input from the cosmic rock tradition pursuing electronic and percussive experimentalism, notably the jimi hendrix experience, the grateful dead, pink floyd, hawkwind, can and faust. the altered state is founded in experimental electronic music scenes whose off-world arcadias and futuramas were dreamt up with the aid of “the fantastic sounds of the new machinery. . . . the hypnotic, other worldly quality of the timbres and the rigidly insistent mechanistic throbs of the moog and arp synthesizers used by disco producers like moroder, cowley, and bobby o [which] summed up an aesthetic that sought to upset the ‘natural’ order of things” (shapiro dancecult 5(2)62 2005: 111). if utopias are extended ruptures from non-ideal worlds, then those departures, those “breaks”, were prized open in 1970s new york with the assistance of bronx block party legend kool herc, disco remix pioneer walter gibbons (lawrence 2008), turntablist grandmaster flash and others whose artifice was to mix between the percussive breaks (the breaks between vocals and melodies) on copies of the same records, editing the breaks on reel-to-reel tape and pressing them to acetate, pressing the longue disco durée onto the 12-inch record, and more generally forging a culture in which the beat was matched, cut, sampled and remixed—in which now, the liminal state of transit, was getting a permanent encore. this sensibility is intimate with the unrequited longings of soul passing into electro and hip-hop, and enhanced through sound synthesizing technologies such as the vocoder virtualizing the (black) human voice (and body) to produce “hypersoul” (see weheliye 2002). the citizens of this freak nation were commanded to “give up the funk”, notably through the directives of p-funk leader george clinton, a process not dissimilar to the injunction to capitulate to the rhythm under house rules. and this was despite dr funkenstien’s fears, expressed on uncle jam wants you (funkadelic 1979), that the “sexless grooves” of disco were “denuding black music of its funk and, by extension, black people of their humanity” (shapiro 2005: 89). it would be characterized by stylistic miscegenation, fusions of disparate genres and their aesthetics, from funk, soul, synthpop, and afrobeat, as evinced by north italian afro cosmic or afro disco.2 passengers onboard the mothership were intimate with computers, a circumstance apparent in the early-1980s electro-envelope pushed by afrika bambaataa & soulsonic force, whose planet rock 12-inch (1982) sampled kraftwerk’s trans-europe express (nesbit 2005; toop 1984: 130–1). the sensibility of the exile is redolent within the detroit techno tradition adopting european synthpop, especially motorik experimental sounds fomenting with kraftwerk, but also tangerine dream producer klaus schulze, and english new wave acts like depeche mode, new order and the ebm outfit nitzer ebb to produce a “deterritorialised musical sensibility to combat the fall-out of both racism and post-industrial ruin”, which enabled youth cultures in manchester, london, berlin and elsewhere to “make sense of their experience of alienation in the rapidly emerging global technoculture” (rietveld 2008: 17, 8). these acid house techno scenes possessed an empathetic rave-o-lutionary attitude which grew in the wake of the ecstasy explosion at the turn of the 1990s, and was later fed by the polyrhythmic distillations of breakbeat and jungle/drum & bass sounding out a techno-futurism (see eshun 1998). it should be recognized that the interior of the mothership was therefore resonating with dubstreams indebted to the work of king tubby, the 1960s king of dancehall (partridge 2007), black arc studio engineer lee perry (katz 2000), and other midwives to the birth of remixology. and thus, the disctopia is steeped in the tradition of the “sound system”, which, in kingston from the 1960s, saw the likes of tubby cobbling together monstrous rigs of solid bass and reverb. these “sounds”, as they were known, would hold a gravitational influence on their population, with those called to gyrate and grind identifying with its corporate spirit, moving to defend it against other sounds. talking on “sufferah music”, reggae producer derek harriott states that “the equipment was so powerful and the vibe so strong that we st john | the vibe of the exiles 63 feel it. like when we were dancing you were actually part of [the music]. . . . it was ours and so many of us wanted to do something to contribute to it” (in slater 2006). these competitive sound-rig communities evolved over decades as local grounds of identification emigrated from jamaica and were smuggled into hip-hop, rave and their many after parties inflected with a rastafarian sensibility of freedom in exile. luton’s exodus collective, for example, demonstrated a commitment to break free from babylonian oppression (malyon 1998), a theme invoked in the remit of a deluge of post-rave formations, including mobile “tekno sound systems” like spiral tribe, who, hunkering down with the travellers of albion and their free festivals, trailblazed the international teknival movement (st john 2009). but what will concern me more directly here is the contemporaneous quest undertaken by those who sought the way out through travels in (actual and virtual) space, those whose direct forebears might have been the “frontiersmen in the wild west of american nightlife” (mailer 1957: 277), or the “travelers of albion” (mckay 1996) searching for an existential sound system. the vibe of the exile is redolent in the goa psychedelic trance movement, whose disparate expatriates,3 “displaced peoples with displaced minds” (d’andrea 2007: 9), discover unity in exile from life-world crises under the soundtrack of neo-psychedelia. goa, india, would be the exoteric site of propagation through the 1980s as one of the world’s principal freak-destinations since the 1960s absorbed developments in global electronic dance music culture, expatriatism and psychedelic tourism through the decade. the scene there peaked in the early 1990s, after which mass tourism and criminal and regulatory forces have conspired in its demise as a genuine location for the radical immanence that has long motivated traveller enthusiasts and new-spiritual seekers (d’andrea 2007; saldanha 2007; elliott 2010, st john 2012b). but as goa declined as a scene-maker, it proliferated in a liminal-lifestyle expressed through a multitude of national scene translations (st john 2013b). the transnational goa-diaspora was infused with an orientation of the self, itself shaped by the quest for disorientation and self-alienation with the assistance of psychoactives, as carried in imagineer simon posford’s (aka hallucinogen’s) journey into “demention”, the finale on the lone deranger (1997), and as found in multifarious projects celebrating and/or mobilizing leary’s goal of establishing the conditions for vacating the ego’s “routine game reality”. the departures from home, everyday life, sobriety, one’s skin, one’s self, the planet, enabled a resounding “yes” in response to the question posed by hendrix, whose seminal 1967 lp, are you experienced, provided the inspiration for the title of the debut release of psyculture’s most renowned act, formed by posford and raja ram, shpongle (are you shpongled?, 1998). as mentioned, “space” offers one of the critical domains of such experience, such virtuality, such enshponglement, with travel in outer-space—perhaps even “outer shpongolia” (from nothing lasts... but nothing is lost, 2005)—becoming a complex narrative device for inner travail, the avatar’s quest, the shaman’s journey, self-realization. as evinced by the popular mid-1990s london label and club, return to the source, goa/psytrance became prominent within an electronic artifice applied as part of an assemblage of techniques adopted in the interests of consciousness expansion, and in the cultural business of re/mastering the self which pervades the rave imaginary (st john 2004). dancecult 5(2)64 these are processes that are consistent with alternative spiritual paradigms that have, as paul heelas and linda woodhead (2005) identify, become flush with a contemporary culture that has undergone a “spiritual revolution”. this is not far removed at all from the practices kodwo eshun conveys in his study of the popular “science of sensory engineering” within “afrodelica”, which, in more brilliant than the sun, he claims harnesses the “mythillogical principles” of sound, rhythm and vision technologies, repurposed to intensify sensations and propagate “new sensory lifeforms” (1998: a[177], a[185]). such efforts to “technofy” thy self, evoke the flourishing technoccult reliant, like christopher partridge’s popular “occulture” (2004), on the contemporary proliferation of cultic practice through literature, film and music, but which is here dependent on ever-newer and recombinant technics, ascensionist techno-rituals, enabling journeys towards the unknown, transcendence and metamorphosis. edmc is replete with such alchemical techgnosis (davis 1998), with mixing desks, turntables, synthesizers and especially the sampler—techno-alchemical devices par excellence enabling the transformation of found sound through the remix. indeed the remix is the underlying logic here. as a voracious genre of the sonic crossroads, psyculture has absorbed a library of afrodiasporic and other “sonic fictions”, a process paralleled by the voracity, for instance, of techno, whose detroit lineage was founded by african-americans themselves motivated by a variety of futurist resources. edmc is built on remixology, hacking new ware to reassemble old rites, repurposing old tech to break new sonic and kinesthetic ground. it is a sampladelic universe in which origins are notoriously difficult, sometimes impossible to trace (see st john 2012c), and where bodies are continually carving into a future that arrives in a squall of bits and a wall of bass. these genres are more accurately “meta-genres” which, in the case of psytrance, has drawn manifold aesthetics into its psychedelic orbit (lindop 2010) among which can be included jazz, rock, ambient, funk, breaks, dub, electro, techno and industrial.4 in the process of psychedelicization, which often involves styles already liquefied by lsd, musics are modulated to the task of self-alienation. cosmic liminality and the intergalactic trance mission in space age popular music forms, outer space is a realm that exiles of varying backgrounds seek to inhabit. this “space” that is the “place” is external and internal, extraterrestrial and psychosomatic. a cosmic threshold. within the psychedelic imaginary, the realms of the physical and the imagination interface such that space becomes the terrain across which one physically, or within which one psychically, travels. and the farther from routine consciousness one ranges, the more other one might become from one’s self. while travel in exotic locales might potentiate self-transcendence—and such topoi have been variously simulated and achieved, from “exotic” jazz nightclubs (see adinolfi 2008) to temperate and tropical “contact zones” (see d’andrea 2007)—there is no farther to sojourn from one’s physical-ontological routine than the space beyond the earth’s atmosphere. as it transpires, the exosphere was first subject to human exploration and conquest in the period that lsd (and other techniques of self-expansion and out-of-body experiences like meditation, yoga and flotation tanks) achieved popularity.5 from the early psychedelic period, the lsd “trip” st john | the vibe of the exiles 65 gave users the impression of floating in space, a disembodied sensibility imagined with the assistance of astronauts operating in weightless conditions care of the earliest missions into orbit transmitted into homes via television (or indeed with the assistance of scenes from stanley kubrick’s classic gnostic space opera 2001: a space odyssey). if, as victor turner had argued, marginal conditions are essentially liminal conditions, with the space age, humans were accessing the most physically marginal regions to date, a marginality appealing to musicians already marginalized, and who from this period onwards were building what eshun called the “futurhythmachine”. outer space would exert influence on psychedelic artists of many backgrounds, including those who mark dery (1993: 736) described as “descendents of alien abductions”, those afrodiasporic artists for whom extraterrestrial aliens would signify possibility, a controllable future, outer space becoming a “realm of pure possibility”, as turner (1967: 97) would have had it, a theme capitalized upon in science fiction and space-operatic cinema and television. if space is “the place”, as in the theatre, to dramatize one’s cause (one’s alienation), in the space age, the curtain was up and the place was humming. and so, in the sonic fiction of the afrodiaspora there emerged a script with multiple authors/actors, none more significant than perhaps the most psychedelic non-drug user in history, “mythscientist” sun ra—who we might envision seated before his rocksichord and minimoog transcendence machines in gold winged-orb crowned pharaoh’s garb conducting the universal arkestra into an electromagnetic “polyrhythmaze”. sun ra, we have heard, was raised on the science fiction comic book and screenplay narratives of buck rogers and flash gordon, and later studied the science fiction of the nation of islam along with egyptology and the bible (szwed 1997; zuberi 2004: 80). on a mission from saturn, if sun ra’s was a redemption strategy evoking theosophical beliefs about “ascended masters” intervening in and guiding humanity for millennia, he was a rogue interventionist, a sonic esoterrorist adopting “space music” to chart a course into the unknown. he announced in the 1960s that the “space age cannot be avoided and space music is the key to understanding the meaning of the impossible and every other enigma” (eshun 1998: 09[157]). intervening on behalf of the intergalactic council of outer space, ra was not alone, for occupying the firmament of black sci-fi were a motley fleet of iconoclasts, including: the star child himself, george clinton, captaining the mothership connection and commanding the parliamentary “funkentelechy”; africa bambaataa casting black vinyl ufos towards earth (on the cover of planet rock—the album, 1986); and the vanguard of detroit techno, whose earliest member, juan atkins (a.k.a. model 500), was producing proto-techno in the year nasa launched the first black man into orbit (guion bluford jr, in 1983 as a crewmember of the space shuttle challenger). dancecult 5(2)66 figure 1. cover art of afrika bambaataa & soulsonic force, planet rock—the album (1986). in the mid-1980s, as a detroit techno legend, atkins, was producing material like “no ufos” (model 500, 1985), the title suggesting identification with extraterrestrial aliens as oppressed and segregated others, a similar attitude that would be adopted towards machines in the wake of kraftwerk. while prior to this period, the afrofuturist space program was ecstatic, ad hoc and amorphous,6 with the advent of techno, it would adopt more apollonian characteristics like restraint and control. such would be apparent from the onset of the detroit techno juggernaut and advanced by underground resistance, as evinced on 12-inch releases like the final frontier (1991) and through the ur outfit formed by mike banks, robert hood and jeff mills, x-102, whose debut discovers the rings of saturn (1992) featured tracks named after saturn’s moons. banks also had a key role in the martian, the outfit in which various ur members participated to produce the red planet 12-inch series. this was cosmic techno, with early releases like “star dancer” (1993) and “lost transmission from earth” (off their debut meet the red planet, 1992) possessing maximal electro-trance atmospherics. mars has long been imagined the likeliest source of life in the solar system beyond the earth, a mystery provoking the imagination, a red planet pregnant with possibility. many of the releases in the martian series had the zen buddhist-like instruction “the red planet will appear only when your mind is open” printed on the vinyl.7 st john | the vibe of the exiles 67 figure 2. the martian’s meet the red planet (1992). for innovators within the afrospace program, preand post-techno, outer space is a source of mystery and hope, fusion and metamorphosis. space was the place of becoming, new worlds forming from the dissonance generated by filters and oscillators. the odyssey would persist with new york’s illbientalist dj spooky, and continue in, for example, the rhythmic breakbeat fusion of west london’s orin walters (aka afronaught). inhabitants of the cosmic margins are readily identifiable as compatriots, as “space brothers”, fellow exiles, and common themes appear across the sonic fictions of these technocculturalists, afrocosmic heads, flamboyant futurists and star sound collectives, not the least of which was the understanding that space is a cosmic canvas under whose proscenium arch the alienated could enact “cosmo-dramas” (hollings 2002: 101) of empowerment, liberation and becoming-alien. the identification with the oppressed non-human in the form of the extraterrestrial or machine, or both, is endogenous to the afropsychedelic trajectory, in which the alien/ufo or robot is scripted, embodied and deployed as a symbol of resistance. indicative of the influence that celestial bodies, especially mars (along with the sun and the moon), have long exerted on artists within the psychedelic milieu, the red planet would pull dino psaras, steve ronan and iain rive into its gravity field. their goatrance act, cydonia,8 was a dedication to mars as conveyed on two major releases, mind hunter (1997) and the dark atmospheric in fear of a red planet (1999),9 with the jacket graphics dancecult 5(2)68 offering co-ordinates and grids templating the dimensions of a martian civilization. the album conveys how goa artists were sharing off-planetary trajectories with the afronauts of astro jazz and cosmic funk, with jamaican dreadnauts and detroit techgnostics. yet this was an odyssey in space also imbued with eastern mysticism, hindu iconography, yogic practice and the possibility of merging with the divine. this galactic orientation was apparent, for instance, in the work of jörg kessler, label manager at shiva space technology, or in the overlords (ian ion and rune bendixen), whose cover design for all the naked people (arista, 1994) featured three sadhus and an astronaut. while overt hindu symbolism (i.e. the om symbol) might have lost popularity by the late-1990s as the scene receded from goa, producers and psychonauts were remaining true to their roots. thus the oming sequences on astral projection’s space-operatic “cosmic ascension” (dancing galaxy, 1997) left little doubt that the launch sequence for their full-powered mission was initiated on the subcontinent. when, on the cover of his psykadelia (1997), asia 2001 (frenchman gilbert thévenet) projected a violet-skinned hairless and earless alien with large slanted eyes and vestigial lower face gracefully seated in lotus position with its bulbous head at the centre of a mandala, we had arrived at the juncture of two critical paths of self-discovery: the cosmic and yogic odysseys. figure 3. cover art on asia 2000’s psykadelia (1997). st john | the vibe of the exiles 69 together these paths evince a romantic-ascenscionist faculty inflected with eastern eschatology. the mood of progress is captured most evidently by the advancements in astronomy and aerospace sciences and technologies enabling human space flight, and analogizing inner flights. such ascenscionism is implicit to a range of musics influential to the psytrance development. free jazz pioneer, john coltrane, whose later albums included ascension (1965), meditations (1965), om (1967), cosmic music (1968) and the posthumous interstellar space (1974), echoed his interest in indian music and channeling the universal sound “om”, a holy project not far removed from that of sadhu and dark trance legend goa gil (st john 2011) or probably the most instrumental goa producer and conceptechnician, raja ram, himself a jazz flautist who played with 1970s psychedelic rock act quintessence (formed in 1969). coltrane may have been “the first hippie” (eshun 1998: a[183]), but gil and especially raja ram would haul that aesthetic over the sonic hump. raja ram has probably flown more missions into infinity and back than anyone, having formed the infinity project in 1989 (with graham wood), shpongle in the mid1990s (with simon posford) and later forming the influential label tip records (later tip.world) which, by 2000, was still launching spaceships of the imagination (a two part compilation series). pioneering ambient act, the orb, who fused the ambience of brian eno (whose first release was apollo—atmospheres & soundtracks, 1983) with dub reggae, are integral to the psybient trajectory. figure 4. cover art on the orb’s u.f.orb, island red label (1992). dancecult 5(2)70 their well known “blue room” (on blue room, 1992), named after the top secret room in hangar 18 at the wright-patterson air base where the us government allegedly stores ufo crash remains, uses a recording from the 1965 gemini 4 spacewalk, and their earlier adventures beyond the ultraworld (1991) picks up apollo program radio signals from “tranquility base” (on “back side of the moon”). in 1992, the orb toured their album u.f.orb with music scholar rupert till recalling how they had “a huge balloon as a projection screen, onto which they projected imagery including the apollo space launch” as well as “rockets taking off ”.10 studio engineer and former bassist with killing joke and member of some thirty other acts including the orb, martin “youth” glover would be critical to the infusion of ambient dub in psychedelia, having launched the down-tempo label, liquid sound design, in 1998 (a sub-label to his dragonfly records, the first psychedelic trance label). ambient and trance-fusion act, star sounds orchestra, whose debut planets (1991) featured tracks named after all the planets in our galaxy, would foment an ethnodelia appealing to the trance machine.11 and one of the key carriers of the techno-cultural cosmo-liberationist aesthetic within psytrance is a progressive style which owes its sophisticated optimizations to the cosmic rock tradition, notably pink floyd,12 whose concerts screened footage of apollo missions. as ken mcleod (2003: 346) points out with regard to the cosmic musicians and the space program: the impressive banks of keyboards, the complex myriad of knobs and dials associated with the analogue synthesizers of 1970s progressive rock . . . and the increasingly advanced and variegated number of electronic guitar effects, were roughly analogous to the advanced technology being developed and exploited in the real space program. thus the fetishisation of technique, virtuosity and musical complexity, which marked much of this music, is mirrored in the complexity of its instrumentation and technology. surrounded by banks of equipment, turning dials, monitoring screens and gauges, artists within psychedelic electronic music genres were like navigators setting the course towards uncharted space; a cool, detached presence in command of the ship, the sensibility of the austere competent programmer embodied by contemporary djs across all genres. as already noted, deep space is a universal source of awe, its depths occulting mysteries of origin and destination, genesis and apocalypse, with the mid-twentieth century penetration of space providing an allegory for percipience, the penetration of the “final frontier”, the journey into the mind. this adventurous frontier-crossing mentality notably championed by timothy leary, has endured among the privateers and experimentalists drawn to goatrance, for whom nasa’s apollo space program held appeal in narrating the journey. while nasa was developing and harnessing science and technology with the purpose of launching humankind beyond the exosphere, in ways imitating their various forebears, psychedelic artists were repurposing audio technologies to enable exploration of inner space, the unconscious. indeed, the space mission analogizes this process, where st john | the vibe of the exiles 71 “mission control” (e.g. “houston”) signifies base ego, the rational consciousness from which explorers seek distance and with which they may experience patchy communications or oxygen supply crises while in “orbit” (“houston, we’ve had a problem”). thus apollo dialogue, as reproduced on juno reactor’s seminal transmissions (1993), astral projection’s the astral files (1996) and trust in trance (1996), or on cybernetika’s nanospheric (2008), which reproduces flight dialogue from the perilous apollo 13 mission, effects a drift into the unconscious, and the unknown, where adversities are overcome and anything is possible (see st john 2013a). to reproduce inquiry from the mysterious atmospherics of “aliens” by french outfit total eclipse (on their debut 12-inch aliens / sound is solid, 1994), who are these aliens? “where do they come from?” and “what do they want?”. for technicians temping on the space programs in the psychedelic diaspora, outer space is a fictional realm potentiating the transcendence of condition, even the human condition, perhaps any human condition. as outer space enables one’s freedom from complex historical, social and personal conditions, it swarms with alien “nations”. as fantasies and phantoms are launched, hopes and fears projected, these fictions, these alien-nationalities, orbit the earth like a million satellites beaming back uncanny data to programmer communities and receiver cults. and as they buzz the heavens or haunt our dreams these alien fictions communicate with one another, they mate and mutate. hard “black and white” distinctions between millenarianisms— afrodiasporic and otherwise—seem pointless as, for one thing, sonic fictions are plagiarized and remixed over and again, and for another, there is no simple “black” and “white” alien divide here given the presence, for instance, of large numbers of japanese and brazilian producers and enthusiasts in the psychedelic continuum. it is certain that disparities in socio-economic opportunities, race prejudice and social exclusion condition the “freedoms” sought—including alienation/alien-ation—and the capacity to achieve these outcomes. while alienation for the majority is the result of a composite of factors related to race, gender, sexuality and limited opportunities, for others it more approximates the lifestyle strategy of the self-exile who seeks departure from repressive conditions, and who is resourced enough to convert repression into leisure. the “astral traveller” with the universe, multiverse or hyperspace within reach, offers a portrait of the relatively affluent (typically) white male raised on a diet of progressive individualism and the promise of manifest destiny. what is more, psychedelic trance has had very few black producers and enthusiasts among its marginal-albeit-privileged population.13 yet, as purported in the disctopian visions of producers, promoters and participants alike, ultimately, it is the music, and its primary sites of reception, that potentiate intertextualization, inter-alien contact. across a variety of edm cultures and their events, historically admitting those who seek freedom from manifold oppressions, the mothership charts a familiar course across the cosmic threshold and into the unknown, the potent source of transformation. indeed eshun celebrates the capacity in black atlantic sonic artistry to abduct and mutate those whose sensoriums are exposed to its alchemy—a becoming-in-sonics, a private futurism, the innerspatializing of the mythstakes. dancecult 5(2)72 flight club: the interplanetary intercorporeality machine while eshun made a remarkable contribution to the study of afrofuturism, a trajectory the study of which has been accused of leaving the body behind in extropian conceptual gymnastics, he holds that the posthumanist “rhythmscience” of which he is concerned is not disembodied, indeed he made out that “sound machines don’t distance you from your emotions . . . [they] make you feel more intensely, along a broader band of spectra than ever before in the 20th century” (1998: 00[-002]). a discussion of kinaesthesia and “the sensory environment” of pressure (ibid. a[183]), is preceded by reference to electronic composers, notably sun ra, being “tone scientists” through which crowds are like an “instrument played by electronics”. sun ra’s work revealed that “music is the science of playing human nervous systems, orchestrating sensory mixes of electric emotions: the music of yourself in dissonance”. yet, in these attentions to those who “engineer new humans through electronics” (ibid: 09[161]), we learn little of the role of the impact of their science and engineering in the primary real estate of their affect—in the laboratory of the dance floor. the vibe is aborted, presumably in the departure from the “street” and the “soul” chaining the afrodiaspora to the blues and preventing a cyborgian future. besides a small paragraph headed “the audience is a medium” (ibid), sites of reception are disregarded in this momentous quest to master the sonic fiction. the departure from the social is revealed as a deliberate effort to exaggerate the impact of sonic fiction on individuals as “new sensory lifeforms” (ibid. a[183]). but in the flight from sociality, the dedication to chart the use, development and impact of sound “conceptechnics” overlooks the role of cultural performance in “the sensory environment”. sonic fiction is certainly read in front of one’s home stereo, inside the woofered public-privacy of your wheels, and by public transportusing “headphonauts” (ibid. 07[133]), but the electrosonic is a fiction that is ultimately shared, performed in intercorporeal audio-tactile rooms of varying size and sound quality. surely, the vibrant dance floor, whether the main deck or boiler room of the mothership, is heaviest among the pressure “points of maximum rhythmic hyperdelia” (ibid. a[187]). and so gravitation pulls us back on the dance floor, the gravity of which is confirmed through the way clubs, warehouse raves and dance festivals are commonly designed to replicate off-planetary or cosmic space, where the dance floor is the launchpad with djs programming and/or initiating the launch sequences. the sensation of being off one’s planet and out of one’s mind, enhanced by an ever growing compendium of psychedelic or entheogenic astro-fuels, is variously sonified as, for example, in earth nation’s ethereal sound bath, “alienated” (from their debut 12-inch alienated, 1994) or any of hallucinogen’s early work like “alpha centauri” (released on his first 12-inch alpha centauri / lsd, dragonfly, 1994). this transportative socio-sonics is enhanced by video, décor, blacklight, 3d string art installations and other technologies of the senses. amid the ultraviolet subsonic meteor storm and laser battle, one might detect djs appearing as high-tech skywalkers, as with the shoulder and forearm robotics adopted by swede anders nilsson (aka andromeda), or as “grey”-inflected extraterrestrials, apparently the desired effect of the alien mask-wearing st john | the vibe of the exiles 73 german guitar-trance act s.u.n. project. more generally, “surrounded by a circular bank of blinking sound equipment supplemented by various laser lights and smoke effects”, the dj appears like an “otherworldly futuristic benefactor, controlling foreign, unfamiliar technology” (mcleod 2003: 351). under strange light, some of these characters appear to be transmitting messages from off-world locations.14 while this image of singularity and control insinuates the greek god and titular head of nasa’s lunar program, the paroxysmal indeterminacy and saturnalian funk of the dance floor reeks of that other god who, alongside apollo, inspired nietzsche in the birth of tragedy to develop an influential heuristic for understanding polarity in western civilization. with this tension in mind, neil disconaut, who had launched space raves for the association of autonomous astronauts (1995–2000), radio checks direct from the dance floor on the “dionysus programme”. he reports “sensations of ‘rushing’, of accelerating velocity, of the body tracing a line of flight and of leaving behind ‘the real world’ and establishing a direct connection with the wider universe”. kicking up some dust on the moonscape of european myth and folklore, a lunarscape that nasa can never touch, he communicates further that there are “clear parallels here with the effects on the body and the euphoric feelings of escaping gravity associated with ‘lift off ’ by more traditional means”.15 these are not gagarin-esque solo-flights. with a constellation of mirror balls and starshower lighting effects, dance floors have long been imagineered as realms for “space” exploration and alien encounters, a design-intent traceable at least to the 1960s and psychedelic rock (e.g. london’s ufo club), and would be carried by disco and funk in the 1970s. opened in the old henry miller theatre in times square in 1978, zenon was one of the more audacious examples from that period. the club boasted a sixteen-channel sound system, and its owners hired douglas trumbull (creator of the special effects in close encounters of the third kind) to design a spaceship that would descend and hover over the heads of the dancers—a project that was ultimately found unworkable and aborted (shapiro 2005: 215). the “obsession with space and the prog rock tendencies” characterizing italodisco, would manifest at the “cosmic club” in lazise between 1979 and 1984 (shapiro 2005: 276), and by the late 1980s, the opulent mega-club space opened in ibiza. in the meantime, another ufo club, this time fueled by acid house techno, landed in the vaults of a former department store in mitte in 1988 (closing in 1990, and later reopening as tresor) where young citizens of the reunifying germany, occupying a no-man’s-land between the east and west, were willingly abducted from state-run tyranny and corporate slavery. soon after, the space club (subsequently the warehouse) opened in koln (see the film by sextro and wick 2008). as interplanetary ports and portals, such clubs would promote an internationalist aesthetic with attention to diverse sonic flavours. at club megatripolis opening in mid-1990s in london club heaven, fraser clark played with the idea, not far removed from terence mckenna’s novelty theory, that dance floor occupants were “tuning in” from the future. the mission objective of the dionysian programme unfolds. in intercorporealized flight clubs one performs the fiction of alienation, and the discovery of one’s self is potentiated in the encounter with other habitués of the flow, space brothers and sisters if you will, who, like dancecult 5(2)74 planets orbiting the self, are proximate and within reach. thus the dance floor mothership becomes a living-mythology enabling contact with those who are alien—or other—to one’s self. in the landscape of the vibe, s/he who is “alien” is rendered a “friend”. today, dance parties are off-world and multi-genred carnivals where participants enact sci-fi fantasies in which the alien dances among us. in the festal dancescapes of psyculture, the almond-eyed and vestigial alien is pervasive, a symbol of ultimate difference, which signifies at the same time the romantic will to transcend difference. this icon of otherness is, in mcleod’s view (2003: 339), “capable of challenging simplistic binaries of male/female, black/white or rich/poor”, with alien iconography enabling a “symbolic incorporation of the idealized, raceless, classless, and genderless plurality of the dance floor”. thus, in its emblematizing and erasure of difference, the archetypally benevolent alien is a utopic standard of unity, with aliens flying on banners at international psycultural and visionary arts festivals, embossed on textile fashions, digitized in website graphics and inhering in contagious logos, like flags under which all unite.16 “israliens”: seeking another world as mentioned at the beginning of this article, israeli goa outfit power source sampled sun ra from space is the place on their driving classic “goaway”. the group would later reproduce lines from the same source on their 1999 release “skywalker” (cosmic waves): “it’s the music of the earth, the music of the sun and the stars. the music of yourself. . . . teleport the whole planet here, through music”. approaching sun ra as something of an alien guru, israeli kfir shlomovitz (aka space monkey) later deployed the same material on the psybreaks departure “flash-daddy” from his debut psychotic episode (2004). space is the place is rare cinema combining director john coney’s lurid blaxploitation designs with sun ra’s cosmic plans. the film’s message is ambiguous, since sun ra initially announces his intentions to repatriate earthlings to an exclusive off-world “colony for black people”, though it emerges that non-african americans (as far as i could tell, two white “hookers”) are permitted to board the mothership, and sun ra announces to one ship-bound passenger, the subservient jimmy fey, that he is to leave his “black parts” at the door (sun ra appears to be electing to absorb his “blackness”). in the arkestra’s final performance, before the mothership launches from an exploding earth, sun ra chants: “your ignorance will be your salvation. . . . i will take you to new unseen worlds . . . another world”. underlining sun ra’s philosophy of embracing the unknown, the film echoes star trek and the early 1960s series the twilight zone. yet, rather than replicating human folly in space, the mothership is ultimately bound for a raceless future, a utopic alien-ation. st john | the vibe of the exiles 75 figure 5. video cover for john coney’s space is the place. north american star system (1974). the mythos of the raceless unknown appears to suit disaffected israeli trancistim—the term israeli trancers use to identify themselves (see schmidt 2010)—who made their entrance into psychedelic trance downstream from historical and social alienation. that is, it is appealing to those whose ancestors survived the holocaust and established a zionist state. but, more immediately, it appeals to young adults who, following mandatory military service and a tense upbringing, undertake a secular quest for another world, an alternate reality pursued in an outlaw, hyperliminal, techno-tribal lifestyle (see st john 2012d). israeli goatrance illustrates a penchant to decal the vibe with the promises inscribed in galactic travel, the alien encounter, with the designation “israliens”17 striking appeal as a polysemous signifier, a hybrid term signifying both israeli citizen and the outsider/ exile depicted in stylised homunculus iconography. an aestheticized “sixties” appears to have affected israelis in the late 1980s/early 1990s, with experience sought and obtained in the encounter with the other/otherness, including: foreign encounters (notably, in travels to goa, thailand, japan and other destinations); sexual encounters (especially across ethnic/ dancecult 5(2)76 racial lines); queer encounters (especially in a burgeoning gay and lesbian scene in tel aviv), virtual encounters (with the assistance of psychedelics and or entheogens); and alien encounters (curiously, many among those who have been abducted by aliens are regarded as “experienced”: see partridge 2003: 30). by the 1990s, a younger generation of israelis were prepared to be abducted by and experienced in music, and their adoption of afrofuturist aesthetic devices in which space was the place for the effacement of race reveals a mythos of unity in exile from historical trauma, a not insignificant tendency given that israel possesses what is likely the highest population of psytrance producers and enthusiasts per-capita in the world. indeed psytrance is popular music in israel, a circumstance not replicated in any other country. following a three-year military service, young male and female israeli adults experience temporary exodus from the permanent crisis at home via an international backpacking rite of passage (see noy and cohen 2005), perhaps enabling self-styled and luxurious reenactments of the myth of abraham who, as ken goffman (2004: 12) notes, was “history’s first self-exile”. the protracted dimensions of this phenomenon have triggered considerable anxieties among critics as self-expatriation in trance obtains the character of a risk-laden lifestyle for youth as trancistim initially smuggled the goa “state of mind” and guided the freak mothership into the holy land (taub 1997; sagiv 2000). though it should be recognized that rather than simply an import, the vibe of the (self ) exile is endogenous to israel, which is why afrofuturist and other ascensionist discourse holds such appeal. thus, we find the utopic project of one of the genre’s most famous acts, astral projection—formed in 1995 by israeli pioneers avi nissim, lior perlmutter and yaniv haviv18—whose oeuvre is characterised by a quest for off-planetary becoming, as conveyed on storming tracks from the classic trust in trance release of 1996, like “people can fly”, “aurora borealis” and “utopia”. the group’s early anthem “enlightened evolution” (from the 12-inch by that name, 1996) used the memorable sample: “we have determined that the human form is best suited to our purposes”.19 while it seems disingenuous to attribute sophisticated philosophical systems to artists based on short sound-bites, i suggest that their sonification indicates at least three connected implications: that astral projection were identifying themselves with raceless extraterrestrials; that they were committed to assisting the human condition; and that their art (their music) facilitates this evolution/abduction/becoming. that astral projection were fixated with cosmogenesis in which space was the stage for new beginnings was transparent in their classic “let there be light” (orange compilation, 1995), on which can be heard the critical lines from genesis (the first book of the old testament), spoken by apollo 8 nasa lunar module pilot, william anders, in his christmas eve 1968 broadcast from lunar orbit. spoken against the vast background of open space, the narrative promises life flowering in an empty void. within the dark vacuum of space, light becomes a source of hope. in this light, it is clear that outer space offered a blank canvas for the imagination, a topos upon which utopian fantasies were projected, fresh designs uploaded, new worlds populated. st john | the vibe of the exiles 77 figure 6. cover art for astral projection’s another world. trust in trance records (1999). with astral projection and in many other israeli goa/psytrance acts, one finds evidence of a belief in a higher, or cosmic, purpose, in which those who are experienced, impart their wisdom to others in a messianic commitment to tinker with evolution, raise consciousness, revitalize humanity, save the earth, generate new worlds, etc. this diverse mission is so often conveyed via the language of visitation, contact, abduction, as found in samples and, ultimately, music is the vehicle mastered by those who feel chosen to transport the trancefloor into a better world. promoter asher haviv fits the bill here. in 1997, haviv organized what was at that time the largest psychedelic trance festival in israel and anywhere else: “karahana: a drugless festival”, so named as a way of successfully garnering the support from authorities to hold the event at ganey huga, a popular water park. the event attracted some 15,000 people, and ori gruder’s film documentary of the event, karahana (1998), promoted that the festival came “from outer space, from another dimension, with cosmic-hypnotic sounds came the trance-ship and landed in israel. the super-computer chose the ‘drugless’ festival as the place where the revolution will start”. here the party vibe is infused with the sensibility of the chosen, the elect, though clearly this is augmented by the messianic temperament of promoters like haviv. and so, in 2007, the ground was once again cleared for the landing of the “trance-ship” at the holy rave at timna national park in the arava desert (at the site of a replica of the ark of the covenant) over rosh hashana dancecult 5(2)78 ( jewish new year). at timna, haviv struck the pose of a moses-like figure shepherding the elect few on board his colossal mothership towards the “light at the end of the desert”. this cosmic salvation has its parallel in the work of sun ra who through an early mystical awakening experience—an alien abduction via “transmolecularization” to saturn— believed he was selected to undertake the redemption of his people and build the arkestra. it is a project integral to psytrance, but is seemingly most advanced among the historical descendants of the “chosen people” as per the old testament, some of whom might see in sun ra a fellow exile. this is not in any way orthodox judaism, yet sometimes artists become akin to channels of prophecy, such as mfg (message from god) the group formed by guy zukrel and aharon segal, though the message more generally holds more in common with alternative spiritual perspectives inflected with indian religion and philosophy, as partial and superficial as this often is. there is no evidence that these artists possess sustained “cosmic plans” like sun ra (or believe that the world necessarily faces immanent collapse), but psyculture is prominent in a terrestrial and “progressive millenarianism” (as opposed to an “apocalyptic millenarianism”: see wojcik 2003), where artists, promoters and enthusiasts respond to ecological cataclysm, economic disaster and social upheaval coincident with the end of the mayan calendar cycle (see st john 2011b). while holding inheritance from the off-world fantasies of leary and sun ra, this is not a disembodied extropianism. such is evident in israel in the emergence of full on, a mechanically funkipated chopper trance sound which would offer evidence that the declaration to “give up the funk” was being called for and getting a response. here, one’s experience, would be expressed less by one’s movement through the astral planes or elevation into the mathematics of universal sound, but grounded in the swing, the funk, the groove. not a cerebral space-time continuum occupied by prog-psy participants, but a tribal bootytime illogicality, a trajectory also undertaken within the electro and tech-house aesthetics pulsating through psychedelic trance in the first decade of the 2000s. indeed, the black body, a veritable spacepimp, is sometimes deployed as a signifier. take, for instance, psysex’s come in peace (2003), a funked-up and over-sexed space-romp the title track on which features the memorable line “bro was on!” incidentally, the album’s title revises the famed apollo 11 narrative employed on dance 2 trance’s early 1990s anthem “we came in peace” released on a 1991 self-titled maxi-single (the cover of which features a b&w close-up of an open helmeted astronaut). while nasa dialogue was used to convey a peaceful message at an historical juncture in which the iron curtain was raised and apartheid dismantled, over ten years later, with the “come” in the title adapted to convey orgasm, if there was a line between abduction and seduction, the astral and the orgasmic, it had grown fuzzier. with the post-goa electro-express carrying strains of cosmopolitanism and miscegenation subverting dominant sexual and racial categories, a funky ambience pervaded psyculture by the first decade of the 21st century, with growing numbers of artists joining the electroinfluenced progressive house party. labels like blue tunes recordings and the work of producer/djs like feuerhake or fusco, for example, illustrate that the “progressive” edge of psychedelia is partially shaped by the demand for the electro pulse.20 st john | the vibe of the exiles 79 the growth of psychedelic electro-funk may signify the return from the astronautical discharge of goatrance, the cosmic heights of which have nevertheless enabled extraordinary vistas and critical readouts momentous to “ground control”, the self, the earth. keen pirates of apollo dialogue, astral projection’s seminal release (the astral files, 1996) “zero” marks that moment of ejaculatory blast-off where the crew of apollo 8 have completed their count down, initiated launch sequence, and cleared the tower. at maximum thrust “houston” reads the voyagers “loud and clear”. the december 1968 apollo 8 mission was the first manned space voyage to escape the earth’s gravitational field. the story was taken up on astral projection’s second cd release, with the only words on the track “black and white” being retrospective commentary from mission commander frank borman: “and the view of the earth, it was the only place in the universe that had any color. everything else was black and white” (trust in trance, 1996). the comments speak to what has been identified as the greatest revelation of the apollo missions—which derived not from rocks gathered on the moon, but from earth, the appearance of which over the lunar horizon startled borman and his crew, the first humans to witness planet earth from the lunar orbit (literally from the “dark side” of the moon). indeed the “earthrise photograph” taken at that time by astronaut bill anders would become arguably the most important photograph ever taken. the image of a blue globe, small and vulnerable in the vastness of space was, according british space historian robert poole, “an epiphany in space . . . a rebuke to the vanity of humankind” (mckie 2008). offering what has been referred to as the “overview effect”, “earthrise” would provide the stimulus for the “gaia hypothesis” and inspire the popular expression of ecological and humanitarian concerns. the revelation captivated many goa/ psytrance producers, promoters and boosters, the movement giving rise to festivals which would instrumentalise a planetary vibe aboard spaceship earth. karahana offered an earlier model for this type of experience, but it would be the international total solar eclipse festivals emerging from the mid-1990s (see st john 2013c), and transnational festivals like australia’s exodus, portugal’s boom, or brazil’s universo parallelo, each attracting thousands from a multitude of countries, that would continue to be significant in this regard. these events are known for their lateralized accommodation of genred multitudes, perhaps none more so than boom, which in its fifteen years, has evolved into a weeklong biennial climax in which, in 2012, some 25,000+ people (from over one hundred countries) participated. “teleport the whole planet here” this article has begun the daunting task of charting the vibe of the exiles. furnished with futurist fantasies and imagined as a cosmopolitan mothership, programmed to enable public utopias and private parties, within psyculture, downstream from goatrance and psytrance, this socio-sonic aesthetic is conceptualized with the assistance of space age programs, science fiction cinema and administered with multiple sonic genres. in its optimized state, the vibe is a fusional context, an orgiastic temporality conditioned by a remix aesthetic involving the recombination of psycho-integrators, sonic debris and popular cultural artifacts. existential communitas has been a lasting feature of psyculture dancecult 5(2)80 from its inception, whose “mothership connections” and astral projections are grounded in romantic-ascensionist and afrofuturist psyconceptechnics. while it is clear that variant histories and patterns of economic and socio-political alienation have conditioned the fabulous fictions and indubitable revelations of alienation/alien-ation, in the history of edmc, the dance floor vibe is both the launching pad to, and the landing zone for, other subjectivities and worlds. akin to cosmic rock and space jazz in which we can trace its roots, goatrance emerged as a hyper-transitional fusional movement embracing the trope of space exploration as a narrative of metamorphosis, and, concomitantly, the alien as a stylistic device, signifying, as mcleod similarly conveyed for raves, a utopic desire to transit to “a common ‘other’ transcending divisions of race, gender, sexual preference, religion or nationality” (2003: 354). such pretensions are doubtlessly idealist. after all, arun saldanha (2007) has outlined a tendency in goa where domestic tourists are held by party-goers to dilute the purity of the “freak” nation, and researchers of israeli trance have observed a tendency among middle-class ashkenazim to exclude from mesibot those who are not “beautiful people”, nominally lower-class eidot ha’mizrax or jews of north african or middle eastern descent (meadan 2001: 35, 44; schmidt 2010). such may be elitist, or even racist, attitudes towards ethnic “aliens”, yet it should be recognized that undesirables subject to exclusions are sometimes noted for their predatory and offensive behaviour towards female participants, which is an observation made by schmidt and supported by my own observations. this serves to illustrate that “freedoms” pursued within the domain of the edm vibe are heterogeneous, that it is inhabited by parties differentially committed towards its success. within the complex psychedelic imaginary, the alien is desirable and liberating, albeit intercepted along different orbits. thus, cosmic utopias and extraterrestrial exotica of afrodiasporic “alien abductees”, “israliens” and other home-seeking astral-travelers are defined according to differential historical oppressions, contemporary traumas and personal life-world circumstances. psyculture luminaries continue to build freak arkestras whose mechanics of transcendence and mythos of universality may be as utopian as sun ra’s vision. yet, their inspiration has seen the emergence of spectacular sonicities whose precincts hum with cultural and sonic diversity. and their imperative, like that of sun ra and other agents in the afrofuturist pantheon, is to tweak the perennial groovebox, effect the vibrations and optimize the vibe in the pursuit of an alternate reality. notes 1 following linguist david dalby, leland traces “hip”, and thus “hippie”, to the wolof language of slaves from the west african nations of senegal and coastal gambia among whom hipi meant “to open one’s eyes”. additionally jive is rooted in jev, meaning “to disparage or talk falsely”, and dig is rooted in dega, “to understand” (see leland 2004: 5–6). 2 in which innovators beppe loda and daniele baldelli figured strongly. loda used the phrase “elettronica meccanica” to describe his music mixing, and used the word “afro” and later “freestyle” to describe his mix tapes and selections partly inspired by african/tribal music and “afrobeat” (campbell 2007). baldelli played diverse selections of classical, african and brazilian folk, and synth-pop from the late 1970s through mid-1980s (wang 2005). st john | the vibe of the exiles 81 3 the organizers of portugal’s boom festival report that passport holders from over 100 different nations attended the festival in 2012. 4 while many examples could be provided here i can only mention a few: loopus in fabula’s funkadelic mission; breaks going astral care of deviant electronics, syncro and other psybreaks pioneers; and psychedelic dubmeisters youth and ott. 5 much of the charting of inner/outer space has been conducted with the assistance of psychedelics and “entheogens”, a theme explored, for example, in rick strassman et al (2008). 6 the constant changing titles for sun ra’s arkestra (e.g. solar myth arkestra, blue universe arkestra and jet set omniverse arkestra) is a good example of this. 7 with the sampled transmission from black panther party cofounder huey p. newton (e.g. “the spirit of the people is greater than man’s technology”) on “lost transmission from earth”, this work does not deviate from ur’s militant trajectory. 8 cydonia is a region of mars achieving notoriety after images taken by the viking orbiters in 1976 were sent back to earth revealing an apparent human face and pyramidal rock formations. 9 the title holds an allusion to public enemy’s fear of a black planet (1990). 10 rupert till, email to the author, 7 april 2009. 11 still sought-after in the psychedelic electronic festival circuit, sso would become renowned for producing “cosmically tuned” music; that is, music produced according to the calculations of the cosmic octave developed by hans cousto, which recognizes that each planet holds its own specific frequency, rhythm and color. the idea inspired the signature “cosmic gong” developed by sso member jens zygar and cousto. the 1995 album inter planetary ambience (live in london) (i.t.p. recordings) features “a complete musical journey through the planetary tunings of our solar system” (from sleeve). 12 pink floyd are known to have produced one of the first electronic psychedelic tracks, “on the run” (the dark side of the moon, 1973). 13 this assertion is consistent with the views of artur soares da silva, an organiser of portugal’s boom festival, who informed me that psytrance “is the only dance music that was originated with no ‘black’ people involved from the scratch”. he stated that while descendents of former portuguese colonies, cape vert, guine-bissau and angola, have been involved in boom from the beginning, their numbers are small, mainly from middle class backgrounds, and quite a few “from families of politicians or military”. he further stated that about 100 people of african descent were present at the 2008 boom festival, estimated to attract 25,000 people (artur soares da silva, email communication, april 30, 2009). 14 perhaps not as far-fetched as it seems, if kenji williams fulfils his desire to be the first person to dj to dance floors on earth from its orbit, a desire he communicated to me in interview on limnos, greece, in 2007. 15 “take a dancing flight”. newsletter of disconaut aaa (association of autonomous astronauts) <http://www.uncarved.org/disconaut/dnaut2.html>. 16 while in iconography and sonic graffiti the benevolent alien offers a potent utopian icon of hope and unity, there is evidence (e.g. within “dark trance” productions) of the malevolent alien other forecasting decidedly dystopian futures and a fear of the unknown. 17 as, for instance seen on the israliens compilation series released by hom-mega. dancecult 5(2)82 18 all previously involved with techno/goatrance project sfx (along with guy sebbag). 19 it was the voice of the invid regess lifted from the episode “reflex point” on the final series of the mid-1980s robotech series, which, incidentally, augured the spread of japanese anime in the west. 20 the la boum compilation (2009) holds interest here 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attack: african jive to new york hip hop. boston: south end. turner, fred. 2006. from counterculture to cyberculture: stewart brand, the whole earth network, and the rise of digital utopianism. chicago: university of chicago press. turner, victor. 1967. “betwixt and between: the liminal period in rites de passage”. in the forest of symbols: aspects of ndembu ritual (victor turner anthology), 93–111. ithaca: cornell university press. wang, daniel. 2005. “interview with baldelli”. discopia #3, may. weheliye, alexander. 2002. “‘feenin’: posthuman voices in contemporary black popular music”. social text 71, 20 (2): 21–47. st john | the vibe of the exiles 85 wojcik, daniel, 2003. “apocalyptic and millenarian aspects of american ufoism”. ufo religions, ed. christopher partridge, 274–300. london: routledge. zuberi, nabeel. 2004. “the transmolecularization of [black] folk: space is the place, sun ra and afrofuturism”. off the planet: music, sound and science fiction cinema, ed. philip hayward, 77–95. london: john libbey publications. discography afrika bambaataa & soulsonic force. 1982. planet rock. tommy boy music (vinyl, 12-inch): tb 823. <http://www.discogs.com/afrika-bambaataa-the-soul-sonic-force-planet-rock/ release/2047>. afrika bambaataa & soulsonic force. 1986. planet rock – the album tommy boy music (vinyl, lp): tblp 1007. <http://www.discogs.com/ afrika-bambaataa-soulsonic-force-planet-rock-the-album/release/98021>. asia 2001. 1997. psykadelia. trans’pact productions (cd): 097-008. <http://www.discogs.com/asia-2001-psykadelia/release/238790>. astral projection. 1996. enlightened evolution. tip records (vinyl, 12-inch): tip 010. <http://www.discogs.com/astral-projection-enlightened-evolution/release/17693>. astral projection. 1996. the astral files. trust in trance records (cd): t.i.t.cd008. http://www.discogs.com/astral-projection-the-astral-files/release/44980>. astral projection. 1996. trust in trance. tip records (cd): tipcd5. http://www.discogs.com/astral-projection-trust-in-trance/release/41508>. astral projection. 1997. dancing galaxy. ganesha (cd): gan-02. <http://www.discogs.com/astral-projection-dancing-galaxy/release/20570>. astral projection. 1999. another world. trust in trance records (cd): t.i.t. cd 019. <http://www.discogs.com/astral-projection-another-world/release/15581>. coltrane, john. 1965. ascension (edition i). impulse! (vinyl, lp): as-95. <http://www.discogs.com/john-coltrane-ascension-edition-i/release/532432>. coltrane, john. 1965. meditations. impulse! (vinyl, lp): as-9110. <http://www.discogs.com/john-coltrane-meditations/release/885346>. coltrane, john. 1967. om. impulse! (vinyl, lp): as-9140. <http://www.discogs.com/john-coltrane-om/release/928106>. coltrane, john. 1968. cosmic music. impulse! (vinyl, lp): as-9148. <http://www.discogs.com/john-coltrane-alice-coltrane-cosmic-music/release/1885299>. coltrane, john. 1974. interstellar space. impulse! (lp): asd-9277. <http://www.discogs.com/john-coltrane-interstellar-space/release/933890>. cybernetika. 2008. nanospheric. self-released (mp3 album). <http://www.discogs.com/cybernetika-nanospheric/release/1650669>. cydonia. 1997. mind hunter. blue room released (cd, maxi-single): br061cd. <http://www.discogs.com/cydonia-mind-hunter/release/75760>. cydonia. 1999. in fear of a red planet. blue room released (cd): br079cd. <http://www.discogs.com/cydonia-in-fear-of-a-red-planet/release/35817>. dancecult 5(2)86 dance 2 trance. 1991. dance 2 trance. suck me plasma (cd, maxi-single): suck two cd. <http://www.discogs.com/dance-2-trance-dance-2-trance/release/257262>. earth nation. 1994. alienated. eye q records (vinyl, 12-inch): 4509 95485-0. <http://www.discogs.com/earth-nation-alienated/release/10460>. eno, brian (with daniel lanois & roger eno). 1983. apollo atmospheres & soundtracks. e’g records (vinyl, lp): 813 535-1. <http://www.discogs.com/ brian-eno-with-daniel-lanois-roger-eno-apollo-atmospheres-soundtracks/ release/72002>. funkadelic. 1979. uncle jam wants you. warner bros. records (vinyl, lp): wb 56 712. <http://www.discogs.com/funkadelic-uncle-jam-wants-you/release/101480>. hallucinogen. 1994. alpha centauri / lsd. dragonfly records (vinyl, 12-inch): bflt 14. <http://www.discogs.com/hallucinogen-alpha-centauri-lsd/release/96507>. hallucinogen. 1997. the lone deranger. twisted records (cd): twscd1. <http://www.discogs.com/hallucinogen-the-lone-deranger/release/20583>. jimmy hendrix experience, the. 1967. are you experienced. track records (vinyl, lp, mono): rs 6261. <http://www.discogs.com/jimi-hendrix-experience-are-you-experienced/ release/993028>. juno reactor, 1993. transmissions. novamute (cd): nomu 24 cd. <http://www.discogs.com/juno-reactor-transmissions/release/2262>. kraftwerk. 1977. trans-europe express. king klang (vinyl, lp): 1c 064-82 306. <http://www.discogs.com/kraftwerk-trans-europa-express/release/75547>. la boum. compiled by nok. 2009. blue tunes recordings (cd, comp): btrcd026. <http://www.discogs.com/nok-la-boum/release/1740588>. martian, the. 1992. meet the red planet. red planet (vinyl, 12-inch): rp-1. <http://www.discogs.com/martian-meet-the-red-planet/release/7042>. martian, the. 1993. cosmic movement / star dancer. red planet (vinyl, 12-inch): rp-2. <http://www.discogs.com/martian-cosmic-movement-star-dancer/release/2126>. model 500. 1985. no ufos. metroplex (vinyl, 12-inch): m-001. <http://www.discogs.com/model-500-no-ufos/release/1300331>. orange compilation. 1995. tip records (cd, comp): tip cd 02. <http://www.discogs.com/various-orange-compilation/release/33089>. orb, the. 1991. the orb’s adventures beyond the ultraworld. big life (2 x cd): blrdcd 05.<http://www.discogs.com/orb-the-orbs-adventures-beyond-the-ultraworld/ release/13265>. orb, the. 1992. blue room. logic records (cd maxi-single): 74321 10702 2. <http://www.discogs.com/orb-blue-room/release/13933>. orb, the. 1992. u.f.orb. island red label (cd): 162-535 006-2. <http://www.discogs.com/orb-uforb/release/2728>. overlords, the. 1994. all the naked people. arista (cd): 72445-11083-2. <http://www.discogs.com/overlords-all-the-naked-people/release/619233>. pink floyd. 1973. the dark side of the moon. harvest (vinyl, lp): shvl 804. <http://www.discogs.com/pink-floyd-the-dark-side-of-the-moon/release/1873013>. st john | the vibe of the exiles 87 power source. 1996. goaway. matsuri records (vinyl, ep): mp16 <http://www.discogs.com/power-source-goaway-ep/release/58786>. power source. 1999. cosmic waves. melodia records (cd): mr 1010. <http://www.discogs.com/power-source-cosmic-waves/release/112591>. psysex. 2003. come in peace. hom-mega (cd): hmcd31. <http://www.discogs.com/psysex-come-in-peace/release/219682>. public enemy. 1990. fear of a black planet. def jam recordings (cd): ck 45413. <http://www.discogs.com/public-enemy-fear-of-a-black-planet/release/458988>. shpongle. 1998. are you shpongled? twisted records (cd): twscd4. <http://www.discogs.com/shpongle-are-you-shpongled/release/27195>. shpongle. 2005. nothing lasts... but nothing is lost. twisted records (cd): twscd28. <http://www.discogs.com/shpongle-nothing-lasts-but-nothing-is-lost/release/462630>. space monkey. 2004. psychotic episode. agitato records (cd): age1035. <http://www.discogs.com/space-monkey-psychotic-episode/release/227416>. spaceships of the imagination. 2000. tip.world (cd comp): tipwcd05. <http://www.discogs.com/raja-ram-spaceships-of-the-imagination/release/36153>. star sounds orchestra. 1991. planets. fønix musik forlag (cd): fmf cd 1051. <http://www.discogs.com/star-sounds-orchestra-planets/release/420335>. star sounds orchestra. 1995. inter planetary ambience (live in london). i.t.p. recordings (2 x cd): aeos 001cd <http://www.discogs.com/ star-sounds-orchestra-inter-planetary-ambience-live-in-london/release/625273>. total eclipse. 1994. aliens / sound is solid. dragonfly records (vinyl, 12-inch): bflt 16. <http://www.discogs.com/total-eclipse-aliens-sound-is-solid/release/12906>. ur. 1991. the final frontier. underground resistance (vinyl, 12-inch). ur-003. <http://www.discogs.com/ur-the-final-frontier/release/2111>. x-102. 1992. discovers the rings of saturn. tresor (2 x vinyl, lp): tresor 4. <http://www.discogs.com/x-102-discovers-the-rings-of-saturn/release/12764>. filmography coney, john (dir). 1974. space is the place. north american star system. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072195/>. gruder, ori (dir). 1998. karahana: the first psychedelic trance movie. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlg8e8srw3w>. kubrick, stanley (dir). 1968. 2001: a space odyssey. mgm, stanley kubrick productions. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/>. sextro, maren and holger wick (dirs.). 2008. we call it techno! a documentary about germany’s early techno scene and culture. sense music & media, media atelier, germany. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1698597>. popular music fandom: identities, roles and practices mark duffett (ed.) new york: routledge, 2014. isbn:978-0-415-50639-7 (hardcover) rrp:us$125.00 (hardcover) jadey o'regan griffith university (australia) the study of music fandom is a relatively new area of academic interest within the wider field of popular music studies. this collection of essays offers a solid grounding in the bourgeoning field. in the same way as bennett, shank and toynbee's popular music studies reader (2006) was a reprise of frith and goodwin's on record (1990), this book acts as an update of lisa lewis' the adoring audience (1992), one of the earliest, and now seminal, texts in the field. twenty-two years later, popular music fandom offers a new collection of fan perspectives on music from the 1950s to the 2000s that also touch on new technologies (such as the internet and social media) which now play a significant role in shaping music fandom. duffett's introductory chapter gives a detailed overview of both the history of fan studies and the problems that surround the study of fan culture. many of the earliest studies of fan culture were in the area of film and television. while useful, they did not provide an adaptable framework for fan studies in popular music. duffett notes that the lack of any kind of framework to analyse the unique set of practices that are associated with fandom is part of why literature on the topic is relatively rare compared to other areas of popular music studies. the reason for this, duffett notes, is that "fandom does not fall neatly into easy processes of generalization: 'music fandom' is one term for a wide range of phenomena and identification occurring in a variety of different times and places, a term that encompasses a range of tastes, roles, identities and practices" (27). while the intersection of many of these elements is what makes fandom studies such a fertile area for analysis, it also means that it often slips through the cracks between musicology (which is often concerned only with the text), sociology (which often views music through the window of subculture) and psychology (which relies on concepts sometimes contested by cultural studies). to study music fandom in a cohesive way, an interdisciplinary approach is needed to examine not only the practices themselves, but the relationships between them. as duffett states, music fandom "combines a threshold of affective engagement with, variously or in combination, musical appreciation, music practice, celebrity-following, social networking, dancing, collecting and self-expression" (27). popular music fandom features chapters that touch on all of these "engagements", from roy shuker's overview of record collecting and appreciation, to matt hill's chapter on the "celebrity-following" of specific music producers, to cornel sandvoss' study of ibiza and edm through an analysis of online forums. of particular interest are the two chapters which deal directly with edm and dance culture: beate peter's "beyond capital, towards myth: edm fandom and dance practice" and cornel sandvoss' "i love ibiza: music, place and belonging". peter's thoughtful consideration of fandom in chapter three uses edm as a case study to better understand the complex issues that surround the creation and definition of fan cultures. like many of the contributing authors, peter explores the importance of a fluid framework for fandom studies in order to "reflect the contemporary state of social flux" (93). further, this fluidity also takes into consideration that fandom is not always a lifelong commitment, and that fans may belong to many groups at the same time, or at different times throughout their lives. the case study then explores the social and legal contexts around early rave music and how these definitions have changed (and still change) over time. from this, peter threads together the social, psychological and philosophical to better understand edm fandom and dance practice as both an individual and collective group experience—often at the same time. myth-making has long been discussed as a thread that runs through popular music history (see kelly and mcdonnell 1999), and when applied to edm, the creation and reliving of individual and shared "mythical" experience may help the reader to understand the deep loyalty expressed in dance music fandom. sandvoss' investigation into the community surrounding the ibiza edm scene combines an anthropological framework with quantitative and qualitative data collection. this data was taken from a popular message board, the "ibiza spotlight" (launched in 1999). the thematic analysis covers 70,535 separate posts and is combined with skype interviews with frequent posters. through this extensive data collection, sandvoss aims to address the question of whether one can be a fan of a "place" in the same way as a "text", as both place and text are "socially constructed though symbols, discourses and representations" (244). this exploration raises some interesting ideas, particularly the detailed discussion of "vibe", which, from the interviewee responses, seems a significant part of ibiza's lasting appeal. the "vibe" also encompasses feelings of fun, safety and acceptance, while also acknowledging the fluidity and temporality of the ibiza edm community. the idea of "vibe" in a social context is not dissimilar to "groove" in a musicological sense—we know when we have felt it, but it is often difficult to define in a precise way. sandvoss does well in exploring this idea of "vibe", an often intangible but important component of many fandoms. large-scale studies such as sandvoss' allow for data to be arranged in many different ways, and for both small and broad-scale trends to be uncovered. however, with so much data available for analysis, it is disappointing that it is used so infrequently in the chapter. instead, most analysis is specifically focused on interview comments. similarly, while the chapter outlines many of the positive experiences surrounding ibiza, there is no acknowledgement of those who may not have had the transcendent community experience those on the message board recounted. negative reports from posters may also be a part of the fan experience in ibiza—what happens when the myth of ibiza is shattered for edm fans? in addition to chapters focusing specifically on dance music, other notable contributions include matt hill's exploration of fandom around record production. while analyses of record production are beginning to increase in frequency in popular music studies, very few cover the fandom around record production. similarly, roy shuker's analysis of why fans feel the desire to collect records, or engage in "completism", also covers ground often missed by sociological studies of popular music. nedim hassan's investigation of fan practices in the domestic environment illuminates experiences so common to many that they are often overlooked; they still involve both music and social interaction, which makes them important to studies of fandoms. each chapter offers something engaging for the reader, whether or not you are familiar with or enjoy the kind of music each fandom surrounds. one criticism of popular music fandom is that while it covers areas of sociology, anthropology and psychology well, it is missing any connection to musicology. chapters discuss various kinds of music; however, with the exception of matt hill's occasional citing of musical examples, there are no references to any musicological elements in relation to the fandom that surrounds them. while focusing on the "text" is certainly not at the centre of fan studies, some connection with it may contribute to answers about what fans fall in love with and why. reading through popular music fandom encouraged me to reflect on my own experience as a music fan, and of the many fandoms i have inhabited over the course of my musical and academic career—after all, our early love of music is usually what fuels the curiosity to want to understand more deeply the strange, enjoyable, giddy experience of being a "fan". as a collection of chapters, ideas and analyses, popular music fandom offers a varied, interesting and important contribution to the growing area of fandom and fan culture studies that is certain to influence further research. references bennett, andy, barry shank and jason toynbee (eds.). 2006. popular music studies reader. new york: routledge. frith, simon and andrew goodwin (eds.). 1990. on record: rock, pop, and the written word. london: routledge. kelly, karen and evelyn mcdonnell (eds.). 1999. stars don't stand still in the sky: music and myth. new york: new york university press. lewis, lisa (ed.). 1992. the adoring audience: fan culture and popular media. london: routledge. versions, dubs and riddims: dub and the transient dynamics of jamaican music dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 7(2): 5–24 issn 1947-5403 ©2015 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.02.01 versions, dubs and riddims: dub and the transient dynamics of jamaican music thomas vendryes ecole normale supérieure de cachan (france) abstract dub emerged in jamaica in the early 1970s, and, for a decade, it became a prolific and intensely innovative dimension of jamaican popular music. yet, during the mid1980s, while dub flourished at the international level, influencing popular music in general, the genre of dub declined in popularity in jamaica. how could this musical innovation, so evidently associated with jamaica, expand and develop internationally while at the same time decline in jamaica itself ? in this paper, i explore the modalities and evolution of jamaican music production and consumption. through a description of the jamaican music industry context, with reference to individual artists’ paths and a summary of jamaican dub production, i show that even as the jamaican music milieu was highly favorable to the emergence of dub, dub proliferated as a genre only by developing ties to a diaspora of international audiences and practitioners. keywords: production studies, jamaican popular music, history of dub, audio-engineer, riddim, performance mixing thomas vendryes is associate professor at the department of social sciences of the école normale supérieure de cachan and researcher at the centre d’économie de la sorbonne (france). his research focuses on socio-economic change in developing countries. feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.01.02 dancecult 7(2)6 “what will happen to dub in 1983?” —scientist encounters pac-man lp (back cover) dub is eternal —the 420 dubkraft anthology introduction emerging from the practice of versioning (i.e. multiple interpretations of a given instrumental track) that sprang up at the close of the 1960s, dub became a psychedelic and prominent dimension of roots reggae that came to dominate the 1970s. a couple of years after the release of a handful of pioneer dub albums around 1973, the b-sides of jamaican singles were almost universally devoted to the dub re-interpretation of the tune pressed on the a-side. dub artists such as king tubby, lee perry, errol thompson, scientist and augustus pablo rose to fame, with a few receiving international recognition. by the late 1970s, dub had become a fully grown-up genre, with specific production techniques and aesthetics, a pantheon of “kings” and a wide audience (barrow and dalton 2004: 215, 230). it was in the late 1970s that the dub phenomenon spread out of jamaica. by the 1980s, a series of producers at least partially specialized in dub had become active in the uk (dennis bovell, adrian sherwood, mad professor) and in the us (most notably brad osborne and lloyd “bullwackie” barnes) (sullivan 2014: 77–96). the dub genre was nurtured and expanded internationally by a community of dedicated groups and artists, from france (zenzile) to japan (dry & heavy), and from germany (rhythm & sound) to canada (dubmatix). maybe even more importantly, the dub techniques and aesthetics developed in jamaica—and especially the concept and practice of the remix—are considered as having a significant impact on the way music is created and produced in a wide array of genres, from punk to hip-hop and dance music (howard 2004: 231). however, at the same time that dub disseminated outside of jamaica, and even outside of the boundaries of jamaican music, it lost ground in its home country (barrow and dalton 2004: 215). some dub artists left the country (lee scratch perry, scientist) while others turned to new genres such as dancehall (king jammy, king tubby), leaving only a handful to maintain dub alive in jamaica, though mostly as a side activity (sly & robbie). herein lies the paradoxical aspects of the birth and development of dub as a genre: whereas dub was born in jamaica, with a set of aesthetic and technical characteristics that are specific—if not unique—to jamaican popular music, after a decade or so, dub almost disappeared in its native land, while propagating out of jamaica’s national and musical frontiers. the aim here is to show that if dub was born in jamaica it is because it is deeply rooted, as a genre, in the particular ways jamaican music is consumed and produced. but the very forces and dynamics that allowed dub to emerge eventually surpassed it, leaving dub as a transient byproduct of jamaican music’s structural evolution, nurtured and developed, then, in other contexts. vendryes | versions, dubs and riddims 7 this paper will first briefly recall the birth and history of dub, then identify the reasons why this particular genre emerged in jamaica in the 1970s, and, in the last section, discuss why its production shifted from jamaica to an international milieu. a brief history of a jamaican music progeny: the birth, growth and departure of dub toward the birth of dub motta’s studio foundation in 1951 (hitchins 2014: 14) marked the beginning of music recording in jamaica, which sprouted out of two roots (o’brien chang and chen 1998: 10–18; barrow and dalton 2004: 3–11). the first such “root” came from colonial history, in the inheritance of african, christian and caribbean mixed musical forms (pocomania, kumina, revival zion), and of european settlers’ dances (such as the quadrille or mazurka). it eventually gave birth to mento, the first musical genre specific to jamaica. the second root of jamaican music was the us african-american influence in the 1940s and 1950s, especially rhythm and blues as well as (big band) jazz, which were extremely popular among jamaica’s then-emerging urban audience (o’brien chang and chen 1998: 20–1; bradley 2001: 15; barrow and dalton 2004: 17–18). in the 1950s and early 1960s, both mento and what came to be called “jamaican boogie” were recorded in kingston’s first studios (hitchins 2014: 7). a crucial, and original, trait of jamaican music, which has remained characteristic ever since, was that the main outlet for music, the primary place of music consumption, was the dance hall, where the prime actors were the “sound systems” (stolzoff 2000). their centrality has had four important consequences for jamaican music and its evolution. first, the essential musical objective was dance. second, the huge power of sound systems gave them the capacity to reproduce a wide range of sonic detail (hitchins 2014: 35–6), especially in low-frequencies, which had become a signature of jamaican musical production (hitchins 2014: 81–5; and as underscored by the very title of bradley’s influential book about reggae, bass culture [2001]). jamaican music has then been designed to be felt as much as it is heard, to generate what henriques calls “sonic dominance”, where “the bass line beats on our chest, vibrating the flesh, playing on the bone and resonating the genitals” (2003: 452). third, jamaican music production was driven by fierce competition between sound system operators, in constant search of new, original and specific recordings, dub plates (i.e. blanklabels, specials, acetates), that would allow them to “dominate” competitors (o’brien chang and chen 1998: 19–24). the fourth and final consequence is that jamaican practices of the sound system have given a prominent role to djs, who have been, since the founding figures of count machukie and then u-roy (bradley 2001: 292–298), in charge of introducing, commenting and “toasting” on the music played by the selecta.1 it was in the early 1960s, from these two musical roots, the colonial and africanamerican, and within the context of the dance hall, structured by sound systems, that ska dancecult 7(2)8 emerged, “the first music that the rest of the world associated exclusively with jamaica” (barrow and dalton 2004: 3). with its characteristic horn lines, “the ska beat was fast, appropriate for dancing, and emphasized offbeat accents that propelled the music forward” (moskowitz 2006: 271). ska was soon to be replaced by the “slower, more refined and, most of all, cooler” rocksteady (barrow and dalton 2004: 55). after a couple of years of gestation, rocksteady gave birth to reggae, with the term appearing on the maytals’ “do the reggay” in 1968 (barrow and dalton 2004: 87). since then, reggae has gained international recognition, listened to by audiences and played by bands on all continents as well as receiving its own grammy category in 1985. whereas reggae is an “umbrella term” that “went on to encompass a wide variety of styles” (moskowitz 2006: 253), some general and characteristic musical traits can be identified, mainly the prominence of the rhythm section, the importance of low-frequencies (especially bass) and syncopation due to emphasis on the offbeats and afterbeats (o’brien chang and chen 1998: 43).2 in the late 1960s through early 1970s, the aesthetics as well as the general context of jamaican music had become well established, and ready for the sprouting of versions and their development into dubs. versions and dubs the release of the first version3 in 1967 is one of the most famous and referential turning points in the history of jamaican music (bradley 2001: 312; barrow and dalton 2004: 216–7; veal 2007: 52). one evening in 1967, rudolph “ruddy” redwood, operator of the supreme ruler of sound sound system, went, as usual, to duke reid’s treasure isle recording studio to get some “specials” from reid’s audio engineer, byron smith. however, “as he ran through the tapes of [the paragons’] “on the beach”, byron smith inadvertently left the vocal track off ” (barrow and dalton 2004: 216). this instrumental version became a huge success at ruddy’s next dance. immediately after this “spine-tingling moment” (bradley 2001: 312), versions became the new craze with jamaican music audiences and producers. in a couple of years, the b-sides of jamaican singles almost universally provided a version of the vocal track pressed on the a-side. these first versions constituted recordings where the vocal track has been simply removed, muted from the original song, and sometimes replaced by an instrumental solo (barrow and dalton 2004: 218). eventually, the rhythm tracks presented by versions came to be interpreted and worked on, giving birth to dub. “voo-doo”,4 by the hippy boys (1971) is generally considered as the first dub track (barrow and dalton 2004: 219). dub versions of an original recording did not only mute and remove the vocals, they manipulated, de-constructed and re-constructed the left-over tracks, with the addition of various sound and audio effects, in particular tape delay, reverb and echo (veal 2007: 64–76). an illustrative example of the difference between versions and dubs is the comparison of the version of horace andy’s “skylarking” produced by coxsone dodd in 1972, with the dub mixed by king tubby for the same song released by bunny lee a few years later.5 the more sophisticated dubs progressively replaced vendryes | versions, dubs and riddims 9 versions on b-sides, while in the early 1970s a handful of “first dub album ever” candidates were released: prince buster’s the message dubwise, herman chin-loy’s aquarius dub, java java java java by the chin brothers and errol thompson, and finally the upsetters’ blackboard jungle dub, mixed by lee “scratch” perry and king tubby. in the second half of the 1970s, dub practically became the reverse side of reggae: b-sides of jamaican singles were covered by the dub versions of a-side recordings, and the number of dub albums increased exponentially. a new generation of artists—producers, musicians, audio-engineers—came to the forefront of this emerging scene, as shown in table 1.6 by the end of the 1970s, dub was not just a marginal subgenre of mainstream reggae, it was one of its key dimensions, with a prominent aesthetic influence. for example, king tubby, a leading audio-engineer, producer and sound system operator of the 1970s and 1980s, one of the “founding fathers” of dub, became much sought-after by producers to mix dub b-sides (bradley 2001: 323). eventually, dub was perceived not as a secondary interpretation, a b-side, but rose to its full independence as an a-side. in 1975, the single “baby i love you so” (produced by augustus pablo, vocals by jacob miller) was released in the uk with the dub version by king tubby (the classical “king tubby meets rockers uptown”) on the a-side (bradley 2001: 323). a year later, lee “scratch” perry released what is “often considered one of the defining statements of the genre” (veal 2007: 158), the super ape album (1976). what is crucial here is that some of the album’s tracks—including the title song “super ape”—were not direct reinterpretations of existing materials. the dubs were not to be heard with an “original” track in mind; they were not versions anymore. from b-side versions, dub finally settled as a genre into full a-side status (sullivan 2014: 48). the eventual decline of dub in jamaica and the dub diaspora dub: born in the early 1970s, grown-up by the end of decade and gone by the mid-1980s. as veal writes: “the early 1980s were also the last years of dub as a contemporary musical movement in jamaica” (2007: 188). the stream of dub albums dried up, as can be seen in the discogs database: 152 dub albums were released in jamaica during the 1970s, 74 in the 1980s, 36 in the 1990s and a dozen since 2000.7 even if this information may not be exhaustive, it confirms a well-acknowledged trend. this impression is confirmed by a quick examination of the careers of the main actors of the jamaican dub scene. table 1 presents the dub pioneers of the very early 1970s: errol thompson, clive chin, herman chin-loy, augustus pablo, keith hudson, bunny lee, king tubby and lee perry. they were followed, in the mid-1970s, by a second generation of dub artists, such as jammy, scientist (both disciples of king tubby), sly & robbie and the late-comer peter chemist, who also trained at tubby’s studio. the striking observation is that for almost all of them, the production of dubs became less prolific by the mid-1980s. three trajectories are visible. most simply left the music industry at that time (clive chin, errol thompson, herman chin-loy, keith hudson, sylvan morris, dub specialist). others remained active, but shifted their musical production away from dub and toward the new dancecult 7(2)10 digital sounds of dancehall (bunny lee, king tubby, jammy, sly & robbie). only lee perry and scientist have kept issuing dubs as their core musical activity—but outside of jamaica. so by the end of the 1980s, dub was clearly no longer a “contemporary musical movement in jamaica” (veal 2007: 188). artist audio engineer producer beginning of musical activity beginning of dub production end of dub production in jamaica end of musical activity notes augustus pablo c. 1971 c. 1971 c. 1993 1999 pablo’s dub production slowed in the 1980s, and almost stopped by the mid-1990s. pablo passed away in 1999. bunny “striker” lee mid-1960s early 1970s mid-1980s cont. a very influential producer of the 1970s, lee played a key role in the development of dub, with king tubby and jammy. clive chin early 1970s early 1970s mid-1970s mid-1970s c. chin was mainly active as a producer in the early 1970s. he left the music industry and jamaica in the mid-1970s. dub specialist c. 1974 c. 1974 c. 1980 c. 1980 dub specialist is the generic name under which a series of dub albums were issued by producer c. dodd, before he moved to new york. errol “et” thompson late 1960s early 1970s early 1980s 2004 “et” is mainly famous for his work with producer joe gibbs (african dub all-mighty series) in the 1970s–early 1980s. he passed away in 2004. herman chinloy c. 1970 c. 1970 mid-1970s mid-1970s one of the very first pioneers of dub with the album aquarius dub (1973), herman chin-loy had limited activity after 1975. keith hudson end of 1960s c. 1974 c. 1974 1984 after a brief career in jamaica, including the release of the influential pick a dub in 1974, k. hudson emigrated to the uk, and then us. king tubby c. 1970 c. 1970 mid-1980s 1989 a pivotal figure of the genre, king tubby’s dub releases slowed after the mid-1980s. he was shot dead in 1989. lee “scratch” perry early 1960s c. 1970 early 1980s cont. a pioneer and eminent figure of jamaican dub, lee perry destroyed his own studio and left jamaica in the early 1980s. lynford “andy capp” anderson c. 1960 c. 1970 late 1970s late 1970s andy capp was one of the most prolific audio-engineer in the early years of versions, making a key contribution to mixing techniques. peter chemist early 1980s early 1980s late 1980s cont. a late comer in jamaican dub, peter chemist was active as an audio engineer mixing dubs in the mid-1980s. prince/king jammy c. 1976 c. 1976 late 1980s cont. starting at tubby’s studio in the mid-1970s, jammy has been releasing dubs ever since, even if only marginally after the mid-1980s. scientist c. 1975 c. 1975 c 1985 cont. a disciple of king tubby in the mid-1970s, scientist left jamaica in 1985, and continues to release dubs from the us. sly & robbie mid-1970s mid-1970s mid-1980s cont. a very influential rhythmic section, sly & robbie actively released dubs up to the mid-1980s, but only occasionally afterward. sylvan morris mid-1960s early 1970s late 1970s late 1980s morris is an important yet under-credited audio-engineer, who most notably mixed dubs for coxsone dodd, harry j and augustus pablo. table 1. an overview of jamaican dub artists vendryes | versions, dubs and riddims 11 it does not mean that dubs suddenly disappeared from the jamaican musical landscape, but they were demoted back to b-sides, and lost the prominence acquired in the 1970s. no artist, producer or audio-engineer became as specialized in the genre as lee perry, king tubby or scientist, and less and less dedicated dub albums were released. yet, while dub receded in jamaica, it took root overseas. in the uk, dennis bovell released a series of dub albums between 1978 and 1980; neil “mad professor” fraser founded his ariwa label in 1979; and after a first dub album in 1978, adrian sherwood launched his own on-usound label in 1980 (sullivan 2014: 83). all three have remained dedicated and influential dub artists to this day. in new york, producers such as brad osborne, everton da silva and lloyd “bullwackie” barnes released a series of important dub albums in the 1970s, often in collaboration with artists from jamaica (sullivan 2014: 92–6). from there, dub expanded worldwide. table 2 presents the number of dub albums referenced on discogs,8 in the whole world and jamaica, respectively, with jamaica’s rank for dub albums production reported in parenthesis. even if imperfect, these figures indicate a very clear trend: since the early 1970s, dub has been prospering—but outside of jamaica. five hundred and twenty-one dub albums were released in the 1970s, 152 of which in jamaica, and it is very likely that a significant proportion of us and uk albums were in fact recorded there. in the 2000s, 5,572 dub albums are referenced, more than ten times more, but only ten coming from jamaica—less than from hong kong! number of dub albums 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s whole world 521 1,645 3,654 5,572 jamaica (rank) 152 (2nd) 74 (4th) 36 (14th) 10 (37th) table 2. dub albums production besides its spread as a genre per se, dub has also expanded through the emergence and development of derivative and hybrid genres (such as dub poetry, digidub, dubstep and dub techno), as well as through its aesthetic and technical influence on other genres and styles. to quote howard on lee perry and king tubby: today, the two jamaicans are rightly regarded as the forefathers of mixology—a beat science that has significantly influenced punk pioneers (the clash and the slits), post-punk deconstructionists (the fall and public image ltd.), trip-hop/jungle/drum and bass mavens (massive attack, tricky and squarepusher, et al.), turntablists (dj spooky and cut chemist), and hip-hop innovators (from grandmaster flash, to the beastie boys, to timbaland) and beyond (2004: 230–1). dub may also have played a key role in the emergence of “the now commonplace practice of song remixing” (veal 2007: 2). if dub was born in jamaica in the early 1970s, a dozen years later it almost vanished in its native land as an autonomous genre to flourish elsewhere. how could this paradoxical evolution be possible? as dub is a progeny of jamaican popular music, emerging in the early 1970s, the following section will discuss reasons for this formation. http://www.discogs.com dancecult 7(2)12 the birth of dub: why jamaica? music created by jamaican audio-engineers as discussed in the previous section, and evident for its listeners, dub’s characteristic trait has been the re/interpretation through mixing of recorded tracks. it was primarily crafted by audio-engineers. for example, half of the dub artists presented in table 1 were first and foremost audio-engineers,9 even if boundaries between the roles and functions of music production have not always been easily drawn in the jamaican context. the position of the audio engineer was at the mixing console, between musicians and vocalists on the input side, and pressed recordings on the output side. for dub to be possible, audio-engineers must have had the technical and statutory possibilities to creatively alter the recorded material before its release. as for the technical context, it was practically impossible to make dubs in jamaica, or anywhere else in the world, before 1963, simply because the music performers (musicians, vocalists) were recorded on a single track (hitchins 2014: 8). even if early recording techniques could to some extent be used creatively, mainly through the placement of microphones, it was not possible to re/interpret a set of tracks once recorded. studio re/interpretation only became possible after 1963 with the introduction of multi-track recording consoles (hitchins 2014: 8), which allow for the rearrangement and alteration of different musical parts. volume, balance and timbre of the different tracks could be modified, while sound effects (delay, echo, reverb) could be used and external sounds added. the creative space for post-recording mixing steadily expanded in the 1960s and 1970s as recording studios became better equipped, shifting from the basic one-track federal studio of ken khouri in 1959 to the multi-track facilities of the 1960s and the sixteen track machine installed by byron lee at his dynamic sounds studio in 1970 (o’brien chang and chen 1998: 84–5). throughout this period, jamaican audio-engineers tended to work at the frontier of technological constraints. engineers skilled enough to modify audio equipment—producing new sound effects—had a decisive advantage. king tubby, with his background in electrical engineering, stood far above the others in this respect. to quote howard: tubby created customized reverb machines, makeshift equalizers, and homemade delay units. his most important enhancement involved replacing the board’s four worn-out sliding volume faders with newer, more resilient sliders that afforded him far greater command and control of the mixing levels. by improving the flexibility of the faders, tubby was given a clear advantage over competing engineers (2004: 221). recording and mixing technology thus set, unsurprisingly, the technical conditions of possibility for dub. however, on top of these technical possibilities, to create versions and dubs, the audioengineer must also have had the statutory capacity to alter the recorded sounds: to intervene for artistic reasons—and not merely technical ones—during the developmental process of a vendryes | versions, dubs and riddims 13 record, as in the case of jamaican audio-engineers. indeed, when musical production started in jamaica in the 1950s and early 1960s, producers (such as motta, khouri or seaga) knew very little if anything about the technical aspects of audio-engineering or about the tastes of the target audience, thereby allowing for an important autonomy of the audio-engineers (hitchins 2014: 66). likewise, musicians and vocalists were often gathered by a producer on a project-basis rather than structured as a regular band (bradley 2001: 50; hitchins 2014: 78). this session-based approach to music production, combined with the flexibility and impermanent nature of instrumentalists’ and singers’ collaboration, also tended to give audio-engineers a role of arrangers, or of creative coordinators. to quote hitchins, jamaican popular music production has been characterized by “an attitude towards the recording process where the audio engineer assumed responsibility for all aspects of sound creation and capture as a creative rather than technical endeavor” (2014: 70). this technical and institutional context thus permitted the emergence of dub, but couldn’t be the determining factor, as it was not specific to jamaica. innovative and stateof-the-art audio equipment was not used in jamaica first, as it was created and developed in technologically advanced and industrialised economies—north america, western europe and japan. as for the creative role of the audio-engineer, even if it has been specifically constitutive of the jamaican musical milieu, it was also present in general in popular music production from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, when audio-engineers progressively turned from what kealy (1979) calls the purely technical “craft-union mode” to the creative “art mode”. the roles of engineers such as geoff emerick for the beatles’ revolver or sgt. pepper’s lonely heart club band (howard 2004: 23–4, 29–30; hitchins 2014: 215), or mike ross and eddie kramer on the “third stone from the sun” track for jimi hendrix’ are you experienced? album, were no less important than the ones played by jamaican audio-engineers—the audio-engineering work on “third stone from the sun” being, for example, mentioned by uk dub artist dennis bovell as a seminal influence (sullivan 2014: 78). in brief, the opening of post-recording mixing possibilities, for technical and statutory reasons, made the emergence of dub possible, but as similar developments took place elsewhere, the decisive factors in the jamaican formation of dub must also lie elsewhere. mixing for the jamaican audience first, versions and dubs had the same objective as jamaican popular music in general: dancing in the dance hall—as exemplified by the aforementioned history of the first version ever played. the dance hall crowd danced to low frequencies. one of the main differences between early versions and later dubs was the emphasis, in the latter, on bass and drum (veal 2007: 57), a feature that has remained constitutive of dub as a genre. there are two other defining characteristics of jamaican popular music of the 1970s, which were present or even emphasized in dub mixes: syncopation and “rawness”. syncopation in this context can be traced back to ska and its emphasized afterbeat,10 which has become “the hallmark of later jamaican music” (barrow and dalton 2004: 4). the second trait of jamaican popular dancecult 7(2)14 music, also inherited from its first days—from motta’s studio according to hitchins (2014: 20)—has been the tolerance, if not a preference, for what can be called a “raw” sound, the seemingly “unsophisticated” and even “discordant” rendering of a “downtown” or “from the country” feeling (hitchins 2014: 20; o’brien chang and chen 1998: 33).11 from interviews and his own experience of the jamaican music milieu as a session musician, hitchins states that jamaican popular music has been characterized by “an approach that is driven by intuitiveness and spontaneity rather than by concepts of perfection in regard to performance or sound” (2014: 20). thus, dubs were primarily characterized by a rendering, and even an emphasis, of three traits of their musical material: low-frequency rhythms, syncopation and rawness. another jamaican feature that distinguished dub from other music genres using the mixing console as a creative device is time. jamaican musical production has been indeed characterized by an intense time pressure. bassist george “fully” fulwood describes to veal the process of 1970s studio production, how “we might go inna the studio about two hours, and come with fourteen, fifteen songs!” (2007: 47). hitchins (2014: 78–9) similarly notes that during a typical recording session for dodd in the 1960s, each song was allowed a maximum of three takes, whereas at the same time, a us pop record could represent 100 hours of studio time. in the 1990s, the production of a tune took approximately four to six hours (hitchins 2014: 167). this is first and foremost due to the fact that jamaican music producers were investors and financiers (bradley 2001: 41; hitchins 2014; 63–6) under acute competitive pressure: they were thus willing to craft records rapidly and efficiently. moreover, their primary goal was to release records as “acetates” or “dub plates”, shortlived soft-wax discs designed to be tested and played exclusively but temporarily by sound systems (veal 2007: 51–2). if successful, the record could then be released commercially. this two-step commercialization process allowed or even called for a modality of music production through trial-and-error experimentation, which was made possible by the aforementioned tolerance for imperfections and mistakes. jamaican audio-engineers and dub artists created in the same general context: they had to mix quickly, but mistakes were allowed. lynford anderson remembers recording and mastering “almost a hundred songs a day” (barrow and dalton 2004: 91), while scientist states about his dub production that “all these albums, we did them like in hours” (veal 2007: 47). this gave rise to a specific mode of mixing, which hitchins (2014) labels “performance-mixing”, and which is maybe best defined by veal as “using the mixing-board as an instrument of spontaneous composition and improvisation” (2007: 78).12 finally, in parallel with the multiplication of dubs in the 1970s, a mode of production unique to jamaican popular music emerged: what hitchins (2014) calls the “riddim production method” (see also o’brien chang and chen 1998: 75–8; bradley 2001: 349– 352; barrow and dalton 2004: 261; manuel and marshall 2006; veal 2007: 48). rhythmic patterns of bass and drum became autonomous from the songs they were used in. these riddims were taken from an existing song or—increasingly—“composed as autonomous music backing tracks” (hitchins 2014: 135). riddims became the support of numerous vendryes | versions, dubs and riddims 15 (sometimes hundreds13) of songs or interpretations—including versions and dubs. the riddim production method appears as articulated with the two aforementioned specificities of the jamaican context, both linked with the centrality of the dance hall and the sound system: the intense pressure of competition; and the primary objective of dance. indeed, on the production side, the re-use of pre-existing and popular rhythms reduced both cost and risk for the producer (manuel and marshall 2006: 448, veal 2007: 55), while the riddim method also satisfied the aesthetics and selection of sound system operators. first, in a sound system, the selector acted as a “macro-composer” (veal 2007: 85), and having at their disposal several tracks recorded on the same riddim was extremely useful in constituting sets, enabling the selector to keep the crowd dancing to an efficient rhythm pattern (bradley 2001: 333). second, to make a difference in the fierce competition between sound systems, operators had to play specific records (called “dub plates”, “specials”, or “acetates”), which generated a constant demand for special mixes or versions of popular songs (veal 2007: 53). mixing dubs from existing tracks thus provided a convenient way for producers to offer selectors a variety of tracks to compose their sets and specific tracks to attract an audience hungry for novelty and variety. so dub was consubstantial to the emergence of the riddim production method, as it constituted a way to introduce diversified and specific interpretations of rhythmic patterns. the available studio production techniques and the status of audio-engineers made the birth of dub possible in jamaica in the 1970s, and this matrix was brought to fruition by the specific fertile elements of jamaican popular music at that time, in terms of musical material, production context and consumption patterns. this explains dub’s particular aesthetics (low-frequency rhythm basis, syncopation, rawness) and modality of production (performance-mixing, multifariousness of interpretations). however, while this context remained largely unchanged, dub faded from the front stage after the mid-1980s in jamaica. the final section will argue that dub did not last as “a contemporary musical movement in jamaica” (veal 2007: 188) because it constitutes a transient by-product of the evolution that eventually gave birth to the dancehall genre. yet dub has not disappeared, either: it persists on b-sides in jamaica, and flourishes elsewhere. the continuation of dub: why not jamaica? an intermediate product as stated before, in parallel with the emergence of dub, jamaican popular music evolved toward the riddim production method (hitchins 2014), or the “riddim/voicing system” (manuel and marshall 2006). the multiplication of versions since the late 1960s, followed by dubs, was correlative to the increasing dissociation between a completed tune and the supporting track. the supporting track was the rhythm pattern plus (optionally) a melodic scheme, while the completed tune included the addition of vocals and instruments during the final studio mix. dancecult 7(2)16 the re-use of existing tracks to generate new records is not specific to jamaica: covers and versions are pervasive in popular music. however, this practice has taken hold in jamaica at an unequaled scope, and has eventually become the very principle of music creation. in the late 1960s, the release of the first versions constituted the first step in the deconstruction of jamaican tunes into two elements: the rhythmic (and optionally melodic) infrastructure and the vocal/instrumental/dub interpretation, wherein a version revealed a mere exposition of the infrastructure. the second step took place in the early 1970s with the first releases of follow-up versions of existing tracks, that is to say the addition of a new superstructure on top of the versions. the significant breakthrough in this direction was undoubtedly the huge success of u-roy, who in 1970 was celebrated for his toasting ( jamaican-style rap or public address) over versions of duke reid’s rocksteady classics (barrow and dalton 2004: 123). in a few years time, jamaican producers began re-using their rhythm tracks—or that of their competitors’ hits—to record new tunes. the phenomenon steadily developed in the 1970s, with symptomatic moments like the release of yamaha skank (1974), the first album dedicated to interpretations of a single rhythmic infrastructure, taken from slim smith & the uniques’ “my conversation” (barrow and dalton 2004: 292). this evolution culminates in 1985, when jammy released wayne smith’s “sleng teng”. indeed, jammy first carefully worked with noel davy on the rhythmic infrastructure (hitchins 2014: 107–11), completely autonomously, before any projected future interpretation. after wayne smith’s version and its huge success, the “sleng teng” riddim has been used as a supporting infrastructure for nearly a hundred other tunes in 1985, to a total of several hundred up to this day.14 as hitchins writes, the “sleng teng” moment “displaced the ‘song’ in favour of the ‘riddim’ as the central creative focal point” (2014: 100). the 1985 success of sleng teng concluded the transitional dynamics of jamaican popular music production that had begun with redwood’s first version in 1967. the rhythm track—now called riddim—became fully acknowledged as an infrastructure available to support numerous interpretations. dub constituted a dimension of this structural evolution of jamaican popular music between 1967 and 1985, parallel to the multiplication of vocal, dj or instrumental interpretations of the existing rhythmic infrastructure. but there is an essential difference between dubs and these three other kinds of versions. the vocal and instrumental versions constituted finished, yet open, musical products that could be played by the sound system as they were, and took the rhythmic infrastructure as given. on the contrary, dub versions worked on the rhythm tracks themselves: they went deeper into the reinterpretation of existing rhythmic infrastructures. at the same time, they remained unfinished and incomplete in the jamaican context, for they were designed to support a superstructure: the vocals, and especially the live toasting of a dj, as performed by the sound system primarily and on record occasionally.15 indeed, vocals and lyrics have been a constitutive dimension of the process of cultural creation that takes place in the dance hall and through the sound system, with the dj playing a fundamental role. as cooper writes, “pleasure in the word is a fundamental element of the total theater of the dancehall” (2004: 5). jamaican vendryes | versions, dubs and riddims 17 sound system culture thus has had a constitutive literary dimension, even if an oral one, making it what devonish (1998) calls an “orature”. whereas vocal, dj or instrumental versions showed how an existing rhythmic infrastructure could be re-used to generate several musical finished products, dubs manifested how this rhythmic infrastructure could be interpreted and modified to provide support for new versions. while the first versions separated recorded songs from their rhythmic infrastructures, vocal/dj/instrumental and dub versions constituted a shift in the general evolution of jamaican popular music toward the riddim production method: the former leading to the multiplication of records on the same rhythm tracks, the latter to creative work on the same rhythmic pattern. versions and dubs thus mostly remained an intermediate material for the production of vocal, dj or instrumental tunes. for example, despite the huge amount of versions and dubs released at the time, only a handful appear in the whole series of yearly top 25 records of jamaican charts for the years 1970 to 1985 (as noted by o’brien chang and chen, 1998: 224–8). this underscores that dub, for the jamaican popular music mainstream, remained an unfinished musical product, waiting to become the support of an interpretation—for a record or in the dance hall. however, this particularly intermediate position of dub versions became less and less tenable in the early 1980s, with technological developments in soundrecording techniques and the settling of the riddim production method. dub grows up into dancehall as depicted, the re-use of existing rhythm tracks led progressively to the differentiation of jamaican music production in two steps: the building of generic riddims, and their subsequent use as a support for various tunes. the creation of rhythmic infrastructures has come to replace the reinterpretation of rhythm tracks extracted from existing songs. this structural evolution of jamaican popular music was reinforced, if not made possible, by technological change. indeed, during the 1970s, dubs were often mixed by audio-engineers from musical material that was pre-recorded, on which they had little control, if none at all. for example, king tubby’s studio was too small to record live musicians, so tubby and his acolytes (in particular scientist and jammy) had to work on pre-existing tracks, recorded by others. this context radically changed in the 1980s, due to the diffusion of new music technologies, especially drum machines and synthesizers (hitchins 2014). with the new technologies, it became possible for audio-engineers to create novel tracks and sounds, as they did not have to rely solely—if at all—on prerecorded material. even if studio musicians remained in high demand, the fact that they could now be recorded one at a time on a multitrack system, rather than as a group, reinforced the direction and creative role of the audio-engineer. as a consequence, the dub practitioners and audio-engineers of the 1980s could go one level deeper in their composition of rhythmic infrastructure. in the dub versions of the 1970s, audio-engineers interpreted and rearranged rhythmic structures taken from existing songs; with the technological developments of the 1980s, they could now directly build riddims from scratch. dancecult 7(2)18 at the same time, these new techniques also permitted a closer connection between the composer of the supporting rhythmic infrastructure and the djs or singers who “ride it”, as the expression goes. indeed, the advent of multitrack recording technology allowed studio engineers to easily record, one after the other, several vocalists (or instrumentalists) over the same rhythm structure. the recording engineer could even alter or modify the supporting rhythm (and other) tracks to suit different vocal interpretations. based in particular on his own experience as a session musician in jamaica, hitchins writes: “performance-mixing therefore employed dub and version b-side mixing strategies but applied them in a new role, helping to integrate multiple vocal performances with a pre-recorded riddim as cohesive pieces of commercial music” (2014: 139). in the 1980s, technical changes as well as the general spread of the riddim production method extended dub’s intermediary role. if dub seemed to lose prominence in jamaican popular music production, it is because it expanded, upstream and downstream, deeper into rhythmic composition, and further into the adaptation of the eventual vocal interpretation. dub “grew up” into the riddim-production method, characteristic of the dancehall sound, the dominant genre of jamaican popular music after 1982. the traits attached to dub were thereby transferred to riddim-based dancehall. the primacy of the rhythm, at the service of vocal interpretations, the importance of sonic experiments and musical innovations, and, finally—a characteristic feature of contemporary jamaican popular music production—the practice of performance-mixing that are all common to dancehall all derive directly from dub. if dub ceased to be a primary focus of the musical production in jamaica, it is because dub’s constitutive set of techniques evolved together with the available technology. dub was eventually absorbed into the new genre of dancehall, with its own musical material. perhaps the best illustration of this absorption of dub into dancehall is the trajectory of king tubby and his apprentice jammy. both represented the intermediary status of dub productions in the 1970s. as noted previously, at tubby’s studio, they didn’t have room to record musicians, so they mixed tracks recorded elsewhere (veal 2007: 116). but they also seized any opportunity to expand their creative control, upstream and downstream. eventually, a vocal booth was set up (sullivan 2014: 46). significantly, though, jammy came to signify the shift of jamaican music into computerized, riddim-driven dancehall with the release of the epoch-making hit under me sleng teng by wayne smith in 1985. trained as an audio-engineer by tubby, jammy became the “undisputed ruler” of early digital dancehall (barrow and dalton 2004: 291), while tubby soon joined this new sound (barrow and dalton 2004: 303–5). representing jamaican dub in general in the 1970s, the production work of tubby and jammy created, and developed, the popular music genre of dancehall in the 1980s. dub’s seminal versatility dub receded in jamaica as an autonomous and significant genre during the mid-1980s, when its techniques and objectives became constitutive dimensions of the new dominant sound, dancehall. however, if this evolution may have been unavoidable in the jamaican context, vendryes | versions, dubs and riddims 19 with its specific aesthetic and production values, outside of jamaica dub has survived as a distinct genre; it has generated, alone or through hybridization, many subsequent genres, and it has influenced popular music in general. indeed, its transitional, experimental and exploratory nature makes dub a multifaceted and shifting object, of which boundaries are not readily drawn, and definitions are not easily specified. yet this ambiguity makes it especially seminal. dubs may be the ancestors of remixes, now pervasive in popular music (veal 2007: 2). dub’s riddim aesthetic, based on the sounds and culture of the roots reggae era, have provided the conditions for the musical genre of dub poetry (moskowitz 2006: 94). although many dub progenies could be identified and debated, i wish to conclude by discussing why it is outside jamaica that dub has developed as a stand-alone genre. as depicted earlier, despite their significance for jamaican music in the 1970s, dubs basically constituted intermediary products between the pre-recorded tracks and vocals. outside of jamaica, however, dub met listeners who were not necessarily dancehall participants. this international audience did not expect dubs to be danced to and/or to be interpreted through toasting. they could have been exposed to other genres—in particular psychedelic rock and funk, but also disco, house, techno and hip-hop—that also relied on the creative use of the mixing console. the global audience of the “dub diaspora” tended to take dubs as finished products, with specific listening and aesthetic characteristics. as adrian sherwood, a pivotal uk dub artist since the late 1970s, states: “we all loved reggae, but when the dub stuff came along it was just perfect for sitting down and listening to and getting blasted” (sullivan 2014: 88). even if this disposition also existed in jamaica, it was more prevalent overseas. for example, the aforementioned initiative to release the single “baby i love you so” with the dub “king tubby meets rockers uptown” on the a-side came from the us mango and uk island labels (bradley 2001: 323), whereas in jamaica, the dub version remained on the b-side.16 the fact that most of scientist’s albums (or compilations) were released under international labels such as greensleeves or clocktower, even before scientist left jamaica17 illustrates that albums produced by jamaican artists and specifically dedicated to dub as a genre were often—if not most often—aimed at foreign buyers. the identification and delineation of dub as a discrete genre are thus—at least partly—predicated on the way it was received by listeners outside of jamaica (veal 2007: 224). probably the clearest illustration of this difference between the overseas and jamaican use and understanding of dub is the contrast between lee perry and king tubby’s respective trajectories, as the two undisputed jamaican dub masters stood exactly at opposite poles of the jamaican dub world. it is true of their personalities; tubby’s always shiny shoes and sobriety stood in stark contrast to lee perry’s consumption of alcohol and drugs and extravagant behavior. more importantly, this contrast is true in their approach to dub. indeed, tubby’s studio was conceived to mix material that had been recorded elsewhere, and the intended output was b-sides as well as dubplates, specials or acetates, whereas lee perry’s black ark studio, founded in 1974, was fully equipped to record musicians and vocalists. so while tubby’s dubs were by essence intermediary musical products, and so represented the quintessence of the place of dub within the general jamaican music production, lee perry, on the other hand, created complete musical products. perry’s productions began not with dancecult 7(2)20 a rework, but with recording studio musicians. perry went through the intermediate steps of performance and experimental mixing to the eventual additions of vocals and the final mix. his dubs were finished, stand-alone tracks, as discussed earlier through the example of his super ape album. as sullivan summarizes: although both perry and tubby are of equal stature in the history of dub, their working methods were completely different. tubby worked with a mixing board and vocals, while perry constantly worked on live rhythms and compositions (in fact, his sessions often started off with recording the studio band). tubby “stripped down”, whereas perry’s approach was often more additive (2014: 48). with their respective interpretations of dub techniques and aesthetics, king tubby always remained at the very core of the jamaican music mainstream, with limited outside influence, while lee perry found himself increasingly on the fringes in jamaica, with a growing audience overseas. after scoring a few hits in the uk at the end of the 1960s, and through an arrangement with the newly founded uk-based trojan records, perry “made the first of many trips to london in 1969” (katz 2006: 80), while at the same time he shifted his production towards instrumentals and experimentation (katz 2006: 81–3). by the end of the 1970s, perry was heavily dependent on the uk island label for the release and promotion of his production, which was less and less present in jamaican dance halls. as katz writes, “perry’s link with island had given him the greatest exposure outside jamaica, helping to establish him as a cult figure with an entirely new audience” (2006: 302). lee’s productions in jamaica, at the close of the 1970s, “are complex and dense experimental works on which perry’s individual personality is strongly evident, equally indicative of how far his creations were from reggae’s mainstream” (katz 2006: 301). eventually, in the early 1980s, the black ark studio was destroyed by fire, and perry left jamaica to continue his still-ongoing musical career overseas. the paths of king tubby and lee perry represent dub’s dual destiny. tubby remained faithful to dub’s origins—mixing versions—and eventually shifted to riddim-based and digital dancehall, thus exemplifying the place and trajectory of dub within the jamaican music mainstream. on the other hand, perry expanded dub techniques and aesthetics to develop it as a genre, progressively growing apart from the jamaican dance hall public, but establishing contact with an overseas audience. if the versioning or remix dimension of dub, as represented by tubby’s approach, was eventually absorbed into the very production of jamaican music after the mid-1980s, dub was received as a genre per se by different publics overseas, and, as represented by lee perry, it is abroad that it eventually found the context to endure and develop. conclusion dub appeared in jamaica in the early 1970s, occupying the creative space opened by versions between recorded tracks (especially their rhythmic infrastructures) and their interpretations in sound system performance (mainly in dj toasting). up until the midvendryes | versions, dubs and riddims 21 1980s, dub developed as a part of jamaican popular music, shifting toward a specific modality of creation, the riddim production method, where riddims are built to support several vocal interpretations. dubs constituted by-products of this evolution, but necessary ones, as dub as a sub-genre represented the laboratory where techniques and aesthetics of rhythm construction and interpretation were elaborated. as these newer riddim techniques became established, jamaican dub lost its raison d’être, and the set of techniques it embodied was absorbed into dancehall. king tubby’s trajectory epitomizes this mainstream dynamic. however, outside jamaica, dubs were also received as stand-alone musical works, with a decisive influence on popular music, especially through dub’s specific mixing strategies and objectives. as with lee perry himself, who stepped out of jamaica’s musical context, dub has developed independently—to become a genre full of life with numerous global offspring. acknowledgements i would like to thank jedediah sklower for his support and audrey bangou for her advice on earlier versions of this manuscript, as well as tobias c. van veen and hillegonda rietveld for their careful reading of this paper, and their valuable comments. i must also acknowledge the important feedback from an anonymous reviewer. notes 1 the term dj has a specific meaning in jamaica: the selecta (selector) plays in a jamaican sound system the role of what is called a dj elsewhere; in other words, they are the person who selects the tracks, while the dj is a mc (master of ceremonies), a vocalist who toasts (raps) on the music that is being played (stolzoff 2000: 98). 2 while the syncopated feelings of jamaican popular music (or of other music genres for that matter) are often attributed to the emphasis on the offbeat, this term itself has no standard definition, and can actually cover several diverging meanings. “off ” beats can first be understood as the opposite of the “on” beats, that is to say the strongest beats in a standard 4/4 measure, beat 1 being the strongest one (the “downbeat”), beat 3 the second strongest. offbeat is thus very often taken simply as a synonym of “backbeat”, which is strictly defined as the second and fourth beat of a 4/4 measure. but offbeat can also be understood as “upbeat”, that is to say, a sound that takes place between beats. in the context of jamaican popular music (and african music), these upbeats are called “afterbeats”, because they tend to echo or delay the preceding beat—rather than anticipating the following one (for a detailed discussion, see mccarthy 2007: 64-7). as a matter of fact, jamaican popular music is characterized by both dimensions of the “offbeat”, as it combines “accented afterbeats with heavy backbeats” (witmer and mccarthy 2014: 653). 3 version is written in italics thereafter when referring to the specific musical product it denotes in jamaica. dancecult 7(2)22 4 the whole single, with the vocal on the a-side and the dub version on the b-side can be listened to at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85tdl9gtsnq> (accessed 30 september 2015). 5 the first one can be listened to at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h__dhfsd_xu>; the second at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uy5cnmy0ba> (both accessed 30 september 2015). 6 table 1 does not aim to be exhaustive, but, rather, provides synthetic insight on the most active and significant artists, audio-engineers and producers of dub in jamaica. the information presented comes from reference works on jamaican popular music (especially o’brien chang and chen 1998; bradley 2001; barrow and dalton 2004; moskowitz 2006; veal 2007), and from online databases (discogs, riddimguide and roots-archives). 7 these are the results of a search carried out on discogs, with three filters: dub as style, lp as format, and jamaica as country: <http://www.discogs.com/search/?style_ exact=dub&format_exact=album&country_exact=jamaica> (accessed 30 september 2015). 8 research conducted on discogs for albums labelled as related to the dub style <http://www. discogs.com/search/?style_exact=dub&format_exact=album> (accessed 30 september 2015). 9 namely: errol thompson, king tubby, lyndord anderson, peter chemist, prince/king jammy, scientist and sylvan morris. 10 see note 2. 11 among many others, an illustration of the difference between the sonic values in jamaica and for the more general popular music world can be found in the comparison between the track “love one another” by althea & donna in 1978 (prod. joe gibbs) and its re-mastered version (under the title “jah rastafari”) for the 2001 re-release of their album uptown top ranking, which can be respectively listened to at <https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=x5xnxh4l4oa> and <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swbe0gk5nma> (both accessed 30 september 2015). 12 a clear illustration of the practice of “performance mixing” is the video of prince jammy mixing the dub “jailhouse rock” in the documentary deep roots 2: bunny lee story/black ark (part 3—bunny lee story, approx. 44:53–46:30), and viewable online at: <https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=s-kswcv6ynm> (accessed 30 september 2015). 13 the top 10 riddims according to riddimguide: <http://www.riddimguide.com/more/ statistics> (accessed 30 september 2015). 14 see riddimguide: <http://www.riddimguide.com/tunedb/riddim_sleng%20teng/sortby_ year> (accessed 30 september 2015). 15 a sequence “song – dub – dj” can be found on the phil pratt thing compilation, with “going the wrong way” by al campbell, the discomix (dub) and its interpretation by big youth, “love jah jah children”. 16 see the discogs summary of jamaican releases <http://www.discogs.com/jacob-miller-baby-ilove-you-so/release/862755> compared with international ones <http://www.discogs.com/ augustus-pablo-king-tubby-meets-the-rockers-uptown/release/1891051> (both accessed 30 september 2015). 17 see scientist’s albums referenced on discogs (<http://www.discogs.com/artist/33468scientist?type=releases>) (accessed 30 september 2015). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85tdl9gtsnq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h__dhfsd_xu https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uy5cnmy0ba http://www.discogs.com/search/?style_exact=dub&format_exact=album&country_exact=jamaica http://www.discogs.com/search/?style_exact=dub&format_exact=album&country_exact=jamaica http://www.discogs.com/search/?style_exact=dub&format_exact=album http://www.discogs.com/search/?style_exact=dub&format_exact=album https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5xnxh4l4oa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5xnxh4l4oa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swbe0gk5nma https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-kswcv6ynm https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-kswcv6ynm http://www.riddimguide.com/more/statistics http://www.riddimguide.com/more/statistics http://www.riddimguide.com/tunedb/riddim_sleng teng/sortby_year/ http://www.riddimguide.com/tunedb/riddim_sleng teng/sortby_year/ http://www.discogs.com/jacob-miller-baby-i-love-you-so/release/862755 http://www.discogs.com/jacob-miller-baby-i-love-you-so/release/862755 http://www.discogs.com/augustus-pablo-king-tubby-meets-the-rockers-uptown/release/1891051 http://www.discogs.com/augustus-pablo-king-tubby-meets-the-rockers-uptown/release/1891051 http://www.discogs.com/artist/33468-scientist?type=releases http://www.discogs.com/artist/33468-scientist?type=releases vendryes | versions, dubs and riddims 23 references barrow, steve and peter dalton. 2004. the rough guide to reggae. 3rd ed. london: rough guides ltd. bradley, lloyd. 2001. bass culture: when reggae was king. london: penguin books. cooper, carolyn. 2004. sound clash: jamaican culture at large. new york: palgrave macmillan. devonish, hubert. 1998. “electronic orature: the deejay’s discovery”. social and economic studies 47(1): 33–53. henriques, julian. 2003. “sonic dominance and the reggae sound system session”. in the auditory culture reader, ed. michael bull and les back, 451–80. oxford: berg. hitchins, ray. 2014. vibe merchants: the sound creators of jamaican popular music. farnham: ashgate publishing. howard, david n. 2004. sonic alchemy: visionary music producers and their maverick recordings. milwaukee: hal leonard corporation. katz, david. 2006. people funny boy: the genius of lee scratch perry. london: omnibus press. kealy, edward r. 1979. “from craft to art: the case of sound mixers and popular music”. work and occupations 6(1): 3–29. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/009392857961001>. manuel, peter and wayne marshall. 2006. “the riddim method: aesthetics, practice and ownership in jamaican dancehall”. popular music 25(3): 447–70. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143006000997>. mccarthy, leonard j. 2007. “the significance of corporeal factors and choreographic rhythms in jamaican popular music between 1957–1981 (ska, rocksteady, reggae), with an historical and critical survey of all relevant literature dealing with jamaican folk, religious and popular musics and dance”. phd. dissertation (higher education), york university. moskowitz, david v. 2006. caribbean popular music: an encyclopedia of reggae, mento, ska, rock steady, and dancehall. westport: greenwood press. o’brien chang, kevin and wayne chen. 1998. reggae routes: the story of jamaican music. philadelphia: temple university press. stolzoff, norman c. 2000. wake the town & tell the people: dancehall culture in jamaica. durham: duke university press. sullivan, paul. 2014. remixology: tracing the dub diaspora. london: reaktion books. veal, michael. 2007. dub: soundscapes and shattered songs in jamaican reggae. middletown: wesleyan university press. witmer, robert and len mccarthy. 2014. “reggae”. in bloomsbury encyclopedia of popular music of the world, volume 9, ed. john shepherd and david horn, 650-69. london: bloomsbury academic. discography althea & donna. 1978. love one another. joe gibbs record globe (7-inch). <http://www.discogs.com/althia-donna-love-one-another/release/3964809>. althea & donna. 2001. uptown top ranking. front line records (lp reissue): fl 14. <http://www.discogs.com/althea-donna-uptown-top-ranking/release/519469>. andy, horace. 1972. skylarking. bongo man (7-inch). <http://www.discogs.com/horace-andy-skylarking/release/1306560>. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/009392857961001 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143006000997 http://www.discogs.com/althia-donna-love-one-another/release/3964809 http://www.discogs.com/althea-donna-uptown-top-ranking/release/519469 http://www.discogs.com/horace-andy-skylarking/release/1306560 dancecult 7(2)24 andy, horace. 1977. skylarking. jackpot (7-inch). <http://www.discogs.com/horace-andy-skylarking/release/6575435>. beatles, the. 1966. revolver. parlophone (lp): pcs 7009. <http://www.discogs.com/beatles-revolver/release/409199>. beatles, the. 1967. sgt. pepper’s lonely heart club band. parlophone (lp): pmc 7027. <http://www.discogs.com/beatles-sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts-club-band/release/499497>. chin, clive, vincent chin and errol thompson. 1973. java java java java. impact! (lp): imp/ lp 0001. <http://www.discogs.com/impact-all-stars-java-java-java-java/release/3003757>. chin-loy, herman. 1971. aquarius dub. aquarius (lp): aqlp001. <http://www.discogs.com/herman-chin-loy-aquarius-dub/release/5176419>. hippie boys, the. 1971. voo-doo. syndicate (7-inch). <http://www.discogs.com/little-roy-hard-fighter/release/3360987> (uk release). jimi hendrix experience, the. 1967. are you experienced. track records (lp): 612 001. <http://www.discogs.com/jimi-hendrix-experience-are-you-experienced/release/993028>. maytals, the. 1968. do the reggay. pyramid (7-inch): pyr-6057. <http://www.discogs.com/maytals-do-the-reggay/release/3467392>. pablo, augustus. 1975. king tubby meets the rockers uptown. island records (7-inch): wip.6226. <http://www.discogs.com/ augustus-pablo-king-tubby-meets-the-rockers-uptown/release/1891051>. perry, lee “scratch” and the upsetters. 1976. scratch, the super ape. upsetter (lp). <http://www.discogs.com/upsetters-scratch-the-super-ape/release/5039060>. prince buster. 1972. the message dubwise. fab (lp): ms7. <http://www.discogs.com/prince-buster-the-message-dub-wise/release/4164965>. scientist. 1982. scientist encounters pac-man. greensleeves (lp): grel 46. <http://www.discogs.com/scientist-scientist-encounters-pac-man/release/155366>. smith, slim and the uniques. my conversation. jackpot (7-inch): jpr 7001. <http://www.discogs.com/uniques-my-conversation/release/3598581>. smith, wayne. 1985. under me sleng teng. jammy’s records (7-inch). <http://www.discogs.com/wayne-smith-under-me-sleng-teng/release/4110749>. upsetters, the. 1973. blackboard jungle dub. upsetter (lp): lp 0115. <http://www.discogs.com/upsetters-blackboard-jungle-dub/release/757561>. various. 1974. yamaha skank. success records ltd. (lp): srl lp 015. <http://www.discogs.com/various-yamaha-skank/release/3886042>. various. 2000. phil pratt thing. pressure sounds (cd): pscd 27. <http://www.discogs.com/various-phil-pratt-thing/release/2050123>. various. 2012. dub is eternal. dubkraft records (digital). <http://dubkraftrecords.tumblr.com/post/21729335927/dub-is-eternal-the-420-dubkraft-anthology>. filmography screenedge. 2007. deep roots music 2: bunny lee story/black ark. usa: mvd visual. http://www.discogs.com/horace-andy-skylarking/release/6575435 http://www.discogs.com/beatles-revolver/release/409199 http://www.discogs.com/beatles-sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts-club-band/release/499497 http://www.discogs.com/impact-all-stars-java-java-java-java/release/3003757 http://www.discogs.com/herman-chin-loy-aquarius-dub/release/5176419 http://www.discogs.com/little-roy-hard-fighter/release/3360987 http://www.discogs.com/jimi-hendrix-experience-are-you-experienced/release/993028 http://www.discogs.com/augustus-pablo-king-tubby-meets-the-rockers-uptown/release/1891051 http://www.discogs.com/augustus-pablo-king-tubby-meets-the-rockers-uptown/release/1891051 http://www.discogs.com/upsetters-scratch-the-super-ape/release/5039060 http://www.discogs.com/prince-buster-the-message-dub-wise/release/4164965 http://www.discogs.com/scientist-scientist-encounters-pac-man/release/155366 http://www.discogs.com/wayne-smith-under-me-sleng-teng/release/4110749 http://www.discogs.com/upsetters-blackboard-jungle-dub/release/757561 http://www.discogs.com/various-yamaha-skank/release/3886042 http://www.discogs.com/various-phil-pratt-thing/release/2050123 http://dubkraftrecords.tumblr.com/post/21729335927/dub-is-eternal-the-420-dubkraft-anthology the concrete and the ephemeral of electronic music production colin mcguire york university doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.01.12 in the summer of 2012, one of my uncles made an unusual request: he asked me to compile and send him a complete catalogue of my recorded music. this was to include everything, from official releases to bootleg remixes and from electronic dance music (edm) to electronic music for modern dance. this task put me in a position to reflect on my studio work and i was somewhat surprised by what that process revealed. i had been operating under the unexamined assumption that a finished recording was concrete in its fixedness, as manifested in its ability to be played back or copied with self-same exactitude. approaching the ontology of recordings from a broader perspective, however, i came to realize how ephemeral records are, from their conditions of (re)creation and storage media, to their usage by other people. the vagaries of studio music production the first tracks i recorded were made in the electronic music studios of edmonton, alberta, canada’s macewan university from 1997 to 1998.[1] the environment there was at the crossroads of older analogue equipment and new digital technologies. i will briefly outline a few of the issues that presented. working with tape delays provided rich echo effects, but not ones that were willing to sync with the roland tr-707 rhythm composer (drum machine). the roland sh-101 analogue synthesizer was capable of some gloriously quirky monophonic sounds that were highly unstable and varied with the air pressure. samplecell’s digital sampling software and the sequencer in studio vision pro’s digital audio workstation (daw) were generally reliable, but also prone to glitches that demanded to be incorporated, rather than attempting sisyphus-like corrections. recordings were done on tape using analogue four-track and/or digital eight-track machines, while masters were run onto either reel-to-reel or dat tapes. when i eventually built up my own project studio in 1999, i was relieved to have what i thought was a more stable and reliable setup: cubase as a daw; propellerheads’ rebirth software emulating a roland tb-303 bass line, as well as roland tr-808 and tr-909 rhythm composers; propellerheads’ recycle for chopping loops and samples; and the roland juno 106 digital/analogue keyboard synthesizer. later, i moved from cubase to protools while upgrading the limited sound-set of rebirth to the more fully featured reason, further supplementing the latter with software devices from native instruments. the sequencing, sound generation, recording, editing and mixing capabilities of a computer-based system were as dependable (and flexible) as i had hoped, but digital data is subject to other problems. most of the finished recordings from my project studio that have been burned onto audio cds remain playable, although some of the earliest have by now expired. i have had hard drives fail, zip discs become obsolete and data cds get corrupted, thereby losing the tracks and working files stored on them.[2] as i upgraded my computers and operating systems, older software would no longer work and was not always replaced—whether by choice or by being outmoded. a program file from one daw will not typically open in a daw from a different company and there are sometimes even problems opening files between different versions of the same daw. for all the vagaries of using hardware gear, at least a physical synthesizer or reel-to-reel tape still works when computer software changes. no technology is infallible, however, and hardware will eventually break down just as tape will ultimately degrade. i was able to bring together most of my tracks for the compilation, but a few were lost to corruption of the media they were stored on, as well as lack of access to the technology to play them back or recreate them. amongst some of the surviving tracks, i found a couple that i thought could use a bit of remixing. one of them had only raw audio recordings of the main vocals and synthesizer parts to work with because the rest of the track’s sequences and mixing belonged to software that had long since become obsolete. another had its working files stored on a data cd that was corrupted, so all i was left with was the track on an audio cd. this forced me to re-edit and re-master the recording without the ability to actually remix it, as has sometimes been done by djs when tweaking a commercial release by another artist (brewster and broughton 2000: 176). the capacity to remix a piece of music may in some ways seem unimportant if one has a definitive recording of it, but the lack of this capacity makes the recording into an artefact locked into its historicity. true to what virgil moorefield has observed about popular music in general, electronic music is not usually based on written notation, relying instead on timbre and rhythm (2005: xiv). this underscores the contingency of electronic music production because of the way it is even more wedded to the specifics of technology than, say, rock music and is therefore vulnerable to the relentless drive of advancement, the ravages of mechanical failure and challenges to data integrity. re-makes or covers are rare in electronic music, while remixes and re-edits are assigned a separate identity from the original. only exact copies are treated as being selfsame. this phenomenon led me to some considerations about recorded music from another perspective. reconsidering duplication, distribution and playback mechanical reproduction has had a profound impact on the fine arts, which has not been lost on scholars. in the early twentieth century the marxist cultural theorist walter benjamin (1969[1935]) argued that the mass availability of industrially reproduced art would liberate it from its bondage to ritual and its basis in private or religious exhibition. he also saw mechanical reproductions as lacking the unique aura of an original, but only echoing it in new contexts. picking up where benjamin left off, artist and critic douglas davis (1995) theorized that digital reproduction actually transfers the aura of the original onto the copy, thereby eliminating any clear distinction between them. he further suggested that through digitization, “images, sounds, and words are received, deconstructed, rearranged, and restored wherever they are seen, heard, and stored” (davis 1995: 381). benjamin’s notion of aura is tied up with issues surrounding the unique autographic presence of physical artwork, so ascribing it to allographic arts like music may be a bit of a stretch (see goodman 1976). the stronger part of davis’ idea lies in underscoring the reproducibility of digital media that elides any difference between master and duplicate.[3] he also notes the fundamental manipulability of digital media and positions the audience squarely in the process of creation, echoing roland barthes comment, “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination” (1977: 148). digital music presents a special case in the ongoing dialogue surrounding art and reproduction. a genre like modern edm is not a simulation of acoustic music, but rather a simulacra that following gilles deleuze “is not degraded copy, rather it contains a positive power which negates both original and copy, both model and reproduction” (italics in original, 1983: 53).[4] as a result, it plays by a slightly different set of rules than other musics, such as jazz and folk, where a wider range of variation is still viewed as being self-similar (seeger 1977). in digital music, copies of recordings are no longer duplications, but rather part of a clonal colony, like a field of genetically identical mushrooms that has reproduced by vegetative asexual procreation.[5] the tight link between a track and exact copies simultaneously makes the definitive recording more rigidly associated with the identity of the piece and makes said identity more ephemeral because it has less tolerance for variation than other musics. to the best of my knowledge, my music has never been remixed by anyone other than me, but i have done some promo-only remixes of other peoples’ music and some self-remixes. the use of a part(s) of a recording in order to create a derivative work further loosens the idea of the concrete autonomy of a record by re-contextualizing, reconceptualising and, in a sense, re-creating. the term reordered listening was coined by sheena hyndman to cover this phenomenon and is defined as, “the experience of coming into contact with remixed music prior to experiencing the source material that forms the basis of said remix” (2012: 15). a digital sample or a key element of a complete recording is not enough to resurrect the original, but perhaps there is a reincarnation or transfiguration in the remix. this shifting identity is typically marked by a change of name that tacks the remixer’s descriptive postscript onto the title. when re-ordered listening occurs, the remix supersedes temporally prior versions to become the original. the vagaries of distribution and playback have their own effect on the solidity of digital music. the catalogue i compiled for my uncle is all in mp3 format; in fact, i have not released any of my music in analogue format since 1998 and my most recent release (2012) is only available online. digital distribution has helped me to connect with a global audience, but also gives rise to existential problems for my music once it leaves my studio. beyond any cultural factors in its reception, i know that my beats—as is the case with much high fidelity electronic music—can sound very different depending on what type of playback equipment is used and the environment it is diffused into, from smartphones and headphones, to home stereos and car stereos, and on to nightclub speakers, fm radio and digital streaming. furthermore, sometimes only part of my music may be heard, such as in the tv show departures, where they used just the main groove and not the melody or words of my tracks. even the mp3 format itself can change the sound when the original high quality audio files are converted.[6] i mitigate this by using maximum quality mp3s, but i have no control on what distributors or listeners do to the files. the above examples do not necessarily destroy the identity of the piece, but rather blur the seeming concreteness of the digital master. everyone’s a dj: improvisation and manipulation recording gives plasticity to the fleeting, time-based nature of music that is belied by an increasing variety of disjunctures in dissemination and reception. if all music is ontologically improvisation that varies only in degree, as the phenomenologist bruce ellis benson (2003) contends, then recorded music is no more concrete than acoustic performance. benson’s assertion is based on the lexical availability of the word improve lying within improvise, such that composition, performance and listening all to some extent take existing material and manoeuvre it in order to create the experience of music. in light of benson’s ontology of music as improvisation and my own reflection on recorded music, i would venture to say that a recording is not concrete at all, but rather concrète in its readiness to be manipulated, transformed and re-contextualized. in the early 1940s, the french audio engineer and composer pierre schaeffer conducted some of the first experiments in music making using pre-recorded sounds, which he called musique concrète. this involved everyday noises and/or musical instruments being manipulated via turntable and eventually with reel-to-reel tape machines. years later he concluded that it was not enough to create a totally new type of music; audiences would need to acquire new aesthetics and ear training in order to appreciate it (schaeffer 1959). i am not trying to suggest that there is a direct lineage between schaeffer’s turntable experiments and today’s djs, but rather to point out that audiences have become accustomed to the practice of manipulating records. this is particularly true in edm (and hip-hop), where djs have become the unwitting successors of schaeffer’s experiments. in another sense, however, everyone is a dj because of the improvisation involved in selecting, diffusing and interpreting music, even when it is for his or her own solitary enjoyment. re-ordered listening is no longer limited to studio remixes. what used to require turntablist-level scratch djing or a stage full of gear now occurs live with relative ease thanks to the assistance of technologies that have emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century. the vinyl record and turntables—in all their mechanical glory—remain an important part of dj culture, but there has been a massive increase in the reliance on digital playback technologies supported by online distribution (farrugia and swiss 2005; montano 2010). software like ableton live, hardware like dj cd players, hardware/software systems like serato scratch live and various types of audio processing effects all present djs with significant real-time control of recorded music, allowing them to essentially remix on the fly. most of this technology is capable of assisting or even automating basic dj skills, such as beat matching, which i would argue does not simply make the job easier, but actually puts the onus on djs to be more creative in their sets. when i have done gigs using m-audio’s torq software/hardware (similar to serato), i make an effort to loop certain sections, use effects processing, trigger short samples and draw out extended beat-mixing segues with other tracks in order to create new versions of tracks as part of a dj/producer performance. re-ordered listening in relation to dj sets is becoming increasingly common, as the role of the dj has been democratized by digital equipment. ephemeral technology and the duality of concrete/concrète the tribulations of music production and recording technology are not a new discovery (moorefield 2005: 99–102). what made them stand out to me was the retrospective process of compiling a recording catalogue for my uncle. since i built my first project studio in 1999, i had generally considered my productions to be stable objects: during creation working files could be played back at will with total precision, while finished recordings could be used to generate exact digital copies. on a broader scale, however, ontological cracks manifested themselves in this mental schema when i realized the existence of the technology undergirding music production and reproduction is severely bounded. this recursive shift in perspective led me to further considerations regarding the life of a track beyond the confines of my studio. upon reflection i saw that digital reproduction and distribution, combined with the proliferation of playback technologies for both home and professional use, have furthered a paradigm that underscores the improvisatory ontology of recorded music. despite the nuances that have been added to my outlook on digital and electronic music, a finished recording has a certain degree of undeniable concreteness because of its capacity for exact playback and reproduction. i do not either deny the possibility that some people may maintain legacy equipment and a herculean approach to the preservation of their recordings, working files and the use of their music by others. my epiphany is simply that the studio, storage media and playback formats of a track are, in the long run, ephemeral, while the inherently improvisatory nature of diffusion, performance and reception makes even definitive recordings concrète in their malleability. author biography colin mcguire is a ph.d. candidate in music at york university in toronto, canada. he has positioned his doctoral work in ethnomusicology at the intersection of music and martial arts, but he also djs and produces under the name ronin e-ville. mcguire’s music has been nominated for an independent music award, has been in the top 20 of the earshot! canadian radio charts for electronica, and is featured on the gemini award winning travel tv show, departures. <http://about.me/colinpatrickmcguire> references barthes, roland. 1977. “the death of the author.” in image music text, trans. stephen heath, 142–8. london: fontana press. benjamin, walter. 1969 [1935]. “the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.” in illuminations, ed. hannah arendt, trans. harry zohn, 1–26. new york: schocken books. benson, bruce. 2003. the improvisation of musical dialogue: a phenomenology of music. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. brewster, bill and frank broughton. 2000. last night a dj saved my life: the history of the disc jockey. new york: headline book publishing. davis, douglas. 1995. “the work of art in the age of digital reproduction (an evolving thesis: 1991–1995).” leonardo 28(5), third annual new york digital salon: 381–6. <http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0024-094x%281995%2928%3a5<381%3atwoait>2.0.co%3b2-m>. deleuze, gilles. 1983. “plato and the simulacrum.” trans. rosalind krauss. october 27: 45–56. <http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/778495>. farrugia, rebekah and thomas swiss. 2005. “tracking the djs: vinyl records, work, and the debate over new technologies.” journal of popular music studies 17(1): 30–44. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1524-2226.2005.00032.x>. goodman, nelson. 1976. languages of art. 2nd edition. indianapolis, in: hackett publishing company. hyndman, sheena. 2012. “mediating musical experience: studying the effects of the remix on patterns of music production and consumption.” ph.d. dissertation, york university. montano, ed. 2010. “‘how do you know he’s not playing pac-man while he’s supposed to be djing?’ technology, formats and the digital future of dj culture.” popular music 29(3): 397–416. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143010000449>. moorefield, virgil. 2005. the producer as composer: shaping the sounds of popular music. cambridge, ma: massachusetts institute of technology. schaeffer, pierre. 1959. “musique concrète et connaissance de l’objet musical.” revue belge de musicologie 13(4): 62–7. <http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3685954>. seeger, charles. 1977. “versions and variants of the tunes of ‘barbara allen.’” in studies in musicology 1935-1975, 273–320. berkeley and los angeles, ca: university of california press. notes [1] at the time, the institution was called grant macewan community college. [2] the working files of a studio project include all audio recordings and program specific data needed to play back a piece. this involves the musical and engineering elements such as the composition, arrangement and mix, which themselves are dependent upon the software environment including the daw, plug-ins and sample libraries. [3] a 16 bit, 44.1 khz, aif master is the same as a 16 bit, 44.1 khz, aif copy and other high quality formats (e.g., wav, aac, ogg and flac, as well as cd and dvd audio) are indistinguishable to all but the most discriminating audiophiles—if at all. [4] detractors of electronic music might be more inclined to follow jean baudrillard’s negative view of simulacrum, where truly effective simulation leads to destruction of meaning through a hyperreal state that exchanges signs for other signs. [5] i am indebted to bret battey for introducing me to the idea of clonal colonies, which he discussed in a talk at york university during the winter of 2014. [6] mp3s use lossy compression, which results in audio quality that is inversely proportional to file size. in extreme cases it can even add sound artefacts during the conversion process. vocalizing: mc culture in the uk nabeel zuberi university of auckland (new zealand) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.02.14 mcs are those “figures of speech” (henriques, 2011: 175–206) that take up the microphone to soliloquize, spit and slur bars with idiosyncratic flows. they rhyme and narrate themselves and their stories over beats in a range of music genres, including hip-hop, grime, dubstep and what is often more loosely termed “bass music”. mcs riding or “getting on” a variety of beats complicate the fetishistic discourse of genre in dance music. more significantly, the mc’s established oral techniques are steeped in the “live” settings of the sound system and the improvised moments of battles, freestyles and cyphers. the voices of the mc are codified and organized in an evolving assemblage present across a range of digital audio and audiovisual media. given the mc's tendency to discuss themselves and what they do, in many cases mc recordings are also commentaries on working in this changing media environment. more broadly, the mc’s social resonance also offers insights into the politics of voice in debates about the racialization of national identity in multicultural britain. genre as gervase de wilde and gabriel myddleton of the heatwave sound system mention in the sleeve notes for the 2008 compilation an england story: from dancehall to grime: 25 years of the mc in the uk (soul jazz), the mc has operated across “different but connected genres” (various artists 2008). these include the more jamaican influenced sounds of dancehall, the cadences of us hip-hop, the spongy rhythms of uk garage, the minimalist video game aesthetics of grime and the diversifying beats and textures of post-dubstep electronica. mcs offer their voices to a range of producers and styles. their voices may rhyme in patois, speak in other vernacular tongues—including local english creoles such as cockney—and switch between these different codes as well as throw in the cosmopolitan vocabularies of (south) asian london. they sometimes quote us hip-hop in their own accents and idiosyncratic flows. the african presence in verbal references and beat patterns is increasingly audible today in some of these recordings by britons of nigerian and ghanaian descent, for example. the mc is also not confined to afrodiasporic and dance music genres or the hardcore continuum but can cross over into rock music, as for example, in 2007 when lethal bizzle released both babylon’s burning the ghetto (a song that draws substantially on the post-punk single “babylon’s burning” by the ruts) and police on my back, a 1968 recording by black-and-white english rock group the equals, that was covered by the clash on london calling (1979). in 2013, dizzee rascal recorded goin’ crazy, a duet with pop idol and former boy band member robbie williams. there isn’t space here to discuss the formation and boundary making of genres and sub-genres in electronic dance music cultures, or to explore the pros and cons of simon reynolds’ “hardcore continuum” as a concept, but the particularity of mcs brings debates about subjectivity (and individuals) to qualify or temper the hegemony of habitus or scenius in dance culture discourse. live and indirect writing about the jamaican dance hall, julian henriques (2011: 182–203) breaks down the mc’s poetics into the following: “guidance” of the audience during the dance; the “championing” of the sound system to which he or she belongs, often in a staged competition or clash with another sound system; “instruction” of those assembled, both in the immediacy of the event and in a more pedagogical sense on the subjects of the day. the mc must both ride the rhythm with a proficient and pleasing flow for the audience and should be able to “conduct the choir” or move the crowd to respond vocally and in dance. he or she invokes and “toasts” musical and other cultural forebears and rivals and so “traces” a tradition or community in which the mc is embedded. the unique personality must loom large in the styles of writing and vocalization on the mic. these techniques, honed in the sweat and saliva of the “live” event, have been transferred unevenly to media and the technologies of recording and playback. studio set-ups and music production software have long treated the voice, which has found itself doubled and multiplied, cut up and sampled, its pitch shifted and retuned in the history of pop (brophy 2010). psychoanalytical approaches to the voice already stress its inherent detachment and otherness from the subject (dolar 2006). studies of ventriloquism have offered ways in which to consider the voice as something disembodied and rematerialized in other media (connor). ways of understanding the voice as “phonic substance” and not as the transparent repository and carrier of subjectivity have been important in demythologizing the racialized discourses of authenticity and soul often projected onto african and african diasporic musical forms and practices in particular (moten 2003). a growing body of work on electronic and dance music has helped to make uncontroversial the proposition that music is inseparable from the technologies responsible for its articulation. for example, susana loza and kay dickinson’s (2001) analyses of female voices in disco and other dance music genres and nick prior’s account of such cyborg singers argue that these syntheses—which put quotation marks around “humanness” in many respects—remain attached to the social and cultural expectations of racialized and gendered voices. however, in approaching the treatment of the voice in mid-1970s jamaican dub, 1980s digital dancehall and early uk dubstep in the 2000s, ross gibson argues that the interplay of carbon and silicon in recordings favours the latter as “the singer can ooze into the world and shift shape as the need or urge arises” (2010: 223). given the value placed on the singularity and central personality of the mc in most hip-hop and grime tracks, might we speculate that there has been a multiplication of the mc’s voices as artists experiment with the possibilities of mobilizing different social voices through new technologies and also seek to diversify their presence in music media? these voices enhance the profile of the mc but may also operate with a measure of autonomy from his or her agency. matthew fuller writes about uk pirate radio in the mid-1990s from a deleuzian perspective, noting the many ways in which all kinds of voices from “television, film, radio and previous music recordings bounce off each other in hip-hop tracks” (2005: 29–30). as he also states, “but almost nowhere, even in beatboxing and for many reasons, does it [hip-hop] allow the voice to become primarily synthetic. the reckoning behind this? that it allows the voice to operate more vigorously in keeping it real” (2005: 29–30). however, “keeping it real” may have changed. the late dj screw of houston made a career of slowing down mcs and singers’ vocals to a drawl. producer madlib heightened the pitch of his voice for his animalistic alter ego quasimoto. lil’ wayne and kanye west have deployed autotune extensively, while jay-z has gone on record to criticize the technology in his song doa–death of autotune. this may not quite be a crisis of authenticity, but writing about the scandal of milli vanilli’s voices emanating from elsewhere, philip auslander (1999) pointed out that such anxieties about technological mediation often mark the passing of one regime of simulation to another and a moving of the goalposts of authenticity. we might be more cautious about these changes and suggest that some of the established skills and codes of the mc are still held in high regard while the range of vocal manipulations suggest the wider distribution of the mc’s voice across many sites. boosting confidence? in grime—which has dominated uk mc culture in the 21st century—the beats have been designed for mcs to spit their bars with their voices front and centre of minimal rhythms with sub-bass frequencies and sharp keyboard stabs to support these flows. however, in many versions and remixes, the mc chooses to give up his or her voice, to partially devolve vocal agency to the producer’s whims. one such notable example comes from trim aka trimbal/trimothy and his track confidence boost preview. this is a short track from the mixtape (really a cd and digital download) soulfood vol. 2 (2007), with an acapella beginning in which trim—with an east london accent—sends a message out to “the young who are 'nike'd out' with 'hoodies low'”, citing examples of different positive and negative circumstances in which they might find themselves. for example, “girl, if you look good in your clothes”, “if you have issues and you don’t care who knows”, “if you’ve had a dad or mum, but not both”. he follows each example with the words “strike a pose” for therapeutic self-affirmation, echoing madonna’s chorus in vogue (1989), but for working-class youth. the second half of the track features a drum pattern with keyboards muffled in the background of the mix and trim’s voice up front in the mix. producer and singer-songwriter james blake reworked trim’s vocal under his remixing signature “harmonimix” in 2010, which was eventually released on a 12” single by belgian label r&s in 2012. according to journalist and producer martin clark’s recollection, blake “was trying to manipulate trim’s (spoken) voice so it sounds like he’s singing backing harmonies with himself” (blackdown 2012). for the first minute of the track his voice sounds full and clear and at the centre of the mix. but then the pitch changes several times, and these distinctive frequencies separate into simultaneous voices that overlap like several chipmunks drowning in the waves of slow sub-bass pulse and industrial drone that replaces the drum pattern of the original. the official music video attaches these voices to shots of several young women in hoodies. at one point, one of them mouths trim’s words. the images flicker between light and shadow, often in time to the glitches in the instrumental texture of the song. blake appears in a few shots, a low-key silent figure that remains stationary in the background for the most part. in many respects, blake’s production style and treatment of trim’s vocals is similar to his own first few eps in which as mark fisher puts it, “the voice is a smattering of traces and tics, a spectral special effect scattered across the mix” (fisher 2013). fisher and simon reynolds situate blake’s work as part of an introspective turn in dance music’s affect in the 2000s, where the utopian futurism of the rave/jungle/hardcore continuum has been replaced with retrospection and hauntology (fisher 2010). while the chesty weight of trim’s voice is still present in the first minute of the song, his voice dissipates but is not as broken up into wisps as blake’s voice on his early recordings. rather blake brings out a more reflective emotionalism and discourse about love, romance and vulnerability that is already present in trim’s evolving and growing corpus of mixtapes (such as ghostwriter vs. autotune: volume 10 from 2011), alongside the more common boastfulness and battling rhetoric. however, what fisher and reynolds suggest might be more accurate in assessing some of the largely instrumental grime that has been released in the last year, seen by many as a signal of the waning of the mc’s force and a shift in the balance of cultural power to the producer or beat maker. instrumental music had a strong presence in the early 2000s when grime emerged from uk garage or 2-step, but became dominated by mcs. dubstep took on the mantle of futuristic instrumental music until its commercialization around the turn of this decade. that mainstream success has meant that many producers and some labels (such as night slugs) have returned to the palette of instrumental grime. there is both a curatorial and hauntological dimension to some of instrumental grime’s use of mc voices. grime is now a decade old since formative releases such as wiley’s eskimo (2002) and igloo (2003) instrumentals, his genre-heralding vocal wot do u call it? (2004) and grime’s number one album, dizzee rascal’s boy in da corner (2003). the cumulative weight of the genre has generated a measure of nostalgia and reassessment, evidenced on remixes of early tracks, websites and mixes documenting the genre’s development and key moments, the big dada label’s release of the grime 2.0 compilation in 2013, as well as histories such as dan hancox’s stand up tall: dizzee rascal and the birth of grime (2013). hancox places grime in the pantheon of afrofuturism: you can hear this afrofuturism most of all in the sonics of grime production—the stark, unfiltered minimalism of the kick drums, the interplanetary weight of the bass line, the sleek ray gun zaps and zips of a synth, the whole way the edifice shines like a spacesuit. it’s the sound of the future city kids always dreamed of, even while grime’s lyrics describe with molecular detail the dirt of the mcs’ vividly quotidian lives; mcs who, with the best will in the world, were not universe-traversing spacemen, but teenagers growing up in the poorest parts of london, in the grounded world of new labour britain (hancox 2013: 175). in the cavernous tracks of instrumental grime producers such as visionist and wen (see 2013), grime has found its equivalent of burial and zomby’s rave mythologists. as joe moynihan notes, “wen’s ability to snatch the most evocative (not to mention gully as all fuck) vocal snippets and suspend them like ghosts being shot at with a low-end proton pack has basically sent all other producers cutting old radio sets up straight to bed” (2013). in his ominous “road”, trim's “confidence boost” vocal is further chopped into traces of grime's street mythology. volume and productivity on his album 2012 album evolve or be extinct, the so-called godfather of grime, wiley, uses his treated voice to play multiple characters and juxtapose his london and patois accents. in some sketches between songs, wiley slows down his voice to characterize irritating immigration and customs for cartoon effect. in several other recordings he playfully denies that he is alvin the chipmunk. these are well worn but still resonant trickster gimmicks. the range of sites for mc voices across media is a theme in many grime tracks, which offer a vernacular commentary on the emergent media assemblages in which these recording artists work. musicians’ own accounts of authorship and creativity provide rich research material. the self-reflexive aesthetics of mc culture generate hyperbolic interpretations of the means of production, distribution and consumption, as well as more everyday reports about musical work. grime voices put lie to the notion that its arbiters are the work shy unemployed propagated by the conservative government. in track after track over typically 140 beats per minute, grime artists manifest the work ethic of “grindin’” and brag about their productivity in terms of the longevity of their mixtape series and the growth of their reputations. in it’s wiley from the showa eski ep (2011), wiley spits “i’m giving out zip files like a virus”, referring to his insubordinate release of 200 tracks on 11 zip files over the internet in 2010, when he became frustrated with one of the recording companies to which he was signed to release a forthcoming album. tracks on grime mixtapes and compilations increasingly make reference to the presence of mcs and the numbers of their followers on twitter. mobile music the hip-hop track studio backpack rap from the album freedom of speech (2012) by speech debelle (corynne elliot), whose stage name embodies the articulation of voice, is a more modest celebration of mobile music production. on her website, debelle describes the song “as all about virtual instrumentation and an ode to her producer kwes. she recalls that “he would take out his laptop and midi-usb keyboard and that would be it. we’d start working and i couldn’t believe what he could do with so little equipment”. debelle is actually known for playing with live musicians rather than programmed beats unlike many of her grime counterparts. the chorus claims “it’s all in his bag, studio backpack rap” and that he’s “rocking with the laptop, macbook pro”, using a “cracked version” of the software program logic, though he will soon graduate to pro tools: “he still likes cubase because it gives him the drum kicks that are old school. she uses the right plug ins, provides the lyrics, hits the quantize button and she’s a star”. such representations of mobile music in music recordings and videos build on the quotidian activities of musicking that have been essential for the development of mc culture, often for londoners who hail from some of the harshest landscapes of urban reconstruction and poverty in neoliberal britain. richard bramwell (2012) has written about teenage boys and girls clustered around the back seats of the top deck of london buses honing their mc skills over minimal beats shared from mobile phones. simon wheatley’s (2010) book of documentary photography don’t call me urban: london in the time of grime captures images of young people from 1998–2010 in makeshift studios, short lived pirate radio stations, bedrooms and youth centres, writing and reciting bars, spitting and vibing off each other in ciphers, shooting video, gripped with play station 2 games and sounds. this is the ground on which the mc drives—competencies and skills have been honed—and that have generated some of the biggest names and successful livelihoods in uk mc culture. several grime artists have crossed over and met with some commercial success, partly due to the sloughing off of grime’s associations with criminality, reinforced by years of negative press discourse, policing and policies curbing live performances; but also through a less edgier sound and lyrical content. these scant but crucial resources for hip-hop practitioners and their aspirations should be built upon in youth and educational institutions, when instead these institutions have been hit by financial cuts delivered by the current conservative-liberal government. as raymond codrington has observed, “in spaces that bring together blacks of various backgrounds, hip-hop music and culture has become the bridge that has allowed young people to navigate complex understandings of blackness that are not dealt with in other segments of english society” (2006: 192). black british popular culture is arguably dominated by communities of caribbean descent, and in particular, jamaican culture. articulations of african identity are sometimes brought to the fore, other times relatively obscured in assertions of a subsuming music identity around genre (hip-hop, grime), around british national identity in the case of successful dizzee rascal (a.k.a. dylan kwabena mills of nigerian and ghanaian descent, born 1984), who recorded a song for another one of the england football team’s forlorn campaigns as well as performing at the opening ceremony of the 2012 london olympics. local identity can also be prominent, as in dizzee’s promotion of e3, the eastern postcode of one of grime’s founding districts, bow. africanness may be asserted in both continental or national terms in the songs and brand identities of artists, such as afrikan boy and his nigerian roots, sway and tinchy stryder (a.k.a. kwasi danquah iii’s) assertion of their ghanaian “black star” identity. more broadly, the question of blackness is a problematic in the music-industry marketing category of “urban music”, a term which has met with some scepticism. mc culture has contributed to changes in english voices and languages. we can re-interpret the racist and paranoid speech of historian david starkey when he remarked after the urban riots of august 2011 that the “whites had become black”—in part due to “jamaican patois” and rap music. we can lay claim to the ways in which mc culture has contributed to creative and cultural life, to the convivial communication and wellbeing of postcolonial london, as well as to those of us further afield prepared to listen to these voices closely. author biography nabeel zuberi is senior lecturer in media, film and television at the university of auckland. his publications include sounds english: transnational popular music (university of illinois press, 2001), media studies in aotearoa new zealand (co-edited with luke goode, 2004 and 2010), and the forthcoming black popular music in britain since 1945 (ashgate), co-edited with jon stratton. he is also working on a monograph about contemporary western music genres and the muslim to be published by palgrave. references auslander, liveness. 1999. performance in a mediatized culture. new york: routledge. blackdown. 2012. “trim vs. james blake: the story”. blackdown. 23 june: <http://blackdownsoundboy.blogspot.co.nz/2012/06/trim-v-james-blake-story.html> (accessed 30 september 2013). bramwell, richard. 2012. “the aesthetics and ethics of london-based rap: a sociology of hip-hop and grime”. ph.d. dissertation (london school of economics and political science). codrington, david. 2006. “race, rap and class in london”. in globalization and race: transformations in the cultural production of blackness, ed. kamari maxine clarke and deborah a. thomas, 179–99. durham: duke university press. connor, steven. 2000. dumbstruck: a cultural history of ventriloquism. london: oxford university press. dickinson, kay. 2001. “‘believe’?: vocoders, digital women and camp”. popular music 20(2): 333–47. dolar, mladen. 2006. a voice and nothing more. cambridge: mit press. fisher, mark. 2013. “the secret sadness of the 21st century: mark fisher recommends james blake’s overgrown”. electronicbeats.net. 18 april: <http://www.electronicbeats.net/en/features/reviews/mark-fisher-recommends-james-blakes-overgrown/> (accessed 30 september 2013). fisher, mark. 2010. “you remind me of gold: dialogue with simon reynolds”. markfisherreblog. september:<http://markfisherreblog.tumblr.com/post/32185314385/you-remind-me-of-gold-dialogue-with-simon-reynolds> (accessed 30 september 2013). fuller, matthew. 2005. media ecologies: materialist energies in art and culture. cambridge: mit press. gibson, ross. 2010. “carbon and silicon”. in voice: vocal aesthetics in digital arts and media, ed. norie neumark, ross gibson and theo van leeuwen, 211–24. cambridge: mit press. hancox, dan. 2013. stand up tall: dizzee rascal and the birth of grime. london: amazon kindle. henriques, julian. 2011. sonic bodies: reggae sound systems, performance techniques, and ways of knowing. new york: continuum. loza, susana. 2001. “sampling (hetero)sexuality: diva-ness and discipline in electronic dance music”. popular music 20(03): 349–57. moten, fred. 2003. in the break: the aesthetics of the black radical tradition. minneapolis: minnesota university press. moynihan, joe. 2013. “unboxed: an introduction to instrumental grime’s new wave”. factmag.com. 08 august: <http://www.factmag.com/2013/08/08/unboxed-an-introduction-to-instrumental-grimes-new-wave/> (accessed 30 september 2013). prior, nick. 2009. “software sequencers and cyborg singers: popular music in the digital hypermodern”. new formations 66: 81–99. wheatley, simon. 2010. don’t call me urban: london in the time of grime. newcastle upon tyne: northumbria press. discography dizzee rascal. 2003. boy in da corner. xl recordings (uk). (cd): xlcd170. <http://www.discogs.com/dizzee-rascal-boy-in-da-corner/release/165610>. dizzee rascal featuring robbie williams. 2013. goin’ crazy. vertigo (germany). (cd single): 06025 3741914. <http://www.discogs.com/dizzee-rascal-featuring-robbie-williams-goin-crazy/release/4656257>. jay-z. 2009. d.o.a. (death of auto-tune). rocnation (us). (12-inch): 75678-95863-2. <http://www.discogs.com/jay-z-doa-death-of-auto-tune/master/188985>. lethal bizzle. 2007. bizzle, bizzle / babylon’s burning the ghetto. v2 (uk). (cd single): vvr5044923p. <http://www.discogs.com/lethal-bizzle-bizzle-bizzle-babylons-burning-the-ghetto/master/193466>. lethal bizzle. 2007. police on my back. v2 (uk). (cd single): vv5044933. <http://www.discogs.com/lethal-bizzle-police-on-my-back/master/193468>. madonna. 1989. vogue. sire (us). (12-inch): 0-21513. <http://www.discogs.com/madonna-vogue/release/98901. speech debelle. 2012. freedom of speech. big dada recordings (uk). (cd): bdcd 193. <http://www.discogs.com/speech-debelle-freedom-of-speech-/release/3402420>. trim. 2011. ghostwriter vs. autotune: volume 10. digital release (uk). (mp3 download): <http://grimehq.com/download/artist/trim/ghostwriter-vs-autotune/>. trimbal. 2012. confidence boost. r & s (belgium). (12-inch): rs1210. <http://www.discogs.com/trimbal-confidence-boost/master/487075>. trimothy. 2007. soulfood vol. 2: lyriks. trim (uk). (cd): trimcd002. <http://www.discogs.com/trimothy-soulfood-vol-2-lyriks/release/1270139>. various artists. 2008. an england story: from dancehall to grime: 25 years of the mc in the uk 1983–2008. soul jazz records (uk). (cd comp): sjr cd 177. <http://www.discogs.com/various-an-england-story/release/1990379>. various artists. 2011. grime 2.0. big dada recordings (uk). (cd comp): bdcd226. <http://www.discogs.com/various-grime-20/release/4594043>. wen. 2013. commotion ep. keysound recordings (uk). (12-inch): ldn035. <http://www.discogs.com/wen-commotion-ep/release/4303605>. wiley. 2003. igloo. wiley kat records (uk). (12-inch): wk 017. <http://www.discogs.com/wiley-igloo/release/690170>. wiley. 2004. wot do u call it? xl recordings (uk).(12-inch): xlt 179. <http://www.discogs.com/wiley-wot-do-u-call-it/release/249820>. wiley. 2011. show eski ep. prodigal entertainment (jamaica). (12-inch): pej002. <http://www.discogs.com/wiley-showa-eski-ep/release/2868699>. wiley. 2012. evolve or be extinct. big dada recordings (uk). (cd): bdcd187. <http://www.discogs.com/wiley-evolve-or-be-extinct/release/3427400>. wiley kat. 2002. eskimo. wiley kat records (uk). (12-inch): wk003. <http://www.discogs.com/wiley-kat-eskimo/master/181053>. from grapefruit to plastic surgery: experiments in contemporary musique concrète brian speise independent researcher doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.01.13 the origin musique concrète has evolved a great deal since its beginnings in the late 1940s. pierre schaeffer used disc-recording lathes—and later, tape machines—to record the sound of found objects such as spinning toy tops and more conventional instruments like the piano. he then edited, processed and combined these recorded sounds to create complete musical compositions. schaeffer’s compositions were experimental and avant-garde in nature, and he never intended them to be appreciated by a wide audience (schaeffer 2012: 114). his music was simply meant to be an exploration of timbre and dynamics made possible through the use of recording technology. however, experiments with musique concrète that are presently occurring within the world of electronic dance music (edm) and other musical genres are quite different from schaeffer’s original work. artists like matthew herbert and matmos are proving that composers can make music out of nearly any recorded sound—accessible music nonetheless. for his one club album, herbert collected various sounds from the robert johnson club in offenbach, germany and then processed them into electronic music. in the “sonography” page of herbert’s website, he lists the sound sources used on the album, which include people in the club stomping, clapping, texting one another and even kissing (2013). as mentioned in their 2004 article in sound on sound, matmos recorded the sounds of plastic surgery—such as forehead lifts and liposuction—for a chance to cut is a chance to cure. admittedly, the sound sources are bizarre, but they are also quite inspiring. the potential that digital audio workstations (daws) and software offer us in the world of sound is astonishing; even liposuction can be incorporated into music. this modern musique concrète is not necessarily danceable or meant to be played at clubs; however, the presence of tonal harmony and melody and dance rhythms separate it from the less-accessible, avant-garde musique concrète. i was recently inspired to try my own attempt at modern musique concrète, and what i learned was fascinating and incredibly inspiring. the methodology early last year, i was composing credits music for a short zombie film, and i thought the project would be perfect for experimenting with musique concrète. i should point out that this was not a work of dance music at all, but it had elements of electronic music that producers of edm can appreciate. the first thing i did for this project was lay out a loose set of ground rules for myself. i wanted to record and compose with as many found sounds as possible, so i made this my focus. i decided i would capture sounds from everyday objects around my house and also from outdoor ambiences. my criteria for which sounds to gather were informal: if it was interesting to me, i recorded it. in general, i preferred using my zoom h4n portable recorder to record individual sounds, due to its portability and ease of use. the microphones and preamplifiers are built into the unit, so recording a unique sound is as simple as pressing the record button. however, i also occasionally used a contact microphone plugged into the zoom to extract unusual sounds out of found objects. this is a technique also favored by matmos (doyle 2004). as soon as i finished gathering the sounds for this project, i began the sound-designing phase. sound design is traditionally a vital part of the musique concrète compositional process, so i wanted to closely follow that standard. sound design involved editing and splicing the captured audio in my daw and also processing it to enhance the sound and/or remove the association of each sound’s original source. my setup featured an m-audio fast track ultra connected to a macbook pro laptop running ableton live 8. live was my primary software tool for sound designing and arranging this composition, based on its flexibility and ease at performing such tasks. i imported my field recordings into live either as standalone pieces of audio or as samples loaded into software samplers. the following section highlights the recording and sound design processes that i used for various sounds within the composition. the experiment found kick one of the first sounds that i created was a kick drum sample. this “found kick” consisted of a recording of a grapefruit peel and a balloon. i recorded the grapefruit peel by pressing my contact microphone into the peel skin with one hand, and plucking the peel with the index finger of my other hand. surprisingly, this produced a nice, low, thumping sound. the sample did not have enough attack to stand on its own as a kick drum sample, so i needed to combine it with another sound. a balloon might not be the natural sound choice in a situation like this, but it is what i selected. i inflated a balloon, mic’d it with my contact microphone, and struck it with the palm of my hand. the resulting sound had more attack and fewer low frequencies, so i suspected it would pair well with the grapefruit peel sample. next, i imported both of the samples into native instrument’s software sampler, kontakt 5, and added equalization to improve the attack and low-end. i designed the kontakt instrument so that both samples would respond to the same note pressed on a midi keyboard; this allowed both of the samples to be played in-sync at all times. i also added compression and distortion to give the samples more impact. the result of all this sound design was a sample that, to my ears, sounded eerily close to a traditional kick sample. it certainly had a unique sound, but the amazing thing to me was how familiar it seemed as well. figure 1. recording a grapefruit peel with a cold gold contact microphone. photo: speise (2013). figure 2. recording a balloon with a contact microphone. photo: speise (2013). found snare of course once i had a kick drum sample, i needed to make a snare sample to accompany it. i wanted the snare to sound a little “trashy”, but it also had to equal the found kick’s intensity. junk percussion seemed to me like my best option, so i searched around my house for any sort of loud, percussive sound. the two objects that stood out to me were the door to my clothes dryer and my small, metal toolbox. i discovered that the slamming of the dryer door made a great percussive thud. it had a surprising amount of low-end as well. i recorded this in my basement with the zoom h4n. rather than cut and edit these samples into the composition by hand, i loaded them into kontakt to combine with other samples. i also added some of kontakt’s built-in effects, such as the tube distortion plug-in, to sculpt the tonality a bit. the other sound source, my toolbox, made a great crashing impact when dropped on the ground. i gathered the toolbox, a flat rock to drop it on and my zoom h4n. my home studio has a fairly limited functionality, so i decided to record this sound outdoors. for loud percussive sounds like the toolbox, i found that it was better to record outside where there were fewer acoustical issues such as room reflections. however, recording outdoors had a much higher level of ambient noise, such as cars and wind. this was not a big problem, because the sound was sufficiently loud enough to overcome most ambient noise. after my toolbox recording session, i loaded three samples into kontakt. then—like the found kick—i configured my toolbox and dryer door slam samples so that they responded to the same midi information. i also pitch shifted the samples in different ways to create more sonic complexity. what i ended up with was a hard-hitting, junkyard snare. it certainly was not a conventional snare sound, but i felt like it worked quite well in the context of a zombie film score. figure 3. capturing a sample of my dryer door slamming shut. photo: speise (2013). figure 4. capturing a sample of my toolbox with the zoom h4n. photo: speise (2013). tea kettle organ by this point, i knew that it was possible to create big percussion samples out of found sounds, but i was not sure how feasible it would be to create tonal instruments out of them. in my search for interesting sounds, i recorded samples of my tea kettle boiling. i had no idea at the time how i would use this sound, but i recorded it anyway. as the tea kettle was boiling on the stove, i took out my cell phone and held the built-in microphone close to the kettle spout. it was an extremely low-fidelity recording. i later loaded these samples into one of my favorite samplers of late, izotope iris, and started designing a new instrument. i shifted the root pitch of each of the three tea kettle samples to give the “tea kettle organ” a richer frequency spectrum. i also added distortion within iris to create more tonal richness. a low-frequency oscillator (lfo) was useful for creating a vibrato effect, and i also added a sine wave generator to enhance the fundamental pitch of the overall sound. with all of the processing, these low quality tea kettle recordings were transformed into an organ-like sound. i was absolutely astonished by this. more importantly, the instrument was tonal enough that it could be used to create melody and harmony. figure 5. recording a tea kettle boiling. photo: speise (2013). additional instruments and sound design particularly for the end of my composition, i wanted to create an eerie soundscape that would fit the mood of a zombie film. as i was gathering sounds for the project, i experimented with recording outdoor ambiences. i made one of the recordings while wandering around the university of colorado’s campus in downtown denver, colorado, u.s.a. i heard interesting sounds coming from the woodshop of the fine arts building, so i immediately made a short field recording from where i was sitting in a nearby computer lab. the recording picked up the distant droning of saws in the woodshop, but it also picked up the sound of air circulating through the lab and nearby conversation. those sound sources do not seem as if they would make an interesting recording, but with some signal processing applied, they created a subtle, horror-like ambience. within live, i filtered out unwanted frequencies in the recording and i also applied one of ableton’s stock plug-ins, resonators. this gave the ambience an eerie, pitched quality. the overall soundscape was sounding a little thin with only one sample, so i augmented the woodshop ambience with an ableton software instrument called “steam pipe effect”. this instrument had similar sonic characteristics to my recording and seemed to pair well with it. i also added an ambient recording of rain falling on the top of an outdoor space heater. one evening while it was raining, i taped my contact microphone to the underside of the heater and put it out into the rain. the raw recording sounded vaguely like rainfall, but it also had a pronounced metallic clang. i imported the sample into izotope iris and pitch-shifted it down several octaves. i also added chorus and reverb to increase the perceived depth of the sound. the metallic clang of the original now sounded more like the distant, pounding feet of an army of the undead. my intent in combining all three of these sounds was to create a creepy, horror movie ambience to finish off my composition. in addition to the found sounds already mentioned, i also used more traditional, recognizable instruments. these helped to thicken the sound of the composition. i added floor tom and crash cymbal parts for percussive accents. these were recorded in the university of colorado denver’s recording studios. i used acoustic baffles and close-mic’ing techniques to achieve fairly dry samples. this allowed me to more effectively add reverb to the samples and blend them with the found sounds. i also used a software organ in native instrument’s “vintage organs” sample library to create bass lines. i was surprised with how well these instruments seemed to blend with my found sounds. the aftermath the elements that make up my composition may seem strange. mic’ing grapefruits and balloons is admittedly not standard procedure, but the end result is not so odd. i used all of the found sounds that i recorded in the service of conventional western melody, harmony and rhythm. what the listener notices is not where the individual sounds come from, but the overall musical effect. essentially, the individual recorded sounds are musical building blocks, much like sine waves and sawtooth waves are building blocks for the creation of synthesizer sounds. unlike the more traditional means of synthesis, musique concrète requires the element of sound recording. composers are forced to explore their surroundings and search for sound. as i found out from my own experience, the process of finding sounds is exciting and inspirational. the results of searching are often unexpected and somewhat serendipitous. i found interesting sounds when i least suspected them; by carrying my zoom h4n recorder with me at all times and actively listening for sound, i opened myself up to the possibility of finding useable material. once recorded, there are an endless number of ways in which material can be processed. i was amazed at how transformative sound design and processing could be with the current technology available. particularly with software, turning nonmusical sounds like a boiling tea kettle into a tonal, musical instrument is now well within composers’ grasp. the result of transforming these sounds is unique; they are much more individualized and unusual than a synthesizer sound created with basic waveforms. thus, to anyone involved in edm production, i highly recommend exploring musique concrète. it incorporates recording, composition and signal processing in a unique way that invites experimentation and exploration of the unpredictable world of sound. author biography brian speise is a graduate of the master of science in recording arts program at the university of colorado denver. he recently completed his master’s thesis, which explores the relationship between current music technology and musique concrète. he currently lives in kansas city, missouri, where he is active as a musician, composer and audio engineer. email: brianspeise@gmail.com references doyle, tom. 2004. "matmos: the art of cut & paste." sound on sound, may. <http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/may04/articles/matmos.htm> (accessed 28 october 2013). herbert, matthew. 2013. "sonography". matthew herbert. <http://dev.matthewherbert.com/sonography/> (accessed 28 october 2013). schaeffer, pierre. 2012 [1952]. in search of a concrete music. trans. christine north and john dack. berkeley, california: university of california press. discography herbert, matthew. 2010. one club. accidental (cd): ac44cd. < http://www.discogs.com/matthew-herbert-one-club/release/2480337>. matmos. 2001. a chance to cut is a chance to cure. matador (cd): ole 489-2. < http://www.discogs.com/matmos-a-chance-to-cut-is-a-chance-to-cure/release/1381>. dancecult 7(2) 2015: editor's introduction, masthead and table of contents volume 7 number 2 2015 echoes from the dub diaspora guest editors tobias c. van veen and hillegonda c. rietveld executive editor graham st john (griffith university, au) from the floor editors alice o’grady (university of leeds, uk) graham st john (griffith university, au) reviews editor ed montano (rmit university, au) foreign languages editor luis-manuel garcia (university of groningen, nl) production editor botond vitos (de) operations director ed montano (rmit university, au) art director botond vitos (de) publications manager carlo nardi (rhodes university, sa) copyeditors luis-manuel garcia (university of groningen, nl) jerome hansen (uk) jonathan karpetz (mcgill university, ca) katrina loughrey (au) kath o’donnell (au) magdalena olszanowski (concordia university, ca) production assistant garth sheridan (rmit university, au) dancecult journal of electronic dance music culture issue 7(2) 2015 issn 1947-5403 ©2015 dancecult published twice yearly at <http://dj.dancecult.net> international advisory board sean albiez (southampton solent university, uk), eliot bates (university of birmingham), andy bennett (griffith university, au), mark j butler (northwestern university, us), anthony d’andrea (university of limerick, ie), rebekah farrugia (oakland university, us), kai fikentscher (de), luis-manuel garcia (university of groningen, nl), françois gauthier (université de fribourg, ch), anna gavanas (institute for futures studies, se), chris gibson (university of new south wales, au), jeremy gilbert (university of east london, uk), alice o’grady, university of leeds (uk), ross harley (university of new south wales, au), david hesmondhalgh (university of leeds, uk), tim lawrence (university of east london, uk), geert lovink (university of amsterdam, nl), rene lysloff (university of california, riverside, us), alejandro l. madrid (university of illinois, chicago, us), charity marsh (university of regina, ca), tony mitchell (university of technology sydney, au), karenza moore (lancaster university, uk), andrew murphie (university of new south wales, au), christopher partridge (lancaster university, uk), anne petiau (itsrs / université paris 5, fr), hillegonda c rietveld (london south bank university, uk), geoff stahl (victoria university of wellington, nz), sonjah nadine stanley-niaah (university of west indies, jm), graham st john (griffith university, au), will straw (mcgill university, ca), rupert till (university of huddersfield, uk), tobias c. van veen (université de montréal, ca), michael veal (yale university, us) dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture is a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture (edmc). a platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on the shifting terrain of edmcs worldwide, the journal houses research exploring the sites, technologies, sounds and cultures of electronic music in historical and contemporary perspectives. playing host to studies of emergent forms of electronic music production, performance, distribution, and reception, as a portal for cutting-edge research on the relation between bodies, technologies, and cyberspace, as a medium through which the cultural politics of dance is critically investigated, and as a venue for innovative multimedia projects, dancecult is the journal for research on edmc. cover design by tobias c. van veen volume 7 number 2 2015 introduction to echoes from the dub diaspora . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 01 hillegonda c. rietveld and tobias c. van veen feature articles versions, dubs and riddims: dub and the transient dynamics of jamaican music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 05 thomas vendryes “chase sound boys out of earth”: the aura of dubplate specials in finnish reggae sound system culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 kim ramstedt africa on the moon: the complexities of an afrofuturist reading of dub . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 john harries borderlands: dub techno’s hauntological politics of acoustic ecology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 alessio kolioulis victims themselves of a close encounter: on the sensory language and bass fiction of space ape (in memoriam) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 tobias c. van veen from the floor – online war dubs nabeel zuberi darkcore: dub’s dark legacy in drum ‘n’ bass culture chris christodoulou conscious sounds: encountering jah shaka christopher partridge “the only good system is a sound system”: the dub riddim revival in kingston erin c. macleod riddims & routes: dub diaspora dj mix tobias c. van veen a.k.a. tobias.dj reviews remixology: tracing the dub diaspora (paul sullivan) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 tobias c. van veen sonic bodies: reggae sound systems, performance techniques and ways of knowing (julien henriques) . . . 121 dennis howard the routledge companion to remix studies (eduardo navas, owen gallagher and xtine burrough, eds.) . . 124 hillegonda c. rietveld groove: a phenomenology of rhythmic nuance (tiger c. roholt) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 daniel schnee deviance and risk on holiday: an ethnography of british tourists in ibiza (andy bennett) . . . . . . . . . . . 130 bina bhardwa issn 1947-5403 ©2015 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 7(2): 1–4 issn 1947-5403 ©2015 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.02.00 introduction: echoes from the dub diaspora hillegonda c. rietveld and tobias c. van veen london south bank university (uk) / université de montréal (canada) dub is a term that resonates in multiple aspects of electronic dance music culture. in the crates of djs, the search terms of online record shops, and echoing throughout scholarly and cultural genealogies, dub signifies a signature style of spatialized rhythm and sound that derives from the studio practices pioneered by jamaican dance sound systems since the late 1960s, in which versions—“dubs”—were crafted from instrumentals of reggae recordings.  eventually, the techniques of this type of remix, both disruptive and echoic, became an end in itself. the resulting dub aesthetic, as veal (2007) puts it, shatters not only song form and narrative conventions, but ruptures and fragments the cultural politics of dominance. pressed on vinyl and spun by dj selectors, the skeletal forms of reggae allowed vocalists, emcees and the dancing crowd to superimpose lyrics during sound system events. using the studio as instrument, by the 1970s the practice of versioning developed into a remix aesthetic. as an evolving and experimental art, dub foregrounds the texture of sound as a landscape of low frequency vibrations, haunted absences and instrumental snippets punctuated by rhythmic events and otherworldly toasting. crucially then, dub is not only a musical style but also an artistic discourse, in the aesthetic act of making dub—a type of remixing that emphasizes the phatic affects of sonic space and haunted time. this special issue began with a question posed to the dancecult listserv in april of 2014: what research had been conducted around the cultural dissemination of dub, particularly its cross-genre, and transcultural, influence upon dub techno? how might we, as scholars that attend to dub as a sonic, cultural, and black atlantic formation, coordinate various perspectives on what might be called the “dub diaspora”? our interest in thinking the complexity of dub arose through its valences: the multiple inflections of dub as it encompasses a production practice and a remix aesthetic as well as the embodied experience of dub’s haunted spaces and echoes on the dance floor. the study of dub calls for its critical as well as speculative thinking as a mode and materialist practice of editors’ introduction dancecult 7(2)2 belonging, a space of encounter and exchange, and a shared imaginary of cultural allegiance. before encountering sullivan’s book remixology: tracing the dub diaspora (2014; reviewed this issue), the phrase “dub diaspora” arose in our conversations as a conceptual alliteration for what we imagined as but one vector, one could say, of paul gilroy’s concept of the black atlantic (1993)—those “routes not roots” of music, recordings and performance that are forged from the trauma of the middle passage, particularly as dub’s routes arise from the carribean afrodiaspora. from the discussion that circulated on-list and off (with initial ideas and support from jonathan s. taylor), we further developed our interest in addressing the dub diaspora as a musical discourse, thinking it by way of affective “acoustemology” (feld 2012) and as a sonic “way of knowing” (henriques 2011), both of which proffer a metaphor and theoretical framework for an approach to contemporary cultural politics that fuses sounding with embodied epistemology and ontology. as our conversation opened onto questions to which we had no ready answers, it became evident that a special issue was in need, one in which multiple avenues of research would echo and version the nascent concept of dub diaspora. this special issue of dancecult responds to the need to better understand the multiple practices that can be said to articulate the dub diaspora. likewise, this issue’s scholars represent a diverse set of research practices that reveal different questions as to what the dub diaspora means as a conceptual and critical research concept. in “versions, dubs and riddims”, thomas vendryes explores the history of jamaican dub production and consumption, offering a critical overview as to how dub transited from a popular music genre that epitomised the musical and political terrain of jamaica during the 1970s, to its “decline in popularity” as dancehall overtook dub during the 1980s. as vendryes argues, dub emerged as an influential global style, capable of mutating any number of other genres, at the same time that it departed jamaica, routing itself through what we have come to call the dub diaspora. kim ramstedt addresses the media format and cultural resonance of the dub plate, particularly as it is deployed within the context of a reggae sound system in finland. ramstedt develops a production studies approach to the manufacturing of such unique instrumental recordings, addressing how the shift in media format from acetate vinyl to digital has complicated the concept of a singular recording. ramstedt proffers a critical reading of walter benjamin’s concept of “aura” by addressing how dub plates connote cultural authenticity—and the significance of “jamaica” as the locus of such authenticity— in their customisation for a specific sound system. john harries explores the speculative realms of dub mythology by developing the diasporic connections between afrofuturist tendencies in dub and african-american music culture, turning to a crucial re-reading of kodwo eshun that reexamines the futurist tendencies of the dub diaspora. by delving into the differences and similarities between the speculative imaginaries of sun ra, the arkestra bandleader, jazz composer and philosopher poet from saturn, and lee “scratch” perry, whose mystical production techniques defined the output of his black ark studio, harries complicates attempts to collapse cultural differences while, van veen and rietveld | introduction 3 at the same time, exploring how afrofuturism has become integral to the dub diaspora’s mythos. alessio kolioulis stakes out the “borderlands” of dub by tracing the “hauntological politics” of dub techno that span productions in kingston, london, detroit and berlin. by exploring the multiplicity of aesthetic, social, and economic relationships that arise between dub techno and urban space, kolioulis develops an “acoustic ecology” of dub production that draws attention to the myriad ways in which urban geographies both simultaneously reflect and produce the haunted spaces and echoes of dub music. our closing article, by special issue guest editor tobias c. van veen, is written in memoriam to uk dubstep emcee and dub poet space ape, a.k.a. stephen samuel gordon. space ape’s imaginative approach to dub as “bass fiction”, suggests van veen, combines both speculative theory and embodied practice. by developing the many allusions in space ape’s “sensory language” to process philosophy, ritual possession and horror fiction, van veen argues for the crucial role of radical black performance in afrofuturist ontology, explicating how space ape undertakes a creative becoming through the material convergence of what he calls the sign / sine of the dub. our from the floor discussion demonstrates the wide reach of dub’s reverberations. nabeel zuberi turns to “war dubs”, undertaking an exemplary exploration of the many ways in which dub’s production techniques have arisen in electronic dance music culture— particularly its “musical practices, forms, technologies and institutions”—during “recent wartime”. in a similar vein of analysing dub for its political messaging, chris christodoulou carefully unpicks the racialised and post-industrial connotations of “dark” and “darkness” in uk bass culture, tracking how “dark” discourses in grime, dubstep and jungle/drum ‘n’ bass constitute a critical reply to the “ethnocentric demonisation of blackness”. meanwhile, two scholars conduct gonzo reportage from dub events a world apart—and yet intimately connected. chris partridge reports on his experience of the “sacred” in the “affective space” of jah shaka’s sound system, reminding us again how discussing dub on a conference panel supremely differs from the bone-shaking rattle of its performance, where, “that evening, dub mattered”. erin macleod, who is “from foreign”, provides an update on kingston’s dub club, suggesting that the success of this seminal sound space of dub appreciation has led to a “dub riddim revival” that traverses jamaica’s capital “from hope road to crossroads to lower first street in trench town”. and last, but not least, tobias c. van veen switches his signature to tobias.dj, providing a live turntablist performance of dub versions that traverses new and classic cuts of dub techno, dubstep and dub proper, drawing from vinyl and digital files alike, in a mix that echoes through the haze of delay and reverb thanks to the roland re-201 space echo. we hope you will enjoy this diversity of dub’s reverberations as much as we have enjoyed assembling this eclectic and inspired issue. may the dub discussions—regarding dub as musical form, as cultural practice and as concept—echo on through the dreadsphere of babylon. tobias c. van veen & hillegonda rietveld hallowe’en 2015, whistler/london dancecult 7(2)4 references feld, steven. 2012. jazz cosmopolitanism in accra. durham: duke university press. gilroy, paul. 1993. the black atlantic: modernity and double consciousness. cambridge: harvard university press. henriques, julian. 2011. sonic bodies: reggae sound systems, performance techniques and ways of knowing. new york: continuum. sullivan, paul. 2014. remixology: tracing the dub diaspora. london: reaktion books. veal, michael e. 2007. dub: soundscapes and shattered songs in jamaican reggae. middletown ct: wesleay university press. the digital musician (second edition) andrew hugill new york: routledge, 2012. isbn: 978-0-415-80659-6 (hardcover), 978-0-415-80660-2 (paperback), 978-0-203-11179-6 (pdf ebook) rrp: us$130.00 (hardcover), us$44.95 (paperback), us$44.95 (pdf ebook) martin koszolko rmit university (australia) the second edition of the digital musician is an expansive book reflecting more than ten years of research by the author and examining the complex nexus of creativity, cultural awareness, performance and sound production. in this volume, andrew hugill argues that the development of an individual creative voice is an essential ingredient of musical creativity, far more significant to creating innovative music than whatever tools or techniques one might use. as noted in the preface, the title of the book refers to all musicians working creatively with sound. this broad definition embraces edm creators. since its first edition (2008), the book has been intended as an educational tool. the second edition has been redesigned and expanded to be of further significance to university and college students of music technology courses, covering both theoretical and practical approaches to electronic and electroacoustic music. the title of the book might lead potential readers to believe that the subject matter focuses on developments in music production technologies. yet this is not the case and the author quickly dispels such misconceptions. as hugill explains, the book is not a reference manual for computer music production (xiv), and he dutifully leaves such investigations to other authors and numerous books that already exist. instead of technical advice, the book is a vast resource of creative projects that can expand the imagination of digital musicians. these suggested projects are categorised in relation to the level of complexity, and as such can be used by educators for classroom exercises or source material useful in designing course assignments. in addition, the book features an expansive list of annotated listening examples, which illustrate each of the discussed topics. these help to validate cultural, artistic and philosophical issues discussed in the text, and have the added benefit of providing historical context for each chapter. the educational aspect of the book is further exemplified by the inclusion of reading suggestions and discussion questions at the end of each chapter. an important feature of the digital musician is the companion website, intended to expand the book's content by providing additional material as well as web links to discussed music and other relevant websites. however, several of these links are now invalid or expired. despite this shortcoming, the website features a wealth of material that complements the book, and includes expanded information on the case study artists and suggestions for further projects, the latter being of particular educational use. the new version of the book brings some revisions of the content featured on the companion website—for example, the first edition was accompanied by musimoo (adkins 2009, hugill 2005a), an interactive online educational environment, which has now been removed. the revised edition features a new layout and structure. new chapters have been added and now the book consists of four distinct parts: engaging, creating, knowing and being. the first part poses questions related to forging one's creative identity and expanding aural awareness. this is a logical starting point, as the above-mentioned elements are fundamental in shaping the unique voice of musicians working with digital technologies. the second part, creating, is the largest in the volume and examines such topics as performance, sampling, synthesis, the compositional process and instruments. the chapter on synthesis exemplifies the analytical focus that permeates the book. in this chapter, hugill does not offer an investigation into how to program a synthesizer, instead he focuses on aesthetics as well as on defining various types of synthesis available (103). in past research, hugill examined creative uses of the internet in music education, collaborative composition projects and the use of virtual environments (hugill 2005b), and he continues to emphasise the benefits of networked sound and collaborative online work (81–3, 162–65), which is particularly relevant given the growing importance of the network space for music creation. the third part, knowing, discusses various issues related to critical judgement. in addition, this part outlines the cultural context for music with discussion of key critical theories and their application in "identifying certain cultural tendencies and phenomena" (203), and how this knowledge can assist in self-evaluation as a musician. the final part, being, concentrates on examining practical aspects of being a digital musician with discussion on careers, promotion and business. it is also here that hugill discusses the changing landscape of music education and training. he suggests that it should no longer be limited to formal musical training, since "a digital musician will benefit from education in a wide range of areas, and not just 'music'" (256). this illustrates the significant challenge facing electronic musicians nowadays, as the demands of the marketplace require proficiency in a wide range of digital technologies as well as in conventional music. aiming to "build up a picture of shared ideas and practices in digital music" (258), hugill has collected qualitative data through interviews with sixteen international musicians with a range of experiences behind them. through these interviews, artists reflect on key themes explored in the book, and this provides the framework for the final part of the volume. the broad reach of hugill's selected topics occasionally might leave readers craving more in-depth information. for example, the description of the "rhythm" musical tradition and the argument that various heavy-metal scenes are defined as belonging to a tradition having a "relative lack of interest in pitch" (4) seems to demand further justification. however, it could also be argued that more controversial statements can become starting points in debates, and are particularly useful in a classroom setting. i had the opportunity to implement some of the book's recommended listening and suggested projects in the classroom for an undergraduate course in computer sound production, and found this content to be effective in the educational context. the scope of the book is a reflection of the vast array of issues that a contemporary electronic musician needs to reflect upon and address. while there is no shortage of books on many of the topics covered in hugill's text, the digital musician is an important summary of key issues concerning music practitioners using digital technologies. as an electronic musician, i found the volume stimulating and as potentially prompting further investigation into the field. indeed, the continuous encouragement to reach further, via a rich provision of additional reading and music resources, is one of the major strengths of the book. hugill's avoidance of focusing on technical matters overcomes the challenge of fading relevance, which faces many publications that discuss digital technologies. the book skilfully combines discussions on aesthetics, musicianship and technology, and encourages further investigation of issues that have not been covered in depth due to lack of space. a large number of suggested project ideas, the sheer breadth of the covered topics and generous additional online material encourage experimentation and further study, and also foster creativity. the digital musician is a stimulating resource for students, educators and artists looking to expand their skills and examine their inspirations and motivations. references adkins, mathew. 2009. "andrew hugill, the digital musician". organised sound 14(1): 109–17. hugill, andrew. 2005a. "from online symphonies to musimoo: some creative uses of the internet in music and education". contemporary music review 24(6): 527–40. ———. 2005b. "internet music: an introduction". contemporary music review 24(6): 429–37. ———. 2008. the digital musician. new york: routledge. the routledge companion to remix studies eduardo navas, owen gallagher and xtine burrough (eds.) london: routledge, 2015. isbn: 978-0-415-71625-3 (hardcover), 978-1-315-87999-4 (e-book) rrp: £150 (hardcover), £142 (e-book) hillegonda c. rietveld london south bank university (uk) co-editors eduardo navas, owen gallagher and xtine burrough describe remix studies as “the result of a long process of rich cultural production directly informed by computing technology” (1), a study area that has developed from 1990s remix culture that can be linked to internet and copyright activism. in a nutshell, the remix is “based on the act of using preexisting materials to create something new as desired by any creator––from amateurs to professionals” (1). as such, remix culture can be understood as a set of cultural practices that depend on the reproduction and subsequent recontextualisation of images, sound and text. in particular, in the era of digital cloning and subsequent morphing of existing, authored materials, the legal aspects of private copyright ownership versus the populist idea of shared communal goods has created a space of complex cultural conflict that provides a rich set of starting points for critical debate. “remix”, as a word, came into existence in relation to a musical practice that developed during the emergence of underground disco and hip-hop cultures in new york during the 1970s, when three-minute songs were not lasting long enough to engage dancers, who gave preference to rhythm sections over melody. although the role of the dj has shifted over the years, at that time djs could be regarded as performers who used mass-produced consumer items, in this case music recordings, as narrative elements to produce a unique dialogue with dancers. in response to the need for strong danceable grooves, hip-hop djs extended rhythmical break sections of pop records by interchanging two identical vinyl recordings between two turntables. meanwhile, for the disco dance floor, some djs would overlay instrumental recordings with a cappella vocals to produce a new “third record” (rietveld 2011), currently understood as a “mash-up”. since the mid-70s, professional club djs began to adopt the role of remixer, extending and restructuring three-minute pop recordings into lengthy dance mixes in the recording studio, and producing special versions on reel-to-reel tape and 12-inch vinyl discs. blurring the distinctions between music makers and music consumers, it was often via their experience as remixers that djs turned into music producers. in a parallel world, in the context of jamaican reggae, dub emerged as a type of remix practice. when multi-track tape became available at the end of the 1960s, generic bass and drum tracks were produced that could be dubbed over by different singers, thereby keeping recording costs low. the practice of the dub was extended, however, when in the early 1970s sound engineers produced dub mixes for specific sound systems on unique acetate cuts, or dub plates, to compete for dance crowds; most functioned as backing for the “toasts” (a type of rap) of the dj (the mc). versioning and the echoic dub aesthetic became intertwined within this particular remix practice, eventually influencing dance producers in the post-disco scene. such recombinant processes have cross-fertilised across genres, especially within various forms of electronic dance music. the emergence of affordable digital samplers during the mid-1980s helped to enhance the music remix. cutting and restructuring had so far been achieved by hand during the dj set with vinyl records, and in the studio through splicing tape or by dubbing over multi-track recordings. although the early samplers offered an audibly low sample rate, resulting in deterioration or loss of sound quality, and recording only small snippets of audio, here we can identify a beginning of digital “copy and paste” culture. during the early 1990s, this resulted in a number of legal test cases, in particular in the us against hip-hop recordings, and intense debate emerged regarding authorship, authenticity and the notion of shared cultural goods. although the word “remix” as well as the specific customization of sound recordings is rooted in the genealogy of electronic dance music, cultural practices that re-contextualize ready-mades can be found elsewhere, not least in the early 20th century avant-garde. before the second world war, collage techniques, photographic trickery and film editing were pushed to the edge of surrealism in europe. in other political realms, photographic images were altered to suit the propaganda machines of repressive state regimes. cut-up art practices continued in literature, as some writers tried cutting up text to create unexpected meanings, and during the 1960s visual pop artists spliced up everyday popular imagery. in other words, the remix is not necessarily tied to digitalized creative practices or to the realm of musical production techniques. within remix studies as described in the collection under review, however, the aim is to investigate the aesthetic, ethical and political potential of digital media in particular. within its 41 chapters, covering 515 pages, the scope of subjects in this reader is therefore wide. in terms of the remix in music, kembrew mcleod makes a contribution on the history of sampling in the form of a collage of his interview material with music artists, as does roy christopher with a focus on musical memory in the digital age. also of direct interest to the readership of dancecult is an essay by nate harrison, by now famous for a viral youtube video in which he explains the origin of the “amen break”, a museme that is significant in electronic dance music genres based on breakbeats, such as electro and jungle; here harrison traces the way in which his version of this narrative started out as an arts installation, and how its online video version was subsequently adopted, and even plagiarized, in unexpected ways. although it is not made explicit by the editors, the broad subject matter of this collection of essays demonstrates how music can effectively be used as a mode of cultural and conceptual analysis. a similar point is made by dub theorist michael e. veale (2007), with reference to the work of paul gilroy and other authors in the realm of black identity politics and music. and henriques (2011) shows in the context of reggae sound systems that music is “a way of knowing”, an idea that is partially inspired by attali (1985), who regards noise as prophetic, heralding future social structures. from here, it may be possible to argue that the versioning and remix practices employed by dance djs and remixers are echoed back and forth within current flows of remix culture, making this collection of essays in remix studies extended versions of what could, arguably, be understood as being part of the “dub diaspora”. references attali, jacques. 1985. noise: the political economy of music. manchester: manchester university press. henriques, julian. 2011. sonic bodies: reggae sound systems, performance techniques, and ways of knowing. london: bloomsbury. rietveld, hillegonda c. 2011. “disco’s revenge: house music’s nomadic memory”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 2(1): 4–23. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.01>. veale, michael e. 2007. dub: soundscapes and shattered songs in jamaican reggae. middletown ct: wesleyan university press. guest editor’s introduction: muisc is a plane of wisdom dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 5(2): 2–6 issn 1947-5403 ©2013 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.02.01 “music is a plane of wisdom”1 transmissions from the offworlds of afrofuturism tobias c. van veen mcgill university (canada) what would the 20th century have looked like without afrodiasporic music? this evocative question—put to me during a late night listening session to the “annunaki flow” of killah priest2—tests the boundaries of even the most dedicated theorist of dystopia. imagine the alternatives. while the high priests of avant-garde abstraction might have prevailed— satisfying the likes of adorno, the frankfurt school critical theorist who notoriously scoffed at jazz—would there have been much good music to dance to? probably not. i shudder to imagine a world without relentless rhythm and trancendental funk. over the past few hundred years, the diverse cultures of the afrodiaspora have transformed the inheritance of multiple west african musical traditions, seeding what we now know as gospel, the blues, jazz, swing, rock ‘n’ roll, r&b, funk, dub, house, techno, electro and hip-hop—a red carpet list, to be sure, of the world’s foremost dance musics. which is to say: music in general, music for the most of us. this is not to say that afrodiasporic cultures are the only ones that shake with rhythm, or that such musics arose in isolation to other traditions. all of the above dance musics are hybrid forms, shaped by the contributions of multiple cultural inflections, contaminations and crossings. but throughout each is a core component that, one might say, reflects what is also an afrofuturist trajectory. afrofuturism, coined by mark dery in a 1993 roundtable with samuel r. delany, tricia rose and greg tate, arose to describe the production of afrodiasporic science fiction in multiple art forms, from music to literature, comics to film. such works were initially understood as representing blackness where it had been whitewashed from the future. hence, an “afro-futurism”, in which minoritarian blackness in all its forms is strategically projected against futurologies of hegemonic whiteness—so that there is, and will be, a future for the all-but-erased “dark matter”. but afrofuturism—as dery pointed out himself, along with his interlocutors—is inherently more complex than this. as eshun argued in his manifesto of “sonic futurism”, afrofuturism projects multiple (and conflicting) futures through figures that appear to transform not only the coordinates of blackness, but the default givens of guest editor’s introduction van veen | “music is a plane of wisdom” 3 the “human” in general (1999). eshun’s radical approach to the deracination of blackness has lead to debates over the limits of black identity, embodiment and posthumanism (see weheliye 2002). in a later essay, eshun (2003) described how afrofuturism looks to the past as well as to the future, seeing the triad of temporal dimensions as plastic and constitutively interrelated. thus writers and artists such as womack (2013) have reiterated how afrofuturism repurposes the future, mobilizing futurology as a discourse capable of mutating and changing future outcomes by reinterpreting the past—and its eurocentric, colonized and imperialist narratives—so as to disrupt and thereby reinvent the unfolding conditions of the present. even mainstream science fiction has played this role—and provides an excellent example—starting with nichelle nichols’ portrayal of lt. nyota uhura on the original star trek series, whose appearance has inspired both actor levar burton (in his portrayal of geordie laforge on star trek: the next generation) and mae carol jemison, the first female black astronaut in space. these afrofuturist inflections render porous the boundary between science fiction and reality. strategic myths of future blackness propel shifts in the real, and crucially, the so-called real world invades myth—with jemison guest starring on generations at burton’s request.3 afrofuturist science fiction appears capable of warping the real: is this not a marker of afrofuturism’s transformative effects? such strategic operations that remix fact through fiction were coined “mythscience” by sun ra. a founding afrofuturist of the mid-20th century, ra developed many of the concepts and motifs still in play today, pioneering electronic and conceptual experiments as a jazz composer, poet and bandleader of the mythscience arkestra. ra was also an ancient alien, embodying the return of a pharaohnic deity from saturn (see szwed 1998). ra, who walked the earth as the “living myth”, demonstrated the possibilities of exploding the givens (and contradictions) of not only “black”, but human identity—which is to say, of “identity” itself. afrofuturism, then, is not just a descriptor of “black science fiction”, but has been mobilized against constraints placed upon black/human identity in general—including its ontological, conceptual and epidemeral containers. alondra nelson, whose research pioneered afrofuturist studies in the early 2000s, posited afrofuturism as a discourse to counter the rhetoric around the digital divide that saw blackness as opposed to technology (2002). but today, with over a century of afrofuturist artists, works, and two decades of scholarship to reflect upon, “afrofuturism” has come into its own as a greater gestalt. it is now being put to use by artists identifying with, and thus transforming the shapes and meanings of, “afrofuturism”. it is no longer a descriptor applied after-the-fact, but has been transformed in the unfolding present in the reinterpretation of past (afro)futurisms. this special issue of dancecult establishes an initial foray into addressing afrofuturism both within what has become shaped as electronic dance music culture (edmc) studies, as well as on its borders. likewise, its essays often test the limits of what has been previously thought around, and theorised as, afrofuturism. afrofuturism and electronic music are more or less impossible to untangle. the imaginative and science fictional worlds wrought in the electronic music of detroit techno, acid house, jungle, dub and dubstep are all directly (or indirectly) inflected by afrofuturist concepts and tropes. the broader world of dancecult 5(2)4 dance music cultures resonate with afrofuturism, as noted above, from george clinton’s funk to john coltrane’s interstellar jazz. but electronic dance music in particular has always drawn close to science fiction, and to tropes of the alien, the android or the cyborg, and to machinic worlds and manifests of otherworldly realms. electronic music production has long fetishized its machines, its producers as spaceship pilots, its djs as outerspace shamans, and its events as alien abductions. though some fourteen years has past since eshun published his exhilarating and mindbending tract that traced the many inflections of afrofuturism in edmc—more brilliant than the sun: adventures in sonic fiction—afrofuturism, as a resource for analysis, has seen scattered use amongst edmc scholars (and for that matter, those in popular music studies and elsewhere). eshun’s performative exorbitance and critical put-down of what he called “cultstud” undoubtedly put off the tweed-wearing among us. but since the advent of a participatory drive in edmc studies, in which boundary concepts are gleaned from participant discourses and “situated knowledges”, there is no reason for afrofuturism not to be front-and-centre in the conceptual arsenal—especially when encountering the many imaginative forms of futurism, and particularly transformational futurisms that arise from afrodiasporic contexts and that permeate nearly all quadrants of planetary dance culture. there is also another discourse that deserves further attention in edmc, and that is race, and the role and force of raciology in edmcs, and how afrofuturism plays a role in both representing ideas of race as well as transforming them. afrofuturism has produced a wealth of thought. the possible analyses are many. these are but exploratory probes. let us to turn to the essays. populating afrofuturism are a number of tropes that gravitate around the android and the alien as allegories, or metaphors, for the dehumanization wrought upon afrodiasporic peoples by atlantic slavery and colonialism. but are such machinic, alien and androidal figures limited to allegorizing the alienation and abduction operations of slave trade capitalism? in my opening essay, “vessels of transfer: allegories of afrofuturism in jeff mills and janelle monáe”, i suggest that monáe’s performances as android cindi mayweather and jeff mills’ science fictional approaches to detroit techno undertake a series of becomings that transform the raciological defaults of identity. at the limit, afrofuturist aliens and androids abandon the supposed superiority of “the human”, thereby transforming the enlightenment inheritance that exalted the “human” only by dehumanizing and alienating its other(s). a parallel undermining of the supposed givens of ontology and (white) subjectivity takes place in mark fisher’s article, “the metaphysics of crackle: afrofuturism and hauntology”, where fisher points out how “white” culture “can no longer escape the temporal disjunctions that have been constitutive of the afrodiasporic experience”. hauntology, a quasi-concept borrowed from philosopher jacques derrida that destabilizes ontological presencing, is repurposed to describe the retro-temporality and ghostly renditions of dubstep. in a concise reading, fisher demonstrates how hauntology is inseparable from the temporal disjunctions of afrofuturism and (post)modernity. van veen | “music is a plane of wisdom” 5 the ritual experience of dance is often peopled by exiles from elsewhere seeking encounters with the alien. wherever this tends to happen, graham st john tends to be in attendance, taking notes during the eclipse of reason and sun alike, and in this exceptional instance, undertaking an exhaustive cataloguing of afrofuturist tropes and sensibilities in psyculture. in his article “the vibe of the exiles: aliens, afropsychedelia and psyculture”, st john explores how such afrofuturist tropes are communicated through cross-cultural encounters as the sensibility of the exile, revealing hitherto undiscovered threads of afrofuturist echoes and suggesting the kinship of cultures that seek exile in the alien. on the edges of afrofuturism, trace reddell undertakes a provocative study of its crosscultural and “white” inflections in his essay “ethnoforgery and outsider afrofuturism”, positing a “hybridity-at-the-origin” of afrofuturism to deconstruct “racial myths of identity and appropriation/exploitation”. writing on the edges of dance cultures, reddell also demonstrates the pervasive influence of the “ethnological forgeries” of german prog-rock group can, the works of david byrne and brian eno, and trumpeter jon hassell’s fourth world volumes as a conceptual, musical and technological blueprint for the electronic music cultures that followed. arguing for an “outsider afrofuturism”, reddell suggestively posits an outside-that-is-an-inside to the afrofuturist trajectory of exile, aiming to “reject multiculturalism’s artificial paternal origins, boundaries and lineages” by opening up “alternative routes toward understanding subjectivity and culture”. this issue’s from the floor section includes a few afrofuturist encounters that, in other contexts, would merit article status. i begin with the full version of an interview—or rather remixed and emailed textual encounter—with dj spooky that subliminal kid, a.k.a. paul d. miller, in which he discusses his involvement with the founding of the afrofuturism.net listserv in the late 1990s and the meaning of “afrofuturism” in his own remixological approaches to film, performance and music. turning to mc culture in the uk, nabeel zuberi investigates recent developments in grime and dubstep where the voice has been deprivileged in a shift toward hauntological instrumentality, contributing to the ongoing demythologization of “racialized discourses of authenticity and soul often projected onto african and african diasporic musical forms and practices in particular”—but also complicating avenues of vocalizing the paradoxes of postcolonial identity. queer afrofuturism in music has rarely been discussed,4 and in this introduction to the work—and many dance hits—of disco artist sylvester james, reynaldo anderson unearths how sylvester’s “androgynous lifestyle and gay identity” contributed “to the notion and formation of ‘the black fantastic’”. drawing attention to the central but at times forsaken role of disco in presaging the dance cultures of techno and house, anderson also undertakes the crucial labour of refocusing our attention on questions of sexuality and gender in articulating what might be called “fabulous afrofuturism”. in closing, i would like to thank the editorial staff at dancecult—and their new hosting through griffith’s university—for their dedicated efforts in producing this issue, and for dancecult 5(2)6 keeping the innards of this open access and online journal well-oiled. in particular i would like to thank graham st john, who has supported this project in more ways than one for many orbits. on a last note, the above articles are part of a larger edited volume on afrofuturism that has been in the works since 2008 entitled other planes of there: afrofuturism collected, and that will hopefully see the light of print publication in the coming year—annunaki willing. tobias c. van veen left coast, october 2013 notes 1 the title quote comes from sun ra’s poem “music the neglected plane of wisdom” (ra 2005: 244). 2 by the always mind-bending dave pires (http://davepires.com) as we listened to the psychic world of walter reed (2013)—an album i nearly slept on before kentyah fraser dropped the wisdom. 3 as lt. palmer in “second chance” (1993). 4 which is not to discount the science fiction (and criticism) of samuel r. delany that often creatively if not provocatively addresses sexuality and gender in its offworld scenarios and dystopian urbanisms. however, for the most part afrofuturist scholarship has yet to address sexuality and gender, speculations by szwed (1998) on ra’s near-androgyny and/or celibacy aside. references dery, mark. 1994. “black to the future: interviews with samuel r. delany, greg tate, and tricia rose”. in flame wars: the discourse of cyberculture, ed. mark dery, 179–222. durham: duke university press. eshun, kodwo. 1999. more brilliant than the sun: adventures in sonic fiction. london: quartet. ———. 2003. further considerations of afrofuturism. cr: the new centennial review (3)2: 287–302. nelson, alondra. 2002. “introduction: future texts”. social text (71): 1–15. ra, sun. 2005. the immeasurable equation: the collected poetry and prose of sun ra. ed. wolf, james l. and hartmut geerken. norderstedt: waitawhile. szwed, john f. 1998. space is the place: the lives and times of sun ra. new york: de capo press. weheliye, alexander g. summer 2002. “‘feenin’: posthuman voices in contemporary black popular music”. social text (71): 21–48. discography priest, killah. 2013. the psychic world of walter reed. proverbs records (us): <http://www.discogs.com/killah-priest-the-psychic-world-of-walter-reed/release/4823265>. groove: a phenomenology of rhythmic nuance tiger c. roholt new york: bloomsbury academic, 2014. isbn: 978-1-4411-6627-2 rrp: us$100.00 daniel schnee independent scholar (canada) a fundamental expression of zen buddhist theology, attributed to founding patriarch bodhidharma, states that a true understanding of enlightenment lays in a “special transmission outside the scriptures” (jap: kyåe betsuden), unwritten and unreasoned—inexpressible knowledge passed down the lineage. and though tiger c. roholt’s groove: a phenomenology of rhythmic nuance is decidedly non-theological, it makes a vigorous and compelling case for its own kind of special transmission outside of the “scriptures” of husserl, heidegger, and merleau-ponty’s phenomenological writings: kinesis over thesis, embodiment outside of analysis, the phenomenon of “groove” in music. taking on the subject after the “husserlian reduction” of the world-as-experienced (carr 1967: 372) rather than the ontology of world-as-existing, roholt examines the titular concept of groove, generally understood as a particularly influential drumbeat, or the feel of rhythms within songs (1). his argument is thus: that (1) grooves have a particular feeling, (2) they somehow involve the body, (3) are embodied and not theoretical/conceptual, and (4) to understand a groove is just to feel it. groove is an essential part of many genres of music and, as roholt reasons, an affective theory of groove will aid in better communication between musicians, critics, producers, and so on. in the attempt to do so, roholt creates a type of informal cartesian reversal: sum ergo cognito . . . i am thus i think, and therefore the body can know a priori through movement what the mind by its very nature seeks a posteriori. this distinction is important because it allows roholt to move forward from the canon(s) of philosophy in order to situate the reader in their own body, a truly remarkable feat for a philosopher, especially one who does not hold simultaneous graduate degrees in ethnomusicology or psychology. choosing, and then moving on from, maurice merleau-ponty’s phenomenology of motor-intentionality, he both entertains the reader and upholds the top standards of philosophy (clarity and utility) without theoretical monism. as merleau-ponty himself stated in “eye and mind”: “science manipulates things and gives up living in them. it makes its own limited models of things; operating upon these indices or variables to effect whatever transformations are permitted by their definition. it comes face to face with the real world only at rare intervals” (1964: 159). to return the reader to this real world then, roholt creates particularly interesting taxometries, which i have organized into a tripartite form. first of all, grooves (affective beats or rhythms) are classified by roholt as outside writing (taxometric number 1): program notes, music theory, biography, ethnography, musical notation, dynamic markings; outside the musical score. he begins this process in chapter one by giving an example of two different drum beats created for the beatles’ song “love me do”, comparing the differing accents and flow in the performance of session player andy white’s album version to band member ringo starr’s 45 rpm version. in doing so, roholt creates an initial reference for use throughout the rest of the book. noting that their beats, when notated, look the same but sound different, this example reveals that what makes each unique are nuances of timing. but the problem here is that roholt is using a drumbeat that does not fit another very common description of groove as a quality of feeling. grooves have a feeling, but certain songs are “groovy”, and have a genre-specific groove that has a greater (more intense) effect on listeners and dancers than “love me do.” a drummer can also groove (intransitive verb) and create a powerfully affective drumbeat, and “love me do” is slightly groovy at best. indeed, throughout the book, roholt does not clearly define the differences between groove the noun, adjective, or intransitive verb, and much of what is defined as black music, for example, contains grooves of such impact that the light and airy beat of the beatles’ song pales in comparison. roholt’s later use of sly and the family stone’s “thank you (falettinme be mice elf agin)” is such an example (113) and one could argue that his thesis would have been better served focusing on such grooves for their intensity and bodily affect. also, roholt uses the terms “pushing” and “pulling” as a way to describe the rhythmic tension that a great groove contains, when in actual fact the terms playing “behind” or “ahead” of the beat are more common (and i argue, better) metaphors amongst jazz musicians, for example. but, that being said, the idea of pushing and pulling foreshadows roholt’s conclusion in chapter four, and thus what occurs in or as a result of the process of pushing/pulling is the true key to his argument. a positive aspect of referencing a notated drumbeat vs. personal nuance raises the issue of non-standard notation, in particular graphic scores. “to standardize notation is to standardize patterns of thought and the parameters of creativity” argues sylvia smith (in sauer 2011: 11), and though roholt immediately leaves the idea of the score behind, it could be argued that it is notation itself that needs to expand beyond the standard to somehow include the “outside body”. in this sense then it is not what lies outside the scriptures but rather what the scriptures themselves need to address. the answer, in this case, may lay in part in the improvisation that accompanies many graphic scores, the potential for groove to occur spontaneously. expanding notation thusly, the musical score is not static or predictable. secondly, (taxometric number 2): grooves are in the bodies of musicians and audiences. using the drums (roholt’s main instrument) as an example, some movements are technically required while others are not but are valuable as part of facilitating the feel of a rhythm. this example provides a gateway to the study of non-rhythmic nuance as part of grooves, as woodwind instruments such as the arabian naï flute require both grand and subtle un-rhythmic movements (nodding) of the head to create vibrato, but are highly flexible and personal in the process of evoking powerful ecstasy (tarab) in the listener. as well, the player of a noh theater flute (nohkan) can change the timbre and pitch of a note by merely waving or flicking a free finger near an open tone hole, a process open to great emotional potential even within its own acoustic indeterminacy. noh also provides another excellent example of the marriage of emotion to rhythm in the syllables (kakegoe) shouted out by noh drummers before or as certain beats are played. these cries and shouts play into the overall effect of the drama, putting the spectator in a state of semi-mystical ecstasy (myôfû)—an immediate essence of being which is “beyond all possibility of enunciating or explaining” (arnold 1957: 86). what matters are the feelings imbued/aroused in both the musician and audience, via an imprecise kinesiological act of shouting or instrumental fingering. thus, musicians move their vocal chords and bodies intentionally; they direct their motor skills toward a specific end, what merleau-ponty calls motor-intentionality. the feel of a groove is the “affective dimension of the relevant motor-intentional movements” (105). as one “feels” their way along an icy sidewalk with their feet, our knowledge of ice is embodied as much as conceptual. directing the body, rather than theoretical analysis, toward the experience and creation of groove provides the opportunity to experience a/the groove personally and non-cognitively understand its power with our hands, throat and feet. finally, roholt’s third taxometric is rather profound in that it opens up a field of study that has yet to be addressed: there are specific things to feel and approaches to feeling them. there is a way to live in the world with motor-intentionality that understands groove rather than acknowledges its conceptual veracity. this is because rhythmic nuances “push” and “pull” against the general pulse (fundamental tempo) of a song or beat, and thus motor-intentionally creates a certain feeling of enjoyable bodily disequilibrium, which is emphasized by movements of the body. this sense of disequilibrium—motor-intentionality towards oscillating balance and pleasant unbalance—is such a perfect description of what grooves feel like from both a drummer’s and dancer’s perspective, it is rather amazing that no one has yet discussed it at length. rather than being unpleasant, bodily disequilibrium is a potent state found widespread in music and dance, routinely felt in any style of music in varying degrees depending upon the nature of the genre (pitched-based, percussion-based, etc.). implied in this terminology too is that there can be taxonomies of disequilibria, differing in praxis and pedagogy; swing feel in jazz, the “stumbling,” lilting flow of turkish aqsaq rhythms, and the wonderfully disequilibric relationship between the handclaps and spoken syllables of south indian konnakkol—without which the art of solkattu could not exist. an excellent example of this are the expanding and contracting yatis, augmented and reduced sets of syllables (“rhythmic design” sankaran 2010: 30) that also create geometric patterns when transcribed (in essence, another kind of graphic score). in this case, roholt’s work also creates a significant gateway into groove phenomenology amongst non-musicians, the groove-receiving body being as potent experientially as the groove-creating body. thus, taxonomies of general disequilibria after roholt can be fruitfully situated in edmc; further studies engendered by both academics and emerging groups of musical disequilibrians. references arnold, paul. 1957. le théâtre japonais. paris: l'arche. carr, david. 1967. “maurice merleau-ponty: incarnate consciousness”. in existential philosophers: kierkegaarrd to merleau-ponty, ed. george schrader, 369–429. new york: mcgraw-hill book company. merleau-ponty, maurice. 1964. “eye and mind”. in the primacy of perception, ed. james m. edie, 159–190. evanston: northwestern university press. sankaran, trichy. 2010. the art of konnakkol: spoken rhythms of south indian music. toronto: lalith publishers. sauer, theresa. 2011. notations 21. new york: mark batty publishers. os djs da perifa: música eletrônica, trajetórias e mediações culturais em são paulo ivan paolo de paris fontanari porto alegre: sulina, 2013. isbn: 978-85-205-0693-6 rrp: r$43.00 carlos palombini universidade federal de minas gerais (brazil) the djs that ivan fontanari studies in os djs da perifa (henceforth the periph djs) may be traced back to the dances that, in the early 1970s, started spreading across rio de janeiro, são paulo, belo horizonte, salvador and porto alegre. these events gathered a mostly black young crowd from lower-class neighbourhoods who would dance to rhythm and blues derived genres played by the first brazilian djs. as african-american music evolved from soul to funk, philly soul, disco and euro-disco in the 1970s; to hip-hop, electrofunk, electro, house, garage, acid house and techno in the 1980s; and to jungle, drum ‘n’ bass, trap and dubstep in the 1990s, afro-brazilians picked on whatever african-american music they identified with and made it pivotal to their cultures. between the late 1980s and early 1990s, dj nazz and others brought from europe and the us the synth-pop, electrofunk, electro, miami bass and latin freestyle tracks that, subjected by funkeiros (funksters) and such djs as grandmaster raphael to various processes in cities around the guanabara bay, gave rise to funk carioca, the first brazilian genre of electronic dance music (see palombini 2014). more restricted in popularity and influence, the group fontanari studies rose from the working-class zona leste (henceforth east end) of são paulo in the 1990s to gain notoriety at the turn of the century through the performances and productions of djs marky, patife and xerxes (a.k.a. xrs), who highlighted a subgenre of drum ‘n’ bass sometimes designated by the terms sambass, drum and bossa or bossa and bass. drum ‘n’ bass arose in the uk in the 1990s as a derivate of jungle, the first native genre of british electronic dance music, which emerged in the late 1980s. between 1992 and 1993 drum ‘n’ bass reached brazil (190–1), where a 1997 boom was followed by decline (204). yet at the turn of the century brazilian drum ‘n’ bass was back in the spotlight. marky, patife and xerxes released albums, dj mixes and singles on various formats (acetate, cd, vinyl) in brazil and in the uk; the italian label cuadra distributed four double volumes of the sambass compilations; and emi included drum ‘n’ bass remixes by brazilian djs on the cd rewind, a compilation of wilson simonal songs. when fontanari started fieldwork in 2005, the são paulo techno and drum ‘n’ bass scene perceived itself as in danger. three historical east end venues had closed their doors, and the relatively upscale nightclubs that catered for a white middle-class clientele in the centre were discontinuing techno and drum ‘n’ bass events. this did not pose a threat to marky, patife and xerxes, who could pursue their careers elsewhere. the earlier generation though had not enjoyed the same amount of public recognition and depended on those venues for survival. by contrast, a new generation of aspiring professionals, to whom marky and patife had been inspirational, relied on menial jobs to earn their living while collaboratively staging parties in the periphery out of which their role models had come. fontanari turns his attention to this group. he asks: “why were drum ‘n’ bass djs the most prominent in brazil if the genre was viewed as unappealing to the local market?”. the author has previously conducted ethnographic research into the white middle-class porto alegre rave scene. the periph djs derives from his 2008 doctoral dissertation in social anthropology, which won a national arts foundation award for critical writing on music in 2012. from may to december 2005 fontanari participated in 27 parties and conducted 18 formal interviews in the course of which he came face-to-face with 22 djs, a record-shop owner and a party promoter. he suggests that, “as they learn the mixing potential of the machine called mixer, djs incorporate its properties while attributing to the machine creative powers undifferentiated from their own, in a process of biomechanical-symbolic feedback” (226). fontanari narrates how he built up the character of the ethnographer so as to become another—rather than the other—and thus conveniently circulate among periphery djs and partygoers; among residents of the working-class neighbourhoods where periphery djs and partygoers lived; among people in the unmarked territories periphery djs and partygoers named the centre; and to cross these boundaries without attracting hostility or unwanted attention. the function of the periphery dj is to “bring closer to the periphery a world of distant references through the performance of electronic music while promoting the distancing of themselves and their followers from the periphery world” (81). he explains: “for this reason, the most valued performances were those by periphery djs who had followed the longest trajectories, individualizing and personalizing themselves to the utmost degree in relation to the periphery audience” (112). this is fontanari’s leitmotiv, which the reader follows through a set of anthropological methods systematically pursued: ethnography of periphery-dj parties in the periphery and in the centre; semi-structured interviews with periphery djs and a promoter working in the periphery; semi-structured interviews with periphery djs and one record-shop owner working in the centre; analysis of technical devices in their relations to periphery djs’ existence; and analysis of two drum ‘n’ bass hits released by periphery djs in 2001. this leads him to the recognition of a direct relationship between the mixing potentials of drum ‘n’ bass/techno and the modes of interaction in the periphery/centre: “in the periphery there was collaboration between djs. the centre was a place for individualized initiatives” (239). however, “there were no mixes of drum ’n’ bass with axé-music or pagode” (243).[1] mixing and combining possibilities were defined by “ethnic signification, class signification and geopolitical signification” (243–4). at this point we come across a most intriguing trait of musical appropriation and re-signification processes within the african diaspora: afro-brazilians tend to associate such african-american genres as disco, house and techno to whiteness, whereas a black-british genre such as drum ‘n’ bass retains persistent links to blackness (240–1). the periph djs offers an x-ray view into a culture that risked falling into oblivion since the day when brazilian techno and drum ‘n’ bass started to fade out of mainstream earshot. interviews are especially engrossing and leave us wondering what career paths the author’s collaborators may have subsequently taken. the periph djs sets a high standard for brazilian scholarship in the field. additionally, those who wish to challenge currently held assumptions on funk carioca shall find in this study something akin to a control group. references guerreiro, goli. 2014. “axé-music”. in bloomsbury encyclopedia of popular music of the world vol. 9: genres: caribbean and latin america, ed. david horn, heidi feldman, mona-lynn courteau, pamela narbona jerez and hettie malcomson, 24–6. london: bloomsbury. lima, luiz fernando nascimento de. 2014. “pagode”. in bloomsbury encyclopedia of popular music of the world vol. 9: genres: caribbean and latin america, ed. david horn, heidi feldman, mona-lynn courteau, pamela narbona jerez and hettie malcomson, 580–3. london: bloomsbury. palombini, carlos. 2014. “funk carioca and música souls”. in bloomsbury encyclopedia of popular music of the world vol. 9: genres: caribbean and latin america, ed. david horn, heidi feldman, mona-lynn courteau, pamela narbona jerez and hettie malcomson, 317–25. london: bloomsbury. notes [1]axé-music and pagode are two genres of brazilian afro-pop: on axé-music see guerreiro (2014); on pagode see lima (2014). the creative studio practice of contemporary dance music sampling composers dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 6(1): 41–60 issn 1947-5403 ©2014 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.01.03 the creative studio practice of contemporary dance music sampling composers justin morey leeds metropolitan university (uk) phillip mcintyre university of newcastle (australia) abstract this paper seeks to investigate some of the considerations that inform and help to determine the creative studio practice of contemporary sampling composers. collaborative writing and production, specifically the co-opted collaboration implicit in using samples, will be assessed to consider those aspects of the production process which the participants consider to be authorial. these considerations include acts of listening, selecting and editing. in examining these matters, this paper places emphasis on how sampling composers actively constrain their options in order to promote a creative relationship with their musical material. techniques such as, firstly, traditional sample manipulation, secondly, the use of a sample as an initial building block for a composition from which the sample is then removed and, finally, live performance in the studio which is subsequently cut up and treated as a sample, will be discussed. case studies, in the form of semi-structured interviews with sampling composers, will be drawn upon to assess approaches to and views about these forms of studio composition. keywords: sampling, technology, creative practice, legal framework, social context justin morey  has a background in sound engineering and music production, running his own recording studio in london from 1995–2003. he  has been teaching in higher education since 2001. his main research interest is in sampling as a creative practice within british dance music. his research has been published in the iaspm-norden music, law and business anthology (iipc), the iaspm journal 2012 digital nation special edition, and the  journal on the art of record production ( jarp), two of which  are co-authored with phillip mcintyre. phillip mcintyre has been involved in the music industry for the past thirty years where he has been a songwriter, instrumentalist, musical director and manager. he has worked as a music journalist and produced and engineered audio and video recordings. he currently teaches sound production at the university of newcastle australia. his latest book is entitled creativity and cultural production: issues for media practice. more detail on phillip mcintyre can be found at: <http://www.texasradio.com.au/pages/mcintyre_p.html#top> feature article http://www.texasradio.com.au/pages/mcintyre_p.html#top dancecult 6(1)42 background to the study and methodological approach previous work by the authors has explored the ways in which advances in studio technology have afforded those involved in collaborative popular music composition a range of creative approaches which have, in turn, led to non-traditional decisions when considering the kinds of contributions to the production process that can and are considered to be authorial (mcintyre and morey 2010). a more recent study (mcintyre and morey 2011) sought to identify the creative practice of sampling composers in terms of the influence of a complex system of technological, social, cultural, economic, legal, historical and geographical factors, which derived its theoretical perspective from mcintyre’s work on creativity and cultural production (mcintyre 2007, 2008, 2009a, 2009b, 2010, 2012). this work presents evidence to support the idea that creative action occurs as the result of a dynamic system in action. in building on this work this article aims to explore some of the specific studio practices employed by composers who have worked, or continue to work, with samples, and the extent to which these approaches to writing and creating music may be distinct from those of composers and studio practitioners for whom the use of phonographic samples does not represent a significant part of their creative methodology. a case study methodological approach (yin 1989) was employed in our research. interviewing was the single method adopted following the realisation that while triangulation using multiple methods is common to many positivist approaches, it may be “rooted in a scientifically naive notion that multiple methods can reveal a single, ‘true’ reality beyond frameworks of theory and interpretation” ( jensen and jankowski 1991: 63). for us the goal has not been to come up with a global statistical generalisation (yin 1989: 21) but instead, following the dictums of qualitative research, an attempt to uncover the meaningful activity of sampling composers. we have used a convenience sample (lull 1990: 19) for this research project, and for brief biographical details of those involved with the study please refer to page 60. it should be acknowledged here that the case study sample comprises uk sampling composers who have worked across a range of dance music styles that incorporate samples, including house, techno, early hardcore, breakbeat, big beat, dubstep, hip hop, trip hop and ambient house. as such, it is not within the scope of the study to draw any conclusions about dance music practice globally, or indeed about practice in genres of dance music outside of those created by our case study sample. given the variety of music that our interviewees have worked on however, it may be reasonable to assume that some of the approaches to composition and production discussed hereafter may be employed by dance music composers working in other genres and other countries. it is also worth noting that the term “sampling composers” will be used throughout the article to refer to the interviewees and any third parties engaged in similar activities of cultural production, because this is more convenient than the often interchangeable use of terms such as “artist”, “producer”, “dj” and “programmer”, and because the prime concern here is with sampling as an authorial and compositional activity. we would also argue that the term “composer” has had a tendency morey & mcintyre | the creative studio practice of contemporary dance music sampling composers 43 to be reserved in musicological literature for individuals producing either orchestral music, or what might be classified as art music, and that the term deserves to be used more widely in reference to those working within what may be broadly described as popular music. co-opted authorship the use of intertextual devices as a necessary form of meaning-making has not only been recognised as a form of reference for consumers of texts but it is increasingly seen as a basic mode of creative activity by producers of communicative texts. as roland barthes argued, all texts occur in “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” (1977: 146). while these ideas largely refer to a conceptual practice related to consumption, intertextuality is increasingly recognised as a fundamental technique of creative production in as much as all things come into being from a set of antecedent conditions (aristotle 1960: 142). for sampling composers, these modes of intertextual action, that draw on pre-existing works, operate as an extended form of co-creation rather than existing as merely a conceptual activity. by incorporating third party samples in their work, literally derived from other texts, sampling composers effectively co-opt the writers (though not necessarily the performers) of the sampled work as co-authors once the sample clearance process has been agreed. a recent example of the potentially circuitous nature of this is the plan b song “ill manors”, which sampled the string arrangement from the german pop musician peter fox’s 2008 song “alles neu”. these string parts were taken (but rearranged and rerecorded rather than sampled) from the fourth movement of shostakovich’s 7th symphony, leading to the following writing credits for “ill manors”: ben drew [plan b], a shuckburgh [his co-composer], vincent von schlippenbach, david conen, pierre baigorry [the three writers of “alles neu”], dmitri shostakovich [who also receives a co-composer credit on “alles neu”] using and clearing samples will clearly have an economic impact on those composers who use them, and there is evidence both that costs of clearance have risen significantly in the last ten years, and that sampling composers have modified their practice as a result (see morey 2012a, 2012b for a full discussion of this). despite the expense involved, a number of our interviewees felt that there was an ethical obligation for these co-opted writers to be rewarded in cases where the use of the sample was substantial and obvious: i basically think, my honest opinion is that if you use a sample and you can hear it and it’s totally obvious, and everyone knows, or even the trainspotters know, you have to pay your dues for that because it’s enhancing your music.1 i suppose if you’re using something as a sound source, if you’re taking a held chord or a note or something like that, then replaying that, i think that should be allowable really. i think if you’re taking a whole four bar loop or something, then that’s a different case.2 dancecult 6(1)44 i think certainly if someone sampled four bars of my music i’d expect something for it.3 i’ve declared samples, i’ve not declared samples. i think it depends on how much you use.4 i think that in a perfect world, if everybody was reasonable, if you’re using something that’s basically musically recognizable or sounds good because of somebody else’s playing or somebody else’s writing, then yeah, you should clear that. and if you thought you were going to get treated fairly, i think that people would be much more like ‘yeah, that’s just what you do’—do you know what i mean? a bit like paying a session musician. when it’s just like a noise that’s twisted up beyond all recognition, it doesn’t really matter about the original, whatever it was, because it’s changed, it’s something else.5 while there was a consensus that sampling a significant part from another record should be reflected by a clearance fee and/or a co-write, one mismatch that can be identified is of that between the contribution made by songwriters to a recording, and the elements of a record that the sampling composer may be interested in using. the writers of a song were historically considered to be (and still are considered to be in many cases) the creator(s) of the melody line, underlying chord structure and lyrics. this is largely a matter of convention, but this situation, as has been noted elsewhere (mcintyre 2001: 103, 106–9 and wicke 1990: 15–16), may have resulted from changes in the way music has been interacted with. once musical interaction moved from the music hall and the family piano toward the recorded arena, the principal musical object interacted with also changed. for those who predominantly interacted with sheet music the obvious points of reference were with what could be seen on the sheet, that is, the lyric, the melody and what was often a simple harmonic accompaniment. once gramophones and records became the primary mode of musical interaction, what was predominantly engaged with changed, leading to a fuller interaction with the performance characteristics of a piece, as well as a greater concentration on arrangement and production values of what was now mainly a recorded sound work. as a result of these changing relationships some have claimed, as hennion does, that “the song is nothing before the arrangement”—arguing that creation “occurs at the moment of orchestration, recording, and sound mixing” (hennion quoted in fitzgerald 1996: 20–21). in this regard, sampling composers take these ideas one step further, often taking sections of the underlying groove of a song or moments when the song drops to a single instrument, such as a bass run or a drum break and using these fundamental elements as the basis for composition. in zak’s framework for compartmentalising studio production, these are elements that belong largely to the third “compositional layer” or “track”, with the other two layers being the “song” and “arrangement” (2001: 24). they are often sections of performance by the studio musicians that are not part of what might be notated as the “song”, and for which those musicians receive no income as a result of being sampled (income from sample clearance goes to the songwriters and rights owners—the record company and publisher—but there are no royalties for the performers on the sample, as there would be morey & mcintyre | the creative studio practice of contemporary dance music sampling composers 45 on the original record, unless they also happen to be the writers or co-writers). for example, clyde stubblefield of the jbs and gregory c. coleman of the winstons, performers of the “funky drummer” and “amen” breaks respectively, two of the most widely-used samples, are not credited as co-authors of the songs containing their performances. as such, it can be argued that the co-authors in a record using samples often have little or no authorial input on the sections of music being used. the overall sound, texture or rhythmic feel of a sample were repeatedly identified by our interviewees as the main characteristics that lead them to use it: sometimes we might sample a drum loop that’s amazing, you know it’s got a fantastic sound. for us it’s the atmosphere that it gives [to] something . . . so more for the sound and the feel that a sample would give you rather than the playing. i don’t think we ever sampled anything specifically for the melody.6 so we sort of chanced upon all this stuff that we weren’t really aware of because it wasn’t part of our generation really. it was probably the sort of music that would have been frowned upon by the post-punk generation, stuff like steely dan and america. we really liked the kind of woody warmth to that stuff, which was all obviously produced in lovely studios, and the sound you were getting off the vinyl . . . and just taking little bits of that, you know, tiny little loops of a little bass run or bongo loop or something like that. and hearing that in the context of the cleanliness of the analogue synths and drum machines and stuff like that, we just enjoyed that whole kind of warmth really, and just the way it added this kind of organic dirt.7 you know certain things prick up my ears. the sonics, the groove, although nowadays you can change the groove, that’s the great thing about it, but it is essentially the sonics.8 it was so basic at first, and my attitude to it was so basic; that you just heard something that you liked and took it, and you didn’t really examine why you liked it that much. it was only much later when, like what i was saying to you, about realizing the shortcomings of most musicians that i realized that, being a non-musician myself, what was really special about those old records that you were taking bits from. those players were fucking properly good and the circumstances that they recorded in were atmospherically different than the way modern records are recorded, and that’s part of the whole thing.9 a lot of the time, it is the sound, not just an addition. it’s a rather dull and predictable answer but, depending on your sample source, you can add layers of texture and atmosphere that may be impossible to achieve elsewhere. of course, there are legions of competent producers creating their own atmospheres with pure electronics that they have sound designed. i’m in complete admiration of that too but i’m also aware that there’s a certain snobbery about that, which i could care less for.10 dancecult 6(1)46 bob bhamra’s comment confirms warner’s view that “the grainy, distorted nature of many samples also provide a useful foil to the ‘sanitized’ quality of the sounds produced by many modern synthezisers, and as a result give a greater range and depth of sound palette” (2003: 30). richard barrett’s view, meanwhile, appears to support rodgers’ argument that sampling composers prioritise the timbre or “grain” of a sample because “it reveals the tactility and pleasurability of the recording process, and, in the case of much groove-based electronic music, it often reflects a producer’s attempt to create a texturally nuanced sound that will elicit physical response from a dancefloor” (2003: 318). in this regard the work of roland barthes highlights this important proposition. barthes (1990) describes, in line with julia kristeva, what is called the pheno-song and the geno-song. for these two the pheno-song covers all the formal phenomena which are in the service of communication such as the structure of the language being sung and the rules of the genre being used, all of which take their “bearing directly on the ideological alibis of a period” (barthes 1990: 295). the genosong on the other hand, and the one that concerns us more directly here, is associated with the “diction” of a piece and is concerned with “the voluptuousness of its sound signifiers” (barthes 1990: 295). this is what roland barthes calls the “grain” in music which elicits a response leading to a form of pleasure he labels jouissance, an ecstatic and physical pleasure that goes beyond the formal distinctions normally relied on to analyse music. furthermore, as a result of an over-concentration on the semiotic interpretation of music’s lyric content there has been insufficient attention paid to the sounds themselves, to the intramusical structures of what middleton calls the “primary level of signification” (1993: 177). chang has also noted similar distinctions between the prioritisation of sound over melodic content: the conception of creativity as the construction of diverse, unexpected relationships is a reminder of the distinct conceptions of sound-as-object in instrument-based and sample-based music. sample-based music uses sounds instrumentally, rather than using instruments to make sounds. in sampling, sound marks the beginning of the creative process, and is accordingly treated as raw material. instrument-based music treats sound as an ontological object, in which sound is considered the end of the process (2009: 145). this emphasis on timbre over melody further enforces the idea that the co-opted participants in sample based music will often be the musicians that played on the sampled track, and that moments of performance that are sonically pleasing are often of more interest to sampling composers than identifiable riffs or melodies. these composers could be said to be assembling a group of unknowing and uncredited session musicians who have never met, and finding a way to make these different moments of performance work together. andy carthy, for one, views his sampling practice in this way: i think when you’re working in isolation using bits of other people’s music, or even if you’re adding bits of your own or working with other musicians, i always try and give each element its own personality, even if it’s imagining it as a little cartoon figure, like morey & mcintyre | the creative studio practice of contemporary dance music sampling composers 47 a member of the muppets’ band or something, and then it’s almost like you’ve created this little band and you’re trying to get them to talk to each other and have fun playing together. and once they’re all happy, that’s when you know that the track’s working. it’s almost personalising something that’s quite mechanical. every element you pick is there for a reason and has its own little personality anyway, so it’s getting all these different musicians who’ve never met each other to talk to each other and have a good time, probably without anyone ever realising it.11 simon reynolds likens an audio recording and a sample taken from it to a “residual ghost”, that is “unaware of change in its surroundings and continues to play the same scene repeatedly” (reynolds 2012: 313). reynolds has also noted that much of the discourse surrounding sampling has been written largely in its defence, and offers the concern that the time-based nature of sampling and repeating musical performance presents issues that do not arise from other forms of appropriation art, such as collage: recording is pretty freaky, then, if you think about it. but sampling doubles its inherent supernaturalism. woven out of looped moments that are like portals to farflung times and places, the sample collage creates a musical event that never happened; a mixture or time-travel and séance. sampling involves using recordings to make new recordings; it’s the musical art of ghost co-ordination and ghost arrangement. it’s often compared with collage. but the added dimension of time that music inhabits makes sample-based music profoundly different from photomontage. with recorded music, however much it’s doctored and enhanced through studio techniques (multitracking, overdubs et al.), what you hear is a sequence of human actions happening in real time. (i’m talking about played music here, of course, but that is overwhelmingly what gets sampled, rather than music that has programmed rhythms or is made with digital technology.) to take a segment of living time—which is what a sample is—and chain it into a loop isn’t just appropriation, it’s expropriation. in a certain sense—neither literally true nor utterly metaphorical—sampling is enslavement; involuntary labour that’s been alienated from its original environment and put into service in a completely other context, creating profit and prestige for another (reynolds 2012: 313–14). although approaching sampling from very different philosophical viewpoints, it is interesting to note a certain convergence in describing what happens, between carthy’s metaphor of working with cartoon figures, and reynolds’ “ghost co-ordination and ghost arrangement” (2012: 313). while the idea of samples, and indeed recordings in general, as audio ghosts is persuasive, reynolds’ criticisms of sampling ignore the contribution of the sampling composer, and assume that listeners will hear a sample-based composition differently to “a sequence of human actions happening in real time” (2012: 314). reynolds himself has acknowledged surprise of the speed at which listeners became normalised to sample-based music and “how it just became an everyday part of our listening lives to enjoy—and to accept as music” (2012: 311), while simon frith has argued that the distinction between a played performance and a constructed performance may be slight as dancecult 6(1)48 far as the listener is concerned: i listen to records in the full knowledge that what i hear is something that never existed, that never could exist, as a ‘performance’, something happening in a single time and space; nevertheless, it is now happening in a single time and space: it is thus a performance and i hear it as one (frith 1996: 211). while there may be unresolved issues surrounding both the ethics of co-opting authors and players to contribute to a sampling composition, and the extent to which copyright law enforces a mechanism for some of these contributions to be rewarded and not others, our interviewees have demonstrated a clear desire to continue to assemble compositions by these means, which prompts some discussion of how far listening may be the fundamental compositional strength of these composers. listening as authorship csikszentmihalyi has argued that within any given domain, creativity can be seen as the result of agents with the requisite immersion and skill producing something of sufficient novelty that it becomes recognised and validated by the field (csikszentmihalyi 1988: 329). in terms of sampling practice, some, such as schloss (2004: 66), have argued that the complexity of the transformation or manipulation of a sample can be seen to be a measure of validation by the field that the sampling composer in question has produced something of creative note. while our interviewees certainly acknowledged sampling composers who undertook considerable manipulation of samples (known as “chopping” and “flipping” in hip-hop production), it was interesting that they generally placed no greater values on these technical skills than they did on the ability to identify a sample that would work within a given context. as such, the ability to listen and select was considered as compositionally significant as any production or technique-based skills: sometimes i think as a programmer or producer you’re thinking ‘i’ve got to do something to this to justify my involvement’ but sometimes actually all you need to do is [say] ‘i’ve selected that two seconds of music, and there’s absolutely nothing i can do to improve it. i’ve chosen it, there you go’.12 i think the skill, really, is in recognising a good sample. i find a lot of the stuff i’ve got is very odd little bits of tracks or ends of records, things like that. there’s barely anything there really, but it’s kind of knowing when you’ve heard something that’s going to work really. i think that’s the thing that comes from doing it for a long time.13 i think sampling is just one of those things that, you know . . . you just hear something and it has to be that that has to be used.14 richard barratt prioritises listening over other studio or compositional skills, and explains why he has made a conscious decision to avoid learning sample manipulation: morey & mcintyre | the creative studio practice of contemporary dance music sampling composers 49 to tell you the truth, i wouldn’t even go anywhere near the computer—i’d just tell the engineer what sounds good. i really don’t give a fuck about any of it. i’m not interested in getting involved with pressing keys on a keyboard or pressing keys on a computer, because i think as soon as you start doing it, you can’t hear what you’re doing any more. it becomes like an exercise in twatting about, rather than being able to hear the music. do you know what i mean? i’d rather sit back from it. i think it’s a musician’s disease really. as soon as you start playing things, and if you play it yourself, you start listening to it in a different way than if it was someone else who’s playing it, and then it’s very easy to lose your perspective very, very quickly.15 andy carthy explains in more detail why he thinks that having an ear for a good sample is as important a creative act as sample manipulation, or creating a work from a number of small, less identifiable fragments: you know, some of my favourite sample tunes are not doing too much to the sample. that’s a thing as well, because people think, “well, you’ve not added anything to it”. you listen to something like “the 900 number”, and that’s a marva whitney tune on 33, it’s a two bar loop and mark’s [dj mark, the 45 king] production technique is just adding drum machine hits at relatively low volume behind—just very subtly toughening up the original drums on the record but without obviously being beefed up too much . . . . i’d hate it if he started adding loads of extra elements to his music, but his ear for choosing a good sample that you will want to listen to over and over again for five minutes is undeniable, you know what i mean? so it’s sometimes just that pure repetition of something which is so sublime that you don’t want anything to change about it over and over again—that’s one of the elements that i really like about sampling. or you listen to, say, dj premier or something like that. a lot of his best tunes, stuff like the crooklyn dodgers tune with the really heavy brass loop and the little bell dinging at the end of it. 4 bar loop—probably he’s not even chopped that up. kick and a snare—that’s it! couple of cuts on the chorus, but absolutely killer, you know what i mean? . . . . the same thing can apply to art. you know, is seurat with his kind of pointillist intricacy more viable than a mark rothko? i don’t know. is it? something isn’t better simply because it’s more complicated or been interfered with more, because sometimes you want to show the beauty of what you’re actually using.16 carthy’s views recall warner’s comment that the sampling composer “need not be a physical virtuoso, only a virtuoso of the imagination with an expertise in the manipulation and organization of sound”, whose “musical imagination is likely to have developed largely through listening to recordings” (2003: 96–7). warner also references nattiez’s idea of an esthesic dimension in the construction of musical meaning; rather than some traditional ideas of communication theory where the meaning of a text is “a producer’s transmission of some message that can be subsequently decoded by a ‘receiver’” (1990: 9), reception is, in line with roland barthes’ (1977) ideas mentioned above, “a complex process that reconstructs a ‘message’” (1990: 17), where listeners “construct meaning in the course of dancecult 6(1)50 an active perceptual process” (1990: 12). warner argues that this view of reception is particularly useful when considering music created with samples, because the life experience of the listener may have significant consequences to their apprehension: when a listener identifies the source of a sample, the extra-musical connotations (be they physical, cultural or phonographical) inform the purely musical response. these non-musical associations become part of the interpretative process; the listener’s understanding of the piece is dependent on whether identification takes place, and a culturally informed response is quite different to a musically informed response. physical, cultural or phonographical signs replace or override musical signs and, as a consequence, a different kind of communication takes place (warner 2003: 97). it can be argued that our sampling composers interviewed here are hyper-listeners—they have a deep knowledge, not only of sample-based music, but of the often obscure origins of many of the samples used by their forebears and peers (both barratt and reeves use the term “trainspotters” to describe what some might see as the geeky obsessiveness of the serious vinyl collecting dj). for the sampling composers in this study, one of the key skills appears to be identifying a very short section of groove from a record, and having a feel for how that groove, and smaller sections derived from it, will work when repeated. for example, martin reeves’ (krafty kuts) track “the funk is” (2001) features two bars of fender rhodes electric piano and guitar, although it is unclear without knowledge of the original sampled source if this two bar phrase is sampled from one place in the original record, or itself constructed from multiple locations, or indeed multiple records. the stereo location of the main fender rhodes riff (centre) and the two guitar parts (strummed chord fairly hard right and staccato palm muted guitar centre left) suggests that all three of these parts could be from different sources, while the three note electric piano phrase that features in the final two beats of the two bar phrase is sufficiently different both sonically and tonally from the other material to suggest that it is either sampled from another source, or has been played in, or programmed from a sampled keyboard instrument. the full loop can be heard for the first time at 1.06. elsewhere, variations derived from this loop have been created to provide changes in the groove and dynamic of the piece. at 37 seconds, in the introduction, a four bar loop is created from repeating beats one and two of bar two of the original loop 14 times, followed by the last two beats of resolution from the original loop, with the addition of a single electric piano chord on the final off beat of bar two, and a stuttering of the main fender rhodes sample in bar three. at 1.36, a different variation occurs where the first bar of the two bar loop is repeated three and a half times, followed by the final two beats as resolution, while at 1.50, the original loop is returned to but with an additional electric piano hit on the final off-beat of bar one. on each occasion, the drums and bassline are also altered to fit with these changes while retaining the sense of forward motion. it could be argued that none of these variations would be likely to appear as a played repetitive groove on, say, the kind of funk and jazz funk records that reeves may have used to obtain his samples, because morey & mcintyre | the creative studio practice of contemporary dance music sampling composers 51 musicians will naturally introduce slight variations in a repetitive groove and because the idea of repeating a single beat from a main riff to form a different riff would be uncommon, and by the nature of live musicianship, still contain minor variations, rather than being exact copies. reeves has produced something distinctive, which manages to avoid sounding mechanical because of the careful choice of elements of groove from which it has been composed. given significant technical skill as a turntablist, and sufficient record decks and copies of the record, it would be technically possible (although very challenging) to recreate much of the variation composed here by reeves, which suggests that his compositional approach and resulting sound derives from the habitus of both dj and studio-based composer. as richard burgess asserts: we’re not talking about the kind of instinct that you’re born with. this is the instinct that develops from being around music, musicians and studios your whole life. this, i think, is the reason that djs with no musical or technical ability can still become excellent producers. they have listened to many, many records, logged the way people responded to the music and subconsciously programmed their instinct to be able to reproduce those excitement factors in their own records (1997: 177). as reeves indicated, “you just hear something and it has to be that that has to be used”.17 this process of gaining an instinct for what will work can be associated with the acquisition of a sampling composer’s habitus, which has been described as: a ‘feel for the game’, a ‘practical sense’ (sens practique) that inclines agents to act and react in specific situations in a manner that is not always calculated and that is not simply a question of conscious obedience to rules. rather it is a set of dispositions which generates practices and perceptions. the habitus is the result of a long process of inculcation, beginning in early childhood, which becomes a ‘second sense’ or a second nature ( johnson in bourdieu 1993: 5). the development of a producer’s or composer’s habitus is centred in many cases on the ability to switch from listener to composer and back again, as suggested above, to the extent that these two roles, focused on either listening as production or listening as consumption, will, at times, become indistinguishable. these ideas of the complexity of listening fit well with the proposition that the processes of production and consumption in communication, which have often been [t]reated as isolated parts of a uni-linear process, are not seen here as separate entities. it is argued that they can only be isolated from the system [of communication] for purposes of analysis as they constitute integrated aspects of the system itself and are themselves constituted by it. it is this system that brings meaning into being. this is how messages are created (mcintyre 2012: 8). dancecult 6(1)52 the constraints of samples as compositional tools in creating a musical work, a sampling composer’s “agency, the ability to make and effect decisions, is dependent on the structures, principally the domain and field, they encounter and surround themselves with. as such their freedom to act is relative to the domain and field they work in” (mcintyre 2009a: 7). the existence of the limits set by the domain and field are not only constraining factors but they also enable creative action. janet wolff argues the existence of these so-called limits actually enables creative activity. she suggests that “all action, including creative or innovative action, arises in the complex conjunction of numerous determinants and conditions” (wolff 1981: 9). further to this, morey (2012a, 2012b) has argued that sampling composers value the restrictions placed on their compositional process, whether these be the timbral and timing issues inherent in incorporating a completed recording (as opposed to individual parts) into a new record, or the restrictions placed upon them by copyright management in terms of quantitative or qualitative usage of samples. three approaches to using samples that appear to value these constraints have appeared with sufficient regularity in our interviews for them to be noteworthy. a) samples chopped “by hand” since the introduction of propellerhead recycle software in 1994, it has been relatively straightforward for someone familiar with music production software to take a loop from a recording and, provided that you have found a start and end point on a sampler reasonably accurately (so that it loops smoothly), use software to detect the main transients (or hits) and quantise the loop, either through the software assigning a different midi note value to each hit and quantising these notes in a midi editor or daw, or, more recently, through a combination of transient detection and time stretching, such as logic’s flex mode. anecdotal evidence suggests that the use of recycle was relatively standard in certain genres of uk dance music, especially drum & bass, where the combination of using sampled drums and the need for a tightly quantised rhythm track that can be edited easily via midi, made it a very useful tool in speeding up workflow. out of our group of sampling composers, however, only aston harvey said that he used it regularly, and only began doing so in 2001, seven years after its release, while paul hammond has started to use ableton for time correction, but only very recently. the other interviewees preferred to edit “by hand”, i.e. cutting and trimming as many individual slices of the loop as are needed in the sampler or daw. andy carthy explains why he believes this works for him: i like chopping . . . i like using my ears to do that. i’m sure recycle can be used well and it can save you a lot of time, but i also think any time saving technique also cuts out a lot of the human element which actually makes it appealing. you know, i can chop stuff up as much as is needed, and i really like chopping stuff up in the mpc or chopping stuff up when i’m using a sampler, because i can be playing the tune morey & mcintyre | the creative studio practice of contemporary dance music sampling composers 53 and messing around with the start points, or tuning things up and down. if i record something into logic, a beat and a loop, i’ll just manually chop it up and move it around to get them to fit together. or you might get a beat tight and then change the tempo because i think the human instinct is to get it as in time as possible. so you can get it really really tight, and then roll the tempo up or down by a couple of bpm, just to suddenly give it quite an odd swing.18 carthy’s comments suggest a belief that the affordances of time correction software can push sampling composers into putting everything perfectly in time, and he has taken steps to avoid this in his own practice. however, the fact that most of the producers here prefer not to use time correction software may be more indicative of the point at which they began their careers in music, generally the late 1980s to early 1990s, than of a general avoidance of such tools by sampling composers in general. it also helps to verify bennett’s view of “risk aversion” among both professional studio producers and sampling composers such as norman cook (2010: 174–9), suggesting that many professionals are cautious about how new hardware and software may lead to a change in their sound, either because of inherent sonic characteristics, or because of disruption to their established workflow. b) start with a sample, then discard it a practice that emerged as being common to a number of composers was to begin with a sample, as a source of inspiration, build up a composition around it, and then remove the sample altogether. one explanation for this practice is honer’s comment that “sometimes it’s better just to start with something than stare at a blank screen”19, but it can also be argued that this method allows the sampling composer to be inspired by the sound and groove of a sample, without the incumbent costs of sample clearance and loss of publishing income to co-opted co-writers. you can find a part of an old ’60s record that you really like and then use a loop of that as a start point and add to it, and add to it, and recreate it, but not recreate it exactly musically, but just use it as a source of inspiration, or for the feel and the rhythm, and then get rid of the sample. so hopefully you’ve changed it musically but maybe you’ve kept the tempo and the actual feel of the piece as well.20 what we tend to do is to use a sample, like a two or four bar loop as the basis, as the starting point of a track, and then kind of write a track up around it, and then lose the original sample. it’s almost like you build up a sculpture around a kind of initial object and then take that initial thing away . . . . they immediately create a vibe, the subtlety of the way . . . i’ve always generally sampled music that is played by real musicians, rather than sampling electronic stuff, which means that there’s that kind of natural swing and ebb to the sample, and then to work around that is the enjoyable aspect really.21 dancecult 6(1)54 this process does not entirely fit with any of the collaborative songwriting models proposed by bennett (2011), although arguably it could be seen as a form of “jamming”, except that some of the musicians are not present in the room, nor are they able to modify their performances in response to those who are present. in terms of a songwriting method however, this use of an initial sample that is then discarded very much fulfils the role of “stimulus material” in what bennett describes as the “six (non-linear and interacting) processes [that] are at play in a co-writing environment—stimulus, approval, adaptation, negotiation, veto and consensus” (2011). where its use may differ from more traditional songwriting methods is in the sampling composer’s view of groove and feel being valued over melody. in addition, while copyright management has restricted their ability to use the sound of a sample, this practice allows them to preserve some of the joy of sampling in their compositions. c) treat your own recordings as samples it may not come as a surprise that sampling composers will treat their own musical performances as samples because, arguably, any piece of music that is recorded in a daw, unless done so in one take with no overdubbing, is constructed from a collection of samples of varying length. as eliot bates has argued, “in contemporary computer-based audio recording, every moment of recorded sound is essentially a ‘sample’. thus, rock ‘n’ roll, country, blues, and classical—genres not traditionally associated with sampling—are now sample-based musics” (bates 2004: 283 quoted in harkins 2010: 3). where the practice, as discussed by our sampling composers, may differ from, say, current pop production methods, is that it appears to arise from a desire to include elements of performance that are not exactly in time or at concert pitch, as would frequently be the case when sampling from vinyl, rather than as a way of eradicating what may be more commonly considered mistakes. so you know, more and more recently i’ve just been recording kind of myself attempting to play drums, that kind of thing, almost making a little groove, and then sampling that and kind of and going “right, well i’ve done that really quickly, i’ve sampled that, i’m going to record that to two track and use it as a starting point for something else”, and not allow myself to go back and mess around with all the individual elements. in the same way as having a sample, you’re imposing those restrictions upon yourself, and quite often it’s the pushing up against those restrictions and dealing with music that is already completed and using that as the starting point for something else—it’s those restrictions which i think really test and encourage your creativity.22 we’ve been using guitar quite a lot, doing a lot of very abstract sort of guitar stuff. we’ve got millions of guitar pedals that we feed the track back through and all that kind of stuff, a lot of re-sampling things. and we’ve been playing a lot of the keyboards in live, doing a lot of dubbing of stuff that we then just record as audio and then start chopping that up, and using ableton to do that really. so we’re applying the whole morey & mcintyre | the creative studio practice of contemporary dance music sampling composers 55 kind of sample ethic to it again really, but it happens that the stuff we’re making is of our own making rather than being taken off records really, so we’re still treating stuff as samples . . . . i think there are so many options, really, in the software, that you’ve got to limit yourself.23 this compositional approach suggests that sampling composers want to maintain a connection with the techniques that they employ when working with samples, and also indicates an additive approach to composing a rhythm track that is the starting point for the composition. it would be reasonable to assume this compositional method would be more common in studio-based music created by individuals or duos (as is the case with the interviewees in this study for the bulk of their output) than with full bands, but that is not to say it is unique to sampling composers. for example, david byrne’s description of the songwriting process of talking heads’ remain in light identifies a similar approach, which he terms “modular music”: we gave ourselves two weeks to build this instrumental scaffolding . . . the vocals would have to come later. . . . we worked rapidly. one or two people would lay down a track, usually some kind of repetitive groove that would last about four minutes, the presumed length of a song. maybe it would be a guitar riff and a drum part, or maybe a sequenced arpeggio pattern and an intermittent guitar squeal. others would then respond to what had been put down, adding their own repetitive parts, filling in the gaps and spaces, for the whole length of the ‘song’. as we’d listen to one part being recorded, we’d all be scheming about what we could add—it was a kind of game. this manner of recording had the added advantage that we weren’t trying to replicate the sound of the live band. we hadn’t gotten attached to the way these songs and their instruments and arrangements sounded in performance, so in some way the conflicts we had confronted when we’d first entered a recording studio years previously were bypassed . . . . after the tracks began to fill up, or when the sound of them playing simultaneously was sufficiently dense, it was time to make sections. while the groove usually remained constant, different combinations of instruments would be switched on and off simultaneously at different given times. one group of instruments that produced a certain texture and groove might eventually be nominated as a ‘verse’ section, and another group—often larger sounding—would be nominated as the ‘chorus’. often in these songs there was no real key change. the bass line tended to remain constant, but one could still imply key modulations, illusory chord changes, which were very useful for building excitement while maintaining the trance-like feeling of constant root notes. up to this point, there was still no top-line melody, nothing that the singer (me) would put words to. that came later (byrne 2012: 157–58). david byrne’s discussion of the compositional process for remain in light raises a number of questions about how far the compositional practices of the interviewees in this study are mirrored across other forms of popular music. one advantage that byrne notes is the lack of attachment to any version of the material rehearsed by the band, because the compositional dancecult 6(1)56 process had begun in the studio. it is probably no coincidence that talking head’s producer for remain in light was brian eno, who discusses an “additive approach to recording” in his essay “the studio as compositional tool”: you can begin to think in terms of putting something on, putting something else on, trying this on top of it, and so on, then taking some of the original things, or taking a mixture of things off, and seeing what you’re left with—actually constructing a piece in the studio . . . . it puts the composer in the identical position of the painter—he’s working directly with a material, working directly onto a substance, and he always retains the options to chop and change, to paint a bit out, add a piece, etc. (eno 2004: 129). remain in light was released in 1981, before digital sampling technology was widely available, and the compositional process developed by byrne and eno for the record anticipates the techniques used by sampling composers, once access to digital samplers became more commonplace. given that any laptop loaded with daw software can be thought of as a giant sampler (compared, say, to the sampling time offered by the 32mb of ram in a fully expanded akai s1000 sampler in 1988), we can be confident that a “ground up” approach to songwriting, where the initial building blocks are groove and rhythm, rather than chords and melody, has become an increasingly common compositional practice, especially given the qualitative data gathered from interviews with songwriters working in popular music forms that are not traditionally sample-based (mcintyre 2001: 108–9). perhaps the chief distinction between sampling composers and other popular music composers in this regard is that the foundations in their ground-up approach may often arrive ready-made. conclusions increasingly, the approach of the interviewees in this study may not differ especially from songwriters working in rock, country or pop, except perhaps that the groove is often the end in itself, and that they are working more purely with the relationships between timbre and groove than in other genres of music, while the way in which small sections of playing are often repeated magnifies their compositional importance in comparison to the sampled source material. in terms of compositional skill, listening is prioritised over both instrumental skill and an understanding of music theory, while the relative reluctance of our interviewees to incorporate the latest innovations in sample manipulation into their own compositions suggests that although affordable digital sampling technology certainly enabled non-traditional musicians to become composers, technological advances in this area are not necessarily altering compositional practices. notes 1 martin reeves, interview with co-author (via telephone), 21 october 2011. 2 paul hammond, interview with co-author (online via skype), 13 september 2012. morey & mcintyre | the creative studio practice of contemporary dance music sampling composers 57 3 dean honer, interview with co-author (sheffield, uk), 15 september 2011. 4 andy carthy, interview with co-author (via telephone), 24 november 2011. 5 richard barratt, interview with co-author (via telephone), 3 november 2011. 6 dean honer, interview with co-author (sheffield, uk), 15 september 2011. 7 paul hammond, interview with co-author (online via skype), 13 september 2012. 8 aston harvey, interview with co-author (via telephone), 29 september 2011. 9 richard barratt, interview with co-author (via telephone), 3 november 2011. 10 bob bhamra, interview with co-author (via email), 11 september 2012. 11 andy carthy, interview with co-author (via telephone), 24 november 2011. 12 andy carthy, interview with co-author (via telephone), 24 november 2011. 13 paul hammond, interview with co-author (online via skype), 13 september 2012. 14 martin reeves, interview with co-author (via telephone), 21 october 2011. 15 richard barratt, interview with co-author (via telephone), 3 november 2011. 16 andy carthy, interview with co-author (via telephone), 24 november 2011. 17 martin reeves, interview with co-author (via telephone), 21 october 2011. 18 andy carthy, interview with co-author (via telephone), 24 november 2011. 19 dean honer, interview with co-author (sheffield, uk), 15 september 2011. 20 dean honer, interview with co-author (sheffield, uk), 15 september 2011. 21 paul hammond, interview with co-author (online via skype), 13 september 2012. 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production of art. london: macmillan. yin, robert. 1989. case study research: design and methods. newbury park, ca: sage. discography krafty kuts. 2006. freakshow. against the grain (lp): atgd04. < http://www.discogs.com/krafty-kuts-freakshow/master/164474>. fox, peter. 2008. alles neu. downbeat (cd single): lc 04652. <http://www.discogs.com/peter-fox-alles-neu/release/1741703>. new york philharmonic orchestra. 1965. shostakovich, symphony no. 7, op. 60 “leningrad”. cbs (lp): s 72349/50. <http://www.discogs.com/dmitri-shostakovich-new-york-philharmonic-orchestra-the-leonardbernstein-shostakovich/release/4037070>. plan b. 2012. ill manors. 679 recordings (cd single): 679l179cd. <http://www.discogs.com/plan-b-ill-manors/release/3493174>. talking heads. 1980. remain in light. sire (lp): srk 6095. <http://www.discogs.com/talkingheads-remain-in-light/release/116491>. http://www.iaspmjournal.net/index.php/iaspm_journal/article/view/589 http://www.iaspmjournal.net/index.php/iaspm_journal/article/view/589 http://www.discogs.com/krafty-kuts-freakshow/master/164474 http://www.discogs.com/peter-fox-alles-neu/release/1741703 http://www.discogs.com/dmitri-shostakovich-new-york-philharmonic-orchestra-the-leonard-bernstein-shostakovich/release/4037070 http://www.discogs.com/dmitri-shostakovich-new-york-philharmonic-orchestra-the-leonard-bernstein-shostakovich/release/4037070 http://www.discogs.com/plan-b-ill-manors/release/3493174 http://www.discogs.com/talkingheads-remain-in-light/release/116491 dancecult 6(1)60 short biographies of interviewees there follows some information about the sampling composers interviewed in this study: a) richard barratt. richard, better known as parrot, is a dj and producer who formed sweet exorcist (warp records) with richard kirk (cabaret voltaire), was a member of add n to (x) and part of the dance act all seeing i who had top 20 hits in the uk with the songs “beat goes on” (ffrr 1998) and “walk like a panther” (london records 1999). b) bob bhamra is a dj, producer and proprietor of uk underground dance label west norwood cassette library (wncl), with seventeen releases since 2010 at the time of writing. c) andy carthy. better known as mr scruff, andy is a dj and producer who has released over thirty singles since 1995 and five albums for the ninja tune label, including a uk top 30 album in trouser jazz (ninja tune 2002). he is also very well known in the uk for playing five to six hour dj sets, incorporating a wide range of dance music genres, at his touring club night keep it unreal. d) paul hammond. paul is best know for his work with the duo ultramarine, whose albums include every man and woman is a star (rough trade 1992), united kingdoms and bel air (blanco y negro 1993 and 1995 respectively). e) aston harvey has worked with artists including rebel mc, definition of sound and dj rap. as part of blapps posse, he was responsible for the hit “don’t hold back” (tribal bass 1991), was a member of remix specialists the sol brothers, and is best known as one half of the freestylers, along with matt cantor, who have produced albums and singles that have reached the top 40 both in the uk and australia. f ) dean honer, like richard barratt, was a member of add n to (x) and all seeing i, and as part of i monster he created a uk top 20 hit with “daydream in blue” (dharma records 2003), which samples the song “daydream” by the günter kallman choir (polydor 1970). this led to honer’s involvement in the production of “daydreamin’” (atlantic 2006) by us hip hop star lupe fiasco, which sampled i monster’s record. honer also co-produced the human league album credo (wall of sound 2011) and, with barratt, has engaged in production work for britney spears. g) martin reeves. better known as krafty kuts, martin is a well-known uk breakbeat producer and dj with an extensive catalogue of over thirty of his own single releases, three studio albums, twelve mix albums and more than thirty remixes of other artists including jurassic 5, arthur baker, eric b. & rakim, afrika bambaataa and fatboy slim. dj culture in the mix: power, technology, and social change in electronic dance music bernardo alexander attias, anna gavanas and hillegonda c. rietveld (eds.) new york and london: bloomsbury, 2013. isbn: 978-1-62356-690-6 (hardcover), 978-1-62356-006-5 (paperback), 978-1-62356-994-5 (epub ebook), 978-1-62356-437-7 (pdf ebook) rrp: us$120.00 (hardcover), us$34.95 (paperback), us$30.99 (epub ebook), us$30.99 (pdf ebook) carlo nardi rhodes university (south africa) it is feasible that dancecult readers have already grabbed a copy of this book, which might defy the point of reviewing it here in the first place. i will try anyway, taking advantage of this space to highlight some of the topics covered by this collection. suggesting that one of the strengths of the volume is the plurality of its voices, i will initially comment on a sample of chapters that i find especially noteworthy. i will then conclude with some remarks that are intended to problematize the association between dj culture and edm. i will start with fontanari’s chapter, which grasps the complex and multifaceted cultural and political economy of edm. by focusing on poor working-class areas in the largest city in brazil, são paulo, he presents a grounded exploration of an only apparently marginal scene, thus managing to reinstate a sense of reality about the dj experience. regardless of the scene in which they are operating, the vast majority of djs, who might be invisible to the mediated world of edm but who contribute substantially to sustain the nightlife industry in every corner of the world, will probably relate to fontanari’s account of struggling edm practitioners and promoters. if fontanari's study is grounded in a local scene, attias’ reflections apply more generally to dj practices and, in particular, to the authentication of audio formats. his chapter further develops a debate that has already gained momentum in this journal (attias 2011; van veen and attias 2011, 2012) and that will also engage scholars from other fields of music studies as well as performers. here, attias discusses critically the discursive negotiation of values about automation and human creation in dj practice in order to debunk arguments for or against the adoption of specific technological devices: “for essential to such arguments is an unstated warrant: musicianship is a matter of human skill, a techne in the classical greek sense, a creative practice, that nevertheless seems corrupted by the influence of technology” (29), concluding that, “[u]ltimately, the formats themselves are less important than the creative discourses that surround them” (39). also, fikentscher’s chapter, a taste of which was given during the iaspm biennial international conference in 2013 in gijón, demystifies many assumptions about djing, putting the role of technology in perspective and, by comparison, reassessing the importance of music programming, a point that is also advanced in lawrence’s essay (see below). fikentscher sheds light on the diverse dimensions of music programming, which involve not only “what songs to play (selection), [but also] when and how to play them” (136). while doing so, he argues for research that will redress an imbalance in dj culture studies, which so far, claims the author (124), have mainly favoured macro-level approaches. lawrence, in a chapter about the saint in new york that has been previously published in this journal (2011), looks at particular instances by which partygoers exercise pressure on djs and club managers, hence influencing not only music selection and mixing aesthetics but also, ultimately, employment dynamics. lawrence inscribes these pressures and the resulting uniformity of the aesthetic within the framework of market-driven neoliberalism in the 1980s, which “positioned djs as hired entertainers whose primary function was to serve the community and the setting” (224). yu, based on the assumption that “technology has lowered the costs and the financial barriers of entry are significantly diminished” (163), looks at issues of value and authenticity among djs as far as the adoption of new technological tools and the discontinuation of older ones produces a contested cultural terrain. while i am not keen to endorse the “technological democratisation” thesis, this chapter provides a good complement to attias’ more theoretically-based chapter with its insights on the experience as perceived by a handful of melbourne djs. on the other hand, rietveld, notwithstanding her established professional involvement as a dj, quite intriguingly decides to focus on her experience as a club-goer instead. drawing on michel foucault’s concept of heterotopia, she outlines a phenomenological reading of the clubbing experience that shows how it activates the confluence of contradictory elements that are modulated according to the prevalence of either sonic dominance or spectacular culture. back to the perspective on dj practice, gavanas and reitsamer examine gendered dynamics in edm culture and networks, paying attention to the role of the accumulation of social and cultural capital in supporting or hindering dj careers as well as the inherently conflicting negotiation of female djs’ self-image. the main thesis of the authors is condensed in this passage: “we argue that this scarcity of women artists originates partly in the gendered social construction of technology and partly in the informal character of working environments and social networks in electronic dance music cultures, dominated by images of male artist/musician/producer/entrepreneur and the sexualized images of (young) women” (54). a merit of the book consists of its insights into particular scenes, which is in itself a characterising trait of dj cultures. valuable field research, historical research and interviews with scene operators and participants spot light on various contexts, including new york city (fikentscher; lawrence), sydney (montano), melbourne (yu), london (rietveld; gavanas and reitsamer), são paulo (fontanari), berlin (gavanas and reitsamer; fikentscher; paulsson), stockholm and malmö (paulsson). the importance of scenes for edm and dj culture demonstrates that, as much as they constitute global phenomena that, up to a point, exceed geographical boundaries, they are also inextricably tied up with place. at the same time, each contextual analysis might reveal certain recurring patterns and processes that can inspire new research about different scenes. in this regard, montano’s chapter provides a thorough theoretical discussion of edm scenes as an intersection of local dynamics and international flows of edm that travel through trajectories of trade and imperialism. through field research about djs performing in commercial venues in sydney, he shows how the production of locality is also the result of conflicts and alliances between local and international djs involving issues of authenticity, value, identity, cultural flow and cultural capital. as we have seen, the authors included in this collection approach dj culture from various critical perspectives that manage to challenge laymen’s beliefs and media accounts, which are often inaccurate even when they don’t take either of the two extreme forms of moral panics or glorification. yet, there is at least one issue that possibly has not been problematized enough. this concerns the topic of the book itself—dj culture—and whether it can actually be identified as a distinct entity also through an association with edm. while the focus on edm is the volume editors’ legitimate decision—besides, one that is made explicit already in the title—such self-imposed constraint partially frustrates the contentment to finally see the release of a book of this kind. the intrinsic value of these essays should not lead us to ignore a pressing question: why is there hegemony of edm scholars over dj studies? on the one hand, it is undeniable that the relationship between various edm styles and djing is intimate, in that it invests specific aspects like techniques and aesthetics of performance, sound amplification, music distribution, dance styles and so on—aspects that are discussed in depth in the book (for example, formats by attias, mixing aesthetics by lawrence, the configuration of dance spaces by rietveld). nonetheless, taking these aspects as proof of a privileged link between edm and djing is but a naturalisation of certain historical dj practices. different kinds of features might be relevant for different dj cultures, for instance the fact that some cultures favour style and define themselves also in subcultural terms, while other more loosely-based cultures are more extemporaneous and gather people together mostly around a common music taste rather than around values that endure beyond the situation of entertainment. as a matter of fact, dj culture or, even better, dj cultures (this is the point i am trying to make: i would have gone for the plural instead) are variously rooted in different musical genres and local contexts, each with its own specific norms, and all showing intimate links with technology, the disciplining of the body and musical aesthetics, including mixing techniques and music programming. i have the impression that the topic itself of dj culture, especially when considered as a singular noun, is somewhat a fallacy in that it does not account for the autonomous development of contexts or scenes that might have only spurious links to each other. if the contemporary music industry is apparently characterised by an unprecedented pace of change, edm especially epitomises this due to its strict dependence on the latest technology, marketing strategies and consumption fluctuations—which might explain the need to anchor the definition of the subject to this specific kind of music as a way to secure theoretical strength and coherence. nonetheless, the risk is to produce a homogenised and, possibly, even hegemonic understanding of phenomena where distinctions might prevail as compared to the fact that recorded music is reproduced through pa devices to a public. this collected book includes other chapters that, due to space constraints and personal research interests, are not dealt with in this review. specifically, hall and zukic draw on deleuze and guattari’s concept of refrain to establish the function of the dj as a deterritorializer of “power/knowledge spaces of edm culture” (106); christodoulou deals with the ritualization of speed at social dance events within drum ‘n’ bass, thus offering a concrete illustration of paul virilio’s idea of a “regime of speed” within contemporary capitalism; paulsson investigates the adoption of military aesthetics within swedish so-called synthscenen and the political economy of sexuality that is thereby constructed; and morrison engages the reader in an excursion into literary reinterpretations of dj culture by irvine welsh and pat w. hendersen. also, notable scholars of edm, djing and club culture, including mark butler, rebekah farrugia, simon reynolds, graham st john, will straw and sarah thornton, may not be included in the list of contributors, yet they are often evoked throughout the various chapters. overall, this makes for a kaleidoscopic look at dj culture. after all, rietveld makes it clear from the first words of the introduction that the edm dj has many dimensions, being at the same time “party leader, sonic entertainer, auditory artist, music programmer, record mixer, beatmatcher, cultural masher, music producer, creative music archivist, record collector, sex symbol, role model, upwardly mobile brand, youth marketing tool, dancefloor parent, witch-doctor, tantric yogi, cyborgian shaman, the embodiment of studio-generated music” (1). to conclude, this is a collection of (mostly) original contributions that succeeds in capturing the dynamic nature of both dj culture and edm. references attias, bernardo alexander. 2011. “meditations on the death of vinyl”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 3(1). <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.10>. lawrence, tim. 2011. “the forging of a white gay aesthetic at the saint, 1980-84”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music 3(1): 4-27. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.01>. van veen, tobias c. and bernardo alexander attias. 2011. “off the record: turntablism and controllerism in the 21st century (part 1)”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 3(1). <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.08>. ———. 2012. “off the record: turntablism and controllerism in the 21st century (part 2)”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 4(1). <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.01.09>. disco's revenge: house music's nomadic memory dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 2 (1): 4–23 issn 1947-5403 ©2011 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.01 disco’s revenge: house music’s nomadic memory hillegonda c. rietveld london south bank university abstract this article addresses the role of house music as a nomadic archival institution, constituted by the musical history of disco, invigorating this dance genre by embracing new production technologies and keeping disco alive through a rhizomic assemblage of its affective memory in the third record of the dj mix. this exploration will be illustrated through a close analysis of a specific dj set by a chicago house music producer, larry heard, in the setting of rotterdam, 2007, in which american house music is recontextualised. refining the analysis through close attention to one of the tracks played during that particular set, grand high priest’s 2006 “mary mary”, the analysis shows how dj and music production practices intertwine to produce a plurality of unstable cultural and musical connections that are temporarily anchored within specific dj sets. the conceptual framework draws on the work of deleuze, guattari and foucault, as well as baudrillard’s sense of seduction, with the aim to introduce a fluid notion of mediated nomadic cultural memory, a type of countermemory, enabled by the third record and thereby to playfully re-imagine the dynamic function of a music archive. keywords: house music, dj practices, third record, cultural memory, nomadology dr. hillegonda rietveld is reader in cultural studies at london south bank university, uk, where she teaches and supervises topics in sonic culture. her publications address the development and experience of electronic dance music cultures and she is the author of this is our house: house music, cultural spaces and technologies. she has been involved professionally in club and dj culture since 1982, when she moved from rotterdam, the netherlands, to release her first electronic recording as part of quando quango, for factory records in manchester, uk. feature article https://phonebook.lsbu.ac.uk/php5/person.php?name=rietveld.h rietveld | disco’s revenge 5 “each successive technology has enhanced the significance of older cultural artefacts by allowing them to be joined to others that clarify and embellish them... —straw (2007: 11) despite its demise, disco would live on in numerous other dance forms. —brewster and broughton (2006: 202) house rose from the remnants of disco. —garratt (1998: 45) introduction drawing on house music as a case study, this article will conceptualise how a djbased music genre may be understood as a nomadic archival institution. the analysis will particularly appropriate deleuze’s political concept of the institution (1989) and deleuze and guattari’s concept of nomadology (1986). assuming that music genres retain rhizomic memory traces of the genres that are part of its formation, house music will be explored as constituted by disco’s musical legacy, invigorating this dance genre and keeping it alive through a continuation of its affective memory. in this, house music may be regarded as a specific act of defiance, arising in chicago from the ashes of the “official” destruction of disco (rietveld 1998). by attempting to circumvent traditionalist linear history, a type of counter-memory (foucault 1984) is produced that aims to challenge stilted notions of house music.1 the practice of the dj draws on archived banks of pre-recorded music to create a relevant mix that continuously recontextualises these recordings. through the creation of the third record in the dj’s mix, the recombination of (at least) two recordings, as well as a revision of disco’s archival canon, house music may be perceived as a fluid musical archive, operating between the mediation of recorded musical production and lived cultural memory. within this process, (underground) disco’s fragmented aesthetic of an empowered marginalised community, arguably first established within america’s version of racism, homophobia and economic division, is reworked. in this context, i argue that house music has produced a dance musical memory of everynight empowering pleasure, which is further mapped in house music’s increasingly complex, spiral and rhizomic genealogy. although the role of disco elements in the formation of house music is of interest here, i do not wish to settle the roots of house music. instead, beckford (2006: 5) suggests with reference to the work of deleuze and guatari: “unlike roots that dancecult 2(1)6 separate into segments and break, rhizomes rupture or shatter at any given point but will start up again at their old or new point, representing a process of ‘de-territorialisation’ and ‘re-territorialisation’”. in relation to the third record, i will interpret “de/reterritorialisation” as processes of de/recontextualisation in which one sound recording makes comment on the next in a new and sometimes unexpected manner due to the various cultural spaces in which the mix is presented. mutating disco during its development throughout the 1970s, the disco dance floor gained its celebratory mood, in part, from civil rights victories (fikentscher 2000; rietveld 2003; easlea 2004; shapiro 2005). by the end of that decade, as disco shifted out of the marginalised culture of night clubs into broad daylight and threatened the livelihoods of established rock radio djs, a well documented backlash to its overwhelming success finally pushed disco back underground. this process culminated in the televised blowing up of disco records in chicago’s comiskey park, a white sox baseball stadium, in 1979 (lawrence 2003; rietveld 1998). in its renewed marginalised cultural position, dance culture returned to the secrecy of night culture, a creative space outside the spectacle of the major music industry, enabling it to develop relatively unfettered in new directions. eleven years later, in 1990, chicago’s mythologised2 house dj frankie knuckles reflected that, those guys declaring disco being dead actually was kind of like a blessing in disguise because it had to turn itself, because it ‘d just gotten too much. . . . could you imagine what would it be like, right now? ugh—all that polyester—i couldn’t stand it (savage 1990). this reference to polyester is a camp, ironic, yet loaded connotation that points to artificial textile used in the late 1970s in the production of flared “smart” trousers and tight shirts, favoured by transnational disco crowds—as illustrated by the popular 1977 movie saturday night fever.3 the term was used as shorthand for the proliferation of “fake” disco styled music, from pop to symphonic re-workings, manufactured by a cynical music industry eager to follow the latest trend. in this one short remark, house music and underground disco are constructed as culturally authentic, as opposed to an industry-led disco craze that had “gotten too much”. as house music emerged during the early to mid-1980s, its distinctive electronic take on disco’s aesthetic provided a discursive nocturnal space in chicago to a clientele that perceived itself as excluded by american society: “the people who had fallen from grace” (prof funk, in cosgrove 1988: 4). in the words of dj frankie knuckles, “house . . . it’s not actually disco’s revival, it’s disco’s revenge” (savage 1990). as an important aspect of disco music, the incessant groove has been forged within the basic functional dj mix to keep dance music going all night long. in adapting popular music to the disco dance floor during the mid-1970s, new york’s disco djs started to reedit existing records to create specialist disco mixes. these would be longer than the usual 3-minute pop single, repeating the energetic parts4 and making the tracks dj-friendly for rietveld | disco’s revenge 7 layered beat mixing by emphasising the rhythm and minimising melodic harmonies at their intros and outros. occasionally, such tracks would appear in official public release on 12inch vinyl, the disco single; by the end of 1975, new york based disco chronicler alletti wrote in record world that, “you’re just the right size: the 12-inch disc ‘for disco djs only’ has been established during the past year . . . on the one hand, mere promo gimmicks . . . on the other, something of an artform in themselves” (alletti 2009: 144). even lengthier disco re-edits and mixes existed exclusively on the dj’s reel-to-reel tape; dj frankie knuckles brought this practice with him from new york to chicago in 1977, when he took up a dj residency there at the warehouse, a dance club that mainly catered for young black and latino homosexuals (rietveld 1998). a well-known example is knuckles’ relatively raw ecstatic re-edit of first choice’s 1977 album version of “let no man put asunder“, which became a warehouse classic. this re-edit was finally released as part of a 12-inch vinyl remix dance ep in 1983 on salsoul records, after knuckles had left this seminal chicago club space to establish the power plant. although lil’ louis, and ron hardy even before that, had also made waves as local djs around that period (kempster 1996) knuckles’ music programming and dj technique proved to be inspirational to a new generation of music makers. so much so, that enthusiastic heterosexual dance music fans also started to frequent this club. to cater for a growing clientele of aspiring djs, local import record shop, importe etc, set up a new section for music played at the warehouse: underground soulful and electronic dance music as well as european electronic dance, including italo disco and, in the words of scott ‘smokin’ silz “a lot of the stuff coming out of germany and the uk” (bidder 2001: 19); they named it “house music” (hindmarch 2001). house music eventually developed into a clearly distinguishable genre during the 1980s within the, mostly african american (and latino) dance scene in chicago. djs produced electronic tracks and special mixes as components of their dance sets, basing their main mix techniques on those developed by their new york disco antecedents. importantly, within the dj mix, marginalised components of popular music (its breaks, riffs, intros, outros, bass lines, sexually explicit and ecstatic yelps, tranced out repetition) were and still are foregrounded in the resultant (re)constructions. a continuously shifting genealogy is thereby created from recorded music archives (components of musical memory) at the very moment of a dance event in the dj mix. in this way, house music is forever in a state of becoming. from around 1985–86, house music’s electronic diy aesthetic spilled to west europe and beyond, to develop into a generic cosmopolitan dance formula across global club and party dance floors, picking up influences and mutating in the process. because of its fluid creative practice of mutation, i will argue that the musical aesthetic of house music functions as a nomadic, or wandering, institution, a fluid groove machine within which the musical memories of underground disco are inscribed and re-enacted, embedded and embodied. like disco, the musical format of house music is characterised by an explicitly articulated 4/4 measure of between 120 to 140 bpm with a recognisable bass drum “foot” that kicks on each beat; a snare on the 2nd and 4th beat; and an open hi-hat in dancecult 2(1)8 even intervals between the bass drum and snare (as “and” in: one and two and…),5 that ranges in pace from marching through strutting to jogging. the combination of this repetitive machine beat with syncopated rhythms produces a funk impulse that frames an open sonic canvas of various cultural influences in a potentially inclusive, democratising, manner. at the same time, as the amplified bass-heavy beat unites dancers under one groove, “dancing becomes a form of submission to this overmastering beat” (hughes 1994: 149). through the shared experience of surrender, the dj produces a specific group subjectivity that, even temporarily, effaces everyday social stratifications on the darkened dance floor.6 nomadic archival institution i wish to employ deleuze’s model of a dynamic autonomous institution as a conceptually playful entry point to gain further insight into house music’s musical memory of disco. back in 1967, within the context of french intellectual debate regarding power and desire, deleuze suggested that, rather than a “system of rights and duties”, an institution may be understood as a type of organisation that functions according to “a dynamic model of action, authority and power” (1989: 77) that is relatively independent of state authority. here, deleuze presents institutions as autonomous configurations and draws in this argument on the work of de sade, a libertine philosopher of power, who argued that the french revolution could have been more successful if a multitude of institutions would have been set up instead of a new head of state supported by a national legal system. in the us, during the late 1960s, parallel (but not identical) sentiments regarding the state were put into practice in the psychedelic counterculture and the (sometimes psychedelic) funk scene. in their turn, such a range of counter-cultural practices fertilized the inception of disco when, for example, david mancuso started throwing lsd7 inspired dance parties in the late 1960s at his new york loft and, after a self-searching crisis, made this into a regular event in 1970, attracting a racially and sexually mixed crowd (brewster and broughton 2006; buckland 2002; lawrence 2003). according to lawrence (2003: 86), “mancuso’s extended sets usually opened with a range of esoteric selections that slowly built into a fully charged session of african and latino rhythms, driving r&b, and danceable rock”.8 this heady mix of ideas, people and sounds became of seminal importance to the genealogy of both disco and house music; several young aspiring underground disco djs who later shaped the sound of dance music (including young frankie knuckles), regularly attended the loft (lawrence 2003). disco chronicler shapiro (2005) additionally shows that (underground) disco was a celebration of important gains made in american civil rights: black power, gay liberation and the women’s movement; yet, the claim for civil rights in itself actually confirms a wish to be recognised by state authority. ultimately, though, disco parties took on a rhythm and life of their own, leading in the late-1970s to the commercially successful phenomenon of disco and all that this dj-driven club music and fashion style entailed. in identifying characteristics shared by the 1970s new york underground disco and the 1980s chicago house scenes, three aspects of the deleuzian institutional model will be appropriated here: use of spaces; dance floor dynamics; and production practices (this will rietveld | disco’s revenge 9 be addressed at length). firstly, marginalised (urban) spaces were adapted as dance venues in such a manner that they effectively enhance a sonic experience. at a basic level, discos are social spaces where people can dance to recorded music. when the word “disco” lost its value, it was replaced by “club” and “dance party”; as hughes states, “as long as people go out to clubs and dance to recorded music . . . disco lives” (1994: 148). when disco and, subsequently, house music, emerged, deserted manufacturing spaces (the outcome of industrial decline) were regularly appropriated as dance venues.9 within the semi-legal status of such temporary spaces, dancers could enjoy a tactical and paradoxical “ecstasy of disappearance” (melechi 1993: 38).10 in some cases, such a temporary space would become a more regular club. the warehouse in chicago was one such example, which retained some of its autonomous status by not serving alcohol; the consequently relative lack of licence inspections enabled the dance club to cater for a mixed, yet mainly young, ethnically marginalised, sexually experimental crowd. for many dance spaces, the visual field that, in principle, could support a “mastering gaze”,11 was fragmented by smoke and psychedelic lighting. the dance floor at the warehouse was a dark space into which people descended from the top floor, while for the music box, where ron hardy ruled between 1983–87, the space was painted punk-rock black while a strobe light created temporal disorientation. simultaneously, the sound system would dictate the organisation of such a dance space, amplifying the dj’s mix, the continuous sound track to dance the night away. the music box offered a hi-fi quality system that, according to seminal techno producer derrick may, was “real shitty”; it was also powerfully loud, as witnessed by house music anthem producer marshall jefferson, who energetically declares that, “it physically shook me!” (bidder 2001: 22-23). by enhancing the sonic dominance in the dance space,12 a dynamic immersive interaction on the dance floor is achieved that enables the dancer to let go of the everyday structures of reality; in this sense, such dance clubs offer a third space, an alternative world to work and home.13 inspiring many budding dj-producers, within such spaces the transitional potential of the dj mix can take music to new configurations. secondly, the interaction between dancers and dj on the dance floor has a particular dynamic that is simultaneously authoritarian and democratic. as an entertainer in spaces that are purely dedicated to dancing, the dj is enabled to take on the ritual role comparable to what deleuze and guattari describe as a nomadic “chief, who . . . is more like a leader or star than a man of power, and is always in danger of being disavowed, abandoned by his people”; he “has no other means of persuasion, no other rule than his sense of the group’s desires” (1986: 11). the crowd bestows power to the dj, who in turn seduces the crowd to keep on dancing.14 the dj is a musical authority in this relationship; however, the sound track, selected from available records on the night, importantly comes into existence in dialogue with the dancers. although the dj often employs a disciplinary continuous beat, the dance floor can be a brutal place for djs as dancers spontaneously vote with their feet. effective house music djs will be one step ahead of the crowd’s desires, ensuring the musical mix is just right for a particular moment in time. in this manner, the crowd and the dj dynamically interact in the configuration of a set.15 instead of couple dancing, dancecult 2(1)10 each participant dances both individually and collectively, sharing a libidinal relationship with the music within an ever-changing configuration of fellow dancers. immersed in the music, dancers feel free to act out their embodied musical interpretations. in some cases, the dj may also be compared to a shaman, taking the dancers on a journey in which they let themselves go with the musical flow.16 dancing all night in a transitional space, physically and symbolically, long past the point of exhaustion, can at times make the dancer feel as though spiritually reconstructed, reborn. the social organisation of both underground disco and a house music dance event may hereby be regarded as embodied examples of deleuze’s notion of the libertine institution, that “dynamic model of action, authority and power” (1989: 77), in which embodied memories are (re)produced. finally, the deleuzian institutional model may be applied to production practices of house music. this is at the core of my argument and will therefore be discussed at some length, culminating in a microanalysis of a dj set and one of its tracks. the loose networks of producers and distributors that delineate house as a genre operate within a dynamic “grey economy”: some aspects legal and some others showing degrees of illegality or civil disobedience. versions, re-edits, remixes, dj mixes, digital samples and bootlegs are essential dj technologies, components of assemblages which diminish distinctions between collector and producer, between curator and author. as producers and small labels ignored and subverted copyright issues during the early years of house, the memory of disco was partly invigorated outside of a legal framework.17 economic necessity is one reason; legal procedures in copyright clearance may be beyond the financial reach of underground dance djs, while the chicago label owners at times toyed with royalty assignments to their own benefit. within various electronic dance music scenes, one also finds an understanding of music as a common good, a shared form of communication, in which musical outputs structurally and affectively make comment on each other. the very existence of the dj practice is based on pre-existing recordings that people learn to love and cherish. suiting evocative feelings and affect within specific party dynamics, the dj’s mix routines can lead to original production work, remixes or new work with recognisable digital samples and bass-lines. although special dj mixes and re-edits were part of disco practices since the mid-1970s, in chicago, a combination of fierce dj competition and accessible equipment led to the exponential production of unique mixes and re-edits, to enhance the authenticity, and thereby the authority, of dj sets. the easiest way to accomplish a signature sound was by using a drum machine during a dj set to support and enhance the rhythm of dance recordings. this became an especially attractive option when japanese company roland made such equipment relatively affordable during the early 1980s. a technical parallel occurred amongst hip hop djs in new york, enabling the development of electro, electronic hip hop. in chicago, the embrace of “the one”, the driving 4/4 funk rhythm that had underpinned disco, combined with the (roland) drum machine, eventually led in the mid-1980s to the production of instrumental tracks that would be user-friendly for beat and layered mixing. groove-heavy and minimal in terms of drum programming, bass lines and a few encouraging sampled vocal phrases, such tracks would be played simultaneously with, or alternated by, existing (vocal) dance recordings. rietveld | disco’s revenge 11 initially, dance tracks would include reconstructed disco elements that were recognisable to the crowd. “on & on”, created by jesse saunders in 1983, was a very early example of such a diy disco reconstruction; according to garratt it was a simplified analogue electronic version of a “b-side of a bootleg megamix” of “lipps inc’s ‘funky town’ and donna summer’s ‘bad girls’ that his crowd would clap along to” (1998: 44). when this recording, which was far from a slick studio production, became a local dance hit with radio rotation, fellow djs felt encouraged to also try out music production; both sparse rhythm and bass tracks (locally indicated as “jungle”) and electro tracks were the initial result. from around 1987, when digital sampling became affordable, disco and self-referential house fragments were increasingly used; outside of the underground dance scene such samples could sound ghostly in their dislocated state. this practice was further adapted as part of a lucrative cross-atlantic musical dialogue. for example, disco single “le freak” by chic was remixed in 1987 by phil harding for uk-based pop production company pwl as house track “jack le freak”; the vocals and some of the original instrumentals were combined with an additional roland tr-808 drum box and recognisable components were “borrowed” from chicago house hits, in particular the bass line from adonis “no way back” which was released in 1986 by chicago-based label trax records. in other instances, disco elements have been used more as pastiche than for their immediately recognisable and, perhaps nostalgic, content. a well-documented example is the 1989 uk dance hit “ride on time” by italian male production outfit black box, in which samples of loleatta holloway’s 1980 black american vocalisation of love sensation, were lifted from an a cappella bootleg. in their deterritorialised state, the vocal samples were repositioned as an anonymous signifier of diva femininity (bradby 1993), and thereby superficially communicated a marketable aura (in its italian version) of black american house music “authenticity”. in its various electronic disco abstractions and distilled electronic funk structures, house music thus seems to function as a veritable metamorphosing musical memory machine, an assemblage that exists within the nomadic practice of the dj-archivist. the third record as eccentric practice further insight into the production of house’s musical memory may be gained through the mobilisation of deleuze and guattari’s notion of a temporary, deterritorialised, nomadic “war machine” (1986). this concept can be understood as a marginalised formation, a third space, that exists outside of the dialectics of the “state apparatus”: “located . . . between two articulations . . . (but) ‘between’ the two, in that instant, even ephemeral, if only a flash, it proclaims its own irreducibility” (deleuze and guattari 1986: 7). deleuze and guattari draw here from several examples of socio-political configurations, such as religious or multinational organisations, which (comparable to deleuze’s earlier model of the institution) operate across borders and cannot be reduced to any single state. at one extreme, such organisation could exist for the sole purpose of pure war, of undisciplined destruction; on the other extreme, the war machine may be regarded as a creative movement. in this (perhaps romantic) model of the war machine, deleuze and guattari dancecult 2(1)12 relate exteriority (outsider status) to the notion of eccentric science, which is typified by the following three main characteristics: reality is regarded as a fluid mode of becoming, rather than a solid and stable entity; developments occur in a spiral flow, rather than in a linear fashion; and “figures are considered only from the point of view of the affections that befall them”, proceeding “from a problem to the accidents that condition and resolve it” (deleuze and guattari 1986: 19, authors’ italics). house music may hereby be eccentrically conceptualised as a nomadic war machine, both in terms of its discursive function as a music genre and through this article’s analytical method. it is within the very heart of the aesthetic practice of mixing records that a specific nomadic dynamic is generated, which has the potential to write and rewrite musical memory. an ephemeral moment of transition between one record and another is produced, a third record that can only exist within a dj mix; “located . . . between two articulations . . . (but) ‘between’ the two, in that instant, even ephemeral, if only a flash, it proclaims its own irreducibility” (deleuze and guattari 1986: 7). in house music, the dominant beat usually remains, like clockwork, while musical components of the separate records enhance, intermingle and even destroy each other within the “slow mix”, a layered form of beat mixing (rietveld 1998).18 from the selection of music that has been brought to an event, the dj is required to know the records well enough to judge what to play next and how. even if the dj would play the same set and exactly the same mixes each time, every mix is different, even if slightly, as contextual parameters change: the available records, the mood of the crowd, the narrative moment in the set, the technical possibility to produce a viable mix. in brief, the third record comes into existence within the accidents and problematic of a specific moment in time. in the energetic nomadic interaction of such aesthetic practice, the irreducible third record generates a fluid rhizomic musical memory that is in a continuous process of becoming. from this third record, the transitional moment in the mix, new musical forms emerge—counter-memories that can be, at different times, nostalgic, cannibalistic, amnesic, yet are always embodied in the dancer and the dj. curated soundscapes to illustrate the curatorial and archivist role of the dj-producer in this configuration, the discussion will now focus on a close reading of a 2007 set at de unie19 in rotterdam, the netherlands, by chicago house veteran larry heard (aka mr fingers and fingers inc),20 which i attended on saturday 7 april. this dj-set offered a trip down memory lane, mostly recognisable tracks, a canonical mixture of deep house, detroit techno and underground classics, punctuated by recent releases.21 the newer tracks were contextualised by their musical predecessors and the older tracks were recontextualised in a contemporary framework. for example, those present heard the powerful 2006 track “mary mary” by grand high priest (vs. aretha franklin), followed by “house nation”, a driving chicago house track from 1986 by housemaster boyz’ and the rude boy of house.22 on occasion, in the middle of minimalist funk-driven electronic house tracks, vocal samples yelped ecstatically, sounding like brief memory traces of soulful disco from a distant past. rietveld | disco’s revenge 13 through the programming (sequencing selected tracks into a narrative order) heard communicated his position towards the history of house music within the context of what he expected, or presumed, from a rotterdam crowd. making connections to the mellow dance music he is known for, larry heard played a selection of early american techno tracks that sounded, in hindsight, like slick electronic interpretations of chicago house music. for example, the 1987 detroit techno classic “strings of life” under derrick may’s alias rhythim is rhythim, followed by techno-house track “energy flash” from 1990 by new yorker joey beltram, and the early trance of “plastic dreams”, produced in 1992 by dutch dj robin albers as jaydee. both of the latter tracks were first released by antwerpbased techno label r&s, while beltram’s “energy flash” was also released by detroit-based techno label transmat, the same label as for “strings of life”. the creation of this specific third record aimed to reach out to a younger generation in the middle of a post-war modern city that during the early 1990s gave birth to gabber house. this is a type of dystopian body music (verhagen et al. 2000), rooted in a specifically european trajectory in electronic dance music.23 its accelerated “um-pah-um-pah” rhythm and abstracted techno textures in many ways seemed the cultural antithesis of chicago deep house, which larry heard had helped to define. in particular, his instrumental track “can you feel it”, recorded as mr fingers, was embellished in 1988 with samples from a 1981 live version of “can you feel it” by disco-favorites the jacksons and, crucially, by chuck roberts’ manifesto, vocalised in the style of a sermon, that presents house music as a utopian inclusive church. here, heard attempted to make a compromise towards techno, but his dj style made it a classic chicago house music set: nostalgic in one sense, yet persuading listeners and dancers within their current context to make fresh, nomadic, connections within the archival memory of contemporary electronic dance music. grand high priest’s “mary mary (original mix)” is a contemporary track that stood out in heard’s programing in terms of its house sensibilities of electronic deconstruction that, like underground disco, is at once deeply spiritual and suggestively libidinous.24 typical of chicago house, the structure of this version is minimalist; it mainly consists of sequenced bass, drum programming and vocal samples. compressing the unfettered gospel vocalisation of “mary, don’t you weep”, aretha franklin’s intense (spiritual) elation is highlighted. traces of the original recording context can be heard, as handclaps by a choir and crowd fade in washes of audio delay at the end of each repeated sample. the effect is slightly messy, woozy like being high on poppers.25 the dislocated vocals seem stripped of most of their embodied “grain” (barthes 1977); yet the emotion in the voice is so focused that it seems to overcome this compression, projecting a distilled version of exalted womanhood into virtual sonic space.26 the added electronic programming re-asserts a new “grain” within a “fierce”27 masculinized framework: its marching snare drum progresses like an american civil war army from a hollywood movie; aggressive synthesized high-mid frequency sample stabs invade the musical space in the rhythm of an engaged computer game player; and a synthesized bass-line with an analogue texture, seems at once chicago “old school”, yet new in its low frequency range. in brief, overflowing with an excess of overcoming and dancecult 2(1)14 empowerment, this track touches one’s core psychologically and physically due to the unholy combination of engaged vocal performance, propelling snare, brutal stabs and penetrating all-embracing sub bass. as an assemblage it seems a hyper-real version of chicago house, as described by journalist cosgrove almost two decades earlier in his introductory sleeve notes of an boxed 12-lp collector’s set: “the decadent beat of chicago house, a relentless sound designed to take dancers to a new high, is schizophrenic music, it has its origins in the gospel shriek and its future in spaced out stimulation” (1988: 4). during heard’s rotterdam set, my personal experience of intertextuality was deepened by the knowledge that joe claussell, a well-known new york dj-producer who claims to keep the spirit of underground disco alive, has produced a dj-exclusive remix of this track in 2006, “mary st. mary (sacred rhythm mix)”. i heard claussell “work” this version during a dj set in london in 2006, creating a third record from a long version in which he filtered the frequencies with the eq of his dj mixer to accentuate an additional hammond organ improvisation. because its sonic texture refers to gospel church services and its unbridled performance, the roving unruly hammond phrases emphasized the spirituality of the gospel samples. the phrases simultaneously seemed to ignore both the rationalised measures and the harmonic scale of the original track, rebelliously battling against its structure like a war machine. at once sacred and profane, when amplified and reworked on the darkened dance floor, this version induces a deep sense of release in the dancer who submits, body and soul. nevertheless, without the additional organ, the “original mix”, as played by larry heard in his rotterdam set, is a strong reminder of the chicago house tracks from the mid-1980s. at the time of attending heard’s set, i only owned the “sacred rhythm” remix as a singlesided cut on a white label 12-inch vinyl dance single, enigmatic, without further artist or recording information, which adds to its seductive mystique. it could easily have remained an anonymous track in my collection—as so many house tracks are, outside of their original scene of production, especially in the 1980s before the world wide web. further online research, however, reveals that grand high priest is the alias of craig loftis, an (at the time) 43-year old african american dj and interior designer of clubs and restaurants, who was bestowed his dj-producer title by the nu bang clan, a collective of us deep house djs. embedded within the first generation of the chicago house music scene, it effectively took loftis 27 years to gain his first club hit, proving his faith in house music. on myspace, an expanding web-based social network that hosts a significant proportion of the us underground dance scene, he states on his page that: after redesigning the sound system for his club the powerplant 1015 he became frankie’s personal sound engineer and opening dj for the next 4 years. . . . craig and frankie worked on the development of frankie’s production company powerplant ltd. along with various remixes of existing songs, craig and frankie concentrated on producing a chicago artist named jamie principle. when frankie decided to leave chicago in 1988, craig was offered the position as chief engineer in charge of production for dj international records where he remained for the next eight years (loftis 2007). rietveld | disco’s revenge 15 the power plant was frankie knuckles’ follow-up club, after he left the warehouse, which became the music box with dj ron hardy. jamie principle’s atmospheric electro pop recordings had been available on cassette tape for some time before frankie knuckles finally decided to produce his classic track “waiting on my angel” for release in 1985. it is therefore no surprise that despite the appearance of “mary mary” in 2006, it slotted so well within heard’s musical history lesson. it affectively communicated the producer’s— loftis’—specific musical journey. around the time of the production of “mary mary”, loftis worked as a dj in chicago where, in the early 21st century, he felt challenged in weaning his black gay crowd off hip hop and back into house music. in 2006, he explained during an interview with 5 magazine that “mary mary” was carefully constructed from sounds and structures that, he observed, would move his crowd, thereby illustrating how the nomadic practice of the dj can function as a transitional laboratory to create new directions (5 magazine 2006). for example, the excessive (camp) snare programming in “mary mary” seems to invoke a workout on muscle buffing steroids. bodybuilding is arguably an important aspect of cosmopolitan homosexual nightclub culture, where the male body is on display for sexual pleasure, both in terms of body shape and physical endurance. in an ethnography of a new york gay house club during the late 1990s, amico observes that, “by impelling the participants to physical action—dancing which can go on for hours—the beat also engenders a performance of the construction of masculinity through a physical response” (amico 2001: 362). simultaneously, the insistent use of the snare functions as a vague (literally, in a nomadic vagabond sense) musical memory of the early 20th century, when in new orleans marching bands provided the ragtime musicians who, eventually, inspired the driving strut of funk and disco (shapiro 2005). in this manner, house music rhizomically remembers both gay culture and its african american heritage. the vocal samples of “mary mary” are steeped in african american religious culture, lifted from “mary, don’t you weep” an album track from aretha franklin’s 1972 live gospel recording at new temple missionary baptist church, los angeles, which was re-released on cd in 1999. franklin has earned the title of lady soul for her secular work in the 1960s, her vocal style influencing disco divas throughout the 1970s and 1980s. fikentscher (2000) has also drawn connections between a black music continuum an underground disco in 1970s and 1980s new york; one of his respondents, david lozada, remembers that in paradise garage (an ethnically mixed gay dance club in new york with a parallel history to chicago’s the warehouse), “on sunday mornings at around 7:00 a.m., larry would stop all the dancing by putting on aretha franklin singing ‘mary don’t you weep’. we knew he was giving church” (2000: 105). in this way, “mary mary” spirals through cultural time in a (digitized) musical memory loop. the musical journey of “mary mary” has taken it beyond chicago’s house scene, making it an excellent dj tool for heard to communicate a nostalgic set to his rotterdam crowd in 2007. according to 5 magazine (2006) it first appeared in the gay clubs on pre-release, similar to disco promotions in new york in the 1970s, until it developed over several years into an unstoppable us underground dance hit. its official release in spring 2006 coincided dancecult 2(1)16 with the 21st winter music conference in miami (wmc), the yearly international showcase event for dance club music, which operates as a major network hub in the dissemination of house music’s archival output. without its intimate frames of reference in rotterdam, this track nevertheless retained its affective textures due to context provided by heard’s programming. in the hands of the next dj, it would be re-contextualised, generating different new meanings—for example, six months later i heard an instrumental version in the same rotterdam space, this time played by a london dj, ig culture, to a jazz dance crowd: functioning as a filler, without the vocal samples, it sounded less profound than when it had been played in claussell’s or heard’s set. meanwhile, three chicago remixes have been released that feature vocals by chicago’s house diva dajea, which traces the erased sampled snippets of franklin’s ecstatic baptist consolation. yet, although dajea’s voice is forceful and not as strongly compressed as the initially sampled vocals, it seems a vacuum imitation that has lost its initial depth of spiritual feeling and authenticating ambience. such pastiche is perhaps more appropriate for broader youth markets where, arguably, house music cannot “be described as a cathartic outburst from socially frustrated sections of society” (langlois 1992: 237) and where the notion of “underground” may be more a matter of marketing strategy than of a social reality (thornton 1995). monuments since its formation, attempts are made to anchor the nomadic dance machine of house music, to moor the party ship and to formalise its classic canon, as well as its proto-types. in 1989, the chicago house sound was defined outside of its local scene by, for example, a comprehensive 12-lp box set together with illustrated sleeve notes, which leaks around the edges of genre definition by usefully including early warehouse disco classics, chicago’s jack tracks, work from local label competitors trax records and dj international, as well as other independent labels, and examples from new york electro and detroit techno. by 1994, classic house was redistilled as mostly vocal club dance on definitive house mastercuts volume 1 (mc). more recently, in 2002, a small japanese book publication, house legend: the core of dance music, offered brief statements about key figures and an extensive list of collectable vinyl releases. then, in 2005, on the 21st birthday of trax records, the mayor of chicago joined in with a double-edged sword of official recognition and cultural appropriation by declaring: i, richard m. daley, mayor of the city of chicago do hereby proclaim august 10, 2005, to be house unity day in chicago, and urge all chicagoans to be aware of the events arranged for this time (remix 2005). such defining practices of remembering could possibly stilt dance music’s promiscuous creative musical and organisational principle. nostalgia functions as a form of romance in which musical memory idealizes the past, excavating and anchoring perfect zero moments, whilst forgetting the incidents, the messy mistakes, the experiments, the accidents, that gave rise to the carnivalesque ecstatic moments of the nomadic third record. within rietveld | disco’s revenge 17 exponentially multiplying communication media, from internet forums to collector boxsets, house music’s complex and disjointed wanderings have been polished to a few shiny well-paved avenues of repetitive encyclopaedic knowledge that point persistently towards an intense crossroads that once catalysed an explosion of creative energy. regardless of local debate and heated contestations by local dj-producer talent, the dominant story of house music seems to set its moment of formation with frankie knuckles at the warehouse, the weekly chicago dance club that, between 1977 and 1983, catered for a predominantly black and latino homosexual dancing crowd in the heart of mid-america. it is at this intense network node that new york’s underground disco sensibilities and dj techniques met with post-industrial chicago, and with imported italo disco and electro pop from elsewhere in europe. despite its unruly past, within the musical mythology of house music the memory of the warehouse seems to have been tamed, its music digitally dissected and its locally contested reputation more or less solidified, as an anchored institution in dance cultural history. it is, therefore, important to note, that house music did not gain exportable currency through record releases until several years after the warehouse closed down and that it took time for house music to crystallise into a distinguishable marketable genre,28 bringing club music back out into the day light, though without the luggage of “polyester” disco connotations. in summary, traditional history is usually told by winners and survivors. however, by having constructed the concept of house music as a nomadic archival institution, it is hoped that alternative memories and histories, counter-memories, may be heard. this article has argued that house music affectively functions as a dynamic and wandering institution. like a religion, for example, it exists outside the state apparatus, and, as in the case of african american house music, spreads a message of both spiritual and earthly, libidinal, love. although disco has been remembered at times through digital sampling practices, turning the past inside out like the reflections from a glittering disco mirror ball, these dislocated fragments are not always consciously recognised. more importantly, disco’s emotions and affect (its passions, its struggles, its pleasures, its jouissance) are passed on in the memory machine of house music’s rhythmical structures and dj techniques. the nomadic third record is thereby an important eccentric curational practice, a fleeting crucial moment in the interaction between available recordings, the dj’s journey and the context of the crowd. this in turn results in new musical forms based on reinterpretations of recorded memory. throughout the formation of house music, disco’s rhizomes have been woven spirally through rhythmical time and dance cultural spaces whereby, “chicago (house music) was the clearest example of disco being lovingly continued under another name” (brewster and broughton 2006: 337). dancecult 2(1)18 acknowledgements i wish to thank both will straw and graham st john for their encouraging support in the production and completion of this article. in addition, i’m grateful for the expert suggestions made by both anonymous peer reviewers. the responsibility for playful inconsistencies or for speculative spontaneity in the final version, however, is mine alone. notes 1 stilted notions of house music may be informed by, for example, purism of “real house music” fans or social demarcation based on sexuality and racial identity. 2 frankie knuckles has been mythologised in an encyclopaedic manner as the godfather of house music— a point of contention amongst chicago djs (rietveld 1998; bidder 2001). 3 for snapshot descriptions of disco attire, see jones and kantonen (1999); for connections between new york city’s disco elite and the fashion world, see haden-guest (1997). 4 compare the hip-hop dj practice of using “breaks” (see, for example, rose 1994). for further reading on disco and house music dj techniques, see, for example, brewster and broughton (2002, 2006), fikentscher (2000), poschardt (1995), rietveld (1998, 2007), as well as kemster’s 1996 edited collection on house and techno production techniques. 5 for a musicological analysis of edm grooves, see butler (2006) and zeiner-henriksen (2010), as well as a wider ranging collection edited by danielsen (2010). for a further analysis of repetition in edm, see garcia (2005). 6 see also buckland (2002) and rietveld (1993, 1996, 2004a). counter arguments can be found, for example, in pini (2001). 7 lsd (lysergic acid diethylamide) is a psychedelic drug, popular with the counterculture, which alters perception to a less structured mental state. a changed sense of time helps the user become absorbed in the here and now, which in turn can enhance the experience of a long night of groove-based dancing. 8 by way of illustration, when i attended the loft in new york in 1983, both the crowd and the music were heterogeneous even though the majority of dancers seemed to be young latino and african american gay men and electronic dance music (mainly from the us and uk) dominated. 9 this is indeed a comparable story to acid house and raves from the late 1980s and 90s 10 melechi concluded this, years later, in a critical analysis of acid house parties in the uk (1993). 11 see mulvey (2009) for an introduction of the notion of the “mastering gaze”. 12 for further discussion of sonic dominance, see also henriques (2003) on the reggae sound system session. 13 for a comparable analysis of new york’s queer clubs, see buckland (2002: 43-44). 14 see baudrillard (1990)—seduction here signifies a specific power relationship based on desire. 15 see also, for example, fikentscher (2000) and rietveld (1998). 16 examples from chicago are frankie knuckles and ron hardy and later, in the 1990s, derrick carter, ron trent, anthony nicholson. similarly, in new york, seminal “shamanic” underground rietveld | disco’s revenge 19 djs include disco pioneers david mancuso and nicky siano and, into the 1980s, garage dj larry levan; into the 1990s, house djs todd terry and masters at work, while by the end of that decade djs like joe clausell, danny krivit and osunlade (also trained as a caribbean yoruba priest) returned to the aesthetic logic of early underground disco. 17 for debates regarding digital music production and distribution practices, see, for example, katz (2005). for a comparison with other dj practices, raising important questions regarding authorship, schumacher (1995) offers a detailed study of how rap producers ignored copyrights during the 1980s, until damning test cases against sampling practices occurred in the 1990s. examples of further discussion regarding a fluid notion of authorship in disco and house music can be found in, respectively, krasnow (1995), rietveld (1998) and straw (1995). 18 on the third record, see also butler (2006) and rietveld (2007). 19 de unie is a 1980s reconstruction of a 1920s modernist artists’ café space – the original was destroyed, as was most of rotterdam’s centre, during world war ii (1940–45). 20 larry heard is especially famed for the 1986 recording, can you feel it. a sermon dubbed onto this track provides house music with a manifesto: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfuujexs03a> (accessed 6 march 2011). 21 see also a review of the night by wijnstekers (2007). for a brief clip of this dj-set and the club space, see, for example: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pltb-xt3_m> (accessed 6 march 2011). 22 the artist name(s) is an alias for dj-producer keith farley, a self-declared godfather of house. the recording was released by dance mania, a label managed by jesse saunders. 23 the harsh sounds of locally produced gabber house seem to insert, into a house music framework, the sonic memory of decades of industrial noise heard during the rebuilding and further development of war destroyed rotterdam. 24 see also johnson (2004). 25 “poppers” refers to amyl-nitrate, a fleeting chemical developed to open the blood circulation in heart patients, but used recreationally in (gay) dance clubs. 26 for a further discussion of sampling gendered sexuality, see bradby (1993). 27 within the context of african-american gay club culture, “fierce” indicates a tough feminine attitude. 28 see also rietveld (2004b). 29 all discogs.com links were last accessed 8 march 2011. 30 although the release date was 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international conference. 249–54. montreal: centre of research on candian cultural industries and institutions. thornton, sarah. 1995. club cultures: music, media and subcultural capital. cambridge: polity press. verhagen, stijn, frits van wel, tom ter bogt and belinda hibbel. 2000. “fast on 200 beats per minute. the youth culture of gabbers in the netherlands”. youth & society 32 (2): 147–64. wijnstekers, marcel. 2007. “larry heard @ de unie”. djscene.nl. 17 april: <http://www.djscene.nl/party/reviews/2007/april_/can_u_feel_it?visitorid=966916bbe2 5a43a1a8dc946f86b673f7> (accessed 6 march 2011). zeiner-henriksen, hans t. 2010. “the ‘poumtchak’ pattern: correspondences between rhythm, sound, and movement in electronic dance music”. ph.d. thesis (musicology), university of oslo. <http://folk.uio.no/hanst/indexpoumtchak.htm> (accessed 27 february 2011). discography29 adonis. 1986. no way back. trax records (12-inch): tx112. <http://www.discogs.com/ adonis-no-way-back/master/6738>. beltram, joey. 1990. “energy flash”. beltram volume 1. r&s (12-inch ep): rs 926. <http://www. discogs.com/joey-beltram-beltram-vol-1/master/27621>. ———. 1990. energy flash. detroit: transmat (12-inch): ms-16. <http://www.discogs.com/ beltram-energy-flash/master/7362>. black box. 1989. ride on time. de-construction (12-inch): pt 43056. <http://www.discogs. com/black-box-ride-on-time/master/117300>. chic. 1978. le freak. atlantic (12-inch): dsko 131. <http://www.discogs.com/ chic-le-freak-savoir-faire/master/126211>. ———. 1987. jack le freak. remix by phil harding for pwl. atlantic (12-inch): 0-86634. <http://www.discogs.com/chic-jack-le-freak/master/127114>. fingers, mr. 1986. washing machine/can you feel it. trax records (12-inch): tx127. <http:// www.discogs.com/mr-fingers-washing-machine/release/1948>. fingers inc. feat. chuck roberts.1988. can you feel it? london: desire records (12-inch): wantx 6. <http://www.discogs.com/fingers-inc-featuring-chuck-roberts-can-you-feel-it/ master/5664>. first choice. 1977. “let no man put asunder”. delusions. gold mind records (lp, album): gzs-7501. <http://www.discogs.com/first-choice-delusions/master/62280>. http://www.djscene.nl/party/reviews/2007/april_/can_u_feel_it?visitorid=966916bbe25a43a1a8dc946f86b673f7 http://www.djscene.nl/party/reviews/2007/april_/can_u_feel_it?visitorid=966916bbe25a43a1a8dc946f86b673f7 http://folk.uio.no/hanst/indexpoumtchak.htm http://www.discogs.com/adonis-no-way-back/master/6738 http://www.discogs.com/adonis-no-way-back/master/6738 http://www.discogs.com/joey-beltram-beltram-vol-1/master/27621 http://www.discogs.com/joey-beltram-beltram-vol-1/master/27621 http://www.discogs.com/beltram-energy-flash/master/7362 http://www.discogs.com/beltram-energy-flash/master/7362 http://www.discogs.com/black-box-ride-on-time/master/117300 http://www.discogs.com/black-box-ride-on-time/master/117300 http://www.discogs.com/chic-le-freak-savoir-faire/master/126211 http://www.discogs.com/chic-le-freak-savoir-faire/master/126211 http://www.discogs.com/chic-jack-le-freak/master/127114 http://www.discogs.com/mr-fingers-washing-machine/release/1948 http://www.discogs.com/mr-fingers-washing-machine/release/1948 http://www.discogs.com/fingers-inc-featuring-chuck-roberts-can-you-feel-it/master/5664 http://www.discogs.com/fingers-inc-featuring-chuck-roberts-can-you-feel-it/master/5664 http://www.discogs.com/first-choice-delusions/master/62280 rietveld | disco’s revenge 23 ———. 1983. let no man put asunder (mix by frank knuckles). salsoul records. (12-inch ep): sg 397. <http://www.discogs.com/first-choice-let-no-man-put-asunder/master/66064>. franklin, aretha.1999 [1972] mary, don’t you weep. on: amazing grace: the complete gospel recordings. los angeles: rhino / warner (2xcd, album): r275627. <http://www.discogs. com/aretha-franklin-amazing-grace-the-complete-recordings/release/1679683>. grand high priest . 2006. mary mary (original mix). chicago: we-ze records. (12-inch): weze001. <http://www.discogs.com/grand-high-priest-mary-mary-grand-high-priesthidden-mixes/release/720620>. ———. 2006. mary st. mary (sacred rhythm mix). white label, unofficial release (1-sided 12inch): msm-48. <http://www.discogs.com/release/843223>. holloway, loleatta . 1980. love sensation. gold mind records (12-inch) gg 505. <http://www. discogs.com/loleatta-holloway-love-sensation/master/221221>. housemaster boyz, the, and the rude boy of house. 1986. house nation. dance mania (12inch): dm 003. <http://www.discogs.com/house-master-boyz-and-rude-boy-of-housethe-house-nation/release/7303>. jacksons, the. 1981. “can you feel it”. live. epic (2xlp): ke2 37545. <http://www.discogs. com/jacksons-live/master/160675>. jaydee. 1992. plastic dreams. r&s (12-inch): rs 92027. <http://www.discogs.com/ jaydee-plastic-dreams-switch-remix/master/7360>. principle, jamie. 1985. waiting on my angel. chicago: persona. (12-inch): jp111 <http://www. discogs.com/jamie-principle-waiting-on-my-angel/master/8369>. rhythim is rhythim. 1987. strings of life. detroit: transmat (12-inch ep): ms 004. <http:// www.discogs.com/rhythim-is-rhythim-strings-of-life/master/695>. saunders, jesse. 1984.30 on & on. jes say records. (12-inch ep): js9999, prl8426. <http://www. discogs.com/jesse-saunders-on-and-on/master/8442>. various artists. 1989. the history of the house sound of chicago: …from the very beginning… the complete story. bcm records (12xlp, compilation): b.c. 70-2060-49. <http://www.discogs. com/various-the-history-of-the-house-sound-of-chicago/master/141105>. various artists. 1994. classic house: definitive house mastercuts volume 1. mastercuts/ beechwood music (2xlp, compilation): cutslp-20. <http://www.discogs.com/ various-classic-house-mastercuts-volume-1/release/49391>. filmography hindmarch, carl. 2001. pump up the volume. london: flame productions, for channel 4. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0847411/> (accessed 27 february 2011). “mr fingers ‘can you feel it?’“. posted by housenationchicago on youtube. <http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=tfuujexs03a> (accessed 6 march 2011). “larry heard @ ‘clone and bootleg pres frantic flowers’” (= larry heard at the unie, 7 april, rotterdam). posted by powertothebeats on youtube. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ pltb-xt3_m> (accessed 6 march 2011). http://www.discogs.com/first-choice-let-no-man-put-asunder/master/66064 http://www.discogs.com/aretha-franklin-amazing-grace-the-complete-recordings/release/1679683 http://www.discogs.com/aretha-franklin-amazing-grace-the-complete-recordings/release/1679683 http://www.discogs.com/grand-high-priest-mary-mary-grand-high-priest-hidden-mixes/release/720620 http://www.discogs.com/grand-high-priest-mary-mary-grand-high-priest-hidden-mixes/release/720620 http://www.discogs.com/release/843223 http://www.discogs.com/loleatta-holloway-love-sensation/master/221221 http://www.discogs.com/loleatta-holloway-love-sensation/master/221221 http://www.discogs.com/house-master-boyz-and-rude-boy-of-house-the-house-nation/release/7303 http://www.discogs.com/house-master-boyz-and-rude-boy-of-house-the-house-nation/release/7303 http://www.discogs.com/jacksons-live/master/160675 http://www.discogs.com/jacksons-live/master/160675 http://www.discogs.com/jaydee-plastic-dreams-switch-remix/master/7360 http://www.discogs.com/jaydee-plastic-dreams-switch-remix/master/7360 http://www.discogs.com/jamie-principle-waiting-on-my-angel/master/8369 http://www.discogs.com/jamie-principle-waiting-on-my-angel/master/8369 http://www.discogs.com/rhythim-is-rhythim-strings-of-life/master/695 http://www.discogs.com/rhythim-is-rhythim-strings-of-life/master/695 http://www.discogs.com/jesse-saunders-on-and-on/master/8442 http://www.discogs.com/jesse-saunders-on-and-on/master/8442 http://www.discogs.com/various-the-history-of-the-house-sound-of-chicago/master/141105 http://www.discogs.com/various-the-history-of-the-house-sound-of-chicago/master/141105 http://www.discogs.com/various-classic-house-mastercuts-volume-1/release/49391 http://www.discogs.com/various-classic-house-mastercuts-volume-1/release/49391 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0847411/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfuujexs03a http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfuujexs03a http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pltb-xt3_m http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pltb-xt3_m the international recording industries lee marshall (ed.) abingdon: routledge, 2012. isbn: 978-0-415-60345-4 (hardcover), 978-0-203-83466-4 (ebook) rrp: £80.00 (hardcover), £80.00 (ebook) paul oldham university of south australia (au) the majority of analyses of the recording industry typically zone in on the west and the activities of major record labels at the expense of other international markets and non-major labels. even discussion of the global fortunes of the majors will commonly veer towards discussing the music industry as if it is a coherent and homogenised entity and there is no difference in the ways the majors operate from region to region. thankfully over the past two decades there has been a welcome move in popular music studies away from the restrictive and discriminatory west-centric and major label angle—found typically in english-speaking countries—toward a much more inclusive perspective of the recording industries. this academic anthology is part of that process and i welcome the approach. the anthology is organised into two parts. the first is a contextualising introductory section spanning three chapters, while the second is comprised of seven, alphabetically-arranged, region-specific case studies. these cover three of the largest selling regions of the hegemonic mainstream (japan, france and brazil) alongside two which are tightly integrated with the “legitimated” (3) industry (finland and south africa) and a further pair of peripheral regions (czech republic and ukraine). given that a substantial number of these markets have only rarely been subject to an english-language examination, the intrinsic value of this section is significant. while the book lacks a formal conclusion, editor lee marshall’s scene-setting introduction does a decent enough job of threading the anthology’s themes together to make one seem unnecessary. these case studies reveal that, with a few exceptions (such as hong kong and mexico), the overall trend in most countries over the first decade of the 21st century has been a notable increase in domestic market shares and local repertoire. each territory is discussed through a detailed analysis of specific circumstances which have led to this, and the figures included here indicate that “music fans have been more loyal to local artists than global hits” (2). several of the authors suggest a key reason for this is that, broadly speaking, it is more difficult for fans to illegally download or file-share music by local artists than that by international mainstream artists such as katy perry. the anthology commences with a contentious piece by john williamson and martin cloonan which problematizes much of the previous writing on recording industries and argues that these industries are indeed far from homogenous and best studied in terms of component parts (notably recording, live music and publishing). additionally, they underline an economic and ideological shift of power away from the recording industry (which according to them should be pronounced dead or, at the very least, extremely unwell) to the live music industry, and how this has affected artists and record companies. an examination of the industry’s dominant companies of 2011—live nation and the “big four” major labels (universal music group, sony, warner and emi, prior to emi’s absorption by umg and sony in 2013)—shows that most have resorted to adopting the 360-degree (or “all rights”) model pioneered by sanctuary to generate revenue from publishing, live performances, merchandising, sponsorship, endorsement deals and more across the music industries. dave laing offers a valuable analysis of the history of the 20th century music industry in five sections and ambitiously tackles approximately 20 years per section, engaging with: technological innovation (from edison’s cylinder to the mp3 format); intellectual property law and disorder (from the 1909 us copyright law to tape piracy); changing hierarchies of consumer media (print to online); musical and demographic trends (dance crazes to youth cultures); and wider economic forces from the micro (the firm) to the macro (the global economy including the rise of consumerism). here marshall picks up again to investigate the immense difficulties faced by the recording industry (particularly in the us) in the first decade of the 21st century (which echoes three comparable crises from the 20th century). marshall’s historical analysis offers a valuable and balanced perspective on the dramas of the past decade. like williamson and cloonan, marshall’s prognosis for the us industry is not good, though he does admit with a back-handed compliment that, while the “big four” remain in the top five biggest music sellers, their clout has diminished and their dominant position is far from assured. he also suggests that a larger focus on big investments in international stars and the imposition of 360-degree contracts on all locally signed artists could become the norm. the case studies section begins with three chapters which tackle larger-selling regions, each with different concerns. for instance, masahiro yasuda reveals japan as a market lucrative enough to overtake the dwindling us market but one which also currently stands at a curious crossroads between the two contradictory trends of centralising dynamism—which brings the japanese recording industry in line with more conventional markets via locally embedded commercial practices such as “so-called ‘tie up’ production(s)” and 360 deals (154)—and a decentralising tendency towards “more diffuse participatory creativity”(168). he also outlines the specific set of peculiar issues it has presented to the four transnational major labels which, though highly profitable, hold an equal if not lesser influence on the market than the thriving domestic labels. this, he argues, is due to local practices such as the limited diversity of radio stations and once-strong, domestic j-pop tie-up productions which would simultaneously plug product to all strands of the “complex web of consumer services” (154) including transnational megastores, karaoke boxes and record rental businesses. yasuda also discusses japan’s idiosyncratic and more open approach to copyright protection and p2p sharing. hugh dauncey and philipe le guern’s chapter on france focuses on how and why the french government developed one of the world’s most aggressive and proactive legislative responses to the problem of digital piracy, leading to the controversial and repressive hadopi (haute autorité pour la diffusion des oeuvres et la protection des droits sur internet) law adopted in 2009 to protect creativity and profitability. similarly, sam howard-spink discusses how rampant p2p and mobile-based piracy have negatively affected brazil’s relations with the us since the 1990s. he also reveals that on the other side of brazil’s notorious wealth divide (and beneath the radar of its official statistics) exists a legion of dynamic cultural economies such as organised and established independent labels which are attuned to brazilian market sensibilities. two further case studies describe how music retail has survived in the smaller markets which are closely integrated with the dominant industry. pekka gronow explains how the small but strong finnish domestic market has benefitted greatly from favourable copyright laws on secondary uses of music (such as broadcast) which see all income taken from foreign recordings used to support local production. in contrast, tuulikki pietilä argues that for the highly fragmented ethnicities and distribution of wealth of south africa’s 50 million strong population, most of the activity in the non-major industry, such as sales at live shows, is unaccounted for by the international federation of the phonographic industry. the two case studies which focus on peripheral regions where global labels have little if any influence in the domestic market are perhaps the most fascinating. c. michael elavsky describes a czech music culture that is both fully integrated into global industry practices but highly resistant to the westernising cultural imperialism of copyright and intellectual property regulations. here piracy, rather than being just a matter of legality, takes on a different ideological purpose among low-wage earners. this brings up the importance of considering how the issue of piracy has a different meaning depending from which side of the corporate power dynamic you are looking at it. this point is also addressed by adriana helbig in her chapter on the even more peripheral market of the ukraine, where the crackdown on piracy by national and international organisations has not been effective due to widespread political corruption. this, she says, is exacerbated by global online corporations such as apple’s lack of presence in the region, coupled with the fact that international and local internet sellers refuse to accept ukraine-issued credit and debit cards. the international recording industries offers a series of important insights into the turbulent recent history of the diverse global industries and different localities of what marshall describes as “the first major content industry to have its production and distribution patterns radically disturbed by the internet” (1). all readers will discover something new in this absorbing anthology. live coding: a new approach to musical composition alexandra cárdenas independent composer/live coder. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2018.10.01.14> my work focuses on the musicality of code and the algorithmic behavior of music, research and exploration in which live coding takes a central role. in recent years, i have travelled the world, performing and teaching live coding as a performative practice for music that connects diverse social, political and artistic fields. live coding is a technique for writing and performing music in real time through engagement with computer algorithms. as a composer of western classical music, my work has always leaned towards algorithmic patterning, and live coding has become the ideal tool to express my musical thought, as well as to generate a space for questioning given paradigms about contemporary music. figure 1. alexandra cardenas performing at geiger festival in gothenburg, sweden, 2014. credit: ruud gielens. for me, music must be free from aesthetic and commercial boundaries. as the italian composer ferruccio bussoni said: “music was born free; and to win freedom is its destiny” (busoni 1911: 5). the laptop liberates me as it extends my cognitive possibilities with its capacity for the rapid calculation of stochastic processes and allows me to travel with an electroacoustic studio in my backpack. advances in computation mean advances in the capacity of translation of my musical thought and its mutations. the computer and i nourish each other’s processes, embodying donna haraway’s (1991) concept of the cyborg and opening up unpredictable paths. i am constantly looking for ways to bridge social, artistic, and technological gaps, and the use of free and libre technologies and philosophies (stallman 2017) has proven to be an honest response to this need. live coding works with these philosophies, nourishing a global community that thrives on inclusion, transparency, and sharing. as composer and performer, the flexibility of computer-based music allows me to do both at the same time, improvising for the concert hall as well as the dance floor: from the royal conservatory of ghent in belgium to an algorave in platohedro, a communal house in a working-class neighborhood of medellin in colombia. algorave (a portmanteau of algorithmic rave) is a scene that promotes the creation of (often live coded) music for the dance floor, putting together the apparent disparate disciplines of computer programming, dance music, live veejaying, and musical composition in real-time. due to the rapid growth of the worldwide algorave scene, some journalists have speculated that it could be the future of dance music. i’m sure it won’t be the only future, but i do believe that algorave continues the evolution of techno, so closely entwined with the evolution of society and technology itself. i’m currently reading future shock by alvin toffler (1970), creating a thread that connects me now from an artistic residency in upayakuwasi, ecuador, to 1980s detroit, usa. music has always been a force for bringing people together, and rave culture is a contemporary expression of this primal urge for community and abandon. live coding in this context broadens the artistic potential of the celebratory space, creating a fusion of body and mind. one of the practices of the algorave is to project the screen of the performer, revealing the code that is producing the music. this breaks down the mystique of the artist, revealing the process of musical creation and the possibility of appropriation by all. no flashy 3d buttons, only pure text. education is not a closed process and doesn’t begin or end with a school. we need to look for ways to constantly educate ourselves, in an endless process of research and development. in my case, giving workshops is an important way to accomplish this, both inside and outside of institutions. i’m particularly concerned that everybody should have access to artistic, and specifically musical, creation. code really can be democratic and my desire in teaching is that everybody should have this opportunity: young and old, men and women, rural and urban. the live coding scene, including its algoraves, is a kind of prototype of a utopian community where everybody can contribute whether they have been playing for one day or ten years. this is a political question that has to do with the empowerment of diversity in different communities and is the motivation of my teaching and artistic activities. i dream of a world where technical and artistic education is available to all, and where music recovers its primary community role: that of healing, growth and expression. my travels, residencies, performances, and workshops aim to sow the seeds of this transformation. author biography alexandra cárdenas (<algorave.com/alexandra-cardenas/>) is a composer, programmer and improviser, born in bogotá, colombia in 1976. using open-source software like supercollider and tidalcycles, her work is focused on the exploration of the musicality of code and the algorithmic behavior of music, especially through the practice of live coding. this is a way of creating music in an improvisatory manner, by typing and editing computer code directly into the laptop to create sound as the performance progresses. references busoni, ferruccio. 1911. sketch of a new esthetic of music. new york: g. schirmer. haraway, donna jeanne. 1991. simians, cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature. new york: routledge. stallman, richard. 2017. “free software is even more important now”. <https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.en.html> (accessed 2 may 2018). toffler, alvin. 1970. future shock. new york: bantam books. investigating the value of dj performance for contemporary music education and sensorimotor synchronisation (sms) abilities dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 8(1): 46–72 issn 1947-5403 ©2016 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2016.08.01.03 investigating the value of dj performance for contemporary music education and sensorimotor synchronisation (sms) abilities douglas maccutcheon alinka e. greasley mark t. elliott university of leeds (uk) university of leeds (uk) university of warwick (uk) abstract two studies were conducted to establish a more complete picture of the skills that might be accessed through learning to dj and the potential value of those skills for music education. the first employed open-ended methods to explore perspectives on the value of djing for music education. the second employed experimental methods to compare the ability of djs to synchronise movement to auditory metronomes. twenty-one participants (seven professionally trained musicians, seven informally trained djs, seven non-musicians) took part in both studies. qualitative data suggested that all participant groups felt djs learn valuable musical skills such as rhythm perception, instrumental skills, knowledge of musical structure, performance skills, and a majority agreed that djing had equal relevance with other musical forms e.g. classical music. quantitative data showed that informally trained djs produced more regular timing intervals under baseline and distracting conditions than the other experimental groups. the implications of the findings for the inclusion of djing into formal music curricula are discussed. keywords: dj performance; turntablism; music education; sensorimotor synchronization; distraction douglas maccutcheon is a marie curie early stage researcher (esr) and phd candidate in environmental psychology at the department of building, energy and environmental engineering, university of gävle (hig). he has a background is in musicology and music psychology. current research investigates how the classroom environment (acoustics, signal-to-noise ratios) affects language and memory in bilingual children and children with mild to moderate hearing loss and forms part of the ongoing marie curie project, icare (improving children’s auditory rehabilitation, <https://www.icareitn.eu>). <douglas.maccutheon@hig.se> alinka greasley (phd) is associate professor of music psychology, school of music, university of leeds where she teaches music psychology at all levels, and leads the ma applied psychology of music programme. her research lies mainly within the field of social psychology of music, and her interests mainly focus on people’s experiences with and uses of music in everyday life, including musical preferences, music listening behaviour, electronic dance music culture and dj performance practice. <a.e.greasley@leeds.ac.uk> mark elliott (phd) is assistant professor at the institute of digital healthcare, university of warwick. his research interests focus on human movement coordination. in particular, mark’s work has investigated how humans use the sensory information available to them to time and synchronise their movements. <m.t.elliott@warwick.ac.uk> feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2016.08.01.03 https://www.icareitn.eu mailto:douglas.maccutheon@hig.se mailto:a.e.greasley@leeds.ac.uk mailto:m.t.elliott@warwick.ac.uk maccutcheon, greasley and elliott | investigating the value of dj performance 47 introduction traditional approaches to music education have been irrevocably transformed by the emergence of information and communication technology (ict) in schools as increased use of music technology to develop critical computer skills has introduced contexts to the music classroom that have not traditionally been associated with music and learning (hallam and rogers 2010; himonides and purves 2010). the varieties of music technology that children now have access to, and engage with, outside of the music classroom encompasses too broad a range of instruments, multimedia interfaces, software applications and creative workstations for an exhaustive list to be given here. the important issue is that the old methods of music education, such as those associated with traditional formal training, are not necessarily applicable to the educational contexts in which musical skills are now developed (himonides and purves 2010), and arguably are equally as inapplicable to new music styles and new instruments that have emerged out of contemporary technology and musical practices. music pedagogues in the uk and elsewhere have are becoming increasingly interested in the capacity for informal learning practices to inspire personal and creative growth in the music classroom, which has led to a growing inclusion of informal learning methods in music education in an attempt to ground music education in a more “learner-centred way” and combat the flagging interest in formal music training in schools (price and d’amore 2007; green 2009; mcqueen and hallam 2010; cain 2013). these changes in teaching and learning approaches have been well documented. for example, in her influential research, lucy green (2009) describes her experiences introducing informal learning practices of popular musicians into classroom environments in seven schools in northern england, and in doing so, emphasises the teacher’s role in guiding behaviour and tasks, and observing with minimal intervention or participation (cain 2013). one uk initiative, musical futures, sees teachers as integral in exchanging knowledge about and embedding informal teaching and learning practices into music classrooms. the movement reflects increasing awareness of how learning has been radically altered by the influx of technology, both in and outside the music classroom, and a desire to adapt teaching styles accordingly (thomas and brown 2011). in 2010, mcqueen and hallam reported that musical futures included twenty eight schools in the united kingdom and over seven hundred secondaryschool teachers (mcqueen and hallam, 2010); the initiative has subsequently expanded to australia and canada and is growing daily in scope and influence. comprehensive reports of their research (including quantitative surveys and longitudinal studies) are available on the musical futures website. results show that informal learning practices are adaptable to more formal educational contexts, and that the underlying processes are equally capable of producing musical outcomes as more traditional methods. although green and the musical futures initiative focused on traditional instruments, this research argues that informal musical practices associated specifically with icts such as djing/turntablism (terms used interchangeably throughout this article), may have the http://www.musicalfutures.org http://www.musicalfutures.org dancecult 8(1)48 potential to develop critical creative and musical skills in learners as effectively as more traditional methods and instruments. djing is a fairly diverse area covering a range of behaviours that have not necessarily been clearly delineated. however, there seems to be consensus in popular dj tutor books as to how to learn to dj (broughton and brewster 2002; webber 2007; steventon 2010; vorobyev, coomes and murphy 2012). smith’s (2013) investigation of “collective creation” among professional hip-hop turntable teams points towards an agreed consensus as to methods employed during dj performance, suggesting a homogeny in approach among djs that makes collaboration and learning possible. due to this consistency of approach, dj performance may perform a valuable function in music education classrooms in the future, particularly those that utilise collaborative and informal teaching and learning practices (crow 2006). while there is a growing body of literature on dj culture (bell 2009; hansen 2010; montano 2010, 2013; attias, gavanas and rietveld 2013), dj performance as a musical practice has been somewhat overlooked in music education and psychology literature in the uk despite its prevalence. the progressive increase in djing outside the music classroom due to affordable technological advances has aided the growth of this informal music practice. this research posits that djing might be utilised in the music classroom to convey essential music principles to learners who would otherwise feel alienated or restricted by more traditional instruments, may not come from backgrounds within which they are exposed to this subcultural musical practice, do not have access to the equipment due to socio-economic factors, or may be excluded from musical activities involving traditional instruments due to physical restrictions or disabilities. djing in contemporary music research and education djs in their contemporary state evolved from two wellsprings. one source can be traced to the disk jockey radio announcers, influential cultural icons that selected and cued the records on music programs (e.g. dick clark and alan freed), while the second origin of djing is traced back to the first experimental music written for the gramophone by the composer hindemith in 1930 (his grammophonplatten-eigene stücke) in which pitch/speed augmentation and sampling (layering two or more pre-recorded sounds simultaneously) were used in a recorded musical work for the first time (katz 2012). when mixing two or more songs/samples simultaneously, contemporary djs make use of techniques such as cuing, beatmatching, blending, phrase matching and rhythm matching (broughton and brewster 2002), techniques that are described in more detail in due course. in addition, some djs use a set of two or more turntables as a musical instrument by scratching, negotiating and deconstructing the sampled music and “resisting the intended purpose of the turntable as an autonomous playback device” (vandemast-bell 2013: 243), thereby turning djing into a virtuoso performance art which is referred to as turntablism (chapman 2012). djing is generally associated with hip-hop and electronic dance music (edm: techno, house, trance, garage, drum n’ bass, to name but a few) but the origins of turntablism as an art maccutcheon, greasley and elliott | investigating the value of dj performance 49 form are to be found in hip-hop (poschardt 2002; butler 2006). in hip-hop performances, the dj mixes samples and breakbeats (percussive music samples) over which a vocalist raps, and performs occasional scratch solos on the turntables. breakbeats have been used since the 1970s when djs began to notice the effect of overtly percussive sections of music on disco dancers (smith 2000). studies in the psychology of music are beginning to investigate why percussive music like breakbeats elicit such strong responses in dancers (van dyck et al. 2013). djing has also found its way into popular music genres in a variety of ways; for example, famous bands such as portishead, incubus, linkin park and slipknot all feature live djs as permanent band members. an overview of the small quantity of current academic literature on djing indicates that the there is still much about this musical practice to investigate within discipline of music psychology. a highly theoretical analysis of the semiotic content of dj performance (specifically reggae and club djing) has been provided by bakker and bakker (2006) which adopts a semiotic framework to interpret the meaning of djing, but makes claims about what djs do without any empirical grounding such as questionnaires and interviews. a recent addition to the academic literature on djs is an article by vandemast-bell (2009, 2013), a dj and academic. bell used himself as the subject and discusses the manner in which live dj performance involves tactile manipulation of sound through physical means, as well as “realtime composition”. he is responding to the prevalent conception that a dj is just someone that plays other people’s music. although his work provides an important context for this research, it is limited because it is based on the personal experience of an expert as opposed to objective data or scientific observations ( jabusch 2006). further context for this research is provided by a study by greasley and prior (2013) which investigated the understanding and use of the notion of musical shaping among professional djs. results showed that djs use the idea of shaping to modify a track while it is playing (e.g. equalisation); to control the transition between tracks (e.g. matching structural sections); and in relation to the overall trajectory of a set (e.g. choices of tunes, which order). there was also evidence that the djs understood musical shaping multi-modally, through gesture and visual representation as well as sound. of direct relevance to this study, snell (2011) discussed the skills developed in turntablism courses at two higher education music departments—berklee college of music and the royal conservatory of music in toronto—in an attempt to illustrate the benefits for music educators and students. she established that skills developed were predominantly “beat matching, pitch awareness, improvisation, and sensitivity to musical styles” (snell 2011: 176), and also argued that turntablists develop transferable skills. studies such as these have provided important insights into what may be developed through djing as an informally learned musical practice, yet more empirical research is needed. tackling this need, butler and trainor (2015) quantitatively established djs ability to detect rhythmic deviations in musical patterns were the same as trained percussionists, and also established whether or not a one-week intervention consisting of djing lessons improved rhythmic pattern deviation detection— the results were non-significant. dancecult 8(1)50 the purpose of the two musicstudies reported in this article is to explore the relevance of djing for music education, and to empirically establish a more complete picture of the skills that might be accessed through learning to dj. in order to legitimise its use as an educational tool, this study aims to investigate basic motor skills developed by djing (sensorimotor synchronization), and whether or not learning to dj can be used to convey essential underlying musical principles. study 1: perspectives on the value of dj performance for music education the first study we devised sought to pinpoint contemporary perspectives on the value of djing for music education, and equally sized groups of formally trained classical performers, informally trained djs and non-musicians were recruited. a musical training questionnaire was used to determine the respective extents of our participants’ musical training so as to make sure that our participants properly matched the respective categories of our study. all of the participants completed the perspectives on djing questionnaire, and the djs also took part in semi-structured interviews. the questions included perceptions of whether djs can be classified as musicians, what musical skills they learn, and whether djing should play a greater role in contemporary music education. the sample consisted of seven professional string players (age range 18-60, mean age=26.56, sd=13.78), seven non-musicians (age range 20-37, mean age=25.43, sd=4.89) and seven professional djs (age range 25-43, mean age=35.71, sd=5.33). the djs performed in a wide variety of edm styles (including electro, breakbeat, techno, house, hip-hop and drum ‘n’ bass, scratching) and with the exception of one participant who had attended a dj academy for a short period of time, the djs were all self-taught and randomly selected through opportunity sampling. data were analysed using thematic analysis. ethical clearance was gained from the ethics committees at the two institutions where the study was run, and in accordance with our ethics agreement, participants are referred to by their category (classical musician, dj and non-musician) in the analysis in order to maintain anonymity, unless they explicitly asked to be named. perceived musicianship of djs the first line of enquiry concerned whether participants perceived djs to be musicians. twenty out of twenty one participants felt that djs can be considered as musicians. reasons given for categorising djs as musicians grouped into four themes, namely, manipulation of mood and emotion, musical knowledge, technical knowledge and creativity. some participants expounded on the musical knowledge employed by djs, including rhythmic, melodic and structural elements as being essential to dj practices. one classical string player felt that training was an additional necessity when defining a musician, while nonmusicians similarly thought that skill was essential. in a different but related question, one classical musician stated that djs have to “master technology in a way similar to learning an instrument”. one of the professional djs made a direct comparison between djing and piano playing during his interview: maccutcheon, greasley and elliott | investigating the value of dj performance 51 when you watch dj craze it’s like a musician playing an instrument, it’s like he’s playing the piano, he’s got all these beats set up, plus he’s using the turntables and scratching the beat, and he was scratching with one hand whilst he was playing the beat with the other hand, like playing the piano, hands doing separate things. speaking of the creative processes behind djing that substantiate the view of djs as musicians, another dj argued that “creating new music/a new song by combining pre-existing songs or using electronic sounds is no different to music created by the combination of different physical instruments or voices”. in other words, a conventional musician plays patterns of musical tones with their instrument much the same way as djs play patterns of samples (sections of recorded music) using their instrument, and as such, djs situate themselves at a point somewhere between composer and musician through the act of (re)arranging presampled music in real time, often through improvisation. one dj supported the general view, arguing “if they [djs] aren’t musicians, who play music, what could you classify them as?”. only one (non-musician) participant openly disagreed that djs are musicians, stating rather dismissively that “there is some skill involved and required, but that’s the same for driving a car”. overall, participants’ accounts suggest that djs are perceived of as musicians if they physically mediate the sounds that are heard through various techniques (mixing and scratching for example). dj performance in music education we asked the three groups of participants three questions relating to the value of djing for music education: 1) whether they thought that djs learn valuable musical skills through what they do, 2) whether djing has cultural relevance on a par with classical music tradition, and 3) whether djing lessons should be offered alongside traditional music lessons as part of a formal music education. in response to the question one, all participants unanimously agreed that djs develop musical skills. table 1 shows the skills mentioned in thematic categories. only the category of mixing is dj-specific; all other categories apply generally to music education. table 1: participants’ perceptions of the musical skills learned through dj performance musical skill times mentioned rhythmic perception 7 harmonic perception 5 musical structure 4 music technology 4 music performance 4 stylistic knowledge 4 instrumental skills 3 mixing 3 music production 3 dancecult 8(1)52 across all participant groups, rhythm perception was the most noted category of musical skill learned by djing, perhaps as a result of the beat-based nature of the music and the fundamental necessity of beatmatching. this result was in line with the propositions of this research as a whole and substantiates the quantitative investigation of rhythmic perception described in study 2. mixing requires that harmonies as well as beats match, which might explain why skills relating to the category of harmonic perception were mentioned second-most by participants. skills relating to musical structure, technology, performance and stylistic knowledge were all mentioned an equal number of times. in addition to a wide genre-based knowledge of available repertoire, djs are required to understand the structure of bars, phrases and overall pieces in order to produce their mixes, while their knowledge of music technology and musical performance are obvious components of their art. instrumental skills, mixing and music production were all mentioned three times. one professional dj and tutor, dan de lissandri (henceforth dan), felt the following skills were learned through djing: the most basic skill all djs who mix have to learn is how to count to a pulse, how to recognise the first beat of a bar and phrase, and how to match the tempo of a song to the tempo of another song. advanced musical skills occur when a dj recognises the harmonic, rhythmic or textural effect of mixing two sounds together. scratch djs learn at least the equivalent amount of musical skills as percussion players as both use tactile methods to add musical elements to compositions. true turntablists use mixing, beat matching and scratching (i.e. all the elements of djing) to produce entirely new compositions. these turntablist compositions utilise melodies, beats and basslines from other recordings but rework them into brand new pieces which are clearly separate from the original. there can be no doubt that these djs have learnt valuable musical skills to do so (de lissandri 2014). another professional dj and tutor jim reiss (henceforth jim) wrote: some may think it is just about pressing a button or to look good but there is a lot in involved in djing; counting beats and bars, understanding structure and timing, learning about the key of a piece of music, musicianship, performance, music technology and creativity (reiss 2014). in the second question, participants were asked whether djing had a cultural relevance on a par with classical music tradition. out of the twenty one participants, nine stated that djing had greater contemporary relevance than classical music, eight stated that djing had equal relevance to classical music, and four claimed that djing was not as relevant as classical music. results were surprising; all classical musician participants claimed that djing was equally as, or more culturally relevant than classical music, whilst those claiming djing is less culturally relevant entirely consisted of non-musicians and djs. it was expected that each group would defend their position (classical music for classical musicians, djing for djs) and non-musicians’ opinions would gravitate towards their stylistic preferences (which were also maccutcheon, greasley and elliott | investigating the value of dj performance 53 noted as part of the study by correlating their responses with a list of each participant’s top five favourite songs/albums), but results suggested that this was not the case. should dj lessons be part of formal music curriculum? the final question was intended to establish if people felt that djing lessons should be offered alongside traditional music lessons as part of a formal music education. sixty two percent of participants stated that djing lessons should be offered, fourteen percent claimed that they should be optional, fourteen percent claimed that they did not know, and ten percent stated that djing lessons should not be offered alongside traditional music lessons (both of whom were non-musicians). a non-musician participant stated that djing is “more of a hobby and if you get good you could go professional but i don’t think it’s really an educational thing”. this contrasts sharply with one dj who argued that learning to dj is as valid as studying the violin or piano because young people get to work creatively with the music they really enjoy, rather than having to learn predetermined repertoire, usually chosen by a teacher, and perform in a limited number of musical styles (e.g. baroque, classical, romantic and modern). jim argued that the two supposedly disparate learning approaches could be mutually beneficial: most young people today gain their first access to music through pop culture and djing is a large part of that. if we insist that all young people who show an interest in music need to learn a traditional instrument first, then we will fail to encourage musicianship in the majority. if we do offer dj education we help naturally musical young people discover music in a manner which they feel comfortable with. this in turn helps us signpost them onto more traditional instruments if they so wish (reiss 2014). another dj noted the functional value of djing skills by mentioning that “djing has a place in the music industry; therefore, you are equipping people with skills to work”. the two dj tutors jim and dan were djing instructors at a dj school and were active in local schools where they were using the teaching of djing skills for various educational purposes that were partly funded by local council for certain projects. their opinions on the value of djing in music education were highly developed and their answers provided substantial arguments for inclusion of dj performance in school music curriculums. discussions centred on the motivational aspects of djing for young people, including children with special educational needs (sen); devising a rubric for teaching djing in a consistent way, which differs according to the style being taught: e.g. the ‘choppy’ style of hip-hop mixing compared with ‘seamless’ mixing style of progressive house, and the inclusion of dj performance into mainstream education. their first focus when teaching was to get the young people thinking about the preferred music they personally would want to hear in a mix. the tutors were very keen to impress on the young people that they should choose music that they enjoy. the tutors then teach the basics of mixing, acknowledging that this differs according to different musical styles, as emphasised by dan: dancecult 8(1)54 we start off by teaching about bringing the record in on the first beat, then we explain the structure of the music, because we try and tie it into their music lesson as well, getting them to think about the intro, when you listen to a piece of music, you get an introduction, you might get a hook, a riff, a break, verse, chorus, another break, so getting them to understand that, and we’ve devised a diagram [see figure 1] to show the layering of tunes …i want to get some lego actually, to try and explain it better, a few blocks of lego would be one track, and then you overlap it with another track, how to work out where to bring the next track in, analysing that there’s a minute introduction, and so on, but at the same time, it’s entirely up to you how you mix it, it’s your creativity, your originality, we’re just explaining how we do it, how other djs do it, or explaining how the music has been written, but there’s no rules around that…that [points to diagram] approach works with house music, and drum and bass, but with hip-hop and rnb, or popular or rock music, a different mixing style is needed, maybe just fading it, or doing an effect just before dropping the next tune in (de lissandri 2014). the tutors noted that tune selection was particularly important when working with young people with physical disabilities, many of whom did not have the motoric skills needed to manipulate the speed of the platters on the decks. overall, the tutors felt that around ninety five percent of the young people they worked with were able to gain at least basic skills, and they talked about how motivating and confidence building dj performance could be, particularly for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, and sen children. as regards the relevance of djing for the traditional music curriculum, they argued that they “tick lots of curriculum tick boxes, such as understanding musical structure, dynamics, texture, and creative processes” (reiss 2014) and that interest in dj lessons was growing all the time. they were applying for further funding to allow them to work in a greater range of schools, continue the outreach work they had started, and raise awareness among secondary school teachers. when asked how realistic it is that djing could start to form part of the curriculum, dan responded: figure 1. dance music song structure (simplified for teaching purposes) maccutcheon, greasley and elliott | investigating the value of dj performance 55 i really do think it will. from us speaking to secondary school music teachers, and heads of music, because we’ve recently taught at ten schools around the city, speaking to most of them, a lot of young people are interested in djing as their performance for gcse, but the music teachers don’t understand it enough, the examining board don’t understand it enough, so it’s a bit of a difficult situation for them (de lissandri 2014). it became apparent both from the tutors’ accounts and the responses from all participant groups about the relevance of djing that there is a need to establish criteria for the examination of dj performances to enable young people to pursue djing at school. the dj tutors reported that future work included a conference linked to a higher education music college within the city in which they were running workshops for secondary school teachers to teach the basics of djing and the range of dj equipment that is currently available. at a six month follow-up, we asked jim and dan how the workshops—which encompassed how to plan a mix, demonstration of mixing and scratching, ‘have a go’ and q&a sessions—had been received by the teachers. at the start and end of each workshop, they asked teachers to list disadvantages and advantages of dj performance. teachers were focused on disadvantages at the start, listing only a few advantages, including cost of equipment, lack of teacher understanding, and problems with assessment, but were much more focused on advantages at the end, such as improved aural and timing skills, and musical creativity (see table 2). after the sessions, the tutors had immediate bookings from schools to deliver workshops to their pupils. table 2: teachers’ perceptions of the advantages and disadvantages of djing at gcse level ‘pros’ before session “inclusive” “accessibility. cultural relevance”. “exciting. relevant to their interests. not stuffy”. “cool and instant. leading to depth as appropriate”. “getting kids interested in engaging with music who might not have otherwise”. ‘cons’ before session “large amount of songs and software will be trouble for crappy school networks”. “many music teachers don’t understand djing”. “cost? £”. “how to assess a performance? too ‘informal’ for an exam”. “not enough educational material to inform teaching / learning”. dancecult 8(1)56 “how do you mark it?” “less chance to interact, be ‘on the beat’ with others”. “do schools understand genre?” “needs practice”. “reluctance to learn formal notation required for composition / listening units”. “not seen as proper music by other students. not enough teacher knowledge/experience”. “need all the kit in school”. “no instrumental skill. lack of note reading skill. teacher expertise”. “equipment”. “cost of equipment. schools/funding? teacher skills? expert training/cost”. “teacher doesn’t have a clue! how do you teach a whole class?” “difficulty. you need a great deal of aural skills to achieve a high standard”. ‘pros’ after session “understanding of tempo and tempo relationships (cross curricular links with numeracy)”. “permits access to technologically / scientifically minded kids”. “engages challenging students. own musical interests addressed. engaging with music more accessible”. “improved aural skills. develops ict skills. accessible music. engaging. cool”. “real musical creativity possible”. “timing. in-tune. engaging.” “ability to access music course through something they enjoy”. “djing can be a form of an arrangement.” “engaging for kids – lots of djs in mainstream at the moment”. “genre accessible to some young people who are harder to reach with “conventional” instruments”. “engaged. new skills.” “range of options for equipment. lots of analysis and skills involved. engaging and creative”. “affordable – for the entry versions”. “enthuses. encourages practice and perseverance”. “fun to do”. “addictive! inspiring. challenging”. “rhythmic manipulation and splicing of breaks to form a new piece. restructuring preexisting materials to create a new form”. “cost effective to beginners for first time equipment”. “naturally engaging. immediately musical”. maccutcheon, greasley and elliott | investigating the value of dj performance 57 study 2: the sensorimotor synchronization (sms) ability of djs in our second study, we devised an experiment to explore how accurately djs can time and coordinate their movements in comparison to formally trained classical musicians and non-musicians. the experimental paradigm used for studying this is often termed as sensorimotor synchronization (sms), or the “coordination of rhythmic movement with an external rhythm” (repp 2013: 403). this task is of particular importance because it is the fundamental cognitive ability that allows humans to engage in nearly all aspects of musical performance, and extends to all forms of synchronised movement across species (toiviainen and snyder 2003; jäncke 2006; repp and su 2013). sensorimotor synchronization (sms) is often studied by measuring participants’ finger tapping responses to an external auditory metronome, presented under a variety of conditions (repp 2005; repp and su 2013). there are many contexts in which this sort of behaviour may occur in ecologically valid contexts, but a rhythmical musical setting remains the most obvious and prevalent environment in which this cognitive-motor skill is applied, as it aids synchronization between players in collaborative musical activities (repp 2005; jäncke 2006;). sms is also necessary for djing, particularly when beatmatching, cuing and scratching. tapping along to an isochronous (regularly occurring) beat is a relatively easy task for most people. there is evidence that correcting and maintaining movements in time with an external isochronous auditory beat is automatic. the timing errors observed between the movement and the external rhythmic cue are referred to as asynchronies and the process human subjects apply to minimise their asynchronies are collectively referred to as error correction in the sms literature (repp and su 2013), which includes phase correction and period correction (repp and moseley 2012; repp and su 2013). phase correction consists of the automatic process of adjusting of the phase of subsequent taps relative to the phase of the stimulus onsets (repp and moseley 2012), and in this way, synchronization is established through continuous sensory feedback (engbert et al. 2002). this is referred to as the phase correction response (pcr) (repp 2003a). period correction is a voluntary error correction action and consists of the subject comparing the perceived inter-onset interval (ioi) of the stimulus (i.e. the metronome clicks) with the period of their “inner timekeeper” or internal sense of the beat, and correcting the inter-response intervals (iris) (i.e. the distance between subsequent tapped responses) accordingly (repp and su 2013). sms studies have highlighted significant differences in timing accuracy between different populations and under a variety of different conditions that test the extent of this ability within and across modalities (repp 1999, 2003b; krampe et al. 2001; aschersleben 2002; krause et al. 2010a; elliott et al. 2011; fuji et al. 2011). musicians have been shown to be highly advantaged in this task (aschersleben 2002; repp 2003b) and some musicians more than others (krause et al. 2010a, 2010b; fuji et al. 2011). in contrast, musically untrained people have been shown to be an appropriate control group for sms studies because their asynchronies tend to be approximately 10ms larger than amateur musicians (aschersleben 1994), and even greater when compared with music students (aschersleben 2002). in dancecult 8(1)58 addition to being more accurate, musicians have been shown to be less variable in their tapping responses than non-musicians in a variety of studies (madison 2000; repp and doggett 2007; krause et al. 2010b; repp 2010; fuji et al. 2011). these differences between groups provoke questions as to how sms ability relates to the motor system, cognitive processes such as attention and perception, and how is it developed within different learning contexts such as formal and informal training. an ecologically valid musical setting requires a more complex application of sms ability (wing, endo, bradbury and vorberg 2014). in this context, continual adjustment of timing takes place in order for performers to convey the expressive intentions of the music and maintain interpersonal coordination with other performers through the cognitive processes of prediction and adaption (konvalinka et al. 2010; nowicki et al. 2013). a central tenet of the current research is that in an ecologically valid performance setting, sms adaptability has to be maintained despite unexpected internal and external distractions that direct attention away from the target source. previous studies show that a distractor-based experimental paradigm is the most applicable for testing this complex phenomenon in musicians, who are expected to perform more accurately under conditions of distraction than the control group of non-musicians (repp 2003a; repp 2005). here, we will investigate the differences in sms performance between formally trained (string players) and informally trained (djs) musicians, using a distractor-based paradigm. professional string players were chosen to represent the formally trained group because of the degree to which they regularly entrain rhythmically with external sources (repp 2005; repp and su 2013) in auditory and visual domains, without the direct use of some form of tapping with their dominant hand. for this reason, formally trained drummers and pianists were excluded from the participant group because tapping with their dominant hand is an intrinsic part of their art and provides a distinct motoric advantage in sms tasks over other types of musicians (krause et al. 2010a, 2010b; fuji et al. 2011). despite a lack of actual tapping with their dominant hand (which usually holds the bow), an ensemble musician in an orchestra synchronously entrains with the visual cues provided by a conductor as well as the auditory cues provided by the multitude of other instruments in their sonic environment through the perceptual/cognitive mechanism of feedback control ( jäncke 2006). in the execution of this process they must filter out the misleading sounds of those less capable of entraining due to differences in skill level, distractions and other factors, and focus on their own auditory stream as well as other auditory streams they perceive to be consistent with the conductor’s timing-related gestures (luck and toiviainen 2006). djs were chosen to represent informal musical practitioners because of the prevalence of djing as a performance art and the degree of professionalism djs attain without any formal musical training (greasley and prior 2013). as described above, the practical development of sms occurs during musical performances when timing discrepancies brought about by distractions, differences in skill level between players and other factors are perceived and corrected by the performer. this ability to isolate and eliminate noticeable asynchronies successfully is especially relevant to the fundamental djing technique of beatmatching, in which one beat must be strictly maccutcheon, greasley and elliott | investigating the value of dj performance 59 adhered to whilst matching the other (asynchronous) beat during a performance in order for two tracks to be appropriately mixed (i.e. played simultaneously). although there are technically no other performers in a conventional dj setup, the coordination and entrainment of two rhythmic sources in phase is the essential part of dj performance that is thought to develop sms ability, a central hypothesis of the quantitative study reported in this article. furthermore, djs are continually aiming to maintain synchrony in a performance by eliminating asynchrony between the beat of the music that is already playing, and the samples they overlay and “mix” into the sonic environment, which is at the heart of what djs do: intertextual layering of different audio samples to produce new and interesting combinations and aesthetic relationships (bradby 1993; kistner 2006). hypotheses formally trained classical musicians achieve greater accuracy in sensorimotor synchronization experiments, in terms of reduced mean asynchronies and lower asynchrony variability when compared to non-musicians (repp and doggett 2007; fuji et al. 2011). we predicted that professional djs would exhibit movement-timing performance that closely matched that of formally trained classical musicians, despite having been informally trained. method we assessed movement timing performance of three groups of participants: non-musicians (nm), formally trained classical musicians (cm), and informally trained djs (dj). we used a sensorimotor synchronization paradigm to test the performance of each participant. in addition to a simple finger-tapping task to an auditory metronome, we also required participants to synchronise movements to a metronome in the presence of an additional “distractor” metronome. in this paradigm, participants are required to synchronise their taps as accurately as possible with an isochronous target sequence whilst an additional simultaneous isochronous metronome sequence, the “distractor”, diverts attention away from the target sequence (repp 2003a, 2005). in this experiment we used phase distractors. a phase distractor metronome has the same tempo as the target metronome, but is offset in phase, such that the beats of the distractor consistently occur slightly earlier or later than the beats of the target metronome. distractor cues disrupt participants’ movement responses by exerting the effect of phase attraction, causing participants to gravitate the timing of their movements towards the onset phase of the distractor metronome and away from the target phase onset, a phenomenon which participants have shown difficulty in resisting (repp 2002). the phase distractor paradigm is a task that is very much related to the challenge faced by a dj beat mixing two tracks: they must be able to switch attention between the independent beat-lines of the two tracks (broughton and brewster 2002). hence, we predicted that participants in the dj group would show superior performance in this task compared to the other two groups. dancecult 8(1)60 the same twenty one participants who participated in the qualitative study took part in the experiment. technical problems with the tapping sensor led to a substantial loss of data from one of the classical musicians. in addition, we found that during analysis another classical musician appeared to have struggled to synchronise with the metronome during the simple baseline tapping tests. hence they were excluded from further analysis. to balance group sizes, we analysed the best five participants from the dj and non-musician (nm) groups along with the five remaining classical musicians (cm). selection performance was based on the lowest average asynchrony variability measured across all baseline trials. equipment setup participants sat a desk and were instructed to tap their index finger onto a force-sensitive resistor in time with an auditory metronome presented over sennheiser hd-212 headphones. the experimental trials and metronome signals were controlled using the mattap toolbox (elliott et al. 2009) in matlab (the mathworks inc., ma, usa). a national instruments daq-usb 6229 data acquisition card was used to output the metronome cues outputs and also capture the tapping response inputs with a common 10k samples/sec sampling clock. the presented metronome stimuli had a tone pitch of 440hz, with each tone having 30 ms duration. in the distractor conditions, an additional metronome was presented simultaneously, differing only in pitch (700hz) and was phase offset to the target metronome. experimental task the experiment was split into two main tasks: a baseline task and a distractor task. during the baseline task, participants synchronised finger taps to a single metronome. these baseline conditions were established in order to measure participants’ asynchrony mean and variance under normal conditions, i.e. without distraction. for each trial, the metronome was presented at one of 6 different inter-onset intervals (ioi, the time between beat onsets, see fig. 2): 340ms, 420ms, 500ms, 580ms, 660ms and 750ms. each trial consisted of 30 metronome beats. participants completed three trials per ioi condition. in the distractor task, the auditory stimuli consisted of a target metronome with an ioi of 500ms in all trials. after an initial 5 beats of the target metronome, an additional distractor metronome was introduced (differentiated from the target metronome by a higher tone pitch). the distractor metronome had the same ioi as the target metronome, but the beats were offset in time relative to the target by: ±160ms, ±80ms, ±40ms, ±20ms and 0ms. a positive phase offset meant the distractor metronome beats were presented slightly later than the target beats; a negative offset resulted in distractor beats presented earlier than those of the target metronome (see figure 2). each trial consisted of 30 target metronome beats (25 distractor metronome beats) and participants completed 3 trials per phase-offset condition. maccutcheon, greasley and elliott | investigating the value of dj performance 61 figure 2. schematic representation of the experiment. participants were instructed to tap their finger in time to a target purple metronome with an inter-onset interval (ioi) of 500 ms. an additional red distractor metronome was presented which had the same ioi as the target but was offset in phase by an amount d, such that each beat occurred slightly earlier or later than the target beats. in the baseline condition, only the target metronome was presented at a number of different iois. finger tap onset times were recorded and measured relative to the target metronome onsets to calculate asynchrony (a). early finger taps (as shown) resulted in negative asynchronies. inter-response intervals (iri) were calculated as the time between consecutive finger tap onsets. baseline and distractor trials were interspersed and presented in a randomised order across the experiment. participants were instructed that they would hear a single target metronome, followed by a second distractor metronome in some trials. their task was to always tap along with the first metronome they heard and ignore the distractor metronome as best as they could. participants completed two practice trials to familiarise with the task. analyses we recorded the finger tap onset times and aligned them to the related target metronome beat onset times using the mattap toolbox (elliott et al. 2009). from these measures we calculated the corresponding asynchronies and iris across a trial (see figure 3). the mean and standard deviation of asynchronies and iris were subsequently calculated for each trial and averaged across trials within a condition for each participant. for the distractor task, dancecult 8(1)62 we further analysed the mean relative asynchrony to quantify how much participants were distracted away from the target metronome. that is, how much the asynchrony changed relative to the asynchrony observed in the 0ms phase offset condition. baseline conditions were analysed independently from distractor conditions. for the baseline task, statistical analyses were based on a group (dj, cm, nm; between-subjects) x ioi (340, 420, 500, 580, 660 and 750ms; within-subject) mixed-anova design. for the distractor task a similar mixed anova design was used based on group (dj, cm, nm; between-subjects) x phase offset (±160ms, ±80ms, ±40ms, ±20ms and 0ms). post-hoc analyses were adjusted for multiple comparisons using the bonferroni method. greenhousegeisser adjustments were made for results that violated sphericity assumptions. results: baseline task as observed in most sensorimotor synchronization tasks (repp 2005; repp and su 2013) we found all groups tapped slightly ahead of the metronome showing a negative mean asynchrony result regardless of the metronome ioi (fig. 3a). we found no significant difference in the mean asynchrony between groups (f(2,12)=.55, p=.593), but did observe a slight change in the mean asynchrony in relation to the metronome ioi (f(1.7,3.4)=4.76, p=.024). in particular, we observed that the shortest ioi resulted in a more positive mean asynchrony (p=.030, relative to 420 ms ioi; fig. 3b). participants’ tap intervals also corresponded very closely with the metronome with mean iris being within 1-2ms of the metronome ioi. we found no significant difference in mean iri between groups. figure 3. (a) mean asynchrony across baseline conditions by group. error bars indicate standard error (se). (b) mean asynchrony by metronome ioi in baseline conditions, collapsed across groups. error bars indicate se. maccutcheon, greasley and elliott | investigating the value of dj performance 63 variability in production of the timing intervals did vary between groups (f(2,12)=7.80, p=.007). in particular, we found a significantly lower iri standard deviation in djs compared to both cm (p=.009) and nm (p=.029) indicating that participants in the dj group produced more regular timing intervals (see figure 4a). we observed a similar, non-significant trend for the asynchrony standard deviations across the three groups (see figure 4b). as expected, slower metronome tempos (longer iois) resulted in higher iri (f(5,10)=23.29, p<.001; see figure 4c) and asynchrony (f(5,10) = 20.61, p<.001; see figure 4d) variability regardless of group. figure 4. the dj group had a significantly lower iri variability than the nm and cm groups (a). a similar but non-significant trend between groups was also observed for asynchrony variability (b). as predicted, both iri (c) and asynchrony (d) variability increased with larger metronome intervals. error bars indicate se. *=p<.05. dancecult 8(1)64 results: distractor task to measure the effects of the distractor metronome on each group, we analysed the change in asynchrony as a function of the distractor phase offset. for each participant, we subtracted their mean asynchrony in the condition when the two metronomes were aligned (i.e. no distractor) from the mean asynchronies calculated in each of the other distractor conditions. these relative asynchronies were then averaged across participants within each group and plotted against the phase offset of the distractor (see figure 5). a least squares linear regression was applied to the resulting data. the gradient of the fitted line indicated how strongly the participants within each group were influenced by the distractor: a large positive gradient suggested the were strongly influenced, while a gradient close to zero indicated that participants were able to ignore the distractor metronome and continue to tap in time with the target metronome. we found that the nm group were particularly affected by the distractor metronome (gradient = .26, r2=.78), while cm were less affected (gradient = .11, r2=.39). the dj group appeared to be unaffected by the distractors overall (gradient = .00, r2 = .00). the low r2 for the dj group suggests a poor fit. this is mainly due to a distractor effect occurring only at -20 ms and -40 ms, suggesting distractors with a very small phase offset have a relatively strong effect, even in the dj group. figure 5. relative mean asynchrony relative to the distractor offset. relative asynchrony is calculated by subtracting the mean asynchrony at zero distractor offset (i.e. no distraction) from the mean asynchronies at each of the other offsets. negative numbers indicate events occurring earlier than the target metronome beat. a least squares line of best fit is shown on each plot (dashed line). the steep gradient of the nm group indicates a strong effect of the distractor on the participants’ asynchronies. in contrast, the almost flat gradient in the dj group indicates they are unaffected by the distractor cue. maccutcheon, greasley and elliott | investigating the value of dj performance 65 finally, we investigated how the distractor metronome contributed to the variability of the tapping asynchronies to the target cue. we found a significant interaction between phase offset of the distractor and group (f(5.2, 31.4) = 2.81, p=.031). further investigation indicated that the dj group achieved a lower asynchrony variability overall, compared to the nm group (p=.015; see figure 6). in addition, we observed that for large positive distractor phase-offsets, the nm and cm groups both had a large increase in variability, while djs were unaffected. figure 6. asynchrony standard deviation relative to the distractor offset. both nm and cm groups show large increase in variability for the +80ms and +160ms distractor offsets. however, the dj group show a consistent variability regardless of distractor offset. general discussion djing/turntablism and other informally learned arts and creative practices have already been used in a variety of contexts outside of formal education that substantiate their potential use-value in education and the wider community. for example, hip hop arts practices (which include turntablism, emceeing, break-dancing and graffiti) (chang 2005) were utilised in a number of community-based projects in canada which fostered “creative, thoughtful and artistic subjectivities” in children (marsh 2012). furthermore, pasagiannis (2007) showed the therapeutic value of turntablism for “at risk” youths. indeed, the value of including creative technologies and icts within fine arts and other disciplines has been well substantiated in the literature, and it is widely acknowledged that such practices are of substantial value in terms of promoting creative thinking (wheeler et al. 2002), collaboration (smith 2013), identity formation (marsh 2012; shiu 2007), both outside and within the classroom (marsh 2006). however, this paper has focused on skills developed that are relevant with regards to conveying musical principles and instrumental techniques, as we believe that a case has already been strongly made with regards to extra-musical skills in the literature. dancecult 8(1)66 in the quantitative study, all groups showed a negative mean asynchrony but there were no significant group differences in the mean asynchrony or mean iris in baseline conditions. the dj group produced more regular timing intervals overall in baseline conditions, and a similar, non-significant trend for the asynchrony standard deviations across the three groups was observed. in the distractor conditions, the distractor metronome contributed significantly to the variability of the tapping asynchronies, but the dj group achieved a lower asynchrony variability overall when compared to the nm group, and were unaffected by large positive distractor phase-offsets that caused a large increase in variability in the other two groups. musicians’ superiority over non-musicians at minimising asynchrony during general tapping tasks is well established in the literature (repp 1999, 2003b; krause et al. 2010a, 2010b; fuji et al. 2011) however these results could not reliably affirm claims that classically trained musicians showed a smaller negative mean asynchrony (nma) in relation to other populations (aschersleben 2002). for example, in aschersleben’s (2002) study, the nmas of musicians were as low as -14ms in relation to non-musician populations, whose taps anticipated the metronome by up to 50ms, but the findings of the current research did not reveal significant differences in nma between groups, and most participants fell consistently between -30 and -45ms. in the repp (2003a) study on which the distractor condition used in this study was based, repp found that phase differences between a target and distractor metronome exerted a strong effect on synchronization accuracy and the variability of taps, a phenomenon which repp called “phase attraction”. supporting repp’s findings, the effects of phase attraction were also evident in all populations in this study, however, a key finding is that dj participants were least variable of all the groups when faced with large phase-distractor offsets that increased variability in the other two groups, an advantage that may be due to regular beatmatching of two unsynchronised tracks during the mixing process. however, it should be noted that contemporary dj equipment provides the possibility of automatically beatmatching tracks, and it is therefore debatable as to how long beatmatching will remain an element of dj performance as certain djing genres become increasingly more automated (e.g. house/techno). it is suggested that the practice of beatmatching should still be a requirement for any formal djing instruction that aims to develop sms abilities. further research would build on these preliminary findings; results illustrate that the need for a large-scale study that is broader in scope. research could also be directed towards establishing a more comprehensive understanding of the range of sms skills developed through djing. suggestions include an adaptive timing study in which phase perturbations/ shifts occurring in the target sequence could be used to investigate phase correction responses (measured through phase shifts below point of jnd =/10% of the ioi) (repp 2010) and period correction (measured through the use of phase shifts above point of jnd) (schulze et al. 2005). the degree to which formal musical training and informal musical practices enhances other cognitive faculties (e.g. executive function, working memory) should also be the focus of future research, though it should be noted that musical training should not have to justify itself according to its extra-musical outcomes, in agreement with rauscher (2009). maccutcheon, greasley and elliott | investigating the value of dj performance 67 the results of the qualitative study highlighted that participants in all three groups felt that djs learn valuable musical skills that are not specific to djing but to music education generally, including rhythm perception, harmonic perception, instrumental skills, knowledge of musical structure, performance skills and stylistic knowledge. a majority agreed that djing had equal relevance with other musical forms (e.g. classical music) and that djing had a high degree of contemporary relevance, especially in popular culture. on the whole, non-musicians were the most sceptical of the value of djing in society and education, and djs that were also djing tutors had the most positive attitudes towards the inclusion of djing into formal music education. an overwhelming majority of participants agreed that djing lessons should be offered alongside traditional instrumental tuition, yet there is much progress to be made in establishing criteria for the examination of dj performances to enable young people to pursue djing at school. to establish the sort of instrumental training using djing equipment that formal music education requires (green 2002), formal links will need to be made between music education institutions and djing academies and teachers. how djing might be more generally incorporated into school music curriculums and examinations is deserving of future research, directed towards investigating the views of a wide sample group of formal music educators and amateur djs, who may help us to gain insight into the way in which these musicians acquire instrumental skills and musical knowledge in much the same way as green’s (2002) investigations of popular musicians informal learning practices. such research would provide data that could be used to articulate how an educational methodology for djing lessons might be structured and implemented and eventually integrated into formal music education. in the qualitative study, the views of classically trained performers and non-musicians were restricted to short responses. future research could build a more comprehensive data set on perspectives regarding djing in order to develop awareness of its educational potential as well as its usefulness for those with special education needs. in addition, as it was difficult to reliably establish levels of formal and informal training through self-report and certain markers of achievement (e.g. formal examinations or measures of professional experience), longitudinal studies might be conducted in order to quantify the relationship between amount of time spent practicing and musical outcomes while devising a way to measure the degree to which formally trained musicians adopt informal training strategies to learn a number of other instruments which they are familiar with but not expert in (as well as applying informally learned techniques to their formally learned art). conclusion the aim of this research was to establish the skills learned through djing and to map perspectives on the potential value of djing for music education from a variety of people involved in music performance and education. in line with green’s (2002) view that informal learning practices and formal music education are not mutually exclusive but draw on one another, the findings substantiate the view that contemporary music education could be strengthened by integrating practices that have grown organically in informal contexts and dancecult 8(1)68 have subsequently developed into socially significant musical practices. djing, as a culturally relevant informal musical practice, should be placed firmly on the research agenda in the fields of music education and music psychology. references aschersleben, gisa. 1994. afferente informationen und die synchronisation von 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http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/mp.2003.21.1.43 http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/mp.2003.21.1.43 http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/mp.2013.30.4.349 http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/mp.2013.30.4.349 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2013.775817 http://dx.doi.org/10.1046/j.0266-4909.2002.00247.x http://dx.doi.org/10.1046/j.0266-4909.2002.00247.x http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2013.1125 astronauts, psychonauts and electronauts graham st john griffith university (australia) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.02.10 i was recently asked to write a commentary on one among many of the extraordinary works produced by gwyllm llwydd for a forthcoming book of his artworks. with influences from willifred sätty, max ernst, rick griffin and buddhist mandala art, llwydd's psychedelic art is produced via paint and digital media. in the 1960s he formed diy press, a publishing company for street poets. in the 1980s, he formed early electronica band grey pavilion which migrated between la and london. besides painting, llwydd today lives in the pacific northwest publishing the invisible college magazine, operating the turfing blog and selecting at radio earthrites. i chose to comment on llwydd’s “astronaut”, the contemplation of which gave me pause to recall apollo 14 lunar module pilot, edgar mitchell, whose return journey to earth in 1971 was occasioned by a powerful savikalpa samadhi experience. uniquely exposed to earth from space, mitchell, who later founded the institute of noetic sciences, recalls: “you develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it”. figure 1. astronaut by gwyllm llwydd (gwyllm-art.com). the revelations of mitchell and his fellow gnostronauts in nasa's space program of the 1960s and at the turn of the 1970s, are felt by subsequent generations—a revelatory mood beautifully captured in “astronaut”. the work is a rendering of ed white, the first american to walk in space, during the gemini 4 mission on 3 june 1965. the psychedelicising of this historic eva (extra-vehicular activity) performance over earth, gives me pause to reflect on the interwoven trajectories of outer and inner space farers. i'm given to contemplate ways the space odyssey, and the adventures, trials and insights of astronauts, have been appropriated to narrate the psychedelic journey; how the mid-twentieth century aeronautical mission out into orbit would serve to allegorize the inward journeys associated with contemporaneous psychedelia, for which the figure of the astronaut—typically alone in space—offered, and continues to offer, iconic décor. while the marriage of inner and outer space was apparent in the psychedelic art of the late 1960s and early 1970s (i.e. at the culmination of the space race and the nasa apollo missions), it would be revisited by psychedelic electronic musicians from the 1990s, and it is here stunningly depicted by llwydd. in recent preoccupations, i've given thought to the remixtical artifice of psychedelic electronica, downstream from a cosmic music tradition. like media shamans and sound engineers in a psychedelic space program, dj/producers lift scripted lines from science fiction cinema and spoken material from other popular cultural sources pressed into the service of the transcendent states that are evoked, imitated and enabled through this artifice. in the context of dance events, from small parties to larger festivals, these pop-cult fragments are part of a liminal assemblage of sensory technologies and spiritechnics that optimise, enhance and comment on extraordinary states of consciousness. in recent years, i’ve grown interested in the way vocal samples are repurposed to narrate the psychedelic journey and its potential for mystical experiences out of body, out of mind and off the planet, so often associated with alien contact and entity encounters, potentiating serious re-evaluations of the self. here i sample a few samples. for further details, see my article “aliens are us” (st john 2013). “imagine yourself in infinite space floating”. this call to disembodiment was made by one of the most enduring goatrance artists, space tribe, on “all you need is spirit and nothing” (the ultraviolet catastrophe, 1997) evoking a state of mind in meditation, or the sensation experienced in an isolation tank, or under the influence of lsd. using early samplers, the flotation bath had been entered at the roots of cosmic trance when, for instance, the belgian outfit d.i.d (osvaldo la rosa and benny augustyniak) released versions of their classic “orbital walk” (d.i.d, alcyone, 1992; d.i.d, astronomia, 1993) in which they sampled a soviet cosmonaut—presumably alexei leonov, who, on the voskhod 2 mission, was the first man to walk in space on 18 march 1965—reporting on his space walk. the transfigurement in the psychedelic journey, the distance of space farers from base-consciousness (“houston”), and the potential for encounters with the other, are themes artists have regularly depicted using the mission dialogue of nasa astronauts. “boy, it’s just beautiful up here looking out the window—it’s just really fantastic”, reports apollo 16 commander john w. young, on klf’s “what time is love? (live at trancentral)” (1990). these re-mediations preceded an avalanche of repurposed dialogue over the subsequent decades. in “trance” music intentionally produced to affect a journey, often performed in contexts where interactive audiences are undergoing psychedelic journeys, producers sought the means to narrate the sensation of psychic transportation. masterfully harvesting space travel tropes to orchestrate the sensation of weightlessness, the infinity project were chief among seminal goatrance acts. their 1992 techno-trance journey, “zero gravity” from tribadelic meltdown features an astronaut reporting on the sensation of “perfect zero gravity”, and claiming “you can feel it shake, there’s a real strong vibration”. this perfect place in space so regularly depicted in sound-bytes and graphic arts represents optimal conditions for achieving gnosis. an untitled track (“b2”) on tip's 1993 time and space ep features space-avatar dave bowman’s eureka moment from unedited versions of stanley kubrick’s 2001: a space odyssey: “my god, it’s full of stars!” based on arthur c. clarke’s epic novel, featuring one of the most powerfully gnostic narratives in cinema, 2001 is among the most sampled films in psyculture. space has been a source of awe throughout recorded human history, its depths occulting mysteries of origin and destination, genesis and apocalypse, with the mid-twentieth century penetration of space a theatre for astrofuturist salvationism as promoted by visionaries like clarke and robert r. heinlein, its conquest a route to consciousness evolution according to timothy leary and otherwise providing an allegory for percipience—the journey into the mind. this is evident, for example, in the work of popular astronomer and author carl sagan, who, sampled on “self-discovery” by cosmosis (fumbling for the funky frequency, 2009), announces: “we journey from ignorance to knowledge. growth reflects the advancement of the species. the exploration of the cosmos is a voyage of self-discovery”. figure 2. cosmosis, fumbling for the funky frequency (2009). but it is the iconic figure of the astronaut to whom i return. it was the space technicians, aeronautical engineers, unlikely mystics, who, returning from their trip, gifted humanity images of our home from space, a boon that historically coincided with the birth of psychedelia. the only words on israeli goa legends astral projection’s track “black and white” are from december 1968 apollo 8 mission commander frank borman: “and the view of the earth, it was the only place in the universe that had any color. everything else was black and white” (trust in trance, 1996). the remarks speak to what has been identified as the greatest revelation of the apollo missions—deriving not from rocks gathered on the moon, but from earth, the awesome sight of which over the lunar horizon startled borman and his crew, the first humans to witness the earth from the moon’s orbit. indeed the “earthrise” photograph taken at that time by apollo 8 crewman william anders would become one of the most important photographs in history. offering the “overview effect”, earthrise and the later whole earth image taken on the 1972 apollo 17 mission, would confirm the idea of “spaceship earth”, recently projected in alfonso cuarón’s 2013 science fiction thriller gravity (in which a woman, dr. ryan stone, played by sandra bullock, unassumingly adopts the role of the space avatar). figure 3. earthrise (1972). photo credit: nasa. the new perspective was amplified by the cosmic engineers of goatrance and their progeny. producing as asia 2001, the space-struck gilbert thévenet, for instance, laid down the gnosis on “râ” (râ, 1996): “gaia became visible through the new knowledge about the earth gained from space. gaia is the earth seen as a single physiological system, an entity that is alive”. by using such material, producers were enabling dance floor habitués to approximate the revelatory satori of those space voyagers. and so, on his ascendant opus, “go for orbit” (super collider, 2010), aphid moon dropped the payload delivered by apollo 17 commander eugene cernan, the last man to step off the moon (on 14 december 1972): you really know where are you at this point in time and space, and in reality and in existence, when you look out the window and you’re looking back at the most beautiful star in the heavens, the most beautiful because it’s the one we understand and know it as home, its humanity, its people, family, love and life. you can see from pole to pole, and across oceans and continents and you can watch it turn and there’s no strings holding it up. and it’s moving in a blankness that is almost beyond conception. while astronauts are explorers of outer, and psychonauts explorers of inner, space, their common legacy are the challenges and perils faced while navigating uncharted terrain, the overcoming of which potentiates threshold objectives for humankind. this heroic testing of the limits was a theme that continually arose in the work of psychonaut terence mckenna, who once stated with regard to psychedelics: you are an explorer and you represent our species and the greatest good we can do is to bring back a new idea because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness. to whatever degree any one of us can bring back a small piece of the picture and contribute it to the building of the new paradigm, then we participate in the redemption of the human spirit. imbricating hallucinogenic mushrooms and dmt in particular, these lines have been sampled many times over—i first heard this aboard burn in noise’s “transparent” (passing clouds, 2008). in this electrosonic fiction, the voice of mckenna comes over like the flight director from houston. mckenna was at pains to point out that the objective of the “trip” was not the psychotherapeutic advancement of the self, but consciousness evolution, and that the psychedelic mission was laden with risks. one had to be prepared to place one's accepted worldview in danger of being ripped apart. and again we find direct comparison with the astronaut for whom the risks have been of a different order, as exemplified by ed white himself, who died alongside two other astronauts in the apollo 1 command module in an explosion during a prelaunch test at cape canaveral on 27 january 1967. when white was finally coaxed back into the spacecraft after his 20-minute spacewalk in june 1965, he had commented: “it's the saddest moment of my life”. higher than any human had ever been, he knew he’d never achieve such heights again. author biography graham st john (phd) is an australian anthropologist and cultural historian of electronic dance music movements and their event-cultures with an interest in their complex religious and performative characteristics. he has been awarded postdoctoral fellowships in australia, united states, canada and switzerland and is author of six books including global tribe: technology, spirituality and psytrance (equinox, 2012), and technomad: global raving countercultures (2009). he is executive editor of dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture, and adjunct research fellow in the griffith centre for cultural research, griffith university. reference st john, graham.2013. “aliens are us: cosmic liminality, remixticism and alienation in psytrance”. journal of religion and popular culture 25 (2): 186–204. <http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/jrpc.25.2.186>. discography aphid moon. 2010. super collider (cd, album): aphidcd001. <http://www.discogs.com/aphid-moon-super-collider/release/2105047>. asia 2001. 1996. râ. trans'pact productions (cd, album): 096 002. <http://www.discogs.com/asia-2001-r%c3%a2/release/201335>. astral projection. 1996. trust in trance. phonokol (cd, album): 2041-2. <http://www.discogs.com/astral-projection-trust-in-trance/release/873775>. burn in noise. 2008. passing clouds. alchemy records (cd, mixed): alcd026. <http://www.discogs.com/burn-in-noise-passing-clouds/release/1366875>. cosmosis. 2009. fumbling for the funky frequency. holophonic records (cd, album): holo 606. <http://www.discogs.com/cosmosis-fumbling-for-the-funky-frequency/release/1877292>. d.i.d. 1992. alcyone. buzz (vinyl, 12-inch): bzzxl 106093. <http://www.discogs.com/did-alcyone/release/111736>. d.i.d. 1993. astronomia. buzz (cd, album): bzzcd 106113. <http://www.discogs.com/did-astronomia/release/452847>. infinity project, the. 1992. tribadelic meltdown. fabulous music uk (vinyl, 12-inch, ep): fabu 016t. <http://www.discogs.com/infinity-project-tribadelic-meltdown-ep/release/185193>. infinity project, the. 1993. time and space. dragonfly (vinyl, 12-inch, ep, promo, white label): bflt 9. <http://www.discogs.com/infinity-project-time-and-space-ep/release/214731>. klf. 1990. what time is love? (live at trancecentral). klf communications (vinyl, 12-inch, 45 rpm): klf 004 x. <http://www.discogs.com/klf-what-time-is-love-live-at-trancentral/release/45906>. space tribe. 1997. the ultraviolet catastrophe. spirit zone (cd, album): spiritzone031. <http://www.discogs.com/space-tribe-the-ultraviolet-catastrophe/release/70367>. filmography cuarón, alfonso. 2013. gravity. warner bros. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1454468/>. war dubs nabeel zuberi university of auckland (new zealand) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.02.11> dub’s doubling and dispersion of sounds in new moments of recording and performance frustrates the search for a root or origin. so we must tread a fine line between acknowledging the contributions of jamaican music to the development of other music genres beyond the caribbean, and accepting that kingston dub synchronically and diachronically is itself part of, and in some respects beholden to, a network or assemblage of various, distinctive musical practices, forms, technologies and institutions. one of the most forceful articulations of how we might think about genealogies of music is jeremy deller’s artwork the history of the world (1997–2004), which presents a flow diagram that connects acid house music in the uk in the late 1980s to brass band music that sprang from the industrial culture of the mid-nineteenth century. such a picture might help us to visualize the affinities, threads and traces that run through jamaican dub and other electronic dance music since its emergence in kingston studios and sound system culture in the early 1970s. my interest here is primarily in how a few of dub’s techniques pervade electronic dance music culture and mediate the representations and affects of violent conflict, particularly since 9/11 with the “war on terror”, the wars on afghanistan and iraq, and the growth in the western hemisphere of surveillance and securitization. my research project is tentatively titled “war is in the dance”, after a version of frankie paul’s 1984 dancehall hit “worries in the dance”, backed by the roots radics, produced by henry “junjo” lawes at channel one, and mixed by sylvan morris at dynamic sound studio. the linguistic and phonetic slippage between the utterance “worries in the dance” and “war is in the dance” opens up an indeterminate third space for dubwise speculation. as michael veal has noted, the “music’s structural uncertainty” also suggests “insecurity” (2011: 256). dub’s theatrical sonics of fear and dread inform the way crisis is evoked in many electronic genres. dub’s intimate relationship with the midi age of sequencing is clear on king tubby’s special 1973–1976, which collects the engineer’s dubs of tracks produced by niney the observer and bunny “striker” lee. in the album’s notes, steve barrow writes that the cut “a rougher version” “has a keyboard intro which appears to anticipate acid house music by a decade”. even the 2009 youtube uploader of this song comments that “tubby and bunny lee accidentally invented techno some 12 years ahead of schedule”. “a rougher version” is a 1976 dub of jackie edwards’ “invasion”, itself a cover of burning spear’s “the invasion” from his famous album marcus garvey (the version on the dub album garvey’s ghost is titled “black wa da-da”). here one finds the grand narrative of the middle passage in fragments as tubby foregrounds edwards’ echoing phrase of “took us away from africa in order to steal our culture”. the otherworldliness of the electronic pulse opening the track, the warped high-pitched tones and distorted piano notes are designed for sound system shock and awe. in the documentary dub echoes (bruno natal, 2008), steve barrow reminds us that the dancehall was open air. the dubplates of tubby’s hometown hi-fi sound would send the sharp treble of amplified cymbals richocheting across city neighborhoods. the bass would vibrate through dancing bodies and rattle buildings. electronic bleeps, drones, gunshots and police sirens in the dub mixes, or added live in the dance, would reshape the anxieties of an everyday life of police curfews and assassinations into musical entertainment. bass, how low can you go? the techniques of the sound system remain at the heart of what linton kwesi johnson termed “bass culture” (on his 1980 album of the same title) and they continue to reverberate in the belly of “bass music”, the category applied to several genres today. the war mode is part and parcel of the “sonic dominance” that julian henriques (2011) has argued is the raison d’être of sound system practice, ritualized in the sound clash between competing sound system operators. steve goodman has drawn attention to the sound system as central to “sonic warfare” with the “almost totalitarian sensuality of bass materialism” activating fear “to be transduced and enjoyed in a popular musical context” (2010: 29). the bug (kevin martin) has taken on board this aspect of sound system aesthetics. martin’s twitter and facebook feeds often feature reference to the heavyweight sound that will “destroy” live audiences as they take masochistic pleasure in the onslaught of rhythm and power. that loudness and bass effect are supported live and on record by the battle mode of many of his mc collaborators. daddy freddy, riko, flowdan and burro banton channel and modify the jamaican tradition of booming dj voices like cutty ranks, bounty killer and ninjaman. the bug’s several collaborations with warrior queen have included a tune expressing outrage at the london transport bombings by islamists on july 7, 2005 (“dem a bomb we” from 2005) as well as her transformation into a military cyborg in the video for “poison dart”, as giant beetles operate like mobile sound systems in an apocalyptic desert battleground. well before the term afrofuturism had gained much critical momentum, and in the still early days of the internet, martin was already sensitive to dub as “a technological agent of transformation,” as he noted in his compilation macro dub infection volume one (1995), which included expected digital dub like the disciples and the rootsman, alongside the more unexpected post-rock group tortoise, drum ‘n’ bass duo 4 hero, and a host of other artists from disparate music fields. martin’s notes present a genealogy to match jeremy deller’s flow diagram, with citations from and commentary on tubby, space pop impressario joe meek, avant-garde electronic modernists like george russell, tod dockstader, sound system guru jah shaka, jazz composer and band leader sun ra, brian eno and david byrne, jimi hendrix, miles davis and his engineer teo macero, and cut-up artist william s. burroughs. just as the bug signifies surveillance, fefe talavera and simon fowler’s artwork for its releases (e.g. the latter’s at war with time series) alludes to the iconography of the security state, as well as comic book and sci-fi landscapes of cities under bombing. the bug’s oeuvre seems apposite in a period when music’s function as a weapon has been a concern for musicians, audiences and scholars (cusick 2008; cloonan and johnson 2013; pieslak 2009). the expansive catalogue of muslimgauze (bryn jones) uses dub techniques with jarring, often ear-splitting distortion in his obsessive rendition of conflict in the islamic world. jones died in 1999, but was such a prolific bedroom producer (in salford, england) that several labels continue to release “new” material. dub’s dread through reverb, echo, jamaican vocals and most importantly bass frequencies is one of the foundations of dubstep from the early and mid-2000s. digital mystikz , shackleton and pinch generated cavernous recordings designed for the 12” single format and rumbling intimacy of small clubs, with dub’s high-contrast drum and sub-bass for melancholic affect, suggesting the exhaustion of war by way of the haunting capacities of dub. this dub ethos is also characterized by a technological fetishism for the snap, crackle and pop of vinyl, and/or the murkiness and hiss of tape. the exemplar of this tendency is the music of burial which uses these effects to create mournful and haunted soundscapes. it is telling that burial’s “come down to us” (from 2014’s rival dealer ep) is used in the first two minutes of adam curtis’s 2015 film bitter lake about the us, uk and soviet union’s involvement in afghanistan. one of the key moments in the film involves a russian veteran in a wheelchair on a subway train shouting, “we’ve brought back mujahideen ghosts.” kibwe tavares’s remarkable science-fiction short film robots of brixton (2011) also draws on dub hauntology, featuring proletarian robots that battle police robots, sound bites of mainstream racist reportage of the 1981 conflict in brixton, and ending with karl marx’s famous statement that “history repeats itself, not as tragedy, but as farce.” mourad bennacer’s sound design for the film is a turbulent mix that includes a dj hiatus dub with a re-recording of dub poet linton kwesi johnson’s “insurrection” which documented the events of 1981. the film had a timely release in the same year that rioting broke out in several british cities following the police shooting of mark duggan on 4 august. media sound bites and sampling voices static, white noise, hums, drones, electronic signals and buzzes in the productions of the bug and burial draw upon the musique concrète of jamaican dub. the analogue sampling and collage of police sirens, animal roars, cars, babies crying and media sources in dub albums such as joe gibbs’ famous series african dub all mighty volumes 1-4 (1975-1979) and lee perry and the upsetters’ revolution dub (1975) have influenced punk and electronic music genres. mixing audio from television, radio and film with dance rhythms is one point of convergence between dub and industrial music. news broadcasts are sprinkled across dance records that address political issues. at the intersection of dub and post-punk industrial noise in the 1980s on-u sound and its house producer adrian sherwood were responsible for an extensive catalogue, including the reggae styles of dub syndicate, creation rebel, african headcharge and prince far-i, but also the more dissonant cut-up aesthetics of the voice of authority, tackhead, mark stewart and the maffia. sheffield group cabaret voltaire developed its sound in the 1970s and 80s, influenced by dub, industrial tape culture and synthesizer music. inspired by francis ford coppola’s film the conversation (1974), surveillance remained a theme in their work. albums such as the voice of america (1980), red mecca (1981) and the covenant, the sword and the arm of the lord (1985) sampled the speeches of politicians, policemen and televangelists, and addressed conflicts between the united states and the islamic world, and the growth of religious fundamentalism. hip hop and dj culture have made audio collage ubiquitous. some of the most common examples of sampling voices in dance music involve the direct citation of jamaican djs from dub recordings. hip hop, jungle, drum ’n’ bass and dubstep, and the jingles and samples for radio stations pay homage to these oral hooks. for example, several samples from mikey dread’s “operator’s choice” from his african anthem (the mikey dread show dubwise) (1979) are peppered across hundreds of recordings, radio mixes and podcasts, far beyond the bursting forth of the words “riddim fulla culture” around the 30-second mark of public enemy’s “welcome to the terrordome” on fear of a black planet (def jam, 1990). war games what happens to war modes in electronic music when the bass culture of dub and club sound systems is increasingly mediated in what wayne marshall (2014) terms “treble culture”? today’s listening privileges the tinnier sounds of cellphones, laptops, pads and game consoles with in-built or blue-tooth speakers, as well as the bass and sub-bass of large sound systems. production styles have changed to suit smaller playback technologies, even as mobile devices and accessories have enhanced their bass output. video games and their war simulations have influenced the sound and look of music genres that draw on dub aesthetics. grime emerged in the early 2000s with a generation of producers and pirate radio djs shaped by sega, nintendo and the sony playstation, and games often adapted from kung fu films and japanese anime. fighting games gel with the battle culture of mcs and producers. the japanese music of many video games has informed grime and orientalist electronic music (sinogrime, for example), which has a more pointillist sound with glacial synth melodies and washes over booming bass lines. song titles and imagery in a growing number of tracks with this sound often refer to war from the skies. for example, the la duo nguzunguzu (its name taken from jamaican dj yellowman’s dancehall hit “zunguzunguzung”) produced videos and artwork for its skycell ep (2011) that dramatize global conflict as it appears in video games and sci-fi films. fatima al qadiri’s “vatican vibes” (2011) presents a helicopter raid in a pastiche of a trailer for a new video game. references to flight in recordings with soaring synths yet menacing low-end frequencies play on the idea of war from the air as the “technological sublime,” those “experiences of awe and wonder, often tinged with an element of terror” as david nye describes the concept (1994: xvi). a large number of post-dubstep and techno records mention drones in their titles. mumdance and logos, for example, the producers of “border drone” (2015) define their sound and that of other simpatico producers as “weightless,” an emergent sub-genre. the immersive three-dimensional spaces and processed beats of all of these dub-inflected recordings reveal several different modes of articulating the affects of war—from sonic dominance, through cut-up and collage for ironic and polemical purposes, to the technological sublime of flight troubled by the terror of bombing. these particular clusters of musical affect have to be theorized in relation to the broader circulation of mediated war affects. but they demonstrate the force, adaptability and continuing resonances of dub sound and culture for processing the wars in our midst. author biography nabeel zuberi is senior lecturer in media, film and television at the university of auckland. his publications include sounds english: transnational popular music (2001) and black popular music in britain since 1945 (co-edited with jon stratton, 2014). he has co-hosted the basement, a weekly music show on base 107.3 fm auckland since 2004. references cusick, suzanne g. 2008. "you are in a place that is out of the world...”: music in the detention camps of the “global war on terror." journal of the society for american music 2(01): 1–26. goodman, steve. 2010. sonic warfare: sound, affect, and the ecology of fear. cambridge: mit press. henriques, julian. 2011. sonic bodies: reggae sound systems, performance techniques, and ways of knowing. new york: continuum. johnson, bruce, and martin cloonan. 2013. dark side of the tune: popular music and violence. london: ashgate publishing. marshall, wayne. 2014. "treble culture". the oxford handbook of mobile music studies 2, eds. sumanth gopinath and jason stanyek. new york: oxford university press: 43–76. nye, david e. 1994. american technological sublime. cambridge, massachusetts: the mit press. pieslak, jonathan r. 2009. sound targets: american soldiers and music in the iraq war. bloomington: indiana university press. veal, michael e. 2007. dub: soundscapes and shattered songs in jamaican reggae. middletown, connecticut: wesleyan university press. discography 15 years in an open boat. 1997. on-u sound (2 x cd comp): 7243 8 44254 2 5. <http://www.discogs.com/various-15-years-in-an-open-boat/release/195440> al qadiri, fatima. 2011. genre-specific xperience. uno (12-inch): uno006. <http://www.discogs.com/fatima-al-qadiri-genre-specific-xperience/release/3227050> applebim and shackleton. 2006. soundboy’s bones get buried in the dirt volume 2. skull disco (12-inch): skull:05. <http://www.discogs.com/appleblim-shackleton-soundboys-bones-get-buried-in-the-dirt-volume-2/release/746804> bug, the featuring warrior queen. dem a bomb we. ladybug records (7-inch): lbg001. <http://www.discogs.com/bug-dem-a-bomb-we/release/538216> bug, the. 2008. london zoo. ninja tune (3 x 12-inch, album): zen132. <http://www.discogs.com/bug-london-zoo/release/1395903> bug, the. 2014. angels & devils. ninja tune (2 x lp): zen211. <http://www.discogs.com/bug-angels-devils/release/6006475> burning spear. 1990 (1975/1976). marcus garvey/garvey’s ghost. island records (cd): 846 757-2. <http://www.discogs.com/burning-spear-marcus-garvey-garveys-ghost/release/495013> cabaret voltaire. 1980. the voice of america. rough trade (lp): rough 11. <http://www.discogs.com/cabaret-voltaire-the-voice-of-america/release/45543> cabaret voltaire. 1981. red mecca. rough trade (lp): rough 27. <http://www.discogs.com/cabaret-voltaire-red-mecca/release/53913> cabaret voltaire. 1981. 3 crépuscule tracks. les disques du crépuscule (12-inch): twi 018. <http://www.discogs.com/cabaret-voltaire-3-cr%c3%a9puscule-tracks/release/87162> cabaret voltaire. 1985. the covenant, the sword and the arm of the lord. virgin/some bizarre (lp): cv 3. <http://www.discogs.com/cabaret-voltaire-the-covenantsword-and-the-arm-of-the-lord/release/202061> digital mystikz. 2006. haunted/anti-war dub. dmz (12-inch): dmz007. <http://www.discogs.com/digital-mystikz-haunted-anti-war-dub/release/619088> dread, mikey. 1979. african anthem (the mikey dread show dubwise). cruise records (lp): cruz 001. < http://www.discogs.com/mikey-dread-african-anthem-the-mikey-dread-show-dubwise/release/1441438> gibbs, joe and the professionals. 1975. african dub all-mighty. joe gibbs record globe (lp): none. <http://www.discogs.com/joe-gibbs-the-professionals-african-dub-all-mighty/release/2275643> gibbs, joe and the professionals. 1977. african dub all-mighty chapter two. joe gibbs record globe (lp): none. <http://www.discogs.com/joe-gibbs-the-professionals-african-dub-all-mighty-chapter-two/master/161400> gibbs, joe and the professionals. 1978. african dub all mighty chapter three. joe gibbs record globe (lp): none. <http://www.discogs.com/joe-gibbs-the-professionals-african-dub-all-mighty-chapter-3/master/161402> gibbs, joe and the professionals. 1979. african dub all mighty chapter four. joe gibbs music (lp): none. <http://www.discogs.com/joe-gibbs-the-professionals-african-dub-all-mighty-chapter-4/master/161404> johnson, linton kwesi. 1980. bass culture. island records (lp): ilps 9605. <http://www.discogs.com/linton-kwesi-johnson-bass-culture/release/728595> king tubby, observer allstars and the aggrovators. 1989. king tubby’s special 1973-1976. trojan records (2 x lp compilation): trld 409. <http://www.discogs.com/king-tubby-observer-allstars-aggrovators-king-tubbys-special-1973-1976/release/155371> macro dub infection volume one. 1995. virgin (2 x cd comp): 7243 8 40475 2 8. <http://www.discogs.com/various-macro-dub-infection-volume-one/release/115747> mumdance and logos. 2015. proto. tectonic (2 x lp): tec082. <http://www.discogs.com/mumdance-logos-proto/release/6651677> muslimgauze. 2000. baghdad. staalplaat (cd): muslimlim 014. <http://www.discogs.com/muslimgauze-baghdad/release/194929> nguzunguzu. 2013. skycell. fade to mind (12-inch ep): fade008. <http://www.discogs.com/nguzunguzu-skycell/release/5163468> paul, frankie. 1984. war is in the dance. greensleeves records (12-inch): gred 147. <http://www.discogs.com/frankie-paul-pass-the-tu-sheng-peng-war-is-in-the-dance/release/681880> pinch. 2006. qawwali. planet mu (12-inch): ziq133. <http://www.discogs.com/pinch-qawwali/release/634060> public enemy. 1989. welcome to the terrordome. def jam recordings (12-inch): 44-73135. <http://www.discogs.com/public-enemy-welcome-to-the-terrordome/release/101244> shackleton. 2006. soundboy’s nuts get ground up proper. skull disco (12-inch ep): skull003. <http://www.discogs.com/shackleton-soundboys-nuts-get-ground-up-proper-ep/release/694909> shackleton. 2008. death is not final. skull disco (12-inch): skull 09. <http://www.discogs.com/shackleton-death-is-not-final/release/1245549> videography curtis, adam. 2015. bitter lake. uk: bbc. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4393514/> natal, bruno. 2008. dub echoes. uk: soul jazz (dvd): sjr dvd207. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1265968/> tavares, kibwe. 2011. robots of brixton. uk: <http://www.factoryfifteen.com/> <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2023664/> dead by dawn, 1995 dj balli independent author <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.01.12> the following is a chapter translation from my book apocalypso disco: la rave-o-luzione della post techno (published in italian in 2013 by agenzia x), a collection of non-fiction, “literary remix”, fiction and interviews featuring key post-rave scenes: from break-core, to speed-core, to mash-up, to mutant dance floor, to psytrance, to 8 bit and to gabba. the chapter on gabba was previously translated and published in dancecult (balli 2014). apocalypso disco is a mix of musical essays, sonic fiction, auto-fiction and interviews with key personalities in the scenes i inhabited. i would like to clarify the autobiographical element of the book. i was always reluctant to use this technique since i was not usually interested in reading about “other punx”, but in my way of “being one”. full stop. however, meeting with agenzia x and learning their methods of oral research on countercultures (here i am thinking of the verbal side of marco philopat’s works), as well as their use of the narrative self, has been essential in melting away my inflexibility, making me aware of the epistemological potentiality of narrative in first person. my experience of being “sonically belligerent” must be considered essentially as an investigation on the field, which is not too far from what academic sociology teaches us. since i’ve always tried to combine my dj and producer activities with my writing, even if just for a press release, a record review, a flaming reply on the c8.com forum or in 140 digits on my twitter account @dj_balli, i've always done it looking for the camouflaged language typical of the complexity of sound in which i am absorbed. all along, i have used and abused the linguistic scratch techniques, including such neologisms as futuritmachine, phonomotors, scratchadelia, conceptechnics 1200, along with distilling audio-ideas such as sonic fiction, schizophonia and turntablization (the concept of putting every conceivable sound on vinyl with the aim of using them for scratching). what follows is a good example of my “auto-fiction”, exploring that “swinging london” (maybe more appropriate to say that 220 bpm pounding!) of the nineties lost between neo-situationist cults and breakcore music. 23 speedcore parties in london they even pointed it out through the headlines of the local bbc news, “operation amazon, a crackdown on london tube”. obviously i didn't give a damn about the report and carried on without hesitation, turning up at walthamstow station every single day after 5pm, asking the passing commuters coming from the city, “you got a spare travel card”? the 9-to-5 workers were heading back home at that time, throwing away their daily travel cards (still valid till midnight) just after the gates. stuck as i was at the very last stop of the victoria line, while being put up by steve strange with whom i was sharing a housing benefit council flat, it was in finding that ticket that signalled the start of my daily london adventures (not only mine apparently, as the authorities felt justified in pushing back against the phenomenon). indeed, a few days after the beginning of operation amazon, my ritual inquiry, “have you got a spare travel card?” was met by a suspicious character, with a crooked rapper-style cap, who invited me to the side where he showed me his tfl badge. he saddled me with a huge fine which, unpaid, ended up in court (but that is another story). after the crackdown, i was left with an incredibly long walk to central london. i honestly wouldn't be able to say how many miles or kilometres i wandered to get to the 121 centre on railton road in brixton. i walked through all of hackney, then london bridge as i marched on endlessly towards south london. i am usually a good walker, never complaining about walking somewhere! but that 23rd of august was too painful. after several hours marching, i arrived just in time for the 7pm vegan meal, where all of the dead by dawn (surely the most underground party in the uk) organizers, djs and bartenders were converging. figure 1. dead by dawn flyer. photo credit: <http://unearthly.c8.com> (1996) christoph fringeli from praxis records, the main organizer of the event, was already there and nomex, following the dogmas of his realist film unit, was unloading some wrecked monitors that he was using as set design from his van. as usual, only the sound system was missing, we were hiring it from dan of the hekate crew. sitting at the anarchist centre info-point i noticed a geezer with a green kraftwerk tee. i thought to myself: “who the fuck is this guy wearing that mainstream t-shirt?”. he smiles to me: “hi, i'm toby, dj scud!”. he didn't say anything more to me that night. his set, halfway between reggae and harsh noise bombardment, was exceptional to say the least. at that party, the full dead by dawn crew came up with the brilliant idea of making me the leader of the event’s self-managed kitchen. “you are italian, you know how to cook”. that night a mate of mine, dj piddu, was playing, over from the link project in bologna, so i had to accept. despite my efforts, i showed my incompetence as a cook. i didn't know what i could say to debunk the myth of all italians being good cooks. i got away with cooking a last minute vegan “squat style” “mutoid” of beans and chips. meanwhile the setting up was feverish. the sound system had finally arrived and they were setting up in the basement. it was in a square room not any bigger than 10m x 10m, and established as the schizoid dead by dawn dancehall. as usual, the night started at 9pm with the invisible college meeting, which was basically a public pre-assault noiz-disco-cambodia debate. on the 23rd of the previous month’s event, john eden talked about topy (thee temple ov psychick youth), the london psychogeographical association was discussed and the autonomous astronauts were taking enrolments. that night, there was heavy anticipation for the bard of all the avant/retro-gardes, stewart home. everybody was wondering if he actually did like techno or not. talking about the word “techno”, after all the debate of the enigmatic invisible college with which every dead by dawn began, it's worth underlining the dialectical distress that the crew was putting itself under just to define the different genres to print on the flyer. everybody was aware that none of the sounds had anything to do with traditional techno anymore. detroit was not just an ocean away, but an entire intergalactic universe away. although, to make the event noticeable amidst all the london underground events, we decided to use “techno” on the flyer, along with “speedcore”, which is a dead by dawn neologism. speedcore for our crew didn't name just the genre used to define an ultraspeedy 4/4 kick, but a general heavy and experimental attitude on the dance floor. we got away with using this pair of terms on the flyers. in other cases, we used the term “hard techno”. as an italian intolerant towards certain stale rave dogmas, i was always against the term. in the uk this term did not bear the reactionary meaning it still has in italy (usually written as “hard-tekno”). it was only towards the end, around the 23rd edition of dead by dawn, that it finally became clear what most (kovert, aphasic, torah, jason vfm, stevvi, rachel zhark, howard slater, peter hodgkinson etc.) were actually playing: hard break or breakcore. an exception was “south-london” electro by mr. controlled weirdness, which was a unique case, but somehow alchemically befitting the music-policy dictated by dead by dawn. what emerged was a melting pot of all the black jungle beats, drum 'n' bass, reggae dancehall, hip-hop raging around the brixton area and the broadside of white noise coming from the most well-known contemporary and industrial music. “the strike of art is the highest form of art in a neoist society where art has became obsolete and useless!”, boomed stewart home. the invisible college meeting started with these words, officially kicking off the 21st edition of dead by dawn. the death of art in hegel is a romantic concept, outdated, so nineteenth-century. dada anti-art turned out to be more functional for the system of art than any traditional and classic expression. it's not merely a boycott of the artistic institutions, such as gustav metzger and the art workers coalition, but is also a claim of the futility of art and a demand for recognition of union rights (on top of a guaranteed income) for the operators who agree on a vision of an aesthetic universe. it is surely not a surprise that the art strike campaign i launched in 1985 was mostly ignored by museums and contemporary art galleries. however some art strike action committees spread in london, ireland, baltimore, albany (ny), san francisco and montevideo. an official movement dispatch also appeared, “yawn” published by lloyd dunn in iowa city. figure 2. stewart home’s art strike bed, photo credit: <http://www.3ammagazine.com> (2011) neil interrupted my rendition of stewart home's speech whispering in my ear, “there's some guy at the door, asking for the guest list”. it must have been crash. i looked for him outside the 121 info-centre. waiting for me in railton road there was that half cut beard (meaning shaved on the right side and grown on the left side...that earned him the nickname “half a beard man”) of crash, my milan matey. he was trying, as he did every single time, to sneak in for free. sure, crash was always buying a lot of vinyls from cristoph and was helping out all the time, which included playing for free for the dead by dawn cause, but it was only three bloody quid. anyway, after the usual spiels, i managed to fucking get him in. i fought hard to save him the massive amount of 1 pound 50!!! we hadn’t seen each other for quite a few days and he had a lot of stuff to tell me about. i was making a big effort to follow him, since he was, as always, super-involved in squatting issues. we went to the top floor of the 121, where the bar and the anti-ambient room were, which was the idea of paul nomex, also the official dead by dawn vj. it took the piss out of the chill out zone in conventional parties. instead of an area designed to help others decompress and relax from the frenzy of the dance floor, as it was in the techno and trance mainstream scene, we introduced a space where the sound was even more unsettling, scraping and rigorous, without any kind of beat. it included bombardments of power-electronics, white noise and walls of cacophonies coming from a previously compiled tape. everything was playing from a home theatre sound system. that was the best place to chat, have a drink and a bite. after thirty minutes of crash’s complaints about his squatting issues i desperately tried to change the subject by any means necessary. he eventually moved to discussing his prediction that the merger of hip-hop and industrial cultures would lead to something really ground breaking in the near future. it seemed to him that this development would happen here in london, the most hyper-advanced megalopolis, with a large african diasporic presence, in all of europe. while the intuition was interesting, his “prophetic” tone was a bit funny and out of proportion. but, at the end of the day this was exactly what dead by dawn was trying to do, to get out from the cul-de-sac of pure noise, already deadlocked from ages, through funk, which was intended not really as a musical genre, but as a goose bump that makes your ass shake. the rallying cry seemed to call for a combination of the dance floor and sound terrorism. crash was right that the beer at dead by dawn, a discount ale, was still really horrible, despite the party now attracting an average of 150 people. we scarfed down the last of the leftover carrot-balls and the rest of the vegan meal. looking for the closest 7/11 to stock up on beverages, we headed downstairs. that was the best place to see the great wall of china, made up of old tvs skipped by paul nomex, which were functioning as video tapestry for the event. throughout, a total amount of 35 monitors were obsessively looping the sequence of a high-altitude skiing accident. an insane setup, based on velocity and sped up adrenaline, then obsessively repeated in slow motion in sync with the bumping of the dance floor beat. the themes of the nomex realist film unit were hyper-kinetic oddities of every kind. beyond the carom blurting in the snow, i remember a korean-japanese doubles table-tennis match... a real must! there were also scattered everywhere copies of pieces of writing from technet, an anonymous london collective of experimental writers working on the fusion of literature and electronic music. at every dead by dawn we were discovering some cryptic pamphlet in the shape of a flyer: sonic paper stories, organized as tracks, the music pieces of dance music. track°: every party is the end of an era something to take and use. without any apparent reason, they lifted up in the sky both travelling mists of noise and corporal music. not here, not there, although they revealed again in the corners as notes of groove on the flow of the vinyl /// track*: it was about a noise which sounds like the one of wolves absorbed in howling to the freezing winter sky. i assure you, the pillars of the house were shaking, the windows, hit by the detectable breath of their lungs, were clinking and looking like they were about to disintegrate, as if handfuls of heavy sand had been thrown against the glass plate. in front of this mind-blowing sight we ran away panic stricken, hair upright on our heads; leaving our mantels and hats behind. we scattered in every direction, in streets that in a second were filled up from more than a hundred people, abruptly woken up from their sleep; the crowd headed through the door and towards the ground floor, looking for the origin of this spectral, horrendous, howl, which was raising as if it was coming out the damned sinners lips for eternity in the most extreme of the burning hells (technet, 1994–95). we were about to leave the basement when we heard wafts of gastric basses and hyper-broken rhythms. it was dj jackal on the console. figure 3. carlos jackal. photo credit: <www.theapricity.com> (2012) the name came from the infamous south american red terrorist. the moniker was always masking a different turntable manipulator, always, of course, from south london. in fact, the sound was pure jungle and absolute nigga hardcore, showing that the bros have it bigger, and musically, they also have an unequalled sense of rhythm, at least to some caucasian losers like we were. coloured from the scratches of the london tube’s concrete recordings, of canary wharf and generally of the english megalopolis’s acoustic sprawl, the mix was absolutely killing it. in that moment, in those hundred square meters, the third world war was happening. the answer from the canteen was charged up, this was music meant to get the masses loose, to cause pavlov-like reactions. get some mice, put them in a metallic cage, hermetically seal it and start bombarding the acoustic space with hyper-high-pitched frequencies. a fantastic sensation. a mix of urban nihilism, of post-industrial funk, which in a millisecond was giving sense to a century of noise from russolo onwards. i saw crash suddenly leave the dance floor just when dj jackal was mixing beats, which was beyond odd. i followed my friend, who had suddenly gone pale. it was not the speed or any other shit like it...crash was cut in two with a stomach-ache. the shitter of the 121 was not exactly the excelsior. i cleared the way for him and he started puking. i came up with a hypothesis, “fuckin' carrot-balls, it must be those”. i realized that crash was busy in a massive puke... of course he wasn’t answering. i stopped paul: “were the carrots off?” he shrugged, ”don’t know, skipping is usually safe...but you never know...”. the vegan meal, as usual, was skipped. it was from the leftovers of the brixton market, which was right in front of the 121. i came out with some king dinners by skipping, but the slight risk of hepatitis a b c d e f g z was always in my mind. meanwhile, crash kept on vomiting, locked in the bathroom. other people started queuing for the shitter. after fifteen minutes i dragged him out. we went to the upper floor, to the anti-ambient area. he was still dead pale. must have been food poisoning. those fuckin' rotten carrots. he was lying on the bench of the info-centre, walls of empty frequencies in the background. it was a scene he would have enjoyed very much, if only he would have been a bit more conscious. as a hypochondriac regarding my own health, but also concerned for my friend, i decided to take him home. night buses would have been a fuckin' delirium...but fuck there were still three dead by dawn parties to go before the 23rd and final event! crash couldn't stay in there like this. after two changes we arrived in trafalgar square. i was dragging him with me like a bag of potatoes. from there it was easy to get to every corner of london. the best part was that in all of crash’s housing chaos i didn't even know where he was living anymore. “bah i’ll take him to mine in walthamstow” i decided. still 25 minutes to the next night bus though. not long after, maybe as an effect of the fresh night air, crash started looking healthy again and feeling generally better. “fuck i felt awful...as if i had a line of baygon!” “they must have been really rotten for a while those carrots...” i replied, happy to see him in shape again. “oh but what the hell are we doing in trafalgar? it's early, just 2 o'clock...” “hey pale-faced, you know i'm hypochondriac...you really looked like you were ‘dead by dawn’”. “ah ah...you and your dead by dawn uh! come on, let's get back there, you asshole of a balli”. basically, all the same hassles were repeated getting back to railton road. caught by the emergency before, i had simply paid the ticket to the driver getting into the bus, both for me and for crash. “there's a trick not to pay the night bus. we just need to sneak in from the exit doors”. squatter wisdom. at trafalgar, it turned out to be even easier. there was always a lot of people getting off, hence by the third night bus we actually managed to sneak on without being seen from the rear-view mirror. in half an hour we were in kennington again, where the whole mess started. only one bus in five was opening the back doors, as nearly no one was getting off there. when, once per hour, that bloody fuckin' lucky bus was coming, the doors only opened for a few seconds and sneaking in without getting nicked was an olympic mission. after almost three hours i lost hope: “let's do this fuckin' ticket and that's it... it's getting cold as well”! “no, niet, null.” diehard as usual, crash. but there it was: the 13b. a fat black lady got off, slowed down by massive bags. a huge push comes and...bam! we found ourselves comfortably seated on the bus. the 13b was the only night transport passing all the way through brixton, and for this reason it was stopping every single minute. after a hundred stops, by 4:53am we were back on railton road. day was almost breaking. from a hyper-kinetic kick we could detect the speedcore murder that was being committed in the basement. the entrance was packed. as soon as we arrived on the dance floor the sound cut out. there were quite a few who were dead by dawn, but nothing compared to typical italian “wastedness”. we tapped into a debate with keith stevvi about a web platform for hard electronic music. christoph and others, had already opened subnet, a transnational network for diy vinyl distribution. to put our contents on the net was a logical consequence. the discussion moved eventually to the anti-chill out zone, in front of a big pot of chips and beans, a post-dead by dawn ritual. there were twenty of us, munching chips and scarfing down baked beans (in the uk they are sweet!!). it was there that c8.com was born (or at least that is when i discovered it)! the forum dedicated to our sound scene at the time is still active. c8 was the menu code for the chips and beans in railton road. “20 c8 courses, please!” ahahahah :d acknowledgments thanks to roberta bononi, workin klass noize and michael horowitz. author biography modern, liberated, contemporary, of a broad spectrum, artistic, intellectual, post-organic, vegetative, stress-relieving, experimental, extraordinary. all these adjectives are often applied to electronic music, but with dj balli (sonic belligeranza rec.) things are different. references and general reading aa. vv. 1991. art strikes paper. edinburgh: ak press. alien underground. 1994. alien underground 0.0. london: self-published. alien underground. 1995. alien underground 0.1. london: self-published. balli, riccardo. 2013. apocalypso disco. milan: agenzia x. ———. 2014. “how to cure a gabba”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture, 6(2). <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.02.12>. datacide magazine. 2012.berlin: datacide. home, stewart. 1988. the assault on culture. london: aporia press & unpopular books. technet. 1994–95. technet. london: self-published. an introduction to music technology, second edition dan hosken new york: routledge, 2015. isbn: 978-0-415-82572-6 (hardcover), 978-0-415-82573-3 (paperback) rrp: us$147.00 (hardcover), us$68.95 (paperback) martin k. koszolko melbourne polytechnic (australia) dan hosken explores the myriad of ways in which technology can be implemented in the practices of composers, performers and teachers. this introductory text spans a large group of topics covered in a comprehensive and accessible way. the volume is divided into four sections: sound, audio, midi and software instruments and computer notation and computer-assisted instruction. included are also two appendices, covering computer hardware and computer software. each of the main sections is preceded by an overview text summarising the key issues discussed. hosken argues that principles of music technology should be analysed in the context of practical work, and throughout the text he provides suggested activities, complementing the core content. the importance of aural experiences is also emphasised and the book is presented with a companion website featuring audio examples relevant to the covered topics. the website is up to date and provides a large collection of resources, such as audio examples, youtube videos and urls to relevant online content. the online component is a helpful expansion of the material covered in the book and allows dissemination of various types of information conveniently gathered in one place, which is practical in a teaching environment. hosken is pragmatic in his approach and prioritises the importance of the presented material to students operating in the contemporary music production landscape. an example of this method is the choice of topics for the appendices. the decision to include the discussion on computer hardware and software in the appendices was dictated by the fact that, while important, these topics are intuitively understood by current generations of students who grew up with computer technologies. while a good understanding of the fundamental knowledge related to computer hardware and software is very helpful in troubleshooting of the technical problems as well as the efficient day-to-day work with music technology, the priority in the volume is given to sound-related topics, which is a sensible choice. the second edition of the book, reviewed here, sees a restructure of some of the content as well as new additions. section three midi and software instruments now includes chapters on synthesis and sampling, which in the first edition of the book were presented separately. the new edition offers several references to mobile platforms, particularly ios-based apps facilitating music creation and performance as well as computer-assisted instruction. this discussion on mobile apps is a welcome update, as since the launch of the ios app store in 2008 musicians have gained access to an ever-growing range of tactile apps with unparalleled music capabilities. in addition to the information on ios apps, the updated text features references to hardware accessories relevant to the ios platform. the book helps to facilitate an understanding of the key principles that lie behind the technology, rather than discussing specific software or hardware tools. while the text does not focus on specific software there are numerous references to popular plugins and digital audio workstation (daw) programs. these examples offer a fairly broad overview of available software options, with the most frequently mentioned daw applications being pro tools, reason and logic pro, while other popular daws such as cubase and ableton are mentioned only in passing. this approach helps to avoid the dangers of analysing minute details of technological tools that change at a rapid pace, which would quickly render such analysis obsolete. as such, there is a degree of reliance on the reader’s capacity to conduct further research into various, more specific aspects of audio technology that they might be utilising or learning at the same time. this additional research can hopefully be facilitated and aided by lecturers of undergraduate courses, as students are hosken’s primary reader group. in my own tertiary teaching practice, i found the segments of the book discussing the properties of sound, midi, synthesis, sampling and bit rates to be of particular value to students new to these aspects of music technology. such content has proven to be an excellent resource for introductory information on these topics. the book is designed for makers and creators who want to use technology in their present or future professional activities and for whom, hosken argues, it is important to understand how music technology works. he does not discuss technology separate to music, which, i believe, is a step than can help practitioners who frequently wear a hat of musician and sound technician at the same time. in my practice as a music producer i found that it is often easy to fall into the trappings of technological solutions to problems encountered in a mix and forget about the musical ones. an example of a discussion just as important to music performers as it should be to music technologists is chapter three, featured in the first section of the book focused on sound, where topics such as harmonics, overtones and timbre modification are discussed. a limitation of the book is the lack of more in-depth explanation of some complex topics or processes that might be challenging for beginners. examples of such topics, covered rather briefly, include a discussion on tuning and temperament in the section on sound, and the description of compression in the section covering audio. a topic that could be also expanded in a future update to the section on midi and software instruments is elaboration on how midi technology and computer software can be used in a live performance context. the closest the book gets to this issue is a discussion on performance apps for ios devices and a brief description of midi mapping. yet there is no discussion on the possibilities for interactive performance facilitated by programs such as ableton live. this software is discussed primarily as an example of a daw capable of hosting max for live, where the latter is mentioned as an illustration of a programming environment. it is possible, however, to use other featured topics on midi hardware and ios performance apps as a helpful guide covering at least some issues related to live performance set-ups. at the beginning of the book, hosken clearly states that the amount and depth of coverage was carefully considered and designed in a way to make the content suitable for an introductory class. to combat the issue of limited coverage of some of the more complex issues, at the end of each of the sections we find a list of further readings as well as suggested activities, expanding on the initial topics. the overarching thesis of hosken’s book is that the understanding and mastering of technology empowers musicians to focus on music and ultimately provides them with the means of making a living in a variety of ways, such as arranging, composing, teaching and performing. this is aligned with my own experience, as i found that the merging of strong musical skills with an in-depth knowledge of technology is a reliable recipe for being able to gain independence as well as authority in the studio, on stage as well as in the music technology classroom. overall, hosken has successfully analysed and presented a wide breadth of material that is of importance to music practitioners utilising technology. the book is a comprehensive introductory resource on a variety of topics that can be used as a valuable starting point to further investigations in the field. musical rhythm in the age of digital reproduction anne danielsen (ed.) farnham: ashgate, 2010. isbn: 978-1-4094-0340-1 (hardcover), 978-1-4094-0931-1 (ebook) rrp: us$93.47 (hardcover), us$72.90 (ebook) stefanie alisch university of bayreuth (germany) the field of (ethno)musicological groove research spans about two decades if we see charles keil's article "participatory discrepancies and the power of music" (1987) as a beginning. two central tropes in the debate around groove are 1. the relevance of microrhythmic variances; and 2. their production through interaction between musicians. this being so, groove discourse has been marked by overt and covert technophobia and a cultural pessimism that favors hand-played rhythms over electronically produced ones, decrying the latter as soulless, stale and unable to bring about community making processes (see keil 1995). musical rhythm in the age of digital reproduction offers a timely update of this discussion through close readings of the micro-rhythmic makeup of tracks from r&b, trip hop, us and uk garage, varieties of house, techno, pop and abstract electronica. some might remember anne danielsen's in-depth study presence and pleasure: the funk grooves of james brown and parliament (2006), itself a staple of the groove discourse. between 2004 and 2009, "rhythm in the age of digital reproduction (radr)" ran as a group research project under danielsen's guidance at the university of oslo, where she is a professor of musicology. the volume presents results of the project that was funded by the norwegian research council (http://www.hf.uio.no/imv/english/research/projects/rhythm/). contributors range from danielsen's then phd students to established figures of rhythm research like eric f. clarke and tellef kvifte. the project pivots on the question: "what happened to the sound and rhythm of african-american-derived, groove-directed popular music styles when these grooves began to be produced and played by machines?" (1). danielsen's introduction summarizes key concepts of groove research such as basic pulsation; the synching of different rhythms on a material level or a perception level called "entrainment"; the idea that an abstract model of a rhythm exists and that each played actualization diverges from the abstract model; and the notion that inter-onset-intervals are the fundamental criteria for perceiving the structure of a rhythm. danielsen advocates a focus shift in three aspects: a) the move away from discussing rhythm purely in terms of inter-onset-intervals on a time line and towards an inclusion of timbre and sound as constituting elements of a groove; b) leaving behind the idea that bodily-performative practices serve merely as illustrative expressions in favor of treating body movement as a vital element of groove; c) abandoning the idea of digital audio workstations (daws) as dehumanizing and instead exploring how they enable the development of new musical gestures. the volume is divided into three parts: i) microrhythm and rhythmic structure; ii) groove and embodiment; and iii) mediation and music production. choosing depth over comprehensiveness i introduce here one contribution from each section. in part i) danielsen analyzes the pulse of d'angelo's neo-soul hit "left and right" according to three different models of microrhythmic deviation: the metronome model, which focuses purely on impacts on a timeline; the local time shift model which also works with inter-onset-intervals, but includes relations of time-spans; and her own innovative beat bin model, which recognizes the "shape of the beats at a categorical level that is the dynamic feature of the groove" (33). a beat bin has a certain extension in time, but instead of just marking a beat's beginning and end point, this model considers the sound qualities (transients, bass rumblings) on the sound's material level and rhythmic tolerance on the listener's perceptional level. the beat bin has a shape similar to the letter u, which is placed on a rhythm's timeline with steeper or flatter lines indicating the beat's extension in sound beyond note-onset-points. beat bins can be placed in equidistant fashion and still contain within themselves varying sound events of shifting position. danielsen's contribution provides not only a meticulous analysis of the d'angelo track, but also a concise overview of pulse models while challenging classics of groove and rhythm theory. the bin metaphor evokes a sense of three-dimensionality (not just a one-dimensional onset-point on a two-dimensional time-line), thus including sound perception and body movement of the listener. in part ii) hans t. zeiner-henriksen's chapter "moved by the groove: bass drum sounds and body movements in electronic dance music" also explores the impact of sound variations within an individual rhythmical element. starting with the popular dj trick of depriving the audience of the bass drum sound for a couple of bars only to provoke euphoric reactions when the bass drum finally returns, the chapter demystifies the ubiquitous association between rhythm and body movement by taking a close look at a crucial rhythmic element of dance music, the bass drum. in an earlier study, the author investigated body movements on the up-and-down axis with relation to rhythmic structure in edm. he found that downward motion of head, foot and upper body tend to occur on the downbeat, usually the place of the bass drum. upward movement is associated with the upbeat, usually the place of the hi-hat. within an individual bass drum sound in edm, there is very often a descending in pitch, and it becomes unclear what should be regarded as the beat. is it the bass drum's onset-point in time or the moment when the lowest pitch is reached? touching on music psychology and neuro-scientific models such as affordance, entrainment and mirror neurons, the chapter links descending pitch in a bass drum sound and downward body movement on the downbeat through the concept of primary metaphor. the discussion of frequency ranges, transients and pitch shifts within certain bass drum sounds shows an increasing trend to deploy bass drums with descending pitch shifts over the last three decades. the aesthetic result is a push and pull effect between a downbeat that feels late and an upbeat that feels early. zeiner-henriksen's exploration of the "inner dynamics" (139) of bass drums in quantized music in relation to bodily movement concludes that "the downbeats of a dance track are crucial in providing not only pulse but a specific sensation of pulse, which affects the way all other rhythmic patterns and sounds are experienced" (139). considerations of sampling as discussed in terms of copyright (infringement), as supposedly subversive practice, and as mainly connected to hip hop and not musicologically as an aesthetic practice across genres serve as the starting point for paul harkins' "microsampling: from akufen's microhouse to todd edwards and the sound of uk garage" in part iii). harkins moves away from the notion of sampling as "sonic quotation and the reconfiguration of existing sound recordings" (179) and towards discussing "some of the ways in which the digital sampler, as a creative tool, has shaped the music of producers" (178). harkins reminds us of the four uses of the term "sampling" as defined by kvifte: 1. the conversion of sound from analogue to digital; 2. relating to the use of hardware or software samplers; 3. "integrating existing recordings into a new recording as a recognizable sonic quotation" (180); and 4. the "use of tape splicing or digital editing to enhance studio recordings" (180). canadian producer akufen records "random fragments of obscure songs and mistuned white noise" (184) from the radio and arranges them into "abstract sound paintings" (186) with straight drum patterns. todd edwards, on the other hand, developed a distinct house style that is marked by 1. a trademark swing owing to the ensoniq eps sampler's "16 triplet-quantizing feature" (191); and 2. "a choir of sampled voices" (188) comprising minute pieces of r&b and disco vocals singing "meaningless melodies" (188). several themes run through the volume. affordance serves as a theoretical framework that links groove perception and production while dynamically linking them with the specific context of the listener. furthermore, danielsen, bjerke and zeiner-henriksen include "timbre, pitch, dynamics and texture" (15) in the groove discussion, thus expanding established notions of the attack-sustain-decay-release model of sound events and the note-onset positions as defining elements of a groove. while in some cases the use of visual representations is clear and strongly tied in with the verbal analysis (danielsen), in other cases it is of a rather illustrative nature. succinct metaphors capture the aesthetics of certain grooves. images like the "seasick time-feel" of d'angelo's tracks (21), the "ill, tight sound" of timbaland (179), and the "stuttering effect" that "recalls a skipping cd" (171) make the musicological analyses appeal to the senses of the reader. overall, musical rhythm in the age of digital reproduction is a precise, lucid and superbly edited compendium and a rich source of literature on rhythm and groove that lends itself as advanced teaching material. i wish there was a cd with this book, because the selection of musical material is brilliant, and listening to the analyzed tracks while reading is a must. references danielsen, anne. 2006. presence and pleasure: the funk grooves of james brown and parliament. middleton, ct: wesleyan university press. keil, charles. 1987. "participatory discrepancies and the power of music". cultural anthropology 2(3): 275–83. –––– 1995. "the theory of participatory discrepancies. a progress report". ethnomusicology 39: 1-20. remixology: tracing the dub diaspora paul sullivan london: reaktion books, 2014. isbn: 978-1-78023-199-0 rrp: $31.54 (cad); $25.00 (usd); £15 (uk) tobias c. van veen université de montréal (canada) paul sullivan opens his remixology: tracing the dub diaspora by writing that “dub is a genre and a process”, as he describes the intersection of afrodiasporic and rastafari soundsystem culture with bass-heavy music styles as “ethereal, mystical, conceptual, fluid, avant-garde, raw, unstable, provocative, postmodern, disruptive, heavyweight, political, enigmatic ...” (2014: 7). dub resonates as an echo through all of these signs, though remixology tends to provide a lightweight treatment of the complex of metaphors sullivan commences with. less an intensive cultural study, even less so indulging in the kind of rich poetic license one would expect from a music journalist such as david toop, sullivan’s make-do journalistic approach combines first-hand interviews with a repackaging of well-travelled tales to tell a rich narrative of dub’s musical and cultural development, focusing on its producers, soundsystem operators, selectors and djs. avoiding the usual rounds of critique that gives cultural studies its edge—there is very little here on gender/sexuality, power/violence, colonialism/race or nationalism/politics—and leaving unremarked the sometimes provocative and interesting statements that arise in interviews, sullivan nonetheless provides a gentle-enough grand narrative of dub’s outward spread from jamaica. in the process sullivan lays the groundwork for naming the “dub diaspora” as a transnational network based upon postcolonial migrancy and the dissemination—through copying, remixing and versioning—of dub studio and performance practices. remixology proves a readable and insightful treatment of dub for lay readers and studious scholars alike, beginning with a smart retelling of dub’s origins in jamaica, where sullivan weaves the history of soundsystem culture into the invention of reggae and lover’s rock, providing a convincing case for the evolution of dub as a creative studio practice of “versioning” reggae tracks where “the engineer could also be an artist in his own right” (2014: 47). though there is nothing particularly new to be gleaned here for readers of michael veal (2007), sullivan’s at-hand interviews provide fresh takes upon the early years—from the 1970s through dancehall—by crafting a series of mini-biopics focused on individual practitioners such as lee “scratch” perry (“keenly experimental” (2014: 41)), king tubby (“polite, fairly reserved, and clean-cut” (2014: 45)) and scientist (who created “a clean, minimal style of dub that proved highly popular” (2014: 53)). though these biopics of these and other producers often rely upon secondary sources, they nonetheless provide a concise and efficient insight into a practitioner’s background, style and creative process. sullivan details how such producers came to dub music by articulating the social milieu of studio production—the individual quirks and social relationships that gave rise to various alliances and fall-outs—to an overview of various producers’ primary recorded works and how their style differed from (or borrowed from) the work of others. thus, for example, sullivan smartly describes how “tubby worked with a mixing board and vocals, while perry constantly worked on live rhythms and compositions” (2014: 48). such effortless wordcraft—that defines an important methodological and sonic distinction in dub music production—encapsulates sullivan’s style. though at times i had wanted remixology to delve deeper into the sociopolitical complexes of afrodiasporic identity, history and religion that strike through dub cultures, the attention of the text to both an accessible level of diction and argument is an achievement that cultural studies scholars, lost in the quagmire of postmodern verbiage, would be well-advised to learn from. that said, remixology felt oddly lacking—given its journalistic strokes—in its descriptive exploration of dub as a musical sounding. an attempt to evoke in words what dub sounds like, particularly when addressing specific tracks cited in the text, remained strangely absent. nor are the albums themselves evaluated from the perspective of a music critic; instead, a sparse but repetitive deployment of jazz-style journalistic clichés abound in describing its practitioners—the “legendary”, “monumental”, and so on. likewise, sullivan cultivates a particular (if not peculiar) perspective upon the undefined distinction of the “underground”—to which perry apparently “went” to after the mysterious black ark studio fire (2014: 50)—to the “mainstream”, the latter to which uk ambient dub house act the orb apparently belongs to (2014: 90) (indeed, the orb are not otherwise discussed in remixology, which appears something of a strange omission). moving on from the demise of dub in jamaica, sullivan emphasises its influence upon new york hip-hop, not particularly as a bass riddim spatialised sound (which is less prevalent in most hip-hop, to be sure), but as a studio practice and structure of soundsystem performance, noting that “both grew out of impoverished urban areas as a means of self-expression” (2014: 97) (and to which we might add: “self-empowerment”). one of the more intriguing moments here is when sullivan unpacks dj kool herc, who, though of jamaican descent, has in interviews denied that jamaican dee-jaying informed his “pioneering” approach (2014: 99). here sullivan draws upon eyewitness accounts of herc’s toasting style as well as dub and reggae musical selection to suggest otherwise, while also resampling an interview with jeff chang (2005) where herc pays respect to his roots in jamaica’s trenchtown. remixology is at its most critical when questioning the reliability of self-mythologising narrative, insofar as sullivan remains suspicious as to how memory is often recontextualised by performers for the service of other values (such as appearing “authentically” american). keeping to nyc, sullivan draws attention to dj spooky and the coining of the dub-and-dread influenced hip-hop genre of “illbient”, though only over the course of a scant two and a half pages (2014: 102–04). though sullivan mentions spooky’s jamaican roots, it would have been interesting to hear more about the creative connection between spooky, british-guyanese producer mad professor, and canada’s twilight circus dub soundsystem (ryan moore, originally from vancouver, bc, who now lives in the netherlands), precisely because of their overlapping series of collaborations with spooky’s dubtometry (2003). indeed, the connections forged through spooky’s album are more or less synecdoche to the entire thesis of the “dub diaspora”—a provocative thetic slogan of which much more needs to be said. more also needs to be said concerning the dub diaspora in a later chapter on dub techno. though sullivan mentions how the berlin club tresor was “heavily-involved in the formative detroit-berlin connection” behind (dub) techno, he doesn’t explicitly reflect upon how the “dub diaspora” was manifested in, as well as was already a constitutive aspect of, this connection (2014: 169). other opportunities are also missed to further posit the musical imaginary and means of the dub diaspora; for example, while sullivan is attentive to the work of basic channel, maurizio (moritz von oswald), tikiman (paul st. hilaire, whom toronto’s deadbeat later collaborates with) and the chain reaction (sub)label—a worthy feat considering its scant academic attention—there is oddly enough no mention of mike ink’s label studio one. ink’s minimalist rhythmic structures have yet to be analysed as drawing from their more famous jamaican namesake. these critiques of the conceptual rigor of “dub diaspora” aside, sullivan provides a useful discussion of dub techno, describing basic channel’s nine-record m-series as defining “the dub-techno blueprint” (2014: 171) while conducting informative conversations with both oswald and stefan betke (a.k.a. pole). sullivan’s narrative is at its most detailed when it builds into the profound impact dub has had upon british music, from digidub and post-punk to “uk rap and the dubcore continuum” (2014: 116). remixology shines in sullivan’s evidently more familiar surroundings of ragga jungle, drum ‘n’ bass, 2-step, garage, grime and dubstep, where he traces in some detail the early import of dub music, immigrant musicians and soundsystem performance to the uk during the 1970s. sullivan outlines how reggae and dub soundsystem and production styles mutated into post-punk, ’80s dancehall, ’90s electronic music and millenial dubstep developments, providing one of the more efficient reviews of the uk dub continuum. particular attention is paid to the influence of dub soundsystems—such as lewisham’s saxon studio international and coxsone outernational, and their complex series of named allegiances to their jamaican counterparts—providing a sociohistorical context that is not always present in other chapters. of particular interest too is the focus on dubstep; mala’s quote that “britain isn’t jamaica but it’s still an island, with an island mentality” (in sullivan 2014: 142) resonates with the larger patterns of postcolonial migrancy and cultural adaptation at work in the british context that likewise remains marked by its “island” posture of structural racism. while sullivan is attentive to how racism has factored into the british jamaican cultural context, he is not as critically aware as to how his own prose often implicitly replicates the paradigm of race itself; for example, he describes how “employment and housing were denied to [jamaican immigrants] because of their race” (2014: 57)—rather than the critical and important understanding that discrimination takes place because of racism (or more accurately here: because of white supremacy). sullivan pays particular attention to the year 1976, when eric clapton’s infamous on-stage “drunken rant” to “stop britain from becoming a black colony” mirrored similar “racist diatribes” from conservative mp enoch powell that likewise reflected the imf-imposed welfare cuts under the labour government (2014: 71). while remixology is not primarily concerned with audience responses or the transactional and circuitous relations between dancefloors, music, performers and technologies, i was pleased to note that sullivan grants some quasi-agency to the technological objects and devices that led to dub’s characteristic bass-space of reverb and echo. sullivan notes some equipment throughout, from the defining use of the soundcraft mixing board and “roland space echo drum machine” (not a drum machine, of note, but a reverb tape-machine) (2014: 42), through to the use of the sony playstation in producing grime (2014: 137) and the creative repurposing of misfunctioning technologies to produce glitch dub and techno, notably pole’s infamously broken waldorf pole filter (2014: 175). however, there is little description of what these devices do, how they work, and how they are creatively disabused to make novel and unworldly sound. media studies and production studies scholars will find many signposts here, but the in-depth unpacking will have to be furthered elsewhere. at the very close of remixology, sullivan outlines a debate between contemporary dub practitioners over the authenticity of digital versus analogue dub studio practices (2014: 214–21). canada’s dub techno artisan deadbeat (a.k.a. scott montieth), who is a professional music software designer, argues that digital effects today are “near one-to-one copies” in “software form” of “nearly every piece of vintage hardware today known to man” (2014: 217), while the likes of clive chin, who apparently was “lured” back into the studio to combat the rise of digitally-produced dub, argues that digital “just doesn’t sound as pure and warm as analogue” (in sullivan 2014: 218). deadbeat nonetheless does not champion the digital as superseding the analogue, as he makes the point that what matters isn’t so much the effects themselves, but what is fed into them (2014: 217). an attentive media scholar would perhaps suggest that the technicity of the object does in fact matter, at the material level, in the composition of sound but also the reciprocal and physical relation of the body/self to technicity, but unfortunately remixology does not enter into a meditation upon these interesting positions. rewinding remixology’s highlights, one only wishes sullivan had entered into some interpretative forays over the very meaning of dub, both as a sounding and to its practitioners. the pop group’s mark stewart, for example, says that he sees “dub as a skeleton key to reality” (in sullivan 2014: 151), suggesting a technico-ontological explication of reverb space and delayed time through resounding sound, while at the same time, sullivan discusses dub as a “tool to transport listeners to the past” (2014: 9). how this occurs or what this means is unclear. in his introduction, sullivan also claims that remixology “looks at dub’s role as a ‘meta-virus’” (2014: 11), but precisely what this means, other than a meta-metaphor, and how it applies to the dissemination of dub, or the structure of the book itself (which is linear enough in a traditional biopic formulae, and not as a viral spread of replicants—expect no quasi-deleuzean dreaming here) remains as unclear in the conclusion as it is posited in the introduction. of course such metaphors are welcome concept probes for further thought—in mcluhan’s sense—though one wonders why, ultimately, the book is called “remixology”, given that the signifier sees little use inside the book’s pages nor significant definition in relation to dub. insofar as the book is a discourse (logos) on the remix, it isn’t, really—remixology is more concerned with the history and worldwide spread of dub music, its practice of versionings, its significant personages and locales of influences, and its forging of what might be called a “diaspora” of sonic and cultural networks, moreso than any particular discourse upon the “remix” as such. nonetheless, remixology remains a must-read for any scholar of afrodiasporic music culture, and certainly for any enthusiast of dub, be they a lay reader or academe deep into the haunted echoes of bass culture—though with the caveat that, if the latter, its claims should be listened to with a critical ear, attentive to what is left out of its empty spaces as much as to what resounds within. references chang, jeff. 2005. can’t stop won’t stop: a history of the hip-hop generation. new york: st. martin’s press. veal, michael e. 2007. dub: soundscapes and shattered songs in jamaican reggae. middletown: wesleyan university press. harm reduction or psychedelic support? caring for drug-related crises at transformational festivals dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 7(1): 55–75 issn 1947-5403 ©2015 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.01.03 harm reduction or psychedelic support? caring for drug-related crises at transformational festivals deirdre ruane university of kent (uk) abstract many of the edm events known as “transformational festivals” provide psychedelic support spaces: volunteer projects caring for festivalgoers undergoing difficult drug experiences. mostly drawn from the festival community, many volunteer carers (“sitters”) subscribe to psychedelic culture discourse which frames these substances as aids to personal growth if handled appropriately. however, within the dominant paradigm of international drug prohibition, support projects must employ the contrasting discourse of harm reduction in order to gain access to events, visibility to festivalgoers, and integration with other support staff. harm reduction, a paradigm for the care of drug users which began as a grassroots heroin addict advocacy movement, has since become associated with neoliberal, medicalised views of drugs, drug users and the self. this article considers how psychedelic support workers negotiate this discourse dichotomy in the course of caregiving, within differing national and local drug policy climates. early findings are presented from ethnographic fieldwork as a psychedelic support volunteer with three organisations at seven festivals, combining participant observation and in-depth interviews with nineteen support workers. events in the uk, the us and portugal were studied due to these countries’ contrasting policy regimes. points of conflict between the psychedelic and harm reduction discourses were found to create tensions both within the support organisations and in their relations with on-site medics, security guards, festival organisers and police. the findings suggest that mainstream harm reduction discourses may be a poor fit for psychedelics and that risks inhere in their adoption by festival support spaces, such as abjection of drug users in difficulty which may create a trust-damaging divide between users and workers. keywords: transformational festivals, psychedelics, recreational drugs, harm reduction deirdre ruane is a doctoral researcher at the university of kent’s school of social policy, sociology and social research. her research interests include drug harm reduction, festival cultures and edmcs. she has been published in transforming cultures ejournal and the forthcoming anthology by dave king et al., neurotransmissions: essays on psychedelics from breaking convention. strange attractor press. feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.01.03 dancecult 7(1)56 introduction tuesday 5 august, 2014, boom festival, portugal. late afternoon. now that the sacred fire has been lit, the first beats from the dance temple roll across the hillside to meet the onrushing crowd. the heat is punishing, but inside the temple we find shade and cool falling mist. faces turn up to receive it. it’s finally begun. many of the crowd, swept up in the moment, drop acid—or a blue fractal blotter they think is acid—round about now, and by midnight psychedelic support space kosmicare is having its busiest night on record. within the compound, near the centre of the site, a full team of sitters and others not on shift, pulled in to help, are hard at work. i’m with a young irishman who thinks he’s in hell. it’s like psychedelic a&e: visitors are arriving on foot and in jeeps or buggies, alone or brought by friends, medics or security. the list on the whiteboard by the front desk, where visitors are checked in and their detailed admission forms are filled in, gets longer and longer. most of them are having classic lsd trips: a familiar sequence of dissolution and gradual reassembling. but by morning we are wondering why a few just don’t seem to be coming down. that’s when people from checkin—the government-endorsed drug checking lab that’s been running all night by the main dance floor—arrive with their detailed findings and an explanation. what the visitors thought was lsd is in fact dox, a family of psychedelic amphetamines with twenty-five to thirty-six hour effects. as we formulate a strategy for visitors on dox, checkin are posting warning signs all over the site. burn night, 31 august, 2014, burning man, nevada, usa. after watching the most stubborn man in the history of burns finally collapse i arrive on shift at the zendo “psych support” space at 2:00am. inside it’s warmly lit, with piles of blankets on raised sleeping platforms, and skilled therapists stand ready to assist. but it’s buried down a dark side street with minimal footfall, out past 2.30 and e, and because of the hostile nature of nevada law enforcement, its advertising has been evasive and ambiguous. it’s almost empty. some roamers are being dispatched to the biggest and loudest dance camps, to tell people about the zendo and offer to sit with anyone they find having a crisis. they will find no one who admits to this. the shift leader quietly points me towards a guy sitting cross-legged on the floor, swaying and moving his hands fluidly through the air. after we’ve talked for a while i ask him what he took. he closes up and pulls away. “i don’t see why i should tell you that”, he says, “it’s irrelevant to my personal quest”. saturday afternoon, 26 july, 2014, secret garden party, uk. kosmicare uk is tucked away in the most remote corner of the festival site, far from the medical and welfare tents, behind a fairground swing ride that pumps out disco. we’re expecting a quiet shift. then a dozen or so late-teenage boys and girls arrive, supporting a terrified ruane | harm reduction or psychedelic support? 57 girl who is convinced the security guards intend to strip-search her. they’ve all taken what they think is mdma. one of the volunteers, a chemist, examines their baggie and decides it’s pentedrone, a recently synthesised cathinone associated with compulsive binges and stimulant psychosis. he’s almost right—months later, results from a postal testing service confirm it’s pentedrone’s closest relative, alpha-pvp—but at the time there’s no way to check. meanwhile i watch them follow their friend down into the same pit of paranoia: black magic, conspiracy, harassment, sexual violence, incontinence and shame. the three of us on shift work flat-out long into the night. sleep will resolve the problem, but they think we’re part of the conspiracy, and they won’t sleep here till we’ve won their trust. the next afternoon i head over to medical and welfare. we were told they’d been briefed, but the ones on duty haven’t heard of us. there have been hundreds of cases like the ones we had, distressed and paranoid in eerily similar ways. but the brusque nurse on the triage desk won’t believe that it’s not mdma. she insists it’s “the bad batch the police told us about”, so pure that people are overdosing. i try to tell her that the effects we saw were nothing like mdma overdose, and anyway there’s bound to be much more than one bad batch at a festival this size—but she’s busy, and no longer listening. psychedelic support involves the provision of a “care space” or refuge from the sometimes overwhelming atmosphere of edm and other events, with volunteer carers known as “sitters” providing support to participants having difficult drug experiences. the purpose of the space is to assist participants towards the resolution of these experiences, and relatedly to alleviate the burden of psychedelic crises upon on-site medics who are often ill-equipped to handle them. most often appearing at “transformational festivals”, these spaces are also known as “psychedelic welfare” or “psychedelic harm reduction”. “psychedelic harm reduction” is a somewhat contentious phrase. harm reduction is a paradigm for the care of drug users offering an alternative to approaches which focus on criminalisation and abstinence, seeking to reduce the harm rather than the use of drugs. however, over the years the paradigm has changed from a grassroots movement driven by users to one shaped by discourses of neoliberalism and medicalisation. the discourse of psychedelic culture, expressed in the ideologies of transformational festivals, conflicts with that of mainstream harm reduction in its evaluation of “drugs”, in its conception of the drug user, the self and the other and its understanding of the nature of the relationship between drugs workers and the users they support. while psychedelic support workers tend to subscribe to the psychedelic culture discourse, they must work within the harm reduction paradigm to be permitted to operate at events, leading to tensions which affect their care practices. this complex situation is further impacted by the effects of national and local drug policy. as part of my doctoral research, i spent the summer of 2014 volunteering with, observing and conducting interviews with three psychedelic support organisations, at festivals in three countries with contrasting legal climates. these were kosmicare uk (uk), the zendo project (us) and kosmicare (portugal). this paper will use early fieldwork findings and dancecult 7(1)58 relevant literature to compare the discourse of psychedelic culture and the transformational festival with that of harm reduction, and consider ways in which the tension between the two discourses affects the support organisations. first, the scene must be set. transformational festivals have a distinctive culture which sets them apart from other edm festivals, focusing on self-transformation and communitybuilding through dance, group ritual and co-creativity. psychedelic support plays an important role in this “transformation”. the following section draws upon both scholarly and scene writing, along with my own observations during fieldwork, to provide a brief introduction to the transformational festival. transformational festivals, identity and the collective transformational festivals are an emerging category of events with some or all of the following features: edm, including psychedelic dance music; visionary art; an emphasis on creative participation rather than spectatorship; leave no trace or permaculturebased operating principles; seminars, workshops and lectures; green politics and/or social activism; and a remit of personal and social transformation (krasnow 2012), along with widespread use of psychedelics and group ritual. leung (2010) positions the american and canadian west coast as the current centre of the movement, though transformational festivals can be found worldwide. figure 1. the sacred fire, boom. photo credit: author (2014). ruane | harm reduction or psychedelic support? 59 several cultural currents converge in the transformational festival, a non-exhaustive account of which will be given here. one is burning man, at which a temporary community known as black rock city is built in the nevada desert for a week each year. burning man began as an anarcho-punk event emphasising art, ritual and co-creativity. dance music camps arrived later, becoming integral to the event ( jones 2011: 84–8). another influence on the transformational festival was the goatrance movement, which was seeded in the late 1960s with “spontaneous dance jams” on the beaches of goa mounted by “freaks” who had settled there. by the 1970s, these events had evolved into full-moon dance gatherings (st john 2012: 34–5). as the goa scene itself declined in the 1990s and 2000s, psychedelic events inspired by the goa aesthetic and philosophy began to spring up worldwide, such as boom, ozora and envision festivals. in the uk, the transformational festival scene that supports events like sunrise celebration, waveform and alchemy is rooted in the free festival/new age traveller movement of the 1970s, and was further fuelled by 1980s–90s uk rave and its legendary outdoor events (dearling 2012: 14). migrating across the atlantic in the mid1990s, rave combined with “progressive currents” on the us west coast to bring about a proliferation of transformational festivals there (leung 2010). the “transformation” which is said to occur at these events has various vectors. social transformation may arise from connections made, information exchanged and skills learned at events. in constructing festival spaces, crews and festivalgoers engage in utopics: a form figure 2. constructing the temple, burning man 2014. photo credit: author (2014). dancecult 7(1)60 of “spatial play” involving the construction of physical representations of “the good society” (marin 1984: 6–12; hetherington 1998: 328). though these representations are necessarily temporary and often hotly contested (st john 2013), they enable the formation of activist networks which can persist on return to the “real world”, in areas such as non-market economies (kozinets 2002: 20–38), environmentalism (purdue et al. 1997: 660–4), or use of festival-learned skills to assist disaster relief efforts ( jones 2011: 176–8). alongside the transformational festival’s utopian social aspirations, and inextricable from them, is the idea of the transformation of self through the festival experience and the non-ordinary states of being it facilitates. numerous authors, for example gilmore (2010: 13), tramacchi (2000: 206) and pike (2011: 158), have framed the festival state by way of victor turner’s theory of liminality (turner 1969: 95), in which a threshold is crossed into a “betwixt and between” state where everyday rules and the flow of normal time are suspended and new social roles can be assumed. however, st john’s reconfiguration of turner’s theory (2001) offers a better purchase on transformational festivals, acknowledging the wild heterogeneity of peak experiences and the central role of embodiment. perhaps the most common image of the collective, embodied spirit of transformational festivals is that of the dance floor, on which ego boundaries are said to dissolve, resulting in ecstatic experiences of communion mediated by the rhythms of psytrance and other edm, and often assisted by consumption of psychedelics. duffy et al. (2011: 23) describe how an “emotional response of belonging” arises from communication “through pulse”, such as that engaged in by a dancing crowd moving in synchrony. as st john (2012: 183) writes, in spaces like the dance temple at boom festival “the boundaries that separate people from each other and from the world are subject to liquidation”. this merging with the collective may involve a temporary suspension of—or deliberate flight from—everyday identity as a unitary neoliberal subject (as described by rose 1996: 41) constantly engaged in processes of self-monitoring, self-governing and efficiency maximisation. as st john (2012: 116) writes, one becomes “unburdened of disciplined, voluntary modes of subjectivity”. while one is thus unburdened, a different subjectivity reveals itself. experiences of selfhood within the space of the transformational festival are characterised by fluidity, integration with others and periods of dissolution into group ecstatic states—an experience which is arguably the driving force behind the transformational festival’s collectivist, utopic aspirations. however, the process is not always smooth. as echenhofer (2012) found, the phase of dissolution early in a psychedelic experience can be disturbing and involve an upwelling of difficult emotions. in the right setting, and especially if support is given, this crisis phase can give way to a “healing catharsis” (leung 2010) which resolves into an experience of reintegration, both in oneself and with the collective. this process is highly valued within transformational festival culture and seen as an opportunity for growth (zendo 2013: 2). thus leung (2010) sees the provision of psychedelic support as integral to the culture. ruane | harm reduction or psychedelic support? 61 figure 3. sunrise at the dance temple, boom. photo credit: author (2014). in the context of these values, drug consumption preferences in transformational festival culture differ from those, for instance, at corporate edm events. informal surveys of festivalgoers during fieldwork in the uk and portugal, alongside data from drug checking facilities, allowed me to build up a picture of supply and demand based on respondents’ stated preferences and on which substances they had noticed were being sold within the festival. “classic” psychedelics such as lsd, mushrooms and forms of dmt such as the smoking blend changa are the most highly valued, and along with mdma, the most sought after. cannabis is ubiquitous, and lesser-known synthetic psychedelics such as the 2c family are also popular. stimulants such as speed and mephedrone are present, but less popular than at more corporate events. ketamine provokes widespread ambivalence: many profess to dislike it but it is nonetheless widely used. most “hard” drugs such as heroin and crack—though not cocaine, at least not unanimously—are shunned by transformational festivalgoers, many of whom distance themselves emphatically from users of addictive drugs. finally, novel psychoactive substances (nps) such as the dox family, nbome and alpha-pvp, are rarely sought or sold explicitly; rather, they tend to be sold as one of the “classics”. successive waves of bans on psychoactive substances make the ongoing synthesis or rediscovery of still-legal nps an attractive proposition for the drug trade. nps have little history of human use and thus carry unknown risks. dancecult 7(1)62 several key aspects of psychedelic culture discourse will be foregrounded in this analysis, as they are central to the work of psychedelic support projects. these are views of the self; views of drug use and its value; attitudes to drug users and their relationship with support workers; and conceptions of the central purpose of the support space. the self is here regarded as transpersonal, holistic, part of a collective, and capable of dissolving and reforming, with a porous self/other boundary. in theory, drug users undergoing intense altered states are seen as engaged in valuable internal processes, and thus deserving of respect (zendo 2013: 2). as fellow scene members, support workers are considered to be the peers and equals of those they support. finally, the facilitation of potentially beneficial psychedelic processes with the aim of personal growth is the core purpose of the support space. as we shall see, each of these points contrasts sharply with mainstream harm reduction discourse. the next section provides a brief introduction to the support projects, their work within the transformational festival milieu and the differing pressures of local and national drug policy upon them. there is little scholarship concerning the projects as yet, so this account rests upon memoirs of and conversations with support workers, along with my own field observations. ground crew: psychedelic support projects at work psychedelic support volunteers are drawn from festival culture. many are psychologists, psychiatrists, counsellors and other mental health professionals; others are community drugs workers; some simply have extensive experience with psychedelics. their remit of care covers all difficult drug experiences for which medical attention is not required. while most work within the care space, mobile teams, such as the vibe patrol at boom or the zendo roamers at burning man, circulate on dance floors to “keep the vibe high”, providing primary care, water, reassurance and sometimes transport to the care space. the first step in a visitor’s care is establishing whether they require medical attention, referring them to medical staff if this is the case. if not, care strategies are shaped by what the visitor is believed to have taken, and thus the profile and estimated duration of the effects. for those deemed to be undergoing a psychedelic crisis arising from a normal dosage of a well-known substance, care focuses on the facilitation of the visitor’s internal process. it may start with the provision of basic comforts such as blankets, water or tea and a private, low-stimulus space if desired. subsequently, sitters remain with visitors, talking, listening or simply sitting quietly with the visitor as desired. the aim is to create an atmosphere of safety in which the visitor feels able to confront and process difficult emotions. in transformational festival culture, dance is seen as a powerful catalyst of this internal work. thus some care techniques use movement and dance to help visitors towards catharsis. zendo training includes a segment on “bodywork” techniques which encourage the visitor to focus on and amplify involuntary movements, and kosmicare sometimes features a separate space in which visitors can dance if desired. ruane | harm reduction or psychedelic support? 63 most such cases resolve without problems given support, comfort and time. however, many others are less predictable. visitors may have taken too much of one substance or an incompatible combination of several; been unwittingly spiked; be suffering from difficult physical conditions, lack of food or sleep; or been sold a more harmful substance than the one they expected. care of these cases focuses on the minimisation of health impacts. visitors are monitored closely and may be medicated if their case does not seem to be resolving, though this is avoided where possible. in rare cases, support workers may decide to keep visitors within the compound if they are thought to be a risk to themselves or others. formulating a care strategy with the right balance of process facilitation and damage control is easier in policy climates where drug checking is possible. where checking is prohibited, support staff must rely on guesswork and experience. experience, however, is inadequate in the face of the constant influx of nps being sold as more familiar drugs. punitive climates which lack checking facilities, and where transactions must be performed hastily and surreptitiously to avoid police, create favourable conditions for the sale of partly or wholly adulterated drugs, recalling rhodes’ (2009) characterisation of governments as “agents of harm production”. some of the roots of psychedelic support lie in the free festival movement of the 1970s in the uk, which saw the setup of festival aid, later festival welfare services, a governmentfunded organisation linked to drugs charity release and run by members of the traveller movement (dearling 2012: 65–80). others spring from goa, where karin silenzi de stagni, now the manager of kosmicare uk, set up a popular “nest” space at beach parties in the late 1990s (de stagni 2013). elsewhere, in 2001, maps—the multidisciplinary association for psychedelic studies—began to provide support at us festivals like burning man. a few years later, taking advantage of decriminalisation in portugal, portuguese government agency sicad invited maps to set up kosmicare at boom (emerson et al. 2014: 34), inspiring de stagni to start a uk branch. other projects include daath psy-help in hungary (móró and rácz 2013: 1), alice project and eclipse in germany and mobile drug checking services like spain’s energy control and austria’s checkit! which provide some psychedelic support as an adjunct to their lab work. however, this paper focuses on kosmicare, the zendo project (also a maps initiative) and kosmicare uk. kosmicare portuguese project kosmicare had approximately sixty volunteers, many of whom were mental health professionals, at boom festival in 2014. volunteers work in shifts of six with experienced shift leaders and a medical team on hand. their compound, whose structures are provided by the festival, is central and well publicised on maps and brochures. they share detailed data with checkin, a front-of-house (that is, providing feedback to users on a short timescale) drug checking laboratory with state-of-the-art testing facilities located beside the dance temple, boom’s central dance floor. dancecult 7(1)64 the portuguese policy environment is perhaps the most liberal in the world. in 2001, as documented by hughes and stevens (2010: 1001–18), possession of a small amount of any illicit drug was changed from a criminal offence to an administrative one and a battery of government-sponsored harm reduction programs were rolled out. medicalisation was at the core of the approach, with drug use portrayed as a public health issue. maps and sicad launched kosmicare at boom the following year (emerson et al. 2014: 34). while psychedelic support projects in many other countries struggle to justify their existence to the authorities, kosmicare is heartily endorsed by the portuguese government, and boom organisers give kosmicare unprecedented visibility and publicity on-site. however, within this more relaxed policy climate, some tensions still arise between the psychedelic discourse to which the majority of support workers subscribe and the medicalised, harm-reduction-based approach of portuguese drug policy. these mostly concern moves towards formalisation of the care space and will be explored later. the zendo project in the us, maps’ current psychedelic support project is the zendo. managed by a team of therapists, with about eighty volunteers, it operates at events in the us and costa rica, and relies on crowdfunding and donations. the zendo is notable for its intent to act as a figure 4. the zendo setup at burning man. photo credit: author (2014). ruane | harm reduction or psychedelic support? 65 “teaching hospital” for psychedelic therapists, in hopes that the law will eventually change to permit this type of therapy (emerson et al. 2014: 34). however, such a change still seems a remote possibility under us drug policy. the provision of harm reduction facilities is illegal for event organisers under the rave act of 2003, as this is considered to be “encouraging the use of drugs” (blake 2015). policy in nevada, burning man’s home state, is especially punitive; for example, it is a felony to possess a drug checking kit. as emerson et al. (2014: 34) state, a previous maps project worked with the black rock rangers—burning man’s own community safety group—from 2003 to 2008, but was forced to shut down as harm reduction became increasingly criminalised; today the zendo is not connected with the organisers of burning man. zendo workers must, therefore, find an accommodation between the values of psychedelic discourse and the representatives of a mainstream culture who regard harm reduction as dangerously radical. another feature of the us festival landscape is the typically heavy police presence, including many undercover police. warnings not to talk about drugs with anyone outside one’s own camp are passed around burning man and broadcast on the city radio station bmir. as a result, silences attend both sides of the relationship between the zendo and those it seeks to support. since open provision of harm reduction at events can be problematic in the us policy climate, the zendo takes the precaution of advertising as “psych support” rather than psychedelic support. furthermore, visitors and potential visitors are reluctant to discuss their drug consumption due to the climate of distrust arising from policing strategies. this reticence and the absence of checking facilities complicates the processes of formulating care strategies and predicting how cases will progress. possibly due to the zendo’s low profile, its rates of visitor participation tend to be much lower than those of kosmicare at boom, though the event is considerably larger (seventy thousand compared to boom’s forty thousand in 2014). in 2014, the zendo was moved from its previous central placement to a remote location with its case total for the week falling by about half, to fifty-five. for comparison, kosmicare at boom 2014 had just short of four hundred cases. while there are other possible explanations for this dramatic disparity, such as burning man’s ethos of self-reliance or its structure of close-knit, supportive camps, the possibility cannot be dismissed that a significant number of burners who might have benefited from the help of the zendo may have been afraid to ask, unaware of the zendo or unable to find it. kosmicare uk more informal and emphatically peer-based compared with the portuguese organisation, kosmicare uk (kcuk) is linked with it in name only, though many kcuk volunteers have also worked at boom. the core identity of most kcuk volunteers is that of the experienced psychedelic user supporting those with less experience, though some are also therapists. the organisation is smaller-scale than the others, running on donations from visitors and small contributions towards expenses by event organisers. the tents and field dancecult 7(1)66 figure 5. the altar in the main care space at kosmicare uk. “lady kosmicare” painting by karin silenzi de stagni. photo credit: author (2014). kitchen are the managers’ own, shifts of two or three are fielded, and there is no medical presence on staff. of the three groups in this study, kcuk are the most open about their support of the psychedelic discourse. this openness can cause problems in a policy climate which appears to be growing more punitive. though the medicalisation approach to harm reduction was pioneered in the uk, reaching a peak of popularity there during the new labour years (1997-2010), the subsequent conservative/liberal democrat government reinstated supply and demand eradication as its central approach (hm government 2010). at festivals, front-of-house drug checking is not possible under uk law at the time of writing. psychedelic support is not illegal, but organisers of larger events, under the supervision of local councils and police, are wary of giving any indication that they are condoning drug use. in recent years many uk festivals have been subject to last-minute, unaffordable policing fee increases, which in most cases amount to a de facto shutdown (for one example, see resident advisor 2010). thus, even if kcuk gains admittance to these events, their presence may go unacknowledged and unpublicised by the organisers, and problems often occur with visibility, infrastructure supply and integration—or lack of—with other on-site support services. each of the three organisations has been shaped by the policy climate within which it operates. all experience conflicts and dissonances between the values of transformational festival culture and the local policy climate. in the more punitive regimes, the organisations’ ruane | harm reduction or psychedelic support? 67 values run counter to policy and to prevailing opinion, and if made explicit these conflicts can result in the abrupt termination of their work at the events. despite these difficulties, all three groups, and psychedelic support as a movement, appear to be undergoing a spurt of growth and formalisation. kosmicare have begun to release quantitative findings on the efficacy of their intervention (carvalho et al. 2014). an international collaboration between support workers, the manual of psychedelic support, has codified many formerly fluid and ad-hoc working practices (oak et al. 2015). kcuk is currently applying for charity status. the support groups’ methods, results and values, which formerly tended to be implicit and shared among practitioners, are becoming increasingly explicit, codified and public. the groups are facing choices about the discourses and contexts they will use to frame this information. one possible frame is that of harm reduction. it is now the core paradigm in portugal, with a history of political influence in australia and the uk (o’malley 2002: 280) and for a short time in the us (marlatt 1996: 785). as such, it can be seen as providing a quasi-respectable banner behind which drug policy reformers can rally. however, harm reduction is a concept freighted with assumptions and axioms which conflict with those of psychedelic culture, or exacerbate pre-existing problems within the culture. the following section examines the academic literature on harm reduction and considers its origins, in order to understand the implications for psychedelic support projects and the possible risks inherent in adopting harm reduction as their dominant discourse. harm reduction: a brief history of an idea harm reduction began as an advocacy movement by a group of dutch heroin users, the “junkiebond”, who first went public at the beginning of the 1980s (blok 2008). the movement set out to offer an alternative to the then popular approaches to drug use: attempts at supply and/or demand eradication, and “abstentionism” or use reduction. instead, this approach focused on the reduction of “risk behaviours” such as the sharing of needles. the original approach was pragmatic and had peer-based services at its heart, on the basis that “drug users themselves know best what their problems are” (wijngaart 1991, cited in marlatt 1996: 784)—this is now known as the “dutch model”. marlatt (1996: 785) describes an awareness, among early us harm reduction advocates, that drug use transpired in a complex social context and that marginalisation and inequality contributed both to the likelihood of drug use and the harm arising from it. however, the concept mutated throughout the 1990s as it was adopted in other countries, losing many of its progressive aspects. the brief enthusiasm for the approach in the us swung back towards a more punitive neoconservatism. the emerging “uk model” replaced the focus on peer support with medicalisation. awareness of the social context of drug use receded, replaced by a more neoliberal view of the drug user in which use was seen as merely a matter of free, individual choice (o’malley 2002: 280), isolated from social issues and problems, and addiction was perceived as a “disease of the will” (valverde 1998). dancecult 7(1)68 despite attempts to uproot or reconceptualise this approach, the neoliberal view of the self remains implicit to harm reduction rhetoric and practice. delineated vividly by rose (1996: 44), the neoliberal subject is a rational, choice-making individual whose ostensibly free choices and projects of self-government and self-improvement are in fact manifestations of internalised micro-processes of power which enable those in authority to govern “at a distance”. rather than being seen as part of a community, neoliberal subjects are entrepreneurial and competitive. this view of the self has various implications for harm reduction: dislocation of the user from their community or society; over-emphasis on rationality at the expense of pleasure (moore 2008); and the portrayal of the addict (and by extension, drug users in general) as one who has misused their free will by making a bad—that is, irrational and irresponsible—choice. thus, within policy and practice, drug users became increasingly demonised. moving further from the “dutch model”, a deep divide developed between drugs workers and users, although involvement of users in their own treatment is still a nominal goal (onsia, 2014). concepts of harm shifted, foregrounding harm done by drug users to communities through crime (hunt and stevens 2004: 334–5). this shifting concept of harm has faced sustained critique recently. it has been said to lack an evidence base (nutt, king and phillips 2010: 1564), and to neglect large-scale harm caused by government agencies and policies (rhodes 2009: 196). further, regarding psychedelics, critics such as tupper (2008: 297–303), emerson et al (2014: 28) and tennison (2012: 1–12) take issue with the focus on harm—which they consider to be relatively minimal—at the expense of the therapeutic and social benefits psychedelics could provide. this view is shared by many support workers. thus harm reduction discourse may be something of a poisoned chalice for the psychedelic support movement. the benefits which the discourse can confer in terms of respectability and legitimacy may not compensate for the difficulties of attempting to reconcile the values of transformational festival culture and harm reduction. the communal, fluid view of “self ” and “other” within the transformational festival contrasts with the conception of self in harm reduction discourse: isolated and competitive, within a model where loss of self-mastery constitutes failure and weakness. similarly, views of drug users as potentially engaged in valuable practices, and deserving of respect, conflict with mainstream portrayals as abject, criminal and will-impaired. while the drugs of choice in transformational festival culture are predominantly psychedelics (valued as cognitive tools or “teachers”) and recreational drugs which facilitate dancing, the underlying assumptions of harm reduction discourse are shaped by heroin and other highly addictive substances. finally, peer support is integral to care initiatives at transformational festivals; leung (2010) portrays care spaces as developing organically from practices of informal care by “strangers and friends” within the festival. mainstream drugs organisations, on the other hand, perceive support workers as distinct from (and at worst, superior to) current users. ruane | harm reduction or psychedelic support? 69 many of my participants expressed their discontent with the terminology of harm reduction and were reluctant to use it. nonetheless, this approach permeates the world of psychedelic support, leading to explicit and implicit tensions in areas where the two discourses intersect. the final sections use fieldwork findings to explore some of these areas. open and closed care spaces tangible expressions of the two competing discourses, and clashes between them, can be observed at the physical boundary between care spaces and the festival. at kcuk, which subscribes more to psychedelic culture discourse than that of harm reduction, the care space—an outdoor campfire area, a large army tent for more talkative visitors and a bell tent divided into private spaces—is designed to present few barriers to entry. kcuk workers are aware that visitors may feel too shy, wary or ashamed to ask for help immediately, especially in the context of the uk drug laws where admitting use can be risky. thus the open campfire area acts as a low-commitment stage in the establishment of trust. space within the bell tent is carefully managed, but on the whole kcuk’s configuration reflects the psychedelic discourse of the collective-minded, fluid self and the need for a porous boundary between visitors and support workers. this approach does have its disadvantages, in that it can be difficult to keep track of more mobile visitors and their friends at busy times. in its earlier iterations, kosmicare at boom was similarly open, incorporating a social space. however, as representatives not only of psychedelic culture but of portugal’s innovative drug policy, since 2010 kosmicare have been keeping detailed records to measure the efficacy of their intervention. each visitor’s mental state is evaluated by their sitter on arrival and departure, using a form with seventy-five questions. to enable this monitoring process, the compound has been fenced, with a single entrance via the front desk, and entry has been restricted to sitters and visitors. results to date have been encouraging: “pre-post mental state evaluation showed statistically significant difference (p<.05) confirming crisis resolution” (carvalho et al. 2014: 1). for many volunteers, the research project is a powerful source of credibility for psychedelic support, part of an increase in efficiency which has generally been warmly welcomed and considered to have made caregiving easier. on the other hand, some had reservations about the increase in formality, the need for a fence and the complexity of the assessment forms, changes which they felt had moved the atmosphere of the space towards that of a medical facility and hindered the caring process. kosmicare’s self-auditing project draws upon harm reduction discourse rather than that of the transformational festival. auditing is part of the neoliberal project; increasingly, experts in every institution are required to provide detailed quantitative evidence that their methods work (rose 1996: 44), while for individuals the notion of empowerment “recruits people into active self-management” (bondi 2005: 504). as we saw earlier, transformational festivals allow participants to experience a temporary suspension of their usual identity as a modern competitive self-monitoring subject—whether on the dance floor at events like boom (st john 2012: 116), through cathartic mass ritual such as the burning of the dancecult 7(1)70 figure 6. doorway of the zendo. photo credit: author (2014). temple at burning man (gilmore 2010: 93), or simply through immersion in temporary community (kozinets 2010: 36). some volunteer respondents suggested that formalisation was seen as an incursion of the “real world”, with its monitoring, bureaucracy and efficiency, into festival space, disrupting this suspension. others felt the shift to a more medicalised, monitored care space had restricted the range of experiences afforded by the space, excluding both recreational use and “sacramental” use (that is, in a ceremonial fashion with the intent of spiritual growth). for some of these respondents, this concern reflected a wider anxiety: they saw medicalisation of psychedelics as a potential threat to transformational festival values, commodifying the substances and restricting their use to medical contexts, away from festive crowds and dance floors. in their view, one discourse had the potential to erase the other. conceptions of use and users the transformational festival scene distinguishes itself from more corporate festivals by its emphasis on personal growth, as opposed to consumption and hedonism. for many of my respondents, recreational use practices at the transformational festival are intricately bound up with therapeutic or sacramental use. one participant said, in relation to “wandering” on psychedelics at burning man, “…you get a lot of healing done. a lot of that is not that verbal… people are dancing, moving, trying to integrate stuff ”. for him, dance was associated ruane | harm reduction or psychedelic support? 71 with recreational modes of use, but also central to the transformational process. however, others are more critical of what they see as purely recreational use. a participant described boom as “a wasted opportunity” for spiritual growth, saying there should be more explicit spiritual teachings available throughout the site and that the festival was “devolving… into an escapist, hedonistic free-for-all”. another had begun to feel that the loud dance music at boom was an impediment to safe psychedelic use, rather than a catalyst for transformation. it is perhaps inevitable that such diverse value judgments about different modes of drug use will be made. however, a few participants went further, to make value judgments about the types of user—an attitude which meshes with mainstream harm reduction discourses in potentially damaging ways. the harm reduction and transformational festival discourses involve contrasting views of “self ” and thus of “self-control”. in keeping with the neoliberal foundations of the discourse, in mainstream harm reduction, loss of self-control tends to be portrayed as a sign of a bad choice which has led to the impairment of one’s conscious will. at worst, the will-impaired are seen by drugs workers as deficient in full personhood and without entitlement to respect. this attitude is linked with the gradual transformation of harm reduction from a peerbased movement to one in which there is a broad divide between workers and “citizens” (a term for users), and the culturally predominant portrayals of users as criminal, irresponsible and dangerous have been accepted. interview participants in the uk, and a few elsewhere, tended to describe on-site medical staff and security as representatives of this approach, with a hostile, judgmental and patronising attitude towards drug users in difficulty. psychedelic support training sessions propose an alternative view, in keeping with the more fluid concept of self within psychedelic culture. volunteers are encouraged to respect visitors in deep altered states, which may indicate valuable internal processes—as one participant said, “we don’t know if they are meeting god”. respect for visitors is accompanied by perception of support workers as visitors’ equals. due to the emphasis on peer support, trust is established; visitors are thought to feel safer with “a festival person… not a uniform person”, as one participant put it. nonetheless, in the comments of a few participants a type of user emerged, considered to be hedonistic and reckless, who did not seem to receive equal respect: “there will always be stupid people doing stupid things”, was one position. sometimes these users were portrayed as outsiders, not in tune with the values of transformational festival culture. in this context, it is perhaps unsurprising to see some commentators within the field of psychedelic support attempting to counter public fears that the substances are inherently harmful with the idea that harm generally stems from improper use, or indeed the characteristics of particular users. in the foreword to the manual of psychedelic support (oak et al. 2015: 9), danforth attributes problems with psychedelics to, among other factors, “problematic mindset [and] lack of ego strength”. similarly, móró and rácz (2013: 6) write: “hallucinogenic drug use in a party environment may occasionally turn into a bad trip, especially for unprepared and non-experienced persons with an unstable worldview and an irresponsible attitude toward mind-altering substances”. dancecult 7(1)72 a substantial proportion of psychedelic crises and other drug emergencies at edm festivals may indeed be associated with lack of experience, knowledge or preparedness (my observations seemed to support this). however, emphasising these causes of difficult experiences while ignoring other possibilities has problematic implications. in keeping with the damage control view of psychedelic support, this explanation tends to portray such difficulties as the regrettable mishaps of neophytes rather than welcome opportunities for growth which may occur at any point in a user’s life. this represents a shift away from the ethos of the transformational festival, to which these experiences are fundamental, in the direction of mainstream harm reduction. more concerning, this view of drug-related crisis may result in victim-blaming: a visitor’s difficulties may be taken as sufficient evidence that the visitor has acted irresponsibly. many factors contributing to drug-related harm at festivals can be seen as systemic and exacerbated by national and local drug policy, such as the unrestricted use of adulterants, the ongoing development of new and unpredictable nps as older drugs are banned, or the unavailability of checking services to offset these problems. in this context, explaining difficult psychedelic experience as “irresponsible” appears consistent with neoliberal ideology in “transfer[ring] all responsibility for well-being back to the individual” (harvey 2005: 76). this way of thinking about drug use may disrupt the bond between visitors to support services and their sitters by making sitters more open to mainstream harm reduction discourses, whereby drugs workers are seen as fundamentally separate from users, who are subjected to othering or abjection. thus the strengths of peer support, in which workers are perceived as equals and trusted by visitors, could be greatly diminished, and some of the transformational potential of these events impeded. conclusion the discourse of transformational festival culture contrasts in a number of ways with that of currently popular approaches to harm reduction based on medicalisation and the “uk model”. these points of contrast include two distinct conceptions of self (one holistic and transpersonal, the other rational and isolated), different conceptions of psychedelic use (one which considers a substance as a cognitive tool or teacher, the other drawn from the world of heroin addiction and focused on harm and crisis) and different approaches to the support of drug users. within hostile regulatory climates, the adoption of harm reduction discourses carries less risk for psychedelic support organisations than openly espousing those of psychedelic culture. however, the relevance and utility of the harm reduction approach is limited when applied to psychedelic crises at transformational festivals, and may in fact diminish support groups’ ability to connect with users and reduce harm in these cases. nonetheless, the support groups’ work at festivals—drawing on both discourses—provides an 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festivals”. presented at tedx vancouver, vancouver. <http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/tedxvancouver-jeet-kei-leung-tr> (accessed 12 may 2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.01.11 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jmp/jhs024 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13537900050005976 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2006.11.001 http://www.maps.org/images/pdf/psychedelic-harm-reduction-2013.pdf http://vimeo.com/78241633 http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/tedxvancouver-jeet-kei-leung-tr sonic bodies: reggae sound systems, performance techniques and ways of knowing julian henriques new york: continuum, 2011. isbn: 978-1-4411-0151-8 (hardcover), 978-1-4411-4429-4 (paperback) rrp: us$90.00 (hardcover), us$29.95 (paperback) dennis howard university of the west indies (jamaica) sonic bodies: reggae sounds systems, performance techniques and ways of knowing by julian henriques offers a fresh and illuminating exploration of jamaican auditory culture through the reggae sound system, making a significant contribution to an aspect of caribbean and jamaican culture that is in dire need of interrogation and epistemological grounding. the book’s originality stems from henriques’ formulation of thinking through sound: “this can only be expressed through corporeal practices of thought, rather than the more commonplace discursive line of thought” (xviiii). this approach, coupled with what he calls “sonic dominance”, allows henriques to distance himself from the established and growing literature on jamaican music culture. henriques explains “sonic dominance” as a total immersion of its participants in the phenomenon known as the reggae sound system, with its vibration frequencies connecting with every fibre of the participants’ beings. sonic bodies, according to the author, is the incarnation of the sound system crew, the audience, the innate knowledge and the pulsating response to the bass culture of jamaica. relying on a bricolage approach, henriques employs his theoretical model, “thinking through sound”, fusing it with disparate disciplines such as greek philosophy, geometry and grammar, sound theory and postcolonial theory in his exploration of the sound system. these theoretical considerations are operationalized through “a dynamic model for both raising questions about the world as distinct from the way the trope of the visual image is often used to settle them” (xviii). the book is divided into five distinct sections. “preamble: thinking through sound” introduces the concepts of sonic dominance, sonic bodies and thinking through sound. thinking through sound is offered as an alternative to normative behaviour of thinking through images, hence henriques attempts to position the auditory senses at the forefront of theoretical interrogations. the study is located within the realms of the discipline of cultural studies with its multidisciplinary approaches. a brief literature review acknowledges noted work that informs the book, and some biographical information about the author is also gleaned here. “introduction: practising and theorising sounding” begins with chapter one that exposes the traditions of orality, music practice and sonic architecture that establish the bass culture of jamaica. the proposition of thinking through sound is elaborated on, and henriques then outlines the notion that all sonic bodies are configured in these vibrations of bass culture. he proposes that these vibrations can be categorised into three distinctive wavebands. firstly, they are material, a by-product of the sound system itself and the equipment and its phonography; secondly, there is the corporeal waveband encompassing the crew’s performance and the crowd response; and the final waveband relates to the sociocultural—the interaction, behaviour, traditions, style and cultural practices within the dancehall environ. it describes the feeling and understanding of participants of the dancehall scene. the “vibes” are a way of making sense of the sociological and philosophical underpinnings of the dancehall while in a sense valorising the ordinary but deeply rooted activities and traditions of urban dwellers in kingston’s inner city and suburban enclaves. other theoretical approaches are considered in relation to this “vibrational waveband model”. henriques manages with skilful facility to engage in a serious theoretical discourse on the reggae sound system and its attendant socio-political, cultural, technological, postcolonial and musicological trajectories. chapter two extends the reader’s understanding of the vibrations of the waveband as periodic movements that are only facilitated through three elements. the elements prioritized by henriques are: the medium for dissemination; the instrument for making the noise; and the techniques for using the instrument. a critical feature of this “propagation model” is that the three elements are triangulated, that is, “they are present together at the same time” (39). elaborating on the elements, henriques continues his theoretical foundation and proposes that the media of soundings is split between the “material vibrations of a speaker cone” (xxxiii), as well as the sociocultural realities of the music scene and space. the instrument of sounding would include the sound system equipment embedded in the material waveband and the mortal embodiment of the sound system players situated in the sociocultural waveband. the techniques of sounding located in the sociocultural waveband include “the crew’s kinetic skilled performance skills, such as the selector’s dextrous skills on the turntables” (xxxiii). “part one: the audio engineer and the material waveband” commences with chapter three, in which the important but hitherto ignored role of the engineer of the reggae sound system takes centre stage. considerations are made for the pre-performance rituals of what henriques calls “compensation”. this is explained as the process for fine-tuning and adjusting the auditory dimensions of the sound system, which is a critical imperative in the sound world. this iterative exercise is achieved through the three procedures of manipulating the electronic components to achieve that ideal sound quality; then monitoring the subsequent sonic output; and finally evaluating the “auditory qualities” of “balance”, “weight” and “attack”, which is vernacular technical-speak utilised in the sound world. the final exercise of evaluation invariably leads to compensation, as the phonographic output is never constant. this trait explains the recursive nature of this performance trope. henriques gets to the heart of a phenomenon with this exposition and it is clear that his extensive fieldwork achieves thick descriptive quality with geertzian precision. chapter four establishes a historiography of sound system development through the prism of engineering and the tradition of apprenticeship. this technical journey starts with headly jones, the creator of the modern day sound system. the engineer is then given a unique position of being everywhere and nowhere in the context of all three wavebands of sounding. a trajectory is also laid out for the journey of a skilled engineer, from apprenticeship to master craftsman status. henriques again expands the possibilities by engaging in a theoretical and methodological juxtaposition of ideas from a variety of scholarship (stern, chavannes, gates, levin) which he dubs “sonic engineering”. “part two: the selector and the corporeal waveband” starts with chapter five, titled “juggling”. the selector as a skilled technician and performer is interrogated: “this includes building the vibes or intensities of the session, and ‘steering’ the crowd along the procession of the night” (xxxiv). the skilled performance techniques of the selector are outlined in detail, which continues the thick descriptive trajectory of the book. techniques such as “bass drop”, “the touch”, “mixing” or “juggling”, and “pull ups” are offered as unique skill sets of these re-performance specialists within the three vibrational wavebands of sounding. in chapter six the selector’s skill is juxtaposed with jamaican studio techniques to examine these processes in a broader context of auditory techniques and their role in the sound world. additionally, a comparative analysis of the two concludes that “to the extent that there are parallels between the selector’s and engineer’s performance, it is taken as evidence for the common characteristics of the different wavebands of sounding that the propagation model describes” (171). “part three: the mc and sociocultural waveband” contains the last three chapters and the epilogue “dubwise”. the role of the mc is elaborated in chapter seven. utilising several performance styles, lyrical techniques and personal traits, the mc encapsulates a “distinctive sociocultural waveband to the sounding of the session” (xxxv). chapter eight, “rhetoric and the logic of practice”, is the most epistemologically challenging portion of the book. here, henriques laboriously enunciates a theoretical model, steeped in greek philosophy, of the mc and his trope of voicing. this formulation is further complicated by the introduction of bourdieu’s “logic of practice” and the esoteric pythagorean concept of harmonics by hans kasyser. henriques’ arguments and postulations are both infuriatingly dense and at the same time absolutely stimulating. depending on your position, one wonder if this was necessary at all or an essential and engaging treatise. in chapter nine, the “sonic logos” is introduced, which is articulated in a manner that leaves the reader trying to unravel this complex set of thoughts. “dubwise” is an attempt to address some of the weaknesses inherent in the inquiry and summarises the journey of thinking through sound with sonic bodies within an environment of sonic dominance. what are the main contributions of the volume to auditory scholarship? sonic bodies manages to achieve henriques’ intentions of departing from the established literature and presents a theoretically fresh approach to the study of jamaican sound system culture. in so doing, he demonstrates a critical link to not only the theory-to-praxis trajectory but also privileges an alternative epistemology, which shuns language notation and representation. however, it is done at times in what would be best described as an extremely cumbersome and unnecessary detailed language style that leaves the reader intermittently frustrated. sonic bodies manages to elevate the conversation about the jamaican sound system culture from its usual sociocultural and political orientations to an auditory exploration of sound culture and theory. one of the end results of this novel approach is it poses a challenge to a reliance on visual cues of word, images and discourse, which is commonplace. while the bass culture of jamaican society, the skilled technique and performance of mc/ selector, and the sonic architecture of the jamaican dancehall are all effectively explored, henriques fails to link his wavebands to any serious sociocultural notions of reception and production within the context of jamaican music production aesthetics. despite this, henriques demonstrates an extensive understanding of the literature of auditory theory, cultural studies and philosophy which is very enriching for a variety of disciplines, and has added an outstanding cross-/multi-disciplinary work that will be used by scholars from varying disciplinary and theoretical orientations. “why would i want to put my art in your museum if i have my own house?” an interview with rucyl magdalena olszanowski concordia university (canada) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2017.09.01.10> figure 1. rucyl, new york (2015). photo courtesy of the author. it’s the summer of 2015 and i’m in new york for a residency at barnard. by chance, i notice rucyl post on her social media that she is in new york for a weekend and i message her immediately to meet up. i had been wanting to include her in my documentary, microfemininewarfare, but hadn’t managed to do so yet. rucyl mills (b. 1970s) is a multi-format artist, singer and music producer currently based out of la. she grew up in philadelphia and spent many years of her life in nyc. with no formal training, she joined the alternative hip-hop group, the goats (ruffhouse/columbia records) in 1992, with which she toured for a couple of years. the band experience made her see, that, yes, “i am an artist”. consequently, she was propelled to go to the new school in new york to study jazz. she dropped out, and later came back for a bsc in new media, a program she found more suited to her sonic explorations. she received her masters from the interactive communication program at nyu, which alongside mentor, unsung jazz vocalist, teri thornton, provided her with resources and time to hone her craft and branch out fully into electronic music using blues and jazz vocal improvisation in electronic composition. after finishing her degree, she worked on various audio-visual projects including the chakakhantroller, a wearable midi controller. in the same year, she co-founded the duo saturn never sleeps with king britt, a “futuretronic” label and audiovisual group influenced by the re-articulated contemporary afrofuturism movement. they released an lp yesterday’s machines, toured the world and performed at various events like tedxphilly, art basel, moogfest, and ica in philadelphia. she is currently promoting her first solo full length album, caveat (2016) and spending time at various new media residencies figuring out new ways of sounding and listening. one of the things we are faced with when we are young is figuring out who we are, who we want to be and how to get there. for some, that road is easy, or at least straight forward, for others, it requires circuitous maneuvers. this interview is framed by an artistic optimism demonstrating how rucyl came to be. rucyl was mostly raised by her father, a musician who gave it up to become a high school math & physics teacher. his philosophy was that you can’t make money making music, an assertion that stayed with her for years. the following explores rucyl’s history, her road to becoming an artist, staying an artist without compromise, the importance of community and other women, not giving up, being taken seriously as a female artist, the negotiations that artists have to make with others, themselves and their equipment and how she managed to flip her father’s assertion for her benefit, and follow her own motto, “why would i want to put my art in your museum if i have my own house?” a nod to the oft-quoted audre lorde (1984): for the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. they may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. and this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support. rucyl and i meet in harlem alongside my crew, two other women, at her friend’s apartment to bear witness to her magic. rucyl sits cross-legged on the hardwood with her mic and gear, and performs a medley of loopy improvisations and previously recorded material. i negotiate my role as director, interviewer, fan and friend as we begin. below is an excerpt from an interview we recorded that hot summer day. magdalena olszanowski: you had mentioned there was always music around—jazz, reggae, dancehall—all the while your dad said this key point that seems common among young people if they don’t come from privileged households that have the resources to let their kids do art without financial worry. he said art and music is important, but you need a job, or you need to do something else; that somehow music won’t be enough. i remember being told the same thing about art. i’m curious if that has stuck or influenced you? rucyl: it was a huge thing for me because i wanted to be an artist from a really young age but i didn’t have any references of how to do that. i knew that in my mind i was like, i can’t make any money, and if i can’t make any money how will i eat or survive? that has definitely informed all of my choices until now. however, now i have created a situation where i can do other things creatively and i can get paid for them and enjoy them and i don’t have to change the way i do music to make money. so, i kind of flipped it, from music is just something i do and maybe i can make some money doing it, to now it’s more like “i don’t want to have to make money from it”. it gives me more freedom and i can do it every day or stop for a year. while this quote was always in the back of mind i fought against it—“that’s not true dad! i have to follow my dreams”, i told him when i left high school [to tour] (laughs). so i tried it and it’s a really rough life. it’s not an easy path to do music—pop, experimental or chamber, etc.—it’s just as difficult as any other job in the western world, and i don’t think it’s really respected here until you’ve excelled at it. you also don’t have support systems in place unless, you are finally that one of a million, or if you have some academic background and you might be able to get more support. of course, my dad is so supportive and proud: “i always knew you were going to do great”, he tells me and i’m like “but you told me not to do it” and his riposte is: “i just wanted to make sure you weren’t going to starve because you’re not going to marry someone for money, so, i had to set it up”. he already knew i was a feminist when i was eight. this statement, even though it was well-intentioned, kept me from allowing myself to believe in my craft for a really long time. i was like “i can do it but i’m not going to put 100% because i don’t really have the time because it’ll take the time away from me making money”. but every time i stopped making music i would get depressed. so, i had to find a way to keep doing it. i would never tell children [not to pursue their art], but we are a different generation. is it a generational thing? or an immigrant thing? because this was also the case for me. i always wanted to be an artist, but i didn’t start drawing and become amazing, i had a hard time playing instruments, i loved to dance and write but that didn’t seem legitimate; it didn’t seem like “art”. so i was told that that is not something you can do unless you are an artistic genius. while my mom encouraged me to write and take photos, when i thought about going to art school for writing and photography, i was told that this is not something that you do, you have to go get a non-art degree to get a job. and of course, i ended up back where i needed to be, in writing and image-making, but it took a different meandering route. i’m sure some people are strong-willed enough and will still go after their art dreams when they are young, but if you are self-conscious you are going to think that art school is only for a reserved elite, an elite that is determined outside of your milieu, and you need to make money because you see your parents struggling. it’s very real. and if your family is struggling, they can’t give you money to get an instrument or provide lessons, so you don’t even have an opportunity to get good. role models are key in this and can sometimes change things around—was there somebody before university that made you think, maybe you know, i’m going to do this music thing anyway, or something you came across? i didn’t really have any references or role models except the music i listened to. i remember the first time i heard sade and saw her, it was like seeing a different world for the first time. it was like, whoa, there is someone that culturally looks like me! where i grew up [in philadelphia] there was no one else that looked like us. we didn’t have visual references, and when i saw sade, i connected to her... it wasn’t that i wanted to be her, but i could sing all her songs; i sang the way she sang. i didn’t grow up in a church background. i had no training. when i heard her tone, i was like, i can fit with that. she is one of my hugest influences. james, from my old band, the goats, influenced me the most. i saw somebody creating music with their hands in front of me and not playing instruments. he was also very encouraging, saying things like: “you’re smart, you just have to do it” he took the time to explain everything to me. james was like: “you’re amazing, you can do anything you want!” to have someone say that to you when you’re fifteen or sixteen is big! he would go on: “write a rap, sing! press this button a look how this computer works”. once i got my hands on a computer, i was like, “whoa this is amazing”. when james showed you what you can do on a computer—do you think it allowed you to see music from a different perspective? yes! figure 2. rucyl at home (2014). photo courtesy of rucyl. instead of classically trained instrumentation or singing, computers allowed for a different world of creation that didn’t need formal training like needing violin lessons. it was my way in. looking back, it was also a defining point. i started to understand i’m an artist and that i can use different tools. once i understood that there was a tool set and a system, i was like, ok, “if i just keep doing this i’ll get better”. i didn’t have any references before then. sometimes you are not just born with it. a lot of people have to do a lot of work. even someone like al green locked himself in a closet for months until he liked the tone of his voice! it all fell into place when i saw it [computer-based music] was something i could craft in a different way because it was tactile and outside of me. singing comes from the inside. now i could create something with my hands. now i was creating my own environments to support myself. i had no other way to do it. this was it. also, if you are working with daws [digital audio workstations], you can do effects and move your voice around rather than straight singing... there’s a side of me that is folk-oriented too. pure acoustic. however, there is something in the ability to manipulate something that has just left my body. it’s amazing to me. i can have something come out and i can manipulate it and change it to something else. i can hear myself, but i get to also hear myself singing along with myself. for me, it’s so fascinating. the first time i started doing that was before i knew about laurie anderson or pauline oliveros... and when i did find out about them, i was blown away. they’ve managed to stay relevant and make money as they age, which is rare in the art and music industry. figure 3. preparation for solar bass installation, colombia (may 2016). photo courtesy of rucyl. it’s something i think about a lot: why would i want to put my art in your museum if i have my own house? this totally captures the sentiment for me. i think galleries are wonderful, but who built that house, why is that determining the power of what you created? if you are an artist in her forties or fifties, or you become invisible, or you become famous for a minute and then you are not, then what? if an art gallery is defining you then what are we really talking about here? a lot of musicians re-invent themselves for other avenues to have longevity and success. there is nothing wrong with that, however, if you are determining the wealth of yourself and the worth of yourself, based on someone else’s definition, then it’s really about delivery systems. how is the art or the music being delivered? who is determining what gets delivered? who is determining who says what is good? if you listen to all of those things then you aren’t really being artistic. you are being a fan. you are being spoon-fed. i’m really interested in the conversation about who said what—who is the person who decides, “what i say is cool, i’m a curator and i’m trained and i know everything and i’m amazing”. at the end of the day, i don’t want my self-worth to be determined by, if my art is put into someone else’s house. why can’t i define how my art is displayed and in my house? for me, success is legacy, not the present moments. if i have an archive of stuff that i’ve done then i’ve succeeded. if i think about it that way i don’t have to worry about those other things. i know it’s a privileged thought process though because i’ve been fortunate enough to set up my life, so i can survive in other ways. spiritually i survive off music, but it’s not giving me food to eat. sometimes it does; but it’s not my main work. that’s allowed me to think about it this way—legacy. so, i can have some amazing work i left behind and people can look at it later and do whatever they want with it. there are roles for different types of artists. i’d rather be a laurie anderson and do weird shit till i’m eighty. ok, i guess she’s pretty well known though (laughs). but she became super successful because she created her own delivery systems. and she created a world that she wanted for herself. she wasn’t like “i need to get into this situation or into this situation”. people were coming to her because she created her own environment; she was the first artist to have a residency at nasa! [and the last official one]. she understands where her power is, because she knows who she is. i want to spend my energy doing that. i’m a long curve kind of person. i feel like i’m just getting started and i’m forty, and i’ve been doing music since fifteen. just now, i’m like, i might be onto something. is it because you found a community that reinforces what you are saying or has a similar language to you? it’s because of the internet. that’s how i found my community. the quality of people i’ve been able to connect with is amazing. when i first started using the internet, the www, i understood that this was going to change everything—content delivery systems and how people connect. now i was able to have access to socio-cultural visual things that i wouldn’t have access to otherwise and directly from a person instead of having to look at a perspective that has been historically preserved by someone else’s perspective. so, i can go on vine and see a kid in nigeria making a film and his vision is not about reading instructions in a book that’s been filtered by other people with other institutional agendas. so, i am able to directly influence people and people can influence me directly and i can have people that are on my vibration. it’s vital to see people who are sort of similar to you, doing work that you kind of want to do or in your periphery, especially when dealing with various modes of oppression that women are wont to. it’s community! i grew up as a tomboy. i didn’t get that the [sexual and misogynist] dynamic was happening until about sixteen. then i started getting it. all the band mates were seven to ten years older so they “little sistered” me, which was great, but as i got older, for sure! stuff comes up! right before i left the band, i tour managed the last tour. it was... awful. it was one of the worst, most rewarding things, because i learned so much, but i was nineteen and tour managing a band all over europe. the way i was treated, i couldn’t believe. there was no respect. i had to get other people to stand with me when it was time to collect the money because they didn’t want to pay me directly. but, it doesn’t bother me now, because that can’t happen to me now. i don’t react the same way. i just get “whatever” because i don’t feel that power is being taken away from me, because i don’t create my music in spaces where it’s determined by someone else’s power structure. do you see what i mean? before, when i was younger, i was under the influence of, like, “i need to get that gig”, so i need to assimilate or fit in, now i’m like “nah, i don’t need it, i got to go”. i can do this in my living room and film it. but that’s being forty now—“i don’t care what your issue is, i won’t support you or play in your club or festival if you treat me poorly”. i have standards because of that previous stuff. that stuff is terrible. i can’t do that with music because music is church, it’s god, it’s spiritual. i can’t have you hurting me in my most vulnerable position. i can’t make music with people i don’t like. if i’m not on the same energy level or wave or vibration, i physically cannot do it. it’s too... i can cry thinking about it... it’s so real for me. so, spiritual and emotional, it’s my purest state. i feel the most vulnerable and the most powerful doing it. it’s definitely frustrating because it is such a sacred space and it can be so jarring to have someone come in with those intentions. you learn to recognize it but when you are younger you cannot recognize it... ...and you just feel it and it messes you up. you’re uncertain how to negotiate that. you are in this moment of being vulnerable and feeling so open to all of that and to have someone else come in for these reasons of not respecting you is jarring. do you have some moments to share about this? because some people give up. i did give up! i gave up for five years from about 2002–2007 because i had bad experiences with producers and label owners and a&r situations. the industry in the early 2000s was so intense because of the changes that were happening, like majors were folding, you weren’t being supported, no more production deals and so on. popular black music, or pop music in general, they [record labels] didn’t know what was happening, and they couldn’t fit me into any particular situation. i was getting things like, “if you dressed like this” and i’m like, “i’m not going to do that”, i was a b-girl, i couldn’t do it. they’re like, “if you straighten your hair”. and i’m like, “i can’t do any of that”. it was ridiculous to me. i guess i did have some backbone back then, but at the time it didn’t feel like it. i just knew i couldn’t do it. i would have some terrible situations with people who i would record with and they would hold my demos or they would say unless you sign this (where they get all the publishing), i’m not going to give you the recording and i said “i’m done. i’m not going to do this. i’ll do something else. i’ll use my four-track recorder and my computer and do music like that”. and five years went by like that. i didn’t do anything. i didn’t want to play with bands or do jazz gigs. i was over it, but then i was like “i’m so depressed” and i started meeting other women in nyc who were having the same experience. i realized i needed community. i didn’t have a support system—it was just me alone and whoever i was doing music with. i had no “hey girl” to bring with me to a studio. i’ve always been very isolated. i thought i was being independent but i realized i was self-isolating. i realized if there’s five of us they can’t do it [push us around]! and that’s kind of how i got out of my funk. i also met this woman teri thornton. she won the thelonious monk competition the year she died. she was a vocal coach of mine at school at the new school. we stayed friends and she would give me lessons. our lessons would be: ok some piano and sing for ten minutes then she would close the piano and say: “let’s go to the bar”, and we would sit at the bar for the rest of the lesson and she would tell me about her life. she kind of looked like me, we had the same complexion, we were super tight right away. she was maybe in her early seventies, and she would just tell me stories and i would just sit there. i started realizing “oh this [mistreatment] happens to everybody!” i have friends who are really successful and ambitious. some of them are kind of cold because they had to shut off sections of themselves to get to a certain place and to survive. i don’t want to be like that, i [would] rather be mushy or else my art is going to suffer. so, to hear someone successful say, “just do you, everyone is going to give you a rough time regardless, it won’t be just other men, it’ll be other women too, you just gotta want to do it, and if it doesn’t feel right just leave”. this is what i’ve always understood—i can leave. i didn’t have to be thirsty, there’s always another opportunity. some of things you are saying—being open to certain people and certain energies and knowing what to be closed to. this is difficult to negotiate, what to go for, what to say no to, and how to compromise. if you’re saying yes to these things that are giving you these goals then inadvertently you are saying no to others. i don’t need to be famous. once i understood that about myself, it’s easy, because you‘re like, “so?” i don’t need fame. i think when i was younger i wanted recognition. but in my early thirties when i started understanding i had a peer group, i looked around at my peers and thought, “they were amazing and they think i’m amazing, and if my ten friends think i made an incredible record then i’m set”. that sounds really fulfilling. do you collaborate with your peers? can you tell me a bit about saturn never sleeps and collaborating artistically with a partner [king britt]? you don’t have to answer! it was the first time i did that, and for me it was really hard. king is a producer, and he would tell you what to do, and i was like, “ugh don’t tell me what to do”. so, we had our own studios. we didn’t share production spaces. we had separate soundproof areas. sonically he’s got an incredible ear, but how we did the record, he would create some of the pieces and i would take it and add onto it or write the lyrics. and then i would record it and he would arrange it and then i would say yes or no. in some ways, we didn’t do it together, because we weren’t in a room creating things together, it was more of a collaboration. why do you think that? a lot of it is me i think. i don’t think i wanted to. i was particular about—i want to do it—and a lot of it was probably because i was a woman and my previous experiences. he was supportive. now i’m different. i don’t operate that way, now i’m like, “let’s do it together”. before i was like, “i need to go in my cave then i’ll bring it to you”. power dynamics were super important to me at the time. i was concerned with protecting myself to make sure i didn’t lose my voice, because i lost it so many times before. figure 4. set up for live performance, 17 frost street space (may 2015). photo courtesy of rucyl. is there something protective about gear? how does this relationship manifest into the tools you use? the tools: i have my controllers and my laptop running ableton live and loads of vsts and plug-ins and i use max for live too, and midi controllers, which allow me to control those virtual instruments inside my laptop and a mic. i have other set ups using all analog equipment and hopefully i get to that in the next couple of years. i’m moving further and further away from wanting to touch my laptop. building the chakakhantroller was a response to that—how do i make electronic music without being in my laptop and playing a synth? so i took apart the trigger finger and used maxmsp and programmed it to control audio/visual anything. i have four audio inputs to control my vocal and any tracks coming out of my computer. i can control visuals. anything i was running on my computer i could do with this. i named it after chaka khan because she was my spirit muse that year, to inspire me to be fearless. i was going to make a wireless version and that year ableton came out with all these controllers, so i didn’t need to make them anymore. i wanted to get away from being in the laptop. your body also moves differently... i didn’t like that laptop look at all. when i first started doing laptop music i was doing sine waves and bleeps and blobs and i saw a video of it and i was like, “this is so boring”. it’s just a light on my face and the computer eyes; your eyes all bugged out. there is nothing sexy about that at all (laughs). however, once i started wearing the chakakhantroller and playing it, i didn’t really like it. i loved that i built it but i was like, “this doesn’t feel like the movements i want to be doing”. so, i went back to the laptop and to home-brew software and diy controllers. so, then i was into the hacking vibe. so the problem was that i didn’t like staring into the screen. i started using the akai controller, which allowed me to do all the mixing and control, everything before it even gets to the board in the room. so no one can tell me, “i want to do this to your vocals or that”. i can say: “no, i know exactly how i want my vocals, thank you”. i can control everything, i can set my monitors. i had a very self-contained unit. so how i think about the equipment is like this one woman explaining to me about tarot. “the tarot cards don’t actually do anything, they are the medium, i don’t even need them. i have them 1) so people don’t get freaked out; 2) it’s just the tool to trigger what is already happening inside and outside of me”. so equipment is like that for me. it’s a visual reference and a tool. basically, it’s a medium, something tactile that i can be doing to kind of disguise a little bit, all the stuff that is coming out of me. so, i’m trying to be in that process to make sound come out and go through that whole experience of getting myself to a spiritual place for that moment. i have the tools there to distract you and i’m doing things with them, but without it [the gear] i don’t think i could do it. i don’t know if i can just sit there with a mic and the music playing with some other way... there’s also something about it being a reference technology as a visual, while i’m doing my work. i want people to understand that i’m in this space. i want people to know that i know how to use software and a computer. not that it’s super important, but it is. the visual is important because i want people not to make assumptions based on the way i look, whatever the reference is for the way that i look, i want them to understand that i look this way and i can also do that. so, it’s a bit of a geek girl nerd kind of thing, which i’m super into. but it sets up a narrative of respect immediately, because i’m not saying “i look really cute today and i’m going to sing some tracks”, there’s nothing wrong with that but because of my past experiences, i want to set up a situation where right away, it’s like, “what is she doing? i don’t even understand!” it’s a respect situation like you’re not going to assume certain things about me because i have a laptop and controllers, you’re going to be like “what’s that?” having gear sets up a legitimacy... yes! and it’s kind of hot, in the geek out way. like there was that female_pressure visibility tumblr about women and their tools. specifically, in electronic music, and pictures and their tools. for my documentary too; i always try to get the hand/body shots of working. there’s something about it. in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many women in the visual arts would paint their self-portraits that would portray them with their tools. yeah... woman + machine! it’s hot, and it shows that there are other ways to look at women and it’s attractive that she can do these things, and it doesn’t mean she’s masculine, it means she knows how to do this shit. i love to see men doing their shit too. i’m into that stuff. i always get to have conversations afterwards about gear. i’m educated about it. i know what i’m doing. i can have these conversations and i deserve to be in this space. you can not like my music, but you aren’t going to tell me i don’t know what i’m doing. you know, i didn’t realize in “listening to the body” (2011) and in “heart awake” (2011) that the vocal is you. i didn’t realize you sang because your web presence is very much you as a producer with your tools. that’s interesting. i thought that was the opposite of what most people thought. i thought it’s a sample especially because it’s heavily modulated, there’s something about the body and voice ... can you tell me about it? it took me a while to get into modular synthesis. it’s a very expensive hobby. i always wondered why i’d see these guys who are sixty and “finally got my modular”. because you can’t even afford it until you’ve saved your whole life. some get kits. yeah piece by piece... but shit, so expensive. how did you decide to get the moog, other than wanting it forever? i had an sh–101 for a while, and i knew i had to get a moog and i got a white one, [the limited minimoog voyager performance edition white]. visually it’s so inspiring. my studio is my bedroom... or my studio has a bed in it. the latter is how i think about it. so, i wake up and it’s the first thing i look at and sigh in awe. it cost more money than my car. but yeah wow, it’s my boo (laughs). i love that machine. it’s so much like a human voice. i can sit in front of my moog and play it for three hours, and i might be playing one note and messing with the parameters. i feel it. to me, it is a very angelic instrument. it’s chakra tuning. like reggae, when you stand in front of the bass speaker, you feel: “i’m all tuned up now. i can go on with my week”—positive vibrations. there’s something to these frequencies and i’ve looked into it but that’s a whole huge conversation. it cleans the mind, cleanses the palate, bad things cannot happen when that’s happening. like people at a moog show; everyone is zen. analog gear, not to say that it isn’t electronic, but there’s a sentience to it; a kind of liveness is in those types of instruments. it’s organic. it’s a real entity. i don’t know, i’m still figuring it out. all i know is it moves me. i get so excited about it. i wish they were lighter so i could bring them around more. they’re heavy, it’s really magical shit (laughs). whenever you meet someone else who has a moog you get all like, “oh you know, you get the thing”. and when people come over i always play it for them because most people have never seen one or touched one, and when they hear it, they’re like, “oh i didn’t get it [before]”, or they didn’t until they’re in the space. it’s made me cry! if i’m not crying i’m not doing it right (laughs). that’s my motto with music. it’s not weakness to me, it’s pure emotive joy! this interview is part of a larger forthcoming project, microfemininewarfare. acknowledgements i am grateful for the opportunity to have interviewed rucyl. i would like to thank xiaojue for putting up with my moods and cravings, jason dasilva for providing the equipment at such short notice and his assistant naeisha rose for managing the cameras. finally, i’d like to thank all of the people who believed and still believe in this project. like rucyl, i’m a long-curve kind of person. author biography magdalena olszanowski is an artist and phd candidate (abd) in communication studies at concordia university, montreal. she is a researcher and photographer at act (ageing, communication, technologies) in montreal. her scholarly and artistic work on gender, image-making, electronic music, censorship and ageing has been published in books and journals such as nomorepotlucks, dancecult, feminist media studies and visual communication quarterly. her dissertation is focused on feminist online image-media histories of the 1990s. she has performed as a vj and dj internationally and hopes to resurrect her documentary, microfemininewarfare, featuring women experimental electronic music composers. website: http://raisecain.net/. email: magdalena.olszanowski@concordia.ca. references lorde, audre. 1984. sister outsider. essays and speeches. berkeley, ca: crossing press. ratliff, ben. 2000. “teri thornton is dead at 65; jazz singer had hits in 1960s”. new york times, 7 may. discography rucyl. 2016. caveat. (digital album). <https://www.discogs.com/rucyl-caveat/release/10712291>. rucyl. 2011. uma kanya. (digital album). <https://www.discogs.com/release/10712377>. saturn never sleeps. yesterday’s machines. (digital album): sns-001. <http://www.discogs.com/saturn-never-sleeps-yesterdays-machines/release/3326344>. aphex twin’s selected ambient works volume ii (33 1/3 series) marc weidenbaum new york: bloomsbury, 2014. isbn: 978-1-6235-6890-0 rrp: £9.99 toby young university of oxford (uk) richard david james—known by his moniker aphex twin—has created an almost mythical status in music history. albums like the fragile analogue bubblebath eps and the ghostly pop of selected ambient works 85-92 set james up as one of the most original and free-thinking of electronic producers. but nothing he had created previously quite compared to the austerity and ephemerality of his uncompromising 1994 album selected ambient works volume ii (henceforth saw ii). devoid of titles or descriptions, each individual track was only marked by a thumbnail image, symbols floating between alphabet and hieroglyph. this ambiguity carries through to the music, without fixed genre, constantly hovering between beautiful and menacing, tense and relaxed, comprehensible and obfuscated. this difficult and uncompromising nature of the album makes it the perfect object of study for marc weidenbaum’s contribution to bloomsbury’s revered 33 1/3 series—a collection of books designed to shed new critical light on well-established canonical albums. weidenbaum’s central tenet is that, despite a well-documented reputation for being ‘beatless’, the album is actually always ‘in time’ (even if perhaps a fragmented time), suggesting the work as a sonic metaphor for our technologically mediated era. weidenbaum’s project is to help demystify and elucidate the vaporous nature of this music, to return it to a rightful place in the canon of experimental beat music, and to apply a more critical ear. rather than placing the ambience of james’ music in the all-too-forgiving context of sound art, weidenbaum situates saw ii firmly in the functional space of post-rave chill-out rooms, offering sanctuary for clubbers to ‘come down’ from long hours of dance and drugs. but, rightly, he also acknowledges that the album owes a great deal of debt to the more esoteric aesthetic perspective of early electronic music, paying clear homage to the likes of brian eno, jon hassell, philip glass and even the grand masters of musique concrète, figures like pierre schaeffer and pierre henry. in many ways, saw ii provided a new ambient manifesto for the first generation of listeners from a technological (or at least internet-led) epoch, drawing creatively from this tension between low and high art to create a truly genre-breaking work, firmly grounded in mainstream culture. weidenbaum’s account provides an in-depth examination of the album in this context, focusing his critical apparatus on the context and reception of the album to create a space for the reader to explore the work on their own critical terms. weidenbaum avoids an obvious track-by-track breakdown, instead focussing on creating a narrative of the album’s history and reception through the book’s seven chapters. nevertheless there are several highly compelling accounts of tracks from the album, providing the attentive and imaginative readings that form the book’s backbone. one such example occurs in a discussion of ‘white blur’. picking up on the track’s opening gesture—the solitary sound of a wind chime—weidenbaum deftly opens up his analysis into a broader discussion of how the wind chime as a generative instrument (in that it is simultaneously system and instrument) relates to systems-based compositional approaches used by james, questioning exactly where the creativity and artistry come in creating the electronic equivalents of these generative instruments. this concept of machine-generated compositional systems is an interesting recurrent thread, and central to much of the analytical thinking of the book. another interesting critical lens that weidenbaum often touches on, though in less detail than systems and technology, is the notion of repetition. much of the surface tensions in saw ii involved small-scale repetitive ostinato and sonic gestures, often involving subtle changes in timbre over the course of the track to create long-scale narrative. a particularly fine example of this occurs in weidenbaum’s discussion of ‘rhubarb’, which neatly analyses the relative simplicity of its repetitive surface details (moving from a five-note melody, to a six-note one, and back to five notes with a ‘missing space’) in the broader aesthetic context of early-twentieth-century modernism, in particular channelling the spirit of erik satie. nevertheless, weidenbaum is at his best when he writes about the non-musical issues of the album; its complicated inception, the unconventional track listing method (and the interesting relationship with fans which this fostered, as they took the onus of naming james’ tracks themselves), the reception of the album in general, and its legacy both in media syncs and as an inspiration to future works. there are also nods to the issues of canonization and the creation of a ‘high’ form of dance music in the album’s invented genre of idm (‘intelligent dance music’). whilst now the grandiose ‘high’ art connotations of idm’s genre label might come across as snobbish or alienating, weidenbaum makes the compelling point that when saw ii was released, such a bold gesture had an important impact on the broader public perception of electronica as either four-to-the-floor dance music or the a-rhythmic background to a narcoleptic come-down. weidenbaum’s journalistic tone leads the reader effortlessly through his carefully constructed narratives, always respectful of aphex’s artistry without ever falling into uncritical hagiography. it is a shame though that he did not get the opportunity to interview the elusive producer for his book, though hints of james’ personality occasionally appear in reference to an earlier telephone interview the pair had in the mid 1990s. indeed, the myth around james’ work runs so deep in discourse around the album that it is often hard to tell what is fact or fiction, even from seemingly reliable sources. weidenbaum all too often skirts around these problems, avoiding discussion of james’ complicated public persona and the problems this causes in understanding his work. one area where this is particularly noticeable is that of james’ creative process. a lot of the myth circulated in fan literature talks about his obsession with homemade synths and circuit-bending, yet weidenbaum tantalisingly refers in several sections to the possibility of a lot of the album’s sounds being made from distortions and manipulations of off-the-rack equipment. this relationship between the album, the creative process and its technological mediators is a particularly rich one, and a more in-depth discussion of some of these issues would have benefited the broader cultural considerations at play in the book. however, these are just small issues. in general, the grand project of this book—to demystify the layers of complexity in this seminal album and its reception—is accomplished successfully. one of the biggest appeals of saw ii lies in the invitation to find meaning in it and weidenbaum’s account is the perfect vehicle to do this, helping the listener to connect up the disentangled sonic fragments and re-assemble them in a personal way. hip-hop turntablism, creativity and collaboration sophy smith farnham: ashgate, 2013. isbn: 978-1-4094-4337-7 (hardcover) rrp: £55.00 (hardcover) mark katz university of north carolina (us) even for readers of this journal and devotees of the art of the dj, the advanced form of record manipulation that sophy smith spotlights in her 2013 monograph, hip-hop turntablism, creativity and collaboration, may seem rather recherché. watch, for example, the british dj crew (and one of smith’s featured groups) known as the scratch perverts in action. two men stand before a long table lined with gleaming technics 1200 turntables, their restless hands twiddling knobs, flicking sliders and manhandling vinyl discs, transforming bits of prerecorded sounds into completely new music. the tempos, timbres, textures and rhythms change every few seconds; what would clear a dance floor in record time (so to speak), instead draws the rapt attention and enthusiastic applause cheers of the crowd. (i can always tell newcomers to a turntablist showcase when they try, always unsuccessfully, to dance.) it is the collaborative musical transformation of groups like the scratch perverts that fascinates smith, a musicologist, composer and performer who teaches at de montfort university in england. smith’s particular goal is to develop an analytical framework for studying this music, a project she undertakes in order to “demonstrate that hip-hop music is worth academic attention not just in its role within popular culture, but as music itself” (2). after the introduction, the first four main chapters provide the historical and cultural background for the art of turntablism, as it has come to be known. the context in which smith places hip-hop turntablism is less hip-hop itself (or related african american expressive practices) than the modernist and postmodernist experimental music of pierre schaeffer and john cage and their successors. smith seems to drawn by an impulse (not uncommon among scholars, and one that has impelled me at times) to defend hip-hop by connecting it to practices and traditions that fellow academics recognize as legitimate. the problem is that hip-hop turntablists have little connection to those traditions. just because john cage picked up a record player’s tone arm and set the needle down in rhythmic patterns in 1939 does not mean that he had any influence on grandwizzard theodore (who long ago stopped going by “dj theodore”, as smith identifies him) when he did the same in 1977. to my mind, the real contribution of the book comes in chapter 6 when smith, drawing on her observation of various dj teams (also known as crews) in rehearsal, explores the collaborative process of developing collective turntable compositions. of particular value is when smith brings out the musicians’ voices, as when she cites beni g describing his group’s musical process: “the only way i can explain it is it’s like two, three or four artists all holding the same paint brush wanting to paint one picture and they’re all trying to paint it in a slightly different way” (62). these musicians think of themselves as innovators, and their process of collective innovation could be of great interest to those who study the interaction among musicians within a group. as beni g explains elsewhere of turntable groups, “their sort of innovation and their attitude—they’ll look at the turntables and ... be like how can we mess with the equipment? how can we mess with this to make it completely different? to me, that’s crazy good, to keep pushing it in that way” (57) (smith would have benefited from books such as ingrid monson’s saying something: jazz improvisation and interaction (1997), though i should point out that the performances that smith studies are not improvised). the most substantial portion of this book comes in the chapters in which smith carefully develops her analytical methodology. although this work is impressive in many ways, i have to wonder whom is really served by it. when, on pages 140–45, smith sums up her analysis of various performances (the videos of which readers have no easy access to, by the way), most of her conclusions might seem obvious, for example: “the routines consist of smaller sections” or “tempos alter in most sections”. it’s not clear how these observations would guide the listening or deepen the appreciation of those first encountering this music, or help the musicians themselves understand their own art. put another way (and to soften my criticism), smith’s contributions in this book are strongest when she analyzes processes rather than products, using her keen ears and eyes to give us access to a vital musical tradition that transforms technologies of sound reproduction into instruments of musical creation. references monson, ingrid. 1997. saying something: jazz improvisation and interaction. chicago: university of chicago press. filmography “the scratch perverts @ skratchcon”. 2006. youtube. <http://youtu.be/mqvwrk_jf3w> (accessed 27 april 2014). folk music and commercialization in danubian trances and boheme dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 7(1): 97–115 issn 1947-5403 ©2015 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.01.05 folk music and commercialization in danubian trances and boheme barbara rose lange university of houston (united states) abstract hungary participates in the central european narrative of rejuvenation and renewal through edm, but the commercialization of remixes has disturbed that account. hungarians debate the meanings of two different cd projects: deep forest’s 1995 album boheme and károly cserepes’s 2003 album danubian trances: mikroworld– ambient. hungarian fans praise danubian trances as an elegant update of national sensibility. boheme’s remixes of hungarian and romani folksong have earned a very different response, from shock at the cuts that deep forest made to folk song recordings to anger about cultural appropriation. hungarians have reflected that boheme, like many west european firms, extracted a resource from the country. by contrast, they view their own remixing of folk music from the peoples of the former austro-hungarian empire as having continuity with other genres that elevate folksong. i argue that where commerce encounters a previous practice of elevating music aesthetically and morally, it may further marginalize that practice but it does not change its character. keywords: hungary, roma, gypsies, appropriation, postcommunism barbara rose lange is associate professor of ethnomusicology at the moores school of music, university of houston, texas, usa. she has studied the music of hungarians and roma in the late communist era. she has also conducted research on improvised and avant-garde music. she is the author of holy brotherhood: romani music in a hungarian pentecostal church (oxford, 2003). her current project concerns experiments with folk music in bratislava, budapest, and vienna. <rlange@uh.edu>. feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.01.05 mailto:rlange@uh.edu dancecult 7(1)98 introduction a sense of rejuvenation, renewal and communalism through electronic dance music (edm) extends from central europe into hungary. however, the commercial success of some edm remixes has disturbed this atmosphere. hungarians have debated the meanings of two different cd projects: deep forest’s 1995 album boheme and károly cserepes’s 2003 album danubian trances: mikroworld–ambient. both projects sample hungarian and romani (gypsy) folksinging. the two projects take different approaches to their material; one broadly showcases the unique expressions of folksinging from hungary and the other processes its sound in a highly detailed way. hungarians had contrasting responses to the two projects. they viewed their own remixing of regional folk music as an extension of communal participation initiated generations earlier by such musicians as béla bartók. by contrast, many in hungary felt that boheme had extracted a resource from the country and prevented their native efforts from finding a large audience.1 the hungarian debates illustrate tensions between creativity and inequality that characterize cultural appropriation in general. at the same time, the debates infuse a history that is particular to hungary and to east-central europe. remixes of folk and local sounds have spurred creativity in local music industries as well as in noncommercial arts scenes (see greene and porcello 2005; madrid 2008). in one sense, these projects just use a common technique of musical quotation. however, global commerce changes the power relationships in such efforts. as jacques attali argues, the imitation or copying in mass production overwhelms the source’s expression (1985: 32, 87–9). in addition, musical appropriation can carry out racism or ethnic exclusion. perry hall, writing on african american music, identifies a cycle of exploitation (1997). the white mainstream initially rejects african americans’ vernacular creativities, but then adopts and changes these same folk expressions. if the mainstream finds “economic value”, then the adopted form occupies the public sphere and excludes the original form (hall 1997: 38). yet hall finds that this very marginalization provides space for african americans to claim and create new idioms. hall’s comments address the recurring debates over appropriation in major styles of popular music from rock to hip-hop. digital sampling of folk music into global hits, including in edm-derived styles, has extended the “basic inequity” and “negative caricature” of the exploitation cycle into many cultures, even as it romanticizes the transcultural (see feld 1996: 27; frith 2000). considering interactions between balkan roma, west europeans, and americans, carol silverman argues that the main question is not whether appropriation takes place, but “who benefits from these exchanges” (2013: 274). in this case study of boheme and danubian trances, i consider the fact that hungarians have their own history of appropriating folk music into art music. elevating folk music in this way has enabled them periodically to gloss over ethnic exclusions, especially of the romani people (see brown 2000), yet this elevation also supplied a communal framework from which citizens of hungary including roma could discuss and try to counteract commercial appropriations that extended to them in the postcommunist era. i argue that where commerce encounters lange | folk music and commercialization in danubian trances and boheme 99 a previous practice of elevating music aesthetically and morally, it may further marginalize that practice but it may not change its character. concept and sound in boheme and danubian trances boheme is a project by the deep forest producer duo consisting of the frenchmen eric mouquet and michel sanchez. together with dan lacksman, they produced their first eponymous album in 1992. boheme was their second effort, this time just by the mouquetsanchez duo, released in 1995. both albums were extremely successful as pop music; in 1996 boheme won a grammy award for best world music album. deep forest conveyed exotic adventure with their projects. boheme’s jacket notes set the idea of revealing a hidden and faraway world (taylor 1997: 12–13). deep forest’s boheme project samples hungarian, romani, russian, native american, taiwanese and other folksong. however, the title boheme singles out a trope of the nomadic and freedom-loving gypsy as presented in the 19th century by franz liszt (whose book about romani instrumental music was entitled des bohémiens et leur musique en hongrie).2 thus, like liszt, mouquet and sanchez juxtapose hungarians and hungary’s ethnic minority the romani people. boheme’s two main sampled records are rom sam ame! (we are rom) and musiques de transylvanie (musics of transylvania), both from the belgian label fonti musicali. boheme’s notes juxtapose romani and hungarian within a metaphorical adventure. paraphrasing the album notes of musiques de transylvanie, boheme outlines a journey into the forest, led by the voice of hungarian singer márta sebestyén, “bird of good omen on our bohemian wanderings” (deep forest 1995: 2). the two main sampled records are from the communist era and represent two different sets of people. rom sam ame! is a compilation of recordings that claude flagel, lou flagel and hungarian ethnographers had made in the 1970s of romani singers in the hungarian countryside.3 the recordings on rom sam ame! are all vocal and the singers are bilingual in romani and hungarian. musiques de transylvanie is a record that budapest folk revivalists and the french claude flagel made in 1988–9 to protest and publicize the dictator ceausescu’s program to depopulate and even raze the villages of ethnic hungarians living in the neighboring country of romania. much of the music on musiques de transylvanie symbolizes mourning for lost village culture. the album contains a significant number of solo laments, prayers and other songs. by the time that deep forest licensed the record for sampling just a few years later, the protest message of musiques de transylvanie was a historical relic. although boheme credits the albums it sampled, only sebestyén and one other revival singer, kati szvorák, are credited by name. one number on boheme, “bulgarian melody”, is a studio collaboration between mouquet, sanchez and sebestyén.4 boheme is a mixture of segued and separate numbers, some of them purely instrumental but most with song samples as melody layers. the deep forest album of 1992 included many overlapped short samples (vocalizations by the forest people, or pygmies, of central africa drew the most attention). boheme mostly samples full phrases, although those phrases are dancecult 7(1)100 not necessarily from the beginning of a given recording. whereas the samples of deep forest had undergone some electronic processing, the samples for boheme have just occasional layering, splicing and reverb. hungarian and romani language, the unique timbres of the singers, and the melismas and glissandi of the folksong performances provide unusual sonic qualities analogous to effects processing. “bohemian ballet”, for example, has clearly defined layers including drum, bass, hi-hat, a clap track, synth lines and two melodic samples, one from rom sam ame! and the other of undefined origin.5 this and most of boheme’s other numbers build layers, reach a tempo of 120bpm, move to a break, reintroduce a regular beat, and fade to a solo loop. danubian trances is a project by the hungarian composer and producer károly cserepes. in the 1970s and 1980s, cserepes was a member of the acoustic folk-inspired group vízöntő (aquarius). he began incorporating electronics after he was able to import a roland jupiter 8; the instrument was very rare in the communist country. he collaborated with notable rock singers and folk performers such as márta sebestyén; under their performances of folksongs he created a bed of synthesized sounds and magnetic tape loops. he moved to digital sampling in the 1990s. through his eldest daughter, an event organizer who ran the cökxpön ambient zone at hungary’s sziget festival, cserepes then became interested in ambient music, edm and “the spatial dimension of sound”.6 figure 1. károly cserepes, ipomea live project, budapest, hungary. photo credit: lászló gajdos (2009). lange | folk music and commercialization in danubian trances and boheme 101 cserepes’s 2003 album danubian trances: mikroworld–ambient envisions dreamlike communion with a lost world. the cd’s cover graphics reproduce the lajos gulácsy painting az ópiumszívó álma (the dream of the opium smoker) and the notes “invite you to take a psychedelic journey along the hungarian danube” (cserepes 2003). cserepes explained that the philosopher béla hamvas’s essay az öt géniusz (five genius loci) had inspired him. hamvas “divided the country into five parts according to character”.7 right-wing nationalism in hungary also cultivates an intense mysticism of place, but cserepes took care to explain to me that his exercise was meditative and did not have right-wing implications: “it’s true that inside a small country the even smaller areas have a microclimate, a spiritual microclimate. . . . for this you have to live here. it doesn’t have an ideological significance at all, it is an emotion (érzelem)”.8 the folk samples on danubian trances include historical recordings of very elderly folksingers, children’s folksong, zithers, bagpipes, hurdy-gurdy and reed flute. there are samples of birdcalls, the fluttering of birds’ wings, rustling reeds and crickets. the samples are mostly short fragments and they infuse all layers including breakbeats. they are processed with tempo modification, rapidly switched channels, echo, panning and other techniques. cserepes adds sparse selected elements such as a clap track or bass and establishes tempi ranging from 90–95bpm. in “náni” for example, short samples of a hungarian folksong, klezmer violin, thai music, church bells and the sound of a horse-drawn carriage echo over a sparse dub track. the treatment of the carriage sample is one of many intricate details. cserepes pans the sound from left to right and loops the sample so that the clops of the horse hoofs and the whirring of the carriage wheels resemble a needle cycling in the runout groove of a record. in the dub track of “náni”, cserepes uses many processing techniques such as filtered frequencies, cutting instruments in and out, panning and “barely audible” tracks (see veal 2007: 65–77). legal objections to boheme boheme and danubian trances had vastly different distribution histories. boheme was released by sony, sold millions of copies worldwide, received a grammy, and went into regular rotation on pop music radio in hungary. danubian trances was self-published by cserepes and distributed only locally by the hungarian label fonó.9 boheme’s success concentrated several layers of inequity within the european union and within hungary. by 2004 deep forest and the hungarian musicians whose recorded voices the duo had sampled were part of the same political and legal entity, the eu, so that in principle there existed a way to address some of the inequities. for albums that remix ethnographic recordings, there are legal and ethical conflicts resulting from the fact that field recordings originally made for education and study were recycled for commercial use. the commercial use highlights how copyright is centered on an individual creator; copyright practice assumes that folk music does not have such a creator and therefore disadvantages the varied ways that local communities may acknowledge creativity (seeger 2004; toynbee 2004: 123). another disadvantage comes from the legal dancecult 7(1)102 understanding of the unique qualities a musician brings to the performance of a song. many interpretations of copyright law do not acknowledge performing rights for folk music. as is well known, deep forest bought the rights to albums of folk and non-western music from the record companies that had released the albums. some of the people who had recorded the songs, as well as record companies that first published these recordings, had clearly obtained releases from the original performers and were clearly able to license the music to deep forest. however, many other recordings that the duo licensed had been made in an earlier era when there was oral agreement for recording, compensation was made in the field on a one-time basis, no signed document existed, the original performers had passed away, and the people recording the music and the record companies assumed that every performance was of a folksong that did not have a known author (see zemp 1996). in the case of boheme, deep forest (and fonti musicali and sony) exercised a privilege on musicians who lived just a short distance from them and who could easily be identified. this album focused the anger of many hungarians about being obscured and “ventriloquized” (novak 2011: 629). boheme also brought to the fore the disadvantaged position of romani people inside hungary and within europe, as well as an interest in and sympathy towards them that a significant segment of magyars felt during the 1990s before extreme anti-roma feeling spread in the country. in hungary, discussion over the legality of boheme focused on its two hit singles “marta’s song”, in which sebestyén’s voice is sampled from musiques de transylvanie and “freedom cry” in which károly rostás’s voice is sampled from rom sam ame! the terms of any royalty arrangement between sebestyén, mouquet and sanchez are unclear for the original studio recording of boheme’s number “bulgarian song”. as deep forest’s remixing ethics were being discussed very heavily among ethnomusicologists, in the late 1990s i asked sebestyén about her opinion of whether what the duo had done was right. she responded that legally they were in the clear. sebestyén actually became more famous for her performances of “szerelem, szerelem” (love, love) and other hungarian folksong that gabriel yared incorporated into the soundtrack and score of the oscar-winning the english patient in 1996. a decade later, sebestyén reflected that the deep forest case was a “strange situation in which . . . i was involved without my knowledge” (2007). she observed ruefully that it was the arrangers who had gotten royalties, not the performers of folksongs. however, she felt a major difference between the two treatments of her voice: the producers of the english patient showed her what they intended to do before the film was released, whereas mouquet and sanchez had completed their mix and had released “marta’s song” before informing her. deep forest’s sampling of a romani singer’s voice for “freedom cry” caused a public controversy. “freedom cry” samples the song “esik eső (kisangyalom)” (rain falls [my little angel]) performed by károly “xuttan (huttyán)” rostás on rom sam ame! although rostás was an impoverished member of the romani minority living in a southeast hungarian village, one niche of hungarians already knew rostás’s voice quite well. folklore researchers had recorded rostás doing bass scat-singing (szájbőgőzés, “oral bassing”) in the 1970s, and lange | folk music and commercialization in danubian trances and boheme 103 folk revivalists as well as young romani singers emulated him.10 when “freedom cry” and “marta’s song” went into regular rotation on hungarian pop radio, a much larger number of listeners who did not normally pay attention to folk music heard the voice of rostás and also sebestyén. the filmmaker andrás salamon relates that he was one of these people. in the 1990s he was making documentary films on roma in hungary. salamon has explained that with documentary film he intends to depict states of existence and he does not intend to be an “investigative reporter” (oknyomozó riporter; see szőnyei 1998). salamon’s film huttyán (1996) exemplifies this approach. salamon relates that he decided to seek out the performer of “freedom cry”. he found that rostás had passed away and witnessed rostás’s family, like many other rural roma, living in abject poverty. he and his staff financed the travel of rostás’s sons, one of whom was in a wheelchair, and then filmed them traveling from their small village to paris and to brussels, meeting with sony, and sightseeing. no payment from sony or the deep forest duo resulted.11 huttyán premiered on hungarian television with a large viewership and has been programmed there every few years since 1996. salamon was criticized for facilitating the rostás’s efforts so actively and for possibly raising the family’s expectations unrealistically. salamon explained that he himself had not understood copyright law or the intransigence of international corporations. he explained that he was shocked when sony did not pay anything to the rostáses (szőnyei 1998). marginalized people such as roma face particular difficulties if they want to challenge what they experience as cultural appropriation. in this case the original event was the recording of rostás that had occurred decades prior to deep forest’s sampling. international copyright law had been unclear on the question of intellectual property during suits of the 1990s (guy 2002: 196). the general agreement on tariffs and trade (gatt) and within the european union, the eu copyright directive of 2001 were meant to establish a uniform application of “western-style copyright protection” (see frith and marshall 2004: 4, 13; seeger 2004: 158–9). the trade related aspects of intellectual property (trips) provision of gatt globalized notions of individual authorship. although trips has aided efforts to keep local control of intellectual property, trips also fixed the western notion of copyright, rendering local communities less able to utilize their own concepts of intellectual property in the global commercial environment (see arewa 2006). notwithstanding the implications of these measures for extending the notions of western copyright and of individual authorship into cultures that conceive of intellectual property quite differently, the eu directive did in principle offer a framework for litigation, and by the mid-2000s, hungary was a member of the eu. the “brussels i” regulation of the eu (no. 44, passed in 2000) stipulates that a citizen of one eu member state can sue a party in another eu member state. the citizen has the option of initiating the suit within the courts of his own country, or alternatively suing in the nation where the defendant is located (european commission n.d.: 14). in the mid-2000s, the rostás sons, represented by the budapest copyright lawyer zoltán markovits, initiated a suit against sony and the flagels in hungary. the legal case was complex. three different international copyright laws had been in effect over the decades dancecult 7(1)104 during which rostás was recorded, rom sam ame! was released, and deep forest made its remix. in addition, there was the question of whether “esik eső” was folk music or rostás’s original song. markovits argued that károly rostás was the unique author of “esik eső”, that rostás was owed performer’s fees, and that these should be paid posthumously. prior to trial, flagel settled with the rostás family for a small sum (borzák 2006). for the suit against sony, the budapest court solicited an expert opinion from the hungarian academy of sciences. the ethnomusicologist katalin kovalcsik rendered the opinion. she had in fact researched and written about the way that personal invention and autobiography penetrated the singing of important romani performers in hungary (kovalcsik 1987). she explained to me that in her judgment, “esik eső” was indeed rostás’s individual composition.12 sony’s lawyers argued that it was folk music and that a performer’s fee does not have to be paid for folk music (borzák 2006). the budapest court rejected the rostáses’ suit and it was thus unable to proceed in the eu legal system. hungarians on ethics and aesthetics in danubian trances and boheme in reflecting on boheme and danubian trances, hungarians (among them the successions of urban young people for whom clubbing and edm were formative experiences in the 1990s and 2000s) balanced their own ethics and aesthetics with the knowledge that two west europeans had gained worldwide fame for the music coming out of their own region. hungarians consider their own use of folk music from throughout the eastern europe region a statement of humaneness and of aesthetic elevation in the footsteps of béla bartók. bartók and several other modernist artists opposed the entrenched nobility in hungary and advocated for poor peasants at the turn of the twentieth century (see frigyesi 1998). bartók did this by making direct contact with peasants of several nationalities and recording their music. he applied an aesthetic ideal of organicism from european art music of the nineteenth century according to which all details should reinforce each other to create a unified work. bartók regarded some peasant songs as symmetrical, concentrated and a model of organicist perfection (see bartók 1989[1931]: 142).13 there are several parallels between this bartókian standard and the image presented not just by hungarians, but also by deep forest. mouquet and sanchez call boheme’s numbers “songs of freedom and fraternity”, and this could be seen as analogous to (yet more vague than) the multiethnic approach of bartók. mouquet and sanchez say that boheme is “calling us to hear the eternal beauty of the human voice in a new guise”, and this parallels bartók’s and many other classical composers’ reshaping of folk music. however, hungarians did not hear boheme’s remixes at all in this way. a case in point is boheme’s number “gathering”, which uses two lines from a folk prayer that revivalist andrás berecz sings in an emotional folk style on musiques de transylvanie. the original song, an entreaty to st. stephen, the patron saint and first christian king of hungary, is the final number on musiques de transylvanie and as such conveyed a protest against the isolation and the crisis of the villages under ceausescu. mouquet and sanchez did have the ability to consider the meaning of the text, since the jacket notes of musiques de transylvanie supply full line-by-line translations. lange | folk music and commercialization in danubian trances and boheme 105 however, the duo selected two expressively sung fragments from the middle of the song that by themselves are not intelligible hungarian: “but above all/ as the guardian of our country”. to my knowledge, berecz has not made any public comment on this, but márta sebestyén has done so. as a unesco artist for peace, sebestyén frequently advocates for the live performance traditions and lands from which her songs originate. she objected that “andrás berecz’s saint stephen song was as though it had been broken on the wheel (olyan volt, mintha kerékbe törték volna). is it not terrible that they break a sacred song to pieces and that it doesn’t mean a thing to them”? (kiss 2003). in sebestyén’s view, deep forest had destroyed the song’s folk religiosity. discussions of károly rostás and deep forest/sony’s treatment reverberated online throughout the 2000s and as recently as 2013. (the comments are in many different languages; here i discuss the hungarian remarks.) a number of hungarians have uploaded rostás’s original performance of “esik eső” from rom sam ame! to youtube, and others have transcribed rostás’s text to blogs and youtube response sections. many comments show how boheme and huttyán have permeated hungarian popular culture. response posts summarize the events depicted in huttyán, sometimes mistakenly assuming that sony did compensate the rostáses. some have reminisced about hearing the deep forest version on hungarian pop radio and under the credits to the 1990s video game asterix & obelix. extreme anti-roma views are not absent from the forums around “esik eső,” although they are rare. such posts insist that nothing is original about rostás’s performance (thus spreading the racist idea that roma contribute nothing to the nation; the same has also been asserted about jewish musicians). in response, other commentators have asserted the originality of rostás’s language and interpretation. rostás’s grandson and one of his sons have repeatedly written on these forums that the song is károly rostás’s own and have described the circumstances under which he began to sing it. they also express anger at the fact that sony did not compensate them. many listeners reflect that rostás’s performance touches them personally and describe playing the song over and over again. the comments predominantly reveal a sympathetic identification with rostás, his family and the expressive culture of romani people in hungary. in responding to danubian trances, hungarians balanced the bartókian organicist aesthetic with their reactions to the album’s edm-related style. reviewer eszter veronika kiss saw danubian trances as “a completely new format of [cserepes’s] customary electronic music”. she observed that, as the album is in the ambient genre, “we might actually translate this expression as environment-music. . . the musical numbers stand together in a montage of the countryside’s rustlings, sounds and music (kiss n.d.). if much ambient music sampled nature sounds in order to create a general sensation of space or to give a general spiritual feeling (reynolds 1998: 190, 196–7), kiss is praising the opposite: cserepes’s intricate processing, selection and coordination of hyperlocal samples. some listeners found ironic commentary in cserepes’s fusion of electronic styles with old, acoustically recorded samples. on “timeismycanvas”, the edm blogger “rúka” rates danubian trances “10 out of 10” among “older records that have perhaps unjustifiably been forgotten”. he hears cserepes making dancecult 7(1)106 daring attempts . . . at the record’s most humorous point, in the “madudáj” composition, [in] which a bagpipe sample takes the place of a drum ‘n’ bass influence. . . . my favorite part is when, between drum machine breaks, he substitutes an old woman’s csujogatása (rhythmically chanted verses) for what would be the mc’s role at a jungle party (“rúka” 2012).14 rúka finds an “exceptional ability to paint an atmosphere” where cserepes had added the sound of the horse-drawn carriage to the breakbeats (tört ütem) in “náni”. rúka calls attention to a parallel between cserepes’s mikroworld concept and bartók’s collection of piano miniatures entitled mikrokosmos. cserepes also [c]olors the sound palette very subtly (finoman) with live instruments and synthesized sounds alike, but the impression always remains organic. . . . [w]e sometimes discover acoustic characteristics of an era, dub effects, but to me it never becomes jarring; the main role always belongs to the hungarian folk music, whose timelessness remains intact (“rúka” 2012). rúka mainly blogs about international issues in dub and edm, but here he is showing double consciousness as a dub advocate and as a hungarian with knowledge of classical music. he hears cserepes’s creation of edm and at the same time he sees danubian trances fully achieving an organicist standard. hungarian writers differed on whether danubian trances could facilitate a meditation on disappeared culture. lászló marton, organizer of the world music stage at the sziget festival and other high-profile venues and a major reviewer of world music in hungary, commented that cserepes was “turning into the gale” of world music trends with his microworld aesthetic. yet marton objected quite strongly that “the spiritual thrills do not match the saturation of feeling that they deserve” (2003). in contrast to marton, máté papp, writing for új forrás magazine, praised cserepes’s “archaic-psychedelic sound”; the listener “in a moment’s time can be carried and rocked into the danubian transcendence (dunai transzcendenciájába) of his own past and present” (papp 2003, emphasis in original). the comments by papp and marton fall into two broader categories of response to european minimalist styles of edm: “it can be heard as stark and cold because of its minimalist aesthetic or incredibly lush and detailed, if the listener focuses on these artists’ subtle manipulation of the atmospheric elements” (veal 2007: 236). marton may also be responding to basic “impersonal” and “celestial” features of ambient music (reynolds 1998: 192, 197). cserepes’s project did attenuate the passions that ethnographic recordings arouse in hungarian listeners, but it did this in order to cause listeners to meditate on the loss of microscopic worlds. “a domestic product”: hungarian views on commodification the global success of boheme caused many hungarians to reflect on what happens when folk remixes become commercial. steven feld has characterized the commercialization process as “schizophonic”, creating a division where “oral performance and cultural lange | folk music and commercialization in danubian trances and boheme 107 participation are transformed into material commodity and circulable representation” (1996: 13). hungarian reactions map such a division somewhat differently. even though they utilize recorded media hungarians have not treated many of their own local remixes as a material commodity. instead they have viewed their own efforts as modernized cultural participation on a continuum with live performance. hungarians did believe that boheme’s remixes had transformed folk music into a material commodity. many saw in this event the larger socioeconomic imbalance between eastern and western europe that occurred with the fall of communism. reactions crossed the political spectrum, and included selfreflection as well as expressions of outrage.15 hungarians with a multicultural orientation saw irony in the contrasts between successes. lászló marton showed this orientation through his programming of afropop, klezmer, and balkan acts. he reminded his readers that cserepes had modest success when he combined synthesizer with folksinging in the 1980s; this was “small comfort” (enyhe vigasz) when boheme achieved global hit status a decade later (marton 1998). cserepes himself reflected on the fact that he, a person of urban privilege, was sampling the temporally, geographically, or demographically distant and disadvantaged folk. in his opinion the issue had arisen with the change of technology from magnetic tape-splicing and tape loops; digitization had made mixing easy and ushered in the fashion for mixing all types of ethnic music together. this in turn raised the question of socioeconomic imbalance: this is a questionable thing morally, [the question of ] whether it is correct or not. in general it’s better if an exotic, touristic result does not happen. deep forest was a bit like this, they made entertainment music out of it, and they used these elements as art for art’s sake (l’art pour l’art) a bit. so they used them not in terms of the contents, but to the degree of spectacle. i think the difference is that when i used these types of elements, i chose them for the reasons or from the aspect of content. . . . not because it was upbeat (jópofa) or interesting, i didn’t put [a sample] in there because of that.16 cserepes is here distinguishing himself, as a contributor to ambient, film music and performance art scenes, from deep forest as a pop group. these comments illustrate how cserepes and many hungarian listeners are attuned to whether a producer keeps folk content elevated and recognizable; if the producer succeeds they feel a local cultural participation, although a commodifying imbalance will always place such an endeavor in doubt. however, in hungary’s electronic music scenes, there is no particular consensus on how to treat folk music. lászló hortobágyi, who centers his sounds mostly in indian music, has done dub and goa trance projects. he also mixed the voice of folksinger irén lovász for világ fa (world tree), with this album winning the 1996 preis der deutschen schallplattenkritik (german record critics’ award). but hortobágyi has stated that his passion does not lie with hungarian music and that he is not interested in dance rhythms. he comments that he does not prefer to think about the origins of his sound samples, since he is isolating frequency spectra from them for textures that are inspired by indian music (marton 2001: 271–8). dancecult 7(1)108 anger and shock about the unequal exchange in boheme crossed the political spectrum in the 1990s. in 1997 the folk musician ferenc kiss had composed the soundtrack to the film romani kris cigánytörvény (gypsy law, dir. bence gyöngyössy) and used a recording of károly rostás’s voice. a review in the romani periodical amaro drom criticized the film’s depiction of roma in desperate material circumstances, but did not single out the soundtrack. however, when etnofon records released the soundtrack on cd in 2000, reviewer lajos fogarasi took the opportunity to comment on it: károly rostás is a domestic product (hazai termék) and not an import. as a result far fewer recognize his local fame than they do his foreign [fame]. or rather we, too, know it from there: that they took it away, packaged it up there, and then brought it back and sold to us the [very] thing that, if we had not given to them for free, we would have had for free, and they would [only] have been able to obtain for a lot of money (2000). fogarasi expressed a common local view on the inequalities between east and west. in hungary after 1989, locally grown food and locally manufactured household goods disappeared from stores only to be replaced by far more expensive products with west european labels. my co-respondents from all walks of life were quick to identify the many cases in which the west european firms had used local raw goods to make the new products. on other occasions they commented that west european firms had bought the hungarian factories and then simply relabeled and re-priced the same hungarian products. like many other people in the former communist countries hungarians felt that they had become the object of “colonial relationships” (see pine 1998; seeger 2004: 160). in fogarasi’s analogy, rostás’s singing had, like the local household goods, become an object of unequal exchange. adherents of the hungarian far right have attributed a sacred character to folk symbols.17 it might be assumed that they are especially angry about western europeans using folk material from hungary, but they also engage in some self-reflection. the contrarian feró nagy, originally a dissident punk rocker of the 1980s, has become prominent in far-right “national rock”. he has asserted that only foreigners like deep forest were able to sample and remix the folksong of hungary effectively: “i can’t put it into a musical setting because then i would desecrate the ancient flame . . . it’s a typically hungarian thing that two foreigners were able to do this. we couldn’t, because it was said that it was not permitted, so you respected [folk music], so no means no” (2008). nagy is critiquing his fellow countrymen for treating folksong as an elevated and sacred object; in his view, hungarians only prevented themselves from making commercial hits out of folk music, and thereby left an opening for others to do so. recorded remixes of folk music aroused many passions in the 1990s and early 2000s. the hungarian reactions reflect the major socioeconomic changes of postcommunism. across the spectrum, there is anger at being exploited, contemplation on the ethics of re-using cultural goods, and self-critique of the way that elevating art can suppress experimentation; remixing sparked a lengthy discussion of what is appropriate for commercial use. the writers and musicians that i discuss here are treating commodification and communal lange | folk music and commercialization in danubian trances and boheme 109 participation as mutually exclusive. some, like nagy, see this bifurcation as a choice; others, like fogarasi or marton, are viewing it as imposed from outside. there have been subsequent samplings and alleged samplings of music from hungary into global hits; although they are mentioned in the hungarian press, they have not generated the same persistent commentary. contemporary processing techniques make such samples difficult to document.18 live performance and folk remixes for my hungarian acquaintances and friends who participate in electronic dance music culture, local folk music has a miniscule role, although folk music has such prominence in the country that it nonetheless appears in unexpected ways. the major budapest club venue the a38 ship regularly programs acoustic folk music for one of its spaces; recent performers include the buda folk band and the romani group parno graszt (white horse). since an effective way to pre-empt appropriation is for marginalized people to put their own live music into the public sphere (see hilder 2012), budapest club venues are significant. as the right wing has penetrated the rhetoric and symbolism of national identification in the 2000s and 2010s, other constituencies such as edm adherents emphasize an international and multicultural vision.19 deep forest and cserepes have both done live pas in hungary. deep forest has appeared in hungary several times; one recent appearance was at a very large rock/sports venue. sebestyén has appeared a handful of times in person with mouquet and sanchez to reprise the song phrases of the two boheme numbers that feature her solo voice. live singers not from hungary have re-enacted the numbers that include rostás’s voice (see deep forest 1999). in 2005, cserepes self-published the album ipomea: tricolor, which in many ways figure 2. ipomea: tricolor cd jacket (2005). dancecult 7(1)110 is the optimistic contrast to danubian trances. a warm synthesizer palette predominates, the album is instrumental except for some wordless vocalizations, and it uses only a few processed african and southeast asian music samples. cserepes made a series of appearances in the late 2000s at large outdoor public spaces. the concerts featured solo rock or folk singers and live instrumentalists playing minimalist motives while cserepes mixed selected bass, synthesizer and other tracks from ipomea, very rarely from danubian trances. in 2013, cserepes produced flashback, another series of danubian trance-style mixes, but he notes that the ever-shifting styles in edm and ambient music are not compatible with meticulous processing. live appearances by deep forest, cserepes, and folk musicians create a good audience mood or hangulat vastly different from the disjunctures and imbalances that the recorded remixes set in play. conclusion debates about musical appropriation are ongoing and arise especially when a project achieves hit status. some musicians and observers think of appropriation as a basic creative activity, while others see it as an exploitation of inequality. in hungary, a special version of this debate erupted when the digital sampling of folk music collided with the elevated status of folk culture inside the country. the debate surrounded edm-related genres, core idioms of the postcommunist era. boheme, a global popular hit created by west europeans and published by a multinational recording company, sampled hungarian and romani folksong to project an image of gypsy-style wandering. danubian trances, created and self-published by a hungarian, projected an atmosphere of micro-climates. boheme’s success highlights legal and ethical conflicts that arise when previous recordings are recycled into commercial use. in hungary, these conflicts were felt very strongly during the initial fifteen years of postcommunism. boheme’s publication coincided with a host of changes, including a wave of sympathy for romani people, transition to global capitalism, and connection with eu legal frameworks. hungarians experienced boheme’s sampling as a moral and aesthetic violation against which they had little recourse. by contrast, they embraced danubian trances as a project that took folk music into the genre of ambient music without changing its elevated status. many hungarians regard boheme’s commercial success as part of the larger socioeconomic imbalance between them as citizens of a former communist country and their west european neighbors. hungarian reflections on boheme and danubian trances have crossed the political spectrum. they see the projects as metaphors for unequal exchange, but they have also included self-critique. the case of danubian trances and boheme shows that where commerce encounters a previous tradition of elevating music aesthetically and morally, it may marginalize that tradition but not change it to any great degree. lange | folk music and commercialization in danubian trances and boheme 111 notes 1 this article is part of my larger ongoing project on experiments with folk music in eastcentral europe 1989–2008. it also draws on my ethnographic research of the 1990s and 2000s on romani and hungarian folk and popular music. my research was supported in part by the fulbright joint austrian-hungarian research grant (2007). all translations from hungarianlanguage articles, interviews and personal communications are mine. i thank anikó dávid for her assistance in checking translations and transcriptions. see nye 2013 on the integrative significance of edm in central europe. on hungary, see kömlődi 1999 and studies by angyalosy, vitos and nagy in gergely 2010. 2 here i use romani language terms (rom/roma/romani, sing./plur./adj.) to refer to romani people and “gypsy” to refer to the image of the gypsy. i also mention the country of romania in this article. its national language, romanian, is a romance language unrelated to romani, which is an indo-aryan language. many hungarian roma are bilingual in hungarian, the nation of their citizenship, and in romani. they sometimes switch between the two languages while singing. 3 during the communist period in the 1970s and 1980s, claude flagel had been a strong advocate of hungarian folk music, managing to visit hungary, record music and arrange tours and record releases for hungarian folk groups in belgium and france. 4 boheme samples numerous romani singers from rom sam ame! all are named in the original recording’s jacket notes but not on boheme. 5 a solo voice sample is from the stick-dance song “rudas csillag hajnal hasad[ik]” (pole star, dawn breaks). mouquet and sanchez cut the first syllable so that the line begins “-das csillag”. a group-singing loop on “bohemian ballet” is sampled from a song in an old, very emotional genre called in romani loki gilyi (slow songs), where one singer starts the song lines and others join in. i am unable to identify the processing and/or provenance of the second half of this loop (several field recordings document károly rostás singing this particular song). 6 károly cserepes, interview with the author (mp3 recording), budapest, 16 may 2006. 7 károly cserepes, interview with the author (mp3 recording), budapest, 16 may 2006. see also hamvas 1985 [1959]. 8 károly cserepes, interview with the author (mp3 recording), budapest, 16 may 2006. 9 cserepes had released two previous cds with fonó, but in 2003, the label was reorganized to focus only on folk music and jazz. 10 see hooker 2006 on exploitation and ethnic inequality in the instrumental music of the hungarian folk revival. 11 for several years in the 2000s, the wikipedia page on deep forest reported that some proceeds from boheme were donated to the györgy martin foundation. as with deep forest’s first eponymous album, the end result of such donation is vague (see zemp 1996). the györgy martin foundation’s stated purpose is to support research on hungarian and european traditional dance, but its awards of the 2000s were almost exclusively in support of hungarian folk culture and not romani folk culture. 12 katalin kovalcsik, personal communication with the author, budapest, november 2007 and may 2012. dancecult 7(1)112 13 where hungarians see bartók’s activities as signal statements of inclusion, some neighbors see the dominance of the austro-hungarian dual monarchy (1867–1917), in which the hungarian half of the monarchy tried to assimilate the numerous slavic, german, romanian, jewish and romani minorities living in its territory. 14 the verses here are dudautánzás, a set of syllables imitating the bagpipe. 15 timothy taylor, comparing boheme with the other 1996 grammy nominees from africa and elsewhere in the global south, saw boheme’s win as a privileging of western music (1997: 12). 16 károly cserepes, interview with the author (mp3 recording), budapest, 16 may 2006. 17 anti-roma and anti-semitic lyrics of the “national rock” genre resound casually in everyday family activities as well as at more provocative events (see feischmidt and pulay 2014). 18 in 2014, the romani singer mónika “mitsou” juhász alleged that beyoncé’s producers had sampled her voice for “drunk in love” (nyscef index no. 162333/2014, 22 december 2014). in 2010, christina aguilera’s production team sampled the pop singer kati kovács for “woohoo”, cleared the copyright with the original record company hungaroton, and did not get objections from kovács or the songwriter (see békés and mezei 2010). 19 carol silverman discusses balkan romani music in west european clubs. she argues that despite an ideology of freely celebrating culture, djs and impresarios exploit the romani musicians (2013: 280–6). references arewa, olufunmilayo b. 2006. “trips and traditional knowledge: local communities, local knowledge, and global intellectual property frameworks”. marquette intellectual property law review 10(2): 155–80. attali, jacques. 1985. noise: the political economy of music. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. bartók, béla. 1989 [1931]. “a népi zene hatása a mai műzenére”. in bartók béla írásai, i, 140-4. budapest: zeneműkiadó. békés, gergely and péter mezei. 2010. “a sampling megítélése a magyar szerzői jogban”. iparjogvédelmi és szerzői jogi szemle 5/115 (2): 5–32. borzák, tibor. 2006. “ellopták apám hangját”! szabad föld online, 12 may 2006. <http://www.szabadfold.hu/cikk?6152>, (accessed 3 june 2008). brown, julie. 2000. “bartók, the gypsies, and hybridity in music”. in western music and its others: difference, representation, and appropriation in music, ed. georgina born and david hesmondhalgh, 119–42. berkeley: university of california press. european commission. n. d. a citizens’ guide to cross-border civil litigation in 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<http://magyarnarancs.hu/zene2/lemez_tud_valamit_cserepes-tandori_ helybol_tavol-57242#>, (accessed 6 june 2013). ———. 2001. érintés (világzeném). budapest: etnofon. ———. 2003. “world music: bizonyára”. magyar narancs 37, 9 november. <http://magyarnarancs.hu/zene2/world_music_bizonyara-55075>, (accessed 6 june 2013). nagy, feró. 2008. interview by szilvia bátky-valentin. 21 october. <http://www.nepzene. hu/?teljes_cikk=uj_208621224620756&tipus=nepzene>, (accessed 3 august 2013). http://etnofon.hu/hun/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=78 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2012.689473 http://folkradio.hu/hir/170 http://magyarnarancs.hu/zene2/lemez_tud_valamit_cserepes-tandori_helybol_tavol-57242 http://magyarnarancs.hu/zene2/lemez_tud_valamit_cserepes-tandori_helybol_tavol-57242 http://magyarnarancs.hu/zene2/world_music_bizonyara-55075 http://www.nepzene.hu/?teljes_cikk=uj_208621224620756&tipus=nepzene http://www.nepzene.hu/?teljes_cikk=uj_208621224620756&tipus=nepzene dancecult 7(1)114 novak, david. 2011. “the sublime frequencies of new old media”. public culture 23(3): 603–34. nye, sean. 2013. “minimal understandings: the berlin decade, the minimal continuum, and debates on the legacy of german techno”. journal of popular music studies 25(2): 154–84. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jpms.12032>. papp, máté. 2013. “kék hajnal nakonxipánban. károly cserepes: danubian trances”. új forrás, 13 january. <http://ujforras.hu/?p=1663>, (accessed 6 june 2013). pine, frances. 1998. “dealing with fragmentation: the consequences of privatisation for rural women in central and southern poland”. in surviving post-socialism, ed. sue bridger and frances pine, 106–23. london: routledge. reynolds, simon. 1998. generation ecstasy. boston: little, brown. “rúka”. 2012. “10/10 cserepes – danubian trances”. 19 october. <http://timeismycanvas. blogspot.com/2012/10/1010-cserepes-danubian-trances.html>, (accessed 13 june 2013). sebestyén, márta. 2007. “önmagam szeretnék lenni”. interview by gergely agócs. fidelio, 4 april. <http://fidelio.hu/jazz_world_folk/interju/onmagam_szeretnek_lenni>, (accessed 10 november 2007). seeger, anthony. 2004. “traditional music ownership in a commodified world”. in copyright and music, 2nd ed., ed. simon frith and lee marshall, 157–70. new york: routledge. silverman, carol. 2013. romani routes. new york: oxford university press. szőnyei, tamás. 1998. “nem vagyok szociális munkás. interjú salamon andrás filmrendezővel”. magyar narancs 14: 28–9. taylor, timothy. 1997. global pop: world music, world markets. new york: routledge. toynbee, jason. 2004. “traditional music ownership in a commodified world”. in copyright and music, 2nd ed., ed. simon frith and lee marshall, 123–38. new york: routledge. veal, michael. 2007. soundscapes and shattered songs in jamaican reggae. middletown: wesleyan university press. zemp, hugo. 1996. “the/an ethnomusicologist and the record business”. yearbook for traditional music 28: 36–56. <http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/767806>. discography cserepes, károly. 2003a. danubian trances: mikroworld–ambient. károly cserepes (cd): fonó fa-911-2. ———. 2003b. “náni”. danubian trances: mikroworld–ambient. károly cserepes (cd): fonó fa-911-2. spotify. <https://play.spotify.com/track/0ktmotrtijwvugxdyhifpv>, (accessed 28 may 2014). ———. 2005. ipomea: tricolor. károly cserepes (cd). ———. 2013. flashback. károly cserepes (mp3). selections, soundcloud. full date posted. <https://soundcloud.com/user4656887>, (accessed 20 may 2014). deep forest. 1992. deep forest. sony (cd): 57840. <http://www.discogs.com/deep-forest-deep-forest/release/4064562>. ———. 1995a. boheme. sony (cd): bk 67115. <http://www.discogs.com/deep-forest-boheme/release/37846>. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jpms.12032 http://ujforras.hu/?p=1663 http://timeismycanvas.blogspot.com/2012/10/1010-cserepes-danubian-trances.html http://timeismycanvas.blogspot.com/2012/10/1010-cserepes-danubian-trances.html http://fidelio.hu/jazz_world_folk/interju/onmagam_szeretnek_lenni http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/767806 https://play.spotify.com/track/0ktmotrtijwvugxdyhifpv https://soundcloud.com/user4656887 http://www.discogs.com/deep-forest-deep-forest/release/4064562 http://www.discogs.com/deep-forest-boheme/release/37846 lange | folk music and commercialization in danubian trances and boheme 115 ———. 1995b. “bohemian ballet”. boheme. sony (cd): bk 67115. spotify. full date posted. <https://play.spotify.com/track/24tgurlgdmvahyqlwflmwo>, (accessed 28 may 2014). ———. 1999. made in japan. sony epic (cd): bk 63927. <http://www.discogs.com/deep-forest-made-in-japan/release/223639>. hortobágyi, lászló and irén lovász. 1995. világ fa. fonó (cd): fa-063-2. <http://www.discogs.com/lov%c3%a1sz-ir%c3%a9nhortob%c3%a1gyi-l%c3%a1szl%c3%b3-vil%c3%a1gfa/ release/1515706>. magyarországi cigány népdalok. gypsy folk songs from hungary. 1975. hungaroton (lp): slpx 18028-29. <http://www.discogs.com/cigány-magyarországi-cigány-népdalok-gypsy-folk-songsfrom-hungary/release/1513871>. musiques de transylvanie: traditions de la monorite hongroise. 1989. fonti musicali (cd): fmd 115. <http://www.discogs.com/various-musiques-de-transylvanie-erd%c3%a9lyi n%c3%a9pzene-transylvanian-folk-music/release/4332193>. rom sam ame! 1993. fonti musicali (cd): fmd 194. sebestyén, márta. 1992. apocrypha. prod. károly cserepes. rykodisc – hannibal (cd): hncd 1368. <http://www.discogs.com/m%c3%a1rta-sebesty%c3%a9n-apocrypha/release/2145993>. filmography gyöngyössy, bence. 1997. romani kris cigánytörvény. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0129345/>. salamon, andrás. 1996. huttyán. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0140273/>. https://play.spotify.com/track/24tgurlgdmvahyqlwflmwo http://www.discogs.com/deep-forest-made-in-japan/release/223639 http://www.discogs.com/lov%c3%a1sz-ir%c3%a9n-hortob%c3%a1gyi-l%c3%a1szl%c3%b3-vil%c3%a1gfa/release/1515706 http://www.discogs.com/lov%c3%a1sz-ir%c3%a9n-hortob%c3%a1gyi-l%c3%a1szl%c3%b3-vil%c3%a1gfa/release/1515706 http://www.discogs.com/lov%c3%a1sz-ir%c3%a9n-hortob%c3%a1gyi-l%c3%a1szl%c3%b3-vil%c3%a1gfa/release/1515706 http://www.discogs.com/cig%c3%a1ny-magyarorsz%c3%a1gi-cig%c3%a1ny-n%c3%a9pdalok-gypsy-folk-songs-from-hungary/release/1513871 http://www.discogs.com/cig%c3%a1ny-magyarorsz%c3%a1gi-cig%c3%a1ny-n%c3%a9pdalok-gypsy-folk-songs-from-hungary/release/1513871 http://www.discogs.com/various-musiques-de-transylvanie-erd%c3%a9lyi-n%c3%a9pzene-transylvanian-folk-music/release/4332193 http://www.discogs.com/various-musiques-de-transylvanie-erd%c3%a9lyi-n%c3%a9pzene-transylvanian-folk-music/release/4332193 http://www.discogs.com/m%c3%a1rta-sebesty%c3%a9n-apocrypha/release/2145993 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0129345/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0140273/ vessels of transfer: allegories of afrofuturism in jeff mills and janelle monaé dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 5(2): 7–41 issn 1947-5403 ©2013 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.02.02 vessels of transfer: allegories of afrofuturism in jeff mills and janelle monáe tobias c. van veen mcgill university abstract the performances, music, and subjectivities of detroit techno producer jeff mills—radio turntablist the wizard, space-and-time traveller the messenger, founding member of detroit techno outfit underground resistance and head of axis records—and janelle monáe—android #57821, cindi mayweather, denizen and “cyber slavegirl” of metropolis—are infused with the black atlantic imaginary of afrofuturism. we might understand mills and monáe as disseminating, in the words of paul gilroy, an afrofuturist “cultural broadcast” that feeds “a new metaphysics of blackness” enacted “within the underground, alternative, public spaces constituted around an expressive culture . . . dominated by music” (gilroy 1993: 83). yet what precisely is meant by “blackness”—the black atlantic of gilroy’s afrodiasporic cultural network—in a context that is afrofuturist? at stake is the role of allegory and its infrastructure: does afrofuturism, and its incarnates, “represent” blackness? or does it tend toward an unhinging of allegory, in which the coordinates of blackness, but also those of linear temporality and terrestial subjectivity, are transformed through becoming? keywords: afrofuturism, afrodiaspora, becoming, identity, representation, race, android, alien, detroit techno, janelle monáe tobias c. van veen is a writer, sound-artist, technology arts curator and turntablist. since 1993 he has organised interventions, publications, gatherings, exhibitions and broadcasts around technoculture, working with mutek, steim, eyebeam, the new forms festival, citr, kunstradio and as concept engineer and founder of the upgrademtl at the society for arts and technology (sat). his writing has appeared in many publications. tobias is editor of the forthcoming volume other planes of there: afrofuturism collected. as of 2014 tobias will be postdoctoral researcher in communication at the université de montréal. an archive of dj mixes resides at djtobias.com. feature article dancecult 5(2)8 all things exist, live and react in relation to space. —jazz vocalist king pleasure, liner notes to golden days (1960) i wanted to land a ufo on the track. —model 500 again that’s the reason for the masks, we were simple “vessels of transfer” from somewhere beyond our understanding which i think people understood and could see. —mad mike banks, underground resistance1 the performances, music and subjectivities of jeff mills and janelle monáe are infused with the black atlantic imaginary of afrofuturism. mills, a founding member of detroit techno outfit underground resistance, innovative turntablist and pioneer of minimalist techno production, has performed worldwide since the early 1990s; monáe, in her guise as android cindi mayweather—and with the blessings of prince and big boi of outkast2—has risen to become the heir apparent to a futurist and freaky afropop tradition. their respective global reach demonstrates paul gilroy’s observation that the black atlantic—gilroy’s term for the “non-traditional tradition, an irreducibly modern, excentric, unstable, and asymmetrical cultural ensemble” of the afrodiaspora (1993: 198)— communicates and establishes shared identities and nodal points of history through calland-response forms of music even as its subjects are “separated in space and time or divided by the technologies of sound reproduction and the commodity form” (indeed since the development of the internet, such “imaginary effects” of dispersed identification and history are all the more powerful; see gilroy 1993: 102). we might understand mills and monáe as continuing the black atlantic ex-centric tradition by disseminating an afrofuturist “cultural broadcast” that feeds “a new metaphysics of blackness” that becomes enacted “within the underground, alternative, public spaces constituted around an expressive culture . . . dominated by music” (gilroy 1993: 83). yet what precisely is meant by “blackness” in a context which is afrofuturist? in which monáe’s cindi mayweather is an android on the run from human authorities, and in which mills has become the messenger, a time-andspace traveller returning from the future to forewarn us of the catastrophic results of first contact with extraterrestrials? such “identities”—which i here adopt as fluid and performative—often lend themselves to a movement that exceeds their characterization as stage personae, suggesting a becoming that transforms the coordinates of subjectivity.3 thus we need ask whether such identities— afrofuturist androids, aliens, cyborgs, etc.—“represent”, in an allegorical mode, conditions of afrodiasporic experience (“blackness”) or whether afrofuturism is capable of unhinging allegorical referents to humanist bodies and terrestrial markers of difference, thereby developing autonomous forms of becoming and thought: rather than a “a new metaphysics van veen | vessels of transfer 9 of blackness”, do we not encounter a “mythscience” that challenges our previously held conceptions of blackness and of metaphysics? prelude i. the messenger jeff mills is crouched over his equipment: his fingers gracefully flying over the dj mixer, silver headphones cocked on his head, his intense gaze taking in the five glowing pioneer cd decks that surround him in a semi-circle. a heavy black cloth drapes the stage like a ceremonial shroud. mills is a lone figure on stage, intense and focused, as if manning a solo soundship, the navigator of a relentless barrage of intergalactic techno (see fig. 1). the outer space symbolism of mills’ multimedia composition is not accidental: the sights and sounds of afrofuturism pervade the haunting, minimalist performance. a science fictional array of bleeps, squelches and synthesizers crack audibly like solar flares, punctuating the intensive polyrhythms and driving bass; behind mills, a photograph of earth’s moon fills the massive projection screen (see fig. 2 below). figure 1. jeff mills at mutek 2012, montréal. photo: mutek.org. dancecult 5(2)10 among the scattered scenes of planetary electronic dance music culture (edmc), mills’ performance is emblematic of afrofuturism—a term more complex than it first appears, afrofuturism delineates a tradition of afrodiasporic media production, thought and performance that engages science fictional practices and themes to envision alternate identities, timelines and counterrealities. such envisioning operations create startling, creative and uncanny effects—often, by imaginatively challenging whitewashed futures and colonialist histories with africentric and futurist revisionings—while crucially offering ways to subversively transform afrodiasporic subjectivities. afrofuturism invokes multiple strategies. on one level, its narratological and fictive operations seeks to represent black subjects in futurist timelines. on other levels, it utilises alternate timelines and other worlds as allegories capable of representing but also transforming the coordinates of the present—such as becoming alien or android subjectivities that challenge the meaning of “race” in post-humanist timelines.5 afrofuturism also provides a framework for deciphering its “mythsciences” and “alterdestinies”. its reflexivity produces its own tools of interpretation. as nabeel zuberi writes, afrofuturism “codifies, organises and maps an alternative cultural history and critical framework for [afrodiasporic] media production” (2004: 79).6 this includes the entry of afrofuturism into scholarship, where since the early 1990s a nascent field of “afrofuturist studies” has begun to appear in a number of disparate publications, undertaking genealogies of afrofuturist motifs in literature, film, music, and other media.7 the development and imaginative embrace of alien, machinic, astral, and cyborg subjectivities in afrofuturism, all of which abandon or modify the archetypal, enlightenment form of the human—from janelle monáe’s archandroid to jeff mills’ messenger—offer an escape hatch from paradigms for afrodiasporic identity that are all too often restricted to the violence and capitalist bling of ghetto realism, confined to post-slavery resonances of subalternity, or entrapped within the lingering effects of the civil rights era, in which african-american subjects had to struggle, over the course of a long century since the emancipation proclamation, for the right to be considered enlightenment subjects. to this end, as kodwo eshun argues, “it’s in music that you get the sense that most africanamericans owe nothing to the status of the human. african-americans still had to protest, still had to riot, to be judged enlightenment humans in the 1960s” (1999: a[193]). hence the transformative capacity of the alien, and of afrofuturist science fictional approaches, that explore unearthly universes, timelines, and identities. when the “human” is nothing but the historical entitlement of white supremacy, signifying an embodied technology of exclusion, there is little reason to invest within the very same paradigm that was once deployed to systemically oppress and enslave one’s ancestors.8 even at the outset, with its aliens and androids, afrofuturism is full of unbelievable figures and outright paradoxes. this is not surprising, given the mythical status—and extensive mythical systems—of its practitioners, from sun ra, the ancient alien pharoah from saturn, jazz composer, philosopher poet, and arkestra bandleader, whose music novelist anthony joseph alluded to as “transcendent jazz—the metaphysics of another world” (2006: 120), van veen | vessels of transfer 11 to dr. octagon, the alien gynecologist and hip-hop emcee of “robot voodoo power” from jupiter;9 from george clinton’s dr. funkenstein and the mothership connection of space funk outfit parliament, to detroit techno outfit underground resistance and their collective of black resistance fighters (the suburban knight, chamaleon, chaos, mad mike, rolando), and underwater drexciyans (descendents of slaves thrown overboard during the middle passage). afrofuturism confronts the participant with these mythical figures that nonetheless “walk the earth”. such fantastical becomings—what sun ra called the “living myth” of his own impossibility—confront the scholar with a choice, or rather, upset the divide in western thought between myth and science, fact and fiction, the real and the imaginary. in the close to his interview “motion capture” in more brilliant than the sun (1999), kodwo eshun argues that either one begins by accepting the interesting effects of the impossibility, for example, that sun ra was born on saturn, and is the return (from the future) of an ancient alien deity who once ruled kemet—the afrocentrist name for the revisionist history/myth of black pharoahnic egypt—or one dismisses ra’s extravagance as merely fiction, his thought as merely poetic, his jazz as merely music, his entire strategy here on earth as merely that of an intriguing but irreverent artist, who nonetheless isn’t as “serious” or “politically effective” compared to his fellow travellers of the era, such as malcolm x, the nation of islam, or the black panthers. to bow to the latter dismissal, which would eschew all that strays from the gravity of the supposedly serious path of outright political action, however, is to leave the greatest fiction of all—consensual reality and its imperial history—unquestioned. it is also to ignore the equally fantastical elements of the black panthers (who housed sun ra when he taught at berkeley in 1971; see kreiss 2008), and the yacub/mother plane mythotheology of the nation of islam.10 to sidestep the tricky dynamics by which myth informs reality, in which fiction builds fact, is to not only enact a puritanical division that in-itself is fictive, but it is to close the door upon creative strategies of manifesting other worlds and alterdestinies—which is to say, transformed afrofutures, futures otherwise for us all—just as it is to leave unquestioned the reality that, apparently, we are all human—just some more human than others. it is also to decisively ignore the fact that for hundreds of years, africanist peoples were subjected to the fiction of biological inferiority and thus, the fact of slavery. this constitutively contaminated relation between fact/fiction is known in the work of sun ra as mythscience. thus afrofuturism challenges the invisible paradigm of unquestioned reality—the “reality” that in the past has proclaimed the inferiority of blackness and the de jure privilege of white supremacy, that has denied certain peoples the status of “human” and cast them as alien slaves, the invisibly “white” reality where blackness is alienated—through the construction of mythsciences and the intervention of chronopolitics (eshun 2003). in what follows i will seek to provide provisional encounters with these concepts, thereby aiding in the development of a shared lexicon for afrofuturist studies that, at the same time, complicates what are becoming a set of assumptions concerning the role of allegory in afrofuturism. i seek to articulate these concepts—hinge them to practices, or better, demonstrate how dancecult 5(2)12 such (technological) practices demonstrate the operational force of a concept (in eshun’s language, conceptechnics)—by way of an immersion in two contemporary afrofuturists, both of whom engage with electronic music and are deeply invested in dance cultures: the techno releases and dj performances of jeff mills; and the android afrofunk of janelle monáe. but first i begin with allegory. allegories of afrofuturism as afrofuturist kodwo eshun explains, in a passage that picks up on several themes that will occupy us below, it’s in music that you get this sense that most african-americans owe nothing to the status of the human. african-americans still had to protest, still had to riot, to be judged enlightenment humans in the 1960s—it’s quite incredible. and in music, if you listen to guys like sun ra—i call them despots, ra, rammellzee, and mad mike [of underground resistance]—part of the whole thing about being an africanamerican alien musician, is that there’s this sense of the human as being a really pointless and treacherous category, a category which has never meant anything to african-americans. this is particularly true with sun ra—just because ra pushes it by saying that he comes from saturn. i always accept the impossibility of this. i always start with that, where most people would try and claim it was an allegory. but it isn’t an allegory: he really did come from saturn. i try to exaggerate this impossibility . . . (eshun 1998: a[193]). eshun performs a double-move that at once demonstrates the inadequacy and yet the necessity of reading afrofuturism as allegory—precisely because he does the latter himself. on the one channel, eshun advocates an approach to afrofuturism that urges us to embrace afrofuturism’s impossible claims of alien embodiment, thereby unhinging the figure of the alien from being nothing other than an allegory of the historical experience of slavery, structural racism and persistent discrimination. this crucial move allows us to think through afrofuturism’s temporal effects—how it challenges the reality of certain histories, and the history of certain realities—and thus to conceptualize its discourse as autonomous. there is no need, once allegory is unhinged, to continuously read afrofuturism as “standing in for a reality elsewhere”. yet, even as eshun refuses the allegorical role of sun ra’s alien identity, for example, he nonetheless derives the afrofuturist critique of the human from the historical experiences of african-americans. on the other channel, eshun refuses the allegorical role of sun ra precisely because we can understand him as saying that african-american experience remains, in reality, an unhuman condition: thus “african-americans still had to protest, still had to riot, to be judged enlightenment humans in the 1960s”. the reality of this fiction—that africanamericans are unhuman—is the constitutive paradox at work, for now it is the historical conditions themselves that are already irreal, as it were, and as they remain, wherever the “real fiction” of racist formations take place. it is that racist fictions become realities, and van veen | vessels of transfer 13 thus inscribe real histories, with real laws and real effects, that shapes the constitutive and intractable paradox at work in considering the role of “allegory” in afrofuturism: for what allegory is there for the fiction of racism, for experience lived as inhuman, when it is already a fiction? thus the standard definition of allegory—as a fiction that represents the real, a literalization technique that symbolizes a referent, be it a concept, thing, event, or person— is upset. in afrofuturism, allegory itself is the epistemological condition of possibility for the real/fiction divide. afrofuturism itself arises from a set of historical conditions—the trauma of slavery, that in public enemy’s phrase, “armageddon bin in effect” (1988), but also through a shared set of non-western belief systems and occult beliefs—that question the supposed impermeability between reality and fiction, precisely from irreal conditions. i will explicate this below with janelle monáe. definitions of afrofuturism unearthed: new forms of the other speaking on cbc radio’s q with jian ghomeshi, monáe strikes a cool, if not unsettling, poise, as if she remains undecided whether she is appearing as monáe or as her alien-android alter-ego, cindi mayweather. with the release of the electric lady in 2013, monáe has arrived at the forefront of what might be called afropop—a fusion of soul, funk, hip-hop and r&b that references prince, betty wright, james brown, george clinton, michael jackson, and grace jones (among others) just as it resonates with afrofuturist motifs of the android, time travel, and outer space. her five-part metropolis suite, now in its second album (with one extended ep), undertakes an imaginative reinterpretation of fritz lang’s 1927 silent film, metropolis. crucial to this reinterpretation is her inversion of maria, the female android who is constructed to seduce and trick the proletarian workers of metropolis. in monáe’s version, “slave cybergirl” #57821 becomes the archandroid, the revolutionary mediator between the proles and the elites, just as her africanist embodiment reverses maria’s whiteness to the archandroid’s blackness. over the course of the suite, the archandroid is on the run from the authorities, and hides-in-plain-sight, posing as the pop star cindi mayweather, a.k.a. the electric lady. back in cbc studios, monáe is cool—very cool—behind the mic. as if programmed. then she begins talking about androids: i speak about androids because androids represent, to me, a new form of ‘the other.’ and i love speaking about the future because it gives us all a chance to rewrite history and do what’s right—or continue to do what’s wrong, and oppress those we don’t understand, oppress those who may not look like us. i think it’s important that those issues or subjects are still being brought to the forefront. i mean, you can parallel it all to being an immigrant in today’s united states, to just being the minority in the majority. so cindi [mayweather, the archandroid] represents the heart, the mediator between the mind and the hands (monáe 2011). when janelle monáe speaks of androids as a new form of the other, she demonstrates the allegorical force of afrofuturism: the way in which its science fictional tropes—in dancecult 5(2)14 particular its aliens and androids—are capable of representing experiences of the “other”. what is the mode, however, of this representation? monáe’s “parallel” is the immigrant, but also a generalized experience of othering, in which oppression follows from visual difference, an effect of “being the minority in the majority”. on stage, monáe has often remarked before singing her anthemic “cold war” that the song speaks to her experience as an african-american woman in the music industry. the track’s second stanza is telling, in which monáe sings, in her guise as cindi: “if you want to be free / the underground is the only place to be”. here, the “underground” takes on a double signification, suggesting both monáe’s unconventional and conceptual—which is to say, afrofuturist—approach to the industry, but also cindi’s flight, as she descends into the subterranean labyrinth of metropolis. as if directed both to the droids and humans of metropolis circa 2026 and the “oppressors” and “others” of today’s earth, the chorus repeats: “this is a cold war / do you know what you’re fighting for?” monáe’s coolness and cindi’s androidal composure (the most composed, perhaps, since the 1950s bebop style of miles davis) can thus be explicated: her afrofuturist mythsystem is an effect of the cold war, that ongoing, protracted struggle known as racism, to which the droid’s “cold war” serves as allegory. for the most part, scholars of afrofuturism have embraced definitions that emphasize its allegorical force, and by which allegory is understood as a fiction representing real conditions. mark dery coined the broad definition of afrofuturism in 1994 as afrodiasporic “signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future” (136) to—as yaszek summarizes—“explore how people of color negotiate life in a technology intensive world” (2006 :42).11 alondra nelson, who co-founded the afrofuturism.net listserv with paul d. miller in 1998, cites the definition agreed upon by list members as afrodiasporic “voices with other stories to tell about culture, technology and things to come”, as well as “sci-fi imagery, futurist themes, and technological innovation in the african diaspora” (nelson 2002: 9).12 nelson and miller go on to outline the task of the afrofuturist scholar as exploring “futurist themes in black cultural production and the ways in which technological innovation is changing the face of black art and culture” (2004). more germane to edmc, nabeel zuberi describes sonic afrofuturism as “a black music tradition that engages with separation, escape and otherness through the tropes of science fiction” (2004: 78). in zuberi’s definition, the historical markers of a universalized “black experience” are likewise allegorized through science fiction. to this end, afrofuturist scholarship has focused on science fiction produced by afrodiasporic authors and artists, wherein the authorial body is grounded as the “real” from which the work is read as allegory. this approach lends itself to sociological accounts of afrodiasporic engagements with technologies (see nelson, thuy and hines 2001). scholars have likewise positioned afrofuturism as a way to redress the problematic of the “digital divide” wherein, as nelson writes “blackness gets constructed as always oppositional to technologically driven chronicles of progress” (2002: 1). afrofuturism thus presents an imaginative realm capable of redressing the digital divide, insofar as it gestures toward a corpus of authorial afrodiasporic bodies involved with various technological practices, as van veen | vessels of transfer 15 well as media that allegorize blackness in technoscientific narratives. yet important and necessary as such analyses are, they approach their limitations when facing the unhinged force of afrofuturist allegory, and its potential to transform the parameters of its “real” referents. what if monáe’s “other” isn’t just a question of mapping its meaning back onto her (african-american, female) authorial body, and of mapping the androidal cold war onto existing conditions of racism, but of thinking through, at the same time—as she says— new forms of the other? monáe’s alter-ego, the alien-android cindi mayweather, draws attention to the technologies of othering. the android, which is a robot constructed to appear as if human, is nonetheless a second-class, mechanistic, subaltern subject. the cover of metropolis: the chase suite depicts mayweather/monáe as a half-dismembered robot, her white metallic body, replete with protruding wires and a head implant, missing an entire arm, a hand, and a lower torso. the number “57821” is visible on her chest, along with a circuitboard and a series of buttons. that her body is white suggests that her erstwhile blackness is a skin that has been removed, revealing the cold metallic truth of her construction. that this “truth” appears as white suggests a complicated dialectic at play between black/white, which is elsewhere reflected in her costuming, and appreciation for uniforms, from primarily black tuxedos (circa the archandroid (2010)) to white (the electric lady (2013)). monáe’s play between white/black suggests a more complex operation at work than that of a grounded, allegorical referent to either white or black bodies. or humans. it suggests, in the words of paul gilroy, an operation that makes “raciology appear anachronistic” (2004: 335). but the meaning of such an anachronism, when the future appears to recall the past, is also more complex than at first appears. but what form might this new other take? the opening to metropolis: the chase suite (2008), begins by narrating the plight of cindi, who is on the run—from the authorities and their bounty hunters—as she has fallen in love with a human: i’m an a-a-alien from outer space (outer space) i’m a cybergirl without a face, a heart, or a mind (a product of the man, i’m a product of the man) i’m a slave girl without a race (without a race) on the run cause they hate our ways and chase my kind they’ve come to destroy me! — janelle monáe, “violet stars happy hunting!” (2008) cindi is a product of the (hu)man: an androidal technology. “she”—as in monáe’s world, androids have genders13—is also “slave girl without a race”. if she is not categorizable by race, this is because she is not human and thus (one speculates) not subject to racial ideologies of hierarchical biologism. she is nonetheless “a new form of the other”. what “other” is this, if the android does not represent—or cannot solely be reduced to—race per se? dancecult 5(2)16 specters of the atlantic: pharoahs, aliens and androids monáe’s strategic deployment of cindi mayweather is successful precisely because it unearths a straightforward allegorical reading of afrodiasporic conditions of otherness—or, as i would like to suggest, because such otherness is already an allegory. the fictive reality of the android folds back on itself, reaching an uncomfortable point where the allegory of the android to blackness, and the real experience of becoming an android, have already met in the historical trauma of slavery. the android “is a product of the man:” it has been engineered to undertake certain servile tasks—much like how african subjects were enslaved (and thus purchased, traded, and sold) as commodities. the commodification of subjectivity is emphasized by ian baucom in his specters of the atlantic: finance capital, slavery, and the philosophy of history (2005). baucom argues that it is because humans are already “represented” as commodities—the modernity of the “subject $”—that modern commodity capitalism gets its jumpstart. baucom goes on to demonstrate that “it is to finance capital rather than to the french revolution [as argued by hegel] . . . that we should look for the birthplace of the modern subject, the origins of a philosophical discourse on and of the modern” (baucom 2005: 55). in short, modern subjectivity is not born in the fire of radical democracy and the overthrow of the monarchy by the bourgeoisie: it is born in the advent of slavery as the complete commodification of the subject. it is this complete commodification of the subject, argues baucom, that is an effect of the general structure of allegory. baucom quotes halpern: “the commodity renders allegory obsolete by perfecting and globalizing the latter’s logic of representation. under mature capitalism, allegory is no longer simply a literary technique but is rather the phenomenology of the entire social-material world” (halpern 1997: 13; in baucom 2005: 21). allegory is thus not the “effect” of commodity capital, or to put it in crude marxian terms, the aesthetic form of superstructure to capital’s commodity base. as baucom writes, allegory is “something closer to an epistemological condition of possibility: a mode of representation which enables and clears the grounds for a form of capital which is an intensification and a wider practice of it” (2005: 21). the commodity—the human commodity qua slave, qua android—is “practical allegory—allegory in the sphere of social practice” (halpern, in baucom 2005: 21). that the afrodiasporic slave marks the birth of modernity in the commodity form is a point already made by novelist toni morrison, as kodwo eshun remarks: in an interview with critic paul gilroy in his 1991 anthology small acts, novelist toni morrison argued that the african subjects that experienced capture, theft, abduction, mutilation, and slavery were the first moderns. they underwent real conditions of existential homelessness, alienation, dislocation, and dehumanization that philosophers like nietzsche would later define as quintessentially modern. instead of civilizing african subjects, the forced dislocation and commodification that constituted the middle passage meant that modernity was rendered forever suspect (eshun 2003: 288). van veen | vessels of transfer 17 the “new form of the other”, in the form of the android, the cyborg, the alien, or the posthuman in general, is thus the cyclic return of an old form that marks the birthplace of modernity: the enslaved-commodified human. that the new form of the other resurrects a past is a central motif of afrofuturism, where its futurological operations tend to themeatize ancient africanist mythsciences. on the cover of the archandroid (2010), janelle monáe appears in what appears to be a gold, pharoahnic headdress, though uncannily so as an android, the ancient egyptian wear transformed into a technological skyline of metropolis itself. in doing so, monáe plays on the afrofuturist trope of the ancient black alien or android pharoah, as initiated by sun ra’s playful (but altogether serious) deconstruction of afrocentric historical revisioning, the latter exemplified in texts such as james’ stolen legacy (2001 [1954]), and what gilroy outlines as “popular ‘afrocentric’ assertions that the great discoveries of western science and technology were known to ancient africa, stolen from their ancient sources, and then assigned by white supremacist historians to the greeks” (2004: 339). while there is some effective reality to be gleaned from afrocentrism’s historically revisionist claims—a debate that rages around the more careful work of martin bernal’s black athena (2002)—i would suggest that when afrocentric historical revisioning attempts to establish monolithic historical claims that support an essentialist raciology, rather than challenge it, the black political culture that results tends toward a confined, static elaboration of both race and history that forecloses the imaginative unfolding of the future, and thus, is at odds with afrofuturism. the coordinates of the present at stake here, as paul gilroy outlines, is the “romantic and sentimental distaste for the racial capitalism that, at an earlier point, had made blacks themselves into commodities, [and that] is a profound factor that influences the moral conditions in which black political cultures take shape” (2004: 333). at stake in afrofuturist temporal operations—what we will explicate shortly as its chronopolitics (eshun 2003)—is a symbolic combat that challenges what gilroy outlines as “militant vindicative [black] nationalism”, and its historical revisionism that seeks to establish an essential blackness as original or superior (2004: 338–9). in this respect, the afrofuturist appropriation of kemetian motifs, for example in earth, wind, and fire’s pyramidal and pharoahnic fantasies, or killah priest’s pharoahnic headdress on the psychic world of walter reed (2013), expands rather than contracts such mythos: it elevates it to a mythscience, in which the future reveals a past transformed, and in which blackness, and black identity, is likewise unshackled from its restraints—including the programmatic referral to “blackness” as the central marker of difference. by exploring alternate forms of becoming that unbind the confines of race, afrofuturism implicitly affirms a “widely shared sense of race consciousness as earthbound and anachronistic” just as it explicitly pursues “another mode of recognition in the most alien identity” that carries it “beyond the human altogether” (gilroy 2004: 344; 348–9). “armageddon bin in effect”: chronopolitics baucom’s underlying temporal thesis in specters of the atlantic (drawn from walter benjamin) is that of an eternal return that marks the “long contemporaneity” of capitalism, dancecult 5(2)18 “the idea that oscillating forms of capital [which we here read as embodied allegories of commodified subjectivity] inform and are informed by the shifting phenomenologies and recycled generic protocols of cultural practice” (2005: 23). the effect of cyclicity as a historical form means that each cycle contains within itself the ghostly aftereffect of a past cycle, in the manner of fredric jameson’s theory of “sedimented” genre in the political unconscious, whereby “the ideology of form itself, thus sedimented, persists into the later, more complex structure” (1981: 141). this also means that each cyclic sedimentation faces the uncanny return of its repressed. the point i wish to make here is that temporal cyclicity is a signature or form that afrofuturism carries into our own future from its past. cyclicity itself is a historical form, and there are different forms of it. thus temporal cyclicity, the looping return and its insistent repetition, is itself an insistent occupation, or motif, of afrofuturism that changes over time, just as each one of its cycles is haunted by a repressed/ sedimented form of the cycle—such shifts in cyclicity perhaps explaining the appeal of repetitious electronic music.14 jeff mills’ focus on change and cyclicity in his texts and techno productions (which i will turn to below) is echoed by monáe, who summarizes the above discussion when she says “i love speaking about the future because it gives us all a chance to rewrite history”. the effect of such cyclic temporality upon scholarship means that each afrofuturist cycle of cyclicity, each genre of repetition, signals a form wherein “time does not pass, it accumulates” (baucom 2005: 24). wire journalist mark sinker mapped out such a sedimented temporality in his 1992 article, “loving the alien”, in which he suggested that the android and the alien are not just referential allegories for past or present black identity—though they also serve this contemporaneous purpose—but in sun ra’s words, “real fictions” that demonstrate the ongoing reality of such allegory, in which the accumulation of past cycles of futurism overlay the phenomenology of the unfolding present: the advantage of science fiction (sf ) as a point of cultural departure is that it allows for a series of worst-case futures—of hells-on-earth and being in them—which are woven into every kind of everyday present reality. . . . the central fact in black science fiction—self-consciously so named or not—is an acknowledgement that apocalypse already happened: that (in public enemy’s phrase) armageddon been in effect (sinker 1992). thus afrofuturism (for public enemy) begins with the end times. time is the accumulation of the apocalypse and its aftershocks. lisa yaszek also draws attention to how afrofuturism interprets the present as already science fictional in its accumulation of past futurisms and their aftermaths: a post-armageddon wasteland of exile and “alien nation” following from the abduction experience of atlantic slavery (2006). thus, like monáe, sinker suggests a more complex allegorical operation at work, in which representation exceeds its symbolic correlative to a referent and becomes a weltanschauung—a worldview of cyclic perception and interpretation, a way of being/becoming in the world that accelerates the reality of the irreal, drawing the cycles of the future into the present in the same moment that it unearths van veen | vessels of transfer 19 the past’s futurisms, the effect of which is an abandonment of consensual “reality” and its norms: the ships landed long ago: they already laid waste whole societies, abducted and genetically altered swathes of citizenry, imposed without surcease their values. africa and america—and so by extension europe and asia—are already in their various ways alien nation. no return to normal is possible: what “normal” is there to return to? (sinker 1992) sinker’s text provocatively demonstrates how afro-futurology, inclusive of its cyclic reinterpretations of the past, alters the coordinates of the present: the contemporaneous “as-is” is revealed by afrofuturism in its constitutive temporal abnormality. such temporal revelations are thus transformed by afrofuturism to un-earthings. both sinker and mark dery (1994) recognised how the afrofuturist undertaking is disruptive to white-washed visions of the future, just as it likewise exposes the colonization of the past, what sun ra called the “real fictions” and “manufactured memories” that make up the all-but-erased deep history of the afrodiaspora (ra 2005). if the afrodiaspora rarely saw itself represented in mid twentieth century futurology—notable in the absence of africanist representations in the 1964 new york world’s fair (samuel 2007)—today the past of atlantic slavery is at stake, with recent educational reforms in the lone star state attempting to erase its traumatic history through underhanded semiotics, as atlantic slavery is abstracted into the “atlantic triangular trade”.15 in all these cases, and as gilroy reminds us, we need to “be alert to the politics of temporalization” (2004: 339). kodwo eshun, in his 2003 essay on chronopolitics, outlines the dynamics of one of afrofuturism’s signature operations, its temporal politics: by creating temporal complications and anachronistic episodes that disturb the linear time of progress, these [afro]futurisms adjust the temporal logics that condemned black subjects to prehistory. chronopolitically speaking, these revisionist historicities may be understood as a series of powerful competing futures that infiltrate the present at different rates (eshun 2003: 297). my turn to chronopolitics and cyclicity here is in part a response to gilroy’s call, at the end of between camps, in which he argues: “we need self-consciously to become more futureoriented. we need to look toward the future and to find political languages in which it can be discussed” (2004: 335). gilroy hints at such a language in a passage on afrofuturology, and in particular his focus on “music and musicians” of the “black vernacular” who have turned to “extraterrestriality, futurology, and fictions of techno-science”, precisely because “denying the future and the right to be future-oriented became an integral part of the way white supremacism functioned during and after the slave system” (2004: 337). yet “black appeals to the future”, or at least gilroy’s invocation of such appeals, already has a past, a particular signature of futurism. gilroy laments the passing futurology of antiracism, just as he laments the loss of 1970s-styled afrofuturism and how “people no longer play with the possibility of departure from the planet in the same spirit with which their predecessors dancecult 5(2)20 had entertained the idea of return to africa” (2004: 341; 350). i would like to suggest a few points at this time: first, that “the future” is not just (in) the future, but a particular sedimentation of past signatures whose future is yet to-come. and second, that such sedimentation has cycled past gilroy’s focus on mid-20th century afrofuturism (which, according to gilroy, in-itself resurrected the spirit of marcus garvey and his “back to africa” campaigns). monáe’s contemporaneity, as it references the afrofunk of the ‘60s to ‘70s, but also weimar modernism and ‘80s electro-funk, suggests a novel unfolding of futurist cyclicity in our own time. a pervasive futurity-to-come propels jeff mills and techno music, as well as electronic music’s futurology in general—the latter unfortunately absent from gilroy’s repertoire of afrofuturology. sun ra suspected that “invented memory” was “placed in the minds of what is called man, in order to keep same from looking backward into a void… because of what has happened” (2005: 60). throughout his poetic philosophy, ra often depicted how the afrodiaspora has been systematically excluded from the privilege of writing (its) history—or projecting its futures. its conspicuous absence, however, often no better mirrors its tokenistic representation. etienne balibar reminds us that the stereotype of the racialized “community” is a contradiction “which sees an identity as community ascribed to collectivities which are simultaneously denied the right to define themselves” (1991: 18). this right of definition, in history and toward the future, situates chronopolitics as a “political language”. strangely, chronopolitics remains a scarcely recognised field of political intervention, even as afrofuturist science fiction has sought to address absences of afrodiasporic futures. in the militarist and masculinist white visions of 20th century antiseptic science fictional futures—more or less leading up to star trek’s debut of lt. nyota uhura in 1966—there was nary a body of colour to be found.16 robots and russians were more plentiful. the word “robot”, coined by czech writer karl čapek in his 1920 story rossum’s universal robots (r.u.r.)—and as paul d. miller reminds us17—is a metaphor for “slave”. keeping this in mind, we can begin to analyse how, in “golden age” science fiction, the figure of the excluded and racialized other had nonetheless been insidiously included: the other had just been sanitized as metallic robota, “their” troublesome attributes of consciousness and demand for “human rights” quietly erased through deferential reprogramming. isaac asimov’s three laws of robotics that command the preservation of humans—first introduced in the short story “runaround” in 1942—are equally at home on an antebellum plantation as on 22nd century mars.18 the similitude of future robotica to past slavery—or of a future dystopia to its past “hells on earth”—is not lost on afrofuturist authors such as octavia butler, who in kindred (1979) deployed the sci-fi device of time-travel to revisit southern plantation slavery. we might interpret such a literary device as precisely chronopolitical. monáe’s androidal incarnation as cindi mayweather likewise conducts an afrofuturist chronopolitics; we are reminded again that in the invention of the future, it is the manufacture of the past that takes its form in the uncanny return of the repressed. the android, in this respect, marks the uncanny incarnate, as a robot made to look as if human—a point not lost on fritz lang. van veen | vessels of transfer 21 afrofuturist interventions in chronology hold a purpose. by imagining alternate futures—a process that requires a simultaneous revisioning of the past, but also its unconscious return—the coordinates of the present are shifted. new and hitherto impossible realities come into effect. as well as past irrealities. ra’s afrofuturist take on kemet, for example, sidesteps the claims of truth and authenticity argued for by afrocentric revisionist history, pursuing instead what he calls mythscience, or the impossible embodiment of “a living parable/parallel”, an “alterdestiny” that uses creative fictions of past and future to reorganise the present coordinates of fact so that he, himself, may walk earth as a living myth. ra meditates upon rendering the “impossible” a reality: wisdom on its abstract planes uses myth as medium to understanding thus a living parable to the outward or inward truth is every myth: and from the myth you can see the likeness of the truth-out — sun ra, excerpt of “living parallel (1972)” (69: 2005) the messenger returns so far, celebrants and critics of those [afrofuturological] cultures have had to consider the power of meaningful sound before they could move toward the different and perhaps less demanding tasks involved in analyzing the visualization of the extraterrestrial and the futuristic in racialized forms (gilroy 2004: 342). techno thunders from the speaker stacks. symbols of outer space and alien contact abound (see fig. 2). mills is piloting his project entitled the messenger / sleeper wakes (2012), the liner notes of which read: “the sleeper explores time and the absence of it, the method of creating music for a specific time in our future, the preparation and calculation of what could and will be and most importantly, what we do with this sensitive and rare opportunity”. mills is preoccupied with the future, with time, and unfolding music that will accelerate what he sees as its “cyclical” effects. in his star people performance text (2013), mill emphasizes the persistent unfolding of change, in which “there must always be destruction of the old to bring forth the new”. yet such destructions are in themselves not new: there is a “compulsive” history of erasure. perhaps thusly, he states: “cycles in our evolution are compulsive, never-ending and guarded by the nomadic reasoning that we live for today, but we dream for tomorrow”. dancecult 5(2)22 figure 2. jeff mills, sleeper wakes, mutek 2012, montréal. photo: tobias c. van veen. van veen | vessels of transfer 23 throughout his twenty-five odd years of techno production and djing, mills has consistently pursued the concept of cyclical change, a concept that techno music shapes into aesthetic discipline through its compositional focus on mechanical, industrial, and otherwise alien forms of sonic repetition in electronic music. unlike lyrical music, techno presents added challenges for scholars. its music must be approached on at least two registers: that of its affect (the embodied impact of its soundwaves on the dancefloor) and that of what eshun calls its “sonic fictions” (1999), the textual, visual, and conceptual productions that surround, but also inflect, its recording and performance: its weltanschauung. operating in the register of affect, the signature style of mills’ techno—marked by its tight, four-bar loops, accented with polyrhythmic percussion and the force of its synthesizers, whether exploring realms of pounding distortion, sci-fi soundtracks, or africanist and latin patterning—always sounds as if it is but an echo of a future music to-come. yet once caught in its vortex, a body bound to the speaker stacks, mills warps the experience of time, and all feels timeless: hours are spent on the dancefloor as if abducted to the moment of an ever-repeating, ever-unfolding cycle of what amiri baraka once called “the changing same”. then there are the sonic fictions of jeff mills, axis records and underground resistance. on the sleeperwakes.com website, mills’ first entry is a report from his travels to mercury, where he observes “that the planet does exercise a earthlike character in terms of its liquid deposits” (2009). he goes on to write: “i’m not sure i’m the same person i was then after witnessing such a array of occurances in my travels [sic]”. apparently, mills has become the messenger, the last surviving member of a future earth terraformed by invading aliens. mills’ sonic fiction appears to hint at a further step, one undertaken only by a few afrofuturists: that of becoming, of a transformation of subjectivity, toward the alien, android, cyborg, or other-worldly. or even just a self-perception as already within the future: the messenger is a time traveller, here to warn earth of future doom; a technochronoprophet. the 2012 release of the messenger explains the doomsday scenario, its liner notes reading: the messenger is the fourth chapter of a musical science fiction series. this chapter explores the recycling of planet earth and the end of all earth’s life forms. doomsday appears to be nothing more than an agricultural reconditioning phase controlled by an alien life forms [sic], they reveal the explosive reality of creating the human animal for the production and harvesting of dreams. caught between secretive human+alien relationship, the messenger pleads the case for more time so that humans can evacuate earth and save innocent lives—but time has run out. mills’ written statements identify himself within his afrofuturist mythsystem: in a reversal of white saviour myths—in particular, the allusions here to the matrix (1999), in which humans are harvested by machines for energy, and dark city (1998), in which humans are harvested in cyclical time for their souls—mills is the messenger, and like will smith’s character robert neville in the zombie apocalypse film i am legend (2007), the last (black) man standing. mills’ personification of a character in his own mythsystem resonates with the afrofuturist tradition of adopting alien, cyborg, or machinic identities that perform dancecult 5(2)24 the double task of both allegorizing and transforming the embodied performance of blackness. or rather, surpassing an indeterminate threshold, the performance of identity shifts into a becoming: an exodus from raciology in which the markers of blackness are no longer determinant nor referential. one becomes other to or from the other. earth is left behind. i would like to suggest that afrofuturist becomings provide an escape from the “constraints” of “black community”, in which, as paul gilroy argues, black artists are confined—in expression but also analysis—to allegorizing or representing “race” (1993). picking up on balibar’s quote above, this is to say that the markers of community stereotype those “within” it; in gilroy’s words, community provides its racialized members with “an imaginative entitlement to elaborate the consciousness of racial adversity while limiting them as artists to the exploration of that adversity” (1993: 182). afrofuturism suggests a technology of the self that undertakes a transformative becoming. sun ra, the ancient black alien deity from saturn, is perhaps exemplary in this respect, turning to a legal change in name and erasure of his human records in the lifelong dedication to becoming alien (see szwed 1998). ra exceeds the allegorical role of performative identity: he becomes, in his own words, a “living myth”, a title whose inherent contradiction accentuates the mythical operations of afrofuturist revisionist history, in which ra becomes the embodiment of the ancient black pharaoh, alien ruler of kemet. ra’s becoming embodies a chronopolitical gesture that flees earthly raciology precisely to transform it: to seek an alien alterity to racialized otherness. but if mills has become “the messenger”—a designation that likewise has resonance within 20th century africentric history, as the title of elijah muhammed, founder of the nation of islam, messenger of allah—who was he before? earthly history tells us that mills is founding member of detroit techno collective underground resistance (ur) with mad “mike” banks in the late 1980s. formerly known as the wizard, mills transformed the mixed-genre scratch-turntablism he pioneered on detroit radio into an aggressive, rapidfire style of techno turntablism as one of two ur assault djs (the other, rob hood).19 leaving ur in 1992, mills founded the techno label axis, developing a minimalist yet polyrhythmic production style that pushed the boundaries of distorted, 4-bar loops, haunting melodies, and industrialist palettes. it was with his sublabel purpose maker that mills gained planetary recognition, incorporating latin percussion into a repertoire that culminated in the emblematic track “the bells” (kat moda ep, 1997). over the past decade and a half—though audibly since his soundtracking of fritz lang’s 1927 film metropolis in 200020—mills has explored ever more science fictional themes in his music productions and visual imagery, returning to afrofuturist concepts of outerspace realms and alien contact first charted under the x-102 alias with mad mike and rob hood, who on their celebrated 1992 release, x-102 discovers the rings of saturn, combined minimalist acid techno with liquid basslines and “spiritual” synthesizer pads.21 on the rear of the 12-inch sleeve, above a stark image of the outer planet’s rings, the text reads: “imagine being in an atmosphere where all your god given senses are ineffective, where your existence is a mere fragment in a ring orbiting a planet. you may find yourself van veen | vessels of transfer 25 caught in the state between the rotation of motion and the rotation of life circulation”. caught: captured by sound, abducted into space, and transported to an inhuman plane of existence as inanimate matter drifting among saturn’s rings—and circling high above the birthplace of sun ra. coincidence?22 in orbit to the jungle planet a substantial aspect to appreciating the affective force of techno is registering the intangible imaginary of its concepts. mills writes that the concept album should “materialize an idea or theory, to try to explain with music a certain place or a certain thing” (in eshun 1999: 07[132]). in this respect, mills’ releases and performances are inscribed with sonic fiction, “the packaging which works by sensation transference from outside to inside”, inclusive of the material, print, and physical wrappers of a record release, from its gatefold images to its liner notes (eshun 1999: 07[121]). two new sublabels of mills’ axis records, something from the sky and taken, feature label imagery from 1950s science fiction films. stark, black-and-white photographs depict white actors gazing skywards. frozen in frame, hands often shielding their eyes, these archaic symbols of 1950s-era science fiction gaze out past the black rings of the record, as if symbolically trapped on their small, rotational planet, surrounded by the dark rings of the record’s wax. who or what is this “something in the sky”? who has been “taken”? who or what has been left behind? this is not the first time that mills has drawn attention to the black materiality of the 12-inch record. the record is perhaps the ultimate commodity form in recording music. increasingly a fetish object surpassed by digital forms that promise better fidelity, durability, and portability, its materiality nonetheless ensures its persistence, insofar as its surface offers both the fictitious imprint of sonic authenticity—signaling its sacred role in dj culture—as well as a precise control surface for turntablists. in its materialization of the commodity form, the record serves as a “practical allegory” to that of slavery: its default blackness resonates with the reality of enslaved commodification. thus tinkering with the material concept of the record, and its symbolism, takes on higher stakes than at first envisioned. records are also, crucially, circular: they rotate. they have rings. they allegorize the very concept of ra’s birthplace, saturn, and serve as a homage to the concept of afrofuturism itself. speaking of x-102 discovers the rings of saturn, mills says that “the label itself is the actual planet, the grooves are the actual rings, so in a certain way you can give the impression that the grooves are the rings of saturn” (in eshun 1999: 07[133]). the concept is rendered material in sonic and visual registers: sonic fiction becomes tactile. as eshun remarks, “the mastering, sequencing and timing of the album, the track, the label, the sleeve, the title: the conceptual potential of each is materialized” (1999: 07[133]). of course techno music strives to materialize the affective resonances of its science fictional concepts through soundwaves, transmitted at high volume on the dancefloor: the synthetic bleeps and otherworldly rhythms are engineered to transport the dancing body to other worlds through sonic affect alone. the afrofuturist art of techno, however, demands more dancecult 5(2)26 of its listener than just ecstatic dance. afrofuturism propagates its weltanschauung through materialized mythsystems, of which sonic fiction is a part (eshun 1999: 07[103]). through artwork, conceptual performances, and texts, afrofuturist techno distinguishes its sonic universe from similar but conceptually bereft patterns of club fodder—the latter which mad mike calls the “attack of the clones”.23 figure 3. jeff mills, the jungle planet (2013). artwork: julien pacaud. van veen | vessels of transfer 27 mills’ 2013 album, the jungle planet, is the fifth in his messenger series (see fig. 3). with each release, mills has unfolded an extraterrestrial narrative of the eschaton, as the messenger bears witness to the end of humankind through disastrous first contact with a terraforming alien species. from the axisrecords.com website, mills details the discovery of the jungle planet: after aliens agriculturally recondition earth and purposely cause the end of the human species, with no home or place he can return to, earth’s only survivor known as the messenger embarks on a search to find the residue of human dreams in an attempt to re-create his species once again. he desperately travels to a place where the concepts of human animal were designed. a place in another dimension in space to a planet that is beyond belief. a super planet, 300 times the size of jupiter with three suns, two solar and one of an unknown source. with four hour days and a near constant cover of darkness, growth is constant. the planet supports trillions upon trillions of life forms. it was here that the concept of human and life and dreams for commercial reasons was created. in a last ditched effort to restore his race, the messenger travels to and searches the planet, through its bizarre and obscure landscape with fragile hopes. this planet is called the jungle planet. what is afrofuturist techno? “techno is a music based in experimentation; it is music for the future of the human race”, states the creed of underground resistance (ur). techno is a means of interstellar communication: “alien transmissions from the red planet”, as ur’s martian label declaims. techno is sonic shock tactics in the language of ur and mills: “waveform transmissions” and “sonic landmines” designed to smash the “wall between races” erected by the programmers of the “mediocre audio and visual programming that is being fed to the inhabitants of earth” (creed). according to eshun, the effects of such sonic fictions are powerful: “concept feeds back into sensation, acting as a subjectivity engine, a machine of subjectivity that peoples the world with audio hallucinations” (07[121]). the combination of sound+concept, argues eshun, has the ability to transform subjectivity. the timespace of such an encounter is the dance floor, where subjects are immersed in auditory stimuli, hallucinating freely. during the dance floor trips, one travels: afrofuturist techno—like ra’s “outerspace jazz”—abducts the listener to other worlds. it seduces the dancing body into alien and machinic becomings through sonic fictions that depict its music as transmissions from alien planets or android producers. techno: astrologies of the streets admittedly more abstract than lyric-bound music and its verse-chorus structure, techno abstracts itself from earth at greater acceleration. consequently it often deflects or refuses an allegorical role to earthly concerns. but such “abstraction”, i would argue, heightens the concrete encounter with sonic affect: with no lyricism to interpret, the experience of techno is one of interpreting—through dance—its rhythmic affect to its sonic fictions. as eshun writes, “techno disappears from the street, the ghetto and the dancecult 5(2)28 hood” (1999: 07[102]). the alien and offworld nexus of techno music doesn’t “represent” earthly concerns, geographies, or identities in the way that gangsta’ hip-hop or west coast g-funk articulates—in a double-movement of critique and fetishization, celebration and mourning—the violence of impoverishment, the confines of ghettoization, or the anger and frustration of structural unemployment and systemic discrimination.24 this is not to say that afrofuturist music—including its hip-hop—turns a blind eye to earthly conditions. hip-hop in general deploys what tricia rose describes as its “primary properties of flow, layering, and rupture [that] simultaneously reflect and contest the social roles open to urban inner-city youths at the end of the twentieth century” (1994: 22). the difference is that afrofuturist techno defers the contestation of urban paradigms through their (troubled) representation: rather, it seeks exile, inhabiting alternate realities, projecting alterdestinies, and “representing” an impossible yet enticing unearthly becoming for the abducted: like ra’s jazz, it “travels the spaceways”. emcee killah priest of wu-tang clan describes the afrofuturist relationship to the terrestrial ghetto as one of conducting “astrologies of the streets” (“the pwowr (problem solver)”, 2013). with the lyrics of priest in mind and, in respect to mills, the otherworldly rhythms of the jungle planet, we can imagine how the terrestrial is transformed into an uncanny topography. mills and priest elevate the listener to a position where earth becomes other, as if viewed from orbit, its strange behaviours witnessed with an extra-terrestrial perspective. though such otherworldly perspectives, afrofuturist music conducts an abweltanschauung or offworlding of erstwhile humanist approaches. we may imagine how afrofuturist music off-worlds the listener by phaseshifting the mind and body with futurist rhythms and science fictional sounds; rather than becoming grounded in “ghetto life” we are unearthed from terrestrial points of reference and the grounds of representation. with afrofuturist sound, we are initiated into the imaginary of an other-space—and space of-the-other-to-enforced-otherness—that seeks (and thus unearths) elsewhere as well as elsewhen. star people if sound is capable of producing hallucinatory effects—including the warped “chronopolitical language” explored above—there remains limitations to the visual allegories of sonic fictions. gilroy broaches such shortfalls when he writes that “seeing and hearing the future need not add up to the same thing” (2004: 342). i would like to draw this missive to a close with a critique of the limitations of afrofuturism, not in the register of the visual per se, but in respect to the limits of representation. in the context of aesthetic appreciation, an insufficient attempt at visual representation can diminish the impact of sound alone. but visuality can also register the limits of representation by attempting to literalize what is otherwise transformed by way of sound. the same goes for the representative aspects of text. such limits were highlighted in a performance by jeff mills at the new forms festival (2013) in vancouver, canada, where mills debuted his new audiovisual performance, star people. thoughout the three-hour performance, the visuals intermittently superimposed the faces of first peoples—wearing headdresses and otherwise adorned in “traditional” wear—upon cosmic starscapes (see fig. 4).25 van veen | vessels of transfer 29 figure 4. jeff mills, star people, vancouver, canada (2013). photo: tobias c. van veen. dancecult 5(2)30 in the star people text, mills discusses his concept of cyclicity, before writing: in indian culture, the consistent belief in the co-habitation of humans and aliens is a relationship that has existed long before their land of america was visited by the europeans. the common belief is this: star people descended from the sky and landed in the mountains around indian tribes. they became friends and teachers. children were born from this relationship. at the age of three, these special children were taken up into the stars to learn. in the later teen years, the children are brought back to earth by the visitors and reunited with their indian family. these special people walk the earth and are among us now. jeff mills presents star people. a 3 hour musical observation and journey on the relationship between humans and our paternal connection with visitors from the stars. mills’ text is evidently problematic, not the least its mode of address.26 though mills’ reference to the star people parallels various afrofuturist and populist myths of ancient alien contact, the text generalises the beliefs of multiple peoples, and risks objectifying the “star people” into an afrofuturist mythsystem much in the same way that colonialism appropriated the symbols, performances and cultural signs of first peoples while, at the same time, tokenizing their presence.27 projected upon the screen, the “star peoples” appeared anachronistic—as if “they” live in the past, always in “traditional” costume, even as the text emphasizes their contemporaneous existence. what chronopolitical futurisms otherwise to the “traditionalist” stereotype could have been imagined? the problematic here is compounded by a language of ownership through the other that raises questions of who speaks for the star people, just as their representations depict a mute faciality. besides its sympathetic resonance with star peoples, how does mills’ performance differ structurally from appropriations of “indian tribes” and other such “cowboys & indians” stereotypes that provided the “exotic” content of golden era sci-fi? the critique i proffer here was reflected elsewhere. james bates, arts beat reporter of campus and community radio station citr 101.9fm, writes that i was excited to see how the connections between certain aboriginal cultures and alien mythology would play out. this was perhaps the biggest disappointment. maybe i should have been tipped off by the heavy use of the word “indian” denoting north american indigenous people in nff 13’s own description. but simply superimposing images of first peoples onto the aforementioned space images does not serve as any substantial comment or exploration of the afro-futurist ideas star people seemed to draw inspiration from (bates 2013). van veen | vessels of transfer 31 figure 5. jeff mills, star people, vancouver, canada (2013). photo: tobias c. van veen. dancecult 5(2)32 bates goes on to write, “if i had arrived thursday night prepared to dance, without any expectation of narrative or mythology, i probably would have enjoyed the night a lot more”, suggesting that, on the aesthetic level, he had expected a more cohesive integration of the visual to the sonic registers, precisely because of the role mills’ sonic fiction played in contextualizing the performance.28 however, i do not wish to imply that mills’ choice of representations were distasteful. on the contrary, the photographs were aesthetically stunning portraits. nor do i think that the concept of creatively exploring first peoples’ beliefs in alien contact is in-itself at issue; utilising the myth without addressing its living embodiments would only erase first peoples from the picture. to paraphrase rey chow, i too believe that the “mixing of genes and genres” deconstructs raciology (2002: 17). the problem, however, is that the visual representation of star peoples, as a literalized allegory of the concept, was not afrofuturist enough: the imagery tried to ground the concept in the authenticity of a racialized/facialized other whose mute visage performed the stereotypes of “indian” stoicism and silence. the transformative capacity of allegory to exceed earthly reference was abandoned; instead allegory literalized raciology as if to authenticate—through a stereotyped faciality of the other—mills’ attempt to craft a mythscience from star peoples. more intriguing would be to imagine alternative becomings for star peoples—as well as depictions that underscore how, in “walking the earth” today, the alien among “us” hide in plain sight. if i close with this scene, it is not because i harbour a desire to single out mills’ work for critique; it was chance that i attended star people while crafting this text.29 mills’ five-cdj set was an advanced exploration of offworld techno that left the dancefloor—an eclectic mish-mash of generations, nationalities, genders, and ethnicities—teleported to imaginary realms (see fig. 5). however the performance serves as a means to demonstrate the limits of afrofuturism by way of its shadow: that afrofuturism articulates the means to dismantle raciology through operations of becoming and chronopolitics that unearth—or at least render uncanny and ambiguous—representative allegory. and that its escape velocity can fall short if its forces remain grounded in literalizing representation and authenticity. interplanetary cosmospolitanism: the futures of afrofuturism spanning two generations of afrofuturism,30 jeff mills and janelle monáe signify a planetary counter-tradition whose contours remain to be traced in their emergent complexity. as the likes of mills and monáe expand the repertoire of afrofuturist sounds, signs and strategies, new questions and concepts arise that renew ancient meditations. what does it mean to be designated (un)human? what are the techniques of becoming otherwise? what do such becomings mean for subjectivity, for “race” and “blackness”? though afrofuturism is in part an inventive countermand to—and thus implicated within—raciology, it differs from strategies that would reify (and celebrate) the latter in (“bio”)cultural forms.31 the alien and the android model quasi-autonomous becomings that are constitutively open-ended. these figures also arise from a remix of world cultures. mills van veen | vessels of transfer 33 and monáe have both articulated afrofuturism’s android, alien and machinic becomings to the 20th century european avant-garde as well as science fiction.32 monáe’s black-andwhite sets and costumes allegorize the epidermal polarization of raciology to the film stock and noir shadowing of fritz lang’s german expressionism. monáe, a third-generation afrofuturist, is particularly attentive to the ways in which the android speaks to (post) modernist forms of bondage—and autonomy. monáe has also set a new standard in reworking the afrofuturist inheritance. during her performances of “tightrope”, she accepts a cape brought to her on-stage, as if shouldering the mantle of james brown across generations and genders (see fig. 6). figure 6. janelle monáe shoulders the cape. photo: janellemonae.com. dancecult 5(2)34 she ends by calling for the break “one more time”—at least five times. her performances are theatrical set-pieces: her band swings with the precision and orchestrated movement of not only brown’s funk outfits but the big band era of cab calloway and duke ellington, while her band’s dress, hair and fashion style signify 1960s soul, notably diana ross and the supremes. and like funk, big band, swing—all the “rhythmachines”—both mills and monáe33 call upon us to dance, reaffirming the transformational freedom of the ritualistic, embodied movement that makes us all into spastic androids, moonwalkers and aliens.34 but how pervasive is the afrofuturist inheritance in global pop and dance culture? drawing from the master of anti-gravity ballet and robotic movement himself, the king of pop, monáe does the moonwalk.35 like michael jackson, she dances—and at times sings—like a dysfunctional robot.36 do not these machinic and alter-gravitational movements, encapsulated in the strange embodiment of michael jackson, suggest unexplored afrofuturist pathways of what it means to become alien?37 jeff mills, unlike monáe, works without lyricism and rarely with image. performativity is inherently robotic: on stage, mills is a composed technician, devoid of expression. his hands move with the grace of a conductor; small, precise gestures send attentive crowds into rapture. the legacy of detroit techno is twofold: like sun ra’s outerspace jazz, it undertakes a sonic exploration of musical boundaries. but also like ra’s monumental performances, it is tied to the ancient ritual of the experiential event, in which one is immersed in cyclic sound and transported through repetition, movement and affect to imaginative offworlds. techno alienates: it communicates the coordinates of alien and machinic music; it de-humanizes the dancing self. while monáe embodies the alien as cindi mayweather, detroit techno abducts the audience, making its alien arrival a tangible and transformative undertaking. as womack (2013) has surveyed, artists are now organising around the concept of afrofuturism, transforming its meaning and operations by reinterpreting its past. this past is constitutively intertwined with modernity and the latter’s futurological narratives of progress—a teleology that was supposed to leave unhumans behind. can afrofuturism proffer a means to transform such raciological discourses? in between camps, paul gilroy argues that modernity, qua the enlightenment, is inextricably bound-up with raciology. he writes that “the consolidation of modern raciology required enlightenment and myth to be intertwined” (2004: 59). in short, mythscience is at the heart of modernity. i concur with his analysis of how the enlightenment defines the birth of man only by excluding the racialized slave—and the female body. like gilroy, i do not believe that these are grounds to reject its “universalist promises” (62), but rather to transform them, precisely because of the latter’s foundational mythscience. for gilroy, the way forward is through “planetary humanism”, a discourse that seeks to abolish race in the establishment of a renewed cosmopolitanism. but is “humanism” enough? is the “human” species the only member of the planet’s cosmopolitan club? is not “the human” just another manifest of raciology, a “race” that, while celebrating its planetary solidarity, implicitly (if not explicitly) assumes a superior relationship to the rest of earth and its species? afrofuturism speculates upon a third alternative for our third stone from the sun: van veen | vessels of transfer 35 a cosmospolitanism that seeks to transform species-being in a universal becoming alien. a “universality” that is no longer bound to the terrestial; a universality that affirms its alien ex-centricity to earth through a cosmospolitanism of species. cosmospolitanism suggests that the “human” itself is a contingent becoming, one that is well due for short-circuiting in light of the many species to which we remain hostile aliens.38 acknowledgements thanks to jonathan sterne for everything. thanks to dave pires for the deep night conversations, sha labare for reminding me we are not the sole alien species, kentyah fraser for the supreme. thanks be to mad mike banks and cornelius harris of underground resistance, jeff mills, yoko uozumi at axis records, alain mongeau and the press team at mutek, malcolm levy and jessica santa at new forms festival, and android #57821, cindi mayweather, and her cohort major lee. “deprogram the programmers. . .” notes 1 emails to author, 9–27 july 2009. 2 prince, the symbol of soul and titan of tight funk, perhaps needs no introduction. outkast, the atlanta-based hip-hop crew of andré 3000 and big boi, perhaps do, if anything for their 1996 album atliens—a smooth roll through heatwaves of freaky flow—where extraterrestriality allegorizes the excluded middle of southern hip-hop to east/west rivalry, as well as emphasizing the alien-nation of southern blackness. 3 becoming is deployed here to articulate a transformative subjective process (sujet-en-procès) that exceeds the constraints of identity and representation through repetition, hauntology and ontogenesis. to this end it draws upon the eurocentric philosophical heritage of gilles deleuze and félix guattari, the mutable différance of jacques derrida, the “eternal return” of nietzsche, and the work of gilbert simondon and bernard stiegler in articulating historical becomings of technics that modulate the “infinite finite” of différance. however, it is not the place of this article to replay such philosophical perspectives. here, i turn to afrofuturist modes of performative and speculative thought through music and becoming. 4 for a decent fan video of the performance, see “jeff mills presents. . . ” (2012), and for a roland tr-909 improvised set, see “jeff mills vs tr-909. . .” (2012). 5 as yaszek writes, “contemporary afrofuturists assume that in the future race will continue to matter to individuals and entire civilizations alike” (2006: 43). yet, as gilroy has argued (2004), “race” itself is subject to futurist transformation. scholars have yet to trace afrofuturist philosophical epistemes or the musical antecedents that would presage sun ra and john coltrane’s outerspace jazz. given the mixture of religious, ritual and occult practices that infuse afrofuturism, the future might unearth a past speculative tradition more ancient than previously envisioned. at the very least, africanist aesthetic practices were appropriated by european artists for the future art of modernism (see gikandi 2006). 6 i have here replaced “african-american”, as i have elsewhere in other quotes, with dancecult 5(2)36 afrodiasporic”. i maintain that afrofuturism is not only an afrodiasporic futurology (as does gilroy, 2004) but an (inter)planetary episteme. 7 for an introductory list of afrofuturist scholars informing (and where possible cited within) this article, see dery (1994); eshun (1999); nelson (2002); rollefson (2008); sinker (1993); van veen (2003, 2003a); weheliye (2005); williams (2001); womack (2013); yaszek (2005, 2006); and zuberi (2004). 8 or, afrofuturist becoming disrupts hegel’s master/slave dialectic by disabusing the subalternity of the slave and transforming its unhuman status into the renegade and uncanny autonomy of becoming-alien. the alien is the excluded (temporal) term of the dialectic that sends its relentless wheel careening. this thesis, which underlies the philosophical infrastructure of this article’s meditations on becoming, will have to be explicated elsewhere. 9 for an inventive and crucial reading of dr. octagon’s “robot voodoo power” in relation to sun ra’s mythscience and gilroy’s “anti-anti-essentialism”, see rollefson (2008). 10 as expressed in elijah muhammad’s message to the blackman in america (1965), including the origin myth of yacub, the mad black scientist who invented the white man, and ezekiel’s wheel, the orbiting “mother plane” ufo with bombers poised. the latter offers an intriguing science fictional interpretation of ezekiel 1:16: “the appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the colour of a beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel”. 11 at the time, dery’s definition focused on african-american science fiction literature, even though his examples of comics, music and film—and orbiting rastas noted in william gibson’s neuromancer (1984)—implicated the afrodiaspora. 12 like dery above, nelson’s original quote reads “african-american”, even as nelson, on the same page, writes of “new directions in the study of african diaspora culture” (2002: 9). 13 which, granted monáe’s comments about being an african-american woman in the music industry, demands a thinking-through of the doubled operation of difference at work in the female android, a motif that follows from monáe’s crucial inversion of fritz lang’s character of maria in metropolis (1927): from white to black, and from androidal double of the human maria—who tricks the proletariat into infighting—to androidal rebel, hero of the droidal proletariat, who serves as mediatator between the droids and humans (the head, heart and hands). 14 and in particular, minimalist techno and dub-infected forms where the “space” around rhythms is often described (and heard) in terms of a “hauntology”, which signals an unstable ontological field in which the return of the repressed ghost whispers in the track (see fisher 2013, this issue). as zuberi writes, “what seems to unite these diverse pieces of [hauntological] music is their attempt to capture the grain of earlier playback technologies and recording methods” (2007: 284). 15 though the triangular nomenclature has been rescinded, similar changes remain (see yobie 2010). 16 for a critical reading of race in star trek, see bernardi (1998). retroactive critiques of tokenism aside, the impact of uhura cannot be underestimated; astronaut mae carol jemison credits nichelle nichols’ character for inspiration. 17 in the interview in this issue: “afrofuturism unbound: tobias c. van veen in conversation with paul d. miller”. 18 which isn’t to say that čapek and asimov weren’t cognisant of the metaphorical status of van veen | vessels of transfer 37 robots to subaltern subjects—indeed, that was the point, as also in lang’s metropolis. hence the resonance of asimov’s rules: 1. a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. a robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the first law. 3. a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law. 19 for a more thorough history, see pope (2011) and gholz (2011). 20 which i was fortunate enough to experience at the 10th anniversary of sónar festival in barcelona (2002), where i came across a film installation of mills’ metropolis soundtrack. mills’ metropolis is tightly synchronised: as the workers labour repetitiously in the construction of the ziggurat, so do mills’ industrialist loops. both mills and monáe are drawn to lang’s metropolis, for reasons that will have to be considered in greater depth elsewhere. 21 mad mike likens the feeling of synthesizer playing to that of playing in church (email to author, 28 may 2008). in 2008 tresor reissued this classic as x-102 rediscovers the rings of saturn. 22 ra is also signified by monáe, who as cindi mayweather, is stalked by black-robed figures with mirrored visages that appear to have followed her from ra’s film space is the place—see the videos (and stage performances) that accompany the archandroid (2010), “dance or die” live (2011) and the music video for “tightrope” (2010). 23 conversation with author, may 2008. 24 tricia rose details in black noise how “hip hop replicates and reimagines the experiences of urban life” (1994: 22). 25 i use the canadian designation for indigenous or aboriginal peoples; in the united states the preferred term is native american, though i believe it remains problematically colonial and nationalist. 26 critically: “indian culture” as a nonspecific naming of a multiplicity of first peoples; the collapse of cultural multiplicity into a “common” or “consistent belief;” that “their land” was named “america” pre-contact; the transition from “their” and “they” to the possessives “us” and “our; and the assumption of a “paternal” (and not material or otherwise) connection. 27 as well as attempting to systemically erase first people through territorial conquest, colonial war and ghettoization (“reserves”). 28 this criticism was also shared by exclaim! arts critic alan ranta (2013). 29 unfortunately, mills was unavailable for interview. as a turntablist with nearly every axis release in my crate, i hold a deep respect for his work (enough to critique it). 30 mills, born in 1963, is now fifty; monáe, born in 1985, is twenty-seven. 31 my main point here is to differentiate the trajectory of afrofuturism from afrocentrism, even though their history, concepts and persons are constitutively entwined. 32 which is not to assume that the european avant-garde is solely “white”, but rather that afromodernism has been neglected (see nuttall 2006). as noted above (see gikandi 2006), the “avant-garde” appropriated (and reworked) abstractionist techniques from the africanist arts that have in turn influenced afrodiasporic futurist practices. it is just this constitutive dancecult 5(2)38 hybridity that afrofuturism seeks to accentuate—though by ungrounding eurocentrism. of note, mills also turns to pioneering sci-fi writer h.g. wells, sampling his 1910 dystopian novel title, sleeper wakes (2009). 33 and nietzsche. and emma goldman—“if i can’t dance, i don’t want to be part of your revolution”. 34 monáe emphasizes dance throughout her albums, particularly “tightrope” (the archandroid) and “dance apocalytic” (the electric lady). for a detailed analysis of mills’ desire for a participatory, dancing audience, see gholz (2011). 35 and is second-to-none in doing so to the king himself (rip). see her short film “many moons” (2008), where she moonwalks backwards and forwards. 36 like a robot gone berserk, perhaps. see monáe’s performance with nas (2008). at the end of “many moons” (2008), cindi mayweather dances herself into the sky, defying the bondage of gravity, before she is hit by a sky-born power surge and short-circuits. 37 might we not speculate upon the epidermal transformation of michael jackson as an afrofuturist attempt to manufacture alien posthumanism? how might whiteness signify not just caucasian identification, but the android’s “chrome”? in monáe’s “many moons” (2008), cindi mayweather is initially white: blackness is applied by pressing a button by her ear. on the electric lady (2013), dj crash-crash discusses androids “polishing chrome”. for a series of (troubled?) ruminations on jackson, see fisher (2009). 38 i am indebted to sha labare’s dissertation, “farfetchings: on and in the sf mode” (2010) for connecting afrofuturism to a broader critique of speciest thinking, and to the voicings of the space ape, for the resonant phrase “hostile aliens” on the track “space ape” (burial, 2006). references bates, james. 2013. “new forms ’13 arts review—jeff mills leaves star people premise unfulfilled”. citr.ca. 13 september: <http://www.citr.ca/index.php/2013/09/new-forms-13arts-review-jeff-mills-leaves-star-people-premise-unfulfilled/> (accessed 13 september 2013). baucom, ian. 2005. specters of the atlantic: finance capital, slavery, and the philosophy of history. durham: duke university press. bernal, martin. 2002. black athena: the afroasiatic roots of classical civilization, volume i: the fabrication of ancient greece, 1785–1985. toronto: scholarly book services, inc. bernardi, daniel leonard. 1998. star trek and history: race-ing toward a white future. new brunswick: rutgers university press. butler, octavia. 1979. kindred. new york: doubleday. chow, rey. 2002. the protestant ethnic and the spirit of capitalism. new york: columbia university press. dery, mark. 1994. “black to the future: interviews with samuel r. delany, greg tate, and tricia rose”. in flame wars: the discourse of cyberculture, ed. mark dery, 179–222. durham: duke university press. eshun, kodwo. 1999. more brilliant than the sun: adventures in sonic fiction. london quartet. van veen | vessels of transfer 39 ———. 2003. “further considerations of afrofuturism”. cr: the new centennial review 3(2): 287–302. fisher, mark, ed. 2009. the resistible demise of michael jackson. new york: zero books. ———. 2013. “the metaphysics of crackle: afrofuturism and hauntology”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture (5)2: 41–55. gholz, carleton. 2011. “maintaining ‘synk’ in detroit: two case studies in the remix aesthetic”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture (2)1: 45–62. gibson, william. 1984. neuromancer. new york: ace science fiction. gikandi, simon. 2006. “picasso, africa and the schemata of difference”. in beautiful ugly: african and diaspora aesthetics, ed. sarah nuttall, 30–59. durham: duke university press. gilroy, paul. 1993. the black atlantic: modernity and double consciousness. cambridge: harvard university press. ———. 2004. between camps: nations, cultures and the allure of race. london: routledge. halpern, richard. 1997. shakespeare among the moderns: towards a mechanics of modernist fiction. ithaca: cornell university press. james, george g.m. 2001 [1954]. stolen legacy. sauk village: african american images. jameson, fredric. 1981. the political unconscious: narrative as a socially symbolic act. ithaca: cornell university press. joseph, anthony. 2006. the african origins of ufos. cambridge: salt publishing. kreiss, daniel. 2008. “appropriating the master’s tools: sun ra, the black panthers, and black consciousness, 1952–1973”. black music research journal 28(1): 57–81. labare, sha. 2010. “farfetchings: on and in the sf mode.” ph.d dissertation (history of consciousness), university of california at santa cruz. nelson, alondra. 2002. “introduction: future texts”. social text (71): 1–15. ———, thuy linh n. tu and alicia headlam hines, ed. 2001. technicolor: race, technology and everyday life. new york: new york university press. ———, and paul d. miller. 2004. “about afrofuturism”. afrofuturism.net. <http://www. afrofuturism.net/text/about.html> (accessed 27 may 2004). nuttall, sarah, ed. 2006. beautiful ugly: african and diaspora aesthetics. durham: duke university press. pope, richard. 2011. “hooked on an affect: detroit techno and dystopian digital culture”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 2(1): 24–44. ra, sun. 2005. sun ra: collected works vol. 1, immeasurable equation. ed. adam abraham. chandler: phaelos. ranta, alan. 2013. “jeff mills, hangar, vancouver bc, september 12”. exclaim.ca. 13 september: <http://exclaim.ca/reviews/newforms/jeff_mills-hanger_vancouver_bc_september_12> (accessed 14 september 2013). rollefson, j. griffiths. 2008. “the ‘robot voodoo power’ thesis: afrofuturism and anti-antiessentialism from sun ra to kool keith”. black music research 28(1): 83–109. samuel, lawrence r. 2007. the end of the innocence: the 1964–1965 new york world’s fair. syracuse: syracuse university press. dancecult 5(2)40 sinker, mark. 1992. “loving the alien in advance of the landing—black science fiction”. wire (96). szwed, john f. 1998. space is the place: the lives and times of sun ra. new york: de capo press. van veen, tobias c. 2003. “fuck art let’s dance”. fuse 26(3): 12–19. ———. 2003a. “it’s not a rave [2.0]”. graduate researcher 1 (2): 90–96. ———. 2013. “afrofuturism unbound: tobias c. van veen in conversation with paul d. miller”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture (5)2. weheliye, alexander g. 2005. phonographies: grooves in sonic afro-modernity. durham: duke university press. williams, ben. 2001. “black secret technology: detroit techno and the information age”. in technicolor: race, technology, and everyday life, ed. alondra nelson and thuy linh n. tu, 154–77. new york: new york university press. womack, ytasha. 2013. afrofuturism: the world of black sci-fi and fantasy culture. chicago: lawrence hill books. yaszek, lisa. 2005. “an afrofuturist reading of ralph ellison’s invisible man”. rethinking history 9 (2/3): 297–313. ———. 2006. “afrofuturism, science fiction, and the history of the future”. socialism and democracy 20(3): 41–60. yobie, benjamin. 2010. “texas approves renaming slave trade as ‘atlantic triangular trade’”. sfgate.com. 21 may: <http://blog.sfgate.com/ybenjamin/2010/05/21/texas-approvesrenaming-slave-trade-as-atlantic-triangular-trade/> (accessed 21 september 2013). zuberi, nabeel. 2004. “the transmolecularization of [black] folk: space is the place, sun ra, and afrofuturism”. in off the planet: music, sound and science fiction cinema, ed. phillip hayward, 77 –95. bloomington: indiana university press. ———. 2007. “is this the future? black music and technology discourse”. science fiction studies 34(2): 283–300. discography burial. 2006. burial. hyperdub (uk): hdbc001 <http://www.discogs.com/burial-burial/master/11767>. mills, jeff. 1997. kat moda ep. purpose maker (us): pm-002 <http://www.discogs.com/jeff-mills-kat-moda-ep/release/236850>. ———. 2000. metropolis. tresor (de): 155 <http://www.discogs.com/jeff-mills-metropolis-2/master/255996>. ———. 2009. sleeper wakes. third ear ( jp): xecd-1122 <http://www.discogs.com/jeff-mills-sleeper-wakes/release/2049264>. ———. 2013. the jungle planet. axis (us): forthcoming. monáe, janelle. 2008. metropolis: the chase suite (special edition). wondaland (us): 511234-2 <http://www.discogs.com/janelle-monáe-metropolis-the-chase-suite-special-edition/ release/1507753>. ———. 2010. the archandroid. wondaland (us): 512256-2 <http://www.discogs.com/janelle-monáe-the-archandroid/master/260095>. van veen | vessels of transfer 41 ———. 2013. the electric lady. wondaland (us): 536210-2 <http://www.discogs.com/janelle-monáe-the-electric-lady/master/595570>. priest, killah. 2013. the psychic world of walter reed. proverbs records (us): <http://www.discogs.com/killah-priest-the-psychic-world-of-walter-reed/ release/4823265>. public enemy. 1988. it takes a nation of millions to hold us back. def jam (us): 527 358-1 <http://www.discogs.com/public-enemy-it-takes-a-nation-of-millions-to-hold-us-back/ master/30296>. underground resistance. 1998. interstellar fugitives. underground resistance (us): ur-045 <http://www.discogs.com/underground-resistance-interstellar-fugitives/master/783>. x-102. 1992. x-102 discovers the rings of saturn. tresor (de): tresor 4 <http://www.discogs.com/x-102-discovers-the-rings-of-saturn/master/4867>. ———. 2008. x-102 rediscovers the rings of saturn. tresor (de): tresor 234 <http://www.discogs.com/x-102-rediscovers-the-rings-of-saturn/release/1377125>. filmography “archandroid janelle monáe in studio q”. 2011. youtube. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmxqeigmdww> (accessed 21 september 2013). “janelle monáe ‘dance or die’ live 2011”. 2011. youtube. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjqbswkwm-c> (accessed 21 september 2013). “janelle monáe – many moons [official short film]”. 2008. youtube. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhgbznhvg0c> (accessed 01 january 2009). “janelle monáe – tightrope [feat. big boi] (video)”. 2010. youtube. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwnef uakcbc> (accessed 01 january 2011). “jeff mills presents the messenger/sleeperwakes – mutek 13 edition – montreal”. 2012. youtube. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fb6nitzb6lc> (accessed 01 june 2013). “jeff mills vs tr-909 live @ mutek 2012”. 2012. youtube. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06c-xotpl7o> (accessed 01 june 2013). lang, fritz. 1927. metropolis. germany: universum film (ufa). <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017136/>. lawrence, francis. 2007. i am legend. usa: warner bros. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480249/>. proyas, alex. 1998. dark city. usa: mystery clock and new line cinema. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118929/>. “rolling stone presents nas & janelle monáe – janelle monáe dances and ends off with moon walk”. 2008. youtube. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hamylsrhwgo> (accessed 01 january 2009). wachowski, andy and lana. 1999. the matrix. usa: warner bros. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/>. reviews-typeset reviews we call it techno! a documentary about germany’s early techno scene and culture. maren sextro and holger wick. sense music & media, media atelier, germany, 2008. sensedvd02. rrp: £16.49 doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.11 hillegonda c. rietveld london south bank university (uk) the documentary we call it techno! provides a german perspective on the development of electronic dance music to both a german and english-speaking audience through subtitles and the choice of an english voice-over. based on interviews with key people in the scene, it tells the story from the definition of post-punk electronica from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. there are two parts. the main film is illustrated by rare archive material from private collections of participants and key people of the developing scene. the second part consists of interview excerpts and additional interview material. the following djs, party concept designers, club promoters, label managers and record shop workers, all male except one, took part: alex azary, andreas rossmann, armin johnert, ata, boris dlugosh, claus bachor, cosmic baby, dimitri hegermann, dr motte (of early love parade fame), elsa for toys, frank blümel, hell, jürgen laarmann, mark reeder, mike ink, mijk van dijk, ralf niemcyzk, sven väth, talla 2xlc, tanith, thomas koch, tobias lampe, triple r, upstart and wole xpd. the interviewees benefit from their maturity and their insights gained over decades, while the use of the german language produces a deeply reflective mode. in particular, mike ink places the scene’s idealism in a wider historical-materialist perspective, while azary observes that, “techno expresses the emotion of today’s times best of all, basically the blankness of society”. the resulting documentary is a serious self-searching narrative that demonstrates that the term techno was very much the electronic sound track of the millennium. the narrative starts with the introduction of the term techno as early as 1984 by talla in a frankfurt record shop called city music, to indicate “music created technologically”, such as “new order, depeche mode, kraftwerk, heaven 17, then later front 242. i actually filed everything under techno. and people liked it” (talla). this was followed by the techno club, set up by alex azary and talla, which hosted postpunk electronic bands, the neuewelle (new wave), like d.a.f. (deutsch amerikanischefreundschaft) and nitzer ebb. this club night became a hot spot for electronic body music (ebm), a sound that was led by the belgian front 424. it also inspired the establishment of specialist magazine frontpage that self-defined the merging techno scene. initially the club attracted suburban males, until djs like sven väth, who developed his career in this frankfurt scene, moved away from industrial and ebm to embrace american techno and acid house. berlin had been physically segregated from west germany, until the fall of the wall in 1989. according to tanith, the electronic experiments by german pioneers, dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(1) 2009, 142-56 issn 1947-5403 ©2009 dancecult http://www.dancecult.net/ such as klaus schulze, were effectively forgotten by a younger berliner generation that mainly listened to guitar rock. until the arrival of techno-house from the us that is, which sounded more fun than the aggression of ebm. acid house was introduced there via the radio shows of monika dietl, which were listened to on both sides of the berlin wall. when the wall came down, an extraordinary festive period emerged in berlin, which brought together creative talents from east and west germany. from this, the love parade emerged, in the summer of 1989, consisting of a sound system on a truck, playing acid house and detroit techno. the title of the documentary refers to a popular track of this period, “call it techno” (breaking bones 1989), an electro freestyle track by brooklyn-based dj frankie bones. its musical influences seem to cover a wide range of electronica, including kraftwerk, klf and afrika bambattaa, while an electronically treated vocal summarises a history of techno from an american perspective. the documentary’s version of techno’s story is different from the usual one, of how detroit dj producer derrick may and british entrepreneur neil rushton marketed detroit’s electronic dance music as distinct from the chicago house sound in 1988. it becomes quite clear that techno was indeed a concept, a sign of the times, which inspired people in europe and the us in parallel fashion. the documentary subsequently charts the experience of young people devoting their lives to the party scene, which went into overdrive during the early 1990s: its idealism, its creative energy, the flaunting of hegemonic common sense in terms of lifestyles and regulations and the sense that a revolution had occurred, a break in history. more women became involved and footage reveals a distinct difference in gender relations. 1980s footage from the technoclub shows an all male punk mob; while in footage from the early 1990s one sees boys and girls with happy grins, taking ecstasy pills, travelling from city to city to follow their favourite djs. each city seemed to have its own distinct approaches to this party phenomenon, some supporting the super star dj and others being much more about the music itself, the crowd and the experience. techno, in this version of events, accommodates a clear break in german history: pre1989 techno as post-punk electronica, angry, macho, full of fear and loathing; post1989 techno as fun, celebratory, camp and queer. from this melting-pot of ideas, eventually a german trance aesthetic emerged, again first in frankfurt, with dj dag and sven väth, which further developed in the techno-trance scene that revolved around the berlin love parade. in sum, this dvd corrects the anglo-american hegemony on the history of electronic dance music with a unique collection of images and interviews. it is therefore a must in the collection of anyone who studies and enjoys electronic dance music. references frankie bones. 1989. call it techno. breaking bones records (12-inch). bbr-400. usa. various. 1988. techno! the new dance sound of detroit. ten records ltd (10 records) uk // 303 322-406. dixg 75. virgin schallplatten gmbh. germany. reviews 143 lost and sound: berlin, techno, und der easyjetset. tobias rapp. suhrkamp, frankfurt am main, 2009. isbn: 3518460447 [german only] rrp: €9.50 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.12 sean nye university of minnesota (usa) “a new berlin is emerging – and nobody is noticing” (p.9). the first line of rapp’s lost and sound. berlin, techno und der easyjetset clearly states the motivation behind the book: the need for an update of berlin techno. rapp is well situated to write such an update. he reported on berlin nightlife for many years as the editor of one of berlin’s leading newspapers, die tageszeitung. the first line also indicates that techno is no longer the focus of the media, since most scholars and journalists associated the berlin techno-scene with the love parade. given this relative invisibility, it might come as a surprise that berlin has become a center of the international techno-scene like never before; from the concentration of print media to the conglomeration of expat musicians. can it be that techno is also the soundtrack of the zero years, as rapp calls this decade? rapp answers affirmatively – at least for berlin. however, the role of techno has changed. rapp aims to pinpoint exactly what these changes are. he asserts, “this is also not the east-berlin of the nineties, that adventurous playground forming the backdrop of the love parade, with its flamboyant dancers on walls that still bore the marks of history” (p.33). the book primarily concerns itself with the innovations of the zero years. four aspects form the core of his investigation: 1. the move of the scene’s locus from the friedrichstraße/leipziger straße club mile of the 1990s to the friedrichshain/kreuzberg club mile of the zero years. 2. the new mood of the scene in the post-love-parade age (after the love parade was canceled in 2004 and 2005 and definitively moved to the ruhr valley in 2007). the first techno generation is aging but remains active; simultaneously new generations of techno activists are emerging. 3. the development of a new form of techno tourism and club management through bargain airline travel such as easyjet. 4. the replacement of hard techno (tresor label) and pop techno (low spirit label) as the dominant berlin sound by minimal as the sound of the zero years. as his first focus, rapp describes berlin’s new club mile, which consists of a range of clubs, including berghain, watergate, maria, weekend, that in fact spread over five kilometers along the banks of the river spree. these banks form the border of berlin’s two famous countercultural districts, friedrichshain and kreuzberg, underscoring their continued importance for city nightlife. rapp emphasizes that in terms of style and location, the new clubs differ markedly from the old clubs, for example ewerk, bunker, and the old tresor and wmf. the old designs were innovative and playful, but also provisional. the owners knew the locations were likely to be bought out by developers. nevertheless, this club mile prepared the ground for the rise of 144 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 techno in berlin and for the exceptional success of the love parade. the route of the love parade in front of the brandenburg gate was not only of historical importance; it was also crucial for tourism. the parade drew masses of tourists, who also took part in the club events of the berlin love week surrounding the parade. the entrance fees were jacked up and the number of clubbers always overwhelming, guaranteeing big profits for the clubs. until 2003 the love parade and the associated love week were the most prominent examples of international club tourism. even without the profits of the love week, however, the new club scene is financially well situated. most clubs now have long-term rent contracts and are richly equipped with the latest sound systems, with, for example, the club berghain named as “best club in the world” in 2009 by the british magazine dj-mag. the scene is now even more international, considering the number of expat musicians living here, most prominently richie hawtin. yet without the media event of the love parade, this new scene remains relatively unknown. the diary of a typical club-week frames the book’s analyses and assists in presenting the mood of the new underground, which is rapp’s second point of focus. the club-week begins on a wednesday and ends (perhaps) the following monday. interviews with various protagonists – djs, youth hostel managers, rave mothers, and club owners – enliven rapp’s analysis. rapp’s journalistic reports are a diverse mix of cultural, sociological, and economic analysis. his third point of focus is the entanglement of the scene in international networks. he emphasizes this interdependence through the new economy of club tourism, made possible by bargain airlines. rapp writes, “the easyjet-raver is the definitive subject of european nightlife of the zero years. he came, without a grand announcement, and has developed into the most important subcultural figure of the present” (p.78-9). rapp explains how the combination of new bargain airlines on the one hand, and berlin’s economic crash after the optimism of the nineties, on the other, allowed for the emergence of this new european subject. the easyjet-raver could both fly on the cheap and visit an exceptionally cheap city. indeed, the failure of berlin’s plans for an economic revolution following reunification meant that, compared to cities like london or paris, berlin remains a bizarrely inexpensive metropolis. in short, what has been bad for berlin business has been good for the international underground. the first three foci of rapp’s analysis offer some considerable new insights. however, as an overview of the musical history of the berlin scene the book is less helpful. rapp’s investigation remains bound up with the minimal scene. what for him counts as the berlin sound of the zero years was actually only one of many trends. he does not explain that minimal only came to prominence in berlin during the middle of the decade through the establishment of labels liked perlon and m_nus. rapp dedicates an entire chapter to the minimal dj/producer ricardo villalobos (p.110-120), stating plainly “he is the biggest dj-star of the zero years” (p.110). with that he contradicts his earlier claim that the new scene has no stars, rather “the berlin clubs and their public” (p.12). indeed, throughout the book, rapp repeatedly mentions villalobos so much that he outs himself as a swooning fan and minimal-groupie. he thereby utilizes a trend that had already been purposefully hyped by him and other journalists. rapp even includes a berlin discography, which is a personal collection of minimal hits – beginning in 2003 with, again, a villalobos album. the book thus tends towards the genre of a travel guide and advertisement for minimal, instead of analyzing it as part of berlin techno. reviews 145 furthermore, an examination of the electro and electroclash trends is missing. for his topic, an analysis precisely of these scenes was needed because they played important roles in the first tourist waves during the zero years. if rapp decided villalobos was necessary to include, then an important “star” is missing: namely, ellen allien and her label b:pitch control. she is important precisely because of rapp’s focus on the easyjet-raver and club tourism. she has presented herself as a berlin-dj unlike any other, with her albums stadtkind (trans: city-child) and berlinette and, even more strikingly, through her dvd club-tour-guide of berlin for the time out series. indeed, the material of her musical productions is a crossover between techno and tourism. other equally influential stars during the zero years can also be listed: for example, monika kruse, t.raumschmiere and anja schneider, not to mention paul van dyk, whose continued international stardom resulted in him receiving the landesverdienstorden (land order of merit) from berlin in 2006. to be sure, rapp does examine other branches of the techno scene. there are interesting interviews addressing new media and technology with producers robert henke, philipp sollmann and ben clock. rapp analyzes the debates regarding urban renewal with the example of media spree, a construction project that could have a major impact on the new club mile. he also examines new online forum restrealitaet.de and internet fanzine resident adviser. nevertheless, one would expect a more diverse analysis of the many styles from electro to breakcore that make up the berlin sound. finally, the role of media needs more attention. many pop-cultural festivals and institutions have moved to berlin – print media like spex and groove, the music channels viva and mtv, the popkomm, etc. – a trend that has profited to the detriment of cologne, which in many respects was the pop media center of germany until 2000. such gaps demonstrate that rapp’s attempt to combine a personal diary with cultural analysis is not as successful as he perhaps wished. rapp loses himself in self-absorbed scene life and gossip. too much club jargon and name-dropping takes place, thus making some of the book comprehensible only to insiders. despite these faults, the book offers an important update on berlin techno history. the literature and media that defined the popular understanding of german techno was published more than ten years ago. the following titles appeared in the decisive year 1998: simon reynolds’ energy flash, rainald goetz’s rave, iara lee’s documentary modulations and tom tykwer’s run lola run. perhaps the most internationally well-known german book on electronic dance music, ulf poschardt’s dj culture, appeared even earlier, in 1995. for those whose knowledge of german techno is based on such literature, rapp’s lost and sound will be a helpful update. it makes clear that the history of techno is not over, and rapp is correct that the zero years are an important period in this history. 146 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 psychedelic white: goa trance and the viscosity of race. arun saldanha. minneapolis and london, university of minnesota press, 2007. isbn: 0816649936 (hardcover) 0816649944 (paperback) rrp: us$60.00 (hardcover), us$20 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.13 anthony d’andrea university of limerick (ireland), university of chicago (usa) chromatic variation in ethnographic analysis reflecting a deleuzian turn in social geography, psychedelic white: goa trance and the viscosity of race examines rave tourism in goa through the prism of a materialist theory of race and racial segregation. well-written, erudite and thought-provoking, the book opens with the observation that the mostly white psytrance music fans (also known as goa freaks) arrive at parties only after indian tourists have departed. the author arun saldanha, a belgian geographer of indian descent, expresses his discontentment, “i felt this segregation”, and adds, “this book wants to find out what sort of theoretical vocabulary is necessary to make sense of racism when it is not supposed to be there.” (p.5). the basic question it seeks to answer then is, “what makes white bodies stick together?” according to saldanha, racial segregation is a basic effect from the ethnic profile and profiling of white psytrance fans and backpackers in goa. the book provides a philosophically robust retheorization of race. opposing social constructionism, saldanha seeks to develop a materialist theory of race, centered on the deleuzian concept of viscosity, defined as resistance to flow and perforation. considered for its corporeality rather than representation, race is organized like a machinic assemblage, as instantiated in ritual experiences of the psytrance collective in goa. saldanha demonstrates familiarity with a wide range of philosophical work, including not only deleuze and guattari, but also levinas, goffman and fanon, among other thinkers in feminism and poststructuralism. psychedelic white has gained attention among geographers of race, as a number of book reviews have praised saldanha’s innovative theorization while also questioning its internal consistency at a philosophical level. this review, instead, highlights how this philosophical hypertrophy has created analytical problems in the study of psytrance. within a complex formulation of race materialism, psychedelic white discusses the more proximate notion of “psychedelics”, which saldanha defines as the dynamics of self-transformation enabled by travel, drugs and music. yet, these techniques are examined in relation to the racial background of westerners. in a series of refined reviews on the history of countercultures, orientalism, hippies and drugs, saldanha refers to the creative needs of “white men”, a term repeated ad nauseam throughout the first third of the book. this bias could have been moderated in the light of the anthropological truism that a wide variety of societies, and not only the white west, nurtures more or less complicated relationships with such techniques and devices of selftransformation. as such, the reader may be left wondering how whiteness and psychedelics are causally determined, and, if so, what is the significance and implication that saldanha attempts to address. reviews 147 based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in northern goa between 1996 and 2002 (and again in 2006), the empirical horizon of psychedelic white is constrained within a sharp racial angle, as organized across the book in three analytical sites: the shared experiences of goa freaks, the visual economy of rave tourism, and the politics of location in goa. the philosophical work so interestingly advanced by saldanha results in a racial determinism under which psytrance formations are forcefully examined. political economy is reduced to “phenotype and foreignness” (p.163). “goa freaks are microfascists” (p. 89). the book is permeated with “depressing conclusions”, as saldanha well puts it, following anecdotal analyses of white exploitation, segregation and indifference toward indians. psytrance formations, saldanha argues, have paradoxically thickened rather than transcended racial segregation in goa. the book is thus marked by a predominantly negative assessment of countercultural formations in india. in deleuzian words, psychedelic white focuses on the lines of death traced by this war machine, and says virtually nothing about the emancipatory potential of chromatic variation. some readers may even find that the impressive philosophical apparatus delivered by saldanha tends to lose connection with the empirical reality it seeks to explain. indeed, psytrance freaks are eccentric individuals, often elitist, arrogant and troubled. in a decadent and dystopic scene such as northern goa psytrance, most freaks and backpackers would likely feel more comfortable interacting with phenotypically similar peoples, whereas some individuals may express racist behavior at times. however, the argument that psytrance in goa is essentially reaffirmed through racial segregation would require stronger empirical testing and support. incredibly, important factual questions were overlooked in the book. firstly, psytrance insiders reject tourists – regardless of race – whether in goa or elsewhere. spatial segregation between insiders and outsiders is a basic feature of electronic dance scenes around the world, and goa is no different, for its members regularly attend other scenes interlinked across global countercultural circuits. in this connection, trance (ecstatic) experiences generally occur with no essential reference to issues of racial identity or segregation. internal bickering is pervasive within white psytrance subgroups in goa (p.152), and clashes involving national, generational and class difference are at least as common as those predicated on race. moreover, several indians (and other not exactly white individuals) occupy significant positions in the scene, as djs, party promoters and well-off diasporic fans. mating relationships across racial groups are common, even against india’s backdrop of patriarchy and sexual harassment, considering white females’ frequent complaints about native males. furthermore, saldanha does not account for the violence, exploitation and segregation that some indians explicitly perpetrate against third-world immigrants working in goa. likewise, he neglects that white travelers’ attitude of indifference towards indians is more often than not a simmelian response to the overwhelming demand incessantly posed by street vendors, beggars and sexual predators across india. all in all, edm studies indicate that class, gender and sexual orientation, alongside race, are all important factors in the makeup of electronic dance scenes. the psytrance scene in goa embodies complex multiplicities that cannot be easily explained by means of reduction to a single analytical category alone. as an ethnographic study, the claim that psytrance identity is founded on racial segregation is perplexing, particularly when argued on basis of empirically grounded evidence. no significant discrepancies can be found by cross-checking my fieldwork with saldanha’s ethnography at the level of observed behaviors. at a closer look, how148 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 ever, it becomes evident that saldanha has neglected the cultural point-of-view of psytrance people. in fact, he explicitly states that their representations on transcending prejudice would have misled him; and that he would not have been able to understand white identity in goa by approaching it discursively or psychologically (p.130). instead, saldanha chooses to observe their forms of sociability, at a distance, without ever addressing underlying meanings, intentions and desires. as such, the dismissal of native representations remits psychedelic white to a pre-geertzian moment, strangely resonating with classical british functional-structuralist anthropology. not by accident, in both british and deleuzian versions, subject interiorities become effects of larger social and material structures (machinic assemblages). as a possible remedy, what is the meaning of white bodies sticking together would have been a legitimate, even safer question. in other words, how problematic race actually is according to foreigners and natives in goa would be a question that largely defines the social and explanatory pertinence of a theoretical framework. however, goa freaks and goan villagers rarely speak in psychedelic white. in fact, they become largely incidental against the philosophical apparatus weaved across the book. in its appendix, saldanha correctly notes how difficult it is to interview psytrance freaks in goa, even though he seemed to possess a remarkable ability to socialize with them. conversely, saldanha provides a list of interviewees including a relative majority of indian authorities, intellectuals, journalists and activists, all of whom have been opposed to rave tourism. more widely, in a world of complexities, ethnographers ought to be supple in finding ways to engage, translate and interpret examined ways of life, initially in their own terms of sociability and intelligibility. concurring with saldanha, the locus of truth, as bourdieu puts it, rarely resides at the surface level of discursive representations alone. however, they provide critical clues towards a persuasive account that is both intellectually compelling and empirically accurate. in dismissing the voice of goa freaks, saldanha has paradoxically incurred an act of segregation by only allowing his own representations to speak and prevail. ultimately, the book fails to address a critical counter-hypothesis: psytrance fans reject indian tourists and beggars because they egregiously disrupt psytrance practices. “trance parties” are ritual practices of a quasi-sacred nature by which scene insiders can ritually express their anger and opposition to the modern self, morality and system. logically, those who don’t appear to share or respect the meanings entwined in such countercultural practices and ideologies are deemed unwelcome outsiders. in this light, the book’s main premise – that white freaks reject indian tourists because of their race – is empirically flawed. consequently, its main argument – that foreign countercultural formations in india are essentially reproduced on the basis of racial segregation – must be questioned.  the fact that these are “mostly white” formations struggling with native and alien majorities does not suffice to define them as founded, identified or reinforced by racial segregation. segregation and racism are not the same. psychedelic white must be commended for its philosophical ingenuity. nonetheless, in order to do justice to saldanha’s exquisite contribution to race studies, the book would have benefited from a more nuanced and cautious analysis of psytrance formations empirically and methodologically. it would have been more persuasive by better calibrating its racial determinism vis-à-vis the multiple, complex and polysemous injunctions of global psytrance locally, and particularly by means of a more direct dialogue with the scholarship on psytrance, travel and tourism in india and southeast asia. in battling against social constructionism, psychedelic white has lost sight of the empirical dimension it sought to explain, along with alternative philosophical explana reviews 149 tions. in their double folding, war machines are defined both for their lines of flight and death, as well as for their viscosity and chromatic variation. how to account for race as chromatic variation would have opened up a whole new range of empirical and theoretical possibilities. all along, the fixity of psytrance in northern goa (as in elsewhere) can be assessed as an ambivalent tactic of resistance for keeping the space of creative experimentation, one that is continuously threatened and reinforced by external formations, linkages, and power/knowledge arrangements. global nomads: techno and new age as transnational countercultures in ibiza and goa. anthony d’andrea. london and new york, routledge, 2007 isbn: 041542013x (hard) 0203962656 (ebook) 978-0-415-55376-4 (paper) rrp: $132 (hardbound), $28 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.14 charles de ledesma university of east london (uk) anthony d’andrea is a “transnationalist” researcher who has set out to explore the fissures and contradictions of twenty first century globalisation. global nomads is the end product of six years of field work in the bye ways of alternative cultures, and covers multiple visits to india and ibiza. it is a singular work and an indispensable contribution to a growing body of accessible academia on the curvature of globalisation, critical studies and counter cultures. as well it is an immensely readable ethnography of the lives, passion, habits and thoughts of overlapping sets of “expressive expatriates”, as d’andrea calls them. this label loosely corrals a colourful cast including djs at techno trance parties, traders in textiles at the hippie markets of goa and ibiza, artists, digital developers and international drug dealers. d’andrea defines “expressive expatriate” early on. “as a counterpoint in migration studies, the terms ‘expressive’ and ‘expatriate’ depart with the predominantly utilitarian and essentialized understanding of the mobile subject” (p.7). also weaving through the book is the concept, the global (neo) nomad, which d’andrea suggests is the philosophic base of the expressive expatriate. “many have abandoned metropolitan centres where they enjoyed a favourable material situation” (p.8). but, d’andrea cautions, his expressive, neo-nomadic, alternative subjects are not free of all the trapping of contemporary life nor do they wish to be. he applies foucault’s concept of bio power and judges that these peripheral, although not marginal, social vectors ride in tandem with neo liberal regimes. in the hands of a less radical, committed writer, a cynical edge – end of 1960s countercultural traditions; decimation of 1980s’ rave culture energies; creeping commoditisation of the global trade in goods and artefacts – could undermine such an analysis. but, thankfully, not; d’andrea remains steadfast in spirit and calling. global nomads is a resolutely optimistic work, theoretically fluent and empirically fascinating. divided into five main parts, d’andrea sets out his stall admirably in the opening chapter, “neo-nomadic”, which adds to the multiple voices in the graham st john150 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 edited collection, rave culture and religion, and in various work from robin sylvan and paul heelas, by connecting new spiritualities and techno dance culture with globalization. before nailing neo-nomadic as his defining meta-concept, d’andrea helpfully provides a short overview of critical work on the nomadic per se; using deluge’s famous epithet, “the nomad does not move” to clarify that the neo nomadic need be understood as a state of mind and being, not merely a state of movement. d’andrea begins his field report in la isla blanca – ibiza – with a colourful narrative spotlighting various neo-nomadic lifestyles encountered on the island during peak season. there is yoga teacher nora, clothes retailer rochelle, new age body practices seeker barbara and island long-stay kirk who, like d’andrea, is an anthropologist. a rather bucolic scenario builds of creative types running a busy clock of night time events, markets, yoga and “bio dance” classes, although the picture clouds in the ethnography’s next section with an exploration of the hippie and club scenes in the island’s resort, san antonio. d’andrea charts how conflicts develop in the increasingly commoditised spaces of package tourist density. he less successfully summarises field work conducted at the island’s largest nightclub, privilege, offering few surprises beyond a rather functional listing of expected details and views. we learn too of the antics of the highly extrovert couple who ran club night manumission, and how they ‘performed live’ sex acts during the night. d’andrea is revealing on the club industry economy, its army of bohemian workers who work the club season, and the party promoters behind club profitability. beyond its crass commerciality, he identifies that there are some opportunities where “exceptional parties were able to break through the nationalism that underlies mainstream clubbing in ibiza and become exciting references in the global club scene” (p.107). before heading for north goa, where sound system parties most resolutely weren’t in this mould, d’andrea stops off at point 2 in his transnational research, neospiritual guru osho’s “international meditation resort” in pune, south india. d’andrea is refreshing on this ashram turned “new age resort” as he holds centre ground between the osho supporters, sannyasins, and osho bashers, although the tone is largely one of a distanced disappointment with the commercial direction taken. this section ends with a reminder of the translocal connections between ibiza, pune and goa, three key nodes in a neo-nomadic, counter cultural lifestyle pattern which may take in goods trading, new age therapies, mind altering drug bouts and all night dancing at beachside full moon trance parties. it is goa that d’andrea travels to next and it is here that global nomads truly finds its pace and footing. after setting the scene with a brief history of the tiny, once portuguese-held, south india enclave, and western interest in it, d’andrea launches into a field report on “rebel sannyasins”, trance party promoters; backpackers after sun, parties and drugs; mornings sipping lattes and smoking hash chillums in the famous cafe, the german bakery, and attempts at elucidating information from the traveller freaks and hippy elders at the centre of the action. in an interesting ethnographic aside he finds that “at a methodological level, the politicized silence of freaks constituted a challenge to conventional methods of data collection” (p.189). but d’andrea, in exchanges parallel to those of arun saldanha in psychedelic white, beavers away patiently and soon finds his subjects full of views and stories. one, bojan, believes india to be a land “that is female, round, and the karma yoga instantaneous” (p.193). later in this masterly field report, d’andrea reaches a ravishing climax. the sub section “the techno trance assemblage: aesthetics of power and limit-experience” remains the strongest, most ethically powerful and revealing writing on the psyche reviews 151 delic trance party to date, certainly in an academic context, if not anywhere. so many nights and mornings spent searching for and, on occasions, finding, techno trance parties, has fully rubbed off on d’andrea and, unlike in the more extensive psychedelic white, the reader feels fully and disarmingly there, propelled into the vortex of chromatically varied digital beats aiming to upset and re-constitute subjectivities. locating the trance dance, first as a limit-experience which can ‘tear the subject from itself ’ (p.209), the writing collapses key elements – music, technology, raver psychology, bodily gesture and dance and potent chemical enhancers – into enchanting, hypnotic and critically consistent prose. “trance parties have been designed to engender a magic aura that remits participants into a cosmic temporality” (p.210). d’andrea’s use here of the deleuze and guattarian concept “assemblage” is judicious, not overstated, using a nomadological spirit to generate potency and mystique in the writing; attempting, successfully, to enact in words the process it sets out to describe. no matter, really, that there are one or two factual gaffs in this section. d’andrea, for example, states that the 1980s were a fallow period in the north goa party scene, picking up strength in the early 1990s. not so. djs goa gil and laurent played stupendous, night-long, tranceified electronic mixes at numerous parties in those years, with events attended by many hundreds of revellers. a stylistic weakness is the occasional repetition of phrases and sentences as d’andrea unveils his conceptual framework across various chapters. but this is no surprise given a keenness for publishing finished segments as the research project elapses. d’andrea has simply had a number of go’s at re-defining and re-casting his ideas. this doesn’t detract at all from a book which is thoughtfully crafted, stimulating, syntactically evocative and critically valuable. d’andrea’s study of neo-nomadism in expressive expatriates, his turnof-thecentury field work in multiple nodes where alternative cultures still flourish and, particularly, his sharp dissection of the trance party cosmos, is invaluable material for students of, well, just about any discipline you can imagine which touches ostensibly on globalization, cultural anthropology, neo-religious studies, cultural studies and popular music. feel free to add to the list. breakcore: identity and interaction on peer-to-peer. andrew whelan. newcastle upon tyne, cambridge scholars publishing, 2008. 337 pp. isbn: 1847186572 $60 us (hardcover) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.15 emily d. ferrigno yale university (usa) the study of virtual music communities is a fascinating and timely endeavor, given the widespread phenomenon of “bedroom production”. musical subcultures are often shaped by and mediated through online means, such as forums, chatrooms and list152 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 servs. virtual environments provide vital space in which musical practitioners share creative methods of musical production, define genre, hold aesthetic debates and socialize. virtual ethnographies are not yet numerous, and scholars interested in identity, gender and race as they exist in the virtual realm would do well to consult andrew whelan’s study. whelan’s book is an informative examination of virtual community from the chatrooms of soulseek, a file-sharing application used by electronic dance music producers. whelan focuses on users involved in breakcore, a breakbeat-centered genre influenced by jungle, industrial, and hardcore techno. whelan draws upon the theories and practices of his discipline (sociology), and illustrates concepts with robust sections of ethnographically-culled data, working with a 2100-page transcription of conversational text from soulseek chatrooms over a period of six months, as well as email interviews with producers. whelan’s analytical focal point is chatroom dialogue. he uses textual analysis to illustrate how the individuals in his study define themselves, how chatroom dialogue creates and ascribes musical meaning, and how soulseek users employ discursive cues to identify “insiders” and “outsiders.” in the introductory chapter, as well as in the concluding section of the book, whelan engages with the “rationalization/democratization” debate, a discourse central to his study. he confronts the hypothesis that technology serves to inhibit and ultimately dehumanize music, which stands in opposition to the utopian vision of technology as an agent of social change, allowing the voices of socially excluded groups to be heard (p.24). whelan provides a useful introduction to the peer-to-peer environment and file sharing protocol, and examines the mp3 file (the medium of exchange) as a “sociocultural fetish”. whelan describes how “rip crews” encode new music into mp3 format, “tag” the files, and distribute/disseminate them to the larger community. each mp3 is accompanied by an “nfo” file, which identifies the mp3 and its creator. these files are written in a source code that allows the creator to insert jokes, illustrations, and the like into the nfo. several examples of nfo files are provided in the text. whelan focuses on three practices that he describes as “shibboleths,” or “terms indicative of social location or origin, the use of which therefore serves to distinguish between groups” (p.14). these are the use of 1) nigga/nigger (chapter 5); 2) gay/ghey (chapter 7), and 3) the “amen break” (chapter 8), a widely sampled drum break from the winstons’ 1969 hit, “amen brother”. whelan provides lengthy analyses of textual exchanges in soulseek chat rooms, in which social boundaries are defined and redefined, and multiple conversations occur at once. the use of the terms “nigga/nigger” is presented in the context of “ritual insult exchange,” as well as flatly racist discourse. as whelan explains, “the term [nigga] is embedded within a matrix of ethnic and subcultural identity politics, and as such tells us much about the orientations of those who deploy it” (p.144). he bases his analysis on the use of “nigga” as a style-marker common among us youth, a characterization which is perhaps too superficial to provide the reader with sufficient context for virtual analysis. the verbal presence of “nigga/nigger” in american society is extremely complex, and quite different in its “real world” application, as opposed to the anonymous environment of virtual chatrooms. anonymity presents significant difficulties for social analysis, in that age, race, nationality, and even (spoken) english language fluency of chatroom users may be unknown. the second shibboleth “gay/ghey” is also examined within the context of chatroom discourse. whelan bases his analysis on the concept of “gay” as not only homo reviews 153 sexual, but also encompassing characteristics and ideals rejected by hegemonic masculinity (p.182). noting that, “the ‘joking’ exploration of the semantics of gay is a popular trope among young men” (p.200), whelan presents several examples of chatroom dialogue related to anal eroticism. he then explains the use of “ghey” in the chatrooms to describe something “lame” or “generic” (the homosexual connotation orthographically removed). the discussion concludes with an examination of masculinity, a frequent theme in whelan’s study, given the scarcity of participants identifying themselves as female in breakcore chatrooms. in chapter eight, “junglist,” whelan begins to focus on the music around which his study is centered. he discusses the aesthetics of breakcore via chatroom discourse, addressing polarities such as old school/new school and mainstream/underground. whelan regards the “amen break” as a third shibboleth, a time-honored (and wellworn) sample used in electronic dance music. however, he also highlights the debate within the breakcore community as to whether the use of the amen is creative, progressive, or even interesting. this problematizes the classification of the amen as a shibboleth; while the amen is well known in the breakcore community, its utilization is not a given. perhaps, then, the amen is a shibboleth used to distinguish subgroups from one another, rather than distinguishing the entire breakcore community from outsiders. whelan’s book ends with a lengthy “journey through the media” (p.319), covering a range of topics from sampling ethics and branding, to utopian visions of peer-to-peer culture. whelan characterizes his book as a “collage,” and, in fact, his theoretical discussions are dense, at times unfocused and difficult to follow. whelan’s own ideas are often obscured by his prose style and frequent quotation of others’ work. this also limits the accessibility of the text to specialists, which can be a serious shortcoming when writing to an interdisciplinary audience. in addition, whelan’s engagement with musical analysis is not a strong point of the book. he describes the amen break as embodying “polyrhythmic hesitancy”, the snares “sketching an idiosyncratic, irregular pattern”. like many drum breaks, the amen is characterized by syncopation, a basic feature of funk drumming–hardly idiosyncratic, and, in fact, very “regular”. the reader is not given a particularly clear description of what breakcore and its related genres sound like (beyond the discography). whelan does participate in the breakcore scene (as a chatroom member and perhaps a producer), but the reader is not privy to this information. the inclusion of reflexive ethnography would have added necessary transparency to his study, for when the reader is well acquainted with the author, ethnographic authority and agenda are made clear, and thus can become secondary to the voices of the observed. despite these shortcomings, whelan makes a rigorous contribution to the study of musical culture in the digital age. he delves into an examination of the sometimes crude nature of chatroom discourse, thoughtfully employing textual analysis to unpack the complexities of race, gender and social interaction. whelan’s discussion of the internet, society and identity is enlightening. he introduces the term “networked individualism” in which “identity is organised and expressed through consumption practices” (p.319), whereby participatory and collaborative consumption are encouraged, in opposition to the model of passive consumption set up by the music industry (p.305). this observation suggests that (somewhat problematically) whelan embraces a utopian (and democratic) vision of peer-to-peer file sharing, in which recorded sound is free and open to all–collected, utilized, manipulated and most importantly, shared. 154 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 the high life: club kids, harm and drug policy (qualitative studies in crime and justice volume 2). dina perrone. monsey (ny), criminal justice press, 2009. isbn: 978-1-881798-46-0 rrp: $35 (paperback) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.16 lucy gibson university of manchester (uk) dina perrone’s study of “club kids” based in new york city presents an illuminating analysis of the cultural and situational context in which club drugs are used. while most literature on drug use tends to focus on users from impoverished communities and the harm they experience, the high life challenges the typical drug user stereotype by showing the “hidden” deviant behaviour of seemingly conformist, affluent and well-educated young adults. perrone opposes america’s war on drugs and argues that the focus of drugs policy should shift from a criminal justice approach (abstinenceonly strategy) to a more balanced response that includes principles from both the cultural and health fields and focuses on the well-being and lifestyles of drug users. the book begins by outlining two assumed flaws in america’s current drug war: that drug users have a pathology, which is the only factor leading to the “drug problem”; and that all illegal drug use leads to harm. perrone challenges these assumptions by asserting that the “...culture and capital of the user and the social environment in which the drugs are used greatly influence use, abuse, and harm” (p.2). chapter one builds on the introduction by providing an overview of how perrone met the club kids and offering initial insights into their lives. moreover, the chapter describes the ethnographic field methods deployed to study the participants’ use of club drugs such as mdma, methamphetamine (crystal meth), ketamine and ghb. the book is based on perrone’s observations, discussion with club kids during fifteen months of fieldwork and interviews with eighteen club kids aged between 22 and 33. the subsequent chapters are separated into two parts: (i) club kids’ dance culture and (ii) drug use among the club kids. the first part examines the club kids as a subcultural group by assessing how they correspond to subculture literature and earlier drug-using subcultural groups such as hippies, mods and skinheads. the book demonstrates that, in contrast to traditional subcultural groups, club kids do not wish to reject the dominant culture, but rather, they adhere to the consumerist norms of conventional american society. club kid culture and the clubbing experience are explored using theories of consumption, commercialisation and globalisation, and by situating the club kids within postmodern theories of the nature of late capitalism. throughout part one, perrone neatly uses the club kids’ perceptions of clubbing, its importance and the suitability of using drugs in club settings to illustrate the fantastical, “carnivalesque” and commodified nature of contemporary club culture. the second part of the book explores the club kids’ patterns of drug use. perrone shows how club kids maintain their jobs and uphold family responsibilities whilst using relatively large quantities of drugs. through their social and economic privileges, the club kids are able to avoid criminal justice sanctions and limit harm. the author employs a theoretical framework, which refers and adds to the prior work of norman reviews 155 zinberg, to describe how factors (drug, set, setting, timing and capital) in club kids’ lives allow controlled and safe drug use. perrone expands on zinberg’s (1984) framework of “drug, set and setting” by adding supplementary concepts of timing and capital drawn from primary data. timing and capital include both club kids’ resources and stages or transitions in the life course. the author demonstrates how a drug’s properties, the setting in which the drug is used, the user’s mood (set), resources (capital) and phase of life-trajectory (timing), shape drug using practices and impact on the relationship between drugs and harm. perrone uses rich and detailed quotations from her respondents to demonstrate how club kids negotiate drug use to minimise harm and avoid criminal justice penalties, while also revealing the larger contradictions in club kids’ lives. chapter seven provides a final discussion of the study’s findings and offers a wider examination of their implications for drug policy in the u.s. perrone pertinently argues that “...socially and economically privileged drug users, such as the club kids, are better equipped to manage their clubbing and drug-using behaviors than are less privileged users...the war on drugs is disproportionately a war on poor people. thus, white, middle-class users are more capable of concealing their drug use and escaping public and police detection than their lower-class counterparts” (p.205). for perrone, the war on drugs has been lost and future policy should de-stigmatise users and help to minimise the harm resulting from drug use rather than concentrate on arrest or punishment. perrone’s study offers a convincing account of the social, cultural and environmental factors that shape drug use among club kids. the book provides a fascinating insight into club kids’ lives and how regular drug users are able to occupy conventional social roles and sustain typical social relationships. however, two minor criticisms remain. although numerous references to relevant work are evident throughout the book, the statement “...cocaine can benefit those with asthma” (p.130) is not supported by academic evidence and readers may want to know the basis for such a claim. moreover, recent post-subcultural literature (e.g. bennett 1999; bennett and kahnharris 2004) has been omitted from the discussion. perrone states that club kids are not a subculture in the traditional sense of the term. yet, she continues to use this term to describe the club kids as a distinct social group. that aside, the book offers a stimulating analysis of club kids’ drug use by highlighting the reasons for clubbing, and exploring club kids’ motivations, and cultural practices. perrone provides a thought-provoking discussion that challenges the majority of literature on drug use. the study is invaluable for students of electronic dance music culture as it questions current failing policy in the u.s. and offers new ways of conceptualising the culture and context of drug use. references bennett, andy. 1999. subcultures or neo-tribes? rethinking the relationship between youth, style and musical taste. sociology, 33: 599-617. bennett, andy and kahn-harris, keith. 2004. after subculture: critical studies in contemporary youth culture. london: palgrave. zinberg, norman. 1984. drug, set, and setting: the basis for controlled intoxicant use. new haven: yale university press. 156 dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture • vol 1 no 1 like so many things i both know and don't know lisa busby goldsmiths, university of london (uk) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2017.09.01.12> in 2014, i was commissioned to make a new work for survival kit festival, umeå, sweden. the outcome, i begin alone in this action: a series of sounding zones, was a number of outdoor long duration sounding performances in the city and surrounding rural area. in eight different locations, i undertook a series of eight-hour dj performances with a bespoke and portable, self-powered sound system, and a selection of domestic playback equipment. this site-specific set of actions proposed to explore bodily endurance in performance; the socio-cultural role of the soundsystem as a viable tool to create what bey termed the “temporary autonomous zone” (1985); the fringes or limits of what skills and sites might be considered dj practice. i have continued to investigate site-specificity in djing through collaborative practice; in 2015 artists ruthie woodward, fran perry and i formed the ensemble, the nomadic female dj troupe. in our performances we also worked without mains electricity[1] and “off stage” at festivals and gigs on the uk diy scene. we developed interests in blurring the lines between experimental live improvisation and more traditional mixing practices; using our live sung voices in our mixes; and investigating plurivocal and collectivised structures inspired by various moments in feminist activist histories.[2] this neatly worded opening paragraph makes it sound like i have some sort of sense of what i was doing, what i am doing. i use tidy academic signposting language like “proposed to explore”, and i casually reference “experimental live improvisation” and the “uk diy scene” as if they are tangible, unexploded things that don't require interrogation. i use the word dj wildly as validation or affirmation of my status as one. i suggest a linear narrative where there is none. the artist, scholar and founder of ladyz in noyz, marlo de lara, recently described her practice as “watching sound unfold in multiple acts of embodied non-linear story telling” (2016). there is also an andra mccartney quote i like, about the act of sounding being analogous to “a mariner’s slow and careful navigation through unfamiliar waters” (quoted in rogers 2010: 18). what is presented here is a collection of artifacts, evidence of a porous and incomplete “working through” of my relationship to the two aforementioned projects, and in turn their relationship to a perceived field of feminist action. most often documentation of process notes and questions in the form of field notes and partially transcribed conversations, but also sometimes more abstract imaginings and responses to questions and answers which are “not quite yet”.[3] ... i begin alone in this action: survival kit gallery documentary (busby 2014) ... field notes, umeå, 2014 20/9/14, kungsgatan och pilgatan (the main route through town) i travelled from the bottom of the bike bridge to the gallery it felt very fast, very constant i mostly played ‘usherette’ style with the fruit crate strapped onto my front lots of people stopped to talk or just listen cameras documenting the event captured it from bicycles, everyone cycles here the second half of the day in the ‘gig’ style set up of the gallery was less comfortable not a natural scenario, people watched attentively and i wondered if they realized how long i was going to keep playing when an older man came to look at the set up, and asked me questions about it, i could feel the eyes of the crowd quizzically wondering what was happening and wondering why i was talking to him the expectation was definitely that this was a gig and he was interrupting this is wrong i left my performance area to talk to him i felt torn but equally if this is in part about engaging other people i’m not interested in denying people their own way in, that comfort through dialogue 22/9/14, gathörnet västra strandgatan (a street in town, near the river and some ex-industrial buildings) the night before the temperature dropped suddenly by performance time the wind was high and so weather moved through quickly it felt like i experienced all the weather the city offered on this day i kept taking off and putting on layers, by the end of the day i was huddled under a bridge to shelter from a snow shower 24/9/14, naturvetarstråket, ålidhem (a park and playground) this day i really enjoying finding spots to sit quietly and be with the sound i was handling, probably the first time felt in the zone for extended periods of time various children came to see me and examine extensively my equipment and bike cart, climbing trees and on rocks i wondered if i disturbed their playing, and if i had the right to be here 25/9/14, skulpturparken aktrisgränd (a sculpture park and open wooded area, near residences) there was a turn today, an oppressive loneliness characterised the performance i had to deal with the sun setting and working in the dark, in a more rural setting, for the first time i was terrified even though i knew i must be safe[4] 28/9/14, nydalasjön (a lake) the first time it rained and i had no real shelter i dropped a record player in the wet sand, i think the needle’s still okay i wonder about how hard it is to mix for 8 hours, and is contributing to this the fact that in some locations there is no audience but my experience has been more about creating a landscape in response and collaboration with the surroundings, moment to moment can the physical landscape be my audience these zones i am creating—who are they really for? to be honest i wonder if this is a work for me 1/10/14, grillplatsen mitt i gimmonässpåren och olika platser i skogen (a forest) this location was far and hard to get to, and i wanted to go into the forest, not sit on the edges i found a hut at the end of the day, and my friend organised a little party of people to camp there with me, to listen to my mix in the final few hours we ate sausages, it was kind of them this was an unsettling location again, particularly in the darkness i don't really understand this uncontrolled reaction, i’m not exactly doing something that puts myself at risk, so it seems melodramatic to feel scared i guess the courage that is part of this self-imposed methodology, manifests somehow in not just the endurance but actually channeling a focus to mix given the conditions, and my own feelings about them it doesn't always work but i guess failure is a part of any performance, or at least any process ... facebook message posted by survival kit festival, 4/10/14[5] today, during her last sounding zone performances here in umeå, lisa busby's bespoke soundsystem died. this event occurred 2 hours and 20 minutes into this [sic] 8th and final performance. lisa will be continuing to walk her planned route, visiting each proposed zone in turn with any equipment that has survived. in this alternate sounding zone performance, lisa will deposit records and tapes in each location. her route is the cycle road and along the river from sofiehem to the bildmuseet arts campus. ... the nomadic female dj troupe (nomadic female dj troupe—supernormal 2015) ... score for a photo shoot arrange your three bodies into various configurations that form interesting shapes for the camera, but obscure your face. triangles are nice, but also try stacking up vertically and horizontally. figure 1. nomadic female dj troupe promotional photography (2015). photo: john harries. ... conversation fragments, the nomadic female dj troupe, 2016 ruthie woodward: sometimes, for me, i had to find a spot where i was comfortable, and then i would have to move every now and then. there is quite a lot of discomfort for me in our practice because of sitting in weird places or lots of walking around carrying heavy things. i’m not 100% sure why that is relevant or why i think that's interesting... [pause] lisa busby: but we continue to do it for some reason. woodward: and we do it to ourselves. busby: yeah, we self impose. francine perry: we’ve never actually played on a stage have we? busby: okay. it was designed for the festivals wasn't it? what does it mean now, to be nomadic? i think often it means unpowered, and that’s interesting. woodward and perry [simultaneous]: yeah. ... woodward: the fact that it’s an all female band will always be a thing. busby: yeah but we’re foregrounding it even further by putting it in the title. ... to do list, 11/6/15 lisa—website fran—logo ruthie—tech spec all: 1. buying battery powered fairy lights, ponchos, umbrellas, megaphones, mini amps 2. sewing straps for box backpacks and trays 3. rehearsing ... rehearsal reflection, date unknown i remember we talked about performances being sonically spatialised using our bodies. there might be a “basecamp” with a central and loudest sound emitter, but around this we three could walk and sound using smaller devices to act as orbital or at least moving sound sources. this idea of roaming in orbit feels interesting to me, unusual at least. it makes me think of something between topographical maps and those cage scores that are just intersecting circles. having something like that dictate or map literally sounding paths for us to follow whilst mixing, and the sonic experience being constantly moving and changing in space as our paths cross and diverge, undulating proximities. i wonder why we never did that? and then what if you did that not in some sort of spacious, gorgeous landscape or open area—you did it in a crowd, or at an existing gig or something. i’m not sure i’d ever have the courage to do that. that feels quite hardcore. ... score for a power cut imagine the tempo and the motivational narration by rosemary conley from your “slimobility exercise tape”. adopt boat pose until power resumes performed march 18, 2016 ... conversation fragments with best friend, 2016 lisa busby: i’m really concerned—so in my abstract i was like oh, to what extent is a nomadic stance—so to what extent is using unusual technology or, not unusual technologies, but like opting out of mainstream technologies and mainstream settings [pause] is a deliberate feminist stance of opting out because those things are associated with a sort of masculinised narrative of technology, of everything, of fucking performance, of everything. john harries: so there is a valid question to ask about, actually, about every micro-decision that happens in the music as well. whether those decisions are addressing a similar kind of opt in/out dichotomy? busby: how would they be? harries: well, as you say for example, the decision to sing non-verbally, to sing as a texture, when that decision emerges in an improvisation, in a performance, is there an aspect of that which is about a will to opt out of what’s expected? busby: even if we don’t know it. harries: even if you don't know it, yeah. harries: conversely, in a kind of what might otherwise be an experimental music or free improvisation setting, is the decision to drop a beat in the middle of it an opting in, or opting out? busby: it’s an opting in if you think of it as dance music, but it’s kind of an opting out if you think of it as... [pause] harries: [picks up] ... experimental music, both of which scenes are potentially equally gendered and hampered by sets of preconceptions. ... busby: and then when the main acts came on people loved it. it did feel like people really knew what was going on, it was like this is a band and this is a band of electronic musicians who are making bangin’ music—we can all dance now, great. and, that thing you were saying about “it’s really confrontational when you come outside of the confines of stage, for an audience”. i feel like the exact opposite, i feel like if i was on a stage i’d feel really secure cause people couldn’t really see what i was doing. whereas i feel like putting myself [pause]... so there’s a mystique there’s a performance mystique of not knowing really how these sounds are generated. but when you put yourself on the floor, in some ways it's a really vulnerable or submissive position arguably. because anyone could literally walk over and kick all your shit over, but not even in that aggressor/vulnerable position—you’re literally opening up your whole methodology, you’re totally demystifying a methodology. you’re basically saying look this is what we’ve got. this shit, this pile of shit that doesn't really work is what we've got, and this is what we’re doing, you can see literally exactly how complicated or simple our actions are at any given time, you can see when some of us aren’t doing stuff. harries: yeah but that in itself is confrontational. busby: why? harries: it’s vulnerable, right, but it’s not submissive, actually. it’s vulnerable yes as you're physically exposed, but it’s not submissive because it’s actually kind of saying, in a way it’s sort of saying i don't care about what you think about what i’m doing, i don’t care about pretending to make this into something that you might want it to be. so that’s confrontational. it’s also confrontational in the sense of, um, just the fact it deliberately is not engaging with that kind of mystique of musical performance. don't forget that’s what a lot of people like about performance, that's what a lot of people want to happen when they go to a gig, is to watch somebody and be really impressed by the magic that’s happening onstage. which is why the knife thing is confrontational, it’s why that jenny hval gig was confrontational. it’s that sense of going like—you want me to be a rock star, well fuck you, that’s not what’s happening here. and even if it’s really fun, it’s really inclusive, it’s really democratizing, it still does have that element to it i think. ... as points of anchor for you the reader i now present the following list of contextualizing ideas and questions that i have either tried to untangle through research, or am tacitly aware of. i have tried to present them in a coherent reading order, so they may inform one another as you proceed, but do be aware these are thoughts in progress to be considered, not any sort of argument. for the same reason, no conclusions are presented. female, feminist, knowing, not knowing these projects could be read as having what deborah withers calls “strategic affinities” (2014) with “the fragmented legacy” (2013: 3) of other feminist activity in sound and music. but i and we[6] didn’t design it that way, although it is fair to say that i and we were aware of what withers calls the “intangible cultural heritage” of feminist action (2015). or to rearrange that—we were intangibly aware of the cultural heritage of feminist action. furthermore, i and we struggled day to day with what holly ingleton discusses perceptively with relation to the her noise project: joan scott’s assertion of “the need to both accept and refuse sexual difference”, and “not as strategies of opposition, but the constitutive elements of feminism itself” (in ingleton 2012: 49–50) so both of my own projects are characterised, for me at least, by complicated dualities of at once knowing and not knowing, of deliberately and simultaneously articulating and obfuscating. i realised that as an improvising practitioner i encountered a similar field of negotiations when i read tracey mcmullen’s interview with judith butler, “improvisation within a field of constraint” (2016: 21–33). the discussion highlights the possibility of improvisational gesture or action to be volitional, but also or alternatively relational, nonconceptual; and furthermore examines improvisation as a tool in arts making but also in social and behavioural settings. i am improvising musician. i am improvising feminist. i had felt liberated by my experience of musical, sonic, or bodily improvisation as an open site for multiple ways of doing and knowing, but had never before aligned my relationship to my own feminist gesture as similarly improvisational until reflecting on these projects. opting out of what? a number of possible strategies inherent in these works could be understood as challenging or opting out of hegemonic, and masculine, narratives and spaces of technology and technological making—particularly when considering dominant or mainstream dj cultures.[7] 1. the use of domestic, non-professional, obsolete, portable, hacked, and/or hand made equipment. 2. when working solo, a move away from the dual deck set up, and when collaborating, the continuously collectivized nature of the sound making (where anywhere up to nine channels may be live). in both instances, sequential positioning largely gives way to an unusually dense layering of sound. 3. the audible tension between rhythmically stable dance music and arrhythmic improvised music. 4. the nomadic stance—embodied in embracing outdoor or other unexpected locations, un-staged performances when in more traditional venues, and the decision to restrict ourselves to battery power only. i reserve the right to define these sounding actions as feminist, but refuse any implication that in doing so they become only feminist actions. it is worth considering, then, that these strategies could be seen as opting out of something other than gendered musical constructs, and indeed opting in to one or more other things? much of what i and we do—methodologies, instruments and resulting sound—might be considered the bread and butter of lo-fi, glitch, noise, free improv or experimental music(s). marie thompson (2016: 97–8) observes that experimental music has a long-standing concern with countering the traditional and that this complicates the position of counter-hegemonic activities as straightforwardly, unequivocally or exclusively “feminist”. most interestingly though, citing cox (2015: 98) she posits that “experimental music itself could be conceptualised as ‘feminine’, in as much as it frequently prioritises fluidity, messiness and dynamism” and you do not necessarily need to identify as female to be understood as generating “feminised noise”. note that feminised should not be uncritically equated to feminist; thompson points out the feminised may impede patriarchal structures but can exist within them. so, to return to my previous point—my knowing and not knowing—improvising as a musician and feminist has led me to a nexus of sites; i and we practice in some sort of liminal space where simple notions of opting in or out become complicated within a mobile set of strategies and resulting soundings that present multiple positions within contextual layers. i and we are not edm djs, nor are we free improvisers—both worldviews come to bear and yet this is not an argument either for some sort of post-identity or simplistic “genre-mashing” position. i and we may be both audibly inhabiting and rejecting different performance and sounding gestures, and the resistance may lie somewhere in the making visible cross-contextually. singing with/in the mix i and we vocalise within mixes. in the nomadic female dj troupe this is characterized thusly—lyrics are improvised and non-narrative when used; non-verbal vocal sounding is as common as text-led or melodic singing; no single person takes the role of lead vocalist; vocalising is often collective harmonisation, textural, fragmentary, heavily processed; vocalising is almost always spontaneous; and crucially singing does not necessarily stop us engaging with other mix actions. it is obvious, but nonetheless valuable, to point out that this may be one more example of our simultaneous “inhabiting and rejecting” strategy, the “making visible” i outline above. the following readings of the use of our voices in this way might also be worth reflecting upon: 1. we are not vocalists that appear on tracks, or sing live with a dj. we are djing and singing. the value may be less to do with the content of the vocalizing, and more the fact we are doing it at all. 2. it could present a flattened, non-hierarchical framework for operation, one that focuses on collectivity rather than a competitive “dj battle” stance. 3. it may represent one of many resistance techniques women in the sonic arts and electronic music have and continue to use to challenge historic and sociocultural stereotypes (lane 2016). stereotypes that manifest in both representations of women’s voices in sound and music filtered through a masculine perception (kretowicz 2012) and the exclusion and invisibility of women in these fields.[8] the vulnerable body and the confrontational body vulnerability is present in a number of ways in these performances: in the lone female body in public and often isolated spaces, and in the un-staged, ground-level performance setting that allows for the demystifying of creation of sound. this making visible of vulnerability is inextricably tied to a sense of refusal or confrontation, though. tara rogers notes that many of the female artists she encountered in her pink noises project, “cultivate technological sophistication in their work, but stake out philosophical positions that run counter to using dominant techno-scientific priorities of precision and control as ends in themselves” (2010: 8). i wonder if our visible active bodies in space, in relation to our instruments and the audience, present a physical enactment of such philosophical positioning. author biography a scottish artist based in london, lisa busby is a composer, vocalist, dj and senior lecturer in music at goldsmiths, university of london. she performs and composes with bands the nomadic female dj troupe, rutger hauser and previously sleeps in oysters, as well as working independently as a solo artist. she is particularly interested in using playback media as instruments, but also works in text based score, installation and site specific performance. lisabusby.com. references bey, hakim. 1985. “t. a. z.: the temporary autonomous zone, ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism”. <http://hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html> (accessed 17 july 2014). cox, christoph. 2005. “a la recherché d’une musique feminine”. in her noise, ed. lina dzuverovic & anne hilde neset, 9–14. newcastle-upon-tyne: forma. giulia damiani and barbara mahiknecht. 2016. “(un)wanted proximity”. goldsmiths, university of london. potatoes and stones art research symposium. marlo de lara. 2016. “ladyz in noyz”. goldsmiths, university of london. doing sonic cyberfeminisms: strategies of sonic resistance. panel event. farrugia, rebekah. 2012. beyond the dance floor: female djs, technology and electronic dance music culture. bristol and chicago: intellect. ingleton, holly. 2012. “her noise: identifying feminist strategies”. reflections on process in sound 1: 44–51. gadir, tami. 2016. “resistance or reiteration? rethinking gender in dj cultures”. contemporary music review 35(1): 115–29. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1176767>. kretowicz, steph. “comment: gendered production and the artists who are vocal about it”. dummy. 18 december 2012. <http://www.dummymag.com/features/comment-gendered-production-and-the-artists-who-are-vocal-about-it> (accessed 10 october 2014). ———. “trends of 2013: let’s talk about gendered production, baby”. dummy. 5 december 2013. <http://www.dummymag.com/features/trends-of-2013-gendered-production-vocal-processing-planningtorock-sophie> (accessed 10 october 2014). lane, cathy. 2016. “why not our voices?” women and music: a journal of gender and culture 20: 96–110. (accessed 18 november 2016). <https://doi.org/10.1353/wam.2016.0006>. mccartney, andra. 2000. “sounding places with hildegard westerkamp”. ph.d. dissertation, york university. mcmullen, tracey. 2016. “improvisation within a scene of constraint: an interview with judith butler”. in negotiated moments: improvisation, sound and subjectivity, ed. gillian sidall and ellen waterman, 21–33. durham and london: duke university press. rodgers, tara. 2010. pink noises: women on electronic music and sound. durham and london: duke university press. scott, joan w. 1996. only paradoxes to offer: french feminists and the rights of man. cambridge and london: harvard university press. thompson, marie. 2016. “feminised noise and the ‘dotted line’ of sonic experimentalism”. contemporary music review 35(1): 85–105. (accessed 2 august 2016). <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1176773>. withers, deborah m. 2013. “re-enacting process: temporality, historicity and the women’s liberation music archive”. international journal of heritage studies 7(8): 688–701. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2013.794745>. ———. 2014. “strategic affinities: historiography and epistemology in contemporary feminist knowledge politics”. european journal of women's studies 22(2): 129–42. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506814551759>. ———. 2015. “intangible cultural heritage and the women's liberation music archive”. in sites of popular music heritage: memories, histories, places, ed. sarah cohen, rob knifton, marion leonard and les roberts, 125–39. london: routledge. filmography busby, lisa. 2014. “i begin alone in this action: survival kit documentary”. vimeo. uploaded on 23 september 2014. <https://vimeo.com/106976301> (accessed 11 august 2017). “nomadic female dj troupe—supernormal 2015”. vimeo. uploaded on march 2017. <https://vimeo.com/209370155> (accessed 11 august 2017). notes [1] power supplied from the grid to homes, offices, etc. [2] in both projects the sound making spaces i and we created were advertised or known to be open to participation. it was an exciting challenge and experience, one that yielded successes and failures, but it is not the focus of this text. [3] this phrase emerged from the 2016 goldsmiths art research symposium potatoes and stones(see damiani & mahiknecht 2016) and one that i felt a particular affinity with as a description of process-led methodologies and enactments of working. [4] i understood, rationally, that i was undertaking relatively safe activities in a relatively safe environment (and by this i mean i was statistically very unlikely to come to any physical harm for any reason, including attacks from other people). nonetheless, my bodily and emotional experience was one of fear that i could not control or define. i am distantly aware that this “fearfulness” felt by women in public spaces has been explored by gender theorists. like so many things i both know and don't know, the details or complexities of this shared knowledge i could not recount, like something partially recorded to tape but now lost in layers of overdubs and hiss. [5] original message posted on swedish social media and translated by the author. [6] the “we” referred to here is specifically the members of ensemble the nomadic female dj troupe, and i use the phrase “i and we” to make distinctions between or correlate actions of my own in my solo practice and of the group. [7] for contextualizing writing on dj culture as a male dominated space see farrugia (2012) and gadir (2016). [8] for contextualizing writing on women’s use of the voice in sonic arts see lane (2016), and in electronic dance music culture see kretowicz (2012, 2013). the globalization of musics in transit: music migration and tourism simone krüger and ruxandra trandafoiu (eds.) london: routledge, 2013. isbn: 978-0-415-64007-7 rrp: us$140 (hardcover) garth sheridan rmit university (australia) advances in communication technologies and the global flow of people as tourists, workers and permanent or temporary migrants have facilitated the spread of music beyond their originating communities and across national borders. accordingly, the globalization of music is an increasingly well-researched area of inquiry within popular music studies and ethnomusicology. key themes within the area include the importance of music within diaspora communities, the role of globalization in cultivating musical diversity, the interruption of local cultural practice, cultural commodification, hybridity and appropriation. the globalization of musics in transit engages with many of these themes and places the migration of people and music at the centre of each chapter. this review will feature a general overview of the collection, followed by discussion of the chapter most pertinent to scholars of electronic dance music culture. the globalization of musics in transit is grouped into two sections, “music and tourism” and “music and migration”. “music and tourism” features seven chapters that consider how music features in tourism discourses and how musical cultures develop around tourist subcultures. the discussions of these themes focus on topics including encounters between nomads and tourists in west africa (amico), music and cruise ships (cashman and hayward), the use of domestic and migrant musical culture in branding by european cities (cohen and roberts; krüger) and the evolution of psyculture within transnational traveller groups (st john). “music and migration” consists of six chapters that discuss the practice of music in diaspora, the relationship between music and identity, appropriation and adaptation. these themes are related to discussions concerning the ghanaian diaspora (carl), identity and symbolism within south africa's jewish population (muir) and the globalization of balkan gypsy music (silverman). present throughout the volume are concerns as to how people and musics take instruments, voices and musical styles through processes of diasporization and migration. the effects of transit and resettlement on musical practices are as much of interest as the evolution of new cultural traditions including forms of migratory or diasporic music. graham st john's chapter, “goatrance travellers: psychedelic trance and its seasoned progeny”, analyses the development and spread of goa trance, psytrance and psyculture. while psyculture may be common ground for those familiar with st john's research, this chapter focuses on the role of tourism and travelling in establishing the communities involved in the culture's origination and global proliferation. st john builds on the work of d'andrea (2007) in pointing to the formation of a transnational “freak” diaspora in goa since the late 1960s. the concept of diaspora is engaged by st john to refer not to a national or ethnic group, but instead to a countercultural movement that is diverse in terms of political and personal philosophies, ethnicity and nationality. music is kept at the fore in discussing the roots of psyculture, and the role of migratory artists including goa gil, dj laurent, ben watkins and martin glover is central to establishing goa and psytrance as auditory, physical and metaphysical spaces for experiencing transcendental psyculture and the reimagining or “obliteration” (171) of the self. st john critically outlines paths through which psyculture spread internationally, as practitioners, promoters and attendees took elements of the experiences and set to replicate and expand the culture at home and in other traveller enclaves throughout the 1980s and 1990s. the resulting cultural transit is related back to the themes of the collection, as the music is shown to have spread through the nomadic practices of travellers, and established an industry of festivals and publications that add to psyculture's global and migratory outlook. the culture's transnational roots become clear in st john's discussion of the links between goa and portugal's boom festival, and the importance of boom to global psyculture. similarly, the analysis of the importation of psyculture to israel as travellers established events there after taking part in seasons in goa reveals patterns of musical migration. while the focus on the “freak” diaspora is strong, the research raises further questions regarding the relationship of psyculture to cultures and nations within which they operate, particularly regarding exclusionary practices of event organizers in goa and thailand, the impact of traveller-oriented psyculture in brazil, or issues surrounding the commodification of orientalist aesthetics. the globalization of musics in transit returns throughout to issues surrounding globalization and identity, two areas well covered within popular music studies and ethnomusicology. as taylor reflects in the afterword, identity is an increasingly fractured, politicized and under-theorized concept. taylor argues that this is particularly true in the study of poplar music, where discussion of identity (whether individual, cultural, national, social or musical) can become a placeholder for a substantive analysis of identity. taylor raises further concerns that in such a discussion the ethnographer risks projecting their personal identity onto those studied. the globalization of musics in transit resists such simplistic discussions and builds a picture of a complex global web of identities being challenged, built upon and reimagined through cultural practice, tourism and migration. the strong thematic focus and broad topic base mean this collection could be valuable to a range of research interests including popular music studies, cultural anthropology, diaspora studies and tourism studies. references d'andrea, anthony. 2007. global nomads: techno and new age as transnational countercultures in ibiza and goa. london: routledge. dancing outdoors: diy ethics and democratised practices of well-being on the uk alternative festival circuit dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 7(1): 76–96 issn 1947-5403 ©2015 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.01.04 dancing outdoors: diy ethics and democratised practices of well-being on the uk alternative festival circuit alice o’grady university of leeds (uk) abstract focussing on the uk’s vibrant alternative festival scene, this article examines how traces of the free party movement in the late 1980s continue to pervade the ethos and aesthetic register of contemporary events. it considers the potent diy ethic of the campsite that emerged as a result of the convergence of travellers with sounds systems such as spiral tribe, exodus and bedlam. it examines how the aesthetics and ethics of these rural, grassroots gatherings hark back to a particular moment in british history and how the sights, sounds and cultures of the current festival circuit are intimately connected to the histories from which they grew. the article argues for a reading of outdoor space, as experienced within the frame of the alternative festival, as a locale for the performance of political and personal freedoms. it asks how the cultural legacy of opposition through dancing outdoors serves as an expression of democratic culture and as spatial practice of belonging. the article makes explicit the links between alternative forms of democratic participation and sensations of individual and collective well-being that arise from outdoor dance experiences. finally, it considers the role of rurality in constructing a festival imaginary that promotes participation, agency and connectivity. keywords: well-being, democratic culture, rave, alternative festivals, rural space. alice o’grady is associate professor in applied performance and head of the school of performance and cultural industries, university of leeds, uk. her specialism lies within the field of interactive performance, underground club cultures, festivals and play. she has worked on a number of collaborative, interdisciplinary projects that investigate modes of participation and engagement within a variety of social and playful contexts. she is section editor for dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture. feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.01.04 o’grady | dancing outdoors 77 introduction dawn breaks onto a cloudless sky and sunlight sweeps across the fields. wisps of smoke from last night’s fires curl upwards as the ashes float down upon empty beer cans, forgotten items of clothing, and remnants of half eaten meals never to be finished. this is sunday morning. two days and two nights of furious dancing in hot dark tents and cold open fields, the sky pierced through with green lasers that go on forever and bounce off blankets of clouds that remind us autumn is on its way. this is equinox and the tribe have come out to celebrate its passing. the freaks and uniques of britain have come here to cut loose, to get down and dirty, freewheeling their way into a temporary outdoor world made of mud, hay bales and brightly coloured, handmade decorations that adorn the trees and flap in the breeze creating a salute for dancers who pass by. this is day three of the festival where the excesses of weekend hedonism become etched on people’s faces, where walks become staggers as exhaustion takes over and festival refugees litter the campsite like fallen soldiers. when the bags are packed and the debris cleared, and as the raggle-taggle collective prepare for re-entry into the world that lies on the other side of the fence, their faces, though haggard, tell a story of three days well-lived, outdoors with friends, where the elements came to join the party and played alongside them.1 the sights, sounds and cultures of the uk’s current alternative festival scene have a unique heritage. they spring from a time when music, mobility and dancing outdoors was seen as a potential threat to law and order by the authorities and as a potential point of liberation and emancipation by groups of people committed to self-organization and diy living. the alternative festival as it is experienced today has its roots in a specific socio-political context. as a cultural phenomenon it belongs to the uk’s rich tradition of free festivals and countercultural gatherings, and from there developed as a direct result of the convergence of travellers with sound systems, i.e. mobile networks of artists, musicians and djs such as spiral tribe, exodus, circus warp, diy and bedlam. scholars of edm and alternative culture have defined the traveller/raver alliance as one of the most potent subcultural crossovers of recent history, paying particular attention to glastonbury festival’s pivotal role of importing all night raving into a festival context in the late 1980s and early 1990s (collin 1997; rietveld 1998; worthington 2005; st john 2009). adopting glastonbury and other events as critical sites for “facilitating an intimate raver/traveller, crusty/hippy alliance” (st john 2009: 34), sound systems and techno crews rallied at that time under the umbrella of diy culture (mckay 1998). a cultural hybrid emerged that embodied the libertarian-anarchist principles of bey’s temporary autonomous zone (2003). the actions of those involved and the legislation that came into force thereafter via the criminal justice and public order act (1994), changed the way collective dance practices were perceived, not only by the authorities, the media and middle england, but also by those involved in a culture committed to dancecult 7(1)78 using open space opportunistically. since those days of defiance, rebellion and civil disobedience, gathering outdoors to dance in the fields and woodlands of the british countryside has been reconfigured. festivals now play a central role in the uk’s cultural economy and represent an important growth industry ( jacobs 2011). despite this process of commercialisation, festivals belonging to the countercultural heritage described above continue to prioritise the rural idyll as an indicator of certain values and ethical choices and use it as a location that offers the possibility of transformation and growth. drawing on the notion of the taz as a “means of creating an outside or true space of resistance to the totality” (bey 2003: xi), this article offers an account of the significance of outdoor space in providing what bey calls “the ‘peak experience’ of autonomy” (2003: x). it contributes to current discourse on social participation by arguing for a reading of outdoor space, as experienced within the frame of the alternative festival, as a locale for the performance of political and personal freedoms. more specifically, it asks how the cultural legacy of opposition through dancing outdoors serves as an expression of democratic culture and as spatial practice of belonging. like the “transformational festivals” of the west coast north american tradition that are explicitly concerned with consciousness awakening, personal growth and spiritual development (leung 2010), and exemplified by events such as lightning in a bottle and british columbia’s shambhala, rural alternative dance festivals in the uk promote a transformational agenda but in a rather different way and for a different purpose. the broad philosophies of participation, sustainability, responsibility and creative expression are common to both event types and, to some extent languages, imagery and aesthetic sensibilities are shared. however, unlike transformational festivals elsewhere, the uk variant is underscored by the diy spirit of punk. these events possess a harder edge and are linked to a period of civil disobedience that politicised the practice of dancing outdoors. twenty years on and now part of the regulated leisure industry, the alternative dance festival in the uk is still firmly situated within this countercultural lineage and consciously draws on its aesthetic. at the same time, these events borrow from other traditions (e.g. garden parties, english fetes, camping trips, wilderness adventures) in their evocations of the british countryside. idyllic pastoral settings are positioned as optimal locations for the events as they offer participants the possibility of reconnecting with more “authentic” ways of living which may lead to some form of personal or social transformation. the alternative rural festival is configured as a space where participation, and the benefits one may draw from it, is prioritised and, to a certain extent, romanticised. the focus of my discussion is to make explicit the links between alternative forms of democratic participation and well-being, where one arises from and prompts the other to form a virtuous circle. “well-being” here is understood not only as a subjective state that is characterised by happiness, satisfaction and fulfilment but also as a process, a collective act of what haworth and hart call “sense-making” (2007: 1). in this configuration, well-being is not simply about how a person feels on an individual basis but how they make sense of the world through acts of citizenship, engagement and agency. to explore further the o’grady | dancing outdoors 79 relationship between collective participation and well-being, the article interrogates the value of dancing outdoors as an articulation of do it yourself culture that is perhaps better expressed as “do it together”. consciously constructed according to idealistic principles, contemporary alternative festivals provide the opportunity to imagine how life might be lived according to a set of values that differ to those of neo-liberalism. in a world where many cities are in crisis and communities are in free fall, rural festivals act as temporary places of revelry and radical conviviality that offer glimpses of different forms of social organisation. this alternative model is framed and perceived as one that aspires to be more ethical, sustainable, autonomous and inclusive than the day-to-day experience of industrialised, urban living. focussing on the outdoor and natural context of such events, the article offers a new reading of festival experience as an embodied process that connects people to people and people to place. braiding the political with the pastoral, the outdoor space of the alternative festival becomes a place where radical togetherness might be enacted, albeit on a temporary stage, and as such offers a critical model for understanding participatory practices across other contexts and locations. the article utilises data gathered during a period of extended fieldwork that spanned four festival seasons between 2011 and 2014 and covered both the north and south of the uk. taking an ethnographic approach that included participant observation, interviews and questionnaire surveys, the work focuses on small-scale events, specifically alchemy, bearded theory, waveform, solfest, eden and nozstock festivals.2 drawing together some of the more distinctive qualities of the british alternative festival, the article considers how this cultural phenomenon has emerged from an outlawed past into a sanctioned present, and analyses the way in which it might offer the potential for a re-enactment of community, using doreen massey’s concept of space as the context for our collective “becoming” (2005). taking an eco-psychological perspective, it examines the sensations of interconnectedness that arise from and are associated with collective space-making practices. it contributes to a growing body of research on alternative festivals that seeks to better understand countercultural heritage and its relationship to normative modes of social organisation (mckay 2000; hetherington 2000; worthington 2005; partridge 2006; st john 2014). building on previous work that examines edm festivals as alternative playworlds (o’grady 2015), the article demonstrates how outdoor dance events contribute to what we might call a “festival imaginary” through which participants experience positive sensations expressed variously as spiritual, psychological, physical or social well-being. while one might be sceptical about the ability of the festivals under consideration to develop a new politics of participation to challenge, rival, or even replace neoliberal models, it is nevertheless useful to consider the festival as a form of outdoor discourse that affords participants an immediate sensation of liberation in combination with a critique of the constraints from which they seek escape. how the rural setting plays into this dual process of liberation and critique lies at the heart of this analysis. dancecult 7(1)80 the alternative festival in britain britain’s countercultural tradition and the emergence of free festivals are already well documented (aitken 1990; hetherington 2000; worthington 2005; partridge 2006). free festivals proliferating in the 1970s were predicated on idealized notions of community, spirituality and authentic connection to the land (partridge 2006: 41). they promised an alternative, utopian model of living that was based on egalitarian ideals. in the late 1980s, with the explosion of rave culture, these ideals were reconfigured for a new generation and taken up by sound systems such as spiral tribe for whom a retreat to the outdoors became part of a strategic exodus out of the city (st john 2009: 41). partying outdoors became a symbol of freedom and, as collin suggests, represented a romanticized philosophy where disinherited youth may reconnect with nature (1997: 203). in many ways, this paradigm of rurality as the context for idealized forms of expressive autonomy has altered very little. today’s alternative festivals are predominantly located in rural settings, promise escape from the routines of urbanized daily life, and consciously draw upon a countercultural heritage in which the countryside is both romanticized and politicized in equal measure. the term “alternative” is, of course, loaded, and highly contestable. it does, however, serve as a useful umbrella term to denote practices that are characterized as oppositional, resistant, marginal and non-conformist. for the purposes of this article, “alternative culture” is used to signify a rejection of what might be perceived as “mainstream”. in festival terms, this translates into events modelling themselves differently to the large-scale, highly commercial festivals such as v, leeds and reading, download and glastonbury (despite the latter’s status as being largely responsible for giving birth to alternative festival culture in the uk in the early 1970s3). where these events demand huge ticket prices and offer stadium-sized experiences for festivalgoers, alternative festivals4 such as sunrise celebration, bearded theory, eden, alchemy and beautiful days are small by comparison. events are framed as grassroots, community-driven occasions that consciously display a commitment to ethical partying, participation, co-creation and collective engagement. generally, alternative festivals rely heavily on the skills and labour of supporters and contributors who work the festival as volunteers or in exchange for a ticket. most events provide a holistic experience for attendees by hosting workshops, presentations on arts, crafts and eco-living initiatives, walkabout performances and fire shows, healing areas, massage tents, yoga classes, organic food and market stalls, as well as the requisite programme of live musicians and djs. typically, there is an articulation of commitment to sustainability, with green credentials playing a significant part in the promotion of the event. advertising costs are kept low with events relying predominantly on social media, event loyalty and a single website to facilitate ticket sales.5 overt branding and sponsorship is either rejected entirely or kept to an absolute minimum with traders, stall holders and artists drawn from the local area so that the event benefits the place and people closest to its gates. o’grady | dancing outdoors 81 figure 1. demonstration of blacksmithing at alchemy festival. photo credit: author (2014). figure 2. demonstration of wood carving with chainsaws at alchemy festival. photo credit: author (2014). dancecult 7(1)82 although the alternative festival as a paradigm of socially inclusive practice and conscientious living is a common trope that permeates many festival narratives, it is important to remember that they are also messy, unpredictable, chaotic spaces dedicated to hedonism and excess. fearing crime and public disorder, many living near festival sites object to events taking place on their doorstep. organizers work hard to maintain good relations with the surrounding neighbours, paying attention to noise pollution and traffic issues in order to keep both licensing officials and local residents happy. although alternative festivals are part of a wellregulated industry and the threat to rural communities is minimal, they continue to pose a challenge to conservative values not least because they allow people the opportunity to gather en masse, outdoors, in ways they are prevented from doing so elsewhere. for some, festivals are temporary interruptions to daily life. they provide a brief escape into a hedonistic world that gives respite from workday responsibilities. for others, particularly those who live and work on the circuit, alternative festival culture is both philosophy and lifestyle. the scene contains what george mckay calls “the gamut of alt. culture” and attracts individuals who are drawn to the countryside not only for its natural beauty but also for its potential as “deeply politicised space” (mckay 2000: 121). it is the environmental nature of this politicized space and the freedoms it affords that frames the contemporary experience of festival going. the present cannot be uncoupled from the past. through intentional restaging of the countercultural aesthetic, today’s events provide a platform for the performance, or (re)enactment, of autonomy that not only echoes the past but also meets the current demand for self-actualization through social (and socialized) participation and democratic practice. outdoor space and the process of becoming in the early 1990s, amidst the moral panic surrounding the travellers and the free party movement, occupation of outdoor space by autonomous groups was seen as a real threat to social order (see hetherington 2000: 14–17 for full discussion). performed outdoors and occasionally captured by the press, expressions of collectivity, autonomy and selfdeterminacy were, at this time, destabilizing conventional and restrictive versions of what constituted home, family and kinship. both the travellers and the sound systems that had begun to move rave out of urban locations and into the countryside, were beginning to imagine new ways in which people might congregate, live and determine their own leisure practices. these alternative imaginings became concrete through the occupation and utilization of open space. parties, raves, gatherings and free festivals became the focal point for celebrating alternative living and articulating a multitudinous “quest for freedom” (st john 2009: 32). collectives such as spiral tribe developed a brand of “techno-spirituality” that was rooted in the desire to return to a world where “the disinherited could be connected to natural rhythms and tribal ritual in an open-air dance event” (ibid: 45). with manifestos such as these in place, britain’s countryside became the stage for the performance of autonomy. o’grady | dancing outdoors 83 with open space at such a premium, britons’ relationship with the countryside, steeped in sentimentality and nostalgia, has always been highly charged. the control of rural space, who regulates it, protects and manages it, who inhabits, claims and challenges ownership of it remains a persistent concern. although large, rural free parties that caused moral panic in the early 1990s are a cultural phenomenon of the past, the desire to occupy space autonomously remains. according to bey, “the temporary autonomous zone appears not just as an historical moment, but also [as] a psychospiritual state or even existential condition” (2003: x). he argues humans are driven by the need to experience autonomy in cohesive groups, as he says “in real space/time” (2003: x). it could be argued that any notion of the taz has been effectively deactivated by authorities, who have encouraged its incorporation into the leisure industry as a way of taming it. alternative festivals look and feel very much like the free parties and gatherings of the past but are strictly controlled and regulated spaces that are required to adhere to stringent health and safety requirements in order to keep their license. however, the taz is much more than mere “counter-cultural drop-out-ism” (bey 2003: 132). rather, it is a conscious tactic that requires certain conditions rather than particular organisational structures in which to flourish and can, therefore, exist within the frameworks it seeks to oppose. while the alternative festival may not be a truly autonomous zone as originally conceived by bey, it continues to provide a “geographical odorous tactile tasty physical space” (bey 2003: x) for the performance of autonomy. it provides a context in which these performances figure 3. sunset at alchemy festival. photo credit: author (2012). dancecult 7(1)84 can be enacted alongside and with others. as massey argues, “we cannot ‘become’ . . . without others. and it is space that provides the necessary condition for that possibility” (2005: 56). massey calls for space to be recognized as a sphere of possibility that allows for the existence of multiplicity and plurality. as she argues, “space is always in the process of being made. it is never finished; never closed” (2005: 9). in occupying space together and allowing for the interplay of open exchange between people, process is prioritized. the taz becomes a space (or perhaps an attitude) in which occupants can work through, or rehearse, what it means to co-exist in a given location. in this analysis, outdoor festival spaces that embrace the elements of chaos, openness and uncertainty in their playful, performative and expressive challenge to mainstream culture are, to adopt massey’s phrase, “creative crucibles for the democratic sphere” (massey 2005: 153). festival publicity, in this instance from nozstock, makes explicit the connections between play and participation and uses it as a framing device and statement of intent: the festival’s ethos is about bringing play to everyone, in whatever form it can. nozstock believes in the value of not only entertaining, but in participation and contribution. it’s an ever-changing event with a clear agenda; to invite conversation, interaction and serious recreation (nozstock 2015). the emphasis here is on open interaction through play. there is an invitation extended to participants that positions them as agents in the production of the event (yeganegy 2012). the implication here is that the very act of participation produces pleasure. in marketing terms, the co-creation model offers insight into changing consumer trends and the “consumption of experience” in, for example, “boutique festivals” ( johannson and toraldo 2015: 5). however, what participation in the alternative festivals included in my study reveals about identity, identification and psychological gratification is of greater concern. to make the link between democratic practices of participation and psychological well-being, it is necessary to draw upon and braid together a number of concepts, beginning with a geographical analysis of social networks and agency. democratic cultures and the politics of being outdoors over the past decade scholars have begun to approach the question of democracy from a geographical perspective (barnett and low 2004; watson 2004). sophie watson in her work cultures of democracy: spaces of democratic possibility (2004) offers a critique of robert putnam’s influential book making democracy work (1993) in which he argues political association and democratic engagement are contingent on relatively fixed versions of space such as regions, cities and defined geographical location. putnam makes the connection between strong networks of civic engagement through clubs, associations, cooperatives and so on, and formal democratic participation. he suggests that horizontal networks such as these are essential forms of social capital. in turn, these networks foster forms of reciprocity and social trust. reciprocity and trust then translate into functioning democracy within the community (putnam 1993: 172). watson, on the other hand, calls for an exploration o’grady | dancing outdoors 85 of “democratic cultures” that may occur within “different or less obvious spatial forms” and which may be characterized as “domestic, interstitial, temporary, or fluid” (2004: 207). using youth rave culture as her example, she argues that “there may, in other words, be a spatial reordering of community and social capital taking place, which at times may not be obvious, which may be shifting or momentary, and which may even be invisible to all but those involved” (watson 2004: 209). although not exactly invisible, the shifting, temporary world of the alternative festival is one such place to look for a reordering of community that is predicated on sociability and conviviality. in the festival context, the value of social networks as described by putnam is undeniable. indeed, events would not function effectively without them. in line with watson’s modelling however, these networks are fluid, not fixed. they are inherently mobile, more slippery and ultimately contingent. the social sphere of the small-scale alternative festival, allows groups and individuals to build bonds over a short, intense period but without formal commitment. although subject to immediate evaporation after the event, some of these social bonds are sustained through other mechanisms. a web of interrelations that is developed and maintained, often through social media, reformulates and reconfigures groups across and between festivals. this process involves participants in what massey might call a dynamic “throwntogetherness” (2005: 181) and invests this version of community with an innate uncertainty but also lends it openness and vitality. figure 4: waveform festival. photo credit: author (2012). dancecult 7(1)86 as massey argues, fixed notions of community can be reconfigured through spatial practice. she suggests, “spatialities of power can be reordered through practices which are more egalitarian, less exploitative and more mutually enabling” (massey 1999: 284). experiencing a sense of community, albeit fleetingly so, is perhaps one of the great lures of the alternative festival and, paradoxically, its most potent anti-marketing tool. putnam argues that since the 1970s people have been systematically pulled apart from each other and their communities (2000). this, he claims, presents a real threat to democracy in action. although putnam is offering an analysis of civic participation in the united states, the point is applicable to most western democracies that rely on citizenship, participation and shared experience to function effectively. embodied festival practices (camping, eating, drinking, dancing, celebrating outdoors) provide temporary respite from the isolation experienced as a result of the persistent erosion of community. while traditional notions of community may be crumbling, new forms are emerging. festival communities, although temporary, are opportunities through which some individuals and groups may access the experience of belonging that is denied to them elsewhere. trust and belonging, unsurprisingly, are key indicators of social well-being. the festival campsite ethic is predicated on cooperation. the tented village is made and unmade over the course of a weekend by those who inhabit it. this self-built space requires certain levels of trust and collaboration to function effectively and, although dissolving at the end of each event, partially meets the needs of participants to experience what it means to live side-by-side with their neighbours in co-created space. as cultural geographer jen jack gieseking and designer william mangold suggest, “the process of making and remaking places confirms our agency and responsibility in producing spaces—both material and imagined—that emphasise equality, justice, and democracy” (2014: 393). adopting the aesthetic register of another era, the alternative festival emphasises the do it yourself ethic and spirit of communality. paradigms of collective action, responsibility and accountability run alongside those of hedonism, self-gratification and consumption. whatever the paradoxes inherent in this reading, the festive event serves as a leveller. it is open to the elements and all participants are at its mercy. the music is loud; the dancing is tribal. in this setting, non-hierarchical modes of participation are prioritized. there is reverence and respect for festival veterans but celebrity culture is largely rejected. the ethic is one of radical togetherness rather than strategic separation and division. as watson points out “the free party movement, provided an entirely different cultural space, one which had to be fought for, but one which represented a new form of sociality and which was, arguably, also a democratic space” (2004: 216). although the cultural space of the free party no longer exists in the same way or with the same potency, it could be argued, that this notion of “democratic space” has been reconfigured into a new cultural product. as boltanski and chiapello argue, capitalism absorbs aspects of anti-capitalist critiques into itself (2007). the so called “new spirit of capitalism” is formed out of the critique levelled at its predecessor, in this instance the rave/traveller model of autonomy and authenticity and, in broader terms, the “artistic critique” of 1968 that drove the countercultural movement. in response, the o’grady | dancing outdoors 87 new spirit of capitalism appeals to values of self-actualisation, freedom and community. it adopts these principles and markets them. to a certain extent, festival events that situate themselves at the more alternative, radical or transformational end of the spectrum have been subject to this very process of incorporation. however, many festivalgoers are savvy and practised consumers of experience in other parts of their lives. the commodification of “authentic” festival experience does not render the experience meaningless or empty. on the contrary, participants are able to draw pleasure, satisfaction and well-being from events that are consciously created and stage managed as part of a radical socio-political tradition that puts community, autonomy and rurality at its heart. outdoor space, collective expression and hedonic experience as music psychologists jan packer and julie ballantyne point out, although there is a wealth of extant research that looks at the positive health and well-being benefits of engaging with music in a variety of contexts, there is little research conducted on the psychological benefits of music in relation to music festivals (2010: 164). furthermore, there is even less consideration given to how the outdoor nature of festivals factors into sensations of subjective well-being. drawing on theoretical frameworks from positive psychology, their study identifies the association of four facets of music festival experience with well-being outcomes. these four facets include the social experience, the festival atmosphere, the music experience, and separation experience. each facet intersects and supports the other producing a range of social, psychological and subjective well-being outcomes. although there is some consideration of environment in relation to the separation experience, particularly how the festival provides a different setting to that of daily life or is experienced as a “time out of time” (falassi 1987), that these events generally take place outdoors and ideally, in the case of alternative festivals, in rural settings of outstanding natural beauty, is overlooked. this omission is surprising given the significance of location to the “anticipated experience” of intensified sensation on offer ( johansson and toraldo 2015). appropriating the iconography of the english pastoral, website publicity alludes to “stunning scenery” (eden festival 2015), “beautiful grounds” and “woodland areas” (bearded theory 2015), “glorious rolling countryside” (kendal calling 2015) and “breathtaking beauty” (green man 2015). magikana festival uses perhaps the most evocative description: magikana is located deep in one of the most remote areas of the uk, where the roads end and the wild cambrian mountains begin. the area is a protected habitat, and outstandingly beautiful with raw welsh mountain tops and untouched valleys where some of the sources of major rivers of the uk originate. here you will find quartz crystal everywhere, endless green hills and craggy cliffs, red kites flying, otters in the streams, badgers, foxes, wild ponies and horses, and of course some good ole welsh sheep. on the hills you will also find standing stones, and old stone circles and stunning views as far as the eye can see (magikana 2013). dancecult 7(1)88 figure 5: magikana festival, wales. photo credit: allana angus (2013). securing remote rural settings for the purposes of festival represents a geographical marginality that reflects the broader desire to escape into and occupy the idealised liminal world of the forest (o’grady 2015). remote locations require commitment and effort not only in terms of travelling to the festival but also necessitate collaboration and cooperation once in situ. tactical escape into the countryside for the purposes of social gathering, in the uk at least, is steeped in a tangled web of nostalgia, sentiment, history and politics. participating in contemporary alternative dance festivals forms part of this ongoing narrative and, for some, underpins the meaning they ascribe to it. the idea that being connected to nature has positive outcomes and, in general, makes us feel good may seem intuitive. however, emerging research on the restorative benefits of natural environments from the field of ecopsychology (rosak 1992; naess 1995; herzog et al 2003; hartig and staats 2006; kahn and hasbach 2012) is providing empirical data that, brought into conversation with that of cultural ethnographers, sheds new light on the potential significance and impact of outdoor dance experiences for effective social functioning and democratization. as mayer and frantz argue, increased connection with nature enlarges one’s self-concept and builds feelings of “community, kinship, embeddedness, and belongingness” (2004: 512). furthermore, experiencing positive emotions through connecting with nature can promote both hedonic and eudaimonic aspects of well-being (wolsko and lindberg 2013). in other words, the effects are not simply immediately enjoyable and temporary but have lasting and enduring impact in the form of offering a sense of social fulfilment and meaning for those involved. although festivals are by definition temporary, deriving well-being from the experience may produce effects that extend beyond the time frame of the event and into other realms. o’grady | dancing outdoors 89 clearly self-reported accounts of any potential “impact” on well-being can only provide us with a partial picture of the relationship between embodied experience and psychological benefit. nonetheless the language participants use in their responses provides some insight into how they perceive the experience for themselves and how it fits within the broader context of self-discovery, community and quasi-spiritual practices of the self as exemplified by transformational festivals with a conscious transitional agenda. when asked whether outdoor festival experiences contribute to their own sense of well-being, all respondents agreed positively.6 this was articulated in various ways but included a range of emotional, physical, social and spiritual benefits. the positive benefits were described predominantly as facilitating a process of connectivity, both with other people and the natural environment: i feel there is a connection between a beat, a movement and the awareness of the landscape… i feel there is a connect with harmony in the landscape…and harmony within the music. (1)7 a festival is about being more connected with our true selves, that is with the outdoors, earth and nature. (3) it deepens my connections with people and place. (19) running through the responses was a frequent reference to the interrelation between the music, the people and the earth, and it was this triangulation that seemed to produce the most effusive descriptions of the festival experience as being “meditative”, “playful” and “transformative”. for respondents, the critical distinction between outdoor and indoor experience was the sensation of freedom. this feeling was expressed as physical, emotional and spiritual release, often in combination. the outdoor environment provided literal space to move and metaphorical space in which to be different. the natural environment was seen to provide the setting for enactments of liberation that were in stark contrast to daily life. it is a chance to play, to be free, to let go and to flow through troubles and worries in a way that exposes the truth of matters and gives life a focus and a course to follow that wasn’t clear without the space, time and clarity of the dance floor. (2) having beautiful nature or beautiful art made with love around you creates a space and setting conducive to feeling safe, and free to let go and rise up in your true nature. (2) dancing outdoors is bliss, in the sun, in the dark, even in the rain! you can go bonkers as conkers and have the freedom to do so. (13) the sense of freedom from not being confined produces a spiritual freedom that is reinforced by the direct contact with the natural world, especially for me as a city dweller. for me, it produces a sense of communion. (19) dancecult 7(1)90 in many accounts it was the very act of dancing outdoors, occupying outdoor space freely and expressively, that fostered a sensation of togetherness: dancing outdoors can connect me with other people, it is nice to share a beat, share a collective experience. (1) dancing outdoors makes me feel alive… sharing the experience with other people makes me feel more connected to them. (3) i feel a strong sense of ‘secret community’. (4) the notion of “secret community” here is interesting insofar as it indicates belonging to a group that is somehow protected, clandestine and exclusive. here the shared moment excludes the outside world as much as it includes those present. the “blissful festival family” (nozstock 2015) is a powerful trope and reinforces notions of belonging and strengthened familial ties. as well as facilitating connections between people, the festival space was seen to allow connections with place: [the feeling] is one of connection; connection to the music, to the people, to the earth, to the sky and to myself. to feel united with something greater than i could ever imagine, and yet to get the sense that in this moment, life is so breathtakingly real. (8) in a busy working life dancing outdoors reminds me of how small i am (we are) and can help me keep things in perspective… it provides me with a chance to reconnect to nature that’s different from going for a walk in the hills. the music and nature work in perfect harmony. (18) this feeling of interconnectedness, or reconnection with something that has been lost, is expressed variously as connection with a more authentic version of self; connection to nature and the universe; reconnection to a simpler way of life; and as connection to one’s immediate and present environment. the outdoor locale plays a significant role in facilitating this process of reconnection. the experience is expressed in quasi-spiritual tones with nature configured as being the conduit to authenticity. being in the outdoors space can subtly liven our senses and reminds us of our origins. we are the elements; we are nature. by awakening our senses we are creating the conditions whereby we can be open and present and are able to meet and respond in a moment of genuine contact. in the transitional outdoor space we hold the potential to let go of our culturally given roles, associations and resistances and in doing so, we can liberate our energy for full creative expression in relation to the music, to the art, to another and to ourselves. (8) the outdoor space of the alternative festival is conceived as a space of liberation where “genuine” contact might be made and where individuals take some responsibility for producing those very conditions in which this may occur. there is an implied sense of o’grady | dancing outdoors 91 responsibility and accountability woven into this statement that demonstrates a belief in the ability of outdoor space to remind us of the present moment, the here and now. consistent with massey’s idea that space is constituted through interactions and is the product of interrelations (2005: 5), the outdoor space of the festival is felt, at least, as one that encourages negotiation, encounter and transition. the english countryside has for centuries provided the context for what we might call the propagation of “the pastoral myth”. life in the country has long been regarded as more wholesome, authentic, natural and spiritually edifying than city living. the idealized countryside acts as a counterpoint to the inequalities and injustices of the city and harks back to a time of communal landownership. as john short points out, “this image has been the basis of a whole series of rural utopian creeds from shakers to hippies. it is the communizing of the rural idyll” (1991: 32). in many ways, the environmental ideologies of the alternative festival scene fit neatly into this paradigm. immersion in a countryside that is of outstanding beauty and remote, is seen as providing the route to the flow experience of festival togetherness (hetherington 2000: 64): the experience should be more than ‘outdoors’, it should be situated in a setting of outstanding natural beauty if possible. (1) when i think ‘outdoors’ here i think of a remote site within natural surroundings: be it rural countryside, deep woodlands or remote hills. the further removed from our association with the mundane world, the more potent the effect of the experience. (8) the experience is seen as providing participants with a potential “effect” that they carry with them back into daily life as they become “reset, recharged, renewed, refreshed, ready for the mundane again” (2). whether such an effect actually occurs is, of course, subject to speculation. however, what is apparent is the resurgence of the pastoral myth in a time of austerity and widening social inequalities, coupled with a growing and fervent belief that expressions of communality, played out in rural settings are, in some way, good for participants. the aesthetic register and organisational design of events is created to reinforce this pastoral playground, using iconography taken from other contexts such as the village fete, the medieval fayre and the free party/illegal rave in the woods. alchemy, for example, uses straw bales both as sound proofing devices but also as climbing frames. straw is scattered around simply for people to play in. bunting, flags, fairy lights, hand made sculptures and art works are in abundance. a streamside walk under weeping willows leads to healing tents, fire pits and a pedal powered stage. taking place at the autumn equinox, collective celebration of nature is a fundamental part of the event and the free party/traveller “vibe” evidenced most effectively by the extensive galleries of photographs on the festival’s website.8 the quest for intimate connection to the natural environment and a deep sense of belonging in space in times of hardship and economic divide, mirror retrospective accounts of rave. as mark harrison of spiral tribe puts it: dancecult 7(1)92 no matter how remote, how windswept, the show always went on. every weekend we searched out the few remaining wild places: forests, mountains, moorland…we dodged roadblocks and patrols by navigating back roads, woodland tracks and ancient green lanes. with the ground underfoot as our path and the lie of the land as our guide, we drifted over the edge of the only map we had. our inner-selves reached out and made new connections with geographical space and geographical space reached in and made new connections with us. we were exploring another england. a synaptic landscape (harrison, 2013). harrison’s newly aligned relationship with the landscape might be what gieseking and mangold call a type of “spatial imagination” through which we are able to “enact alternative ways of living” (2014: 357). as they argue, by re-making spaces and thereby altering our interactions with others within those spaces, new ways of understanding and representing our place in the world are required. by establishing the presence of a spatial or geographical imagination in which the individual as agent is at liberty to conjure, enact and realize alternatives, we can begin to see how society’s relationship with the landscape becomes politically and psychically charged. a reprioritization of the imagination allows the dimensions of the alternative festival to be read as a space of playful potential and social empathy. if festivals provide opportunities for the enactment of imagination, they become potential sites of learning. by dwelling in the imaginative realm for even a short period of time, ways of living differently come into view, empathy can be built and tools gathered to break what is supposedly fixed and finished. conclusion for gieseking and mangold, “spatial imagination can open up ways to take notice of being in the world” (2014: 357). the path between the imaginative realm and the concrete world in which we operate is efficacious allowing individuals the freedom to dream how the other might become. the imaginative geographies of festival culture are rooted in historical narratives of political freedoms, opposition and resistance as well as personal narratives of abandon, hedonism and collective play. imagining alternative places and societies has a long history and the concept of utopia/dystopia in relation to rave culture has been discussed by various commentators seeking to understand and critique the space-making practices of pioneer ravers (gibson 1999; reynolds 1998). of course, these events as cultural products are not without their contradictions. while on the one hand they sit within the tradition of earlier countercultural scenes such as raves, free parties and occupations, from another perspective they are the output of a process of domestication of this same legacy. as ticketed events, it could be argued that what is on offer is a packaged, sanitised, hyperreal version of what was originally conceived as a tangible alternative to mainstream ideologies and capitalist structures. however, if we return to the idea that the taz may be understood as an attitudinal stance, a radical tactic emerging within the very structures it seeks to oppose, then it is possible to see that, located in open countryside and with an articulated o’grady | dancing outdoors 93 commitment to participation, certain festivals are creating the conditions by which the peak experience of autonomy may be reached. responses from festivalgoers suggest that their outdoor dance experiences contribute not only to their immediate enjoyment of the event but to their personal sense of well-being, expressed predominantly as interconnectivity and liberation. if it is possible to accept that alternative festivals that belong to the rave/traveller tradition are providing participants with collective experiences that have the potential to be transformative, then what are the critical factors that contribute to that process? undoubtedly, the outdoor character of these events means that participation and forms of agency are socialised in more visible and direct ways. interactions are face-to-face, personto-person, and place-to-person. the removed geophysical character of such events helps individuals and groups congregate, organise and form social bonds in ways that are different to, say, urban events or those that occur indoors. the british countryside is an idealised, romanticised and politicised space. as such, it is the ideal environment for a culture that also oscillates between these positions, often quite intentionally and strategically. the pastoral myth continues to circulate. if nothing else, festival utopias reflect the desire for a more co-located, present way of life that is unmediated. the rural festival offers an escape from the routines of city life and provides participants with a temporary framework for living in a way that makes them feel more connected to both their fellow human beings and the places in which they encounter each other. the wider implication of this is to ask what is occurring in our cities, our homes, our indoor spaces and our virtual worlds that prompts so many people to enact a weekend exodus? what “alternative” are these events offering and how might the model of “three days well-lived” be translated to other contexts where participation, connectivity, critique and agency would be 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http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0305735610372611 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01438300600625408 http://dx.doi.org/10.1089/eco.2013.0008 dancecult 7(1)96 notes 1 the opening passage is transcribed from the author’s field notes, alchemy festival, september 2014. 2 the author’s immersive participation in the festivals as a ticket holder was integral to the research methodology and used as an intentional strategy for revealing insight into personal well-being. each festival was experienced from an “inside” perspective that prioritised first hand experience and intuitive reactions to being outdoors. reflections on her own embodied responses to events as they unfolded were documented using diaries, notebooks and video in situ at each festival. this documentation was then analysed and considered in light of interview and questionnaire material from festivalgoers that was gathered and returned to the author post event. 3 see george mckay’s seminal book glastonbury: a very english fair (2000) for a full discussion of this particular event’s history and its relationship to counterculture. 4 festival nomenclature changes at a rapid rate. various online festival sites may categorize festivals as “boutique” or “grassroots” but seldom identify an event as “alternative” in the way i am using the term in this article. many festivals that would see themselves as subscribing to some of the ethical and quasi-political concerns of the free party movement, do not even feature on official listings, preferring to rely on social media networks and word of mouth for advertising and ticket sales. 5 as it states on the beautiful days website for example, “beautiful days does not advertise and has no corporate sponsorship or branding and has sold out every year in advance” (beautiful days 2015). 6 out of twenty-one respondents only two suggested that dancing outdoors at a festival was no different to dancing indoors. 7 numbers in brackets are used to identify individual respondents whilst maintaining anonymity. 8 photographs of alchemy festival can be accessed from: <http://www.alchemyfestival.co.uk/photos.html> http://www.alchemyfestival.co.uk/photos.html dancecult 10(1) 2018: guest editor’s introduction, masthead and table of contents algorithmic electronic dance music guest editors shelly knotts and nick collins volume 10 number 1 2018 executive editor graham st john (university of fribourg, ch) from the floor editors alice o’grady (university of leeds, uk) dave payling (staffordshire university, uk) reviews editor toby young (university of oxford, uk) production editor botond vitos (university of fribourg, ch) operations director botond vitos (university of fribourg, ch) art director botond vitos (university of fribourg, ch) managing editor tommy colton symmes (rice university, us) associate editors katrina loughrey (ge) kath o’donnell (au) production assistants dave payling (staffordshire university, uk) garth sheridan (rmit university, au) community manager katrina loughrey (ge) dancecult journal of electronic dance music culture issue 10(1) 2018 issn 1947-5403 ©2018 dancecult published yearly at <http://dj.dancecult.net> international advisory board sean albiez (southampton solent university, uk), eliot bates (university of birmingham, uk), andy bennett (griffith university, au), mark j butler (northwestern university, us), anthony d’andrea (university of limerick, ie), rebekah farrugia (oakland university, us), kai fikentscher (de), luis-manuel garcia (university of birmingham, uk), françois gauthier (university of fribourg, ch), anna gavanas (institute for futures studies, se), ross harley (university of new south wales, au), tim lawrence (university of east london, uk), geert lovink (university of amsterdam, nl), alejandro l. madrid (university of illinois, chicago, us), paolo magaudda (university of padova, it), charity marsh (university of regina, ca), andrew murphie (university of new south wales, au), alice o’grady (university of leeds, united kingdom), christopher partridge (lancaster university, uk), anne petiau (itsrs / université paris 5, fr), hillegonda c rietveld (london south bank university, uk), geoff stahl (victoria university of wellington, nz), sonjah nadine stanley-niaah (university of west indies, jm), graham st john (university of fribourg, ch), jonathan sterne (mcgill university, ca), will straw (mcgill university, ca), rupert till (university of huddersfield, uk), tobias c. van veen (université de montréal, ca), michael veal (yale university, us), botond vitos (university of fribourg, ch) in memory of ed montano, dancecult reviews editor, production editor, production assistant, operations director 2009-2018. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture is a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture (edmc). launched in 2009, as a platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on the shifting terrain of edmcs worldwide, dancecult houses research exploring the sites, technologies, sounds and cultures of electronic music in historical and contemporary perspectives. playing host to studies of emergent forms of electronic music production, performance, distribution, and reception, as a portal for cutting-edge research on the relation between bodies, technologies, and cyberspace, as a medium through which the cultural politics of dance is critically investigated, and as a venue for innovative multimedia projects, dancecult is the leading venue for research on edmc. cover: the yorkshire programming ensemble (type) live at open data institute in 2017. image shows laptop band members lucy cheesman, ryan kirkbride, and laurie johnson from left to right. photograph by joanne armitage, used with permission.. http://dj.dancecult.net volume 10 number 1 2018 introduction to algorithmic electronic dance music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 01 shelly knotts and nick collins feature articles cyclic patterns of movement across weaving, epiplokē and live coding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 05 alex mclean, giovanni fanfani and ellen harlizius-klück spaces to fail in: negotiating gender, community and technology in algorave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 joanne armitage an interactive algorithmic music system for edm. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 tami gadir rogue two: reflections on the creative and technological development of the audiovisual duo— the rebel scum. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 ryan ross smith and shawn lawson from the floor – online teaching live coding of electronic dance music: a case study lee cheng saboritmico: a report from the dance floor in mexico emilio ocelotl, luis n. del angel and marianne teixido limits in algorithmic dance music renick bell algobabez: writing code, pushing buttons shelly knotts and joanne armitage live coding: a new approach to musical composition alexandra cardenas luuma, between code and controllerism chris keifer ¿algoritmos? algo ¡ritmos! algorithms? algo rhythms! esteban betancur guiterrez reviews girl (kandeyce jorden, dir.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .83 maren hancock weekend societies: electronic dance music festivals and event-cultures (graham st john, ed.) . . . . . . . . . .87 charles de ledesma frankenstein goes to holocaust: mostri sonori, hyper mash-up, audio espropri (riccardo balli) . . . . . . . . .90 paolo magaudda popular music, digital technology and society (nick prior) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .93 andreas rauh playing with something that runs: technology, improvisation, and composition in dj and laptop performance (mark j. butler). . . . . . . . . . . .96 toby young issn 1947-5403 ©2018 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 10(1): 1–4 issn 1947-5403 ©2018 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2018.10.01.00 introduction: algorithmic electronic dance music shelly knotts and nick collins durham university (uk) / durham university (uk) shelly knotts develops performances and systems for technologically-facilitated improvisation exploring aspects of code, data and computer networks. she performs internationally, collaborating with computers and other humans. she is currently a researcher at durham university, working on developing browsercomputer music tools as part of the project musically intelligent machines interacting creatively. in 2017 she was leverhulme artist in residence at newcastle university working on molecular soundscapes with computational chemist agniewszka bronowska. previous research interests include the political practices implicit in collaborative network music performance practice; designing systems that play with particular data structures for algorithmic and improvised music creation; developing interfaces for improvisation. her creative work has appeared on the chordpunch record label, absence of wax net label and in leonardo music journal. she has received commissions and residencies from national organisations. as well as performing at numerous algoraves and live coding events, current collaborative projects include network laptop band offal (orchestra for females and laptops), and live coding duos algobabez and [sisesta pealkiri]. in 2017 she was a winner of the bbc radiophonic workshop oram award for innovation in sound and music. web: <http://datamusician.net>. nick collins is a professor in the music department at durham university and a specialist in computer music. he has researched extensively in algorithmic composition for electronic and popular music, as well as artificial intelligence for live music performance. recent funded projects include musically intelligent machines interacting creatively exploring web browser based machine listening and learning, a sky arts television documentary project to computer generate a new musical theatre work, a leverhulme trust artist in residence grant for the durham music department involving the development of emotion-aware concert systems, and a sub-project for the ahrc transforming musicology grant on electronic music audio corpus analysis. he has published over 80 research papers since 1999 including a much downloaded 2012 computer music journal article on his autocousmatic software for automatic electroacoustic music creation. he has reviewed for major conferences, journals and research councils in the field, and been external examiner for 12 phds from music composition to music psychology. he co-edited the cambridge companion to electronic music (cambridge university press 2007) and the supercollider book (mit press, 2011), wrote the introduction to computer music (wiley 2009) and co-wrote electronic music (cambridge university press introductions series, 2013). practical electronic dance music experience extends from many nightclub laptop gigs to the creation of automated edm tools such as bbcut (csound, supercollider, iphone) and the infno software. web: <http://composerprogrammer.com>. algorithms are at the heart of the virtual studio software applications underwriting so much contemporary dance music, but are normally the prior preserve of music engineering teams rather than musicians. this special issue, however, engages with algorithms as musical material, and especially with music which is inherently founded on computer guest editors’ introduction http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2018.10.01.00 http://datamusician.net http://composerprogrammer.com dancecult 10(1)2 programming technique. a recent manifestation of this is the algorave, an explicit site of live algorithmic electronic dance music (edm), produced through such means as on stage computer programming (algorave.com). creators of edm have vast amounts of software at their disposal, including specific musical programming languages; modern digital audio workstations now often include the capacity to utilise a programming language, such as python and max/msp embedded within ableton live, or logic’s midi scripter. the history of algorithmic techniques within mainstream and experimental fringe dance music predates the coining of the term algorave (collins and mclean 2014). powerful computer music coding environments have been co-opted for use in club contexts, by such well known figures as autechre (max/msp), bt (csound, composer’s desktop project), cylob, aphex twin (supercollider) and holly herndon (chuck), amongst many others. some artists have written their own software from scratch, such as the generative gabbatechno artists slub, or commissioned others to supply it, as with coldcut and the vjamm and coldcutter programs. research in this area extends from the introduction of new algorithmic techniques for the production of dance music, to the computational analysis of existing edm, via critical appraisal of algorithms in the wild. live realtime systems, as well as offline studio software, have been developed. an increasingly algorithmically literate culture will see increasingly algorithmically literate music, and the rise of music-oriented computer programming has great implications for future directions within edm. the articles collected in this issue consider algorithmic edm from diverse perspectives. they provide cultural critique, assess its use as a teaching aid, describe individual studio and performance practices and explore views on the confluence of computer programming and music making, with live coding (collins et al. 2003) a frequent, if not compulsory, locus. these diverse contexts reflect the placement of algorithmic edm both within academic study and as contemporary artistic practice with a globally distributed scene. the algorave has become a banner for performance events which include live coding and related practices, with some practitioners also academics, but by no means all. this issue’s longer papers give us an in-depth look at the development of two separate performance systems; present research on gender in the algorave scene; and consider the importance of patterns in algorave with respect to wide ranging historical links to weaving and classical antiquity. the from the floor section includes two shorter papers focusing on algorithmic edm in the context of undergraduate education and live coding in mexico; we also feature a number of artist statements, to give insight into individual practices. alex mclean, giovanni fanfani and ellen harlizius-klück’s article brings together three seemingly disparate fields, to find deep connections between ancient greek poetic metre, weaving and the patterns manipulated in the tidalcycles live coding programming language. alongside many examples of rhythmical pattern across their triumvirate, they argue for a luddite perspective on the algorave movement itself, as a surprising reaction to new technological development. joanne armitage questions the perceived openness of the algorave scene through a series of interviews with women about their experiences as part of the algorave community. she knotts and collins | introduction to algorithmic electronic dance music 3 suggests the dominance of technical discourse and the bias towards technology developed by men is a challenge for diversity in the scene. she argues changing narratives in the community alongside female only learning and support spaces and female-centric tech development as possible strategies for creating more diverse futures for algorave. artiin is an interactive computer music system operating within edm styles, intended both for live performance and studio music generation. its author richard savery’s article provides an overview of its capabilities and technical basis, and evaluation through six djs, though the system and its source code (for max for live) is not currently publicly released. ryan ross smith and shawn lawson describe the development of their audio-visual performance systems over several years and how their creative ideas evolved in response to changing contexts and working methods. amongst other projects their collaboration resulted in the force—a live coding system for generative visuals. the from the floor contributions include lee cheng’s case study where a university level teaching module uses live coding as a method to teach edm styles and introduce students to computer music practices. marianne teixido, emilio ocelotl and luis n. del angel chart the development of the algorave band rggtrn, who foreground latin american dance music styles in their performances. in developing their collective practice they came to recognize and problematize gendered labour practices in mexican algorave contexts, and the lack of visibility of mexican algorave performers in the broader international scene. they explain how their working practices and aesthetics have evolved in response, to ensure a more equal distribution of input. renick bell discusses limits in algorithmic edm and the technical directions he is pursuing to lessen them. he also points to the limits of genre norms in edm contexts, and the challenge of stretching audiences to accept music at the boundaries of convention. shelly knotts and joanne armitage formed the band algobabez to disrupt gendered tech spaces. they describe how the duo performs gender, contributes to diversify the algorave scene (musically and demographically) and intersects with their academic work, developing performance projects that consider the body in algorithmic performance. for alexandra cardenas, live coding bridges artistic, social and political thought, foregrounding principles including freedom, transparency and inclusion. she travels the world teaching and performing as a live coder and sees teaching live coding as a tool to develop diverse communities through democratising technology and culture. chris kiefer reflects on his experiences combining code with new musical interfaces. he explains the difficulty of designing programming systems and musical controllers that provide intuitive ways of combining the two modes of working. esteban betancur developed a library for flexible syntax design in live coding language chuck, in response to the challenges of teaching live coding and developing an algorave scene in colombia. he highlights the importance of syntax to performers and audiences, and how the dominance of english language in programming is a challenge for code literacy in the latin american context. dancecult 10(1)4 the future of algorave the algorave scene embodies an intersection of tools, community, practice and education. in charting their experiences with algorithmic edm, algorave practitioners frequently mention the feeling of “freedom” that live coding gives them, with chris kiefer highlighting how the curiosity of audiences makes it easier to experiment, and alexandra cardenas discussing the freedom to travel when your instrument is a laptop. algoraving has made musicians of computer scientists and computer scientists out of musicians, encapsulating the ability of computer music to transcend disciplines. the computing machinery brought to bear on dance music production will only get more intense, with new currents in artificial intelligence research, such as deep learning, applied to larger and larger corpuses of example audio material. hopefully, though not inevitably, computer listening analysis will take place with better and better simulation of human musical understanding. machine listening is familiar to electronic dance musicians from such examples as the virtual dj tool traktor’s automatic track alignment, or logic’s flex pitch tool for adjusting pitch contours. academic music engineering has tackled such topics as beat box tracking as user interface frontend (kapur, benning and tzanetakis 2004), automatic mash-up generation based on detection of effective cut and transition points (davies et al. 2013) or the prior analysis of a corpora of edm before concert generation based on the trained model (eigenfeldt and pasquier 2013). since machine listening and machine learning facilities are now so easily available as libraries for programmers, we would anticipate more, and more significantly automated, algoravethms in future work. indeed, as long as computers hold sway within edm production, algoraves will have the opportunity to exist as a subversive social commentary on computing and dance music, even if the fine details of those algorithms on public display remains a more niche undertaking. unleashed from pandora’s boom box, the algorithmic age demands a pumping soundtrack. references collins, nick and alex mclean. 2014. “algorave: live performance of algorithmic electronic dance music”. london: proceedings of new interfaces for musical expression. collins, nick, alex mclean, julian rohrhuber and adrian ward. 2003. “live coding techniques for laptop performance”. organised sound 8(3): 321–30. davies, matthew, phillipe hamel, kazuyoshi yoshii and masataka goto. 2013. “automashupper: an automatic multi-song mashup system”. curitiba, brazil: international society for music information retrieval conference. eigenfeldt, arne and philippe pasquier. 2013. “considering vertical and horizontal context in corpus-based generative electronic dance music”. sydney: proceedings of the fourth international conference on computational creativity. kapur, ajay, manj benning and george tzanetakis. 2004. “query-by-beat-boxing: music retrieval for the dj”. barcelona: international society for music information retrieval conference. dancecult 5(2) 2013: executive editor's introduction, masthead and table of contents volume 5 number 2 2013 special issue on afrofuturism edited by tobias c. van veen executive editor graham st john (griffith university, au) from the floor editors alice o’grady (university of leeds, uk) graham st john (griffith university, au) reviews editor ed montano (rmit university, au) foreign languages editor luis-manuel garcia (university of chicago, de) production editor botond vitos (monash university, au) operations director ed montano (rmit university, au) copyeditors luis-manuel garcia (university of chicago, de) jerome hansen (uk) sheena d. hyndman (york university, ca) katrina loughrey (au) kath o’donnell (au) production assistants carlo nardi (it) martin koszolko (rmit university, au) marc kushin (goldsmiths, university of london, uk) garth sheridan (rmit university, au tobias c. van veen (mcgill university, ca) dancecult journal of electronic dance music culture issue 5(2) 2013 issn 1947-5403 ©2013 dancecult published twice yearly at http://dj.dancecult.net international advisory board sean albiez (southampton solent university, uk), eliot bates (university of maryland, college park, us), andy bennett (griffith university, au), mark j butler (northwestern university, us), anthony d’andrea (university of limerick, ie), rebekah farrugia (oakland university, us), kai fikentscher (de), luis-manuel garcia, university of chicago (de), françois gauthier (université du québec à montréal, ca), anna gavanas (institute for futures studies, se), chris gibson (university of new south wales, au), jeremy gilbert (university of east london, uk), alice o’grady, university of leeds (uk), ross harley (university of new south wales, au), david hesmondhalgh (university of leeds, uk), tim lawrence (university of east london, uk), geert lovink (university of amsterdam, nl), gordon lynch (birkbeck university of london, uk), rene lysloff (university of california, riverside, us), alejandro l. madrid (university of illinois, chicago, us), charity marsh (university of regina, ca), tony mitchell (university of technology sydney, au), karenza moore (lancaster university, uk), andrew murphie (university of new south wales, au), christopher partridge (lancaster university, uk), anne petiau (itsrs / université paris 5, fr), hillegonda c rietveld (london south bank university, uk), geoff stahl (victoria university of wellington, nz), sonjah nadine stanley-niaah (university of west indies, jm), graham st john (griffith university, au), will straw (mcgill university, ca), rupert till (university of huddersfield, uk), tobias c. van veen (mcgill university, ca), michael veal (yale university, us), andrew whelan (university of wollongong, australia) dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture is a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture (edmc). a platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on the shifting terrain of edmcs worldwide, the journal houses research exploring the sites, technologies, sounds and cultures of electronic music in historical and contemporary perspectives. playing host to studies of emergent forms of electronic music production, performance, distribution, and reception, as a portal for cutting-edge research on the relation between bodies, technologies, and cyberspace, as a medium through which the cultural politics of dance is critically investigated, and as a venue for innovative multimedia projects, dancecult is the forum for research on edmc. cover image: jeff mills at mutek 2012. photo: tobias c. van veen. volume 5 number 2 2013 executive editor’s introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 01 graham st john guest editor’s introduction: “music is a plane of wisdom”—transmissions from the offworlds of afrofuturism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 02 tobias c. van veen feature articles vessels of transfer: allegories of afrofuturism in jeff mills and janelle monáe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 07 tobias c. van veen the metaphysics of crackle: afrofuturism and hauntology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 mark fisher the vibe of the exiles: aliens, afropsychedelia and psyculture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 graham st john ethnoforgery and outsider afrofuturism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 trace reddell ethnography from the inside: industry-based research in the commercial sydney edm scene . . . . . . .113 ed montano “stay in synch!”: performing cosmopolitanism in an athens festival. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .131 vassiliki lalioti from the floor – online afrofuturism unbound: tobias c. van veen in conversation with paul d. miller tobias c. van veen vocalizing: mc culture in the uk nabeel zuberi fabulous: sylvester james, black queer afrofuturism and the black fantastic reynaldo anderson reviews books afrofuturism: the world of black sci-fi and fantasy culture (ytasha l. womack) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152 tobias c. van veen mp3: the meaning of a format (jonathan sterne). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158 nabeel zuberi electronica, dance and club music (ed. mark j. butler). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 hillegonda c. rietveld film electronic awakening (dir. andrew johner) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164 garth sheridan showtime (dir. rollo jackson) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166 philip kirby issn 1947-5403 ©2013 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net st john | executive editor’s introduction 1 i am pleased to announce that dancecult is now hosted at griffith university epress where the latest version of open journal systems has been successfully installed. there remain a few minor technical problems, but we appear to be back on track. a quick note to congratulate everyone involved in making the migration to our new server at griffith epress possible: andy bennett and griffith centre for cultural studies, suzanne bailey and the team at griffith epress and operations manager ed montano. i am also happy to report that all past, present and future articles published in dancecult are assigned dois. we plan to implement full doi compliance measures in future editions. this has been the result of the success of our fundraising campaign earlier in 2013 and the hard work performed by carlo nardi, and production editor botond vitos. this themed issue of dancecult guest edited by tobias c. van veen showcases research on afrofuturism. the issue also features two non-theme feature articles. graham st john, executive editor executive editor’s introduction doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.02.00 mp3: the meaning of a format jonathan sterne durham: duke university press, 2012. isbn: 978-0-8223-5283-9 (hardcover), 979-0-8223-5287-7 (paperback) rrp: us$89.95 (hardcover), us$24.95 (paperback) nabeel zuberi university of auckland (nz) if history is written in a grain of sound, jonathan sterne turns the humble and ubiquitous mp3 inside out to reveal the longer histories of sound, music and communication embedded in the digital format. one strand of this book elaborates the importance of telephony to the development of sound technologies, a role that has often been marginalized in studies that have tended to privilege phonography and, more recently, digital media. sterne argues that research in telephony has been central in the economic drive for compression of sound and “information” more generally. these scientific and industrial imperatives have shared many of the same ideas as intellectual fields and aesthetic movements. sterne contends that the scientific theories and experiments that led to the mp3’s emergence in the early 1990s are part of a longer process of constructing a “universal” listening subject once hearing could be isolated as a phenomenon and rationalized as an idea. the book details the pre-history and genesis of the mp3, its adoption and dissemination, its ontology and epistemology. in the process, sterne intervenes in fundamental debates in media theory and the political economy of media and telecommunications. he engages with several key terms in audio engineering and suggests some of his own for rethinking sound and hearing. his research archive includes scientific documents, corporate histories, interviews with scientists/engineers, and scholarship in several academic fields. in the introductory chapter sterne calls for “format theory”, at once a more finely grained and more thorough and distributed approach to media and media change than the usual demarcations of film, television, radio, sound recording and digital media, for example, allow. according to sterne, a focus on formats such as the lp, cd and cassette is more likely to reveal relations between technologies, economics and cultures of everyday practice. he proposes the concept of mediality defined as “a quality of or pertaining to media and the complex ways in which communication technologies refer to one another in form or content” (9; original italics). this ordinary cross-referencing refuses the teleologies that persist in some approaches to intermedia, remediation or transmedia, and it doesn’t presume any hierarchies. mediality provides a more contingent analysis of media and their social meanings, moving beyond or behind the media object to the relations between technological forms and infrastructures, codes and protocols, regulations and policies, industry standards and corporate organization. sterne dwells on these aspects of the mp3 in part to redress the attention on mp3 players and mobile listening practices in the academic literature. chapter 1 addresses “perceptual technics” which sterne defines as “the application of perceptual research for the purposes of economizing signals” (19). sterne frames work at at&t, bell labs and western electric in early twentieth century corporations’ attempts to calculate human life and apply instrumental reason to human bodies for profit. the goal of corporate monopoly fuelled research on hearing in psychoacoustics. taking cues from foucault on power/knowledge and bourdieu on fields, sterne connects the legitimization of this scientific field with its institutional context. in and through media technologies such as the audiometer, which aimed for standardized measurements, hearing was abstracted from bodies and experiences. different kinds of value could be ascribed to particular frequencies, and some frequencies could be defined as surplus. sterne coins the term “surplus definition” for the difference between the definition of sound that could be produced and the definition required for the signal to still work. that difference generated “perceptual capital” which could generate economic value. in this probing and measurement of the inner ear and the mind’s ear, theories of sound and corporate research shaped by technologies sought efficiencies in signal transmission and reception. chapter 2 “nature builds no telephones” proceeds with this genealogy of the mp3 into the period from the 1920s to the 1940s, as psychoacoustic research and its technologies continue to model and abstract hearing with such innovations as cochlear microphonics, and define the sense as a form of information processing. sterne contends that this research influenced the development of information theory and cybernetics more generally during this period. this chapter centres on what now seems a bizarre and cruel experiment in 1929, in which ernest glen wever and charles w. bray at princeton university removed the mid brain and cerebral cortex of live cats that were wired into an at&t phone system. these feline cyborgs contributed to theories of signal transmission, and “perceptual coding” of audio at the “minimum threshold of intelligibility to people and machines” (84). in chapter 3 sterne examines perceptual coding in the 1980s in the broader context of a “domestication of noise” on a number of fronts in the 1960s and 1970s, including the use of noise in dentistry, workplaces, and experimental and popular music. practices in these fields inform each other with practitioners often moving between them. by the ’70s, scientists had realized that they didn’t need to eliminate noise but could mask annoying or unnecessary sounds with other sounds. theories of psychoacoustic masking and models for compression of sound shaped theories and models for digital communication, and computers increasingly mediated the ways in which scientists imagined hearing. inventions like the vocoder which synthesized speech and computer models of hearing based on the cochlea are indicative of sound culture defined by what sterne—riffing on jacques attali’s age of “composition”—calls “decompositionism”, which he defines as a “new malleability of sound and noise across cultural domains that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s” alongside “processes that analyze it, decompose it, and reassemble it” (127). chapter 4 arrives at the mp3 proper and how the format was made an industrial standard through a series of negotiations, struggles and compromises between different economic interests in the telecommunications, broadcasting, consumer electronics and computer industries. the mp3 emerged from companies with different markets and distinctive technological requirements. two codecs for coding and decoding audio competed for prominence, representing two consortia. on the one hand was musicam, which comprised primarily of philips and panasonic/matsushita, and on the other was aspec, supported primarily by fraunhofer iis (institut für integrierte schaltungen/institute for integrated circuits), at&t, thompson, and france télécom. mpeg (motion picture experts group), which had been formed as an extension of the jpeg (joint photographic experts group) in 1988, arbitrated competing interests and its layer scheme for the new digital format accommodated these different constituencies. layer 2 represented musicam, but aspec’s layer 3 compressed audio better than layer 2, though it sacrificed quality of sound. in this chapter, sterne argues that we need to focus more on the politics and governance of audiovisual standards in studies of media regulation, since such standards are increasingly defined across several media sectors. from this industry focus, chapter 5 shifts to aesthetic judgments in the design and interpretation of listening tests in 1990 and 1991 that shaped the mp3 format. far from being “objective”, these tests constructed a particular type of listening subject and propagated certain values about what constituted “good sound”. they aimed to remove subjective experience and context from their listening, but chose particular genres or styles of music for their listeners. while appearing disinterested, they mobilized the tastes of the engineering culture in which they were designed. sterne recounts an anecdote about suzanne vega visiting the labs where her song “tom’s diner” had been one of the key pieces of music in the testing of the mp3 standard to explain the clash in listening subjectivities between audio engineers and many other listeners. chapter 6 explains the success of the mp3 as a “nonrivalrous” and “nonexcludable” resource in the 1990s and 2000s due to a confluence of industrial, technological and cultural forces in which the record industry was slow to embrace internet distribution of music, and computer manufacturers and consumer electronics led the way. the internet underground music archive, napster, and piratical or unauthorized reproduction and distribution were elements though not determinants in the mix. sterne uses the debates around piracy to ask if music is a thing or a process. he opts to take a middle path that conceives of it as a “bundle of affordances” and outlines the major perspectives on music as technology, commodity, property, and the idealized (romantic and modernist) work of art beyond performance. the mp3 is enmeshed in processes but as a container technology is treated as a thing. against some of the romantic, utopian and singular positions taken up in debates around internet music and piracy, the chapter critiques libertarian views of information and the way the notion of the gift economy has been used to understand often non-reciprocal mp3 traffic without obligations to return the gift. he also picks apart the music industry’s rhetoric on piracy. sterne is persuasive in his argument that the history of music piracy from radio, to home taping and the internet in many parts of the world reveals that unsanctioned forms of copying and distribution and their associated activities have often had a symbiotic relationship with sanctioned market practices. he is skeptical about anti-copyright movements constituting a coherent public that might counter the capitalist organization of music, instead more keen to stress that capitalist and non-capitalist forms of music making and exchange have existed together for a long time. it will be interesting to see if the progress of organizations such as the pirate party and others advocating culture of the commons will contradict sterne’s playing down of their political possibilities. the book’s conclusion speculates about both the resilience and the possible end of the mp3. as sterne notes—and i can confirm since i happen to be typing this on the first cassette store day—older or residual media formats survive; though he also points to the fragility of digital files and hard drives which means that some major currents in mp3 music such as the mashup may not be archived adequately. sterne also mentions the aesthetics that have emerged as electronic musicians and djs have played with the mp3’s sonic qualities on other software platforms. he predicts the persistence of audio compression, given the desire for music in mobile technologies such as smart-phones, and wireless communication between different technologies. more importantly, he argues that what we consider media today might be more “diluted” and distributed, so that issues around infrastructures, formats and platforms might become more significant for the politics of communication. sterne’s book offers scholars of dance musics many entry points and applications. we already have considerable scholarship on particular formats such as the 12-inch single and cassette. most obviously but importantly, this history of the mp3 reminds us that new or digital media are actually part of longer histories, and that the analogue vs. digital schism is overstated. there are lessons here for those studying the intersections of economic, political, social and cultural forces in which music hardware and software of various kinds emerge and become widely used and dumped. sterne’s discussion of noise is useful for thinking how what seem like disparate fields of production (science and art) are actually asking the same questions and using similar concepts. his argument doesn’t assume that noise in music or sound art is necessarily radical or transgressive, but can be quite ordinary and accommodated in existing systems. in thinking about the “good” or “bad” sound of audio formats, we might reflect on the taste formations and values that inform these judgments and how they do or do not acknowledge and encourage a plurality of listening practices. we can trace how subcultural networks and music piracy may not fund terrorism, but might gel with regular business in many respects. there is much in this big book about a little thing that will inform scholarship across sound studies, communication and popular music studies. discography vega, suzanne. 1987. tom’s diner. a&m (7-inch): vega2. <http://www.discogs.com/suzanne-vega-toms-diner/release/570788>. afrofuturism: the world of black sci-fi and fantasy culture ytasha l. womack chicago: lawrence hill books, 2013. isbn: 978-1-61374-796-4 (paperback) rrp: us $16.95 (paperback) tobias c. van veen mcgill university (canada) following upon her accessible and personable book documenting the transformation of “race” in the late 20th century african american context, post-black: how a new generation is redefining african american identity (2010), ytasha womack has written a similarly enlightening and readable survey of afrofuturism. womack provides several useful definitions of afrofuturism, notably as “an intersection of imagination, technology, the future, and liberation”, in which “afrofuturists redefine culture and notions of blackness for today and the future” by combining “elements of science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-western beliefs” (9). with its first-person narrative, easy-going interview quotes from afrofuturist artists, musicians, writers and scholars, overview of afrofuturism’s scholarly history, artistic and musical traditions, and numerous references to past and contemporary afrofuturist works, the book is particularly useful for first-comers and adherents alike, and will particularly do well as an introductory text at high school and undergraduate levels. womack’s chapters are prefaced by full-page black-and-white comic-style artwork from john jennings and james marshall, an added touch that greatly aids in visualizing the futurist hybridity of black identity and technology. unlike the requisite dryness of much scholarly work, womack takes a conversational approach. afrofuturism is viewed as a positive means to overcome barriers presented by systemic racism and socioeconomic inequality, not the least because the book is tied together by womack’s narration of her own experiences in the field—from her days discovering other “afrogeeks” as a university student to speaking at various exhibitions and conferences as the author of the rayla 2212 series of science fiction novels. her reflections lend a personal aura to her ongoing encounters with all the unusual suspects of afrofuturism. the book’s concise and digestible chapters, grouped together by approach and media format, cover all the expected bases—science fiction literature, music, comics, film, music videos, black inventors and technologies—as well as a taste of the unexpected, including the cosmogony of the dogon, the contemporary healing practices of malidoma somé in africanist religion and ritual, d. scot miller’s afrosurrealism manifesto, afrofuturist curators and exhibition organisers including “the afrofuturist affair”, and a chapter devoted to “the divine feminine in space” (a.k.a. women in afrofuturism). womack provides a basic overview of afrofuturist media production and its artists as well as its outliers, fielding through the afrodiasporic speculative and science fiction of octavia butler, samuel r. delany and nalo hopkinson, as well as afrofuturist musical traditions from sun ra and lee “scratch” perry to george clinton, grace jones to erykah badu and janelle monáe. in regards to speculative fiction, womack (much to my delight) discusses african american literature of the 19th century as the forerunner to later 20th century developments, providing a summary of earlier authors including george s. schuyler and sutton e. griggs while emphasizing how “the black visionaries of the past . . . used [speculative and proto-science fiction] as devices to articulate their issues and visions” (124). (these earlier references, as well as womack’s passing attention to africanist and egyptian cosmogonies, suggest that there is still much work to be done in unearthing the deep roots of afrofuturist approaches.) womack undertakes the particularly vital task of developing an inventory of afrofuturist works that have not been covered in previous publications—a kind of minoritarian approach that balances out the erstwhile attention to the stars. she draws attention to a number of exhibits and conferences that have taken place throughout the united states featuring artists who have since picked up on the term “afrofuturism” and utilised it to inform their work. womack also briefly outlines “afrofuturist critical theory” as a growing movement within scholarship to advance afrofuturist concepts as critical tools, turning to the work of kodwo eshun, alexander weheliye, d. denenge akpem and reynaldo anderson, among others. this is where afrofuturism offers a different sort of avenue for thought, in which afrofuturist philosophical approaches provide a platform for discussing the concepts articulated throughout its diverse media (or implied by its practices). in a chapter called “project imagination”, womack discusses the production of “futurist” technologies by afrodiasporic inventors. in conversation with alondra nelson, womack turns to sociological accounts of technologies invented by people of colour. this approach is particularly useful, for it demonstrates the ways in which “afrofuturism” has been put to use to not only retroactively describe afrodiasporic futurism but to articulate the project of reclaiming and rewriting whitewashed histories of technological production, including contemporary accounts of afrodiasporic technological production. yet—and here i will turn to some suggestive criticism, which i hope the author forgives me for—while womack lists a number of interesting technologies whose invention involved people of colour (including “the modern computer”—a claim that is perhaps more complex than she lets on, for also at stake here is an assumption of individualism over the complex collective production involved, including the role of technological actants (see latour 2007)), her summary does not provide backgrounds of the inventors nor give detail of the inventions and their conditions of production. when turning to a book such as this, i expect most readers want to know more about these things and the people behind them, including basic references for dates and places. passing over names and details leaves black history in the shadows—a peculiar absence given the book’s stated aims. unfortunately this particular example stands in for the digestible but at times breezy structure of the book. i give womack the benefit of the doubt, however, insofar as she has crafted the text for a popular readership. that said, i wish womack had spent more time explicating various works as well as questioning her often intriguing sources. why not? populism shouldn’t neglect the role of inspiring pedagogy—lessons we can draw from freire, fanon and malcolm x, but also from w.e.b. du bois, whose the souls of black folk (1994 [1903]) combined personal reflections with criticism and speculation. i would love to see womack probe ambiguities and question stated intentions. it is evident that a number of interesting interviews lay behind this book, but for the most part they are dispersed across chapters just as they are often quoted without comment. i would love to see longer engagements with the various artists and theorists. when she does take the time, mainly in her later chapters, womack begins to develop her perspectives and the work of others to great effect. perhaps we can understand this book, then, as sketching out the call signs for an afrofuturist book to-come. my second criticism concerns technology, or rather womack’s approach to it. at times, she seems to equate afrofuturism with the ideologies of silicon valley and its techno-libertarian capitalism—what was critiqued in the 1990s on the nettime listserv as “the california ideology”—where new technologies are the stepping stones to social, racial and economic liberation. a number of such quotes abound: “today technology enables a greater ability to create and share images across the world. social media, websites, music downloads, digital cameras, low-cost sound engineering, at-home studios, editing equipment, and on and on” (134). womack continues in the same vein, emphasizing increasingly easy-access media production and internet distribution, before ending with “two years ago, a still photographer shot my family reunion photo. a few months ago, a cousin shot the whole bunch (more than a hundred) with her ipad” (134). unfortunately such well-worn celebrations of what used to be called “cyber-capitalism” reflect an unfortunate trend of reducing radically futurist approaches to the uncritical adoption of widespread consumer communications technologies. while i do not doubt the impact of digital technology, this seems all the more reason to question it in the context of afrofuturism (the references here are also thoroughly corporate: “ipad” and “instragram”, instead of say, “linux” and “bittorrent”). is it possible to think afrofuturism as critical of the technologies that doubtless enable it? what are the downsides to such technologies when they have just as well been used to conduct surveillance and covert operations against afrodiasporic peoples—or people in general—agitating for change? elsewhere, womack performs a similar theoretical move when she equates afrofuturology with the populist ideologies of “hope” that, for example, echoed from the campaign of president obama. how does “hope” reconcile with a cyclical futurism in which, as womack iterates, “the right words and actions can speak the future into existence, [just as] the same can recast the past” (153)? part of afrofuturism’s resilience is that it avoids the wishful thinking of utopianism by inventing rituals and techniques of temporal direct action (or what kodwo eshun calls “chronopolitics” (2003)). ideologies of hope appear a far cry from eshun’s militant reflections on afrofuturism’s posthuman despotism—“characterized by an extreme indifference to the human” (1999: 00[-005])—or sun ra’s final act of destroying earth in space is the place (1974).[i] another question lays beneath the skin of the text, as it were: the complexities behind afrofuturist articulations of “race”. here i do not wish to criticize womack on this point, by any account, but rather read her text as indicative of a tension within afrofuturist scholarship. the question as to whether “afro”-futurism is essentially tied to black bodies, or whether its imaginary force achieves an escape velocity from defining identity/subjectivity through “racial” markers is a paradox that strikes through afrofuturism and its scholarship, womack included. on the one channel, womack emphasizes the importance of black representation in science fiction, in which the “obvious absence of people of color in the fictitious future/past”, and the dearth of blackness in mainstream science fiction film, television and literature provoked the imagination of “countless black kids who yearned to see themselves in warp-speed spaceships” (6)—a childhood she likewise identifies with. in her discussion of afrofuturist scholarship, womack places emphasis on the role of representation, in which scholars are apparently “dedicated to the study of works that analyze dynamics of race and culture specific to the experiences of black people through sci-fi and fantasy works” (23). on the other channel, as womack emphasizes, and following her similar meditations in post-black, afrofuturists not only redefine contemporary as well as past/future “notions of blackness” (9), but articulate how race is “a creation too” (27). she approvingly quotes artist and filmmaker cauleen smith, who says “blackness is a technology. it’s not real. it’s a thing” (27). this approach would seem to suggest, then, that scholars should not just look for representations of blackness, “specific to the experiences of black people”, but to ways in which blackness has been constructed as a particular “technolology” that afrofuturism unearths through its alien, android and other post-human identities. at the limit is eshun’s approach that attempts to reject “all notions of a compulsory black condition” in the rendering unrecognizable of “blackness” (1999: 00[-004; -001]). these two positions reflect a constitutive tension to afrofuturism, one that cannot, i believe, be erased—precisely by definition of afrofuturism. it is also what keeps afrofuturism perpetually relevant in its transformational dialectic of cyclicity that distorts the mirror of capitalist temporality.[ii] either way, this tension ought to be meditated upon explicitly, precisely as the poles of this tension can be read temporally as well as strategically: while black representation remains significant to the present, afrofuturism dreams of a post-human future just as it revisions the past (as alien nation, through time-travel, as public enemy’s “armageddon bin in effect”, etc.). but any hint of a teleological utopianism is more complex than it appears: afrofuturism’s mission (as also articulated by filmmaker cauleen smith) is to invade the present with futures revisioned from the past. what role does “race” play in the post-human, which is to say, in a future/past strategically repurposed to the present? we may turn to a sentence reflecting this tension, in which womack notes her fascination with “the growing number of artists . . . who were developing art exploring people of color and the future. . . . and all utilizing black characters or aesthetics to deconstruct images of the past to revisualize the future” (22). the question remains, however, as to whether blackness is to be deconstructed in the very same “revisualization” operation, and if so, what the effects are upon its sociological referents in black bodies. as womack writes, “the notion of bending time erases the prism of race-based limitations that all too often lace the present and define the recent past” (154). but does this simply translate, as d. denenge akpem suggests, into “self empowerment” (154)? or is there not a technology of self/other transformation at stake? these remain avenues of thought that, though hinted at in afrofuturism, as well as in post-black, remain mostly unexplored. in closing, i’d like to simply emphasize that i’d love to hear womack think through these and other questions. this hasn’t been the book for it—but perhaps it is to be had in the future. as usual in many books published in today’s market, the text is in need of some fact-checking. wallace d. fard muhammad, and not elijah muhammad, was founder of the nation of islam (and in 1930); mark sinker was a journalist at british music magazine wire, and not american technoculture’s wired. these are minor points, but worth considering if citing the text. references dubois, w.e.b. 1994 [1903]. the souls of black folk. new york: dover. eshun, kodwo. 1999. more brilliant than the sun: adventures in sonic fiction. london: quartet. ———. 2003. “further considerations of afrofuturism”. cr: the new centennial review 3(2): 287–302. latour, bruno. 2007. reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. oxford: oxford university press. womack, ytasha. 2010. post-black: how a new generation is redefining african american identity.chicago: chicago review press. filmography coney, john. 1974. space is the place. usa: north american star system. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072195>. notes [i] regardless of whether it is ra or the overseer who destroy earth, ra is certainly complicit in it; these appear to be the “raised stakes” of the tarot-based cardgame, and ra appears ultimately indifferent to its annihilation. [ii] see “vessels of transfer: allegories of afrofuturism in jeff mills and janelle monáe”, this issue. global tribe: technology, spirituality & psytrance graham st john sheffield: equinox, 2012. isbn: 978-1-84553-955-9 (hardcover), 978-1-84553-956-6 (paperback) rrp: us$90.00 (hardcover), us$29.95 (paperback) tobias c. van veen université de montréal (canada) the culmination of over a decade of research in the field—in the heat and dust of deserts, forests and beaches; the mysticism and anarchy of doofs, burns, eclipses and solstices—graham st john’s global tribe: technology, spirituality & psytrance undertakes a definitive exploration of global psytrance cultures. beginning with a much-needed history of the western “traveller” figure that cultivated a life of ecstatic exile on the beaches of goa, india, st john explores the influence of the goa scene’s psychedelic aesthetics upon the development of “psyculture” and its frenetic, rapturous and at times spiritual electronic dance music known as “psytrance”. the story of psyculture, st john writes, begins with western hippie travellers gathering in goa, where anarchic assemblies of counterculture drop-outs threw psychedelic beach parties that combined mysticism, entheogens and “cosmo rock” music in the 1960s and 1970s. in the 1980s, goa as a place and musical aesthetic slowly transformed itself, shedding jam-band psychedelic rock and embracing the all-night dance rituals of dj culture. turning to first-hand accounts from the scene’s founders and figures (including a chapter on goa gil as well as earlier progenitors), st john details goa’s countercultural and musical shifts, describing the progression of cultural conflicts that shaped its eventual turn to electronic music, before becoming the spiritual and symbolic home of the genre and subcultural aesthetic known as “psytrance” in the 1990s. with intensity, passion and an exquisite attention to detail, st john describes how “goa”, as a signifier for a mythic space and time of privileged freedom for western drop-outs, became synonymous with electronic trance music, “orientalist” psychedelic aesthetics and shamanic approaches to dj mixology and participant dance rituals. after explicating goa’s history, st john turns to psyculture scenes worldwide. crafting an engaging and enlightening journey through its many festivals and events, st john draws upon extensive participant interviews and historical testimony as he unfolds the past and present state of psyculture happenings and festivals. speaking with dancers, djs, promoters, producers, writers, artists and travellers, st john reports in from the edges of the dancefloor, describing how psyculture has become an enduring and rich dimension of electronic dance music culture that continues to pursue peaceful, collective living in sonic celebration. the text ramps up in intensity as st john strives to articulate traveller identity to the qualitative values that emerge from psyculture. reporting in from over a decade of travels to psycultures events around the globe, st john theorizes the ontology of the traveller, describing how the western drop-out explores “being-in-transit” by pursuing, and re-creating, the entheonautic exploration of altered states first pioneered on anjuna beach. the many insightful and often provocative passages of global tribe are born out of st john’s dedication to being-in-transit as a means of self-transformation and ethnographic exploration. drawing upon the language deployed among field participants—in workshops, encounters, flyers and internet forums, but also album and track titles, liner notes and ephemera—st john cultivates an exhaustive conceptual lexicon in which to address and theorize psyculture. the peculiar flavours of the idiom places demands upon the reader, as st john often writes with the impact of experiential shorthand. concepts such as neotrance and trance carnival, or that of being-in-transit and the various permutations of (neo)liminality, undertake the analytical labour in forging precise meanings and contexts for the cultural (and at times political) framework of exodus. these and other concepts explore dimensions of psycultural exile, wherein participants pursue ecstatic belongings by undertaking transformational reconstructions of the self. by differentiating his theoretical usages from the texts of mikhail bakhtin, hakim bey, gilles deleuze, victor turner and georges bataille, st john nuances these base concepts and contextualizes their application through experiential ethnography, developing their complex meanings through various contexts, personages and events under consideration as well as positioning conceptual developments within a tour-de-force reading of psyculture music and edmc studies literature. my only regret with st john’s conceptual arsenal is that it has not been explicated further. though turner receives some attention, readers not familiar with the above figures will find themselves seeking context and illustration elsewhere. st john calls his ethnographical approach that of the “socionaut”, whereby participant interviews but also immersion in the field with the musical and social fabric of psychonautical experiencing is interwoven with media studies approaches to electronic music and art. in short: without judgement or moralism, entheogens are ingested, described and reiterated as integral to the force and form of psyculture belongings and experiences. the resulting textual blend is intoxicating, sometimes dizzying, and the densely packed style of the opening chapters can be a tad overwhelming even to those familiar with the literature and the psycultures at hand. but once st john settles into a mid-tempo groove, particularly in the memorable account of portugal’s boom festival—at ~25, 000 souls for seven days, the largest psytrance gathering in the world—his rapid accumulation of observations reveal a wealth of insights that, once unpacked, challenge what might be termed simplistic readings of psyculture, or edmcs in general. st john challenges readings that would see psyculture as but a consumerist, nihilist or hedonist practice, and dismisses moralising tendencies that mask as critical scholarship. st john also ably demonstrates the uneven but exciting embrace of ecologically sustainable practices and collectivist and environmentalist political ideals by psyculture festivals like boom. st john is, indeed, quite critical of texts that are themselves critical of psyculture. while at times this approach is refreshing, it can lend itself to its own contradictions. i wish to turn to several crucial questions in st john’s text while recognising that i do so at the pain of glossing over substantial theorisations of “edge work” and the transformations of “ritual” practice within modern life that are intriguingly analyzed by st john as permutations upon (turner’s) “post-liminal liminality” (163). global tribe is ambitious in its efforts to outline and delimit psyculture’s alternate dreamworlds and collective fantasies of ideal belonging. by immersing himself into the festival-traveller matrix without reserve, and by embracing a shift away from a moral limit towards a physical one (310), st john does not shy away from contemplating the abyssal search for greater meaning in our planetary-bound existence. if i now turn to problematics of race and gender, orientalism and neocoloniality, it is to raise issues that often trouble the whole of edmc studies and not just st john’s socionautic approaches to psyculture. st john defines his ethnographic approach as attending to the complexities of the unfolding event, emphasizing the participant diversity of psyculture as resisting grand narratives. the incommensurability of multi-perspectival subjectivities is utilized to denounce theoretical critiques of psyculture for the error of their “one dimensional discourses”. this boundary operation is particularly the case with st john’s critique of arun saldanha’s psychedelic white: goa trance and the viscosity of race, a work that st john critiques as “empirically flawed race reductionism” (286). saldanha’s research focuses on the viscous grouping of white bodies in goa as authenticating the subcultural experience of psytrance, arguing that “subculturally pure in anjuna comes to mean racially pure” (2007: 127–131). for his part, st john critiques saldanha’s ethnography, arguing that, contrary to saldanha’s observations of early-morning dancefloors, goan psyculture is more ethnically diverse and inclusive than saldanha claims. but it is at this point that ethnographic observation faces the greater problematic of an institutional whiteness encoded in historical relations of power and privilege. given the very nature, or rather, construct of “goa” as a site of privileged exile for western drop-outs—a point that st john readily acknowledges (73)—it would be amiss not to address the global role of white privilege in establishing (psytrance) traveller cultures. there is some irony to the fact that, in the era of anticolonial struggles and the civil rights movement, middle-classed western whites undertook “elective exodus” from the “maladies of modern life” by jetting off to non-white “developing” countries (73). in a post/neocolonial country like india, where the maladies of modern life present more extreme manifestations than those of the west, white travellers exclusively benefit from a historically-troublesome socioeconomic privilege that underscores the exclusive mobility, or “freedom”, of the traveller—a figure that needs to be counterposed not just to the “tourist”, as st john suggests in his boundary work around psyculture, but to the refugee. other privileges in psyculture remain on the periphery to st john’s analysis; thus the privilege of (white) males, as djs and scenesters, is asserted in the otherwise absence of women in psyculture’s founding tales. st john’s text also remains ambiguous as to the analytic value of the distinction between psyculture “travellers” and erstwhile “tourists”—especially when the “domestic tourist” stands in for indian nationals visiting a scenic region of their own country. at times st john appears to champion the deleuzean definition of “traveller” by anthony d’andrea (66)—global nomads whose “smooth space” is contrasted to the “striatic space of dwellers”—while elsewhere he points out how the concept blurs in “vertical/horizontal ‘lines of flight’” (332), as the distinction between tourist/traveller, nomad/dweller breaks down in practice (precisely because of privilege). critics of deleuze, such as zizek, would point out that deleuze’s concepts of flow (as embodied in the traveller-nomad) are not resistant to capitalist relations of exploitation but rather are the privileged conditions of them. the crucial issue, as reflected in the work of saldanha, is that the psyculture distinction of tourist/traveller masks a hierarchy of racialisation that ensures the “subcultural purity” of the “goan tribe” in what sara ahmed calls institutional whiteness. the issue is not that goan psyculture today is specifically or totally white—saldanha likewise acknowledges its diverse and multinational characteristics—but, as saldanha writes, “most probably white. hence psychedelics isn’t antithetical to white modernity” (2007: 6). in short, psyculture is, and like globalized (post)modernity, default white: it commences from the place of privileged whiteness and extends its hegemony. like all such projects of white modernity, psyculture unavoidably exhibits what edward said called “orientalist” attitudes of white tourism to the “exotic”. st john’s position is complex around these issues and far from antithetical to their points—he observes how “the trappings of tripping in the east continue to be deployed to make the hard sell” (332)—thus noting how psyculture is implicated within the “exoticism” of self-reflexive modernity and the very tourism industry that caters to and reinvents the figure of the traveller. at the same time, and understandably so, st john wants to substantiate the experiential claims of psyculture as undertaking an exodus that escapes something of (post)modernity’s racialized neocolonialism. it is from an ethnographical and molecular stance (in the deleuzean sense of studying dynamic masses instead of molar totalities) that st john critiques saldanha’s ethnography for failing to recognize the ethnic plurality of psycultural bodies (66–71). for st john, saldanha privileges theory over practice. however, the reciprocal relation between theory and practice raises the question as to how one practices theory, and theorizes practice. saldanha carefully aligns his analysis within a deleuzean, biomaterialist construct of racialized “viscosity”; a theory that st john praises for its innovation, though if so it begs the question as to why he doesn’t support its observations. for saldanha, the problem is precisely that of theorising the observation of racialized phenomena: all is not what appears when observing the construct of race. it is theory that problematizes the observer. saldanha, turning to the molecularity of race as it approaches the molar, points out how a kind of racialized flocking behaviour of whiteness—a “viscosity” of white bodies on the dancefloor, a clumping of whiteness—not just discourages nonwhite bodies from participating in psyculture, but performs the primordial state of its subcultural authenticity. hence “psychedelic white”: a default-white-psychedelia that transcends the fact of diverse bodies (saldanha 2007: 6). saldanha argues that the fact of diverse bodies in psyculture does not make psychedelia, as the “mystical structure of feeling . . . epitomized in the sixties cult of lsd,” any less of a white cultural project (6). whiteness is the metaphysics of modernity that schematizes embodied privilege in psyculture. countering saldanha’s claims, st john cites scholarship contending that there are indian djs, promoters, “diasporic insiders” and “revered sadhus” (67) in goan psyculture. yet—and perhaps here we need to raise the question of gayatri spivak’s “native informant”, that name for the mark of expulsion from the ethical subject of humanity—nowhere in global tribe do we hear the words and stories of nonwhite psyculture participants. their narratives are not included alongside those of their white, western, male progenitors, from dj laurent to goa gil to eight finger eddie. if indians are indeed prominent within the goan scene—as other scholars such as d’andrea assert—then why are they not also prominent within the ethnographic text, their accounts woven into the history of goan psyculture, the cadence and rhythm of their voices granted recognition? in the ethnographic field as a whole, there remains a lacunae: a comprehensive account of goan djs and saddhus, scenesters and locals, but also indian visitors, tourist operators and spectators—all those others classified as but “tourists”, not real “travellers”—remains to be seen. the erasure or rather pronounced colouring of race is—as it often is—entwined with that of protecting (white) female bodies from the other. here, gender arises as the troubled site of predation. st john cites an account—entitled “women of goa” by the anonymous internet handle lava 303—of how “predatory domestic tourists” (read: non-white indians) often harass white women. as st john rightly points out, the “ever-present threat of sexual assault” is not “intrinsically indian (or racial)” (67). yet, neither lava 303 nor st john address that such misogyny is faced by not only white women, but all women, and overwhelmingly by women of colour. by just pointing out violence against white women in goa, the threat of sexual assault that indian women face daily is left unaddressed (as is goa’s sex tourism industry). lava 303’s account also singles out israelis for “special attention,” charging that they treat goa like “their new colony . . . another promised land” (in st john 2012: 67). here, again, is an exception within an exception: why is it that israelis are singled out but not the westernized “travellers” who first made goa into a promised playground for western fantasies of an exotic eden? something of this question is addressed in chapter seven of global tribe, in what might be deemed st john’s “critical turn” towards problematic aspects of psyculture in israeli and australian (though not goan) case studies. various languages and mechanisms of exclusion (in the case of israel) and indigeneous appropriation (australia) are discussed, as well as critiques of israeli psyculture “enclaves” that exhibit neocolonial role-playing (236). here, “elitism” signifies the hierarchial ordering between insiders/outsiders as travellers/tourists. as st john writes, “ethnic-oriented identifications . . . reveals elitism internal to psychedelic tribalism, where the freak ethos of a ‘global tribe’ competes with the realities of ‘tribal boundaries’ maintained through ongoing acts of distinction” (245). i believe this is a much needed statement, and that its framework demands to be rethought in the context of psyculture’s historical and global project, beginning with the site of its mythical origin in goa. also, the ability of “elitism” to encompass the problematics of race, gender and coloniality above is uncertain. in global tribe, “elitism”everywhere stands in for intersectional privilege—a phrase that bell hooks would amplify to “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”. at the very least, elitism is understood as the convergence of racialisation to gender-inequality in the context of neocolonial relations, and as such, remains somewhat inadequate as an analytic signifier. st john’s emphasis in global tribe is on the experiential and the diversity of individuated trajectories as undermining a totalising critique that would obliterate such differentiations. psycultural subjectivity is, for st john, simply too many to be ascertained in one conceptual schema. pointing out the numerous possible experiences of the western traveller, st john acknowledges that some, but not all “other [travellers] devoured the imaginary (oriental) other in orgies of consumption, while excluding domestic indians from the party” (69). yet while acknowledging such exclusion, st john rejects saldanha’s observations of goa as embodying, in its viscosity of psychedelic white, precisely this statement. while psyculture travellers today include “passport holders from many countries” (201), telling assumptions as to a default westernized psyculture are everywhere produced. in the closing chapter, st john quotes a musician describing how his sonic desire is to “rendezvous with the exotic, being intimate with the authentic experience”, what st john elsewhere analyzes as the orientalist aesthetics of psytrance that sample—some would say appropriate—“eastern and native imagery” (332). in another moment, a psyculture reveller describes the marginalisation of the psytrance stage at the 2009 symbiosis festival, writing that: “very segregated, i almost felt like a black man, in the 50s at this party” (277). such offhand but telling quotes, as well as the troubled use of “ethnodelic”, signal an unthought default-white privilege that appropriates as well as exoticizes the other. in a carefully writ but defensive section, st john seeks to explicate psyculture’s orientalism, an aesthetics that is all-too-prevalent to anyone that has seen psytrance album covers and their multi-coloured buddhas, shivas and rainbow saddhus. however, st john concludes that “while goatrance has been demonstrated to have had an aesthetic romance with orientalism, this story does not infuse its ‘neotribal’ mobilization” (69). psyculture romanticizes orientalism without being orientalist; it is difficult to ascertain how the two can be kept apart. there is little critical value to an “aesthetics” if it is to be thought as distinct from the subjectivities of being-in-transit that articulate the ontologies and significations of belonging to psyculture. it is just as unclear how neotribalism escapes “aesthetic” neocolonialism; it cannot be described as entirely “off the grid” of neoliberalism, as st john otherwise contends (163). psyculture is very good at consuming and selling lifestyle products designed to facilitate “the self [as] a project, revisable and upgradeable” (172), products that sell you “freedom of choice” (162), the latter a tenet of psyculture anda classical tenet of (neo)liberalism. that orientalism impacts more than aesthetics is also on view when discussing the figure of the “primitive” in psyculture, or what st john calls the “soft primitive” as the “visage of the aboriginal, amerindian or amazonian invented as a figure of primal unity” (206). in other discourses, such inventions have been known by the term noble savage. in a brief few sentences—and again, one wishes there was simply more on what are troubled topics—st john mentions his attendance at germany’s “indian spirit festival”, which has “typically deployed totem poles, dream catchers and feathered head-dresses to promote and decorate its vibe” (206). thieving cultural artifacts from the other to heighten the white vibe has its canonical representations. yet st john asserts the complexity of the practice, noting that “when i attended the 2010 edition of indian spirit and anticipated a galaxy of amerindian signs consumed by crowds ravenous for the primitive, my expectations were not met, and could not determine attendance as evidence of one’s complicity in neocolonial practice” (206). how these “ravenous” neocolonial expectations were not met is left unclear. what would meet such expectations if attendance at a festival complicit with cultural appropriation is not enough? the title alone signals the trappings of neocoloniality: no “ravenous” displays are needed if thieving the other’s cultural artifacts as fashion-accessories is normalized. it is here that a structural contradiction resonates from an unexplicated ethical assumption: why is it perfectly acceptable for european whites to stage racialized appropriations of other cultures, but not for india’s “domestic tourists” to watch (with amusement, no doubt) the half-naked, high whites dancing to trance music at anjuna? even as st john is right to critique “one dimensional discourses” that would only situate psyculture as but an orientalist project based upon a limited ethnographical encounter, the contradictions resulting from overstating this position suggest that an alternate approach might be found that incorporates the likes of saldanha’s critical insights. such a project would not need to deny psyculture’s (undeniable) radical exodus but would rather further it by accelerating escape velocity from psychedelic white. “goa” is constructed out of a history of white traveller privilege that is at odds with the transformational values of the other cultures that psyculture exoticizes and appropriates. in other edmc festival cultures, critical moves have been made to counteract such appropriations, based upon consultation with local indigenous populations (such as canada’s bass coast festival banning “indian headdresses” in 2014). when unbound from white privilege, psyculture catalyzes what st john calls a collective “being-in-transit” that abandons ethnonationalist constraints, turning instead to the dreamdancing of cosmic community. yet this radical abandonment takes as its condition of possibility the ongoing globalization of (white) privilege, one which, if effaced for the purposes of championing exodus, only results in recoding its radical project as (yet another) institutional whiteness. in handling these complex issues around edmcs, st john offers a provocative, detailed and insightful reading of psyculture that—like the best texts written from the most challenging conditions of the field—poses more questions than it answers. references saldanha, arun. 2007. psychedelic white: goa trance and the viscosity of race. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. the sound studies reader jonathan sterne (ed.) new york: routledge, 2012. isbn: 978-0-415-77130-6 (hardcover), 978-0-415-77131-3 (paperback) rrp: us$120.29 (hardcover), us$38.52 (paperback) carlo nardi independent scholar (italy) readers often reflect an attempt to legitimize a newly formed field of study through the ex post facto selection of eminent forefathers and texts. undeniably a qualified figure to pursue this endeavor, jonathan sterne is a point of reference for everyone interested in the cultural study of sound, mostly thanks to his groundbreaking book the audible past: cultural origins of sound reproduction (2003), not to mention, among others, his examination of the role of commodification and psychoacoustic models of hearing in the development and success of the mp3 format (2012), his critique of the concept of orality according to writers of the toronto school (2011) and his investigation of the use of music as a crime prevention tool (1997). with this reader, however, sterne does not intend to establish a new academic field in the traditional sense, that is, by cocooning an embryonic discipline within a given set of theoretical concerns and epistemological boundaries, but rather to advance a dynamic and open concept of sound studies as “a name for the interdisciplinary ferment in the human sciences that takes sound as its analytical point of departure or arrival” (2). this volume is a welcome addition to a range of scholarly texts aimed at organizing the interrelated although not coinciding topics of sound-, aural-, auditoryand, more generally, sensory studies. it will thus be of interest firstly for anyone whose research interests are in such fields as music, sound art, cinema, media (including radio, television, video games and the internet), linguistics, drama, dance, sound design, architecture, disability, sound storage and reproduction, telecommunications and psychoacoustics, that is, where sound is already a central object of study. secondly, it can engage students and scholars in areas (for instance, political communication or education) where sound plays a relevant part and, nonetheless, is often (literally) overlooked due to the prevalence of ocularcentric paradigms. finally, sound—sound knowledge, sound practices, sound imagination—is intended as a conceptual framework that, by encouraging unorthodox interpretations of the world, can profitably extend its reverberations (the temptation to speak in metaphors is strong) to other fields of knowledge. extremely wide-ranging and definitely substantial even for a reader, the book contains forty-five chapters, including an introduction by the editor, and is organized in six groups of readings: “hearing, listening, deafness”, “spaces, sites, scapes”, “transduce and record”, “collectivities and couplings”, “the sonic arts: aesthetics, experience, interpretation” and “voices”, each with a brief introduction. it is not only that its abundance makes it impossible to do a comprehensive review of the content, but also that the selection is consciously aimed at eschewing synthesis. in his introduction, sterne provides a list of references that serves as well as an extensive bibliography and includes a list of collections of previously published and unpublished works that, as compared to the sound studies reader, tackle the issue of sound/audition from different angles. among these, the most similar in scope to the present book are bull and back (2003), drobnick (2004) and pinch and bijsterveld (2011). it is no surprise, then, that the introduction is dedicated in significant part to a clarification of the specificity of this anthology. as sterne explains, this reader places culture at the center of the definition of sound: “to think sonically is to think conjuncturally about sound and culture” (3). nevertheless, the relationship between sound and culture is not unproblematic. formerly, sterne conceptualized sound as a primarily human-centered problem: “. . . the hearing of the sound is what makes it. my point is that human beings reside at the center of any meaningful definition of sound” (2003: 11). here, however, he reviews his position, conceding an alternative stance that, while acknowledging a degree of reflexivity between the conceptualization of sound and that of hearing, “assumes the physicality of sound and then considers its cultural valence” (7). while this dualism seems to be inherent in the nature of sound, sterne crucially contends that a distinctive trait of sound studies is the adoption of a critical stance towards the role of sound within wider formations of power and subjectivity: “. . . without critique, it is art, technical discourse, science, cultural production or training practice ‘about sound’, and not sound studies” (5). the culturalist approach of several contributions suggests that there persists a permanent rift, at both the theoretical and epistemological levels, between the study of sound and the senses as cultural constructions and their understanding within physics, biology, experimental psychology and neuroscience, that is, the disciplines that have conceptualized the “physicality of sound” as we know it. this rift has arguably triggered at least two tendencies, both owing to the fact that, in its early days, the sociocultural study of the senses was posited as a conscious reaction to a prevailing attitude in the “hard sciences” to both universalize and reify human sensation: firstly, cultural studies have generally overemphasized the malleable and variable features of the senses at the expense of their biological substance; secondly and for similar reasons, too often scientific objectivity has been sacrificed to the advantage of a self-referential dialectic that sociologist franco ferrarotti tagged “aestheticizing radicalism” (1977: 469), a form of scholarship that possibly reveals more about the writer’s ideological mindset than about the real functioning of sensory processes. this second trait is more noticeable in texts inspired by literary studies and, to a certain extent, philosophy, which also have a significant presence in the reader and about which i will say more later. there is a further, more general concern related to focusing on just one sense. several chapters, such as jacques attali’s “noise: the political economy of music” and emily thompson’s “sound, modernity and history”, underscore the need for a reappraisal of the study of hearing to counter the tendency to privilege sight in scholarship.[1] this legitimate claim, however, might lead to an underestimation of the intersensory nature of the human experience, or, borrowing david howes’ words, “the multi-directional interaction of the senses and of sensory ideologies” (2005: 9). in fact, an exclusive emphasis on hearing might contribute to the reproduction of a compartmentalized model of the senses, that is, a paradigm typically developed under the aegis of modern science and backed by a specific ideology that pervades academics as much as laypersons. regarding this, sterne himself elsewhere equates an aspect of this ideology to an “audiovisual litany [that] renders the history of the senses as a zero-sum game, where the dominance of one sense by necessity leads to the decline of another sense” (2003: 16). on the other hand, the choice to focus on sound rather than on hearing has at least two advantages. in the first place, it provides physical phenomena with a substratum of objectivity—and one that exists beyond the human body—that is often mystified in the most radical constructionist accounts of perception. in the second place, and inducing me to rethink my objection, it acknowledges that the ear is only one of many human receptors resonating with vibrations. in so doing, while keeping its focus on the cultural dimension of the senses, the sound studies reader avoids a common objectifying idea according to which the internal sensory processes are understood as an extension of the external sensory organs (see mazzolini 1989). sterne must be given credit for offering asylum to an extremely wide selection of approaches that without any doubt will satisfy every palate. this task, however, as it promises liberation from the strictness of epistemology, risks ipso facto to dissolve into the many streams of mutually contradictory paradigms and, at times, even self-contradictory ones. regarding the latter, i refer in particular to those (few) chapters, such as kodwo eshun’s “operating system for the redesign of sonic reality” or steve goodman’s “the ontology of vibrational force”, that deal with idealistic conceptions of sound or discharge the scientific method tout court. in particular, eshun contends that, “[f]ar from needing theory’s help, music today is already more conceptual than at any point this century, pregnant with thoughtprobes waiting to be activated, switched on, misused” (452) or, more succinctly, “[p]roducers are already pop theorists” (451). inspired by eshun, goodman, envisaging an ontology of sound that highlights “the in-between of oscillation, the vibration of vibration, the virtuality of the tremble” (71), argues that theory should be subordinated to the object of study: “[w]e place theory under the domination of sonic affect, encouraging a conceptual mutation” (70). however, the idea itself of an ontology of sound, as much as it is at odds with the study of actual historical formations, threatens to reduce multifaceted phenomena involving sound and hearing to a mechanistic metaphysics unable to grasp the real, let alone to affect social change. many readers will undoubtedly feel comfortable with texts that, imbued with metaphysics and literary theory, display a prose dense with portmanteaus, neologisms, metaphors and other stylistic liberties at the expense of rigor and, alas, clarity, or where everyday knowledge is promoted to theorization, and bewilderment and paradox are used as critical tools in their own means. as a matter of fact, anticipating any possible misunderstanding, sterne explains that “there is no a priori privileged group of methodologies for sound studies” (6). furthermore, it is probably true that, at this stage, a less inclusive choice would have encountered different but equally insurmountable problems, reflecting only a limited portion of the “interdisciplinary ferment” above mentioned. nonetheless, i fear that the lack of a consistent epistemological approach and, in particular, the departure from a scientific mindset, might prevent not so much the development of sound studies as a fruitful scholarly interest in its own right, but, more importantly, it might undermine its critical potential. in fact, i doubt that there can be critique if theory is disengaged from a realist philosophy of science. in fact, certain essays made me wonder to what extent empirical criteria of validation or falsification are relevant for the sake of an argument. i will illustrate this point with an example. alexander weheliye’s chapter “desiring machines in black popular music” tackles a subject that might possibly be of interest for the readers of this journal, namely the twofold use of technology as signifier and signified in contemporary r&b, concluding that “segments of mainstream black popular music . . . [i]nstead of dispensing with the humanist subject altogether, . . . reframe it to include the subjectivity of those who have had no simple access to its western, post-enlightenment formulation, suggesting subjectivities embodied and disembodied, human and posthuman” (517). as emancipating as this statement sounds, my qualms derive from the fact that weheliye’s argument is based on an erroneous assumption that might sound trivial to most but, instead, points to methodological issues regarding the challenges of interdisciplinarity. weheliye interprets voice processing as a development of an anti-naturalist “mechanized voice” (513) first codified by roger troutman and zapp in the eighties, but he mixes up the vocoder for the actual instrument that troutman used in the examples cited (and for which he is still well known among funk and hip-hop fans), namely the talk box. as any music maker or listener familiar with the two devices will confirm, the vocoder and the talk box function in different ways (in terms of articulation, performance skills and additional instrumentation needed), produce different audible effects and, as the case in question shows, are associated with different performers. this does not necessarily imply that weheliye’s thesis should be easily dismissed—or that my hasty confutation would be sufficient for such purpose. nonetheless, the lack of empirical evidence raises concerns that are worth considering. in fact, if a premise is wrong, how can the conclusions that are derived from it still be considered valid? more in general, does empirical evidence contribute to define criteria of validity in similar cases or are we just in the domain of metaphysics? if the latter is true, how can scholarship be truly critical? this is clearly an epistemological issue that affects also our understanding of what we mean by methodology, and whether we choose to consider it an uncountable noun, that is, a common platform for selecting, discussing, comparing and evaluating research methods, or we surrender to its multiplication in irreconcilable paradigms. the real question is, what is the advantage of substituting methodology (rather than “methodologies”) with dialectical skills, thus devaluing discourse as an end in itself (see gouldner 1970: 12–14)? aware that this space does not allow for a full discussion of this topic, i would like to conclude quoting a passage from this same reader as it apparently voices similar preoccupations for idealistic conceptualizations of sound. rick altman, in his examination of “film fallacies” in screen sound (previously published in altman 1992), claims that, in order to “restore a sense of sound’s role in creating our sense of the body, we must depend on historically grounded claims and on close analyses of particular films rather than on ontological speculations that presume to cover all possible practices” (228). accordingly, sound studies at large should reflect how historical actors experience and conceptualize sound. in fact, a genuinely critical theory of sound, both as a modus operandi aimed at dismantling forms of structural inequality and domination and as emancipatory praxis, not only cannot be detached from real actors, but also should reveal actual contradictions in order to encourage actors to change reality. as boltanski writes, “[t]he idea of a critical theory that is not backed by the experience of a collective, and which in some sense exists for its own sake – that is, for no one – is incoherent” (2011: 5). the sound studies reader provides so much food for thought that, in this brief space, i could only give some hints of its reach, the issues it addresses and the problems it raises. needless to say, it will likely become a benchmark for anyone interested in this topic. notes [1] attali contends that, as music is capable of anticipating changes in the structure of society, we must learn to sharpen listening skills: “today, our sight has dimmed; it no longer sees our future, having constructed a present made of abstraction, nonsense, and silence. now we must learn to judge a society more by its sounds, by its art, and by its festivals, than by its statistics” (29). thompson examines the intersections between the cultural history of acoustics and that of the urban environment in american cities: “[m]y work addresses an aspect of construction long neglected by visually oriented architectural historians. i challenge these historians to listen to, as well as to look at, the buildings of the past, and thereby suggest a different way to understand the advent of modern architecture in america” (123). references altman, rick. 1992. “four and a half film fallacies”. in sound theory/sound practice, ed. rick altman, 35–45. new york: routledge. boltanski, luc. 2011 [2009]. on critique: a sociology of emancipation. trans. gregory elliott. cambridge: polity press. bull, michael and les back, eds. 2003. the auditory culture reader. new york: berg. drobnick, jim. 2004. aural cultures. toronto: yyz books. ferrarotti, franco. 1977. “intorno al metodo della sociologia critica” [issues of method in critical sociology]. in storia del pensiero sociologico, volume iii: i contemporanei [history of sociological thought, volume iii: contemporary thinkers], ed. alberto izzo, 461–73. bologna, il mulino. gouldner, alvin w. 1970. the coming crisis of western sociology. new york: basic books. howes, david. 2005. “introduction: empire of the senses”. in empire of the senses: the sensual culture reader, ed. david howes, 1–17. new york: berg. mazzolini, renato. 1989. “schemi e modelli della macchina pensante (1662–1762)” [schemes and models of the thinking machine (1662–1762)]. in la fabbrica del pensiero. dall’arte della memoria alle neuroscienze [the factory of thought: from art to memory in neuroscience], ed. pietro corsi, 68–143, 198–200. milano: electa. (engl. tr., “schemes and models of the thinking machine (1662–1762)”. in the enchanted loom: chapters in the history of neuroscience, ed. pietro corsi, 68–143, 198–200. oxford: oxford university press, 1991.) pinch, trevor and karin bijsterveld, eds. 2011. the oxford handbook of sound studies. new york: oxford university press. sterne, jonathan. 1997. “sounds like the mall of america: programmed music and the architectonics of commercial space”. ethnomusicology 41(1): 22–50. ———. 2003. the audible past: cultural origins of sound reproduction. durham, nc: duke university press. ———. 2011. “the theology of sound: a critique of orality”. canadian journal of communication 36(2): 207–25. ———. 2012. mp3: the meaning of a format. durham, nc: duke university press. techno studies: ästhetik und geschichte elektronischer tanzmusik kim feser and matthias pasdzierny (eds.) berlin: b_books, 2016. isbn: 978-3-942214-25-4 rrp: eur20.00 timor kaul university of cologne (germany) in 1995 a group of authors who were deeply embedded in the new music scene wrote and published techno (anz and walder 1995), a compendium exploring both the history of the genre in its broader sense as well as its contemporary status. techno studies: ästhetik und geschichte elektronischer tanzmusik adapts not only the cover art of techno but also its inherently methodological approach, combining various kinds of texts and perspectives on the subject. dj, writer and editor of scene magazine de:bug, sascha kösch contributes to both anthologies. in techno studies, he writes three short essays concerning the practical and epistemological problems of writing reviews of techno tracks. daniel schneider’s chapter “party im schuber” indicates the process of historicisation and cannonisation of that which was, for a long time, considered inherently futuristic. schneider, who is based at archiv der jugendkulturen in berlin, highlights the connection between his work as an archivist and the techno scene itself, striving towards a neutral position that takes into account various factions within the scene, as well as the importance of diverse sources of information for a complete, critical research of techno (92). his ideas seem to amalgamate well with the general approach taken in techno studies. the academic study of techno of various disciplines along with its social, cultural and bodily phenomena might be subsumed under the term electronic dance music culture studies (edmcs) and is linked to a “practice shift” in humanities, as rosa reitsamer points out in “die praxis des techno”. participant observation or even going native present the opportunity to collect very rich data, including intimate, internal knowledge of subcultural music scenes. however, such personal engagement may cause ethical conflicts as well as methodological complications, which is one of the classic dilemmas of sociological and ethnographical research. in his chapter “anonym, verkörpert, anders” luis-manuel garcia, along with the help of four interviewees, describes some of the more intense problems encountered while carrying out ethnographic fieldwork within queer nightlife scenes, where sexual subjectivity and physical safety are often underlying issues. moreover, the club environment seems to allow for new methods of research to be implemented. in her chapter “we call it techno!” julia keilbach reflects on a documentary of the same name, which attempts to reconstruct the birth of techno in berlin through a montage of short interview samples with pioneers of the scene. however, it is exactly this technique that renders the documentary unable to explore the necessary methodical scope that can be considered to be real oral history; there lies a “hidden author” behind the narrative that is provided to the audience, illustrated through the director’s choice of particular statements and sentiments (97). the end result is a historical narrative that excludes the integral role of both gay subculture and the international artists and projects involved in the formation of techno. in his excellent chapter “‘das nachkriegstrauma abgetanzt?’”, matthias pasdzierny investigates how techno managed to achieve its status as “soundtrack of the german reunion”. he explains how, in actuality, this process took place retrospectively—the memories of scene members seem to have been affected by media reports that interpreted the new sounds and hedonistic movement as indicative of a “vergangenheitsbewältigung”, a farewell to the old germany and its nazi past, and presenting the opportunity to cultivate a completely new german identity (115). besides trance, another subgenre of techno—minimal—could take on a special german resonance and image. this development, along with new discourses around minimal as a genre prefix as well as an aesthetic paradigm for any kind of electronic dance music, are analysed by sean nye in his chapter “von berlin minimal zu maximal edm”. the film fraktus (germany 2012) portrays an obviously faked techno-myth, placing its origin within the context of the neue deutsche welle (ndw). despite the fictional characters in the film, its overall argument can be backed up with some evidence—at least when observed from a modern perspective—as mentioned during the talk with musicians jacques palminger and carsten meyer, aka erobique, in “fraktus—in techno-mythos” (139). in “klangzeitgeschehen”, barbara volkwein describes her musicological approach to techno. as a consequence of the methodological difficulties involved in analysing techno tracks, she suggests a combination of traditional and new methods including participant observation, and descriptions of sounds and aural textures. in the case of the latter, jens gerrit papenburg refers to the importance of sound systems and other technical aspects, such as the cutting of maxi singles for reproduction and perception—but also the production of dance music—in his chapter “boomende bässe der discound clubkultur”. he convincingly argues that traditional musicological analysis is not able to grasp the bodily aspects of sounds experienced in the club and therefore misses a central aspect of the specific aesthetics this genre of music emits (195). kim feser recognises another technical aspect of the production of electronic music that has had an immense impact on its aesthetics—sequencers. in his chapter “ein sequenzer kommt selten allein”, he shows how electronic devices like moog synthesizers, the roland 808 and especially a combination of the two might blur existing differentiations between instruments and machines, musicians, composition and automatic processes, as well as between digital software and analogue hardware. techno-related styles are characterised by the complex interplay between technical innovation, aesthetic discourses and musical practices (235) that include a “false” use of gear (232). this approach should be called experimental, which is something that becomes evident in stefan goldmann’s chapter “kreuzmodulation” (162). goldmann begins with an interesting attempt at developing the aesthetics of techno, which is based on the aural perception of musical material itself, created with specific line-ups of electronic instruments manipulated by filters, effects and fm-synthesis. while goldmann refers to the theoretical concept of neuronal learning, martha brech again draws on the familiar connection between techno and the poststructuralist philosophy of gilles deleuze and felix guattari in “zwischen den ohren”, most evident in releases from the label mille plateaux. this kind of highly conceptualised “intelligent” techno and the intellectual reflections on its “deterritorializing” effect had its heyday during the second half of the 1990s. however, deterritorialization might today be found in genres such as glitch hop—following developments in this area would likely be a much more interesting focus for contemporary research. in “vom ereignis erzählen”, diedrich diederichsen refers to the frequently assumed countercultural dimension of techno and argues that the music’s immediate bodily experience is in line with the non-political aspects of the foregone hippy movement (62). the question of “meaning” in often instrumental techno tracks is evaluated by jochen bonz in “am nullpunkt der identifikation”. opposing the ideas inspired by poststructuralist perspectives of alternative identifications for the individual and one’s liberation via techno, bonz claims that the expressive culture of techno is characterized by weak and often short-lived forms of identification, which correspond with the semantic and semiotic openness or even meaningless of the music itself (47). one might argue against bonz’s view that many people deeply identify with certain techno labels, artists or tracks, as is often the case with many other genres of music. the idea that techno is the not-too-distant-cousin of other forms of pop emerges again while reading techno studies and it raises its head once more in the chapter “kommunikative strategien und ideologien von liveness bei laptop performances”, musicologist mark butler exploring how the famous issue of “authenticity” was revived by dj performances. rosa reitsamer goes on to show that physicality is as much a part of the dj’s subcultural capital as both their musical selection and knowledge. the resulting scene hierarchies, which are often linked with categories such as gender or race, have to be seen critically (32). today’s “techno ideologies” and idealized historical narratives often seem to result from not too much more than a series of events that usually begin with the politically-driven ideals of influencers, spread by scene media and eventually being picked up on and backed up by some academic analysts afterwards. furthermore, it is still all too common that the afro-american roots of the genre are ignored (or even “whitewashed”), causing further misinterpretation. in light of its afro-american heritage, characteristics particular to techno, such as pattern repetition or extensive sound manipulation, appear as neither the mere results of new technical possibilities nor as a sudden break in musical or cultural history, but as central stylistic devices to be found in various other genres like rhythm ‘n’ blues, funk, disco or hip-hop. however, despite these general critical remarks, techno studies surely provides some immensely important and critical contributions to the discourses surrounding the field at large, whether that be as subsumed under the umbrella term techno or under today’s more popular term edm. references anz, philipp and patrick walder (eds.). 1995. techno. hamburg: rowohlt. on the content and contribution of mcs in british drum 'n' bass dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 6(2): 42–60 issn 1947-5403 ©2014 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.02.03 on the content and contribution of mcs in british drum ‘n’ bass alistair fraser maynooth university (ireland) abstract drum ‘n’ bass music has received some attention from academics but the contributions of mcs who perform onstage alongside djs in live events and broadcasts needs further consideration. in response, and using mc lyrics, secondary interviews and tweets, this article is a “critical celebration” of what mcs bring to british drum ‘n’ bass. the critique concerns the content of what mcs say, some of which i argue undermines the cultural and economic potential of the music. the celebration explores what mcs bring to drum ‘n’ bass, particularly practices that i suggest should be viewed as community services. i therefore argue that mcs are community workers, providing, leading, building and networking in ways that help generate solidarity, reciprocity, and alliances within and across an overlapping and diverse world of drum ‘n’ bass. keywords: drum ‘n’ bass music, mcs, cooperation, electronic dance music alistair fraser is lecturer in geography at maynooth university, ireland. his work cuts across political, economic and cultural geography, including research on the global food economy, land reform and agrarian change in south africa, and british drum ‘n’ bass music. feature article fraser | on the content and contribution of mcs in british drum ‘n’ bass 43 introduction a key feature of british drum ‘n’ bass is the presence of mcs who perform alongside djs in clubs and raves and on radio and internet broadcasts. mcs usually rap, chant or “spit bars” on top of the music, sometimes with the aim of gently accompanying the music but also in many cases to hype up the crowd. as the author of one of the first books on drum ‘n’ bass, brian belle-fortune, notes, “essentially mcing involves someone speaking and/or singing over the dj’s records. . . . mcs fill the gap between djs, the music and the audience. interacting with the crowd, an accomplished mc turns a flat audience into a good one, a good audience into a hyper one” (1999: 144). mcs, then, are very much “the visible voices and faces of the jungle drum & bass scene” (belle-fortune 1999: 144). thus, as in jamaican dancehall (e.g. see manuel and marshall 2006) and live hip-hop, these lyrical contributions and voicings during live events are a central element of enjoying drum ‘n’ bass (ferrigno 2008; christodoulou 2009). like the music as a whole, which covers a broad range of styles, there is a reasonably large spectrum of mcs, from the more casual and relaxed styles of mcs such as cleveland watkiss, justyce, conrad or sp:mc, to the fast-paced, so-called “crowd hype mcs” such as eksman, funsta, ic3, skibadee or the unique shadow demon coalition mcs (bassman, trigga and spyda). there are mcs who have been around since the first raves, such as mc:gq, navigator, and det; but drum ‘n’ bass has also required that a newer generation emerge, as is perhaps best represented by mcs such as harry shotta or messy. the scene for mcs is therefore quite vibrant as one of the leading mcs, eksman, has noted recently: “never in its history has dnb had so many technical, talented mcs. it’s beautiful to see” (mc eksman 2013). it is important to note here that mcs have always occupied a contentious position in drum ‘n’ bass. for many djs, promoters and followers of the music, they are either not at all welcome or only to be tolerated in small doses: “some punters and djs love mcs [sic] participation. others don’t. some revel in the unbroken lyrical, iambic, trochaic and free verse rhythms. others just aren’t in it” (belle-fortune 1999: 149). this tension leads some prominent mcs to claim that, “mcs by definition in this game are surplus to requirements” (knowledge magazine 2011a). it also means they are often excluded from many of the most important economic spaces in drum ‘n’ bass. for example, many radio shows, including the flagship (but late-night, off-peak) drum ‘n’ bass shows on bbc radio 1 and ministry of sound radio, usually run without mcs, perhaps due to pressure from record labels to let djs profile tracks amidst a crowded and fragmented marketplace, or because the precise spontaneity of mc performances is overly-risqué. some events promoters also tap into a sense among many ravers that mcs overdo it, performing inside events in a narcissistic way, claiming fame, demanding too much attention and ruining the music. mcs can undermine the collective feeling of raving, that sense that the crowd are trying to bounce off of the same vibe, which is then disrupted by an mc spitting bars, even bars about their own life, their importance, say, or their virility; in the process of celebrating their own significance dancecult 6(2)44 and bolstering their cultural capital, mcs can alienate and upset: certainly any drum ‘n’ bass raver in britain will be familiar with the tensions mcs create, not least with the figure of the raver dancing next to you who stops and shouts at you, ‘i fuckin hate mcs’. consequently, events such as rupture in london—whose musical policy is very much at the experimental, less commercial end of the drum ‘n’ bass spectrum—have tried referring to mcs as ‘hosts’ in an attempt to place an emphasis on how the event will be about the music, rather than the surplus-to-requirements mc. at the same time, in the same space of the club or rave, there are also many drum ‘n’ bass followers who enjoy what mcs do. there is clearly a market for their talents and interest in what they do. mcs are listed on flyers for drum ‘n’ bass events. they are booked by promoters to perform alongside specific djs: bassman with grooverider, skibadee with hazard, mc drs with calibre, and so on. and whether spitting bars or performing call and response, there are usually always plenty of ravers buzzing off their contribution. some ravers even sing along to what mcs say, knowing their most popular lyrics from tapes or cds of live events or radio shows. moreover, given the commercial success of grime mcs such as dizzee rascal and wiley and their efforts in reorienting british music towards the mc (see reynolds 2013: 638–40), there are certainly drum ‘n’ bass followers who turn up in part to hear what the star mcs of the scene have to say, even to compare what they can do on a more modest commercial scale with dizzee or others. in short, drum ‘n’ bass mcs are definitely liked by many. regardless of perspective, however, mcs have played a fundamental part in the growth of drum ‘n’ bass music, retaining a strong position within the industry: walk into a drum ‘n’ bass tent at a rave or festival, or head along to a club in a small town or large city in britain and the likelihood is that mcs will be present and performing alongside djs. in this regard, of course, drum ‘n’ bass is quite different to most other edm sub-genres that emerged from the early 1990s, although more recent sub-genres such as grime and dubstep have also emerged alongside an mc culture quite similar to or even more pronounced than drum ‘n’ bass (see hancox 2013; reynolds 2013: 638–40). surprisingly, despite their prominent presence within drum ‘n’ bass music, mcs have not received too much attention in the academic literature dealing with the music (e.g. see morgan and sidnell 2003; ferrigno 2008; fraser and ettlinger 2008; christodoulou 2009; hall 2009; christodoulou 2011; fraser 2012). for instance, in a fascinating recent article in this journal, christodoulou (2011) sidesteps any discussion of the role of mcs in the experience of bass fetishization in london’s drum ‘n’ bass clubs. hall (2009) also neglects any consideration of mcs in an otherwise insightful thesis examining the dancing body in drum ‘n’ bass club culture. likewise, fraser and ettlinger’s (2008) article on what they refer to as the “cultural economy” of british drum ‘n’ bass ignores the role mcs play in creating the spaces within and upon which the music has survived and thrived. but mcs have not been entirely out of the picture. for example, ferrigno (2008) draws on her research on drum ‘n’ bass in the u.s. to briefly note the importance of mcs within broader performance practices, such as the way mcs interact with djs to produce rewinds fraser | on the content and contribution of mcs in british drum ‘n’ bass 45 or “to talk about where they are from (e.g. ‘representin’ from the uk’), where they are performing, and what they and the dj are doing for the audience (e.g. ‘we’re breakin’ it down’)” (2008: 86). and in his comprehensive review of the social dance space in drum ‘n’ bass culture, christodoulou (2009) provides an excellent overview of the origins and meaning of mcs in drum ‘n’ bass (2009: 51–62). he demonstrates, for example, that mcs found a place in drum ‘n’ bass by drawing on talents practiced in reggae sound systems popular among the jamaican and broader west indian community in london. as such, many of the most noticeable mc practices in drum ‘n’ bass can be traced to those origins, probably most especially the use of rewinds, which “involves the mc calling on the dj to re-play a record from its opening bars in response to the exhortations of ‘rewind’ from the audience” (2009: 52). moreover, the use of “call and response” interactions between mcs and the audience, which “involves a succession of two distinct phrases performed by different musicians, whereby the second is heard as a direct response to the first” (2009: 53), reflects the black atlantic diaspora (gilroy 1993) of which many mcs are members. such practices mean that drum ‘n’ bass audiences develop knowledge about what the response might be to specific calls, for example, by no means was it inevitable that everyone in an audience would know “bo!” was the response to stevie hyper d’s call of “junglists are you ready?” (see also morgan and sidnell 2003). participation in drum ‘n’ bass culture therefore generates practices and activities that shape and define the vibe inside events. it follows from all this that mcs need to be seen as closely involved in “actively direct[ing] the social dance practices of the audience by coordinating their activities with the music being played by the dj, of which the mc will be expected to have intimate knowledge as well as the ability to monitor the progress and mixing of records” (christodoulou 2009: 60). this theme is also examined in depth in a fascinating essay by morgan and sidnell (2003), which draws on their analysis of mc performances in canadian drum ‘n’ bass events to demonstrate how mcs “collaborate in intricate ways with both the audience and the dj” in a way that “provide[s] for the observable organization of the social setting” (2003: 271, 287). thus, when an mc such as det says “whistles massive blow, horns massive blow” and audience members do so, they show “that they have both attended to and understood the mc’s talk and are therefore actively engaged in the ongoing course of action being constructed” (2003: 284). considering the role of mcs in british drum ‘n’ bass although mcs have received some attention in the literature on drum ‘n’ bass, i argue more needs to be said. specifically, i present what i refer to as a “critical celebration” of mcs in drum ‘n’ bass. using a selection of mc lyrics, the article is “critical” of three features of what mcs say: sexist, misogynist lyrics; the extent to which mcs focus on party vibes rather than, say, political commentary on the society around them; and the use of a certain narrative about how their place in the drum ‘n’ bass culture reflects their talent and hard work. following the critique, the latter part of the article then presents the “celebration”. in part, i want to celebrate what mcs do because they deserve praise: for me, at least, dancecult 6(2)46 and no doubt for many other followers of drum ‘n’ bass music, mcs have gone a long way towards giving the music its buzz, whether in the club or rave, over the airwaves, or while listening privately during a commute. this is not to say that mcs are always and everywhere a necessary part of the drum ‘n’ bass mix; clearly, as i have noted, there are many followers, not to mention djs and promoters, who would rather do without them. nevertheless, there is no denying that mcs have played a major part in producing the vibe, the hype of drum ‘n’ bass music, hence one reason for my celebration is to acknowledge the central role they play and have played over the last twenty years or so. further, when considering their role in british drum ‘n’ bass (as is my focus), respect is due to talented people from often quite harsh contexts who make a living and a career doing something they love, rather than muddling through often low-paid, casual or un-rewarding employment; that is, recognition is needed for people, like mc gq, who can look back at what they have achieved and be thankful: coming from where i was coming from, wasn’t really a great place, you know what i mean, when i was a youth still, do you understand what i mean? so, you know, the achievements of, from that, d’you know what i mean, with a lot of my friends banged up and whatever, to me doing what i’m doing, and me still kinda being on it, is like i gotta thank god for that, do you know what i mean? i always wake up and feel i’m really really grateful for this blessings that i have and for the opportunities to still fly and do my thing (rinse fm 2012a). that participation in forms of electronic dance music has enabled many such people to generate a living (and often a good living, with travel and the accumulation of experiences far beyond what most of their peers ever achieve) is already well known, especially with regards to djs and music producers (e.g. see fraser and ettlinger 2008: 1650–1). but at least with respect to drum ‘n’ bass music, there is a risk that the achievements of djs and producers overshadows those of mcs. this article aims to acknowledge the contribution mcs make. there is also one final reason for celebrating drum ‘n’ bass mcs and it arises from my analysis of the role they play and the practices they perform inside and beyond the rave. following fraser (2012), i argue that drum ‘n’ bass, like other edm genres, emerged and thrived via “relations of solidarity, reciprocity, generosity, caring, and empathy” (2012: 505); that is, there is an ethic of solidarity which helps produce a process of “accumulation by cooperation” by sharing knowledge, skills, and experiences. drum ‘n’ bass is constituted in part by an arena in which cooperation can occur and a set of relationships that certainly values paid work and earning money, but it also entails relations that generate forms of reciprocity and alliances, from which much of the viability and vibrancy of the music and its cultural economy emerges. getting to grips with this feature of drum ‘n’ bass requires placing it in a wider context, one dominated by changes in british society, especially the emergence of neoliberal mentalities about economy and culture (e.g. see harvey 2005: 55–63). as noted elsewhere fraser | on the content and contribution of mcs in british drum ‘n’ bass 47 (e.g. collin 1997; reynolds 2013), british rave culture emerged in the aftermath of margaret thatcher’s push for deindustrialization and her attack on vestiges of working class unity, especially the trades unions. the emergent neoliberalizing society valued individualism and entrepreneurialism – values that fit and simultaneously clash with central aspects of rave culture. the fit is obvious: consider, for example, how a neoliberal mentality about how to live one’s own life individually and entrepreneurially overlaps with the time spent dancing by one’s self inside the rave, or the entrepreneurship that created new record labels, club nights, or broader promotion companies. there is an undeniable individualism and a strong spirit of entrepreneurialism in rave culture. we do find the ‘bling’, the signifiers of material success, even the sense that rave’s heroes are in many ways thatcher’s children. but at the same time, key values of rave and dance music cultures clash with post-industrial neoliberal society and its mentalities and sensibilities. generating the buzz on the dancefloor is a communal, collective endeavour: an experience of sharing and feeding off of each other, not out-competing others, not out-doing them. likewise, although entrepreneurship has been a central aspect in the successful endurance of rave and dance music cultures, among many of its entrepreneurs there remains a strong emphasis on staying independent – not selling up to a major company, say – not necessarily just chasing the money. and although the economic vitality of rave music cultures such as drum ‘n’ bass has been built in part by taking advantage of regulatory changes that reflect a neoliberalizing britain, this is not to say that a raw, unfettered capitalism is its driving ethos. in short, it seems churlish to imagine that rave cultures would have somehow died in infancy were it not for the changes thatcher pursued: parallels and overlaps between rave cultures and neoliberalizing society exist but so too do disconnects and tensions. it follows from this that, in developing an understanding and then making something of the evident reciprocity and alliances we find in rave cultures such as drum ‘n’ bass, there might be some payoff in locating these practices relative to other examples occurring elsewhere within post-industrial, neoliberal, globalizing society. one particularly striking parallel to consider here is with work in the social sciences aiming to grasp contemporary forms of solidarity and cooperation (e.g. see venkatesh 2002; sennett 2003; gibsongraham 2006; sennett 2012). for example, even in the heartlands of neoliberal society – in fact, precisely in reaction to many of the worst excesses and outcomes of individualism and entrepreneurialism – there is immense social value attached to community work, to taking part and working together with others on projects of a diverse nature. in his call for attention to just such a pro-community spirit of cooperation, richard sennett (2012), argues that we need to understand the possibilities and limitations of working together; that is, how do practices of cooperation help communities take shape or contribute to their breaking up amidst harsh as well as relatively benign social and economic circumstances? communities and a spirit of cooperation need to be understood but also celebrated, not least because they often run counter to today’s hegemonic narrative of neoliberalism, which states that individualism trumps collective action or that entrepreneurship should outweigh solidarity. dancecult 6(2)48 my aim is to examine how drum ‘n’ bass emerges from the continued effort to reproduce just such a spirit of cooperation. to be clear, in talking about drum ‘n’ bass in this way, i do not intend to suggest that its industry or scene is in fact a community; nor do i claim that drum ‘n’ bass is somehow devoid of internal divisions, politics, anger or resentment. but there does remain within the world of drum ‘n’ bass an identifiable loyalty to the music and to co-practitioners; and a clear belief that the music generates a particular type of buzz which demands respect and a future, as indeed the following tweet from mc harry shotta (@haryshotta) demonstrates: “so much love for dnb & all the drums heads, you won’t find another scene with such loyal supporters & such energy in the raves” (harry shotta 2013). the point here: there is a drive among many drum ‘n’ bass practitioners, promoters and punters to generate a communitarian spirit; a feeling that such a community could emerge and in some cases does emerge, albeit temporarily within a rave or across a dispersed geographic setting during a live broadcast. like other efforts to create the right feel on the dance floor, there is within drum ‘n’ bass a belief in the need to recreate the vibe generated in the early 1990s rave scene: that vibe of solidarity and sharing, of doing something original in a way that can cut across social differences and divisions. as actors with a microphone who can verbalize emotions and sensibilities inside events, mcs have to be seen as key players in the production of this communitarian spirit. my aim is to demonstrate that mcs do a lot to translate and promote these sensibilities and beliefs about cooperation into relations and alliances that help move forward the music and those who produce and consume it. specifically, i argue that mcs provide services, or more accurately that they perform ‘community work’ for audiences, promoters, and other artists. the article uses a range of materials. one key source has been mc lyrics. lyrics present the researcher of electronic dance music (edm) with an unusual opportunity, given that the music has a strong instrumental influence. i argue that mc lyrics need to be seen as rich data that can be analyzed and interpreted. in part, my aim in this article is to look closely at the sorts of things that mcs say in their live performances. although a lot of what they say is rather mundane (the sort of repetitive call and response discussed above), mcs also “spit bars” and produce meaningful rhymes that are highly interpretable. there is significant scope to interpret what they say, which this article seeks to attempt. and analysis of some contemporary mc lyrics highlights problematic and positive features. in addition to mc lyrics, i use materials from published interviews with drum ‘n’ bass mcs in magazines, blogs and radio shows; tweets written by drum ‘n’ bass mcs since mid-2011; and some of my own experiences as a follower of drum ‘n’ bass music since 1994. in terms of scope, my work has been focused on british drum ‘n’ bass mcs. i recognize at the outset a british focus offers only a very partial view of the general picture regarding mcs in drum ‘n’ bass music, since the music has grown geographically and its growth has generated new levels of diversity, much as is the case with global hip-hop culture; however i have not been able to conduct a broader analysis. fraser | on the content and contribution of mcs in british drum ‘n’ bass 49 a critique of drum ‘n’ bass mcs: just hot chicks, hotel sex and maintaining the bubble? as much as i might only like to celebrate what mcs do and what they have achieved, it is unquestionably the case that any such celebration must be balanced with a critique of some of the lyrics drum ‘n’ bass mcs “spit”. consider some lyrics from four sets of “bars”, two from mc funsta and two from eksman, both of whom are popular and frequently-booked mcs in british drum ‘n’ bass: bars, it’s all about bars, hot chicks ‘n fancy cars, do your own thing ‘n don’t watch ours, uncontrollablez red like mars. (kool london 2010) please, i only came here for the p’s [pounds], if i’m lucky, i might get some t i t’s [breasts], roll up to the bar, a couple of jd’s [ jack daniels], only thing i wanna do is battle divvy mcs. (kool london 2010) acting like a gangster? i’ll act like a pimp. i’ve got your girl’s phone number, i might give her a link. while you’re working nine to five, i might take her for a drink. then i’ll fuck her from behind, bent over the sink. (kool london 2011)1 yo, she want some hotel sex, hotel sex, she want some hotel sex. hotel sex, she want some hotel sex. in the shower in the bed, bent over the desk. she says “aaaargh that feels amazing”, ekser went stiff with the noise she was making. up down, up down, bed starts shaking, wall starts banging till my back starts aching. (kool london 2011) two points need to be made before proceeding to consider the broader significance of these lyrics. first, neither funsta nor eksman only spit bars such as these: both are versatile and talented mcs who have a wide repertoire of lyrics. second, by no means is it possible to find all mcs in drum ‘n’ bass contributing lyrics such as these. indeed, the counterpoint to what i aim to raise here is dancecult 6(2)50 that drum ‘n’ bass does not have the same level of violently misogynist lyrics as can be found in some areas of u.s. hip-hop / rap (e.g. see adams and fuller 2006; oware 2009). still, the objectifying message funsta and eksman send to women in drum ‘n’ bass audiences is clearly misogynist. they might not purposively contribute to the production of a space that is unwelcoming to women, but their lyrics achieve as much. these lyrics therefore need to be seen as partly generative of the highly masculinist tone of british drum ‘n’ bass. despite efforts to attract women, including promotions that allow women free entry and attempts to book djs who will play music at the less visceral end of the spectrum of drum ‘n’ bass, the british scene retains a “hard” feel. the result: british drum ‘n’ bass has lost much of its female audience. as hall (2009) notes, for example, the ratio of men to women in many events is often 80:20 and at best 60:40 (see also hall 2009: 197–201). this gendered exclusionary tone to british drum ‘n’ bass is particularly curious and problematic because it contradicts one of the music’s more progressive elements: unlike many “elite” edm events (e.g. see measham and hadfield 2009), entering a drum ‘n’ bass event will rarely, if ever, require conforming to any particular dress code: many drum ‘n’ bass practitioners take pride in the fact that the music broke down barriers, particularly racial and class differences within britain (as i discuss below). against this backdrop, it has to be seen as significant that two of the leading mcs in contemporary british drum ‘n’ bass have built their careers whilst using misogynist and exclusionary language. it also suggests that one key task of a drum ‘n’ bass mc is to parade their masculinity by chatting with a bunch of other guys; to show off and have a laugh in a way they think is fine, that is, by teasing each other, boasting about their supposed sexual prowess. it reflects their insensitivity to the diverse audiences to which they seek to appeal; and in this sense at least they undermine the potential for the sort of drum ‘n’ bass dj they tend to perform alongside to truly reach beyond a parochial british male audience. not surprisingly, lyrics by leading mcs such as funsta have led some commentators within the industry to publicly call for an end, as the following tweet from drum ‘n’ bass journalist joanna ronson and subsequent (sarcastic) re-tweet by mc funsta demonstrates: “‘@joannaronson: @funstamc remember our little chat in brizzle? no bars about fanny [vaginas] please. :p’> ooooh :(”. a second line of critique regarding british drum ‘n’ bass mcs is their tendency, if not to entirely eschew politics, then at least to avoid making the sorts of commentaries on contemporary society that their time holding the microphone affords them. there are some exceptions, of course. for example, perhaps one of the most significant lyrics here is mc det’s “black, black, white, white, come together we unite”, which evocatively speaks to some of the progressive racial politics within drum ‘n’ bass, which led mc 2shy (@2shymc) to reflect in public, using the popular #junglememories hashtag: “#junglememories a scene that broke down all barriers regarding races, colours and creeds purely for the love of the music. hardcore jungle d&b” (2shymc 2011; also see fraser 2012). in addition, in one of the few albums by drum ‘n’ bass mcs, i don’t usually like mcs but... by drs, there are some sharp political commentaries on contemporary britain, not the least of which is his fraser | on the content and contribution of mcs in british drum ‘n’ bass 51 track blackhearted, which takes aim at the treatment of children in british public housing schemes: blackhearted children from a home that’s broken won’t eat their greens but i’m sure they’ll smoke ‘em not even fully grown brain but they can’t take the potent but they can’t take the pressure, the only way of coping today they’re famous, yesterday nobody knows ‘em nobody questions why they done it, why their youth was stolen growing in diseased streets, full with parasites and rodents so why they travel in packs, hoods up, expressions frozen or why they cry themselves to sleep at night time lost in these dark estates searching for the right sign. but where they live no shred of hope that you might find with prostitute mothers selling bodies by the road side where drug addicts beat grandmothers for their pensions where the air’s so dirty when you breathe it takes the stench in where alcoholics drink community spirits you can see it in these kids’ faces reaching their limits. so politics—that is, the act of intervening and engaging with what is happening in society as a whole—does feature in drum ‘n’ bass. but the inescapable sense from the music is still that lyrics tend to focus on working with and alongside the music, rather than commenting on the society outside the club or rave. this sentiment is perfectly captured in an interview with mc messy: i’m fully aware of my job on stage, and think about a set in terms of its composition. i should simply be another layer to the tune, which is already massively layered and complicated. what i do should nestle nicely inside the music, with the aim of enhancing its impact. . . . i know the show isn’t about me, and that i’m there to bridge the gap by interacting with the crowd, and maintaining the bubble. (knowledge magazine 2011b; my emphasis). the conclusion: an ideal-typical drum ‘n’ bass mc should steer clear of speaking about society at-large and opt instead to “maintain the bubble”. as funsta has noted: . . . as a voice and a focus point in the parties and on the airwaves, you have to send a positive message. not only because it is the right thing to do, people come out to have a good time not to be reminded of the struggles they have to deal with all week! (knowledge magazine 2011a) perhaps this is fine; like edm as a whole, drum ‘n’ bass is hedonistic and seeks to capitalize on the desire from punters to get away from it all for a few hours (reynolds 2013). maybe the best approach for a drum ‘n’ bass mc is just to downplay politics. maybe the drum ‘n’ dancecult 6(2)52 bass mc should avoid using their opportunity on the microphone to comment critically on the society in which they live, mirroring the prevalence of ‘slackness’ in jamaican dancehall reggae, from which many drum ‘n’ bass mcs took inspiration (see excellent discussion on this issue in various parts of christodoulou 2009). but what a shame. what a shame that not enough of these important and public practitioners of the music offer the sort of commentary on contemporary society that adds a rawness and an edge to the output of many of their peers in hip-hop (e.g. see lamont hill 2010). deemon rocka, one half of the ragga twins, has claimed that drum ‘n’ bass mcs need to blend “consciousness and party vibes” (gale 2013): the evidence seems to suggest that the latter spirit is more important than the former. a final line of critique of drum ‘n’ bass mcs is far less straightforward. to get there, some context is necessary. at issue is the economic and cultural history of drum ‘n’ bass. as noted elsewhere (e.g. fraser and ettlinger 2008; christodoulou 2009), drum ‘n’ bass had humble origins in working and middle class areas of britain from which djs and producers made the music, often using rudimentary equipment, and worked with promoters to make events that took place beyond the more elite or at least mainstream night time economy. that drum ‘n’ bass has flourished so successfully over the last twenty years has been celebrated by many of its leading practitioners, many of whom would never have expected to lead such interesting and well-travelled lives if not for the music (see belle-fortune 1999; fraser and ettlinger 2008: 1650–1). there is, then, a “success narrative” within drum ‘n’ bass which goes like this: talent, when combined with hard work and entrepreneurialism, can deliver material change for working and middle class people, even amidst a harsh capitalist economy. this is a narrative that values persistence, professionalism, and a drive to succeed, rather than pursuing shortcuts via crime, for example. mcs seem to be key audible proponents of this view and some use their time on stage to advance it. consider some lyrics from funsta: do what you like and do what you wanna, don’t grow up to be a suicide bomber, you don’t want fbi to be on ya, killin’ innocent people gets you nowhere. you want the eighth or the chains or the hummers? how you gonna get that? are you gonna get a gat [gatling, a type of gun]? go to university and get your brain fat. that goes out to all, even if your face black. yeah i say that, put the a.k. back, wanna kill another jigga ‘coz he’s got more figures? try be the bigger man and get your own dinners! (funsta 2010) fraser | on the content and contribution of mcs in british drum ‘n’ bass 53 this rhyme is partly a commentary on the possibility that radicalized young people might turn to suicide bombing, as occurred in london in july 2005. but funsta goes further by noting some of the other options facing young people in contemporary britain: theft, guns, or suicide, but then also using talent, skill, education. funsta speaks to the fact that many young people in britain (and many of those in the audiences of clubs or raves in which he performs) will turn to criminal activities for an income given the limited possibilities of finding well-paid employment in the mainstream economy. his message is not to take this route: if you want to get “the eighth [of an ounce of cocaine or marijuana] or the [gold] chains or the hummers [humvee, an automobile produced by am general]”, do not get a gun but rather “go to university and get your brain fat”. i argue the lyrics also have to be seen in the context of the success narrative within drum ‘n’ bass as a whole. the call on audiences is to do as the leading practitioners of drum ‘n’ bass have done: doing the mileage, being professional, putting in the graft; not to rest on their laurels but to get up and get out there, very much in the way margaret thatcher’s conservative governments called upon the british working class to forget waiting for unions or the state to help them and instead become entrepreneurial and forge their own paths towards material enrichment. rather than taking short cuts, rather than getting a gat, the message here is to work hard while in education, say, or via developing an entrepreneurial spirit. that numerous mcs from related genres such as grime have gone on to achieve considerable commercial success only reinforces this sense, even though the hard work that many people in their audiences undertake in the mainstream economy will rarely bring such rewards. this final issue is the crux of the matter: maybe the leading practitioners of drum ‘n’ bass have achieved their success through hard work and entrepreneurialism; and maybe that route is open to all. yet, for every leading light who can talk about their path to success, there are countless others who never managed to overcome the various and multiple constraints and obstacles that confront those who want to avoid the mainstream economy or let their latent shine. “do[ing] what you like and do[ing] what you wanna” is not quite as simple as it sounds. moreover, the quite individualistic view within the success narrative, one that champions personal development, would have few opportunities to be heard if mcs did not also perform a range of other critical roles within drum ‘n’ bass; roles that contribute to the overall success of the music and which in turn enable mcs to reflect on their individual success. any critique of this aspect of drum ‘n’ bass mcs must therefore be juxtaposed with a degree of celebration of the cooperative spirit pervasive within the “scene”. a celebration: mc practices inside and beyond the rave mcs stand (literally, on stage, holding their microphones) at the centre of a drum ‘n’ bass scene in which actors work to generate a communitarian spirit. their most important actions are certainly the words they speak or shout or sing, but as scholars we also need to consider a range of other practices; that is, attention needs to be paid to what mcs do inside and beyond the rave. dancecult 6(2)54 community work inside the rave one among many ways that drum ‘n’ bass connects with my raving life is the way ravers can shape how events unfold. of course, like any dance music event, if no-one gets up and moves then the vibe is never going to be up to much. but in drum ‘n’ bass there is one practice that has gone a long way to make events just that little bit more interactive and participatory: the rewind. drum ‘n’ bass is not the only form of dance music in which these can be found, but it is certainly the case that the practice has played a major part in its success. as morgan and sidnell (2003) and christodoulou (2009) noted, rewinds happens when a dj drops a particularly good track, perhaps one that ravers have never heard before, or when a ‘classic’ is played (such as konflict’s messiah or alex reece’s pulp fiction). one indicator that a rewind will occur is the crowd reaction: shouts from the crowd of “bo-bo-bo” or waving hands in the air. the mc is a crucial mediator in these situations; although rewinds can happen even without them, when present a key task for the mc is certainly to interact with the crowd and use the microphone to call to the dj for a rewind, often to the annoyance of the dj who might already have begun mixing in the next track (hence this can be one source of tension between djs and mcs). there is, therefore, a fair bit of interaction between the mc, sometimes the dj, and the raving crowd inside drum ‘n’ bass events, precisely because ravers know there is the possibility that a meaningful track can be pulled up and played again. for this reason, mcs are not just welcomed by many drum ‘n’ bass followers, but for plenty they are absolutely central to the vibe, to the very buzz they are seeking; hence, drum ‘n’ bass in a club or rave without an mc can feel under-populated, empty, even quiet. when they are doing their job effectively, mcs hype up the audience and make events exciting, more enjoyable, even unforgettable. thus, according to mc dynamite, who rose to fame in drum ‘n’ bass via magical performances alongside roni size in the mid-1990s: “live performances are all about getting the crowd involved, making them feel like every tune is their favourite, even if they haven’t heard it before” (knowledge magazine 2011c). stepping back and contemplating the significance of these roles, it is important to view mcs not just as collaborators inside the rave but also as providers of a service. and not just these services. for example, mcs might pass on information about tracks played by djs, which is especially welcomed by those so-called “trainspotters” who desperately want to know which producer made which track. then there are the requests for security or the promoter to come to the dj booth; for the driver of a car with a certain license plate to go outside and check their vehicle; and of course for the sound engineer to turn up the volume. mcs also pass on various messages to their audiences and to other artists and industry insiders, which might take the form of a “shout out”, “big up”, or a “hold tight” to this or that mc, dj, producer, promoter, or whoever. finally, there are also various “shouts” to people in the audience in live events (or to listeners to web or radio shows who might send in sms text messages or emails). these sorts of voicings are far from mundane. they signify who is important, who deserves to be mentioned; and they might be used to help cement otherwise weak ties between different “crews” or groups of drum ‘n’ bass practitioners. fraser | on the content and contribution of mcs in british drum ‘n’ bass 55 i suggest that all of these services are forms of community work akin to what sennett (2012) argues is needed to make cooperation viable. in their interactions with the crowd to get rewinds or through shout outs or demands on sound engineers, mcs “practise commitment” (2012: 247–73) to drum ‘n’ bass by passing on and helping to build knowledge about its world in a way that makes attending an event seem important, worthwhile, valuable. given the origins of the music in the early 1990s rave scene in britain and especially the ground-up and communitarian spirit that existed then, these forms of community work retain a value in drum ‘n’ bass: there remains a real sense that the music and the culture and economy around it should be cooperative, collaborative, shared, as well as independent and strong. although they appear to be performing a seemingly mundane set of services inside the rave, mcs need to be viewed as crucial interlocutors in the ongoing effort to renew solidarities and build a set of collaborative relations that help make it possible for drum ‘n’ bass to survive and expand. beyond the rave: leading, building and networking what they do inside the rave is important; but mcs perform a range of other practices that also need to be seen as community work. there are two sets of issues to consider here. the first is what i refer to as their practices of “leading and building”. one key way to see this is to note how active some prominent mcs have been in promoting their own events and re-shaping the scene as they do so. mc eksman, for example, has been successfully running his own overload events since 2009. he discussed how this emerged in a recent interview: alright, so basically there was a guy from bristol who used to run a night called overload and i used to perform down there at all his gigs…and he was selling his brand, he was like he’s had enough, it’s not working for him; and i saw what he’d built up and i thought do you know what with what i could bring to the table i could make this work…” (rinse fm 2012b). his efforts have paid off: overload events continue and have become a mainstay on the crowded london drum ‘n’ bass calendar. meanwhile, another london-based mc, shabba d, has had success with his sticky events, a selling point of which is that women enter free of charge (at least, before 11pm). part of his thinking was that not enough women were attending drum ‘n’ bass events (as i noted earlier in the article); as such, his efforts have been aimed at trying to re-make the terrain in which drum ‘n’ bass is played: . . . i mc at different venues all over the country and world and i just don’t think there’s enough girls in drum ‘n’ bass. . . . i think there’s less trouble when there’s more girls in the place, you know, why you gonna fight with a man when there’s ten sexy girls in front of ya dancing? . . . and we started off really small and it’s just got big, man. dancecult 6(2)56 . . . and not maximum promotion, as well, we just done things our way and maybe a couple of times last minute, but i think scala has helped us as well, because that’s a big venue and to the drum ‘n’ bass ravers, they don’t get to use it all of the time, either, so that’s been good for us. . . . and they’ve all been good, man. . . . so we do girls don’t pay and we got sticky presents masters of ceremony which is more based on the mc, which is what i am, so for the up-and-coming man to come through as well, so it’s a good thing, do you know what i mean? and yeah some of the parties: different crowds, different crowds, people come to the raves and say ‘you know what shabbs, that’s a different crowd’” (rinse fm 2011). as shabba notes, running events is not just about building and shaping the way drum ‘n’ bass is experienced; rather shabba is showing leadership by trying to “bring in” up-andcoming talent, something eksman has also discussed with respect to his events: if you want the scene to move forward you’ve gotta bring in the new talent, you can’t be greedy. . . . the longer the scene is, the longer everyone eats. . . . what makes me different to a lot of promoters is that i’m an artist, i know what it’s like to come through (rinse fm 2012b). in taking on these tasks, both eksman and shabba are showing leadership, striving to build the scene, making a difference. they have not been satisfied with receiving bookings but have opted instead to shape the cultural economy of drum ‘n’ bass. and much of that work they have done for themselves, as eksman noted: just ‘cause i am who i am it doesn’t mean i can’t stand outside a rave and put in the work. even the other night i was out putting up boards and stuff. at the end of the day if you want something you gotta put in the work and that’s what i’m all about (rinse fm 2012b). if the first way to see mcs performing community work beyond the rave is their practices of leading and building, the second set of issues is about their work as “networkers”. in part, this sort of work reflects the overlapping nature of drum ‘n’ bass, with various “crews”, such as those associated with a particular record label or radio station, or even perhaps groups from a particular area. but these groups overlap, working and performing together in events or by remixing each other’s music. as i have noted, one role that mcs have inside the rave is to give “shout outs” to individuals as well as members of these various crews. outside the rave, too, mcs take on this role over the airwaves or on internet broadcasts. it follows from this that mcs should be viewed as key linkers, making connections, “bigging up” others, or spotting opportunities to emphasize the community vibe needed to make an event roll. as the following quote from mc eksman demonstrates, by having a microphone and the time and space to speak to their audience, mcs have the opportunity to pass on thanks, recognition, big ups; that is, they have the opportunity to go beyond collaborating and leading by linking up the overlapping networks that constitute the drum ‘n’ bass: fraser | on the content and contribution of mcs in british drum ‘n’ bass 57 hold tight the kool crew, maximum boost going out every time. hold tight all the djs, all the mcs, all the producers, promoters, everybody involved in our scene in england abroad, everywhere, making it strong. remember it’s not about competing, it’s about linking, making it bigger [...] right we’re signing out like this. original. logan-d, eksman, herbzie. don’t forget to catch us up here a bit more. that’s right. representing drum n bass. time to put the work in. and represent. to all the followers. hold tight the brockie. hold tight the ragga twins. hold tight the shabba, fatman [...] hold tight the skibba wherever ya dere, big up the harry shotta what’s going on, fam? to all the massive representing drum & bass jungle making moves, hold tight the danny friction. hold tight the sp. big. out to the biggie, hold tight majika, hold tight joe, that’s how we roll. out to the lloyd, big up all the innovation crew, hold tight ollie. hold tight the phantasy. hold tight the clayton, hold tight all the breakin science massive, yeah? hold tight the definition crew. to everybody making moves. (kool london 2011; my emphasis) in addition to these forms of collaboration, mcs have been, and are arguably becoming more important as providers of lyrics on tracks made by drum ‘n’ bass producers. of course, inside the club or the rave mcs collaborate by adding a live lyrical layer to mostly instrumental music and this helps create the vibe on the dance floor; such practices of live collaboration multiply the power of the beats and knowing that mcs might add such lyrics frees up producers to make instrumental music. drum ‘n’ bass mcs also conduct studio work, even if not as much as some mcs would like: for example, mc eksman has discussed his regret at the limited amount of time producers have given mcs to make vocal tracks (rinse fm 2012b). unlike the outstanding commercial success of grime mcs, few of these collaborations have hit the charts, perhaps with the exception of dj marky, xrs and mc stamina’s lk. i argue these practices make mcs key networkers in drum ‘n’ bass. they spend time in the studio with producers and work to create outputs that might have commercial potential, but more realistically and practically are aimed at busting up dance floors; that is, these forms of collaboration are not just about getting in the studio to make tunes that can make money, but are undertaken for the sake of the art, for the sake of doing something that will last, indeed for the sake of doing something that will contribute to the greater good. in a way, then, these collaborations are aimed at leaving a mark, which one drum ‘n’ bass pioneer, doc scott (@docscott31), has called on others to consider in a recent tweet: “when everything is said & done. did you leave a legacy? did you make a mark? were you even noticed? or did you just make some money?” (doc scott 2012). conclusion like other forms of edm, drum ‘n’ bass has its own feel, its own vibe. on the dance floor, it is very much about building up for the drop, letting it come down, riding the rolling bassline, enjoying the mixdown, waiting for the next drop, and bam: we’re off again. drum dancecult 6(2)58 ‘n’ bass has both a jump-up-and-down, as well as a roll-with-it, let-it-flow feel. mcs add to all this, at least in my view. they perform, act, work it; they move the audience, bring them along, take them away, even. they are important. having people who take a microphone and “spit bars”, as well as provide the sorts of community services i have explored above, has been an asset to drum ‘n’ bass. mcs have helped the “scene” survive and thrive. thus, this group of lyrically-proficient and often highly talented mcs has been critical in creating a vibrant, exciting and interconnected world of drum ‘n’ bass, thereby contributing to the creation of what dowdy (2007) has referred to as its ‘interactive spaces of collective identity’ (dowdy 2007). but as this article has also reviewed, mcs also undermine drum ‘n’ bass. in part because many of them are in (what chang [2007: 335] has elsewhere referred to as) the “[f ]ullest agitation of their becoming”, some of their lyrics are misogynist and exclusionary. it follows that, inasmuch as i believe scholars of edm need to celebrate the way mcs have built careers and lives, incomes and opportunities in ways that empower them, albeit in a fragile way, to accumulate wealth and experience via numerous forms of cooperation; such a celebration needs to be tempered by recognizing how they also undermine the sort of vibe and feel that i expect all of us love about edm. notes 1 calling attention to eksman’s dig at the nine to five worker must be balanced by the following tweet: “@eksman_mc after this early morning rise, i salute all the 9-5 people... makes me appreciate my job a million times more!” (mc eksman 2012). references adams, terri m. and douglas b. fuller. 2006. “the words have changed but the ideology remains the same—misogynistic lyrics in rap music.” journal of black studies, 36: 938–57. 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“’trying to break it down’: mcs’ talk and social setting in drum & bass performance”. in global pop, local language, ed. harris m. berger and michael thomas carroll, 269–90. jackson, uk: university press of mississippi. oware matthew. 2009. “a ‘man’s woman’? contradictory messages in the songs of female rappers, 1992–2000.” journal of black studies, 39: 786–802. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0021934707302454>. reynolds, simon. 2013. energy flash: a journey through rave music and dance culture. london: faber and faber. rinse fm. 2011. uncle dugs with special guest mc shabba d. 11 no 2011: <http://www.mixcloud.com/dizzyuk/rcff-uncle-dugs-rinse-fm-special-guest-mcshabba-d-111111/> (accessed 28 august 2013). ———. 2012a. uncle dugs with special guest mc gq. 25 may 2012: < http://www.mixcloud.com/dizzyuk/rcff-uncle-dugs-rinse-fm-special-guest-mc-gq-25512/> (accessed 28 august 2013). ———. 2012b. uncle dugs with special guest mc eksman. 27 july 2012: <http://www.mixcloud.com/dizzyuk/rcff-uncle-dugs-rinse-fm-special-guest-mceksman-27712/> (accessed 28 august 2013). sennett, richard. 2012. respect in an age of inequality. new york: norton. ———. 2012. together: the rituals, pleasures, and politics of cooperation. london: yale university press. venkatesh, sudhir. 2002. the rise and fall of a modern ghetto. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. discography alex reece. 1995. pulp fiction. metalheadz (12-inch): meth 011. <http://www.discogs.com/alex-reece-pulp-fiction-chill-pill/release/2779665>. dj marky and xrs. 2002. lk ‘carolina carol bela’. v recordings (12-inch): v035. <http://www.discogs.com/dj-marky-xrs-featuring-stamina-mc-lk-carolina-carol-bela/ release/3124941>. konflict. 2005. messiah. renegade hardware (12-inch): rh65. < http://www.discogs.com/konflict-messiah-beckoning/release/391800>. kool london. 2010. dj ruffstuff with mc funsta. digital recording no longer available online. ———. 2011. dj logan d with mc eksman and mc herbzie. digital recording no longer available online. mc drs. 2012. i don’t usually like mcs but… soul:r (14 × file, album, mp3): soulr057. <http://www.discogs.com/drs-i-dont-usually-like-mcs-but/release/3830179>. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0021934707302454 http://www.mixcloud.com/dizzyuk/rcff-uncle-dugs-rinse-fm-special-guest-mc-shabba-d-111111/ http://www.mixcloud.com/dizzyuk/rcff-uncle-dugs-rinse-fm-special-guest-mc-shabba-d-111111/ http://www.mixcloud.com/dizzyuk/rcff-uncle-dugs-rinse-fm-special-guest-mc-gq-25512/ http://www.mixcloud.com/dizzyuk/rcff-uncle-dugs-rinse-fm-special-guest-mc-eksman-27712/ http://www.mixcloud.com/dizzyuk/rcff-uncle-dugs-rinse-fm-special-guest-mc-eksman-27712/ http://www.discogs.com/alex-reece-pulp-fiction-chill-pill/release/2779665 http://www.discogs.com/dj-marky-xrs-featuring-stamina-mc-lk-carolina-carol-bela/release/3124941 http://www.discogs.com/dj-marky-xrs-featuring-stamina-mc-lk-carolina-carol-bela/release/3124941 http://www.discogs.com/konflict-messiah-beckoning/release/391800 http://www.discogs.com/drs-i-dont-usually-like-mcs-but/release/3830179 strobe light salvation michael arty ghannoum independent author <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.01.13> my friend kurt is the driver. we’re doing 140 on the 720 east with eight pills, ten grams of weed, an open mind, and a ticket worth a full day’s salary. we have to get there before the line-up consumes the block. he tells me it’s a party...well not exactly a party. he tells me it’s like an event...but not exclusive. it is like a nightclub...but some call it a temple. “hello...can you prep before we get there?” the driver reminds me. “prep what? it’s a pill you pop and voila no?” i pull out the bag and weigh it in my hand. “ha! it is not just a pill; it is not just any magical bean you swallow and hope for the best, it is a delicate and complex composition of ethyl’s methyl’s and...” “it is powder, in caplet, powder made in a bathtub”. i respond in a motherly tone. “how crude...mdma my boy is not to be fucked with. it is about high time you are reminded of that. it’s not for always, it’s not even for today, but it’s here tonight...for you to experience the flip side of things...” kurt pulls out his inner encyclopedia and explains to me how it’s the leading ingredient in ecstasy; the touchy feely side of the drug. it enhances the senses a thousand times over, and then a thousand times under, leaving its users in a hypnotic trance towards an unparalleled unison. quite the promise for someone in my rather depressed state. already he’s dragging me against my will, in hopes to change my life. what does he know about this place that i don’t? “listen, tell me now, it’s either you in or out. not good to double guess yourself on this shit. take one enjoy it and then...whatever...no worries dude. just puke it out if you’re feeling totally off...” a very reassuring introduction to my night, i have my survival based on my ability to puke on demand and a stoners ability to administer cpr on the dance floor. all hands on deck captain this is going to be a bumpy ride. “ya ya no worries dude. fuck it what’s the worst that can happen?” “dats it buddey...so let’s go mutha fucka, you parachuting that shit or not?” a parachute consists of a small piece of rolling paper, in which you empty out the said capsule. one sprinkles the powder gently in the center, fold it once into a triangle and then roll in the sides to create a small onion shaped package. at which point you lick the sticky part onto the center creating a square tablet. i know i’ve used three different shapes to describe what we once called a parachute, but the point of the package is that it slowly goes down your throat and melts in your belly. kurt believes in the theatrics of pleasure, he says it’s not the same without them. “it’s what separates us from junkies”, he’s said time and time again. a rather delicate task when you’re racing through traffic... we arrive at a sketchy parking lot. in front is our destination, a small black door, with a man in front. his face is...cheerful, but i don’t hear any music outside...i never understood why he loves this place so much. he’s only been a few times, but it’s as if he needs to come back rather than wants to. a need is after all a dire want, and as his number two i guess it is my turn to see what he sees. perhaps it’s the freedom he feels? under the cover darkness, while the world is a sleep, a few boys enter a big black box of mystery; it does have a nice ring to it. “how many did you make?” “four”. “cool. we take one now so that it hits by the time we get there and get inside. “what about the rest?” “we’ll put half in my sock half in yours; at least if one of us gets caught the other can still supply the night...just chill...let’s fucking party”. i toss the paper caplet in my mouth and i hear a million voices screaming ‘no’, and only one whispering ‘yes’. we walk up to the entrance. i’m waiting in line at the door. at this point they begin admitting us, like cattle. one by one, side by side, tickets in our hand, drugs in our shoes, we seem to be ready for whatever’s coming. “seem” is definitely the best way to put it, for most things. i can assume everyone is here to get wasted and laid. but there’s something about the crowd that suggests something more. bah, a fool’s chase. these kids around me might be thirty but they’re still human in the end. how different can they be? the bouncer is smiling...odd...the couple in front of me must be at least my mother’s age, not calling her old or anything but they seem like they went to woodstock in high school. walking relics from an age where rebellion was converted into cash, where free love was being just like everyone else; how far we have come indeed. “welcome home”. the bouncer greets the couple. they smile. the kind of smile that takes them back to their youth, as it unfolds for them at 128 slides per minute. with a quick tear of my ticket, i’m in. the hostess gives me that same grin. she knows it’s my first time, i’m like a virgin on prom night; anxious, curious, and entering the lion’s den. her face is telling me that i shouldn’t worry. that we, those who chase freedom, have all been where i am standing now. it’s as comforting as a pond at the bottom of a waterfall. a punk girl takes my jacket; i tip her a coin and begin to walk the steps up to the room. there are only twelve but it feels like every step is taking something out of me. my stomach feels like molten iron. my heart begins to race as i stumble on the fourth step. the bouncer chuckles. it is not nervousness, it’s not fear. it is that voice that said “yes. what’s the worst that can happen?” that’s creeping me out the most. devils usually stay in hell, angels in heaven; i guess the dance floor is my realm, fuck’em all right? “raise your arms and spread your legs sir”. a colossus stairs me down and pat’s me alike. the drugs are in my tummy you fool, and the other two are in my socks. lower and lower... “take off your shoes please...sir?” “ya sorry i was just...distracted by the track”. “mhm but i still need you to take off your shoes”. he reaches for my feet and i shit a ton of bricks. he feels them clearly. he would be a shitty bouncer if he didn’t. a stare. he isn’t looking away, he sees every last milligram of sweat on my face. what is he going to say? please don’t call the cops, please don’t kick my ass, and please don’t take my drugs... “it’s his first time”. kurt responds. i guess that makes a difference when you’re about to get pummelled for smuggling drugs into a club. the security guard pulls me from the back shoulder towards his mouth and whispers in my ear. “garbage, now”. i’m relieved i still have both my legs, but am kind of upset i wasn’t sent back home. the only thing scarier than our journey to find salvation is accepting when and where we find it. beyond the curtained entrance, i stare in awe at a black and red couch harem. chirping like little birds, these ravers are buzzing around me without a single sense of awareness, manner, or restraint. heads tilted back as if everyone is asking “is my nose clean?” and a slacked lower jaw...what am i doing here? “the music”...a voice answers me. “but they don’t care, they don’t care if you are or aren’t here”. all i see are flashing lines of white clothing in an otherwise haphazard sea of bobbing heads. the crowd is imbued with debauchery and delirium. they speak to no one as they are mesmerized by the dance of light and mirrors. “we are human...after all...” the speakers answer my desperate search for understanding. and then, for the first time in my life, i feel a wave... “sugaa, you going to need this”. kurt smiles and hands me a bottle of vitamin water. his lips are tickling his eye lids. i’ve never seen him so happy, and he’s stepping up and down, with no moment of calm or steadiness. “it seems natural”. “hahaha i told you!” splurges kurt. i just realized i spoke out loud. it went from thought to speech without any filter or pause. my stomach sends another gurgle as we head to the dance floor. does one eventually get used to this place...? “i guess it’s about time we get into this mess”. kurt waves his hand commanding me to follow and charges forward. tints check! out of the pocket and onto the nose, my world goes from dark to black and i snap my feet on the dance floor. step by step the music gets louder, thirteen to reach the top, a perilous journey in search of pleasure. “breathe...” step one. this is probably karma biting me in the ass, amongst the rest of the shit i owe her. step two. i think i’m in a comfy place...i did eaves drop a “welcome home”. step three. this music is called house or tech house or... step four. currents of electricity manifested into a breath? gaze? thought? no of course not, what were you thinking of again? step five. should i feel at home here...yes that was the thought. step six. i am attaching myself to the strangers around me. step seven. we are sharing a common instability. step eight. the unknown is comforting when the abyss becomes your haven. step nine. where your movement becomes a voice, where your voice becomes an image. step ten. an image i can trust, is it just on account of the shades? step eleven or are they really blind? step twelve. well they sure as hell can’t hear me thinking. step thirteen. i reached the dance floor. “bliss”. the ravers are doing their thing as they prance and dance in a fixed two-step radius. i got my outfit and a candy bottom water bottle, but is that enough? should i find my own dance turf so i can seemingly integrate myself into the crowd? or do i pull the cool guy right ankle over left and lean on the couches to spot out potential numbers? no one seems to be talking all that much, very few are sitting from what i see from this angle. i might as well do as they do. but when in rome, do people act roman for pleasure or do they go with their own baggage to make basilica their bitch? i look at these romans and the musical orgy performed in front of my eyes and can still only ask myself “why”, and “how”...thump thump thump thump the base calls to its spectators and they obey its every command. “fuck!” “what’s wrong?” kurt perplexed by my sudden burst of discomfort. “it’s not kicking in...i’m getting antsy as fuck man, this is bullshit, i knew that fucker must have hustled us”. “hahaha! dude just calm down! don’t think about it! let the music guide you, that bean is just a key, you still have to walk up and open that door, just...just...listen”. “should i take another one?” “chill the fuck out, it’s been twenty minutes. we’re here, you don’t want to get too cracked, so just chill and enjoy the music”. i could have been at work in five hours. surrendered to some mundanity and not have to worry about escaping. it would have been another eight hour shift. a good lump sum in my hand, i could have asked the new intern out. but nooooo, i chose not to go and do all those “normal” things right? living like a bohemian mutha fucka, isn’t that right? so which is it going to be this time? who am i impressing, what does my honor cost me this time? my stomach begins to gurgle. every time i think of what to do and when or why the gurgles beat me down stronger...just let go...let go where? who are these people around me? at least at a club i could differentiate between the drunkards, brawlers, players, pushers, hoes, bitches, teases, bangersand, anyone else up and down the social mosaic. it’s easier to know people when they are wearing a mask, but here, there are none. there are no sides, there are no types, no faces, no styles, just vibes. there is only the dj, the dancers and the dance floor. these creatures of the night juggle mind and soul in an attempt to brew their dreams through musical retreat. how artificial has their salvation become? are they just faking it till they make it to true happiness? is happiness being digested in my stomach now with a crude cocktail of chemicals seeping into my bloodstream? keep pumping that stim stim stim stimuliii, stim stim stim stimuliii and all will be well in the end. something about this highway to pleasure doesn’t seem right. it all seems too natural to be real, too easy to accept and too hard to understand. the music, the harmony, the synchronicity of the mix, all so delicately timed to pull you back as you begin to step forward. it breathes air into your sails as you dream of the waterfall you so desperately need to fall off from to wake up. strange...my fingers are really hot...and i’m getting this...numbing feeling when i open and close...space...between fingers... bathroom. rinse your face off kid, i think those burritos are kicking in...oh shit...do i have to take a shit...what the fuck...okay run... check for toilet paper and minimal jizz on the seat and let it drop. and the beat goes on... “hey...where is the bathroom?” i ask a prancing bambi as i attempt to hide my flinching and gas induced face twitches...twitch...twitch...did i just blink nine times between our responses...? “down on your left”. she smiles, and gives me a long amphetamine-induced stare. time seems to stand still in that moment until i realize how long this beat has been going on. inhale, strobe, exhale, inhale, strobe, exhale. she raises her hand and touches my face. her hand feels like a thousand little feathers caressing my skin. like my cheek is the wind, dancing in a harem of silk and velvet. “come with me you”. i follow her without a second thought. “hold on a second”. i don’t want to break my harmony, i want to, nay, i must stay exactly here for as long as i... “what’s wrong?” the goddess questions my faith. “i feel...slow...and...awake... i’m sorry... it’s just i’ve...” i have never felt this way in my life. my body and mind have joined in a surge of pulses and wobbles that break every thought into a thousand little whispers. not only can i not move but i cannot think of moving, let alone finish my sentence. “shhhhh don’t worry about it, just listen to what he’s saying”. she’s the most beautiful thing i’ve ever seen. i would spend an eternity staring at her long brown hair, her perky cheek smile, those small puckery lips, and the owl-like eyes i see behind the sunglasses. the music stops. we stop dead in our tracks as if our minds and bodies are connected. we look behind us and see a giant disco ball towering over us from atop the stairs. a new day, a new sun, that awakens us all with... flangers? swooshes...? swoosh.swoooooooshh.swoooooooooooshhhh. the dj slices through the crowd, with three turns of a dial. thousands have fallen with the murderous break; thousands are reborn with the rolling drop, such is the cycle of the dance floor. the sound waves crash into the loop of my ears, and grind my heart to a thundering stop. the swoosh penetrates my spine and i begin to stare at the ceiling. i raise my hands in the air. open them slowly, and begin to caress the space around me. it is not empty. it never is and it never was. a wavering blast of bass slaps me across the face. i turn to look at my venus, and she kisses me on the steps. i was in love once and i could comfortably say this is greater than love. it is beyond love, it is beyond reason and second only to the thought of an eternal paradise without woes, questions or prisons. in this kiss i understand why a grain of sand is exactly where it is. the kiss ends...the song changes. she laughs and drags me to the bathroom. every step i take feels calculated and predetermined as if i know what is about to happen. into a stall we go and a little white bag of hope appears. she smiles, and hands me her hand with a slithering powdered worm from her thumb to the crease of her wrist. her lips aren’t moving, but i hear her voice in my mind. she forbids me to do anything else but accept her gift. sniff...my eyes role back as a rush of energy fills up my nose, sliding down my throat and with an awkward gulp the creature numbs my face from fin to chin. “what do you love?” what the fuck did she just ask me? wait, you can hear the answer already, even before she said it. you heard her ask it twenty minutes ago. it was rehearsed. the two of us have been practising this moment without even knowing it. it can’t be this perfect. puzzle, piece by sound, beat by nail. dear lord i just took your throne. “i love...me... i love you”. another smile. she draws another chalk line, steps out. gives me one more kiss. i pull her in and take off my shirt. she bites my ear, and i lick her neck, every hair on my body stands and the bass penetrates the walls of the stall, tickling every toe, stinging every surface, pulping every pout. i can hear the dj talking to me, telling me what to do. where to put my hand, what to touch, what to press, when to nibble and when to hump. she follows the script. uttering moans and sighs till i was convinced she was my wife, the world watching and cheering me on as i unbuckle my pants. i can feel her thoughts and read her mind through her eyes. “wait” she still has her glasses on. she lifts them off her head. did she just hear me? have i been saying all of this aloud...? he whispers yes and stops my pants from dropping. this isn’t like me, surely i’m...hallucinating? inebriated? fucked up? dead? “i’m sorry...i can’t do this...my boyfriend is upstairs. i told him i was going to buy a bottle and i saw you and i knew what you needed to see, what you were missing... i couldn’t leave you there. that’s how we vibe”. she gently taps me off, pulls out a capsule and the baggy of blow. cracks em both and in one motion slides both through her nostril. sniff, burn, ouch and she’s gone. i have no idea what she was talking about, but it made absolute and perfect sense. “one...one what...” my jaw drops and i mumble a few more “ones” and “whats” as i attempt to understand what the fuck just happened. “you’ve just been lit babe”. “lit?” “living in trance baby, living in trance”. from that moment forward it felt like i no longer needed to think of my night. it was perfect, a thousand years of knowledge acquired in a bathroom stall...who would have thought... i wonder how long i’ve been gone...kurt... i step outside and scan the harem for my companion. “duuuuddddeeee. how you feeling man?” my partner in crime calls out. he's lost his shirt and part of his mind. his jaw hanging after every word, as if he was a famished beast returning from a gruesome grisly gastronomical gestation of gnarling gargling giggles. if i were to begin explaining to him my reliving of creation, i would never finish. “do you feel different, funny, bro do you feel fucked up, like the small prickly things on your hand? you got the rolly eyes?” his pupils are growing through his sunglasses and are spying into my soul. every new word he says becomes an echo in the back of my mind. “bro did you tap her, oh my god man this is just so...fuck man i love you bro... i’m so happy you came with me finally...watch bro...watch this...watch the music... the harmony bro, the fucking harmony just rising and dropping”. he turns back staring at the red and black decor, the projector screen pulsing shadows to the sound of electronized distortion. watch, tick tock tick tock, this be the tale of the tattle tale clock. my eyes stride like a metronome, as the snaps and snares of the track infect my feet and polish the dance floor with my sweat. overlapping sight and sound ensure our ability to feel what we think, and understand what we know. the speaker is pulling me into its cone. through the beat i see it, my feet, their wrong, its right left...not left right...right...left...right...left...up...down...right...left...stomach, chilled, shit, suppressed, mind, absent, feelings, high, it seems to my senses, that every key of this track is a...key. “i need to sit”. “go get some water dude, your sweating buckets”. i nod my head, confused and amazed at how he knew when i was thirsty, although...i don’t feel thirsty...be safe...listen to the ferrymen. red to white, black to white, white to black, white to red. i put both hands on the cold counter, red to triangle. “one water please”. i thought i was yelling at the top of my lungs, but only a peep came out of my mouth. i throw a twenty on the table before she says the price. i do not think twice about the change, she just saved my life, she’s a heroine. what is my $20 worth in the fifty years i will be living after this day? day...what time is it...? i see my friend loafing on a sofa, his back bent against the red leather cushion, legs stretched long across the hallway, and his head hanging on the other side of the couch. he’s staring at an ominous void between his mind and reality. i can feel that nothing is going through his head except a sense of bliss, generated by the musical potion bubbling around us. he grabs the water out of my hand, takes a long sip, awakens from his coma and forces me to drink the rest. i sit quietly next to him following the orders of the beat. i can follow where it’s going, the journey has only just begun and i find it as difficult to swallow as the water... i couldn’t be happier. “what time is it bro?” we check the clock... i must be really fucked up...we've been here for at least five hours... i had time to fall in love, shit, have an existential crisis, solve two out twelve riddles of the cosmos, enter the hellish void of imagination, die and be revived by the sexiest trance maiden i’ve ever seen... surely it can’t be 5:36. author biography “a thousand stories unfold in a blink of an eye”, is an armenian expression that stuck with michael ghannoum in his career as an independent writer. graduated from concordia university in history, michael is a traveller, raver, and community leader in his home town of montreal. fear in the festival field: threat, apprehension and apathy kaitlyne a. motl university of kentucky (us) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2017.09.01.11> threat i beg your pardon?! after more than fifteen hours of driving and the associated strains that attend new field sites, i wanted to give the group of neighboring campers the benefit of the doubt—even after calling them out on their ear-splitting racist banter. they couldn’t have actually said that. after all, i was alone and in an unfamiliar place; no less, this band-of-brothers was quickly draining any physical or emotional capacity to ignore their grotesque impersonations of racial stereotypes. i was no stranger to the jam band/edm events that i had spent the several years prior enjoying as a fan and was used to the customary off-color shenanigans of festival participants. yet, it was different now. i was now approaching them as researcher who desperately needed “rapport” to elicit the honest and insightful conversations that would substantiate and validate my project. the emergent spokesman of the offending group repeated it again, slowly and fueled by the icy support of his brethren. “if we see you again, we will rape you”. it felt as if the entire universe had been sucked through a pinpoint to the right of my heart. turning away, i heard the quiet murmurs of the group rising to a buzzing roar as i disassembled the tent that i had spent too long assembling a few hours before. i could still hear them through the glass windows of my locked car as i tried to sleep, knowing that i’d need to be in tip-top shape for tomorrow’s rounds of dissertation interviewing at this large edm festival located in the midwestern united states. still now, several years later, i wonder if they watched me sleep. *** women experience marginalization in all scenes; edmc is no exception. women’s experiences are infrequently represented in dominant edmc narratives and positions of power within the subcultural scene (farrugia 2009; olszanowski 2012). as i navigated my dissertation fieldwork exploring identity, belonging, and the impacts of edmc’s mainstreaming, i began to notice the many ways that women who participate in edmc are marginalized, even as researchers. for some researchers, ethnographic fieldwork magnifies the intersecting inequalities of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability that they face outside of these settings. researchers’ social locations may offer them enhanced access to field sites, rapport with study participants, and a sense of security within these spaces (bhardwa 2013; robinson 2013; rosendahl 2013). however, researchers who are marginalized by their social positions may experience heightened interpersonal discomfort as they interact with antagonistic research participants (perrone 2010; bhardwa 2013) or as they negotiate their own identities and actions in response to the ever-shifting dynamics of the field (rooke 2009; norris 2013; rinaldi 2013). some field researchers, especially if they are of marginalized genders or sexualities, experience heightened concern and fear of sexual violence, including ogling, verbal harassment and unwanted sexualized contact (lee 1997; coffey 2002; bhardwa 2013). this fear is not an overly-paranoid response; women’s experiences of sexual violence in research settings, particularly within ethnographic fieldwork, are incredibly common (green et al. 1993; coffey 1999). researchers’ concerns for personal safety deeply impact the nature and scope of their inquiry—the topics they study; the practices framing their data collection, the physical, financial, and emotional resources invested in the research; what biases underpin analyses; and how the findings are communicated to varying audiences (green et al. 1993; lee 1997; kenyon and hawker 1999; sharp and kremer 2006; perrone 2010). in the libertine and masculinized contexts of edmc events, patterns of sexual violence mimic larger issues of gender and sexual inequality (st john 2012). thus, already sparse academic considerations about researcher safety must explore who is “safe” to study edmc and what privileges underpin scholarly participation within this discipline. *** apprehension but... why won’t you just go over there and talk to them? i didn’t think that the universe-containing pinpoint in my chest could get any smaller, but it did. the security guard i approached appeared to be an “adult” that could mediate this tension. play nice, kids. share the campground. be kind to your neighbors. rape threats aren’t plur, boys. “it’s a festival”, the unfazed guard muttered over a chewed cigarette. “what’re you goin’ to do about it”? this “adult”, a figure of authority in a purposefully chaotic realm, told me exactly what i had heard thousands of times before. boys will be boys. fests will be fests. the risks that you take by simply being here are yours and yours alone. don’t take candy from strangers. always watch your drink. better yet, don’t drink at all. don’t be a snitch. be a big girl. take off some clothes and let loose, you’re being a prude. for god’s sake, put on some clothes—you’re asking for trouble. deflect, defend, diffuse your problems, always with a smile. the guard subsequently rejected my plea to move my campsite somewhere else. “then everyone would want to move. sometimes, you just get [placed next to] assholes”. i wanted to turn the stinging well behind my eyes into tears. tears would have shown just how vulnerable and terrified i felt. now what? i couldn’t go back to my campsite, as i didn’t want to encounter the death-drop in my neighbor’s conversation, followed by grossly sexualized slurs. i couldn’t go home—it was too far away and i was fixed to a rapidly diminishing data collection window. should i contact the on-site police? i knew i would be immediately castigated, losing credibility with potential research participants. i wanted to call my committee members, to see what they would do—but then feared that they would see my apprenticeship as amateur. after all, the historical ritornelle of ethnographic research poses fieldwork as a scholarly “rite of passage”—particularly for graduate students (roguski and tauri 2013). i infrequently heard about the issues my advisors faced in their fieldwork experiences. the only thing i gleaned from those battle stories was their unanimous triumph: what problems they faced, what problems they solved—skilled and field-savvy, coolly resilient and independent. just as an academic should be. just as i feel as if i am, in this moment, not. if i couldn’t do this work on my own, effectively navigating the field and “wrangling” research participants, how could i be entrusted with their research legacies? if i discussed this event and its discontents, would they withdraw support of the project? would they think i had underprepared for this inquiry, despite years of personal, non-academic participation and several pilot sites? i shouldn’t feel this way. i had meticulously prepared a small forest’s-worth of ethics review paperwork which challenged me to consider risk and techniques for minimization of it at every turn. but as sharp and kremer (2006) note, many ethics review applications primarily focus on protecting research participants and the institutions that sponsor research; seldom do they address risk considerations for researchers themselves. all of the language within these review documents, all of the research trainings in which i had participated, and all of the texts i had read to prepare for the application process centralized on protecting subjects, and perpetuated a professional myth that “successful” researchers are wholly immunized from (much more, totally cognizant of) the inevitable risks a field may pose (green et al. 1993). the message from these sources was clear: even when researchers did encounter risks, the prospect of “good data” outweighed whatever vulnerabilities they faced (punch in bhardwa 2012: 50). ... it’s all a part of the job. *** okay, plan b. find some allies. as hopeful as i was about finding kindred spirits to befriend and find protection with during the event, my apprehensions couldn’t be quelled. i was a researcher, an outsider. everything that i had taken in about ethnographic reciprocity and rapport was organized into a gross form of ethical calculus. would this be exploitative, taking in physical and social protection from others? how would my role as a researcher impact the likelihood of finding “shelter”? would i somehow have to compromise my demeanor or research, in an effort to secure “emergency rapport”? researchers are encouraged to gain rapport while being sensitive to the frequently marginalized nature of research participants. but what considerations do we as scholars give to the similarly complex identities that may endanger researchers? our lives, including our participation within field sites, are framed by power dimensions. as researchers, it is too easy to forget that we are not wholly sheltered from these echoes. *** apathy six interviews. six interviews out of a goal of thirty. i could not help but to feel ashamed. i had completed a mere 20% of the interviews i had planned for this field site, wanting to reduce the times that i crossed paths with my offending neighbors. unable to make the necessary trips to retrieve and secure my recording device, i simply went without it—and went without collecting the needed interviews. i returned only to sleep, departing well after my harassers left for the night’s revelry. their daily exit did not occur until dusk, after the collective sobriety of festival-goers had diminished—making it nearly impossible for me to comply with the ethical standards approved by my university. although ambitious and energetic at the beginning of the project, the fear and frustration that i had initially felt within this space morphed into an apathy toward interacting with other festival-goers, undermining my data collection. there’s nothing more i can do. i’ll just work harder and longer at the next field site. but, i didn’t. the betrayal that i had felt resonated through how i prepared and participated within subsequent field sites, in some cases risking ejection from event grounds to be able to sleep behind locked doors and to carry contraband self-defense products. i adjusted my already modest sample size to accommodate future fallouts from similar aggressions. i politely feigned camaraderie with many festival-goers i interviewed, even as they spouted a spread of “-isms” while lauding the wholesome, inclusive nature of edmc. my silence eschewed prospective backlash, but also compromised opportunities to foster much-needed dialogue on these glaring contradictions. momentum slowed, as it was perceivably safer to make gradual, stinted progress rather than rebrand myself as a target. three years since, i am still coping with the reverberations of this event. what happens if i publish my work? will someone in that group (or someone akin to their casual use of violence) read it and have direct means to contact or find me? *** for many women in edmc, threats and experiences of violence (particularly sexual violence) become so afflictive that it delimits the ways they participate in this scene, if not discourage their participation altogether. my own experience of harassment lends light to how researchers are not guaranteed immunity from these threats, despite public and scholarly perceptions of their objectivity and skill. although participant safety is paramount, researcher perceptions and experiences of threat cannot be ignored—especially when study participants compromise researcher safety, as well as the projects they undertake. although this inversion disrupts conventional power dynamics between the researcher and the researched, it also imparts widespread and long-lasting ramifications to how researchers approach the field, build rapport with study participants, collect and analyze their data and communicate their findings to wider audiences. here, i detail some of the complex and contradictory concerns that framed my experience of this upheaval. specific preventative prescriptions in minimizing researchers’ experience of risk may not respond to the consistently evolving nature of field sites and the phenomena that takes place within them, nor to the unique ways that researchers may experience threat (kenyon and hawker 1999; roguski and tauri 2013). instead, i present three broad suggestions for addressing this issue: support sustained, honest conversations about the complicated and sometimes risky nature of ethnographic fieldwork, particularly as it may impact marginalized scholars. acknowledge the messy and iterative process of this approach. this includes breaking down professional guises that may discourage or further disempower researchers. demystifying the research procedures we undertake and how we personally problem-solve within the field does not simply offer insight to the lived experiences of researchers, but assists us to identify perspectives and phenomena that various privileges allow us to overlook (collins 1986). further, these discussions lay the groundwork to develop innovative research approaches (ngunjiri, hernandez and chang 2010). within institutional and scholarly circles, advocate for ethics board procedures, methods and methodological trainings that incorporate considerations of researcher vulnerability. doing so destigmatizes researcher risk, fostering proactive measures that realistically recognizes the varied experiences and severity of unsafety that scholars face within fieldwork settings and prepares them with skills they may need to abate these threats. encourage collaborative praxis with edmc stakeholders—event participants, producers, staff, and local communities. integrate scholarly and practical knowledges from all parties to develop initiatives that address wider inequalities of race, class, gender, sexuality and ability within edmc and its scenes. coda i survived that weekend without experiencing physical harm, but the psychological echoes of this threat continue even to this day. to cope, i took to sharing my story with fellow woman-identifying festival participants. over the span of three years and twenty festivals, scores of women disclosed their own perceptions of risk, affirming that my story was tragically common. despite their victimization and persistent marginalization within edmc, many women nurtured their unwavering love of festivals through community advocacy efforts, instituting programs to address the unique problems that women face in edmc. the stories and strength of these women encouraged me to revise the focus of my dissertation. within this new directive, i am exploring how norms of gender and sexuality within festival events contribute to widespread physical, sexual and psychological threats to women and how these impact women’s participation and identities within edmc/jam band communities. despite renewed gusto, growing personal networks within edmc and jam band communities and ample experience within festival field sites, i still sleep in my car. author biography kaitlyne motl is a phd candidate in the sociology department at the university of kentucky. her research explores intersectional inequalities of race, class, gender and sexuality as they manifest in hybridized jam band/edm festival scenes. specifically, her work focuses on women’s unique experiences of physical, social and sexual threat within “jamtronica” festival participation. she enthusiastically welcomes contact through email: kx.motl@uky.edu. references bhardwa, bina. 2013. “alone, asian and female: the unspoken challenges of conducting fieldwork in dance settings”. dancecult: journal of dance music culture 5(1): 39–60. <https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.01.03>. coffey, amanda. 2002. “sex in the field: intimacy and intimidation”. in ethical dilemmas in qualitative research, ed. trevor welland and lesley pugsley, 57–74. burlington: ashgate. ———. 1999. the ethnographic self: fieldwork and the representation of identity. thousand oaks: sage. <https://doi.org/10.4135/9780857020048>. collins, patricia hill. 1986. “learning from the outsider within: the sociological significance of black feminist thought”. social problems 33(6): s14–s32.<http://doi.org/10.1525/sp.1986.33.6.03a00020>. farrugia, rebekah. 2009. “building a women-centered dj collective: from san francisco to cyberspace to sister usa”. feminist media studies 9(3): 335–51. <https://doi.org/10.1080/14680770903068308>. green, gill, rosaline s. barbour, marina banard and jenny kitzinger. 1993. “’who wears the trousers?’ sexual harassment in research settings”. women’s studies international forum 16(6): 627–37. <http://doi.org/10.1016/s0277-5395(08)80007-6>. kenyon, elizabeth and sheila hawker. 1999. “’once would be enough: some reflections on safety for lone researchers”. international journal of social research methodology 2(4): 313–27. <https://doi.org/10.1080/136455799294989>. lee, deborah. 1997. “interviewing men: vulnerabilities and dilemmas”. women’s studies international forum 20(4): 553–64. <https://doi.org/10.1016/s0277-5395(97)00043-5>. ngunjiri, faith wambura, kathy-ann c. hernandez and heewong chang. 2010. “living autoethnography: connecting life and research [editorial]”. journal of research practice 6(1): article e1. <http://jrp.icaap.org/index.php/jrp/article/view/241/186>. norris, aaminah. 2013. “connecting the dots: researcher positionality in participant observation”. ethnography matters. july 23. <http://ethnographymatters.net/blog/2013/07/23/connecting-the-dots-researcher-positionality/>. (accessed february 23 2017). olszanowski, magdalena. 2012. “what to ask women composers: feminist fieldwork in electronic dance music”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 4(2): 3–26. <https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.02.01>. perrone, dina. 2010. “gender and sexuality in the field: a female ethnographer’s experience researching drug use in dance clubs”. substance use & misuse 45(5): 717–35. <https://doi.org/10.3109/10826081003595127>. rinaldi, jen. 2013. “reflexivity in research: disability between the lines”. disability studies quarterly 33(2). <https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v33i2.3711>. robinson, caitlin. 2013. “wasta capital: ethnographic reflexivity at a rooftop nightclub in beirut”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 5(1). < http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.01.13>. roguski, michael and juan marcellus tauri. 2013. “key issues effecting field researcher safety: a reflexive commentary”. new zealand sociology 28(1): 18–35. rooke, alison. 2009. “queer in the field: on emotions, temporality, and performativity in ethnography”. journal of lesbian studies 13(2): 149–60. <https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160802695338>. rosendahl, todd j. 2013. “negotiating salient identities in queer edm spaces”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 5(1). <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.01.15>. sharp, gwen and emily kremer. 2006. “the safety dance: confronting harassment, intimidation, and violence in the field”. sociological methodology 36(1): 317–27. <http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9531.2006.00183.x>. st john, graham. 2012. global tribe: technology, spirituality and psytrance. sheffield: equinox. music, style, and aging: growing old disgracefully? andy bennett philadelphia: temple university press, 2013. isbn: 978-1-4399-0807-5 (hardcover), 978-1-43990-808-2 (paperback), 978-1-43990-809-9 (e-book) rrp: us$74.50 (hardcover), us$25.95 (paperback), us$25.95 (e-book) and ageing and youth cultures: music, style and identity andy bennett and paul hodkinson (eds.) new york: bloomsbury, 2012. isbn: 978-1-8478-8836-5 (hardcover), 978-1-8478-8835-8 (paperback), 978-0-8578-5295-3 (pdf e-book), 978-0-8578-5037-9 (epub e-book) rrp: us$99.95 (hardcover), us$39.95 (paperback), us$27.99 (pdf e-book), us$27.99 (epub e-book) liz giuffre university of technology sydney (australia) popular music studies has long been associated, if not synonymous, with youth culture. the development of a space for ageing in popular music studies shows that our field is maturing finally (pun intended). however, these two books still use youth as a reference point, with bennett launching his monograph with the problem of finding a way “to deal precisely with the question of how people move on from youth and effectively grow older with popular music” (2), arguing the need to look beyond the youth/popular music binary expectation. notably, the title of the edited collection ageing and youth cultures: music, style and identity also clearly still centres on ‘youth’ as something of a default age identity for musical engagement—with ageing being relative to an apparently stable marker of a universal sense of ‘youth’. the introduction to the volume also introduces notions of diverse age engagement in terms of expanding notions of “youthfulness” (an idea that encompasses an attitude rather than an age) and “adulthood” (a term that suggests a certain degree of autonomy and independence) (2–3). interestingly, the term “post-youth” also appears (25), again a way to describe something that is essentially other than ‘youth’, but is still dominated by the idea of popular music and youth necessarily being tied. both works make valuable contributions to the field of popular music studies and beyond, challenging the implication that listeners and participants simply stop being part of the field once they reach a certain age. in his monograph, bennett’s emphasis on the link between popular music and concepts of youth expands debates about the utility of age as a discourse. it’s an idea that’s developed further with the focus on individual and collective lifestyles of baby boomer and post-baby boomer audiences in chapter two (42–63). the idea is that these audiences are continuing a connection to popular music that was established when they were younger, mapping “everyday processes through which popular music retains significance for aging audiences” (62). the implication remains, though, that the association is with the same music or musicians rather than with new ones as the audiences progress—an interesting note in itself (are these audiences simply not wanting to engage with new sounds? do they feel that doing so might replace the older ones? do they not feel that the ‘new’ sounds represent their relatively ‘old’ experiences?). the chapters that follow develop this in more depth with ethnographic accounts of specific audience members—again important work given how little evidence currently exists of audiences in this area—but still leaving more questions to be answered. for example, in the chapter on career, discussion about the local punk scene in adelaide covers the continuing participation of interviewees, but doesn’t go into more detail about how “older punks” exist in a broader musical context (100–1). that is, are they inspiring new artists to come onto the scene (irrespective of age)? or, is the scene one for those who were ‘there in the day’ and want to continue to extend that day? discussion of broadcasting and other popular music suggests a broader engagement (102–3), and these gaps aren’t necessarily weaknesses of the study, but rather show how rich the vein of inquiry is, and how much more there is to explore. the ageing and youth cultures edited volume provides more scope to explore different identities, with notable (and ground-breaking) additions like taylor’s work on queer audiences, fogarty’s work on genre beyond rock/pop and bennett’s work on dance scenes. the section focused on the realities of ageing on practice and engagement also provides insightful coverage of the field (gibson; tsitsos; davis). the collection overall provides many useful case studies (particularly for teaching), while also fitting across different disciplines (cultural studies, gender studies, popular music studies, audience and participation). again, the emphasis is on what bennett and hodkinson proclaim is now “a new ‘post-youth’ cultural territory that is expanding rapidly to encompass a range of lifestyle and aesthetic sensibilities through which ageing individuals retain tangible cultural connections to tastes and affiliations acquired during their teens and early twenties” (6). the inclusion of dance music and its ageing audience is one that is yet to be explored in other works so far, particularly given association with other subcultures including relatively new drug and dance cultures—this section is not about cautionary (or regretful) experiences, but instead treats the music and these scenes with the same broader popular music contexts as others in the collection. the ground covered in this volume is ambitious and clearly detailed, but again, leaves questions. what is the influence of ‘new’ music on ‘old’ fans, for example? and why does youth ‘begin’ as a teenager? could audiences for tween and pre-school music also be considered as part of popular youth culture? this last question is one where i have found these volumes particularly fruitful pieces to launch further discussion. borderlands: dub techno’s hauntological politics of acoustic ecology dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 7(2): 64–85 issn 1947-5403 ©2015 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.02.04 borderlands: dub techno’s hauntological politics of acoustic ecology alessio kolioulis paris 8 university (france) / sapienza university of rome (italy) abstract this article explores the aesthetic, social and economic relationships between dub techno and urban space. sketching out the neoliberal economic transition from the post-war economy to a post-fordist society, this article lingers on dub/techno trends from four cities: kingston, london, detroit and berlin. an archaeology of dub techno is reconstructed into four parts, each highlighting an affective relation, or “sound map”, between music and neoliberal economic production. starting with the hauntological melancholia of london-based burial’s music, this article traces the history and sonic networks of the dub techno diaspora, from detroit techno’s city of urban decay to berlin’s divided city. finally, dub techno is narrated through a “borderland” mapped sonically between detroit and berlin, suggesting a futuristic politics of dub techno’s acoustic ecology. keywords: dub techno, detroit techno, dub diaspora, acoustic ecology, post-fordism, neoliberalism alessio kolioulis is a phd candidate at paris 8 university and sapienza university of rome. alessio holds a bsc in development economics from the university of florence and a ma in social anthropology of development from the school of oriental and african studies. he is an editor for millepiani journal and eterotopia france, an independent publishing company. alessio works in the programme team at stars foundation. he lives in brixton, london. <www.millepiani.org>, <www.eterotopiafrance.com>, <a.kolioulis@gmail.com>. feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.01.02 http://www.millepiani.org http://www.eterotopiafrance.com mailto:a.kolioulis@gmail.com kolioulis | borderlands 65 drawing from guattari’s approach to ecology (1989)—where ecology must be analysed across its social, mental and environmental dimensions—this article explores the aesthetic relationship between dub techno soundscapes, the urban environment in which they proliferate and the socioeconomic aspects that surround dub techno production. turning to the ancient greek root of the word aesthetics, which means “to feel” (aisthanomai), i suggest that aesthetic relationships between the soundscape of a city and its acoustic elaboration can affectively articulate an artistic effort to reproduce the ecology of a city. thanks to visual and music production software used in the creation of electronic music, soundscapes can be translated into urban cartographies, or sound-maps of the city, in which aspects of the city are captured and elaborated to express particular social and political affects. for example, matthew gandy (2014) theorises links between the soundscape of a city and its social and mental environments, starting from j. g. ballard’s novel the soundsweep (1960). gandy argues that ballard’s hi-tech dystopian landscapes are rooted in the continuum between technology and the body. the protagonist of ballard’s sound-sweep, mangon, is a specialised technician working for a sound removal service. his duty is to recycle the noise dumps at the edges of the late-modern metropolis. as gandy depicts, in ballard’s world the urban soundscape presents an “acoustically defined form of social stratification” (2014: 37). in a similar way to gandy’s description of ballard’s soundscape and following mark fisher’s approach to hauntological music (2013; 2014), in this article i explore the archaeology of dub techno. by “archaeology” i mean a foucauldian analysis of the present, tracing the history of dub techno backwards from its present phenomena to detect its patterns and contingencies—and how these impact upon current political issues. i call dub techno, the accumulation and stratification of dub sounds’ techniques into techno’s rhythmic components. the result of this articulation is treated firstly as an artistic expression of the distinct socio-political environments in which the two genres emerged separately. secondly, the urban context of dub techno is analysed through the lenses of political spatial analysis. following krims’ suggestion that “urban ethos is thus not a particular representation but rather a distribution of possibilities” (2007: 7), i will first turn to burial’s acoustic interpretation of contemporary london, tracing burial’s “hauntological” music (fisher 2014) through the dub diaspora to kingston. i will then explore the rise of detroit techno and how it is linked to hybrid forms of dub techno found in german producer moritz von oswald’s music as basic channel. my aim is to map the capitalist transition to post-fordist economies by exploring the relationship between dub techno and urban space, reflecting upon the hauntological sounds that encompass urban communities in kingston, london, berlin and detroit. by doing that, attention is paid to trace part of the “old” and “new” struggles that are associated with the foundations of both dub and techno. borrowing from simon reynolds’ definition of genre—a “semantic condensations of popular desire” (2013a: 666)—and furthering fisher’s “hauntological” interpretation of dub electronic music (2013; 2014), i define dub techno as a subgenre manifested by a sense of futuristic melancholia that incorporates urban soundscapes into electronic dub rhythms. dancecult 7(2)66 i argue that dub techno’s artificial suspension is a sign of hybrid nostalgia toward the future that resonates in digitalized environments and reflects the aesthetic relations between dub techno soundscapes and urban space. with the reduction of public space and advent of telecommunications, global suburbs are trapped in a state of “connected suspension”. telecommunications connectivity has enabled the formation of virtual mobile networks that contribute to the erosion of fordist society by further erasing leisure as distinct from work (van veen 2010). the effects of connectivity have resulted in a state of “connected suspension” between past and future where the present is compressed and accelerated. london: haunting the future simon reynolds has compared the sound of london-based producer burial to ballard’s dystopian cities, and defines burial’s debut album on hyperdub, burial (2006), as an audio essay about london’s byegone “hardcore continuum” (2013a: 644). with this expression reynolds indicates “a continuum of musical culture that emerged out of the british rave scene. . . . i call it hardcore because the tradition started to take shape circa 1990 with what people called hardcore techno or hardcore rave” (reynolds 2013b). burial, born william emmanuel bevan, a london-based dubstepper and electronic music producer, achieved some fame when his debut album was nominated by several magazines, including the wire, for album of the year (fisher 2014: 101). burial’s innovative style hinges on a blending of syncopated sounds typical of dubstep music with bass frequencies that characterise deep house or minimal techno. his extended use of “crackles”, a series of peaked and sharp sounds prolonged over dark background frequencies, suggests an attention to london’s noisy soundscape, including the broadcasts of pirate radio. further, burial’s slow tempo is condensed into a slow motion existence that resonates as a kind of techno existentialism against the pressures of urban life. since 2005, when his first ep “south london boroughs” appeared, most of his music production has been released through hyperdub, the label created by steve goodman, a.k.a. kode 9. with hyperdub, burial has released two albums, burial (2006) and untrue (2007), and eight singles and eps, including south london boroughs (2005), distant lights (2006), ghost hardware (2007), archangel (2007), street halo (2011), truant (2012) and rival dealer (2013). other notable releases include the abstract tracks “four walls” (2011) and “paradise circus” (2011) in collaboration with massive attack, and a series of works with four tet and radiohead’s thom yorke, moth/ wolf club (2009) and ego/mirror (2011), both released on text records. for a long time, burial’s identity was a mystery (hancox 2013). burial was often associated with other names, including british musician kieran hebden, a.k.a. four tet. burial’s anti-exposure attitude reinforced the ghostly sound of his music, in a similar fashion to underground resistance’s faceless music. for reynolds, the parallel between burial’s london and j.g. ballard’s dystopian city has been noticeable since the first ep south london boroughs (2005). burial admitted to testing the sound-sphere of suburbia by driving through london’s southeast at night, calling this method “the car test” (clark 2006). as burial put it, “the car test started with me boring the fuck out of my mates, kolioulis | borderlands 67 trying to play tunes. the car test was ‘do they sound good on the car stereo at night time, driving through london?’ that’s ‘the car test.’ some detroit tunes have that too, that distance in the tune—the ‘thousand yard stare’ in the tune” (burial, in clark 2006). it is interesting here to point out how the relationship between the experience of machines (the car) and the production of electronic music is made explicit. in this image of london there is almost continuity between bodies and technology: urban life is a global experience through an embodied connection with the mechanical sphere. according to reynolds: yet in another sense burial’s music, and dubstep in general, could equally be about any city anywhere. . . . instrumental music goes international so much easier. dubstep has a far better fit than grime with all those old nineties notions of techno as a postgeographical sound, a musical force that is actively deterritorializing and bordercrossing (2013a: 644–645). when downtempo is linked to syncopation, the result is yet another form of deterritorialisation, though this time not geographical but metaphysical. in the review of burial’s production included in ghosts of my life: writings on depression, hauntology and lost futures (2014), mark fisher describes the “hauntological” as an urban phenomenon of melancholia. “hauntological melancholia” embraces multicultural identities and underpins the digitalization of the metropolis. for fisher, examples of hauntological artists are burial, william basinski, the ghost box label, tricky, the caretaker, mordant music and philip jeck. what these artists have in common are sounds characterized by a deep sense of melancholia. however, fisher’s hauntology is not melancholia per se. he argues that hauntology is neither the melancholia of the left, in which left wing politics is attracted by the glorious past but fails to project itself into the future, nor paul gilroy’s “post-colonial melancholia” (2006), in which fisher sees the contradiction of denying and, at the same time, calling for a multicultural identity. hauntological melancholia, on the contrary, keeps looking for the “modern ghost”, for changes and disruptive forces. fisher points out that “faced with 21st-century music, it is the very sense of future shock which has disappeared” (2014: 7). drawing from derrida’s spectres of marx (1994), fisher defines hauntology “as the agency of the virtual, with the spectre understood not as anything supernatural, but as that which acts without (physically) existing” (2014: 8). as fisher puts it, “the music of burial and of ghost box is haunted by a paradoxical nostalgia: a nostalgia for all the futures that were lost when culture’s modernist impetus succumbed to the terminal temporality of postmodernity” (2013: 45). this impotence of dealing with the future is haunted by the “abstract spacetime of capital” (2013: 46). in 2006, when burial’s homonymous debut album was launched, rave culture had in many ways been surpassed. as van veen explains, under the pressure of what deleuze called the “control society” (1992), the “disappearance” of raves in the uk throughout the 1990s coincided with the reemergence of corporate club culture (2010: 29–30). if rave culture embraced a sociality openly adverse to the “work ethic”, its precarious employment dancecult 7(2)68 conditions nonetheless led to the mutation of raves into a profitable clubbing activity (van veen 2010: 30; 32). the “new cultural industries”, including clubbing, monopolised those communities that succeeded in the formation of creative spaces of dancefloor leisure. if “raving as activity blurs the line between work and play” (van veen 2010: 31), the rise of corporate dance clubbing profits from exploiting the dissolution of these boundaries. rave, in short, was already a ghost of its past when burial encountered it. burial’s experience with raves came through his older brother: he had never been to a rave when he first heard rave hardcore, garage and jungle music. for burial, raves meant an imagined escape from a life of offices, corridors and clocks. an escape, however, that was impossible to fully achieve. in fisher’s text, burial remembers one of his childhood dreams where he desires to be put in a bin, feeling warm and protected from the outside rain, away from the routine of an amorphous existence (2014: 108). burial’s distinctive bass is a memorialisation of that episode. his soundscape is a womb and the correspondent sound-image of his tempo a map of suspended affections. his approach to space, in line with dance floor djs, clearly stands at the opposite end of festivals’ “spectacle dj” (rietveld 2013). burial’s anxiety is diluted in a dub-heavy sound map. this suspension derives from the mourning of rave culture’s death, despite a desire for its resurrection. unlike accelerated jungle, burial’s dub bass is warm and downcast. euphoria is only evoked and not released, suggesting a type of suspended pleasure. voices are pitched down or up according to the gender of the singer, so that they sound angelic, ghostly, or demonic—hanged. according to fisher, the compression of the future marked the end of the post-war social consensus and the restructuring of capitalist society. this process had started during ‘80s thatcherism, where attacks on the working class varied from cuts in benefits, housing and education to the demonization of unions and the right to protest. fisher calls this period “the slow cancellation of the future” (2014: 6) arguing that contemporary music lacks a futuristic force. as information about the future has become an important commodity, future itself has been colonised by commercial forces. however, in contrast to fisher, i would argue that the “withdrawal” from politics that characterised rave culture (van veen 2010) had put clubbing culture to work on its own politics. cognitive capitalism’s toolbox contributed to the mutation of rave cultures. a combination of technologies aimed at erasing the boundaries between work and leisure, characteristic of new modes of production, was at the basis of the co-evolution of rave and clubbing cultures. as van veen argues, “it is this hybrid form of workplay which now becomes the general category of labour. that it appears ‘unreformable’ is all the more understandable given that work is simply no longer work, but a constitutive element of enjoyment (leisure)” (2010: 33). following these dynamics, burial’s depressive acceptance of the end of rave culture goes beyond mourning and finds in the ghosts of london a path against boredom and a life of order. in fact, in line with guattari’s (1989) attempt to re-orient freudian ghosts such as sexuality, childhood or neurosis, modern spectres should be seen in a futuristic and constructivist fashion, unfolding new possibilities, assemblages and subjectivities. kolioulis | borderlands 69 through burial’s music, i have related the sound scapes of dub techno to its hauntological urban conditions. turning to guattari’s (1989) approach to ecology, we can dissect burial’s london soundscape into three parts. the mental dimension is marked by the modern ghosts of hauntological melancholia. the future is lost, and it appears as a ghost of rave’s past. the social dimension is characterised by conservative politics and its pressure to control desires and dampen alternative lifestyles. the urban sphere represents the environmental dimension where media and technology inform neoliberal conditions of workplay. in the following three sections i will explore the archaeology of dub with a similar approach, highlighting the material conditions in which dub techno genres emerge and how they link to their cities of belonging. in this way, i argue that dub techno soundscapes can capture living conditions aesthetically and, at the same time, propose and advocate for an alternative politics of the future. in so doing, i aim to pay attention to the relation between a politics of the future and sound-maps such as dub techno that depict the co-evolution between social machines and urban life. london to new york: the dub diaspora and post-war fordism the fordist era is characterised by large manufacturing plants employing a large base of workers, mass consumptions and high levels of public investment used to sustain the growth of an urban population (sassen 2001). after world war ii, countries such as the united states, the uk, france and holland were in demand of cheap labour. the importation of caribbean peoples was seen by governments as a valid solution to the labour shortage. the resulting exodus from the caribbean to the uk and the us started in the late ‘40s: puerto ricans, surinamese, dutch antilleans, martinicans, guadeloupians and west indians filled low-paid sectors across the west. compared to their counterparts with similar socioeconomic backgrounds, jamaican migrants tended to be more skilled, better educated and from urban centres. there were also other substantial differences between these communities, for example, in what grosfoguel calls the “modes of incorporation” of afro-caribbean populations in the new labour markets of their country of destination (1997: 36). in france, caribbean migrants were almost entirely absorbed by the public administration, while in the uk and the us, migrants were employed in labour intensive sectors like manufacturing. for most of the second half of the twentieth century, the relation between net migration and unemployment rates was negative. between 1955 and 1974, there was a positive relation between employment and migration rates (peach 1991). industrial cities like birmingham and london in the uk or detroit and new york in the us attracted large numbers of migrants. in remixology: tracing the dub diaspora (2014), sullivan investigates the cultural bridges between kingston’s sound system culture and the caribbean diaspora in new york, london, bristol, berlin and toronto. of these channels, the kingston-london axis was of particular importance. thanks to the 1948 open-door policy, through which people of the commonwealth could obtain british nationality, the jamaican sound had a network for the movement of cultural goods. as sullivan reports: dancecult 7(2)70 it has been estimated that by the late 1950s there were already around 50 basement clubs in south london managed by west indians. these venues—particularly the illegal blues dances—were of inestimable values as sites of cultural expression, social cohesion and autonomy for the afro-caribbean community, as well as for the preservation and dissemination of jamaican music in the uk (sullivan 2014: 58). at the same time, the jamaican sound was developing with particular traits. the rise of rockand-roll in the u.s. in the late 1950s meant a shortage in the supply of tunes for kingston’s sound system scene. in need of new tunes and with limited recording facilities on the island, stanley motta’s studios and radio stations like rjr, jbc and federal started to press recordings onto dubplates. these were subsequently tested in dance halls to verify whether it was worth cutting these dubplates on expensive vinyl. by the mid-1960s, the jamaican recording industry became self-sufficient. twoand four-track recorders were installed. proto-dub instrumentals were cut from other popular tracks. as sullivan indicates, “it soon became clear that these dub versions had an economic advantage, insofar as they allowed different songs to be created with the same rhythm at no extra costs” (2014: 26). thanks to the expansion of the sound system culture in the uk, to emulate the original dub sound, london clubs were importing both american r&b and jamaican records directly from kingston. it meant that the music supply chain was able to demand higher prices in order to sustain local production. from the early ‘60s until the mid ‘80s, london and other british cities saw the growth of sound systems. among the first visible systems in london were coxsone, fatman and jah shaka. the latter migrated from jamaica to southeast london and became a “one-man-band, choosing his own records, controlling the equipment and deejaying when necessary” (sullivan 2014: 64). jah shaka later set up his own foundation with the aim of providing financial and technical support to dub projects in jamaica, ethiopia and ghana. yet shaka was also the uk’s first digidub pioneer. as sullivan reports, “rather than working with musicians to provide source materials as the original kingston engineers did, he built his early dubs from the ‘ground up’ using drum machines and synths in early records” (2014: 66). the afro-caribbean diaspora populated the metropolis’ suburbs. it is worth comparing how mass immigration impacted london and nyc throughout the ‘50s. some white members of the working class first responded with fear, subsequently with resentment. after years of racialised tension, the suburbs experienced sporadic yet intense levels of violence. as sassen reminds, “the radical transformation in the city’s demographic composition altered the meaning of public housing . . . segregation in the city increased immensely (2001: 253). in west london, for example, caribbean migrants experienced a degree of racism that was unknown at home. in 1958, the infamous notting hill race riots lasted for several days and saw teddy boy mobs attack black residents in what londoners call the “forgotten” riot (olden 2011). however, the response to this infamous event was about to mark a watershed in london’s music history. claudia jones, the communist journalist who set up britain’s first black newspaper, the west indian gazette, launched the first edition of the notting hill carnival as a community response to these attacks. born in colonial trinidad, having lived as a child in harlem, new york, and deported in 1944 to kolioulis | borderlands 71 britain for her activism as a member of the communist party of the usa, jones called for a “tricontinental, internationalist radical politics [in] the heart of britain” (whittall 2014). with the notting hill festival in london and the paul’s festival in bristol, a sense of community was established through music production and the sound-system culture. however, jamaican music wasn’t new to london. many clubs were formed in the 1950s where members of the west indian diaspora could enjoy clubbing and even religion without fear of racism and repercussions (beckford 2006). what is worth noting here, however, is that while clubs were countercultural spaces that formed an underground web, the notting hill carnival affirmed djs and sound systems as part of london’s music culture. britain was not the only country jamaicans emigrated to. the us was a popular and closer destination, especially after the government loosened restrictions in the ‘60s through amendments to the immigration and nationality act imposed a decade earlier. big cities on the east coast were the preferable choice, with nyc, philadelphia, washington and miami at the top of the list. jamaican migrants in london and new york had a very different experience of assimilation. as foner puts it, “being submerged in a wider african american community has affected west indian new yorkers in ways that their london counterparts simply do not encounter (2005: 113). jamaicans in the us represented a small percentage of the overall black population; while in the uk jamaicans and west indians represented one of the first black communities. the multiethnic composition of american society helped jamaicans to more rapidly integrate into the afro-american population (foner 2005: 109–10). differences in the ethnic composition of the population were coupled with the development of patterns of migration. as terry-ann jones (2007) summarises, there are several models explaining stages of migration. first, “the neoclassical economic approach to migration is based on the assumption that migration is a response to global differentials in labor supply and demand” (2007: 21); second, “according to the network approach to migration, migrant networks promote continued international movement” (2007: 24); and finally, “cumulative causation . . . suggests that migration affects the societies of both the origin and destination countries in such a way that future decisions to migrate are dependent on past and current patterns of migration” (2007: 27). a good example of the latter pattern of migration is lloyd “bullwackie” barnes. barnes was an occasional singer and sound engineer from kingston. when he realised that his career was stalled in jamaica, he decided to join his mother in new york. barnes found a fertile environment in the house parties around brooklyn, queens and the bronx. bringing “the reggae motown [to] the bronx” (sullivan 2014: 94–5), barnes later formed the bullwackie all stars, featuring collaborations with high-profile jamaican artists such as horace andy, wayne jarrett and jackie mittoo. wackie’s first production, dub unlimited (1976) was followed by creation dub (1977) and nature’s dub (1980). after an initial success, the wackies almost disappeared from the scene. it was only in the ‘90s that barnes and his stars remerged thanks to basic channel, the label and dub techno artist identity consisting of german duo moritz von oswald and mark ernestus (sullivan 2014: 95). overall, in a different fashion than in britain, the dub diaspora in the us encountered dancecult 7(2)72 different genres such as hip-hop and disco. this encounter produced new dancehall styles that merged kingston’s scene with afro-american music. in order to posit the “dub diaspora” from kingston to london and new york, i have briefly reconstructed the fordist socioeconomic basis for the migration of jamaican populations. i have highlighted racialised tensions in london to show the political relevance that dub and sound systems had on the modes of integration of west indian communities. in the following section i look at racialised tensions and labour conflicts in detroit. in so doing, i analyse the second generation of detroit techno producers through ways in which the urban environment is reflected in their music production. detroit techno and the transition to post-fordism the “golden age of capitalism” or “long boom” eventually stopped producing positive effects on growth rates. the 1970s recession brought to an end the post-world war ii economic “miracles” in countries like west germany, italy, france and japan made possible by keynesian approaches to economic policies. as naomi klein puts it “the keynesian revolution against laissez-faire [capitalism] was costing the corporate sector dearly. clearly what was needed to regain lost ground was a counterrevolution against keynesianism, a return to a form of capitalism even less regulated than before the depression” (2007: 56–7). the new neoliberal ideology promoted by the economists of the chicago school, which emerged politically as reaganomics in the us and thatcherism in the uk, took the form of cutting social benefits and deregulating markets. the so-called fordist paradigm, with its mass-scale production and labour migration, was turned over by a new set of neoliberal policies. in part, this change of paradigm was due to innovative solutions in the field of technology and robotics. with workers demanding higher wages, factory managers had to look for new solutions to organise production. thus, in a decade of struggles and changes, and with opportunities to relocate production to developing countries, the industrial society was entirely re-shaped during the 1970s. detroit, the heart of the fordist industry, is paradigmatic of this shift in global production. the urban decay exemplified by detroit is directly linked to the dismantling of fordist production. moreover, working class, urban white racism wasn’t particular to britain. in the early 1960s, black workers employed in detroit’s auto factories started to raise their voices by denouncing the double exploitation under which they were forced to work. on the one hand, they were subjected to longer shifts, more dangerous tasks and lower wages. on the other hand, the united auto workers union (uaw) remained silent to their requests (alexander and rucker jr. 2010: 858–9). thus, only months after the detroit 1967 riots, black industrial movements formed the league of revolutionary black workers. the league expanded in all major factories, including chrysler, ford and general motors. newsletters started to circulate in factories with the aim of building political consciousness. in-plant and out-plant strategies were promoted, forming ties with journalists, students and their communities. a series of wildcat strikes hit major industrial cities. one year before the establishment of the league, the dodge revolutionary union movement (drum) kolioulis | borderlands 73 started using bongo and conga drums in strikes to draw attention to their cause (dillard 2007). in this scenario, motown records was targeted by groups such as the drum and the inner-city voice, a popular magazine connected to the politicisation of afro-american workers. in their views, motown records “was more interested in its own profits and was far removed from the struggle to improve economic opportunities for workers in detroit and elsewhere” (vincent 2013: 176). however, motown faced a destiny similar to uaw, when eddie holland, lamont dozier and brian holland, known as the h-d-h team, left the label into a dispute over profits and royalties. detroit’s implosion enabled a process of creation that is well reflected in what music historian dan sicko defines as “the beauty of decay” (1999: 59). hence, it becomes crucial to describe some of the socioeconomic elements that characterised the imagination of the first and second generation of detroit techno djs and producers such as jeff mills, juan atkins, kevin saunderson, derrick may, carl craig and mad mike. firstly, it is important to look at the relation between techno music and urban space. as vecchiola recounts, influential radio dj “the electrifying mojo” “refused to recognize generic borders, dispensing with the notion that city residents would only tune in for stereotypically ‘urban’ music” (2011: 100). mojo’s stance of “refusing generic borders” allows for an understanding of the musical and social context behind the rise of detroit techno. a typical mojo night had a mix of spaceship effects, an hour of new brand music, half an hour of slow jams, the midnight funk association call-to-order (where the entire city was asked to signal its presence by turning up lights, honking horns and dancing), regular funk bands such as parliament/ funkadelic, and an artist vs. artist selection, all of which was often followed by a live mix from a guest dj. the variety of mojo’s shows unified different genres in the culture of the mix. for listeners, “tuning in” was part of a process of identification and sense of belonging to the city. on the contrary, the spatial configuration of industrial cities like detroit was jeopardising social ties and accumulating disparities. as saskia sassen has shown, in global cities such as london and new york, under the increasing pressures of new modes of production, the divide between suburban middle class and low-income families of the inner city represented one sign of geographical inequality (2001: 250–53). with one class taking advantage of remote-work, office jobs were created in the suburbs in stark contrast with the centralisation of production in the urban centres. simultaneously, the automation of production substituted factories with mechanised plants. hence, the rationale behind postwar urban development was obsolete. economic and technological factors re-configured the sociospatial organisation of urban landscapes. haunted by its past glory, and with a lack of teen dance clubs in the suburbs, detroit’s youth had to create its own nightlife. as sicko states, “given the disconnectedness this generation had with its own city, the importance of self-identification makes a lot of sense” (1999: 40). as a result of this process, the city was divided between east and west, “jits” and “preps”. however, one factor that in the early 1980s reunified the city was eurodisco, known in detroit as “progressive”. partygoers started to appreciate italo-disco, a style of dancecult 7(2)74 electronic disco heavily influenced by italian disco producer giorgio moroder. further, according to sicko, italo-disco formed some of the basis for the detroit techno blueprint when paul lesley and sterling jones, a.k.a. a number of names, “would work two copies of kano’s holly dolly (1980) repeating the spare intro over and over again and doubling up the chorus” to create the celebrated track sharevari (1981). thus “the connection between italo-disco, techno and detroit’s high school sophisticates can all be heard in this one single” (1999: 52–3). in the meantime, techno’s future artists were witnessing an attempted renovation of detroit. for a decade, the city centre had been forgotten by the dynamics of the east/ west divide. through a sort of social osmosis, the crowds in the east and west detroit started coming together again in the mid-1980s (sicko 1999: 55). furthermore, attempts to revamp the downtown core vanished in what we could call a “failed” gentrification during which the new detroit failed to come to terms with its past. lack of investment and a decreasing population contributed to a stasis in the redevelopment of the city. the deep affinities between techno pioneers and this ghostly environment have been emphasised by juan atkins, john “jon 5” housley and richard “3070” davis, a.k.a. cybotron, with their techno city (1984). in this classic ep, davis and “atkins’ vocals are processed to sound ancient and mysterious, echoing the old soul of detroit, while his lyrics welcome visitors to the city” (sicko 1999: 63). pope (2011) has argued that the second generation of detroit techno producers confronted the dystopian experience of the dismantling of the motown city through music. in addition, according to pope there is a profound leap between sharevari (1981) and cybotron’s alleys of your mind (1981). while the former celebrated the old detroit and its consumeristic ideology, the latter displayed a turn and a break with the past (pope: 2011: 34). detroit techno metanarratives reveal a deep and affective connection with the city and its failed future politics that stress the hauntological ambiguities of detroit’s dystopian/utopian techno sound. as pope puts it, “throughout its ‘history’ techno warns of our technological future—a future which is felt, according to a dystopian outlook, to be already, irrevocably, ‘here’” (2011: 38). the second socioeconomic factor in the evolution of detroit techno is the new relationship established between artists and machines. on the one hand, the advancement of mechanisation and robotics contributed to the collapse of the fordist society. however, on the other, the children of factory workers were increasingly fascinated by the alternative uses of machines. the “manufactory” and “futuristic” elements in the collective consciousness of the time remains one of the most powerful elements of detroit techno. in the past 35 years, examples can include—among many others—cybotron cosmic cars (1982), mike banks a.k.a. mad mike’s hi tech dreams / lo-tech reality (2007) and jeff mills’ flying machines (2012), all of which define detroit techno’s ambiguous, dystopian/utopian hauntological symbolism. detroit techno exhibits an ambiguous hauntology because it has yet to dematerialise into a hauntological metaphysics as described by fisher (2013). here the ghosts of the city’s past are still very material, as seen in the mad mike record label for hi-tech dreams / lo-tech reality (2007)(see fig. 1). kolioulis | borderlands 75 figure 1. mad mike hi-tech dreams / lo-tech reality (2007). it is in the interspace between the past, its present form and the on-the-ground dreams of a better future that techno aesthetics is politicised. the ambiguous utopian/dystopian yet futuristic aesthetic of second generation detroit techno artists has the ability to discover an affective relation between urban life and new forms of capitalism. as pope asserts, “detroit . . . cannot be meaningfully framed (off ), and, as such, it reminds one of the ontological oblivions of late capitalism while also revealing the subjective mode appropriate to this encounter: techno survivalism” (2011: 41). pope’s argument is particularly strong at describing the materialistic stances of the desires incorporated in the sound and aesthetics of detroit techno. a good example of such materialistic desire is embedded in the ambivalence towards technological development and their use of antiquated tools to showcase an intrinsic cyberpunk spirit (pope 2011: 38). this is perhaps another cause of the reason why afro-american detroit artists have been interpreted through the lenses of afrofuturist narratives (see van veen 2013). drexciya—formed by gerald donald and james stinson in 1992—produce electro music that is deeply connected to an afrofuturist “haunted future”. for example, drexciya’s “aquatopia” links with the black atlantic through label artwork, lyrics and underwater electro sounds on all of their major works, including bubble metropolis (1993), aquatic invasion (1995) and the two albums neptune’s lair (1999) and harnessed the storm (2002). drexciyans are the mythical descendants of africans thrown overboard during the transatlantic crossing (womack 2013: 70). by sounding-out this afrofuturist aquatic space, the duo creates a new dystopian battle tale in which drexciyan battalions are at war against today’s “reality programmers”. while simultaneously addressing the slave trade through a dancecult 7(2)76 radical reimagining of its lost descendents drexicya’s “sonic warfare” reminds its listeners— particularly afro-american detroit youth—of present conflicts. in a similar way to van veen’s comparative analysis of mills’ space-faring alter-ego “the messenger” and janelle monáe’s android alter-ego, “cindi mayweather”: such identities . . . often lend themselves to a movement that exceeds their characterizations as a stage personae, suggesting a becoming that transform the coordinates of subjectivities. thus we need to ask whether such identities— afrofuturist androids, aliens, cyborgs, etc.—“represent”, in an allegorical mode, conditions of afrodiasporic experience (“blackness”) or whether afrofuturism is capable of unhinging allegorical referents to humanist bodies and terrestrial markers of difference, thereby developing autonomous forms of becoming and thought . . . (van veen 2013: 8). for detroit techno artists, the “becoming future” is expressed by a creative continuum between bodies, machines and their environment that ruptures with the present. however, the solution is neither homogenous nor harmonic. on the contrary, it aims at relocating the disjuncture of the late capitalist time-space and workplay in a different dimension. by collocating new forms of subjectivities in new temporalities, this post-human/cyber-spirit is able to “conquer” time: a crucial resource to think and oppose lo-tech reality with hi-tech dreams. as eshun reminds, today “the powerful employ futurists and draw power from the futures they endorse, thereby condemning the disempowered to live in the past. the present moment is stretching, slipping for some into yesterday, reaching for others into tomorrow” (2003: 289). in the search for new becomings, techno artists create new subjectivities; a sign of rupture with a stretched present and the rejection of past identities. drawing from guattari’s “polyphonic subjectivity”, trace reddell has conveyed an interesting perspective on afrofuturism and techno music. he argues whether “afrofuturism can include works and artists influenced by africa though not of african descent” (2013: 90). this argument has the ability of going beyond racialised identifications and the risks implied in interpreting afrofuturism as an authentic cultural form. reddell welcomes what he calls a “technocultural strategy that deconstruct racial myths of identity, appropriation and exploitation” (2013: 90). he depicts this strategy from the observation of juan atkins’ multiple machinic identities and guattari’s “machinic dimensions of subjectivation” (2013: 94). the co-evolution of “humans” and “machines” in detroit is a fundamental trait of detroit techno music production. casting away material goods and services, capitalism turned to the “production of signs, of syntax and of subjectivity”, which became strategically important for the reproduction of power, control and capital (guattari 1989: 137). by paying attention to the social, mental and environmental dimensions of urban living, new techno subjectivities create alternative sound-maps of the city. two effects can be traced from detroit techno’s response to post-fordist society. first is a creative approach to the post-fordist transition to an ambivalent technological environment; and second is an indissoluble affinity within music productions between politicised social conditions, kolioulis | borderlands 77 cognitive possibilities and environmental settings. in the next section these two effects are discussed together, highlighting the excess and overflow of this encounter through the hybridism of dub techno acoustic ecology. berlin: dub techno acoustic ecology with post-fordism demolishing the factory “walls” and nurturing the birth of the internet economy, western economies developed global markets in which finance and media blended together. high return investments were made possible by new financial markets, which, at the same time, were built on highly sophisticated machines. technology was not only responsible for the collapse of the socialist bloc—unable to keep up with the technological revolution—but was also changing the settings for new subjectivities, in the form of remote work and increasing time spent interacting with communications technologies such as mobile phones and computers. in the aftermath of the fall of berlin wall in 1989, the german capital’s social space was sharply divided into two spheres: businesses, shops and universities in the west and public housing in the east. contrary to what politicians promised, foreign companies that were supposed to invest in the eastern part of the city never arrived. thanks to this vacuum, berlin’s youth and creative class profited from a large amount of empty buildings. clubs and art mushroomed as artists rushed in to occupy the abandoned central district of berlin, the former “no-man’s land” known as mitte. at the same time, and unlike other countries in europe, germany did not experience immigration from the caribbean islands. instead, germany was a popular destination for southern europeans, turkish migrants and south-east asians (sullivan 2014: 168). the link between the city and dub hinged on a particular encounter. throughout the ‘90s, tresor and the hardwax record store—with tresor originally located in the abandoned wertheim department store in mitte—became berlin’s electronic music hubs. since hardwax opened in 1989 it has been owned by mark ernestus, who took an early interest in detroit techno. it is at hardwax that ernestus met moritz von oswald, a respected studio musician and multi-instrumentalist. their first ep as “maurizio”, ploy (1992), was released under their label “m” and featured a remix by detroit techno duo underground resistance (“mad” mike banks and jeff mills). a year later, in 1993, jeff mills remixed maurizio’s enforcement, this time released under the name cyrus. at the same time, tresor was contributing to the spread of the detroit sound by releasing underground resistance’s tresor ii: berlin detroit—a techno alliance (1993) compilation. during this period, the duo opted for detroit mastering plant the national sound corporation (nsc) to press tracks like basic channel’s lyot rmx (1993), phylyps trak (1993) and quadrant dub (1994). all of these records are heavily influenced by dub, despite “ernestus and von oswald still want[ing] to classify the music as minimal techno” (twells 2014). the tension between minimalism and dub produced the prototypical dub techno genre. from 1993 to 1995, ernestus and von oswald operated as “basic channel”, revitalising von oswald’s passion for dub. at the same time, the duo set up the mastering and cutting dancecult 7(2)78 facility dubplates and mastering, based in kreuzberg, berlin. basic channel’s galaxy produced several sublabels, from basic replay, to burial mix, chain reaction, false tuned, imbalance recordings, main street records, maurizio and rhythm & sound. basic channel released experiments from vainquer, substance and monolake (robert henke and gerhald behles) through chain reaction; and dub-influenced music with jamaican artists on basic replay. increasingly unsatisfied by the popularisation of berlin’s club techno scene, ernestus and von oswald sought new, revolutionary sounds. in 1996 the duo formed the label burial mix to finally accost dub and reggae with house and techno, enlisting tikiman (paul st. hilaire), a vocalist from the dominican republic who performed with the berlin-based reggae group livin’ spirit. over time the “archaeological work” (kopf 1996) that the duo applied to the acoustic relation between dub and techno changed. what defined the dub techno blueprint was perhaps the ability to shape a never-ending relationship between the two genres. for example, sullivan (2014: 172) writes that “rather than their former approach of applying dub’s spatial aesthetics to techno, the duo reversed the process and applied techno’s digital production values to dub, creating a spaced-out, ‘hauntological’ sound” for never tell you (burial mix 1996). another example of techno’s application to dub can be found in barnes “wackie’s” resurrection. barnes appeared alongside rhythm and sound in 2003, playing live at francois kevorkian’s deep space night. the successful experience of collaborating with diasporic jamaican dub artists was followed in 2005, when ernestus and von oslwald released see mi yah (rhythm & sound 2005), an album that features collaborations with reggae vocalists—some in berlin, others in jamaica—including willi williams, jah cotton, freddy mellow, rod of iron, sugar minott, koki, bobbo shanti, walda gabriel, ras donovan and ras perez. the album is characterised by tunes individually arranged and composed into a strong 46-minute suite of dub techno. more recently, the experimental project entitled “the moritz von oswald trio”, formed by max loderbauer, moritz von oswald and vladislav delay, produced the first, studio-oriented, electronic music approach between the two genres, playing dub techno “live” in festivals and clubs using a blend of live acoustic instrumentation and electronic hardware. in these occasions, with one of the latest being at bloc festival in march 2015, moritz von oswald and max loderbauer, the two permanent presences of the trio, presented a set with new member tony allen, fela kuti’s former drummer. in the new formation of the trio, tony allen plays drums, max loderbauer plaus synthesizers while moritz von oswald occupies the centre of the stage with percussion-sequencing drum machines and additional electronics. as allen puts it: “the programmes have to be dealt with first—we’re always searching for something, but it’s not improvising—it’s more like a feeling that we’re trying to get to” (smith 2015). where is the trio trying “to get to”? it could be argued that the final dub techno artefact is a recomposition of the roots, as if below the surface of electronic development from dub to techno there is an essential pattern: that of technics. it is here, at this point, where the archaeological intersects the aesthetic, that acoustic political ecology emerges. acoustic http://www.discogs.com/artist/259606-rod-of-iron http://www.discogs.com/artist/52818-sugar-minott http://www.discogs.com/artist/52818-sugar-minott http://www.discogs.com/artist/220358-koki http://www.discogs.com/artist/259610-bobbo-shanti http://www.discogs.com/artist/259607-walda-gabriel http://www.discogs.com/artist/70534-ras-donovan http://www.discogs.com/artist/259608-ras-perez kolioulis | borderlands 79 ecology amplifies the emergence of the affective relations between bodies, tools and artefacts. when new modes of hauntological and techno subjectivities manipulate their heritage through hybrid creations, they facilitate the exposure of a continuum between space and its specific and contingent social activities. borderlands: berlin to detroit i would like to close by analysing the album borderland (2013), composed by detroit’s juan atkins (model 500) and berlin’s moritz von oswald (see fig. 2). the album appears twenty years after tresor ii: berlin detroit—a techno alliance (various 1993). at the acoustic level, borderland combines the sound scape co-evolution of the two cities, berlin and detroit, which have been closely related not just for their “techno alliance”, but through how each has respectively embraced creativity as a response to neoliberal urban decay and renovation, suggesting a virtual bond between the two cities through dub techno. with borderland the acoustic bond expresses proximity between techno artists from the two cities, demonstrating a similar affectivity toward a highly technical environment; a hope, perhaps, for detroit and berlin’s shared future. the signifier “borderland” suggests the surroundings of the liminal environment, as dark as a nocturnal urban forest. yet, it seems to advocate for a future politics—a utopistic escape from the current states of urban life, towards a world in which is possible to combine sustainability with technological development, suggesting a sophisticated aesthetics of urban nature. there are four tracks included in borderland that outline this aesthetics of acoustic ecology. these are electric garden, electric dub, treehouse and digital forest (atkins and von oswald 2013). figure 2. borderland (2013) cover by visual artist delfina venditti. dancecult 7(2)80 in all of borderland’s tracks, the hybrid nature of dub techno is exposed by juxtaposing the digital and the natural world. the result is a collection of sound maps where forests, trees and gardens fade into wires, data servers and digital sounds. electrified sounds are dubbed with mechanical chirping, evoking the idea that nature’s body is mechanical and that all machines are primal. further, the project seems to stress the need for sustainable urban environments; cities need a coherent vision between ecological and technological developments. the symbolic title of treehouse, for example, illustrates a desire for utopic housing in techno-cities capable of can satisfying the needs of urban dwellers. in a similar way, digital forest depicts the urban environment as a data universe. electric dub and electric garden resound as a tactic to awake the sleepy collective memory, conquering urban gardens and colonising the mentality of the city’s dwellers with a new politics inspired by hi-tech ecology. the producers’ social and mental environments remind us of images and experiences of decay, struggle and failed economies. the dialectic between ecology and technology seems to arise from an artistic preoccupation for suggesting visions of and for the future through dub techno. looking at guattari’s “manifesto” the three ecologies (1989), ecology is always entrenched across the social, mental and environmental dimensions. on the one hand, guattari introduced marxism into philosophy of mind and, as a result, re-interprets cognitive mechanisms as mental modes of production. these are performed by “social machines” that are key to our understanding of the social and mental environment. machines are primarily social in nature and not technical, because the conditions and usage are organised according to the needs of society (pearson 2001: 1363). guattari argues that when we imagine a visual representation (“map”) of these processes, we are producing cartographies. depending on the nature of the surfaces (visual or acoustic), these maps represent a unique connection between what we feel (aesthetics) and our desire to materialise their existence (1989: 133). if dub techno’s socioeconomic environment is urban space and music affectively represents, through its sound map, the current socio-political realities of cities, borderland well describes a situation in which techno’s utopian ambitions are incorporated into the search for ecological solutions and their mutual co-evolution. borderland is not a search for a lost habitat: rather, it suggests a hauntological escape from the present. if the modern ghosts of the crackle appears each time artists express the compression of the future, in the aesthetic of borderland the political sensibility puts the feet on-the-ground and reterritorialises social desires in the sounding of dub. the materialist yet utopian desires expressed by borderland in the combination of technology and ecology stands for a politics of acoustic ecology. interpretations of dub techno that fail to detect the symptoms of a politics of acoustic ecology risk disempowering its creative forces. hence, at the symbolic and material level, dub techno represents the encounter between ecology and technics. through a socioeconomic approach to the dub diaspora and the role of technology in modern life, dub techno can be seen as an attempt to ameliorate the experience of urban society’s “suspended connectivity” and hauntological melancholy. it redefines in modern and artistic terms a never-ending kolioulis | borderlands 81 relationship between technologies, bodies and their environment through resounding dub. tracing a line between the genesis of dub and techno music, i have claimed that this hybrid genre expresses a politics of acoustic ecology, suggesting the desire for a social impact that underpins the co-evolution of sustainable technology and urban ecology. to conclude, i have tried to show how the archaeology and aesthetics of dub techno are combined to express the relation between nature and the city through acoustic ecology. in the first section, i have analysed ways in which post-fordist capitalism has undertaken the seizure of futuristic politics. i have done so by stressing the hauntological melancholia of burial’s dub. departing from the london soundscape, i then touched upon the dub diaspora and how the socioeconomic patterns of migration revealed an important vector of creative, musical resistance, through dub, techno and dub techno, against neoliberal ideologies during the post-war era. turning to detroit, i suggested that the formation of new subjectivities and mythological narratives provided a means of opposing the decay of neoliberal urban living conditions. finally, exploring berlin’s dub techno through the dub techno of moritz von oswald and mark ernestus, and connecting to to detroit’s juan atkin’s through a “borderland”, i have tried to demonstrate that the artistic continuum that flows throughout dub techno “gets to” the roots of technological development through a politics of acoustic ecology. through the lense of guattari’s ecology, i have proposed a political reading of dub techno that intersects heterogeneous fronts (subjectivities, urban decay, migratory patterns) to suggest the importance of the intersections between social, mental and environmental dimensions of urban electronic music. acknowledgements 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of sonic experience paul c. jasen london: bloomsbury academic, 2016. isbn: 978-1-5013-0993-9 (hardcover), 978-1-5013-3591-4 (paperback), 978-1-5013-0995-3 (epub e-book), 978-1-5013-0994-6 (pdf e-book) rrp: us$120.00 (hardcover), us$39.95 (paperback), us$34.99 (epub e-book), us$34.99 (pdf e-book) daniel schnee independent scholar (canada) decades ago, a volunteer at the edmonton jazz festival was assigned driving duties for pianist herman poole blount, to transport he and members of his group between calgary and edmonton for their respective festivals. a three-hour journey, blount spent much of the time scribbling in a small black notebook, often pausing to think and look out the window. the volunteer was extremely curious about the contents of the book, and made it his mission to peak inside of it at any given opportunity. during a brief pause at a gas station to refuel, the band exited to buy snacks, presenting the driver with his opportunity. it turned out to be a small collection of crossword puzzles. but why was the driver obsessed with blount’s book? the answer to this true story (told to me personally by the driver himself) can be found in low end theory: bass, bodies and the materiality of sonic experience by paul c. jasen. low end theory is a fascinating study of low frequency pitches, their physical effects, and how humans understand and define such tones, the goal being the creation of new language and terminology that helps the humanities better appreciate material agencies as sound-related scholarship moves into unexplored areas. what is there to be discovered in low tones? is it possible to create a new, previously non-existent language to access and create cross-cultural comparisons? the book starts with the idea that there is not a suitable language to access and describe the cross-cultural investigations of bass tone, how things feel and sound in settings where there is a significant amount of low tone. using the general term “bass”, this word also includes or represents vibration, and extra cochlear perception including acoustics, infrasound and liminal events that could be called sound-like, pointing to “whole intermodal worlds of sonic experience beyond audition, where perception is unsettled and synesthetic overlaps make bodies re-imagine themselves and their surroundings” (3). sound (as a mechanical vibration) is thus best understood as a relation and not an object. thinking with vibration then requires conceptual tools that are especially attuned to matter-in-process and what jasen calls the “circuits of responsivity that emerge between sonorous beings” (14). a key theoretical concept underlying the book is the idea that the human body in its materiality is a contingent being adaptively recomposing (moving, adjusting, testing, imagining, anticipating) in the immanent relations of its worldly encounters. adding sound into the mix, we arrive at an incorporeal materialism, a body’s relational potentials (which theorist brian massumi describes as their “yet-ness”: 13). this contingent, imaginative “body” that emerges in its sonorous relations is what jasen calls the “sonic body”: wondering how a “given vibratory milieu augments or diminishes” a body’s capacity to act—alone or collectively (194). by imagining or theorizing this sonic body jasen asks not what do we make of bass, but rather what does bass make of us? how does bass undulate and unsettle; how does it incite; how does it invade the lives of people, drawing bodily thought into new equations with itself and its surroundings? two important concepts that jasen focuses on is how sound, in this context, is most meaningfully understood as (1) a relation and not an object, and (2) the foundation of what is known as a myth science: the unmaking of consensual reality and inventing livable futures through myth making; the affect of sonic experience being a modulatory influence on the social scenes in which low (or indeed any) tones occur. also including infrasound, or inaudible frequencies from nature or industry (the “presence-absence” of such sounds), low tones register in the body as a feeling of being acted upon by an unseen agent, which stimulates imagination and influences perceived reality. here jasen introduces the term spectral catalysis, topologies of wave energies or conditions of molecularity that open up the body to “strange minglings” aka spectral-level events or the swarming of spectral uncertainties that create (1) new inflections of felt reality, and (2) turn the body into a series of questions and forced adaptations (33). this is essentially how “certain material-sonic conditions can deterritorialize the sonic body in ways that spark new trajectories in individual and collective activities” (17), adding to the myth-sciencing that can occur in such moments. one such myth-scientist is the aforementioned pianist herman blount, and the effect of his mythology on his fans. blount (1914–1993) was a philadelphia-based jazz pianist, born and raised in alabama. though this is fact, blount changed his named to “sun ra” and vehemently insisted that he was born and raised on the planet saturn, later coming to earth to create peace and harmony through poetry, onstage theatrics, unusual electric instruments such as his massive hexagonal light instrument dubbed the “outerspace visual communicator”, and the making of cosmic music. his efforts would later come under the aesthetic category of afrofuturism: an african-american movement combining science fiction, mythology, philosophy, fantasy and social critique, the “application of imaginative force to the alteration of lived reality” with which african americans might invent their own “alter destiny” (200). as ra himself states, “myth permits man to situate himself with the past and the future. what i am looking for are the myths of the future, the destiny of man ... if one wants to act on the destiny of the world, it’s necessary to treat it like a myth” (lock 1999: 61). ra’s myth-science itself was highly influential and immense, drawing upon ancient hermetic writing, religious texts, theosophy, contemporary science fiction and cryptic numerology, and was instrumental in reviving african-american interest in ancient egypt. ra even called his various assembled sidemen “tone scientists”. such was the mystique and legend surrounding ra that the aforementioned jazz festival driver was immensely interested in peaking into ra’s black notebook to see if there was anything of philosophical or literary importance, any arcana he could glean and share with his friends: wisdom or creative mythology that would give the driver social capital amongst his peers (status via participation in the ra mythos through personal contact with the master myth-scientist himself). as jasen reveals, bodies of myth science accumulate around unusual vibratory milieus (28), and sun ra’s own “tale of becoming”, how he categorized and philosophized about his experiential knowledge, serves as an excellent parergon to jasen’s own attempt at rigorous speculation on the sound body. thus, not meaning to be definitive, jasen intends for the book to be an “experiment” (187), its own kind of myth science, a work that “strives instead to engender a mode of thought that draws sound-related scholarship into unfamiliar territory, and help nudge the humanities more broadly towards a greater appreciation of material agencies” (19). the aim is “to fertilize a mode of perception—to find ways of conceptually inhabiting the vibratory encounter, finding means to render it sensible in language, and letting theory be informed by it” (187). jasen also states that his writing, like a myth-science, “need not be utterly ‘right’ or objectively accurate. it’s doing its job if it manages to convey something of a milieu’s affects, and their escapes, in ways that put theory more closely in touch with the sonic body” (17). indeed, as hakim williams states, the “quest for certainty” in the sciences “ends up narrowing and ‘colonizing’ the realm of the possibilities, in terms of diversity of approaches, and ways of being and thinking”(2015: 28). this is the great strength of the book and ultimately the success of its goal, as it analyzes a wide variety of sonic events and their sites in thoughtful and imaginative ways while attempting to evade scientific monism or intrinsicism. but this also raises the issue that myth “science” provides no guarantee that any/all mythologies will avoid inculcating actual delusion, cult behaviour, oppression, or other modes of thought and action that are intellectually suspect, or obscure social reality. jasen openly admits his work is an effort to “deform” thought, rather than clarify it, to “push it into the always complex, and often strange, traffic between nature and culture”(17). if we have to deform thought to advance, then this suggests jasen’s method neither enriches nor supplements the existing scholarship on sound and materiality. jasen also states that the scientific literature on sound, and its accounts of peculiar neuro-scientific effects, is “constrained by its unwillingness to pursue anomaly and its social life” (17), though he cites no examples of such. this weakens his argument and, as alan singer states, “the disposition towards contextual relativism depends on prejudicially conflating reason with instrumental dogmatic thinking. in this way, reason becomes the scapegoat antagonist for without which any such aesthetic quest cannot proceed to the sanctifying pedestal of pure art. the conflict between reason and the aesthetic becomes the motive for the aesthetic evasion of conflict” (2003: 111–12). jasen concludes the book with the statement that “we will never know just what a sonic body can do. all the more reason to keep asking the question” (194). following such a declarative statement with the inference that we should ignore its premise (the “certainty” of never knowing) works to undermine the salient aspects of the book and feels like a negation of jasen’s previous efforts, the very monism he seeks to avoid. in that sense, salomé voegelin’s book sonic possible worlds: hearing the continuum of sound (2014) works better towards categorizing or defining theory around what is heard and felt, versus what we imagine has been heard and felt, through descriptive language she defines as “textual phonography” (2014: 1). overall, though, low end theory is an interesting and thoughtful addition to the greater discussion of sound materiality, and will serve as excellent graduate-level reading for ethnomusicologists, folklorists and anthropologists alike. references lock, graham. 1999. blutopia: visions of the future and revisions of the past in the work of sun ra, duke ellington, and anthony braxton. durham: duke university press. singer, alan. 2003. aesthetic reason: artworks and the deliberative ethos. university park: pennsylvania state university press. voegelin, salomé. 2014. sonic possible worlds: hearing the continuum of sound. new york: bloomsbury academic. williams, hakim m.a. 2015. “fighting a resurgent hyper-positivism in education is music to my ears”. action, criticism, and theory for music education 14(1): 19–43. life and death on the pulse dance floor: transglocal politics and erasure of the latinx in the history of queer dance dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 8(1): 1–25 issn 1947-5403 ©2016 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2016.08.01.01 life and death on the pulse dance floor: transglocal politics and the erasure of the latinx in the history of queer dance tim lawrence university of east london (uk) abstract although the dominant response of politicians, journalists and campaign groups to omar mateen’s 12 june 2016 massacre of forty-nine people at the pulse nightclub in orlando revolved around the repetition of already established arguments about terrorism, this article will outline how the massacre amounted to a specific attack on the latinx community.1 it will also argue that, although distinctive, the discursive erasure of the specifically queer latinx finds a partial echo in the way that latin culture has been marginalised in writing on dance culture. an outline map of the somewhat opaque latinx contribution will be offered as a small tribute to those who have lived for and now died on the latinx dance floor. the account of the dancers who gathered at pulse, the music they danced to, and the unstable, marginalised and dynamic networks of musicians, dancers and party spaces that preceded them will be considered within j. blake scott and rebecca dingo’s (2012) evocation of the “transglocal”. if transglocal encounters “can generate new meanings and subject positions” (blake scott and dingo: 7), so the dancers at pulse can be seen to have moved resourcefully, dynamically and creatively between the local and the transnational as they sought out new modes of expression and community in a darkening global terrain. keywords: pulse, orlando; latinx; lgbtq; dj culture; terrorism tim lawrence is a professor of cultural studies at the university of east london. he is the author of love saves the day: a history of american dance music culture, 1970–79, hold on to your dreams: arthur russell and the downtown music scene, 1973–92, and life and death on the new york dance floor, 1980–83, all with duke university press. he is the co-founder of the centre for cultural studies research and lucky cloud sound system. <www.timlawrence.info>. feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2016.08.01.01 http://www.timlawrence.info dancecult 8(1)2 deepening divisions in the us political landscape (berman: 2016), combined with social media’s decimation of the once seemingly frenetic twenty-four hour news cycle (alejandro 2010), fueled the near-instantaneous rationalisation of the pulse massacre through the prism of ongoing debates about terrorism and gun control. presumptive republican presidential candidate donald trump had already thrown out the casually fascistic suggestion that all muslims should be banned from entering the us when he tweeted: “appreciate the congrats for being right on radical islamic terrorism, i don’t want congrats, i want toughness & vigilance. we must be smart!” (trump 2016). obama described the attack as “act of terror and an act of hate”, and although he remarked that the place where lgbt americans “were attacked is more than a nightclub—it is a place of solidarity and empowerment where people have come together to raise awareness, to speak their minds, and to advocate for their civil rights”—he maintained that “this could have been any one of our communities”, that an attack on “any american […] is an attack on all of us”, and that the massacre served as a “further reminder” of the need for gun control (time 2016). presumptive democratic presidential candidate hilary clinton framed the massacre as both “an act of terror” and an “act of hate”, and pointed to the need to defeat “international terror groups” and keep guns “out of the hands of terrorists” (briefing 2016). the new york times summarised the massacre as “a tragedy that combined gun violence, a hatred of gays and ties to islamist terrorism” (shear 2016). talk of terrorism, the nation and the west escalated to the point where the specificity of the massacre became hard to discern. barely twelve hours after it had elapsed adam schiff of the house intelligence committee declared that evidence indicates “an isisinspired act of terrorism” (new york times 2016). the following day fbi director james comey noted that despite there being no indication of outside direction the intelligence community was “highly confident that this killer was radicalized at least in part through the internet” (shabad 2016). two days later the fbi agent in charge of the investigation called the massacre both a hate crime and an act of terrorism (rt.com 2016). meanwhile it took the republican governor of florida rick scott almost forty-eight hours to recognise that the massacre was perpetrated against the lgbt community, with florida’s attorney general pam bondi equally evasive (wolf 2016). in the uk commentator owen jones left sky tv’s studios when presenters insisted that the attack wasn’t homophobic, after which the irish independent rounded on jones for failing to point out that the homophobic attack was “religiously motivated” and for propagating “identity politics at its most exclusionary and grotesque” (o’doherty 2016). some weeks later the fbi maintained that the investigation “hasn’t revealed that he [mateen] targeted pulse because it was a gay club” (goldman 2016). even if the scale of the shooting was undeniably shocking, it also became commonplace to overstate mateen’s spree as the “deadliest” in us history (breen 2016; broverman 2016; guardian 2016; ravitz 2016; teague 2016), situating it as an attack on the nation while papering over bloodier massacres perpetrated against native americans. lawrence | life and death on the pulse dance floor 3 in fact, the framing of mateen as an isis-inspired terrorist was based on spurious evidence. he attended his local mosque, the islamic center of fort pierce, but only infrequently. he twice went to saudi arabia on a pilgrimage in 2011 and 2012 to perform umrah, making him one of six million muslims who do so annually. in 2013 he claimed to be aligned to both al-qaeda and hezbollah, and citing two groups who are sworn sunni-shiite enemies. concerned when it heard about these claims, the fbi investigated mateen only to close its inquiry when he explained he had made the comment in response to being teased for his muslim faith. a further fbi investigation into possible links between mateen and a us citizen from the same mosque in fort pierce who took part in an al-qaeda affiliate attack led nowhere. mateen’s claim to know people who were linked to the brothers who carried out the boston marathon bombing turned out to be fictional. on the saturday before the massacre he posted messages declaring his allegiance to the leader of isis, calling on the u.s. and russia to stop bombing isis, but the declaration bore no relation to patterns of strict religious conduct or ideological support of isis. all the same, a cbs poll published on 15 june showed that three-quarters of us citizens believed mateen’s attack was either an act of terrorism or an act of terrorism as well as a hate crime, while wikipedia reported matterof-factly that the massacre constituted “the deadliest terrorist attack in the u.s.” since 9/11 (salvanto et al 2016; wikipedia 2016). the depiction of mateen as typical of the orientalist male outlined by edward said (1995)—effeminate yet sadistic, simple yet duplicitous, outwardly functional yet psychologically unstable, intelligent yet irrational—provided further presumptive evidence that his actions were driven by so-called islamic terrorism. abusive behaviour within his first marriage appeared to affirm long held views about patriarchal violence within islam while parallel stories of his pursuit of sexual encounters with other men via the gay dating app grindr as well as the pulse dance floor raised the thought that the massacre was rooted in his inability to reconcile his sexuality with his religion, which was repeatedly cited as being intolerant of homosexuality. reports of mateen’s increasingly angry demeanour, including a certain broodiness displayed during some of his visits to pulse, pointed to an individual wrestling with conflicting cultural affinities and desires that were bound to culminate in an uncontrollable explosion. citing no sources, the guardian linked the massacre to islam when it reported that mateen was “said to have enrolled in online courses taught by a homophobic imam” and added that “homophobia and jihadism are anything but mutually exclusive” inasmuch as “isis executes people it says are gay, stones them and throws them from roofs” (ackerman and siddiqui 2016). particular prominence was given to mateen’s father’s facebook video comment that “god himself will punish those involved in homosexuality” (sullivan and wan 2016). referring to the father’s story of his son’s expression of revulsion when he saw two gay men kissing while spending time with his second wife and son, the washington post noted that if mateen was “interested in men, it would have been difficult to tell his father” before asking: “was it islamic state ideology or some personal demon that drove him to target gay people?” (sullivan and wan 2016). dancecult 8(1)4 the overall depiction reaffirms jasbir k. puar’s argument that constructions of terror and terrorist masculinities are “metonymically tied to all sorts of pathologies of the mind and body” as well as permeated by “perverse, improperly heteroand homomuslim sexualities” (puar: xxiii–xxiv). puar and amit rai note how the personality defect model has been developed within terrorism studies as one of two main explanations of the “terrorist mindset”, with terrorists assumed to display pathological defects that are rooted in unconscious feelings of hostility towards their parents (perhaps because of abuse or adolescent rebellion) or of exaggerated identification (perhaps because of perceived suffering experienced by their parents) before the pathology becomes narrow, extreme and absolutist in adulthood. it follows that if terrorism is a symptom of a deviant psyche, or the breakdown of the psyche of the heterosexual family romance, then monster-terrorists are products of a form of “failed heterosexuality” (puar and rai: 124). yet people who experience sexual conflicts or display psychotic symptoms don’t inevitably go on to carry out terrorist attacks, just as the people who carry out such attacks aren’t necessarily conflicted or psychotic, and while it remains possible that more compelling evidence will come to light, for now sima shakhsari is right to suggest that mateen’s lastminute declaration of allegiance to isis might well have been made to give a “heroic” gloss to his homophobia, with isis a “deterritorialized imagined community where anyone who wants to defy certain social rules can claim belonging (or is assigned belonging)” (shakhsari 2016). ultimately the terrorist label stuck to mateen because of his afghan background and islamic heritage, just as, conversely, no terrorist sympathies were attached to the white man who was arrested before carrying out a planned attack at pride in los angeles on the same day as mateen carried out his massacre. “the muslim feigns patriotism and practice of american customs, but it is a trick, so he must be watched for signs of savagery as he prays in the mosque and goes about his business”, notes roqayah chamseddine of the orientalist view of the muslim. “the muslim american is a hyper-visible yet invisible being who will have his american-ness stripped from him the moment he errs” (chamseddine 2016). the rush to affirm mateen’s pathological terrorist intent just so happens to support a nationalist discourse that positions the us as the hub of global democracy, liberalism and morality, with a generalised islamic east posited as an overt or covert threat to those values and their associated way of life. in perhaps the most remarkable of these interventions, trump, not previously renowned for his dedication to lgbtq rights, figured the attack on “gay and lesbian citizens” as “a strike at the heart and soul of who we are as a nation” because it enabled him to figure the liberal west as being at war with illiberal islam, thereby justifying his proposal to ban muslims from entering the us. “the bottom line is that the only reason the killer was in america in the first place was because we allowed his family to come here”, he argued, adding that mateen’s father comes from a culture where 99% of people support sharia law (trump 2016). “that is a fact, and it’s a fact we need to talk about”. lawrence | life and death on the pulse dance floor 5 as much as trump’s claims to liberalism might amaze, his contention sits within a widely accepted discourse that gives the us permission to enact illiberal policies, ranging from foreign wars to the maintenance of guantanamo bay to the policing of people of colour, in order to defend its claim to being the bastion of western liberalism. to point this out is not to argue for the equivalence or non-equivalence of the us vs. the rest so much as to note that, for all of the talk about us tolerance, including freedom for its lgbtq citizens, levels of homophobia, racism and sexism remain high—one might even say surprisingly high given these underpinning claims to liberalism. puar (2007 2) also points to the relatively recent rise of homonationalism, or a form of nationalism that embraces the idea of lgtbq rights and policies around, say, gay marriage so long as those embraced under this banner are willing to articulate the nationalist concerns of the political establishment. in this manner queer liberals have been coopted to a cause that is quick to support the introduction illiberal measures to defend liberalism. meanwhile muslim countries, intent on preserving relations with the us, lined up to denounce isis and distance themselves from its ideology; saudi arabia’s problematic ties with isis along with the united states’s generally strong diplomatic ties with saudi arabia passed all but unmentioned; and the silence surrounding the bombing campaign in syria also escaped scrutiny (even if the post-pulse panic strengthened its underlying rationale). nor was any mention made of the fact that the horrendous death toll recorded at pulse continued to be matched on a near daily basis in iraq, as tracked by iraq body count.2 such are the power relations that underscored the way mateen came to be defined in the hours that followed his attack. “in a war-on-terror world, there is an injunction to grieve in public for american lives lost to terrorism in order to ward off suspicion and further targeting”, points out maya mikdashi (2016). “this injunction applies as well to the dead in france or belgium, but not to victims of terrorism (state or otherwise) in iraq or nigeria or syria. this phenomenon is directly related to the ways in which us political discourse on the war on terror has starkly divided the world into victims (europeans and americans) and perpetrators (muslims and arabs)”. as it happens the men who described their interactions with mateen painted a picture of someone who enjoyed friendships with gay men and drag queens as well as someone who was able to differentiate between his own religious beliefs and the more conservative ideas of his father. in the longest testimony, a man going under the name of miguel told univision that he and mateen had a relationship that was akin to being “friends with benefits” and that they met some 15–20 times in a hotel room over a two-month period before the relationship came to a close in december. “he say muslim religion is a beautiful, beautiful religion”, commented miguel. “it’s a religion where everything’s about love, where everybody’s welcome—gay, trans, bisexual, hetero, everybody”. he noted that mateen never appeared to be violent. “he [was] looking for love”, added miguel. “to be embraced”. miguel hypothesised that mateen carried out the attack as an act of revenge, angered that he might have become infected with hiv (even though the test came back negative) (univision 2016). other pulse regulars remembered him as a sullen character, yet none dancecult 8(1)6 recalled an individual unable to reconcile his desire with his religious beliefs—or a person who, assumed to be a frustrated gay muslim, might channel his pent-up frustration on the very people his religion “forbade” him to desire, and in so doing give succour to the fake idea that being islamic and queer could only result in that kind of rampage. nor was there so much as a hint that mateen lived his life according to the kind of hardline wahhabist strictures advocated by isis that might have made him want to carry out an attack on the group’s behalf. the gay community’s response to the massacre expressed deep emotional shock while avoiding the easy temptation to characterise mateen as a conflicted muslim terrorist. at vigils staged across the world, speakers argued for the need to oppose those who sought to use the massacre as an excuse for anti-muslim prejudice (browne 2016). yet they often did so from a compromised point-of-view, such as when advocate editor matthew breen (2016) argued that talk of isis was a “goddamned red herring” and that mateen’s hatred was “homegrown” inasmuch as it expressed societal homophobia, yet also recirculated the possibility that he was fuelled by islamic extremism, with the latinx identity of the pulse crowd left invisible by his broader evocation of a generalised lgbtq community. courtney fry (2016) followed up with a piece that noted the mainstream media’s reluctance to identity the night as a queer night yet again generalised the attack by maintaining that all lgbtq party spaces were now in “extreme danger” and that “a place that has always been known as an oasis from the bigotry, homophobia, transphobia, biphobia, physical threats, assaults, and murders that happen in the outside world, has now been torn to shreds”. the colourblind response spread to the atlantic, which published research showing that “lgbt people are more than twice as likely to be the target of a violent hate-crime than jews or black people”, and “more than four times as likely as muslims, and almost 14 times as likely as latinos” (green 2016), as if lgbtq people couldn’t be jewish or black or muslim or latinx, as if killers could only be motivated “on the basis of one strand of hatred”, and as if white lgbtq people are “more vulnerable than other minority groups”, as jack halberstam (2016) points out. a few days later the new york times presented fbi data showing that lgbtq people were the second most targeted group in 2005, behind “jewish” and ahead of “black”, “muslim”, “hispanic”, “asian” and “white”, and were the most targeted group in 2014, only to note at the very bottom of the article the that “vast majority” of lgbtq people killed were “black or hispanic transgender people” (park and mykhyalyshyn 2016)—providing further evidence of the need, in halberstam’s words, to “challenge this sense of an amorphous homophobic threat that separates homophobic violence out from the particular, convulsive expressions of racialized hate” (2016). as research (waters et al. 2016) on attacks carried out against lgbtq people between 2012–15 published by the national coalition of anti-violence programs (ncavp) reveals, white gay men were in fact the victims in eleven of a total of eighty-eight homicides, with the rest distributed between black transgender women (39), black gay men (11), latinx transgender women (8) and other (19). lawrence | life and death on the pulse dance floor 7 it was primarily left to members of the latinx queer community to note the erasure of the specificity of the attack.3 am foiles sifuentes (2016) expressed her anger at the way “the same people that forced queer people of color to the margins are the ones hosting these public places of grieving” before asking: “even in death—why is it okay for you to continue to force queer people of color to the margins? how can you find comfort in ignoring your collusion in their erasure?” acknowledging the difficulty inherent in critiquing more powerful figures in the lgbtq community because they also “shared in the vulnerability and trauma of the incident”, ramón rivera-servera pointed out reactions nevertheless “distanced themselves significantly from the specificity of this as a latino, primarily puerto rican, experience” (kornhaber 2016). several writers cited christina hanhardt’s (2012) research into the way past lgbtq calls for anti-violence measures have often led to forms of increased policing that endanger queer people of colour and wider communities of colour. “the white lgbtq community doesn’t face the criminalization and policing that our community faces every day”, remarked jorge gutierrez, founder of familia: trans queer liberation movement (vasquez 2016). “not just at pride, but every day, everywhere we go. that’s our life”. the everyday homophobia and racism experienced by queer people of colour offers a more obvious explanatory context for mateen’s actions than any last-minute declaration of sympathy for isis. there have, of course, been gains in the us in recent years, including the supreme court june ruling in obergefell v. hodges that effectively made same-sex marriage the law of the land, the white house lgbtq pride reception where transgender figure 1: flyer for pulse’s saturday night parties. dancecult 8(1)8 immigrant leader jennicet guttiérrez pointed to the plight faced by lgbtq immigrants held in detention centres, and the black lives matter movement’s demanding an end to police violence and anti-black racism (waters et al. 2016). yet during the same period a slew of anti-lgbtq initiatives swept the nation in the form of “religious freedom bills” and “bathroom bills” while racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric spiraled. if anything the backlash intensified during 2016, with eighty-seven bills aimed at limiting lgbtq rights introduced in legislatures between january and june—a marked increase on previous years (mason et al. 2016)—with police shootings of black men continuing apparently unabated. “outside, they call you an abomination”, author justin torres (2016) noted the day after mateen’s attack. “outside, there is a news media that acts as if there are two sides to a debate over trans people using public bathrooms. outside, there is a presidential candidate who has built a platform on erecting a wall between the united states and mexico — and not only do people believe that crap is possible, they believe it is necessary. outside, puerto rico is still a colony, being allowed to drown in debt, to suffer, without the right to file for bankruptcy, to protect itself. outside, there are more than 100 bills targeting you, your choices, your people, pending in various states”. in terms of his personal location within this culture, mateen sought out employment in violent settings and, perhaps not coincidentally, reproduced violent behaviour. he worked as a state prison guard at the martin correctional institution and then for multinational security company g4s, a “hotbed of routine abuse, sexual violence, extremism and homophobia” where the “routine protection of violent, racist tendencies among its security officers appears to be an institutionalised global problem”, according to nafeez ahmed (2016) of the institute for policy research and development. mateen was sufficiently obsessed with the idea of working for the new york police department he took a series of selfies dressed in one of its shirts. some acquaintances remember a person who littered his speech with the invective of hate. he took excessive quantities of steroids as he built himself up into a muscle machine and was a wife beater. he also committed his hate crime not against the united states, but against the latinx lgbtq dancers who congregated at pulse that saturday night—otherwise why travel two hours to pulse instead of one of the city’s two-thousand other bars? shakhasari (2016) wonders if it was mateen’s “performance of a homophobic and misogynistic american masculinity enabled by everyday militarism, and constructed visà-vis the ‘failed masculinity’ of the muslim other, that led to this massacre”. the critic acknowledges that the existence of violence, homophobia, transphobia and misogyny in the middle east shouldn’t mask the “hypocrisy of an exceptionalism that assumes the us to be the bastion of freedom and progress”. mateen’s expression of homophobic and violent sentiments might not offer final proof of his motivations, but in the final instance his actions were much more obviously homophobic and violent than inspired by the ideology of isis. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lgbt-state-bills-discrimination_us_570ff4f2e4b0060ccda2a7a9 lawrence | life and death on the pulse dance floor 9 writing the latinx dance floor into pulse and the history of dance culture what, then, of the population that mateen attacked—a population that has been, to varying degrees, left out of accounts of the massacre? barbara pomo and ron legler founded pulse in 2004 in honour of pomo’s brother, john, who died from aids in 1991, evoking his heartbeat in the club’s name. located at 1912 south orange avenue, the venue promoted itself as “the hottest gay bar in orlando”. regular theme nights included noche latina on mondays (featuring a reggaetón dancehall soundtrack), twisted tuesdays (a talent night hosted by axel andrews and kai’ja adonis), college night wednesdays (hosted by angelica sanchez and weekly guests), tease thursdays (a burlesque show hosted by lady bri and blade matthews), platinum fridays (a hip hop night hosted by angelica sanchez) and upscale latin night on saturdays (hosted by former rupaul’s drag race contestant kenya michaels). offering three rooms and a chic interior, the venue carried the promise of style, fabulousness and an escape from hardship. “guests are free to choose which best suits their present mood”, diego wyatt (2016) of next magazine reported in february. “some fall under the spellbinding mystery of the adonis room, an intimate space filled with beautiful male and female go-go dancers. some head to the lounge, complete with a state-of-the-art lighting and sound system, a dance floor, vip area and the main bar. and others go for the patio, which is undergoing some sprucing up to accommodate the relaxed atmosphere. each area has its own dj and vibe. translation: there’s something for everyone”. prior to the attack the club attracted an eclectic crowd made up of lgbtq people and straight friends of all ages and ethnicities, with saturdays particularly popular with queer latinx dancers. “i was too white to fit in with latinos and i was too hispanic to fit in with white kids”, one told matthew rodriguez (2016) of mic.com. “but on latino night on saturdays i didn’t feel that way. it was just literally a time and place where everyone could be together and enjoy yourselves”. numerous drag performers got their start at the venue and indeed two trans women of colour were featured on publicity for the party that started on 11 june and ended with the massacre. queer women were also a notable presence and, as trish bendixson (2016) notes, featured among the victims of the attack. non-latin migrants— including mateen—were admitted into the mix. “i think pulse differs from tourist clubs, as well as other local clubs, for a couple of reasons”, pomo commented in an interview with billboard the day after the killing spree (gray 2016). “one of our biggest goals was to create a warm, welcoming atmosphere that was family-like, with people who shared my vision”. continuing the legacy established by pioneering party spots such as the loft, the sanctuary, the haven and the limelight in early 1970s new york city (lawrence 2003), pulse operated as cross between a home, a refuge, a community centre and a pleasure palace. “growing up in a black and brown community where hyper-masculinity was acted out as a form of survival, i actually grew up hating on pulse”, dance floor regular daniel leon-davis (2016) recounts in fusion. “in my community, like in so many others around the world, my identity as a gay man was viewed as a form of weakness. so much so that even when i came dancecult 8(1)10 out, i refused to go to gay clubs because it meant that i would be one of ‘those gay men’ ”. everything changed when he went to pulse. “over the next several years, pulse became the place where my best friends learned to be themselves”, he adds. “pulse was where i learned to love myself as a gay man. pulse was where i learned to love my community”. pomo also made a point of supporting local charities, raising funds for entertainers who wanted to enter pageants, educating around hiv/aids prevention and working in tandem with the straight community (gray 2016). “we were never exclusive of any person’s cause”, she maintained in her billboard interview. “our doors were open to everyone”. pomo added: “people who aren’t out, people who are exploring, people who are transitioning need a place to do this without judgment, they need acceptance; this is what pulse was always about”. operating at the intersection of race and class as well as sexuality and gender, pulse is also rooted in the intertwining forces of colonialism and neoliberalism. with an estimated 1,000 puerto rican families currently relocating to florida every month, the state is close to surpassing the total puerto rican population of new york (alvarez 2016), and orlando remains one of the primary destinations for this transitory population. the underpinning reasons for the movement are clear: congress has historically refused to act on the unincorporated colony’s seventy-billion dollar debt, leaving it unable to file for bankruptcy; its economy has stagnated since 2011; its population is declining; and its unemployment rate is twice as high as mainland us, with poverty three times as severe (chappatta 2016). as us citizens puerto ricans are also free to travel to the mainland, with florida offering them the nearest landing point in the us as well as access to employers such as seaworld orlando resort, universal orlando resort, walt disney world resort and legoland. in august 2015 the new york times observed that the current wave of migration “is transforming a corridor of central florida that is increasingly viewed as economically powerful, culturally diverse and politically pivotal” (alvarez 2015). lgbtq puerto ricans joined the migration to orlando in part because of the city’s nightlife, with its ten-plus gay bars matching the total in detroit, a city three times orlando’s size, and pulse offering queer migrants an opportunity to escape the “compulsory heterosexuality” (rich 1980) of the city’s theme parks. pomo notes that lgbtq holidaymakers would head to the club as well (gray 2016). saturday 11 june started out as a regular latin night with dj ray rivera, a.k.a. dj infinite, selecting a mix of hip hop, r&b and reggaeton, or “old school” as he put it in a facebook exchange (rivera 2016), with dj flawless and dj simo holding down the other two rooms. when mateen began his rampage rivera initially thought that someone was letting off firecrackers, reports asawin suebsaeng (2016); then he turned the music down and understood what was going on. sourced from the biographical testimonies and photographs posted on social media by lovers, family members and friends, a person-byperson roll call of those who died conveys the connectedness as well as the pluralism of the social coalition that gathered on the floor that night (mirkinson et al. 2016). “maybe your ma blessed you on the way out the door”, torres writes in his tribute to the dead, imagining the multiplicity of circumstances that might have preceded their congregation (torres 2016). “maybe she wrapped a plate for you in the fridge so you don’t come home lawrence | life and death on the pulse dance floor 11 figure 2: flyer for the saturday night party at pulse on 11 june 2016. and mess up her kitchen with your hunger. maybe your tia dropped you off, gave you cab money home. maybe you had to get a sitter. maybe you’ve yet to come out to your family at all, or maybe your family kicked you out years ago”. torres offers further scenarios that articulate the way the sonic and social underpinnings of the pulse dance floor stretch across time and space in transglocal fashion, to cite j. blake scott and rebecca dingo’s (2012) evocation of culture combines the global and the local while “moving through space or across lines, as well as changing the nature of something”, in the words of anthropologist aihwa ong (1999: 4). in the run-up to mateen’s attack the pulse floor connected the disparate yet intertwining experiences of, to reference torres’s diverse community further, the dancer whose lover decided to stay at home to the one who is allowed to stray, the one who is flush to the one who is broke, the one who doesn’t speak spanish to the one who barely speaks english, and so on, until he finally asks after the dancer who might be undocumented, a common experience in the latinx community, not solely in terms of the estimated eleven-million migrants who lack authorisation to live in the us (kronstad and passel 2015), but also in terms of societal location. the lack of authorization extends to latin music, which until recently barely figured in a field that was assumed to consist of a binary exchange between black and white musicians and listenerships. john storm roberts addressed the erasure when he argued that “latin music has been the greatest outside influence on the popular music of the united states” (roberts: ix), and ned sublette developed the analysis by showing how the “commonplaces of cuban music became commonplaces of american music” (2004: 571) by 1951. raquel rivera carried the analysis to hip-hop, noting how new york puerto ricans were “integral” dancecult 8(1)12 to the culture since its inception (2003: 3). ed morales went on to trace the latin influence on rock, hip hop and other sounds in latin beat: the rhythms and roots of latin music from bossa nova to salsa and beyond (2003), and jim mccarthy and ron sansoe extended the analysis in the voices of latin rock (2005). césar miguel rondón’s spanish history of salsa came out in english three years later (2008), after which the authors of reggaeton (2009) pointed to how the sound emerged as a transnational jamaican, nuyorican, panamanian and puerto rican music with no singular place of origin. more recently, juliet mcmains (2015) has tracked the development of salsa dance in new york, los angeles and miami as well as its relationship to salsa music. however, the latin influence on dj culture, disco, house music and other electronic dance sounds remains largely undocumented, and that left the impression that either the sound of the music or the sexuality of a significant number of its makers weren’t sufficiently latin, or weren’t primed for easy integration into stories about national and diasporic musical movements. in this manner the queerest strand of latinx culture has passed under-historicised, right up to the point when mateen’s assault on the culture revealed just how easy it remains to erase latinx queerness. ramón h rivera-servera argues that the analysis of the utopian space of the queer latinx dance floor requires an “engagement with the cultures of pleasure that characterize the club” as well as “the cultures of struggle that mark the multiple trajectories and negotiations undertaken by dancers on their way to and as a precondition for the utopian experiences of the dance floor” (2004: 271) what journeys, then, were undertaken in order for the dancers to congregate at pulse on 11 june 2016, not only in terms of how they and the music they danced to coalesced that night, but also how previous generations of dancers and musicians (including djs) combined to make latinx dancers and latin sounds become an integral part of dj-led dance culture in the first place, from the pre-disco formation of the opening years of the 1970s through to the rise and fall of disco through to its mutant aftermath and the subsequent rise of house? while rivera-servera (2012) has developed an insightful ethnographic analysis of the latinx dance floor that unfolded in eight clubs located in new york, rochester, san antonio and austin between 1998–2003, and while josé esteban muñoz (2009) has elucidated crucial aspects of latinx performance in club settings, a history of the culture that locates its development within the broader conjunctural landscape of dj-led dance culture has yet to be written. the point isn’t that key latinx figures never get to be mentioned in other accounts of queer dance culture so much as their contribution tends to be mentioned in passing, as if they were incidental, when in fact it could be argued that, to adapt sublette’s phrase, the commonplaces of latinx music have become commonplaces of dance music. although it is beyond the scope of this article to provide a detailed analysis, a post-pulse survey of dj culture and disco during the 1970s confirms the extent of a latinx presence that has only crept into writing on the culture. any historical account would need to being begin with the year zero beginnings of contemporary dance music culture in 1970 when david mancuso and francis grasso, spurred on by a convergent crowd that articulated lawrence | life and death on the pulse dance floor 13 the energies of gay liberation, civil rights, feminism, anti-war protests, the broader countercultural movement and bohemian culture, pioneered the practice that saw djs begin to select records as part of a democratic, antiphonal conversation with the dancing crowd (lawrence 2003). although there were no latin-specific discotheques in operation at the time, latinx dancers formed a key contingent at the loft and to a lesser extent other venues, their presence traceable to the “great migration” of puerto ricans to the us mainland during the 1950s and the passing of hart cellar act in 1965, with the latter loosening up restrictions on non-european migration to the us. their communicative presence can have only encouraged djs to select records with varying degrees of latinness into a mix that was largely yet by no means exclusively composed of african american recordings, with tracks such as babe ruth’s “the mexican”, barrabas’s “wild safari” / “woman”, joe bataan’s “latin strut”, chakachas’s “jungle fever”, chicago transit authority’s “i’m a man”, gil scottheron’s “the bottle” and war’s “city, country, city” offering latin elements. publishing the first article to point to the rising number of dj-led dance venues in the city, vince aletti (1973) described the emerging sonic amalgam as ‘‘afro-latin in sound or instrumentation, heavy on the drums, with minimal lyrics, sometimes in a foreign language, and a repetitious chorus”. how did latin influences make themselves heard in these records? who were the musicians and producers who spearheaded the development? what journeys did the recordings make en route to the new york dance floor? to what extent were the djs who played them rooted in latin culture? although italian americans dominated the formative years of the dj profession (thanks in part to the mafia’s presence in a number of discotheques), and although african americans such as tee scott and larry levan became increasingly influential as the decade progressed, latinx djs also made their mark, with david rodriguez (the limelight) and richie rivera (the firehouse, the anvil, flamingo) the most notable, and john “jellybean” benitez, armando galvez, hector lebron, freddie mendoza, mike mora, eddie rivera and ray velazquez also significant during this period. these djs cultivated a range of styles that articulated their diasporic subjectivities in sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit ways. calling himself the contessa, rodriguez selected records with unprecedented attitude as he told tempestuous stories by interweaving the lyrics of songs (lawrence 2003). meanwhile the shyer richie rivera emerged as one of the city’s most compelling djs as he played alternate weekends at flamingo, the most influential private party for the white gay male crowd, introducing such a high level of latin percussion he acquired the nickname “boom boom rivera”. based at the cork & bottle, eddie rivera might have been the first dj to introduce latin imports into his sets, among them “el bimbo” by the chocolate boys, a 1974 import (aletti 1998: 87). meanwhile john benitez, whose mother migrated from puerto rico to the south bronx during the early 1950s, integrated recordings such as the latin-jazz-disco of “what you need is my love” by cindy rodriguez (aletti 1998: 231). latinx sounds became more prominent in disco during the second half of the 1970s. van mccoy led the charge when he scored a number one hit with “the hustle”, which tapped into the revival of the latin dance style in suburban discotheques. formed with the idea dancecult 8(1)14 of latinising the philadelphia sound after its jewish-syrian owners had mined the latin import market, salsoul proceeded to bring roy armando, andy gonzalez, manny oquendo and peter “choki” quintero as well as conga player larry washington into the studio, so whereas philadelphia international house band mfsb used only one conga/timbales player (washington), salsoul went “very latin”, according to vibes player and producer vince montana (lawrence 2003: 170). with tom moulton accentuating the latin percussion in his extended mix of patti jo’s “make me believe in you”, vicki sue robinson heightening the percussion and flight in “turn the beat around”, karen young combining afro-latin rhythms with jazz and r&b in “hot shot”, walter gibbons foregrounding congas, timbales and dramatic expression in his mix of salsoul orchestra’s “salsoul 3001”, and richie rivera emphasising an insistent woodblock in his mix of anita ward’s “ring my bell”, the kind of syncopation, colour and contrast that was more obviously typical of cuban music than the r&b groove and swing that shaped early disco came to overtly infuse disco during the second half of the decade, with scores of other records incorporating the shift. meanwhile gibbons demonstrated how djs could generate a latin-inflected style behind the turntables when, paralleling dj kool herc in the bronx, he pioneered the technique of extending the percussive break by mixing between bongo heavy tracks such as “2 pigs and a hog”. with the partial exception of the salsa-ification of salsoul, these significant developments have at best been acknowledged only in passing in writing about disco. certain institutional gains paralleled these developments, all of them unfolding within straight settings. on the discotheque front, the copacabana, the cork & bottle and the ipanema all targeted a latinx crowd, with djs such as freddie mendoza, tony gioe, mike mora and eddie rivera mixing disco with latin tracks. as secretary of the new york record pool, an organisation co-founded by mancuso to distribute free promotional records to djs, rivera convened a separate latin music department before forming a breakaway organisation, the international disco record center (idrc). straight latin djs followed rivera while lgbtq ones stayed with mancuso and subsequently joined judy weinstein’s for the record after mancuso wound down his pool. lacking a night marked as their own, lgbtq latinx dancers continued to head to the loft as well as other private party spaces that catered to mixed crowds, including the gallery and the paradise garage. “it [the gallery] was never clearly defined along black gay lines”, notes dj nicky siano of some of the non-normative aspects of latinx queerness that require further examination (lawrence 2003: 104). “there were so many people who were just sexual. a lot of black men would have sex with other men but didn’t consider it gay sex. puerto rican men, who would never have been caught dead in a gay club, were ‘just hanging out, man, getting blow jobs, fucking some ass’. it wasn’t about gay or straight. it was about, ‘hey, let’s party!’ ” by the end of the 1970s, as a national backlash threatened to wipeout disco, latinx protagonists could reflect that they had little to lose given that their profile was already subjugated. admittedly the most influential new york dj of his generation, larry levan of the paradise garage, would soon cite david rodriguez as one of the “the school of djs” who had most influenced him (harvey: 30). meanwhile richie rivera held down his position lawrence | life and death on the pulse dance floor 15 at flamingo and salsoul remained a hallowed label in the opinion of new york city djs. yet the lgbtq latinx dance crowd remained largely invisible to the wider public, in part because of its racial profile, in part because of the subterranean character of the private party network, while the latinx contribution to the sound of disco barely registered as discussions framed the genre as either black (african american disco) or white (eurodisco and the bee gees). it followed that when sales started to decline and the backlash gathered pace, the debate about disco’s status revolved around the argument that a culture born out of african american r&b had abandoned its roots by producing a bleached sound for a white audience. that, in turn, established the bifurcated framework that would enable the rise of rap music to be interpreted as a black working-class response to disco’s journey into white commercialism, itself an oversimplified analysis of the relationship between these two sounds (lawrence 2016). the ongoing marginalisation of the latinx weakened the position of eddie rivera when he attempted to persuade the wider latinx music community of the benefits of supporting party djs and making records that could be played in discotheques (fernandez 1982; billboard 1982). a history of latinx dance culture that extends to the 1980s and 1990s might take account of several key developments, including the rise of john “jellybean” benitez as one of the most influential party djs of the early 1980s; the contribution of shannon’s “let the music play” to the emergence of freestyle as a uniquely latin-flavoured dance floor sound, including nayobe’s breakthrough contribution; the manner in which “little” louie vega made a name for himself on the new york freestyle scene before becoming one of the most influential house music djs of the 1990s; the game-changing impact of vega’s masters at work and nuyorican soul collaboration with kenny “dope” gonzalez, which saw the duo frequently team up with latinx musicians as they established themselves as the most influential house music remix/production team of the decade; the contribution of chicago latinx djs and artists, including jesse velez, ralphie rosario and liz torres, and new york dj/producer/remixer david morales; the pioneering role played by cutting records and nervous records when it came to showcasing latinx house artists; the ongoing fluctuations of the new york dance floor, which included the rise of the house of xtravaganza as the first latinx ballroom house and the closure of the garage; and the opening of a number of queer latinx and cross racial party spots, including escuelita and suspect in manhattan, krash in queens, and the warehouse in the bronx. any analysis would need to consider the relationship between the straight and the queer as well as the white and the racialised. “the sexual economies of commercially driven latin culture, generally assumed and marketed as heterosexual, are queered at the site of the local, reconfigured under a different cultural economy”, notes rivera-servera (2004: 282). “likewise, the often unquestioned whiteness of the gay club is challenged by the virtuoso demands of the latina/o dancer”. following alexandra vazquez’s call for an analysis of cuban music that refuses attempts to craft the country and its culture “as a fixed, immobile, and nonchanging object” (2013: 11), so an account of latinx dance needs to remain alive to the borders through which the music bleeds, the instrumental combinations it stimulates and the cross-genre flights it encourages, if only because these very qualities are compelling to latinx dance crowds dancecult 8(1)16 figure 3: nuyorican soul led by “little” louie vega and kenny “dope” gonzalez that often experience life as unfixed, mobile and disjunctive. as vazquez further suggests, we also need to listen in detail to the music, including to deceptively incidental moments in any recording, such as the sound of the woodblock in anita bell’s “ring my bell”, originally written and recorded by frederick knight for juana as a slow track before henry stone, the owner of tk productions and distributer for juana, came to decide, perhaps through breathing the miami air that passes from puerto rico and cuba to orlando, that the knight record would benefit from a richie rivera mix (discoguy, undated)—after which rivera accentuated or even introduced the woodblock. as they reveal the power relations that structure how music is recorded and how it circulates, these details can inform the analysis of latin party music while encouraging us to learn more about its submerged history—including, as i have come to understand while researching this article, that rivera also mixed latinised disco tracks such as melba moore’s “standing right here” and two man sound’s “que tal america”. how did the work of “boom boom rivera” and others contribute to a viral economy of songs and moves that prepared the terrain for pomo and others to congregate at pulse? if the sonic and social underpinnings of the pulse dance floor stretch across time and space in a transglocal fashion, so do the threats that latinx dancers face as they engage with the culture, with homophobic and racist violence hardly new, and the dance floor never straightforwardly constituted as a safe lgbtq space. after all, until the new york law that forbade two men from dancing with one another was repealed in 1971, police officers routinely threatened to close establishments unless they received a payoff. an ensuing period lawrence | life and death on the pulse dance floor 17 of relative tolerance faltered when the economic slowdown of the late 1970s engendered an overtly homophobic anti-disco backlash. by 1983, as gentrification gathered pace, new york city intensified its regulation of the city’s nightlife (hae 2011) and within a couple of years a neighbourhood association forced the owner of the paradise garage michael brody to announce he would close the party when his lease expired. as crack-related violence spiralled, brody also installed a metal detector. meanwhile the aids epidemic led to a clamp down on all-male bathhouses and clubs, with reagan’s drawn-out refusal to talk about the disease widely interpreted as a sign of queer disposability. offering no obvious respite, mayor giuliani clamped down on party spaces as part of his “zero tolerance” campaign. throughout and beyond, dancers of all persuasions faced the threat of fire, even if the blaze at new orleans lgbtq hangout the upstairs lounge in 1973 remains the only one to have been caused by arson. jessica ravitz (2016) surveys other attacks carried out against queer venues, some of them successful (eric rudolph’s bombing of a club in atlanta in 1997), others unsuccessful (an attempted arson attack on a seattle club in 2013). in terms of sheer concentration, however, mateen’s act remains the most violent of all and has resulted in a heightened sense of precariousness. if the safe space of the lgbtq dance floor has only ever been relatively safe, and if pulse continues to welcome its lgbtq crowd into a purpose-built environment with increased security measures, perhaps not that much will change. the daily beast might have introduced the strapline the “day the music died” into an article about the massacre (suebsaeng 2016), but of course forty-nine people died on the pulse dance floor, not the “music” or the broader desire to gather and dance to music with friends, and the commitment to continue the ritual has become pivotal to the lgbtq community’s response. “‘safe space’ is a cliche, overused and exhausted in our discourse, but the fact remains that a sense of safety transforms the body, transforms the spirit”, torres (2016) notes of the culture’s inevitable bounce-back. “so many of us walk through the world without it. so when you walk through the door and it’s a salsa beat, and brown bodies, queer bodies, all writhing in some fake smoke and strobing lights, no matter how cool, how detached, how over-it you think you are, latin night at the queer club breaks your cool. you can’t help but smile, this is for you, for us”. torres adds, poignantly: “the only imperative is to be transformed, transfigured in the disco light. to lighten, loosen, see yourself reflected in the beauty of others. you didn’t come here to be a martyr, you came to live, papi. to live, mamacita. to live, hijos. to live, mariposas”. on hearing the news of the massacre, i couldn’t immediately imagine how pulse might re-open and concluded instead that the mayor of orlando should fund the opening of a new, purpose built lgbtq venue while converting pulse into a museum dedicated to the victims of the massacre as well as the history of queer dance culture. having opened the venue as a life-affirming gesture in the first place, pomo understood much more clearly that the show had to go on, and also established the onepulse foundation, which is committed to contributing 90 percent of funds to the national compassion fund and the remaining 10 percent to the creation of a memorial. meanwhile the orange county regional history centre collected some 3,500 items related to the massacre from inside the club as well as dancecult 8(1)18 spontaneous memorials. although no quick decision will be taken on the future of the collection, some items will be included in the pre-planned exhibition “pride, prejudice & protest: glbt history of greater orlando”. “this touched thousands of lives”, michael perkins, manager of the centre’s museum, told the orlando senitel (hudak 2016). “we are trying to preserve it for generations”. the totality of these elements show how pulse negotiated the precarious divide between loss and creation, between violence and love, from the day it opened, and not simply the night mateen entered the venue armed with a gun. just as josé esteban muñoz (2009) points to the way that queer racialised hope and loss come intertwined, with the work of building a utopia left to those whose lives have been damaged, so pulse dancers have long been habituated to negotiating the violence of homophobia, racism and poverty. if mateen’s attack took their experience of violence to levels none of them can have imagined, the utopian worldmaking goes on because it was already mandatory, because it cannot be extinguished, and because violence breeds resourcefulness. pulse’s purpose has never been more urgent, its task to negotiating the local, the national and the transnational never clearer. at the same time, queer latinidad voices and sounds are resisting their erasure. anger and grief are fuelling joy and resistance. as pomo’s new motto puts it, “our hearts are broken but our pulse is strong”. figure 5: pulse’s post-massacre flyer. art by meghan mcdunnah: <https://www.facebook.com/mmcdunnahart/> https://www.facebook.com/mmcdunnahart/ lawrence | life and death on the pulse dance floor 19 acknowledgements thanks to graham st john for encouraging this article and for comments as well as further editing suggestions by jonathan karpetz. notes 1 latinx is used as a gender-neutral alternative to latino that also references agender, gender fluid, gender non-conforming, queer and trans latin people. like latinidad it understands connections that exist between latinx people without reducing them to an essential characteristic. 2 see <https://www.iraqbodycount.org>. 3 exceeding the idea of latinness, or the idea of a shared geopolitical identity, the floor amounted to a latinx space that reflected the complexities and contradictions not only of immigration, colonialism, race, colour, legal status, class, nation, language and the politics of location, but also queerness, in line with juana maría rodríguez’s framing of the queer latinidad (2003). references ackerman, spencer, and sabrina siddiqui. 2016. “fbi to investigate if orlando gunman’s sexuality was a motive in shooting”. guardian, 14 june. <https://www.theguardian.com/ us-news/2016/jun/14/orlando-shooting-omar-mateen-motive-pulse-nightclub>. 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(accessed 26 july 2016). https://mic.com/articles/146457/orlando-s-gay-latino-community-describes-pulse-nightclub-in-their-own-words#.aqunrviba https://mic.com/articles/146457/orlando-s-gay-latino-community-describes-pulse-nightclub-in-their-own-words#.aqunrviba https://www.rt.com/usa/346848-fbi-orlando-hate-crime-terrorism/ https://www.rt.com/usa/346848-fbi-orlando-hate-crime-terrorism/ http://cbsnews.com http://www.cbsnews.com/news/orlando-mass-shooting-poll-trump-obama-clinton-reaction/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/orlando-mass-shooting-poll-trump-obama-clinton-reaction/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-director-comey-highly-confident-orlando-shooter-radicalized-through-internet/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-director-comey-highly-confident-orlando-shooter-radicalized-through-internet/ http://www.merip.org/after-orlando http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/13/us/politics/president-obama-expresses-outrage-over-massacre-at-nightclub.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/13/us/politics/president-obama-expresses-outrage-over-massacre-at-nightclub.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/06/12/pulse-dj-describes-orlando-massacre-everybody-was-just-panicking.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/06/12/pulse-dj-describes-orlando-massacre-everybody-was-just-panicking.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/troubled-quiet-macho-angry-the-volatile-life-of-omar-mateen/2016/06/17/15229250-34a6-11e6-8758-d58e76e11b12_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/troubled-quiet-macho-angry-the-volatile-life-of-omar-mateen/2016/06/17/15229250-34a6-11e6-8758-d58e76e11b12_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/troubled-quiet-macho-angry-the-volatile-life-of-omar-mateen/2016/06/17/15229250-34a6-11e6-8758-d58e76e11b12_story.html https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2016/jun/13/orlando-terror-attack-victims-pulse-nightclub https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2016/jun/13/orlando-terror-attack-victims-pulse-nightclub http://time.com/4365454/orlando-shooting-president-obama-speech-transcript/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/in-praise-of-latin-night-at-the-queer-club/2016/06/13/e841867e-317b-11e6-95c0-2a6873031302_story.html?utm_term=.cb39784b4173 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/in-praise-of-latin-night-at-the-queer-club/2016/06/13/e841867e-317b-11e6-95c0-2a6873031302_story.html?utm_term=.cb39784b4173 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/in-praise-of-latin-night-at-the-queer-club/2016/06/13/e841867e-317b-11e6-95c0-2a6873031302_story.html?utm_term=.cb39784b4173 dancecult 8(1)24 trump, donald. 2016. “donald j. trump addresses terrorism, immigration, and national security”. 13 june, <https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trumpaddresses-terrorism-immigration-and-national-security>. (accessed 26 july 2016). ———. 2016. twitter post. 5:43pm, 12 june, <https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/ status/742034549232766976>. (accessed 26 july 2016). univision. 2016. “transcript of interview with man who claims to be former lover of orlando gunman”. 22 june, <http://www.univision.com/univision-news/transcript-of-interview-withman-who-claims-to-be-former-lover-of-orlando-gunman>. (accessed 26 july 2016). vasquez, tina. 2016. “reimagining safety for queer and trans communities in wake of orlando”. rewire. 23 june, <https://rewire.news/article/2016/06/23/reimagining-safetyqueer-trans-communities-wake-orlando/>. (accessed 26 july 2016). vazquez, alexandra t. 2013. listening in detail: performances of cuban music. north carolina: duke university press. waters, emily, and chai jindasurat, cecilia wolfe. 2016. “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and hiv-affected hate violence in 2015”. national coalition of anti-violence programs, <http://www.avp.org/storage/documents/ncavp_hvreport_2015_final.pdf>. (accessed 21 august 2016). wikipedia. 2016. “pulse (nightclub)”. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/pulse_(nightclub)>. (accessed 21 august 2016). wolf, colin. 2016. “nearly 48 hours later, florida gov. rick scott finally acknowledges the lgbt community”. orlando weekly. 14 june, <http://www.orlandoweekly.com/blogs/ archives/2016/06/14/nearly-48-hours-later-florida-gov-rick-scott-finally-acknowledges-thelgbt-community>. (accessed 21 august 2016). wyatt, diego. 2016. “the pulse of orlando”. next magazine. 3 february, <http://nextmagazinefl. com/central-florida/the-pulse-of-orlando>. (accessed 21 august 2016). discography babe ruth. 1973. “the mexican”. odeon (lp): 3351. <https://www.discogs.com/babe-ruth-first-base/release/6541665>. barrabas. 1972. “wild safari” and “woman”. wild safari. rca victor (lp): 443.043. <https://www.discogs.com/barrabas-wild-safari-afro-soul/release/617339>. joe bataan. 1974. “latin strut”. mericana records (7-inch single): m-7157. <https://www.discogs.com/joe-bataan-latin-strut-peace-friendship-and-solidarity/ release/867207>. chakachas. 1971. “jungle fever”. polydor (7-inch single): pd-15030. <https://www.discogs.com/the-chakachas-jungle-fever/release/2069961>. chocolate boys. 1974. “el bimbo”. les disques fleur inc. (7-inch single): fl 479. <https://www.discogs.com/chocolate-boys-el-bimbo-voltaire-pier/release/8354579>. chicago transit authority. 1969. “i’m a man”. chicago transit authority. columbia (lp): gp 8. <https://www.discogs.com/chicago-transit-authority-chicago-transit-authority/ release/9195483>. https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-addresses-terrorism-immigration-and-national-security https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-addresses-terrorism-immigration-and-national-security https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/742034549232766976 https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/742034549232766976 http://www.univision.com/univision-news/transcript-of-interview-with-man-who-claims-to-be-former-lover-of-orlando-gunman http://www.univision.com/univision-news/transcript-of-interview-with-man-who-claims-to-be-former-lover-of-orlando-gunman https://rewire.news/article/2016/06/23/reimagining-safety-queer-trans-communities-wake-orlando/ https://rewire.news/article/2016/06/23/reimagining-safety-queer-trans-communities-wake-orlando/ http://www.avp.org/storage/documents/ncavp_hvreport_2015_final.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/pulse_(nightclub) http://www.orlandoweekly.com/blogs/archives/2016/06/14/nearly-48-hours-later-florida-gov-rick-scott-finally-acknowledges-the-lgbt-community http://www.orlandoweekly.com/blogs/archives/2016/06/14/nearly-48-hours-later-florida-gov-rick-scott-finally-acknowledges-the-lgbt-community http://www.orlandoweekly.com/blogs/archives/2016/06/14/nearly-48-hours-later-florida-gov-rick-scott-finally-acknowledges-the-lgbt-community http://nextmagazinefl.com/central-florida/the-pulse-of-orlando http://nextmagazinefl.com/central-florida/the-pulse-of-orlando https://www.discogs.com/babe-ruth-first-base/release/6541665 https://www.discogs.com/barrabas-wild-safari-afro-soul/release/617339 https://www.discogs.com/joe-bataan-latin-strut-peace-friendship-and-solidarity/release/867207 https://www.discogs.com/joe-bataan-latin-strut-peace-friendship-and-solidarity/release/867207 https://www.discogs.com/the-chakachas-jungle-fever/release/2069961 https://www.discogs.com/chocolate-boys-el-bimbo-voltaire-pier/release/8354579 https://www.discogs.com/chicago-transit-authority-chicago-transit-authority/release/9195483 https://www.discogs.com/chicago-transit-authority-chicago-transit-authority/release/9195483 lawrence | life and death on the pulse dance floor 25 cindy rodriguez. 1976. “what you need is my love”. disko-mania (12-inch single): dl-557. <https://www.discogs.com/cindy-rodriguez-what-you-need-is-my-love-phoenix/ release/2863913>. patti jo. 1975. “make me believe in you”. disco gold (remixed by tom moulton). sceptre records (lp): sps 5120. <https://www.discogs.com/various-disco-gold/release/1052277>. van mccoy. 1975. “the hustle”. avco records (7-inch single): av 4653. <https://www.discogs.com/van-mccoy-the-soul-city-symphony-the-hustle-hey-girlcome-and-get-it/release/263503>. vicki sue robinson. 1976. “turn the beat around”. rca victor (7-inch single): pb 10562. <https://www.discogs.com/vicki-sue-robinson-turn-the-beat-around-lack-of-respect/ release/692440>. salsoul orchestra, the. 1976. “salsoul 3001”. salsoul records (12-inch single): 12d-2011. <https://www.discogs.com/salsoul-orchestra-nice-n-naasty/release/75606>. shannon. 1983. “let the music play”. emergency records (12-inch single): emds 6540. <https://www.discogs.com/shannon-let-the-music-play/release/66766>. gil scott-heron/brian jackson. 1974. “the bottle”. strata-east (7-inch single): ses-19742-45. <https://www.discogs.com/gil-scott-heron-brian-jackson-the-bottle/master/7833>. war. 1972. “city, country, city”. the world is a ghetto. united artists records (lp): uas-5652. <https://www.discogs.com/war-the-world-is-a-ghetto/release/428062>. anita ward. 1979. “ring my bell (midnight mix)”. t.k. disco (12-inch single): 124. <https://www.discogs.com/anita-ward-ring-my-bell/release/2906909>. karen young. 1978. “hot shot”. west end records (12-inch single): wes 12111. <https://www.discogs.com/karen-young-hot-shot/release/79289>. https://www.discogs.com/cindy-rodriguez-what-you-need-is-my-love-phoenix/release/2863913 https://www.discogs.com/cindy-rodriguez-what-you-need-is-my-love-phoenix/release/2863913 https://www.discogs.com/various-disco-gold/release/1052277 https://www.discogs.com/van-mccoy-the-soul-city-symphony-the-hustle-hey-girl-come-and-get-it/release/263503 https://www.discogs.com/van-mccoy-the-soul-city-symphony-the-hustle-hey-girl-come-and-get-it/release/263503 https://www.discogs.com/vicki-sue-robinson-turn-the-beat-around-lack-of-respect/release/692440 https://www.discogs.com/vicki-sue-robinson-turn-the-beat-around-lack-of-respect/release/692440 https://www.discogs.com/salsoul-orchestra-nice-n-naasty/release/75606 https://www.discogs.com/shannon-let-the-music-play/release/66766 https://www.discogs.com/gil-scott-heron-brian-jackson-the-bottle/master/7833 https://www.discogs.com/war-the-world-is-a-ghetto/release/428062 https://www.discogs.com/anita-ward-ring-my-bell/release/2906909 https://www.discogs.com/anita-ward-ring-my-bell/release/2906909%3e. https://www.discogs.com/karen-young-hot-shot/release/79289 electronica, dance and club music mark j. butler (ed.) farnham: ashgate, 2012. isbn: 978-0-7546-2965-8 (hardcover) rrp: £170.00 (hardcover) hillegonda c. rietveld london south bank university (uk) as part of their series the library of essays on popular music, ashgate offers an anthology of english-language academic work on electronic dance (and) club music that has developed since the early 1990s. added to this is richard dyer's 1979 trailblazing paper "in defense of disco", which points to the radical potential of the experience of dancing to dj-driven music. compiled by musicologist mark j. butler, the selection of twenty-eight ready-edited contributions offers topics that go beyond rave, techno, house and trance to include kwaito, nor-tec and glitch. it opens with a useful explorative piece on digital dj-ing by pedro peixoto fereira, arguing that the dj and dancers are part of an interactive network in which dancers actively embody the recorded music. the articles, chapters and other extracts that follow are divided into three sections: part i, production, performance and aesthetics; part ii, the body, the spirit and (the regulation of) pleasure; and part iii, identities, belongings and distinctions. these include authors such as mark j. butler, tara rodgers, fiona buckland, anthony d'andrea, graham st john, arun saldanha and others, who engage with electronic dance music cultures from musicological and/or anthropological perspectives. in the introduction, butler justifies the selection by defining the music cultures in this collection on the basis of four criteria. first, the music under discussion is performed by djs and digital producers. second, the music is produced for dancing, and thereby part of a dance culture. third, the engagement with this music is site-specific, depending on what may be called a "club-concept" (xi). fourth, the electronic dance music culture that is addressed here has a common history in disco and can be regarded as post-disco. in short, the common attributes here are "electronic sound production and performative consumption through dance" (xiii)—although it is also pointed out that electronica, as a music genre, is not necessarily made for dancing. counting 536 pages, plus preface and introduction, this is a substantial book. a complete anthology is never possible, but it does provide a handy point of reference for those that teach in the area of electronic dance music and culture, and it can also work well as a primer for an early literature review in research dissertation work. included are many classics in the field, by authors such as kai fikentscher, tim lawrence, barbara bradby, philip tagg, sarah thornton, maria pini, sean albiez and ben malbon. these are mainly selected from academic journals, such as popular music, journal of popular music studies, or culture and religion, as well as a range of academic book publications. however, it seems surprising that no work appears from ashgate's own explorative publications in the field, initiated in 1993 by rave off: politics and deviance in contemporary youth culture, edited by steve redhead for its previous subsidiary, avebury. neither does it offer a selection of non-academic, yet knowledgeable and reflective existing work by journalists and creative producers in the field, comparable to the approachable mix of audio culture: readings in modern music, edited in 2004 for continuum by christoph cox and daniel warner. even more surprising is the forbidding price of this anthology, currently available in hardback only, given that no original work was produced, apart from the introduction, and no copyediting was required, even maintaining the original layout of the contributions. why does such a popular topic of study have to be so inaccessible? it seems that ashgate has, so far, missed out here on the opportunity to reach a potentially much wider readership. references cox, christoph and daniel warner,eds. 2004. audio culture: readings in modern music. london: continuum. redhead, steve, ed. 1993. rave off: politics and deviance in contemporary youth culture. aldershot: avebury. along the lines of the roland tb-303: three perversions of acid techno botond vitos monash university, australia doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.01.14 during the early years of electronic dance music (edm), certain producers discovered creative new ways for using drum machines and synthesisers which had been originally designated by manufacturers as substitutes for “real” instruments and human performers. these artists, sometimes accidentally or unintentionally, produced copies without originals by steering away from the natural referent and using these “fake” instruments not as imitations but for their own special sonic attributes (butler 2006: 70). similar to a musical meta-language, many edm tracks are primarily concerned with the qualities of the medium into which they are embedded; their content is frequently subordinated to this concern, and lyrics are often non-existent or applied as atmospheric effects reinforcing the sound. following mcluhan (1964), in such instances the medium becomes explicitly the message, reflecting an engagement with the intertwined mediums of electronic sounds and drugs from which a range of cultural and historical ties unfold. this article illustrates this argument through the case study of acid techno squat parties in melbourne, in which sound, drug and environment interact as three ghostly layers influencing the vibe. the discussion draws on interview fragments (predominantly from a focus group conducted with acid techno performers/organisers and regular partygoers) from my recent phd research of melbourne edm scenes. a significant element of my study addresses the exploitation and exploration of accidents and malfunctions in edm. in acid techno the roland tb-303 bass synthesiser is responsible for the acid sound, the history of which emerged from the creative perversion of technology by certain early producers. this went hand in hand with the reattribution of pharmaceutical drugs as recreational and found its emblematic habitat in the post-industrial space of the warehouse squat party. techno and the roland tb-303 particularly in the genre of techno, the key structural particularity of the music lies in the manipulation of repetitive loops: the music is thus engaged in further repetitions of a copy that lost its original. the aesthetic dimension of this engagement is reminiscent of warhol’s early production of soup can series in pop art, through which he “attacked the concept of originality in an original way” (baudrillard 1997: 11). in techno tracks the act of copying the copy is associated with subtle changes in the sound layers, leading to a differential repetition. the layers are typically endowed with percussive, rhythmic functions: contrary to most genres of popular music where drums establish the meter of the track while remaining in the background, in techno “drums are the music, to the extent that the few melodic elements that are present (e.g., the riffs) frequently assume a percussive role as well” (butler 2006: 93). figure 1. series of roland tb-303 bass line generators. image by author (2013). one of the “fake” rhythmic instruments that had been perverted by early edm producers, the roland tb-303, reached iconic status, particularly in the contemporary acid techno subgenre. the tb-303 bass line synthesiser was unsuccessful for its designated scope because it produced “inauthentic” sounds, and its design made it incompatible for playing, yet suitable for programming music (butler 2006: 68). by applying its built-in effects in the “wrong” way to its programmed sound patterns, certain edm artists—most notably chicago-based dj pierre (brewster and broughton 2000: 315)—started creating extremely resonant, squeaky and distorted sound layers. in the words of a melbourne acid techno producer: jake (28): the birth part is where the bass line is, which is what the 303 is, it's a bass line instrument originally, when the knobs are turned down. so it's more just a bwoh-bwoh-bwoh-bwoh... a base tone. it's not a frequency that catches in the high range; it's more the feeling, the sub-feeling. but once you start to turn up the cut off and resonance [knobs], it really takes your body with you. and i think if you have acid or hallucinogenic drugs, once you hear acid techno, your body actually rises with it; your mind travels with the tone. it's a repetitive tone that will only have, maybe, an 8–16 bar loop, but the way that you turn the knobs to change the actual frequency outcome, it keeps it interesting, it doesn't just go on being the same forever.[1] in acid techno this modified bass line (which is very far from the sound of the bass guitar) is used in conjunction with the physically moving grooves of hard techno music, contributing to a kinaesthetic intensity that is often further amplified by drugs. as explained by another focus group participant: cooper (35): yeah, that's just something about the power or intensity of it. a lot of people think hard music is aggressive or, you know, there's something unsocial about it, but really, for me it's like, you can't say a sports car is evil or aggressive, but you know, it must be really enjoyable to drive on, because it's powerful. and the music basically is just the only thing . . . that's caught me. and for some instances i wouldn't even say techno is like music to me. i hate saying this because it's kind of cliché. but music to me, i like a lot of bands and stuff like that, but the only thing that actually gives a physical response to music, regardless of, you know, drugs or no drugs, is techno and acid techno.[2] cooper’s words signal a highly functionalist approach to (acid) techno, where the music is praised for its rhythmic and sonic qualities that trigger physical impulses in the listener. the marriage of sound and drug the consumption of popular recreational drugs such as acid (lsd) and ecstasy (mdma) became organically connected to the techno genre after its exportation from detroit to the british rave parties of the late eighties (sicko 2010: 78–80). the emergence of recreational drugs can be regarded as a technological appropriation, with both mdma and lsd being invented as pharmaceuticals first and then appropriated for other uses (redhead 1993; russell 1993). in the focus group i conducted both drugs were frequently mentioned, with acid considered particularly conducive for directing attention on previously unnoticed layers in the music. jake: the tb-303, which is the main instrument of acid techno, is referred to as the acid sound. which, hence, acid techno. basically the particular tone, and the way it changes frequency, and the way it rises and drops, on certain drugs can really take you to, for the lack of another term, take you to another world. i took a lot of lsd and hallucinogenic drugs at one particular event to see one particular acid techno artist, and i was, like, the drunk guy at the party. i could barely stand up straight. i was stumbling all over the place. two of the weirdest guys that i would usually be looking at, i saw at the corner of my eye, going: look at this guy. looking at me, tapping each other, laughing: look at this guy! but it really opened up my perception to sound and frequency range. hearing this particular tone from speakers higher than the roof, and, you know, your mind grabbing onto different parts of it, that you wouldn't usually zoom in on when you would go to a party “straight”.[3] jake’s introduction of the hallucinogenic potential of the tb-303 (which he also mentions in the first fragment of this article) resonates with certain cultural commentaries. although the exact etymology of the sonic attribute “acid” is unclear, anecdotic evidence links it to lsd consumption in the early chicago house scene (brewster and broughton 2000: 314), and its first appearance in edm discographies is dated to the “acid tracks” (1987) single released by chicago-based group phuture, the inventors of acid house (sicko 2010: 72). acid house, together with detroit techno, was exported to the u.k. in the late 1980s, where acid would mistakenly become a buzzword for predominantly ecstasy-related moral panics during the heyday of the rave scene (sicko 2010: 78). nevertheless, the hallucinatory or lsd-like qualities of the acid sound are commonplace. for instance, brewster and broughton (2000: 314) evoke its perfect synergy with the “lsd induced frenzy” of early chicago clubbers, whereas sicko (2010: 72) describes the tb-303 as emitting “aural equivalents of liquid mercury—the sounds of psychedelic hallucination”. experiencing acid (techno) while on acid (lsd) can thus be a decisive experience, opening up one’s “perception to sound and frequency range”. for participants such as jake, the two synergistic components are inextricably linked in the formation of a recurring theme in techno that draws on this expanded flow of frequencies. monelle (2006: 25) highlights that musical texts, similarly to literary texts, are transforming meaning, adding an imaginative dimension to the one inherent language. acid in techno correlates to a transformative and imaginative expansion of this fusion of the linguistic sound/drug mixture: for jake it signifies a powerful aesthetic experience, the exact definition of which is problematic (“for the lack of another term”). furthermore, in this case even the linguistic signification relates to processes of technological appropriation, creating further shifts in meanings or losses of original referentiality: the tb-303 is no longer used as a “fake” instrument; lsd is no longer a pharmaceutical drug. urban squat spaces the history of acid techno is interwoven with technological perversions, such as exploring the acid sound of the roland tb-303 bass synthesiser, or the rediscovery of pharmaceutical drugs such as lsd or ecstasy as recreational. this is complemented by a third appropriation of (predominantly) industrial spaces, such as abandoned warehouses and factory buildings used for dance events. in melbourne, the use of squatted spaces was an international import first and became a necessity later, with increasing regulation and security measures pushing the subgenre to the margins of urban nightscapes. the eerie atmosphere of such settings is a good companion to the squeaky frequencies of acid, as the recollections of a partygoer from a recent party suggest: stan (23): a kind of theatre/factory sort of structure with no purpose, just kind of sitting there with no reason in the middle of what is quite a dynamic and industrial area. it’s quite good to see this relicy type of artifact [that looks like] the 50s or 40s factory that’s sort of fallen on hard time[s]. but i’m not sure what they did there, it’s a mystery what they did there. it’s not quite a theatre, not quite a factory; it’s quite enigmatic as a venue. . . . there is something very artistic about a disused industrial building. it just seems like a place in incredible flux, which is on the cusp of being demolished, but in that sort of transition between what it was and what it will be, in a sort of limbo.[4] just as early edm producers were exploring the “gaps” in technologies outside of their intended or “useful” applications, with the tb-303 being one of the notable examples for this process, such places “in incredible flux”, as the one evoked by stan, are discovered as gaps in the machinic landscape to be filled with the technological imaginary of edm. such desolate environments carry the connotations of familiarity and freedom for the interviewees, as opposed to the “shinier” but severely regulated commercial clubscapes of melbourne’s cbd. apart from warehouses, the parties may occasionally transform other urban spaces such as disused areas under highway overpasses or abandoned car parks: lucas (42): for example, new year’s eve, two years ago. underground car park, literally, underground, circular car park ... cooper: in suburbia, in a rich area. lucas: and yeah, we went on all night. two sound systems, heaps of people. cooper: and this is an underground car park that's probably eight storeys down, and the bottom six storeys filled with water. that's why it was, you know, too expensive to demolish, because of all the water in there. . . . yeah, we looked at it, we looked at this place on google maps, and it's just this big black hole. and that’s basically the entrance to this, where the building used to stand, you know.[5] such provisional settings conjure a shroud of uncertainty that separates the acid techno phenomenon from everyday urban reality by both contributing to the effect of the drug/music interplay and disguising the party from the gaze of the wider public and the authorities. partygoers are thus invited to immersive journeys that traverse through the fringes of the urban nightscape and typically evade mainstream (mass and online) media trajectories, just as the location evoked in the fragment is situated in the blind spot or “black hole” of google maps. conclusion: perverting machines the melbourne acid techno parties addressed in this article are shaped by sound, drug and environment as three intertwined layers of technological appropriation. as cooper confirms: “techno is like a drug to me now”,[6] and these two components may contribute to an aesthetic experience that is organically connected to the use of squatted urban spaces. from the afterlife of technologies and (predominantly) industrial environments, acid techno parties may invoke machine-ghosts that are sometimes brought back to haunt the everyday as well, as the concluding fragment humorously suggests: sophie (34): my dad used to joke that the music i listened to sounded like when he used to work at the factories [laughs]. like the machinery. . . . and my mum has caught me dancing to the washing machine before [laughs]. and the other day at work, i'm like: someone's playing really good music, who is that? and i'm wandering around the offices, trying to work out who it was, who is playing good music, and i realised it was a dot matrix printer. it was like: oh god, i need help [laughs].[7] author biography botond vitos is a phd candidate at the school of media, film and journalism, monash university, melbourne, australia. he received an ma in cultural anthropology and an ma in dutch studies from the elte university, budapest, hungary. his research interests include electronic dance music studies, the media ecology of the electronic dance floor, the relationships between music and technology, and the cultural contexts and meanings of drug use. his phd project "experiencing electronic dance floors" is a comparative analysis of the techno and psytrance scenes in melbourne. email: x@vitos.tv references baudrillard, jean. 1997. “objects, images, and the possibilities of aesthetic illusion”. in jean baudrillard: art and artefact, ed. nicholas zurbrugg, 7–18. london: thousand oaks. brewster, bill and frank broughton. 2000. last night a dj saved my life: the history of the disc jockey. updated edition. london: headline. butler, mark j. 2006. unlocking the groove: rhythm, meter, and musical design in electronic dance music. bloomington, indiana: indiana university press. mcluhan, marshall, 1964. understanding media: the extensions of man. new york: mcgraw-hill. monelle, raymond. 2006. the musical topic: hunt, military and pastoral. bloomington, indiana: indiana university press redhead, steve. 1993. “the politics of ecstasy”. in rave off: politics and deviance in contemporary youth culture, ed. steve redhead, 7–27. aldershot: avebury. russell, kristian. 1993. “lysergia suburbia”. in rave off: politics and deviance in contemporary youth culture, ed. steve redhead, 91–174. aldershot: avebury. sicko, dan. 2010. techno rebels: the renegades of electronic funk. second edition. detroit, michigan: painted turtle. discography phuture. 1987. acid tracks, trax records (12-inch): tx 142. <http://www.discogs.com/phuture-acid-tracks/release/1949>. notes [1] focus group (melbourne), 24 january 2012. [2] focus group (melbourne), 24 january 2012. [3] focus group (melbourne), 24 january 2012. [4] individual interview (melbourne), 23 june 2012. [5] focus group (melbourne), 24 january 2012. [6] focus group (melbourne), 24 january 2012. [7] focus group (melbourne), 24 january 2012. life and death on the new york dance floor 1980–1983 tim lawrence durham: duke university press, 2016. isbn: 978-0-8223-6202-9 rrp: us$27.95 charles de ledesma university of east london, uk cultural historian tim lawrence’s first book love saves the day adopted a chronological approach to east coast disco’s dramatic arc through the 1970s. then his follow-up hold on to your dreams widened the timeline, honing in on a valuable contributor to new york’s downtown music scene—cellist and composer arthur russell. while lstd ranged widely across many spaces, djs, artists, assorted characters and issues, the russell biography was an intimate portrait of a key player, who died from aids-related complications in 1992. life and death on the new york dance floor 1980–1983 (henceforth life and death) is the third segment in lawrence’s new york project. now he narrows the timeline and brings a forensic examination to just four years in the party scene. on the title, lawrence explains, “the reference to life is intended to evoke the way that new york party culture didn’t merely survive the hyped death of disco but positively flourished in its wake”. and he clearly and convincingly argues that the short period was one characterised by a stirring artistic ferment, across music, art, dance and club space innovation. lawrence explains: “instead of depicting the 1980–1983 period as a mere bridge that connected the big genre stories of 1970s disco and 1980s house and techno, i submitted to its kaleidoscope logic, took my foot off the historical metronome, and decided to take it—the book—to the bridge” (ix). his excavation uses all available sources to bulk out the progression through the years across a variety of intersections, downtown and uptown; legal locations such as clubs and galleries, to homes, disused industrial spaces, drilled djs to first comers, established genres such as disco and r&b and the fresh fusions, collisions and cross pollinations garnered from a quintessentially new york diy outlook pickled by new keyboard and synthesizer, recording and sound system technology. lawrence’s greatest resource is the many era participants happy to recall their exploits and share their knowledge. but early on he cautions, “because the story of a person can never be fully re-created, it follows that the portraits developed here will inevitably appear slim, yet the broad intention is to show how the multitude of participants . . . helped create and in return received sustenance from a towering scene” (xii). lawrence begins with downtown’s punk-art nexus, chronicling the opening of the mudd club and the lesser known studio 57. whereas mudd promoter steve mass’s white street alternative to studio 54 catered to a fashionable elite—including andy warhol—and in time built a strong reputation internationally, 57 was smaller, emphasizing bizarre happenings and intimate collisions. soon-to-be influential artists of the era—jean-michel basquiat, keith haring and others—found their graffiti art and mixed-media explorations promoted and supported within these frenziedly creative spaces. to follow, scaling up, was danceteria, which had floors dedicated to video and music. soon lawrence’s attention turns to the subcultural happenings in african-american communities away from downtown, across the city in the bronx, where discrete expressions—graffiti, breakdancing, rapping and djing—were gradually pulling together and, in time, powering downtown and midtown venues such as negril and the roxy. having established the degree of (sub)cultural ferment, lawrence launches a trenchant analysis of the post-disco formation. honing in on the medium-to-large clubs—the funhouse, paradise garage, the saint, the loft and better days—he illustrates time and time again that early 1980s new york seldom lacked a valid replacement to fin de siècle disco, hardcore punk and embryonic hip-hop. we are introduced to the key players: the loft’s david mancuso again (although he is given a much less prominent role than in lstd); former rocker mark kamins; the fiercely exact groove-master of new r&b mixing tee scott; the progenitor of latin hip-hop and electro funk dub john “jellybean” benitez; the richly creative arthur baker who realized the seminal “planet rock”; tony humphries who laid waste at the zanzibar in new jersey; radio mix-master deluxe shep pettibone; and the acknowledged genius of the day larry levan. if life and death has a centre—and determined researcher lawrence crafts horizontal accounts of cultural production wherever possible—then it has to be levan. the author charts his ascent from jobbing dj, to the visionary behind the garage’s legendary sound (with top audio designer of the period richard long), to master artist on the decks always re-shaping his eclectic track list, to remixer and producer of some of the r&b post-disco dubified classics of the day, and on, sadly, to his death, weakened by long-term heroin use. lawrence does not get caught up in the mix too much, but the sections on the levan peaks are strong, such as the story behind arguably the era’s most throbbing, sublime track—the nine-minute remix of the peech boys’ “don’t make me wait”. insights, stories and gossip on levan and garage culture spill from participants eager to share memories. a dj—or, rather, a track selector as he never mixed records—david mancuso can be viewed as a central thread, a solid presence through this fast-moving scene. his loft club on prince street, although small, was still the favourite for many africanand latin-american dancers, mancuso’s fierce attention to sound always the prime focus. mancuso tells lawrence why in 1983 he removed the mixer from his system: “without the mixer there was a three-decibel increase in the sound, which was a lot. it was like i was 97 percent of the way up the mountain, and that last 3 percent made a big difference” (387). mancuso and levan were at opposites poles: levan forever re-calibrating the music in line with his restless spirit on a system which would “break light bulbs in the apartment building next door (bruce forest interview, 388), while mancuso’s search for a sonic purity—a steady centre in the ecstasy of flow—was produced on an admittedly superlative but nevertheless home-sized system. and he never touched the tracks, wanting to remain true to the creator’s vision. indeed, the garage and loft peaks chime with the heights of the downtown scene in general. lawrence watches as the mudd club and other iconic locales lose their edge, and others such as the roxy and area come into vogue (this latter period also sees the emergence of madonna). readers may be surprised that relatively little time is awarded to major threats like the rise in hard drug consumption and the proliferating aids crisis. however, these key areas are judged contextually rather than given a life of their own. towards the end of the riveting account, lawrence senses, “even when confronted by the spectre of decay and even death, new york’s partygoers lived for the night – for the meeting of friends, for the embrace of strangers, for the performance, for the immersion, for the surge, for the scream” (457). in summary, lawrence reflects from a number of vantage points. he assesses that with the rise in rents and ongoing gentrification, fewer artists and alternative creatives could survive in downtown, and the political landscape became increasingly demoralising. finally, as lawrence draws his paean to the era’s ethic of “democratic socializing” (461) to a close, he draws out parallel urban lives and deaths: “clearly the task of redemocratizing new york and indeed other global cities remains daunting, yet the gathering desire to listen to music, dance, and engage creatively with a level of public freedom that was once taken for granted is visceral. feeding the appetite for change, the downtown era and its scarcely believable level of activity attest that, given the right conditions, a different kind of city can exist” (483). life and death is a major contribution to scholarship on cultural production. its fine-slicing of a short, fruitful period in one great city’s life helps better situate both well-known and little-known music cultures. lawrence charts the dawn of electronic dance music with verve, detail and sensitivity. what’s next for him? danger mouse’s the grey album (33 1/3 series) charles fairchild new york: bloomsbury, 2014. isbn: 978-1-6235-6660-9 rrp: us$14.95 ian rogers rmit university (australia) bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series has long provided a helpful provocation for music academics. the theme of the series remains deceptively simple: tell the readership something new about a popular album. as such, the june opening of bloomsbury’s submission window creates a welcome burst of activity amongst colleagues and friends. we’ve all either thought about submitting or have done so. as a means to speak to each other, as specialists and fans, the series has become an ongoing topic of conversation, something to talk about at conference dinners and online and such. the currency of these books neatly dovetails with some of the core aesthetic tendencies of popular music studies. the series squarely addresses our history of public outreach; something all-but-written into the dna of popular music studies via the early involvement of leftist advocates like stuart hall and the music-critic-slash-scholar simon frith. additionally, popular music studies is a discipline that has always had to contend with the widely circulating work of greil marcus, who in many ways popularized the kind of focused ‘deep-dive’ into a music ‘moment’ found in so many of the books included within the 33 1/3 concept. all of this feels particularly pertinent when considering the grey album by university of sydney academic charles fairchild. it is an unusual addition. firstly, the album in question is perhaps the most famous mash-up of all time, drawing its instrumental bed samples from the beatles (1968, known more colloquially as the white album) and its vocal a cappella from 2003’s the black album by jay z. the back-story of the grey album’s technical production is straightforward and unspectacular: new york hip-hop producer/dj danger mouse (brian burton) assembled the album largely to impress his friends. it is the exacting work of a master craftsperson but few of the usual narrative tropes fortifying canonization and mythmaking apply here. yet, the album remains popular, controversial and, as fairchild notes, unusually affecting: “danger mouse seemed to humanize jay z in ways the rapper’s own work could not . . . the brittle edges of shawn carter’s public persona, slightly smoothed through honest and unexpected introspection, achieved more range than might have been initially granted when twinned with paul mccartney’s arcadian ramblings” (116). in short, the album is undeniably important. at heart, this book is about the cultural and commercial forces that occasionally obscure this importance. fairchild’s book is divided into four sections. the front half concerns reception, specifically how the grey album was positioned, attacked and censored by the music industries. despite the centrality of commercial enterprise, the history of music scholarship is not—with notable exceptions like frith and keith negus—particularly awash with nuanced critique of the music industries. more recent work by matt stahl, mike jones, jim rogers and mark banks corrects this somewhat, and i’ll happily situate this book in that camp as well. for what it is—a work of popular non-fiction—the first two sections of the grey album serve as an admirably succinct and relatable introduction to the field. this book would make an ideal text for undergraduate study of music and industry and fairchild’s agility as a writer is evident throughout. take, for example, the interwoven threads of cultural/media studies combined here with various subtle nods to concepts such as brand extension, product life cycle and marketing: “many people seem to think that the music industry exists to make music. in fact, it exists to make money from music, mostly by moving it from one place to another” (44), and . . . we all know music acts as a kind of socially organizing medium that helps people make sense of social experiences. we know this because we have experienced this. music gives us something we want and value. the music industry’s job is to exploit what music gives us as thoroughly as possible by trying to create as many social, cultural and economic relationships with as many of us as possible and keep them going as long as they can (46). in short, fairchild very carefully examines a seldom-discussed topic: the long-lasting effectiveness of the music industries. despite the popular rhetoric, these industries are still pervasive, active and profitable. they remain legally enacted and protected, and the grey album proves a valuable case study in how the desires of industry can still clash and overrun those of listeners. the remainder of the book presents a brief history of sample-based music (for want of a better term) and a final chapter on the exact assembly of the album from its source materials. i found the history lesson helpful and clear. also interesting was the contrasting history of the two source albums, specifically the similarities in the career arc between the two source artists. only the final moments of the grey album proved a little dull; strictly for fans only. the minutiae of where particular samples were drawn from and how they were assembled and why certain combinations proved effective were fascinating for track one but i soon found myself skipping ahead. a discussion of the specific sampling technologies utilized might have added something to this discussion. or perhaps it would have labored it further. i don’t know. ultimately, fairchild’s book is at its best when considering the album at a distance. the story of the album’s reception and circulation is paramount here. it is doubtful that the grey album would have attained the status it did if the commercial music industries had not intervened and raised the album’s profile. i’m even surer that a book pitch for such an album would be met with little interest failing this absurd example of the ‘streisand effect’. instead the specific cultural circumstances surrounding the distribution and legitimacy of this recording provide grist for the mill. this particular moment in music history provides a unique opportunity, which this author has seized for great effect. his subject proves an invaluable lens through which to critique all manner of cultural industry and institution. never mind the fact that charles fairchild has provided an entry into the 33 1/3 series about an album that was never really for sale. it’s a brave move but a worthy one. i commend the author, and the editors who commissioned it. searching for a cultural home: asian american youth in the edm festival scene dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 7(1): 15–34 issn 1947-5403 ©2015 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.01.01 searching for a cultural home: asian american youth in the edm festival scene judy soojin park harvard university (united states) abstract this article investigates the recent proliferation of asian american participants in electronic dance music (edm) festivals with a particular focus on those organized by insomniac events in southern california. as insomniac’s events aim to propagate an ethos of plur—peace, love, unity and respect—reminiscent of historical rave culture, these events promise a space where anyone, regardless of race, class, gender or sexuality, is accepted. using an interview-based methodology paired with participant observation, i argue that asian american youth’s status as “perpetual foreigners” and subsequent desire for cultural belonging have motivated their participation in events promoted by insomniac. nevertheless, the asian american participants i interviewed defined notions of belonging, authenticity and subcultural capital in the edm festival scene in relation to suburban middle-class whiteness and in opposition to urban hiphop blackness. my research provides a much-needed study of nonwhite participants and how they negotiate their subjectivities in relation to the contemporary edm festival scene. keywords: asian american youth, belonging, racial ideology, plur, electronic dance music, insomniac events judy soojin park received her bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, in social studies with a focus on identity and inequality in the us at harvard university. her award-winning senior thesis was a study of how asian american youth negotiate their subjectivities in relation to the contemporary edm festival scene in southern california with a focus on ideologies of race, class, gender and sexuality. <judysoojinpark@gmail.com> feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.01.01 mailto:judysoojinpark@gmail.com dancecult 7(1)16 introduction this article investigates the recent proliferation of asian american participants in electronic dance music (edm) festivals with a particular focus on those organized by insomniac events in southern california, such as electric daisy carnival1 and the wonderland series. insomniac is unique among organizers of large edm festivals in this region, such as hard events, as it appears to have fully embraced the historical rave culture and ideology of plur (peace, love, unity and respect). insomniac’s events not only emphasize a magical and utopian ambience with themes incorporating alice in wonderland and the snow queen, but insomniac founder pasquale rotella has explicitly referred to plur in his social media accounts and has actively encouraged attendees to wear kandies,2 a defining symbol of plur in contemporary edm festival culture (rotella 2014; sachs 2014). by propagating an ethos of plur, insomniac’s events promise a space where anyone, regardless of race, class, gender or sexuality, can experience cultural belonging and acceptance. meanwhile, as insomniac’s festivals continue to become increasingly massive and commercialized, these events have attracted significant participation from groups beyond the middle-class white participants typically associated with the edm festival scene. this newfound diversity of participants tests the egalitarian ethos of plur and provides an opportunity to examine how various groups negotiate their subjectivities in relation to the contemporary edm festival scene. this article is a preliminary study of this tension between the massive contemporary edm festival scene and the ideology of plur, which purports that edm festivals are free from identity-based boundaries or inequalities. using an interview-based methodology paired with participant observation, i argue that asian american youth’s status as “perpetual foreigners” and subsequent desire for cultural belonging have motivated their participation in edm festivals. nevertheless, the asian american participants i interviewed defined notions of belonging, authenticity and subcultural capital in the edm festival scene in relation to suburban middle-class whiteness and in opposition to urban hip-hop blackness. these experiences further perpetuated dominant understandings of race and the normalization of whiteness amongst my informants.3 edm festivals are a meaningful place to analyze identity and belonging, as their roots can be traced back to the historical rave scene providing marginalized groups with alternative spaces of transgression. house music first developed in predominantly gay black clubs in chicago in the 1980s, which provided a pressure valve, especially for clubgoers facing the dual oppression of racism and homophobia (silcott 1999: 22). soon house music became popular in the uk after several british djs encountered the music in the open-air disco scene of ibiza in the summer of 1988, often referred to as the “summer of love”. these djs sought to replicate this “hippie-ish, under-the-stars, beautiful open vibe”, together with variations of house music and the euphoric effects of the drug ecstasy also encountered in ibiza, in london (silcott 1999: 31). taking place in clubs, warehouses and even fitness centers, these dance parties came to be called “raves”. although the british rave scene was far park | searching for a cultural home 17 removed from chicago house, it similarly provided a space of transgression—in this case, for british youth to escape from the cultural repression and economic realities associated with the thatcher era. the concept of raves quickly spread beyond the uk and returned to the us, where the concept of plur flourished in various locations, but particularly in california where the legacies of the 1960s counterculture persisted. the first recorded raves were in los angeles and san francisco in the late 1980s, hosted by british expatriates (reynolds 1998: 149). throughout the nineties, the us rave scene developed in different forms in various locations. importantly, most of these scenes came to be identified with middle-class white youth with house music’s connection to the chicago gay black scene largely forgotten. this whitening of the scene was facilitated by a moral panic and news coverage of white middleclass youth partaking in excessive drug use in unlicensed dance parties. by the early 2000s, police crackdowns had largely corralled the rave scene into conventional nightclubs and the live event industry. the latter grew steadily and began to gain notable traction in the late 2000s. in 2010, insomniac’s electric daisy carnival (edc) attracted wide news attention due to a fifteen-year-old female attendant dying from overdose of ecstasy, which caused the city of los angeles to place a moratorium on all remaining events for the year. ironically, my interviewees believed that the news served as publicity for edc, which moved to las vegas in 2011 as a three-day festival attracting a record of more than 230,000 participants. despite rave’s roots in providing a space of belonging and acceptance for marginalized groups, few scholars have focused on nonwhite participants’ negotiations of race or class in either the rave or edm festival scenes. in fact, there seems to exist a clear tension between scholars’ claims that raves erase identity-based boundaries and stereotypes, and their lack of attention to how nonwhite participants negotiate this “erasure”. most ethnographic studies have focused on ways raves provide white middle-class participants with socially distinct identifications and an alternative space of peace, love, unity and respect (thornton 1996; collin 1997; reynolds 1998; hutson 2000; measham et al. 2001; hill 2002). notable exceptions include fikentscher (2000) and buckland (2002), although my research provides more recent analysis, focusing specifically on asian american participants, a largely overlooked group in edm cultural studies. therefore, my research makes two key contributions. first, it provides a much-needed study of the contemporary edm festival scene focusing on how nonwhite participants negotiate their subjectivities in relation to the scene. in particular, the dominant depiction of asian americans as “honorary whites” offers a unique opportunity to question the extent to which asian american participation reinforces, obfuscates or undermines the middleclass whiteness of edm festivals. second, my research seeks to increase the visibility of asian american youth and their engagements with popular culture, which has been largely neglected in ethnographic research and theory.4 as lee and zhou note, “asian american youth as a group have been almost entirely omitted from research on youth and youth culture in the u.s.” (2004: 9). i argue that the academic negligence of asian american youth’s involvement in popular culture further perpetuates their status as “perpetual foreigners”. dancecult 7(1)18 after discussing my research methodology, i trace the history of dominant white depictions of asian americans, which have consistently portrayed asian americans as perpetual foreigners, inassimilable to the white american culture. then, i analyze how the asian american youth i interviewed have turned to the edm festival scene for its promise of an egalitarian utopia, exemplified by the ethos of plur particularly in insomniac’s events. finally, i argue that despite the rhetoric of racelessness, edm festivals are signified by middle-class whiteness defined against lower-class hip-hop blackness, which my interviewees imagined to be urban lifestyles full of crime and gang activity. research methodology most of my data consist of in-depth interviews with asian american edm festival participants in southern california, paired with contextual information from participantobservation of the 2014 white wonderland organized by insomniac. over the course of eight months from may to december 2013, i conducted thirty-eight interviews with youth who self-identified as asian american and have attended at least three edm festivals in southern california, although thirty-one interviewees have attended more than eight. i interviewed twenty-one males and seventeen females. all interviewees were above the age of eighteen and the average age was twenty-three. i used the snowball sampling method by first asking my high school and college networks in southern california and then my interviewees for introductions to asian american edm festival participants. i used the open-ended and semi-structured interview method, as this study focuses on asian american youth’s subjective understandings of identity and belonging. my interviews ranged from a half-hour to an hour and a half. i allowed interviewees to self-identify as asian american rather than imposing a formal definition, because my research focuses on asian american-ness as a cultural identity—an individual’s sense of belonging within a group based on his or her understanding of the group’s culture. this decision relies on the assumption that racial categories such as asian americans are social constructions that are historically contingent and unstable in their boundaries. as a result, i interviewed three individuals who identified as asian american and as half-asian or multiracial. the majority of interviewees, thirty-three of the thirtyeight, ethnically identified as chinese, taiwanese, korean, or vietnamese, which, according to my informants, reflects the popularity of edm festivals among these ethnic groups. thus, it is important to note that the asian american cultural identity under discussion in this article is based on the specific understandings and experiences of my informants from limited ethnic groups, rather than a universal definition. based on my interviews, i would synthesize their understanding of asian american-ness to be associated with middle-class east asian (more specifically chinese, taiwanese and korean) and vietnamese youth living in suburban southern california. nevertheless, informants of other ethnicities (south asian, filipino, japanese and multiracial) self-identified with the asian american classification largely through their identifications within east asian or vietnamese social groups. though i do not argue that the diverse narratives and experiences of various ethnicities within park | searching for a cultural home 19 east asian, south asian and southeast asian groups can be collapsed into one category, i suggest that the broader “asian american” group is the most relevant to discussions of race in the edm festival scene. most of my interviewees categorized racial groups in the scene as whites, blacks, latinos and asian americans, defining asian americans as inclusive of individuals from east asian, south asian and southeast asian groups. i paired these interviews with participant observation at six edm events including the 2013 white wonderland, an annual new years eve music festival organized by insomniac. my experiences at white wonderland helped to contextualize my interviewees’ experiences and support my interview findings. i experienced firsthand the magical and fantastical production by insomniac, including white pillars surrounding the stage, snowflakes and chandeliers hanging from the ceiling and rays of laser light covering every corner of the dance floor. as noted by several interviewees that “white wonderland has the most asians” due to its location in orange county with a large asian american population, i found that more than half the participants were asian american. furthermore, most of the asian american participants i saw appeared to arrive in predominantly asian american groups without significant interaction with those outside their groups. my lack of direct exposure to music festivals beyond white wonderland serves as a limitation of my study. nevertheless, it is important to note that my research question focuses on racial ideologies and their interplay with the ideologies of the edm festival scene rather than racial performance. i focused my initial research on interviews as they allowed me to analyze how these ideologies influenced asian american participants’ understandings of their experiences in the edm festival scene and of their asian american identities. i plan to conduct further ethnographic research to support the preliminary findings presented in this article. researcher positionality another limitation of my study is the extent to which my position as a researcher influenced interviewee responses. i am not an insider to the scene, as i did not listen to edm extensively and had never attended a festival before i began my research. i also never experienced the influence of drugs, which various scholars (collin 1997; reynolds 1998; hutson 2000; mccall 2001; hunt et al. 2010) and many of my interviewees believe are an important aspect of the edm festival culture. on the other hand, my status as an outsider to the scene allowed me to ask festival participants a wide range of questions relating to their observations of other participants, as well as their perspectives on the plur-based culture, drug use, attire and sexual expressions. although i am an outsider to the scene, my interviewees seemed to consider me an insider in other ways.5 given that i am an asian american young woman from southern california, my interviewees seemed excited to share relatable experiences ranging from the high schools they attended to the asian market where they first heard trance music. in particular, my young age seemed to put interviewees at notable ease, as indicated by their use of slang and profanity, candid discussions of their sexual or illegal experiences dancecult 7(1)20 and expressions of internalized stereotypes of race and class that have become critical to my analysis. in particular, my interviewees seemed to be very comfortable sharing their internalized stereotypes of asian americans and even suggested that i would know about the academic pressures or strict parents because i was also asian american. on the other hand, my identity as a heterosexual woman seemed to limit some interviewees’ responses when discussing topics of gender and sexuality. some instances, however, such as when my male interviewees would noticeably hesitate or filter their perspectives on female participants, served as powerful moments for analysis. perpetual foreigners without a cultural home in this section, i argue that despite the seemingly contradictory nature of various dominant portrayals of asian americans, such as the “yellow peril” and “model minority”, asian americans are consistently portrayed as “perpetual foreigners” who are unassimilable to the dominant white american culture. these depictions have created a complex relationship between asian americans and the mainstream american culture. not only do these “controlling images” (hill collins 2000) circulate through popular culture and media, but they have also largely excluded asian americans in popular culture and media. although whites have occasionally depicted asian americans with similar characteristics as middle-class whites when it serves their interests to do so, the persistent portrayal of asian americans as perpetual foreigners ultimately denies asian americans access to the privileges of middle-class whiteness. from “yellow peril” to “model minority” though dominant portrayals of asian americans have shifted from the “yellow peril” in the late 1800s to the “model minority” in the 1960s, this transition was initiated by whites to advance white interests. the first dominant depiction of asian americans, particularly chinese immigrants to the west coast in the late nineteenth century, was their portrayal as foreign threats to the american nation and family. often referred to as the “yellow peril”, white americans’ fear of this threat was framed not only in racialized imperialist terms of “earlier fantasies of exotic but distant asia”, but also in gendered terms of chinese americans jeopardizing traditional white gender roles (lee 1999: 9). chinese american men were depicted as cheap “coolie laborers” who stole jobs from white male laborers and undermined the white man’s duties to his family. chinese american women were depicted as prostitutes who threatened the “purity” of white womanhood (lee 1999: 9–10). these fears eventually culminated to the 1875 page act: the first federal restrictive immigration law that prohibited the entry of “undesirable” immigrants from asia, particularly those perceived likely to become forced laborers or prostitutes. popular representations of asian americans shifted from the undesirable coolie laborers and prostitutes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the “model minority” in the 1960s, “at the peak of the civil rights and ethnic consciousness movements” (lee and park | searching for a cultural home 21 zhou 2004: 17). in this context, whites used depictions of socioeconomically successful asian americans to deny the existence of racial inequalities and to blame other nonwhite groups, such as blacks and latinos, for being culturally unfit or unwilling to attain success (lee 1996, 2005). various scholars have critiqued this stereotyping for obfuscating racial inequalities, hindering nonwhite solidarity and alienating asian americans who do not fit into the successful “model minority” mold. some scholars, however, have overlooked the interrelated link between depictions of asian americans as the “model minority” and the “yellow peril”. for example, lee and zhou argue that the model minority stereotype “marked a significant departure from the portrayal of asian americans as aliens and foreigners” (2004: 17). nevertheless, i am sympathetic with the view that “the model minority and the yellow peril are actually continuous images” in that both images have depicted asian americans as perpetual foreigners who could be easily stereotyped as exotic creatures in order to advance white interests (kibria 2002: 132).6 despite the “model minority” myth characterizing asian americans with seemingly positive and white-like qualities such as being hardworking, disciplined and success-oriented, it also suggests that asian americans are ultimately unlike whites in that they are too hardworking, disciplined and successoriented, or that they possess only these qualities. both the “model minority” myth and the “yellow peril” alienated asian americans as uninvited guests to the us who threatened the economic security of whites. representations in popular culture and music the link between the “model minority” myth and the “perpetual foreigner” archetype is particularly pronounced when discussing representations of asian americans in popular culture. media depictions have powerful implications by serving as “controlling images” that disseminate dominant ideas about marginalized groups that often justify their own oppressions (hill collins 2000). not only is popular mediation of asians and asian americans scant, but even the few existing images are limited in the complexities of their representation: the overly sexualized “lotus blossom baby (a.k.a. china doll, geisha girls, shy polynesian beauty, et al.) [or] the dragon lady (fu manchu’s various female relations, prostitutes, devious madams)” for asian women and the desexualized “egghead/wimp, or… the kung fu master/ninja/samurai” for asian men (fung 2005: 237). in popular music, asian americans lack not only representation in the number of artists, producers and djs, but also a mainstream sound or scene that they can call their own (lee and zhou 2004: 19). granted that south asian bhangra music has experienced popularity in the us and some incorporation into popular music (maira 2002), east asians and southeast asians, who composed most of my interviewees, have not experienced as much success.7 for example, my interviewees noted that east asian american artists seem to experience difficulty gaining sustainable success with white audiences, with the exception of “one-hit wonders like ‘gangnam style’ or ‘like a g6’”.8 dancecult 7(1)22 this exclusion of asian americans in popular music reflects both the “model minority” and “perpetual foreigner” stereotypes. the “model minority” myth suggests that asian americans prioritize stable socioeconomic success over cultural and political engagements and that they lack the creativity necessary to become successful artists (yu 2001: 189). the “perpetual foreigner” stereotype largely prevents white audiences from considering asian american artists as american artists in the first place. in turn, the lack of asian american representation in popular music further perpetuates the dominant notion that they are unassimilable to american culture. as robert lee argues, “the ‘common understanding’ of the oriental as racialized alien…originates in the realm of popular culture, where struggles over who is or who can become a ‘real american’ take place” (1998: 5). i argue that the recently popularized edm festival scene has also become a valuable place to frame discussions of who can belong as a “real american”. as revealed throughout my interviews with asian american participants, the scene perpetuates the myth that it is an egalitarian utopia while falling short of true racial equality and acceptance. this myth serves to further the dominant obliteration and denial of racial inequality in the us today. belonging through escape in this section, i analyze how my interviewees’ participation in the edm festival scene relates to their asian american identities and desire for cultural belonging. i argue that these discussions reflect a paradoxical understanding of the relationship between their asian american identities and their participation in the scene. my interviewees claim that the edm festival scene provides asian american participants with access to mainstream american culture, yet the scene also represents experiences they consider antithetical to their asian american backgrounds. searching for belonging the common thread throughout the history of the rave scene, despite all of its reappropriations, relocations and resurgences, is that raves represented spaces of belonging and acceptance to participants who have felt socially marginalized. the focus and definition of this marginalization has shifted in the us, particularly as rave culture, originating in gay black communities, has been reappropriated by middle-class white youth who identified themselves as social outcasts. in contemporary edm festivals, particularly those organized by insomniac, this promise of belonging and acceptance persists through the ideology of plur. many participants believe plur connects the edm festival scene with historical rave culture, or rather, their utopian imaginations of this culture. in fact, the majority of my informants used the word “rave” interchangeably with an “edm festival” despite the clear differences in scale, production and culture of these two scenes. as edm festivals have grown increasingly massive and its participant-base increasingly diverse, the juxtaposition between the ethos of racial inclusion symbolized by plur and the racialized groupings of participants creates a unique opportunity to analyze how nonwhite participants negotiate their subjectivities in relation to scene. park | searching for a cultural home 23 among my key questions to interviewees was why they believed asian american participants were drawn to the edm festival scene. a surprisingly high number of responses invoked asian american youth’s desire for cultural belonging and the rave scene’s historical function of providing a welcoming space for society’s outcasts. elise,9 a twentytwo-year-old korean american, grew up in a predominantly asian american community where more than eighty-percent of the students at her high school were asian american. in response to my inquiry, she stated, “i feel like a lot of asians feel the need to fit in just because, you know, we are from a different country”. by asserting that “a lot of asians…are from a different country”, even when she herself was born in the us, elise seems to have internalized the dominant depiction of asian americans as perpetual foreigners who “feel the need to fit in”. later in the interview, she connects this desire for belonging with the plur-based culture of edm festivals: i think a lot of people that are into electronic music tend to be like introverted… like not the most popular people at school and stuff, so i feel like they feel accepted when they go [to edm festivals] cause they’re not feeling judged or anything… it’s easy for them to make friends there, so i think that’s what appeals to a lot of asians. elise implicitly draws the parallel between asian american youth and the introverted and unpopular white youth associated with the historical rave scene, suggesting that both groups seek a cultural scene that provides them with an alternative reality of belonging and acceptance. greg, a twenty-one-year-old chinese american, echoed this belief that edm festivals provide a space for asian americans to experience belonging, although his experiences were different than elise’s in that he grew up in a predominantly upper-middle-class white neighborhood in ventura county. noting that he has “personally felt racial discrimination” in his life, greg stated that the edm festival scene provided him and other asian americans with a sense of belonging away from the dominance of the popular white kids in school: at least all or most of the asian americans that i’ve seen growing up in high school or middle school, they always wanted like a sense of belonging, to belong to something, whether they found like electronic music or something… for the most part, asians, they’re always like, ‘oh, he’s probably all weak, can’t protect himself.’ he’s always picked on so it’s like to belong, like having a sense of family. this imagery of “family” recurs regularly in the edm festival scene and seems to be another legacy of the historical rave scene’s communal and uniting power. many interviewees called the groups with whom they attend edm festivals, “rave families” and the people who first introduced them to the scene, “rave moms” and “rave dads”. my interviewees’ use of the metaphor that a “rave” is one big family suggests that they feel a deep connection with other participants who provide protection from the social dominance or bullying of the outside world. yet, as i argue throughout the article, this metaphor of the family paints an overly idealistic picture of the contemporary edm festival scene that is divided along racial and class lines. dancecult 7(1)24 following trends in addition to the desire to find belonging, my informants also expressed a closely related belief that asian american participants attended edm festivals to “follow a trend”. charles, a twenty-two-year-old vietnamese american, stated that asian american youth began attending edm festivals “because it’s a fad. yeah, i feel like asian american culture, like, they’re really heavily influenced by trends and fads, you know, what’s in”. when i asked charles why he believes that the “asian american culture” is heavily influenced by fads, he replied, “i have no idea. it’s always been like that as far as i’ve seen, like when a new big restaurant comes out or when boba10 came out… it’s like the sense of being included, you know”? several other interviewees made similarly broad claims that asian americans are trendier than other racial groups. these perceptions highlighted these interviewees’ beliefs that asian american youth participated in edm festivals to fulfill their desire for belonging. a question that emerged from these conversations was whether asian american participants believed that these trends, including edm festivals, were started by whites or by other asian americans. the responses were divided. elise provided a nuanced answer to this question, stating that “a raver identity is like something that makes you different from that average american, but at the same time… kinda ties you to the other asians”. in other words, elise suggests that asian american participation in edm festivals serves the dual purpose of adopting the “raver identity”, which they considered to be alternative to the mainstream and developing connections with other asian american participants. a useful concept with which to analyze this phenomenon is subcultural capital, which sarah thornton (1996) defines as the status of “hipness”, composed of cultural knowledge and commodities that participants of “subcultures” adopt in order to distinguish themselves from the mainstream culture and other subcultures. in other words, elise seems to believe that asian american participants reacted to their need to “fit in” to mainstream white america by “standing out”, especially as they do not have access to dominant means of achieving popularity. classifying the massive and commoditized edm festival scene as a “subculture” may be closer to the participants’ imaginations than reality, yet my interviewees firmly believed that asian american participants adopted the unique “raver identity” to obtain a status of “hipness”, as well as to become connected to other asian american youth in the scene. escaping from “asian american identities” despite claiming that edm festivals provide a sense of belonging for asian americans, my informants paradoxically believed that edm festivals also provide an escape from their asian american identities. when i asked irene, a twenty-one-year-old taiwanese american, if she thought her experiences as an asian american motivated her decision to attend edm festivals, irene responded that “parental restrictions”, which have been a “big part of [her] life”, motivated her participation. invoking dominant depictions of asian americans as park | searching for a cultural home 25 the model minority, irene suggests that “parental restrictions” are an essential part of her understanding of the asian american identity: i think at raves, there’s a contrast from being asian, because, you know, it’s not like that strict, restraining curfew, being home by ten… like asians, you can’t really do that and get kicked out of the house, that sort of thing? so yeah, it’s just like, i think because it’s such a stark contrast from being an asian. it’s the freedom (emphasis mine). irene considers her participation in edm festivals to be antithetical to “being an asian” and suggests that edm festivals open up the opportunity to free herself from her asian american identity. several interviewees also noted that edm festivals provided them with the freedom and escape from strict parents, which they understood to be central to their identities as asian americans and parallels dominant white depictions of asian americans as the model minority. anthony, a twenty-one-year-old vietnamese american, takes this idea of escaping from asian american-ness further to argue that asian american participants, including himself, have turned to edm festivals in order to assimilate into whiteness, in contrast to elise’s earlier statement that asian americans became connected to each other through their participation. although anthony, like elise, went to a predominantly asian american high school, he notes that the most popular kids in school were white. he first heard about edm festivals from several of these “popular” white girls, who he said he was “obsessed with” and “wanted to be their friends”. he further stated, “basically, that’s why i was trying to hang out with them and trying to like assimilate into their whole white culture”. when anthony saw some of these girls posting about an upcoming edm festival on their social media accounts, he states, “i was so intrigued and i wanted to be popular and i wanted to be cool, so i started like looking into it”. it was only because of his desire of wanting to become as popular as these white girls and “assimilate into white culture” that he first began attending edm festivals. anthony extrapolates from his experiences to conclude, “asians are trying to assimilate and copy white people, so they try to do the same thing”. anthony suggests that even though he attends edm festivals with predominantly asian american groups, he is entering a space that signifies a type of whiteness that he perceives to be “cool” and seeks to adopt. unmasking the middle-class whiteness of edm festivals in this section, i evaluate the ideological myth that the plur-based edm festival culture is equally welcoming to and accepting of all identities. i argue that the edm festival culture is dominated by middle-class whiteness, as whites predominantly control ideologies of authenticity and belonging within the scene. it is important to note that i do not base my argument merely on the racial demographics of edm festival participants. instead, i seek to highlight the racialization of edm festivals, or the process of ascribing a race to the scene, by analyzing which groups control and represent the “raver identity” related to the edm festival culture. first, i discuss how my informants negotiate the idea that most of the “main dancecult 7(1)26 characters” of edm festivals, including event producers, djs and participants, are white despite the edm festival’s claims of being raceless spaces. then, i argue that authenticity and belonging in the edm festival scene are represented and dominated by middle-class whiteness. lastly, i demonstrate how my informants understand edm festival culture as being antithetical to what they believed to be urban black hip-hop culture. i wish to highlight my interviewees’ practice of “strategic ignorance”, which alison bailey (2007: 88) defines as “a form of knowing that uses dominant misconceptions as a basis for active creative responses to oppression”. in other words, instead of simply accepting or denying dominant white depictions of asian americans, asian americans may resist creatively by adhering to certain depictions when it serves their interests to do so. for instance, asian americans’ internalization of their status as the model minority and its association with work ethic and ambition can be useful for improving their educational and vocational prospects. it allows them to benefit from their relatively closer association with middle-class whiteness and to disidentify themselves from the oppressions of other nonwhite groups. in the context of the edm festival scene, strategic ignorance allows asian american youth to justify their participation in a scene dominated by middle-class whiteness through their firm belief in the cultural similarities between whites and asian americans, as well as culturally racist understandings of other nonwhite groups. this section also highlights my informants’ agency amidst the dominant racial structures and ideologies, as well as their statuses as “oppressed<->resisting subjects”, simultaneously oppressed, resisting their oppression and oppressing other groups through cultural racism (bailey 2007: 83). “white people are still the main characters” although most of my interviewees adhered to the ideology of plur to claim that they do not associate edm festivals with any particular race or ethnicity, a few individuals explicitly noted the scene’s white dominance. when asked if she associates edm festival culture with a racial group, jen, a twenty-year-old taiwanese american, stated, “even though i always go with asian americans, i would still say i think of white people for raves. the reason is because when all those events put up photos, it’s always like white people photos. like white people are still generally the main characters… attendees, djs are generally white people”. jen suggests that media images serve a powerful role in ascribing whiteness to the edm festival scene for both participants and outsiders, regardless of whether the images accurately represent the firsthand experiences of participants. these images similarly echo the news coverage of the american rave scene in the nineties, which triggered the moral panic around middle-class white youth excessively using drugs and made middle-class white youth the main characters despite other racial groups participating in the scene. annie, a twenty-year-old taiwanese american who attended the same international high school as jen in taiwan, echoed a similar belief in the dominant whiteness the edm festival scene. when asked why she thinks edm festivals appeal to asian american youth, park | searching for a cultural home 27 annie responded, “i feel like the type of asians they attract are asians who are more westernized… i don’t wanna use this word, but i definitely don’t see many ‘fobby’11 asians at raves at all”. annie’s statement reflects a binary understanding of asian americans as the “westernized asians” and “fobby asians”, distinguished by their abilities to assimilate into white cultures. in fact, annie seems to use the word “westernized” as a euphemism for culturally white. when pressed further about why there are not as many black or latino participants at edm festivals who may be just as “westernized” as asian american youth, annie responded hesitantly, “oh yeah, hm… i don’t know, i feel like, i feel like when you, um, listen to hip-hop and rap and stuff, like the image of black people is just so strong and i feel like that’s kinda the same thing for edm. like for edm, the image of white people is very strong so…” this statement not only places hip-hop blackness and edm whiteness as polar opposites of each other, but it also implies that the aforementioned “westernized asians” are better able to identify with the whiteness of the edm festival scene than black or latino youth, a practice of strategic ignorance which places asian americans higher on the racial totem pole than other nonwhite groups. although jen and annie were two of the few interviewees who explicitly noted the association of edm festivals with whiteness, my other interviewees’ discussions revealed that the “main characters” in the scene are dominated by whites. although there are no official statistics on the demographics of popular djs, a public poll hosted by dj mag (2014), a popular magazine dedicated to dance music, shows that sixteen out of the top 20 djs are white. at the 2013 white wonderland, all the go-go dancers and five of the six djs were white—the sixth dj was laidback luke, a multiracial filipino-dutch dj. laidback luke was one of a handful of nonwhite djs that my interviewees listed when i asked the question why it seems that most famous djs seem to be white. other asian american djs they listed included steve aoki, shogun and ken loi, while they also pointed to afrojack as another prominent nonwhite dj. nonetheless, the aspect of these discussions important for my analysis was not the actual proportion of successful djs who are nonwhite but rather the ways in which my interviewees reacted to this question and what these reactions revealed about their understandings of race in the scene. a great number of interviewees were surprised by the question and noted they had never thought about the race of edm djs, uttering comments such as “now that i think about it, a lot of djs are white…” others were quick to justify this phenomenon and thereby uphold the belief that the edm festival scene is equally accessible to all races—they noted that the music originated in europe or turned to reasons why nonwhite groups are not pursuing dj careers. the latter point relied on dominant racial stereotypes such as that asian americans value financial stability and lack creativity, while blacks relate better to hip-hop lyrics focused on urban lower-class lifestyles. in fact, one interviewee pursuing a career as a dj claimed, “actually [my asian american identity] might work to my advantage because there are so little… it’s like jeremy lin, you know?” these responses reflected two ways in which dominant racial ideologies were infused with the historical rave ideology adopted by the edm festival scene; the normalization of whiteness and the denial of racism by invoking culturally based arguments. dancecult 7(1)28 controlling authenticity, belonging and subcultural capital the normalization of whiteness and denial of racism were also persistent in discussions of the dominant participants in the scene. in the context of an accelerated commercialization of the edm festival scene in the last few years, informants described a tension between the “kandi ravers”—the most authentic and original attendees—and the “frat bros”—the newcomers who were ruining the plur-based culture through their disrespectful behavior. although they did not always make this connection explicit, a closer analysis reveals that both these groups signify different forms of middle-class whiteness. in analyzing the different forms of whiteness, i adopt andersen’s belief that scholars ought to pay particular attention to the “differentiation among whites” rather than “using whiteness as a monolithic category” (2003: 28). my interviewees identified kandi ravers as white social outcasts from middleclass suburban high schools in surrounding regions. on the other hand, they identified the frat bros as the popular white kids who moved on to participate in the greek fraternity systems at nearby universities. although frat bros may more closely approximate popular understandings of middle-class whiteness, signified by their representations of financial, social and cultural capital,12 both frat bros and kandi ravers represent forms of middle-class whiteness differentiated by levels of mainstream social acceptance. when describing the types of participants that she observes at edm festivals, vicky, a twenty-year-old korean american, stated, “i think half of the people that went were like the hardcore rave people, who, when you first think of rave people, the weird white people who wear a lot of kandi and they’re very eccentric and… they just kinda look like druggies”. although vicky was explicit in describing the whiteness of the kandi ravers, most interviewees only noted that kandi ravers tended to be white when prompted about their race, suggesting the normalization of whiteness in discussing the most authentic participants in the scene. my informants expressed complex relationships with the kandi ravers, who were considered to be “losers” in mainstream culture yet also represented the most authentic ravers with access to the subcultural capital within the edm festival scene. although my informants did not want to be fully identified as kandi ravers, they seemed to desire partial identification in order to be regarded as authentic “ravers”, with the status of “hipness” discussed in previous sections. this partial identification was pronounced in the resentment shared with kandi ravers toward the frat bros, who were invading the scene and jeopardizing the subcultural capital of edm festivals through their mainstream tendencies. vicky described the other “half ” of the attendees at edm festivals as “frat bros and sorority girls”, who have recently entered the scene to party, take drugs and find sexual partners. my informants’ views of the frat bros and sorority girls were gendered. their resentment was predominantly directed toward the frat bros for their “obnoxious” and “disrespectful” behavior. the sorority girls, while definitely inauthentic participants in their eyes, were “not hurting anyone [or] taking people’s spaces”. the frat bros were criticized for pushing, shoving, fighting and generally “having fun at other people’s expense”—behaviors considered to be antithetical to the ethos of plur. compared with kandi ravers, interviewees were highly park | searching for a cultural home 29 conscious of the whiteness of the frat bros, often emphasizing this in their responses. for example, irene described frat bros as “really, really white. like the white guys with the tank tops… like the frat tank tops”. this emphasis on the whiteness of the frat bros compared to the kandi ravers seems to relate not only to my interviewees’ exposure to predominantly white fraternities and sororities in college, but also to their understandings of whiteness being associated with the self-entitled, disrespectful behavior of frat bros. on the other hand, the whiteness of the kandi ravers, the most authentic participants, remained largely invisible. asian american participants’ discussions of the kandi ravers and frat bros revolve around authenticity and belonging in the edm festival scene, which are framed as negotiations of different forms of middle-class whiteness. they have come to understand kandi ravers as the embodiment of authenticity and subcultural capital through their loyalty to plur and frat bros as the embodiment of the mainstream and cultural capital through their statuses as “popular” and “obnoxious” white men. while my interviewees have turned to the edm festival scene in order to seek access to subcultural capital and belonging, these ideals are ultimately defined in relation to middle-class whiteness. opposition to urban black hip-hop culture the edm festival scene not only represents middle-class whiteness, but also represents anti-lower-class blackness through my informant’s beliefs that “rave culture” was contrary to their imaginations of urban black hip-hop culture. toni morrison (1992) has argued that qualities are attributed to whiteness only in relationship to their absence in a racialized other. i argue that this definition through inversion also relates to classed understandings of race, as middle-class whiteness is defined in opposition to lowerclass blackness. to my informants, hip-hop culture seems to represent the other that is antithetical to the middle-class whiteness of edm festivals. this classed understanding is an important factor behind my informants’ beliefs that they can belong in the edm festival scene through their strategic internalization of the model minority myth, which suggests that asian americans are culturally and socioeconomically closer to middleclass whites than other nonwhite groups. only a couple of interviewees explicitly expressed middle-classed understandings of edm festival culture. responding to why asian american youth are drawn to edm festivals, priya, a twenty-two-year-old indian american, noted that edm attracts higherincome groups, implicitly defined as white and asian american, while her lower-income “black and mexican friends” were more attracted to rap and hip-hop: i think especially for me and especially for asians that i know, most of us are middle or upper-middle-class, so i think it’s harder for people to associate to things like rap or hip-hop, which is, you know, mostly talking about struggle… which is probably why you see more of my black and mexican friends who are into other music like rap and hip-hop. dancecult 7(1)30 she further noted that the ticket prices for edm festivals are “not cheap”, so the events attract a higher income demographic. through her discussion, priya points to two ways she believes that class position influences engagement with cultural scenes. first, socioeconomic status influences the types of cultural activities individuals can afford. second, “class habitus” draws them towards different types of musical and cultural scenes; that is the “long-lasting dispositions of mind and body” derived from the classed experiences of socialization, which in turn shape people’s cultural engagements (bourdieu 1986). when asked whether she associates edm with the middleor upper-middle-class, priya answered, “i think so”. nevertheless, she had trouble explaining exactly what makes edm seem middleor upper-middle-class, except that she did not think edm evoked “struggle” like hip-hop. other interviewees also expressed inconsistent racialized and classed understandings of edm to explain why “asian american youth are more drawn to edm than hip-hop music”. nick, a twenty-four-year-old taiwanese american dj-in-training, stated that he felt like edm appeals to asian american youth because “it’s probably easier to relate to than a lot of hip-hop. like i don’t know about selling drugs or gang-banging”. nick implies that most hip-hop music invokes activities associated with the (black) urban lower class which asian american youth would not relate to, seemingly based on the sweeping assumption that most asian americans are middleor upper-middle-class. nick further stated that in contrast to hip-hop, edm is “very international… because there are very little lyrics, or the lyrics are very melodic so it’s not really about what the lyrics are… everyone can hear a good melody, you know?” at this point, nick pauses and seems to realize that the idea that everyone can enjoy edm equally contradicts his earlier statement that he does not see many black participants at edm festivals. after some hesitation, he states that he does not know why asian american youth seem to be attracted to edm. “it could be because there’s something about it that other people don’t like about it, you know? like maybe there’s something about edm that black people don’t like”. nick’s statements reveal how he negotiates the contradiction between his firm belief that edm is open to all racial groups and his observation that there are few black participants in the scene. instead of questioning whether edm may not be as “international” and inclusive as he had claimed, nick effectively maintains his belief that edm is not associated with any race by suggesting that blacks simply do not choose to enjoy the music. this again represents an instance of strategic ignorance as nick seeks to justify his desire to become a popular edm dj and believe that he would not encounter racism as an asian american. conclusion asian american youth have turned to the edm festival scene to fill the cultural void created by their status as perpetual foreigners. yet while edm festivals, particularly those organized by insomniac, perpetuate the promise of an egalitarian utopia through the plur ideology, both the physical production of the events and the symbolic production of authenticity in park | searching for a cultural home 31 the scene reflect the dominance of middle-class whiteness. my interviewees’ references to this middle-class whiteness were often implicit, reflecting the normalization of whiteness in the edm festival scene, effectively hidden by the commodified ideology of plur. on the other hand, my interviewees described the scene as explicitly antithetical to lower-class blackness, which they believed was encapsulated by what they understood to be hip-hop culture. these discussions served several different strategic interests of the asian american youth i interviewed, as they justified their participation in the edm festival scene dominated by middle-class whiteness, associated themselves more closely with middle-class whiteness and disassociated themselves from the oppressions of other nonwhite groups by adhering to cultural racism. my interviewees’ discussions of the contemporary edm festival scene reflected and perpetuated the belief of middle-class whiteness as the desirable norm and lower-class blackness as the undesirable other. in this article i have aimed to fill critical gaps at the intersections of cultural studies and asian american studies. i have argued that previous scholarship on raves and edm festivals has largely overlooked the opportunity to analyze the disjunction between the egalitarian ideology of raves and dominant ideologies of race and class. meaningful complements to my study would include the study of race, class, gender or sexuality among other nonmiddle-class-heterosexual-white participants in edm festivals or other scenes dominated by middle-class whiteness. this article also calls for more research on asian american youth’s engagements with popular and underground cultures, particularly research that adopts a more ethnographic approach given the limited participant observation in my preliminary findings. i have argued that asian americans provide a unique lens on the normalization of whiteness in various cultural scenes, as their “perpetual foreigner” status often invokes desires for cultural belonging, while the “model minority” myth characterizes asian americans as similarly middle-classed as whites, albeit to advance white interests. i also argue that the current lack of scholarly attention on asian american youth’s cultural engagements further perpetuates the notion that asian americans are perpetual foreigners with unique, segregated cultures rather than meaningful participants in cultural scenes, as observed in the edm festival scene in southern california. acknowledgements i would like to thank dr. sadhana bery for advising my research. i would also like to thank dr. alison denton jones and dr. chiwen bao for their advice and encouragement, as well as the harvard college research program for the funding of this research. lastly, i would like to express my sincere gratitude to each of my interviewees for willingly sharing their experiences and expressing their belief in the value of this study. dancecult 7(1)32 notes 1 although electric daisy carnival occurs in las vegas, i include the event as part of the edm festival scene in southern california given its origins in the greater los angeles region and the significant participation from residents of southern california, according to my interviewees. 2 kandies are bracelets, necklaces or other accessories made of neon beads that my interviewees believed are a defining symbol of plur and “rave culture” in the contemporary edm festival scene. kandies are frequently exchanged between two participants that have developed a connection at a festival, following a ritualized handshake simulating each component of plur. 3 i define normalization of whiteness as the process in which whiteness has become “the unacknowledged norm [and] the location from which others are defined and judged” (andersen 2003: 28). 4 see maira (2002) for an important exception and lee and zhou (2004) for a more general discussion of asian american youth studies. 5 see hill collins (1986) for a more thorough discussion of the insider and outsider distinction. 6 also see yu 2001; lee 2005. 7 i refer to “south asian” and “east asian” american artists together here, not because i do not acknowledge the important distinctions in their histories and cultures, but because dominant american cultures have largely collapsed the two groups into the category of “asian americans”. 8 references to korean pop singer psy’s song “gangnam style”, which became the most watched video on youtube in 2012 and asian american hip hop group far east movement’s “like a g6”, which achieved number one on the us billboard hot 100 for two weeks in november 2010. 9 all interviewee names are pseudonyms throughout the article. 10 boba is a taiwanese tea-based drink with chewy tapioca balls that several interviewees claimed “blew up” in asian american communities several years ago. 11 a fob (fresh off the boat) is a colloquial term used to describe an immigrant, typically asian american, who is perceived not to have assimilated into the american culture, language and behavior. 12 i use social capital to mean one’s social networks that have value, and cultural capital to mean one’s non-financial social assets, such as education, intellect, speech, or dress, that can increase one’s opportunities or life chances. see bourdieu (1986). references andersen, margaret l. 2003. “whitewashing race: a critical review essay on ‘whiteness’”. in white out: the continuing significance of racism, ed. ashley doane and eduardo bonillasilva, 21–34. new york: routledge. anderson, tammy l. 2009. rave culture: the alteration and decline of a philadelphia music scene. philadelphia, pa: temple university press. bailey, alison. 2007. “strategic ignorance”. in race and epistemologies of ignorance, ed. n. tuana, 77-94. albany, ny: state university of new york press. park | searching for a cultural home 33 bourdieu, pierre. 1986. “the forms of capital”. in handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education, ed. j. richardson, 241–58. new york: greenwood. buckland, fiona. 2002. impossible dance: club culture and queer world-making. middletown, ct: wesleyan university press. collin, matthew. 1997. altered state: the story of ecstasy culture and acid house. new york: serpent’s tail. dj mag. “top 100 djs”. dj mag. 2013. <http://www.djmag.com/top100> (accessed 1 march 2014). fikentscher, kai. 2000. “you better work!” underground dance music in new york city. hanover, nh: university press of new england. fung, richard. 2005. “looking for my penis: the eroticized asian in gay video porn”. in a companion to asian american studies, ed. kent a. ono, 235–53. malden, ma: blackwell publishing. hill, andrew. 2002. “acid house and thatcherism: noise, the mob, and the english countryside”. british journal of sociology 53(1): 89–105. <http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/00071310120109348>. hill collins, patricia. 2000. black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. new york: routledge. hutson, scott r. 2000. “the rave: spiritual healing in modern western subcultures”. anthropological quarterly 73(1): 35–49. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3317473>. kibria, nazli. 2002. becoming asian american: second-generation chinese and korean american identities. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press. lee, jennifer, and min zhou, eds. 2004. asian american youth: culture, identity, and ethnicity. new york: routledge. lee, robert g. 1999. orientals: asian americans in popular culture. philadelphia: temple university press. lee, stacey j. 1996. unraveling the “model minority” stereotype: listening to asian american youth. new york: teachers college press. ---. 2005. up against whiteness: race, school, and immigrant youth. new york: teachers college press, columbia university. maira, sunaina. 2002. desis in the house: indian american youth culture in new york city. philadelphia, pa: temple university press. mccall, tara. 2001. this is not a rave: in the shadow of a subculture. toronto: insomniac press. measham, fiona. 2001. dancing on drugs: risk, health and hedonism in the british club scene. london: free association. morrison, toni. 1992. race-ing justice, en-gendering power: essays on anita hill, clarence thomas, and the construction of social reality. new york: pantheon. reynolds, simon. 1998. generation ecstasy: into the world of techno and rave culture. 1st ed. boston, ma: little, brown. rose, tricia. 1994. black noise: rap music and black culture in contemporary america. hanover, nh: university press of new england. rotella, pasquale (pasqualerotella). “owlie and his supporters spreading the positive vibes at #edc! #peace #love #unity #respect”. 13 april 2014. tweet (accessed 9 may 2015). http://www.djmag.com/top100 http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/00071310120109348 http://www.jstor.org/stable/3317473 dancecult 7(1)34 sachs, elliot. “diplo bans kandi, pasquale rotella responds”. youredm, 11 august 2014. <http://www.youredm.com/2014/08/11/diplo-bans-kandi-pasquale-rotella-responds/> (accessed 9 may 2015). silcott, mireille. 1999. rave america: new school dancescapes. toronto, ontario: ecw press. thornton, sarah. 1996. club cultures: music, media, and subcultural capital. 1st u.s. ed. hanover: university press of new england. yu, henry. 2001. thinking orientals: migration, contact, and exoticism in modern america. new york: oxford university press. http://www.youredm.com/2014/08/11/diplo-bans-kandi-pasquale-rotella-responds/ deviance and risk on holiday: an ethnography of british tourists in ibiza daniel briggs basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2013. isbn: 978-1-137-02239-4 rrp: £58.00 bina bhardwa institute for criminal policy research, birkbeck, university of london (uk) drink, drugs, debauchery and deviance. daniel briggs offers an insightful ethnographic account of young working-class brits on holiday in the balearic party island of ibiza. in what is a captivating and enjoyable read, the book is a welcomed ethnographic addition to the field—a field historically reliant on quantitative survey research and dominated by a public-health focus. set in san antonio’s infamous drinking strip, the west end, and adopting a critical realist stance, briggs follows a group of young working-class men from “southside” as they indulge in unrestrained hedonism and excessive consumption. in doing so, what unfolds is a window into san antonio’s casualties, viewed as the victims of social conditioning in what is essentially the dystopian antithesis to “living the dream”. branded “the place to be” and located at the height of their “holiday career” after summers of sampling pre-packaged experiences in other european party resorts, briggs’ status-seeking, identity-shaping subjects come to ibiza for the “superclubs”, the consumption of alcohol and illicit drugs and freedom from the world of work and responsibility. briggs notes the centrality of leisure and the instrumentality of work in the lives of his research participants: “there seemed to be a general consensus in my sample that the role of work, if they had any, was to sustain leisure pursuits and that every opportunity in their youth had to be seized to celebrate the moment before either responsibility and/or old age started to interfere”(54). however, in reality briggs’ research participants “can’t really afford to go [to the superclubs] so end up most nights on the west end”(8). wrapped in an ideological blanket of market capitalism and “hyperconsumption”, critically briggs suggests that visitors to the white isle engage in inauthentic, “structurally conditioned” (3) experiences or what he terms “unfreedom”. yet, by painting ibiza-goers as passive victims of consumerism, briggs fails to empower the consumer and in turn suggests that freedom is illusory and young consumers are culturally hypnotised by the ideology of hyperconsumption with little or no choice or resistance. limited consideration is given to the discerning consumer or the potential of consumers to negotiate risk and self-regulate and moderate their behaviour. in stripping the agency of the working-class consumer, briggs is in danger of homogenising working-class culture and sidelining cultural difference, a critique synonymous with subcultural theory’s past. early on in the book briggs draws our attention to the limitations of his work. critically, briggs’ inattention to classed, ethnic and gendered diversity on the island misses the possibility of producing a number of different versions of ibiza (bhardwa and moore 2014). this then reproduces the class-based stereotypes that plague both popular imagery and commentary on the island. furthermore, the focus on problematic behaviours forfeits the pleasures associated with participation in dance music cultures (bhardwa 2014). in chapter two: the flexible but entirely serious methodology (and revisited in chapter eleven), briggs outlines his position in the field as a participant observer and highlights the ethical dilemmas that accompany research with intoxicated participants. however, he notes that his transparency and reflexivity is not applauded by the academic community, who not only cast doubt on the academic worth of his research, but also remain uncomfortable with the study of pleasure. he writes, “if only i could convince some of the world’s leading drug and alcohol journals which have outright rejected my work because they considered it to be ‘unscientific’ or have accused me of ‘enjoying myself’” (208). as briggs notes, the challenges of conducting research in dance settings raises much ethical debate—an important debate to have—and briggs’ research is pivotal in opening up the muted dialogue. a timely strength of the book is briggs’ reference to the salient and perpetual role of social media and social networking sites such as facebook and twitter in the production of online narratives. the pre-“holiday hype” gathers pace online, and facebook posts consisting of photos and status updates continue to provide “live” narratives once out in ibiza, but post-ibiza this content is also a valuable bank of online memories. as an essential read for any post-rave culture scholar, the book taps into a wide range of themes from identity construction and dance music culture to consumerism and the study of leisure. through the combined use of rich fieldwork description, in-situ research and humour, briggs has produced a fantastic, thought-provoking and highly-recommended contribution to the field. references bhardwa, bina. 2014. “the construction of dance consumer identities: an exploration of drug use, digital technologies and control in three dance settings”. ph.d. dissertation, lancaster university. bhardwa, bina and karenza moore. 2014. “ibiza discovered? exploring the politics and contesting the practices of contemporary research in ibiza”. university of leeds (uk): british sociological association annual conference. “stay in synch!”: performing cosmopolitanism in an athens festival dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 5(2): 131–151 issn 1947-5403 ©2013 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.02.07 “stay in synch!”: performing cosmopolitanism in an athens festival vassiliki lalioti national and kapodistrian university of athens (greece) abstract synch is an electronic music festival that takes place in athens every summer and brings together people of various cultural origins and musical and aesthetic interests. as a total performance event, synch becomes a site of complexity, polyvocality and hybridity; a site which allows participants to create and express cosmopolitan attitudes of openness for others, people, ideas and experiences. adopting an anthropological/ ethnographic perspective, this paper moves beyond distinctions between elite vs. ordinary and consumer vs. ethical cosmopolitanism, and investigates synch as a site where local and trans-local aspects of life and a set of socio-cultural meanings in greece today are being negotiated. keywords: festival; performance; cosmopolitanism; ethnography; greece vassiliki lalioti is lecturer in anthropology of performance at the faculty of music studies, national and kapodistrian university of athens. she has conducted ethnographic research in various areas of greece, she is the co-author of the book “...because it’s in our blood”. from ancient drama to flamenco: bringing anthropology back to the field of experience (in greek) and her papers have been published in various greek and international journals. her research interests are in the fields of performing arts (theatre, music), anthropology of the body, anthropology of technology. email vassiliki at <vlalioti@music.uoa.gr>. feature article dancecult 5(2)132 introduction synch, is an urban, mixed genre international festival with special focus on music and contemporary technologies. it was first held in june 2004 in lavrio, a city 40 km south-east of athens, but since 2006 it takes place in athens every summer. music is the core of synch: from electro, dance, house, techno, ambient and electronica to experimental, post rock, noise, electro latin and hip hop. hundreds of established and rising young artists from greece and many other, european and non-european, countries have “vibrated its spaces with contemporary music” (elissavet, audience member).1 apart from music, synch is also about moving image and new media. according to many local and international audience members and journalists, it has become the biggest music, art and technology festival in greece and one of the most significant in europe. festivals, public celebrations, spectacles and public events in general have always been some of anthropologists’ favorite subjects of study because they are considered to be celebrations of community, values, identities, ideologies and continuity, either as expressions of a collective consciousness (durkheim 1976) or as dynamic, dialogic and polyphonic ritual performances (turner 1982). traditionally festivals have been approached as “time out of time” (falassi 1987), that is, as having clearly defined boundaries from the world outside, placing emphasis on closed spaces, fixed times and indigenous social actors. in the contemporary globalized world, however, flows of people, information and capital have led to situations of increased individual mobility, demographic change and new work and life rhythms. thus, there is a growing literature that seeks to position festivals in a context that is fluid and open to different scopes of transnational society and cultural vectors (picard and robinson 2006). within this context, the emphasis is placed on their significance as specific kinds of experience and the multiplicity of—usually contradictory—meanings that are at once personal, social, cultural, political and economic (getz 2010: 7). in this light, i intend to investigate synch as a site of complexity, polyvocality and hybridity; as a performance event that allows participants to create and experience cosmopolitan attitudes of openness towards others, people, ideas and values. to achieve this, i explore the relationship of the festival with the city of athens and focus on the ways in which performers and audience members participate and communicate with each other in the festival spaces. the ethnographic material used in this paper was collected during fieldwork i conducted in athens. fieldwork included participant observation during the synch festival of 2009 and 2010, as well as informal talks with members of the audience and unstructured interviews with musicians and organizers. published material from internet sources and artists” interviews in musical magazines were also utilized in order to shed light on the meanings those involved attribute to their experiences. the scarce anthropological/ethnographic literature on electronic dance music (edm) festivals mainly investigates the ways in which liminality generates potential transformative experiences for participants. jaimangal-jones, pritchard and morgan (2010), for example, discuss the significance of journey and liminality for participants attending large festivallalioti | performing cosmopolitanism in an athens festival 133 type dance music events and contend that travel to dance events is socially constructed by participants both as a rite of passage and as a pilgrimage or source of spiritual fulfillment. with reference to portugal’s boom festival, st john (2009) also explores the religio-spiritual characteristics of psytrance music culture. my aim, however, in this paper is to contribute, on the one hand, to the study of electronic music, a current cultural phenomenon that has been ignored by greek anthropology,2 and, on the other hand, to a wider academic discussion on greek music. studies of greek music have mainly focused either on folk/traditional genres (herzfeld 1982; kallimopoulou 2009), or on rebetiko (tragaki 2007), but recently there is a growing interest in popular music genres and cultures, like éntehno (papanikolaou 2007), laikó, (dawe 2003) and jazz (tsioulakis 2011), as well as in various artists, like anna vissi (polychronakis 2007), which, placed in their social and cultural context, shed light on local and trans-local aspects of life and on a set of socio-cultural meanings in greece today. tracing cosmopolitanism cosmopolitanism is one of the most recently debated topics in social theory. there is a growing interest in cosmopolitanism both on the level of politics and political discourse, and in the fields of social sciences and humanities, especially in political science, comparative literature, philosophy and anthropology. although not all theories on cosmopolitanism could be covered in this paper, it could, however, be argued that some scholars have used it as a prescriptive vision of global democracy and world citizenship, some as a theoretical space for describing hybrid cultural identities, while others as a way for defining social processes and individual behaviors expressing a capacity to accept cultural difference.3 traditionally, the term mainly referred to social elites who had the privilege to travel, come to contact with and adopt ways of life, attitudes and values beyond their national cultures. thus, designations applied to the term such as “elite”, “liberal”, or “artificial” essentially criticized cosmopolitanism as an elitist social representation or as an impossible project that aimed to reconcile universal values with a diversity of culturally and historically constructed subject positions. however, there is a current tendency to move beyond both the western, elitist aura of the old cosmopolitan model, and beyond old models of the multi-, interand cross-cultural in a number of ways. one could cite rabinow’s (1986) “critical cosmopolitanism”, which acknowledges that transnational experiences are particular rather than universal, and forced as well as voluntary, clifford’s (1992) “discrepant cosmopolitanism”, which refers to existing practical stances as opposed to theoretical ideals, cohen’s (1992) “rooted cosmopolitanism” grounded in the sociocultural specificities of the nation state, or werbner’s (1999) “working-class cosmopolitanism”, which focuses on demotic and popular experiences of transnationalism. according to gilbert and lo, all of them could be seen as efforts “to remake cosmopolitanism into a more wordly and less elitist concept, an endeavor that includes recuperating “cosmopolitans from below”—defined along class and racial lines and encompassing refugees, migrants and itinerant workers” (2007: 5). dancecult 5(2)134 cosmopolitanism also refers to various critiques of globalization that, either as polarities or as complimentary and articulated terms, made the localist/globalist framework of analysis central. during the last decade, scholars problematized the understanding of globalization as flows and –scapes,4 since it could not take into account the uniqueness and unevenness of the described phenomena (inda and rosaldo 2008: 6). recent anthropological work has thus shown that globalization should be seen as a set of actions and agencies, which often exist in conflict and opposition. from this point of view, turino (2003: 61-3) proposes cosmopolitanism as a useful analytical tool, further suggesting “cosmopolitan formations” that have their own habits and resources for living and are themselves culturally grounded. more specifically, in order to understand trans-state cultural and musical processes we should ground the analysis in specific people’s lives and experiences. stokes (2007), too, proposes to understand cosmopolitanism as the product of certain kinds of intentionality and agency, which we might appropriately understand politically and culturally. we should not, however, forget the elements of play and pleasure in the global circulation of musical practice and think of music as a process of making “worlds” rather than a passive reaction to global “systems”. despite the tensions it has reflected and the variety of adjectives that have been attributed to it, cosmopolitanism is closely related to notions of empathy and respect for other cultures and values, efforts to bridge cultural differences through dialogue and aesthetic enjoyment, as well as to complex ways to juggle particular and transcend loyalties (werbner 2008). within this wider theoretical frame, delanty calls us to move beyond “normative, political and moral accounts of cosmopolitanism as world polity or universalistic culture in its conception” and see it as “socially situated and as part of the self-constituting nature of the social world itself ” (2006: 25). in other words, one of cosmopolitanism’s major dimensions is that it opens up normative questions, that is, it allows us to imagine an alternative society. in order to interpret the significance of post-traditional urban festivals5 as expressions of contemporary society, sassatelli (2011) uses the notion of cosmopolitanism as one of their key ingredients. criticizing the fact that the scarce sociological and anthropological literature has been mainly driven by economic research focusing exclusively on economic returns, and thus on an instrumental vision of festivals, she argues that this tendency has contributed to reinforcing the idea that, from a cultural point of view, festivals are of little relevance since they are dominated by commercial, “inauthentic” logics. taking them seriously by virtue of their sociability and experiential form, however, we may “trace the complex, polyvocal, discursive and relational field that the festival generates” (sassatelli 2011: 17). she thus proposes to problematize clear-cut dichotomies between elite and ordinary, as well as between consumer and ethical cosmopolitanism that previous approaches established. the fact that contemporary festivals were introduced in order to reboot local economies through new consumption, as well as to demonstrate an openness to multiculturalism and multiethnicity, cannot be distinguished from more “ethical” forms, that is, from a cosmopolitan ethos of solidarity, which is based on combatting racism, protecting rights of displaced people and fostering inter-cultural dialogue and commitment to distant strangers (sassatelli 2008: 33-35). lalioti | performing cosmopolitanism in an athens festival 135 departing from this point of view, in the following sections i will show that synch is a hybrid cultural site, that is, a site where people who belong to different cultural groupings can transcend their immediate selves and interact with members of other local and translocal collectives. my aim is not to impose a specific theory on the analysis of my ethnographic material. instead, drawing on the theoretical perspectives of cosmopolitanism described above, i wish to achieve a better understanding of my research partners” festive experiences and the ways they negotiate local belongings in a global, rather than in a national, or even european, frame of reference. entering the field i first attended synch in 2009, a few weeks after i began an ethnographic research of the electronic music scene in athens. my interlocutors insisted that synch was the festival i should attend if i wanted to get a picture of the different tendencies in the field. in general, my attempt to enter the field was a particularly difficult, exotic, discomforting and enchanting experience. forty-year-olds, such as my friends and i, do not usually follow or participate in electronic music cultures in greece. those who do participate are mainly young people in their early twenties, although older goers (30-year-olds) are not rare. the main difficulties i faced were related to the complexities that stem from studying groups within a familiar urban setting (i have grown up and lived in athens for most of my life), and to the blurred landscape of electronic music itself (what is electronic music?). according to giannis,6 for example, one of the first musicians i met, “nowadays everything is electronic music, that is, whether you play rock, or jazz, or techno, since the entire process is electronic, whether your sources are electronic or digital, everything ends up in digital mixing and your final material is digital, either a sound file or a cd”. after a short period of wandering around crowded clubs very late at night (or very early in the morning), listening to totally incomprehensible kinds of music and talking to “strange” people, i slowly began to recognize a few artists, sounds and places that made more sense to me. finally, my fieldwork focused on specific clubs and bars (bios, k44, stavros tou notou, six d.o.g.s.) that are either related to or commonly identified with the history and development of the more “artistic” (έντεχνη) electronic music, and with specific artists. within the context of popular music studies, the term that refers to genres and subgenres as techno, house, electro, hip-hop, trip-hop, electro-punk and progressive, is “electronic dance music” (edm).7 in greece, the electronic music scene is more focused on what is called “dance” and “experimental” music. in many events, bands combine artistic (έντεχνα) with dance elements and, during the last decade in particular, what we have is mainstream mixed with r&b and house. according to my interlocutors, four or five years ago distinctions were made mainly between mainstream and underground clubs, especially in athens and thessaloniki. however, owners of larger mainstream venues started to invite underground groups that had become quite popular. thus, even musicians who did not perform mainstream genres had the opportunity to play in big clubs like luv and blend. but now this industry is gone. there is still a house and techno scene but it is one that is mostly dancecult 5(2)136 aimed at an audience of music lovers. there are few big clubs for mainstream and a few smaller ones for more underground and experimental music. theoretically there are three tendencies in the european electronic music scene, of which greece is considered to be a part: a) the experimental electric, electroacoustic music, that is, experimentations by jazz musicians who have a classical education (like the music of xenakis and stockhousen), b) the strictly dance scene, which includes mainstream and underground, and c) what is found between the former two and is known as the indie (independent) music scene. in smaller clubs today, however, dance music coexists with experimental and distinctions between electronic music, indie or experimental and dance become blurred. since my interlocutors themselves use the term “electronic music” instead of edm, i prefer to also use this term in this paper. as it was mentioned above, synch was first held in june 2004 in lavrio, in the technological and cultural park an historical and industrial area of 200.000sq.m, which is used for academic/research, educational, business and cultural activities. it lasted for three days and it included various streams of electronic music, architecture, video and other visual arts. in 2006 synch became part of the athens and epidaurus festival and since then it takes place in the athens city center. it is under the aegis of the ministry of culture, the municipality of athens, the hellenic tourism organization, the prefecture of eastern attica and the secretariat general of information and communication. it is predominantly financed by public institutions, thus keeping the ticket prices relatively low (they range from 30 to 45 euros per day). although more than forty-five thousand people and hundreds of artists have participated in the festival, the economic crisis led to its scaling down to two days in 2010 and to a “tribute to silence” in 2011 (see next chapter). synch and the city city festivals provide concentrated versions of local, regional, national and transnational encounters and often thematize the art of living together that the city has always represented thus claiming a special tie with cosmopolitanism (parker 2004). as i show next, the relationship between synch and the local identity, although a significant element in its development and success, it nonetheless constitutes a negotiated space; a space in which multiple belongings and identities are constantly at play. people who participate in synch, either as artists or as members of the audience, are mainly young locals. they often come from middle and upper socioeconomic strata, and travel a lot—for studies or leisure—in europe and other parts of the world, thus probably representing an elite (although not small) minority of the greek population.8 very often, however, they live in other regions of greece, they are older, immigrants from african, asian and european countries, and come from lower socioeconomic strata. synch, thus, allows the emergence of a group of a “culture of cosmopolitanism”, based not so much on traditional socioeconomic criteria, but on the availability of global symbols and narratives due to the media and popular culture, as well as physical and virtual travel (szerszynski lalioti | performing cosmopolitanism in an athens festival 137 and urry 2002). electronic music itself can be considered such a global symbol that allows definitions of the self and the other beyond local and ethnic identities ( jeffery 2010). this was made very clear by petros,9 one of my key-interlocutors, who had played in synch twice. he is thirty years old, a phd student, and a noteworthy experimental electronica artist: author: how would you call your music? petros: music [laughs] is it greek music? yes, why not? i am greek. until i get a new passport … it sounds funny. if i asked you to put it in a category? category … i don’t know. contemporary (σύγχρονη) music, i believe. what do you mean by contemporary music? it is the music you make when you express yourself specifically, in your specific time and place. the creation of new and the strengthening of already extensive networks of professionals in electronic music also makes synch a site for the negotiation of cosmopolitan (localtranslocal) identities. there is a small electronic music industry in athens, dealing with its creation, promotion and consumption. in 2010 for example, synch, in collaboration with the “sae athens” school of sound engineering and musical technology, organized a series of seminars and workshops for professionals and amateur music producers. in 2007, record labeling, a record company, organized a seminar for practicing and future professionals such as musicians, producers, label managers, distributors and salesmen. during their lectures, markus detmer (of the staubgold company in berlin) and philippe petit (of the bip-hop company in marseille) covered various aspects of establishing and managing an independent record label, as well as well as issues related to the manufacturing of compact discs, internet-only projects, concert promotion and copyright. synch draws part of its appeal from the local identity and the cultural context of the city, whilst it contributes to the strengthening of the identity of athens as a cultural and tourist centre. athens is an emblem of a glorious culture of the past—“contested” not only by locals but by “the world” too with a long history inscribed on its monuments and archaeological sites; an attractive tourist destination.10 the organization of a variety of cultural, athletic and other events are also aimed to an international tourist market and reflect aspects of contemporary life.11 synch is considered to be one of the most important international music events of athens in terms of its capacity to promote the city image through the participation of foreign artists and audiences and its international press coverage. in 2007 synch was invited to participate in the luxemburg cultural capital of europe, as well as to the “europareise” (travel around europe) organized by c/o pop of cologne, one of the biggest european festivals. in the same year it won the best european festival award in the qwartz electronic music awards. acknowledging the festival’s contribution to the development of the city’s cultural image and the local cultural identity abroad, government and local authorities as well as public institutions took synch under their aegis. in 2006 dancecult 5(2)138 it became part of the athens and epidaurus festival (“greek festival”). it is a theater, music and dance festival that was founded in 1955, and its history is embedded within the adventures of the wider sociopolitical history of greece during that period. in search of a “new identity—a festival that is inclusive, that reflects its host city, and that brings the livelier aspects of society back into play”, its organizers decided to: systematically open up the festival to cutting-edge international productions, and to promote young greek artists who have something to say to contemporary audiences. to spread the events of this arts festival across the entire city, to seek out new and different audiences, and to cater for ever more arts lovers through the select events of a contemporary festival (greek festival, official website). within this context, synch was introduced as a key festival in the strategic development of the regional cultural policy for athens with the goal of promoting contemporary greek music and artists nationally and internationally. its success (according to organizers, musicians and audiences) enables the festival organizers to plan smaller events in other cities of greece and of the world. as the art director of synch said: i believe that five years from now the festival will attract an audience from all over the world and will, of course, be one of the inseparable cultural events of the hellenic summer, travelling, during the months before the festival, to various cities of the world and greece, organizing pre-synch events aiming at synchronization (συγχρονισμό) with various cultural realities (papaioannou 2006). the significance that the organizers attribute to the transcendence of the festival’s local boundaries is also manifested in the letter they uploaded on synch’s site, apologizing to the public for its absence in 2011: tribute to silence dear friends of synch, we apologize for the late announcement to all of you, artists, collaborators and of course audience, that you, since 2004, support us and with the help of all of you synch has been raised to one of the most famous and quality festivals of europe. this year synch is dedicated to silence. we so need it to plan the second phase of the festival to evolve and at the same time to develop its potential content not only in the frame of a two day festival in athens, but also in other places and spaces inside and outside greece, creating the conditions for the next step of synch. stay in synch;-) (synch festival official website 2011). one of the side effects of the economic crisis was the scaling down of the 2010 festival to two days, hosting a smaller number of groups and having fewer people attending, especially on the first day. despite the problems, synch still represents “the only significant live music event of the summer, the feast of the electronic music in athens” (fotis, 37 year old, manager of a record shop).12 this feast, however, is not only connected to local and ethnic identities, lalioti | performing cosmopolitanism in an athens festival 139 but to a mix of global identities of the electronic music culture itself, as natali tsirigoti, head of synch’s press and communication office, argued: everyone respects and supports it. especially now, after 5 years, its reputation has been spread to all international art agencies since everyone were going back with the best of impressions. the fact that many well-known artists ask for an invitation to participate in synch is not out of chance. it goes without saying that they are positively influenced by our being under the aegis of the athens festival (2008). in everyday discourse synch is very often compared and related to the sónar festival13 in barcelona: “i really enjoyed it. i feel like i gained one more day in sónar!,” said maria. europe, however, constitutes part of the wider, international context of the digital culture scene. more specifically, new technologies constitute a defining element of synch itself: from 2004 until 2006 its subtitle was “electronic music and digital arts”, from 2007 until 2009 it was “innovative music, moving image, new media”, while in 2010 it became “innovative music, workshops, market”. according to a view in the press, the art director of synch “put greece on the world festival map” since its philosophy has been to present to the greek and international audience, young and established artists from around the world as well as all current trends in the fields of music, new media and moving picture. its creators claim that synch’s aim is to develop “the idea of the cultural promotion of a new audiovisual adventure”, and to “attract, through a communication platform, artists and creative people from greece and the whole world” (papaioannou 2006). innovations in electronic technology, arts and music are, thus, perceived to merge at the international level, to be borderless. they are considered to be a way of expressing, and a field for cultivating cosmopolitan attitudes, open to aesthetic and artistic trends on global scale and not just at a european level (skrbis and woodward 2007; szerszynski and urry 2002). participation and communication according to gadamer (1986) festivals are very important because they are occasions where we can be united and communicate with one another beyond class, educational background, ethnic or cultural origin. those who participate in them are embedded in a play that goes beyond their subjective choice, activity and intending, thus making it impossible for someone to describe exactly what happens (it can never be the same for all participants). participation, however, requires some degree of immersion, inclusion, being together and communication.14 one cannot celebrate alone and whoever participates in a festival wants to communicate. communicating, however, does not necessarily mean the exchange of words, it is more about being together, rather than about agreeing about this or that (grondin 2001: 46). a capacity to enjoy cultural diversity and pluralism may be created, a capacity that is not only experienced by the individuals often labeled as “cosmopolitans” but is itself “a product of creativity and communication in the context of diversity” (werbner 2008: 2). synch takes place in technopolis (τεχνόπολις) and in benaki museum (pireos street building), although in an informal way it includes other places in the city center like bars, dancecult 5(2)140 clubs, shops and town squares where festival participants can meet and interact with each other. technopolis (greek for αrtcity) is an industrial complex of 30 acres that used to house a gas factory but now belongs to the municipality of athens. it is located in gazi (γκάζι), an area very close to the acropolis that used to be a working-class historical district of athens. in the beginning of the decade of 2000, however, gazi became a center for alternative artistic and queer experimentations—it is inscribed in the collective consciousness as a gay friendly area because of the big concentration of gay oriented businesses and houses of lgbt (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans) people. although these experimentations have given their place to an unlimited and unconditional development that led to violent transformations and to extreme commercialization (giannakopoulos 2010), gazi still constitutes a cultural hub and one of the most lively and active neighborhoods of the city. apart from synch, technopolis hosts concerts, painting, sculpture and photography exhibitions, theatrical performances, film projections and conferences. a few blocks away from technopolis, in pireos street, there is the new benaki museum building. it is the oldest museum in greece—it was founded in 1931—with exhibitions that cover the history of the hellenic world from antiquity until our days, as well as collections of chinese, pre-columbian, islamic and coptic art. the new benaki museum building hosts various contemporary greek and international visual and plastic arts exhibitions, theatrical performances and music concerts. participating in synch festival is a complex activity. it involves walking around, drinking, eating, singing, dancing, watching, but perhaps most importantly, taking pleasure in interacting with other people: “…the important thing is the feast itself. you have this communicational power of the festival that will bring together very different people”. by “different people”, nikos (a thirty year old bar-tender, who is also a graduate of the national school of drama and a member of a professional theater group)15 means that not all of them share the same aesthetic and musical interests. in the first years of the festival there were two clearly distinct groups of audience: one from the electro-acoustic scene and one from the club culture and the dance scene. today however this distinction is partially blurred and the audience is actually composed of people with different interests in music, dancing and electronic culture in general. coexisting in the same space and time, but especially rehearsing and working toward common goals, artists too, create friendships, knowledge and contingent alliances (albahari 2008). petros described this coexistence in synch: “yes, of course i met musicians from abroad. some of them i already knew, we hang out together, we had a few beers, and we wrote some things together”. in 2009 and 2010, as in previous years, musicians who participated were from various ethnic and/or cultural origins like canada, uk, france, germany, italy, us, japan, brazil, new zealand and greece. participating artists also expressed different styles and came from a variety of music backgrounds. not only did they appear in the same festival, some performed on stage together. for example tony allen, the nigerian drummer of fela kuti (afrobeat) played with jimi tenor (electro-jazz) and blixa bargeld, frontman of einsturzende neubauten (industrial band), and for many years guitarist of the bad seeds lalioti | performing cosmopolitanism in an athens festival 141 (australian alternative rock band) played with alva noto (electronic minimalism). in 2009, mulatu astatke (ethio jazz) played with the heliocentrics (hip-hop, funk, jazz, psychedelic, electronic, avant-garde and ethnic music). these social relationships and cultural dialogues, irrespective of their being considered as aesthetically sound or enjoyable, may imply the creation of new meanings and practices, and not just a mere exchange of understandings already available to individual participants. technopolis has two open stages that host the more popular concerts. the audiences there “are bigger and more open” sing and dance to the music of the most celebrated international performers, and there is a “big hubbub” (νταβαντούρι) (maria, member of the audience, 28 year old, nurse).16 there are also three closed rooms for “alternative, experimental artists” and ways for audience to interact and meet people, for those who, according to maria, have a “more serious” relationship with the music. these spaces are smaller, allowing for a more direct contact, including eye contact, between performers and members of the audience. the fact that people usually do not know the artist they are going to see and since they are moving around the open stages and closed rooms, might imply, however, that the boundaries between the different groups are not so clear. people are rather driven by curiosity, by the need to “experience something new, something different”, said alexandros (32 year old, chemist and musician who performed in synch).17 boundaries between live music performances and other activities that take place at the same time are also not clear. installations, videos, internet art, film festivals, lectures and workshops allow participants to meet in various closed and open spaces in technopolis and benaki museum, to communicate and get involved in many different ways. according to papaioannou’s video interview to ελculture.gr, a website with daily information about culture (e.g. theatre, dance, music, festivals): these meeting points between music, video, lectures, workshops and installations, express the concept of synchronization, which is the main concept of the festival: all of synch is a cultural proposition through workshops, videos, and music. when you go somewhere it is a total feeling. you do not just turn the television on and leave. they are all on the same level. . . . the planning philosophy of synch is to create the sense that you are in a musical trip. it is something we continuously work on for six years now. it is a total performance event. it is a thing that is alive. it is a living organism (“synch festival 2009”). performances are not objects or things but practices, events and behaviors (schechner 2006: 1–2). as a total performance event, characterized by liveness and movement, synch does not represent a specific identity but constitutes a process of becoming in a deleuzian sense (cull 2009: 2–3). becoming is an attempt to come into close contact, to encounter the other while preserving or respecting one’s own relations and world. as most of my interlocutors argued, through participation in the many and different activities of synch, they seek to bond with artists they already know or with others they don’t know yet, and to share with their friends and other participants this feeling of togetherness. the feeling dancecult 5(2)142 of togetherness does not necessarily presuppose sameness. what participants rather share at synch is difference. differences are bridges rather than gaps thus and boundaries—be they aesthetic, generic, cultural or ethnic—are experienced not only as that at which something stops, but as that from which something begins to take shape (deleuze 1994): a trip, an active process “of becoming more open to the other” (kostas, thirty one year old, unemployed journalist).18 what attracts participants to synch is its heterogeneity, its multiplicity and open-endedness, the “encounter with the not-yet-known that leads to synchrony” (kostas) although it does not depart from similarity of habits and styles. rather than being an experience of a totalisable collectivity, of an assemblage defined by its abiding identity or principle of sameness over time, synchrony, which also constitutes the motto of the festival and its clearly expressed aim, is closer to a deep sense of oneness with others through moving, sounding, listening, seeing and playing together.19 although cosmopolitanism, according to skrbis and woodward (2007: 730), can be seen as opportunity for a wide range of experiences, this does not mean that it is always free of anxieties regarding “culture loss”. on the other hand, seen as a form of what is called “cultural omnivore” (peterson 2005: 258–60), it can become a means of distinction, a learned indifference to the culture one supposedly belongs to. as i will show next, in either case, participants often view synch as a threat to high culture since hybrids and mixed forms of what, in the context of electronic music and digital arts is perceived to be high and low, are very common. hybridity when it was first staged, synch constituted a new kind of event for greece. it was different from the classical music events that had their roots in the rock festivals of the 1970s, as far as the concept on which they were based is concerned, as well as on the kind of experience they offered: “i would say that it is the most dignified festival, we do not have anything similar. when rockwave20 went into decline, many years ago, synch was the one to bring something more innovative (sic), newer, fresher that covered a big part of the audience here”, said alexandros. it was widely considered to be an avant-garde festival intended for small audiences, but open to new experiences in the fields of contemporary music and new media, audiences. its innovative and avant-garde character has been its most publicized element and the one that is supposed to attract artists and audience members: for a second year, the synch festival takes place in greece, the most important activity in the field of electronic music and digital arts. the most avant-garde [event], for a second year in the technological, cultural park of lavrio. . . . a unique occasion for the lovers of contemporary technology, of contemporary art, and of course, of electronic music (stefi events 2005). however, according to participants, the history of synch festival shows a process of the two cultural poles of high-brow and low-brow (levine 1988; peterson and kern 1996) merging, while mainstream dance-based styles and experimental music and artists become lalioti | performing cosmopolitanism in an athens festival 143 more mixed. most of my interlocutors agree that synch began as an independent event, that is, “it used to bring more explorative performances”.21 as time went by and because of changes in the economic environment and trend (μόδα), the festival adjusted to the newly developing frame. not “mainstream” (sic) but “different” (eleni). although it preserved the multimedia, experimental and technological character that it had from the beginning, this was reduced. some believe that as long as it does not distort its character in order to attract bigger audiences to generate the necessary profit it is ok to adjust its content to trends. others feel that its character has been distorted through time and although it began as a very avant-garde festival, it has now “come to the limits of “skyladiko” (σκυλάδικο)”. “skyladiko” is a term that, during the decades of 1970s and 1980s, was used to denote specific night clubs with cheap, popular (λαϊκή) music performed by second class singers. today the term refers to all music clubs that play folkpop music (μπουζούκια) whether singers are first or second-class names. all bad quality songs based on banal music patterns and cliché lyrics are called “skyladika’: author: what do you mean skyladiko? petros: it can go the dance or house music way. i call this skyladiko too. i have no problem. i may listen to skyladika of this kind too. i may go to a bar and have fun, but this is not music, this is background (sic) for looking at tits. isn’t it a good thing that you can hear so many different things [at synch]? it is so, this is a good thing. the bad thing is that the phase turns into a bordello when mix together so many disparate things, which do not have an affinity. i am not saying good or bad, but very different things. that is, for example, one comes to listen to a more intellectuelle (sic) music, a difficult thing, that he has to sit down and think about it. the other is a merry andrew and comes to technopolis with chicks, with tits and beers. this thing is not right. we can see that synch is a complex and multivocal field where participants experience dichotomies between authenticity and commerciality, as well as boundaries between high and low culture are not so clear. there is a long discussion about the specific historical transformations that have led to the problematization of such distinctions, and to the loss of the critical edge of avant-garde and easier, commercialized forms of art.22 cosmopolitanism becomes a more useful concept for the analysis of such experiences and debates, since it was as cosmopolitanism that the challenge of high culture avant-garde art was conceived—praised or condemned—before it supposedly lost its critical edge to commercialization; that is, a challenge to dominant, national middle-class, capitalist values (chaney 2002: 159–60). in other words, the loss of the critical “emancipative” function of aesthetic (high) culture was considered the price to pay to dispose of high cultural elitism, and thus a condition for the democratizaton of culture ( jones 2007: 74). hybridity and deconstruction of categories also refers to musical genres and the constant reconfiguration of the category of “electronic music” itself. especially in recent years this tendency has led to the festival’s openness to many different styles and musical traditions: from electro, dance, house, techno, ambient, electronica to experimental, post rock, noise, dancecult 5(2)144 electro latin and hip hop. when i asked alexandros how he would define his music he told me: alexandros: i don’t know exactly what it is i do to tell you the truth. author: and does it not matter nowadays? yes, things are so mix and match (sic) that if you ask me, i cannot tell you what i do. i just feel good with it. it may have 500 elements in it or it could be only one. that is, once you, as a listener, can communicate with x or y you are listening to and you just like what you hear, it makes you feel good, you don’t have to put a label on it in order to explain the reasons why you like it. hybridity also refers to the use of the spaces in which the festival takes place: technopolis is a new, youth and alternative to mainstream culture urban space, while benaki museum is an institution with a long history in the promotion of more “serious” arts. it also refers to the coexistence of music with visual arts and other forms of culture that deconstructs categories and clear-cut boundaries. more specifically, apart from music, throughout its history, synch included the following subunits: a) “synch arts”: in 2005, for example, it included interactive installations, videos and disc covers related to contemporary electronic music scene, b) “synch cinema”: in 2009 it presented “the silent movie project”, that is, two-minute videos by creators from many different countries, c) “new media”: in 2009 it presented greek contemporary video art and multimedia installations, d) “gatherings” (syn_athroiseis): in 2009, artists and scholars discussed the relations between sound and space, memory and boundaries. lectures and workshops also constitute inseparable parts of synch festival. in 2009, social/cultural anthropologists, sound engineers and djs, “starting from different points and following different paths” came together in order to “question the definitions and the boundaries of contemporary “electronic/digital” music, and discuss the relationships formed between music and various aspects of life with music, such as, entertainment, space, the internet and hearing” (synch festival official website 2009). although specific political issues are not directly related to the organization of the festival, a wider democratic perspective, on the level of diversity of cultural activities and openness of access, is one of its constitutive elements: through different stages and rooms we want to give people the opportunity to watch different things at the same time. if you do not like something you may go somewhere else. i think this is more democratic for the audience in relation to the ticket they pay. for us this is festival: a total experience (papaioannou 2006). democratization consists not only in giving the opportunity to access this artistic and musical aesthetic and academic approaches related to it but also in raising people’s cultural curiosity and educating the audience about digital culture: we did not imagine that something like that existed. my friend brought me here and i am very glad to discover something i did not know. new musics, artists. this is the meaning of this festival. its power—due to the reputation it built all these years—to lalioti | performing cosmopolitanism in an athens festival 145 bring together so many different audiences, with such different origins, and allow them to communicate. i feel that now i can go deeper in things i wasn’t interested in until now, or i had not stumbled on (panos, 26 year old, postgraduate student in computer science).23 bringing together people with very different musical and aesthetic backgrounds and creating a context for creative interactions amongst all participants may lead to “different and interesting things”. for example, panos, a big fan of the dance scene discovered other, more “artistic” (έντεχνες) aspects of the electronic music scene. of course, this is not always the case. the line between kitsch and vanguard improvisation is often blurred. as a performance event and a total experience, however, synch cultivates a democratic attitude in the sense of offering a broad audience the opportunity to come to contact and appreciate music and artists that are generally only appreciated inside specific niches or elites (magaudda and colombo 2010: 142). “us” and the “others”: some concluding remarks petros—and other greek artists who participate in synch—often combine western (e.g. jazz, electroacoustic) and traditional/folk (e.g. from the northern greek regions of macedonia and epirus) elements in his music. this choice is part of a wider east-west musical orientation and, indeed, consciousness which is explored, negotiated, contested, developed and given a high profile in the popular music industry in greece today (dawe 2003). but this was not always the case. until the 1990s western taste was supposed to be for the elites while the traditional, with its evident oriental elements, for the culture of the masses (papageorgiou 1997). this antithesis reflected a bipole, which was dominant in perceptions of the greek ethnic self since the foundation of the greek nation state in 1832. more specifically, as the distinctive heirs of the ancient greek civilization, which also constitutes the perpetual cultural matrix of europe, greeks belong to the west. in addition, the image of the east (mainly in association with turkey and remnants of the era when greece was part of the ottoman empire) has been a common and convenient justification for the negative aspects of the greek character, the peripheral placement of modern greece in relation to the west, and the state’s inability to keep up with “progress” in europe (herzfeld 1982). within this context, musical tradition has had great symbolic and political power and has played a significant role in the process of construction of greek cultural identity. greek politicians and elites identified the west with the “high other”, and encouraged greek people to imitate it, while casting the east as the “low other”, which should be avoided (cowan 1993). due to the urgent political objective for greece to conform to the european union’s socioeconomic and living standards, however, this picture changed after the 1990s (mouzelis 2002, voulgaris 2008). modernization required adaptation to western european social and political practices and rejection of nationalistic practices. in this frame, the general shift towards the use of global media communications, satellite tv and radio, dancecult 5(2)146 internet and link-ups between greek and international music corporations opened up the country and its musicians to a new sound world and to audiences around the world.24 the “orient”, in the form of the globalized “ethnic” other, diffused the negative associations with the ottoman past and the close links between the greek and east-mediterranean cultures began to be acceptable since they now constituted modernized “ethnic” cultural products (dawe 2003). in this light the appearance of giorgos maggas—a greek roma clarinet player, who combines gypsy music with tsifteteli and traditional greek rhythms— in 2005 on the stage of synch with the tuxedomoon, although harshly criticized, was not fully denounced (watch video “tuxedomoon vs yorgos maggas 2 @ synch festival”). in many respects, synch festival contributes to the opening up of the country to the world as it gives participants an opportunity to negotiate hybrid local belongings in a global, rather than in a national, or even european, frame of reference. as a total performance event, that is, as a set of relations and happenings, synch does not represent a specific identity but rather, within the context of diversity, encourages participants to enjoy cultural pluralism and become cosmopolitans. more specifically, cosmopolitanism is produced and reproduced by the complex relationship of synch with the local identity. although local identity is a significant element in the festival’s development and success, it nonetheless constitutes a negotiated space. thus, on the one hand, electronic music itself is perceived as a global (beyond eastern-western dichotomies) symbol and innovations in electronic technology, arts and music as borderless. on the other hand, synch supports networks of people working in the field of electronic music in athens but it also expands their ties with other european and international professionals. it is closely related to the strengthening of the identity of athens as a cultural and tourist city, but its organizers, artists and audiences also place special emphasis on the transcendence of the festival’s local boundaries through international promotion and the organization of smaller events in other cities of greece and of the world. synch becomes a site where different aesthetic and musical interests (mainstream and experimental, authentic and commercial or high and low), musical styles and traditions (electro-acoustic scene and club culture and dance scene), spaces and artists-performers interactions (open/closed, youth and alternative/mainstream and “serious’), music and other activities (visual arts, workshops and lectures) connect rather than divide participants. participation at synch—like in any festival—requires some degree of being together and communication. communication amongst people of various interests does not necessarily mean the exchange of words. the fact that they coexist in various places inside technopolis and in the city center, they rehearse and work together, they dance, eat, drink and walk around, and they come to contact with new musical and other art genres allows them to take pleasure in interacting with other people and enjoy the feast – probably the most significant aspect of the festival itself. communication does not require agreeing about this or that. thus, the fact that synch, once considered a very avant-garde festival, promotes the deconstruction of fixed boundaries between styles, traditions, genres and spaces is perceived by some musicians and audience members as a decline, whilst by others as a more open and democratic choice. lalioti | performing cosmopolitanism in an athens festival 147 notes 1 elissavet, interview with the author, 14 june 2009. 2 see also lalioti (2012), where concepts of liveness, embodiment and materiality in electronic music performances in athens are being discussed. 3 for extensive reviews, see gilbert and lo (2007) and rapport (2012). 4 especially the work of appadurai (1996) was particularly influential. rather than seeing globalization as an irreversible and homogenizing force from above, he emphasized the emerging possibilities produced by local negotiations of transnational currents. 5 with this term, sassatelli (2011) refers to the growing number of festivals in recent decades with an enduring relationship to urban settings. she contrasts them to earlier anthropological perceptions of festivals as organic expressions of the so-called traditional societies and as platforms for the representation and reproduction of their identities. 6 giannis, interview with the author, 26 february 2009. 7 there is an extensive literature on the origins, history, and typology of edm. for an exploration of various issues related to it from a broad range of academic disciplines, see butler (2012). 8 at least this was the case before the crisis, which is violently transforming and impoverishing greek society. the investigation of the connection between synch, economic crisis and locality, although of great interest, is beyond the scope of the present paper. 9 petros, interview with the author, 11 october 2010. 10 the local/global dimension of the classical greek heritage is one of the most widely discussed issues related to the greek nation, nationalism and national/ethnic identity. see yalouri (2001). 11 although, for example, the 2004 olympic games and the organization of various (music, theatre, cinema, etc.) festivals during the past decade reinforced the image of athens as an international attraction for tourists, the city is far beyond rome, barcelona and istanbul, which are considered to be its main competitors. this is due to issues related to the environment, tourism policies, quality of life and services and prices (lagos et. al. 2008). 12 fotis, interview with the author, 12 june 2009. 13 for sónar festival, see chalcraft and magaudda (2011). 14 according to ehrenreich (2007), communal rituals of dance and celebration in different times and cultures have expressed the joy of life. despite the centuries of repression by the forces of the so-called “civilization”, festivity keeps bubbling up because it is nearly as innate as the quest for food and shelter. 15 nikos, interview with the author, 13 june 2009. 16 maria, interview with the author, 5 june 2010. 17 alexandros, interview with the author, 7 october 2010. 18 kostas, interview with the author, 7 june 2010. 19 drawing on merleau-ponty and deleuze and guattari, saldanha (2002) shows how, in the multiracial tourist environment of goa, music is capable of organizing “factions” of bodies along dynamic socio-spatial boundaries. dancecult 5(2)148 20 rockwave is an annual rock-pop festival in athens, which was first held in 1996 <http://www. rockwavefestival.gr/site/>. 21 eleni, interview with the author, 12 june 2009. 22 adorno’s critique of the cultural industries is one of the best-known. 23 panos, interview with the author, 4 june 2010. 24 analysing the music of a singaporean artist, kong (1996) illustrates how music is both an expression of local/national influences and reflective of the power of globalising forces. references adorno, theodor w. 2001. “culture industry reconsidered”. in the culture industry: selected essays on mass culture, eds. theodor w. adorno and jay m. bernstein, 98–106. london: routledge. albahari, maurizio. 2008. “staging cosmopolitanism”. isim review 22: 12–13. appadurai, arjun. 1996. modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. 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2013). dancecult 7(1) 2015: editor's introduction, masthead and table of contents weekend societies: edm festivals and event-cultures edited by graham st john volume 7 number 1 2015 executive editor graham st john (griffith university, au) from the floor editors alice o’grady (university of leeds, uk) graham st john (griffith university, au) reviews editor ed montano (rmit university, au) foreign languages editor luis-manuel garcia (university of groningen, nl) production editor botond vitos (de) operations director ed montano (rmit university, au) art director botond vitos (de) publications manager carlo nardi (rhodes university, sa) copyeditors luis-manuel garcia (university of groningen, nl) jerome hansen (uk) jonathan karpetz (mcgill university, ca) katrina loughrey (au) kath o’donnell (au) magdalena olszanowski (concordia university, ca) production assistants paul jasen (carleton university, ca) garth sheridan (rmit university, au) dancecult journal of electronic dance music culture issue 7(1) 2015 issn 1947-5403 ©2015 dancecult published twice yearly at <http://dj.dancecult.net> international advisory board sean albiez (southampton solent university, uk), eliot bates (university of birmingham), andy bennett (griffith university, au), mark j butler (northwestern university, us), anthony d’andrea (university of limerick, ie), rebekah farrugia (oakland university, us), kai fikentscher (de), luis-manuel garcia (university of groningen, nl), françois gauthier (université de fribourg, ch), anna gavanas (institute for futures studies, se), chris gibson (university of new south wales, au), jeremy gilbert (university of east london, uk), alice o’grady, university of leeds (uk), ross harley (university of new south wales, au), david hesmondhalgh (university of leeds, uk), tim lawrence (university of east london, uk), geert lovink (university of amsterdam, nl), rene lysloff (university of california, riverside, us), alejandro l. madrid (university of illinois, chicago, us), charity marsh (university of regina, ca), tony mitchell (university of technology sydney, au), karenza moore (lancaster university, uk), andrew murphie (university of new south wales, au), christopher partridge (lancaster university, uk), anne petiau (itsrs / université paris 5, fr), hillegonda c rietveld (london south bank university, uk), geoff stahl (victoria university of wellington, nz), sonjah nadine stanley-niaah (university of west indies, jm), graham st john (griffith university, au), will straw (mcgill university, ca), rupert till (university of huddersfield, uk), tobias c. van veen (mcgill university, ca), michael veal (yale university, us) dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture is a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture (edmc). a platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on the shifting terrain of edmcs worldwide, the journal houses research exploring the sites, technologies, sounds and cultures of electronic music in historical and contemporary perspectives. playing host to studies of emergent forms of electronic music production, performance, distribution, and reception, as a portal for cutting-edge research on the relation between bodies, technologies, and cyberspace, as a medium through which the cultural politics of dance is critically investigated, and as a venue for innovative multimedia projects, dancecult is the journal for research on edmc. cover photo by pascal querner: <www.pascalquerner.at> (2007) http://dj.dancecult.net http://www.pascalquerner.at volume 7 number 1 2015 introduction to weekend societies: edm festivals and event-cultures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 01 graham st john feature articles searching for a cultural home: asian american youth in the edm festival scene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 judy soojin park boutiquing at the raindance campout: relational aesthetics as festival technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 bryan schmidt harm reduction or psychedelic support? caring for drug-related crises at transformational festivals . . 55 deirdre ruane dancing outdoors: diy ethics and democratised practices of well-being on the uk alternative festival circuit . . . . . . . . . 76 alice o’grady folk music and commercialization in danubian trances and boheme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 barbara rose lange transpositions free parties and teknivals: gift-exchange and participation on the margins of the market and the state. . .116 anne petiau (trans. luis-manuel garcia) from the floor – online dead by dawn, 1995 dj balli strobe light salvation michael arty ghannoum reviews books goa: 20 years of psychedelic trance (tom rom and pascal querner). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 joshua schmidt danger mouse’s the grey album (33 1/3 series) (charles fairchild) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132 ian rogers the globalization of musics in transit: music migration and tourism (eds. simone krüger and ruxandra trandafoiu) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134 garth sheridan why music matters (david hesmondhalgh). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 kat nelligan music, style, and aging: growing old disgracefully? (andy bennett) ageing and youth cultures: music, style and identity (eds. andy bennett and paul hodkinson) . . . . . . . . 139 liz giuffre issn 1947-5403 ©2015 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 7(1): 1–14 issn 1947-5403 ©2015 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.01.00 introduction to weekend societies: edm festivals and event-cultures graham st john griffith university (australia) graham st john is an anthropologist specialising in dance movements, event-cultures and entheogens. he is author of the forthcoming mystery school in hyperspace: a cultural history of dmt (evolver, 2015), the monographs global tribe: technology, spirituality and psytrance (equinox, 2012) and technomad: global raving countercultures (equinox, 2009), in addition to five edited collections, including the forthcoming weekend societies: dance festivals and event-cultures (bloomsbury 2016). graham is founding executive editor of dancecult and is adjunct research fellow at griffith centre for cultural research, griffith university. his website is <www.edgecentral.net>. researchers across the spectrum of social and cultural disciplines have, in recent times, sought to bring understanding to a growing cultural pattern where festivals have become integral to tourism and regional cultural economies and to the performance of identity and lifestyle. while electronic dance music (edm1) cultures are implicated in the “festivalisation of culture” (bennett, taylor and woodward 2014), they have lent their own unique sensibility to the pattern over the past two decades, at the crossroads of diverse local and global influences. when i say unique, i mean that electronic dance music culture possesses distinct festal roots, in the club, the rave, the party. beneath its diverse variations, it is an event-culture. but to refer to edm festivalisation is to acknowledge the variegated ways in which the local events and native cultures of dance music have evolved (and some might even argue devolved) into larger scale mediated cultural events and global festivals. so far as dance cultural studies is concerned, this is relatively fresh terrain, despite the fact that edm cultural events and their event-cultures proliferate and diversify rapidly. the local/global socio-cultural complexity of dance festivals demands conceptual frameworks capable of rendering these practices amenable to understanding—frameworks that will inevitably evolve from sustained ethnographic and multi-methods research. this is the kind of research that, for instance, led chalcraft and magaudda (2013), by way of a comparison of sònar and womad, to coin the phrase “festivalscape”, a concept inspired by appadurai’s editors’ introduction http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.01.00 http://www.edgecentral.net. dancecult 7(1)2 (1990) variety of “-scapes”—ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes—each comprising unique sets of “flows” that intersect with others at the shifting local-global disjunctures of modernity. all such “scapes” intersect in the festival, a topos greater than its components. festivalscapes are a set of cultural, material and social flows, at both local and global levels, both concrete and imagined, both deliberate and unintended, which emerge and are established during a specific festival. in this sense, festivals can be seen and analysed as terrains where different cultural, aesthetic and political patterns and values temporarily converge and clash, constantly creating, stabilizing and redefining the setting of festival interaction, and in so doing stressing the problems raised by the multiple articulation of global cultural flows, local life and spatiality (chalcraft and magaudda 2013: 174). if music festivals, themselves diverse popular cultural phenomena (see mckay 2015), offer privileged perspectives on the “local globalities” of late modernity (chalcraft and magaudda 2013), edm festivalscapes are unique lenses on the diversity of such intersections, albeit substantively under-researched. while there have been a variety of approaches to dance cultural industries, including cultural histories of disco (lawrence 2003) and transnational house club culture (rietveld 1998), studies of regional (buckland 2002; anderson 2009) or “hypermobile” (d’andrea 2007) scenes, there has been no sustained study of edm festivalisation, including research that could observe the evolution of a cultural industry through the fates of individual cultural events. edm culture lies at the crossroads of local dance event origins and global industry imperatives. this themed issue of dancecult offers a selective introduction to this development in advance of an edited volume, weekend societies, forthcoming with bloomsbury. feature articles in this edition of dancecult will be republished in that interdisciplinary volume which will offer, by way of its greater range of contributions, a more comprehensive statement on the emergence and development of edm festivals and their event-cultures. this edition then offers something of a teaser to that volume, like a flyer to the main event coming soon. from massive anarcho-libertarian raves sprouting around the london orbital at the turn of the 1990s, to dance empires responsible for cross-genre (“edm”), multi-city, transnational mega-raves, dance music festivals have flourished worldwide over the last twenty-five years. they have become platforms for a variety of arts, lifestyles, industries, policies and indeed event-cultures, whether free-party teknivals proliferating across europe since the mid-1990s; colossal attractions like belgium’s tomorrowland, a “festival world” enabled by new forms of mediatisation (holt 2015) and attracting more than four hundred thousand people over two weekends in july of 2014; “transformational festivals” like southern california’s lightning in a bottle; or digital arts and new media showcases like montreal’s mutek and barcelona’s sónar festival, the event most instrumental “in legitimizing electronic music as an artform” (chalcraft and magaudda 2013: 187). st john | introduction to weekend societies 3 the proliferation of dance festivals is an echo of the profusion of dance cultures and their night and day worlds. while weekend societies are exemplary event-centred cultures that provide their memberships with identification and recognition independent from traditional sources (e.g. ethnicity, faith, class), eventised movements are diverse in their organisation, intention and populations. from ethically-charged events with commitments to local regions and indigenous communities to subsidiaries of entertainment conglomerates touring multiple nations annually, edm festivals are expressions of “freedoms” that are revolutionary and recreational. co-created “do-ocracies” inspired by burning man or corporate sponsored bureaucracies in the mould of electric daisy carnival, churches of genre or ecumenical free-for-alls, dj-driven or fusional by design, offering sustainable solutions or orgies of excess, with habitués worshipping brand-name djs or showing support for independent sound systems, diversity is evident across management styles, mediatisation strategies, performance legacies and modes of participation. from detroit’s movement electronic music festival to portugal’s boom festival, dance music festivals have become stages for the performance of transnational meta-cultural aesthetics (e.g. techno, dub, psychedelic) and their potential synthesis. characterised by meteoric rises, like insomnia events’ electric daisy carnival (edc), and tragic demises, like berlin’s love parade (nye and hitzler 2011), these events have become major cultural and tourism industry hubs. with stakeholders and ticketholders carrying disparate motives, styles and expectations they are contested sites. as cultural flashpoints, dance festivals continually incite fledgling operations under variable missions—reclaiming tradition, maintaining independence, selling culture, reducing harm, evolving consciousness—all transpiring at the verges of the dance floor. dance event-cultures and festivalisation the history of edm culture is in large part a story of the emergence of dance events and the cultures that have sustained them. it is a story of interrelated eventised dance movements that in many cases have evolved from localised cultural events (i.e. raves) to global cultural events (international, global festivals). between these ends of the spectrum, the story typically involves the formation of event-cultures; e.g. acid house, rave, techno, psytrance, dub cultures and their diasporic movements whose populations have as their common purpose the dance event. such are festal enclaves beyond which their “cultures” may have little prestige or currency. it is a story that holds a different narrative according to the eventculture in question, a narrative that may change in tone depending on whom among the variety of stakeholders one dialogues with. while there have been diverse event-centred dance cultures emergent in this development, here i reflect upon two distinct forms. one is the free-party tekno sound system culture that flourished in france, italy and elsewhere in europe from the mid-1990s, which was inspired by spiral tribe and other sound systems formed from collaborations between travellers and ravers, a development that saw the formation of teknivals (st john 2009: ch 2). the other is psyculture, which emerged in the wake of goatrance and which caused the birth of portugal’s boom festival among a dancecult 7(1)4 now crowded calendar of psychedelic trance festivals in europe and worldwide (rom and querner 2011; st john 2014a). despite the differences between these festal cultures, the variations in ethics, technics and sensory aesthetics, they share utopian sensibilities shaped by responses to lifeworld circumstances, not least of all state regulation and corporatisation of dance music culture, and indeed the mainstreaming of “edm”. across these eventcentred movements we find fiercely independent music and event-industries reliant on the re/production of the festival, a space of gift-exchange and alternative commercial economies that are most consistent in “free” (or by donation) events. as anne petiau states in her contribution to this edition, “free parties and teknivals: gift-exchange and participation on the margins of the market and the state” (translated by dancecult’s foreign languages editor luis manuel-garcia from the french original), “in these alternative festive practices, one can recognise the means by which individuals constantly re-establish social ties relevant to a system of gift-exchange, whether outside the systems of market and state or in their interstices”. petiau explores the status of the french teknival as gift, a reciprocal logic distributed throughout the worldwide teknival movement where event-goers are encouraged to contribute to and effectively co-create events. the ethos of participation or “no spectators” can also be found at the root of psychedelic trance events in goa, and in every region of its emergence worldwide. but it is an ethos that is also challenged in each region, as small-scale events burgeon into festivals, as markets grow and fan-bases develop, as dj cultures become celebrity cultures, as cottage industries become cultural industries. original scenes are challenged as artists become inflated into headphone-wearing icons occupying stages that grow higher and more elaborate, and where the gulf between the elevated artist and a vast sea of dancers—including those watching live-feeds at locations inside the venue or on the other side of the planet—grows wider. maintaining an original plur ethos becomes a dubitable motivation for massive up-scaled festivals like insomniac’s electric daisy carnival. if edc, mounted in numerous locations annually across the us and abroad, amounts to a “religious experience” for participants—as observed by dj tiesto in under the electric sky (cutforth and lipsitz 2014), the documentary film for the 2013 las vegas edc—one could speculate on the apparatus responsible for eliciting transcendence on a scale that attracted three hundred and fifty thousand people to the event at the las vegas motor speedway that year. in the film, one designer offers this insight: “people are coming here to be inspired. if you go back to the purpose of cathedrals and what people were going for, it was to feel small and spiritually alive”. making people feel small amid the spectacle is lucrative for insomniac founder pasquale rotella who, at one point in the film, casts a commanding gaze across the edc spectacle aboard a vip float. strategic eventaggrandizement of this nature appears to have become indispensable to festival marketing since the tomorrowland 2011 aftermovie (tomorrowland 2011). in fabian holt’s analysis, that film converts the cultural event into a cinematic experience. st john | introduction to weekend societies 5 it offers an emotional journey through the festival with footage from locations, stages, and crowd situations that give a sense of a euphoric festival experience. more than simply a sequence of episodes, the video is edited to build emotional momentum and convey a sense of physical arrival at the festival site and to show how the festival evolves from day to night. the cinematic flow is filled with symbolic gestures, such as smiles and kisses to the camera, party photograph posing, and pretty people, all of which are typical elements in corporate-style marketing videos—but with larger euphoric crowds and dj superstars (holt 2015). as a mediated effort to capture the immediacy of an event, could the cinematic experience augment an event-culture, in this case that which is enlivened by the sounds of progressive house? such triggers an avalanche of questions concerning the role of new mediatisation practices in edm cultural events, notably the deregulation of broadcasting that has permitted event-organisations to distribute video by way of youtube and social media. what might cultural events and beyond that, event-cultures, look like in these “new configurations of time, space and capital” (holt 2015)? what are the dimensions of the “event” in a world of infinitely remediated live-feeds, and where aftermovies are “digital folkloric texts that everyone shares” (holt 2015). and “is it possible to base a culture”, as simon reynolds asked nearly two decades ago, “around sensations rather than truths, fascination rather than meaning, jouissance rather than plaisir?” (1997: 109). for event marketing strategists, the answer is probably “yes”, if by “culture” one means a brand to which event-goers are loyal. to observe the festivalisation of dance culture is in some ways to observe the career of the liminal experience that has been emically recognised as the vibe—the socio-sonic experiential currency valued across dance scenes. many researchers have recognised that the sociality of the much vaunted vibe approximates the undifferentiated sensation of “spontaneous communitas” (turner 1969). for experients, this is a social juncture in which one participates wholly—not a spectator. in the “discommunitas” of edm, such participation ultimately involves the dissolution of subjectivity in which one becomes other to one’s self. in all the regions of its development, edm event managers typically recall that ur-moment when “it all made sense”, that protean transformative juncture that afforded the inspiration to mount events that attempt to recreate the primal rave, augmented by sensory technologies and event design. among the chief aspects of communitas is its capacity to unify strangers, each of whom are wholly attending, including those with disparate backgrounds, aesthetics and ethnicities. in the worldwide localities, or global localities, of its emergence—usually within metropolitan centres, but also in expatriate and experimental enclaves such as goa in the late 1980s, black rock city (or burning man, see jones 2011; st john 2014b), or perhaps germany’s fusion festival—the non-local community of the edm festival is stamped with cosmopolitan relationships (see also lalioti 2013). while art festivals are known to explicitly privilege the encounter, exchange and dialogue with the other (chalcraft, delanty and sassatelli 2014), the dance festival is primarily dedicated to optimising the conditions for the othering of the self. there have been few attempts to critically address such relationships within edm cultural events and their event-cultures, dancecult 7(1)6 which have proclaimed utopic sensibilities inscribed, for example, in the mythos of plur (peace, love, unity, respect), or the psychedelic dissolution of self-other boundaries. an exception is judy soojin park’s opening article in this edition “searching for a cultural home: asian american youth in the edm festival scene”, which addresses racial stereotyping within scenes that have typically promoted egalitarianism. park’s study of insomniac events in southern california demonstrates how asian american participants leverage “belonging” in a middle-class white dominated scene by way of the imagined other of “urban hip-hop blackness”. by focusing on the negotiations of race and class by nonwhite participants’ in edm festival scenes, park’s work is representative of a neglected research direction within edm cultural studies. dance festivals hold varying commitments to the varieties of cosmopolitanism identified by chalcraft, delanty and sassatelli (2014: 111)—including the relativisation of one’s own identity, positive recognition of the other, mutual evaluation of cultures and a shared normative culture, which involves self-other relations that are “mediated through an orientation towards world consciousness.” with regard to the latter, portugal’s boom festival commands attention as a vehicle for “planetary consciousness”, a hallmark expression in the psycultural diaspora, as evident in total solar eclipse festivals (st john 2013). while these festivals are characterised by a “global” consciousness, as reflected in cultural programming, ecological sustainability programs, artist nationalities and attendance by international “travellers”, they are nevertheless mounted within national borders where host cultures shape event management, promotion, programming and participant experience. but while host nations curate events, there is ambivalence expressed within psyculture towards national identity. on the one hand, one’s nationality is valued. in alchemy of spirit, the documentary produced on boom 2012 (droid i.d. 2013), the many participants vox-popped at the film’s beginning are asked to state their country of origin. many nations are identified, and boom revels in the multitude of national passport-holders represented at the event. for example, the front page of the boom 2014 newspaper the dharma dragon celebrated the presence of ticket-holders from a record one hundred and fifty two nations at that event. national identity is performed on site, including by way of national flag displays by individual dancers. and yet such displays are not without controversy. in 2014, also by way of the dharma dragon, boom issued an edict to the effect that there should be no displays of national flags inside the main dance floor: the dance temple. it is an observance consistent with that venue’s stature as a sacred site, a global destination for transcendence-seeking pilgrims, a “mothership” in which one becomes temporarily abducted from standard identifiers (like nationality). transformational festivals given that three of the articles in this edition of dancecult address the subject, discussion of the phenomenon of “transformational festivals” is pertinent here. i have long been cognisant that festivals, especially those across the alternative spectrum of events, are transformational. in fact, this is among my chief motivations for researching such events, that they permit entrants to become liminars (literally: threshold dwellers) while occupying the demarcated st john | introduction to weekend societies 7 time-space framework of the event. as festal citizens, participants are afforded passage into a transitional world possessing liminal conditions and carnivalesque logics (or illogics) to which inhabitants are compelled to surrender. the mood prevailing is, as victor turner knew, not inconsistent with a rite of passage, a structured ritual which possesses the power to transform an individual’s status, identity and life; only, the liminality of the modern festival holds heterogenous, elective and hyper-mediated characteristics. raves and other dance events in the edm spectrum have embraced the transitional logic of the rite of passage, with ravers liminars par excellence. whether revelatory practitioner accounts, or scholarly treatises, or those combining these approaches, edmc literature offers testimony to the power of rave, techno, house, trance, etc, to transform participants, with experients typically claiming that events have changed lives, occasioning the formation of associations, causing re-evaluations of lifestyle, consumer and relationship patterns and the fashioning of more and more raves. in those events where the economic and aesthetic contribution of participants is encouraged, the cultures endogenous to these events are stamped with the imprimatur of transformative potentiality. today, an event model appears to have harnessed and bottled this logic. “transformational festivals”, in which electronic music often predominates (although not exclusively), like lightning in a bottle (california), symbiosis (nevada), lucidity (southern california), the oracle gatherings (seattle), beloved (oregon), shambhala (british columbia), sunrise celebration (uk), envision (costa rica), boom (portugal),2 among many others, are downstream from the confluence of various countercultural event models, including: west coast north american festival culture, notably burning man; uk free festivals in the traveller tradition; and goa trance/psytrance and psychedelic electronica. we could trace several interwoven movements influencing these event models: progressive consciousness evolutionary agendas that have typically been associated with the new age movement; sensory technologies and their purposeful—“shamanic” or “gnostic”—application, as documented, for instance, in the film electronic awakening ( johner 2011); healing arts and the human potential movement; egalitarianism, civic engagement and direct democracy (turner 2014); the back to the land movement, sustainability practices and permaculture; the visionary arts movement and entheogens; embracing and appropriation of indigeneity (ritual and symbolism). shedding light on transformational festivals, bryan schmidt in his article, “boutiquing at the raindance campout: relational aesthetics as festival technology”, states that these events include “an ecstatic core ritual provided through electronic dance music; visionary art, performance, art installations and live art; a workshop curriculum covering a spectrum of new paradigm subjects; the creation and honoring of sacred space; ceremony and ritual; a social economy of artisans and vendors (or, alternative gift economy); a natural, outdoor setting to honor the earth; and a multiple (typically 3–7) day duration”. these are the paraphrased observations of jeet-kei leung, a documentary film-maker from vancouver who popularised (and capitalised) the phrase “transformational festival” in a 2010 tedx talk and subsequently produced a four-part documentary webseries the bloom (leung and chan 2014). dancecult 7(1)8 these events, then, are programmatically transformational. that is, we can identify within their precincts the interwoven agendas of personal growth and global consciousness that are a legacy of the transpersonal counterculture. reliant on a transformational architectonic, that these event-industries are commercial operations catering for a select middle-class event-going market is inscribed in the idea of the “boutique” festival, a term sometimes used, as with schmidt, interchangeably with “transformational festival”. “boutique festivals”, which have evolved rapidly in the uk in the last decade, involve substantial programming diversity, in which edm can be a minor element, although typically substantive, as in boomtown fair. these are participatory arts festivals, involving “ethical living”, possessing no commercial sponsorship, offering diverse dance music genres and lifestyle workshops and often “upmarket amenities” (including glamour camping, or “glamping”, in yurts, podpads and tipis). within an intensely competitive festival market, event survival and growth relies on events becoming strategically distinguished from those that do not offer countercultural authentica in their experiential design. critical to this festival-based authenticity is the degree to which events are removed from those where the “main stage” and lineups predominate proceedings (and promotions), and where festivalgoers are empowered to be co-creators in event production, a collaboration that takes diverse forms: from programming input, to costuming and theatrical performance, to simply dancing. by contrast to the hypermediated mainfloor mentality sponsored by smirnoff, the boutique festival is presented as “the informed consumer’s choice; one who appreciates, and has the means to adhere to, a green and ethical lifestyle as part of leading a sustainable and responsible existence”. as johansson and toraldo (2015: 9) further suggest, “the implication is that by choosing the boutique experience, the consumer also performs an active choice of separation from the mainstream”, a process these authors imply is illusory. the “experience design” of these weekend societies provides the opportunity for “temporary countercultural identity performances” ( johansson and toraldo 2015: 11), a position echoing long held assumptions about the carnival as safety valve. while the idealisation of consumer participation is integral to these festivals, whether “co-creativity” is an expression of the creative agency of individuals or “exploitation in the form of free labour through the expropriation of knowledge, creativity and communication” ( johansson and toraldo 2015: 4), is open to interpretation. we are not far removed, it seems, from what marketing and consumption researchers refer to as the “co-creation of value” in the fashioning of brands (pongsakornrungsilp and schroeder 2011). the enterprising consumer may be the ideal event-goer within this type of event that embraces a philosophy of participation consistent with the mythos of the autonomous individual whose exercise of choice paves the way to prosperity, and/or democracy. whether events offer micro-models of neoliberalism (or democracy), encouragement of participant agency straddling the consumer/producer divide appears to be the hallmark strategy of the transformational festival, events that routinely cite the ethos of burning man, the annual nevada countercultural event also known as black rock city, as inspirational. according to chen (2012) the “inclusive community logic” of burning man transforms participants into prosumerists (participants who st john | introduction to weekend societies 9 produce and consume), a simultaneity also recognised as integral to consumer tribalism (see cova, kozinets and shankar 2007). burning man demonstrates that prosumerism can be harnessed to ends other than profit margins, a circumstance that has provided motivation for immersive art festivals worldwide in a variety of ways and with varying degrees of success. turning to bourriaud’s “relational aesthetics” to expose in exuberant ethnographic detail the relational and open-ended social artifice of the californian raindance campout, schmidt also begins unpacking some of the internal conflicts native to the operation of such events, including the privileged status of participants and the fraught terrain of cultural appropriation. that such festivals are dynamic experimental sites where the shaping influence of conflicting discourse and practice and policies and behaviour, are negotiated in-situ, is confirmed in deirdre ruane’s article, “harm reduction or psychedelic support? caring for drug-related crises at transformational festivals”. ruane’s multi-sited ethnography of voluntary care-provision organisations at boom, burning man and secret garden party illustrates how these events are dynamic proving-grounds for competing paradigms of drugs, drug users and the self. this is a field warranting far more attention from researchers and ruane offers a sound beginning. while burning man has inspired uk festivals like secret garden party and boomtown fair, such events appear to cherrypick from the principles of black rock city, effectively “remodelling the ‘no spectators’ ethos to fit within their own economic framework” (robinson 2015: 173). still, this should be kept in perspective. while these events are not prestigious “free-party” universes obligating forms of gift-exchange and event coproduction (as in the logic of the teknival), they do not, at the same time, offer “electric sky package” tickets (at $5,000) with access to private front-row tables with prime stage views on the “vip cabana deck”, as sold by insomniac events for edc new york 2015. while the capitalist cultural logic behind this strategy appears to be about as removed from “free”, “inclusive” and “authentic” dispositions as possible, resistance to such developments continues to prompt alternatives within the edm culture industry. indeed, the embrace of participative arts and popular immersive theatricality offers a face-palm to the star/audience, producer/consumer divisions magnified beyond measure at edc. with that said, as under the electric sky demonstrates, ravers remain eternal participants by way of the shared dance ekstasis—eternalised further through hyper-social mediations of “eternity” on facebook. but it will be critical longitudinal studies of dance and electronic arts festivalscapes and their cultural industries, research of the kind that prizes open the motivations, imperatives and strategies of transnational dance entertainment empires, that will determine more precisely what it is that event-goers are participating in. such studies would doubtlessly uncover a diversity of experimental co/production practices, like that found, for instance at the s.u.n. summer gathering in hungary whose ticketing strategy is an innovation in the democratisation of festival space. for its third annual event, s.u.n. implemented a strategy where ticketholders are provided the opportunity to shape the direction and content of the festival as “members” with rights to vote for major acts and land development projects.3 dancecult 7(1)10 among the key recurring features of these recurrent events is that they are visited by participants who often travel significant distances (regionally and internationally). travel to and altered experiences within rural spaces are among the features of these events appealing to their populace, typically urban-dwelling participants temporarily vacating. the affective dimensions of festive rurality are among the chief characteristics of alternative edm festivals in the uk explored by alice o’grady in her article in this edition, “dancing outdoors: diy ethics and democratised practices of well-being on the uk alternative festival circuit”. while holding kinship with transformational festivals, these events are said to possess distinct roots in the uk free party movement arising from the convergence of travellers and diy sound systems. o’grady is concerned with how these events, which also borrow from traditions like “garden parties, english fetes, camping trips, wilderness adventures”, prioritise the rural idyll and foster authenticity by way of temporary relocation into the countryside. while it is unstated in o’grady’s analysis, i suspect that part of the appeal of these events, their capacity for enhancing “well-being”, is that they are not just experimental spaces, but familiar spaces of experimentation. and yet festivals rarely survive without innovation, which in countries with cluttered events calendars like the uk, the us, germany and australia, requires strategic efforts to gain the favour of, and build support from, the event-going public. like other cultural goods and services, the value of the festival emerges not only in its consumption, but in “the anticipation of a desired experience” ( johansson and toraldo 2015: 5). and perhaps nothing builds excitement more than the promise of surprise (i.e. that which is alternative to what is available elsewhere). but while novelty is implicit to the event design of edm festivals, a circumstance ensuring event-management will continue to innovate, events also possess a drawing power that relies on their ability to return eventgoers to a familiar place. we might understand this by way of the highly anticipated “little death” of the ecstatic dance state, the entranced condition, in which the experient is permitted to go out of their mind in the company of others, friends and strangers alike, a circumstance augmented through intention and experience design. the popular desire for this condition might be stated to be the desire to be without desire, even however fleetingly. but understanding of the “little death” of the festival cannot arrive by way of discursive analyses. building anticipation for novelty is critical within the edm culture industry, where mediators, none less than dj/producers and label promoters (some of whom operate their own festivals or manage event sound-stages), play an important role in fashioning innovative style, genre iterations, tempo changes, typically formulated through the fusion of existing aesthetic elements, by which an original experience is promised. but the quest for originality in the laboratory of dance is countermanded by the desire for the familiar, the return to origins. this festal tension echoes the logic of csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) “flow” state. here, an experience is characterised as “flowing” where the artifice experienced (i.e. sport, music) is novel, and yet not too novel. the tension is especially st john | introduction to weekend societies 11 evident in scenes that display remarkable resilience, like psytrance (see o’grady 2015), whose participants will return time and again to a “vibe” that is furnished by aesthetic conventions that are both timeless (e.g. the 16th note) and challenging (e.g. new styles like “hitech”). across dance music scenes the “vibe” represents a curious balancing act of novelty and familiarity, innovation and authenticity, change and stasis, the tensions between which appears to illuminate that experience most endearing to event natives— the familiar otherness of ekstasis. this logic is recognised by thomas turino who offers insight on the role of challenges in the optimizing of the musical experience sought by those who will return time and again to re-enter the flow. these are states associated with activities that must include the proper balance between inherent challenges and the skill level of the actor. if the challenges are too low, the activity becomes boring and the mind wanders; if the challenges are too high, the activity leads to frustration and the actor cannot engage fully. when the balance is just right, it enhances concentration and that sense of being at one with the activity and perhaps the other people involved (turino 2008: 4). in edm scenes, music producers, event organisers and dance floor occupants attempt to maintain this harmony, the balancing of which in recurrent and reversioned events offers insight on the nature of “progressive” sensibilities (for psytrance, see st john 2012: 214–15). while this familiar difference empowers participants to enter experimental and transformative states of selfhood, finding the tension-line amid shifting aesthetics grows increasingly difficult as edm cultural events expand to host disparate event-tribes inside their sprawling precincts, such as might be found at germany’s fusion festival. as events grow in scale to accommodate more music styles, performance arts and other options across vast sites, some of them visited by a hundred thousand for a night, others camped in by a few hundred over a week, their liminal domains grow complex. if originary cultural events represent an arguably simplistic case of liminality, larger scale events are hyperliminal contexts, which in the case of boom, for example, illustrates the propensity for energy sustainability and expenditure sought in equal measure by convergent populations (st john 2014c). other events falling under the transformational rubric tend to offer multiple means for transition by permitting event publics the ability to perform variable identities that emerge on a status spectrum between consumer (the entertained) and producer (the artist), the complex liminal conditions of which warrants further consideration in the emergent field of edm festival studies. this returns me to the logic of the transformational festival, and not to mention many other events consciously investing in a transformational logic. such events rely upon the development of cultural industries dedicated to augmenting the conditions of participant liminality through the optimising of event experience design, sensory technologies and prosumer arts. this event-liminalisation raises questions about the supposed efficacy of these recurrent events, inquiries that will benefit from sustained and longitudinal studies of festivals. one might inquire, for example, as to whether these events facilitate dancecult 7(1)12 transformations in personal, social and cultural conditions according to the passage rite model in which these festivals typically invest, or are they more akin to transitional worlds, parallel cultural universes and liminal mini-states to which event-goers and raving liminars repeatedly return? does event attendance afford passage and recognition outside of the event, or does event experience, relationships and prestige hold currency only within the eventised culture itself ? as earlier mentioned, while this edition has several chapters addressing the transformational festival, the forthcoming bloomsbury volume on edm festivals aims to expand considerably upon this rather narrowband analysis of edm festivalisation. this edition of dancecult includes several other contributions. there is a feature article by barbara rose lange, whose “folk music and commercialization in danubian trances and boheme” explores debates in hungary in response to deep forest’s 1995 album boheme and károly cserepes’s 2003 album danubian trances: mikroworld–ambient. there are also included two from the floor pieces. the first is a further chapter installment from riccardo balli’s book apocalypso disco: la rave-o-luzione della post techno. translated from the italian by balli himself, the text offers a valuable first-hand account of london’s formative dead by dawn parties of the mid-1990s. the second, “strobe light salvation”, by montreal-based writer michael arty ghannoum, offers an eye-opening entry into the club and represents the style of experiential narrative that this section of the journal was designed for. the issue also includes five book review articles, diligently brought to you by ed montano. many thanks to all our copyeditors, including two new team members: jonathan karpetz and magdalena olszanowski (joining kath o’donnell for this issue). and thanks again to botond vitos (wearing hats as production editor and art director) for bringing this issue home. notes 1 while this introduction and the articles in this edition of dancecult refer to “edm festivals”, this should not be confused with the cross-genrefied market designation “edm” which has been mainstreamed by way of event organisations like electric daisy carnival. in this introduction, i use “dance festivals” interchangeably with “edm festivals”. 2 while there are proposed to be ninety “transformational festivals”, there is debate and disagreement about which events meet jeet-kei leung’s criteria set out at <http://thebloomseries.com/guidelines-for-inclusion-transformational-festivals-map> (accessed 13 may 2015). 3 <http://solarunitednatives.org> (accessed 15 may 2015). http://thebloomseries.com/guidelines-for-inclusion-transformational-festivals-map/ http://solarunitednatives.org st john | introduction to weekend societies 13 references anderson, tammy l. 2009. rave 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http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/tedxvancouver-jeet-kei-leung-tr http://thebloomseries.com https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7cdtaiales afrofuturism unbound: tobias c. van veen in conversation with paul d. miller tobias c. van veen mcgill university (canada) doi: 10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.02.13 in this extended discussion, paul d. miller, a.k.a. dj spooky that subliminal kid—the multimedia artist and eclectic turntablist, trip-hop and experimental beat producer, academic speaker and crafty writer who first burst onto new york’s downtown dj and art scene in the early 1990s—reflects upon the meaning of afrofuturism past, present, and future, as well as discussing his involvement with the afrofuturism.net listserv, which he and scholar alondra nelson founded in 1999. the listserv drew together artists, scholars, writers, musicians and assorted creatives intrigued by the then-nascent study of afrofuturism—a term the listserve “broadly defined” as afrodiasporic voices with “other stories to tell about culture, technology and things to come”, encompassing “sci-fi imagery, futurist themes, and technological innovation in the african diaspora” (nelson 2002: 9). as the interlocutor to paul’s flow, i have also at times dipped into his world, first meeting him in 1997 during an album tour and lecture at simon fraser university in vancouver, canada—where he blew my mind as an undergraduate student by illustrating his points with turntablist mixes, opening my eyes to thinking through rave culture and turntablism in the context of deconstruction and academia in general. since then i have bopped heads with him on various panels, and most pleasurably, had the difficult challenge of following his rocksteady performances at turntablist gigs. for two decades, paul d. miller has embodied something of the sci-fi afrofuturist, mixing arts, styles and discourses, and like his name suggests, adopting intangible personae that flit between the real and surreal. as his alter-ego dj spooky—or vice-versa—paul d. miller (and his many collaborators) has advanced the aesthetics of remix culture by exploring a wide-range of media, from his genre-bending illbient albums of the 1990s, in which he combined hip-hop with dub rhythms and ambient atmospheres while sampling the 20th century musical and poetic avant-garde, to his later work in multimedia film and sound installation, including a critical audiovisual remix and performance piece of d.w. griffith’s 1915 film, the birth of a nation (entitled rebirth of a nation (2005 performance; 2008 film)). though spooky has undertaken numerous multimedia projects (including, most recently, a series of audiovisual performances at the metropolitan museum of art in new york), rebirth in particular stands out for his strategic deployment of the remix aesthetic. as an opener to our discussion, i’d like to point out a few of its salient aspects that make it a piece worth engaging with on aesthetic and critical levels. to wit, spooky’s rebirth stages a critical afrofuturist operation: it intervenes in a canonical work of racialist nationalism that notoriously attempted to depict antebellum slavery as a benevolent institution, just as it sought to lament the loss of confederacy and glorify the klu klux klan. the first film to be screened at the white house—by president woodrow wilson—griffith’s the birth of a nation depicts a celebratory racist vision of the american deep south in the civil war era, in which the klu klux klan are the heroes, and southern black folk but caricatures expressing their love and devotion to kindly plantation masters. by contrast, spooky’s remix expresses the critical spirit of the 21st century afrofuturist project: it takes on a problematic narrative of the past and undermines it with futurist remix aesthetics, utilising a kind of “cinematic graffiti” that plays off a trip-hop and classical avant-garde soundtrack to destabilize the film’s systemic racism. spooky’s rebirth of a nation is effectively afrofuturist not only for its use of remix strategies, but because it undertakes a chronopolitical intervention: it remixes a monumental representation of the past so as to challenge the coordinates of the present (and thus alter the unfolding of the future). by questioning the ways in which the past has been represented, and challenging the hold such representations have on the present, the unfolding of the future is subject to a new set of possibilities hitherto denied or occluded (and previously thought of as impossibilities). the general strategy at work here—of messing with temporal representations so as to upend received narratives that insidiously program the future—echoes what kodwo eshun calls afrofuturism’s “chronopolitics”: by creating temporal complications and anachronistic episodes that disturb the linear time of progress, these [afro]futurisms adjust the temporal logics that condemned black subjects to prehistory. chronopolitically speaking, these revisionist historicities may be understood as a series of powerful competing futures that infiltrate the present at different rates (eshun 2003: 297). for spooky, d.w. griffith’s birth constitutes a founding moment of 20th century media manipulation: a revisionist representation of the past that sought to romanticize antebellum slavery so as to justify contemporary discrimination. spooky’s remix isn’t a cut-up—it maintains the film’s integrity in its 3 hour plus length. by allowing the film to play-out more-or-less as intended, the film’s racist elements are not lost to reordering or to a repurposing of the film into other media. spooky takes a rather different strategy, creating a running audiovisual commentary that re-frames the film stock, annotating it visually with ghostly shapes such as circles and arrows that diagram the film’s optical means of audience manipulation. the film’s annotated optics play out against a modern and unsettling soundtrack that further unbalances the film’s attempt to naturalize racism. by way of the listserv’s definition of afrofuturism, spooky’s strategy is such an “other story”—through cinematic graffiti, the “other” intervenes in the film’s optics; an-other hand marks-up the film’s screenic space. past representations of the enslaved and black other, the clansman, and the civil war are annotated upon otherwise. or to put it in other words, spooky tags the birth of a nation with a cinematic form of graffiti—creating a resilient, abstract, and at times geometric counter-language to the film’s racist typologies. by exploring a form of cinematic graffiti, spooky references (at least) three pioneers of street art, including futura (for his arrows), ramm:∑ll:z∑∑ (for his diagrammatics and arming of the letter-form), and jean-michel basquiat (whose paintings combined abstraction with graffiti symbolism). by subjecting the film’s visual register to cinematic graffiti—a variety of visual effects, superfluous frames and photoshop-like treatments—spooky reveals the optical and representational mechanics at work in the film’s romanticized representation of plantation slavery and the klan militia. the mechanics of representation that maintain the illusion of any sort of historical normalcy to slavery are shattered. thus by applying graffiti to the film’s visual register, spooky attempts to shortcircuit the film’s representational techniques through a chronopolitical intervention. these latter techniques were designed to skew the viewer’s emotions in favour of its racist characterizations. spooky visually “calls out” the film, drawing the viewer to the edges and unseen areas of the frame that subtly reinforce its depictions. just like how street art pops from the walls into daily existence, capturing the attention of the city-dweller and making her suddenly aware of the urban landscape’s hidden aesthetic potential, spooky’s visual interventions provoke an unsettling double-take—not only during the film, but in its aftermath. if the film is to impact the futurity of “race” and “nation”, then their all-too-digestible representations in the contemporary mediascape should become as unsettling and irreal as that of rebirth. as spooky’s design elements tag and redraw the screen, scenes that attempt to normalize racist narrative and characterization appear as but constructed visions hinging upon contingent optics. spooky’s soundtrack, featuring a performance by the kronos quartet, but also hip-hop rhythms and dark ambient interludes, undermines the visual register with resonances in the aural. as the white-hero narrative escalates, the audio begins to undo its romanticized masculinity with a murky and unsettling illbient score. the hallucinatory design elements overtake the silent-film era epic in concert with its afrofuturist soundtrack of hip-hop, downtempo, and illbient styles, leading to a meltdown of the “original” film’s premises. in his more recent work, spooky has travelled to antarctica to investigate the intersection of global flows of finance, territorial claims and climate change. the following cut is an extended (and better contextualized) version of our discussion, conducted in 2009, that originally appeared in spooky’s text documenting his antarctica project, the conceptual print publication the book of ice (brooklyn: mark batty, 2011). of note, the exchange below did not develop turn by turn, but consisted of a series of fragmented questions that spooky responded to all at once. the questions, which have been sliced-and-diced by spooky, follow from his essay “tactical plagiarism: robot, robots, robota!” which weaves out of the dialogue’s finale. the below remix returns some of the atmosphere to the initial discussion, which followed from a text that spooky had written for an anthology on afrofuturism entitled other planes of there—afrofuturism collected (and which i promise is still forthcoming). — tobias c. van veen osmotic strategy machine: the (flawed) unfolding of afrofuturism (v2) tobias c. van veen: in our email exchange, you speak of afrofuturism in the past tense. is afrofuturism a historical moment, temporally limited? or can afrofuturism be put to use, like one would utilise a descriptor of a body of knowledge—which does not die and outlives its progenitors (like jazz, hip-hop, deconstruction, or philosophy itself)? paul d. miller: every movement has its sell-by date. i think that there were a lot of flaws in the way that afro-futurism unfolded, and i think it missed certain pressure points in the flow of how culture evolves in this day and age. it wasn’t digital enough, it didn’t have a core group of people with any kind of coherent message. it was conceptually open ended without any kind of narrative. people tend to like that kind of thing. i speak of afro-futurism in the past tense because i think that the culture at large caught up to and bypassed many of the issues it was dealing with. forget the idea of the “permanent underclass” that people like greg tate (no disrespect) kept pushing. forget the idea that blacks are outside of any system—we are the system. i guess that many people outside of the arts have awakened to the day and age and moved on. it seemed like afrofuturism just didn’t have a cohesive situation to have music, art and literature evolve from. sure, afrofuturism can be used, as you put it to be a “descriptor of a body of knowledge, which does not die and outlives its progenitors (like jazz, hip-hop, deconstruction, or philosophy itself)”—but only by sleight of hand (which is sampling, anyway). it’s basically a hall of mirrors, a smoke and fog routine in a middle brow cheap magic show. but hey... even that can be interesting sometimes. i like to think of mix tapes and collage aesthetics as being two sides of the same devalued coin. in this scenario, an album isn’t really an album: it’s a manifesto about the place of history in our modern collaged, scrambled, sampla-delic to the core, mega info overloaded digital culture. with references stretching from thorstein veblen’s “theory of the leisure class” and john maynard keynes classic in the field of economics “the general theory of employment, interest, and money” over to hip-hop’s relationship to psychoanalysis and à la edward bernay’s concept of the “manufacture of consent”—the concept of the “mix” album is a groundbreaking meditation on hip-hop and electronic music’s relationship to philosophy, economics, and the science of sound in a world where the steady drumbeat of the financial meltdown has made music the last refuge of young people with less and less time and money. my peer group of artists—like rob swift, dj krush, dj shadow, cut chemist, rjd2, dj logic, amon tobin, and coldcut—have all played with the idea of concept albums. i love the way that artists like saul williams, nine inch nails, and radiohead have played with that idea of open source dialectics. they’re just catching up to dj culture. ditto for the artworld, literary world. science was there ahead of everyone though ... is that afrofuturist? afrofuturism is usually read through its artists, its musicians, performers, and writers—from sun ra and george clinton to dr. octagon, grace jones, and underground resistance, octavia butler and samuel r. delany to anthony joseph and nalo hopkinson. is afrofuturism primarily an arts movement? conversely, what does “art” mean here in the 21c remix world? what is at stake when afrofuturism is thought in terms of art? what happens to art when it meets afrofuturism? i never really thought of my self as belonging to an “arts movement”—i think of afrofuturism as an osmotic strategy machine. it absorbs other strategies, replaces them, viral like, and re-introduces the genetic sequence back into the host. arts movements, are usually way too european. my faves are stuff like the tropicalismo movement out of brazil, that questioned the very foundations of what it meant to be a person of color in a high racist society. art should say “these dreams are possible”. to me, the major issue the 21st century faces is the basic fragmentation of almost every solid historical reference point. why do people believe rush limbaugh? would an art movement be able to inspire that kind of blind (and bland) devotion? sure. but what makes afrofuturism interesting, is that it simply defies categorization. i think of my artwork and music as panhumanist. if you look at aimé césaire’s “négritude” in comparision to yambo ouologuem’s “bound to violence” (le devoir de violence, 1968) and the ease with which ouologuem’s work was dismissed because it used “plagiarism” (nobody would blink an eye in this day and age of cut and paste aesthetics), then yes, you can see the uneasy tension that a literary and arts movement based on any kind of ideology would have: the tools in our era continuously change, and so do the categories of judgement, and the criteria of “quality”. it’s all super ambiguous. i kind of dig that. commentators have often assumed that “afrofuturism” bears some connection to italian futurism of the early 20th century—or even that it follows from it. from your perspective, is the “futurism” of afrofuturism connected to the italian futurists? if so, is this connection representative of a historical moment that connects afrodiasporic artists working in a certain time and mode with early 20th century futurism? or is it a connection that has been made in retrospect, on a theoretical plane, as a way of connecting the signifier of “futurism” to luigi russolo’s “art of noises”, or filippo marinetti’s embrace of industrial and warfare technologies? there’s an african american pianist named “blind tom bethune” who was one of america’s premier pianists after the civil war. i guess you could say he was black america’s first rock star jazz musician. he knew how to simulate the sound of cyclones, storms, and even large battles. his composition “the battle of manasas” was meant to evoke the large scale of the civil war, and the way machines churned out automatic death... i look to earlier things like the origins of robotics in the idea of the “automaton” and the development of an algorithmic way of looking at the city. in fact, i always enjoy bringing this up, the term “algorithm” is derived from al-khawarizimi, an arab mathematician and astronomer from the 9th century. his books were also a relation to the term “algebra” (also arabic), so... the idea of a mathematics of the city, goes a lot deeper than the futurists. they just got the media hype. afrofuturism, in my mind, is a kind of inverse mirror where europe and africa collide, and the rest of the world watches in awe. but yeah, musically, luigi russolo’s 1915 manifesto “the art of noise” is probably the basic dna connection, and there’s valentine de st. point’s feminist “manifesto of lust” that was written against marinetti’s fascination with machines. she celebrated the human body. things like that inspire me. the connection between afrofuturism and the futurist movement is there, if you’re looking for stuff like professor griff from public enemy being called a fascist, or stuff like that, too... if russolo’s “the art of noise” is the basic dna connection of italian futurism to afrofuturism, is this a similar moment to afrika bambaataa sampling kraftwerk, where the black origin myths are reversed, and an afrofuturist sound is born in the mix of things? reverse, inverse—the algorithms show us everything comes from pattern recognition. i don’t really think of these issues in black and white anymore, i pretty much never thought that everything was so divided. so... next question? with respect to professor griff, how do the politics of italian futurism play into the afrofuturist inheritance? i am curious, in this respect, if we can read something of this complex inheritance in your remix of d.w. griffith’s rebirth of a nation... rebirth of a nation is a dj mix applied to cinema. don’t forget that the root word of cinema is “kinetic.” it’s been 100 years since filippo marinetti wrote his infamous “manifesto of futurism” and even more since ferruccio busoni made his essay “sketch of a new aesthetic of music”. what has changed in the world since these two seminal essays were written? for one thing—we’ve finally come to terms with seeking some kind of balance between noise, rhythm, and repetition. we’ve opened our ears to the sound of the world around us in a way that composers and artists of the last century would have found extremely difficult to come to terms with. think of the italian futurist, luigi russolo’s 1915 manifesto “the art of noises” and extract: “let us cross a great modern capital with our ears more alert than our eyes and we will delight in distinguishing the eddying of water, air and gas in metal pipes, the muttering of motors that breathe and pulse with an indisputable animality, the throbbing of valves, the bustle of pistons, the shrieks of mechanical saws, the jolting of trams on the tracks, the cracking of whips, the flapping of awnings and flags. we will amuse ourselves by orchestrating together in our imagination the din of rolling shop shutters, slamming doors, the varied hubbub of train stations, iron works, thread mills, printing presses, electrical plants and subways”. try doing that on a plantation... the practice of remixing—what you call cut-and-paste aesthetics above—suggest a pragmatic breaking down of the theory/praxis divide: yesterday’s philosophical deconstruction is today’s download. for example, with widespread piracy, the theoretical elements of the “remix” become the normalized experience of computerized youth: you take what you need to remake what you want. but this poses certain kinds of problems for content creators, in particular artists, even artists who utilise remix aesthetics. how do you approach artists who embrace cut-and-paste aesthetics but nonetheless copyright their works? my favorite artists are people like david hammons, duke ellington, julie mehretu, liebniz, blind tom bethune, mos def, anti-pop consortium, everything that the afropunk scene is up to, santagold, etc. one of the main issues i always, always, always see in arts movements like afro-futurism is a kind of informal apartheid between use-practice in the everyday world—gasp, multiculturalism!!!—and the basic sense of theory and ideas that drive the agenda of an art movement. the theoretical constructs that many of the participants use to en-frame the discourse around how digital media and politics intersect, is very rarely tied to the “real” world. think of paul virilio (dromology and claustrophobia, yeah!), and charles sanders peirce’s “logic of pragmatism”—i would bet they didn’t listen to duke ellington. just a guess. etc etc. you’ve often spoken about the relationship between slavery and robots, forced labour and automation. the science fictional figure of the robot (even as it becomes reality) suggests an afrofuturist paradigm for rethinking slavery. in this respect, what kind of response is afrofuturism to the history of slavery? likewise, how do afrofuturist tropes of automation and robota address slavery? i am thinking here of afrofuturist practices that challenge the concept and praxis of property—given that “slaves” were constructed as such—with robot mythologies and the creative misuse of automated technologies (turntables, synthesizers, recording archives). (these are just starter questions on a massive debt of thinking here.) for me, in the hip-hop era, we need to look back at some precedents in the “avant garde”—george antheil’s “ballet mécanique,” erik satie’s music of modal repetition, the serialist movements of arthur shoenberg, anton webern, and pierre boulez, the electronic tape manipulations of the arab composer halim el dabh, the studied, delicate balance between eastern and western tonal structures of debussy’s “la mer,” the density of india’s traditions of formal compositions in ravi shankar, the paradoxical innovations of olivier messiaen and edgard varèse ... all of these find a home in repetition. hip-hop, house, techno—they all demand a kind of “participation mystique”—ditto for essays like emerson’s infamous essay “of quotation and originality”—he uses the term “massive debt...” to talk about the credit owed to history for any new innovation. my mixes say this: tactical plagiarism: robot, robots, robota![1] plagiarism is necessary. progress implies it. —isidore ducasse aka comte de lautréamont the future is already here. we have borrowed again and again from the edge of reality, and payment is now due. press rewind if we haven’t blown your mind. this mini essay is a brief, non-linear foray into what humpty dumpty felt like when he got broken up, and realized he could never be put back together again. it’s an exercise in multiple frame formats, digital glitches, and above all, the sound of skipping records. i like to think of some of the issues i've seen develop in what was called “afro-futurism” about play and labor [develop] as a strange dialectic between known forms of labor and their evolution into other “unknown” forms like the social accumulation of knowledge, the discursive space of dj mixes, the fragmented codes people use to foster “temporary autonomous zones” made of real time interaction. above all, afrofuturism, for me—was a sense of irreverence for almost any standard form of representing ethnicity, class, originality and any kind of limitation on what it means to be a human on this messed up planet we all call home. we’re all afrofuturists, because, put simply, we all participate in a post colonial, neo-darwinian/lamarckian paradox of evolution—some traits and characteristics simply aren’t inherited: they have to be force marched into something dynamic that absorbs all the old forms of thinking and creates a space in culture where something new can happen—that’s the paradox. there really isn’t anything new. if we go back to the original futurist movement, you can see the seeds of our current moment: it was a movement widely seen as being based on music. from ferruccio busoni’s 1907 essay “sketch of a new aesthetic in music” to luigi russolo’s manifesto of 1915 “the art of noise”—we’ve been seeing how the various art movements of the beginning of the 20th century appropriated african, asian, and african american motifs—america has been trying to catch up ever since. that is our inheritance. it's very rare to see the kind of hybrid discourse many art movements talk about in praxis, so i've taken the liberty to create a fiction based on a record by a fictional character: dj spooky. it’s an idea put to work, with an agenda about what “play” means in the era of abstract labor—i.e. we live in an info economy, let’s play with an idea. seriously. in terms of the idea of “labor”—i'm always drawn to karel capek, the czech writer who popularized the term “robot” (a good theme for summer 2009’s blockbuster era of terminator and transformers). the word which is derived from the czech noun “robota” meaning “labor.” to celebrate the idea of labor and automated daemons that, for example, inhabit my favorite book of last summer, daniel suarez's daemon. labor and slavery have defined the african american experience of the last several centuries, but not locked it into a fixed format situation. the idea of the “other” is always at the heart of america’s relationship to the “enlightenment”. to make this concrete, i thought i'd pass this along. it's the story of the origin of rossum's universal robots (r.u.r.), by the czech author, karel capek. it ties into some of the science fiction themes, and overall “otherness” of the concept of african americans as an internal “other” in the u.s. and the way that novelists like mary shelley with frankenstein, or eugene ionesco with his “rhinoceros” or yevgeny zamyatin with his story “we” have all explored: what happens when automation, ideology, and the flawed ways we create meaning as human beings emerge from the paradox of the basic fact that we’re all making this up as we go along. so i present a parable of labor—or, the way slavery can be transmuted into automation. from a to b and back again, says the cyborg andy warhol: about the word “robot” translated by norma comrada. a reference by professor chudoba, to the oxford dictionary account of the word “robot” and its origin and entry into the english language, reminds me of an old debt. the author of the play r.u.r. did not, in fact, invent that word; he merely ushered it into existence. it was like this: the idea for the play came to said author in a single, unguarded moment. and while it was still warm he rushed immediately to his brother josef, the painter, who was standing before an easel and painting away at a canvas till it rustled. “listen, josef”, the author began, “i think i have an idea for a play”. “what kind”, the painter mumbled (he really did mumble, because at the moment he was holding a brush in his mouth). the author told him as briefly as he could. “then write it”, the painter remarked, without taking the brush from his mouth or halting work on the canvas. the indifference was quite insulting. “but”, the author said, “i don't know what to call these artificial workers. i could call them labori, but that strikes me as a bit bookish”. “then call them robots”, the painter muttered, brush in mouth, and went on painting. and that's how it was. thus was the word robot born; let this acknowledge its true creator. references eshun, kodwo. 2003. “further considerations of afrofuturism”. cr: the new centennial review 3 (2): 287–302. nelson, alondra. 2002. “introduction: future texts”. social text (71 summer): 1–15. notes [1] the following text—including quotations and the whole citation of “about the word ‘robot’”—is writ/remixed by paul d. miller. dancecult 12(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 12(1) 2020: 85–97 issn 1947-5403 ©2020 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net bass, mids, tops: an oral history of sound system culture joe muggs & brian david stevens london: strange attractor press, 2019. isbn: 978-1-9072-2277-1 (paperback) rrp: us$29.95 (paperback) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.12> edward k. spencer university of birmingham (uk) university of oxford (uk) knowing how the world enjoys blackness, and seeing what happened to george [floyd], we—black people—get the feeling that people want our culture, but they do not want us. in other words, you want my talent—but you don’t want me. . . . you cannot enjoy the rhythm and ignore the blues (clara amfo speaking on bbc radio 1, tuesday 2nd june 2020). since this book arrives in the wake of the windrush scandal, black lives matter protests in bristol and now boris johnson’s inflammatory remarks regarding the last night of the proms, we must hope that the voices and stories amplified by bass, mids, tops reach a wide audience. it does not deal with reggae sound systems in the same way as henriques (2011) but is instead concerned with a constellation of uk genres that have their roots in black british sound system culture. in a perspicacious foreword, mykaell riley suggests that this oral history is not only about the enjoyment of bass weight but also about “something truly unique to the uk” (11) that is at once personal, cultural and political.1 refreshingly, instead of eulogising bass itself in the manner of recent scholarly monographs (goodman 2010; jasen 2016),2 the book comprises twenty-five interviews with a diverse array of people involved in the development of uk bass culture. as joe muggs notes in his introduction, he “can’t claim peer-reviewed rigour” (20), but his transcripts will certainly be of interest to researchers concerned with rare groove, acid house, jungle, drum ‘n’ bass, garage, dubstep, grime and uk funky. reviews dancecult 12(1)86 at this point some readers might ask whether joe muggs is overshadowed by simon reynolds. the short answer is not really. although his book is inevitably haunted by reynolds’ controversial hardcore continuum,3 from the outset muggs is keen to distance himself from a “definitive history” and linear narratives. he stresses that the book is “quite the opposite, in fact: it’s deliberately partial, arbitrary, and conversational . . . an attempt to look at multiple interwoven continua: life stories, genre stories, sound stories, all happening at once” (14). despite this, the interview transcripts are arranged into a roughly chronological order, beginning with dennis bovell (writer and producer for the lovers rock anthem silly games), norman jay (a key figure in the rare groove era), adrian sherwood (of dub syndicate), youth (martin glover, of killing joke and the orb), tony thorpe (moody boyz), rob smith (smith & mighty), george evelyn (nightmares on wax) and nicolette (vocalist for shut up and dance and massive attack). this is followed by four interviews with key figures from the jungle and early drum ‘n’ bass era, namely dego (of 4hero and reinforced records), dj storm (the self-professed “mum” of metalheadz), jumpin jack frost (who muggs casts as “the archetypal jungle dj”) and krust. the shortlived garage years are represented by sarah lockhart (who worked in a&r long before the establishment of fwd>> and her time at rinse fm), noodles (of groove chronicles along with el-b) and zed bias. this last interview segues into muggs’ conversations with the dubstep producers skream and mala, before kromestar is used as another link (with grime, represented by terror danjah). notwithstanding this domino sequence, the book then starts to seem less teleological during the final sweep of interviews (with t.williams, cooly g, toddla t, samrai, barely legal and shy one). sometimes the transcripts become bogged down with details that are interesting but rather trivial. similarly, the endnotes provide useful track details and demonstrate that muggs is a true anorak, someone who is utterly devoted to archiving musical heritage. intermittently, however, the reader can glimpse some heavier themes pertaining to gender, race, timbral politics and subcultural capital. in the first instance, dj storm ( jayne conneely) explains that she always has to “work that little bit harder” as a woman in a scene that is still overwhelmingly male: “we’ll always turn up on time and look well-presented because we’re women. it’s a shame that we’re not always given the chances we deserve” (192). elsewhere, sarah lockhart recalls the “intimidating” atmosphere of record shops with a collector mentality and stresses that she “didn’t like that it was just boys” at fwd>> (253). on the other hand, nicolette love suwoton appears to embrace longstanding associations between low-frequency sound and maleness when she states that “my voice is so feminine and the bass has a more masculine energy, if you like, so i love that contrast” (145). the timbral articulation of difference is indeed another recurring theme that emerges from the transcripts. although there is some consensus among the interviewees that the acid house era represents a brief period of total unity (with “people from all kinds of backgrounds, colours, nationalities, all coming together” (207), to use jumpin jack frost’s words), george evelyn laments the advent of “the italian piano house thing” and the way that “bass took a reviews 87 back seat in some clubs” (131). for tony thorpe, these “‘progressive”’ timbral developments “killed the unity, the family kind of thing . . . it’s like they forgot about black music and just went ‘oh we’re making money now, fuck that”’ (95). history repeats itself. much later on in the book, tesfa williams talks about trying to establish himself as a house producer and feeling the need to obfuscate his own identity as a black artist through his t.williams moniker: “the market is predominantly white male . . . my first name is african and i knew people would associate whatever with that and that might cause barriers as well” (392). the transcripts also demonstrate that uk bass culture has often been characterised by infighting (e.g. zed bias on the infamous “garage committee”) and closed-minded snobbery (especially when hijacked by hipsters). one of the most telling anecdotes of all arrives in the interview with terror danjah. hungry to reach a new, youthful audience having been at coachella 2011, terror danjah (rodney pryce) worked on an anthemic track titled full attention with the vocalist ruby lee ryder—one featuring the cardinal sin of a tear-out bass dubstep drop. kode9 (steve goodman) was confused and unable to hide his disappointment. but as terror danjah tried to explain, “this is for the people who don’t understand, i’m not known now . . . the people who bought planet mu knew, like people that are connoisseurs, sipping their wine like [comedy posh voice] ‘yas it’s terror danjah’. but the kids don’t know who i am!” (317). we might conclude that insularity and fear of selling out creates a unique set of problems. although muggs’ material is rich and evocative, some nit-picking is now required. given the specific focus of his book, i think that including “uk” in its title would have been a good idea. it would also have been useful to see the precise date of each interview at the start of every transcript. more generally, the book would have benefitted from better proofreading and copy editing—its pages are littered with typographical errors and missing words, and there also seems to be an obvious factual mistake in the nicolette chapter (the title of the massive attack track she features on is “three” not “seven”). my main criticism, however, concerns muggs’ distrust of academia and critical interpretation. this scepticism is by no means unfounded, and muggs may well have goodman/kode9 in mind when he writes that “you could pick musicians who help you make a very specific political point, or rave tracks that illustrate your chosen crypto-lacanian-post-pomo-contra-frankfurt fashion in cultural criticism” (19). but as the interviews make clear, sound system culture is political in every sense of the term, and riley’s excellent foreword could have been matched by an essay-length afterword by a bass music scholar (monique charles and christabel stirling come to mind, for instance). overall, the book is stimulating and frustrating in equal measure. as riley stresses, “formal education about music is vital” (11), and if this “very specific strand of british popular music” (12) is to become a mainstay of undergraduate curricula then i fear that critical, peer-reviewed scholarship is a necessary evil. nevertheless, muggs should be congratulated on gathering fruitful source material for this kind of work. dancecult 12(1)88 notes 1 riley also reflects on his work with the reggae philharmonic orchestra (rpo) in the 1990s: “it was a political statement, it was challenging the system . . . asking questions about what music is about in the uk” (11). additionally, it should be noted here that riley is currently leading an oral history project of his own with the black music research unit at the university of westminster. 2 for an important critique of goodman’s impersonal vibrational ontology, see kane (2015). 3 the hardcore continuum debate involving jeremy gilbert, mark fisher and simon reynolds can be found in the inaugural volume of dancecult. references goodman, steve. 2010. sonic warfare: sound, affect, and the ecology of fear. london: mit press. henriques, julian. 2011. sonic bodies: reggae sound systems, performance techniques, and ways of knowing. new york: continuum. kane, brian. 2015. “sound studies without auditory culture: a critique of the ontological turn”. sound studies 1(1): 2-21. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2015.1079063> jasen, paul. 2016. low end theory: bass, bodies, and the materiality of sonic experience. london: bloomsbury. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2015.1079063 reviews 89 night fever: designing club culture 1960 – today mateo kries, jochen eisenbrand, catherine rossi (editors) weil am rhein, germany: vitra design museum, 2018 398 pp. isbn: 978-3-945852-24-8 (english edition); 978-3-945852-23-1 (german edition) rrp: €59.90 this must be the place: an architectural history of popular music performance venues robert kronenburg new york, ny and london, uk: bloomsbury academic 286 pp. isbn: 978-1-5013-1927-3 (hb), 978-1-5013-1928-0 (pb), 978-1-5013-1929-7 (epdf), 978-1-5013-1930-3 (ebook) rrp: £91.80 (hb), £17.99 (pb), £14.39 (epdf), £14.39 (ebook) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.13> hillegonda c. rietveld london south bank university (uk) the study of the architecture of music venues is a developing area, illustrated here by two publications, one offering a historical perspective on spaces of live popular music performance, the other specifically on the more recent development of clubs where dancing to records prevails. in the introduction to their substantial exhibition catalogue, nightfever, co-curators rossi and eisenbrand explain the focus is on “spaces designed to elicit the after-hour excitement and escape . . . and the design cultures the nightclub has created” (16). created for the german interior design company vitra (2000), the book offers graphic design, architectural drawings and interior photography of a wide range of clubs, accompanied by interviews with its architects and designers, and a selection of reflective essays by a selection of club researchers; it includes maps and floor plans of clubs in belgium, italy, and in clubbing capitals berlin, london, new york, and johannesburg. kronenburg offers a broader architectural timeline of music venues that historically have enabled the experiential and transience of live music, mainly in west-europe and the usa. both publications stress the importance of human interaction, and the social aspects of sharing and interacting with music. for rossi and eisenbrand, the club venue offers a type of participatory theatre in which to act out various persona, a canivalesque space that enables daily identities to disappear. for kronenburg, music venues offer a sense of synchronicity that is uniquely experienced during a live performance, connecting music makers with their audiences. this must be the place is a continuation of kronenburg’s interest in flexible and mobile architecture and the experience of music (see for example, his 2012 monograph on live music venues). as the live industry is increasingly dominated by large international promoters, dancecult 12(1)90 threatening the livelihoods of “grassroots venues”, kronenburg’s 2019 publication attempts to salvage their histories, opening with an ode to the more intimate popular music events in the home, followed by an overview of smaller european theatres that emerged during the dawn of industrialisation, during the 1700s and 1800s. while urbanisation slowly but surely intensified during that era, popular theatre venues became part of circuits for travelling shows, and public houses that were popular for their music and theatre programming would metamorphose into music halls. later in the book, there is a discussion of european social dance venues from the 18th up to the mid-twentieth century, starting with dance pavilions of london’s pleasure gardens, followed by the ballrooms and dancehalls that ultimately swapped their orchestras for djs during the 1970s and 80s. the historical black and white as well as glossy colour prints, both drawings and photographs, add to a deeper understanding of the look of some of these venues. kronenburg further addresses the development of venues in the usa that ultimately became jazz and a dance clubs, including early twentieth century juke joints and blues bars, and a chapter specifically dedicated to the various jazz venues of new orleans. supper clubs and cabaret venues, where one could have dinner while watching a show and maybe have a dance afterwards, offered a variety of jazz and popular music. of particular interest for the design of discos and dance bars are speakeasies, which emerged during the 1920-1933 national alcohol prohibition. also known as the jazz age, or the roaring twenties, during these thirteen years drinking became an underground activity. kronenburg’s interest in film leads to a brief discussion of the use of certain music venues as backdrop for a range of film narratives that mythologize the association of italian-related american mafia with such venues. in the safety of such secretive clubs, marginalized gendered and racialized identities could be explored and asserted, a theme that rossi and eisenbrand identify as an important element of discotheques and nightclubs, where liminality “is explored though the one activity that unites all club culture: dancing” (19). underground dance styles that use the body musically as an expressive instrument can, according to fikentscher (2000: 25), “be understood as part of an american continuum of social dance styles that has been marked by a pervasive african american imprint at least since the 1920s”. in night fever, catharine rossi additionally highlights the importance of avant-garde and experimental movements to the development of night clubs as we now understand them, with reference to happenings in new york, and radical design architects in italy during the 1960s and 1970s. in this way, the combination of design and the musical practices of such venues have had an important influence on the development of discotheques and dance clubs from the 1960s onwards. also contributing to nigh fever, tim lawrence provides an overview of the dance clubs in new york city that further shaped the disco concept, from mancuso’s home, the loft, to the extravagancies of studio 54. for kronenburg, such venues herald the transition from live music performance to “record scenes”, reviewing a range of djled events and venues where participants dance to recorded music, from influential new york dance clubs in the 1960s and 70s, to the northern soul scene in england. yet, it is important to acknowledge that also the dj is a musical performer (rietveld 2016). such venues are often found in areas that are regarded as undesirable, taking place within the reviews 91 night-time that make them invisible to everyday society. yet their pioneering drive can add cultural capital to a neighbourhood and thereby set in motion processes of gentrification that can, ironically, eventually push away these venues. both publications give recognition to the multi-sensory aspect of music venues. for rossi and eisenbrand mobile theatrical lighting and participatory spectacle are of importance to dance clubs. kronenburg further emphasises the importance sound when dancing to records, assuming that the staged music performance stops being a spectacle; this holds true for smaller clubs, but less so for commercially driven events (rietveld, 2013). for both, though, the discussion of music venues mainly focuses on visual aspects rather than the acoustic space in the experience of music. perhaps this is not surprising. architecture is dominated by visual design, with acoustic architecture a smaller component in this field. added to this is the mediation of the story of dance clubs and music venues though text and still images, in which it is a challenge to translate the dynamism of sound and dance. particularly night fever showcases a visually lush selection of key dance clubs, including the post-industrial interior design of manchester’s the haçienda (fac51) by ben kelly, visually echoing the functional modernist interiors by bauhaus and gerrit rietveld; yet despite its visually innovative design it was beset by acoustic challenges. the famously fine-tuned sound system design by richard long for paradise garage is given recognition throughout the catalogue, but this does not translate well visually, unlike images of grace jones being body painted by keith haring for a show in that influential new york underground club. a spectacular colour image of the gold-metal coated despacio sound system seems offered by way of compensation; designed by james murphy this was inspired by both richard long’s work and by the chilled out balearic music aesthetic of ibiza (“despacio” means “slowly”). still, ibiza’s clubs are notably absent, despite its influential dance music clubs and party culture. this just illustrates that the richness and complexity of music club history makes it impossible to be exhaustive. references fikentscher, kai. 2000. “you better work!” underground dance music in new york city. hanover nh, and london, uk: wesleyan university press. kronenburg, robert. 2012. live architecture: popular music venues, stages and arenas. oxford, uk: routledge. rietveld, hillegonda. c. 2016. “authenticity and liveness in digital dj performance”. in musicians and their audiences, ed. ioannis tsioulakis and elina hytönen-ng, 123-33. new york, ny and london, uk: routledge. ——— 2013. “journey to the light? immersion, spectacle and mediation”. in dj culture in the mix: power, technology, and social change in electronic dance music, ed. anna gavanas, bernado a. attias and hillegonda c. rietveld, 79-102. new york, ny and london, uk, bloomsbury academic. “dance! voices from the exhibition ‘night fever: designing club culture 1960 – today’”. vitra magazine. <https://www.vitra.com/en-gb/magazine/details/dance>. https://www.vitra.com/en-gb/magazine/details/dance dancecult 12(1)92 moon juice stomper: a novel (goa 1987-96) ray castle new zealand: independently published, 2019 313 pp. isbn: 978-1791998271 rrp: £12 <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.14> graham st john independent researcher if dance music scenes have windows of fortune, anjuna, goa, in the late eighties was peak oil, and ray castle was there to drill it. after three decades, castle has finally knocked out, psychedelic disco balls and all, what is certain to become the definitive warp and scintillating weft on this “scenius” during its electronic heyday. as perhaps the most influential yet least documented dance music culture in history, this moment has long been an enigma. a golden triangle for cultural exiles and outcastes. a haven for human flotsam and jetsam surging up the electric shores of the arabian sea, before ebbing into the deep recesses of memory. the absence of reporting on this lost horizon and its discommunitarians would normally be enough to draw the attention of enthusiasts of goa and its many after parties. fortunately for us, as the work of a wordsmith with an acute attention to detail, moon juice stomper is a literary charm. among other aliases, as dj masaray, castle performed in goa in the late eighties and early nineties, becoming a vocal critic of the industry that emerged in the subsequent decades. having once elevated ecstatic bodies above the sands of distant languid beaches, castle now sustains the levitational effect in a narrative at times reminiscent of castenada or h. s. thompson. commanding a white-knuckled ride through the “mystical anarchy” of “gonzo goa,” capturing the explosive atmosphere at this freak nadir, his self published intervention in creative nonfiction transports readers inside the minds of the habitués of this remote crossroads … even as they’re going out of their minds. and in doing so, castle does what any freakologist worth their beatific bath salts should do: he delivers us into the heart and soul of the matter. this journey into the many-layered vibe of goa — the roots of goa trance and its worldwide psytrance progeny — is no mean feat, as castle has seamlessly achieved the notoriously difficult and routinely futile task of writing about dancing. this accomplishment stands tall in the history of dance culture narratives. the central characters stand off the page in a third person approach that repeatedly lures readers into the sweet spot. the book is reviews 93 hallucinatory, but also realistic. it conveys the gift economy and music swopping integral to this scene. goa fans and scholars will be fascinated by the effort to weave pseudonymised figures like goa gil, laurent, fred disco, vath, raja ram/tip and space tribe, among many others, into this semi-fictionalised account. enthusiasts will likewise appreciate how track vocal samples are mixed into the narrative, dada-jockey style, and the way the story builds tension and achieves climax at the full moon party under the banyan tree in 1988. other points of intrigue include the descriptions of drug politics, police corruption, party bans, bar/gambling cartels and various historical anecdotes. generations of train spotters will be shooting their cosmic load over these pages. the struggle to sustain “paradise” is an overarching theme, and quite apparent in the efforts to maintain the vibe into the early 1990s as the scene came under growing external and internal pressures. whether castle captured this long tail effect adequately is open to dispute, for the book, it could be warranted, drags. then again, this is faithful to the partyarc of the scene itself: build-up, peak vibe and long come down, with many after parties inclusive. it echoes a movement where parties found ways to survive through the next day and night, and then the following morning, and afternoon… and beyond that, in more remote regions and neighbouring states. as the stakes rose, the illegal parties grew more adventurous with road trips out of goa to maharajstra. the buccaneer spirit of making pirate parties by any means (sustaining the addiction and entitlement to the parties) seems to drive the plot. the effort to treat the goa scene (or “scenius”) like a collective character responding to its own growing notoriety as a nascent global industry and party brand is ultimately commendable. the book might have done more to address the overall impact on the locals of privileged europeans making party in the colony. this said, it does end with a neat twist in which an indian fashion entrepreneur markets the “goa psy trance” brand. it also illustrates one important outcome of the story: how upper middle class indians are now the primary customers of goa bar discos, that charge more for entry than a club in europe, to hear with a beer in their hand dance music that was once banned. in a world stricken by a pandemic that has effectively closed down dance cultures, the scene captured in moon juice stomper appears even more exotic. with its alluring wordcraft, this book holds unquestionable cult gravitas. remixing the music, intrigue, love, bizarre sex, violence and drama of real places, events and figures, not least of all the author himself, the book amplifies a movement in its un/making. every epic era needs its chronicler, and in castle, goa has its homer. dancecult 12(1)94 avicii: true stories dir. levan tsikurishvili usa: black dalmation films, opa people production, piece of magic entertainment, and sf bio, 2017. <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7357302/> <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.15> george musgrave goldsmiths, university of london (uk) university of westminster (uk) it is extremely hard to review a documentary like avicii: true stories and disentangle myself from the research on mental health and the music industry which i have spent the last four years immersed in (gross and musgrave 2016; 2017; 2020). with almost every minute that passes of this profoundly sad, and at times chilling film, i found myself thinking that, in many respects, what i was watching was one of the most extreme case studies imaginable for the conceptual architecture we have developed to try and grapple with the potential for toxicity which a music career presents. knowing the tragic endpoint, of course, changes the way one watches and experiences the film. on the one hand, it is a simple story of a young man making music and the stresses and strains of his working life which ends in tragedy. on the other, it is an allegorical morality tale, which challenges us to think about themes such as corporate ethics, responsibility, creativity, passion and exploitation. the film pivots around two central relationships. the first is the relationship tim bergling has with music making, realised  in the spellbinding form of deeply personal, at times even intimate, footage of him in the studio. we see him creating early versions of loops between 2008 and 2010 (which we as fans know will go on to be huge records), or jamming with nile rodgers, or creating toplines with aloe blacc and chris martin; each of these artists seemingly mesmerised at tim’s ability to reformat their different talents within the remit of edm. the second key relationship is between avicii and the music industry, exemplified and crystallised in his connection with his manager arash “ash” pournouri. it is through this relationship in particular that the moral and ethical challenges of the piece are articulated. at the beginning of the film, it is hard not to begrudgingly admire pournouri — who embodies the entrepreneurial spirit of spinning gold from thin air — as we hear him on the phone to emi pushing the deal for avicii’s first major single higher and higher, up to $500,000. this feeling of respect does not last for long. thirteen minutes in, still at the beginning of avicii’s career, we hear pournouri exclaim almost excitedly, in what turns out to be a chilling and prophetic statement: “tim is going to die. with all the interviews, radio tours and everything, he’ll drop dead”. as a viewer, this early feeling of discomfort permeates much of the ensuing ninety minutes. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7357302/ reviews 95 just a few scenes later, we see bergling having to cancel performing at the 2013 ultra music festival in australia — for what we now know was alcohol induced pancreatitis (ralston 2018) — working on his laptop in hospital and talking about upcoming performances. at this point of the documentary we start to see how his career has become more than just about making music, but is now an infrastructure; with stakeholders and responsibilities and pressures and expectations and dependence. it is in this environment, as those around him make entirely fatuous statements such as “you can do the show if you want to”, that, as a viewer, you start asking questions about whose interests are really being prioritised. who is working for who? indeed, perhaps more conceptually; what is coercion, what is control, and what does it look like? the subtle operation of a system of exploitation rooted in ideas of guilt and responsibility where, as bergling himself says he feels “lucky and blessed”, is laid bare before our eyes. here, and indeed throughout the documentary, you find yourself thinking simply: “who is looking after him?” one day later, we see bergling looking exhausted — a picture of enervate fragility with his eyes rolling back in his head — being cajoled into accepting a series of interviews with the press. it is frightening to watch. appalling, honestly. ticking in the background like a sombre metronome is the counter of shows performed, which we see rattling exponentially higher as the film progresses. forty-six minutes into the film, we are now in 2015, and the show counter ticks over 700 towards 775. we hear from bergling about the enormous stresses and pressures as more and more shows are added to his diary. we hear too from david guetta about the burden of expectations to deliver a global hit again. the sense of pressure feels intense in these scenes, as we see bergling sitting in his villa in ibiza creating the album stories, being reminded by those around him to eat and described by his childhood friend as a “shell”. it is interesting, personally, that i could place my own connection to the music of avicii, as a fan, at this point in the journey of the film. in august 2015, i saw him play at ushuaia in ibiza — the venue which would eventually host his final ever performance. the party was incredible, and just as bergling talks about finding genuine happiness in moments of those shows, so too from my perspective as a fan, i remember that happiness. the following month, in september 2015, he cancelled all of his future performances. it is surreal to think that standing in ushuaia at that time, i had no idea about what was happening to him or the pain he was going through. within the first minute of the documentary, i was reminded of a quote by an interviewee from my own research who described fame as being akin to sitting in the back of a car that someone else is driving at ferocious speed as the g forces push you back in the seat and the world spins past you. this is perhaps the easiest way to read the heart-breaking narrative unfolding over the course of the documentary: a naive, introverted boy hurtling through a world he did not, or could not, understand, in which all he was searching for was, as he phrased it, “finding a connection with people and being accepted”. the speed at which he goes from sending demos to blogs and eating pasta on his bed to headlining a festival and being introduced by madonna is frightening. pournouri has, of course, denied this reading and presentation of events (ralston 2018). indeed, reading things purely in this way denies dancecult 12(1)96 the very real moments of joy we see in the film: the smile on bergling’s face in the early moments as crowds chant along to his first global hit “levels”; the stages with all of the crowds and lights and lasers and confetti; the incredible outdoor studio at the top of the grand canyon writing songs; the footage of him relaxing with his friends in malibu, in the mansion that he was finally able to bring them to honour the “contracts” they wrote in crayons as kids (stating that if any of them “made it” they would invite each other along to their mansions); or on the ile sainte-marie in madagascar after retiring, seemingly at calm. this is the duality of the story, and indeed of musical careers generally; the immense highs and joys, and the indescribable lows. in addition, this reading also denies bergling any sense of agency, and again, this is not what the film shows either. there is footage showing how acutely aware he is of himself and his personality; at sixty minutes in we see him discussing carl jung’s conceptualisation of introversion and we learn that he has been in therapy. he is emotionally attuned in a way that is not surprising for a musician; a type of work that is reliant on the understanding of, and connection to, emotion in the same way that a builder relies on and develops physical strength. bergling was clearly aware that things were deeply wrong with how he was feeling, both physically and emotionally. at the moment in the film when he announces his retirement, one still, as a viewer, finds oneself asking: “how does it get from here, to his suicide in oman?”. you still hope that perhaps there will be a different ending. at around seventy minutes in, there is a marked shift in the tone of bergling’s voice, as what up until this point has been a kind of resigned acceptance morphs into resentful anger. it is in his realisation and articulation of this anger that we see how the environment within which he lived and worked was reliant on him continuing to run on the treadmill. he tells everyone around him that he just wants the performances to stop, seemingly desperate for people to listen to him. “it’s harder to cancel these shows than to do them”, we hear someone in his team say. “it would be harder to do them, for me”, he says. “hear me out”. “as long as you know it could cost you quite a lot”, and they run through each show and how much money would be lost. “it’s giving me anxiety”, he tells them. again, this scene is horrible to watch. we hear the coerciveness of commitments “needing to be honoured”, leading the viewer to ask in whose interest it is for bergling to keep going and whose interests are being represented. we hear his team tell him that he will lose money, but of course what they mean is that they will lose money too. ten minutes later, there is an exchange which, given where the story concludes, makes one feel slightly sick. his manager, tellingly, says: he doesn’t understand the value of money or that his decisions can have very negative consequences for other people, or that the only reason people care is because he is successful right now. if he stopped being successful a lot of people would jump ship. i’m sure of it. what is perhaps most unsettling, or frustrating, or dispiriting, or upsetting — i am unsure of the best word to capture the feeling — is how the film concludes. we see tim in 2016 on a beach, retired from performing live, having separated from his manager, apparently reviews 97 healthier and feeling stronger and working on new music; in theory doing the thing he loved most. by april 2018, he would be dead having taken his own life whilst on holiday in oman. as a viewer, you are left devastatingly unclear how he arrived at the point of such despair. perhaps no one will know. what the documentary appears to show, to my reading at least, was the tragic story of a shy and anxious young man, who loved making music and the deep, meaningful joy it brought him, propelled into a world reliant on the ever more avaricious exploitation of his labour in order to support the development of an economy which had formed around him, where simple human care and compassion had been decimated by the compulsion to keep going and market his music, and against which he tried to fight back. certainly, this is just one reading, and it is important to note that many of the individuals whom the film appears to point fingers of blame at have disputed their representation. nonetheless, it is hard to watch it and not feel that tim had been profoundly let down by many of those around him. rip tim bergling / avicii: 1989-2018 references gross, sally and musgrave, george. 2016. “can music make you sick? music and depression. a study into the incidence of musicians mental health. part 1: pilot survey report”. help musicians uk/musictank. ———. 2017. “can music make you sick? music and depression. a study into the incidence of musicians mental health. part 2: qualitative study and recommendations”. help musicians uk/musictank. ———. 2020. can music make you sick? measuring the price of musical ambition, university of westminster press. ralston, william. 2018. “who really killed avicii?” british gq. <https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/who-really-killed-avicii> (accessed 1 september 2020). https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/who-really-killed-avicii victims themselves of a close encounter: on the sensory language and bass fiction of space ape (in memoriam) dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 7(2): 86–115 issn 1947-5403 ©2015 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.02.05 victims themselves of a close encounter: on the sensory language and bass fiction of space ape (in memoriam) tobias c. van veen université de montréal (canada) abstract this text is written in memoriam to dubstep emcee and poet space ape (stephen samuel gordon, b. june 17th, 1970; d. october 2nd, 2014). in his own words, space ape arose from the depths of the black atlantic, on a mission to relieve the “pressure” through bass fiction.1 my aim is to explicate space ape’s bass fiction at the intersection of material and imaginal forces, connecting space ape’s embodied concept to a broader afrofuturist constellation of mythopoetic becomings. memory and matter converge in the affect and sounding of space ape as the hostile alien, a virtual body shaped at the intersection of dread bass, riddim warfare and speculative lyricism. space ape set out to xorcise that which consumed him from within by embracing the “spirit of change”. turning to process philosophy, i demonstrate how space ape’s bass fiction—his virtual body—activates the abstract concepts of becoming in the close encounter with the hostile alien. keywords: afrofuturism, dubstep, bass culture, race, process philosophy, becoming, affect theory tobias c. van veen is sshrc postdoctoral fellow in communications at the université de montréal. tobias’ work intersects philosophy of technology, media archeology, and critical race theory, focusing on projects of collective emancipation and becoming. tobias is editor of the afrofuturism special issue of dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture (2013) and co-editor with hillegonda rietveld of the journal’s special issue “echoes from the dub diaspora” (2015). a techno-turntablist and practitioner of interventionist media arts since 1993, tobias is creative director of the iosound.ca music label, collaborating with festivals and media arts centres worldwide. tobias tweets @fugitivephilo. feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.01.02 van veen | victims themselves of a close encounter 87 “focus upon intensity”: introducing the virtual body of space ape figure 1. space ape conducting xorcism. photo credit: hiroo tanaka (2012). lately there’s been a serious rise in the pressure . . . we have to take serious measures —space ape, live at mutek 20072 serious measures taken. the weight of all that has passed, a past buried in the aquatic depths of the black atlantic, seeks relief from the pressure through bass culture. the mission of space ape is to xorcise such weight through bass fiction. the pressures of the memorial depths are heavy: the traumatic memory of the middle passage and what public enemy call “armageddon been-in-effect”—that black existence is already post-apocalyptic, that the end times already took place (sinker 1993; van veen 2015)—but also relief from pressures internal and individuated, localised to the cellular body of space ape. in space dancecult 7(2)88 ape’s sensory language, bass fiction seeks relief from the pressure of white supremacist signs by pressuring black bass sines; bass fiction recombinates sign and sine in a radical black ontology of becoming the “hostile alien”. space ape, hostile alien in process, crafts the concepts of bass fiction through sensory language lyricism, his emcee flow punctuating the subwoofer shakes of the haunted and minimalist london dubstep of kode9, burial and the bug. in the process, language is shaken alike. new concepts flow from bass fiction; but also new becomings of the body, new sonic affects in the bass materialism of dubstep; new routes that trace the dub diaspora. in this encounter with space ape, i will undertake an approach i call speculative irrealism, constructing a signifying series of concept formations that transgress the boundaries between fiction and philosophy by hinging upon the “real fictions” of irreal yet entirely material affects and becomings. in the following series of speculative postulates, constructed as echoes of space ape’s sensory language, i will trace some of the irrealist affects space ape creates through his inventive becoming of a “hostile alien”, by putting into conceptual motion the signs and sines of his sensory language—the imaginal materia of his bass fiction. • • • at first moving slowly, his eyes cast downwards, space ape begins accelerating his body into a frantic pace. in the video for “on the run” (xorcism, 2012), his body vibrates and stutters, shifts and jerks as if possessed by the samples of haitian rhythm.3 the minutae of splitsecond video-editing accelerates the near in/human contortions; the moments of space ape’s agitated motions are sliced and superimposed by the technics of the moving image. as the physical body of space ape appears to move faster than humanly possible, its intensity becomes ever the more counterpoised to the calm delivery of his lyrics. space ape is no longer but one static body represented on screen; the video’s micro-edited accumulation of frames combine and contrast a multiplicity of gesturing body-images. the rapid, and rhythmic, accumulation of image and after-image in the retina effectuates the superposition of space ape from which the virtual body emerges. “on the run” depicts the body becoming n+1; the virtual body renders its flesh as wave/form. the emergent virtual body of space ape approaches the undulation of effervescent audio, in which the body—which is to say, his body n+1, as wave/form—becomes a bass fiction. the virtual body, no longer bound to its static self, undulates as a wave/form in which bass culture and the imaginal realms of afrofuturism recombinate. another way to say how space ape’s body becomes bass fiction is that it does so in the break—that n+1 trajectory where “syncopation, performance, and the anarchic organization of phonic substance delineate an ontological field where black radicalism is set to work” (moten 2003: 85). it is in the break between the audio delivery and the overaccelerated black body, in the blurred and cut multiplicity of body-images, that the virtual body of space ape emerges, not in its presencing, but through the sensation of its effects: the becoming of a hostile alien (see fig. 1). van veen | victims themselves of a close encounter 89 hallucinating senses individually, insidiously are in any combination, rhythmically shifting gears, focus upon intensity wait—big people a talk, nobody try fuck with i-man clarity mind starts slippin familiar tracks bending warping, interfering with the facts sensory language leaves us with no habit for lying we are hostile aliens, immune from dying. —burial (feat. the space ape), “space ape” (burial, 2006) space ape’s declaration of immunity from death is an enunciation of his virtual body, of the life of black radical becoming that is hostile and alien towards classified ontology. space ape remains, always against the epidermal racism of white supremacy, supremely human when forced into the static ontology (or great chain) of being. but being is not where anything begins; it is where the stuff of becoming stops, where it is classified and ordered, policed and disciplined. “on the run” amplifies space ape’s hostile alien becoming—hostile towards its static classification, hostile towards white raciology—through the “fleeting” appearance of the virtual as that ontological field of black radicalism. space ape’s body becomes virtual through its “multiplication of images” (massumi 2002: 133) that distend and contort, accelerate and render transformative the static (and raciological) classification of the black body as the “tribal” body of the “primitive”. the body before us is not but one image, a static thing—the monstrous primitive, the “superhuman” black body—but folds in and out of it/self, through what space ape calls a “bass fiction” of transformation. the virtual body is signed through a sampling of bass fiction; it is inscribed through its wave/forms. like space ape’s sampladelia of riddims, the “images of the virtual make the virtual appear not in their content or form, but in fleeting, in their sequencing or sampling” (massumi 2002: 133). crucially, the virtual cannot be apprehended directly: only its effects can be felt, in the break/down of the affective sensorium. by introducing the ontological field of black radicalism through the virtual body of the hostile alien, space ape focuses upon affective intensity in the convergence of affect and meaning, sign and sinewave, the imaginal and the material that characterises the “sensory language” of what space ape coins as bass fiction. “sensory language” signifies not just lyricism, spoken or writ, but the technical inscription of signs as sines, of the warp of the voice interwoven with the woof of the bass. far from unifying technicity and voice, or mastering the voice by way of technicity, the sensory language of bass fiction draws attention to their reciprocal and constitutive relation in the ceaseless production of affective becomings. 4 the spoken sign, far from pure phonē, already signifies an originary technical apparatus (that technical construct of the “human subject”) in which, vocal chords activated, sinewaves emit; bass fiction lowers the register so that the voice collides with the amplified sinewaves of bass culture. every singular enunciation of bass fiction encompasses the collectivity of bass culture; it arises not in isolation but as part of what paul gilroy describes as the dancecult 7(2)90 “call-and-response” of the black atlantic (1993)—that communicative imaginary in which transactions take place across time and space through recordings and performances that activate collective enunciations of becoming. gilroy’s concept of the black atlantic describes the shared and ever-evolving imaginary constructed through the circulation of media, music and memory among the afrodiaspora, that “non-traditional tradition, an irreducibly modern, ex-centric, unstable, and asymmetrical cultural ensemble” (1993: 198). bass culture names what mykaell riley describes as “the intersection between jamaican and british popular music since the late 1950s”, a nascent concept that “came to life” in the title of dub poet linton kwesi johnson’s 1980 album (2014: 101). bass culture can be productively coordinated with what paul sullivan calls the “dub diaspora”—that network of peoples and sounds “closely following [but not reducible to] the jamaican diaspora”, in which “dub’s role as a ‘meta-virus’” infiltrates “a host of mutant ‘strains’ and hybrids” of music, language and culture (2014: 11). space ape’s bass fiction, through its musical sounding and vocal styling, is tied to (or infected by) the dub diaspora, insofar as it articulates the colonial and postcolonial patterns of migration and imperial occupation to the dissemination of the bass culture genre of dub. space ape’s creative invention of bass fiction, then, signifies the convergence of low-end sine waves with the speculative imaginary of bass culture, or what kodwo eshun calls in its afrofuturist archetype across genre and culture, “sonic fiction” (1999). the point of convergence is the becoming of the virtual body to the unfolding ontology of black radicalism. it is in this sense—of sensory language that calls upon bodies to affectively respond—that space ape will come to chant that “you need bass fiction in your life”. space ape enunciates the collective need for the creative activation of becoming, for the imaginary manifest in material process, for that ceaseless shift across sign/sine toward the virtual body of the hostile alien. becoming the living myth of bass fiction in the bass/fiction, the imaginal and memorial realm of the sign meets the material vibratory force of the sine. it is the imaginal and affective link of the physical body to the virtual body that connects space ape to afrofuturism, that connects his body of work to the lineage of dub poetry, and that exposes space ape’s black body at the point where it actualises the virtual into a becoming-alien. such “black performances”—in their radicality, qua becomings—are “disruptive of the oppositions of speech and writing, and spirit and matter” (moten 2003: 14). an entire western metaphysics that separates mind from body (descartes), and that excludes africa from europe and world history (hegel), so as to justify violence toward racialised and enslaved (sub)humans, is held in the break, disrupted, and broken by becomings of the black atlantic radical imaginary, by the force and affect, the wave/form, of bass fiction. indeed, as michelle wright has argued, what 20th century “african diasporic counterdiscourses of black subjectivity” have in common, besides a negotiation with “western theoretical van veen | victims themselves of a close encounter 91 formations”—and by proximity and intent space ape and this text negotiate with gilles deleuze and process philosophy—is a radical emphasis upon how “black subjectivity . . . must negotiate between the abstract and the real . . . between the ideal and the material” (2004: 3). coming to terms with space ape as a “living myth” that walks the earth suggests a mythologising approach to the evidently impossible fact of space ape as a living hostile alien; yet such mythscience—sun ra’s term for the ideological truth/strategy of how myth informs reality and fiction builds fact—operates precisely at the level where the black fantastic becomes lived experience (van veen 2013: 11). on the one level, mythscience questions the fundamental myths ingrained by raciology as truth: that (sub)humans are fit for slavery precisely because they are “truly” (in)human; that the white body is the imperial human from which all else are othered. on the other level, mythscience addresses such constituent false myths by creatively tapping into what ra called “alterdestinies”: the potentia of the virtual to elaborate impossible living myths in the speculative becoming of other worlds. in philosophies of process and becoming, namely those of deleuze (1990), whitehead (1978), and massumi (2002), the concept of the “virtual” expresses the maximal degree of potential, of the unpredictable and transformative capacity for creativity at its most unharnessed. “if the alternative mode of abstraction into which perception extends is the possible”, writes massumi—and by the possible we understand the domain of the logical, the rational, but also all that remains in the opposite and limit of this metaphysical binary, as expressed by the impossible—“the intense mode of abstraction into which sensation potentially infolds is, at the limit, the virtual” (2002: 98). the virtual has particular significance for a black radical ontology, precisely because the latter is, to resample a phrase, an “activist philosophy at no remove from life’s immediacy” (massumi 2011: 1). attenuating process philosophy to black radical ontology has particular significance for approaches to electronic dance music culture (edmc) that seek to understand how it is that various bodies materialise the transformative capacities of the speculative and radical imaginary through sound, rhythm and movement. this is especially the case for afrofuturism, in which musical forms of detroit techno and electro, chicago acid house, uk jungle, jamaican dub, hip-hop, and other such diasporic and electronic wave/forms already enunciate a collective black radical becoming. • • • with black radical ontology in mind (and body), in this article i mobilise process philosophy through the speculative imaginaries and affective riddims of space ape, examining how space ape becomes the “hostile alien” by intersecting afrofuturism and bass culture through the creative invention of bass fiction. space ape’s hostile alien becoming, through the rearticulation of sign to sine in bass fiction, can be coordinated to the concept of the dread body. julian henriques writes of the rastafari dread body as a “voicing body, an echoic vessel”, one that exists as a doppelgänger, transiting “from an embattled relationship to authority to one incorporating the quality of endurance against its oppressive powers” (2014: 192, 195). the virtual body is not elsewhere or purely imaginal; it amplifies the dancecult 7(2)92 immediacy of black radical ontology as the figure of dread. space ape transits through becomings of the dread body, taking on the alien accents of jamaican rastafari and the loa possession of haitian vodou; as a hostile alien he voices dread of authority while at the same time becoming authority figures who dispense dread. such self-creation further transits through an inventive and mythological lexicon that, as the enunciation of bass fiction by space ape the dub poet and emcee, undertakes a speculative mode of concept production. it is in part my purpose here to amplify kodwo eshun’s phrase that “producers are already pop theorists” (1999: 00[-004]) by accelerating and intensifying space ape’s conceptual apparatus, investigating and exploring its many allusions and affects. i am also responding to paul gilroy’s call to develop “political languages” in which “the future” can be discussed (2004: 335) by insisting that political speech, precisely to shape alternative futures free from raciology, must converse with concepts enunciated by the becomings of the black radical imaginary. in short, radical afrofuturism requires “the experiences of the underground, the vagabond, and those constituencies marked as deviant” that constitute what richard iton calls the “black fantastic” (2008: 16). the fact of life itself is an activity of change, of becoming. this is where the “hostile alien” forces mobilised by afrofuturism begin: space ape’s bass fiction body is already a creation, or becoming of self, constellated to a historical network of black atlantic becomings that intersect machinic, organic, sonic and archetypal bodies. the bass fiction of space ape, as one of gilroy’s “imaginary effects” of the black atlantic (1993: 102), intersects the virtual/ physical body at the point where the speculative imaginary is actualised in becoming. space ape’s bass fiction body enacts “process as becoming”, which as massumi reminds us, “is not just creative activity . . . it is self-creation” (2011: 2). sine of the hyperdub: signs you need bass fiction in your life tobias c. van veen: what brought space ape up from the depths? space ape: weight. it was a weight of pressure, you know what i mean? vibrations. these are the things that you feel inside. comes up, comes up, comes up, comes up, comes up, comes out—weight. it’s about weight. that’s like when you try to deal with the bass fiction. that’s where a bass fiction is coming from. coming from the need to expel this weight.5 the space ape arises from the depths of the black atlantic, appearing under the codename of “daddi gee” on the first release of the hyperdub label in 2004. the label was the sonic extension of a blog of the same name run by steve goodman, a.k.a. kode9, which detailed the emergent genres of london’s bass culture—the “hyperdub” of jungle, 2-step and dubstep.6 in the blog’s first essay, hyperdub is defined as “an ‘info virus’ that ‘replicates in both humans and machines’” (metford 2000). the two signifiers in the portmanteau call upon an acceleration—the hyper activity of an expansion into speed and dimension—of jamaican bass culture’s dub practices of copying and versioning, practices that take place through bass fictions. van veen | victims themselves of a close encounter 93 in its initial use on the hyperdub blog, “hyperdub” appears as a term for what simon reynolds calls “the hardcore continuum” of the “rave virus” (2008). metford writes that “‘hyperdub’, or simply ‘hardcore’ . . . transcends mere musical genre, being more usefully understood as a set of nomadic sub-cultural practices, to which a relentlessly deconstructive art practice is central” (2000). understood as the skeletal framework of a deconstructive aesthetic praxis, hyper/dub transforms and accelerates the jamaican studio practices of dropping out vocal and instrumental parts of reggae tracks to create a “version”—a riddim track that would be the basis for (over)dubs (veal 2007: 52–54). mark fisher describes the versioning process as “dubtraction”—“the production of virtualities, implied songs all the sweeter for their lack of solid presence” (fisher, in goodman 2010: 159). dub, as ian penman writes, “echoes like a phantom” (1995). during the creative peak of jamaican dub production in the 1970s, its producers explored the soundscapes of echo, delay and reverb in the studio through the creative ab/use of analogue tape loop machines such as the roland space echo (veal 2007: 153–8). as they created dub versions, producers messed with the aural perception of time and space. as paul sullivan writes, such effects “can be used as a tool to transport listeners to the past”, provoking a “sense of jamaica’s ancestral african roots, while at the same time invoking the infinity of the cosmos—and the future—by creating cavernous spaces within the music” (2014: 9–10). in the performance of space/ time studio technics, and through its affective intensity that conjures imaginal realms, dub’s reverberations connect to, and construct, the collective memory of the black atlantic, those “imagined pasts and futures animating the african diaspora” (veal 2007: 197). in the interstices and absences of dub, a multiplication of echoes and reverbs sound-out its haunted spaces: spaces that are felt, in the volume of the sound system, as the affects of a virtual space where cultural memory—of intergenerational trauma, the middle passage, but also of future transcendance, of zion—meets sinewave matter in its bass vibration. it is this virtual space that speaks to dub’s imaginal forces, its ability to become hyperdub, to accelerate not just a specific riddim and bass patterning but a cultural mutation of matter and memory. as erik davis writes, there is no original, no motherland outside the virtual, no roots that are not at the same time rhizomes remixed on the fly. yet by improvising and mutating its own repetitions of prerecorded material, dub added something distinctly uncanny to the mix. dub’s analog doppelgängers, spectral distortions, and vocal ghosts produced an imaginal space no less compelling in its own way than the virtual african zion that organized so much of reggae’s rastafarian longings (davis 2008: 63). hyperdub as concept/practice widens the practice of versioning dubs to encompass not just riddim music, but cultural mutations as a whole.7 in kode9 and space ape’s nexus of sound and lyrics, concepts and performance, bodies and hyperdub sinewaves intermingle in the fervour of a collective self-creation—a two-step becoming, “kode9 + the space ape”, i and i.8 afrofuturism, as the afrodiasporic continuum in which space ape (and kode9) operate, can briefly be described as black atlantic futurism that challenges the exclusionary timelines dancecult 7(2)94 of white modernity through science fictional practices of the speculative imaginary (fisher 2013; van veen 2013; womack 2013). afrofuturism seeks to deconstruct reified myths of a future/past white hegemony with a multi-hued alterdestiny. in its creative and critical capacities of temporal activism, known as chronopolitics, afrofuturism reinvents the past— unearthing buried and excluded black histories—to accelerate and infiltrate powerful black futures and becomings into the present (eshun 2003). • • • hyperdub would become known as one of the foundational record labels of dubstep—a 21st century reworking of london 2-step garage,9 itself an electronic versioning of africanamerican hip-hop and r&b, infused with the dancehall bass and organic tempo of jamaican dub while at the same time overlaid with the angst and existential crisis of urban dread. it is telling that hyperdub’s first release, “sine of the dub”, appears as a homage to, and extension of, the dub poetry tradition encapsulated by lynton kwesi johnson and benjamin zephaniah.10 on “sine of the dub”, kode9 and space ape develop the intersection of dub poetry and dubstep that would mark a collaboration spawning some nine singles and two albums, lasting until the final release of the duo, “ghost town / at war with time” (hyperdub 013, 2015). the initial vinyl pressing of “sine of the dub” (hyperdub 001, 2004) by “kode9 & daddi gee” is titled “sign of the dub”. when re-pressed in 2006, its titled changed to “sine of the dub”, daddi g had dropped his archetypal patronym to become “space ape”—a naming that has also been spelled on various releases with and without a spacing between the space/ape. in the two pressings, these slippages between signifiers suggest a passage from the sign to the sine, from the signifier of the concept to the material wave of the sounding. this passage, i suggest, ought not to be treated as a correction or a linear shift, but as a convergence of sine/sign as that of the infolding of the imaginary and the material, through the fundamental sounding-out of conceptual homophony. the process is also temporally recursive, the shift in space ape’s naming undertaking a chronopolitics of revisioning the label’s, and space ape’s, origins. the deconstructive cultural practice of dub, in the process of versioning, is put to praxis in the shifting passage of the release titles. on “sine of the dub”, space ape’s gravity-fed lyrics resound with dread, speaking of murder and spectacle, akin to the incisively epigrammatic yet hallucinatory style of a nick land performance/text, in which electronic music is punctuated by abstract readings of cybertheory that herald the rise of the nonhuman and the machinic.11 underneath space ape’s dread verse, kode9’s minimalist bass pulse and dub echo rhythmically punctuate the flow: “people say / a man never truly happy / unless a next man / truly dies” (“sine of the dub”, 2004). the space ape’s lyricism appears to border somewhere inbetween the hip-hop afrofuturist imaginary—the perverse yet spaced-out emcee flow developed by ramm:∑ll:z∑∑, dr. octagon and to an extent, rza’s urban black superhero bobby digital—and a cyberpunk theory-fiction reminiscent of the output of nick land and sadie plant’s cybernetic culture research unit (ccru), of which kode9 was a graduate student.12 van veen | victims themselves of a close encounter 95 however, unlike land’s cyberpunk phuturism that sought to maximise intensity until “impending human extinction becomes accessible as a dance floor” (2011: 398), space ape’s orality transits through the body—at the intersection of the black atlantic’s virtual body of the hostile alien to the individuated dread body—by way of dubstep’s gravity-fed tempo and dread voicing that pings the sinewave depths of bass materialism. dubstep, even in its deconstructive cultural framework as accelerated hyperdub, slows down the movement of the dance floor body, leaving its gestures as suspended in time as dubstep’s echoes are in sounded space. even as space ape may be “deprogramming the body” (land 2011: 398) through a close encounter with an “alien virus” (“space ape”, burial 2006), space ape’s body remains a dread body of bass fiction. moreover, the body as such is not to be erased: it remains, not to be surpassed or discarded in favour of a machinic futurism, as in land’s accelerationist fantasy of superseding capital, but as an agent of the mutatis mutandis, a necessary force against all that weight that has constrained, lashed and racialised the human body. even as space ape and kode9’s work engages with the futurist, horrorist and machinic tropes of accelerationism—in which “the only way out of capitalism is to take it further” (noys 2014: x)—it operates like detroit techno as a “critique of the ‘smoothness’ of acceleration, by a repetition that disrupts the future” (noys 2014: 54). space ape’s bass fiction interrupts the illusion of a predestined, whitewashed and accelerated future that would all too easily erase the blackness of the dread body, in part by reflecting in the dub aesthetics of its gravity tempo the equal horrors of stasis, in which despite all, too much remains the same. 2-step: twist the lines out of all recognition the space ape’s incanted flow is at a crossroads with its content. slowly does space ape speaks of terrible things, sounding-out a lovecraftian horrordub that likewise resonates with wu-tang clan project gravediggaz. space ape’s exorcism of cybertheory and uncanny acceleration of the radical afrofuturist imaginary above all evokes dread: a drawn-out bass drawl is pitched to space ape’s voice, its timbre panned and eq-ed until the nearly inhuman chant blends with the low-end frequencies of the bass riddim. what space ape says merges with (and is as significant as) how it sounds. the crossroads of the sign and the sine converge in its bass fiction, a phrase that resounded as a riddim chant at space ape’s 2007 mutek performance in montréal with kode9, calling upon the crowd in a ritual invocation of the hyperdub imaginal that also recognises the potent force of the sound system: “you need bass fiction in your life / you need bass fiction in your life / you need bass fiction in your life...”.13 at the level of the sonic materia of the voice—the emergent substrate in which the physical is perceived—and the signifiance of its content, as barthes wrote of kristeva’s concept of the semiotic, where the subject is lost to the play of a deconstructive flow of signifiers (1977: 10), space ape, as the collective enunciation of the two, enters as the uncanny figure of the crossroads. dancecult 7(2)96 in space ape’s flow over dubstep, he is speaking through the sonic materia of a genre derived from and haunted by 2-step, the late ‘90s london house/garage genre that in-itself is haunted—which is to say, samples as its influence, and thus incorporates its cultural memories, its transgenerational ghosts—by the “soul values” of african-american r&b (see weheliye 2002: 32). what r&b remains haunted by—as recordings that today appear, in weheliye’s phrase, as “future-oriented artifacts”—are the “spirituals” that signify an “opaque and fragmented african american past” (weheliye 2005: 96). up through the depths of future dubstep, then, drift the spirits of a fractured afrodiasporic past. what fisher calls “sonic hauntology . . . ‘blurs contemporaneity’ with elements from the past, but, whereas postmodernism glosses over the temporal disjunctures, the hauntological artists foreground them” (2013: 46). hauntology calls upon the past to reinvent it, wielding the transformed past as a temporal tool against the closed future avenues of a commodified and whitewashed present. hauntology is thus a sonic tactic deployed by the afrofuturist strategies of chronopolitics. such strategically revised histories are often construed through what eshun (1999) calls sonic fictions—the imaginal materia of sign and sine—that take on hyperdub specificity in bass fictions. sonic hauntology likewise describes the “deconstructive art practices” of the afrodiaspora that transmits the sonic materia of past futurisms—those embedded former soundings and visions of alternate futures that remain encoded in recordings, texts, media and memory, likewise inscribed in the material memory of bodies and becomings—through the “call-and-response” of the black atlantic (gilroy 1993: 102). as a hauntological convergence of two genres of and at the crossroads, 2-step and dubstep signify not just a sine (a sound) but a sign (a concept). 2-step/dubstep meet on the crossroads as the imaginal materia of bass fiction. space ape sounds-out the concept in “backward” (hyperdub 004, 2006), in a track that calls forth the new—the very invention of poetic dubstep—at the same time that it rewinds genre and cultural memory in its “2-step”, as it were, backwards: one step forward, watcha’ 2-step one step forward, watcha’ 2-step twist the lines out of all recognition understand this you have to make a decision motional persisting without paraflexible (h)earing fling this blasted sin thing away from my audio addiction the truth lies somewhere between a lie an a fiction there’s no use blaming the haste we chase after because all is fair an equal between servant and master. 2-step describes a movement in sound—a forward shuffle and back of the break-beat—that can be thought of not just as a genre descriptor but as a concept. space ape’s lyrics call to attention how “2-step” signifies a chronopolitical movement forward into bass futurism yet, in the hauntology of its resonant memorial trauma often left unvoiced, backward. 2-step is reconstructed from past genres at the same time that it becomes the memorial signature of van veen | victims themselves of a close encounter 97 future dubstep. 2-step is thus a temporal concept of double movement between past and future, memory and matter; it signifies the convergence of the shuffling movement of the physical body to the temporal register of the virtual body. further, its chronopolitics of bass materialism take shape in the bass fiction becoming of the hostile alien who will come to enunciate 2-step as concept. in “backward”, space ape adopts as elsewhere the accent of a jamaican rastafari patois. this adoption suggests, however, a mutation rather than imitation. space ape’s voicing is already synthesized into a low-frequency sine wave. at the “materiality of the body speaking” against its “grain” (barthes 1977: 182), space ape speaks against the grain of the body’s “mother tongue” by becoming-infected by an alien virus: victims themselves of a close encounter desperate abductors, constructors become infected, vexed by an alien virus, so alien, so viral —burial (feat. the space ape), “space ape” (burial, 2006) what is this alien virus? it is, in part, the virus of the alien in and of itself, the virus of becoming-alien; a trope that resonates in afrofuturist work as an allegory for the (themeatically) infectious yet dangerous attraction of blackness.14 yet this becoming-alien takes on specific material effects in the hyperdub framework. space ape’s infection is 2-step: it operates at both the level of the sign and the sine, twisting both what is sounded and how it sounds, as it transits between past/future. breaking down the 2-step reveals two vectors: on the one level, space ape describes being infected or possessed by an accent, an inflected speech pattern that mutates the speaking of the sign. the close encounter with the alien signals dub’s infection of the physical body with the virtual body of dub’s hauntological memory—the encoded memories of a language virus that routes through the dub diaspora. such becoming-infected is likewise suggested by goodman’s description of hyperdub as an “info virus” that replicates in both human and machine (metford 2000). on the other level, becoming-infected by an alien accent is a form of sensorial possession: the boundaries of words are “twisted” around truth; and “the truth lies somewhere between a lie an a fiction” (“backward”, 2006). infected by the accent of the alien sign/sine, the space ape emerges as the figure of the crossroads, papa legba. legba grants or denies human communication with the spirit world of the loa; he is the great elocutioner and trickster who facilitates as well as hinders communication and understanding (morris 2006). in the video for “the devil is a liar”, space ape appears in black top hat, suit and sunglasses, his skin adorned with the white lines of haitian loa possession (see fig. 3). space ape is presiding at the crossroads as “the guardian of boundaries” (morris 2006: 196) where knowledge/power intersect, where “truth lies”, where at the intersection of a decision, with lines (and genres and boundaries) twisted, “all is fair an equal between servant and master” (“backward”, 2006). there are few places where all becomes “fair an equal” between the enslaved and the enslaver, where the “truth lies” somewhere between lie and fiction, and where the devil is a liar. the crossroads, the very place where papa legba grants decision, is one such place. dancecult 7(2)98 in this uncanny moment, space ape is not a human emcee flowing over an electronic music track, but becomes the loa at the crossroads of the 2-step—sign and sine—in which the doppelgänger of the two produce a machinic enunciation. “there are no individual statements”, write deleuze and guattari, “every statement is the product of a machinic assemblage, in other words, of collective agents of enunciation” (2000: 37). in every enunciation, the otherness of language and its multiplicity of delaying-and-deferring components voice multiple meanings in the individuated utterance. the space ape’s collective enunciation of bass fiction take shape at the 2-step convergence of hyperdub’s sign/sine, as he speaks with the infected alien voicing of inflected jamaican rastafari patois, in the appearance and utterance of a loa possession. space ape voices the 2-step chronopolitics of collective trauma, navigating the memory of the middle passage through the futurity of bass fiction. as hostile alien, space ape presides at the crossroads of death and life, past and future, as the figure whose task it is to relieve the weight of all that has been buried below in the black atlantic. • • • but such enunciation also operates through the machinic phylum of the electronic music studio. dub has long considered the vocalist as but one component of the studio’s cybernetic machine, where technologies of feedback transform noise into signal. as erik davis writes, “dub created room within afrodiasporic culture for a cyborg mythology grounded in technical practice” (2008: 65). and as goodman notes, “dub virologists”—of which he himself is a viral version, qua kode9—“open up this key dimension of machinic orality in the understanding of black music” (2010: 164). what speaks through the machinic orality of space ape’s bass fiction resounds as an archetypal chant that relieves the “pressure” of the deep and all of its weight (of all the pressures: the weight of history, struggle, white supremacy). bass fiction is a convergence of the speculative imaginary and bass materialism that “comes up and out” and expels the weight of pressure through a collective and machinic enunciation.15 space ape: as above so below (the quest for dread mutants) the first clue as to their becomings is in the names themselves. kode9, an elusive moniker that goodman has yet to explicate, hints of the “k” as signifying a “germanic language virus” that “turns a soft sound into a hard sound”.16 space ape presents a rich imaginal signifier. the space ape in name transforms the title of the seminal lee “scratch” perry album super ape (1976), in which the title track softly chants: “this is the ape man / trying to creation / are you ready to step with i, man?”. the “ape man” signifies the black body, enslaved as subhuman, as but ape, transformed by its moniker of “super” into a towering and vengeful beast of zion, bringing the revolutionary creation to babylon: the island records cover features a king-kong-like ape uprooting trees in simian rage. the moniker of the “space ape” suggests at first a supersimian from outer space—but space ape claims that he van veen | victims themselves of a close encounter 99 arises from the deep, an affinity with what davis calls “distinctly aquatic surroundings [of dub] . . . a kind of ‘out’ inner space, a liminal womb” (2008: 64). though space ape’s nomenclature likewise suggests an affinity with afrofuturist performers who originate on other planets—sun ra from saturn; dr. octagon from jupiter—space ape arose from the depths of the black atlantic. space ape: that’s the space ape innit, really. that’s this thing—the alien beneath the sea, it comes up, it’s a hostile alien. kode9: so it’s beneath the sea and not outer space? space ape: yah. beneath the sea. why beneath the sea and not outer space? if sun ra is coming from saturn, where is the space ape coming from? space ape: the space ape is part of the whole tribe left adrift, man. that’s where it is. that’s where it’s coming from.17 space ape arises from below—a super ape descendent of the overthrown “black animalia” of the middle passage, grown large in the deepness of black aquatic space, emerging as the vocal signwave of a massively dread body. but this dread body is powerful precisely in its sounding. the bass fiction of space ape resonates at the low-end frequencies of affect, in which voice and bass materialism converge in the act of bringing-forth the novel into becoming through the act of naming. “this is the creative power of sound”, writes henriques of the rastafari process of the i-and-i, “the generative performance of sonic embodiment” (2014: 196). in space ape’s lyricism, the power/knowledge of the i-and-i is signalled in the ambiguity of his deployment of “you”. in the above exchange with kode9, stephen samuel gordon speaks of space ape in the third person, as an “it”, a “hostile alien”—the figure of the crossroads—that arises from the aquatic deep as if to possess his creative self. the way in which space ape reinvents his selves calls to mind fred moten’s observation of blackness as “an ongoing event of an antiorigin and an anteorigin, replay and reverb of an impossible natal occasion, the performance of a birth and rebirth of a new science, a phylogenetic fantasy that (dis)establishes genesis, the reproduction of blackness in and as (the) reproduction of black performance(s)” (2003: 14). the depths are not alone of dread bodies. in the afrofuturist mythology—sonic fictions of the black atlantic—another electro-aquatic species arises from the deep to “deprogram the programmers” of babylon: the drexciyans, mutated descendants of enslaved africans thrown overboard during the middle passage. the drexciyans infer their heritage in part from the zong massacre, whose captain collingwood drowned some 142 enslaved africans in 1781—so as to collect the insurance on his (sub)human “commodities” (see baucom 2005). from the liner notes of drexciya’s the quest (submerge, 1997): dancecult 7(2)100 are drexciyans water-breathing, aquatically-mutated descendants of those unfortunate victims of human greed? have they been spared by god to teach us or terrorize us? did they migrate from the gulf of mexico to the mississippi river basin and to the great lakes of michigan? do they walk among us? are they more advanced than us? how and why do they make strange music? what is their quest? (in williams 2001: 168) formed in 1989, the techno and electro duo drexciya have become central to the afrofuturist cyborg and aquatic sonic fictions of detroit techno collective and label underground resistance.18 their debut 1992 release, “deep sea dweller” (shockwave records), develops the template for the sonic fictions that followed: often mystical but also militaristic missives into aquatic riddims. these “monsters from the low end”, writes kodwo eshun, “submerge you in liquid dystopia” (1999: 06[083]). but unlike the bass fictions of space ape, the harmonic chords of detroit appear throughout drexciya’s “aquatic” electro riddims, suggesting that the bubble metropolis—the name drexciya give for their underwater urban lair—is also a sea space of some peace and tranquility. like dubstep—particularly the work of hyperdub artist burial, whose releases sound-out a convergence of south london’s council estates with the memorial remembrance of rave’s warehouse echoes and late-night pirate radio sessions filled with static—drexciya’s sonic fictions evoke the imaginal materia of space. and like dubstep, aquatic space provides the coordinates: sonar pings, seabed reverbs and underwater echoes resound throughout drexciya’s broken beat electro and techno that, in eshun’s words, “militarizes parliament’s 70s and hendrix’s 60s atlantean aquatopias” (1999: 06[083]). indeed, both drexciya and space ape are, in their own ways, mutations from the deep that escape the confines of the imperial human, creating a shared speculative imaginary of the black atlantic that seeks to process the generational trauma of the middle passage. the spatial coordinates of these haunted aquatic depths are signed through the technology of the sine, and its waves of reverberation and echo. yet drexciya’s more frenzied moments of intensified riddim provide a stark contrast to dubstep’s bass fiction. drexciya’s angular and striking sounds, pitched towards the relentless rhythms of techno (120~150 bpm) at often twice the tempo of dub (50~90 bpm), call to mind an aquatic invasion, or sea storm summoned by drexciyan technology, ready to take the shore with hurricane force. though the sonic fiction of drexciya finds cultural comradeship with the bass fiction of space ape, nonetheless their respective sine-waves diverge at the point of riddim. between drexciya and space ape may be differentiated two distinct enunciations of collective becoming from two nautically distant shores of the black atlantic; two different sonic fictions with different materialisations of the transit through sign/sine. yet, in both cases collective becoming passes through the depths of the aquatic—that deep sea space of the haunted past. living in their “bubble metropolis” (12-inch, underground resistance, 1993), the drexciyans craft electro and techno music for the sonic arsenal of an “aquatic invasion” (12-inch, underground resistance, 1995). they also map a future “journey home” to the african continent in the liner notes to the quest. the means of the return are further van veen | victims themselves of a close encounter 101 explored in underground resistance’s 1998 lp, interstellar fugitives, which features a rap sheet of its cyborg, alien and aquatic afrofuturist artists/entities. the liner notes, or fugitive “report” issued by the intergalactic bureau of investigation, reveals the existence of a mutant r1 strain of african american genes that have crafted the dread bodies of historical “warrior” figures such as martin luther king, jr. and nelson mandela, referring to them as “digital ebola guerilla operatives with reinforced rhythm awareness capabilities”. steve goodman summarizes the report: “combining a revisionist black history with science fiction, genetic theory, and ethnomusicology, ur produced a kind of ‘dub fiction’, where history is versioned into an occulted vibrational battle of cosmic proportions that parallel ishamel reed’s mumbo jumbo” (2010: 157). space ape would certainly qualify as an r1 mutant on the rap sheet of underground resistance, voicing the aquatic and alien dread of the black atlantic. the aquatic cthulhu cult of the drexciyans ‘they had come from the stars, and had brought their images with them.’ —h.p. lovecraft, “call of the cthulhu cult” (2008: 221) the space ape is “part of the whole tribe left adrift”—one can speculate upon an undiscovered island, a “lost continent” of mutant descendants who, in league with the drexciyans, accelerated their r1 genes to become super/space ape. the afrofuturist constellation of space ape and the drexciyans offers a shared speculative imaginary for destabilising the present with mutant black becomings that address the traumatic history of the black atlantic. in the continuation of “backward” (hyperdub 004, 2006), space ape offers a warning for mutants seeking recognition from their former masters: “watch how the mutants fight and struggle / pushing up themselves to find space inna the middle / to be scene (seen) is what it all seems to mean”. despite a long history of anticolonial and antiracist struggle, space ape observes how much remains the same in the “equal” politics of recognition between “servant and master”: “strange how things seem to remain the same / when all the while we a try to make change”. space ape attributes such persistent sameness, in part, to religion “filling up you head with all these quotes from the scripture / to rupture a structure don’t want to make this thing corrupt ya”. in this respect, space ape marks out his bass fiction differences from the theological scriptures of, one would suspect, dub’s rastafari. in this case, despite bass fiction’s resonance with rastafari dub’s low-end sine, the speculative sign finds itself split over the governing structure and its contested ontotheology. but he also names a second force. “backward” signals the listener (and enunciator) in the ambiguity of its you, where: “understand this you have to make a decision”. the decision is marked out between religion (which we might understand as alluding to what lisa amanda palmer describes, after carolyn cooper, as the “conservative values within rastafari culture” (2014: 127)) and this second force—a force “creating biological patterns more mystical than saturn”, this “abstract black hole laughing after you”. the choice is not between myth and science, but rather between two sonic fictions, two mythsciences: between received scripture—the dancecult 7(2)102 truth-structure of ontotheological signs—and the mystical yet biological and extraplanetary force of what sun ra called the outer darkness. that the abstract black hole is more mystical than saturn also appears to signal a challenge to sun ra—who declared himself from the ringed planet—or rather ra’s complex allegiance to christianity, though the latter is thoroughly transformed and in its own way abstracted by way of a unique rereading that intersects the nation of islam, afrocentric kemetian mythosophy, occult qabbalah, alien abduction, and the nation of islam offshoot, the five percent (see szwed 1998). i do not have the space to attend to ra’s afrofuturist reformulation of christianity here, save to note that ra undertook his own creatively qabbalistic rereadings of the bible, inverting (like nietzsche) much of its roman power structures, so as to reveal how white supremacy had contaminated its messaging (see ra 2006). • • • what i do wish to emphasise is how such afrofuturist mythologies are operative—they work in the realm of sonic fictions, converging sine with sign by sounding-out mythscience. as ben williams writes, the mutational mythologies of afrofuturism “imagine an origin of a blackness that, since it is characterized by the concept of mutation rather than that of skin color, cannot be reduced only to blackness” (2001: 171), an argument also found in sean albiez’s discussion of racialised identity in detroit techno (2005). a critical reading here of williams must remain suspect of the “only”—to reduce blackness to skin colour is to epidermalise the qualia of mutation itself; the individuated instance of “what kind” that designates a particular afrofuturist becoming remains nonetheless infused with blackness, precisely because the heritage of blackness is not a skin that can be shrugged off under white supremacy. the mutant dread body is just as likely to be overdetermined (and feared) by white supremacy for its apparently “superhuman” (or “superape”) powers, labelled and exterminated upon sight due to the threatening condition of its “black superiority” (gilroy 2004: 258). this is why there is one other mythopoetic figure that becomes dredged from the black atlantic by the space ape: cthulhu. what if—and here the speculative philosophical shaping of the imaginary takes shape— the drexciyans discovered—or invented, as biological kindred—cthulhu, that “monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long narrow wings behind”, in which consciousness manifested “in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity”? (lovecraft 2008: 209; 201).19 the horrordub of space ape naturally approaches the monstrousities of lovecraft’s horrorfiction; as space ape iterated during an interview, “we is fishes… we did not come up on water on two foot”.20 with riddim chants and bass fiction, space ape and the drexciyans appear in league to uplift cthulhu from his underwater city of r’lyeh, a city where “one could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal”, a city that lovecraft’s narrator describes as “close” to the architecture of “futurism” (2008: 222–23). space ape’s notion of an “abstract black hole” comes close to naming this horror. but his seminal description of space ape as entity, van veen | victims themselves of a close encounter 103 in collaboration with burial on the latter’s debut album, makes the connection tantalisingly explicit, as if combining in one moment of speculative irrealism the drexciyans (“victims themselves of a close encounter / desperate abducters”) and cthulhu (“living space apes, creatures, covered, smothered in ripe tentacles”): victims themselves of a close encounter desperate abducters, constructers become infected, vexed by an alien virus, so alien, so viral living space apes, creatures, covered, smothered in ripe tentacles stimulating the audio nerve directly you wanna come flex with me? — burial and space ape, “space ape” (burial, 2006)21 there is an intriguing further connection to be made in this moment of speculative fiction that processes philosophy—a point where the intertextuality of space ape and the drexciyans is allowed to roam the radical imaginary. such a moment, here, suggests an afrofuturist reading of h.p. lovecraft’s tale of the cthulhu cult, “the call of cthulhu”, where indeed, race plays a peculiar (though on some levels predictable) role. in retelling this tale, we apply the bass fictional imaginary hitherto described to points of intersection in lovecraft’s narrative between horror and race; the result is a monstrous crafting that attempts to relieve pressure from the deep by amplifying the shared speculative imaginary of the black atlantic in lovecraft’s text. the various characters of lovecraft’s tale who are all in the know concerning the elder god cthulhu all appear as racialised subjects, most with aquatic connections. from the beginning, the professor whose research uncovers the cthulhu cult (that is, for white people) mysteriously dies “after having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro” (lovecraft 2008: 202). the sculptor whose dreams catalyse him to craft totemic cthulhu objects is described as a “thin, dark young man” (2008: 204). further dream patients describe “a dread of something abnormal” while “voodoo orgies multiply in haiti, and african outposts report ominous mutterings” (2008: 207). but crucially, the first climax of the tale appears in the louisiana swamps of new orleans, where a cthulhu cult is discovered, “infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the african voodoo circles” (2008: 208). these “louisiana swamp priests” are linked to “eskimo wizards” worshipping similar totems of a tentacled, giant and winged cthulhu (2008: 210). the louisiana cult is discovered in “black haunted woods”, a territory “substantially unknown and untraversed by white men” (2008: 211), where the cthulhu cult members are found dancing and drumming, having conducted a ritual murder of local white “squatters” (who though they live in the same “black” woods, are described by the white narrator as “mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of lafitte’s men” (2008: 211)). nearly all the members of the cthulhu cult are racialised as afrodiasporic; the one exception is the reference to its “eskimo wizards”, who in the narrator’s raciology are likewise typecast as racialised “primitives”. a further clue, in dancecult 7(2)104 this respect, to space ape’s connection to the cthulhu cult is in the choice of his musical sample matter for his solo album xorcism (2012), which utilises haitian and kamchatkan siberian (northeastern russian indigeneous) rhythms and chants. such sampling, as tricia rose points out, is “not unlike versioning practices in caribbean musics”, insofar as it is “about paying homage, an invocation of another’s voice to help you to say what you want to say”, through a “process of musical and cultural archeology” (1994: 79). space ape’s sonic archeology of haiti and kamchatkan rhythms intensifies the usual processes by which sampling undertakes homage through invocation, insofar as it invokes the other’s alien voicing through a process of hauntological possession. space ape becomes-infected by the ritual music makers attributed by lovecraft to the cthulhu cult; knowingly or not, his bass fiction is already shaped by cthulhic signs, sampled as the sine-waves of indigeneous kamchatkan riddims. not only are the black woods and seas of the cthulhu cult unknown to white men, but the entire alien cosmogony of the elder gods—those “abstract black holes laughing at you”, in space ape’s verse—hint at an interstellar and aquatic realm of nonhuman elder mutants known solely through the ritual and musical traditions of the black atlantic. lovecraft’s tale is already a sonic fiction, relying on its riddim chants to awake cthulhu from sea slumber; in this slippage of signs to sines, it encompasses the collective enunciation of a bass fiction, as its horrorific alien entity slumbers under the unfathomable weight of undersea pressure. bass fiction, in this sensory language, also allegorises the upwards momentum of what has been buried: in its uncanny return, cthulhu embodies the very mechanics of horror, individuating the becoming of that which horrifies, as that which is dreamed crawls up from the deep, emerging qua becoming, refusing to remain pushed down, refusing to remain erased from memory and history alike, under the sea and submerged into myth. cthulhu, as collective enunciation of the erased and submerged black atlantic, returns. lovecraft’s unreliable narrator, steeped in white supremacy and blinded by racism, cannot see the mutant r1 cthulhu for what it is: an aquatic alien war machine, communicating through dreams and riddim, biding its time to arise from the deep. like space ape, cthulhu arises when the collective enunciation of its afrodiasporic followers call it forth through chants and riddim rituals in the dance; and like how the drexciyans seek to exact vengeance for the trauma of the middle passage by unleashing sonic storms from above and below, cthulhu arises to avenge its aquatic burial. indeed, cthulhu arises only when its afrodiasporic followers undertake the necessary alignment of their machinic orality with the precession of the stars to relieve the pressure. cthulhu is not just a horrorific figure, but the arising of an elder god, an ancient telepathic mythos incarnate, a pre-western and pre-christian figuration that “is fishes” and yet vaguely anthropoid—a virtual body of hostile alien becoming, descended from the stars yet buried in the aquatic deep. the spatial orientiation of cthulhu is often signalled as an “occult” aspect of lovecraft, but it is properly hermetic, which is to say, an axiom of kemetian mythscience visible in the architectural alignment of egyptian artifacts: as above, so below.22 van veen | victims themselves of a close encounter 105 reading anew the anthropic fish-shape of cthulhu, it also calls to mind the ancient dogon beliefs in the fish-like nommos of sirius that are often referenced in afrofuturist mythos; sirius plays a predominant role in egyptian/kemetian star science (see griaule and dieterlen 1986). reread again, cthulhu appears as already an afrofuturist figure, an infection of the hostile alien virus in lovecraft’s text. from space, from that distant continent of the outer darkness, cthulhu arises from its middle passage sea burial, from the groundless ground of traumatic memory. the troubling dreams of the tale’s white characters, foreshadowing the outer space alien’s aquatic emergence, allegorise white fears over the rise of the black atlantic, and its return of the repressed, and hostile, alien. • • • the timing is crucial, the stars must be right; the alien arrivals of interstellar afrofuturists suggests a coordinated attack in dreams and from water, land, and outer space: when the stars were right, they could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, they could not live. but although they no longer lived, they would never really die (lovecraft 2008: 214). the great underwater city of r’lyeh, “with its monuments and sepulchres”, where cthulhu and his cohorts wait entombed for the stars to realign, is already part of a dread black imaginary that connects the aquatic to the alien, outer space to the depths of aquatic and inner space. like drexciya’s neptune’s lair, r’lyeh awaits resurgence from the depths; its technical construction as monumental architectural likewise signals its intended design as a space for collective becomings through the future chants of riddim science. and like space ape’s virtual body of the hostile alien, “immune from dying”, they would never really die. the afrofuturist alien-aquatic becoming lives-on: it infiltrates and survives even the horrors of white mythology. living out my life like i’m on the run (reprise) i’m keeping all the scars you gave me i’ll show them to you indirectly i’m scratching at the pain within let me show you how the world begins. — the space ape, “on the run” (2012) the last blog post for london-based dubstep poet space ape is dated october 29th, 2012, just two years shy of his death on october 2nd, 2014. the post features but a single video, for a track entitled “on the run”, self-released as part of his 2012 solo album, xorcism. press play and the black body of space ape appears, the darkness of his skin constrasted by painted white lines—or lashes—that criss-cross his face, back and arms. even as space ape is on the run—hunted, and haunted—he faces the camera as if to challenge his persistently dancecult 7(2)106 ambiguous interlocutor, the “you” of his lyrical direction. facing the onset of cancer, in xorcism space ape confronts the analogical, yet autonomous and arbitrary, relationship of the sign to the sine, of the bass fiction mapped to the becoming of a singular and individuated body that will, through its sonic fiction, exceed its earthly existence. xorcism maps, in flesh and blood, the sines of bass fiction through signs scrawled across his body, while confronting, and yet celebrating, the immunity of his virtual body to death. staring at the camera underneath hooded and shadowed eyes, space ape evokes the very mythologised image of the urban primitive, his bare-skinned black body marked by white scars—scars that can likewise be perceived as the sacred geometry of haitian vodou, signs cut upon flesh that reflect the sines and sounds of the haitian drumming, chanting and ritual music that space ape samples throughout xorcism. space ape’s white scars suggest the x-raying of the skeletal, and the tracing of an internal scarification; they likewise suggest the scars of bearing the burden of whiteness upon the lashed and hunted skin of a singularly alien, black body. a body at the crossroads, marked by white crosses (see fig. 2). figure 2. space ape, xorcism (2012). photo credit: hiroo tanaka (2012). van veen | victims themselves of a close encounter 107 materialised as white signs inscribed on the flesh, these visual metaphors, like white phosphorous, set fire to his “burnt charcoal skin” (“spirit of change”, xorcism, 2012). as he writhes in spastic motion, space ape makes immediate mention of his scars in the first line of “on the run”. these burning white lines appear to memorialise the “scars you gave me” (and once again, the ambiguous you, a “you” that is at once both us and them, him and you, becoming and being, sign/sine): scars upon the liminal skin lashed by forces that blur the internal and external, from a “you” that fluctuates between the within/without. “on the run” is the second track, or rather, ritual, of space ape’s “xorcism”. the album as a whole appears as an xorcism of a thing that possesses, or haunts, space ape. each of seven tracks is no longer than just over two minutes; each ritual is brief, to the point, and dense with affect and signification. the erasure of the letter “e” in the album’s title draws attention to the graphic mark of the letter “x” as it fronts xorcism: the intersection of two lines, two lashes, two scars, in a cross. space ape/papa legba. that the “e” has been removed suggests that the xorcism is not of an e/xternality that has come to reside within, but of a thing that possesses the liminal state of transgressing inside to outside, of being of both and yet neither. possessed by the hostile alien within; a hostile becoming of the otherwise autonomous alien. black skin / white scars white supremacy has long lashed its scars upon the thin epidermal layer of the flesh, in a process that frantz fanon called “epidermalisation”, whereby the epidermis is the site of an ontological fissure between the human and the inhuman (2004: xv). the skin is a battleground; it encloses selves that are viewed by white supremacy as but dread bodies. space ape’s bass fiction enters into a becoming of the body that writhes against yet with its scars, that challenges its interlocutors, that looks you in the eyes while it is eaten from within. the album of xorcism arises, in this space, as the horrorific bass fiction soundtrack for the tale of hostile alien becoming, in which black radicalism arises from the deep, from the drexciyans to space ape, to relieve the weight of all that burdens. • • • white supremacy declares black bodies subhuman by dint—in part—of their darkened epidermis. but space ape has preemptively abandoned what kodwo eshun calls the “treacherous category” of the human (1999: 00[-005]). space ape is a “hostile alien, immune from dying” (“space ape”, burial, 2006). like the drexciyans, space ape is an r1 mutant. but xorcism signifies the threshold of bass fiction becoming nonfiction: it is the virtual body confronted with the becoming-death of its earthly source, with the fragility of its flesh. xorcism marks the crossroads of the sign/sine, of the non-fictional becoming though which we all must pass. • • • dancecult 7(2)108 yet the body is now confonted by the hostile alien within; space ape is confronted with the materialisation of a deadly becoming run amok. for these scars are also of a cancer. in the “razor-like” rain from a “wretched sky”, space ape tries to “wipe clear a memory of an internal enemy / siphoning his energy” (“spirit of change”, xorcisim, 2012). as his music samples the sound and spirit of vodou (vodouisant, to be a “servant of the spirits”, in a sound/space where “all is equal between servant and master” (space ape, “backward”, 2006)), space ape must “trust in this spirit, the spirit of change”. by embracing the “spirit of change”, the deacon of becoming, space ape sets out to “xorcise” that which consumes him from within. such an xorcism is not a rejection, an irradiation or exorcism proper; rather, it seeks to separate the spirits from the cells through the brave affirmation of what comes to pass, in the affirmation of what amiri baraka called the “changing same” (1999). an affirmation, even, in the giving of his body over to science—a giving over that is inflected with all the horrors of tuskegee—in which he will be “compliant” (“he gave his body over to science”, xorcism, 2012). xorcism at the intersection of forces external and internal (see fig. 3). space ape’s later lyrics, in xorcism above all, but also the dread dubstep of “the devil is a liar” on killing season (hyperdub 012, 2014)—a title that darkly anticipates the transformation of worlds figure 3. space ape as the devil (is a liar). photo: gustav newby (2014). van veen | victims themselves of a close encounter 109 and bodies that is to come—reflect a convergence of disenchantment, in which the structural racism of the body politic materialises in the cancer of his black body. space ape rhymes with the cool yet fierce clarity of an emcee who, as dummy magazine observes, expresses “his deep dissatisfaction with contemporary britain” (cliff 2012). in the same gesture, as the press release of label hyperdub reveals, space ape channels his personal experience of “coping with a rare form of cancer, neurolymphamatosis”: i’ve been dreaming of a wonderful life in peace with a child and a beautiful wife but life’s a liar baby life’s a cheat making promises it cannot keep —the space ape, “on the run” (xorcism, 2012) • • • as he twitches and writhes to saxophone reminiscent of ornette coleman, space ape’s black skin fades into the black background, leaving the scars of whiteness vibrating in the dark, his fervent lyrics appearing all the more urgent given the brevity of the becoming, some two minutes and twenty-three seconds. • • • the space ape’s human body, in the name and father of stephen samuel gordon, was consumed after a five-year battle with cancer. i write in memoriam and reverence to stephen—an inspiring force whom i met but once, but saw perform as space ape twice.23 i write in the spirit of the changing same, the spirit space ape embraced in his xorcism of the alien within. i marvel at his bravery for undertaking an xorcism that signalled acceptance of all that may come. and i write to memorialise how it is that the space ape, the hostile alien, this bass fiction of the virtual body, is immune from dying—the space ape as afrofuturist becoming, as the “self-creation” of an inventive life that knew no bounds, as a virtual body that intersects the earthly and the unearthly, a speculative and singular radical imaginary that once walked the earth, can never die, and can be activated again to xorcise all that has confined, marked, lashed and scarred the becoming of a body. space ape resonates still in the bass fictions of the deep; he arises from the black atlantic to relieve the pressure every time the record is spun. rest in the depths and shake loose the stars. for stephen samuel gordon, the space ape, 17 june 1970—2 october 2014. acknowledgements i give my most humble thanks to the spirit of stephen samuel gordon, who inspired countless others to seek out their own becomings. rest in power. to steve goodman and luciana parisi, my deepest respects. boundless gratitude to hillegonda rietveld, and kind thanks to the anonymous reviewer. dancecult 7(2)110 notes 1 interview with the author, june 2007. see “kode 9 & space ape @ mutek 07 _ [tv]”: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0myajfs3uq>. 2 see “kode 9 & space ape @ mutek 07 _ [tv]”: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0myajfs3uq>. 3 according to clash magazine (murray 2012), samples for the album were taken from the following tracks, mostly of haitian origin, though some from the traditional music of the siberian peoples of kamtchatka: anastasija vasilevna gitorovka. 1999. “chant et tambour sur cadre jajar” (track 4). sibérie 4. korjak kamtchatka: tambours de danse de l’extreme-orient siberien. buda musique (cd): 925982. artibonite\archaie. 1995. “rara\bizango” (track 2). rhythms of rapture, sacred musics of haitian vodou. smithsonian folkway recordings (cd): sf 40464. <http://www.discogs. com/various-rhythms-of-rapture-sacred-musics-of-haitian-vodou/release/1731052>. drummers of the societe absolument guinin. 2001. “contredance” (track 1), “afranchi” (track 3). voodoo drums. universal sound (cd): us cd 16. <http://www.discogs.com/ drummers-of-the-societe-absolument-guinin-voodoo-drums/master/171133>. irina khristoforovna kolegova. 1994. “accapella” (track 5). sibérie 4. korjak kamtchatka: tambours de danse de l’extreme-orient siberien. buda musique (cd): 925982. premye nimewo group. 1995. “laserenal” (track 7). rhythms of rapture, sacred musics of haitian vodou. smithsonian folkway recordings (cd): sf 40464. <http://www.discogs. com/various-rhythms-of-rapture-sacred-musics-of-haitian-vodou/release/1731052>. street music of haiti. 2010. “vaksin mix / madolfe / neg yo rele / pa blie / map navigue” (track 6). rara in haiti. soul jazz records (cd): sjr cd230. <http://www.discogs.com/ no-artist-rara-in-haiti-street-music-of-haiti/release/3017027>. 4 yet such technicity does not produce a unity of the sign with the voice, but rather signals its constitutive différance with itself, its differal/delay/deferral precisely because of such “supplementary” technicity at the origin (which is to say, technicity is that which is added on after to make the origin complete to begin with). i admit an aside here that will have to be taken up elsewhere, following up on derrida when he writes, in speech and phenomena: “in order to really understand where the power of the voice lies, and how metaphysics, philosophy, and the determination of being as presence constitute the epoch of speech as technical mastery of objective being, to properly understand the unity of technē and phonē, we must think through the objectivity of the object” (1973: 75), a point that ought to resonate with speculative realism, save that such a thinking through aims precisely at the speculative distinction of subject/object, of the différance between the what and the who, in this case, as that différance between the human and the alien. it is because of the constitutive technicity of the différance between the what/who that there lies the potential for the human to become the virtual body of the alien; thus the speculative technicity or mythscience of speculative irrealism becomes necessary. 5 interview with the author, june 2007. see “kode 9 & space ape @ mutek 07 _ [tv]”: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0myajfs3uq>. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0myajfs3uq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0myajfs3uq http://www.discogs.com/various-rhythms-of-rapture-sacred-musics-of-haitian-vodou/release/1731052 http://www.discogs.com/various-rhythms-of-rapture-sacred-musics-of-haitian-vodou/release/1731052 http://www.discogs.com/drummers-of-the-societe-absolument-guinin-voodoo-drums/master/171133 http://www.discogs.com/drummers-of-the-societe-absolument-guinin-voodoo-drums/master/171133 http://www.discogs.com/various-rhythms-of-rapture-sacred-musics-of-haitian-vodou/release/1731052 http://www.discogs.com/various-rhythms-of-rapture-sacred-musics-of-haitian-vodou/release/1731052 http://www.discogs.com/no-artist-rara-in-haiti-street-music-of-haiti/release/3017027 http://www.discogs.com/no-artist-rara-in-haiti-street-music-of-haiti/release/3017027 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0myajfs3uq van veen | victims themselves of a close encounter 111 6 the hyperdub blog is now archived at <http://riddim.ca>. 7 “hyperdub” appears as a passing descriptor in goodman’s sonic warfare, in one of two chapters on afrofuturism, where it appears to signal the rave virus of the hardcore continuum (2010: 165). 8 the recombinatory invention of their personas and proper names, as constellated becomings of an afrofuturist speculative imaginary, will be attended to below. space ape’s designation of himself as “i-man”, a reference to the jamaican rastafari patois, appears above in the lyrics to “space ape” (on burial, 2006). 9 simon reynolds writes that 2-step “is a general rubric for all kinds of jittery, irregular rhythms that don’t conform to garage’s traditional four-on-the-floor pulse” (1999a). 2-step is a breakbeat genre that developed first in london from a cross between the deep and soulful sounds of new york garage house (named after the paradise garage) and uk drum ’n’ bass. 10 see zephaniah’s collaboration, “illegal”, with uk minimalist house duo swayzak, on himawari (2000). 11 for example, see nick land’s “meltdown” (circa 1997): <https://soundcloud.com/ virtualfutures/meltdown-nickland>. land’s work may be situated as an influence for space ape’s verse, insofar as stephen samuel gordon was closely affiliated with members of land’s cybernetic culture research unit (ccru), including steve goodman (kode9) and luciana parisi (see below). 12 goodman is a former member of the cybernetic culture research unit (ccru), an exiled arm of warwick’s philosophy department run first by sadie plant (before she abandoned academia) and then nick land (before academia abandoned him). the ccru (infamously) never did officially exist from approximately 1995 through 1997. in simon reynold’s words, the ccru was “striving to achieve a kind of nomadic thought” through its multimedial pastiche of deleuzean philosophy, cyberpunk science fiction, numerology and chaos magick (1999). its grad students included cultural theorist mark fisher (k-punk) and abstract sex feminist scholar luciana parisi, afrofuturist theorist and otolith group filmmaker kodwo eshun, hyperdub label founder, dubstep producer and academic steve goodman (kode9), as well as speculative realist philosophers ray brassier and iain hamilton grant. parisi was the life partner of stephen samuel gordon. it is worth taking a moment to realise the incredible contribution of the ccru to modern thought and artistic practice. 13 see “kode 9 & space ape @ mutek 07 _ [tv]”: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0myajfs3uq>. 14 for example, in octavia butler’s clay’s ark (1984), an alien virus is brought back to earth by an astronaut (eli) that remakes human bodies into catlike creatures with improved sight, hearing and reflexes. though not overtaking human consciousness entirely, the virus instills the urge to infect others and breed ever-more alien children. themeatically, the virus from alpha centauri allegorises popular culture’s “superhuman” tropes of blackness (and fears of “black breeding” and miscegeny) while exploring the question of what it means to be human (and become-alien). 15 interview with the author, june 2007. see “kode 9 & space ape @ mutek 07 _ [tv]”: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0myajfs3uq>. 16 interview with the author, june 2007. see “kode 9 & space ape @ mutek 07 _ [tv]”: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0myajfs3uq>. https://soundcloud.com/virtualfutures/meltdown-nickland https://soundcloud.com/virtualfutures/meltdown-nickland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0myajfs3uq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0myajfs3uq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0myajfs3uq dancecult 7(2)112 17 interview with the author, june 2007. see “kode 9 & space ape @ mutek 07 _ [tv]”: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0myajfs3uq>. i have here corrected my interview question, which (incorrectly) identified sun ra as from jupiter. 18 until the death of james stinson on 3 september 2002, the identities behind drexciya remained (all but) unknown. gerald donald continues to produce music under other heteronyms (including dopplereffekt and arpanet), as well as re-releasing drexciya material (and unreleased material) via the journey of the deep sea dweller series (i–iv) on clone classic cuts. 19 in turning to cthulhu, i nod to recent work in speculative realism (and other thingly approaches) on h.p. lovecraft, particularly texts from eugene thacker, graham harman and dylan trigg. because of the space it would require, i must set aside a possible encounter, other than to propose here a very different kind of speculative irrealism, one in which the objective certainty of speculative realism’s unknowable “thing” (or “object”) remains constitutively undecideable (insofar as it is purely object, not subject), in part because the ontological differentiation of the who from the what encodes an unequal relation of power in its différance that tends to serve the who. 20 interview with the author, june 2007. see “kode 9 & space ape @ mutek 07 _ [tv]”: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0myajfs3uq>. 21 this track exists in two 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duke university press. whitehead, alfred north. 1978. process and reality (corrected edition). new york: the free press. williams, ben. 2001. “black secret technology: detroit techno and the information age”. in technicolor: race, technology, and everyday life, edited by alondra nelson and thuy linh n. tu, 154–77. new york: new york university press. wright, michelle m. 2004. becoming black: creating identity in the african diaspora. durham: duke university press. womack, ytasha. 2013. afrofuturism: the world of black sci-fi and fantasy culture. chicago: lawrence hill books. http://virtualfutures.co.uk/archive/ccru/ http://garagemusic.co.uk/2step.html http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.02.02 van veen | victims themselves of a close encounter 115 discography burial. 2006. burial. hyperdub (cd): hdbcd001. <http://www.discogs.com/burial-burial/master/11767>. johnson, lynton kwesi. 1980. bass culture. island records (lp): ilps 9605. kode9 & daddi gee. 2004. sign of the dub. hyperdub (12-inch): hyp001. <http://www.discogs.com/kode9-daddi-gee-sign-of-the-dub-stalker/release/267379>. kode9 + the space ape. 2006. backward. hyperdub (12-inch): hyp004. <http://www.discogs.com/kode9-space-ape-backward-9-samurai/master/103380>. ———. 2006. sine of the dub / stalker. hyperdub (12-inch): hyp001. <http://www.discogs.com/kode9-space ape-the-sine-of-the-dub-stalker/master/11487>. ———. 2014. killing season. hyperdub (12-inch): hyp012. <http://www.discogs.com/kode9-space-ape-killing-season/release/6224674>. ———. 2015. ghost town / at war with time. hyperdub (12-inch): hyp013. <http://www.discogs.com/space-ape-ghost-town-at-war-with-time/release/6907760>. space ape, the. 2012. xorcism. self-released (mp3). <http://www.discogs.com/space ape-the-xorcism/release/4040906>. swayzak. 2000. himawari. medicine label (lp): 498646-1. <http://www.discogs.com/swayzak-himawari/master/64133>. upsetters, the. 1976. super ape. island records (lp): ilps 9417. <http://www.discogs.com/upsetters-super-ape/master/129942>. http://www.discogs.com/burial-burial/master/11767 http://www.discogs.com/kode9-daddi-gee-sign-of-the-dub-stalker/release/267379 http://www.discogs.com/kode9-space-ape-backward-9-samurai/master/103380 http://www.discogs.com/kode9-space ape-the-sine-of-the-dub-stalker/master/11487 http://www.discogs.com/kode9-space-ape-killing-season/release/6224674 http://www.discogs.com/space-ape-ghost-town-at-war-with-time/release/6907760 http://www.discogs.com/space ape-the-xorcism/release/4040906 http://www.discogs.com/swayzak-himawari/master/64133 http://www.discogs.com/upsetters-super-ape/master/129942 “the only good system is a sound system”: the dub riddim revival in kingston erin c. macleod university of the west indies (jamaica), vanier college (canada) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.02.14> when lee “scratch” perry won a grammy in 2003, i remember listening to a programme on jamaican radio in which the hosts were answering calls from people wondering just who this “scratch” person actually was. sure, his jamaican e.t. album had just won a major award, but there were few people who seemed to know anything about the man. there was awareness of some of the songs perry had produced, but little awareness of the production creativity so celebrated outside of jamaica. as a canadian reggae fan who had moved to jamaica thanks to a government volunteering program, i was shocked. how could people not know about this dub reggae pioneer? but i am, as people in jamaica say, “from foreign”. whether through sweeping studies like michael veal’s dub: soundscapes & shattered songs in jamaican reggae (2007) or statements from perry biographer and reggae historian david katz that “dub has proven to be the most influential reggae sub-genre of all” (2014), it is clear that dub is foundationally important. past its heyday in the studios and (sometimes) dancehalls of the 1970s, however, it has not always been popular in jamaica. at the time of perry’s grammy win in 2003, you would have been hard pressed to hear dub in jamaica. if interested in that syrupy slow thump, jamaica would have been a disappointment. to hear dub reggae riddims, played on a strong, sturdy, bass-driven sound system, you’d have had to go to the uk for jah shaka or iration steppas or channel one. but in recent years, things have changed. though dancehall is still jamaica’s popular music and available on the radio and in the street at pretty much every hour of the day, every sunday evening you can now pay a visit to gabre selassie’s house to hear his rockers sound station sound system at kingston dub club. yes, even he admits that the idea of dub club came from the uk, but it is nice to hear dub back on jamaican shores. and it seems like interest in dub is expanding. figure 1. behind the bar at kingston dub club. photo credit: erin c. macleod (2015). though it has been around for over a decade, it is only really been in the past couple of years that dub club has been a thing in kingston. but on sunday evenings, up on skyline drive—a road that seems to hang precariously on the edge of the hills looking over kingston—gabre hosts sound system legends like saxon and king jammy’s, asking them to drop in and demonstrate their talents. over the past year or so the crowd has grown so large that a larger balcony and bar has been built (one no longer has to enter gabre’s house to use the washroom), and there’s probably over a couple hundred people—many are regulars, but there is representation of folks “from foreign” as well—who pack the yard every week. inspired by dub club, there have been events that have cropped up all over the city, from uptown to downtown, from hope road to crossroads to lower first street in trench town: inner city dub, dubwise, vinyl thursdays, trench town rock saturdays... as part of what is referred to as a “reggae revival”, i’ve read more than a couple articles that seem to suggest that the upsurge in dub alongside the rise of the revivalist cadre of artists like jah 9, chronixx, protoje, kabaka pyramid, jesse royal, iba mahr, kelissa and so on, would seem to indicate a shift away from dancehall. but i think it is more of a reminder of how, at the centre of musical experience in jamaica remains the sound system: the huge speakers and amplifiers that can be set up anywhere and at anytime, transforming car parks, streets, fields and beaches into dancehalls. the sound system has origins reaching back to the 1950s, when soundmen would connect record players to large, custom built speakers. the history of the sound system has been outlined by numerous scholars, but sonjah stanley-niaah focuses specifically (and helpfully) on the ways in which sound creates and recreates spaces in jamaica (2010), and julian henriques on the effect of these sound spaces (2011). dub may have blossomed in the studio, with production luminaries like king tubby, scientist and jammy’s, but it began on the sound system—and it is the sound system that is at the heart of the music in jamaica. whether the system is playing dancehall, roots, dub or celine dion, it is the sound that creates the space—the sound carves a dancehall out of a kingston street or a backyard on skyline drive. the sound system can carry any kind of music, as can be observed through the popularity of the north american mainstream phenomenon of edm (electronic dance music) which has also arrived on the island, with promoters pitching edm parties. the sound system is malleable—and the selectors know that they are responding to the crowd. chatting online to michaelangelo matos, author of the underground is massive: how electronic dance music conquered america (2015), he told me that “the thing with edm system culture is that it's not really at all about interaction. it's about spectacle. i have no problem with spectacle, per se, but it’s a wholly other paradigm than the selector responding to the audience in kind.” it doesn’t matter the music—with the sound system, it is all about what the audience wants. gabre selassie, when i went up and visited him at his home during the day, when the view is even more breathtaking, told me that his goal is to provide an option—to respond to a need—and to answer to the audience. people want to hear dub. just like how people at the forty-years-old-and-still-running rae town old hits sunday street dance want to hear barbra streisand, barry gibb and rick astley (so klassique sound will respond in kind), so too is gabre inviting anyone who wants to hear roots, rockers, reggae and dub—both classic and new—over to his house for a weekly party. and gabre thinks that an ideal plan would be dub club followed up by rae town. these events both centre on the sound system. i always tell people that i fell in love with reggae not because of bob marley, but because of stone love—one of jamaica’s most legendary sound systems. i’ve spoken to soca fans who insist that even the most resistant people will fall for the 150 bpm speed of power soca as long as it is introduced on the road. as a recent convert to the music of machel montano, i’d probably agree and i think that you might say the same thing for the sound system. it really is about the space that the sound system can create. for me, if i’m honest, dub has never been my favourite style of reggae. though i could happily listen to the lee perry-produced heart of the congos over and over again, i was never one for late-night dub-driven listening sessions. but gabre’s dub club changed that. dub works in the car, on headphones or at home, but dub club is a different space. sure, it’s about the music, but it’s also about the sound system. a mural that sits behind where the dub club stack of speakers is strung features further images of speakers and the message “the only good system is a sound system”. i can certainly get with that. author biography erin c. macleod teaches caribbean literature at vanier college in montreal, quebec. she has also been a lecturer in the institute of caribbean studies at the university of the west indies, mona campus, jamaica. she is the author of visions of zion: ethiopians and rastafari in the search for the promised land (nyu press, 2014) and has written about music and popular culture for the guardian, rolling stone, pitchfork, and wondering sound, among others. references katz, david. 2014. “dubbing is a must: a beginner’s guide to jamaica’s most influential genre.” fact (16th april). accessed 7th july 2015: <http://www.factmag.com/2014/04/16/dubbing-is-a-must-a-beginners-guide-to-jamaicas-most-influential-genre/>. henriques, julian. 2011. sonic bodies: reggae sound systems, performance techniques and ways of knowing. new york: continuum. matos, michaelagelo. 2015. the underground is massive: how electronic dance music conquered america. new york: dey street books. stanley-niaah, sonjah. 2010. dancehall: from slaveship to ghetto. ottawa: ottawa university press. veal, michael e. 2007. dub: soundscapes & shattered songs in jamaican reggae. middletown: wesleyan university press. discography congos, the. 1977. heart of the congos. black art (jamaica): klp005. <http://www.discogs.com/congos-heart-of-the-congos/master/37159>. perry, lee “scratch”. 2002. jamaican e.t. trojan records (uk): tjzv002. <http://www.discogs.com/lee-scratch-perry-jamaican-et/master/79287>. the vibe as peace: edmc conflict studies and montreal psytrance spheres dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 12(1): 66–84 issn 1947-5403 ©2020 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.11 the vibe as peace edmc conflict studies and montreal psytrance spheres marc-olivier castagner université du québec à montréal (canada) abstract while discourses of peace abound in cultural, youth and edmc studies, notably in relation to concepts like communitas, the dominant moral and modern conceptions of peace and conflict appear limited to tackling the inevitable conflict dynamics inside parties and around the vibe as a peak experience. inspired by contemporary peace studies, peter sloterdijk’s psychopolitical-morphological argument known as spherology and participation in montreal’s psytrance scenes, this paper offers an alternative understanding of productive conflicts at work in the vibe and outside of it. at the end, this paper seeks to offer observers and practitioners means to discuss the various peace-conflict dynamics nascent on dance floors with effects on global cultural formations. keywords: peace, psytrance, atmosphere, sloterdijk, spherology marc-olivier castagner holds a phd in political studies from the university of ottawa. he specializes in critical security, conflict and peace studies and the thought of peter sloterdijk. an avid darkpsy and techno enthusiast, his doctoral thesis explored the “rave-o-lutionary conflict” opposing rave cultures and contemporary western societies. he previously published on the relationship between humour and violence and european security, and he lectured in peace studies and conflict resolution at st. paul university in ottawa. he recently began teaching in contemporary geopolitics at the département de science politique of the université du québec à montréal (uqàm). email: <castagner.marc-olivier@uqam.ca>. feature article mailto:castagner.marc-olivier@uqam.ca castagner | the vibe as peace: edmc conflict studies and montreal psytrance spheres 67 introduction in the last decades, cultural and edmc studies illustrated the intimate relation between peace and conflict in the cultural politics of youth underground movements. these studies portrayed underground cultures as solutions carved out with violence and pressure, removed from neoliberal economics, environmental degradation, racism and misogyny. within a cultural architecture apart, underground movements and cultures appeared to create “a social space where difference, status and inequalities are temporarily suspended”. known by participants as “the vibe”, these spaces were “renowned for their extremely low levels of violence” (olaveson 2004: 94). fuelled by a reconciliatory and utopian mood, edm cultures were also described as preoccupied with changing the world and with bringing peace to all. some applauded without hesitation these pastoral mobilisations that “have a positive impact in the real world in a variety of ways” (sylvan 2005: 181). others, however, noted not without a touch of anxiety, that the vibe to export reveals, from the inside-out, other, more conflictual dynamics.1 this latter group emphasize that the more we look and live through these cultures, the more we see the immanent bordering or conflicted peaceful practices of the vibe. noting the conspiracies, paranoias, orientalism and microfascism characterizing the journey towards the peak, some edmc observers have concluded, if implicitly, that their field, at its very core, studies cultures as conflicts. such an understanding, obviously, generates important questions. this article explores some of them. if edmcs are at their core conflictual, what does this imply about analyses of the vibe as peace? can conflict be involved in the transpersonal peak experience so often presented in edmc literature and testimonies? how can the vibe be discussed in terms of conflict? our journey departs from the peace-conflict framework particular to (neo-)birminghamian cultural studies analysis or even turnerian anthropology. second, it considers edmc (conflict) studies with concepts from critical peace studies and psychopolitics. to illustrate, it will draw material from ethnographic and auto-ethnographic insights generated from the author’s many years of active participation in montreal’s psytrance universe. the scene, part of a “transnational, emergent and labyrinthine” culture (st john 2012: 4), will at first appear as a local iteration of what is often presented as the most peaceful of contemporary edmcs. it is characterized by ascentionist tropes and many issues central to the project of the human potential movement. it appears as the radicalisation of the plur generation’s resistance to neoliberalism. it carries an objection to the wars on crime, drugs and terror; it stages a quest towards global ecological transformation, sexual, gender or queer emancipation and active reconciliation with indigenous peoples all around the world. for the newcomer or the observer on the margins, this culture—especially at its peak—is peace realized, or peace in a process of realization. in what follows, we will see how psytrance in montreal is embedded in conflict(s). the first step of our inquiry, supported by the work of contemporary peace theorist wolfgang dietrich, will explain the importance of acquiring distance from moral and modern visions of peace. moral and modern frameworks theorize peace with concepts like justice and dancecult 12(1)68 security. in this dichotomous thinking, the vibe as peace cannot also be the vibe as conflict. in other words, it cannot approach the productive tensions inherent to feelings and ideas of justice and security. we will then explore a post-modern perspective to frame the party as a place rife with exclusionary dynamics. and a trans-rational perspective follows, furthering the analysis. supported by a fusion of stanislav grof ’s perinatal psychology and peter sloterdijk’s morphological tool, spherology, this section will discuss the vibe as an immunological density.2 the section describes the vibe’s achievement of temporary harmony through absorption and enlargement. the vibe and the experience of peace it carries are here understood to be entirely constitutive of conflict. at the end, being conscious about the productivity of conflict for the sustainment of any vibe is not to depart from psytrance ideals or practice, quite the contrary. psychopolitical analysis, combined with the other images or layers of peace, reinforces the deep tendencies while offering practitioners and observers means to discuss emergent bordering practices and their effects on the culture and its agents. bring back dionysus: the moral-modern peace paradigm in psytrance we should begin with a few notes on conflict and peace. practicing and researching conflict, from inter-state violence to internal cultural tensions, reproduces specific conceptions and visions of peace. when we engage in conflict, actively or discursively, we also engage in peace. but as peace theorists argue, contrary to conflict, peace still remains an unknown (lederach 2005: 5). in his recent trilogy entitled many peaces, wolfgang dietrich uncovered four layers of meaning (or “images”) attached to the term peace in western minds and practices: the energetic, the moral, the modern, and the post-modern peace (dietrich 2012, 2013 and 2018). let us focus for now on the most dominant assemblage: the moral combined with the modern. according to dietrich, the moral dimension of this dominant assemblage appeared a few centuries before christ and as early as the axial age. in this vision, peace means justice. however, justice “is [not] perceived here and now, but it is projected forward from a pitiful now into a better future, which first of all has to be imagined” (dietrich 2012: 74). as such, this vision posits a generalized cosmic total war between the good and the bad where peace and conflict are mutually exclusive. the present is conflict, chaos, division. it is dominated by exteriority. peace as justice becomes synonymous with the establishment of a clear separation between what is inside and what is outside. keeping the chaotic outside at bay is only one aspect of this total war. the other battlefield is the homeland, here and now: there are agents of chaos within us that must be either purified or excluded. for such peace to be maintained, two parallel movements must persist: the conversion or purification of the world, and submission to discipline by continual ritualized purifications. such a peace appears more like permanent wariness: a warmongering peace, a peace resulting from combat. castagner | the vibe as peace: edmc conflict studies and montreal psytrance spheres 69 for contemporary peace theorists like dietrich, there are few differences between the moral and the modern visions. since the “death of god”, justice was partially translated as security. however, the increased interest in worldly and material matters did not alter the spatial logics. both enacted the same processes of combat for peace, the same constant separation between inside and outside. while the hobbesian leviathan is one example of peace through permanent war, marxian classless society obtained by infinite expropriations is another. indeed, the modern vision is only a secularized version of the thousands years old cosmovision. for dietrich, both visions usually operate together in idea and practice. just like most of the social sciences and humanities, many branches of edmc literature exhibit a broad tendency to describe the vibe as peace, as justice, as security. some of the branches especially prone to theorizing a static and dichotomous understanding of conflict and peace include social-constructionist readings of the liminal, explorations of moral panics and discussions on emancipation or resistance.3 on the one hand, certain cultures were said to be in permanent peacelessness or war with the “mainstream”, while on the other hand their vibes were portrayed as (temporary or victorious) “authenticity”. conflict, especially within the vibe, was camouflaged. for these theorists, the vibe was peace. conventional narratives about psytrance culture and its history usually reaffirm such analysis.4 born in goa at the end of the 1980s before becoming a worldwide culture, psytrance pioneers were expatriated hippies, backpackers and freaks who felt the injustices and insecurity of neoliberalism, the war on drugs and the restrictions imposed by instrumental reason. as an answer to these outside pressures and modern illnesses, they developed a specific solution, a space carved into the margins of the mainstream. linked to the human potential movement, they tried to enact the revival of the archaic and the rebirth of dionysus. individual practices of ascension from the mainstream—like dance, drug intake, ashrams and travel—became means for the rise of a community of the enlightened (neo)shamans. the vibe, as it happened in their beach parties, was justice and security, a temporary victory over a chaotic and violent european modernity. fuelled by this experience and an extensive spiritual framework, the psytrance community acquired a global purpose: provoking global changes in consciousness. the goa “state of mind” exported worldwide with the tight networking of tourists and musicians contaminated montreal in the early 1990s. since then, its pioneers like dj zen, rikam, and more recently prana papa or akibel, have decorated montreal’s party spaces with an ascentionist structure. they are supported by a potent network of diy artists, promoters and collectives managing food, scene building, equipment sharing and party organizing. the community meets at carved out places. these include underground parties, local cafés, smoke shops, nightclubs, festivals like eclipse and timeless, sunday park events and food sharing assemblages, urban and remote. each of its community spaces is said to be both outside the mainstream and connected with the traditional, the archaic, the sacred, often performed via the reutilization of local indigenous symbolism and practices; every festival has its teepees and many have sacred smoke ceremonies. i cannot count the number dancecult 12(1)70 of times i stumbled on the global culture arch-prophet, terence mckenna, in montreal. music is ripe with his quotes, and i once came upon his book, food of the gods (same edition as mine), on my neighbors’ camp table at timeless 2018. while the spaces are still surveilled and curtailed in many ways by the mainstream, those of us who transitioned from club culture find peace, peace as justice, peace as security. inside these spaces, my friends and i can finally spread love and be spiritually open to nature’s energy. we can be on the good side, while being opposed in principle to the plagues of mainstream club culture: money, individualism, production, heteronormativity. authenticity in these spaces is measured against poser events like weekly piknic electronik and expansive stereo afterhour, or mega-raves like black and blue. participants and organizers—my crew included—constantly state the need to change world consciousness. we do this by proselytising to outsiders and contributing to harm reduction or ecological food-sharing. and of course we do this by making some noise. québec’s and canada’s national days are celebrated separately, on june 24th and july 1st respectively. during these weekends, many core actors of montreal’s psytrance scene merge, as they often do, with local techno crews increasingly marked by the presence of french expatriates to organize underground (anti) nationalist parties and festivals. on both st-jean-baptiste and canada day, parties will be held illegally. on the south shores of the st. lawrence river, facing montreal, one party offers a bricolage of resistant tropes: “no one is illegal”, inverted flags and loud music. the post-modern truth-experience psytrance culture is not, however, only in conflict with its not-so-distant outside. there are conflicts and power relationships inside, within the vibe, but the moral-modern peace paradigm is ill-equipped to see them. following dietrich’s genealogy, it is only with postmodern peace that a new paradigm opens up. peace is no longer justice or security, but truth about justice or security. and since there are as many practiced truths as there are contexts, conflicts necessarily abound. readers of bourdieu, foucault, maffesoli and deleuze in edmc studies emphasized the internal conflicts of dance cultures.5 they have shown intrinsic power relationships at work at various levels. they understood the (neo)shaman as a product of knowledge, technologies of power and habits: a subject of varied but specific dispositions, some applied to the surroundings of the party, some internalized in strict self-imposed discipline. authors have explored issues such as the biopolitics of harm reduction, normalizing practices at the door, lifestyle and discipline and debates on the best spiritechnics. in this vision, the (neo) shaman depends on (and contributes to) the formation of his/her “milieu”, the organized space. as explained by campbell, “the milieu is a mode and a medium for grasping the spatial co-ordinates and normalised distributions of circulatory flows such that an optimal circulation of people and things can be managed and maintained” (campbell 2019: 17). similarly, psytrance events are never only about “music”. seminars, visual designs, panels and barriers show the way at night and help channel traffic away from the river bridges. castagner | the vibe as peace: edmc conflict studies and montreal psytrance spheres 71 harm reduction specialists are on patrol, guidelines frame the ascentionist practices of the (neo)shamans in the gathering, and participants are encouraged to constantly look out for each other. edmcs, notably psytrance in montreal, are especially interesting to analyse from the post-modern vision. there are and always will be a plurality of crews and their vibes, truths about justice and security. walking through the encampments in a local edm festival, one may find a variety of vibes. as one prominent montreal producer explained, “here one needs to build his own clique”. and as saldanha observed with wisdom, “clique formation has a geography” (2007: 150). my own crew of friends is representative. we generally have the same opinion about the “illnesses” of society, but we value different things at parties, not only with respect to music. most of the girls of the group are creatures of the day, highly spiritual, love psychill, do yoga, and restrict their drug consumption to the minimum. the boys are on the transgressive side, nocturnal, less spiritual, more party animals; they prefer psytech because it is harder. i myself stand in the middle: spiritual but also transgressive, deep into darkpsy. debates and confrontations within our group are inevitable all year. how (much), when and why? which kind of music? which kind of activities? which party should we go to together? for example, there are intensive debates yearlong in relation to the biggest event of the year, eclipse, organized by rikam’s techsafari. each year it is the same discussions. for some participants, sometimes pejoratively called the hippies, eclipse is too commercial, too big. it has lost its authenticity. 3000 participants and a $350 ticket? it has lost its essence, its soul, its authenticity! but as an organizer told me, “everyone is here”. no one would miss this so-called commercial event for anything. going to a party is also highly ritualized. everyone needs slightly different preparation. while my girlfriend and i are light travelers (food, quality substances, warm clothing, cigarettes, a hoola-hoop and body paint), some friends pack like it is the end of the world. once on site, they will establish our encampment with great care. at night, trying to reach the peak will be a long and difficult process where small ritual differences within a group of friends will often become explicit. a friend wanting to get “trashed” might just be cautioned on his/her intentions, incited to take care of his/her health. in montreal, not only within our group, consumption of what mckenna calls “dominator” drugs, those reinforcing ego (cocaine, alcohol, etc.), is debated. with time, our group stabilized. more recently, on saturday nights of summer festivals, we split into smaller clusters, each with their own ways of the (neo)shaman. this “deliberate indifference”, or explicit differentiation, is necessary. in the words of saldanha, discussing the tensions between freaks and beggars in goa, “[w]e all agreed that deliberate indifference is necessary in order to have fun on the dance floor and not be bogged down by guilt. i too had to learn it” (2007: 171). in the post-modern vision, the vibe is not the experience of group security and justice in relation to a demonic always-present mainstream. it is a “truth” experience designed by individual and collective means where the (neo)shamans, the subjects, feel entirely immersed in their own internalized dispositions, sustaining feelings of security and justice. i have my own well established practice of reaching the apex: being alone in the dancecult 12(1)72 middle of the hardcore darkpsy sets, barefoot, enough cigarettes and water around, no copious meal within the last 4 hours. others in the group will prefer to walk in the forest, eat constantly and laugh their arses off. each of us practices our own “truths”. i don’t mind my group coming around and chatting on the dance floor, but if they stick around for too long, they break this vibe i am co-creating with the other lone dancers around me. i also find whistles disruptive. although they are crucial to others’ vibes of emancipation and authenticity, it is a far cry from mine. nonetheless, that is a truth i hold to: whistles are so vibe-breaking that they should be prohibited on site. thankfully, they are rare in events, in comparison to djembés. parties are “truth spaces” where various understandings of peace abound and bump up against each other. the inevitability of conflict led st john to affirm that psytrance communitas might be better termed discommunitas (st john 2012: 77-78). the vibe is plural and relational. it depends on context, participants and participants’ knowledge and practices. any single party is better viewed as a plurality of vibes and vibe tribes (st john 2009: 120). authors had it right when using the metaphor of the city in reference to parties, events, or even the music. discussing the early rave scene, gore viewed parties as “microcosm of the contemporary metropolis” (1997: 51). st john, in describing boom festival, referred to it as a “dance metropolis”: “a temporary sonicity that includes its own cosmopolitan population, architecture, communications, plumbing, restaurants and shopping center, security, and recycling” (2009: 126). in these spaces, the vibe is peace and conflict, peace predicated on multiple necessary exclusions. the paradoxical transrational-spherological peace experience this paper will now follow critical peace theories interested in the spatiality of pre-discursive peace-conflicts dynamics. they will be related, if implicitly, to notions like body, feelings, emotions and trauma, ultimately moving us towards a psychopolitical take on the vibe.6 wolfgang dietrich is at the core of this current. inspired by indigenous and oriental cosmovisions, as well as by the figure of the shaman, the unesco chair of peace studies looks to reactivate what he terms the energetic peace, a vision silenced (but never forgotten) in the western world since the coup d’état by the moral paradigm two millennia ago. the result is stunning: from the refusal of rigid dichotomies by the post-modern emerges another image of peace, namely the transrational, where the subject is notably understood to be: . . . like a constellation of energy. the energy, which is imagined as the innermost self, is contained in the body that itself is an accumulation of energy enclosed by a more or less firm form. this form is permeable, because every human being also has an energy field outside of his/her own body, and this field is influenced by other human beings, just like she/he herself also influences the energy field of others (dietrich 2012: 242).7 for such energetic beings, peace is first of all a matter of harmony, an immersion wherein “the energy of life [can] flow unimpeded” (dietrich 2012: 260). in order to access this harmony and be “in the flow”, a person has to open up. for harmony, castagner | the vibe as peace: edmc conflict studies and montreal psytrance spheres 73 . . . arises first of all within the human being itself. from this grows harmony with others, and from that in turn, harmony with the whole world…. peace is manifested through not desiring and not wanting to control, the letting happen (dietrich 2012: 48-49). at this point, some scholars will probably be inspired by spinozist-deleuzian conceptual tools like intensity or atmosphere.8 however, as argued by anderson, rigid nonrepresentational theories giving ontological priority to affect risk dismissing the ways in which affect is shaped, worked, conducted, contained, generated and transmitted by discourses, images and apparatuses (2014: 79-103). peter sloterdijk’s spherology, supported by stanislav grof ’s perinatal psychology, offers this article a potent toolbox sensible to these aspects. this addictive “meta-narrative” tells a story of energetic beings in spheres. for sloterdijk, a heideggerian and nietzschean philosopher, a sphere is composed of five co-constitutive elements: two diffused poles, a density, a form or force and a difference between inside and outside. the first two elements are the active/ecstatic pole (the self ) and the activating pole (the partner of self ). the third is an atmosphere (a field, a vibe) linking the two poles of partnership. there is no individualism here. a subject is inherently dual: inspired, conducted, contaminated, mesmerized, driven, mobilized by the energies of others. as elden and mendieta explain, “coming to the world is a form of coupling; being-with is a being-withanother which forms a couple” (elden and mendieta 2009: 6). as the being-in-sphere partners with humans and things, s/he “participate[s] and create[s] multiple microspheres simultaneously” ( janicka 2016: 66). s/he engages permanently and continually in spherical relationships of various formats and of various polar qualities. the same goes for psytrancers and members of montreal’s edm scene. while i come to this dance floor, this party, i come with many partners in and around me: girlfriend, friends, gods, this or that dj, former teachers, terence mckenna, sloterdijk, st john, some material objects (my cigarettes and leather pouch). some partners are new to me: this dancer next to me with whom i will spend the night sharing a spot. i also share my partners with others, forming molecular networks, vibe tribes or what sloterdijk would call “foams”: surreal neighbourhoods composed of many spheres held together by commonalities that enable accelerated contaminations and transmission (sloterdijk 2003: 230). the fourth element of a sphere is a container form around the self guaranteed by the partner(s). this creates, finally, a sensible difference between interior and exterior. the sphere, as a concept, directly discusses the spatiality of psytrance subjectivities and their assemblages. it is a concept that puts emphasis on the density formed by relationships that one inhabits. the density of these relationships distinguishes and protects inhabitants from the world through the (re)creation of a world. hence, as we will see, the vibe, as a feeling of justice and security, a produced truth experience, is a deep experience of space as protective interiority. dancecult 12(1)74 every sphere has similar structural qualities (interiority, bi/multipolarity, a density, etc.). it also has a generalized purpose: it is a transfer of past space-experiences (couture 2016: 69). dietrich goes on in the same direction: “biographic experience of the world is predetermined by perinatal experience in a decisive way” (dietrich 2013: 55). any sphere models the intra-uterine bubble (the placenta, or the mother-foetus relationship), the most perfect protection and habitat one would have ever lived in and the proto-subject’s first experience of harmony. stanislav grof, the pioneer of transpersonal and psychedelic psychologies who inspired dietrich and sloterdijk, stated it clearly: a human’s first experience is the core of the basic perinatal matrix (bpm) system, the compass for anyone’s biographical experiences. in the womb, all needs are met and beings-to-be float, ecstatic, in non-duality, in “a blissful, undifferentiated, oceanic state of consciousness” (grof 1975: 105). this is also “closely related to, if not identical with, the transcendental experiences . . . for which abraham maslow coined the term ‘peak experiences’” (grof 1975: 107). the bpm i conditions subsequent experiences of peace and harmony for a human subject. spherology, in the same way, illustrates how placenta nurtures foetus in a surreal relationship. a sphere is formed around the ecstatic being-to-be, providing the latter with a habitat, protection, immunity and a primary experience of perfect interiority. later in life, spheres are spiritual and concrete re-constructions of the first experience of harmony. spherical beings design daily their extra-uterine wombs with micro-rituals, practices, symbols and movements. my spheres emerge in the knowledge and practice that i enact here and now. a couple materializes in its apartment, a tribe in its hang-out and its encampment, a spiritual community in its churches and rituals. psytrance culture, therefore, enacts different scales of spherical processes. i am attracted to this or that party by my (local) spherical influences and will try to transfer/reinforce them on site. for example: prana papa, an inspiring dj that i enjoy listening to at home, is scheduled to play. i will not miss the chance to dance in his music! moreover, my girlfriend and i, having our own spherical relationships, will try to inhabit our common space in this festival. my influences of work, family, school and life-events—not unlike hers—will mark the way we act or move here. together, we will have our own vibe, and someone passing between us or visiting our tent will be able to experience that difference. that guy with the whistle surely has his very own spheres. the same is true of vibe tribes with their encampments and rituals; they are multipolar spherical assemblages sustaining their own vibes. as ten bos explains, “human beings are creatures that desire to be encircled and surrounded” (2009: 79). event organizers and promoters, in designing the “difference engine” (st john 2012: 8), have their very own spherical intentions reminiscent of group psychotherapy. the party-space ought here to be “a safe, sheltered environment [that] may help people to act, express emotions, and create meaning in a way that they cannot otherwise do in daily life” (hunger and rittner 2015: 376). they offer a terrain of experimentation for anyone to create their own spheres of harmony. in this sense, castagner | the vibe as peace: edmc conflict studies and montreal psytrance spheres 75 vibe cultures—mastering ecstasy, immersion and contacts—are veterans of the journey towards primal interiority. psytrance, with its marked spirituality and its quest for the archaic harmony in being, appears as a radicalized expression of what sloterdijk calls spheropoetics, the art of installation. surrounded by spiritual discourses, symbols and a complex technical assemblage, edm and psytrance parties intend to provoke radical at-wombness. participants’ testimonies directly speak about this experience as cosmic harmony, as being in the womb of mother nature. djs, organizers and participants will then work to perfect their coordination on site so that every vibe tribe will have its means to reach this thing, or better, so that a “meta-vibe” may emerge. so far, the vibe is peace. it is the density of relationships that a subject inhabits mentally and physically, a density that resonates with the primordial space of life. however, spheres are immunological designs that protect their inhabitants from the outside. the moral and the modern, just like the post-modern understanding, showed aspects of this exclusionary tendency clearly. spheres are hence constituted by and constitutive of conflict; they are as much a product of primordial harmony as of a second space, what grof calls bpm ii, or what sloterdijk calls anti-sphere (2010: 545). grof identifies bpm ii as formed in the early stages of the birthing process, when the mechanisms of expulsion abruptly end the experience of non-duality. in this anti-sphere (if ever one can be “in” such a thing) everything is turned upside down; the former inhabitant of the sphere is now crushed (and/or dissolved) in an instance of complete externalization. grof understands this second basic perinatal matrix to enable “the recording of all unpleasant life situations in which an overwhelming destructive force imposes itself on the passive and helpless subject. the most typical and frequent examples are situations endangering survival and body integrity” (grof 1975: 121). these include “experiences [of ] incredible physical and psychological tortures” (grof 1975: 116). for sloterdijk, the nurturing partner, the animator, seems to have abandoned (or arguably, turned in alliance against) the self who now faces imminent death. therefore, we may easily relate this space to pure oppression, invasion, dis-animation, auto-referential enclosure, étroitesse, depression, melancholia, ennui, dystopia, nietzschean individuation and obviously hell. psytrance is versed not only in creating hospitable spheres of love and harmony. it also specializes in the production of atmospheres of intensity, conscious bombardments, a difference engine channelling a variety of thoughts, emotions, feelings and affects that are sometimes too heavy and challenging. in the party, one has contact with a multiplicity of atmospheres, spheres and vibes in the same physical space. as anderson argues, atmospheres are local entities, far from being universal. atmospheres are relations of co-existence where each entity is affected differently by the whole. “atmospheres can . . . coexist alongside one another without fusing or melting together precisely because the objects and bodies that make up an atmosphere do not exist as a set of totally interactive or accessible relations” (anderson and ash 2015: 40). s/he does not stand, dance, live in all, but s/he is still touched constantly. while many will be compatible with my own spherical constructions dancecult 12(1)76 (we are all here at this party, no?), others might externalize, invade, crush or change the climate of my own portable spaces. this touch, that thought, even a whistle, might threaten this vibe i am in. still, oppression is not conflict yet. something must ensue: an activity, a mobilisation, a process of discharge, a fight for interiority, being outside yet moving to, hopefully, get home. our understanding of transrationalism underlines the importance of a third experience of primal space that sloterdijk calls purgatory. grof names this spatial experience bpm iii, the dionysian perinatal matrix. the situation ceases to have the quality of suffering and agony; the experience then changes into a wild, ecstatic rapture of cosmic proportions that can be referred to as ‘volcanic ecstasy’ [that] involves enormous explosive tension with many aggressive and destructive elements [where] various polar sensations and emotions melt into one undifferentiated complex that seems to contain the extremes of all possible dimension of human experience (grof 1975: 125). in transrationalism, today’s tensions in inter-personal relationships are reminiscent of past experiences. they are symptoms of previous unresolved conflict episodes, themselves reenactments of the primal spaces of birth. these reactions, these new “episodes” for dietrich, “block” the flow of energy (dietrich 2013: 34).9 parties may indeed provoke such episodes. as a participant is repeatedly distressed by intensive body contacts, speeches, loud music, wind, smoke, dirt, body odors, lack of sleep, anything that makes a party a madhouse, s/he can become possessive, violent, and/or resentful for being forcibly abandoned by his/her partners, thrown in hell. reactive, s/he will move towards identifying the sources of pain and destroy/cancel them. these offensive mobilisations will usually be framed as being for justice and security. but such “dark” spheropoetics is warmongering and arguably carries a “bad vibe”. the ethics of peace in shamanism, transrationalism, spherology and psytrance is different. it promotes a working with more than the fight against energetic blockages of the self. to use a spherological metaphor, the spherical being needs to correct the atmospherical pressure through adaptation. and this cannot be performed individually; it requires basic immunity, partnerships that are hopeful and encouraging (“go on, almost there!”). ritualized party destructuration is a structured process: the post-birth participant somewhat already knows the finale (sweet interiority) and is animated towards it. hence, psytrancers of the dark night are trained regulars willing to withstand the adversities of the party itself. thanks to friends, comfortable clothing, my take on the ideological structure of the culture itself and over a decade of party experience, i can stand and enjoy the darkpsy hardships composed of bodies, vibes, musical cues like screams, police sirens, alien sounds or dark mantras, anything that has the potential to reactivate anti-spherical experiences. i can be in this hard void yet dancing my ass off with a smile. i understand that “opening ourselves to what we oppose may lead us into a crisis. such a crisis can be healing” (dietrich 2013: 126). castagner | the vibe as peace: edmc conflict studies and montreal psytrance spheres 77 throughout this journey driven by hope, recalling bmp iii, intensity is on the rise until the participant reaches the climax. for the resentful, climaxing means the (metaphorical) destruction of the inopportune other and the return to status quo ante bellum. but for the (neo)shaman, the movement is different. the apex is the overcharge and dissolution of what was left of ego mechanisms. dietrich, like turner, argues that when a certain limen is crossed, “subconscious mechanisms are no longer active. the persona’s contact boundaries dissolve, and a world that lies beyond them opens up” (dietrich 2013: 221). energy flowing completely free, the persona drops the mask. s/he starts, like the afrofuturists state, to “feel at home in alienation” (goodman 2010: 61). when one crosses the limen, s/he reaches experience-spaces related to bpm iv, with or without being “struck by visions of blinding white or golden light” (grof 1980: 85). doing so, s/he basically comes back to bpm i. if we follow our spherological interpretation of transrationalism, however, what happens in climactic states is less complete dissolution in non-duality than, again, a process of transfer. it reproduces perinatal experience-spaces and their subsequent re-enactments in the world. “hey, i know this place!” indeed, rebirth, or birthing anew, is no linear process; it is a cycle. the spherological tools understand the end as the re-establishment of the beginning, the sphere, at-wombness and the interior experience of non-duality. as ten bos argues, “mysticism is the art of being surrounded or enclosed without fear and desire. this implies that the surrounding medium loses its object status: you are in it rather than in front of it” (2009: 78). rebirth, as it is happening on the dance floor, is huxley’s mindat-large, or minds-in-enlargement. in spherological analysis, human beings are caught in a uterine destiny where “transcendence is interior building” (morin 2009: 61). peak-like situations are moments of (re)creation of a larger, cosmic interiority. here, oppressive exteriorities become real proximity, inside, vectors sustaining life itself. being conscious of my immersion in this ultimate and infinitely generous sponsorship is immunity. harmony in vibe-culture emerges from this bizarrely active tranquility built on conflictual processes. the vibe, single or plural, general or particular, good or bad, is conflict, a continuous process of absorption of what-is-not-already inside. everyone’s daily spherical construction project is therefore driven by two complementary peace-conflict drives. going back inside, after being (un)voluntarily thrown into antisphere, is one thing. the other, happening daily, is staying indoors: resisting constant micro-conflictual pressures that might lead to anti-spherical experiences. this is the idea of immunity. indeed, one can only explore the outside world while being comfortably installed in some interiority structure, in his/her very own vibes. without spheres, i would never have the protection needed to attend a party, much less to withstand the crushing intensity of the dark hours madhouse. i would not be able to organize the absorption process in order to translate the world as home. any opening is a policed opening, policed by one’s partners, the spherical structure itself that one inhabits. morin explains: “being-in-the-world means being-able-to-be-with what is not given here and now, yet this openness is mediated by a being-in-a-sphere. if openness to what is remote is essential to being human, so is the protected space that grants this openness” (morin 2012: 85). never leave home without dancecult 12(1)78 your headset, your diet, the motto of your grandpa, this or that knowledge, a language of some sort. with nothing to make sense of the world, i would be dissolved in nothingness. a sphere is an atmosphere, an “assemblage of technologies, calculations, practices and strategies which fill out a three-dimensional and volumetric space” (campbell 2019: 13). for sloterdijk, atmospheres are containment in what we live. a sphere is “a spatially anchored immune system en miniature and thus, immunologically speaking, a sort of preventive security construction” (klauser 2010: 331-332). it is “designed to demarcate a sphere of well-being from invaders and other agents of unwellness . . . that establishes a physical border between the protected interior and the potentially dangerous exterior” (borch 2008: 558).10 if such (atmo)spheres are not growing, constantly absorbing new meanings and affects, they cannot hold true. exteriorities will always provoke rebirth, the hard reconstructive process. the problem then is the fact that churches, nations, communities and couples are all spherical projects, and none are ever entirely realized. they all have constant unfinished business. partners (techniques, gurus, knowledge, gods) offer neither perfect immunity against nor perfect absorption of a complex world. a disruptive noise, an opposing theory, an unwanted touch: spherical-beings are always threatened with rebirth by the coldness of exteriorities. nothing is ever entirely immune to climate-change, the impact of exteriorities that might provoke unwanted transitions to bpm ii and iii moment-spaces. with this transrational model in mind, we see that edm cultures are especially prone to difficulties. because their participants play radically with space, vibe cultures accelerate the immanent spherical reconstructive cycles. they constantly live through (and provoke) climate changes. for cultures that prioritize peace and harmony, the management of these changes is key. for psytrance, with its purported spirituality, this process is especially challenging and seems to provoke translations of perennial theological dilemmas: how can exteriorities still be part of the divine, how to deal with them and how to obtain final closure? for a moment, everything is inside as i stand in this perfect harmony after a long struggle: days of negotiation to choose the event, days of preparation, hours of driving and installation. my mind is at large: everything—music, dancers, wind and sun—is part of this perfect universe. in the middle of the dance floor, at the highs of the peak, i am one with the divine being, one with the cosmos. temporarily yet timelessly discharged. but everlasting harmony is difficult to maintain for the modern living being. it will surely be local and temporary. in the transrational framework, “disturbances in the sensation of peace, peacelessness, are stored in the memory of the body” (dietrich 2012: 250). it is a work of a lifetime to be discharged of pain, or, using spherological language, to sustain a large spherical construction that immunizes a self from the touch of unwanted affects. anything can resonate with past-present trauma-spaces; anything can become for me a vector of oppression that is not processed by my partnerships as vector of expression, as a vector towards harmony. some things won’t be processed as interiority and the space will shrink radically. castagner | the vibe as peace: edmc conflict studies and montreal psytrance spheres 79 on this aspect, psytrancers need to navigate many issues. larger spaces created by mindsin-enlargement are never shared by everyone on site. not everyone is in the madhouse at the same moment, not everyone stays long enough beside others to be co-absorbed into what could be called an emergent collective space. as others have said in relation to edmcs, “there is no singular climax point of the event” (takahashi 2005: 256). moreover, this harmony is bodily, and “bodies make mistakes, trip or fall, get toothache or migraine, can see only partially or not at all, get chronic diseases like arthritis—or simply drop dead” (thrift 2008: 238). they are vulnerable. moreover, sunshine comes, policemen arrive, weekends end, psychedelics fade, mom calls, this friend is elsewhere; the musical-technical assemblage is not flawless. my partners—friends, gods, music—are imperfect partners. i feel something cold touch me and now i am back on earth. you felt it also, didn’t you? did i just feel your space implode, therefore mine? i am transitioning towards bpm ii or iii, and i must fight once again for interiority through absorption. this is the historical mode of survival for spherical spaces: to preserve the inside via absorption of the outside. indeed, “the best protection against the outside, the best immunisation of the interior, is the integration of that outside” (morin 2009: 62). we have at this point a glimpse of the tortuous relationship between peak and post/ pre-party, a crucial articulation still waiting for more explorations. the party won’t last, but i will still try later, maybe tomorrow, to reach this never-lasting harmony again. i might change my process, be more prepared or more open; or i might look to construct walls around the dance floor to block the outsiders, the vibe-breakers. with such adaptations, i might migrate towards new neighbourhoods, and arrive to the next party with new friends, or to entirely different parties. in any case, to reach the climactic party harmony again, i will need to absorb in some form any potential vibe-breaking exteriority. let us extrapolate on some visible tendencies. if absorbing means maintaining my distance from the mainstream and its agents by identifying tourists here and revolutionizing the world, so be it. this too will be an absorptive process, ridden with conflict at every level. if, on the contrary, i need to consume the other in order to be this cosmic being unmoved by down-to-earth criticism of cultural appropriation, again, so be it. either i eat the world or exclude it totally, but such a resulting harmony will always be of conflict. conclusions in the last decades, edmc conflict studies have referred to various conceptions of peace. using paradigms that dominate social sciences, these studies have described music cultures, psytrance included, as answers to “partly conscious and unarticulated feelings of injustice” ( jensen 2018: 410), answers to climates of insecurity. the conflict they described was understood to exist between the music culture and its oppressive environment, alternatively identified as the capitalist music industry, instrumental reason and its legitimations of environmental degradation or heteronormativity. while useful for understanding the place and the relationship between music cultures and host society, these studies also limited the dancecult 12(1)80 exploration of conflict dynamics at the core of party experiences, at the core of the vibe. the post-modern vision overcame this limit and enabled the observer and the participant to develop a sense of the power relationships inherent at any party. the vibe was understood as a truth experience, the product, creation, design of many coordinated individual and collective movements of knowledge and practices endogenously enacted by subjects. the party hosted many vibes and many tribes enacting them. this paper continued the inquiry of edmc conflict studies with attention to the psychopolitical processes marked by conflict at the core of the vibe. indeed, using transrationalism as a combination of spherology and psychedelic psychology, it showed that psytrancers live in “dyadic, triadic, and multipolar bubbles [that] are the exterior of the interior and the interior of the exterior, the ecstatic intertwining of the subjects in the common interior space where those that really live together are mutually nurtured” (castro noguiera 2009: 87). central to current scholarly interest on the spatiality of subjects and bodies, sloterdijk and grof help explain how human beings live in their relationships, in their immunity habitats. these structures happen to be constantly challenged, and paradoxically, they have to be in order to create and sustain the deepest peace possible. parties radicalize the living conditions of being: they offer psytrancers the path to harmony through absorption of what is exterior to them. but since parties are multiclimactic, neverlasting harmonies, they also suffer from radical compression of space, the passing of their peace. veterans of continuous climate changes, psytrancers must brace for the next time and what st john called an “intracultural energy crisis” will surely follow (2014: 57). debates about collective absorption qua protection will mark the next parties. at the end, the vibe, notably in psytrance, is of both peace and conflict, and the two aspects must at every level be understood together as one single (but complex, multidimensional) process. notes 1 the critical eye of simon reynolds (1998) launched the discussion, but it is authors inspired by bourdieu and deleuze that offered the most impressive framework for understanding the internal or co-constitutive tensions; see saldanha (2007, 2010), d’andrea (2007, 2010) or goodman (2010). 2 sloterdijk’s meta-narrative is very well synthesized by elden (2012) and couture (2016). 3 see, for example, sylvan (2005) and turner (1982, 1988) on the liminal. see also hier (2002), martin (1999) or miller (2006) on moral panics. for (neo)birminghamian analysis, see shildrick and macdonald (2006) or thornton (1995) or d’andrea (2010). this paradigm could also include the bakhtinian concept of carnival (1984), or durkheim ennui (hampartzoumian 2004). 4 on the detailed history of psytrance, see st john (2010, 2012) or reynolds (1998). 5 see, for instance, d’andrea (2007) and saldanha (2007) on the formation of cliques through discipline. marsh (2006) offered a very interesting discussion on the biopolitics in rave regulation in relation to harm reduction initiatives. see st john (2012, 2014) for the various polar tensions between vibe-tribes. see also thornton (1995) and d’andrea (2010) for an exploration inspired by the sociology of bourdieu. castagner | the vibe as peace: edmc conflict studies and montreal psytrance spheres 81 6 couture explains what psychopolitics means: “psychological moods [are] qualities that can be transferred from individuals to collectivities and vice versa” (couture 2016: 8). 7 the “transrational” child of the post-modern combines ratio and energy. it is conceived as a mean to discuss and produce harmony, the latter clearly being a human technical/tactical intervention rather than an otherwordly blessing. 8 many authors have worked on concepts sympathetic to the “energetic being”. see for instance massumi (2002), manning (2007) and goodman (2010) on intensity; and thrift (2008), anderson (2009), bissell (2010), adey et al. (2013), ash (2013), philippopoulosmihalopoulos (2013), anderson and ash (2015) and bille, bjerregaard and sørensen (2015), on atmosphere. 9 abuses, violence and traumas are “strangulated emotions (‘abgeklemmter affekt’)” (grof 1980: 26). they are experiences of emotional and physical charge, negative or toxic engrams; they are “injurious or otherwise painful moment[s] literally recorded by the body” (kahn in goodman 2010: 135). on this aspect, it is pertinent to link this discussion to the central dimension of erin manning’s analysis of affect: the don’t touch me (2007). 10 see, for similar arguments, klauser (2010: 331) and sloterdijk himself (2003: 173). references adey, peter, laure brayer, damien masson, patrick murphy, paul simpson and nicholas tixier. 2013. “‘pour votre tranquilité’: ambiance, atmosphere, and surveillance”. geoforum 49:  299-309. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.04.028>. anderson, ben. 2009. “affective atmospheres”. emotion, space and society 2: 77-81. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2009.08.005>. ———. 2014. encountering affect: capacities, apparatuses, conditions. surrey: ashgate. anderson, ben and james ash. 2015. “atmospheric methods”. in non-representational methodologies: re-envisoning research, ed. philippe vannini, 34-51. new york: routledge. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.05.006>. d’andrea, anthony. 2007. global nomads: techno and new age as transnational countercultures in ibiza and goa. new york: routledge. ———. 2010. “the decline of electronic dance scenes: the case of psytrance in goa”. in the local scenes and global culture of psytrance, ed. graham st john, 40-54. new york: routledge. ash, james. 2013. “rethinking affective atmospheres: technology, perturbation, and space times of the non-human”. geoforum 49: 20-28. bakhtin, mikhail. 1984. rabelais and his world. bloomington: indiana university press. bille, mikkel, peter bjerregaard and tim flohr sørensen. 2015. “staging atmospheres: materiality, 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https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/anarchist-studies/24-1/are-these-bubbles-anarchist castagner | the vibe as peace: edmc conflict studies and montreal psytrance spheres 83 jensen, sune qvotrup. 2018. “towards a neo-birminghamian conception of subculture? history, challenges, and future potentials”. journal of youth studies 21(4): 405-21. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2017.1382684>. klauser, francisco. 2010. “splintering spheres of security: peter sloterdijk and the contemporary fortress city”. environment and planning d: society and space 28: 326-40. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d14608>. lederach, john paul. 2005. the moral imagination: the art and soul of building peace. oxford: oxford university press. manning, erin. 2007. politics of touch: sense, movement, sovereignty. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. marsh, charity. 2006. “‘understand us before you end us’: regulation, governmentality, and the confessional practices of raving bodies”. popular music 25(3): 415-30. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143006001000>. massumi, brian. 2002. parables for the virtual: movement, affect, sensation. durham: duke university press. martin, daniel. 1999. “power play and party politics: the significance of raving”. journal of popular culture 32(4): 77-99. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0022-3840.1999.00077.x>. miller, toby. 2006. “a risk society of moral panic: the us in the twenty-first century”. cultural politics 2(3): 299-318. <https://dx.doi.org/10.2752/174321906778531682>. morin, marie-eve. 2009. “cohabitating in the globalized world: peter sloterdijk’s global foam and bruno latour’s cosmopolitics”. environment and planning d: society and space 27: 57-72. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d4908>. ———. 2012. “the coming-to-the-world of the human animal”. in sloterdijk now, ed. stuart elden, 77-95. cambridge: polity press. olaveson, tim. 2004. “‘connectedness’ and the rave experience: rave as new religious movement?”. in rave culture and religion, ed. graham st john, 85-106. new york: routledge. philippopoulos-mihalopoulos, andreas. 2013. “atmospheres of law: senses, affects, lawscapes”. emotion, space and society 7: 35-44. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2012.03.001>. reynolds, simon. 1998. generation ecstasy: into the world of techno and rave culture. new york: routledge. saldanha, arun. 2007. psychedelic white: goa trance and the viscosity of race. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. ———. 2010. “the ghost of goa trance: a retrospective”. in the local scenes and global culture of psytrance, ed. graham st. john, 55-65. new york: routledge. shildrick, tracy, and robert macdonald. 2006. “in defence of subculture: young people, leisure and social divisions”. journal of youth studies 9(2): 125-140.   <https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13676260600635599>. sloterdijk, peter. 2002. bulles: sphères i. paris: pauvert. ———. 2003. écumes: sphères iii. paris: maren sell. ———. 2010. globes: sphères ii. paris: fayard. st john, graham. 2009. technomad: global raving countercultures. oakville: equinox. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2017.1382684 https://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d14608 https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143006001000 https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0022-3840.1999.00077.x https://dx.doi.org/10.2752/174321906778531682 https://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d4908 https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2012.03.001 https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13676260600635599 dancecult 12(1)84 ———. 2012. global tribe: technology, spirituality and psytrance. sheffield: equinox. ———. 2014. “the logics of sacrifice at visionary arts festivals”. in the festivalization of culture, ed. andy bennett, jodie taylor and ian woodward, 49-67. farnham: ashgate. sylvan, robin. 2005. trance formation: the spiritual and religious dimensions of global rave culture. new york: routledge. takahashi, mélanie. 2005. “spirituality through the science of sound: the dj as technoshaman in rave culture”. in call me the seeker: listening to religion in popular music, ed. michael j. gilmour, 239-66. new york: continuum. thornton, sarah. 1995. club cultures: music, media and subcultural capital. cambridge: polity press. thrift, nigel. 2008. non-representational theory: space, politics, affect. new york: routledge. turner, victor. 1982. from ritual to theatre: the human seriousness of play. new york: paj publications. ———. 1988. the anthropology of performance. new york: paj publications. dancecult 6(1) 2014: guest editors' introduction, masthead and table of contents production technologies and studio practice in electronic dance music culture edited by ed montano and simon zagorski-thomas volume 6 number 1 2014 executive editor graham st john (griffith university, au) from the floor editors alice o’grady (university of leeds, uk) graham st john (griffith university, au) reviews editor ed montano (rmit university, au) foreign languages editor luis-manuel garcia (university of chicago, de) production editor botond vitos (monash university, au) operations director ed montano (rmit university, au) copyeditors luis-manuel garcia (university of chicago, de) jerome hansen (uk) sheena d. hyndman (york university, ca) katrina loughrey (au) kath o’donnell (au) production assistants paul jasen (carleton university, ca) carlo nardi (rhodes university, sa) garth sheridan (rmit university, au) dancecult journal of electronic dance music culture issue 6(1) 2014 issn 1947-5403 ©2014 dancecult published twice yearly at http://dj.dancecult.net international advisory board sean albiez (southampton solent university, uk), eliot bates (university of maryland, college park, us), andy bennett (griffith university, au), mark j butler (northwestern university, us), anthony d’andrea (university of limerick, ie), rebekah farrugia (oakland university, us), kai fikentscher (de), luis-manuel garcia, university of chicago (de), françois gauthier (université du québec à montréal, ca), anna gavanas (institute for futures studies, se), chris gibson (university of new south wales, au), jeremy gilbert (university of east london, uk), alice o’grady, university of leeds (uk), ross harley (university of new south wales, au), david hesmondhalgh (university of leeds, uk), tim lawrence (university of east london, uk), geert lovink (university of amsterdam, nl), gordon lynch (birkbeck university of london, uk), rene lysloff (university of california, riverside, us), alejandro l. madrid (university of illinois, chicago, us), charity marsh (university of regina, ca), tony mitchell (university of technology sydney, au), karenza moore (lancaster university, uk), andrew murphie (university of new south wales, au), christopher partridge (lancaster university, uk), anne petiau (itsrs / université paris 5, fr), hillegonda c rietveld (london south bank university, uk), geoff stahl (victoria university of wellington, nz), sonjah nadine stanley-niaah (university of west indies, jm), graham st john (griffith university, au), will straw (mcgill university, ca), rupert till (university of huddersfield, uk), tobias c. van veen (mcgill university, ca), michael veal (yale university, us), andrew whelan (university of wollongong, australia) dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture is a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture (edmc). a platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on the shifting terrain of edmcs worldwide, the journal houses research exploring the sites, technologies, sounds and cultures of electronic music in historical and contemporary perspectives. playing host to studies of emergent forms of electronic music production, performance, distribution, and reception, as a portal for cutting-edge research on the relation between bodies, technologies, and cyberspace, as a medium through which the cultural politics of dance is critically investigated, and as a venue for innovative multimedia projects, dancecult is the forum for research on edmc. cover photo by colin p. mcguire (2014). http://dj.dancecult.net volume 6 number 1 2014 guest editors’ introduction: introduction to production technologies and studio practice in electronic dance music culture . . . . . 01 ed montano and simon zagorski-thomas feature articles gateway of sound: reassessing the role of audio mastering in the art of record production . . . . . . . . 08 carlo nardi old instruments, new agendas: the chemical brothers and the arp 2600 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 hans t. zeiner-henriksen the creative studio practice of contemporary dance music sampling composers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 justin morey and phillip mcintyre “waiting for the bass to drop”: correlations between intense emotional experiences and production techniques in build-up and drop sections of electronic dance music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 ragnhild torvanger solberg fruity batidas: the technologies and aesthetics of kuduro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 garth sheridan a proposed typology of sampled material within electronic dance music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 robert ratcliffe from the floor – online the concrete and the ephemeral of electronic music production colin mcguire from grapefruit to plastic surgery: experiments in contemporary musique concrète brian speise along the lines of the roland tb-303: three perversions of acid techno botond vitos laevorotation at boom 2012 reba manuel reviews books dj culture in the mix: power, technology, and social change in electronic dance music (eds. bernardo alexander attias, anna gavanas and hillegonda c. rietveld) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 carlo nardi beyond the dance floor: female djs, technology and electronic dance music culture (rebekah farrugia) . . . . 127 hillegonda c. rietveld popular music in evangelical youth culture (stella sai-chun lau). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130 mark evans hip-hop turntablism, creativity and collaboration (sophy smith) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 mark katz pop-rock music: aesthetic cosmopolitanism in late modernity (motti regev) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 catherine strong issn 1947-5403 ©2014 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 6(1): 1–7 issn 1947-5403 ©2014 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.01.00 production technologies and studio practice in electronic dance music culture ed montano rmit university (australia) simon zagorski-thomas university of west london (uk) when we are lost in the euphoric moments of dance floor bliss, it is easy to forget about the skill and effort it takes to make the music that elevates us. the dance floor isn’t the place for conversations on the advantages and disadvantages of particular digital audio workstations or pieces of hardware. perhaps that is why many studies of electronic dance music culture (edmc) engage with the socio-cultural contexts that have underpinned the development of its various styles and scenes, and in contrast, the studio, and its role in the production of edm, remains comparatively underexplored territory. that said, many of the key scholars of edmc have engaged with the production technologies, sonic aesthetics and compositional structures of edm, including mark butler, hillegonda rietveld, graham st john and sarah thornton. more broadly, there is the now-established field of the art of record production, with the association for the study of the art of record production, its annual conference, and the journal on the art of record production. this field draws on a hybrid mix of practitioners, academics, theoretical models and research methodologies. this special edition of dancecult on production technologies and studio practice in edmc is intended to add to this existing work, and to lend further attention to the behind-thescenes endeavours that generate the music that drives the dance floor. as the essays in this issue demonstrate, analysis of production in edm revolves around much more than merely studio work. structural qualities, media discourse and globalisation are just some of the various topics given attention by the contributors. this variety, together with the increasing prominence of the study of the art of record production, indicates that there is much interest in the studio practice that informs edm creation. on a broader scale, this seems like part of a larger shift in popular music studies and musicology in general towards examining the sound of the music and way that it is made/performed. popular guest editors’ introduction dancecult 6(1)2 music studies has tended to focus on the context in which the music exists and is engaged with by audiences. even the very few exceptions, such as walt everett, philip tagg and allan moore, have worked with quite schematic representations of the musical sound such as harmonic, scalar and rhythmic descriptions. the recent shift has involved looking at music as the result of particular types of activity or gesture—eric clarke, allan moore and philip tagg have all moved in this direction—and the types of metaphorical or associative meaning that the sound of particular types of activity might suggest as interpretations. within edm, this form of analysis needs to account for the way that computers are involved in the process—both in the way that they suggest mechanical activity but also in terms of how they create metaphorical/associative relationships with human gesture and more familiar acoustic instrumental technologies. we can’t, for example, hear an 808 snare or clap sound without interpreting it in relation to an acoustic snare drum or a “real” hand clap. the essays in this edition also demonstrate that we need both to make a distinction between the study of production and the sound of recorded music, and to look at how they are connected. musicology has historically focused on the way that music sounds and the ways in which audiences interpret it, rather than on the ways that composers and performers work when they are creating and performing it. of course, any structural interpretation involves some assumptions or assertions about the composer’s or performer’s intentions, but there is still a fundamental difference between studying what was made and how, why, where and when it was made. this also relates to the previous point: that popular music studies has always been much more focused on the how, why, where and when from a sociological perspective rather than from a psychological or practical perspective—looking for broad themes such as the exploration of afrofuturism in the previous issue of dancecult (even if done through specific case studies). one theme that runs across all of the pieces in this special issue involves changes in production technology. the landscape of music production has shifted significantly in recent years, with digital technologies, software and home studios supplanting analogue hardware and professional studio spaces. these changes are often uncritically filtered through the lens of the “democratisation of technology” argument. these changes could just as easily be described in terms of de-skilling, of shifting creative and technical decisions away from practitioners to product designers and of consumerising production technology. however, while we find this problematic and worthy of further interrogation, it remains the case that the processes that underpin edm production have changed somewhat in the past two decades through the use of new technologies, even if access to those technologies is highly mediated by the same sorts of social and economic factors that affected access to previous technologies. as most of the essays here demonstrate, the development of digital production technology and software has impacted on individual production practices, edm sonic aesthetics, global flows of music, authenticity debates, and even re-evaluations of the merits of analogue equipment. the variety of research methodologies and analytical perspectives in the essays reflects the vibrancy of the study of edm production, but it also points to some areas that need ed montano and simon zagorski-thomas | production technologies and studio practice 3 further consideration. firstly, there is a need for some standardised aspects for the analysis of recorded sound/music, while recognising that there are relevant theories out there already in other areas of musicology. if there is indeed a shift in the focus of musicology, then we need to be looking for some agreed methods of analysis. the ecological approach to perception that eric clarke utilises is one contender for this. denis smalley’s notion of spectromorphology is another (as discussed by robert ratcliffe in this issue). both of these approaches broadly relate to hearing a type of activity and attributing meaning based on how that activity might be interpreted—so the larger picture that seems to be emerging in relation to this is that the psychology of music needs to form the basis of our understanding rather than methods that are based on the technical musical theory that has underpinned musical analysis for the past century or more. and if the study of musical sound is heading towards interpretations flowing from the type of activity that may have made a sound (or some empathic, metaphoric or associative connections we make from the perceived activity to some other mental space), that shift is accompanied by a parallel shift seeking to understand the psychology of the creative process. this second shift can be seen in the growth of performance studies, practice as research and the ethnographic and psychological study of communal musical practices as well as in the study of the production process. secondly, the approaches taken in the essays make some of the fundamental problems of musicology more obvious—and flag up some interesting questions about music, sound and interpretation. if it wasn’t already obvious, studies like those in this issue demonstrate that the traditional analytical tools that relate to melodic shape and variation, as represented through the chromatic scalar medium of notation and harmonic progression and its relation to the analysis of form, are only part of the story. indeed, the study of scores and notation— whether published scores or the transcriptions of normally non-notated music—precludes the study of features such as micro-timing in both rhythm and dynamics or timbre. thirdly, the essays demonstrate how the well-documented problems of ethnomusicology also apply to collaborative studies with practitioners, with, for example, the use of promotional interviews as evidence. ethnomusicologists have been struggling with various aspects of the problem that whenever you start to observe and analyse an activity/ situation, you fundamentally alter it. just as a subject’s behaviour changes when they are being observed, if as a researcher you ask participants to describe or talk about that process, they are likely to change their whole perception of it. those of us who are studying the process of production can learn much from the insights, discussions and mistakes that have helped shape ethnomusicology and from those historians engaged in studying the social construction of technology. the issue begins with carlo nardi’s article on audio mastering, a neglected topic in not only edm studies but also music studies more broadly. drawing on personal interviews with mastering engineers and field research in mastering studios in italy and germany, nardi engages with a number of issues to emphasise the place of mastering as a central intermediary process in the journey of music from artist to consumer. as the article demonstrates, dancecult 6(1)4 an exploration of audio engineering provides not only a deeper knowledge of the art of record production, but also a greater understanding of changes across the broader music industry. nardi articulates this through discussions of technology, compression and audio formats. the specific playback demands of edm listeners require particular approaches to mastering, and as nardi demonstrates, mastering engineers operate in a unique space between the desires of the artist, the expectations of the listening audience, and their own knowledge and understanding. we can thus view mastering beyond its more frequently charted connections to record production, and instead as situated within a much broader set of manufacturing, promotion and consumption processes. the conflicts, tensions and disputes that permeate the discourse surrounding analogue and digital technologies run across edm media as much as they do edm artists and audiences. hans t. zeiner-henriksen engages with this discourse in his article on the chemical brothers’ fondness for a particular piece of analogue equipment—namely, the arp 2600. drawing on wiebe e. bijker’s “sociotechnical approach to the development of technology” and sarah thornton’s notion of subcultural capital, zeiner-henriksen discusses how distinct stages and processes can be identified in the shift from analogue to digital technologies, and how some analogue equipment becomes more prized than its digital counterpart. there is a certain absurdity in favouring the bulky, the antiquated and the flawed over the convenient, the modern and the superior, and yet much like vinyl continues to have a place within dj culture, the old is not always superseded by the new. zeiner-henriksen demonstrates how the development of production technology is bound up with a complex set of value judgments and authenticities that are tied to both artist and audience. intriguingly, zeiner-henriksen invokes the “democratisation of production” argument, not as a way of emphasising the positive outcomes of technological development, but rather as a possible cause of steering artists and producers back to older equipment, so that they may maintain a position of distinction and “declare that their craft demands more than just the newest equipment”. in the first of two articles in this issue that deal directly with sampling, justin morey and phillip mcintyre explore the creative practice of a selection of key uk-based edm producers. drawing on personal interviews with these producers, the article provides insights into how sampling is perceived as a creative endeavour and how it is tied up with interpretations of authorship. the processes of listening, selection and editing that come together under the act of sampling are informed by not only the artistic impulses of the producer, but also technology and copyright management, amongst other things. morey and mcintyre look specifically at how the “co-opted collaboration” that is enacted through sampling manifests itself in the various understandings of authorship and creativity that frame the practice. their study demonstrates not only how sampling is a central part of the studio work of contemporary edm producers, but also how it invokes new understandings of the processes of composition. we remain in the studio for ragnhild torvanger solberg’s article, in which she explores specific production techniques to make connections between the structural qualities of ed montano and simon zagorski-thomas | production technologies and studio practice 5 edm tracks and the emotional experiences clubbers have while listening, or rather dancing, to them. drawing on literature from music psychology, as well as edm studies, solberg employs a theoretical framework based on musical expectancy and gravity to articulate how clubbers engage with the “build up” and “drop” sections of contemporary edm music. such sections have become increasingly prevalent within edm in recent years, excessively so in some styles, with the resultant sonic clichés. solberg focuses on two specific tracks—“body” by cinnamon chasers and “icarus (extended version)” by madeon—to demonstrate how particular approaches to edm production generate certain structural qualities, which in turn affect, and indeed effect, “intense musical and emotional experience” in the club environment. solberg’s original analysis provides a template on which to base further research into the relationship between studio practice and the dance floor experience. the scholarly and journalistic literature on edm is dominated by perspectives from north america and europe. less attention has been given to the development of edm styles outside of these territories. as such, garth sheridan’s piece on the historical emergence of angolan kuduro provides a timely exploration of a style that exists still very much on the periphery of the global flows of club culture. based on fieldwork in angola and portugal, alongside practice-based research via studio and performance collaborations with key kuduro artists, sheridan discusses how digital technologies have shaped the development of kuduro over the past two decades. dealing with civil war, authoritarian rule and the lingering impacts of colonialism, kuduro practitioners have had to negotiate their craft in a fraught and politically complex environment. sheridan details some of the techniques and technologies that have informed the stylistic development of kuduro. in the process, he shows how music production and studio practice are intimately connected with sociopolitical contexts, and how producers negotiate the restrictions and limitations of these contexts. the final feature article in this special issue is robert ratcliffe’s analysis of sampling as a production practice in edm. complementing morey and mcintryre’s essay, ratcliffe proposes a typology that classifies the variety of ways in which edm producers engage with sampling through compositional practice and use of technology. conceptual material from the field of electroacoustic music is applied to the discussion, which broadens the scope of the theoretical and analytical language used to interpret edm. ratcliffe’s typology demonstrates the different approaches edm producers take when utilising pre-existing sonic material as part of their music. as with all the other articles in this issue, the impact of technological development on changing production practice is central to the discussion. producers sample for a variety of reasons, and these can be influenced by artistic intentions, musical knowledge, availability of technology and legal constraints. ratcliffe’s typology contributes to the emerging discourse around the analysis of the structure and content of edm, and provides a framework for further investigations of sampling practice, and more broadly the creative processes of edm production and studio practice. the from the floor section of this special issue, subtitled “stories from the studio”, features two pieces that, coincidentally, both engage with ideas around musique concrète, dancecult 6(1)6 albeit in significantly different ways. colin mcguire reflects on his own production work as a way of interrogating the ephemerality of recordings. the request of a family member for a compilation of his recorded output led mcguire to revisit his compositional work and to reflect on the shifting technological landscapes that have informed this work. commencing his production activities in the late 1990s in a studio environment that was transitioning from analogue to digital recording technologies, mcguire firstly details some of the issues and difficulties in working within a genre that is so wedded to technology in terms of sound production, storage and playback. as well as emphasising the distribution avenues that digital formats have opened up for music producers, mcguire argues that digital technologies have generated a more improvisatory environment for the selection, diffusion and interpretation of music. for mcguire, a recording “is not concrete at all, but rather concrète in its readiness to be manipulated, transformed and re-contextualized”. after making the compilation and reflecting on his work, mcguire’s realisation is that the frenetic pace of technological evolution renders studio and playback technologies ephemeral, while at the same time eroding the definitiveness of individual tracks. brian speise takes a more direct path through musique concrète. drawing on his own compositional practice, he situates this work within a broader field of contemporary edm that takes inspiration from musique concrète. speise cites matthew herbert as one example of a producer who utilises found sounds to create a modern take on musique concrète that “is not necessarily danceable or meant to be played at clubs”, but that incorporates “tonal harmony and melody and dance rhythms [that] separate it from the less-accessible, avant-garde musique concrète”. speise provides a comprehensive account of the production processes behind his composition of credits music for a short zombie film, for which he experimented with musique concrète. while not obviously connected to edm, the technologies and techniques speise details relate to any producer of electronic music. speise’s case study reinforces how shifts in technology have transformed the production landscape for electronic music composers, and arguably allow for easier incorporation of found sounds into the compositional framework. for speise, the experimental chain reaction set off by his musique concrète explorations generated more unique and individualised music. one topic that is not addressed in this special issue (although not by choice), and needs to be considered in future research, is the issue of gender. women are conspicuous by their absence in these articles, which is reflective of the field of music production more broadly. rebekah farrugia’s monograph beyond the dance floor: female djs, technology and electronic dance music culture (reviewed in this issue) goes some way towards redressing this absence, but there remains much more to be said on the barriers that have seemingly limited female participation in record production. as carlo nardi identifies in his article, the “substantial gender bias” in the field of audio mastering needs further attention. while we have one female-authored article in this issue, ragnhild solberg’s focus is on the music of two male producers. in all of the other essays, it is very much a case of “boys and their toys”. there are parallels here with dj culture, anna gavanas and bernardo attias noting in their introduction to the 2011 special issue of dancecult on the dj how their selected ed montano and simon zagorski-thomas | production technologies and studio practice 7 essays “describe dj culture as primarily a ‘masculine’ pursuit”. identifying the topic itself is problematic—by doing so, we draw attention to it, and thereby risk framing female producers as somehow unusual or worthy of exclusive attention. ultimately, the issue of gender should not be an issue. as hillegonda rietveld states in her review of beyond the dance floor, “one day, it is hoped, we may simply speak of the creative practices of djs and music producers, without a need to qualify gender”. in closing, we would like to thank the crew of the good ship dancecult—editors, peer reviewers, copyeditors and production assistants—without whom we would still be in the studio trying to nail that breakdown. we would particularly like to thank dancecult executive editor graham st john for giving us the opportunity to develop this themed issue. in much the same way as the production of edm draws on various sonic histories, this issue builds on the many voices of edm scholars past and present, and we hope that it stimulates further research and debate on the creative work that produces the music around which our dance floors revolve. frankenstein, or the 8-bit prometheus dj balli independent author <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2016.08.01.12> after having whistled quite a number of 8 bit versions of famous pop songs, and delighted my ears with chip-tune covers of black metal and classical music, i thought it was about time to extend micro-music aesthetics and re-contextualization to literature and remix mary shelley’s classic accordingly. hence, my book frankenstein, or the 8-bit prometheus, available in 2017 through chili com carne and thisco and previously published in italian in a slightly different version and title. you can catch a glimpse of it in the following text, an eclectic mix of music-related essays incorporating hyper mash-up, gabber, break-core, horrorcore and much much more, as seen from my first-hand experience as label owner (sonic belligeranza records 2000–2017). figure 1. frankenstein goes to holocaust book cover. credit: dr. pira 1. shelley bot @maryshelleyfr (shelley 1992: 12 + “gothic” ken russell, 8 bit cinema) i passed the summer of 1816 in the environs of geneva, at the villa diodati rented by lord byronanism with john pus rancidori and my future husband pervy bisex shelley. the season was cold and rainy and after the customary séance, in the evenings we crowded around a pair of technics1200 and amused ourselves with absurd hyper mash-ups of vinyl records which happened to fall into our hands. we used to mix everything together, from hawaiian music to gabba, and these sonic monsters, together with the gloomy atmosphere of the villa, excited in us a playful desire for freestyle rapping. thus we started to rap on the top of the aforementioned mutant juxtapositions, until lord byronanism, surely seized by an abusive and blasphemous euphoria, suggested a slam poetry competition on the most sickening sonic wretch! i suddenly had a premonition about the inevitable tragedy waiting for our wicked company, a retaliation on our explosive and irrepressible coprolalia. sure enough, lord byronanism would have died during a teknival in greece; my beloved pervy bisex shelley would have drowned during a house music-flavoured pool party and john pus rancidori would have committed suicide after having published his notorious “vampire freestyles” in 1819. before dying violently myself, i, mary evilwin shelley, intended to transcribe the sonic wretch completed that decisive night. my memories were vague and almost lost in my lysergic and precarious mind, so i found an odd way to bring my recollection to life: i stood like a human lightning rod on the roof of the villa diodati on a stormy night; the visceral sound blob i had created started to flow again in my body like the pouring rain in the irregular lightning. so here is a selection from 17 hyper mash-ups that might prove suitable to spark life into a new human breed.....the 8-bit prometheus! lebensborn mash-up vs hyper-mash-up mash-ups are made up by music contrasts, absurd juxtapositions, political incorrectness, hyperboles—the free association of ideas. when i think about this hyper-music fathered in a lab, what comes to my mind is the repugnant nazi eugenics brought to scandinavia by the third reich. with the term lebensborn we invoke the german association created in 1935 by heinrich himmler with the goal of securing the racial purity through the birth of children of pure aryan descent. the program was also conducted outside germany, particularly in norway, due to the physical features—blue eyes, blonde hair—of the local population that were deemed suitable to the improvement of the aryan race. the third reich gave assistance to children born to norwegian women and fathered by german soldiers: mothers received economic support and children could be sent to special institutions to receive food, medical assistance and a (nazi) education. apparently, the number of german offsprings born from 1940–1945 was 10,000–12,000. half were raised in special nazi nursery homes created by lebensborn. the most famous of these lebensborn children is probably anni-fird “frida” lyngstad, the brunette from abba who sang with a sugar voice despite her bitter life experience (connolly 2002). try to play fernando or mamma mia (where frida's voice stands out for its pleasantness) now that you know and tell me they don't sound pretty twisted all of a sudden... but carrying on with my controversial association of ideas, i would say that the plunderphonics technique causes a similar modification in the genes of pop music: it warps its first goal (i.e. the numbing pursuit of turbo-capitalistic hedonism) in order to create something different, something literally bastardised (“bastard pop” is another term to refer to the genre). this new creature, the offspring of the most eclectic sound plagiarism, is fathered as a mocking means to subvert both the predictability of mainstream music and the strict mentality of some austere clubbers. i think the best results can create hilarious cultural short circuits. others aim to entertain the dance floor and don't possess any traces of humor whatsoever. there are even some cut-ups that evoke a brisk sense of terror during a dj set by using snippets of horror movies and creepy news, but in the end they tend to induce a sardonic laughter, rather than fear. some people are quite skeptical about the real power of cultural and political subversion that the crossovers technique would entail. according to fringeli (2005), “thus it comes as no surprise that so much mainstream pop is sampled these days—what is supposed to be ironic is essentially affirmative towards the music industry. it's a desperate bid for acceptance, for commercial 'success'.” while it might be stated that there is no longer a music industry as such (at least in the form that fringeli had in mind while writing his bulletin), i also feel that there are very few audio-collages left that could be dubbed subversive—what i refer to as hyper-mashup. as soon as bastard pop consolidated as a music genre for mtv prime time, these hyper-mashups or sonic frankensteins, as i also like to call them, started to decline. shelley bot #7 @maryshelleyfr (shelley 1992: 99–100) it is with considerable difficulty that i remember the original era of my being; all the events of that period appear confused and indistinct. a strange multiplicity of sensations seized me, different files on the desktop being opened at the same time as i was playing and recording ambient sounds and sequencing them....darkness then came over the screen and all of a sudden i realised i could not exist without the constant code-processing of my motherboard. the hyperkinetic flow of sounds of any sort was so huge that once transcribed on a pentagram, the countless number of notes constituting my sonic persona formed a compact black monolith. i was born black midi, just like the music sub-genre of the same name. the reboot of the system gave new life to my digital body, with the sequencer finally showing the music tracks that constituted my existence: a combination of drum breaks (with multiple effects such as wah-wah, flanger, echo, and so on), and wobbling basslines that complemented the gothic architecture of my dna. of all the files i could find in it, the cheapest and trashiest one was probably a .zip with the entire milli vanilli discography... so i began to sample from that dance music rubbish like a proper music prankster. from the hovel in which the integrated sound card of my system resided, i was able to record several sonic events almost every weekend. long rides of valkyrian synth lines added an epic dark-trance feeling to the regular breakbeats set at 140 bpm that ensured a danceable balance to the dj sets; the sync function of dj mixing softwares was automatically beatmatching the tracks, thus avoiding any telluric soundslide. those were the models of party music that humankind was listening to. during the week, when i was left alone in the woods, the lonely jingles of the digital processes of my cpu were resounding among the trees. as opposed to the aforementioned recordings, their frequencies sounded warped and their rhythmic loops schizoid, a sudden shock of hyperkinetic kick drums. how i was terrified when i established the utter aberration of my waveform, a series of spikes on the abscissa axis! it was obviously an abscess of pink noise that had been added during the mastering session. but then the waveform was suddenly sinking on the ordinate axis, a dreadful pitch-bending of the rhythm that bestowed a satanic feeling on the sample of eighties commercial music that had been used. compared to the perfect sounds of psytrance, breakbeat and tech house recorded during the weekend, the whole material proved to be painfully mismatched. at first i stared back, unable to believe that it was indeed my sounds to which i listened; and when i became fully convinced that i was in reality the music monster that i am, i was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification. alas! i did not yet entirely know the fatal effects of this miserable sonic deformity. sonic frankenstein pt. 1 mc pavarotten, mc domingore, mc carreraxe, dj swagner, david guitto, bob synthclair, (sound)cloud deadbussy, johan sebastian bug, ludwig beathoven, pert ill’ic chipkovsky, anton bruckner(d), maurice rave l, frank seenanthrax, rank sinatra, s.i.m. on kor funkle, abba<>gabba, 9 inch natalie, bee jesus & mary chrome, phat boy shit, chet faker, public enya, kate mosh, kylie minoise, gym morrison, miguel osé, toy george, kalvin clein, sun ta(n), duran duran duran, f.i.l.f. (father i'd like to fuck) collins, jamirobrain, napalm def, bo no ma, anthtax squeeze factory, ampex twin, bally corgan, grind master flesh, dub spencer & trance hill, orangin stream, masonna, eine stunde merzbauten, bop singlayer, joe t. vernelli, conchita wurstel, dance alighieri disco inferno, durutti colon, giorgio gabber, goregiastic records, dead mau5e5, genitallica, flosstradamus, macello basstrojanni, sbandao bullets, anal sorrenti, trill scott-heron, com truise, mongoly-nazi, woody allin, jew tang clan, seitan clan, lollocaust, winnegans fake, infidel, delay lama, korn flakes, einsturzende neubunny, acti mel, dandy wahrol, obi uan bon jovi, sam arcanda, funk shui, ponzio pilates, romina power violence, , dj nu mark, pink freud, ampex twin, baby shitter, deaf leopard, romina power-electronics, turandeath, toscunt, falsnuff, il macellaio di siviglia, ghettorade, ab/cd, campari teenage riot, gran master trash, cous cous klan,, mc donald trap, nirv anal, new kids on black bloc, punk floyd, midi vannilli, lion-el glitchie. figure 2. mc domingore. credit: rancid opera shelley bot #17 @maryshelleyfr (shelley 1992: 209–10, 214) alas! the battery of the gameboy i relied on is gone; i feel that i shall soon die, and he, my music enemy and sonic persecutor, may still be in being. during these last days i tried to reset lsdj, the software i used to father such a frightful audio-blob, and i refused—and i did right in refusing—to create a remix version of it, and therefore generate a proper music genre, that of mash-up. my tenacious rejection has led him to destroy many rave-party devotees: tekno, goa trance, drum'n'bass, dubstep, even ambient music fans... the task of his destruction was mine, but i have failed. i ask you, dear reader, to fulfill this duty and eradicate the sonic belligerence! in this hour, when i momentarily expect my release, a strenuous concern disturbs me: that the sonic wretch might continue to undermine the strict categorisations of music genres. farewell, dear reader! seek happiness in a 4/4 house loop and avoid any sonic ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of hyper-composition, that is to say creating irreverent tracks from a multitude of different music sources. the turntable became slower, going from 45 to 33 rpm... the needle itself began to skip because of the stack of dust, until the eyes of dr. frankenstein closed forever, while the irradiation of a gentle smile passed away from his lips. i have condemned my creator to misery; i have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin. there he lies, white and cold in death like frozen food. i look on the hands which used a humble game boy to grind the most incompatible music genres, from country music to the obscure japanese onkyokei, from ragga to the alpini choirs, from polka to gravewave, and so forth...fear not that i shall be the instrument of future music mischief. my work is nearly complete. i shall die. i shall no longer be seized by audioschizoid attacks, nor surpass the hearing range that is audible by humans again. he is dead who called me into being: farewell dr. frankenstein! you did seek my extinction, that i might not cause greater wretchedness to illegal rave parties; yet, the worst revenge did come from my very own existence, and from the sufferance caused by the awareness of being such a wretched audio-monstrosity. this, you never understood! he sprung from the tiny screen as he said this, upon the ice-craft which lay close to the vessel. he was soon borne away by the waves and lost in the darkness and distance that remained as a permanent screen saver on its monitor... acknowledgments thanks to my editor francesco fusaro and to william langstone for the proofreading. author biography bored to death by dj/producers who stand and play one record after another, dj balli favourably compares djing with surgery: a combination of techniques for recreating/destroying a sound-body. frankenstein, or the 8 bit prometheus reports on this aspect of his philosophy. references and general readings connolly, kate. 2002. “torment of the abba star with a nazi father”. the guardian, june 30. <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/jun/30/kateconnolly.theobserver>. connor, michael. 2013. “the impossible music of black midi”. rhizome, sep 23. <http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/sep/23/impossible-music-black-midi/>. fringeli, christoph. 2005. “breakcore?”. praxis newsletter 18, september. shelley, mary. 1992. frankenstein or the modern prometheus. england: penguin classics. discography john oswald. 1993. plexure. avant (cd). avan016. <http://www.discogs.com/john-oswald-plexure/release/158330> the production of space in chicago footwork adam laurence university of sussex (uk) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.13> music's spatial dynamics are a site of evolving academic discourse. david byrne astutely compares the dry acoustics of the african plains, that allowed polyrhythms to be used in african music, with the wet and reflective reverb of western european churches and cathedrals that demanded the composers of the middle ages use long and expansive tones in their choral chants (2013: 18-19). however, ”space”, as i will demonstrate, extends beyond the material and articulates itself in a number of dimensions. in relation to footwork, an understanding of space is crucial. footwork, a genre that branched off the increasingly commercialised house and juke scenes, is uniquely distinguishable by the "precise ferocity of its sonic palette and the precise ferocity of the dancers' movements" (brar 2016: 22). this idea of the body existing as a space is crucial to an understanding of footwork's relation to space. in this article, i will begin by positioning south and west chicago as a generative force for the production of footwork music (and equally of footwork music’s production of its own distinguishable spaces). this claim draws on dhanveer singh brar’s assertion that footwork possesses a "phonic materiality… the mechanism for the realization of the force of blackness" (2017: 23). this is a mode of production that draws on the awareness of the self as fuel for the articulation of lived experience as expressed through the phonic. this is an important theoretical underpinning for this essay, as it helps to explain footwork as a “ghetto” music. secondly, i will combine this conceptual framework with musical analyses of specific case studies. this is done in order to illuminate the ways in which there is a direct relationship between footwork producers, djs and dancers, which will in turn demonstrate the music’s spatially generative and conductive capacities. lastly, i will question the gendered spaces that footwork hosts, and present it as a genre that enacts a set of contradictory behaviours towards its treatment of gender and the presence of women. thus, a synthesis of these three approaches to footwork will support my claim that footwork, through its particular production and reflection of space, is a native expression of south and west chicago. we must first situate footwork within its ”social” space in order to appreciate the symbiosis of the genre’s "insistent sociality" (brar 2017: 23) with its musicality; thus it is essential to pin down an understanding of the ‘ghetto’. of particular notoriety in america, chicago’s south and west sides have been experiencing dramatic depopulation and gentrification for the last decade. as the subject of intense sociological and historiographical debate since the 1930s (haynes and hutchinson 2009: 347-52), the ghetto is often framed as an area of concentrated poverty and depopulation. to incorporate henri lefebvre’s claim that "social space… is a social product" (1991: 26), a particular insight into footwork is formed—that there is a relationship "between the sound and the performativity of footwork" and "lived experience internal to chicago’s south and west sides" (brar 2017: 22). by this, it is meant that footwork necessarily enacts a reflection of the social space in which it inhabits. we see this in the fact that footwork nights and dance battles are frequently held in community centres, ice skating rinks or other low-cost and easily manageable locations (timandbarrytv 2014). this particular use of architectural space that is socially re-appropriated, as well as contributing to footwork’s status as “underground” can be seen as a generator of the sound and movement of footwork itself. the dance battles, communal yet adversarial (nights are explicitly known as ”battle groundz” or “the war zone”) at the same time, is distinct from the uncoordinated nature of traditional dance music club floors. from the architectural spaces used to the sound made, we can observe key constitutive elements of what makes footwork particular to the locales of south and west chicago. footwork should not only be framed within an understanding of socio-economical parameters, but also in district-based, and even imagined spaces. the genre has roots within house/ghetto house and juke music (quam 2017). however, these can be immediately separated with what footwork has become: a “faster, uglier and even more hyperlocal mutation of juke” (brar 2017: 26). this idea of the hyperlocal is crucial in order to effectively situate footwork within a specific space. for producers of footwork, the districts of south and west chicago proved crucial in the formation of their genre, as the spaces became a force of musical reaction. dj rashad talks about how the west side was known for djing at blisteringly fast tempos (up to 180bpm), "and so we met west side halfway since they come out south and we did 160, and it's been working ever since" (timandbarrytv 2014). what appears to be the case therefore is that, while there are territorial distinctions within chicago, there is a sense of collaboration and compromise between the south and west sides. in a shared apathy and disaffection with the increasingly commercialised house and juke scenes, an imagined community, and thus a space, was created. through this imagined community therefore, space came to represent more than physical demarcations and came to encompass shared values. space incorporates more than material surroundings, or even imagined spatial communities; it also includes the body. many attest to an "intersection of sound, space and sensation" as it occurs within the body (ouzounian 2006: 69-79). therefore, an understanding of footwork’s relationship with the body is crucial. footwork is distinguishable by its "complex arrangement of rhythmic textures at a rate of propulsion that on initial exposure seems to place the music at the limits of the listenable" (brar 2017: 21). rhythmically, a clear comparison can be made against the more “four to the floor” style of house and juke music, where a clear signifier of all four main beats are established by a kick drum. because of this negated pulse, a sonic space opens up for the dancers to occupy in a free and fluid state. a particularly good example of this sense of rhythmic abstraction can be found in the sparse “eraser” by rp boo (various artists 2010). beginning with a fuzzy drone, a simple percussive click maps out the beat. shortly after this, an electronic snare claps with an emphasis on beats two and four of the bar. however, this sense of rigidity dissolves when the “fuck that burn 'em all” sample appears. at 1:20, we hear the sample appear initially on the second beat of the bar, but in the following bar, the sample begins on the third beat. this switchover continues for a number of bars. despite this, rather than serving to obscure the music and make a physical relationship with the sound hard to attain, this acts as a canvas upon which the dancer “fills in the blanks”. this is indicative of footwork’s "graphic command of blank space" (mistry 2015) something that emerges from both a calling for these “blanks” to be filled in physically, as well as the result of instruction by the dance circle to sit back. footwork often makes reference to particular dance moves that constitute the basics of the style, such as in “whea yo ghost at, whea yo dead man” by dj elmoe (various artists 2010) which calls upon the dancers to perform the ”ghost”, a staple footwork move. additionally tunes such as “star wars” by dj killa e (various artists 2010) employ trumpet and brass-like stabs at the beginnings and throughout, as a kind of call to arms/war at the battle groundz. considering video evidence of the dance battles available online (the medium through which planet mu label boss mike paradinas discovered footwork), most battles and videos are exclusively male. and if we are to discuss the body as a musical-spatial device, then the body on a gendered level must also be considered. in theorising chicago footwork as a gendered space, i wish not to confine my argument within a narrative of simply claiming that it either does or does not possess a ‘gendered’ musical assemblage. instead, i borrow from christabel stirling’s “beyond the dance floor” to interrogate the perceptions of ‘maleness’ within the space of footwork, internal and external. for stirling, historically gendered associations with genres have "come to be experienced teleologically—as essentialised, or always already there" (stirling 2016: 141). thus, rather than there being a ‘natural’ or biological basis for gendered genre-based divisions, these behaviours have historical roots that undertake a self-perpetuation. stirling’s thesis provides a compelling take on some of the attitudes and reflections many footwork djs and producers supply of their genre. dj traxman notes: bros they had moves, you know like, ‘i can dance’ you know, ‘i can do my footwork in the circle’ you know, cause peoples were fascinated by that but then again you had the girls when the parts come, you know, you got the girls hitting the floor (timandbarrytv 2014). similarly, dj manny says that "footwork’s come a long way… at the time all the females would just be standing around and all the guys would be in the corner just battling, so it kind of offset the party" (timandbarrytv 2014). an initial analysis of these two accounts would be one that pointed to footwork as a musical assemblage that is generative of, and perhaps reflective of, gendered dynamics. indeed, taking traxman's and manny’s word, a picture is built up of the interactions between men and women within footwork spaces. however, if we synthesise this observation with stirling’s account of historically gendered entrenchment, these two quotes from traxman and manny suggest more about their attitudes and perspectives towards gender dynamics within their scene. for here, both traxman and manny suggest that the rhythmic complexity and intense speed of footwork combine to produce an inherently “masculine” sound. if this is the case, lack of gender inclusivity could be seen as a feeling of ”away-ness” from the perspective of women. by “away-ness” “historically mediated orientation away from an object” is meant, with the result being “women resistant to inclusion” (stirling 2016: 139-40). thus, if a discussion of gender is to be brought into the question of footwork’s production and reflection of space, then two observations should be made. first, that an exploration into internal perceptions about gender dynamics rather than simply presenting a gendered separation (or lack thereof) proves a more useful method within the context of dance music. second, that these dynamics do exist, but only due to the historical solidification of these perceptions. having acknowledged the gendered spaces that operate within the locales of south and west chicago, to consider producers external to this region, especially when they are women, reveals intriguing insights. if this is done, what is at stake is stirling’s rejection of a biology of sound. to illustrate this, let us consider the work of the producer jlin (jerilyn patton). by existing outside of chicago, as well as being a woman, jlin challenges established spaces within footwork on two levels. renowned experimental electronic producer actress, said of techno producer umfang that she is able to create transitions and elements to the music "which men rarely can do because they’re always copying another artist. they’re fanboys, forever fanboys" (ravens 2017). this idea that as a result of living outside of male-dominated spaces women perceive and create in opposition to men, is highly applicable in this scenario. on a musical-production level, jlin actively avoids the use of samples (with the exception of occasional vocal samples) (fintoni 2015), a key ingredient of footwork. when i started… i was sampling and one day i had asked my mom to listen to the sample of teena marie… i asked her what she thought about it and she said: ‘it’s ok, but what do you sound like?’ (duncan 2016). in not using samples and using her own sourced material, jlin not only produces an altogether different quality to the sound but, crucially actively reflects and produces an alternate space. to be sure, male producers do add their own vocal input, but the cry of “i am the queen! you are not my equals”, provides contrast to the largely demeaning lyrics of male producers (timandbarrytv 2014). jlin, as a producer caught up in the particular "gendered socio-musical formations" of footwork, is "reflexively engaged with the gendered implications of the sounds" that she produces (stirling 2016: 131). this is further exemplified by her relationship with movement. seeking inspiration from ballet, jlin writes music specifically for women dancers such as the track “i am the queen” (jlin 2015), which was made for the footwork dancer cristal (duncan 2017). in this, we see mirrors with the collaboration between dancers and producers in male footwork circles (timandbarrytv 2014). thus, jlin presents strong signifiers of herself acting outside of traditionally male-dominated spaces. however, this is not to implicate her exclusion from these spaces. jlin herself says that "there’s a masculine/feminine thing going on where the two are intertwined. i’d say the feminine part of it is buried inside what i do, whereas the sound itself is bold in a masculine way" (fintoni 2015). this is interesting for two reasons. firstly, it reinforces "essentialist beliefs that particular sounds and aesthetic qualities are inherently abhorrent to women" (stirling 2016: 134). second, and in contrast, it suggests jlin’s ability to effectively negotiate this space and use her creative practice "to experiment with social change" (stirling 2016: 131). thus, jlin can be seen to be “away” from and “present” to gendered spaces simultaneously. conclusions i have demonstrated footwork’s receptive, as well as generative force for the reflection and production of space. more specifically, footwork has precise "relations between bodily movement and sound" (brar 2017: 23). as a receiver of physical commands from the dance battles and crews (their own battle formations determined by the diy spaces that they use), footwork producers are provided with a set of physical parameters, around which they negotiate. simultaneously, footwork producers adopt the role of conductor over dancers and dance battles. on the one hand, rhythmic stabs and frenzied syncopation and intricacy set a standard of intensity for the dancers. on the other, “open” sonic space (as seen in eraser by rp boo) can be constructed to delineate where dancers should “fill in the blanks”. a gendered space appears to exist within the footwork scene, and through an application of stirling’s thesis, this can be explained by a historical entrenchment that permeates into the perceptions of sound on a bodily level from both men and women producing music. this has implications for a reading of footwork in relation to space, as it complicates the bodily aspect of footwork (a phonicmateriality) to incorporate a discussion of gender. what becomes clear is that there are a multitude of spaces that footwork reflects and produces. while a larger study into footwork’s spatial dynamics could have scope to suggest what implications the emergent scene in japan (thump 2017) has on a framing of footwork as locally specific to chicago, i believe that i have provided a sound case for footwork’s particularism to chicago. acknowledgements i give credit and thanks to dhanveer singh brar and his 2016 paper “architekture and teklife in the hyperghetto: the sonic ecology of footwork” for providing the inspiration and foundation my essay draws upon. i encourage everyone to purchase his recent works ”teklife, ghettoville, eski: the sonic ecologies of black music in the early 21st century” (brar 2021) and “beefy's tune (dean blunt edit)” (brar 2020). i would also like to sincerely thank dr. christopher warne, professor lucy robinson and dr. mimi haddon at the university of sussex for their guidance, inspiration and support throughout my time working with them. additional shout-outs to nathan and mette for their surgical eyes on my ramblings. author biography adam laurence is an american studies and history graduate from the university of sussex. originally written in 2017, a version of this paper won the 2019 british american studies association undergraduate essay prize. adam’s dissertation was entitled “theories of ’non’: investigating historiographical collapse through the online experimental underground”. adam continues to run the experimental radio, podcast and live events series search history, a platform dedicated to unlikely connections across genres, mediums, localities and times. email: adamlaurence@protonmail.com website: https://bit.ly/3c6aoum references brar, dhanveer singh. 2016. “architekture and teklife in the hyperghetto: the sonic ecology of footwork”. social text 34(1(126)): 21-48. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/01642472-3427117>. brar, dhanveer singh. 2020. beefy's tune (dean blunt edit). london: the 87 press. brar, dhanveer singh. 2021. teklife, ghettoville, eski: the sonic ecologies of black music in the early 21st century. london: goldsmiths press. byrne, david. 2013. how music works. london: canongate books. duncan, jay. 2016. “jlin: footwork, ballet and mistaken identity”. artefact magazine. 1 march. <https://www.artefactmagazine.com/2016/03/01/jlin-footwork-ballet-and-mistaken-identity/>. (accessed 5 february 2017). fintoni, laurent. 2015. “jlin unleashes her dark energy on footwork”. fact. 5 march. <http://www.factmag.com/2015/03/05/i-create-from-a-place-that-is-the-belly-of-the-beast-jlin-unleashes-her-dark-energy-on-footwork>. (accessed 5 may 2017). haynes, bruce and ray hutchinson. 2008. “the ghetto: origins, history, discourse”. city and community 7(4): 347-52. <https://doi.org/10.1111%2fj.1540-6040.2008.00271_1.x>. lefebvre, henri. 1991. the production of space. oxford: blackwell publishing. mistry, anupa. 2015. "jlin dark energy". pitchfork. 2 april. <http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20450-dark-energy/>. (accessed 2 may 2017). ouzounian, gascia. 2006. “embodied sound: aural architectures and the body”. contemporary music review 25(1): 69-79. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494460600647469>. quam, dave. 2010. “the evolution of footwork”. resident advisor. 19 november. <https://ra.co/features/1235>. (accessed 2 may 2017). ravens, chal. 2017 “actress: rebirths and requiems”. dazed digital. 14 march. <http://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/35125/1/actress-azd-interview>. (accessed 2 may 2017). stirling, christabel. 2016. “‘beyond the dance floor’? gendered publics and creative practices in electronic dance music”. contemporary music review 35(1): 130-49. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1176772>. thump. 2017. “inside the schools and dance battles fuelling japan's footwork scene”. thump. 22 february. <https://thump.vice.com/en_uk/article/thump-specials-footwork-in-tokyo>. (accessed 2 may 2017). discography various artists. 2010. bangs & works vol. 1: a chicago footwork compilation. planet mu (cd comp): ziq290cd. <https://www.discogs.com/various-bangs-works-vol-1/master/293391>. jlin. 2015. free fall. planet mu (vinyl): ziq368. <https://www.discogs.com/jlin-free-fall/release/7811594>. filmography “tim & barry's "i'm tryna tell ya" feature length footwork documentary”. youtube, 1:04:33. timandbarrytv. uploaded on 2 december 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2alj88yz3u8&t=1956s>. (accessed 2 may 2017). africa on the moon: the complexities of an afrofuturist reading of dub dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 7(2): 43–63 issn 1947-5403 ©2015 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.02.03 africa on the moon: the complexities of an afrofuturist reading of dub john harries goldsmiths, university of london (uk) abstract this article attempts a detailed and specific analysis of the music and the mythology of lee “scratch” perry and other key figures and works in dub, in relation to afrofuturist thought and the music, theory and philosophy of sun ra in particular. it discovers at every turn multiple layers of complication, points of disjuncture as well as confluence, but argues that we can identify complicity and hybridity between these forms and their key protagonists without reducing their distinctiveness or specificity. by viewing dub through an afrofuturist lens, the article aims to illuminate aspects of dub that would otherwise remain hidden, allowing that here, as in the development and diversification of the musics themselves, the revelatory relationship may be reciprocal. keywords: afrofuturism, dub, sun ra, lee “scratch” perry, diaspora john harries is a lecturer in popular music at goldsmiths, university of london, with specialisms including production, fringe aesthetics in popular music and performance technology. he is also a producer and composer/performer, making electronic pop with sleeps in oysters, odd beats and interactive installations as lake dysmal and improvised noise with rutger hauser. in 2015 he founded record label and artist’s co-operative the lumen lake to support grassroots experimental music making in south-east london. information and contact details at <http://www.gold.ac.uk/music/staff/harries/>. feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.01.02 http://www.gold.ac.uk/music/staff/harries/ dancecult 7(2)44 the black ark burns if reggae is africa in the new world, then dub must be africa on the moon; it’s the psychedelic music i expected to hear in the ‘60s and didn’t. the bass and drums conjure up a dark, vast space, a musical portrait of outer space, with sounds suspended like glowing planets or with fragments of instruments careening by, leaving trails like comets and meteors (ehrlich1982: 106). i am an extraterrestrial, not from another planet but from heaven (lee “scratch” perry quoted in mottram 2007). and a sound that lived in the solder joints of labyrinthine patch bays, in the grain of the dirt on grubby tape heads, in the walls themselves, etched with esoteric graffiti from which particular letters have been meticulously scored out, is lost and can never be remade. a ghost is born. the smoke trails blow into the past and into the future. after the fire, in the narrative of the mainstream british music press at least, lee “scratch” perry is no longer eccentric, erratic, unpredictable. now he’s plainly mad (kelly 1984: 7). but beneath that narrative, probably a little closer to the truth and infinitely sadder, is a story of consuming racialised alienation. reflecting on the decision to torch his own studio, scratch said “it was then that he realized he was ‘a white man’, because ‘the way black people was treating me, how could i be one of them?’” (bradley 2000: 499). in this desolate acknowledgement of the potential for external social conditions to devalue and strip away a positive sense of racialised identity, we might find a parallel with sun ra’s determination not to identify as human, to “escape the parameters . . . of humanity” (womack 2013: 60). kodwo eshun observes that in afrofuturist thought, “the human is a pointless and treacherous category” (1998: 3), and it is that sense of treachery, of historically established or otherwise inevitable betrayal that seems to connect perry’s statement with ra’s assertion of saturnian origin. there are distinctions as well as commonalities to be observed here, though. noting ingrid lafleur’s definition of afrofuturism as “a way of imagining possible futures through a black cultural lens” (2011), the bleakness of perry’s position might suggest a disconnect, since it seems to identify no possible future in the black culture around him. ra’s luminous response to the “treacherous category” (eshun 1998: 3) of humanity is foundational to afrofuturism as it is now understood. but where ra refused the delimited humanity that the white power structures of the southern united states belatedly offered—indelibly marked as it was by the alien abduction horror story of slavery (sinker 1992: 33)—and adopted instead a sci-fi post-reality of his own making, perry, in this moment, found no escape from the treachery. as his music drifted, bounced, skipped off into space, he cast around for a different shade of human to identify with, and ended up burning the primary site of his creative expression out of his own world. it is as good an illustration as any of the complexities of an afrofuturist reading of dub, a form as irreducible as any in the history of popular music. indeed, through a longer historical lens the picture complicates still further, as we might observe that perry did eventually find harries | africa on the moon 45 an escape, and a way to re-shape his creative identity as an international producer in selfimposed exile from jamaica. perhaps this identity, shaped in exile, suggests a further point of affinity with ra the saturnian? my research for this article started from the perspective that dub seemed to be dealt with in a relatively cursory fashion in a lot of writing on afrofuturism. i had the impression that commentators would take time to work towards an evolved understanding of key africanamerican figures—ra, rammellzee, george clinton—and then skate elegantly over afrocaribbean artists like lee “scratch” perry, scientist, or worse still, dub as a homogenized concept-lump, in a few brief pages. working back through the defining music-focused texts of contemporary afrofuturist thinking, i’ve found that this perception wasn’t wholly accurate. whilst some core publications, such as eshun (1998) and womack (2013), certainly do devote fewer pages specifically to lee “scratch” perry than to comparable american figures, there are significant documents from as early as the mid-90’s (e.g. penman 1995; corbett 1994; john akomfrah’s 1996 documentary the last angel of history) and plenty of more recent discourse that stress the significance of dub to any understanding of afrofuturism (such as fisher 2013). at this point some definitions are needed. in respect of afrofuturism, to expand upon lafleur’s definition cited above, ytasha l. womack offers the following: both an artistic aesthetic and a framework for critical theory, afrofuturism combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-western beliefs. in some cases, it’s a total revisioning of the past and speculation about the future rife with cultural critiques (2013: 9). the sense that womack conveys here of afrofuturism as essentially multiple rather than singular, as a meta-concept encompassing or engaging in dialogue with a sprawling range of ideas, might run counter to an initial understanding of dub as a highly specific musical form. dub can be understood as a particular language of sound (and later in this article i will mount something of a defense of that position, or at least give some thought to its value), closely tied to a specific time and place. however, recent discourse around dub (partridge 2010; sullivan 2014) has offered a broader reading of the form as concept as much as content or context, more expansive and rhizomatic in character than a singular sonic or socio-cultural reading could permit. sullivan couches this in poetic terms: ethereal, mystical, conceptual, fluid, avant-garde, raw, unstable, provocative, transparent, postmodern, disruptive, heavyweight, political, enigmatic . . . dub is way more than ‘a riddim and a bassline’, even if it is that too. dub is a genre and a process, a ‘virus’ and a ‘vortex’ (2014: 7). indeed, as compared to earlier jamaican musics, dub can be thought of as primarily defined by “linguistic, formal, and symbolic indeterminacy” (veal 2007: 35). the significance of this perspective is that it allows the possibility of dub as afrodiasporic, rather than reinforcing a limiting sense of rootedness in time and place. in this conception, dub and afrofuturism are dancecult 7(2)46 brought inexorably together, and not only as parallel diasporic forms with distinct lineages. taking on board paul gilroy’s stress in the black atlantic on “roots and routes . . . flows, exchanges and in-between elements that call the very desire to be centred into question” (1993: 190), it is possible to identify key figures of dub and of afrofuturism as nodes in the same network, without reducing the specificity and distinctiveness of the former. that, ultimately, is my argument here: that dub can be understood as distinct and specific, whilst existing within an afrofuturist network—a complex, simultaneously dialogical web of connections, spanning music, history and religion. in discussing dub and afrofuturism together, we might hope to “project the plural richness of black cultures in different parts of the world in counterpoint to their common sensibilities” (gilroy 1993: 81). some strands of that discussion, often concerning points of difference rather than confluence between relevant musical lineages but not precluding hybridity and complicity between them, will be discussed here in a series of dialogical case studies, with special attention to the work of jamaican dub producer lee “scratch” perry. the mighty upsetter the example of perry makes the inappropriateness of a binary or antithetical approach, which might look to oppose dub and afrofuturism, particularly apparent. granted, the framework of futurist concepts and imagery that us-based jazz auteur sun ra erected around his music and life seem clearly defined and intellectually purposeful in retrospect, whereas a figure like perry remains a knotty thread, too complex and contradictory to be easily unraveled. but, if we’re tempted to identify a simple point of difference even in the irreducible complexity of perry’s oeuvre and any message we might attempt to tease out of it, we might usefully refer to ian penman (1995: 38): this other tradition has always (sometimes bitterly) been suffused with an inherent (sometimes crippling) sense of doubt: doubt that any ‘public’ pronouncement of oppositionality . . . had any real point; and that you rather had to reclaim a language of your own – encoded, murky, stellar – from out of the shy or earth where you found yourself, from out of the myriad “discredited” pasts or futures. in the ‘60s and ‘70s, sci-fi shamen like miles, sly stone and george clinton (taking some of their cues from writers like samuel delaney and ishmael reed) chose this option. if you were anyway going to be consigned to society’s margins, then why not speak (in) a marginal tongue? penman’s alignment of dub in general with the troubled, muddled worlds of george clinton’s funkadelic project, as well as miles davis’ bitches brew (1970) and sly stone’s there’s a riot goin’ on (1971) serves as a reminder that the focused and clearly articulated futurist programme of ra is necessarily no more central to a nuanced modeling of afrofuturism than any other node in the network. all of these musics, and perry’s too, must speak to our understanding of afrofuturism, exist within it as well as in dialogue with it. harries | africa on the moon 47 the machinebrain and the living man amongst the many contradictions in perry’s self-made mythology, we might note that as well as a white man, he self-identified as “a machine being” (quoted in martin 1995: 32), not so much wired into the desk as indistinguishable from it, controlling the mix at a molecular level. scratch as cyborg, then. but, starting at a generalised conception of the sound of his classic 1970s dubs, it is hard not to feel that the blood vessels and nerve endings of the man are invading the circuitry of the black ark’s systems—warping and mutating it from the pure order envisaged by its fastidious designer, king tubby—and not the other way around. in an interview with david toop for ocean of sound, scratch himself seemed in part to frame it that way: then i put my mind into the machine by sending it through the controls and the knobs or into the jack panel. the jack panel is the brain itself, so you’ve got to patch up the brain and make the brain a living man (perry, quoted in toop 1995: 113). certainly, there are crucial distinctions between this image and motifs presented by some american afrofuturist musicians which we can identify as related. something in the messy, endlessly detailed environment of the black ark control room suggests a parallel with the similarly densely layered world of rammellzee—but for all their machinic appearance, rammellzee’s iconic armoured suits do not represent cyborgs. rather, they are “gods called the ramm ell zee” (rammellzee quoted in tate 2004: 35), metaphoric representations of the philosophy of gothic futurism. a closer parallel is probably the sleek, metropolis and blade runner-inspired glamour of janelle monáe’s android other (van veen 2013: 13; mcconville 2014). but the image here, in monáe’s own description and as derived from fritz lang, is specifically of a wholly artificial android as distinct from a partly organic cyborg. by literal definition, then, lee “scratch” perry’s machine being is innately more organic and less metallic than these counterpoints in african american musical futurism. this sense of the organic undiminished, despite a deeply felt connection to machinery, can be partly understood in relation to core precepts of dub. in bass culture, lloyd bradley relates the rebalancing of a mix to “ancient african medicine that splits the body up into seven centres or ‘selves’ – sexual, digestive, heart, brain, etc. . . . [and] would, as practitioners always describe it, ‘bring forward or push back’ different centres” (2000: 309). this seems to suggest a shamanistic element in the cyborgian construct that lee perry built around himself. beyond this, dub must also be understood as fundamentally bodily in relation to its initial inception as a source of new recorded material for sound systems, and the centrality of the physical, visceral, immersively sonic experience of those systems. however, noting this facet of dub’s origins, it is instructive to consider julian henriques’ description of the form as born to “the most powerful music machines in the world vibrating every organ of the body” (2011: 53). the observation that a sound system employs technology to act physically upon a “corporeal medium of sounding” (2011: 23) indicates a reciprocal relationship between technology and the human body. in this we might identify dancecult 7(2)48 a starting point for scratch’s line of thinking, and the compelling suggestion that human and machine were intertwined in dub right from its beginnings. so, if we overstate the organic in perry’s cyborgian conception of himself we are in danger of overlooking the reciprocity between man and machine which is central to the image in the first place. as much as perry the man is infiltrating the machine, he also tells us that the “jack panel is the brain itself ” which needs to be made into “a living man” (perry, quoted in toop 1995: 113). the sense is that both man and machine are incomplete until they are jacked together. the combination of the two in this light becomes an expression of perry’s creative potential as well as a political statement, just as the identity of the archandroid is for monáe. different arks as the cyborg is a trope common to lee “scratch” perry and to us-based afrofuturist musicians, so too is the ark. specifically as a common point of departure for perry and for sun ra, the concept of the ark warrants consideration as a second brief case in point here. considering the black ark and the arkestra as the chosen musical vehicles for perry and ra’s imaginative flights, we might initially identify the ark in both instances as a spacecraft leaving earth for other worlds. however, we should also observe that the black ark, for all its sci-fi knobs, switches and cabling, is often a more explicitly biblical signifier. sometimes, for perry, it was unequivocally the ark of the covenant: when you see a rainbow in the sky i tell you that is truly the sign of the ark of the covenant. i bring the ark out of egypt, down to 5 cardiff crescent, washington gardens. no-one in kingston, jamaica, noticed it was out of egypt, so i give them reggae music, the treasure of king tut (perry quoted in mottram 2007). and then elsewhere, the black ark also represents that other biblical ark, and its sound needs to be understood in relation to water and to animal life. paul sullivan identifies an “aquatic” (2014: 43) dimension to perry’s sound, and also reproduces this analogy drawn from a david toop interview with the man himself: something there was like a holy vibration and a godly sensation. modern studios, they have a different set-up. they set up a business and a money-making concern. i set up like an ark . . . you have to be the ark to save the animals and nature and music (1995: 129). the degree of biblical specificity here might be expected to show up distinctions between perry and ra, particularly considering the depth and detail of the latter’s own interrogative engagement with christian scripture (corbett 2006: 6). but ra’s own poetry asserts “i have known a heaven all my own” (geerken and wolf 2005: 64), and reminds us frequently that his sci-fi mythology can’t be reduced to a simple critique of christianity. unequivocally, the arkestra must also be understood in relation to the arks of the bible. stefany anne harries | africa on the moon 49 golberg’s 2014 essay on ra, since reproduced on the arkestra’s own website, confirms this with reference to ra’s own words: the name arkestra itself was an allusion to the ark of the covenant. ‘a covenant of arkestra,’ said sun ra, ‘it’s like a selective service of god. picking out some people. arkestra has a ‘ra’ at the beginning and the end. ra can be written as ‘ar’ or ‘ra,’ and on both ends of the word it is an equation: the first and the last are equal…. in the middle there is ‘kest,’ which equals ‘kist,’ as in ‘sunkist’…i read that in sanskrit ‘kist’ means ‘sun’s gleam.’ this is why i called my orchestra ‘arkestra’ (2014). aside from the extraordinary similarity with perry’s assertion above, what ra’s discussion here illustrates most clearly of all is that no particular privilege was accorded to any strand of his philosophy. that which stood up to ra’s penetrating interrogation was subsumed into his system completely, aligned with elements drawn from all of human history and all across the globe. though his approach to his materials is superficially more disordered, the same is true of perry. that the black ark might be the ark of the covenant and full of animals and also a spaceship is the point. perhaps the noah analogy connects to a whole animalistic and ecological strand of scratch’s iconography (corbett 1994: 19), and explains for us the presence of the “super ape” (1976) and the “croaking lizard” (1976), but simultaneously we see that the black ark may be carrying its animal passengers to an ultimate destination on another world. this over-arching sense of pluralism or hybridity also allows christian iconography to interact in perry’s work with the more complex and difficult to classify (middleton 2015: 3) structures of rastafari, and even with “the aura (if not the actual practice) of jamaica’s obeah tradition of neo-african black magic” (veal 2007: 142). these apparently diverse elements are manipulated in a number of ways in perry’s practice, but most conspicuously linguistically. it’s worth considering in parallel an observation from john corbett that “perry’s is a discursive kingdom, a creative world of hidden connections and secret pacts exposed in language” (1994: 128), and darren middleton’s suggestion that “the first rastafari scrutinized sacred writings from their social location [and] practiced an ingenious form of mother-tongue exegesis or vernacular interpretation” (2015: 9). in perry’s free-ranging monologues and in his musical works, rastafari, obeah, science fiction, ecology and the bible are not merely presented alongside one another, but are integrated in a comprehensive re-versioning. writing about the post-punk tendency to identify dub as musically iconoclastic, christopher partridge notes “in much jamaican dub, the deconstruction of the canonical and, arguably, the reified in reggae, was less a subversion of musical hegemony and more a celebration of it” (2010: 223). we might note a related tendency on a philosophical or ethical plane here. it is not celebration of extant philosophies that ra and perry are engaged in, of course, but iconoclastic deconstruction is not an accurate portrayal either. these artists share a joyful perception of the recombinant potential of ideas. dancecult 7(2)50 of lightness if an interrogative engagement with christian symbolism connects perry and ra so too, to my mind, does the significance of what glenn ligon identifies simply as “lightness” (2001: 87): ra’s interest in flight is a kind of politics. being light is a refusal of the limitations of what is considered human. . . . to be light, to be able to fly away, is to be able to imagine something beyond what we see. what we see now is pretty grim, so ra’s ability to see beyond a particular historical moment as a way to change it remains compelling (ligon 2001: 87). noting the previously discussed complications with an aesthetic characterisation of lee perry dubs as organic, we might also turn to the notion of lightness for a way to describe the uniqueness of the sound of the black ark: the sound achieved in the ark was unique. the music was springy and light, as though it had been dabbed gently onto the vinyl, like kisses. at a time when other studios were making passable dub impressions of steamhammers getting to work on massive chunks of concrete, the ark dubs were often spidery constructions of lacy delicacy (kelly 1984: 7). in understanding the importance of lightness in perry’s 1970s work, it is perhaps instructive to compare it with the contemporary output of fellow dub pioneer king tubby. we can draw an aesthetic distinction between the airy, upward motion of perry’s mixes and the archeological downward delving of king tubby dubs with reference to certain specifics of production technique. perry eschews tubby’s more dramatic mix gestures, rarely truly isolating instrumental elements or inverting the mix hierarchy, maintaining instead constant but translucent filtered layers of sound. counter-intuitively, this greater vertical layering makes for lighter sounding mixes—as it is not heard in isolation, but pushed through the tubes of compressors and against the saturation limits of the tape in combination with other elements, perry’s bass never achieves the thudding weight and all-encompassing warmth of tubby’s. in the drums, the prevalence of a classic, bounding one drop (from carlton barrett’s tenure in the early years of the upsetters through into the playing of black ark fixtures like “benbow” creary), lighter on the kick drum than the rockers’ patterns heard elsewhere, ensures that the high frequencies of the hi-hat predominate. the high-end emphasis is often also intensified by a gauzy web of additional percussion credited to scratch himself. where vocals, horns and melodica are employed only briefly, gesturally in tubby’s dubs, they are a constant presence, smeared thinly over the top of perry’s soundworld. as an exemplar of all of this, we might take max romeo’s “chase the devil” (1976)—perhaps the perry production that looms largest in british pop cultural consciousness thanks to an iconic rework at the hands of the prodigy in the track “out of space” (1992), and, incidentally, one of the productions to emerge from the black ark which we might most immediately identify as afrofuturist. the stepwise motion of earl “chinna” smiths’ guitar, harries | africa on the moon 51 snaking up beneath romeo’s yearning vocal; the irresistible bounce of “benbow” creary’s hi-hat, buoyed up still further by the croaking guiro and keith stirling’s immaculate choppy offbeat keys—everything in the record seems directed towards generating lift, defying gravity. and even when re-versioned for super ape (1976) as “croaking lizard”, the riddim is overwritten with an extensive new vocal in the form of prince jazzbo’s toasting. contrary to what we might assume prior to a focused, analytical listen, this production is most decidedly not about the low frequencies. even boris gardiner’s propulsive bass is restlessly, upwardly, mobile. granted, in “chase the devil” it is satan, not romeo or scratch, who is taking flight. but the lightness of perry productions does seem audibly, aesthetically to touch a transcendent impulse closely related to ra’s urge to flight. and in an almost unutterable sense of dismay at immediate social realities, it surely derives from the same source. lest we’re in danger of reducing the spectrum of afrofuturist musical creation to ra alone, it is perhaps worth observing as a final note here that an emphasis on lightness might distance lee “scratch” perry musically and conceptually from some other important afrofuturists. musically, the “syrupy, bass-heavy” (womack 2013:63) sound of parliament/funkadelic and the punishing techno of underground resistance don’t immediately speak of lightness. metaphorically or conceptually, the image of an armourclad rammellzee or afrika bambaataa’s “planet rock” (1982) can be read as speaking of substance, of momentum generated by mass or the weight to stand against the violence of the gothic future. this potential distinction emerges no less strongly when we consider perry’s work in relation to other dub producers, though. perry’s sonic lightness has already been considered here as contrasting with key aspects of king tubby productions, and is no less distinct from the surgically precise scientist dubs that followed in the 1980s and will be discussed later on. the larger picture always shows dub and afrofuturism as simultaneously distinct and interwoven, as complex webs within a web of concept and creation where no singular mode of understanding goes very far. as a case in point, we might return to paul sullivan’s related identification of perry’s sound as “aquatic” (2014: 43), and observe that in certain respects, the closest purely sonic parallel to perry’s dubs of the 1970s is found across decades and continents in the similarly submerged techno of detroit’s drexciya (see williams 2001: 167–72). to find another race the semi-comical spectre of old nick in “chase the devil” and the prevalence of old testament judeo-christian references throughout reggae and dub raises a fundamental question in respect of the relationship between dub and afrofuturism. an informed understanding of the latter requires that we reach back to the beginnings of african american music, to slavery, to transportation: the twist is that if you are black and believe in the supernatural, and are issued from an ecological determinant that does not permit of such a psychological extreme as dancecult 7(2)52 american puritanism… the circumstance of finding yourself in a culture of white humanist pseudo-puritanical store-keepers must be revolting. and if you are the slave of such a culture, your sorrow must be indeterminable (baraka 1963: 10). it is a familiar observation, but nonetheless a centrally important one: we must surely look to amiri baraka’s assessment of the yawning gulf between african supernatural belief systems and christian puritanism if we’re to attain even the most elementary understanding of sun ra’s motivation in developing his own alien mythology/reality. in brief and basic form we might note that as an afrocentric consciousness grew amongst african americans in the ‘60s, the need for transcendence from grim social realities was not diminished. but for some, the viability of existing gospel modalities as the expression of that need clearly was diminished. ra found what we might think of as an extraordinarily compelling alternative in the assertion of the possibility of a spiritual and physical transcendence beyond the limits of earthly existence that didn’t require the permission of the slavers’ god, yet his own writings continued to draw from the christian tradition, and to interrogate and engage with established spiritual structures. similarly, in many reggae-derived musics, judeo-christian imagery persists through the ‘70s and into the present, but crucially as filtered through the lens of rastafari. we can identify here a further central parallel between ra’s self-made mythology and dub in all its specificity. where dub maintained (and maintains) a forward rush aesthetically, in its relationship to rastafari and the christianity of the old testament, dub specifically looks backwards thematically, to the historical golden ages of ethiopia and egypt: when confronted by stalwarts of religion, philosophy and science who sought to falsify history in the service of western slavery, black preachers–though for the most part unlearned–discovered in the only book to which they had access (the bible) that egypt and ethiopia were in africa, and that these countries figured very importantly in the history of civilization. to blacks, africa (interchangeable with ethiopia) became a glorious, biblical homeland equated with zion (sanders 1982: 60). this looking backwards and forwards simultaneously is a defining afrofuturist position, and dichotomous “links with ancient egypt and outer space” (lock 2011: 29) are present in ra’s astro-black mythology from its earliest incarnations. and as ra invoked the dichotomy audibly in the temporally dislocated alien-primitivism of “ancient aiethiopia” (1959), “jamaica’s dub pioneers used echo . . . to provoke a sense of jamaica’s ancestral african roots, while at the same time invoking the infinity of the cosmos – and the future – by creating cavernous spaces within the music” (sullivan 2014: 10). but, to ra, and in the lineage of afrofuturism that runs through electro to present day hip-hop, is the possibility of rejecting modes of being, modes of blackness imposed by history, also central? the history that was a key determinant of ra’s mode of expression, jazz, was that of slavery, a cultural cataclysm characterized by kodwo eshun as “a total break in modernity” (eshun 2006: 292). we might assume then that creative progress required the rejection of that history. introducing the ra thesis in travelling the spaceways: sun harries | africa on the moon 53 ra, the astro-black and other solar myths, cheryl lynne bruce (2010: 11) invokes frantz fanon’s statement that: “i am not a prisoner of history. i should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny” (fanon 1967: 229). however, ra’s adoption of egyptian and other pre-christian signifiers shows us that he did not reject history but rather worked to revision it in the interests of a living present and a possible future. eshun’s concept of “chronopolitical” (2003: 291) artistic intervention may provide a more accurate model, in which “science fiction was never concerned with the future, but rather with engineering feedback between its preferred future and its becoming present” (2003: 289). and for all that ra seemed at times to consciously set himself up in opposition to christian religious teaching that he regarded as reactionary, he did not reject christianity. certainly, as graham lock notes, “making the vision real was a central impulse in sun ra’s performances. . . . his outer space utopia was offered as an alternative to the mythic space usually invoked by those means, i.e. the christian heaven” (lock 2010: 31), but lock also identifies facets of ra’s mythology/reality as directly analogous to afro-baptist practices and conversion experiences: for example, many of the converts describe being taken to heaven, often by flying through the air or by travelling along a very narrow path: sun ra’s story of his initial visit to what he identified as another planet incorporates both the elements of flying and of travelling along a narrow route (2010: 32). the parallels can be traced further, and are often compelling. for lock, they serve the dual purpose of establishing a possible concrete reality at the root of ra’s tales of alien abduction, but also and more importantly identifying the significance of ra’s science fiction iconography as a representation of established spiritual/religious models. the implication is that ra’s “antipathy to the black church” (lock 2010:31), often expressed in terms of frustration at a refusal in those quarters to acknowledge the concrete reality of rapid change in the space age, was founded primarily on formal rather than spiritually fundamental points of difference. in dub and other jamaican musical forms, the language and imagery of the old testament seems to remain closer to the surface, to never be as completely reimagined as in its integration into ra’s mythology. nonetheless, we can identify similar re-purposing of christian sources, and a similar intent to revise the power structures that were often attendant upon them. where ra told audiences “you’ve outlived the bible. which was your scenario. you’re in a science-fiction film now” (quoted in lock 2010: 32), lee “scratch” perry asserts “i am an extraterrestrial, not from another planet but from heaven” (quoted in mottram 2007). christian iconography as it manifests in reggae-derived musics including dub is of a vein which would doubtless appear strange, verging on the heathen at times to amiri baraka’s american puritans, but it is never expunged, never explicitly rejected, from “chase the devil” to the congoes “feast of the passover” to scientist’s “jerusalem dub”. as has already been touched upon, the will to reimagine christianity was already substantially present in jamaican culture in the form of rastafari. michael manley has dancecult 7(2)54 suggested that rastafari provided a solution to the central problem of christianity as a white person’s religion, and therefore a tool of subjugation inseparable from the inhumanities of the slave trade: man has a deep need for religious conviction, and rasta resolves the contradiction of a white man’s god in a colonial society … i think that the only jamaican who truly knows who he is has to be the rasta man (quoted in sanders 1982: 59). if we accept this assertion, the immediate implication is that the need to create an entirely new mythology to encompass the complexities of afrodiasporic cultures’ relationship to christianity and to pre-christian histories that drove ra in the us was absent in jamaica. moreover, in jamaica, in dub in general and perry’s work in particular, the ancient africa of the old testament co-existed not only with adapted religious structures derived from the same source, such as rasta and those of the afro-protestant pocomania sect, but also, more visibly and immediately than in the us, with culturally distinct practices like obeah (veal 2007:142). the socially determined religious framework that dub existed within was arguably already considerably more muddied, plural and malleable than the one that ra worked with, within and without. however, alongside this differentiating factor, fundamental parallels between ra’s mythscience and rasta are also evident. particularly, we must observe a parallel with ra, the exiled saturnian, in rasta’s identification of its people as exiled from a homeland, both spiritually and physically (geographically), to which they must one day return. furthermore, ethiopianist and other afrocentric movements existed in the u.s. and were hugely significant in shaping african american cultural and social identity through the ‘70s and beyond. ra’s work didn’t emerge in a vacuum. more accurately, i feel the geographical distinction we must draw between our respective understandings of dub and the work of us-based afrofuturist musicians as distinctive musics of exile is one of scale rather than distance. if rasta’s ethiopianist stance had its clear equivalents in the u.s., the thing that very clearly did not and could not happen was that those equivalents became intertwined with a musical form which came to dominate the entire cultural identity of the nation, as reggae did in jamaica. the sheer scale of the north american popular cultural context that these elements existed within made such an exaggerated impact impossible, and inevitably, the more explicitly afrocentric jazz became through the ‘60s and ‘70s, the further from the white american cultural mainstream it drifted. the near mono-cultural ubiquity of ska, rocksteady and later reggae-derived musics in jamaican pop, in strange contradiction to the marginalized social status of rastas there (sanders 1982: 59), meant that the music, in rude health, inevitably transitioned to britain with the migrants of the mid-twentieth century. that transition was central to the music latterly punching above its weight in terms of global cultural significance. harries | africa on the moon 55 corner crew dub so, through rastafari we can understand dub as a music of exile, but an exile in some important respects distinct from the experience of african american afrofuturist creators. babylon, in common with slavery in the caribbean and the us, is dystopia now, but it is a dystopia, which permits of only one resolution. whereas some african americans looked to the assertion of their civil rights in the us, or to the possibility of a separatist state within that nation as espoused by the nation of islam (gardell 1996: 60), or in the case of ra looked very much elsewhere, contemporaneous jamaican afro-consciousness looked only to a return to the source, to africa, for deliverance. in this regard the closest parallel in the us to the position of rastafari as expressed in dub is that of marcus garvey’s universal negro improvement association and african communities league (unia-acl). in the philosophy and active policy of the unia-acl, the long term goal of “africa for the africans” (garvey 1986: 68) was paired with an immediate, practical engagement with issues of social welfare. it is this same pairing, broadly speaking, that we might note in dub as a manifestation of jamaican culture and rastafari. it is perhaps the sense of babylon as a universal condition escapable by a single route only, but ameliorable by positive action in the meantime, from which the strain of street-level social consciousness and comment in dub derives. the importance of social commentary in the work pouring out of the black ark during the few extraordinarily productive years of its existence is apparent at a glance. so many of the perry productions which endure in a global pop consciousness come from this place—“war in a babylon” (1976), “police and thieves” (1977), “life is not easy” (1978). the impulse to tie this expansive music to gritty reality is omnipresent in dub, as expressed succinctly in the introduction to “gimmie mi gun” by dr. alimantado: the man can’t say dat iah! how the man mean i can’t say dat? then the police n’soldier deh deh far then what! when a gunman backround di corner and a police n’soldier no deh deh we a go use fe defend i-self ! seen according to what is going on in the world and society today that motivate me to do this song, i say. . . . (from best dressed chicken in town, 1978) an increasingly unsettled and violent youth culture in jamaica is frequently linked to the musical evolution of rocksteady and then reggae from ska, and then in those musics towards increased bass weight, more pensive moods, and harder rhythms. dub is one of the end points of this aesthetic trajectory. sullivan perceives the jamaican pop soundworld as growing “more ominous as it soundtracked the emergence of the rude boys, jamaica’s first youth subculture” (sullivan 2014: 22). but if the sense of threat evoked by the rise of street violence worked its dancecult 7(2)56 way into the sonic makeup of the music, the music-makers also responded with a tellingly specific brand of righteous morality in narrative content and themes. for michael manley, the urgency of social messaging in jamaican popular musics again derives, at least in part, from the backward gaze of ethiopianist or rastafarian beliefs. in this light, the preponderance of revolutionary motifs in the music of bob marley is understood thus: “faith begins with an acceptance of the possibility of continuity. if you cannot survey a continuity into your own past, you cannot believe in a continuity into your own future. marley had that faith” (manley 1982:12). on one level, the urge to street level social comment in these musics sits uneasily with certain canonical afrofuturist modes. kodwo eshun notes the importance in afrofuturist thought of attaining or retaining “a possibility space which leaves behind or moves away from traditional notions of black culture as based on the street, for instance, based on traditional notions of masculinity, based on traditional notions of ethnicity. it’s a boredom with those ideas” (2006: 10). literal comment on the violence, inequity, even just the mundane specifics of life as a black american is certainly relatively scarce in the music which defines afrofuturism as canon or concept. even as the lineage extends to contemporary alternative hip-hop this conceptual marker remains significant. reviewing shabazz palaces’ lese majesty for the wire magazine, hua hsu notes that the presence of some (mild) old-school rap braggadocio is in “jarring” (2014: 51) contrast to a lyrical style otherwise characterized by “afrofuturist dreaming and a swaggering commitment to its own alien language” (2014: 51). if the lyrical/narrative position of lese majesty needs to be understood in relation to both science fiction and the immediacy of hip-hop social comment, we can perhaps understand the reluctance of shabazz palaces and other contemporary artists to accept the afrofuturist tag (stannard 2015: 19). the iconoclastic model of black atlantic futurism evinced by eshun above permits no such compromise. however, a second contemporary hip-hop example shows us that that model is not by any means the whole of the picture of afrofuturism, and that the pairing of explicit afrofuturist imagery and literal social comment can be successful. on the psychic world of walter reed, killah priest combines these elements not just thematically across the course of the album, but often within a single rhyme: investigation found the macs and volts in his apartment the informant, mob cops, crime bosses and cover ups, fbis and flying saucers watching night watch, online love affairs and true crimes congregation of masons showing new signs government conspiracies the x9 hollow in the hands of this killa bee jericho flesh build walls around my mind from a speck of dust to my exodus to the black holes to the nebulas (“new reality”, 2013). harries | africa on the moon 57 and still other examples can be found. a similar balance occurs throughout the recorded oeuvre of doom (formerly mf doom), albeit with the direct science fiction references translocated to a superhero/supervillain mythology.1 even in the case of tricky, whose lyrics often play with obfuscation and ambiguity, alexander g. weheliye observes that the absence of signifiers of “nonindividuated sociality . . . hardly provides a safety net from the real” (2005: 188). positioning afrofuturist thought as oppositional to more grounded strains of social commentary is ultimately too simple anyway. for a central example to the contrary we might look to sun ra’s “outerspace employment agency” from space is the place (1974), an unequivocal takedown of social stereotypes and systemic barriers to social justice. when ra says in space is the place, “i hate your absolute reality” (see coney 1974), he is neither dismissing nor rejecting the reality of black life, but rather those who would absolutize it to the mundane. the “outerspace employment agency” seen in this light becomes more than satire, even a formative example of the principle identified by nk jemisin (quoted in womack’s afrofuturism) as “art as real world planning” (womack 2013: 177). beyond this, the urge to kick against the dissatisfactory in the world was in the dna of the music itself, a driving force of ra’s direction of his musicians: “‘play some fire on it,’ sun ra would tell his musicians. ‘if you’re not mad at the world, you don’t have what it takes’” (golberg 2014). returning to dub, perhaps the aforementioned spectre of an increasingly troubled youth culture hanging over dub music from its inception should form part of our understanding of key musical statements from another prominent dub futurist: scientist. scientist’s dubs on scientist meets the space invaders are markedly hard-edged by comparison to lee perry’s organic mulch or even tubby’s more technically rigorous mixes. this can be explained in part by advances in technology in the years immediately following the late ‘70s heyday of those latter giants, but that’s only part of the picture. creative production choices like scientist’s use of densely mixed, hard-toned and markedly short reverbs in the place of tubby’s de-tensioned springs or perry’s swirling echoes point to a conceptual intent behind the toughness of these dubs too. bass is thickened with chorus and flanging effects, the comforting familiarity of guitar and organ harmony is absent for long periods, and where more expansive delays are employed, as at the opening of “time warp”, high feedback values produce an immediate and aggressive distorted crunch. noting these choices alongside song titles like “laser attack”, “de materialize” and “super nova explosion” and that iconic cover art featuring scientist locked in explosive battle with pixelated alien foes, extraterrestrials in scientist’s world seem to be aggressors to be repulsed. this is of course in contrast to some canonical afrofuturist music, perhaps primarily to the “invitational” mode (whitehead 2010: 25) of sun ra’s position as an alien himself, wherein the alien is necessarily a positive signifier. or, see also model 500’s trailblazing techno masterwork “no ufo’s” (1985): “they say there is no hope / they say, ‘no ufos’ / why is no head held high? / maybe you’ll see them fly”. scientist’s aliens are a them beaming down to us, but with violent intent, and they certainly haven’t been invited. a similar positioning of extraterrestrials negatively, as aggressors, does appear elsewhere in afrofuturist music. dancecult 7(2)58 we can connect scientist’s hard, combative dub to the excoriating techno-blitzkrieg of mad mike/underground resistance’s “death star” (1992), or to the generally ambivalent, fearinflected representation of extraterrestrials in rammellzee’s elaborate mythscience or kool keith’s work as dr. octagon (see dr. octagonecologyst, 1997). it may be a stretch of the imagination to suggest that in the preservative echoes of dub, we observe what walter benjamin describes as a need to “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (cited in weheliye, 2005: 79). however, it may be possible to assert that like rammellzee’s unique modes of creation, a production like meets the space invaders (1981) arrives simultaneously from a place of immediacy, a specific social present, as well as from a science-fictional, quantum infinity stretching between past and future. dub come save me all of the above can carry us so far. we can learn a lot about the foundations of dub by understanding its relationship to religion, to jamaican youth and street culture, to sound systems and dancehall. we can get a sense of the complicated contexts that spawned super ape and king tubby’s meets rockers uptown. and by extension we can map the many connections and disconnections between dub and what we might identify as an african american afrofuturist musical lineage. within the discussion so far, i have made the attempt to tie these contextual considerations to the content of the music itself, and to understand the distinct styles of iconic producers in relation to environmental or social conditions. however, this approach has the potential to be reductive when misapplied or misunderstood, as it may fail to recognize dub’s development towards abstraction rather than emotive representation or lyrical narrative. this is a significant shortcoming when, ultimately, so much of dub’s magic resides in its refusal of narrative and its assertion of sound as pure sound, not sound as signifier. if we talk about dub, then, we need to find our way back to the sound itself. sullivan notes, that “although dub was, and is, more or less a fluid process with no rigid rules, certain sonic tropes are recognizably consistent when tracing its development. chief among them are reverb and delay (echo)” (sullivan 2014: 9). whilst we can understand echo as a type of memory, what mark fisher calls “technologised time” (2013: 47), perhaps even as a retaking of a cultural space which was colonized, we should also allow ourselves to understand these “sonic tropes” as sound––and sound that speaks without needing explanation. when ian penman observes that “dub’s sub-sonic echo is no mere fx—it is the effect proper of a certain subjective view of the world: the dark sonic mirror reflection of a rasta’s phantasmal worldview” (1995: 39), it is perhaps regrettable that he does not quite pursue this line far enough. the sub-sonic echo at hand (see also weheliye 2005: 92) is the historical echo and the social echo. but the audible echo, the sonic echo is “no mere fx” either—it is the substance of this music, at its very core, and an objective reality as well as a subjective one. julian henriques notes the significance of this material aspect, stating that “dub’s musical aesthetic can be described as an excavation of the material and energetic qualities of sound, removing all but the essential drum and base [sic], to create an echoic space in the music for the listener to enter” (2014: 197). harries | africa on the moon 59 penman’s concern seems to be that this reading of dub makes it vulnerable to appropriation, to being “written of/off as if it were purely and simply a formal musical device which can be lifted and appliquéd willy-nilly” (1995: 38). but to emphasize the purely sonic in dub is to emphasize its abstractness, ultimately its confounding, complex otherness. when tubby and others built a new form on the spectral foundations of byron smith’s inadvertent removal of the song from a song (sullivan 2014: 7), the effect was not to simplify the music any more than malevich’s “black square” (1915) simplified painting. i would argue that dub’s untethering of sound ultimately makes it more complicated and irreducible, as well as adaptable, fundamentally plastic, perpetually in transformation—but harder to “lift” because it is harder to grasp. if we accept dub as focusing to a considerable degree on sound as sound, this facet in conjunction with its technological origin makes diversification inevitable: technology was responsible for the birth of dub and has stayed crucial to its development. by the time producers and engineers had started engaging with dub outside of jamaica, they were already using new, or different, equipment and methods compared to their kingston counterparts (sullivan 2014: 215). questions of where the diversification of dub as a cohesive form ends and the appropriation and assimilation of its tropes into other forms begins, are complex and ultimately subjective. sullivan goes on to say that the technology-derived plasticity of dub “created a tension between those who viewed dub as a genre specific to 1970s kingston, and those who believed it should use the new technologies to innovate” (2014: 215), but this is probably a moot point. artists that we might identify as carrying dub forward necessarily do so in circumstances radically different from those of its inception, technologically and socially— but the dub echo as fundamental sound object (not effect or ornament) means that dub is most assuredly roots manuva, portishead, tricky, the bug, the pop group, burial just as it is tubby, jammy, scientist or scratch. in short, dub is its own sonic diaspora, a shifting world of sound that transcends geographical, social and ethical borders—in paul sullivan’s phrase, a “meta-virus” (2014: 11). my initial unease around the treatment of dub in afrofuturist analysis, noted in the introduction to this essay, stemmed in part from the fact that the term “afrofuturism” only emerged in the early 1990’s (dery 1994: 180), as a retroactive descriptor for a body of work dating back several decades prior. the danger that i perceived in this was that its discourse would be curatorial, and the half century-spanning diasporic forms in question would be simplified so that they could be ringfenced. however, just as dub has evolved, engaging with different musics and taking on different meanings, so has afrofuturism endlessly diversified, not just as a concept, but as a living creative movement. womack’s 2013 survey considered divergences such as d. scot miller’s afro-surrealism (2013: 165), which have emerged since dery’s “black to the future” (1994). moreover, as with the echo in dub, a key function of afrofuturism is the disordering of linear time. an attempt to isolate the rhizomic structure that is afrofuturism in a moment in time, or to a specific historical period overlooks this key function. i’m reminded of paul gilroy’s assessment of africentric assertions of cultural dancecult 7(2)60 anteriority: “the anteriority of african civilisation is asserted not in order to escape this linear time but in order to claim it and thus subordinate its narrative of civilisation to a different set of political interests without even attempting to change the terms themselves” (1993: 191). very clearly, afrofuturism attempts to change the terms. • • • afrofuturism and dub. an echo back and forth that changes with each iteration. the feedback turned up high, distortion of the image on the tape. sun ra and lee “scratch” perry, “alien döppelgangers”.2 not the same, but connected, complicit. if singular conclusions evade us here, it is because we’re speaking of musical worlds built to resist absolutes, where commonalities do not preclude distinctiveness and distinctiveness does not imply fragmentation: the very least which this music and its history can offer us today is an analogy for comprehending the lines of affiliation and association which take the idea of the diaspora beyond its symbolic status as the fragmentary opposite of some imputed racial essence (gilroy 1993: 95). but between the lines, or traversed by them, something else too. not an absence, but an expression of potential: echoic space. acknowledgements thanks to tobias c. van veen for numerous specific insights into afrofuturism that would otherwise have escaped me, and for encouraging me to delve deeper and find a more evolved understanding of the subject. thanks also to hillegonda rietveld for detailed and constructive editorial input. notes 1 the supervillain mythology referred to here is central to doom albums including born like this (2009) and madvillainy (2004), the latter a collaborative project with madlib released under the name madvillain. 2 tobias c. van veen, personal communication with the author (by email), 22 april 2015. references baraka, amiri. 1963. blues people. new york: harper perennial. bradley, lloyd. 2000. bass culture. new york: viking. bruce, cheryl lynn. 2010. “some ra”. in travelling the spaceways: sun ra, the astro black and other solar myths. 9–11. chicago: white walls. harries | africa on the moon 61 cohen, sheldon. 2009. sleevenotes to jazz in silhouette cd reissue (2011). phoenix records: 131511. corbett, john. 1994. extended play: sounding off from john cage to dr. funkenstein. durham/ london: duke university press. ———. ed. 2006. the wisdom of sun ra: sun ra’s polemical broadsheets and street corner leaflets. chicago: white walls. dery, mark. 1994. “black to the future”. in flame wars: the discourse of cyberculture, ed. mark dery, 179–222. durham: duke university press. ehrlich, luke. 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equation: the collected poetry and prose. norderstedt: books on demand/waitawhile. golberg. s.a. 2014. “a cosmic centennial”. the smart set. 29 april 2014. <http://www.act.unibayreuth.de/resources/heft2014-05/act2014_05_scott.pdf> (accessed 16 february 2015). henriques, julian. 2011. sonic bodies. new york: continuum. ———. 2014. “dread bodies”. small axe 18(2): 191–201. hsu, hua. 2014. review of lese majesty. the wire, august: 51. kelly, danny. 1984. “lee perry”. new musical express, 17 november: 6–7 and 58. lafleur, ingrid. “visual aesthetics of afrofuturism”. tedx fort greene salon. youtube. uploaded 25 september 2011. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7bcaszk9zc> (accessed 5 may 2015). ligon, glenn. 2010. “remember the revolution”. in travelling the spaceways: sun ra, the astro black and other solar myths. 85–88. chicago: white walls. lock, graham. 2011. “right place, right time, wrong planet”. in travelling the spaceways: sun ra, the astro black and other solar myths. 29–35. chicago: white walls. manley, michael. 1982. “reggae: the revolutionary impulse”. in reggae international, ed. stephen davis and peter simon, 11–13. london: thames and hudson. martin, kevin. 1995. “echo chamber odysseys”. the wire, may: 32. mcconville, davo. “janelle monáe, nate wonder and chuck lightning talk moog and entropic utopias”. noisey. 5 may 2014. <http://noisey.vice.com/blog/janelle-monae-nate-wonder-andchuck-lightning-talk-moog-and-entropic-utopias> (accessed 16 february 2015). middleton, darren j. n. 2015. rastafari and the arts. abingdon/new york: routledge. mottram, jack. 2007. submit response. 25 jan 2007. <http://submitresponse.co.uk/ weblog/2007/01/25/lee-scratch-perry/> (accessed 17 february 2015). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7bcaszk9zc http://noisey.vice.com/blog/janelle-monae-nate-wonder-and-chuck-lightning-talk-moog-and-entropic-utopias http://noisey.vice.com/blog/janelle-monae-nate-wonder-and-chuck-lightning-talk-moog-and-entropic-utopias 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van veen, tobias c. 2013. “vessels of transfer: allegories of afrofuturism in jeff mills and janelle monáe”. dancecult 5(2): 7–41. doi: <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.02.02>. weheliye, alexander g. 2005. phonographies: grooves in sonic afro-modernity. durham/london: duke university press. williams, ben. 2001. “black secret technology: detroit techno and the information age”. in technicolour: race, technology and everyday life, ed. alondra nelson, thuy linh n. tu with alicia headlam hines, 154–176. new york and london: new york university press. womack, ytasha l. 2013. afrofuturism: the world of black sci-fi and fantasy culture. chicago: lawrence hill books. discography afrika bambaataa and the soul sonic force. 1982. planet rock. tommy boy (12-inch): tb 823. <http://www.discogs.com/afrika-bambaataa-the-soul-sonic-force-music-by-planet-patrolplanet-rock/release/1080424> doom. 2009. born like this. lex records (cd): lex069cd. <http://www.discogs.com/doom-born-like-this/release/1701916> dr. alimantado. 1978. best dressed chicken in town. greensleeves records (lp): grel 1. <http://www.discogs.com/dr-alimantado-best-dressed-chicken-in-town/release/728062> dr. octagon. 1997. dr. octagonecologyst. dreamworks records/bulk recordings (cd): drmd-50021. <http://www.discogs.com/dr-octagon-dr-octagonecologyst/release/2056537> killah priest. 2013. the psychic world of walter reed. proverb records (cd). <http://www.discogs.com/killah-priest-the-psychic-world-of-walter-reed/ release/4823265> janelle monáe. 2010. the archandroid. bad boy entertainment/wondaland (cd): 7567-89898-3. <http://www.discogs.com/janelle-monáe-the-archandroid/release/2358638> junior murvin. 1977. police and thieves. island records (lp): ilps 9499. <http://www.discogs.com/junior-murvin-police-thieves/release/609735> lee scratch perry. 1997. arkology. island jamaica (cd): crncd6. <http://www.discogs.com/lee-scratch-perry-arkology/release/195142> http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.02.02 http://www.discogs.com/afrika-bambaataa-the-soul-sonic-force-music-by-planet-patrol-planet-rock/release/1080424 http://www.discogs.com/afrika-bambaataa-the-soul-sonic-force-music-by-planet-patrol-planet-rock/release/1080424 http://www.discogs.com/doom-born-like-this/release/1701916 http://www.discogs.com/dr-alimantado-best-dressed-chicken-in-town/release/728062 http://www.discogs.com/dr-octagon-dr-octagonecologyst/release/2056537 http://www.discogs.com/killah-priest-the-psychic-world-of-walter-reed/release/4823265 http://www.discogs.com/killah-priest-the-psychic-world-of-walter-reed/release/4823265 http://www.discogs.com/janelle-mon%c3%a1e-the-archandroid/release/2358638 http://www.discogs.com/junior-murvin-police-thieves/release/609735 http://www.discogs.com/lee-scratch-perry-arkology/release/195142 harries | africa on the moon 63 mad mike. 1992. death star. underground resistance (12”): ur-022. <http://www.discogs.com/mad-mike-death-star/release/3060> madvillain. 2004. madvillainy. stones throw records (cd): sth2065. <http://www.discogs.com/madvillain-madvillainy/release/239980> max romeo. 1976. chase the devil. charmax music (7-inch): ctd01 tynch. <http://www.discogs.com/max-romeo-chase-the-devil/release/552363> max romeo and the upsetters. 1976. war in a babylon. island records (lp): ilps 9392. <http://www.discogs.com/max-romeo-upsetters-war-ina-babylon/release/163696> the meditations. 1978. life is not easy. scandal records (7”): sc.002. <http://www.discogs.com/meditations-life-is-not-easy/release/6404307> miles davis. 1970. bitches brew. columbia (lp): gp 26. <http://www.discogs.com/miles-davis-bitches-brew/release/37006> model 500. 1985. no ufo’s. metroplex (12”): m-001. <http://www.discogs.com/model-500-no-ufos/release/1300331> prodigy, the. 1992. experience. xl recordings (cd): xlcd 110. <http://www.discogs.com/prodigy-experience/release/660> roots manuva. 2002. dub come save me. big dada recordings (cd): bdcd040. <http://www.discogs.com/roots-manuva-dub-come-save-me/release/39956> scientist. 1981. scientist in the kingdom of dub. kingdom records (lp): kvl 9004. <http://www.discogs.com/scientist-in-the-kingdom-of-dub/release/440190> scientist. 1981. scientist meets the space invaders. greensleeves records (lp): grel 19. <http://www.discogs.com/scientist-scientist-meets-the-space-invaders/release/122876> shabazz palaces. 2014. lese majesty. sub pop (cd): sp1044. <http://www.discogs.com/shabazz-palaces-lese-majesty-/release/5942434> sly and the family stone. 1971. there’s a riot goin’ on. epic (lp): ke 30986. <http://www.discogs.com/sly-the-family-stone-theres-a-riot-goin-on/release/5431106> sun ra and his arkestra. 1959. jazz in silhouette. el saturn records (lp): lp-5786. <http://www.discogs.com/sun-ra-and-his-arkestra-jazz-in-silhouette/release/3922959> upsetters, the. 1976. super ape. island records (lp): ils 9417. <http://www.discogs.com/upsetters-super-ape/release/2494209> filmography akomfrah, john. 1996. the last angel of history. uk-germany: black studio film collective, channel 4 television corporation. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113604/> coney, john. 1974. space is the place. usa: north american star system. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072195/> lang, fritz. 1927. metropolis. germany: universum film (ufa). <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017136/?ref_=ttco_co_tt> scott, ridley. 1982. blade runner. usa-hong kong-uk: warner bros. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083658/> http://www.discogs.com/mad-mike-death-star/release/3060 http://www.discogs.com/madvillain-madvillainy/release/239980 http://www.discogs.com/max-romeo-chase-the-devil/release/552363 http://www.discogs.com/max-romeo-upsetters-war-ina-babylon/release/163696 http://www.discogs.com/meditations-life-is-not-easy/release/6404307 http://www.discogs.com/miles-davis-bitches-brew/release/37006 http://www.discogs.com/model-500-no-ufos/release/1300331 http://www.discogs.com/prodigy-experience/release/660 http://www.discogs.com/roots-manuva-dub-come-save-me/release/39956 http://www.discogs.com/scientist-in-the-kingdom-of-dub/release/440190 http://www.discogs.com/scientist-scientist-meets-the-space-invaders/release/122876 http://www.discogs.com/shabazz-palaces-lese-majesty-/release/5942434 http://www.discogs.com/sun-ra-and-his-arkestra-jazz-in-silhouette/release/3922959 http://www.discogs.com/upsetters-super-ape/release/2494209 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113604/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072195/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017136/?ref_=ttco_co_tt http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083658/ dancing to the loop: repetition in contemporary music. an interview with tilman baumgärtel geert lovink institute of network cultures (netherlands) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2016.08.01.10> since the late 1980s, the german media critic tilman baumgärtel has developed an interest in sound loops, recently deciding to write the analogue part of its history. in his 2015 monograph schleifen (loops) tilman describes early tape recorder experiments and their evolution over the past decades into a basic cultural technique. arguably, schleifen is the first book on the history of electronic music that is solely dedicated to loops. besides detailed stories on how individual artists and producers technically defined the language of loops over a period of thirty years, schleifen also touches on the philosophical and strategic question of why repetition has become so prominent in today’s culture. due to my own involvement in radio and my passion for german media theory, i asked tilman to do an email interview. as a german journalist and (new) media critic, baumgärtel is known for his work on net.art and his film writings, such as his phd on harun farocki and publications on south-east asian cinema. baumgärtel’s latest anthology, a reader on international media piracy: pirate essays (2015), was put together on media piracy with comparative case studies. after having lived in south-east asia for a long time, he and his family returned to germany where he became a media theory professor at the polytech in mainz. despite several philosophical remarks and numerous references to adorno, who’s known for his devastating critique of numbing repetition, schleifen is not german hermetic theory. tilman is a gifted writer and journalist who chose to tell stories. the book starts off with the experiments in the 1940s of the french musique concrète composer pierre schaeffer. tape recorders were not just capturing musical performances, they were used to alter and enrich music as such and create tape-based compositions. for this he developed special hardware, the phonogène, a forerunner of digital sampling software. we then move on to karlheinz stockhausen, who studied with schaeffer in paris and created tape experiences in 1953 in the west-german wdr radio studio in cologne. however, all his life stockhausen would remain skeptical about the artistic potential of an endless repetition of the same. in that same year, sam phillips reached a historical breakthrough with his sun studio recordings of the young elvis presley. the delays, echo effects caused by tweaked recording and display heads, produced a revolutionary sound in which the “original” was treated as raw material that could be manipulated, delayed and distorted. no longer was the aim of recording to catch a clean and pure version of the “real” sound. it is only during the 1960s that an explicit will to repetition was being celebrated in the works of steve reich. a relative unknown early chapter has been dug up by tilman about the frankfurt am main artist peter roehr, who died young at the age of 23 in 1968. roehr produced film tape-loops and other “serial formations” that became so familiar a few years later in conceptual arts. we then encounter the rise of minimal music of la monte young and the classics of terry riley and steve reich, who all get special attention in the book. wikipedia describes minimal music as a style “marked by a non-narrative, non-teleological, and non-representational conception of a work in progress, representing a new approach to the activity of listening to music by focusing on the internal processes of the music, which lack goals or motion toward those goals.” tilman takes us from artist to artist, through andy warhol’s films, into ken kesey’s magic bus, to the well-known experiments of the beatles, ending with a dedicated chapter on donna summer’s 1977 disco hit “i feel love”, assembled by the munich producer giorgio moroder. it’s not hard to see how repeating patterns can invite one to go on a spiritual journey and is utilized as a technique to open up one’s “doors of perception”. whereas modernists are supposed to be critical of repetitive motives, it is seen as a post-modern feature to quote and repeat. as tilman writes, minimal music and techno refuse to follow “the unfolding of the motif” and other narrative forms of development in composition. instead of a linear timeline there are cyclical forms, which have been looked at with suspicion in the west. moving away from the arrow, the goal-oriented approach of progression, we experience a periodical return of elements that slowly mutate and assist us to transform into otherness. i encountered the magic of the loop in the second part of the ’80s when i participated in the amsterdam pirate radio scene (radio patapoe and radio 100) with groups such as rabotnik and dfm and theorized their william burroughs-style cut-ups and loop techniques (lovink n.d.). at the time, loops were already so self-evident that they needed no special attention and melted into a general theory of (re-)mixing, in which loops were seen like one of many ingredients. my radio chapter was followed by the collaboration with the graphic aesthetics of mieke gerritzen, who’s still using the warhol copy-paste style, showing how bold and seductive the repetitive elements in visual culture can be, for instance in her 2004 video beautiful world. needless to say that gilles deleuze’s “repetition as difference without a concept” has had a profound influence on the generations, even though in this case theory did not anticipate events but more reflected—and embodied—the contemporary culture of its time. for dj and techno producer richie hawtin, loops assist in finding an internal balance, as a response to information overload and all the crazy events. repetition can also make the viewer or listener aware of issues and bring aspects of the daily technological existence to the surface. in that sense, loops can function as an awareness machine and should not just be condemned as a symbol of silly numbness (these days projected onto hardcore rave parties). however, as steve reich warns us, loops as such are meaningless. “they are not cool, they are simply silly, complete uninteresting. if you just let them run, one is either mad or stoned. it really depends what you do with it”. gl: the motivation to write this book was your astonishment about the mass popularity of techno and similar loop-based music. could you say more about what exactly keeps on surprising you? tb: i learned to play the guitar, when i was a kid. and of course, we had music lessons in school. but apart from canons like “frère jacques”, this repetitive type of music was not part of the musical education i received. this type of music does have a rich tradition, of course, if you think about african and latin-american percussion music, or southeast asian gamelan, or indian ragas. but it’s not really part of the western canon, or at least it wasn’t part of it, when i got my musical education. western music might contain repetitive elements like the rhythm, but it typically has a teleological harmonic structure, that leads to an end, the harmonic resolution. loop-based music, on the other hand just goes on and on and on, and it is easy to mistake that for a lack of structure, if you are not clued in to the workings of this kind of music. the listener does not have to follow a harmonic progression, but is confronted with these cyclic, repetitive patterns. (by the way, it was the book american minimal music by the flemish belgian composer and musicologist wim mertens, that first made me understand these musical structures as a serious alternative to western music.) when i first encountered techno and house, i was quite stunned, because this type of music was so different from the music i had grown up with. in fact, at first i hated it. i thought it was some kind of marching music. when you grew up in an intellectual milieu in post-war germany, strongly rhythmical music was always tainted by the nazi past. it wasn’t just me. stockhausen’s music has no simple meters for the same reason: he heard military music as a child during the third reich, so he later vowed to never make use of this method to organize his music. unfortunately that kept him from appreciating the popular music that he partly inspired, like krautrock or techno. whenever he was asked about this type of music, he cruelly slammed it as music for drug heads, precisely because of its repetitive nature. gl: in the book you map a debate, that always pops up but never quite became a debate, on pros and cons of repetition in music and visual arts. you are quoting steve reich saying that they are a silly effect. he says loops in themselves are not cool, they are simply stupid and completely uninteresting. it maybe be nice when you’re stoned but its not art. it all depends what you do with it. we’re still in debate with adorno, nearly fifty years after his death. ever since minimal music there are producers who resist the development of motives and narrative development, delving into the depths of rhythmic sounds that refuse to come up with a memorable melody line. the rational western subject, you write, is afraid of repetition and circular time. it is not done to repeat one’s self. tb: steve reich talks about the loops that other people are doing. these are stupid. his loops are genius, because he is a conservatory-trained composer, and he eventually turned tape loops into orchestral works. ;) but seriously—what i learned to appreciate about loop-based music was how it can create complexity out of something deceptively simple. steve reich’s early tape compositions—like “it’s gonna rain” or “come out”—are perfect examples of that: very short loops that slowly run out of sync, that will mess with your mind. in the book i have this great quote from techno-dj ricardo villalobos. he says that techno “is ideal for a totally strung-out state of mind in which you do not know anymore who you are or who your father is”. i think it can be very healthy to pulverize your ideas about who you are occasionally, about how identity comes about from time to time. freud’s thanatos, the law of the father, the ego—techno can turn all these concepts into a source of joy. gl: in the sixties, minimal music that used a lot of loops was criticized as outlaw culture, crypto-fascist and empty, lacking any passion, as soundtracks of the machine age that merely reflects the boring perfection of consumer society. we’re no longer provoked in such a way. for us, the subversive elements of rave culture are always, potentially, there. are techno and dance, in essence, anti-authoritarian, or is this an outdated approach all together? many of my friends are still searching for even the most miniscule signs of dissent at festivals. why is this so important? tb: i don’t think any style of popular music is inherently anti-authoritarian or liberating. today, i cannot imagine a more narrow-minded and reductive music as punk rock. yet this was considered to be the most revolutionary type of music by many in the late 1970s—and at that time for good reasons. on the other hand, not everybody in the sixties thought that loops were “crypto-fascist”: the music that terry riley developed out of tape loops was popular among hippies and “heads”. a certain kind of music and more particularly certain songs—like “street fighting men” by the rolling stones, “keine macht für niemand” by ton steine scherben, or even that old chestnut “i will survive” by gloria gaynor—might provide the soundtrack for individual self-liberation because of their message, or even for concrete action like occupying an abandoned apartment building or finally kicking out that useless boyfriend of yours. music with no explicit message like techno might have served similar purposes for the reclaim the streets initiative, or even the love parade, the fuck parade etc. but i think what these unstructured, anti-narrative and “aimless” types of music can do when played in clubs, at parties or festivals, is to create these void spaces that leave room for the self-expression of the audience. that goes for psychedelic rock as well as for techno and other styles that came after. if the point of the music you enjoy is to yell “we will rock you”, it forces you to decide who you are and who these other people are that you want to rock/dominate. if the music is just a repetitive, never-ending pattern of electronic farts, on the other hand, it leaves you with this wide-open space that you can use to understand yourself or to express yourself. not so long ago, as a male person in germany you could not wear a skirt on the streets. but you could do that in a techno club. now you can do it on the street (even though you might still run into trouble in certain places...) but generally, techno clubs were laboratories of the self, where you could try out new identities, and it helped that the music did not impose a narrative or an identity on you. gl: coming from amsterdam i can’t really see that marijuana, cocaine and ecstasy produce an avalanche of interesting art works, or even a creative environment, for that matter. they open doors of perception that provide a different view but lead nowhere. you write about the link between warhol and his factory, and the use of amphetamine, in a period when he was very productive and produced famous art work. what’s your position of repetition and drugs? for instance, you do not mention the spiritual direction in which the movement also took off, for instance with goa trance. tb: i am not against drugs. i think without ecstasy techno would not have taken off the way it did. again, this type of repetitive music was very alien to western sensibility at that time, and many “got it” after somebody put a pill on their tongue and dragged them into a club, a fact immortalized in many early rave tracks like “everything starts with an ‘e'” by e-zee possee & mc kinky or “ebeneezer goode” by the shamen. the early ecstasy apostle psycho-pharmacologist alexander shulgin advocated the use of the drug in the 1970s in a timothy-leary-type “set and setting” situation with soft music and in a comfortable environment for psychological sessions. but as soon as the drug made its way on the black market, you have these blissed-out dance parties, for instance in texas around 1980, where an outfit called the texas groups started to sell it in large quantities. this is described in great detail in matthew collins’ altered state. from there, it made its way to the east coast, new york and eventually to europe, and was accompanied by a new kind of club culture and dance music. you can actually hear that for instance on non stop ecstatic dancing, a remix album by soft cell that was produced after the band encountered ecstasy in new york. the new versions of their songs, especially “memorabilia”, have this fluid, pulsating and techno-like quality that is notably different from their earlier, robotic electronic music, and there is even a rap by a “cindy ecstasy”. at that time, ecstasy was hard to get in europe and very expensive, so it did not lead to a new kind of club culture yet. but when it became easier available around 1990, it did its part to launch rave and techno. however, i do not advocate drugs. i know that many people from amsterdam have an extremely negative view of drugs, probably because they have seen the damage they can do. ecstasy seems to be a drug that can be used recreationally, since it does not create addiction, and simply stops working if you used it too often. but i do not want to diminish the danger of drugs, especially meth, which is also popular in the techno scene. these drugs help to open your mind to the simple patterns and these minuscule deviations from these patterns that lead to complexity. but many people got into that without any chemical help. deleuze in his book on repetition and difference quotes david hume over and over again: “repetition does not change the subject of repetition, but the mind of the observer”. and that’s what i like to think was the greatest accomplishment of techno. it might take drugs to open you up to this experience, but it is not a prerequisite and in the long run it might lead to a lowering of standards. goa is horrible and seems to be an example for just that... as for andy warhol and his diet pills: there is a very long chapter on him in the book, which in my opinion is the best, but also the most challenging chapter in the book. i cannot summarize it here, but the detachment and the “coldness” that is characteristic of his art, his films and his persona certainly had to do with his use of amphetamine. so i do not agree that drugs lead nowhere. artists have always used drugs to come with new ways of expression. i guess the important thing is to know when you do not need them anymore. in any case, alcohol is the worst drug of all of them. interestingly, despite the easy availability of drugs in the techno scene and the generally very taxing lifestyle of djs and producers, you have almost no techno-versions of jim morrison, keith moon, janis joplin or syd barrett, who ruined themselves with drugs in the sixties. there might be the occasional ron hardy or mark spoon, but djs like robert hood, jeff mills, westbam, dj hell or sven väth have been at it for over three decades. they are all well into their 50ies, and they are still going strong, produce music, run companies and tour internationally. alexander shulgin died aged 88. gl: the last, brilliant case study in the book deals with donna summer’s disco hit from 1977, “i feel love”, produced by giorgio moroder, with its orgasmic loops, which echoed through our squats in amsterdam in the late seventies. why did you stop there? would this require a part ii of your studies? what defines electronic dance music these days? is it still the loop? tb: wait a minute—“i feel love” was a hit in the squats of amsterdam? that would have been such a triumph over “es geht voran” by fehlfarben, which was the german squatter’s favorite! anyway, there will never be a second part of this book. it is about how loops became an accepted part of the aesthetics of western music and of contemporary art. around 1980, all the elements are in place, and if you would want to trace the further development of loops after that date, you would have to write an encyclopedia, that might contain the names of countless new artists, but not a lot of additional insight into the subject. i think the strengths of the book are these select “case studies” of individual works and oeuvres that range from the late ’40s to the late ’70s. deep readings of these pieces were more important for me than trying for completeness. there are a lot of excellent studies of electronic dance music from the ’80s onward, many of which came out in the last couple of years, and i felt i could not add anything new to this body of research. if i should ever have the time to research and write another work of that scope, i think it would be about feedback, which is a similar topic as loops in terms of socio-cultural relevance. repetition of course is still the most important element of contemporary techno, but i should leave it to younger people to come up with more nuanced opinions on the contemporary situation of techno... gl: in a short concluding chapter you note that techno’s aim today is “to stay in the rhythm”. you emphasize the collective experience of the dance floor. the perspective is not the one from the composer or the attentive but passive recipient. maybe this was adorno’s failure after all: the lack of embodiment that made this type of critique insusceptible to the “small differences” that deleuze recognizes in the seemingly monotonous repetition of the beat. you also mention that techno is used to find an “inner balance”. tb: my intellectual upbringing was shaped by the concept of the “media apriori” that friedrich kittler drummed into our heads in germany in the ’80s and ’90s: the idea that media basically have a hard-wired logic of their own, and that culture was a result of these technological apparatus and givens (i did not read a lot of adorno during my time at the university, because i was turned off by his arrogance vis-à-vis jazz and mass culture in general. walter benjamin was what i read from the frankfurter schule; i only really started to appreciate adorno much later). for techno, the idea of the “media apriori” seemed to make perfect sense at first: repetition was native (or, as kittler might have said, “built into”) the analog and digital instruments that were used to produce this type of music. in techno, the medium—the sequencer, the sampler—seemed to become the message. and the first rave parties i went to seemed like this total “rise of the machines”, where the repetitive logic of the machine, the assembly line, took control of a defenseless audience. but at the same time it created a social context and a culture in its own right—with its own language, fashion, graphic and interior design. journalism, later even literature, and kittler’s teachings did not help much in understanding these processes. in a way, the book is my attempt to find a balance between the media materialism of kittler and the analysis of the cultural and social results that media technology can trigger. here the birmingham school and those who applied that type of thinking to understand the agency of the audience (like john fiske and henry jenkins) were very important, even though i hardly refer to them in the book. media technology is important, yes, and was often unfairly ignored by the sociological writing that dominated german media theory in the ’70s. but the machines aren’t everything, it’s what people end up doing with them. this kind of research interest also got me to work on net.art. with the net, you also had a technology with seemingly self-evident “rules”, and then the use, abuse or contradiction of these rules by artists and hackers. as far as the embodiment is concerned: both humans and machines are repeating creatures. the difference is that humans repeat with slight variations (in the heartbeat, breathing etc), whereas machines repeat with machinic precision. works like the early minimalist tape loop compositions by reich or riley or even “i feel love” show that you can get machines to produce this kind of organic, not completely regular, slightly off repetition too. i like the term “electronic body music” from the ’80s much better than “techno”, because it is a more fitting description of the merging of the machinic and the organic that this type of music is ideally capable of. john miller chernoff, in his seminal study african rhythm and african sensibility, explains how minuscule variations in west-african percussion music produce the aesthetic phenomena of the “funk” or “groove”. mark butler, in unlocking the groove, adds to that research to show how techno uses beat boxes, samplers and sequencers to create the same type of slight irregularities, that make something, that at first seems totally rigid and in-sync, quite flexible and “funky”. he has tons of examples of how producers manage to have their technology run slightly out of sync and produce metric dissonances, despite being midi-connected machines, that should function in perfect unisono, for example carl craig’s “televised green smoke” or james ruskin’s “connected” (he could have referred to a lot of krautrock, especially tangerine dream, who became experts in having sequencers run slightly out of sync in the 1970s). so that shows that “i feel love” is not a singular example of how two types of machinic repetitions are used to create precisely a non-machinic type of repetition that is so complex that it probably could not be notated and that even confused donna summer herself. so machines can come up with their own type of “différence”. you just have to use them differently. making machines repeat in a slightly irregular way as part of an art work invokes another type of technology, one that does not exist, but should exist, one that does not have these oppressive features such as robot-like precision—“soft machines”, if you will. gl: a cultural technique that is not so often used these days is the delay. we know the echo effect. the merry pranksters built a delay machine inside their bus using tape recorders that produced real delays of several seconds or more. the philosophical dimensions of delay are different from mere repetition: it points at the possibility of slowing down, it invites us to reflect on what we just expressed. tb: in the end, it is all about perception, isn’t it? but you are right: the tape echoes that kesey or terry riley produced with the help of loops are aesthetically very different from the metric patterns, that steve reich and—again, in other works—riley used tape loops for. that is what i wanted to demonstrate: how working with loops can lead to very different aesthetic results. they can produce new types of sound, as in the early work of pierre schaeffer, stockhausen, even elvis, which is what the first part of the book is about. only the second part is about metric, pattern-based types of music. i wanted to show how flexible loops are as an artistic tool. but as far as echoes in pop music are concerned, there is no way of beating “echo and reverb” by peter doyle, so i did not even try. gl: in the acknowledgments you come up with an impressive list of all the clubs and festivals you frequented over the years. how does the history of the loop play out into these party environments? tb: my understanding of loops was shaped by going to clubs regularly. or rather: i only discovered that subject, because i found myself on the dance floor and all these ideas came to my mind that were the starting point of the book. i think it is important to expose yourself to what you study, but of course i did not go clubbing just “for science’s sake”. it was great fun, too. again, it is “electronic body music” and to do anything to your body that music has to be loud, the bass has to be kicking and you have to be ready to give yourself up to it. i don’t think that techno has changed fundamentally since the advent of this style, even though the fact that most electronic music is produced with computers these days has lead to more nuanced music. and of course, there are all these sub-styles that developed out of the basic parameter. but only a couple of weeks ago i went to the berlin techno club tresor when it had its 25th anniversary, and it felt like nothing had changed in a quarter of a century. in a way, loops have created this “time-less time” in club life. they have produced a very stable aesthetic, with only minute changes to the basic modus operandi, even though the club fashion might have changed. my kids find rock old-fashioned, probably because of the suffering singers, the narcissistic guitar-violators, the general pathos and the self-serving aura of authenticity. but they are still shocked by techno, which has seeped only via edm-type of breaks and sound effects into the pop music they listen too. so, in a way, techno is still the music of the future. it might seem vain to mention all the parties and clubs i have been to. (i actually just noticed that i completely forgot the ones in amsterdam and rotterdam that i visited in the 1990s. ;) i mentioned it to show where proto-raves took place in the 1980s, before techno became this stable aesthetic—the italians were always ahead at that time and if you listen to the mixes by cosmic-djs from that period, you will find most of what contemporary djs do rather simplistic and lacking! and i wanted to pay tribute to all the people who made these places possible, and that includes the barkeepers, the bouncers, the cloak lady—i love these people, and i wanted to express my gratitude to them. club life is such an ephemeral thing, that has rarely been described well. i did not spend a lot of time in my book trying it myself, but i wanted to acknowledge the fact that electronic dance music would be unthinkable without that context. gl: readers can easily notice that most of the research for this book was done around 2004. was the work on this book suddenly disrupted because of your move to south-east asia? did you start to look at the material in a different way because of this break of about a decade? tb: i finished the book around 2006 and then i didn’t do anything with it for a couple of years, because i was living in asia. i felt that if the book was published i should be back in germany to be able to promote it. and i was worried all the time that somebody else would come up with the idea for such a book, because i thought it was such an obvious topic. but fortunately, that did not happen. ;) i thoroughly revised the book before publication and took the latest literature into account. and i think that the book is absolutely up-to-date and will age rather gracefully. gl: imagine if alternative für deutschland, and farage, wilders and lepen would all instrumentalize electronic dance music and techno into their populist right-wing movement and would get 30–40% of the votes. would that change your position? i know this is not the case... perhaps with the exception of some “identitarian” neo-nazi groups in germany that have incorporated the rave aesthetics and lifestyle into their approach. michel foucault countered such rhetoric with the “non-fascist” notion and proposed certain lifestyles and strategies that were neither anti-fascist nor fascist. can we say that the current techno is non-fascist music? tb: the current populist movements in europe and the us that you mention thrive on being against something. against immigration, against muslims, against immigrants from mexico, against the burka, against merkel, against hillary etc. the loop-based music i write about seems to thrive on blurring the dialectic oppositions between “them” and “us” and ideally make them obsolete. dance music is about celebrating the brotherand sisterhood on the dance floor, not about creating conflict between different races, identities etc. as heaven 17 said: “we don’t need this fascist groove thing”. it might be naive to assume that loop-music could never by hi-jacked by populists or nazis. but as far as i can see, it has not happened yet, and there must be reason for that. gl: without becoming nostalgic, do you believe in a comeback of the tape recorder? the cassette tape lasted quite long, well into the 2000s, but then also disappeared. storing data on tape still happens. would that be a starting point? what attracted you in the first place, the material aspect of the tape in general or the magnetic technology? to create a loop on a computer is now damned easy. but how about reserving the sound direction, for example? tb: working with tape is very time-consuming and quite difficult. most people who did it have very little nostalgia for this method. i show in my book how the sequencer was developed partly by people who were tired of splicing tape. working with synthesizers or with digital instruments makes it much easier to work with metric, loop-type of repetition. some might say: too easy. there is something to the claim that loops make it incredibly simple for anyone to produce music. it is very instructive to play around with a small kaos pad or a korg volca synthesizer. they are really cheap, but after just a little bit of fumbling around with these gadgets you will get something that does not sound so different from “real” club music. and that is to a large extent due to the fact that they have these sequencers that just keep on repeating. that has led to the emergence of bedroom producers with no formal musical training who can cobble techno tracks or hip-hop beats together in no time. and that in turn has led to a flood of releases that nobody can keep track of anymore. there is nothing wrong with that. in fact, there is something very democratic and empowering about it. this type of music has a different raison d'être than a schönberg symphony or a chanson by jacques brel. a lot of these tracks are just “tools” for the dance floor. and of course, some of the most brilliant electronic music—from pierre schaeffer to phuture—has been produced by people who were not professional musicians and used very simple means. but as writers such as jaron lanier or andrew keen have reminded us in connection with the internet, this kind of technologically supported creativity can also lead to the leveling of culture with very stereotypical and conformist results. i don’t want to say that they are right as far as electronic music is concerned, but i can see where they are coming from. i am not sure if a “return to tape” would be a way out of this, though. tilman baumgärtel, schleifen, zur geschichte und ästhetik des loops, kulturverlag kadmos, berlin, 2015. <http://www.loopsbuch.org>. author biographies tilman baumgärtel (phd) is a writer. he lives in berlin and teaches media studies at hochschule mainz. previously he was a professor at the university of the philippines in manila (2005–2009) und at the department of media and communication at the royal university of phnom penh (2009–2012). he has written or edited nine books on various aspect of media culture, including internet art, computer games, the aesthetics of loops and the director harun farocki. schleifen. zur geschichte und ästhetik des loops is his latest publication. geert lovink is a media theorist, internet critic, and director of the institute of network cultures in amsterdam. references baumgärtel, tilman. 2015. a reader on international media piracy: pirate essays. amsterdam university press. lovink, geert. n.d. “the theory of mixing: an inventory of amsterdam free radio techniques”. <http://www.mediamatic.net/5750/en/the-theory-of-mixing>. (accessed oct 10 2016). death of/in british drum ‘n’ bass music alistair fraser maynooth university (ireland) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.14> almost since its inception, the demise of british drum ‘n’ bass music has been heralded by critical observers and consistently refuted by its practitioners. more than twenty years since it emerged, clubs and raves are still bubbling with its distinctive sound and energy. part of the music’s vibrancy undoubtedly results from the talents of its creators and innovators. another part is simply the connection drum ‘n’ bass followers have with the music: a sense that this is their music; a scene they make on the dance floor, over the airwaves, or via social media. drum ‘n’ bass is as alive as ever. yet, like other genres of music — like popular or rock music more generally — drum ‘n’ bass has to deal with the death of leading artists. in 2017, as may passed to june, drum ‘n’ bass practitioners and followers mourned the death of marcus intalex, a widely respected manchester-based dj/producer and founder of the influential soul:r record label. in comparison to the deaths of stars such as david bowie or prince, the passing of marcus intalex barely registered in mainstream media: hardly surprising, given d&b’s relatively small cultural footprint. within the d&b scene, however, marcus intalex was the first drum ‘n’ bass leading light to pass away in the social media age, a factor which made the subsequent response all the more remarkable. across sites such as twitter, there was, of course, plenty of sadness and respect for his achievements. practitioners and followers tweeted links to some of his best tracks, live sets, podcasts and interviews. kind words were said about the man and his legacy. but then something else happened. within two days of the news breaking, mc drs and luke lsb released a track called “angels fall” (drs and lsb 2017) originally on bandcamp.com and announced that all proceeds would be used to help pay for funeral costs for marcus’ family: we are still very much mourning the sad and sudden passing of our beloved friend marcus kaye, known to many as marcus intalex or trevino. whilst longer term we will be putting our heads together to find a fitting tribute to marcus’s life and music, for now we would like to share a track from drs and lsb which seems to reflect our thoughts at this time. the track ‘angels fall’ is available now to download with an option to make a donation which will help us to support marcus’s mum pat and girlfriend ayumi in the short term and with funeral arrangements while finances are being arranged. any excess funds raised will be distributed to causes close to their hearts. thank you for your messages of love and support and your many memories of marcus which are giving us comfort in this dark time (farmer 2017). within a week, the original drs tweet was re-tweeted 700 times and the scene’s top djs and artists such as andy c and goldie called on their followers to buy the track and sent messages of love and support to marcus’ family and friends. the most crucial point to take from all this is the fact that proceeds had to be raised. there is no way that i, merely a distant observer, can know the circumstances, but the contrast here has to be made with the death of other musical stars: no fundraisers were needed for bowie or prince, but in the world of drum ‘n’ bass — and arguably more broadly across edm, given the expanding range of scenes — participation in the industry does not necessarily generate the income and fame (or more accurately, achievement or impact) provided in other scenes. to help meet the shortfall, then, drum ‘n’ bass “headz” stepped in, facilitated by new social media, music technologies such as mp3s, and new distribution networks such as bandcamp. amidst this period of mourning, too, the full-spectrum vitality of drum ‘n’ bass was on display. tribute shows were aired on doc scott’s future beats radio show on origin fm; dj bailey’s radar radio show; by dj fabio on rinse fm; on dj hype’s kiss fm show; and by dj friction on bbc radio 1. there were tribute events in manchester and no doubt numerous shout-outs by mcs in clubs and raves across the country. and across these diverse channels stories were told about marcus intalex that demonstrated the humble, communitarian origins and development of drum ‘n’ bass. at the core of these messages was something that may not be unique to drum ‘n’ bass but is nevertheless definitive: it is a musical industry, a cultural economy, a scene, a livelihood, maybe even a way of life, built from the ground up by people just like marcus intalex. in record shops, dj booths, dance floors across the country and then the world; in music studios; on their own record labels; with their talents and commitments in relations of solidarity (by no means exclusively), british drum ‘n’ bass music was made, extended, pushed and pulled forever forward by artists and practitioners, promoters and punters buzzing on exactly the sort of devious drops, rumbling basslines, kicking breakbeats and choice samples that marcus intalex put together so perfectly. in marcus’ passing, then, d&b had cause to stop, take stock, look back and become nostalgic and yet thankful for the efforts he pursued, along with many others (e.g. calibre, drs, dub phizix, fabio, doc scott). marcus intalex was a leading light, a mancunian master of this decidedly british form of music. but his impact was also far more universal. his music touched lives across the scene. his expansive discography, which extended into techno music via the name trevino, is intimately known by drum ‘n’ bass followers. his music will be played for years to come. rest in peace marcus intalex. and rest, sir, knowing that drum ‘n’ bass continues: death in drum ‘n’ bass reaffirms there has been no death of drum ‘n’ bass. author biography alistair fraser is lecturer in geography at maynooth university, ireland. his work cuts across political, economic and cultural geography, including research on the global food economy, land reform and agrarian change in south africa, and british drum ‘n’ bass music. email: alistair.fraser@mu.ie references farmer, g. 2017. "lsb & drs release track for marcus intalex, ‘angels fall’". data transmission, 31 may. <https://datatransmission.co/news/lsb-drs-release-track-marcus-intalex-angels-fall/> (accessed 7 oct 2019). discography drs, and lsb. 2017. angels fall. (youtube). <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdqzgjckylo>. (accessed 7 oct 2019). sonic possible worlds: hearing the continuum of sound salomé voegelin new york: bloomsbury academic, 2014. isbn: 978-1-6235-6509-1 rrp: us$100.00 daniel schnee independent scholar (canada) “that quality we call beauty . . . must always grow from the realities of life.” this statement by japanese novelist jun’ichirou tanizaki, from his essay in praise of shadows, evokes a sense of the aesthetic being rooted in lived experience. having experienced, we then categorize, judge and assign value to the “reality” our senses provide. it is on this phenomenological foundation that author salomé voegelin builds sonic possible worlds: hearing the continuum of sound. the central tenet of voegelin’s work is that traditional musical compositions and contemporary sonic works are investigated through separate and distinct critical languages (and histories), and thus no continuous study of both as a unified field is possible. thus, she proposes a new analytical framework that can access and investigate works across genres and times, enabling a comparative engagement, including soundscape composers whose works involve a visual context. but in the process of sound creation there can arise great discrepancies concerning what we believe we have listened to versus what we have heard, revealing more sophisticated sonic life realities from which our personal views on aesthetics and truth grow. methodologically, the book is a philosophical project: a philosophy “not about objects and ideas but about the transient ephemerality of sonic materiality and subjectivity. it aims to create a philosophical experience that might not convince in terms of philosophical orthodoxies and histories but through the reader as listener’s own experience, her simultaneity with the heard, from where he struggles between language and listening, producing a philosophical place made of sounds and words” (5). this, as voegelin states, is directly built on theodor adorno’s concept of the essay as a formless form of text that “makes no claim of being anything other than an experiment, a suggestion, a provocation maybe, and relies on the fact that as an essay it has no obligation to be all inclusive . . . and does not have to come to firm conclusions either” (4). indeed, this reflects the idea that the “quest for certainty ends up narrowing and ‘colonizing’ the realm of the possibilities, in terms of diversity of approaches, and ways of being and thinking” (williams 2015: 28). thus voegelin states that her aim is “not to listen to understand, judge, categorize, or preserve the soundscape, but to illuminate and generate the plural possibilities of the landscape as an environment that involves everything that is and that could be” (13–14). the book begins with a fascinating quote from voegelin’s blog entitled “my room”. in it she describes how sound enters her room from all angles, and is invisibly present in her visual world: a set on which “sound plays invisible narratives (cheerful, sinister, unnoticed, etc.), testing notions of intimacy, neighborliness and so on. unseen protagonists who might really be there, or just invented by me play out fantastic scenarios that might be real . . .” (1). similarly, she quotes a later post wherein she describes an autumn walk through fallen leaves as a “sound of memory and perennial joy at the weather turning cold, sounding the idea of autumn as an ‘iconographic’ sound: a sonic emblem that sounds its emblematicness through my participation, and thus is clearly not an icon at all . . . i activate it and hear it sounding us together, a socio-symbolic relationship” (9). such descriptions of sonic presence in visual space are referred to by voegelin as “textual phonography”, which produces not a recording of the heard but of listening, which “produces another sound in the imagination of the reader that is not the sound i heard but the sound generated in her action of perception of reading about sound”. this “recording in words” does not create recognition of an object or subject, but triggers a generative interpretation, what the reader imagines or remembers of what voegelin heard, and what one might go on to hear as a result of these words (1). this textual phonography voegelin describes is not only a fascinating manner of writing, but also has a practical aspect in research on sonic materiality that supports voegelin’s thesis of critical language lacunae. thus, voegelin contributes a valuable rubric that has already shown itself to have practical use, one such lacuna being made apparent recently during a personal visit of my own to the temple of confucius in hanoi, vietnam. văn miếu – quốc tử giám is a hanoian confucian temple that also held the ancient imperial academy, vietnam’s first national university. built by emperor lý thánh tông in 1070, văn miếu is a place of serenity and history: its various gardens, courtyards and stele aimed at honoring its cultural heritage and inspiring vietnamese to “follow the traditions of respecting the [sic] teachers, talented scholars, fondness of learning, and high ethical behavior” (văn miếu center pamphlet). walking through the various pavilions and courtyards, my intention was to document the temple’s architectural and aesthetic features to complement similar research i have done in east asia. but this effort was interrupted by loud pop music blaring into the temple complex from an adjacent store located on the northeast side of văn miếu street. the music, with its cheery electronic beat, filled courtyards and gardens: its presence inescapable and embedded within the temple’s spatial and acoustic ecology. immersion in its sonic materiality created a very real socio-symbolic presence (intrusion), a new social relationship within an environment meant to be its opposite: quiet, scholarly and ethical. văn miếu, in this moment, ceases to be an inclusive, well-defined conceptual confucian whole, and becomes something different. being present in văn miếu as a site of unintentional pop music meant i was occupying it as a socio-acoustic plurality, a reality of its milieu, and voegelin’s textual phonography would provide invaluable insight into this circumstance. such phonography truly succeeds in making her case both plausible and imaginable to the reader, due to its alterity, its “otherness”, beyond standard epistemology employed by ethnomusicologists, for example. thus, voegelin makes a very practical, thoughtful contribution to philosophical aesthetics, and inclusion of engaged textual phonographies would surely broaden and revitalize current debates in ethnography, ethnomusicology and musicology. voegelin’s phonography, though, unfortunately becomes problematic as the book progresses. not because her approach yields ineffective conceptual or imaginative alterities, but rather that it treats traditional musical composition and the academy heuristically in anti-disciplinarian rhetoric, a kind of methodological monism that assumes that current formal structures of music composition, ethnomusicology and so on are universally agreed upon to be the sole correct approaches. thus, her writing does not achieve the goal of providing an organized structure for formal analysis that is free of the very bias she proceeds to suggest in the preceding traditions. for example, voegelin defines music as the organization of sound into a shape “privileged by history and canons, set apart by virtuosity and the esoteric knowledge of the discipline: knowledge built from inside the discourse to retain control from outside interference, to remain self-sustaining within its own ideology that justifies its existence to an outside world, while keeping it out” (122). the culprit in this case is “the professional”, who is “allowed to define the very standards by which its superior competence is judged”. this professional autonomy allows “the experts to select at will the inputs they receive from the laity”, their autonomy isolating them. thus, in part, professionals live in “the ideologies of their own creation, which they present to the outside as the most valid definitions of specific spheres of social reality” (187). voegelin also asserts that “having lost our measure in the dialectic authorities of god and science means that our own identity has lost the transparency that it held in opposition to them also. so now a contingent subjectivity needs to be found through the obscure mobility of sound in the mirror of silence that does not hold still” (47). she does not name specific individuals, institutions, gods or scientific fields that are responsible for identity loss—those who organize sound into privileged shapes that resist alterity—but proceeds nevertheless to characterize organization of sound as inherently esoteric, set apart, controlled and self-justifiably isolated from an outside world by “experts” (187). voegelin even goes so far as to state that in her plurality of possible worlds, music itself “loses its hegemony and discipline” (14). since there are no given exceptions to this characterization, this is a categorical proposition lacking any evidence to the contrary. lacking such evidence, voegelin commits a conjunction fallacy, assuming that the co-occurrence of professionals and acts of superiority, controlled input and ideological validation is more likely than a single act by a single professional. this representative heuristic eliminates the possibility of proof to the contrary, and thus weakens voegelin’s case for a comparative language. as a result, there is now “no longer a need to locate musical value in the score, the musical text . . . this is a musicality not delineated by genius, perfection, and the right interpretation of a piece of work, which protects a specialism from outside influence and interference” (124). this supposed lack of musical value being a necessity in the creation of a score, sounding everything without becoming anything, is not the comparative study voegelin promises, but might be read as prima facie iconoclasm, appropriation by negation, or a socio-centric privileging of a purposefully uncritical aestheticism within which voegelin acknowledges “right from the start that we might as well misunderstand each other and that it is only through the effort and desire to be understood and to understand that temporarily, with a lot of good will and timing, in moments of coincidence, shared understandings will be found, while the rest remains experience” (5). she also does not address motor-intentionality, and how the body (dancing) might play a part in textual phonography of edm or other genres that share intimate group socialities. but voegelin herself is a senior academic and critical participant in the very structures she examines, thus sonic possible worlds is best understood not as an organized structure for formal analysis, but rather a useful aesthetic manifesto on sound and textual phonography that will no doubt provoke meaningful debate on epistemology and aesthetics. references 2016. văn miếu – quốc tử giám: historical and cultural vestige. hanoi: center for scientific and cultural activities. tanizaki, jun’ichirou. 1977. in praise of shadows. sedgwick: leete’s island books. williams, hakim m.a. 2015. “fighting a resurgent hyper-positivism in education is music to my ears”. action, criticism, and theory for music education 14(1): 19–43. out of love: edm tourism to ibiza and the repression of local cultural identity philip hayward university of technology sydney (australia) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.09> as a researcher of both island cultures and music more generally, i have had the opportunity to collaborate in research in chiloé island, in south america, in japan’s amami and ogasawara islands and in vanuatu over the last decade. these locations have all been the sites of various forms of cultural revival and reimagination that demonstrate the resilience of their communities. other locations have attracted my attention for very different reasons. this short article examines one example of the latter, the western mediterranean island of ibiza. in what follows i explore the history of the edm club culture that has developed there and its impact on the island more broadly. ibiza’s contemporary club scene has its roots in the “balearic beat” scene that began at the amnesia club in the mid 1980s. the club had interesting origins. it was founded by radical spanish philosopher and drug experimentalist and decriminalisation campaigner antonio escohotado espinosa. while espinosa hailed from madrid, the club was established in a secluded property near san rafel, in the rural centre of ibiza, in an attempt to evade the scrutiny and reach of general franco’s repressive police force. amnesia was initially an open centre for counter-cultural wanderers but quickly morphed into a discotheque playing a range of alternative musics. one of its earliest djs was an argentinian journalist, alfredo fiorito, who arrived in ibiza in 1977 and began djing in the early 1980s. fiorito was well-versed in a range of musical genres and mixed rock and funk material with us house music. living up to amnesia’s founding principles, many patrons enjoyed the music while under the influence of illegal stimulants and/or hallucinogens. the early-mid 1980s are something of a legendary period for those who lived or visited the island at the time, representing the flowering of a post-hippy counter-culture remote from the conservative politics and greyness of much of europe. it should be emphasised from the outset that ibiza was the location of a club and related scene that was primarily composed of temporary migrants from outside the island, and many from outside of spain. the “ibizan-ness”/”balearic-ness” of the scene and the music associated with it was situational rather than expressive of any elements of ibizan culture. the story of the scene’s relocation to and refiguration in the uk is well-known. in 1987 a group of young british djs, including nicky holloway, paul oakenfold and danny rampling, visited amnesia with dj trevor fung (who had played at the club in 1983). they experienced something of a revelation concerning the potential to mix musical sounds, as exemplified by dj alfredo’s sets, and to perform for audiences who were chemically attuned to such combinations. returning to london, the rest is history… the most relevant aspects of this history (for this article at least) are rampling’s establishment of the weekly shoom club night in south london and oakenfold’s ibiza reunion late night sessions in streatham in 1987-8. over the next decade, ibiza—and the balearic islands more broadly—assumed something of a legendary status for brits and other europeans as a place to visit, to aspire to visit and/or to fantasise about. in the late 1980s and early 1990s, at least, the free-spirited hedonism on offer around ibiza’s club scene—and its increasing association with mdma—was something of an in-group, aficionado pursuit. but as the decade progressed the extent of the island’s club scene and of tourism to it increased substantially and became more mainstream, leading to its cool being well and truly blown by the trans-european chart success of dutch dance-pop act vengaboys’ single ”we’re going to ibiza” (vengaboys 1999). regarded as irredeemably cheesy by aficionados of ibizan club culture, the song merits passing comment. modelled on the similarly stylistically bland exoticism of “barbados” (typically tropical 1975) by welsh pop producers jeff calvert and max west, the vengaboys’ song and its animated video proclaimed ibiza as a place to escape dull, everyday reality and to party by the mediterranean. despite its lyrics aptly summing up the appeal of the island and its club scene, the crass populism of plodding reggae/house rhythm track and music video indicated the manner in which the ibizan experience had gone mainstream (at the same time as it publicised it further to mass audiences). building on the historical phases discussed above, edm club-related tourism is now a massive mainstream industry on ibiza. the island’s small, permanent population of 134,000 has been overwhelmed by a rising tide of tourists over the last decade, with 3.24 million visiting in 2018. in this manner, the island offers a classic example of what is increasingly being referred to as “over-tourism”. over-tourism has led to small-scale, local protests and resistance to the increasing effacement of traditional ibizan culture (such as language and music) but has gained little traction in the face of the economic might of the edm related tourism industry. anthony d’andrea’s techno and new age as transnational counter-cultures in ibiza and goa (2007) provides a comprehensive introduction to earlier types of counter-cultural settlement and visitation on the island. the counter-cultures d’andrea profiles involved new age travellers who lived in out-of-the-way parts of the island. in the 1980s they existed at the margins of the island’s economy with varying degrees of overlap with a new wave of travellers/tourists whose visits focussed on attendance at (and various types of preparation for and recovery from) the island’s edm network. the low-impact presence of earlier new age travellers is in marked contrast to the scale of contemporary club industry on the island, some being what are known as “mega-clubs” that can house up to 10,000 patrons. these clubs form, perpetuate and service the dominant musical imaginary of and for western tourists to ibiza: an intense and protracted experience of dancing to high-volume edm music (usually performed at around 130 bpm) in spectacular surrounds. through both their history and their dominant presence on the island, the clubs, their managers, promoters and staff have increasingly assumed identities as ibizan and/or as expressive of ibizan-ness in a manner that serves to erase deep-rooted ibizan identities. these aspects are evident in the following discussion of the ushuaïa club. ushuaïa is one of ibiza’s best-known venues and also one whose promotion and public image illustrates the club scene’s (highly commercialised) manipulation of the “participant imaginaries” of clubbers. as graburn and gravari-barbas have asserted: this set of imaginaries, referring to a place, to expected experiences, hoped for or feared at the vacation site—as well as the practices these experiences induce—and to the host population or other local actors, requires a highly complex analysis. this is especially true since it concerns not only the tourist who is at the center of the tourism system and who is ultimately the decision maker for the trip, but also the intermediaries who stand between the tourists and their destination, at all the different moments in the decision-making process. these middlemen, the tour operators, guides, and others may manipulate or even counteract the tourist imaginary (2010). this characterisation readily applies to aspects of the establishment and presentation of ushuaïa. one of the first intriguing things is its name. rather than being a local term, ushuaïa is the name of the main town in argentinean tierra del fuego, at the far southern tip of south america, about as remote and thereby ”exotic” a locale as you can imagine from western europe. the locale is so distant from the club’s patrons’ experience that it might be taken to signify a “never never land”—the remote, fantasy island of jm barrie’s peter pan whose inhabitants are perpetually youthful. the club was given its name by its owner and originator, the french entrepreneur yann pissenem, who started in the entertainment business by managing venues in barcelona the mid-1990s. although ushuaïa is only located 3 kilometres south of ibiza’s main city and 5 kilometres from its international airport, pissenem gave it its name because, in his own words it “felt like the end of the world, at that time” (lunny 2019). here we have an interesting insight into the subjective perception of remoteness. the politics of place and of claiming authority to represent place are manifest in ibiza’s club scene and are clearly illustrated in a set by highly popular dj david guetta at ushuaïa that was streamed live in 2019. on a stage prominently visually branded as ushuaïa by its illuminated logo, guetta introduces his set by calling out to “ibiza” and then asking the crowd—who are, presumably, in this context taken in some way to be “ibiza”—whether they are “ready”. following a teasing intro before the beats and light show kicks in, guetta makes the hand sign for a heart (meaning “love”), as the track shifts into a sampled song sequence whose lyrics refer to the singer holding “your heart in the palm of your hand” and “carrying you to the promised land” where you’ll “never be alone”—suggesting the place in question to be ibiza and/or ushuaïa. guetta then specifically welcomes the crowd to the club and to ibiza and introduces himself as the music into an extended, up-tempo instrumental passage. guetta’s address strikes me as a pale or postmodern equivalent of the “welcome to country” that indigenous australians extend to non-indigenous visitors attending events on ancestral lands. the indigenous australians’ speeches often stress their clan group in order to establish their status as the traditional custodians of the land eligible to welcome visitors. guetta attempts no such framing of his own ancestral position in this context, which is probably appropriate as he is a paris-based dj of mixed belgian and moroccan jewish ancestry. the “country” he is welcoming the club audience to is a fantasy one, collectively co-constructed by tourists and by tourism intermediaries and entrepreneurs. in that process, any preceding and/or “real” ibiza becomes (at best) a skeletal stage—like a basic computer graphic object which is brought to life by detailed rendering and illumination. ushuaïa and other clubs have minimal connection to anything specifically ibizan and local talent has minimal presence on their stages. when i asked seasoned visitors to ibiza’s club scene if they had heard of any djs from ibiza the only individual (confidently) identified as such was roger sanchez (only problem being that he is a new yorker of dominican descent who is known for working with madonna and diana ross). the central issue for ibiza is that it is principally imagined by outsiders. traditional cultural forms are so low in profile as to be invisible and have not been elevated by any successful minoritarian discourse or mechanisms. the few who still attempt to imagine a traditionalist ibizan cultural identity are very much a minority and that culture is not represented as emblematic of ibizan in any tourism discourse (unlike, for example, the manner in which flamenco is promoted as emblematic of andalusia—and/or the manner in which it has been appropriated as emblematic of spain more generally). this leads us to the “imaginary of practices” proposed by graburn and gravari-barbas, referring to aspects of the imaginary that “are linked as much to practices associated with categories of space, as to particular identified places” (2011). there is actually very little about the distinct materiality and cultural heritage of ibiza that determines its international dance music culture. magaluf and palma on mallorca have very similar scenes, as do further-flung locations such as cancun, patong and boracay. indeed, the geographically constituted scenes of the latter have more in common with each other than they do with other parts of the yucatan, phuket or the central philippines. the tourist imaginary in these locations is a translocational one co-created by tourists, industry intermediaries and facilitators and by a loosely associated group of internet participants who represent global club culture online, collating texts and audio-visual representations into dense image resources that often prefigure tourists’ experiences of them. the tourist imaginary in this context is a (literally) dis-placed one. gaonkar has provided a succinct characterisation of the “social imaginary” as an “enabling but not fully explicable symbolic matrix within which a people imagine and act as world-making collective agents” (2002: 1). we can see the inter-connection of internet representations and tourist expectations and experiences in these terms and we can regard these as being “imaginary in a double sense”, existing “by virtue of representation or implicit understandings” and being “the means by which individuals understand their identities and their place in the world” (2002: 1). drawing on this we can also see them as the means by which places frequented by tourists assume identities in the modern era. whatever fashionable cachet ibiza’s club scene may still have, whatever (undoubted) pleasures it may offer and however much money it pours into the ibizan economy, it is still a huge—and potentially terminal—blight on ibizan cultural heritage. the massification of the (initially low-key) counter-cultural scene is so extensive that it blocks the reassertion of distinctly ibizan cultural forms. this experience is in stark contrast to that of catalonia (to which ibiza’s language culture is affiliated). not to conflate the very different nature of the two locations and societies but, unlike catalonia, there are no local equivalents to castell gymnastics or performances of sardana music and dancing in ibiza that attract popular support and approbation and no rap fusion acts such as barcelona’s tribade who use local argot to both celebrate and critique the repression of their culture. however uncomfortable it might be for returning clubbers to acknowledge it, edm is the dominant hegemonic force on ibiza and the tourists who support it through their patronage continue to be active agents in the repression of local identity. tribade – ‘mujeres’ (2017) author biography philip hayward is an adjunct professor at the university of technology sydney. he is editor of the online journal shima and a member of the audiovisual ensemble, the moviolas. his recent publications include an article about ibiza entitled “place, visibility and perception: the materiality of es vedrà and its enfolding within new age discourse and media-lore,” co-authored with marcel farinelli, in coolabah 27 (2019). email: prhshima@gmail.com references d’andrea, anthony. 2007. techno and new age as transnational counter-cultures in ibiza and goa. new york: taylor and francis. gaonkar, dilip parameshwar. 2002. “towards new imaginaries”. popular culture 14(1): 1-19. <doi:10.1215/08992363-14-1-1>. graburn, nelson and gravari-barbas, maria. 2012. “tourist imaginaries”. via: tourism review. 2012(1). <https://doi.org/10.4000/viatourism.1180>. lunny, oisin. 2019. “meet yann pissenem, the hypercreative mind behind ibiza’s hottest nightclubs”. forbes, 9 september. <https://www.forbes.com/sites/oisinlunny/2019/09/09/meet-yann-pissenem-the-hypercreative-mind-behind-ibizas-hottest-nightclubs/#4e838a56593b>. (accessed 28 july 2021). filmography “tribade mujeres (prod. taboo)”. youtube, 3:56. tribade. 25 december 2017. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt7ihrkf7ec>. (accessed 6 march 2020). discography tropical, typically. 1975. barbados. uk: gull (single): guls.14. <https://www.discogs.com/typically-tropical-barbados/master/62312>. vengaboys. 1999. we’re going to ibiza! netherlands: breakin’ records (cd): krak 4031. <https://www.discogs.com/vengaboys-were-going-to-ibiza/master/98038>. gateway of sound: reassessing the role of audio engineering in the art of record production dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 6(1): 8–25 issn 1947-5403 ©2014 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.01.01 gateway of sound: reassessing the role of audio mastering in the art of record production carlo nardi rhodes university (south africa) abstract audio mastering, notwithstanding an apparent lack of scholarly attention, is a crucial gateway between production and consumption and, as such, is worth further scrutiny, especially in music genres like house or techno, which place great emphasis on sound production qualities. in this article, drawing on personal interviews with mastering engineers and field research in mastering studios in italy and germany, i investigate the practice of mastering engineering, paying close attention to the negotiation of techniques and sound aesthetics in relation to changes in the industry formats and, in particular, to the growing shift among djs from vinyl to compressed digital formats. i then discuss the specificity of audio mastering in relation to edm, insofar as djs and controllerists conceive of the master, rather than as a finished product destined to listening, as raw material that can be reworked in performance. keywords: record production, sound, dynamic compression, electronic dance music, senses, participant observation, participant listening carlo nardi is research associate at rhodes university. he received his phd in sciences of music from the university of trento in 2005. his work has focused on the use of technology from a sensory perspective, authorship in relation to technological change, the organization of labour in music-making and screen sound. between 2011 and 2013 he was general secretary of iaspm, the international association for the study of popular music. feature article nardi | gateway of sound 9 a new visibility for audio mastering between 2008 and 2012, musictech, one of the most popular magazines for music production, dedicated four of its special issues focus to audio mastering. until that moment, each musictech focus had been devoted to a different daw.1 quite significantly, the first special issue on mastering “proved to be the best-selling focus to date” (pettengale 2009: 3). this example might appear somewhat arbitrary, if it weren’t for an apparent proliferation of printed and online publications on audio mastering, including manuals, specialist magazines, youtube tutorials and forum discussions targeted at professionals, amateurs or both, witnessing to a sudden interest in a phase of record production that has been traditionally given scant attention. this leads to at least three observations. in the first place, and quite ironically, mastering, as the final step of record production, has become visible concomitantly with a gradual process of dematerialisation of the music itself brought about by digitalisation, from vinyl records and cassettes, through cds and digital files—a development that is especially manifest when we look at the most recent changes among dj practices in edm.2 if mastering originally could be identified mainly with the process of cutting the vinyl master, now more emphasis is placed on what is sometimes called pre-mastering, that is, the eq and dynamic treatment that is applied before physically obtaining the master version. inevitably, mastering engineers have to cope with changes in the technology for music production, consumption and distribution as well as with changes in audio formats; hence, the study of their strategies of adaptation to a continuously transforming landscape can be especially insightful for music studies at large. in the second place, those same technological transformations have offered musicians and producers a shortcut for releasing their songs directly through the internet, freeing independent artists, among other things, from the need to pay for a professional mastering service. as williams (2012: online source) suggests, this tendency involves musicians’ choices as well the consequences that these choices, in turn, have on sound engineers: “for many musicians, the promise of total control over the recording process, and the liberation from studio hierarchies provides the incentive for investing time and capital in mastering daw recording technology”. the roles of music practitioners can hardly be expected to remain untouched. in the third place, mastering has a special significance for edm in that the product of mastering, regardless of the type of format, is re-actualised into a performance in the hands of the dj. in this regard, the shift from vinyl records to digital formats in many dj scenes and the appearance of new digital formats for djs have encouraged new practices also among mastering engineers, whose targets are not only music listeners but, specifically, music performers as well. finally, music software and hardware companies have promptly capitalised on these new opportunities, using the specialist press to launch and promote dedicated products pitched at a wide range of users. in fact, magazines and websites not only review existing consumer dancecult 6(1)10 products, creating synergies with the music manufacturing industry, but they also have to rely on existing products, that readers can mostly recognise, in order to illustrate the procedures of audio mastering.3 in short, mastering has become a viable way to sell audio processing software. the relevance of audio mastering for music studies while other aspects of record production have been given significant scholarly attention from music scholars, audio mastering has remained out of the radar, with a handful of publications—mostly theses and dissertations—being notable exceptions (nardi 2005a, nardi 2005b, nardi 2007; papenburg 2011; shelvock 2012). one reason for this absence might be the methodological difficulty of investigating a practice that is normally performed individually inside the studio. lack of access to a hidden domain plus complications in recognizing and evaluating empirically the concrete acts of and motivations behind sound manipulation add to this difficulty. moreover, emphasis on technical rather than musical skills relegates mastering engineers to the domain of science rather than music, hardly calling for academic interest from a scholarship that too often remains entangled in discourses of artistic integrity and authenticity. not surprisingly, then, the very specific contribution of mastering to the art of record production and, concomitantly, its influence on consumption practices is rarely acknowledged if not even noticed at all by both music listeners and music scholars. nonetheless, as frith and zagorski-thomas (2012b: 3) rightly point out, “in the studio technical decisions are aesthetic, aesthetic decisions are technical, and all such decisions are musical”. mastering, in particular, is a crucial gateway between production and consumption insofar as it consists of the final step of sound manipulation before a product is released for sale, and as such it deserves wider consideration. overlooking the study of audio mastering does not just mean neglecting an integral aspect of record production, but also failing to identify the clues that it can offer to understanding ongoing transformations across the music industry at large. one of these transformations is immediately apparent if we look at what théberge (1997) and taylor (2001), among others, describe as a major shift in music making in relatively recent times, namely, the progressive convergence between music production and reproduction as allowed by digital samplers, synthesizers and sound banks, and the use of turntables and audio mixing consoles as performing instruments in their own right.4 tools such as digital vinyl systems and software for live electronics have further emphasised this convergence insofar as they considerably rely on pre-existing libraries of music made of songs, loops, instruments and templates. for all these reasons, the emergence of dj culture suggests that the relevance of mastering, as we have seen, expands well beyond music consumption, exercising a significant influence on performance as well. the relationship between engineering techniques and aesthetics is worth further scrutiny at least for two reasons. firstly, sound engineers manipulate sound according to rules that nardi | gateway of sound 11 define the higher or lower appropriateness of techniques in relation to the kind of material, including music genre, the identification of defects to correct, the kind of listening context that is predicted, and so on. needless to say, these rules are affected by and in turn affect music aesthetics, just as suggested by frith and zagorski-thomas in the quote above. secondly, the role of mastering engineers finds itself at the intersection of what is widely acknowledged as the moment of creation, which is normally identified with songwriting, arranging, performance and—at least since the growing acknowledgment of the studio as a creative environment—production, and the moment of consumption. as such, the audio engineer acts as an intermediator between music makers and music consumers, offering insights to research about the functioning of the music industry at large. indeed, this position places the audio engineer as a crucial mediator of meanings, technology and social roles at various levels of analysis. this is especially true for music genres, such as house or techno, which assign great importance to sound production aspects like dynamic compression and stereo sound field, which are partly achieved at this stage of production. whilst not denying that there is an important, possibly predominant technical component of mastering engineering, my aim is to highlight both the arbitrary facets of this component, which are also noteworthy, and the constructed nature itself of the “technical” within the broader purpose of audio mastering. with this i don’t mean to neglect the objectivity of the physiology of hearing and of the physicality of acoustics, on which most techniques are based, as they are fundamental to the ability to predict listening conditions and experiences, but rather to stress the cultural dimension of hearing and sound as a defining characteristic of mastering engineering. in particular, i want to underscore the connections between techniques and aesthetics, based on the assumption that the former are never neutral but are always entangled in cultural meanings and social relations, while the latter require formalized techniques and procedures in order to be expressed through cultural products and practices. the benefits of this kind of interest can be especially fruitful if we look at the responses of mastering engineers in relation to changes in music formats and technologies as a partial and yet significant snapshot of current transformations of the music industry at large. aims of research and methodology this paper pursues three aims, exploratory, interpretive and epistemological respectively. in the first place, it investigates the practice of mastering engineers in the context of edm production. this task involves the consideration of the skills and techniques required to operate successfully within the domain of the mastering studio, as well as the capacity to interface with clients, the ability to empathise with audiences and, essentially, a comprehension of how the music industry works. as a consequence, audio mastering practices ought to be set in relation to the larger aesthetic and economic demands of edm, including pressures derived from current patterns of music consumption and trends in technology manufacturing, promotion and consumption. dancecult 6(1)12 in the second place, it reassesses the creative role of studio techniques within the broader process of record production, following the path paved by the association for the art of record production and works such as kealy (1979), hennion (1989), meintjes (2003), porcello (2003), warner (2003), green and porcello (2005), frith and zagorski-thomas (2012a). while too often the assumption of a fixed divide between art and technique is taken for granted, this kind of approach has proven effective in disclosing the ideological nature of some (popular) music studies. moreover, it sets the techniques adopted and the aesthetic goals pursued in relation to each other and to existing ideologies of record production, in order to give account for the economic dimension of the art/technique divide and the forces that shape it. finally, considering that audio mastering greatly consists of implicit knowledge produced individually inside secluded spaces and embodied in everyday practice— knowledge, furthermore, that can hardly be grasped by mere verbal account or disengaged observation—the object of research poses relevant obstacles to ethnographic observation. this consideration brought me to design a participant approach that, in combination with interviews with practitioners, could ensure both analytical detachment and an empathetic understanding of the process of mastering. stemming from this experience, i will briefly discuss the epistemological concerns that frequently characterise research about music production and sound engineering, suggesting ways to obtain effective data from ethnographic work. regarding the methodology, data for this study has been collected in three ways, namely, through semi-structured interviews (in english, italian and german), participant observations and secondary sources. interviews took place in two different periods. in 2004 and 2005 i met various mastering engineers in berlin, bologna and trento; i interviewed them and i interacted with them in the studio, adopting a style of participant observation that i will describe later. this data constitutes the basis for the exploratory section of this paper. in november 2013 i interviewed two of the same mastering engineers, mauro andreolli of das ende der dinge (trento) in person and bo kondren of calyx studio (berlin) through skype; the interview with kondren was conducted in english while the interview with andreolli was conducted in italian and then translated by me in english. in these interviews, parts of which are presented as transcripts later in this article, we discussed four topics: (i) the gradual shift from vinyl to digital formats and, in general, the emergence of new formats, such as itunes plus and traktor remix sets; (ii) trends in dynamic compression techniques and aesthetics; (iii) any other significant changes in mastering aesthetics and techniques; (iv) professional mastering vs. diy mastering. this longitudinal research design allowed me to look at the changes that had happened in the time-lapse between the two data collections, specifically highlighting transformations in audio formats and practices among edm djs. the data collection in 2004 and 2005 also included observant participation. as i mentioned earlier, ethnographic work on audio mastering and sound engineering practices faces at least two interrelated problems, precisely, it being performed in private space and nardi | gateway of sound 13 mostly through individual work. related to this, and notwithstanding the significant volume of specialist literature on mastering, direct accounts are, as for most social practices, sometimes vague if not mystifying.5 in fact, the extreme detail and precision of acoustics and the physics of sound (the “science”) is not always matched by the same exactness when setting determined choices in relation to different aesthetics of sound (the “art”), and these aesthetics to specific ideologies of music production. if we think of audio mastering as a kind of musical practice, we will agree with théberge (1997: 167), who borrows from bourdieu the concept of habitus to describe how such practice is learnt: in music . . . the habitus takes the form of that unconscious yet fully structured system of sounds, gesture, meanings, and conventions that we commonly refer to as a “style”. . . . style, then, for the musician, is something that is acquired only through an extended process of learning through practice. in short, the practice of audio mastering requires the acquisition of “techniques of the body” (mauss 1935)6 that are strictly codified by culture as much as they are hardly verbalised by discourse. the aim of participant observation is to mirror the same kind of gesture between the observer and the observed, that is, to pursue a “full-bodied understanding of culture and experience” (howes 2005: 1; see also drobnick 2004) that can allow the ethnographer to recognise cultural practices from within. accordingly, i adopted a participant approach that got me to interact with mastering engineers as they performed their activities in the studio. in particular, the object of research was the process of manipulation of the music tracks that i had brought into the studio for the mastering process, which allowed me to observe the practice of sound engineering in its development rather than simply based on verbal explanations, detached visual observation or critical listening. to sum up, the aim of this ethnographic approach, which involves as much participant observation as participant listening, is to (i) rely less on discourse and more on practice; (ii) bypass some of the limitations of detached observation and secondhand accounts in favour of a kind of “participant listening” (forsey 2010); (iii) place sound—its objective reality as sound waves endowed with musical meaning—at the centre of research. this ethnographic experience and its findings, therefore, are the starting point to discuss the relevance of sensory skills and dispositions in doing popular music research and, more extensively, how this approach could benefit other domains of research, too. a wide range of secondary sources, including specialist press, internet forums and video tutorials on dvd and internet platforms were consulted. while initially noticing what seemed less a growing awareness than a sudden burst of interest for this aspect of music production, i explored more carefully the following issues: techniques that are given most attention; how specific techniques are set in relation to particular aesthetics, including genre aesthetics; discussions about how formats affect the mastering process; explicit and implicit considerations on the skills and purpose of mastering, paying attention to markers such as “craft”, “art” and “technique”; considerations of the distinctions between professional and amateur mastering. dancecult 6(1)14 technology and the senses: the practice of audio mastering whether audio mastering is a matter of art or technique is perhaps not the best way to put it, because both aspects are evidently involved. art and technique are not two ingredients that can be weighted out in separate parts; instead, they are two aspects of the same process. moreover, the definition of what is art and what is technique is far from undisputed as it changes with time and context. needless to say, the role of technology further complicates the issue. given these difficulties, i will take an emic perspective to examine how actors employ the concept of art to denote a subjective contribution to music production as opposed to technique as the methodical application of predefined procedures. i will apply what lysloff and gay (2003: 2) call “ethnomusicology of technoculture”, an approach that “is concerned with how technology implicates cultural practices involving music”. concurrently, i will also set these uses in connection to claims made by the engineers when addressing specific aims. more generally, i will try to challenge the dualism art/technique by stressing the subtleties of the practice of audio mastering, highlighting the interrelation between the two aspects rather than their polarisation. for this purpose, i start considering two interconnected aspects, namely, the use of technology and the role of sensory faculties in defining audio mastering skills and knowledge. later i will give voice to the mastering engineers that i interviewed in 2013 to discuss two case studies. mastering engineers not only mediate between music makers and music listeners, but they also negotiate between technology, human agency in general and creativity in particular on a daily basis. a widely accepted understanding of the role of mastering is that, although it is a necessary aspect of record production, it admits a limited level of discretional intervention. in this sense, the mastering engineer intervenes at a stage in which the artistic product has been already crafted. his or her7 aim is that of enhancing qualities that are already in the mix, albeit often in fieri. common metaphors, which can be found in countless websites and forums, include the conviction that the mix is a “rough gemstone” for the mastering engineer to “cut and facet”, or that mastering is just the “cherry on top” that can “make a mix glow” but it cannot, in any case, “turn shit into gold”. the position of mastering at the end of the chain of record production means that the engineer needs to be able to manage relationships with musicians and producers while keeping in mind music consumers’ expectations. more precisely, the engineer needs to translate the client’s requests, which can be more or less specific, into particular sound treatments. these requests can range from correcting certain defects in the mix to achieving a master that can get the better of other records. as far as the client demands a competitive product, the capacity to relate to the final consumer is paramount for the engineer. knowledge of acoustics, human physiology and digital compression allows one to anticipate different listening experiences and to set the proper adjustments to the musical material. for instance, by testing the master on a different range of speakers, including mobile phone speakers, the mastering engineer tries to achieve the best compromise so that the master will have an optimal performance on different audio nardi | gateway of sound 15 equipment. this knowledge also brings to awareness the limits of the engineer’s body as an evaluating instrument, and, therefore, helps to deal with issues of stress and fatigue. finally, it consents to integrate technology with critical listening fruitfully, adopting visual meters to both compensate for structural shortcomings of the human hearing and keep it under control, that is, under a condition of stability. this contradicts the common supposition that the adoption of sophisticated technology can be a substitute for the human capacity to evaluate sound in its components and as a whole. in fact, only a few tasks are achieved exclusively through the use of technological devices—for instance, the treatment of those frequencies that are beyond the range of the human ear—as critical listening is largely predominant. more interestingly perhaps, they refute an equally common misunderstanding of the functioning of the senses, namely, that seeing would be more objective than hearing. in fact, as we will see, the ear can be employed to form rational judgments thanks to the implementation of specific techniques of listening within a controlled environment. in fact, ethnographic data and personal testimony show that mastering engineers place more trust on their sense of hearing than in any visual representation or prosthetic device. although this is a sense that has been refined through years of practice, whether by trial and error or, more often, by more structured training, in the end it comes to constitute a rational method. i will borrow from sterne (2003) the periphrasis “techniques of listening” to define these sensory strategies. sterne contends that the development of ways to get aural information from the stethoscope and the telegraph proved to be especially efficient in a historical context in which the rational method had imposed itself on a broad range of human activities. in turn, a similar attitude was adopted with early versions of the phonograph as an efficient way to discriminate auditorily between information and noise. in a similar way, sound engineers adopt strategies to evaluate audio signal by ear—what is normally called “critical listening”, which generally occupies a major part in audio engineering manuals. what characterises most of these procedures is that they generally frame their object between two known objects, or, in other words, they evaluate sound or elements of sound in comparison to a given standard. an example of this is the use of reference material, such as a song of the same genre, against which the master is compared. a different kind of strategy involves the capacity to recognise, under certain circumstances, particular defects of the audio signal, such as resonances and clicks; in this case, the engineer identifies the problem by emphasising, respectively, the frequency range or the time frame in which the undesired phenomenon appears. it is also worth noting that, since digital processing allows for non-destructive operations, it is possible to compare the processed version with the unaltered event, once again operating on the basis of comparison. all these approaches resemble the simulation of a laboratory experiment in many ways, insofar as the minimisation of environmental interference, the use of reference material and the possibility to bypass the audio processors helps to assess which variable is actually affecting another variable while keeping potentially confounding variables under control. dancecult 6(1)16 a second important aspect of mastering engineering is the capacity to listen as other people. with empathetic skills i refer to a kind of expertise that is as important as the techniques above illustrated and yet diverges significantly in terms of structure and application. one way to understand the divergence between techniques of listening and empathetic skills is through a dichotomy. the first are analytical in that they isolate discrete elements of sound events and treat them separately with the purpose of issuing objective evaluations. the second, on the other hand, are synthetic in that they evaluate sound comprehensively: their terms of reference are, more explicitly, specific genre conventions or more general conceptions of sound aesthetics. empathetic skills also are acquired mainly through practice, reading and talk, rather than through formal learning. this is a kind of knowledge that involves the capacity to abstract from the particular situation of the mastering studio and imagine concrete listening experiences. accordingly, the mastering engineer has to show proof of being able to step into somebody else’s shoes. in this sense, audio mastering is a role-play where the engineer has to put his or her own musical taste aside so that it does not interfere with judgements while trying to anticipate that of the listener. it is just this capacity to take the perspective of someone else—precisely, clients and different types of consumers—that is fundamental in order to reach a comprehensive evaluation of musical events. nobody will deny that music is something different than just an audio signal as it is invested with particular meanings and values. therefore, the fact that an engineer has his or her own taste about music, provided that it does not interfere with the evaluation, is not a hindrance to but rather a prerequisite for empathy as far as it reveals the capacity to understand the musical qualities of sound and not just its strictly acoustic properties. in this sense, the periphrasis “sound engineer” is somewhat misleading insofar as it neglects the musical knowledge and skills that are constitutive of the profession. although mastering engineers address actual value judgments more or less explicitly, the latter are still relevant due to the special matter they are confronted with. it is important to stress that both analytic listening techniques and empathetic skills, being aimed at the same purpose, are often applied in synergy. not only do they both require certain environmental conditions, but, quite significantly, even scientific tasks demand that the body, hearing included, is set in an optimal state to operate properly. more significantly, also techniques of listening, as well as conceptions about audio treatments, conform to specific aesthetics. it is true that visual meters provide objective measurements of acoustic events, nonetheless not only do these measurements occur in an environment that abstracts from a wide range of variables that characterise more realistic listening situations, but they also are in the service of a certain conception of the “object”, i.e. music. in fact, the capacity to manipulate sound characteristics such as dynamics and equalisation responds first of all to a qualitative idea of how dynamics and equalisation should sound, while their quantification through equalisation curves or dynamic range diagrams is actually a way to help achieve that idea ex post facto in a consistent and efficient way. i will now illustrate the process of audio mastering in more detail with data collected from the 2013 interviews focusing on two case-studies: dynamic compression and audio formats. nardi | gateway of sound 17 case-study i: dynamic compression in order to illustrate the permeation between techniques and value judgements i will introduce the topic of the so-called “loudness war”, the much-hyped race to make the average loudness of records higher and higher in order to beat competition and gain more exposure. while this race had already started with the development of vinyl records, especially 7-inch singles destined for juke-boxes, it gained new ground in public attention with the advent of the cd and digital processing, which not only allowed for higher dynamic headroom but also objectified dynamics in the visual representation of the lpcm (linear pulse-code modulation) encoded sound wave. in recent years, however, several critical voices have raised concerns over this trend, so that more subtle dynamic treatments are more common nowadays. what contributes to the interest around this debate is that the concept of loudness is subjective in itself, while the “war” is apparently fought on an objective basis, namely, dynamic range compression and, hence, reduction. the dynamic range of a track is especially relevant for edm, as mastering engineers have to consider that the dj will further manipulate a track; accordingly, they will put a threshold on certain aspects of audio processing—just as producers leave a few bars with the beat for the purpose of beatmatching, mastering engineers should keep some dynamic compression headroom for the dj to balance the level of tracks uniformly. kondren regards the “loudness war” to be an equivocation that belongs to the past. he explains that it was not about loudness in particular but rather about “smashed and undynamic loud records” where everything is “squeezed together”: the loudness war was a problematic situation especially due to . . . badly done loud records. it was not about loudness in general . . . the music was overwhelmed, the music was losing all its dynamics it lost space and those things. of course, nobody wants to have something like this, nobody wants to go to somebody and ask for a service if the service is not done well.8 he also asserts that nowadays it is not issue: nowadays for a good mastering studio or for somebody who is trying his best and is using the best available techniques, what we have called “loudness war” is not that much an issue anymore. . . . today if somebody is using available modern techniques of gain reduction, dynamic reduction, expanding and microdynamic treatment, he should be able to achieve a tremendous loudness without having as many artifacts as before.9 he insists on a qualitative change, where the aim of loudness is still achieved but not at the expense of other unwanted effects: it is possible to produce loud records without having the perception or the impression of something that is stuffed together . . . even some of the house producers aren’t dancecult 6(1)18 looking for loud records anymore, because, they say, for my music it’s much better if it is more dynamic, good pumping and pushing around, and not having that huge overall average level.10 kondren notices a significant improvement in terms of techniques and tools for mastering. he also perceives a change in the aesthetic approach, which is more respectful of dynamic depth and definition: nowadays we are working more with decompression than with compression. . . . that means that the snare is still punchy, the drums are still kicking out a little bit so that it is moving your ass or whatever, that you have a shiny and transparent appearance of the highs, not those smashed highs, therefore it is very often necessary nowadays to decompress, to de-limit material, and bring back a certain dynamic stage, what we call mostly microdynamics, which means that the music is still very loud but inside of the music the specific parts, the instruments, still have something that is appearing as if it were more dynamic that it is in the end.11 he specifies that this applies to edm as well: especially for those kinds of music it is important that we maintain the basic dynamic structure that was in the track before the master. we must find a way so that, after the mastering, the dynamic relationship between the different instruments is more or less the same, yet much louder, much more glued, much more like an ensemble, so that everything is working better together . . . but still with a lot of dynamics in each instrument. this is the aim, this is the special goal of what we have to do in mastering today.12 kondren is keen to say that these results can be obtained also without the equipment of a professional studio. he asserts that, on condition that you work very hard, you are smart enough to find the right plug-ins, you have an optimal monitoring situation and you have enough time, then you might achieve the same results as a professional mastering studio. dynamic treatment depends considerably on the format. in the digital domain, the higher the quality, the more appreciated dynamic range is. as andreolli further clarifies: i need to compress [itunes plus files] less. in an mp3, with a dr4 [dynamic range] i obtain a lot of artifacts, but with a better resolution i can push it more because the resulting files are supposedly indistinguishable from a wav file. it is like the tale about the blanket that is too short, either you cover your nose or your toes, therefore you have to make some choices. as a consequence, when you know that that track goes only on a cd you clear the way from possible options and you aim at obtaining the ideal dr for that kind of format. on the other hand, if you know that it is going to go on itunes you set up the dynamic treatment differently.13 the matter is not dynamic compression in itself, but how one applies it and for what purpose. andreolli complains about apple’s soundcheck, a feature of the itunes player nardi | gateway of sound 19 that automatically adjusts playback volume of different tracks at approximately the same level: “this thing implies a lot of collateral effects. . . . the first is that you cut off the artist from control on his music, which is an important issue”.14 he personally disagrees with bob katz when he declared that pink floyd should have the same loudness as pink: you are actually removing a fundamental instrument of expressivity, because it is the artist’s decision, even within a single album, if a single episode has to have a different kind of dynamics than another. this choice belongs to the artistic sphere, not to the technical only. it is as if in the visual arts someone would say, “what is this mess? from now on, all paintings have to be 90x120”. . . . we have come to a paradox, it is all in the hands of these people that should make computers who are deciding the size of paintings for painters.15 case study ii: audio formats both andreolli and kondren notice a growing request for new digital formats. kondren explains that, overall, 30–40% of the releases have a special master reworked for itunes but for edm this figure is slightly lower. he ascribes this difference with the role that beatport plays for edm,16 which might suggest that it is not only technical considerations about the quality of the format, its storage capacity or the listening situation that determine the success of a format over another, but also its channels of promotion and distribution. at the same time, the success of digital formats does not always result in the older formats becoming obsolete. in this regard, both engineers admit that the demand for vinyl is growing. on the other hand, the availability of a certified service for itunes plus does not necessarily mean that the implementation of the format is straightforward. andreolli highlights some problems he has encountered: since about a year i have been offering certified itunes plus mastering. i give clients two separate masters, one for itunes and one for cd. . . . to release your music on itunes you generally need an intermediary, so-called aggregators, such as cd baby or tunecore. unfortunately, many aggregators . . . still don’t know how to manage highresolution masters. . . . while i am careful to apply the correct kind of algorithm, they perhaps ask a secretary to do the work between an invoice and an email or they use a five-year old software. . . . it is frustrating to offer this service because i conform to the specifications communicated by apple but, as things stand at the moment, there are still issues in implementing these standards.17 it should also be mentioned that formats affect the mastering process only up to a point. as andreolli explains: when a client requests a mastering service for both vinyl and digital release, the engineer does not need to make two completely separate jobs, as the root is common. the first step is obviously to listen in order to identify finalities, expectations, signature and a series of things . . . to understand the design to give to the mastering process. dancecult 6(1)20 elements like timbre are common . . . if there are resonances on the drums those have to be adjusted anyway. the preparatory phases and settings are common, when mastering for vinyl it is more a matter of cuts rather than applying a different eq.18 especially since we are looking at edm, discussion about formats cannot leave music genre out of the picture. however, mastering engineers generally assume that a mix already adheres to particular genre norms in terms of style, balance, sound and so on. consequently, music genre does not affect directly the mastering process insofar as its aim is already defined by the attempt to highlight and improve features that are already in the mix rather than to mould it according to genre aesthetics: when i master a record, i suppose that the artist or producer has already considered the kind of listener and that the product has been crafted accordingly. therefore, my approach to mastering is not significantly affected by these considerations, as far as, when i get a mix, i suppose that there is a certain degree of sync between the music and the listener, also in relation to music genre. on the other hand, i am more concerned about any limitations of the format and the kind of use. some choices have already been made before the mastering.19 regarding dynamic compression, it is true that different genres are associated with different treatments, yet some features are normally in the mix already, so that the engineer needs just to go along with the original choices of the artists or producers. as andreolli explains, it is of foremost importance to pitch a service at a particular product, rather than to apply a standardized set of processing steps: sometimes, instead, things are done in a serialized way or through standard procedures, but, inevitably, something gets lost about the specific characteristics of the music that is being processed in that moment. this is also a betrayal of those who have worked on the preceding phases of the work.20 at the same time, aesthetic issues are an integral part of the job: generally, who contacts me already knows my kind of approach and my engineering history. . . . although i work with a wide range of music genres, these are mostly works that lend themselves to an artistic and subjective approach on my end, because mastering is not only a technical issue but there are also aspects that appeal to personal taste and therefore when i have some concrete inputs [from musicians or producers] i obviously take them into account. whenever there is something that can be achieved by using my sensibility, i don’t back out.21 ideally, new formats develop from the encounter between musicians’ demands and the new technological possibilities that manufacturing companies can offer. due to their role as gateways, mastering engineers can play a part in mediating between the two. based on the assumption that more djs are using native instruments traktor rather than dvs like serato, calyx has created a new format called traktor remix sets in partnership with nardi | gateway of sound 21 native instruments. this is a form of stem master with separate tracks that, once imported in traktor, can be mixed, looped and processed by the dj in ways that a simple stereo mix would not allow. kondren sees it as a chance for producers to deliver a new kind of product and for djs to increase their control of their mix, and states, quite emphatically, that this is “the first new digital improvement” in digital music: . . . you have a wider space, you can do more. . . . other digital formats have just something like a better resolution, or a worse resolution like mp3s and the likes, or better resolution like super audio cds with higher sampling rates … traktor remix sets is the first new creative format . . . which brings to the dj totally new possibilities which he didn’t have before.22 when i asked kondren if the awareness of doing a master aimed at performers rather than listeners changes his approach, he initially admitted that he had not thought of the issue from this perspective. nevertheless, he remarked that traktor remix sets have a higher resolution and a special handling of dynamics (i.e. much less sound limiting) purposely in order to allow further treatments by the dj. these brief observations should be sufficient to hint at the existence of a complex network of practices, ideas and discourses in which formats are encapsulated. it goes without saying that, insofar as the aim of mastering is to produce an object that can be used to produce a limitless amount of copies, music formats are of central concern. mastering engineers have to keep pace with changes in the ways music is brought onto the market, with audio specifications of different formats and with the listening contexts that they are more or less closely associated with. edm has always been characterised by certain apposite formats. mastering engineers have started to pitch their services directly to djs at least since the advent of the 12-inch single. in more recent times, the diffusion of digital vinyl systems, dj software and live electronic practices among edm performers has further emphasised this alliance. in this regard, it is worth noting that mastering for performance introduces a new significant dimension to the profession of audio mastering that, hopefully, will attract further scholarly attention in the years to come. participant listening the distinguishing features of the practice of mastering engineering recommend that specific methods of research be undertaken with this object of study. as we have seen, mastering requires implicit knowledge that, as much as it is effective in practice, is still quite unsystematic verbally. at the same time, a thorough “training of the senses”, which is achieved through first-hand experience, is an irreplaceable aspect of the profession. whilst the objectivity of judgement, which is provided by such implicit skills, complements the explicit knowledge of the fields of acoustics and physiology, the frequent fuzziness of its intellectual conceptualisation instates an aura of mystification about discourse on mastering. dancecult 6(1)22 a tendency to juxtapose body techniques with rationality, besides, can be found in several aspects of modern societies, music included.23 the actual role of the audio engineer, therefore, is constantly split between science and art as well as between different domains of knowledge that are kept separate and often even hierarchized. the fact that most mastering tasks are accomplished by individuals who work in isolation inside the studio makes it even harder to demystify this knowledge in its practice and recognise any interconnections between discursive, aesthetic, technical and economic aspects that it involves. a precondition for opening this “black box” is to fully acknowledge audio mastering as part of a larger chain of record production, thus disentangling its technical aspects and putting them in relation to the values and aesthetics that are shared by music makers, mastering engineers included, and audiences alike. for this purpose, alongside interviews, detached observation and critical listening, i adopted a particular ethnographic approach that has allowed me to sidestep some of those obstacles. by bringing musical material into the mastering studio and discussing with the engineers about the manipulation of that specific material rather than about the mastering process in abstract, i managed to enter into a professional relationship, albeit partly simulated, with the engineer,24 thus enacting the typical roles of the client/engineer interaction and enhancing the collaborative and relational aspects. also, it should be remembered that the process of mastering is about that transitory phenomenon that we call sound as much as it is about the result of that process, i.e. the master. put differently, mastering deals with sound but also with its objectification in the form of a specific input format and a more or less correspondent output format: most of what occurs between the mix, which is submitted by the client, and the output object, manifests itself as sound. therefore, at least from the engineer’s perspective, sound—and the capacity to listen to it critically—is a primary tool to enable the transformation of an object into another that is qualitatively superior through value-laden evaluations. this understanding of sound resonates well with sterne’s (2003: 11) stance: you can take the sound out of the human, but you can take the human out of the sound only through an exercise in imagination. . . . the hearing of the sound is what makes it. my point is that human beings reside at the centre of any meaningful definition of sound. with this article i wanted to emphasize how audio mastering involves aesthetic sensitivity, creative thinking and decision-making as integral aspects. while moulding frequencies, dynamics, the stereo sound field, dither, and so on, the mastering engineer does not simply operate within the “cold” domain of acoustics, but, ultimately, deals with sound, or, better, with music. nardi | gateway of sound 23 notes 1 musictech also publishes a monthly printed issue and a website, <http://www.musictech. net/>. 2 regarding the contested terrain that constitutes the current and recent relationships between dj practices, formats and edm scenes, see farrugia and swiss (2005), montano (2010), attias (2013), yu (2013). 3 in truth, freeware is sometimes presented in such magazines and websites. however, the disproportion between reviews and discussions of free software as compared to non-free software, together with the emphasis on the key role of consumer products for available commercial music, ends up substantiating the superiority of the latter. 4 both théberge and taylor emphasize the centrality of digital technology in this convergence. in particular, théberge (1997: 2–3) stresses that “digital musical instruments are hybrid devices: when one plays (or programs) a drum machine, synthesizer, or sampler, one is not only engaged in the production of sounds and melodic or rhythmic patterns but in their technical reproduction as well”; taylor (2001: 16) contends that “digital technology is helping to challenge—even, in some instances, break down—the difference between production and consumption”. 5 a noticeable example of this style can be found in katz’ (2007) landmark work on audio mastering, which, on the one hand, repeatedly reinforces the art/science divide and, on the other, riddles the text with jokes, aphorisms and even an original poem entitled “at last”, “a contemplative poem, my hopes and dreams of our musical and audio future” (14). 6 according to mauss (1936), a technique of the body consists of a mostly implicit set of rules and procedures, which are accepted by a community and are transmitted through training. a technique of the body is aimed at performing a certain recurrent intellectual or physical activity. 7 normally his: the substantial gender bias of audio mastering is a topic that would need further attention. 8 bo kondren, interview with the author, online via skype, 26 november 2013. 9 bo kondren, interview with the author, online via skype, 26 november 2013. the concept of microdynamics has been brought to the wider public by katz (2007[2002]: 109–10): “the art of manipulating dynamics may be divided into macrodynamics and microdynamics. i call music’s rhythmic expression, integrity or bounce, the microdynamics of the music. i call macrodynamics the loudness differences between sections of a song or a song-cycle. . . . if you think of a music album as a full-course meal, then the progression from soup to appetizer to main course and dessert is the macrodynamics. the spicy impact of each morsel, is the microdynamics.” 10 bo kondren, interview with the author, online via skype, 26 november 2013. 11 bo kondren, interview with the author, online via skype, 26 november 2013. 12 bo kondren, interview with the author, online via skype, 26 november 2013. 13 mauro andreolli, interview with the author, trento, 13 november 2013. 14 mauro andreolli, interview with the author, trento, 13 november 2013. http://www.musictech.net/ http://www.musictech.net/ dancecult 6(1)24 15 mauro andreolli, interview with the author, trento, 13 november 2013. earlier he mentioned that he liked apple more when they were making just computers. 16 beatport is currently the main online music store specializing in dance music. 17 mauro andreolli, interview with the author, trento, 13 november 2013. 18 mauro andreolli, interview with the author, trento, 13 november 2013. 19 mauro andreolli, interview with the author, trento, 13 november 2013. 20 mauro andreolli, interview with the author, trento, 13 november 2013. 21 mauro andreolli, interview with the author, trento, 13 november 2013. 22 bo kondren, interview with the author, online via skype, 26 november 2013. 23 to quote théberge (1997: 161) on this issue: “the 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<http://arpjournal.com/1845/ putting-it-on-display-the-impact-of-visual-information-on-control-room-dynamics/> yu, jonathan. 2013. “electronic dance music and technological change: lessons from actornetwork theory”. in dj culture in the mix: power, technology, and social change in electronic dance music, ed. bernardo alexander attias, anna gavanas and hillegonda c. rietveld, 151–72. new york and london: bloomsbury academic. http://arpjournal.com/1845/putting-it-on-display-the-impact-of-visual-information-on-control-room-dynamics/ http://arpjournal.com/1845/putting-it-on-display-the-impact-of-visual-information-on-control-room-dynamics/ dance librarian: sonic explorations of the bandcamp underground botond vitos leuphana university (germany) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.11> classifying music in the digital age: from taxonomies to folksonomies since the dawn of the digital age we have experienced an unprecedented proliferation of music facilitated by digital tools and media channels. the music streaming platform spotify, for example, makes over 70 million songs available (spotify 2021), while electronic dance music vendor beatport hosts 11 million tracks (beatport 2021). from an "avant-conservative" perspective (graham 2016: 115–6) the hyper-exposure of music is not only exploitative of the artists but also degrading to the cultural experience. advocates of this view claim that while in the past the limited availability of obscure or fringe music was the token of “underground” authenticity, today we are flooded with content and accustomed to the sense of instant gratification enabled by digital downloads, with our engagement with underground culture becoming superficial and passive. conversely, supporters of a "digital liberationist" position celebrate the growth of free digital culture, where the production and accessibility of music is tied to fewer constraints, and musical experience is enriched by blogs, podcasts and weblinks (graham 2016: 118–20). without taking sides, we might agree that when it comes to fringe genres, the digital explosion does not erode niche consumption patterns and associated concepts of subcultural credibility and capital (thornton 1996). the distinction from the “mainstream” has always been a focal concern of music cultures (holt 2007: 24). within the digital ecosystem, the means of achieving this are reproduced in novel ways: beyond the possession of underground music, other factors come into play such as being able to effectively search, select and share it in the online context (tófalvy 2020: 69–71). keeping up with the abundance of new releases can be challenging for music professionals and audiences alike; therefore, digital music distribution platforms employ some form of algorithm to make personalised recommendations or to automate the categorisation of music. although many aspects of music are notoriously hard to describe, which also reflects the non-specificity and non-referentiality of signification (holt 2007: 22) particularly in electronic dance music, users rely on verbal labels that aid orientation within the sonic landscape, make recommendations easier, and are also attached to extra-musical activities. according to their broad definition, genre names identify musical events tied to socially accepted rules for the members of a community (fabbri 1982: 52). music is a social activity: one goes to an event and meets like-minded people, or experiences a sense of togetherness triggered by a shared appreciation of the performer. the socio-cultural embedding of music events may prescribe forms of belonging, dress and behaviour codes, common values and practices, and are prone to economic regulation (fabbri 1982: 59; holt 2007: 22–4). fabbri (1982: 60‐3) also emphasises the musical community’s awareness of genre rules and their (use or analytical) competence in their (de)codification, mentioning the transgressions of genre boundaries which may lead to codification of new genres. compared with classical and western art music, categories in popular music are fuzzy and fluid (holt 2007: 14–15). more generic genre descriptors, like “house” or “punk”, may sound straightforward and less confusing, but they are also less useful for uncovering complexities and nuances. more specific categories, like “future funk” or “cold wave”, are more practical in this regard, but may sound obscure or even esoteric to a non-specialist audience. particularly in electronic dance music, a “metagenre” (shuker 1998: 122) that features a very high number of sometimes overlapping subgenres,[1] genre rules are often contested, which may generate creative criticism (mcleod 2001: 66). music tech companies attempt to cut through the turmoil of genre labels by providing (and improving) relatively detailed taxonomies, or well-designed labels that help both humans and algorithms to find and connect to music. subgenre naming can be part of a merchandising strategy, related to a top-down model of genre categorisation (mcleod 2001: 67) and standardisation within a music industry that is more preoccupied with market segments than genre cultures (holt 2007: 26). beatport, for example, separates its electronic dance music catalogue into 30+ subgenres as of 2021, while its taxonomy encompassed 23 subgenres in 2016 and 29 subgenres in 2018 (caparrini et al. 2020). as noted above, such categories are not carved in stone. the proliferation of subgenres in electronic dance music is not only related to the rapid stylistic evolution of the metagenre but also to other factors such as the creation and maintenance of subcultural capital (mcleod 2001: 72) and the need for detailed categorisations for djs who string together similar tracks in their performances, which will also serve as indicators for partygoers (lindop 2010: 116). when it comes to niche genres, bottom-up, free tagging systems or folksonomies (vander wal 2007) may better capture diversity and creativity, although they are less exact by their nature. reflecting the formal and informal musical expertise (lepa et al. 2015) of artists and audiences, these user-generated tags may refer to affective qualities and localities or express free associations (charles 2020: 27). supported by certain independent music promotion and marketing websites, they may provide swift reactions to stylistic inventions and aid the discovery of fringe music composing the "long tail" (gaffney and rafferty 2009). bandcamp, for example, is seen as a reputable publishing platform aimed towards independent musicians and labels (hesmondhalgh, jones and rauh 2019: 7) that encourages the use of tags (folksonomies) by its users. in certain cases, such tags may offer a refreshing contrast to beatport’s genre categories. bandcamp dance librarian as a cultural anthropologist, i have been involved in the study of alternative electronic dance music communities and event-based cultures; as it is often the case, this interest has permeated into my personal life. consequently, i have first-hand experience of grassroots artists resisting classification to their music on the grounds that such labels are narrow and limiting—especially when they are defined by major industry vendors. at the same time, such categories provide basic orientation within a kaleidoscopic musical landscape, which can be particularly useful for newcomers to a music scene. the bandcamp dance librarian project grew out of these impressions. the open-source python project makes use of the industry taxonomy of beatport in an attempt to detect stylistic tendencies or repertoires within the bandcamp libraries of (mainly) grassroots labels. to achieve this, an automatic subgenre classifier is trained on beatport’s genre-specific top-100 lists, [2] which predicts the possible subgenres a track may belong to based on an audio analysis of its musical features. the classifier is then applied to detect the styles a whole bandcamp library may belong to. the tracks within a library are first individually analysed, then distributed into groups or clusters based on their possible subgenre affiliations. the project output includes the identified clusters (which are amalgams of beatport genres), the most frequent tags (folksonomies) added by the artists/labels to the bandcamp pages of each group’s releases, and a more detailed report on three representative tracks. it is therefore possible to compare the industry taxonomy of beatport with artist folksonomies, as long as such tags are provided on bandcamp.[3] let’s take a look at a working example. sonic groove can be described as a berlin-based industrial techno label with strong ebm (electronic body music) influences from a niche side of the electronic dance music spectrum. neither industrial techno nor ebm techno are part of the bandcamp taxonomy, so one can expect that stylistically similar subgenres will be detected by the classifier. after running the librarian we get a report proposing three clusters with the following timeline distribution (the clustering algorithm may give slightly different results each time): figure 1: sonic groove genre clustering. photo credit: botond vitos (2021). cluster 0: techno, electro and indie dance the first group (cluster 0) is tentatively associated with the (raw-deep-hpynotic) techno, (classic-detroit-modern) electro and indie dance beatport genres (the numbers in brackets represent confidence values). in this case 245 tracks are assigned to the cluster based on their similarity with the audio features of the cluster centre. this sonic centrepoint is illustrated through three tracks complete with links to their bandcamp pages and their associated folksonomic tags: figure 2: sonic groove—cluster 0. photo credit: botond vitos (2021). note: not all tracks of the cluster are restricted to the identified styles (the clustering is based on best approximation). bandcamp links: https://sonicgroove.bandcamp.com/track/catenary https://sonicgroove.bandcamp.com/track/negative-energy-density https://sonicgroove.bandcamp.com/track/vanishing-point as indicated by the folksonomies, sonic groove artists move beyond beatport’s taxonomical boundaries. genre negotiation, even on the level of the individual, is a constant engagement in independent popular music (holt 2007: 4–5). cluster 1: techno to hard techno the second group is crystallized around more evident techno influences: figure 3: sonic groove—cluster 1. photo credit: botond vitos (2021). bandcamp links: https://sonicgroove.bandcamp.com/track/instrumentality https://sonicgroove.bandcamp.com/track/waterstorm https://sonicgroove.bandcamp.com/track/mitral-regurgitation-ancient-methods-mix the classification indicates that these tracks are closer to the general sound of techno tracks on beatport. cluster 2: ambient finally, the last cluster is predominantly classified as ambient. the example tracks are highly atmospheric, and their beats are less pronounced. figure 4: sonic groove—cluster 2. photo credit: botond vitos (2021). bandcamp links: https://sonicgroove.bandcamp.com/track/uncompleted-remnants https://sonicgroove.bandcamp.com/track/step-4 https://sonicgroove.bandcamp.com/track/walk-into-the-broken-night the folksonomy tags may indicate music (sub-)genres, such as ambient, ebm, electro, industrial, noise, techno. while the industrial(-techno) subgenre, for example, is not included in the beatport taxonomy, by clicking on the tag on bandcamp and navigating further, the user can discover similar artists and tracks. the folksonomies may also refer to aesthetic modes (purism, futurism), localities (berlin, hamilton, new york) and moods (desolation, subway). it should be noted that “electronic / ebm / electro / industrial / techno / berlin” is used as boilerplate for sonic groove releases when no other (more specific) tags are provided, referring to the general sound and the home city of the label. classifying techno cities the remainder of this article presents a use case of bandcamp librarian focused on localities and location tags (signifying cities, countries and sometimes nationalities). such tags help to put local music scenes on the map; in the case of particularly prolific or creative cities they can be connected to specific genres too. most commonly, they identify the city or country where the music label or the artist is based. electronic music production requires relatively accessible tools and is usually carried out entirely by the producer; prominent artists are often running record labels that are integral to promoting music and structuring scenes (charles 2019: 60–1). these aspects contribute to the burgeoning of independent music communities across the globe. the case study draws on features extracted from 36 bandcamp libraries. the libraries are offered by a piece of music journalism (kirn 2020) addressing some of bandcamp’s “underground” techno labels that “have a sense of community, even [as] a small collective of a few friends unlikely to catch larger attention”. such specialist music press is characterized by thornton (1996: 151–60) as niche media, which is particularly efficient in categorizing social groups, classifying sounds, defining cultural distinctions and baptising genres. holt (2007: 21) also emphasises the way genre formation in popular music is influenced by “center collectives” or clusters of significant insiders (fan communities, critics, producers, artists). while the collection offered by kirn is “by no means a comprehensive list”, it is still suitable for our current aim: a blink into the sounds of a curated group of “underground” techno labels distributed into groups according to their bandcamp location tags. the collection includes 15,255 tracks analysed by the librarian. a total of 98,390 tags are attached to the tracks, illustrated by the word cloud below: figure 5: techno label tags. photo credit: botond vitos (2021). in total, 12,419 tags refer to locations or nationalities. the majority of the location tags designate cities—more often than not, these are where the labels are based: figure 6: techno label location tags. photo credit: botond vitos (2021). the following table shows the ten most significant cities based on the total number of tags pertaining to each location (city), and the number of labels that tagged these cities in their bandcamp library: location berlin detroit chicago uk japan mexico madrid hamburg new york los angeles count 2350 520 234 794 130 1188 1079 273 191 156 nr of labels 16 10 6 5 3 2 2 2 2 2 figure 7: techno cities—tag-based quantification. photo credit: botond vitos (2021). (note: united kingdom has been conflated with london for the purposes of this illustration.) in one way or another, the relative relevance of these cities within the global techno circuit can be inferred from these numbers. by instructing the librarian to treat as a single cluster all tracks that are tagged with the same city label, an attempt can be made to delineate an overall—although not the only—sound that can be identified with a location. berlin: techno to electro the sound of berlin, for instance, is classified as follows: figure 8: berlin techno—single cluster. photo credit: botond vitos (2021). bandcamp links: https://ostgut.bandcamp.com/track/cruising https://marceldettmann.bandcamp.com/track/viscous https://avianstore.bandcamp.com/track/led-up-garden-paths of course, defining a single cluster will not account for the sonic diversity of such an influential city. increasing the number of clusters to three provides more variety: figure 9: berlin techno genre clustering. photo credit: botond vitos (2021). cluster 0: techno, electro and minimal-deep-tech as suggested by the folksonomies, the first group is mainly built around experimental, detroit techno and house influences. the track examples cover various atmospheres, from bouncy (tech-)house to hypnotic/moody to more experimental beats, pointing towards the limitations of the classification algorithm or the need to define more clusters. figure 10: berlin techno—cluster 0. photo credit: botond vitos (2021). bandcamp links: https://toktokrecords.bandcamp.com/track/sax-and-violence https://djt1000.bandcamp.com/track/sounds-like-space https://snorkenterprises.bandcamp.com/track/reverse-bias cluster 1: raw techno the second group of tracks are quite confidently identified as raw, stripped-down techno: figure 11: berlin techno—cluster 1. photo credit: botond vitos (2021). bandcamp links: https://47x47.bandcamp.com/track/x9 https://pacou.bandcamp.com/track/range-of-sound-alternate-mix https://flashrec.bandcamp.com/track/sylvie-maziarz-his-tension-flash-recordings cluster 2: ambient finally, ambient emerges as the defining genre for a smaller cluster, with all track examples coming from the same label (avian): figure 12: berlin techno—cluster 2. photo credit: botond vitos (2021). bandcamp links: https://avianstore.bandcamp.com/track/sunk https://avianstore.bandcamp.com/track/endless-lines https://avianstore.bandcamp.com/track/evitandus the appearance of this cluster reflects the prevalence of beatless or experimental tracks on techno releases. (note: focused on dance music genres, the classifier does not include an “experimental” class, with ambient falling closest to this category.) detroit: techno, minimal-deep-tech and electro in long-standing historical alliance with berlin, detroit is the birthplace of techno. in this case the location tag primarily refers to detroit techno, a subgenre that belongs to a network of translocal scenes (bennett and peterson 2004: 8–10) today. designating a single cluster point conjures the dreamy textures of a detroit sound prevalent in the track examples: figure 13: detroit techno—single cluster. photo credit: botond vitos (2021). bandcamp links: https://djt1000.bandcamp.com/track/head-down-kuba-sojka-remix https://anoderecords1.bandcamp.com/track/they-are-watching-us https://moderncathedrals.bandcamp.com/track/modern-cathedrals-pt-1-terrence-dixon-remix it should be noted that only one of the track examples is released on a detroit-based label (modern cathedrals). conclusion, constraints and future directions focused mainly on the techno genre, the classification exercises in this article yielded satisfying results (admittedly, sometimes after re-running the algorithm), confirming the hybridity of electronic dance music, the transgression of taxonomical boundaries, and the ways the latter can be reflected in folksonomies. of course, the performance of the librarian is limited by the accuracy of the subgenre classifier. the scores of the algorithm are similar to the model of caparrini et al. (2020: 6),[4] which can be seen as fair results when taking into account the standard features extracted, the high number of subgenres and subgenre proximities. caparrini et al. (2020: 14) offer a few suggestions for improving the classifier, much of which would involve structural analysis carried out, ideally, on full-length beatport tracks (as opposed to the freely provided two-minute samples used in this project). for increasing the stylistic variety, the librarian can be used with other genre classification algorithms too. for instance, the tensorflow auto-tagging models supplied with the essentia audio and music analysis library (alonso-jiménez et al. 2020) can be employed to predict a wider group of popular music genres, venturing beyond the boundaries of electronic dance music in such sonic explorations. author biography botond vitos is a cultural anthropologist with research interests in popular music studies, electronic dance music culture, event-cultures, the burning man movement and genre classification in machine learning. he is part of the editorial team at dancecult. email: x@vitos.tv references alonso-jimenez, pablo, dmitry bogdanov, jordi pons, and xavier serra. 2020. “tensorflow audio models in essentia”. barcelona, spain. 2020 ieee international conference on acoustics, speech and signal processing (icassp). <https://doi.org/10.1109/icassp40776.2020.9054688>. bennett, andy, and richard a. peterson. 2004. “introducing music scenes”. in music scenes: local, translocal and virtual, ed. andy bennett and richard a. peterson. 1–16. nashville: vanderbilt university press. besseny, amelia. 2019. “lost in spotify: folksonomy and wayfinding functions in spotify’s interface and companion apps”. popular communication 18(1): 1–17. <https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2019.1701674>. caparrini, antonio, javier arroyo, laura pérez-molina and jaime sánchez-hernández. 2020. “automatic subgenre classification in an electronic dance music taxonomy”. journal of new music research 49(12): 1–16. < https://doi.org/10.1080/09298215.2020.1761399>. charles, christopher. 2019. “part of the tribe: crews, residence, and affiliation in underground dance music scenes”. iaspm journal 9(2): 55–74. <https://doi.org/10.5429/2079-3871(2019)v9i2.5en>. charles, christopher. 2020. “genre in practice: categories, metadata and music-making in psytrance culture”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 12(1): 22–47. <https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.09>. "company – about beatport". beatport. 2021. <https://about.beatport.com/>. (accessed 14 october 2021). fabbri, franco. 1982. "a theory of popular music genres: two applications". in popular music perspectives: papers from the first international conference on popular music research, amsterdam, june 1981, ed. david horn and philip tagg. 52‐81. goteborg: iaspm. gaffney, michael, pauline rafferty. 2009. "making the long tail visible: social networking sites and independent music discovery". program 43(4): 375–91. <https://doi.org/10.1108/00330330910998039>. graham, stephen. 1996. sounds of the underground: a cultural, political and aesthetic mapping of underground and fringe music. ann arbor: university of michigan press. hesmondhalgh, david, ellis jones, andreas rauh. 2019. “soundcloud and bandcamp as alternative music platforms”. social media+ society 5(4): 1–13. <https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119883429>. holt, fabian. 2007. genre in popular music. chicago: university of chicago press. kirn, peter. 2020. “underground techno labels: a bandcamp guide”. cdm. 1 may. <https://cdm.link/2020/05/underground-techno-labels-a-bandcamp-guide/>. (accessed 14 october 2021). lepa, steffen, anne-kathrin hoklas, hauke egermann, stefan weinzierl. 2015. “sound, materiality and embodiment challenges for the concept of ‘musical expertise’ in the age of digital mediatization”. convergence: the international journal of research into new media technologies 21(3): 1–7. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856515579837>. lindop, robin. 2010. “re-evaluating musical genre in uk psytrance”. in the local scenes and global culture of psytrance, ed. graham st john, 114-30. london: routledge. mcleod, kernbrew. 2001. “genres, subgenres, sub-subgenres and more: musical and social differentiation within electronic/dance music communities”. journal of popular music studies 13(1): 59–75. <https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-1598.2001.tb00013.x>. shuker, roy. 1998. key concepts in popular music. london: routledge. thornton, sarah. 1996. club cultures: music, media, and subcultural capital. hanover: university press of new england. "spotify—company info". spotify. 2021. <https://newsroom.spotify.com/company-info/>. (accessed 14 october 2021). vander wal, thomas. 2007. “folksonomy coinage and definition”. off the top. 2 february. <https://vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html>. (accessed 14 october 2021). notes [1] one possible illustration is provided on the popular webpage ishkur’s guide to electronic music. [2] the following (sub-)genre labels were borrowed from beatport’s 2021 jan charts: afro house, ambient, bass house, big room, breaks, dance-electro pop, deep house, drum&bass, dubstep, electro (classic-detroit-modern), electro house, funky-groove-jackin' house, future house, garage-bassline-grime, hard dance-hardcore, hard techno, house, indie dance, leftfield bass, leftfield house & techno, melodic house&techno, minimal-deep tech, nu disco-disco, organic house-downtempo, progressive house, psy-trance, reggae-dancehall-dub, tech house, techno (peak time-driving), techno (raw-deep-hypnotic), trance, trap-hip-hop-r&b. [3] a few more (technical) details about the project: the classifier is based on the methodology of caparrini et al. (2020). the model is trained on a dataset of 92 audio features extracted from tracks within beatport’s top-100 lists in 32 subgenres. beatport provides two-minute samples of each track, and bandcamp usually offers freely available full-length (low-bitrate) streams as track previews, which are suitable for musical feature extraction and analysis. complete bandcamp libraries are processed, and the classifier predicts each track’s class (subgenre) probabilities, which forms the basis for the clustering algorithm. the number of clusters can be set in advance or calculated automatically. results are provided in a pdf file with links to up to three representative bandcamp tracks (if possible, from different artists) in each group and their attached tags (folksonomies). [4] for more details please refer to the project’s github repository. golden section proportionality in the music of dzihan & kamien dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 13(1): 101–128 issn 1947-5403 ©2021 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.07 golden section proportionality in the music of dzihan & kamien dave collins independent researcher (uk) michael dunn university centre, doncaster college (uk) abstract academic studies of the golden section are evidenced across a range of disciplines. in music the discourse has been dominated by analytical studies from the realm of classical music but much less with relation to popular music. in order to explore this absence an in-depth case study was undertaken into the golden section within edm through an analysis of the musical output of the european duo, dzihan & kamien. the authors employed time-based rather than conventional score-based analytical procedures, that is, through counting elapsed recorded musical time. key musical event points relating to compositional structure provided criteria against which calculations were made, while the deviation of musical event points from the mathematically calculated golden section points was also evaluated. from some 66 tracks by dzihan & kamien analysed, 45 demonstrated less than just 3.5 percent deviation from calculated golden section points. keywords: golden section, edm, musical proportion, digital composition dave collins gained his phd at the university of sheffield (uk) in the psychology of musical composition alongside a career as an educator. he is the founding editor of two academic journals, the international journal of performance arts and digital media and the journal of music, technology and education. his key publications are in the field of creative cognition exemplified in musical composition and the search for appropriate methods of enquiry. this led to his published book the act of musical composition by routledge in 2016. he now acts as consultant in the field of professional development in higher education. email: davestorth1@gmail.com michael dunn is programme leader for the ba hons creative music technology programme at university campus doncaster. research interests are diverse and include publications upon the study of creative cognition and the use of computer systems, and the role of music technology in education. alongside lecturing on the ba, michael also works as a sound artist, software engineer, composer and performer, with an emphasis on collaborative practice. recent work includes the floating memories ar sculpture installation in july 2021, and we are transient poetry soundscapes broadcast for the cop26 summit in november 2021. email: m.p.dunn@live.com feature article https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.07 mailto:davestorth1%40gmail.com mailto:m.p.dunn%40live.com dancecult 13(1)102 introduction the history and influence of what is known as the golden section within human thinking and upon human creativity reaches back to euclid in the fourth century bc and reappears in differing terminologies—golden section, golden ratio, golden mean, divine proportion— throughout western thought since. understood as a measure of proportionality and balance, the golden section, in purely geometric terms, occurs when a line or distance is divided in such a way that the ratio between the lesser [b] and greater [a] lengths is equivalent to the ratio of the greater length [a] to the whole [c], which can be expressed as a:b = c:a. put numerically, if the whole is a single unit, then the value of the larger length is 0.618 and the lesser 0.382. expressed as a percentage the golden section of a distance or length occurs at a point corresponding to 61.8 percent of the whole. figure 1. geometry of the golden section this ratio or proportion based on irrational numbers has been conjectured as a mathematical principle not only reflecting universal laws like the structure of dna, the growth patterns of plants, the shape of seashells and the spiral structures of galaxies.1 it is said to be also embedded in the products of human creativity such as architecture, graphic design, product design and so on.2 alongside this extensive literature from within the visual arts, there also exists a body of scholarship regarding the golden section and its relationship to music, primarily with respect to notions of structural balance and proportion. the golden section and music the relationship of the golden section to music dates back to the nineteenth century with zeising’s 1854 landmark book “new theory of the proportions of the human body” where he argued the case for establishing universal laws of beauty—encapsulated in the golden section—which would correspond to observable patterns in nature and art.3 however, the main growth of serious scholarship in the realm of music and the golden section began in the late twentieth century and as michelle phillips has pointed out, “from 1970 to the collins and dunn | golden section proportionality in the music of dzihan & kamien 103 present day, the number of publications that mention the golden section has increased each decade” (phillips 2019: 3), primarily exemplified in the work of scholars such as ernest lendvai and roy howat.4 to a lesser extent, the creative output of other composers in relation to the golden section has been explored by a diverse range of studies that include musical works spanning some seven hundred years.5 in very much the same way that golden section proportionality in the visual arts has been calculated through the counting of lengths or distance, the analytical procedures in these music-based studies have been implemented through the horizontal arithmetical counting of the notation of barlines, pulse and individual notes throughout the score of a particular piece. determining golden section event points in music the analytical procedures within the literature cited above employ a wide range of musical factors to determine what are called later in this study “golden section event points”. in essence, event points occur when the musicologist uses particular musical parameters in a proportional analysis of a chosen piece of music; these may be dynamics, pitch, harmony, tempo, instrumentation and timbre, or a combination of more than one parameter. some criteria used in studies have included changes of key, musical pauses, a return to the tonic key, the introduction of new themes and so on. what is clear is that a very diverse selection of music elements have been used by analysts across a range of classical music to enable their calculations of golden section (gs) event points, ranging from small scale musical pieces such as howat’s analysis of debussy’s five minute long jardins sous la pluie for piano to larger scale works such as lendvai’s study of bartók’s three movement sonata for two pianos and percussion at around twenty six minutes (howat 1993: 136-38; lendvai 1996: 18-26). proportional deviation of course, in any numerically based analysis of a piece of music some consideration needs to be paid to what degree of mathematical deviation from the golden section ratio can be regarded as meaningful. in this respect adams makes the following important observation: for the analyst who seeks any kind of credibility in claiming the use of gs in a work, it is crucial to minimize the extent of acceptable deviation from the exact gs ratio. after all, gs proportions are perilously close to one-third and two-thirds, fundamental divisions in music. slightly overshooting the first or undershooting the second can easily bring the composer into the purview of gs” (adams 2003: 243-44). he goes on to suggest that a reasonable margin might be 2 percent. atlas, in discussing the potentiality for contradictions of golden section points when the music is being performed, points out in his scrutiny of recordings of puccini aria from la bohème that these range from 1.6% to 2.66% (atlas 2003: 277). rofe, in his analysis of the golden section in the music of shostakovitch, employs an accuracy margin of plus/minus 1.5 percent (rofe 2008: 32). dancecult 13(1)104 the golden section and non-classical musics as can be seen, the studies outlined above have been concerned with the golden section in western classical music spanning a time period of at least six centuries and a wide range of styles from early mediaeval choral music to opera and twentieth century electronic music. and within the broad spectrum of what constitutes classical music there have been a lesser number of studies in other genres such as musique concrѐte and electroacoustic music.6 there is a paucity of published papers on the golden section in the similarly wide stylistic field of popular music; thus this study seeks to explore possible golden section proportionality within popular instrumental music, specifically electronic dance music (edm), doing this through the work of european duo dzihan & kamien.7 the music of dzihan & kamien dzihan & kamien’s music is broadly characterized by a blend of instrumental jazz and electronic idioms fused by layers of acoustic and synthetic parts, often with an emphasis on near-eastern modes in the lead lines. in terms of genre, their work straddles downtempo, nu-jazz and acid jazz with prominent traits of house, funk and soul. tracks are largely instrumental and range in duration from around two to eight minutes. instrumentation typically comprises drums or percussion, bass and keys, over which a range of different instruments carry the lead lines, often using near-eastern modes and instruments with free improvisation. there is also extensive use of sampling, editing and looping techniques throughout, indicating the use of contemporary digital audio workstation (daw) software tools. this is further evidenced by each track having a consistent tempo, suggesting the use of a grid-based timeline to record and/or sequence the tracks.8 in terms of compositional form, their music largely aligns with contemporary electronica idioms. percussion is in a simple quadruple meter at a regular tempo over which thematic material is introduced and repeated (looped) with some variation. and development is not established through change of key, tempo or introduction of contrasting movements, but through variation in the combination of different instrument parts. typically, a predominant theme is established, followed by contrasting instrumental and/or breakdown sections, and finally a return to the original theme. structure in the music of dzihan & kamien whilst tracks from the third studio album, their 2009 music matters, are more poporiented, relatively short (mean duration 3’46”) and utilize a typical verse-chorus song form to provide a sense of unity throughout the song, the most prevalent characteristics of dzihan & kamien’s work can be found in the studio albums freaks & icons (2000), gran riserva (2002) and lost and found (2010). these are more representative of edm form, combining and varying loop-based layers of instrument parts to articulate the development of a single musical theme, with most tracks lasting between four and six minutes (mean duration 5’05”). here, the main theme provides a sense of unity across the track, while collins and dunn | golden section proportionality in the music of dzihan & kamien 105 significant changes to instrumentation and dynamics in the breakdowns provide the main source of musical, sonic and dynamic contrast. edm form in dzihan & kamien’s work at this point, it should be made clear that it is inaccurate to define dzihan & kamien’s music wholly as edm, since musical content and instrumentation identify more clearly with jazz, funk and middle eastern styles. furthermore, the majority of their work has an emphasis on acoustic instruments played by real musicians as opposed to electronic sounds controlled by computer sequencers. however, their work is representative of the loop-based production paradigm allied to contemporary edm that essentially manipulates one musical idea across a whole composition through different combinations of looped instrument parts. whilst it serves as a relatively primitive overview, not being representative of the nuanced and divergent nature of contemporary edm, dj stanley’s “song map” does provide a useful framework of reference for the analysis of how musical materials are structured through time, and it continues to appear in the literature to illustrate the rudiments of edm form (butler 2006: 222).9 figure 2. song map for edm form this model communicates not only the order of sections through time (x-axis), but also the emergent arc of dynamic intensity (y-axis). thus, the width of any given region indicates its duration as a scaled proportion of the whole track, whilst vertical height represents an aggregated measure of the amplitude, instrumental complexity and overall energy presented by that section. the above literature is largely consistent in its identification of the different sections. dancecult 13(1)106 figure 3. structure of edm form the core can be thought of as the foremost section of the piece that carries the main theme at its highest intensity. it is described as the “fullest” section (anderson & eigenfeldt 2011: 9). all instruments and loop layers are usually “thicker” and “simultaneously active” (lópezserrano et al. 2016: 503). meanwhile, underpinning bass and percussion provide the track’s “regular groove” (solberg 2014: 73). looking at dj stanley’s song map, it can be seen that the core sections (labelled b and d) establish the main material at the highest intensity around which the other sections are arranged. the breakdown denotes a distinct section within the track that performs two important functions. firstly, it contrasts with the preceding core section (b) which is often highly repetitive and thus susceptible to becoming stale. secondly, it builds emotional tension and heightens musical anticipation towards the reintroduction of the core (d) at a key point referred to as the drop, and in doing so renders the final core section more powerful. thus, it can be seen that the function of the breakdown is as “a contrasting section to the verse…to build tension, and lead back or crescendo to the verse in anticipation of ‘the drop’” (anderson and eigenfeldt 2011: 9). the drop occurs when the breakdown ends and the final core section begins; to reference the earlier song map, this is the point at which c transitions to d. this moment is interpreted as the “culmination of the track” (solberg & jensenius 2017: 308). it is the “tensionresolving part” which solberg describes as the highest intensity point of the composition (solberg 2014: 68-70). this could be understood as the pivotal moment of the composition that elicits a “heightened and intensified emotional experience” in the listener through the careful construction of the preceding breakdown section (solberg 2014: 74). within the context of this broad edm structure, the authors had noted (informally in the first instance) some particular resonance with the golden section in the music of dzihan & kamien, which consequently provided the impetus to examine their music in more detail. furthermore, given the substantial and varied musical output of the duo, with over 50 tracks incorporating elements of downtempo, trip-hop, house and other loopbased edm sub-genres, the focus on dzihan & kamien’s repertoire provided a breadth and diversity of examples. as a result a more in depth and detailed study of the whole of their output was undertaken. collins and dunn | golden section proportionality in the music of dzihan & kamien 107 initial observations seemed to show that the point of golden section in dzihan & kamien’s tracks often coincided with the start or end of breakdown or instrumental sections, while more extensive listening also pointed towards middle-eight and bridge sections as being potentially prominent. significantly, this shaped the overall approach towards determining golden section event points in the study; that is to say, it focussed the analysis upon the boundaries of these key sections that demarcated their start and end points, which are now referred to as sectional boundary points. consequently, the function and importance of these sections within their respective compositional wholes was considered, which necessitated an interpretation of each track’s overall structure and how it was organized through the ordering of sub-sections across the timeline. what unified these sectional boundary points in terms of function was that they marked the junctures at which significant musical changes occurred. for example, the end of an instrumental section might transition into the start of a breakdown, or the breakdown back to the core. furthermore, these boundary points often expressed the composers’ decision to introduce contrast through new musical layers and significant changes to instrumentation and dynamics. in the case of the breakdown and instrumental sections, quite often their end points actually represented what could be considered the pinnacle of the piece, where dynamic intensity built towards the drop and a final reprise of the core. the significance of the sections themselves was also intimated by their uniqueness and prominence, since the breakdown and instrumental sections often only occurred once in the track and were emphasized by extended duration, variation in instrumentation, significant dynamic changes and sonic manipulation. collectively, these criteria reinforced an approach towards determining sectional boundary points as meaningful golden section event points, and as a result, the analysis was predicated on the significance of these sections within the overall compositional structure. materials and methods accessing dzihan & kamien’s catalogue of work was a relatively straightforward process. using discogs as a database of all official releases, it was possible to source physical cds and to access individual tracks using online streaming services (spotify and youtube). to arrive at a definitive list of recordings for use in this study, it was firstly necessary to filter out duplicated releases, radio edits of longer tracks and remixes by other artists. this left 67 tracks. by taking a proportional sample from this list, a comprehensive exploration of the prevalence of the golden section within their music then became feasible. the challenge of course would be to implement the predominant methodology of counting from a musical score, which has formed the backbone of all previous golden section studies in musical composition. however, since dzihan & kamien’s mode of music creation is through daw-based software tools, any analysis cannot be contingent upon counting from a musical score. similarly, since the tempi in all the analysed tracks remain consistent, issues of performance variation impacting upon score-based analysis are irrelevant. scoredancecult 13(1)108 based counting was jettisoned and replaced with a temporally-oriented (elapsed, or linear time) methodology of counting fixed musical recordings of tracks in minutes and seconds. this time-based analytical procedure was then used to calculate the golden section point for each track, where the total duration of a track was independently measured, converted into seconds and multiplied by the golden section constant (0.618).10 so, for example, the mathematically derived golden section point—hereafter referred to as the calculated gs point—for ocean air (2000, duration 5’20” or 320 seconds) was calculated to occur at 3’18” (198 seconds) as follows: gs point = 320 secs * 0.618 = 198 secs = 3’18”. figure 4. deriving the mathematically calculated golden section (gs) point. the calculated following the gs point calculation, a structural analysis was undertaken for each piece by listening through in real-time from beginning to end, taking note of the order, duration and organisation of the different musical sections, the instrumental arrangement and any prevalent dynamic changes. in essence, the aim was to establish an overview of each composition’s structure, to enable informed judgments to be made about the calculated gs point in the context of the whole composition. an example of this structural overview is shown below, using ocean air (2000) to illustrate. figure 5. ocean air (2000) dur. 5’20” simplified structural overview the calculated gs point was then reviewed to ascertain whether any significant musical events coincided with its intersection. in the example above, it can be seen that the calculated gs seems to occur close to the sectional boundary point between the main theme and the breakdown, and so this would be noted and scrutinized further. collins and dunn | golden section proportionality in the music of dzihan & kamien 109 temporal deviation when determining whether a track supported any coincidence between the calculated gs point and an identified musical event point, any such musical events are unlikely to occur at the exact timing of the calculated gs, and, reflecting the literature’s reference to acceptable deviation, a figure of +/-3.5 percent was implemented in order to determine whether any such musical event was indeed close enough to be permissible. this also took into account adams’ concerns that gs proportions are “perilously close” to the common divisions in musical structure of one-third/two-thirds (adams 1996: 243). the acceptable deviation—which will now be referred to as the deviation percentage—was calculated as follows: deviation = (gs point musical event) / total track duration. to illustrate this in ocean air, the gs point of 3’18” (198 seconds) is just two seconds away from the start of the breakdown at 3’20” (200 seconds). dividing this time difference by the track’s total duration of 5’20” (320 seconds) results in a deviation percentage of -0.625 percent. since this figure is within the threshold of +/-3.5 percent this was considered as close enough to the gs point to be deemed coincident. had the deviation percentage been beyond the value of +/-3.5 percent it would have been rejected.11 results applying this methodology across all 67 of dzihan & kamien’s tracks, 22 were excluded from further analysis for the following reasons: one was inaccessible (sammy fu vinylonly release); seven had no significant musical event points at the calculated gs point and fourteen had musical event points with greater than a 3.5 percent deviation. the remaining forty-five tracks were found to support coincidence of the calculated gs point with key musical event points, within the threshold of 3.5 percent deviation. the most significant initial observation was that the calculated gs point of a large proportion of tracks appeared to coincide with the start or end of key musical passages, most commonly the breakdown but also instrumental and bridge sections. beyond this, there were other occurrences where the calculated gs point coincided with more unique musical event points such as the holistic division of a track into separate proportions.12 the inverse gs point was also considered, leading to further instances of coincidence against key musical event points.13 consequently, it was possible to establish three clear event categories that brought all these examples together in a structured overview of how and where the calculated gs points coincided with musical event points for dzihan & kamien’s tracks. dancecult 13(1)110 figure 6. golden section event type categories to clarify, an overview of the whole data collection process is presented in the diagram below. figure 7. overview of data collection process collins and dunn | golden section proportionality in the music of dzihan & kamien 111 an analysis of dzihan & kamien’s music through the event types event type one (twenty-one tracks) this event group brought together all instances where the calculated gs point coincided with the start of a key section within the composition. of the 21 tracks included, ten coincided with the start of the main breakdown, four coincided with the start of a break, four coincided with the start of an instrumental and three coincided with the start of a bridge. figure 8. event type one dataset dancecult 13(1)112 the start of the breakdown was by far the most common musical event to coincide with the calculated gs point in this event category, accounting for ten of the twenty-one tracks. whilst each track’s breakdown varied in terms of duration, common to all these instances was the section’s role within each track, clearly demonstrating the defining features identified in the previous discussion of the breakdown and edm form (introduction of contrasting material, reduction in dynamic intensity, removal of key percussive elements such as kick drum and lead towards the drop and a reprise of the core). for example, in i guess she… (2000) thematic material is introduced and developed through the intro up to 1’29”, after which the fullest combination of instrumental layers, representing the core, plays until 2’04”. the track drops in intensity through an instrumental section to lead into the breakdown at 2’39”, which in this example starts three seconds after the gs point (deviation of 1.12 percent). the majority of the instrument parts, including the primary percussive layers, are removed during the first half of the breakdown, leaving just the vocal sample “i guess she fell in love” playing over sustained electric piano, muted kick and hi-hat; this is a unique combination of instrument layers in the context of the whole composition. use of reverb and delay create a sense of ambience and space that complements the significant drop in dynamic intensity. the second half of the breakdown introduces percussive layers to build intensity towards the drop where the core is reintroduced at 3’10” and continues into the outro and the end of the track. figure 9. i guess she… (2000) dur. 4’13” the other nine tracks in which the golden section coincided with the start of the breakdown bore similar characteristics; the calculated gs point marked the transition from a prior, busier and more intense section—most often the core—to a more ambient or sparse section with muted percussion and attenuated dynamic intensity. four further examples—just you and i (2000), gutenmorgenduft (2002), 1 (2010) and 99 (2020)—also evidenced coincidence at the start of breakdowns. however, there were some differences in the defining features of these sections. for example, they were of significantly shorter duration, or they existed in relation to another more prominent breakdown section collins and dunn | golden section proportionality in the music of dzihan & kamien 113 elsewhere in the track that led us to differentiate these instead as break sections, in order to remain true to the defining features of the breakdown in edm form.14 nevertheless, they did appear to serve a similar purpose, in that the calculated gs point would coincide with the start of a break section in which instruments would thin out, percussion would be removed and intensity would diminish, before returning to the core. the other examples in this event group indicated close coincidence of the calculated gs point with the start of an instrumental—dundaeova (2002), call me (2010), ahmet bont (2010) and join us (2010)—or bridge section—summer fever (2005), busted (2005), life can be good (2005). these could be considered as musical event points since they evidenced the composers’ intention to introduce contrasting musical materials at a clear sectional boundary point. event type two (twelve tracks) the second event group brought together all instances where the calculated gs point coincided with the end of a key section within the composition. of the twelve tracks included, six coincided with the end of the main breakdown, two coincided with the end of a break and four coincided with the end of an instrumental. figure 10. event type two dataset dancecult 13(1)114 coincidence of the calculated gs point with the end of the main breakdown section was most prevalent, accounting for six of the twelve tracks, with the remaining instances marking other breaks and instrumental sections. while in the first event group the calculated gs point marked the beginning of the breakdown, the examples in this second event group occurred at the end of the breakdown, which would typically then transition into the final core section. it is argued that this is particularly significant, since the construction of edm form indicates that the second half of the breakdown tends to ramp up towards the drop and the return of the core, representing the culmination or “highest intensity point” in the track (solberg 2014: 70). to clarify using dj stanley’s edm song map, this would correspond with the transition from section c to d. figure 11. event type two mapped against edm song map in this sense, the event type two breakdown examples evidence the calculated gs point coinciding with what could be argued as the pinnacle of the entire composition: the drop. using airport (2002) to illustrate, after a lead-in that introduces some of the melodic and rhythmic elements, the core is established and supported by full percussion. subsequent to this, the track moves to a slightly less intense instrumental section which sees some layers, such as the prominent synth, removed, while other new instrumental parts are introduced to offer variation and contrast. collins and dunn | golden section proportionality in the music of dzihan & kamien 115 figure 12. airport (2002) dur. 5’12” at the breakdown, the majority of the percussion drops away to leave just the main chord progression and melody playing against a minimal backdrop. the calculated gs point occurs three seconds (deviation 1.34 percent) before the end of the breakdown and the drop, at which point the core is re-established at its maximum intensity, supported by full percussion and other key instrument layers. some unique parts are introduced after the drop, for example a trumpet line, which renders the final core section more prominent in the context of the whole composition. finally, the track drops down to the outro and the end of the piece. in addition to the six tracks with breakdown end events, two others—slowhand hussein (2000) and after (2000)—evidenced coincidence with less significant break sections which were either preceded and followed, respectively, by longer and more prominent breakdown events. as already explained, it was considered appropriate to distinguish between breakdown and break events. finally, there were four further instances where the calculated gs point coincided with the end of instrumental sections which also tended to then lead into the core at the end of the track: around (2010), basmati (2002), debussy (2010) and barbeque (2010). interestingly, parallels can be drawn between these instrumental sections and the breakdown sections, since both seem to perform the unique and essential function of preparing the listener for a re-introduction of the core at the drop, as a final reprise of the track’s main thematic material. regardless of the exact nature of each of these examples, they are united by the fact that the end of a clearly defined, discrete musical section, integral in establishing contrast within each piece, coincides closely with the calculated gs point. in many of these examples, this point of coincidence also represents the pinnacle of the composition. for more often than not, the end of the breakdown or instrumental marks the drop and/or a final reprise of the core at maximum dynamic intensity and extended duration. dancecult 13(1)116 event type three (twelve tracks) the final event group brought together any remaining instances of golden section proportions aligned with clear musical events and sectional boundary points. this included examples where, in the absence of any coincidence at the 0.618 calculated gs point measured from the start of the track, the 0.618 calculated gs point was instead measured from the end of the track, or what has been termed here the inverse calculated gs point. also included are instances in which the calculated gs point marked holistic structural proportions between verse/chorus groupings and ramp events, all of which are explained in more detail below. out of the twelve tracks identified, seven marked key sections or structural proportions at the inverse calculated gs point, two marked other structural proportions in the compositions and three marked the start of a ramp event that built towards the drop. figure 13. event type three dataset in order to calculate the inverse golden section point, the same methodology was applied as was outlined earlier (taking a track’s total duration and multiplying it by 0.618). however, instead of then measuring this calculated duration from the start of the composition, the collins and dunn | golden section proportionality in the music of dzihan & kamien 117 temporal measurement was taken from the end of the composition, which simply meant working with the same golden section proportions but in reverse order. what was found were further examples of coincidence with key sectional boundary points, including the start or end of breakdown and instrumental sections. for example, in deep disco (2010) after a short ambient introduction, the core is established with some slight variation in instrument layers until 2’12”. here, just one second after the inverse calculated gs point at 2’11”, there is a pronounced change in direction as the track moves to an extended instrumental section that markedly contrasts the previous material. subsequent to this, a short drum break at 3’52” signals a return to the core, which is then repeated al fine. figure 14. deep disco (2010) dur. 5’42” here, one can clearly see a very close correlation (deviation +0.29 percent) between the inverse calculated gs point (2’11”) and the start of the contrasting middle section (2’12”). essentially, deep disco, along with a number of other tracks in this group, demonstrates similar attributes of gs coincidence to those discussed in the first two event groups, the only difference here being that coincidence is mapped against the inverse mathematical gs proportion. other instances of the inverse calculated gs point present compelling support of golden section alignment that becomes apparent when examining the structural proportions of the composition as a whole. for example, in i wish (2005), the initial intro, verse, bridge and chorus are demarcated from the subsequent verse, triple chorus and outro by a short eight second section that slows to a brief pause. this is a unique moment in the track which seems to punctuate the whole composition by dividing it into two parts, a and b: dancecult 13(1)118 figure 15. i wish (2005) dur. 4’39” the ratio between former (a) and latter (b) parts portrays almost exact gs proportions of 0.382:0.618, with the inverse calculated gs point occurring at 1’47”, just one second before the start of the new verse at 1’48” (0.36 percent deviation). similar proportionality can be found in the standard calculated gs point examples in this group, such as waiting (2009), which can be subdivided into two. part a consists of two verses and a chorus linked by a short bridge section. and part b is almost identical but only contains one verse. the calculated gs point occurs just after the end of the chorus in part a, at which point the track slows noticeably and attenuates in amplitude, adding an extra bar (two to three seconds) to the end of the chorus. this concludes part a and enables a transition to part b. once again, this is a unique moment in the composition, and the perception is one of the music slowing to a momentary pause before the new verse is introduced. figure 16. waiting (2009) dur. 3’27” collins and dunn | golden section proportionality in the music of dzihan & kamien 119 here, the calculated gs point could be interpreted to mark the division of the composition into former (a) and latter (b) parts which resemble golden section proportions, albeit approaching the limits of acceptable deviation at 3.38 percent. in a similar manner to i wish (2005), this example is indicative of a more holistic representation of the calculated gs since it can be seen how the entire composition (a:b, or a+b:a) corresponds with golden section proportions (0.618:0.382 and 1:0.618 respectively). finally in this group, three instances were identified in which the calculated gs point marked the onset of musical and dynamic changes within the breakdown that indicated a build or ramp towards the drop: stiff jazz (2002), spacewater (2000) and where are we? (2000). figure 17. stiff jazz (2002) dur. 5’50” in these cases, each track transitions from core to breakdown and in doing so moves from a higher to lower intensity. fewer instrument layers result in an ambient, open feel. looking at stiff jazz (2002) as an example, the breakdown starts to build at 3’37”, just one second after the calculated gs point (deviation 0.29 percent). the onset of the ramp is marked by the introduction of new instrument layers which provide a change of direction and a renewed sense of momentum, and the section continues to build in intensity as the drop approaches and all instrument parts are re-introduced for the core at 4’15”. to reiterate an earlier point, given the significance of the drop as the pinnacle of the whole track and the moment at which the final reprise of the core occurs at maximum dynamic intensity, these ramp events seemed particularly noteworthy. dancecult 13(1)120 summary from the sixty-six tracks subject to analysis, forty-five tracks supported alignment of the calculated gs point with significant musical events to within 3.5 percent deviation. this corresponds to a striking 68 percent of dzihan & kamien’s tracks—just under five and a half hours of music—which evidence golden section proportions. of these tracks, deviation ranged from 0.0 to 3.5 percent with a mean average of just 1.58 percent, signifying a close alignment between the mathematically calculated gs point and the occurrence of key musical events. as a reminder, this deviation figure is an indicator of how closely the calculated gs points occurred in relation to the coincident musical event points, and thus a smaller deviation percentage value denotes a closer representation of golden section proportions within the music. these figures are broken down further in the schematic below, enabling comparison between the different event type groups and against the overall aggregated figures. figure 18. deviation percentage overview visualising this data graphically enables a better appreciation of its significance; the box plot below presents the average median and mean deviation amounts with the minimum and maximum deviation values at the lower and upper range boundaries and the interquartile range. this represents the midspread or central grouping of deviation values: collins and dunn | golden section proportionality in the music of dzihan & kamien 121 figure 19. box plot key thus, the box plot for each event group illustrates the deviation measurements for all tracks included within that group. each deviation measurement represents the time difference between the calculated gs point and the musical event point identified for each track. the further one moves to the left side of the graph, the lower the deviation, indicating a closer coincidence between calculated gs point and musical event point. figure 20. deviation percentage overview box plots although originally setting a deviation threshold of 3.5 percent, the data actually indicate that the majority of tracks were well below this limit, as evidenced by the interquartile range for all groups spanning from 0.7 percent to 2.42 percent. therefore, the majority of the data would remain credible even within more stringent margins, such as the 2 percent “reasonable margin” described by adams (1996: 244). dancecult 13(1)122 discussion the journey which began with an early intuitive hunch that one or two tracks from the creative output of dzihan & kamien might perhaps reflect golden section proportionality led to an in-depth analysis of over sixty of their songs. experimental findings indicate that some sixty-eight percent of their tracks align to, on average, just under 1.6 percent overall deviation of the identified key structural events from the mathematically calculated golden section. acquiring this data meant implementing a different methodological procedure from any previously described in the literature. edm-based music is not predicated on a musical score, but upon the use of daw technologies. so it made sense to abandon score-based counting approaches, which have dominated golden section music analyses, and replace them by counting elapsed time. as pointed out earlier in this paper, there have been some not insignificant concerns by respected analysts themselves around the reliability of the counting bars methodology, in the main due to the inconsistent tempi across analysed works. however, in this study, the overwhelming majority of pieces under scrutiny employ a stable, consistent tempo. additionally, there are no comparable issues regarding variations in performance interpretation from the composer’s intended tempi, since each track/song exists as a finished recorded artefact. in effect, the creative acts of musical composition and production are one and the same. counting in minutes and seconds not only releases the methodology from these issues but focusses the demarcation of key musical event points away from discerning them on a printed page to an aural apprehension of how such event points manifest themselves in experienced time. as stated earlier, the bulk of studies on the golden section in the arts sit in the visual domain, and in this context the perception of proportional relationships is both holistic and simultaneous. for example, the proportional relationships lying within the various dimensions of a mediaeval cathedral, or the interrelationships between various components within a painting, can be apprehended in one moment. in the case of music this is not possible since it is time-contingent. reybrouk suggests that, “since music is a temporal art [it] is characterized by the consumption of time. in distinction to, for example, a geometric figure which is perceived at a glance, it relies on the successive presentation of its component parts” (reybrouk 2005: 12). and as ray howat points out, “if a painting or building is clumsily proportioned, a sensitive observer can see the fact in an instant; in music, though, we have to hear the piece through to make the equivalent evaluation” (1983: 1). in other words, when listening to music it could well be that the golden section is perceived retrospectively, after the event.15 allan atlas semi-humorously notes that this perception is “a far more complicated affair than that of spatial proportions, which are nice enough to stand still” (2003: 282). and as boykan has rather acerbically pointed out, “you can easily compare lengths in the visual world, but it is rather a stretch to ask us to keep track of a ratio in a situation of gradual unfolding” (2004: 25-6). collins and dunn | golden section proportionality in the music of dzihan & kamien 123 these are however, issues that relate more to the psychology of musical perception, which sits outside the scope of the current paper. when looking at how proportionality might function within the actual creative act of composition rather than its later perception, the matters of holistic visualisation described above may, particularly in the setting of digital compositional tools, be relevant. macchiusi describes such a setting: “the daw’s particular visualisation of a composition as a compound graphical object, temporally delineated and stretched across a timeline, highlights a modular form of arrangement that centers a spatial analysis of music” (2017: 9). this spatial aspect, he continues, “is emblazoned across the screens of countless (music) producers, making up an integral part of their process” (macchiusi 2017: 122). and within the spectrum of visual environments in a daw, it is the so-called “arrange window” which allows the musician to comprehend what macchiusi describes as the “synoptic outline” of the entire composition.16 this leads to the possibility that in such a creative digital workspace, the composer/arranger may be influenced—consciously or otherwise—by the visual representation of the emerging composition. macchiusi goes on to state that, “creating visual clarity forces many producers to constantly think analytically, visually defining the form and function of various sections of their arrangement while still in the midst of the compositional process” (2017: 142; our emphasis). in email correspondence with dzihan & kamien this sense of synoptic visualisation was echoed when vlado dzihan said that, “as a composer/producer you develop more of a bird’s-eye when you work on a piece, and that gives you a better overview regarding the flow between energy, pauses, dynamics, silence.”17 this “birds-eye overview” might be used by any composer engaged in the creative act of composing, but it may well be reinforced even further by contemporary composers through their use of screen-based tools such as the daw. the authors of this paper suggest that these digital tools might naturally engage a visual, holistic appreciation of possible golden section proportions upon the computer screen which might then in turn be translated into temporal music and sound events. this has been echoed by marrington in his study of daw-based musical composition. …the entire composition can appear as a single entity on the screen. this presents an interesting deconstruction of the established notion of the composition as a design made apparent through unfolding in time and further emphasizes the composition as object in visual space (marrington 2010: 5). exploring this possibility inevitably then leads to the consideration of matters of compositional intentionality. in some of the literature, issues of conscious intention are discussed: to what extent is the musician aware of the golden section and how consciously do they incorporate such proportionality into their work?18 from our written communication with vlado dzihan it was very clear that he had no deliberate intention to incorporate the golden section into his music. dancecult 13(1)124 vlado dzihan: i’m familiar with these [the golden section and proportionality in music] although i do not have a specific knowledge about it…. i also believe that a formula or intention to use these principles on purpose to make music would turn out rather uninspiring.19 and when asked how the duo establish an effective balance between sections when structuring their music, dzihan says it is “rather an instinct than a formula”. structuring a piece of music for him is… dzihan: ...similar to speech—you also do not talk in one stream, you take a breath, you make a pause, you might look for a right expression, you get louder or softer, etc. so it is the same with music—for instance, the tension, the focus might be given by the pauses and the silence. clearly, the act of composition described here is heavily reliant upon creative intuition and feel rather than the intentional use of any formal compositional procedures over and above any general alignment with edm generic structures. if not intentional, the question then arises as to why some sixty-eight percent of the creative output of dzihan & kamien, sustained over a period of twenty years, reflects golden section proportionality to such a close degree? conclusion from the findings outlined, the authors of this paper are led to enquire whether the serious exploration of the golden section in music should remain largely confined to the domain of classical music. and from this case study of just one aspect/sub-genre of popular music it seems not. using a time-based rather than score-based methodology as a foundation or jumping-off point, it may be possible to explore a further range of popular music genres in terms of golden section proportionality and any associated impact upon the creative processes involved in the composition of music. to what extent the digital audio workstation—with its visual representational overview of an unfolding composition—might influence these processes is potentially another line of enquiry worthy of future study, which would be particularly relevant to contemporary music composition, given the prevalent use of daws in such music. acknowledgments we thank vlado dzihan for their correspondence during the study. this offered valuable insight into the creative approach of the duo, which was particularly useful when considering the findings of our analysis. collins and dunn | golden section proportionality in the music of dzihan & kamien 125 notes 1 see for example oldershaw (1982), green (1995), zeng and wang (2009), chen et al. (2011) and luttge and souza (2019). 2 a most recent and unexpected occurrence is to be found in the official press conference video for the fiat 500, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvbazeu-hzg (at 9’37”). 3 zeising’s work has been contested by tatlow in her comprehensive historico-critical overview (see tatlow 2006: 69-85, where she refers to the practice of “golden numberism” beginning in the 1830s). tatlow’s critique, however, is primarily concerned with matters of compositional intentionality. 4 lendvai has undertaken extensive analyses of the compositions of bartók (see lendvai 1966a; lendvai 1966b), while howat’s (1983) comprehensive book explores the golden section in the music of debussy. 5 examples from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries include machaut (powell 1979), dunstable (trowell 1979), dufay (sandresky 1981), through mozart (perry camp 1968), to the 20th century with composers such as satie (adams 1996), shostakovitch (rofe 2016), stockhausen (maconie 2005) and ligeti (luchese 2001). jonathan kramer (1988: 303-4) offers a wider range of composers. 6 with reference to the musique concrѐte tradition, lewis (1998) discusses dhomont’s novars, the structure of which is based on multiple golden sections, while zattra (2007) undertakes a textual criticism approach in her analysis of john chowning’s electroacoustic work stria and its associated linkages with the golden section. 7 exploring possibilities of golden section in instrumental music avoids any potential constraints of popular music song structures which are based on rational numbers (e.g. 4, 8, 16). 8 there is some slight drift in the tempo in some tracks such as weltempenfanger (2010). 9 publications that have referenced this overview of edm form include snoman (2013), (solberg 2014), eigenfeldt and pasquier (2015) and lópez-serrano et al. (2016). 10 we are mainly applying here what lendvai refers to as the positive (long musical section followed by shorter section at 0.618) rather than the negative (short musical section followed by longer section at 0.382). we are not applying any complex aspect of the nesting of gs points such as in the analyses by howat. 11 taking adams’ concerns into account with respect to ocean air, for example, the two thirds/ one third issue would have placed a calculated point of two thirds of the total duration of 5’20” to occur at 3’ 33”, some distance from the hypothetical gs point of 3’18”. 12 for example, in waiting (2009, dur 3’27”), this division occurs at 2’01”, splitting the song into former (verse-verse-chorus) and latter (verse-chorus) parts that are representative of gs proportionality, 0.618:0.382. 13 the inverse calculated gs point was arrived at by calculating the normal gs point using the previously outlined methodology, but then measuring from the end of the track, as opposed to the start. essentially, this inverts the order of the larger and smaller gs proportions. 14 to clarify, in edm form, the breakdown constitutes the longest, most dramatic break from the core, and thus any occurrence of a break section in this present study which did not closely meet the edm definition or was eclipsed by another more prominent instance in the track, was classified not as a breakdown but as a break. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvbazeu-hzg dancecult 13(1)126 15 see also phillips (2019). 16 the arrange window is the main workspace within a daw where regions, containing different musical sequences, are repeated, layered and sequenced across a timeline, thereby creating the desired musical arrangement. these regions are visually represented on the screen as blocks of different colours, which the user is able to manipulate using the mouse. 17 email correspondence with vlado dzihan, 15th june 2020. 18 issues of conscious intention are discussed primarily with respect to 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institutions in montreal and beyond david madden pepperdine university (us) abstract it is within a context of crisis, work and scene culture that this text takes an entry point to address ongoing challenges edm scenes face in montreal, quebec. particular attention is paid to the city’s politics of the night and some of its street-level institutions and venues including never apart (nva), an edm-focused lgbtq+ non-profit organization. giving attention to street-level institutions is especially pressing right now as many cities attempt to rearticulate the tenuous futures of their nighttime cultures. as discussions develop beyond the pandemic, it is vital that a broad range of sustainable cultural expressions are brought to the fore, including edm events and parties. local initiatives, along with more robust and equitable systems of exchange and patronage at a cultural level, provide some of the best options for imagining a post-pandemic future for edm scenes. keywords: edmc, montreal, music scenes, street-level institutions, urban night david madden is an assistant professor of screen arts at pepperdine university. much of his research considers the cultural politics of sound and electronic music from the intersections of history, practice, ageing and gender. his scholarship is also informed by his work as a musician, music producer, community arts practitioner and media artist. currently he is writing a historical book on electronic music (mcgill-queen’s university press, forthcoming) and pursuing researchcreation projects in the areas of sound art, soundscape composition and electronic dance music. <david.madden@pepperdine.edu> feature article https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.04 mailto:david.madden%40pepperdine.edu madden | covid nights: crisis and street-level institutions in montreal and beyond 55 the covid-19 pandemic, as well as ongoing protests from los angeles, to beirut, santiago and beyond, has laid bare and amplified many of the growing structural socio-economic inequalities of over forty years of sustained neoliberalism and its regional permutations. it has also revealed the ways in which our systems of governance and public institutions are ill-equipped to handle such largescale crises, thereby bringing much of the foundational modes of capitalist production and consumption to a halt. perhaps the sharpest articulation of this sentiment came from marxist geographer david harvey in the early months of the pandemic, when he wrote: “much of the cutting-edge model of contemporary capitalist consumerism is inoperable under present conditions…. covid-19 is underpinning not a wild fluctuation but an almighty crash in the heart of the form of consumerism that dominates in the most affluent countries” (2020). this theoretical underpinning of neoliberalism provides a better understanding for the fallout and near collapse of the current gig economy where “a vast army of workers”, from service industry professionals to care givers, as harvey put it, have lost their employment with little to no means of support (2020). included in this are many of the actors—djs, producers, promoters, designers, technicians, etc.—that comprise electronic dance music (edm) scenes. even before the pandemic, as many of us are acutely aware, scores of scene actors were living with very little resources, social support, health benefits and limited prospects for secure, long-term employment. in short, the real problem here is not a virus drying up a gig economy; the real problem is the gig economy itself. adding to these challenges, as scholarly studies of dance music make clear, edm scenes can be highly competitive vis-à-vis access to resources, work, gigs, and opportunities (farrugia 2012: 115–40; fikentscher 2000: 51; reitsamer 2011: 34–5); they often valorize the subcultural heroics of the hustle that necessitates building scenes as sites of urban resistance and renewal (lawrence 2004). it is within this context of crisis, work, and scene culture that this text takes an opportunity to address some of the ongoing challenges edm scenes face in montreal, quebec. it builds upon the abovementioned scholarship while delving into broader musicological discourses ( james 2015; moore 2014: 35–8) and arts-based studies pertaining to an ever-present neoliberal current within a variety of cultural production contexts (harvie 2013: 12–15; win 2014: 3). montreal, which maintains an almost mythical status as the cultural centre of canada, is well-known both inside and outside of the country for its robust musical culture and economy. throughout the city’s long-developed edm history, it established itself as the second biggest disco market in north america in the late 1970s, behind new york, and as one of the biggest producers of 12-inch vinyl dance music singles, particularly of eurodisco and italo-disco (straw 2008: 118–19). more recently, as i have written, it became a beacon of electroclash at the turn of the millennium by way of dj mini’s overdose, a weekly party night that ran for over seven years (2002–2009) at parking nightclub in the city’s gay village (madden 2016: 38–44). it also became a beacon by way of turbo recordings and the records of dj/producer tiga—namely tiga’s and zyntherius’ coproduced cover of corey hart’s 1980s hit “sunglasses at night”. this text brings these histories in contact with the present through a discussion of montreal’s politics of the night https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw6k0kmvcci dancecult 13(1)56 and some of its street-level institutions and venues including never apart (nva), an edmfocused lgbtq+ non-profit organization. giving attention to street-level institutions is especially pressing right now, considering that so many cities throughout the world are attempting to rearticulate their nighttime culture. the futures of these institutions within this culture remain tenuous, at best. so as discussions of the urban night develop beyond the pandemic, it is vital that a broad range of sustainable cultural expressions are brought to the fore, including edm events and parties. such local initiatives—along with more robust and equitable systems of exchange and patronage at a broad cultural level including the continued development of online platforms like bandcamp—and greater support for universal basic income for all workers provide some of the best options in imagining a post-pandemic future for edm scenes. covid nights in montreal when i began writing this text in january 2021, a snapshot from my former place of residence, montreal, presented an all too familiar picture of the pandemic: an “exploding number of covid-19 cases in the province and the extreme stress it’s placing on the healthcare system” (fahmy 2021). this led to the initiation of a quebec-wide curfew that lasted through the winter months. these measures also came with increased police presence and community surveillance of nighttime activity; those who broke the curfew potentially faced fines of $6000 cad.1 montreal was not alone in approaching day and night with stark oppositional and competing policy initiatives, whereby the liveliness of packed skating rinks and parks of daylight hours was followed by the extended reach of state powers after dark. as will straw emphasized, “the culture of the night was largely forgotten in the ‘new urban planner’ initiatives of the montreal pandemic summer, where the days were bright, bustling and crowded, but quickly turned calm and empty with the arrival of the night” (2021).2 edm parties, raves, and afterhours events did not entirely come to a halt during the pandemic, as many locales continuing to organize illegal club nights as well as what have been dubbed “plague raves” (hanford 2020). but along with many other urban centres, montreal largely transformed its night into a city of desolate spaces marked by the heavy presence of police, municipal workers, and their machines: buses, street cleaners, snowremoval machinery, and so on. furthermore, the substantial growth of online forms of cultural expression that has flourished since the beginning of the pandemic—from concerts to workshops, gallery tours and zoom talks—contributed to diminishing the status and significance of the night. as straw put it, online culture has again “severed the intimate connection between nocturnal cultural expression and other characteristics of the night,” especially as it relates to genres and forms that are typically associated with the night like electronic music (2021).3 this ongoing situation presents several challenges to those who rely on edm scenes for their livelihood as so much of this labour requires close proximity of bodies, heavy travel for gigs, and easy access to the economic and cultural life of the night. montreal’s particular situation vis-à-vis covid-19 came at a crucial time in its development of new possibilities in relation to the nighttime economy and culture. like https://www.neverapart.com/ https://www.ubiworks.ca/ madden | covid nights: crisis and street-level institutions in montreal and beyond 57 many cities, including new york, tokyo, toronto, valparaiso, amsterdam, paris, berlin and toronto, montreal recently established a new administrative position called the noise and night commissioner (le commissaire du bruit et de la nuit), the city’s version of a night mayor. according to andreina and gelders, by the end of 2018 more than forty cites had created night mayors, which are also referred to as “managers” and “czars” as well as other designations; they “are individuals selected by cities to act as a liaison between nightlife establishments, citizens and local governments” (2020: 3–4). while local variations abound, these positions are predominantly created in order to address nocturnal “hardware” (the spatial and built environment of the night); “software” (the policies and regulations governing the night); and to mediate and promote “consensus among the wide variety of actors involved in nocturnal governance” (andreina and gelders 2020: 4). in montreal, while the specifics of this new position remain fuzzy, it is worth mentioning that such initiatives have been coupled with the sustained efforts of activists, edm scene actors, and a range of stakeholders, including the non-profit organization nva, urging the city of montreal to enact policy measures in line with other cities that better support the safety and expansion of night culture (straw 2021). of particular importance, a montreal night council (conseil de nuit) comprised of twelve members from a range of local organizations and institutions was created in the early months of the pandemic by mtl 24/24: a nonprofit organization whose mandate is to enhance and promote the development of the city’s nightlife economy. as post-pandemic discussions of the nighttime economy advance, they must encompass a variety of sustainable cultural expressions, including edm events and parties, rather than following the approach of the heavy panic-driven restrictions that were directed at rave culture in the late 1990s (gilbert and pearson 1999: 146–57; marsh 2006: 424). to this end, for many years various scene actors and stakeholders in montreal have been lobbying the province’s alcohol and gaming board for a permanent extension of alcohol consumption hours to 6:00 am (riga 2014). at the moment, it is illegal to sell alcohol after 3:00 am, which limits the number and kinds of activities that can thrive and the economic sustainability of the culture of the night. during the pandemic, bars, clubs and cultural institutions had to close earlier than normal, even during the city’s temporary opening in the summer of 2020. these discussions and initiatives, as well, must develop more inclusive approaches to semi-legal and private spaces, from which so much of the musical culture of the city, in particular edm, emerges. the need for more edm-friendly spaces (e.g. lofts and warehouses) that do not get regularly harassed by police and are not precariously tied to the whims of gentrification and the economic interests of property developers is a common theme from my research of various edm scenes throughout the last twenty years. with montreal and other cities developing their post-pandemic transitions, it is crucial that an array of stakeholders – from community groups and organizations to municipalities and scene actors – foreground the economic and social realities of labour in edm scenes and the nighttime cultural sector more generally. djs and producers generally work for per-item dancecult 13(1)58 sales of their music and merchandise or through per-gig payment, which significantly impedes the possibilities for long-term employment and commitment to music scenes. adding to these challenges, venues and clubs with essential and long-lasting ties to edm scenes were closing in urban centres even before the pandemic, largely due to gentrification, increasing rents and the growing contested atmosphere of nighttime sensory politics. as andreina and gelders detail, for example, fifty-eight percent of lgbtq+ venues in london (as well as many of the city’s nightclubs and entertainment spaces, including the famed fabric) shut down in a ten-year period. fabric had its license revoked in 2016, albeit temporarily, before the night czar was appointed (andreina and gelders 2020: 7). in london as in montreal, working as a dj or producer within the orbits of local culture typically entails seeking out additional forms of employment as a way to guarantee a sustainable living. in canada, the already challenging labour conditions of edm scenes were amplified by the pandemic with so much economic and cultural activity drying up. many scene actors were unable to receive the canada emergency response benefit (cerb), which provided financial support to canadians directly affected by covid-19, as their particular modes of precariousness very often fell outside the program’s eligibility requirements. given this situation and the ongoing need to address long-lasting social and economic injustices, both inand outside edm scenes, it should come as no surprise that initiatives like universal basic income, with its mission to “equip canadians with evidence-based narratives that basic income is good for the economy”, are starting to gain mainstream attention and build support in canada (see https://www.ubiworks.ca). for djs, producers and other musical creators, this could potentially remove, at least in part, the heavy reliance on per-item sales and per-gig remuneration that structures music scenes by changing the source of canadians’ financial stability to a system that brings a certain standardized level of income to all workers. the pandemic has also laid bare and exasperated many of the structural inequalities of streaming platforms such as the heavily capitalized apple music and spotify. their revenue sharing for artists is minimal at best, with potential profits largely reserved for the record industry’s major labels, transnational media conglomerates, and the private equity firms that have “enacted leveraged buyouts in every sector of the cultural industries”, in an effort to “monetize content catalogues across streaming platforms”, as andrew dewaard argues (forthcoming). as a result of this ongoing exploitative imbalance in the music industry and its streaming platforms, artists are turning to outlets like bandcamp, which distributes a fairer share of royalties to musicians. the relationship between artists and bandcamp intensified during the pandemic, primarily due to bandcamp fridays, which was launched in march when the company announced plans to wave its usual 15% take on digital sales, and 10% on physical sales throughout 2020 on the first friday of each month, thereby directing 100% of sales to artists. by the end of september, the program had channeled almost $100 million to artists with as little as a two-day turnaround, adding to the more than $584 million since 2008. initially established solely as a digital music site, the company has since expanded into merchandising, vinyl, cds, cassettes, and t-shirts; in the past year alone, it https://www.ubiworks.ca/ https://www.ubiworks.ca/ https://www.ubiworks.ca/ madden | covid nights: crisis and street-level institutions in montreal and beyond 59 has sold 5 million digital albums, 2 million tracks, 1 million vinyl records, 600 000 cds, 300 000 cassettes, and 250 000 t-shirts (roberts 2020). it is too soon to tell whether bandcamp’s current success will lead to any long-term changes in the industry or to the proliferation of other like-minded revenue sharing platforms, especially as the full extent of the damage caused by covid-19 to local scenes and scene sustaining institutions remains contested and undefined. it is also unclear just how many djs, producers and edm scene actors will permanently pivot away from music scenes to seek a sustainable living elsewhere. current reports from britain are troubling in terms of the future health and sustainability of nightclubs and in terms of the sheer volume of musicians who are considering leaving the music industry (hunter 2020 and beaumontthomas 2020). edm scenes in montreal and canada face similar prospects for the future unless there is a commitment to a more inclusive and equitable approach to musical labour in moving forward with its covid-relief schemes. these programs need to be expanded in order to ensure that smaller performance venues and nightclubs have futures in the culture of the night and the musical economy. it is important to point out that small music venues remain understudied, especially in relation to musical labour and the broader circuits of the music industry (grenier and lussier: 2013). in the context of montreal, small music venues (petit[s] lieu[x] d’arts et de spectacles) are typically defined as having a capacity of fewer than 350 people. as grenier and lussier argue, they generally “fly under the radar of those public institutions responsible for documenting, by means of various statistics and monitoring activities” (2013: 174). much like london, some of montreal’s most important nightclubs and music venues have faced similar pressures in the face of increasing noise abatement and rezoning measures. this attention to small venues seems even more crucial given that cities around the world are rearticulating and addressing the urban nighttime culture and economy as musical creators continue to rely on revenue from their paid gigs. acknowledging the importance and vitality of small music venues, nightclubs and other street-level institutions unlocks several pressing questions at the heart of the existence and sustainability of music scenes. straw’s foundational bourdieusian definition of a musical scene as “that cultural space in which a range of musical practices coexist, interacting with each other within a variety of processes of differentiation, and according to widely varying trajectories of change and cross-fertilization” helps this article pose some questions (1991: 373). for instance: if there is indeed an edm scene, or many scenes within montreal, does it have everything it needs to remain one? does it have the places where people talk about music? does it have the places for live music? does it have the necessary forms of support? or is it operating in a big deficit vis-à-vis all of these things? how many scene actors can be supported? is there an overabundance of labour supply? this set of questions guides the next section as it delves into the history of nva, its relationship to the broader dynamics of electronic dance music culture (henceforth edmc) in montreal, and in relation to what is needed in order to maintain more sustainable local edm scenes. dancecult 13(1)60 neoliberalism, montreal and nva the sustained impulse within edm and popular music discourses to celebrate music scenes for their heroic do-it-yourself (diy) ethos of music-making is steadily giving way to broader neoliberal understandings of music cultures and the material conditions of scene actors. this is especially the case since edm advanced as a global phenomenon and since various modes of diy culture became ubiquitous features of the music industry. with respect to the first point, scholarly studies such as sarah thornton’s 1995 club cultures and tim lawrence’s 2004 love saves the day have detailed the way edm scenes have developed through a recursive opposition to the mainstream, whether real or imaginary, as a locus to draw their affective power, bodily politics, and “subcultural capital”, and as subaltern sites of urban resistance, pleasure, and utopianism. dance music scenes have defined and valorized themselves internally through their commitments to an underground ideology. this includes an ambivalent anti-corporate rhetoric that has intensified since the birth of rave culture, in part due to democratic narratives of dancefloors, music production and music distribution. and as david hesmondhalgh tells us, these scenes have been structured by a “very great degree of segregation between white dance music culture and black music institutions (sound systems, shabeens and blues parties)” (1997: 175–76). this was true before and after the golden age of raves (1988–90), despite widespread and often celebratory reports to the contrary. more recently, research has addressed the various ways edmc articulates social distinctions through attention to gender and power dynamics (farrugia 2012: 17–34; madden 2012: 36–9), its devotion to subtle temporal changes to bpms, what steve goodman (2004) refers to as “speed tribes”, and through its adherence to particular approaches to performance and instrumentation (butler 2014: 25–64). the turn to neoliberalism to frame studies of edm stems in large part from the everincreasing economic insecurities, unstable labour conditions and larger market forces directing djs, producers and other scene actors to embrace flexibility and innovation—both of which are key features of neoliberal capitalism—while building and maintaining their careers through self-entrepreneurship. for many djs and producers, as i have detailed this regularly entails adopting a variety of both creative and entrepreneurial roles, from social media manager, booking agent and promoter to designer, mentor and performer (madden 2016: 40). a combination of all these roles constitutes the requisite skill set for potentially developing a successful local or international professional career. where access to social assistance programs is limited, flexibility and innovation can involve reconsidering the styles of music one performs in order to remain in contact with the rapidly shifting cycles of edm, continuously investing in new music-making techniques and instruments, taking on different kinds of gigs (e.g. corporate events and parties), as well as different forms of non-musical work. according to robin james, a spirit of hyper competitiveness, with its emphasis on individual correctives to overcome crises and structural injustices, is framed by the discourse of resilience, which is a distinct aesthetic and ethical feature of neoliberal capitalism. for james, resilience forms “the new means of production” in that “crisis and madden | covid nights: crisis and street-level institutions in montreal and beyond 61 trauma are actually necessary, desirable phenomena—you can’t bounce back without first falling” (2015: 4). perhaps resilience has become the perfect neoliberal affect of our times, displaced from its original context as an empowering resource for survival to an emotional one-size-fits-all remedy that justifies continued oppression, violence, risk and uncertainty.4 neoliberalism is the political economic turn since the 1970s. as david harvey writes, “human well-being can best be advanced by the maximization of entrepreneurial freedoms within an institutional framework characterized by private property rights, individual liberty, unencumbered markets, and free trade” (2007: 22). harvey posits that “the role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices” (2007: 22). scholarship in this area is emerging across a variety of cultural production and musical contexts. it addresses the ever-creeping emphasis on entrepreneurial training and pedagogies in the world of classical music since the economic crash of 2008 (moore 2016: 38); how the idealization in the artistic and creative industries of the entrepreneurial artist mirrors neoliberal priorities like privatization, free trade and devaluation of social services (harvie 2013: 62–6; win 2014: 3); and women edm djs who face disproportionate obstacles when it comes to making a living because of the impacts of neoliberalism (gavanas and reitsamer 2016: 3). the material changes brought on by neoliberal capitalism play out in specific ways in the circuits of edm in montreal and in relation to the operational conditions of street-level institutions. in part, this is due to specific contextual conditions that contribute to the city’s and province’s distinctness in terms of its music scenes and cultural sector. in quebec, there is a strong tradition of public support for the arts. the federal and provincial governments provide funding for various aspects of the music industries, making it an anomalous north american marketplace. the city of montreal provides certain programs for the arts as well. many montreal edm artists and prominent cultural institutions, such as the pop montreal international music festival and mutek (an annual festival dedicated to digital creativity and electronic music), rely on public funding from all levels of government for their survival.5 these non-profits could not operate from year-to-year without this support which primarily comes in the form of grants, employment partnerships and tax benefits. montreal maintains a substantial labour supply for the creative industries. as stolarick and florida describe, in the early 2000s the city emerged second in north america in terms of the percentage of people operating in the “super-creative core” which includes: “computers, mathematics, architecture, engineering, life sciences, physical sciences, social sciences, education, training, library, arts, design entertainment, and media” (2006: 1802). furthermore, the province is distinct in terms of its position vis-à-vis the global music industry. since the international industry’s collapse in the late 1970s resulted in the majors and their canadian affiliates severing ties to quebec and canadian content, there has been an intensified move to local, independent music-making. a void was promptly filled by quebec, or québécois, independent labels, which by 1986 controlled close to 85 per cent dancecult 13(1)62 of popular music production (grenier 1993: 211). more recent figures suggest that this number currently sits closer to 95 per cent. it is within this context of a predominantly independent local music-making culture that in 2015 nva—a 12 000 square feet gallery, music production, and creative space in the mile ex neighbourhood of montreal—opened its doors. it acts as a central intermediary between local edm artists, lgbtq+ communities and the broader circuits of national and international dance music. the organization does this by producing a range of activities: on and offsite edm events and parties, workshops and skill sharing engagements, public talks. it publishes a monthly online magazine that features both local and international talent. the space even houses nearly 10 000 vinyl records that were collected between 1985 and 2005 by a dj named jean-michel cauvin, a.k.a. nivoc. nivoc was a resident of montreal’s most well-known afterhours club, sona, which was started by the aforementioned dj/ producer tiga and remained open from 1996 until 2004. the “about” section of their website describes how, through these activities and more, nva’s mission is “to educate on equality, the environment and conscious living, while celebrating both established and emerging artists. the platform is geared towards igniting positive change and unity through culture”. their events have brought many popular and up-and-coming international edm artists in contact with montreal’s scenes, have partnered with other local organizations such as the abovementioned pop montreal and mutek, and have entertained corporate partners including red bull music academy. nva’s creative, educational and community engagement programs are primarily steered by a three-person committee of full-time directors: its founder, executive director and curatorial, communications coordinator. their yearly operating budget almost entirely comes from an endowment provided by their founder, a software tech entrepreneur, with additional funding provided through local and provincial governmental grants, as well as intermittent contributions by their events partners, both corporate and non-profit. the curatorial, communications coordinator position was formerly established as a music directorship when nva opened in 2015, with responsibilities including guiding, managing, and curating its edm-centred music programming and partnerships. however, as the organization was forced to halt and then move away from their dance music and educational events due to the pandemic, a new more expansive curatorial role was created in january 2021, with the previous music director leaving her post. the former music director is also a dj and producer under the moniker softcoresoft, and like many working within local music scenes, has permanently stopped her musical activities as a source of generating primary or even tertiary income because of the pandemic. the new curatorial position is mainly charged with developing the organization’s current and future cultural programing, which as it stands, is heavily geared towards online talks, gallery exhibitions, and tours of the space. for instance, their february 2021 online magazine and exhibitions were dedicated to celebrating “black heritage month”, with very little attention devoted to their usual musically-oriented focus. madden | covid nights: crisis and street-level institutions in montreal and beyond 63 while there are no specific plans for returning to pre-pandemic edm programming, it is important to point out that much like other street-level institutions inand outside montreal, nva has encountered many operational challenges in its history. even before the pandemic, it was confronted by the city’s highly contested nighttime sensory politics and their enforcement. some of montreal’s most vital cultural institutions and small music venues, such as the well-known société des arts technologiques (sat) and the smaller divan orange, have faced severe fines for noise violations. the latter was eventually forced to close in 2018 after thirteen years in operation and more than 10,000 shows (kelly 2015). more recently, bar le ritz, a small music venue also in mile ex that opened in 2008, started receiving fines when the neighbourhood was rezoned from commercial to residential in 2017. the venue’s owners even contested these violations in court proceedings during the pandemic (karwacki 2020). it is also important to note that fines for noise violations have steadily increased throughout the years, as grenier and lussier stress in their 2013 study of small music venues in montreal. as previously mentioned, nva’s brick-and-mortar space was opened in 2015 in the progressively gentrifying area known as mile-ex, which is just to the north of the mile end neighourhood and to the west of little italy. like many urban centres facing intense gentrification, it is now perhaps best known for condominiums and the many cultural workers inhabiting the area, as well as a high-density retail, restaurant, bar and café culture. the american fashion magazine vogue took notice of the neighourhood, once calling it “the most interesting area in town” (burshtein 2016). for the first couple of years of its existence, nva produced many regular monthly edm-focused events and parties onsite, in part, to take advantage of the centre’s indoor-outdoor construction and its many amenities, including a salt-water pool, multiple sound systems, and a private, enclosed terrace. these events often showcased a mix of local and international djs and producers, with a particular focus on lgbtq+ scenes. as condominium construction and the number of residential dwellings expanded in the area, nva received a rising number of noise complaints and encounters with the police, and, as a result, the non-profit halted all onsite parties, thereby putting an end to this vital event space and resource for both up-and-coming and established lgbtq+ musicians and creatives. the organization continued programming events at offsite locations; however, this forced them to find new locations, which often come with heavy rental and security fees, and develop relationships with collaborators— property owners, event and service industry staff—for every event. it also led to a drastic cutting in the number of events it produced from year-to-year. this is a common situation for promotors and edm organizers; it is difficult to find reliable spaces that can be used on a regular basis within the circuits of downtown neighbourhoods, thereby limiting the ability of small-scale institutions to build and contribute to local cultural scenes. much like other cultural non-profits, nva is limited financially in the ways it can support edm artists and freelancers who contribute to its monthly online magazine. the centre’s foundational budget is mostly allocated to operational costs and full-time salaried employees. this includes the executive director and the curatorial communications coordinator, an dancecult 13(1)64 operations manager, an administrative manager, a graphic/web designer, videographers and so on. the non-profit only supports artists and cultural workers on a project-to-project or per-gig basis, rather than with a more long-term and sustainable approach. on the one hand, the organization is similar to record and management companies that employ staff on a fullor part-time basis while delivering intermittent small percentages and payments to the artists with whom they work. on the other hand, it is important to point out that nva’s defining terms of success are not fully centred on particular economic relationships with the cultural industries and the people who produce those industries. as a non-profit and community-oriented project, and while acknowledging these as complex and contested notions all their own, the centre is attempting to establish longlasting commitments to montreal and the many lgbtq+ scenes and spaces it comes in contact with, represents and is a part of. in this way, it is unlike many record companies and management firms. the organization does not define its success in terms of the market and sales metrics or in terms of its connectivity to the global music industry. it operates under entirely different valuations of culture and music as more than economic and popular, as vital textures forming local lifeworlds and scenes. nva focuses on developing sustainable local relationships with people and institutions and local manifestations of culture instead of suturing itself to the international corporate music industry and its circuits. this places nva in line with other local institutions like community and campus radio stations. it also aligns nva with the musical activities of church life, where music is an opportunity for learning, spiritual enrichment and resistance, as although these sites are not typically visible within musical scenes and edmc frameworks. conclusion while certainly not an exhaustive study of street-level dynamics as they relate to the broader circuits of montreal’s edm scenes, this analysis brings into focus some of the important tensions that local scene-building and scene-sustaining institutions face in the current musical and cultural economy. these tensions have been amplified to such an extent during the pandemic that the future of some important institutions is now called into question. in montreal, like in many cities, street-level institutions faced pressures from residential neighbours and authorities before the pandemic as a consequence of municipal policy measures, urban renewal projects and increasing gentrification. these sought to snuff out a broad range of sensory expressions that are emblematic of nighttime urban vitality, from bright lights to food smells to dance music sounds. in addition to $400 million in provincial funding for the arts in the 2020–21 fiscal year, an anomaly in the context of north america, the city of montreal and the provincial government of quebec have put forth detailed plans for financial assistance programs for certain kinds of cultural venues and promoters totaling $50 million (kelly 2020). nonetheless, the economic fallout and effects of this crisis will linger for many years to come. there are signs of this already, such as the sheer number of venues that have closed and the many workers permanently moving away from the cultural sector. music venues play a vital role in local music scenes in that they provide meeting points, circulation, and space for a range of cultural activities, and in their madden | covid nights: crisis and street-level institutions in montreal and beyond 65 commitments to diversifying the terms and measures of success for long-lasting cultural scenes. these institutions create circulatory networks, whether human or otherwise, for people and musical practices. for these reasons and many more, street-level institutions— including local shops, bars and clubs—merit more attention in studies of edm and in studies of music scenes more generally. the move to maintaining sustainable post-pandemic edm scenes in montreal and beyond requires local governments and stakeholders—musicians, cultural workers, activists, etc.—to actively develop an imagined future that includes street-level spaces as necessary and vital parts of cultural and economic life. in the face of neoliberal capitalism (hall 2011: 10–1), it also necessitates that the cultural left and the political left create more linkages of solidarity by way of advancing initiatives like universal basic income and supporting a broader range of inclusive social programs. in the united states, for instance, this might entail collective grassroots support of medicare for all and increasing minimum wage. for musical workers in edm scenes, namely djs and producers, turning away from exploitative relationships with global corporate platforms like apple music and spotify in favor of more locally-oriented and viable initiatives such as bandcamp is a necessary first-step in transitioning to a more equitable musical economy.6 under such a model, the revenue generated through sales primarily goes to the musicians and producers rather than the intermediaries. taken together, these are not the remedies for all systemic ills, to be sure. yet they do provide scalable templates and models for imagining a healthier future for musical scenes and the cultural vitality of cities. acknowledgements the author would like to thank everyone at dancecult, graham st john and the reviewers for such timely and generous feedback. notes 1 on the first night, 84 tickets were given out for curfew infractions, many in the range of $1550 cad (saba 2021). 2 the original text in french is as follows: “cependant, la culture de la nuit a été largement oubliée dans les initiatives « nouvel urbaniste » de l’été pandémique de montréal, où les journées étaient lumineuses, animées et pleines de monde, mais rapidement devenue calme et vide avec l’arrivée de la nuit”. 3 the original text in french is as follows: “la culture en ligne, quand il s’agissait de genres et de formes que nous associons à la nuit (comme la musique électronique) a rompu le lien intime entre l’expression culturelle nocturne et d’autres caractéristiques de la nuit”. 4 see katz, who posits that resilience, which is defined as “the individual or systematic ability to cope with, adapt to or bounce back from adversity”, was initially a revelatory concept in ecology and in childhood studies, in particular (2020: 53). dancecult 13(1)66 5 the pop montreal international music festival has been running annually in montreal since 2002 and was initially created by daniel seligman, noelle sorbara and peter rowan. 6 on the commercial viability of bandcamp, see for instance, kieran devlin’s “the rise and rise of bandcamp”. references beaumont-thomas, ben. 2020. “third of british musicians may quit industry amid pandemic”. the guardian, 22 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https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.0.0054 https://www.franceculture.fr/societe/will-straw-repondre-a-la-devastation-de-la-vie-nocturne-causee-par-la-pandemie-de-covid-19 https://www.franceculture.fr/societe/will-straw-repondre-a-la-devastation-de-la-vie-nocturne-causee-par-la-pandemie-de-covid-19 https://doi.org/10.1068/a3874 https://www.ubiworks.ca/ https://doi.org/10.1111/awr.12026 http://www.discogs.com/tiga-zyntheriussunglasses-ep/release/18500 brian eno: oblique music sean albiez and david pattie (eds.) new york: bloomsbury, 2016. isbn: 978-1-4411-1745-8 (hardcover), 978-1-4411-2912-3 (paperback), 978-1-4411-5534-4 (pdf e-book), 978-1-4411-4806-3 (epub e-book) rrp: us$100.00 (hardcover), us$29.95 (paperback), us$25.99 (pdf e-book), us$25.99 (epub e-book) ed montano rmit university (australia) the influence and impact of brian eno ripples across various music genres. while widely known as a producer of a selection of the world’s most successful rock bands, electronic dance music has connections to some of eno’s most important and influential work, perhaps most notably in the ambient genre. furthermore, some of eno’s most innovative work with u2 coincided with the band’s explorations of dance music rhythms, electronic sounds and remixing, while eno’s more recent output has involved collaborations with underworld’s karl hyde. eno’s presence looms large over edm. and yet, of course, his work draws on and crosses over into much more, and as this rich, engaging and thought-provoking collection from sean albiez and david pattie demonstrates, the man and the myth of eno provide fertile topics for critical and analytical discussion. while eno has also contributed his talents to other media fields such as sound design, art installations, software design and writing, this book focuses on his work as a musician, and the many collaborations and productions this has involved. albiez and pattie have gathered together a collection of insightful and stimulating chapters from an international selection of scholars. while they cover a broad array of topics and moments from eno’s long career, there are a handful of key themes and issues that re-appear throughout and neatly tie the collection together. while the authors clearly demonstrate the importance of eno’s work, they do so by situating it in relevant social and cultural contexts and acknowledging the contributions of the other musicians eno has constantly surrounded himself with. at the core of the book and its explorations sits eno, but this is countered by the acknowledgement that eno himself doesn’t sit at the core of his projects. rather, as pattie and albiez note in the introduction, eno is “somewhere in the system as part of the ecology of the recording, but not its focal point” (2). the chapters explore the various processes, systems, technologies and theories that have shaped eno’s solo and collaborative projects, in which eno is positioned as “a key part of the creative structure, but not necessarily its centre” (7). the book is divided into two sections. part one explores “eno: composer, musician and theorist”, while part two considers “the university of eno: production and collaborations”. both provide an abundance of fresh interpretations of eno’s work. notably, even with eno’s public profile as a producer being arguably greater than his profile as a composer (even if that production work simultaneously involves composition), the book’s second half manages to present some familiar histories in new light. in part one, the first of two chapters from david pattie introduces us to some of eno’s background and influences, framed in a discussion of his role in roxy music in the early 1970s. pattie explores the tensions that surfaced between eno and singer bryan ferry, and situates the band’s pioneering work as emerging from the british art-school system that encouraged the experimental tendencies of many key popular music figures from the 1960s. eno’s production work on ferry’s compositions helped to position him as a key figure in the popular music landscape in the 1970s, and even if his time in the band was only brief, pattie demonstrates how eno was beginning to formulate some of the key principles that have continually informed his work since. as pattie concludes, the creative relationship between ferry and eno fractured due to their distinct approaches to composition, with ferry “drawn towards the shaping of a musical object”, while eno “preferred to explore systems and processes” (26–7). cecilia sun’s chapter explores some less familiar territory through a consideration of eno’s experimental work in the 1970s with the portsmouth sinfonia and the scratch orchestra. eno, of course, is well-known for acknowledging his lack of formal musical education and defining himself as a “non-musician”, and sun discusses how eno harnessed this “non-musicianship” to engage in experimentation and explore new approaches to music creation. while eno may ultimately have shifted his attention away from the more radical avant-garde, he was able to incorporate his experimental experiences into creative processes that challenged traditional conceptions of music creation, and, as sun notes, in doing so he identified technology as “the greatest compositional tool for a non-musician” (46). patties’s second chapter traces eno’s progression in the 1970s from the glam sound guru of roxy music to a popular music polymath with an intellectual orientation embraced by music journalists of the time. pattie focuses on eno’s early solo material to sketch out more of the processes that have since underpinned eno’s innovations and inventions—“the period in which all the main components of what we might call the eno myth came together for the first time” (50). the following chapter from chris atton furthers this portrayal of eno the intellectual, with an analysis of media representations of eno from the british weekly music press of the late 1970s and early 1980s. as well as demonstrating eno’s approach to framing his work in interviews, atton makes some broader observations about how the music press shapes and influences audiences. for atton (and indeed most of the other authors in this collection), eno’s work sits somewhere between the avant-garde and the popular, in the process stimulating debates about authenticity and originality. perhaps of most interest to scholars of edm will be mark achtermann’s chapter on eno’s ambient music, specifically the ambient four-album series released between 1978 and 1982. achtermann develops this into a broader discussion of the purposes and uses of art, drawing on the work and arguments of writers j. r. r. tolkien and r. g. collingwood. while on occasions this makes for a somewhat dense philosophical journey through fairy storytelling, achtermann arguably delivers one of the collection’s most unique and engaging chapters, locating some of eno’s most influential work in a broader context of aesthetic purpose. achtermann uses eno’s ambient output to consider how one defines such music, and the extent to which it can be considered as actual music, concluding that eno’s work, while presented as art, also calls into question the nature of art, encouraging listeners to “reappraise their understanding of music and the uses of music” (103). the first section is rounded out by a chapter from edm scholar hillegonda c. rietveld, who extends the discussion of eno’s ambient music with a focus on his soundtrack work and a close analysis of the 2009 film the lovely bones, and a chapter by sean albiez on eno’s use of the voice (both his own and that of others) in solo and collaborative work between 1991 and 2014. albiez considers the way eno has used various technologies and production techniques to challenge traditional conceptions of the role of the voice and words in songs, arguing that this evidences a “post-humanist stance that . . . raises issues concerning the liminality of identity, and the slipperiness of technologically mediated subjectivity in the contemporary period” (119). part two begins with an expansive co-written piece by sean albiez and ruth dockwray that provides a fascinating exploration of the historical precedents and broader cultural contexts that connect to eno’s 1979 lecture “the recording studio as compositional tool”. as well as tracing a journey through eno’s education in the 1960s and his time in new york in the late 1970s and early 1980s, albiez and dockwray unpack the lecture’s main themes, and then link these back to the work of seminal composers who came before eno such as john cage, erik satie and pierre schaeffer. in doing so they position eno’s lecture and theories not as breaking new intellectual ground, but rather as breaking down boundaries between different musical worlds, with eno acting “as a conduit for these ideas to enter discourses around studio production in popular music” (168). no discussion of eno is complete without a consideration of his oblique strategies cards, developed by eno and peter schmidt in 1975 as a way to generate creativity in the studio through presenting collaborators with various cryptic messages. kingsley marshall and rupert loydell contribute an engaging chapter that takes one particular card strategy as the theme and focus for each of its sections. within these they explore how eno has articulated and responded to the strategy through his many collaborations. this provides a rich exploration of eno’s working practices throughout the years, set against the authors’ questioning of collaborative practice in the digital age when they ask “is there value in returning to limited systems (such as oblique strategies) that deny creators opportunities, somehow allowing them to realize something different?” (176). the book’s final four chapters focus on specific production collaborations in eno’s career. elizabeth ann lindau provides a comprehensive overview of eno’s work with david byrne of talking heads on the album my life in the bush of ghosts from 1981, a work that fused african rhythms, sampled vocals, loops and more. released a few years before sampling came to dominate popular music and the rise of “world music” as a marketing category, eno and byrne’s project can be seen as a pioneering forerunner of more commercially successful releases such as paul simon’s graceland. while acknowledging the criticism that has been levelled at western artists appropriating/exploiting non-western sounds, lindau argues that ultimately eno and byrne’s album stands as an example of “ethnographic surrealism” (206). a book on eno with no discussion of u2 would arguably be missing something. yet the abundance of written material on the band makes it difficult to present anything new. as such, noel mclaughlin deserves credit for tackling an obvious topic and providing some fresh insight on the band’s work with eno, framing his discussion around the issue of nationality, playing u2’s irish background against eno’s english heritage and uncovering how each has influenced the other. mclaughlin provides a valuable assessment of some of eno’s most commercially successful work, at the same time taking to task and building a solid argument against those critics who have dismissed u2 and subsequently eno for choosing to work with such a commercially-focused act. while oblique music does a fine job of mapping and reinforcing the significance of eno’s work and practices, two of the most intriguing chapters are those from jonathan stewart and martin james, both of whom challenge the eno myth through case studies that problematize as much as they praise eno’s approaches to collaboration. stewart presents a fascinating account of eno’s production of devo’s 1978 debut album. while still delivering a discussion that argues for the importance of eno’s work, stewart draws on interview material to unpack some of the tensions and “irreparable methodological differences” (211) that ran through the album’s production. as well as providing a comprehensive analysis of the album’s tracks, the project background sketched by stewart demonstrates that, while band and producer may have shared an appreciation of synthesizer technology and the avant-garde, conflict arose in other areas, such as the band’s refusal to engage with eno’s oblique strategies cards, devo’s jerry casale describing how the band’s response “was pretty disrespectful . . . we were good at spinning off humorous smart ass quips and he didn’t appreciate it” (217). in the book’s final chapter, martin james considers eno’s role as “urban ethnographer” through exploring his work in documenting the no wave new york music scene of the late 1970s, resulting in the no new york compilation. sketching the city’s vibrant art scene that eno landed in upon arriving in 1978, james details the events leading up to eno’s engagement with the no wave movement made up of bands that “each applied avant-garde tendencies to eclectic pop frameworks” (262). we learn that eno’s approach of selecting just four bands to record for his compilation was just one of several issues that generated tensions between eno and some of the artists involved in the scene. in contrast to his other work, james explains how eno’s no wave production displayed “little evidence of . . . using the ‘recording studio as a compositional tool’ with the majority of the recordings having no separation between instruments and no overdubs” (264), and instead james suggests eno’s aims were to use the studio as “an ethnographic tool” (265, original italics). yet, as james argues, despite eno’s efforts in bringing this music to wider public attention, his approach was miscalculated. with some of the artists criticising eno’s production techniques, and james describing how eno’s celebrity served to exaggerate his importance in the scene, the project is presented as somewhat flawed. james’ chapter thus captures how not all of eno’s projects can be framed as success stories. this much needed book explores the many trajectories of eno’s varied career, and it will engage and excite any music lover, regardless of your opinion of eno’s work. it’s a richly rewarding collection that deftly explores and unpacks the work of one of popular music’s pioneering figures. while much has been written on eno, and no doubt will continue to be written, oblique music does an outstanding job of critically capturing both the well-known and less familiar elements of eno’s work. beyond the specifics of this work, the book provides some thought-provoking material on broader issues such as collaboration, composition, creativity, experimentation, musicianship, technology and more, and as such will stimulate the interest of anyone engaged in music creation and production. this is a book that you will return to time and again—like eno’s best work, its rewards make themselves most evident after repeated visits. bring the break-beat back! authenticity and the politics of rhythm in drum ‘n’ bass dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 12(1): 3–21 issn 1947-5403 ©2020 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.08 bring the break-beat back! authenticity and the politics of rhythm in drum ‘n’ bass chris christodoulou university of westminster (uk) abstract this article focuses on the critical divergences between rhythm and repetition in contemporary drum ‘n’ bass music in three key ways. first, it shows how the characteristic “chopping” and acceleration of sampled break-beats emphasises continuity with the past, thereby placing the genre in a continuum of black atlantic cultural practice that articulates historical recuperation as a political priority, while signifying the discontinuity of time in an accelerated culture. secondly, it addresses the persistent use of live break-beats as an impulse within the genre to emphasise competing discourses of authenticity in the context of black atlantic cultural memory. thirdly, having examined the embodied performativity valorised in the sampling of live break-beats, the article shows how the critical valuation of rhythmic characteristics can function as a catalyst of genre mutation and sub-genre development in drum ‘n’ bass and other electronic dance music genres. keywords: authenticity; black atlantic; break-beat; drum ‘n’ bass; jungle dr. chris christodoulou is the course leader of ba contemporary media practice at the university of westminster. his research is concerned with the impact of accelerated culture on global youth scenes and subcultures, especially in the context of electronic dance music. he completed his phd thesis, renegade hardware: speed, technology and cultural practice in drum ‘n’ bass music, in 2009. he is also interested in contemporary fan communities based on the collecting of obsolete and residual electronic media. email: <christc@westminster.ac.uk>. feature article mailto:christc@westminster.ac.uk dancecult 12(1)4 since the formation of the linked genres of jungle and drum ‘n’ bass from within london’s inner-city regions during the early-1990s, the break-beat has been the focus of critical discussion amongst participants about the cultural value of rhythm in the genre. in particular, it is often argued that the aesthetic and cultural priorities signified by break-beats strongly contrast with the relatively simplified beat structures of most other forms of contemporary electronic dance music (edm). for example, ben murphy of dj mag argues that “breakbeat music in all forms is becoming ever more viable for those bored of straight house and techno four-fours, and jungle is its most expressive variant” (2018). this emphasis placed on accelerated break-beats—brief rhythmic segments characterised by speed and rupture, musically translated into feelings of “funkiness”—points, on the one hand, to the genre’s development out of a condition of rapid technological change in a post-industrial society. on the other hand, it points to the dynamic cultural matrix to which paul gilroy refers to in the title of his 1993 book as the black atlantic (1993). thereby, i want to examine the role of the break-beat in authenticating discourses of membership in drum ‘n’ bass culture, significantly based on the ability to derive pleasure from funkiness as an aesthetic experience and knowledge of the origin of the most widely-used “breaks” on african-american soul and funk records from the 1960s and 1970s, particularly for djs, producers and music collectors. such discourses are entwined with the perceived interconnectedness of drum ‘n’ bass—as digitally-driven and largely metropolitan contemporary dance music—to a wider continuum of black atlantic culture. the sense in which the post-industrial city is experienced as an unstable and fast-changing milieu is especially articulated in the creative practice of “choppage”, a term used by drum ‘n’ bass participants to convey the intricate process of building and combining multiple break-beat patterns on a single recording. and this sense is also inscribed in the name of one of london’s most well-known dance clubs that foregrounds break-beat-oriented jungle and drum ‘n’ bass: rupture. while break-beats continue to be a prominent feature of the genre as a whole, the most mainstream drum ‘n’ bass music tends to displace breaks in favour of relatively simplified “two-step” beat structures that are more typical of styles outside the immediate influence of black atlantic music.11 for example, hot right now, by dj fresh featuring rita ora, and the remix by drum ‘n’ bass production duo sigma of us rap artist kanye west’s nobody to love, foreground the familiar characteristics of pop music production.22 following hennion, both display a carefully balanced link between “lyrics, the music and the singer” and rhythmic patterns comprised of a dominant kick drum on the first and third beat of each bar (1983: 164). for schloss, break-beats articulate “an african-american compositional aesthetic” that balances “cyclic motion, repetition and variation, and ‘groove’” (2002: 33). the beats on hot right now and nobody to love feature a diminished emphasis on groove, variation and cyclic repetition, in favour of sparse and repetitive drum hits that provide space for the inclusion of lyrics, even though most drum ‘n’ bass tracks are instrumental. thereby, they develop a sense of narrative functionality that is further accompanied by a prominent melodic structure typical of contemporary chart-oriented pop. as such, twostep rhythms are often vilified by some drum ‘n’ bass participants as deviating from the christodoulou | bring the break-beat back! 5 genre’s supposed funky priorities, as demonstrated by the title “all you 2 step bastards leave our planet”, a 2001 track by paradox. these examples show how gilroy’s view that musical forms which foreground “processes of cultural mutation and restless (dis)continuity” can be used to illustrate how musical rhythm resists and participates in hegemonic cultural and ethnocentric discourses in post-industrial society. in this way, this rhythmically inscribed divergence in drum ‘n’ bass illustrates the cultural implications of, as middleton suggests, “questions of like and dislike, boredom and excitement, tension and relaxation—in short, the dialectics of musical repetition” (2006: 15). rhythm as rupture the development of jungle and drum ‘n’ bass corresponded with the growing economic and technological accessibility of computer-based digital audio workstations (daws) such as steinberg’s cubase and c-lab’s creator, a forerunner of the industry-standard logic pro. in this sense, the “restless” rhythms integral to the history of black atlantic music (gilroy 1993: 2) intermingle with the highly complex levels of rhythmic reconstruction enabled by digital technology. the foregrounding of breaks as a primary feature of the genre articulates rupture as a key experience of a high-tech, accelerated culture, while affirming brokenness as an african diasporic aesthetic response to feelings of cultural disconnectedness shaped by specific experiences of class and ethnicity. to use gilroy’s terminology, it articulates the “processes of cultural mutation and restless (dis)continuity that exceed racial discourse and avoid capture by its agents” (1993: 2). while break-beats cohere with gilroy’s account of mutational cultural processes in black atlantic music, suspicion of drum ‘n’ bass is based on its strongly multi-ethnic and working-class origins, as well as its foregrounding of digitally sampled and accelerated (time-stretched) rhythms. as kodwo eshun argued at the time of the genre’s emergence, “jungle is the one music everyone agrees is no good”, while “the very fact that questions of race and class come up over and over indicates unease with the music’s following, who they are and what (its participants are) up to” (1994: 43-44). the “relentless four quarter beat” (rietveld 1998: 148) that is a key feature of the most globally popular edm styles such as house and techno, is often produced using analogue drum machines like the roland tr-808. in contrast, the break-beats more widely employed in drum ‘n’ bass are brief, syncopated rhythms that have been sampled from 1960s and 1970s soul and funk records.33 since the early-1980s, digital samplers have been used to repeat—or “loop”—break-beats into extended sequences, while a number of largely new york-based djs released unlicensed compilations containing rare and sought-after breakbeat loops specifically for use by producers of the nascent style that would become known as “hip-hop”. waugh distinguishes 4/4 beats from break-beats in the following way: all dance music is in 4/4 time which means it has four beats to the bar. if you count the beats you’d count 1-2-3-4… those are the main beats, the ones you groove to . . . a break-beat is simply a rhythm which is not in the four-to-the-floor mould. break-beats are often more rhythmically complex and there are opportunities to create unique, exciting and individual patterns (2000: 6). dancecult 12(1)6 even though break-beats foreground rhythm and syncopation over evenly divided beats, they nevertheless adhere to an overall 4/4 beat pattern. thereby, it remains in “4/4 time”. in examining the importance of rhythmic characteristics for audiences of different edm styles, butler argues that syncopated funk patterns differ from the metronomic beat structures of house and techno by offering specific potential for expressive movement by dancers (2006: 81-9). this potential is often framed in terms of funkiness; a quality defined by danielsen as appearing “when a layer of potential cross-rhythm is used to create small stretches in time that fall between a dominant basic pulse” (2006: 71). meanwhile, “funk” is both an africanamerican musical genre and us slang for “bad smell”, signifying sweat and bodily excess. in other words, the funkiness which danielsen identifies as synonymous with syncopation develops when strong off-beats appear in between the main four quarter beats (2006: 71). whereas house and techno tracks largely emphasise the main beat through regular bass or kick drums—thereby inducing what rietveld describes as “a sense of trance-like bliss” (1998: 148)—break-beats pull at the listener’s sense of time by suggesting the development of new rhythmic lines. for butler, “break-beat rhythms tend to de-emphasize strong beats, instead placing considerable stress on metrically weak locations” and highlighting “irregularity” as a key characteristic (2006: 78-9). as such, the listener’s search for a “basic pulse” or a strong beat generates brief feelings of tension that are temporarily relieved as she learns to anticipate the off-beats through the break-beat’s repetition at even points in time. during the late-1980s, house and techno achieved considerable popularity with british audiences at dance club venues like the hacienda in manchester and shoom in london, and at large illegal rave parties held in disused warehouses and fields along the orbital route of the m25 (rietveld 1998). at such events, early drum ‘n’ bass djs like fabio and grooverider often mixed house and techno tracks with the same beat patterns that africanamerican hip-hop djs and producers had been using to produce “rhythmic complexity, repetition with subtle variations” and “rhythmic tension over stated or implied meter” (rose 1994: 67).44 for rose, such effects provide “important clues in explaining sources of pleasure in black musics” (1994: 67). similarly, middleton argues that while “almost all popular songs, to a greater or lesser extent, fall under the power of repetition”, african diasporic approaches to rhythm are typically inscribed in structures which are “shorter and more insistently repeated” than in the “discursive” approach of the “european art tradition” involving “the repetition of longer units” (2006: 17). by the early-1990s, a significant proportion of british edm tracks entirely replaced 4/4 kick and bass drum patterns with sampled break-beats, whose relative speed prompted the use of the appellation “hardcore”. break-beat-based hardcore records were bought in considerable numbers by both rave audiences and the wider record-buying public in the uk and, as a result, were strongly represented in the national pop charts. however, this combined use of breaks with 4/4 beats polarised rave audiences in the uk. those in the north of england and scotland generally preferred the similarly fast, yet bouncier 4/4 rhythms of “happy hardcore”, while those in the midlands and the south were more drawn to the accelerated funk, soul and hip-hop grooves of “break-beat hardcore”. the preference shown christodoulou | bring the break-beat back! 7 by such audiences for the funkiness of break-beats points to the workings of environmental habituation, where the musical tastes of audiences living and growing up in such regions have been modulated by exposure to african-american music where break-beats feature widely. hargreaves and north have examined how the “effects of familiarity on preference seem to occur whether caused explicitly through deliberate repeated presentations of particular songs, or more implicitly through gradual acculturation to musical styles” (1997: 91-2). such acculturation can also involve the modulation of the arousal evoked by the social environment. according to konečni, music listeners are “engaged in a constant exchange with the social and non-social environment, of which the acoustic stimuli are a part” (1982: 501). in this context, the preferences for breaks amongst largely metropolitan and working-class rave audiences can be linked to a desire to create a musical framework of predictable cycles out of the unpredictability and complexity associated with urban, postindustrial living. funky hardcore “hardcore jungle”, “ragga techno” and “jungle techno” were among the most prominent names given to records made by the mainly london-based hardcore djs and producers, many of which included instrumental and vocal elements from jamaican dub, dancehall (ragga) and reggae. the tempos attained by the accelerated break-beats of hardcore tracks reached twice those of these jamaican-derived forms, thereby enabling the incorporation of powerful bass-lines running at around 80 bpm alongside the use of other idiosyncratic reggae sounds and samples, such as echoed guitar, powerful subsonic bass frequencies and jamaican patois toasting by mcs.55 and tracks like funky hardcore by qbass emphasised the same funk-derived break-beat samples used in us hip-hop production since the early1980s. the first record in the lineage referred to by reynolds as the “hardcore continuum” (2009) to feature the word “jungle” in its title was jungle techno by tottenham-based producer noise factory. each ibiza record featured the word “junglizm” on its inner sticker label. this gave the label a coherent sense of identity while also serving as a memorable term for audiences to categorise similar music that was being played at dance events like jungle book and jungle fever. by 1993, the tempos of most jungle tracks occupied a range of around 160 bpm, while the name “drum ‘n’ bass”—which had also emerged as an alternative name for jamaican dub in the 1970s (veal 2007: 185)—was adopted to describe records in which the drums and the bass were foregrounded as formal elements. although the terms continue to be used synonymously, “drum ‘n’ bass” has been preferred to “jungle” by some of the music’s practitioners due to the latter term’s ethnocentric connotations. the formal differences between drum ‘n’ bass and other edm forms like house and techno points to contrasting rhythmic priorities that converge around distinct forms of cultural practice. rose highlights how repetition enabled by the looping facility of digital samplers intensifies the inherent funkiness of the break-beat: dancecult 12(1)8 samplers allow rap musicians to expand on one of rap’s earliest and most central musical characteristics: the break-beat… these are points of rupture in their former contexts, points at which the thematic elements of a musical piece are suspended and the underlying rhythms are brought centre stage. in the early stages of rap, these break beats formed the core of rap djs’ mixing strategies . . . the effect is a precursor to the way today’s rappers use the “looping” capacity on digital samplers (1994: 73-74). as “points of rupture”, break-beats have a syncopated character which can serve as the starting point for the creation of a sense of rhythm out of unevenly divided or distributed beats. musicians and audiences commonly refer to this characteristic in terms of funkiness. as such, the looping of breaks at regular points generates a sense of a continually reinscribed difference. a pulling of the listener’s motor impulses occurs as the beats appear at initially unpredictable moments, before a resolution in time is achieved when the rhythm returns to the beginning. after persistent listening, the subject learns that this resolution is only temporary, and that it will once again give way to rhythms that are unpredictable. as chapman describes: unlike in hip-hop, where sampled breakbeat grooves are simply looped at a moderate tempo, drum and bass producers dissect and fragment breakbeats into their smallest components, reassemble them into intricate, asymmetrical patterns and then set them at a rapid tempo (2003: 3-4). it is notable in this regard that the term “funk” is also sometimes used in african american discourse as a synonym for “panic”. although she does not specifically mention the breakbeat, danielsen suggests that feelings of funkiness develop out of the rendering safe or knowable of rhythmic difference: rather than repeating a prefabricated figure, one repeats an internal difference. one makes up one part and answers with another in an eternal rhythmic dialogue. every time the answer is the same . . . a different answer would take the whole process off course, and the entire fabric of rhythm might fall apart (2006: 164). danielsen’s description of rhythm as an internal conversation is emphasised by the specific use of the looped break-beat in drum ‘n’ bass. the repetition of fragmented and recombined break-beats in the production of asymmetrical patterns (the chopping to which participants refer) prevents the “falling apart” of the rhythmic conversation. this institutes a dialogue in which the question and answer of the dialogue, to use danielsen’s terms, are simultaneously present. thereby, rhythmic difference is internalised as an inevitable process and a matter of course. in drum ‘n’ bass tracks where breaks are emphatically chopped, rupture seems to be deeply woven into the fabric of the track’s rhythmic structure. since their inception, jungle and drum ‘n’ bass have been maligned by participants of other edm genres on the basis of its appeal to a multi-ethnic and largely working-class demographic. it is in this sense that the widely-used tag of “dark” (as in “darkcore” or “dark jungle”) evokes two senses: a dystopian discursive framework linked to living and growing up in a socially and economically recessive urban environment; and the darkness of black christodoulou | bring the break-beat back! 9 people’s skin. in a white british context, the latter can subconsciously operate as a signifier for danger, subversion and criminality. this outlook permeates the foreboding ambience of early tracks like “valley of the shadows” by origin unknown, which places a female voice intoning “i felt that i was in this long dark tunnel” alongside a murmuring bass-line. in particular, critical reactions to the syncopated character of black atlantic music have been informed by racially charged media images of savage and frenetic drumming, thereby shaping the ways in which funk is defined in popular discourse. danielsen emphasises how the historical link between funk and the body, especially the black body, has been constructed by eurocentric discourse to articulate the corporeality of the human body as “the dirtiest of the dirty” and “as a euphemism for fuck in its sexual meaning” (2006: 3). in this context, “funkiness” is frequently used outside musical discourse as a synonym for body odour, uncultured or uncivilised behaviour and a vulgar compulsion to achieve carnal gratification. in a visual context, doane observes how anthropological photography in the earlytwentieth century “dictated the incessant visualisation of native eroticism”, instituting the “visibility of the dark continent to europeans”, and melding together anxiety and desire into the dominant image of the african dancing body (1991: 213). one example of this visually informed racial bias towards rhythms seeming to emanate from the “dark continent” can be found in a club listings section of i-d magazine: “(djs) colin faver and colin dale playing guaranteed-no-break-beats progressive electronics . . . at regular wednesday night knowledge” (collin 1992: 54). mainstream media narratives regarding the “darkness” of jungle and drum ‘n’ bass were, according to hesmondhalgh and melville, “racist responses to a music that was defiantly ‘black’, whose core market was obviously black, and whose structure reintroduced elements of black musical forms and practice” (2001: 99). in addition to the racism underpinning the reception of jungle and drum ‘n’ bass in popular culture, gilroy’s concept of the black atlantic can be used to elaborate on the dual articulation of race and class to which the development of the music can be seen as a cultural response. for gilroy, african diasporic cultural expressions draw on a multiplicity of black histories and politics. while a common experience of powerlessness experienced in white cultures is sufficient to secure a sense of affinity across the atlantic, a key feature of black atlantic cultural practices is openness to participation by others. the traditions of “improvisation, montage, and dramaturgy” are considered responses by black atlantic people to racism (gilroy 1993: 78). gilroy claims the specific regional and socio-economic contexts in which black and white young people live and grow up in britain has led to an emphasis on music as a means by which both ethnocentrism and class exploitation can be challenged. in this respect, the music’s speed is arguably the key galvanising experience for its white, working class participants. lockwood’s investigation into the phenomenology of class experience identified fatalism as a structuring trait in the working-class attitude to life. this suggests a tendency to live from day to day and in the here-and-now, while long-term planning is rejected in favour of “present-time orientation” (lockwood 1982: 363). an emphasis is thereby placed on immediate gratification and “fast living” to ensure that pleasures of the moment are not sacrificed for future rewards. since these contexts are dancecult 12(1)10 shaped by specific local and economic conditions, the sense of feeling disempowered that black atlantic musical practices address can also produce meaning and pleasure for nonblack listeners in the uk who share similar material circumstances. break-beats and authenticity the early development of drum ‘n’ bass was almost exclusively dependent on the use of digital music production technologies, especially the sampler. in this context, break-beats sampled from 1970s soul and funk records that featured live drumming performances enabled a discourse of authenticity to develop around knowledge of the recordings from which these “breaks” were derived. such a discourse permeates the genre in the form of its identification as a “break-beat culture”, as is indicated in the url of drum & bass arena (an influential website in the digital circulation of the genre, founded in 1996): “breakbeat.co.uk”. as part of a wider cultural lexicology, break-beats are also often assigned names that contain traces of the name of the artist or the title of the original recording from which it was sampled. the most widely used break is amen, derived from “amen, my brother”, the b-side track to colour him father by washington soul and funk group the winstons. the amen break is characterised by a sharp snare drum and cymbal sequence, and its widespread presence in drum ‘n’ bass is framed by its initial familiarity among producers by dint of its use on a large number of hip-hop tracks in the 1980s, especially on “king of the beats”, a b-side track on the 1988 single join me please . . . (home boys – make some noise) by mantronix. on june 7th 2019 at the rupture club, held every three months at the corsica studios complex in south london (fig. 1), one of the tracks that received an especially boisterous response from the dancefloor was “serenity” by j majik. “serenity” contains traits that characterise tracks from the ambient jungle sub-genre of drum ‘n’ bass. initially, the track is comprised of multiple sustained single-note chords, oscillating gently, alongside naturalistic effects such as tidal waves and birdsong softly entering and leaving the mix. this intro sequence continues for almost one minute, until a distorted, rearranged amen—with the lower frequencies removed via equalisation, giving the break a soft, shimmering quality— appears for four bars, teasing the listener with a sense of anticipation. the break’s middle and low ends are then sharply dropped into the mix, prompting the audience to respond with frenetic dancing. then, at one minute and thirty-two seconds, a heavy subsonic bassline appears; the soothing chords and low-frequency bass murmurs are in acute contrast to the crashing, snare-heavy timbres of the amen break. the feeling of sonic completeness that is subsequently produced augments the audience’s pleasure, inciting expressions of approval in the form of noisy whooping, and exclamations of “bo!” (fig. 2) in imitation of a gunshot sound the raising of and one raised hand in the air in the shape of a pistol.6 almost as popular as amen is the “think” break sampled from “think (about it)” by lyn collins, which has a shuffling and spring-like character.7 an older track that received a particularly strong response from the rupture crowd is based on both the amen and think breaks. “this is l.a.”, by brixton-based producer lemon d, opens with a fairly uncomplicated rendering of the think break, while a looped sample combining a wah wah guitar riff and a fender rhodes keyboard melody—a typical feature of 1970s funk tracks— christodoulou | bring the break-beat back! 11 is introduced as the 16th bar begins.8 this element—recognisable to many drum ‘n’ bass participants as the kind of musical reference one might hear on a gangsta rap record from the early-1990s—is punctuated by an ominous sample of the american national broadcasting corporation’s (nbc) broadcaster tom brokaw intoning, “this is los angeles, gang capital of the nation”. brokaw’s speech is sampled from televised coverage of the riots that followed the controversial beating of black motorist rodney king by a group of white police officers. a sense of permanence and intractability about the city’s grim situation is connoted by the line’s frequent repetition until, at one minute and forty-five seconds, the melodic layers are unexpectedly removed, leaving an ominous drum roll that builds as the sound of circling police helicopters looms overhead. as the drum roll reaches its peak, brokaw asks in a paternalistic tone, “let’s see if there is anything that can be done about all of this”. at this point, a powerful bass drop—characterised by a dull, pumping effect—punctuates the music with a startling forcefulness. this signifies both a challenge to the dancer’s sense of the main beat—whose apparent control over the rhythm has been confronted by the sonic violence of the bass and the replacement of the think break with a series of crashing amen patterns—and augments the realisation that speed and rupture are inevitable characteristics of post-industrial urban life. the track continues in this vein until its conclusion at six minutes and twelve seconds. figure 1. rupture flyer, june 2019. dancecult 12(1)12 figure 2. girl making the bo! sign, at kemistry memorial, may 2009. photo by james burns. lemon d has channelled the explosive violence unleashed by the sub-bass gesture into the amen break, cutting and splicing this sampled rhythm in such a way that the loud snare fragments undermine the dancer’s internal sense of a steady 4/4 meter. together with the impact of the bass accents, the scything, unpredictable snares have the effect of temporarily tearing the ground from beneath the dancer’s feet. it is only after extended listening that one can hear patterns emerge; the bass notes occur at regular intervals, providing a structure for what seems like the spontaneous disorder of the sampled snare fragments. they signify the presence of a broader, systemic permanence to this chaos. as such, the ground-level chaos of the post-industrial city, apparently encouraged by official powers, has been shockingly articulated. at rupture and in its promotional media, an authenticating narrative defined by the use of sampled break-beats strongly resonates. while some drum ‘n’ bass artists have achieved substantial commercial success in recent years, the relative absence of break-beats in the most popular tracks suggests the persistence of a performative discourse whereby prevalent digital production techniques, especially the theft implied in sampling apparently signifies the absence of competent musicianship. goodwin suggests that western audiences still prefer “to see their pop musicians doing something” but “audiences have grown increasingly accustomed to making an association between synthetic/automated music and the communal christodoulou | bring the break-beat back! 13 (dance floor) connection to nature (via the body)” (1990: 269).9 it is this erasure of the live body from the domain of composition that is assumed to be equivalent to the erasure of the composer’s expressive presence within his or her music, reinforcing the suspicion that, as virilio states, “technology now aspires to occupy the body” (1999: 59). whereas realtime drumming on soul and funk recordings demonstrates the agility, coordination and expressiveness of human performers, sped-up break-beats are often pejoratively defined as signifying creative passivity that is complicit with the disruptive power of digital technologies, especially computers. for example, an article on the independent news website claimed that “playing drum and bass during operations hampered (surgeons’) communications with nurses (putting) patients at risk” (harrold 2015). for james, the early dependence on break-beats and other samples allowed drum ‘n’ bass to be seen as “stupid music for stupid people” (1997: 19). in defiance of this apparent stupidity, the legitimacy of sampling as a creative practice is defended by omni trio’s view that “jungle is sequenced music . . . . we are not ashamed of that” ( james 1997: 90). the music’s programmed character is not a critical issue for its audiences, to the extent that human competence in both musical and wider cultural senses seems to have been irrevocably transformed by the cultural prevalence of digital technology. this impulse to reclaim the sampled break-beat can also be linked to a desire to sustain the presence of drum ‘n’ bass within a continuum of black atlantic cultural practice. in particular, ferrigno argues that the use of break-beats can be considered a form of digital homage to the human drummers on african american funk recordings. the drum breaks that drum ‘n’ bass producers rely upon came from 1960s and 1970s funk and soul recordings . . . their utilization is a way in which drum ‘n’ bass producers can send respect to their predecessors (ferrigno 2011: 100). such reverence does not seem to depend on a qualitative difference between music that is performed by human beings in real-time (live) and programmed musical composition, even if the programmer has no musical skill in the performative sense. for example, paradox (fig. 3), a choppage pioneer and regular performer at rupture who uses keyboards and computer software to trigger often complex sequences of sampled break-beats, directly situates drum ‘n’ bass within a black atlantic continuum of funk-based music by using a microphone to inform his audiences of the original african american soul and funk recordings from which his breaks originate. however, as perchard highlights in the context of african american hip-hop, the critical identification of sampling as a cultural practice that serves to reinforce membership within a continuum of black atlantic music can obfuscate producers’ efforts to construct their own uncommon musical successes within what could be understood as an autonomous hip-hop tradition; while aspects of cultural memory and memorial were in play, so too were self-interested exploitations of the forgotten and the unknown (perchard 2011: 290). dancecult 12(1)14 in the context of drum ‘n’ bass, the authenticity conferred by the return of the break-beat shows the extent to which authenticating notions informed by historical legacies of black atlantic musical practice are also shaped by the economic and creative efficacies offered by sampling technologies. on the one hand, the rapid tempos and relative cost-effectiveness of its sample-based digital base indicate that drum ‘n’ bass developed out of a working class-inflected creative impulse for speed in both its aesthetics and musical production. on the other, its computer-based compositional framework also contains the possibility of lengthening the production process by reassembling break-beats into intricate and lengthy reconfigurations, thereby legitimating drum ‘n’ bass as a form of art music on the basis of particular producers’ virtuosity with computer and sample-based technologies.10 figure 3. paradox live at the sun and bass festival, sardinia, september 2014. photo by james burns. going backwards: break-beats and sub-genre formation the recent return to prominence of previously outmoded sampled break-beats in drum ‘n’ bass points to an internal dynamic that monroe identifies in edm genres more broadly as the “sheer velocity of technologico-creative development” (1999: 147). monroe suggests that the intertwining of recent technological developments with creative practices in “electronic music” institutes an inevitable mutational movement of fragmentation into ever-smaller sub-genres. christodoulou | bring the break-beat back! 15 any music where electronics are the central or predominant form of instrumentation is a mode of expression explicitly constituted by technological factors, even when . . . the equipment used is deliberately antique or corrupted. as such, the simultaneous potentialities of both establishing and disintegrating new genres are infinitely greater than in other forms (monroe 1999: 149-50). monroe makes two key points concerning the role of technology in edm genre mutation, both of which can help to illustrate the development of the choppage subgenre as an authentication of the formerly idiosyncratic, but now threatened practice of using sampled break-beats within the drum ‘n’ bass parent genre. first, monroe argues that the number of potential subgenres increases exponentially with the creative incorporation of electronic technologies, regardless of whether these technologies are new, used in accordance with the manufacturer’s instructions or consciously misused. secondly, he claims that the increasing rate of technological development and tempos on the one hand, and the proliferation and self-cancellation of electronic music genres on the other hand, has become ever more rapid. contrary to assumptions by practitioners and some music critics of the inherently progressive trajectory of electronic music on the grounds of its creative intimacy with digital technologies, this speed of mutation is also defined by a continual looking backwards, whereby the formation of “subgenres and consequently the counter-subgenres are driven by a contra-distinctive dynamic” (monroe 1999: 150). “contra-distinctive dynamic” refers to the trajectory taken by electronic music genres and subgenres that have been replaced or superseded, only to re-emerge as new subgenres in a reactionary vein. in this respect, the re-introduction of sampled break-beats suggests a conscious re-emphasis on largely discarded genre rules in an impulse to recover a lost authenticity. such re-enactments or retro-constructions are an effort to bring closer technical or stylistic developments located in the recent or distant past, including specific characteristics that pre-existed the formation of the parent genre, thereby reinforcing the significance of formal idiosyncrasies, such as sampled break-beats. monroe argues that once later stages of sub-genre development are reached, there is an inevitable movement back to a genre that pre-existed but nevertheless influenced the development of the parent genre from a distant historical point (1999: 151). in the context of drum ‘n’ bass, the choppage subgenre appeared in the mid-2000s as an attempt to re-inscribe the funkiness that seemed to have been lost with the decline in the use of formerly live break-beats as jungle transformed into drum ‘n’ bass in the late-1990s. the titles of influential recordings in the sub-genre, such as equinox’s “ital lion tuff head” and “acid rain vip (breakage remix)”—both of which feature radical reconstructions of the amen break—also convey a sense of historical indebtedness to past genres in its continuum of electronic music. the patois vernacular of the former affirms the role of 1970s jamaican sound system culture in the formal development of drum ‘n’ bass, while the latter pays homage to the uk acid house scene of the late-1980s for establishing the genre’s participatory network of underground clubs and raves in the hardcore continuum. lison describes this continuum as: dancecult 12(1)16 a certain lineage of electronic dance music with a shared concern that transcends the formal, stylistic boundaries that demarcate each subgenre and persists through and beyond the limited shelf life that any particular style may have in the popular consciousness (2012: 130). thereby, for lison and monroe, subgenre development in edm often signifies both a regressive return to what monroe refers to as “the ‘true’ spirit of the original” (1999: 151), a point of obsolescence where the genre either dissolves—having been overwhelmed by processes of commercialisation or hybridisation—nor stabilises for long-term survival. in this latter formation, the main formal (usually rhythmic) characteristics of the parent genre are reinforced to withstand potential commodification and prevent stylistic fragmentation into ever-smaller subgenres and micro-genres that excessively deviate from the formal elements of the parent genre. the formation of the choppage style and club nights like rupture suggests that the apparent narrowing of stylistic possibilities provides impetus for the development of new subgenres in drum ‘n’ bass, thereby reinforcing negus’ view that creativity arises “out of a sense of frustration with conventions and a desire to break the codes and genre rules and move across the boundaries of genres” (1999: 181). as such, it is possible to link the rapid and narrowing movement of drum ‘n’ bass subgenre formation to wider aspects of contemporary cultural production. this specialising or “niche-ing” dynamic can be seen as an articulation of similar forces that produce the audience and genre specialisation feature of structurally fragmented cultural markets in a post-industrial context. in other words, a similar impulse to maintain and dissolve specialised niche markets along with their own mass-production infrastructure can be seen to be at work in the rarefied domain of drum ‘n’ bass genre mutation as well as in the most consciously pre-programmed and market-researched mainstream cultural products. examining the role and impact of record companies in musical creativity and the development of genres, negus states that, while the (record) industry does provide a structural context and set of business practices which frame and shape how music and artists are ‘processed’, the industry is also itself constituted out of the available ‘texts’, their potential meanings and the practices through which they have been created. in this way, an everyday (often conservative) social aesthetic connects with and shapes the politics of the industry. this interaction is not easily understood, but is necessary for a fuller understanding of cultural production . . . genre cultures . . . are playing a part in ‘producing’ the industry as much as the industry is ‘producing’ these musics (1999: 178). negus claims that there is a complex intertwining between the production of musical genres and the wider patterns and velocities of cultural production involving innovation, technological development, the impulse for short-term profits and the desire to be part of the newest phenomenon. in addition, he claims that cultural production depends on both the appearance and substance of innovation and resistance in order for commodification to work successfully. as such, the fate and formation of both the drum ‘n’ bass parent genre christodoulou | bring the break-beat back! 17 and its subgenres can be connected to both the speed with which musical creativity can be facilitated through the use of digital technologies—thereby making it a sector of the cultural market that mutates too rapidly to be entirely dominated by the music industry— and the need of post-industrial cultural production to constantly invent and reinvent new niche markets to service. it is possible for the commodification of drum ‘n’ bass to be economically beneficial to both the genre’s producers and the wider music industry. but it is also notable that a significant membership within the genre is convinced that the continued survival and relevance of drum ‘n’ bass requires avoidance of corporate entanglements with mainstream popular music culture. one means by which such evasion is achieved is through the impulse to continually innovate new styles and subgenres faster than the wider music industry can incorporate them, even if such stylistic expansion involves looking backwards to previous developments in the genre’s continuum. as fast as the mass market can assimilate and commodify underground subgenres, these subgenres can mutate and negate each other just as quickly. this negation ensures the creation of pre-commodified zones that are temporarily outside of the commercial music industry, even if this pursuit is based on a construction of resistance against commodification. another authenticating practice is articulated by rupture’s policy of encouraging djs to play vinyl. vinyl is perceived as a niche medium in comparison to digital musical formats. such practices adhere to shuker’s definition of forms of “active” participation which connote an “aficionado” or “connoisseur” membership. active participation designates the consumption of and contribution to specialist media, regular attendance of live events and esoteric knowledge of specialist recordings and genres, in contrast to the “passive” fandom associated with the participation in more popular music styles (shuker 2005: 99). conclusion by addressing the variability of rhythmic structures in electronic dance music, especially those that do not conform to the emphasis placed on the four quarter beat typical of popular styles like house and techno, it is possible to show that the critical value attached to specific genres and sub-genres is stratified according to historical, ethnic and class-inscribed taste cultures. in drum ‘n’ bass, this stratification is illustrated in the division between the relatively simplistic beat structures of the most popular current tracks and the break-beats sampled from 1960s and 1970s soul and funk recordings that formed the basis of the earliest examples of the genre. in the context of drum ‘n’ bass’ location within a hardcore continuum that emphasises cultural resistance against the mass production practices and values of the mainstream music industry, such loss is articulated as surrendering to the pressure of commodification. pop music structures divert attention away from the genre’s digitally programmed technological base, most vividly articulated in the use of densely layered and edited break-beat patterns. thereby, the foregrounding of break-beats on particular tracks is a means by which a sense of authenticity—seemingly lost in the pursuit of commercial success in a highly populated and competitive environment for recorded music—can be dancecult 12(1)18 recovered. in addition, the emphasis placed on sampled and heavily edited break-beats reinforces the broken aesthetic that rose and gilroy ascribe to the priorities black atlantic music is argued to place on the cultivation of flow and continuity out of ruptured historical, cultural and socio-economic contexts. finally, the return to break-beats articulated by much recent drum ‘n’ bass output signifies an especially regressive dynamic of subgenre mutation, whereby sample-based practices are used to authenticate a genre whose formation is deeply entwined with digital production technologies within a black atlantic musical lineage that precedes the digital. in the wider context of electronic music, the enfolding of live human performances from the past within recent technological practices suggest an increasing emphasis on the role of historical continuity as a means by which cultural resistance against the mainstreaming of musical practices with which wholly digital creative logics are often associated. notes 1 “mainstream” in this context refers to media organisations whose political and ideological bias is determined by corporate ownership and the resolute reinforcing of its commercial interests. in this vein, williams argues: “there are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses” (1961: 289). 2 these are two of only a relatively small number of drum ‘n’ bass tracks to have entered the uk top 40 national chart, with both reaching number one in february 2012 and april 2014 respectively. 3 scruton describes a syncopated rhythm as “a single rhythm, in which the accent falls regularly off the beat—often on a note which lies between two beats” (scruton 1999: 29). 4 in electronic dance music, the term “track” refers to records that are largely instrumental, as opposed to songs in which lyrics are prominent. 5 in his 1988 study of reggae sound-systems in south london, les back designates the term “mic (microphone) chanter” to the acronym mc, although “master of ceremonies” is more widely applied to a performer who introduces or verbally directs other performers and the audience. in this regard, both definitions are applicable to the practices of the drum ‘n’ bass mc. it is notable that “mc” also functions as a verb, meaning “to perform as an mc”. 6 the expression “bo!” derives from its use at jamaican reggae sound-system events where local “yardie” gangs would often meet to settle scores with gun violence. although its celebratory use in the context of both reggae sound-systems and drum ‘n’ bass dance events is a sign of approval of the immediate social participatory framework, it can, in terms of its originating context, also be said to connote an ability to survive inclement social circumstances in everyday urban life. 7 the popularity of the think break among producers is supplemented by the novelty of a sped-up james brown in his role as a backing singer exclaiming “you’re bad sister!” across the duration of the break in a theatrical approval of collins’ performance. this can be a useful gimmick in attracting attention to a recording on which the break features. 8 wah wah is a musical effect achieved on an electric guitar by controlling the output from the amplifier with a pedal. christodoulou | bring the break-beat back! 19 9 see schumacher (1995) and mccutcheon (2007). this critical position is reinforced by existing copyright law, which does not recognise sampling as a form of creative practice. for example, section 183 of the copyright designs and patents act 1988 refers to the “infringement of the performer’s rights by use of recording made without consent”. similarly, section 187(1) enables the prosecution of a person who “infringes the rights of a person having recording rights in relation to a performance who, without his consent or, in the case of a qualifying performance, that of the performer”. 10 for example, chris sharp’s article on photek for the wire focuses on the producer’s idiosyncratic break-beat manipulation, and avoids any discussion of the break-beat as an inscription of black atlantic collective memory. “in a rare stroke of formal unity, the emotional depth of photek’s music is a direct consequence of its technical complexity . . . it’s precisely because (photek) spends upwards of a month on each track . . . attending to the requirements of each individual sound, eschewing, almost monastically, any easy route through the music-making process” (sharp 1997: 29). references back, les. 1988. “coughing up fire: sound-systems in south-east london”. new formations, 5: 141-52. <https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/new-formations/5/coughing-up-fire>, (7 october 2020). butler, mark. 2006. unlocking the groove: rhythm, meter, and musical design in electronic dance music. bloomington: indiana university press. chapman, dale. 2003. “hermeneutics of suspicion: paranoia and the technological sublime”. echo: a music-centred journal 5(2): <http://www.echo.ucla.edu/volume5-issue2/chapman/ chapman.pdf>, (accessed 17 september 2019). collin, matthew. 1992. “clubs: news and views”. i-d, september: 54-6. copyright designs and patents act. 1988. “section 183”. <http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ ukpga/1988/48/section/183>, (accessed 14 august 2020). danielsen, anne. 2006. presence and pleasure: the funk grooves of james brown and parliament. middletown: wesleyan university press. doane, mary ann. 1991. femmes fatales: feminism, film theory, psychoanalysis. london: routledge. ferrigno, emily. 2011. “the dark side: representing science fiction in drum ‘n’ bass”. new review of film and television studies 9(1): 95-104. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2011.521722>. goodwin, andrew. 1990. “sample and hold: pop music in the age of digital reproduction”. in on record, ed. simon frith and andrew goodwin, 258-74. london: routledge. hargreaves, david j. and adrian c. north. 1997. “experimental aesthetics and everyday music listening”. in the social psychology of music, ed. david j. hargreaves and adrian c. north, 84-110. oxford: oxford university press. harrold, alice. 2015. “surgeons warned playing drum and bass during operations puts patients at greater risk”. the independent, 5 august. <https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/ health-and-families/health-news/surgeons-have-been-warned-to-stop-playing-drum-and-bassduring-procedures-10439163.html>, (accessed 14 august 2020). https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/new-formations/5/coughing-up-fire http://www.echo.ucla.edu/volume5-issue2/chapman/chapman.pdf http://www.echo.ucla.edu/volume5-issue2/chapman/chapman.pdf http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/183 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/183 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2011.521722 https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/surgeons-have-been-warned-to-stop-playing-drum-and-bass-during-procedures-10439163.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/surgeons-have-been-warned-to-stop-playing-drum-and-bass-during-procedures-10439163.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/surgeons-have-been-warned-to-stop-playing-drum-and-bass-during-procedures-10439163.html dancecult 12(1)20 hesmondhalgh, david and melville, casper. 2001. “urban breakbeat culture: repercussions of hip-hop in the united kingdom”. in global noise: rap and hip hop outside the usa, ed. tony mitchell, 86-110. hanover, ct and london: wesleyan university press. james, martin. 1997. state of bass: jungle, the story so far. basingstoke: boxtree. konečni, vladimir j. 1982. “social interaction and musical preference”. in the psychology of music, ed. diana deutsch, 497-516. london: academic press. lison, andrew. 2012. “love’s unlimited orchestra: overcoming left melancholy via dubstep and microhouse”. new formations, 75: 122-39. <http://dx.doi.org/10.3898/newf.75.07.2012>. lockwood, david. 1982. “sources of variation in working-class images of society”. in classes, power, and conflict: classical and contemporary debates, ed. anthony giddens and david held, 359-72. london: macmillan. mccutcheon, mark. a. 2007. “techno, ‘frankenstein’ and copyright”. popular music (26)2: 259-80. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143007001225>. middleton, richard. 2006. “in the groove or blowing your mind? the pleasures of musical repetition”. in the popular music studies reader, ed. andy bennett and barry shank, 15-21. london: routledge. monroe, alexei. 1999. “thinking about mutation: genres in 1990s electronica”. in living through pop, ed. andrew blake, 146-58. london: routledge. murphy, ben. 2018. “the return of jungle”, dj mag, 21 march. <https://djmag.com/content/return-jungle>, (accessed 6 october 2019). negus, keith. 1999. music genres and corporate cultures. london: routledge. reynolds, simon. “the hardcore continuum, or, (a)theory and its discontents”. energy flash. 27 february 2009. <http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/02/hardcorecontinuum-or-theory-and-its.html>, (accessed 4 october 2020). rietveld, hillegonda. c. 1998. this is our house: house music, cultural spaces and technologies. aldershot: ashgate. rose, tricia. 1994. black noise: rap music and black culture in contemporary america. middletown: wesleyan university press. schloss, joseph g. 2002. making beats: the art of sample-based hip-hop. middletown: wesleyan university press. schumacher, thomas g. 1995. “‘this is sampling sport’: digital sampling, rap music and the law in cultural production”. in media, culture and society 17(2): 253-73. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/016344395017002006>. scruton, roger. 1999. the aesthetics of music. oxford: oxford university press. sharp, chris. 1997. “photek: lone swordsman”. the wire, may: 26-39. shuker, roy. 2005. popular music: the key concepts. london: routledge. veal, m. 2007. dub: soundscapes and shattered songs in jamaican reggae. middletown: wesleyan university press. virilio, paul. 1999. negative horizon. london: continuum. waugh, ian. 2000. quick guide to dance music. london: pc publishing. williams, raymond. 1961. culture and society: 1780-1950. harmondsworth: penguin. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143007001225 https://djmag.com/content/return-jungle http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/02/hardcore-continuum-or-theory-and-its.html http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/02/hardcore-continuum-or-theory-and-its.html http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/016344395017002006 christodoulou | bring the break-beat back! 21 discography equinox. 2004. “ital lion tuff head”. track aa on stagger / ital lion tuff head. intasound (12-inch): inta003. <https://www.discogs.com/equinox-stagger-ital-lion-tuff-head/release/334978>. equinox. 2006. “acid rain v.i.p. (breakage remix)”. track 1 on acid rain v.i.p. planet mu (12-inch): ziq134. <https://www.discogs.com/equinox-acid-rain-vip/release/634905>. j majik. 2019. full circle. infrared (lp): infraltdlp01. <https://www.discogs.com/j-majik-full-circle/release/13575946>. lyn collins. 1972. “think (about it)”. track 1 on think (about it) / ain’t no sunshine. people (7-inch): pe 608, 2066 215. <https://www.discogs.com/lyn-collins-think-about-it-aint-nosunshine/master/215092>. lemon d. 1995. “this is l.a.”. track 2 on urban flava pt 1. metalheadz (12-inch): meth014. <https://www.discogs.com/lemon-d-urban-flava-pt-1/master/18658>. mantronix. 1988. “king of the beats”. track 5 on join me please... (home boys make some noise). capitol (12-inch): v-15386. <https://www.discogs.com/mantronix-join-me-please-home-boys-make-some-noise/master/33554>. noise factory. 1991. “jungle techno”. track 2 on loving you / jungle techno. ibiza (12-inch): ir008. <https://www.discogs.com/noise-factory-loving-you-jungletechno/master/476765>. origin unknown. 1993. “valley of the shadows”. track 2 on the touch / valley of the shadows. ram records (12-inch): ramm 004. <https://www.discogs.com/origin-unknown-the-touch-valley-of-the-shadows/ release/17714>. paradox. 2001. “all you 2 step bastards leave our planet”. track 1 on …leave our planet / she mirrors me. form-3 recordings (12-inch): fm 001. <https://www.discogs.com/paradox-prolog-leave-our-planet-she-mirrors-me/release/176861>. qbass. 1993. “funky hardcore”. track 1 on funky hardcore / deepa. suburban base (12-inch): subbase 12r. <https://www.discogs.com/qbass-deepa-funky-hardcore/master/1440>. the winstons. 1969. “amen, brother”. track 2 on colour him father. metromedia (7-inch): mms-117. <https://www.discogs.com/the-winstons-colour-him-father/release/2360143>. https://www.discogs.com/equinox-stagger-ital-lion-tuff-head/release/334978 https://www.discogs.com/equinox-acid-rain-vip/release/634905 https://www.discogs.com/j-majik-full-circle/release/13575946 https://www.discogs.com/lyn-collins-think-about-it-aint-nosunshine/master/215092 https://www.discogs.com/lemon-d-urban-flava-pt-1/master/18658 https://www.discogs.com/mantronix-join-me-please-home-boys-make-some-noise/master/33554 https://www.discogs.com/noise-factory-loving-you-jungletechno/master/476765 https://www.discogs.com/origin-unknown-the-touch-valley-of-the-shadows/release/17714 https://www.discogs.com/origin-unknown-the-touch-valley-of-the-shadows/release/17714 https://www.discogs.com/paradox-prolog-leave-our-planet-she-mirrors-me/release/176861 https://www.discogs.com/qbass-deepa-funky-hardcore/master/1440 https://www.discogs.com/the-winstons-colour-him-father/release/2360143 the studio as contemporary autonomous zone:crisis and creativity in electronic music dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 12(1): 48–65 issn 1947-5403 ©2020 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.10 the studio as contemporary autonomous zone: crisis and creativity in electronic music paul chambers university of adelaide (australia) abstract this article explores electronic music making in a context of precarity and climate crisis. i use ethnographic research conducted in the australian city of adelaide and the provocative ideas of nineteenth century german philosopher, max stirner, to situate the electronic music studio as a contemporary autonomous zone, an interface between creative expression and capitalist existence. i argue that the studio functions as a physical and psychological space to develop what stirner termed “ownness”, taking possession and realizing one’s own capacity and power. i propose ownness as a theoretical tool for understanding the studio as a site of self-realisation and micropolitical action, investigating how electronic music practice shapes subjectivity, autonomy and resistance. the contemporary studio emerges as a refuge from the anxieties and uncertainties of late-capitalism, a therapeutic outlet and means of becoming, an opportunity to find voice and vocation in the violence of the present. keywords: studio, creativity, electronic music, autonomy, stirner paul chambers obtained his phd from the university of adelaide in 2019. he started clubbing in the 1980s, was a dj and promoter through the 1990s and continues to make and perform electronic music. he is currently assisting dianne rodger in research into how hip-hop programs are being used as an educational tool in workshops designed for and attended by aboriginal and torres strait islander youth. email: <paul.chambers@adelaide.edu.au>. feature article chambers | the studio as contemporary autonomous zone 49 introduction this article explores how contemporary music makers situated themselves, their art and creative practice in response to the alienation of late-capitalism and existential crisis. the studio in electronic music can take the form of a bed, a bedroom or a dedicated music space, and production technologies range from a cheap laptop and cracked software to thousands of dollars of hardware. using ethnographic research conducted between july 2016 and january 2018 in the australian city of adelaide, i attempt to understand how contemporary uncertainties around precarity, employment and environmental issues were influencing subjectivity. i consider the electronic music studio as a contemporary autonomous zone, a physical and psychological interface between creative expression and capitalist existence. this observation is an update on what bey termed a taz, or temporary autonomous zone (1991), an impermanent space outside structures of control. born made a similar comparison, arguing that musical practice could function as a “space of exception to larger structures of social power” (2010: 235). i apply the ideas of nineteenth century german philosopher, max stirner, to show how the music studio could enable the individual to achieve a meaningful sense of ontological freedom (newman 2017: 156). drawing inspiration from stirner’s philosophy of ownness, i investigate three ways that contemporary electronic music practice worked to shape subjectivity, autonomy and resistance. firstly, i show how the studio was used to forge new modes of self-expression. in his key work the ego and its own (1845), stirner emphasised the importance of individualism and “uniqueness”; to be free in a real sense, one must become an “owner” in terms of self-will and self-possession (1971: 238).1 the powerful and often relatively accessible musical tools of the contemporary music studio allowed infinite opportunities to produce music and the self. the studio functioned as a space where subjectivity was composed and enacted through creative processes, aided by skills and technologies and achieved with commitment and perseverance. the stories of dedication, invention and becoming through music practice, i argue, were suggestive of stirnerian strategies of self-construction. secondly, i situate the studio as a refuge from what jeong termed the “melancholy of modernity”, an oasis from the existential anxieties and uncertainties of late-capitalist existence (2017: 4). stirner was an early critic of democratic modernity, suspicious of state power and subservient faith in moral idealism. he perceptively understood the vulnerability of autonomy to the economic competition and government coercion of emerging liberal societies in the nineteenth century.2 stirner located an innate capacity for freedom within the individual as a bedrock from which to build “self-defining, self-constituting and ‘egoistic’ forms of subjectivity outside of any prescribed standard or norm” (newman 2017: 156). as apocalyptic scenarios and austerity attenuated hopes for the future, electronic music was reported by over a third of my interlocutors as a therapeutic outlet; the studio emerged as a space that could evade and escape societal systems of control. music practice became a vital way of processing the present, a means of achieving autonomy in the face of structural conditions seen as manipulative and alienating. dancecult 12(1)50 thirdly, the studio allowed sonic strategies of resistance to articulate what i call a politics of the personal, a response to contextual circumstances rooted in subjective experience.3 i demonstrate how music’s enduring potential for rebellion, coupled with the technological affordances of the modern studio, enabled intensely personal and counter-hegemonic expression. in the striving to realise one’s own creative voice i identify an echo of stirner’s exhortation for the individual to actualise their own path of freedom. i propose ownness as a theoretical tool that could understand the studio as a self-directed space where music became an empowering practice of creative self-mastery and personal fulfilment. stirner and the studio i first encountered stirner’s ideas while working in an anarchist bookshop in the late 1980s, a collectively-run operation that seriously attempted to put into practice its members’ political convictions. stirner was and remains something of a controversial outlier even for this most radical of political philosophies.4 contrary to his contemporary karl marx, the ownership of private property was considered an inevitability which stirner extended to all aspects of the self (1971: 169). he saw property offering the potential for autonomy and constituting a problem of access rather than possession. however, to be free in a real sense, one had to become an owner in terms of self-will, someone independent and indifferent to social and moral laws: “ownness . . . is my whole being and existence, it is i myself. i am free from what i am rid of, owner of what i have in my power or what i control” (stirner 1971: 112). stirner believed action at the level of the large group or society could only be warranted by an appeal to an abstraction such as freedom and morality, what he termed the “spooks” of the humanist age (1971: 56). he avoided making prescriptive statements about what freedom was or should be, arguing that as an expression of the individual’s power and capacity, freedom could only be determined by the self and its particular interests (newman 2019: 159). this uncompromising standpoint has left his work open to a range of evaluation. it has been called a “philosophy of unsparing nihilism” (paterson 1971: ix), psychological egoism of self-interested motivation ( jenkins 2009: 224) and an ideological foundation for libertarian hyper-capitalism (ashford 2014: 979).5 newman has arguably gone furthest in rehabilitating stirner’s influence; he identified a poststructuralist aspect to stirner’s anarchism, rejected notions of an essential form of subjectivity and advocated the subject’s ongoing self-constitution (2017: 172). if power and freedom were always relational and unstable, autonomy would become less a final state of emancipation that one reaches and more an ongoing experimentation with different forms of existence and ways of relating to oneself (newman 2011b: 204). postmodern notions of identity conceived of multiple narratives of the self and described identity as a becoming rather than being (frith 1996: 109). such ideas had a close connection to the way music functions in identity construction (born & tilley 2011: 381). denora showed how chambers | the studio as contemporary autonomous zone 51 music worked to affect individual memories and emotional states and to construct personal meanings, describing it as a central component in the “conglomerate” of the self (2006: 24). i acknowledge stirner’s emphasis on self-construction downplayed the individual’s constitutive relationship with wider society, well argued as it was in social theory.6 however, his philosophy did identify the possibility of personally meaningful transformation that ultimately can only be done for oneself. i argue the studio allowed adelaide’s music makers to experience this self-in-process through an engagement with music. in his anthropological study of power, rapport identified a capacity of the individual to “create personally meaningful and viable environments and to traverse these in the pursuit of their own life-projects” (2003: 3). rapport saw a potential in everyone to apply a seriousness and commitment to practice that allowed the subject to escape from the control and influence of external forces. for stirner, an intrinsic egoism affirmed the self even in the absence of external freedom and formed the basis for self-liberation. it was this reading of stirner that resonated with my ethnographic material and led me to apply his philosophy to a contemporary context. in allowing the synthesis of a range of processes, objects and contexts through aesthetic expression, the studio was central to how my participants constructed their subjectivity. i therefore consider the electronic music studio as a place of liberation in this stirnerian sense, “an ontologically anarchic space of subjectification” which gave the subject the possibility to define their own path, or paths, of freedom (newman 2017: 18). methods and results a total of 62 participants aged between 18 and 52 took part in semi-structured interviews focussed on the practice of electronic music production, with an average age of 30.25 and a mode age of 24. the project aimed to examine the impact of digitalization on society by exploring the subjectivities and capabilities of a cross-section of music makers with respect to how and why they make their music. my interview questions covered the context of commencing electronic music practice, how music was produced, attitudes to digital platforms and their perceived influence, the importance of social relationships within music and how my participants’ practice related to their beliefs and values. i identified 85 per cent of my participants as male, a figure closer to 70 per cent for those 25 and under, although attitudes to gender and sexuality were nuanced and fitted more into a fluid spectrum of possibility. 27 of my participants used a mixture of software and hardware to make their music. of the 26 who only used software, 18 were aged 25 and under. the results highlighted the importance of the age variable with a clear enthusiasm for digital methods of music making further down the age range. this predilection was expressed in attitudes towards computer technology elsewhere in life, such as engagement with social media, developing and maintaining friendships online and acquiring musical preferences. my fieldwork period in adelaide fruitfully coincided with a brief “golden age” in the city’s electronic music milieu. the scene itself was a patchwork of various micro-scenes, often dancecult 12(1)52 with little contact with each other.7 despite its fragmented nature, it was soon clear that there was loads going on. i attended 88 events where electronic music was performed, but 3 in particular became significant case studies. sidechain was a fortnightly event showcasing four live electronic acts. the monthly experimental music night featured three live acts, often electronically-based. and club sync was a sporadic club night playing disparate music sourced from across the world but featuring a strong cohort of local producers. all 3 events had an implicitly inclusive policy of booking acts that ensured a wide diversity of music makers had the chance to perform, often for the first time. this abundance of research material meant i was forced to select who to approach for the project. the objective requirements of my research question demanded a broad data base, and i always aimed for a representative demographic and stylistic range. significantly for this paper, however, i also found myself following an instinctive feeling for those i perceived to have an original voice in their music. i promised to keep my participants’ identities anonymous as i wanted everyone to speak deeply and sincerely, without any expectation that what they said would be identified by others and considered “cool” or “correct”. consequently, i asked people to come up with a pseudonym, or leave it to me to think of one. my research provides an insight into an invisible sector of contemporary music making, often ignored in music writing since finnegan’s 1989 ethnography the hidden musicians. as someone with a long history around electronic music, it quickly became apparent that electronic dance music culture (edmc) had expanded to accommodate a wide array of electronic music makers; experimental musicians, sound art creators and laptop-tweaking singer-songwriters were among those i encountered. as i visited studios and witnessed performances, delved into musical histories and creative processes, the motivations and ambitions, hopes and fears of a diverse range of music makers emerged. when i asked participants how the contemporary conditions of life may be affecting their music, 60 per cent replied that the wider context of world events and social issues was significantly reflected in their music practice.8 of the other 40 per cent, two thirds said instead that their music was all about their personal and/ or emotional experiences.9 23 (37 per cent) of my interlocutors reported that music practice for them functioned as personal therapy.10 what made the repeated accounts of music’s role in strategies of personal development and wellbeing significant was their representation across the age range and stylistic spectrum. seeking to understand how electronic musicians display a personally meaningful relationship with musical practice drew me to the ideas of stirner. “freedom” was a word that often came up throughout my discussions with electronic music participants in which the studio served as a space of possibility outside of the restrictive pressures of society. stirner’s notion of ownness became a theoretical tool that i could use to understand the electronic music studio as a place for constructing new modes of subjectivity and ways of life. chambers | the studio as contemporary autonomous zone 53 the studio and the self one question i increasingly asked participants as my research progressed was whether they considered “a sense of self-development” as an important part of their music practice. on reflection, this was an ambiguous and ill-defined concept on my part, but 41 of my interlocutors agreed, with an average age of 30.4. the following accounts refuted the power of economic determinism as a driver in music creation by describing how participants defined self-development in their practice. personal values and experiences were the bedrock and foundation of individual expression, nurtured in sonic safe spaces and manifested with the musical means available. the comparative affordability of adelaide, compared with the major metropolitan centres of sydney and melbourne, made a domestic music room a realistic proposition, but headphones or even earbuds were enough to turn on, zone in and let it out. jane (19) was one of my youngest interlocutors but a prolific music maker, who described “being in the zone” as extremely important, the zone being the space “where everything comes from”. jane’s account raised the important question about the boundaries of autonomous space in the networked age. this was a time when software upgrades and the influence and inspiration of specific social media platforms provided a seemingly infinite choice of cultural options to explore and articulate. feeling unable to make music casually as something on the side, jane had to “lock herself in” spatially and psychologically, focusing with tunnel vision on her musical process. she recalled a lifelong desire to make music that, given her lack of music education, seemed a distant possibility until the internet provided the inspiration and the means to make it happen. youtube rapidly matured her tastes, and downloading ableton—a daw with an intuitive user-interface—allowed her to express her expanding and eclectic aesthetics.11 jane was in no doubt about music’s role in her self-development, associating her practice with personal discovery: “i’m always thinking about that actually, like where am i going from here? and it seems like naturally to happen, i develop more and more”. her early attempts, “a lot of atonal noise stuff ”, were considered an important phase of expression, and she had begun exploring a range of styles including ambient and jersey club, a process that she felt was organic and reflected the broad and shifting interests of her personality.12 her attitudes to musical expression articulated a politics of the personal. jane: for the most part it is about honing-in on hyper specific emotions that i have had in the past, that are sort of reoccurring. yeah, it is more to do with myself and my feelings and self-expression, more than the world around me. brother lucid (37) talked in a similar way about the studio as a creative sanctuary. having immersed myself in his extensive bandcamp discography, it was clear that his adhd diagnosis, late in life, was now an important part of his personal identity and an inspiration for his music. it emerged in his online promotion, in his track titles and as soon as we started talking. like others with adhd, the need to block out internal and external dancecult 12(1)54 distractions meant he would get “mad scientist in the laboratory” about his studio work: hyper-focussed, not eating. he saw the impulsivity and hyper-creativity of adhd more widely in the information age. for people with adhd, the short attention spans and mad scrolling through social media feeds was “mental, really crazy”. in the studio brother lucid made his music simply, looping beats into audition on his laptop and playing in everything else manually over the top in separate takes.13 he described the elements like certain “characters”. he told me that with every track he needed to be doing something that he hadn’t heard anyone else do, a constant challenge as he couldn’t afford lots of gear and had to adapt whatever was to hand. he labelled this process as “postapocalypse diy”. bloodbottler (27) was happy to describe himself as “a bit of an anarchist at heart”, and his up-tempo brand of breakbeat bricolage fused fast-cut vocal samples from cult films with juxtaposed snippets of saccharine pop. the aim was to startle and offend an audience into questioning what he saw as the manipulation of the powerful. he first learnt music by trying to recreate drum and bass tracks on an electribe sampler before developing his own style. youtube tutorials provided him the knowledge of how to use daw software like pro-tools and reason. bloodbottler acknowledged that music practice had made him put in “a lot more effort” than other areas of his life; it was something he could focus on and develop. he described getting a new piece of equipment as an extension of the self and learning to do more through it: “i feel like the better i get at producing, the better i get as a person. that sounds really stupid and egotistical, but it is true”. this association with learning, self-development and new equipment provided a fresh insight into associations of excessive consumerism regarding studio gear, perhaps exemplified in the name of a producer forum like gearslutz.14 any new equipment was a rare occurrence for bloodbottler, who was looking for work and made do with a minimal hardware set-up and an old apple laptop which he used to maximum effect. after meeting makers of eye candy instagram videos featuring impressive studios and twinkling modular monoliths, my suspicions of shameless displays of cultural capital were supplanted by the tangible joy of those sharing an intimate and usually long-gestating relationship with sound. kyle (34) was a case in point, with a well-honed social media presence and a studio set-up reinforced by the corporate sponsorship of a japanese synthesizer company. kyle started off making music in his teens using a basic tracker program on an amiga computer.15 now he made commercially popular big room club music and considered his music as a form of self-expression that could connect with people on a fundamental level. he saw the need to “upgrade this vehicle” with more forms of self-expression as an important factor, but it was clear that sound itself was paramount. “i have pure joy in playing keyboard, you know, at home, just turning the keyboard on, and just playing keys, that’s it”. i first met him shortly after his performance at a very well-known australian music festival. he was at the stage of his career that many i spoke with would like to get to, yet it obviously came with its own inherent complications. chambers | the studio as contemporary autonomous zone 55 like many musicians, kyle’s identity revolved around the individuality and self-expression of the “authentic artist” and the aim to make music that was satisfying for himself as a musician and music fan. a sense of self-development emerged when he talked of his ability to successfully adapt to the shifting tastes of the market; he saw it as a way to challenge himself and bring in new ideas. he admitted to going through his own low periods of selfdoubt, and said he made music against the side of himself that would drag him down. his was a work against his shadow side: “i’m not sure if it reaches the psychological level of self-actualisation, but it is close enough to it because i wouldn’t have known how to express myself if it wasn’t for music”. peter (22) was a young producer also aspiring to make commercially popular music. i first met him after a performance at sidechain toward the end of my fieldwork. as soon as the music began, my ears pricked up. everything was fat, sharp and clean, and the harmonies were really good. peter’s investment in his craft was evident in his production quality. at our interview he told me how he allocated a few hours a day to the process. he was happy to try and make music a career but only by doing music he liked, although he hoped other people would enjoy it. peter considered self-development in music as facing what you did not know, particularly at the performance stage when he said it was easy to stop learning. as an example, he suggested taking a break from song-writing to learn a new synth until you were confident with it, as it was easy to get distracted by just making songs. music had always been an emotional outlet for peter. he recounted how teenage awkwardness had been relieved through learning the guitar and how to write expressively, a process he had transplanted into making electronic music on ableton. he saw society becoming more “closed off ” in terms of physical interaction with each other because of social media and considered music as a way to understand himself and express emotions. his accounts spoke of an inherent sincerity and honesty in self-composed music that was always emergent, regardless of conscious intention. peter: when you are making music, you are letting out your subconscious emotions. even if you don’t think you are doing it, you are. you just make something and then you think, well that is a part of me, that was in me somewhere but now i have got it. it was important to distance these stories of self-development from a neoliberal agenda of entrepreneurialism, consumption choices and self-aggrandisement. these accounts placed the studio as a separate space, physically and psychologically, from the normative ideals and control structures of society, which emphasized the liberating creativity of the present moment. the studio allowed the development of subjectivity through music; it enabled the music maker to answer what jenkins considered a fundamental stirnerian question: “have i been able to determine what and who i am?” ( jenkins 2014: 19). the studio as refuge while advances in computing and communication enabled more people “to envisage themselves as active producers of information, knowledge, capability and meaning” (stalder 2016: 22), such technologies have also been considered as a lubricant for the spread of dancecult 12(1)56 globalisation and neoliberalism.16 in the contemporary condition of late-capitalism, debt servitude, right wing populism and post-fordist work practices conspired to encourage alienation and paranoia.17 optimism around the potential of capitalism to open avenues for more varied forms of independent work ignored the reality that creative opportunities were used by many in adelaide during their free time as an escape and as a way to deal with contextual conditions.18 making music had elements of diversion and the chance to live vicariously through creative activity, and stirner’s own biography revealed some uncanny parallels with studio practice. carroll said of the writer that “a drab and inconsequential reality was compensated by an assertive philosophy concerned with limitless possibility” (1971: 17). research by gross and musgrave confirmed the importance of music to a person’s well-being and sense of self-identity, but they also stressed that the precarity and conditions of the environment a person worked in was the source of problems with mental health (2017: 7). for many of my interlocutors the studio provided a safe space, an opportunity to disengage from the restrictions and pressures of external conditions but also to envisage an alternative. roy (18) saw the studio as a refuge and path of self-discovery. his studio set-up was basic; using ableton and a couple of hardware synths, he sang his own songs along to his music. this process allowed him to be “super-personal”, more than he felt he could be with his friends. roy: it is like my deepest feelings, my deepest thoughts and emotions. really just enjoying that with myself. that is what i feel is the beauty of making music, because it just enables you to do that. i suppose that it is like an escape, to make music for me. just an escape from everything, just zone out, just like go into my own world, and create my own art, and just feel comfortable with it. although he considered himself something of a “misfit” in his school community, roy felt his style of music has helped other people understand and accept what he was like and how he was feeling. music had become all about freeing himself up to “do whatever the hell i want”. his recent album, released on bandcamp and spotify, contained songs that related to him personally and to how he thought other people might feel in society. he said that in helping him reflect on who he was as a person, making music had been a huge part of his personal growth and developing maturity. roy: i am slowly learning my own morals and everything on the way as a result. i feel it is definitely really important, it is the direction i would like to keep going, to keep making music, and learning from my own music, and learning about myself through my own artistic process. andy (43) evidenced similar attitudes to his music practice. a veteran of adelaide electronic music, he told me stories of the heyday of rave in the city, when it was easy to get venues in the abandoned buildings of the inner city. we discovered a shared a punk background, a biographical feature of six other male interlocutors from across the age range in my chambers | the studio as contemporary autonomous zone 57 research, that signalled a possible musical and ideological rite of passage. now he preferred to “hunker down” in the studio with a nord drum machine and modular gear to focus on creating quality and “timeless music”. again, the studio’s value as an expressive conduit and safe haven were made clear: andy: i couldn’t survive without it; it is a sanctuary for me. i know that i can walk in there and kind of almost decompress life through it. . . . the way you are feeling really comes out in the sounds you are creating. andy said he had to have an artistic outlet, a voice in the world, or he “would go crazy”. electronic music could be this outlet because there was more room for different frequencies that were emotive and could create and communicate feeling. he was in no doubt that music and self-development were like a symbiotic process, “like a therapy process”. at the present moment with “the world in turmoil”, he found himself returning to the ideals of punk, using music as a platform to express hidden statements in some of his tracks. he said he always had hope and had seen it in the youth and their desire to save the planet. moe (29) was a producer/performer currently leading a high-profile existence in adelaide edmc. she had a savvy and strategic media presence, and she described herself in our interview as the “social media queen”. many of her posts and promotional shots featured glamourous poses and scenes of hedonism and hands-in-the-air elation. yet when she discussed her social media “brand” in our interview, moe acknowledged there was a certain happy and bubbly persona that she had to maintain. she told me how she would suppress aspects of her personality, such as illness or depression, because she did not want to show weakness or engender sympathy. as a self-confessed “control freak” with a past in band performance, the studio allowed moe the space to work to her own timeframe, to play and record everything herself through ableton. music allowed moe the opportunity to mine her emotional history, to transmute autobiography into therapeutic release through music and lyrics. she described the process as “more like a therapy for me, what i’m going through”. she thought of music as an extension of herself, especially in “darker themes” which she felt could be relatable for people going through hard times; perhaps it helped them to know others had experienced the same feelings. jay (39), a hip-hop producer well-known locally in the genre’s australian “golden age” of the early 2000s, was similarly forthright about the therapeutic value music provided in his life. he made music on logic but highly valued “crate-digging” for elusive sampling gold. i conducted the interview in a food hall in a southern suburb of adelaide, and it was clear by the frequent waves and smiles to passers-by as we talked that he was well-known in the local community. yet jay confided bouts of depression that coincided with a relationship separation. music was the medium he used to get through this episode. jay: i really used it as a therapy, i had a lot of drama, when i was making a beat i was off with the fairies, so i used it as therapy, i was unhappy, and a lot of my good music came from being unhappy. dancecult 12(1)58 jay reported that the music he made was not political in the protest sense but was deeply connected to his individual experiences. he was adamant that he wanted to prove his individuality, and he reasoned upon reflection that he was driven by himself and by a desire to contribute to australian music more broadly. although jay said the times when people had told him his music had helped them through life were important, music as therapy and self-development was not dependent on positive feedback and validation from others. instead he felt “you should always be expanding. like anything in life, you should always be learning”. amber (24) was a classically-trained musician for whom the computer made it easy to sequence music without having to own instruments. a lack of finance kept her studio down to a laptop, soundcard and headphones. she used fl studio, a daw at the more affordable end of music production. amber saw herself as a musician, artist and writer and described creativity as the “centre” of her identity. “i think i am a very individualistic kind of person, to be honest, i have a bit of an ego, and that’s why i see myself as an artist”. like many other producers at the creative coalface, genre took second place to personal expression, as amber proclaimed an aim to be different from everyone else and not influenced by trends. in a poignant moment in the interview, when she talked about promoting inclusivity in her music that extended to all humans and species, a small bird flew down to her feet. like others in this article, amber wanted her music to move others on an emotional level; in her case, her listener might have considered their “spiritual connection” with the land. she said her lyrics could be taken as political and she made music against those who wanted to uphold the status quo, or who were “selfish and unaware of their privilege”. but most often her music was more about escape. she felt a sense of helplessness and despair for the generations to come and, while optimistic about the tolerance of the young, she wanted her music to be an escape from austerity as well as a reminder. “its real bleak. . . . we all need to escape from reality when it gets too dark, too horrid. but we also need to be reminded about it so we do something about it if we can”. the studio provided a refuge from the pressures of existential angst, a physical space that could alleviate the alienation of late-capitalism and release feelings that may have been easier to express elsewhere in less-restrictive periods in the past. while stirner found his own identity and independence through his writing, music for my participants worked to survive or subvert contemporary conditions; it functioned as a fulfilling creative practice and as an outlet for generating affinity and micro-ethical expression. the studio as resistance stirner’s solutions to ensuring the individual requirements of living through the need for collective enterprise were transitory associations of egoists; the micro-political and ethical strategies he favoured needed to be created for people by themselves. rather than committing to cooperative goals or serving altruistic intentions, each egoist would benefit from undertaking a shared activity of mutual interest (shone 2013: 233). this kind of informal social arrangement based on shared affinity resonated with the patchwork of chambers | the studio as contemporary autonomous zone 59 micro-scenes, networked interest groups and shifting taste coalitions that characterised the contemporary adelaide electronic music milieu. sharing some parallels with cooper’s conception everyday utopias, the city’s sonic socialities and music studios could be viewed as networks and spaces that offered the chance to perform everyday life in a different fashion, creating change by building new forms of experiencing the world (2014: 227). many of my interlocutors revealed an ethical driver to their creative practice, one that did not fit with any defined political identity or allegiance. while for some this was about choosing to ignore the political, seeking an escape and release from real world pressures, for others their music was an explicit part of an ethical identity through which they could express and comment upon the experiences of day to day living. one of the emerging features of adelaide electronic music was the rise of singer-songwriters utilising electronics and vocals in their recorded works and performance. i encountered producers singing or speaking the lyrics of a personal statement about themselves, their relationships, vulnerabilities and values along to their own productions, often accompanied by little more than a laptop and midi controller, unencumbered by any need to make people dance. it was expressed by one of my interlocutors, ali (22), as writing music “in terms of a realism people can relate to”. ali was a classically-trained musician who had realised composing her own music, rather than playing someone else’s, was far more fulfilling. she turned to the laptop because it allowed her to make “radio-worthy” music more easily. ali used the laptop as a midi controller and sequencer—playing notes in by hitting letters on the laptop keyboard or drawing them in on the ableton graphic user interface timeline—to overcome certain musical weaknesses like drumming.19 she also enjoyed the problem-solving part of the process: “like i hear something in a track, and i want to do that and i don’t know how to do that. i will literally sit there for two hours until i figure out how to do it”. the internet’s resources for cracked software allowed her to try out an array of studio tools, and she felt some of the plug-ins now available could “make anything sound amazing”. her current music reflected her own circumstances of life. ali: i don’t write new music about a certain topic, you know. like a social stance or something. but i do write music that i feel relates to people my age in terms of realism and just how it is to be like alive and living in your own bubble. not everyone was relying on the spoken word to channel these understandings. the gentle music of william (23) articulated a connection to geographic place with a sense of the political firmly rooted in personal experience. he described his music as process-driven and very much based in the computer where he began with a “seed of audio”, a sample or riff which went through various processes to get something he wanted. sound was something malleable, pulling details out, chopping it all up, reversing and stretching. he described his work as music to fall asleep to, or that would sit with you, as music that that allowed for melancholy and was open to interpretation. for william it was a way of dealing with life. he likened his practice to mindfulness and being in “the zone” for long periods. dancecult 12(1)60 william’s music was designed for connected listening and intimate engagement, for a focus on the subtle changes and dynamics that could convey the conceptual intentions of the composer. it was also aimed at others; william made it available to torrent for free in a low sound quality format, as well as through bandcamp at a higher bit rate. he considered music a part of bringing society closer together, and he started a label with friends in order to “be the change”. while he thought about the prevailing context of the times when composing, he viewed his music as more of a subjective journey, exploring personal issues. william: i’m not one for obvious stuff. . . . it gets to a point where you are not looking at frequencies, you are not looking at what you are hearing, you are looking at what you are actually feeling in your gut as you are doing it. this sense of an inner moral compass was echoed by red robin (35), a prolific musician with a similar commitment to music as process. he saw his practice as an effort to express an understanding of the world he lived in, an attempt to make it a “better” place though whatever means and skills he had to do so. a long-running piece of sound art he was working on explored the famous 1865 goyder’s line that delineated the boundary of land in south australia that received sufficient rainfall to allow cropping. due to climate change, recent projections had brought the line further southwards. characteristic of many of his recordings it brought together a strong sense of place and an ecological sensibility. the work consisted of two saw tooth waves fed into a vocoder and outboard effects. the carrier frequency was based upon the traditional goyder’s line and the second was the modulation frequency, based on a prediction of the future trajectory of goyder’s line incorporating climate change. the sounds played against each other, creating a drone and subtle modulations. the programming software max msp in ableton live was used to map the lines, and the piece conveyed the sparseness of the landscape that inspired red’s work. although stressing that his work was firmly bounded in reality, red was drawn to the dystopian near-future science fiction of the black mirror television series. he viewed the contemporary times as weird and dangerous, “terrified of climate change”; it is this terror from which his music was an escape and to which his music offered a challenge. red: the best thing i can do for the sake of my optimism and my mental health and sustaining relationships and friendships with people, before i take to the streets with a sandwich-board shouting the end is nigh, is really working within my own space. i interviewed nix (34) shortly after his attendance at an outback “diy survivalist” festival. a veteran of experimental free jazz and psych rock bands for around 15 years, he now preferred to perform and improvise electronic music with hardware. most of his gear was bought second-hand and housed in a home-made road-case on a self-built table. he felt most of the music he was making with a poet collaborator was all about “the potential apocalypse”, with lots of dark eerie textures. nix: there is often this kind-of immanence, and this feeling of something is about to happen, or you are in this zone of the unknown, and stuff like that. and i do feel that we are in a place where things could just easily topple over the edge at any time. chambers | the studio as contemporary autonomous zone 61 nix considered his music and art was all part of a process of “constant self-development and transformation” that tied into a spiritual understanding of himself as a “part of everything else”. his music was an attempt to help catalyse and transform the people and everything around him, to get “myself and people moving to the next step where they need to be, keep going forward and growing, not in some linear evolutionary terms, but just however you want to see it”. nix’s music articulated these aspects in himself as “a personal, self-driven thing” that he wanted to share with others to make them “feel inspired or uplifted or intense or whatever”. a sense of self-construction was a major part of his art, personal path and mythology: “i’ve started to come to terms with and understand the feeling there’s a role. . . . it’s a constant self-development, and its transformation”. nix’s comments seemed to combine a stirnerian sense of self-mastery with a distinctly social dimension, to fuse music’s potential for instigating a personal sense of renewal with a wider social project. there was a sense in these accounts of an ethical foundation for creative practice from music-makers engaged with an open and personal sense of what constituted the political outside of fixed ideologies. stirner’s psychological focus on change saw improvement occurring through individual effort and collective understanding, rather than through causes and ideals (newman 2011a: 9). the studio was a means to articulate fears and relieve existential anxieties but also to affect and nurture a sense of affinity with others. conclusion it was clear when talking to people about music practice that self-expression was considered valuable in and of itself, regardless of whether you could make a living from it. as the space for this to happen, the studio was the story behind the music you listened to and the tunes you danced to, from big room anthems and tech house chuggers to modular explorations and ambient excursions. away from festival euphoria and the excitement of clubland or gallery chatter, as a music maker, sooner or later, it was just you and the machines. every creative ego has to deal with its own. in a society saturated in digital communication channels and media seductions, in moral panics and negative news, the studio was a chance for my interlocutors to disable distractions and enter “the zone”, an unrestricted play space and uninterrupted flow state. given the number of people that talked of music practice as therapy, it was possible to see music practice as a form of spiritual and philosophical estrangement from many aspects of contemporary life: technologies of control, climate change, growing wealth disparity and precarity and an economic condition that prioritised desire over meaningful fulfilment. the importance of creativity to health and well-being was supported by the centrality of music practice to my interlocutors’ lives. the limitations of applying a nineteenth century philosopher’s ideas to twenty-first century music producers were obvious. what about digitalisation and dynamic range? streaming platforms and social media? while changes in external context are constant, dancecult 12(1)62 the internal challenges of finding meaning and satisfaction in them are timeless. there was something in stirner’s insistence for individuals to work it out for themselves that held as true today as ever. his non-prescriptive openness and belief in the individual fit well with the wide cast of colourful characters from my research who resisted any reductionist move to essentialise identity, let alone musical style. stirner argued that the egoist could freely determine their own practices, relations and ways of living outside of the control of centralized institutions. he perceptively saw through the hollow illusions of the emerging political and economic landscape, the sacrificial subservience to ideals of freedom, democracy and progress. his philosophy of ownness was a refutation of passivity and leaving things to others. the exhortation to conscious egoism and ethical responsibility appeared as a different path for liberation and psychological wellbeing, different from waiting for government policy, benevolent capitalism or “leaders” that always disappointed. i argue that in the contemporary autonomous zone of the studio, in attitude and spirit, many music makers have come to a similar conclusion. acknowledgements this work was supported by the provision of an australian government research training program scholarship. no potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. notes 1 for a succinct overview of stirner’s ideas and influence on anarchist benjamin tucker, see steve shone’s “max stirner: hanging out with one’s own” in american anarchism (2013: 207-35). shone’s focus is on what stirner’s individualist approach can contribute to those dissatisfied with the contemporary political system in america. 2 autonomy is defined here as “self-determination” (hesmondhalgh 2010: 235). 3 resistance here is used in both of moore’s conceptualisations of the term: as “symbolically subversive practices” that can be vulnerable to being subsumed into consumer culture; and as the active engagement in resisting “the dominant ideologies encoded in the texts and commodities they consume” (2011: 1213). 4 see marshall 2010 on bakunin’s collectivist anarchism; kropotkin 1902 on kropotkin’s non-hierarchical organisation; and mueller (2018) on recent debates that use the collectivist approaches of proudhon. 5 other scholarly interest in stirner has focussed on questions of anarchist orthodoxy (e.g. schmidt and van der walt [2009] and ferguson [2011]) or philosophical interpretation (e.g. welsh [2010] and jenkins [2014]). 6 see for example bourdieu’s 1984 text distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste. 7 i use straw’s understanding of the term “scene” here to denote the multiple aspects of electronic music practice in adelaide (2014: 477). 8 28 of 47 (with an average age of 30.5) replied that the wider context of world events and social issues was significantly reflected in their music practice. 2 of 47 (with an average age of 27.5) chambers | the studio as contemporary autonomous zone 63 were unsure and 17 of 47 (with an average age of 29) said that there was no connection. 9 12 of 17 said instead that their music was all about their personal and/or emotional experiences. 10 23 of 62 of my interlocutors said their practice functioned as a form of therapy, with an average age of 30.6. this figure may be conservative as the theme emerged during interviews and became further explored as the research progressed. 11 a digital audio workstation is an all-in-one music software platform that provides a virtual studio complete with instruments, effects and a timeline architecture in which to combine the elements of music production. 12 jersey club is an electronic dance music genre, developing in the nineties, with a fast 130-140 bpm tempo and characterised by chopped staccato beats and vocals. 13 audacity is a free recording and audio editing application software. 14 gearslutz is one of several online electronic music producer forums that emerged in the 2000s as a site for discussion between music makers of varying levels of experience, and as a resource for researching and reviewing music making equipment. 15 a basic tracker is sequencing software characterised by positioning notes on a vertical timeline. it is heavily dependent on the use of samples. 16 taylor claimed digital technologies were not only facilitating neoliberal policies but had helped to introduce them into work and culture (2015: 120). 17 for more on the contemporary condition of late capitalism, see stahl (2010), braidotti (2013) and harvey (2018). 18 see florida (2004) and banks (2010) for optimistic takes on capitalism and creative work. 19 musical instrument digital interface is a communications protocol to connect instruments such as synthesizers or samplers via cable or usb so they can communicate with each other. references ashford, david. 2015. “‘a new concept of egoism’: the late modernism of ayn rand”. modernism / modernity 21(4): 977–95. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mod.2014.0084>. banks, mark. 2010. “autonomy guaranteed? cultural work and the ‘art–commerce relation’”. journal of cultural research 14(3): 251-69. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14797581003791487>. bey, hakim. 1991. t.a.z: the temporary autonomous zone, ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism. brooklyn: autonomedia. <https://hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont>, (accessed 13 october 2020). born, georgina. 2010. “for a relational musicology: music and interdisciplinarity, beyond the practice turn”. journal of the royal musical association 135(2): 205-43. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02690403.2010.506265>. born, georgina and christopher tilley. 2011. “music and the materialization of identities.” journal of material culture 16(4): 376–88. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1359183511424196>. bourdieu, pierre. 1984. distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste. london: routledge & kegan paul. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mod.2014.0084 https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14797581003791487 https://hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02690403.2010.506265 https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1359183511424196 dancecult 12(1)64 braidotti, rosi. 2013. the posthuman. cambridge & malden: polity press. carroll, john. 1971. “introduction”. in max stirner: the ego and his own, ed. john carroll, 11-36. london: jonathan cape. cooper, davina. 2014. everyday utopias: the conceptual life of promising spaces. durham: duke university press. denora, tia. 2006. “music and emotion in real time”. in consuming music together: social and collaborative aspects of music consumption technologies, eds. kenton o’hara & barry brown, 19-33. dordrecht, springer. ferguson, kathy e. 2011. “why anarchists need stirner”. in max stirner, ed. saul newman, 167-88. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. finnegan, ruth h. 1989. the hidden musicians: music-making in an english town. cambridge: cambridge university press. florida, richard. 2004. the rise of the creative class: and how it’s transforming work, leisure, community and everyday life. north melbourne, victoria: pluto press. frith, simon. 1996. “music and identity”. in questions of cultural identity, ed. stuart hall and paul du gay, 108-27. london: sage. gross, sally anne and george musgrave. 2017. “can music make you sick? a study into the incidence of musicians’ mental health part 2: qualitative study and recommendations”. commissioned by help musicians uk. university of westminster: musictank publishing. <https://www.helpmusicians.org.uk/assets/publications/files/can-music-make-you-sick-part2-qualitative-study-1.pdf>. harvey, david. 2018. “universal alienation”. journal for cultural research 22(2): 137-50. <https://dx.doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v16i2.1026>. hesmondhalgh, david. 2010. “normativity and social justice in the analysis of creative labour”. journal for cultural research 14(3): 231-49. <https://doi.org/10.1080/14797581003791461>. jenkins, john. 2009. “max stirner’s egoism”. heythrop journal 50(2): 243-56. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2265.2009.00444.x>. ———2014. “max stirner’s ontology”. international journal of philosophical studies 22(1): 3-26. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2013.857704>. jeong, boram. 2017. “theory of subjectification in gilles deleuze: a study of the temporality in capitalism”. phd dissertation (philosophy), duquesne university. <https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/170>, (accessed 13 october 2020). kropotkin, pëtr a. 1915. mutual aid: a factor of evolution. london: w. heinemann. leopold, david. 2011. “a solitary life”. in max stirner, ed. saul newman, 21-41. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. marshall, peter h. 2010. demanding the impossible: a history of anarchism. oakland, ca: pm press. moore, ryan. 2011. “resistance”. in encyclopedia of consumer culture, ed. dale southerton, 1213-17. thousand oaks: sage publications. mueller, gavin. 2018. “digital proudhonism”. boundary 2. 31 july. <https://www.boundary2.org/2018/07/mueller/>, (accessed 3 august 2019). https://dx.doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v16i2.1026 https://doi.org/10.1080/14797581003791461 https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2265.2009.00444.x https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2013.857704 https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/170 chambers | the studio as contemporary autonomous zone 65 newman, saul. 2011a. “introduction: re-encountering stirner’s ghosts”. in max stirner, ed. saul newman, 1-18. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. ———2011b. “stirner’s ethics of voluntary inservitude”. in max stirner, ed. saul newman, 189-209. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. ———2017. “‘ownness created a new freedom’: max stirner’s alternative concept of liberty”. critical review of international social and political philosophy 22(2): 155-75. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13698230.2017.1282801>. patterson, ronald w. k. 1971. the nihilistic egoist: max stirner. london: oxford university press. rapport, nigel. 2003. i am dynamite: an alternative anthropology of power. london: routledge. schmidt, michael and lucien van der walt. 2009. black flame: the revolutionary class politics of anarchism and syndicalism. oakland, ca: ak press. shone, steve j. 2013. american anarchism. boston: brill. stahl, m. (2010). “cultural labor’s ‘democratic deficits’: employment, autonomy and alienation in us film animation”. journal for cultural research 14(3), 271-93. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14797581003791495>. stalder, felix. 2018. the digital condition. cambridge, uk & medford, ma: polity press. stirner, max. 1971. the ego and his own. london: jonathan cape. straw, will. 2014. “some things a scene might be”. cultural studies 23(3): 476-85. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2014.937947>. taylor, timothy. 2015. music and capitalism: a history of the present. chicago: university of chicago press. welsh, john f. 2010. max stirner’s dialectical egoism: a new interpretation. plymouth, uk: blue ridge summit, lexington books. filmography brooker, charlie. 2016. black mirror. uk: netflix. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2085059/>. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13698230.2017.1282801 https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14797581003791495 https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2014.937947 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2085059/ delian modes: listening for delia derbyshire in histories of electronic dance music dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 9(1): 9–27 issn 1947-5403 ©2017 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2017.09.01.01 delian modes: listening for delia derbyshire in histories of electronic dance music frances morgan royal college of art (uk) abstract this paper examines the work of english composer and sound designer delia derbyshire (1937-2001) in the context of histories of edm and historical accounts of women in electronic music. examining the media discourse around derbyshire, whose reputation has grown significantly since her death, i consider how derbyshire has come to be regarded posthumously as both a pioneering electronic composer and a forerunner of dance music and electronica in the uk. i consider how these identities are related to her gender, and how gender is constructed and expressed in the discourse around her life and work, with reference to the musical-critical phenomenon of hauntology. keywords: delia derbyshire, bbc radiophonic workshop, electronica, feminist histories, archival practice, music blogging, music journalism, hauntology, fan studies frances morgan is a music and media critic based in london. a contributing editor to the wire magazine, she is currently a phd candidate in the critical writing in art & design department at the royal college of art, researching the history of ems in collaboration with the science museum. she has recently published articles in organised sound, fylkingen tongues, the wire and sight & sound. feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2017.09.01.01 dancecult 9(1)10 1. delia derbyshire’s life and legacy delia derbyshire (1937–2001) occupies a unique place in histories of electronic music. the music and sound design that she created while working at the bbc radiophonic workshop, london, between 1963 and 1973 was heard by countless viewers and listeners of tv and radio; yet—like many of her colleagues—she was not regarded primarily as a composer, but as a creator of what the bbc termed “special sound”, that is to say radiophonic sound effects, as well as electronic realisations of music composed by others.1 born in coventry, in the east midlands, and educated in music and mathematics at cambridge university, in 1963 derbyshire was employed by the radiophonic workshop, an adjunct of the bbc’s drama department set up in 1958 to provide sound effects for radio dramas. the workshop expanded to provide electronic themes for numerous tv and radio dramas, documentaries and news programmes throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s. derbyshire’s best –known work was an electronic realisation of the composer ron grainer’s theme tune to dr who, the hugely popular science fiction series. the dr who theme, which was the first electronic tv theme tune to be broadcast on british tv, is instantly recognisable to generations of viewers in the uk and worldwide. many of derbyshire’s compositions abandon the conventions of the soundtrack music of their time, and are closer in form and intention to classical electronic or electroacoustic works. pieces such as “the delian mode” and “blue veils and yellow sands” (derbyshire, bbc radiophonic music, 1968), for example, are structured around slow transformations and shifting layers of sound with the aim of exploring subtleties of pitch and timbre. desmond briscoe, the former head of the workshop, recalled that, “mathematics of sound came naturally to [derbyshire] and she could take a set of figures and build them into music in a way quite different from anyone else”, creating “very beautiful–almost unearthly–and quite remarkable music” (briscoe 1983). however, soon after leaving the bbc in 1973, derbyshire retreated from music, composing only in private, if at all. shortly before her death, derbyshire’s work from the 1960s and ’70s started to be reappraised by electronic and rock musicians, as well as those interested in histories of british broadcasting, and she became recognised as an innovator of electronic music. since 2001, interest in derbyshire’s life and work has grown rapidly. on the one hand, derbyshire’s posthumous recognition is part of a more general reappraisal of the pioneering work done by the bbc radiophonic workshop during the years derbyshire worked there, as scholars of electronic music and media, as well as the bbc itself, have come to recognise the value of the workshop’s output. however, it is derbyshire in particular who has entered the wider cultural imagination, prompting scholarly attention (niebur 2010; winter 2015), kara blake’s documentary film the delian mode (2009), a stage play (standing wave, nicola mccarthy 2004), a radio docu-drama (blue veils and golden sands, martyn ware 2002), museum exhibits, and the vinyl release of rare recordings such as the soundtrack to anthony roland’s film circle of light (composed by derbyshire with artist elsa stansfield in 1972 and released by trunk records in 2016). derbyshire has been visually represented morgan | delian modes 11 on t-shirts and posters. she is frequently cited in list-based articles about pioneers of electronic music, particularly those that focus on female musicians. her position as one of a small number of female practitioners to have worked in the radiophonic workshop has caused her to be celebrated as a role model for women working in all forms of electronic music and music technology. in the circulation of images of her at work in the workshop, she can be said to have become iconic. in 2017, which would have been the year of her eightieth birthday, a series of events organised under the heading delia derbyshire day took place around the uk.2 initially a grassroots initiative set up in manchester in 2012 by electronica artist caro c, delia derbyshire day is now a publicly funded touring event, working in collaboration with derbyshire’s archive at the university of manchester, as well as other partners including the prs (performing rights society) fund for new music, full of noises festival and digital women’s archive north. these events included educational workshops for schoolchildren, premieres of new audiovisual works by emerging artists, and lectures from derbyshire’s former radiophonic workshop colleagues. delia derbyshire day provides a useful illustration of derbyshire’s current status in uk public arts culture and the way in which her legacy has been instrumentalised to promote new and emerging artists whose work responds to hers. less explored, and less formally recognised, has been the relationship between the growth of delia derbyshire’s legacy and certain movements in british electronic dance music culture; and the position of derbyshire within media discourse around edm. this paper examines how the music of derbyshire—and the persona with which her music is inextricably entwined—has been adopted into several edm histories. one is the history of women’s involvement in edm; another is a more locally situated narrative about electronic dance music and electronica in the uk. in this paper i ask why the authors of these narratives have been eager to claim derbyshire as a pioneer in a form with which she had no personal involvement, and consider the basis of these claims by drawing on selected works by the composer. i consider derbyshire’s legacy from the perspective of feminist historical and archival practice as well as with reference to the musical-critical phenomenon of hauntology (reynolds 2006, 2011; fisher 2014; pattie 2016). 2. electronic music histories, underground media and fandoms through my citation of articles and other texts published by the bbc, mixmag, dj, the wire and various blogs in this paper, i acknowledge the importance of all kinds of media in shaping perceptions of electronic music’s history and its current practice (while acknowledging that “the media” is being used here as shorthand for very different forms of discourse ranging from marketing copy on a music retail site to an independent print magazine). the media play a key role in presenting, framing and delineating areas of music in which such traditional genre boundaries demarcating “popular” and “classical”, or, say, “edm” and “ambient’, or “techno” and “noise” are blurred or problematised; they also, dancecult 9(1)12 increasingly, present accounts of electronic music history, which might otherwise remain an area of specialist study, to a general public that includes groups such as record collectors, music technology enthusiasts and edm fans. in “pioneer spirits: new media representations of women in electronic music history” (morgan 2017: 238–49), i argue that, “print and online media play a role in making visible certain aspects of electronic music history to consumers who might also be practising musicians, music scholars, and potential researchers”, while “[a]cademic writers and researchers exploring the relations between gender, sound and technology increasingly use the same platforms as online critics to discuss, promote and present their interests” (morgan 2017: 239). in other words, many of us occupy multiple identities, as readers, consumers, scholars, fans, and practitioners, and our use of media is equally diverse, overlapping and multi-directional. this is especially the case in areas whose scholarship still occupies a marginal position in the academy, such as scholarship of edm, and the scholarship of feminist and other activist practices. while stories concerning electronic music histories and celebrating post-war electronic music pioneers have become prevalent in popular music media of all kinds in the last decade, delia derbyshire was one of the first figures to be recognised in this way, as underground, non-commercial and user-generated media began to amplify her life and work in the late 1990s and early 2000s. a key driver of delia derbyshire’s posthumous recognition has been the activities of musician-enthusiasts such as pete kember (aka sonic boom from the band spacemen 3), drew mulholland, and john cavanagh, who carried out interviews with derbyshire in the years shortly before her death (kember 2000; cavanagh 1998),3 and martin guy, who set up the website delia-derbyshire.net and subsequently wikidelia; as well as the members of the delia derbyshire mailing list, which has been running since 2003.4 the work of guy and other independent historians to catalogue and make public derbyshire’s music through underground media channels has been complicated by formalisation of the delia derbyshire archive, the contents of which were acquired by manchester university’s centre for screen studies from derbyshire’s former colleague mark ayres, in 2009, and are now held at the john ryland library.5 although guy has visited the archive, he is critical of what he considers to be its lack of accessibility to the public, writing, with regard to derbyshire’s unpublished tapes, “someone should just put it all on the peer-to-peer file sharing network but so far no one [who is] able to [do this] has taken the initiative” (guy 2017). it is clear that guy’s continuous amassing and cataloguing of material relating to delia derbyshire is in part a means of expressing his affection for her, which he reveals in more personal reflections, writing that, derbyshire “has visited me in dreams many times, always a positive, encouraging, sometimes delighted figure” (guy 2017). although a detailed study of this area is beyond the reach of this essay, it would be informative to look at fan-led media projects such as wikidelia and the electronic church of st delia in the context of cult fandom as described by matt hills (2002), in order to analyse in more detail how notions of gender are constructed and expressed in different morgan | delian modes 13 kinds of electronic music histories. wikidelia meets the criteria of cult fandom in the sense that its relationship to derbsyhire is highly affective and emotional; the project is enduring rather than transient; and it is based around a subject who is no longer living (hills 2002: x) to think of wikidelia, and other such user-led projects, as products of fandom is not to trivialise them or detract from their validity as acts of research, but to understand them as being produced as part of the formation of a fan identity, which is an identity that “performs cultural work” (hills 2002). while the construction and expression of gender within fandom is a complex topic, it seems clear that the fan’s experience of certain texts or figures within cult fandom is related to “the social experience of gender as well as to the iteration of gender codes” (hills 2002: 127). an investigation of derbyshire fandom would also allow for reflection upon the differences and similarities between male, female and gender non-conforming fans’ perceptions of derbyshire, considering how their fandom is performed and through which kinds of creative activities. for example, initiatives such as delia derbyshire day could be examined for their roots in fandom by women musicians, as could the production of the feminist histories of electronic music as described in section 5. it is of course possible, as catherine grant argues in her study of the influence of second-wave feminism on contemporary art, to be a “fan of feminism” (grant 2011); and it is by writing through my own tentative identity as a ”scholar-fan”, pace hills, of both electronic music and feminist criticism, that i develop many of the arguments in this paper.6 to return to the example given above, i suggest that guy’s characterisation of derbyshire as a benevolent apparition that visits him in his dreams to thank him for his archival efforts is a highly gendered expression of his fandom; and that similarly gendered expressions can be found, albeit less overtly, in more professional, objective accounts of derbyshire in “official” media accounts. although this more mainstream discourse around derbyshire does not always objectify her as explicitly as a fan discourse might, it frequently combines an uncritical admiration with a desire to own and assess previously unheard material that she may or may not have intended for public consumption. as histories of post-war electronic music become a more familiar part of the media discourse around certain forms of electronica and edm, there has also been an increase in releases of archival electronic music by labels also associated with new electronica, experimental music and edm, such as public information,7 as well as the formation of new imprints, series and sub-labels specifically for such releases.8 in some cases, the language and marketing structures associated with micro-genres of dance music have been assimilated by labels that release archival recordings of electronic composition. i propose that this is not merely a pragmatic commercial decision—in that a retailer like boomkat sells electronic music of all kinds and delivers these musics in a similar way regardless of genre—but that it acknowledges a shared territory between what we might call post-war electronic music (that is to say, modernist electronic music realised primarily in academic and broadcasting studios during the post-second world war period) and certain areas of edm culture. dancecult 9(1)14 in the following section i discuss some examples of how delia derbyshire’s work has been positioned within this territory as both representative of its time and uncannily predictive of various dance music futures. i ask what identities and desires are articulated in these claims and how derbyshire’s gender both encourages and problematises this discourse. 3. possible futures: delia derbyshire as rave prophetess in this section, i discuss a number of media stories that position delia derbyshire’s music as predictive of electronica and edm. in part (i) i look at the discovery of previously unheard tapes that were greeted by some media outlets as “evidence” of derbyshire’s pioneering use of technology which leads her to produce music that sounds like edm. in part (ii), i examine how a similar claim has been made for derbyshire’s prescience in making music that sounds “proto-rave”; however, this claim is made from a musical-cultural perspective rather than a technological one. in both accounts, i argue, we can see how derbyshire has been framed within narratives of music technology and music journalism as a figure through whom authors can express certain ideas about musical and technological futures. (i) “now as much as then” in 2008, the bbc website ran a story about the discovery of an archive of delia derbyshire’s tapes (these recordings went on to become the basis of the derbyshire archive). the story accompanied an instalment of pm, a general magazine programme on bbc radio 4. the article paid particular attention to a piece of music that “sounds like a contemporary dance track, which was recorded, it is believed, in the late sixties” (wrench 2008). musician paul hartnoll, from the group orbital, was quoted as saying that the music “…could be coming out next week on [left-field dance label] warp records… it’s incredible when you think when it comes from. timeless, really. it could be now as much as then” (wrench 2008). this aspect of the story was picked up by music technology websites including music radar, which ran a story under the headline, “new evidence that doctor who composer invented dance music” (rogerson 2008) and create digital media (cdm) (create digital media 2008a). the music in question is a piece named “dance from noah” (derbyshire, sounds from… ems, 1972), written for the bbc schools programme and first broadcast in may 1971. it was also included on a promotional flexi disc produced by the synthesiser company ems (electronic music studios), whose synthesisers derbyshire used to realise the piece. “dance from noah” is a short cue consisting of a percussion track overlaid with a simple bass figure. the time signature appears to be one of derbyshire’s favoured compound ones, in this case 12/8, although it is hard to define precisely. there is a lead melody consisting of two or three almost identical phrases, and a counterpoint that signals the cycling of the melody back to the first phrase halfway through the cue and modulates between f major and f minor. while there are elements in the track’s melodic content that are reminiscent of synthesizer lines from electro or techno music, the use of counterpoint and the staccato morgan | delian modes 15 and harpsichord-like tone of the second melody line owe as much to derbyshire’s fondness for baroque keyboard music. the rhythmic aspects of “dance from noah” are more noteworthy. in repurposing sounds such as white noise and a low frequency oscillator to create its beats, rather than a drum machine or sampled percussion, it could be aligned with experimental forms of techno in which texture is used for rhythmic purposes, such as the music of pan sonic. the focus on rhythmic layering and the relation of rhythm to meter provides the clearest link to the way edm is structured; while the fragmentary nature of the track leaves its development open to question in a way that makes it consistent with the longer, gradually unfolding structures of a dance track. the excitement that greeted the track was due to that fact that, because of the way it was presented on the radio show, it was thought to date from the time in which derbyshire had access only to sound generators and tape-splicing techniques–which would make “dance from noah” truly remarkable. hartnoll commented: i’ve got a shedload of synthesizers and equipment, whereas delia derbyshire got out of the radiophonic workshop when synthesizers came along. i think she got a bit disheartened and a bit bored with it all when the synthesizer came along and it all became a little too easy (wrench 2008). however, while it is true that derbyshire left the bbc radiophonic workshop soon after the workshop began using synthesizers widely, and was known not to enjoy using them as much as tape techniques (niebur 2010: chapter 4), she was also an early adopter of the ems vcs3, an instrument whose sound would not be unfamiliar to paul hartnoll as it is well-known as the first british-made commercial synthesizer. the misapprehension was corrected by archivist david butler on the cdm message board, after some commenters wondered if the track was a fake, as they had surmised that it must have been created using a synthesizer (cdm 2008b). in the presentation of this story, we can see how derbyshire’s technical mastery is foregrounded so much so that it is portrayed inaccurately and becomes the subject of a message board debate. the desire to present derbyshire as someone who was so preternaturally skilled that she could actually work outside of the realms of musical-technological possibility is apparent in hartnoll’s comments, as is a need to frame the music within a familiar context of underground edm: that of the uk label warp records. derbyshire is thus presented as an outlier who can nonetheless be situated within a continuum of british underground electronic music that, in the case of warp-released artists such as aphex twin and boards of canada, has taken influence from the music created by the bbc radiophonic workshop. here we see how the listener, with the help of information they have been given, co-creates the (history of the) music, adding to it their own desires, references, practices and memories.9 in foregrounding derbyshire’s technical mastery, hartnoll and the writers and commenters of cdm perpetuate a techno-deterministic narrative that not only situates derbyshire as primarily a technological innovator, rather than a composer whose interest dancecult 9(1)16 in the mathematics of sound far outweighed her interest in hardware, but also suggests that technological innovation is the most important factor in discussing electronic music’s history and development. this is not an uncommon attitude within electronic music; yet i would argue that it is a problematic one that prioritises masculinised ideas of technological achievement in which “to be in command of the very latest technology signifies being involved in directing the future” (wacjman 1991: 144). here, knowledge of the history of music technology, as well as possession of its tools (the “shedload of synthesizers”), is used by hartnoll to demonstrate his own position of power and authority in relation to derbyshire’s history. the commenters on cdm also participate in a techno-deterministic dialogue in which they doubt derbyshire’s authorship of the track based on their knowledge of music technology—authorship which is in question until another male authority figure, the archivist, confirms it to be true. (ii) proto-everything the previous example showed how delia derbyshire’s work is situated in a narrative of musical-technological innovation and advancement, as well as a narrative of discovery of “lost” recordings familiar to record collectors. in the following paragraphs, i will consider how derbyshire has been portrayed in popular music criticism, within a discourse of popular modernism as defined by mark fisher and others. this discourse can be traced to the journalism of uk-based music papers such as nme in the 1980s, and resurfaced in a culture of blogging in the early to mid-2000s, with some crossover into print journalism via the wire magazine. influenced by theorists such as frederic jameson, this discourse is committed to an idea of the future—or futures plural—that is articulated in certain forms of pop culture, particularly music and television, described by mark fisher as exemplifying “popular modernism”; that is to say, cultural products through which “the elitist product of modernism was retrospectively vindicated” and modernist techniques were “not only disseminated, but collectively reworked and extended” (fisher 2014: 22). the music made by the bbc radiophonic workshop has been frequently cited by fisher and others as an example of popular modernism, due to its use of avant-garde techniques and innovative technologies to create music that would be heard in popular and domestic settings. the development of the musical-critical phenomenon dubbed “hauntology” by fisher and others, notably simon reynolds, is also based in this critical milieu. certain forms of british electronic dance music such as rave, hardcore, jungle/ drum’n’bass and various forms of electronica feature heavily in this discourse, embodying once again an idea of futuristic technologies and techniques that were not only available to but enthusiastically embraced and then further developed by communities of musicians who operated independently from mainstream channels but created popular, if not populist music. the idea that british dance music culture is historically significant in itself and is morgan | delian modes 17 situated within, and refers to, an historical continuum of modernist electronic music can be seen in an increasing awareness among musicians and critics of dance music’s sonic and social histories, as well as having influenced the discussion around histories of electronic music more generally. this notion of a continuum of futuristic popular british electronic music is apparent in blogger robin carmody’s obituary for delia derbyshire written for the wire magazine in 2001. he refers to her dr who theme as a “throbbing piece of proto-electronica” and a composition titled “pot au feu” (derbyshire, bbc radiophonic music, 1968) as a “protorave track decades before its time” (carmody 2001: 14). there are a number of reasons why carmody might single out this track. firstly, it is an anomaly among the derbyshire recordings that were available at the time, as it was not a theme tune for a particular programme, but a kind of collage, made to showcase the possibilities of the workshop as well as derbyshire’s skills.10 secondly, it contains sonic markers shared with some forms of edm from the 1990s, in this case acid house and hardcore techno. lasting for just under four minutes, “pot au feu “starts with a bubbling, noisy sound which cuts off to forefront a tonally ambivalent bass line that brings to mind the sound of a 303 or other sequencer, with high, metallic tones playing a simple melody centred around minor seconds and sevenths. it then changes key and a faster rhythm, made from treated hand percussion, replaces the bass line with a variation of the previous melody coming in. the melody sounds as if it was originally played on a stringed instrument such as a zither, and there are sporadic chords from an electric guitar later in the track, but the overall texture is electronic, with sine tones creating a harmony line towards the end of the piece. the insistent introduction of the second melody—twelve notes at the same pitch hammered out insistently, followed by a four note upward pattern—catches the attention and is certainly the hook of the piece, but at the same time there is a sense of various different elements vying for attention, with no one element settling into the role of the “lead” instrument. the disorientation created by unfamiliar sounds, or familiar sounds in unusual configurations; the approximate pitching of the first bassline; the treated guitar that sounds deliberately synthetic—these are all traits with analogues in early uk edm. elsewhere, carmody refers to “an alarm-bell of a hook recalling the ‘panic/excitement’ lines so prevalent in early 90s hardcore”,11 referring to the aggressively urgent, angular melodies found in hardcore techno. there is also a sense of tension and release evoked by the stopping of one element and the sudden replacing or reappearance by another that corresponds with the “dynamic of removal and return” that pervades almost all edm (butler 2006: 91). the comparison to hardcore could also allude to the tempo of the track, which is fast and suggests techno rather than house music. it would also not be surprising to read an article written in the same time period that compared this piece of music to mid-90s drum ‘n’ bass, as the shifting, galloping rhythm and the drifting, glassy melody recalls the sound field created by producers such as dillinja. dancecult 9(1)18 like hartnoll’s response to “dance from noah” in part (i), carmody’s assessment of “pot au feu” can be said to be co-creative, assembling an interpretation of the music that corresponds with a particular musical/historical model. while the former focuses on technology and sonic practice, the latter is more concerned with a musicological and cultural reading, yet both arrive at the conclusion that derbyshire’s music can be heard as predictive of edm. in part (iii), concluding the section, i examine the differences between these interpretations and the role that derbyshire’s gender might play in the formation of both. (iii) methods and mediation as we can see from these two examples, there are structural, processual and sonic parallels that can be drawn between delia derbyshire’s compositions and those created in the 1990s by edm producers, in the use of electronic sounds as melody sources, simple, often minorkey or modulating melodies, unusual rhythms created with treated percussion sounds, and indeterminately pitched elements that treat pitch as more akin to timbre, a practice common to sample-based dance music (butler 2006: 66). while the working methods used by derbyshire in 1968 and 1971 and by dance musicians in the 1980s and 1990s are in many ways different, instances of path dependency, most obviously between the cutting and repurposing of recorded sounds on tape and the practice of digital sampling, highlight a similarity between compositional methodologies despite technological and cultural differences. likewise, the sonic treatments available to derbyshire, such as reverb, delay, and high and low pass filters, and the preference for clearly “electronic” sounds such as oscillators and noise generators, are also present in edm, even though the technologies for obtaining those sounds have changed. here, the common ground between post-war modernist electronic music and edm production that i refer to in section 2 of this paper can be characterised primarily as one of shared practice. however, the aim of carmody and other writers of his milieu is not to examine corresponding methods of music making across historical periods so much as to put derbyshire’s music into a critical dialogue with what they consider to be the most forwardlooking of contemporary electronic music, which is not the “classical” electronic music that derbyshire herself strove towards, but the popular music for which she had less regard. reviewing the 2002 re-release of bbc radiophonic music, also in the wire, ken hollings hears echoes of a whole lineage of electronic popular music, not just edm, in derbyshire’s “ziwzih ziwzih oo-oo-oo” (bbc radiophonic music, 1968), a composition written for tv adaptation of an isaac asimov story: “its backwards intonations and inflexible phrasing have the whole history of techno-pop’s alien otherness, from [david] bowie and tubeway army right through to fischerspooner, written into them” (hollings 2002: 66). here, derbyshire’s work is set in a narrative of electronically mediated pop music in which new technological possibilities produce new modes of expression. morgan | delian modes 19 in this section, we have seen how certain desires are articulated in the ways in which an historical piece of music is heard and described by its later listeners and how these desires can also be presented within/as evidence-based, factual news items. the figure of delia derbyshire, who is of course no longer alive to articulate her own desires, becomes a mediator between different technological and cultural realms, supporting writers such as carmody and hollings’s suggestion that edm is part of a continuum with the experimental electronic music created by derbyshire, and that one of edm’s points of origin is the electronic sound and music transmitted by british public service broadcasting. the writers’ own experience of this music, via exposure to tv and radio as children and young adults, therefore becomes significant; and they, too, become participants in the narrative. rather than centring derbyshire, this narrative predominantly centres the listening, writing subject and their—generally his—body of knowledge and range of memories. referring to mark butler’s (2006) notion of the “masculine kind of stories” that proliferate in edm histories (and which will be discussed further in section 5), it could be said that these also constitute masculine stories, because they are centred in men’s experiences and knowledge of electronic music, and the ways in which they demonstrate that knowledge. while these critical appraisals celebrate derbyshire’s prescience, they have the effect of pushing many aspects of her work to the background: her pursuit of “serious” music, which included a period assisting luciano berio (butler 2014: 71); her affinity for sculpture and other forms of visual art (winter 2015: 138–40); and the study of mathematics and analysis of acoustic phenomena that resulted in her more abstract works, are disregarded in favour of technical prowess and an accidental correspondence with a form of popular music. while it is part of the writer’s role to sound out such unlikely correspondences between time periods and musics, there is also a tension inherent in the fact that it is a female composer who is being reclaimed by a critical milieu comprised mostly of men; and that these interpretations of her music began to appear soon after her death (beginning, as we have seen, in her obituary). despite her early success at the bbc radiophonic workshop, derbyshire struggled personally and professionally to find a sympathetic context for her work during her lifetime, at one point giving up music altogether for some years. her occasional collaborations with artist film-makers including elsa stansfield, madelon hooykaas and elizabeth koziman offer, as i have proposed when writing about circle of light (morgan 2016: 68), a glimpse of productive relationships with experimental visual artists which, sadly, were not developed beyond a few works. these self-imposed gaps and absences in derbyshire’s career, combined with the restrictions on creative control and experimental practices imposed by the bbc, are, and should be, frustrating and troubling for researchers into derbyshire’s life and work, for they portray an artist unable for various structural and personal reasons to realise her full potential. however, i believe that these absences and lacunae have made possible her cooption by the musical-critical movement known as hauntology, in which absences, ghosts, temporal anomalies and incomplete memories, combined with ideas of state-controlled dancecult 9(1)20 artistic institutions and the aforementioned popular modernism, are fundamental. it could be said that, within hauntology, women appear as avatars of a utopian post-war britain, ghostly manipulators of old technology, and reassuring but disembodied voices. in the following section i examine this claim by situating delia derbyshire’s music and persona in the context of hauntology’s preoccupation with the past and its sonic traces, as a gesture towards future research into the gendered as well as temporal relations at work within a phenomenon that has so far lacked a feminist critique. 4. listen with mother: hauntology and gender the bbc, as is the case with other public service broadcasters, has often been described as paternalistic, with reference to its founder john reith’s ideas of broadcasting as a “social tool” (hendy 2013) for bringing a “high” standard of cultural and political discourse to a wide listenership, delivered in an authoritative yet kindly manner. yet in other descriptions it is feminised: a common nickname for the bbc was, for many years, “auntie beeb” or just “auntie”. the origins of the nickname are debated, but its effect was to cast the corporation as a sensible, older woman with a familial relationship to the listener or viewer. it was also derogatory in some usages, implying prudishness and closed-mindedness (“auntie knows best!”); but ultimately, especially viewed in retrospect, auntie is a benevolent figure who has our best interests at heart. the term “soft coercion”, coined by nina power to describe the recorded, coded white, middle-class female voices that we hear every day on railway station announcements and automated supermarket checkouts in the uk, points to the ideology behind this kindly yet authoritative female archetype (power 2014: 23). simon reynolds suggests that some of the music associated with hauntology expresses affection for the days of the “nanny state” (reynolds 2011: 348) of post-war britain, to use another gendered expression,. he writes, in regard to electronica label ghost box: this lost era of planning and edification represented a paternalism (or perhaps maternalism, given its association with things like free school milk for kids and bbc children’s fare like watch with mother) that rock’n’roll in some sense rebelled against. . . . but by the early 2000s, these bygone ideals of progress started to acquire the romance, pathos and honour of a lost future (reynolds 2011: 348). if maternalism is one of the absences that hauntology mourns, perhaps it is not surprising that, with a few notable exceptions such as the late trish keenan of the band broadcast, women have been absent from the musical and critical manifestations of it, except as archetypes: maternal or aunt-like voices, witches (a key hauntological theme for artists such as the advisory circle is popular representations of the occult), and studio-cloistered public servants such as derbyshire and daphne oram. hauntology’s centring of the male experience is in keeping with the focus on artists’ and writers’ memories of their own boyhoods, which are invariably referred to in interviews and articles, not only in blogging, where it might be expected, but in academic articles such as pattie (2016). morgan | delian modes 21 while mark fisher’s writing on hauntology has engaged with its theoretical and political dimensions, simon reynolds’s account of the phenomenon, which he and fisher knowingly titled in homage to jacques derrida’s concept of the same name, is the one that has been the most legible to musicians and critics, via his wire article “society of the spectral” (reynolds 2006). however, what began as an observation and framing of certain concerns in electronic music has now become a genre of electronica whose relationship to dance music culture, and to its attendant politics of race and class, is increasingly distant. pattie (2016), in a useful retrospective account, remarks that hauntology has become depoliticised and that the term is used now to denote certain material and technical qualities: coming to describe a type of recording that was haunted, or that existed in an indeterminate relation to the past; it bore the spectral imprint of previous styles and technologies, mixed with techniques and approaches available only to the contemporary musician (pattie 2016: 195). the articles by carmody and hollings from the early 2000s signal an early expression of a hauntological framing of derbyshire’s music. since then, derbyshire has been called upon to represent a number of traits associated with hauntology, such as the celebration of an educational “maternalist” culture as epitomised by the bbc, and the techniques and devices of analogue music production. she epitomises popular modernism through her role in creating widely disseminated experimental electronic music, as well as lending support to the idea that such music prefigured or is connected to edm and electronica. as i state in the opening section, derbyshire’s life and work have also become symbolic of a wider history of women’s electronic music-making, both classical or popular, by musicians, scholars and journalists. my concluding section examines this narrative and derbyshire’s place within it. with reference to feminist archival practice and dance music journalism, i consider the ways in which claiming derbyshire as a pioneering figure in an area such as edm can be problematic as well as celebratory. 5. herstories of electronic music: delia derbyshire and the feminist archive as writers including rodgers (2015), goh (2014), bliss (2013) and morgan (2017) have pointed out, media accounts of women in electronic music history often describe them as “pioneers”: exceptional figures whose achievements are portrayed through a lens of both sacrifice and empowerment. following rodgers’ (2015) critique of this phenomenon, and drawing on sally macarthur’s (2010) writing about the positivist, empirical frameworks often used in liberal feminist musicology,12 i perceive a decontextualising effect in the numerous buzzfeed-style lists that appear in online media, which bring together women such as pauline oliveros, bebe barron, laurie spiegel and daphne oram—and of course, delia derbyshire—to illustrate the idea of a tradition or lineage of women experimenting with electronic music. i propose that this can contribute to the commodification of such composers’ work, to the extent where, in the currently crowded market for repackaged dancecult 9(1)22 archive recordings of electronic music, gender becomes akin to one of the “microgenres” more commonly associated with edm (morgan 2017: 243). there is a risk that the critiques mentioned above can have a counterproductive effect on efforts to reinstate the historical achievements of women, and amplify and celebrate their contributions to the field of electronic music—contributions which have frequently gone unnoticed. as farrugia (2012) notes, women producers and djs have often been ignored in the few histories that have been written of edm (farrugia 2012: 27). additionally, as farrugia (2012), rodgers (2015) and media theorists such as wendy chun have pointed out, women’s participation in all kinds of technological–cultural activities, from recordbuying to computing, has frequently been omitted from the histories of those practices. writers and musicians such as antye greie-ripatti draw on the history of women’s electronic music-making to strengthen networks of women making electronica and edm in the present day.13 in this way, historical narratives of women in electronic music can become resources for activists, demonstrating “a desire to take control of the present though a reorientation of the past” (eichhorn 2013: 7). eichhorn refers here to a particular set of feminist archives—materials from feminist activist communities, such as pamphlets, zines and so on. however, her account of the archival turn in feminist scholarship is useful in considering how archival recordings and images of musicians such as delia derbyshire can be read as items of feminist historymaking or utilised for feminist aims, even if derbyshire herself did not identify as a feminist (hutton 2000).14 in accounts such as those by blanning and the black madonna (2015) and the uncredited dj magazine article “these are dance music’s most influential female pioneers” (2017), a connection is drawn between derbyshire and edm djs and producers of the present day in order to strategically demonstrate that innovation by exceptional women in electronic music production has historical precedents. yet as well-intentioned as many iterations of it might be, it can be argued that the “female pioneers” narrative invites a recapitulation to heteropatriarchal narratives which welcome women only as anomalies within established systems (morgan 2017: 241). as butler (2006: 46) notes, such an approach perpetuates rather than counters gender norms: existing accounts tend to emphasise the creativity of a few individuals, and they often include elements of heroic struggle as well: obstacles to be overcome and technology to be conquered. . . . it is not just that the heroes (the specific individuals) of these stories are male, but that the stories themselves are masculine kinds of stories. in the case of delia derbyshire’s story, one might see a masculine aspect to the way in which she is characterized as a “hero” or genius who achieved great technical mastery. in this way, she becomes the masculine subject of the story, thus elevating her to a point at which she can be considered on an equal footing with her male contemporaries, and part of what tara rodgers calls a “patrilineal history” of electronic music (rodgers 2010: 15). one could also say that equally “masculine” is the characterization of derbyshire as a vulnerable figure lost to history, not least in the insistence that she has needed rescuing or rehabilitating from morgan | delian modes 23 historical neglect, an account that denies her agency and casts her as dependent on the heroic efforts of her rescuers, such as wikidelia’s martin guy. butler’s proposal also helps us to avoid focusing too heavily on the gender of the writers of such histories. while it is true that, so far, most feminist scholarship of electronic music history has been undertaken by female-identified writers, it is also the case that both men and women writing in the media perpetuate the “masculine stories” that butler identifies. such stories gloss over the difficulties and inequalities experienced by the women of the past in favour of an empowering narrative, as well as deflecting attention from the inequalities that are still rife in electronic music of all kinds—and which are indeed perpetuated by some of the same people who celebrate women’s historical achievements. for example, dj, despite its assertion that “arguably the most innovative artists of all in electronic sound are women” (dj mag 2017), was widely criticised in 2016 when the cover of its 25th anniversary issue featured 25 male djs and none of any other gender. historians of edm must be especially alert to the perpetuation of reductive narratives of electronic music, even if they appear to redress gender inequalities. for example, many of articles about “female pioneers” that i cite in “pioneer spirits” (morgan 2017) focus on composers such as delia derbyshire, suzanne ciani and eliane radigue, rooting “electronic music” within a white, euroand us-centric context of studio-based composition using highly advanced technology, often within academic or national broadcasting institutions. it is my concern that the history of edm, which has developed outside of those institutions, and in which the interstices of class, race, geography and sexuality as well as gender are of such importance to the development of its subgenres and scenes, is misrepresented when set in this dominant, “patrilineal” model of electronic music history, which for the most part has accommodated women only if they are white, western european or north american, and educated within certain academic frameworks. while it follows the list-based format of many other articles about “female pioneers”, lisa blanning and the black madonna’s (2015) article for mixmag, “20 women who shaped the history of dance music”, challenges this model in some important ways. their account begins with delia derbyshire but does not continue with a list of similar composers, instead highlighting the contributions of promoters, shop owners and a&r staff as well as musicians and djs. the list is inclusive of queer and trans women, and women of colour, and mentions collaborative practices, such as the chicago house dj collective superjane. here, with the localised practitioner’s perspective of the black madonna, who is a chicago-based dj, delia derbyshire is positioned not only as a solitary genius but also an actor within a diverse conversation across race, time, geography and practice, with the purpose of making a “political intervention into the present” (eichhorn 2013: 8). to conclude, it is essential that writers, musicians and artists are able respond to the official and unofficial archives of electronic music in creative and challenging ways, creating new works, new stories and, should they wish, new origin myths, genealogies and conceptual leaps and bounds: the purpose of this essay is not to proscribe any such efforts, nor to set in place my own idea of who delia derbyshire was and is. she can be recognised as a figure dancecult 9(1)24 of empowerment for women musicians, a representative of a period of modernist popular culture, a technological innovator, and a progenitor for british edm: her work and what we know of her life allow for all these interpretations. however, if feminist historians of electronic music are, as antoinette burton writes, to aim to “denaturalise the presumptive boundaries of the official archive space” (burton 2006: 8), we should likewise critique the unofficial archive spaces that have constructed similar boundaries of their own, asking that the reorientation towards history represented by these various reclamations of the work of delia derbyshire are met with resistance to forming new dominant narratives around gender, culture and electronic music, and with efforts to effect change in the present. acknowledgements i would like to thank magdalena olszanowski and rebekah farrugia for their invaluable editorial support during the writing of this paper. thanks must also go to the bbc written archives, david butler of the delia derbyshire archive, and the authors of wikidelia.net for providing access to archive materials. notes 1 louis niebur unpacks the complex relationship between “special sound” and incidental music in his account of the bbc radiophonic workshop, noting that in some cases “special sound” functions as music as well as sound effect (niebur 2010: 75–7). 2 <https://deliaderbyshireday.wordpress.com/> 3 kember’s interview carried out for surface zine can be accessed here: <http://www.deliaderbyshire.org/interview_surface.php> (accessed 26 october 2017), and cavanagh’s for boa zine can be accessed here: <http://www.delia-derbyshire.org/interview_boa.php> (accessed 26 october 2017). 4 <http://lists.topica.com/lists/delia> (accessed april 2017). a related facebook group “the electronic church of st. delia” is currently active: <http://www.facebook.com/theelectronic-church-of-st-delia-169766083079916> (accessed april 2017). 5 <http://www.centreforscreenstudies.manchester.ac.uk/delia.htm> (accessed september 2017). 6 as more academic accounts of derbyshire have been produced since the increase in media accounts of her life and work, hills’s writing on the “scholar-fan” (the academic who also maintains a fan identity) and the “fan-scholar” (the fan who uses academic theory in their writing) might also be useful in drawing attention to the ways in which “fan and academic identities can be hybridised or brought together” (hills 2002: xxx). 7 in 2012, the uk-based label public information released archive recordings from the 1960s by british inventor/composer f. c. judd and new releases by edm/electronica artists ekoplekz and austin caesar. an early example of this tendency can be seen in rephlex records’ corelease, in 2003, of the lp compilation music from the bbc radiophonic workshop. https://deliaderbyshireday.wordpress.com/ http://www.delia-derbyshire.org/interview_surface.php http://www.delia-derbyshire.org/interview_surface.php http://www.delia-derbyshire.org/interview_boa.php http://lists.topica.com/lists/delia http://www.facebook.com/the-electronic-church-of-st-delia-169766083079916 http://www.facebook.com/the-electronic-church-of-st-delia-169766083079916 http://www.centreforscreenstudies.manchester.ac.uk/delia.htm morgan | delian modes 25 8 such as recollection grm, an imprint of editions mego, that releases archival works from the grm studio, paris. 9 on a youtube post of “dance from noah”, i notice that a number of commenters, rather than citing warp records, now write that it sounds like grime, referring perhaps to the bright, minor-key synthesizer lines heard in grime instrumentals. 10 the piece was made using elements from cues that derbyshire had made for specific programmes, for example a 1965 radio programme on science and technology in finland (percival 2013). 11 carmody writes elsewhere, “pot au feu” is: “three minutes and nineteen seconds of paranoia, virtually a rave track circa 1991 in its structure; a stuttering, pounding teleprinter-paced bassline worthy of timbaland as the tension builds, then a moment of chaos and crisis, an alarm-bell of a hook recalling the ‘panic/excitement’ lines so prevalent in early ‘90s hardcore” (carmody 2000). 12 macarthur refers to studies in which data is used to show, for example, the low number of female composers programmed in concert halls, in the hope that those institutions will then address this lack. 13 greie-ripatti’s “nerdgirls” mix (<http://nerdgirls.poemproducer.com/>) demonstrates this approach. 14 in hutton’s interview, derbyshire is quoted as saying, “a producer once said to me, ‘you must be an ardent feminist,’.... i said ‘what!’, i hadn’t even thought in those words”. references blanning, lisa and the black madonna. 2015. “20 women who shaped the history of dance music”. mixmag. <http://mixmag.net/feature/20-women-who-shaped-the-history-of-dancemusic/16> (accessed 26 october 2017). bliss, abi. 2013. “invisible women”. the wire. <http://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/columns/ abi-bliss_invisible-women> (accessed 26 october 2017). briscoe, desmond and curtis-bramwell, roy. 1983. first twenty-five years: bbc radiophonic workshop. london: bbc. burton, antoinette. 2006. archive stories: facts, fictions, and the writing of history. durham, nc: duke university press. butler, david. 2014. “‘way out-of this world!’ delia derbyshire, doctor who and the british public’s awareness of electronic music in the 1960s”. critical studies in television 9(1): 62–76. london: sage. <https://doi.org/10.7227/cst.9.1.5>. butler, mark j. 2006. rhythm, meter, and musical design in electronic dance music. bloomington: indiana university press. carmody, robin. 2000. title of blog post unknown. elidor. quoted on delia-derbyshire.net. <http://delia-derbyshire.net/#potaufeu> (accessed 28 october 2017). carmody, robin. 2001. “delia derbyshire rip”. the wire 210, august: 14. http://nerdgirls.poemproducer.com/ http://mixmag.net/feature/20-women-who-shaped-the-history-of-dance-music/16 http://mixmag.net/feature/20-women-who-shaped-the-history-of-dance-music/16 http://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/columns/abi-bliss_invisible-women http://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/columns/abi-bliss_invisible-women https://doi.org/10.7227/cst.9.1.5 http://delia-derbyshire.net/#potaufeu dancecult 9(1)26 create digital media 2008a. “delia derbyshire recordings found, including ahead-of-its-time dance track”. 18 july. <http://cdm.link/2008/07/delia-derbyshire-recordings-foundincluding-ahead-of-its-time-dance-track/> (accessed 26 october 2017). create digital media 2008b. “archivist responds: yes, virginia, delia derbyshire really was that awesome”. 29 july. <http://cdm.link/2008/07/archivist-responds-yes-virginia-deliaderbyshire-really-was-that-awesome/> (accessed 26 october 2017). dj mag. 2017. “these are dance music’s most influential female pioneers”. 8 march. <https://djmag.com/features/female-electronic-music-pioneers> (accessed 26 october 2017). eichhorn, kate. 2013. the archival turn in feminism: outrage in order. philadelphia: temple press. farrugia, rebekah. 2012. beyond the dance floor: female djs, technology and electronic dance music culture. bristol: intellect. fisher, mark. 2014. ghosts of my life: writings on depression, hauntology and lost futures. london: zero. goh, annie. 2014. “confrontation, diplomacy, subversion—strategies for feminist activism in sound?” university of the arts, london. “sound:gender:feminism:activism” conference. abstract: <http://hernoise.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/sgfa-2014booklet.pdf> (accessed 26 october 2017). grant, catherine. 2011. “fans of feminism: re-writing histories of second-wave feminism in contemporary art”. oxford art journal 34(2): 265–86. oxford: oxford university press. <https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcr021>. hendy, david. 2013. public service broadcasting. london: palgrave. hills, matt. 2002. fan culture. london and new york: routledge. hollings, ken. 2002. “review: the bbc radiophonic workshop bbc radiophonic music”. the wire, 225, november: 66. hutton, jo. 2000. “radiophonic ladies”. sonic arts network magazine. archived at <http://delia-derbyshire.net/sites/article2000johutton.html> (accessed 26 october 2017). macarthur, sally. 2010. towards a 21st century feminist politics of music. farnham: ashgate. morgan, frances. 2017. “pioneer spirits: new media representations of women in electronic music history”. organised sound 22(2): 238–49. cambridge: cambridge university press. <https://doi.org/10.1017/s1355771817000140>. morgan, frances. 2016. “delia derbyshire & elsa stansfield: circle of light”. review in the wire, 391, september: 68. niebur, louis. 2010. special sound: the creation and legacy of the bbc radiophonic workshop. oxford: oxford university press. pattie, david. 2016. “stone tapes: ghost box, nostalgia and postwar britain”. in the oxford handbook of music and virtuality, ed. shara rambarran and sheila whiteley, 392–408. oxford: oxford university press. percival, james. 2013. “delia derbyshire’s creative process”. ma thesis (musicology), university of manchester. power, nina. 2014. “soft coercion, the city, and the recorded female voice”. in the acoustic city, ed. matthew gandy and bj nilson. berlin: jovis. reynolds, simon. 2006, “society of the spectral”. the wire, 273, november: 26–33. http://cdm.link/2008/07/delia-derbyshire-recordings-found-including-ahead-of-its-time-dance-track/ http://cdm.link/2008/07/delia-derbyshire-recordings-found-including-ahead-of-its-time-dance-track/ http://cdm.link/2008/07/archivist-responds-yes-virginia-delia-derbyshire-really-was-that-awesome/ http://cdm.link/2008/07/archivist-responds-yes-virginia-delia-derbyshire-really-was-that-awesome/ https://djmag.com/features/female-electronic-music-pioneers http://hernoise.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/sgfa-2014booklet.pdf https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcr021 http://delia-derbyshire.net/sites/article2000johutton.html https://doi.org/10.1017/s1355771817000140 morgan | delian modes 27 reynolds, simon. 2011. retromania: pop culture’s addiction to its own past. london: faber & faber. rodgers, tara. 2015. “tinkering with cultural memory: gender and the politics of synthesizer historiography”. feminist media studies 1(4): 5–30.<https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2015.1.4.5>. rodgers, tara. 2010. pink noises: women on electronic music and sound. durham, nc: duke university press. rogerson, ben. 2008. “new evidence that doctor who composer invented dance music”. 18 july. <http://www.musicradar.com/news/tech/new-evidence-that-doctor-who-composerinvented-dance-music-165571> (accessed 26 october 2017). wajcman, judy. 1991. feminism confronts technology. pennsylvania: penn state university press. winter, teresa. 2015. “delia derbyshire: sound and music for the bbc radiophonic workshop, 1962–1973”. phd thesis (music) university of york. wrench, nigel. 2008. “lost tapes of the dr who composer”. bbc news, 18 july. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7512072.stm> (accessed 26 october 2017). discography bbc radiophonic music. 2002. bbc radio enterprises (cd comp): rec25mcd. <https://www.discogs.com/bbc-radiophonic-workshop-bbc-radiophonic-music/ release/173394>. derbyshire, delia. 1968. bbc radiophonic music, bbc radiophonic workshop. bbc radio enterprises (lp comp): rec 25m. <https://www.discogs.com/bbc-radiophonic-workshop-bbc-radiophonic-music/master/84825>. derbyshire, delia. 1972. “dance from noah”. sounds from…ems, electronic music studios (london) limited (flexidisc comp): promotional release, no serial number. <https://www.discogs.com/various-sounds-from-ems-synthi/release/670765>. derbyshire, delia and stansfield, elsa. 2016 (recorded 1972). circle of light (original electronic soundtrack). trunk lp: jbh061lp. <https://www.discogs.com/delia-derbyshire-and-elsa-stansfield-circle-of-light-originalelectronic-soundtrack/release/8823727>. music from the bbc radiophonic workshop (2003). bbc music/rephlex (lp comp): cat147lp. <https://www.discogs.com/bbc-radiophonic-workshop-music-from-the-bbcradiophonic-workshop/release/212869>. filmography blake, kara. 2009. the delian mode. canada: philtre films. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1442559/>. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxnmsgaegai> (accessed 26 october 2017). https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2015.1.4.5� http://www.musicradar.com/news/tech/new-evidence-that-doctor-who-composer-invented-dance-music-165571 http://www.musicradar.com/news/tech/new-evidence-that-doctor-who-composer-invented-dance-music-165571 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7512072.stm https://www.discogs.com/bbc-radiophonic-workshop-bbc-radiophonic-music/release/173394 https://www.discogs.com/bbc-radiophonic-workshop-bbc-radiophonic-music/release/173394 https://www.discogs.com/bbc-radiophonic-workshop-bbc-radiophonic-music/master/84825 https://www.discogs.com/various-sounds-from-ems-synthi/release/670765 https://www.discogs.com/delia-derbyshire-and-elsa-stansfield-circle-of-light-original-electronic-soundtrack/release/8823727 https://www.discogs.com/delia-derbyshire-and-elsa-stansfield-circle-of-light-original-electronic-soundtrack/release/8823727 https://www.discogs.com/bbc-radiophonic-workshop-music-from-the-bbc-radiophonic-workshop/release/212869 https://www.discogs.com/bbc-radiophonic-workshop-music-from-the-bbc-radiophonic-workshop/release/212869 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1442559/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxnmsgaegai spaces to fail in: negotiating gender, community and technology in algorave dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 10(1): 31–45 issn 1947-5403 ©2018 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2018.10.01.02 spaces to fail in: negotiating gender, community and technology in algorave joanne armitage university of leeds (uk) abstract algorave presents itself as a community that is open and accessible to all, yet historically, there has been a lack of diversity on both the stage and dance floor. through womenonly workshops, mentoring and other efforts at widening participation, the number of women performing at algorave events has increased. grounded in existing research in feminist technology studies, computing education and gender and electronic music, this article unpacks how techno, social and cultural structures have gendered algorave. these ideas will be elucidated through a series of interviews with women participating in the algorave community, to centrally argue that gender significantly impacts an individual’s ability to engage and interact within the algorave community. i will also consider how live coding, as an embodied techno-social form, is represented at events and hypothesise as to how it could grow further as an inclusive and feminist practice. keywords: gender; algorave; embodiment; performance; electronic music joanne armitage lectures in digital media at the school of media and communication, university of leeds. her work covers areas such as physical computing, digital methods and critical computing. currently, her research focuses on coding practices, gender and embodiment. in 2017 she was awarded the british science association’s daphne oram award for digital innovation. she is a current recipient of sound and music’s composer-curator fund. outside of academia she regularly leads community workshops in physical computing, live coding and experimental music making. joanne is an internationally recognised live coder and contributes to projects including laptop ensemble, offal and algo-pop duo algobabez. recent projects include a coding cultural exchange between yorkshire and tokyo funded by arts council england, british council, daiwa foundation and sasakawa foundation. feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2018.10.01.02 dancecult 10(1)32 introduction the term algorave came into use to describe events where people gather together to watch and perform live coding, or the act of exploring and editing code as performance.1 through this, algorave has emerged as a descriptor of genre—music made through live coding. algorave brings the mundanity of computer programming to a social context where expertise is lived and live, where immediacy is skill and labour is performed. together with the practice of projecting laptop screens, a central emphasis is placed on the technology being utilised. with this, algorave merges computer science and electronic dance music, and much research has separately explored issues around gender and participation in these fields—where women are wildly underrepresented (vitores and gil-juárez 2015; gadir 2016). it is algorave’s intersection of these two practices that makes it an interesting space to critically explore the complex gender and power relations that emerge through performance and computation. much thinking around live coding has centred on development and application of tools and systems to perform with (collins et al 2003; roberts and kuchera-morin 2012); its practice as something that incorporates composition, notation and improvisation (magnusson 2011; sicchio 2014; parkinson and bell 2015); on liveness and embodiment (baalman 2015; cocker 2016) and on audiences (mclean and burland 2016). in this article, i will explore existing discussions relating to gender in the two fields through pedagogy, practices, audiences and technologies. algorave’s merging of programming and electronic dance music results in the potential for many barriers to participation to be at play. despite this, line-ups often demonstrate a greater gender balance than other electronic music club nights. whilst discussions relating to diversity and equity are ongoing with organisers and practitioners, and several women and non-binary only workshops have taken place, there is little research pertaining to the impact this has had on the scene itself. furthermore, there has been no research into the experience of underrepresented groups operating within in the scene. whilst live coding music is a relatively niche approach to electronic music performance, its visibility has increased through recent media attention, and much of this has been focussed around algorave. due to its size and a tendency towards free and open source software, algorave can present as an opportunity for beginners and underrepresented groups through lesser economic barriers than many other electronic musical practices. at the same time, as an embodied performance where digital and technical expertise is wrought through and on the body, longstanding gendered concerns around embodied identity, performance, and discourse resonate in algorave (see balsamo 1996). and we could add to these issues further discussions around gender and labour or precarity (gill and pratt 2008; jarrett 2015). until early 2016 there were only a few women active in the scene and those who were had academic backgrounds in computer music and electronic composition. in this article, i will draw upon interviews conducted during august and september 2017 with 8 women who are active performers within the uk algorave scene. the women interviewed perform with a range of software setups in different mediums (sound and/ armitage | spaces to fail in 33 or visual) and come to the stage with different prior experiences of code and electronic music. through these semi-structured interviews over piratepad, an online live editing platform, we discussed their experience engaging, practicing and acting within the scene. their accounts reflect the positive and open community that algorave positions itself to be through discourse and code of conduct, nevertheless, issues relating to gender and technology emerge through every woman’s account. taken together they suggest that despite the promises of both the community and the technology, the performative nature of live coding and performing algorave events deeply genders their experiences. we discussed the disruptions that caused women to begin acting within the scene, the challenges they have faced through learning and developing their live coding skills and developed discussion across a range of themes from performances of gender, new ways of balancing creativity and technicality, questions of authenticity and supporting communities. through this, i hope to shine a light on the work of women within the algorave scene, the barriers they have overcome and their work and activism. my biases are rather explicit: i feel a deep tenderness towards and connection with the women of algorave, as one of them. many of the issues raised here, relating to practices, technologies and creative outcomes are relevant to all practitioners of live coding, but my intention here is not to exclude the men of algorave, but to provoke a discussion around algorave that can be led by women voices. it is also highlighted that whilst women are re-addressing the balance in algorave as a practice, they are underrepresented in the development of coding languages. i conclude by considering the next steps for algorave in terms of developing a community of practice that addresses diversity in a more collective manner by considering technological and structural issues within the scene. disruption, activation and overcoming barriers gendered processes are seen as constitutive of what is recognised and valued as technology and technological expertise; simultaneously, technology is one of the ways in which gender identities and regimes are reproduced and/or transformed (vitores and gil-juárez 2015: 10). computing has been coded masculine. historically men have controlled technologies (faulkner 2001) and this is no different in algorave, where languages are developed by men, gigs are mostly organised and promoted by men, and (historically) lineups were majority men. in discussions, many men have been sympathetic to these issues offering notions of solidarity, and some men have actively supported women-centred activities through funding and resources. several women i spoke with alluded to a sense of hierarchy in live coding, whether it be in terms of the gatekeepers or promoters, or the dominance of conversation on online platforms around the technical or the idea that some performers are “bigger names” than others. whether this hierarchy is imagined or felt (or both), it is important to note that both the human and computational generate this sense of structure. as maureen mcneil has long argued, technology has always been bound up in and as a gender relationship (mcneil 1987: 5), which includes the social, material, the lived and the imagined. dancecult 10(1)34 as someone who is active within the community, it would be challenging for me to begin directly unpacking these structures that i in some way form. instead, i will analyse the experiences of the women i have interviewed and suggest ways in which these structures impact them, and suggest ways in which these barriers can be lessened towards a feminist algorave future. the lack of women engaging in computer science has been a subject of analysis for decades. common explanations for women’s lack of engagement include perceptions of coding as a masculine activity and “the image and stereotypes of computer scientists and people in computer science as awkward, nerdy males who lack interpersonal skills and are obsessed with technology” (vitores and gil-juárez 2015: 3). many initiatives have been designed to support women back into computing (lagesen 2007) on precisely this premise. girls who code for example, an initiative to encourage young women and girls into computer disciplines, tells us that “the gender gap in computing is getting worse… in 1995, 37% of computer scientists were women. today it is only 24%”.2 concepts such as the leaky pipeline (vitores and gil-juárez 2015)—the notion that women are funnelled through computing education and leak out of it at various junctures—fail to address the historic and social issues that result in women “voting with their feet” and not engaging with computing (faulkner 2001: 79). this pedagogically centred, linear approach presents women as an issue to be fixed rather than focusing on systems by which gender technologies are socialised, for instance stereotypes of women lacking the capacity to develop skills in computing (vekiri and chronaki 2008). such stereotypes are reflected in some of the interviews, where women talk about early experiences and encounters with programming. algoraver 2:  i’d been given the opportunity a few years back to take part in [an introductory sql programming course], but didn’t really think i had the ability to really understand it. a pivotal moment within algorave, which sought to overtly re-address the gender balance, was a free all-women live coding workshop at huddersfield university in december 2015. since that workshop, the number of women actively live coding within algorave has increased considerably. such workshops seek to challenge assumptions that (live) coding is a purely technical practice, while the practices during the workshops can function to bridge experiential gaps (lagesen 2007), so that the performative elements of (live) coding can also become more routine and habituated and less of a performance. it also broadened the professional backgrounds of women live coders: many had no previous experience of coding and limited experience of electronic music production. algorave frames coding within an arts context, revealing that it can exist outside of mathematics and data analytics. it has been suggested that improving the teaching and feminising the content of programming can work to encourage women to engage with the discipline (lagesen 2007). furthermore, it challenges “the perception of computer-related subjects as unattractive and/or boring” (vitores and gil-juárez 2015: 3). the women i interviewed identify the ease at which a satisfying outcome can be achieved as a motivational factor in continuing their engagement with live coding. armitage | spaces to fail in 35 algoraver 4:  i was able to create a quick simple techno track after an hour or so of learning ixi lang, which was so satisfying. [i] really didn’t know coding could be used for fun until then. . . . i could understand how people used it to retrieve data etc., but that was about it. . . . i think it’s made me realise that with understanding just the basics you can make things happen. as well as presenting coding as something that has satisfying outcomes, algorave places coding in a social scenario. through the medium of algorave, coding can be framed as a social activity, not least because of the performative and interactive elements of the events, but also because of the peer learning and support that underpins the accompanying workshops. this framing works to a certain extent to dispel the idea that coding does not necessarily have to be an obsessive or one-to-one relationship between human and computer, but one that is more relational and involving many different parties (gansmo et al. 2003; vitores and gil-juárez 2015). if we add the notion of liveness here too, live coding explores code as communication, as human, as lived and as embodied (cronin and roger 1999). what was noticeable from the conversations with algoravers, was that it was these latter issues that were commented on: algoraver 1: [the social is] a really important aspect of it for me actually, i’ve met so many people through live coding. algoraver 4: i guess i like hanging around those people, and they create a supportive environment for me. if they weren’t so encouraging of beginners, i wouldn’t be here. . . . i think that the algorave/live coding environment is a really stimulating one overall, that just welcomes people of all levels and lets them do whatever they want, really. perceptions of coding as a masculine activity, have previously been reported to significantly decrease women’s interest in it (lagensen 2007), but it is noticeable from the two excerpts above that the social dimensions of algorave—which i am arguing lends a differently gendered lens to it—are what is cited as important. their participation is not a result of the technology itself, but the supportive and encouraging dimensions generated by the social and human element. in a similar vein to longstanding work on women and gaming (see kerr 2003; thornham 2011), all the women i spoke with were activated (i.e. became active performing in the algorave scene) by having a direct encounter with someone already involved in algorave: they joined because of social connections. one interviewee had attended a workshop on a whim, and she relayed how direct encouragement and being offered a local gig presented an opportunity for her to hone her skills and have something to focus on. through these activities, the number of actively performing women has significantly increased in the uk algorave scene and has resulted in a critical mass (roberts, kassianidou and irani 2002). this suggests a real potential for algorave to change the current gendered landscape of coding. a critical mass can work alongside the visibility of women role models in contemporary algorave scenes to shift a wider perception of coding as normatively gendered masculine (lagensen 2007). dancecult 10(1)36 more than the visibility of role models, the social dimensions of coding workshops and the critical mass of women in the algorave scene though, what many women cited as important was the performative dimensions of algorave as something that was a turning point in terms of their coding and involvement in algorave: algoraver 1:  we were told that there was an algorave coming up, and anyone who wanted could have a go. that piqued my interest. algoraver 2:  i really wanted to say yes to force me to engage with coding, it was a welcoming scene and being asked [to play] was a huge factor in making me do it. having people who are willing to give those opportunities is definitely important. algoraver 6: i wasn’t going to perform, like, ever, but [someone] convinced me to, and i am glad i did! . . . i could never picture myself making anything anybody would want to see. i never thought i would enjoy performing, but i really really ended up doing so! playing through feel, living through code algoraver 4: no sound is the right sound. it is this that is really interesting when thinking through issues of gender and technology, not least because of the longstanding feminist work around female subjectivity and issues of embodiment. algorave stands in direct contrast with early writings about the disembodied promises of virtual reality or cyberspace (rheingold 1991) which were picked up by feminist scholars (turkle 1995) in relation to the possibility of leaving your real body behind and playing “a role as close to or as far away from one’s ‘real self ’ as one chooses” (1995:12). here the body is not left behind and it is the performative and embodied act of algorave which is both initially terrifying and deeply persuasive. coding has become one element of performativity (butler 1990) so that interviewees emphasize the embodied experience rather than (for example) the act of coding or the technological successes and failures. i am suggesting here that we acknowledge this as part of the success of algorave in terms of rectifying a deep gender imbalance around gender and coding. furthermore, algorave performers come from a multiplicity of musical disciplines, which might explain their readiness to perform and the variety and openness of stylistic approaches. although there are discernible conventions emerging in terms of sound quality and rhythmic structures, algorave encompasses and shifts through many genres and is used as a description of a genre in itself. as a fledgling scene, the sonic qualities of algorave are open to interpretation and reconstruction by people with different aesthetic preferences. there are three discernible elements caught up in a performance: the body, the interface/code editor and the project screen image allowing audience member to see the code. the women i spoke with often emphasised embodied performance, as opposed to the relationship with the interface and projected code. women acting within the scene find a sense of freedom in programming as a means of exploring sound in ways that they could not in consumer-available digital audio armitage | spaces to fail in 37 workstations (daw). the tensions between the technicity of interface and approaches to performing and developing materials is discussed in the section below. algoraver 2:  i found them [daws] interesting, but something about it made me feel disconnected from the process . . . getting into making electronic music felt complicated, and perhaps even a big investment to get the right tools. interviewer: when you say right tools what do you mean? algoraver 2: programs such as ableton, but also maybe synths etc. most people i know who make electronic music seemed to really know about synths etc. a perception from me (wrongly) that a level of expertise was needed, perhaps more so than with guitars/other instruments. algoraver 1: tidal is much more conducive to creating groove than a lot of conventional software, in my experience anyway!  i think also as a beginner there is so much that e.g. ableton can do that is impenetrable or difficult to access/figure out. this notion of right tools reflects an assumption that a considerable amount of prior knowledge is required before being able to create music with these technologies—anyone who has led or taken courses on these tools will know this is not strictly true. whilst digital technologies are often considered methods of democratising the music making process, issues around gender equity emerge when looking at their user base (bell 2015). these technologies have been gendered through their design by developers who are predominantly men—and their representation in culture and society through advertisements and media. several of the women i spoke with, who were not trained in music technology or computer music, had previously explored hardware synthesizers and software, particularly ableton live. they found investments of time, labour and money and requirements to acquire and use the right tools a daunting prospect. furthermore, the above quote from algoraver 2 reflects how they felt the need to demonstrate an understanding of what is under the hood to be able to engage with a technological interface in a creative manner. a typical commercially available daw is in many ways a closed system and is generally black box in its design. it is also dependent on a user’s interaction with a graphical interface. these systems are expansive and offer the music creator a complex range of processes and effects that can be applied to sounds that are organised within the simple piano-roll time grid. by reducing the interface to code, live coding presents an opportunity to perform differently—an environment with the appearance of technicality where sonic complexity ensues through the interaction of different code elements. constraints arise through language and a performer’s knowledge of it and through this, performers demonstrate a technical proficiency with their tool. algoraver 2:  i did [play around with synths previously], but not through trying to understand how they worked, really just messing around until something sounded interesting. dancecult 10(1)38 algoraver 4: that was so important to me personally: the immediate result. the idea that i wouldn’t need to wrestle with a learning curve that would put me off before i’d even created one thing. messing around emerged as a method for the performers i interviewed to develop their style. many of the women i spoke with developed their practice through a sense of exploratory feel—seeking a groove that they couldn’t quite explain. many women interviewed discussed their approach in abstract and intangible terms that are not goal orientated but felt experiences. the focus is shifted from the tools and mechanics or the materiality of code, to how it is lived through a performance. for my interlocutors, it is not about optimising algorithms, but embodying them and allowing their own musical voice to emerge through them. algoraver 1: i practice to get a feel for what works, but this is a tricky balance because i don’t like to overprepare. even the more experienced performers practice in this way, developing systems that challenge how and why they perform with code. this is demonstrated in an interviewee’s (algoraver 8) performance system. here, the performer is not trying to explore the code as a mathematical process, but as something that is performed, embodied and lived. algoraver 8:  i made a piece with a concentration feedback loop—basically it tried to distract you by giving you new code to perform with when your concentration level gets high. through performance practitioners display a confidence in experimentation with code and an acceptance and enjoyment of failure, which does not necessarily emerge in how they discuss their relationship with the technology itself. many of the women i spoke with didn’t feel a need to have an in-depth technical understanding of the language they were using outside the demonstration of technicality on stage: “the audience has no or little preconceptions of what is a skilled performer and that makes it very accessible to enter as a newbie” (algoraver 4). they didn’t feel compelled to spend time learning haskell and hack tidal, or supercollider to hack ixi lang.3 they are working within the constraints of their interfaces, playing through feel and at times pushing their limits. this presents some difference to the descriptions of some women’s initial interactions with synthesizers and daws where they didn’t feel confident using them as they weren’t sure how they worked technically. at this stage in its conception, live coding as a technical practice is considerably more niche than operating ableton, for example. the mechanics of live coding practice are explicit in performance, but audiences’ general unfamiliarity with code-as-interface provides a space for women to mess around on stage. this seems to leave the only technical critique of a woman’s live coding performance to be something along the lines of “did you code this all by yourself ?”—well yes, you just saw me (an issue that will be discussed later in this article). armitage | spaces to fail in 39 living through code is a common theme that emerges in our discussions—from those who have been coding professionally for many years and those with less experience. for some, code emerges as a way of dealing with or organising life, for others code allows an expression of self, or a way of manipulating lived experiences and speaking back to them creatively. one person interviewed spoke about code as a way of working through their daily life, adding structures to it and providing functions for being. these lived patterns merge with their daydreams and expressions of colour and geometry to form her live coded visuals. one interviewee reflected on coding as a meditation—a daily practice and something that structures them. another spoke about her sonic palette and how code helped her develop a sense of self in performance: “[incorporating] my own sounds into live coding is what makes me connect with it, makes it feel personal to me” (algoraver 1). using their own lived sounds allows the performer to express a sense of self on the stage that brings a sense of authenticity and has allowed her to develop her own musical voice within algorave. doing code for some of the women i spoke with was never something they thought they were capable of, yet through live coding they have found code to be something they live and know. to a certain extent, these issues would seem to implicate the body and the notion of performativity in notions of expertise and knowledge enacted through the performance. but what is noticeable is that the women algoravers do not approach their performances in this way: their bodies are part of a wider experience and perhaps this is what enables them to experiment and fail behind the projected screen. finding joy in error and space to fail in algoraver 4: i do also often feel the annoying need to explain that i’m really just doing fairly simple stuff. it’s a very strange dichotomy. on the one hand, i want to show that i am getting better with each gig, but on the other hand, when someone (male or female) asks me a question about my work, i tend to tell them i’m using a very simple language that does very simple things. many women directly identify a feeling of impostor syndrome, whilst others demonstrate characteristics of it through discussion. one more experienced performer describes this feeling initially but growing through it, but another is still plagued by feelings of inadequacy every time they enter the stage. simplicity and complexity are themes that arise through most interviews. with this, many women i spoke with were quick to underplay what they do. the quote above is from an internationally performing algoraver who regularly features on mixes, has released an album and facilitates live coding workshops. algoraver 3: one barrier to participation is the need to be perfect or produce perfect work. . . . women find it hard to do something in a male dominated technical field because we do not allow ourselves to make mistakes, or our mistakes seem worse somehow because we are carving out our space in that world. i think to live code as a woman is to be exposed and then vulnerable to men who feel more comfortable in a tech environment and get things wrong and make mistakes and own the performance space. dancecult 10(1)40 algoraver 8: we talked about failing a lot when initiating new women into the scene and i think that’s maybe changed some discourse for the better.  in computer science pedagogy, one argument that has been put forward to explain the lack of engagement from women is their fear of failure. such fears were not currently held by any interview subjects, but most reported these concerns at the very outset of their live coding journey. algoraver 2 made it clear that coding seemed like something inaccessible to her prior to starting live coding. this demonstrates a common barrier women face when engaging with coding—the idea that it is beyond their capacity, outside their interests and something that is intangible, with unclear outcomes and potentials (lagensen 2007). it became clear through these interviews that by presenting and experiencing failure as something that could be every day, performative and creative it did not present such a barrier to women. algoraver 4: seeing a live coding workshop advertised for absolute beginners with no coding background and for women only. that sold it to me . . . removing the reason for that feeling [of being daunted in a tech environment], i.e. men, really helped the appeal. i felt that i could ask to repeat something, or ask a silly question just about getting the computer started up or the sound going, that sort of thing. . . . i would have felt hesitant to show my lack of skills in a mixed group, because i would have the overwhelming feeling of ‘needing to know that stuff by now’. through all-women and non-binary workshops, underrepresented groups found a safe space to fail in their learning. many of the women who first encountered live coding through this route echo the comments above. in their lived memory, men have taken technology and defined it as a male space. although many women are keen to stress that this is not the actions of all men, it can take just one comment to create an invisible and impenetrable barrier to their access. algorave offers performers a space in which to fail constructively. from its inception, failure has been an expected and at times thrilling outcome of live coding performances. failure emerges as errors through performance in number of ways—errors in code input and structure i.e. syntax, runtime and logic, made by the human performer; musical errors, or errors that cause sound to change in a way that is unintended; fatal errors that result in crashes and (often) restarts; and hardware errors, issues with powering connections and sound systems. live coding is a practice of spontaneity, uncertainty and instability. crashing has long been part of the algorave aesthetic as an expression of liveness and technicality— merging systems with bodies to the point of no return. remembering a 2014 high-profile performance, one interviewee describes her experience of a crash. algoraver 8: there was probably about 200 or so people there in a club. anyway, my sound cut out 20 minutes into my 1 hour set. i had to do some debugging for a while to work out what was going on and basically either my firewire cable died or it got pulled out or something—but there was a 15 minute debugging break in the middle armitage | spaces to fail in 41 of my set. i was pretty mortified, but talked to a few people and they didn’t seem to mind—i think someone else also had a pretty big crash in the same show which helped a bit. i think the general consensus was that live coding is risky and shit happens. the process of her crash was exposed and performed to the audience. a veil of silence lay over the club. moving from the obvious, to the unexpected to the impossible she found the unlikely culprit: a hardware failure. unravelling systems and wires on stage, a test of keeping your cool. drunk, tired, stressed in the club looking for errors that aren’t posted, tangible and that could be located at any point from software to laptop to audio interface to the venue’s sound system itself. stunning the audience with silence. mortified, of course. could this be celebrated in any other space? as the algorave scene has expanded its technologies have become more refined, setups are more stable and languages higher-level and more constrained. this has worked to reduce input errors and lower the knowledge threshold. the latter has been a powerful tool in engaging women in the practice. one interviewee, who has been performing for around a year, suggests they have never experienced a crash on stage. to many of the early live coders, this opportunity to fail publicly was a celebrated and crucial part of the art. the refinement of languages coupled with a shift towards artists prepreparing large portions of their code suggests a move from algorave’s raw experimentalism to composed performances. with performances becoming increasingly slick there is a space to explore the new tensions that arise when error occurs. this is particularly necessary to examine as the scene matures and commercial pressures increase. dismantling barriers and performing diversity algoraver 4: it is never the male presence in itself that is a barrier, but it is the reactions of some men that will create an invisible barrier that says to women ‘you don’t belong here in the way that i do’. all women are keen to discuss their positive experiences within the community, expressing similar sentiments to algoravers 5 and 3, “i feel like the algorave scene is very inclusive” and “algoraves are supportive of women and a safe space for women to work”. many of the women interviewed describe how they were encouraged by men to participate and offered performance opportunities by men. this atmosphere is fostered through a code of conduct developed by community members that extends to all those participating in events.4 the main areas that were highlighted to be problematic for women were interactions with men in the audience after playing, and participation on the live coding chat forum on slack. like all improvisational practices, audience feedback in the moment and post-performance is a critical element of an individual developing their practice and such interactions can be invaluable. some of the performers i have spoken to require positive feedback to feel that their performance was a success. those that report negative experiences at algoraves normally receive comments from men that undermine their technical ability. men have shown genuine surprise at a woman’s ability to code, resulting in the comments and behaviours dancecult 10(1)42 illustrated below. they do not necessarily relate to the quality of the performance—often the comments are made because the individual deems a performance to be good—but seek to suggest that the woman is incapable of producing complex code. algoraver 8: sometimes you can tell that they are a bit too surprised, but that’s all. . . . i don’t think i’ve ever had a direct criticism of my algorithms, but have had stuff like, “was it really you doing the coding?” algoraver 2: someone [asked] me whether i’d actually made it myself, whether i’d written the code myself . . . or was just triggering [it]. . . . when i asked the question back of ‘why’ i did get positive feedback of, ‘oh, it was really good, looks complicated’. . . . i did wonder at the time whether he would’ve asked the same to another guy. algoraver 3: i have had an audience member mansplain brackets to me after i missed one and could not see it for ages. in their performance with code, women algorave performers are dismantling stereotypes and gender norms. some audience members (all those i interviewed said these comments came from men) are unable to bypass stereotypes even after seeing a woman coding onstage for thirty minutes. whilst algorave places the act of coding in a very social and lived scenario, the stereotype of the programmer permeates through the attitudes and behaviours of some audience members. interviewees identify similar issues in pedagogical contexts, where lessexperienced men seek to undermine their knowledge and materials during teaching. the live coding slack channel (<https://livecode.slack.com>) is a key community space where live coders discuss their work.5 the women i interviewed either never or very rarely enter into discussions on the slack forum, reporting that they have felt ignored and undermined on the platform. fast paced discussions of tools dominate general topic threads and this works to centre the technical in discussions. the dominance of technical discussion on slack underpins the maleness of the forum. discussions focussed on the technical and developmental can reinforce “women’s exclusion from innovation and technological creation” (vitores and gil-juárez 2015: 5). towards a (more) diverse future in the uk, an increase in the uptake of live coding by women can be traced back to several women-only workshops including one in december 2015, and another workshop at nottingham pride in summer 2016. these direct interventions were intended to pique the interest of women from a range of expertises—from music technology history to administration and market analysis. through interventions and activism, the women of algorave are forging for themselves a space within algorithmic dance culture. algoraver 6 suggests that this is one thing that motivates her continued engagement with the community, “also how open the ladies are, and proactive too. that’s important.” this work has not gone unnoticed. a recent article by mixmag suggests that women algorave https://livecode.slack.com) armitage | spaces to fail in 43 performers are crafting the future of electronic music (bolt 2017). women practitioners are conscious that despite their recent increase and exposure, the diversity of algorave should be continually questioned. as live coding continues to grow, activities to ensure a critical mass of women live coders must be sustained (lagensen 2007). furthermore, certain areas of underrepresentation need desperate attention: “i think there is a real issue with whiteness in algorave” (algoraver 1). creating spaces for women to learn and fail within and external to the core community has significantly increased the number of women actively engaging within it. this requires time and labour and to a certain extent signifies a burden of representation on the women who are marginalised as it is. many of the women i spoke to felt dutiful about “passing on” their live coding education which speaks to the strong sense of community felt between women of the algorave. many women working within algorave have full time jobs and responsibilities elsewhere, but several have already conducted workshops for women and non-binary people. but there are still questions as to how algorave can create opportunities for women who need childcare support, financial support and come from different educational backgrounds. ultimately, algorave women have made a huge contribution to live coding: they present a diversity of practice through expanding genres and styles, they offer new ideas and opportunities, wider communities and different knowledge. they remove live coding from its often-technical discourse by centring creativity. from these interviews, it became clear that a feminist narrative can be strengthened in live coding in several ways. firstly, by shifting the discourse in live coding away from tools and developing those that focus on performance processes, experiences and creative outcomes. secondly, by providing a stage and platform for women and other underrepresented groups to perform. thirdly, creating opportunities for women to lead the organisation and promotion of events. although the first and second of these are already being addressed to a certain extent by the community, this burden is not shared equally, and there is a need to develop these activities further. although women are using live coding languages to develop their musical practice, they are still finding themselves on the “receiving end” of a technology. this technology is not gender neutral—when men are have historically made most of the decisions pertaining to its design and achieved wider recognition as skilled workers in their use of it (faulkner 2001). this gendering of technology underpins the live coding community. women algorave performers are acting in a space that further confounds the complex gendering of technical skills and knowledge. these tensions around simplicity vs complexity, technicality vs creativity and authenticity vs knowledge rupture through ill-considered comments from audience members and, more passively, through technically dominated discussion of live coding by male practitioners on online forums. with this, another area that needs to be addressed is the environments and languages for live coding that are predominantly developed and sustained by men.6 whilst effort has been made to involve women as performers, little has been done to support women in developing their own languages. it could be suggested that a language developed by women would act as the next significant cornerstone in further feminising the algorave scene. dancecult 10(1)44 notes 1 although recently algoraves have begun to incorporate performances involving algorithmically generated music in a wider sense. 2 see <https://girlswhocode.com/about-us> and <http://www.tech-girls.org/latestresearch.html> (accessed 10 january 2018). 3 over time, this surface-level approach needs to be challenged, and opportunities for women to deepen their understanding of computation concepts and constructs need to be provided to have true structural and technological equity within the scene. 4 the full code of conduct can be found at this link: <https://github.com/danhett/ algoraveconduct/blob/master/conduct.md> (accessed 10 january 2018). 5 this chat forum has recently moved from slack to <https://talk.lurk.org/home> (accessed 8 may 2018). 6 there are notable contributions by women to the development of live coding languages. this includes marije baalman as a longstanding contributor to supercollider and part of the modality team (see <https://modalityteam.github.io/team>), amy alexander’s “the thingee” and olivia jack’s “hydra” (see <https://github.com/ojack>). references baalman, marije. “embodiment of code”. in 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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2015.1087309 limits in algorithmic dance music renick bell independent author <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2018.10.01.12> a friend and i have been discussing what is lost in algorithmic music. without having personally used an algorithmic music system, he proposed tentatively that there might be more possibility or fewer limits in a human sitting behind a piano than when using an algorithmic music system. having used algorithmic music systems for over 20 years and having also studied piano, i felt intuitively this was not the case. possibly most obviously, the timbre of a piano (even when prepared) is limited compared to what a computer music language can produce. a person sitting at a piano lacks the endurance, creativity, and speed to execute the range of patterns which can be generated by algorithmic systems; the limitation is more stark if you consider the necessity for the human piano player to practice. the immense number of immediately realizable possibilities in algorithmic systems is at a completely different scale than those of a piano. for example, after booting my system, i immediately have access to thousands of rhythm patterns, which an extremely creative individual would struggle to produce even a small percentage of in a reasonable time. still, algorithmic music has limits, particularly algorithmic dance music. the limitations of the genre might be construed as becoming fewer, but these exist, particularly in terms of audience perception of danceability. personal interaction with audiences tells me that different segments of the audience simultaneously want algorithmic dance music to go beyond the sounds provided by other dance music styles and also want it to conform to some timbral or formal characteristics of contemporary dance music; if this music is meant to be consumed by a dance floor audience, taste must be accommodated. maybe all that can be done to overcome these limitations is to present music at the borders of the norms and hope that they are stretched to some degree. beyond the limits described above, i feel some technical limits: the interface: several issues impair the usability of algorithmic systems, such as the ease with which novel patterns can be entered, the speed with which large numbers of parameters can be set and the simplicity of entering new algorithms for the system to use (blackwell and collins 2005). the algorithms used to generate patterns: while existing tools can generate a wide variety of patterns, the difficulty of making new and interesting algorithms remains no different from that of a pianist trying to generate new material at a keyboard. synthesis techniques: it is difficult to find the right balance between a system which is complex enough to provide the widest possible variation in timbre, while simultaneously simple enough to be manipulated by a single user in real-time (tolonen et al. 1998). coordination between systems: while it is simple for two musicians on traditional acoustic instruments, such as a drummer and a pianist, to play together, there are greater technical hurdles to bring two live algorithmic music performers into the same degree of sync that we perceive the traditional musicians to be achieving. to overcome some of these limits, i am pursuing the following directions: elegant expression of core system functions: the interface of a live coding system needs to be efficient for a performer to produce changes which come fast enough to entertain audiences. i am trying to optimize the interface of the core functions of my algorithmic system to improve their usability. handling parameters and processes with agents:[1] with the number of simultaneous processes and parameters being able to quickly exceed those of traditional instruments, the algorithmic performer needs additional tools to handle them or needs a simpler interface. agent processes, meaning autonomous systems within an environment that sense that environment and act with purpose over time (franklin and graesser 1996), seem from personal research to make this easier if an appropriate interface is also provided. i am exploring different types of agents and means for linking the agents for coherent changes across the behaviour of all agents (or a subset of agents). one such agent in my system, conductive, observes rhythm patterns and changes them based on two observed factors: the length of time since the last change of base pattern (loosely, its "boredom") and the "boredom" of other agents in the system. connecting systems through osc: i am working towards being able to easily link two systems for deeper and more meaningful improvisations. for example, a pianist seldom receives a truly direct influence from a drummer. the pianist listens and possibly modifies their playing in response to the drummer, and vice versa, but algorithmic systems open the possibility for one performer to actually manipulate a co-performer's system in superficial or very deep ways. taking cues from similar efforts such as benoitlib (borgeat 2010) and republic (2016) (both for supercollider), i am working on tools using osc to send and receive messages to other systems and then providing responses to received messages that change the state of the system, including the algorithms at the core of the system. generating algorithms for generating rhythms: unfortunately i am not prepared technically for this advanced topic, but i would like to reach this point. successfully dealing with these limitations will increase the sense of freedom i feel when using my system, and hopefully my own progress can contribute towards expanding the range of possibility within the field of algorithmically-produced dance music. author biography tokyo-based renick bell improvises bass-heavy algorithmically-generated music full of percussion and noise by live coding with open source software, including software he has written called conductive. he has just released an album on rabit’s halcyon veil label and released an ep on lee gamble's uiq in late 2016. his music practice corresponds with a research practice of writing software and writing research papers on live coding, electronic music and art. email: <renick@gmail.com> web: <http://renickbell.net> references blackwell, alan, and nick collins. 2005. "the programming language as a musical instrument". in proceedings of the 17th workshop of the psychology of programming interest group (ppig05), 3: 120-30. brighton: university of sussex. borgeat, patrick. 2010. "benoitlib: supercollider extensions used by benoît and the mandelbrots". github.com. <https://github.com/cappelnord/benoitlib> (accessed 3 august 2018). franklin, stan, and art graesser. 1996. "is it an agent, or just a program?: a taxonomy for autonomous agents". in international workshop on agent theories, architectures, and languages, ed. jörg müller, michael wooldridge and nicholas jennings, 21-35. berlin: springer. <https://doi.org/10.1007/bfb0013570>. supercollider-quarks. 2014. "republic: simplify synchronisation of networks and make it easy to join and quit a running session". github.com. <https://github.com/supercollider-quarks/republic> (accessed 3 august 2018). tolonen, tero, vesa välimäki and matti karjalainen. 1998. evaluation of modern sound synthesis methods. espoo: helsinki university of technology. notes [1] in this context "an autonomous agent is a system situated within and a part of an environment that senses that environment and acts on it, over time, in pursuit of its own agenda and so as to effect what it senses in the future" (franklin and graesser 1996). hip-hop headphones: a scholar’s critical playlist james b. peterson new york: bloomsbury academic, 2016. isbn: 978-1-5013-0825-3 (hardcover), 978-1-5013-0824-6 (paperback), 978-1-5013-0827-7 (epub e-book), 978-1-5013-0826-0 (pdf e-book) rrp: us$120.00 (hardcover), us$29.95 (paperback), us$25.99 (epub e-book), us$25.99 (pdf e-book) james cox university of queensland (australia) by his own admission, james braxton peterson is “one of the earlier professors to teach hip-hop at the collegiate level”, and hip-hop headphones is a great representation of peterson’s 20+ years of engagement with hip-hop at this scholarly level. hip-hop studies have been conducted by scholars in a variety of different disciplines—geographers, linguists, sociologists, anthropologists and many others have all made invaluable contributions. peterson himself comes to hip-hop studies as a professor of english and director of africana studies at lehigh university. with this diversity in mind, hip-hop headphones sets out some very useful approaches to the study of hip-hop culture. hip-hop headphones is a collection of definitions, lectures, academic essays and other scholarly discussions and resources all produced by peterson. the book is organised into five parts: the first examines definitions; the second looks at speech and beats; the third comprises a collection of scholarly reviews; the fourth is a transcription of a round-table discussion on race theory and gender in hip-hop’s global future; and the final section is titled “rapademics” which includes pieces peterson has written in response to his role as a public academic in the us. the collected nature of the book is part of its strength, but also its greatest weakness. the collection of works here demonstrates the scope of engagement possible in hip-hop studies. however, the book does feel like it often repeats itself—in particular, examples and points that, when the book is read as a whole, make the reader feel like we’ve been there before. some of the inclusions in the collection also let down the strength of the book—the scholarly reviews of books, documentaries and articles do not add as much to the collection as they could. these are the only real weaknesses in the book though, as hip-hop headphones provides some valuable contributions to the field of hip-hop studies, particularly in setting out definitions and methodologies for not only researching hip-hop culture but also teaching it in a variety of settings. peterson’s emphasis on “critical listening” to a range of hip-hop related texts sets up a key theme that is continued throughout the book. the first chapter, “re: definition”, is one of the strongest of the book and would be very useful as a reading for students and educators alike who are not necessarily familiar with hip-hop studies or hip-hop culture itself. as the title suggests, the chapter establishes some very useful definitions of hip-hop culture and for the study of hip-hop, such as peterson’s definition of the three loosely organized eras of hip-hop. within hip-hop scholarship there has generally been a reluctance and “hedging-of-bets” when it comes to providing definitive years for the eras of hip-hop. peterson defines the “old school era” (1979–1987), followed by the “golden age era” (1987–1993) and the “platinum era” (1994–approximately 2004). while i’m not personally sold on the choice of “platinum era” as a term, these definitions do provide a welcome addition to hip-hop scholarship. while the first chapter would work well as a reading for undergraduate students, the second chapter is probably better suited to post-graduates and educators who are teaching aspects of hip-hop culture. within this chapter peterson presents a rubric for appreciating, evaluating and understanding the impact and importance of mcs. while the elements of the rubric are similar to many hip-hop fans’ discussions around questions like “who’s your favourite rapper”, it provides more structure to these discussions. the rubric is also an example of the “critical listening” approach peterson promotes throughout the book. in this way, by critically listening to an artist’s work, and applying such a rubric, conversations about “favourites” and “bests” become conversations about aesthetics, location and performance. this combination of critical thinking and listening is an important way of shaping in-class discussions of hip-hop. the most valuable parts of the book are perhaps found in the appendices, where peterson provides examples of the syllabi he has used to teach a variety of hip-hop inspired courses, and also a collection of playlists he has assembled during these classes. these appendices relate specifically to chapters two and four in the book, and are excellent examples of how hip-hop cultural practices can be incorporated into classroom pedagogies. peterson advances what he calls a “playlist pedagogy”, and he ties this in with the concept of the “ubiquitous learning environment”. suggested by yahya, ahmad and jalil (2010), ubiquitous learning environments are described as “any setting in which students can become totally immersed in the learning process”. peterson uses playlists here, in combination with the aforementioned critical listening skills, as a way to extend the potential for learning beyond the traditional classroom space. the playlists described in the appendix cover all manner of topics raised in hip-hop songs, such as suicide, black prison narratives, often-sampled songs, and odes to/of hip-hop culture. these playlists are just suggestions and ones that peterson has complied through his experience using them in classrooms, but they also make great starting resources for those teaching with and about hip-hop. hip-hop headphones makes a valuable, and much needed, contribution to the field of hip-hop studies. chapters from the book would be excellent readings for students, but the book’s main audience will be those interested in using hip-hop in classrooms. the strongest sections of the book are where peterson documents his teaching practices, and these sections will be incredibly useful to those teaching elements of hip-hop culture. references yahya, saadiah, erny arniza ahmad and kamarularifin abd jalil. 2010. “the definition and characteristics of ubiquitous learning: a discussion”. international journal of education and development using information and communication technology 6(1): 117–27. dancecult 12(1) 2020: editor's introduction, masthead and table of contents dance culture in the time of corona edited by dave payling and graham st john v12.1 2020 dancecult journal of electronic dance music culture issue 12(1) 2020 issn 1947-5403 ©2020 dancecult published yearly at <http://dj.dancecult.net> international advisory board sean albiez (southampton solent university, uk), anthony d’andrea (university of limerick, ie), mark j butler (northwestern university, us), rebekah farrugia (oakland university, us), kai fikentscher (de), alistair fraser (maynooth university, ie), luis-manuel garcia (university of birmingham, uk), anna gavanas (institute for futures studies, se), ross harley (university of new south wales, au), tim lawrence (university of east london, uk), geert lovink (university of amsterdam, nl), alejandro l. madrid (university of illinois, chicago, us), paolo magaudda (university of padova, it), charity marsh (university of regina, ca), andrew murphie (university of new south wales, au), alice o’grady (university of leeds, united kingdom), christopher partridge (lancaster university, uk), dave payling (staffordshire university, uk), anne petiau (itsrs / université paris 5, fr), hillegonda c rietveld (london south bank university, uk), geoff stahl (victoria university of wellington, nz), sonjah nadine stanley-niaah (university of west indies, jm), graham st john (au), jonathan sterne (mcgill university, ca), will straw (mcgill university, ca), rupert till (university of huddersfield, uk), botond vitos (de), toby young (university of oxford, uk) dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture is a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture (edmc). launched in 2009, as a platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on the shifting terrain of edmcs worldwide, dancecult houses research exploring the sites, technologies, sounds and cultures of electronic music in historical and contemporary perspectives. playing host to studies of emergent forms of electronic music production, performance, distribution, and reception, as a portal for cutting-edge research on the relation between bodies, technologies, and cyberspace, as a medium through which the cultural politics of dance is critically investigated, and as a venue for innovative multimedia projects, dancecult is the leading venue for research on edmc. cover design and photography by botond vitos and dave payling thanks to loophole berlin for providing the space executive editor graham st john (au) production editor botond vitos (de) from the floor editorial director dave payling (staffordshire university, uk from the floor editor alice o’grady (university of leeds, uk) reviews editor toby young (university of oxford, uk) operations director botond vitos (de) managing editor tommy colton symmes (rice university, us) community manager katrina loughrey (de) art director botond vitos (de) associate editors kath o’donnell (au) alistair fraser (maynooth university, ie) production assistants richard anderson (university of liverpool, uk) christopher charles (university of bristol, uk) dave payling (staffordshire university, uk) http://dj.dancecult.net issn 1947-5403 ©2020 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net v12.1 2020 editor’s introduction: dance culture in the time of corona . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 01 dave payling and graham st john from the floor – online no screenshots on the dance floor ben assiter india’s electronic music scene under lockdown: the first three months of the covid-19 pandemic chris mcguinness a post-post-soviet scene post-quarantine camille leblanc liederman virtual dance floors: shall we dance or fly? emília simão and paula guerra good vibes friday: reflections on livestreaming during the covid-19 lockdown samantha warren sound systems at the george floyd protests in minneapolis during the summer of 2020 tommy symmes transformation through connection? insights from a pilot study of story sharing cubes at burning man events terje toomistu and jukka-pekkä heikkilä feature articles bring the break-beat back! authenticity and the politics of rhythm in drum ‘n’ bass . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 chris christodoulou genre in practice: categories, metadata and music-making in psytrance culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 christopher charles the studio as contemporary autonomous zone: crisis and creativity in electronic music . . . . . . . . . . 48 paul chambers the vibe as peace: edmc conflict studies and montreal psytrance spheres . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 marc-olivier castagner reviews bass, mids, tops: an oral history of sound system culture (joe muggs & brian david stevens) . . . . . . . . .85 edward k. spencer night fever: designing club culture 1960 – today (mateo kries, jochen eisenbrand & catherine rossi, eds.) & this must be the place: an architectural history of popular music performance venues (robert kronenburg). . 89 hillegonda c. rietveld moon juice stomper: a novel (goa 1987-96) (ray castle) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .92 graham st john avicii: true stories (levan tsikurishvili, dir.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .94 george musgrave dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 12(1): 1–2 issn 1947-5403 ©2020 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.00 dance culture in the time of corona produced during the great confinement of 2020, this issue of dancecult features a special from the floor edition (dance culture in the time of corona) alongside regular feature articles. the world navigates a pandemic in full rage. inside the networked and mediated immediacy of global-scale surreality, dance music cultures and industries are adversely impacted. passing into an extended moment of global uncertainty, our distributed eventcentred communities show little sign of returning to “normal”. documenting their author’s thoughts and experiences during the first few months of the covid-19 crisis, when the first wave of infections and lockdowns spread across the planet, the articles in from the floor 2020 echo this uncertainty. the introduction of measures to reduce and prevent travel and contact has decreased opportunities for people to socialise and halted larger gatherings leading to major international festivals, concerts, club nights, carnivals and conferences being cancelled or transformed to virtual gatherings. this is particularly disruptive for our community which relies on these events for connection and transformation (see toomistu and heikkilä this issue). venues and musicians have also been hit financially, leaving many clubs on the brink of closure (hancock and gray 2020), musicians seeking ways to supplement their income (see mcguinness this issue) and party people without the charged feelings of solidarity (vandenberg, berghman and schaap 2020). undeterred and with limited options, djs and producers have made efforts to continue their work. this has led to an upsurge in the adoption of streaming technologies, with smaller pop-up events run by individuals and large scale planned events promoted by established companies and organisations (see assiter this issue). the diy ethos inherent to the scene, re-emerges. piecing together the required equipment, finding space and promoting online events virtually has become an urgent necessity (see warren this issue). these efforts have provided options for real-time connections and feedback between artists and their audience, and ravers can instant message and chat with each other, conjuring some degree of the vibe that occurs so naturally in person. this collective effervescence has been recreated using emojis and instant messages to livestream chats and potentially more effectively through immersion in the virtual worlds available on some platforms (see simao and guerra this issue). doors have therefore been opened for many to develop and continue these strategies into the future. these efforts have helped fill the void, but they exclude those without the necessary technologies or bandwidth and are insufficient in creating the visceral experience felt in the crowd and lifted by the energy emanating from the speaker stacks of a good sound system. a few “real” events have continued for those willing to take the risk, sometimes expected and others less predictable. coronavirus couldn’t prevent large gatherings and sound systems editor’s introduction dancecult 12(1)2 at the recent protests in minneapolis (see symmes this issue). many others have sought the release valve of free parties and other unlicensed raves (lhooq 2020). while openly promoted initially, as news outlets condemned their occurrence, and authorities responded with the threat of significant fines, events were pushed further underground. as the content of from the floor 2020 illustrates, the edmc research community responded with enthusiasm and at short notice to the call on this theme at this critical time. we expect our next editions to feature further content addressing the pandemic’s impact across edmcs and research, and encourage further submissions (to both our feature article and from the floor sections). in addition to regular feature articles, we trust readers will enjoy the following from the floor content: • ben assiter (uk), no screenshots on the dance floor. • camille leblanc liederman (lithuania), a post-post-soviet scene post-quarantine. • chris mcguinness (us), india’s electronic music scene under lockdown: the first three months of the covid-19 pandemic. • emília simão and paula guerra (portugal), virtual dance floors: shall we dance or fly? • samantha warren (uk), good vibes friday: reflections on livestreaming during the lockdown. • tommy symmes (us), sound systems at the george floyd protests in minneapolis during the summer of 2020. • terje toomistu (estonia) and jukka-pekkä heikkilä (finland), transformation through connection? story sharing cubes at burning man events while the “other side” remains opaque inside our unevenly distributed global meltdown, as the material presented in this issue of dancecult illustrates, optimism and community remain vital across electronic dance and music cultures. until we meet again on the dance floor. . . dave payling (from the floor section director) graham st john (executive editor) dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture references hancock, alice, and alistair gray. 2020. “nightclubs fear collapse as dance floors remain out of bounds”. financial times. 19 september. <https://www.ft.com/content/3b1535f3-478b4bd1-a1e4-613ef675e12f>. (accessed 16 october 2020). lhooq, michelle. 2020. “rave to the grave”. rave new world. 18 september. <https://ravenewworld.substack.com/p/rave-to-the-grave>. (accessed 16 october 2020). vandenberg, femke, michaël berghman and julian schaap. 2020. “the ‘lonely raver’: music livestreams during covid-19 as a hotline to collective consciousness?”. european societies. <https://doi.org/10.1080/14616696.2020.1818271>. https://ravenewworld.substack.com/p/rave-to-the-grave https://doi.org/10.1080/14616696.2020.1818271 my practice of live performance of spatial electronic dance music sébastien lavoie university of huddersfield (uk) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.16> when i compose music using spatialisation techniques, i am aiming to create a sense of immersion and movement. i am enthralled by the ability and possibility to move sound in space and i consider it an important feature of music. for me, it enhances the listening experience, and this is achieved through localization, diffusion, height and trajectories of sounds. the implementation of spatial counterpoint in my compositions utilises parallel and contrary spatial motion. this use of “spatial counterpoint”[1] inherently implies a set of compositional considerations for approaching a new work. my music is different to more typical electronic dance music (edm) since we can hear sound trajectories, changeable rates of speed in sonic movement, localization and a height dimension in the sound. i have arrived at a heuristic meaning and common sense set of rules for spatialisation. my spatialisation technique was influenced by the position of the three rings of speakers at different height in the spatialisation and interactive research lab (spiral)[2] studio at the university of huddersfield. in keeping with my concept of “gravitational spatialisation”, i decided to keep most of my loops containing “heavy” low frequencies (20hz~250hz) on the bottom circle of eight speakers while moving or positioning the loops with mid and high frequencies on the two rings of speakers above. this creates a “gravitational spatialisation” where higher pitch sounds are usually heard above the lower bass sounds or kick. since the ears perceive and localise the high pitch sound more easily (lee, gribben, and wallis 2014), i tend to place the sounds on the higher rings of speakers. this last finding is supported by lee, gribben and wallis where they state that “the addition of height channels in new reproduction formats such as auro-3d, dolby atmos and 22.2, etc. enhances the perceived spatial impression in reproduction” (2014: 1). genesis of the performance practice the idea of rhythm and dancing has been important throughout my life and over several years i attended numerous nightclubs in order to hear djs during the “golden age” of house and techno music. the instant somatic gratification from the bass frequencies was compelling. yet, i was also drawn to the compositional and intellectual aspects of this music. i started to go to nightclubs at the age of 14 years old and i grew up listening to dance music, which at the time (around 1988) coincided with the birth of house music. over the years, i have acquired knowledge from these music genres by regularly attending events of this kind and i have developed a strong inclination for rhythmical music, especially edm. unfortunately, most of them do not utilise the art of spatialisation in any significant way. this is where i thought i could reconcile my musical aspirations: incorporating my skills from acousmatic composition and implement them in an edm style. i started as an acousmatic composer and i became a composer/performer of edm at a later stage. i have developed a studio practice, where i want to integrate live performance and in-the-moment decision making at every point. my upbringing in nightclubs was dedicated towards the physical aspect of life. i relate this to my ongoing need to experience music viscerally when i compose, and although i had a rigorous training in it, i do not find this sense of physicality in much of the acousmatic repertoire. since i have always been drawn to edm, i started to apply my acousmatic practice to these styles of music production. through my particular compositional practice, i mix techno, house and trance music. i also define how my composer/producer/performer interchangeable roles work seamlessly as it is an interesting creative model. i have explored through the evaluation of spatialisation tools and plugins, which ones would be relevant to implement to edm. there is a preparation, a selection, and a structure to each of my performances; i organize the set list and program for each specific event. the experimentation is done as the performance evolves, reading and sensing the components of that moment in order to provide the required musical offering: when an edm producer (usually also a dj) in a recording studio selects and organizes sounds in determined ways, he is already acting in accordance with their virtual effects on a dance floor. experimenting with sound combinations, he is also experimenting with his audience's movements, thus producing a kind of tool that comes from and arrives at his relations with the dance floor (ferreira 2008: 18). thus, there are similarities between the act of djing and my live performance. they both are organized in advance, but they also allow the freedom to improvise with the already composed musical material. what differs is my ability to decompose and recompose certain parts from the pieces as they unfold. in addition, i can apply specific effects on individual loops, which allows me to generate new musical ideas and directions to develop during the improvisational sections. in my work, i do consider my method of formal arrangement to be a form of experimentation into what a track or composition can be. i want the experience to be an immersive one that can be appreciated both by the body and the head. during the first year of my phd research (deway 2019) i produced some fixed media work that attempted to bridge these different styles of composition: the academic and more commercial music. for me, these pieces lack the sense of physical and intellectual fulfillment that i am looking for when i create work. consequently, throughout the following experimentations, i concentrated my compositions towards live performance that includes my concept of gravitational spatialisation. furthermore, i realized that sitting down at a concert was not my preferred mode of listening and because i like to move, and i like to hear the sounds moving as well, this form of embodied listening propelled me to search for a new way to perform and experience my music. ultimately, my objective is to have a self-awareness of what it is i am making musically, where it is drawing from, and to demonstrate that what i am doing is synthesizing those key characteristics into something that is compositionally my own. the way i compose and perform is through musical structure, process and intuition. the key compositional elements are the gradual accumulation and fragmentation of texturally and rhythmically driven loops. these elements help me to create a sense of musical flow through the “emergence” and “disappearance” of sonic content. the sense of flow is important for me when i compose, create or perform because it is organically evolving, transforming and changing what is happening musically. it allows me to have a vivid awareness, which enables me to react, respond and adapt to the music. it also allows me to reach an elevated state of consciousness inand of-the-moment. among the characteristics that i consider important when composing is the immersive quality of the music. this immersion is related to the enclosed space where an array of speakers is the vehicle to convey the spatialisation and the musical gesture to “transport” the audience during a performance. ultimately, i want the audience to experience a sense of immersion within the concert space, and through articulation points to make them aware of the musical structure. in addition, viscerality is another concept that is included in my work. it is achieved through immersion, the use of low frequencies and “gravitational spatialisation”; it is a phenomenon that emerges from all the actions i take when i perform my music. the feel-good quality to my music can be interpreted as superficial (pleasant to the ears) but there is an intellectual questioning regarding what comes next in order to provide this musical continuum. the objective when i compose/perform is to feed into what sounds good to me and into different models of musical decision-making such as adding or removing music loops, or by filtering the sonic content of the music. the inter-relationships between the fast-paced rhythmic loops from my pieces mixed with the longer, reverberating sounds are playing with the concept of ebbing water; transitioning smoothly or not with current and new sonic materials. this methodology of composing is reflected in my music and is described in jacques attali’s book, noise: [music] is more than an object of study: it is a way of perceiving the world. a tool of understanding. [...] music, the organization of noise, is one such form. it reflects the manufacture of society; it constitutes the audible waveband of the vibrations and signs that make up society (1985: 4). in my research into the application of spatial technologies and techniques to edm, in order to create immersive and sublime experiences, this is one way in which i use music to understand my place as an original creative person within society. the music is more than an object of study and technical implementation of compositional principles, it is a way for me to articulate how i express myself in the world. composition and spatialisation tools throughout my research, i have experimented with a range of software and hardware tools that allow differing spatial formats to be explored. from this, i was able to develop a methodology of spatialising edm. i believe that the role of spatialisation in edm will continue to grow as nightclubs and academic institutions continue their interest in it. what is inspiring for me are the new tools and environments which are going to emerge and how i will be able to incorporate them into my practice. one of the areas that excites me is opened up by the dolby atmos plugin[3] and its application. my experience of using the dolby atmos plugin tools at their london studio in august 2017 was an easy adaptation of the knowledge i had gained from the tools i was already using within ableton. this seems to suggest an exciting future, where the sonic experience is enhanced; it is an evolution compared to the current stereo standard in edm. i was pleased to find out that the methodology i have developed, within the ableton and max4live framework, was an easy adaptation with the dolby tool since they function in a similar way; this demonstrates that the technology is evolving in the same direction and becoming more refined. this leads me to think that i am ready and prepared for what is next in the field of spatial edm because i know what works for me and how to achieve it. i am also enthusiastic about the fact that dolby “is bringing its object-based 3d-audio platform to the dance music sphere by way of club installations and apps aimed at studio and dj mixing” (rothlein 2015). they are also looking to expand the locations where their technology is installed. after london (ministry of sound), chicago (sound-bar) and san francisco (halcyon), clubs in tokyo and berlin are also on their radar. this encourages me to continue and to strive in that direction, in order to keep my knowledge and skills relevant. also, i am curious to see what ableton has planned with regards to the performance of multi-channel edm. there are max4live objects in their latest software version (live 10) that have implemented high order ambisonic libraries and a binaural tool which enables the user to play with multi-channel/surround/ambisonic audio. as an artist i do think it is important that i need to push boundaries—doing it step by step while still accomplishing what i want to do musically. i want to continue to promote nightclub (commercial) music as being as valid as any other genre. i see a comparable evolution with jazz music when it was considered an “underground” phenomenon, not welcomed into academia, until it reached universal acceptance. edm has followed a similar development entering progressively academic institutions as a subject of serious study. a parallel occurrence can be observed with the recent shift in perception of society in regard of graffiti artists such as banksy, who did not have any other outlet than the street to display his art, and now is welcomed into galleries and other prominent art centers. this shows how something can exist outside the establishment and may become institutionalized. thus, i want to elevate edm to a noble art form in order to teach it, not just use it for commercials purposes only. perspectives of spatial edm one of the reasons i have completed this long academic endeavor of 5 years was to push myself further as a musician in an evolving technological landscape. i was motivated to do it because i see a trend among the younger generation of music students: they often have not played traditional instruments such as a guitar, a violin or a piano, but most likely they own a computer which has the potential to be a musical instrument. this coincided with my own situation, using the computer as a creative tool. in my research project i have demonstrated that merging composition and improvisation can provide a rich creative environment for the composition and performance of edm. furthermore, i have established in this document that my live performance practices redefine what a composer of edm can be. thus, i want this research to promote a viable future for modern edm composers. as such, this commentary presents a methodology and a set of accessible tools to be able to create and teach music as a contemporary artist, while acknowledging the growing popularity of edm and spatialisation. when i first encountered the spiral studio at the university of huddersfield, i was intimidated by its size and its complexity. since then, i have assessed various tools and techniques for spatialisation and what changed most since the beginning of the research is the level of confidence i have acquired when approaching large speaker arrays. also, since i am using accessible spatialisation tools (max4live plugins “max api ctrl1lfo” and “max api sendsxnodes”), i have developed a method to adapt quickly and easily to various configuration of sound systems. over the course of my research, i have learned ways to promote myself as a performer by growing a social media presence by livestreaming my music. since july 2016, i have performed live on several streaming platforms such as youtube, facebook, twitch, and periscope; i have over 150 videos where i play music, one example is the recording below. rocket verstappen studio live recording (deway 2016) this experience is an ongoing project and it allows me to improve my music on a technical and practical level. it is a practical outlet for me to mature as a performer and also to reach an audience around the world. i am looking forward to the day where spatial audio will be accessible in a livestreaming format since the technology is still being developed and not yet available. until then, i am getting ready. author biography sébastien is a french canadian from montreal who regards himself as belonging to this generation of composer-producer-performer who use the laptop as a musical instrument. this compositional tool allows him to develop his musical skills as much on stage as in the studio. his phd research investigated the use of spatialisation tools and techniques to enhance electronic dance music through an immersive sound experience. sébastien’s works have a form and shape arising from pre-compositional and in-the-moment decisions. email: sebastien.lavoie.1@gmail.com website: www.sebastiandeway.com references attali, jacques. 1985. noise: the political economy of music. volume 16. theory and history of literature. manchester: manchester university press. deway, sebastian. 2019. “research—3d spatial audio”. 3d spatial audio, may. <https://www.sebastiandeway.com/research>. (accessed 31 may 2019). ferreira, pedro. 2008. “when sound meets movement: performance in electronic dance music”. leonardo music journal 18: 17–20. <https://doi.org/10.1162/lmj.2008.18.17>. lee, hyunkook, christopher gribben, and rory wallis. 2014. “psychoacoustic considerations in surround sound with height”. in 28th tonmeistertagung, 10-9. cologne, germany. robjohns, hugh. 2017. “dolby atmos at the ministry of sound”. sound on sound, january. <https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/dolby-atmos-ministry-sound>. (accessed 8 april 2018). rothlein, jordan. 2015. “dolby atmos comes to ministry of sound”. resident advisor, 3 december. <https://www.residentadvisor.net/news/32448>. (accessed 20 june 2018). filmography “rocket verstappen (studio live)”. uploaded on 27 august 2017. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ap9gigjmxm>. (accessed 9 september 2017). notes [1] this is my spatial contrapuntal system for this practice: i have called it “gravitational spatialisation”. it comprises a spectral separation of the audio content with sound positioned according to its frequency. [2] the studio is used for research into the development of new control mechanisms for the spatialisation and diffusion of sound in performance and composition. additionally, the studio is used for composing multi-channel electroacoustic pieces to be played in concert and installation environments. the spiral studio is a 25.4 channel studio. it comprises three octophonic circles of speakers that provide a height dimension, a central high speaker pointing straight down to the sweet spot, and four subwoofers. [3] at ministry of sound, tracks were processed using the dolby atmos panner plugin, which was used to automate the three-dimensional panning of various musical elements (robjohns 2017). darkcore: dub’s dark legacy in drum ‘n’ bass culture chris christodoulou london south bank university (uk) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.02.12> the popular use of the terms “dark” and “darkness” in bass-oriented electronic dance music (edm) styles, such as grime, dubstep and jungle/drum ‘n’ bass, points to the recontextualisation of the racial category of blackness on the one hand and the dark uncanniness of post-industrial urban space on the other. acknowledging the influence of dub on a continuum of bass-oriented edm styles in the uk, i focus on drum ‘n’ bass to show how “dark” discourses within the dub diaspora can be defined as a critical response, firstly, to the ethnocentric demonisation of blackness as the post-colonial other of modernity, and secondly, to the destructive conditions created by the political economy of the contemporary city where rapidly changing relationships between class, gender and technology determine access to wealth and social prosperity.[1] in both senses, desire is conflated with darkness to normalise experiences of being marginalised and disempowered on the basis of ethnicity, subaltern class position and urbanised alienation. during late 1992 and early 1993, jungle or “jungle techno” developed as a dominant soundtrack for london’s inner city rave scene.[2] the genre is based on a combination of powerful bass sounds and break-beats that are either synthesised or digitally sampled from existing musical recordings, before being accelerated and looped, whereby, the tempos of drum ‘n’ bass bass-lines are typically half those of its break-beats. as 1993 progressed, the more descriptive term “drum ‘n’ bass” was being used alongside jungle to designate jungle tracks that emphasised the drums and bass as the core elements. as such, drum ‘n’ bass shares its name with a museme in jamaican dub, where “drum ‘n’ bass” was used to describe the instrumental, rhythm section of reggae that developed from studio recordings of reggae songs in the early 1970s, to be used for dubbing new melody and vocal lines (veal 2007). since the late1980s, developments in digital music production like sampling and time-stretching have enabled pre-existing bass-lines from dub records running at around 85 beats-per-minute to be combined with accelerated break-beats running at around 170 beats-per-minute. simultaneously, in the uk, a familiarity with jamaican music based on post-war migration from the west indies contextualised the cultural use of contemporary music production technologies. in particular, the exporting of jamaica’s dub and reggae sound systems to english cities in the mid-1970s helped to foster a sense of solidarity between black/white identified peoples on the basis of shared working class experiences (hebdige 1987), thereby facilitating the 1990s development of drum ‘n’ bass. while the term drum ‘n’ bass continues to be used synonymously with jungle, it has been preferred by some of the music’s practitioners on the basis of the latter term’s supposedly ethnocentric connotations. for smiley, one half of the production duo shut up and dance, the term “jungle” remains highly charged: “the fact is, it’s got racist connotations, it always has. you watch old films and they say ‘turn off that bloody jungle music!’”.[3] implicit in this interpretation is the use of “jungle” to denigrate the african american rhythms of 1920s harlem dancehall jazz. while the patrons were largely white, performers were almost exclusively black, pointing to the term’s formation from a discourse of ethnic otherness (bakari 1999). such fear of “jungle music” is supplemented by a fear of miscegenation: the feeling that african diasporic musical rhythms would seduce white youth into the “dark continent” of a primitive and hitherto repressed sexuality. mary ann doane shows how the “dark continent trope is hence invoked in the context of a return to the motifs of castration, lack, and envy” (1991: 210). conversely, drum ‘n’ bass practitioners often point to the jamaican usage of “jungle” to signify the sharing of cultural and socio-economic experiences of young people living and growing up across the atlantic. in this context, the conscious internalisation of a position of “darkness” locates drum ‘n’ bass membership within what imruh bakari refers to as a “subaltern discourse” of post-colonial experience (1999: 109). bakari argues that since the 1960s, jamaican music, aesthetics and language have resonated with british working class afro-carribean, ethnic irish and other white youth who share similar experiences of social exclusion, unemployment and poor educational opportunities in the rapidly de-industrialising regions of cities like london, birmingham, bristol and manchester. as such, the established network of sound systems, all-night clubs and pirate radio stations informed by dub practices in the uk’s inner cities can be seen as attempts to affirm legitimate forms of identity from within the margins of everyday british life, rather than a desire to overcome an assumed “lack of identity” (bakari 1999: 109). in drum ‘n’ bass, dance event flyers and record sleeves often feature jamaican and rastafarian imagery, such as gold and green colours of the jamaican flag on the dread recordings label’s “dub dread” series of compilation lps and the image of the conquering lion (see fig. 1). the “king of the jungle” serves as a pervasive signifier of majestic power and mystical righteousness prevalent in the rastafarian-inflected narratives of dub and reggae sound system culture. the adoption of such an image in the context of uk drum ‘n’ bass points to gilroy’s reading of w. e. b du bois’ concept of “double consciousness” in black atlantic culture; the double meaning of the “urban jungle” as a “dread” space of sinful transgression (1993: 77) takes place at the same time that participation in jungle music is constructed as providing divine strength and inspiration. figure 1: a representation of the “conquering lion” on the record sleeve for fire, by prizna featuring the demolition man (1995). kevin robins and frank webster argue that fatalism constitutes a main attitude to life and future prospects in the post-industrial city, whereby “difficult and often painful experiences are integral to urban living” (1999: 258). thereby, the thematic prominence of darkness within drum ‘n’ bass culture points to how it is informed by the post-industrial conditions of its development. a fatalistic outlook permeates the foreboding ambience of early tracks like valley of the shadows by origin unknown (1993), which features a female voice intoning, “i felt that i was in this long dark tunnel” alongside a menacing, dub-influenced bass-line. during its early development between 1992 and 1994, darkcore and dark were often used synonymously with jungle and drum ‘n’ bass as descriptive categories for this burgeoning style of up-tempo edm. ken mcleod argues that futuristic themes exhibited by popular cultural texts “deflect the often darkly rational, scientific, and sometimes militaristic notions of progress that have characterised much of late twentieth and early twenty-first-century life” (2003: 337). mary ann doane (1991) claims that the recurrence of post-human imagery in popular culture is based to a considerable extent on the success of dystopian science-fiction films like the terminator, robocop and blade runner. according to lavender iii, the protagonists of the terminator, robocop and blade runner correspond to three specific kinds of synthetic being, respectively the ai (artificial intelligence), the cyborg (cybernetic organism) and the android (2011: 191). the ai-endowed robot, the cyborg and the android, act as signifiers for the fear that humanity is in danger of becoming entirely absorbed into a future in which technology has become the paradigm by which progress is measured. for lavender iii, the cyborg in particular constitutes a key category of the representation of post-human identity in science fiction texts, and “refers to a biological-mechanical synthesis between human and machine wherein normal biological capability is enhanced by electromechanical devices that disrupt the boundary between nature and technology” (2011: 191).[4] the record sleeve for the deep cover mini lp by the guyver (reinforced 1995) dramatically articulates this boundary disruption in the form of a dreadlocked cyborg mc, thereby reframing the familiar figure (at least to londoners) of the urban rastafarian in a futuristic context (see fig. 2). this fascination with the cyborg can be seen to have developed out of a sense of paranoia about the post-industrial displacement of human labour by cybernetics and information technologies, and the political and corporate power structures that seem to legitimate their destructive social effects in urban environments. in this context, drum ‘n’ bass culture transforms dub’s visual iconography to construct the future as “dread time”. figure 2: deep cover mini lp by the guyver (1995). the adoption of dub’s powerful basslines provides one of main sonic signifiers for drum ‘n’ bass’ dark futurism. for hebdige, the bassline provides “the basic background throb of reggae’s heartbeat” (1987: 82). within the history of reggae’s opposition to institutional and colonial authority (gilroy 2002), this heartbeat has arguably evolved into an oppositional signifier. descriptions of the “rebel bass”, or “dread bass” in black atlantic music discourse have served to contextualise its threatening sonority, framing phil tagg’s view that low frequency sound in western culture typically signifies darkness and fear (2000: 173–9). the bassline may also be read as an articulation of the painful passage of migration that connects vast geographic and historical distances. as iain chambers argues with reference to the work of dub poet linton kwesi johnson, “bass history is a hurting black story” (my italics, 1985: 161). the double meaning of bass as indicating both heartbeat and hurting can also be used to convey the dark uncanniness of post-industrial culture, especially for male bodies previously fortified by the need for physical strength in interactions with the technologies of heavy industry. cybernetics and other new technologies render the working class male impotent of his “natural” physical power and hence, his once privileged social position. yvonne tasker claims that, in the shift from an industrial society of production to a post-industrial society based on consumption, technological development facilitates the “denaturalising of the supposed naturalness of male identity” (2004: 110). in both post-colonial and post-industrial contexts, hurting bass frequencies articulate feelings of subjective and shared embattlement, generating a sense of masculine re-embodiment via what steve goodman calls the “bass materialism” of music strongly influenced by jamaican sound system culture, whereby a “rearrangement of the senses” is an effect of the collective “processing of vibration” on the dance-floor (2010: 28). while the heavily amplified bassline marks the indebtedness of drum ‘n’ bass to caribbean music, it is also useful in this regard to examine bass in its hurting aspect as an inscription of a crisis of masculinity in a late-capitalist context. the ways in which the development of jungle and drum ‘n’ bass drew from the sonic, visual and lexicological legacy of dub can be seen as one important response from a largely multi-ethnic and working class demographic in london and, later, other metropolitan regions of the uk, to the considerable social and cultural changes brought about by the shift in the uk from an industrial to a post-industrial society in the 1980s and 1990s. in particular, dub’s dread discourse and narratives of spiritual righteousness continue to be adopted to reframe the “dark continent” as a reminder of modernity’s colonial dark side while also signifying the inevitable reality of life in the urban jungle. in this way, the ethnocentric connotations linking darkness to blackness are recontextualised and co-opted as an aspect of diasporic cultural practice. in sonic terms, drum ‘n’ bass borrows dub’s foreboding dread bass to articulate a narrative of the future as a new dark, dystopian, age; an apparently inevitable period during which working class masculinity is disempowered and denaturalised by electronic technology and rapid economic change, while narrating a migratory history of african diasporic hurt wrought by displacement and deindustrialisation. author biography chris christodoulou, phd, is a senior lecturer in the school of media, arts and design at the university of westminster. his research is concerned with the relationship between speed, technology and the city in electronic dance music scenes and subcultures. his phd, entitled renegade hardware: speed, pleasure and cultural practice, was undertaken at london south bank university, and completed in 2009. he is also interested in fan communities based on the collection and repurposing of obsolete and residual media. references bakari, imruh. 1999. “exploding silence: african-caribbean and african-american culture towards 2000”. in living through pop, ed. andrew blake, 98–111. london: routledge. chambers, iain. 1985. urban rhythms: pop music and popular culture. basingstoke: macmillan. doane, mary ann. 1991. femmes fatales: feminism, film theory, psychoanalysis. london: routledge. gilroy, paul. 1993. the black atlantic: modernity and double consciousness. london: verso. ———. 2002 [1987]. there ain’t no black in the union jack. london: routledge. goodman, steve. 2010. sonic warfare: sound, affect, and the ecology of fear. massachusetts: massachusetts institute of technology press. hebdige, dick. 1979. subculture: the meaning of style. london: methuen. ———. 1987. cut ‘n’ mix: culture, identity and caribbean music. london: comedia. lavender iii, isiah. 2011. race in american science fiction. bloomington: indiana university press. negus, keith. 1996. popular music in theory: an introduction. london: polity. mcleod, ken. 2003. “space oddities: aliens, futurism and meaning in popular music”. popular music 12(3): 337–5. reynolds, simon. 2013 [1998]. energy flash: a journey through rave music and dance culture. london: picador. robins, kevin and frank webster. 1999. times of the technoculture: from the information age to the virtual life. london: routledge. tagg, philip. 2000 [1979]. kojak: fifty seconds of television music. new york: mass media music scholars’ press, inc. tasker, yvonne. 2004 [1993]. spectacular bodies: gender, genre, and the action cinema. london: routledge. veal, michael. 2007. dub: soundscapes and shattered songs in jamaican reggae. middletown: wesleyan university press. discography dead dread. 1994. dread bass. moving shadow (12-inch): shadow 50. <http://www.discogs.com/dead-dred-dred-bass/release/6341>. the guyver. 1995. deep cover. reinforced (12-inch lp): rivet 1279. < http://www.discogs.com/guyver-the-deep-cover/release/440392>. origin unknown. 1993. valley of the shadows. ram records (12-inch): ramm 004. <http://www.discogs.com/origin-unknown-the-touch-valley-of-the-shadows/release/17714>. prizna featuring the demolition man. 1995. fire. labello blanco (12-inch): nlb18. < http://www.discogs.com/prizna-fire/release/17867>. various. 2012. dub dread 4: dubplate clash. dread recordings (cd): dreaduk007cd. < http://www.discogs.com/ray-keith-vs-bladerunner-dubplate-clash-dub-dread-4/release/3924572>. filmography cameron, james. 1984. the terminator. usa: orion pictures. < http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088247/>. scott, ridley. 1982. blade runner. usa: warner bros. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083658/>. verhoeven, paul. 1987. robocop. usa: orion pictures. < http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093870/>. notes [1] this paper draws on the author’s phd research project into the politics of speed in drum ‘n’ bass culture, entitled renegade hardware: speed, pleasure and cultural practice in drum ‘n’ bass culture, undertaken at london south bank university between 2005 and 2009. participant comments referred to in this paper were taken from interviews conducted with djs and producers, along with club and rave audience members during this time. [2] see reynolds (2013: 293–314) for a summary of jamaican cultural practices in the formation of jungle. [3] smiley, interview with the author (the bell public house, tottenham, north london), sunday 18th june 2006. [4] in addition to the cyborg, lavender iii argues that the clone constitutes the other category of the posthuman, and is defined as a “genetically engineered human, that is, a human descendant composed of scientifically constructed flesh. it is a copy of an original form, in this case the human form” (2011: 191). mapping a lineage of female event producers living in british columbia jennifer rebbetoy independent researcher <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2017.09.01.13> the raver experience at festivals is well documented in popular media, such as vice. what is not as commonly written about is the behind the scenes experience of those who work in production. this is a tale of one woman’s experience working alongside six female event producers and a re-telling of what informs their work ethic. even though edm has roots in the underground, it is not immune to gender stereotypes. i’m proud to share an example of how the edmc i participate in supports women breaking into new positions of power as event founders, producers and managers. i aim to celebrate these women by re-telling their stories. dismantling gender stereotypes is heavy work and not for the faint of heart. that is why i categorize these leaders as the bold (those who dare to occupy these positions first), the fearless (those who continue to push the boundaries of what it means to be a boss) and the ambitious (those who are solidifying new opportunities for other women). no matter how you look at it, these women aren’t standing still. british columbia, canada (b.c.) is home to many of the premiere festivals in the country such as shambhala music festival, bass coast and kamp festival. each festival has its own distinct reputation. shambhala music festival (smf) is the biggest and oldest. after first opening their gates in 1997 they were selling out by 2011 and have hosted 10,000 visitors annually ever since. the land smf takes place on is a working family-run farm 11 months of the year. attendees are free to express themselves in experimental ways through costume and ritual. the organizers keep safety at the forefront of their decisions but post few rules. for example, they do not state explicitly that headdresses are not allowed yet dj ndn of the indigenous group a tribe called red said at the end of their set in 2014, “shambhala thank you for being respectful” (storey 2014). those who highly value the music and art at raves greatly appreciate bass coast; a medium sized boutique event with roughly 4,000 visitors, founded in 2009. the grounds boast fifty plus art installations and mostly producers (those who play electronic music they’ve composed) fill the bill as opposed to trending djs (those who mix tracks composed by other people). this level of discernment attracts a more mature crowd than smf. the organizers help make behavior predictable by posting rules familiar to life outside of the festival. for example, they have licensed areas where they condone the use of alcohol and have strict searches for all banned items, which includes war bonnet style headdresses (michaels 2014). for those who are seeking community-strengthening activities, kamp festival is a logical choice. since its inception in 2015 the event has grown from 300 visitors to 600 in 2017. it’s tagline “a summer camp for adults” entices those who are attracted to the festival model (musical performances in spectacular settings) but at a more relaxed pace. the organizers balance their nighttime music lineup with a daytime activity and workshop lineup. this keeps folks positively engaged throughout the day in activities like yoga, crafts, canoeing, lectures, etc. all attendees also belong to one of four color camps. this gives everyone a bigger goal to unify around and allows good old fashion team spirit to run rampant on the grounds. the organizers welcome families and acknowledge the sinixit, the indigenous people, who first inhabited the land where the event takes place. these reputations are shaped by the values of folks working behind the scenes. between 2011-2015 i worked as a production assistant, volunteer talent hostess and public relations assistant and crossed paths with six remarkable female figures in powerful positions at these festivals. the experiences compelled me to probe deeper with individual interviews to uncover what informs their work ethic. since all of them are at different stages of their careers i began to see their connections across festivals as a lineage, each indirectly setting the stage for the next. the bold corrine bundschuh is a daughter, sister to two siblings and mother of one. in my three years as corrine’s assistant, i saw her making bold choices. in the spring of 2016, i sat down in corrine’s living room to reminisce about her eighteen year career as an executive producer. i recognized corrine’s boldness in actions like not accepting support from corporations or advertisers and keeping the festival run 100% independently. her boldness looked like commanding a staff of twelve year-round employees and strategizing how to scale marketing efforts, tickets sales, security, staff meals, volunteer positions, parking, waste management, stage teams and so much more. she was bold when talking with police chiefs, fire chiefs, ambulance directors and city officials to answer any questions they might have about the festival and brainstorm ways to mitigate the effects of the influx of people to the nearby towns during the festival. she was bold to have a sympathetic ear to all the issues that arose unexpectedly at show time, a voice of reason and to never miss a beat on the dance floor. during my time working at smf, i was most impressed with corrine’s negotiation skills. caught in a difficult position between the limitations of the farm being completely off the grid, pleasing patrons, supporting team leaders, growing the festival and keeping city officials happy, corrine held it together with playfulness and grace. one of the best traits about corrine’s leadership style was that she wasn’t afraid to take control of and responsibility for the festival. by the time corrine shifted to take on smf full-time, she was a trained dancer with film, theatre and stage-managing experience. when the festival was still in its infancy and edm as a genre was largely unknown in salmo (indie rock and country dominated the radio), corrine transferred the leadership skills she learned in other industries and grew them alongside the festival. for most of corrine’s career, no other events like smf existed for her to learn from. in the beginning she did what felt right and enjoyed using the artistic and business sides of her brain in tandem. eventually she learned how to motivate different personalities and effectively deliver bad news. corrine’s ability to include input from many key players during her decision-making helped the team take smf from “hated locally to beloved nationally”, as she put it. [1] sara spicer has worked at smf since 2001 under many different titles: music curator (for all stages), talent manager, creator of the talent services team, and vip camping zone and lounge. currently she is the living room stage director and djs as lioness. my appreciation for sara stems from her dedication and passion for the rave. her bold taste-making abilities have been so integral to creating the flavor of smf that many ideas she set in motion are still practiced.[2] for example, the hospitality at smf is partially based on the principles she started with the vip camping zone and lounge and is well known to this day. in 2001, sara booked up and coming west coast djs to help represent the vibe of the festival and also recoup some of the costs by keeping the budget down. this practice still continues today and has earned smf the reputation as a place that showcases new edm music. through all of the growing pains of the festival, sara and her husband hoola, have maintained their own music promotion business, the pride, and continue to host parties in b.c. year-round. sara has an incredible drive while staying humble. she says, “the best thing i could have done for the festival was step down year 11 [as music curator] so that all [six] stage directors could have full creative freedom”. as edm splintered into several subgenres, this allowed each stage to become more tightly curated around specific sounds and artists and acquire their own die-hard fans. these milestones have not come without obstacles. at times six stage directors is like having too many cooks in the kitchen. but like corrine, sara also leads by doing what feels right in the moment. “i do my best to show up in the world with authenticity,” she says, “i consider it best practice to operate from integrity”. i think this looks like being respectful of everyone’s perspective, which can be difficult in times of conflict amongst creative people. in my experience this realness emanates from sara whether she just got off stage or is mingling with the smokers outside the club.[3] the fearless liz thomson and andrea graham run bass coast. in 2013, i volunteered at bass coast on their talent services team. while exploring the grounds, i was enamored with the art installations; it made an otherwise regular campground look pretty. more than pretty, it was interactive, the kind of art you could walk under, sit on or climb up. this was the work of liz. i learned from andrea that liz is “the eyes of the festival” because she curates the overall look through graphic design, approving art applications, stage design, lighting, etc.[4] taking on this responsibility did not come without challenges but liz didn’t let fear control her life. for example when the festival started, liz was in her late twenties, her son was one, and she was separated from his father and supporting herself. regarding how she rose above difficult situations she says, “there could have been emotional barriers that prevented me from taking initiative but i chose to ignore them and i had a support network that enabled me to do so”. i asked liz about her mentors; “my role models are not involved in festival culture, they are involved in mountain culture”. she says they “are people who love life and can take care of their families, business and health”. each year she refines her vision and motivates her team members to help her realize it by being flexible and accepting “that there are numerous ways of doing something”. andrea also djs as the librarian. i’m a massive fan of her music. the fan girl inside me was delighted when she asked for my help at the festival. while i was volunteering at bass coast, i arrived early to help set up the cabins and tents set aside for the headlining djs. on a shelf in one of the cabins i found a technics 1200 turntable. in the spirit of tidying up, i put the turntable in our gear checkroom. later, a flustered librarian came to our check-in gate. “i put something in one of those cabins and...” she began to explain. i felt like a hero retrieving the piece of gear utterly necessary for her performance. “i need to practice”, she said, as she held up her freshly bandaged thumb complete with stitches from the hospital. the wound was from an accident with a skill saw. later in the day i was tasked with picking up the members from a tribe called red at the front gate and touring them around the grounds. they asked specifically to meet andrea or liz; i knew where to go. andrea didn’t mind being interrupted and i was happy to complete another connection above the usual responsibilities. in both situations andrea was warm and full of gratitude, even though i was just a volunteer. empathizing with everyone from headlining djs to volunteers makes andrea the ears of the festival. she handles the overall sound of the festival through the music and performance curation, audio/stage production and promotional touring.[5] her rise to festival founder came as a natural progression in her life. the first bass coast occurred two weeks after selling a coffee shop she opened with her mom and successfully managed for three years. andrea also takes inspiration from outside the festival world, specifically from her late father who managed resort hotels. “he called his leadership strategy ‘management by walking around’”, she says. it’s not surprising then she’s unafraid to get her hands dirty on site rather than simply delegating from afar. andrea motivates her team by trying to “avoid using the words ‘i’ or ‘my’ and replace them with ‘we’ and ‘our’ when possible”. i believe this helps give team members ownership over their tasks. “there’s always a solution”, is another sunny motto she shared of her problem solving style. andrea’s dedication to needs of the group makes it feel as if she values cooperation over competition.[6] the ambitious zan comerford and i have been festival colleagues for nearly five years. she’s one of those familiar summertime faces that pop up as you both run in opposite directions getting stuff done on any given festival site. one of the first things you notice upon meeting zan is her energy, which she ambitiously throws behind any task asked of her. over the years, zan has become entrenched in the festival culture in b.c. and beyond holding titles such as, volunteer coordinator and asset manager at bass coast, marketing and enterprise manager at symbiosis gathering and talent services manager at smf.[7] i learned about zan’s experience of gradually moving up the rungs in the festival world. during the same time she became a new mother, zan grew from a vendor with a separate business, to a festival volunteer to a festival manager. how did she do it? “the main thing i’ve noticed about moving forward in this industry is seeing opportunities and jumping on them as quickly as possible”, she notes. i asked her what her responsibilities often include as a manager at festivals. she responded with several explanations: “keeping the vibes high and moving in the right direction”, “not passing on stress to other team members” and “holding a high level of integrity and focus without being afraid to be silly at the same time”. in the midst of her new position of power, zan remains humble, “the parking and garbage crews are the real rock stars. we often joke, without parking and garbage crews, a festival is just a giant dirty riot in a field”, she says. spoken like a true production manager, someone who doesn’t just worry about the hype but also takes pride in the style in which the mundane logistics are carried out.[8] i met ruhamah buchanan about four years ago when the grove stage started at smf; she was the performance art director, which included curating and managing the circus, aerial and dance performances at the stage.[9] she also shares the volunteer coordinator position with zan at bass coast and assists at directing kamp festival. i’m blown away by ruhamah’s ambition to be dedicated to multiple summer events in b.c. because even while juggling many responsibilities that can push the limits of financial pay, she remains approachable at show time and doesn’t take out her frustration on others. speaking from experience, it’s a relief to know you have managers who won’t have a meltdown. it makes sense ruhamah is able to stay calm in the eye of the storm, she’s had practice. through her performing arts based high school she was encouraged to volunteer at the edmonton fringe festival and blues festival as early as fifteen years old. since then she has volunteered and worked at all styles of events across alberta and b.c. “enjoying a combination of music and art at each”. now she’s a self proclaimed festival junkie. along the way, ruhamah says she’s “discovered production is an art all of its own”. one of the best techniques she uses to maintain good relations with her co-workers is the wrap-up meeting. she explains, “i often speak with many of the performance groups and other production members after each event to discuss all aspects of the event. this helps me learn how i can improve my communication approach”.[10] producing fierce leaders these moments are the building blocks of the legacies of six female event producers in the west coast bass scene, legacies that ripple out into the larger edm community like the reverb from a sound system washing over the people on a dance floor. in my time working at these events and others, i see how it has taken the bold to stay true to their values even when they are not popular in the mainstream. it takes the fearless to carve out original niches and the ambitious to set the pace as positive role models. all three types contribute to building a community of female leaders that empower each other. these moments document leadership through vulnerability; each had examples of giving/receiving feedback effectively, starting new trends and sharing responsibility with their fellow workers. this stands in stark contrast to the top down hierarchal structures that capitalism privileges. something special is happening in b.c. rave culture! without the help of affirmative action policies, women are rising to positions of power in these businesses. at the same time, these businesses continue to gain in popularity (by consistently increasing their populations or selling out of tickets completely). i feel the values of inclusivity and cooperation upheld by these women trickle out from production to the public thereby creating a uniquely relaxed environment to work and play. for me, these women demonstrate it’s possible to get your hands dirty and make confident business decisions all while gaining the reputation as a revered and beloved leader. it’s a reminder that these festivals are not only transformative on the dance floor but also behind the scenes. author biography jennifer graduated from mcmaster university with a bachelor’s degree in communication studies and cultural studies and critical theory. at shared shift communications, she creates training manuals for small businesses that provide creative and flexible workplace environments for young people. http://www.sharedshift.ca/. references storey, nicola. 2014. “shambhala music festival 2014: freaks, fairies and magic mushrooms”. 19 august 2014. <http://www.ixdaily.com/the-buzz/shambhala-music-festival-2014-freaks-and-fairies> (accessed 5 october 2017). michaels, sean. 2014. “canadian festival bans native american-style headdresses”. the guardian. 25 july 2014. <https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/jul/25/canadian-festival-bans-native-american-style-headdresses> (accessed 8 october 2017). notes [1] due to health reasons, corrine stepped down from her job at smf in 2014. [2] sara spicer, email with author, sept. 28, 2016 [3] sara continues to curate the living room stage at smf with her husband hoola. [4] liz thomson, email with author, sept. 6, 2016 [5] andrea graham, email with author, sept. 12, 2016 [6] liz and andrea continued to innovate and keep bass coast relevant in the west coast bass scene in 2017. [7] zan comerford, email with author, sept. 15, 2016 [8] zan again accomplished working at bass coast, smf and eclipse gathering in 2017. [9] ruhamah buchanan, email with author, oct. 1, 2016 [10] ruhamah again accomplished working at kamp festival, bass coast and the grove stage at smf in 2017. dancecult 6(2) 2014: masthead and table of contents volume 6 number 2 2014 executive editor graham st john (griffith university, au) from the floor editors alice o’grady (university of leeds, uk) graham st john (griffith university, au) reviews editor ed montano (rmit university, au) foreign languages editor luis-manuel garcia (university of groningen, nl) production editor botond vitos (de) operations director ed montano (rmit university, au) art director botond vitos (de) publications manager carlo nardi (rhodes university, sa) copyeditors luis-manuel garcia (university of groningen, nl) jerome hansen (uk) katrina loughrey (au) kath o’donnell (au) production assistants martin koszolko (rmit university, au) garth sheridan (rmit university, au) contributing editor sheena d. hyndman (york university, ca) dancecult journal of electronic dance music culture issue 6(2) 2014 issn 1947-5403 ©2014 dancecult published twice yearly at <http://dj.dancecult.net> international advisory board sean albiez (southampton solent university, uk), eliot bates (university of maryland, college park, us), andy bennett (griffith university, au), mark j butler (northwestern university, us), anthony d’andrea (university of limerick, ie), rebekah farrugia (oakland university, us), kai fikentscher (de), luis-manuel garcia, university of groningen (nl), françois gauthier (université du québec à montréal, ca), anna gavanas (institute for futures studies, se), chris gibson (university of new south wales, au), jeremy gilbert (university of east london, uk), alice o’grady, university of leeds (uk), ross harley (university of new south wales, au), david hesmondhalgh (university of leeds, uk), tim lawrence (university of east london, uk), geert lovink (university of amsterdam, nl), gordon lynch (birkbeck university of london, uk), rene lysloff (university of california, riverside, us), alejandro l. madrid (university of illinois, chicago, us), charity marsh (university of regina, ca), tony mitchell (university of technology sydney, au), karenza moore (lancaster university, uk), andrew murphie (university of new south wales, au), christopher partridge (lancaster university, uk), anne petiau (itsrs / université paris 5, fr), hillegonda c rietveld (london south bank university, uk), geoff stahl (victoria university of wellington, nz), sonjah nadine stanley-niaah (university of west indies, jm), graham st john (griffith university, au), will straw (mcgill university, ca), rupert till (university of huddersfield, uk), tobias c. van veen (mcgill university, ca), michael veal (yale university, us), andrew whelan (university of wollongong, australia) dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture is a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture (edmc). a platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on the shifting terrain of edmcs worldwide, the journal houses research exploring the sites, technologies, sounds and cultures of electronic music in historical and contemporary perspectives. playing host to studies of emergent forms of electronic music production, performance, distribution, and reception, as a portal for cutting-edge research on the relation between bodies, technologies, and cyberspace, as a medium through which the cultural politics of dance is critically investigated, and as a venue for innovative multimedia projects, dancecult is the journal for research on edmc. cover photo by steve marks: <alittlelight@live.com> (melbourne, 2013) http://dj.dancecult.net mailto:alittlelight@live.com volume 6 number 2 2014 feature articles “an avatar . . . in a physical space”: researching the mediated immediacy of electronic dance floors . . . 01 botond vitos competitive remix practice and networks of support in electronic dance music economies . . . . . . . . 22 jonathan karpetz on the content and contribution of mcs in british drum ‘n’ bass . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 alistair fraser from the floor – online this place is my place: sunrise [total recall], west indian centre, leeds, uk. saturday 22nd march 2014 alice o’grady astronauts, psychonauts and electronauts graham st john towards a granular study of scenes at vancouver’s new forms festival tobias c. van veen how to cure a gabba riccardo balli reviews books apocalypso disco: la rave-o-luzione della post techno (riccardo balli) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .61 andrea brighenti global tribe: technology, spirituality and psytrance (graham st john). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .63 tobias c. van veen the varieties of ecstasy experience (sean leneghan) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .70 daniel schnee the digital musician (andrew hugill) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .73 martin koszolko popular music fandom: identities, roles and practices (ed. mark duffett) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .76 jadey o’regan issn 1947-5403 ©2014 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net rogue two: reflections on the creative and technological development of the audiovisual duo—the rebel scum dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 10(1): 63–82 issn 1947-5403 ©2018 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2018.10.01.04 rogue two reflections on the creative and technological development of the audiovisual duo—the rebel scum ryan ross smith and shawn lawson monash university (australia) / rensselaer polytechnic institute (us) abstract this paper examines the development of the audiovisual duo obi-wan codenobi and the wookie (authors shawn lawson and ryan ross smith respectively). the authors trace a now four-year trajectory of technological and artistic development, while highlighting the impact that a more recent physical displacement has had on the creative and collaborative aspects of the project. we seek to reflect upon the creative and technological journey through our collaboration, including lawson’s development of the force, an opengl shader-based live-coding environment for generative visuals, while illuminating our experiences with, and takeaways from, live coding in practice and performance, edm in general and algorave culture specifically. keywords: live coding; collaboration; edm; audiovisual; star wars ryan ross smith is a composer, performer and educator based in melbourne, australia. smith has performed and had his music performed in north america, iceland, denmark, australia and the uk, and has presented his work and research at conferences including nime, isea, icli, iclc, smf and tenor. smith is also known for his work with animated notation, and his ph.d. research website is archived at animatednotation.com. he is a lecturer in composition and creative music technology at monash university in melbourne, australia. email: ryanrosssmith [@] gmail [.] com . web: <http://www.ryanrosssmith.com/> shawn lawson is a visual media artist creating the computational sublime. as obi-wan codenobi, he live-codes, real-time computer graphics with his software: the force & the dark side. he has performed or exhibited in england, scotland, germany, spain, denmark, russia, italy, korea, portugal, netherlands, australia, brazil, turkey, malaysia, iran, canada, mexico and the usa. lawson studied at cmu and énsba, receiving his mfa from saic. he is a professor in the department of art at rpi. email: lawsos2 [@] rpi [.] edu .web: <http://www.shawnlawson.com/> feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2018.10.01.04 http://animatednotation.com/ http://www.ryanrosssmith.com/ http://www.shawnlawson.com/ dancecult 10(1)64 figure 1. obi-wan codenobi and the wookie performing at refest in new york city (2015). in a galaxy far far away: 2014 obi-wan codenobi and the wookie, aka the rebel scum, aka shawn lawson and ryan ross smith, began as a parody wrapped in an enigma, with a more than passing interest in what was to us an exciting new field of performance practice: live coding. for those who may be unfamiliar with the term, live coding simply describes the editing of the source code or algorithm of a piece of software while that software is running. the practice of live coding has existed for some time, although a significant touchstone of sorts occurred in 1996 with the publication of supercollider at the international computer music conference (icmc). this is followed by a coalescing of practices by nick collins et al. in 2003, ge wang and perry cook in 2004, andrew sorensen in 2005, the creation of live algorithm programming and a temporary organization for its promotion (toplap) in 2004 and the accompanying book chapter with the same title in read_me: “in a new discipline of live coding or on-the-fly programming the control structures of the algorithms themselves are malleable at run-time. such algorithmic fine detail is most naturally explored through a textual interpreted programming language” (ward et al. 2004: 243). eleven years after the publication in read_me, the first international conference on live coding (iclc) was held at the university of leeds in 2015. iclc and the related international conference on live interfaces (icli), have been instrumental in our development as an audiovisual live coding duo, but our collaboration first started in a galaxy far, far away in troy, ny. in 2014, smith was a graduate student at rensselaer polytechnic institute researching animated notation, and lawson, a professor of computer visualization. after a couple years we floated the idea of an audiovisual collaboration based loosely on the star wars smith and lawson | rogue two 65 metaverse. the first performance set we created, if it can be called that, was hastily thrown together for an evening of audiovisual performances held at the electronic media performing arts center (empac) in troy, ny in april, 2014. creating a system where obi-wan codenobi could directly engage with his visual materials in real time was in large part the impetus for this project, and so in preparation, obi-wan codenobi built the force, a livecoding opengl shader environment that analyzed and reacted to the spectral content of the wookie’s sound. like live coding languages in general, the force enables on the fly creation and manipulation of functions to elicit an (almost) immediate visual response. as collins et al. note, “as long as the program has to be compiled in order to be able to run and to simulate a user interface, the time delay between creating the tool and using it seems to be very dominant” (2003: 327). confronting this delay was an important consideration in the development of this project, and to that end, the force auto-compiles and attempts to execute the shader code as the code is being written. successful compiles are executed, unsuccessful compiles retain the previous successful compilation, and although there is a small delay time between typing, compilation and execution, the process feels nearly instantaneous.1 this immediacy facilitates fast paced graphical changes in performance. the audiovisual synchronicity is based on the aforementioned spectral content from the sound. the wookie’s audio output is analyzed through a fast fourier transform (fft) process which is parsed into four bins. the four bin values are packed into a vector4 data type for easy transmission to the graphics card and used to modulate properties of the imagery. smith had previously been working with a handful of standard fare software and hardware, including max/msp (visual programming/patching environment), ableton live, pro tools and logic, modular and semi-modular synthesizers, amongst others. smith’s music traversed a wide range, from folk and pop to idm and experimental, inspired by artists like squarepusher and aphex twin from warp records, venetian snares and μ-ziq from planet-mu, the clicks & cuts series from mille plateux, telefon tel aviv, autechre and many others. for those interested in digging, smith had also collaborated on a remix of public enemy’s “b side wins again” with jeff snyder (aka scattershot, the inventor of the incredible manta controller). for the wookie this project was a good excuse to return to some of the more beat and pattern-based music he had put on hold during graduate school. with time being a significant factor, the wookie assembled a fairly simple, tempo-based, sample-mangling patch in max/msp to process several earlier works of his in order to inject a sense of rhythmic regularity. specifically, the max/msp patch randomly selected start and stop points within an audio file that adhered to some small, metered subdivision based on the predefined tempo and then looped these short sections. these sections were not necessarily defined by any significant transient content, but the repetitive nature of these micro-loops produced a sense of rhythm based on the tempo-dependent relationships between one another. in this case, the wookie’s musical selections for this performance leaned much more toward the electronic music side of things than dance music. still, the musical characteristics of edm had great appeal to us, and it is under this umbrella that the dancecult 10(1)66 wookie’s current music and many of the live coding musicians that populate the algorave scene operate within, including mike hodnick, alex mclean, renick bell and many others. now, it must be noted that during our performance at empac, nobody danced, and really, why should they? smith had never dj’d, but then again this certainly wasn’t a dj set, and the idea of bringing the party hadn’t really crossed our minds. this was, first and foremost, a fun project by a visual artist and musician in a decidedly artsy space for engineering students who were hoping for skrillex and girl talk mashups, at least until smith’s computer crashed. still, we enjoyed the project and each other’s company, and that was reason enough to reflect on our experience in order to determine a better and more artistically fulfilling path. the main culprit was the music. we felt that the relationship between the music and visuals did not read as cohesively as we had hoped, and in order to increase the likelihood of significant audiovisual correspondence over the course of a performance, a sonic palette containing more transient-rich and repetitive material would be built from the ground up, including slight changes to the audio interpreter in the force. in summation, this first collaborative attempt uncovered a wealth of flawed materials that were perfect for reflection, rebuilding and refinement and inspired a solid foundation of potential practice. a new hope: 2015–2016 while our goals with the force and the wookie’s sample-mangling at that first performance was to inject some rhythmic regularity, leave room for improvisation and generate cohesiveness between the audio and the visuals, the time constraints left us with little time to develop any compositional identity. and so, following our performance at empac, and inspired by the audiovisual cohesiveness of groups and artists like daft punk and squarepusher (specifically his face-melting performance at the creators project in san francisco in 2012), which appeared more fixed than improvisatory, we created a more composed work: kessel run (2014). the visuals and audio for kessel run were developed in closer correspondence in order to produce a more cohesive audiovisual connection, and musically, leaned more heavily on strong rhythmic material and instrumentation more closely associated with edm. kessel run led to a couple performances in spain (radical db) and portugal (icli). the kessel run video is linked here: kessel run. the performance in portugal was particularly influential as it was our introduction to the algorave. an algorave describes an event in which performers deploy music generating algorithms of some sort (hence the “algo” prefix) in front of an audience, often controlled via live coding (cheshire 2013). the performances frequently, but certainly not always, borrow heavily from various sub-genres under the edm descriptor, from gabba to breakbeat (check out neil c smith’s live-coding amen $ mother function) to more obtuse musical forms, although often replacing the visual pomp and circumstance associated with largescale edm events with the performers’ projected code. https://vimeo.com/130277124 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sge9poc5bda smith and lawson | rogue two 67 inspired by our experiences in spain and portugal, and invigorated by the conceptual and social framework of the algorave, we created sarlacc (2015) with the support of a residency at culturehub. culturehub is an arts and technology center in new york city with affiliations to la mama also in new york city and the seoul institute of the arts in south korea. culturehub provides residencies for artists, educational opportunities for youths and hosts festivals. during our time at culturehub we used their multi-projector, multi-channel audio systems to increase the scale of our production and presentation. figure 2. obi-wan codenobi and the wookie performing at isea in vancouver (2015). at this point it is important to note that the audio components for kessel run and sarlacc were not created and performed with code, but with ableton live. with live, the wookie retained improvisatory and structural control during performance while following a malleable set list of precomped fragments. in similar fashion, while the visuals were being live-coded by obi-wan codenobi with the force, he too followed a coding score so as to maintain a tight visual correspondence with the music and to hit structurally significant cue points throughout the set. we achieved the cohesiveness we had hoped for, but ended up feeling, well, a bit bored just playing the same stuff over and over. after rounding out our residency at culturehub with a performance that included like-minded composerperformers dataf1ow and bevin kelley (see figure 1), we performed sarlacc in scotland (acm cc), england (iclc), canada (isea), germany (generate!), the netherlands (lpm) and several local us venues. the sarlacc video is linked here: sarlacc. https://vimeo.com/121493283 dancecult 10(1)68 episode v: 2016 for our next project, owego system trade routes (2016), (ostr) the wookie began using the live coding language tidalcycles (mclean et al. n.d.) in conjunction with a modular synthesizer. the details of the modular rig are fuzzy as it has changed dramatically since that time, but the primary sound sources were the make noise dpo and noise engineering basilimus iteritas, sequenced by a make noise rene, clocked by alm’s pamela’s workout and modulated/modified by a series of function generators, lfos and vcas. the decidedly improvisatory nature of this work explicitly countered the fixed structure of kessel run and sarlacc, while the tidalcycles elements retained the transient-rich, pattern-based rhythmic material. in this setup, the modular synth was not in any way synchronized with tidalcycles, but functioned as a standalone noise generator of sorts, influenced by, and influencing the behaviour of the force. video samples of owego system trade routes album are linked here: owego system trade routes samples. figure 3. appiosc device outside and inside (2016). in an attempt to further counter the scored predictability of the previous works, and to add a new dimension to the interaction between the audio and visual components, we created the appiosc in collaboration with frank appio (lawson, smith and appio 2016). the appiosc is a hardware device that converts text code into control voltage (cv) for use on the modular synthesizer, and can generate, modulate and sequence basic functions, including saw, square, triangle and sine waves. open sound control (osc) messages sent to the appiosc determined frequency, amplitude and function type, and assigned values could be static or set to be randomized per frequency period. the text-to-cv algorithm searched for letters, spacing, or keywords in the force to attain sums that were further adjusted to fit within a range suitable for the appiosc. for example, if a block of code contains 15 “-” characters, that value 15 would be modded by a specified max, for example, let’s say 10 resulting in a value of 5. this 5 value is further scaled within that 10 maximum to return a float value between 0.0 and 1.0 resulting in .5. mathematically this would look like the following: finalvalue = (charactercount % specifiedmax) / specifiedmax https://vimeo.com/153029100 smith and lawson | rogue two 69 the final value and property to change are sent to the appiosc. as code is added or deleted, that final value might change, impacting the cv signals being sent from the appiosc to the modular synth. these cv signals could be applied to various modules within the synthesizer to affect lfo and function speed, pitch/tuning, filter cutoff and resonance and any other parameter that accepts cv. the cv coming from the appiosc could be quite erratic at times, which introduced a fantastic source of uncertainty. cv from the modular could also be sent back into the appiosc, where it would be converted into streams of numbers available for use in the force. unfortunately, our use of this device was under-explored due to the eventual long distance nature of our collaboration. simply put, we didn’t have enough time with the appiosc, and this lack of experience inherently and repeatedly pushed us towards a surprisingly consistent sonic texture. well, that and the conversion algorithm computing the text of the fragment shader into the values of the control voltage. golan levin postulated a similar scenario as: “. . . the premise that any information can be algorithmically sonified or visualized is the starting point for a conceptual transformation and/or aesthetic experience. such projects may or may not reveal the origin of their input data in any obvious way . . .” (2010: 273 –4). levin further reveals the potential fault by highlighting the relationship between raw data and the artistic content it may produce: most commonly, the transmutability of data per se is not itself the primary subject of a work, but is rather used as a means to an end, in enabling some data stream of interest to be understood, experienced, or made perceptible in a new way (2010: 274). moreover, due to ostr’s heavy reliance on spectral analysis for communication from audio to visual, we inadvertently supported the argument that visuals are secondary to the audio, not unlike the itunes visualizer (alexander and collins 2007: 134). despite its shortcomings, the concept of the appiosc in and of itself was an intriguing one: integrate a complex control voltage scenario with the relevant leftovers of contextuallyirrelevant live-coding. still, in revisiting our means-to-an-end we found that obi-wan codenobi’s live-coding text to sonic conversions were simply repetitive and frequently disappeared into the overall sonic texture. perhaps we had been seduced by the potential of some perceptible relationship, confusing the randomness of the text-to-cv conversion with what was little more than an imperceptible 1:1 relationship. a stronger path may have been to explore how the raw text data could have been mapped onto a more musically-significant structure. another solution would have been to apply a global scale and/or quantizer to the data stream as it leaves the appiosc. this type of control, a conductor of sorts, could oversee the text-to-cv/cv-to-text conversion at the low-level while applying a high-level structure to compartmentalize the data into more usable or perceptible bursts of information rather than slower changes to a stream of continuous values. the ostr audiovisual album was published on the spanish label naucleshg, and we had the opportunity to bring this work and the appiosc to canada (iclc), england (icli) and australia (nime). dancecult 10(1)70 as mentioned above, once our collaboration turned long-distance we were unable to continue exploring the possibilities that the appiosc may have afforded us. but this was a bit of a blessing, and in the spirit of healthy self-deprecation, we felt that we had let the intriguing possibilities of the hardware lead our project down an aesthetic path that had little positive impact for us or anyone who saw us perform. recognizing this failing, we wanted to again integrate the audiovisuals and show the artist’s hand in the work. the artist’s hand in the visual arts refers to mark making, as in the quality and personality of the line, brushstroke, etching and so on. it also implies that the work itself feels divorced from the artist, meaning that artist her/himself does not seem present in the work. or, this may indicate that something is too slick or refined, hence a machine-made copy. for us it meant to lose the appiosc’s black boxness and get everything up on the screen. luke’s side quest to dagobah (as in, so, what are we really doing?): 2016 before developing a solution to both our long-distance collaboration and our desire to remove the black box, we took a moment to consider what it was we were doing, and how the algorave scene in general, might fit into a broader artistic and historical narrative. furthermore, and influenced in part by the massive interest in contemporary edm, we found ourselves looking a bit closer to try and gain a better understanding. while exploring the visual components found in some edm performances we found ourselves traveling through an ancestral tree of methods and technologies including color organs, animation (artistic and commercial), film, video arts, performance, theater, music, light shows, expanded cinema, music videos, live cinema, gesamtkunstwerk, psychedelia and synesthesia with the most closely generalizable precedent being the video jockey (vj) (spinrad 2005; crevits 2006; eskander 2006; shaughnessy 2006; alexander and collins 2007; alexander 2010). more specifically, within the vj category there are subcategorizations for scratch video, clip-based work, video synths and code-based procedures to mention a few (watz 2006; alexander and collins 2007). most revealing was the frequent, emergent thoughts regarding a subservience the vj had to the audio: [f]or many, vjing [sic] is a dirty word, artists view it as eye candy for the clubbing generation, musicians view it as a secondary accompaniment to their music at best, vjing [sic] is regarded as audio-visual wallpaper, not worthy of serious consideration. [y]et to my eyes, the best vjs are creating a new, fluid interface between sound and image—one that is genuinely mould-breaking and aesthetically invigorating, and one that deserves to be recognized as a 21st century art form (faulkner 2006: 9). this mirrors marius watz’s experience of being a vj: still vj culture is in its nascent stage and the vj rarely becomes a full-fledged member of the band, typically remaining a visual commentator. . . . however, any visual artists and audio-visual collaborative projects seek to reach new levels of integration between sound and image (2006: 5). smith and lawson | rogue two 71 taking a moment to consider the integrated aspect of audiovisuals, there has been much discussion about the connection between edm with visuals and their synesthetic affects (crevits 2006; eskander 2006; watz 2006; alexander and collins 2007). crevits goes so far as to state that if the edm drug culture had been different then vjs may not have existed: the vjing at house parties reproduces this [synesthesic] experience. whereas ecstasy does create a ‘spiritual’ symbiosis of sensation, it doesn’t evoke many concrete visual hallucinations compared to lsd. one could say that if lsd had been the drug of the house scene there would have been little or no need to compensate for the lack of performance or low visual character of a dj set. there would be no vjing (2006: 15). even if we disregard the hubris of this statement we can’t overlook the multiple references to real or perceived synesthetic effects of audiovisual performances. we have encountered performance attendees who reported having some degree of synesthesia; however, obi-wan codenobi and the wookie neither claim to be synesthetes nor have aspired to intentionally create synaesthetic work, and believe this speaks more to the integrative collaborative approach, direct mappings, or learnt synesthesia (alexander and collins 2007: 137). a contemporary synesthetic condition could also be a result of the post-digital human condition as per watz, “one could just as easily claim that the thirst for synaesthetic experiences is a response to our multimedia-saturated world, where instant sensory gratification is the order of the day” (2006: 6). large-scale audiovisual edm spectacles may simply quench that thirst. figure 4. obi-wan codenobi performing at acm cc in glasgow (2015). dancecult 10(1)72 in addition to our desire for more structural and audiovisual cohesiveness, we were beginning to identify more and more with alexander’s comments on the fluidity between vjs and live cinema artists (2010: 202), and as laptop performers, we have sought to expand the narrative aspects of our performance by perpetuating our loose narrative around the star wars metaverse.2 but beyond our naming conventions and obi-wan codenobi’s jedi stage attire, we did not intend to create strict, star wars-based textual, storyboard, or compositional narrative for audiovisuals, as that would reduce the potential for artistic flexibility and improvisation. rather, it gave a couple star wars fans reason to find inspiration in more obscure references, like r5-d4 or dannik jerriko, nevermind the inherent value in inspiring conversations regarding the merits of the original tentacle-less sarlacc. still, however insignificant this conceptual basis might be, it is worth noting the in-between space of vjing and live cinema: a third, and lesser-known type of audiovisual performance practice operates within a performing arts context while also drawing from conceptual, performance art, and new media art practices. in the absence of a commonly agreed-upon name for this practice, we can refer to it here as ‘conceptual audiovisual performance’ (alexander and collins 2006: 135–6). given the relative infancy of live coding practices in historical terms, it seems appropriate to consider the algorave as a conceptual audiovisual performance environment, but not one that need adhere to any specific type of performance. and so, the star wars concept disappears, easily outweighed by the far more interesting and broader concept of live coding. luke’s return to dagobah (are we sure about what are we really doing?): 2016 from the musical perspective, we have been considering edm as a high-level container for any and all music that is a) largely created and/or performed by/with electronic means and b) contains the musical attributes (beats and patterns) and, in some cases, the live social contexts of edm’s 70s and 80s prototypes. yet, it is also the case that edm as a musical, cultural and capitalist phenomenon, that simon reynolds refers to as nothing more than a “rebranding coup”, may represent a more contemporary set of micro-genres that preclude one’s understanding of their history (reynolds 2012). naturally, artists working within genres are not necessarily keen to embrace whatever label is placed upon them, and as collins notes: “genre is a contentious area at the best of times, but an especial minefield in electronic dance music, where producers, journalists and consumers are always eager to promote new micro-genres” (2012: 1). in-line with collins, gresham-lancaster notes that within the major online (streaming and download) distributors: . . . the history that i have experienced over the last four decades is not represented at all. ‘electronic music’ in the various forms offered by the pull-down menus of these apps refers to a form of dance music from the late 1990s on and bears little resemblance to the ‘electronic music’ that has been such an important part of my own musical life (2017: 76). smith and lawson | rogue two 73 still, the immense growth of this musical culture has brought electronic music to a massive audience, and despite this kind of commercial success, it is fair to say that a lot of this music is decidedly experimental in nature. from juan atkins and frankie knuckles, kraftwerk, to the wonderfully pornographic performance practice of anklepants and many others, the performative act is a necessarily visceral and/or tangible one, and the methods by which these sounds were made possible were always changing. in michaelangelo matos’ extensive tome on the rise of edm through the multiple lenses of the artists, party promoters and attendees, he suggests that the liveness these artists brought to the stage were of exceptional importance. for instance, moby’s use of dat tapes on stage became a flashpoint of sorts, as, “ . . . party flyers around the u.s. were promising “live pas” from artists. being able to bring it onstage with a bunch of gear and no traditional instrumentation was starting to matter” (matos 2015: 149). moby’s response questioned the value structures associated with dance culture with the eye of a historical musicologist: . . . people who make an issue out of ‘is it live?’ techno are dangerously reminiscent of people who can describe eric clapton’s [sic] guitar solos in depth and who dismissed punk, techno, hip-hop (and jazz and rock and roll for that matter) as not being valid because you didn’t need a masters degree in music theory to appreciate them (matos 2015: 153). yet this separation of process and presentation is necessary when considering the logistical nightmare and massive expectations of large-scale performance events. a computer-based (or anything-based for that matter) live performance that is largely improvisatory is likely ill-advised if the spectacle requires perfection in its execution (think about the cost of a stadium concert). figure 5. obi-wan codenobi and the wookie performing at icli in brighton (2016). dancecult 10(1)74 our experiences at several algoraves, festivals and conferences imparted a fantastic feeling of social engagement, community and experimentation. and while not all participants in each situation may have veered toward some form of edm (although many did, including inspired performances by mike hodnick, the algobabez, alex mclean, charlie roberts and renick bell to name a few), the very context of a bar, club or concert setting and the transparency of the projected code, enabled a wide range of forms to not just coexist, but to encourage communal engagement. the ubiquitousness of edm in the popular sphere presented a uniquely fertile opportunity to bring it back underground—academically, ironically or otherwise. at an algorave, people not only care how you make something, but want to see the code you are using to make it in real time. in some ways, this is not unlike a dj, turntablist or finger drummer, and we certainly aspired to connect more directly with our equipment from the musical, visual and physical perspectives by sharing this process and our screens with the audience, as is the common practice of live coding (ward et al. 2004). amy alexander notes that “laptop performers are now beginning to address the question of performativity” (2010: 204). the algorave has, in some sense, become a beacon for the integration of populist aesthetics (here edm musical attributes and visuals that reflect upon them) with good old-fashioned laptop performance and the somewhat pedagogically-inclined practice of live coding. and so, our approach, like many others, to edm-inspired live coding practices in the context of the algorave environment supplants preprogrammed perfection with a direct engagement with the possibility of failure (crashes, performance anxiety, lack of good ideas, etc.) while retaining what we consider to be the most salient and generalizable visual and musical qualities of edm: repetitive, danceable rhythms and correspondent visuals, even if those visuals may sometimes be just code. return of the jedi: 2017 as mentioned earlier, we eventually found ourselves looking into our own personal sarlacc: long-distance collaboration. with the wookie moving from troy to the mountains, a new approach was required. to this end, obi-wan codenobi created a new live coding environment, the dark side (lawson 2017). this new ide is browser-based, telematic and supports both tidalcycles and opengl shader languages in a single text buffer (lawson and smith 2017). performers use the familiar the force interface and are presented with a text editing experience similar to the collaborative functionality of google docs: multiple performers edit the code simultaneously from any internet connection while all text edits, text cursor movements and window scrolls are recorded with timestamps to a small json formatted file.3 audio and visuals are rendered client side, meaning that each performer receives the highest quality possible audio and visuals that their hardware permits. furthermore, the recorded text file can be played back with the highest possible quality audio and visuals available to the end receiver.4 with the dark side we were able to continue collaborating in real-time from our respective homes while retaining full audiovisual resolution. smith and lawson | rogue two 75 with the dark side supporting our new approach to rehearsing telematically we completed a new work, ev9d9 (2017). the ev9d9 video is linked here: ev9d9 from generate! festival. the dark side has also enabled performances in which one or both of obi-wan codenobi and the wookie perform remotely, and in one scenario our text recording was performed by a third computer.5 other performances included the center for new music in san francisco (one performer remote), sample music festival in berlin (one performer remote), generate! in tübingen (both performers local) and iclc in morelia (one performer remote).6 figure 6. obi-wan codenobi and the wookie (remote) performing at iclc in morelia (2017). moving to the audio side of things, with sample-based live coding languages, including mclean’s tidalcycles (the audio live-coding language used alongside the force or in the dark side), the performer is limited not only by what functions are available, but by what sample material the composer/performer has made available to themselves and how this material is exploited in performance. when developing the materials for ev9d9 we created raw materials that represented the musical space we sought to occupy, while building in https://vimeo.com/261648424 https://vimeo.com/261648424 dancecult 10(1)76 room to discover alternative compositional spaces that might signify alternative genres in part or in whole. no big tricks here, just a compositional practice informed by edm, assembled/manipulated with live-coding.7 ev9d9 contains five separate pieces that can be performed in whole or part. a performance containing all five pieces will last approximately 30 minutes, although each section can be compressed or extended depending on set duration. each piece contains a sample set including standard percussion elements (kick, snare, hi-hat), intro and/or outro and bass, melodic and harmonic material. the sample set for each piece was generated using pro tools, ableton live and maschine. since tidalcycles reads samples from folders, each piece contains a series of folders with descriptive labels. for instance, the 2nd piece, ev123, contains folders for kick, snare and hihat (evk123, evs123 and evh123), folders for intro and outro material (evint123 and evout123), folders for verse and chorus (evv123 and evc123) and folders for a filtergate sample and an arpeggio sample (evfg123 and evarp123). in some folders there is only one sample, but in others, specifically chorus’, there may be numerous samples in order to inject some variety into certain sections. the “ev” at the beginning of each folder name refers to the “ev” in ev9d9. the letter(s) following “ev” refer to the content of that folder (“k” refers to kick, “fg” refers to filtergate, etc.), and the number “123” refers to bpm. in a performance of ev9d9 the elements of each piece are coded and executed in order, although there is a lot of room for flexibility. for instance, there is no set beat/pattern for each piece, and patterns developed for one piece can often be carried over to the next piece. one of the more interesting problems to solve when performing ev9d9 in its entirety are the transitions between different tempi, due in part to the use of longer samples that are not tempo-dependent. beyond these structural or skeletal elements and their tempodependence, each piece is wide open for improvisation using a wide range of samples selected for the project. it isn’t really in the scope of this article to go into depth about the full functionality of tidalcycles (look to the website for more informations: tidalcycles), or any of the many other live coding languages in use. still, the similarities between making beat and/or pattern-based music with tidalcycles and other off-the-shelf products is worth noting. as written on the tidalcycles home page, “tidal allows you to express music with very flexible timing, providing a little language for describing patterns as step sequences” (mclean et al.: n.d.). this statement is similar to any number of products, from the korg volca series to ableton to modular sequencers, with the exception of the word language. with tidalcycles you are representing the sonic output you want with code; no fancy interface, no visual representation of the audio, just the computer’s blank screen that you populate over the course of a performance. yet, it is the very non-flashiness of this environment that requires a different mode of thinking, and creates a performative and creative situation far removed from other electronic music models. for example, to create a simple beat, one might type: d1 $ s “[bd*4 , [~ sn]*2 , hh*4]” https://tidalcycles.org/ smith and lawson | rogue two 77 in this example, the bd (bass drum) and hh (hi-hat) are playing on every quarter-note, while the snare drum plays on the offbeats. once compiled this pattern will continue until it is changed or silenced using the aptly named function “hush”. far more interesting is to take advantage of scheduling and random functions. in the following example, the “sometimes” function is used to occasionally reverse the sound and/or slow the pattern down to half speed. the samples used are segments from the amen break in 8th notes (although occasionally removed due to the “?”) and a gabba kick on the 1 and 3. lastly, samples are chosen randomly from the two folders called “amencutup” and “gabba” respectively in order to impart even more variation. d1 $ sometimes (# speed “-1”) $ rarely (slow 2) $ s “[amencutup*8? , gabba*2]” # n (irand 16) a slightly more verbose example pulled from the ev9d9 set (below) demonstrates additional functionality including pitch-shifting, scheduled solos, sequenced modifiers, weighted randomness and local and global speed malleability. a code block like this has a generative quality to it, producing a variety of sonic results over time while retaining the musical foundations of this particular section. d1 $ every 11 (const (s “[evk110*16? , [~ evs110]*4 , evh110*16 , notes*8?]” # n (irand 5))) $ slowspread ($) [id,rev,(|+| accelerate “-1 1”),stut 8 0.8 0.125,slow 2,chop 4,slow 1] $ stack [ every 7 (striate 4) $ sometimes (|+| accelerate “-1”) $ s “<subroc3d*16 space*16 h1*16>” # n (irand 6) # end “0.1” # up (sine*16), sometimes (|+| up (choose [2,4,6,8,10])) $ every 11 (striate 2) $ every 9 (slow 0.5) $ every 7 (slow 2) $ every 5 (|+| accelerate “-1 1”) $ every 6 (stut 8 0.8 0.125) $ s “[evk152*4? , [~ evh152*2]*2 , [~ evs152]*2]”, sometimes (jux (iter 4)) $ s “s13*8?” # n (irand 12) # cut “1”, randcat [ s “k1*8 speed*8?” # n (irand 12) # end “0.1”, s “gabba*8 stab*4?” # n (irand 12) # end “0.1”, s “numbers*8” # end “0.05” # up (sine*8), s “~ notes*4” # end “0.1”, s “<s1*8 k1*8>” # n (irand 10) # up (sine*32) ] ] as is hopefully obvious, this is not even scratching the surface. the variety of methods for handling sample and cycle manipulation is deep, and as the introduction of new technologies or exploitation of existing technologies have often made significant impacts on compositional and performative directions, different live coding languages enable different musical outcomes. similarly, edm has evolved in parallel with technological development and adoption, from turntables and the tb-303, to the introduction of midi, sampling, the wide range of dj software, controllers and everything else. the long-term impact of live dancecult 10(1)78 coding languages as a fairly new musical technology can’t possibly be predicted, but it is fair to say that the introduction of edm-inspired musical practices into this micro-microsub-genre of live coding will continue to inspire new ideas that straddle that weird space between popular music and scholarly enquiry. epilogue: 2018 and beyond much of this paper focuses on the technological and compositional path we have moved along over the last several years in order to highlight our process more objectively, but at its roots the writing of this paper has been an opportunity for us to subjectively and aesthetically evaluate the processes and results of a collaboration that has been very meaningful to us and continues to challenge our creativity. in closing, it seems apt to share alex mclean’s recollection of a 2011 car ride published in wired: we [alex mclean and nick collins] tuned into a pirate station playing happy hardcore, and we thought it would be good to [computer] program some rave music . . . it’s kind of changing the way people think about computer music . . . and also breaking the limits of what electronic music can be (cheshire 2013). indeed. thank you for reading and may the force be with us. notes 1 the delay time is 200ms set on a keypress timer callback. each time a key is pressed the timer is refreshed back to 200ms. if no other keys are pressed in that amount of time, the callback sends the code to be compiled and executed if successful. 2 our star wars obsession is the impetus for many aspects of this collaborative endeavor. this includes stage names, titles of audiovisual works, titles of written papers, titles of software and performance attire with robe and lightsaber. some of the more esoteric titles are listed in the references under wookieepedia. a few titles are fan-fiction generated, which not surprisingly have been less successful. repurposing star wars, speaks to a digital-postmodern condition and opening the door to a nostalgic futurism, where authenticity and originality are more ambiguous. this is in-line with edm genres, where samples are often appropriated, and a sense of futurism and science fiction is often pervasive. our extended-metaphor-parody provides both a geeky entry point as well as a secondary narrative of conceptual context. 3 json is the acronym for javascript object notation, and its data structure is that of an unordered set of key/value pairs. this format is usually saved or transmitted as text, not binary, for human readability. 4 compression algorithms for audio and video use lossy data algorithms to make files smaller, typically compromising the information. with the text recording files, the dark side plays smith and lawson | rogue two 79 back the text edits in real-time, thereby re-creating a simulacra of the original performance with 60fps, pixel-perfect video and uncompressed audio. we use the term simulacra because each time the text file is played any random numbers are regenerated, so the playback is incredibly similar to the original but never exactly the same, although it may be possible to regenerate exactly the same piece by seeding the random number generators. in our observations an hour long performance would result in a 10-15mb text recording, while a screen-recording of equal length could be >100gb and already data lossy. 5 a performance at the new york electroacoustic music festival in 2017 at the abrons art center. 6 the dark side has not only been crucial to our continued collaboration, but has enabled several presentations that would have been logistically improbable if not impossible. for example, we used the dark side at the sample music festival in berlin during a lecture smith gave on creating pattern-based music with tidalcycles. it was determined well in advance of the lecture that lawson would not physically attend, but would be present within the dark side. in another case, a series of events left smith stranded in newark, nj and unable to join lawson in morelia for iclc. this necessitated smith’s virtual presence at the formal paper presentation of the dark side. we were able to prove that the system works, making smith’s travel woes and lawson’s inability to be in berlin incentives. the performance of ev9d9 scheduled for the last day of iclc in morelia clearly highlighted the fact that one half of the rebel scum was missing from a performance standpoint, but served as another proof of the project, and left us wondering what other possibilities there were beyond using the dark side as a method for rehearsals, lecture-demos and as a safeguard against debilitating flight delays. an additional demonstration of the dark side backend went un-announced at morelia iclc performance. since many algoraves and clubs have notoriously bad or non-existent wifi connections, the dark side was designed to be low-bandwidth, such that only the code edits are transmitted. because only minimal data needs to be transmitted, an international phone data-plan is more than sufficient, and in fact, is what we used in morelia. 7 it may of interest to note that computer-based audio content analysis (anderson and eigenfeldt 2011; collins 2012; panteli, bogaards and honingh 2014) and generative systems based on ear-based content analysis (anderson, eigenfeldt and pasquier 2013; eigenfeldt and pasquier 2013) do exist, and provide valuable insight into certain sonic characteristics that may elude our ears during a causal listen (e.g., the specific offset in milliseconds of a swing pattern from the ¼ or ⅛ note divisions). as anderson et al. writes regarding their gedmas system, “the compositions are based on a corpus of transcribed musical data collected through a process of detailed human transcription,” and it is this kind of familiarity with the corpus (computer-guided or based entirely on one’s own personal understanding of a style) that may help aid in the creation of musical material reminiscent of whatever genre one seeks to emulate (2013: 5). dancecult 10(1)80 references alexander, amy. 2010. “live visuals”. in audiovisuology compendium, ed. dieter daniels and sandra naumann,198–211. köln: walther könig. alexander, amy, nick collins. 2007. “a history of audiovisual performance”. in cambridge companion to electronic music, ed. nick collins and julio d’escrivan, 126–39. cambridge: cambridge university press. christopher anderson, arne eigenfeldt and philippe pasquier. 2013. “the generative electronic dance music algorithmic system”. northeastern university (massachusetts): aaai publications, ninth 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uploaded on 18 march 2017. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzuhjg6eyjk&list=plmbipibv-wqkbbm_ uoqpa62qmcto4psgq> (accessed 3 january 2018). falkner, michael. 2006. audio-visual art + vj culture, ed. michael faulkner/d-fuse, 9. china: laurence king publishing ltd. gresham-lancaster, scot. 2017. “a personal reminiscence on the roots of computer network music”. leonardo music journal 27: 71–7. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/lmj_a_01022>. levin, golan. 2010. “software art”. in audiovisuology compendium, ed. dieter daniels and sandra naumann, 270–83. köln: walther könig. lawson, shawn. 2014. “the force”. github. <https://github.com/shawnlawson/the_force> (accessed 1 january 2018). ———. 2017. “the dark side”. github. <https://github.com/shawnlawson/thedarkside> (accessed 1 january 2018). lawson, shawn, ryan ross smith. 2017. “the dark side”. centro mexicano para la música y las arts sonoras (mexico): proceedings of the third international conference on live coding. lawson, shawn, ryan ross smith, frank appio. 2016. “closing the circuit: live coding the modular synth”. mcmaster university (canada): proceedings of the second international conference on live coding. https://ec.crypton.co.jp/pages/prod/vocaloid/cv01_us https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzuhjg6eyjk&list=plmbipibv-wqkbbm_uoqpa62qmcto4psgq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzuhjg6eyjk&list=plmbipibv-wqkbbm_uoqpa62qmcto4psgq http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/lmj_a_01022 https://github.com/shawnlawson/the_force https://github.com/shawnlawson/thedarkside smith and lawson | rogue two 81 matos, michaelangelo. 2015. “the underground is massive: how electronic dance music conquered america”. new york, ny: harper collins publishers. mccartney, james. 1996. “supercollider: a new real time synthesis language”. hong kong university of science and technology (china): proceedings of the international computer music conference. mclean, alex, david ogborn, sean lee, julian rohrhuber, ben gold, tom murphy, eric fairbanks, scott fradkin, pd3v, mike hodnick, lennart melzer. “tidalcycles”. tidalcycles. <https://tidalcycles.org> (accessed 1 january 2018). panteli, maria, niels bogaards, and aline honingh. 2014. “modeling rhythm similarity for electronic dance music”. málaga (spain): the 13th international society for music information retrieval conference. shaughnessy, adrian. 2006. “last night a vj zapped my retinas the rise and rise of vjing”. in audio-visual art + vj culture, ed. michael faulkner/d-fuse, 10–3. china: laurence king publishing ltd. smith, eoin. 2010. “electronic dance music and academic music: genre, culture and turntables”. de montfort university (united kingdom): proceedings of sound, sight, space and play. sorensen, andrew. 2005. “impromptu: an interactive programming environment for composition and performance”. queensland university of technology (australia): proceedings of the australasian computer music conference. spinrad, paul. 2005. “history”. in the vj book inspirations and practical advice for live visuals performance, ed. paul spinrad, 17–25. los angeles: feral house. reynolds, simon. 2012. “how rave music conquered america”. the guardian, 2 august. <https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/aug/02/how-rave-music-conquered-america> (accessed 3 january 2018). rubin, courtney. 2015. “silent discos let you dance to your own beat”. the new york times, 17 june. <https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/18/style/silent-discos-let-you-dance-to-yourown-beat.html> (accessed 3 january 2018). wang, ge, perry r. cook. 2004. “on-the-fly programming: using code as an expressive musical instrument”. shizuoka university of art and culture ( japan): proceedings of the 2004 international conference on new interfaces for musical expression. ward, adrian, julian rohrhuber, fredrik olofsson, alex mclean, dave griffiths, nick collins, amy alexander. 2004. “live algorithm programming a temporary organization for its promotion”. in read me: software art & cultures, ed. olga goriunoca and alexi shulgin, 243–61. aarhus university press. watz, marius. 2006. “more points on the chicken: visual instruments and new directions in improvised visual performance”. in `ve-``ja: art + technology of live audio/video. ed. xárene eskandar and prisna nuegsigkapian. 6–7. china: h4 san francisco. wookieepedia et. al. “ev9d9”. wookiepedia. last modified 25 october 2017. <http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/ev-9d9> (accessed 3 january 2018). ———. “kessel run”. wookiepedia. last modified 3 december 2017. <http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/kessel_run> (accessed 3 january 2018). https://tidalcycles.org https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/aug/02/how-rave-music-conquered-america https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/18/style/silent-discos-let-you-dance-to-your-own-beat.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/18/style/silent-discos-let-you-dance-to-your-own-beat.html http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/ev-9d9 http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/kessel_run dancecult 10(1)82 ———. “sarlacc”. wookiepedia. last modified 24 december 2017. <http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/sarlacc> (accessed 3 january 2018). ———. “rouge two”. wookiepedia. last modified 10 november 2017. <http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/rogue_two> (accessed 3 january 2018). live code-ography lawson, shawn. ryan ross smith. 2014. kessel run. vimeo, 38:48. <https://vimeo.com/130277124> (accessed 28 september 2017). ———.  2015. sarlacc. vimeo, 21:19. <https://vimeo.com/121493283> (accessed 28 september 2017). ———. 2016. owego system trade routes. naucleshg, 79:00. <http://naucleshg.com/shawnlawson-ryan-ross-smith-owego-system-trade-routes> (accessed 28 september 2017). ———. 2016. owego system trade routes (samples). vimeo, 4:07. < https://vimeo.com/153029100> (accessed 28 september 2017). ———. 2017. ev9d9. vimeo, 26:06. <https://vimeo.com/261648424> (accessed 28 september 2017). ———. 2017. ev9d9 a real-time text-capture performance version (use google chrome). github, 11:24. github. <https://github.com/shawnlawson/ev9d9> (accessed 28 september 2017). http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/sarlacc http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/rogue_two https://vimeo.com/130277124 https://vimeo.com/121493283 http://naucleshg.com/shawn-lawson-ryan-ross-smith-owego-system-trade-routes http://naucleshg.com/shawn-lawson-ryan-ross-smith-owego-system-trade-routes https://vimeo.com/153029100 https://vimeo.com/261648424 https://github.com/shawnlawson/ev9d9 “chase sound boys out of earth”: the aura of dubplate specials in finnish reggae sound system culture dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 7(2): 25–42 issn 1947-5403 ©2015 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.02.02 “chase sound boys out of earth”: the aura of dubplate specials in finnish reggae sound system culture kim ramstedt åbo akademi university (finland) abstract this study seeks to expand our understanding of how dubplate specials are produced, circulated, and culturally valued in the international reggae sound system culture of the dub diaspora by analysing the production and performance of “chase the devil” (2005), a dubplate special commissioned by the finnish mpv sound system from jamaican reggae singer max romeo. a dubplate special is a unique recording where, typically, a reggae artist re-records the vocals to one of his or her popular songs with new lyrics that praise the sound system that commissioned the recording. scholars have previously theorized dubplates using walter benjamin’s concept of aura, thereby drawing attention to the exclusivity and uniqueness of these traditionally analog recordings. however, since the advent of digital technologies in both recording and sound system performance, what benjamin calls the “cult value” of producing and performing dubplates has become increasingly complex and multi-layered, as digital dubplates now remediate prior aesthetic forms of the analog. by turning to ethnographic accounts from the sound system’s dj selectors, i investigate how digital dubplates are still culturally valued for their aura, even as the very concept of aura falls into question when applied to the recording and performance of digital dubplates. keywords: aura, dubplate special, dj, performance, reggae, recording, authenticity kim ramstedt is a phd candidate in musicology at åbo akademi university in finland. in his dissertation project, ramstedt is studying djs as cultural intermediaries and the localization of musical cultures through dj practices. ramstedt is a board member of the finnish society for ethnomusicology and the global music centre in finland. he also works as a club and radio dj. ramstedt’s dissertation is financed through the finnish doctoral programme for music research. email: <kim.ramstedt@gmail.com>. feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.01.02 mailto:kim.ramstedt@gmail.com dancecult 7(2)26 introduction within the remixology of dub culture, which sullivan (2014) traces from its origins in kingston to early hip hop and disco in new york, through to electronic dance music culture in the uk, germany and canada, one form of dub-related remixing that is often overlooked in academic discourse is the recording of what has been called “dubplate specials” (henriques 2011: 167), “dubplates” (sterling 2010: 67) or simply “specials” (soul shake down mix 2008).1 a dubplate special is a customized one-off recording where, typically, a reggae or dancehall artist is hired to re-record the vocals to one of his or her popular songs on the same instrumental backing track, but with new lyrics that praise (or “big up”) the sound system that commissioned the recording. the sound system, which in its essence consists of a crew of djs and mcs playing recorded music as part of live performance, has since the 1950s been at the core of jamaican dancehall culture, providing dance music to audiences instead of live bands. today, customized dubplate specials are recorded and performed using both analog and digital technologies, and can be heard in performance and on exclusive sound system mixtapes. mixtapes are often distributed in cd format, or as a digital file in online environments, further personalizing the dubplate repertoire amidst the otherwise fixed commercially available recordings. authors such as eshun (1998) and henriques (2011) have suggested that as unique cuts, and thereby unique works of art rather than mass-produced copies of recordings, dubplate specials invoke a benjaminian sense of aura. according to henriques dubplates and the practice of versioning in dub culture “goes against the traditional idea of originality in the work of art that benjamin described as giving it its ‘aura’” (2011: 167). citing eshun, henriques further suggests that through dubplates “the aura is reborn in the middle of industrial reproduction” (2011: 167). their respective argument suggests that, as dubplates are not copies among copies, but single unique works that only exist as a singular item, it follows that dubplates too can be perceived as auratic. considering the ambivalence of benjamin’s concept of aura, only suggesting that dubplate specials possess an aura does not proffer a sufficient conceptualization of the complex process of mediatization (auslander 2008) involved in the production and reception of the recordings, particularly with regards to the new digital environment they circulate in. by not further developing their argument, henriques and eshun fall into a tautology, following benjamin’s description of aura as that “which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction” (1968: 221). by claiming that dubplates are unique and therefore auratic, henriques and eshun reduce benjamin’s concept of aura to that which exists as a unique product. although henriques within his own theoretical framework provides an elaborate conceptualization of sound system practice and notes that the “dub version is a deeply layered whole” (2011: 168), the theorization of dubplates through benjamin’s notion of the aura demands further investigation. not least because, as hennion and latour suggest, the aura, or “the nostalgia for the aura” is by benjamin himself seen “as an illusion, as the residue of a cult value” (2003: 92). even if we accept henriques’ argument that aura can be found ramstedt | “chase sound boys out of earth” 27 in unique objects that are based on mass-produced copies, we do not know what exactly it would mean to experience aura in the production or performance of dubplates specials. this study seeks to expand research on “outernational” (partridge (2010: xi) reggae and sound system cultures by investigating a particular case of dubplate practice in finland. i undertake a critical evaluation of the application of aura as an analytical tool to conceptualize dubplate recording and performance practices in the finnish context of the dub diaspora. what, precisely, does it mean to suggest that dubplate specials encompass a benjaminian aura? does the concept of aura have a similar meaning for sound system culture in jamaica as it does in other parts of the world, where an additional element of cultural brokerage, to use sterling’s (2010: 97) vocabulary, is involved? regardless if the concept of aura is, as such, applicable to dubplate practice, merely assessing its relevance provides us with new perspectives upon a practice that has partially been neglected as a subject of research, as well as new insights into the application of the concept of aura. although, the “sound clash”, as macleod and chamberlain (2012) note, has declined in popularity in both jamaica and finland, dubplates still continue to be be used in sound clash contests. in these competitions, sound systems seek through their customized recordings to “differentiate” (stolzoff 2000: 211) themselves from their opponents. it is in the interest of sound systems to keep their arsenal of dubplates as secretive as possible, so that their rivals cannot use the audio “information” against them. the monetary amount sound systems pay for their dubplate specials are also mostly kept secret (sterling 2010: 67). as dubplate specials are a sensitive area of enterprise for sound systems, i have chosen a case that is not too recent, so as not to jeopardize the activities of any particular sound system. the case i will be analysing addresses a dubplate special of jamaican reggae singer max romeo’s song “chase the devil”, commissioned by the finnish mpv (metsäpalovaara) sound system in 2005. with regards to this material, this study reflects a particular materialization of the “dub diaspora” (sullivan 2014), exemplifying the far-reaching influence and materialization of dub practices outside jamaica, as well as addressing how the outernational practices of dubplate creation circulate through jamaica. my aim is to conceptualize dubplate specials as a transnational musical dialogue between their origin of production in jamaica and consequent reception in finland by furthering benjamin’s concept of aura. three distinct aspects prescribed to the concept of aura are discerned and investigated as separate, but not discrete, categories that structure the study and serve as my analytical tools. however, before i engage in the analysis, a brief background to the concept is in order. dubplate specials benjamin suggests that “the uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition” (2007: 223). in order to be able to analyse how dubplate specials are perceived as auratic, we need to first understand the cultural history of sound system culture in jamaica, and second, the characteristics of its adaptation in europe and dancecult 7(2)28 finland in particular. a relevant starting point is the emergence of the sound system as a performing entity of popular music among the jamaican lower class. according to dancehall anthropologist norman stolzoff (2000: 41), when, after world war ii, the uk was in need of post-war rebuilding, it turned to its colonies as a source of labour. the open-door policy applied by the british government inspired a large number of jamaicans to migrate— among them many trained musicians. furthermore, most of the remaining musicians in the capital of kingston went to work in the emerging tourist industry of the north coast, as an increasing demand by hotels for musicians who could play mento, performed as authentic folk music for tourists, resulted in a decrease of local entertainment in the urban areas of kingston (stolzoff 2000: 42). the shortage of live music resulted in a search for alternatives and, as reggae historian lloyd bradley (2001: 4) notes, open-air loudspeaker cabinets had become a popular way of attracting customers into bars and shops in the mid-1940s. as most lower class jamaicans could not afford radios, people would gather in front of the speakers and soon music became the main reason to visit any establishment (bradley 2001: 4–5). the entrepreneurial potential of a shop sound system was quickly realised, and the few individuals who owned a set of speakers would, for a small fee, offer to set up their sound system at events, providing an alternative to live music (stolzoff 2000: 41). this form of entertainment quickly escalated and by the early 1950s, lawns and yards across kingston had been established as “dance halls”, where mobile sound systems provided entertainment to those who were barred from elite uptown venues (stolzoff 2000: 42). those who attended these events were inspired by the american rhythm-and-blues records that sound system operators imported from the united states and, as david katz suggests, by the “witty live commentary from the deejays attached to a particular set” (2003: 4). during a performance, the dj (also known locally as “the selector”) would encourage dancers by communicating with the audience in various ways (manuel and marshall 2006: 449). sound system operators would carefully read the reactions of the crowd, who took part in creating the event by consuming, judging and influencing the music. an exceptionally popular record could for example be “pulled up”, rewound and played again from the top. according to bradley, the sound system sessions had become: a lively dating agency, a fashion show, an information exchange, a street status parade ground, a political forum, a centre for commerce, and, once the deejays began to chat on the mic about more than their sound systems, their records, their woman or their selves, it was the ghetto’s newspaper (bradley 2001: 40). the different sound systems, each with a loyal set of followers, competed with each other, not only for the most powerful speaker systems or the technical and verbal skill of the djs, but for the exclusivity of their musical repertoire. this led to sound systems removing the labels from their most praised records, so as to prevent their competitors from locating a copy (katz 2000: 4). in the latter half of the 1950s, as rock ‘n’ roll gained in popularity in the united states, the production of the rhythm ‘n’ blues records favoured by jamaican sound systems consequently began to decline. according to stoltzoff (2000: 42), the audience in ramstedt | “chase sound boys out of earth” 29 jamaica could enjoy a few elvis or chuck berry tunes, but djs still needed a fresh supply of potentially exclusive rhythm ‘n’ blues records. confronted with this shortage of music, sound system operators started recording their own music with jamaican singers and musicians (stolzoff 2000: 57–8). these first records produced in jamaica in the 1950s did not enter mass production, but circulated as unique one-off recordings that provided sound systems with exclusive material in the growing competition of the dance halls (manuel and marshall 2006: 449). these records were pressed directly onto what in jamaica came to be called “dubplates”— acetate discs normally used as an intermediary step in the mass-production of vinyl records (stoltzoff 2000: 58). for mass duplication, the acetate cut needs to be transferred onto a master plate, which is used to stamp the audio grooves onto vinyl. as the local productions gained in popularity, sound systems and studios gradually ventured into pressing larger quantities of their recordings (stolzoff 2000: 59). however, sound systems also continued to use the one-off dubplates, even though acetate discs wear out faster than pressed vinyl recordings. as dub scholar michael e. veal notes (2007: 51), acetate machines are normally only used in mastering plants, but in jamaica these were standard equipment in recording studios. without any real copyright law enforcement, this meant, as paul sullivan (2014) suggests, that the producers “owned the songs” and could essentially do what they wanted with them. according to veal (2007: 52), the increasingly sophisticated sound processing equipment enabled studios to experiment with the mixes and over time sound system operators discovered that audiences enjoyed versions of songs that were mixed differently from the commercially available singles. each sound system that commissioned a dubplate was given a “different mix” and duplates also came to be used in sound clashes, contests in which sound systems battled for audience approval by offering the most “unique and personalized versions of popular songs” (veal 2007: 52). this culminated, as veal details, in the “production of dub plate ‘specials’, on which popular singers would re-record their vocal melodies, modifying the lyrics in order to praise the sound system that commissioned the special” (2007: 53–4). outside of jamaica, the uk has with its substantial jamaican diaspora been the “principle country” where reggae and particularly dub culturally and musically developed (partridge 2010: xi). the first sound system was established in london in 1956, but although nearly every major city by the 1970s had an established sound system culture, the phenomenon remained largely underground for the general public, with performances catering mostly for the jamaican expatriate community (partridge 2010: 108–10). reggae and jamaican cultural forms became for black caribbeans in the uk an important source of identification, representing a creative channel against the racism and oppression they encountered ( jones 1988: 40–49). black cultural forms, according to jones, have been valued also by white audiences in britain for their “rebellious edge” (1988: xxii–xxiv). whereas american popular music was somewhat removed from the white british experience, reggae and dub came to mediate the african-caribbean diaspora in the heart of urban britain. as paul dancecult 7(2)30 gilroy notes, at a certain moment reggae “ceased, in britain to signify an exclusively ethnic, jamaican style and derived a different kind of cultural legitimacy both from a new global status and from its expression of what might be termed a pan-caribbean culture” (1993: 82). as such, without regards to the particularities of the cultural roots in jamaica, many finnish listeners first encountered reggae through the recordings of cover versions, such as eric clapton’s adaption of bob marley and the wailers’ “i shot the sheriff ” in 1974, which was also covered by a local artist in finnish that same year (ramstedt 2014). due to the lack of live reggae music up until the 1990s, vinyl recordings have remained culturally significant in finnish reggae ( järvenpää 2014: 292). however, a proper sound system culture did not emerge in finland until after the turn of the millennium, when sound systems adapted a more localized style of performance that included finnish language announcements (“toasts”) by mcs (ramstedt 2014). since then, a number of sound clashes have been organised. at the moment, reggae in finland is in “a process of increasing diversification”, with events featuring live bands as well as dedicated sound system events with djs who are exceedingly topical regarding contemporary jamaican dance music ( järvenpää 2014: 273–4). at the same time, a “number of reggae aficionados” identify more with “the most influential british roots reggae sound systems” ( järvenpää 2014: 274, 291). from an international perspective, despite a recent decline in the production of dubplate specials in jamaica, dubplates remain an integral part of the reggae industry (manuel and marshall 2006: 469, fn. 9). sound systems from different parts of the world have commissioned jamaican artists to voice these customized recordings, and sound clash competitions have been organised on a global level, at times resulting in the victory of nonjamaican sound systems, such as mighty crown from japan (macleod and chamberlain 2012). the production of dubplates has, as such, formed an important source of income for artist in jamaica (stolzoff 2000: 115–50). but more relevant for this study, duplate specials are a way for sound systems globally to form a link to dub and reggae culture in jamaica, as well as a culturally valued means to personalize and differentiate their performance. “chase the devil” and mpv sound system i will now turn to the dubplate special by jamaican artist max romeo, commissioned in 2005 by finland’s mpv sound system. the special is based on “chase the devil”, originally produced by lee “scratch” perry in his black ark studio, released both as a single in 1976 on island records and the same year on max romeo’s lp war ina babylon. “chase the devil” represents the typical “swirling, aquatic sound” of perry’s “classic black ark productions” (veal 2007: 154). perry’s production was also one of the reasons for mpv sound system to “cut a dub” of the song.2 in an email interview with the author, mpv sound system mc and vocalist nestori described how he obtained the “chase the devil” dubplate special in 2005. nestori and mpv’s selector antsa, residing in the finnish city of turku at the time, received a list of artists who would be available for a dubplate recording session in jamaica.3 among the list of artists was max romeo, which made the choice easy. the group ramstedt | “chase sound boys out of earth” 31 immediately knew that they wanted a dubplate of the song “chase the devil”, which is one of max romeo’s most popular songs. “chase the devil” has sustained its popularity over the years, reaching a level of cross-over success when british rave outfit the prodigy sampled the phrase “i’m gonna send him to outer space to find another race” on their track “out of space” in 1992—although nestori claims not to have been familiar with this recording. after wiring the agreed payment for the recording to jamaica, which nestori recollects to have been somewhere around 150–200 euro, they proceeded to write the customized lyrics they wanted max romeo to voice for their dubplate special.4 they received the recording in split audio format, with the familiar instrumental track of the record on one channel and the new vocals on the other. using the received material, antsa mixed and re-engineered the song to a suitable sound. as mpv was playing mostly vinyl at this time, the next phase was to cut the record onto an acetate disc. nestori completed the last phase of the process while visiting berlin, where he personally delivered the recording and collected the acetate—the traditional medium of the “dubplate special”. “chase the devil” is one of the many dubplate specials mpv has commissioned (see fig. 1). it is worth noting that, since 2005, mpv has been performing less as a sound system. nestori, who does not not work full time in the music industry, has more recently been performing with the “roots reggae” oriented intergalaktik sound ( järvenpää 2014). the figure 1. 10-inch acetate disc featuring the dubplate special of max romeo’s “chase the devil”, commissioned by mpv sound. photo credit: titta holmberg (2015). dancecult 7(2)32 selectors, antsa and especially andor (who works full time as reggae and dancehall dj), have increasingly focused on contemporary jamaican dancehall music. a few of their specials, including “chase the devil”, can be heard on andor’s mpv soul shake down mix (2007), a mixtape cd-r of around 400 copies. at the time of its release, the mix was available for purchase at specialist record shops in finland and at mpv performances. later in 2008 a digital mp3 version of the mix was distributed online. according to my research, the mix is the only available source where listeners can hear the dubplate special outside of mpv’s live performances. during the live sets and sound clashes, the recording has, as nestori recounts, been mostly played on cd.5 the recording exists as such in several formats, both digital and analog: as an mp3 file, cd-r, and acetate vinyl recording, which are used differently depending on the performance setting. distance audio: soul shake down mix (2007). this private link has been provided for reference only—please do not distribute or otherwise share: <https://soundcloud.com/kim-ramstedt/mpv-sound-soul-shake-down-mix/s-zpqkv> the concept of “aura” has become part of the lingua franca of cultural theory, yet, or perhaps because of this, it is often used as if we all know and can agree on what the concept entails. however, benjamin does not describe the concept of aura; rather, as aleida and jan assmann suggest, benjamin constructs it “in the moment of its supposed vanishing” (2003: 153). hence, in order to understand what it means to suggest that within reggae sound system culture, dubplate specials are perceived to have an “aura”, we need to acknowledge that aura is not an inherent or fixed attribute of the dubplate, but a re-emerging quality that users prescribe to the medium. as such, i am interested in how aura is understood to reappear in dubplate specials, digital or analog, as compared foremost to the mass-produced recordings they are based on. following both benjamin’s essay and various scholars’ interpretations and applications (assman and assman 2003; auslander 2008; baecker 2003; bolter and grusin 2000; hennion and latour 2003), i have discerned three distinct aspects prescribed to aura. these categories—distance, cult value and originality—will serve here as analytical tools to help conceptualize how dubplate specials articulate values of cultural authenticity in international reggae sound system culture. let us begin by investigating the notion of distance as it relates to benjamin’s concept of aura. according to benjamin, aura can be defined as “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be” (2007: 222). notwithstanding that benjamin reserves this feature of auratic distance only to cult value, to which i will later turn, we can proceed to investigate the concept of distance by looking at how the closeness of art (in this case the recording of jamaican singer max romeo) has resulted in the disappearance of aura (benjamin 2007: 223). according to benjamin the decay of aura rests partly on the desire of the “contemporary masses” to “bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly” (2007: 223). regarding dubplate specials, and our case study at hand, an element of “closeness” can be identified. as sterling https://soundcloud.com/kim-ramstedt/mpv-sound-soul-shake-down-mix/s-zpqkv ramstedt | “chase sound boys out of earth” 33 notes regarding japanese sound systems, dubplate specials afford them the “power to bridge” the “gap between the culture’s jamaican stars and the japanese casual fan” (2010: 97). similarly, for the finnish listener, jamaica and the culture of jamaican dancehall reggae is brought “closer” by a work that has explicitly been recorded for performance by a finnish sound system. in mpv’s “chase the devil” dubplate special, the “jamaican star” max romeo’s references to the mpv sound system make explicit a verbal and conceptual connection between jamaica, as the origin of reggae culture, and finland. in a spoken introduction, before the song starts, max romeo states that mpv is “the musical voice of jah people”, explicitly suggesting that the sound system in question sympathizes with the causes of the rastafari movement that romeo is seen to represent. later in the chorus, instead of the original lyrics (“i’m gonna put on an iron shirt and chase satan out of earth”), max romeo sings “i’m gonna put on a mpv shirt and chase sound boys out of earth”. these references to the sound system signals not only that max romeo acknowledges the existence of mpv, but also that they are authentically part of global reggae culture. mpv is not mentioned in isolation in the lyrics, but they are boasted as chasing other sound systems “out of earth”—out of their sphere of competition—in accordance with the competitive nature of sound system culture. thereby, the dubplate links on a broader level the finnish reggae community to the “field of international dancehall culture” (sterling 2010: 97). jamaica is no longer an unattainable distant location, but appears “closer” to the finnish listener participating in the activities of the local reggae community. as järvenpää suggests, “roots reggae sound systems” in finland have sought to establish a link with a “reggae tradition” considered “lost in the caribbean” since the advent of contemporary forms of dancehall (2014: 291). as such, the sought after proximity with the jamaican origins of reggae does not automatically imply a connection with the current state of the culture. following benjamin’s reasoning, this closeness would, however, suggest that aura is disappearing from the work. as assmann and assmann suggest, cult value implies for benjamin a “transcendent experience”, something that has a “distance from everyday reality” (2003: 155). when the gap between the jamaican star and finnish fan is bridged through the recording, does not the work become more familiar and more intimately part of the everyday? taking a different perspective, distance can be experienced in the work because, while the listener in finland is brought closer to the jamaican setting of the dubplate special, the distance between mpv sound system and their fans increases due to the recording’s exclusivity. while an average listener can easily obtain any commercially available version of max romeo’s song, it is unlikely that they will be able to acquire a customized dubplate version. the time, labour and finances spent on the recording makes the mpv sound system, despite the dubplate recording’s closeness, more distant and, as such, it could be argued that the local listener can experience the sound system itself as “auratic”. furthermore, it should be noted that whereas the commercial versions of the song exist as discrete copies—as distinct recordings on vinyl, cd or as digital files—acquiring mpv’s dubplate version of the song as a separate recording remains exceedingly difficult. one would need to digitally sample the recording from the soul shake down mix (2007), dancecult 7(2)34 as the recording is not, at least to my knowledge, publicly available anywhere else. thus, as benjamin notes, “the essentially distant object is the unapproachable one” (2007: 243, fn. 5). as mpv’s dubplate special is not available for purchase nor easily available digitally as an isolated recording, it remains all the more unapproachable as an object to the listener than the commercial version. mpv’s “chase the devil” dubplate special will in most situations only be approached by listeners as part of the sound system performance—or on a mixtape like the soul shake down mix—and is, as such, mostly experienced as part of the context that the sound system provides. consequently, distance can also be understood as a particular element of liveness, as it has been explored by performance theorist philip auslander (2008). according to auslander, liveness should not be reduced to an “ontological quality of live performance” (2008: 50). live theatre can be as mass-produced as a mediatized performance can be unique: both live performance and the performance of mediatization are predicated on disappearance: the televisual image is produced by an ongoing process in which scan lines replace one another, and it is always as absent as it is present; the use of recordings causes them to degenerate (auslander 2008: 50). although all sound as temporal phenomena could be argued to exist in a state of disappearance, the dubplate special has an evanescence beyond the commercially available versions. the presence of the work disappears even sooner after it has been experienced and becomes distant once more. while a fan can easily listen to the commercial version of “chase the devil” for the full duration of the song, the experience of listening to the dubplate special depends on the programming of mpv sound system and, as stolzoff notes, dubplates “are rarely played for more than a minute, or only a few seconds” (2000: 207). depending on the record, the commercially available version of “chase the devil” is between three and seven minutes long. on the soul shake down mix, the dubplate special is heard for one minute and fourteen seconds, of which a few seconds is a crossfade with the previous song. in sound clashes, where dubplate specials are most often heard, there is a convention, especially towards the end of the clash, where records are played just long enough to identify the voice of the artist and the song. dubplates, as such, could be argued to exist in a greater state of “disappearance” (auslander 2008: 50) than the commercially available versions. another revealing aspect regarding the evanescence of the dubplate is that mpv have chosen to press their max romeo dubplate as an acetate vinyl recording. acetate vinyl recordings exist as such in a state of increasing disappearance due to the format’s physical degradation. with each play or performance, the grooves of an acetate disc substantially wear out, and unlike a mass-produced vinyl disc, last only a total of some fifty plays. although mpv’s “chase the devil” special exists primarily as an infinitely reproducible digital recording, the dubplate is in all of its various media adaptations treated essentially as a “remediation” (bolter and grusin 2000) of the acetate disc, as the traditional analog medium ramstedt | “chase sound boys out of earth” 35 of the dubplate special. as bolter and grusin suggest, “new technologies of representation proceed by reforming or remediating earlier ones” (2000: 61). this remediation—“the representation of one medium in another” (2000: 45)—is according to bolter and grusin a defining characteristic of digital media. although digital files can circulate without limit in a digital environment, sound systems in finland have sought to restrict the wide dissemination of digital dubplates. in an interview in 2009, andor maintained that if the recorded audio from a sound clash is disseminated online, it renders the dubplates less useful for the sound system later, because listeners have the opportunity to hear and familiarize themselves with what had been unique recordings.6 as such, dubplates are used scarcely and not widely disseminated outside live sound system performances. regardless of their contemporary digital format, dubplates are thus treated as if each performance degrades the aesthetic value of the recording, as it would the material existence of an acetate disc. returning once more to the notion of distance, what the finnish audience is fundamentally brought closer to through the dubplate is the artist heard on the recording. as macleod and chamberlain imply, dubplates can be understood to have developed as a substitution for a live artist performing alongside the recorded music in a sound system: “they [dubplates] simply travel a lot cheaper than artists, first on platters and later cds and usb drives” (2012). drawing further on bolter and grusin, “digital media function in a constant dialectic with earlier media, precisely as each earlier medium functioned when it was introduced” (2000: 50). as such, the digital dubplate, whether on usb drives or cds, remediates the cultural authenticity of the acetate disc, which in turn remediates the presence of a live performer affiliated with the sound system. cult value this brings me to the second theme of this analysis: cult value. according to benjamin, an “authentic work of art has its basis in the ritual” (2007: 224); it is from the ritual function that a work derives its aura. and like aura, we can discuss cult value in terms of its disappearance or emergence. what is the “ritual” function that the work is associated with? for benjamin, works accorded ritual functions are “ceremonial objects”, insofar as what matters is their “existence, not their being in view” (2007: 224). the cult object’s existence serves a ritual function; it is not valued or appreciated for its aesthetic properties. before turning to the dubplate special, there is a ritual aspect to the commercial version that we need to acknowledge first, namely the cultural and religious values of rastafari associated with the style of reggae music that max romeo is seen to represent. as i have discussed elsewhere (ramstedt 2014: 51), in terms of genre, the ideological value of reggae represented largely by the rastafari movement is important for many listeners, including those in finland. max romeo is a well-known adherent of the rastafari religion, and although “chase the devil” does not include any explicit or exclusive rastafari references, the religious theme of the song is already present in its title. as such, it would be easy to suggest that the song has, by its association with a religious movement, a sine qua non “cult” dancecult 7(2)36 significance, in the sense of its ritual value. however, this would be to prescribe all songs within this particular genre a ritual function, which does not correspond with benjamin’s idea of the uniqueness of the aura (2007: 223–4). in mpv’s dubplate version of the song, most of the religious references in the lyrics are replaced by vernacular phrases from sound clash culture. instead of “the devil”, max romeo’s lyrics chase mpv’s competitors “out of earth” by using a familiar vocabulary from sound clashing that “marvels at the foolhardiness” (sterling 2010: 67) of rival sound systems. max romeo uses terms such as “tin pan” and “drum pan” to describe rival sound systems, a derogatory term that references their poor audio quality. “tin pan” audio is thin (having a narrow eq range) and low in volume, which is an insult to sound systems that strive towards a rich and loud sound range. the mpv dubplate special, as such, departs from the spiritual realm of rastafari into a context where dubplate specials have the unique ritual function of “killing” other sound systems in a sound clash (stolzoff 2000: 211). to expand on this ritual function, german sociologist dirk baecker’s interpretation of benjamin is useful here. according to baecker, when a work of art moves away from its traditional role within cult practice: it not only loses cult value but it also gains new windows opening toward several sides. it now demands to be viewed as something that once had cult value, and the beholder who is interested only in cult value must now “cover” the side windows, close the doors, and make an effort to imagine the work of art as a black box looking only upward (baecker 2003: 13). for baecker, a work with “cult value” exclusively serves its ritual function and cannot have “windows” open to any other function or meaning. even if max romeo’s commercial recording of “chase the devil” can hypothetically have solely a ritual dimension with reference to its “ideological value” (ramstedt 2014: 51), one would have to make an effort not to be influenced by other meanings and functions the work may have. mpv’s dubplate special, on the other hand, is designed to be performed by a particular sound system and although it can be digitally copied and played as an isolated recording by individual listeners, it is in practice exclusively performed by mpv and serves the special function of being “ammunition”(sterling 2010: 155) for sound clashes. according to nestori, the “chase the devil” dubplate contributed to the “killing” of a rival finnish sound system, meaning that this particular dubplate played a role in securing the victory of the sound clash for mpv.7 the dubplate thus carried out its ritual function in the culture of sound clashing. another important aspect of cult value that baecker raises is the fact that “cult value essentially depends upon repetition” (2003: 12). the cult value of the “chase the devil” dubplate special in a sound clash setting does not arise solely from its uniqueness. the reason why a dubplate special can only be played for a short duration, as explained earlier, is because listeners are already familiar with the mass-produced version of the recording. what enables the dubplate special’s cult value in a sound clash setting is its prior existence in commercially available copies. however, baecker also maintains that “to the degree” that ramstedt | “chase sound boys out of earth” 37 an object’s “attraction remains framed by the cult they do not count as works of art” (2003: 12). in the sound clash setting, a dubplate special’s ritual function to “kill” a rival sound system is also dependant on its aesthetic functionality. thus baecker’s reading of benjamin’s binary distinction between art and cult value is not entirely applicable to dubplates. at the same time, the audience does not attend a sound clash to admire individual works of music—there are multiple layers of art making taking place, where dubplate specials only provide one piece of a larger web of meaning creation. originality the third and last aspect of aura that i wish to investigate is the “originality” of the work. if cult value and the experience of aura is not dependent on the existence of a unique object, what is the function of originality and the uniqueness of the dubplate special? baecker suggests that “cult practice neutralizes a comparison with similar kinds of artifacts not associated with the cult” (2003: 12). accordingly, to evaluate its originality, a comparision should not be made between a dubplate special and its commercial version, but rather between dubplates. if a dubplate special can be identified as “original” in comparison with other dubplates, that is, other similar works identified with the same ritual practice, only then can we arguably experience a sense of its aura. a google search for “chase the devil dubplate”8 displays two audio clips of similar dubplate specials on the first page of results, and several more appear on the following pages. the results of this search demonstrate that the cultural values of “originality” and “authenticity” have arguably been redefined with the proliferation of dubplate specials in the internet era, with their dissemination reflecting the widespread adoption of digitization in dubplate recording and performance practices. this search also shows that a significant number of similar dubplates have been commissioned by other acts. acknowledging the popularity of max romeo’s song, it is safe to assume that there is an abundance of “chase the devil” dubplate specials. indeed, having a dubplate special of the song is not particularly exceptional for a sound system. nestori (2015a) recounts a sound clash where a rival finnish sound system “countered” mpv’s “chase the devil” dubplate with a similar dubplate special that referred to, and commented upon their particular dubplate. such a counter special suggests that a rival sound system was aware of mpv’s special and had a retaliation dubplate cut for the occasion. the “chase the devil” dubplate is, as such, not even unique to finland. therefore, mpv sound system’s dubplate special of “chase the devil” is in itself by no means completely original, even if it is a one-off object in comparison to the commercial copies of the song. as baecker suggests, “only by being compared to something similar does the uniqueness of a thing become evident” (2003: 12). there has to be something “original” that makes a dubplate stand out among other other similar recordings. in accordance with benjamin, originality can be equated with something that is experienced as “authentic” (2007: 220). although authenticity for benjamin means the presence of a single original object, dancecult 7(2)38 following auslander (2008) we can expand this premise further. as auslander suggests, in rock culture listeners experience “mass-produced objects as auratic through the process of authentication”, which requires that the object is “positioned within historical discourses” (2008: 95–6). in other words, an object derives its authenticity from a multifaceted and historically contingent process, based on the context of a particular genre that accounts for the “story of the musicians who produced it” (auslander 2008: 96). auslander highlights “live performance” as a “unique object” (2008: 96) that authenticates the mass-produced object within rock ideology. if we consider mpv’s dubplate special of “chase the devil” as a mass-produced object—in the sense that similar objects exist in their exclusivity with other sound systems—what authenticates this object is its association with a particular performance setting and its historical discourse. as such, we find ourselves, in auslander’s words, in a “dialectical tension” (2008: 97), where the performances are perceived as auratic through the dubplate special while, at the same time, the dubplate special derives its originality from its exclusive association with mpv and the performance setting they facilitate. in the dialectical tension between the performer and the object that is being performed, what becomes valued by audience and performer alike is a sense of closeness. if listeners perceive the performer to have a close relation with the performed material, the performers are thus perceived as authentic. however, as we have already established, the experience of distance in dubplates, and in their performances, is multilayered and somewhat contradictory. the dubplate can in itself be perceived as a distant auratic object to the listener with regards to its remediated evanescense and unapproachability. yet the analog tradition of authenticity and unique aura that the digital dubplate remediates is nonetheless brought closer to the listeners’ experience insofar as the dubplate links the local audience, separated by distance from jamaican culture, with the “routes not roots” (gilroy 1993) of the dub diaspora and its international reggae culture. there are several parallels to draw from this case study in regards to ongoing debates about the concept of authenticity in popular music studies, for example as articulated by weisethaunet and lindberg (2010). the experience of distance can be understood both as a proximity between the “work and the author”, as well an “unmediated” communication between the performer and his or her audience (weisethaunet and lindberg 2010: 467–68). what is culturally valued in this context, however, is not an “auratic distance” but a proximity, or closeness, that renders the work authentic. similarly, we are reminded of benjamin’s distinction between aesthetic functionality (or art as such) and cult value, as discussed earlier. this latter distinction can perhaps be better understood by comparison to “folkloric authenticity”, where an individual artistic expression is balanced against a representation of the “cultural values” and “collective memory” of a community (weisethaunet and lindberg 2010: 469–70). dubplates are still culturally valued in finland because they are understood to be part of the “genuine” tradition of sound system culture that values the historic medium of the acetate disc, even though the latter are no longer technically necessary in the digital age. the “illusion [and] residue of cult value” (benjamin 2003: 92) lives on in the dubplate acetate via association to a perceived tradition, even as that tradition reconstructs its cultural values of authenticity to remediate the aura of the analog in the digital. ramstedt | “chase sound boys out of earth” 39 by deconstructing the concept of aura through the remediation of the analog in the digital, as drawn from the particular dubplate case study here, we have arrived at the need to engage in an increasingly complex dialogue around the notion of authenticity in popular music studies. it can be established that simply using the term aura to describe features that are perceived as culturally valuable as projected onto an object is somewhat problematic. yet, whereas the concept of authenticity within popular music studies has been theorized beyond a univocal usage of the term, the concept of aura is still widely used without sufficient rigor. concluding discussion in this study, i have sought to conceptualize dubplate specials within an international reggae sound system culture using benjamin’s concept of aura. this concept has previously been used by scholars to draw attention to the exclusivity and uniqueness of these traditionally analog recordings in contrast to the mass-produced copies they are based on. since the advent of digital technologies in both recording and sound system performance, how dubplates are produced, circulated, and culturally valued in the international reggae sound system culture of the dub diaspora has grown increasingly complex and multi-layered, as digital dubplates now remediate prior aesthetic forms of the analog. by considering the mpv dubplate special of max romeo’s “chase the devil”, i have shown that digital dubplates are still valued for different auratic aspects, even as the limits of benjamin’s concept aura become evident when applied to the recording and performance of digital dubplates. following contemporary discussions around benjamin’s essay, i have evaluated three distinct features prescribed to the concept of aura: distance, cult value and authenticity. each of these categories highlights various aspects of dubplate specials and therefore provides different interpretations of the concept of aura. understanding the aura of dubplate specials as a feature of distance remains multi-layered and contradictory. while we could establish that this case study provides for the “closeness” felt by finnish audiences towards reggae culture in jamaica, as a medium, dubplate specials have a distant material feature—they are temporally and spatially more absent than their mass-produced versions, partly due to the digital remediation of the traditional analog medium of the acetate disc. at the same time, as the “jamaican star” in our case example is brought closer to the finnish reggae community, the mpv sound system become more distant as performers, as they alone have the exclusive ability to play the dubplate special. indeed, for private listening of “chase the devil”, listeners would most likely turn to the commercially available version of the recording, rather than the dubplate recording associated with the sound system. experiencing the performance of the dubplate as auratic in this sense accords with benjamin’s argument that “the cult value” and aura of an object retires “into an ultimate retrenchment: the human countenance” (2007: 225–6). it is no longer the work of art which maintains an auratic quality, but the performers—in this case, the mpv sound system collective themselves. regarding cult value, the contradiction that baecker identifies in benjamin’s theory applies also to this case study. the perception of a dubplate’s cult value as ammunition in a sound clash setting does not derive solely from its “originality”. cult value depends upon dancecult 7(2)40 repetition, which is why dubplates can be played in short segments and simultaneously remain ephemeral, precisely because audiences are already familiar with the music due to the repeated listening of the numerous copies available of the commercial version. dubplates have a more important ritual value for sound systems themselves, as listeners are not fixated on individual works in a sound clash but upon supporting their favourite sound system. at the same time, baecker’s and benjamin’s binary between art and cult value can be questioned in the case of dubplates, where aesthetic features of the recording affect its cult value. in the context of finnish sound system culture, benjamin’s focus on a discrete work as the condition for experiencing aura is likewise brought into question through the plurality of the digital object itself. in dubplate specials, the feature of originality prescribed to the concept of aura can be equated with a process of authentication that a listener experiences in performance. what is original in mpv’s dubplate special, compared to other sound system’s similar specials, is that it has been commissioned by the particular sound system. the special is a part of their performance and the musical context of the sound system clash. whereas mpv can be experienced as auratic through the dubplate they have commissioned, the process also works in the other direction—a dubplate special is original by its exclusive association with that particular sound system. parallels can also be drawn to the concept of authenticity, as it has been debated within popular music studies, emphasizing the complexity of unequivocally describing dubplate specials as auratic. curiously, whereas authenticity has been diversely theorized, the concept of aura often lacks sufficient analytic engagement. the concept of aura as such is perhaps not the most adaptable tool, at least not in understanding dubplates, due to the layered meaning-creation at play in sound system culture. however, with additional material and tools from the body of research around benjamin’s concept of aura, the concept nonetheless provides valuable insights into the diverse attitudes to recording and performance among different cultures of the dub diaspora. acknowledgments i want to thank current and previous members of mpv sound system, nestori, andor and antsa, for all the material and information they have provided. without their collaboration and contributions, this study would not have been possible to conduct. notes 1 these terms should not be confused with the medium of the acetate disc, originally called a “dub plate” (veal 2007: 51–55) in jamaica. in this study, i am concerned with the concept of dubplates as specially commissioned works and will refer to the particular medium of the recordings separately. ramstedt | “chase sound boys out of earth” 41 2 nestori, email to the author, 23 february 2015. 3 nestori, email to the author, 23 february 2015. 4 nestori, email to the author, 13 may 2015. 5 nestori, email to the author, 25 february 2015 6 andor, interview with author, 15 february 2009 7 nestori, email to the author, 23 february 2015. 8 google search, “chase the devil dubplate”: <https://www.google.fi/webhp?sourceid=chromeinstant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=utf-8#q=chase+the+devil+dubplate&tbm=vid> (accessed 27 february 2015). references assmann, aleida and jan assmann. 2003. “air from other planets blowing: the logic of authenticity and the prophet of the aura”. in mapping benjamin, edited by timothy lenoir and hans ulrich gumbrecht, 147–57. stanford: stanford university press. auslander, philip 2008. liveness. performance in a mediatized culture. new york: routledge. baecker, dirk. 2003. “the unique appearance of distance ”. in mapping benjamin, edited by timothy lenoir and hans ulrich gumbrecht, 9–23. stanford: stanford university press. benjamin, walter. 2007. “the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction”. translated by harry zohn. in illuminations, edited by hannah arendt, 217–51. new york: schocken books. bradley, 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dancehall culture in jamaica. durham and london: duke university press. sullivan, paul. 2014. remixology. tracing the dub diaspora. london: reaktion books. veal, michael e. 2007. dub: soundscapes and shattered songs in jamaican reggae. middletown: wesleyan university press. weisethaunet, hans and ulf lindberg. 2010. “authenticity revisited: the rock critic and the changing real”. popular music and society 33 (4): 465–85. discography clapton, eric. 1974. i shot the sheriff / give me strength. rso (7-inch): so-409. <http://www.discogs.com/eric-clapton-i-shot-the-sheriff-give-me-strength/ master/74013>. mpv sound. 2005. chase the devil dubplate special. unreleased (mp3). mpv sound. 2007. soul shake down mix. mpv sound (cd-r). prodigy, the. 1992. experience. xl recordings (cd): xlcd 110. <http://www.discogs.com/prodigy-experience/master/8585>. romeo, max / the upsetters feat. prince jazzbo. 1976. chase the devil / croaking lizard. island records (7-inch): wip 6330. <http://www.discogs.com/max-romeo-upsettersfeat-prince-jazzbo-chase-the-devilcroaking-lizard/master/223194>. romeo, max & the upsetters. 1976. war ina babylon. island records (lp): ilps 9392. <http://www.discogs.com/max-romeo-upsetters-war-ina-babylon/master/490972>. http://www.discogs.com/eric-clapton-i-shot-the-sheriff-give-me-strength/master/74013 http://www.discogs.com/eric-clapton-i-shot-the-sheriff-give-me-strength/master/74013 http://www.discogs.com/prodigy-experience/master/8585 http://www.discogs.com/max-romeo-upsettersfeat-prince-jazzbo-chase-the-devil-croaking-lizard/master/223194 http://www.discogs.com/max-romeo-upsettersfeat-prince-jazzbo-chase-the-devil-croaking-lizard/master/223194 http://www.discogs.com/max-romeo-upsetters-war-ina-babylon/master/490972 popular music, digital technology and society nick prior london: sage, 2018. isbn: 978-1-84860-044-7 (hardcover), 978-1-84860-045-4 (paperback), 978-1-47393-416-0 (e-book) rrp: £75.00 (hardcover), £26.99 (paperback), £26.39 (e-book) andreas rauh university of leeds (uk) nick prior sets out to investigate the complex relationships between contemporary popular music, digital technology and society. his aims are ambitious, and the breadth of topics covered in the seven chapters (including online music consumption, digital music production, mobile listening and the connections between music and video games) is evidence of the author’s broad and in-depth knowledge of relevant fields and debates, as well as the importance and ubiquity of digital technologies in the worlds of contemporary popular musics. the premise of the book—which the author freely admits he is not the first to observe—is that music and technology are intrinsically connected; in prior’s words, “all music is technological in the sense that it is mediated by technological material, forces, and processes” (3). however, the starting point in prior’s approach is his suggestion that, from the early 1980s onwards, changes associated with (largely digital) technologies “have dramatically reshaped . . . [the] landscapes of popular music” (5). prior has argued in previous works about the importance of the early 1980s in understanding the development of contemporary popular music (see prior 2010), but this latest book is his most sustained and successful effort in analysing the developments of digital technology (for music) and its complex relationship with the broader issues concerning popular music at large and society in general. moreover, he must be credited for addressing these difficult topics using clear and accessible language—particularly useful for undergraduate students—and avoiding simplistic views about the role of technology in social, cultural and historical change in general. readers interested in debates about technology, including many scholars of dance music culture, will probably be familiar with the theoretical framework used in the book. prior draws largely from science and technology studies (sts), and follows the tradition of scholars from popular music studies (jones 1992; théberge 1997) and sound studies (taylor 2001; pinch and bijsterveld 2004; sterne 2006) in highlighting the importance of user agency—yes, the classic discussion of turntables as machines for music (re)production and the (re)appropriation of roland’s tb-303 as evidence of user agency is on page 9. nevertheless, given the long history of electronic dance music and technology, as well as prior’s background as an electronic musician, there are surprisingly few direct references to the genre through the book.[1] in fairness, this is not a genre-focused work, and the strengths of its contributions to relevant theories relies on its effective use of theoretical concepts in the analysis of the selected cases and topics (chapters two–six), and how these theoretically-informed analyses drive forward contemporary debates about the interplay of music, technology and society (see the discussion about the japanese cyborg pop star hatsune miku on pages 138–41 for a good example with regards to issues about authenticity, performativity, representation and simulacra). prior’s able use of theory shines in his discussion of the incorporation of sampling as a standard compositional process across genres of popular music, including pop and rock. furthermore, he offers the compelling argument that widespread use of sampling is evidence of a broader process of naturalisation of technology (understood as the assemblage of devices, practices, and associated socio-cultural meanings) in society. thus, while prior argues this book is not a deeply theoretical work (15), one of its most significant contribution lies in retaking and updating many of the classic debates that have framed our understanding of society and technology using contemporary data and cutting-edge musical works, and showing how widely these digital technologies relate to socio-cultural changes. the breadth of topics that the book touches on is commendable, and it was a pleasant surprise to read a chapter dedicated to music and video games alongside an in-depth analysis of software for audio manipulation and circulation (an often overlooked yet important element of contemporary digital music production). but as i read the book, i was frequently left wondering about the underlying implications of digital technologies for those most deeply invested in it; for instance musicians, producers, committed fans, and the music and tech industries. in other words, what are the positive and negative aspects associated with digital technologies for each group of stakeholders? take the debates about democratisation of cultural production and digital technology as an example. drawing from “third-age” internet studies, prior rightly acknowledges that digital technologies—such as online platforms—have been normalised and integrated in most of the (post)industrial western world. however, recent research about the “platformisation” of cultural production (nieborg and poell 2018) and the political economy of digital technologies (wittel 2017) highlight the contradictions between a higher concentration of power by tech industry giants and the potential benefits that digital technologies offer to democratise cultural production. on the music consumer side, given the business model of online platforms (such as music streaming) based on the commodification of user data and privacy concerns, it may well be the case of bringing question about users’ rights, power, transparency and a more critical assessment to the forefront. it is true that sts have contributed to understand the intricacies of complex technological assemblages, but the field is not traditionally concerned with issues of power and agency, and prior does well to bring the latter into the forefront by touching upon many critical elements throughout the book, even if briefly. the passages where he brings up issues such as gender, race, power and agency to the analysis add valuable contributions to the book and provides some of the sharpest insights in the book.[2] however, given the author’s informed analysis of the complexities about the relationship between popular music, digital technologies and society, alongside his in-depth knowledge of the fields, it would have been very interesting if he were to have offered a more detailed critique with a normative view that takes into account these increasingly pressing issues. overall, this is a significant contribution to the study of popular music, and its focus on digital technology offers valuable insights that help unpack the complexities between music, technology and society. it will be of interest to scholars from the fields of popular music, media and communication, video game studies, music production and sociology of music. musicians and practitioners will also find the book useful to understand the landscape they operate in as cultural producers. lastly, music educators and researchers interested in methodological questions will find the discussion in the last chapter insightful, as prior describes his efforts to teach and research music-production processes using a collective practice-led research approach. references jones, steve. 1992. rock formation: music, technology, and mass communication. newbury park, ca: sage. nieborg, david and thomas poell. 2018. “the platformization of cultural production: theorizing the contingent cultural commodity”. new media & society: 1–18. pinch, trevor and bijsterveld, kevin. 2004. “sound studies: new technologies and music”. social studies of science 34(5): 635–48. prior, nick. 2010. “the rise of the new amateurs”. in handbook of cultural sociology, ed. john hall, laura grindstaff and ming-chen lo, 398–407. new york and london: routledge. sterne, jonathan. 2006. “the mp3 as cultural artefact”. new media & society 8(5): 825–42. taylor, timothy dean. 2001. strange sounds: music, technology & culture. new york: routledge. théberge, paul. 1997. any sound you can imagine: making music/consuming technology. hanover, nh: wesleyan university press. wittel, andreas. 2017. “the political economy of digital technologies. outlining an emerging field of research”. in digitisation. theories and concepts for empirical cultural research, ed. gertraud koch, 251–75. new york and london: routledge. notes [1] exceptions to this include: the meanings associated with discovering music in dance cultures as a form of symbolic capital (53), which could explain contemporary hierarchies of musical taste online; the discussion about the significance of sampling and drum machines as both devices and compositional practices in electronic dance music (68); the use of the vocoder by detroit techno pioneers as an example of digital manipulation of the human voice (129), and how the genre normalizes heavily processed vocals (135); and, how the designer of the 2002 video game rez, an early example of music as games, was influenced by the sensorial (and arguably synesthetic) experiences associated with 1990s raves. [2] for examples, see the discussions about the limits of technology in the democratisation of music production (88–9), lack of transparency of online music streaming’s recommendation algorithms (45–6), concerns about “free labour” in participatory cultures (49–50), a critique of the ethics of sampling (127), and an analysis of the gendered roles of female singers in the digital manipulation of vocals (137). dancecult 8(1) 2016: masthead and table of contents volume 8 number 1 2016 executive editor graham st john (university of fribourg, ch) from the floor editors alice o’grady (university of leeds, uk) graham st john (university of fribourg, ch) reviews editor ed montano (rmit university, au) foreign languages editor luis-manuel garcia (university of groningen, nl) production editor botond vitos (de) operations director ed montano (rmit university, au) art director botond vitos (de) copyeditors luis-manuel garcia (university of groningen, nl) jerome hansen (uk) jonathan karpetz (mcgill university, ca) katrina loughrey (au) kath o’donnell (au magdalena olszanowski (concordia university, ca) production assistants paul jasen (carleton university, ca) garth sheridan (rmit university, au) dancecult journal of electronic dance music culture issue 8(1) 2016 issn 1947-5403 ©2016 dancecult published yearly at <http://dj.dancecult.net> international advisory board sean albiez (southampton solent university, uk), eliot bates (university of maryland, college park, us), andy bennett (griffith university, au), mark j butler (northwestern university, us), anthony d’andrea (university of limerick, ie), rebekah farrugia (oakland university, us), kai fikentscher (de), luis-manuel garcia (university of birmingham, uk), françois gauthier (ca), anna gavanas (institute for futures studies, se), ross harley (university of new south wales, au), tim lawrence (university of east london, uk), geert lovink (university of amsterdam, nl), alejandro l. madrid (university of illinois, chicago, us), paolo magaudda (university of padova, it), charity marsh (university of regina, ca), ed montano (rmit university, au), andrew murphie (university of new south wales, au), alice o’grady (university of leeds, united kingdom), christopher partridge (lancaster university, uk), anne petiau (itsrs / université paris 5, fr), hillegonda c rietveld (london south bank university, uk), geoff stahl (victoria university of wellington, nz), sonjah nadine stanley-niaah (university of west indies, jm), graham st john (university of fribourg, ch), jonathan sterne (mcgill university, ca), will straw (mcgill university, ca), rupert till (university of huddersfield, uk), tobias c. van veen (université de montréal, ca), michael veal (yale university, us), botond vitos (de) dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture is a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture (edmc). a platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on the shifting terrain of edmcs worldwide, the journal houses research exploring the sites, technologies, sounds and cultures of electronic music in historical and contemporary perspectives. playing host to studies of emergent forms of electronic music production, performance, distribution, and reception, as a portal for cutting-edge research on the relation between bodies, technologies, and cyberspace, as a medium through which the cultural politics of dance is critically investigated, and as a venue for innovative multimedia projects, dancecult is the journal for research on edmc. cover photo by botond vitos http://dj.dancecult.net volume 8 number 1 2016 feature articles life and death on the pulse dance floor: transglocal politics and the erasure of the latinx in the history of queer dance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 01 tim lawrence dj mini and montreal’s vulgar dance music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 david madden investigating the value of dj performance for contemporary music education and sensorimotor synchronisation (sms) abilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 douglas maccutcheon, alinka e. greasley and mark t. elliott transpositions when club culture goes online: the case of boiler room . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 guillaume heuguet (trans. luis-manuel garcia) from the floor – online dancing to the loop: repetition in contemporary music. an interview with tilman baumgärtel geert lovink the diy free party collective dave payling frankenstein, or the 8-bit prometheus dj balli reviews life and death on the new york dance floor 1980–1983 (tim lawrence) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .88 charles de ledesma os djs da perifa: música eletrônica, trajetórias e mediações culturais em são paulo (ivan paolo de paris fontanari) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .91 carlos palombini aphex twin’s selected ambient works volume ii (marc weidenbaum) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .94 toby young brian eno: oblique music (sean albiez and david pattie eds.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .96 ed montano sonic possible worlds: hearing the continuum of sound (salomé voegelin) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 daniel schnee issn 1947-5403 ©2016 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net algobabez: writing code, pushing buttons shelly knotts durham university (uk) joanne armitage leeds university (uk) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2018.10.01.13> beginnings algobabez came together through a shared skepticism of code-bro cultures, a flurry of oestrogen, and overloaded algorave line-ups. collaboration felt inevitable.[1] we were both performing regularly as solo performers but were drawn together by the maleness of the scene. our first performance took place in the corporate sheen of the open data institute as part of leeds digital festival (2016). we felt a sense of disrupting the atmosphere—when we started playing the crowd changed. the women moved forwards, the men we didn’t recognise (so assumed part of the festival) moved backwards. we had to let rip, ending in smelting metal and broken eardrums for all.[2] though totally unplanned, and a result of resistance to the context, this set up a "legend" around algobabez as an obnoxiously noisy and unapologetically feminist double-act.[3] sonically this performance caused a shift in the scene (see futures below). blank slate we’ve always embraced the experimental foundations of the live coding scene e.g. (collins 2011), preferring to do everything in the moment composing our tracks in response to context, audience, mood, alcohol consumption and each other. before performing we don’t discuss structures, preferring to just bounce off each other, developing a structure as we work, continually creating and resolving tensions. our performances often oscillate between building up and then stripping back dense textures, creating space for each other, and working in different frequency bands to fill in gaps. our individual live coding practices meant we naturally took specific musical roles when we started to collaborate: knotts making textural drone sounds that are rhythmic and broad spectrum, and armitage tending towards coding drums, effects and patterns. but these roles have always been as fluid as the code, with us merging, swapping and bouncing off each other’s contributions. part of the algobabez sound is combining sound qualities: pairing knotts’ lo-fi software synths with armitage’s higher-fidelity hardware instruments that she controls through midi and occasional manual button-pushing intervention. we’ve resisted the more recent live coding modes of coming to the floor with pre-written code and polished pre-composed music. coding from scratch is more fluid and visceral. responding fundamentally to the context and risking absolute failure connects us to the audience and each other in ways that pre-coding limits (mclean and parkinson 2014). it feels simultaneously powerful and communal to stand in front of an audience and challenge gendered expectations by writing code from scratch. having said all that, we didn’t come to this entirely unprepared: we rehearsed once before our first show. beyond algorave beyond algoraving, we’ve been using algobabez as a research vessel, looking at new ways of knowing and controlling sound through performance. by integrating armitage’s knowledge of physical computing and knotts’ skills with biometrics, algorithmic systems and network music we have explored algorithmic improvisation in new ways through projects such as babenodes, vibez and chemical algorave. babenodes encourages audiences to interact, through dancing, with sensors mapped to performance parameters including tempo, triggering samples and mixing volume of our relative sound.[4] our chemical algorave performance used data sourced from drug design processes to control parameters of armitage’s drum machine and generate melodic patterns for knotts’ synths.[5] most recently we developed vibez, a telehaptic live coding performance where performers share their biometric signals across the internet with algorithmic mediation (knotts and armitage 2018). as non-normative coding entities, we're interested in bodily interventions in the code space and through these projects have been using biometric signals from ourselves and the audience to intervene in our normal performative flow. all of our projects are woven with the threads of feminist theory (plant 1997; hayles 2010; balsamo 2011). we both engage with feminism in our academic work and this has fed into the way we present ourselves as algobabez. connecting the technical "algo" to an ironic use of a term of endearment—that is more at home in mainstream popular music than experimental contexts—allows us to overtly perform gender in academic and electronic music scenes where women are underrepresented. we’ve used this "ironic gender performance" as a mechanism to build narratives around our work, and cement a resistance to the mainstream, in a way that we often shy away from in solo projects. futures the sound world of algorave has changed as a result of algobabez taking noisy sounds and seamlessly integrating them into four-to-the-floor beats. we didn’t set out to play a particular genre or type of music, but this emerged out of improvisation and performance, and we’ve seen this experimentation with sound propagate across the scene since we started playing. we’ve taken the more experimental side of live coding—often concerned with supercollider synthesis—and worked out how to transpose it into the algorave context. we create noise on the dancefloor while projecting ourselves as bad-ass women, crafting new codes for the future of algorave. algobabez has also made a significant contribution to diversifying the gender balance in the uk algorave scene through teaching workshops, changing narratives, acting as role models and informally mentoring other performers. through collaboration with other women including alexandra cardenas, lucy cheesman and miri kat we have helped to establish a critical mass of women who are performing, teaching and organising live coding activities (bolt 2017). author biography algobabez have been blasting eardrums with noisey synth-driven algo-pop since 2016. formed of algorave regulars shelly knotts and joanne armitage, they use supercollider to code and control patterns of weird, wonky, noisy, thumping, danceable music. ok apart, but better together: 2 babes, 2 laptops and 1 sound. <https://twitter.com/algobbz> <https://algorave.com/algobabez/> references balsamo, anne. 2010. designing culture: the technological imagination at work. durham: duke university press. bolt, isabelle. 2017. "meet the female coders pushing electronic music into the future". mixmag, 31 august.<http://mixmag.net/feature/female-coders-algorave> (accessed 1 october 2017). collins, nick. 2011. "live coding of consequence". leonardo 44(3): 207-11. <https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_00164>. hayles, katherine n. 2010. my mother was a computer: digital subjects and literary texts. chicago: university of chicago press. knotts, shelly and joanne armitage. 2018. "vibez: a small sense of presence at a distance". porto: international conference on live interfaces. leeds digital festival. 2016. "code in the dark". <https://leedsdigitalfestival.org/code-in-the-dark> (accessed 10 april 2018). mclean, alex and adam parkinson. 2014. "interfacing with the night". lisbon: international conference on live interfaces. plant, sadie. 1997. zeroes + ones: digital women + the new technoculture. new york: doubleday. johnson, eric. 2018. "why silicon valley has a bro culture problem and how to fix it". recode, feb 5: <https://www.recode.net/2018/2/5/16972096/emily-chang-brotopia-book-bloomberg-technology-culture-silicon-valley-kara-swisher-decode-podcast> (accessed 6 november 2018). notes [1] for example, see johnson (2018). [2] clip of first algobabez performance: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxqntk_5svw> [3] we are not exaggerating; the sound system was literally smoking. [4] babenodes2.0 performed at improvisational creativity workshop, prato, july 2017: <https://vimeo.com/240415986> [5] performance at chemical algorave, culture lab, newcastle, may 2017: <https://vimeo.com/218455683> dancecult 13(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 12(1) 2020: 143–158 issn 1947-5403 ©2020 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net exploring nightlife: space, society and governance jordi nofre and adam eldridge (editors) london: rowman and littlefield, 2018 300 pp. isbn: 978-1786603289 rrp: £32 <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.14> fiona hutton victoria university of wellington (new zealand) exploring nightlife is a fascinating and insightful volume exploring often overlooked issues related to the “night” and those who inhabit it. the concepts of nightlife, night time, and urban nightscapes are closely scrutinised by the diverse authors in this collection. nightlife for the purposes of this review is conceived as both the actual physical sites for the consumption of intoxicating substances and experiences, and as the location of such sites within city nightscapes. therefore, nightlife, as the authors in this book highlight, refers to more than physical venues. it is a more fluid concept that can also refer literally to life at night: how the urban landscape is transformed after dark, and how the city at night is consumed by its often-diverse populations. as the editors note in their introduction to the book, nightlife is not new, but the regeneration and gentrification of urban areas is a phenomenon that has taken on increased significance in the post-industrial era of neo-liberalism. such regeneration often has a relationship with nightlife, either by altering, sometimes radically, existing ebbs and flows of urban nightscapes or through the introduction and development of new nightlife areas and venues. the idea that this type of intervention and regeneration in inner city locations and other areas perceived as run down, risky and dangerous will “save” the area and its inhabitants while providing economic stimulation and profits is one that is critically interrogated in this volume. a variety of topics such as: harm reduction; power and resistance in city nightscapes throughout processes of gentrification and regeneration; resistance to regeneration as a form of social control; and the displacement of existing nightlife traditions, are explored by the authors in this volume providing a critical and nuanced discussion of some of the key themes related to nightlife and the city after dark. reviews https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.14 dancecult 13(1)144 a key theme running through many of the chapters in this volume is the success of regeneration and gentrification, and the typically dramatic effects these kinds of urban policies have on nightlife and those who inhabit(ed) urban nightscapes. several authors question these kinds of developments noting the displacement of important nightlife traditions to make way for allegedly new and improved ways of experiencing the spaces and places of the night. it is also notable that the capitalist model of economic revitalisation and profit is a key presence in schemes of regeneration and gentrification, in contexts that have previously had very different ways of approaching social life: for example, the socialist perspective of pre-war yugoslavia that viewed nightlife and leisure as important for human development, not as an escape from capitalist oppression of labour as noted by nihad cengic and jordi martin-diaz (54). the gentrification of nightlife after the bosnian war to accommodate new migrant groups as well as the emerging youthful middle classes, coupled with new kinds of state policies, radically altered the nightscapes of sarajevo, producing tensions between old and new residents of the city. as peta wolfison in chapter 2 notes class inequalities are often embedded in gentrification and regeneration developments, producing tensions between urban populations and antagonism towards city planners who have “ruined” previously thriving night time economies. similarly, in johhannesburg crystal oloukoi’s description, in chapter 1, of urban redevelopments and the symbolic violence wrought by gentrification paints a vivid picture of sanitised and surveilled spaces with previous inhabitants displaced to other parts of the city. a westernised view of nightlife is challenged by atepheh amid in chapter 5, through her discussion of the city of mashhad in iran. using religion as a lens to explore the redevelopment and gentrification of a particular part of mashhad that contains an important shrine, a different view of the night unfolds. a vibrant, thriving nightlife culture, built over centuries exists or existed in mashhad and the night was not associated with sin and immorality as it is in many western cultures. a 24-hour city was built around the arrival of pilgrims to visit the shrine at any time of the day or night, and places serving food or providing accommodation were bustling and numerous. the plan to redevelop this area to accommodate more pilgrims and visitors to the shrine is critiqued in this chapter with amid pointing to the negative impact on the local cultural and economic success of the area. the redevelopment has overwhelmed existing night time communities and failed to attract pilgrims to the new modernised area. similar to other chapters in this volume she points to the detrimental effects of gentrification on public night time spaces and the cultural diversity they engender. this volume therefore raises key questions around gentrification and regeneration such as who are they actually for and who do they benefit? although, more pertinent questions to ask may be who should they actually be for and who should they actually benefit? as noted in the example of amsterdam by irina van aalst and ilse van liempt in chapter 11. here “touristification” is viewed as problematic and as upsetting the balance between sex workers and residents in the red-light district of amsterdam. the redevelopment reviews 145 of this area of the city to reduce the visibility of sex work, to attract a more respectable class of tourist to the area, has had detrimental effects on the urban spaces/s and on the sex work industry. locals can no longer shop for essentials like bread in their newly developed upmarket environment, and sex work clients are scared away by the high level of tourism that makes clients of sex workers highly visible. here the impression is that urban development was outward facing in a global tourist context rather than inward facing for local residents and businesses, and raises the question of who should these kinds of regeneration and gentrification plans be aimed at? these are also issues raised by daniel malet calvo, joao carlos martins and inigo sanchez-fuarros in chapter 9 throughout their consideration of the “studentification” of lisbon through the presence of erasmus students. the commodification of the student experience has contributed to the segregation of urban nightlife between eramus and local students, while the gentrification of areas of the city offering commercialised student nightlife experiences continues the eviction and displacement of previous populations. it could be argued that areas with countercultural and resistance traditions are replaced with “controlled diversity” the phrase used by penny-panagiota koutrolikou in chapter 4 (79). however, perhaps encouragingly, calvo et al. also note that not all erasmus students flock to the commercialised experience with some preferring more diverse nightlife experiences. in chapter 4 penny-panagiota koutrolikou also notes issues of displacement of some populations through the gentrification process in her exploration of the nightlife developments in athens. the concept of “ghettos of the mind” is raised here in relation to fears about particular, often inner-city, neighbourhoods, exaggerated through media discourse and sensationalism. this chapter also raises questions about surveillance and control – are increased surveillance and control the price paid for gentrification and revitalisation of inner city and other run-down areas? new gentrified populations demand safety and reassurance through increased policing and control of undesirable pre-existing residents, as they experience newly developed residential and nightlife areas. as pertinently noted in this chapter, solutions to problems such as addiction and poverty are seen through repression and displacement, rather than through helping the populations that need it (77). resistance to regeneration and gentrification is also noted the brazilian context, in rio de jenerio by marcos paulo ferreria de gois, in chapter 13, with more intensive policing accompanying the revitalisation and redevelopment of urban areas, aiming to control unruly groups. the effect was to reduce the numbers of patrons visiting these newly developed areas at night, similar to the experiences in amsterdam, and “the heavy-handed actions, as a result, only worked as a stimulus for the creation of other night places, protected from the eyes of authority” (218). these kinds of observations bring to the fore the fluidity and flexibility of nightlife, and the perseverance of resistance in urban nightscapes. this perseverance of resistance is noted by some of the authors in this volume, notably samantha wilkinson in chapter 7 and jose sanchez-garcia in chapter 6. mahragan music is seen as resistance music, linked to working class male populations, and exists on the dancecult 13(1)146 margins of city nightscapes in cairo. mahragan enthusiasts are seen as misfits and the music as vulgar and uncivilised by those who want to present a westernised, cultured face to the global world. the endurance of mahragan music, its politics of resistance and challenge to dominant groups, signals that these hidden and underground spaces of the night time economy continue alongside the gentrification that often dramatically alters urban landscapes, echoed in the erasmus students who seek out “authentic” local experiences and resist more commercialised entertainment developments. the pleasures and harms related to alcohol and other drug intoxication are also explored in this edited collection. the choices of young people in two suburban areas in manchester, uk about where and how to consume alcohol may also be read as resistance to commercialised nightlife spaces from which they are excluded due to age, gender or class. young people in these under researched cultural contexts moved between spaces for alcohol consumption and a number of things played a part in their choices: others inhabiting the bars/pubs; the atmosphere; what kind of night out they wanted and so on. for those choosing to drink in outside spaces, such as parks, the freedom and excitement experienced were preferable to being in enclosed spaces. samantha wilkinson—in chapter 5—makes the important point that outdoor spaces were not necessarily used for drinking because young people had nowhere else to go – some groups of young people actively sought out and chose these kinds of places for alcohol consumption. her work also demonstrates that the nightscape is multi-faceted and complex with a number of different ways of engaging with suburban drinking environments, allowing a rejection of commercialised venues. marion roberts in her discussion in chapter 8 notes the gendered aspect of the night time economy with women struggling to find a (safe) space or place in this hyper masculine environment. intoxicated women face a number of issues, not least the accusation that they are inviting harms such as sexual violence by being intoxicated. often policies to make the night time playscape safer are gender neutral, ignoring the issues faced by women in particular, although roberts points to two promising initiatives based on improving mini-cab safety, and raising the profile of the unacceptability of sexual violence and harassment of women in nightlife venues. however, the challenge to undo deeply embedded notions of traditional masculinities and femininities in spaces of intoxication is fraught with tensions that “require concerted and explicit action to challenge” (143). the development and commercialisation of the leisure industry and night time spaces has led to the normalisation of the use of illicit drugs in some clubs and venues. the notion of pleasure, bound up with illicit intoxications, is explicitly engaged with by helena valente, christina vales pires and helena carvalho in chapter 12 in their exploration of harm reduction in the portuguese context. they focus on a peer based harm reduction organisation that offers advice to club and other party goers around alcohol and other drug use, and sometimes provides reagent testing of substances. the importance of engaging with discourses of pleasure is noted by the authors of this chapter, as well as the necessity reviews 147 of moving away from medicalised notions of harm reduction that are not necessarily appropriate for a mainly youthful population using drugs in a recreational manner. the success of this approach is demonstrated through interviews with users of the services, who note their behavioural change in terms of not mixing drugs, taking less of a substance or drinking less alcohol. reducing the harms related to the city nightscape and moving patrons successfully through their intoxication experiences is an important part of urban development that should not be forgotten or sidelined. it is clear from the chapters in this volume that the night is a complex phenomenon, entangled in a number of debates related to space and place as well as numerous social, cultural and historical contexts. the arguments presented by the authors in this edited collection raise important questions around gentrification and development of city nightscapes, not least who benefits or should benefit from these kinds of developments. sadly, it seems that often such developments sweep away existing thriving and diverse nightlife cultures displacing marginalised populations and moving them further to the outskirts of urban life. however, that resistance is still apparent speaks to the importance of diversity in shaping nightlife spaces and places, even if from the margins. this volume grapples with the thorny problems surrounding the development of nightlife, gentrification and regeneration in a global context, not least the complexities in developing nightscapes that are as risk free as possible, while maintaining diversity and respect for existing nightlife cultures – a highly recommended read. dancecult 13(1)148 dutch dance, 1988-2018: how the netherlands took the lead in electronic music culture mark van bergen (trans. andrew cartwright) amsterdam: mary go wild, 2018 320 pp. isbn: 9-789082-075854 rrp: €17.50 <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.15> sean nye university of southern california (us) in an iconic scene from the social network, young mark zuckerberg and napster-founder sean parker are sitting in a sleek dance club in san francisco. while discussing business, they are immersed in some hypnotic music bordering on progressive house or trance. the track is cassius’s “the sound of violence”, but as remixed by dennis de laat, a producer from the netherlands. moreover, de laat’s mix was released on a sublabel of spinnin’ records, one of the bestselling dance labels in the world—itself based in hilversum near amsterdam. that a dutch producer would soundtrack a key scene from a film concerned with big-tech entrepreneurship would come as no surprise to mark van bergen, the author of dutch dance, 1988-2018: how the netherlands took the lead in electronic music culture. the topic of this book is primarily the history and rise of dutch dance music both within holland and abroad. when exploring the lineups of major edm festivals over the last decade, the presence of global stars from the netherlands certainly stands out: tiësto, armin van buuren, martin garrix, afrojack, hardwell, chuckie, and nicky romero, to name a few. however, partly because of underground tendencies that avoid the commercial mainstream, edmc studies has scarcely touched on why and how these dutch stars came to have such prominence in dance pop. dutch dance is the first book in english to attempt a recounting of this history up through commercial success. the book is divided into four chapters, or “dance stages”, that explore the respective decades of this history, from the 1980s to the 2010s. a longtime journalist and lecturer on edm and the music industry, van bergen has assembled an impressive array of interviews and insider knowledge. dutch dance is also a long-time project, as this book is an expanded edition of an original 2013 publication that covered a 25-year history. van bergen’s publisher, mary go wild, is itself the publishing wing of a key dance store in amsterdam that was launched in 2013. mary go wild, as store and publishing house, resulted from a successful book launch of a volume of the same name. multiple books focusing on dutch dance have followed, the majority of which have not appeared in english (e.g. bergen 2013). https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.15 reviews 149 given this relative scarcity of english scholarly resources, questions of presenting and translating dutch dance history for an international audience are key. the volume’s strengths lie here in that it is primarily a scene history, with a wealth of details, although i will discuss some critical responses to the framing and analysis of this history. i recommend that readers focus on the insights into the music industry and the regional dance scenes discussed by van bergen. as an overarching history of four decades, the book explores key styles in dutch dance’s evolution. in the 1980s chapter, van bergen primarily explores the reception of disco, house, techno, and new beat in holland, emphasizing the foundations of dance music in queer and black american dance cultures. regarding the 1980s scene in holland, particular attention is given to pioneering djs such as eddy de clercq and joost van bellen at the amsterdam club roxy, as well as hillegonda rietveld’s experiences at the hacienda when house music exploded. van bergen promotes the notion of a dutch “autumn of love” as a response to the famed british “summer of love” in 1988. this idea resituates and complicates the uk focus in the development of rave culture, demonstrating a transnational evolution of rave across europe.1 in the 1990s chapter, van bergen shifts to a key period of transformation in dutch dance culture. he emphasizes the innovations of dutch gabber and hardcore, and the founding of the event organization id&t, which has had lasting marks on dutch dance to this day. importantly, van bergen does not forget holland’s key success at this time with respect to eurodance, exploring acts from twenty 4 seven to 2 unlimited, followed later by the vengaboys. such a focus demonstrates the long history of dance pop in holland beyond current edm stars. van bergen points out key features in 1990s rave, such as the links between gabber and soccer culture, as well as the full array of hardcore djs from paul elstak to gizmo. he further addresses the debates on the shift by paul elstak to happy hardcore, along with stars such as charlie lownoise and mental theo. still, critical limits to the national focus in this narrative emerge here. a number of transnational stories are left out. with respect to gabber, van bergen surprisingly only makes mention of inspirations from the belgian scene, with no discussion of the influences of marc acardipane and pcp records from frankfurt, as well as lenny dee and industrial strength in new york. in terms of techno and house, i would also have been interested in more discussion of the international networks of pioneering artists such as speedy j and miss djax. to be sure, there is a great deal to cover in this history, and van bergen lays important groundwork in addressing this decade. when he turns to the 2000s, important shifts are also highlighted. by the beginning of the 2000s, the massive influence of three dutch trance stars—tiësto, ferry corsten, and armin van buuren—could be observed, along with the refinement of gabber into the more accessible and popular genre of hardstyle. he also highlights the founding of another major events company, q-dance, in connection with hardstyle. important stories are recounted here in how various artist networks evolved: for example, ferry corsten’s production talents were combined with tiësto’s focus on djing. trance stars were also becoming dancecult 13(1)150 representative of a new transnational european identity, reflected in tiësto’s famous djset at the opening ceremonies of the 2004 summer olympics in greece. van bergen also reminds us of some major shifts in monetary and political organization that are sometimes not addressed in dance history—for example, the introduction of the euro in 2002, along with the continued expansion of the e.u. and the schengen area (172-73). these developments of trance and hardstyle then lead to the 2010s and the “fourth stage”, with the particular dutch stamp on edm pop with a new generation of stars such as martin garrix and hardwell, with major commercial success in the usa. indeed, this final chapter is properly called “vegas billboards”. van bergen emphasizes that “enormous billboards in hotspot cities like miami and las vegas display the faces of dutch djs” (234). i can attest to such billboards in hollywood, as well as on a visit to las vegas in 2013. images of tiësto, along with scottish star calvin harris, were displayed on the mgm grand casino in sizes equal to the announcements of david copperfield and cirque du soleil. however, despite the chapter’s title, i did not find many details on las vegas’s particular history, such as tiësto’s move to las vegas and his residency at club hakkasan at the mgm grand.2 still, in taking this review full circle back to the social network, van bergen at least discusses the rise and expansion of the aforementioned spinnin’ records as a global label and brand (249-256). beyond these detailed scene histories, however, the results in dutch dance when it comes to a critical analysis of the music industry and dance culture are decidedly mixed. the tone of the writing tends too much toward pop rhetoric. for example, van bergen states with casual positivity that dutch dance’s brand “has gone from strength to strength” (10). the constant mix of historical narration and interview quotations, some of which read like pr statements, does not provide enough variation in analysis. a troubling feature for scholars, there are also no footnotes or page number citations, so it can be difficult to locate van bergen’s sources (though a bibliography and an index are included). furthermore, there are repeated attempts to compare holland in the age of edm to the dutch golden age, which borders too much on clichés rather than a close analysis of dutch politics, culture, and economics since the 1970s. van bergen primarily positions the netherlands as a place of neoliberal entrepreneurship, with music little different from any other import cargo, which can be refined and sold around the globe (272–273). little critique regarding this is offered, although dutch edm stars have come under heightened scrutiny regarding cultural appropriation and the excesses of commercialization – more recently by house legend marshall jefferson.3 quite a number of underground dutch artists are left out of the picture in this later edm-star focus, though again, edmc scholarship has also not done enough to address the pop mainstream. how this history is framed and critiqued within the context of dance music and the current crisis in the festival economy will be ever more important. van bergen does, however, provide a detailed history across four decades, which demonstrates that major stars such as tiësto certainly did not emerge out of thin air. more research on dutch dance history and festival culture is needed, which hopefully reviews 151 will include translations of more recent memoires published by mary go wild and related organizations. notes 1 for a comparable discussion, see gert van veen’s “amsterdam’s autumn of love” in resident advisor: https://ra.co/features/1945 2 see the report in rolling stone in 2013: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/ tiesto-commits-to-long-term-residency-in-las-vegas-48833/ 3 see marshall jefferson, “why i quit djing”, in mixmag, 28 october, 2020. https://mixmag. net/feature/marshall-jefferson-why-i-quit-djing. reference van bergen, mark. 2013. dutch dance: 25 jaar dance in nederland. amsterdam: xander uitgevers. https://ra.co/features/1945 https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/tiesto-commits-to-long-term-residency-in-las-vegas-48833/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/tiesto-commits-to-long-term-residency-in-las-vegas-48833/ https://mixmag.net/feature/marshall-jefferson-why-i-quit-djing https://mixmag.net/feature/marshall-jefferson-why-i-quit-djing dancecult 13(1)152 the new age of electronic dance music and club culture anita jóri, martin lücke (editors) cham: springer, 2020 226 pp. isbn: 978-3-030-39001-3 (hb), 978-3-030-39004-4 (pb), 978-3-030-39002-0 (ebook) rrp: €103.99 (hb), €62.39 (pb), €85.59 (ebook) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.16> tom smith university of st andrews (united kingdom) in the time since the new age of electronic dance music and club culture was written, everything has changed for berlin’s nightlife and the world’s clubbing landscape. yet the ideas articulated in this edited volume still stand up to, and illuminate, the changes to clubbing brought by the pandemic and point to important considerations as clubs begin to contemplate emerging from shutdowns. anita jóri and martin lücke’s volume emerged from a conference in june 2017 held at berghain in berlin, which brought together academics with industry professionals. the breadth of discussions in this volume is a testament to the extraordinary cross-disciplinary work being undertaken to enhance and challenge our understandings both of berlin as a clubbing metropole and the wider electronic music industry. the project is inspired, in jóri and lücke’s words, by the belief that “scholars and practitioners should work more closely with each other in order to create a common language amongst them, thereby aligning research and practical fields” (2). the range of different written styles, personal reflections and academic insights is one of the strengths of the book, as are the many chapters that demonstrate the potential for analysing unconventional sources of knowledge on dance music to improve our understanding of the face-to-face and virtual networks around electronic music. contributors analyse online communities (youtube and facebook), work by activist collectives, bookshop bestseller lists and even techno music created live without recorded sound. this powerful case for drawing on different kinds of expertise shows how work on electronic music can contribute a great deal to similar trends across humanities scholarship today. the volume’s introduction describes the background to the conference and outlines the content of the articles. it avoids broader statements about the book’s contribution to existing scholarship, which rather undersells the important insights its authors and editors bring to the field both individually and collectively. some of the volume’s authors, too, could signal more clearly the potential reach of their ideas and methodologies and their significance for wider scholarly debates. this leaves readers to draw connections and trends between articles ourselves, but in some ways this approach is welcome, given that the authors and editors could not have foreseen the changes to the club industry so soon after the essays went to press. https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.16 reviews 153 one such connection is the closure or repurposing of clubs as physical spaces and the increase in virtual clubbing and musical communities. botond vitos’s proposed project on how music fans might use audio media to recreate club experiences in their personal spheres, for example, will have gained in salience over the course of the pandemic. jóri’s own contribution on facebook groups for collectors of the roland tb-303 bass line explores computer-mediated discourse analysis methods that will be of interest for scholars now researching the online club communities that have flourished during the pandemic, such as club quarantine, united we stream and keep hush. some reflection on the conference’s own setting at berghain would be interesting in this respect, given that the club’s physical space has been given over to art exhibitions since march 2020, with other berlin clubs like the kitkatclub even operating as test centres during the pandemic. the concern around gentrification and closures in berlin—a live issue since the earliest years of the twenty-first century—also takes on new urgency in 2021. of particular interest here are lukas drevenstedt’s piece on changes and gentrification in berlin and kata katz’s article about the closure of echo books. drevenstedt and katz both show that clubs and electronic music depend on a complex and “sensitive ecosystem” and call for recognition of the components that make up these musical worlds (10). further investigation is needed into musicians’ and nightclub proprietors’ creativity in the face of extreme, often prohibitive pressures caused by berlin’s rapid gentrification. these insights have acquired new international significance since the pandemic, with scholarship of this sort having an important role to play as clubs continue to respond to the hardships of 2020 and 2021. the volume’s focus on berlin is interesting and justified: the city plays such an important role in the world’s electronic music scenes, both as a symbolic centre and in terms of the opportunities it offers to djs, producers, club promoters and clubbers. the best contributions are those that “provincialise” berlin – to use dipesh chakrabarty’s term – not just as a place but an idea that means different things and is mobilised in different ways depending on context, both within and outside the city (2000: 3–6). such articles locate berlin scenes in their specific environment and resist the urge to extrapolate to other contexts, which can be tempting given berlin’s symbolic weight in electronic music culture. benedikt brilmayer’s history of electronic musical instruments, for example, situates important developments in berlin alongside significant innovations that came to berlin more belatedly. this work is a reminder that the city’s symbolic importance for clubbers is a relatively new development, historically speaking, but that it has nonetheless been a centre for musical developments over many years. ewa mazierska’s article analyses the symbolic, economic and stylistic importance of berlin for “musickers” (a neologism by christopher small encompassing musicians, other industry professionals, clubbers and fans (1998)) in vienna and cities in the west of poland. these local scenes demonstrate how berlin’s prestige in other european contexts is shifting and contingent. in fact, a strength of the volume is its differentiated focus specifically on austrian electronic music (bianca ludewig, mazierska, josef schaubruch), a context often overlooked in studies of club culture. dancecult 13(1)154 the volume is most clearly aligned with current scholarship on electronic music where it turns its attention to diversity and social justice in club scenes. ludewig’s article serves as a good introduction to this topic in berlin and austria, ranging widely from her feminist collective work with female:pressure and meetup berlin, through discussions of racism and whiteness in the telling of techno history in germany. patrick valiquet addresses the industry’s gendered assumptions and hierarchies—both implicit and explicit—in his analysis of darsha hewitt’s youtube pedagogy. katz asks just how radical the crowds are at berlin’s many protest parties, a question that has gained relevance given some of the berlin scene’s responses to 2020’s black lives matter protests (kirn 2020). reflecting on these articles, i found myself asking similar questions of material from elsewhere in the volume: jóri’s examples suggesting further possible conclusions about how masculinity works in online communities around electronic music, and lücke raising the question of how quantitative surveys might contribute insights around gender, race and class to understanding the social component of club scenes. it would be interesting to reflect on how the articles in this volume fit alongside work on other genres of electronic music in germany and austria. i think, for example, of research on hip-hop in the german context (e.g. el-tayeb 2003; weheliye 2009; saied 2012), on germany’s reggae and dancehall scenes (aikins 2005; pfleiderer 2018) or on eurodance (thom 2016), which allow a more expansive definition of ‘electronic dance music cultures’. the new age of electronic dance music and club culture will be welcomed by students and scholars in many disciplines working on berlin, austria, electronic music and popular music, social media, and many topics besides. individual articles will no doubt find a home on course reading lists: ludewig’s already features on my own course on german popular music and articles like lücke’s and brilmayer’s function as potentially useful reference works for statistics and historical information around electronic music in berlin. the book is meticulously referenced, and its bibliographies provide a wealth of further reading. taken as a whole, the volume provides insights into many of the ongoing questions guiding current scholarly debates, and even as those debates shift in response to the pandemic, these essays suggest where our future enquiries might go. references aikins, joshua kwesi. 2005. “wer mit feuer spielt . . . aneignung und widerstand – schwarze musik/kulturen in deutschlands weißem mainstream”. in mythen, masken und subjekte: kritische weißseinsforschung in deutschland, ed. maureen maisha eggers, grada kilomba, peggy piesche and susan arndt, 283–300. berlin: unrast. chakrabarty, dipesh. 2000. provincializing europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference. princeton, nj: princeton university press. reviews 155 el-tayeb, fatima. 2003. “‘if you can’t pronounce my name, you can just call me pride’: afrogerman activism, gender and hip hop”. gender and history 15(3): 460–86. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0953-5233.2003.00316.x>. kirn, peter. 2020. “no love parades this time: in the midst of crisis, an image of tonedeaf ravers in berlin”, cdm, 1 june. <https://cdm.link/2020/06/crisis-and-racism-in-berlin/>, (accessed 18 june 2021). pfleiderer, martin. 2018. “soul rebels and dubby conquerers: reggae and dancehall music in germany in the 1990s and early 2000s”. popular music 37(1): 81–99. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143017000587>. saied, ayla güler. 2012. rap in deutschland: musik als interaktionsmedium zwischen partykultur und urbanen anerkennungskämpfen. bielefeld: transcript. small, christopher. 1998. musicking: the meanings of performing and listening. middletown, ct: wesleyan university press. thom, nico. 2016. “the popularization of electronic dance music: german artists/producers and the eurodance phenomenon”. in perspectives on german popular music, ed. michael ahlers and christoph jacke, 111–5. new york: routledge. weheliye, alexander. 2009. “my volk to come: peoplehood in recent diaspora discourse and afro-german popular music”. in black europe and the african diaspora, ed. darlene clark hine, trica danielle keaton, and stephen small, 161–79. chicago: university of illinois press. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0953-5233.2003.00316.x https://cdm.link/2020/06/crisis-and-racism-in-berlin/ https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143017000587 dancecult 13(1)156 join the future: bleep techno and the birth of british bass music matt anniss london: velocity press, 2019 300 pp. isbn: 978-1-9132-3100-2 rrp: £14.99 <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.17> ian trowell independent scholar matt anniss’ book on the bleep scene feels like an extension or output of warp records, exuding the purple colour scheme that distinguished the sheffield label from its outset. it takes its title from the early (and somewhat overlooked) record release from tuff little unit and employs the sans serif font and simple design of tight blocky design with italicised elements seen on early releases such as the lfo album frequencies. the label, established in 1989 as both a continuum and fresh direction of previous initiatives such as fon (a studio, a label and a shop), initially became the imprimatur of the bleep sound. anniss grew up through this scene and clearly holds on to its importance. his book draws heavily on his recent journalism work for the red bull music academy where he has been documenting the early experiments and activists in this yorkshire scene. he writes in an impassioned and detailed style, the narrative constantly driven by both the author’s own feelings for the scene and a need to establish himself as an original participant in it. at times it feels as if the book is written for a cohort of believers who keep the faith, like an updated occurrence of the northern soul mythology. there is an important rationale to the book, as anniss argues for re-assessing the historical understanding of this scene within the wider complex chronology of dance music. he has a point here, and he sets out to demolish myths, redress historical versions, timeframes and figures, and re-situate the northern origins of bleep. this intent is signalled early on, where anniss sets out the official version of “british dance music finding a distinctive voice” (6) with a when (1991) and a where (london). the originators and perpetrators of this version of history are not initially called out, though simon reynolds’ go-to work on dance music energy flash is clearly the main culprit. reynolds’ book, dense and magisterial, covers bleep and the sheffield scene in an eight-page section within the chapter “second wave of rave 1990-1992” (reynolds 1998: 97-104). anniss ultimately calls out reynolds, whilst acknowledging his pioneering work, towards the end of the book where reynolds is accused of mixing cause and effect, downplaying the north and overplaying the south (238). this version of events set out by reynolds—his hardcore continuum within a wider lineage of dance music linking detroit, chicago, new york and the uk—proliferates as an authoritative discourse, in some way a testament to reynolds’ powerful writing. anniss does not list the numerous sources that peddle this accepted version of events, but examples https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.17 reviews 157 are plentiful. for a typical (recent) case, richard king’s the lark ascending sees uk rave culture having the simplistic lineage of ibiza clubbers pioneering the balearic scene and moving on to set up the london club shoom (king 2019: 267). end of story. anniss conducts his careful counter-history, exploring what michel foucault considers as the important rupture points, unearthing an “archaeology of a silence” (macey 2019: 95). this is both a noisy silence of dance music at full volume, and a silent noisiness as the sub-bass that defines the bleep scene is often felt through the vibrations that engulf the body and surrounding environment of the nightclub. there is a constant trope throughout all of anniss’ interviews regarding the severity of the bass sound; stories of household hifi speakers unable to detect the sound, of studio engineers saying it’s more than my job’s worth to cut the record, of club spaces and glass fittings dangerously vibrating as the white labels are played out for the first time. the bass horror script of blown out equipment and speakers, akin to star trek’s scotty engine-room scenario, is an apocryphal story that crops up in many testimonies of dance music. the book is structured in four parts named after classic bleep records, riffing on (or more appropriately, sampling from) the warp catalogue. the first part, covered in four chapters, is most interesting for me, and anniss works hard to craft a different history to the bleep sound, establishing his counter-narrative to rave mythology. he covers the cultural, social, political and topographical background of the places and spaces that gave rise to this sound, settling on three pivotal ideas. firstly, the north of england in the second and third terms of thatcher’s government, depicted as a kind of war mentality with left wing councils such as sheffield offering youth opportunities in arts. secondly, anniss carves out an interstitial place in the subcultural slew of the early 1980s, a post-northern soul fandom that was previously hindered by racist attitudes. new protagonists repopulate the husk of the scene in the early 1980s to hold jazz-funk all-dayers, dance competitions, the nurturing of dance crews. this quickly leads to an embrace of the nascent electro and break-dancing scene around 1983, with venues such as nottingham’s rock city and its saturday afternoon sessions offering an important beacon. thirdly, anniss documents the important role of sound system culture, the lovers rock and dub genres, and the illicit and distinctive blues club scene. anniss identifies a convergence of these trends, giving rise to clubs such as jive turkey in sheffield. further influences are added such as the championing of house music around 1986 and the influx of a small cohort of fashion obsessed northern hooligans or grafters noted for stealing and dealing designer goods. some of these peripheral characters are clustered on an ibiza scene, but two years before it became famed for the balaeric sound. anniss touches upon the importance of fashion without significant detailing – there is mention of jive turkey being very dressy and, from experience, i’d say this was something of an understatement! the second part of the book documents the key activists, chapter by chapter. manchester’s gerald simpson (a guy called gerald) takes the chronological priority with his 1988 track voodoo ray proving a club hit and eventually breaking into the mainstream charts. anniss suggests that this provokes a response from sheffield, who admired the record, dancecult 13(1)158 giving birth to bleep. this movement is carefully tracked through bradford’s unique 3 who release theme in late 1988, leeds based nightmares on wax who debut in 1989, their city colleagues lfo from 1990, and importantly sheffield’s forgemasters who provide warp’s inaugural release track with no name. part three of the book documents the spreading out of the scene, starting close to home with the relatively overlooked sheffield label ozone, and then radiating out to midlands based network, luton’s chill, the wider bleep and breaks movement, and finally an overseas perspective. part four is anniss’ take on the decline and legacy of the scene, taking the castle morton 1992 rave as a watershed (the moment where king commences his writing). anniss suggests a split into darkcore/jungle and happy hardcore/rave, such that bleep and bass has an increasingly vestigial presence. there are some insurmountable problems. the elephant in the room concerns warp’s disputed origins and divergent versions of an acrimonious break up, hindered by co-founder steve beckett’s declining to be interviewed. whereas beckett contributes to both reynolds’ overarching work, and rob young’s labels unlimited focus on warp, anniss powers on and is driven by his enduring closeness to the scene, sharing spliffs with the protagonists as they recall hazy nights in bedroom studios and dub-plate mayhem. anniss doesn’t proffer any academic or subcultural theory, though his historical approach of testimony and anecdote glimpses oversights and omissions. there is little contemporaneous source material apart from a single i-d report on the northern bleep scene. further, in 1990 a clutch of warp releases made significant inroads into the mainstream charts, jockeying with early 1990s dance-era novelty records such as mc hammer, partners in kryme’s turtle power, fab and mc parker’s thunderbirds tribute and timmy mallett’s glib sampling of early house records. both tricky disco and lfo climbed the charts, sharing similar videos of cut-up scenes from early cinematography and eadweard muybridge stop-motion photography. none of this recalled or analysed by anniss. the pace is urgent, intense and breathless, with dot-to-dot detail of dance spaces, club names, tracks and dance moves. anniss takes an occasional moment to stop and sample the air, such as on snake pass between manchester and sheffield (64) or at park hill flats for a brutalist memoir to accompany the concluding paragraphs. anniss forgoes an index for a pure chronographical time-line that carries the book through, mimicking the urgency of a dub-plate record – a desire to get the thing out there as soon as it is produced. references king, richard. 2019. the lark ascending: the music of the british landscape. london: faber & faber. macey, david. 2019. the lives of michel foucault. london: verso. reynolds, simon. 1998. energy flash: a journey through rave music and dance culture. london: picador. plague raver reflections: what happened in the pandemic stays in the pandemic richard anderson university of liverpool (united kingdom) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.09> introduction the onset of the covid-19 pandemic in march 2020 led to sixteen months of closure for uk clubs and dance music event venues. during this time my research into underground dance music scenes was forced to follow the field online. one aspect of this realignment examined the discourses emerging within dance music focused social media groups. prominent among the narratives emerging in response to media reportage was debate focused on the phenomena of plague raves. looking back now, just over a year since covid-19 restrictions/protections were lifted in the uk, lockdowns seem like a long time ago, perhaps even a world away. opinions and actions that until only recently were deemed so important have seemingly evaporated. what follows are reflections on contemporaneous responses to select dj behaviour during the pandemic and musings on whether these have any lasting relevance. plague raves as a term was probably born from uk tabloid newspaper headlines expressing outrage over prohibited unlicensed dance events held during the latter stages of the uk’s first national lockdown. moral panic over illegal raves was rebooted into the national psyche. however, within dance music scene rhetoric and its associated specialist media there emerged a distinction between unlicensed parties held in locked down countries—illegal raves; and legal club events taking place in countries with limited/no pandemic controls which were termed plague raves. initially the publicity around such activities focused on high profile djs invited to entertain wealthy patrons in mediterranean retreats, in purpose-built party rooms, or for billionaires in the middle east on their private yachts (williams 2020). as the pandemic’s duration extended, control measures between countries varied enormously and consequently the extent to which dance music events were curtailed was highly inconsistent. western european promoters eyed opportunities in nations with fewer covid-19 cases/restrictions and initiated a steady migration of dance music personnel and capital from countries where parties were prohibited into the global south. name djs could tour as porous border restrictions facilitated what were considered legitimate business reasons to travel. florida and dubai were the initial destinations, but these extended to bogota, columbia and tulum in mexico both of whom experienced verified club superspreader infections (business teshno 2020). amnesia, an ibiza based party organiser invited european djs to fly in and entertain predominately wealthy white patrons at beach parties in zanzibar since “no cases” were reported in the country courtesy of tanzania’s covid-19 denying president, who subsequently was suspected of dying due to the disease. social media blackout whilst plague raves were legal in their host countries, the djs playing at these events were conspicuously coy in documenting their participation. appearances in these countries did not feature on their social media timelines, except perhaps holiday snaps on a beach. the events themselves were not advertised on listings sites such as resident advisor (gillet 2020). the berlin born mantra of no phones so as to be in the moment, underwent a transference into a rider for djs not wishing to be identified in their locked down home countries as having played at these parties. online criticisms of such dj behaviour suggested they were taking advantage of other country’s less strict covid-19 rules. if you’re throwing, playing, or attending “secret” parties right now, and asking people not to take photos and videos, it’s because on some level you know what you’re doing is wrong, and that you’ll be judged poorly by your peers and community for it (plagueravers 2021a). there were djs who spoke out and directly condemned plague rave djs such as the uk’s dave clarke, bicep and bushwaka. dedicated social media accounts such as business teshno and plague ravers were set up to comment on and expose such practices and their direct correlation to rising covid-19 cases in the aftermath of such parties (business teshno 2020; plagueravers 2021b). some djs who had not played at plague raves suggested boycotting future events featuring djs who had: all artists that stayed home following life saving measures (the vast majority) should consider refusing to perform with colleagues who preferred boosting their ego by touring during a pandemic, making all of us look like pieces of shit in the process. (darko esser 2021). social media fallout(s) such commentary initiated numerous discussions and reactions within dance music communities’ social media posts. internet spaces were significantly amplified as sites of virtual gathering for dance music audiences in the uk and other western european countries who experienced over a year of curtailment of dancing activities. in my tracing of dance scenes’ online dialogues, i conducted an online survey [n=194, f=47.6%, m=53.7%] which revealed that facebook remained the predominant method of discovery about events for 70% of participants, even amongst younger respondents and despite the rise of instagram. over half reported using facebook groups. these function as nurturing places in which members garner a sense of support and community. they are also a well-suited medium for debate, so from june 2020 i scraped selected conversations across a range of uk-based dance music dedicated facebook groups, applying manual data anonymisation before undertaking conversational and discourse analysis of the threads and comments. this data was supplemented with reflections from survey respondents and in depth semi-structured interviews with dancers and local scene infrastructure practitioners [n=29], to examine how scenes responded to the idea of plague rave djs and what resonance this may have, if any, within dance music cultures after the pandemic’s long moment.[1] reactions to illegal raves generally deemed these irresponsible, despite most sympathising with participant’s desire to dance again. however, plague raves elicited much more divided discussions. the idea of any post-pandemic shunning of plague rave djs was met with mixed and heated responses. whilst some commenters suggested there should be accountability for such djs’ actions, many expressed a distaste for any form of blacklisting, likening this to cancel culture. others declared the whole debate as simply “moaning” and that such concerns should be left behind—“it's over”. the findings point to a fractured response. one interpretation is that by this stage in the lockdowns the longing to dance and reexperience its sociality after a protracted denial negated the relevance or importance of plague raves for many uk/euro clubbers. preoccupied with their own restricted situations, the events in tulum, mexico seemed very far away. debates were often polarised but most who commented tended towards continuing their support for djs regardless. a certain reverence for favourite djs and their right to “make a legal buck” prevailed: “a few of the djs i cherish the most performed at these events but that’s not going to stop me paying to attend their gigs in future. no way!” (facebook respondent 1 2021).[2] for some local djs there was a certain reticence to criticise others too much. this anonymous dj expresses a civil, sympathetic response, recognising the grey area around finance and risk taking choices, “it was a lot of the bigger djs and we don't know what sort of massive mortgages… massive teams they have to pay” (2020).[3] in contrast, a female dj observed that name djs perhaps didn’t face serious financial threats given the high fees they’d charged prior to the pandemic, whilst also expressing an awareness of the local public health situation in mexico, these people will still get booked even if they didn't do those gigs. it was quite unfair that the rest of us were all waiting at home and doing the right thing. in places like tulum the local people were really suffering (2021).[4] she went on to equate plague rave djing as an example of a wider pattern of behaviours reflective of amorality amongst mostly male djs: the more money and fame you have, the more responsibility you have, because you have more influence on people. the people who were doing it, it wasn't a surprise. the guys mourning erick morillo…. it was immoral (2021).[5] a local dj with an existing international profile similarly rejected the idea: for so many reasons i wouldn't have wanted to do it. it was morally wrong. it wouldn't be worth the backlash for a few grand. i said to my management and agent, let's not even entertain it… and nipped it in the bud before the offers came in.[6] as social commentator nina power suggested, the pandemic had forced people in their isolated spaces to confront and, “balance the relationship between their individual desires, their concern for people they know, concern for people they don’t, their general appreciation of risk and the laws, rules and guidelines” (power 2020). the mood of ambivalence towards the health risks plague rave djs took that could affect themselves individually, party attendees or the wider, generally poorer communities in these global south locations, prompted a search for theoretical basis that could underpin an understanding of the motivations behind such behaviours. feel the need in me that humans have innate and motivational needs is a very prevalent and popular scientific idea. many people are familiar with maslow’s idea on hierarchy of needs (1954). whilst maslow was critiqued for lacking academically robust methods, a recent large-scale global study on motivational theory by tay and diener largely vindicates maslow’s hypothesis that “once basic safety needs (such as health) are met, individuals seek out fulfilment of ‘higher’ or psychosocial needs” (2011: 361). dancing, in collective, mutually supportive environments can be considered as constituting one means to fulfil subjective well-being and psychosocial needs within the “social support and love” and “feeling respected” categorisations outlined by tay and diener (2011: 361). this reflects earlier works on dance as an affective life enriching force (malbon 1999; pini 2001; garcia 2020). the global pandemic however, was a novel disruptive force to the stability of basic safety needs. in the global north, where collective provision of health services to all in society is perceived as a “public good” (hodgson 2013; sekera 2014), this sense of security was shattered. as covid-19’s risk to health became paramount, it was evident this risk was not equally shared. seemingly non-threatened (younger) individuals could consider themselves as facing a low risk. this distinction complicated the protection of health as a public good. western european countries, dominated by neoliberal ideologies, emphasised individualised risk responses, rather than a reflexive empathetic solidarity which would require negotiation and perseverance (bauman 1998; giddens 1999). were dj needs prioritised due to supposed minimal individuated risk, at the expense of the public good? feel the (psychosocial) need in me it could be argued that djs from affluent european countries were seeking out fulfilment of their own higher psychosocial needs of feeling esteem and a sense of personal recognition. for one anonymous belgian dj, who travelled to play in tulum in mexico, such motivation appeared a key consideration, “djing is my life, my passion; i’m not made to play for a camera, i longed for a real human connection” (lion 2021). individual dj posts on instagram tended to reflect this lacking, expressing how much they’d missed seeing people enjoy themselves. prominent swiss-chilean selector luciano didn’t shy away from the fact he played at parties in zanzibar, posing pensively by his hotel’s pool with the accompanying text reading, “thinking about next time we will all hug” (luciano 2021). evidently a message for his global north facebook audience, unable to meet socially, never mind swim in a pool in a tropical paradise. financial needs were not far from the surface of plague rave djs’ concerns. for the anonymous belgian dj, “it’s like i'm on my own. i don't receive any benefits, money was running out fast, the offers kept coming, and i wouldn't be doing anything illegal” (lion 2021). this isn’t mentioned to negate this, and many other djs’, often precarious financial situations. their economic problems were likely very real. this particular dj took the risk and was in fact infected whilst playing in tulum, becoming seriously ill, no doubt alongside many others. established name djs however hold significant economically privileged positions. some command per show fees said to be in the region of £25k. their pre-pandemic fame enabled them to travel and bypass not only covid-19 prevention controls but their own lack of patience in waiting for the european club circuit to reopen. there was an overall sense that the pandemic was a very different experience for the rich and famous. arguably maintaining the status of being rich and famous was perhaps the driving motivational psychosocial need for plague rave djs, alongside an economic compulsion to maintain currency through exposure. sociopaths in headphones (matthew 2021) the predominant acceptance of plague rave djs behaviours evidenced in the above analysis of social media posts and comments is reflective of a dance music media culture in which journalists foster an adoration of djs. this can be seen represented in manchester super-promoter the warehouse project’s feature on the dj waff, describing them as, “a dj and producer who, while embedded within the ibizan club culture, brings a more underground and eclectic offering to the hedonistic home of the super club” (2016). rhetoric which randomly name-drops the term ‘underground’ to confer authenticity is rarely disputed. waff however exemplifies djs whose performative actions as being underground are entirely at odds with their earning disproportionately mainstream, even elite salaries. during the pandemic waff distinguished himself as a dj who both organised and played at an illegal warehouse rave in london and played at plague raves in tulum, bogota and phuket (business teshno 2021). he never stopped. yet when djing at parklife festival in the uk two months after club events reopened he wrote afterwards, “it’s so nice to see so many people back on the dance floor” (waffdj 2021b). this of course wasn’t something he himself had missed out on at all over the last 16 months. this extract from his pandemic experiences best exemplifies this: by far one of the best experiences i’ve ever had, not only did we get one of the biggest private jets in the world to fly us to colombia, we had a full on party in pyjamas 39,000 ft in the sky, and it was the best time (waffdj 2021a). performative rhetoric clubs have now reopened and many take comfort in a sense that ‘what happened in the pandemic stays in the pandemic’ as communities attempt to put distance between now and the pandemic’s stark moment in our lifetime. dance music events are happening but have not sprung back to a 2019 normality. economic precarity and uncertainty has been exacerbated. issues around safety at dance music events prevail, particularly for women. white males continue to dominate line ups at the expense of female and black djs. whilst touring djs continue to accrue a massive amount of air miles in the midst of a climate crisis (mclaughlin, fineberg and macwilliams 2021). dance music scenes continue to be confronted with fundamentally ethical issues. in the face of the covid-19 pandemic, the behaviour of select djs, for a time, polarised dance music scenes. for some, the issue added to a weariness of saturated moralism amidst a drawn-out continuum of curtailed freedoms. for others, the few plague rave djs were found wanting ethically, chasing dollars whilst engaged in performative rhetoric. author biography richard anderson is a university of liverpool phd candidate and ma graduate. his dissertation focused on aspiring musicians’ use of internet platforms for career development. his phd investigates underground dance music scenes in the face of the threats of gentrification and covid-19. https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/institute-of-popular-music/people/research-students/richard-anderson/ references bauman, zygmunt. 1998. life in fragments: essays in postmodern morality. oxford: blackwell. business teshno. “plague raves: what were they thinking”. medium. 16 november 2020. <https://businessteshno.medium.com/plague-raves-what-where-they-thinking-124d1cf4473a>, (accessed 5 may 2021). business teshno. “waff may 4th 2021”. 6 may 2021. facebook. <https://www.facebook.com/businessteshno/posts/255079269635818>, (accessed 5 may 2021). esser darko (darkoesser). “something to chew on”. 23 february 2021. tweet. <https://twitter.com/darkoesser/status/1364126094518059009>, (accessed 5 may 2021). dj mag staff. 2020. “erick morillo dies, aged 49”. dj mag. 1 september <https://djmag.com/news/erick-morillo-dies-aged-49>, (accessed 1 october 2021). franzke, aline. anja bechmann, michael zimmer, charles ess, and the association of internet researchers. 2020. “internet research: ethical guidelines 3.0”. association of internet researchers. <https://aoir.org/reports/ethics3.pdf>, (accessed: 17 february 2021). garcia, luis-manuel. 2020. “feeling the vibe: sound, vibration, and affective attunement in electronic dance music scenes”. ethnomusicology forum 29(1): 21-39. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2020.1733434>. giddens, anthony. 1999. “risk and responsibility”. the modern law review 62(1): 1-10. <https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.00188>. gillet, ed. 2020. “plague raves: is clubbing in a pandemic ever ethical?”. dj mag. 9 september. <https://djmag.com/longreads/plague-raves-clubbing-pandemic-ever-ethical>, (accessed 24 october 2020). hodgson, geoffrey m. 2013. from pleasure machines to moral communities: an evolutionary economics without homo economicus. chicago: university of chicago press. lion, jonas. 2021. “belgian djs touring abroad during the pandemic: both sides of the argument”. red bull elektropedia <https://web.archive.org/web/20210426170111/https://redbullelektropedia.be/article/belgian-djs-touring-abroad-during-the-pandemic-both-sides-of-the-argument/>, (accessed 07/09/2022). luciano. “thinking about next time we will all hug”. 21 february 2021. facebook. <https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=273435737475083&set=a.2354232979429>, (accessed 11 september 2021). malbon, ben. 1999. clubbing: dancing, ecstasy and vitality. london and new york: routledge. maslow, a.h. 1954. motivation and personality. new york: harper. matthew, terry. 2021. “‘sociopaths in headphones’: what happened when plague raves came to zanzibar”. 5mag. 11 june. <https://5mag.net/features/plague-raves-zanzibar/>, (accessed 1 september 2021). mclaughlin, eilidh, eva fineberg, and fallon macwilliams. 2021. “last night a dj took a flight”. cleanscene.club. <https://cleanscene.club/report.pdf>, (accessed 5 september 2022). pini, maria. 2001. club cultures and female subjectivity: the move from home to house. basingstoke: palgrave. plagueravers. 2021a. “it's called accountability sweetie”. 12 january 2021. instagram. <https://www.instagram.com/p/ckvdj5cg_kg07molzvqsansxjoxslqt3h4nq5i0>. (accessed 1 september 2022). plagueravers. 2021b. “we don’t really even know what to say anymore…”. 26 april 2021. instagram. <https://www.instagram.com/p/coixkekhmzk/>, (accessed 1 september 2022). power, nina. “the politics of care: rethinking collective being in the wake of covid-19”. nina power. october 26 2020. <https://ninapower.net/2020/10/26/the-politics-of-care-rethinking-collective-being-in-the-wake-of-covid-19/>, (accessed 11 november 2020). sekera, june. “re-thinking the definition of ‘public goods’”. real-world economics review. july 9 2014. <https://rwer.wordpress.com/2014/07/09/re-thinking-the-definition-of-public-goods/>, (accessed 22 june 2021). tay, louise, and ed diener. 2011. “needs and subjective well-being around the world”. journal of personality and social psychology 101(2): 354-65. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0023779>. the warehouse project. 2016. “whp feature 009 waff”. <https://www.thewarehouseproject.com/feature/waff>, (accessed 22 june 2021). waffdj. 2021a. “one of the best experiences of my life”. 9 april 2021. instagram. <https://www.instagram.com/p/cnc3eiphwsq/>, (accessed 26 august 2022). waffdj. 2021b. “wow…. what an amazing weekend that was”. 13 september 2021. instagram. <https://www.instagram.com/p/ctxnt6sifoi/>, (accessed 13 september 2021). williams, ollie. 2020. “how the rich partied during coronavirus lockdown”. forbes 20 september. <https://www.forbes.com/sites/oliverwilliams1/2020/09/20/how-the-rich-partied-during-coronavirus-lockdown/>, (accessed 12 december 2020). notes [1] use of social media datasets raised several novel ethics concerns, particular issues relating to data ownership, privacy, and anonymity. as described in the association of internet researchers' internet research: ethical guidelines 3.0 informed consent for “big data” projects in which many thousands of users are potentially involved is not feasible (franzke et al 2020). consequently, my research has taken an approach to pseudonymise using key matching, and deletion of usernames and other highly identifiable information from the dataset when storing and processing. this includes postdates and facebook groups names. in cases where the content of individual comments is referenced directly, phrases have been paraphrased, rather than being quoted directly to avoid the feasibility of reverse searching which could identify specific facebook users. [2] facebook respondent 1, posting in a facebook group (on facebook), february 20211. [3] anonymous dj 1, interviewed by the author (uk), september 2021. [4] anonymous dj 2, interviewed by the author (uk), september 2021 [5] anonymous dj 2, interviewed by the author (uk), september 2021. for reference, erick morillo was a renowned columbian american dj producer who in august 2020 faced charges of sexual battery upon a woman. within a month of his arrest, he died of a suspected suicide drug overdose (dj mag staff 2020). [6] anonymous dj 1, interviewed by the author (uk), september 2021. the diy free party collective dave payling staffordshire university (uk) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2016.08.01.11> introduction the diy free party collective was founded in nottingham, uk, in 1990 and were among the originators of the nottingham house music sound. they had many releases on their own strictly for groovers label, part of diy discs, and supported and influenced other producers such as inland knights, nail, the littlemen and many others. they were also at the forefront of the free party scene in the uk and inspired other local sound systems such as smokescreen and pulse to take up the mantle in providing unlicensed all night parties in outdoor locations throughout the midlands. with the passing of anti-rave legislation, mounting external pressures from police and authorities and internal problems caused by drug abuse, hedonistic lifestyles and the logistics of maintaining businesses, fractures were inevitable. despite their past problems diy have amassed a great deal of love and respect for their selfless attitude and contribution to dance music culture and this resurfaced when they held their 25th anniversary party in 2014. formation and early history diy were formed when a group of friends started djing and holding club nights in nottingham. harry had moved from bolton as a student where he met rick ‘digs’ down, simon ‘dk’ and other people around the city. pete ‘woosh’ was a regular visitor to nottingham and also later moved down from bolton. in 1989 simon had just started djing and harry had a birthday party at a place called the garage. although diy did not exist at this point this could be thought of as the first diy club night. after this party, momentum gathered and they started doing house parties and the occasional club night. the major turning point in diy’s trajectory came at the glastonbury festival of 1990. it was there they met with the traveller community with whom they started holding free parties. as well as providing sites and friendship the travellers had connections with nik turner (hawkwind) and this allowed diy to use their well established pyramid stage. hawkwind’s philosophy of freedom, peace and psychedelia were also fused into diy’s melting pot of ideas borrowed from other movements such as punk, indie and dance and this helped shape their free thinking attitude. initially diy would take their own decks onto various traveller sites and use their sound systems, but this meant sharing the bill with other djs and musical styles. eventually this became problematic, as diy were trying to promote their own particular sound, made up of american house, b-sides and american dubs with snippets of vocals, and not all the party goers could relate. this led to them commissioning and buying their own bespoke sound system, enabling them to do their own parties with complete control of their own sound. for diy it was all about the bass. the sound system was dominated by bass bins that had a particular warm sound, and produced a very bass heavy sound.[1] at this point harry, rick and pete were living together and running the operation. they started doing paid club nights to bring in money to help finance the free parties and set up two record labels. this involved looking after finances, promotional activities and everything else involved with managing the collective. for them, it became all consuming with nothing else for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for several years. although enjoying the lifestyle, putting out music releases, running club nights and taking copious quantities of drugs week in, week out they had little time for partners and family and relationships inevitably suffered. the hedonistic lifestyle was difficult to juggle with running a business and maintaining professionalism. this ultimately led to an implosion and they eventually dissolved into a haze of heroin abuse. another early pressure on the activities of diy was the passing of the uk criminal justice and public order act in 1994 (often abbreviated to the criminal justice act or cja). this much reviled piece of legislation had a specific section titled “power related to raves” (hmso 1994: 60). this helped police restrict the activities of ravers, sound systems and traveller communities and allowed them to stop gatherings and seize equipment. various protests were organised including reclaim the streets and the anti criminal justice bill marches in london, but they were ultimately unsuccessful in forcing a rethink of the new legislation. one catalyst in the government’s crackdown was the castlemorton (whitehurst 2014) gathering in 1992. diy had a significant presence there but with an awareness of the possible consequences and an eye on the future were assisted by the travellers to smuggle out their sound system in various vehicles. after this many of the travellers moved to derbyshire where the police force was underfunded and less able to prevent raves and traveller movement. it became logistically easier for diy to hold parties here, where open countryside and disused quarries formed the backdrop for many large parties. there was, however, continued and increased police focus on parties, sound systems and their organisers and paranoia began to set in amongst the contributors. worried their communications were being monitored, diy went to such lengths as discussing business in the back of articulated lorries on exodus[2] farm by candlelight so they were certain no one could listen in. this situation could not continue and resulted in diy concentrating more on djing, running their record label and club nights. they spent many productive years travelling the world djing, putting out records, working in the studio and occasionally risking a free party. 25th anniversary party 2014 in august 2014 diy reignited the love they had nurtured during their formative years by holding their 25th anniversary party. using their original sound system, vinyl turntables and a large marquee, the all-nighter was always going to be a special event and was attended by several hundred people. the intention was for this to be a farewell party. they put all the remaining diy and personal monies into the event and it effectively bankrupted them. some money was raised by the traditional method of sending round a collection bucket but this raised negligible funds relative to the cost of holding the event, as is usually the case. people travelled from throughout the uk and abroad and these two videos give a snapshot of the evening and morning of the party. evening video (payling 2014a) morning video (payling 2014b) here’s a vinyl mix[3] from digs and woosh also from the same event: while simon dk was still playing the party was closed down around 10.30 on the sunday morning as police arrived and gradually coaxed people away from the site. there was no trouble, but it took a while as people were reluctant to leave such a vibrant atmosphere. when everyone had finally dispersed, some records, collection buckets and other equipment were left in the hire van for collection the following day. sorting everything out was a job for another time. on arriving back, pete and harry found a hole punched in the back of the van and everything had been stolen. it seemed like a professional job and, in disbelief and desperation, they called a friend to let them know what had happened. without their knowledge, and even before getting back to nottingham, a paypal account had been set up to help raise money to pay for the losses and damages to the van. this triggered an up swell of love and support individually and via social media and there was an outpouring of generosity from friends of diy and those attending the party. other djs auctioned off their own personal, rare records and art prints and other items were sold to help contribute to the fund. the account raised several thousands of pounds, made diy solvent again and will be used to fund future events with plans including a benefit club night and further birthday celebrations. although diy did not consider it ethical to set up the collection personally, the somewhat fortuitous turn of events proved how much respect they still command and how willing people are to contribute to the sustainability of free parties when given an opportunity to do so. present day and glastonbury digs and woosh continue to dj and glastonbury is an annual fixture in their schedule. they still owe them a big debt as it is where they first hooked up with the traveller community. pete and friends first climbed the fence in 1981 and continued to do so as its height increased until it became physically impossible to get over. ironically as soon as this happened diy began to be booked! the first year glastonbury had a dance field it was housed in a big marquee and was scheduled to finish at midnight. diy managed to get their hands on a vehicle pass and smuggled in their pa. they drove into the dance field and set up the pa in the same field a short way from the official marquee. as soon as they had kicked everyone out diy fired up the generator and all the kids coming out of the marquee came straight over to the diy rig. all expectations were that they would be closed down by michael eavis but they were allowed to continue and were still there on monday afternoon. obviously, they were fulfilling a need and the dance area has continued to grow ever since. pete and rick now perform in nyc downlow (part of block 9) or genesis and can be found there enjoying their annual pilgrimage. acknowledgements many thanks to pete woosh for spending time to chat about his experiences with diy and to discuss this article. author biography dave teaches music technology at staffordshire university. he is a video music composer and holds a phd in visual music composition. his more recent work focuses on composition for video music with an emphasis on electroacoustic composition and how this can be combined with abstract animation and video concrete. dave also produces more mainstream electronic music under the pseudonym payl and is integrating this more closely with his academic research. website: https://davepayl.wordpress.com/ references hmso. 1994. criminal justice and public order act 1994. <http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/33> (accessed 7 october 2016). whitehurst, andrew. 2014. "free party politics: castle morton | djmag.com." 28 march 2014. <https://djmag.com/content/free-party-politics-castle-morton> (accessed 7 october 2016). filmography payling, david. 2014a. “diy 25th birthday party night 2014”. youtube. uploaded on 13 july 2016. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uajtikfe6ry> (accessed 7 october 2016). payling, david. 2014b. “diy 25th birthday party morning 2014”. uploaded on 13 july 2016. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pu6kkyhmeto> (accessed 7 october 2016). notes [1] they later sold the sound system to friends but still have access to it and it was used at their 25th anniversary party. [2] the exodus collective, another free party sound system with similar diy philosophies based in luton. [3] the same soundcloud user (mumbo jumbo & diy archive) has many archived and recent mixes form diy djs https://soundcloud.com/mumbo-jumbo-2/digs-whoosh-diy-25th-bithday-pt2 mexican sonidero sound system culture in times of covid-19 moses iten rmit university (australia) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.12> introduction i am both dj and researcher, and this article was inspired by my reflections during the first weeks and months of the worldwide lockdowns beginning in march 2020 due to the covid-19 pandemic.[1] djs/musicians in the "global north"—including australia where i’m based—were struggling to make themselves relevant as performers online. meanwhile the mexican sonidero (sound system) operators of the barrios (ghettos) amongst whom i’d done phd fieldwork in 2019 and have inspired my work as a dj/producer for 15 years, continued and expanded their already well-established online presence. this is because the sonideros (sound system operators) are well-accustomed to a significant part of their audience being in semi-permanent lockdown as undocumented workers stuck on the other side of the heavily militarised us-mexico border. in light of an increasingly online existence for djs and electronic music producers on a global scale due to covid-19 restrictions, this article aims to emphasize the significance of how the particular mexican sonidero practice has evolved online as a powerful creative response to the struggles endured by their dancing public. methodology and my positioning as a researcher as a dj with a professional practice of 15 years, i am best known as a specialist of cumbia and music producer with the cumbia cosmonauts project. i grew up in working class rural environments in switzerland and australia, and first travelled to mexico as a 22 year old in the early 2000s, where i lived a year as a student. i largely served my informal apprenticeship as a dj participating in australia’s “global post-rave counterculture” (st john 2009: 92), during which “i learnt to listen” in what can be considered as an informal apprenticeship (henriques 2011: 88-122). over the years i frequently returned to mexico and my professional dj/producer practice has evolved to heavily align with mexican sonidero culture, although being based primarily in australia. my phd research on digital cumbia is practice-led and informs a dj-as-researcher approach (iten 2021b). during 2019 i spent time in the mexican cities of monterrey, puebla and mexico city, where the physical fieldwork featured in this article was experienced. back in melbourne, australia, i have continued to engage “remotely” and “imaginatively” (pink et al. 2016), primarily via the social media platforms of youtube and facebook where sonideros are most active. being physically based far away from the main sphere of creative influence on my practice, i have become accustomed to primarily participating with sonidero culture online. therefore, this research is informed by more than a decade of participant observation. background on sonidera sound system culture in mexico, sonideros are part of a sonidera sound system culture that is parallel to that of jamaica for example. sonidera culture first emerged in the 1940s, with the convergence of new audio technology and cities exploding with poor rural migrants. the earliest sonideros collected mostly afro-cuban records, to which from the 1960s onwards colombian cumbia was added and grew to become increasingly dominant. the cradle of cumbia is the northern coast and adjoining tropical hinterlands of colombia. cumbia became popular across latin america from the 1950s onwards. in mexico, cumbia proved particularly popular in the barrios, where sonideros transformed cumbia over several decades to become the slowed-down, synthesizer-driven and digitally produced cumbia sonidera (sound system cumbia) in the 1990s, which also became hugely influential across the americas (iten 2021a). there are a handful of texts providing greater insight into sonidero culture, although this research is almost exclusively published in spanish and written by cronistas (chroniclers) rather than scholars.[2] the recent documentary film yo no soy guapo by joyce garcia (2020) is very much an invitation to dance, but it also shows the struggle for survival of the sonideros as a culture of the "street". this is an existential struggle, as the sonideros are in constant negotiation and battle with the authorities over doing events on streets, often the only public space accessible to hold these events representing the communities at home, of course, in the most precarious parts of the cities: the barrios. trailer yo no soy guapo (garcia 2018) sonidero culture is barrio-based and associated with the so-called "lumpen proletariat" (manuel 1988: 18-19), who in mexico are often compelled to emigrate to the usa as undocumented workers in order to survive. hence there has been a lot of research focused on the sonideros as part of a "border culture" performed via saludos (shout-outs) by border-crossing sonideros or on mixtape recordings.[3] the significant online presence of sonidero culture has so far received little attention from scholars. online presence of sonidera culture sonideros operate as entrepreneurs, audio engineers and media entities and accordingly adopt the latest technology and adapt it to suit their specific needs. this included embracing the arrival of the internet and especially social media in the mid-2000s. on youtube there are thousands of videos featuring live performances and a diversity of background videos, uploaded by sonideros and their supporters. some compelling examples of footage which doesn’t feature live performances includes numerous videos of the arrival of trucks full of sound system equipment in remote rural villages. arrival of sonido master in zacatipa, guerrero (chivas montecristo 2011) since the first hand-held video cameras, footage of bailes sonideros (sound system dances) has been distributed in video cassette and dvd formats. this then continued online, and over the last decade an increasing number of youtube channels have appeared dedicated to broadcasting sonidero culture. at a sonidero event during 2019 in the mexican village of tlaxcalancingo, just outside the city of puebla, i observed at least six online broadcasters filming the performing sonideros (figure 1). they were jostling to get as close as possible to the sonidero to provide an intimate view of their two-fold performance for those in attendance physically at the dance, and for those who were following the event online via live streaming or on demand videos edited and uploaded by the various broadcasters. there is such a wealth of footage available online; some events can be observed from the points of view of different broadcasters, and their creative presentation of the videos builds and heightens the online experience as parallel to the physical experience of the baile (dance). many of those attending the bailes can be observed engaging with social media during the event. at the physical event, the sonideros are constantly being handed pieces of paper, posters and dancers’ smart phones with greetings meant for those in attendance as well as online. simultaneously the sonideros are also responding to comments posted on their livestreams online. figure 1. sonidero performance being filmed in puebla, mexico. photo credit: moses iten (2019). one of the earliest youtube broadcasting channels dedicated to sonidera culture is richard tv, who started with a selfie stick posting the first videos in 2012 and has meanwhile grown to more than 4000 posted videos and close to 900,000 subscribers. the popularity of richard tv can be attributed to the presenters’ journalistic flair and genuine curiosity about all aspects of sonidera culture. richard tv pioneered the broadcasting of not just live footage from the dances, but also interviews with sonideros, sound engineers and dancers. an early hit on the channel is a documentary-style report featuring an interview with the audio engineer of sonido fantasma, which currently has 3.4 million views and elevated the interviewee—the audio engineer "bomper"—to become a celebrity normally reserved for the sonidero owner-operators. audio engineer explains sound system setup of sonido fantasma (richard tv 2017) since the possibility of live streaming has emerged in more recent years, this has arguably become the most significant part of the sonidero’s online presence. depending on the profile of a particular sonidero, livestreams can attract thousands of viewers leaving hundreds of comments. this phenomenon created the space for online sonidero channels dedicated exclusively to the live streaming of broadcasts from a studio setting. during my fieldwork in puebla in 2019, i was invited to perform as cumbia cosmonauts for one such channel, la gargola sonidera tv, who established themselves as a media entity broadcasting live videos via facebook performed by local luminaries such as the late sonido samurai (featured in the video below), as well as up and coming sonidero talent and touring internationals. samurai can be seen responding to the comments left on the facebook page of la gargola sonidera tv, whilst assistants bring him other smart phones in order to respond to comments left on the same broadcast simultaneously being shared on other facebook pages. shout outs on la gargola sonidera tv are given to listeners in various barrios across the city of puebla, gang members and people in prison, and most prominently the hundreds and thousands of people from the mexican state of puebla part of the emigrant diaspora of undocumented workers in the usa. sonido samurai livestream performance via facebook (la gargola sonidera tv 2019) millions of mexicans have crossed, and keep crossing, the border into the us to look for work and, as already mentioned, sonidera culture has travelled with them. but once having overcome the hardship and danger of crossing the border without documentation, they are stuck and likely to be separated for many years from family back in mexico. this immobility deserves to be recognised as a type of lockdown endured by millions of mexicans (and undocumented people across the globe more generally). accordingly, since at least the 1980s a vital part of sonidero culture as being barrio-based has been in facilitating the broadcasting and distribution of greetings and salutations across the border via physical recordings. in the 21st century, the bulk of these social connections have been broadcast online. impact of covid-19 on sonidera culture evidently, sonidera culture has always had a big presence online, and when the first lockdowns were imposed across the globe due to covid-19, their well-established online activity continued and expanded. meanwhile here in australia in early 2020, i could sense many people’s anxiety of not being able to travel or work freely perhaps for the first time in their lives. even in a wealthy city like melbourne which is globally renowned for its vibrant music scene, live musicians and djs were particularly affected as their precarity has been spectacularly exposed during the covid-19 pandemic (strong and cannizzo 2021). this impacted my own income as a professional dj/producer and, whilst i faced similar anxieties to my melbourne-based colleagues, i couldn’t help reflecting on how sonideros and their dancing public have always endured hardship akin to lockdowns in the precarious socio-economic reality of their barrio existence and more particularly as undocumented workers in the usa. precarity is never hidden in the barrios, and with covid-19 this precarity has only been intensified. like melbourne’s live music music scene, sonidero events have been severely restricted. dances have been raided and stopped for not following measures such as the taking of temperatures, keeping distance, wearing masks, and so on. there are many prominent sonideros who have died directly or indirectly because of covid-19. beyond the existential impact on the sonideros themselves, it can be argued the greater the suffering in the barrio, the more vital sonidero culture becomes. during the first lockdowns in mexico city, the well-known sonido la conga performed from his rooftop making neighbours dance on theirs. sonido la conga performing in peñón de los baños (fleximania 2020) during the pandemic, online broadcasting has grown exponentially, and continues to grow. in other research emerging of how electronic musicians and djs have resorted to online broadcasting due to covid-19 lockdowns “livestream fatigue” was documented, although ultimately overcome by broadcasting intimate moments from their daily lives (sarkar 2021: 50-1). in the case of sonideros, this intimacy had already been exposed pre-pandemic by the likes of richard tv. perhaps the most notable change of sonideros livestreaming during covid-19 has been the scale of their events. for example, some of the most renowned veteran sonideros, such as la changa and sonido caribali, used to much bigger stages, could now be seen performing small, intimate and private events. playing back-to-back with sonidero friends and joining the dancefloor to enjoy their own selections. sonido caribali back-to-back performance with sonido siboney, mexico city (2021) concluding reflections on sonidera culture online the more intimate online broadcasts during the lockdowns have emphasized the conviviality and bringing together of people which is so central to sonidero culture. before the pandemic, emphasis was increasingly on the size of the dances and the audio-visual technology, but with the lockdowns even the biggest sonideros resorted to local events in private circles. these videos may portray precarity but have also served to remind us of the organization going on beyond the bailes as a form of mass entertainment, to see these as a love for music bringing together people as community meetings and nuclei of a way of resisting homogenous corporate and government sponsored culture. reduced to the bare bones and seeing the sonideros dancing themselves, broadcasting from their rooftops and their patios are stark reminders of where the sonideros go once the glamour of the event is over. it’s now more important than ever to show solidarity and connection by contributing through online engagement, through documentation and through analysis and reflection. it’s my hope that there will also be new alliances, connections, tactics and strategies to make sonidera culture even more resilient in the future, when it's possible again to travel, and to dance. auhor biography moses iten is a dj/producer and phd candidate at rmit university, melbourne. he has toured the world with the cumbia cosmonauts project. his research focuses on sound system cultures, with a special interest in cumbia and mexican sonideros. he is the foreign languages editor at dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture. email: mosesiten@gmail.com references cruzvillegas, jesus. 2016. pasos sonideros. mexico city: proyecto literal. delgado, mariana and marco ramirez cornejo, eds. 2012 sonideros en las aceras, vengase la gozadera. mexico city: tumbona ediciones. henriques, julian. 2011. sonic bodies: reggae sound systems, performance techniques and ways of knowing. london and new york: continuum. iten, moses. 2021a. “the roots of digital cumbia in sound system culture: sonideros, villeros, and the transformation of colombian cumbia”. journal of world popular music 8(1): 77–101. <https://doi.org/10.1558/jwpm.43089>. iten, moses. 2021b. “the dj-as-researcher approach: methods emerging through ‘digital’ cumbia fieldwork”. dancecult conference. staffordshire university (uk).. manuel, peter. 1988. popular musics of the non-western world. new york and oxford: oxford university press. pink, sarah, heather a horst, john postill, larissa hjorth and tania lewis. 2016. digital ethnography. los angeles and london: sage. ragland, cathy. 2013. "communicating the collective imagination: the sociospatial world of the mexican sonidero in puebla, new york and new jersey". in cumbia! scenes of a migrant latin american music genre. héctor fernández l’hoeste and pablo vila, eds. durham and london: duke university press. sanchez, pedro. 2019. textos sonideros (1999–2019) vol. 1: cronicas. mexico city: ediciones negis-teodis. sarkar, pradip. 2021. “being a dj in a time of zero social huddling: tales from a locked-down india”. perfect beat 1(1):47–55. <https://doi.org/10.1558/prbt.19347>. st john, graham. 2009. technomad: global raving countercultures. london: equinox. strong, catherine and fabian cannizzo. 2021. "pre-existing conditions: precarity, creative justice and the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on the victorian music industries". perfect beat 12(1):10–24. <https://doi.org/10.1558/prbt.19379>. wirz, mirjam. 2018. ojos suaves/soft eyes: sound system cumbia from mexico to the world. translated by delphine tomes, brendan flannery and moses iten. mexico city and zurich: mirjam wirz. filmography amigos suscribanse a nuestro canal de musica sonidera. “los jinetes de chuchito vera ((lucky wepa )) sonido lucky star—tlaxcalancingo puebla 2019”. youtube, 6:39. uploaded on 27 august 2019. <https://youtu.be/ofv0k2mtxje> (accessed 18 november 2021). amigos suscribanse a nuestro canal de musica sonidera. “es la cumbia de mi tierra peñon de los baños—sonido la conga—concierto en la azotea 2020”. youtube, 7:56. uploaded on 12 may 2020. <https://youtu.be/unsgwm-p3qy> (accessed 12 november 2021). chivas montecristo. “llegada de sonido master armando cuatle en zacatipa gro”. youtube, 7:03. uploaded on 22 august 2011. <https://youtu.be/7empcb6kumw> (accessed 19 november 2021). dancecult. “moses iten – the dj-as-researcher approach: methods emerging through ‘digital’ cumbia fieldwork”. youtube, 21:41. uploaded on 12 october 2021. <https://youtu.be/qr2ygpdfkho> (accessed 12 november 2021). joyce garcia."yo no soy guapo". vimeo, 81:00. uploaded on 1 may 2020. <https://vimeo.com/ondemand/yonosoyguapo> (accessed 24 november 2021). richard tv. “asi reacciono sonido siboney cuando le enseñó este tema sonido caribali de willi”. youtube 17:00. uploaded on 23 may 2021. <https://youtu.be/fjv2ddx4hts> (accessed 22 november 2021). yuli rodriguez. "trailer yo no soy guapo". vimeo, 7:03. uploaded on 19 january 2016. <https://youtu.be/7empcb6kumw> (accessed 23 november 2021). notes: [1] this article is based on a paper i presented at the “sso#7 sound systems at the crossroads” online conference in july 2021, hosted by the sound system outernational research group based at goldsmiths university, london. [2] the role of cronistas is particular to latin america and their cronicas (chronicles) are considered as a type of engaged investigative journalism or intellectual engagement with popular culture. the anthology sonideros en las aceras, vengase la gozadera (2012) edited by mariana delgado and marco ramírez cornejo as part of el proyecto sonidero, brought together scholarly analysis with cronistas and sonideros writing about their culture. notable latter publications include those by mirjam wirz (2019), jesus cruzvillegas (2016) and pedro sanchez (2019). [3] cathy ragland’s (2013) research on the “sociospatial world” of sonidero culture connecting the mexican state of puebla with the us states of new york and new jersey is particularly notable. when club culture goes online: the case of boiler room dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 8(1): 73–87 issn 1947-5403 ©2016 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2016.08.01.04 when club culture goes online: the case of boiler room1 guillaume heuguet université paris sorbonne (france) translation by luis-manuel garcia university of birmingham (united kingdom) abstract contemporary media technologies are often perceived as providing an opportunity to widen the audiences of cultural events. online video broadcast (“streaming”) formats seem to be especially promising for popular music events. this article analyzes the encounter between these club/rave cultures and streaming technology through a dual event—both on-site and mediatized—run by a [relatively] new organization, boiler room. video streaming seems to offer the promise of alleviating many obstacles to participation historically associated with underground culture, but in doing so it also threatens to undermine the specialist exclusivity that contributes to the community’s own sense of authenticity. this article is interested in how event organizers appropriate such technologies, adjusting them to club culture in order to develop online an original variant of the dj experience. i aim to show how decisions regarding stage design, videography, and website development all contribute to building the social significance and specificity of an episode in club culture. keywords: television; internet; spectatorship; authenticity; web design; semiotics guillaume heuguet is a phd candidate in communication and information sciences at gripiccelsa (université paris sorbonne). his work focuses on digital media, music culture and journalism. he is chief editor of the french series in music criticism, audimat (http://revue-audimat.fr/), and collaborates with the publisher, la rue musicale (philarmonie de paris). transposition http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2016.08.01.04 dancecult 8(1)74 translator’s introduction: in this article, heuguet provides a deep semiotic reading of boiler room’s online remediation of underground dance music events. in particular, he examines closely a handful of webpages, video streaming frameworks, and social media interfaces related to a specific boiler room event in 2012, drawing upon a nuanced notion of mediation (hennion 2015) and of the “media event” as a genre of cultural happening designed to be mediatized (dayan and katz 1994). the analysis has a range of foci, including event design, videographic staging, website design, and social media integration. in this manner, heuguet tracks how boiler room’s organizers navigate a careful path between the tensions that arise between the two experiential modes they strive to connect: “underground” exclusivity and subcultural specialization versus mass audiences and open accessibility; televisual staging versus realist-candid static camera shots; financial dependence on brand sponsorship (i.e., indirect advertising revenue) versus anti-corporate counterculture; face-to-face corporeal intimacy versus online social media. ultimately, this article returns repeatedly to issues of authenticity and artifice, demonstrating how boiler room has developed an evidently successful compromise between the two. guillaume heuguet’s article first appeared in french in 2015 as “quand la culture de la discothèque est mise en ligne”. culture et musées 24: 107–24. after television, which may have seemed like an outlet for state cultural policy concerning live entertainment (bouquillon 1992), contemporary technologies are often perceived as an opportunity to widen the audiences of cultural events. online video broadcast (“streaming”) formats thus represent a particular challenge for events associated with “legitimate” culture seeking to reach a broader audience. at the same time, these formats seem already custombuilt for cultures considered “popular”. by virtue of representations of the internet over the past few years that have characterized it as a “social” and democratic medium (candel 2014) as well as the connection between popular musics and technologies of mass broadcast like the record (maisonneuve 2009) or television (blanchard 1987), the broadcast of popular music concerts has found its logical extension online, with new opportunities for musicians to gain visibility and for experiences adapted to remote spectatorship. this logic, which consigns these musics to mass circulation across digital media, requires nuance in light of two other phenomena. one the one hand, there is the specialization within these musical worlds, which recreates aesthetic hierarchies between and even within genres, which in turn serve as vectors of social distinction (glevarec and pinet 2009: 73–5). on the other hand, there is a developing sense of historicity in relation to popular musics as well as a rise in activities that constitute them as heritage, such as the multiplication of national exhibitions dedicated to rock or electronic musics (le guern 2013). these musics, insofar as they give rise to specialist cultures appreciated by amateur-experts, take on values by which technological mediations can be judged to be transformative (hennion 2007: 312; hennion 2015), whether positively or negatively so. thus, video and the internet are not simple broadcast outlets, but rather mediations that change the form and modalities of musical appropriation. heuguet | when club culture goes online 75 one particularly interesting case is the “dj-mix,”2 the musical practice of disc-jockeys (djs) that consists of playing records in venues dedicated to festive outings—clubs and discotheques—in order to make a crowd dance while also demonstrating technical and aesthetic competence. as this musical practice becomes a full-fledged object of consumption in the form of recordings published on disc or online (e.g., cd-mixes, podcasts), fans concerned with the aesthetics of the disc-as-object construct hypotheses about the intentions of producers and adequate modes of listening: a bootleg recording of a public dj-mix bought on the black market does not accrue the same meanings as a mix recorded specifically for a record label. these evaluative parameters for media objects and broadcast settings are connected to a “culture of the discotheque”—club culture—connected in turn to the practices of djs and their aesthetic use of discs—dj culture—such as it has been analyzed and designated by scholars for more than a decade (fikentscher 2000; lawrence 2003; shapiro 2007). studies of these practices are marked by ambivalent stances, desiring to preserve a communal identity while also producing euphoric representations of openness and sharing. this article seeks to analyze the encounter between these cultural forms and technology through a dual event—both on-site and mediatized—run by a new organization called boiler room. i will observe the different editorial frameworks that stage a festive event that took place on 25 january 2012, in a disused public pool in berlin, stattbad wedding, featuring the djs dixon, move d, jus-ed and the duo midnight operator. i aim to show how decisions regarding stage design, videography, and website development all contribute to building the social significance and specificity of an episode in club culture. dancing to records according to bill brewster and frank broughton, the origins of the discothèque are to be found somewhere between jimmy saville in leeds, who was allegedly the first to make people dance to records,3 and the many nightlife establishments that opened in paris after the war (brewster and broughton 2007: 52–62). in february 1965, the new york times sought to describe a burgeoning phenomenon in the us: “the common denominator of the discothèque is darkness, a small dance floor and the beat” (lawrence 2003: 14). since that era, when it was described a trend with no tomorrow, the discothèque has turned into an institution: these spaces would henceforth connote rituals of youthful socialization, seduction and dancing. they have given rise to a cultural history that endeavors to describe the contours of a constantly evolving club culture. after having emerged at a time when disc jockeys were replacing (conventional) musicians, this culture eventually spilled out of nightclubs in the 1980s, when english youth spurned the exclusive and expensive nightlife venues in london’s city center in favor of dancing in open fields in the suburbs. in addition to the diversity of venues, atmospheres and crowds, historical accounts of these parties all emphasize the political and at times elitist dimensions of these spaces; they characterize these events as conducive to experimentation with identity and social relations. seeking to remain faithful to the particularity of events where djs, much like jazz musicians (becker dancecult 8(1)76 1985), navigate between artistic originality and the functional dimensions of dance music, morgan jouvenet gleans from her interviews a shared pursuit of a form of trance, a “transport” that also functions as a “blast off [décollement] from the trivial-social” (2001: 22). this experience of the nightclub as a site of achieved utopia—as a space “enchanted” by a sense of equality—informed accounts of those new york discothèques frequented by gay latinos and african-americans (lawrence 2003) as well as those of paris and london, not to mention the raves and free parties that gained prominence during the 1990s. this musical abandon goes together with a bracketing of social roles and aims to consolidate the effects of communal commixture. the extent and quality of the audience appears in the majority of accounts as the primary determinants of one’s experiences. on every occasion, participants were obliged to overcome qualifying hurdles in order to access the event. this is the case for clubs and their “door policy,” but also for raves and free parties, since the illicit nature of these festivities also entailed logistical obstacles that served as a veritable initiatory quest. what happens, then, when the mediatization of these parties online seems to alleviate these logistical obstacles? this article is interested in how an organizer of musical events appropriates these technologies, adjusting them to club culture in order to develop online an original variant of the dj-mix experience. the boiler room project was born in london in 2011, launched by thristian richards and blaise bellville. according to richards, the inspiration came to from the suggestion of british djs bokbok and oneman to use the web-streaming platform ustream to enable internet users to virtually attend “bedroom”-style dj-mixes filmed specifically for the web. on the “about” page of the project’s website,4 “the uk’s rich pirate radio heritage” is also mentioned as an influence.5 after having experimented with filming the recording of a dj-mix originally intended for a mix-cd bundled with the magazine platform, richards and bellville decided to invite djs to show up at the offices of the magazine, accompanied by a small group of invited friends, to have their performances broadcast using web streaming technologies such as those offered by the platform livestream. in 2012, specialist media outlets profiling this project noted the originality of this doubly entertaining event, highlighting the intimacy of an on-site, face-to-face event remediated online on a global scale.6 two years later, boiler room gradually increased the frequency of their broadcasts, their filming locations, and the range of musical styles on offer, eventually offering multiple broadcasts per day on different continents. the development of this activity is based on a particular business model, that of brand sponsorship. in exchange for their financial support, brands can have their logo displayed on various media associated with boiler room events. the organization also delegates production and recording expenses to record labels hoping to promote their artists through media exposure as well as the legitimacy associated with this media outlet. these economic dynamics force boiler room to judge between artistic choices catering to an audience depicted as specialist and demanding, and those brought about by financial dependence on record labels. heuguet | when club culture goes online 77 an analysis of three webpages will permit us to observe the production of meaning surrounding a boiler room event dating from the project’s initial period of development. i describe the manner in which a media configuration both invokes and inscribes itself within a cultural history of discothèques and dj-mixes: a page entitled “boiler room berlin 006 / dixon, move d, midnight operator (live) & jus-ed”.7 it is an event listing, comprised of a visual element that serves as a flyer, an unsigned text, and a series of musical excerpts. a page entitled “live”, which is the live [web-tv] broadcast page.8 it is composed of a frame within which a video stream is broadcast using the viewing platform livestream, along with a synchronous discussion forum [“chat room”]. a page entitled “dixon’s 30 min mix”,9 which serves as an archive of the four performances originally broadcast on the evening of 25 january 2012. it provides access to video of dixon’s performance stored in the video-archiving platform vimeo. of particular interest here are the visual components featured in the video, which correspond to elements from the original “live” broadcast page. these pages were first observed in may of 2012, and the site has since undergone an overhaul that modified certain elements, but a proportion of the editorial choices remain the same. dj dixon’s performance was chosen for analysis after several weeks of observing the website’s activities. one of the reasons for this choice has to do with this episode’s apparent success during broadcast—more so than any other episode during the same period—with web traffic managing to crash the video stream for several minutes at a time. moreover, the disused pool “stattbad wedding” is a regular venue for boiler room events, and certain remarkable staging effects correspond to recurrent choices made by the organization during that phase of their development. for these reasons, this episode serves not as a marginal performance among those hosted by boiler room, but rather as a representative case that brings into relief a number of filmic directives. this corpus is occasionally complemented by observations drawn from the website’s “about” page, the organization and appearance of the site as a whole during the time of study, and the mobilization of smaller media forms issuing from platforms such as facebook and twitter. the interpretation of these forms is based on an initial phase of general observation of platforms devoted to the broadcast of concerts online, in particular the “concerts to go” [concerts à emporter] of websites la blogothèque, arte live web, and deezer sessions. this process enables the identification of the particularities of boiler room’s online and videographic rhetoric. this is followed by a mapping between these signs and references drawn from a corpus of ten primarily anglophone academic works concerned with the history of djs, mixing, and discothèques. these are summarized and more specialized works based on ethnographic and historical approaches, which i mobilize here as secondary sources of the imaginary of club culture and the dj-mix. dancecult 8(1)78 in order to represent the dj-mix online, the organisers of boiler room employ different symbolic frameworks: the events during which the dj plays in front of an audience, with associated knowledge and aesthetics; the use of videographic techniques, and contemporary internet practices. my approach consists of simultaneously analyzing (without conflating) the relations between the production of a musical experience valued by club culture and certain significations attributed to the pragmatic and media-specific aspects of its “mediations” (hennion 2015). i will thus study the discourse found on the boiler room website, their techno-semiotic composition, the scenography of the event, and its videographic rhetoric, with the aim of revealing the symbolic challenges of media writing [écriture] that a dual onsite/online event poses.10 with the phrase “media writing” i signal the consideration of the poetics of “on-screen writing”—writing on/through the screen—along with its inscription in a particular editorial practice.11 the corpus of webpages chosen for analysis permits a view of editorial attempts to mediate between a logic of broad accessibility to all web users and a logic of tailored experience specific to a community of specialists. this entails understanding how a mediatizing project based on club culture constructs continuity between representations of community and online audio-visual production. through the choice of dj, venue, and the manner of expressing these choices on the website, the organization builds an image of the reader as an informed amateur and then casts itself as a participant in the “authenticity” of a specialist culture; in keeping with the norms of musical appreciation of a dj-mix produced on-site, seeking out kinesthetic and aesthetic effects, the staging of the performance flaunts the usual routines of concert videos (darkness, placement of the audience, static shot) in order to better offer the viewer a scopic position as witness to a small-scale cultural scene. finally, the design of the website contributes to building a form of online event around broadcast, along with the image of communal success. inscribing the authenticity of the local event online club and rave cultures have often carried with them a series of topical oppositions, which pits a mainstream, associated with commerce, spectacle, and conformism, against an “underground” stream characterized by disinterest, obscurity, and authenticity. sarah thornton, in her seminal monograph, sets out to take account of how actors promote this antinomy, identifying a “youthful commonsense that club culture is the inverse of broadcasting’s domestic accessibility and that it is the antithesis of widely-disseminated tabloid talk” (thornton 2013: 109). from the perspective of partygoers, “the general accessibility of broadcasting, in the strict sense of the word, is at odds with the esotericism and exclusivity of club and rave cultures; it too widely distributes the raw material of youth’s subcultural capitals” (thornton 2013: 124). this opposition between festive events and their mediatization is reinforced by negative associations made by the media with regards to nighttime and clubbing, and also by the technical challenges of transmitting festive energies across media. similarly, thornton notes that, between 1988 and 1992, the british television heuguet | when club culture goes online 79 show the hitman & her showed british viewers long sequences featuring a crowd dancing to popular music hits. she remarks that “the act of putting bright lights on the crowd as opposed to dance acts—the process of illuminating a culture that is supposed to take place in the dark—usually destroys the atmosphere that is the linchpin of club authenticity” (thornton 2013: 127). here, the event is optimized for television viewers to the detriment of its atmosphere in situ; and yet, this atmosphere is implicitly designated as the index of a club event’s success and authenticity. boiler room stages these musical and festive practices, and presents itself as taking part in the authenticity of a specialized culture. the notion of authenticity only appears explicitly on their website’s “about” page, through the use of terms such as “sincere”, “honest”, and “authentic”.12 this rhetoric contrasts clearly with the rest of the site, which conveys a more conspiratorial tone. on the event-listing page, written in a more colloquial and relaxed style, the repeated use of the first-person singular “i” and phrases such as, “i know we say stuff like that all the time”, presumes a reader that is familiar and intimate. the description of the performing djs is relatively elliptical, presuming that the reader trusts the curator’s judgment: “even if i say so myself ”; “i’ll guarantee that”. web users are even supposed to be acquainted with certain artists: “if you ever caught the guy in a club situation”. the flyer image posted on the event-listing page evokes the event in two ways: the heading “boiler room berlin 006” and a set of geographic coordinates. the use of numeric geographic coordinates evokes encryption and playfully refers back to the esotericism of the flyers announcing the first rave parties in the united kingdom, before the criminal justice act (1994) outlawed this type of event.13 in a similar fashion, the background image of the flyer, framed by the pipes of the stattbad wedding swimming pool, represents the space while also referencing rave promoters’ practice of using disused industrial sites as party venues. this space is also described by the page’s authors as “our home”, thus evoking intimacy and familiarity, which also underlines its inscription within a series revealed by the event’s name: “boiler room berlin 006”. viewed from the historical perspective of festive practices, this manner of presenting the event appears to be a compromise between the models of the rave and the club, which are two models of partying that include djs, the former envisaging massive accessibility and the latter something more limited in scope, neither of which can claim a monopoly on “underground” values, since this concept is defined in opposition to both discrimination and the “masses” (thornton 2013: 167). since rave parties are forced to change location regularly in order to escape police intervention, rave locations can be imbued with an aura of novelty, whereas the club is more thoroughly ritualized. through the codes of its flyer, boiler room thus draws from a double heritage to inscribe a berliner swimming pool into the logic of club culture. viewed from a perspective internal to this culture, one can apprehend the authenticity of this inscription as arising from choices—the right location, the right dj—that appear to conform to cultural codes; but on the website these choices are doubled with a presentational rhetoric that completes this authenticity effect. by mobilizing images of objects familiar to its audience (such as the flyer), by employing a conspiratorial tone in its writing, and by organizing the dancecult 8(1)80 website around searches by dj names, boiler room has designed a specialist website that is nonetheless accessible to everyone. scenography and videography of the dj-mix the website’s evocation of intimacy through connotative play may seem a fragile ploy in itself. if readers are willing to identify with the conspiratorial tone of the event listing, they do so by suspending their awareness of the website’s public accessibility. they enter into a double game corresponding to a certain form of specialized media that articulates between the wide accessibility of the internet and a specific mode of address on the surface of the page. and yet, in principle, the deployment of video on the “live” and “recordings” pages complicate the promise of proximity apparent on the event-listing page. as a musical medium, video is historically an expensive tool; when used in the context of intensive marketing campaigns, it represents a priori intentions for massive broadcasting and employs a rhetoric of spectacle, which aims to imitate or intensify musical effects. boiler room, however, is an exceptional case. rather than making the dj-mix more telegenic, they present the dj as a participant in a cultural scene that the video merely captures. dj performances pose two problems for visual staging. the first has to do with technology: the dj’s instruments are two turntables and a mixing board (“mixer”). the turntables enable the playback of records that are mostly unknown to the audience. the mixer serves to shape, adjust, mix, and filter sonic frequencies. most of the records were also created using the same filters and effects that are found on mixers. and so, it is difficult to identify from the sound alone which sonic transformations are the result of the dj’s actions and which are simply part of the recordings. furthermore, in order to select records and adjust their speed, djs must listen to a stream of sound through their headphones that differs from what is being broadcast. djs must conceal this discontinuity by dancing and regularly demonstrating that they are “in sync” with the audience, that they share simultaneous enjoyment. it is these particularities of performance practice that often lead to oppositions between conventional “live” musicians and djs. in contrast with the jazz concert as “ideal type”, fans of dj-mixes cannot assume that what they hear corresponds to the dj “playing”, in the musical sense. in contrast with the rock concert as ideal type, the djs are not the sole charismatic source of the music, perhaps “playing” on that charisma to intensify musical effect. djs only represent the music explicitly by indicating its source: the records; if they have a personal aura, they derive it from their role as mediator-technician. the second problem facing the televised representation of dj performance is the importance of duration: think of a djing performance in a compressed time-frame. where a guitarist can impress an audience by playing a thirty-second sequence of chords, what a dj does takes a lot longer—a dj needs to be judged on a twoor three-hour narrative of tracks (brewster and broughton 2006: 22). heuguet | when club culture goes online 81 this opposition between the immediate effects of conventional music concerts and the gradual work of the dj appears in the words of jimmy saville, the first dj to have brought together a crowd to dance to sound recordings: i didn’t think i was an entertainer. what i was doing was creating an atmosphere. an entertainer sings, dances, tells jokes, juggles. i didn’t do any of that (quoted in brewster and broughton 2006: 53). this is not to say that a dj performance cannot also be spectacular: the counterexamples are numerous. what is of importance here is that the aesthetic significations of the djmix are often presented as invisible and requiring a particular mode of listening. for these various reasons, the staging of this performance as a concert or music video risks appearing “inauthentic”. boiler room thus adjusts their double-mediation—the spatial arrangement of the event and their use of technology—and chooses to use static shot and live broadcast. the use of live broadcast as a form of shared time, an experience of simultaneity between the moment of recording and the moment of viewing, is an acquired form of media knowledge. on the internet, this is renewed by the mobilization of conventional signs. the presenceeffect generated by stressing this “live” aspect is reinforced by the naturalizing effect of the static shot. according to fredric jameson’s reflections on experimental video, the static shot produces a sense of “pure temporality” and shared timing between the spectator and the body on the screen, which operates as a reality-effect on the temporal mode, as opposed to the montage of different shots, which invents a fictional temporality ( jameson 2007: 129–33). the double choice of live streaming and static shots serves to compensate for the artifice of the scenography. indeed, according to the usual staging practices of clubs and raves in the 2000s, web users wishing to find an “authentic scene” would more likely expect the dj to face the dancers, rather than facing away from them as it happens here. the dj faces the camera, which constitutes a sort of on-site relay for the eye of internet spectators, but without being visible themselves: this creates a degree of fluidity concerning the dj-mix’s intended audience. since djs are expected to adapt to their audience, they need to observe the crowd and adjust their mix to their reactions. facing the camera, however, djs can neither see the reactions of internet spectators nor observe those of the dancers behind them—short of turning around. it is thus through this unusual scenographic choice that boiler room not only mediatizes a musical performance, but connects it to a cultural scene. it is as if the group that appears on screen had been invited to produce for the camera a visible performance of a cross-section of a community of fans united around shared experience. this type of staging that binds together an aesthetic object with the staging of its reception in the same mediaform is not at all innovative: it refers, for example, back to the staged audiences of television variety shows. rather, the originality of boiler room’s programming is to be found in the compromise between the minimalism of video techniques, approaching the aesthetic of a webcam, and the decision to foreground the audience, which belongs more to professional television than club culture. dancecult 8(1)82 the peculiar placement of the audience lends a somewhat contrived aspect to the local on-site event, but it also permits investing the dj-mix with significations of community, presenting the video’s soundtrack as an experience shared by a chosen few. the use of static shots, the weak lighting by televisual standards, and finally the incidental gestures of the dj all have the advantage of adding nuance to the strangeness of the crowd’s placement and its simulacrum-effect. indeed, watching the video of dixon spinning records mostly involves watching him turning a dial, listening to the sound for a few dozen seconds while shuffling about, taking a mouthful from his drink, glancing furtively at the camera, adjusting the next record, fixing his hair mechanically, smiling to someone nearby, listening and shuffling again, adjusting the knobs on the mixer, turning around to see the audience: the dj’s performance is visible only as a succession of more or less incidental gestures, as if the camera’s presence was of no concern. thus, while the local event made reference to rave and club imaginaries through the choice of venue and its mode of online presentation, the minimalism of the video itself does not invite internet spectators to transform themselves into remote partygoers but rather places them in a position of eyewitnesses to a cultural scene of community. figuring communal success and the online event while not going so far as to adopt the constant streaming of conventional television channels, boiler room sets a specific time for the broadcast of its sessions and thus offers video outside of an archival system, running more as a network. the organization thus hews close to the historical origins of radiophonic broadcast, the word “episode” [emission] originally describing the intermittent aspect of broadcast programs. web users are invited to pause for a moment in their net-surfing to virtually attend an episode. this interruptive aspect of the media event, which led dayan and katz (1994) to coin “festive television”, finds parallels in club culture, especially in the intermittent character of british pirate radio broadcasts, but also in the “record hops” of the disco era, recounted as “small parties and underground events” that “engendered garage sessions and illegal raves” and represented “a forum for new musical directions and dj arts, from disco to hip-hop” (poschardt 2002: 111). one finds some mention of these events in literature or television series: for example, in tom wolfe’s essay, “the noonday underground”, he describes a young english worker letting off steam at lunchtime discotheques in 1968: two hundred and fifty people at tiles, “underground at noon—a vast black room heaving with music and human bodies” (quoted in poschardt 2002: 132). in the twenty-fifth episode of its fifth season, the american television series the office referred to the same type of space-time: a “disco café” built on the floor below the employees’ offices threatens their productivity when they go dancing during their breaks. if the symbolic value attached to djs and to the space-time they seem to enchant with their presence may seem sufficient reason to make web streaming a moment not to be missed, dayan and katz have shown that “television ceremonies” tend to occur in association with a cluster of peripheral programs in order to better guide the spectator towards an experience heuguet | when club culture goes online 83 of the mediatized happening as media-event. the particularity of numerous contemporary platforms for online writing such as facebook and twitter can be found in the injunction addressed to web users to produce micro-texts and to put into circulation media productions using semi-automatized modes of writing. before, during, and after the broadcast, these branded web-tools are mobilized to signal the “live” broadcast as a moment to experience and recount. “timeline” framing elements drawn from these platforms appear on the “live” page immediately underneath the live video stream. fixed thusly to the broadcasting framework, these objects take advantage of the connotations of social affinity organized on facebook and twitter to suggest that the dj-mix resembles a community of experience online. web users who possess “profiles” registered with these platforms thus find themselves invited by boiler room to redouble the broadcast’s status as event through the spectacle of the status update. the timeline on the page serves as an exemplar: giving prominence to such micro-publishing enjoin users to write in turn. the same result is encouraged by a series of micro-signs that attempt to make online expression a low-cost technological operation—“in one click”—according to “an economic logic of least effort” (candel and gomez-mejia 2013). in this way, the activation of the intermediary sign “tweet” triggers the opening of a web-browser window with a pre-written message of the form “live @boileroom http:// [link]”, which the user can simply edit and publish. with regards to facebook, the injunction to quick, colloquial writing is explicit—“discuss this event”—and reinforced by the antechronological dating of comments: “[##] minutes ago”. this production of real-time interest in the broadcast is accompanied by a highlighting of its popularity. like other internet-based industries, boiler room “capitalizes on-screen the systematic production of values related to activity, current events, gregariousness, and popularity” (gomez-mejia 2011: 395). the “like” and “tweet” buttons are juxtaposed with small bubbles representing the sum of comments published mentioning that page on each of these social media sites. re-textualizations of an icon such as the “like” button can take on different meanings: “personal expression, indication of a potential audience for a brand, or reader endorsement” (candel and gomez-mejia 2013: 145). the manner in which it is positioned in the “live” page suggests that, from the point of view of the page’s designers, the ambiguity between these three sorts of statements does not pose a challenge to the imagination of a limited and specialized community. the number “83,000” on this page, which remains visible even when the broadcast is not taking place, means that the button is not exclusively linked to the broadcast itself, but also to the page as a whole. the consubstantial ambiguity of this micro-form, which brings a variety of intentionalities to the same polling symbol, and whose ultimate meaning remains unresolved in the absence of a legend, is thus instrumentalized by boiler room to imply mass popularity. this valorization of popularity “by the numbers” may seem to be contradictory to the image of a specialized community, unless one considers facebook’s imaginary of identity and affinity—“profiles”; “friends”; etc.—which is concentrated in the micro-form “like + [###]”. this icon can thus circulate in various spaces, and the number can reach impressive heights, all the while carrying positive connotations. dancecult 8(1)84 there is thus, all other things being equal, a logical affinity between two approaches to dual entertainment, those of facebook and boiler room. boiler room creates an event that is accessible [in person] to a limited group, in order to then give everyone access to it via broadcast, all the while suggesting through its discourse that internet spectators are not there by accident. facebook incites users to create a network of “friends” to whom their micro-publications are primarily addressed, all the while making them available to everyone else—according to the platform’s default privacy settings—in the moment as well as afterwards, as an archive. the use of the “like” button by boiler room thus takes on the traits of a fruitful encounter—symbolically as well as commercially—between the imagery of underground music and those of social media websites. media exposure, a source of criticism within these worlds, is doubly neutralized here. it is firstly neutralized by its proximity to all of the signs on the “live” and “recordings” pages—limited audience in the video, web layout—that mobilize specialized knowledge and, secondly, by the interpretation of the number associated with the word “like”, as if referring to the number of potential “friends” included in a group of user-publishers whose co-presence on the same social media site might indicate possible affinities. this media-based establishment of a paradoxical community success would thus constitute the sort of compromise both dreamed of and sought after by stakeholders, between the values of underground musical experience on the one hand and the principle of media-accessibility on the other—and all rendered possible through a strategic use of contemporary online mediation. notes 1 original publication: guillaume heuguet. 2015. “quand la culture de la discothèque est mise en ligne”. culture et musées 24: 107–24. <http://www.actes-sud.fr/catalogue/ musees-collections-expositions/revue-culture-et-musees-n-24> 2 [translator: the original term used in french is “le mix”, to refer to the predominant mode of musical performance in electronic dance music cultures. as an english loanword, its usage in french does not risk being confused with other, more common meanings of the term in english. in english, a more common equivalent term would be the “dj set”, but this loses the metaphorical reference to mixing, which is at times important for the author’s semiotic reading. instead, i have simply translated the term as “dj-mix”, which is also a valid (albeit less idiomatic) term in english.] 3 [translator: although saville was not the first to play records in a dance hall, he claims to have been the first disc jockey to use twin turntables to ensure a constant stream of music to accompany dancing.] 4 see: http://boilerroom.tv/about/ (accessed 1 may 2012). this page, as it was observed in may of 2012, has a particular status because it seems to be addressed primarily to potential commercial partners while nonetheless remaining readable by any web user. the layout of the text itself evokes a commercial presentation with prominent and concise subject headings, the name boiler room set in bold capital letters, and a general tonality of promise http://www.actes-sud.fr/catalogue/musees-collections-expositions/revue-culture-et-musees-n-24 http://www.actes-sud.fr/catalogue/musees-collections-expositions/revue-culture-et-musees-n-24 http://boilerroom.tv/about/ heuguet | when club culture goes online 85 that resembles a press release. notably, this text concludes with a comment that addresses expectations regarding relations with sponsoring brands: “by working solely with brands we respect we are building a truly sustainable model”. [translator: for an archived version of the page on 4 may 2012, see: https://web.archive.org/ web/20120504190932/http://boilerroom.tv/about/] 5 according to simon reynolds, “abandoning the last vestiges of mainstream pop-radio protocol”, the british pirate radios that accompanied the rave movement “sounded like ‘raves on the air: rowdy, chaotic…with a strong emphasis on audience participation (enabled by the spread of the portable cellular phone)” (reynolds 1998: 265). 6 see: http://www.c-heads.com/2012/04/19/interview-with-the-co-founder-of-boilerroombpm/ (accessed 8 september 2014). 7 see: http://boilerroom.tv/session/boiler-room-berlin-006-dixon-move-d-midnight-operatorlive-jus-ed/ (accessed 1 may 2012). 8 see: http://boilerroom.tv/live/ (accessed 1 may 2012). 9 see: http://boilerroom.tv/dixons-30-min-mix-2 (accessed 1 may 2012). 10 this approach in terms of “media writing” [écriture médiatique] and “on-screen writing” [écrit d’écran] is indebted to the work of souchier on editorial enunciation as well as souchier and jeanneret on the poetics of on-screen writing (souchier 1998; souchier and jeanneret 1999).   11 “from the socio-semiotic perspective on digital media, the notion of on-screen writing [écrit d’écran] does not dissociate the surface of writing produced on the screen from the structuring of the text made possible by the technological apparatus” (souchier and jeanneret 2009). this concept is especially useful here for thinking through the media productions set up by a similar enunciative instance, that is, “web pages” that integrate multiple regimes of writing: text, images, video, and combinations of programming code associated with small-scale visual forms like the “like” button, which are connected to a cultural memory of media. 12 see: http://boilerroom.tv/about/ (accessed 1 may 2012). 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trivialité. les médiations de la communication, enjeu de pouvoir. paris: editions non standard. jouvenet, morgan. 2001. “emportés par le mix: les dj et le travail de l’émotion”. terrain 37. <http://dx.doi.org/10.4000/terrain.1297> lawrence, tim. 2003. love save’s the day. a history of american dance music culture, 1970–1979. durham: duke university press. le guern, philippe. 2012. “un spectre hante le rock... l’obsession patrimoniale, les musiques populaires et actuelles et les enjeux de la ‘muséomomification’”. questions de communication 22:7–44. <http://dx.doi.org/10.4000/questionsdecommunication.6820> maisonneuve, sophie. 2009. l’invention du disque 1877-1949: genèse de l’usage des médias musicaux contemporains. paris: archives contemporaines. poschardt, ulf. 2002. dj culture. paris: kargo. http://dx.doi.org/10.3917/rfs.503.0599 http://dx.doi.org/10.4000/terrain.1297 http://dx.doi.org/10.4000/questionsdecommunication.6820 heuguet | when club culture goes online 87 reynolds, simon. 1998. energy flash: a journey through rave music and dance culture. london: picador. shapiro, peter. 2007. turn the beat around: the secret history of disco. london: faber & faber. thornton, sarah. 2013. club culture: music, media and subcultural capital. hoboken: wiley. good vibes friday: reflections on livestreaming during the covid-19 lockdown samantha warren university of portsmouth (uk) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.05> this is a tale of seven djs' rapid adaptation to a new way of performing, accompanied by reflections from the dance music scene on the future of the virtual club. a few weeks into the covid-19 "lockdown", on good friday 2020, we decided to convert my planned "in the key of she" networking party at brighton music conference to a live-streamed event: "good vibes friday". figure 1. good vibes friday flyer (2020). photo: samantha warren. in the key of she is the title of my leverhulme trust fellowship, exploring career experiences of female, female-identifying and gender minority electronic music (self) producers to shed light on the persistent male dominance of digital-creative cultural production. the music industry recognises its gender balance problem with various initiatives to balance festival and gig line-ups, such as the keychange initiative. when we consider the more technical roles in the industry, things get even more unbalanced. for example, according to the annenberg inclusion initiative, only around 2% of music producers are women (smith et al. 2019). with electronic music production increasingly being seen as a source of reputational capital for contemporary djs, if women are not producing and/or releasing their own tracks, they will struggle to compete with their male peers (reitsamer 2011). getting started: pre-show nerves we'd agreed to run the event several weeks in advance of the planned date, and i got stuck in to producing flyers and artwork for it (figure 1), but we all put off doing anything about the technical arrangements until just over a week beforehand. with the exception of me, we were a bunch of experienced, accomplished performers, well used to setting up technical equipment and with considerable audio know-how. yet we were still suffering from that destructive kind of paralysis that comes from being anxious of the unknown, and especially the technological unknown. these streaming technologies are rooted in the gaming world, and thus firmly coded as masculine, so it can feel extra daunting for women to learn to use them. after some deliberation we decided to use the free broadcast software obs, and stream via twitch. i think we were all in denial about learning how to livestream an event to some degree. at the start of this project most of us didn't know each other very well, but we all agreed that one of the nicest parts of the experience was pulling together to help each other out—there was definitely a camaraderie in trying to get everything to work, and none of us wanted to quit. i’m pleased to say that all but one of us managed to get the set-up to work in the end. when you're a dj who is also female, you're used to having to make everything just that little bit better than when the men do it. we feel we are under pressure to be perfect every time as any mistakes we do make are less likely to be attributed to an off day, or regular slip-up on the part of the dj, than they are to the fact we are women. in turn, our clattered mix, or poorly adjusted sound level is then extended to all female djs, in ways that just don't happen for men. it can be hard to mix with the weight of the sisterhood resting on your shoulders. we also knew that women are likely to be subject to online trolling (suhasini 2020), with misogynist posts and sexualised remarks about their appearance, dress, hair, etc. track selection, set progression and especially technical skill are also often called into question (renshaw 2016). despite being confident live performers in the physical world, it was not surprising that most of us were nervous about putting ourselves out there to a public we couldn't see, through a medium we weren't familiar with. to charge or not to charge? i initially intended to link the livestream to a paypal pool so i could pay the 6 other djs who were sharing their music and time. for at least 2 of the djs, gigging is a large part of their income, and another relies entirely on her musical career to make a living. the covid-19 lockdown has completely wiped out most full time djs' main revenue streams. at the time of writing, there is still no live sector, and with no clubs open, there are no gigs, which means no income. in addition, many freelance djs fell between the cracks of the uk government's support for the self-employed. i hoped that our audience would want to support these artists who had seen their livelihoods disappear overnight. however, when contacting a couple of pr people in my networks to ask if they would help promote the event, they were reluctant to do so if we were raising money for the artists themselves. so we decided to run the event as a fundraiser for crisis, the uk homeless charity, for their covid-19 appeal (and raised almost £400). the general feeling was that if we "charged" to access the livestream, there would be a social media "backlash" with fans considering a dj playing in their own home, to audiences in their own homes to be money-grabbing and self-centred, plus people just wouldn’t pay to watch/ listen. i had already seen this response to deep house/ techno dj mr. c's facebook offer of one-to-one dj lessons via zoom for $100, plus a similar reaction to another dj’s offer to provide detailed feedback on bedroom producers' tracks for £30 a time. these seemed like excellent opportunities—when else would you be able to have such direct access to big name professionals in this way? and why shouldn’t these people charge for their time (reynaldo 2020)? the backlash demonstrates an assumption that djs are well paid, something that is not true for the vast majority of those who work in the industry. but more significantly, it speaks very much to the "culture of free" on the internet, that just because it’s online, it should be way cheaper, ideally costing nothing. we see this in the pricing of any creative product distributed or consumed via the internet. there is no shortage of people who will provide their content for free either, meaning that anyone who wants—or more importantly needs—to monetise their content will have great difficulty doing so because there is always someone to undercut them. even the good vibes friday djs were happy not to get paid, saying that they were just looking forward to jamming with a bunch of other women, learning new livestreaming skills and getting the chance to play "in public" which in turn would help them maintain their profile among their followers. yet in the physical world, clubbers would have happily paid to enter a club. we were providing 8 hours of non-stop music, the djs were still performing for the audience, still doing their job, so surely that’s worth a fiver? managing the stream: communication is key sadly, on the night there were problems with jay hill's stream quality. she is located on the east coast of the u.s. and although her local internet was working fine, something was going awry under the pond it seemed and her stream quality was so poor that we had to abandon her feed. she has since recreated the set and posted it on her youtube channel (hill 2020). jay hill's post-stream recording of her set for good vibes friday. poor jay played for at least half an hour before she glanced at her phone and saw i’d been trying to message to tell her that both her video and audio stream were too stilted and jumpy to continue and we had to move to the next dj who played for an extra hour. this really brought home how important keeping in real-time contact with one another was in managing the stream—coordinating set start and finish times to ensure minimal pauses between djs, and relaying feedback on audio levels, camera positions and so on proved invaluable. we already had a shared facebook messenger group and it was brilliant fun sending comments and messages of support to each other as the night progressed. however, it can be hard, and feel unprofessional, to check your phone when you are in the mix, but unless you are working with two laptops it's also the only way you can see the comments that your audience are leaving, which is a vital part of feeling connected, as i discuss further below. a couple of us had computer crashes and last-minute tech panics, but by and large the stream went off really well. twitch has a mode where one account can "host" another stream through it and this is the system we used. it meant that the audience only had to stay "tuned" to one twitch account for the whole night, and only one of us (me) had to be involved in managing the change-over between djs. at the end of one set i would simply "un-host" the current dj, then "host" the next using a simple command in the chat box. if there was a delay i could revert to streaming my own content which displayed an "up next" placeholder. changeovers were a little stressful, but apart from jay's connectivity disaster they all went smoothly and the sense of achievement was palpable. i very much enjoyed being a virtual stage-manager! yes, we could pull this off! jacki-e · jacki-e itkos livestream set 10-04-2020 jacki-e’s "good vibes friday" techno set recorded on the night. performing to a virtual audience: togetherness through comments one of the most interesting dimensions to the whole event was how it felt to be performing at home, to an empty room—or perhaps our partners, and pets—while simultaneously knowing you are broadcasting live to an unseen audience. djing is a co-created performative artform as brigitte biehl's wonderful work on "kinaesthetic feedback loops" (2018) explains. the circuit of embodied exchange between dj and dancers is an affective element in working the crowd and responding to their vibe in terms of mixing style, track selection, tempo, energy management and so on. in turn, they respond to you as dj and the loop continues. of course, all this is missing when the audience is only in your imagination! as i have mentioned already, one important way in which connection was established was via online messaging. while playing my set i was receiving messages from personal friends via whatsapp, messages from my fellow stream djs on messenger, and from people i didn't know via the twitch chat box. two of us had microphones in our set-up which made it easier to respond directly to the "crowd". saya, one of our djs, put this beautifully: "i felt togetherness through the comments. instead of looking over the decks at my dancers, i was looking at my computer screen for their words". the club in the home: ironing boards, props and camera angles one of the challenges of djing in a bar or club is that you often have no idea what the dj booth, or set-up will be like. for women, the decks are often too high (a few of us have had to stand on boxes in the past, to be tall enough to see everything properly), the lighting can be poor, and the space cramped—all of which you have little or no control over. when you bring the club to your home, you have total control, but this brings with it a whole new set of problems. do you have furniture that’s the right height? is what can be seen behind you appropriate? how do you stop kids and pets wandering into the scene? are you able to shut yourself off from flatmates, pets, or family for the duration of the stream? does any of this even matter? for me, one of the joys of watching livestreams has been voyeuristic—to see into the artist’s domestic space. the ethos of edmc (particularly in the underground) is very much diy, so it seems right that this extends to livestreams too. watching carl cox sitting in his music room, casually flipping vinyl on and off his turntables, or four tet play a boiler room set from his house with his children’s artwork on the walls also feels like a great leveller, a restoration of the human in the idol and a return to a more community feel around the music and its performance. it’s also just been fun to see how my friends and djs i admire, like anna lunoe, have dressed their spaces with fluffy toys, disco-balls, backdrops and gone to so much trouble to recreate that club experience, all while maintaining enough light for effective video. figure 2. just her's lightbox (2020). photo: samantha warren. partners and family can also be much more involved than when their other half, or mum, goes out to play a show. our partners proved invaluable in helping with technical logistics and screen tests, making cameo appearances, monitoring the chat messages and even bringing an interactive dimension to things—just her was taking requests for phrases to display on the lightbox that her wife then duly fulfilled no matter what was suggested (figure 2)! for us, the main issues were firstly getting the right equipment—not all of us had cdjs or a controller in our homes, and even when we did, it wasn't straightforward to set up the decks where there was room to play, and get a decent angle for the webcam(s). although i was fortunate to have a dedicated studio space, my dj equipment was set up facing the wall, which required a lot of trial and error to reconfigure. it involved shifting the decks and mixer and using a tall side-table borrowed from the living room to balance the laptop on, via a pile of books. the dj among us with the most professional looking set up used an ironing board draped in a dark sheet! with another pinned up behind her, and disco-lights providing the perfect ambience, you never would have known she was standing in her living room. another of us simply wasn't able to make her setup work, so we just streamed her audio with a logo placeholder for the visuals. the alternative would have been to stream footage of her chest for the entire hour which didn't seem like quality viewing! the final issue to take into account was the timing of people’s slots—was the dj able to play loud music when children, or other members of their household or neighbours were trying to sleep? figure 3. the makeshift livestream studio (2020). photo: samantha warren. virtually the new normal? some are suggesting that the "virtual club" may outlive the pandemic (lhooq 2020). at least two of the good vibes only djs are planning to continue online after clubs re-open—not to replace their face-to-face gigs, but for marketing, and connecting with new audiences, especially those in different countries. since the gvo stream, saya has been booked for an impressive number of livestreams and virtual gigs and hopes these will translate into bookings in the physical world when the time comes, and psibindi plans to launch a psysisters channel on twitch to platform women artists and djs. i will also continue to livestream from time to time as a result of this experience—if only to a handful of friends. i have been enjoying the "pop-up" feel of many streams—a quick message to friends, a post on social media and then "go live". it's reminiscent of the secret parties of the early rave scene. but our experiences with good vibes only show that not everyone is invited to this party. access to dj equipment, a space and time to perform, strong bandwidth, technical know-how and family/domestic circumstances all throw up challenges that will disproportionately affect parents (and probably that mostly means mothers), those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, and people who live in areas with poor connectivity (smith et al. 2018)—either through their rural location, or high demand on local networks. playing music at home also requires your neighbours' patience which may not be forthcoming if you live in a tower block, or multi-occupancy housing, which is likely to impact on bame communities especially. if we want to exploit the opportunities the virtual club offers for all, these issues are important to note. it has now become clear a return to the "old normal" is not likely for a long time and fully immersive events are now appearing. vr festivals with full and impressive line-ups such as lost horizon and resident advisor now has a streamland page where ravers can find an event to "attend" any night of the week. however, only those with the means to stream are able to take part in any digital rave revolution if it happens. these larger, professionally organised events are also raising the profile of monetisation. since our good vibes only stream, soundcloud have partnered with twitch to fast-track soundcloud pro creators to "affiliate level" on twitch allowing them to receive revenue from ads displayed during their stream. facebook have a "stars" system allowing those who are enjoying livestreams and videos to send money to the artist, albeit in tiny amounts and reportedly have plans to roll-out a fuller pay-per-view system for "going live". individual artists have been "busking" by asking for donations or asking people to buy their music on bandcamp (especially on the first friday of every month when bandcamp have been waiving their fees). mixcloud's new "live" feature allows tips (morse 2020) and importantly has the most comprehensive partnership with licensing organizations meaning more creators get paid for their music too (reynaldo 2020). the virtual worlds and immersive virtual club experiences described by llooq (2020) and kocay (2020) certainly paint an enticing picture, and surely connect with increasing social shifts toward online connection, digital engagement and virtual experiences—whether we think this is for better or for worse. people from all over the world—djs as holograms and crowd as avatars—can join these events in one space that simultaneously exists everywhere, yet nowhere. the ultimate in simulation, a perfect copy of something that can never exist in material form. if baudrillard were alive today, perhaps he would just smile and say "je te l'avais dit", i told you so. acknowledgements i would like to thank just her, saya, jay hill, jacki-e, malissa, and psibindi for sharing their reflections on the event, enabling the writing of this article. author biography samantha warren is a longstanding raver and more recent dj and producer, as dovetail. she is a co-chair of the association for electronic music’s (afem) diversity & inclusion group and a professor in organization studies at university of portsmouth. she is currently undertaking a leverhulme fellowship "in the key of she: women, technology and cultural production" investigating the careers of female electronic music (self) producers, motivated by broader research interests in creative labour, and relationships between work, aesthetics and the senses. samantha.warren@port.ac.uk http://www.port.ac.uk/about-us/structure-and-governance/our-people/our-staff/samantha-warren references biehl, brigitte. 2018. "'in the mix': relational leadership explored through an analysis of techno djs and dancers". leadership 15(3): 339-59. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1742715018765050>. kocay, lisa. 2020. "inside lost horizon: a virtual reality music festival". forbes. 1 july. < https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisakocay/2020/06/30/lost-horizon-virtual-reality-music-festival/#442599103900>. (accessed 18 august 2020). lhooq, michelle. 2020. "people are paying real money to get into virtual zoom nightclubs". bloomberg, 14 april. <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-14/virtual-nightlife-grows-past-dj-livestreams-to-paid-zoom-clubs>. (accessed 18 august 2020). morse, phil. 2020. "how to legally make money from your dj mixtapes & livestreams". digitaldjtips. 15 may. <https://www.digitaldjtips.com/2020/05/legal-dj-mixtapes-money>. (accessed 18 august 2020). reitsamer, rosa. 2011. "the diy careers of techno and drum 'n' bass djs in vienna". dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 3(1): 28–43. <https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.02>. renshaw, david. 2016. "how we can get sexist trolls out of electronic music?". fader. 11 july. <https://www.thefader.com/2016/07/11/boiler-room-nightwave-sexism-interview>. (accessed 18 august 2020). reynaldo, shawn. 2020. "dj sets are going online but is anybody getting paid?". pitchfork. 22 april. <https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/dj-sets-livestreaming-economics-electronic-music-coronavirus>. (accessed 18 august 2020). smith, alan, nic fildes, david blood, max harlow, caroline nevitt and ændrew rininsland. 2018. "broadband speed map reveals britain’s new digital divide". financial times. 18 july. <https://ig.ft.com/gb-broadband-speed-map>. (accessed 30 august 2020). smith, stacy. choueiti, m. and pieper, k. inclusion in the recording studio? gender and race/ethnicity of artists, songwriters & producers across 600 popular songs from 2012-2018. los angeles: university of southern california, 2019. <http://assets.uscannenberg.org/docs/aii-inclusion-recording-studio-2019.pdf>. (accessed 18 august 2020). suhasini, l. 2020. "why women artists are easier targets for trolls at online gigs". rolling stone india. 17 april. <https://rollingstoneindia.com/why-women-artists-are-easier-targets-for-trolls-at-online-gigs/>. (accessed 18 august 2020). filmography "good vibes friday – in the key of she". youtube. uploaded on 13 april 2020. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2etkdaeo_vk&list=plgligzgy6tztnhif2py0vjsqsx_kgb6bb>. (accessed 25 august 2020). boutiquing at the raindance campout: relational aesthetics as festival technology dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 7(1): 35–54 issn 1947-5403 ©2015 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.01.02 boutiquing at the raindance campout: relational aesthetics as festival technology bryan schmidt university of minnesota (united states) abstract this article uses nicholas bourriaud’s theorizing of “relational aesthetics” to consider the mechanics that facilitate strong subcultural ties amongst participants of small-scale, “boutique” festivals. relational aesthetics describes art that takes human interaction as its theoretical horizon, where art works are envisioned primarily as social interstices. using california’s raindance campout as a case study, i argue that festivals may be viewed as a form of relational art, where organizers create environments that prompt meaningful human performance. building on critiques of the revolutionary energy bourriaud invests in his concept, i propose that we might productively understand relational aesthetics as an indeterminate technology always adaptable to particular political ideologies. i use art present at raindance to illuminate some of the event’s unspoken political prerogatives; despite attempting to disassociate from the ethos of a perceived us mainstream, i argue that raindance still coincides with logics of modern liberalism including consumerism and cultural appropriation. keywords: relational aesthetics, performance, festival, subculture, ideology bryan schmidt is a phd student in the department of theatre arts and dance at the university of minnesota. he holds an ma in theatre studies from florida state university. his dissertation research focuses on the “transformational festival” movement, using the lens of performance to examine its connection to global ecoand ethno-tourism industries. his work can be seen in theatre journal and tdr (the drama review). he can be contacted at <schm3474@umn.edu>. feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.01.02 mailto:schm3474@umn.edu dancecult 7(1)36 introduction in operation since 2005, the raindance campout departs from mega-music festival models by building an aesthetically customized, social and spiritual experience. with a maximum capacity of just one thousand people, and no indication that admission limits will soon be significantly raised, raindance exemplifies what some festivalgoers call a “boutique” festival, a small-scale event that caters to a specific subculture in its music and aesthetics. usually run for profit, boutique festivals emphasize style, personality and community over big-name attractions and spectacle firepower, drawing tight-knit circles (“tribes”, as they sometimes call themselves) instead of disparate crowds. for raindance, this means including intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic components to distinguish itself from the myriad other events in the california festival ecosystem. in addition to djs spinning day and night on amplified sound stages built in lush, natural settings, the gathering hosts a range of organized rituals, psychedelic art displays and workshops on subjects like chakra yoga and “aquaponics with applied permaculture”. raindance combines electronic dance music, artisanal vending, intricately constructed outdoor spaces that house performances and lectures, and a spiritual component linked to the “new paradigm” (a contemporary redeployment of new age) that integrates—and, it might be argued, appropriates—cultural practices from east asia, south asia, south america and, especially, pre-colonial america. the brainchild of dj john edmonds (commonly known as little john), raindance is a product of the santa cruz underground rave scene with related events spanning back to 1995. although raindance now takes place far from santa cruz (at least a 4to 6-hour drive, generally), it maintains a connection to the local scene, with djs and much of the crowd hailing from that area and returning to the festival year after year. though open to the general public, the ticketing link for raindance 2013 referred to participants as a “private group” and sold “membership passes for our annual private gathering”, suggesting an attempt to retain a social dynamic that does not extend far from its original constituency (raindance presents 2013a). as one first-time attendee put it: “raindance is a family affair— everyone knows each other and has been a part of the [northern california] underground tribe for a long time. refined, evolved lifers, industry players, baller growers, local hicks, old-school scenesters, down-to-earth artists and misfit freaks made up the crowd, which felt experienced, passionate and highly stylized” (knowfun 2014). for this raindancer, the feeling of a tight-knit community is attractive. his valorization of experience and stylization speak to how boutique festivals create unique, appealing subcultural articulations—sociality distinctive enough to be considered part of the festival’s attractions, but manifested through the improvised activities of the participants themselves, rather than prepared stagings by organizers. by perceiving members of the crowd as “experienced”, “refined”, “evolved”, the reviewer enunciates participants’ ability to hold space in unique ways as a kind of artistic skill, one that can be developed through practice. in this article i wish to use the raindance campout as a case study to think through how social practice can take on aesthetic qualities. the event typifies trends in global festival culture that emphasize organizing principles based on generating interpersonal connection schmidt | boutiquing at the raindance campout 37 and dialogue to create an artistic synergy within temporary constructed spaces, trends that have now started to be adopted by large-scale, highly corporate events as well. yet small-scale, boutique festivals should not be looked at as large festivals in-waiting. that is, they should not be characterized by what they lack, be it large crowds, high-profile musical acts, or spectacle firepower; instead, boutique festivals should be considered sites for personal and subcultural identity-making based on playful, improvised, personal encounters with other participants, and it is towards this activity that their art, music, workshops, architecture and even vending are oriented. as opposed to the unifying mass spectacles of large events—crystalized in, say, the throngs of people cramming together to view a headliner at coachella, or the collective cheers of burning man participants watching the event’s titular effigy go up in flames—raindance thrives by generating affective ties between participants through momentary encounters that occur not only on the main dance floors, but also in interstitial, participant-created performance sites: renegade sound stages, altars and installations, drum circles, theme camps. in what follows, i first investigate the creative potency of raindance by considering it through the lens of what art curator and critic nicholas bourriaud calls “relational aesthetics”, work that creates social situations (rather than objects for contemplation) and takes as its theoretical horizon the field of human interaction. bourriaud’s theory provides a critical apparatus that allows us to consider the festival space as one co-created by participants and organizers, where the event’s music, dance, sculpture, workshops and ritual practices become social interstices that facilitate micropractices of intersubjectivity; these induce a sense of alterity vis-à-vis quotidian forms of political economy. within the space of a boutique festival, i argue, relational aesthetics solidify subcultural ties by creating a feeling of communality, a bond that helps instill a value system determined by the event’s framing dramaturgies. while such practices are present at large-scale events as well, the relative intimacy of boutique festivals—which affords the sense of a personalized, exclusive experience—creates a rarified air that makes subcultural identification more acute. to members of relevant circles, attending boutique festivals confers what cultural sociologist sarah thornton (following pierre bourdieu) calls “subcultural capital”, the bona fides that allow entry into a niche community and distinguish oneself from the mainstream (1995: 27). in the context of leave-no-trace boutique festivals like raindance, which lack sizable archives or media visibility, using relational aesthetics as an analytical lens helps us understand the mechanics and political economy of subcultural identity-making. relying on observations noted while attending the 2013 and 2014 raindance campouts as a participant-observer (both times working as a volunteer), i begin by discussing how raindance might be viewed as an example of relational art. while, for bourriaud, relational aesthetics carry an inherently progressive and democratizing energy, following prominent critiques of the theory i suggest that their political implications are more murky—potent yet indeterminate. to help unpack the larger implications of this small festival, then, i conclude by discussing raindance as an example of an emerging category of similar events known as “transformational festivals”; this serves to illuminate the dramaturgy that guides participants and organizers towards specific ethical imperatives, as well as to highlight some of the political prerogatives that attend such practices. dancecult 7(1)38 raindance as relational art discussing his fifteen-year career throwing parties and festivals, little john describes his motivation in terms of building scenarios that allow for improvised and combinative artistic expression: “i personally like to provide space for creative people to be able to express themselves through music, dance, painting, stilt walking—whatever your creative passion is, bring it, do it, throw it in the mix” (limbach 2010). little john’s impetus for creating events like raindance characterize the festival’s power as deriving not so much from the spectacle technologies and sensorial stimulation that amount to “putting on a show”— massive sound systems, choreographed light shows, pyrotechnics, etc.—but from its ability to summon artistic display enacted by the participants themselves. many, perhaps even a majority of raindance participants identify as artists in some respect, and the festival brings together their creative energy in order to build a unique synergy. staging a festival involves developing aesthetically heightened zones that attract social interaction, and logistically enabling participants to do the same. much like katherine chen’s characterization of the organizing strategies of burning man (considered by many to be the progenitor of contemporary alternative festival culture), orchestrating an event like raindance is a matter of attracting talented individuals to the event, motivating them to contribute, and creating an infrastructure that allows the free flow of artistic energy (2009). the characterization of artistic practice as a process of instigating (rather than enacting) creative expression coincides with nicholas bourriaud’s theorizing on relational art in his book relational aesthetics. bourriaud defines relational art as “an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space” (2002: 5). he contrasts relational art to object-oriented modes of art making characteristic of modernity, wherein a completed piece gets consumed by a patron, who is excluded from the act of creation and presumed to be passive when interfacing with the artwork. relational aesthetics, instead, present an art form “where the substrate is formed by intersubjectivity, and which takes being-together as a central theme, the ‘encounter’ between beholder and picture, and the collective elaboration of meaning” (2002: 5–6, emphasis added). in other words, the artwork is not a materialized manifestation of the artist’s private imagination, but the performative interplay that results from people coming into contact with the piece itself, and with each other in the spatiotemporal frame presented by the piece. little john seems to echo this sentiment: “to me it’s like, if you’re a painter, you have your canvas, you have your paints, you have an idea of what you want to paint, and that’s your thing. for me, it’s like a three dimensional, living, breathing painting that i set up, and create this whole interactive art space of music, sound, artists” (limbach 2010). his artistic product is not a sculpture, painting or concert; it is not even the architecture of the festival space itself, with its sound stages, installations and tentscape. it is, rather, the participantgenerated performances that activate these sites in real time. while bourriaud developed relational aesthetics as a way of explaining 1990s interactive gallery art, his theory helps us schmidt | boutiquing at the raindance campout 39 understand the labor necessary to create the decorated dance floors, altars, sculptures and lighting displays scattered throughout the festival; they are not intended to be the festival’s foci, but their loci, gathering points that prompt meaningful human performance. the performances that take place at raindance are infinitely variable and may or may not correspond to recognized artistic genres. the festival brings different forms of art-making together within a single space, allowing them to intersect with one another. there is, of course, music: santa cruz “family dj’s”, acts from the greater california area and usually a couple international artists.1 there is dancing: scrums bouncing in front of the sound stages, flow artists spinning glowing poi, staves or hula hoops, tweaked-out loners on the periphery bizarrely bouncing with the beat. there is painting: artists with canvases just to the side of the dance floor creating vibrant, visceral, visionary art; they color with techniques so nuanced that the images seem to subtly bend and warp, injected with a kind of kineticism. there are poetry readings, water sculptures, electro-kinematic installations and much more. what makes the space so exciting, though, is the saturation of talented individuals in close proximity, enabling them to scaffold their creative energies by riffing off one another: a visual artist’s brush strokes become guided by the music (see fig. 1); a dancer creates an elaborate choreography using a bedazzled scepter she borrows from a metal sculptor; painters design crazy body art that circulates the grounds through ambulation. even staged rituals are made all the more potent through musical accompaniment and by taking place near beautifullydesigned altars that incorporate spiritual icons from around the world. figure 1. a painter creates visionary art near the dance floor of a raindance sound stage. photo credit: author (2013). dancecult 7(1)40 art emerges in unexpected places: walking from the main dance floor back to your campsite, for instance, you might encounter a well-made stone stack, a light installation hanging from the trees, a theme camp with carpets and pillows decorated with east asian spiritual symbols to encourage impromptu meditation. sometimes enhanced by participants’ use of hallucinogens, these eye-catching areas become assembly points for meaningful interaction. one evening, as i strolled through a wooded area in the quieter part of the festival grounds, i stumbled upon a van that had been converted into a mini-sound stage, complete with turntables, amps and small, rotating leds; as amateur djs spun their jams, passers-by gathered around to listen, dance and converse. someone started spinning poi, which prompted me to join him; a woman began to wildly dance, going airborne with each base drop, stinging the ground with her foot and kicking up dirt into the eyes of those standing around; someone else came by and offered to rub fine-scented oils on anyone who cared for it. the entire event was aesthetically heightened, too, by participants’ costumes, face paint, and trendy festivalwear (many components of which could be purchased in the festival’s vending tents): tunics, boots, utility belts, corsets, glowing boas, bangles, feathers, jewelry of all kinds, snazzy fedoras with ostentatious feathers sticking out, a woman with a fur tail, a guy in a child’s tiger suit. the saturation and simultaneity of these myriad creative activities in the space of the festival blurs disciplinary boundaries, breaks down the barrier between quotidian life and aesthetic encounter, collapses the binary between performer and spectator and troubles the notion of a stable, structural artistic frame—where and when, precisely, does quotidian life end and the aesthetic experience begin? cultivating a participatory ethic, the festival itself becomes an example of what performance scholar wendy clupper meier calls a “heightened theatrical zone”, where self-performing, role-playing and collective collaboration become operative modes of being, and which opens up space for the remaking of identity (2007: 170). likewise, graham st john describes similar visionary art festivals as hyperliminal spaces that “expose participants to disparate modes of selfdissolution and reflexivity” (2014: 64). the potential for unexpected and aesthetically rich performance activity to crop up at any moment invigorates the raindance space and binds its populace together. discussing the performance event, theatre scholar erika fischer-lichte uses the concept of the “autopoietic feedback loop” to describe the invisible, self-generating energies that connect participants to one another; by creating an oscillating sense of the self as performer and the self as spectator, subject and object, participants are plunged into a state of liminality2 (2008: 12). in doing so, the performance event scrambles notions of the self and primes participants for communal transformation (50). considering raindance through the lens of relational aesthetics allows for the notion that, within the container of the event space, art is everywhere and always a performance event; it can arise unexpectedly, co-generated, free-form, disciplinarily intersectional, subject to momentary contingencies. fischer-lichte’s theorizing might be seen to operate in schmidt | boutiquing at the raindance campout 41 conjunction with bourriaud’s, which characterizes artistic practice as an experimental production of new social bonds; together, they point to a way of understanding how the density of creative activity at raindance might lead to powerful forms of subcultural identification. its boutique size and ability to summon the tight-knit santa cruz edm community create circumstances wherein familiarity and repeated encounter give rise to a sense of intimacy and intersubjectivity. the limits of relational aesthetics while intersubjective connections may be intensely meaningful to festival participants, it is crucial to question their durability and political directionality rather than assume their inherent value. scholars have rightly critiqued bourriaud’s sanguine approach to the development of relational aesthetics on a number of different grounds, especially the liberatory rhetoric that accompanies it. for bourriaud, relational art is without a doubt a positive innovation, one that “permit[s] the development of new political and cultural designs” through dialogic interaction; it is capable of generating new economic possibilities by allowing for micropolitical disengagements from the dominant system of capitalist exchange: over and above its mercantile nature and its semantic value, the work of art represents a social interstice. this interstice term was used by karl marx to describe trading communities that elude the capitalist economic context by being removed from the law of profit: barter, merchandising, autarkic types of production, etc. the interstice is a space in human relations which fits more or less harmoniously and openly into the overall system, but suggests other trading possibilities than those in effect within the system (2002: 6). bourriaud recognizes that relational art still operates as a commodity, but, as stewart martin notes, he sees it as having “an essentially critical relation to capitalist culture, defined by its resistance to exchange-value and, at least implicitly, its struggle with subjection to the value form” (2007: 376). bourriaud’s belief in the positive potential of these temporary rearticulations of capitalism (rather than the sustained engagement of more classical leftist projects) aligns with festival communities’ faith in the creation of transitory sites that enable alternative social practices as a foil to corporate consumerist culture. this is especially apparent in the cultivation of alternative economic practices at festivals, such as the artisanal and gift economies present at boutique events like raindance. the artisanal economy consists of artists, jewelers, metallurgists, clothing designers and food sellers who attempt to counter the apparatus of mass production by vending goods that they themselves have produced. such an economy operates through personal encounter, attempting to reframe the exchange event as a site for interpersonal connection between buyer and seller instead of the alienation normalized in industrial capitalism. the profit motive is still operative, but it is not the end of the story; dancecult 7(1)42 vendors in an artisanal economy sacrifice the possibility of a potentially more profitable scale of production in order to create objects that retain the aura of their creator’s labor, and which circulate among participants assumed to share similar values. in a gift economy, made famous through events like burning man, participants appear to abandon the profit motive altogether; they donate to the community goods, services, art objects, performances and lectures—labor for which one typically receives compensation in the quotidian world. the presence of these free items and activities are part of the draw of events like raindance, and those who offer them appear to allow the event to capitalize on their labor power for no or minimal compensation (at most the waiving of the admission fee, and this only for those whose labor would be valued much higher in the outside marketplace). yet, to view such donations as complete disavowals of the profit motive occludes the (sub)cultural capital generated by this seemingly free labor. whether conscious of it or not, what participants sacrifice by declining to sell their work they gain in reputation within the community, a status that is sometimes parlayed into gigs or commissions for larger, more financially lucrative venues and ventures. such a system creates the veneer of eschewing capitalist exchange, but does not necessarily escape its perquisites. martin pushes back against the notion that temporary rearticulations of capitalism, particularly in the context of an artistic event, actually lead to realistic models for the future. quite to the contrary, he believes that they are “helplessly reversible into an aestheticization of novel forms of capitalist exchange”, further abstracting the logics of capital even as they attempt to transcend them (2007: 371). even though alternative economic practices occur at festivals like raindance, attending the event itself is a form of exchange, one more in line with what economists joseph pine ii and james h. gilmore term the “experience economy”, than with typical goods and service exchange (1999). bourriaud’s theory fails to account for the cultural capital generated by participating in relational aesthetics, which ultimately reasserts the value form presumed to be bracketed off when in the social interstice. the claim to an “authentic” community that exists outside the mainstream market is itself laden with cultural capital; yet, as with events like burning man, claiming alterity vis-à-vis the quotidian does not release participants from the market’s sign game or social logics (kozinets 2002: 36). rather, the required intersection with mainstream capitalism to generate the technology and materials necessary to produce raindance’s relational art gets abstracted through the social interaction that occurs around it. the affective ties boutique festivals generate create memorable, moving, even transformational experiences, but they also create loyal customers. keeping this in mind is crucial to understanding how, despite creating liminoid spaces that house alternative economic structures, boutique festivals still plug into normative macroeconomic paradigms. claire bishop has also argued vehemently against assuming, as bourriaud does, the a priori politicality of relational art. she notes that because “he regards the open-ended participatory work of art as more ethical and political in implication than the autonomous, finite object”, the interactive premise of relational art is seen as inherently superior to schmidt | boutiquing at the raindance campout 43 optical contemplation, which is deemed passive and disengaged; yet, “underlying [this] argument about relational aesthetics is the presumption that dialogue is in and of itself democratic”—far from a foregone conclusion (2005: 118–9). for bishop, the fundamental flaw in bourriaud’s argument is that the conversations created around relational art tend to be between people who already have much in common: gallery goers with similar dispositions towards art consumption, or, in the case of boutique festivals, subcultural groupings with pre-established aesthetic interests, agreed upon rules for social conduct and similar political postures. instead of more agonistic models of democracy that embrace concepts like subject-group difference (laclau and mouffe 1985) or dissensus (rancière 2010), bourriaud’s discussion of relational art points towards a liberal-democratic utopia in which frictions and antagonisms between disparate subjects simply disappear. this critique certainly holds weight in the context of raindance, a space in which participants are already bound together through common location, artistic tastes and lifestyle choices, as well as important identity-positional attributes like class and race (the festival’s population, like most in the california scene, is by a vast majority white and middle or upper-middle class). indeed, events like raindance tend to be judged on criteria like “good vibes”, an unspoken copasetic quality that values minimal conflict and the feeling of social cohesion. this is not to say that conflicts don’t occur, but they tend to manifest on a personal level rather than through political positioning, and organizers attempt to police it when it becomes outwardly visible and threatens the harmony of the space. i acknowledge these powerful critiques of relational aesthetics to make clear that i see the theory as offering a way of understanding the formal qualities of raindance’s artistic practice, the intentionality integral to creating festival spaces and the efficacy such work has in solidifying subcultural ties—but not as an apparatus to assert the revolutionary qualities of boutique festivals. in fact, the critiques leveled at relational aesthetics are useful for understanding contradictions that arise in the politics of festival culture, wherein too often the creative ethos and transformational project get positioned as inherently critical and progressive. the reality, i suggest, is far murkier. but questioning bourriaud’s assumptions regarding the a priori progressivism of relational art should not amount to ignoring its potency. we should instead think about what might be achieved by viewing relational aesthetics as a technology, a way of reifying or disseminating ideology via the immanence of participation. relational aesthetics act as a kind of spectacle, but one that operates differently than guy debord’s famous society of the spectacle (which bourriaud sought to counter in writing relational aesthetics). they present, instead, an encoding power that, as performance scholar margaret werry writes, is not “hegemonically totalizing, [but instead] a transversal, constellated and coincidental, mobile and multiple cultural formation, open to the intransigence, desire, and momentum of the subjects it produces” (2005: 381). festivals constitute diffuse ideological apparatuses that utilize the creative energy of participants to consecrate a particular ethico-political position—one that is often inexplicit, but which can be gleaned from sustained attention to participants’ activities and event dramaturgies. self-identifying through their disidentification with dancecult 7(1)44 an imagined mainstream (e.g., the “misfit freaks”3 described by the raindance attendee in this article’s introduction), boutique festivals and their participants use the language and poetics of subculture to declare independence from certain normative paradigms (industrial capitalism, mass consumer culture, etc.). but in distancing themselves from this position, they abstract the way other mainstream values get reified—as i will soon discuss in greater detail. their participatory nature a catalyst for subcultural identity formation, relational aesthetics help naturalize the idea that a community’s values are self-generated, primal aspects of the individual or subculture itself—rather than the ideological residue of an opposing social structure. viewing relational aesthetics as a technology forces us to question the purposes towards which that technology gets deployed, directing us to consider the discourse that frames events like raindance. to do so, in the following section i discuss how raindance operates within an emerging category of events called “transformational festivals”, whose ethical system has lately begun to be codified and disseminated. communicated through raindance’s website, advertisements and framing rituals, as well as through popular online hubs frequented by festival regulars, this ethical system constitutes the major dramaturgy that bounds the performance event prompted by relational art. my goal here is not to produce a comprehensive and definitive accounting of raindance’s politics, but to consider a couple of axes on which the concept of “transformation” is built in order to reveal what it abstracts. what transformation? a[n] experience as unbelievable as raindance 2014 is few and far between. my soul and body is fiercely cleansed of all pain and stress involved in my life. i literally cried harder than i ever have because of laughing soooo hard. the thing that makes me smile about it now is knowing that i was [consciously unconscious] the whole time. for my life to change for the better in that state of mind [i] feel unbelievably blessed. so from here...with a clean canvas i am super exited to learn and grow with my family and have my heart beat again (briscoe 2014). [raindance web advertisement:] the term ‘transformational festival’ was not even a buzz word when we started. we just knew we were on to something special. we knew it deserved to be nurtured and cultivated, and yet had no idea that ten years later there would be so many amazing festivals, and that the west coast would become a trendsetter for conscious gathering evolution (andy 2014). i want to frame this section by discussing a participant-created water sculpture and altar given prominent placement on the festival grounds in both 2013 and 2014 (fig. 2). an example of relational art, it encapsulates the political axes i wish to explore in raindance as a whole. schmidt | boutiquing at the raindance campout 45 figure 2. water sculpture with permaculture system created by gerasimos christophoratos. photo credit: gerasimos christophoratos (2013). the piece consisted of two pools stacked on top of one another, lined with dozens of wooden slats like a giant crate; water flowed through a spout from the top pool to the lower one, and a solar-powered pump cycled it back up again, creating a continuous loop so that the tranquil sound of running water continued for the festival’s duration. a variety of cultural-geographical images and artifacts lined the structure: a figurine of krishna holding a flute, two buddha heads, candles depicting jesus christ and the virgin of guadalupe, a picture of the painted desert, a san pedro cactus, a clay vase featuring a brown-skinned figure with a headdress holding a potted plant (seemingly a central american derivation), a wood-carved native american face wearing a plumed headdress. the artist, gerasimos christoforatos, who produced the piece as a gift to the raindance community, deployed these symbols as an attempt to “incorporate all the different religions of the world, to represent the unification of what we might all consider to be spirituality”.4 christoforatos’ sculpture also served a functional purpose, working as an operational hydroponic and permaculture system. troughs growing small herbs lined the top pool, while the bottom one contained fish; waste from the fish pumped back up to the top tank to help fertilize the plants, and in turn, the runoff from the plants helped feed the fish—both could be harvested for human consumption. the piece constitutes a particularly visible example of relational art at raindance, presumably seen by everyone and built with the intention of encouraging people to “hold space” with one another by presenting an aestheticallyand spiritually-charged environment. dancecult 7(1)46 as christoforatos expresses, the piece was incomplete upon its arrival; it grew to completion via the acts of communal co-creation that it prompted: people would bring certain kinds of stones or crystals and different candles and incense, different types of artistic metal objects; they may bring things to hang around the buddha’s neck—medicine pouches, little pendants of eagles. and things build up over time as people leave objects behind. so we reach this climax where people are giving what they have to offer to the piece, and just as the event is over and the climax is over, things get taken apart; and just as it’s built up it’s also built down.5 through the community’s donations, christoforatos sees the sculpture taking on a lifespan coincident with the duration of the festival, generating a kind of community aura. this, he proposes, extends beyond objects placed upon the sculpture to performance practices, rituals and social encounters that occurred around it: a man who set up a desk nearby and wrote poetry, a juggler who attracted onlookers as he practiced, even some confused partiers who used the sculpture to fill their drinking bottles. in 2013, the piece demarcated one of raindance’s workshop spaces, hosting intellectual and embodied classes: “making a wild-crafted hydrosol”, “herbal medicine for the home”, “spirits in a bottle”,6 “weaving a dreamcatcher”, “finding your inner jedi”, “anchors with wings”.7 for christoforatos, all of this was absorbed into the sculpture itself, endowing it with an energy that reflected the ethos of the festival community. through thinking about this sculpture, we can see a number of tropes associated with raindance as a whole: 1) an emphasis on ecology and sustainability, and a particular fascination with water;8 2) a non-specific spirituality that mixes elements from different world religions and indigenous cultural practices; 3) an emphasis on identity-making and the unleashing of personal potential through spiritual practice—in a word: transformation. over the past ten-to-fifteen years, a number of similar edm events sharing these values have cropped up primarily in california and british columbia, coming to be known as transformational festivals. raindance does not explicitly label itself a transformational festival on its logo or website, but as the advertisement that begins this section indicates, administrators are aware of the term’s growing cachet and embrace being categorized as such. the term “transformational festival” is relatively new, having only emerged in the last five years or so, and largely due to the efforts of jeet-kei leung, an avid participant in the west coast festival scene and documentarian of edm culture. leung’s tedx vancouver talk in 2010, entitled “transformational festivals and the new evolutionary culture”, codified the term around a series of event models, principles, and aesthetics, and helped disseminate it widely amongst festival participants and organizers. leung parlayed his talk into a kickstarter campaign that led to the creation of a four-part documentary of transformational festivals called the bloom series, and an accompanying web portal that helped solidify their ethics and poetics.9 according to leung, transformational festivals are powered by the co-creation of an immersive, participant-driven reality (what i’m here associating with relational aesthetics). schmidt | boutiquing at the raindance campout 47 they are distinguished from other festival genres by the following qualities: an ecstatic core ritual provided through electronic dance music; visionary art, performance, art installations, and live art; a workshop curriculum covering a spectrum of new paradigm subjects; the creation and honoring of sacred space; ceremony and ritual; a social economy of artisans and vendors (or, alternative gift economy); a natural, outdoor setting to honor the earth; and a multiple (typically 3–7) day duration (the bloom series 2014). leung frames transformational festivals as “a cultural renaissance in progress”, an “evolution” and a conduit for “building a better world” (the bloom series 2014). like bourriaud, his language creates a teleological narrative of positive development, a dramaturgy that frames the raindance experience as a participatory critical project. yet, when we consider that transformational festivals arise within the context of north american liberalism, a number of axes emerge on which we might consider their distinctive political positionality: economic structure, spiritual inflection, sexual, gender10 and racial politics, etc. certainly, as these events gain momentum and spread beyond the west coast scene, efforts should be made to more comprehensively account for these various aspects. however, seeking to avoid straying from my subject thus far, here i wish only to briefly discuss two major areas made visible through christophoratos’ previously discussed artwork: 1) the ecological ethos cultivated within the festival space, and; 2) a form of spirituality that grafts contemporary technology to practices of indigenous culture, what leung refers to as “ancient future culture” (tedxtalks 2011). ecological ethos christophoratos gifted his water sculpture to the raindance community in order to “educate people about sustainability so that we can spread this kind of technology to make a difference here and abroad”. while technically not 100% self-sustaining (the system can be run on solar power, but requires modest nutritional supplementation) the altar itself performs homeostasis by displaying a self-perpetuating life cycle between plant and animal, bioprocesses at perfect equilibrium. the cultural symbols that surround it depict humans as the stewards of this equilibrium, rather than antagonists. the sculpture’s cyclical permaculture functionality, beauty and relational aesthetics crystalize how transformational festivals generate an environmentally-oriented politics amongst its populace. acting as both inspiration and, through workshops dedicated to teaching sustainable living techniques, training grounds, they seek to spread ecological consciousness beyond the festival frame. all transformational festivals are leave-no-trace events, where organizers guarantee that, post-festival, the land will be left in as pristine shape as before participants arrived. the leave-no-trace ethos is central to generating feelings of subcultural belonging vis-à-vis other, presumably more hedonistic events. when i attended raindance, i remember discussing with some people camping near me how they could no longer bring themselves to attend festivals without the leave-no-trace label because of their discomfort with the trash politics that accompany them—not only the beer bottles, wrappers and cigarette butts unthinkingly dancecult 7(1)48 strewn across the event grounds, but the way that a culture of ecological carelessness intersected with human relationality to make for a colder, more impersonal environment. in contrast, practices of trash consciousness—picking up one’s cigarette butts and placing them in a snazzy pouch, or converting beer cans into recycled sculptures—reverberate throughout transformational festival spaces, constituting ecological microperformances that reify communal solidarity through a sense of shared ethics. of course, leave-no-trace events can never hope to literally leave no trace. cigarette butts get picked up, string and twine tangled in trees get taken down, but even if visible markers of the event disappear, traces can be found at the molecular level: soap used for making giant bubbles (a playful relational art activity i saw both years i attended raindance) that sinks into the soil, or a feather from someone’s festive boa that gets trampled into the ground. while i do not suggest that participants are ignorant of this contradiction, i want to point out that since leave-no-trace eschews unseen remnants of festival activity, it normalizes a perceptual frame that can only account for concrete, visible forms of environmental impact. furthermore, leave-no-trace is in-part achieved through the labor of volunteers who patrol the grounds picking up trash in exchange for a free ticket to the festival after three four-hour shifts. in 2014, the festival added a $25 “impact fee” for all participants, including volunteers, to offset the labor and logistical costs of making the event carbonneutral. while these aspects no doubt illustrate the legitimate attention organizers pay to environmental concerns and weave an ecological ethos into the event’s dramaturgy, they also authorize consumption patterns wherein the labor that sustains them gets abstracted. transformational festivals necessarily impact the environment through the gasoline burnt to generate the wattage required to run sound stages and lighting displays, and to travel into remote spaces. but participants and organizers view this as a strategy, where the training and consciousness-raising that takes place within the space outweighs the heightened consumption patterns perceived to generate this momentum. seen thus, events like raindance constitute what slavoj žižek calls a “chocolate laxative”, a calling card of contemporary liberal society wherein “the very thing which causes damage should already be the medicine” (2004); the impact fee, combined with the leave-no-trace policy (encouraged through community self-regulation but only guaranteed through organizers’ post-festival management), potentially reifies unsustainable consumption patterns that accompany the event’s saturnalian atmosphere. ancient future culture it is unclear precisely how the raindance name came about—some say that it arose to reference an unusually dry summer at the time of the company’s founding, while the poster for the group’s first event (a “tribal dance party”) suggests an homage to ritual practices in ancient egypt and africa (raindance presents 2014). regardless of the derivation, suffice it to say the event’s name characterizes it as a fusion of contemporary recreational practice (camping) with indigenous ritual, and this carries through to the spiritual inflection of the festival’s contemporary iteration. schmidt | boutiquing at the raindance campout 49 figure 3. a piece of visionary art present at raindance 2013 (artist unknown). note how the headdress (suggesting indigeneity) and skin color are combined with neon coloring and deconstructive geometrical patterns. photo credit: author (2013). the transformational festival movement encourages signifiers of indigenous culture to get deployed alongside contemporary technologies that create a heightened state of aesthetic richness (light shows, synthesizers, hallucinogens, etc.) in order to induce a return to what are presumed to be more sustainable environmental practices and more respectful human interactions. placed throughout raindance, for instance, were dreamcatchers, a totem pole, a teepee; altars (like the one described above) included figurines and symbols reflecting indigenous cultures from around the globe; paintings depicted indigenous bodies fused with cybernetic technologies (see fig. 3); participants wore headdresses, moccasins, beaded vests, and other clothing inspired by representations of native americans; they integrated objects like maōri poi into their dance practices and instruments like the didgeridoo into cut-and-paste water rites or dance floor rituals. transformational festivals, as described by leung, are built on a premise of fostering a new mode of spirituality discovered through combining the reperformance or redeployment of “ancient” ritual elements alongside the spectacle firepower provided by contemporary visual, aural and chemical technologies; this leads, potentially, to what he calls “reindigenization”, an attempt to simultaneously “reconnect with the earth…with our own indigenous nature”, and to explore “a re-encounter [with] representatives of indigenous communities” (festival fire 2014). leung’s concept of reindigenization proposes a fundamental mutability in terms of the positionality of the predominantly white, middle class population that attends transformational festivals. it aligns with what arun saldanha has discussed as the white ethico-political project of psychedelics aimed at transcending the geohistorical body (2007: 15). seen thus, transformation here posits an evacuation of one’s hegemonic identity to enter a primal, fluid state of being; participants then reconstitute their identities, picking dancecult 7(1)50 and choosing from a range of cultural practices that may or may not align with their former positionality. participants come together at transformational festivals to form temporary (white) enclaves dedicated, at least in part, to rearticulating the self as malleable, adaptable, and performative, able to perceive and indeed become that which is perceived as the antithesis and casualty of global modernity: the indigenous other. despite what i take to be the genuinely respectful intentions of festivalgoers,11 the dangers of such a project should be immediately apparent. the relative absence of indigenous bodies at events like raindance speaks particularly loudly, coinciding with contemporary controversies that display the lack of control indigenous groups have over their own representation (e.g., the naming of the us football team the washington redskins). the ability to view indigeneity as a mutable category that can be tried on, played with, cast aside or altered if desired undoubtedly speaks to the privileged position many festivalgoers occupy within the us cultural hierarchy. it both displays and refortifies white supremacy by characterizing whiteness as neutral, unmarked, a blank slate. furthermore, the appropriation of religious and cultural practices for the purposes of reinvigorating the identities of festivalgoers threatens to drain these practices of their specificity, historical significance, and symbolic power. it redeploys them as forms of identity capital in a neoliberal marketplace that does not privilege those from whom the practices were mined, but rather, homo economicus, the rational figure of political modernity that can detach from the web of cultural associations that sustain community and resistance (werry 2011: 185). there is reason to suggest that some of these issues are also familiar to patrons and organizers of transformational festivals themselves: one such event, lightning in a bottle, banned headdresses and other explicit native american mimicry in 2014; others are following suit, triggering widespread debate within the community about issues of cultural appropriation. discussing “reindigenization”, leung himself acknowledges the danger of reifying exploitive behaviors, and explores how to bridge the gap between indigenous and contemporary neo-tribal communities “in a good way, in [a] right relationship[, in] a way that is not replaying the dynamics of colonialism, but is attempting to heal those dynamics” (festival fire 2014). he thus outlines at least a personal consciousness of the ease with which projects that emphasize such cultural remixing (particularly as enacted by relatively privileged persons within the hegemonic order) can slip into a reiteration of neo-colonial marginalization practices even if, outwardly at least, it is precisely the racial/gender/class politics of white colonial modernity from which transformational festival participants attempt to disassociate. conclusion bourriaud wrote relational aesthetics primarily to understand shifts in the 1990s european gallery art scene, and it is worth questioning the need to reach into such a different space to theorize an event like raindance. despite festival culture becoming a major artistic trendsetter for society at large, it often gets dismissively framed as a hedonistic party scene rather than a critical space for creative identity-making or ethico-political development. as schmidt | boutiquing at the raindance campout 51 just one small example, a 2015 new york times article discusses how the wassaic project, a new york-based artist residency, developed an accompanying festival event that aimed to mimic the “spirit” of music festival culture; in the article, organizer bowie zunino described a desire to build an event with a sense of generosity and sociality, but “where the art wasn’t hippy stuff but serious contemporary art” (green). while zunino values the affective ties that arise within music festivals, he effortlessly dismisses the artistic practice that, as i have argued, helps generate this communal cohesion. discussing raindance as relational art, i hope, does work to counter similar characterizations of festival culture as lowbrow and unserious, a frou-frou hobby that contrasts with thoughtful contemporary art practice. perspectives like zunino’s occlude the creativity, collaboration and discipline that enable events like raindance—from organizers and participants alike. the lens of relational aesthetics opens up festival culture to modes of analysis that take seriously its affective power and ethical imperatives. it reveals the technologies by which boutique events generate a sense of belonging and inspiration without access to the resources of larger festivals. while i have sought to refute the teleological, liberatory trope seen in bourriaud’s writing and the discourse surrounding transformational festivals, placing the two in conversation makes visible the participatory technologies that operate at events like raindance and potentially propagate liberal values. relational art in the context of the raindance campout does indeed produce real transformations that bind participants together and encourage alternative social practice, but transformation is never neutral. it occurs within the discursive frame that circumscribes it and travels along multiple axes, rather than a single, positivist continuum. the progressive energy participants, organizers and spokespeople invest in the concept of “transformation” naturalizes such a continuum and abstracts contradictory critical axes: the presence of the material culture, rituals and representational practices of diverse peoples substitutes for actual multicultural diversity; the impact fee’s assurance of sustainability and proper stewardship of the land obscure the unsustainable consumption patterns that participants engage in while at the festival; alternative economic practices amongst a tiny population supplant systemic critique. this is not to call out the raindance campout for “bad politics”, but merely to indicate that it has politics, politics that cannot be uncritically contrasted to an imagined normative “mainstream”. neither relational aesthetics, nor a boutique size, nor an ethical model assures progressivism. the point is not to moralize but to advocate for reflexivity amongst participants, organizers and scholars in determining where transformational festival culture’s ethical imperatives lie. the dizzying array of rituals, artistic practices, costumes, dancing bodies, finely constructed spaces—all simultaneously present in the spellbinding crucible of a natural setting—should not prevent us from questioning what happens when the amps are finally turned off and the temporary community dispersed. intensity of experience, the novelty of creative invention and the richness of sociality should prod us to ask the crucial question: “what exactly have i signed up for here?” dancecult 7(1)52 acknowledgements many thanks to arun saldanha for helping me set off on this project, and to rita kompelmakher for attending raindance with me and providing much needed feedback on my writing and observations. notes 1 santa cruz family djs include brother, digital honey, stridah, the pirate, mozaic, dax, rob monroy and little john himself. festival headliners in the last two years have included vibesquad, pumpkin, random rab, bluetech, shpongle, om unit, thugfucker, eprom, marty party and russ liquid. 2 fischer-lichte elaborates on this form of liminality as a feeling of existing “between the norms and rules of art and everyday life, between aesthetic and ethical imperatives” (2008: 12). 3 the “freak”, as discussed by arun saldanha, performs oppositionality via the dominant social structure that governs her/him. his chapter “goa freaks” provides an excellent conversation on the conceptual history of the freak and how it relates festival/rave culture—especially in regards to the culture’s ethical and racial dynamics (2007). 4 gerasimos christoforatos, phone interview with the author, 5 november 2014. 5 gerasimos christoforatos, phone interview with the author, 5 november 2014. 6 a workshop on aromatics, essential oils, and plant spirits. 7 “a playful exploration of core essence using transformational life coaching techniques and creative inquiry exercises” (raindance presents 2013b). 8 the presence of water has always been an important element of the raindance campout. in the early years, the event was held in a scout camp near santa cruz that had a swimming pool; in recent years, the festival occurred on the yuba river (2013) and feather river (2014). the river provided a refreshing place for participants to cool off during hot california afternoons (a nearby sound stage helping to build the party), as well as a site for daily water blessings and yoga practice that took place in the morning and evening. 9 leung is also writing a book with the working title: “dancing together into the great shift: transformational festivals & the new evolutionary culture”. 10 in leung’s tedx vancouver talk, he discusses “gender alchemy” (a challenge to the manichean male/female divide) and “models of compatible diversity” as formative components of the transformational festival movement (tedxtalks 2011). 11 graham st john suggests that although many deployments of native american imagery in festival settings falls into the camp of solipsistic neoprimitivism, “some exemplify genuine efforts to advance change in the wake of the recognition of crises of self and globe, or contextualize respectful exchanges involving collaborative intercultural performances” (2013: 191). schmidt | boutiquing at the raindance campout 53 references “an interview with jeet kei leung”. festival fire. 19 april 2013. <http://festivalfire.com/jeet-kei-leung/> (accessed 16 nov 2014). andy. “fort knox five to dj at raindance festival 10 year anniversary!! june 6–9th”. june 3 2014. <http://www.fortknoxfive.com/2014/06/03/fort-knox-five-to-dj-at-raindancefestival-10-year-anniversary-june-6-9th/> (accessed 16 nov 2014). bishop, claire. 2005. installation art. london: routledge. bourriaud, nicholas. 2002 [1998]. relational aesthetics. trans. simon pleasance and fronza woods with the participation of mathieu copeland. dijon: les presses du reel. briscoe, chris. “a experience as unbelievable…”. 12 june 2014. facebook. <https://www.facebook.com/events/656336294428254/> (accessed 22 february 2015). chen, katherine. 2009. enabling creative chaos: the organization behind the burning man event. chicago: university of chicago press. fischer-lichte, erika. 2008. the transformative power of performance: a new aesthetics. new york: routledge gilmore, james h. and b. joseph pine ii. 1999. the experience economy. cambridge: harvard business school press. green, penelope. 2015. “the wassaic: a festival, a ‘beautiful’ flood and now art”. new york times, 4 march: d5. knowfun. “dancing in the rain—lost in sound reviews raindance 2014”. lost in sound. 26 june 2014. <http://lostinsound.org/dancing-rain-lostinsound-reviews-raindance 2014/> (accessed 16 november 2014). kozinets, robert v. 2002. “can consumers escape the market? emancipatory illuminations from burning man”. journal of consumer research, 29(4): 20–38. laclau, ernesto and chantal mouffe. 1985. hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics. london: verso. tedxtalks. “transformational festivals: jeet kei leung at tedxvancouver”. youtube. 20 august 2011. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8tdpqp6m0ah> (accessed 5 may 2013). leung, jeet-kei. “guidelines for inclusion on transformational festivals map”. the bloom series. 13 jan 2013. <http://thebloomseries.com/guidelines-for-inclusion-transformational-festivalsmap/> (accessed 16 november 2014). limbach, elizabeth. “raindance”. 7 april 2010. good times. <http://www.gtweekly.com/index. php/santa-cruz-arts-entertainment-lifestyles/santa-cruz-arts-entertainment-/983-raindance. html> (accessed 16 november 2014). martin, stewart. 2007. “critique of relational aesthetics”. third text 21(4): 369–86. meier, wendy clupper. 2007. “the performance culture of burning man”. ph.d. dissertation (theatre studies), university of maryland. raindance presents. 2013a. “participate”. <https://www.raindancepresents.com/campout2013/ participate.php> (accessed 1 august 2013). ———. 2013b. “randance 2013 workshops”. <https://www.raindancepresents.com/ campout2013/workshops.php> (accessed 1 august 2013). http://festivalfire.com/jeet-kei-leung/ http://www.fortknoxfive.com/2014/06/03/fort-knox-five-to-dj-at-raindance-festival-10-year-anniversary-june-6-9th/ http://www.fortknoxfive.com/2014/06/03/fort-knox-five-to-dj-at-raindance-festival-10-year-anniversary-june-6-9th/ https://www.facebook.com/events/656336294428254/ http://lostinsound.org/dancing-rain-lostinsound-reviews-raindance 2014/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8tdpqp6m0a http://thebloomseries.com/guidelines-for-inclusion-transformational-festivals-map/ http://thebloomseries.com/guidelines-for-inclusion-transformational-festivals-map/ http://www.gtweekly.com/index.php/santa-cruz-arts-entertainment-lifestyles/santa-cruz-arts-entertainment-/983-raindance.html http://www.gtweekly.com/index.php/santa-cruz-arts-entertainment-lifestyles/santa-cruz-arts-entertainment-/983-raindance.html http://www.gtweekly.com/index.php/santa-cruz-arts-entertainment-lifestyles/santa-cruz-arts-entertainment-/983-raindance.html https://www.raindancepresents.com/campout2013/participate.php https://www.raindancepresents.com/campout2013/participate.php https://www.raindancepresents.com/campout2013/workshops.php https://www.raindancepresents.com/campout2013/workshops.php dancecult 7(1)54 ———. “#tbt flyer for the first ever raindance party”. 01 may 2014. facebook. <https://www.facebook.com/raindancepresents/timeline> (accessed 16 november 2014). rancière, jacques. 2010. dissensus. trans. steven corcoran. new york: bloomsbury academic. saldanha, arun. 2007. psychedelic white: goa trance and the viscosity of race. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. st john, graham. 2013. “indian spirit: amerindians and the techno-tribes of psytrance”. in tribal fantasies: native americans in the european imaginary, 1900–2010, ed. james mackay and david stirrup, 173–96. new york: palgrave macmillan. ———. 2014. “the logics of sacrifice at visionary arts festivals”. in the festivalization of culture, ed. andy bennett, jodie taylor and ian woodward, 49–67. burlington, vt: ashgate. thornton, sarah. 1995. club cultures and subcultures: music, media, and subcultural capital. middletown, ct: wesleyan university press. werry, margaret. 2005. “‘the greatest show on earth’: political spectacle, spectacular politics, and the american pacific”. theatre journal 57(3): 355–82. ———. 2011. the tourist state: performing leisure, liberalism, and race in new zealand. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. žižek, slavoj. “a cup of decaf reality”. lacan dotcom. 2004. <http://www.lacan.com/zizekdecaf.htm> (accessed 6 december 2014). https://www.facebook.com/raindancepresents/timeline http://www.lacan.com/zizekdecaf.htm india's electronic music scene under lockdown: the first three months of the covid-19 pandemic chris mcguinness city university of new york (us) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.02> on sunday, 8 march 2020, rumors circulated that covid-19 reached bengaluru, an indian it hub reputed for its drinking culture and electronic music scene. that night, a sizeable crowd gathered at the city's tao terrace to hear pawas gupta, a berlin-based techno producer of indian origin. for a moment, one could feel lost in the music and forget that coronavirus was finally reaching india, a nation of 1.4 billion people. by night's end, event-goers awkwardly attempted social distance farewells, as they knew it might be a while before another gig. unbeknownst to them, city and state-wide lockdowns would be issued over the coming days. as the public mood descended into fear and uncertainty, music promoters postponed gigs and my dissertation research meetings were rescheduled. i boarded an empty flight to mumbai and returned to my flat, vacated by flatmates who had gone back to their hometowns. on 24 march, prime minister narendra modi declared a nationwide lockdown which would be extended multiple times through june 2020. over the last five years, india's electronic music scene has grown into a vibrant independent industry, with electronic music producers playing at clubs and festivals sponsored by beverage and clothing brands. lockdown rendered this infrastructure largely irrelevant, forcing the scene to seek new modes of survival. drawing from interviews with electronic music producers, industry professionals and fans, this essay pieces together how electronic music producers were affected during the first phase of lockdown of the covid-19 pandemic in india. experiments during unprecedented times the first days of lockdown were an experiment in governance and in home living. devoid of car horns, the mumbai soundscape was replete with sounds of pressure cookers releasing steam in the homes of families living in close quarters. apartment residents walked laps on rooftop terraces during those warm spring evenings and the prime minister's voice resonated from televisions through the open windows of homes and into gullies where watchmen sat facing empty roads. as india observed the west succumb to pandemic, many indians unequivocally supported a lockdown. life slowed down and everyone waited. the spirit of experimentation drove many electronic music producers to take inspiration from a coronavirus-saturated mediascape. a video of politician ramdas athawale chanting "go, corona, go!" (the times of india 2020) became a controversial meme that was seen by many as a chant of unity and by others as a futile cause. the video was remixed by mumbai-based artists nathan thomas (nate08 2020) and sanaya ardeshir, (sandunesmusic 2020), among others. although their music employed conventions from lesser known genres like footwork, glitch and lofi, the remixes gained significant traction on social media. other indian artists, like hyderabad's raj varma, yungraj, participated in "#covidwars", an international beat challenge where producers called upon each other to create bass music (covid wars 2020). without pressures of club time slots and crowds, artists had opportunities to experiment with different musical styles and audiences had more time to listen. as bengaluru-based producer ketan bahirat, oceantied, mentions: it was weird for everyone...especially for those of us making club-oriented music... you know, because we were so used to music specifically to play on a dancefloor and a lot of people didn't even feel like doing it anymore. so all my arrangements changed, all my moods changed.[1] free time provided an opportunity for producers to pursue alternative projects; e.g., indira kanawade, dj smokey, diverged from her regular drum 'n' bass project to create hindustani-fused house. karan kanchan, known primarily for his work in indian hip hop, curated a free and open source sample library from indian producers entitled sounds of bedroom producers volume one. kanchan also began an instagram live series dedicated to sampling old bollywood songs. free time provided senior industry figures with chances to explore undiscovered artists; for instance, director of internet radio boxout.fm mohammed abood and artist manager tej brar co-hosted a producer listening session on instagram live. india's electronic music scene is extraordinarily diverse and cannot be pinned to a single type of sound nor style. however, india's scene possesses a distinct sociopolitical context from which common musical experiences are generated and a set of technologies through which practitioners convene. producers from different indian cities streamed their creative processes on facebook and twitch, while developing relationships through whatsapp groups and discord channels where tracks and technical tips were shared. multiple producers with whom i spoke looked back at these early weeks as a "leveling of the playing field". for them, it was a glimmer of creative cross-pollination that was independent from hierarchies of the pre-covid-19 music scene. networks of care and support as lockdown continued into april, may and june, it became clear that coronavirus cases in the country were not decreasing. to make matters worse, heart breaking news of stranded migrant workers and looming anxieties of economic downturn were compounded by worries of how the virus might spread after lockdown. many indians turned to civil society organizations to offer food and assistance to those in need. care played just as important a role for musicians under lockdown and well-being check-ins became a routine exercise among friends. vizag-based kalimireddy nikhil describes, i think it's like this worm that's growing inside us. all my life, i was alone while my parents were at work. now i am with my parents all throughout the day. it gets to me and not meeting my friends gets to me. some amount of social interaction, not by text, but by calling up friends, goes a long way during this time.[2] charity became ubiquitous. djs provided financial assistance and groceries to other artists. playing and producing for a cause became a prominent motivation to organize streamed events. for instance, artists for a cause was a multi-day online festival which raised funds to feed migrant workers, and streams for relief raised funds for victims of typhoon amphan, a storm which devastated regions in east india and bangladesh during may 2020. curated compilations of music, made during lockdown, brought recognition to many lesser known indian producers. the creation of these compilations were dependent upon networks of support and the sharing of resources. kolkata-based artist and promoter varun desai formed social isolation records, releasing social isolation 1, social isolation 2 and social desolation, compilations of music by indian noise and ambient artists. drawing on his experience in organizing netlabels since 2009, desai felt that many barriers for artists of the pre-covid-19 scene could be circumvented—that "there are so many great ideas and so little confidence" and "having someone push their work is much needed right now".[3] desai found himself mastering music and setting up online music platform accounts for many of the compilation artists. ketan bahirat organized a series of releases entitled 22-2, which began as a producer challenge where 22 producers provide 22 samples with which each producer has two days to make a track. two subsequent albums were released with formal distribution, and its participants connected with one another through instagram, discord and twitch. while networks of care and support played many roles—psychic survival, skilling and social responsibility—industry professionals became increasingly reliant on each other. the directors of indie agencies came together through whatsapp to share resources and news about a music economy that was changing on a day-to-day basis.[4] financial precarity the music industry came to a halt the moment lockdown began. venues stopped operating. festivals scheduled for 2020 were cancelled. sponsors terminated contracts. many food and beverage employees were owed outstanding balances. in the indian music industry, debt is so common that it is often assumed to be part of working relationships. but when work stops, it is uncertain whether debts will be repaid. without any financial assistance, artists have been forced to question the validity of their profession. as mumbai producer nawed khan states: "we suddenly realized that having just one skill is a bad thing and there's nothing else you can do right now since you spent 20 years honing this skill, and suddenly the skill is useless in the real world".[5] another producer shares a similar sentiment. "it's been almost 15 years for me as a dj/vj, but today i am feeling like a beginner and have to start struggling from scratch".[6] a number of artists increasingly promoted the sale of their music during commission-free bandcamp days (diamond 2020), or found side-hustles like teaching music production over zoom. many took out loans or leaned on family support. some considered new career paths, taking jobs in their family businesses. others resorted to relatively low-paying gigs such as delivering food for the app swiggy. moving forward as lockdown eased during june 2020, the covid-19 reproduction rate increased rapidly. considering unpredictable travel regulations and the potential for infection, international artist tours in india have been rendered unforeseeable in the near future. these factors have prompted promoters and brands to focus on local acts, which may lead to artists playing more frequently in their home cities, potentially spawning regional electronic music scenes. at the same time, online concerts geographically broadened listenership while posing some challenges. lack of physical co-presence prevented artists from observing audience reactions, and audiences may not have always known if a stream was pre-recorded or truly live. promotion was limited by algorithms that restricted the reach of posts and djs were limited by copyright-identification algorithms, with exception to mixcloud (black 2020). artists took newfound interest in their onscreen appearance. as mumbai-based producer brij dalvi, three oscillators, mentions: "at home, there's no lighting, there's no smoke, there's no show, there's nothing. artists have got to make their bedroom look jazzy. otherwise it looks like just another dude or chick playing a dj set from their rooms".[7] but not all artists under lockdown were capable of producing visually competitive streams, as varun desai points out: "how do you film multiple camera angles if you're by yourself in isolation?" uneven distribution of resources led artists and promoters to act as brokers. hyderabad's dj jee-1 created a platform to host guest djs as a virtual reproduction of his bollywood club nights,[8] rana ghose of re:produce artists curated concerts on his own server in delhi, and mumbai-based agency gently altered hosted events through their relationship with the interactive platform shotgun. by june, it became clear that many economic relations of the pre-covid-19 music scene were replicating online. established physical venues sought to stake their position in digital terrain, using their brand names and relationships with sponsors to finance high quality streams of artist performances tailored for commercial entities. some artists with whom i spoke lamented the increasingly competitive field of social media and yearned for a musical utopia that came and went during the early, experimental days of lockdown. as india's online music economy develops, music producers may increasingly find themselves negotiating roles as influencers, delivering musical experiences that are more tightly integrated with e-commerce, social media and virtual environments. blogs have played an important role in taste-making; for instance, the indian blog wild city promoted local artists while also hosting workshops on music production. games such as minecraft have served as platforms for online music festivals, where gamers attended concerts at a variety of virtual stages. block fest, the first online festival to feature a stage for indian artists, was scheduled for july 2020. no matter how the industry might be restructured post-lockdown, the covid-19 pandemic and lockdown have fundamentally challenged music producers to interrogate their artistic motivations and relationships with each other. the present instability of what the future might bring leads musicians to ponder what their communal identity might be. as kalmi describes: even though the covid is there, in the end what is this all about? is it for money and recognition? both might be there today and gone tomorrow. but i feel like this is that time to make better relationships with all the people whom you've lost touch with...we need to think about how we as a whole community and a generation, not just a single person, can take things forward.[9] acknowledgements i wish to thank ketan bahirat, tej brar, ramita chaterjee, brij dalvi, varun desai, rana ghose, kerry harwin, indira kanawade, jee-1, karan kanchan, nawed khan, kenneth lobo, kalmireddy nikhil for their valuable time and insights which were essential to the formation of this essay. author biography chris mcguinness is a phd student in ethnomusicology at the graduate center of the city university of new york. his dissertation topic of electronic music production in india is supported by a research fellowship from the american institute of indian studies. chris has extensive experience as an electronic music producer, having made music for feature films, documentaries and independent projects. cmcguinness@gradcenter.cuny.edu references black, rachel. 2020. "mixcloud launches a dj live streaming platform with copyright figured out". dj techtools. 21 april 2020. <https://djtechtools.com/2020/04/21/mixcloud-launches-a-dj-live-streaming-platform-with-copyright-figured-out/>. (accessed 26 september 2020). chakarvorty, reshmi. 2020. "djs mixing it up, home style". deccan chronicle. 7 june. <https://www.deccanchronicle.com/entertainment/music/070620/djs-mixing-it-up-home-style.html>. (accessed 30 june 2020). "covid wars: viral music challenge reaches india's soundcloud music producers". wild city. april 1 2020. <http://www.thewildcity.com/news/17005-covid-wars-viral-music-challenge-reaches-india-s-soundcloud-music-producers>. (accessed 26 september 2020). diamond, ethan. 2020. " support artists impacted by the covid-19 pandemic". <https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/bandcamp-covid-19-fundraiser/>. (accessed 30 june 2020). nate08music, "160 corona edit cc". 14 march 2020. instagram. <https://www.instagram.com/p/b9ths95js8q>. (accessed 30 june 2020). sandunesmusic, "sitting in a pile of boxes on my living room floor as it's officially moving day this side". 14 march 2020. instagram. <https://www.instagram.com/p/b9tbwdtji_o> (accessed 30 june 2020). filmography "'go corona, go corona' chants union minister ramdas athawale as if to send the virus back from india". youtube, 1:11. the times of india. 10 march 2020. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dpd708sk98>. (accessed 30 june 2020). notes [1] ketan bahirat, interview with the author (on whatsapp), 25 june 2020. [2] kalimreddy nikhil, interview with the author (on whatsapp), 26 june 2020. [3] varun desai, interview with the author (on whatsapp), 24 june 2020. [4] tej brar, interview with the author (on whatsapp), 25 june 2020. [5] nawed khan, interview with the author (on whatsapp), 24 june 2020. [6] anonymous, interview with the author (on facebook), 23 june 2020. [7] brij dalvi, interview with the author (on whatsapp), 25 june 2020. [8] jee-1, interview with the author (on facebook), 26 june 2020. [9] kalimreddy nikhil, interview with the author (on whatsapp), 27 june 2020. dancecult 13(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 12(1) 2020: 143–158 issn 1947-5403 ©2020 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net exploring nightlife: space, society and governance jordi nofre and adam eldridge (editors) london: rowman and littlefield, 2018 300 pp. isbn: 978-1786603289 rrp: £32 <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.14> fiona hutton victoria university of wellington (new zealand) exploring nightlife is a fascinating and insightful volume exploring often overlooked issues related to the “night” and those who inhabit it. the concepts of nightlife, night time, and urban nightscapes are closely scrutinised by the diverse authors in this collection. nightlife for the purposes of this review is conceived as both the actual physical sites for the consumption of intoxicating substances and experiences, and as the location of such sites within city nightscapes. therefore, nightlife, as the authors in this book highlight, refers to more than physical venues. it is a more fluid concept that can also refer literally to life at night: how the urban landscape is transformed after dark, and how the city at night is consumed by its often-diverse populations. as the editors note in their introduction to the book, nightlife is not new, but the regeneration and gentrification of urban areas is a phenomenon that has taken on increased significance in the post-industrial era of neo-liberalism. such regeneration often has a relationship with nightlife, either by altering, sometimes radically, existing ebbs and flows of urban nightscapes or through the introduction and development of new nightlife areas and venues. the idea that this type of intervention and regeneration in inner city locations and other areas perceived as run down, risky and dangerous will “save” the area and its inhabitants while providing economic stimulation and profits is one that is critically interrogated in this volume. a variety of topics such as: harm reduction; power and resistance in city nightscapes throughout processes of gentrification and regeneration; resistance to regeneration as a form of social control; and the displacement of existing nightlife traditions, are explored by the authors in this volume providing a critical and nuanced discussion of some of the key themes related to nightlife and the city after dark. reviews https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.14 dancecult 13(1)144 a key theme running through many of the chapters in this volume is the success of regeneration and gentrification, and the typically dramatic effects these kinds of urban policies have on nightlife and those who inhabit(ed) urban nightscapes. several authors question these kinds of developments noting the displacement of important nightlife traditions to make way for allegedly new and improved ways of experiencing the spaces and places of the night. it is also notable that the capitalist model of economic revitalisation and profit is a key presence in schemes of regeneration and gentrification, in contexts that have previously had very different ways of approaching social life: for example, the socialist perspective of pre-war yugoslavia that viewed nightlife and leisure as important for human development, not as an escape from capitalist oppression of labour as noted by nihad cengic and jordi martin-diaz (54). the gentrification of nightlife after the bosnian war to accommodate new migrant groups as well as the emerging youthful middle classes, coupled with new kinds of state policies, radically altered the nightscapes of sarajevo, producing tensions between old and new residents of the city. as peta wolfison in chapter 2 notes class inequalities are often embedded in gentrification and regeneration developments, producing tensions between urban populations and antagonism towards city planners who have “ruined” previously thriving night time economies. similarly, in johhannesburg crystal oloukoi’s description, in chapter 1, of urban redevelopments and the symbolic violence wrought by gentrification paints a vivid picture of sanitised and surveilled spaces with previous inhabitants displaced to other parts of the city. a westernised view of nightlife is challenged by atepheh amid in chapter 5, through her discussion of the city of mashhad in iran. using religion as a lens to explore the redevelopment and gentrification of a particular part of mashhad that contains an important shrine, a different view of the night unfolds. a vibrant, thriving nightlife culture, built over centuries exists or existed in mashhad and the night was not associated with sin and immorality as it is in many western cultures. a 24-hour city was built around the arrival of pilgrims to visit the shrine at any time of the day or night, and places serving food or providing accommodation were bustling and numerous. the plan to redevelop this area to accommodate more pilgrims and visitors to the shrine is critiqued in this chapter with amid pointing to the negative impact on the local cultural and economic success of the area. the redevelopment has overwhelmed existing night time communities and failed to attract pilgrims to the new modernised area. similar to other chapters in this volume she points to the detrimental effects of gentrification on public night time spaces and the cultural diversity they engender. this volume therefore raises key questions around gentrification and regeneration such as who are they actually for and who do they benefit? although, more pertinent questions to ask may be who should they actually be for and who should they actually benefit? as noted in the example of amsterdam by irina van aalst and ilse van liempt in chapter 11. here “touristification” is viewed as problematic and as upsetting the balance between sex workers and residents in the red-light district of amsterdam. the redevelopment reviews 145 of this area of the city to reduce the visibility of sex work, to attract a more respectable class of tourist to the area, has had detrimental effects on the urban spaces/s and on the sex work industry. locals can no longer shop for essentials like bread in their newly developed upmarket environment, and sex work clients are scared away by the high level of tourism that makes clients of sex workers highly visible. here the impression is that urban development was outward facing in a global tourist context rather than inward facing for local residents and businesses, and raises the question of who should these kinds of regeneration and gentrification plans be aimed at? these are also issues raised by daniel malet calvo, joao carlos martins and inigo sanchez-fuarros in chapter 9 throughout their consideration of the “studentification” of lisbon through the presence of erasmus students. the commodification of the student experience has contributed to the segregation of urban nightlife between eramus and local students, while the gentrification of areas of the city offering commercialised student nightlife experiences continues the eviction and displacement of previous populations. it could be argued that areas with countercultural and resistance traditions are replaced with “controlled diversity” the phrase used by penny-panagiota koutrolikou in chapter 4 (79). however, perhaps encouragingly, calvo et al. also note that not all erasmus students flock to the commercialised experience with some preferring more diverse nightlife experiences. in chapter 4 penny-panagiota koutrolikou also notes issues of displacement of some populations through the gentrification process in her exploration of the nightlife developments in athens. the concept of “ghettos of the mind” is raised here in relation to fears about particular, often inner-city, neighbourhoods, exaggerated through media discourse and sensationalism. this chapter also raises questions about surveillance and control – are increased surveillance and control the price paid for gentrification and revitalisation of inner city and other run-down areas? new gentrified populations demand safety and reassurance through increased policing and control of undesirable pre-existing residents, as they experience newly developed residential and nightlife areas. as pertinently noted in this chapter, solutions to problems such as addiction and poverty are seen through repression and displacement, rather than through helping the populations that need it (77). resistance to regeneration and gentrification is also noted the brazilian context, in rio de jenerio by marcos paulo ferreria de gois, in chapter 13, with more intensive policing accompanying the revitalisation and redevelopment of urban areas, aiming to control unruly groups. the effect was to reduce the numbers of patrons visiting these newly developed areas at night, similar to the experiences in amsterdam, and “the heavy-handed actions, as a result, only worked as a stimulus for the creation of other night places, protected from the eyes of authority” (218). these kinds of observations bring to the fore the fluidity and flexibility of nightlife, and the perseverance of resistance in urban nightscapes. this perseverance of resistance is noted by some of the authors in this volume, notably samantha wilkinson in chapter 7 and jose sanchez-garcia in chapter 6. mahragan music is seen as resistance music, linked to working class male populations, and exists on the dancecult 13(1)146 margins of city nightscapes in cairo. mahragan enthusiasts are seen as misfits and the music as vulgar and uncivilised by those who want to present a westernised, cultured face to the global world. the endurance of mahragan music, its politics of resistance and challenge to dominant groups, signals that these hidden and underground spaces of the night time economy continue alongside the gentrification that often dramatically alters urban landscapes, echoed in the erasmus students who seek out “authentic” local experiences and resist more commercialised entertainment developments. the pleasures and harms related to alcohol and other drug intoxication are also explored in this edited collection. the choices of young people in two suburban areas in manchester, uk about where and how to consume alcohol may also be read as resistance to commercialised nightlife spaces from which they are excluded due to age, gender or class. young people in these under researched cultural contexts moved between spaces for alcohol consumption and a number of things played a part in their choices: others inhabiting the bars/pubs; the atmosphere; what kind of night out they wanted and so on. for those choosing to drink in outside spaces, such as parks, the freedom and excitement experienced were preferable to being in enclosed spaces. samantha wilkinson—in chapter 5—makes the important point that outdoor spaces were not necessarily used for drinking because young people had nowhere else to go – some groups of young people actively sought out and chose these kinds of places for alcohol consumption. her work also demonstrates that the nightscape is multi-faceted and complex with a number of different ways of engaging with suburban drinking environments, allowing a rejection of commercialised venues. marion roberts in her discussion in chapter 8 notes the gendered aspect of the night time economy with women struggling to find a (safe) space or place in this hyper masculine environment. intoxicated women face a number of issues, not least the accusation that they are inviting harms such as sexual violence by being intoxicated. often policies to make the night time playscape safer are gender neutral, ignoring the issues faced by women in particular, although roberts points to two promising initiatives based on improving mini-cab safety, and raising the profile of the unacceptability of sexual violence and harassment of women in nightlife venues. however, the challenge to undo deeply embedded notions of traditional masculinities and femininities in spaces of intoxication is fraught with tensions that “require concerted and explicit action to challenge” (143). the development and commercialisation of the leisure industry and night time spaces has led to the normalisation of the use of illicit drugs in some clubs and venues. the notion of pleasure, bound up with illicit intoxications, is explicitly engaged with by helena valente, christina vales pires and helena carvalho in chapter 12 in their exploration of harm reduction in the portuguese context. they focus on a peer based harm reduction organisation that offers advice to club and other party goers around alcohol and other drug use, and sometimes provides reagent testing of substances. the importance of engaging with discourses of pleasure is noted by the authors of this chapter, as well as the necessity reviews 147 of moving away from medicalised notions of harm reduction that are not necessarily appropriate for a mainly youthful population using drugs in a recreational manner. the success of this approach is demonstrated through interviews with users of the services, who note their behavioural change in terms of not mixing drugs, taking less of a substance or drinking less alcohol. reducing the harms related to the city nightscape and moving patrons successfully through their intoxication experiences is an important part of urban development that should not be forgotten or sidelined. it is clear from the chapters in this volume that the night is a complex phenomenon, entangled in a number of debates related to space and place as well as numerous social, cultural and historical contexts. the arguments presented by the authors in this edited collection raise important questions around gentrification and development of city nightscapes, not least who benefits or should benefit from these kinds of developments. sadly, it seems that often such developments sweep away existing thriving and diverse nightlife cultures displacing marginalised populations and moving them further to the outskirts of urban life. however, that resistance is still apparent speaks to the importance of diversity in shaping nightlife spaces and places, even if from the margins. this volume grapples with the thorny problems surrounding the development of nightlife, gentrification and regeneration in a global context, not least the complexities in developing nightscapes that are as risk free as possible, while maintaining diversity and respect for existing nightlife cultures – a highly recommended read. dancecult 13(1)148 dutch dance, 1988-2018: how the netherlands took the lead in electronic music culture mark van bergen (trans. andrew cartwright) amsterdam: mary go wild, 2018 320 pp. isbn: 9-789082-075854 rrp: €17.50 <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.15> sean nye university of southern california (us) in an iconic scene from the social network, young mark zuckerberg and napster-founder sean parker are sitting in a sleek dance club in san francisco. while discussing business, they are immersed in some hypnotic music bordering on progressive house or trance. the track is cassius’s “the sound of violence”, but as remixed by dennis de laat, a producer from the netherlands. moreover, de laat’s mix was released on a sublabel of spinnin’ records, one of the bestselling dance labels in the world—itself based in hilversum near amsterdam. that a dutch producer would soundtrack a key scene from a film concerned with big-tech entrepreneurship would come as no surprise to mark van bergen, the author of dutch dance, 1988-2018: how the netherlands took the lead in electronic music culture. the topic of this book is primarily the history and rise of dutch dance music both within holland and abroad. when exploring the lineups of major edm festivals over the last decade, the presence of global stars from the netherlands certainly stands out: tiësto, armin van buuren, martin garrix, afrojack, hardwell, chuckie, and nicky romero, to name a few. however, partly because of underground tendencies that avoid the commercial mainstream, edmc studies has scarcely touched on why and how these dutch stars came to have such prominence in dance pop. dutch dance is the first book in english to attempt a recounting of this history up through commercial success. the book is divided into four chapters, or “dance stages”, that explore the respective decades of this history, from the 1980s to the 2010s. a longtime journalist and lecturer on edm and the music industry, van bergen has assembled an impressive array of interviews and insider knowledge. dutch dance is also a long-time project, as this book is an expanded edition of an original 2013 publication that covered a 25-year history. van bergen’s publisher, mary go wild, is itself the publishing wing of a key dance store in amsterdam that was launched in 2013. mary go wild, as store and publishing house, resulted from a successful book launch of a volume of the same name. multiple books focusing on dutch dance have followed, the majority of which have not appeared in english (e.g. bergen 2013). https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.15 reviews 149 given this relative scarcity of english scholarly resources, questions of presenting and translating dutch dance history for an international audience are key. the volume’s strengths lie here in that it is primarily a scene history, with a wealth of details, although i will discuss some critical responses to the framing and analysis of this history. i recommend that readers focus on the insights into the music industry and the regional dance scenes discussed by van bergen. as an overarching history of four decades, the book explores key styles in dutch dance’s evolution. in the 1980s chapter, van bergen primarily explores the reception of disco, house, techno, and new beat in holland, emphasizing the foundations of dance music in queer and black american dance cultures. regarding the 1980s scene in holland, particular attention is given to pioneering djs such as eddy de clercq and joost van bellen at the amsterdam club roxy, as well as hillegonda rietveld’s experiences at the hacienda when house music exploded. van bergen promotes the notion of a dutch “autumn of love” as a response to the famed british “summer of love” in 1988. this idea resituates and complicates the uk focus in the development of rave culture, demonstrating a transnational evolution of rave across europe.1 in the 1990s chapter, van bergen shifts to a key period of transformation in dutch dance culture. he emphasizes the innovations of dutch gabber and hardcore, and the founding of the event organization id&t, which has had lasting marks on dutch dance to this day. importantly, van bergen does not forget holland’s key success at this time with respect to eurodance, exploring acts from twenty 4 seven to 2 unlimited, followed later by the vengaboys. such a focus demonstrates the long history of dance pop in holland beyond current edm stars. van bergen points out key features in 1990s rave, such as the links between gabber and soccer culture, as well as the full array of hardcore djs from paul elstak to gizmo. he further addresses the debates on the shift by paul elstak to happy hardcore, along with stars such as charlie lownoise and mental theo. still, critical limits to the national focus in this narrative emerge here. a number of transnational stories are left out. with respect to gabber, van bergen surprisingly only makes mention of inspirations from the belgian scene, with no discussion of the influences of marc acardipane and pcp records from frankfurt, as well as lenny dee and industrial strength in new york. in terms of techno and house, i would also have been interested in more discussion of the international networks of pioneering artists such as speedy j and miss djax. to be sure, there is a great deal to cover in this history, and van bergen lays important groundwork in addressing this decade. when he turns to the 2000s, important shifts are also highlighted. by the beginning of the 2000s, the massive influence of three dutch trance stars—tiësto, ferry corsten, and armin van buuren—could be observed, along with the refinement of gabber into the more accessible and popular genre of hardstyle. he also highlights the founding of another major events company, q-dance, in connection with hardstyle. important stories are recounted here in how various artist networks evolved: for example, ferry corsten’s production talents were combined with tiësto’s focus on djing. trance stars were also becoming dancecult 13(1)150 representative of a new transnational european identity, reflected in tiësto’s famous djset at the opening ceremonies of the 2004 summer olympics in greece. van bergen also reminds us of some major shifts in monetary and political organization that are sometimes not addressed in dance history—for example, the introduction of the euro in 2002, along with the continued expansion of the e.u. and the schengen area (172-73). these developments of trance and hardstyle then lead to the 2010s and the “fourth stage”, with the particular dutch stamp on edm pop with a new generation of stars such as martin garrix and hardwell, with major commercial success in the usa. indeed, this final chapter is properly called “vegas billboards”. van bergen emphasizes that “enormous billboards in hotspot cities like miami and las vegas display the faces of dutch djs” (234). i can attest to such billboards in hollywood, as well as on a visit to las vegas in 2013. images of tiësto, along with scottish star calvin harris, were displayed on the mgm grand casino in sizes equal to the announcements of david copperfield and cirque du soleil. however, despite the chapter’s title, i did not find many details on las vegas’s particular history, such as tiësto’s move to las vegas and his residency at club hakkasan at the mgm grand.2 still, in taking this review full circle back to the social network, van bergen at least discusses the rise and expansion of the aforementioned spinnin’ records as a global label and brand (249-256). beyond these detailed scene histories, however, the results in dutch dance when it comes to a critical analysis of the music industry and dance culture are decidedly mixed. the tone of the writing tends too much toward pop rhetoric. for example, van bergen states with casual positivity that dutch dance’s brand “has gone from strength to strength” (10). the constant mix of historical narration and interview quotations, some of which read like pr statements, does not provide enough variation in analysis. a troubling feature for scholars, there are also no footnotes or page number citations, so it can be difficult to locate van bergen’s sources (though a bibliography and an index are included). furthermore, there are repeated attempts to compare holland in the age of edm to the dutch golden age, which borders too much on clichés rather than a close analysis of dutch politics, culture, and economics since the 1970s. van bergen primarily positions the netherlands as a place of neoliberal entrepreneurship, with music little different from any other import cargo, which can be refined and sold around the globe (272–273). little critique regarding this is offered, although dutch edm stars have come under heightened scrutiny regarding cultural appropriation and the excesses of commercialization – more recently by house legend marshall jefferson.3 quite a number of underground dutch artists are left out of the picture in this later edm-star focus, though again, edmc scholarship has also not done enough to address the pop mainstream. how this history is framed and critiqued within the context of dance music and the current crisis in the festival economy will be ever more important. van bergen does, however, provide a detailed history across four decades, which demonstrates that major stars such as tiësto certainly did not emerge out of thin air. more research on dutch dance history and festival culture is needed, which hopefully reviews 151 will include translations of more recent memoires published by mary go wild and related organizations. notes 1 for a comparable discussion, see gert van veen’s “amsterdam’s autumn of love” in resident advisor: https://ra.co/features/1945 2 see the report in rolling stone in 2013: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/ tiesto-commits-to-long-term-residency-in-las-vegas-48833/ 3 see marshall jefferson, “why i quit djing”, in mixmag, 28 october, 2020. https://mixmag. net/feature/marshall-jefferson-why-i-quit-djing. reference van bergen, mark. 2013. dutch dance: 25 jaar dance in nederland. amsterdam: xander uitgevers. https://ra.co/features/1945 https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/tiesto-commits-to-long-term-residency-in-las-vegas-48833/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/tiesto-commits-to-long-term-residency-in-las-vegas-48833/ https://mixmag.net/feature/marshall-jefferson-why-i-quit-djing https://mixmag.net/feature/marshall-jefferson-why-i-quit-djing dancecult 13(1)152 the new age of electronic dance music and club culture anita jóri, martin lücke (editors) cham: springer, 2020 226 pp. isbn: 978-3-030-39001-3 (hb), 978-3-030-39004-4 (pb), 978-3-030-39002-0 (ebook) rrp: €103.99 (hb), €62.39 (pb), €85.59 (ebook) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.16> tom smith university of st andrews (united kingdom) in the time since the new age of electronic dance music and club culture was written, everything has changed for berlin’s nightlife and the world’s clubbing landscape. yet the ideas articulated in this edited volume still stand up to, and illuminate, the changes to clubbing brought by the pandemic and point to important considerations as clubs begin to contemplate emerging from shutdowns. anita jóri and martin lücke’s volume emerged from a conference in june 2017 held at berghain in berlin, which brought together academics with industry professionals. the breadth of discussions in this volume is a testament to the extraordinary cross-disciplinary work being undertaken to enhance and challenge our understandings both of berlin as a clubbing metropole and the wider electronic music industry. the project is inspired, in jóri and lücke’s words, by the belief that “scholars and practitioners should work more closely with each other in order to create a common language amongst them, thereby aligning research and practical fields” (2). the range of different written styles, personal reflections and academic insights is one of the strengths of the book, as are the many chapters that demonstrate the potential for analysing unconventional sources of knowledge on dance music to improve our understanding of the face-to-face and virtual networks around electronic music. contributors analyse online communities (youtube and facebook), work by activist collectives, bookshop bestseller lists and even techno music created live without recorded sound. this powerful case for drawing on different kinds of expertise shows how work on electronic music can contribute a great deal to similar trends across humanities scholarship today. the volume’s introduction describes the background to the conference and outlines the content of the articles. it avoids broader statements about the book’s contribution to existing scholarship, which rather undersells the important insights its authors and editors bring to the field both individually and collectively. some of the volume’s authors, too, could signal more clearly the potential reach of their ideas and methodologies and their significance for wider scholarly debates. this leaves readers to draw connections and trends between articles ourselves, but in some ways this approach is welcome, given that the authors and editors could not have foreseen the changes to the club industry so soon after the essays went to press. https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.16 reviews 153 one such connection is the closure or repurposing of clubs as physical spaces and the increase in virtual clubbing and musical communities. botond vitos’s proposed project on how music fans might use audio media to recreate club experiences in their personal spheres, for example, will have gained in salience over the course of the pandemic. jóri’s own contribution on facebook groups for collectors of the roland tb-303 bass line explores computer-mediated discourse analysis methods that will be of interest for scholars now researching the online club communities that have flourished during the pandemic, such as club quarantine, united we stream and keep hush. some reflection on the conference’s own setting at berghain would be interesting in this respect, given that the club’s physical space has been given over to art exhibitions since march 2020, with other berlin clubs like the kitkatclub even operating as test centres during the pandemic. the concern around gentrification and closures in berlin—a live issue since the earliest years of the twenty-first century—also takes on new urgency in 2021. of particular interest here are lukas drevenstedt’s piece on changes and gentrification in berlin and kata katz’s article about the closure of echo books. drevenstedt and katz both show that clubs and electronic music depend on a complex and “sensitive ecosystem” and call for recognition of the components that make up these musical worlds (10). further investigation is needed into musicians’ and nightclub proprietors’ creativity in the face of extreme, often prohibitive pressures caused by berlin’s rapid gentrification. these insights have acquired new international significance since the pandemic, with scholarship of this sort having an important role to play as clubs continue to respond to the hardships of 2020 and 2021. the volume’s focus on berlin is interesting and justified: the city plays such an important role in the world’s electronic music scenes, both as a symbolic centre and in terms of the opportunities it offers to djs, producers, club promoters and clubbers. the best contributions are those that “provincialise” berlin – to use dipesh chakrabarty’s term – not just as a place but an idea that means different things and is mobilised in different ways depending on context, both within and outside the city (2000: 3–6). such articles locate berlin scenes in their specific environment and resist the urge to extrapolate to other contexts, which can be tempting given berlin’s symbolic weight in electronic music culture. benedikt brilmayer’s history of electronic musical instruments, for example, situates important developments in berlin alongside significant innovations that came to berlin more belatedly. this work is a reminder that the city’s symbolic importance for clubbers is a relatively new development, historically speaking, but that it has nonetheless been a centre for musical developments over many years. ewa mazierska’s article analyses the symbolic, economic and stylistic importance of berlin for “musickers” (a neologism by christopher small encompassing musicians, other industry professionals, clubbers and fans (1998)) in vienna and cities in the west of poland. these local scenes demonstrate how berlin’s prestige in other european contexts is shifting and contingent. in fact, a strength of the volume is its differentiated focus specifically on austrian electronic music (bianca ludewig, mazierska, josef schaubruch), a context often overlooked in studies of club culture. dancecult 13(1)154 the volume is most clearly aligned with current scholarship on electronic music where it turns its attention to diversity and social justice in club scenes. ludewig’s article serves as a good introduction to this topic in berlin and austria, ranging widely from her feminist collective work with female:pressure and meetup berlin, through discussions of racism and whiteness in the telling of techno history in germany. patrick valiquet addresses the industry’s gendered assumptions and hierarchies—both implicit and explicit—in his analysis of darsha hewitt’s youtube pedagogy. katz asks just how radical the crowds are at berlin’s many protest parties, a question that has gained relevance given some of the berlin scene’s responses to 2020’s black lives matter protests (kirn 2020). reflecting on these articles, i found myself asking similar questions of material from elsewhere in the volume: jóri’s examples suggesting further possible conclusions about how masculinity works in online communities around electronic music, and lücke raising the question of how quantitative surveys might contribute insights around gender, race and class to understanding the social component of club scenes. it would be interesting to reflect on how the articles in this volume fit alongside work on other genres of electronic music in germany and austria. i think, for example, of research on hip-hop in the german context (e.g. el-tayeb 2003; weheliye 2009; saied 2012), on germany’s reggae and dancehall scenes (aikins 2005; pfleiderer 2018) or on eurodance (thom 2016), which allow a more expansive definition of ‘electronic dance music cultures’. the new age of electronic dance music and club culture will be welcomed by students and scholars in many disciplines working on berlin, austria, electronic music and popular music, social media, and many topics besides. individual articles will no doubt find a home on course reading lists: ludewig’s already features on my own course on german popular music and articles like lücke’s and brilmayer’s function as potentially useful reference works for statistics and historical information around electronic music in berlin. the book is meticulously referenced, and its bibliographies provide a wealth of further reading. taken as a whole, the volume provides insights into many of the ongoing questions guiding current scholarly debates, and even as those debates shift in response to the pandemic, these essays suggest where our future enquiries might go. references aikins, joshua kwesi. 2005. “wer mit feuer spielt . . . aneignung und widerstand – schwarze musik/kulturen in deutschlands weißem mainstream”. in mythen, masken und subjekte: kritische weißseinsforschung in deutschland, ed. maureen maisha eggers, grada kilomba, peggy piesche and susan arndt, 283–300. berlin: unrast. chakrabarty, dipesh. 2000. provincializing europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference. princeton, nj: princeton university press. reviews 155 el-tayeb, fatima. 2003. “‘if you can’t pronounce my name, you can just call me pride’: afrogerman activism, gender and hip hop”. gender and history 15(3): 460–86. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0953-5233.2003.00316.x>. kirn, peter. 2020. “no love parades this time: in the midst of crisis, an image of tonedeaf ravers in berlin”, cdm, 1 june. <https://cdm.link/2020/06/crisis-and-racism-in-berlin/>, (accessed 18 june 2021). pfleiderer, martin. 2018. “soul rebels and dubby conquerers: reggae and dancehall music in germany in the 1990s and early 2000s”. popular music 37(1): 81–99. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143017000587>. saied, ayla güler. 2012. rap in deutschland: musik als interaktionsmedium zwischen partykultur und urbanen anerkennungskämpfen. bielefeld: transcript. small, christopher. 1998. musicking: the meanings of performing and listening. middletown, ct: wesleyan university press. thom, nico. 2016. “the popularization of electronic dance music: german artists/producers and the eurodance phenomenon”. in perspectives on german popular music, ed. michael ahlers and christoph jacke, 111–5. new york: routledge. weheliye, alexander. 2009. “my volk to come: peoplehood in recent diaspora discourse and afro-german popular music”. in black europe and the african diaspora, ed. darlene clark hine, trica danielle keaton, and stephen small, 161–79. chicago: university of illinois press. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0953-5233.2003.00316.x https://cdm.link/2020/06/crisis-and-racism-in-berlin/ https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143017000587 dancecult 13(1)156 join the future: bleep techno and the birth of british bass music matt anniss london: velocity press, 2019 300 pp. isbn: 978-1-9132-3100-2 rrp: £14.99 <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.17> ian trowell independent scholar matt anniss’ book on the bleep scene feels like an extension or output of warp records, exuding the purple colour scheme that distinguished the sheffield label from its outset. it takes its title from the early (and somewhat overlooked) record release from tuff little unit and employs the sans serif font and simple design of tight blocky design with italicised elements seen on early releases such as the lfo album frequencies. the label, established in 1989 as both a continuum and fresh direction of previous initiatives such as fon (a studio, a label and a shop), initially became the imprimatur of the bleep sound. anniss grew up through this scene and clearly holds on to its importance. his book draws heavily on his recent journalism work for the red bull music academy where he has been documenting the early experiments and activists in this yorkshire scene. he writes in an impassioned and detailed style, the narrative constantly driven by both the author’s own feelings for the scene and a need to establish himself as an original participant in it. at times it feels as if the book is written for a cohort of believers who keep the faith, like an updated occurrence of the northern soul mythology. there is an important rationale to the book, as anniss argues for re-assessing the historical understanding of this scene within the wider complex chronology of dance music. he has a point here, and he sets out to demolish myths, redress historical versions, timeframes and figures, and re-situate the northern origins of bleep. this intent is signalled early on, where anniss sets out the official version of “british dance music finding a distinctive voice” (6) with a when (1991) and a where (london). the originators and perpetrators of this version of history are not initially called out, though simon reynolds’ go-to work on dance music energy flash is clearly the main culprit. reynolds’ book, dense and magisterial, covers bleep and the sheffield scene in an eight-page section within the chapter “second wave of rave 1990-1992” (reynolds 1998: 97-104). anniss ultimately calls out reynolds, whilst acknowledging his pioneering work, towards the end of the book where reynolds is accused of mixing cause and effect, downplaying the north and overplaying the south (238). this version of events set out by reynolds—his hardcore continuum within a wider lineage of dance music linking detroit, chicago, new york and the uk—proliferates as an authoritative discourse, in some way a testament to reynolds’ powerful writing. anniss does not list the numerous sources that peddle this accepted version of events, but examples https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.17 reviews 157 are plentiful. for a typical (recent) case, richard king’s the lark ascending sees uk rave culture having the simplistic lineage of ibiza clubbers pioneering the balearic scene and moving on to set up the london club shoom (king 2019: 267). end of story. anniss conducts his careful counter-history, exploring what michel foucault considers as the important rupture points, unearthing an “archaeology of a silence” (macey 2019: 95). this is both a noisy silence of dance music at full volume, and a silent noisiness as the sub-bass that defines the bleep scene is often felt through the vibrations that engulf the body and surrounding environment of the nightclub. there is a constant trope throughout all of anniss’ interviews regarding the severity of the bass sound; stories of household hifi speakers unable to detect the sound, of studio engineers saying it’s more than my job’s worth to cut the record, of club spaces and glass fittings dangerously vibrating as the white labels are played out for the first time. the bass horror script of blown out equipment and speakers, akin to star trek’s scotty engine-room scenario, is an apocryphal story that crops up in many testimonies of dance music. the book is structured in four parts named after classic bleep records, riffing on (or more appropriately, sampling from) the warp catalogue. the first part, covered in four chapters, is most interesting for me, and anniss works hard to craft a different history to the bleep sound, establishing his counter-narrative to rave mythology. he covers the cultural, social, political and topographical background of the places and spaces that gave rise to this sound, settling on three pivotal ideas. firstly, the north of england in the second and third terms of thatcher’s government, depicted as a kind of war mentality with left wing councils such as sheffield offering youth opportunities in arts. secondly, anniss carves out an interstitial place in the subcultural slew of the early 1980s, a post-northern soul fandom that was previously hindered by racist attitudes. new protagonists repopulate the husk of the scene in the early 1980s to hold jazz-funk all-dayers, dance competitions, the nurturing of dance crews. this quickly leads to an embrace of the nascent electro and break-dancing scene around 1983, with venues such as nottingham’s rock city and its saturday afternoon sessions offering an important beacon. thirdly, anniss documents the important role of sound system culture, the lovers rock and dub genres, and the illicit and distinctive blues club scene. anniss identifies a convergence of these trends, giving rise to clubs such as jive turkey in sheffield. further influences are added such as the championing of house music around 1986 and the influx of a small cohort of fashion obsessed northern hooligans or grafters noted for stealing and dealing designer goods. some of these peripheral characters are clustered on an ibiza scene, but two years before it became famed for the balaeric sound. anniss touches upon the importance of fashion without significant detailing – there is mention of jive turkey being very dressy and, from experience, i’d say this was something of an understatement! the second part of the book documents the key activists, chapter by chapter. manchester’s gerald simpson (a guy called gerald) takes the chronological priority with his 1988 track voodoo ray proving a club hit and eventually breaking into the mainstream charts. anniss suggests that this provokes a response from sheffield, who admired the record, dancecult 13(1)158 giving birth to bleep. this movement is carefully tracked through bradford’s unique 3 who release theme in late 1988, leeds based nightmares on wax who debut in 1989, their city colleagues lfo from 1990, and importantly sheffield’s forgemasters who provide warp’s inaugural release track with no name. part three of the book documents the spreading out of the scene, starting close to home with the relatively overlooked sheffield label ozone, and then radiating out to midlands based network, luton’s chill, the wider bleep and breaks movement, and finally an overseas perspective. part four is anniss’ take on the decline and legacy of the scene, taking the castle morton 1992 rave as a watershed (the moment where king commences his writing). anniss suggests a split into darkcore/jungle and happy hardcore/rave, such that bleep and bass has an increasingly vestigial presence. there are some insurmountable problems. the elephant in the room concerns warp’s disputed origins and divergent versions of an acrimonious break up, hindered by co-founder steve beckett’s declining to be interviewed. whereas beckett contributes to both reynolds’ overarching work, and rob young’s labels unlimited focus on warp, anniss powers on and is driven by his enduring closeness to the scene, sharing spliffs with the protagonists as they recall hazy nights in bedroom studios and dub-plate mayhem. anniss doesn’t proffer any academic or subcultural theory, though his historical approach of testimony and anecdote glimpses oversights and omissions. there is little contemporaneous source material apart from a single i-d report on the northern bleep scene. further, in 1990 a clutch of warp releases made significant inroads into the mainstream charts, jockeying with early 1990s dance-era novelty records such as mc hammer, partners in kryme’s turtle power, fab and mc parker’s thunderbirds tribute and timmy mallett’s glib sampling of early house records. both tricky disco and lfo climbed the charts, sharing similar videos of cut-up scenes from early cinematography and eadweard muybridge stop-motion photography. none of this recalled or analysed by anniss. the pace is urgent, intense and breathless, with dot-to-dot detail of dance spaces, club names, tracks and dance moves. anniss takes an occasional moment to stop and sample the air, such as on snake pass between manchester and sheffield (64) or at park hill flats for a brutalist memoir to accompany the concluding paragraphs. anniss forgoes an index for a pure chronographical time-line that carries the book through, mimicking the urgency of a dub-plate record – a desire to get the thing out there as soon as it is produced. references king, richard. 2019. the lark ascending: the music of the british landscape. london: faber & faber. macey, david. 2019. the lives of michel foucault. london: verso. reynolds, simon. 1998. energy flash: a journey through rave music and dance culture. london: picador. beyond club cultures: the mobile dj and devotional music in north india bharat s independent researcher <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.10> introduction: new spaces of electronic dance music the history of electronic dance music in india can be dated back to the explosion of disco music in the early 1980s. in subsequent decades hip-hop, breakbeat, psychedelic trance and a number of other genres have entered the musical milieu through film and radio and, in recent years, the internet and streaming services. in this process, a number of local djs and producers, as well as clubs and dance festivals have emerged. but electronic music has also gone beyond the club, to the highways and streets of the country and become embedded in a number of social phenomena. here, i take you through one such phenomenon: the religious pilgrimage, specifically the kanwar yatra, an annual pilgrimage undertaken by devotees of the hindu deity siva in the auspicious month of sawan[1] (july-august). figure 1. hawkers in haridwar. photo credit: bharat s. (2019). every year in sawan men (and more recently women) from the north indian states of uttarakhand, himachal pradesh, rajasthan, punjab, haryana, uttar pradesh, and delhi gather at the pilgrimage town of haridwar[2] situated in the foothills of the himalayas where the sacred river ganga enters the north indian plains to take part in this ceremonial transportation of holy water from the river for libations at various shrines dedicated to siva. some arrive by bus and specially arranged trains, others drive down in large groups on trucks and tractors. the pilgrimage is notable for the considerable physical rigour it demands. once in haridwar pilgrims fill up containers with holy water from the river and begin the return journey on foot, with many walking anywhere from 100 to 300 miles within a span of ten days. young adults and teenagers of low-income urban and rural backgrounds make up the bulk of the pilgrims, called kanwarias or bhole after bholenath[3] in common parlance. the pilgrimage gets its name from the kanwar, the bamboo apparatus on which the water is transported, although in recent years more elaborate kanwars of fibreglass, styrofoam and metal have also become popular. figure 2. pilgrims with their kanwars in haridwar. photo credit: bharat s. (2019). figure 3. kanwars of different sizes and shapes. photo credit: bharat s. (2019). figure 4. a jhanki (tableaux) kanwar being pulled by pilgrims on the streets of muzaffarnagar. photo credit: s. bharat. (2019). figure 5. another jhanki kanwar in muzaffarnagar. photo credit: s. bharat. (2019). figure 6. a large kanwar modelled after a temple shrine, delhi. photo credit: s. bharat. (2019). concurrent with the pilgrimage’s growing popularity there has been a veritable explosion of kanwar music—beat driven electronic music with religious themes whose production is tailored to take maximum advantage of the sonic impact and reach offered by large pa systems rigged up on the backs of trucks, creating what is known locally as the “mobile dj”.[4] figure 7. pilgrims and bathers at har ki pauri, haridwar. photo credit: s. bharat. (2019). take figure 7, for instance, photographed at har ki pauri, the main ghat[5] of haridwar during the sawan season in 2019. it is a photograph that may best be described as noisy. it is awash in bright colours crowded together—the saffron of pilgrims’ clothes, the yellow, pink and neon greens of their kanwars, the golden colour of tinsel and the deep red of the wet sandstone steps. small-time hawkers and vendors thread their way through the mass of pilgrims. the auditory scene is as chaotic as the visual one. at the base of everything is the roar of the flowing river, accented by the splash of pilgrims diving into it, laughter and shouts and loud conversation. the trade cries of vendors and hawkers is another layer of sound added to this mix. overlooking this are the loudspeakers, used variously to locate people separated from their friends or families in the crowd, to appeal for donations, to make public service announcements and crowd control, and to play prayer songs at auspicious hours of the day. surrounding all of this is the relentless sound of traffic from the street. out of sight, across the river, to the left, there is a sprawling mud field where pilgrims park their trucks. from these parked trucks, from time to time, an “open”[6] mobile dj’s bass-y barrage breaks into this already crowded composition. figure 8. buses and trucks parked on a field near the riverbank in haridwar. photo credit: s. bharat. (2019). figure 9. a small mobile dj mounted on a pickup truck, next to the jhanki (tableaux) kanwar it will accompany. photo credit: s. bharat. (2019). figure 10. front view of figure 9. photo credit: s. bharat. (2019). the soundtrack of faith in what follows, i delve into this polyphonous “soundtrack” of the kanwar pilgrimage, using a combination of field recordings, commercially released music, youtube clips and photographs accompanied by my own annotations and field notes. in doing so i embed this music within a larger field of sonic occurrences and the social processes they are tethered to and argue that our preponderant focus on the club floor often removes from sight other locations of electronic dance music cultures, particularly in the global south. i use the word soundtrack for three reasons. firstly, to convey that sound is embedded within a broader social field where it may or may not enjoy performative primacy. a soundtrack can draw attention to itself, but it can also recede to the background. secondly, unlike a soundscape the soundtrack bears no connotations of a totality or holism (sterne 2013: 186). tracks are layers that can be added up or silenced. lastly, the term foregrounds the centrality of the mechanical reproduction of sound and its technological mediation through devices ranging from cell phones and bluetooth speakers to sophisticated sound systems costing hundreds of thousand rupees. kanwar music the word pilgrims most commonly use to describe their disposition is shraddha (faith). in the kanwar pilgrimage shraddha is expressed through the laborious physical act of carrying the kanwar and adhering to the many niyam (rules) that govern the behaviour of a person bearing the kanwar. if shraddha is religious feeling in motion, then this soundtrack is one of its motors. kanwar music is drawn from a common repertoire of songs about siva that occupy an “intermediate sphere” (manuel 2015) where folk, pop, film and devotional music overlap. produced by regional music labels[7], they’re sung by popular folk singers of the region in a mix of haryanvi, punjabi, and hindi—the language spoken by most of the pilgrims at haridwar. the language is extremely colloquial, with a healthy mix of commonly heard english words. i offer examples of some of these tracks. nakli bhang (lang: haryanvi) [eng: fake bhang] (tauwood 2017) domestic disputes between siva and his consort parvati are a popular theme in kanwar songs. here siva accuses parvati of giving him fake bhang (edible cannabis) and parvati retorts that his growing tolerance is the problem, not the potency of the bhang. bhola whatsapp pe aa gaya (lang: haryanvi) [eng: bhola’s on whatsapp now] (supertone regional 2017) here technology and social media frame and mediate the hierarchical male homosocial relationship between deity and devotee, the latter occupying a fluid space somewhere between friend, fan, and follower. bhola communicates with his devotees over the instant messaging platform whatsapp. another popular trope in these songs is to present the pilgrims as members of siva’s baraat (wedding entourage); eg. “bhole di baraat”, “shiv ki barat hai”. bam lahiri (hindi) (sony music 2007) one of the most well known songs of this genre is “bam lahiri” by hindi playback singer kailash kher. while never marketed as a kanwar song, its imagery and style have become templates for newer tracks. the “dj mix” before these songs reach the mobile dj, they pass through the hands of a “mixer” who creates a “dj mix” by adding layers of bass-driven beats and studio effects to the original track. these mixes are uploaded on youtube and circulate via informal networks over whatsapp and file sharing mobile apps. bhang pili gora ne dj remix by dj somvir muanaa (2021) in this remix, very little of the original song’s structure is altered. the work of remixing a kanwar song is more about enhancing the song with a backing beat rather than reworking the song’s structure. this mix, like many others, incorporates the mixer’s name into it like an auditory watermark. in a system so fluid, informal and unregulated, this is often the only way of ensuring authorship. when heard in large gatherings, it also acts as an effective form of publicity. figure 11. pilgrims on the nh-334 near the uttar pradesh border. photo credit: bharat s. (2019). the mobile dj having been remixed by the dj, the song passes into the hands of the mobile dj operator. in its present form, the yatra is unthinkable without the deafening, rib-crushing throb of the mobile dj’s rhythm track. a whole economy of motorized vehicles, music production, and sound reproduction technology is mobilised around it. a dj setup for the kanwar yatra may range from something as simple as two speakers and a mixing console secured to the back of an autorickshaw to elaborate rigs involving multiple speakers and lights and a crew of helpers and mechanics to keep the machinery operational. the mobile dj is a common phenomenon in north india, its uses ranging from wedding processions to political rallies and religious gatherings. unlike loudspeakers, which are not designed to call attention to themselves, the mobile dj apparatus is as much visual as it is auditory, rigged up with plastic garlands and tinsel and a bevy of strobe lights. mobile djs are hired by pilgrims to accompany them on the journey. the music enhances the spectacle of lights, and elaborately decorated tableaux. one pilgrim described it as a force that “keeps the feet moving”[8] despite the aches and pains, the swelling and the blisters that are an inevitable result of the journey. figure 12. pilgrims dancing in haridwar. photo credit: bharat s. (2019). figure 13. a mobile dj passing through muzaffarnagar. photo credit: s. bharat. (2019). figure 14. a massive mobile dj setup with more than two dozen speakers of varying sizes. photo credit: s. bharat. (2019). figure 15. pilgrims dancing on the streets of muzaffarnagar. photo credit: bharat s. (2019). figure 16. the crew of a mobile dj system resting under a tarp. photo credit: bharat s. (2019). most mobile djs are operated by young men attached to a sound system rental service, such as raavan dj, and learn through apprenticeship, starting out as helpers in the crew. it is the owner of the service who receives bookings and assigns the operators to gigs. nitin is a 19 year old operator from noida, uttar pradesh who started out as an apprentice three years ago. like most operators, weddings[9] are the primary source of work for nitin, but he has been booked twice for the kanwar yatra. as a paid service, his priority is to satisfy the client and farmaish (requests) are common and difficult to refuse. key to sustaining the momentum of a mobile dj performance is transitions: the starting should be such that the public is excited that the dj is playing… if a song, for instance, is three minutes long, we don't play it for the entire duration. at most we play the song for a minute…because we start getting requests once the music starts… it depends on the public, the way they are dancing. as i said, beat to beat… if i think the song is too slow, and i want the public to go faster, then i will think about what i can play to make them dance faster. when the beat kicks in, when there is a punch to it, it gets the public going[10]. the focus is not on the creation of a seamless groove through beatmatching and eq work but on moving “beat to beat”—the rapid introduction of novelty to keep dancers on their toes by quickly cycling through songs—and the “punch” of an explosive beginning. bharat iyer · knwss01 haridwar during the sawan mela (iyer 2019) here is a recording made on the banks of the ganga one evening during the sawan mela in 2019. in less than a quarter of an hour, the operator cycles through nearly half a dozen popular tracks – bhole di baraat, bam lahiri, bhola bah gaya ganga main, sari duniya jhuman lati o chandre sute ne, mast malang, akhiyan udeek diyan. to ears accustomed largely to club dj-ing the effect is very disorienting at first. figure 17. pilgrims on top of a mobile dj. photo credit: s. bharat. (2019). figure 18. residents gathered at shiv chowk in muzaffarnagar, uttar pradesh in the evening to observe the passage of kanwars. photo credit: s. bharat. (2019). figure 19. a military-themed jhanki (tableaux) with images of the indian armed forces, actors dressed in military fatigues, and models of the indian-made brahmos cruise missile. photo credit: s. bharat. (2019). figure 20. kanwars crossing shiv chowk at night. photo credit: s. bharat. (2019). contests of loudness and strength: the soundcheck and the dj battle one pilgrim described the escalating arms race of massive mobile djs as a form of “taakat pradarshan” or show of strength and power. the pinnacle of this practice is the “soundcheck”, the local name for tracks produced specifically for dj battles that take place when mobile djs cross paths along the pilgrimage route. videos of dj battles from the pilgrimage abound on the internet and they’re a way of mobile dj companies to build a reputation. dj battle (mᴀɴ ᴋᴀʀᴀɴ gᴀᴍɪɴɢ 2019) the raspy, booming, saw tooth wave heavy instrumental tracks designed to show off the power of the system are often a stage for a phallic, masculine exercise of one-upmanship evident in the body language of the two crews, the pelvic thrusts and gestures, and macho posturing (in some cases, bodybuilders accompany the crew, flexing their muscles with the bass in the background). banter between the mobile dj crews and the pilgrims they accompany is a big part of the dj battle. the banter is a composite of speech, gestures, and samples of dialogue from popular media and films. winning the listening public over to your side is as much about the banter as it is about sound. the north indian dj battle is largely focused on the machinery itself, and the crew’s ability to operate it and push it to its limit. the sound is a means to exhibit the power of the equipment with the victor being the one who is able to deliver the biggest "punch". but insofar as this victory is determined by the response of the public, the "punch" cannot be reduced to a purely measurable property like decibel levels. it is a composite affective response to the affordances of the equipment, which includes the visual appearance and spectacle of the mobile dj, the sound, and the behaviour of the crew and the operator on the mic. conclusion: edmcs in the global south in the global north, club cultures are often associated with communities and subcultures alienated from the "mainstream" by class, gender, race and sexuality. analytical categories and frameworks for the study of edmcs have historically emerged out of this context. scholarship on this subject builds on the broad premise that electronic dance music marks a transition from the logic of the song to the logic of the track, departing from the strophic structure of the song towards an exploration of repetition, rhythms and non-cartesian modes of listening (eshun 1988, reynolds 2013). in india the nightclub and the rave are spaces typically associated with an urban "westernized" elite. in order to grasp fully the place of electronic dance music in such contexts, it is critical to expand our imagination beyond the club floor to other manifestations of edmc. in the kanwar pilgrimage public spaces like the riverbank and the interstate highway are transformed into staging grounds for dance music. the soundtrack of the kanwar yatra, with its emphasis on the punch over seamlessness and its abrupt transitions disrupts the logic of the song. but it does so not in the direction of the groove, but towards a more fragmented formation whose genealogy is partly grounded in kanwar music’s sources and partly in a performative space where dancing is not a singular, continuous act but one among many expressions of ludic energy embedded within the flow of religious practice. in the process, mobile dj culture in north india has developed its own vocabulary of music production and listening distinct from the club. theorisations of electronic music derived from euro-american club contexts cannot sufficiently account for the trajectories of edmcs in regional, non-metropolitan mediascapes. the global spread of electronic music underscores the need for locally grounded, context-specific ontologies and vocabularies of analysis. acknowledgements this article is based on a research project titled "soundtracking the kanwar yatra: a study of popular music and religion in north india" supported by the india foundation for the arts (ifa) arts research grant. author biography bharat s. is an archivist at the french institute of pondicherry and an anthropologist by training. email: bharatiyer08@gmail.com references eshun, kodwo. 1998. more brilliant than the sun: adventures in sonic fiction. quartet books. manuel, peter. 2015. “the intermediate sphere in north indian music culture: between and beyond ‘folk’ and ‘classical’”. ethnomusicology 59(1): 82–115. <https://doi.org/10.5406/ethnomusicology.59.1.0082>. reynolds, simon. 2013. generation ecstasy: into the world of techno and rave culture. new york: routledge. sterne, jonathan. 2013 “soundscape, landscape, escape”. in soundscapes of the urban past, ed. karin bijsterveld, 181–94. bielefeld: transcript verlag. discography iyer, bharat. “knwss01”. soundcloud audio, 11:23, 2019. <https://soundcloud.com/bharat-iyer-3/knwss01>. filmography dj somvir muanaa. “नक़ली भाँग_nakli bhang (dj remix ) ll rajbala bahadurgarh ll bhole song herd bass dj somvir muanaa”. youtube, 5:15. uploaded on 12 jul 2021. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fswcfhso3bk> (accessed on 28 aug 2021). mᴀɴ ᴋᴀʀᴀɴ gᴀᴍɪɴɢ. “raavan dj vs raavan dj”. youtube, 10:16. uploaded on 23 july 2019. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-boj8b9wue> (accessed on 30 june 2020). sony music india. “kailash kher bam lahiri”. youtube, 4:11. vevo. uploaded on 22 may 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tn3fqz9kzzc> (accessed 28 aug 2021). supertone regional. “haryanvi 2018 song -भोला आ गया whatsapp पे | shiv bhajan | bhola aa gaya whatsapp pe | tanu and manu”. youtube, 3:26. uploaded 18 dec 2017. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycy_vdsjh3e> (accessed on 28 aug 2021). tauwood. “nakli bhang (remix) ll नकली भांग ll superhit shiv song 2017 ll rajbala bahadurgarh || tau wood”. youtube, 5:14. uploaded 21 jun 2017. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra5c3srheoy> (accessed 28 aug 2021). notes [1] sawan is the fifth month of the lunar hindu calendar, which overlaps with july and august in the gregorian calendar. [2] haridwar is the most popular starting point for the kanwar yatra at present, but there are other places too—gangotri, gaumukh, sultanganj, and tarakeshwar to name some, all on the banks of the river ganga. of these haridwar, in the himalayan state of uttarakhand, and sultanganj in bihar are by far the two most popular. gaumukh and gangotri are further upstream of the river ganges, nestled deep in the mountains, making the journey longer and more arduous, meant only for the really determined pilgrims. the pilgrimage route originating at tarakeshwar in the eastern state of west bengal is shorter and popular mainly within its immediate vicinity. [3] bhola is hindi for a naive or simple person and bholenath is the lord of the simple people. in taking on the term bhole the pilgrims present themselves as simple devotees of siva, granting them a moral legitimacy and dignity that their customary place in the lower rungs of indian society denies them in everyday life. [4] in everyday north indian parlance the term “dj” refers to the machine itself, rather than the human operating it. the person behind the console is called an operator. [5] steps along the banks of a river commonly used for bathing and washing clothes, as well as for ritual purposes. [6] in local parlance the process of turning on the mobile dj is known as “sound kholna” or opening the sound. [7] these labels emerged as part of a broader trend in north indian popular regional music that developed in the 1980s with the introduction of cassette tapes. the best example of this mediascape is t-series, a record company founded in the 1980s that started making pirated cassette tapes and grew over the years into a giant corporation with a very diverse catalogue of bollywood and regional music, setting the template for a number of regional record labels like mor music, tau company and sonotek that have come up since. with the rise of mobile internet and streaming services, regional labels are now largely dependent on revenue from their youtube channels. these companies either produce their own music or purchase the rights to songs from the artist and upload them on their channels. for their part musicians gain visibility from these uploads and make most of their money from live performances. [8] pankaj, interview with author (manglaur), 23 july 2019. [9] a wedding crew consists of an operator and two helpers who accompany the equipment. an operator makes around inr 1,000 per gig, while helpers make inr 500. [10] nitin, interview with author (phone call), 8 march 2020. “an avatar . . . in a physical space”: researching the mediated immediacy of electronic dance floors dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 6(2): 1–21 issn 1947-5403 ©2014 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.02.01 “an avatar . . . in a physical space”: researching the mediated immediacy of electronic dance floors botond vitos independent researcher (germany) abstract this article addresses the mediations of technologies and user experiences on the dance floors of melbourne techno underground scenes. interviewees for my doctoral research project recalled embodied experiences of a “second life”, similar to computerised virtual realities but in the physical space of the party. this article argues for the application of baudrillardian theory in the investigation of such experiences, contending that the chemical and musical object of electronic dance music is capable of the virtualisation of its immediate environment and the adjustment of the subject’s everyday life. emphasising the merits of ethnographic fieldwork in electronic dance music research, i call for a reading of baudrillard that allows an empirically based exploration of his concepts. my focus on insider accounts of virtualisation processes is conducive to the close investigation of the dance floor “vibe” in the context of consumer culture. keywords: vibe, mediation, drugs, virtual, techno, baudrillard botond vitos received his phd degree with specialisation in cultural studies from monash university, melbourne. his research interests include electronic dance music culture, the media ecology of the electronic dance floor, the relationship between music and technology and the cultural contexts and meanings of drug use. his phd project “experiencing electronic dance floors” was a comparative analysis of the techno and psytrance edm scenes in melbourne. email: <x@vitos.tv>. feature article mailto:x@vitos.tv dancecult 6(2)2 the electronic dance music (edm) genre of techno emerged in late 1980s detroit, relying on influences such as kraftwerk, funk, european synth-pop, and the post-industrial cityscape of decaying detroit city (brewster and broughton 2000: 320–32). in the early 1990s, in the second wave of detroit techno, dj/producer collectives such as the underground resistance and +8 developed a harsher sound inspired by electro, uk synth-pop, industrial music and electronic body music, partly as a counter-reaction against the mainstream entertainment industry (reynolds 1999: 219–20). with the dramatic increase in edm genres and subgenres since the 1990s, techno became a diversified phenomenon with numerous crossovers to other genres. my research addresses the melbourne incarnation of the genre, primarily focusing on its acid-detroit-hard-industrial subgenres. for the individual partygoer, regular participation in techno events is a constantly evolving experiment shaped by the mediatory agents building the club environment such as the music, drugs, visual arrangements and audience interactions. although the subjective interpretation of the dance floor experience may vary, those i have interviewed within the melbourne scene emphasised the need for encountering strange sounds and rhythmic structures, which often generate feelings of confusion and displacement. within a soundscape dominated by machinic effects, this draws attention away from the echoes of industrial production and opens up a psychedelic space that disrupts normative rational processes through peculiar arrangements of repetitive musical structures. downstream from detroit techno, the dance floor may open up a mindset that is constituted, in the words of kodwo eshun (1998: 120), through “the covert operations of drumcodes, the synthesis of unknown sensations, the modulation of frequent emotions”. such syntheses and modulations are carried out in the “laboratory” of the club, where in most cases the pitch-black darkness is impregnated by techno music, a few lights, the occasional strobe and artificial smoke. these synergistic mediations are further enhanced by recreational drugs, some of which may induce synaesthetic perceptions, providing access to a zone that is hidden beneath the everyday realities of consumer culture. as stated by one interviewee of my research: cooper (35): especially if you start taking any hallucinogenic drugs . . . you put yourself in a mindset or a zone, and from this zone you get out this whole layer of stuff that most people miss on their own.1 in understanding the ways in which such multimedia experiments adjust and overwrite urban realities, i employ a reading of jean baudrillard. the heavily mediatised, immersive environments of edm clubs provide a particularly good fit for baudrillardian theory, and the latter’s focus on the transformative capabilities of the medium is conducive to the discussion of clubbing in the context of consumer culture and everyday life. however, i also contend that the media ecology of the dance floor is not a straightforward recombination of everyday media processes, and the ethnography of clubbing is capable of altering what baudrillard identifies as the simulacrum and the virtual in particular ways. to clarify this statement, in this article i argue that recreational drug use enables a virtualisation of the self vitos | “an avatar . . . in a physical space” 3 that shows similarities and differences with the consumption of everyday media contents. clubbing encompasses a chain of thoroughly mediated, immersive experiences akin to participation in computer-based virtual worlds but distinctly involves the ritualised and excessive consumption of specific mediating technologies in contexts that are commonly regarded as extraordinary and in which the gap between the virtual and actual is eliminated, leading to profound reconfigurations of everyday life. the in-depth understanding of such virtualisations calls for the analytical transposition of the dance floor experience or “vibe”. this connects baudrillardian theory with insider, self-reflexive methodology, the possibilities of which are addressed below. tracing (retro-)futuristic knowledge: epistemological concerns this article relies on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over one year (2011–2012). i opted for a micro-level qualitative approach suited to a close analysis of the dance floor experience. the fieldwork involved three overlapping layers. first, i conducted self-reflexive participant observation at ten techno events held in melbourne to investigate the interplay of music, drugs, setting and partygoers on their dance floors. the second layer involved four focus groups and four individual interviews addressing the insider experiences of the field, focusing on the contexts and mediations of the dance floor experience. my preferred interview format was the focus group, with follow-up interviews strengthening the results. i used pseudonyms during the evaluation of the results to ensure the anonymity of the participants. finally, i examined some of the social media representations of the relevant parties. this investigation of melbourne techno dance floors was facilitated by the application of baudrillard’s media theory, results from which will be discussed later in this article. while baudrillard’s writing is often hyperbolic, deliberately adopting an anti-empiricist perspective, which questions the necessity of extensive empirical fieldwork, the tension can be resolved by considering a critical reading of his work that allows an empirically based exploration of his concepts. in baudrillard and the media (2005), william merrin reflects on the anti-empiricist methodologies of baudrillard, as well as marshall mcluhan. for both thinkers, innovative theory cannot be based simply on empiricism because processes of cultural transformation are concealed by the familiarity of the observed phenomena, just as the apparent “content” of a medium blinds us to its transformative capabilities (mcluhan 1964: 9). such theory is raised through speculation and escalation; in an accelerated world that seems to overcome our ideas, thought itself must become extreme and confrontational (merrin 2005: 61–2). baudrillard describes the emergent “semiotic system” of contemporary complex societies as a means of social control, culminating in his idea of the simulacrum. yet in merrin’s (2005: 99–100) reading, theory for baudrillard also provides a site of resistance against this semiotic system through the identification or awakening of resisting “symbolic” processes derived from the durkheimian tradition of social anthropology. in this sense, theory is a “process of invention and inversion” aimed to be “not simply a descriptive statement of the real but its critique and transformation” (merrin 2005: 158). the following discussion dancecult 6(2)4 addresses the ways in which this late 20th century position can be reconsidered. baudrillard himself was subject to severe criticism and accusations of denying the “real” casualties when he described the overwhelming and mediated military offensive of the gulf war as a “non-event” in which the absence of direct confrontation and the controversies around the casualties were overshadowed by the production of a media model of the war. however, by the 2003 invasion of iraq, similar accounts of “virtual wars” became popular clichés or parts of the canon of media analysis (merrin 2005: 96). thus the danger of such provocative thought is not that it is deemed wrong, but that it is deadly accurate and subsequently justified by the world. yet once realised, radical thought also loses its edge, and in this way baudrillard himself could be “eclipsed, reduced to the ghost of his own semiotic simulacra” (merrin 2005: 159). in an interview, baudrillard (1995) evokes a conversation with his japanese translator, who explains that the interest in his works declined among japanese readers as his theory of the simulacrum has become a commonplace reality. this anecdotal account signals “the paradox of utopia made real [that] clearly makes every utopian dimension perfectly useless” (baudrillard 1995). for the purposes of this article it is insignificant whether contemporary japan provides such complete realisations of the simulacrum, or even if the conversation actually occurred. if baudrillard’s writing is not necessarily founded in empiricism but develops as prophetic theory not unlike science fiction to which the world is then elevated— and this elevation has indeed been accomplished in various aspects of contemporary society—then his thoughts are highly relevant to the analysis of a heavily mediatised, remix-laden culture, the central focus of which lies in the experiential transformation of its dance floors into hallucinatory environments through communal consumption of cutting edge sound and drug technologies. just as the japanese “[ha]ve been living in the future for such a very long time now”— according to canadian science fiction writer william gibson (2001)—my starting argument is that since the 1980s edm parties have been generating psychic conditions for experiencing a chemical/musical object bleeding into or conquering urban realities, driven by a logic of consumption that can best be understood through the concept of simulation. if the post-utopian dreams of japan seem far away from the context of this research, a quick stroll through melbourne’s cbd reveals snapshots of the simulacrum. in the cliniquelly2 clean spaces of most distinguished shopping malls, glamorous shopkeepers are selling the luxurious magic of “scientifically proven” beauty products for clients from a population struggling with obesity (pink 2011), while competing with pin-up girls: such is the magical thinking governing consumer culture (baudrillard 1998: 31–4). shoppers are checking the inexhaustible succession of facebook posts and notifications pumped out by their phones with an intensity that shifts baudrillard’s (1998: 122) mass media programme analysis into the next gear. during a may night in 2012, partygoers smoking a cigarette in the outdoor designated area of the liberty social nightclub are being harassed and directed to stand straight under the street lights of flinders lane by bouncers sustaining the fantasy of order at all costs, as part of a general project of over-protection feeding the “rationalist paranoia vitos | “an avatar . . . in a physical space” 5 of our social systems” (baudrillard 2002: 99). yet, there’s a flip side to this: descending into the darkness of the club, the order is turned inside out, behaviour that is criminalised “overground” becomes the norm underground (ironically, melbourne bouncers tacitly encourage drug consumption by preventing access to those intoxicated with alcohol). partygoers are “losing it” as their senses are bombarded by flashes, lasers and thick layers of simulated sounds within the “ordered disorder” (featherstone 1991: 82) of the techno party. such underground encounters with the future-present tend to avoid the gaze of the mass media or appear distorted in their simulations. antonio melechi’s portrayal of early uk acid house discusses one such “disappearance” of the subcultural subject within the “cyber-space” of the party, which is followed by a distorted and “hysterical re-inscription” in the mass media (melechi 1993: 33–5). when describing the disappearance of the subject, melechi adopts baudrillardian terminology that describes the interaction between the object and the subject in consumer culture. for baudrillard (1997a: 14–15), the (consumer) object has become a “strange attractor”, a vertiginous organising principle that seduces the subject in a world that is now invented for its assimilation by media and advertising. from this perspective, products are imposing their presence on consumers, sacrificing ambiguity and illusion to the technological perfection of models broadcast through mass (and social) media. a typical symptom of this process is the profusion of amateur photographs transforming the lived experience of the consumer into a reflection of technological trends. photographed, broadcast and consumed, the subject’s identity is conjured away and reconstructed through a web of technological mediations. baudrillard depicts a system where fetishised objects are devouring the identities of their subjects as sacrificial masks, problematising the subject’s identity in a world that is now modelled through simulations. such perspectives are uncomfortable for a social analysis that tries to defend the human subject by designating value to human agency. yet in media studies, baudrillard’s work can be considered particularly useful because, by emphasising form over content, it investigates the medium as a transformative means of social control, providing a historical and philosophical foundation for this process through his theories of simulation and virtuality (merrin 2005: 154–6). keeping this in mind, my intentions are far from saving the subject, yet i am still using ethnography to provide analytical depth and a nuanced investigation of local contexts. my research is not carried out under a positivist agenda, and i contend that there are differences and reversals in edm consumption that need to be addressed. in underground scenes, drug/ music technologies are used with reflexivity, and deliberate goals of aesthetic fulfilment are to be achieved. while baudrillard propagates a “radical thought” that is deliberately anti-empiricist and non-representational, his theoretical perspective is reconciled within my methodological agenda. my project explores technological mediations and local contexts, drawing on interviews that are primarily focused on form (technology) instead of content (representation). following hennion (2001: 5), my main concern is not with the determinisms or beliefs of participants, but their ways of achieving aesthetic pleasure and their perceptions of the applied media processes. dancecult 6(2)6 a second life in consumer culture building on focus group interview fragments, i now turn to one phase of my research focused on recreational drug consumption and its relation to everyday life. framed by the context of the local scene, the effects of drugs are as integral to the dance floor “vibe” as musical structures and environmental arrangements. indeed, club culture can be succinctly defined as a “heady combination of dance music . . . and drugs” (moore 2003: 138). yet the circulation and use of illegal substances separates clubbing from many other recreational activities or hobbies. accordingly, my interviewees often note that letting others know about their drug consumption would be received with bewilderment or stigmatisation in many everyday environments. even so, consumer culture does promote inversions and transgressions through institutionalised techniques of “controlled de-control” (featherstone 1991: 81–2). mike featherstone traces such techniques to the “carnivalesque” (bakhtin 1968), arguing that the grotesque bodily processes of the medieval carnival were first excluded from the civilising process of modernity that led to the formation of the middle classes, only to return in the cultural sites and spectacles of consumerism such as theme parks, malls and tourism (featherstone 1991: 81–2). erik van ree (2002: 351–2) argues that as extremely potent products of consumer culture, recreational drugs may immerse the consumer into “dream-worlds” that overshadow the effects of other technologies applied for similarly “hallucinatory” effects. the focus groups of my fieldwork signal that the intense, druginfused atmosphere of the party may impregnate everyday values and give rise to the intriguing sentiment of leading a covert “second life” that is shared with fellow partygoers. this reflects the detachment of drug consumption from more mainstream social trends, which criminalise or pathologise it, or resimulate it through media panics.3 kane race (2005) describes recreational drug consumption as “excessive conformity to contemporary consumer culture” while also highlighting the regulative intentions of the state in its attempt to secure a “distinct moral position in the field of pleasure”. van ree (2002: 351) notes that criminalisation is not applied to substances such as alcohol and tobacco partly because they are also consumed for their taste and smell, and these practices render their use apparently less “wasteful” and therefore more acceptable. however, the consumption of illegal drugs is detached from practices of tasting and smelling and expresses “the desire for pure pleasure, a principled disdain for the useful” (van ree 2002: 351). it ultimately provides an intensified self-image of consumer culture, something which the very same culture strives to conceal. this is reflected in the criminalisation of recreational drugs, which, however, renders their use even more desirable for the consumer by reiterating the consumer trend of individualism. “defiant consumption”, van ree (2002: 352) concludes, “has become an established aspect of the western consumer society”. similar to the roller coasters of amusement parks that simulate extreme danger with the minimisation of actual risks, the weekend consumption of party drugs is normalised within edm scenes and fits into a wider culture of “riskless risk” that repackages risk into the predictable abstractions vitos | “an avatar . . . in a physical space” 7 of insurance policies, computer games and moral panics (harley 2000: 86-87). it should be noted however that with certain hallucinogenic drugs, such as lsd, the course of the experience can be highly unpredictable. the appeal of drugs is enhanced by not only their legislative but also their ontological detachment from everyday practices. attempting to address the possible ontological status of drug worlds, during a focus group i enquired about second life, the online virtual world where users interact with each other through “avatars”.4 the expression had been spontaneously applied to techno parties by stuart, and subsequently adopted by other participants of the same focus group. i was interested if the drug-infused experience of the party could be compared to computer-based virtualisations: q: so you’ve mentioned second life, is [the experience] like an online video game? stuart (23): yeah, for sure. you’re literally like . . . an avatar but in a physical space.5 tom boellstorff (2008: 19) notes in his ethnographic monograph on second life that online virtual worlds are dependent on the gap between the virtual and the actual. this gap enables a spatial dislocation that is desirable and constitutive of the virtual (users from various actual locations may interact within the same virtual environment) yet may also lead to temporal shifts that may be disruptive (time resists virtualisation and may hinder the interactions of users that live in different time zones). boellstorff (2008: 105) emphasises that the existence of this gap “is critical: were it to be filled in, there would be no virtual worlds, and in a sense no actual world either”. stuart’s words suggest that the consumption of party drugs enables states of self-virtualisation where this gap is eliminated, triggering the paradoxical awareness of a mediated immediacy that meshes together the sensory experience of actual, physical environments with the consumer experiences of mass and online media contents. to further explore this statement, an analogy can be drawn between the chemical effects of drugs and the semiotic effects of media ads. party drugs ironically fulfil the promises of happiness, adventure and enchantment that permeate the mediatised context of everyday life. contrary to advertisements that distribute tautological imperatives coded in the discourse of the brand as self-fulfilling prophecies ratified by the purchase of the customer (baudrillard 1998: 127–8), widely used recreational drugs such as mdma and lsd instantly deliver their promise by replacing the sign value of the media with the use value of the chemical effect. additionally, they cause an intensified and temporary change in the perception of the world that surpasses the more subtle mechanisms of everyday media. in the context of the techno party, the augmentative effect of a cybernetic or virtual “second life” infiltrates the actual experience of the dance floor: “a [cybernetic] avatar but in a physical space”. stuart’s definition of this crossover between the “physical” and the “virtual” also urged me to think about the recreational drug’s function as a medium or technology in consumer culture. on a cross-cultural note, in various traditional societies the consumption of psychoactive drugs, such as preparations of hallucinogenic plants including cacti and fungi dancecult 6(2)8 among native americans, not only disturbs the categories of everyday reality but also takes place in a highly structured, ritualistic framework, and is inseparable from cultural and religious beliefs (davis 1985). at the symbolic level, traditional rituals provide access to “a world beyond process”: by leaving the mundane world behind, the participant can be part of a life-transcending entity (bloch 1992: 3–4). contrary to this, the consensual “code” of contemporary western societies defines the possible effect mechanisms in terms of a molecular process of interaction with serotonin transporters within the body. further investigation of this molecular mechanism defines the role of everyday reality in the evaluation of the drug effect. before this examination i first specify the most prevalent drugs in the scene. the following diagram shows the various substances discussed during the focus groups, ranked according to the frequency of occurrence. the participants were urged to discuss any drugs that they considered relevant.6 figure 1. substances discussed during the focus groups. the most frequently discussed drugs are acid (lsd) and mdma (the desirable active compound in ecstasy pills), followed by speed (amphetamine) and pot (marijuana). i give particular attention to lsd and mdma as my fieldwork suggests that speed and pot, in accordance with the diagram, are less relevant in the context of the investigated subsections of the melbourne techno scene. both lsd and mdma can be classified as psychedelic substances. the core group of psychedelics is typically divided into two cohorts: hallucinogenic tryptamines such as lsd; and entactogens such as mdma (brandt and passie 2012: 539). during the waking states of sense perception, the external sense organs (detectors) collect information from our surroundings which are then transmitted for processing in the brain. lsd and mdma affect neurotransmitter activities, acting as internal mediators (more precisely as secondary mediators reprogramming the primary mediator of neurotransmission) that alter reality as this is perceived, as opposed to non-altered or vitos | “an avatar . . . in a physical space” 9 everyday sense perception. similar accounts were stated by my interlocutors, with one describing the influence of such drugs through the analogy of using coloured sunglasses. while musical mediation at parties—and also the circulation of media signals in day to day environments—originates from outside the physical limits of the body, the drug mediates internally by influencing neural activity, prescribing a deeper and more convincing immersion into one’s virtual environment. the process is operational (the intake of the drug is analogous to the push of a button, although the sensory effects are often delayed) and continuous with very limited interruptibility (partygoers are seldom in possession of antidotes that could neutralise or alleviate the effects). from the current perspective of neuroscience, lsd most probably inhibits serotonergic cell firing and triggers an effect of sensory overload in the brain (passie et al. 2008). this increases responsiveness to stimuli previously of little significance (key 1965) leading to dose-dependent distortions in sense perception. visual distortions are common, as well as auditory alterations. thomas (25): [lsd] can play with your head and make you do, not make you do things, but just focus on a few things. i had some moments where the music just died down all the sudden, and i could just hear everyone’s conversation, like really distinctly. . . . i just focused, and just chattering everywhere. i’m just talking to a mate, like why is there so much chattering? [he says:] ah, it’s probably the trips or something. and i’m like: ah, yeah [laughs]. and it goes on for a good 20 minutes, and finally the music comes back again.7 as for mdma, its street name “ecstasy” refers to its mood-enhancing psychological effects that are primarily mediated by its pharmacological interactions with serotonin and dopamine transporters (liechti and vollenweider 2000). the drug is often consumed in recreational settings for its “empathogenic” or pro-social qualities (bedi, hyman, and wit 2010). cooper (35): proper mdma, it almost gives you a feeling [that] you’re one with everyone. you don’t hate your enemies; it really does give you this empathy, whether it’s false or not. for the time you’re on it, you really just, you can’t understand why people fight in the world. . . . and it really shaped the scene, and it really did have a lot to do with the type of people that went there, and you’ve got to give it credit. you know, it’s the reason why there were so many nice people there, and not any fights. but unfortunately, with any kind of amphetamine, there’s gonna be a time when it wears off, and people get cranky, and the after-effects [laughs].8 the experiences recalled by thomas and cooper exemplify some of the general effects of hallucinogenic tryptamines, which may produce profound alterations in the perception of surroundings, and entactogens (or empathogens), which facilitate intimate connection to the subject’s social (and musical) environment. moreover, while the effects of lsd are often unexpected and more influenced by individual set and setting, mdma shows a more predictable pattern of effects (brandt and passie 2012: 539). dancecult 6(2)10 mdma also internalises, intensifies and converts music into heightened bodily sensations or into closed-eye hallucinations, especially with higher doses: curtis (31): for me a lot of the time it helped me to . . . literally visualise the music. and i remember one [occasion], it was actually a rave party. . . . there was a point where i actually stopped dancing, and i sat down, on one of the stands inside the arena, and listening to the music, i was really getting into the music. and i just closed my eyes, and there was a very strong visual hallucination. closed eye visuals, and the music completely guided what was happening in my, you know, visual experience. and i stayed there for an unknown amount of time, and then when i came out of it [i felt] this reconnection of reality that i’ve never experienced before. one particular experience. for me it was connected to the drug being a visual kind of catalyst. very strong mdma.9 curtis evokes a hallucinatory journey within the music that is disengaged from the visual environment of the venue and involves synaesthetic perceptions or mixed sensory experiences. such perceptions are sometimes triggered by mdma and are particularly characteristic of lsd consumption. cretien van campen (2007: 146) describes synaesthesia as “the result of a stimulation of one sense that results in a multisensory perception”: the brain may add, for instance, colours and forms to the experience of the music, from which the music becomes inseparable. the synaesthetic perception is not grounded in an external sense organ, such as the eye or the ear, but operates beneath the senses, similar to a “hidden sense” (van campen 2007: 158). van campen (2007: 113) notes that the drug-induced synaesthetic experiences of nonsynesthetes significantly differ from the perceptions of synesthetes. while actual synaesthesia is, in most cases, an integral part of the subject’s everyday life and normal functioning, the drug experiences of non-synesthetes may trigger temporary and haphazard sensory correspondences that differ from their normal states of mind and hence are often perceived as hallucinatory or disrupting (van campen 2007: 113). accordingly, my research suggests that drugs such as mdma or lsd enable the virtual augmentation or distortion of reality that may lead to the development of new insights and in this case even new senses. finally, the “reconnection with reality” that curtis “never experienced before” signals that the individual participants may traverse multiple drug-altered realities (in this case from the synaesthetic experience of the music to the heightened and unique perception of the actual physical environment). the production of these drug-altered audio-visual effects and feelings takes place in the human brain, and their referent is the (consumer) reality of everyday sense perception that is commonly experienced during the “normal” functioning of the nervous system. by altering the transmission of the message, the medium of the psychedelic drug affects perception in such a way that it temporarily overwrites the real referent, potentiating a raised awareness of the social and cultural conditioning of reality. in certain contexts, the altered state may trigger insightful reflections, and my interview findings generally support vitos | “an avatar . . . in a physical space” 11 the argument that psychedelics “have the potential to show mind-manifesting properties under appropriate internally and externally supported conditions” (brandt and passie 2012: 539). as suggested in the following fragment: q: so there’s something that, generally speaking, drug use adds to your personality. christina (28): yeah, exactly, it’s not only about the music and the gigs. james (24): yeah, maybe i’d say as a whole package i guess. christina: a package to grow up [laughs].10 the subjective interpretation of the drug experience itself may vary among respondents and scenes. in recent research on uk clubbing (rief 2009), some respondents regarded druginfluenced encounters in clubs as “not real” or illusory in character, while others connected their experiences to “genuine” or “real” feelings. for my interviewees, the internalised drugmedium creates a distorted augmentation of the real (everyday sense perception), with the latter already being affected by everyday media processes. during the experience the effect is either accepted or lived as real (for cooper, mdma “really does give you . . . empathy”); or self-reflexively questioned as fake (evident in thomas’ assertion that “it’s probably the trips”). this is dependent on substance, set and setting. following the experience, the druginfluenced perspective is generally considered artificial or fake by my interviewees, as a virtual reconfiguration of actual reality that is strikingly different from everyday environments. in my research the theoretical relevance of these findings resides in the possible connections to baudrillard’s discussions of simulation (1994) and related concepts of virtuality (1997b) and psychedelic violence (2002: 96–101). back to the future: theoretical feedback as indicated by poster (2001: 133–5), the virtual appears in baudrillard’s writing from the 1990s, first used interchangeably with simulation and gradually connoting an intensification or perfection of simulation through the widespread use of increasingly more immersive environments that require additional human interaction. for baudrillard (1997b), virtuality pervades everyday reality, where it is for the most part undetectable. in consumer culture, lived experience is necessarily raw material that feeds the virtual. the potential virtualisation of all aspects of life places the virtual camera in our head: we have “swallowed our microphones and headsets” in the obsession for operationalising the world and trapping the real into its hyperreal model (baudrillard 1997b: 19–20). by the application of this metaphoric imagery baudrillard highlights the almost invisible influence of mediatisation and virtualisation on the immediate context of everyday life. yet he denies the possibility of complete virtualisation: a perfect, “high-def ” doubling of the world would render the non-virtual useless, effectively eliminating us from the formula or forcing us to retreat into extinction. at the end of this text baudrillard argues that a complete fulfilment of virtualisation is, fortunately, impossible. dancecult 6(2)12 drug use at techno parties involves the internalisation of an external object that accomplishes the mediatisation of the surrounding reality in the context of a ritual that temporarily enacts a similar condition of “high-def ” virtualisation. the lived experience of the party is formed and transformed in “real time” (baudrillard 1997a: 25): the flow of the (non-)event is mediatised immediately by the drug. drugs mediate by altering the transmission of neural messages in the brain: this definition situates the effect in the wider context of operationalising or micro-processing human experience through virtualisation technologies: the era of miniaturization, of remote control, and of a microprocessing of time, bodies, and pleasure has come. there is no longer an ideal principle of these things on a human scale. all that remains are miniaturized, concentrated and immediately available effects. this change of scale is discernable everywhere: the human body, our body, seems superfluous in its proper expanse, in the complexity and multiplicity of its organs, of its tissue and functions, because today everything is concentrated in the brain and the genetic code, which alone sum up the operational definition of being (baudrillard 1988: 18). the chemical model of drugs belongs to the same semiotic system as the genetic code, taking its share of the virtualisation of the world.11 however, lsd and mdma both signal a diversion from pharmaceuticals (applied to sustain the healthy model of the body) to recreational drugs (applied as virtualisation technologies to “abnormalise” the body). similar to the “misuse” of antiquated bass and drum synthesisers by early edm and detroit techno producers (pope 2011: 38), the rediscovery of pharmaceutical drugs as recreational can be regarded as a technological appropriation, with both mdma and lsd being invented as pharmaceuticals first and then appropriated for other uses (redhead 1993a; russell 1993). on the macro level of social processes, baudrillard (2002: 97) metaphorically defines recreational drugs as antibodies that are released by the social body in response to the threat of its hyperoperationalisation. within this biomedical model of the social, drugs emerge as a lesser of two evils: the temporary disturbance of reality through the anomalous effect of drugs expels the overwhelming effect of totalitarian rationalisation, just as “human beings gain effective protection from madness by resorting to neurosis” (baudrillard 2002: 99). when reality is increasingly pervaded by simulation, so is its antibody, leading to an internal clash within the system: drugs question the sovereignty of the code as an “anomaly becoming institutionalized” (baudrillard 2002: 100), one which is still reproved in most dominant medical and governmental discourses. this tension between drugs and reality is exploited by techno dance floors, where chemical catalysts actualise the “waveform transmission” (eshun 1998: 136) of techno tracks within the body, and togetherness is found in the alienating sensation channelled through the music. the repetition of the night out in terms of clubbing leads not only to momentary departure from the real, but creates a prolonged distancing from the everyday as well: vitos | “an avatar . . . in a physical space” 13 stuart (23): telling people: wow, i’m going to japan to the most amazing techno festival in the world. they’re like: what the fuck are you talking about? . . . that’s not the reason i like the music, but i’m sure it contributes something to that feeling that you’re finding and exploring something new. exploring in another life, like pushing boundaries in another world.12 distinct from parties, home listening would constitute an in-between phase, appropriate for actualising the qualities of the music and possibly delivering flashbacks of the music/ drug experience. something is brought back to the everyday from the party, and this also relates to the enduring effect of taking recreational drugs in general, as the perception of everyday reality undergoes alteration. according to respondents, especially in the case of lsd, sensibilities are raised and attention is directed toward “weird things” or surprising associations stirring up the contexts of the everyday. it is as if the naturalising processes of consumer culture would lose from their aura of objectivity, confirming the assertion that the virtualities induced by psychedelics may increase awareness of the cultural conditioning of reality. this is a significant departure from computer-based virtual worlds such as second life, where the perceived intimacy and reality of the experiences can be seen an extension of the medium’s operation as a means of cultural conditioning. boellstorff (2008: 239) notes that although the online environment facilitates the development of exotic avatars and unusual structures, during his ethnographic fieldwork he was “struck by the banality of second life”, reflected in the “mundane creativity, conversation, intimacy, shopping, entertainment, even tedium” of its regular events. boellstorff (2008: 209–11) suggests that such interactions are impregnated by an ideology of “creationist capitalism” and an economic model of “prosumption”, where creativity is celebrated as self-expression and freedom, and consumption as a form of leisure is turned into a form of production with the possibility of actual world profits.13 none of my interviewees would consider their psychedelic drug experiences as mundane or financially profitable. instead, they often evoke extraordinary journeys through virtualised soundand clubscapes that are far removed from everyday contexts or work environments. some even claim that techno is more architecture than music in the sense that its effect is an organisation of abstract spatiality rather than narrative temporality—(synaesthetically) intensified at parties by drugs such as lsd and mdma. during my visit to the japanese capital in 2012, where i was reading the essay collection of sci-fi writer william gibson (2012), some of my interlocutors’ comments remained vivid in my memory. focusing on the sequential experience of machinic sounds and rhythm, a journey through the soundscapes of a techno club night could be visualised as a gaijin’s (foreigner’s) wandering the neon canyons of tokyo without a native language compass. what prevails here is the fascination with the pattern variations in the sensory overload of neon lights where the advertised messages are incomprehensible or merely add atmospheric effects to the trip. while the energy flashes14 of techno music are much more stark and minimalistic than the kaleidoscopic pulsation of the dancecult 6(2)14 japanese metropolis, its special effects still generate immediate intoxication while on drugs, providing entrance to a hyperreal environment governed by semiotic codes and mediating technologies. such futuristic visions of the urban nightscape lack divinity: as gibson (2012: 44) states, the “capital-f future”, which has been a cult for many science fiction aficionados in the 20th century, is now perceivably over. contrary to the utopian mindset or even religious sentiments of the older generation, 21st century youth are consuming events (or non-events according to baudrillard) in the mediated context of an “endless digital now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory” (gibson 2012: 44). paul hegarty (2004: 106) traces baudrillard’s concept of the virtual, among others, to the 1980s cyberpunk sci-fi mapped out by authors such as gibson. the retro-futurist connotation of the concept resonates well with the mythical detroit origins of techno, where producers used antiquated and retrofitted electronic equipment in their sonic exploration of post-industrial urban dystopia (pope 2011). finally, i wish to address the significance of the ritual context provided by techno parties in contemporary consumer culture and its deviations from rituals in traditional and nonwestern societies. the latter can be typically associated with baudrillard’s concept of the “symbolic”. merrin (2005: 12) shows that the symbolic can be derived from a durkheimian tradition built around the concept of the “sacred”: a state of the divine actualised in traditional rituals that produces the experience of a profound reality which has a transformative power in everyday life. this “symbolic”, forming the basis of social interaction and communication in traditional societies, provides the ground for baudrillard’s category of the “real” (used in the sense of an underlying reality),15 which he situates as a critical foundation against the simulacrum (merrin 2005: 42). this juxtaposition pervades his whole oeuvre: for example, in a genealogy of the simulacrum baudrillard (1994: 5) derives the “metaphysical despair” of iconoclasts from the realisation that the power of the image may extend beyond the mere distortion of the platonic idea. thus the image became monstrous as it potentially enabled the dissolution of its original (divine) referent, suggesting “that deep down god never existed, that only the simulacrum ever existed, even that god himself was never anything but his own simulacrum” (baudrillard 1994: 5). rex butler (1997: 51) notes that much of baudrillard’s writing revolves around this tension between the original and the perfection of its copy. from the moment of its technical perfection the copy no longer constitutes an imitation but a simulacrum that only resembles itself (the relationship is no longer of resemblance but of two distinct originals). baudrillard’s category of the real signifies the very difference or the distinctive essence of the original that permits resemblance and resists the act of copying, becoming an internal limit of simulation. this creates a paradoxical situation because at its best, theory itself constitutes a simulacrum that tries to approach this real that resides outside its grasp. in other words, in this epistemological model “any attempt to speak of [reality] can only turn it into a simulacrum, and . . . reality is the limit to all attempts to speak of it, to turn it into a simulacrum” (butler 1997: 54). while culture itself is interwoven with simulation processes, baudrillard suggests, in accordance with his critical position on the side of the symbolic, vitos | “an avatar . . . in a physical space” 15 that traditional cultures attempted to sustain a symbolic balance with the “unconditional simulacrum” reflecting the reality or the “radical illusion” of the world (baudrillard 1997b: 18). elsewhere baudrillard (1997c: 49) describes this illusion in terms of an unknowable hypothesis of an enabling condition where “nothing is itself, nothing means what it appears to mean”. the possibility of illusion is, however, jeopardised with the emergence of the “conditional [or] aesthetic form of the simulacrum” growing out from our current sociocultural conditions that seeks to reduplicate the real with its hyper-operational model (baudrillard 1997b: 18). a contemporary example for this tendency is provided by (online) virtual worlds such as second life. boellstorff ’s (2008: 170) work signals that many residents of second life consider their online experiences and intimacies as profoundly real and sometimes more real than their actual world counterparts. the foundations of this virtual world are indisputably defined by an underlying code composed of sets of discrete signals (bits) stored on a server farm, which in 2007 approximated a million gigabytes (boellstorff 2008: 103). theoretically, it is possible to gain a perfect snapshot of the world in any given moment in time by creating a backup copy of it (the only condition is that the size of the backup storage must equate the storage size occupied by the virtual world). no matter how sophisticated the virtual world becomes, the operational definition of this underlying code remains an internal limit of its system. boellstorff (2008: 231–2) addresses the ways social forms, interactions and even notions of place and embodiment are encoded into the platform, which suggests that “[v]irtual worlds raise the possibility of a whole new degree of control over culture”. at a highly evolved state, the virtual world will seem perfectly real and meaningful for its residents while lacking an essential feature of reality: the enigmatic disputability of its ontological status. this is the “radical illusion” that baudrillard considers as an indispensable condition of reality and attempts to defend in his work. while the techno party is situated in the virtual, rather than the symbolic, domain, it may also compensate for the sense of losing touch with the sociality and shared meaning sustained by the symbolic rituals of non-western societies, not unlike other simulated rituals of consumer culture (merrin 2005: 26) (while baudrillard’s discussion of the symbolic does betray nostalgia, he also defines this traditional mode of social relations as sustained by rituals that are inherently violent). thus the weekend warrior of edm could be compared with the after-hours resident of virtual worlds (or with the sports supporter, or the consumer of community-forging tv shows, etc.). yet for baudrillard such mediated communities simulating collective meanings serve as artificial defences of a social system still haunted by symbolic demand, and are inadequate to counter the possible “revenge” of the symbolic through events such as riots and terrorist acts (merrin 2005: 27). baudrillard (2002: 96–9) situates the emergence of recreational drugs alongside such violent events: the “psychedelic violence” of drug use might represent a symbolic reaction against the excessive normalisation and rationalisation of the semiotic system. yet again, drugs have developed into an anomaly that is no longer heroic or subversive, but becoming institutionalised and losing its violence (baudrillard 2002: 100)—thus reincorporated into the semiotic system dancecult 6(2)16 of consumer culture. the remaining question concerns the role of drug consumption after having lost this symbolic edge. the drug-enhanced edm phenomenon is not only capable of offering a paradoxical “escape from the objective drudgery of life” (baudrillard 2002: 99), but it may also contribute to a particularly effective substitution of the symbolic that, in the case of techno, happens in its purest form, stripped bare of messages, focusing on the channelling of intensities. this is the trajectory of the “safe” military campaign where the collision lacks the target, and there are no real casualties. still, the experience in its drug-mediated intimacy moves beyond the hyperreality of mass and social media simulations, with the brand being abolished, the sign value being substituted by the use value of drug/music technologies, enhancing the simulacrum and transferring it into the bodily experience. techno is percussion-music, characterised by a structural minimalism that builds on repetition with subtle changes. similar to warhol’s early soup can series in the visual arts, the music “attack[s] the concept of originality in an original way” (baudrillard 1997a: 11), opening the doors to a warholian repetition factory where metrical processes are produced and programmed, comprised of simulated sound patterns arranged into continuous loops of interlinked textures. of major concern for my interviewees is the experiential incorporation of this “machine-made music that turn[s] you into a machine” (reynolds 1999: 28) through the “programming” of sounds within their own bodies, a process that is often considered inseparable from actual or recalled drug experiences. the paradox of this mediated immediacy triggers the experience of that cybernetic “avatar . . . in a physical space” that seems to be potent enough for providing my interviewees a transformative profusion of the semiotic that in the durkheimian tradition was previously characteristic only to the symbolic, thus effectively negating the indispensability of the symbolic in this cultural context. of course, by referring to the role of simulation processes in the production of the symbolic in traditional rituals, one can also argue that “the symbolic was itself only ever a simulacrum” (merrin 2005: 38, 41). conclusion for partygoers of the melbourne techno underground, regular clubbing constitutes prolonged involvement in a series of multimedia performances on the flip side of consumer society. central to these events is the “vibe” of the party, which is commonly experienced through chemical mediation. this article called for a theorisation of the dance floor in terms of the virtualisation of its immediate environment. while this perspective is not prevalent in edm studies, it is suited to the close evaluation of the processes that shape experience on electronic dance floors. st john (2012), for example, shows that the vibe of psytrance dance floors is affected through the synchronous use of vocal media samples and the sampling of drugs. this article contended that the understanding of partygoer accounts such as the virtual “avatar” imagined in a “physical space” is facilitated by the application of baudrillardian theory to field experiences. in edm studies baudrillard’s concepts were used in redhead’s (1993b) edited volume on early uk rave where audiences “disappeared” into technological vitos | “an avatar . . . in a physical space” 17 dreamscapes of sound (melechi 1993: 34) or surrendered to a complete void of meaning (rietveld 1993: 65). these texts adopt a macro-level perspective and are less focused on the lived experience of the partygoers or the actual music played at parties.16 reading baudrillard in the light of insider experiences opens up new ways for understanding the intrinsic social and techno-aesthetics of such “hidden populations” (demant, ravn and thorsen 2010: 242). this also implies that the context of edm studies is beneficial for an empirically based exploration and possible reconsideration of baudrillard’s concepts. this article began an exploration of the embodiment of virtuality (baudrillard 1997b) at parties and the psychedelic violence (baudrillard 2002: 96–101) of related drug use in the context of the melbourne techno underground. of particular interest for my research is the conceptualisation of the experience in the context of consumer realities. as an institutionalised anomaly, indeed an “excessive conformity” (race 2005) to consumer culture, recreational drug use at techno parties allows glimpses into a hyper-operational, “virtual programming of the world” (baudrillard 1997b: 27). this engagement resonates with early detroit techno’s aesthetic project of becoming “aware of the coevolution of machine and human, the secret life of machines, the computerization of the world” by building “sonic fictions from the electronics of everyday life” (eshun 1998: 103–4). at the same time, psychedelic drugs may act as antidotes to (consumer) reality by raising awareness of its cultural conditioning (brandt and passie 2012: 539). my findings suggest that by leading the drug-infused ”second life” of clubbing, partygoers often experience an opening up of everyday reality as well, which is then conceived as maturation. acknowledgements thanks particularly to graham st john for his thorough feedback and advice, as well as to luis-manuel garcia and the anonymous reviewers for commenting on earlier drafts of this text. notes 1 focus group (melbourne), 24 january 2012. 2 clinique is a world-renowned skincare and cosmetics brand that surrounds itself with the aura of science in terms of its marketing strategy. 3 throughout the history of edm, party drug use often contributed to the emergence of new “folk devils” (cohen 1972) in the media, associated with subsequent criminalisation of parties (gore 1997: 56–7; homan 1998: 72; st john 2009: 9–10). dancecult 6(2)18 4 second life is an online virtual world run by linden research, inc. it is shaped by its residents represented by user-customisable avatars, who are able to buy land, build properties, run businesses, sustain relationships and participate in various other social and economic interactions. real world businesses and institutions such as nightclubs, restaurants, fashion stores and university campuses may also have a presence in second life. the economy of the world is based on the linden dollar, which can be converted to real world currency (descy 2008). 5 focus group (melbourne), 14 november 2011. 6 the diagram was created in nvivo qualitative research software, and it is based on manual coding of interview data, which improves the reliability of the findings (welsh 2002). 7 focus group (melbourne), 13 july 2012. 8 focus group (melbourne), 24 january 2012. 9 focus group (melbourne), 13 july 2012. 10 focus group (melbourne), 2 november 2011. 11 the co-discoverer of the dna sequence, francis crick was an occasional lsd user, although contrary to a rumour appearing in the british press after his death, biographical evidence suggests that he was not high during the discovery of the double helix (ridley 2006: 156–7). 12 focus group (melbourne), 14 november 2011. 13 although boellstorff (2008: 243) does not consider second life as a simulation per se because its semiotic referent lies within a virtual environment and not in the actual world, he admits that many of its aspects and interactions simulate actual world conditions. this position can be reconciled with the baudrillardian theory of the virtual by considering that the perceived reality of the second life experience is sustained precisely by such simulations, while keeping in mind that the 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http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/865/1880 http://www.discogs.com/beltram-energy-flash/release/2084 dj mini and montreal’s vulgar dance music dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 8(1): 26–45 issn 1947-5403 ©2016 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2016.08.01.02 dj mini and montreal’s vulgar dance music david madden concordia university (canada) abstract this article advances claims about montreal’s electronic dance music scene through mapping the career of one of the key actors who shaped the electroclash scene from the early 2000s onwards—music producer/dj mini (née evelyne drouin). by way of detailing the career of dj mini, this text attempts to add to the queer musical narratives currently emerging from music scene analyses. counter to the experiences of many women djs and musicians participating in heterosexual and male-dominated music scenes, drouin received extensive mentoring and support from various informal queer social networks spread throughout the circuits of the city. not only did she gain access to a local production network of equipment and skill sharing, drouin was also given access to spaces where she was able to develop production skills on her own time and at her own pace. dj mini’s story offers a telling case for the ways in which the politics of access—institutional, social, technological—remain central to the vitality and inclusivity of local music scenes. keywords: electroclash; montreal; dj mini; overdose; electronic dance music david madden is a soundmaker and postdoctoral fellow at ageing + communication + technologies, concordia university. feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2016.08.01.02 madden | dj mini and montreal’s vulgar dance music 27 introduction the aim of this article is to advance claims about montreal’s electronic dance music scene through mapping the career of one of the key actors who shaped the electroclash scene from the early 2000s onwards—music producer/dj mini (née evelyne drouin). drouin spearheaded overdose, a weekly electroclash party night at parking nightclub in the heart of the city’s gay village. while running the night for just over seven years (2002–2009), drouin acted as a dj, entrepreneur, music producer, cultural broker, promoter, graphic designer and mentor, all of which form the necessary skill set for building and maintaining a successful professional dj career, whether locally or internationally. by way of detailing the career of dj mini, this text attempts to add to the queer musical narratives currently emerging from music scene analyses (whiteley and rycenga 2006; taylor 2008, 2009, 2010; lawrence 2011), for, as jodie taylor argues, the queer subject “is largely forgotten in subcultural and popular music studies” (2012: 153). while negotiating some of the key diy dilemmas of current independent music culture, such as balancing the entrepreneurial aspects of maintaining a career with the more creative dimensions of music production and performing, drouin’s rather rapid rise to prominence in montreal’s electroclash scene involved working within various informal queer social networks spread throughout the circuits of the city. counter to the experiences of many women djs and musicians participating in heterosexual and male-dominated music scenes (see cohen 1997; katz 2006; reitsamer 2011; gavanas and reitsamer 2013), drouin received extensive mentoring and support from bar and record shop owners, in addition to musical training from more experienced djs and music producers working in montreal’s gay village. not only did she gain access to a local production network of equipment and skill sharing, drouin was also given access to spaces where she was able to develop production skills on her own time and at her own pace. dj mini’s story offers a telling case for the ways in which the politics of access—institutional, social, technological—remain central to the vitality and inclusivity of local music scenes. the second motivation of this article is to challenge certain dominant understandings of electronic dance music through discussing some of the ways in which montreal operates as a centre of electronic dance music production and consumption, beginning with disco in the 1970s and continuing through the 1980s and 1990s with the development of various local independent music scenes and the emergence of the gay village from the early 1980s onwards. dominant histories of electronic dance music have typically been woven by a “moral geography”, says will straw, which tend to selectively emphasize the more rigid and mechanical northern european styles of dance music while rooting out and downplaying its more extravagant and vulgar permutations and expressive possibilities (2008: 114–5). some of the more vulgar aspects of electronic dance music include the presence of lush orchestral adornments (most commonly connected to late 1970s disco and eurodisco), the incorporation of female vocal tracks and the mixing of various rock music stylizations. though the inclusion of female vocal tracks and rock music stylizations are heavily tied to http://www.djmini.com/ dancecult 8(1)28 the aesthetics of electroclash (madden 2012), all of the aforementioned vulgar elements of electronic music are tightly connected with montreal’s dance music history. as straw emphasizes, ever since disco’s real or imagined “collapse into vulgarity” and pluralism in the late 1970s, “broad currents within western dance music have been shaped by the impulse to install rationality and militancy as protective walls” against the possibility of this type of demise; adding: “[t]his has most noticeably been the case within that dance music culture which flirts regularly with rock music” (1993: 171). montreal scene setting: from disco to the indies a prominent empirical foundation for this analysis draws from my own experiences within montreal’s electroclash scene and a series of semi-structured interviews i conducted with drouin in 2011 and 2012. during the interviews, we discussed her personal history with music as a producer, dj and entrepreneur, among other threads.1 the qualitative data collected through this participation in montreal’s electronic music scene(s) in the 2000s is discussed in relation to scholarly literature on music scenes (straw 1991, 2004; grenier 1993; taylor 2012), electronic music (straw 1993, 2008; rodgers 2010), montreal (remiggi 1998; stahl 2001; straw 2005; stolarick and florida 2006) and dj and club culture (thornton 1995, fickentscher 2000; katz 2007). research into various local music scenes has a long and highly developed history within popular music studies and cultural studies, dating back to at least the late 1980s and early 1990s with the work of straw (1991), barry shank (1994) and, later, holly kruse (2003), among others. the concept was initially deployed as a way to move beyond the limitations of the term (musical) community, which implied a degree of uniformity somewhat at odds with the variety of musical practices and expressions emerging within urban centres at the time (straw 1991: 368). an early foundational definition of scene comes from straw, who writes: “[a] musical scene . . . is that cultural space in which a range of musical practices coexist, interacting with each other within a variety of processes of differentiation, and according to widely varying trajectories of change and cross-fertilization” (1991: 373). the concept of the scene has been particularly useful when mobilized vis-à-vis the ways in which music and a plurality of music-related practices emerge, interact and circulate within particular cities and spaces as well as globally, and it is for these reasons that scene is employed throughout this text in relation to electroclash. furthermore, as taylor argues, the notion of the scene is particularly useful when discussing “queer music-oriented collective formations” as the “heterogeneity of scene as an analytical tool allows for multiple points of orientation” (2012: 148). scene is used to denote various electroclash-related practices throughout montreal, in addition to smaller, more defined “clusters of social and cultural activity” within the city (straw 2004: 412). this article is primarily concerned with the ways in which local street-level activities and institutions (e.g., bars, nightclubs, record stores) produced and sustained the coming together of rock and electro in montreal in the late 1990s and early 2000s. madden | dj mini and montreal’s vulgar dance music 29 before moving on to the contributions of drouin vis-à-vis electroclash, i introduce some important historical developments in montreal and quebec that helped set the context for the emergence of the electroclash scene in montreal at the turn of the millennium. i begin by briefly presenting some broader, current statistics on the montreal region that may suggest why montreal continues to develop as a centre for cultural production, art and music, while providing more contextual information for readers who are unfamiliar with the city’s cultural makeup. montreal is one of the twenty-five most populous metropolitan areas in usa and canada and it is third in terms of population density, after boston and new york (stolarick and florida 2006: 1802). as stolarick and florida write, of the twentyfive most populous cities, montreal has the second-highest percentage of people working in the “super-creative core”, which the authors define as those working in the following disciplines: “computers, mathematics, architecture, engineering, life sciences, physical sciences, social sciences, education, training, library, arts, design entertainment, and media” (2006: 1802). stolarick and florida argue that the combination of “density and creativeclass employment” create the ideal cultural and economic context for which “innovations generated by the interactions between individuals are more likely to occur” (2006: 1799). one of the key claims that the authors draw from their research on the driving mechanisms of urban economic development is that creative production flourishes and increases in places like montreal, where there are high numbers of artists and creative workers regularly meeting and engaging with each other (2006: 1801). even though stolarick and florida’s study makes important connections between economic growth and creative workers, their work largely focuses on developments within montreal from the 2000s onwards—when montreal’s indie music scene began taking shape and receiving international attention thanks to artists such as godspeed you! black emperor and arcade fire, and with the establishment of the annual pop montreal music festival, which began in 2002. however, it should be noted that many of the important local conditions that enabled the emergence of electroclash materialized much earlier. dating back to the city’s prominent disco scene of the 1970s, montreal has long been known for an intermixing of nightlife culture and dance music. entrepreneurs (label owners, djs, nightclub owners, etc.) capitalized on montreal’s infrastructure of discotheques leftover from the 1960s and the city’s heritage and reputation as an epicentre of nighttime entertainment, activity and sin throughout most of the twentieth century (stahl 2001). in the 1970s, the city emerged as one of the most robust markets for the consumption of disco, whether at nightclubs or through the sales of records and the production of disco, as many local record companies began producing and distributing their music throughout europe and the americas in the closing years of the 1970s (straw 2005: 190). in 1979, at the moment of disco’s commercial peak right before the music’s international collapse, billboard magazine deemed montreal “the second most important disco market on the continent, outside new york” (as cited in straw 2008: 118). the rather rapid decline of disco’s popularity coincided with the global music industry’s first major crisis in thirty years, after a period of unprecedented growth and rationalization dancecult 8(1)30 between 1973 and 1978 (grenier 1993: 210). in the aftermath of the international crisis, quebec continued producing large quantities of dance music records, particularly of the eurodisco and italo-disco variety, even if many producers and distributors attempted to disguise the origins of their assemblage, fearing that the records might be perceived as coming from the wrong place. straw writes that quebec disco labels and performers “cultivated a deliberate vagueness about their identities”, which continued the tradition of canadian and quebec “cultural commodities to hide (or, at the very least, downplay) their origins, to look as if they came from more credible centres of cultural authority” (2008: 118–9). between the mid -1970s and the early 1980s, quebec operated as one of the biggest international centres of production for dance music recordings, and in particular 12-inch vinyl dance singles. notable local players included the parapluie group of labels, producer and distributor vincent de giorgio, and disco performers such as karen silver, patsy gallant and suzy q (straw 2008: 118–9). as quebec’s largely francophone music industry started producing signs of rejuvenation roughly six years after the crisis (grenier 1993: 212), montreal’s anglophone and allophone music-makers remained disproportionately underrepresented within the quebec industry until the 1990s. however, since this article seems to be setting up a misleading anglophone/francophone division within montreal and quebec’s musical culture at large, i will offer some clarifications before moving forward.2 there were many anglophone and allophone musicians/artists performing and recording in quebec in the 1980s and 1990s; however, they were not signed to the francophone-controlled labels that grenier (1993) discusses. and, while the music and artists represented by these franco-indie labels were almost exclusively francophone, some anglophone musicians were key players in shaping the sounds that emerged from these quebec labels in the 1980s and 1990s. the guitarist rick haworth, for instance, played on and/or produced many of the popular or hit albums released by the label audiogram, including the works of paul piché, michel rivard and daniel bélanger. going further, grenier speculates that some of the people who had previously worked in the montreal offices of the anglo-controlled transnationals and major labels that closed during the crisis of the 1980s ended up working for the new local independent francophone labels.3 on a personal note, when i first moved to montreal in the late 1990s to pursue undergraduate studies, my impression of the city was that it lacked the necessary infrastructure and smaller performance venues to accommodate the high number of musicians moving to the city annually. between 1995 and 1999, though there was a very limited selection of legal venues in downtown montreal that catered to musical groups, many of these establishments maintained pay-to-play policies that inhibited the sustainability and growth of local live music. pay-to-play arrangements typically involve musicians paying a service fee to a venue in exchange for the chance to perform. performing musicians in such arrangements also tend to be responsible for all promotional material (e.g., making posters and flyers), hiring a door person to collect cover or admission charges, in addition to guaranteeing the venue a sizable attendance turnout. furthermore, the venue and the musicians usually agree upon madden | dj mini and montreal’s vulgar dance music 31 a monetary penalty if the minimum number of attendees is not reached. this might explain why a lot of live musical activity in downtown montreal in the 1990s seemed to take place in semi-legal lofts, warehouses and apartments. by 2000, more legal venues that did not require musicians to pay for the chance to play began opening up in areas such as mile end and on or near the upper main, where, at the time, commercial and residential rental prices were noticeably cheaper than those of the lower main.4 the best-known example of this is the restaurant/music venue casa del popolo, which was opened by montreal musicians mauro pezzente and kiva stimac in 2000, an establishment that maintains solid bookings of traditional musical ensembles and djs and a range of other cultural activities, including book launches and poetry readings. venues like casa, in addition to many other legal and semi-legal performance spaces, such as lofts and warehouses, started accommodating the city’s ever-expanding population of musicians and performers; some of whom, like me, “moved here to study” in the 1990s “and stayed to make music”, as geoff stahl puts it (2001: 104). like stahl, richard florida attributes part of this robust sociomusical economy to the relocation by north american musicians to montreal in the 2000s looking to capitalize on the city’s relatively low rental rates—both in terms of living spaces and the availability of rehearsal spaces—and the city’s venerable reputation as a centre of cultural production and activity (2011: 2). according to florida’s more recent work charting the ongoing geographic changes of the popular music industry, montreal currently has the third highest “concentration of music business establishments” behind nashville and los angeles, which includes distributors, record companies, recording studios and publishers (2011: 1). of course, the presence and continued development of the interrelated and pluralistic, yet highly distinct, anglophone and francophone music scenes is one of the main reasons why the city has such a high concentration of infrastructure for music-related practices. post-millenial montreal and electroclash at the turn of the millennium, montreal’s new legal venues and nightclubs also started housing many of the city’s electronic dance music party nights, including electroclash events, partly as a consequence of the increasing regulations directed towards raves in the late 1990s. these regulations helped create a temporal shift in consumption, from the afterhours of rave scenes and afterhours clubs, to the hours of the night regulated by alcohol licensing laws. charity marsh argues that “the entire raving phenomenon became an object of concern to be researched and studied by municipal authorities, the police force, health care workers, various media, and public intellectuals” in the late 1990s and early 2000s (2006: 416). in toronto, the increase in rave surveillance and research led to such measures as bill 73, which “attempted to dissolve rave culture”, as marsh writes, by calling for “a licensing for all venues, building safety code regulations, fire codes, unrestricted access to water, the need for toilets and fresh air, food services, security, paid duty officers, ambulance services, drug and health education, communication with city authorities, a definition of rave, and the periodic review of recommendations” (2006: 424). in her foucauldian analysis dancecult 8(1)32 of toronto’s rave culture, marsh is careful to point out, however, that ravers were willing participants in the regulation process and became “ensnared by their own self-disciplining techniques” (2006: 428). similar regulatory strategies were pursued in montreal, largely through modifications to existing alcohol licensing laws and the enforcement of municipal fire codes by the montreal police service and local firefighters (maari 2009). yet, in spite of these regulations against afterhours parties and raves, billboard magazine marked montreal canada’s “hotspot” of edm culture in 2001 (leblanc 2001: 79). this move away from afterhours partying required a different soundscape as the more epic techno and house musics that djs had been spinning at raves and afterhours clubs were no longer suitable to the new setting and earlier hours. this transition is best represented musically with tiga’s mixed emotions: montreal mix sessions volume 5, which was released in 2000. montreal’s tiga spent most of the peak moments of electroclash in the early-to-mid 2000s developing an international career (i.e., primarily outside of montreal) as a dj and producer, primarily through the success of a co-produced cover of corey hart’s “sunglasses at night” (2001)—one of the biggest hits of electroclash. tiga was heavily involved as a pioneering force in montreal and within the larger electronic dance music scene in canada and europe since at least the mid-1990s. the dj/producer is generally credited with organizing the first rave in canada (1993’s solstice, which was held in montreal), in addition to establishing montreal’s first afterhours club (sona), and dna records, the first electronic dance music retail store in montreal (girard 2011: 109). in 1998, he also started a record label (turbo recordings), which continues to operate within the international circuits of edm culture. by the end of the 1990s, tiga had grown tired and burnt-out from djing at raves and afterhours clubs throughout the decade and was looking to spin more regularly between 12:00 am and 3:00 am. he started djing at pub quartier latin, a club located a few blocks east of the lower main, where he introduced dancers to a new set of sounds, including some of the tracks from mixed emotions: montreal mix sessions volume 5. as a dj, tiga acts simultaneously as a connoisseur of tastes and as a cultural broker. the mixed emotions release pulls together rarities from tiga’s crate-digging practice while attempting to solidify cuts for the emerging late-night dance floor. the double cd is perhaps best understood as representing a transitional moment in electronic dance music, with “disc 1” (montreal mix sessions volume 5) devoted to passing sounds and with “disc 2” (bonus electro funk cd) comprised of the new proto-electroclash sounds to come. the mix is caught between shifting cycles of edm, from the big room techno and house tiga played at raves and afterhours clubs to more electro-oriented dance musics played before 3:00 am. tiga also provides an interesting entry point into the particular personality-driven gender play, cross-dressing and celebrated sexuality that is at the centre of electroclash. throughout the years when electroclash operated as a dominant form of electronic dance music (2001–2004), tiga’s gender performance was marked by a mix of sexual identities and gender-bending, both in the aesthetic choices he made as a music producer and the imagery and artwork that accompanied his releases. the cover artwork for mixed emotions: http://turborecordings.com/ http://risingdigitalshop.com/tiga/tiga mixed emotions.jpg madden | dj mini and montreal’s vulgar dance music 33 montreal mix sessions volume 5 pictures a close up photo/illustration of tiga wearing an androgynous wig and lipstick—referencing a mix of david bowie’s 1970s gender-bending period and soft cell’s marc almond—with the text written in soft pink and purple. the back cover of the cd shows tiga standing profile in a bathtub with his head cropped out of the photograph, sporting nothing other than a pair of black underwear and a pronounced erection. most of the press coverage from this period featured a shirtless tiga looking rather boyish in tight black. at the turn of the twentieth century, as electroclash party nights started moving to nightclubs and bars and away from afterhours, warehouses and lofts, consumption and performance practices began changing as well. while the genre incorporated many stylistic elements of rock, including its song structural elements and backbeat-driven energy, electroclash club nights, parties and performances imported many of the live practices normally associated with staged rock and pop performances. as simon reynolds writes: this new (nu?) generation have abandoned the very ethos of ecstasy culture: the principles of egalitarian unity and ‘only connect’, the notion of shedding your ego in the hypnotic flow of the music and merging with the crowd, and the ‘in the mix’ aesthetic that treats tracks [as] anonymous components for the dj’s seamless montage. instead, nu-wave electro-pop songs (known as electroclash) compete to stand out, through domineering vocals, larger-than-life singers (as opposed to the depersonalised diva-as-raw material approach in most modern dance), witty lyrics, and extravagant amounts of obscenity and trash talk (as cited in girard 2011: 115). in the early 2000s, it was not uncommon for electroclash events to be housed at more rockoriented venues or theatres with stages, with audiences starting to face the dj, producer or performer, who was very often showcased facing the audience on a stage. these parties were also typically marked by the increased consumption of alcohol and cocaine—rather than ecstasy, mdma and speed, known for their associations with rave culture—a certain gender ambiguity and a corresponding change in dress to skinny ripped jeans, tight t-shirts and heavy makeup, an attire often worn by both men and women. previous to these developments, electronic dance music djs and performers usually took more of an anonymous stance in a live setting, even if they were high profile djs and/ or producers. in the mid-1990s, rave djs were typically obscured by flashing lights, with party attendees dispersed in various places on the dance floor, facing and moving in every direction. although djs were very often the featured draw of raves and club nights in the 1990s, with their names prominently displayed on promotional materials, including flyers and posters, party attendees would generally not watch or even face djs as they performed their sets. for example, this is how sarah thornton (1995) contextualizes british dance music clubs in the 1990s and the role of the dj: what authenticates contemporary dance cultures is the buzz or energy which results from the interaction of records, dj and crowd. ‘liveness’ is displaced from the stage to the dance floor, from worship of the performer to a veneration of ‘atmosphere’ or ‘vibe’. dancecult 8(1)34 the dj and dancers share the spotlight as de facto performers; the crowd becomes a self-conscious cultural phenomenon (29). . . . though djs may be musicians, they are rarely performers in the pop sense of the word. in purpose-built clubs, mixing booths tend to be tucked away and djs unseen. as cultural figures, djs are known by name rather than face (65). with the emergence of electroclash in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was a movement away from the dance music liveness that thornton discusses. the atmosphere or vibe remained the most important element of an event or party; however, djs and performers took more of the spotlight as the cult of personality ethos of rock and pop music seemed to arrive alongside the grittier timbres of the backbeats. electroclash djs and performers started participating in “the trafficking in performer identity and poetic vision that have marked other musical forms (like rock or soul)”, as straw writes (2008: 129). around this time, electroclash djs and performers regularly used microphones for interacting with audiences, perhaps drawing on the live performance practices of hip hop, while the requisite technical precision of seamless cross-fades and beat-matching associated with house and techno djs was often replaced by rougher mixing techniques. electroclash sets seemed to play out in more of an identifiable track-to-track fashion, much like a rock or pop show, rather than the throbbing consistency associated with house music, techno and raves in the 1990s. these emerging production and consumption practices were perhaps most strongly and regularly exhibited in montreal at dj mini’s overdose nights. much like the “subcultural lore” emerging from montreal’s disco scene in the 1970s (straw 2005: 191), when electroclash started circulating throughout various nightclubs in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the genre was perceived as having a natural affinity with the city’s pre-existing cultural fabric(s). and like disco, electroclash mixed and circulated in montreal with a certain amount of ease in many social contexts and neighbourhoods, in part because it was not easily categorized as exclusively francophone or anglophone, and as neither straight nor gay. in musical terms, this ambiguity is most prominently present in the vocalizations of electroclash. although much of the lyrical content of the genre is in english, electroclash vocal tracks are often sung with a developed sense of irony and disguised by various digital effects such as a vocoder, which arguably draws listeners and dancers to the materiality of the vocal utterances and phrasing rather than the linguistic content or subject matter of the lyrics (see weheliye 2002). this connects electroclash to a long history of electronic dance music and, in particular, eurodisco (and dub), which very regularly employs “highly codified, minimal units of english speech: ‘orders, announcements (including self-announcements), greetings, lists, simple reports (‘red alert!’)’ and so on” (kronengold, quoted in straw 2008: 129). these discreet units of english are also typically deployed in highly repetitive phrases. for instance, tiga and finnish producer jori “zyntherius” hulkkonen’s aforementioned “sunglasses at night”, a cover version of corey hart’s 1983 release with the same title, leads with an easy-to-follow abab song structure, or verse followed by chorus. tiga and zyntherius eliminated the original cut’s eight bar pre-chorus employed to set up the https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw6k0kmvcci madden | dj mini and montreal’s vulgar dance music 35 release of the chorus, and, as a result, the whole track moves back-and-forth between two alternating lyrical refrains, which are sung by tiga with slight variations: part a, “i wear my sunglasses at night/so i can/so i can/watch you weave then breath your story lines”; and part b, “don’t masquerade with a guy in shades oh no”. by cutting out hart’s pre-chorus, tiga and zyntherius’ version maintains the same synthesizer progression throughout the track, as hart’s move to the pre-chorus is the only harmonic change in the original song. dj mini and overdose aside from the role of the producer, the dj is perhaps the most masculine professional role in electronic dance music. in scholarly studies of dj culture over the last twenty-five years, women djs are most notable for their absence. in katz’s (2007) analysis of battle djs, for instance, “the vast majority” are men, whether working locally or touring internationally; fikentscher argues that women djs number less than ten percent (2000: 33); and straw (1993) notes that while electronic dance music draws much of its political credibility through its connections to marginalized sexual (and ethnic) communities, “virtually all of the club djs in the english-speaking world who exercise influence are male” (173). going further, straw adds, “there are more women in heavy metal bands than there are female producers or mixers of dance records” (1993: 173). while this article recognizes the importance of detailing the lack of female participation and representation as djs (and producers) within electronic dance music culture, it should be emphasized that these statistics can be misleading and somewhat arbitrary if the studies that contain them do not analyze the social and cultural factors that produce such numbers. dj mini benefitted from a local mixed queer network of people working in various music-related clusters of streetlevel activity—from bars and nightclubs to record stores and domestic studio spaces—who acted as mentors and collaborators throughout her career trajectory. by peering into these smaller local networks of musical activity, it seems that the number of women working with electronic sound changes significantly, especially in comparison to the number of women featured in electronic music magazines or represented on record labels or at major electronic music festivals. drouin’s move from the periphery to the centre of montreal’s electronic dance music scene in the city’s gay village at parking in the 2000s began when her family relocated from rimouski, qc, to montreal when she was sixteen. although she did not have any formal music training or any plans to produce music, drouin developed an interest in electronic music after attending raves throughout the city. in her own words: i wasn’t really planning to make music in general until i discovered electronic music at raves and then i got really involved with it. . . . i started going to raves and getting interested in drum ‘n’ bass, and i have a feeling it’s because of the frequencies, there’s so much low-end, the bass is really present and melodic and percussive.5 drouin’s pedagogical path to becoming a dj after her initial experiences at raves started while working at a local club, bluedog, located on the main, and known for its queer nights dancecult 8(1)36 in the late 1990s and early 2000s. the manager of the club recognized drouin’s developed interest in djing and electronic music, and allowed her to use the club’s dj/sound equipment during the day when the club was closed and during the early hours of the night when there were few patrons in attendance. the manager also mentored and trained drouin as a dj, in addition to buying the emerging artist some records and a record bag. mini’s development from a beginner dj with no equipment of her own to a respected working dj happened relatively quickly (three-to-four years), largely through her commitment to learning various musical techniques, by connecting with networks of other working djs within the city and through receiving mentoring by more experienced djs and producers. as drouin continued to play a variety of nights at bluedog, djs who recognized her talent and commitment to the practice started inviting her to dj at other bars and clubs. one very experienced professional dj who spent many years spinning in the gay village offered her work in the record shop that he owned, while also teaching her more advanced dj techniques and introducing her to the dj circuits of the village. before being able to fully support themselves through dj gigs and/or studio production work, djs often work in record stores or in musical equipment shops in order to help pay for the heavy capital investment required to become a dj, as the stores would most likely give their employees a rebate on all in-store purchases, including records and dj equipment. when drouin first started djing nearly twenty years ago, in order to be taken seriously by their peers, aspiring djs had to develop extensive vinyl collections, both for practice purposes and for gigs/ performances, while also having to acquire two highly specialized vinyl players or turntables, a mixer, headphones and two speakers as necessities of the trade. in the 1990s, before the post-millennial move to primarily using less expensive burned cds with mp3s in dj sets, the industry standard for djing usually included two technics sl-1200 vinyl players, which could be obtained for approximately $700 cad new, or $400 cad used. new 12-inch vinyls cost approximately $15 cad, and used vinyl records could range from $3 to $5 cad. based on recent conversations with professional djs in montreal, a relatively small vinyl collection for a working dj in the 1990s might have contained about two thousand records; a bigger collection might consist of ten thousand records and beyond. as stated above, dj mini ran overdose every thursday for just over seven years at parking nightclub (which is no longer in operation). the club was situated on amherst, just south of sainte-catherine street in the heart of what many consider to be the largest gay village in north america (straw and tallack 2009: 4). after many of montreal’s gay establishments moved from the city’s west-end downtown core in the early 1980s, the village developed rather quickly in montreal, following the openings of the bar au deux r in february of 1982 and la taverne normandie, the bar kox and the nightclub max in 1983 (remiggi 1998: 269). by january of 1992, only ten years after the opening of au deux r, sixty-five out of the one hundred professionals and commercial establishments listed in fugues (le magazine des gais et lesbiennes du québec) were concentrated in the neighbourhood, and in particular along sainte-catharine (remiggi 1998: 272). since the 1990s, the area has continued to develop a strong residential core, in addition to building on its commercial infrastructure of cafés, stores, restaurants, nightclubs and bars. madden | dj mini and montreal’s vulgar dance music 37 because drouin’s overdose nights were hosted on parking’s mixed night, there was a highly articulated crossing of genders and sexualities. on mixed nights, gay clubs typically allow heterosexual men and women to enter as long as the door person or bouncer decides that they meet the club’s criteria for entrance, whether these involve dress codes or vibes. in contrast, on friday and saturday nights at parking, it was much more difficult for those who identify as straight—or those who were “coded” as straight—to gain admittance to the club. on weekends, gaining entrance to the club was perhaps most difficult for heterosexual women. these types of door policies or gatekeeping mechanisms have historically been put in place in order to maintain a homosocial environment and to protect various gay scenes from acts of homophobia, violence and surveillance. in montreal, for instance, before moving east in the early 1980s, many of the city’s west-end gay establishments along stanley, peel and the lower main were targeted in the 1970s during “une campagne de nettoyage préolympique”, as remiggi writes (1998: 276). although the “cleaning” was not exclusively directed at montreal’s gay bars, these establishments faced consistent harassment and surveillance by the state throughout much of the 1970s and into the early 1980s. when drouin first started to dj at parking nightclub in the early 2000s, the abovementioned mixing at overdose was not yet present. in its original incarnation, overdose was much more geared towards gay men and was first established around another dj (frigid), who specialized in glam rock and 1990s alternative music. according to drouin, when she was initially brought in to dj once per month at parking, the thursday night was “originally very, very queer and very glam”. i asked drouin how she eventually started running overdose and this is how she responded: i saw that the night was going down, and i thought to myself, this has got to be something else. so why not, why don’t i take over. i’ve worked in bars before, i’ve done nights, i’ve done promotion and i know how the system works and the electroclash sound is obviously picking up, so why not push it a little bit further. so i sat down with the owners and i made a business proposal. i basically explained what i would do and the people i would hire. building on her previous experiences djing and working at bluedog as a bartender, promoter and manager, mini would go on to perform two full nights per month, which generally meant spinning for four hours at a time. she would also alternate between inviting one international dj (e.g., ellen allien, richie hawtin, felix da housecat) and one local guest dj per month, and thereby beginning the process of acting as a mentor to younger djs in montreal. additionally, drouin handled all of the bookings, hired much of the bar staff and brought in all of the people for the promotions team, which was initially funded and supported by the proprietors of parking. cover charges typically ranged from $5–$10 throughout the seven years that mini ran the night, with anywhere from 350–1200 people coming through the club on any given thursday. drouin also created a mix cd to both pull together and articulate some of the disparate styles that form electroclash—from rock to more techno-inspired dance musics—in dancecult 8(1)38 addition to using the mix as a strategic promotional tool, drawing attention to her new conception of the overdose night and to her emerging practice as a dj. drouin personally burned all copies of the mix cd before distributing them to retail stores, bars and to other djs throughout downtown montreal. as she puts it, the mix was a “turning point” for the new “mixed” overdose night: i made a mix for people to discover what the sound of the night was going to be. and i got that printed and then distributed in all of the music shops and all of the clothing stores in montreal. but the cd was originally just for promo, in order to get people involved in my nights. in this way, a mix cd operates as a branding tool for drouin and other djs where the real gains are perhaps better understood in relation to accumulating a certain level of cultural status or capital within a scene, rather than directly gaining economic profits through cd sales and distribution. drouin’s mix cd was primarily distributed free of charge and functioned as a way to establish a relationship with an audience through a mutually agreed upon set of aesthetic conventions and desires. drouin realized that her overdose night at parking might be sustainable when the mix was launched and performed as a live dj set: the night we did the launch of the cd . . . there was water dripping on us and people were going crazy. it was also the turning point, where we actually knew what the sound was, and where we actually got to know the crowd. on the mix cd there was miss kittin, felix da housecat, some more underground things, and i think it had peaches and gonzales in there as well. what is perhaps most interesting about the above remarks is the implicit understanding that the success or failure of a recorded mix is largely determined by the response from an audience and the degree to which a dj is able to maintain an audience for future performances and gigs. without a strong response from an audience, a mix cd very quickly becomes just another form of discarded ephemera collecting dust on shelves, apartment floors and computer hard drives. additionally, it is important to point out that for drouin, adult.’s track “nausea”, released by the detroit label ersatz audio in 2000 and included on the mix cd, best represents electroclash, which she describes as “bitchy, square, fully synthetic music with a loud, obnoxious singer over it, singing with a lot of attitude”. yet, just as drouin’s overdose emerged as one of the most successful electronic dance music nights in montreal—in part, because of the heavy rotation of electroclash—a stylistic shift was required to sustain the party. one of the consequences of spinning the latest edm styles and bringing internationally known djs to perform at overdose once every month, is that it puts the night, and montreal’s electroclash scene in general, directly in contact with the shifting cycles of electronic dance music, which is marked by a “rapidity of cyclical change” (straw 1991: 382). staying relevant and maintaining a connection vis-à-vis these quickly changing cycles and international dance music culture as a whole requires a local https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gqfwikamoe madden | dj mini and montreal’s vulgar dance music 39 party night like overdose to constantly shift its stylistic focus by incorporating related emerging sounds that are gaining popularity elsewhere. towards the mid-2000s, electroclash was shortened to electro and the vulgar stylizations were replaced by a more pronounced techno-oriented and instrumental sensibility (madden 2012). edm dance floors began to pushback against the perceived vulgarity of electroclash, as the celebrated glamour, ambiguity, rock orientations and sexuality of the genre were interpreted as stylistic adornments lacking in substance, especially in relation to the more austere historical authenticity of techno. music journalist martin turenne, for instance, reported in exclaim! (“canada’s music authority”) that with electroclash, electronic dance music “has been overtaken by style mavens with little concern for the intricacies of their new found pet sound” (2006). in a similar vein, brent luvaas argues that ultimately “the point” of electroclash “is a glamour-obsessed, nostalgic exhibition put on by people more concerned with style than substance” (2006: 173). progressively, the vocally driven sounds of peaches’ “fuck the pain away” and miss kittin & the hacker’s “frank sinatra” played at the turn of the millennium were ousted on dance floors by more techno-leaning instrumental cuts like alter ego’s “rocker”, which was released in 2004. this international techno-shift meant that drouin and the other local djs performing at overdose had to incorporate more techno-sounding styles into their sets or risk appearing out of touch with the most current cycles and styles of electronic dance music. as drouin suggests: for me, eventually, when electroclash started fading away a little bit and people were kind of tired of hearing that sound, obviously, to keep the night going i moved into a more techno, straight up, four-on-the-floor sound. . . . it was a really slow transition. originally, the first three years were very rock and more queer, and eventually the night moved into more of a berlin sound, a little bit more tech-house, a little bit more techno and towards the end it was pretty much techno. however, moving in more of a techno direction in the mid-2000s also caused overdose to slowly recede into the local electronic dance music scene as one of many techno nights littered throughout various neighbourhoods in the city. as a musical form that was very personality-driven, electroclash allowed a dj persona to develop in an extravagant fashion that was not so easily available with techno. not only did drouin have to reestablish her “signature sound” and look, as she refers to it, the dj had to further develop skill sets, such as studio production, in order to continue making a living as a performing musical practitioner, given that overdose slowly started making less and less money. as she emphasizes, “eventually i realized that if i want to survive, i have to make more music. and i decided to make an album”. as the night began declining in popularity in the late 2000s, it became clear to drouin that overdose would again need to be totally relaunched and reconceptualized to remain operating at parking. one of the drawbacks of hosting a party night in such a large club, which holds well over five hundred people at any given moment, is that the venue needs to be close to capacity for the night to seem successful and profitable. unfortunately, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp3nurysedg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gelw1ifoxho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqafcawlhq0 dancecult 8(1)40 the moment that drouin realized that overdose needed this complete restaging was also the moment that she lost the desire to continue running the night. being a locally oriented professional dj keeps one tethered to the circuits of the city, and after seven years of djing in montreal and quebec, drouin wanted to spend more time traveling and working in the studio as a producer and spend less time booking other djs for a club night. by 2007, as overdose became less and less economically profitable, the infrastructural support needed to run the weekly party night was slowly taken away by the people who owned parking. additionally, around this time club owners in montreal and elsewhere became increasingly weary of investing in street level promotions teams as these networks progressively moved to online social media sites such as facebook. mini’s initial business plan for the night, which included funding for a promotions team and materials, was no longer maintained as it was most likely a tenuous agreement from the beginning. from 2002–2007, a significant amount of the promotional budget was allotted for designing and printing flyers that would be distributed hand-to-hand by a street team of promoters to other nightclubs, scene actors, schools and retail stores. this form of street level promotional activity was necessary in order to keep any night going, overdose or otherwise. however, when the budget was cut, the proprietors of parking expected drouin and her team to carry out the same labour commitments of the previous five years, including spending five nights per week handing out flyers to nightclub patrons. once the budget was defunded by parking it also became much more difficult for mini to foster relationships with both local and international djs who might potentially spin at the thursday night. this meant that overdose would slowly lose its position in montreal as a meeting point of local and international edm culture, and by 2009, the weekly ended. conclusion for professional djs working in local or international circuits of electronic dance music, the entrepreneurial aspects of sustaining a career, such as running a label or creating and sustaining a weekly party night, rarely mix well with the more creative aspects of the practice, such as performing and studio production. maintaining the weekly overdose night for over seven years and booking all of the djs and performers, in addition to hiring a promotional team, amongst other duties, requires that “70 percent of your life becomes dedicated to that”, as dj mini puts it. luckily for drouin, and unlike the experiences of many other women djs working throughout the western world (see rodgers 2010), she was able to continually meet and interact with queer networks of other djs, producers and mentors who were willing to share their knowledge of the craft and their musical equipment in times when she needed some form of support. at the beginning of her career in music, drouin was helped by the aforementioned amateur dj and manager of bluedog. likewise, a professional dj assisted her in developing more advanced dj techniques, while introducing her to dj possibilities in montreal’s gay village and hiring her in the record store that he owned. as she incorporated more studio-based production as part of her practice in the early-to-mid-2000s, drouin received private sound design lessons for three years from her madden | dj mini and montreal’s vulgar dance music 41 manager’s friend, leading up to the release of her first album, audio hygiene (2006). as drouin emphasizes: “after three years, we finally had an album ready. the album was a trialand-error process, with a lot of different genres coming in and out at the same time, because i had the time to experiment”. in the years since overdose, mini has made numerous pragmatic decisions in order to continue her professional musical practice as a dj and producer as she no longer has an ongoing weekly site to rely on. this is not uncommon for djs and other musical practitioners hoping to establish life-long professional careers in music and creative production. for drouin, these decisions entail reconsidering the musical genres she incorporates when spinning, the styles of music she produces in the studio, who she collaborates with and the range of gigs she agrees to accept. since 2009, mini has expanded her musicing to include more corporate events (e.g., retail store openings, fashion shows and corporate sponsored parties), sound, visual and interface design. she now uses dj mini as a brand identity, rather than solely as a dj moniker, to encompass all of the skills—artistic, educational and entrepreneurial—that she has developed in her nearly twenty-year career. in 2012, drouin independently released a second full-length album of original tracks entitled espace temps, while broadening her mentoring to include educational and musical workshops for kids in montreal. lastly, this article attempts to challenge some of the more dominant understandings of electronic dance music through mapping some of the ways that montreal operates as a centre of electronic music production and consumption. north american (and anglo) understandings of dance music tend to follow a selective evolutionary path, with an ongoing fascination with the united states’ three urban centres of dance music and their relationship with certain parts of western europe, most notably london, berlin and paris: chicago, known as the “birthplace” of house music, in reference to the music played at the club warehouse in the city during the early 1980s; detroit, known for its techno associations and the belleville three ( juan atkins, derrick may and kevin saunderson), whose techno dance music sounds launched in the uk on the 1988 virgin records compilation, techno: the dance sound of detroit (thornton 1995: 74); and new york, where american disco first emerged from david mancuso’s love saves the day party in 1970, the ensuing parties at the loft in the noho district of manhattan (lawrence 2003), and nightclubs like the sanctuary on west 43rd street (fickentscher 2000: 26). because of this anglo-american centricity, important dance music centres such as italy, spain and quebec, which very likely produced as many disco records as miami and new york, rarely receive attention in histories of disco and electronic dance music. interestingly, as straw contends, disco’s “roots in southern france and italy are just as long as those in the united states, even if the former are seen as less heroically subcultural” (2008: 125). this text argues that part of this omission in the historical record is due to montreal’s continued fascination with the more vulgar aspects of electronic dance music, from the orchestral-infused disco of the late 1970s and early 1980s to the hypersexual rock stylizations of electroclash at the turn of the millennium and beyond. dancecult 8(1)42 acknowledgements the author would like to thank andra mccartney, brian fauteux and jonathan sterne for insightful comments on earlier iterations of this article. many thanks to dancecult reviewers for such generous feedback. notes 1 in addition, i attended nearly one party night per month between 2001–2006, overdose being the event i frequented the most, where i was able to develop numerous ongoing relationships and conversations with party attendees, djs, promoters and other scene actors. 2 grenier, drawing directly from the work of straw (1991), points out that although largely francophone oriented, quebec emerged out of the international crisis as a “pluralistic musical space” in the 1980s, “within which a range of musical practices coexist, interacting with each other within a variety of processes of differentiation, and according to widely varying trajectories of changes and cross-fertilization” (straw, quoted in grenier 1993: 222). 3 line grenier, email to author, 14 september 2012. 4 the main refers to montreal’s boulevard saint-laurent, which has historically operated as a line dividing montreal’s anglophone population to the west and 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sessions vol. 5). turbo (cd): marcd-013. <http://www.discogs.com/tiga-mixed-emotions-montreal-mix-sessions-vol-5/ release/1052>. tiga and zyntherius. 2001. “sunglasses at night”. sunglasses ep. international deejay gigolorecords (12-inch): gigolo 80. <http://www.discogs.com/tiga-zyntherius-sunglasses-ep/release/18500>. http://www.discogs.com/miss-kittine-hackerfirst-album/ release/20345 http://www.discogs.com/peachese-teaches-of-peaches/release/50236 http://www.discogs.com/tiga-mixed-emotions-montreal-mix-sessions-vol-5/release/1052 http://www.discogs.com/tiga-mixed-emotions-montreal-mix-sessions-vol-5/release/1052 http://www.discogs.com/tiga-zyntherius%09sunglasses-ep/release/18500 an interactive algorithmic music system for edm dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 10(1): 46–62 issn 1947-5403 ©2018 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2018.10.01.03 an interactive algorithmic music system for edm richard savery georgia institute of technology (us) abstract artiin is an interactive computer music system for live performance and composition of edm. artiin is able to function as an autonomous musical creator with no humaninput, or can generate one or more streams in response to human input: for example creating a ride cymbal pattern influenced by an incoming bass pattern. the system shows how developments in interactive music can be repurposed for a system designed to meet a djs workflow. this article explores the design of artiin as well as musical concepts that underpin this work and other systems that influenced its development. artiin was designed by the author in max for live, with multiple custom externals written in java. while the system is currently used by multiple musicians, it is not publicly available. keywords: algorithmic composition; artificial creativity; generative music; computer improviser richard savery is a music technologist, composer and performer focusing on developing software and robots that creatively make music, whether through autonomous musical agents or simple compositional aids that can work with a human. feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2018.10.01.03 savery | an interactive algorithmic music system for edm 47 introduction multiple projects have engaged with the automatic generation of electronic dance music (dahlstedt 2001; ulyate and bianciardi 2001; collins and mclean 2014). interactive music systems for concert performance are an established research area in computer music (drummond 2009). artiin is an interactive music system created by the author in los angeles, usa between 2015 and 2017, with ongoing developments. artiin was designed for edm and generates music using a combination of mathematical models, data-driven systems and transformation of input material. generated material can interact with existing musical material or live input from a human performer. artiin was designed in max for live with externals written in java. artiin was created to explore how continuing developments in music generation, interactive music systems and music information retrieval can be applied to an edm system. this system was designed to be used by djs and critically to be useful to djs beyond the author. the author conducted user studies primarily aimed at guiding the development process and engaging potential users. artiin can be conceptualized as three separate musical agents performing on drums, chordal synth and bass. artiin was designed to be versatile for many different uses: it can range from a complete piece with no human-input to generating a supporting chordal accompaniment around a vocal line. flexibility of use and transparency are key design parameters and artiin aims to be capable of slotting into the performer’s live rig. it can be used for composing new material or generating ideas, and more commonly it is used in live performance to add new material. this article outlines some past systems that have influenced artiin. it also covers the global concepts behind artiin before describing the input analysis and musical generation processes. the musical decision-making process and user interface are then described, followed by a user study and potential future work. background computer composers and improvisers can be used to explore new processes unavailable to traditional human composers. pearce, meredith and wiggins (2002) describe four motivations to devise computer programs to create music: to make new music, as tools for other composers, as a theory of musical style, or to model cognitive processes of music creation. other authors note that algorithmic music can additionally allow for new musical outcomes (miranda and wanderley 2006: 224). these outcomes can occur in the music created by the system and in the human reaction to this input. artiin aims to create music that wouldn’t be created by a human performer alone, using unique methods only available to a computer. in the current work, we explore new musical territory in studio and live electronic dance music, empowered by computer generation. this work also investigates broader questions about how edm is generated; to attempt to replicate musical creation many questions must be answered about how musical decisions are made. how can a computer listen to music, how can it create music and how dancecult 10(1)48 can it decide what to do? exploring these questions necessarily involves developing a better understanding of how humans compose. interactive music systems the present work primarily focuses on developing an interactive computer program that is capable of creating music in real-time with a human. this research builds on a range of interactive computer music systems. its general design principles are inspired by voyager (lewis 2000) and the interactive music systems of robert rowe (rowe 2001, 1993). interactivity requires that the computer not only reacts to human input but also adds new musical elements. considering computer systems as interactive, as opposed to only reactive, dobrian states: “interin the word ‘interactivity’ implies mutual influence between agents that are also in some way autonomous decision makers” (dobrian 2004: 1). ideally this software aims to act as an independent interactive musical collaborator, capable of developing its own unique musical concepts, while listening and engaging with a human musician. boden defines three ways in which computational creativity can occur: combinational, exploratory and transformational (boden 2000). combinational creativity is when familiar ideas are combined in new ways, such as re-arranging audio samples into a new piece. exploratory involves searching within the bounds of a paradigm and finding new forms of creativity, such david cope’s generation of new music in the style of western classical composers (cope 1989). cope generates music through a data-driven approach recombining existing classical works into new pieces. transformational refers to breaking outside the confines of an existing paradigm and is the hardest to achieve. global concepts and musical assumptions material is generated through transformative and generative methods. artiin is built as a live algorithm (blackwell, bown and young 2012), defined as an improviser that interacts with musicians. artiin works primarily within combinational creativity combining existing techniques into a new system. artiin’s approach to algorithmic composition is to view musical creation as an extended series of scaled and quantifiable decisions. these decisions can be made in two categories, firstly as an on (1) or an off (0). secondly, decisions can be between 0 and 1, such as 0.5. through a combination of many instances of these decisions it is possible to create a diverse decision-making system. in this way, many cases of simplicity can lead to a deep level of complexity. these factors then need to be combined with a way to interact with incoming ideas. for this i impose a model of interaction whereby ideas can be ignored, copied or opposite parameters applied. for volume, performing the opposite would mean playing soft when the input is loud. an example of this structure is presented in figure 1. there are always four decisions made: volume, density (how many notes occur), range and intervals. artiin decides on levels of interaction for each component individually. it may choose to copy volume levels but ignore density levels, allowing for a much broader range of results. savery | an interactive algorithmic music system for edm 49 figure 1. artiin decision making process figure 1 portrays a simplified version of artiin’s decision-making process. considering artiin within roads’ (2004) scales of time, these decisions do not reach the micro level (milliseconds) and generally focus on the sound object level. it is my hope that the ideas are reduced to a point where choices are inherently decided in the timbre qualities of virtual instruments. it is possible for the computer to make all decisions at each level, however with transparency and a range of uses a key design goal, the user is able to influence certain parts of the decision-making process. input artiin can receive input via midi or through an audio signal. the user sets which musical information to be processed by artiin and labels it chordal, bass or drums. audio is converted into a variation of midi. standard midi includes a “note on” message with velocity value for the start of a note and “note off ” for the end of the note. with artiin, audio also includes velocity values during the note to allow the system to register volume changes throughout a note. once all information is converted to midi, it is stored in a database which grows throughout the performance. artiin also retains information from past performances by the performer. audio analysis for audio analysis, artiin uses a custom plugin made in java (written in collaboration with jakob nagel). while there are existing plugins that could complete this task, a custom external was made to prevent artiin from relying on third party externals. audio first undergoes preprocessing by removing all signal beneath a volume threshold, which is set before each performance dependent on background noise. this signal is then processed to extract note onsets, pitch and dynamics. to compute the parameters, the input audio signal is divided into blocks of 1024 samples, each with an overlap of 512 samples. the parameters of notes (pitch rounded to a midi value and onset/offsets), tuning (cents) and dynamics are then extracted for each block. notes are considered an individual midi pitch, while the tuning is the deviation from this pitch. tuning deviation is measured when a note is bent over a quarter tone. dancecult 10(1)50 pitch tracking is implemented using the auto-correlation function (acf). the acf is computed and normalized by dividing through the first value of the acf. thus, the maximum value of the normalized acf equals 1. for each block, the candidate sample indexes are determined to be the sample indexes from the index on, where the autocorrelation at the first instance undercuts a certain threshold of t (wang and brown 2006). we determined t to be 0.35 as first few sample indexes generally have very high correlations (in particular, the first sample index will have a correlation of 1, which is the maximum), but would correspond to frequencies out of our target range. for each block b, the index with the highest correlation is extracted out of the candidate indexes. the frequency for each block b is computed by , where denotes the sampling frequency of the given audio file in hertz. equation 1 the dynamics of each audio block b are computed (see eq. 1) where b(n) denotes the value of the nth sample of block b and 1024 is the number of samples in block b. for onset and offset detection, a novelty function is used using spectral flux (bello et al. 2005). onsets are determined to occur at the timestamp of each block, for which the novelty function surpasses the onset threshold ton = 0.3. analogously, offsets are determined to occur at the timestamp of each block, for which the novelty function undercuts the offset threshold. in the case of multiple onsets detected in a row (without offsets detected in between), the missing offsets are added at the same timestamps where the corresponding onsets occur. in the case that multiple offsets are detected in a row (without onsets in between), all of those offsets are discarded, except for the first one. after the performance parameters (pitch, dynamics, onset and offset for micro-timings) have been computed for each audio block, the actual performance data of the overall audio is aggregated. at this point, the audio is now a text file, containing sampled note values that have a specific starting time and duration, as well as a pitch and volume that may change over time. audio descriptors with the notes (midi value), volumes and tuning extracted, artiin then creates higherlevel descriptors. the high-level descriptors are intervals, range, volume and density. these descriptors were chosen primarily as they are easily understood by the users of the system. additionally they can be clearly mapped from input to output when appropriate. signals are first separated into musical phrases, which are determined by a rest length after a sequence of notes. the length required to set the end of a phrase is defined by an inverse relation to the phrase length. that is, at the beginning of the phrase a longer rest is required (3-beats) while the longer the phrase persists, the shorter the rest time required to signal a new phrase. while this is a far from perfect system, it has proven relatively reliable in testing savery | an interactive algorithmic music system for edm 51 by the author. through evaluation using the meertens tune collections (van kranenburg 2016), the phrase detection system showed an accuracy of 60%, however failure was usually due to doubling the length of a phrase. for the purpose of artiin, the required element of phrase detection is storing musical motifs that have a logical start and finish. since phrase detection is a subjective music information retrieval task (livingstone et al. 2009), a fully accurate system for artiin is unrealistic. intervals is an average of an array containing the distance between each set of notes. intervals are handled in this way to describe an input’s variation between stepwise scalar material and wider movement. additionally, averaging avoids storing redundant information that is already available to artiin in the midi file. range is a single value showing the distance between the highest and lowest note in the set time period. volume is the normalized dynamic level. density is the number of notes played per measure and is capped at 32. each of these descriptors are analyzed over the different time lengths of 1 second, 5 seconds and 20 seconds for real-time. these descriptors each have preset levels to range from 0 to 1 (see fig. 2). these descriptors are added together to give a complexity level out of four to each section of material (see fig. 3). density is weighted three times higher than the other three parameters, due to its higher influence on perceived complexity. figure 2. high-level descriptors figure 3. high-level descriptors sample results the same metrics are generated for each of the three virtual instrument’s outputs. at any stage, any instrument can draw on the volume, or the density and complexity of the other real dancecult 10(1)52 and virtual instruments in real-time. this allows for interaction between the independent components of artiin itself. storing music artiin stores the audio input and audio descriptors separately. the audio input file records the incoming midi or the analyzed audio signal. new ideas are added at the end of each phrase. for the audio signal, stored ideas are an array of numbers containing time in milliseconds, pitch, velocity and tuning distance from midi pitch. for incoming midi, the velocity remains the same for each sample and tuning is normalized when the midi contains no tuning information. the second file contains the high-level descriptors with the start time of each phrase. in this way, artiin can search for the start point of an idea with a set descriptor or complexity level. artiin also maintains a database of all past performances of its own output and the input it has received. from its own output, it only stores ideas that have been sonically realized, not all ideas that have been created. input monophonic ideas are added to the database that is used for markov model generation. input drum patterns are added to the drum generator database. storing these ideas in this manner allows for a system that can change over time in ways dictated by its users, gradually adding the user’s musical language into its own. users are also given the option to retain what is played within each performance. musical creation artiin creates music through three different methods, utilizing transformative and generative processes (rowe 1993). generative processes include data-driven methods and mathematical generation. user-created ideas are altered both on real-time input and by changing ideas from the database described in earlier sections. these methods of creation are then chosen from by artiin to create the final output. data-driven melody generation: markov models one of artiin’s key forms of creation is through data-driven systems. this system incorporates a knowledge base drawn from 200 edm files in midi format. this data was compiled from two online sources in 2018: freaky loops and wa productions. unfortunately, due to licensing restrictions preventing distribution, this dataset cannot be shared. parts that didn’t fit into one of these categories were discarded, such as high-pitched rhythmic ostinatos. categorization of midi files was done through a very simple automatic process separate to artiin, written in python. this process separates the midi file into distinct channels (consistent in the data sets) and then checks for range, and polyphony. to allow for variation in keys between each piece, the midi files were transposed into all twelve keys and therefore represented twelve times in the dataset, without a distinction between major and minor. a markov chain is a stochastic process that bases the probability of a new idea on what has occurred before. markov chains have been used extensively in algorithmic composition savery | an interactive algorithmic music system for edm 53 (ames 1989; roads 1996). first order markov chains use only the current state to decide on the upcoming state, while second order chains use the current one and the most recent state. artiin uses a custom external (coded in java) for markov models of rhythmic and harmonic ideas for the bass and chordal synth. it uses a minimum of fourth order chains, trained from the midi file dataset. data-driven chord progression generation: markov model artiin can automatically create a chord progression ranging from four to eight bars long. these progressions all follow the same linear pattern, beginning with a tonic chord. the chords after the tonic are based on a first order markov model, with set probabilities to move to a different chord. the likelihood of each chord was chosen subjectively based on decisions made by the system creator, aiming for appropriate progressions for edm. mathematical generation many composers have used fractal equations in algorithmic composition (roads 1996). studies in perception have shown that fractal contours applied to pitch and loudness can be recognized by listeners (schmuckler and gilden 1993). it has also been proposed that the music of bach can be reverse engineered to represent fractal equations (hsu and hsu 1990). this form of generation is useful because it is nonhuman, taking the system into new territory as creative stimulation. to generate in this way, artiin uses the formulas of the ikeda map and the henon map and uses the resulting number to generate rhythmic relations, harmonic progressions and influence overall structure. both the hénon map and ikeda map are two-dimensional maps create a series of x, y coordinates using the equation below. figure 4 displays a graphical representation of the ikeda map (created in matlab by the author). figure 4. ikeda map dancecult 10(1)54 these maps are iterative processes and discrete dynamical systems that show chaotic results. a discrete dynamical system moves at chosen time intervals, and continually uses the same formula to move to new locations. new values in a sequence can be chosen whenever required. chaos in mathematics refers to systems that can show drastically different outcomes despite only slight variations in their initial conditions; the musical effect is to open up many unanticipated trajectories. important to artiin’s use is the tendency of chaotic systems to create highly structured almost periodic orbits, with unexpected deviations following logic that is not often easily discernable. the hénon map and ikeda map are particularly effective for musical patterns because they display a regular orbit, albeit with chaotic results that contain intermittent outliers. by using an underlying formula such as this, i believe it is possible to create the illusion of an intelligent organized system that has somewhat predictable results, but does show occasional  creativity through the chaotic movements, reaching beyond the more predictable patterns. balancing between predictability (the regular orbit) and unpredictably (the chaotic results) is a key part of music, assuming pure repetition itself is not the aesthetic basis of the piece. pierre boulez describes all western music as “caught up in a ‘dilemma’ involving repetition, variation, recognition and the unknown” (campbell  2010: 154). iterative processes can be considered a form of musical composition through their internal repeating process that create recognizable patterns. with the addition of chaotic results as the “unknown” these formulas can be used to create musically useful output. through experiments substituting the hénon map with alternate formulas or with random values, it became apparent that this use of an iterative formula does contain musical significance. while my use of the hénon map does produce defined harmonic and rhythmic characteristics, this sound is never identical in subsequent performances. i would liken its output to that of a performer reinterpreting improvisational guidelines in each performance. artiin uses three versions of the henon and ikeda maps, with a version of each changing once per four measures, once per measure and once each beat. the starting values for each are randomly assigned each time artiin is run. by using multiple versions of each map, parameters (such as harmony, rhythm and structure) move at different speeds.  this allows for very direct mappings from the variables to musical parameters, without sacrificing musical interest and variety. each instrument uses the hénon map in a slightly different way, but one common characteristic is to use the x and y values to create rhythmic lengths. as a basic variation, each value of x and y could be multiplied by 100 to create a note length (in milliseconds) and once these notes end the next point in the map is created to output the new note lengths. by using this internal structure from the hénon map across multiple iterations, combined with the input of a live performer, it is possible to create many varied results from the one algorithm. savery | an interactive algorithmic music system for edm 55 for example, if the hénon map output the values of 1 and 0.75 (all numbers are to 4 decimal places), this would be converted to a quarter note and then a dotted eight note. each unit is considered to be worth one beat; as these maps produce a range of numbers this can create a wealth of rhythmic ideas. rhythmic ideas can be quantized to any degree by the user (set by the synco option in the user interface). for edm, the lowest level of quantization still quantizes the generated material. drum pattern generation in addition to mathematical generation, drum parts are also generated using a simple stochastic process based on set levels of syncopation and density. using these parameters of density and syncopation artiin places drum hits across a two-bar grid and generates positions to place a drum hit. higher syncopation levels encourage more placement off the beat while density levels set how many notes are created. this is followed with each note assigned a probability of being hit each time through the cycle, again set by the density and syncopation level. the second level of probability allows continued variance in the beat similar to prior work in the area (collins 2001). this process is used to create a simple groove that can lock in the more complex interactive ideas. the groove is shown to the user (see fig. 5), and new versions can be created at any time. figure 5. drum pattern generation input transformations input material is also transformed and used by artiin. artiin is able to repurpose any previous musical information. this is primarily performed by extracting parts of an idea at a set complexity. once the musical motif is taken, artiin will play either a fragment of the motif, or a variation of the motif. these ideas can be transformed in many ways, including rhythmically and harmonically. rhythmic transformations are when the motif is extended or shortened, internally altered (such as with an extra embellishment) or with a start point shifted. harmonic transformations occur when an entire motif is transposed, or parts of the motif are transposed. dancecult 10(1)56 the other important input transformation occurs in real time using incoming rhythmic distances as a base for output. for example, if the distance between the last two notes is a quarter note, a pattern that corresponds to the ratio of this idea is played in real-time. this could be in eighth notes, quarter notes or half notes, relating to half, equal or double the input. before input transformations are used by the broader system there is a final layer of post-processing that can be enabled. this post-processing can alter the harmonic output by transposing signal notes to fit within a key. it also simplifies rhythmic patterns when appropriate to fit the global parameters. musical decision making at this stage, artiin has an array of algorithmically created musical ideas to draw from. any of these parameters can be indirectly controlled by the user, as discussed in the userinterfaces section below. as an autonomous decision-making scheme determining the behavior of each component in the absence of human intervention, artiin plays a basic game amongst each instrument, using ideas inspired from game theory. each instrument firstly chooses a random four-number sequence containing any combination of 0, 1 and 2. this list is then compared to a set database of winning ideas for each instrument, that relates to the incoming level of complexity. for example, when the state of nature (set by the complexity level) is 6, the best answer for the bass may be 0 0 0 0 (see fig. 6). if the chordal synth chooses 0 1 2 1, that is then a distance of 4 away from its best answer (0 + 1 + 2 + 1 = 4). the chordal synth is then more likely to choose these answers the next time the complexity level is 6. the goal is not to achieve the best possible answer, but instead to dictate potential musical directions. the game also doesn’t necessarily lead to the best answer: in table 3 the chordal synth is now more likely to choose 0 1 2 1 as the best answer, even though it is relatively far from 0 0 0 0. figure 6. game based decision making savery | an interactive algorithmic music system for edm 57 output artiin sends a midi out to user selected virtual instruments. these instruments can be from any synthesizer hosted in ableton including third party plug-ins. the bass part is monophonic and the chordal synth requires a polyphonic instrument. each individual drum sound (cymbal, snare) can be chosen by the user. allowing the user control of the sounds is a necessity as it is beyond the scope of artiin to include its own synthesis methods. with timbre a central component of edm, it is expected that users will prefer to use their own sounds when creating edm. this does however mean that artiin makes no attempt to control lower level timbre parameters. user interface the user interface was designed for ease of use in live performance and composition. with this end goal the generative systems described above are not mapped directly to the user interface, and are instead controlled abstractly. the aim of the interface however is not to restrict control, but instead to simplify decisions by reducing their complexity. as well as chordal synth and bass and drum controls, there is a general control interface. this displays the chord generation that is currently created by artiin, as well as providing a global “kill” switch and a global reset option. chordal synth and bass figure 7. chordal synth and bass interface the chordal synth and bass have matching interfaces, although they are independently set. the “listen to” options allow the user to choose up to three incoming streams of either audio or midi, including other artiin instruments. while it is possible to bus more streams together, in testing this created an output far abstracted from the incoming streams. “disso” refers to the dissonance level and impacts how closely artiin follows incoming harmonic ideas. this also alters the level of post-processing on transformational ideas. dancecult 10(1)58 “quant” refers to the level of quantization. this acts like a regular method of quantization, restricting rhythmic values to a set grid, dependent on the user’s chosen level. this method of quantization acts independently of ableton live’s quantization settings. if this forces notes to overlap, the first note will remain while other notes are dropped. the final parameter density describes how many notes per measure can occur. no selection for any category will allow the computer to decide the parameters. drums figure 8. drum interface the user is able to choose a density level and a quantization level independently for the kick drum, snare drum, ride cymbal and hi-hat (see fig. 5). unlike the chordal and bass interface, however, when no option is chosen while the drums are on, each part reverts to the simple drum generative method. defaulting to the simple generative drum pattern was chosen as the other drum methods tend to have a distracting influence. there is no single method to control all components of the drums simultaneously as it seemed stylistically ineffective to have the entire drum kit reacting in the same manner. the drum kit is most effective when one element (such as the kick) is responding to the bass while the snare drum is then responding to the kick drum. allowing each component to react individually creates the sound of multiple percussionists. while such can be used for a novel effect, it is often not stylistically appropriate. the “fills” option allows the drum kit as a whole (not individual components) to create fills around all incoming ideas. the “midi note” option allows the user to assign which midi note will be triggered. user studies artiin underwent two separate user studies, the first conducted with an early iteration. the primary goal of the user tests was to identify if the system is usable for dj practice. the first user study took place in january, 2016 and consisted of an informal discussion among six savery | an interactive algorithmic music system for edm 59 djs, each of whom perform at least once a month. qualitative responses were recorded in the group discussion, with participants able to lead the discussion. discussions included an analysis of artiin and also explored broader ideas for additional software potentially useful in their workflow. from the first user study three conclusions were reached and used to continue development. firstly, although this was not a user complaint, the implementation of techniques can always be improved. overall, the participants thought the musical output worked well with their own inputs and believed the output would be effective in performance. the original intention had been to implement novel developments in interactive music into the system, such as the work performed by magenta in deep learning ( jacques, 2016). it was originally expected that the majority of work would need to be performed on the algorithmic processes, instead future efforts focused on interface design. the second conclusion from the first round of user testing was that while tools can be effectively repurposed, the principles behind them must be rethought. the development of an autonomous system was often undesirable for users, who instead prefer the system to accompany and support their work. this understanding led to the final conclusion emerging from this user study: that control over the system is pivotal to the user’s enjoyment of the system. the original interface consisted of a single screen that allowed a user to turn each instrument on and off, but no lower level controls. the second user study was conducted in december, 2016 by which time artiin was in the form described in this article. the study was again conducted as a discussion, however focused on whether or not the goals of the original discussion had been achieved and other potential improvements for the system. this study took place after adding the lower level controls explained in this article. the same six users unanimously preferred the newer version. it became clear that transparency of control greatly improved their desire to use the system. however, it also became clear that the current scheme did not meet the requirements of all users. of the six participants, two requested lower level control, one was satisfied with the control scheme, while the remaining three believed the control scheme could be improved further. one suggestion was to develop a modular system where the user can define their own control scheme. after the second user study, all six musicians were given the option to continue using artiin with support from its creators. three participants decided to continue using artiin and now regularly use it in their work. their most common use of artiin is adding single layers at certain times in different pieces. these djs remain in regular communication and actively contribute to the development of artiin. the three users who elected to discontinue using the system were asked to explain their decision. while one stated they didn’t feel it was a tool useful for their work, the other two mentioned that it did not fit into their current workflow. from initial discussions within the first user study it was found that, on average, each dj added or removed software and hardware from their setup within six months. dancecult 10(1)60 future developments artiin remains a prototype and has not had extensive user studies beyond the feedback gained from its initial user pool. one key flaw with artiin is its control of timbre, a key characteristic of edm. for edm, midi can capture important information on dynamics and pitch, but timbre qualities will need to be addressed in future versions. using midi out does however allow artiin to work with a user’s chosen instrument sounds. some users deploy artiin for certain parts of a piece, but then want to transition to composed material. artiin currently possesses a limited ability to make longer-term musical structural decisions. the use of game theory for decision-making leads to varied structures, however these ideas are not always effectively connected. this is not usually a problem as when used with live input the structure is determined by the user. artiin’s methods of interaction could be improved through better methods that do not rely on a one-dimensional model (-1,1). of significant interest for artiin is developing further methods of retaining its own musical ideas and interactions from past performances. users have noticed variation in the output after multiple use, due to changes in the database as the system stores ideas. artiin’s markov model and drum generation are both altered during the course of a user’s interaction with the system, but developing this method further could develop a better user response. future user research of audience reaction and perception may also be useful before making further changes to the system. conclusion artiin provides an algorithmic approach to edm that can be used in many different ways, suitable for a variety of workflows. artiin demonstrated the application of a range of research in interactive music for edm. significantly, it showed that existing research in other genres can be applied very effectively, but new principles for applying this research have to be defined for the genre. in particular, artiin demonstrated the need for clear control and ui for live performance of edm. acknowledgements thanks to jakob nagel who was the co-developer of the audio analysis system. references ames, charles. 1989. “the markov process as a compositional model: a survey and tutorial”. leonardo 22(2): 175–87. <https://doi.org/10.2307/1575226>. bello, juan pablo, laurent daudet, samer abdallah, chris duxbury, mike davies and mark b. sandler. 2005. “a tutorial on onset detection in music signals”. ieee transactions on speech and audio processing 13(5): 1035–46. <https://doi.org/10.1109/tsa.2005.851998>. savery | an interactive algorithmic music system for edm 61 blackwell, tim, oliver bown and michael 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(seattle): chi’01 workshop on new interfaces for musical expression (nime-01). <https://doi.org/10.1162/014892602320582963>. wang, deliang, and guy j brown. 2006. computational auditory scene analysis: principles, algorithms, and applications. wileyieee press. <https://doi.org/10.1109/tnn.2007.913988>. playing with something that runs: technology, improvisation, and composition in dj and laptop performance mark j. butler new york: oxford university press, 2014. isbn: 9780195393613 (hardback), 9780195393620 (paperback) rrp: £86.00 (hardcover), £20.99 (paperback) toby young university of oxford (uk) published in 2014, playing with something that runs is already widely cited across edmc scholarship and in receipt of industry-wide plaudits (notably the 2015 pmig outstanding publication award from the society of music theory). and yet surprisingly, it has yet to be reviewed in an academic journal. through a stylish interdisciplinary approach, butler elegantly transcribes, renders and elucidates the landscape of improvisation across contemporary djing and live production practices in full 360° technicolor. butler’s methodology feels as virtuosic and light of touch as any of the musicians he examines, bringing together elements of ethnography, anthropology, sociology, analysis and aesthetics to deftly unpack the complex issues of creativity, liveness, hybridity and interaction at the core of his investigation. for a scholar so well versed in the theoretical, it is admirable that the monograph’s backbone comes from extensive observations and interviews with djs and laptop musicians, focusing predominantly on fieldwork conducted by the author across a variety of berlin studios and nightclubs. at the heart of the discussion is an exploration of the various elements (both practical and theoretical) that comprise live performance in edm. in addition to offering useful reviews on existing literature, each chapter draws together central elements of dance music performance studies with other recurring themes in butler’s work such as ontology and the “work concept” (chapter one), creativity and materiality (chapter two), perception (chapter three) and technological mediation (chapter four). intersections with other pillars of edm scholarship inevitably feature in much of the work—for instance in the final chapter, which is underpinned by a discussion about repetition and its perception—but typical to butler’s previous work, revisiting these well-trodden paths never feels tedious. indeed, the new lens of performance frequently offers up new and interesting ideas; for example the compelling notion of a “perfect loop”, which adapts robert fink’s idea of recombinant teleology to consider how the micro-manipulation of static or repetitive material can lead to the perception of a technologically-driven musical experience as quasi organic. this strand of the book—unpicking the ways by which fluidity in performance is created from seemingly static, typically pre-recorded musical objects—is one of the most interesting aspects of butler’s discussion, and really gets to the core of what his work is about. one of the most compelling theoretical tools of the book for instance is the author’s identification of seven techniques or “technologies” used by djs and laptop performers for the creation of fludity: viz. repeating, cycling, going, grooving, riding, transitioning and flowing (71–2). the handling of static material such as loops, samples and records through these actions—which butler describes as musical affordances—are commonplace enough to practitioners, but too often treated as problematic in lieu of the more rigid definitions of musical composition, improvisation or performance that are typically found in musicology. through this lens of affordances, as well as butler’s analysis of both theoretical and practical examples, a more precise discussion of musical creation in dance music is opened up, with profound implications for future discussions of edm ontology. overall, playing with something that runs is an immaculate piece of popular musicology, with the potential to become one the cornerstone texts in our discipline. its interdisciplinary approach provides an incredibly compelling insight into the performance and consumption of live edm, and the companion website offers a great tool in bringing the discussions of recordings and performances to life through carefully curated audio and video examples. it would be ideally suited as a key text for any popular music course whilst also having the potential to deepen and expand our discipline at the highest level, and really does provide something for everyone. i could not recommend it more highly. have things really changed, or is it just me? ageing and dance music culture donna bentley independent author and dj <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.15> the year is 2019, nearly 3 decades away from the emergence of dance music and underground electronic music culture. twenty-three years ago, around the mid to late 90s was when i started going out. my outward ventures onto the scene started some time below the legal drinking age. the year 2000 finally arrived, and i could legitimately participate. part of me feels that if i hadn’t experienced the dance movement when i did, i would have missed out. looking back now i can’t believe i didn’t realise how good it was in comparison to how i personally see the scene today. i know the new party goers of today, when you ask them about how their night or weekend went, will convey to you that they felt like their weekend was amazing! i respect that, but for me, things are not the same. back in the day i always considered myself fortunate enough to have experienced and been an active part of a scene so influential, that it has carved out a place of its own within the timeline of uk history. venues were in abundance. it didn’t matter if you were in a town or a city, there was always somewhere to go. venues, like people, came in all manner of shapes and sizes, ranging from the big room to a back room.... somewhere. everything from the licensed, the d.i.y invite-only parties, and the non-licensed parties in the countryside surrounding the city. does anyone here remember trying to get hold of the “party line”? cryptic scrawls of a number, or digits passed on by the muffled dialogue of clubbers looking for the next venue in which to continue the weekend. the task then was to go on a treasure hunt (this was well before having a satnav on your phone was standard), keep your ears open and eventually the rumble of the emitting bass-line would lead you to where you needed to be. you could pick and choose from a variety of events in any number of places. weekends were to be lived for, choices were to be made, people were to be seen and new tracks to be heard. if you were inclined towards record collecting or djing yourself, then seeking out vinyl copies of the tracks you heard at the weekend was also exciting. record shops were prevalent and there was a very physical feel to the scene. you would even need to go to the record shops to buy tickets to events and festivals too. communities formed in record shops and in the smaller event venues. clubs and franchises didn’t seem to be as much as a pairing as they are now. there were a lot more independently run establishments still actively operating. i always knew that if i was in a certain place at a specified time, i would be sure to see people i knew doing the rounds. this was the norm and after a year or so of tagging along with people i knew, i felt 110% comfortable going out on my own in my then home city of sheffield. events hosted djs playing records of all manner of genres. at the time, examples of events that occurred regularly were gatecrasher, hed kandi, ny sushi, urban gorilla and planet zogg. at some events it was commonplace to make your own outfits. i will use gatecrasher, the club event, as an example. this club event had its own unique culture. back when i was living in sheffield the club that hosted gatecrasher, or “crasher” as it was later known, was the republic. the music policy was trance and house oriented. residents included big names such as judge jules, and well-known staples like scott bond and matt hardwick. the entry policy seemed designed to keep the event only for dedicated clubbers. pretty much like how berghain in berlin seems to operate. you may not even get in. entry was never guaranteed, and the reasons for refusal that have been reported back to me have been a bit random. but then, that was part of the excitement. i luckily was never turned away from gatecrasher. i fondly remember the journeys to manchester to source brightly coloured fluffy material to make some fuzzy boot covers and furnish a top, which i lovingly called “my furry tit sling”. my costume paled in comparison to the pieces of luminous sci-fi-esque fashion that some people had made for themselves. if you didn’t fancy going on a fabric pilgrimage and cracking out your sewing machine, fear not, there were specialist clothing shops you could go to. the crowd was awash with all kinds of colours. under blue light illumination you could see the designs that some had painted across their body and face. glow in the dark and uv reactive beads rattled and glowed in the sea of arms that were reaching up to the lasers. the dynamism was amazing. i remember loving the fact that before going out i would wonder what i was going to see and hear and who i would meet, professionals, students, travellers, privileged young internationals hopping the party circuit so they could say they had been there and accumulate some social collateral. the movement felt free and exempt from the conventions of society, a place where you could be yourself and let go in appearance and in movement. an escape from my troubles, and a genuine pleasure to go out. people were polite and there was hardly any trouble. the one thing that united everyone was the same enthusiasm for music, which we all shared. for better or for worse? times change over time this all faded into the background. the media provided coverage of events in magazines and in the news. dance culture was going mainstream. to allow for growth and revenue i am sure a lot of these events and clubs underwent corporate re-structuring. i remember going to the gatecrasher arena event in nottingham in 2004. that was the last time i saw any semblance of the old “crasher” culture. the week following this event, i went to the 10 years of crasher tour in sheffield. i mistakenly turned up with my friends in all our uv garb and were horrified when we arrived. the people already in attendance seemed put off by our appearance and whether real or perceived, it felt like there was a divide. i heard comments that likened us to people of a certain strata of life that deemed us to be undesirable. sadly, there were aspects of the scene that had developed a less than favourable reputation. even clubbers were divided. if you spoke to different groups of people you would notice that aspects of where people would go and who they would and would not be seen with would become apparent. it was not all unfairly based. the club down the road (which i shall not name) from what was then the republic (which hosted gatecrasher) had grown a reputation for knife and substance related incidents. i would not go there, but i would feel perfectly happy hanging around dressed as a canary in a somewhat ravey carnival type setting. i knew this was not for everyone. for myself, i was an energetic personality that liked to explore things that were outside of the mainstream. originating from a conservative and somewhat socially restrictive background, i found i battled a lot in my everyday life to be allowed to just be myself. in another article i wrote (bentley 2017) i also describe the trials i was having being a young female from a non-university background aspiring to break into a meaningful career in science as well as become a dj. this is when convention back then said that wasn’t what young women should be doing. this was also without the support of having family members or friends who were connected in either community. that too was a challenge, and for me, a couple of days on the scene was enough to keep my spirits up, as the people around me seemed to be non-judgemental and share similar value systems. it reminded me that there were people like me out there. i wasn’t the only one. going to events and meeting new people outside of the familiar social groups that orbited my everyday life, reminded me that there is a big world out there. the republic nightclub was now far from what i once recognised it to be. vip booths lined the periphery. champagne bottles propped up in ice, as sharply dressed people sat around. don’t get me wrong, i too appreciate the value of dressing nicely. it does have a place, for me, i dressed up when i was going to a restaurant or on a bar culture type night out. i remember wondering if we were at the right event. i think i would have had similar feelings even if i had realised and adhered to the dress code. the music wasn’t the same either. a bit dejected we didn’t stay for the duration. for us, at this time, it felt stiff and manufactured. i realised that the event had, like many others, grown in popularity and had most likely been re-marketed to appeal to a wider market of people. more people, more drinks sales, more money and of course survival. another thing that i noticed in my latter years in sheffield, and indeed, now in nottingham, was that an abundance of venues were, and still are, closing due to inclement economic circumstances, raids, severe bad press following an incident, infrastructure ruin or licence refusal. either that, or they were burning down to later emerge as a block of flats or some kind of retail or commerce-based establishment. this wasn’t just limited to the dance scene. venues that hosted bands (which i also liked) were on the same path. leading up to this last year, 2019, my current home city of nottingham has lost many a venue. the latest losses include, the maze, the alley café, and the malt cross. on a side note, as the clubs and venues closed over time, so did the record shops. record shops did have a resurgence, when vinyl became fashionable again. in light of music download services, and the transition that djs made as digital technology developed from playing vinyl, to cd, and then from cd to digital media, the record shops have dwindled away into the background again. digital media has made dance music more accessible and more economically accessible. a digital track costs a lot less than a record, they can be duplicated and shared, and they are easier to move about as well. but it’s not all doom and gloom. music streaming and download services have saved me a load of money, although as technology has played more a part of the scene there have been subtle changes in the behaviours of people going out, and also in the things you see. for example, you no longer get demo cds of aspiring new djs in clubs anymore. i remember looking back at events and seeing one of their friends handing out demo cds to members of the crowd whilst they played. if i saw a cd promo person i would of course peruse, free new music and a tangible souvenir from the evening. another entity that has been an integral part of the scene for the last 10 years or so is social media, facebook in particular. i knew that come monday i may have to contact friends of friends to un-tag me from the background of photos. when i was younger, i didn’t realise it at the time because of course social media didn’t exist, but looking back, the absence of facebook in my life back then, was, a blessing. what happened on a night out, stayed on a night out. if a mistake occurred, it would only lurk within the recesses of people’s minds. eventually it, whatever “it” was, would be forgotten. that was the end of it. where we are now, is a time where employers check your profile. maybe bored acquaintances, or gossip fairing friends and family scan your newsfeed. lurking in cyber space, perusing your digital self, waiting for the next thing to share and talk about. trouble is just waiting to ensue. venues and event organisers are conscious of the difficulties social media can bring. i went to a party at xoyo in london. they issue cards before you go in and politely ask you to keep your phones away and off the dancefloor. the northern approach is a tad more direct. at an event i went to at hidden in manchester, before we could go in, we were given a black sticker to put over our phone cameras. of course, they couldn’t confiscate the punters’ phones, manage an amnesty, or insist that stickers were not removed, but at least the sentiment was there. however, the flip side of social media is, that despite not living in manchester, leeds brighton, bristol or london, i can stay up to date with what is going on very easily. i can even buy tickets for events from the comfort of my own sofa. i don’t like to admit it, maybe i changed as well? another aspect that i have not mentioned up until now is that i as a person have also changed and grown, as have my priorities. with the development of a career, earning the responsibility of a house, watching some friends as they become parents, and others as they move away. at 30 something i have a handful of people that i like to go out with. i know what i like, and with disposable funds being sparse these days i cannot always justify spending to go to events. nowadays the music loving members of my circle plan for events around all of our commitments. when we can get together, tickets will be booked, accommodation sought and a weekend away in the making. i know i definitely appreciate going out more these days. fortunately, the events we like seem to be frequented by a supportive older crowd, people in their mid-30s and older. i do like seeing older people other than the ones that i went out with at events. it reminds me that there is no age limit to enjoying music and that it is in effect for everyone to enjoy. times have been economically difficult as well. when you have bills to pay and income is sparse, the first thing that goes is the social life. when i was a late teenager you would plan to head out about 9pm, and head to the club at 11pm after the pub called last orders. now bars can get late licenses and stay open until 1/2am the next day. so, this also alleviates the necessity to make your way to a club towards the end of drinking hours. you don’t have to pay a door fee to get in anywhere or move from where you are camped out if you don’t feel inclined to. when i have been in a crowd seemingly populated by people half my age, i was braced for the usual questions regarding how old i was and what i did. i have no doubt that the questions were well meaning and by no means have i taken offence in some of the reactions that i got to the answers that i gave. interestingly reactions were polarised between what i call “good shock” and “bad shock”. the people that were in admiration were serious scene enthusiasts. they went to the festivals, listened to all the new tracks, and knew that to be still out an about, we too, were also still following the music and its producers strongly. the less favourable responses were received from folk who didn’t seem to be into any music following as much. comments about my partner being old enough to be their dad, (and to be fair, he was) were put out there because i felt that these people could not see how you would still be out on the approach to your 40s. sometimes i feel that there is a bit of a stigma surrounding people who do still go out. often, we were the token older couple, but not always. to be fair, i know, even if there was an abundance of events to choose from within my locality, i know i would not be able to be as prevalent as i was in my 20s. i have more responsibility now. my life experience so far has demonstrated that time combined with money, have an inverse relationship with age. festivals are where i now spend my free summer weekends. when compared to going out in town, i do prefer to go to a good festival. again, except for boom, a large international psychedelic trance festival in portugal, my preference is, the smaller uk festivals. they are more reasonably priced; the acts are perfectly competent and there is less antisocial behaviour. the smaller festivals have a big community feel. there is more of the fun vibe that i like as well. i myself am not one to want to go out and take myself too seriously. i spend all week being serious, as do most people. every tent within the festival arena was like a different room in a club. if you got bored at a festival, you could wander off into another arena for a change of sound or take a bimble around the site and find a willing person or people to pass the time with. the feeling of the small festival scene for me has echoes of the dance scene, back from around the early noughties. i noticed that the bigger a festival gets, the more barriers and restrictions come into place. i also know a lot of people who used to spend all their free time in night clubs are now relying on small grass roots festivals to access the scene whilst staying off the beaten path. interestingly, i know some of the older (former) free party organisers that frequent the small festival scene. back before the criminal justice act came into place, which was before my time, free parties, were more abundant. the people i know in this category (who i will not name out of respect for their privacy) have injunctions in place on them, such that if they ever organise a non-licensed event again, they will get prosecuted. from “back in the day”, to “at the end of the day” all in all, as the scene has changed so has the way in which i interact with and within it. i cannot speculate which direction dance music will go in, culturally or musically. i can say from my experience that i have seen a lot of change in attitude, music, location, fashion and social media. who knows, there may come a time again in the future where we see a resurgence in venues and independent and underground events? i hope so. for now, i appreciate the events that i go to, the time i spend at them and the people i go with (the music comes as a given). as i have aged, i find that i appreciate my weekends out a lot more. i do miss having the spontaneity of meeting up with a familiar group and going on a music related mission that takes the entire weekend. i also miss not having to plan well in advance. however, i do know that the time i do have will be well spent. i will be a happy person if i can still carry on going to these events into my 60s, 70s and, even my 80s. author biography i would describe myself as a dj hobbyist. i'm still djing with vinyl, although i may have to make the transition to digital at some point, but for as long as i can get away with it, i'll keep on with the records for now. i’ve held various residencies and play a variety of genres depending on the venue and crowd. references bentley, donna. 2017. “onwards and upwards: playing my way through the gender division”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 9 (1). <https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2017.09.01.14>. luuma, between code and controllerism chris kiefer university of sussex (uk) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2018.10.01.15> a watershed moment happened fairly recently that showed the last embers of a music production mindset that was ingrained since i was a teenager messing around with cubase. i needed to carry out a studio task, so i naturally turned to some digital audio workstation (daw) software, looked at it, shut it down and did the same thing in code in the audio programming language supercollider instead. it was just an everyday task, but it just didn't seem natural anymore to use the daw. you might even say i livecoded this task; it wasn’t a performance, but i approached it performatively using the same style of coding i would typically use in a performance, sculpting a program in real time until it did the right thing. doing it this way seemed to be more straightforward than using the daw. my way of thinking has shifted; i prefer to express musical ideas algorithmically. this isn’t to say that daws aren't amazing tools, they just don't fit so well with how i tend to think. what follows is a mixed bag of thoughts and reflections on my experience in livecoding, an account of a slow perspective shift from controllerism into habitual livecodeism, and an underlying story of generally failing to find a way to combine these two things well. a quick background: i’m a committed coder either way. i did a computer science degree and have worked as a programmer and coding comes naturally as a means of being creative with computers. i’ve always programmed my own musical tools, starting with live midi sequencing software in the 90s. code was always part of music for me but rarely during performance (unless you count fixing a mid-gig “blue screen of death”). i played at my first algorave in 2013 in brighton, although i didn’t do much coding on stage other than run a mass of supercollider code at the beginning, before playing the gig with various controllers. since then i’ve experimented with different combinations of controllers and code, some of them more esoteric, semi-ridiculous or successful than others. in my view one of the great things about algorave culture is the informality and freedom to experiment. audiences tend to arrive with more curiosity and fewer expectations, so this has encouraged me to try out some creatively high-risk ideas because i wasn’t too bothered about the consequences of them going wrong, which of course some of them did. infloresence was one of these high-risk ventures, a hybrid system that attempted to merge gestural control with coding, with the (probably flawed) idea of using something more expressive than buttons to make code. the controller was a collection of 6-axis motion sensors mounted on animator’s wire (kiefer 2015b), feeding out a large state vector that was turned into code using genetic programming techniques. the functions called from within this generated code could be livecoded, meaning that the system could be used gesturally but also programmed from the keyboard/touchpad. the instrument was at the same time highly intuitive and hugely difficult to play due to the massively non-linear state space of genetic code generation, but when it was programmed with decent constraints it was quite addictive to use. as a performance tool, i found it difficult to switch between gestural control and typing code, to focus attention from one to the other. i didn’t rebuild this instrument after it eventually fell into disrepair, but carried on using genetic programming techniques in other forms: for automatic generation of visuals, mapping from audio features to glsl shaders, and for a browser-based instrument called approgximate programming (kiefer 2015a; kiefer 2016) which allows coding with either text or gui sliders. this latter system works well by confining the interface to mouse and keyboard. i haven’t performed with this but have really enjoyed using it for sound design. infloresence’s experimental mix of controllerism and code, while quite challenging, was also enlightening and i tried to do the same in more constrained circumstances. i used a small coding system within a wider collection of controllers by livecoding glsl shaders in an audiovisual feedback system. i also tried the other end of this spectrum, exploring a mainly text-based setup with a set of extra controllers that were streamed into supercollider using midi and serial connections to an arduino. these streams were inserted into livecoded processes using a library designed for quick mapping of control streams. for this performance, i attempted to follow the livecoding ethic of showing your inner thought process, by wearing a webcam on my head and projecting the image of the controllers-in-use next to the code. this setup was in some ways really satisfying to play, but ultimately didn’t feel right for performance. aside from looking really quite daft, building up the mappings along with the sound felt too slow and the performance dragged; i wasn’t sure if i was programming a controller or controlling a program. i still however use this system for composition, outside of performance-time (and without the webcam)! these few experiments in mixing controllerism with code ultimately didn’t have longevity, but they did have a huge bearing on a current project, the feedback cello. this instrument is a hybrid acoustic-digital system, consisting of a cello with mounted transducers and pickups. they were built in 2016, based on halldor ulfarson’s halldorophone (2018). sound from the strings is processed digitally and replayed through the cello, creating a feedback system which can be controlled very sensitively by playing or damping the cello strings. it can also be played through the digital part of the feedback loop, which in this case happens in supercollider. when i first performed with this (as half of feedback cell (eldridge and kiefer 2016), the main way of engaging with the instrument was livecoding. i chose this partly because i’m not a trained cellist and it felt more comfortable playing supercollider, and partly because code seemed the most natural way to express very precise and subtle interventions in the feedback loop, where micro-scale adjustments have emergent macro-scale consequences. in performance, i sat at my laptop and livecoded the feedback loop, while also reaching out to the cello which was stood next to me, controlling the feedback by damping the strings. this setup was surprisingly intuitive to use, and it seemed to work well because there was an easy, slow balance between gesture and text. ultimately, i’ve shifted away from this setup during performance, because there are now mounted controls on the cello that map into supercollider and i wanted to play the instrument in full. however, this livecoding-gesture hybrid approach has been absolutely essential for composing mappings and signal processing within a workflow that fits the instrument. figure 1. live coding a feedback cello at xcoax, bergamo. credit: pedro tuela (2016). now when playing algoraves, i have veered over to a mostly text-based approach, with modifications to the editor environment to bring in meta-control of the code such as triggered quantised queues for running new code updates and some touchpad control. it seems that i’ve polarised to gestural control with a hint of livecoding, and livecoding with a hint of gesture. trying more balanced combinations, apart from some exceptions, didn’t work in an intuitive way; this might come down to a question of matching timescales of interaction, and making the instrument feel as an integrated whole. looking wider, in and outside of performance, livecoding has become my default way of engaging with music and computers. this may be because livecoding performance has made the way i think about music more algorithmic. it may also be because, compared to other tools, it offers an expressive and creative way to work that is closer to the machine. author biography chris kiefer is a computer-musician, musical instrument designer and lecturer in music technology at the university of sussex, where he is a member of the experimental music technologies lab. he performs with custom-made instruments including malleable foam interfaces and hacked acoustic instruments. as a live-coder he performs under the name luuma. most recently he has been playing an augmented self-resonating cello as half of improv-duo feedback cell, and with the newly formed feedback-drone-quartet brain dead ensemble. email: <c.kiefer@sussex.ac.uk> web: <http://luuma.net> references eldridge, alice and chris kiefer. 2016. “continua: a resonator-feedback-cello duet for live coder and cellist”. in proceedings of the 4th conference on computation, communication, aesthetics and x, 398–401. bergamo: xcoax. kiefer, chris. 2015a. “approgximate audio”. <http://approgx.luuma.net> (accessed 26 june 2018). kiefer, chris. 2015b. “approximate programming: coding through gesture and numerical processes”. in proceedings of the first international conference on live coding, 98–103. leeds, uk: university of leeds. <http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19340>. kiefer, chris. 2016. “approgximate audio: a distributed interactive experiment in sound art and live coding”. international journal of performance arts and digital media, 12(2): 195–200. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14794713.2016.1227599>. úlfarsson, halldór. 2018. “the halldorophone: the ongoing innovation of a cello-like drone instrument”. in proceedings of new interfaces for musical expression, 269–74 the irony and the ecstasy: the queer aging of pet shop boys and lcd soundsystem in electronic dance music dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 11(1): 30–52 issn 1947-5403 ©2019 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.03 the irony and the ecstasy: the queer aging of pet shop boys and lcd soundsystem in electronic dance music larissa wodtke university of winnipeg (canada) abstract the english duo pet shop boys and american group lcd soundsystem are notable for their representation as artists who entered and succeeded in the predominately youthful market of popular music and the hedonistic aesthetic of electronic dance music (edm) at ages considered old for the industry: 32 for vocalists/lyricists neil tennant (pet shop boys) and james murphy (lcd soundsystem). neither of these bands makes straightforward edm—pet shop boys fall under pop and lcd soundsystem can be considered post-punk—but both are influenced by the new york city dance scene of the late 70s and early 80s, and are characterized as ironic. i argue that pet shop boys and lcd soundsystem are ironic because of their belated, knowing position in a genre that privileges the infinite present and unproductive reproduction through repetition. in light of lee edelman’s claim that irony is the queerest of rhetorical devices, the ambivalence of pet shop boys’ and lcd soundsystem’s ostensible lack of youth and the youthful temporality of their edm aesthetic place them in a queer tension between notions of immediate authenticity and the distance of age. keywords: aging, irony, temporality, lcd soundsystem, pet shop boys larissa wodtke is the coordinator for the indigenous academic lead in indigenous affairs and an affiliate of the centre for research in cultural studies at the university of winnipeg. her research has been published in the review of education, pedagogy and cultural studies; under my thumb: the songs that hate women and the women that love them (2017); crowdfunding the future: media industries, ethics and digital society (2015) and seriality and texts for young people: the compulsion to repeat (2014). she co-wrote the book triptych: three studies of manic street preachers’ the holy bible (2017) with rhian e. jones and daniel lukes. feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.03 wodtke | the irony and the ecstasy 31 “neil said the other day he’s now a young old person.” (tennant is 63). “yeah, i think i am,” says tennant. “whereas i’m still an old young person,” says lowe. what’s the difference? “i’m still like a child,” says lowe. “a stroppy child.” so tennant can’t behave like that any more? “he never did,” lowe says. “always the serious one” (potton 2017). thank fuck we were never skinny and young. or at least i wasn’t. that always happens with bands… they aren’t fat when they come back, typically, just, i don’t know, thicker. i was lucky to start this band kind of fat and old, so there’s no, like “look how young they were!” shit to even find on the internet. i mean, we were younger and everything, but we weren’t young, if you know what i mean (murphy 2016). the above quotes from english electronic pop music duo pet shop boys (neil tennant and chris lowe) and american dance-punk outfit lcd soundsystem ( james murphy) demonstrate a queer, or at least non-normative, sense of temporality. in the interview with tennant and lowe, they not only insist that they are simultaneously young and old, but qualify these statements with the words “still” and “always”. similarly, in his blog post announcing the impending reunion of lcd soundsystem, james murphy remarks that he and his bandmates were “younger”, but not “young”. in both cases, there is a sense of remaining the same, but also simultaneously being and not-being. pet shop boys and lcd soundsystem not only share this non-normative temporality, but also the label of “ironic” from the media and critics (for pet shop boys see frith 1988; garratt 1989; price 2002; for lcd soundsystem see host 2005; abebe 2010; carlick 2017; terry 2019). i argue that their non-normative temporality in terms of age, along with their belated career success—neil tennant and james murphy were thirty-two years old when their bands became famous—in a youth-oriented genre like electronic dance music creates this irony. neither of these bands is strictly electronic dance music—pet shop boys are most often considered a pop band, and lcd soundsystem’s music references post-punk—but their music relies on core elements of edm (use of synthesizers, samplers, drum machines and sequencers, repetition, looping, grooves) and often pays homage to the nascent dance music scene of 70s and 80s new york city. the repetitive and looping features of edm, as well as its association with the alternative temporality of all-night clubbing environments, sit in contrast to the linear, teleological time represented by growing older. pet shop boys first gained popularity on the re-release of their best-known hit “west end girls” in 1986, in the middle of thatcherite neoliberalism, and james murphy released his first single, “losing my edge”, as lcd soundsystem in 2002, a time identified with post9/11 new york city and the rise of hipster culture. while pet shop boys began their pop dancecult 11(1)32 music career as queer artists in the midst of the aids crisis, james murphy had experiences in a series of rock bands and as a dj before co-founding the record label dfa records in 2001. to date, pet shop boys have released thirteen studio albums, their latest being super in 2016, but have never regained the mass popularity of what tennant refers to as their “imperial phase” in the late 1980s. lcd soundsystem released three studio albums— arguably peaking with sound of silver in 2007, which is listed in rolling stone’s top thirty edm albums of all time and compared with pet shop boys’ 1988 album introspective (rolling stone 2012)—before disbanding, an event that was documented in a film of their farewell concert at madison square garden in 2011, shut up and play the hits. murphy then announced the reunion of lcd soundsystem in 2016, and subsequently released a new album, american dream, in 2017. though the context differs between pet shop boys and lcd soundsystem, they both have worked within particularly singular visions throughout their careers, with the former noting that “we just do what we do, and sometimes something comes along, like edm, and it seems we’re in the groove. other times we’re working totally against it”, and the latter claiming that success came through being “accidentally current” (wood 2013; jones 2014). however, most pertinent to my argument is the way both bands utilize narrative and lyrics more than is typically expected in edm, producing various subjectivities that remain ambiguous about aging and temporality, and in effect, performing age through language.1 this performativity, similarly to judith butler’s concept of gender performativity, works by exposing the gaps between reality and its construction through language, and the impossibility of an original, pre-linguistic reality (1990). as cultural theorist claire colebrook notes in her overview of irony, “we write and think belatedly, from a textual condition we can neither master nor abandon” (2004: 110). in “the rhetoric of temporality,” paul de man contrasts this distanced temporality of meaning in irony with the more representational unity of meaning in romantic symbolism, demonstrating that the distance between signifier and signified in irony is both spatial and temporal. de man writes that irony “relates to its source only in terms of distance and difference and allows for no end, for no totality” (1983: 222). in other words, there is no resolution to the tension between unity and infinity on the one hand, and division and finiteness on the other. in his study on irony and aging, gerontology scholar william l. randall (2013) draws upon lars tornstam’s term gerotranscendence, which defines a “stage of development . . . in very late life especially in which the boundaries between life and death become increasingly ambiguous, as do those between self and other, past and future” (1996: 171). though randall uses gerotranscendence to argue that aging allows a person to better accommodate contradiction and ambiguity, there is also an interesting corollary in the temporal and subjective instability of gerotranscendence and the unfixity, or “oceanic feeling-tone” in freudian terms, of edm. just as aging prompts one to live one day at a time, or in the “center of the moment” as barbara frey waxman defines it, edm is often associated with an eternal present in losing oneself in dancing and the music, sometimes for days (1997: 135). in generating this non-teleological temporality, the repetitive beats and grooves in wodtke | the irony and the ecstasy 33 edm confound the idea of original and copy, much as irony reveals the impossibility of an original and singular subjectivity. there has been a variety of scholarship published on irony in music, including katherine l. turner’s edited collection this is the sound of irony: music, politics and popular culture (2015) and lars elleström’s divine madness: on interpreting literature, music, and the visual arts ironically (2002). scholars have also explored irony in various popular music genres, such as new wave (e.g. kronengold 2008; cateforis 2011), rap and hip-hop (e.g. jenkins 2015; shryock 2015), electronic music and electroclash (e.g. biddle 2004; luvaas 2006; madden 2011) and indie rock (e.g. atchison 2011). among these studies are differing approaches: some focus on the verbal irony to be found in lyrical content, others look at musical structure itself. elleström supports the latter approach by arguing that if “music has the capacity of ‘saying’ things that are ‘different’ from what words say, it must also have the capacity of saying various things that are different from each other” (2002: 212). as turner remarks in her introduction to this is the sound of irony, “musical irony is not a unified theory but a web of overlapping ideas, disciplines and treatments of dissemblage occurring within a musical framework that investigates the ‘sound of irony’ and its inevitable companion, the ‘irony of sound’” (2015: 6). since music is innately temporal, it lends itself to the inherent spatio-temporal implications of irony: the ironic subject does not just take part in the discourses and norms that are present; she can ask whose norms these are and whether they are valid. irony allows for detachment and an ‘eternal’ point of view; the ironic self can question whether life might not be otherwise, whether ‘we’ might create ourselves differently. indeed, irony detaches itself from any recognised ‘we’ in order to question and disrupt accepted norms. irony is provocative, disruptive, but also hierarchical—setting itself above everyday life and opinion (colebrook 2004: 122). this simultaneous existence within the present and an externality from time itself allows one to judge actions and beliefs while admitting one’s own complicity (colebrook 2004: 120). in de man’s view, language splits subjectivity and precludes an authenticity of an original self. therefore, irony is regarded as a knowing position, placed in a position above or outside of the self, but also an ultimately unknowing one, in that there is no promise of a future resolution of meaning or total understanding. these concerns between irony and meaning, temporality, authenticity and knowingness are at play in both the music and identity of pet shop boys and lcd soundsystem. music critics and scholars alike have read pet shop boys and their music as ironic (e.g. hawkins 1997; smith 2001; hawkins 2002; hughes 2012), or at the very least ambiguous (e.g. textor 1994; maus 2001; balfour 2002; maus 2013), and much of this ambiguity circulates around their queer sexuality. pet shop boys themselves have acknowledged this perception of them in songs like “yesterday when i was mad”, when they lambaste their critics by impersonating their passive aggressive description of tennant and lowe as “expressionless, such irony, although your voice is weak”. this perceived expressionlessness dancecult 11(1)34 and inauthenticity in tennant’s vocal style is often read as ironic, and this is a feature he shares with james murphy whose “flat, disaffected style of singing gives the impression that he’s above it all, not quite dissociating but capable of floating free from the scene” (hsu 2017). in studies on the ironic tone of voice (e.g. kreuz and roberts 1995; rockwell 2000; bryant and fox tree 2005), ironic vocal cues tend to be flat intonation, nasality and slow tempo, and can sometimes be confused with deception, which i would argue is a form of inauthenticity. the inauthenticity of tennant and murphy’s vocal style is shared with electroclash artist tiga, the subject of stéphane girard’s article “(un)originality, hypertextuality and identity in tiga’s ‘sunglasses at night’” (2011). in this article, girard usefully connects the issue of authenticity with gender politics, contending that music, such as pop and edm, are often seen as less authentic because they are feminized, or in the case of edm, the gendered self is ambiguous or non-existent, a blurring that challenges the naturalization of patriarchal, heteronormative authenticity. the blurring and doubleness of meaning that often define irony have also been noted in pet shop boys’ slippage between artificiality and authenticity, and play with notions of high and low art (smith 1995; butler 2003). as ian balfour observes in his essay “queen theory: notes on the pet shop boys”, there is an excessiveness to pet shop boys’ simplicity; by using minimal language, they open themselves up to multiple meanings. in other words, pet shop boys’ meaning is more fragmented and unresolved than unified, fitting into de man’s temporality of irony. unlike pet shop boys, lcd soundsystem has not yet been taken up extensively in scholarship however, music critics and journalists have been particularly interested in the interplay of irony and sincerity in james murphy’s music, especially in relation to early twenty-first-century hipster culture.2 ryan leas, the only critic to have written a monograph exclusively about lcd soundsystem, writes that murphy “would seem to be at the pinnacle of the hipster generation’s supposed mode of existence, that ironic detachment” (2016: 23).3 leas also writes of the first time he saw murphy perform and the realization of his earlier misapprehension when having only heard his music: “he looked old, already. older than expected, at the very least” (2016: 18). this surprise around his age, as well as the apparent incongruence of his age and the kind of music he creates, highlights the other main focus of critical and journalistic attention. the subtitle of jody rosen’s article for slate succinctly combines both of these defining elements of murphy’s profile: “how a chubby ‘old’ guy became king of the hipsters” (2011). murphy is ultimately representative of old age and youth. taking lee edelman’s assertion that irony is the “queerest of rhetorical devices”, i argue that, regardless of sexuality, pet shop boys and lcd soundsystem can be read as queer in their relationship to heteronormative notions of aging and maturation (edelman 2004: 23). in their studies of aging music fans in various genres, andy bennett (2013), paul hodkinson (2011) and jodie taylor (2010) demonstrate that fans’ relationships to popular music can be negotiated in different ways through the process of aging, including taking on the role of mentor to younger fans in a particular scene, shifting the collective norms within a subculture, and challenging heteronormative temporalities by continuing to expand along wodtke | the irony and the ecstasy 35 with a music scene (taylor 2010: 903-04; hodkinson 2011: 278; bennett 2013: 123-50). however, taylor’s work is most useful in its focus on specifically queer temporalities. discussing the “stretched-out adolescences of queer culture makers”, judith halberstam calls this non-teleological refusal to grow into heteronormative adulthood an “epistemology of youth” (2006: 3). similarly, elizabeth freeman pushes against heteronormative time to identify queer time as defined by “asynchrony, anachronism, anastrophe, belatedness, compression, delay, ellipsis, flashback, hysteron-proteron, pause, prolepsis, repetition, reversal, surprise”, and several of these features can be found in the work of pet shop boys and lcd soundsystem (freeman 2010: xxii). in many ways, these artists refuse to “grow up” partly because their subjective time does not obtain with the time perceived as their actual ages; they are simultaneously always late, frozen in the present, and infinitely open to anteriority. due to their already belated beginnings in a musical genre where the expectation is youth, pet shop boys and lcd soundsystem perform non-normative aging and produce irony, and they do this in two ways: through the verbal irony of their lyrics and vocals, which indicate their knowingness and their ambiguous relation to age and temporality, and through the ironic structure of their music, which uses the existing temporal characteristics of electronic dance music whilst merging them with other genre conventions. belated beginnings, the eternal present, and im(mortality): verbal irony in pet shop boys and lcd soundsystem lyrics neil: well i was quite old when the first album came out. i was nearly 32. andrew sullivan: which as a pop star is ancient, right? neil: it’s insanely old. i was a sort of a formed person (sullivan 2009). “dude, i was like 31, 32 when ‘losing my edge’ came out. it’s a very different thing being able to withstand the pressure of being the cool guy on the nme cool list – when you’re 19, 22 it’s a very different thing” (bidder 2009). due to their genre hybridity, pet shop boys and lcd soundsystem are not straightforward electronic dance music, and one of the most prominent areas of difference is in their use of lyrics and narrative. if edm includes lyrics and vocals, they tend to be short, repetitious and certainly not meaningful as narrative. in his book unlocking the groove, mark j. butler makes the distinction between a song and a track, the former more common in describing disco, classic house and garage—genres that feature prominent vocals and can be identified as a complete unit more readily—and the latter used to label instrumental styles of edm with no discernible beginning or end, such as techno, drum and bass and hardcore (2006: 39, 41). by using the form of song rather than track, pet shop boys and lcd soundsystem somewhat disrupt the expectations of the edm genre whilst using lyrics to describe and comment on temporality in dance and clubbing scenes in ambiguous ways. dancecult 11(1)36 despite the fact that most pet shop boys songs are structured like conventional pop songs in terms of narrative and length, ian balfour notes that the “ideal pet shop boys song lasts forever. . . . there is something in the structure and syntax of a pet shop boys tune that suggests the song could—and probably should—‘go on and on forever’” (1991: 6). he argues that this “pervasive preoccupation with infinity” is evident in the pet shop boys’ “refrains of truncated sentences that never end” (1991: 11). balfour points to the implied ellipsis at the end of several pet shop boys’ lyrics: “you were always” from “always on my mind”; “you can’t stop falling” from “love comes quickly”; and “left to my own devices, i probably would” from “left to my own devices”. balfour locates the queer temporality of pet shop boys music in their use of language: “vertiginous movement backward, forward, and back again in time is supplemented by its eccentric grammar (‘we were never being boring,’ a phrase that yokes together finitude and infinity)” (1991: 21). the elliptic structure works with the ellipsis as device to produce both repetitive infinity and an active present even as the lyric may negate itself by using past tenses. simon frith also comments on tennant and lowe’s odd temporality, but instead sees their songs as a paradoxical combination of the static and the anticipatory or belated. he contends that “it’s as if the spaces they occupy are actually frozen moments in time, the moments just before and just after emotion” (frith 1996: 8). this observation echoes comments made by neil tennant about the rationale behind their promotional photographs: “we had the idea they should look like stills from films: ‘something just happened’ or ‘something is about to happen’” (heath 1990: 95). another example of this ambiguous temporality specifically related to age can be found in “young offender” from pet shop boys’ 1994 album very, a song that recounts the narrative of an older man’s attraction to a much younger one. the line “i’ve been a teenager since before you were born” stands out because the use of the present perfect complicates the meaning. because the present perfect denotes an action done in the past but continued in the present, the lyric can be read as the narrator’s simultaneous old age and youth. it is knowingness, but also an expression of enduring hipness and relevance. this ironic temporality can also be found in the “i was there” refrain in lcd soundsystem’s first single “losing my edge”. murphy narrates his own increasing obsolescence in the face of younger musicians and fans superseding him. his assertion of being present at multiple milestones in popular music history, including “i was there in 1968/i was there at the first can show in cologne”, are clearly meant to be temporally impossible because murphy is not old enough and it is unlikely anyone could have physically witnessed them all, but they are also a metaphor for his knowingness and justification for his own music creation in a scene that does not accept or expect his age. he manages to encapsulate the early history of electronic dance music in a few lines, “i was there in the paradise garage dj booth with larry levan/i was there in jamaica during the great sound clashes/i woke up naked on the beach in ibiza in 1988”, and undercut the young hipsters he views as his usurpers by accusing them of “borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties”. at the same time, it is clear that he also borrows nostalgia for times and places he himself only remembers through mediation. wodtke | the irony and the ecstasy 37 “losing my edge” brings attention to the ostensible queerness of the hipster figure in terms of temporality and age. in his book the sacred and the profane: an investigation of hipsters, jake kinzey questions “how long hipsters can ‘bend the stick’ between love of nostalgia (and the infantile) and an equally strong desire for the aged . . . before it finally breaks” (2012: 32). kinzey attempts to understand this atypical temporality of the hipster aesthetic through susan sontag’s notion of camp, writing that hipsters have a “detachment from this reality, a refusal to be fully complicit with what is going on now. the hipster attempts to preserve their individuality by negating the world around it” (2012: 49). this detachment is then perceived as irony, and displays the breakdown of the adult-child binary in the age of neoliberalism, which appears in genres and times besides hipster culture (see wodtke 2018). the same distancing and detachment can also be understood in relation to de man’s irony and the impossibility of truly engaging and understanding reality through a world described and comprehended through language. in his book about lcd soundsystem’s second album sound of silver, leas describes it as “the kind of album that makes you feel like a badass kid at the same time as it makes you feel like a jaded adult”, and this “ironic reference and . . . emotional resonance” is inflected by assumptions of age and how it interacts with time (2016: 25, 30). to further illustrate the ironic temporalities at work in pet shop boys and lcd soundsystem lyrics, i will compare “tonight is forever” from tennant and lowe’s first album please with “tonite” from lcd soundsystem’s latest album, american dream. in pet shop boys’ “tonight is forever”, tennant sings of a dance floor encounter that appears to be both ecstatic and static: it will be like this forever if we fall in love tonight is forever, tell me now you don’t disagree tonight is forever, open the door, you hold the key tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight tonight is the first night we don’t need any more when we dance i don’t think of the future tonight the present temporality of “tonight” is juxtaposed with the infinite temporality of “forever”, but implies futurity and linear time in the use of “the first night”. the narrator does not think of the future even as one seems to be planned with additional nights following this one. another way of reading these lyrics is to see “tonight” as an idea or embodied feeling, one in which the narrator and their love interest inhabit a subjective time at odds with teleological time assumed to be elapsing in the external world, and indeed in the timeframe of the song itself. dancecult 11(1)38 james murphy could be referring to a song like “tonight is forever” in his song “tonite”: everybody’s singing the same song it goes “tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight” i never realized these artists thought so much about dying . . . and all the hits are saying the same thing there’s only tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight then life is finite but shit, it feels like forever it feels like forever . . . you’re missing a party that you’ll never get over you hate the idea that you’re wasting your youth that you stood in the background oh until you got older but that’s all lies that’s all lies even as he equates the trope of “tonight” in popular music as a reminder of mortality, he maintains that it feels like forever. this statement could be understood in different ways: life goes on too long and aging is tiring, and life can feel infinite when one is in the middle of a dance music experience of the kind that makes sense of a “tonight” refrain. in fact, the music backing this song sounds like the very music murphy is dissecting. the frantic sense of time slipping away and youth being wasted is negated as lies. the implication is that there will be more “tonights” much like the “first night” in “tonight is forever”. aging both happens and does not happen. furthermore, murphy playfully references adorno’s negative dialectics in the line, “i’m offering you a chance to get even/but oh, you know very well the dialect of negation”, perhaps offering his own version of unresolved processes, and condemnation of linearity and progress. the music video for “tonite” compounds the sense of infinite repetition by featuring murphy walking along the perimeter of a rotating circular stage as the rest of the band plays in the centre. once again, the supposed knowingness of age sits alongside an eternal present of sameness, two sides of the same coin. tennant and lowe are representative of this duality, too. in his 1988 article about pet shop boys for the village voice, simon frith writes, i enjoy morrissey’s over-the-top gesture of refusal—no sex! no sales! no fun!—but i’m too old to take it seriously, which is why, for me, pet shop boys have a more profound point to make. . . . at their best the pets capture that sense of psychic space, that anticipatory tingling moment just before the money changes hands, when we know that this will be the record, the shirt, the dance, the sex to change our lives, and they share the knowledge that the moment has already gone, the choice is made, our lives remain the same (frith, 1988: 9). wodtke | the irony and the ecstasy 39 by contrasting morrissey and pet shop boys in this passage, frith implies that morrissey’s music is too idealistic in a young person’s way, whereas pet shop boys are capable of both capturing the affective charge of futurity without ever reaching a unified resolution; they are effectively remaining in stasis rather than progressing, and this way of being is held in tension with the conventional forward motion of heteronormative maturation. in chris heath’s book literally, tennant states, “i’ve always tried to write about adult concerns in pop music” (1990: 147). the implication is that pop music is generally not about what are considered adult concerns, but that pet shop boys provide a double perspective through their simultaneous occupation of different temporalities, an ironic “double perspective that invokes two incongruous worlds: the possibility of could or should be, glimpsed in the face of what is” (clift 1999: 539). for example, pet shop boys’ song “why don’t we live together” acknowledges the doubleness of this conventional milestone of heteronormative maturity, “i may not always love you/you may not care/but if we should live together/ there’s something we could share”. similarly, on “saturday night forever” from bilingual they invoke the infinity of tonight, but tennant adds, “i know/that it’s not gonna last”. pet shop boys end their 2014 record electric with “vocal”, a song that seems to comment on the preceding music on electric, and more generally on pet shop boys and their temporal position: i like the people, i like the song this is my kind of music they play it all night long i like the singer, he’s lonely and strange every track has a vocal, and that makes a change and everything about tonight feels right and so young and anything i wanna say out loud will be sung once again, they evoke “tonight” as a representative of the oceanic feeling-tone of electronic dance music, a feeling that comprises both “loss (of differences between self and others, of time and space, of words, images and the senses)” and “gain (of unity, of timelessness and eternity, of control, joy, contact and ineffability)” (malbon 1999: 108). at the same time that it revels in an eternal youth and borderless temporality, the song also acknowledges difference through self-referentiality. put differently, the song title, “vocal”, and the lines “i like the singer, he’s lonely and strange/every track has a vocal, and that makes a change” could be read as describing music like that of pet shop boys; tennant’s vocals are often interpreted as lonely and strange. moreover, pet shop boys remain an outlier in current electronic dance music in that they often use vocals in a conventional narrative song structure, an element that is associated with early dance music and an older audience. the trackiness of several of the songs on the rest of electric (“axis”, “shouting in the evening” and “bolshy”) are not typical of pet shop boys and emphasize the pull between their contemporaneity and their different “kind of music”. dancecult 11(1)40 for lcd soundsystem, there is a similar merging of various temporalities, or as josé esteban muñoz describes this convergence, “ecstasy” (2009: 189). their sound of silver album, which according to leas is “an album built for and off of youth”, emphasizes this distanced, unresolvable temporality (2016: 45). for example, the titular song consists only of the following verse chanted multiple times: sound of silver talk to me makes you want to feel like a teenager until you remember the feelings of a real live emotional teenager then you think again the fact that the entire song repeats these five lines over and over again over an edm background creates an inescapable loop that obfuscates meaning. there is a yearning to return to the past and feel like a younger person, but also a reluctance to experience the reality; at the same time, the line “then you think again” refuses to resolve. the narrator of the song thinks again again, creating an ambivalence over feeling like a teenager and not feeling like one. just as pet shop boys’ ellipses and ambiguity produce a “syntactic openendedness . . . co-existing with the structural infinity of the extended and extendable mix”, the lyrics of “sound of silver” fuse with the relentless beat of the music to create a similar structural infinity without linear progress and a stable subjectivity (balfour 1991: 11). like pet shop boys, lcd soundsystem produces the type of irony that “comprises a series of disruptive acts that shatters the illusion of an organic, linear time and repeatedly forces one back to a blind present” (adlington 1997: 30). the knowing position of pet shop boys and lcd soundsystem’s age distances them from youth even as their repetition and oceanic feeling-tone holds them in an endless present. however, if pet shop boys and lcd soundsystem’s lyrical open-endedness is part of their unpredictability, as balfour argues, then how does this reconcile with the predictable, repetitive yet accumulative beat of their electronic dance music? repetition, non-productive reproduction, and the groove: structural irony in pet shop boys and lcd soundsystem music chris lowe: there’s too much information for your brain to assimilate . . . ‘cause dance music’s not about that, is it? dance music’s about repetition. this was just that (“track by track: pet shop boys and stuart price on electric”). james murphy: that’s where i think meaning is . . . i mean, anything that’s resolvable is boring, musically. and if it’s too chaotic, you don’t feel tension, it’s chaos (chinen 2007). in terms of sound, both pet shop boys and lcd soundsystem notably recall the new york city dance scene eclecticism of the late 70s and early 80s. their music sonically references clubs like the paradise garage, mudd club, area, danceteria and the funhouse, which wodtke | the irony and the ecstasy 41 played a mix of new wave, post-punk, hip-hop, motorik, early house and techno, disco, punk and funk; afrika bambaataa and the soulsonic force would be played in the same set as yazoo and inner life, and gang of four would be spun alongside kraftwerk and kurtis blow.4 this was the scene from which new order and madonna gathered inspiration in the 80s, leading to a fertile cross-pollination between new york and manchester via factory records and their hacienda night club. tennant and lowe have spoken about their preference for this era of clubbing in new york (see robinson 2013; international music summit 2016), first recorded music in new york with hi-nrg producer bobby orlando and eventually played at the hacienda in 1992 (hook 2009: 245). furthermore, they have acknowledged the influence of grandmaster flash and the furious five and afrika bambaataa on their breakthrough hit “west end girls”, and their band name alludes to the peech boys, a new york city dance music group that included paradise garage’s larry levan (heath 1990: 108; nika 2010; international music summit 2016). the new york-manchester dance scene also became an obvious reference point for james murphy’s dfa record label in the early 00s. many of the bands that murphy mentions in “losing my edge”, including pil, the normal and mantronix, were played in new york clubs during the early 80s. in fact, the hybridity that defines pet shop boys and lcd soundsystem’s approach to edm is rooted in the genre-agnostic dance music scene of this time.5 the period is documented, and to some extent romanticized, by tim lawrence in his books love saves the day: a history of american dance music culture, 1970–1979 (2003) and life and death on the new york dance floor, 1980–1983 (2016). part of this idealization is linked to the scene’s ambivalence towards categories of age. lawrence describes the polymorphous child-like atmosphere, which acted as “the perfect milieu for experimental regression . . . and the sheer density of bodies accelerated the transformation from autonomous adult to child-like dancer” (2003: 25). cultural critic tavia nyong’o uses freud’s concept of the oceanic feeling-tone to describe disco, and its association with a sensual, polymorphous existence that breaks down the borders between the subject and the outside world (2008: 105). tennant makes a point of connecting pet shop boys’ creativity with childness: “i think it’s really important to stay connected to that childish, playful element to making music. some people cut themselves off from that when they become a ‘grown up’… and when you do that, you generally cut yourself off from your own creativity” (rachel 2013). furthermore, edm evokes childness in its use of repetition, which is often associated with childlike behaviour and regression (adlington 1997: 12; garcia 2005: 1.1). though this repetition could be interpreted as the “sound of the unobtainable, time turned back on itself in an eternal loop”, it can also be heard as an unresolvable dialectic between linear and vertical rhythmic development, which hawkins describes as “oppositional”, or what i suggest is ironic (frith 1988: 8; hawkins 2003: 97). this sense of both linear and vertical progression within the ostensible stasis of a repetitious loop can be seen in james murphy’s description of his song “all my friends”, which was inspired by joy division’s “transmission”. he describes “transmission” as “the same thing the whole way through, dancecult 11(1)42 and without any kind of embarrassing rockist gesture. it starts off so gentle, and becomes so fucking overwhelming. by the time he’s going, ‘dance, dance, dance to the radio,’ your head’s exploding. and i wanted to see if i could make a song without people playing together. just do it all myself by doing it in layers” (harris 2017). this account begs one of the main questions in relation to edm structure: “when will it change next, and how will it remain the same?” (garcia 2005: 6.2). the music seemingly expands in two different dimensions at once whilst in an endless present of monotonous rhythm. on the other hand, pet shop boys often curtail formal development to emphasize non-linear trajectories. for example, in his article about pet shop boys’ cover versions, mark butler argues that their cover of u2’s “where the streets have no name” alters the musical structure of the original to inhibit the growth of the song, starting in a brash manner rather than building to it (2003). this flattening of climax, or arrested development, markedly works in a contrary way to “all my friends”, but in both cases the ground of the music overwhelms, but doesn’t obliterate, the figure, a posited characteristic of rave music (tagg 1994). tennant and lowe, and murphy use ground to create a queer repetition and reproduction without futurity, or an irreconcilable future. in this sense, their temporal irony becomes a “series of disruptive acts that shatters the illusion of an organic, linear time and repeatedly forces one back to a blind present” (adlington 1997: 30). at the same time, there is a “desire to be in the groove, at least in terms of audio verisimilitude”, which also allows them to “depart from the present” (hawkins 2016: 39). notwithstanding the temporal ambiguity and strangeness of their lyrics, as well as their manipulation of linear and vertical sonic dimensions, pet shop boys and lcd soundsystem both keep precise rhythms, not the more nuanced grooves of other dance music outside out of edm, such as funk and soul; there is not a leaning into or away from the beat. in his 2013 red bull music academy lecture, james murphy expresses his preference for being on top of the beat. notably, this is a repetitious, visceral affect that captivated him as a child; he describes it as “this relentless kind of nodding thing, like this hypnotizing thing. i was always really entranced when things were really hypnotizing. i used to listen to humming machines, anything that was kind of repetitive and loopy . . .” (gross 2010). in 2011 the music website pitchfork produced an annotated discography of lcd soundsystem’s work in which they often remarked on the prominently locked groove, which can be understood as an embodied feeling (roholt 2014). in the face of the failure of semantic language, the embodied groove and repetition of the edm beat takes over. the bodily pleasure of dance music, or the jouissance—“transcendant, indescribable presubjective and prelinguistic bliss” of childhood—achieves what de man argues is impossible, but only addressable through irony (hanson 2014: 390-91). de man’s irreconcilable subject can perhaps be temporarily reconciled or transcended in phenomenologist alfred schütz’s concept of the “vivid present” in music (1951). the vivid present is a time that musician and audience enter into and experience together as a shared subjective temporality, which he interestingly describes as “growing old together”. therefore, schütz appears to be juxtaposing an atemporal subjective present with a linear idea of aging. wodtke | the irony and the ecstasy 43 whether a vivid present or jouissance, or perhaps even a gerotranscendence, the experience of edm does produce a time outside of normative temporality. in fact, frith asserts that the purpose of dance music like disco is “to encourage its hearers to do nothing but listen to it. not even think” (1978). this absence of thought, and thus, an overabundance of presence is aptly illustrated by kieran dahl in his article about using techno music to ameliorate his depression. when immersed in the repetitive beat, dahl writes, “there was no room in my head for intrusive thoughts” (2017). he goes on to describe depression as a disease of contradictions and opposites. . . . you’re anxious of what tomorrow will bring, yet you’re certain you’ll feel no different. . . . your mind is ablaze with distant memories of roads not taken, yet you can’t remember why you just walked into a room. . . . if depression is atemporal, rendering recollections of your past as bleak as visions of your future, raving is feeling present in a series of moments delineated by a beat (dahl 2017). this focus on the present moment rather than any other temporality generates a distance from reality. music theorist jonathan kramer’s description of what he calls vertical music is useful in conceptualizing this temporal state. kramer’s conception of vertical music denies the past and the future in favor of an extended present. . . . future as well as past orientation is minimized. the future, to the extent that it is anticipated at all, is expected to be the same as the present. this kind of music tries to create an eternal now by blurring the distinction between past, present, and future, and by avoiding gestures that invoke memory or activate expectation (kramer 1988: 375-76). though he is describing avant-garde music, he could be defining edm. just as the vertical and linear form a queer tension with the present in the music of pet shop boys and lcd soundsystem, there is also a distinctive interaction between making timely and timeless music at the same time. according to charles kronengold, this simultaneous timeliness and timelessness is one of the features of disco, which is also a musical touchstone for pet shop boys and lcd soundsystem. kronengold argues that disco is a musical syntax that works through textural stratification and on an affective continuum that ranges from “absolute freedom to perfect rigidity”; he elaborates on the flexibility and multiplicity of disco temporality by including “the moment that occurs too early or too late; tropes of time accelerating, slowing down, or stopping abruptly, the sense of clock time’s inadequacy (or adequacy); and . . . the machine time of the synth motive” (2008: 53, 55-56). pet shop boys make a consistent effort to write songs that keep pace with current dance music and stylistic changes, incorporating elements of disco, hi-nrg, house, techno, electro, new jack swing and reggaeton, which resonates with taylor’s description of middle-aged queer music fans who continue to pursue and engage with new styles of music in spite of their age (heath 1990: 185; taylor 2010: 903). as tennant says, “we’ve always tried to be of the present” (heath 1990: 184). in one way, this attachment to the present moment should make their music ephemeral, as much of popular music is; however, there is dancecult 11(1)44 a sense that past songs are in conversation with newer ones, and in this dialogue, they gain a timelessness. tennant remarks that “the making of new music is what fuels and re-fuels an interest in the old songs…and being able to see the through-line of continuity within all the work and how both the new material and the old somehow tie together”, implying a continual return (rachel 2013). similarly, james murphy explains how he wanted lcd soundsystem to produce music that could be returned to over time and be newly meaningful: i kind of liked things that meet you as you changed your taste and changed and grew up. yeah, i think david bowie’s good at that. i think the smiths are really good at that. you’re a kid and you’re like, “this music is so sad.” and then you get older and you’re like, “this music is hilarious.” like, i just didn’t know it was hilarious when i was a kid because it seemed so sad, and then i realized he’s really funny. like, it would just keep refinding you and refinding you. . . . i was always trying to make it so if you scraped through a layer, there was hopefully another layer that was interesting behind it (murphy 2013). this kind of repetition is connected to a tension between growing older and repetition, again suggesting a timelessness and timeliness. this sense of vertical time, or depth and open-endedness of meaning, then converges with the difference to be found in the sameness of edm, or hawkin’s oppositional repetition. the open-ended verbal ellipses that balfour identifies in pet shop boys’ songs reappear in the music of lcd soundsystem (see balfour 1991). leas describes the song “sound of silver” as “an obscure wandering, synths and beats working in mutated ellipses and ellipticals as if forming pathways inward, through those layers of childhood and teenage memory and occasionally bringing those watercolor remnants to some clearer adulthood foreground” (2016: 50). as an ellipsis is an omission or suspension point, and an ellipse is a cyclical figure, pet shop boys and lcd soundsystem’s songs lack a resolution, and ultimately prove their inherent irony. conclusion tennant: for me, being in the pet shop boys has always been a struggle between total embarrassment and total shamelessness (burston 1994). murphy: the whole thing was just made up because it was such a fertile and embarrassing and circular set of feelings (gross 2010). just as the remarks from neil tennant and james murphy at the beginning of this article reveal their bands’ queer temporalities, the quotations above signal the ambiguity and circularity in their sense of age and their work in electronic dance music. part of murphy’s decision to dissolve lcd soundsystem in 2011 involved his discomfort in continuing the band into his late forties. his “formula that appeals both to 20-somethings who just want to lose their bodies to the music and to their more dignified elders who are beginning to realize they won’t be able to do the same for much longer” is comparable to the mixed audiences wodtke | the irony and the ecstasy 45 of old and young for pet shop boys (cruz 2010: 57). the embarrassment described by tennant and murphy could be viewed as part of their knowingness and distance from the queer temporalities of their lyrics and music, but their continued work in an art form that privileges youth and the present speaks to a simultaneous distance from heteronormative time. despite the fact that pet shop boys recently achieved their fortieth hit on billboard’s dance club charts with “the pop kids” from their latest album super, radio stations continue to tell them “‘oh, we won’t ever play your records, because you’re too old’. . . . they’re quite blatant about it. and someone else—who shall remain nameless—said, ‘if yours was daft punk’s next single, we’d have played it automatically’” (rogers 2013). moving from their usual disco-influenced lyricism to the minimal, simple lyrical content of later edm styles, pet shop boys have actually become less conventionally verbal in their last two albums, electric (2014) and super (2016), which were both produced by stuart price and feature tracks such as “axis”, “shouting in the evening”, “pazzo” and “inner sanctum”. the older pet shop boys get, the more they appear to embrace the pure, wordless affect of edm, which moves in the opposite direction of linear notions of maturation. as simon frith observes, “music is . . . about temporal possibility; it suggests that time can be organized intentionally, as a matter of accent and stress, pulse and phrasing, rather than having to be experienced only as a matter of industrial discipline, or of menstrual and seasonal cycles, or of inexorable aging”, and this reorganization of time can also be read as the performativity of age in the context of edm (frith 1996: 156). in this respect, pet shop boys and lcd soundsystem operate between poles and in cycles, a circuit that moves across temporal planes and produces the irony of what tennant describes as the “strange dialectic that pop in theory is a young people’s musical form and it can be about growing old” (dax 2012). notes 1 ros jennings and abigail gardner produced an edited collection (2012) looking at the performativity of age and aging for female musical artists, but do not discuss artists who began their careers at an advanced age; they are more interested in how female artists negotiate propriety and success as an aged performer within cultural constraints, not least of which are gender expectations. 2 lcd soundsystem is mentioned in passing as an example of one of the bands that contributed to the early electroclash scene in david madden’s “cross-dressing to backbeats: the status of electroclash producer and the politics of electronic music” (2011). 3 lizzie goodman includes brief chapters on james murphy, especially his involvement in the founding of dfa records and the production of “losing my edge,” in her oral history meet me in the bathroom: rebirth and rock and roll in new york city, 2001–2011, but does not focus comprehensively on lcd soundsystem. dancecult 11(1)46 4 according to the setlists in tim lawrence’s history of the late 70s (2003) and early 80s (2016) dance scene in new york city, music commonly ranged over diverse artists: the clash, the slits, pil, pere ubu, talking heads, joy division, delta 5, the bush tetras, a certain ratio, was (not was), quando quango, grace jones, suicide, liquid liquid, esg, konk, cybotron, chic, sylvester, grandmaster flash and the furious five, blondie, the b-52s, heaven 17, dinosaur l., freez, james brown, funkadelic, prince and imagination. 5 pet shop boys problematize the genre of edm, especially as it has been used over the past decade in a more mainstream, american context (including artists such as skrillex, deadmau5 and david guetta), and assert that pet shop boys music is not strictly edm because of the underground nature of their influences: “it’s sort of fragmentary. it does have a link to edm, because we make ‘electronic dance music.’ but we do something that’s a bit more coming from a subculture. . . . it’s a different sort of inspiration” (deluca 2013). similarly, james murphy has made a distinction between his style of edm and the more recent mainstream trend; he notably called this current incarnation of the genre “repellent”, “commercial” and 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(ed.). 2015. this is the sound of irony: music, politics and popular culture. farnham: ashgate. waxman, barbara frey. 1997. to live in the center of the moment: literary autobiographies of aging. charlottesville: university press of virginia. wodtke, larissa. 2018. “the child’s place in pop music”. jeunesse 10(2): 173-91. <https://doi.org/10.1353/jeu.2018.0024> wood, mikael. 2013. “pet shop boys synthesize time and style”. los angeles times, 12 october. <https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/la-et-ms-pet-shop-boys-20131012story.html>, (accessed 10 november 2017). discography lcd soundsystem. 2017. american dream. dfa/columbia: 88985456111. <https://www.discogs.com/lcd-soundsystem-american-dream/release/10779564>. ———. 2005. lcd soundsystem. dfa: dfa2138. <https://www.discogs.com/lcd-soundsystem-lcd-soundsystem/master/54832>. ———. 2002. “losing my edge / beat connection.” dfa: dfa 2123r.| <https://www.discogs.com/lcd-soundsystem-losing-my-edge/master/71436>. ———. 2007. sound of silver. dfa: dfa2164. <https://www.discogs.com/lcd-soundsystem-sound-of-silver/master/42446>. pet shop boys. 1990. behaviour. parlophone: 0190295821746. <https://www.discogs.com/pet-shop-boys-behaviour/master/28087>. ———. 2013. electric. x2: x2 0003 vl1. <https://www.discogs.com/pet-shop-boys-electric/master/574383>. ———. 1988. introspective. parlophone: ei-90868. <https://www.discogs.com/pet-shop-boys-introspective/master/28151>. ———. 1986. please. parlophone: pw-17193. <https://www.discogs.com/pet-shop-boys-please/master/317795>. https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2009/06/for-hard-core-petheads-the-tennant-interview-in-full/200905/ https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2009/06/for-hard-core-petheads-the-tennant-interview-in-full/200905/ https://doi.org/10.1017/s026114300000708x https://noisey.vice.com/en_ca/article/zmaxga/stephen-malkmus-listens-to-lcd-soundsystem-its-a-dance-rock-workout https://noisey.vice.com/en_ca/article/zmaxga/stephen-malkmus-listens-to-lcd-soundsystem-its-a-dance-rock-workout https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007769408591574 https://doi.org/10.1353/jeu.2018.0024 https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/la-et-ms-pet-shop-boys-20131012-story.html https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/la-et-ms-pet-shop-boys-20131012-story.html dancecult 11(1)52 ———. 2016. super. x2: x2 0008 vl1. <https://www.discogs.com/pet-shop-boys-super/master/979726>. ———. 1993. very. parlophone: 0190295823085. <https://www.discogs.com/pet-shop-boys-very/master/28399>. filmography “ims ibiza 2016: the pet shop boys – keynote interview”. youtube. uploaded on 3 june 2016. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzlmfrwj5ie>, (accessed 27 october 2017). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzlmfrwj5ie forty-seven djs, four women: meritocracy, talent and postfeminist politics dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 9(1): 50–72 issn 1947-5403 ©2017 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2017.09.01.03 forty-seven djs, four women: meritocracy, talent and postfeminist politics tami gadir university of oslo (norway) abstract in 2016, only four of forty-seven djs booked for musikkfest, a festival in oslo, norway, were women. following this, a local dj published an objection to this imbalance in a local arts and entertainment magazine. her editorial provoked booking agents to defend their position on the grounds that they prioritise skill and talent when booking djs, and by implication, that they do not prioritise equality. the booking agents’ responses, on social media and in interviews i conducted, highlight their perpetuation of a status quo in dance music cultures where men disproportionately dominate the role of djing. labour laws do not align with this cultural attitude: gender equality legislation in norway’s recent history contrasts the postfeminist attitudes expressed by dance music’s cultural intermediaries such as djs and booking agents. the musikkfest case ultimately shows that gender politics in dance music cultures do not necessarily correspond to dance music’s historical associations with egalitarianism. keywords: dance music; dj; gender; politics; postfeminism tami gadir is a postdoctoral researcher at the university of oslo, norway. her current project (2015–2018) addresses gender in dance music culture, focusing on the experiences of djs. this research has been published in a special issue of the contemporary music review on “gender, creativity and education in digital musics and sound art” (2016) and in the routledge research companion to popular music and gender (2017). both djing and clubbing are central to her research. <tami.gadir@imv.uio.no> feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2017.09.01.03 mailto:tami.gadir@imv.uio.no gadir | forty-seven djs, four women 51 introduction it’s not about gender. it’s not about gender. it’s about being good or not. and you’re playing because you’re a good dj, not because you’re a girl. most of the times. i see some bookings, they book because you’re a girl as well, but probably because you are a good girl.1 musikkfest is an annual, multigenre music festival in oslo, norway. in the lead-up to the 2016 festival, a dj and editor of a local arts and entertainment magazine, natt&dag, noted that, of the total number of djs booked for the event (forty-seven), only four were women. the natt&dag editorial (furuseth 2016), entitled “forty-seven artists, four women”, critiqued this imbalance. subsequently, the festival’s booking agents engaged in a heated debate about what they referred to as “political correctness” with djs and fans on social media. to investigate these perspectives further, i held a group interview with five oslo djs; two were booking agents for musikkfest, and one was among the four women booked to dj for the festival. the interview revealed strong beliefs in “hard work”, “skill” and “talent” as the combined means to a successful djing career. the booking agents, supported by the dj who was booked for the festival, also maintained that gender bias is an overstated issue that does not factor into their bookings.2 the debate is a resounding example of the discourses of art worlds that champion art’s supposed ability to supersede inequalities or render such inequalities irrelevant. such a perceived irrelevance is buttressed by the fluid, unregulated work practices and informal social connections that commonly characterise “creative industries”, the encompassing label for these art worlds in policy (frith 2011: 62; reitsamer 2011: 30–1; conor et al. 2015). and it is precisely because creative industries are informally organised and unregulated that cultural intermediaries (in this case, booking agents) are not held to account for unequal hiring practices and other forms of discrimination. the same intermediaries intertwine this idea—that the aesthetic qualities of art reign supreme over concerns about equality—with a neoliberal narrative of individualism comprised of postfeminism, meritocracy and talent. postfeminists hold that the work of feminism is complete, and no longer has a purpose.3 in other words, they espouse the view that we are living in an era in which women have as much agency as men, and gender identity concerns are outdated. scholars have increasingly identified and critiqued this perspective as it has manifested across the west since the 1990s, as well as its prevalence in cultural policy and media (modleski 1991; brooks 1997; mcrobbie 2004, 2009; gill 2007, 2016; conor et al. 2015). for rosalind gill, a stark example of the link between postfeminism and neoliberal, individualist ideals is the bodily self-policing that many women practise, and the packaging of such self-policing as a choice or method of empowerment (gill 2016: 613). the musikkfest booking agents are postfeminist in their opposition to an emphasis—in the media, within musical communities, in political rhetoric, in law—on quantitative gender equality.4 what is more, when they express their objections to the types of gender equality concerns articulated in the natt&dag editorial, they feel silenced and accused unfairly of political incorrectness by their dance music scene peers. dancecult 9(1)52 it is striking that such perspectives prevail even in norway, often cited in media and popular discourse as “one of the best countries in the world to be a woman” (dowling 2010; the economist 2016).5 indeed, in informal conversations i have had about my research in oslo, norwegian-born men in their twenties have commonly protested, “but there are no gender issues in norway”. the laws that have governed norway’s equality and diversity hiring practices in recent history constitute a possible explanation for the strength of this type of postfeminist discourse. one such law is the gender equality act (1978), which is at the centre of policies that govern norwegian working and domestic life. together with other policies that include affirmative action for women on corporate boards and gender self-determination legislation, it has helped to inform the contemporary, mainstream cultural paradigm of gender equality in norway. this normalisation has led to those who believe in “quality” over equality to believe that they are going against the grain of popular cultural discourse. however, the audibility of the musikkfest booking agents’ postfeminist perspectives suggests the opposite: that cultural attitudes toward equality, such as they are expressed in dance music scenes, do not necessarily correspond to what is happening in law. ultimately, the musikkfest case shows that gender politics in dance music cultures are out of sync with the egalitarian discourses expressed in scholarly histories and ethnographies of dance music.6 gender in norway norway has an international reputation, along with other nordic countries (denmark, finland, iceland, sweden), as having among the world’s best records of gender equality (niskanen 2011: 11; the economist 2016). as historian kirsti niskanen notes, gender equality is one aspect of the social democratic political philosophy that underlies many policies in nordic countries, with the workplace as a key site for implementation (2011: 11). indeed, there is evidence of gender equality discourse becoming normalised as early as the 1920s and ’30s in norway’s print media, when women began to participate as equals in civic society through such moves as gaining the right to vote, accessing higher education and organising themselves institutionally and politically (larsen 1927; dagbladet 1929; fearnley 1930; stenhamar 1932; lindbæk 1936). the fact that these discussions took place in the public sphere reflect the strength and momentum of the ideal of equality for all citizens (see dahlerup 2011; niskanen 2011; teigen 2011).7 in the late 20th century, a core policy that anchored this change in work environments was the gender equality act, originally instated in the norwegian parliament in 1978 (see teigen 2011: 88; gender in norway 2016). the act contains clauses that compel government institutions to ensure that female and male genders are represented equally on “committees, governing boards, councils, delegations, etc.” through strict rules of ratio (government.no 2007). furthermore, it instructs employers to “make active, targeted and systematic efforts” to pursue gender equality, rendering any “discrimination on the basis of gender” illegal. “direct differential treatment” means that “a person is treated worse than others in the same situation, and that is due to gender”, while “indirect differential treatment” gadir | forty-seven djs, four women 53 means that “any apparently neutral provision, condition, practice, act or omission that results in persons being put in a worse position than others, and that occurs on the basis of gender” (government.no 2007). following its institutional implementation, a cultural normalisation of the goals of such legislation gradually occurred, though it was met with resistance at every step. in the early 2000s, for example, board executives expressed concerns that positive discrimination towards women on corporate boards would result in better qualified male applicants being overlooked (dowling 2010) and compromise the freedom of choice of managers (teigen 2011: 88). in the early 21st century, measurable gender equality policies have been internalised and integrated into the mainstream; norway’s conservative party, høyre, is among the parties that support such initiatives (dowling 2010; høyre 2017: 36–7, 84, 89–90; teigen 2011: 88). another example of this “evolution” of gender policies is the 2016 legislation that allows people the freedom to identify as female or male regardless of their biological or birth designations (hartline, forthcoming; thommessen 2015–2016; ministry of health and care services 2015–2016; van der ros 2017). the human rights policies of the current norwegian government promotes equality for all genders, ethnicities, sexualities, ages and abilities (høyre 2017: 36) and the constitution contains the statement, “all people are equal under the law” (stortinget 2016a). yet some scholars argue that the belief in (and cultural support for) equality is not in popular discourse in the same way for non-white ethnic minorities as it is for marginalised genders. specifically, people of colour and of nonwestern backgrounds have not yet been effectively incorporated into a widely-accepted, state-endorsed cultural definition of nordic social democracy (svendsen 2017). instead, in an echo of populist politics in other western european countries, the gender equality ideal is commonly conflated with ideas that equate white nordicness with progressive politics and non-white, non-nordicness with gender oppression—in effect, a form of white nationalism (see also butler 2008; mepschen et al. 2010; svendsen 2017). flexible on work, flexible on equality while the norwegian national goal of gender equality has concrete and visible effects in formal organisations, such as strict gender ratios in hiring policies, there is a large disparity between gender ratios in public and private sectors. specifically, women occupy 70.4% of public sector jobs, and only 36.6% of private sector jobs (stovik in dowling 2010; statistics norway 2014). as in other countries, nightclub managers, promoters, booking agents and djs—as entrepreneurs in the private sector—are often self-employed and contracted to jobs on an ad hoc basis. this is an example of how nightlife scenes and other types of art worlds driven by informal networks are exempt from accountability on implementing equality policies. this lack of accountability is a characteristic feature of the “flexible” work world of djs everywhere, and norway is no exception. it is precarious, and people’s livelihoods depend on the whim of other players—booking agents, promoters, label owners and club managers (reitsamer 2011). in contrast to social services departments or public health systems, the dj’s working environment is not publicly regulated, is characteristically informal, unpredictable, dancecult 9(1)54 cash-driven, devoid of official paperwork or organised representation and intertwined with networks that are under the radar of the law (reitsamer 2011).8 djs are frequently sole traders, thereby not falling within the category of employment that safeguard the rights of other staff at the same events (such as bartenders). consequently, if women experience discrimination, there are no systems in place to protect them—they have no formal method of complaint and no one to complain to. as conor, gill and taylor argue (2015), where work is competitive and limited, women and people of colour are particularly susceptible to discrimination. norwegian cultural commentator joachim lund notes that “culture is a self-referential universe . . . the rules and mechanisms valid for the rest of the world do not have validity here” (2012: 6). in other words, culture is supposed to float above or beyond gender and other identity groupings—a prevalent postfeminist sensibility in the culture industries. unless directly challenged, this leads to the persistence of discrimination. indeed, together with the aforementioned prevalence of racial prejudice in mainstream discourse, such a conception of culture also affects participants of colour. for example, in a 2015 interview, a white booking agent and dj in oslo explained to me that a venue hired her to diversify the genre profile of the club—namely, to steer the music away from hip hop.9 she linked this to the club’s reputation as a hub “where most of the drug dealing africans hang out”. this had previously been used by local authorities as a rationale for closing down other hip hop venues, which had been popular among local communities of colour. i asked the agent why authorities do not also crack down on the primarily white night clubs for parallel drug dealing practices. she stated that “these people tend to be rude to the staff… and a bit touchy.” yet this reasoning—drug dealing, rudeness and harassment—is dubious. there is no shortage of white men who deal drugs, are rude to staff, and physically harass women of all backgrounds. the decisions of local authorities, and the subsequent practices of venue managers and booking agents, appear instead to be tied to problematic attitudes about race and its intersections with class: venues that host better-off, white clubbers are allowed to do as they wish. the musikkfest case in this article is made up of white djs and booking agents who perform and book djs mostly at the latter venues. given that they benefit from being part of a dominant and normalised majority identity group, it is unsurprising that they do not raise the matter of race. dance music participants and commentators around the world have challenged the problematic practices of gender and racial discrimination in their scenes. there are numerous examples that appear in media from 2015 and 2016 alone (see matos 2015a, 2015b; hubbell 2016; lal 2016; loben 2016; mitchell 2016; resident advisor 2016; thump 2016; weiner 2016). moreover, norwegian contemporary media, especially mainstream and local newspapers, cover discussions about gender and music industries in numerous editorials and commentaries that include statistics and debates. issues in music that they address range from the programming of the oslo philharmonic (kvalbein 2013: 7) to the percentage of women on stage at øya, a popular music festival (lund 2011: 12; asker 2015: 9). one article cites international coverage of norway for how it meets gender quotas in the music festival scene more effectively than in other countries (woldsdal 2015). nonetheless, as the below case of musikkfest illustrates (furuseth 2016), when people complain about gender discrimination gadir | forty-seven djs, four women 55 in art worlds that are built on informal networks, key players in these networks still react negatively. thus, the ostensible mainstreaming of gender equality language in national politics and media still faces vocal resistance. together, most of the aforementioned media coverage and public discussions are based on the idea that “equality” means measurable ratios of women to men. this neither addresses how gender informs people’s behaviours, nor acknowledges the experiences of gender non-conforming, genderqueer, or transgender people at all, despite the recent legislation that ostensibly espouses more open understandings of gender (thommessen 2015–2016; ministry of health and care services 2015–2016; stortinget 2016b).10 certainly, the promotion of gender equality through numbers can now be characterised as a prominent, even dominant position on gender issues in some of the widely read newspapers and through the main public broadcaster in norway, the nrk.11 yet it is in the meeting of these media voices with gender prejudices that persist in everyday life—through popular culture and postfeminist discourse—where this increased gender consciousness causes discontentment. club cultures and personal politics in this section, i will discuss the case of musikkfest oslo—a free, multigenre music festival, inspired by the french fête de la musique (national music day). the festival has run since 1992 as a public initiative of the city of oslo with the cooperation of public venues and spaces (bjørhovde 2015). in 2016, djs performed both within the official musikkfest program and as part of the afterparties in local nightclubs. of the forty-seven djs booked for the 2016 event, four were women. before the festival, a dj and music editor, karima furuseth (2016), commented on this disproportionately male majority in a music magazine, natt&dag, through her article, 47 artister, fire kvinner (“47 artists, four women”). her editorial provoked impassioned reactions from dance music participants of all genders, and the debate that followed brought issues of gender discrimination to the fore. some participants proceeded to protest through what i have called an “anti-party” of djs who were exclusively women. at the same time, booking agents asserted that they felt unfairly accused of sexism. i attended the anti-party, and later conducted two group interviews with djs and booking agents—one with five participants and one with two. in total, i asked fifteen people (djs and booking agents) for a group interview. seven agreed to talk, and two were split from the remaining five to accommodate their schedules. the participants were involved in various ways in musikkfest and the anti-party, and were therefore well-placed to present a range of perspectives on the controversy. the material that i use henceforth is based on the first group interview with five participants.12 all five participants have played both the roles of djs and booking agents during their careers. i had seen all five participants dj between 2015 and the interview, and had attended club nights promoted by three of them. in the interview material below, hans, lars and initially dani, contend that the natt&dag article is one-sided, simplistic and disingenuous. these and other specifics are subsumed within two overarching themes, central to their claims throughout the interview: first, that any engagement with the topic of gender balance that does not come down on the dancecult 9(1)56 side of booking more women leads to (unfair) accusations of political incorrectness; and second, that gender balance moves the focus away from the quality of the job (merit of the performer). the first point is made by a booking agent, hans: hans: last year, 90% of the dj line-up at musikkfest was female, so we’ve had a lot of the girls already, so it [didn’t feel] natural to do it again. i think the programming aspect of the whole thing has been left out. i think it’s left out that a lot of our culture’s based on community… we felt that the criticism… was wrong, and came from someone who has benefitted from being part of that community. and she also has, of course… her own agenda, and it’s a good thing—but we felt that we couldn’t speak out because it would be politically incorrect to say something, or criticise or comment on it. i guess this is the core of the problem: that we don’t feel like we’re either leaving the girls out or not thinking about them or not booking them. we feel like we actually make an effort, booking female djs throughout the year. but you have to look at the ratio between how many female djs you have, and you have to compare the guys. you have to consider that these girls aren’t always available; that’s left out of this discussion… how a dj plays is left out of the discussion. and… i didn’t feel like taking part in this discussion because everything i said would have been conceived as politically incorrect. tami: in what sense politically incorrect? hans: that if you criticise… it’s always going to come back to, “okay, not booking enough girls. you should have had girls… at that event. you should have had more girls at [club] throughout the year. but there’s [sic] so many people who speak in this discussion who don’t know how the booking industry works, which means it’s very difficult to discuss this… you always end up discussing it on very different terms. here, hans not only objects to what he perceives as an omission of relevant information from the article, but articulates a frustration with criticisms of gender ratios in dj bookings—on the basis that they misunderstand the industry. furthermore, he argues that furuseth should not critique her “community”, where community is implied as a collective description of oslo’s dance music participants. lastly, he points to “how a dj plays” as a factor excluded from the article. this thread is taken up later in the interview, when hans states that he only chooses djs for their talent (not their gender). the second male booking agent, lars, argues in parallel that hard work such as networking (not gender) leads to gigs. as i will show in the next section, the necessarily gendered nature of networking is overlooked, and “hard work” and “talent” constitute a strong postfeminist dual narrative throughout the interview. the politics of the natt&dag author and the booking agents are entangled with a longer history of a dance music community in which most people know each other both professionally and personally. there is little room for detail in the short article, and some women had indeed turned down musikkfest invitations because of previous commitments. gadir | forty-seven djs, four women 57 it is also reasonable that any journalistic account that critiques the actions of others should be fact-checked. in this sense, the booking agents are reasonable in their objections. i wish to complicate and contest their overarching contention, though, that merit should take precedence over gender parity.13 merit (and its gendering) at first glance, the elevation of merit seems an innocent and reasonable contestation against affirmative action. why, indeed, should an artist be booked “just because she is a woman”? dani agrees with this sentiment, partly because she was one of the four women booked to dj at musikkfest. as such, she takes the criticism of the festival’s gender balance as a personal affront to her skills: dani: for me it was an attack on a lot of us… and i didn’t think it was fair… if you want to be represented in what you’re doing… being a female… yes, it is unfair: this is a lot more ratio of men to women; we are not listed on “top 100 djs”, possibly. but my agenda is: “work harder, be heard”, and that’s what it’s about. it’s not about “man versus female” or “female versus man”, and i don’t wanna be booked just because i’m a girl. and i’m starting to notice that’s kind of happening… that i’m being put together with ellen allien or miss kittin or whoever, not for my merit and what i do, but because i am a woman… i think it’s a weird topic, and i feel both sides by being a female, but i also understand, you can’t just book women because they’re women. and to build a balance about it, you need to actually be a great dj. dani’s perspective thus fluctuates between frustration with being branded as a woman when being booked for gigs with women headline acts on the one hand, and being discriminated against for being a woman on the other:14 dani: publications need to talk about what [female musicians] are actually doing, instead of what they’re wearing or what they look like or who they’re dating… i mean, even look at nina kraviz: she still gets every article mention, pretty much, [because] she was together with ben klock, you know… which is probably how she did get where she is. dani views well-known dj nina kraviz simultaneously as an unfair target of unfair media representations, and as a dj who benefited from her relationship with a prolific male dj. thus, on the one hand, dani identifies with women’s struggles and frustrations, and on the other, she aligns with the meritocratic arguments put forth by hans and lars.15 in contrast to perspectives that intersect with the aforementioned postfeminist sensibilities, women are subject to judgements of their merit based on a range of criteria. and while some of these are the same as the criteria used to judge their male counterparts; others are markedly different, such as expectations of how they should present. scholars have addressed and challenged this along with other disparities on the basis that they are informed by limited, binary conceptions of gender (farrugia 2012; gavanas and reitsamer 2013; gadir 2016, 2017). nevertheless, the apparently gender neutral ideal of meritocracy dancecult 9(1)58 fits into neoliberal paradigms that emphasise how individual hard work is rewarded, no matter what. the fact that scores of people are excluded at the outset due to sexism, racism, ableism, classism, ageism and more, is glossed over by the positive terms of this ideology (“work hard, succeed”). as lars said: lars: stand in the door, do decorations, hand out flyers, promote… i did that for five years before i got even a gig. i was… running around with crates of beer for all the party promoters… you have to make a choice, and be poor for several years… before you can make a living out of it… now i’m making money, but the first ten years i didn’t make shit. i hustled and i sold clothes and i sold stuff—i was a small-time gangster… and i guess you have to make a few tough choices regarding that, and for a few people they need to bite the apple and take a job instead… in order to survive.16 hans proceeded to observe how such risk-taking may be gendered: hans: you see people who are really, really thorough—who work, work, work—they succeed. and i’m not saying that girls don’t, but… i think there’s [sic] more guys who dare to take a chance and live off nothing for ten years than girls. hans acknowledges the disparities of risk between the genders without accounting for them, while lars focuses on what he calls the relative “interest” of men and women: lars: there’s always been quite a few females on the scene… i remember going on a national tour with [name] back in ’96, and we brought [name] onto national radio in ’98, so there’s always been talent about… and even to look up to, i guess. but obviously not enough, but i don’t think that has to do with the male djs, probably… the lack of female djs doesn’t necessarily have to do with the 80% of male djs… it might have to do with interest. tami: in what way, because you’ve said this “interest” thing a few times? lars: about spending enough time with the craftsmanship and with music. here, lars deflects responsibility from male djs for lower numbers of women, to a comparable lack of commitment by women to the labour-intensive pursuit of djing. he continues in this vein when discussing what he implies is an obsessive hobby of record collecting: lars: when i was a kid, growing up, buying records, starting into this culture, i always saw one or two girls in the record stores. tami: out of how many people? lars: let’s say if there were 20 guys digging for the same imports, there were one or two girls there. and they often came too late to get the imports, probably because they didn’t have time or they didn’t have enough interest. but those who were around… spent time, and they were good enough and started to dj. i guess it probably has to do gadir | forty-seven djs, four women 59 with the nerd factor of it as well, about spending so much time and being so interested in getting that music and being involved in the scene, and spending those hours in order to understand it and dig it. and it takes up all your time when you’re a kid. and i guess for a girl who’s 15, 16, 17, probably she has other interests, more often than guys, regarding digging deep into a certain type of music style. you can see that when you look at [name], which is like a local band music competition for kids, 80% are guys, performing their music, and it’s 20% girls. and i guess that has to do with how culture is. i don’t know. how females wanna spend their time, you know? in this account, women are less likely to be “nerds”, and girls of 15–17 are less likely to be interested in the pursuit.17 for a moment, lars suggests that cultural factors could be at play, but he subsequently returns to choice: girls do not want to spend their time collecting records. claims about the lack of interest of women in the obsessive pursuit of recorded music has a history across musical genres. the fetishisation of the material artefact, more than simply a means to playing back recorded sound, has been identified by will straw as a marker of masculinity—reinforced by understandings of record collecting as a mode of expertise (1997: 4–5), and in sarah thornton’s terminology, of subcultural capital (1995: 60–1). this “mastery” excludes women due to a process of male “homosociality”— realms of socialisation where men are the sole bearers and sharers of their “nerdish” obsessions (straw 1997: 7 –9). indeed, the rarer the records are, and the more they cater to the tastes of niche, genre-focused musical communities, the more women are denied access (leonard 2007: 46–7; straw 1997: 11–12). the “work hard, be heard” narrative is powerful. however, as hans speculates, such unpredictable work is not possible for everyone. the first people to stop working in such jobs come from socio-economic disadvantage, often including women and people of colour (conor et al. 2015). in addition, in nightclub work, the means to achieving both creative artistry and entrepreneurship are informed by gender (reitsamer 2011: 36–9). to take the most obvious example, women’s bodies in a neoliberal, postfeminist lens are policed (by themselves and by others) and closely maintained through “beauty” treatments and other modifications (gill 2007: 149). ageism is also built into such gender disciplining—namely, the “expiry date” imposed on women. high profile male djs, producers, promoters and record label owners are increasingly revered as they age. yet despite the presence of highprofile women in dance music in their forties and beyond making inroads in the industry, older women who dj are still not the idealised norm. the youthful female still dominates neoliberal marketing imagery—imagery that matters inasmuch as djing is performance and the dj is to-be-looked-at.18 this type of bodily disciplining is integral to the neoliberal female subject’s individual “hard work” ethic. although this generally remains unsaid, it is evident across dance music industries (farrugia 2012; gavanas and reitsamer 2013). in addition, many women i have interviewed have expressed that networking is more difficult for them, due to what reitsamer’s participants describe as “male networks” (2011: 33; see also farrugia 2010: 89). indeed, in this group interview, lill and dani began to talk more freely about their impression of a “boys’ club” after hans and lars had left. this dancecult 9(1)60 might be symptomatic of their sense of vulnerability to the whim of booking agents—that disagreeing with them could have negative consequences for their careers. whether or not this is the case, the formal interview’s epilogue was every bit as revealing as the initial interview where all five participants were present:19 lill: why can’t we say this when the guys are here? why are we holding back on these comments? dani: i didn’t really think about it till now. lill: when they say: “you need to go down to the club and hang out and get to know people”—that’s a boys’ club; there’s no girls in that club. and you don’t get invited… what they’re saying, in between the lines, is basically that “we book on talent”, that “we book more guys than girls”. and what i’m hearing is that there isn’t enough good girls. dani: yeah, that’s what they’re saying, yeah. lill: but they would never admit that. but that’s what they think. and they think that based on their completely subjective opinion—because they are so geeky about production and technical abilities.20 tami: but why didn’t you think you could say all this stuff in front of hans and lars? lill: oh, i’ve had this conversation with hans so many times. dani: lars was very dominating in the conversation. lill: yeah, i got thrown off by that comment. like, he comes in and he talks about his long experience rather than the actual issue at hand, which, i just thought there was no getting anywhere here, anyway… ‘cause he kept bringing up, you know: “if you wanna make it, you have to do this full-time and put your heart and soul into it”. and i tried vaguely to say: “but… fair enough, there is [sic] loads of full-time djs in oslo, but there is [sic] also loads of non-full-time djs. both guys and girls—and the guys get booked more than the girls”. so, if we can look at it from that perspective, and not: “girls aren’t putting enough into it”. the notions of meritocracy that the booking agents articulate rest on two main problematic assumptions. the first is that anyone who works hard enough can succeed regardless of gender. on the contrary, it is less easy for a group that has been historically and systematically excluded from a community to compete for the first time with those who make up the vast majority of that community (conor et al. 2015). that is, the ostensibly objective judgment of the worth of women does not, in practice, take place on an equal footing to the allegedly objective judgment of men’s worth, particularly in environments that have long been male-dominated. the second false assumption is that the milieu is a neutral space in which the promoters and booking agents who curate djs for club nights make gadir | forty-seven djs, four women 61 such decisions objectively; that they base their choices exclusively on performers’ skills, the quality of their mixing and their track choices. this space is not gender neutral; dance music environments are frequently gender unequal by default (like other environments), and those that are not, are exceptional (gadir 2016). this gendering is so normalised that it is often invisible to participants. one such example is the understanding of djs as male by default. in many dance music communities, it is a common experience for women to have difficulty convincing club security that they are there for djing work, not to simply “jump the queue” as a clubber. even once inside clubs, many women are presumed to be in attendance only to assist or support their partners (who are presumed to be male). furthermore, djs are asked to play on a variety of grounds, including those other than the music that they play: friendship; agreements (“if you book me for a gig at your club night, i’ll book you at mine”); loyalty; group musical tastes; sexual relationships; and innumerable other factors. in other words, the whim of booking agents and promoters plays a significant role in dj bookings.21 thus, arguments that selection is an objective process do not stand up as justifications for women’s underrepresentation. talent (and its gendering) in music pedagogical and psychological fields, talent appears to be discussed as ability that pre-exists effort or work (see weinberger 2001). it is also sometimes described through terms such as “innate” (helding 2011; howe, davidson and sloboda 1998: 399–400). in both neuroscience and psychology, ideas about musical talent are further complicated. scholars such as hambrick and tucker-drobb (2014) and mosing et al. (2014: 1800–2), for example, argue that a mix between genetic and environmental factors affect a person’s capacity to realise talent (see also stetka 2014). similarly, neuroscientist gary marcus’ (2012) popular science book on musical learning distinguishes between “music instinct” (a myth) on the one hand and other types of “talent” (a valid concept), on the other (marcus 2012: 9). in the interview with musikkfest booking agents and djs, the theme of talent emerged interchangeably with merit: tami: i asked you [earlier], “in your scene, is it just about talent when people get booked?”, and you said “yes”. but previously, you said that you have to be “hustling”, or… on the door, or be active in the scene. lars: well, you have to spend time in the scene, i guess. tami: okay, so that’s not just based on talent, then, right? lars: no, it’s based on being interested—showing interest as well, of course, yeah. here lars again raises the element of “interest” that djs must show in order to secure bookings. this emphasis between two seemingly opposing concepts—hard work and “networking” on the one hand and talent on the other—has an internal logic. they are, after all, constituents of the same narrative: the brilliant and inspired yet struggling artist, dancecult 9(1)62 who tirelessly and obsessively works at their art. this depiction fits into a distinctive, contemporary version of romanticism that relates to neoliberal ideals of individual selfdetermination (gill 2007, 2016; frith 2011: 62–3; reitsamer 2011). in this framework, an individual “with talent” can defy structural barriers such as class, race, gender, age and sexuality if they only work hard enough. ideas about talent and of the different though related notions of creativity in western musical communities are not just romantic, but also neoliberal: they elevate “a particular sense of selfhood and the valorization of the new” (frith 2011: 70). during the interview, the meaning of merit was expressed concretely from the outset. however, there was no clarity on what “talent” should mean, and i asked those left (all but lars) to explain how they understood it. their responses were revealing: dani: quality of track selection, how you mix that track section… reading a crowd… hans: researching the club. dani: that too, yeah. and just having tracks that are new, but also can be combined with old. i hate when djs play just straight up classics and stuff like that. lill: i think it’s very difficult to answer, because it’s so situational… sometimes i appreciate someone who’s good technically… and that a night flows naturally. dani: i know for me it’s engagement with the dj and audience. hans: one thing is what you perform at the club, but if you’re a shitty person and just a generally bad guy or girl, you’re not going to get booked again. so being professional— from the moment you… set your foot inside a club, until you leave—is also a big, big aspect of it. because promoters… talk to each other, and a lot of… people also want to come back if they have a good night… i think dani summed it up pretty well, because it’s about production talent and it’s about how you perform at the club. you have to know that playing from 12 ‘til 3 or 1 ‘til 3 in norway is very different from playing 1 ‘til 3 in germany. so, it’s about research, it’s about… looking who played there the last weekend—should you have a chat with that person, maybe, just to hear how it was? what worked, what didn’t work? how can you fit your style into that? again, because style is… personal… but it’s still the interaction with the people—and how you see them moving, how you actually look them in the eyes, be present when you’re there—that’s very important, i think. ‘cause there’s [sic] so many good djs with good track selection. but it’s the flow, it’s the groove, it’s the presence. lill: it’s so subjective, music. you have to be able to communicate that with the dance floor. sylvi: it’s both about being technically good and building and getting the floor to dance and… communicating with people, you know, in a musical way. i think that’s talent. gadir | forty-seven djs, four women 63 interestingly, all the interviewees seem to agree that the elusive “flow”, “groove”, “presence” and “musicality” are learned skills. perhaps the idea of the “born artist” is relegated more to western classical or art musics than dance musics. this could partly explain the interchangeability of “hard work” with “talent” in these conversations. regardless, these participants show how fluid and plural the term “talent” is. for djs, it can mean: collecting “quality” music; technical ability on dj equipment; familiarity with an audience; responsiveness to clubbers’ feedback; the right mix of old with new music; an understanding of the temporal specificities of club nights; willingness to receive constructive feedback; showing understanding of genre; being “weird”; behaving “professionally”; communicating with clubbers; the capacity to “flow”, “groove” and be present; and making people dance. in short, for these participants, “talent” equates to a dj being good at their job, and gender, according to the booking agents, does not factor into how they evaluate it. the question of how the oslo participants define talent also matters because of the argument that emerges repeatedly throughout the interview: that to prioritise gender balance is to deprioritise talent. three implications of this common claim stand out. on one level, the subtext is that on average, fewer women than men possess talent in djing. on another, the argument rests on a common (mis)understanding of the idea of talent—one that is not specific to music participation, but that is central to it: namely that it can be evaluated objectively. as the conversation between oslo participants highlighted, talent is not an objective or measurable variable, and sociologists of the arts and music have made it their business to problematise this and similar notions that elevate art above other types of work (becker 1982; frith 1996, 2011). understandings of talent in dj cultures are, on the contrary, often based on personal impressions. these can vary dramatically as djing involves a wide choice of technologies and techniques. talent is therefore too contingent a concept to be “threatened” by gender equality policies. creativity—an idea that frith (2011) aptly describes in durkheimian terms as “a social fact”—should be similarly scrutinised, because it dictates contemporary cultural policies in many western countries (frith 2011: 62; reitsamer 2011: 30–2; conor et al. 2015: 3–5). like talent, creativity has many possible meanings, depending on whether artists (and what kinds of artists), cultural policy makers or market investors are defining it (frith 2011: 63; reitsamer 2011: 39). creativity in the business world can even equate to productivity—google and other silicon valley industry models are cases in point—or utility (reitsamer 2011: 39). in music, including in dj worlds, the idea is still romantic—it demands newness, novelty and “freedom”, while being codependent with the contemporary market economy (frith 2011: 63, 68–9; reitsamer 2011: 40). this codependence is dysfunctional: music requires the work of many actors to materialise, yet it is referred to in musical worlds in old terms of distinction between expressive capacities of individual artists and the “craft” of performing music for money (becker 1982; frith 2011: 70).22 a helpful parallel to the argument about talent is how the artistic “genius” in western musical histories and canons has always been gendered. in one example, philosopher christine battersby has accounted for the way that genius across the arts has been framed dancecult 9(1)64 as the exclusive property of men, all the while possessing “feminine” qualities (1989: 3–11). battersby’s (1989) critique of “genius” is to focus on challenging its gendering: the concept of genius is too deeply embedded in our conceptual scheme for us to solve our aesthetic problems by simply amputating all talk of genius, or by refusing to evaluate individual authors and artists. before we can fundamentally revalue the old aesthetic values, the concept of genius has to be appropriated by feminists, and made to work for us (15). i would also add to this a reminder that genius is a historically-specific paradigm—critiquing the concept is far from “amputating all talk” of it (battersby 1989: 15). in this sense, i understand the gendering of genius to be just one part of this larger paradigm that has many potential grounds for critique.23 overall, talent, creativity and genius are concepts that reflect romantic values of artistry. although the romantic artist—the dj, in this article—seems in some ways to be at odds with the discipline that is required of the neoliberal female subject, the primacy of the individual is not only common, but central to romanticism and neoliberalism. as the group interview shows, djs are embodiments of this blend, with expectations of being both “entrepreneurial” and “free” at once (reitsamer 2011: 36–40; see also frith 2011: 63). what is more, in articulating a “grammar of individualism” (gill 2007: 153), the above participants deny the realities and effects of systematic gender discrimination.24 conclusion when it comes to gender equality, norway is a nation with relative advantage. this is most visible in its legal frameworks, where gender parity—albeit on problematic, binary models of gender—is a key goal. in this article, i have outlined some key moments when governments formalised these ideas: women’s rights to vote, access to university education and unionisation in the early 20th century; the gender equality act in 1978; affirmative action to hire more women on corporate boards in the early 2000s; and the gender selfdetermination law in 2016. however, there is a substantial difference between the equality achieved in public and private sectors respectively. the casual workforce that encompasses dj and many other musicians’ work is a stark example; it is challenging to monitor the implementation of inclusive practices in such fluid and unpredictable environments. consequently, victims of informal discrimination in these settings are unsurprisingly the same people for whom the equality policies have been necessary in the first place—for example, people who are not male and not white. moreover, while various media have constituted platforms for these marginalised voices, the counter-reactions coming from cultural intermediaries such as hans and lars have been at least as audible. specifically, hans and lars argue that they are being misunderstood: that they do not discriminate against anyone, but that women tend to be less interested in the “craftsmanship” of djing, less involved with the “nerding out” cultures of record collecting and less active at informal networking than men. this is often coupled with the assertion gadir | forty-seven djs, four women 65 that intuitive understandings of dance floor dynamics and other markers of quality have nothing to do with gender. the implication is that imbalances are coincidental by-products of the demographics of the people who happen to be performing well. yet as i have shown in this article, these criteria are all profoundly gendered. indeed, as gill observes, “the notion that all our practices are freely chosen is central to postfeminist discourses, which present women as autonomous agents no longer constrained by any inequalities or power imbalances whatsoever” (2007: 153). together, these counter-reactions make up the widespread paradigm of individualism, of which postfeminist and meritocratic philosophies are a part. i have previously argued that popular discourses on utopianism in dance music culture leave little room for addressing problematic gender dynamics in these scenes (gadir 2016). specifically, these perspectives overlook the many spaces that reiterate the same types of discrimination that occur off the dance floor. the perspectives that participants presented in conversation with me after musikkfest are compatible with this idea. as such, claims that some dance floors are free of discrimination while not acknowledging that other dance floors are not, are comparable with postfeminist ideas that gender inequality is a problem of the past. although the two political positions are contrasting, both utopian and postfeminist perspectives of dance music cultures ultimately avoid and deny the hostility and violence that takes place because of gender—behind dj booths, on dance floors and in-between gigs. finally, the musikkfest case shows dj and dance music culture to be an art world, where artistic value is idealised to the point that it nullifies the value of anything else. in this case, the music, through the skill of the dj, is presented as more important than people’s lived experiences of systemic inequalities. this is an unsettling demonstration of what postfeminism, in its omnipresence, actually embodies: a collection of defenses used by those in decision-making or power positions—and internalised by those who are not—in industries where women are significant, active and audible, but where they nevertheless remain unequal participants. acknowledgements thanks are due to tom western for his meticulous interview transcriptions, and to the djs and booking agents in oslo for their time and openness in interviews. i would also like to acknowledge the help of my colleagues in the department of musicology at the university of oslo, for guiding me toward relevant local media and information sources, and for giving me feedback on drafts of this article. thank you to åshild watne for helping me with interpretation of the norwegian language in government sources, and to astrid kvalbein for both her leads to historic media sources on music and gender and inspiring conversations. dancecult 9(1)66 notes 1 lars, interview with the author (oslo), 31 october 2016. 2 all interviewees were given pseudonyms for this article. 3 definitions of postfeminism (or post-feminism) vary. catherine malabou’s definition points to gender and queer theory’s anti-essentialist and dualist stance on gender (2011: 1). however, i use “postfeminism” (one word, no hyphen) as it is used to refer to a kind of anti-feminism in media and culture. 4 far from being simple, “gender equality” is a set of multifaceted, interrelated ideas. what gender equality means for different communities depends on how these communities define it, and what values they hold. some ways of understanding gender equality allow it to be measured, whereas others focus on less quantifiable notions such as culture, knowledge, power, opportunity and individual upward mobility (inglehart and norris 2003; teigen and wängnerud 2009: 21–3). 5 for analyses that challenge the popular discourse on gender equality in the nordic countries, see also teigen (2011) and åsebø (2016). 6 see, for example, fikentscher (2000) and lawrence (2003). 7 putting the idea that all people have equal citizenship status into practice is historically not a given. australia (looking toward britain and the united states) was among the countries that adopted temporary postwar social democratic models in mid-century, for instance, with a policy of so-called “full employment” (macintyre 1986: 7; coombs 1994: 6; macintyre 1999, harris 2001: 11–14). yet among other groups, white australian women were excluded from this—expected to depart from their wartime work and fulfil family and domestic duties (harris 2001: 14). other groups were excluded in various ways, despite the promotion of this period as a golden age, such as the lack of any benefits for long-term unemployed indigenous people (kewley in harris 2001: 14). 8 this is the case for djs at the local level; international, touring djs have managers, lawyers and insurance. moreover, although some events operate “off the radar”, such as in illegal spaces and at unlicenced events, many do take place within publicly regulated spaces such as night clubs and within publicly regulated events that work within legal frameworks. 9 this interview was conducted as part of my current research project (2015–18) on women djs from around the world. 10 hartline notes that on the one hand, the new legislation has been celebrated as forward thinking, and has been understandably embraced by those who have transitioned from female to male, or male to female. however, it is still a form of discrimination against those who identify as genderqueer or gender nonconforming, who still have to choose between “female” or “male” (hartline, forthcoming). in addition, there are still deep systemic issues that remain unresolved, such as the tendency to “diagnose” gender nonconformity as a medical condition by public health services (see van der ros 2017: 129–30; hartline, forthcoming: 3–4). 11 my own research on gender, for example, has been cited on the nrk’s “culture news” radio program (kulturnytt 2016). gadir | forty-seven djs, four women 67 12 the second group had been booked for musikkfest gigs but had to turn them down. this was part of the defense of the booking agents when they were accused of only booking four women—that some had turned down their offers. furthermore, the additional two djs had not been exposed to the public debate, while the other five interviewees contributed to it directly. as a result, most of the conversation with the additional group steered away from musikkfest to general djing experiences, and i have not included these here. group interviews are more complex, and harder to organise than one-on-one interviews. in introducing more people to a conversation, one person’s articulations of an issue necessarily affect how others speak about it, with the resulting narrative being shaped by dynamics of a specific group. however, unstructured one-on-one interviews are also necessarily unsystematic, and always informed by the presence of the interviewer. in conducting group interviews, i match the untidy, performative character of debates between djs and booking agents online. this includes, in the case of the interview in this article, some participants coming and going at different points, while the conversation continues. moreover, the group interview is a means of helping interviewees to feel socially “cushioned” and supported by others, in order that they feel safe to articulate what they wish to. this is especially relevant in this case, where each side of the debate has felt attacked by the other for their differing perspectives. finally, having a group conversation is a means to ensure the inclusion of the male booking agents in the conversation. the stranger status that i held before the interview was mitigated by my offer of an informal group conversation with personal and professional acquaintances (the djs). as an interviewer and moderator, my interventions are the same as in any one-on-one interview: starting with a broad opening question; and interjecting only if a point of particular interest is worth following up. the primary difference is that there are more than two voices, and the conversation steers itself with less help from the interviewer. 13 this is not a view exclusive to this community. the idea that merit is compromised when a gender balance is prioritised is prevalent across the arts in norway, including the visual arts (åsebø 2016). additionally, this was the discourse that prevailed in objections to gender equality policies for corporate boards (dowling 2010; teigen 2011). 14 the latter occurred most notably when the two male booking agents of the group had departed. 15 it is understandable that dani articulates such frustration with the gender critiques on the one hand and agreement with them on the other. as one of the only four women chosen for this festival, she sought acknowledgement of her ability to “make it” on the basis of her skills and not her gender. yet this indicates her exceptional resilience in an aggressively competitive, maledominated milieu, rather than illustrating an equal and fair working environment for all genders. 16 this statement also hinges on gendered assumptions. it disregards the masculine connotations of the “small-time gangster” and the question of whether it is as socially acceptable for women to “hustle” as for men. 17 see will straw (1997) for a compelling analysis of the strong gendering of “nerd” cultures with reference to record collecting. 18 the reality of this visual foregrounding stands in opposition to the traditional (and often idealised) role of the dj—to play music that people dance to. in this way, her job should differ from that of musical performers such as guitarists or singers, as it does not matter whether she is seen. dancecult 9(1)68 19 in an interview conducted by farrugia (2010: 90), techno producer kate simko shows a similar pattern. 20 this last passage is indicative of how the enduring paradigm of sound production and reproduction technologies’ gendering is internalised by all genders, despite women’s active involvement in the development of electronic musics. these ideas about women and technology are also replicated in representations in “the canon” of written texts about electronic and dance musics (brewster and broughton 1999; shapiro 2000), though these have important exceptions (butler 2006; dowling 2010; farrugia 2012; gavanas and reitsamer 2013). however, there are aspects of the cultural histories of these sound technologies that have contributed to contemporary understandings of their gendering (rodgers 2010: 6–8; farrugia 2012: 8–10, 21–3). 21 this is rarely acknowledged openly, presumably due to impressions of professionalism, and more specifically that it would contradict their claims to choosing djs on the basis of skill alone. 22 even in this 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sundvolden (norway): gender national research school general course. https://www.stortinget.no/globalassets/pdf/english/constitutionenglish.pdf https://www.stortinget.no/no/saker-og-publikasjoner/saker/sak/voteringsoversikt/?p=64488&dnid=1#id=7357&view=vote-text https://www.stortinget.no/no/saker-og-publikasjoner/saker/sak/voteringsoversikt/?p=64488&dnid=1#id=7357&view=vote-text https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-do-great-musicians-have-in-common-dna/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1743923x09000026 https://thump.vice.com/en_us/article/three-female-canadian-djs-discuss-gender-inequality-in-the-dance-world https://thump.vice.com/en_us/article/three-female-canadian-djs-discuss-gender-inequality-in-the-dance-world http://www.musica.uci.edu/mrn/v8i2s01.html#real http://thump.vice.com/en_us/article/can-teaching-young-women-to-dj-and-produce-solve-gender-inequality-in-electronic-music http://thump.vice.com/en_us/article/can-teaching-young-women-to-dj-and-produce-solve-gender-inequality-in-electronic-music http://thump.vice.com/en_us/article/can-teaching-young-women-to-dj-and-produce-solve-gender-inequality-in-electronic-music http://www.dagbladet.no/2015/07/07/kultur/oya/musikk/festival/konsert/40013709/ digital arts: an introduction to new media cat hope and john ryan london: bloomsbury, 2014. isbn: 978-1-7809-3320-7 (hardcover), 978-1-7809-3323-8 (paperback), 978-1-7809-3321-4 (epub e-book), 978-1-7809-3329-0 (pdf e-book) rrp: £80.00 (hardcover), £23.99 (paperback), £20.99 (epub e-book), £20.99 (pdf e-book) toby young university of oxford (uk) digital arts is a joint effort from australian scholars cat hope (a composer, whose work i’ve admired from afar for a while) and john ryan, and is presented very much as an introductory reader to some of the central theoretical and practical issues surrounding new media art. the overall narrative thread—if one can call it that—of the book’s nine chapters is one of humanising; tracing a historico-cultural journey from digital art’s inception in the 20th century towards its impact on both the art world and broader society. throughout the book, hope and ryan forge a delicate path between the need for taxonomy and clarity (it being a textbook, after all) and the more ephemeral and open discussions needed for such a mobile and trans-disciplinary topic. the opening chapter in particular is a stroke of genius in this respect, presenting the context of digital art as a cartography—a brilliant alternative to either the repertoire-based canonic approach taken by cox and warner (2004) or the techno-centric focus of demers (2010). this mapping of the various historical and aesthetic points which make up the various networks of ideology, theory and practice that define digital arts is impressive not least in its breadth but also its depth, demonstrating clearly yet efficiently—the book is only 218 pages long—how such communities of thought came to be. the balance between mapping a broad field whilst providing concrete examples (in handy little boxes) and reflecting on some of the related key debates, both inside and outside the field, is a central concern throughout the book, and on the whole is achieved successfully, even if the authors’ conclusion that this complexity makes digital arts as a genre impossible to define (3) feels a little easy. through the main body of the book, hope and ryan unfold a methodical examination of the “digital effect” on key areas of artistic endeavour: photography and film (chapter 3), theatre and dance (chapter 4), music (chapter 5), and finally the sui generis medium of digital web art (chapter 5); all underpinned by a series of helpful case studies on specific artworks, with accompanying mock essay questions masquerading as “reflections”. the fifth chapter on digital music will probably be of most interest to readers here. passing by the obvious theoretical starting point of benjamin (hope and ryan use his seminal “the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction” as the basis for their discussion of photography instead), this chapter is framed around the relationship between technological advancement, genre expansion and—by proxy—the expansion of musical scenes that these new forms of digital production and consumption create. their opening section of background traces this “drastic change ... [in] the direction of music” (104) back to serialism, via musique concrète, of course, before moving through a heavy discussion of the nature of digital synthesis into a light one on some of the tools of digital music production and compositional practices associated with electronic music. whilst readers of this review are guaranteed to know their digital audio workstations from their digital interfaces, i can see how such a basic introduction would be useful to students, nicely peppered as it is with nods to the changing nature of creative processes that these technologies foster. an unfortunately brief discussion of liveness in electronic music—it doesn’t even include the obligatory line about djs checking their emails!—leads to possibly the most compelling section of the chapter, discussing the aesthetic issues of digitally-created music and the interesting tension between its presence in both experimental art and popular culture. maybe in a future publication or revision of this book, hope and ryan might consider extending this section even further, perhaps considering some of the social relationships these art practices form commentaries to (for example noise art as a critical reaction to technological acceleration) or the new move in electronic sound art towards an engagement with the post-human (in works such as guy ben-ary’s cellf, which uses a biological neural network growing in a petri dish to control an array of analogue modular synthesizers in order to create a “neural synthesiser”). the book’s concluding chapters focus on distribution practices, including discussions of downloading, file-sharing and creative commons (chapter 7), and archival preservation of digital material (chapter 8). whilst these are some of the most prosaic topics of the project, the concluding chapter (9) is a particular highlight, replete with a rich discussion of the political and ethical dimensions of digital arts and the role of social media (including non-traditional networked environments like online gaming) in the interface that digital practices offer between the artistic and social. looking back a few years after the publication of this book, it is clear that this is one of the most important issues facing digital arts: that of the role art can play as a catalyst in creating the prerequisite conditions necessary to enable social innovation and change, breaking down barriers and opening up a new potential way to democratize the arts (157). after the cartographic gestures of the introduction, these latter chapters feel more like deleuzian tracing, gathering together ideas on a teleological journey towards an alluring sense of completeness, than cartography. given the spiralling of this book towards a final concluding chapter on hyperrealism in digital art, this movement from mapping to tracing seems to be no coincidence, perhaps presenting a subtle meta-critique of the relationship between the fluid nature of digital arts and the pedagogical need to linearize a field which is still very much a boundary-less network space (pace latour), perhaps even a vulnerable space loosely encompassing a group of discrete disciplines with shared processes but not necessarily goals. or perhaps i’m just over-reading it. for all of the tempting allusions to meta-narratives and subtext, the best way i can summarize this book is functional. in general, the language and presentation of ideas is clear, with the exception of a few slightly obfuscated turns of phrase, such as (for example) the claim that digital art is the “ubiquitous part of our vernacular in today’s ever more globalized world” (2). nevertheless, the central themes hope and ryan draw on are extremely well thought through, with useful bullet-point summaries and further reading lists in each chapter providing the backbone to a clear and comprehensive textbook that would sit well at the heart of any university course on digital and new media art. however, whilst there is considerable critical engagement with the material discussed, there is little in the way of the innovation or revelation needed to make this book a real addition to the established body of scholarly material on electronic music. this isn’t to diminish the work at all—it is brilliant in its relevance and succinct accessibility, and i would highly recommend it to anyone teaching a new media art course—but i would definitely welcome a more adventurous work from the brilliant duo of hope and ryan. references benjamin, walter. 1977 [1936]. “the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction”. in illuminations (trans. harry zohn). new york: schocken books. cox, christoph and daniel warner (eds.). 2004. audio culture: readings in modern music. london: continuum. demers, joanna. 2010. listening through the noise: the aesthetics of experimental electronic music. oxford: oxford university press. challenges to british nightclubs during and after the covid-19 pandemic dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 13(1): 69–87 issn 1947-5403 ©2021 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.05 challenges to british nightclubs during and after the covid-19 pandemic ewa mazierska and tony rigg university of central lancashire (uk) abstract this article assesses the situation of nightclubs in britain during the covid-19 pandemic, considering the prospects for this segment of the british night time economy as the covid crisis unfolded as well as its long-term prospects, in light of the changing patterns of the consumption of club music. it is based on interviews with leading professionals working in the sector, who have long-term experience of managing clubs, organising events and overseeing the sector as a whole. the study is informed by research about the social, economic and cultural value of clubbing and the consequences of covid restrictions on the british night time economy and clubbing in particular, as well as on other aspects of the british economy and social life. keywords: nightclubs, clubbing, night time economy, electronic dance music, covid-19 ewa mazierska is a professor at the university of central lancashire. she has published over twenty monographs and edited collections concerning popular culture and music. these include collaborations with rigg and popular polish electronic music, 1970-2020: a cultural history (2021) and popular viennese electronic music, 1990-2015: a cultural history (2019). mazierska’s work has been translated into many languages, including french, italian, german, chinese, korean, portuguese, estonian and serbian. she is the principal editor of a routledge journal, studies in eastern european cinema. tony rigg is a music industry and leisure sector practitioner, industry advisor, business consultant and educator affiliated with the university of central lancashire where he set up the master of arts programme in music industry management. he has occupied senior management roles in marketleading organisations including operations director for ministry of sound, overseen the management of more than one hundred nightclubs and music venues in the uk and delivered thousands of music events. he has also produced dance music records for leading labels. notable publications include popular music in the post-digital age: politics, economy, culture and technology (bloomsbury 2018), the future of live music (bloomsbury 2020) and the evolution of electronic dance music (bloomsbury 2021), which he co-edited with ewa mazierska and les gillon. he also co-edited the present and future of music law (bloomsbury 2021) with ann harrison. feature article https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.05 dancecult 13(1)70 introduction the social consumption of music has long been a cultural staple and much-loved pastime throughout the world, with related activities taken for granted until the covid-19 pandemic began to take hold in late 2019 and early 2020. at this point in many territories, social gathering came to an abrupt halt. this was instigated by policy makers, in particular governments introducing emergency measures to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. in the uk, policymakers demonstrated different attitudes to different segments of the hospitality industry. this article assesses the consequences and position of nightclubs in britain as the covid-19 pandemic developed and considers the prospects for this segment of the british night time economy beyond it. the article is based on a variety of sources. these include publications about the benefits of clubbing and the problems facing clubs before the pandemic, especially in the uk. second, we conducted interviews with a number of the uk’s leading professionals working in the sector who have long-term experience of operating nightclubs and related businesses. we also used articles about the consequences of covid restrictions on the british night time economy and clubbing in particular, alongside the report, produced following an inquiry by the all-party group for the night time economy, published in february 2021: “covid-19 and uk nightlife”. finally, we drew on the expertise within the nightclub sector of one of the co-authors, tony rigg, who occupied command positions in a number of market leading organisations specialising in the late-night entertainment and dance music industries since 1989, including luminar leisure plc, which operated 237 sites circa the year 2000 making it the biggest venue operator in the uk to date, as well as leading dance music brand ministry of sound, etc. he also works as a professional advisor within the sector. this article has two aims: to inform readers about the situation in which the nightclub sector found itself during the covid pandemic; and to help prevent a similar situation happening again by highlighting the biases and mistakes committed by institutions whose role it is to support culture and the economy, so that they may endure these kinds of difficult times. the benefits of clubbing clubbing brings numerous benefits, which can be grouped into several categories: health and wellbeing, economic, social and cultural. alder and seligman correlate wellbeing and gross domestic product (gdp), regarding it as “the current gold standard for national prosperity” (adler & seligman 2016: 1). they consider what wellbeing is and how it can be measured. they profile a number of concepts including subjective wellbeing (swb), also referred to as hedonic wellbeing, stating that “overall high swb combines three specific factors: (1) frequent and intense positive affective states, (2) the relative absence of negative emotions, and (3) global life satisfaction”. they also consider the alternative approach of the eudaemonic paradigm, “in which wellbeing is construed as an ongoing, dynamic process (rather than a fixed state) of effortful living by means of engagement in meaningful activities”. seligman delineates five domains of life that people pursue for mazierska and rigg | challenges to british nightclubs during and after the covid-19 pandemic 71 their own sake: positive emotion, engagement or flow, positive relationships, meaning or purpose, and achievement, or perma” (adler & seligman 2015: 5). sheppard and broughton provide further insights as to how music and dance cultural practices relate to social determinants of health, in which they conclude that “actively participating in music and dance is an effective means through which individuals and populations can maintain and promote wellbeing and health across the life course” (sheppard and broughton 2020: 16). with this in mind, it is not difficult to see how key activities associated with clubbing, music, dancing, socialising etc could contribute to a sense of wellbeing, be part of an appropriate work life balance and ultimately feed into and contribute to national prosperity. the idea that dancing reduces the stresses of daily life is captured by films such as saturday night fever (1977) and the term “living for the weekend” has frequently been used in association with dance music and clubbing activities. in illustration of this, ministry of sound produced a compilation series in the noughties called big tunes (living for the weekend); in 2014 the bbc produced a television programme titled northern soul: living for the weekend; and the term was featured in the title of a daily mail article, “saturday night fever! how 1970s new yorkers living for the weekend turned the city in to a hedonistic mecca and dance the nights away at clubs like studio 54”. this demonstrates further the importance of escaping the weekly nine to five treadmill and establishing an appropriate work-life balance. some authors also argue that clubbing is a substitute of organised religion by offering an “experience of collective communion and transcendence” (reynolds 1999: 242; see also st. john 2004). as part of the night time economy, nightclubs create revenue, directly and more importantly, indirectly. admittedly, even in cities such as berlin, regarded as the capital of clubbing in continental europe, the club scene achieves a relatively low total revenue through its direct business activity (drevenstedt 2020: 15; lücke 2020: 57-9). however, when the upstream and downstream turnover (in gastronomy, logistics, the music industry etc) is combined, this amounts to a sizeable income and provides a significant proportion of the employment opportunities in large towns and cities, often accounting for 20 per cent of the workforce. this includes many young people working on a part-time basis, who are less likely to gain permanent and full-time work. by the same token, nightclubs, along with community centres and youth clubs, provide distraction and respite from youth unemployment and the other cultural traps associated with it, such as drug addiction, poor health and criminality (drevenstedt 2020: 15-7). in the most recent decade or so, nightclubs have been seen as the “saviours of the high street”, filling spaces abandoned by shops and attracting visitors to the remaining establishments (berkley 1999: 12-13; stone 2018). nightclubs, through an upward domino effect, also attract other sectors of the music business. investigating how berlin became such a major focus of the international music industry, ingo bader and albert scharenberg go as far as to assert that clubs and their associated musical subcultures are “the main reason that global players and major music industry associations have moved their headquarters to berlin” (bader and scharenberg 2010: 76). nightclubs are also a primary reason or at least a motivation for tourists to visit such cities as london, manchester or berlin (sellars 1998; berkley 1999: 12). dancecult 13(1)72 clubs also bring social advantages. they make the areas where they are located more attractive to potential residents by making them safer and more glamorous (berkley 1999: 13; kolioulis 2018). however, the relationship between nightclubs and gentrification in cities such as nyc and london is complex and contradictory. on one hand, the presence of artists and spaces signifying the subcultural richness of socially deprived neighbourhoods, such as clubs, triggered the “hipster gentrification” of these neighbourhoods. on the other hand, once gentrification kicked in, nightlife businesses were blamed for defiling the quality of life of those very same neighbourhoods (hae 2012: 69-74; kolioulis 2018: 210-11). there have been numerous high-profile examples of long-established nightclubs coming under threat due to proposed residential developments, including ministry of sound in london for example, when developer englewood sought permission to build new flats in close proximity to the venue. this was resolved in 2014 through a section 106 agreement, a decision approved by the then mayor of london, boris johnson (bothwell 2014). it is not uncommon for nightclubs to be subject to noise complaints from residents, particularly in gentrifying areas. rigg has dealt with a number, but one of particular note was the ritz in manchester (built in 1927) which, despite being the oldest purpose-built nightclub in the uk and having survived world war ii, came under threat in the early 2000s, when high rise flats were built on the sites of car parks either side of the venue. the ritz has so far survived, but other nightclubs have become casualties of residential representations. experience shows that some people can buy residential properties next to nightclubs and still be surprised by noise. understandably, local authorities would rather not receive noise and other complaints related to nuisance from nightclubs. with local authorities presiding over licensing and public entertainment in the uk since the licensing act 2003 came into force, clearly this can lead to a precarious situation for nightclubs in which they are seen as problems by those in authority. returning to the subject of gentrification, consequential increases in rents have also been a reason for the demise of clubs, impacting on their viability (kolioulis 2018: 213). nightclubs are also known for forging specific subcultural and political identities. they provide space for marginalised communities, such as queer communities, and overcome existing social divisions, for example between ethnic minorities and the white majority, and youth from different cities and countries (campkin and marshall 2016, 2017 and 2018). clubs can be seen also as laboratories of social change (thornton 1995; rymajdo 2019: 112). by the same token, they are important “capsules of history”, which might otherwise pass undocumented (haslam 2015a). the cultural dimension of clubs is recognised by political authorities in some cities, which treat clubs as a part of their local and national heritage, offering them a special status and protection through taxation. the german government proved in agreement in 2016 when courts ruled that berlin’s techno mecca berghain should be in the same tax category as concert venues and museums, given that it produces work of cultural significance (oltermann 2016). a similar narrative of cultural impact can be traced in britain: “we’ve seen how often a venue getting critical acclaim or helping achieve critical mass can go on to have a much wider impact” (haslam 2015a: 345-46). mazierska and rigg | challenges to british nightclubs during and after the covid-19 pandemic 73 nightclubs have often provided outlets for creative practice. when speaking with graham massey (co-founder of 808 state) for this article, he pointed out how important underground clubs were in the evolution of his band’s outputs and activities, providing opportunities to collaborate, experiment and test new music, as well as a means to engage and interact with associated communities. massey’s sentiment that nightclubs are important incubators for original music was further endorsed by jules o’riordan (a.k.a. judge jules), tristan hunt from the association for electronic music, and leading music industry executive silvia montello, in an online round table discussion streamed live 6 may 2021 (music research group 2021). in this forum, they discussed nightclubs’ importance to the electronic music industry, with jules describing them as the “soil in which the more underground records grow”. apart from being testing grounds for new music, nightclubs also serve to facilitate other arts, providing a workshop, laboratory and presentation space for the visual arts, such as painters, video artists and fashion designers (drevenstedt 2020: 17). by the same token, they allow audiences to appreciate these different arts in conjunction with each other, offering them a more complex and active aesthetic experience than that resulting from visiting a gallery, for example, given that in clubs the patrons are not merely passive consumers of art, but are active contributors, inventing new ways of dancing, talking and enjoying themselves. offering aesthetic pleasures is especially important, given that a significant proportion of club goers are not used to visiting places of high culture, such as opera houses or museums. clubbing thus assists in career development and provides a resource in civic and aesthetic education, whilst facilitating cultural engagement for mainstream audiences. british nightclubs before the covid pandemic nightclubs constitute part of the night time industry, and to assess its role, it is worth defining this term and considering the night time sector at large. it is normally defined as the broad ecosystem of businesses operating between the hours of 6pm and 6am. according to the night time industries association, the night time economy contributes £66 billion per year to the uk economy. this makes the sector the uk’s fifth largest industry, accounting for 1.3 million jobs and 8 per cent of the uk’s total workforce (night time industry association). with a vast supply chain of sole traders and suppliers, alongside supporting thousands of freelancers and auxiliary businesses, the sector is a core pillar of the british economy. 60 per cent of town centre revenue is generated after 6pm. much of the attraction of nightlife is in participating in music events and uk music estimates that for every £10 spent in a live music venue, a further £17 is spent in the local community. many of these venues play electronic music for dancing, with much of it produced in the uk. this should be also seen in the context of the global position of the uk popular music industry, which is the third biggest music market in the world, behind only the usa and japan (ifpi 2020). furthermore, popular music is a major export for the uk, generating £2.9 billion for the british economy in 2019 (uk music 2020), and as previously stated, nightclubs are laboratories for some of this new music. moreover, some british clubbing brands have gone dancecult 13(1)74 on to become globally respected market leading businesses. ministry of sound, launched in 1991, became a global lifestyle empire, developing substantial digital communities, a global events business delivering hundreds of club nights all over the world each year, as well as fashion and consumer electronics businesses. the brand also launched a number of nightclubs with international partners in overseas locations. it is also worth noting that ministry developed a substantial record label out of their london club which was acquired by sony music in 2016 for a sum in the region of £67 million (ingham 2017). perhaps most importantly, organisations such as ministry of sound incubated early career talent, producing many of today’s leaders and senior managers in the creative industries. these include the current president of rca uk at sony music entertainment david dollimore; the managing director at island records, nicola spokes; the managing director at marie claire (future media), caroline stent; as well as individuals holding senior positions in leading digital organisations such as soundcloud and facebook. there have also been serious problems experienced by british nightclubs. most importantly, the nightclub sector in britain has been contracting. britain had circa 1,500 nightclubs before the onset of the pandemic, but this number had previously been significantly higher. in london alone, during the first half of the 2010s, the number of nightclubs across the city’s 33 local authorities decreased by 50% (see haslam 2015b; cafe 2016 and lima and davies 2017). moreover, british nightclubs could be regarded as precarious according to three criteria. first, their profit to sales ratio runs at a far from luxurious position, thus in normal circumstances there is an ever-present risk where profits can change into loss. secondly, they are subject to seasonal patterns, with the bulk of their profits being made during several relatively short periods, often mimicking the students’ calendar, such as freshers’ week in university towns and cities, with the converse typically occurring in locations without universities. thirdly, as is the case in many hospitality businesses, clubs have a high payroll to sales ratio due to many transactions being of low value but requiring labour intensive delivery, as is common with the sale of drinks. furthermore, there are legal pressures to provide minimum levels of security personnel, all of whom must have been vetted, trained and registered with the security industries association. this means that when their staff costs are not fully covered, shortfalls can cost them more than owners of other businesses. over time, nightclubs became victims of progressively more stringent constraints and other commercial pressures. in addition to the licensing act 2003, which placed late licenses for the service of alcohol within the grasp of almost any licensed premises, clubs were also subjected to restrictions placed by policy makers on the level of discounts applicable to drinks’ prices (talbot 2006). at the same time, supermarkets were permitted to sell unrestricted quantities of alcoholic beverages at any price. the result of this rule was the development of behaviours such as clubbers pre-loading with alcohol and pushing back the start of their night out, with clubs getting the blame for the ensuing alcohol-related disorder. it is interesting to note that, according to one of our interviewees, the average number of drinks purchased per customer in a club is often somewhere in the region of two per visit, although this can often be a double spirit shot with a mixer, depending on the type mazierska and rigg | challenges to british nightclubs during and after the covid-19 pandemic 75 of club and duration of visit. of the many forces that have compromised nightclubs and led to evolving customer propositions, social media and dating apps have also impacted heavily on nightclub attendances, particularly between 2005 and 2012, providing an alternative means to meet new people and partners. at this moment however, the sector began to experience stabilisation as evolving consumer behaviours settled, with clubbing activities in cities demonstrating more resilience than in provincial towns. despite their contributions to the british economy, as well as social and cultural life, nightclubs have historically received little support from central and local governments and have suffered bad press. this situation can be attributed to the character of entertainment offered by clubs as well as certain misconceptions about club music and culture. club music is seen as different from classical music and live music due to being commercial and lacking the “authenticity” possessed by artists playing acoustic instruments in front of a static audience (mau and nicholas 2020). this is despite the fact that it has been demonstrated on many occasions that djs and other performers in nightclub productions can be virtuosos of their instruments in the same way as singers, pianists and violinists. clubbing is also associated with violent behaviour, caused by alcohol and drug consumption, as well as corridors of hospital er wards filled with intoxicated and injured young people. this perception is not without validity (hughes et al. 2007; pedersen et al. 2016), but nightclubs should also be seen as a way to minimise these social problems and contain them in the safest way possible, thanks to such measures as stringent door policies, id checking and risk-assessment protocols. the message that clubbing is dangerous reverberated within policy with the introduction of form 696. effective from 2005 till 2017, it was the paperwork used by london’s metropolitan police to measure the risk of violence at music events by gathering the personal details of artists and promoters, targeting genres such as grime, garage, r&b and house. in a wider sense, it targeted black, working-class music culture (bernard 2018). so pervasive was its use that the whole london grime scene was nearly derailed, with a similar approach adopted by police across the rest of the country (rymajdo 2017). this example points to two issues which play an important role in the treatment of nightclubs during the covid pandemic. one is an apparent lack of appreciation on the part of the authorities for the value of nightclubs, especially under the conservative government, arguably in part reflecting the fact that young people and people on low incomes (the majority of the nightclubs’ employees) do not constitute the main voting bloc for this party. another connected issue, is a lack of understanding of the specific ways in which nightclubs function, including the seasonality of clubbing and the precarity of the sector, which means that even the most successful operators do not have large cash reserves nor command the same level of trust of the banks as other, admittedly more sustainable businesses. clubs were further hit by the smoking ban in 2007, the purpose of which was to improve the health of the population. this ban drove some clubbers away, in part because many of them were smokers and in part because smoking was seen as part of the club atmosphere, which actually served to mask other odours. dancecult 13(1)76 to summarise this part of the article, we argue that prior to covid, british nightclubs faced many challenges, but managed to hold their ground and enter a period of stabilisation. methodological approach the empirical part of our research is based on interviews with industry insiders from different sub-sectors and regions of britain, conducted in october and november 2020. they include sacha lord, who is the night time economy advisor for greater manchester, as well as a founder of the uk’s market leading dance music event warehouse project and parklife festival. lord was appointed as greater manchester’s “night tsar” in june 2018, with manchester following in the footsteps of london, berlin and amsterdam (heward 2018). we also interviewed peter marks, who is c.e.o. of the largely southern based rekom uk (formerly deltic group), at the time the uk’s largest operator of late night entertainment venues. another of our interviewees is an international operator, aaron mellor, who is owner and c.e.o. of the market leading music venue and club chain tokyo industries. he has many northern based premises in his estate and an expanding international portfolio. we also interviewed michael kill who is the c.e.o. of the n.t.i.a. (night time industries association) industry trade body. our final interviewees were martha bolton, an event promoter and manager of a female collective of djs called “not bad for a girl”, operating in the north-west of england, and graham massey, a well-known electronic musician from manchester. with the exceptions of lord and bolton, rigg has worked closely with the respondents, in particular with marks and mellor, in varying roles and capacities. the interviews lasted between one and a half and two hours and were semi-structured. we asked our informants how the covid restrictions affected the nightclub sector and their own business or area of work, as well as how they assessed the ways the authorities used to mitigate the negative consequences of these restrictions. we also asked them about possible scenarios for nightclubs if the restrictions persisted and if they were entirely or partially lifted. the first set of interviews was followed by e-mail exchanges, to revisit points which required clarification after transcribing and to find out where the responses were still valid, given the fast-changing situation of the covid pandemic. in the choice of our interviewees we followed several criteria. we wanted to get a picture from people with protracted experience in the sector and a more holistic outlook, able to comment not only on the position of their enterprise, but the sector as a whole. for this reason, we approached michael kill and sacha lord. secondly, we tried to collect testimonies about the situations in different regions of britain: michael kill, peter marks and aaron mellor all had such insights. thirdly, we tried to gather views of representatives of different clubbing professions: most importantly managers and organisers of events, and therefore we also asked martha bolton for her views. as our goal was not to present the specific views of each interviewed person, but to use their testimonies to paint a larger picture, we decided not to attribute individual views to each of our interviewees. another reason to do so was the fact that our informants shared similar insights into the situation of clubs during covid. mazierska and rigg | challenges to british nightclubs during and after the covid-19 pandemic 77 a further source of information feeding into our research was the report “covid-19 and uk nightlife: an inquiry by the all-party group for the night time economy”, published in february 2021, which documented the impact of the covid pandemic and the measures taken to control it within the night time economy at large, as well as the recommendations concerning the reopening of this sector and its recovery. it was one of the main sources on which the next section of this article is based. we were also following information about the situation of nightclubs and the consequences of their closures in the british press. the landscape of clubbing during the covid pandemic as our informants told us, the covid pandemic caught them by surprise, as was also the case with most other businesses and institutions. they were unprepared for its immediate impact on british and european populations, as well as its protracted duration. one of our interviewees compared the reaction to going through five stages of grief, beginning with denial, namely insisting that the situation was not serious and would not last for long. this surprise was understandable, given that the whole country was unprepared for the scale of the problem and the government’s continuously changing strategy to fight it, especially the multiple lockdowns which resulted in many businesses being closed, opened and closed again, whilst, however, nightclubs remained shut. the british government recognised that it could not expect businesses to close and cover their losses themselves. accordingly, it came up with eleven schemes which were intended to ease the burden of those businesses forced to close or reduce operations during the crisis. some of these were blanket policies, but others had caveats attached, which had the potential to prevent or reduce eligibility. nightclubs predominantly qualified for three of these schemes, with some exceptions qualifying for others. one that nightclubs did qualify for was the coronavirus job retention support scheme, popularly known as furlough, which covered 80 per cent of the wages of furloughed employees for hours not worked, with employers covering national insurance and pension contributions. however, from the perspective of employers, this scheme was far from satisfactory due to the need to make up the shortfall in wages, as well as the fact that staff continued to accrue holiday entitlement throughout the period of closure at a very significant cost to operators, despite employees not actually being permitted to do any work to offset the cost implications. one of the operators interviewed was still holding a payroll of 1,300 employees a year after having been ordered to cease trading, despite already reluctantly having made redundancies, exiting a number of sites and having had to seek alternative financial backing to survive. arguably, the furlough scheme and the parallel self-employment income support scheme (seiss), which operated on a similar basis to the furlough scheme, running through a similar time period, was not designed to help the nightclub sector, but only to prevent mass unemployment. furthermore, the operators were required to deal with the administrative processes at their own expense, in effect serving as benefit processing agencies, whilst being unable to generate any revenue. dancecult 13(1)78 other strands of help that nightclubs qualified for included rates forgiveness. however, the relief provided by this scheme, whilst helpful, was relatively small. a moratorium preventing the eviction of tenants for non-payment of rent at a time of closure, has enabled many operators to mothball and hold onto their businesses. whilst this may have bought time, it is simply storing up a problem for when the rent arrears eventually have to be paid. despite this, if a business goes bankrupt, unless there is a payment of the accrued debt, the landlord is within their rights to take on another tenant, thus assigning the value in the premises to the new company, to the detriment of the creditors of the original business. as well as the heavy payroll commitments and rental costs, there are other significant costs typically associated with running a nightclub business, whether it is able to trade or not, including property related costs such as service charges on rental premises; essential maintenance; the upkeep of legally required certifications and insurances; utility costs, which typically have significant fixed charges; and costs associated with licenses. in this respect, managers of nightclubs are in a much more difficult position than music festivals for example, which typically do not have the burden of these fixed costs. all businesses forced to close due to covid-19 were eligible to claim grants via their local authorities, with the size of the grant linked to the rateable value of the business. in addition, retail, hospitality and leisure businesses were able to claim one-off grants from £4,000 up to £9,000 based on their rateable value, and local authorities in england have been provided with over £1.5bn of funding overall to support businesses on a discretionary basis. another form of support was the culture recovery fund: a £1.57bn package of grants delivered through the arts council england, the national lottery heritage fund, historic england and the british film institute. it was open to applications from organisations deemed to meet core eligibility criteria based on cultural significance, financial viability and sustainability. whilst some nightclubs such as ministry of sound in london and the cavern club in liverpool, as well as other operators of electronic music events such as warehouse project did receive awards, only a small number of the very well-known operators were recipients, whilst the largest operator of uk nightclubs at the time, deltic group (now rekom), received nothing at all. it is perhaps also telling that the winners of the grants were required publicly to acknowledge the awards they received. although these grants were welcomed, they were not seen as well-tailored to the needs of the night time economy and the nightclub sector in particular. according to our informants, institutions awarding these grants were less inclined to recognise popular music and specifically music more typically consumed in nightclubs. moreover, some grant schemes were designed in such a way that nightclubs could not apply. this referred, for example, to the local authority grant schemes, which permitted applications only from companies which were not allowed to hold debt or those which opened their premises during the pandemic, even if only working at a fraction of their capacity. this type of support also laid bare the fact that popular music professionals, in contrast to their counterparts operating in the classical music and other “high art” segments of the industry, were not experienced in writing grant applications, having been able to rely mazierska and rigg | challenges to british nightclubs during and after the covid-19 pandemic 79 on their commercial viability prior to covid. hence they were at a disadvantage when competing against those who previously supported themselves through government money and the patronage of other arts funding institutions. as one of our informants told us, there was also open hostility to music typically associated with clubs and their orientation towards playing pre-recorded music. this came from politicians such as oliver dowden, the secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport, who we were told said in parliament that live music should be permitted during lockdown, but that this would not include music played in nightclubs, as it is not “live”. this echoes the previously mentioned view that popular electronic music is perceived by some as lacking authenticity. club music was thus seen as being caught in a limbo between classical live music, played in high art venues, which traditionally receives the bulk of subsidies from the state, and more popular live music, played in smaller, local grassroots venues, which prior to covid started to be seen as important for developing local talent and local culture, largely due to the well documented fact that they were in decline. another source of prejudice towards such music, according to our interviewees, was the perception that its culture, in common with the entire night time economy, was lacking in professionalism, employing people with low cultural capital. in reality, as we argue, its economy is based on collaboration between people with different skills. this, in our opinion, constitutes its strength, as it represents a cross-section of society. another grudge that clubs had towards policymakers was the singling out of the hospitality sector as a source of a large number of infections. however, this was not the case, as demonstrated by the fact that according to figures released by public health england, during the five to six weeks at the start of the pandemic when clubs were permitted to operate, the hospitality sector had between only 2 and 4 per cent of traceable transmissions of the virus. even when schemes like “eat out to help out” were introduced, this did not result in a spike of covid cases. in fact, during the time when pubs were allowed to open, cases of covid fell rather than going up (thatcher 2020). it is also worth noting that, as a consequence of legislative legacy, clubs have very efficient air exchange systems, in contrast to other hospitality businesses such as pubs, which makes them less prone to covid transmissions. despite this, the hospitality sector was targeted for closures, unlike other institutions of cultural production such as university campuses, which were allowed to operate. according to our informants, this pointed to the fact that the government’s covid strategy was based less on epidemiological evidence than on choosing to close those sectors of the economy which were easy to close, while keeping open those which were difficult to close due to the state’s investment in them and possible social backlash, even if they were covid hotspots. this grudge was increased by the fact that many clubs invested heavily, in the area of £20,000 to £30,000 per club, to create covid-safe environments. this investment was largely wasted as clubs had to remain closed and were the last hospitality businesses to be permitted to reopen. another issue affecting nightclubs during the pandemic was the lack of clear information provided by the government as to when clubs would be able to operate, under what dancecult 13(1)80 conditions and whether this “new normality” would be permanent or cyclical. against this backdrop, arrangements to resource the survival of nightclub businesses such as bank loans, would be difficult to assess without a sense of the extent of the problem. this was in part attributable to the level of uncertainty pertaining to the behaviour of the virus itself, as well as social reaction to the danger it poses, but also, in the view of our respondents, resulted from the government’s hostile and possibly disingenuous attitude to the night time economy and nightclubs. this arguably prejudicial attitude was reflected in the government’s unwillingness to establish what “covid-secure” meant in relation to clubs, so that club owners could adjust their premises in order to achieve the required level of safety and demonstrate it to the authorities. despite this, the ntia resourced research and produced a series of risk mitigation policies and guidelines with a view to demonstrating that they were no less safe than other hospitality businesses that were encouraged and even incentivised to reopen. it could also be argued that the government has broken a social contract with british businesses, according to which businesses pay their taxes in recognition that a proportion of such payments would be used to pay them back during a period of hardship, especially if this occurred at no fault of these businesses. in particular, as one of our informants suggested, if a nightclub chain contributed £3.3 million per month in corporation tax, it would surely make sense to support it to the sum of £1 million per month if it would ensure successful “hibernation” and recovery post pandemic to start paying taxes again. it is also worth noting that nightclub operations are very efficient with regard to giving back to the economy, for a number of reasons, including the high payroll to sales ratio, which is around 30 per cent of turnover, and thus being subject to income tax and employer’s national insurance contributions, as well as feeding into public spending. furthermore, with a not insignificant proportion of their income being derived from the sale of alcohol, this also contributes to the economy through additional alcohol duties, not to mention corporation tax on profits. bankrupting them for no fault of their own is not only ethically questionable, but also detrimental to the british economy. a further concern in the covid pre-vaccine era was the blossoming of unregulated raves and parties, which are arguably more conducive to spreading the virus and other problems. examples of such activities included two unregulated “quarantine raves” in greater manchester, that attracted 6,000 people between 13 and 14 june 2020 and resulted in reports of a 20 year old male dying from a suspected drug overdose, a woman being raped, three stabbings and with police officers attending being met with violence. indeed, the closing of nightclubs and the consequential gap is likely to have given rise to such a situation. furthermore, police across the country attended to numerous illegal parties during the first lockdown. between 25 march and 7 april, 1,132 coronavirus-related breaches were reported to the greater manchester police force, which included 494 house parties and 166 street parties (bbc news2020a). how many were not discovered, it is impossible to say, in light of their clandestine character. there is no doubt, however, that they resulted in an increased health risk, given that such parties did not include any official mazierska and rigg | challenges to british nightclubs during and after the covid-19 pandemic 81 risk assessment procedures, not to mention the loss of revenue for the government, as taxes were not collected from such events. the combined effect of nightclubs’ protracted closure, and a sense that the night time economy was dispensable or at least of low social and economic value, led to fears of financial insecurity among people working in this sector. 60 per cent of employees surveyed felt they may lose their jobs as a result of the pandemic and not be able to return to their chosen professions (“report on impact of covid-19 on uk nightlife” 2021). further illustrating this, as reported by mixmag, in a survey of 20,000 djs conducted by the music community pirate.com, 70 per cent of djs had “decided to retrain or learn a new skill” (wheeler 2021). such a sense affects both their morale and creativity, adding to the expectations that talent in electronic music will exit the sector or leave britain to relocate to countries more friendly towards club culture, such as germany. exit strategy and post-lockdown scenario when talking to our informants about their future, we asked three questions. one was how they planned to survive the most acute crisis, namely the period of closure during the lockdown, the duration of which was unknown at the time. the second was about conditions of re-opening nightclubs and the immediate period after this. thirdly, we asked about how the pandemic might affect long-term plans within the club sector. the government announced a road map out of lockdown on 22 february 2021 with key dates pertaining to releasing restrictions, though with the caveat that the implementation would be subject to data, rather than dates. it was announced that shops, beauty parlours, gyms and outdoor hospitality would be permitted on 12 april. indoor pubs, restaurants and entertainment would be reinstated on 17 may, with all limits on social contact lifted on 21 june. clearly these were broad statements, but with a promise of more detail to follow. whilst this communication provided hope to the general public, more specific information was required by operators to enable planning and a return to trading. following this, various trials to investigate the safe return of sports matches, events and nightclubs were announced, including a pilot scheme for club activity, by way of two 3,000 capacity events on 30 april and 1 may in liverpool organised without social distancing, which required attendees to be able to demonstrate a negative test taken within 24 hours of the event as a condition of entry (mehta 2021). in relation to the first question, prior to these announcements, the conclusion was that the sector as a whole would be able to survive only if offered substantial help from the government. this included extending the furlough scheme until businesses could operate without restrictions, extending vat and business rates relief through 2021, expanding eligibility for the culture recovery fund and providing a sector-specific support package. in particular, industry leaders suggested that clubs might survive the period of “hibernation” if their costs (apart from salaries, covered by furlough) were divided equally among three interested parties: the club owners, the landlords and the state. conversely, putting all nondancecult 13(1)82 salary expenses on the shoulders of clubs might result in the sector losing 50-70 per cent of its venues after a year of inactivity. obviously, the longer the inactivity lasted, the greater the number of bankruptcies, and the longer the suffering from the commercial legacy of deeper debt. whilst following up after the initial series of interviews, one of our respondents reported it was his understanding that they would be able to operate without restrictions from 17 may. however, in the unfolding picture, the government announced that a vaccine passport would be required to enter, specifically marking out nightclubs as associated with spreading covid, only to give up on this idea in a matter of days ( jackson 2021). again, this testified to the problems experienced by the club sector, resulting from the lack of a clear and consistent approach to it from the political authorities. by this point, however, and in light of the fact that vaccine passports have been widely adopted in other countries, it is expected that they will be required in britain as well. an alternative to this is proof of a negative covid test result. some of our interviewees saw a move to cashless operation for clubs as likely. these changes also hold implications relating to a “culture of surveillance”, which might be contentious to a significant proportion of potential visitors, concerned about their privacy or simply unwilling to endure extra bureaucratic burdens. it is already noted that the idea of “vaccine passports” proved unpopular in britain, especially among the young who would be less inclined to obtain such passports due to being last in the queue for vaccinations, as well as safety concerns about the astrazeneca vaccine, resulting from a possible link between this vaccine and blood clotting, leading to serious side-effects, including death (boseley 2021). other safety measures that had been considered included working at less than full capacity, and for reduced hours. however, apart from this resulting in lowering the income of nightclubs, it would also have negative effects on the club atmosphere. our interviewees pointed out that a key component of the club experience is the energy generated by the crowd, which is compromised in the case of partial capacity events, and they unanimously agreed that this was not a feasible scenario. in theory, moving some of nightclubs’ activities outdoors could help to make up for the lost capacity, because outdoor activities are perceived to be safer. in practice, however, nightclubs seldom benefit from having significant outside spaces. even if they did, there are a number of practical issues to consider, including the british climate and the noise typically associated with clubbing. irrespective of these adjustments, nightclubs cannot just simply open their doors and recommence trading without planning and preparation. “hibernated” premises require significant preparation and maintenance to be reactivated. calendars are often punctuated with “concert level” events, which are subject to the availability of talent and require advance promotion to ensure commercial success. it was hoped that the sector would benefit from some specific government support, such as lowering of vat, but again, in contrast to other hospitality businesses, nightclubs were mazierska and rigg | challenges to british nightclubs during and after the covid-19 pandemic 83 afforded no comparable benefits. government-backed insurance schemes were also hoped for as a solution to spiralling commercial rent debt, though again, at the time of writing, these were not forthcoming. in the long term, it is expected that nightclubs might change in two ways. first, they may need to extend the scope of their operations and be better integrated with other cultural activities, thus providing access to additional funding prospects. this means that venues will need to be more versatile, extend trading hours and expand into additional demographics beyond clubbers. there was already clear evidence of this happening before the pandemic, with some operators disassociating themselves with the term “nightclub” in favour of other descriptors such as “music venue” and “arts and event space”, an approach employed by aaron mellor with some of his venues. this is a trend we expect to continue moving forward. this framing is also reflective of the evolving product and services on offer in some venues, though equally there are operators who will continue to embrace more traditional approaches. another possible change concerns the convergence of the digital realm with music and real-world clubbing experiences. the covid induced disruptions to nightclubs inspired some operators to look beyond the historic scope of their activities into the digital realm. areas investigated that are likely to manifest include apps for virtual and remote access and interactions with real world events and participants. smart devices and gaming technologies, including virtual reality hardware, hold potential to facilitate the convergence of virtual and real worlds. furthermore, such investigations have increased the appetite of operators to enhance real world experiences with augmented reality, tapping into the medium of customers’ smart phones. with steps being made towards these initiatives also comes potential for new models of practice and business. conclusions it is commonplace to say that the covid pandemic is a testing period in the history of britain and the western world at large, often being compared to the period of the second world war. it is thus not surprising that nightclubs share in this difficulty and trauma. however, our argument is that their share was larger than it could and should be, reflecting the prejudices of the political authorities against the night time economy, the liminal status of electronic music and, paradoxically, the financial self-reliance of the sector pre-covid. this meant that the sector was disadvantaged, vulnerable and thus dependant on state help during the period of crises, and that this help was small, patchy and poorly-tailored to the needs of the nightclub sector. consequently, there have been nightclubs that have not survived the pandemic, exacerbating the long-standing shrinkage and precarity of british nightclubs. the smaller the venues and the smaller their financial reserves pre-covid, the greater the danger that they would cease to operate during a period of restrictions, or even after them, due to the need to deal with the problems that accumulated during their inactivity. the larger operators with deeper pockets, and those without rent liabilities, were, of course, better placed to weather the storm. however, even the largest of the uk nightclub operators became a casualty, though it largely re-emerged with a new investment dancecult 13(1)84 scenario. this article highlights a number of points which suggest key policy makers are unsympathetic to nightclubs or are at least more inclined towards supporting other aspects of the uk economy and the hospitality industries. however, professional industry associations such as the ntia hold potential to educate and influence policy makers as to the benefits nightclubs offer to society and the economy. that said, the economic benefits will be smaller due to pandemic related sector shrinkage. it is fair to say that the ntia made significant inroads, however, their task was not an easy one. some of the closed and vacant sites are likely to re-emerge as nightclubs or similar operations, but others will be lost and re-purposed. although the situation for nightclubs has been and remains very difficult at the time of writing, we argue that they deserve to be saved, as the alternative would be a great loss for the british economy, culture and social life. moreover, the covid pandemic showed a need for the closer collaboration between different stakeholders in the nightclub sector, such as local authorities and landlords, as well as the need for better information about the different 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developer over noise”. the morning advertiser, 8 january. <https://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/ article/2014/01/08/ministry-of-sound-noise-boris-johnson>, (accessed 27 september 2021). cafe, rebecca. 2016. “last call: what’s happened to london’s nightlife?” bbc news, 7 october. <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-37546558>, (accessed 3 september 2021). campkin, ben and laura marshall. 2016. lgbtq+ nightlife in london: 1986 to the present. london: ucl urban lab. ———. 2017. lgbtq+ cultural infrastructure in london: night venues, 2006–present. london: ucl urban lab. ———. 2018. “london’s nocturnal queer geographies: why have london’s lgbtq+ nightlife venues been closing and what is at stake when they are lost?”. soundings: a journal of politics and culture 70: 82-96. <https://doi.org/10.3898/soun.70.06.2018> drevenstedt, lukas. 2020. “dimensions of club culture: learning from berlin”. in the new age of electronic dance music and club culture, ed. anita jóri and martin lücke, 9-20. cham: springer. graham, regina and sheila flynn. 2019. “saturday night fever! how 1970s new yorkers living for the weekend turned the city in to a hedonistic mecca and dance the nights away at clubs like studio 54”. daily mail, 12 january. <https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ article-6582751/saturday-night-fever-1970s-new-yorkers-living-weekend-hedonistic-meccastudio-54.html>, (accessed 16 september 2021). hae, laam. 2012. the gentrification of nightlife and the right to the city: regulating spaces of social dancing in new york. london: routledge. haslam, dave. 2015a. life after dark. london and new york: simon & schuster. ———. 2015b. “uk clubs are closing – this is how a nightlife revolution begins”. the guardian, 11 august. <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/11/clubsclosing-nightlife-uk>, (accessed 12 september 2021). heward, emily. 2018. “parklife and warehouse project boss sacha lord appointed as greater manchester’s first ‘night tsar’”. manchester evening 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<https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2006.00642.x>. thatcher, nikkie. 2020. “how many coronavirus cases since pubs reopened?”. the morning advertiser, 21 september. <https://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/article/2020/09/21/howmany-coronavirus-cases-have-there-been-since-pubs-reopened>, (accessed 20 march 2021). thornton, sarah. 1995. club culture. cambridge: polity press. uk music. 2020. “music by numbers 2020”. uk music, 18 november. <https://www.ukmusic.org/ wp-content/uploads/2020/11/music-by-numbers-2020.pdf>, (accessed 10 march 2021). wheeler, seb. 2021. “70 per cent of djs have retrained due to the pandemic”. mixmag, 18 march. <https://mixmag.asia/read/djs-retrained-pandemic-lockdown-international>, (accessed 26 march 2021). filmography music research group. 2021. “the evolution of electronic dance music industry discussion panel and book launch – uclan.” youtube. uploaded on may 6 2021. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94vgvqwh7d>, (accessed 1 october 2021). personal communications martha bolton, interview with the authors (on zoom), 9 march 2021. martha bolton, email to authors, 9 may 2021. michael kill, interview with the authors (on microsoft teams), 6 november 2020. michael kill, email to authors, 6 may 2021. sacha lord, interview with the authors (on zoom), 4 november 2020. peter marks, interview with the authors (on microsoft teams), 6 november 2020. peter marks, email to authors, 12 april 2021. graham massey, interview with tony rigg (telephone), 27 september 2021. aaron mellor, interview with the authors (on microsoft teams), 9 november 2020. https://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/article/2018/10/08/pubs-bars-and-restaurants-will-save-the-high-street https://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/article/2018/10/08/pubs-bars-and-restaurants-will-save-the-high-street https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2006.00642.x https://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/article/2020/09/21/how-many-coronavirus-cases-have-there-been-since-pubs-reopened https://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/article/2020/09/21/how-many-coronavirus-cases-have-there-been-since-pubs-reopened https://www.ukmusic.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/music-by-numbers-2020.pdf https://www.ukmusic.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/music-by-numbers-2020.pdf https://mixmag.asia/read/djs-retrained-pandemic-lockdown-international https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94vgvqwh7d a post-post-soviet scene post-quarantine camille leblanc liederman vytautas magnus university (lithuania) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.03> the quarantine officially ended in lithuania on 17 june 2020, the day before i gave my master's thesis defense.[1] the final three months of my research directly corresponded with the three months of lithuanian quarantine, which started on 16 march. this had an enormous impact on what my thesis ended up being about and my methodology for the final stages of my data collection. while it was a scary time for all of us around the world, it was also an epic time to be collecting anthropological data on an underground culture, specifically rave culture.[2] my work became about presenting a portrait of lithuanian rave culture as it existed just before this quarantine took place. although the end of quarantine marked the end of my official research period, it also marked the beginning of the post-quarantine event season. this report will briefly touch upon what (some) rave events have been like in a post-quarantine lithuania. some potential trends might be echoed in different local contexts that researchers might want to look out for as their fieldwork locations begin opening up, particularly those working in post-soviet countries. situating lithuanian rave culture the post-soviet context is inseparable from the beginning of rave in lithuania during the 1990s. the creative consumption of symbols from the soviet past, "symbolic sampling", by the members of the last soviet generation was the genesis of rave culture in post-soviet societies (yurchak 1996: 99). when the transition period ended around the mid-2000s with lithuania joining the european union and switching its currency to the euro, this symbolic sampling combined with the creative consumption of goods in a newly opened, post-soviet capitalist market (baločkaitė 2011: 409).[3] while rave culture was begun by the last soviet generation (circa 1980s), and there are still people from this generation highly involved as organizers and participants today, during the transition period (circa 1990s) a new generation entered the scene, "the truly new, post-soviet generation" (yurchak 1996: 99). and now, another new generation, which i call the post-post-soviet generation, has entered and started to develop rave culture to match its particular cultural logic. with the entrance of each new generation and the intermingling of the different and varied sensibilities, there are accompanying discursive shifts within the larger rave culture, specifically regarding its institutionalization and commercialization. rave culture in lithuania is primarily an event culture (st john 2016) because the only in-person manifestations of the raver community happen at rave events. events within rave culture, as they are primarily understood in lithuania, include those in clubs, free parties and festivals. this means that raves are both institutionalized and commercialized, but some raves are neither of these things, which is slightly confusing. the distinctive mark of rave culture according to my interlocutors is that it is "underground", but this is a vague, multivocal and relative concept. it is also a concept that carries specific connotations in a post-soviet context, namely: something that is illegal and/or something that is about resistance (these things are related). these connotations for the underground are both deeply intertwined with the worldview of lithuanian ravers, even for people within the post-post-soviet generation. both connotations are found in the explanation of lithuanian underground culture as described to me by one of my interlocutors, a 19-year-old student from vilnius who self-identifies as a raver and does face painting at many different psytrance raves (in both clubs and festivals). her explanation is representative of what many others said: the lithuanian underground culture has always been strong historically, especially since the soviet union oppression and annexes. and not necessarily that underground culture was just rebellious, we had this thing called knygnešys [lithuanian book smugglers], who are our culture heroes... who would carry books through the borders, and that was one of our country's bigger rebellious ways against the oppression, to spread culture and art.[4] as alice o'grady pointed out: "while on the one hand [these events] sit within the tradition of earlier countercultural scenes such as raves, free parties and occupations, from another perspective they are the output of a process of domestication of this same legacy" (2015: 92). her analysis was based specifically on uk outdoor festivals, but the notion of domestication (or commercialization) is also applicable to rave culture in general, particularly to what's happening in rave clubs. lithuanian ravers are keenly aware of this process and implement several (sometimes incongruent) strategies to combat this, often simultaneously. the most popular strategy for combatting the commercialization of rave culture is emphasizing its underground nature, which happens discursively (in person and especially online) and in the marketing for events and artists. the term "underground" was mentioned nearly every single time i asked my interlocutors what the terms "rave", "raver", or "rave culture" mean. this is including interlocutors from all different parts of the rave culture milieu in lithuania (e.g. different subgenres and generations). most seemed to employ the notion of the underground as a tool for differentiating what they are doing from the mainstream. quarantine and the underground renaissance during the quarantine, i stayed at home. this gave me the time to go through and revisit all my data to determine what kind of finalizing data i would need to collect and determine a methodology for collecting it. all of the official in-person events scheduled during the main lockdown period were canceled and many more were postponed (some several times, others indefinitely). so, i became much more actively engaged with the secret facebook groups, where people were complaining about quarantine, hosting virtual raves/festivals with facebook live and sharing memes/posts lamenting about how much they miss rave. about two weeks into quarantine, a petition created on the lithuanian platform www.peticijos.lt/visos/ was circulated in facebook groups to ensure that people who are not ravers cannot use the term "rave" for their branding. the now deleted petition stated (translated from lithuanian): they take advantage of another culture to push their product cheaply... prominent public figures clearly do not understand what styles of music (e.g. techno) dominate in real raves and grind everything into one. don't be indifferent and sign this petition if you don't want to be called 'rave' every song played on power hit radio in the future. the petition, with 281 signatures, was targeted at two specific djs. one of my key interlocutors throughout this research project explained: it's a project of two guys who are djs and producers of edm. they have their own festival which is [an] edm festival. and they are calling that 'rave' and themselves and festival attendance as 'ravers'. because we have quite a strong rave culture it's kind of an insult... this is basically everything what ravers don't like, beginning from people, their taste in music, attitude, lifestyle and so on... it's not like super offensive, i don't really think ravers care much, it's more like wtf.[5] what was most interesting about this was that it seemed that the quarantine's void in actual rave events taking place was being filled with an amplified discourse of "real" and "fake" ravers, a discursive differencing mechanism that has been documented as part of lithuanian rave culture since the 1990s (šliavaitė 1997). for example, here is a comment about the petition representative of the thoughts of most commentators: "the radioist style, called raving, humiliates the true raving culture and its representatives. don't confuse simple popular music with real raving". although my formal research was finished before i was able to truly dive into the effects of quarantine on contemporary sociality and individuality, the way that rave has re-emerged post-quarantine seems to suggest that this discourse emphasizing authentic raving as underground might be translating into practice. the mid-quarantine underground scene like many other countries, lithuania eased its restrictions in phases. bars with outdoor seating areas were allowed to open on 23 april. although they were technically open, serving and playing music, these places weren't allowed to hold larger events until recently with the end of the official quarantine period on 17 june. during this in-between time, bars and restaurants were required to abide by specific guidelines, namely: everyone wears masks, only two people at each table who must be at least a meter apart. from my observations of underground music bars as well as most other places in kaunas, these guidelines were barely followed, e.g. there were often more than two people per table, and it was rare to see a mask. although all mass gatherings of over 150 were officially prohibited even after 17 june, i knew of several illegal parties happening with up to 400. i know a few people who are part of a team that organized some of these parties and, though i was unable to attend them personally, i spoke with many people about the events and received several pictures/videos. they threw three different parties during the quarantine period, each time illegally occupying an empty space within the city (kaunas). one of my friends, who has been a key interlocutor throughout my entire research period, remarked, "actually, no fucks were given about that place... but what's the worst that can happen, they just shut the party. there was that sense of doing it, lots of stress, lots of unknowns, but that's what makes it so good". he also described to me that it was like, "quarantine never happened, forget that," regarding the lack of adherence to any government-specified guidelines. it is important to emphasize that many people outside of the raver scene have also made similar comments, so it doesn't seem to be a uniquely raver thing to have taken the quarantine restrictions lightly. when i asked him about whether he thought that the quarantine was making things go more underground, he said that he agrees. he immediately started comparing the kinds of parties he and his friends were throwing (illegally occupying an empty space to have a party, even if the parties were not free) to the events in clubs. he said, "it's not about the money, it's about the rush you get". and "i would like to stay underground. we can do something legal and something on the side, more '90s".[6] the first legal club event(s) post-quarantine the quarantine officially ended on 17 june and i attended my first club event soon after, but this wasn't the first event to be held post-quarantine. that was a solstice themed event, as the holiday joninės (a.k.a. rasos, midsummer, st. john's day) is a big part of lithuanian folk culture and many people even get the day off from work. the host of the event was walden aether[7] which is one of the biggest psytrance event organizers in lithuania, and a decorating team, label and visual effects producer at events hosted by other organizers. the leader of this organization is j-magi, a member of the last soviet generation who works as a rave culture producer full time, traveling throughout europe decorating and djing at different events and festivals. although there are specific rave clubs in lithuania, walden aether does not have one primary club location, but rather rents out spaces for the events (rather than illegally occupying), sometimes small clubs, and sometimes large music venues. the attendance at the events where i conducted participant observation (pre-quarantine) varied between less than 100 to over 1,000, depending on the scale of the event and venue. at this event, the limited capacity was at 130, and there were around 80 people who attended. although walden aether usually rents out official venues, the space for the event they hosted post-quarantine was, as described to me by j-magi, "true underground".[8] next to the central train station in vilnius (lithuania's capital) there is a building that has been turned into two different bars with outdoor seating directly on the side of the train tracks. in the basement is another space sometimes rented by rave organizations for events. interestingly, j-magi described this event as "true underground", even though this was an officially rented out space, there was a cover charge and they were selling walden aether merchandise in one of the side rooms. in this sense, underground is literal (basement). but, also, the date of the event and the theme of the decorations (symbols of lithuanian paganism) implied a sense of the lithuanian cultural underground. this is the idea that rave culture is following the tradition of the lithuanian culture heroes mentioned earlier. hypothesizing future trends although my master's project is officially over, i will continue to conduct informal research on lithuanian rave culture. it seems likely that the trend of putting special emphasis on the underground (perhaps the specifically lithuanian underground) nature of rave culture will continue as we move into a post-quarantine world. this is what many ravers have optimistically hypothesized, but it remains to be seen whether the appropriation of "rave" as branding will continue to be an issue as the larger (more mainstream) clubs and organizations re-open. what will happen to underground clubs (and their discursive status of being underground) as illegal parties become more popular again? as more countries phase out their restrictions, it will be interesting to see whether a renaissance of underground parties (free or otherwise) happens in other places. or perhaps the increased government surveillance will result in further domestication of rave and other underground cultures. this will all need to be situated within its local context, but it will be interesting to examine these trends on a global level. acknowledgements i would like to thank all of the amazing people i've encountered in my research in lithuania, who have welcomed me with open arms into their community, given me their time and shared their stories with me. thank you to my colleagues and professors at vytautas magnus university who have introduced me to lithuanian culture, and to kristina šliavaitė for taking the time to discuss her work with me. i would also like to thank the contributors to this journal; had i not found it when i did, i probably would have never been able to finish my research. author biography camille leblanc liederman has recently finished her master's degree in social anthropology from vytautas magnus university in kaunas, lithuania. her main research interests are religion, spirituality, mythology and consumer society. she is originally from new orleans, louisiana, and attended undergraduate at the university of massachusetts, amherst. email: camille.liederman@gmail.com references baločkaitė, rasa. 2011. "pleasures of late socialism in soviet lithuania: strategies of resistance and dissent". journal of baltic studies 42(3): 409-25. https://doi.org/10.1080/01629778.2011.597132>. o'grady, alice. 2015. "dancing outdoors: ethics and democratized practices of well-being on the uk alternative festival circuit". dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 7(1): 76-96. https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.01.04>. šliavaitė, kristina. 1999. "reivo kulturos ypatumai lietuvoje (apie 'tikruosius' ir 'netikruosius' reiverius). socialine bei kulturos antropologija". sociologija: mintis ir veiksmas 4 (6): 78-87. https://doi.org/10.15388/socmintvei.1999.4.7017>. st. john, graham. 2016. "electronic dance music culture and religion: an overview". culture and religion 7(1): 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1080/01438300600625259>. yurchak, alexei. 1996. "gagarin and the rave kids: transforming power, identity, and aesthetics in post-soviet nightlife". in consuming russia: popular culture, sex, and society since gorbachev, ed. adele marie barker, 76-109. charlotte: duke university press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822396413-004>. notes [1] the research for this article was conducted for my master's thesis, "seeking belonging: a case study of lithuanian rave culture", which looked at identity and belonging within a specific local, post-soviet context. my research focused on rave culture in the two urban centers of lithuania, vilnius and kaunas, and took place from october 2018 to june 2020. the methodology included participant observation, ethnographic interviewing and online participant observation. this was adapted during quarantine to add two different long-answer surveys, which were inspired by lee gilmore's 2010 burning man questionnaire. [2] rave culture is used instead of edm because this term was used by my interlocutors, with edm understood as the mainstreaming of rave culture. [3] as pointed out by baločkaitė, the scholarly debate on whether or not lithuania should still be considered a post-soviet society ended in the early 2010s with no resolution, but scholars simply moved on. [4] minerva, interview with author (on facebook), 16 april 2020. for the purposes of anonymity, all names have been changed. [5] attenborough, personal communication with the author (on facebook), 1 may 2020. [6] anonymous raver, interview with the author (in person), 28 june 2020. [7] all names have been anonymized, including organization names. [8] j-magi, personal communication with the author (on facebook), 17 june 2020. ¿algoritmos? algo ¡ritmos! algorithms? algo rhythms! esteban betancur gutiérrez instituto tecnológico metropolitano (colombia) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2018.10.01.16> a sunny day in 2014, an 11-year-old boy from a latin american country, in a neighborhood with a history of violence and state abandonment, writes a few lines in something that looks like english in a simple text editor for an audience that looks at him in astonishment. some kind of electronic dance music resonates through space but no one in the public seems to understand the relationship between what he writes and what sounds. he finishes his presentation and then his 9-year old brother takes his place. the same ritual starts: some texts on a screen in something that seems english, he types something wrong, erases and corrects, and after a minute and a half, a bass accompanied by a drum, quite heavy by the way, start to sound through the speakers arranged in the parque explora of the city of medellin ... and the public, without realizing it, is moving their feet, applauding, shouts. two people raise their hands with their eyes closed as if they were at a rave. algo∼ritmos: first live coding performance made by young programmers algoraves were already happening in other places, and the work in live coding and education was already taking place in europe. by this time algorave is around its second birthday, same as sonic pi (aaron, orchard and blackwell 2014), but edm, algorave, live coding, all these concepts were far from us, and we only knew about them through the internet, but there was something that we had in mind. it had to be possible to teach music and programming using the dance floor as an excuse to make the process fun. the question was how to achieve it? could we make a workshop for children, inexperienced programmers and musicians that produces danceable results? was it possible to go further still, to the point of “finding our own voice”, not only with the results, but with the way to produce them? that is, what if we developed our own way of doing edm through the new syntaxes for the creation and manipulation of musical algorithms? of course, all this was possible. there were sonic pi (aaron 2016), tidal (mclean 2014) and ixi lang (magnusson 2011) to prove it. these examples were powerful and transparent enough to show us that writing code does not have to be black magic. and why not eliminate the installation problem too, because we saw during our workshops that installation is an obstacle for the inexperienced (tidal could be the best example of this). if we can use extramuros (ogborn 2015) we can do it collaborative (sharing text buffers, syncing audio) and networked. workshops kept coming, so it was evident we needed to find different ways to answer our questions, and for that reason an initial library was written using the possibility to expand chuck (wang, cook and salazar 2015), which is a domain-specific language developed in north america. chuck can be easily extended, so the library implemented the same cyclic approach of tidal. this approach allowed users to manipulate audio loops in repetitive cycles. in addition, it is possible to change the native words of the language and replace them with those that the performer prefers, facilitating the translation of keywords into a native language. this makes the maintenance of the individual libraries more difficult, but allows for a more expressive use of the code text. for example, the standard chuck expression: sndbuf hh => dac; me.dir () + bassdrum.wav => bd.read ; me.dir () + hithat.wav => hh.read ; 60 /120.0 => oat tempo; while (true ){ 0 => bd.pos ; (tempo/2 )::second => now; 0 => hh.pos ; (tempo/2 )::second => now; } can be written with our new library as: drum(120, 8, [1,0], [0,1]); or tempo(120); bateria.bombo([1,0]); bateria.hh([0,1]); toca => now; these two examples represent the same rhythm and show some of the particular syntaxes made. through exploring syntax modification, we discovered that code style and developing syntaxes to express rhythm was as important for performers as developing their own musical style. for this reason, through the workshops we developed multiple ways to write rhythmic patterns using libraries to expand chuck such as chmusick (betancur 2017), or mini languages inspired by tidal and ixi lang that use both chuck and supercollider or the old dirt (mclean 2014) for audio generation. from these experiments it is important to highlight cmklang (betancur 2016a) that serves as a bridge between extramuros and some of these particular syntaxes. also cqenze (betancur 2016b) that raises an alternative syntax for the manipulation of tidal patterns, including also the transformation functions of these patterns as letters. ||bd | -|hh bd+hh-+ ox hx these three examples represent the same rhythm, using particular syntaxes. through this process, we developed technical solutions which are all housed in public repositories. also, thanks to the effort, constant work and availability of accessible tools, a community of musicians and artists was built. they are using algorithms for the generation of both music and visuals in their works. we don’t know if the audience understand what we do, even with simpler syntaxes, but now we are sure that code can make them dance. coda 2017—december, morelia, mex. spencer salazar (chuck development and maintenance team) during an iclc’17 mid-week party is dancing to a very well produced techno track and suddenly he realizes it is a live coding set, after that, he looks at the screen and notice the coder is using miniaudicle (his development), then, he turns at me and asks, “he is from colombia, am i right”? i’m very excited to answer clearly but, after a few seconds i said, “yes, he is one of the guys i already told you.” i cannot stop thinking in that first time we dance to the beat of the code. author biography musician from medellin, colombia, where he has worked in many collaborations, album recordings and live sessions; also he has worked as software developer for chmusick toolkit, a library to make chuck language an algorave language. he is the author of cqenze, a dsl designed to be a first experience language for non-coders. also, he developed cinevivo, a graphics render engine for rendering live coding languages. he has been musical director in pequeño teatro, one of the most important theaters in medellin where he is one of the founders and coders of algo0ritmos, the only live coding artistic collective in medellin. software developer in ciclux and cinevivo. web: <https://essteban.github.io/> email: <essteb@gmail.com> references aaron, samuel, dominic orchard and alan f. blackwell. 2014. “temporal semantics for a live coding language”. in proceedings of the 2nd acm sigplan international workshop on functional art, music, modeling & design farm ’14, 37–47. new york: acm press. <https://doi.org/10.1145/2633638.2633648>. aaron, samuel. 2016. “sonic pi—performance in education, technology and art”. international journal of performance arts and digital media 12(2): 171–8. <https://doi.org/10.1080/14794713.2016.1227593>. betancur, esteban. 2016a. github—essteban/cmklang: bridge between chmusick and extramuros. <https://github.com/essteban/cmklang> (accessed 10 july 2018). betancur, esteban. 2016b. “diseño e implementación de un dsl: cqenze, como lenguaje de primera experiencia para el cñdigo en vivo”. in proceedings festival internacional de la imagen 2015, 1–6.manizales, colombia. <http://festivaldelaimagen.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/esteban_betancur.pdf> (accessed 10 july 2018). betancur, esteban. 2017. “chmusick, a library to make chuck an algorave like language”. in proceedings of international conference on live coding, 1–7. morelia: iclc. <http://iclc.livecodenetwork.org/2017/cameraready/betancur_iclc2017.pdf> (accessed 10 july 2018). magnusson, t. 2011. “ixi lang: a supercollider parasite for live coding”. in proceedings of international computer music conference 2011 (icmc ’11), 503–6. huddersfield: international computer music association. mclean, alex. 2014. “making programming languages to dance to: live coding with tidal”. in proceedings of the 2nd acm sigplan international workshop on functional art, music, modeling & design—farm ’14, 63–70. new york: acm press. <https://doi.org/10.1145/2633638.2633647>. ogborn, david, eldad tsabary, ian jarvis, alexandra cárdenas and alex mclean. 2015. “extramuros: making music in a browser-based, language-neutral collaborative live coding environment”. in proceedings of international conference on live coding, 163–9. leeds: icsrim, university of leeds. <https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19349>. wang, ge. perry cook, and spencer salazar. 2015. chuck: a strongly timed computer music language. computer music journal, 39(4): 10–29. <https://doi.org/10.1162/comj>. filmography “algo~ritmos”. youtube. uploaded on 26 september 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2j1ocaddqxi> (accessed 10 july 2018). dancecult 12(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 12(1) 2020: 85–97 issn 1947-5403 ©2020 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net bass, mids, tops: an oral history of sound system culture joe muggs & brian david stevens london: strange attractor press, 2019. isbn: 978-1-9072-2277-1 (paperback) rrp: us$29.95 (paperback) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.12> edward k. spencer university of birmingham (uk) university of oxford (uk) knowing how the world enjoys blackness, and seeing what happened to george [floyd], we—black people—get the feeling that people want our culture, but they do not want us. in other words, you want my talent—but you don’t want me. . . . you cannot enjoy the rhythm and ignore the blues (clara amfo speaking on bbc radio 1, tuesday 2nd june 2020). since this book arrives in the wake of the windrush scandal, black lives matter protests in bristol and now boris johnson’s inflammatory remarks regarding the last night of the proms, we must hope that the voices and stories amplified by bass, mids, tops reach a wide audience. it does not deal with reggae sound systems in the same way as henriques (2011) but is instead concerned with a constellation of uk genres that have their roots in black british sound system culture. in a perspicacious foreword, mykaell riley suggests that this oral history is not only about the enjoyment of bass weight but also about “something truly unique to the uk” (11) that is at once personal, cultural and political.1 refreshingly, instead of eulogising bass itself in the manner of recent scholarly monographs (goodman 2010; jasen 2016),2 the book comprises twenty-five interviews with a diverse array of people involved in the development of uk bass culture. as joe muggs notes in his introduction, he “can’t claim peer-reviewed rigour” (20), but his transcripts will certainly be of interest to researchers concerned with rare groove, acid house, jungle, drum ‘n’ bass, garage, dubstep, grime and uk funky. reviews dancecult 12(1)86 at this point some readers might ask whether joe muggs is overshadowed by simon reynolds. the short answer is not really. although his book is inevitably haunted by reynolds’ controversial hardcore continuum,3 from the outset muggs is keen to distance himself from a “definitive history” and linear narratives. he stresses that the book is “quite the opposite, in fact: it’s deliberately partial, arbitrary, and conversational . . . an attempt to look at multiple interwoven continua: life stories, genre stories, sound stories, all happening at once” (14). despite this, the interview transcripts are arranged into a roughly chronological order, beginning with dennis bovell (writer and producer for the lovers rock anthem silly games), norman jay (a key figure in the rare groove era), adrian sherwood (of dub syndicate), youth (martin glover, of killing joke and the orb), tony thorpe (moody boyz), rob smith (smith & mighty), george evelyn (nightmares on wax) and nicolette (vocalist for shut up and dance and massive attack). this is followed by four interviews with key figures from the jungle and early drum ‘n’ bass era, namely dego (of 4hero and reinforced records), dj storm (the self-professed “mum” of metalheadz), jumpin jack frost (who muggs casts as “the archetypal jungle dj”) and krust. the shortlived garage years are represented by sarah lockhart (who worked in a&r long before the establishment of fwd>> and her time at rinse fm), noodles (of groove chronicles along with el-b) and zed bias. this last interview segues into muggs’ conversations with the dubstep producers skream and mala, before kromestar is used as another link (with grime, represented by terror danjah). notwithstanding this domino sequence, the book then starts to seem less teleological during the final sweep of interviews (with t.williams, cooly g, toddla t, samrai, barely legal and shy one). sometimes the transcripts become bogged down with details that are interesting but rather trivial. similarly, the endnotes provide useful track details and demonstrate that muggs is a true anorak, someone who is utterly devoted to archiving musical heritage. intermittently, however, the reader can glimpse some heavier themes pertaining to gender, race, timbral politics and subcultural capital. in the first instance, dj storm ( jayne conneely) explains that she always has to “work that little bit harder” as a woman in a scene that is still overwhelmingly male: “we’ll always turn up on time and look well-presented because we’re women. it’s a shame that we’re not always given the chances we deserve” (192). elsewhere, sarah lockhart recalls the “intimidating” atmosphere of record shops with a collector mentality and stresses that she “didn’t like that it was just boys” at fwd>> (253). on the other hand, nicolette love suwoton appears to embrace longstanding associations between low-frequency sound and maleness when she states that “my voice is so feminine and the bass has a more masculine energy, if you like, so i love that contrast” (145). the timbral articulation of difference is indeed another recurring theme that emerges from the transcripts. although there is some consensus among the interviewees that the acid house era represents a brief period of total unity (with “people from all kinds of backgrounds, colours, nationalities, all coming together” (207), to use jumpin jack frost’s words), george evelyn laments the advent of “the italian piano house thing” and the way that “bass took a reviews 87 back seat in some clubs” (131). for tony thorpe, these “‘progressive”’ timbral developments “killed the unity, the family kind of thing . . . it’s like they forgot about black music and just went ‘oh we’re making money now, fuck that”’ (95). history repeats itself. much later on in the book, tesfa williams talks about trying to establish himself as a house producer and feeling the need to obfuscate his own identity as a black artist through his t.williams moniker: “the market is predominantly white male . . . my first name is african and i knew people would associate whatever with that and that might cause barriers as well” (392). the transcripts also demonstrate that uk bass culture has often been characterised by infighting (e.g. zed bias on the infamous “garage committee”) and closed-minded snobbery (especially when hijacked by hipsters). one of the most telling anecdotes of all arrives in the interview with terror danjah. hungry to reach a new, youthful audience having been at coachella 2011, terror danjah (rodney pryce) worked on an anthemic track titled full attention with the vocalist ruby lee ryder—one featuring the cardinal sin of a tear-out bass dubstep drop. kode9 (steve goodman) was confused and unable to hide his disappointment. but as terror danjah tried to explain, “this is for the people who don’t understand, i’m not known now . . . the people who bought planet mu knew, like people that are connoisseurs, sipping their wine like [comedy posh voice] ‘yas it’s terror danjah’. but the kids don’t know who i am!” (317). we might conclude that insularity and fear of selling out creates a unique set of problems. although muggs’ material is rich and evocative, some nit-picking is now required. given the specific focus of his book, i think that including “uk” in its title would have been a good idea. it would also have been useful to see the precise date of each interview at the start of every transcript. more generally, the book would have benefitted from better proofreading and copy editing—its pages are littered with typographical errors and missing words, and there also seems to be an obvious factual mistake in the nicolette chapter (the title of the massive attack track she features on is “three” not “seven”). my main criticism, however, concerns muggs’ distrust of academia and critical interpretation. this scepticism is by no means unfounded, and muggs may well have goodman/kode9 in mind when he writes that “you could pick musicians who help you make a very specific political point, or rave tracks that illustrate your chosen crypto-lacanian-post-pomo-contra-frankfurt fashion in cultural criticism” (19). but as the interviews make clear, sound system culture is political in every sense of the term, and riley’s excellent foreword could have been matched by an essay-length afterword by a bass music scholar (monique charles and christabel stirling come to mind, for instance). overall, the book is stimulating and frustrating in equal measure. as riley stresses, “formal education about music is vital” (11), and if this “very specific strand of british popular music” (12) is to become a mainstay of undergraduate curricula then i fear that critical, peer-reviewed scholarship is a necessary evil. nevertheless, muggs should be congratulated on gathering fruitful source material for this kind of work. dancecult 12(1)88 notes 1 riley also reflects on his work with the reggae philharmonic orchestra (rpo) in the 1990s: “it was a political statement, it was challenging the system . . . asking questions about what music is about in the uk” (11). additionally, it should be noted here that riley is currently leading an oral history project of his own with the black music research unit at the university of westminster. 2 for an important critique of goodman’s impersonal vibrational ontology, see kane (2015). 3 the hardcore continuum debate involving jeremy gilbert, mark fisher and simon reynolds can be found in the inaugural volume of dancecult. references goodman, steve. 2010. sonic warfare: sound, affect, and the ecology of fear. london: mit press. henriques, julian. 2011. sonic bodies: reggae sound systems, performance techniques, and ways of knowing. new york: continuum. kane, brian. 2015. “sound studies without auditory culture: a critique of the ontological turn”. sound studies 1(1): 2-21. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2015.1079063> jasen, paul. 2016. low end theory: bass, bodies, and the materiality of sonic experience. london: bloomsbury. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2015.1079063 reviews 89 night fever: designing club culture 1960 – today mateo kries, jochen eisenbrand, catherine rossi (editors) weil am rhein, germany: vitra design museum, 2018 398 pp. isbn: 978-3-945852-24-8 (english edition); 978-3-945852-23-1 (german edition) rrp: €59.90 this must be the place: an architectural history of popular music performance venues robert kronenburg new york, ny and london, uk: bloomsbury academic 286 pp. isbn: 978-1-5013-1927-3 (hb), 978-1-5013-1928-0 (pb), 978-1-5013-1929-7 (epdf), 978-1-5013-1930-3 (ebook) rrp: £91.80 (hb), £17.99 (pb), £14.39 (epdf), £14.39 (ebook) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.13> hillegonda c. rietveld london south bank university (uk) the study of the architecture of music venues is a developing area, illustrated here by two publications, one offering a historical perspective on spaces of live popular music performance, the other specifically on the more recent development of clubs where dancing to records prevails. in the introduction to their substantial exhibition catalogue, nightfever, co-curators rossi and eisenbrand explain the focus is on “spaces designed to elicit the after-hour excitement and escape . . . and the design cultures the nightclub has created” (16). created for the german interior design company vitra (2000), the book offers graphic design, architectural drawings and interior photography of a wide range of clubs, accompanied by interviews with its architects and designers, and a selection of reflective essays by a selection of club researchers; it includes maps and floor plans of clubs in belgium, italy, and in clubbing capitals berlin, london, new york, and johannesburg. kronenburg offers a broader architectural timeline of music venues that historically have enabled the experiential and transience of live music, mainly in west-europe and the usa. both publications stress the importance of human interaction, and the social aspects of sharing and interacting with music. for rossi and eisenbrand, the club venue offers a type of participatory theatre in which to act out various persona, a canivalesque space that enables daily identities to disappear. for kronenburg, music venues offer a sense of synchronicity that is uniquely experienced during a live performance, connecting music makers with their audiences. this must be the place is a continuation of kronenburg’s interest in flexible and mobile architecture and the experience of music (see for example, his 2012 monograph on live music venues). as the live industry is increasingly dominated by large international promoters, dancecult 12(1)90 threatening the livelihoods of “grassroots venues”, kronenburg’s 2019 publication attempts to salvage their histories, opening with an ode to the more intimate popular music events in the home, followed by an overview of smaller european theatres that emerged during the dawn of industrialisation, during the 1700s and 1800s. while urbanisation slowly but surely intensified during that era, popular theatre venues became part of circuits for travelling shows, and public houses that were popular for their music and theatre programming would metamorphose into music halls. later in the book, there is a discussion of european social dance venues from the 18th up to the mid-twentieth century, starting with dance pavilions of london’s pleasure gardens, followed by the ballrooms and dancehalls that ultimately swapped their orchestras for djs during the 1970s and 80s. the historical black and white as well as glossy colour prints, both drawings and photographs, add to a deeper understanding of the look of some of these venues. kronenburg further addresses the development of venues in the usa that ultimately became jazz and a dance clubs, including early twentieth century juke joints and blues bars, and a chapter specifically dedicated to the various jazz venues of new orleans. supper clubs and cabaret venues, where one could have dinner while watching a show and maybe have a dance afterwards, offered a variety of jazz and popular music. of particular interest for the design of discos and dance bars are speakeasies, which emerged during the 1920-1933 national alcohol prohibition. also known as the jazz age, or the roaring twenties, during these thirteen years drinking became an underground activity. kronenburg’s interest in film leads to a brief discussion of the use of certain music venues as backdrop for a range of film narratives that mythologize the association of italian-related american mafia with such venues. in the safety of such secretive clubs, marginalized gendered and racialized identities could be explored and asserted, a theme that rossi and eisenbrand identify as an important element of discotheques and nightclubs, where liminality “is explored though the one activity that unites all club culture: dancing” (19). underground dance styles that use the body musically as an expressive instrument can, according to fikentscher (2000: 25), “be understood as part of an american continuum of social dance styles that has been marked by a pervasive african american imprint at least since the 1920s”. in night fever, catharine rossi additionally highlights the importance of avant-garde and experimental movements to the development of night clubs as we now understand them, with reference to happenings in new york, and radical design architects in italy during the 1960s and 1970s. in this way, the combination of design and the musical practices of such venues have had an important influence on the development of discotheques and dance clubs from the 1960s onwards. also contributing to nigh fever, tim lawrence provides an overview of the dance clubs in new york city that further shaped the disco concept, from mancuso’s home, the loft, to the extravagancies of studio 54. for kronenburg, such venues herald the transition from live music performance to “record scenes”, reviewing a range of djled events and venues where participants dance to recorded music, from influential new york dance clubs in the 1960s and 70s, to the northern soul scene in england. yet, it is important to acknowledge that also the dj is a musical performer (rietveld 2016). such venues are often found in areas that are regarded as undesirable, taking place within the reviews 91 night-time that make them invisible to everyday society. yet their pioneering drive can add cultural capital to a neighbourhood and thereby set in motion processes of gentrification that can, ironically, eventually push away these venues. both publications give recognition to the multi-sensory aspect of music venues. for rossi and eisenbrand mobile theatrical lighting and participatory spectacle are of importance to dance clubs. kronenburg further emphasises the importance sound when dancing to records, assuming that the staged music performance stops being a spectacle; this holds true for smaller clubs, but less so for commercially driven events (rietveld, 2013). for both, though, the discussion of music venues mainly focuses on visual aspects rather than the acoustic space in the experience of music. perhaps this is not surprising. architecture is dominated by visual design, with acoustic architecture a smaller component in this field. added to this is the mediation of the story of dance clubs and music venues though text and still images, in which it is a challenge to translate the dynamism of sound and dance. particularly night fever showcases a visually lush selection of key dance clubs, including the post-industrial interior design of manchester’s the haçienda (fac51) by ben kelly, visually echoing the functional modernist interiors by bauhaus and gerrit rietveld; yet despite its visually innovative design it was beset by acoustic challenges. the famously fine-tuned sound system design by richard long for paradise garage is given recognition throughout the catalogue, but this does not translate well visually, unlike images of grace jones being body painted by keith haring for a show in that influential new york underground club. a spectacular colour image of the gold-metal coated despacio sound system seems offered by way of compensation; designed by james murphy this was inspired by both richard long’s work and by the chilled out balearic music aesthetic of ibiza (“despacio” means “slowly”). still, ibiza’s clubs are notably absent, despite its influential dance music clubs and party culture. this just illustrates that the richness and complexity of music club history makes it impossible to be exhaustive. references fikentscher, kai. 2000. “you better work!” underground dance music in new york city. hanover nh, and london, uk: wesleyan university press. kronenburg, robert. 2012. live architecture: popular music venues, stages and arenas. oxford, uk: routledge. rietveld, hillegonda. c. 2016. “authenticity and liveness in digital dj performance”. in musicians and their audiences, ed. ioannis tsioulakis and elina hytönen-ng, 123-33. new york, ny and london, uk: routledge. ——— 2013. “journey to the light? immersion, spectacle and mediation”. in dj culture in the mix: power, technology, and social change in electronic dance music, ed. anna gavanas, bernado a. attias and hillegonda c. rietveld, 79-102. new york, ny and london, uk, bloomsbury academic. “dance! voices from the exhibition ‘night fever: designing club culture 1960 – today’”. vitra magazine. <https://www.vitra.com/en-gb/magazine/details/dance>. https://www.vitra.com/en-gb/magazine/details/dance dancecult 12(1)92 moon juice stomper: a novel (goa 1987-96) ray castle new zealand: independently published, 2019 313 pp. isbn: 978-1791998271 rrp: £12 <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.14> graham st john independent researcher if dance music scenes have windows of fortune, anjuna, goa, in the late eighties was peak oil, and ray castle was there to drill it. after three decades, castle has finally knocked out, psychedelic disco balls and all, what is certain to become the definitive warp and scintillating weft on this “scenius” during its electronic heyday. as perhaps the most influential yet least documented dance music culture in history, this moment has long been an enigma. a golden triangle for cultural exiles and outcastes. a haven for human flotsam and jetsam surging up the electric shores of the arabian sea, before ebbing into the deep recesses of memory. the absence of reporting on this lost horizon and its discommunitarians would normally be enough to draw the attention of enthusiasts of goa and its many after parties. fortunately for us, as the work of a wordsmith with an acute attention to detail, moon juice stomper is a literary charm. among other aliases, as dj masaray, castle performed in goa in the late eighties and early nineties, becoming a vocal critic of the industry that emerged in the subsequent decades. having once elevated ecstatic bodies above the sands of distant languid beaches, castle now sustains the levitational effect in a narrative at times reminiscent of castenada or h. s. thompson. commanding a white-knuckled ride through the “mystical anarchy” of “gonzo goa,” capturing the explosive atmosphere at this freak nadir, his self published intervention in creative nonfiction transports readers inside the minds of the habitués of this remote crossroads … even as they’re going out of their minds. and in doing so, castle does what any freakologist worth their beatific bath salts should do: he delivers us into the heart and soul of the matter. this journey into the many-layered vibe of goa — the roots of goa trance and its worldwide psytrance progeny — is no mean feat, as castle has seamlessly achieved the notoriously difficult and routinely futile task of writing about dancing. this accomplishment stands tall in the history of dance culture narratives. the central characters stand off the page in a third person approach that repeatedly lures readers into the sweet spot. the book is reviews 93 hallucinatory, but also realistic. it conveys the gift economy and music swopping integral to this scene. goa fans and scholars will be fascinated by the effort to weave pseudonymised figures like goa gil, laurent, fred disco, vath, raja ram/tip and space tribe, among many others, into this semi-fictionalised account. enthusiasts will likewise appreciate how track vocal samples are mixed into the narrative, dada-jockey style, and the way the story builds tension and achieves climax at the full moon party under the banyan tree in 1988. other points of intrigue include the descriptions of drug politics, police corruption, party bans, bar/gambling cartels and various historical anecdotes. generations of train spotters will be shooting their cosmic load over these pages. the struggle to sustain “paradise” is an overarching theme, and quite apparent in the efforts to maintain the vibe into the early 1990s as the scene came under growing external and internal pressures. whether castle captured this long tail effect adequately is open to dispute, for the book, it could be warranted, drags. then again, this is faithful to the partyarc of the scene itself: build-up, peak vibe and long come down, with many after parties inclusive. it echoes a movement where parties found ways to survive through the next day and night, and then the following morning, and afternoon… and beyond that, in more remote regions and neighbouring states. as the stakes rose, the illegal parties grew more adventurous with road trips out of goa to maharajstra. the buccaneer spirit of making pirate parties by any means (sustaining the addiction and entitlement to the parties) seems to drive the plot. the effort to treat the goa scene (or “scenius”) like a collective character responding to its own growing notoriety as a nascent global industry and party brand is ultimately commendable. the book might have done more to address the overall impact on the locals of privileged europeans making party in the colony. this said, it does end with a neat twist in which an indian fashion entrepreneur markets the “goa psy trance” brand. it also illustrates one important outcome of the story: how upper middle class indians are now the primary customers of goa bar discos, that charge more for entry than a club in europe, to hear with a beer in their hand dance music that was once banned. in a world stricken by a pandemic that has effectively closed down dance cultures, the scene captured in moon juice stomper appears even more exotic. with its alluring wordcraft, this book holds unquestionable cult gravitas. remixing the music, intrigue, love, bizarre sex, violence and drama of real places, events and figures, not least of all the author himself, the book amplifies a movement in its un/making. every epic era needs its chronicler, and in castle, goa has its homer. dancecult 12(1)94 avicii: true stories dir. levan tsikurishvili usa: black dalmation films, opa people production, piece of magic entertainment, and sf bio, 2017. <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7357302/> <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.15> george musgrave goldsmiths, university of london (uk) university of westminster (uk) it is extremely hard to review a documentary like avicii: true stories and disentangle myself from the research on mental health and the music industry which i have spent the last four years immersed in (gross and musgrave 2016; 2017; 2020). with almost every minute that passes of this profoundly sad, and at times chilling film, i found myself thinking that, in many respects, what i was watching was one of the most extreme case studies imaginable for the conceptual architecture we have developed to try and grapple with the potential for toxicity which a music career presents. knowing the tragic endpoint, of course, changes the way one watches and experiences the film. on the one hand, it is a simple story of a young man making music and the stresses and strains of his working life which ends in tragedy. on the other, it is an allegorical morality tale, which challenges us to think about themes such as corporate ethics, responsibility, creativity, passion and exploitation. the film pivots around two central relationships. the first is the relationship tim bergling has with music making, realised  in the spellbinding form of deeply personal, at times even intimate, footage of him in the studio. we see him creating early versions of loops between 2008 and 2010 (which we as fans know will go on to be huge records), or jamming with nile rodgers, or creating toplines with aloe blacc and chris martin; each of these artists seemingly mesmerised at tim’s ability to reformat their different talents within the remit of edm. the second key relationship is between avicii and the music industry, exemplified and crystallised in his connection with his manager arash “ash” pournouri. it is through this relationship in particular that the moral and ethical challenges of the piece are articulated. at the beginning of the film, it is hard not to begrudgingly admire pournouri — who embodies the entrepreneurial spirit of spinning gold from thin air — as we hear him on the phone to emi pushing the deal for avicii’s first major single higher and higher, up to $500,000. this feeling of respect does not last for long. thirteen minutes in, still at the beginning of avicii’s career, we hear pournouri exclaim almost excitedly, in what turns out to be a chilling and prophetic statement: “tim is going to die. with all the interviews, radio tours and everything, he’ll drop dead”. as a viewer, this early feeling of discomfort permeates much of the ensuing ninety minutes. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7357302/ reviews 95 just a few scenes later, we see bergling having to cancel performing at the 2013 ultra music festival in australia — for what we now know was alcohol induced pancreatitis (ralston 2018) — working on his laptop in hospital and talking about upcoming performances. at this point of the documentary we start to see how his career has become more than just about making music, but is now an infrastructure; with stakeholders and responsibilities and pressures and expectations and dependence. it is in this environment, as those around him make entirely fatuous statements such as “you can do the show if you want to”, that, as a viewer, you start asking questions about whose interests are really being prioritised. who is working for who? indeed, perhaps more conceptually; what is coercion, what is control, and what does it look like? the subtle operation of a system of exploitation rooted in ideas of guilt and responsibility where, as bergling himself says he feels “lucky and blessed”, is laid bare before our eyes. here, and indeed throughout the documentary, you find yourself thinking simply: “who is looking after him?” one day later, we see bergling looking exhausted — a picture of enervate fragility with his eyes rolling back in his head — being cajoled into accepting a series of interviews with the press. it is frightening to watch. appalling, honestly. ticking in the background like a sombre metronome is the counter of shows performed, which we see rattling exponentially higher as the film progresses. forty-six minutes into the film, we are now in 2015, and the show counter ticks over 700 towards 775. we hear from bergling about the enormous stresses and pressures as more and more shows are added to his diary. we hear too from david guetta about the burden of expectations to deliver a global hit again. the sense of pressure feels intense in these scenes, as we see bergling sitting in his villa in ibiza creating the album stories, being reminded by those around him to eat and described by his childhood friend as a “shell”. it is interesting, personally, that i could place my own connection to the music of avicii, as a fan, at this point in the journey of the film. in august 2015, i saw him play at ushuaia in ibiza — the venue which would eventually host his final ever performance. the party was incredible, and just as bergling talks about finding genuine happiness in moments of those shows, so too from my perspective as a fan, i remember that happiness. the following month, in september 2015, he cancelled all of his future performances. it is surreal to think that standing in ushuaia at that time, i had no idea about what was happening to him or the pain he was going through. within the first minute of the documentary, i was reminded of a quote by an interviewee from my own research who described fame as being akin to sitting in the back of a car that someone else is driving at ferocious speed as the g forces push you back in the seat and the world spins past you. this is perhaps the easiest way to read the heart-breaking narrative unfolding over the course of the documentary: a naive, introverted boy hurtling through a world he did not, or could not, understand, in which all he was searching for was, as he phrased it, “finding a connection with people and being accepted”. the speed at which he goes from sending demos to blogs and eating pasta on his bed to headlining a festival and being introduced by madonna is frightening. pournouri has, of course, denied this reading and presentation of events (ralston 2018). indeed, reading things purely in this way denies dancecult 12(1)96 the very real moments of joy we see in the film: the smile on bergling’s face in the early moments as crowds chant along to his first global hit “levels”; the stages with all of the crowds and lights and lasers and confetti; the incredible outdoor studio at the top of the grand canyon writing songs; the footage of him relaxing with his friends in malibu, in the mansion that he was finally able to bring them to honour the “contracts” they wrote in crayons as kids (stating that if any of them “made it” they would invite each other along to their mansions); or on the ile sainte-marie in madagascar after retiring, seemingly at calm. this is the duality of the story, and indeed of musical careers generally; the immense highs and joys, and the indescribable lows. in addition, this reading also denies bergling any sense of agency, and again, this is not what the film shows either. there is footage showing how acutely aware he is of himself and his personality; at sixty minutes in we see him discussing carl jung’s conceptualisation of introversion and we learn that he has been in therapy. he is emotionally attuned in a way that is not surprising for a musician; a type of work that is reliant on the understanding of, and connection to, emotion in the same way that a builder relies on and develops physical strength. bergling was clearly aware that things were deeply wrong with how he was feeling, both physically and emotionally. at the moment in the film when he announces his retirement, one still, as a viewer, finds oneself asking: “how does it get from here, to his suicide in oman?”. you still hope that perhaps there will be a different ending. at around seventy minutes in, there is a marked shift in the tone of bergling’s voice, as what up until this point has been a kind of resigned acceptance morphs into resentful anger. it is in his realisation and articulation of this anger that we see how the environment within which he lived and worked was reliant on him continuing to run on the treadmill. he tells everyone around him that he just wants the performances to stop, seemingly desperate for people to listen to him. “it’s harder to cancel these shows than to do them”, we hear someone in his team say. “it would be harder to do them, for me”, he says. “hear me out”. “as long as you know it could cost you quite a lot”, and they run through each show and how much money would be lost. “it’s giving me anxiety”, he tells them. again, this scene is horrible to watch. we hear the coerciveness of commitments “needing to be honoured”, leading the viewer to ask in whose interest it is for bergling to keep going and whose interests are being represented. we hear his team tell him that he will lose money, but of course what they mean is that they will lose money too. ten minutes later, there is an exchange which, given where the story concludes, makes one feel slightly sick. his manager, tellingly, says: he doesn’t understand the value of money or that his decisions can have very negative consequences for other people, or that the only reason people care is because he is successful right now. if he stopped being successful a lot of people would jump ship. i’m sure of it. what is perhaps most unsettling, or frustrating, or dispiriting, or upsetting — i am unsure of the best word to capture the feeling — is how the film concludes. we see tim in 2016 on a beach, retired from performing live, having separated from his manager, apparently reviews 97 healthier and feeling stronger and working on new music; in theory doing the thing he loved most. by april 2018, he would be dead having taken his own life whilst on holiday in oman. as a viewer, you are left devastatingly unclear how he arrived at the point of such despair. perhaps no one will know. what the documentary appears to show, to my reading at least, was the tragic story of a shy and anxious young man, who loved making music and the deep, meaningful joy it brought him, propelled into a world reliant on the ever more avaricious exploitation of his labour in order to support the development of an economy which had formed around him, where simple human care and compassion had been decimated by the compulsion to keep going and market his music, and against which he tried to fight back. certainly, this is just one reading, and it is important to note that many of the individuals whom the film appears to point fingers of blame at have disputed their representation. nonetheless, it is hard to watch it and not feel that tim had been profoundly let down by many of those around him. rip tim bergling / avicii: 1989-2018 references gross, sally and musgrave, george. 2016. “can music make you sick? music and depression. a study into the incidence of musicians mental health. part 1: pilot survey report”. help musicians uk/musictank. ———. 2017. “can music make you sick? music and depression. a study into the incidence of musicians mental health. part 2: qualitative study and recommendations”. help musicians uk/musictank. ———. 2020. can music make you sick? measuring the price of musical ambition, university of westminster press. ralston, william. 2018. “who really killed avicii?” british gq. <https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/who-really-killed-avicii> (accessed 1 september 2020). https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/who-really-killed-avicii baby raves: youth, adulthood and ageing in contemporary british edm culture dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 11(1): 53–71 issn 1947-5403 ©2019 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.04 baby raves: youth, adulthood and ageing in contemporary british edm culture zoe armour de montfort university (uk) abstract this article begins with a reconsideration of the parameters of age in translocal edm sound system and (super)club culture through the conceptualisation of a fluid multigenerationality in which attendees at edm-events encompass a spectrum of ages from 0–75 years. since the 1980s, it remains the case that the culture is fuelled through a constant influx of newcomers who are predominantly emerging youth, yet there are post-youth members in middle adulthood and later life that are also a growing body that continues to attend edm-events. in this context, the baby rave initiative (2004–present) has capitalised on a gap in the family entertainment market and created a new chapter in (super)club and festival culture. i argue that the event is a catalyst for live heritage in which the accompanying children (aged from 0–12 years) temporarily become the beneficiaries of their parent’s attendee heritage and performance of an unauthored heritage. keywords: fluid multigenerationality, edm-family, baby rave, live heritage, unauthored heritage zoe armour is completing a phd in electronic dance music culture. her work is interdisciplinary and draws from the fields of cultural sociology, popular music, memory studies, media and communication and film. she is the author of two book chapters on ageing clubbers and the internet and the british free party counterculture in the late 1990s. she is a member of the media discourse centre, iaspm and follows the group for subcultures, popular music and social change. she also teaches on a variety of undergraduate and post-graduate courses and attends electronic dance music events. email: <zoe.armour@dmu.ac.uk>. feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.04 dancecult 11(1)54 introduction in the emerging field of youth transitions, older participation has been explored in music scenes, communities, (sub)cultures, neo-tribes and (life)worlds through an examination of ageing, style and identity within rock, soul, punk, edm and goth culture (bennett et al. 2012; armour 2018a). in this article, i want to broaden an understanding of edm cultural affiliation in terms of transitioning into the culture at different ages. first, i reframe the theoretical and methodological stages of what i call edm culture through the lens of age, and propose the conceptualisation of a fluid multigenerationality to describe a continual pattern of teenagers and young/mid/late adults at translocal edm-events since the 1980s. from here, i introduce british edm sound system and (super)club culture as two enduring lifeworlds of social existence with crossover memberships.1 i then explore the presence of what i will call the edm-family dynamic and discuss how this relationship is negotiated within each lifeworld. i propose the use of the following descriptors, rave-parents, rave-children and (super)club-parents, (super)club-children as the foundation for the variability of family scenarios such as the super-clubber stepfather and stepson.2 finally, i interpret the emergence of the baby rave event (2004–present) as a relatively new chapter in the evolution of (super)club culture. i draw on four known branded initiatives that capitalise on a continuous flow of ravers/(super)clubbers, whom i group together as edm-parents, as a way of accounting for a complex attendee heritage and unauthored personal biographies. these two concepts offer an additional perspective on the critical framework of unauthorised popular music heritage (roberts and cohen 2014; baker et al. 2018). i observe that the baby rave event acts as a catalyst for what i call live heritage in which the accompanying children temporarily become the beneficiaries of their parents’ cultural affiliation as edm-children. theorising age in edm club culture in the mid-late 1980s, club culture on the island of ibiza (an archipelago of spain) hosted djs who played to a cosmopolitan and multigenerational collective of hippies, punks and soulies, men and women who were aged from their mid-teens to late-fifties and who danced to a balearic signature sound that was characterised through a fusion of reggae, rare-groove, south american funk, disco, rock, synth-pop, hip-hop and the early house genres from detroit, chicago, new york and italy (redhead 1993: 3; norris 2007: 68). in particular, dj alfredo fiorito (1983–1988) was an early seamless mixer who had a residency at the open-air club amnesia and is credited as a central influence on the innovators of (super)club culture in the uk. the second source of inspiration was the transatlantic connection with club culture in new york and the paradise garage club (1977–1986) that existed during the disco era transition from proto-house to garage house. and where dj larry levan sought to create a culture of unity through attracting a diverse translocal demographic (garratt 1998: 18–20, 287). the first three main club nights that emulated the balearic beat sound that evolved into acid house in britain (1987–1988) and formed the proto ‘super-club’ phenomenon (1991– armour | baby raves: youth, adulthood and ageing in contemporary british edm culture 55 present) occurred in london. trip (nicky holloway), shoom (danny rampling) and spectrum (paul oakenfold) began with a ready-made grouping of jet-set clubbers who lived in london, sheffield and manchester and had worked and partied in ibiza. the clubbing crowd rapidly expanded into a translocal mix of ages (mid-teens to thirties), genders, ethnicities and class backgrounds. in the temporary collapse of social barriers that involved listening and dancing to music and the polydrug consumption of (il)licit3 substances (alcohol, acid, ecstasy and cocaine) that lowered attendee inhibitions, the events reflected the ethos of the existing club culture abroad in ibiza, new york and so forth (norris 2007: 77–78). by 1989 these early club initiatives had inspired an entrepreneurial shift towards the spread of illegal edm-events that were held in abandoned buildings such as warehouses, train stations, aircraft hangers and grain silos. the organisers were businessmen interested in capitalising on the emerging new youth culture. these individuals rapidly morphed this niche-leisure activity into the temporary outdoor mega-rave festival. in particular, sunrise (1989, tony colston-hayter) and biology (1989, jarvis sandy) became known as the orbital raves that were held around the city limits of london (essex, hertfordshire and berkshire) and accessed via the m25. this also led to the occasional flash-free-after-party in local london parks such as clapham common (1989). this brand of edm-events attracted the existing balearic clubber as well as new attendees of the same age group (midteens–thirties). by 1992, the mass gathering at castlemorton common free festival and the introduction of the criminal justice and public order act 1994 (cjb), there was a bifurcation in the culture between politicised edm sound systems and legalised (super) club events (mckay eds. 1998; reynolds 1999: 74–79; armour 2018b: 219–220). with the rise of the british super-club (1991) an affluent youth-oriented target market was sought through advertising in two popular music, fashion and culture magazines of the moment—the face and i-d. the super-club term was coined by andy pemberton (1995) to describe a developing set of edm-events that had a sonic identity related to a resident dj, a distinct logo and décor, which expanded the fan loyalty with some or all of the following parts: a record label, clothing/merchandise business, a shop, dj agency, radio show, in-house magazine, a website, a tour team and a sponsorship team for creating partnerships with external brands. equally, those whom i call super-clubbers (due to their attendance and associated affiliations with the brand) were expected to make the effort to dress-up in order to fit in to the glamour of the event. promoters were strict about who was allowed access and made snap judgements in their decision to refuse entry to individuals who might detract from the ambience of the event. this created the queue tension and exclusivity to which super-clubbers became accustomed (garratt 1998: 291, 302; trollope 2012: 183–184). early academic interpretations of edm club culture in the uk have primarily taken a youth studies approach. this perspective began with the deviance theories of the post-world war i chicago school, and continued with the post-second world war popular music and youth culture associated with the birmingham centre for contemporary cultural studies of the 1970s. later, steve redhead, antonio melechi, hillegonda rietveld, kristian russell dancecult 11(1)56 and patrick mignon from the manchester institute for popular music therefore, maintained a tradition of critical distance through a combination of discourse and ethnographic analyses based on participant observations of acid house culture (1988–1989) that historicised the relationship between music, consumption and the media. in addition, angela mcrobbie focused on what she perceived as the apolitical attendance of young women in edm culture, through their sartorial choices that were based on traditional forms of femininity through the wearing of hot pants and bras (1994: 164). the most compelling research to date, from a position of critical distance, has been thornton’s seminal work on edm club culture, which provided a portrait of british youth and the shift to british acid house from 1988–1992 as a distinct culture (1994: 8-11). thornton’s position was conceived through the notion of ‘hipness’ that drew from the 1940s chicago school of sociology – howard becker (1963) and the work of the french sociologist pierre bourdieu (1984) through a pre–post–(sub)cultural position. thornton observed that dancing crossed “boundaries of class, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, but not differences of age” and that most devoted clubbers fell into two age groupings, 15–19 and 20–24. she also found that the tight age boundaries of clubbing were related to young people that lived in the parental home but who were motivated to “get out of the house and escape the family” (thornton 1995: 15–16). as such, these clubbers did not have a curfew, could afford to spend money on expensive entrance fees and negotiate the loosely enforced drinking age of eighteen. it is possible to place these early studies of club/rave culture during the infancy of an emerging lifeworld that began with a focus on after-hours dancing within a british working-class system, in which the majority of young people left school at sixteen and began earning a low-wage income that meant a semi-independence of prolonged living at home. by the mid–late 1990s the economic situation for young people had not changed, yet (super)club culture had become a translocal experience across towns and cities in the uk and was contentiously accepted as part of the leisure and tourism industry. club culture peaked in terms of profit and mass participation in 1999 (philips 2009: 6). this is reflected in the closure of permanent british super-club residencies amongst the general decline in club venues that have almost halved since 2005 according to the association of licensed multiple retailers from 3,144–1,733 in 2015 (baker 2015). most recently, two london super-clubs called the ministry of sound (1991) and fabric (1999) have survived closure despite pressure from local authorities and the metropolitan police (rafaeli 2014; ellis-petersen 2016; elliss-petersen 2017). notwithstanding super(club) culture remains a translocal activity through the construction of global brands and the return to annual festival events in 1998 that began with creamfields (mchale 2015). the second wave of academic research in the late 1990s to early 2000s broadened the focus on edm club culture, through interviews that had been an omission of the previous scholarship at a time when many devoted (super)clubbers had become experientially seasoned having continued to attend events into early-adulthood (twenties) and midadulthood (thirties). this wave of analysis therefore extended the parameters of age and armour | baby raves: youth, adulthood and ageing in contemporary british edm culture 57 shifted to post-subcultural analysis and new theoretical positions of edm club culture. malbon drew from michel maffesoli’s discussion of vitality and interviewed clubbers who were aged from 21–28 who had started attending raves and clubs in their teens (maffesoli 1993; malbon 1999: 134-152, 191-198). bennett worked through the conceptualisation of maffesoli’s tribus (tribes) in which he used the term neo-tribes and interviewed clubbers from eighteen–thirty (maffesoli 1996: 609; bennett 1999: 599-600). pini emphasised female subjectivity, empowerment and belonging in conducting interviews with women aged from 19–35 (2001: 2). jackson revisited the work of bourdieu to discuss forms of abandonment in the social-sensual experience of clubbing through interviewees aged from 25–55 (2004: 3, 135-143). beyond the present uk focus, buckland has provided insights on embodied queer identities through interviews with ageing new york gay, lesbian and bisexual clubbers from their mid-twenties–early fifties (2002: 193). and gregory explored the perceptions of ageing female raver bodies in toronto (canada) who identified as no longer being active attendees at edm-events, from their mid-twenties–late-thirties (2012: 38). to date, my own research within british club culture has focused on those to whom i have referred as seasoned clubbers and who are a particular grouping of super-clubbers called the dedicated followers of passion (from their thirties–fifties), that are just one example of a loyal ageing collective who share their memories online within public facebook fan groups as an act of digital gift-giving (armour 2018a: 137–152). these latter three works reflect the multigenerational aspect of edm culture as part of the wider discussion in the emerging field of youth transitions. as noted in the introduction, this is in relation to older participation in music scenes, communities, (sub)cultures, neotribes and (life)worlds and examined through ageing, style and identity through rock, soul, punk, edm and goth culture (bennett et al. 2012; armour 2018a). to briefly return to thornton’s work for a moment, she described herself as ageing out of the peer group with which she went clubbing, having started the project at the age of 23 (1995: 2–3). in contrast, my own experience has been to age in the culture with (super)clubbers/edm sound system ravers who like myself have reached mid-adulthood (thirties–fifties) and others, though few in number at the moment, who are in late-adulthood (sixties plus). thornton also noted that many british clubbers moved away from attending edm-events once they formed into couples and began living together or marrying (1995: 16). in moving towards the inclusion of infants, toddlers and young children up to the age of twelve, the baby rave is what i call an edm-family event that encompasses a new dynamic to the commercial enterprise of (super)club culture and the discussion of multigenerational membership. ethnographic approach to research on sunday 22nd february 2015 i was invited along to a family outing with two friends and their 11-month year old son at the uk’s largest multi-venue called the southbank centre in london that hosts a year-round festival programme for art, theatre, dance, classical and contemporary music, literature and debate. the event was an afternoon affair from dancecult 11(1)58 2:00–4:30 pm and scheduled on the final day of the two-week imagine children’s festival (2002–2019) for 0–8 year olds, which ran during the school half term and was called the big fish little fish family rave. the event was discovered as part of the festival activities advertised in the children’s book section of the guardian. the two friends in this study were a white heterosexual couple and closely align to the readership and middleclass london demographic as university educated. at the time the male was 35, a senior editor and copywriter and attended edm-events in the late 1990s–early 2000s in london during his time as a student. the female was 31, an a-level psychology teacher and did not participate in edm culture. the event was undertaken as an overt/covert participant observation. my two friends were informed of the intention to document the experience as part of a “multi-sited” ethnography of (super)club and free party events (marcus 1995; falzon 2009). field-notes were made on a mobile phone using the notepad application, and photographs and video footage were collected on the 12.1 megapixel camera. the images served as a shorthand record of memory to support the field-notes and were stored as a private archive (in order to recognise the ethically sensitive nature of the research). the camera was selectively used and never directly pointed at one attendee in an attempt to remain unobtrusive. rather a general panoramic approach was taken in order to capture multiple activities and the ambience of the event. finally, consent to take singular photographs and footage within the party of four was given. after the event a “micro virtual ethnography” was conducted that drew from the exemplar of christine hine’s extensive internet data gathering practice (hine 2003). the original intention was to search and collect data over a three-month period so as to capture articles, images and video footage about the event beginning with the three early website sources, which were the guardian article, southbankcentre and bigfishlittlefishevents. however, it became necessary to extend the data gathering process and analysis to the previous activities of the big fish little fish (bflf) london enterprise that began in 2013 and to monitor the trajectory of the event as a family clubbing brand business model and its competitors. this was carried out through intermittent update checks over the past four years (2015–2019) that revealed the expansion of a translocal practice across the uk and australia. to date, the bflf event competes with an american initiative established in the uk called baby loves disco (2013–present) and two other baby rave events called rave-a-roo (2016) and raver tots (2017) that each have an independent website and convergent links to sns and comprise the data collection. in terms of observing the mid-adult–late-adult edm attendee some of the discussion in this article is formed from a self-reflexive approach as a “critical insider” in which i have drawn from a) a personal repertoire of recollections as an ageing female attendee who has inhabited both the (super)club and edm sound system lifeworlds, and b) from a series of semi-structured interviews with mid-adult edm attendees that were conducted for a larger research project (hodkinson 2002: 4–6). armour | baby raves: youth, adulthood and ageing in contemporary british edm culture 59 rave-parents and rave-children i argue that edm itself is at the centre of the edm lifeworld. the common features that characterise and unite (super)club and edm sound system culture can be understood through the broad definitions of dancing, listening, dress-style and (il)licit drug consumption. the essential commonality between distinct branded edm-events is that promoters offer a space to gather groupings of individuals together for a heightened social experience of sensorial connection and belonging. the previous section focused on a discussion of youth and ageing in which a fluid multigenerationality of attendance at edm-events has been apparent since the 1980s. that is, the patterning of male and female attendees at (super) club and edm sound system events range from those in their mid-teens–late thirties with a minority in their late-fifties and sixties–seventies. the annual influxes of attendees begin as newcomers seeking to try out the culture. the majority of first-time attendees encounter edm culture in their youth (mid-teens–late-teens). however, slightly older first-timers (early twenties–late-twenties–early-thirties) make up the dynamic of micro-groups of people that attend together, often because of existing family ties in which older siblings go along or via work affiliations that turn into true friendships. after the first time, many attendees do not return because of financial constraints (work commitments), weak group affiliations, a lack of desire to develop a taste for edm where one has not already been formed and mass-crowd intimidation. others begin to adapt to the environment and learn through observation, interaction and the medium of edm focused music-media. a complete transition into the culture is through an intensity of regular (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly) attendance for a cycle of time (one, two or three years) and evolves into a type of permanence. those who remain in the culture become fixed to what becomes a sense of collective identity through music taste, dance and dress style, attitude and buzzwords during the intensity of their (super)club attendance and socialisation within a network of groupings. for example, in 1999 devoted british super-clubbers who belonged to a particular network of groupings performed the hip-wiggle and shoulder shuffle to hard house tracks, wore the acupuncture trainer brand and bantered phrases with the key word “random”. as such, distinctive groupings are formed that have a preference in taste for particular periods of edm in which attendees grow up and are increasingly growing older together, and where dress-style and the music industry is transmuted into a cultural form. the presence of babies, infants and pre-teen children in edm culture has yet to be a topic of discussion in academic research. to begin, castlemorton common free festival was a small gathering of new age travellers (estimated 400) that used the event to find work and meet up with friends. in 1992 the festival became the site of an unprecedented edmmega-rave with an estimated 20,000 attendees. this meant that the family dynamic was first assimilated into the mass gathering of the free party crowd who were a mix of class, ethnicity, gender, age and music tastes—particularly from the crossover of punk and the legacy of the diy ethos (reynolds 1999: 078). the bond between new age travellers and edm sound system collective members who chose to stay within the capitalist system has dancecult 11(1)60 remained. for instance, the east midland network that includes diy, smokescreen, babble, bwpt, doji, wireless and pysborg edm sound system collectives began to have offspring who would be taken along to the weekender outdoor free parties. those i call rave-parents take converted vehicles, caravans and micro-tents so that their children have a safe space to eat and sleep at night as well as mingle with the attendees during the daytime. the attendees that are the offspring of ravers, some of whom have been a part of the culture since their birth, i call rave-children. for example, at an edm sound system club event a founding member/rave-mother was at the same event as her rave-daughter (thirties) who had been introduced to the culture as a child. despite an acknowledgement of each other, there was an unspoken understanding of space. the mother and daughter socialised in their separate groupings. developing a separate identity from the rave-parent was a crucial element to the daughter’s sense of belonging. this was also reflected in the fact that the daughter had altered her surname to minimise the connection during conversation and in using social media such as facebook. elsewhere i have discussed the occurrence of what i call “an organic diy pedagogy” (armour 2018b: 228). in this case, the teenage daughter as newcomer to an edm sound system collective, self-empowers her position within the collective as a carnivalesque performer who weaves in amongst the crowd as part of the ambience of the event (an identity she also uses to work the festival circuit) and is also an organiser/promoter of local night-time edm charity fundraiser club events. the dress-style can be characterised as cyber-neon-victorian that incorporates changing themes such as alice in wonderland. the wardrobe features an intentional macabre look that comprises of a corset, tights, chunky heals, heavy exaggerated make-up, a wig, a hat and props for flirtatious interaction such as stickers, feathers and vodka shots on a tray to help make a profit at the bar. the younger rave-son (thirties) became a world dj/producer. he began playing edm at sound system events from the age of sixteen. he started his career through an association with diy dj/producers who allowed him to play with turntables as a young child at these events. throughout his twenties he gained further experience of djing and made new contacts within the translocal edm sound system network and played at local bar/club venues. this culminated in moving affiliations from the edm sound system collective of his childhood to another when he was offered to take over its running. many of the edm sound system collectives that were created in the late 1980s–early 1990s have a process of handing over the responsibilities of running the initiative that include maintenance and storage of the sound system and the organisation and promotion of the branded event, hence the term collective. this is, therefore, a careful decision in which those who could be called a rave-legacy-receiver are selected due to their commitment and fit to the existing spirit of the edm sound system collective, as individuals who are entrusted to preserve the on-going diy identity through the logo, mascots, a sonic style of edm, and suitable event locations. a number of rave-children born to core members of the edm sound system collective have grown up to make a career as dj/producers. for example, dj/producer max volume (age 24) has a preference for contemporary house and techno while his rave-parents armour | baby raves: youth, adulthood and ageing in contemporary british edm culture 61 ixindamix and meltdown mickey of spiral tribe (now called sp23), remain active within edm translocal culture and continue to play acid house tracks. also, dj/producer charlie kane (age 24) has a preference for house and drum ‘n’ bass whereas sim simmer was the original mc of spiral tribe ( jones 2017). the formation of the local family-rave fundraiser event is another way in which raveparents and their rave-children are accommodated within the culture. the event is city based, involves less travel and expense to attend and is usually held at a venue such as a pub (public drinking house), with a ready-made large outdoor zone that can be fashioned into a temporary dance space and children’s activity area. the pub makes a profit on the purchase of food and drink in return for the free use of the space. this type of event is held at the weekend (on a saturday into sunday) during the spring and summer when the weather is warmer for rave-children. for example, an event called lestival (2013, leicester, east midlands) was advertised through word of mouth and circulated digitally through the facebook event application. it was organised by doji sound system and presented as a micro-festival to raise funds for the local hospice charity called loros. during the daytime (11:00 am–6:00 pm) rave-children were provided with the opportunity to engage in the event through interactive arts and crafts, have their face painted, play on a bouncy castle as well as dance to the low base frequencies of the sound system with their parents and rave collective peers. in addition, dogs accustomed to being around a mass of wandering and dancing bodies at countryside edm sound system events were welcome and allowed to roam freely in the enclosed space. in accommodating the family dynamic the event was markedly divided into day and night-time activities. from mid-evening (6:00 pm onwards) rave-mothers had made the journey home with their children. this created a gendered divide in which the majority of rave-fathers stayed, some for a few hours and others for the duration of the event that lasted for as long as individuals were dancing. in addition, the event was re-populated by attendees who had waited to join the party in late evening when it was dark, the sound system bass was turned up, the strobe lighting was switched on and all traces of the presence of children had been removed. the pub owners made a donation to the charity, a collection bucket was regularly passed around throughout the day and night for donations from attendees and the profit made from the children’s activities was also part of the fundraising in which edm sound system collective members gave their time and resources to make the day fun and entertaining for rave-families. within the edm sound system network of the east midlands, attendees travel beyond their local sound system initiative and socialise regionally at outdoor/club events in nottinghamshire, derbyshire, leicestershire and northamptonshire. edm sound system events that are held in the countryside average one or two times a year and this is repeated with the city based club events. the number of attendees is estimated to vary between 50–2,000 individuals. in this sense, these events mark a return to the underground after the cjb (1994), but also reflect the ageing dynamic in which the day-to-day responsibilities of adult life—working a job, the requirement to pay bills and family obligations that take dancecult 11(1)62 priority over organising and being able to attend a gathering. higher attendance is noted at significant years such as 25 years of diy sound system in (2014) or a milestone birthday such as the male twins of doji sound system in 2019 (payling 2016; armour 2019). equally, then there are rave-parents who take the opposite view to the previous examples in which children are included. the exclusion of children is framed through the notion that the rare and infrequent weekend rave in a field is a temporary opportunity to escape family life and to rekindle a childless freedom before they were parents. to an extent, these findings reflect the work of nicola smith who examined soulies and those she calls soul-children within the northern soul scene (2009; 2012: 159–172). smith notes that her observations have a wider application to all music scenes with longevity. (super)club-parents and (super)club-children within the context of (super)club culture the identity of being a parent is confined to the micro-groupings in which people know each other on a personal level and socially interact with other known micro-groups in attendance at (super)club events. those i call (super) club-parents attend (super)club events that are manufactured for profit and operate within an identity that has an imposed legal age restriction where no one below the age of 18 years may attend. in the 1990s, this was breached by teenagers as young as 15 years of age. however, since 2005 and the london bombings the tightening of security checks on the door has meant that it is practically impossible to break this rule (hadfield 2008). the exception is when admittance is granted to a female attendee who is pregnant. those who i will call super-club mother’s-to-be, are so dedicated to the night out that they will continue to attend events into late pregnancy when a bump is visible. the sight of a pregnant woman dancing contradicts the (super)club environment as a space of individuality and yet this action is a form of embodiment and empowerment exclusive to the experience of women in the culture who defy the myth of slender bodies that represent youth and singlehood. this performance of female identity may be absent from the mediation of the event in which single and group status is often perpetuated to advertise to a youth market, yet it is not an uncommon occurrence within (super)club culture. the appearance of a woman during this phase in her life can still be a surprising sight to attendees because it challenges the perception of the event as a place of escape and abandonment for those who are yet to be tied down with structural responsibilities such as marriage. in contrast, attendees in both young and mature adulthood accept the presence of the rave-mother-to-be at an edm sound system event due to the familial sense of belonging amongst the collective in which hereditary relationships are a part of the dynamic of the culture. similarly, a regular female attendee (1997–2000) at the super-club event held in the northern city of sheffield called gatecrasher (1993–present) recalled meeting a (super) club-mother (mid-forties) and super-club daughter (18 years old) who were super-clubbing together. the mother had originally experienced the early balearic to acid house phenomena and had accompanied her daughter who resided within the parental home and wanted to experience super-club culture but did not have any friends with whom to attend. the bond armour | baby raves: youth, adulthood and ageing in contemporary british edm culture 63 between mother and daughter was embodied through dancing in close proximity to each other and the shared illicit consumption of an ecstasy pill appeared to be rare group dynamic within the super-club environment. part of the rationale for the mother seemed to be the expression of a protective maternal instinct in which a concern for a young inexperienced woman attending an event alone was unsafe. the daughter appeared to be making superclub friends with whom she could potentially make future plans to attend an event without her mother who during this outing had taken on the role of gatekeeper. in focusing on super-clubbers who started a family in the late 1990s and super-club stepparents who partnered with someone that did not transition into the culture, the offspring produced from these unions are beginning to attend the same super-club events in the presence of their parents. for example, while attending the super-club event called passion that was temporarily held at the loughborough student union (2015) before reinstatement at the founding super-club called the emporium (1995–present), a super-club mother (mid-forties) revealed that her two teenage sons (17 and 19 years old) were at the same event in their own grouping of friends. in this scenario, the separation between mother and two sons reflected the previous observation of the rave-mother and rave-daughter. the age gap between the two attendees was also an example of the longevity of the super-club event and the tension of a promotional history that has continually been aimed at a youth market through the replacement of ageing dj/producers such as jfk with dj/producer genix. elsewhere i discuss how jfk has since returned as the resident dj/promoter of passion that attracts a majority ageing demographic i call seasoned super-clubbers in their late-thirties–mid-fifties, and where a sonic blend of trance anthems of the 1990s (including updated remixes) are mixed with contemporary trance anthems that accommodate the carry-over of younger attendees (armour 2018a). during attendance at the northern super-club event called cream (1992–present) held in the city of liverpool at the venue nation (closure, 2015), a reunion night (2014) that focused on trance tunes produced in the 1990s attracted a majority older super-clubber’ (mid-thirties–mid-fifties) attendance. the exception was a super-clubber stepfather (mid-forties) who was accompanied by his stepson (18 years old). the stepson had been introduced to the music in the family home, had seemingly developed a taste for this era of edm production, had been told stories about cream and had developed a curiosity for the culture through peer influence. his mother did not attend due to work commitments the following day but had sanctioned the night-out despite the son being of the legal age to decide (he was still a part of the family unit living in the parental home). his stepfather’s intention was to share some of this past experience in the present. this included the illegal consumption of an ecstasy pill, which the son had consented to take. while this practice was not encouraged the stepfather saw this as a parental responsibility. the rationale was based on that fact that the stepson had revealed plans to consume ecstasy amongst friends. the stepfather therefore, considered that it was safer for his stepson to consume ecstasy for the first time with a parent who could be a supportive guide through the phases of the mind-altering experience. this action poses somewhat of a moral dilemma. it should be dancecult 11(1)64 noted that not all super-club parents would support those whom i call super-club children to take illicit substances of any kind and yet, this is contradictory to those super-club parents who themselves have a history of consumption. here, super-club children are defined as the offspring of super-club parents that have grown up to join the culture through a form of peer inheritance in the parental home, in which an organic edm pedagogy takes place through the activities of listening, dancing and sharing stories about attendance at superclub events. four baby rave initiatives elsewhere i have touched on those whom i will call here edm-teenagers who attended what were known as legal youth raves (14–17 years) and were hosted at club venues in cities across the uk from 1991–1992. these events were held on a school night and attracted young children from the age of ten and teenagers as old as nineteen as there was no measure in place to verify age (armour 2018b: 223–224). a decade later, and the baby rave is a commercial enterprise that belongs to the (super)club culture and festival paradigm as a family-oriented event. in a general sense, it provides an opportunity for both parents and their children to dress for the occasion and dance together as a collective form of social bonding in a public space that is child-friendly. i propose that the new memories that are created between those whom i refer to as the edm-parent and edm-child within a family unit at these events become a part of what i call the parent’s attendee heritage of edm-events before she/he had any dependents. further to this, the edm-event and its constituent parts pertain to a sensorial experience that act as a catalyst in the edm-child’s role as beneficiary of their edm-parent(s) cultural affiliation. the baby rave event is therefore a form of what i call live heritage. the concept draws from an edm-attendee’s personal biography that is contained within her/his imaginary and what i call an unauthored heritage, as it remains undocumented. this is in comparison to academic discussions that explore the praxis of documenting popular music heritage that institutions overlook. so far, this has been framed through the following terms, unauthorised (bottom-up, everyday, anti-heritage) in comparison to authorised (official) and self-authorised authoritative voices in industry and community (roberts and cohen 2014; baker et al. 2018). to elaborate, there have been four main baby rave initiatives that have emerged over the last two decades. the first event originated in north america and is called baby loves disco: the original family dance party (bld, 2004–present). it evolved from a home party into a monthly community event at a nightclub venue (in the city of philadelphia, pennsylvania) and then moved to new york for five years. within the second year, bld toured across twenty-nine u.s. cities and became a global franchise in 2007. enabled through the internet the business is managed from the u.s. and co-created with willing mothers/ fathers in england, scotland, australia, japan, hong kong and dubai. heather murphy (34 years of age) was the founder of the event and self-identified as a professional dancer/ mother who had no previous cultural affiliation to edm. during the event’s development murphy partnered with dj/producer andy hurwitz (founder of the ropeadope record armour | baby raves: youth, adulthood and ageing in contemporary british edm culture 65 label, 1999). the initiative therefore, acquired an edm cultural affiliation and a sense of promotional authenticity with which to target edm-parents, who are drawn to the event due in part to a taste for disco and disco’s revenge: house (1980s–present). since then, it appears that hurwitz has become the sole owner of the “mom and pop” company in which he has emphasised the family dynamic as an edm-father through the inclusion of his wife and three sons in the promotion of the event. the early campaign of the bld event was advertised locally through the line-up flyers on the billboards of the club venue and supported by the mainstream media through a report of the event in the arts and leisure section in the new york sunday times (2005), which reaches a translocal readership. a logo was created to define the branded event that featured a black and white cartoon drawing of a baby with a wide mouth smile, a kiss-curl on the forehead, an upturned jacket collar, pink and yellow ray-ban sunglasses, a yellow rave bangle and the slogan “baby loves disco” on the front of the jacket with two pink hearts that replaced the “a” in “baby” and the “o” in “loves”. the “disco” part was placed in a row of children’s play bricks underneath the baby image. initially, the bld event was aimed at babies, toddlers and small children from 0–6 years of age. the selected theme of disco that encapsulates a music genre and dress-style is understood in the public imagination as a retro-identity associated with the 1970s. the strategy to move the bld to the neighbouring city of new york drew on a lived club history (gg’s barnum room, le clique, xenon, studio 54, ice palace, crisco disco, paradise garage, electric circus, the fun house and hurrah) that ended in the 1980s (garau 2017). in comparison, the baby rave event is held at the weekend in a nightclub venue akin to the adult edm-club event. however, rather than a late evening to all-night structure the event takes place in the daytime on a saturday afternoon for an average duration of three hours. the club venue provides access to an existing dance floor (that if possible is square lit) for children and parents to dance together with an installed disco ball that hangs from the ceiling (in order to create the glitter and glamour of what became an iconic symbol in the club), a dj booth for mixing disco and related edm soul-funk house tracks from the 1970s–present, a licensed bar so that parents can have an alcoholic beverage and a provision of healthy snacks and drinks for the children is arranged by the organisers. on the dance floor, parent and child social interaction is enhanced through two games, first a dance-off between parent and child vs. another parent and child and a parent vs. parent, and second, a competition for the best costume for the best dressed girl and boy. parents are rewarded with a free alcoholic drink and children are given a toy. props are also available such as day-glow balloons. away from the dance floor there is a nappy changing station and further activities in a designated chill-out area. the main features are play tents, face painting, arts and crafts, instruments and toys such as hula hoops, baskets of scarves and egg shakers, inflatables and a bubble machine. this area also enables quiet time for children who need a rest or have become over stimulated. on arrival at the venue there is a pushchair area to leave child-transport that is familiar to parking a car near a (super)club or edm sound system event. dancecult 11(1)66 in 2007, naomi timperley launched the event in her local city (manchester in the north of england). a promotional model was used that matched the companies emerging identity in the u.s. in which timperley emphasised her agency as a young mother/entrepreneur rather than an edm-mother. the event was further promoted through the independent website babylovesdisco and the social network sites facebook, twitter and youtube. the connection to the event’s u.s. identity are maintained through these mediums in which hurwitz’s presence is apparent through promotional videos such as the advert that he starred in for the telephone company t-mobile in which he discusses bld as a career lifestyle. the initiative also developed an ipad app called disco boogie that has been designed to encourage child loyalty through extending the experience away from the event. it is a dance-oriented interactive game that includes digitally synthesised vocoder and vinyl scratch effects. bld toured to cities within england and scotland that were arranged through local venues and mother/father volunteers to organise the event. this strategy enabled newcomer parents of young children to replace the organiser when her/his children had grown beyond the event’s age restriction and the motivation to continue with the franchise had run its course. the event has developed to become an annual feature within the uk family/festival/ arts circuit, in particular, the fringe festival (2009–present). other events are run during the school break such as easter, halloween and christmas. resident djs are employed alongside super-star djs such as fatboy slim (norman cook) as part of the event’s assimilation into british edm club culture. in focusing on child attendance the event’s age range is no longer fixed. some event’s are held during school time and accommodate 0–3 years, while other event’s have a restriction of 0–5 years. the broadest age range was adjusted to include primary school children 4–11 years and has featured a tattoo parlour, nail bar, neon hair streaking, jewelry making, a photograph booth, karaoke and acoustic instruments areas. the disco theme remains consistent but has been merged with alternate dress-up themes that include heroes and villains, pirates, queens and princesses, international flags and pyjamas. the most recent evolution of the event is through the tradition of valentines day that has been aimed at the single edm-parent and an age range for children from 0–8 years. finally, the brand has partnered with local children’s active learning entertainment ventures such as the scottish government initiative called playtalkread. the second initiative, called big fish little fish: 2–4 hour party people (bflf, 2013–present), was created in the uk with the first event in bristol (south of england). founder, hannah saunders self-identified as an edm-clubber in the 1990s and has since become a club-mother that has introduced her offspring to edm culture. this ties into the promotion of bflf as a translocal edm-family event that, like bld, tours to cities on weekend afternoons throughout the uk, is anchored to annual festivals such as camp bestival that accommodate children and has also became part of edm club culture in cities across australia (melbourne, brisbane, the gold coast, perth, adelaide and sydney). the slogan draws from the tradition of the british acid house dance style in which the fingers of the hands are held together to form a fish shape and rhythmically perform the sequence of a mime box shape to the original phrase, “big fish, little fish, cardboard box”. armour | baby raves: youth, adulthood and ageing in contemporary british edm culture 67 an independent website called bigfishlittlefishevents is the hub of the initiative’s marketing campaign with convergent links to facebook, twitter, youtube, instagram and pinterest. these sns serve to increase edm-parent interaction and loyalty and extend the promotion of upcoming events as well as providing a snapshot of previous events through photographs and video footage. the logo is drawn in the tradition of the acid smiley face but painted green, the chakra colour of love, connecting the event to the spiritual tradition of edm culture and the ethos of plur (peace, love, unity and respect). as such, the agenda of bflf has been to attract edm-parents with children aged from 0–8 years, through the deployment of super-star/dj/producers (2 bad mice, slipmatt, aphrodite, dj ss, altern 8, terry francis, plastician, jerome hill, krafty kuts, k klass, dj food, the orb, tom middleton, terry farley, hatcha, mixmaster morris, james tec and nihal) and guest appearances from vocalists such as moloko (roisin murphy). the music playlist is promoted as a mixture of house, trance and techno from the 1980s–present. it enables edm-parents to dance to familiar tracks and share this experience with each other and their children on the dance floor, and extend the sensorial embodied experience of historically being a part of an edm-crowd. the baby rave experience for edm-parents is a space where nostalgia and the present moment with edm-children intersect to create new memories. the dance-style is markedly altered in the case of edm-mothers and edm-fathers who gently swing and sway to the 4/4 beat cradling babies and toddlers. other parents choose to lift their feet and knees a little while holding the hands of their offspring who are perched over their shoulders. most parents bob gently to the groove so as to avoid bumping into any surrounding children. the principle of throwing hands in the air, blowing whistles and horns is maintained and the children imitate these manoeuvres and gestures. in addition, the edm-family initiative extends the notion of multigenerational attendance through the participation of aunties, uncles, grandparents and carers. the child-focused organisation of social activities generally resembled the pioneering bld initiative. however, one distinct feature of the event has been the invention of the parachute-dance in which a large rainbow blanket is temporarily placed over the parents and children on the dance floor. another development of this initiative has been to run child-friendly synthesiser workshops and interactive light installations as part of sharing edm peer knowledge as a diy pedagogical experience. the third initiative, called rave-a-roo (rar 2016–present, jenny kane), is not promoted through the founder’s identity. instead, a reserved business model emphasises the use of the super-club ministry of sound (london) as the main location for 0–10 years. rar is partnered with the children’s family viewing brand cbeebies (shaun the sheep/paw patrol) and toy companies lego and vtech. other silent sponsors include nickelodeon junior, soreen, hoop, selfridges&co and lilgadgets. the djs take on aliases and are dressed in character such as cbeebie’s duggee whereas superstar-djs are absent from the entertainment. there are stage performances that act as a visual aid to motivate and coordinate parents and children in combination with a projection screen that is used to play dance-along cbeebie videos. an rar black ink stamp is used to show payment dancecult 11(1)68 has been verified and also establishes a sense of inclusion (this activity replicates an adult edm-event). rar has adopted an ambassador model called rave-on-calling that enables the edm-parent to sell tickets for which they in return are provided with free entry, party bags, a branded bag and prosecco. a variety of branded merchandise for adults and children to purchase follows the super-club strategy—t-shirts, hoodies, caps, cups, bags, aprons/ bibs phone/tablet cases and a teddy bear. in addition, professional photographs can be printed during the event or purchased online afterwards. the use of a confetti canon is an additional feature while dancing with inflatables and the provision of healthy food parallel the established baby rave model. the fourth initiative called raver tots: throw shapes not toys (rt 2017–present) was the creation of rave-father mike pickets (from surrey, near london) who authenticates his agency within edm culture as a former dj and as an adult with an adhd (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) diagnosis. this also provides a rationale for donations to three charities, national autistic, attention deficit disorder information and support service and nutritious minds that promotes awareness of behavioural differences. rt invites an age range from 0–12 years, has an independent website called raver tots and links to sns facebook, twitter and instagram and has been endorsed by the right-wing media (the bbc, itv, the daily mail and the sun). the logo is based on the traditional yellow acid house smiley face and the edm style is described as house, garage, drum ‘n’ bass and happy hardcore from the 1990s with guest super-star djs (slipmat, artful dodger, nicky blackmarket, druid, brandon block). finally, the brand runs an annual day festival with a capacity for 5,000 attendees rather than attaining a slot in a schedule at an established festival. conclusion within this article, i first addressed the concept of age through a reconsideration of the theoretical and methodological stages in the study of edm club culture, in which i have proposed the conceptualisation of a fluid multigenerationality in order to describe a continual pattern of teenagers, young-adults, mid-adults and rare cases of late-adults at translocal edm-events since the 1980s. the discussion was then furthered in an examination of what i called the edm-family dynamic, through insights into the nuances of age and how this is negotiated within relationships in edm sound system and (super)club culture. i proposed the following descriptors with which to present a general picture of these two lifeworlds, rave-parents, rave-children and (super)club-parents, (super)club-children. for individual scenarios, i used terms that were a useful fit for the sociological construct of the family in edm culture, rave-mother-to-be, rave-mother, rave-father, rave-daughter, rave-son, superclub mother’s-to-be, (super)club-mother, super-club-daughter, super-club son, super-club stepfather and super-club stepson. from this, i discussed the emergence of four baby rave initiatives that have capitalised on a gap in the children’s entertainment market (from 0–12 years of age), appearing to create a new chapter in (super)club culture over the past two decades. in this final part, i interpreted the aesthetic sensibilities of the event as a catalyst armour | baby raves: youth, adulthood and ageing in contemporary british edm culture 69 for what i have called live heritage in which the child temporarily becomes an edm-child and beneficiary of their edm-parent’s prior cultural affiliation as a raver/(super)clubber. this experience may be fleeting for the child who is young and may or may not form a lasting taste for edm but is nevertheless a part of the unauthored personal biography of the edm-parent and their accumulated attendee heritage at edm sound system and (super) club events. notes 1 i use the term (super)club as a shorthand that joins together the super-club and edm specific clubs. this accounts for edm attendees who fall into one or both of these categories. 2 i use the term super-clubber to denote an individual who contextually belongs to super-club culture. 3 i use the term (il)licit as a shorthand that joins together illicit and licit drug consumption. references armour, zoe. 2018a. “dedicated followers of passion (1995–present): seasoned clubbers and the mediation of collective memory as a process of digital gift-giving”. in neo-tribes: consumption, leisure and tourism, ed. anne hardy, andy bennett and brady robards, 13752. switzerland: palgrave macmillan. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68207-5>. armour, zoe. 2018b. “verbal sound system (1997–98): recalling a raver’s diy practices in the british free party counterculture”. in diy cultures and underground music scenes, ed. andy bennett and paula guerra, 219-29. london and new york: routledge. <http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781315226507>. baker, neal. 2015. “half of uk nightclubs have closed since 2005”. the drinks business. 10 august: <https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2015/08/half-of-uk-nightclubs-closedsince-2005>, (accessed 2 february 2019). baker, sarah, catherine strong, lauren istvandity and zelmarie cantillon. 2018. the routledge companion to popular music history and heritage. london and new york: routledge. <http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781315299310>. bennett, andy. 1999. “subcultures or neo-tribes? rethinking the relationship between youth, style and musical taste”. sociology 33(3): 599–617. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/s0038038599000371>. bennett, andy and paul hodkinson. 2012. ageing and youth cultures: music, style and identity. london and new york: bloomsbury. <http://dx.doi.org/10.3384/ijal.1652-8670.12xi>. buckland, fiona. 2002. impossible dance: club culture and queer world-making. middletown, ct: wesleyan university press. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0307883303420178>. child, lauren. and ardagh, philip. 2015. “imagine children’s festival site takeover– what’s happening”. the guardian, 15 february: 32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68207-5 http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781315226507 https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2015/08/half-of-uk-nightclubs-closed-since-2005%20 https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2015/08/half-of-uk-nightclubs-closed-since-2005%20 http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781315299310 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/s0038038599000371 http://dx.doi.org/10.3384/ijal.1652-8670.12xi http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0307883303420178 dancecult 11(1)70 ellis-petersen, hannah. 2016. “fabric nightclub to reopen under strict new licensing conditions”. the guardian, 21 november: 25. ellis-petersen, hannah. 2017. “fabric reopens: crowds in high spirits as legendary club returns”. the guardian, 7 january: 25.. falzon, mark-anthony. 2009. multi sited ethnography: theory, praxis and locality in contemporary research. aldershot: ashgate press. <http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781315596389>. garau, annie. “new york disco clubs in the 1970s: when exclusivity was about inclusivity”. ati, 8 march 2017: <https://allthatsinteresting.com/disco-history>, (accessed 13 march 2019). garratt, sheryl. 1998. adventures in wonderland: a decade of club culture. london: headline book publishing. gregory, julie. 2012. “ageing rave women’s post-scene narratives”. in ageing and youth cultures: music, style and identity, ed. andy bennett and paul hodkinson, 37-49. london and new york: bloomsbury. <http://dx.doi.org/10.3384/ijal.1652-8670.12xi>. hadfield, philip. 2008. “from threat to promise: nightclub “security”, governance and consumer elites”. british journal of criminology 48(4): 429–47. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azn015>. hine, christine. 2003. virtual ethnography. london, thousand oaks and new delhi: sage. hodkinson, paul. 2002. goth: identity, style and subculture. oxford and new york: berg. jackson, phil. 2004. inside clubbing: sensual experiments in the art of being human. oxford and new york: berg. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781474214>. jones, shanna. 2018. “children of the original travelling sound system djs are upholding their parents legacy”. mixmag, 9 may: 23. malbon, ben. 1999. clubbing: dancing, ecstasy and vitality. london and new york: routledge. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0038038501360157>. marcus, george. e. 1995. “ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi sited ethnography”. annual review anthology 24: 95–117. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.24.1.95>. mchale, kirsty. 2015. “a history of creamfields festival”. liverpool echo, 22 august: 9. mckay, george. 1998. ed. diy culture: party and protest in nineties britain. london and new york: verso. norris, richard. 2007. paul oakenfold: the authorised biography. london, toronto, sydney, auckland, johannesburg: transworld publishers bantam press. payling, david. 2016. “the diy free party collective”. journal of electronic dance music culture, 8(1). <https://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/dancecult/article/view/897/778>. philips, dom. 2009. superstar djs here we go! the incredible rise of club land’s finest: glory, excess and burnt out dreams. london: ebury press. pini, maria. 2001. club cultures and female subjectivity: the move from home to house. houndmills, basingstoke, hampshire and new york: palgrave. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9781403914200>. rafaeli, j. s. 2014. “fabric is staying open, but now has to follow a bunch of self-defeating rules”. vice magazine, 19 december: <https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/jmb3ak/fabricstays-open-863>, (accessed 21 january 2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781315596389 https://allthatsinteresting.com/disco-history http://dx.doi.org/10.3384/ijal.1652-8670.12xi http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azn015 http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781474214 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0038038501360157 http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.24.1.95 https://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/dancecult/article/view/897/778 http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9781403914200 https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/jmb3ak/fabric-stays-open-863 https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/jmb3ak/fabric-stays-open-863 armour | baby raves: youth, adulthood and ageing in contemporary british edm culture 71 redhead, steve. 1993. “the end of the end-of-the-century party”. in rave off: politics and deviance in contemporary youth culture, ed. steve redhead, 1-6. avebury: aldershot. reynolds, simon. 1999. generation ecstasy: into the world of techno and rave culture. new york: routledge. <http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203824962>. roberts, les and sarah cohen. 2014. “unauthorising popular music heritage: outline of a critical framework”. international journal of heritage studies 20(3): 241–62. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2012.750619>. thornton, sarah. 1995. club cultures: music media and subcultural capital. oxford: blackwell publishers. smith, nicola. 2009. “beyond the master narrative of youth: researching ageing popular music scenes”. in the ashgate research companion to popular musicology, ed. derek. b. scott, 42747. aldershot: ashgate. <http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781315613451>. smith, nicola. 2012. “parenthood and the transfer of capital in the northern soul scene”. in ageing and youth cultures: music, style and identity, ed. andy bennett and paul hodkinson, 159–72. london and new york: bloomsbury. <http://dx.doi.org/10.3384/ ijal.1652-8670.12xi>. trollope, matt. 2012. one more: a definitive history of uk clubbing, 1988–2008. marston gate: amazon publishing. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203824962 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2012.750619 http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781315613451 http://dx.doi.org/10.3384/ijal.1652-8670.12xi http://dx.doi.org/10.3384/ijal.1652-8670.12xi dancecult 11(1) 2019: executive editorial, masthead and table of contents ageing with edmc guest editor david madden volume 11 number 1 2019 executive editor graham st john (university of fribourg, ch) production editor botond vitos (university of fribourg, ch) from the floor editors alice o’grady (university of leeds, uk) dave payling (staffordshire university, uk) reviews editor toby young (university of oxford, uk) operations director botond vitos (university of fribourg, ch) managing editor tommy colton symmes (rice university, us) community manager katrina loughrey (ge) art director botond vitos (university of fribourg, ch) associate editors kath o’donnell (au) production assistants richard anderson (university of liverpool, uk) dave payling (staffordshire university, uk) dancecult journal of electronic dance music culture issue 11(1) 2019 issn 1947-5403 ©2019 dancecult published yearly at <http://dj.dancecult.net> international advisory board sean albiez (southampton solent university, uk), eliot bates (university of birmingham, uk), andy bennett (griffith university, au), mark j butler (northwestern university, us), anthony d’andrea (university of limerick, ie), rebekah farrugia (oakland university, us), kai fikentscher (de), luis-manuel garcia (university of birmingham, uk), françois gauthier (university of fribourg, ch), anna gavanas (institute for futures studies, se), ross harley (university of new south wales, au), tim lawrence (university of east london, uk), geert lovink (university of amsterdam, nl), alejandro l. madrid (university of illinois, chicago, us), paolo magaudda (university of padova, it), charity marsh (university of regina, ca), andrew murphie (university of new south wales, au), alice o’grady (university of leeds, united kingdom), christopher partridge (lancaster university, uk), anne petiau (itsrs / université paris 5, fr), hillegonda c rietveld (london south bank university, uk), geoff stahl (victoria university of wellington, nz), sonjah nadine stanley-niaah (university of west indies, jm), graham st john (university of fribourg, ch), jonathan sterne (mcgill university, ca), will straw (mcgill university, ca), rupert till (university of huddersfield, uk), tobias c. van veen (université de montréal, ca), michael veal (yale university, us), botond vitos (university of fribourg, ch) dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture is a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture (edmc). launched in 2009, as a platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on the shifting terrain of edmcs worldwide, dancecult houses research exploring the sites, technologies, sounds and cultures of electronic music in historical and contemporary perspectives. playing host to studies of emergent forms of electronic music production, performance, distribution, and reception, as a portal for cutting-edge research on the relation between bodies, technologies, and cyberspace, as a medium through which the cultural politics of dance is critically investigated, and as a venue for innovative multimedia projects, dancecult is the leading venue for research on edmc. cover photo by emma l richmond photography. http://dj.dancecult.net volume 11 number 1 2019 executive editorial: ten years of dancecult . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 01 graham st john guest editor’s introduction: introduction to ageing with edmc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 03 david madden feature articles being and performing “older” woman in electronic dance movement culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 07 alice o’grady and anna madill the irony and the ecstasy: the queer ageing of pet shop boys and lcd soundsystem in electronic dance music . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 larissa wodtke baby raves: youth, adulthood and ageing in contemporary british edm culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 zoe armour a danceable shower of bullets: sound morphologies, concrescence and neurosis in the genesis of an edm beat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 carlos palombini from the floor – online boom bap, trap and ageing in belo horizonte’s rap music scene michel brasil an interview with genesis breyer p-orridge tristan kneschke travellers and sound system protest: matthew smith’s visual commentary dave payling death of/in british drum ‘n’ bass music alistair fraser have things really changed, or is it just me? ageing and dance music culture donna bentley my practice of live performance of spatial electronic dance music sébastien lavoie reviews raving iran (susanne regina meures, dir.). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .97 gay jennifer breyley sweet harmony: rave|today (philly adams and kobi prempeh, curs.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 chris christodoulou popular viennese electronic music, 1990–2015: a cultural history (ewa mazierska) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 anita jóri the relentless pursuit of tone: timbre in popular music (robert fink, melinda latour and zachary wallmark, eds.) 107 maria perevedentseva fyre fraud (jenner furst and julia willoughby nason, dirs.) & fyre: the greatest party that never happened (chris smith, dir.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 tommy symmes issn 1947-5403 ©2019 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 11(1): 1–2 issn 1947-5403 ©2019 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.00 ten years of dancecult welcome to the 16th issue of dancecult. it’s fitting that this, our tenth anniversary issue, is themed “aging with edmc” (guest edited by david madden—see his introduction). working with pkp’s open journal systems platform, we published our first issue in september 2009. if you’re interested in accessing a few memories, take a look back at issue # 1.1. from my perspective as founding executive editor, this past decade has been a long strange trip, over which time dancecult has published something in the order of 160 articles (including 80 peer reviewed feature articles) and 80 reviews, with the journal instrumental to establishing electronic dance music culture as a legitimate interdisciplinary field of research. this commitment to advancing scholarship has been matched by our dedication to genuine open access publishing and commitment to creative commons licensing (attribution-noncommercial-share alike 3.0 license). in an era of predatory publishing, both traditional and new, at dancecult—a member of the radical open access collective—there are no article processing charges for authors, nor subscription fees for readers. genuine oa isn’t just a means, it’s a cause. with dancecult housing research exploring the sites, technologies, sounds and cultures of electronic dance music in historical and contemporary perspectives, over the decade, we’ve accommodated the work of many established and fresh names. from its inception, this experiment has been open to innovation, including via our from the floor section encouraging creative multimedia content. notably, guest edited issues are pivotal to packaging content and furthering the intent and desires of scholars, thought leaders, para-academics and text jockeys across many genres and styles, who together represent the evolving cultures, styles and movements within what we have, for better or worse, labeled edmc. this commitment to ethics and content is matched by a professionalism that has seen dancecult develop as a reputable venue for quality production. the quality is consistent across formats over three main sections: feature articles (pdf), from the floor (html) and reviews (pdf). this effort could not have been accomplished without the dedication of an editorial team that today is comprised of ten volunteers acting in a variety of roles, sometimes multiple. this team performs a valuable service to the scholarly community, currently producing an annual issue. while the team had modest beginnings, it evolved into the dancecult editorial board (deb) overseeing a complete scholar-led in-house production: from soliciting reviews, through copy editing, to layout (in pdf and html) executive editorial http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.00 https://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/dancecult/issue/view/39 http://radicaloa.disruptivemedia.org.uk/ http://radicaloa.disruptivemedia.org.uk/ dancecult 11(1)2 in compliance with our own style guide and well-honed protocols, and with the assistance of a vast network of qualified peer-reviewers. as for the shout-outs. besides myself, current deb members include botond vitos (production editor, operations director and art director), dave payling (ftf editor and production assistant), alice o’grady (ftf editor), toby young (reviews editor), tommy symmes (managing editor) and katrina loughrey (community editor: responsible for our facebook presence, and previously associate editor). notable present mentions include our occasional foreign languages editor luis-manuel garcia, associate editor kath o’donnell and production assistants richard anderson and dave payling. notable past mentions include founding managing editor elliot bates, past managing editor tobias, c. van veen and past reviews editor karenza moore. special mention is reserved for reviews editor & operations director ed montano, who worked tirelessly for the journal over most of these ten years, and whose sad and sudden passing in early 2018 caused an operational disruption from which we’re still recovering. dancecult has weathered a few storms over the decade, not least the ongoing burden of financing basic operational costs. the story in brief. when ojs commenced hosting plans, the scholarly community came together to ensure the journal’s survival via a successful crowdfunding campaign in 2012. between 2013–2018, we enjoyed the support of griffith university epress. after griffith epress shut down its repository in 2018, dancecult, buffeted again by those winds of fate, searches for stable solutions to cover its basic operational costs. at dancecult we remain committed to publishing quality open access interdisciplinary scholarship. for the moment, please enjoy our tenth anniversary offering! sincerely, graham st john executive editor dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture graham@dancecult.net dancecult is an activity of the dancecult research network. https://www.facebook.com/dancecult/ https://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/dancecult mailto:graham@dancecult.net https://dancecult-research.net/ a proposed typology of sampled material within electronic dance music dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 6(1): 97–122 issn 1947-5403 ©2014 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net doi 10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.01.06 a proposed typology of sampled material within electronic dance music1 robert ratcliffe manchester metropolitan university (uk) abstract the following article contains a proposed typology of sampled material within electronic dance music (edm). the typology offers a system of classification that takes into account the sonic, musical and referential properties of sampled elements, while also considering the technical realisation of the material and the compositional intentions of the artist, producer or dj. illustrated with supporting examples drawn from a wide variety of artists and sub-genres, the article seeks to address the current lack of research on the subject of sample-based composition and production, and provides a framework for further discussion of edm sampling practices. in addition, it demonstrates how concepts and terminology derived from the field of electroacoustic music can be successfully applied to the study and analysis of edm, resulting in an expanded analytical and theoretical vocabulary. keywords: edm, sample, sampling, musical borrowing, production, composition, electroacoustic, mimesis, transcontextuality, spectromorphology, source bonding robert ratcliffe is an internationally recognised composer, sonic artist, edm musicologist and performer. he completed a phd in composition and musicology funded by the arts and humanities research council at keele university, uk. he has developed a hybrid musical language and compositional technique through the cross-fertilisation of art music and electronic dance music (edm). his hybrid compositions have been performed and broadcast in over twenty-five countries worldwide, including presentations at international events such as acmc, icmc, l’espace du son, nime and sonorities. feature article dancecult 6(1)98 introduction there have been a number of attempts to categorise the sampling2 practices of art and popular electronic musics, examining both the materials and compositional techniques involved.3 goodwin’s taxonomy of sampling within popular production (1990) proposes three separate categories, based on the intent and motivations of the borrower, and the referential qualities of the material. porcello also makes a distinction between forms of commercial music sampling, recognising three strands that differ in terms of technical implementation and intended mimetic function: mimetic/reproductive, manipulative and extractive (1991). in contrast, cutler’s review of “plunderphonic” applications in electronic art music (2000) identifies five categories, which take into account the compositional procedures involved and the properties of the borrowed elements, including size and recognisability. although cutler touches on popular music, a closer examination of sampling within vernacular forms is provided by sanjek (1994) who differs from goodwin and porcello in his assertion of four strands, including a separate category for remixing.4 in addition, there are several introductory overviews of sampling practice (for instance butler 2006; cox 2007; metzer 2003). such descriptions tend to categorise according to sound type, making a distinction between the use of smaller fragments and extended samples without going into considerable detail or providing specific musical examples. the musicological study of electronic dance music (edm)5 is a newly emerging area of research, and, to my knowledge, this article is the first detailed exposition of sample-based edm. the proposed system of classification takes into consideration both the properties and the functionality of borrowed material, while providing additional information concerning the technical and compositional aspects of sampling. it is intended for the proposed typology to facilitate a better understanding of the materials and processes of edm composition and lead to a more informed listening experience. the typology is illuminated by supporting examples sourced from interviews with edm artists, producers and djs operating in a variety of sub-genres. it also explores the use of concepts and terminology derived from electroacoustic music (in particular, the ideas of simon emmerson and denis smalley) to provide a descriptive vocabulary for edm analysis. the main argument here is that there are many connections and commonalities that exist between edm and electroacoustic music, as seen in the similarity of certain sound materials, and to some extent the compositional procedures and means of production, as directed by available technology. in the following text, specific links are identified in order to demonstrate the effectiveness and potential for a wider application of the electroacoustic device within edm analysis, resulting in an expanded analytical and theoretical vocabulary. the sampled materials of edm can be grouped into four main categories: (a) short, isolated fragments;6 (b) loops and phrases; (c) larger elements; (d) transformed material. these categories can then be divided into further sub-categories depending on the musical function7 and referential8 qualities of the material. a visual representation of the typology is provided below (fig. 1). ratcliffe | a proposed typology of sampled material within electronic dance music 99 figure 1: a proposed typology of sampled material within edm. the first three categories of the typology are based on structural properties (or sample length), with the structural possibilities afforded by sound transformation also accounted for through the inclusion of a separate category for transformed material. the methodology developed provides an effective approach to sample classification, due to the way in which samples are incorporated within edm—this often involves the selection and editing of material according to a specific duration or periodicity, whether it is a single drum hit, a phrase or pattern length, or an entire section of music. sample length may also be predetermined by the specifications of the technology employed; for example, a sampling drum machine may offer a very short recording time or maximum sample length, as it is designed to work with percussion sounds. in contrast, performance samplers are optimised for working with loops and phrases, while software permits the use of larger elements. older technology will also impose its own restrictions due to limited onboard storage. category (a): short, isolated fragments short, isolated fragments: drum and percussion sounds the first sub-category consists of individual percussion sounds that are sampled for use within a rhythmic pattern or stream. typically, this will involve samples collected from a multitude of sources, which are used as elements in a breakbeat or synthetic drum pattern. dancecult 6(1)100 individual samples may be layered9 against existing patterns and loops, or used to form a percussion “sample-bank” that can be controlled from a sequencer, as dj shadow elaborates: i sample a kick, a snare and some hats, maybe from different places. then i build up the loop on the sequencer. sometimes it doesn’t have the right vibe, so i might sample some atmosphere10 and drop that in between the kicks and snares just to make it feel live (cited in scott 1998: 99). a crucial, yet time-consuming part of this process involves the location and extraction of suitable source material, “much like (and often one and the same as) a dj’s practice of ‘digging’ for vinyl records” (rodgers 2003: 318). the importance of collecting, critiquing and cataloguing source material was highlighted by fatboy slim (norman cook) in a description of the pre-compositional process behind his third album, halfway between the gutter and the stars (2000). interestingly, cook documents a process similar to that employed by electroacoustic composers who often collect and catalogue different sound sources along with extensive variations, according to different processes applied to the original (for example, reverb and delay): i realised the starting point for me has always been source material. y’know... samples. so i spent the next few weeks trawling round record fairs and second-hand shops, buying up crateloads of crappy albums for 25p. then it was just a question of sitting down and sifting through everything, finding the bits i liked, sticking them on to disk and cataloguing it all. i have all my bass riffs all set out in different bpms... my loops all chopped into kick, snare and hat... that kind of thing (cited in scott 2001: 96). short, isolated fragments: recontextualised to function as drum and percussion sounds the second sub-category contains sound fragments that are non-percussion-based (although they may contain gestural information11 associated with percussive sounding materials),12 which are recontextualised to function as drum and percussion elements. a common strategy involves the creation of a rhythmic (or “groove”) template that is extracted from an existing breakbeat using specialised software, such as propellerhead’s recycle.13 this is achieved by analysing the performance characteristics of the sampled breakbeat (for example, note onset, duration and velocity information), and allows for the inherent performance properties of the sample to be maintained while replacing the original sounds with recontextualised elements. in an interview with sound on sound magazine, the breakcore14 producer venetian snares describes a similar process, whereby the performance characteristics of a breakbeat are used in conjunction with unconventional percussion sounds: well, yes, in a way they are breakbeats. i’m just not using traditional drum sounds a lot of the time. i prefer to create my own sounds from scratch. a lot of the time i’ll take a breakbeat, originally played by a drummer on a traditional kit, and replace all the drum hits with my own sounds, then chop that up and construct the beats from ratcliffe | a proposed typology of sampled material within electronic dance music 101 that. one method is to open the breakbeat in sound forge15 and regionalise all of the individual hits, by hand – the auto-region function has never seemed accurate enough to me. then i’ll mute all the hits, but leave the regions still marked. then i’ll put my own drum sounds into the regions using the mix function. it’s great because you can layer a lot of sounds in the regions, just as a drum kit would have hats and snares and so on overlapping and interacting with each other. i can have the flow and nuances of real drums, but with whatever sounds i want. the possibilities are endless! (cited in sellars 2002: 178) in the track “timber” (1997) (a politically-charged collaboration between coldcut and hexstatic) recontextualised sounds (associated with industrial logging16) are used mimetically17 to evoke images of deforestation. the design of the rhythmic material is particularly interesting, as the samples are sequenced and manipulated in order to simulate actions of cutting, chopping and sawing (an example of “syntactic mimesis”18 (emmerson 1986)). as suggested above, the ideas of electroacoustic composer and theorist simon emmerson may be helpful in discussing the mimetic aspects of sampled sound in edm. his influential chapter “the relation of language to materials” (1986) explores mimesis in electroacoustic music as part of a proposed continuum of musical discourse (aural and mimetic), which he relates to musical syntax (abstract and abstracted) in a survey of “approaches to language” (1986: 24). short, isolated fragments: pitched elements used as a basis for new musical material the third sub-category contains pitched elements (for example, individual notes or chords) that are sampled and reconfigured to form new material. the motivations for working in this way may vary from the aesthetic, to the ethical or economic. for instance, if a musical phrase has been sampled for its spectral qualities, the application of sound transformation to disguise the origin of the source would remove or distort these properties and render the sample obsolete. as an alternative, edm musicians have developed a variety of methods for generating similar material to help prevent source identification. one way to obscure the identity of the source, while retaining its spectral properties, is to extract individual notes or elements from the sample and to use these in the construction of a new musical phrase.19 this strategy is frequently employed by artists such as the avalanches who altered their approach to working with sampled material: the most basic change has been in what we see as sample-worthy in the first place. instead of loops or grooves we’ve both amassed large collections of chords and notes which in the past we would have ignored. these are pieced together to slowly create small sections – our new loops and grooves – with which we can construct songs (cited in pytlik 2002: 76). dancecult 6(1)102 another reason why edm musicians dissect and recombine samples is because the use of larger, unmodified extracts is often viewed as uncreative or unoriginal. for dj shadow, constructing music from substantial, unaltered material is “an injustice to the art of sampling”, and he is “strongly opposed to that way of working” (cited in scott 1998: 99). it is ironic to find the notion of “authorship” nested within sampling practices, yet musicians such as dj shadow20 only gain a sense of ownership once the source material has been deconstructed and reconfigured to form something new. in the following example, he describes an approach similar to the avalanches: what i do is find a bassline with the right feel then i sample individual notes of that bassline, assign them to different pads on the mpc21 and restructure them to play a different tune (cited in scott 1998: 99). this approach features a gestural use of the sampler that is similar to playing a synthesizer or keyboard containing sample-based sounds (for example, yamaha’s awm (advanced wave memory) system). in this way, the sampler is used to facilitate a form of stored waveform synthesis.22 typically, this will involve editing and looping a short sample, which is mapped across a keyboard (or other interface) and played/programmed to create new material. a notable example is the “reese” bass sample, which is a synthetic bass sound sampled23 and replayed on innumerable jungle and drum ‘n’ bass records. the original sound has been traced to the kevin saunderson track “just want another chance” (1988) (released under the pseudonym reese), and sampled on tracks such as “the mutant remix – rollers instinct” [dj trace remix] (1995) by t. power (reynolds 1999: 22 and 352). short, isolated fragments: non-musical sounds recontextualised as individual notes or events within a phrase or sequence the fourth sub-category contains musical material formed through the organisation of non-musical sound. more specifically, short samples derived from a non-musical object are recontextualised as individual components (notes or events) within a musical phrase or sequence. the material is produced through detailed sample editing (individual samples are often extracted from field recordings) and the use of a controlling sequencer to organise the various fragments into a phrase-level structure. specific examples include the “chainsaw solo”24 of “timber” (1997), and the more recent “printer jam”25 (2009) by mistabishi, where samples of a computer printer are recontextualised to function as the synthetic sounds of drum ‘n’ bass. through such examples we can see how edm musicians explore the musical potential of non-musical materials in a similar way to composers of musique concrète, although recognition of the sound source is intended and often necessary in order to understand the meaning of the samples used. the connection between the use of these materials in edm and musique concrète has been noted by others, and acknowledged by artists such as matmos: ratcliffe | a proposed typology of sampled material within electronic dance music 103 . . . we started to make dance music patterns but have them play only these noisy, difficult, strange sounds. it was almost like the vocabulary was from industrial music and musique concrète, but the grammar was the cut-up of breakbeat techno (daniel cited in doyle 2004a: 78). short, isolated fragments: ornamental sounds the fifth sub-category includes sound fragments that have an ornamental function, such as vocal hits, orchestral stabs, and a whole range of sonic embellishments.26 these can still have a mimetic27 quality in that they evoke a certain genre or historical production style:28 i like the idea of a drum coming from a different age and a different place with a different spirit. when you bring these things together, you get this weird chemistry. like the trail of sound after a snare drum – that is the ambience of that room and what was going on in that room – all these weird, different feelings from different places (tom rowlands of the chemical brothers, cited in micallef 2002). similarly, for the producer amon tobin, a sample’s “point of origin” and the traceability of the original context are important factors when selecting material: for me it’s just important to use sounds that have been used in a different musical context previously. i’ve been really into that idea since my first record when i got so excited by being able to take a sliver of something and maintain the momentum of that snapshot. the idea of having a sound that doesn’t have a ‘point of origin’ seems slightly flat (cited in mackintosh 2003: 104). when describing a sample’s “point of origin”, tobin is referring to the mimetic qualities and cultural location of the sound rather than any gestural cause. furthermore, his use of the term “snapshot” to describe the sampling process highlights one of the main reasons why people get so excited about sampling. like photography, video and forms of digital art in general, sampling uses technologies that facilitate an ease of reproduction to a degree that can create a significant tension between what is technically achievable and what is ethically and legally permissible.29 category (b): loops and phrases loops and phrases: self-referential musical elements the first sub-category includes sampled musical phrases and loops that are self-referential. the presence of sampled material is unknown to the listener, which could be by design— achieved through editing and processing,30 or through the obscurity of the source—or simply fortuitous, and consequently authorship of the material is attributed to the borrower. dancecult 6(1)104 in this category, source recognition is irrelevant, with material selected purely for its musical content. for example, the use of a vocal phrase sampled from “you’re no good for me” (1987) by kelly charles in the prodigy’s “no good (start the dance)” (1994) does not require the listener to recognise the sample;31 it functions as a vocal element, irrespective of the source. similarly, the vast range of borrowed melodic material, bass patterns, percussion loops and track segments used within edm may also be included in this category. it is important to note, however, that the pervasiveness of certain samples (for example, the “funky drummer” loop32) has resulted in a situation in which previously unknown material has become referential through familiarity (sanjek 1994). such samples are located in the third sub-category. loops and phrases: referential non-musical material the second sub-category involves a referential or mimetic use of non-musical material. here we can place cultural or environmental samples that do not have a conventional musical function, but are used for their associative, narrative or symbolic qualities. this includes real-world sounds like the ocean waves flowing through goldie’s “sea of tears” (1995) or the exotic animals of “it began in afrika” (2001) by the chemical brothers. additional examples might include cultural signifiers, such as elements sourced from video games, radio, film and tv (dialogue, sound effects, etc.), the sound of church bells or a notable public event (for instance, the political speech delivered by john major and sampled by orbital on “sad but new” (1995)).33 extensive material of this kind should be located within the corresponding sub-group of category c. however, it is possible to create the illusion of a more extended extract through the repetition of shorter overlapping samples or cross-fade looping.34 this is particularly effective when the loop points are masked by other textural elements (the goldie example above appears to work in this way). loops and phrases: transcontextual musical elements the third sub-category contains sampled material that continues to have a musical function, but in which a referential aspect is also present. this is a dual or “transcontextual”35 use of sampled material, where it is intended for the listener to appreciate abstract musical properties, while simultaneously recognising the source of the sample and its extra-musical associations. here we can locate cultural sounds (for example, samples of non-western music), or elements from popular music that are used either as prioritised quotations, or as musical components complete with extra mimetic associations. in the following example, the chemical brothers discuss the use of moroccan music36 and accompanying cultural associations (a sample from “just tell me the truth” by najat aâtabou) in the context of their electronic track “galvanize” (2005): ratcliffe | a proposed typology of sampled material within electronic dance music 105 that is a sample from a moroccan record . . . everyone thinks it is indian, but it is from morocco. someone gave me this record from the ellipsis arts label; it is amazing – so much energy and so raw. we brightened up the sound a bit and made it more aggressive, but it had so much power to begin with. the idea was to put it with this high-tech sound and get the worlds to collide. that is pretty much the sound that was on the record, backed up with a bit more oomph via effects (rowlands cited in micallef 2005). some sample-based tracks are saturated with borrowed elements that are easily recognisable. this includes the collage-based work of bomb the bass, coldcut, m/a/r/r/s, s’express and their contemporaries, as well as music that uses a limited number of samples combined with original components (for example, music by leftfield or underworld). in either case, the authorship of sampled material may not be acknowledged by the borrowing artist. in addition, there are samples that, although previously unknown, have become referential through frequent and widespread use (sanjek 1994). for example, the “amen”37 drum loop has been used as a jungle signifier in experimental sub-genres of edm, where it is subjected to complex and radical manipulations, often conducted with satirical intent. such an example demonstrates how the selection and incorporation of borrowed elements within edm may be driven by extra-musical factors. in this respect, there is a resonance with the goals of hip-hop musicians who seek “cultural literacy and intertextual reference” through the incorporation of recognisable material (rose 1994: 89). according to tricia rose, hip-hop artists highlight sampled material and challenge the listener to locate the origin of the various musical and lyrical components (rose 1994: 89). the educational value of incorporating recognisable material in this way has been noted by edm musicians such as tim simenon (bomb the bass), who suggests that the music of james brown would be unfamiliar to younger generations if it was not for the proliferation of his material within hip-hop (cited in goodwin 1990). while sample-based edm offers a similar challenge to listeners, there have been instances where the inclusion of well-known material in a new release has been revealed in advance of the music. in this way, the presence of familiar material is highlighted and used as a promotional tool to generate audience interest in the music prior to its availability. this was the case with the prodigy’s recontextualisation of “thriller” (1982) by michael jackson, in “the way it is” (2004),38 which was highlighted during pre-release publicity39 of their fourth album, always outnumbered, never outgunned (2004). the inclusion of such well-known material gives rise to a situation in which the sample’s source becomes cross-referential, with the original music evoking an image of the material in its recontextualised environment. this phenomenon can also be observed in popular music that incorporates samples as signifiers, seen for example in robbie william’s borrowing from “you only live twice” (1967) by john barry, in “millennium” (1998), and madonna’s incorporation of sampled material from “gimme, gimme, gimme (a man after midnight)” (1979) by abba, in the track “hung up” (2005). dancecult 6(1)106 category (c): larger elements larger elements: multi-track parts and a cappellas the first sub-category includes individual vocal or instrumental parts such as commercially released a cappellas and multi-track stems produced for dj performance and remix purposes.40 material may also be sourced from an existing track using specialised software tools and “unmixing” techniques (phase cancellation, spectral editing, equalisation, channel separation, etc.) to isolate and extract individual textural elements for subsequent sampling. this is standard practice within remix and mashup culture,41 where borrowed vocal and instrumental parts are used in a variety of ways, from detailed integration to superposition with minimal editing. sampled elements may be extracted from a mono or stereo recording, or sourced from a multi-channel mix in which instrumental parts are located in specific audio channels and isolated more easily. by converting a multi-channel mix into separate mono files, it is possible to apply additional unmixing for thorough separation of the material. a related strategy involves the use of mogg42 files sourced from music video games like rock band (2007)—these hold the multi-track parts of many established and well-known tracks that can be individually accessed through software such as audacity43 (mogg files 2010). it is possible to make a distinction between parts that are self-referential—as a result of editing or the obscurity of the sample—and those that are chosen for their referential or associative qualities (transcontextual). the recorded solo performance offers a potential source for both types of material. here, we can cite the fatboy slim track “sunset (bird of prey)” (2000) (with vocals sampled from the jim morrison poem “bird of prey” (1969)) and moby’s “natural blues”44 (1999) (based on a field recording of the african-american singer vera hall by the ethnomusicologist alan lomax). furthermore, while both of these examples feature a substantial use of pre-recorded vocals, they demonstrate alternative approaches to the incorporation of such material, with the former based on the extraction and rearrangement of individual phrases, and the latter containing entire sections of unaltered material. the following quote from future loop foundation describes an even more elaborate treatment: there’s a vocal part from a live session that i’d recorded and michael had this idea for it which involved chopping the part up, de-breathing the parts, re-ordering them, taking lines out, adding syllables, putting a massive reverb on them, sampling them with the reverb, reversing them all so that there was a tail-out reverb at the start, adding another forward reverb, and finally re-reversing the whole thing so that there was a tail-in and tail out reverb on the final part (barrott cited in o’sullivan 1999: 64). larger elements: extended excerpts in the second sub-category we can locate extended excerpts of a complete track, including passages, sections and other significant material. a sample of this kind may be incorporated ratcliffe | a proposed typology of sampled material within electronic dance music 107 as an unaltered extract that is inserted or juxtaposed against other sections of the work, or combined with additional elements (especially drums and percussion) to create a new arrangement. in the second approach, the sample may form part of a sequence of extracts from the same source that are reordered to produce an alternative structural trajectory. this can be heard, for example, in “wham! bar” (2007) by mint royale, which uses substantial sections of “wham rap! (enjoy what you do)” (1982) by wham. an extended passage or section is likely to have a transcontextual function, due to the size of the material and the increased probability of recognition. it may be used as a cultural signifier, or contrasted stylistically with the original elements of a production, as in the classical interlude of tiesto’s “athena” (2004) (an electronic “interpretation”45 of albinoni’s “adagio in g minor”), and the james bond inspired “on her majesty’s secret service”46 (1997) by david arnold and the propellerheads. larger elements: extensive, referential non-musical material the third sub-category deals with extensive non-musical material that has a referential or mimetic function. it includes extended field recordings, foley sound, dialogue and other samples from category two that are significantly increased in length. here we might locate a sampled answer phone message or recorded interview (like the extract of rickie lee jones incorporated within the orb’s “little fluffy clouds”47 (1990)), a documented public event (such as the religious sermon delivered by reverend w. leo daniels and sampled by fatboy slim on “drop the hate” (2000)), or a recorded real-world environment (the city soundscape48 documented by daft punk in “da funk” (1997)). in the introduction to “high rise” (1991) by orbital, the presentation of a field recording with minimal editing highlights a connection to the “anecdotal” electroacoustic music of luc ferrari (and related practices) in which environmental recordings are sometimes used with little modification. at the same time, we can identify contrasting examples of recorded space, including a common form of “spatial simultaneity” (smalley 1997) in which a remote space (such as an outdoor atmosphere) is layered behind the proximate components of a track (non-reverberant bass, drums and percussion): “sometimes it’s like finding the perfect stereo atmosphere on a mini disc [sic] that will complement a mix, and that involves getting out of the house for once” (clark cited in barcode magazine 2008). larger elements: complete tracks the fourth sub-category consists of complete tracks or instrumental versions that are used as macro-level material—a practice that has become more widespread since the introduction of audio-based performance and production software such as ableton live.49 a common application is the “a vs. b” (or “a + b”) mashup, in which a complete track or instrumental is combined with a different and often contrasting a cappella. the success of this approach is dependent, to a large extent, on the characteristics and compatibility of the chosen source materials, with integration of the components usually achieved through manipulation of dancecult 6(1)108 large-scale musical parameters (such as tempo and key) and basic timbral modification (equalisation and filtering). an example is “toca’s miracle” (2000), which brings together the a cappella of coco’s “i need a miracle” (1996) and the synthetic-driven instrumental “toca me” (1999) by fragma. the track was initially created by dj vimto as an unauthorised bootleg for dj performance (inglis 2000), but owing to its popularity an official version was later produced by raymon zenker (fragma). in an interview with sound on sound magazine, zenker revealed how the components were combined with little additional editing, consisting of minor sectional reorganisation and adjustment of the vocal tempo and pitch (inglis 2000: 38): the original vocals were at 126bpm, so i had to timestretch them to 135, i think, and i had to change the tuning a bit, it was a little bit out of tune, and then it fitted . . . . it was only about 50 or 30 cents out, just a bit (cited in inglis 2000: 38). recognition of the source and context is not required in this case,50 but the origin of the material can play an important role: for artists like mark vidler (go home productions), the mashup represents an opportunity to unite musicians from different times and places (doyle 2004b), resulting in a “simulated” collaboration, “that did not, strictly speaking, ever take place” (gunkel 2008: 498). category (d): transformed material the processing capabilities of the sampler have allowed edm musicians to explore a more abstract soundworld51 (akin to that of electroacoustic composers) in which causal identity is removed, and the meaning of sounds is deduced by energy profile and morphology alone.52 at the same time, referential or causal information may provide a basis for a sound transformation in which meaning is drawn from the manipulation of a recognisable source.53 the following category is concerned with such samples that are transformed in terms of their spectral and morphological content (their “spectromorphology”54 (smalley 1986 and 1997)), resulting in ambiguous or new material. other types of transformation (for example, a reordering of the structural trajectory, or acts of “theft” which transform the meaning of sampled materials by surrounding them with “an aura of illegality” (metzer 2003: 172))55 are not considered, and should be included in the relevant sub-group of categories a, b, or c. in describing the characteristics and processes of sample transformation, the edm analyst may profit from denis smalley’s article “defining transformations”, which introduces terminology and a categorisation system based on “temporal relations” (smalley 1993: 279). the following useful distinction is provided: in attempting to define transformations we have to adopt two contrasted strategies which are directly related to the type of base identity. the first, linked to identifiable, transcontextual, source-causes, i shall call source-bonded transformation. the second, where extrinsic links and source-causes are imagined, imaginary, or seem so remote ratcliffe | a proposed typology of sampled material within electronic dance music 109 that they appear nonexistent, i shall call spectromorphological transformation. sourcebonded transformation is source specific; spectromorphological transformation is source freed, more free-floating. in between the two are varying degrees of source inference and suggestion; we cannot say where one becomes the other (smalley 1993: 282). it is important to note that the two types (source-bonded and spectromorphological) “may collaborate”, and that “in theory all transformation is created by spectromorphological means” (smalley 1993: 285 and 282). transformed material: short, isolated fragments the first sub-category includes short, isolated fragments that are transformed to create ornamental effects, or percussive or glitch-based sounds for use within a rhythmic pattern or stream. here, the source bonding56 is removed, and the sound is used as something else. this approach has been encouraged by the increasingly sophisticated sound processing capabilities of sampling drum machines and sequencers, and the availability of software tools for conducting complex sound transformations.57 it is important to note, however, that such transformations are no longer confined to the studio environment and commonly appear during interactive electronic performances. due to the increased power and stability of laptop technology, there is a growing practice of “live” sampling in which sounds are captured during performance and used as a basis for real-time composition and improvisation. for example, the experimental edm producer tim exile has constructed a performance and composition system58—based around a custom-designed reaktor59 environment and selection of hardware controllers—that facilitates live sampling and transformation. this system allows for material to be sampled (or resampled) from a microphone or other input source and integrated in real-time as part of a composition/performance. in this way, tim exile will often sample and transform his own voice to create new percussion sounds, building rhythmic material in layers as a performance unfolds. transformed material: loops and phrases the second sub-category deals with the transformation of larger elements. this might involve a covert transformation, in which concealed elements are unknown to the listener, or take the form of a perceivable transition, moving from clearly identifiable material through to the ambiguous and unrecognisable. examples of the latter may be found in the work of fatboy slim, such as the dynamic time-stretch60/pitch-shift degeneration of the track “rockafeller skank” (1998), or the ring-modulated vocal transition between the tracks “retox” and “weapon of choice” on his third album halfway between the gutter and the stars (2000). as many edm musicians sample directly from vinyl,61 turntable techniques, such as “scratching”62 are often used to transform the identity of borrowed material. realtime sample transformation has become much more prevalent since the introduction of dancecult 6(1)110 performance samplers and dj-oriented equipment. for example, yamaha’s su700 and roland’s sp-808 samplers, and effects processors, such as korg’s kaoss pad, included a range of built-in controllers optimised for real-time manipulation and, in particular, the emulation of dj-style effects. more recently, the innovation of virtual dj technology has provided a more immediate way in which to apply turntable effects to sampled material. transformed material: larger elements the final sub-category is concerned with the transformation of larger samples, including non-musical elements, multi-track parts, extended excerpts and complete tracks. these are frequently transformed in live performance to produce alternative or remixed versions of previously released music. studio-based examples also exist, such as the processed dialogue from the science fiction film beneath the planet of the apes (1970), which forms the introduction to “desert storm” (1991) by orbital. a transformation of this kind may be undertaken for practical reasons and, in particular, for the generation of variant or contrasting source material. in this way, the transformation is conceived as a form of “batch processing” that is applied globally to an extended sample, and allows for the timbre or spectromorphology of the source to be altered prior to dissection and resampling. the process can be repeated using different transformation settings and parameters to produce large quantities of source material, with suitable phrases and loops extracted from the resulting collection. a distinction may be made at the procedural level between material that is directly captured from the source and subsequently modified, and that which is passed through additional equipment (such as a guitar pedal, synthesizer or chain of signal processing effects) for transformation en route to the recording device. a wide variety of results may be obtained, from subtle enhancement and controlled signal degradation (for integration with other low fidelity sound sources, such as vintage synthesizers and drum machines) to more significant source-bonded and spectromorphological transformation. the aim may be to disguise or to significantly alter the sample, or to maintain recognisability while further “personalising” the material, as david morley describes: “always sample through something, be it an arp 2600, a compressor, a preamp or a radio. this’ll make your stuff sound like your stuff ” (cited in future music 1998: 110). conclusion the proposed typology provides a framework for the discussion of sampling practices within edm. it is intended to contribute to the emerging descriptive and analytical vocabulary for the study of the genre, in order to facilitate a better understanding of the aims, motivations and work of edm musicians and lead to a more informed consideration of sample-based musics in general. the typology may be applied to the study of a single track, or used as a system of cross-reference for the comparison of materials, attitudes and working methods between individual tracks, albums, sets, artists, genres or time periods. in this way, it allows ratcliffe | a proposed typology of sampled material within electronic dance music 111 for a broader consideration of sampling across the spectrum of edm and, in particular, the identification of different origins and narratives, in terms of aesthetics and creative practice. in addition, the typology demonstrates how the analytical and theoretical vocabulary of electroacoustic music can serve as a useful and effective resource for the edm analyst. this is particularly important, as the lack of an established language for the study of edm is problematic. specific tools and methodologies have started to appear, but many important technical and theoretical aspects have yet to be explored or await further consideration, including, for example, the formalisation of methods for sound categorisation (the current article seeks to make a significant contribution in this area) and the development of appropriate forms of notation to cover the vast array of sonic and musical materials encountered within the genre. similar issues have been tackled within the field of electroacoustic music, and the solutions and strategies developed there may help to answer some of the questions presently faced by the edm analyst. the electroacoustic language used within the typology highlights certain similarities between the sound materials, compositional techniques and production technologies of the two genres. it also suggests that the analytical and theoretical vocabulary of electroacoustic music may be widely applicable and relevant to various forms of edm. a few potential applications might include: the use of smalley’s “spatiomorphology” to help describe contrasting “spatial settings” or the manipulation of “spatial perspective” in a production, mix or performance (1986 and 1997); wishart’s concept of the “sonic landscape” (1986), as an aid to the interpretation of different sonic environments within a track, set or series of related works (for instance, the surreal transition between “skylined” and “claustrophobic sting” (1994) by the prodigy (real and unreal objects/unreal space (wishart 1986)); or landy’s “framework for the categorisation of sound transformation” (1991), used in relation to sound processing and ideas concerning “landscape” and “transcontextuality” (the transformation of a sample’s meaning or context (landy 1991)). beyond these initial suggestions there are many other possible applications for the electroacoustic device, although the edm analyst will need to be selective in choosing an appropriate tool or methodology for the work under consideration; for example, “spectromorphology” (smalley 1986 and 1997) will be helpful when applied to the selected output of some edm artists (those working with more abstract sound materials), but less effective when applied to others (those working with materials and structures that are essentially “instrumental” in nature or origin, or chosen for their cultural significance). in conclusion, it is hoped that the examples offered by the typology will stimulate further interest in the analytical and theoretical vocabulary of electroacoustic music, as the descriptive and investigative possibilities afforded by this language63 could contribute to a better understanding of the sonic and musical aspects of edm. for those wishing to pursue these ideas, the online repository for electroacoustic music analysis (orema)64 offers a useful starting point, including a range of example analyses and information about available tools and methodologies, while the electroacoustic resource site (ears)65 provides an online bibliography and a glossary of key terms. dancecult 6(1)112 acknowledgements i am extremely grateful to both the ahrc for supporting the project, and to mike vaughan for his invaluable thoughts and advice. sincerest thanks to simon emmerson, sohrab uduman and rajmil fischman for commenting on various versions of the typology. thanks also to the guest editors ed montano and simon zagorski-thomas, and the anonymous reviewers at dancecult for their helpful suggestions. notes 1 the typology was first conceived in 2008 as part of a larger research project (see ratcliffe 2012). the classification system has since been significantly revised and expanded. 2 this is a process in which audio is taken from a pre-existing source and used as compositional material within a new work. 3 the different categories identified by cutler (2000), goodwin (1990), porcello (1990) and sanjek (1994) can be summarised as follows: 1. sampling embedded within devices such as sampling drum machines and synthesizers. 2. creative practice that demonstrates an eclectic approach to musical sources and their juxtaposition. 3. practices that “have made an aesthetic out of sampling . . . and in some cases, a politics out of stealing” (goodwin 1990: 271). 4. sampling that explores the potential for sonic exploration, involving the appropriation, manipulation and transformation of materials as sound-sources (for example, during studiobased acousmatic composition or as raw input to a performance). 5. the use of sampling within remix practices. 4 remix materials usually consist of samples extracted from the original track. these may be categorised according to the classification system proposed. 5 “in this article, the term edm is used more broadly, encompassing both mainstream forms, such as drum ‘n’ bass and techno, and experimental sub-genres, such as breakcore and idm” (ratcliffe 2011: 235). 6 this description is derived from cox (“isolated sound fragments”) (cox 2007). 7 this could be melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic etc. 8 in the sense that something extra-musical is signified or recognition of the original context is intended. 9 for example, a roland tr-808 bass drum sample is often used to provide extra sub-bass frequencies when layered with an existing kick drum. 10 sampled atmosphere may include: ambience or reverberation sampled from an existing work, background noise (including environmental recordings), and sonic artifacts introduced via the recording and production process (for example, analogue tape “hiss” or vinyl noise (the “phonograph effect” (katz 2010: 155))). in the example above, dj shadow documents an approach whereby sampled atmosphere is used to add authenticity in the simulation of a recorded live performance. edm musicians frequently adopt this strategy when creating new material from individual fragments; for example, fatboy slim described the use of sampled “air” to conceal the edits in a reconfigured drum loop (cited in scott 2001: 100). ratcliffe | a proposed typology of sampled material within electronic dance music 113 11 this is where we can detect a physical human gesture as the cause or trigger for the sound (such as playing a drum pad or keyboard). 12 for example, the future sound of london would record themselves “hitting railings for percussive sounds” (cobain cited in buskin 2006: 58). 13 for more information, see: <http://www.propellerheads.se/products/recycle/> (accessed 28 november 2011). 14 breakcore is “an extreme, hyper-accelerated form of edm, often involving the use of complex, edited breakbeat patterns. the most notable exponent of the genre is venetian snares” (ratcliffe 2011). according to matt earp of xlr8r, “scud and nomex tracks like “total destruction” helped create the blueprint for much of breakcore’s sound, a high-bpm mash-up of hyperkinetic, post-jungle breaks, feedback, noise, and jamaican elements paired with a devil-may-care attitude towards sampling that pulls from the broadest spectrum of styles (hip-hop, rock, industrial, pop, and beyond)” (earp 2006). see <http://www.xlr8r.com/ features/2006/05/breakcore-live-fast> (accessed 28 november 2011). 15 sound forge is a software application for digital audio recording, editing, and mixing. see: <http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/soundforgesoftware> (accessed 28 november 2011). 16 according to the sleeve notes, the source material consisted of video footage provided by greenpeace, while the track itself was inspired by the “video sampling” of artists such as steinski: “all sound sources are linked to their video sources. whole rhythms have been painstakingly edited out of individual beats and frames” (“timber” 1998 single release). 17 emmerson defines mimesis as “the imitation not only of nature but also of aspects of human culture not usually associated directly with musical material” (1986: 17). 18 emmerson describes two types of mimesis: “‘timbral’ mimesis is a direct imitation of the timbre (‘colour’) of the natural sound, while ‘syntactic’ mimesis may imitate the relationships between natural events; for example, the rhythms of speech may be ‘orchestrated’ in a variety of ways” (1986: 17-18). 19 the success of this approach depends to a certain degree on the timbral distinctiveness of the sample: “. . . a fan can recognise a hit from a ten-millisecond burst” (oswald 2004: 133). 20 dj shadow’s sample-constructed debut album endtroducing (1996) was created using limited technical resources, consisting of an akai mpc 60 mk ii drum machine, a turntable and an alesis adat digital recorder (dj shadow cited in keyboard 1997). endtroducing is recognised by guiness world records as the first, entirely sample-based album (see <http:// www.guinnessworldrecords.com/records-1000/first-album-made-completely-from-samples/> (accessed 28 november 2011)), although this decision has been questioned due to the apparent inclusion of live scratching and recorded vocals (doran 2010). 21 mpc is the model designation for a range of a sampling drum machine/sequencers, originally designed by roger linn and released by akai from 1988 onwards (for instance, the mpc 60, mpc 2000, and mpc 3000). these instruments are favoured for sample-based hip-hop and edm due to both the design of the user interface (featuring drum pads for real-time programming) and idiomatic performance characteristics (such as the swing quantisation algorithm). 22 this is a synthesis system in which an oscillator-generated waveform (the sound source) is supplemented or replaced with a stored audio waveform. http://www.propellerheads.se/products/recycle/ http://www.xlr8r.com/features/2006/05/breakcore-live-fast http://www.xlr8r.com/features/2006/05/breakcore-live-fast http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/soundforgesoftware http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/records-1000/first-album-made-completely-from-samples/ http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/records-1000/first-album-made-completely-from-samples/ dancecult 6(1)114 23 it has been increasingly common for the “reese” bass sound to be imitated (and adapted) using synthesis rather than direct sampling. tutorial patches have been demonstrated, for example in computer music magazine (see sub focus 2007). 24 as described in the sleeve notes (“timber” 1998 single release). 25 in addition to the shorter sound fragments, there are various phrase-level samples (for instance, during the breakdown). these should be located in category b. 26 for example, the future sound of london “had big bags of samples and dubs and noises” and would “sprinkle them over things” (dougans cited in buskin 2006: 58). 27 to borrow from the electroacoustic resource site: “mimetic discourse refers to the signifying potential of referential or extrinsic attributes of sound” (ears 2013). 28 a more recent example was the use of rave signifiers on the prodigy’s fifth studio album, invaders must die (2009). 29 a consideration of related ethical and legal issues is beyond the scope of this article. for further discussion see, for instance, porcello (1991) and schumacher (1995). 30 it is important to note that musical and spectral information from the original sample will be retained, as opposed to radical spectromorphological change, resulting in new material. such transformations are included in category d. 31 a useful online resource is available at <http://www.whosampled.com/> (accessed 28 november 2011). this is a comprehensive comparative database for the identification of borrowed material in sample-driven music (including remixes and cover versions). through the use of embedded audio files (invariably linked via youtube), users may directly compare a sample-based track with original source material. it is an ongoing community-driven project, with users actively involved in the identification process. 32 this is a funk breakbeat performed by clyde stubblefield on the james brown track, “funky drummer” (1970). it is one of the most commonly used samples in popular music, and regularly found in edm genres, such as jungle, drum ‘n’ bass and big beat. for more information on sampled drum loops, see for example, the online database available at <http://www.junglebreaks.co.uk/> (accessed 28 november 2011). this site reveals the most frequently sampled breakbeats within jungle and drum ‘n’ bass, providing detailed discographic information for each sample (original source and subsequent use). a wav file of each sample is also available for online listening or download. 33 i am referring specifically to the sampled voice and applause heard at the start of the track. additional (and substantial) extracts of the speech were used on the live version broadcast on bbc radio 1 in 1995 (see loopz n.d.). 34 this is a facility offered by some hardware and software samplers. it allows the user to crossfade the start/end points of a looped sample, resulting in a smoother and more continuous sound. 35 the concept of transcontextuality is taken from smalley (1992), who originally borrowed from the literary theorist linda hutcheon (1985). according to smalley, a “transcontext” occurs when “the composer intends that the listener should be aware of the dual meanings of a source. the first meaning derives from the original, natural or cultural context of the event; the second meaning derives from the new, musical context created by the composer” (smalley 1992: 542). in this article, the term is reserved for the description of recognisable musical http://www.whosampled.com/ http://www.junglebreaks.co.uk/ ratcliffe | a proposed typology of sampled material within electronic dance music 115 elements (loops, phrases and larger elements), while “recontextualisation” is preferred in relation to referential non-musical samples. 36 the sampling and appropriation of non-western music by western musicians has been discussed by hesmondhalgh (2000). 37 the “amen” breakbeat is sourced from the track “amen, brother” (1969) by the winstons— an instrumental cover version of a standard gospel song (shapiro 2000: 153). the “amen” loop has been sampled in various genres (including hip-hop), but is most commonly known as a convention of jungle and drum ‘n’ bass. here it is utilised at a significantly faster tempo, which was initially achieved through the technique of pitch-shifting, producing a distinctive sound that has become part of the sample’s identity. the “amen” is still used in contemporary drum ‘n’ bass and as a signifier in experimental forms of edm, such as breakcore and idm. a notable example is the music of amen andrews (luke vibert) who has produced a body of work based on the manipulation of the “amen” sample (for example, the album amen andrews vs. spac hand luke (2006)). 38 the material from “thriller” was completely recreated, as rod temperton (“thriller’s” composer) would not allow direct use of the original recording (see dj ron slomowicz n.d.). for more on “sample recreation”—a process in which an unauthorised sample is replicated both sonically and musically in order to function as a replacement (free of the mechanical copyright)—see inglis (2003). 39 for example, the feature article by martin james in future music magazine ( james 2004). 40 in the form of sample cds and dj tools (such as the defected “accapella” series), or sample packs made available through online music stores or remix competitions (some of the most popular online sources include beatport (<www.beatport.com/>), indaba music (<www. indabamusic.com/>), and the now defunct back 2 you). 41 for more on the audio mashup, see mcgranahan (2010). 42 this is a container file holding multiple ogg files (mogg files 2010). 43 audacity is an open-source application for audio recording and editing. it is freely available from: <www.audacity.sourceforge.net/> (accessed 9 june 2013). 44 this track is taken from the album play (1999), which is notable for the sampling of historical field recordings, containing music by african-american vocalists. for further discussion and analysis in relation to “cultural borrowing”, see hesmondhalgh (2006). 45 as described in the album sleeve notes (parade of the athletes (2004)). 46 it should be noted that the orchestral samples were performed and recorded especially for the project, as opposed to sampling directly from the original soundtrack. a related practice involves the use of session musicians to generate unique source material through directed performance or improvisation. such methods were employed by daft punk during the construction of their most recent album random access memories (2013), with a number of legendary session musicians contributing to the record. for more information, see tingen (2013). 47 this is a seminal sample-based production. a partial analysis and graphical transcription is provided by holm-hudson (1997). for information concerning the production and context of the track, see buskin (2011). http://www.beatport.com/ http://www.indabamusic.com/ http://www.indabamusic.com/ http://www.audacity.sourceforge.net/ dancecult 6(1)116 48 the sample continues for the first twenty-five seconds of the track, moving from foreground to background. 49 for more information see: < https://www.ableton.com/en/> (accessed 1 june 2013). 50 the vocal functions as a self-referential melodic and textural component—something that zenker felt was lacking from the original version (zenker cited in inglis 2000). 51 the reasons for carrying out an act of transformation may not only be artistic, but may also arise from a necessity to conceal the source of an “unauthorised” sample. this is especially true if the material has been taken from a widely recognised source and the probability of identification is increased. 52 for an extensive discussion see smalley (1986 and 1997). 53 including, but not limited to: forms of non-musical material (the filtered rainfall in orbital’s “i wish i had duckfeet” (1994)); individual parts and phrases (the “revelatory transformation” (smalley 1993) of daft punk’s “daftendirekt” (1997) or the obliterated drum loop of the chemical brother’s “block rockin’ beats (the micronauts remix)” (1997)); or an extract of a complete track (the descending, multi-stage, pitch-shift of “axis” (1993) by dj solo (featuring dj devine) in the daedelus remix of “down” by sepalcure (2011)). 54 this term is sourced from electroacoustic theory. smalley “developed the concepts and terminology of spectromorphology as tools for describing and analysing listening experience. the two parts of the term refer to the interaction between sound (spectro-) and the ways they change and are shaped through time (-morphology). the spectrocannot exist without the -morphology and vice versa: something has to be shaped, and a shape must have sonic content” (smalley 1997: 107). 55 while some musicians negotiate the issue of copyright through sample clearance, others wish to be provocative by deliberately highlighting the use of unauthorised material. this may be a political gesture or the “illegal” may have a particular appeal to their fanbase. 56 this term was introduced by smalley to describe “the natural tendency to relate sounds to supposed sources and causes, and to relate sounds to each other because they appear to have shared or associated origins” (smalley 1997: 110). 57 examples include hardware devices (such as the elektron machinedrum sps-1uw and octatrack), software instruments and plug-in effects (such as native instruments battery), and also a range of hybrid instruments that combine software editing with a hardware interface (for example, native instruments maschine and artruria’s spark). 58 for further information, see tim exile’s video demonstration: <http://www.youtube.com/wat ch?v=9r38r3bigew&feature=relmfu> (accessed 28 november 2011). 59 reaktor is a virtual studio and graphical programming environment developed by native instruments. it allows users to design and construct their own software instruments, ranging from synthesizers, samplers and sequencers to effects processors and more esoteric devices. there is an extensive online library in which users may share their creations and download additional instruments. for further information see <http://www.native-instruments.com/#/ en/products/producer/reaktor-5/> (accessed 28 november 2011). 60 “time-stretching” is a digital processing technique in which the length of a sample may be compressed or expanded without affecting the pitch or timbre. time-stretching was also used as a colouristic device by jungle and drum ‘n’ bass musicians, especially when working with https://www.ableton.com/en/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9r38r3bigew&feature=relmfu http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9r38r3bigew&feature=relmfu http://www.native-instruments.com/#/en/products/producer/reaktor-5/ http://www.native-instruments.com/#/en/products/producer/reaktor-5/ ratcliffe | a proposed typology of sampled material within electronic dance music 117 percussion samples (for instance, on the track “sound control” (1994) by randall and andy c) and vocal material (for example, on “booyaaa! (open your mind)” (1994) by amazon ii and “screwface 2” (1994) by dubtronic), with the effect becoming common practice through inclusion on a countless number of tracks. according to jon bickle (inmusic brands), the s950 was the first akai sampler to implement time-stretching. 15,000 units were produced from 1988-93 ( jon bickle email to author, 2 august 2013). 61 edm musicians have been known to press samples onto vinyl for manipulation using scratching and other turntable techniques (for example, coldcut (see robinson 1997)). it should be noted, however, that this practice has become somewhat obsolete since the advent of virtual dj technology and emulative turntable effects. 62 this is a technique in which a vinyl record is pushed back and forth against the stylus to create new rhythmic and sonic material. for an in-depth discussion and analysis of scratching techniques, see hansen (2002). 63 ideally, used as part of an expanded set of resources. as i have suggested elsewhere, the 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“spectro-morphology and structuring processes.” in the language of electroacoustic music, ed. simon emmerson, 61-93. basingstoke: macmillan. ———. 1992. “the listening imagination: listening in the electroacoustic era.” in companion to contemporary musical thought, ed. john paynter; tim howell; richard orton; peter seymour, 514-54. london: routledge. ———. 1993. “defining transformations.” journal of new music research 22(4): 279-300. ———. 1997. “spectromorphology: explaining sound-shapes.” organised sound 2(2): 107-26. sub focus. 2007. “the ultimate guide to drum ‘n’ bass.” computer music. august: 30-1. tingen, paul. 2013. “daft punk: peter franco & mick guzauski: recording random access memories.” sound on sound. july: <http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jul13/articles/daftpunk.htm> (accessed 1 august 2013). wishart, trevor. 1986. “sound symbols and landscapes.” in the language of electroacoustic music, ed. simon emmerson, 41-60. basingstoke: macmillan. discography abba. 1979. gimme, 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(enjoy what you do) – special u.s. remix. inner vision records (7-inch): ivl a2442. <http://www.discogs.com/wham-wham-rap-enjoy-what-you-do-special-us-re-mix/release/1691509>. williams, robbie. 1998. millennium. chrysalis (cd): cdchs 5099. <http://www.discogs.com/robbie-williams-millennium/release/37856>. winstons, the. 1969. color him father / amen, brother. metromedia records (7-inch): mms-117. <http://www.discogs.com/winstons-color-him-father-amen-brother/release/423956>. filmography post, ted. beneath the planet of the apes. 1970. usa: twentieth century fox. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065462/>. (accessed 1 august 2013). “tim exile shows his reaktor-based live performance setup”. 2009. posted by nativeinstruments on youtube. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9r38r3bigew&feature=relmfu>. (accessed 28 november 2011). http://www.discogs.com/prodigy-music-for-the-jilted-generation/release/2719 http://www.discogs.com/prodigy-always-outnumbered-never-outgunned/release/313346 http://www.discogs.com/prodigy-always-outnumbered-never-outgunned/release/313346 http://www.discogs.com/prodigy-invaders-must-die/release/1660773 http://www.discogs.com/propellerheads-decksandrumsandrockandroll/release/12037 http://www.discogs.com/randall-andy-c-sound-control-feel-it/release/1479 http://www.discogs.com/reese-just-want-another-chance/release/18335 http://www.discogs.com/sepalcure-love-pressure-remixed/release/3067409 http://www.discogs.com/ti�sto-parade-of-the-athletes/release/330040 http://www.discogs.com/tpower-turquoise-the-mutant-remix/release/20722 http://www.discogs.com/wham-wham-rap-enjoy-what-you-do-special-us-re-mix/release/1691509 http://www.discogs.com/robbie-williams-millennium/release/37856 http://www.discogs.com/winstons-color-him-father-amen-brother/release/423956 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065462/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9r38r3bigew&feature=relmfu no screenshots on the dance floor ben assiter goldsmiths, university of london (uk) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.01> the lonely connectedness of smartphone addiction is a depressive hedonic reversal of mdma festivity. sociality is supervised by multiple embedded corporate platforms. we become our face, working 24/7 for communicative capitalism (fisher 2016: 45). days merge together in static monotony. without movement, time itself slows down: "all rhythms imply the relation of a time to a space" (lefebvre 2004: 89). for those of us with the privilege to social-distance, distinctions between work and social life fold into the blurred temporalities of digitally augmented domestic space. it’s friday night. i quit microsoft word, close my laptop and go to the kitchen to get a beer. maybe i can chemically induce some kind of shift. i return to my desk and dim the lights, hoping to repurpose the space. i open up my laptop, where my social media feeds are saturated with footage from djs' bedrooms. they have been all week. i scroll voyeuristically through countless options of mediated intimacy. parties reimagined as content. hunting for some kind of immersive experience, i try my best to ignore the clutter of memes and news reports vying for my attention. normally i savour this journey—the expectant walks through nocturnal streets—some routes well-trodden, others unfamiliar. that unmistakable low-end throb that signifies proximity. tonight, my only movement is through digital space. eventually one option catches my eye and i click to enter full screen. in the stream, the figure of a dj is only just visible, their silhouette contorted through digital manipulations. i spot a friend in the chat feed and we exchange a few messages, performing an ironic dance floor interaction. after spending most of my day hunched over a keyboard, my mind and body crave an altered state. i stand up and increase the volume on my speakers. the twisted euphoria of lysergic resonance fills the room. a sibilant hi-hat enters, and i sense a brief flash of energy course through me. there’s much to hear, but i miss the feeling of vibration. that sensory overload when i surrender my body as membrane. i dance for a moment, grateful but alone. "alone together". is this the future? livestreaming under lockdown when covid-19 lockdown measures forced the indefinite closure of nightclubs and venues around the world, fundamental questions were raised as to how the aesthetics, communities and economies of dance music culture could survive a physically despatialised context. the sounds and structures of electronic dance music are closely intertwined with the particular architecture of the nightclub space, combining to produce the setting for dance music’s uniquely intimate sensory and social formations. physical space also plays a vital but often overlooked role in club culture’s delicate economy, in which the increasing monopoly of exploitative platforms such as spotify and apple music has rendered live events the only feasible source of income. where many nightclubs already inhabited a precarious position in gentrified, financialised urban space, the pandemic has served to emphasise club culture’s existent fragility. as in many other spheres of life, dance music scenes responded to lockdown with a swift and comprehensive process of digital migration, using audio-visual streaming services as part of attempts to fill the social and economic gap left by closed venues and cancelled events. in certain cases, new media organisations emerged in direct response to the crisis. united we stream started out by broadcasting live from venues across berlin, but soon expanded to numerous cities around the world, using the streams to generate income for a "rescue fund to support clubs in difficulty". existing platforms like boiler room adapted their previous service, moving to host broadcasts "direct from artists’ homes and private spaces". outside of these more formalised services, countless djs and collectives set up their own livestreams on facebook, youtube and twitch, repositioning the "bedroom dj" in a newly public light. such was the number of streams that resident advisor adjusted their events listings to include the digital non-place, streamland. the speed of this transition from physical to digital space was borne out of necessity, and in many cases, revealed an inspiring sense of solidarity within and across localised dance music scenes and communities. at the same time, much of this shift can also be understood as a sudden and unexpected acceleration of processes that were already well underway in much of dance music culture. over the last decade, the unstoppable rise of boiler room had already established the livestream as a ubiquitous component of contemporary club culture’s ecologies of production and consumption. in the early days of livestreaming, there was a conscious sense of separation between streams and events. boiler room’s original east london streaming parties took place on tuesday evenings, while dommune in tokyo was set up to broadcast during the week, specifically to avoid clashing with the schedules of nightclubs. as boiler room expanded their operations, they began hosting stages at festivals, as well as broadcasting from existing events, including several ill-fated attempts to stream from sound systems at notting hill carnival. though such tendencies point toward an increasing blurring of the distinction between digital livestreams and physical events, the unique circumstances of covid-19 presented the first moment in which livestreams were no longer a form of addition or augmentation, but rather a direct replacement of the live event itself. to be sure, long before the pandemic, streaming had already played a vital role in widening access to club culture. despite dance music’s pervasive discourses of universality and togetherness, access to the club space has often been severely restricted by factors including physical ability, financial status and geographical location. in this sense, while livestreaming was for many already an important mode of communicating and experiencing electronic dance music, the pandemic created a singular context in which an entire global culture of digital events was constructed in replacement of any counterpart in physical space. part of this replacement has been about constructing emergency networks and economies of cultural production. most livestreams are free to access but include provisions for donation, with funds channelled to charitable causes, place-based support schemes or specific venues and artists. such strategies were a necessary response to crisis. yet as shawn reynaldo pointed out during the early days of the pandemic, they were also indicative of "just how fragile the electronic music industry had already become" (2020). the rise of spotify, music festivals and skyrocketing dj fees created an impossible economy for the independent dance music scene, in which even the first few weeks of cancelled events under lockdown felt sufficient to trigger wholesale economic collapse. this climate exposes deep structural issues within dance music's internal economies and underscores the continued lack of meaningful state subsidisation for much of urban night-time culture. where modes of night-time governance are gaining prominence in cities around the world, the vulnerability of independent clubs and venues during the pandemic has shown the extent to which nocturnal spaces still remain unrecognized for their contributions to urban public life. municipal acknowledgements of the role of club culture in so-called "creative economies", culture-led "urban regeneration" and attainments of "global city" status rarely manifest into reciprocal or useful forms of support for local scenes and spaces. in this context, the recasting of electronic music culture as a donation economy pushes clubs and venues further into an already fragile matrix, in which remuneration for cultural production is considered a prize, not a right. as well as aiming to fill financial gaps, club culture’s adoption of livestreaming during the pandemic has also been about finding ways to meet collective psychic and social desires. this sense of functional replacement has guided the formation of specific streaming events like resident advisor's club quarantäne, which was set up with a distinctly social purpose in mind. alongside a fundraising aspect, it was conceived as an international online club: "offering people a place to interact with each other virtually, providing the connection that's lacking from our daily lives right now, and looking forward to a future when we will dance side by side again" (resident advisor 2020). such virtual events undoubtedly provide a space for interaction in which dance music acts as some kind of binding agent. yet where the production of what luis-manuel garcia has termed "liquid solidarity" (2013: 242) is dependent on a combination of bodily co-presence, musical-sonic experience and spatio-temporal context, could attempts to reimagine such socialities in digital space serve to undermine much of what is unique about club culture? the technological gaze if rave's ephemeral collectivity is the "aura" necessarily lost in any reproduction of the physical club space, digital approximations may function less as a pacifying replacement, and more as a faint and melancholic echo of loss. again, this can be understood as an acceleration of existing trends. over the years of their existence, boiler room have been criticised for contributing toward an individualised cult of the dj. in contrast with archive footage from the early years of rave, which draws attention to the chaotic, pulsating euphoria of the crowd, boiler room's pervasive aesthetic has reimagined the archetypal representation of club culture as a static shot of the dj booth. in this confined cinematic space, any visual narrative is limited to the twisting of knobs, the sipping of drinks and the performative but self-conscious swagger of those who have knowingly positioned themselves in the gaze of the camera. livestreaming during the era of covid-19 has distilled this aesthetic even further. united we stream’s broadcasts from nightclubs depict eerie, empty rooms where lights flash and smoke machines billow around the lone figure of the dj. such an aesthetic captures a dystopian moment when spaces of shared social liberation were suddenly and radically redefined as spaces of potential infection. safe(r) space is no longer about the regulation of behaviour, it is now determined by the wholesale absence of bodies. in these images of the present we can also catch glimpses of a possible future, in which such disorderly physical environments—already deemed a nuisance to urban life, but now with added viral risk—are reduced to sterile containers for broadcast, transmitting a lonely, nostalgic vision of impossible connection. with so much of our lives already experienced through laptop and phone screens, the physicality of clubs can constitute a vital manifestation of "other" space. they operate in spatial and temporal distinction from the increasingly fluid rhythms of everyday life, in which boundaries between work and leisure are collapsing beneath neoliberal logics of incessant flexibility. where much of pre-pandemic night-time culture was already a threatened and undervalued component of urban life, we should be wary that the acceleration of livestreaming is never allowed to normalise any further incorporation of club culture into a flattened, technological sameness. as coronavirus has driven more and more of our lives online, it has also proven an unprecedented opportunity for big tech. on the surface, club culture’s mass adoption of livestreaming has provided a versatile platform for artists, venues and scenes to sustain themselves mentally and financially during a moment of crisis. yet hidden within discourses of preservation and expanded participation lies an exponential concentration of power among companies including youtube, facebook and amazon (owners of the streaming platform, twitch). so ubiquitous is their presence in our lives, it can be easy to forget that every livestream from the comforting intimacy of a dj's bedroom is simultaneously a valuable commodity for data-hungry corporations in the intangible economy. it is already well-established that our listening habits are tracked, analysed and fed back to us via algorithms on spotify and elsewhere. with the comprehensive reimagining of physical events as audio-visual streams, even the heterotopic immediacy and sanctified freedom of rave is morphed into a terrain of potential surveillance. entry to resident advisor’s club quarantäne was accompanied by a tongue-in-cheek request for "no screenshots on the dance floor" (clubquarantaene 2020). this focus on individual responsibility—a carryover from pre-virtual contexts—distracts attention from the fact that the entirety of the event, including those in "attendance", is necessarily translated into the data flows of a multinational media platform. of course, even the so-called electronic music "underground" is no stranger to pervasive corporate influence, as evidenced by the insidious creep of red bull in recent years. while red bull's logo was at certain points ubiquitous, almost to the point of invisibility, even this degree of normalised involvement pales in comparison to the ways in which the full diversity of global dance music events was suddenly hosted as livestreams via a tiny handful of corporate platforms. in the rush to sustain some semblance of normality, this drastic acceleration of silicon valley's existing omnipresence materialised as the only apparent solution to saving entire economies, cultures and modes of sociality during a moment of crisis. via the most naked logics of capitalist realism, survival itself was presented as inextricably contingent on a dystopian concentration of corporate influence and surveillance. future solidarities past catastrophes have shown us that what may be sold as exceptional can quickly and stealthily be established as the new normal. club culture has been compelled to react quickly to the unique conditions of the pandemic in order to survive, but this moment of rupture and enforced stasis should also be harnessed as a time to reflect collectively on how this return to apparent normality might look, sound and feel. the new normal will be a contested space, emerging out of critique, imagination and struggle. livestreaming and other digital tools have proven themselves a key component of club culture’s survival through the pandemic. what remains unclear at this stage is how this unprecedented digital shift may affect dance music culture's eventual return to physical space. tech companies will be keen to exploit the unparalleled gains they have made during this period—how can vulnerable night-time economies and cultures be prepared for this? i would hope that the new modes of connectivity engendered by the pandemic can be mobilised into continued and expanded structures of solidarity. some scenes have shown themselves more organised than others in this respect. how can this knowledge and experience be shared across space to strengthen local dance music scenes and communities? organisations such as berlin’s club commission and club futuro in turin must be supported to emerge out of this crisis stronger than ever, such that they can inspire and inform similar models of organisation elsewhere. through the work of such solidarity, night-time spaces need to be understood beyond economic frameworks, such that they can be recognised and equitably supported for their contributions to urban social and cultural life. as digital and virtual tools will be exploited in attempts to maximise the flexibility, efficiency and surveillance of labour, so should club culture materialise—when it is safe to do so of course—as a vital manifestation of shared physical space, in which alternative modes of community may be enacted, experienced and imagined. author biography ben assiter is a phd student in the music department at goldsmiths, university of london. his thesis focuses on london's electronic dance music scenes and spaces, exploring their relationship to contested notions of the night-time as cultural territory, economic category and site of urban governance. ben is active in these scenes as a dj and producer and performs internationally as a drummer. email: mu101ba@gold.ac.uk references fisher, mark. 2016. "baroque sunbursts". in rave and its influence on art and culture, ed. nav haq, 39–48. london: black dog publishing. clubquarantaene, 2020. "no screenshots on the dancefloor". 25 march 2020. instagram. <https://www.instagram.com/p/cfhcqtlgqfm/>. (accessed 6 september 2020). garcia, luis-manuel. 2013. "crowd solidarity on the dance floor in paris and berlin". in musical performance and the changing city: post-industrial contexts in europe and the united states, ed. fabian holt and carsten wergin, 227–55. london and new york: routledge. lefebvre, henri. 2004. rhythmanalysis: space, time and everyday life. london and new york: continuum. resident advisor. 2020. "club quarantäne". resident advisor. 24 april. <https://www.residentadvisor.net/features/3650>. (accessed 25 june 2020). reynaldo, shawn. 2020. "first floor #30 — the scene isn’t worth saving". first floor, 25 march.<https://firstfloor.substack.com/p/first-floor-30-the-scene-isnt-worth>. (accessed 25 june 2020). black feminism and the violence of disco dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 13(1): 22–35 issn 1947-5403 ©2021 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.02 black feminism and the violence of disco katharina pawel freie universität berlin (germany) abstract this article interrogates the ways through which black women and black feminist perspectives have been written out of disco’s history. re-reading the dominant discoriogaphies in the u.s. from a black feminist perspective, deconstructs the hegemonic male-centered discourse on disco, whilst intervening in the academic landscape at large, arguing for a genuine intersectional approach. this will be exemplified by a case study of the disco/funk group labelle in the u.s. this allows us to revisit disco’s political potential from a more inclusive standpoint that listens to and enjoys the voices of its black female counterparts. keywords: disco, black feminism, revisionist history, u.s., labelle katharina v. pawel-rammingen is completing a program in north american studies at the john-f.-kennedy institute, of freie universität berlin. her interdisciplinary interests include modern cultural and intellectual history, american literature, as well as philosophy. specifically, she is interested in theories of modernity, history of gender and feminisms and african american studies, informed by postcolonial approaches. she is a strong believer in the positive impact of care and engages in her local community. katharina also likes to explore berlin’s music culture. feature article https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.02 katharina pawel | black feminism and the violence of disco 23 introduction recent revisionism of the 1970s has shifted our imagination from a decade of decline—void of political and cultural growth—to one abundant with political advancement, in which the seeds of change planted in the 1960s, finally bore fruit a decade later. this reimagining reveals the 1970s to be a contentious and contradictory period, as society grappled with newly gained women’s-, racialand gay rights. shifts in identity and representation were formed, reflected and tested in the cultural sphere, reaching their most exuberant manifestations in the era’s burgeoning nightclub and dance scene. disco was not only the thumping heart of the new nightlife extravaganza but was instrumental in shaping understandings of femininity, blackness and homosexuality. although the many histories of disco emphasize its role in these processes most studies nevertheless exclude women’s visions from disco’s narrative(s) (dyer 1979; royster 2005; echols 2010 and haden-guest 1997; jones and kantonen 1999). the recognition of women’s importance to disco tends to be limited to their function as disco queens for the gay liberation movement (haden-guest 1997; cheren 2000). moreover, when studies have managed to challenge this conspicuous lack of agency and place disco in dialogue with feminism, they tend to do so through a narrow frame, unable to include a black feminist analysis (lawrence 2003; shapiro 2005).1 in light of this absence, this article situates itself as a critical intervention into an academic landscape shaped by masculinist analytical categories that all-too-often fall short of a genuine intersectional approach, wherein disco’s expressions of black feminist ideas are routinely overlooked. this article joins a growing literature challenging these dominant analytical paradigms that implicitly erase black women as critical agents from history. an analysis of emblematic discographies will interrogate the means through which this manifestation of epistemic violence take place. revising disco’s historiography (discoriographies) through a black feminist framework attests to the survivalist and progressive potential of disco, voiced so clearly in the music and actions of lauded divas like labelle. this allows for a more nuanced understanding of the ways disco changed and challenged the american cultural sphere and beyond, whilst recognizing black women as active critical agents in music and sociocultural politics. it will highlight the urgent need to integrate black feminist discourses into the histories of popular music. the first half of this article will map the current literature on disco. looking at two of the most prominent chroniclers of disco, tim lawrence (2004) and peter shapiro (2005), it will reveal how even the most nuanced discoriographers fail to acknowledge black women (who dominated disco) as agents of change. both lawrence and shapiro include women in their histories, but neither significantly engage with the meanings of black women’s contribution to disco for black women themselves, and they certainly fail to incorporate a black feminist perspective.2 consequently, the lack of representation of black women in these historiographies is unable to include black women’s musical practices as expressions of black feminist thought and thus, shaping of 1970s american culture. moreover, lawrence and shapiro are not dancecult 13(1)24 alone in their neglect of black women: even promising recent titles like disco divas: women and pop culture in the 1970s, a monograph ostensibly dedicated to women, affords only one chapter to black women (inness 2003). unfortunately, the solitary essay, “women music from carole king to disco divas” by judy kutulas, focuses on women in pop music, but rather than broadening our understanding, it reinforces hierarchical gendered divisions along genres that merely mirror a rock (male) centric critique of disco itself (2003: 172193). a turn to one of the most read essays in music studies, richard dyer’s “in defense of disco” (1979), deconstructs this problematic approach and opens up the discussion in more productive ways. the second half of this article builds on dyer’s deconstructions to analyse exemplary passages from lawrence and shapiro through a black feminist frame, thereby shining a light on the violence endemic within their disco historiographies. outlining black feminism’s central ideas will help to revise the instances in which these chroniclers have arrived at detrimental conclusions through fraught intersectional interpretations. to show this i will take issue with three specific occurrences, all of which are symptomatic of problems in their work more generally, such as a poor intersectional analysis, a narrow reading of labelle’s lyrics deprived of black feminist political potential, and finally, an instance of discursive erasure of black women in lawrence and shapiro’s work. this intervention enables the reader to (re)hear the radicalism of disco and its black female practitioners, who imagined new spaces, found the potential for joy and beauty in 1970s america, and envisioned a future through feminist wisdom, a triumvirate that profoundly alters our understanding of disco’s radical potential.3 ultimately, it challenges the masculinist academic hegemony that often continues to sideline black women’s historical contributions. mapping disco(urses) the importance of disco to gay communities and gay liberation is indisputable and has received growing scholarly attention. studies have stressed the underground roots of disco, from the gay enclaves of fire island’s “tea dances” in the mid-1960s, to david mancuso’s new york private loft parties at the beginning of the decade.4 the equally loved and loathed disco craze swept the nation during the 1970s and, as early as 1979, journalist andrew kopkind dubbed the decade the “disco years” (1979). yet, what exactly the disco years mean and to whom continues to be a contested field of enquiry. more recent revisionist histories have complicated the cultural cliches of a decade comprised solely of polyester suits, platform shoes, cocaine and glitter balls (which were, of course, no small feature of disco) to include disco’s role in processes of changing ideas of blackness, femininity and male homosexuality (lawrence 2003; shapiro 2005). disco named a sensibility that went beyond a musical genre; it generated cultural spaces through clubs, fashion and movies; and provided a sense of community that was, not least, formed on the dancefloor.5 the sexual revolution of the 1960s had profoundly shifted society’s understanding and public acceptance of expressive (hetero)sexuality. nevertheless, “homophobia and harassment katharina pawel | black feminism and the violence of disco 25 were the norm even in big cities” and “gays could still be arrested for simply holding hands”, as cultural historian alice echols reminds us (2010: 42). stylistic changes in popular culture in the 1970s subverted dominant heterosexual masculinity and paved the way for the acceptance of gay lifestyles (lawrence 2003: 148). in this regard, dancefloors, and with them disco’s open-ended, non-partnered dance formats, constituted a kind of protest that shaped understandings of identity and subjectivity in opposition to heterosexual norms (dyer 1979: 412). cultural historian tim lawrence, as well as critic and journalist peter shapiro are notable in their work for historicising disco as serious cultural expression.6 although there exists a rich body of work around disco within musicology and dance culture studies, those studies tend to emphasise specific musical expressions, such as the effects of lush orchestration or the use of falsetto for changing expressions of masculinity (halberstam 2007; hubbs 2007).7 whilst there is much to be gained from these approaches, the accounts by lawrence and shapiro offer a historiographic approach to disco that reveal disco’s centrality to the changing cultural and political landscape in america. in the following sections of this article, i will introduce and engage with lawrence and shapiro’s oeuvre. their work not only represents the most comprehensive attempt to historicise disco, but it is also emblematic of the many failings that have so far blighted disco’s treatment by historians. the particularly gendered focus offered by kutulas will be problematised via dyer’s seminal essay to lead into a black feminist reassessment in the second half of this article. by far the most cited and exhaustive account on disco’s movement is offered by tim lawrence (2003) in love saves the day (lstd), named after david mancuso’s inaugural valentine’s day party in 1970. it chronicles disco, or dance music culture as lawrence prefers to call it, from its underground beginnings to its mainstream adaptation and musical development into the ‘80s dance genre. venues “the loft” and “studio 54” compete for the spotlight in his reading of the “true” character of disco. although lawrence does not try to conceal his bias when he characterises david mancuso’s loft as “the linchpin of the new york underground while the other [studio 54] became the focal point of excessive midtown hedonism” (2003: 3). lstd stands out for its revisionism of disco via an in-depth examination of disco’s underground beginnings and its nuanced view of the many early musical experimentations and discotheques. perhaps lawrence’s most vital contribution is the inclusion of disco’s african american and latino roots in dance music historiography, though this aspect is afforded precious little attention. lawrence prefers to divide his focus for the majority of lstd between the innovative sound technology—such as vari-speed turntable techniques or the use of 12-inch singles—that ignited the disco craze, and oral accounts of the people involved in the 1970s dance scene (2003: 87-90). the interviews comprise the heart of his work and make clear that disco was experienced in many different ways by various and diverse but often unifying groups. this extensive use of oral primary sources is commendable in many respects, but also proves to be a shortcoming of lstd, a critique which i will now briefly elucidate before turning to other discoriographers. dancecult 13(1)26 the predominance of interviews in lstd paints a vivid picture of the disco years and yet obscure the complexities of disco’s sensibility. the many first-hand stories repeatedly describe a familiar and predictable trajectory: innovative sounds and technologies sparking a craze on the dancefloor, only to eventually be superseded by newer sounds (williams 2005). whilst certainly typical of disco, or any pop music for that matter, it fails to interrogate the reasons for this shift in popularity. other than an at times purely descriptive narrative, the overload of detailed information is a veritable “who’s who” of the 1970s disco scene, yet it is one that barely registers “unknown” voices. true, lstd includes an abundance of anecdotes by regular party attendees—as opposed to the usual djs, producers, music critics or celebrities—but these denizens are regulars of exclusive clubs like the “loft”, “paradise garage” or “reade street”. although lawrence addresses the exclusivity of those venues by pointing to the democratic beginnings of disco, the vast majority of his interviewees are nonetheless men (2003: 78-81). this masculinist frame of reference allows a narrowing of disco’s history towards one only conducive for gay male liberation. true, he does acknowledge that “black women had secured an unprecedented presence” (2003: 328), and mentions the likes of gloria gaynor, donna summer and chaka khan, but they receive only fleeting recognition and even then, are only glimpsed through the male (producer’s) gaze. in contrast, studio 54 dj nicky siano is referenced over one hundred times, and loft dj david mancuso clocks in at nearly double that. this interest in men as objects of study effectively erases the contributions of women in disco, and implicitly confirms the codification of disco as a gay men’s genre (traister 2000). these same omissions tarnish journalist peter shapiro’s influential and otherwise extensive work on disco’s influence in american popular culture, turn the beat around: the secret history of disco (2005). expanding on lawrence, shapiro elongates the timeline of his narrative to include disco’s european connections all the way back to the 1930s. in the u.s. context, special attention is paid to disco’s indebtedness to motown’s sound and its promise of black music ownership, and the genre’s subsequent expansion into the mainstream. these “crossover” ambitions, not unique to disco, upended the usual racial dynamics of pop music and afforded greater recognition to black artists in the mainstream (shapiro 2005: 145-174). just like lawrence, shapiro begins by stressing the diversity of early disco’s dancefloors and emphasises disco’s universal appeal, even going so far as to call it “populist music par excellence” because “disco belongs to everyone” (2005: 276). nevertheless, and in a self-contradicting manner, shapiro is not shy to tell us how rare female presence was (2005: 21). women’s scarce appearance is emphatically replicated in shapiro’s consideration of women: we are only introduced to three half-hearted and rather unfavourable illustrations of labelle, gloria gaynor and donna summer, and only to be told that “disco was not about divas” (2005: 104). and yet, disco’s divas embodied the tensions of 1970s women’s liberation movements and sexual expressiveness that “carried this sexual dynamism out of the back room, onto the dancefloor and into the streets”, as shapiro recognises as well (2005: 51). as the second half of this article will demonstrate, a black feminist analysis offers a richer universal approach, able to belong to everyone whilst centring on black women’s experiences (hill collins 1989). katharina pawel | black feminism and the violence of disco 27 although turn the beat around and love saves the day offer valuable and discerning analyses of 1970s dance culture, neither author pay adequate attention to women in disco nor, specifically, black feminist views.8 it is notable that lawrence even criticises shapiro for this omission, lamenting that the diva “goes missing just when you would expect to deepen your acquaintance with her” in the work of his fellow discographer (lawrence 2006: 162). unfortunately, however, this is symptomatic of inadequacies in both of their work. it is even more surprising then that lawrence goes on to describe other discographer’s “fleeting recognition for establishing a milieu in which female vocalists were able to carve out a significant space for artistic expression” (2006: 148). but his own recognition amounts to little more than offering that “disco’s core gay dancers took to these female vocalists because they related to their tales of hardship, pain, and emotional defiance in the face of adversity” (2006: 148). pre-empting a critique of traditional diva worship, lawrence points to the ability of disco’s lyrics to transcend confining heterosexual notions of sexuality (lawrence 2006:148; see also koestenbaum 1993). this is certainly a powerful aspect of disco, and one that i wholeheartedly acknowledge, but what lawrence does not include, however, is a feminist alliance. shapiro is similarly culpable for his neglect of women in disco, even at one point inadvertently brushing against feminism when he states that “‘the personal is political’ was always implicit in disco culture” (2004: 280). even this invocation of feminism’s most famous aphorism fails to inspire an engagement with women. instead, it serves as a springboard for his analysis of changing dynamics of masculinity on the dancefloor.9 unfortunately, neither lawrence nor shapiro are exceptional in failing to disturb this male centric paradigm. at first glance, we might assume to find relief in a compendium edited by innes entitled disco divas: women and popular culture in the 1970s (2003), but the one essay afforded to women in music in this volume brings with it a whole different set of problems. “women’s music from carole king to the disco divas” by judy kutulas provides a brief assault on disco, sketching it as backlash music that eclipsed the “natural looks” and “authentic lyrics” of ‘60s era female singer songwriters (2004: 174-189). in the author’s view, disco divas strut onto the scene only to “help contain the threat [of subversive elements] of women’s movement”. divas, according to kutulas, were understood as “unreal identities” whose empowerment was a “glamorous substitute for substantive economic or political power” (2004: 189). whilst disco’s relationship to women was certainly fluid and confounding, kutulas’ equation of divas with backlash and artificiality reinforces gendered formulations of musical genres that typically ascribe a sense of authenticity to rock and folk while simultaneously discrediting disco and other genres as inauthentic. richard dyer has famously deconstructed this authentic/inauthentic stratification that lionises rock and folk as genuine and sets up disco and other pop music as artificial (and effeminate) capitalist productions emptied of any political potential (dyer 1979). this self-legitimising division solidifies rock as canon that values “authentic” notions of (male) virtuosity and “auteurship” at the expense of racial and gender collaborations (brooks 2008). it invariably understands rock as “normative”, whose mythologies would get “positioned predictably in opposition to what would turn into the rise of [b]lack, latino, and queer disco cultures” dancecult 13(1)28 (brooks 2008: 57). it is for this reason i propose a black feminist intervention freed from these critical paradigms, that is able to adequately include the lives of the disco diva within disco’s revisionism. dyer’s defence of disco not only demystifies the authentic/inauthentic division of cultural production, but also theorises disco’s radical political potential. one of the radical characteristics of disco is its ability to restore eroticism to the whole body, in contrast to rock’s confinement of “sexuality to cock” (dyer 1979: 412). this “whole body eroticism” is part of disco’s focus around the politics of pleasure, and it opens new understandings of the body that “allow us to rediscover our bodies as part of . . . the possibility of change” (dyer 1979: 415). following dyer’s argument that disco “releases you in an open-ended succession of repetitions”, historian walter hughes sees the sonically open-ended sound of disco as evoking the “seemingly endless cycles and plateaus” of the female orgasm (dyer 1979: 410; hughes 1994: 151-154). disco’s foregrounding of female desire signalled a shift in sexual politics: from the portrayal of women as submissive servants to his “sexual healing”, to a more reciprocal understanding of pleasure (echols 2010: 35). in this view, disco truly was the music of “jouissance”—female pleasure. in the following i will show how a politics of pleasure belongs to a black feminist thought and broaden lawrence’s and shapiro’s cultural mapping of disco via a black feminist inspired reading. it will become apparent that there is an urgent need to reassess discography, and academia at large, through the evolving ideas of black feminist thought, in order to pave the way for more inclusive histories and futures. black feminism in disco before returning to shapiro and lawrence i will lay out some of black feminism’s central tenets. black feminism is constantly evolving to meet the new challenges that arise from the intersection of racial and gender discrimination against black women whose experiences of these compounding factors of oppression astutely inform this philosophy. in its essence, black feminism is a philosophy that recognises all black women as inherently valuable and thus centres on the struggle for black women’s liberation. black feminists, like the combahee river collective in the u.s., have long raised concerns that their struggle for liberation needs to work towards black women’s own goals first, rather than being appropriated for someone else’s liberation (1978). at the same time, black feminism does not see its concerns as separate from other systems of oppression because it understands these to be interlocking within the oppressive power structure of “white supremacy capitalist patriarchy”, as bell hooks famously terms it (2000: 109). in short, black feminism stresses the compounding factors of oppression and as such understands that any one experience of these categories— such as gender, race, class, sexuality—cannot be understood or fought independently. further, one of black feminism’s tactics is its focus on joy and beauty as means of resistance. this characterises a philosophy beyond mere survival to one envisioning a prosperous future. finally, and as espoused in the teachings of angela davis, black feminism does not belong to one group of people or gender, but rather functions as a frame of analysis for locating and overcoming dominant power relations (davis 1981). katharina pawel | black feminism and the violence of disco 29 black feminism’s employment of joy as political tool, makes apparent that disco’s sexual politics need to be re-evaluated through such a frame. however, black feminism does not merely advocate disco’s sense of self-satisfaction as relevant to the bedroom (which it does as well), but crucially as an acceptance of oneself. black feminist and poet audre lorde’s seminal “use of the erotic: the erotic as power” sees erotic connections as a way to an “open and fearless underlining of ones capacity for joy” (1978: 89). she goes on to say (and i will quote at length to do her words justice): in the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which i sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea. that self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which i know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. and that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible. (1978: 89) the erotic knowledge, that lorde has so beautifully located, goes beyond mere strategies of survival as it shapes the responsibility to create and demand a fuller and joyful life. it further stresses the importance of fostering and sharing meaningful connections that overcome differences through mutual understandings for a better future. these key aspects of black feminism underline personal experiences as a source of knowledge and emphasise the sharing of joy as a way of fighting oppression from the inside out. it is this personal politics that “gives power to pursue genuine change within our world” (collins 1991: 59). having elaborated one of the central tenets of this ideology, i will now proceed to a black feminist informed evaluation of three case examples from lawrence’s and shapiro’s work. these examples reveal their discographies’ implicit participation in reproducing existing power relations that erase the feminist legacies of black women. in so doing, they continue the pernicious tradition of writing black women out of music historiography. in the first instance, lawrence’s misuse of intersectional language highlights the inherent epistemic violence of a masculinist informed analysis, as does my second example of shapiro’s interpretation of labelle’s song “what can i do for you?” (1974). before concluding, i will situate the work of lawrence and shapiro in my third and final example in relation to bell hook’s enduring insights. let me begin with an excerpt from lstd: “if performers were black and female . . . then their ability to overcome the double oppression of race and sex through gutsy emotion and bodily expressivity made them an applicable candidate for the floor, especially if it was gay” (lawrence 2003: 371). on the one hand, lawrence’s quote reveals what seems to be a misunderstanding of intersectionality. in his wording, black women are doubly oppressed by racism and sexism, rather than experiencing the effects of compounding injustices as black feminism reveals. the latter distinction is crucial as it insists that race is constitutive of gender and vice versa: race is always already gendered. a black feminist analysis is inherently intersectional and would therefore not reciprocate the undermining masculinist dancecult 13(1)30 discourse that permeates disco’s historiographies. or, to use the words of bell hooks, sex and racism are inseparable and “separating racism and sexism was to deny the truth of our existence” (1981: 13). on the other hand, disco was of course profoundly influential for the gay liberation movement, and disco divas such as labelle were happy to be aligned with the struggles of gay liberation (echols 2010: 95-105). however, this cannot come at the expense of recognising black feminist’s methods in a pop cultural terrain that helped to mediate their ideas through songs that navigated racial stereotyping, self-worth and self-ownership. a narrative solely focused on disco’s legacy for gay rights appropriates disco’s political potentials into a single liberation movement story. on the contrary, a black feminist analysis would not exclude disco’s relationship to gay liberation because its philosophy is inherently inclusive. it is shaped by experiences of intersectional standpoints, including sexual orientations. the black queer feminist combahee river collective (crc) warns of the suffocating limitations that black feminist struggles face when other progressive movements subsume black women’s liberation as a mere aid to theirs. to be clear, the crc by no means call for the fractionalisation of liberation struggles but warns that they cannot work towards ending “somebody else’s oppression” without focusing on their own. the failure of lawrence to include even a single comment by disco divas on how they perceived their work, or any serious attempt to interpret on his part, co-opts a narrative otherwise conducive to resisting mutual structures of oppression into a singular masculinist frame. in light of this, “any consideration of disco’s relationship to women must concern itself with the genre’s actual women and the lyrics they sang” (echols 2010: 118). on this note, and for my second example, let me turn to a rare instance in peter shapiro’s discography in which he engages with the actual self-expression of women in disco, in this case the lyrics of disco/funk/soul group labelle. recording in the u.s between 1971-1977 and comprised of members pattie labelle, nona hendryx and sarah dash, labelle were one of the most prominent disco groups, whose 1974 album “nightbirds” is rightly regarded as a quintessential disco classic. one of the tracks, titled “what can i do for you?”, is described by shapiro as a “shockingly direct plea for justice and unity” that “sums up the tumultuous changes . . . of the post-civil rights generation” (2004: 111). we might be grateful to finally see an acknowledgement of black women’s politicisation in turn the beat around, but what conclusion does shapiro draw from labelle’s explicit political and feminist influences here? nothing more than that “the black music of the period should become the soundtrack to gay liberation” (2004: 112). further, even though shapiro describes the lyrics as “primarily concerned not with dignity and basic humanity but with quality of life”, he yet again solely fixes his gaze onto the gay following labelle attracted, side-lining any recognition of black feminist thought (2004: 113). once again, black women are erased from the narrative to foreground their impact on gay liberation, as discussed in the previous example. “what can i do for you?”, as shapiro rightly points out, is a blatantly political record, with lyrics like “people want to live, not merely existpeople want to enjoy, not suffer and fear”, and the urge to “stop fighting” and “become sis and bro” (labelle 1974). a black katharina pawel | black feminism and the violence of disco 31 feminist revision of shapiro’s analysis incorporates his understanding of the song’s plea for justice and unity, however it also broadens the frame to include the black feminist ideas that the song extolls. for example, this anthem of empowerment and peace stresses the importance of quality of life, prefiguring audre lorde’s reminder “to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society” (1978: 88). for lorde, this demand stems from the inner sense of satisfaction (the erotic) and represents a key component of black feminist thought. labelle make this connection explicit in their urge for joy, and, moreover, the call for unity among “brothers and sisters” mirrors the need for alliances in interlocking systems of oppression, reiterating the premise that black feminism belongs to everyone.10 in this regard, labelle’s plea for unity can also be understood as a call to overcome traditional notions of sexuality. most obviously, labelle’s encouragement of sexual nonconformity and freedom manifested itself in the huge gay and lesbian following they attracted—support that they revelled in (echols 2010: 101). more radically, however, they went as far as to forgo any traditional understandings of sexuality. nona hendryx for example, expressed her attitude in a 1975 rolling stones interview, saying: “i don’t know what a heterosexual or a bisexual or a homosexual or a monosexual is. i don’t understand the differences” (echols 2010: 102). labelle not only voiced their radical black feminism, they also performed it. their performance strategies (futuristic outfits, each members’ individual appearance, natural hairstyles, or literally “coming” on stage) helped to imagine new aesthetics that revolutionised representations of black women artists (echols 2010: 98-102; royster 2013). as labelle themselves put it when questioned about their performances: “you could be something that had never been before” (echols 2010: 97). even if labelle were somewhat concerned at first about performing in sexually explicit ways, they quickly recognised black women’s hunger for change.11 we might read this as labelle answering their own question, “what can i do for you?”, when seen as engaging with the sociopolitical climate of the 1970s and the call for radical reimaginings of racial, sexual and gendered understandings. put slightly differently, re-reading/listening to labelle enables us to revise and expand the concept of the archive, incorporating overlooked elements that, as daphne brooks reminds us, “stood in for and as memory of a people” (brooks 2021: 4). understanding this takes seriously various musical practices, not just song writing and production, as strategies to philosophise black life (brooks 2021). incorporating these insights into music historiography renews disco’s political potential, recognising black women as voicing and shaping black feminist ideas, and ultimately allows us to listen to richer histories than those transcribed through masculinist analytical paradigms. before concluding, i will highlight one last important aspect that further implicitly perpetuates racist and sexist tropes, which will become clear by submitting lawrence and shapiro’s work to a black feminist analysis. several self-conflicting instances occur in the discoriographies of lawrence and shapiro, who both mention the exclusion of women from the discotheques and dj booths (lawrence 2003: 22, 91-92, 188-189; shapiro 2004: 21, 148). at the same time, both authors stress the absolute universal character of the dancefloor, comprised of gay men and african americans. ultimately “universality” dancecult 13(1)32 is conflated with “diversity” (because women are excluded) but this seemingly minor confusion has grave consequences. whilst most likely not intended by either lawrence nor shapiro, their inability to register the sexual and racial differentiation as part of what they call the “universal” character of disco effectively erases black women from the discourse. this deduction may seem harsh, but it is necessary to point such examples out in order to work towards overcoming acts of epistemic violence characteristic in music historiographies. in essence, lawrence and shapiro’s language equates “african american” with “black men” and therefore as different to black women, thereby discrediting black women’s specific social location as black and women. for bell hooks this evidences the perpetuation of racism and sexism, as it “denies the existence of non-white women in america” (1981:7). it is long overdue to point to those instances that (re)create dominant paradigms of exclusion and to employ more constructive modes that push against those power structures (murchison 2018). a black feminist philosophy offers an avenue to do so. it shifts our understanding of how to approach the archives, how to read the silences that perpetuate the erasure of black women from history. but it does not stop there because black feminism professes the importance of joy. the centrality of joy does not undermine its project of locating violence, rather it helps to move beyond a status of victimhood, highlighting means of resistance and visions for a better future. disco is/was many things to many people, and it is important not to narrow disco’s polyvalent characteristics into a one-dimensional history at the expense of its most fervent proponents. conclusion labelle’s aforementioned “what can i do for you?” embodies central concerns of a black feminist philosophy whose experienced-based politics urge for alliances in the struggle for peace. in a reversal of the song’s titular question, it ends with the demand “what can you do for me?” this interrogative reiterates disco’s musical emphasis on women’s needs but it also expresses black feminism’s view that the struggle for peace needs to include black women at its centre. the decentring of women’s experiences by music historiographies has largely written black feminist voices out of disco. this article has shown how this is done via masculinist analytical categories that pervade disco historiographies. in this way, disco is historicised as synonymous with gay liberation, marginalising the black women that dominated this genre and disinheriting disco’s black feminist legacies. i have presented my arguments via exemplary readings of the most authoritative discoriographers, tim lawrence and peter shapiro. this has shown the importance of deconstructing the normative categories that perpetuate their non-intersectional view. instead, an analysis through black feminist informed ideas has attended to the absence of black women in discographies and located specific instances of epistemic violence. at the same time, in expressing black feminist ideas, disco offers an opportunity not only to address historiographical injuries, but to highlight the joy, emphasise beauty and find strength for future visions. disco remains yet to be explored for its black feminist political potential and these inquiries can only come hand-in-hand with a shift in analytical paradigms. katharina pawel | black feminism and the violence of disco 33 notes 1 a notable exception in this regard is alice echols’ hot stuff: disco and the remaking of american culture (2010). her interpretative history of disco crucially includes the likes of chaka khan, labelle, as well as donna summer in her chapter on women and disco. this article builds on echol’s insightful work to explore the interplay of disco and black feminist philosophy. 2 despite these books’ publication being nearly two decades old, lawrence’s and shapiro’s work continue to stand as the “definitive historical accounts of disco” in the u.s. (morris 2004; echols 2010). this article itself builds on the in-depth research of lawrence and shapiro, yet it wishes to expand the notion of historical archives to disco’s black women performers who may otherwise fall outside of our collective cultural memory. 3 i build on stuart hall’s (2018) notion of popular culture as a “terrain of struggle between resistance and incorporation”. this is to say, i do not claim that disco is always already radical but that, like any popular expressive culture, it has the potential to challenge dominant ideas, whilst being played out in a resistive space itself. 4 mancuso’s private loft would evolve into “the loft”, continuing its original non-profit but exclusive admission policy on personal invitation-only basis. this article will not engage in the debates around the underground-overground dynamics that have more recently caught the academic attention of disco (see for example, frank 2007). 5 as this article will discuss, for detailed accounts of disco’s changing sensibility, see: lawrence (2003); shapiro (2005); echols (2010) and of course, dyer (1979). 6 whilst they follow haden-guest (1979), jones and kantonen (1999) and cheren (2000) in restoring disco from a “dreaded musical disease”, in lawrence’s own words, lawrence and shapiro attempt to move away from studio-centered accounts to contextualise disco culturally and historically. 7 see for example hubbs (2007) and halberstam (2007). this is not to say musicology or cultural studies offer no valuable contributions. on the contrary, it is from these fields of enquiry that understandings of power dynamics and expressive effects have brought paradigm shifting insights. my point, instead, specifically addresses the inadequate historicisation of disco. 8 black feminist thought in the u.s was no unfamiliar philosophy in the early 2000s but has its fair share of contributors from sojourner truth, anna julia cooper, ida b. wells-barnett, marc mcleod bethune, toni morrison, barbara smith, alice walker, bell hooks, angela davis and many more. 9 shapiro convincingly analyses the politics of the dancefloor to have an ultimately antiessentialist effect, in his (almost) queer approach that pays greater attention to fundamentally destabilising notions in music. lawrence, too, reworks his analysis in a later piece (2006) through a queer (rather than gay) lens and specifically addresses the politics of the dancefloor. in lstd the one exception to this view of identity formation is found in jorge la torre’s account who specifically states the influence of social spaces on his identity formation (lawrence 2000: 189). dancecult 13(1)34 10 for an intriguing reading of labelle’s “nightbird”, see royster (2013). not published at the time of writing this article, daphne a. brooks (forthcoming) subterranean blues: black women and sound subcultures—from minstrelsy through the new millennium, examines the “culture altering performative aesthetics of black female entertainers who helped shaped modernity”. on nina simone’s influence on black feminist ideas and the civil rights movement, see ruth feldstein (2006). there remains much work to be done in exploring the importance of disco’s black women in generating feminism. 11 pattie labelle reflects on this by saying: “i didn’t want to change our name or style of clothing because i was afraid of losing our black following” (echols 2010: 97). references brooks, daphne a. 2008. “the write to rock: racial mythologies, feminist theory, and the pleasures of rock music criticism”. women & music: a journal of gender and culture 12(1): 54-62. <http://doi.org/10.1353/wam.0.0002.> ———. 2021. liner notes for the revolution: the intellectual life of black feminist sound. cambridge: harvard university press. cheren, mel. 2000. my life and the paradise garage: keep on dancin’. new york: 24 hours for life. combahee river collective. 1978. “a black feminist statement”. in capitalist patriarchy and the case for socialist feminism, ed. zillah eisenstein, 362-372. new york: monthly review press. davis, angela. 1981. women, race and class. new york: vintage books. dyer, richard. 1979. only entertainment. new york: routledge. echols, alice. 2010. hot stuff: disco and the remaking of american culture. new york: norton. feldstein, ruth. 2006. “‘i don’t trust you anymore’: nina simone, culture, and black activism in the 1960s”. the journal of american history 91(4): 1349-1379. <https://doi.org/10.2307/3660176>. frank, gillian. 2007. “discophobia: anti-gay prejudice and the 1979 backlash against disco”. journal of the history of sexuality 16(2): 276-306. <https://doi.org/10.1353/sex.2007.0050>. haden-guest, anthony. 1979. the last party: studio 54, disco, and the culture of the night. new york: william moore. halberstam, judith. 2007. “queer voices and musical gender”. in oh boy! masculinities and popular music, ed. freya jarman-ivens, 183-194. new york: routledge. hall, stuart. 2018. “notes on deconstructing ‘the popular’”. in essential essays, volume 1, 347361. durham: duke university press. hartman, saidiya. 1997. scenes of subjection: terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenthcentury america. new york: oxford university press. hill collins, patricia. 1991. black feminist thought. new york: routledge. hooks, bell. 1981. ain’t i a woman: black women and feminism. boston: south end press. ———. 2000. feminist theory: from margin to center. london: pluto press. hubbs, nadine. 2007. “‘i will survive’: musical mappings of queer social space in a disco anthem”. popular music 26(2): 231–244. <https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261143007001250>. http://doi.org/10.1353/wam.0.0002 https://doi.org/10.2307/3660176 https://doi.org/10.1353/sex.2007.0050 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261143007001250 katharina pawel | black feminism and the violence of disco 35 hughes, walter. 1994. “in the empire of the beat: discipline and disco”. in microphone fiends: youth music and youth culture, ed. tricia rose and andrew ross, 147-57. new york: routledge. jones, alan and jussi kantonen. 1999. saturday night forever: the story of disco. edinburgh: mainstream. koestenbaum, wayne. 1993. the queen’s throat: opera, homosexuality, and the mystery of desire.  new york: poseidon press. kooijman, jaap. 2005. “turn the beat around: richard dyer’s ‘in defense of disco’ revisited”. european journal of cultural studies 8(2): 257-266. <https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1367549405051848>. kopkind, andrew. 1979. “what we do now is disco gay music co-opted by straights”. san diego reader, 16 august. <https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/1979/aug/16/what-wedo-now-disco/>, (accessed 11 november 2021). kutulas, judy. 2003. “‘you probably think this song is about you’: 1970s women’s music from carole king to the disco divas”. in disco divas: women and popular culture in the 1970s, ed. sherrie a. inness, 172–93. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. lawrence, tim. 2003. love saves the day: a history of american dance music culture, 19701979. durham: duke university press. ———. 2006. “i want to see all my friends at once”. journal of popular music studies 18(2): 162. <https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-1598.2006.00086.x>. lorde, audre. 1978. uses of the erotic: the erotic as power. new york: out and out books. murchison, gayle. 2018. “let’s flip it! quare emancipations: black queer traditions, afrofuturisms, janelle monáe to labelle”. women and music: a journal of gender and culture 22(1): 79-96. <https://doi.org/10.1353/wam.2018.0008>. royster, jessica t. 2013. “labelle: funk, feminism and the politics of flight and fight”. american studies 52(4): 77-98. <https://doi.org/10.1353/ams.2013.0120>. shapiro, peter. 2005. turn the beat around: the secret history of disco. new york: faber and faber. taylor, keeanga-yamahtta. 2017. how we get free. chicago: haymarket books. thornton, sarah. 1995. club cultures: music, media and subcultural capital. cambridge: polity press. traister, bryce. 2000. “academic viagra: the rise of american masculinity studies”. american quarterly 52(2): 274-304. williams, paul. 2005. “too black, too gay: the disco inferno”. cultural studies review 11(1): 212-216. <https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v11i1.3463>. discography labelle. 1974. “what can i do for you?”. track 6 on nightbirds. epic (lp): ke 33075. <https://www.discogs.com/labelle-nightbirds/release/15774925>. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1367549405051848 https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/1979/aug/16/what-we-do-now-disco/ https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/1979/aug/16/what-we-do-now-disco/ https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-1598.2006.00086.x https://doi.org/10.1353/wam.2018.0008 https://doi.org/10.1353/ams.2013.0120 https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v11i1.3463 https://www.discogs.com/labelle-nightbirds/release/15774925 lick my legacy:are women-identified spaces still needed to nurture women-identified djs? dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 9(1): 73–89 issn 1947-5403 ©2017 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2017.09.01.04 lick my legacy: are women-identified spaces still needed to nurture women-identified djs? maren hancock york university (canada) abstract this article documents lick club; a vancouver, bc lesbian bar that operated from 2003 until 2011, employing predominantly female (as well as trans and non-binary) djs. specifically, this study examines the effects of lick’s physical space on the careers of those djs in the region, focusing on the queer dj network that evolved from the club. the author bases her findings on qualitative data generated from interviews with key players in lick’s localized dj network. the interviewees describe how their participation in lick provided them with access to mentors, dj equipment and performance opportunities that proved to be integral to their development as professional djs. this research corroborates other studies of female djs in the usa (farrugia 2004, 2012) and europe (gavanas and reitsamer 2013, 2016) that demonstrate how mentors are of acute importance in fostering the careers of female and non-binary djs. this study concludes that, although female and non-binary djs are becoming more common in canadian nightclubs and festivals, networks such as the one fostered by lick are still significant to the careers of djs whose identities do not afford them access to the “boys’ club(s)”. keywords: dj, gender, female, canada, lesbian maren hancock is a phd candidate in gender, feminist and women’s studies at york university. the author of lady lazarus: confronting lydia lunch (questing beast, 2000), hancock is presently completing her dissertation on female djs in canada. hancock is also a professional dj and a critically acclaimed recording artist and performer. feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2017.09.01.04 dancecult 9(1)74 introduction if i had not had those experiences at lick, had our group not been given the opportunity to go in there and create space and make something happen and create this really awesome vibe and culture that started to flow from the lick club… i mean i can’t even count how many djs started and moved through and actually became involved in the music scene in vancouver. and i would even go so far as to say specifically because of lick they had the opportunity in a safe environment that wasn’t a super huge club, that they were really super supported in and could really… own their space. if i didn’t have that experience i wouldn’t be in winnipeg doing the same thing.1 this article assesses lick club, a vancouver, bc lesbian bar that operated from 2003 until 2011, employing predominantly female (as well as trans and non-binary) djs. specifically, this study examines the effects that the club’s physical space had on the careers of said djs in the region, focusing on the queer female, trans and non-binary dj network that developed out of the club. a physical space such as lick that caters to female, trans and non-binary djs (thereby side-stepping male-dominated dj networks) can be a significant factor in bringing beginner djs and mentors together. my research corroborates other studies of female djs in the usa (farrugia 2004, 2012) and europe (gavanas and reitsamer 2013, 2016) that demonstrate the acute importance of mentors in fostering the careers of female and non-binary djs. my findings are based on qualitative data generated from interviews with key players in lick’s local dj network. the interviewees describe how their participation in lick provided them with access to mentors, dj equipment and performance opportunities that proved to be integral to their development as professional djs. i also draw on my own emic experience as a dj and promoter at lick. this study concludes that although female djs are becoming more common in canadian nightclubs and festivals, networks such as the one fostered by lick are still significantly important to the careers of djs whose identities do not afford them access to the “boys’ club(s)”. to begin, i invoke halberstam’s (2005) assertion that it is important for academics to document queer and underground cultural environments. the methodology identifies key ethical concerns regarding my hegemonic identity relative to lick’s other central agents, and my position as an insider studying a population of which i am a member. i outline a brief history of lick and the building that housed it in order to both temporally and contextually situate the club. i present findings from my interviews with key lick participants, wherein interlocutors stress the importance of queer, female-centered spaces and communities to support the progress of female and non-binary djs—wherein mentorship is specifically discussed. i subsequently explore the impact that lick’s closure had on the developing pool of female and non-binary djs in vancouver as well as on the city’s underground queer club scene. i finish with a brief consideration of other female and queer-focused dj collectives and networks in canada. hancock | lick my legacy 75 vancouver’s lick club (2003–11): a queer time, space and place i guess kind of feeling in touch with [a queer] community or wanting to feel more in touch with that community because it wasn’t something that i had access to growing up? and you know i really support the idea of having spaces accessible for queer people… i just really like the idea that it was just this little hole in the wall club and it was grimey and people just came as they were and didn’t give a fuck, you know what i mean? at that point that was kind of my mentality, i don’t give a shit, whatever.2 queer lesbian subcultures have rarely been discussed in the existing literature and they offer a new area of study for queer cultural producers and queer academics (halberstam 160). in in a queer time and space (2005), halberstam emphasizes the importance of documenting queer cultural spaces such as lick. as the title suggests, halberstam argues that people develop the use of “queer time and space” not only to oppose dominant societal institutions such as family and heterosexuality, but also in accordance with other logics such as “location, movement and identification” (1). thereby, halberstam takes up notions of queer subcultural practices as alternative modes of living and relating to other people in society. halberstam illustrates the need for queer academics to engage in documenting queer culture in a way that allows for interpretation and conveys a sense of its diversity and complexity. radical cultural work is all too often co-opted by the mainstream media and therefore it is important to generate as many records of queer culture as possible, in order to assert the existence of our cultural communities (2005). informed by halberstam’s thesis, i posit that lick’s community of workers and clients comprised in and of themselves a queer nightclub subculture, one that developed in opposition to the dominant, heteronormative nightclub scene, and the (often unwelcoming) gay male scene. as an academic still closely connected to lick’s dj network, i am taking up halberstam’s call to action by exploring lick as a site that encouraged queer subcultural practices outside of the general male-focused, homosocial dj and nightclub networks in vancouver. importantly, all of the interviewees for this study expressed a desire to have lick documented and remembered. methods the core data informing this study stems from semi-structured, informal interviews that took place over skype between march and may of 2012, ranging in duration from twentyseven to forty-seven minutes. i interviewed seven djs that played lick regularly, and two promoters who have been heavily involved with the vancouver lesbian party scene since the late 1990s. six out of nine people interviewed for this article identify as female. the three exceptions are revoked, who identifies as a trans man, skylar love, who identifies as masculine non-binary, and stacy clark, who identifies as gender queer. four out of nine participants identify as people of colour: dj she, dj t, mandy randhawa and revoked. i dancecult 9(1)76 also incorporate my experience as a white, cisgendered, middle-class and queer3 female as empirical data.4 additionally, i draw on research conducted for my forthcoming dissertation, in order to situate the experiences of the lick djs in relation to a national sample. this second data set is generated from a survey of one hundred and four female djs (including seven respondents who identified as non-binary), from most regions of canada. it should be noted that 23% of respondents resided in vancouver when they completed the survey, which ran online from may 2014 to april 2015. ethical concerns there are many ethical concerns to be discussed; yet it is beyond the scope of this article to do so thoroughly. therefore, i can only outline a few crucial concerns. all of the people interviewed for this article are friends of mine to some degree, and the attendant intimacy might hinder this research if it caused a subject to withhold critical comments for the sake of not disrupting the project. conversely, my friendships with my subjects might potentially enhance the data if our relationship facilitated increased trust and thereby transparency. given the complexity of the relationships between my participants and myself, selfreflexivity is important (rogers 2010; oakley 1988, as outlined in olszanowski 2012).5 in that vein, i acknowledge that i possess many hallmarks of hegemonic female identity and that women like me are already reflected in the existing literature on gender and dj culture. however, unlike me, many of my subjects fall outside of hegemonic norms of race, sexuality and gender, and as such are not currently adequately represented in extant literature. because i strive for a critical analysis that extends beyond my own perspective, i have attempted to centre the discourse of my interviewees as much as possible. i also try to evaluate how my social location affects my research process and analysis, and plays upon my status as an insider (acker 2000).6 in order to ensure that i do not “construct” my participants’ experiences, and/or collapse them with my own, i try to give as much room to their comments and opinions as can be allowed. furthermore, in doing research on people that occupy marginalized positions, i have to critically interrogate my stake in documenting lick’s history, so that i am not exploiting the knowledge they have shared with me. for example, i am careful in exploring the idea that lick was a “safe(r) space” that vastly enabled its participants to become professional djs. the fact that i experienced lick in that way7 immediately calls into question my white privilege and how my comfort may have been at the expense of more marginalized participants at lick.8 realizing that not everyone experienced the club the way that i did, i have to try not to paint lick as a utopia without tensions, conflicts and problems, as those things were always present.9 yet, it is hard not to treat lick as utopic, as its very concept is just that: a nightclub run by and for queer women and other members of vancouver’s queer community. moreover, lick was not under any significant pressure to generate a profit, and therefore the club for the most part was left alone by upper management. this autonomy enabled the club to cater to the needs of its community, as discussed in the next section. hancock | lick my legacy 77 the lick club: a brief herstory lick was a depressed bar in an economically depressed area of town with lots of troubles all around it and it was by no means a destination location and so it didn’t have a lot of the class issues that i think a lot of the other bars had … like along the granville strip that had the taxis driving up… this was a very different ... there was a lot of work, community work, to create safe space for all gendered peoples (clark). a key aspect of lick’s success in developing a network of female, trans and non-binary djs was that the club occupied a permanent space throughout its eight-year run, an impressive amount time for any type of nightclub to remain open. the fundamental reason that lick existed for so long is that it was not required to turn a profit, and so it is worth briefly outlining the special circumstances surrounding the creation and financing of the club. the building that housed lick, the lotus hotel, was built in the 1920s and is itself a part of a historically diverse (racially and sexually), working-class, downtown vancouver community. the lotus hotel still occupies the corner of abbott and pender streets, thereby bordering three (formally) low-income and working class neighbourhoods: gastown, china town and the downtown east side (commonly referred to by its acronym: dtes). during lick’s existence in the 1990s and 2000s, the dtes was branded the poorest postal code in north america. statistically speaking, the dtes was not the poorest area in north america during the time that lick was open, but it was close (skelton 2010). during the 1980s the lotus hotel became a queer destination with political overtones. by example, aids vancouver held their first monthly meetings there in 1983. throughout the 1990s the hotel contained three different gay bars. the lotus was a dance club in the basement that held a weekly women-only night on fridays called meow mix. charlie’s pub had a weekly lesbian night on saturday (claveau 2003). chuck’s pub, which was the smallest venue and eventually became lick, housed drag shows and gay men’s dating game nights (nb: this was in the pre-to-early internet years). on top of these three queer venues there was a low-income hotel containing single occupant residencies (sors). therefore, the physical space that lick occupied was already constructed on an intersectional foundation layered with race, class, gender and sexuality.10 multi-millionaire mark james bought the lotus hotel in 2000—informed by a mandate to serve the queer community in order to honour his late mother’s memory. james’ mother was a prominent ally and activist in the struggle for gay rights and visibility in vancouver. the entire building was renovated over a period of two years and re-opened in 2002. the downstairs venue became the lotus sound lounge and focused on house and techno music, two genres that had not yet become commercialized and therefore heteronormative. charlie’s became honey lounge, which focused on more “lounge-y” musical genres such as r&b, motown and down tempo electronic music. however, the popular weekend drag performances remained. in order to maintain his commitment to maintaining a queer space, james directed that the smallest club, previously chuck’s, remain branded as a gay bar, and initially it was called milk. within a year of being open, stacy clark and a man who was dancecult 9(1)78 part of vancouver’s fetish community approached james with the idea of making milk into a women–only lesbian bar that also welcomed trans women and men. as discussed, james was committed to creating and maintaining a queer space. under different circumstances, lick would have faced economic pressure to compete in vancouver’s highly saturated nightclub market, whereby management might have had to charge a higher cover at the door, and/or sell liquor at a more expensive price point. because lick was able to keep prices down, it was more accessible to women, trans and young people (who earn less income overall due to systemic discrimination in the workforce) than the other gay nightclubs in vancouver (which primarily catered to gay men). when milk was re-branded as lick in 2003, i was hired to dj there. i was already spinning next door in honey lounge and successfully branding myself as an up and coming dj in vancouver’s queer and fetish scenes. lick’s management also asked me to find other female djs for the club. i brought in two djs that i knew from vancouver’s (very small) female hip-hop scene: dj t and skylar love (who then went by the name dj de lux). both of them were under nineteen years old at the time, and therefore not legally allowed in bars.11 in retrospect, i have come to see our flouting of the liquor laws as another way by which we carved out our own countercultural space. (queer) space is the place how lick became a safe space for transgendered djs starts with the history of lick opening as a women’s-only bar, period . . . there was a lot of dialogue . . . around . . . well, what does it mean to be a woman and . . . what is the idea of safe space and what about trans people and how does everyone fit in the community and we’re looking for a space for this group and this group and this group so we’re having community based dialogues . . . and being able to have those dialogues with people in a way that was really productive and community building . . . really led to . . . policy changing and saying, “ok, we’re not a women’s only bar, we’re a queer bar . . . realizing that the idea for lick was not to create this space for “women-only” but . . . to create this space where people who were not represented by the dominant society could come and feel welcome and supported (clark). when lick opened, its admittance policy was “women-only”. however, trans people were also (informally) welcome. above, clark elaborates on the events that led lick to abandon its “women-only” policy after just a few months. as more time passed, the management of lick decided to also admit heterosexual men who were considerate of being in a queer space. lick’s management had no interest in policing gender; rather, they sought to create a space free from unwanted, straight, cisgendered male attention. clark described how lick was created to fulfill the desire to have a fun, nighttime destination for queers: “this was a nightclub. we were coming from a very sex positive, kink positive place. . . . [lick] changed as a result of . . . embracing queer politics, relative to gender and race and class”. for this reason, the club was a safe(r) space to socialize in a queer and sexually charged environment.12 hancock | lick my legacy 79 in a racially segregated and mainly white city, where—by example—black people comprise 1% of the city’s population (compton 2016), lick’s demographic did little more than reflect the general population of vancouver. that said, several people of colour, including resident djs, bartenders and management, were key players in shaping lick’s environment through their programming and presence. revoked was involved with lick almost from its inception—first as a dj and drag king performer, and then as a bartender and a bouncer until finally he became the general manager of all three venues up to their closure when the hotel was sold in 2011.13 revoked was one of the “faces” of lick, seen behind the bar, on the door, on the decks and onstage hosting drag king performances and other theme nights. in addition to these roles, revoked acted as lick’s resident handyman for almost its entire lifespan. revoked’s role in shaping lick’s vibe contributed a great deal to the club’s ability to be welcoming to trans and gender fluid patrons, staff, and performers. during our interview revoked spoke about the sense of familiarity experienced by attendees and staff, another key factor that made lick a potent breeding ground for performers and djs as—again—it was a safer space than mainstream, heteronormative nightclubs: “i believed in the space. i really liked the grassroots fundraising aspect of it. it was really small so it was really intimate and you’d actually meet a lot of people there. and i knew everybody… it was like cheers for gay people!”14 revoked’s comments articulate how lick’s small size and intimate nature fostered a close-knit community of people who worked, created, and partied together. the fact that lick was the site of numerous fundraisers for local and grassroots causes also contributed to a sense of an inclusive, caring community. lick held almost weekly drag king nights and fundraisers; often, these events were a combination of the two. in keeping with its mandate of community service, lick would frequently open and staff the venue free for fundraisers. by example, lick hosted several top surgery fundraising parties for trans men, thereby playing a crucial role in the transition of specific community members. when i interviewed revoked in 2012, a year after lick closed, he expressed his grief over losing the club: it was our goal . . . to try to sponsor somebody[‘s] chest surgery every year and raise enough money [through lick to pay] for that . . . that’s like $15,000 . . . i was really bummed out [as] that [money] could have gone . . . to a lot of people who . . . needed it. despite being a nightclub known for debauchery, lick was also a political space inhabited by a politicized community. during the eight years that lick was open, its diy ethos encouraged amateur performers and djs to take up space in the club through practicing and performing. although lick was small, dark and dirty, clark stresses the importance of having a permanent, physical space to build a local queer cultural community: the reason that i kept participating in [lick] and [why] it really morphed into what it became was that it provided an opportunity for female promoters, djs, performers, [and] bartenders to actually have a space to come and work and feel like they were part of it. [t]o the best of our ability we tried to create a really collaborative environment dancecult 9(1)80 so that people had the opportunity to come and promote, dj, dance, do drag [and burlesque] performances . . . and this whole community just kind of grew out of a really cool concept (clark). in speaking about the cultural community that formed around lick, clark alludes to its significant impact on queer and lesbian culture in vancouver. lick also impacted vancouver nightclub culture in general. despite the prevalence of sexism and heteronormativity, several of lick’s djs, including myself, went on to achieve professional status in the wider vancouver scene and beyond.15 in addition to revoked, some of these djs have been interviewed for this project, specifically kasey riot, skylar love and dj rhiannon. they all describe how lick played an important part in their entry into vancouver’s dj scene, and credit lick’s queer and female focus as creating a safe space for djs to gain chops and cultivate an audience in vancouver. the power of dj networks lick was different in that it was predominantly run by queer management, they actually promoted female djs learning and working there; that had happened in the past but never in that kind of capacity. . . . i think every dj that we know now probably came through lick at one point or another. i think it was hugely important . . . [to have] the space . . . you got to have space to perform . . . to practice and play, you have to.16 in dj culture, both real-world and online social networks play a crucial role in a djs ability to get booked (rogers 2010; farrugia 2012; weiss 2016). feminist scholars of dj culture have demonstrated that female djs benefit from forming collectives and other formal or informal networks (gavanas and reitsamer 2013). being part of a localized network gives female djs the opportunity to receive support from colleagues in invaluable ways, such as getting advice on skills and technology, and opportunities to play for an audience (mitchell 2016; weiss 2016). for example, charity marsh (2002) cites the canadian campus and community radio (ccr) sector as a common entry way into djing for women, as well as opportunities created by queer women’s spaces that favour female djs. m. bredin (1991) also demonstrates how female and queer women’s shows on ccr stations provide favourable conditions for women to learn skills from one another and support each other in the process of producing a radio show. a report commissioned by the national campus radio association and funded by status of women canada corroborates these findings (zeleke 2004). in her study of american female djs, rebekah farrugia looks at the success of san francisco-based dj collective sister sf in providing supportive spaces for female djs both online and off: [t]o a large extent the strong presence of women in [electronic/dance music] stemmed from the efforts of sistersf, a women-centered dj collective. . . . sister sf maintained a space for female electronic and dance music djs both online and offline, by offering a space where they can write themselves into dj culture (2004). hancock | lick my legacy 81 farrugia points to the importance for female djs to fight for their place in dj culture, stating that women are engaged in a “constant battle to claim space for themselves” (2004: 237). she identifies how “getting access to bookings at local clubs—which is where most djs begin their careers—depends heavily on who you know” (2004: 246). her findings corroborate those of gavanas and reitsamer (2013, 2016) who demonstrate the ways that djing is gendered in several different cities in europe, and more specifically, the homosociality of dj networks. reflecting on lick’s impact on vancouver nightclub culture, i argue that there were two crucial factors that enabled the club to foster female, trans and non-binary djs. first, we had a permanent, dedicated space and financial support. the second crucial factor was that lick’s management had a mandate of booking local, up and coming female, trans and non-binary djs. lick provided a space for the “face to face networking” that both farrugia (2004: 257) and gavanas and reitsamer (2016) identify as an essential function of male dj culture. while lick replicates other networks of female djs in many ways, it was unique in that its network of djs and other nightlife personnel was rooted in the physical space of the nightclub, and that most members of the network were “out” as lesbian, gay or queer. in order to get a sense of how many female djs worked in vancouver in the decade before lick opened, i interviewed leigh cousins and mandy randhawa17 of flygirl productions. flygirl has produced lesbian parties at various vancouver venues since the late 1990s; cousins had already produced lesbian parties in the mid-1990s. while they threw a few parties at lick during its run, flygirl events mainly happen in big venues on a monthly basis. despite lick technically being “the competition”, cousins and randhawa recognized its community standing and supported the club, and randhawa often came out to party with the crowd. cousins stated that prior to lick opening, there were no dedicated spaces for female djs to play, nor did she see many female djs in vancouver, save for at the lesbian parties produced by flygirl or one of the few other lesbian promoters in the city. cousins and randhawa both felt that there was a marked increase in local female djs after lick opened, resulting in a larger pool for flygirl to select from.18 they stressed that the reason they booked djs that played at lick was because they felt that those djs were highly skilled and “took their craft seriously” (cousins). dj she also felt that lick’s existence increased the number of female djs in vancouver: i feel like when lick closed, that was the only place where most of us were playing, you know, aside from a few queer events here and there. and now that lick is closed, i feel like a lot more female djs from that pocket of people are getting a lot more play in the city at straight events and different events…definitely there’s a lot more females in the scene for sure. in fact, all of the people interviewed for this article shared the view that lick had fostered an increase in skilled and experienced female djs in vancouver. dancecult 9(1)82 stacy clark was residing in winnipeg and djing under the moniker jonny mexico when i interviewed him over skype in 2012. it was interesting to discover that clark had started djing, as that was not the case when he lived in vancouver. rather, clark filled almost every role at lick except that of a dj, working instead as a manager, bartender, bouncer, promoter and drag king. clark also spoke about the importance of having a physical space such as lick to foster local djs,19 describing how his time at lick resulted in his surprise at the dearth of female, trans and non-binary djs in winnipeg’s club scene. to combat that lack, clark started queerview, a queer dj collective explicitly welcoming to queer, trans and non-binary people. when i spoke with clark, the collective had built a significant presence in winnipeg over two years. in addition to throwing parties, queerview collaborated with a queer youth group to throw all ages parties and teach djing to youth group members. clark remarked that it had become more common to see entire bills of female djs in queer clubs and parties in winnipeg—women who were not just opening for male djs, but also headlining. he stated that this increase was due not only to queerview’s initiatives, but also the efforts of other winnipeg djs to recruit and train more female, trans and non-binary djs. by example, mama cutsworth started her “dj school for all women” in 2012, in response to the lack of female djs in winnipeg. when i interviewed her in 2015, she told me that after four years, fifty-five students had graduated from the school.20 clark points out that the success of parties featuring female djs caused local nightclubs to take notice for financial and creative reasons: i think if this collective wasn’t together, that type of progress wouldn’t be made with [the] clubs. and it could be a factor of . . . these guys are throwing parties and selling out every time, maybe we need to get in on that . . . [maybe] a female dj doesn’t equate to lost revenue for the night, [rather] it equates to creating a different vibe and actually making some money for the club. clark highlights how a nightclub’s drive for profit influences dj booking practices. if female djs draw crowds, and those crowds spend money, nightclubs will book more female djs—if they exist locally. by providing a relatively safe space to learn and practice, both mama cutsworth and the queerview collective increased the number of female djs in winnipeg. the results achieved by lick, queerview and mama cutsworth demonstrate the importance of mentors in encouraging burgeoning female, queer and non-binary djs. i was meant for mentoring you (baby) i know that when djs would come in [to lick] and play they were under a close eye . . . if they had an issue, we were there to help them with it . . . if they felt intimidated, we were there to support them. i think there was just a lot more support versus just kind of showing up at some open decks [night in a club], know what i mean? like, we would actually book them in and make them a little event and make them a [flier].21 hancock | lick my legacy 83 most djs interviewed for this article stated that lick had been a crucial aspect of their journey from amateur to professional. still, i was surprised to learn that several interviewees had either their first ever gig or their first regularly recurring gig (referred to as a “residency”) at lick. during our interview, skylar love listed the names of six djs that they felt had launched their careers lick, including themselves.22 in addition to providing fledgling djs with equipment and an audience, lick also supported djs by promoting their event and ensuring that they had on-site technical assistance. love stated that they “wouldn’t be half the dj i am today if it wasn’t for that place”. when i interviewed love in 2012, they were managing a vancouver dj school in addition to gigging, thereby supporting themselves entirely through dj-related activities. yet, love admitted that they were in a fairly unique situation for a female or non-binary dj in vancouver. they stated that there was only one female student out of ten attending the school at that time, and love made a point of mentoring them: “nowadays i feel like i have to . . . break barriers for women to be able to kind of get in. it’s like, i’m the old mama now and i got my foot in the door, and i’m scooping in my little . . . kin”. kasey riot was djing and producing music in london, uk, when this article was written in 2017. she started coming to lick in 2006 while still underage, and cited love as someone who inspired her to pursue djing: “skylar was like a role model . . . because i started going to lick and i was like, oh, that looks like fun, i want to do that . . . and… female artists in general i think, motivated me to get out there and do my thing”.23 revoked cited love as a role model as well. dj she also stressed the importance of seeing local female djs, thereby having role models that one could actually interact with. after moving to vancouver, dj she had her first local gig at lick, eventually progressing to playing at clubs throughout the city. dj she also managed vancouver’s premier record store for djs, beat street records, from 2007–9. dj she elaborated on the importance of female djs being represented in media: i always kind of looked to female djs, because, you know, again, just how ridiculous the industry is. at the time i was always hearing about male hip hop djs, and when following the history of hip hop there was never any light on females, so, when i started getting into house music i was more on the tip of dj heather mixes, or collette. dj she revealed that although she did find a few examples of female djs in popular culture, while growing up in prince edward island and then living in calgary she did not know of any local female djs to seek out as mentors. the importance of local djs to act as role models and mentors was mentioned by almost all of the interviewees.24 conclusion: gone baby gone, lick is gone… lick closing has definitely left a void in the scene, and particularly for people that are up and coming, i think it might be a deterrent to people… to not have a safe, comfortable place to kind of get in with people, but, at the same time it’s kind of forced people to look beyond that and kind of open their minds a little bit (dj she). dancecult 9(1)84 many interview participants expressed concern that the loss of lick resulted in a lack of spaces wherein underground queer youth culture could develop. randhawa’s comments are salient in this regard: “there were many younger kids that consistently knew that lick was there, the first space that they would know to go would be lick. so, that was my first [thought]: where are those kids now?” both love and riot declared that with the loss of lick came a loss of space wherein to play underground music—the music that most interests them. by example, love, echoing randhawa, stated: “i think with the loss of underground . . . options all that’s left is top 40 and mainstream [music], and the mainstream is going to call on a certain demographic . . . i don’t think a lot of the younger kids even know . . . about queer culture, so that’s even more sad”. love also pointed out that lick fostered not only female, trans and non-binary djs, but also an underground, queer musical sound that was cultivated by, and reflected in, the musical styles of the lick djs. dj she also lamented the loss of lick, as she felt it anchored a somewhat “stable” queer club scene centered around the space and the opportunities it provided for queer djs specifically: at the queer parties i’ve gone to i haven’t seen any up and coming djs, it’s all people who have been around for at least five years… i kind of feel bad for people who are coming up because it’s like how do you get into that scene or have access to it, you know what i mean? revoked also felt that vancouver was lacking in queer spaces in general, and commented: “i’m not even worried about [vancouver having] a queer women’s space… i’m more looking for a queer space where people can chill and get their gay on and be whoever they want to be”. however, it is interesting that both dj she and riot were able to find a silver lining with regards to lick’s closure, as they felt that it forced vancouver’s queer women’s scene to branch out into other clubs and spaces in the city. the title of this article asks if female-focused spaces are still needed to foster the careers of female, trans and non-binary djs, and the answer is both “yes” and “no”. while womencentered spaces are certainly not a necessity for female, trans and non-binary people seeking to become professional djs, i have demonstrated that women-centered spaces definitely do foster the careers of female, trans and non-binary djs. other studies have confirmed the value of female and/or queer networks for fostering female, trans and non-binary djs in canada. recently, david madden (2016) demonstrated how montreal’s dj mini “benefitted from a local mixed queer network of people working in various music-related clusters of street level activity . . . who acted as mentors and collaborators throughout her career trajectory” (34). there are several examples of past and present all-female dj networks, crews, club nights and festivals throughout canada. for example, the calgary-based dj collective girls on decks was founded in 2003 to create opportunities for women to dj (girls on decks’ facebook page).25 the fact that this collective is still active after thirteen years demonstrates not only women’s avid interest in djing, but also the continued need for female-based dj hancock | lick my legacy 85 networks. created in 2009, the collective dnb girls is also heavily comprised of canadian djs.26 a further example of the strength of collectives can be found in “yes yes y’all”, a toronto-based crew comprised of queers of differing genders and ethnicities whose monthly club nights have operated since 2008 and routinely sell out.27 although lick closed in 2011 when the lotus hotel was sold, its spirit lives on in monthly “lick club reunited” parties held in vancouver that feature former staff, djs and promoters from the club.28 in addition, the monthly drag king night “man up!” that began at lick in 2008 is still very popular after relocating to another underground vancouver venue, the cobalt.29 it is apparent that although lick may be gone, it certainly has not been forgotten.30 notes 1 stacy clark, interview with the author (on skype), 15 april 2012. all subsequent references are from this interview. 2 dj she, interview with the author (on skype), 22 april 2012. all subsequent references are from this interview. 3 i identify as “queer” because i do not ascribe to cultural norms around sexuality. 4 i had a long-running and intimate relationship with lick as a dj and promoter for the club. i worked there from its opening during vancouver pride in july 2003 until i moved to toronto in 2009. i played a significant role in the club during the first two years of its existence by djing there on a weekly basis, hiring other djs to play at the club, and creating and promoting events at lick. the frequency with which i dj’d at lick during the first few years of its run definitely contributed to my growth as a dj. throughout my time at lick i was committed to the club because i loved being in a female-and-trans-positive, queer cultural space devoted to music, dancing and activism. i was the most comfortable working in that environment, having been involved in feminist and queer activism since my late teens. as a female dj who had worked hard to establish a name for herself in vancouver, i had a personal mission to make things easier for other female djs and to do my best to destabilize the “boys’ club” of dj networks that predominated vancouver dj culture. 5 feminist research is defined by a refutation of claims to objectivity, a reciprocal relationship with the research subject and the concept of reflexivity. in looking at concepts of reflexivity, i am attracted to brooks et al.’s discussion of harding’s concept of “strong reflexivity”, which “requires the researcher to be cognizant and critically reflective about the different ways her positionality can serve as both a hindrance and a resource toward achieving knowledge throughout the research process” (brooks et al. 2007). 6 my role as researcher intersects with my involvement with lick and places me within an indigenous-insider framework, as i both work in, and study, my own field (hill-collins 1991; acker 2000). basing a theoretical framework on an insider perspective has unique challenges and limitations (visweswaran 1994). although i may share a similar worldview as other group insiders, gained by experiencing the problems that characterize our community, multiple aspects dancecult 9(1)86 of identity also shape research experience and not just that of being an in-or-outsider (hessebiber and piatelli 2007). my subjectivity, including my membership status in relation to those who participated in the research, is a crucial and ubiquitous aspect of the investigation. 7 although i had much busier residencies in bigger nightclubs in vancouver during the time that i was really “coming up” as a dj in vancouver (2003 –05), when i played lick i felt more confident and uninhibited. this feeling of comfort and ease in turn encouraged and enabled me to take more risks, leading to a steady increase in my skill level. in these ways lick’s low pressure, supportive and intimate environment nurtured my growth as a dj. i also experienced lick as a welcome reprieve from the sexism that i often endured while working as a dj in heterosexual and mainstream nightclubs. 8 moreover, for a few years my live-in partner was managing the three lotus venues, which further contributed to my safety and security as an employee of lick. 9 it must also be stated that lick was likely not utopian for the residents of the dtes, who were impacted by the role of lick and the lotus hotel as a business contributing to the gentrification of the dtes and the subsequent displacement of its residents. 10 notably, all three of the aforementioned neighbourhoods have rapidly gentrified since the early 2000s, and as mentioned, the lotus hotel has been a part of that gentrification. 11 i knew that skylar love was only eighteen when they started at lick; however, i did not know that dj t was also underage when she started djing at lick until i interviewed her for this article. with regards to the former dj, perhaps it speaks to the lack of female djs in vancouver that i felt it justified to recruit a dj that was not legally allowed to work in a nightclub. the fact that it did not seem to bother anyone involved with the venue, nor the public it served, perhaps also underscores that lick flew under the radar of the mainstream nightclub industry in vancouver along with all of its attendant institutions, including the police and the liquor control board. 12 as a result, things were quite wild during lick’s first few years. by example, the bathroom toilets were in need of repair after almost every weekend due to people having sex in the stalls. for a sense of how sexually-charged the atmosphere at lick was, see georgia straight (2004) and riot (2011). 13 revoked was hired by my then-partner to replace him as the general manager of the lotus hotel and the three venues when my partner moved to toronto in 2010. 14 revoked, interview with the author (on skype), 24 may 2012. all subsequent references are from this interview. 15 in this case, “professional” connotes that these djs earned a portion, if not all, of their income from djing or dj-related activities, such as throwing and promoting dj and performance based parties. 16 leigh cousins, interview with the author (on skype), 5 april 2012. all subsequent references are from this interview. 17 mandy randhawa, interview with the author (on skype), 5 april 2012. all subsequent references are from this interview. 18 for example, as the 1990s progressed into the 2000s, flygirl relied on one local dj in particular, tracey d (whom i interviewed in 2014 for my forthcoming dissertation). flygirl then brought in internationally famous djs such as kimberly s from san francisco for their hancock | lick my legacy 87 bigger parties, and tracey d opened. when tracey d stopped playing for flygirl during the early 2000s, i was hired in her place, because at the time i was one of only a handful of wellknown female djs, and i had ties to the queer club scene. 19 clark states: “it was a proving . . . ground, a place where they worked through their skills, developed more skills, networked with other djs, other performers, other promoters, built a resume as well, in a really positive environment”. 20 mama cutsworth, interview with author (on skype), 8 april 2015. 21 skylar love, interview with the author (on skype), 3 april 2012. all subsequent references are from this interview. 22 three of the djs that skylar named were also interviewed for this article: kasey riot, revoked and dj t. 23 kasey riot, interview with the author (on skype), 20 march 2012. 24 referencing the survey that i conducted for my dissertation, approximately 54% of respondents indicated having been mentored by another dj (or djs). moreover, 52% of respondents indicated that they had received support and encouragement from within their social circles. overall, only 23% of respondents specified that they did not have any mentors or people who enabled or encouraged them to pursue djing. therefore, approximately three out of four djs surveyed affirmed that they had benefitted from some kind of mentorship and/or supportive relationship, again demonstrating the importance of mentors and community with regards to supporting beginner djs. 25 girls on decks’ facebook page: <https://www.facebook.com/girls.on.decks/>. 26 see the dnb girls’ facebook page: <http://www.facebook.com/drumandbassgirls/>. 27 see the yes yes y’all facebook page: <https://www.facebook.com/groups/52141184423/>. 28 see lick club’s facebook page: <http://www.facebook.com/groups/lickclub/>. 29 for more information on “man up!” view “king for a day” on shamelessmag.com (2011). see also the “man up!” facebook page: <https://www.facebook.com/manupvancouver/>. 30 in 2003, the agency casting extras for the television series the l-word recruited people by posting signs in lick’s washrooms, and as a result myself and several other lick staff and patrons ended up as extras on the television series. in this way, part of lick lives on in the lesbian cultural imaginary of the tv series. sometimes the l-word used the other two lotus hotel venues, the lotus sound lounge and honey lounge, as locations for shooting, with lick utilized as the extras’ holding 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http://www.dailyxtra.com/vancouver/women-at-lick-55329 https://doi.org/10.2307/800672 https://www2.huberlin.de/fpm/popscrip/themen/pst12/pst12_gavanas_reitsamer.pdf https://www2.huberlin.de/fpm/popscrip/themen/pst12/pst12_gavanas_reitsamer.pdf https://doi.org/10.1093/musqtl/gdm007 http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2016.08.01.02 http://www.thefader.com/2016/02/17/female-dj-crews-discwoman-sister-mahoyo-tgaf http://www.thefader.com/2016/02/17/female-dj-crews-discwoman-sister-mahoyo-tgaf http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.02.01 http://www.refinery29.com/2016/03/104016/dj-collectives-girls-only http://www.refinery29.com/2016/03/104016/dj-collectives-girls-only http://thump.vice.com/en_ca/article/gvn5y7/do-we-actually-need-to-talk-about-female-djs-in-2016 http://thump.vice.com/en_ca/article/gvn5y7/do-we-actually-need-to-talk-about-female-djs-in-2016 http://vancouversun.com/news/staff-blogs/is-vancouvers-downtown-eastside-really-canadas-poorest-postal-code http://vancouversun.com/news/staff-blogs/is-vancouvers-downtown-eastside-really-canadas-poorest-postal-code hancock | lick my legacy 89 straw, will. 1997. “sizing up record collections: gender and connoisseurship in rock music culture”. in sexing the groove, ed. sheila whiteley, 3–16. london: routledge. terret, piper. 2003. bedroom dj: a beginner’s guide. london: omnibus press. visweswaran, kamala. 1994. fictions of feminist ethnography. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. zeleke, elleni. 2004. the status of women in community-based radio in canada. (ottawa, on): national campus and community radio association. canada. <http://www.ncra.ca/whv/ncra-report-women-in-community-radio.pdf>. filmography riot, kasey. 2011. “scissorkissculture.com presents lick’s farewell party”. youtube. uploaded on 5 may 2011. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kgcyzc4-ug> (accessed 12 may 2012). shamelessmag.com. 2011. “king for a day”. uploaded on 21 march 2011. <http://shamelessmag.com/blog/entry/king-for-a-night> (accessed 12 may 2016). http://www.ncra.ca/whv/ncra-report-women-in-community-radio.pdf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kgcyzc4-ug http://shamelessmag.com/blog/entry/king-for-a-night transformation through connection? insights from a pilot study of story sharing cubes at burning man events terje toomistu university of tartu (estonia) jukka-pekka heikkilä aalto university (finland) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.07> thank you all these people for making this happening. thank you sun for making this wonderful day happen and making my dream come true, to be able to play and even in such a vulnerable state, without energy at all—still being able to get everything up and have the energy to play a four hour set. that’s beyond my own energy, that was something else. this story was recounted by a participant of the 2019 borderland event in denmark, a weeklong participatory event of more than 3,000 people. the quote is part of a longer narrative by two musicians awaiting the sunrise atop the hill on the event site after a long day and night. while they were compelled to play their music on that hill, transporting their sound equipment from their camp up the steep incline was a mission impossible. much to their enchantment, however, random strangers pitched-in to carry the instruments, including an electric guitar and a piano, to the top of the hill. they eventually created an improvised 4-hour performance during the sunrise, an experience the storytellers described as magical. this is just one among a multitude of profoundly meaningful experiences that participants encounter at events like the borderland, which follows the principles of burning man and has no formal organizational structure, managerial body or employees. these intense, potentially “transformative” experiences might be so insightful that some consider them life-changing. we believe that these types of stories reveal the essence of participatory cultural events, where participants act as contributors, not as customers of a “festival”. as researchers, we aren’t likely to have encountered this story by conducting interviews with a limited number of people. we heard this story thanks to a novel data collecting device, the story sharing cube (see figure 1). in this article, we share some preliminary findings from the pilot application of this new method that enables data collection in the form of stories. we also discuss the potential of the wider application of the method, such as in covid-19 crisis areas or other fragile environments like war zones, that pose extreme challenges to data collection (haer & becher 2012). story sharing cubes at burning man events since its inception with a handful of participants in san francisco in 1986, burning man has grown into an annual gathering of 80,000 participants in nevada’s black rock desert (see st john 2018), and evolved into a worldwide network of regional events, such as the borderland. previous research on this fast growing community has typically applied the methods of participant observation, interviews and post-event online surveys. we searched for ways to reach a wide spectrum of random respondents, while at the same time trying to understand burning man events on a phenomenological level. in an attempt to investigate the diversity of experiences, our aim was to explore: what are the most meaningful event experiences that participants consider worthy of sharing? but the challenge was to collect the data in an environment where traditional surveys and interviews are usually difficult to conduct. for this, a team of scholars, artists and tech-experts from the burning stories research collective[1] co-created a device called the story sharing cube (ssc). encountering these cubes in black rock city (brc) 2019 and burning man regional events, the borderland 2019 in denmark, and burning bär 2020 in berlin, participants who opened the box, found simple instructions along with the consent request to participate in the research, and a single button. upon pressing the button, the recording begins. the simple design that we labelled as a hippie-proof user interface, addresses the challenges of collecting data in a hectic festival environment (ruane 2017). while we also tested the method with slightly different sets of questions, the central request to the participants was to share their most meaningful story from the burning man events they have attended. figure 1. a story sharing cube at burning man in the black rock desert, nevada, 2019. photo credit: terje toomistu (2019). this novel art-meets-science approach builds on the long-term commitment in several disciplines using personal narratives in qualitative research (polkinghorne 1988). it follows the premise that people tend to attribute meaning to life and experiences through stories (vaara, sonenshein & boje 2016). narratives are normally collected in the form of an interview, or through textual analyses of diaries and autobiographies. we instead used a strange inanimate object—a cube. however, since the activity of sharing a story may have a self-affirming quality, we assume that our initiative also adds value to the participants’ overall experience of an event. we also envision particular benefits of the method in the current era of “fundamental uncertainty” (aven & bouder 2020). firstly, despite the ongoing covid-19 pandemic, transformational participatory culture events are organised in the future, but possibly with a change in terms of social distancing and also in the ways how people share their insights with each other. therefore, in an environment that might highlight social distancing, applying a methodology that enables a socially distanced story sharing or feedback recording might be a way forward. besides, the method might be a good addition or alternative to conducting in-person interviews and surveys during the event as it exhausts the field researcher considerably less. while the potential and limits of this novel research method is a wider topic of discussion exceeding the scope of this paper, we will next share the preliminary outcomes of our pilot studies from three events. at brc 2019, we placed 4-6 cubes at different locations, such as at certain camps or bars, as well as at the “trash fence” in “deep playa”,[2] of which the latter proved to be the most popular. most of the shared stories were relatively brief. of the 34 stories transcribed, the average length was 3 minutes, the longest 16 minutes. figure 2. a story sharing cube attached to the “trash fence” at the end of “deep playa” at black rock city 2019. photo credit: terje toomistu (2019). connection through a shared experience following content analyses of the stories in our pilot, the two most prevalent keyword-codes appeared to be transformation and connection (see figure 4). while transformation is perhaps unsurprising, given the nature of events that are often coded as “transformative”, and also the way our central question on the cube was posed (what is the burning story you would like to share?), the high prevalence of stories related to “connection” was unpredicted. these narratives touched upon the theme of doing something together with others, when creating an enjoyable shared experience—such as spontaneously carrying equipment to play on top of the hill at sunrise. while the theme of connection was revealed in various ways, it was foremost expressed as a connection to other people. for example: “this was my first burn and i immediately felt so welcomed by all the people”. often this was expressed as simply highlighting a shared experience—“being here with you, together” or bringing a “virgin”[3] to the burn. on several occasions, connection was very closely linked to transformation, sometimes perceived as a trust to connect: i feel burner culture has transformed me and helped me become a more open person, more capable of trusting people and connecting to them, and not being afraid to give as much as i can to people, to not fear that they’re just gonna take, but to trust that if i give a lot of things to other people, it will lead to connections that will enrich my life. figure 3. the story sharing cubes. photo credit: jukka-pekka heikkilä (2019). new life resolutions a particular connection appears through working for the benefit of others. this may be reflected in a brief testimony “building the temple for the people of brc to have facility to express their joy”, or highlighting service to the community. my story of transformation starts with my first burning man in 2010, and what specifically i think affected me the most was how generous everyone was. i was realising how all the art and the camps, and so many amazing experiences and gifts and things, were all made by the blood, sweat and tears of people for no reason other than to make other people smile and make other people happy, or give them a unique experience or help them grow, or just take care of their basic everyday needs so that they can focus on all that fun stuff while they’re there, and to me that was the most touching. connection was also expressed in more psychedelic, embodied and mind-altering terms, for example, by connecting deeply to one’s soul through dance, or connecting with the earth through mushrooms and with each other through singing, or through shared sexual activities, or a combination. for example: and i asked them if they could give me pleasure, and it became a beautiful, sweet little orgy kind of thing, and then i gave everyone ketamine. while it is true that mind-altering substances were mentioned a couple of times in the stories (although no-one explicitly shared a “trip report”), the abuse of substances was also critiqued. a certain segment of the population is very focused on taking drugs and constantly talking about taking drugs and doing them every day and assuming that everyone else is doing the same. probably because they are high all the time they don’t realize that actually the significant portion of the community don’t do drugs, or they only do them occasionally under special circumstances, or they only do very small amounts that aren’t that perceivable to others. with regard to sexual connection, several stories (recounted by women) explicitly expressed the quality of platonic connections and the value of consent. i just loved the way burners are so platonically affectionate. you get so many offers for hugs and things like this, which just feels very caring and loving, and a lot of the hugs, you know, they’re really safe, they feel really genuine, like they just want to connect with you as you. while the connections to others are sometimes recounted in relation to the perceived transformative experience, there are also other ways transformation is described. while the word “transformation” or “transformative” appeared frequently (11 times) in the stories, what was revealed as central to the stories are resolutions about one’s self and life. these resolutions may involve a participant discovering their mission or role in life, whether that is about “enlightening people” or making others “have a little bit more fun in their life”. or it may be a statement about an aspect of one’s life that needs some re-arrangement, such as “i need to stop working” or “i gotta love someone unconditionally, but my life and my dreams matter too”. someone cited a newly found meaning of life: “the purpose of life is simple: seek joy!” the transformative qualities were less often projected on the more communal level. however, creating conscious communities, a collective vision, or taking the kindness received at burns back to the wider society were mentioned. keeping it weird and going wild besides the deep personal reflections and vivid descriptions of meaningful shared experiences (i.e. connection), almost equally present were stories that highlighted a fun aspect of the burn experience. these were stories about play, creativity, keeping it weird and going wild. one participant quoted lines from hunter s. thomson’s fear and loathing in las vegas, “we have two bags of grass, and 75 pods of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, half a salt shaker of cocaine...”. another shared a funky secret in just one line: “i got a finger put in my butt four years ago and i loved it”. however, not all the shared secrets were fun or kinky. a couple of stories shared a personal traumatic growth experience. one person was coming to terms with a breakup when their ex was also present at the event. there was also a brief touching testimony of someone who was dying of cancer, but did not tell this to anyone. another unexpected aspect in many of the stories was the expression of immense gratitude—well exemplified in the quote at the beginning of the article. sometimes it was explicitly addressed to the researchers who had placed the cube. but the gratitude was often directed to a much more abstract reference. this seems to be as much about a specific community (i.e. burning man, the borderland) as about the gratitude of a living experience per se: “it’s incredible to be here, amazing journey, i love you”. or: “thank you so much, i couldn’t thank you enough”. figure 4. word cloud created from the study’s content analysis keywords. conclusions in conclusion, the story sharing cube proved to be a fruitful method to collect a variety of narratives, opinions and reflections from event participants, for both scientific and community goals.[4] while acknowledging its limitations in comparison to other qualitative research methods such as interviews and participant observation, we see a great potential for the use of ssc not only at burns and other participatory events, but at dance music festivals or conferences where people are expected to share their insights in a narrative format. ssc could potentially be a ground breaking data collecting device for extreme environments including covid-19 crises areas, where traditional data collection is challenging or dangerous (wainwright et al. 2018). regarding event culture research in the covid-19 era, methods enabling story sharing while practicing “social distancing” may prove highly useful. the dataset of the pilot is intentionally narrow, therefore it is too early to draw any complete conclusions from the material. however, the theme of human connection and related transformation is certainly worth further attention. exploring the collective sharing of narratives could also be a fruitful area for future research. sharing all the collected data back to the community in the burning stories forum supports conversation within the community, allows iteration of the methodology and increases communal participation as a whole. we are also planning to explore how the narratives from these events could inspire and comfort people suffering from the covid-19 crisis. however, should social distancing become the new norm at participatory culture events, we are likely to witness a shift in the centrality of the perceived transformation through human connection as our pilot revealed. the preliminary conclusions that underline the significance of human connection for participants at the burning man community gatherings hence echo concerns about the potential change of the transformative essence of these events in the post-covid-19 world, leaving us to wonder what it would be like to burn without meaningful connections with random strangers. acknowledgements we express our gratitude to hugi àsgeisson from blivande stockholm for originally proposing the idea, hilda ruijs from aalto university for currently conducting her thesis on the design of the cubes and the borderland community for funding the materials of the pilot cubes. particular thanks to kalle oja and peter tapio for building the cubes, to all participants who shared a story and to artist mikko heikinpoika (https://mikkoheikinpoika.com) for creating songs from the narrative data we shared back to the communities. figure 5. a story sharing cube at the borderland, denmark. photo credit: hilda ruijs (2019). author biographies dr terje toomistu is an anthropologist focusing on gender, affect and mobility based in tallinn, currently employed as a research fellow at the university of tartu, estonia. email: terjetoomistu@gmail.com dr jukka-pekka heikkilä is a scholar-activist focusing on extreme environments at aalto university, finland and the story sharing cubes project lead. email: jukka-pekka.heikkila@aalto.fi references aven, terje and frederic bouder. 2020. “the covid-19 pandemic: how can risk science help?” journal of risk research: 1-6. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13669877.2020.1756383>. haer, roos and inna becher. 2012. “a methodological note on quantitative field research in conflict zones: get your hands dirty.” international journal of social research methodology 15(1): 1-13. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2011.597654>. polkinghorne, donald, e. 1988. narrative knowing and human sciences. new york: state university of new york press. st john, graham. 2018. “civilised tribalism: burning man, event-tribes and maker culture.” cultural sociology 12(1): 3-21. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1749975517733162>. ruane, deirdre. 2017. “‘wearing down of the self’: embodiment, writing and disruptions of identity in transformational festival fieldwork.” methodological innovations 10(1): 1-11. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2059799117720611>. wainwright, thomas, ewald kibler, jukka-pekka heikkilä and simon down. 2018. “elite entrepreneurship education: translating ideas in north korea.” environment and planning a: economy and space 50(5): 1008-26. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0308518x18766349>. vaara, eero, scott sonenshein and david boje. 2016. “narratives as sources of stability and change in organizations: approaches and directions for future research.” academy of management annals 10(1): 495-560. <https://dx.doi.org/10.5465/19416520.2016.1120963>. figure 6: word cloud created from the transcriptions of the shared stories. figure 7. artist-carpenter kalle oja and techie peter tapio building the story sharing cubes 2019. photo credit: jukka-pekkä heikkilä (2019). notes [1] burning stories research collective is an international team working pro bono to understand burning man and related participatory event cultures. we aim to radically blend science and the arts, both in scientific methods and results dissemination. our ongoing research and activities include case studies of burning man art projects, surveys of communal coping and a conference that brings together a variety of backgrounds to explore the relationship between participatory cultures and capitalism. [2] deep playa at brc in nevada’s black rock desert is the wide area that is the farthest from camping districts. the “trash fence” marks the boundary of the event. [3] first time burner. [4] in addition to the stories collected with ssc, stories shared in text form are also gathered at the burning stories forum. dancing with dumont: individualism at an early morning melbourne rave dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 13(1): 88–100 issn 1947-5403 ©2021 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.06 dancing with dumont: individualism at an early morning melbourne rave matthew t phillips independent researcher abstract drawing from research into australian bush doof festivals and raves, this paper details the happenings at an early morning conscious clubbing rave in melbourne, australia. i draw from my ethnographic research and from the work of louis dumont to demonstrate how the forms of sociality and subjectivity that emerge within the morning rave relate to deeper cultural and symbolic dynamics of individualistic societies. i use a dumontian lens to analyse the dancing, attire and grounding exercises at the rave to help elucidate a deeper understanding of these ritual practices. the ravers are bringing forth an individualistic conception of human subjectivity and human sociality through their lived actions. thus, the rave is not a mere reflection of individualism but a live creation of it. keywords: rave, edm, vibe, ritual, dance, holism, individualism, dumont matthew t phillips is an independent anthropologist based in melbourne, australia. he completed his phd in cultural anthropology at deakin university. his research interests are electronic dance music, anthropology of music, sensory deprivation tanks and consciousness. email: <matthewtphillips1991@gmail.com>. feature article https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.06 mailto:matthewtphillips1991@gmail.com phillips | dancing with dumont: individualism at an early morning melbourne rave 89 the rave in-and-of-itself a group of fluorescent revellers snake down an alley. the beat stomps through the brickwork, a drum call or a noise complaint in the making. we walk towards an open doorway where a spandex-clad woman inspects our tickets and thumbs us eagerly onwards. passed the ticket inspector, we walk into a large hall, a gutted out gymnasium that has been dressed up in streamers, banners and plastic mirror balls. there is no dress code. people wear anything from gym clothes to animal-print leotards. there are many brightly coloured sneakers and lots of glitter and zinc cream. some people wear homemade headdresses while others wear sweatbands and all kinds of jingle jangle spangled bangles. flamboyance seems mandatory. though it is an all-ages event, the majority of participants range from 18 to 35. adults seem to make up for the absence of children by blowing bubbles and throwing glitter and wearing pyjamas and pacifier necklaces. the dance floor is in the centre of the room, framed by a black rectangular stage on top of which a dj station has been placed. most participants leave their personal belongings, their handbags or spare clothing, at the periphery of the room before entering the dance space. the rave has its own gravitational pull. generally, those just arriving stand at the sidelines and sway subtly or nod to the music before moving into the crowd. this transition from the outside to the inside is emphasized by an obvious change in people’s body language. once surrounded by others in the dance space, people will quickly move from relatively reserved and understated gestures towards more extroverted and markedly intensified dance movements. there are aerobics instructors on the stage in front of the dj. but rather than regimented workout sequences, they perform their own individuated movements, just like the crowd. there is a relay of energy between the instructors and the crowd, and both parties encourage and maintain the other’s level of hyperactivity and spontaneous expression. radical self-expression is the aim. the individual and their expressive individuality are paramount. the crowd is a mass of smaller self-enclosed but self-expressive monads, each maintaining their radical autonomy as individuals while also opening themselves up to larger states of collective joy and togetherness. there is the sense of immersion among strangers all following the same beat, but experiencing it individually. michael bull has noted that this is often the nature of aesthetic experience within late capitalism.1 similarly, small has noted that this individuation of aesthetic experience is an anomaly in the history of the human race (1998: 39). throughout most of human history, aesthetic experience has occurred among members of the same community who were, fundamentally, not strangers (ibid.: 39). it is only within large-scale societies of the modern type that communities of strangers emerge and communal events populated by strangers become a frequent occurrence. to go to a morning dance party and share aesthetic experiences with strangers would be strange within non-modern communities, but in modernity this is the primary way in which people have aesthetic experiences with others. dancecult 13(1)90 at the morning rave people are together but alone or, as turkle would put it, alone together (2011: 1). however, rather than focusing on the specific technological or politicoeconomic situations that may give rise to this aesthetic experience i wish to focus on the ritual aspects that underlie it. i see this experience of collective individuation as indicative of not only a type of neo-liberal listening but of a deeper individualism latent within western capitalism in general. i see individualism as the guiding substance of the ritualized behavior at the morning rave.2 ritual is, as sloterdijk has said of religion, anthropotechnical; it ties consciousness and social relations to reality (2009: 16). i do not see ritual as the mere formulaic playing out of preconceived cultural representations. rather, i use ritual here as a process or virtuality infused with creative and originary potentialities (turner 1969: 131, kapferer 2004: 47).3 here, ritual is seen as a process that can “create or generate original circumstances for human psychological and social existence” (kapferer 2004: 37). ritual has the capacity to transform people, to create new modalities and alter the very ground of being, to regenerate and reorient human realities. it has the ability to modify human consciousness and social relations by acting upon them directly. surrounded by sound at the morning rave people leave their clothes at the periphery of the dance space as if they are leaving their worldly personas behind. they enter the dance space as total strangers with their identities wiped clean. they come together and dance. they are together but, at the same time, individuated by the speaker stacks that surround them and the sonic dominance which saturates their perceptual faculties (henriques 2011: xvi). in addition to the sound that surrounds people, there is a psychedelic lightshow which, even in the middle of the day, throbs outwards into the crowd in pulsating onslaughts. in many ways the sound system is set up like giant headphones that surround and enclose the dancers. this enclosed arrangement should allow the sound to enter the dancer’s body unobstructed. it aspires to provide a direct pathway to their perceptual faculties. headphones internalize sound by placing it inside the head. the headphones of the dance space place sound inside the bodies of dancers through supraliminal pathways such as subbass, which is often not heard but felt as a pressure in the abdomen or the inner ear (see jasen 20164). being surrounded by sound generates a sense of immersion for dancers, a feeling of being inside a larger body that encompasses the individual. in this situation, sound is something that exists apart from the human, coming from the outside5, but yet able to enter and intertwine with the human being’s very being-in-the-world. through sound a felt sense of immersion is created. throughout the rave, participants work on this immersion as they attempt to create a sense of oneness amongst each other. this state of immersion is lived and felt through ritual practice. the most common of these practices is dance, which becomes a way of being both inside the music and of it. as sheets-johnstone notes, immersed within the aesthetic experience, “the dancers and the dance are one” (2015: 363-366). any distance between the subject and phillips | dancing with dumont: individualism at an early morning melbourne rave 91 the aesthetic object is bridged by the aesthetic experience. dancing turns oneself inwards towards a form of feeling that exists within the dancer but which is only realized within the aesthetic experience. dancing is a way of not only expressing internal emotionals; at the same time it is a way of sharing emotions with others by drawing them into the dance. in the dance space at the rave there is a sense of unification between separate people who are immersed within the same aesthetic experience. here, dancing is a way of extending the aesthetic into the social world, a way of visualizing it for others. as kapferer notes, the movement of dance “spatializes the temporal structure of music”, because dance is an objectified embodiment of the inner experience of music (1991: 265-266). dance is a communication of inner emotive life, but also a way of drawing others into this aesthetic experience. further, dancing becomes a way of extending oneself outwards into the proximate psychosocial fields of others; the sense of personal self-containment, which people feel holds their sense of separateness from others. in the dance space the beat never stops. the track may change, but the beat remains. while one song is playing, the dj is already beat matching (syncing tempo or beats per minute with the next song. beat matching blends songs into each other, creating one continuous rhythmic unfolding. the dancers bop along, ensuring they keep up with the beat. at some raves people take various stimulants to continue dancing and to enhance the experience of the event, but not here. this is “conscious clubbing”, drug-free raving. participants endure without the help of any stimulants besides the highly caffeinated energy drinks and hot beverages offered at the pop-up food stand. one of the rave’s maxims is rave your way into the day. the disavowal of drugs indicates that this is not only an experiment in sobriety, but also an experiment in the ability of music alone to move people, to reinvigorate them and to pass on a vital energy. the rave occurs from 6am to 9am, in a time-space outside of the workday. here, people expect the music and dance to revitalize and ready them for the work day, but also to reconnect them with a community of like-minded people. revitalization here concerns the individual’s wellbeing and the regeneration of the whole community. importantly, the regeneration of the whole relies on the activities of the individual part. the dj shouts things at the crowd like “are you ready?” and the ecstatic crowd replies with “woo!” or “yeah!”. the dj builds arpeggios and syncopated melodies on top of the beat, increasing the music’s intensity and switching to double-time as the dancers push their bodies further and further to keep up. some men have decided to shed their shirts and singlets and are gyrating around topless. they squelch their stomachs and pound their chests while shouting indiscernible affirmations about the music and the overall vibe of the room. a woman in a onesie (a one-piece garment that covers the legs and torso) walks around with a big placard that has free hugs printed upon it. she smiles and embraces people in the crowd, squeezing their bodies into hers, enraptured in conviviality. a group of d.i.y contortionists spontaneously climb upon the stage and perform their own yogic body origami, twisting in their limbs in blissful dislocations. dancecult 13(1)92 at one point, the crowd changes from a mass into an empty circle. people take turns moving into the centre to perform tiny spectacles for the encompassing crowd; a smiling hula-hoop dancer twirls around inside a plastic ring. the bass drops in and the circling crowd stops dancing and just stands there, watching the centrepiece revolve. the centrepiece is completely interchangeable. this is the point. there is no nucleus, but yet one always appears. the crowd is a constantly moving hive. anyone can have a go. the inside is empty, but at the same time, constantly populated by different people, who switch in and out. heat and the sweat of mixing bodies bring forth the idea of solids melting together, and people try to lose themselves and become one with everyone else. the exercise becomes a mass exorcism of the individual, where each is ground down and swept up in the multitude. at the same time, the whole is completely dependent upon the individual performances of the parts. here, we see an individualistic conception of immersion where any whole is made from the connections of separate parts. in this way, social relations manifests through ritual action. individualism in his 1986 text essays on individualism, louis dumont sees individualism as a specific constellation of values present within western societies since, at least, the eighteenth century. for dumont, the cardinal values within individualism are equality and liberty, which “assume as their common principle…the idea of the human individual” (1980: 38). within individualism, when separated off from the whole of society, an individual maintains their integrity as a complete moral being, still embodying the ideals of liberty and equality. thus, “humanity is made up of men, and each man is conceived as present, in spite of and over and above his particularity, the essence of humanity” (dumont 1980: 38). within each individual is the germinal seed of the wider social whole. the whole is contained within the individual part and the part can exist as a separate moral entity from the whole. for dumont, this differs greatly from traditional holistic societies. within holistic societies the individual is a collective social being who “only possesses value in relation to the whole” (dumont 1980: 42). in contrast, within individualistic societies the relation of the whole to its parts is inverted, and the whole is completely reducible to the part. if society is to emerge at all amidst individualism it must, therefore, emerge through individuals without the suppression of their cardinal values (dumont 1980: 10). in individualism, the part forms the whole through the coming together of parts and the actualization of liberty and equality. dumont opposes the term “societas” to the holistic “universitas” to describe the modern understanding of society as an individualistic and economistic coming-together of individuals with mutual self-interest (dupont 1986: 74). societas constitutes a social contract “by which the individuals composing it have ‘associated’ themselves in a society” (dupont 1986: 74). this idea of coming together is missing in holistic societies where the part is always already within the whole, encompassed phillips | dancing with dumont: individualism at an early morning melbourne rave 93 by a holistic relation. the idea of society as a construct, as something willed into existence by the part, could only emerge within a value system where people were evaluated as individuals, as separated and self-enclosed parts. according to dumont, a particular concept of society and community emerges within individualism. this concept holds that the ideal form of sociality involves the coming together of individuals on an equalized plane of relations and the enactment of liberty and equality. at the morning rave, equalization occurs through collective dancing. a sense of positive egalitarian communion emerges which most participants refer to as a sense of oneness, or simply as the vibe. as i will argue, this is a form of sociality that corresponds to specific ideals within individualism. the poignancy, vitality and perceived revitalizing effects of this egalitarian sociality indicate the significance these ideals hold for people living within an individualistic value system. the morning rave gives insight into the ways in which sociality and social identity are imagined and reimagined within individualistic societies. in addition to being a representation of wider cultural dynamics, the morning rave is a unique event that possesses its own structuring dynamics, sociality and social identity that are, ultimately, irreducible to outside structures. that is to say, the morning rave is not merely reflective or representational of the world outside of it; it is a modality of behavior and being that is distinct and in-andof-itself. through ritual action, the myth of an individualistic whole made from equalized parts is realized live. the vibe events like the morning rave come across as a kind of connective therapy for participants. they will often describe how overwhelmed they feel in their ordinary lives. the rave gives them an opportunity to escape this state of constant 24/7 on-ness and share a space of oneness with liked-minded people. oneness is produced through pure physicality, through real bodies sweating it out in a room. it is all about stripping back to a carnal state, being broken down to a raw form, to an elemental nature. men tear their shirts off and dig their fingernails into their skin, tired of their earthly moulds, caught up in the vibe, trying to excavate the energy of the room from their chests. they feel it in and between their bodies. people invent new forms of proximity, dancing closely together, bumping into each other, touching each other’s skin. it is all about touching and becoming familiar with each other, sharing space and time, creating togetherness through bodily presence. this rubbing together creates an invisible spark, an animate force that moves through bodies and seems to encompass the entire space. this immaterial force is the vibe. the vibe is generally understood as a shared emotional atmosphere that is sensed by people intuitively, not through words but through body language (such as expressions, movements, posture, etc.). graham st. john suggests that the term is derived from “vibration” and that it designates “an ‘intuitive signal’ that may be picked up from other people and the atmosphere” dancecult 13(1)94 (2012: 79). he states that the term’s usage in rave as well new age groups is likely to have originated with the theosophists, hermetic philosophers and spiritualists of the midnineteenth century who purported to “gauge, measure, reflect, and translate ‘vibrations’; to offer universal readings of universal energy” (st. john 2012: 79). according to st. john, this term was adopted by the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s and was then taken up by the goa trance groups of the 1980s that had a direct link to many of the hippies of the summer of love (st. john 2012: 80). much of the music played at australian rave events has strong links to goa trance, such as the various psychedelic trance genres. st. john describes how goa trance producers and djs acknowledge their role in channelling this energy, with trance parties becoming “the chief means by which one could best participate in or connect with this ‘energy’ or ‘vibe’” (2012: 80). the vibe is the best description for that which the dj delivers to their audience. it is an energy that is transmitted in the music and taken up by bodies that dance among other bodies, each passing this energy to others and cumulatively increasing the vitality and animate force of the vibe. as it is an intuitive energy, people do not identify the vibe so much as sense it. further, the vibe is felt interpersonally. it emerges within the relations between people sharing a space. people transmit and receive vibes during interactions with each other through body language, gesture or verbal cues. as something subtle and intuitive, it may be experienced unconsciously and without the transmitter’s knowledge or intention of it. the vibe always relates back to human emotion and emerges from the affective life shared by people within a social world. the vibe possesses qualitative value. a good vibe manifests when people pass around positive energies. but a vibe can also involve non-human agents and the affective forces they muster. in the dance space, a good vibe manifests through the coming together of positive energy that spontaneously emerges between dancers at an edm performance that optimizes that vibe. crucial to a good vibe is people’s ability to let go, be free, have fun and just dance. this amounts to people opening themselves up to their spontaneous affective life and going with the flow of the dynamic force that emerges within the edm performance. this, i believe, also amounts to giving themselves over to the aesthetic experience and allowing themselves to become immersed within the aesthetic world. the dance space is a community of people communicating and relating to each other through invisible signals, as if direct communication and relation were impossible. but there is a direct relation between people. it is a relationship generated through music and dance and defined by the vibe. in the dance space people give so much and so little, everything and nothing, all at once. people throw themselves into ecstatic frenzies, losing themselves in dance. at the same time, they are all locked into self-enclosed, self-expressive dance movements. they do not always speak as the volume of the music can drown out all voices. they do not even really see each other as their vision is constantly blacked out or overloaded by psychedelic light shows. further, people often dance with their eyes closed, closing off all outside stimuli in order to fully experience the music as sound. in many ways the participant’s sensory-motor phillips | dancing with dumont: individualism at an early morning melbourne rave 95 schema is completely separated off from the wider social world and locked in with edm. participants are more preoccupied with how the music or the lights hit them and how they react through dance, than how they interact with each other. the participant is entangled in the dynamics of the dance space, their sensorium holistically targeted by the aesthetics that surround them. saturated in those aesthetics, they are locked out from direct human interaction. nonetheless, a sense of community and togetherness between people persists, grounded in the idea that everybody is there to be together and to discover some form of connection and oneness together. this sense of community and togetherness occurs while being surrounded by aesthetic forms. are aesthetic forms necessary for community to form? the entire dance space is set up for aesthetic immersion, for the sound to surround and the lights to hit people from a multiplicity of shifting positions. it is from this elemental setup that a state of oneness emerges. this is the paradox of community in the dance space: a state of oneness, a holistic togetherness formed from the coming together of people who are isolated and atomized. communion can only occur through the leveling of every individual into a single individual. this is the individual of individualism, the non-social monad existing outside the social world and only creating sociality through equivalent relations with other individuals who are all equal. thus, communion can only be generated through the assertion of individualistic values such as liberty and equality. sameness over difference this sameness is achieved in interesting ways. besides work attire, people also wear plastic native american headdresses, zinc cream war paint, aztec print leggings and boho-chic kimonos; and they refer to themselves and each other as members of a tribe. here, anyone can be anyone because everyone is, ultimately, an equal individual. any signs of distinction or difference are merely masks to be torn away to reveal everyone’s underlying sameness. sameness is, in many ways, easy at this event; those in attendance are all of anglo-celtic australian ethnicity. although it occurs in melbourne, a multicultural urban centre and australia’s second largest city, this conscious clubbing event is still attended by primarily white australians of anglo-celtic descent. in many ways, as kapferer has discussed in greater detail, individualism in australia is the dominant hegemonic culture (2012: 88). it is the culture of the dominant class, which to this day is white australia. this is seen at the rave, particularly in relation to the way that otherness appears. devouring and extinguishing otherness, individualism reveals itself as an expression of dominance by dressing up and dressing down difference. difference is first checked and then balanced. it is marked or worn upon the body and then stripped or washed off as the dancing proceeds. the body must be taken back to its natural undifferentiated state so that people can relate to each other as one and the same. this exoticism of difference, wearing faux indigenous outfits, is not a retreat into a nondancecult 13(1)96 modern primitivism brings forth of the primordial egalitarian state within individualism. it symbolizes the enactment of a state of absolute liberty and equality. as philip j. deloria notes on the dressing up as native americans in the us, playing the other is tied into the assertion of one’s own cultural ideals. for americans, “indianness offered a deep, authentic aboriginal americanness…to play indian has been to connect with a real self, both collective and individual” (deloria 1998: 183). at the morning rave and at electronic dance music festivals in general, australians dress up and play as native americans and indigenous australians and all amounts of other conquered people. this affirms the individual and reasserts the primacy of individualist values; it is not about the other. here, the artificiality of difference is proven in the application and removal of tribal makeup and fake primitive attire. mimetically, the other appears to be sacrificed so that the individual can re-emerge, fully intact. just as the “routine social mask” of work-wear is left at the periphery of the dance space, the masks of difference are sweated away and discarded to reveal the “true” individual beneath (kapferer 2012: 188). this is a kind of sacrificial gesture, a type of symbolic human sacrifice6 in which the other is constructed only to be erased through the shedding of difference. from this erasure, an ideal sociality can emerge, a whole made from equal parts. at the rave this ideal sociality characterized by an individualistic whole is discussed in terms of oneness and the vibe. the vibe is generated and maintained through techniques besides music and dancing. these include grounding and centring exercises such as holding hands, breathing deeply and massaging each other. grounding is about being earthed and becoming present in a particular space and time encompassed by other human beings. grounding aims to develop an awareness of the body and its internal and interpersonal energies (manné 2004: 125). this occurs through various exercises, such as breathing or touching, targeting the body’s “energy field” to “tune” into the energies of other people and places and “learn how they affect us” (manné 2004: 125). touching works to focus on how the body touches and is touched. this is said to bring about a more vivid awareness of one’s body and an acknowledgment that it is, fundamentally, a body “being held in space” (picucci 2017: 145). people imagine sending negative energies out of their bodies, down through their feet and into the earth for “transmutation”, while also focusing on the earth’s energy “as it pulses at the soles of your feet and harmonizes with you there” (summer 2004). you then allow this energy to travel up through the feet to circulate throughout the entire body. this revitalized energy, pregnant with positivity, is then sent out from the body and into the atmosphere to be soaked up by others. this is why people form a circle by holding hands when grounding: they are more easily affected by another person’s positive energy. their held hands become wires connected in a larger circuit board of reenergizing nodes. the energy emanates from people being present in a room full of others, each holding another’s hand. grounding harnesses each individual’s energy and sends this energy on, through people’s hands and into each other. togetherness is founded through the coming together of individual parts. it is maintained through individual self-expression and intentionality, through the invisible releases of individual energy each adding up and phillips | dancing with dumont: individualism at an early morning melbourne rave 97 circulating through the larger whole. holding hands together, embracing each other with touch, intimate gestures shared amongst strangers—these open people up and wipe away personal boundaries people maintain outside the rave. grounding is, thus, also about being ground down to an elemental condition: a body in a room full of other bodies. at the same time, this reduction is a reduction to the individual and its elemental state of liberty and equality. togetherness can only come through the coming together of free and equal parts. at the periphery of the dance space, the hosts have set up a bicycle-powered juicer. a blackboard on a stand next to it reads ‘bike and blend: pedal your own smoothie’. rather than providing pre-processed juice, participants can produce their own juice through the exertion of their bodies. the participants pedal the bicycle which produces enough energy to power the blender attached to the front of the bike. as the participants pedal, the blender slices and mixes fresh fruit and vegetables chosen by the participants. the juice is pure, authentic and real, and the participants themselves are brought into the production process. they are aware of every ingredient, and they use their own bodies to produce the juice. the human-powered juicer bike extracts energy from people and converts it into a productive force, while also making refreshments that aim to revitalize and re-energize the pedaling raver. the vital energy, the vibe, that the raver receives from the music and the crowd is passed through the bicycle to be converted into more energy, which the raver will then take back out into the dance space, further enhancing the vibe. the vibe is the individualistic whole made through the coming together of equalized parts, namely individuals who can only commune through their sameness. this is reflected in the ritual action present at the rave, such as collective dancing, the dressing up and shedding of difference and the grounding rite. through ritual actions, the power of individualism is revitalised, and its symbols of parts coming together to create an egalitarian whole are brought forth in the present. through ritual action, individualism is continually brought into the lived realities of those whom it encompasses. ritual is anthropotechnical, which sloterdijk defines as a type of anthropogenesis through repetitive practice that transforms the human condition. to quote sloterdijk, anthropotechnics are “methods of mental and physical practising by which humans from the most diverse cultures have attempted to optimize their cosmic and immunological status in the vague risks of living and acute certainties of death” (sloterdijk 2009: 10). they are symbolic prosthetics embedded in lived human action and tied to the survival and self-creation of human cultures. rituals are anthropotechnical in that they transmit symbolic frameworks into the lived realities of the human beings who enact them. at the rave, dancers create a living whole made from physically equalized parts. in the grounding rite participants hold hands in a circle, equalising themselves symbolically as well as physically. again, the mythic and the symbolic are embedded in the lived actions of the human beings who experience and enact them. the morning ravers are not blind puppets of cultural forms beyond them. rather, they actively bring social relations and consciousness into being by raving. the morning rave is not a mere reflection of individualism but an active anthropotechnical creation of it. dancecult 13(1)98 notes 1 see bull 2002, 2005 and 2007. 2 roy rappaport’s (1999) emphasis on ritual over myth far exceeds that of other anthropologists of ritual such as geertz, douglas and turner. for rappaport, ritual is not only a way of actualizing or performing myth. it is also a way of bringing forth that which cannot be expressed within myth. as rapport notes, “…certain meanings and effects can best, or even only, be expressed or achieved in ritual’ (1999: 30). however, whereas we might position turner’s understanding of ritual performance as creative, rappaport’s is closer to functionalist accounts. for rappaport ritual “entails the establishment of convention, the sealing of social contract, the construction of the integrated conventional order” (1999: 27). ritual socializes and cements social bonds. as rappaport notes, “ritual contains within itself not simply a symbolic representation of social contract, but tacit social contract itself. as such ritual…is the basic social act” (1999: 138). thus, rappaport’s account of ritual is somewhat conservative and closer to functionalist accounts of ritual that reduce it to a form of catharsis or a repetitive reproduction of social order. 3 following from turner’s the ritual process, bruce kapferer has developed his own distinct formulation of ritual practice as a kind of “virtuality”. kapferer’s ideas on the virtuality of ritual come from his extensive studies of the suniyama exorcism and healing ritual in sri lanka (kapferer 1991: kapferer 1997). for kapferer, the virtual is to be distinguished from the virtuality of cyber technology or the virtuality of an alternative reality, and is, instead, a term he draws from gilles deleuze and felix guattari’s (1988) understanding of the virtual as well as susanne langer’s (1997) notions of virtuality in aesthetic processes (kapferer 1997: 37). for kapferer, rituals, through the gathering together of a multiplicity of aesthetic and affective forces, are able to construct a virtuality that is “really real”, a “complete and filled-out existential reality” that is distinct from the reality outside of the ritual, but which really exists (1997: 47). further, though kapferer stresses the non-referential nature of ritual virtuality to external reality, he also sees ritual as “a vital dimension” of “the really real or, for want of a better term, actuality” (1997: 47). what he means here is that rituals allow people to pull away and fold back from ordinary reality in order to come into contact with vital life processes, the very processes found in the everyday construction of reality. kapferer notes the chaotic and continuously forming, merging and flowing nature of everyday human realities (1997: 48). drawing from deleuze and guattari, he uses the term “chaosmos” to get at this chaotic dimension of reality, which is “fractal-like, always changing and shifting, immanent within and structuring differentiating in form, crosscutting and intersecting as persons move through space and alter standpoint” (1997: 48). in contrast, the virtual reality of ritual is a “slowing down of the tempo of everyday life” and a “holding in abeyance” of some of the vital processes of lived reality (kapferer 1997: 48). thus, the virtuality of ritual is intimately connected to reality, not through reference or representation, but through its engagement with “the compositional structurating dynamics of life in the very midst of life’s processes” (kapferer 1997: 48). ritual is not a symbolic model of lived processes but “a method for entering within life’s vital processes and adjusting its dynamics” (kapferer 1997: 48). ritual is, thus, intimately entangled within life and its living processes. both kapferer’s and turner’s approaches to ritual differ greatly from other anthropologies of ritual such as schechner (2002), bell (1992) and phillips | dancing with dumont: individualism at an early morning melbourne rave 99 shore’s (1999), which instead of focusing on the event of the ritual itself, attempt to construct a universal concept of ritual beyond phenomenological particularity. 4 as jasen notes, sub-bass has the capacity to produce a pressure “thousands of times more powerful than those frequencies involved in speech”, by condensing the air it passes through, making it feel thicker and heavier (2016: 1). in these situations people experience the low-end as an ethereal substance, a pressure that touches the inner ear before it is even cognized and heard. this invisible presence escapes the dancer’s conscious awareness, inducing “feelings of buoyancy, weight and flow” as it fills the inner ear and “disrupts perceptions of motion and balance” ( jasen 2016: 2). it is this “swimmingness” of perception that produces aquatic or oceanic descriptions of low-end sound experiences ( jasen 2016: 2). thus, a sense of immersion is not only idealized but also physically generated by low-end sound and the specific positioning of sound systems within the dance space. 5 music seems to appear from nothing (from silence). as opposed to other forms of art such as painting or sculpture, you do not come upon music but, rather, music comes upon you, seizing you fully rather than being seized or sought out by your attention. 6 dumont (1986) has discussed elsewhere the ways in which the creation of a pseudo-whole within individualism at times calls for the actual sacrifice of undesirable others. references bell, catherine. 1992. ritual theory, ritual practice. us: oxford university press. bull, michael. 2002. “the seduction of sound in consumer culture: investigating walkman desires”. journal of consumer culture 2(1): 81-101. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/146954050200200104>. bull, michael. 2005. “no dead air! the ipod and the culture of mobile listening”. leisure studies 24(4): 343-355. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0261436052000330447>. bull, michael. 2007. sound moves: ipod culture and urban experience. oxon and new york: routledge. deleuze, gilles and felix guattari. 1988. a thousand plateaus. trans. brian masumi. university of london: athlone press. deloria, phillip. 1998. playing indian. new haven: yale university press. dumont, louis. 1980. homo hierarchicus: the caste system and its implications. chicago: the university of chicago press. ———. 1986. essays on individualism: modern ideology in anthropological perspective. chicago: the university of chicago press. henriques, julian 2011. sonic bodies: reggae sound systems. performance techniques and ways of knowing. london: bloomsbury. jasen, paul. 2016. low end theory: bass, bodies and the materiality of sonic experience. ny: bloomsbury. kapferer, bruce 1991. a celebration of demons. bloomington: indiana university press. kapferer, bruce 1997. the feast of the sorcerer: practices of consciousness and power. chicago: chicago university press. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/146954050200200104 https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0261436052000330447 dancecult 13(1)100 kapferer, bruce. 2004. “ritual dynamics and virtual practice: beyond representation and meaning”. in ritual in its own right: exploring the dynamics of transformation, ed. don handelman and galina lindquist, 35-54. ny: berghahn books. kapferer, bruce. 2012. legends of people, myths of state: violence, intolerance, and political culture in sri lanka and australia. ny: berghahn books. manné, joy. 2004. conscious breathing: how shamanic breathwork can transform your life. berkeley: north atlantic books. picucci, michael. 2017. “ritual as resource: health and transformation in the twenty-first century”. in emerging ritual in secular societies: a transdisciplinary conversation, ed. jelte gordon-lennox, 140-157. philadelphia: jessica kingsley publishers. rappaport, roy a. 1999. ritual and religion in the making of humanity. cambridge: cambridge university press. rill, bill. 2006. “rave, communitas, and embodied idealism”. music therapy today 7(3): 648-661. <https://issuu.com/presidentwfmt/docs/mtt_7_3__2006>, (accessed 15 november 2021). schechner, richard. 2002. performance studies: an introduction. london: routledge. sheets-johnstone, maxine. 2015. the phenomenology of dance. philadelphia: temple university press. shore, bradd. 1999. culture in mind: cognition, culture and the problem of meaning. oxford: oxford university press. sloterdijk, peter. 2009. you must change your life. ny: polity press. small, christopher. 1998. musicking: the meanings of performing and listening. middleton: wesleyan university press. st. john, graham. 2012. global tribe: technology, spirituality and psytrance. uk: equinox. summer, zsuzsana. 2004. the now age: demystifying spirituality, the new age and the metaphysical. bloomington: iuniverse inc. turkle, sherry. 2011. alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other. ny: basic books. turner, victor. 1969. the ritual process: structure and anti-structure. hawthorne: aldine. https://issuu.com/presidentwfmt/docs/mtt_7_3__2006 dancecult 12(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 12(1) 2020: 85–97 issn 1947-5403 ©2020 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net bass, mids, tops: an oral history of sound system culture joe muggs & brian david stevens london: strange attractor press, 2019. isbn: 978-1-9072-2277-1 (paperback) rrp: us$29.95 (paperback) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.12> edward k. spencer university of birmingham (uk) university of oxford (uk) knowing how the world enjoys blackness, and seeing what happened to george [floyd], we—black people—get the feeling that people want our culture, but they do not want us. in other words, you want my talent—but you don’t want me. . . . you cannot enjoy the rhythm and ignore the blues (clara amfo speaking on bbc radio 1, tuesday 2nd june 2020). since this book arrives in the wake of the windrush scandal, black lives matter protests in bristol and now boris johnson’s inflammatory remarks regarding the last night of the proms, we must hope that the voices and stories amplified by bass, mids, tops reach a wide audience. it does not deal with reggae sound systems in the same way as henriques (2011) but is instead concerned with a constellation of uk genres that have their roots in black british sound system culture. in a perspicacious foreword, mykaell riley suggests that this oral history is not only about the enjoyment of bass weight but also about “something truly unique to the uk” (11) that is at once personal, cultural and political.1 refreshingly, instead of eulogising bass itself in the manner of recent scholarly monographs (goodman 2010; jasen 2016),2 the book comprises twenty-five interviews with a diverse array of people involved in the development of uk bass culture. as joe muggs notes in his introduction, he “can’t claim peer-reviewed rigour” (20), but his transcripts will certainly be of interest to researchers concerned with rare groove, acid house, jungle, drum ‘n’ bass, garage, dubstep, grime and uk funky. reviews dancecult 12(1)86 at this point some readers might ask whether joe muggs is overshadowed by simon reynolds. the short answer is not really. although his book is inevitably haunted by reynolds’ controversial hardcore continuum,3 from the outset muggs is keen to distance himself from a “definitive history” and linear narratives. he stresses that the book is “quite the opposite, in fact: it’s deliberately partial, arbitrary, and conversational . . . an attempt to look at multiple interwoven continua: life stories, genre stories, sound stories, all happening at once” (14). despite this, the interview transcripts are arranged into a roughly chronological order, beginning with dennis bovell (writer and producer for the lovers rock anthem silly games), norman jay (a key figure in the rare groove era), adrian sherwood (of dub syndicate), youth (martin glover, of killing joke and the orb), tony thorpe (moody boyz), rob smith (smith & mighty), george evelyn (nightmares on wax) and nicolette (vocalist for shut up and dance and massive attack). this is followed by four interviews with key figures from the jungle and early drum ‘n’ bass era, namely dego (of 4hero and reinforced records), dj storm (the self-professed “mum” of metalheadz), jumpin jack frost (who muggs casts as “the archetypal jungle dj”) and krust. the shortlived garage years are represented by sarah lockhart (who worked in a&r long before the establishment of fwd>> and her time at rinse fm), noodles (of groove chronicles along with el-b) and zed bias. this last interview segues into muggs’ conversations with the dubstep producers skream and mala, before kromestar is used as another link (with grime, represented by terror danjah). notwithstanding this domino sequence, the book then starts to seem less teleological during the final sweep of interviews (with t.williams, cooly g, toddla t, samrai, barely legal and shy one). sometimes the transcripts become bogged down with details that are interesting but rather trivial. similarly, the endnotes provide useful track details and demonstrate that muggs is a true anorak, someone who is utterly devoted to archiving musical heritage. intermittently, however, the reader can glimpse some heavier themes pertaining to gender, race, timbral politics and subcultural capital. in the first instance, dj storm ( jayne conneely) explains that she always has to “work that little bit harder” as a woman in a scene that is still overwhelmingly male: “we’ll always turn up on time and look well-presented because we’re women. it’s a shame that we’re not always given the chances we deserve” (192). elsewhere, sarah lockhart recalls the “intimidating” atmosphere of record shops with a collector mentality and stresses that she “didn’t like that it was just boys” at fwd>> (253). on the other hand, nicolette love suwoton appears to embrace longstanding associations between low-frequency sound and maleness when she states that “my voice is so feminine and the bass has a more masculine energy, if you like, so i love that contrast” (145). the timbral articulation of difference is indeed another recurring theme that emerges from the transcripts. although there is some consensus among the interviewees that the acid house era represents a brief period of total unity (with “people from all kinds of backgrounds, colours, nationalities, all coming together” (207), to use jumpin jack frost’s words), george evelyn laments the advent of “the italian piano house thing” and the way that “bass took a reviews 87 back seat in some clubs” (131). for tony thorpe, these “‘progressive”’ timbral developments “killed the unity, the family kind of thing . . . it’s like they forgot about black music and just went ‘oh we’re making money now, fuck that”’ (95). history repeats itself. much later on in the book, tesfa williams talks about trying to establish himself as a house producer and feeling the need to obfuscate his own identity as a black artist through his t.williams moniker: “the market is predominantly white male . . . my first name is african and i knew people would associate whatever with that and that might cause barriers as well” (392). the transcripts also demonstrate that uk bass culture has often been characterised by infighting (e.g. zed bias on the infamous “garage committee”) and closed-minded snobbery (especially when hijacked by hipsters). one of the most telling anecdotes of all arrives in the interview with terror danjah. hungry to reach a new, youthful audience having been at coachella 2011, terror danjah (rodney pryce) worked on an anthemic track titled full attention with the vocalist ruby lee ryder—one featuring the cardinal sin of a tear-out bass dubstep drop. kode9 (steve goodman) was confused and unable to hide his disappointment. but as terror danjah tried to explain, “this is for the people who don’t understand, i’m not known now . . . the people who bought planet mu knew, like people that are connoisseurs, sipping their wine like [comedy posh voice] ‘yas it’s terror danjah’. but the kids don’t know who i am!” (317). we might conclude that insularity and fear of selling out creates a unique set of problems. although muggs’ material is rich and evocative, some nit-picking is now required. given the specific focus of his book, i think that including “uk” in its title would have been a good idea. it would also have been useful to see the precise date of each interview at the start of every transcript. more generally, the book would have benefitted from better proofreading and copy editing—its pages are littered with typographical errors and missing words, and there also seems to be an obvious factual mistake in the nicolette chapter (the title of the massive attack track she features on is “three” not “seven”). my main criticism, however, concerns muggs’ distrust of academia and critical interpretation. this scepticism is by no means unfounded, and muggs may well have goodman/kode9 in mind when he writes that “you could pick musicians who help you make a very specific political point, or rave tracks that illustrate your chosen crypto-lacanian-post-pomo-contra-frankfurt fashion in cultural criticism” (19). but as the interviews make clear, sound system culture is political in every sense of the term, and riley’s excellent foreword could have been matched by an essay-length afterword by a bass music scholar (monique charles and christabel stirling come to mind, for instance). overall, the book is stimulating and frustrating in equal measure. as riley stresses, “formal education about music is vital” (11), and if this “very specific strand of british popular music” (12) is to become a mainstay of undergraduate curricula then i fear that critical, peer-reviewed scholarship is a necessary evil. nevertheless, muggs should be congratulated on gathering fruitful source material for this kind of work. dancecult 12(1)88 notes 1 riley also reflects on his work with the reggae philharmonic orchestra (rpo) in the 1990s: “it was a political statement, it was challenging the system . . . asking questions about what music is about in the uk” (11). additionally, it should be noted here that riley is currently leading an oral history project of his own with the black music research unit at the university of westminster. 2 for an important critique of goodman’s impersonal vibrational ontology, see kane (2015). 3 the hardcore continuum debate involving jeremy gilbert, mark fisher and simon reynolds can be found in the inaugural volume of dancecult. references goodman, steve. 2010. sonic warfare: sound, affect, and the ecology of fear. london: mit press. henriques, julian. 2011. sonic bodies: reggae sound systems, performance techniques, and ways of knowing. new york: continuum. kane, brian. 2015. “sound studies without auditory culture: a critique of the ontological turn”. sound studies 1(1): 2-21. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2015.1079063> jasen, paul. 2016. low end theory: bass, bodies, and the materiality of sonic experience. london: bloomsbury. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2015.1079063 reviews 89 night fever: designing club culture 1960 – today mateo kries, jochen eisenbrand, catherine rossi (editors) weil am rhein, germany: vitra design museum, 2018 398 pp. isbn: 978-3-945852-24-8 (english edition); 978-3-945852-23-1 (german edition) rrp: €59.90 this must be the place: an architectural history of popular music performance venues robert kronenburg new york, ny and london, uk: bloomsbury academic 286 pp. isbn: 978-1-5013-1927-3 (hb), 978-1-5013-1928-0 (pb), 978-1-5013-1929-7 (epdf), 978-1-5013-1930-3 (ebook) rrp: £91.80 (hb), £17.99 (pb), £14.39 (epdf), £14.39 (ebook) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.13> hillegonda c. rietveld london south bank university (uk) the study of the architecture of music venues is a developing area, illustrated here by two publications, one offering a historical perspective on spaces of live popular music performance, the other specifically on the more recent development of clubs where dancing to records prevails. in the introduction to their substantial exhibition catalogue, nightfever, co-curators rossi and eisenbrand explain the focus is on “spaces designed to elicit the after-hour excitement and escape . . . and the design cultures the nightclub has created” (16). created for the german interior design company vitra (2000), the book offers graphic design, architectural drawings and interior photography of a wide range of clubs, accompanied by interviews with its architects and designers, and a selection of reflective essays by a selection of club researchers; it includes maps and floor plans of clubs in belgium, italy, and in clubbing capitals berlin, london, new york, and johannesburg. kronenburg offers a broader architectural timeline of music venues that historically have enabled the experiential and transience of live music, mainly in west-europe and the usa. both publications stress the importance of human interaction, and the social aspects of sharing and interacting with music. for rossi and eisenbrand, the club venue offers a type of participatory theatre in which to act out various persona, a canivalesque space that enables daily identities to disappear. for kronenburg, music venues offer a sense of synchronicity that is uniquely experienced during a live performance, connecting music makers with their audiences. this must be the place is a continuation of kronenburg’s interest in flexible and mobile architecture and the experience of music (see for example, his 2012 monograph on live music venues). as the live industry is increasingly dominated by large international promoters, dancecult 12(1)90 threatening the livelihoods of “grassroots venues”, kronenburg’s 2019 publication attempts to salvage their histories, opening with an ode to the more intimate popular music events in the home, followed by an overview of smaller european theatres that emerged during the dawn of industrialisation, during the 1700s and 1800s. while urbanisation slowly but surely intensified during that era, popular theatre venues became part of circuits for travelling shows, and public houses that were popular for their music and theatre programming would metamorphose into music halls. later in the book, there is a discussion of european social dance venues from the 18th up to the mid-twentieth century, starting with dance pavilions of london’s pleasure gardens, followed by the ballrooms and dancehalls that ultimately swapped their orchestras for djs during the 1970s and 80s. the historical black and white as well as glossy colour prints, both drawings and photographs, add to a deeper understanding of the look of some of these venues. kronenburg further addresses the development of venues in the usa that ultimately became jazz and a dance clubs, including early twentieth century juke joints and blues bars, and a chapter specifically dedicated to the various jazz venues of new orleans. supper clubs and cabaret venues, where one could have dinner while watching a show and maybe have a dance afterwards, offered a variety of jazz and popular music. of particular interest for the design of discos and dance bars are speakeasies, which emerged during the 1920-1933 national alcohol prohibition. also known as the jazz age, or the roaring twenties, during these thirteen years drinking became an underground activity. kronenburg’s interest in film leads to a brief discussion of the use of certain music venues as backdrop for a range of film narratives that mythologize the association of italian-related american mafia with such venues. in the safety of such secretive clubs, marginalized gendered and racialized identities could be explored and asserted, a theme that rossi and eisenbrand identify as an important element of discotheques and nightclubs, where liminality “is explored though the one activity that unites all club culture: dancing” (19). underground dance styles that use the body musically as an expressive instrument can, according to fikentscher (2000: 25), “be understood as part of an american continuum of social dance styles that has been marked by a pervasive african american imprint at least since the 1920s”. in night fever, catharine rossi additionally highlights the importance of avant-garde and experimental movements to the development of night clubs as we now understand them, with reference to happenings in new york, and radical design architects in italy during the 1960s and 1970s. in this way, the combination of design and the musical practices of such venues have had an important influence on the development of discotheques and dance clubs from the 1960s onwards. also contributing to nigh fever, tim lawrence provides an overview of the dance clubs in new york city that further shaped the disco concept, from mancuso’s home, the loft, to the extravagancies of studio 54. for kronenburg, such venues herald the transition from live music performance to “record scenes”, reviewing a range of djled events and venues where participants dance to recorded music, from influential new york dance clubs in the 1960s and 70s, to the northern soul scene in england. yet, it is important to acknowledge that also the dj is a musical performer (rietveld 2016). such venues are often found in areas that are regarded as undesirable, taking place within the reviews 91 night-time that make them invisible to everyday society. yet their pioneering drive can add cultural capital to a neighbourhood and thereby set in motion processes of gentrification that can, ironically, eventually push away these venues. both publications give recognition to the multi-sensory aspect of music venues. for rossi and eisenbrand mobile theatrical lighting and participatory spectacle are of importance to dance clubs. kronenburg further emphasises the importance sound when dancing to records, assuming that the staged music performance stops being a spectacle; this holds true for smaller clubs, but less so for commercially driven events (rietveld, 2013). for both, though, the discussion of music venues mainly focuses on visual aspects rather than the acoustic space in the experience of music. perhaps this is not surprising. architecture is dominated by visual design, with acoustic architecture a smaller component in this field. added to this is the mediation of the story of dance clubs and music venues though text and still images, in which it is a challenge to translate the dynamism of sound and dance. particularly night fever showcases a visually lush selection of key dance clubs, including the post-industrial interior design of manchester’s the haçienda (fac51) by ben kelly, visually echoing the functional modernist interiors by bauhaus and gerrit rietveld; yet despite its visually innovative design it was beset by acoustic challenges. the famously fine-tuned sound system design by richard long for paradise garage is given recognition throughout the catalogue, but this does not translate well visually, unlike images of grace jones being body painted by keith haring for a show in that influential new york underground club. a spectacular colour image of the gold-metal coated despacio sound system seems offered by way of compensation; designed by james murphy this was inspired by both richard long’s work and by the chilled out balearic music aesthetic of ibiza (“despacio” means “slowly”). still, ibiza’s clubs are notably absent, despite its influential dance music clubs and party culture. this just illustrates that the richness and complexity of music club history makes it impossible to be exhaustive. references fikentscher, kai. 2000. “you better work!” underground dance music in new york city. hanover nh, and london, uk: wesleyan university press. kronenburg, robert. 2012. live architecture: popular music venues, stages and arenas. oxford, uk: routledge. rietveld, hillegonda. c. 2016. “authenticity and liveness in digital dj performance”. in musicians and their audiences, ed. ioannis tsioulakis and elina hytönen-ng, 123-33. new york, ny and london, uk: routledge. ——— 2013. “journey to the light? immersion, spectacle and mediation”. in dj culture in the mix: power, technology, and social change in electronic dance music, ed. anna gavanas, bernado a. attias and hillegonda c. rietveld, 79-102. new york, ny and london, uk, bloomsbury academic. “dance! voices from the exhibition ‘night fever: designing club culture 1960 – today’”. vitra magazine. <https://www.vitra.com/en-gb/magazine/details/dance>. https://www.vitra.com/en-gb/magazine/details/dance dancecult 12(1)92 moon juice stomper: a novel (goa 1987-96) ray castle new zealand: independently published, 2019 313 pp. isbn: 978-1791998271 rrp: £12 <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.14> graham st john independent researcher if dance music scenes have windows of fortune, anjuna, goa, in the late eighties was peak oil, and ray castle was there to drill it. after three decades, castle has finally knocked out, psychedelic disco balls and all, what is certain to become the definitive warp and scintillating weft on this “scenius” during its electronic heyday. as perhaps the most influential yet least documented dance music culture in history, this moment has long been an enigma. a golden triangle for cultural exiles and outcastes. a haven for human flotsam and jetsam surging up the electric shores of the arabian sea, before ebbing into the deep recesses of memory. the absence of reporting on this lost horizon and its discommunitarians would normally be enough to draw the attention of enthusiasts of goa and its many after parties. fortunately for us, as the work of a wordsmith with an acute attention to detail, moon juice stomper is a literary charm. among other aliases, as dj masaray, castle performed in goa in the late eighties and early nineties, becoming a vocal critic of the industry that emerged in the subsequent decades. having once elevated ecstatic bodies above the sands of distant languid beaches, castle now sustains the levitational effect in a narrative at times reminiscent of castenada or h. s. thompson. commanding a white-knuckled ride through the “mystical anarchy” of “gonzo goa,” capturing the explosive atmosphere at this freak nadir, his self published intervention in creative nonfiction transports readers inside the minds of the habitués of this remote crossroads … even as they’re going out of their minds. and in doing so, castle does what any freakologist worth their beatific bath salts should do: he delivers us into the heart and soul of the matter. this journey into the many-layered vibe of goa — the roots of goa trance and its worldwide psytrance progeny — is no mean feat, as castle has seamlessly achieved the notoriously difficult and routinely futile task of writing about dancing. this accomplishment stands tall in the history of dance culture narratives. the central characters stand off the page in a third person approach that repeatedly lures readers into the sweet spot. the book is reviews 93 hallucinatory, but also realistic. it conveys the gift economy and music swopping integral to this scene. goa fans and scholars will be fascinated by the effort to weave pseudonymised figures like goa gil, laurent, fred disco, vath, raja ram/tip and space tribe, among many others, into this semi-fictionalised account. enthusiasts will likewise appreciate how track vocal samples are mixed into the narrative, dada-jockey style, and the way the story builds tension and achieves climax at the full moon party under the banyan tree in 1988. other points of intrigue include the descriptions of drug politics, police corruption, party bans, bar/gambling cartels and various historical anecdotes. generations of train spotters will be shooting their cosmic load over these pages. the struggle to sustain “paradise” is an overarching theme, and quite apparent in the efforts to maintain the vibe into the early 1990s as the scene came under growing external and internal pressures. whether castle captured this long tail effect adequately is open to dispute, for the book, it could be warranted, drags. then again, this is faithful to the partyarc of the scene itself: build-up, peak vibe and long come down, with many after parties inclusive. it echoes a movement where parties found ways to survive through the next day and night, and then the following morning, and afternoon… and beyond that, in more remote regions and neighbouring states. as the stakes rose, the illegal parties grew more adventurous with road trips out of goa to maharajstra. the buccaneer spirit of making pirate parties by any means (sustaining the addiction and entitlement to the parties) seems to drive the plot. the effort to treat the goa scene (or “scenius”) like a collective character responding to its own growing notoriety as a nascent global industry and party brand is ultimately commendable. the book might have done more to address the overall impact on the locals of privileged europeans making party in the colony. this said, it does end with a neat twist in which an indian fashion entrepreneur markets the “goa psy trance” brand. it also illustrates one important outcome of the story: how upper middle class indians are now the primary customers of goa bar discos, that charge more for entry than a club in europe, to hear with a beer in their hand dance music that was once banned. in a world stricken by a pandemic that has effectively closed down dance cultures, the scene captured in moon juice stomper appears even more exotic. with its alluring wordcraft, this book holds unquestionable cult gravitas. remixing the music, intrigue, love, bizarre sex, violence and drama of real places, events and figures, not least of all the author himself, the book amplifies a movement in its un/making. every epic era needs its chronicler, and in castle, goa has its homer. dancecult 12(1)94 avicii: true stories dir. levan tsikurishvili usa: black dalmation films, opa people production, piece of magic entertainment, and sf bio, 2017. <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7357302/> <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.15> george musgrave goldsmiths, university of london (uk) university of westminster (uk) it is extremely hard to review a documentary like avicii: true stories and disentangle myself from the research on mental health and the music industry which i have spent the last four years immersed in (gross and musgrave 2016; 2017; 2020). with almost every minute that passes of this profoundly sad, and at times chilling film, i found myself thinking that, in many respects, what i was watching was one of the most extreme case studies imaginable for the conceptual architecture we have developed to try and grapple with the potential for toxicity which a music career presents. knowing the tragic endpoint, of course, changes the way one watches and experiences the film. on the one hand, it is a simple story of a young man making music and the stresses and strains of his working life which ends in tragedy. on the other, it is an allegorical morality tale, which challenges us to think about themes such as corporate ethics, responsibility, creativity, passion and exploitation. the film pivots around two central relationships. the first is the relationship tim bergling has with music making, realised  in the spellbinding form of deeply personal, at times even intimate, footage of him in the studio. we see him creating early versions of loops between 2008 and 2010 (which we as fans know will go on to be huge records), or jamming with nile rodgers, or creating toplines with aloe blacc and chris martin; each of these artists seemingly mesmerised at tim’s ability to reformat their different talents within the remit of edm. the second key relationship is between avicii and the music industry, exemplified and crystallised in his connection with his manager arash “ash” pournouri. it is through this relationship in particular that the moral and ethical challenges of the piece are articulated. at the beginning of the film, it is hard not to begrudgingly admire pournouri — who embodies the entrepreneurial spirit of spinning gold from thin air — as we hear him on the phone to emi pushing the deal for avicii’s first major single higher and higher, up to $500,000. this feeling of respect does not last for long. thirteen minutes in, still at the beginning of avicii’s career, we hear pournouri exclaim almost excitedly, in what turns out to be a chilling and prophetic statement: “tim is going to die. with all the interviews, radio tours and everything, he’ll drop dead”. as a viewer, this early feeling of discomfort permeates much of the ensuing ninety minutes. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7357302/ reviews 95 just a few scenes later, we see bergling having to cancel performing at the 2013 ultra music festival in australia — for what we now know was alcohol induced pancreatitis (ralston 2018) — working on his laptop in hospital and talking about upcoming performances. at this point of the documentary we start to see how his career has become more than just about making music, but is now an infrastructure; with stakeholders and responsibilities and pressures and expectations and dependence. it is in this environment, as those around him make entirely fatuous statements such as “you can do the show if you want to”, that, as a viewer, you start asking questions about whose interests are really being prioritised. who is working for who? indeed, perhaps more conceptually; what is coercion, what is control, and what does it look like? the subtle operation of a system of exploitation rooted in ideas of guilt and responsibility where, as bergling himself says he feels “lucky and blessed”, is laid bare before our eyes. here, and indeed throughout the documentary, you find yourself thinking simply: “who is looking after him?” one day later, we see bergling looking exhausted — a picture of enervate fragility with his eyes rolling back in his head — being cajoled into accepting a series of interviews with the press. it is frightening to watch. appalling, honestly. ticking in the background like a sombre metronome is the counter of shows performed, which we see rattling exponentially higher as the film progresses. forty-six minutes into the film, we are now in 2015, and the show counter ticks over 700 towards 775. we hear from bergling about the enormous stresses and pressures as more and more shows are added to his diary. we hear too from david guetta about the burden of expectations to deliver a global hit again. the sense of pressure feels intense in these scenes, as we see bergling sitting in his villa in ibiza creating the album stories, being reminded by those around him to eat and described by his childhood friend as a “shell”. it is interesting, personally, that i could place my own connection to the music of avicii, as a fan, at this point in the journey of the film. in august 2015, i saw him play at ushuaia in ibiza — the venue which would eventually host his final ever performance. the party was incredible, and just as bergling talks about finding genuine happiness in moments of those shows, so too from my perspective as a fan, i remember that happiness. the following month, in september 2015, he cancelled all of his future performances. it is surreal to think that standing in ushuaia at that time, i had no idea about what was happening to him or the pain he was going through. within the first minute of the documentary, i was reminded of a quote by an interviewee from my own research who described fame as being akin to sitting in the back of a car that someone else is driving at ferocious speed as the g forces push you back in the seat and the world spins past you. this is perhaps the easiest way to read the heart-breaking narrative unfolding over the course of the documentary: a naive, introverted boy hurtling through a world he did not, or could not, understand, in which all he was searching for was, as he phrased it, “finding a connection with people and being accepted”. the speed at which he goes from sending demos to blogs and eating pasta on his bed to headlining a festival and being introduced by madonna is frightening. pournouri has, of course, denied this reading and presentation of events (ralston 2018). indeed, reading things purely in this way denies dancecult 12(1)96 the very real moments of joy we see in the film: the smile on bergling’s face in the early moments as crowds chant along to his first global hit “levels”; the stages with all of the crowds and lights and lasers and confetti; the incredible outdoor studio at the top of the grand canyon writing songs; the footage of him relaxing with his friends in malibu, in the mansion that he was finally able to bring them to honour the “contracts” they wrote in crayons as kids (stating that if any of them “made it” they would invite each other along to their mansions); or on the ile sainte-marie in madagascar after retiring, seemingly at calm. this is the duality of the story, and indeed of musical careers generally; the immense highs and joys, and the indescribable lows. in addition, this reading also denies bergling any sense of agency, and again, this is not what the film shows either. there is footage showing how acutely aware he is of himself and his personality; at sixty minutes in we see him discussing carl jung’s conceptualisation of introversion and we learn that he has been in therapy. he is emotionally attuned in a way that is not surprising for a musician; a type of work that is reliant on the understanding of, and connection to, emotion in the same way that a builder relies on and develops physical strength. bergling was clearly aware that things were deeply wrong with how he was feeling, both physically and emotionally. at the moment in the film when he announces his retirement, one still, as a viewer, finds oneself asking: “how does it get from here, to his suicide in oman?”. you still hope that perhaps there will be a different ending. at around seventy minutes in, there is a marked shift in the tone of bergling’s voice, as what up until this point has been a kind of resigned acceptance morphs into resentful anger. it is in his realisation and articulation of this anger that we see how the environment within which he lived and worked was reliant on him continuing to run on the treadmill. he tells everyone around him that he just wants the performances to stop, seemingly desperate for people to listen to him. “it’s harder to cancel these shows than to do them”, we hear someone in his team say. “it would be harder to do them, for me”, he says. “hear me out”. “as long as you know it could cost you quite a lot”, and they run through each show and how much money would be lost. “it’s giving me anxiety”, he tells them. again, this scene is horrible to watch. we hear the coerciveness of commitments “needing to be honoured”, leading the viewer to ask in whose interest it is for bergling to keep going and whose interests are being represented. we hear his team tell him that he will lose money, but of course what they mean is that they will lose money too. ten minutes later, there is an exchange which, given where the story concludes, makes one feel slightly sick. his manager, tellingly, says: he doesn’t understand the value of money or that his decisions can have very negative consequences for other people, or that the only reason people care is because he is successful right now. if he stopped being successful a lot of people would jump ship. i’m sure of it. what is perhaps most unsettling, or frustrating, or dispiriting, or upsetting — i am unsure of the best word to capture the feeling — is how the film concludes. we see tim in 2016 on a beach, retired from performing live, having separated from his manager, apparently reviews 97 healthier and feeling stronger and working on new music; in theory doing the thing he loved most. by april 2018, he would be dead having taken his own life whilst on holiday in oman. as a viewer, you are left devastatingly unclear how he arrived at the point of such despair. perhaps no one will know. what the documentary appears to show, to my reading at least, was the tragic story of a shy and anxious young man, who loved making music and the deep, meaningful joy it brought him, propelled into a world reliant on the ever more avaricious exploitation of his labour in order to support the development of an economy which had formed around him, where simple human care and compassion had been decimated by the compulsion to keep going and market his music, and against which he tried to fight back. certainly, this is just one reading, and it is important to note that many of the individuals whom the film appears to point fingers of blame at have disputed their representation. nonetheless, it is hard to watch it and not feel that tim had been profoundly let down by many of those around him. rip tim bergling / avicii: 1989-2018 references gross, sally and musgrave, george. 2016. “can music make you sick? music and depression. a study into the incidence of musicians mental health. part 1: pilot survey report”. help musicians uk/musictank. ———. 2017. “can music make you sick? music and depression. a study into the incidence of musicians mental health. part 2: qualitative study and recommendations”. help musicians uk/musictank. ———. 2020. can music make you sick? measuring the price of musical ambition, university of westminster press. ralston, william. 2018. “who really killed avicii?” british gq. <https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/who-really-killed-avicii> (accessed 1 september 2020). https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/who-really-killed-avicii travellers and sound system protest: matthew smith’s visual commentary dave payling staffordshire university (uk) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.13> protest and resistance have been an integral part of the uk underground dance music culture since its emergence at the end of the 1980s. this relationship has been documented by matthew smith, who began photographing the events and people involved while studying his undergraduate degree in stoke-on-trent, the home of shelley’s laserdome and other dance clubs. many of his photographs are hosted on his archive website, which includes images from glastonbury 1989, the anti-criminal justice bill marches in the early 1990s, the mother free festival of 1995 and more. from the outset, his photographs have presented the co-operative, resistive and celebratory aspects of the scene without judgement and from a position of support and solidarity. to consolidate his photo archive and promote the images to a wider audience smith crowdfunded and published his first book, exist to resist (etr) (2017), which comprises a collection of images he captured between 1989 and 1997. the timeline of etr straddles the stages between the rave scene’s liberating genesis and its later inevitable stance of defiance and protest. the book’s preface describes the mood of the time. that culture of celebration also was a product of opposition and resistance to the political policies and leadership of the time. the images in these pages deal specifically with the eventual criminalisation in law of that culture, after it had been rejuvenated and popularised by rave in a way that threatened government and its dictatorial control of democracy (smith 2017: 6). the leadership referred to is the uk premiership of margaret thatcher and, in this context, her government’s ideological and legislative assault on the free festival and traveller communities. smith’s earliest photographs are from glastonbury 1989. this was the first year large sound systems set up on the festival site, when glastonbury was still a destination for travellers from the peace convoy. a selection of smith's photos are presented below, followed by a brief interview about his work and plans. figure 1. nathan convoy field glastonbury 1989. a young boy, nathan, has his name written on his chest in biro detailing his name location and the registration of his parents’ vehicle. photo credit: matthew smith (2019). figure 2. blim bros sound system set up in the traveller’s field outside glastonbury festival 1989. photo credit: matthew smith (2019). the first anti cja march: london, 1st march 1994 after a hedonistic few years and the proliferation of sound systems and parties, epitomised by the castlemorton free festival in 1992, the authorities began a stricter suppression of the traveller lifestyle. legislation was introduced aimed specifically at outlawing sound systems and gatherings. this led to a series of protests against the proposed criminal justice act (cja) of 1994. the first such event, in march 1994, was characterised by peaceful protest, dancing and celebration, with no noticeable civil unrest. smith recalled, the march set off in a massively carnival atmosphere and we were allocated a position at the rear by the stewards. there were a couple of rigs, one a customized bedford cf by desert storm. people were looking on in amazement. there was impromptu dancing to our music on the streets of the capital. the back of the truck was crowded and bouncing. down marble arch and into piccadilly we went, occasionally halting for stragglers and latecomers to catch up, occasionally urging forward to keep the crowd together (smith 2016a). figure 3. the 1st anti cja march. trafalgar square, london, 1 march 1994. photo credit: matthew smith (2019). figure 4. 1st anti cja march. trafalgar square, london, 1 march 1994. members of sunnyside sound system with their pink flag depicting an image of a friesian cow going by the name of liberty the sacred cow. photo credit: matthew smith (2019). the second anti cja march: london, 24th july 1994 spirits were high after the first march and word of mouth ensured the second protest was larger with more sound systems in attendance. despite a small contained disturbance, when some protestors scaled the gates of downing street and mounted police waded in on the crowd, it was again a largely peaceful event. figure 5. exodus sound system from luton on a lorry playing rave music as it passes in front of the houses of parliament during the 2nd anti cja demo in london. photo credit: matthew smith (2019). figure 6. a large group of people and vehicles leaving hyde park as part of the 2nd anti cja demo in london. photo credit: matthew smith (2019). the third anti cja march: london, 9th october 1994 by the third march, authorities were intent to clampdown on the protests. in response to the largest crowd yet — an estimated 100,000 protestors — police presence was greatly increased (smith 2016b). the carnival atmosphere turned violent as mounted police attacked and dispersed the crowds. the cja was passed into law shortly afterwards. figure 7. two girls dancing to smokescreen sound system in park lane outside hyde park during the 3rd anti cja demo. photo credit: matthew smith (2019). figure 8. a protestor in front of a group of armoured riot police outside the grosvenor hotel in mayfair during the 3rd anti cja demo. photo credit: matthew smith (2019). recent events and sound systems these previous photographs represent a selection from smith’s archive and etr book. he has continued to document more recent festivals and events in the uk and europe, sharing them mostly via social media. one example of smith’s recent work is a series of images he captured at the anti-brexit march in london april 2019. this march saw the formation of the stop brexit sound system (doherty 2019), with performances by djs including norman j, aka fatboy slim and others. figure 9. protestors with the stop-brexit sound system, london, april 2019. photo credit: matthew smith (2019). figure 10. a colourfully dressed protestor at the stop-brexit march in london. photo credit: matthew smith (2019). interview with matthew smith.[1] dave payling: when and how did you get the idea for the etr book? matthew smith: back in 2012 i finally managed to sell my house in bristol after a decade of struggling to keep it after the last housing bubble broke just after i bought it. there was some money left over from the sale. it wasn't enough to use as a deposit for another mortgage. that combined with the harsh fact that new financial regulations barred me from even applying for a mortgage for another six years because of the irregularities with the previous one left me with some significant life choices. considering my work and my future as an artist led to the decision that i had to develop the work that made me unique. nobody to my knowledge had the comprehensive historical document of the late 80s/90s rave/protest diy culture that i had made during the time we were running sunnyside, our free party sound system collective. during those times we made events, film, photography and graphic informational works in the form of what we called infotainment to help perpetuate our culture and oppose the plans of government. we also took part in a considerable amount of non-violent direct action in pursuit of standing up for what we believed in, taking part in many of the 90s protests and helping to create a nationwide tour of nightclubs and student unions across the uk to help create an awareness of the civil liberties implications of the impending legislation. so, post bristol i found somewhere cheap and anonymous to live, acquired a scanner, built a studio and spent the next four years scanning all my negatives to make the images visible and useable. i published the resulting galleries on social media. they received major feedback. mostly the public response was how they illustrated the loss of cultural freedom that had occurred in the course of a generation. the next clear outcome was to make a book. so i wrote and made a film for a kickstarter to fund the project and exist to resist just took off from there, receiving worldwide media support during its making from russia through europe to the usa and australia. do you have any follow ups to etr planned? ms. 558 copies of the 1st edition of 1100 were purchased in advance during the kickstarter and the rest sold out very quickly with no traditional marketing or retail. the v&a (victoria and albert museum) have acquired a copy for their library. jeremy corbyn bought a signed copy. during the kickstarter ken loach supported the work, and the book helped form the visual reference during the making of his production company's latest movie about 90s rave culture in scotland called beats, directed by the immensely talented brian welsh. that is a clear indication that there should be a 2nd edition. it would provide an opportunity to improve on the original and to reach a much larger audience. 80% of the funding from the crowdfunder came from my own social media community. the initial years of my work frame a much larger and more diverse historical narrative that tracks the course of the evolution of our modern festival industry to the present day. it is ironic that a criminalised culture has been appropriated as possibly our most popular creative industry. in a very real sense 1994's cja served a very thatcherite purpose to enclose a culture and impose market forces, state regulation and taxation on what was previously a very democratic and successful cultural phenomenon made by ordinary people. i have a lot of ideas for further monographs, zines and multi-media exhibition outcomes in my mind that i would love the opportunity to develop. it's not advisable to share them in detail right now in public because ideas are a precious commodity and for the time being it's better to keep them out of the public domain. one thing i can say is that rave culture created a great, fantastically talented community and i would like to use the book to emulate this and continue to create an artistic, performative and intellectual community dedicated to producing culturally challenging creative output in order to generate future history. with this in mind we have been working towards launching a cic[2] called future history inc. the work received hlf[3] recognition and support not so long ago and that needs expanding on through the cic. there is also arts council funding to access. the object of the cic will be to preserve, celebrate and share the history of the archive in a public legacy. the work will also form part of the backbone the uk's first museum of youth culture to be launched this summer by my long partners at youth club archive. it was an invitation in 2012 to help found the archive with my work that helped significantly in making the decision to fund the production of the archive. last summer in conjunction with the isrf[4] i was invited to all souls college in oxford to host a work/study presentation day to an invited audience of academics around the question of law, who makes it and what is it for in order to provoke new perspectives and potential avenues of research. what other future plans do you have? ms. right now, the immediate future is both exciting and extremely nerve wracking. in a matter of just a few weeks i will be celebrating thirty years of documenting glastonbury festival by going to work there for an amazing production company called block 9 documenting their brand new environment concept at the festival called iicon. i have a very distinct idea to produce a book from that work in time for their 50th anniversary next year. pretty much straight after that i am putting the finishing touches to a major summer show in london. the saatchi gallery have invited me to be a core element of an exhibition called sweet harmony which is due to open on july 12th at their massive space in chelsea. the show is due to run for two months and has a fantastic complimentary roster of artists involved. for the last two years we have been in long term negotiations with a couple of major show venues to produce a show from the book but i have to thank the saatchi for stepping in and making exist to resist on the walls of a gallery into a reality. author biography dave payling is associate professor in electronic music at staffordshire university in the school of computing and digital technologies. he is a video music composer and holds a phd in visual music composition. dave also produces and performs electronic music and is integrating this more closely with his academic research. he is from the floor section editor for dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture. website: http://payl.co.uk/ references doherty, simon. 2019. "the djs fighting against brexit and for a people’s vote". vice (blog), 26 march. <https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/nexpwx/djs-peoples-vote-march-second-referendum-feature> (accessed 23 july 2019). smith, matthew. 2016a. "1st anti criminal justice bill march ’94 — matthew smith". mattkoarchive. 28 february. <http://www.mattkoarchive.com/blog/2016/2/28/1st-anti-criminal-justice-bill-march-94>. (accessed 23 july 2019). ———. 2016b. "3rd anti criminal justice bill march ’94 — matthew smith". mattkoarchive. 28 february. <http://www.mattkoarchive.com/blog/2016/2/28/3rd-anti-criminal-justice-bill-march-94>. (accessed 23 july 2019). ———. 2017. exist to resist. london: youth club. notes [1] matthew smith, personal communication with the author (on facebook), 5th june 2019. [2] a community interest company (cic) exists to benefit the community rather than private shareholders. [3] the heritage lottery fund (hlf), recently renamed the national lottery heritage fund, provides grants to sustain and transform the uk's heritage [4] the independent social research foundation (isrf) is a public benefit foundation dedicated to the promotion of interdisciplinary research in the social sciences. an interview with genesis breyer p-orridge tristan kneschke independent author <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.12> figure 1. genesis breyer p-orridge, the world’s most famous pandrogyne. photo credit: drew weidemann, 2016. where to begin with the storied achievements of genesis breyer p-orridge? s/he's one of the founders of industrial music via the band throbbing gristle, and h/er other band, psychic tv, made the guinness book of world records for the most albums released in a single year, usurping michael jackson. genesis organized underground arts collective thee temple ov psychick youth and spread its occult themes with a 500-page tome (p-orridge and abrahamsson 2010). then there's applying william s. burroughs and brion gysin's cut-up techniques in their extreme pandrogyne project (npr 2014), a melding of bodies with p-orridge’s late partner lady jaye, involving hundreds of thousands of dollars of plastic surgery. genesis has been the subject of multiple documentaries, including the ballad of genesis and lady jaye (losier 2011), bight of the twin (mccarthy iii 2016), and the crowdfunded a message from the temple (unclean 2019). recently, genesis has grappled with being diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. in this rare phone conversation after h/er 2018 moogfest performance in durham nc, the multidisciplinary artist comes across as sagacious and candid, unafraid to confront h/er circumstances. tristan kneschke: how's your treatment going? genesis breyer p-orridge: we've had to cancel tours in europe and australia and all kinds of things since october [2017]. for a while it looked like we'd never be able to even daydream about doing any concert again. in february [2018], i was in the intensive care unit for two weeks and then another week in the oncology ward. my kidneys stopped working 100%. they just stopped completely. they put this tube in my jugular vein and did dialysis for 24 hours a day for three days. thank goodness that, combined with thousands of friends, fans and extended family sending their best positive thoughts, and three voodoo priests in west africa performing a healing ceremony, my kidneys came back. since then i've been pretty stable, but i asked my doctors if they thought it was wise every time we went somewhere. for moogfest 2018, i brought a caregiver and an oxygen generator with me, just in case. we looked and thought, "this is a really good test. it's not very far to travel [from new york city], and it wouldn't be difficult to get back to the hospital if something goes wrong. and it's only an hour-long set." we usually do sets for two and a half hours plus. we tried out three rehearsals on the clock at sunnyvale in brooklyn, and my voice and energy held up, although i was tired afterwards. and so we decided, "let's do a real test and see if we're ever going to be able to play live again." and the answer is, "one by one. one at a time." each situation has to be evaluated separately. i go for blood tests every week, and they tell me what all the levels are of everything and whether it's getting worse, better or stable. and from there, they can recommend further treatment or if you should lay low. gbp. yeah. at the moment, they're doing tests on my siblings and my daughters to see if somebody has good donor material. at some point, i'm going to have to have a stem cell transplant. i'm sure you're finding out what the limits of technology are. gbp. well, it's truly day to day. we have days when we're bouncing around and playing with the dog, and everyone goes, "god, he seems really well. i haven't seen you this healthy and energized in years." and then other days i can hardly be bothered to cross the room and sit down. it's a weird illness, leukemia. i have a strange, quite rare version of it, cmml [chronic myelomonocytic leukemia]. there's not that much research and information on that one. so a lot of what's happening to me is to some degree experimental. i can't really travel without someone who is there to supervise food and sleep and know what my meds are. i mean, it's amazing i'm alive. that time in the intensive care unit, it's the closest you can get without leaving, you know? i was lying there for three days on my back with this tube in my jugular. i couldn't move because it would pull out. and i was just listening to the whirring of my blood being sucked out of me, cleaned and being pushed back in, not knowing if my kidneys would ever work again. you have to really look at your mortality at that point. it's spooky, the idea that you won't exist. it's just so hard for anyone to understand what that means. i'm kind of at peace with it now. i'm hopeful. they said i'm strong, that i'm amazingly fit in other ways for my age. i mean, i'll be 69 in february [2019]. the doctors are shocked by how much i do (laughs). but that's just a mental thing. i've always been like that. "what's next? what's next?" i think that's going to work in my favor. how do you frame someone dropping their body? do you see that as a transition or a passage, or some other way? gbp. pretty much literally. you know, for decades, we were sort of romantic, sentimental existentialists and just thought, "if you die, there's nothing." therefore, use the time you have here to the best of your ability. create and give and do as much as you can, not just for yourself but for everyone and anyone that you have contact with. for the species, ultimately, we're all in this same existential angst, but we deal with it in different ways. having worked with tibetan buddhists and other shamanic cultures in nepal, the himalayas, and in west africa, we have been forced — begrudgingly in a way — to reconsider what the body and consciousness are in terms of physical death. now we have had so many strange experiences that imply there's something else after the body is no longer functioning. the body, jaye used to say, is a cheap suitcase that carries around the mind. and the mind consciousness is what we really are. that means the body is both a useful tool for mobility and sensory experience, but it's also a limitation because it's in such a grueling environment, existing in this planet in apparently a material world, that it also forces you to consider what happens to it. is it a container alone? we came to the conclusion it is. for whatever reasons, our species has consciousness on a level that, as far as we know, is greater than other beings. so dropping the body is a phase, a transition, but not to a clear next phase. no one knows for sure. when jaye dropped her body, one or two days after the funeral, we were at home in our apartment, and alice genese, our bass player was there. edley and a couple of other people were there too. my daughters were saying, "we're really worried about you, papa. we want you to come to california with us so that you can grieve and be safe so we don't worry about you." and we're thinking, "i don't know if i want to go." so as the children were trying to persuade me, we suddenly got this weird impulse. "well, if we do go somewhere else, we need a photo of me and jaye to get there." so we went through to the bedroom. and on jaye's side of the bed was what she called the "kissing wall", about 20 photographs of her and myself kissing in all these different locations. from a dungeon to thailand to kathmandu, you name it. and we were looking at them all and thinking, "which picture should we take?" and then we sort of honed in on this one photograph of us in kathmandu. we were both wearing red robes, and were on one seat entwined, a blob of red with two heads. and we thought, "that's a pandrogyne, two becoming one." so we took it back to the other room. we hadn't said anything about the picture to anyone else, and we placed it face down by these drawers by the window, sat back down and in our chair about three or four feet away my daughters said, "are you going to come to california?" and as we were starting to say, "i don't think so," this picture rose up about four inches, floated across in front of me, turned the right way up and then settled between my feet. wow. gbp. and we went, "i guess we're staying here with lady jaye." we used to say to each other, "when one of us drops our body, we'll try and communicate from the other side," as it's called. but how would we know it's a real communication? so we had come up with three things: that it should be something that has witnesses so you can't imagine it, it should be something that has special meaning, and it has to be an incontrovertibly physical thing that happens. and so lady jaye managed to communicate from "death" in two days. how does our culture better come to terms with aging? how have your practices helped with this? gbp. that's difficult for me because we don't really feel that we're any part of the aging process. the body to me is a machine, and yes it's breaking down, but it always does. so we focus on consciousness and keeping it awake and alive and fluid and able to improvise and change. my mother lived to be 92 and she still did crossword puzzles in the newspaper, read novels every day, and lived on her own because she didn't think she was old. she used to go to the church group and say, "i'm going to help with the old people." and i would say, "oh really? how old are they?" "oh, they're all about 70." she was 20-odd years older, but to her they were the old people because of the way they surrendered to the stereotype. society and culture are basically used as weapons to steal our dreams, our daydreams, our expectations, our potential. they're all deflected or distracted or even censored because a society that has a pyramid power structure can only survive by suppressing those below. and so you always have the lowest common denominator at the top. the more stupid the person in charge, they'll then get people helping them who are even more stupid so they're not really a threat. and so you have this decay of quality and thinking and action. as it decays, then authoritarian solutions become the only way to maintain power. growing old relates to a system growing old, and often it's reflected in the individual. we spent a lifetime trying to be ready to improvise and see the strategies that are being used to attack or suppress you and not assume that you know the answer. you have to keep reassessing what's happening. people are hypnotized to think that old age is a time of surrender, that you're very lucky if you get to live in florida and have just enough money to buy food and play card games and dominoes, and if you don't have that much money you just live in a hovel as more or less a nuisance. it's not like that in other cultures. if you go to africa, they still have the extended family and age is equated with wisdom and knowledge and good advice, and that's true in nepal and tribal communities like the akha tribe and the semang in the jungles of burma. our society has broken that continuity deliberately. "divide and conquer" isn't just a war phrase. my advice would be to find people who are older than you or remember the people in your family that are older than you, and reconnect if you haven't got a good relationship and encourage them to look at life as more free time as you get older, with therefore more things to do, more freedom to think right. but people aren't given those skills in their education. their education is about training people to enter the job force at various levels in order to keep the economic machine running on behalf of those at the top. so wherever you go with culture or perceptions of age or how people think about life and death, it always comes back to how things are right now. as burroughs used to say to me, "if you want to know what's happening, look at the vested interest, and the vested interest is submission." they turn old age into a business where people are in homes and it becomes profit-making. people have to really be wary of being sucked into the way that things are presented and always analyze and critique. "is this really what i believe? is this what i think has happened? does my actual experience agree with this way of living or am i just going along with it?" what can you tell us about the "loyalty does not end with death" exhibition in australia? you weren't able to go to that, right? gbp. no, two days before we were due to fly out, we just felt really strange and got this strong, strong intuition that we shouldn't go, and that was when my kidneys failed. if i'd have gone, i would have been on the plane for 20 hours and my kidneys would have stopped working. i would have died. but some entity — maybe jaye — was whispering a very clear message. "don't go. it's dangerous." so we weren't able to go. we were going to do some lectures and some spoken word with music which had to be cancelled. the exhibition went ahead and in a way it's an homage to lady jaye and to our belief that the spirit, the soul, the consciousness truly is capable of maintaining a sense of individuality without a body. jaye is still part of my life guiding me, keeping me safe at moments like that, because she was a registered nurse, too. loyalty is what jaye said was the most attractive quality in another person, and we tend to agree. loyalty is incredibly precious. unconditional loyalty is almost like an alternate side of unconditional love and it doesn't end with physical death. that triggered the exhibition title. the continual bond relates to the pandrogyne project too. gbp. well, close friends at various times have all said that they felt lady jaye was guiding parts of their life or warning them about things in advance. she's very much alive to the people in our extended family and we all talk to her (laughs). they all think about her every day, that she's there, guiding and advising and hopefully waiting for me to join her. that would be amazing. i can't wait to go and see what the other dimensions are like. author biography tristan kneschke has written for a variety of arts publications including tiny mix tapes, hyperallergic, pop matters, metal sucks, decoder magazine, the wild honey pie and others. he was subrewind's former managing editor and has written extensively about video for no film school and premium beat. he enjoys traveling to places his mother has warned him about. tristan@tristanwrites.com www.tristanwrites.com references npr. 2014. “genesis, lady jaye and the pandrogyne”. npr.org. 20 june. <https://www.npr.org/2014/06/20/323955434/genesis-lady-jaye-and-the-pandrogyne> (accessed 7 october 2019). p-orridge, genesis breyer, and carl abrahamsson. 2010. thee psychick bible: thee apocryphal scriptures ov genesis breyer p-orridge and thee third mind ov thee temple ov psychick youth. edited by jason louv. port townsend: feral house. unclean pictures. 2019. "a message from the temple". kickstarter. <https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/uncleanpictures/a-message-from-the-temple> (accessed 8 october 2019). filmography mccarthy iii, hazel hill. 2016. bight of the twin. usa: the mill. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4145258/>. losier, marie. 2011. the ballad of genesis and lady jaye. france: adopt films, arsenal, epicentre films, godigital. <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1821635/>. dancecult 13(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 12(1) 2020: 143–158 issn 1947-5403 ©2020 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net exploring nightlife: space, society and governance jordi nofre and adam eldridge (editors) london: rowman and littlefield, 2018 300 pp. isbn: 978-1786603289 rrp: £32 <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.14> fiona hutton victoria university of wellington (new zealand) exploring nightlife is a fascinating and insightful volume exploring often overlooked issues related to the “night” and those who inhabit it. the concepts of nightlife, night time, and urban nightscapes are closely scrutinised by the diverse authors in this collection. nightlife for the purposes of this review is conceived as both the actual physical sites for the consumption of intoxicating substances and experiences, and as the location of such sites within city nightscapes. therefore, nightlife, as the authors in this book highlight, refers to more than physical venues. it is a more fluid concept that can also refer literally to life at night: how the urban landscape is transformed after dark, and how the city at night is consumed by its often-diverse populations. as the editors note in their introduction to the book, nightlife is not new, but the regeneration and gentrification of urban areas is a phenomenon that has taken on increased significance in the post-industrial era of neo-liberalism. such regeneration often has a relationship with nightlife, either by altering, sometimes radically, existing ebbs and flows of urban nightscapes or through the introduction and development of new nightlife areas and venues. the idea that this type of intervention and regeneration in inner city locations and other areas perceived as run down, risky and dangerous will “save” the area and its inhabitants while providing economic stimulation and profits is one that is critically interrogated in this volume. a variety of topics such as: harm reduction; power and resistance in city nightscapes throughout processes of gentrification and regeneration; resistance to regeneration as a form of social control; and the displacement of existing nightlife traditions, are explored by the authors in this volume providing a critical and nuanced discussion of some of the key themes related to nightlife and the city after dark. reviews https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.14 dancecult 13(1)144 a key theme running through many of the chapters in this volume is the success of regeneration and gentrification, and the typically dramatic effects these kinds of urban policies have on nightlife and those who inhabit(ed) urban nightscapes. several authors question these kinds of developments noting the displacement of important nightlife traditions to make way for allegedly new and improved ways of experiencing the spaces and places of the night. it is also notable that the capitalist model of economic revitalisation and profit is a key presence in schemes of regeneration and gentrification, in contexts that have previously had very different ways of approaching social life: for example, the socialist perspective of pre-war yugoslavia that viewed nightlife and leisure as important for human development, not as an escape from capitalist oppression of labour as noted by nihad cengic and jordi martin-diaz (54). the gentrification of nightlife after the bosnian war to accommodate new migrant groups as well as the emerging youthful middle classes, coupled with new kinds of state policies, radically altered the nightscapes of sarajevo, producing tensions between old and new residents of the city. as peta wolfison in chapter 2 notes class inequalities are often embedded in gentrification and regeneration developments, producing tensions between urban populations and antagonism towards city planners who have “ruined” previously thriving night time economies. similarly, in johhannesburg crystal oloukoi’s description, in chapter 1, of urban redevelopments and the symbolic violence wrought by gentrification paints a vivid picture of sanitised and surveilled spaces with previous inhabitants displaced to other parts of the city. a westernised view of nightlife is challenged by atepheh amid in chapter 5, through her discussion of the city of mashhad in iran. using religion as a lens to explore the redevelopment and gentrification of a particular part of mashhad that contains an important shrine, a different view of the night unfolds. a vibrant, thriving nightlife culture, built over centuries exists or existed in mashhad and the night was not associated with sin and immorality as it is in many western cultures. a 24-hour city was built around the arrival of pilgrims to visit the shrine at any time of the day or night, and places serving food or providing accommodation were bustling and numerous. the plan to redevelop this area to accommodate more pilgrims and visitors to the shrine is critiqued in this chapter with amid pointing to the negative impact on the local cultural and economic success of the area. the redevelopment has overwhelmed existing night time communities and failed to attract pilgrims to the new modernised area. similar to other chapters in this volume she points to the detrimental effects of gentrification on public night time spaces and the cultural diversity they engender. this volume therefore raises key questions around gentrification and regeneration such as who are they actually for and who do they benefit? although, more pertinent questions to ask may be who should they actually be for and who should they actually benefit? as noted in the example of amsterdam by irina van aalst and ilse van liempt in chapter 11. here “touristification” is viewed as problematic and as upsetting the balance between sex workers and residents in the red-light district of amsterdam. the redevelopment reviews 145 of this area of the city to reduce the visibility of sex work, to attract a more respectable class of tourist to the area, has had detrimental effects on the urban spaces/s and on the sex work industry. locals can no longer shop for essentials like bread in their newly developed upmarket environment, and sex work clients are scared away by the high level of tourism that makes clients of sex workers highly visible. here the impression is that urban development was outward facing in a global tourist context rather than inward facing for local residents and businesses, and raises the question of who should these kinds of regeneration and gentrification plans be aimed at? these are also issues raised by daniel malet calvo, joao carlos martins and inigo sanchez-fuarros in chapter 9 throughout their consideration of the “studentification” of lisbon through the presence of erasmus students. the commodification of the student experience has contributed to the segregation of urban nightlife between eramus and local students, while the gentrification of areas of the city offering commercialised student nightlife experiences continues the eviction and displacement of previous populations. it could be argued that areas with countercultural and resistance traditions are replaced with “controlled diversity” the phrase used by penny-panagiota koutrolikou in chapter 4 (79). however, perhaps encouragingly, calvo et al. also note that not all erasmus students flock to the commercialised experience with some preferring more diverse nightlife experiences. in chapter 4 penny-panagiota koutrolikou also notes issues of displacement of some populations through the gentrification process in her exploration of the nightlife developments in athens. the concept of “ghettos of the mind” is raised here in relation to fears about particular, often inner-city, neighbourhoods, exaggerated through media discourse and sensationalism. this chapter also raises questions about surveillance and control – are increased surveillance and control the price paid for gentrification and revitalisation of inner city and other run-down areas? new gentrified populations demand safety and reassurance through increased policing and control of undesirable pre-existing residents, as they experience newly developed residential and nightlife areas. as pertinently noted in this chapter, solutions to problems such as addiction and poverty are seen through repression and displacement, rather than through helping the populations that need it (77). resistance to regeneration and gentrification is also noted the brazilian context, in rio de jenerio by marcos paulo ferreria de gois, in chapter 13, with more intensive policing accompanying the revitalisation and redevelopment of urban areas, aiming to control unruly groups. the effect was to reduce the numbers of patrons visiting these newly developed areas at night, similar to the experiences in amsterdam, and “the heavy-handed actions, as a result, only worked as a stimulus for the creation of other night places, protected from the eyes of authority” (218). these kinds of observations bring to the fore the fluidity and flexibility of nightlife, and the perseverance of resistance in urban nightscapes. this perseverance of resistance is noted by some of the authors in this volume, notably samantha wilkinson in chapter 7 and jose sanchez-garcia in chapter 6. mahragan music is seen as resistance music, linked to working class male populations, and exists on the dancecult 13(1)146 margins of city nightscapes in cairo. mahragan enthusiasts are seen as misfits and the music as vulgar and uncivilised by those who want to present a westernised, cultured face to the global world. the endurance of mahragan music, its politics of resistance and challenge to dominant groups, signals that these hidden and underground spaces of the night time economy continue alongside the gentrification that often dramatically alters urban landscapes, echoed in the erasmus students who seek out “authentic” local experiences and resist more commercialised entertainment developments. the pleasures and harms related to alcohol and other drug intoxication are also explored in this edited collection. the choices of young people in two suburban areas in manchester, uk about where and how to consume alcohol may also be read as resistance to commercialised nightlife spaces from which they are excluded due to age, gender or class. young people in these under researched cultural contexts moved between spaces for alcohol consumption and a number of things played a part in their choices: others inhabiting the bars/pubs; the atmosphere; what kind of night out they wanted and so on. for those choosing to drink in outside spaces, such as parks, the freedom and excitement experienced were preferable to being in enclosed spaces. samantha wilkinson—in chapter 5—makes the important point that outdoor spaces were not necessarily used for drinking because young people had nowhere else to go – some groups of young people actively sought out and chose these kinds of places for alcohol consumption. her work also demonstrates that the nightscape is multi-faceted and complex with a number of different ways of engaging with suburban drinking environments, allowing a rejection of commercialised venues. marion roberts in her discussion in chapter 8 notes the gendered aspect of the night time economy with women struggling to find a (safe) space or place in this hyper masculine environment. intoxicated women face a number of issues, not least the accusation that they are inviting harms such as sexual violence by being intoxicated. often policies to make the night time playscape safer are gender neutral, ignoring the issues faced by women in particular, although roberts points to two promising initiatives based on improving mini-cab safety, and raising the profile of the unacceptability of sexual violence and harassment of women in nightlife venues. however, the challenge to undo deeply embedded notions of traditional masculinities and femininities in spaces of intoxication is fraught with tensions that “require concerted and explicit action to challenge” (143). the development and commercialisation of the leisure industry and night time spaces has led to the normalisation of the use of illicit drugs in some clubs and venues. the notion of pleasure, bound up with illicit intoxications, is explicitly engaged with by helena valente, christina vales pires and helena carvalho in chapter 12 in their exploration of harm reduction in the portuguese context. they focus on a peer based harm reduction organisation that offers advice to club and other party goers around alcohol and other drug use, and sometimes provides reagent testing of substances. the importance of engaging with discourses of pleasure is noted by the authors of this chapter, as well as the necessity reviews 147 of moving away from medicalised notions of harm reduction that are not necessarily appropriate for a mainly youthful population using drugs in a recreational manner. the success of this approach is demonstrated through interviews with users of the services, who note their behavioural change in terms of not mixing drugs, taking less of a substance or drinking less alcohol. reducing the harms related to the city nightscape and moving patrons successfully through their intoxication experiences is an important part of urban development that should not be forgotten or sidelined. it is clear from the chapters in this volume that the night is a complex phenomenon, entangled in a number of debates related to space and place as well as numerous social, cultural and historical contexts. the arguments presented by the authors in this edited collection raise important questions around gentrification and development of city nightscapes, not least who benefits or should benefit from these kinds of developments. sadly, it seems that often such developments sweep away existing thriving and diverse nightlife cultures displacing marginalised populations and moving them further to the outskirts of urban life. however, that resistance is still apparent speaks to the importance of diversity in shaping nightlife spaces and places, even if from the margins. this volume grapples with the thorny problems surrounding the development of nightlife, gentrification and regeneration in a global context, not least the complexities in developing nightscapes that are as risk free as possible, while maintaining diversity and respect for existing nightlife cultures – a highly recommended read. dancecult 13(1)148 dutch dance, 1988-2018: how the netherlands took the lead in electronic music culture mark van bergen (trans. andrew cartwright) amsterdam: mary go wild, 2018 320 pp. isbn: 9-789082-075854 rrp: €17.50 <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.15> sean nye university of southern california (us) in an iconic scene from the social network, young mark zuckerberg and napster-founder sean parker are sitting in a sleek dance club in san francisco. while discussing business, they are immersed in some hypnotic music bordering on progressive house or trance. the track is cassius’s “the sound of violence”, but as remixed by dennis de laat, a producer from the netherlands. moreover, de laat’s mix was released on a sublabel of spinnin’ records, one of the bestselling dance labels in the world—itself based in hilversum near amsterdam. that a dutch producer would soundtrack a key scene from a film concerned with big-tech entrepreneurship would come as no surprise to mark van bergen, the author of dutch dance, 1988-2018: how the netherlands took the lead in electronic music culture. the topic of this book is primarily the history and rise of dutch dance music both within holland and abroad. when exploring the lineups of major edm festivals over the last decade, the presence of global stars from the netherlands certainly stands out: tiësto, armin van buuren, martin garrix, afrojack, hardwell, chuckie, and nicky romero, to name a few. however, partly because of underground tendencies that avoid the commercial mainstream, edmc studies has scarcely touched on why and how these dutch stars came to have such prominence in dance pop. dutch dance is the first book in english to attempt a recounting of this history up through commercial success. the book is divided into four chapters, or “dance stages”, that explore the respective decades of this history, from the 1980s to the 2010s. a longtime journalist and lecturer on edm and the music industry, van bergen has assembled an impressive array of interviews and insider knowledge. dutch dance is also a long-time project, as this book is an expanded edition of an original 2013 publication that covered a 25-year history. van bergen’s publisher, mary go wild, is itself the publishing wing of a key dance store in amsterdam that was launched in 2013. mary go wild, as store and publishing house, resulted from a successful book launch of a volume of the same name. multiple books focusing on dutch dance have followed, the majority of which have not appeared in english (e.g. bergen 2013). https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.15 reviews 149 given this relative scarcity of english scholarly resources, questions of presenting and translating dutch dance history for an international audience are key. the volume’s strengths lie here in that it is primarily a scene history, with a wealth of details, although i will discuss some critical responses to the framing and analysis of this history. i recommend that readers focus on the insights into the music industry and the regional dance scenes discussed by van bergen. as an overarching history of four decades, the book explores key styles in dutch dance’s evolution. in the 1980s chapter, van bergen primarily explores the reception of disco, house, techno, and new beat in holland, emphasizing the foundations of dance music in queer and black american dance cultures. regarding the 1980s scene in holland, particular attention is given to pioneering djs such as eddy de clercq and joost van bellen at the amsterdam club roxy, as well as hillegonda rietveld’s experiences at the hacienda when house music exploded. van bergen promotes the notion of a dutch “autumn of love” as a response to the famed british “summer of love” in 1988. this idea resituates and complicates the uk focus in the development of rave culture, demonstrating a transnational evolution of rave across europe.1 in the 1990s chapter, van bergen shifts to a key period of transformation in dutch dance culture. he emphasizes the innovations of dutch gabber and hardcore, and the founding of the event organization id&t, which has had lasting marks on dutch dance to this day. importantly, van bergen does not forget holland’s key success at this time with respect to eurodance, exploring acts from twenty 4 seven to 2 unlimited, followed later by the vengaboys. such a focus demonstrates the long history of dance pop in holland beyond current edm stars. van bergen points out key features in 1990s rave, such as the links between gabber and soccer culture, as well as the full array of hardcore djs from paul elstak to gizmo. he further addresses the debates on the shift by paul elstak to happy hardcore, along with stars such as charlie lownoise and mental theo. still, critical limits to the national focus in this narrative emerge here. a number of transnational stories are left out. with respect to gabber, van bergen surprisingly only makes mention of inspirations from the belgian scene, with no discussion of the influences of marc acardipane and pcp records from frankfurt, as well as lenny dee and industrial strength in new york. in terms of techno and house, i would also have been interested in more discussion of the international networks of pioneering artists such as speedy j and miss djax. to be sure, there is a great deal to cover in this history, and van bergen lays important groundwork in addressing this decade. when he turns to the 2000s, important shifts are also highlighted. by the beginning of the 2000s, the massive influence of three dutch trance stars—tiësto, ferry corsten, and armin van buuren—could be observed, along with the refinement of gabber into the more accessible and popular genre of hardstyle. he also highlights the founding of another major events company, q-dance, in connection with hardstyle. important stories are recounted here in how various artist networks evolved: for example, ferry corsten’s production talents were combined with tiësto’s focus on djing. trance stars were also becoming dancecult 13(1)150 representative of a new transnational european identity, reflected in tiësto’s famous djset at the opening ceremonies of the 2004 summer olympics in greece. van bergen also reminds us of some major shifts in monetary and political organization that are sometimes not addressed in dance history—for example, the introduction of the euro in 2002, along with the continued expansion of the e.u. and the schengen area (172-73). these developments of trance and hardstyle then lead to the 2010s and the “fourth stage”, with the particular dutch stamp on edm pop with a new generation of stars such as martin garrix and hardwell, with major commercial success in the usa. indeed, this final chapter is properly called “vegas billboards”. van bergen emphasizes that “enormous billboards in hotspot cities like miami and las vegas display the faces of dutch djs” (234). i can attest to such billboards in hollywood, as well as on a visit to las vegas in 2013. images of tiësto, along with scottish star calvin harris, were displayed on the mgm grand casino in sizes equal to the announcements of david copperfield and cirque du soleil. however, despite the chapter’s title, i did not find many details on las vegas’s particular history, such as tiësto’s move to las vegas and his residency at club hakkasan at the mgm grand.2 still, in taking this review full circle back to the social network, van bergen at least discusses the rise and expansion of the aforementioned spinnin’ records as a global label and brand (249-256). beyond these detailed scene histories, however, the results in dutch dance when it comes to a critical analysis of the music industry and dance culture are decidedly mixed. the tone of the writing tends too much toward pop rhetoric. for example, van bergen states with casual positivity that dutch dance’s brand “has gone from strength to strength” (10). the constant mix of historical narration and interview quotations, some of which read like pr statements, does not provide enough variation in analysis. a troubling feature for scholars, there are also no footnotes or page number citations, so it can be difficult to locate van bergen’s sources (though a bibliography and an index are included). furthermore, there are repeated attempts to compare holland in the age of edm to the dutch golden age, which borders too much on clichés rather than a close analysis of dutch politics, culture, and economics since the 1970s. van bergen primarily positions the netherlands as a place of neoliberal entrepreneurship, with music little different from any other import cargo, which can be refined and sold around the globe (272–273). little critique regarding this is offered, although dutch edm stars have come under heightened scrutiny regarding cultural appropriation and the excesses of commercialization – more recently by house legend marshall jefferson.3 quite a number of underground dutch artists are left out of the picture in this later edm-star focus, though again, edmc scholarship has also not done enough to address the pop mainstream. how this history is framed and critiqued within the context of dance music and the current crisis in the festival economy will be ever more important. van bergen does, however, provide a detailed history across four decades, which demonstrates that major stars such as tiësto certainly did not emerge out of thin air. more research on dutch dance history and festival culture is needed, which hopefully reviews 151 will include translations of more recent memoires published by mary go wild and related organizations. notes 1 for a comparable discussion, see gert van veen’s “amsterdam’s autumn of love” in resident advisor: https://ra.co/features/1945 2 see the report in rolling stone in 2013: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/ tiesto-commits-to-long-term-residency-in-las-vegas-48833/ 3 see marshall jefferson, “why i quit djing”, in mixmag, 28 october, 2020. https://mixmag. net/feature/marshall-jefferson-why-i-quit-djing. reference van bergen, mark. 2013. dutch dance: 25 jaar dance in nederland. amsterdam: xander uitgevers. https://ra.co/features/1945 https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/tiesto-commits-to-long-term-residency-in-las-vegas-48833/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/tiesto-commits-to-long-term-residency-in-las-vegas-48833/ https://mixmag.net/feature/marshall-jefferson-why-i-quit-djing https://mixmag.net/feature/marshall-jefferson-why-i-quit-djing dancecult 13(1)152 the new age of electronic dance music and club culture anita jóri, martin lücke (editors) cham: springer, 2020 226 pp. isbn: 978-3-030-39001-3 (hb), 978-3-030-39004-4 (pb), 978-3-030-39002-0 (ebook) rrp: €103.99 (hb), €62.39 (pb), €85.59 (ebook) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.16> tom smith university of st andrews (united kingdom) in the time since the new age of electronic dance music and club culture was written, everything has changed for berlin’s nightlife and the world’s clubbing landscape. yet the ideas articulated in this edited volume still stand up to, and illuminate, the changes to clubbing brought by the pandemic and point to important considerations as clubs begin to contemplate emerging from shutdowns. anita jóri and martin lücke’s volume emerged from a conference in june 2017 held at berghain in berlin, which brought together academics with industry professionals. the breadth of discussions in this volume is a testament to the extraordinary cross-disciplinary work being undertaken to enhance and challenge our understandings both of berlin as a clubbing metropole and the wider electronic music industry. the project is inspired, in jóri and lücke’s words, by the belief that “scholars and practitioners should work more closely with each other in order to create a common language amongst them, thereby aligning research and practical fields” (2). the range of different written styles, personal reflections and academic insights is one of the strengths of the book, as are the many chapters that demonstrate the potential for analysing unconventional sources of knowledge on dance music to improve our understanding of the face-to-face and virtual networks around electronic music. contributors analyse online communities (youtube and facebook), work by activist collectives, bookshop bestseller lists and even techno music created live without recorded sound. this powerful case for drawing on different kinds of expertise shows how work on electronic music can contribute a great deal to similar trends across humanities scholarship today. the volume’s introduction describes the background to the conference and outlines the content of the articles. it avoids broader statements about the book’s contribution to existing scholarship, which rather undersells the important insights its authors and editors bring to the field both individually and collectively. some of the volume’s authors, too, could signal more clearly the potential reach of their ideas and methodologies and their significance for wider scholarly debates. this leaves readers to draw connections and trends between articles ourselves, but in some ways this approach is welcome, given that the authors and editors could not have foreseen the changes to the club industry so soon after the essays went to press. https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.16 reviews 153 one such connection is the closure or repurposing of clubs as physical spaces and the increase in virtual clubbing and musical communities. botond vitos’s proposed project on how music fans might use audio media to recreate club experiences in their personal spheres, for example, will have gained in salience over the course of the pandemic. jóri’s own contribution on facebook groups for collectors of the roland tb-303 bass line explores computer-mediated discourse analysis methods that will be of interest for scholars now researching the online club communities that have flourished during the pandemic, such as club quarantine, united we stream and keep hush. some reflection on the conference’s own setting at berghain would be interesting in this respect, given that the club’s physical space has been given over to art exhibitions since march 2020, with other berlin clubs like the kitkatclub even operating as test centres during the pandemic. the concern around gentrification and closures in berlin—a live issue since the earliest years of the twenty-first century—also takes on new urgency in 2021. of particular interest here are lukas drevenstedt’s piece on changes and gentrification in berlin and kata katz’s article about the closure of echo books. drevenstedt and katz both show that clubs and electronic music depend on a complex and “sensitive ecosystem” and call for recognition of the components that make up these musical worlds (10). further investigation is needed into musicians’ and nightclub proprietors’ creativity in the face of extreme, often prohibitive pressures caused by berlin’s rapid gentrification. these insights have acquired new international significance since the pandemic, with scholarship of this sort having an important role to play as clubs continue to respond to the hardships of 2020 and 2021. the volume’s focus on berlin is interesting and justified: the city plays such an important role in the world’s electronic music scenes, both as a symbolic centre and in terms of the opportunities it offers to djs, producers, club promoters and clubbers. the best contributions are those that “provincialise” berlin – to use dipesh chakrabarty’s term – not just as a place but an idea that means different things and is mobilised in different ways depending on context, both within and outside the city (2000: 3–6). such articles locate berlin scenes in their specific environment and resist the urge to extrapolate to other contexts, which can be tempting given berlin’s symbolic weight in electronic music culture. benedikt brilmayer’s history of electronic musical instruments, for example, situates important developments in berlin alongside significant innovations that came to berlin more belatedly. this work is a reminder that the city’s symbolic importance for clubbers is a relatively new development, historically speaking, but that it has nonetheless been a centre for musical developments over many years. ewa mazierska’s article analyses the symbolic, economic and stylistic importance of berlin for “musickers” (a neologism by christopher small encompassing musicians, other industry professionals, clubbers and fans (1998)) in vienna and cities in the west of poland. these local scenes demonstrate how berlin’s prestige in other european contexts is shifting and contingent. in fact, a strength of the volume is its differentiated focus specifically on austrian electronic music (bianca ludewig, mazierska, josef schaubruch), a context often overlooked in studies of club culture. dancecult 13(1)154 the volume is most clearly aligned with current scholarship on electronic music where it turns its attention to diversity and social justice in club scenes. ludewig’s article serves as a good introduction to this topic in berlin and austria, ranging widely from her feminist collective work with female:pressure and meetup berlin, through discussions of racism and whiteness in the telling of techno history in germany. patrick valiquet addresses the industry’s gendered assumptions and hierarchies—both implicit and explicit—in his analysis of darsha hewitt’s youtube pedagogy. katz asks just how radical the crowds are at berlin’s many protest parties, a question that has gained relevance given some of the berlin scene’s responses to 2020’s black lives matter protests (kirn 2020). reflecting on these articles, i found myself asking similar questions of material from elsewhere in the volume: jóri’s examples suggesting further possible conclusions about how masculinity works in online communities around electronic music, and lücke raising the question of how quantitative surveys might contribute insights around gender, race and class to understanding the social component of club scenes. it would be interesting to reflect on how the articles in this volume fit alongside work on other genres of electronic music in germany and austria. i think, for example, of research on hip-hop in the german context (e.g. el-tayeb 2003; weheliye 2009; saied 2012), on germany’s reggae and dancehall scenes (aikins 2005; pfleiderer 2018) or on eurodance (thom 2016), which allow a more expansive definition of ‘electronic dance music cultures’. the new age of electronic dance music and club culture will be welcomed by students and scholars in many disciplines working on berlin, austria, electronic music and popular music, social media, and many topics besides. individual articles will no doubt find a home on course reading lists: ludewig’s already features on my own course on german popular music and articles like lücke’s and brilmayer’s function as potentially useful reference works for statistics and historical information around electronic music in berlin. the book is meticulously referenced, and its bibliographies provide a wealth of further reading. taken as a whole, the volume provides insights into many of the ongoing questions guiding current scholarly debates, and even as those debates shift in response to the pandemic, these essays suggest where our future enquiries might go. references aikins, joshua kwesi. 2005. “wer mit feuer spielt . . . aneignung und widerstand – schwarze musik/kulturen in deutschlands weißem mainstream”. in mythen, masken und subjekte: kritische weißseinsforschung in deutschland, ed. maureen maisha eggers, grada kilomba, peggy piesche and susan arndt, 283–300. berlin: unrast. chakrabarty, dipesh. 2000. provincializing europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference. princeton, nj: princeton university press. reviews 155 el-tayeb, fatima. 2003. “‘if you can’t pronounce my name, you can just call me pride’: afrogerman activism, gender and hip hop”. gender and history 15(3): 460–86. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0953-5233.2003.00316.x>. kirn, peter. 2020. “no love parades this time: in the midst of crisis, an image of tonedeaf ravers in berlin”, cdm, 1 june. <https://cdm.link/2020/06/crisis-and-racism-in-berlin/>, (accessed 18 june 2021). pfleiderer, martin. 2018. “soul rebels and dubby conquerers: reggae and dancehall music in germany in the 1990s and early 2000s”. popular music 37(1): 81–99. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143017000587>. saied, ayla güler. 2012. rap in deutschland: musik als interaktionsmedium zwischen partykultur und urbanen anerkennungskämpfen. bielefeld: transcript. small, christopher. 1998. musicking: the meanings of performing and listening. middletown, ct: wesleyan university press. thom, nico. 2016. “the popularization of electronic dance music: german artists/producers and the eurodance phenomenon”. in perspectives on german popular music, ed. michael ahlers and christoph jacke, 111–5. new york: routledge. weheliye, alexander. 2009. “my volk to come: peoplehood in recent diaspora discourse and afro-german popular music”. in black europe and the african diaspora, ed. darlene clark hine, trica danielle keaton, and stephen small, 161–79. chicago: university of illinois press. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0953-5233.2003.00316.x https://cdm.link/2020/06/crisis-and-racism-in-berlin/ https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143017000587 dancecult 13(1)156 join the future: bleep techno and the birth of british bass music matt anniss london: velocity press, 2019 300 pp. isbn: 978-1-9132-3100-2 rrp: £14.99 <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.17> ian trowell independent scholar matt anniss’ book on the bleep scene feels like an extension or output of warp records, exuding the purple colour scheme that distinguished the sheffield label from its outset. it takes its title from the early (and somewhat overlooked) record release from tuff little unit and employs the sans serif font and simple design of tight blocky design with italicised elements seen on early releases such as the lfo album frequencies. the label, established in 1989 as both a continuum and fresh direction of previous initiatives such as fon (a studio, a label and a shop), initially became the imprimatur of the bleep sound. anniss grew up through this scene and clearly holds on to its importance. his book draws heavily on his recent journalism work for the red bull music academy where he has been documenting the early experiments and activists in this yorkshire scene. he writes in an impassioned and detailed style, the narrative constantly driven by both the author’s own feelings for the scene and a need to establish himself as an original participant in it. at times it feels as if the book is written for a cohort of believers who keep the faith, like an updated occurrence of the northern soul mythology. there is an important rationale to the book, as anniss argues for re-assessing the historical understanding of this scene within the wider complex chronology of dance music. he has a point here, and he sets out to demolish myths, redress historical versions, timeframes and figures, and re-situate the northern origins of bleep. this intent is signalled early on, where anniss sets out the official version of “british dance music finding a distinctive voice” (6) with a when (1991) and a where (london). the originators and perpetrators of this version of history are not initially called out, though simon reynolds’ go-to work on dance music energy flash is clearly the main culprit. reynolds’ book, dense and magisterial, covers bleep and the sheffield scene in an eight-page section within the chapter “second wave of rave 1990-1992” (reynolds 1998: 97-104). anniss ultimately calls out reynolds, whilst acknowledging his pioneering work, towards the end of the book where reynolds is accused of mixing cause and effect, downplaying the north and overplaying the south (238). this version of events set out by reynolds—his hardcore continuum within a wider lineage of dance music linking detroit, chicago, new york and the uk—proliferates as an authoritative discourse, in some way a testament to reynolds’ powerful writing. anniss does not list the numerous sources that peddle this accepted version of events, but examples https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.17 reviews 157 are plentiful. for a typical (recent) case, richard king’s the lark ascending sees uk rave culture having the simplistic lineage of ibiza clubbers pioneering the balearic scene and moving on to set up the london club shoom (king 2019: 267). end of story. anniss conducts his careful counter-history, exploring what michel foucault considers as the important rupture points, unearthing an “archaeology of a silence” (macey 2019: 95). this is both a noisy silence of dance music at full volume, and a silent noisiness as the sub-bass that defines the bleep scene is often felt through the vibrations that engulf the body and surrounding environment of the nightclub. there is a constant trope throughout all of anniss’ interviews regarding the severity of the bass sound; stories of household hifi speakers unable to detect the sound, of studio engineers saying it’s more than my job’s worth to cut the record, of club spaces and glass fittings dangerously vibrating as the white labels are played out for the first time. the bass horror script of blown out equipment and speakers, akin to star trek’s scotty engine-room scenario, is an apocryphal story that crops up in many testimonies of dance music. the book is structured in four parts named after classic bleep records, riffing on (or more appropriately, sampling from) the warp catalogue. the first part, covered in four chapters, is most interesting for me, and anniss works hard to craft a different history to the bleep sound, establishing his counter-narrative to rave mythology. he covers the cultural, social, political and topographical background of the places and spaces that gave rise to this sound, settling on three pivotal ideas. firstly, the north of england in the second and third terms of thatcher’s government, depicted as a kind of war mentality with left wing councils such as sheffield offering youth opportunities in arts. secondly, anniss carves out an interstitial place in the subcultural slew of the early 1980s, a post-northern soul fandom that was previously hindered by racist attitudes. new protagonists repopulate the husk of the scene in the early 1980s to hold jazz-funk all-dayers, dance competitions, the nurturing of dance crews. this quickly leads to an embrace of the nascent electro and break-dancing scene around 1983, with venues such as nottingham’s rock city and its saturday afternoon sessions offering an important beacon. thirdly, anniss documents the important role of sound system culture, the lovers rock and dub genres, and the illicit and distinctive blues club scene. anniss identifies a convergence of these trends, giving rise to clubs such as jive turkey in sheffield. further influences are added such as the championing of house music around 1986 and the influx of a small cohort of fashion obsessed northern hooligans or grafters noted for stealing and dealing designer goods. some of these peripheral characters are clustered on an ibiza scene, but two years before it became famed for the balaeric sound. anniss touches upon the importance of fashion without significant detailing – there is mention of jive turkey being very dressy and, from experience, i’d say this was something of an understatement! the second part of the book documents the key activists, chapter by chapter. manchester’s gerald simpson (a guy called gerald) takes the chronological priority with his 1988 track voodoo ray proving a club hit and eventually breaking into the mainstream charts. anniss suggests that this provokes a response from sheffield, who admired the record, dancecult 13(1)158 giving birth to bleep. this movement is carefully tracked through bradford’s unique 3 who release theme in late 1988, leeds based nightmares on wax who debut in 1989, their city colleagues lfo from 1990, and importantly sheffield’s forgemasters who provide warp’s inaugural release track with no name. part three of the book documents the spreading out of the scene, starting close to home with the relatively overlooked sheffield label ozone, and then radiating out to midlands based network, luton’s chill, the wider bleep and breaks movement, and finally an overseas perspective. part four is anniss’ take on the decline and legacy of the scene, taking the castle morton 1992 rave as a watershed (the moment where king commences his writing). anniss suggests a split into darkcore/jungle and happy hardcore/rave, such that bleep and bass has an increasingly vestigial presence. there are some insurmountable problems. the elephant in the room concerns warp’s disputed origins and divergent versions of an acrimonious break up, hindered by co-founder steve beckett’s declining to be interviewed. whereas beckett contributes to both reynolds’ overarching work, and rob young’s labels unlimited focus on warp, anniss powers on and is driven by his enduring closeness to the scene, sharing spliffs with the protagonists as they recall hazy nights in bedroom studios and dub-plate mayhem. anniss doesn’t proffer any academic or subcultural theory, though his historical approach of testimony and anecdote glimpses oversights and omissions. there is little contemporaneous source material apart from a single i-d report on the northern bleep scene. further, in 1990 a clutch of warp releases made significant inroads into the mainstream charts, jockeying with early 1990s dance-era novelty records such as mc hammer, partners in kryme’s turtle power, fab and mc parker’s thunderbirds tribute and timmy mallett’s glib sampling of early house records. both tricky disco and lfo climbed the charts, sharing similar videos of cut-up scenes from early cinematography and eadweard muybridge stop-motion photography. none of this recalled or analysed by anniss. the pace is urgent, intense and breathless, with dot-to-dot detail of dance spaces, club names, tracks and dance moves. anniss takes an occasional moment to stop and sample the air, such as on snake pass between manchester and sheffield (64) or at park hill flats for a brutalist memoir to accompany the concluding paragraphs. anniss forgoes an index for a pure chronographical time-line that carries the book through, mimicking the urgency of a dub-plate record – a desire to get the thing out there as soon as it is produced. references king, richard. 2019. the lark ascending: the music of the british landscape. london: faber & faber. macey, david. 2019. the lives of michel foucault. london: verso. reynolds, simon. 1998. energy flash: a journey through rave music and dance culture. london: picador. exploring personal spectres in electronic music dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 14(1): 2–22 issn 1947-5403 ©2022 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.01 exploring personal spectres in electronic music gareth whitehead the university of surrey (uk) abstract in keeping with derrida’s concept from specters of marx, this study reconceptualises hauntological approaches in electronic music composition. although hauntology has stimulated interest in a variety of artistic disciplines previously, including music (see for example schofield 2019), this research presents an alternative approach to engage with hauntological themes. it accomplishes this by presenting a portfolio of unique musical compositions that examine how the creative process is influenced by the ghosts of personal connections and influences. the portfolio emphasises how the creative process components serve as auditory signifiers that summon ghosts from the past, generating layers of meaning and exhibiting a positive interaction with nostalgia. these approaches aim to broaden and deepen our understanding of how derrida’s spectres are expressed in electronic music production, highlighting existing practice and offering current and prospective musicians a different creative process methodology that allows them to connect more deeply and profoundly with the music they make. keywords: derrida; hauntology; nostalgia; electronic music composition gareth whitehead is a university of surrey phd candidate. his research aims to explore how personal meaning and hauntology affect the creative process of electronic music composition. in addition to his studies, he is an electronic music producer, dj, label owner and lecturer at new college lanarkshire. website: https://www.bulletdodgerecords.com/ email: gareth@bulletdodgerecords.com feature article https://www.bulletdodgerecords.com/ mailto:gareth@bulletdodgerecords.com whitehead | exploring personal spectres in electronic music 3 in this study, hauntological approaches in electronic music composition will be given a new interpretation. i will discuss existing hauntological themes in uk electronic music and exhibit a portfolio of my own work to demonstrate how my methodology differs from that of other practitioners throughout the literature. in my inquiry, i am not seeking to invoke cultural memories or historical aesthetics. instead, i will explore how personal connections and influences impact the creative process, expediting how ghosts are relocated from shared cultural to the personal. furthermore, i will demonstrate how the hauntings of relationships and influences pervade the creative process by engaging with different components that sonically reference elements of my past. this method will expose a deeper meaning within the creative process concealed from the listener whilst engaging positively with nostalgia. jacques derrida’s hauntology the concept of hauntology posited by jacque derrida in his 1993 book specters of marx explores how the past returns in the manner of a ghost to haunt the present. he argues that political, social or cultural historical constituents persistently return as revenants, presenting themselves differently each time (derrida 2011). moreover, they cultivate a temporal and ontological severance in which an adjourned non-origin substitutes presence. the book was written after the fall of the berlin wall and the cessation of communism in western europe. it is primarily a response to the theorist francis fukuyama’s the end of history and the last man (2006) which declares that capitalism has conquered communism. however, derrida disagreed with this assumption and presents the opinion that although communism is in decline, its apparition still haunts and permeates western society. he argues that even though communism’s institutions have dissipated, its ideas are prevalent, existing like a ghost without a body (derrida 2011). although hauntology in the first instance implies ghosts and apparitions, derrida uses the term hauntology to also infer being, the essence of existence. specters of marx was written and first published in french, and because the ‘h’ in hauntology is silent, hauntology and ontology have the same pronunciation, hence, a pun on ontology was employed. according to derrida, cultural, political or personal ghosts of our past always infiltrate the present (derrida 2011). therefore, being and haunting are interlaced; as coverley posits, “to be is to be haunted” (coverley 2020: 8). davis states that insofar as it inhabits the territory of the “levinasian other”, hauntology is an entirely unreconcilable intrusion into our reality that is incomprehensible to us according to our existing cognitive constructs but whose otherness we are responsible for maintaining (2005: 373). similarly, as gray asserts, derrida’s idea of hauntology is an ethical need to maintain otherness even if we are unable to completely understand it, and it has nothing to do with a belief in actual ghosts (2022: 1). an anguish of the other appears simultaneously as an absence and a presence that frequently surpasses our comprehension. however, although invisible, this other nonetheless makes an imprint on us and implores us to act (gray 2022). dancecult 14(1)4 moreover, gray (2022) argues that hauntology can be the result of memory (which in and of itself is a spectre of heritage), of legacy ghosts or of specific people who are neither present nor currently living to us, in us or outside of us. reminiscence has a particular sense of non-contemporaneity since the things that are remembered or celebrated are “neither here nor there” (gray 2022: 2). sonic hauntology and uk electronic music hauntology has been a concept of great interest in a wide range of creative disciplines, especially music (for example, see schofield 2019). rather than being an entrenched musical genre with defined boundaries, it is more a feeling evoked by creatively engaging with contrasting societal remnants of a previous epoch. although hauntology does not pertain to a particular genre of music, sexton (2012) writes that certain styles, due to their technological persuasions, adopt hauntological themes more easily. production methods and digital technology permit the re-emergence of the past to create sonic temporal displacement. electronic music artists have been able to explore hauntological themes with less effort for over 30 years because it has been possible to, quite easily, sample music from different historical periods (sexton 2012: 562). from the early 1980s, digital sampling allowed practitioners to extract elements of tracks using sophisticated hardware samplers to capture audio from cd, vinyl and cassette. coupled with audio production software in the late 1990s, this process made sampling even more effortless (sexton 2012: 562). hauntings of one era could exist alongside hauntings of another, creating temporal disparity. theorist mark fisher and his contemporaries coined the term sonic hauntology (fisher 2013: 44) to describe music that has hauntological themes. they propounded that it produces temporal contrasts by montaging previous periods of the twentieth century with modern day production techniques (fisher 2014: 21). sonic hauntology is typically associated with specific electronic music musicians from the united kingdom who sample british media sound sources and incorporate them into their music, with their objective to create spectral sounds that elicit profound shared cultural memories (fisher 2014: 21). many artists have been associated with sonic hauntology because of the methods they use to engage with hauntological themes (see fig. 1). artist(s) works genre methods used to engage with hauntological themes boards of canada music has the right to children (boards of canada, 1998) idm, electronic, downtempo they generate fictitious memories by sampling public announcements and sounds from 1970s television shows (reynolds, 2011). position normal stop your nonsense (position normal, 1998) electronic, leftfield, abstract music made by sampling a variety of music with a personal connection (reynolds, 2011). caretaker/ leyland kirby selected memories from the haunted ballroom (caretaker, 1999) theoretically pure anterograde amnesia (caretaker, 2005) death of rave (kirby, 2014) experimental, ambient uses ballroom music from the 1920s and 1930s. inspired by the phenomena of forgetfulness, alzheimer's, and dementia – experiments with the brain's challenge to recall instances from the distant and near past (reynolds, 2011). whitehead | exploring personal spectres in electronic music 5 william basinski the disintegration loops (basinski, 2001) experimental, minimal, ambient historical tape loop recordings that have been digitised. they deteriorated as a result of the method utilised to preserve them. with each pass through the magnetic heads, the tape deteriorated, generating an audible effect and hauntings of the old format on the sound recordings. reverb was used to enhance the spectrality of the sound (balfour, 2018). focus group (ghost box records) sketches and spells (focus group, 2004) hey let loose your love (focus group, 2005) electronic sources audio from 1960s library music (sexton, 2012) burial untrue (burial, 2007) electronic, dubstep ; future garage vinyl crackling is sampled to showcase an out-of-date technology in combination with modern production techniques, bringing the ghosts of the past into the present. he takes voices from uk garage and jungle music from the 1990s and transforms them into something unrecognisable, bringing their ghosts into the present (fisher, 2014). uses video games, rainfall and urban recordings to creates empty dystopian city soundscapes. advisory circle (ghost box records) mind how you go (advisory circle, 2005) electronic, experimental, ambient the audio of uk public information films and programmes for schools and colleges from the 1970s are examined (sexton, 2012). mordant music dead air (mordant music, 2006) leftfield, abstract, grime, electro, industrial used library music, early 90s uk techno, and early pirate radio electronic music were all inspirations. used philip elsmore's voice. was a continuity announcer on uk television in the 1970s (reynolds, 2011). pye corner audio sleep games (pye corner audio, 2012) entangled routes (pye corner audio, 2021) electronic, experimental ambient music from the bbc radiophonic workshop and libraries are used. attempts to make the audio sound aged and worn. analogue recording technologies and hardware are used. explores historical sci-fi theme music (pattison, 2021). figure 1. a selection of practitioners who engage with hauntological themes. fisher (2013) argues that a common thread amongst artists who engage with hauntological themes is cultural recollection. this is demonstrated by scottish electronic music act boards of canada, who are regarded by reynolds as one of the first artists to experiment with hauntological themes in their work (2011: 330). they integrate sampled british public broadcasting media from the 1960s and 1970s and children’s television programmes to induce common nostalgic childhood memories. another example of a practitioner who explores the cultural past by injecting musical and cultural influences from previous periods into his work dancecult 14(1)6 is the caretaker, who takes his name from jack nicholson’s character in stanley kubrick’s the shining. his haunted ballroom trilogy (1999) dispenses nostalgia through his music by sampling early 20th century uk ballroom music. fisher demonstrates that he slows the samples down and applies different time domain effects to create a sense of memory play, extracting and transforming them into less recognizable musical presentations (2014: 121). ghost box records, synonymous with hauntology, are instrumental in disseminating music that explores shared cultural memories, having released artists like belbury poly, the focus group, the advisory circle and others. it uses music and imagery to support the idea that society is now living in an illusory past. the media content that the label’s artists use are relics from another world, to create cultural allusions all occurring at the same time to create temporal displacement and conjure nostalgia for a future that never came (sexton 2012: 564). they have been influenced by uk post-war cultural media such as early library music, public address materials, instructional films, and the 1960’s and 1970’s penguin and peloquin paperback children’s book aesthetics as well as the sounds of the bbc radiophonic workshop (fisher 2014: 22). radiophonic workshop contributor, delia derbyshire’s work can also emphasise how patriarchal perspectives have shaped the perception of hauntology. according to morgan (2017), women manifest in hauntology as intangible voices, ghostly controllers of archaic technology and idealised depictions of a post-war britain. morgan examines this further by setting delia derbyshire’s music and persona in the context of hauntology’s obsession with the past and its sonic traces (2017: 19). male perspectives have predominated in the hauntological themes investigated, particularly with regard to early life experiences and technology (which has depoliticized hauntology to some extent). as a step toward future research into the gendered and temporal relations at play within a phenomenon that has thus far lacked a “feminist critique”, these perspectives need to be challenged (morgan 2017: 20). in addition to hauntology being presented through a patriarchal lens, fisher asserts that sonic hauntology advocates a sense of what freud would define as melancholia (fisher 2014: 22). according to the freudian interpretation, melancholia is the result of losses that are so severe that they are transferred to the subconscious; there they remain imperceptible to the conscious mind. melancholia is usually associated with feelings of unpleasantness, sadness, depression when reminiscing and yearning for a previous point in time. for fisher, hauntological melancholia searches for the modern-day ghost as well as for adjustments and unstable components (kolioulis 2015: 67). fisher (2013) and reynold’s (2011) hauntological perspectives respond to what they see as a neoliberal by-product. they claim that because we are so fixated on the past, we are haunted by futures that do not materialise. we have arrived at a point in history when culture evolves without profoundly changing, and politics is reduced to the preservation of a pre-existing capitalist system (fisher 2014: 19). when listening to music from the 21st century, the fundamental idea of a paradigm shift and “futuristic force”, in fisher’s opinion, has evaporated (kolioulis 2015: 68). whitehead | exploring personal spectres in electronic music 7 fisher (2014) believes that the work of artist burial eloquently personifies this notion. he highlights burial’s work, emphasising how his practice can be interpreted as a symbol of political and cultural paralysis. much of burial’s influence comes from the uk hardcore, garage, and drum ‘n’ bass genres of the 1990s, as well as their respective rave events. through his music he is trying to recapture the longing for that period because to him it is nostalgic and has deeper personal meaning. he was too young at the time to attend any of the raves; however, his older brother would frequent some of them, buy the records, and thus expose burial to the culture (kolioulis 2015). much of burial’s music explores temporal detachment because he is trying to recreate experiences and phenomena associated with rave culture and the post rave fallout (fisher 2014). for example, in his night bus track he summons the isolation experienced travelling home from a club during the early hours of the morning, traversing london’s outer zones. he was depicting a time, prior to london’s 24-hour underground service, where the only option for some clubbers to get home was by the public transport service. many clubbers would dwell in the city’s cheaper outer areas, and as expensive taxis were not an option, the late-night bus was the only mode of transport possible. he creates the afterglow feeling of the club, where everything is warm and bright, combined with the intermittent industrial sounds of the city. fisher writes that burial’s creative statement is as much about the literal bus journey as it is about the notion that we are collectively all on the metaphorical night bus journey home from the 90s (reynolds 2011: 394). burial sonically posits the notion that we have been left a future with no possibilities. it is crucial to introduce gilroy’s (2006) concept of post-colonial melancholia, which emphasises the systemic disease of post-colonial politics rather than melancholia as a subjective feeling of loss. in addition to the hatred and violence directed towards black people, immigrants and foreigners, melancholic emotions have made it difficult to respect the commonplace, disorderly multiculture that has grown up undetected in metropolitan areas (fisher 2015: 24). a sense of loss and nostalgia for the past empires, particularly the british, exists. in a musical context, this can even happen unintentionally, as is reported in van straaten’s (2012) analysis of the amsterdam psytrance party scene. the research finds that attendees wish to return to occasions that provided the cosmopolitan sensory aesthetic. such sentimental expressions of nostalgia might be interpreted as cultural practises that shape the cultural present and a hope for a future based on an imaginary history. certain nostalgia appears to provide an environment where people may perceive themselves to be devoid of persistent post-colonial injustices (van straaten 2012: 76). these hauntological and post-colonial issues are further addressed through the historical, scientific and cultural notion of afrofuturism, which investigates the links between african diaspora culture, science and technology. it investigates themes and issues of the african diaspora through technology culture and futuristic fiction, focusing on a variety of media and artists that share an interest in creating black futures that are shaped by afro-diasporic experiences (eshun 2003). according to fisher, the same type of temporal disjunction that has been a feature of the afrodiasporic experience confronts white society through postmodernity and hauntology (2013: 46). this has been the case ever since the first dancecult 14(1)8 africans were taken captive by slave traffickers and propelled into the fictional space-time temporal injunction of capital. slaves are therefore already a part of the future rather than being remnants of the past (fisher 2013: 46). there have been some descendants of sonic hauntology; hypnogogic pop is regarded as its us equivalent. however, unlike hauntology it does not centre around electronic music or sampling nostalgic cultural media. instead, hypnagogic pop originated in the mid-tolate 2000s when musicians such as ariel pink and james ferraro from the lo-fi and noise genres began to borrow music and its related culture from the 1970s to the early 1990s that they recalled from their childhood (reynolds 2011: 346). they would hear this music being played by their parents or on radio and tv shows like mtv, so it was not only a personal memory but a collective one. its primary objective was not to diligently recreate the music of that period, as some revivalist movements do, but to articulate a thread of resemblance that conveys the imprecision of the memory (maël and philippe 2014: 77-78). hypnagogic pop distinguishes itself from revivalist movements in this way because it reassembles a collective memory that is true to the actual idea of the memory rather than the original work (maël and philippe 2014: 77-78). similarly, common features of the recordings were the usage of obsolete analogue equipment to record the music, effects such as reverb and distortion, a diy approach to distribution through community or internet blogs and the use of tape cassettes (reynolds 2011: 345-51). more recently, the dispensing of nostalgia through music has been further emphasised by vaporwave, which arose online in forums like turntable.fm. initially distributed using commercial cloud-based file-hosting platforms it then grew in prominence over time because of websites like bandcamp and last.fm (born and haworth 2017: 640). as trainer (2016) concedes, vaporwave can be defined as a sonic and visual exploration of 1980s and 1990’s culture, collocating various mediums such as films, tv programmes or video games to create downtempo, ambient music.  born and haworth (2017) acknowledge that the internet’s history record becomes a crucial element for vaporwave aesthetics. it uses paradoxical refactoring of sounds, visuals and cultural media from the internet’s heritage to engage with technical notions of the present and recent past. many vaporwave artists use music from adverts or video games that characterise a moment in time. much of what vaporwave musicians’ sample is mass-produced cultural media, which is then augmented with reverb to musically recreate a distant recollection. glitsos  (2017) presents the idea that vaporwave plays with the idea of nostalgia, encouraging the listener to yearn for a time and place that never existed. as ballam–cross (2021) claims, memories elicited by vaporwave are based on false portrayals of reality and focus on periods and places that may only exist in the mind of the listener. it is based on an odd sort of nostalgia that might include hyper-specific recollections of popular culture associated with a listener’s youth, as well as a nebulous, abstract desire for a memory of theirs that was never lived. the assumed past may also intersect with the listener’s childhood recollections, blending their own and others’ memories (winston and saywood 2014). and as glitsos (2017) proposes, vaporwave is a sense of creating artificial nostalgia by playing on the allusion of recollection. whitehead | exploring personal spectres in electronic music 9 engaging with nostalgia as has already been discussed, nostalgia is a common thread among artists that work with hauntological themes. this could portray nostalgia in a negative light since it is mostly a yearning for a future that never arrived. similarly, as wu (2010) reinforces, the displacement, segmentation and instability that characterise the late modern age have given rise to a particular sort of nostalgia that lacks any concrete or sensory points of reference. instead, it is based on the lack of and yearning for a cultural foundation that is both absent and desired. this real history, which was admittedly an imagined past, was in stark contrast to their own actual reality (wu 2010: 66). however, janelle lynn wilson (2015) proposes that engaging with the past can be positive. nostalgia can be spatially grounded and become embodied when we recall or remember it. that is, we retain the location and time of a memory, as well as the lived experience associated with it. this sentimental recall is a true remnant of the past’s existence, a relic of a lived history and can be an instrument for reconstructing diverse pasts and futures, rather than a passive craving for yesterday (wilson 2015: 490). in addition, as hertz (1990) points out, the sensation of nostalgia also brings to the forefront significant people in our lives, allowing for the re-establishment of ties with them. the links may therefore be representational and afford for nostalgic rumination as wilson infers (2015: 489). similarly, holak and havlena’s (1992) study of nostalgic narratives shows that nostalgia is a personal sensation which arouses recollections involving connections with key people throughout critical life events. in line with wing-yee cheung’s (2013) and denora’s (1999) research, nostalgia can link one’s own history, present and future, leading to a feeling of identity and self. similarly, nostalgia may be a beneficial resource for people who desire to maintain a sense of selfcontinuity, allowing a person to construct their own identity during the adolescent years of discovery and self-creation in particular, as mulder et al. (2010) imply. according to arno van der hoeven (2018), positive recollections and nostalgia can be vital in developing sentiments of connection, because it can make significant links between the past, present and future. as a result, nostalgia maintains a sense of self-cohesion which is stressed further by fine and davis (1980), who state that consciously recalling one’s history enables one to observe oneself progressing through time, permitting the current self to be moulded by the former self. pickering and keightley (2006) propose that this decisive memory recall allows individuals to actively create a narrative order for themselves out of the placed past. it is crucial to also acknowledge how culture engages with nostalgia. to quote van der hoeven, “we have to look at how traces of the past prevail in our culture and how audiences and cultural industries use these to construct cultural narratives” (2014: 320). in keeping with this, elodie roy’s (2014) study introduces the idea that nostalgia can be productive, allowing musicians to reimagine the history of popular music in ways that are meaningful to them. this opposes to postmodernist analyst frederic jameson’s (2009) claim that nostalgic media narratives contribute to cliched depictions of the past and historical dementia. dancecult 14(1)10 an example of a musical work that has a positive relationship with the cultural past, according to rees (2021), is daft punk’s 2013 album random access memories. it feeds on nostalgia by enabling daft punk to record a disco album that sounds like it belongs in the 1970s and 1980s. rather than sampling works from the era, they performed all the instruments live while collaborating with a few noteworthy disco performers, most notably nile rodgers. it highlights daft punk’s deeper approach to the creative process, and positively engages with nostalgia. portfolio of work i will now present a portfolio of my original work to show how my approach varies from existing hauntological themes in uk electronic music, offering an alternative interpretation. my portfolio consists of four pieces—the brood, “nineteen92”, “i am with you” and “things happen”—to exemplify how the creative process may have a hidden depth with layers of meaning that are not always evident to the listener on the surface. consequently, i will aim to reveal how the individual operation of electronic music craft transcends the product’s consumption and how it can be impacted by a person’s unique life, musical and interpersonal experiences. relationships with different people in my life and my involvement with music have shaped me as an individual and furnished me with meaning. using a variety of techniques, i invoke historical ghosts that signify these connections. the work will argue that memory can pervade the present as a hauntological phantom, in line with gray (2022), where the apparitions invoked by collaboration, interacting with devices, utilising online video content and abstracted recording processes are investigated. when i recall, there is a sense of non-contemporaneity since the things that are remembered or celebrated are neither here nor there. as a result, it will display a complicated interplay of boundaries whilst causing the anguish of the other to be sensed. my work, like derrida’s hauntology, merges the present with a historical narrative, bringing the past into the present while the present vanishes with the unmet promise of the future. both hauntological and simultaneously positive nostalgic themes are explored in my work. since it examines the past in a positive light rather than lamenting a loss for what was, i will demonstrate how the work is not melancholic. i will examine how spectres vacillate between presence and absence, facilitating replication, fragmenting and undermining its essential capacity to accurately represent something that is no longer there. the ghosts will evolve from being one theme among many to serving as the fragile foundation for all forms of representation and narrative interactions. this exemplifies how the work far surpasses just a nostalgic engagement. the brood: meaningful collaboration with relevant practitioners and technology interaction the brood, which investigates hauntological topics through meaningful relationships with relevant practitioners and technological involvement, is the first project i will discuss. whitehead | exploring personal spectres in electronic music 11 spanning from 2015 to 2017, it consists of an original (whitehead 2015a) and a remix album (whitehead 2017), and it has the primary objective of compiling a narrative of the evolution of house and techno music from its inception to the present day. the original album consists of collaborations with a variety of electronic music producers who forged the early detroit, chicago, new york and uk house and techno scenes in the late 1980s and early 1990s (whitehead 2015b). in addition, i also collaborate with contemporary artists, some of whom have appeared on my record label, bulletdodge to create a juxtaposed combination of old and new. having all these artists contribute to the album references their involvement in the development of these genres and allows their past and current endeavours to haunt the present creative process. for the remix album, i further collaborate with notable pioneers of the 1980’s, 1990’s and 2000’s electronic music genres to reinterpret the tracks from the original album, consequently permitting their hauntings to further pervade the project and to provide adequate new insights on a past period’s musical legacy. this also recalls van der hoeven’s (2014) study. rather than referencing genres through sampling, imitation and production emulation, the project sought to establish a deeper personal hauntological relationship through direct collaboration with relevant artists. in doing so, i call on the ghosts of these artists’ own endeavours, the effect of house and techno, its growth, my influences and my creative progression through working with them. consequently, ghosts and personal and cultural traces of the participants infiltrate the creative process. figure 2 depicts the collaborative process. i employ the term “hauntological relationship” to describe what engaging a given component signifies and the ghosts it summons. figure 2. the brood: the hauntological themes explored throughout the creative process and the interaction between each component. dancecult 14(1)12 moreover, i expanded the notion of ghosts permeating the creative process by further collaborating with significant artists and producing the the brood remixed. this album was also released on bulletdodge and consists of remixes from a variety of other artists who helped shape the evolution of house and techno music and many of its facets from its beginning to the present day. fundamentally, remixing itself is spectral in nature and the notions pertaining to hauntology apply. elements of one musical creation are repurposed, repeated and used to create a new elucidation, with the spectres of the original work present throughout. the remixed work takes its meaning from the original piece and adds new elements to create a different translation. with the brood remixed album, it is not just the ghosts of the original tracks that appear in the remixed versions with which i am concerned, but also the apparitions of the original producers and consequently, the reference to their involvement in the development of house and techno. the new tracks are thus haunted by the audible material of a previous medium, evoking the context in which it was created. until now, i have emphasised the spectral aspect of this project in connection to the practitioners with whom i have collaborated. to push the concept of temporal disjunction and spectral presences even further, i have also incorporated the interplay of historical and current technology. for example, the songs were recorded using the digital audio workstation (daw) ableton live 9, and then mixed on a neve vr60 mixing console with various vintage effects and audio processors by producer michael greig at ssr studios in london to provide that nostalgic historical analogue feel. the neve console was chosen to blend the sound since it was known for its warm analogue qualities and was associated with numerous 1980’s productions, the period of house and techno’s inception. so, a temporal deformity was created by combining current virtual synthesisers and production techniques within ableton live 9 and older analogue equipment. this is a similar technique to many hauntological approaches, taking historical audio remnants of the past that convey archaic technologies (vinyl crackle for example; see schofield 2019) and coupling them with modern day production techniques (virtual synthesisers). furthermore, owing to the physical distance between myself and many of the contributors, most of the songs were developed remotely, with musical parts sent and returned via digital file sharing services. parallels can also be drawn between this distant collaborative technique and born and haworth’s (2017) account of vaporwave since most of it is developed and disseminated through cloud-based commercial file-hosting sites. my motivation for initiating the project, akin to van der hoeven’s (2014) discovery, was to examine how vestiges of house and techno’s past could be employed to generate cultural and personal narratives. as a finished product that was commercially distributed, my interest as a musician was to reflect the significance of each collaborator and bring their importance into the creative process. furthermore, i investigated how historical and contemporary technology might constitute spectral contingents, with their interaction causing temporal bifurcation. whitehead | exploring personal spectres in electronic music 13 “nineteen92”: collaboration with significant practitioner, pertinent devices and abstracted recording processes further collaboration with significant practitioners, the use of pertinent equipment and abstracted recording procedures are used to examine hauntological themes in my “nineteen92” project (whitehead et al. 2020). unlike the brood, which concentrated on chronicling the culturally shared evolution of electronic music and its impact on myself and my record label, the  various elements  with which i will engage during  the creative process for “nineteen92” represent my own wider lifelong relationships. in relation to the past and present, i use nostalgia as a valuable resource to preserve a feeling of self-continuity, as sedikides et al. (2008) emphasise. in line with arno van der hoeven (2018) and mulder et al. (2010) accounts, teenage influences and familial relationships, as well as how they have shaped me, are crucial to the “nineteen 92” project (whitehead 2021a). during my teenage years, music was not only escapism; it also defined who i was, as it does for many young people. it influenced how i dressed and behaved, and it instilled in me a powerful sense of social justice that i have carried with me throughout my life. in particular, the early 1990’s grunge band, nirvana, had a notable influence on me, not only captivating my attention musically, but also introducing me to a new set of principles. therefore, as their influence can still be felt today, i wanted to make a piece of music that acknowledges their legacy through my work. in response to this, i sought out someone who had a direct hand in the recording and production of their songs. jack endino produced and engineered much of nirvana’s music, including their debut album bleach. he agreed to not only work on a piece of music with me, but also to mix the finished output. jack’s commitment to the project was a guitar backdrop to the musical work i had provided. his musical contributions were then recorded onto cd and played on a pioneer hi-fi system i had used to listen to music when i was a teenager. most importantly, i heard nirvana for the first time through this hi-fi. in addition, a shure sm57 microphone was utilised to apprehend the audio while it was playing through the hi-fi speakers, allowing me to record it back into the project using the digital audio workstation, ableton live 10. the shure sm57 microphone had personal significance because it was the first microphone i bought and used to make early recordings, so it referenced my early creative output. after recording, the audio was then converted onto cd, and the process of playing it through the hi-fi and recording it into ableton live 10 using the shure sm57 was repeated. this procedure was conducted numerous times more. in addition, the last time i conducted this course of action, i introduced a zoom effects pedal to add reverb to the signal chain. as a youngster, i acquired and used this audio effects processing device as a guitar pedal to attempt to sound like nirvana. therefore, its inclusion in this project further reflected my earliest creative effort and was another example of how nirvana inspired me to compose my own music. dancecult 14(1)14 throughout this process, i adopted an abstract recording approach by inserting these relevant devices into the creative process and utilising them in this manner. in doing so, whenever i played the cd with jack’s guitar part via the hi-fi, i encouraged nirvana’s ghosts, their personal importance and the traces linked with it to surface and recur. furthermore, as i repeated the recording process, all the components participating in this procedure then started to become ghosts of themselves, conveying how every given point in time cannot be defined in isolation because it is inextricably soiled by the ghosts of all moments that have gone before it. figure 3 shows the ghosts and traces created by this abstract recording process. each creative process component for this work and its hauntological relationships is identified. figure 3. “nineteen92”/abstract recording process: the hauntological themes explored throughout the creative abstract recording process and the interaction between each component. i wanted to reference family relationships throughout this project, so i recorded my first guitar and my father’s 1960’s fender twin deluxe amplifier into ableton live 10 using the shure sm57 microphone. it was my father who encouraged me to listen to music and learn how to play the guitar, so involving the amplifier in this project references my relationship with him. and i used the fender amplifier when i was learning guitar, so it also signifies my progress as a musician. this guitar part was again rendered out of ableton live 10 and copied onto a cd to be played through the hi-fi system. this time, i introduced a boss distortion pedal into the signal chain. the sm57 microphone was also used to record the output from the hi-fi and was connected to the distortion pedal. by including the boss pedal in the process, i was once more addressing a familial bond; the pedal was a 21st birthday gift from my brother, so integrating the pedal into this process acknowledges our relationship. when i played whitehead | exploring personal spectres in electronic music 15 my recorded guitar part through the hi-fi, i encouraged the ghosts of my familial ties, their personal importance and the traces linked with them to resurface and recur, thereby repeating the abstract recording process. throughout this piece of work, i make a reference to nirvana, family members and my musical history by collaborating with jack endino and incorporating many pertinent devices into the creative process; i structure my past using a narrative order in keeping with pickering and keightley’s (2006) study. consequently, the narrative formed by the artistic process, like memory itself and how we recall situations from our past, has no clear beginning or ending. instead, it is randomly sporadic, occurring in the past, present and future in the same space. “i am with you”: utilisation of abstracted production techniques and sampled online video clips of personal importance to further explore hauntological themes in electronic music, the “i am with you” project (whitehead 2021b) combines abstract production techniques and samples audio from online video content that has personal significance. the overarching theme is the hauntings of childhood thoughts that still linger, a past friendship and again my musical background. 1984’s supergirl was a film that i watched extensively as a child. the nihilistic narrative of the film has always left me feeling very unsettled, yet ever intrigued, compelling me to frequently watch it. many of the scenes towards the end of the film, the “phantom zone” and “the demon storm” filled me with fear and dread of the unknown and accentuated my awareness of infinity and my own mortality. watching this film coincided with my realisation that life is finite, and even though we die, life and the universe eternally perpetuate. i always struggled with this concept, particularly as a child. these thoughts and fears that supergirl provoked in me have always underpinned my personality, therefore i wanted to create a landscape whereby i could acknowledge these thoughts, memories and phantom presences that continue to pervade my thinking. to achieve this, i decided to incorporate dialogue from the “phantom zone” and “the demon storm” scenes into my creative process. audio clips from the film, sampled from youtube, reference the feelings evoked by the film, portraying my childhood hauntings, ghosts and lived memories. the notion of past and present is reinforced further by my incorporating a video of a professional drummer who was a childhood friend and the percussionist in the first band i was in. thus, not only as a reference to our childhood friendship but also to our musical partnership, i wanted to capture his essence in this piece to represent what has become of us both as well as what could have been. to achieve this, i sampled the audio from an online drumming performance of his. in addition to my friend being a professional drummer, he also lectures in music and has a multitude of online drumming tutorial videos and performances. the video i selected resonates with me because he is performing a drum ‘n’ bass rhythm rather than a rock rhythm (which i always associated with him). he and i had strictly played rock, so it was interesting to hear him play an electronic music genre because that is now synonymous with my own creative output. dancecult 14(1)16 i used the same technique to sample the youtube content for each video discussed above. this consisted of playing youtube videos on my i-mac before recording them into ableton live 10 using the built-in microphone. this recording process also captures the audio from my physical movements like mouse click and breaths. therefore, the present is recorded as well as the audio from youtube. the past and present share the same temporal plane momentarily. the recorded audio is then edited and repurposed in ableton live 10 to create most of the musical elements. to further summon the ghosts for this piece, i used an abstract production method. to accomplish this, i inserted the audio from the drumming tutorial into ableton live 10, and then converted the audio to midi (using ableton live 10’s “convert to midi” function), so that i had the actual pattern of him playing in addition to the captured and original sound, which i then split into the various drum parts. “i am with you” uses an abstract production technique to explore the concept of presence and existence. the drummer makes a phantom of himself by filming his performance and uploading it onto youtube. the audio is then extracted from youtube to create a ghost of a ghost. finally, i take this a step further by converting the audio to midi and generating a new ghost with all its tracings. not only are the ghosts of the actual recordings present, but so are the ghosts of what they meant to me personally. edited samples from supergirl are then used as the individual drum hits for the pattern. the finished audio from this technique sounds more like a rumbling sub bass than a percussion element, but it is infused with the ghosts of my friend drumming. the hauntological relationship for the video clips is detailed in figure 4, which depicts the ghosts that occur throughout the creative process. figure 4. “i am with you”: the hauntological themes explored throughout the creative process and the interaction between each component. whitehead | exploring personal spectres in electronic music 17 through the capturing, reclamation and repurposing of audio footage from youtube, i explored how spectres from the digital realm can be used as source material and have individual significance. these personal and cultural influences from  various periods of my past are extracted from youtube and transformed into less discernible musical forms. youtube was then utilised as a space to present the work and as a distribution platform. my aim is to demonstrate that no one point in time can be described in isolation because the metaphysical phantasm of the present is contaminated by the ghosts or remnants of previous moments. “things happen”: use of technology devices, sampled online video footage of personal musical representation and abstracted recording procedures “things happen” (whitehead 2022) will draw this current research to a conclusion by exhibiting how i use technological devices, sampled audio from online video footage of personal musical representation and abstracted recording processes to further examine hauntological themes. by sampling audio from youtube once more, the goal of this project is to interact with my previous musical endeavours. in doing so, i sample a track called “left behind”, which was written and presented as the second release on bulletdodge in 2008. this was the first original track of my own that i released on the label. furthermore, i chose the track because the piano section that features as the main riff was initially a musical part that was used in a previous techno partnership i was involved in called edit select. the piano riff was never used on a released edit select track, but it represents that period of my life, thus i wanted to respect its value by incorporating it into “left behind”. for “things happen”, i purposefully chose to sample a piece of music that i composed previously because i am investigating the ghosts of myself: my creative endeavours before i established my record label. to sample “left behind”, i played it on the youtube mobile application on my smartphone. i then used the youtube tempo function to slow down the track. the smartphone was used to capture the audio as a reference to how i consume audio, visual art and media. the smartphone signifies some of my everyday interactions, so i wanted to capture the audio in a similar way. i then connected my smartphone’s headphone output to the boss distortion pedal and then subsequently routed the pedal into ableton live 10. due to the boss distortion pedal being employed in “nineteen92”, this method addressed not just my bond with my brother but also the ghost of the prior project. as a result, using the distortion pedal demonstrates the idea that ghosts come and go throughout our thoughts and experiences. they appear and reappear with no trace of their origins. it was also crucial to make a connection to the outside world and pair with a mechanical process. recognising that much of the media we consume is within the device that we use and dwells in the virtual territory, the aim was to transfer this sampled audio from the digital realm into the external world, then back into the virtual environment. throughout this process, i was inciting ghosts by extracting the audio from its digital domain, performing dancecult 14(1)18 a mechanical procedure, and then feeding it back into ableton live 10. this is another instance of me deploying an abstract approach to audio recording to summon ghosts. once in ableton, i then started to manipulate the audio and created a bank of sounds which were then further modified and used as the musical content for the track. figure 5 details the hauntological relationship for each creative component discussed above and depicts the creative process and ghosts that occur. figure 5. “things happen”: the hauntological themes explored throughout the creative process and the interaction between each component. in this project, i have repurposed original musical materials, and in doing so i have brought memories to the present, allowing them to exist in space and time, initiating a relationship between separate moments entirely removed from linear temporality. the work demonstrates reclamation and repurposing within the confines of the media in which it originates and still exists. conclusion in terms of cultural memory and historical aesthetics, the existing discourse of hauntology in uk electronic music has focused on the works of artists like boards of canada, burial, caretaker and ghost box records. whilst taking these approaches into account, my creative practice widens the hauntological scope and provides a nuanced interpretation and alternative method to engage with hauntology. this process reveals a deeper meaning within whitehead | exploring personal spectres in electronic music 19 the creative process that is concealed from the listener; as a result, it demonstrates that the individual operation of electronic music craft, which is influenced by a person’s unique life and musical experiences and relationships, extends beyond the product’s homogeneous consumption. i, like burial and other hauntological artists, have engaged with personal recollections. however, as discussed in my original works portfolio, i have proposed an alternative strategy in which electronic music artists might engage with a variety of hauntological vehicles. this includes 1) meaningful collaboration with relevant practitioners who serve as phantoms of my past and everything that encompasses; 2) technological devices that are signifiers for familial ties and musical influences; 3) online video footage of personal significance that references childhood emotions, adolescent friendships and personal musical achievements and 4) abstracted recording and production processes that connect disparate periods of my life through disconnected reference points that were not bound by linear time. these methodologies may provide future electronic music practitioners with a more thorough examination and lucid use of hauntology in their work. instead of following fisher in using post-war british media to convey a sense of cultural debilitation, i have shown how engaging with nostalgia can be an effective vessel for reimagining and reconstructing alternative histories and futures. this is different from a passive pining for the past that janelle lynn wilson (2015) and davis suggest (1979). in keeping with elodie roy’s (2014) study, i have shown that engaging with nostalgia may be beneficial, allowing musicians to recreate music’s past in ways that are relevant to them. furthermore, in line with the findings of janelle lynn wilson’s (2015) study, my nostalgic experiences are spatially fixed and embodied when i recall or remember them, as is demonstrated by my portfolio of work. i have remembered locations and times of the memories, as well as the lived experience associated with them. following wilson, this sentimental recall is a remnant of my past existence and a true remembrance of my lived history. additionally, my work is consistent with the findings of holak and havlena’s (1992) investigation because i have demonstrated that nostalgia can be a personal experience that arouses recollections of important people at critical life events through personalised narratives. moreover, in accordance with hertz (1990), i have used my hauntological vehicles to bring people from my past to the forefront to re-establish links with them. i would like to highlight that our own personal narratives are not without influence. for the brood project, i unintentionally constructed what might be termed a patriarchal narrative because it documents the evolution of house and techno from that perspective, in keeping with morgan’s (2017) explanation of male driven hauntological narratives. i would like to interrogate this further in future work, uncovering the foundations of my conception of house and techno’s origins and challenging them. in conclusion, this article unveils how my work has summoned historical personal ghosts, 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to relax/study to: contradiction and paradox in lo-fi hip hop”. iaspm journal 9(2): 40–54. <https://dx.doi.org/10.5429/2079-3871(2019)v9i2.4en>. wu, eileen. 2010. “memory and nostalgia in youth music cultures: finding the vibe in the san francisco bay area rave scene, 2002-2004”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(2): 63–78. <https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.04>. discography caretaker. 1999. selected memories from the haunted ballroom. v/vm test records (cd): offal02. <https://www.discogs.com/release/6785-the-caretaker-selected-memories-from-the-hauntedballroom>. whitehead, gareth. 2015a. the brood. bulletdodge. bdr tb 04 (cd). <https://www.discogs.com/master/1322456-gareth-whitehead-the-brood>. ———. 2017. the brood remixed. bulletdodge. bdr tb 07 (cd). <https://www.discogs.com/release/10531984-gareth-whitehead-the-brood-remixed>. whitehead, gareth, werner niedermeier and jack endino. 2020. nineteen92. bulletdodge. <https://www.discogs.com/release/19810861-werner-niedermeier-gareth-whitehead-jackendino-nineteen92>. filmography whitehead, gareth. 2015b. “gareth whitehead’s ‘the brood’ — techno documentary (bulletdodge records).” youtube, 30:55. uploaded on july 15, 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6gzv-80b-m&t=200s>, (accessed 12 march 2022). ———. 2021b. “i am with you.” youtube, 1:41. uk: mixmag. uploaded on 17 december 2021. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bz2ybw6wxnm>, (accessed 13 march 2022). ———. 2022. “things happen.” youtube, 1:22. uploaded on 23 january 2022. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1orjwifsemg&t=3s>, (accessed 28 march 2022). https://www.sonicscope.org/pub/8zb4jyxk/release/2%3e https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/symb.184 https://dx.doi.org/10.5429/2079-3871(2019)v9i2.4en https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.04 https://www.discogs.com/release/6785-the-caretaker-selected-memories-from-the-haunted-ballroom https://www.discogs.com/release/6785-the-caretaker-selected-memories-from-the-haunted-ballroom https://www.discogs.com/master/1322456-gareth-whitehead-the-brood https://www.discogs.com/release/10531984-gareth-whitehead-the-brood-remixed https://www.discogs.com/release/19810861-werner-niedermeier-gareth-whitehead-jack-endino-nineteen92 https://www.discogs.com/release/19810861-werner-niedermeier-gareth-whitehead-jack-endino-nineteen92 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6gzv-80b-m&t=200s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bz2ybw6wxnm https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1orjwifsemg&t=3s being and performing “older” woman in electronic dance movement culture dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 11(1): 7–29 issn 1947-5403 ©2019 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.02 being and performing “older” woman in electronic dance movement culture alice o’grady and anna madill university of leeds (uk) abstract this article foregrounds the accounts of a cohort of clubbers who are largely ignored both by journalists and scholars alike. grounded in the accounts of aging female clubbers and their participation in electronic dance music culture, it investigates the lived experience of being and performing the category of “older woman” in this context. it examines the materiality of their participation and their tactical responses to being in an environment that has been associated traditionally with youth. in a landscape where scholarship on female participation in club cultures is, at best, scarce, research into the experiences of older women in dance music culture is virtually nonexistent. as such this article represents a first step in addressing a significant gap in understanding women’s engagement with dance cultures as they mature. keywords: aging, space/other-space, female experience, psytrance, well-being alice o’grady is professor in applied performance and head of the school of performance and cultural industries at the university of leeds. her research is concerned with open forms of participation, play and performance within a range of contexts. her latest book, risk, participation and performance practice: critical vulnerabilities in a precarious world, was published by palgrave in 2017. email: <a.ogrady@leeds.ac.uk>. website: <https://leeds.academia.edu/aliceogrady> anna madill is professor in qualitative inquiry and deputy head of the school of psychology at the university of leeds. her research focuses on gender/sexuality, well-being and the resilience of people considered to be vulnerable. email: <a.l.madill@leeds.ac.uk>. website: <https://leeds.academia.edu/annamadill>. feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.02 mailto:a.ogrady@leeds.ac.uk https://leeds.academia.edu/aliceogrady mailto:a.l.madill@leeds.ac.uk https://leeds.academia.edu/annamadill dancecult 11(1)8 a survey called “the great indoors” conducted by currys pc world, a british electrical retailer, concluded that technological advances in home entertainment mean that britons are “hang(ing) up their dancing shoes and prefer staying in to going out on the town” (dixons 2017). according to its results, 31 is the average age that people prefer staying at home and that by the age of 37 adults are too old to be dancing in nightclubs. over a third of its respondents considered it “tragic” to see people in their 30s and 40s in nightclubs. in the same vein, an article in the telegraph (morris 2014) asks the question, “how old is too old to go clubbing?” the piece was written after usain bolt was spotted at a london nightclub at the age of 27. as purveyors of televisions, laptops and computer games it is unsurprising that businesses such as currys might want us to believe that engaging with club culture has a shelf life. querying bolt’s participation in club culture, however, is more likely a comment on incongruity rather than age. there is a mismatch between the public’s expectations of a highly trained athlete and its view of what constitutes “appropriate” behaviour and yet press reports honed in on bolt’s age as being the factor that warranted the headline. these two examples give brief insight into the preconceptions and prejudices surrounding age, identity and participation in club cultures that infuse the popular press and yet they do not take into account the additional marker of gender that is the focus of our article. here we consider accounts of aging female clubbers and their participation in electronic dance music (edm) culture to explore the lived experience of being and performing the category of “older woman” in this context. we examine the materiality of their participation and their tactical responses to being in an environment that has been associated traditionally with youth. in a landscape where scholarship on female participation in club cultures is, at best, scarce, research into the experiences of older women in dance music culture is virtually non-existent. as such this article represents a first step in addressing a significant gap in understanding women’s engagement with dance cultures as they mature. according to market researchers mintel, the uk nightclub market is in serious decline with nearly half of the country’s night clubs shutting in the past ten years (mcgrath 2016). attendance figures have dropped so dramatically that the office for national statistics no longer considers participation in club culture as being statistically significant and has stopped reporting on it. mintel say the group of people most likely to leave clubbing behind are the over 25s (davies 2013). despite this rather bleak picture, there are pockets of resistance against the broader trends which provide the locus of study for this article. although a relatively “clandestine phenomenon” within the uk, psytrance has a global following with a thriving transnational network of festivals such as boom (portugal), ozora (hungary), rainbow serpent (australia), hill top (india) and origin (south africa) that attracts thousands of participants annually (lindop 2010: 119). in the uk, the scene is associated with “alternative” festival culture and, as lindop argues, has a strong “freak” aesthetic that brings together the young and the old, a mixture of free festival veterans and newer converts (2010: 126). “veteran insiders” play a vital role in the reproduction of psytrance scenes internationally, and it is not uncommon to see people in their 60s and 70s partying next to o’grady and madill | being and performing “older” woman in electronic dance movement culture 9 people in their 20s (d’andrea 2010: 48). as a result, the psytrance community is generally considered to be inclusive, tolerant and intergenerational. these attributes, however, are themselves worthy of interrogation and critique and, as our later analysis will bear out, our research problematises psytrance’s narrative of inclusivity in that our participants did, indeed, face ageism and sexual harassment. despite its wide demographic, the psytrance scene still presents a challenge for older women who select this terrain as their club of choice.1 our research sets out to ask how participants navigate this landscape as older women. what does it offer them that other contexts do not? what drives their participation and what strategies do they adopt to manage the responses their participation provokes? literature and the discourse of absence psytrance has its roots in 1980’s goa which is a well documented moment in edm cultural history (st john 2010, 2012). the values of plur (peace, love, unity and respect) seeded here were transported to the british rave scene and have, over time, been woven into the fabric of psytrance parties across the world. with more than a passing nod to the hippie trail that fuelled the emergence of goa trance over 30 years ago, the world of psytrance offers participants the opportunity to extend their clubbing practice well into middle age and beyond. the psytrance scene has a provenance that spans decades and is strangely resistant to change not only in terms of its musical terrain but also in the striking visual aesthetic that accompanies it. the psychedelic decor, clothing, art work all resonate with 1960’s sensibilities and people born in that decade continue to access this peculiarly changeresistant cultural seam. although not limited to psytrance, the phenomenon of an aging dance floor is particularly noticeable in this context and provides a useful setting for an investigation into how constructions of identity are played out within the frame of edm culture. older people are regularly engaging in a practice that has traditionally been seen as the preserve of the young and are showing no signs of stopping. this not only leads to some interesting questions about the nature of edm as an aging cultural product but also signals a shift in the way society views age appropriate behaviours in general. when our attention turns to older women and their clubbing practice, further questions emerge about the appropriateness of certain behaviours that challenge conventional attitudes to both gender and age in tandem. remarkably little is written about the particular experiences of female clubbers (with the exceptions of henderson 1993; mcrobbie 1993; pini 1997; hinchliff 2001; measham 2002), even less so about the experiences of older female clubbers. maria pini’s work, club cultures and female subjectivity, is one of the first sustained explorations of the modes of femininity being lived, figured and constituted within club contexts. it examines what participation in club culture offers women who are seeking to move beyond the constraints of traditional social roles associated with being a woman, such as wife, mother and care giver dancecult 11(1)10 (pini 2001: 1-2). couched in largely utopian terms, a register which was not uncommon for the literature of the time, pini explores the “elsewheres” afforded by rave culture and the sense of belongingness that accompanies the emerging narratives. pini’s research began in the early 1990s when the phenomenon of rave culture was still in its relative infancy. however, pini is at pains to point out that her work is not a youth cultural study as her informants range between the ages of 19 and 35. part of the significance of pini’s study is that it investigates the recreational practices of women who have traditionally been thought of in relation to the domestic context. seventeen years on from pini’s findings and a full 25 years on from when she began her research, the scene and the women in it have grown older and yet their narratives are noticeable by their absence from extant scholarship. our own investigation seeks to address that gap by placing the voices of older female clubbers at the heart of our analysis and, at the same time, challenging and critiquing the issue of invisibility both within the practice of clubbing and the practice of writing about clubbing. the other notable work on the experience of female clubbers is fiona hutton’s risky pleasures? club cultures and feminine identities. published in 2006, her introduction repeats the scarcity refrain and begins by identifying the “lack of space given to the discussion of female clubbers” within scholarly literature (2006: 1). her approach attempts to foreground women’s stories but also seeks to surface the complex debates around risk, pleasure, drug use and sex in relation to societal attitudes about femininity. using qualitative, ethnographic methods that prioritise the voices of participants hutton, like pini, points out that clubbing as a leisure activity “does not appeal solely to young people” (hutton 2006: 3). her informants range from 21 to 39 and, as such, the sample is relatively broad. however, much of the discourse focusses on attitudes to risk-taking in terms of the experiences of “young women” and this is a repeated phrase throughout. age is not a central concern and is barely mentioned as a factor that influences the construction of female subjectivity. nevertheless hutton pursues some pertinent questions that could quite easily be (re)appropriated to incorporate the very particular experience of women in their middle age and beyond. imagine the following being applied to a consideration of clubbers over 50: [d]o female clubbers feel that they can challenge stereotypes of femininity and sexuality within club spaces; can they experiment with drugs and sex, push the boundaries of femininity without being censored or punished for their behaviour/s? or do . . . women feel constrained and pressurised into having casual sexual encounters and acting out ‘acceptable’ femininities? (hutton 2006: 5) if we shift the focus of this passage, only slightly, to older women, it is possible to see how differently we might answer these questions and begin to shed new light not only on the experiences of the women involved but the wider socio-cultural frameworks within which they live. although early club cultural scholarship tended to focus on the experiences of heteronormative men and of youth more broadly (e.g. redhead 1993, bennett 1999; chatterton and hollands 2003), more recent research has explored dance-based activities o’grady and madill | being and performing “older” woman in electronic dance movement culture 11 of individuals who do not perform their age in accordance with heteronormative social convention, preferring instead to occupy “queer temporalities” in which “being in the present takes precedent over a reproductive future” (taylor 2010: 904). with a similar interest in how alternative temporalities are constructed and inhabited, our own study explores the experiences and elsewheres of women in their 50s and 60s who continue to participate in club cultures as a way of accessing an alternative social modelling of living as an older woman in a society obsessed with holding back the aging process. while club cultural criticism of the late 1990s/early noughties was dominated by male authors (with a few notable exceptions like rietveld, mcrobbie , thornton and pini), this imbalance is being addressed by writers such as tami gadir (2016, 2017), rebekah farrugia (2004, 2012), maren hancock (2017), magdelena olszanowksi (2012) and tara rodgers (2010). however, the focus of this later work tends to be on dj culture and women’s contribution to, or position within, the night time economy rather than participant experience which, for older women at least, remains unexplored. a recent special edition of dancecult sought to highlight the centrality of the contribution of women to the cultural production of edm culture while at the same time interrogating the latent misogyny prevalent in the scene. the editors critique the way in which discourse around female participation in dj culture is often couched in terms of “lack” or absence. they argue, “[c]onstantly focussing on a lack is an affront to the women who form the scene and have developed it throughout its history” (farrugia and olszanowksi 2017: 2). they seek to address the problem by dedicating a special issue that re-writes the limited histories that have hitherto focussed on men’s contribution to the culture. although the articles featured in the special issue concentrate on cultural production rather than consumption, the editors ask some useful questions that foreground the complexities of separating out the category of “women” in relation to a particular context. what is particular to a woman’s subjectivity, identity and experience in the scene? how are spaces for and by women produced and maintained? . . . how can we account for and present women’s experiences without an obfuscation of each of their specificities? how can the seemingly problematic foregrounding of gender as a boundary marker be useful? (farrugia and olszanowksi 2017: 4) the specificity of women’s experience drives our own research agenda and these questions chime with our own investigation. however, while we acknowledge the problematics of using gender as a boundary marker, in the instance of participant experience, research indicates that both gender and age are influential factors in relation to women’s active rave participation (gregory 2009: 65). in her article “too young to drink, too old to dance: the influences of age and gender on (non) rave participation”, julie gregory considers age and gender as configurations of social discourse that determine how women enter, engage with and ultimately leave rave culture. her investigation concludes that women are unable to imagine a “lasting adult femininity” within rave as the role of aging woman is seen dancecult 11(1)12 as being incongruent with rave participation (2009: 75-6). if women’s raving is associated with youth, freedom and experimentation, it is time limited and subject to the ever present power relations that operate in other spheres. as gregory argues, “once outside—and oftentimes inside—the rave and related spaces, women have to contend with the social meanings attributed to their specifically aged, gendered, sexualised and drugged bodies” (2009: 76). for gregory’s interviewees this means stopping their involvement with rave culture when age and gendered responsibilities become barriers by virtue of what is seen to be appropriate. while gregory’s article introduces the issue of gender and age in the context of clubbing, it focusses on the past experiences of women who have since given up raving and their reasons for doing so. while there is a general shift in the literature that challenges the marginalisation of women in relation to edm production (see farrugia 2012, reitsamer 2012 or farrugia and olszanowksi 2017), age is still very much absent from the discourse and female aging entirely invisible. as pini argues, much of the early literature on rave culture tends to eradicate distinctive identities with ravers being written about as essentially sexless, ageless and raceless. according to the post-modern view of social dance cultures, loss of self is the prize as one merges into the raving machine ( jordan 1995). in the rave identity disappears and meaning evaporates (melechi 1993; rietveld 1993). in contrast to this, we will argue that identity is the chief indicator of how and why older women continue to mobilise clubbing as a way of accessing the “elsewhere”: in rodgers’ words “a space for mutual encounters between humans and technologies, between familiarity and otherness, that motivates wonder and a sense of possibility” (2012: 477). hence, the research question guiding our study is: what is the experience of being and performing “older woman” in edm culture? method ethical approval was granted by the ethics committee of the faculty of arts, humanities and cultures at the university of leeds in which the study was conducted (pvar 17-078, 21 february 2018). signed informed consent was obtained from all participants to take part in the study, to audio-record interviews, and to use anonymised quotes in reports of the research. participants participants were recruited by word of mouth through the first author’s personal networks. all four were white british women who identified as an older member of edm culture with particular connection to the psytrance scene table 1. o’grady and madill | being and performing “older” woman in electronic dance movement culture 13 pseudonym age (yrs) relational status occupation interview context interview length (min/sec) engagement in edm anita 52 married professional in private at agreed location 38.25 i’ve only really got into shall we say the electronic dance scene in my later years bev 57 in relationship professional in private at agreed location 42.00 i didn’t properly get back into it until my late 40s and then i met my partner when i was 50 and i’ve never looked back. that was when itthat was when i engaged properly carol 67 married retired at home in private 41.20 i must’ve been in my 40s. said that he thought it would be a whole different experience from anything i’d ever you know had as a teenager and he finally broke down my will and i was absolutely converted diane 54 divorced homemaker at home with family 30.10 my ex-husband introduced me when i was 27 into the psytrance scene table 1: description of participants in the order interviewed researchers the first author is 48 years old with a long standing connection to edm culture and the psytrance scene in particular, both as scholar and participant. she is an applied performance specialist with research interests in playful engagement with space, risk and participatory cultures. the second author is 53 years old and unfamiliar with edm culture. she is an academic psychologist with expertise in qualitative methods of inquiry and research interest in gender, health and well-being. data generation all participants took part in a face-to-face, one-to-one semi-structured interview during the spring of 2018 (madill, 2012). the interview schedule was devised by the authors based on the first author’s personal experiences, her knowledge of the field of inquiry, and the second author’s experience of constructing fruitful open questions, probes, and follow-ups. given that the schedule elicited rich and relevant material with the first participant, it was retained throughout the study. interviews were conducted by the first author and lasted between 30 and 42 minutes. audio-recordings were transcribed by a professional company with appropriate confidentiality procedures in place. transcripts utilised orthographic conventions (like a playscript). being mindful of the limitations of the scale, the researchers made a conscious decision to focus on the testimony of a small number of informants to facilitate close analysis of the data. there has been no attempt to generalise from the data gathered. instead the article presents an abstracted discussion of the data and makes suggestions for further research as a result of taking these first steps into understanding the experiences of older women in this context. dancecult 11(1)14 data analysis transcripts were analysed using thematic analysis (ta) as articulated by braun and clarke (2006). this exposition of ta is particularly useful because it allows researchers to modify their approach depending on their research question, unique data set and personal commitments to analytic paradigm through outlining four decisions shaping the analytical procedure. decision dialectic decision √ rich description of the data set vs. detailed account of one particular aspect of the data set x √ inductive analysis vs. theoretical analysis some √ semantic themes vs. latent themes x √ realist vs. constructionist x table 2: decisions made on type of thematic analysis undertaken as outlined in table 2, we conducted an analysis that sought to capture a rich description of the data set, grounded bottom-up in the data, and focused on what our participants actually said as opposed to being particularly interpretative. this approach is situated in a realist epistemology in which we, without being naïve, chose to accept pretty much at face value our participants’ accounts (madill, 2008). after drafting an initial analysis, we noticed the potential fruitfulness of utilising some theoretical concepts to enhance our findings, specifically the bakhtinian concept of “chronotope” which alerts the researcher to the ways in which participants evoke a constellation of “time-space” in their accounts (morson 1994). hence, this paper provides a predominantly inductive analysis and, where appropriate, draws also on these theoretical understandings of time-space confluence. in terms of procedure, the second author outlined potential themes of interest relevant to addressing the research question: what is the experience of being and performing older woman in edm culture? she did so through careful reading of the transcripts, writing notes in the margins, and cycling iteratively between the developing theme and reading the transcripts several times. the two authors then met to discuss the emergent themes. it was at this point that chronotope was identified as a potential useful concept for enhancing the analysis. the first author then spent some time reading the transcripts to provide additional analytical insights, to check that the developing analysis fitted the data well and adequately addressed the research question, and to provide additional analytical insights. these were conveyed to the second author who produced a more detailed draft analysis. the authors cycled through this process several times until both were satisfied with the quality of the written analysis. o’grady and madill | being and performing “older” woman in electronic dance movement culture 15 analysis in the analysis that follows, we make the distinction between being and performing older woman as a way of understanding what it means to inhabit this position within the context of electronic dance music culture. the distinction is subtle but significant. age is not simply a chronological marker of identity. it is something we accomplish or perform (laz 2003). as west and zimmerman argue, we “do age” just as we “do gender” (1987). both are performances of the self rather than fixed, biological determinants. calasanti and slevin point out that within the structures and institutions that frame our world, we work to give meaning to our age (2006: 255). our analysis attempts to reveal this process of “sensemaking” in order to reveal how age performs and is performed in the context of electronic dance music culture. two themes were considered important in understanding our participants’ experience of performing and being an older woman in this context: visibility and other-space. each theme is constituted by several sub-themes as explicated in the following analysis. each subtheme is evidenced by quotations from the interviews and, where appropriate, we explore the ways in which our participants’ experiences are situated in particular constellations of time-space. theme 1: visibility visibility captures the way in which, as older women, our participants experienced themselves as unusually conspicuous in edm culture, the problems that this creates for them, and the strategies they have developed to manage these issues. visibility is divided into three sub-themes: (non-)acceptance, appearance and sexual harassment. sub-theme 1: (non-)acceptance our participants were recruited because their very engagement in edm culture situates them in a particularly interesting time-space. that is, their chronological age positions them as an unusual participant in edm space and all our participants recognise the potential, as least, of being considered out of place. for example, diane states that “people are often amazed that somebody my age is still up there” but that “it’s getting more and more acceptable now because the scene is aging. there’s a lot more people aging on the scene with it”. anita suggests that “society doesn’t recognise that older people still enjoy that scene” but that, as an older woman, within dance culture itself this is not such a problem and, in fact, it is “very nice to be recognised as someone that has, is having a positive experience in a club night and is drawn to what might be cool music”. interestingly, she contrasts this to the patronising and potentially misogynist “‘grab a granny’ sort of nights” of her youth. carol, too, reports that she feels accepted as an older woman in the scene describing how young people say things like “oh i wish i could bring my mum.” diane, too, reports positively that “sometimes when we go out i get called ‘rave mum’” while, at the same time, noting the dancecult 11(1)16 pleasure of being perceived, not as an older woman per se, but as a person: “they don’t see age, they just see a person, in my experience. i could be wrong. maybe other people have had different experiences but a lot of time people don’t see the age”. these positive experiences, however, are contrasted to a background of resistance from younger people which spans annoying curiosity to outright hostility. for example, carol describes how “you get some that look askance”. anita reports comments such as “‘oh you’re older than my mum’ you know ‘what’re you doing here?’… you want people to leave you alone”. and bev explains how she has had to develop a strategy to deal with young people who are over-intrusive: “i had a great deal of fun with him. i quite often have a lot of fun. sometimes i tell people i’m 75”. however, as diane recounts, it can be difficult not to have negative expectations: “i used to think that the younger ones would look at me and go ‘oh go home’ you know? ‘go home. you should be home knitting’” and this was contrasted with the way in which older men were treated. for example, anita said: “i find if people come up to me in the same—in a positive way, they will enquire about my age and it—they don’t enquire about [name of husband]’s age”. older women often experience themselves becoming with age “invisible” in public spaces. as germaine greer explores this is a highly gendered phenomenon which is not inflicted on older men (2018). on the other hand, our participants felt increasingly visible or, more negatively, conspicuous in the dance scene. bev comments on this specifically: “i probably am more visible but then i would—i think women of our age generally become less visible”. carol, too, reports how she feels: more visible now because of my age and certainly the last time i went i drew so many more comments about my age. … i think i feel more visible now with the increase in references to how old i am. anita tried to be positive, saying “you are more visible and it has a mixed—i don’t think it’s always negative. i think some people see it very very positively but not enough perhaps”. however, she also experiences her increased visibility as a problem because “it can interfere with the enjoyment of the whole thing, i mean the concept of going out is all about being free”. it is interesting how, even when our participants’ age brings them a certain status in the psytrance scene, they are implicitly situated in domestic and familial time-space. hence, diane, is respected as a “rave mum” but also abused and told to “go home. you should be home knitting”. anita is told ambiguously, maybe, “you’re older than my mum” and, similarly, young people tell carol “i wish i could bring my mum”. this gendered domestication is clocked by anita who tries to make sense of it saying “i don’t know if that’s to do with mums. this concept of, you know, because we are—because we give birth we’re thought of differently. i don’t know. i don’t know what it is but he doesn’t get asked his age”. o’grady and madill | being and performing “older” woman in electronic dance movement culture 17 sub-theme 2: appearance the problematic aspects of participants’ increased visibility seems related, in particular, to their physical appearance. for example, bev explains that “i’ve been feeling sort of more vulnerable over the last year and just not quite myself. it’s that i know i’m going to stand out in a club because i’ve got white hair”, and carol feels criticised sometimes about her outfits, saying “it shouldn’t matter but it does matter to me if a young woman says to me ‘oh you dress…’”. hence, as older women, our participants could find themselves in a paradox as bev explains: “i don’t want to be invisible. i don’t want to draw unnecessary attention to myself ”. given this experience of implicit and explicit judgement, getting ready for an evening out could be tinged with self-doubt about how to present themselves. for example, anita explains that “it’s that balance between wanting to look nice and feel nice and not wanting to look overdone and silly you know but wanting to perhaps, you know, look like you’re with it without looking stupid [laughs]”. bev expresses a similar sentiment, saying: i don’t want to make a show of myself. i don’t want to look ridiculous even though having said that it’s an environment where you can be and do as you like. for me i’d rather be a bit more quiet about my presence. … i don’t want to look like a twat. hence, the felt sense of being out of place and having to manage this as a potential problem was a palpable aspect of our participants’ engagement with psytrance. “getting it right” involves modifying their self-presentation and considering the specific context they were about to enter. in terms of the former, bev explains that: it’s actually quite a good thing to present yourself as an older woman that looks good and not just good for her age but looks good. looks like they know what’s going on as almost like an example. okay so you know you don’t have to get your tits out or have your belly button pierced but you can still look fucking good in this environment whatever age you are. diane feels the same way, saying “i won’t have my boobs and my bottom hanging out or... do you know what i mean? there is within reason obviously but for the most part i can just be whoever i want to be on that particular night”. such age/space appropriate dressing was couched in a positive light, for example, with carol reporting with relief that “i don’t feel i have to impress anybody”. however, our participants were also communicating implicitly the pressure they felt as older women to present themselves in de-sexualised ways. in terms of considering the specific context they were about to enter, getting their appearance right could be very complex. for anita this involved understanding the difference between festivals and clubs such that “at festivals probably i do wear slightly ridiculous outfits that i wouldn’t wear if i went to a club”. the specific context is a consideration also for diane who explains that “i can still quite happily wear the bright clothes and maybe something—a lot of other people say ‘oh, you’re a bit too old to be wearing that, but in a club—that social environment—it’s more acceptable”. bev is also very aware of context but, dancecult 11(1)18 unlike anita and diane, expresses more of a wish to remain incognito: “i will wear clothes that are appropriate to the event but i don’t particularly want what i wear to say too much about me”. hence, our participants experience also pressure to mute the flamboyance of their self-expression. all our participants also stress how dressing for comfort has become increasingly important. for example, anita says “unlike the old days where i would be wearing ridiculous uncomfortable shoes just for the sake of fashion or appearance—absolutely shoes—it’s comfort is number one”. for bev, it is straightforward: “i predominantly dress for comfort”, as it is for carol: “the main thing is to be comfortable, to have comfortable clothes”. and diane explains that: i like to be very bright and colourful but i also like to be really comfortable because there’s nothing worse being on the dancefloor and not being comfortable. and that’s probably the older woman in me. you know i need to be comfortable and i dress for me really the way that makes me feel good and i’m not bothered if other people don’t like it which you don’t often find anyway. even so, bev conveys with pleasure how she still gets called “a legend. you’re an icon or whatever”. she continues “of course it’s all bollocks but it is sort of quite nice. and i’ve got other friends who are even more out there and glamorous and fabulous and old that you just sort of think ‘yeah fucking bring it on, you know? you sad 25 year old, you know? look at what you can be’”. sub-theme 3: sexual harassment despite our participants’ awareness of having to manage the conspicuousness of their age, modifying their appearance according to context and dressing for comfort, three reported being sexually harassed. in anita’s experience “even when you’re an older woman you’re still preyed upon”, and diane reports that she “sometimes get chatted up by younger men and then i’ll say to them, ‘look, i am such-and-such an age’ and they’ll go, ‘oh’. some will run. some will try their luck, you know?” in a colourful passage, bev describes her experience of being chatted-up by younger men on the scene: bizarrely but even that might be something to do with my age. i mean sometimes i just think, ‘how fucked are you? can you not tell that i’m, you know, twice your age?’ and sometimes it really doesn’t matter. sometimes they go ‘yeah of course i know you’re old. you’re still hot though’ [laughter]. and bev did not perceive this as necessarily a bad thing: “it amuses me more than anything. but yeah of course it’s better for that. well yeah, course it’s quite nice”. however, even though some of these experiences are narrated in a light-hearted manner, they include aspects of self-denigration in the implication that there is a time-space mismatch per se positioning an older woman in a sexualised space. o’grady and madill | being and performing “older” woman in electronic dance movement culture 19 some participants report having to develop practical strategies to help them feel safe. for example, anita says: “i always need to know where [name of husband] is because if i don’t know where he is that can make me feel quite anxious so we’ll usually agree that one of us will wear something that is noticeable”. this is, at least in part, due to bad experiences, as she explains: i’ve had a man come up to me and sort of touch my thigh which i considered inappropriate and you have to sort of say ‘don’t touch me’ and i would point out, you know, ‘i’m with my husband. go away please.’ if i was on my own, yeah, i wouldn’t feel comfortable. theme 2: other-space “other-space” captures the way in which, despite having to manage the problems raised by their increased visibility, our participants leveraged the most enjoyment possible from the alternative environment provided by psytrance culture. other-space is divided into four sub-themes: context, well-being space, well-being drugs, and well-being friends. sub-theme 1: context the increased visibility experienced by our participants was mostly unwelcome and needed managing in order to enjoy their engagement in electronic dance music culture. in particular, they describe becoming more discerning about the places they would go. anita says: “i’m quite selective now. i’ll be thinking about who’s going to be there, how big is it, what’s the security like and then, importantly, what is the night about, what’s the music going to be like?” she also underscores the skill in doing so: “we’ve got good at choosing the right ones”. similarly, carol reports that “i like to go to events where i know i’m going to know people but also that are going to be large enough to know that there’ll be lots of new people as well”. moreover, bev increasingly likes: going to those places that you go to regularly where there would be new people but you’re not going to an unknown. you know what to expect to a certain degree but you’re pretty much guaranteed that certain types of things will or will not happen… having spent the last year or so being more selective. sub-theme 2: well-being space becoming more discerning is related to leveraging as much enjoyment as possible from a particular event. the main enjoyment sought by participants was the sense of well-being that could be experienced within the other-space provided by psytrance. this is described using terms such as “shamanistic”, “shutdown” and “reboot”. it is bev who makes a spiritual allusion, explaining that “it’s almost shamanistic isn’t it? whatever it is and it’s, you know, we are all in an environment where we’re a different version of ourselves”. however, bev also draws on a technological concept saying that “it does change your hardwiring”. anita and dancecult 11(1)20 diane also use technological language. anita says, “it’s quite difficult to define but i still find that i get—what i get is a form of shutdown in terms of activity in my mind” and diane reports that “reboot is the only way that i can put it because it does that for me. it helps me reboot. i get away from everything”. interestingly, all these allusions and metaphors convey how participants felt transformed through their engagement with the other-space provided by the psytrance experience. escapism is also very important, with bev finding a sense of well-being through “an escape from every day” and diane describing in more detail how “the escapism—it’s just the whole package is the healing thing for me. so in itself that’s the best bit [laughter] …it was my adult time. it was me time and it was crucial to myself and to the children”. important also is the feeling of elation and of having fun, with diane saying also that “it seems like it brings out my inner child … just being silly, having fun, joking, making light of things” and that “i haven’t let age decide when i should stop having fun”. carol reports how this sense of well-being could extend beyond the actual event in that “you feel elated. i mean you’re very relaxed the next day and stimulated as well. you’ve got all sorts of new things to process. new people to think about”. on the other hand, although bev reports a similar experience of well-being in terms of “actively engaged hedonism …thoughtful hedonism”, she perceives a reduction in this with age such that “my euphoric moments are fewer and far between”. however, although she ponders her limits, bev offers a wry picture of the ultimate transformation that might be experienced in dance music other-space: “there must become a time where either things you want to go to just stop or one just stops. maybe you just die on the dance floor”. our participants were clear that this configuration of other-space was a place in which they could leave behind their everyday, domestic, and working lives. for example, diane says “while i’m lost in the music i’m not thinking about bills or worries or stresses”. however, as discussed in “(non-)acceptance” above, as older women, our participants paradoxically tended to be situated by other clubbers in domestic and familial space. hence, it is interesting to note that our participants, themselves, made pertinent the domestic sphere in various ways. anita did this through contrasting the dance music other-space to her own domestic space, saying “i don’t think i can recreate that feeling in my home”. others implicitly domesticated other-space in that for bev a particular club “was like going home” and at events diane feels “like i’m at home sometimes”. finally, perhaps most radically, carol suggests that, given her huge enjoyment of electronic dance music, “they should be doing this for old people in old people’s homes”. hence, the ways in which our participants are situated within, and their relationship between, electronic dance music other-space and domestic space appears complex and interweaving. sub-theme 3: well-being drugs some participants made reference to the potential benefits of drugs to enhance their experience of well-being in edm other-space. bev, for example, reports that they could really help her to get the most out of an event explaining that “several hours and quite a bit o’grady and madill | being and performing “older” woman in electronic dance movement culture 21 of medication and then i do have euphoric times.” carol also views drugs as beneficial to the sense of well-being she gets from events saying “the drugs that i take now when i go out are much more of a social drug so you just feel like talking to people. you feel relaxed”. on the other hand, for anita, it is not necessary to use drugs because “your body will naturally want to move and that’s even regardless of any chemical assistance”. interestingly, carol and diane make a specific contrast between the drugs associated with edm other-space and anti-social effects of alcohol. for example, carol describes how: we used to get drunk. i mean that was our way of sitting on our inhibitions but you’re being sick or you’re rushing off to the toilet because you feel woozy and you’ve got to check on your friend who’s not appeared recently and check that she’s not passed out somewhere. i mean it was not a social thing. it was just a way of shielding yourself from your inhibitions really. just masking them whereas i think the mdma removes them so they’re not an issue. similarly, diane says “it wasn’t an atmosphere or a time that really appealed to me you know. the getting drunk and not remembering half the things and, you know, obvious fights breaking out and maybe people being rude to you”. subtheme 4: well-being friends for our participants, the psytrance other-space was also of vital importance to their wellbeing through the opportunities it afforded them to make friends and to feel connected to a community of like-minded people. for example, bev says “we established some good friends. i genuinely have friends in their 20s and 30s who i’ve met through this and i’m not just sort of like the token older person, you know? we have proper relationships.” and anita explains how “my circle of friends has expanded in terms of, you know, kindred spirits over the last five years.” carol even describes how it is the people who “make” an event: “[name of club] i find so scuzzy. it’s absolutely disgusting. it just turns me ill. but the crowd—i’ve had the best night ever just by mixing with people who are so open and friendly.” for carol, this is important because “as you get older, particularly when you’ve retired as well, you become marginal.” moreover, diane explains the benefits, at her age, of socialising: you don’t have to be dancing all the time. you’re socialising. you’re around people who are being very positive and haven’t seen you for a while. they’re very happy to see you and you’re in a beautiful location and you’re making new connections and reconnecting with old connections. socialising with friends was contrasted to a perceived pressure on younger people to secure a romantic relationship. anita explains: “i think initially the force to go outthere was a lot of emphasis on meeting people, meeting partners, having relationship experiences.” and being part of a social scene that provided stimulating connections was, in fact, viewed as increasingly important with age. this is expressed particularly eloquently by carol: dancecult 11(1)22 i came home and said, ‘this is what they should be doing for old people in old people’s homes, i’ve had more exercise, i’ve been more stimulated, i’ve met more people, and i just feel great. i feel energised. you know, i feel wonderful’. how long before the government have started to prescribe this to old people who are at home marginalised and don’t know what to do with themselves? they bloody better had. discussion the discussion will address the complex interplay between being and performing older woman in the context of edm culture with a view to understanding how these experiences contribute to the lived identity of women of a certain age within a scene that is itself aging. it covers the two main themes emerging from the interview material, namely visibility and other-space. as judith butler says, “identity is not static or essential, but performative” (1993: 95). furthermore “performativity is a discursive act that enacts or produces the thing that it names” (butler 1993: 13). starting with the premise that performativity is a productive, generative agent, our research deals with the enactment of the category of older woman and considers how that particular marker of identity performs and is produced in the context of edm culture. what is being enacted by older women in this context? how can the visual identities of our respondents be considered performative in club cultures? how does age itself perform and play out in the club space? and, if the very presence of older women in a club environment can be considered to be a discursive act, what further questions does this prompt about the presence of aging female bodies and the potential challenges they present to culture(s) in the wider sphere? (in)visibility is central to most feminist studies of age and aging (e.g., calasanti and slevin 2006). as woodward claims, the invisibility of older women is “a parable of generational ignorance” and cobrin and levine argue that, within scholarship, female aging continues to be “defined on a deficit model” (woodward 1999: ix; cobrin and levine 2012: 2). in other words, getting older means moving to the margins of visibility in the labour market, visual market and socio-political market. despite the ubiquity of the (in)visibility narrative that accompanies discourses of female aging, our research offers a different perspective. in the context of club culture, the figure of the older woman produces an interesting interplay between invisibility and hypervisibility. specifically, we notice a disruption of the deficit model of aging where getting older equates to “cultural exile” and, instead, see a claiming of cultural space that resists normative values of what is appropriate behaviour for an older woman (meagher 2014: 103). by virtue of their age, our respondents occupy an unusual time-space constellation in the club context which has been traditionally seen as the preserve of the young. being identified as older women makes them conspicuous and creates a type of “performance of incongruity” where the women’s presence and the visual aesthetic they carry on and in their bodies, disrupt the expectations of others within the shared space (o’grady 2009: 240). reactions o’grady and madill | being and performing “older” woman in electronic dance movement culture 23 from other clubbers can be both positive and negative but the key point is that their visible presence alone is enough to produce comment, provoke reaction and, invariably, demand a response from the women themselves. these exchanges produce an immediate tension for the women as they navigate and manage the dynamic oscillation between invisibility and hypervisibility. despite being very visible in the club due to the way age is performing as a marker of identity, the women talk of wanting to be inconspicuous so that they can enjoy themselves without interruption. while in the world of the everyday they might experience invisibility in negative terms, their visibility in the club scene can be a barrier to achieving the sense of “elsewhere”, to use pini’s term (2001), or other-space they seek. hypervisibility, and the potential it affords, is, however, not lost on the women who find ways of harnessing it for their own ends. being viewed as a person out of place produces a certain playfulness in the verbal exchanges that occur. what is, or what is not, age appropriate in this context becomes a site of playful resistance, or challenge, to entrenched cultural norms that operate in the world. the way they choose to present themselves in the club resonates with the work of artists such as cindy sherman and martha wilson who play with the “to-be-looked-at-ness” of female representation in order to subvert it (mulvey 1975). the ways in which older women are associated with the domestic and the familial produces another instance of incongruity where the visual identity marker of having white hair, for instance, is at odds with being present in a sexualised space where predatory behaviour is not uncommon. despite claims that, in the rush of the early days at least, rave culture presented a largely de-sexualised terrain (melechi 1993; hemment 1997; pini 1997), the testimony of the respondents suggest that sexual harassment is another instance of time-space mismatch where they are forced to negotiate their status as older women. it is interesting to note that although inclusive club cultures such as psytrance have a long established reputation of being safe spaces for women, the testimony of our respondents challenges this notion in that they describe being subject to overt sexualisation and objectification. while some of the women mention the positives of this and have developed playful ways to address it, the club context presents a problem for them in the same way as it does for younger women. moreover, it is possibly an area in which older women are particularly vulnerable as there may be the assumption that they should be “grateful” for sexual advances, unsolicited or not, due to their age. more positively, and perhaps controversially, is that these older women consider themselves to be sexual beings and are responded to as such by often much younger men. in order to navigate the space safely, a number of tactical decisions are taken and practical strategies are adopted to ensure their access to and participation in the night is managed effectively. the strategies they adopt are well rehearsed and practised. in schechner’s framing this is “twice behaved behaviours” (1985). this indicates a maturity they bring to their engagement, even when their enjoyment might be judged from a more conventional position as inappropriate or even illegal. their attitude and approach to recreational dancecult 11(1)24 drug use, for example, is particularly measured. the risks and the pleasures are carefully considered and thought through based on experience. this comes across perhaps most clearly in the way the women talk about how they craft their appearance, a process that is laced with complex considerations linked to identity, sexuality, safety, pleasure, comfort and appropriateness. as older women who claim their place within a culture that is associated with youth, the visual representation they adopt could be considered as quiet subversion that presents a challenge to normative assumptions of age and gender. however, at times this quiet subversion threatens to get lost in the process of labelling individuals as “rave mum” or “granny” which tames their challenge by implicating conventional familial, ageist and domestic frames. despite the attempts of others to consign older women to the domestic space, it is the quest for other-space and what that affords which fuels their participation in the scene. the concept of other-space demonstrates the way in which clubs and festivals provide the women with an opportunity to access alternative versions of themselves. framed in various ways, they all talk of the types of transformation they feel are achieved through actively engaged hedonism, namely escape, ritual, healing and well-being. here the language they use points towards an instrumental approach to clubbing that leads to shutdown, reboot and recalibration. to achieve these states, the women consider set and setting to be key and dedicate a great deal of thought to the elements that will facilitate their journey into otherspace. this includes the use of drugs as a type of foucauldian technology of the self (martin, gutman and hutton 1988). they are hyper-aware of the conditions necessary to access a state of transcendence and can articulate the barriers and obstacles equally well. the barriers are associated with unwanted advances, sensing they are out of place or among the wrong crowd, feeling vulnerable – situations that create unsettling or destabilising sensations. the sense of well-being derived from participation in club culture is located predominantly in friendship networks. for older people who often find themselves in an increasingly marginalised position in society, the opportunity for intergenerational recreation, let alone latent hedonism, is rare. this is perhaps one of the biggest challenges to societal norms our research demonstrates. intergenerational friendships fulfil many functions associated with affection and satisfaction. they provide companionship, help, intimacy, alliance, self-validation and emotional security (mendelson and aboud 1999). having fun together is important to friendships more widely (hartup and stevens 1999; way 2013) and can contribute significantly to a rich network of interpersonal exchanges that lead to growth, shared meaning-making and mutual understanding (laguardia 2008). having the opportunity to establish and grow intergenerational friendship networks through conscious hedonism plays an important part in the women’s continued participation and presents further challenge to the more conventional assumptions of what fun might look like to a woman in her 50s or 60s. o’grady and madill | being and performing “older” woman in electronic dance movement culture 25 conclusion the experience of older women who participate in edm culture is noticeably absent from extant scholarship despite the scene itself entering its fourth decade. the terms scarcity, deficit and invisibility accompany scholarly considerations of female aging, not least in relation to clubbing practices. our research offers a critique of the narrative of invisibility that accompanies much of the existing work on the experiences of older women and foregrounds the tactical engagement of this particular cohort as a form of quiet subversion. in the club context older women find themselves being conspicuous by virtue of their age. their presence on the dance floor presents a challenge to what society considers “appropriate” behaviour for women beyond a certain age and, as such, can be framed as a process of resistance, however reluctantly adopted. our research illuminates the challenges such women face, the various reactions they prompt from other clubbers and the strategic approaches they take to deal with these. the ways in which older women resist and defy normative configurations of age/gender subjectivities, raises interesting questions about female aging in contexts beyond the club space. our research challenges the view that particular behaviours have a shelf life and that being an older woman excludes one from certain activities, particularly those that might be considered hedonistic, deviant or illegal. our research suggests that older women are not participating in club culture despite of their age. in most instances they are participating because of their age. each of our respondents came to the psytrance scene relatively late in life and it offers them an experience of well-being and intergenerational social connectedness that would be difficult for them to access in other contexts. in fact, their age and experience enabled them to lever maximum enjoyment from occupying other-space via actively engaged hedonism. acknowledgements heartfelt thanks to the women who shared their experiences and stories with us so candidly and graciously. thanks also to jade bannister for assisting us search for relevant literature in the early stages of this project. notes 1 we use the term “older woman” throughout this article but deliberately resist defining individuals in this category by chronological age. we acknowledge that the term is relative and dependant on context. for the purposes of this study, we were interested in speaking to women who consider themselves to be older within the context of the psytrance scene. this placed our informants 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combined with a questionnaire, where performer experiences of streamed events are analysed within csikszentmihalyi’s “systems model of creativity” (1988, 1999). section 1 provides more detail of the chiptune genre. section 2 is an overview over the state of the art of live streaming in general. in section 3, the “systems model of creativity” framework is introduced, and section 4 summarizes the questionnaire and case study. section 5 concludes. 1 chiptune: nostalgia and hardware hacking as artistic practice chiptune is a lo-fi electronic music style that emerged in the early 70s and 80s. since existing audio playback formats were not suitable for interactive real-time audio applications, special chips were built that could transform electrical impulses from a computer into analogue sound waves. musicians and programmers developed code for these chips, allowing arcade machines, early games consoles and personal computers to be transformed into musical instruments. the unique sonic characteristics of these sound chips set the scene for the iconic 8-bit sound, which continues to inspire musicians in the present day (mcalpine 2018). traditionally, sound chips were controlled with tracker software, a method that some purists still employ in the present day. these musicians enjoy the intellectual challenge and creative restriction of working directly with obsolete technology. among them, hardware hacking is popular (farrell 2020), and fosters a strong diy ethic and mutual curiosity. non-purists expand the chiptune aesthetic into modern music genres ranging from pop and edm to rock, using chiptune software emulations within a standard daw workflow to achieve the typical timbres and arpeggiation found in older 8-bit tunes (paul 2014). figure 1: a catskull electronics arduinoboy (arduino computer) used to control a 90s game boy with midi for 8-bit recordings. photo credit: kirsten hermes (2021). 2 live streaming as a growing medium the covid-19 pandemic led to worldwide lockdowns from early 2020, resulting in cancelled live performances on a global scale. this led to a rise in live streaming among popular musicians. lady gaga, paul mccartney and billie eilish were among 100 artists performing from their living rooms in the globally televised fundraiser concert “together at home” in april 2020 (global citizen 2020). performances inside of video games have taken place even before the pandemic, but experienced a surge in popularity once face-to-face gigs were no longer possible. live-streamed performances are highly accessible to geographically spread-out viewers, allowing niche scenes to overcome physical barriers (kleon 2021; kerrigan 2013). the barriers of entry are low for audiences and practitioners alike. the technology is readily available: a computer or mobile phone is all that is required to put on a show. most social media platforms allow for live streaming, including facebook, instagram, discord and youtube. zoom, teams and skype can also be used. through free screen casting software solutions like obs, we can simultaneously stream to several platforms and custom servers. specialist companies help facilitate more challenging and custom applications. for instance, hopin is an online conference platform, where musicians can perform on a virtual mainstage or chat with audience members in custom breakout rooms. musicians can also make a living online. shows can be offered behind a paywall, or alternatively, donations can be taken during a performance. on twitch, artists can earn money through paid viewer subscriptions and youtube has a button for donations. the ‘metaverse’ offers exciting new opportunities through blockchain technologies, and nfts are a promising potential income stream for creators. ongoing research in up-and-coming live streaming technologies further expands the capabilities for remote performance. ar and immersive vr online chat rooms, motion tracking and games engines allow artists to perform live through virtual avatars. immersive audio can be transmitted over high-speed internet connections, with dolby atmos or sony’s 360-degree reality audio being recent examples. musicians can collaborate remotely over improved high-speed ip networks, thus performing together in real time. increased 5g capabilities make fast internet easily accessible. 3 creativity needs collaboration: the systems model of creativity traditional romantic and inspirationist assumptions saw the individual at the centre of the creative process, whereby a moment of insight or inspiration led to creativity—but many modern researchers argue against these early western views (thompson and mcintyre 2013). several factors are required for creativity, and cultural and social circumstances seem to be as important as the individual (csikszentmihalyi 1999, 1988; sawyer 2012). brian eno coined the term “scenius”, whereby artists are not “lone geniuses”, but form part of a network of creators and consumers that inspire each other, and exchange tools, techniques and ideas through a common language (eno 2009; kleon 2012). in this way, creators and consumers blend into one. in his systems model of creativity (1988, 1999), csikszentmihalyi specified that a creative system needs: a “domain” or culture that consists of symbolic rules, guidelines and practices, an “individual” that can bring novelty into the domain and a “field” of experts who identify and authenticate that novelty. communication in the “field”, in the form of collaboration and social networking play a crucial role for creativity. sawyer (2012) asserts that “your own idea won’t be as good as it would have been if it had gone through the collaborative process”. according to lucy green (2002), songwriters learn about their domain through formal, semi-formal and informal sources, which includes a field of fellow practitioners. djs are most successful when they connect with others and learn to read an audience, and the “magic” happens when both dj and audience experience collective effervescence (fikentscher 2013). in this sense, the audience are also important for an artist to develop their skills. all these examples show that musical practitioners benefit from a supportive community. within the “domain” of chiptune, the artists as “individuals” draw on a “field” of hardware hackers, musicians and gamers, who meet online and face to face to exchange ideas, support and feedback. 4 chiptune streaming gigs: questionnaire and case study the chiptune scene (“field”) is firmly embedded within the online gaming community, and its practitioners are generally tech-savvy and open to technical experimentation. this is a useful starting point for the transition from face-to-face performances to online streaming. to investigate the advantages and disadvantages of streaming gigs for chiptune music, i will analyse my own experiences alongside questionnaire responses from six other chiptune artists. under the moniker nyokee, i combine retro games console sounds with analogue synthesizers, daw production and visuals. my streaming performances have e.g. included the 2021 women in games conference, sponsored by innovate uk, and “gamechangers”, a fundraiser event organised by ukie (the trade association for the uk games industry). i will use my performances to reflect on online chiptune shows. nyokee live at “gamechangers” (nyokee 2021). to gain an outside perspective, i also sent a short questionnaire to six other chiptune musicians, asking the following questions: what setup do you use to play and stream? in some of the online shows you have performed, what went well? what was difficult? overall, what are the advantages and disadvantages of streaming gigs? do you think chiptune works better in streaming gigs or face to face? the interviewees were: shirobon, a well-established chiptune and electronic artist from the uk, who has millions of views on youtube and an international following, btype, an 8-bit punk-rap band from the uk who have performed at a variety of chiptune and anime shows, r41nb0w tr4$h, a touring chip musician, hardware modder and university lecturer from canada, robkta, an italian video game remixer, music composer and disco-chiptune producer based in the uk, circuit bird, a uk producer using the deflemask tracker for sega mega drive music and korg gadget on the nintendo switch, and game genie sokolov—a canadian transgender artist combining chiptune, retrowave and funk, using a sega genesis console. in the following sections, their responses are analysed within the systems model of creativity framework. the respondents’ streaming setups are presented (section 4.1), followed by a discussion of the importance of collaboration in chiptune (“field”, section 4.2). four additional themes were extracted from the audience responses (thematic content analysis): accessibility and inclusivity (section 4.3), audience engagement (section 4.4), live streaming as a tradition in gaming culture (section 4.5) and control of over the look and sound of the show (section 4.6). 4.1 streaming setups the interviewees’ streaming setups are as diverse as their musical styles and demonstrate a good grasp of technology. each respondent has an extensive collection of home devices for performance, including games consoles, laptops running daws, midi controllers, green screens, cameras, dj decks, musical instruments, and various tools for streaming. i use ableton and midi controllers, with live visuals from the third-party plugin ebosuite. the consensus appears to be that performers are not afraid to add a high level of complexity to their live rigs. this is in line with the chiptune “domain”, where technical complexity and computer coding play an important role. figure 2: the ebosuite window in ableton live for streaming visuals. photo credit: kirsten hermes (2021). figure 3: what the audience see when i perform. photo credit: kirsten hermes (2021). 4.2 chiptune as a collaborative pursuit chiptune is a global niche and streaming gigs allow artists to connect with the “field” over a distance. the salience of the community spirit, upheld through nostalgia and technology, was particularly evident from btype’s response, who mentioned “the nostalgia of three different generations”, brought together in a “punk rock meets edm” (btype 2022)[1] aesthetic. according to circuit bird, “streaming gigs [were] a fantastic way to keep the community together” (circuit bird 2022)[2] during lockdowns. r41nb0w tr4$h enjoyed “learning about…communities, exchanging with other performers, reflecting on some of the questions the audience has for you” and “setting up last-minute collaborations” (2022).[3] in this way, online streaming platforms help artists to connect on a global level, and present new opportunities for mutual support and collaboration. 4.3 accessibility and inclusivity most of the questionnaire participants commented on the advantage of accessibility, whereby diverse groups could participate in streaming gigs, and bridge geographical distance. according to r41nb0w tr4$h, streaming gigs were “great for community-building” and included “women, non-binary folks, people of colour, disabled folks, and people from neurodivergent backgrounds” (2022). in my experience, many chiptune artists are neurodivergent (i am, too), and performing from home can help mitigate some of the anxiety that more unpredictable face to face shows can bring. shirobon adds that, “you don't have to worry about travel and accommodation”, which also helped circuit bird who works at weekends. game genie sokolov stresses that “everyone from the world can join” (2022).[4] 4.4 audience engagement all participants commented on the fact that it is more difficult to connect with audiences online than face to face. according to circuit bird, “live music in a club gives us much higher energy, you can join with groups of friends and dance together” (2022). similarly, r41nb0w tr4$h prefers live gigs to streaming gigs, as the latter can feel isolating, and “the party is missing…” (2022). btype misses being in “a physical space with an audience and playing with their reactions and feelings”, which is why he “fell in love with the art of performance” (2022). robkta agrees: since chiptune gigs are “incredibly energetic for the audience, there's the lack of it that can [impact] a bit on the overall experience” (2022).[5] “collective effervescence” or “reading the audience” are more difficult to achieve remotely, as we cannot see or hear the audience and there is a delay between the performance and the stream. performers usually require a separate device for reading audience comments, which adds further complexity. audience members can also not see or hear each other, and also be more easily distracted from the show. still, real-life-performances rarely allow artists to find out what audiences’ members think at specific points in time, an opportunity afforded by the chat function of most available streaming platforms: comments can be saved and archived, and reflected on later. figure 4: a screenshot of comments from one my shows. photo credit: kirsten hermes (2022). 4.5 live streaming as a tradition in gaming culture while it is more difficult to connect with audience members in streaming gigs than in real life, the chiptune genre’s roots do lie in gaming culture, where live streaming is a long-standing tradition. technically savvy gamers, hackers and fellow musicians have used the internet for collaboration, competition and learning for decades. this has helped the chiptune scene transition to a virtual streaming format during the pandemic. as btype states, with chiptune being so rooted in the history of video games, it's so serendipitous (and on brand for chiptune!) that the online performance platforms popping up are also a part of that same root system. i feel chiptune acts benefit from an online audience that is a bit more savvy, even passively, with media tech and art being used as performance tools (2022). 4.6 control over the look and sound of the show audience members depend on visual information to judge the skill of the performer (tsay 2013; vuoskoski et al 2016), and to understand the overall emotion. gesture is a fundamental element of successful performances as it helps to communicate liveness to an audience (joaquim and barbosa 2013). therefore, it can be empowering for artists to be able to control exactly what the audience see. as tech-savvy gamers and fellow musicians, chiptune audience members often enjoy seeing performance setups up close, so they can try to reverse-engineer them. the modern reincarnation of the 8-bit era is not just a musical phenomenon, but includes visual, social, political and performative aspects through artists’ playful congregation around retro-gaming symbols (marquez 1994). during the pandemic, i was able to start working with my partner, who dressed up as a saxophone playing alien. i could also surround myself with diy 8-bit art and show visuals on a screen. being able to experiment with this shift in my visual image, from the comfort of my own home, was exhilarating. “having so much more control over your presentation and aesthetic is a delight. without the constraints that come with using a venue's space, or sharing one with other performers, you can go to town framing your performance however you like” (btype 2022). according to game genie sokolov, “you can play whatever you like, you can control what you look like, you can ensure perfect audio quality… [and decide] how to use the space” (2022).[6] still, performing online can also mean additional technical difficulties, “to the point where most ‘live’ sets have to be pre-recorded to try and avoid these” (shirobon 2022). personally, i did not face many technical difficulties online, apart from one time, when an event organiser used the wrong sample rate, making my music sound fast and high-pitched. the audience enjoyed this effect, comparing it to the nightcore genre, which is in line with the scene’s appreciation of errors and limitations in technology as an artistic theme. 5 conclusion community (the “field”) is an important ingredient in music making. for the close-knit, yet geographically scattered chiptune community, virtual concerts help bridge physical distance and provide a new platform for mutual support and collaboration. due to the close relationship with gaming culture, where live streaming has been popular even before the pandemic, the transition to a virtual streaming format feels natural. chiptune music making is a “domain” characterised by technical complexity and overlaps with electronics and computer science. as a tech-savvy breed of musicians that are eager to learn and “tinker”, chiptune artists use streaming technology confidently and enjoy customising the look at sound of their shows online. they also enjoy helping each other and learning from the community. streaming shows are accessible, which can help neurodivergent artists feel more in control, and bridge physical distance. being able to read chat comments, long after a show, is a useful starting point for reflection. still, chiptune music is a high-energy dance affair which still works best on a real stage, with an audience that can see and hear each other, and the performer, in an immersive way. author biography dr. kirsten hermes is an interdisciplinary researcher, book author (hermes 2021), senior lecturer, singer, violinist and audio-visual artist, bridging scientific and creative domains in her work. kirsten holds a phd in sound perception from the university of surrey (uk), which was funded by the british engineering and physical sciences council. she also works as a freelance sound designer and video creator. contact: k.hermes@westminster.ac.uk. references csikszentmihalyi, mihaly. 2013. creativity: flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. new york: harper perennial modern classics. 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[2] circuit bird, personal communication with the author (on facebook), 9 september 2021. [3] r41nb0w tr4$h, personal communication with the author (on facebook), 9 september 2021. [4] shirobon, personal communication with the author (on facebook), 9 september 2021. [5] robkta, personal communication with the author (on facebook), 9 september 2021. [6] game genie sokolov, personal communication with the author (on facebook), 9 september 2021. finding shelter: recollections of shanghai’s underground music scene in the 2010s tianyu jiang university of music and performing arts vienna (austria) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.09> the shelter was an underground club in shanghai which, during its 9 years of operation from 2007 to 2016, transformed shanghai’s underground electronic music scene.[1] the club is named literally, as the underground space is a former bomb shelter. one has to walk downstairs after opening the unimpressive door of yongfu lu no. 5, then pass through a long tunnel, to be finally immersed in the music. the shelter, shanghai (wang 2009) the shelter’s co-founder gareth “gaz” williams explained in an interview with resident advisor when the club opened in 2007: “it confused a lot of people. it’s not nice at all. it’s just a sweaty dark box. there’s no lights, there’s no dice or cognac—there’s nothing to do but dance” (fernandes 2012). due to the bad cellular reception inside plus the not-yet-advanced camera of mobile devices, footage found on youtube when searching “the shelter shanghai” is of a lo-fi aesthetic—blurry, dark, loud, yet at the same time energetic (see wang’s “the shelter, shanghai” from 2009). media coverage of the shelter established the venue’s role in the local scene as transformative, with headlines like “cutting-edge music finds a home” or “shanghai’s grittiest nightclub” (williams 2016; vice thump 2013). according to these articles, the shelter not only fostered a music-based creative community, but has also become a repository of memories for visitors of various social and cultural backgrounds—from university students from different countries, to professionals of various industries and nationalities—as an intimate social space. this article presents conversations with three dj/producers who experienced the shelter. their memories reveal some of the city’s bygone underground scene attached to the infamous club.[2] figure 1. the stairs to the shelter. photo credit: andrew rochfort, used with permission. lee, independent music producer and dj tianyu jiang: could you tell a bit about your experiences at the shelter? lee: i was still working towards my bachelor’s degree at a university in nanjing at the time, so in 2013 and 2014. i had limited knowledge of the scene and the culture. when i entered the shelter, i thought the place was quite ye (“wild”).[3] it was very dark, you couldn’t see a thing. the mentality of the crowd seemed to be different back then. whenever i went there, it felt like people were talking about music, about the content of things. i would take a train from nanjing to shanghai and go to several venues the same night. so it would be checking some famous headliners first, then switching to venues like dada and shelter. elevator was not open yet. the next morning, my classmates and i just took the train back to school so we could save the accommodation expenses. back then, the emotion surpassed other things. you had that energy when you were young. mau mau, dj, promoter and music director of the club elevator tianyu jiang: have you partied at shelter? i assume the answer is “of course”. mau mau: i went to shelter a lot and i really liked going there. i got to dj and be involved with some of the events. it was a hard place to get into, because gaz was very picky with bookings and parties. especially when my friends and i were more on the slightly silly and fun side of party music at the time, which was not really what he was about. shelter is generally kind of more serious… very experimental? either experimental, or… . shelter is interesting because it was good the way that the booking was half gaz—so experimental, dubstep and these things—and the other half was hip hop, because his partner v-nutz was like a scratch legend. maybe because labels like svbkvlt or genome came out of shelter and kept reinforcing the story of shelter.[4] people don’t talk so much of the other part, the hip hop side. some of the biggest nights i’ve been to were underground american hip hop nights. battle of the beats in shanghai, didjelirium (2011) how was the crowd during that time? messier? for me, one thing that was cool about shelter is that it had more of a mix of expats and locals than most places that were doing underground music at that time. clubs with nights doing house and techno, which was what i’m really into, tended to be mostly expats. shelter was a place where you felt more like you were actually in shanghai. there were some parties at other places with international bookings from europe or the us, where you would almost feel like you were in spain or france. the vibe of those parties could be great, but it could also be a little bit sad. why? just being in shanghai and having these weird bubbles disconnected from local people. then shelter was discovered among the locals. it seemed that the club became popular among people in the fashion and creative industry rather quickly. maybe because it was a “hip” place? i never really thought of shelter as fashionable or a place of fashion. just because it was so dark, you couldn’t really see anything. the toilets were horrible. it was pretty much an underground feeling. but definitely in terms of the creative community, out of all the clubs shelter was the one that most consistently also did things with various visual artists. so, it definitely felt like a place with a creative community. one thing that’s been pretty rare in general in the scene here, is that the staff could also be the people partying at the place. compared to most cities, shanghai generally tends to have this divide between the staff and the customers. shelter, i think, was the first place where it felt like the staff would be the people who also hang out there. that helped to give it a more relaxed sort of community feeling. there is the narrative that people talked more about music back then when going to shelter and nowadays the clubs are more like a social space. interesting. i definitely hear people talk about this now as clubbing is becoming more fashionable and there’s a little bit less … direct engagement with the music. i definitely went to some parties at shelter that were really focused on the music, but i think in general this place gets mythologized, like, is this place all about art? when for a lot of people it was a party and the party was really the core. when shelter closed in 2016, it was still mostly commercial clubs in shanghai. when you imagined a chinese nightclub it would be like with bars and seating areas… . like a yedian (“mainstream nightclub”). exactly. like the clubs in xintiandi.[5] i read some work on the early clubs, like m2. i was lucky that i was here in 2006 so i saw the end of some bigger commercial clubs before shelter, which used to also have some more underground music. these places were like bon bon which is where system is now, or like dkd. i guess you can compare them with potent, so with different rooms and they got a big dance floor. it would be about dancing. but then what i understand from people talking is that basically at the time when i was away after finishing school the really intensely commercial table-serviced clubs opened and killed those clubs. when my friends and i were students, we went half the time to logo, which was the closest to a shelter vibe. less clubby but more dada-ish bar/club but also with a more diy, creative community vibe. we went there half the time and then we went to these big crazy clubs half the other time. there aren’t many academic works on the scene after shelter closed, but there has been a lot of media attention. i think the fact that it closed at the peak of its influence and popularity meant that this pioneering place quickly became legend. i remember i tried to go on the closing night on my way to elevator, just to say hi to the friends there. the line was already around the block, also because it was on new year’s eve. i remember that night because many posted about it on social media. it was the time when people started to engage more with wechat, which was not that big around 2013 and 2014. interesting. it was more like weibo at the time. i wonder how much the fact the city is so transient—out of the people that were really core in shelter, so few of them still live here—i wonder if that has played much of a role in the fact that academically these stories don’t get told so much. i was thinking about this with dada the other day when i was playing at their closing party. i used to do, for three or four years, a party every month at dada so that was like the home base for me. at that time i was also partying at shelter a lot. and i’ve realized all the people i was organizing parties with or going to their parties at dada, none of them are still in shanghai. it made it weird to think the thing is closing and all the people that in my head are so strongly connected to it are not around. maybe that makes it harder to have an in-depth focus on things. maybe most clubgoers back then were university students then they graduated and just went elsewhere? maybe. in the end, when it got really popular, it was more students. i never thought shelter was a student-ish crowd. like dada to me was a very student-based crowd. shelter felt a bit older in general. not a lot older, but it felt more like people in their mid-20s. so they just started to work, got a bit of money to party. yeah exactly, a little bit (laughs). eloise, creative director, dj and founder of all-asian-female electronic music label scandal[6] tianyu jiang: could you share some of your experiences at shelter? eloise: the first time i went there probably was in 2013 or 2014, i was still with my ex-partner. i followed him to shelter since he would go there often. he’s into music. my understanding of electronic music back then was the many old tracks introduced to me via douban radio. i actually resisted and disliked that place. one of the reasons is that many people there were high. you see, i didn’t like the place and my ex was there so often, so i felt very strange. i would mock him as having to “crawl through a rat hole” since the club space used to be literally a bomb shelter under the ground. that feeling of aversion lasted quite long. i didn’t feel a part of shelter even until it closed. nevertheless, shelter holds many memories because of my personal relationship, which also ended around the time the club closed. how would you describe the music played at shelter? the british genres, experimental and some avant-garde stuff. it was also when people like tzusing, osheyack, pan dajing started to emerge. what was your impression of the crowd? it was mixed, all sorts of people. i think at the beginning, there weren’t many who dressed in ya-aesthetics as they are today.[7] one could also see the afterwork suit-and-tie type. i recall an interview about the club all when it opened, that all doesn’t want to be the new shelter. would you say there’s much difference between shelter and all? they are completely different. shelter, as i said earlier, was a hole hidden from sight. all—we both have been there—is quite a fancy place, almost like a commercial bar. it had that vibe from the beginning: the choice of the locale, the size of the space, the overall interior. on these aspects, it does a better job than shelter [did]. you mentioned that people were rather casually dressed at shelter. my impression during the early days was that people who had a rather individual style were those who work in the fashion industry, or have experience from abroad, or those who have professional relationships with art and fashion. or people who might own a vintage store, so they’ve got the outfits. for the ones whose identity already embodies elements of art and fashion, it’s perhaps habitual for them to dress up. but in the latter stage of shelter, the ya-aesthetics also became popular. many would say shelter is where underground electronic music scene begins in china, which seems to mythologize the club. after hearing what i just said, would you think that i mythologize the place? not at all (both laugh). yet the media coverage has made it a starting point of everything. i think to mythologize something in the meantime will stifle that exact thing. are the people you used to go clubbing together with at shelter, still in the scene today? i think my friends all had something to do with music, either as djs or promoters. most of them are not in the scene anymore. only a few stayed. the famous ones i mentioned earlier are, of course, advancing their careers in the scene. gaz continued to work with svbkvlt after returning home. i think people who are at the core of the scene, or who have certain privileges, will keep working with it and getting involved: people from shanghai, the locals as well as the expats. as for the consumers of the night, their configuration has shifted many times already. for shelter or all, they are just passers-by. and for them, the club is also a place that passes. just as a place of choice to spend the weekend. yes. i guess most people won’t attach anything “heavy” to the scene. figure 2. the door of shelter after the closing day, with a paper saying “closed forever”. photo credit: andrew rochfort, used with permission. author biography tianyu jiang (they/she) is a phd candidate at the university of music and performing arts vienna. their doctoral project is an ethnography on the recent years’ proliferating underground queer and women-centered music scenes in shanghai. their main research interests include urban space/place, underground creative scenes and digital literacy. e: jiang@mdw.ac.at references fernandes, sanj. 2012. “clubbing in shanghai.” resident advisor. <https://ra.co/features/1568>, (accessed 21 december 2023). hawthorn, carlos. 2016. “shanghai club the shelter to close after license renewal rejected.” resident advisor. <https://ra.co/news/36800>, (accessed 21 december 2023). vice thump. 2013. “how a bomb shelter became shanghai’s grittiest nightclub.” vice. <https://www.vice.com/en/article/gvnpdx/nightclub-shelter-shanghais-grittiest>, (accessed 21 december 2023). williams, gaz. 2016. “cutting-edge music finds a home in shanghai at the shelter”. electronic beats. <https://www.electronicbeats.net/club-feature-shelter-shanghai/>, (accessed 21 december 2023). filmography didjelirium. “2011-05-12 – battle of the beats in shanghai”. youtube, 22:01. uploaded on 4 july 2011. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nevt_a7gdgq&t=35s&ab_channel=didjelirium>, (accessed on 21 december 2023). oliver wang. “the shelter, shanghai”. youtube, 00:46. uploaded on 6 july 2009. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pw73iitqaf0&ab_channel=oliverwang>, (accessed on 21 december 2023). notes [1] the club was closed on the 31 december 2016 due to a rejected lease renewal (hawthorn 2016). the names “the shelter” and “shelter” were used interchangeably in the interviews. [2] the interviews were conducted in person from july to september 2023 in shanghai and were a part of my doctoral project focusing more on the post-shelter underground music scene. interviews were done in chinese or english, depending on the interviewees’ native language. names of the interviewees are pseudonymized either with no relevance to their professional activities, or their chosen names are used with permission. [3] some words have been retained in chinese because it is terminology difficult to translate, so it is more useful to include the original language. these chinese words are in italics followed by an explanation of the meaning in brackets. [4] browse svbkult’s discography at <https://svbkvlt.bandcamp.com/>, (accessed 17 october 2024). browse genome’s discography at <https://genome666mbp.bandcamp.com/>, (accessed 17 october 2024). [5] xintiandi is an upscale residential, cultural and entertainment district in central shanghai with a cluster of shopping malls, fine restaurants, bars and commercial nightclubs. [6] browse scandal’s discography at <https://scandalsounds.bandcamp.com/music>, (accessed 17 october 2024). [7] in recent years, the single character of ya (“sub-” as used in subculture) has become a frequently used adjective in colloquial chinese to describe a particular fashion and make-up style, which, to some extent, resembles street fashion, as in “harajuku scene.” augmented creativity: using ai collaborators to make a music video dancecult: journal of electronic music & dance culture 17(1): 102–128 issn 1947-5403 ©2025 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.06 augmented creativity: using ai collaborators to make a music video kirsten hermes university of westminster (uk) abstract this article explores the use of ai tools in the diy production of a music video through a practice-led case study involving midjourney, runway and plask. the project demonstrates how ai enables faster and more stylistically ambitious visual content creation, especially for music producers without formal visual training, while also reshaping the artistic challenges for the maker. through critical reflection, public feedback and an industry interview, the study examines how ai functions as an incubator and technical executor, aiding in the preparation and elaboration stages of the creative process. drawing on creativity theory, this article argues that while ai can produce novel and valuable outputs, it lacks intentionality and must be guided, interpreted and curated by humans. the research supports emerging concepts of ai co-creativity, suggesting that the future of content production lies not in ai replacing humans, but in augmenting human direction through collaborative frameworks. keywords: ai, music video, co-creativity, midjourney, motion capture kirsten hermes is an interdisciplinary researcher, book author, senior lecturer and audio-visual artist, bridging scientific and creative domains in her work. she tours internationally under the moniker nyokee. kirsten holds a phd in sound perception from the university of surrey (uk), which was funded by the epsrc. kirsten regularly publishes interdisciplinary book chapters and academic articles, combining scientific and technical knowledge with creative practice. she recently published the book “performing electronic music live”. kirsten also works as a freelance sound designer and video creator, for example for roli. feature article https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.06 hermes | augmented creativity 103 artificial intelligence (ai) refers to systems that can learn from data and adjust their behaviour without explicit programming, with generative ai now capable of producing creative outputs such as text, images and audio. while creation is never ex nihilo, being built on the shoulders of predecessors (sarmiento and stahl 2008), the rise of generative ai has sparked debates around ethical use and the potential replacement of human creatives. supporters of human-centred ai advocate for approaches that support, rather than replace, human capabilities (browne 2022; shneiderman 2022). all creative industries are already experiencing the integration of ai into various aspects of the production process. in music production, more research is needed to understand their influence on the creative thinking of musicians. rather than pursuing full automation, this article focuses on a co-creativity setting, exploring both the affordances and limitations of ai tools in a collaborative artistic workflow. specifically, it examines how co-creativity between humans and ai can be better understood through the lens of music video creation. this is explored through a case study in which a music video was produced using three ai tools: the generative image platform midjourney, the video platform runway and plask, an ai-powered motion capture tool. in addition, a semi-structured interview was carried out with an ai industry leader, using the music video as a springboard for discussion. further, a documentary was produced around the creative process and shown to online communities on reddit, youtube, facebook and instagram, to receive feedback from the public. via this experiment, critical reflection was used as a research method. the findings are grounded in existing literature around creativity. the first section is a brief introduction to the field of ai and tools relevant for musicians. the second section is a summary of existing creativity research. the third section details the practice-led case study. the fourth section discusses the findings from this case study in the context of the existing literature and the last section is the conclusion. a brief introduction to creative ai tools artificial intelligence (ai) refers to machines learning from experience and adjusting to new inputs instead of being explicitly coded. the term ai was coined in dartmouth in the fifties, when pioneer scientists attempted to develop a “fully intelligent machine” (wingström et al. 2022). however, to this day, intelligence is not fully understood and therefore difficult to replicate (wingström et al. 2022). narrow artificial intelligence is designed to perform highly specific tasks, as found in many commercially available ai tools. general artificial intelligence refers to ai that could replicate human intelligence, which is currently not possible. oxford philosopher nick bostrom (2014) defines artificial super intelligence (asi) as “any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest”, a type of technology reserved for sci-fi movies. within ai, the field of machine learning enables machines to carry out tasks which are non-routine and require creativity (susskind 2020). neural networks are a special case dancecult 17(1)104 of machine learning. generative ai is a category of artificial intelligence algorithms that generate new outputs based on specific training data, such as images, text, or audio. there are now dozens of ai tools available for music creation, spanning composition, production, mixing, mastering and more. platforms like suno, udio, stable audio, boomy and mubert can generate full audio tracks with customizable styles, while tools such as orb producer, audiocipher and captain chords focus on midi generation. ai-assisted music production is also supported by platforms like lifescore, aimi, bandlab and logic pro, which offer features for ai collaboration. mixing and mastering can be automated with tools like izotope, sonible and landr. audio separation tasks can be handled by lalal. ai or splitter.ai. beyond music, ai tools are increasingly used in adjacent creative domains. text-based tools like chatgpt, claude and gemini can generate lyrics, promotional content, or concept development. for visual assets such as album artwork and social media content, platforms such as midjourney, google imagen, stable diffusion and flux are being widely adopted. in video, tools like runway, sora, stable video diffusion and kling support the creation of music videos and short-form visuals. some platforms, such as plask and deepmotion, offer motion capture from video and emerging research is also exploring textto-motion generation. ai-generated sound effects for video can now be created via tools like elevenlabs sfx generator, sfx engine and mmaudio. as ai continues to evolve, so do its potential applications across the entire creative pipeline, from idea generation to post-production. many creatives are concerned with ai replacing their jobs (susskind 2020) and there are urgent issues surrounding copyright infringement, particularly the unlicensed use of artists’ work in ai training datasets (european innovation council and smes executive agency 2024), as well as the risk of homogenisation and standardisation of creative outputs due to the tendency of generative models to reinforce cultural bias (zhou et al. 2024). these developments threaten to marginalise underrepresented voices, erode creative diversity and devalue human authorship. in response, this article explores the potential of ai co-creation, that is collaborative processes between humans and machines (specifically for a music video), as a more ethical and creatively fulfilling alternative. in order to understand how humans can collaborate with ai to produce creative outputs, the state of the art in creativity research is briefly summarized in the next section and will be used as a framework for the discussion going forward. researching creativity creative ideas are novel and valuable combinations of known ideas (de mántaras 2020). as such, creativity is agreed to be a twofold concept, requiring both originality and effectiveness (kaufman 2016; wingström et al. 2022). as becker (1982) states, “we are interested in the event which consists of a work being made and appreciated; for that to happen, the activity of response and appreciation must occur”. similarly, bourdieu (1993) posits that works of art exist as symbolic objects only if they are known and recognized, that is socially instituted as works of art. for an output to be perceived as creative, it must be new and hermes | augmented creativity 105 surprising, a definition that often traces back to margaret boden’s work (2004). but where does creativity emerge? traditional romantic and inspirationist assumptions saw the individual at the centre of the creative process, whereby a moment of insight or inspiration led to creativity. as such, early studies into creativity focused on the individual and their biological makeup (thompson 2015). the earliest known study into creativity, carried out by sir francis galton (1869), focussed on “hereditary genius” (thompson 2015). nowadays, it is commonly agreed that several factors are required for creativity, and that cultural and social circumstances are as important as the individual (csikszentmihalyi 1988 and 1999; sawyer 2012). csikszentmihalyi posits that “creativity is the property of a complex system and none of its components alone can explain it” (1997: 56). creativity as a systemic phenomenon in his systems model of creativity (see fig.1), csikszentmihalyi (1988 and 1999) specifies that a creative system needs a “domain” or culture that consists of symbolic rules, guidelines and practices; an “individual” that can bring novelty into the domain and a “field” of experts who recognize and authenticate that novelty. figure 1. revised systems model of creativity (kerrigan 2014). image credit: kirsten hermes. dancecult 17(1)106 the ongoing interactions that occur between the domain, the field and the individual, do not have distinct stages or a specific start or end points: the relationships between each of the elements are “dynamic links of circular causality” (csikszentmihalyi 1988: 329). as such, systems are non-linear, complex and interconnected. communication in the “field”, in the form of collaboration and social networking, plays a crucial role for creativity. many definitions of creativity contain the elements of actor, process, outcome, domain and space (wingström et al. 2022), particularly the first three (amabile 1996; boden 2004; csikszentmihalyi 1997; rhodes 1961) and existing studies show that all five are still relevant in the context of ai (wingström et al. 2022). actors produce creative outcomes within a domain, by engaging in a creative process. space refers to a network of actors, artifacts and environments that interact in the creation processes (wingström et al. 2022). some researchers consider creativity to be distributed into artifacts and the environment (wingström et al. 2022), which becomes especially relevant in the new field of ai. creativity as a process so far, creativity has been described as emerging from systems or networks. it can also be studied as a process with different stages. csikszentmihalyi (2013) distinguishes the stages of preparation, incubation, insight, evaluation and elaboration. in the preparation stage, a problem definition takes place, sparking curiosity. during incubation, ideas are processed in the subconscious, eventually leading to insight. during the evaluation stage, an individual decides whether the insight is valuable and worth pursuing. lastly, elaboration occurs, where the work is implemented and realized. notably, these stages are not linear but recursive and the number of iterations depends on the depth and breadth of the issues dealt with (csikszentmilahyi 1997). in this way, the subprocesses involved in creativity recur over and over in complex sequences (eindhoven and vinacke 1952; mumford et al. 1991; runco 1994). the phases can also co-occur when a person engages in preparation for one aspect of a problem and incubates for another aspect of the problem (lubart 2010). some older models have four stages (lubart 2001). in his presidential address to the american psychological association, guilford (1950: 451) noted that there was “considerable agreement that the complete creative act involves four important steps”, that is, preparation, incubation, illumination and verification. amabile (1996) distinguished problem or task identification, preparation, response generation and response validation and communication. by separating the creative process into distinct stages, ai creativity can be studied in a more nuanced way. the findings and discussion section refers back to these stages from the perspective of the critical reflection. creative personalities some studies are concerned with understanding creative personalities. the well-known ocean model (or five factor model, furnham 2008), refers to the parameters of openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (costa and mccrae 1992). another often discussed parameter is divergent thinking, which humans hermes | augmented creativity 107 do to imagine novel ideas and to explore multiple solutions to a problem (runco and acar 2012). divergent thinking is followed by convergent thinking, where thoughts are combined in a structured way to arrive at the best-suited solution (wingström et al. 2022). beyond these innately human personality criteria, de mántaras (2020) posits that creativity is an advanced form of problem solving that involves memory, analogy, learning and reasoning under constraints: all traits that can be replicated by means of computers. he claims that creativity can be investigated, simulated and harnessed for the good of society. the findings and discussion section analyses to what extent ai could be seen as a creative agent. interactions between individuals and their social environments have a large impact on creativity (csikszentmihalyi 1997), as discussed in the following section. the extent to which outputs are both novel and useful has been categorized in different ways. boden (2004) distinguishes p-creativity (psychological) and h-creativity (historical). p-creativity relates to outcomes that are surprising and novel to an individual’s mind and h-creativity relates to revolutionary outcomes that remain significant throughout history. in this way, creative outputs can not only constitute eminent work, but also more “everyday” levels of creativity (lubart 2001). similarly, definitions of “big c” creativity are concerned with exceptionally creative geniuses, while “little c” refers to the everyday creativity of a given individual (simonton 2013: 71; stein 1987: 420). the rank ordering of creative outputs is socially constructed and prone to change. as such, creativity cannot be reduced to formal properties ( jennings 2010). beyond the human-centric view distributed creativity theories (glǎveanu and petre 2014) and posthuman creativity theories (harris and holman jones 2022) challenge more human-centric views and instead emphasize the interaction between humans and “non-humans” — for example, artifacts and technologies. bruno latour, michel callon, madeleine akrich and john law devised actornetwork theory (ant) in the 1980s. here, groups of human and non-human elements form networks and affect each other via connections in these networks (latour 1996). while ant is often seen as conflicting with the systems view, both models highlight that all human outputs involve complex landscapes of many parameters. from a posthuman perspective, knowledge and creativity can be co-constituted with artifacts or technologies (ihde 1990; latour 2013; rose 2017; wingström et al. 2022). ihde (1990) argues that technologies mediate the human world: technology enables certain actions and hence humans experience the world with and through it (wingström et al. 2022.) posthumanism offers a critical extension to sociocultural perspectives which can be useful in assessing generative ai (kumar and tissenbaum 2022). practice-led case study in order to further understand how ai could be integrated in the creative process, a practiceled case study was carried out. clarke and cook (2004) state that theorists can successfully dancecult 17(1)108 use experimentation as a research method, as for example exemplified in marion gucks “thought experiments” (1994). autoethnographic research can make a difference on culture (smith 2017). haseman (2006) asserts the significance of practice-led research and argues for it to be understood as a research strategy within an entirely new research paradigm, as separate from traditional qualitative and quantitative research. practice-led research is situated within the constructivist paradigm, which maguire (2019) defines as the internal or creative interpretation of the outside world, necessitating differentiation between elements and the fundamentally changeable connections or interrelationships they share. within this paradigm, researchers learn from experience and practice. the key research method used for this article was a critical reflection on the creative process. creative reflection is a method of data collection (fook 2011), with the data consisting of the knowledge or assumptions underpinning practice and the changes made to this knowledge through the critical reflection process. the author acted as both researcher and artist, combining three different ai tools in a novel way in order to produce a music video, reflecting on her creative process while doing so. this meant that three types of research data were created: creative assets and project files within the tools used; the final creative output (the music video); and reflective notes taken throughout the process. as a second step, the researcher structured the reflective notes into conclusions to be presented in this research article. the music video is published on youtube, as is a brief documentary on the process (figs. 2 and 3 contain qr codes that can be scanned to view both videos). the overall creative process did not directly involve any other human participants. figure 2. (left) a qr code linking to the music video, viewable <here>. figure 3. (right) a qr code linking to the documentary, viewable <here>. image credits: kirsten hermes (2023). https://youtu.be/cu8flw8ozai https://youtu.be/wdf7sqr5lzi hermes | augmented creativity 109 the researcher is a self-produced electronic music artist under the name nyokee, creating work that draws on a range of influences including video games, japanese visual culture, hyperpop, y2k aesthetics, surrealism and 1990s rave music. her music incorporates stylistic references to artists such as bjork, grimes and kerli, combining shimmery synths with whimsical ideas (fairies, witches, dolls, cyberpunk, spiritual elements) in an electronic pop format. nyokee’s song “ethereal” emerged from a creative process shaped by her experiences of synaesthesia and regular meditative practice. the track’s lyrics (“touching the inbetween / we are mysterious / we are ethereal”) articulate a kind of pseudo-spiritual sci-fi sensibility, evoking themes of techno-human transcendence and inner energy. these motifs were further translated into visual form through the music video, which features an abstract cartoonish deity, footage of the artist singing and playing the violin, and a glowing, iridescent singing mask, all composited within digitally manipulated skies and science fiction-inspired landscapes (figs. 4 and 5). the aim was to create an immersive audiovisual world that oscillates between utopian and slightly uncanny tones, akin to digital dreamscapes found in video games like “no man’s sky”. while the final track is musically situated within electronic pop and progressive house, the creative emphasis was equally placed on the visual and conceptual aspects of the project from the outset. despite limitations in her own visual design skillset, the artist-researcher planned both the music and visuals in tandem, viewing the project as an integrated multimedia work rather than a song accompanied by illustration. this approach aligns with existing scholarship on music videos that challenges the assumption of the music’s centrality in favour of a more multimodal or audiovisual analysis (cook 1998; vernallis 2004; korsgaard 2017). in this view, music videos are not simply vessels for promoting songs, but complex artworks where image, sound, narrative, gesture and affect all interact. figure 4. a screenshot from the music video, with the artist and abstract deity dancing in sync. image credit: kirsten hermes (2023). dancecult 17(1)110 figure 5. a screenshot from the music video, with the artist playing violin in front of an abstract utopian landscape. image credit: kirsten hermes (2023). prior to the music video project, the artist had been exploring generative ai tools for approximately six months, producing concept art for a range of speculative projects in a similar envisioned style (an example is shown in fig. 6). this experimentation laid the groundwork for the aesthetic development of “ethereal”. figure 6. examples of concept art generated in midjourney. image credit: kirsten hermes (2023). hermes | augmented creativity 111 the final audiovisual output was presented in documentary form and shared publicly. in addition, the researcher conducted a semi-structured interview with a media executive (here referred to as zt) from a company actively developing creative ai workflows. this conversation used the “ethereal” video as a case study to deepen the understanding of cocreativity between human and machine.1 in the following paragraphs, the creative process will be explained in further detail. it should be noted that this research was conducted during 2022 and 2023, prior to the release of more advanced video-generation ai tools and other recent developments. as a result, some of the technologies now available were not accessible at the time of production, due to the inevitable lag between creative practice and academic publication. midjourney is a popular generative ai tool built on image diffusion (a type of machine learning) that produces new images according to natural language processing (nlp), based on text entered by the user. for example, by typing “/imagine prompt”, a user can request any image, in any style (fig. 7 shows an example). they can further specify stylistic parameters, image format requirements or use existing images as inputs for new images. users that are subscribed to the midjourney platform own the copyright to all images they produce. figure 7. an example of an image output generated from text in midjourney. image credit: kirsten hermes (2023). dancecult 17(1)112 for the music video, the artist created still images of bright skies with rainbows and prism effects, as well as utopian landscapes. to transform these images into a movie, a second platform was used: runway. runway has multiple features, one of these being image interpolation. this function can connect still images into a moving picture by generating new image frames to be placed between the input images. since the input images were not part of a realistic image sequence, the result was a series of unexpected but intriguing “watercolour” effects. at the time, video ai tools were still relatively underdeveloped, with limited control and often surreal or unstable outputs; by contrast, the more recent generation of video ai now allows for the creation of more cohesive, cinematic sequences. had these tools been available, the artist would likely have created a more complete audiovisual narrative instead. the aforementioned scenes were overlayed with cloud stock footage in premiere pro, hence creating a collage of imagery, making the artist feel a greater sense of authorship than ai-only content would have allowed for. a further creative constraint was the importance of including footage of the artist herself within the video, which limited the extent to which fully ai-generated content could be used. instead, she filmed herself singing, dancing and playing the violin, using an iphone 11 pro. in order to overlay this new footage with the sky imagery, the artist needed to remove the background in the videos. figure 8. ai-powered background removal from raw footage: the highlighted area is retained. image credit: kirsten hermes (2023). hermes | augmented creativity 113 successful background removal traditionally requires even lighting and a plain (ideally green) background (for greenscreening), neither of which the artist had access to. instead, she used the ai greenscreen feature within runway. this works by uploading footage and clicking on parts of the image that should be isolated, and runway automatically detects outlines based on this (fig. 8). this feature works particularly well for footage with high foreground-background contrast. since the footage was filmed in a residential house, many small keyframes and adjustments were required, and the result was not quite satisfactory. the artist creatively applied motion effects within premiere pro to disguise the errors. this, in turn, led to unintended but effective visual effects. from this, the back-and-forth between the human creator and ai co-creator becomes apparent. the third ai tool was plask, an automatic motion capture tool. the artist created a new character in the 3d graphics software blender: an abstract golden deity with gems as eyes (fig. 9). this character was rigged inside of adobe mixamo, an online platform that generates a “skeleton” for a character to allow graphics artists to apply movement. in order to animate this character, the artist used plask to extract movement data from videos of herself dancing (fig. 10). this movement could be retargeted to the character in blender. figure 9. an abstract golden deity with gems as eyes, created in blender 3d. image credit: kirsten hermes (2023). dancecult 17(1)114 figure 10. rigging in plask. image credit: kirsten hermes (2023). plask offered 900 free credits per day, which meant that about 30 seconds of footage could be analysed at a time. this was less than the required length and hence the artist applied more movement effects and edits in premiere pro to make the video feel fluid. another tool used was blendartrack, a phone application that extracts movement data from faces, which can be used within blender (figs. 11 and 12). this was used to animate an iridescent mask miming the words of the second verse. hermes | augmented creativity 115 figure 11. a screenshot of the blendartrack interface. image credit: kirsten hermes (2023). dancecult 17(1)116 figure 12. 3d mask, controlled via blendartrack. image credit: kirsten hermes (2023). additionally, the artist created landscape elements in blender and drew further assets on an ipad. all assets were combined and edited in premiere pro. findings and discussion: the impact of ai on the creative process in this section, the impact of ai on the creative process is analysed through a reflection on the music video workflow, framed within the literature and the discussion with zt. the analysis will discuss timesaving through task delegation to ai (first subsection), the nature of ai as a creative collaborator (second subsection), challenges and affordances caused by the generative ai tools’ unpredictable outputs (third subsection), the narrow scope of tools (fourth subsection) and copyright concerns (last subsection). hermes | augmented creativity 117 from workflow accelerator to creative actor: what is ai’s place in artistic practice? traditionally, making art takes time, as does making the required equipment and materials (becker 1982). the ai technologies significantly accelerated the artist’s creative process, enabling her to produce an entire music video in just five days, which is considerably faster than typical professional production timelines. previously, the artist created all her work from scratch, whereby an earlier (ai-free) video took five months to complete. zt explained that, similarly, in the industry context, the purpose of ai is increased efficiency and the enhancement of the creative process, allowing outputs to be created more cheaply and quickly. this unprecedented compression of traditionally human-intensive labour invites a shift in perspective, from viewing ai as a mere efficiency tool to interrogating its status as a potential creative agent. developers of new ai tools often focus on replicating human skills (mcclelland 2009), thereby placing emphasis on the machine becoming human-like (dautenhahn 2007). this can be contextualised within the framework of computers as creative entities (de mántaras 2020), a view that has led to the emergence of a subfield of artificial intelligence known as computational creativity (de mántaras 2020). similarly, from a posthuman perspective, as introduced in the second section, ai can be described as a creative actor. stevens and zabelina (2020) note that machines can simulate divergent thinking, a key trait of human creatives. ai creativity is typically evaluated based on the output (ritchie 2007: 69). the turing test (de mántaras 2020) asks whether humans can distinguish between human and machine-made artifacts; if not, the machine is said to demonstrate intelligent behaviour. the lovelace test assesses whether a machine can originate ideas it wasn’t explicitly programmed to produce (wingström et al. 2022). many contemporary ai tools pass both tests in principle, suggesting that parallels can indeed be drawn between ai and human creativity, however there are notable limitations to this because passing output-based tests does not guarantee process-based creativity. in the context of the case study, the ai tools functioned as creative assistants (for ideation, green screen removal and background creation). they were capable of producing technically complex and stylistically varied outputs that would previously have required intensive practice. as someone without professional training in visual design, this marked a dramatic shift in what was creatively achievable, giving the artist more creative possibilities especially in a style that would otherwise heavily rely on computer graphics. however, throughout the process, the ai also produced nonsensical results (unusable images and errors in the background removal), lacking the ability to reflect on these shortcomings. these unpredictable outputs are discussed further below. overall, though ai can simulate artistic techniques, it cannot replicate human reasoning or act autonomously. according to de mántaras (2020), algorithmic or information-processing systems alone cannot perform creative thinking. dancecult 17(1)118 overall, while ai tools may yield novel and unexpected outputs, they cannot transcend their programmed purposes. jennings (2010) argues that for ai to move from apprentice to creator, it must be able to independently modify the standards it applies. it also cannot integrate diverse skills like humans (hertzmann 2018) or meaningfully conceptualise goals and inputs (gioti 2020). “ai lacks identity, feelings, the ability to give meaning to the outcomes it creates” (wingström et al. 2022: 6) or reflect “the lived experience of the human” (mazzone and elgammal 2019: 8). identifying valuable creative problems requires experience, knowledge and training (sawyer 2012), which ai currently cannot achieve due to its narrow focus. a human creative director or curator is still needed to interpret and shape meaning from ai-generated content (wingström et al. 2022). this certainly applied to the case study discussed here, where the artist needed to remain in a directorial role throughout (more on this in the next section). beyond the assessment of ai as a creative actor, creativity is judged not only by the result, but also by the process (kasof 1995), and therefore, de mántaras (2020) raises the question of whether people value computer-generated artifacts as highly as humanmade ones. this ties into magni et al.’s (2024) observation that audiences often ascribe lower creativity to ai-generated works, and that creators often prefer to maintain a visible human imprint in their outputs (newman et al. 2023). informal observations on social media suggest that traditional craftsmanship is still appreciated (susskind 2020), and many are disappointed to learn a work was “just another ai output”. on the other hand, imaginative ideas are sometimes valued more than technical execution. a fitting example is marcel duchamp’s l.h.o.o.q., which gained acclaim for drawing a moustache on the mona lisa in 1991. the use of new technologies can itself become part of the artistic concept. overall, ai may be regarded as a creative actor, but one that fundamentally differs from human creatives. therefore, it is more useful to assess the complex interaction between ai and human creatives in collaborative settings, rather than studying ai creativity in isolation. ai as a creative collaborator ai can complement human work (susskind 2020), and the concept of “co-creativity” has emerged to describe this (wingström et al. 2022: 13). “augmented intelligence” (carroll 2021) offers an alternative framing that highlights the ai’s assistive role in enhancing human capabilities. the socio-technical assemblage of augmented intelligence brings forth “hybrid actors”, made up of both humans and ai. through this, access to the domain becomes democratized and available to a greater number of people. as becker (1982) argues, art is fundamentally social and organisational, not just aesthetic. the second section demonstrated the interconnectedness between creative actors within complex systems. through ai, humans can brainstorm, prototype, and allow culture and history to “collide in a kaleidoscopic inspirational way” (rosella 2022). ai supports hermes | augmented creativity 119 this by enabling a cross-pollination of genres and ideas. zt describes the ai-aided ideation process as “becoming unstuck”, “seeing the idea in context”, or “being taken in a direction you didn’t know was possible”. hence, the ai becomes a tool for both preparation (as a creative incubator) and elaboration (executing ideas). the artist found it useful to test combinations of concepts and styles through ai, feeling as though she was accessing a large database of stock imagery through midjourney, for example. in this way, the use of ai created a sense of indirect collaboration with a wider creative ecosystem, but without the logistical and financial complexities of hiring creatives, finding willing collaborators, or negotiating revisions, in turn allowing for practical access to styles and aesthetics that would have otherwise required a much larger team and budget. redundance, repetitiveness and technical frustration could be reduced, which could also help induce flow states, as characterized by the full immersion in an experience (csikszentmihalyi 1997). unlike with human collaborators, there were no limits on the accepted number of revisions. on the other hand, the absence of human film makers meant that the artist needed to employ a greater degree of critical thinking within the domain of visual arts. human-in-the-loop (hitl) refers to an ai design paradigm in which a human remains actively involved at one or more critical points of the system’s lifecycle, such as data curation, prompt formulation or output selection, so that machine outputs are always guided, corrected or endorsed by human judgment rather than being accepted automatically (mosqueira-rey et al. 2023). in this way, the artist’s role shifts from a traditional maker to a kind of creative director or orchestrator of multiple toolsets. although many parts of the music video creation were outsourced, the artist retained full creative control, refining outputs through iterative prompting. overall, for the ai collaboration to work effectively, the human must bring domain knowledge, artistic intention and critical judgment. unlike human collaborators, ai cannot negotiate or reflect, it simply continues to generate. unpredictable outputs ai often makes serendipitous mistakes, resulting in near-perfect outputs with curious or striking flaws. these outcomes can resolve false dichotomies or provoke fresh thinking. the surreal, the contradictory, and the impossible become expressible through playful experimentation (fig. 13). results may be brilliant or nonsensical, and unpredictability becomes part of the appeal. social media is filled with such outputs: world leaders eating giant food, cartoon characters becoming real, or aliens posing for selfies. this aligns with definitions of creativity as improvisational play (piplica et al. 2012) or open-ended exploration (kantosalo and toivonen 2016), where the ai acts as a playful or thoughtprovoking collaborator. dancecult 17(1)120 figure 13. the surprising result of blending a holiday photo of four hikers with the stock photo of an owl. image credit: kirsten hermes (2023). hermes | augmented creativity 121 because of its unpredictability, the collaborative process with ai can be studied within the domain of group creativity. here, emergent properties arise from interactions between group members, one of whom, in this case, is non-human (glăveanu 2010). when ai misinterprets a prompt in an unexpectedly fascinating way, this misunderstanding can unlock new directions. however, this unpredictability can also make it very difficult to achieve the desired results. the most significant challenge in the creation of the music video was the difficulty for the artist to express her nuanced visual ideas through text prompts. she found that her imagination often outpaced what she could clearly verbalise, and this mismatch led to frustration. while this encouraged her to develop a greater artistic clarity and to be more deliberate and self-reflective, prompting still felt like a search rather than a more direct expression. the absence of social context or shared understanding added friction and introduced complexity, sometimes shifting the focus away from the creative vision toward technical problem-solving. the artist often asked: why does this look like that? how do i change this detail? should i try another tool entirely? these micro-decisions contributed to choice paralysis and a sense of creative overload. prompting, or “ai whispering”, is now seen as a distinct creative skill (susskind 2020), with tutorials and courses teaching users how to collaborate effectively with ai. this demonstrates that ai tools require entirely new skills to be used effectively. interestingly, looking back, the artist notes that despite the challenges, earlier iterations of the ai tools sometimes felt more creatively inspiring than the newer ones. they were more unpredictable and idiosyncratic; qualities that prompted more experimentation. by contrast, current ai platforms feel more polished but also more homogenised, unless the user invests significant effort into deep prompting or fine-tuning. the novelty has worn off, and with it, some of the initial sense of play. therefore, the unpredictable nature of generative ai has both advantages and disadvantages in the creative process. narrow scope of tools ai tools often come with a narrow operational focus and are designed for highly specific tasks, which limits the creative possibilities unless the user experiments with multiple tools or platforms (especially for a multidisciplinary output such as a music video). ai, in its current form, functions as narrow ai rather than general ai (gioti 2020), and is unable to generalise or cross domains in the way humans do. the narrow, style-specific training in many ai tools also reinforces the risk of homogenisation across creative outputs. as researchers have noted, generative ai models trained on similar datasets tend to reproduce dominant styles, which can limit diversity and innovation (karpouzis 2024). therefore, the artist needed to combine multiple tools, each serving a different function and operating within different interfaces. this approach can quickly become costly, given that ai platforms tend to be subscription-based. the artists’ workflow required continual exporting, reformatting and problem-solving between stages. many tools (in this case plask) additionally impose dancecult 17(1)122 restrictions on how much can be generated, which creates stress and pressure when it is unclear how many attempts it will take to achieve the desired result. due to all this, the final video did not fully match the vision expressed in the earlier mood board. the resulting aesthetic had a slightly jarring, collage-like feel that was not entirely satisfying to the artist. in that sense, the process revealed the gap between possibility and practicality: ai did not instantly “solve” creative challenges but rather reshaped them. copyright concerns copyright remains a further complication. many generative ai tools have been trained on artworks without the artists’ consent. according to zt, in industry, the impetus is to train new tools solely using data that the company own, or that a specific individual has created, to ensure compliance with copyright law and to easily create new outputs in a very specific style. this approach was not available to the artist, and therefore, she was concerned about the ethical implications of ai training data and copyright. as a result, fully outsourcing the visuals to ai would have felt wrong. instead, the process became a hybrid collage of ai-generated and self-produced material. this choice also helped to avoid an overtly “aigenerated” look. at times, the artist deliberately opted for more generic imagery to avoid the risk of unintentionally replicating another artist’s distinctive style through ai. while this felt like the safer ethical choice, it also meant the final video lacked some of the visual boldness and originality it might otherwise have had. despite copyright concerns, borrowing and remixing are foundational to artistic practice. jim jarmusch famously claimed that “nothing is original” (piazza 2015), while ferguson (2021) observed that “everything is a remix”. csikszentmihalyi noted that studying creativity in isolation from social and cultural context is futile (mcintyre 2011: 6). in this light, ai offers new mechanisms to access, filter, and recombine the domain. bourdieu (1993) also argued that art must be understood as a manifestation of its field. barthes (1977) questioned authorship entirely, shifting the focus to the receiver. this view supports susskind’s (2020) suggestion that ai enables a more interactive reception of cultural material. in a 2022 interview, experimental composer holly herndon remarked: “these are just human systems that come out of human culture… our biases are really baked into that stuff… it’s really a way for us to understand our shared human archive of music and read it in interesting new ways” (hermes 2022: 185–92). these considerations add further complexity to the discussion around ethics and copyright, which are outside the scope of this article to resolve. overall, ai is not a passive helper in the creative process, but an active and complex contributor. reflecting on this, the artist noted that her creative process has gradually shifted. she now finds that the clarity of her vision must come before engaging with ai tools; otherwise, the tools begin to dictate the work’s direction. hermes | augmented creativity 123 the artist shared her work on youtube and reddit and since the purpose of the work was to test ai tools in the creative process, this in itself generated interest and positive feedback. the socio-political implications of using ai spark debates and artist identities around technophobia, cyborgs and futuristic aesthetics. this also applies to the artist, whose work is inspired by human perceptions of technology. the collaboration with a non-sentient, but arguably intelligent force becomes a cultural phenomenon, which this article demonstrates. conclusion this practice-based case study demonstrates that ai opens up new creative possibilities for music video production, particularly in achieving stylistic effects that would otherwise require advanced skills in computer graphics. for the artist (primarily a musician with no formal training in visual design), ai acted as a bridge between disciplines, enabling her to produce a visually rich video in a fraction of the time and with fewer traditional resources. however, while the ai tools accelerated ideation and execution, they also introduced a new set of creative, ethical and technical challenges. the use of generative ai raised concerns around authorship, copyright and artistic identity. wary of being perceived as over-reliant on ai, or unintentionally reproducing copyrighted material, the artist deliberately opted for a more generic visual style and reintroduced her own, less-polished visual work to preserve a sense of authorship. this compromise, while ethically motivated, limited the creative boldness of the final output and reflected the unease many artists feel when navigating ai tools in their creative process. practically, the process revealed how most ai tools remain narrow in scope, requiring the use of multiple subscription-based platforms, each with its own limitations (particularly for a complex multimedia project such as a music video). issues such as background removal errors, limits on how much can be generated, high subscription costs and inefficient workflows highlighted the friction of working within a fragmented ai ecosystem, requiring constant exporting, reformatting, re-prompting and troubleshooting. text prompting emerged as a critical creative skill. the artist often struggled to translate her nuanced visual ideas into effective prompts, leading to decision fatigue and creative overload. though ai outputs sometimes sparked playful or unexpected insights, they just as often introduced noise, confusion, or disappointment. what began as creative freedom frequently became a form of technical problem-solving. importantly, while ai meets some of the criteria of a creative actor (that is, the ability to produce novel and valuable outputs) it remains fundamentally different from human creators. ai can mimic stylistic techniques and draw from vast domain knowledge, but it lacks reasoning, critical thought and the capacity to form intentional meaning. as such, it cannot operate autonomously within the creative process. human creators must still interpret, curate and develop the significance of what ai generates. this supports emerging ideas around co-creativity and hybrid actors, in which humans and machines form collaborative systems, each contributing in distinct ways. dancecult 17(1)124 the unpredictability of generative ai outputs has both advantages and disadvantages in the creative process. ai functions well during the stages of preparation (as a creative incubator) and elaboration (as a technical executor), but it cannot substitute for the intentional, critical and reflective capacities of a human artist. drawing on the systems view of creativity (csikszentmihalyi 1997), this case illustrates how creative work arises not in isolation, but through complex, interdependent sociocultural dynamics, many of which are encoded into the data used to train ai models. posthuman theory offers a valuable lens to explore these evolving relationships between human and machine, where agency is distributed and creativity is no longer confined to the individual. as traditional technical skills become increasingly replicable by machines, the value of creative ideas and conceptual originality becomes more important than ever. in this context, prompt craft, critical thinking and the ability to explore conceptual spaces are likely to become the defining skills of future creatives. as this project has shown, ai does not solve creative problems but rather reshapes them, requiring artists to adapt, direct and question more 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journal of electronic dance music culture 14(1): 23–38 issn 1947-5403 ©2022 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.02 technique, experience and the social function of techno music: a comparative analysis of theodor adorno and robert fink luciano pascual max-planck-institut für empirische ästhetik daad (germany) idh-conicet (argentina) abstract the aim of this article is to deepen reflections on the links between the technical aspects of techno music, the experience of listening to it and its social function. in order to achieve that goal, we carry out a comparative analysis between theodor adorno and robert fink, which allows us to construct an interpretation of the social dimensions of the techno technique, specifically from the analysis of its teleology and time. this work acknowledges the irreconcilable aspects of the authors; where fink finds a liberating possibility of manifestation and creation of desire or an expression of an emerging new subjectivity, adorno finds the innermost fibres of a mechanism of social alienation. these contradictory interpretations, complexified by contributions from other authors (such as rick snoman, mark butler and diedrich diederichsen, ragnhild solberg and juliane rebentisch), allow us to build a detailed description of the particularities of techno aesthetics. keywords: techno music; aesthetics; social function; experience luciano pascual is a phd candidate in arts at the national university of córdoba in argentina and a doctoral fellow at conicet (consejo nacional de investigaciones científicas y técnicas). he is currently on a research stay at the max-planck-institute for empirical aesthetics (frankfurt, germany) funded by the daad. his research lines seek an articulation between philosophical aesthetics and the technical analysis of electronic dance music. email: luciano.pascual@unc.edu.ar feature article mailto:luciano.pascual@unc.edu.ar dancecult 14(1)24 introduction this paper proposes an articulation between the technical dimension of techno, its forms of experience and possible readings of its social function. to this end, we work with two authors who, with radically different interpretations, allow us a double entry into the aesthetics of techno. on the one hand, we work with the contributions of theodor w. adorno, a philosopher who is recurrently linked to cultural elitism but who nevertheless provides us with a strong theoretical framework for reflecting on the relations between a musical technique and a given social situation. on the other hand, robert fink, who offers a greater description of the musical structures of techno, proposes a progressive reading of the type of experience that this genre can enable. it is not the aim of this paper to suggest a reconciliation of two theoretical frameworks that are so widely distanced. rather, we seek to construct an interpretation of the aesthetics of techno where these contributions, by the very dissonance they generate between them, manage to overcome each other’s blind spots in their theories. our choice of authors and debates allows us to organise this work into two moments. in the first one, we deal with reflections on the social function that can be traced in the production of techno music. although we seek to direct this issue on the specifics of this genre, we are not unaware of the links and similarities between techno and other genres. in this first moment, on the one hand, we will examine the contributions of theodor adorno. although he only makes limited reference to certain electronic and electro-acoustic music, his analysis is valid for tracing the logics of late capitalism and the culture industry within music itself. his idea that music can be experienced as a natural language within the framework of the culture industry, an idea that he develops in his analysis of popular music, is crucial for our articulation between techno technique and social function. on the basis of adorno’s critique, we propose to decipher and understand how the experience, characterised as “proper ideology”, of this natural language is sustained (1976: 50). on the other hand, robert fink allows us to contrast adorno’s reading with his analysis of the technical procedures of minimal music and their prevalence in electronic dance music. although fink brings these procedures closer to an advertising logic, he argues that the function of the music can be found in the manifestation of a new epochal subjectivity and the stimulation of desire. we conclude this first moment by pointing out the counterpoints that place these authors in opposite positions, and by highlighting similar approaches that allow us to delve deeper into the characteristics of techno. in a second moment, we examine specific debates linked to the immanence of techno such as its structural logic and the type of teleology and time it suggests. here we bring back adorno and fink, but we also study authors who have worked specifically on techno such as rick snoman, mark butler and diedrich diederichsen, ragnhild solberg, and authors who have worked on it in a secondary way such as juliane rebentisch. in attempting to mediate the debates with musical analysis, this second block contains more expositive, theoretical moments for sound description, and moments in which these descriptions will be articulated pascual | technique, experience and the social function of techno music 25 with reflections on their philosophical or aesthetic consequences. with contrasting theories and musical analyses, we show that fink’s analytical tools are able to describe more precisely the particularities of techno music structures. we also show that adorno’s contributions provide a more critical understanding of the link between technique, experience and social function than fink’s theory. thus, we conclude by pointing out where the two theories complement each other and where they become irreconcilable. a problem that we encounter even before we begin our analysis is that the category techno is used ambiguously in various academic studies, in online music platforms and in the jargon of music producers. in some instances, techno refers to a broad and abstract range of musical expressions using electronic instruments and certain techniques such as frequency synthesis or sampling, which emerged from the post-disco movements of the late 1970s and is often referred to as electronic dance music (edm). however, in this article we work with the conceptualisations of techno elaborated by rick snoman (2009) and mark butler (2003) wherein it is understood as a more determined genre which emerged in detroit in the mid-1980s. this genre is defined by the manipulation and programming of specific textures, which build arcs of tension and release from superimpositions of looped rhythmic lines (snoman 2009: 284–5). it is also characterized by a regular, four-on-thefloor kind metric, which can appear clearly in a gradual process over a pulse of 125-150 bpm (butler 2003: 144–6). we begin with this second concept of techno, but in the course of our writing and by means of technical descriptions of the music, we aim to specify and determine to a greater degree the object of this study. the function of music in consumer society it would be possible, even if only for a moment, to place adorno’s and fink’s proposals at antipodes. where the first can find regressive and violent forms in the experience of music within the framework of the cultural industry, , the second finds moments of liberation, expression and vivification of the desire that new subjectivities of the time require. where adorno denounces the manipulative and alienating nature of musical technology, fink shows how it is a technology that has no ethical implications, but which depends on the ways in which it is used. it seems pertinent to us to bring back and contrast adorno’s and fink’s writings to address the problem of the function performed by techno music in industrialised society. in this section we intend not only to reveal possible common moments, but also to establish counterpoints and dissonances that do not allow for a single place and function of music in society. the aim of this and the following section is to reflect on the appropriateness of adorno’s and fink’s characterisations by putting them into dialogue with the aesthetics of techno music. adorno and the ideological function of natural language the questions that adorno raises to understand the function of music in society take into account how music is produced, distributed and consumed under the scheme of the culture industry (adorno 1976: 39–54). adorno recognises that the complexity of its function dancecult 14(1)26 cannot be summed up as mere entertainment, nor can it refer directly to its effect, i.e. to the subject’s reactions. the author understands that music plays a central role in the construction of ideology in society, since it reinforces the meanings of the world presented by the culture industry. its function should be read as a “class in the general classified ad section for the world” (adorno 1976: 44). this means that for adorno music, mainly consumer music, would be a form of advertising that aims to show the present world as the right world, as the desirable world. this advertising is aimed at affirming the given as the best product. and adorno makes it clear that the more mistrust there is of the given, the more necessary this advertising function becomes (adorno 1976: 44). the ideological function of music in the culture industry, according to adorno, should not be traced to the explicit conceptual contents of the works, but to how the works enable an integration between the individual and society (1976: 46). this integration can be understood by means of participation in a particular language. this language is experienced in the consumption of musical commodities and facilitated by the preservation of associations between stimuli and senses, intuitions and concepts, which have been reified in automatic schemes of perception through a historical process. adorno states that the experience of music in the culture industry is no longer that of a cognitive, comprehensive, reflective experience. yet certain historically sedimented senses survive in music as isolated elements that are recognised by the listening subject (adorno, 1947: 40). this historical sediment endows certain materials such as chords, timbres, melodic turns, rhythms and textures with a meaning or a concept that is, in principle, immediately experienced. these associations between stimuli and meanings are seen by adorno as historical residues that carry a disciplinary function, enabled by fetishism in experience. this fetishism conceals the structural links between the set of elements that make up the work in pursuit of hypostatising the individual, thus asserting an identity of the phenomenon beyond its context. by isolating each sensitive stimulus from a formal context, the listener narrows the experience to the mere task of recognising the stimulus-concept identity. and for the author, this is such an automated task that it can be done without any reflective effort. the associative tendency of the culture industry is “profoundly embedded in the public” (horkheimer and adorno 1989: 136). thus, in the consumption of the work, understanding is limited to the identification of isolated moments and their respective individual senses, rather than the formal articulation of the various moments. adorno argues that the former is a fragmented understanding, which turns into a “worldwide musical consumers language” (adorno 1976: 39). in this form of consumption, elements remain isolated with their own values, and the formal relations between them are concealed. this language succeeds in reproducing connections of meaning without the need for reflexive mediation due to an automatic identification by the same scheme of associations given a priori by the industry (horkheimer and adorno 1989: 124). but adorno and horkheimer acknowledge that this automatism and immediacy of experience makes such a language a kind of “natural idiom” that coerces a forced integration between the individual and society (1989: 129). in this language, individual and society pascual | technique, experience and the social function of techno music 27 are identified by eliminating any contradiction, any unassimilable information that does not fit into the shared schema. adorno, in an article written with the assistance of george simpson, uses the concept of “natural language” and describes it as the set of “total of all the conventions and material formulas in music to which he accustomed and which he regards as the inherent, simple language of music itself, no matter how late the development might be which produced this natural language” (1941: 24). that the existing is valued and appreciated for its mere existence, akin to the schema of culture, leads adorno to link this experience with an “obeying the extant”. the ideological character of music ceases to depend on explicit content, rather it is understood by the mere acceptance of what is there, thus functioning as “the strongest glue of reality” (adorno 1976: 41). and this obedience, this acceptance of what exists, also functions as a distraction that leads us to assimilate the world as a given, without contradictions that demand reflection. there is no permission for doubt in a scheme as automatic as a reflex. music’s ideological function is expressed in the attempt at total integration between individual and society. as we point out, in a “natural language” where concepts fit perfectly in goods and the role of the individual is exhausted in identification, there is no room for individual mediation. thus, immediacy in non-reflective experience is linked to music’s integrative function. it leaves no room for conceptual reflection between itself [the society] and the subject, and so it creates an illusion of immediacy in the totally mediated world, of proximity between strangers, of warmth for those who come to feel the chill of the unmitigated struggle of all against all. (adorno 1976: 46) an experience limited to immediacy minimises the suffering generated by the impossibility of total integration between individual and society. this consoling function is realised through a schema, perceived as a natural language, which allows for a deceptive universal conciliation. there is consolation insofar as one becomes part of the collective voice, of a “we”, constructed as a priori objectivity. the schematism of music suggests to the individual that in what is most unique and singular to itself, such as its perception and reaction, it is “in accord with all, accepted by and reconciled with all, and that that, ultimately, is the meaning” (adorno 1976: 50). adorno highlights the ideological aspect of a type of experience that dissociates the individual stimulus from its context of meaning, while associating it with an immediate meaning. this kind of experience is also linked by adorno to a disciplining of reactions and to a special kind of social integration. the function of music within the culture industry is, following adorno, that of “ideology in the proper sense of the word” (1976: 52). this kind of music allows the suspension of reflexive processes in order to affirm the immediately given as the correct and desirable world, hence the comparison with advertising logic that helps the integration of individual and society. for without having any specific content or concept, the schema of music experience also manages to “slide into forms of subjective reactions that are psychologically more deep-seated than manifest ideological contents and may therefore surpass their effect” (adorno 1976: 53). dancecult 14(1)28 as we analyse further on, techno music has standardised sound processes that, far from seeking formal or logical links, pursue immediate effect on the listener. some of these effects can be the construction of tension through build-up, or the feeling of stasis through breakdowns. these processes can be perceived quickly or automatically by association with a particular effect and without any musical expertise, allowing experimentation with tension and release. this experience of tension and release also contains a strong social dimension in that it is an experience of shared feelings. these points are further explored in the section dedicated to the technique and aesthetics of techno music. fink and the construction of desire there are few points of contact between the adornian perspective and fink’s proposal when it comes to relations between the experience of music and its social function. and it is precisely this distance that at times allows us to articulate both authors without forcing a reconciliation between them. in the following paragraphs, we delve into the social function that fink finds in repetitive music while comparing and contrasting it with adorno’s perspective. we provide more tools that allow us to interpret the specificity of the techno music experience without abandoning a critical social dimension. robert fink, in his text repeating ourselves (2005), carries out a thorough analysis of the mechanisms shared between advertising technique, disco music and american minimalist music of the 1960s and 1970s. while his text deals with a diversity of genres based on repetition, there are also specific references to techno music . for the author, both the technical revolution of advertising in the 1950s and the technical development of minimalism and disco music are a search to adapt to a new subjectivity emerging from a post-war context. the new economic and cultural contexts allowed the construction of new expressions that he calls “countercultures” (fink 2005: 68). considering these new subjectivities, the techniques developed by the economic and cultural sectors and constituted mainly by repetition would have aimed to vivify a historically appeased desire. fink does not link this technological development to a manipulative intention, but rather to an adaptation of technology to a new situation: the mark of a “crisis of desire” left on subjectivity by the second world war. for the author, the function of advertising is that of stimulating consumer desire for economic prosperity. on the other hand, the function of the new explorations in music are linked to rescuing subjectivity from this “crisis of desire” with the production of “musical desire” (fink 2005: 71–2). fink examines the advertising technique developed from the 1950s onwards and its specific role in creating desire in the subjects of consumer society. a central element of this technique is repetition, both within the advertisement itself and in the repetition of the advertisement in everyday life. as described in detail in the third chapter of his book, advertising is always understood as a gradual process that requires multiple repetitions to change the attitude of consumers (fink 2005: 120–66). advertising would never have expected that consumers pascual | technique, experience and the social function of techno music 29 would go out and buy a product immediately after seeing the advertisement, rather there was an evolving interest that developed from exposure to repeated promotion of the same product. frequency and continuity of presentations were central elements in the planning. by the 1960s, all parameters such as number of advertisements, time of exposure, speed and regularity of the rhythm of barrage were determined in such planning. eventually, the author acknowledges, these same techniques would be adopted by minimal music, disco and electronic music, within his works—techniques adapted to the scale of the work and its internal construction (fink 2005: 142–3). we can establish a dialogue with adorno’s reading since fink recognises in this “technology of sensation” a form of socialisation (2005: 66). the author recalls the musicologist susan mcclary, who argues that “music teaches us how to experience our own emotions, our own desires, and even our own bodies. for better or for worse, it socializes us” (fink 2005: 96). this technology based on the repetition of the same element succeeds in building a psychic structure of expectation; the consumer learns to expect and recognise a certain kind of repetitive development. the following section goes deeper into how this technology works. for now, we are interested in understanding the function that this musical technology fulfils, according to fink, in society. for the author, the function of repetitive music such as disco or minimalist music can be compared to advertising in that it is a “discourse that uses structures in time to create and channel desire” (fink 2005: 82). but, although music imitates the structural forms of advertising, it also confronts the aim of advertising. music uses the trance-like mental states that advertising can induce not to foster desire for a product, but to create and channel desire in the experience of musical discourse. we understand that the difference, for fink, is that the technology of sensation in music encourages meaning-making, whereas advertising seeks the desire for objects (2005: 81–2). fink, unlike adorno, stands aside from denouncing the manipulative uses of this technology. he does not conceive that there are natural or real desires that are deceived or manipulated by music, but rather that they are created like any desire. moreover, fink does not believe that the isomorphism of minimalism and advertising strategies has ethical implications (2005: 66–7). the ethics of the technology of repetitive music depend on how it is used. he even affirms that the technology of stimulating and channelling desire can have a critical use when it “can be seen as immanent critique, transposing the world constructed by mass consumer capitalism into a sonic environment that is equally loud, overwhelming, repetitious, exciting, exhilarating, exhausting, relentless, and (sometimes) terrifying” (fink 2005: 30). here, we can point out a wide divergence between the authors. adorno does not dwell on different contents of desire, on whether desire is for an object or for a discourse. adorno critically analyses the way in which all desires, beyond their explicit content, are stimulated to integrate the individual into social machinery. in other words, adorno might hold that one and the same function is performed by the forms shared by minimalism and advertising. dancecult 14(1)30 fink understands that this technology of sensation arises in the post-war period in pursuit of the desire for an emerging counter-cultural subjectivity, one that is faced with a crisis of desire that was first understood by the technique of advertising. but in adorno’s reading we find that the technique of advertising, the controlled repetition of the same thing, is not aimed at reaching a subjectivity that was there, but rather at enabling subjectivity to be there. in the culture industry, technique reveals itself to be at the service of the given order. it is aimed at sustaining associations adapted to the order and manipulating desire by obscuring social contradictions. technique and aesthetics in techno in order to rethink the social function of techno, we consider it necessary to deepen the analysis of the music and the kind of experience it enables. there are two central debates with which we articulate the technical aspect with the experience of the music. the first concerns the type of musical teleology that structures sound within techno. the second is the temporal logic it proposes. the analyses of teleology and time help us to link the technique of techno with the debates we have presented regarding its social function. although our work focuses on the articulation of adorno’s and fink’s ideas, it is useful to draw on contributions of those who have specifically studied techno music such as rick snoman, mark butler, diedrich diederichsen and ragnhild solberg. this allows us to include technical categories into the description of musical procedures. it is clear that the choice of a particular case for the description and analysis of an entire musical genre always involves a certain degree of injustice. but for the purposes of our work, we have selected a piece by a dj and techno producer who in recent years has gained legitimacy by placing highest in the “alternative” ranking of the magazine dj mag. de witte won this position by having the most downloads on the platform beatport (dj mag 2021). we will examine one of her works to link debates around teleology, meaning, materials and time in techno music. teleology and sense in the first chapter of his text repeating ourselves, fink dwells on one of the most challenged aspects about repetitive music: teleology. for the author, the construction of the piece “as a whole” based on the coherence and directionality of the musical discourse has been one of the most praised values in western music tradition (fink 2005: 31). and it is this value that american minimal music, with its hypnotic repetitions, leads us to reconsider. fink recovers various musicologists who reflect on the division between teleological and anti-teleological music. some suggest that the lack of dialectical construction in musical discourse is linked to a psychological regression of the subject (wim martens 1983), to a submission to authority in terms of consumerism (stephen holden) or to new forms of postmodern metaphysics (leonard meyer). others point to a liberating aspect in the abandonment of the teleological construction in musical discourse and find another way of pascual | technique, experience and the social function of techno music 31 listening that requires no memory or anticipation (michael nyman), an anti-patriarchal and dissident experience of pleasure (susan mcclary and richard dyer) or a tantric-oriental way of experiencing pleasure, in opposition to the orgasmic-western one ( john rockwell). robert fink moves away from these authors and argues that the division between teleological and non-teleological music cannot be reified. he argues, based on the works analysed, that the musical discourse of certain minimal music, disco and even electronic music is organised on the basis of arcs of directionality towards climatic points of tension and moments of release. according to him, these are not strictly teleological pieces, but intermediate kinds of teleologies with arcs of sense that do not necessarily coincide with the total dimension of the work. we are not dealing with a teleological sense of the piece as a whole, where each element would be significant for the construction of meaning. rather, this teleology is about pieces in which the arc of sense becomes exhausted by a cumulative process of building tension and moments of release. according to fink, fragmented “tension-releases” are experienced with periods without directionality in between, which the author links to suspension and stasis (2005: 45). fink uses the term “recombinant teleology” to describe this way of constructing tension-release arcs which do not coincide with the total dimension of the piece, but which do allow for intermediate moments of non-directionality (2005: 42-47). if theodor adorno uses the concept of teleology to refer to sense construction in the piece, it is not with reference to tension-release arcs. as juliane rebentisch points out, we might think that adorno requires a listener “who reconstructs the music in an attentive and present mind” but is also capable of precisely articulating individual musical events in time “such that the latter become manifest in their function in the musical context as a temporal dynamic” (2012: 197–202). again, the critical interpretation of meaning depends on the coherence established between the various elements of the work. “for adorno, to hear means to hear construction, to participate in the composition by creating interrelations that reach forward and backward in time” (rebentisch 2012: 203). the sense of the piece cannot disengage from categories such as coherence or causality that would emerge from the relations between the materials and their historical-immanent qualities. for adorno, unlike fink, the sense of the piece is not conceivable as an arc of tension-release, but as the construction of relations in time whose directionality is the sense of the piece. the analyses of popular music carried out by adorno together with george simpson, which can be woven in with robert fink’s analysis, are highly relevant to our objective and allow us to reflect on techno music. in their co-authored article (adorno and simpson 1941), the authors highlight a quality of music produced for mass consumption that would differentiate it from the dialectical procedure of serious music. this quality is the standardisation of the structure of the piece as well as the standardisation of the details. in mass music every detail, every specific quality of the material, is replaceable, as the material “serves its function only as a cog in a machine” (adorno and simpson 1941: 19). for adorno, in serious music the particular detail managed to refer to the totality of the piece’s sense. in popular music, on the other hand, the context in which the detail manifests itself appears as an extraneous framework. dancecult 14(1)32 we argue that the counterpoint we have presented between fink and adorno is not entirely irreconcilable. indeed, it may even explain a certain characteristic of the aesthetics of techno. although the authors work with different conceptions of teleology, we find that fink’s category of recombinant teleology and adorno’s idea of standardisation can mutually illuminate each other. adorno’s concept allows us to recognise the poverty of formal elaboration in pieces constituted primarily by tension-release arcs, which resign themselves to establishing temporal relations between events distant in time. but with fink, we must recognise that techno music depends on directional processes that demand temporal relations. the dilemma could be clarified if we consider that techno music is sustained by a necessary standardisation of materials and functions that cannot be disengaged with directional processes (however short these arcs may be). what has been standardised is not only material of genre-specific sounds (an aspect that techno shares with other genres); it is these emotional arcs that techno has managed to standardise starkly. arcs of tension-release whose strength and effect on the listener’s experience depends on the internalisation of incessantly repeated schemas. for this reason we argue that fink’s recombinant teleology succeeds in describing with higher specificity than adorno the internal processes of techno music. however, fink’s concept can only make sense from a general framework of standardisation as proposed by adorno. it is the standardisation of the effect of these directionalised processes that sustains long-term interest in musical discourses without the need for materials to construct formal meaning beyond each ‘arc’. in our analysis, in techno music the individual sound event does not formally influence the construction of sense; material and form are not linked to each other, which leads to a loss of the dialectic between parts and whole. what is maintained is an abstract structure to be filled with a wide range of materials. this standardisation enables the construction of arches of tension-release that do not depend on the specificity of the materials. so far, our theoretical reflection is based on the interweaving of literature and techno music. it is now time to consider technical aspects of techno music to determine more precisely the mutual implication of recombinant teleology and standardisation. in the following section we focus on certain formal and structural aspects of techno music that require the articulation of the concepts we have proposed here. recombinant teleology and standardised structure in techno the structure of techno cannot be conceived as a succession of verses and choruses, nor can it be fully understood from the harmonic language of tonality, two aspects that adorno recognises as fundamental in popular music. mark butler studies the structures of electronic dance music, and we will integrate some of his fundamental categories to mediate them with adorno’s and fink’s critiques. butler (2003) argues that electronic music presents a formal organisation structured in modules, each with a standardised function. we develop butler’s categories in the analysis of the piece called “there’s no one left to trust” by charlotte de witte (2020), a renowned techno music producer. this track is relevant for our analysis not pascual | technique, experience and the social function of techno music 33 only because it is the second most popular of de witte’s works according to spotify data, but also because it is particularly schematic. the first eight bars of the track (00:00–00:27) present little textural and chronometric density and have two main elements. a kick marks the pulse with a short sound devoid of tonic quality, but with preponderant bass (sub-kick) and middle frequencies. in the background there is a sustained noise with filtered frequencies. the same sound configuration appears in the last eight bars. the beginning of the piece and the end are largely identical; the only difference is that at the end of the last eight bars a spoken voice is introduced, pronouncing the name of the track. beginnings and endings with these characteristics (clearly marked pulse, few materials and weak tonic information) are commonly found in techno as it is useful for beat matching (butler 2003). beat matching is a technique that aligns the tempo of the concluding piece with that of the incoming piece, allowing for the succession of tracks without an obvious interruption for the listener. we can recognise that this structural moment of the piece responds to an external purpose: the need to be easily articulated with other tracks in order to build the continuity characteristic of presentations in festivals, which can last for days on end. in the following moments (00:28-01:25) we find a procedure already recognised by robert fink in his analysis of minimal music and disco works of the 1970s, and declared by butler as a characteristic procedure of electronic music. it is a technique that consists in adding elements that are iterated and layered consecutively. the duration of the repeated element can be a pulse, a bar or a set of bars. in the first instance (00:28-00:57), these elements are short white noises in sixteenth notes that accentuate the counterpoint. in the second one (min 00:57-01:25) an inharmonic sound, whose rhythmic cell differs from the rest by repeating itself every single bar. this accumulation of materials is followed by a process of elimination of low frequencies, which contrasts sharply with the texture of the first moment. this elimination of low frequencies begins at 01:25 and ends with the removal of the kick at 01:32. this module (01:25-01:39), which consists of a reduction in the number of elements in the texture, mainly the removal of the kick, is understood by butler as a “breakdown” (butler 2003). the processual arc concludes with an abrupt change of texture (01:39) when the kick and low frequencies are reintroduced and several high-frequency elements are subtracted. the section characterised by this re-entry of the kick is what butler calls the “drop” or “dropping the beat” (butler 2003: 415). then a new arc of tension begins (01:39-3:48), which we could characterise as the main one. in this process, the chronometric and textural densification, the filtering of low frequency bands and the intensification of high frequencies construct what butler and fink call build up, an arc of increasing tension. the build up is longer than the previous sections and incorporates new material. this material is the first that has clear tonic content (f#3). it begins with low intensity in a two-pulse loop. in general terms, we can observe that the arc of increasing tension (or build up) consists of re-presenting the materials already introduced in a processual accumulation that densifies the texture. towards the end of the arc, the low frequencies are eliminated and the high frequencies, dancecult 14(1)34 which consist of violet noise, are intensified. because of the degree of tension built up at the end of this arc, we can say that this is the peak of the work. and this arc concludes with a new drop which, being located after a peak in the tension and volume, butler would call a “core” (2003: 286-290). in other words, the core can be understood as the main drop of the piece. in her article “waiting for the bass to drop” (2014), ragnhild torvanger solberg seeks to clarify the links between the emotional experience of listeners and the production techniques of electronic music. she argues that emotional experiences of suspense and tension reach their peak in the modules we call build up, before concluding in the drop. and, according to her study, the moment of the drop corresponds to reactions such as more movement of the bodies on the dance floor and greater feelings of ecstasy and euphoria (solberg 2014: 78). some techno pieces are structured by relatively independent modules with standardised functions: the beginning and the end of the piece function to integrate with other tracks; the build up modules gradually accumulate tension; the drop after the peak that works by releasing the tension, coinciding with the climax of dancing and ecstasy; and the breakdown is a contrasting moment that allows a reduction in texture and chronometric density, generating the conditions to begin an arc of tension. this procedure of constructing arcs by modules has been around, as fink points out, since the minimal music of the 1960s and 1970s. these arcs are gradual processes that build expectation towards a climax, although they do not disappear at the climax. the tension is not released at the end of the work, but “dispersed across a greatly extended time field; distributed across repetitious, gradually changing cycles; and prolonged through interlocking polyrhythmic pulsations” (fink 2005: 134). adorno’s observation concerning the form of popular music is also relevant to techno (adorno and simpson 1941). having a modular structure with standardised procedures responding to a function, the details or specific qualities of the materials do not become significant in determining formal relationships. moreover, the particular sounds of each track could be replaced by analogous sounds from other tracks, and the function of each module would still remain effective. butler points out in his work that it would not be possible to subsume all the pieces into an identical succession of modules, as the order of the modules may vary in each example. but this might also related to what adorno called pseudo-individualisation, which he observed in the mass production of popular music. this simple rearranging of modules endows popular music with a certain “halo of free choice” and variety (adorno and simpson 1941: 25). this artisanal character would make it possible to conceal the similarity with the rest of the musical products while fulfilling the functions of standardised modules. in summary, following adorno, we argue that the effectiveness of the processes of techno music, that is, the listener’s experience of tensions and releases, could not be guaranteed without a framework of standardisation. fink’s contribution allows us to understand with greater specificity how a recombined teleology of tension-release arcs is constructed on the basis of this standardisation. pascual | technique, experience and the social function of techno music 35 time diedrich diederichsen reflects on the relationship between techno and time, pointing out that techno is “one of the most radical and successful ways of fooling people into believing that they are participating in an abolition of time” (diederichsen 2011: 94; author’s translation). he even frames techno within a subcultural tradition that “has always sought to mock time” (diederichsen 2011: 94; author’s translation). for this author, it is the time of life experience that seems to be suspended, allowing the hours to pass without notice. this is due, according to diederichsen, to the lack of external references in techno music. as there is no dramaturgy, no linguistic content, no specific historical reference and no harmonic progression, any external association to the sound is eliminated, generating particular conditions for the opacity of chronological time. the author mentions a biographical anecdote in which the eight hours of dancing were condensed, in his perception, into a single one (diederichsen 2011: 94). other authors have not dwelt on the individual effects linked to time, but have tried to reflect on how or what kind of time develops within the music piece. in this sense, adorno’s reflections on time in the work continue to be discussed today. but what kind of time is present in techno, where the repetition of the identical organises both the smallest cell and the entire structure, where the materials remain identical throughout the piece, where the cycles of tension-release are potentially infinite? adorno points out mockeries or parodies of time in some of stravinsky’s works (1998: 145–75). adorno criticises the static complexion that results from the lack of causal relationships between materials in stravinsky’s works, where the structure imposed from the outside overrides the material’s dynamic impulse. when the piece depends on an abstract form given in advance, when it is not the development of materials and their relations that give sense to the work, we follow adorno in understanding that time is also static. for the philosopher, the becoming of sound is attached to time, to the succession of relations: as a temporal art, music is bound to the fact of succession and is hence as irreversible as time itself. by starting it commits itself to carry on, to becoming something new, to developing. what we may conceive of as musical transcendence, namely the fact that at any given moment it has become something and something other than what it was, that it points beyond itself – all that is no mere metaphysical imperative dictated by some external authority. it lies in the nature of music and will not be denied. (adorno 1998: 150–1) for adorno, music and its events are determined in time through the qualities of before, now and after, and through their relationships (1998: 150–1). thus, it is the temporal disposition of events that shapes the course of time that endows music with content. the manic repetition in stravinsky’s music would deny this. we can understand musical form as an integration in time of the musical content, as a process of synthesis that establishes dynamic relations between the elements. so without relations, without causalities, as we observe in techno, musical time is abstractly denied and disappears from the work. in techno, as in stravinsky, we can find recombinant teleology, but the structure guarantees static units in which the materials are not formally engaged with each other. the dancecult 14(1)36 lack of formal relations is replaced by a structure of impact whose purpose is the arc of effects and reactions of the listener. in this sense diederichsen’s approach can be strained, for the internal musical time of the work is replaced by the time of the subject’s life experience, a time necessary for the technical procedures to affect the listener’s state. however, as rebentisch (2012) points out, musical sense and formal coherence are not always identical. for this philosopher, musical elements can fulfil different functions and even change their function over the course of aesthetic experience. the relationships between the various moments of the pieces do not have a fixed relationship that can be reduced to concepts of coherence, which would essentially already be given in the score. she argues that the meaning of the work cannot be realised in an abstract time; it depends instead on the time of the acoustic process, so that art “can generally not be objectified independently of the performative perspective of the subjects of aesthetic experience” (rebentisch 2012: 207). the author seeks to explore the tension between objective, chronological time and the non-linear time of the aesthetic experience. ‘musical time,’ conceived as genuinely aesthetic time, is not identical to the objective time of its chronometric duration; nor, however, can it be confined to a coherent formal structure. it is unleashed, time and again, in the subjective processes of aesthetic experience. (rebentisch 2012: 208) we argue that rebentisch’s proposal succeeds in solving some of the problems that arise from adorno’s and fink’s theories when analysing techno music by getting a central aspect of time right. this is because she differentiates between two temporal dimensions. on the one hand, the time of the aesthetic experience, and on the other, the time of the sonorous unfolding. the time of the aesthetic experience is potentially infinite because the relations between musical moments are also infinite. the time of the sound, on the other hand, is that of the finite duration of the piece. rebentisch distances herself from adorno as she does not conceive that the unfolding in chronological time is the criterion that should give meaning to formal relations. it is possible that techno might contain a reflection on time that is an honest representation of rebentisch’s thought. procedures such as the loop, the minimal variations, the atomisation of moments, lack of construction and hierarchical of rhythm over melodic discourse expose the contradiction between the internal time of aesthetic experience and that of sounds (rebentisch 2012: 209). in this sense, the author allows us to highlight the critical aspect of the experience of techno music, insofar as the latter succeeds in expressing the contradiction between these types of time. conclusions on the natural language of techno ecstasy, euphoria, pleasure, identification with the sound, the feeling of unity with the music and the group are parts of the experience of techno music and make up a highly complex phenomenon for any theoretical approach. this paper aims to elaborate a possible articulation between a technical techno dimension and a certain social dimension of the experience. without pursuing an exhaustive interpretation of the phenomenon, we have pascual | technique, experience and the social function of techno music 37 found a significant contribution from the contrast and complementarity between adorno and fink. where fink finds a liberating aspect, a possibility of manifestation and creation of desire or an expression of an emerging new subjectivity, adorno finds the inner fibres of a mechanism of social domination and alienation. however, we have also shown that the authors can complement each other by constructing a more precise and complex reading of techno music. in the following, we will present the central points of the paper’s conclusions in a summarised form. robert fink and mark butler allow us to delve deeper into specific technical procedures found in techno. fink’s concept of recombinant teleology accounts for a technical construction that generates an expectation of a particular development, which adorno did not find in the music of his time. expectations no longer rest on the resolution of tonal tension or on the schematic structuring of regular or cantabile melodies. rather, they are sustained by arcs of tension built by an increasing textural and chronometric density and the progressive increase of high frequencies. and it is these arcs that incite the listener’s desire for release of that tension. in this sense, fink points out that this musical desire, a desire for musical discourse, is fostered and enlivened by repetitive music. fink allows us to decipher the technology of sensations of a new teleology that vivifies desire and pleasure, and whose social function can be read as the expression and vindication of a new emerging subjectivity. in this sense, the abandonment of the traditional musical teleology would have a liberating character, enabling the development of a new type of desire and pleasure. following adorno’s thoughts, we were able to recognise that techno can, in a particular sense, suspend the formal construction or the temporal becoming of musical causality. a technique that disregards causal logics would succeed in reducing the experience of music to the immediate effect of the present stimulus that is detached from its musical context. the automatic association between the stimulus and its effect, without the need for reflexive mediation, is the basis for the experimentation of that “natural language” examined by adorno. this natural language can, in concrete terms, be found in techno as the association between a process of accumulation as found in the build up, and the lived experience of rising tension, euphoria and ecstasy as reported by solberg. techno is a natural language since it allows for an identification between the subject of listening and the music, where the experience is reduced to an automatic reaction to the stimulus, devoid of reflexive mediation. it is this unity between stimulus and effect that adorno critically analyses, acknowledging the operation of socially standardised schemes which are the reproduction of historically learned associations. adorno, unlike fink, recognises in this unity an ideological aspect, an integration and unity that ignores the irreconcilability of sound, its effect and its concept. it is possible to understand the ideological function of music insofar as it enables the integration of the individual and society by means of participation in a language perceived and experienced as natural. we argue that both authors recognise a collective encounter expressed in the same schemas that function in the experience. although the authors deduce different social consequences from this, both would agree that a collective encounter in the schemes of perception and identification associated with the pleasurable experience of immediacy dancecult 14(1)38 is part of the social function of techno. the experience of this natural language cannot be understood as mere entertainment or as a source of energy for work, as adorno and horkheimer argued. it is rather a moment of an ideological experience that consoles the subject in a deceptive reconciliation with society and with music. in a fragmented society, the individual achieves a moment of identification with the objectivity of music and with the collective voice. their shared standardised reaction of plenitude, of ecstasy, can finally be understood as compensation for social fragmentation. and in this sense, we suggest that fink and adorno could agree part of the social function of techno is to construct a space where difference is suspended in favour of unity. references adorno, theodor wiesengrund. 1991. “the schema of mass culture”. in the culture industry: selected essays on mass culture, ed. jay bernstein, 61–97. abingdon: routledge. ———. 1998. quasi una fantasia: essays on modern music. london: verso. ———. 1976. “function”. in introduction to the sociology of music, ed. rolf tiedemann, 39–54. new york: the seabury press. adorno, theodor wiesengrund and george simpson. 1941. “on popular music”. zeitschrift für sozialforschung 9(1): 14–48. butler, mark. 2006. “unlocking the groove: rhythm, meter, and musical design in electronic dance music”. ph.d. dissertation (music), indiana university. diederichsen, diedrich. 2011. personas en loop: ensayos sobre cultura pop. buenos aires: interzona editora. dj mag staff. “alternative top 100 djs 2020, powered by beatport”. beatport, 8 november: <https://djmag.com/longreads/alternative-top-100-djs-2020-powered-beatport>, (accessed 17 october 2021). fink, robert. 2005. repeating ourselves: american minimal music as cultural practice. california: university of california press. horkheimer, max and theodor wiesengrund adorno. 1989. dialectic of enlightenment. new york: the continuum publishing company. rebentisch, juliane. 2012. aesthetics of installation art. berlin: sternberg press. snoman, rick. 2009. the dance music manual: tools, toys and techniques. oxford: focal press. solberg, ragnhild. 2014. “waiting for the bass to drop: correlations between intense emotional experiences and production techniques in build-up and drop sections of electronic dance music”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 6(1): 61–82. <https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.01.04>. discography de witte, charlotte. 2020. “there’s no one left to trust”. track 2 on in rave on time. kntxt (ep): kntxt 007. <https://www.discogs.com/master/1837792-charlot>. https://djmag.com/longreads/alternative-top-100-djs-2020-powered-beatport https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.01.04 cyclic patterns of movement across weaving, epiplokē and live coding dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 10(1): 5–30 issn 1947-5403 ©2018 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2018.10.01.01 cyclic patterns of movement across weaving, epiplokē and live coding alex mclean giovanni fanfani ellen harlizius-klück deutsches museum (ge) abstract this article hosts an interdisciplinary exploration of cyclic rhythmic structures, bringing together historical references to ground understanding of algorithmic electronic dance music, and in particular the algorave movement. the role of pattern in uniting dance, music and language is investigated in the ancient practice of weaving, in ancient greek choral lyric, and contemporary live coding. in this context the tidalcycles environment is introduced, with some visual and audio examples. cyclic metrical patterns in ancient greek are then explored in detail, particularly the metrical transformations of epiplokē. finally, this jump between contemporary and ancient practice leads us to consider algorave itself as a luddite movement, its proponents engaged in an unravelling of technology. keywords: epiplokē; pattern; live coding; weaving; algorave alex mclean is researcher and live coder, working as post-doc in the erc project penelope: a study of weaving as technical mode of existence. he completed his thesis “artist programmers and programming languages for the arts” in 2011, in goldsmiths, university of london. he has performed live coded music widely since the year 2000 and organised well over a hundred electronic art and music events, including algomech festival. alex cofounded the algorave and toplap movements, as well as the international conferences on live coding and live interfaces. web: <https://penelope.hypotheses.org/alex-mclean> <http://slab.org> giovanni fanfani is a classical philologist and post-doc, also working in the penelope project, where he explores the relevance of ancient weaving technology for the poetics of archaic greek literature. he received his phd at the university of bologna with a thesis on the intertextuality of euripides’ trojan women. his research focuses on weaving imagery in greek poetry, and on the interaction of lyric and tragedy. web: <http://penelope.hypotheses.org/giovanni-fanfani> ellen harlizius-klück is principal investigator in the penelope project, funded by an erc consolidator grant and hosted at deutsches museum, munich. she was international coinvestigator in the weaving codes—coding weaves project, funded by a digital transformations amplification award of the arts & humanities research council (uk), and marie-curie research fellow at the centre for textile research, university of copenhagen. the philosophy and technology of ancient textile production and its impact on early scientific thinking is her main interest. web: <https://penelope.hypotheses.org/ellen-harlizius-kluck> feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2018.10.01.01 https://penelope.hypotheses.org/alex-mclean http://slab.org/ http://penelope.hypotheses.org/giovanni-fanfani https://penelope.hypotheses.org/ellen-harlizius-kluck dancecult 10(1)6 introduction a typical musical performance at an algorave, sees a live coder on stage (collins et al. 2003) writing code. as they type, their computer interprets their code as sonic, musical structure, with immediate, physical results—in particular electrical impulses being sent to loudspeakers, where they are translated into soundwaves. these air pressure waves propagate across the room, hitting audience members, experienced by them as sound and as music. if they are not dancing too much, they may also read the code on the performer’s screen, which is generally projected in the venue (see fig. 1). the performer responds to the audience in deciding what to type next. figure 1. algobabez performing at blue dot festival 2016, photo dan hett. this journey from discrete symbols to physical movement and back creates a whole experience, encompassing musical action and reaction, formal language, and physical movement. as time is counted out by the performer, through driving repetitions in the music, they make changes to their code that are well timed to play with expectations, feeding or delaying anticipation in the listener. as the audience responds, and the performer responds to the audience in turn, they link physical movements with the abstract structures they are building inside the computer. all of this relates to pattern—patterns in language, in sound, in music and in movement. at a microscopic level, patterns run through the operation of a computer, for example through bitwise shifting operations, boolean logic, modulos and the procedural dance of sorting algorithms. if mathematics is the science of patterns, then computing (as applied mathematics) is the performance of pattern. live coding then is an act of opening up these hidden computational performances, and manipulating them into musical performances. so we have patterns of code, structured into patterns of music, and therefore into patterns of movement, felt by the musician who feeds it back again into code. mclean, fanfani and harlizius-klück | cyclic patterns of movement 7 algorave, as a dance party driven by abstract computer language, seems other-worldy, and it would be too easy to treat it as science fiction made real. in the following article, we instead turn to ancient history to look for cultural precursors that throw a different light on our understanding of algoraves. in particular, we find analogous culture in ancient greece, where pattern also connected text with music and dance. to understand this patterning across the senses, we refer to another artform present in ancient greece—weaving at the warp-weighted loom—which we consider to be ancient apparatus for producing digital (and indeed algorithmic) art. weaving will help us for its explanatory power both as a ubiquitous metaphor for intermingled flows of force, and as a practice in its own right; weaving itself unites pattern, mathematics and the body. the following section provides a short introduction to some practical and philosophical aspects of weaving, and to concepts of pattern and weaving in ancient greek thought and songculture. we then turn our attention to the modern day technology of tidalcycles (referred to by its shorter name “tidal”), and its particular approach to musical pattern, representing patternings of repetition, symmetry, interference and glitch as a function of time. we then return to ancient greece to explore ways in which the notion of epiplokē works as a pattern operator in rhythmical design, generating cyclic structures of metrical sequences in a comparable way to tidal. we then conclude to consider the more recent history of the industrial revolution, relating the practice of live coding to the luddite movements of the early 19th century. textility of weaving, as metaphor and as an ancient digital artform an underlying topic running through this article is the ancient technology of weaving. we examine patterns recurring across weaving, live coding, and ancient greek poetry. in this we look to demonstrate that weaving patterns were an important reference for archaic and classical greek sung-and-danced poetry, both in terms of its design and performance. the fact that the song, the movements of the dancers, and the rhythmical sequences of the poem are all conceptualized in terms of weaving invites us to explore whether this points to a mode of pattern generation that is comparable to live coding of music. while live coding is becoming more widely known (e.g. kretowitz 2017), it is difficult to define, and perhaps a textile-grounded metaphor can help us. we can say that live coding is a community of practice, interested in changing rules while they are followed (ward et al. 2004). this puts forward live coding as a heavily improvisatory practice, where the performer changes the underlying rules of a performance on-the-fly, seemingly taking control of the rules, but at the same time giving up control; by manipulating rules the performer finds unexpected results. this connects live coding to the recent approach of bruno latour as “one of those beings that teach you what you are when you are making it” (latour and porter 2013: 230). here latour meets with tim ingold (2010) and his idea of the textility of making that includes a criticism of the concept of art where an idea is imposed on matter. in contrast, to ingold “the forms of things arise within fields of force and flows of material” (2010: 91). likewise, latour claims that we should not situate “the origin of an action in a self that would then focus its attention on materials in order to carry out and master an operation of manufacture in view of a goal thought out in advance” (latour and porter 2013: 230). dancecult 10(1)8 accordingly, for us the promise of live coding is to reject the predominant goal-driven notion of technological development, and to offer instead an approach that responds to the living moment. here we consider the textility of live code, as a flow of force that we respond to in the process of working upon it. emma cocker coined the term kairotic practice for this complex approach to notation and rules implied in live coding, where the ancient greek term kairos here denotes an opportunity to seize, a fruitful moment, a chance to grasp (cocker 2014): “a kairotic practice is not one of ‘scripting’ in advance or designing from a distance; kairos involves the making of the situation at the same time as deciding how to act” (cocker 2017: 135). kairos is not only related to time in the sense of a reappearing possibility. it also denotes a part of the ancient warp-weighted loom (see fig. 2), namely the shed-bar that divides the series of vertical threads into a binary alternation: every other thread is in front or behind that bar which is fixed on the loom. the opening that is provided by this device (kairos) is called the natural shed. another rod, the kanōn, carries heddles to which all the threads lying behind the kairos are attached. when pulled in front of the kairos, it will produce a so-called artificial shed. the alternation of natural and artificial shed provides the two openings into which the shuttle and weft thread are inserted to produce a fabric. figure 2. the components of a warp-weighted loom, as used in ancient greece. mclean, fanfani and harlizius-klück | cyclic patterns of movement 9 weaving patterns on an ancient loom is an abstract and binary operation in very much the same way as contemporary computer programming. the patterns defining warp and weft colours, heddle configurations, and the operation of shafts each interact to create the end result in ways that are sometimes impossible for a layperson to predict. a loom and a weaver work together to form a digital mechanism, following an algorithmic procedure to create visual patterns on the surface of the resulting woven cloth, that are the result of a sequenced operation on discrete, numerical elements. there is a strong similarity between ancient weaving and contemporary computer programming here, which we explored in a research project entitled “weaving codes—coding weaves” where dave griffiths and foam kernow developed a tangible device for programming weave patterns called the pattern matrix.1 but the technological connection between rhythm, dance and weaving explored in such work is not as recent an idea as it might seem. epiplokē, a greek term explicitly grounded in textile technology and that we could translate as weaving together or interweaving of metrical sequences, denotes a particular mechanism of greek lyric versification that we see as a sort of pattern operator at the level of rhythm. in ancient greek metrical theory, epiplokē refers to a modality of combination/interlacement of sequences within rhythmically homogeneous meters, through the addition and subtraction of one quantity from one end of a meter to the beginning of the other, or metathesis (transposition) of quantities within the meter. a recent re-examination of epiplokē by thomas cole repositions the concept as a fundamental principle and operator of rhythmical modulation within recurrent cyclic patterns; to quote his words about the relevance of the weaving idea in the mechanism of epiplokē, “rhythm is a single fabric in which rise and fall are constantly being interwoven through a pattern of alternating or cyclical recurrence” (cole 1988: 3). through epiplokē, cyclic structures are generated in ways that invite comparison with the mode of manipulating patterns within the live coding software tidal, as we shall see later in this article. just as contemporary computation and music are brought together in an algorave by live coded patterns, it is interesting therefore to see how the ancient digital art of weaving connects to archaic greek dance culture, particularly within the genre of choral lyric.2 this is effected through both the conceptualization of the performance in terms of weaving, and the rhythmical structure of binary elements that, though characterizes greek meter as a whole, shows in the metrical patterns of choral songs a distinctive complexity. such a binary nature, as we shall see, is evident in particular through the alternation/opposition/combination of long and short quantities in meter, and of arsis and thesis in rhythm, i.e. of lifting and lowering the foot literally (in the steps of the dancing chorus) and metaphorically (the metrical foot). algorithmic pattern as ordered structure in early greek thought: the case of weaving the centrality of the concept of pattern for the emergence of early greek reflections on nature and the cosmos should be set against the broader notion of technē, a term whose semantic domain encompasses art, craft and technology: cosmic order (kosmos) is conceived of as embodying “the pattern discovered, or allowed to appear, through making” by the craftsman (mcewen 1993: 42). at dancecult 10(1)10 the beginning of greek architecture, mathematics, harmonics, astronomy and science of nature— closely-related and interacting domains of investigation in much of presocratic philosophy, in particular early pythagoreanism—seems to lie the idea of an ordered and harmonic structure of elements that invests (and projects as cosmological principles) the perceived nature of numbers, their properties and their ratio. philolaus of croton (5th century bc), a pythagorean thinker who cultivated interests in arithmetic, harmony and cosmology, classifies numbers in a binary (or in ancient greek terms: dyadic) way by dividing them into odd, even and even-odd, a mixture of the other two genres probably referring to the unit. the scanty fragments of philolaus seem to grant numbers an epistemological role, as they provide the knowledgeability of the sensible world: we can know things as far as we are able to grasp the structure of numerical relationships that they possess.3 possessing numbers (greek arithmon echein) here refers to an ordered plurality (see huffman 1993: 173–76), potentially a pattern. this would fit well with the practice of arranging odd and even numbers in patterns of pebbles, as eurytus, a disciple of philolaus, is reported to be doing by aristotle and theophrastus (fragments 45 2-3 d.-k.), assigning to each number a corresponding concept according to the number shape/pattern.4 one especially powerful and flexible technological instrument for pattern-generation in antiquity is the warp-weighted loom in use in ancient greece (see fig. 2 above). weaving is digital in nature, in that every in-woven geometrical or figurative element made to appear on the fabric is generated by a structure of crossing threads, arranged and ruled by discrete numerical relationships, rather than being a design imposed on a surface. furthermore, as the weaver follows a procedure to create such a woven structure, this practice of weaving is therefore algorithmic. ellen harlizius-klück has demonstrated that the logic of pattern construction in ancient weaving provides ground for the dyadic arithmetic that surfaces in the fragments of early pythagoreans and in plato, and is later formalized as a coherent theory of odd and even numbers in euclid’s elements.5 ancient weaving employs a concept of number that is not about counting but about possibilities of form, of arrangements of elements that “possess” number and are appositions of binary components by nature (namely dyadic elements of either odd or even). ranking among the earliest technologies developed by humans, weaving (and the related techniques of plaiting, braiding, and stringing) has been shown to bear a broad range of symbolic associations in classical antiquity, spanning a number of human domains (politics, sexuality, poetics).6 our focus in this paper is rather on the logic of ancient weaving, and on the patterns of thought that this technology seems to generate: among these is an algorithmic approach to creating complex structures that are reflected and integrated into the archaic greek view of the cosmos and of poetic composition and performance. early accounts of cosmic weaving and the doctrine of the atomists seem to project onto the (macroand micro-) structure of the universe the logic of the woven pattern as an ordered interlacement of threads. the papyrus fragments of a cosmogony written by pherecydes of syros, reported by a strand of ancient doxography to be the first greek prose book, describe how god zeus generates the cosmos as a pattern-woven fabric.7 the recurrent conceptualization of the process of composing and performing poetry/song (and even dancing in a chorus) in terms of weaving may point to an analogy that invests the deep level of the primary structural elements of the poetic medium–in our case, that is, the metrical and rhythmical units of ancient greek lyric, a dyadic system based on the opposition of short and long quantities.8 mclean, fanfani and harlizius-klück | cyclic patterns of movement 11 encoded weaving patterns in song? one factor that may have played a role in the widespread literary association of weaving and song in antiquity is the tradition of songs at/to the loom, i.e.  rhythmical sung sentences or rhymes used by weavers as mnemonic devices representing weave patterns. anthony tuck (2006) has put forward the fascinating hypothesis that the metrical sequences of archaic greek poetry (and, more broadly, the early corpus of indo-european metrical poetry) might have originally encoded numerical information related to weaving patterns, used in the process of fabric-making. tuck draws this hypothesis based on two sets of comparative evidence. one is the practice, still documented for traditional weavers in certain areas of india and central asia, of committing to memory through worksong the count sequences of patterns they are producing—one may even say performing.9 the other is the pervasive association, in the repertoire of metrical poetry of ancient indo-european literatures (notably the old-indian sacred hymns rig veda and archaic greek poetry), of weaving while singing, and of the “weaving a hymn/song” motif. tuck (2006: 543) suggests that “information embedded within narrative structures, tonal shift, or rhythmical changes, all in association with song, could provide the framework” for the memorization of pattern, and indeed that this “pattern-encoding” could be the origin of proto indo-european recited or sung metrical poetry. distinctions of poetic genre are important though: while the rig veda and homeric epics, two poetic corpora that ground much of tuck’s hypothesis, present a metrical texture based on the repetition of a single-verse sequence, the metrical-rhythmical patterns of greek choral lyric respond to different principles. they are composed by units (metra, lit. “meters”) combined in cola (“members”, recurring sequences of metra) structured in systems of larger stanzas (strophe, from greek strophē denoting the turn of the dancing chorus); an antistrophe (“turn in the opposite direction”) usually follows each strophe, and bears an identical rhythmical design; a final sequence called epode normally closes the strophic system, which is thus called triadic. repeating aab/strophe-antistrophe-epode triads make the structure of a large part of our corpus of choral lyric poetry. the complexity of verse patterns in greek choral song, and the crucial fact that the genre of choral lyric featured together music, singing and dancing in a synchronized performance, add further layers to, and probably complicate the picture envisaged by tuck of weaving-related pattern information coded in metrical sequences of poetry.10 but how are we to imagine the rhythmical patterns governing the performance of a choral song? the initial impulse for this article arose from perceiving potential analogies in the ways in which cycles of recurring rhythmical patterns are generated and manipulated in two—seemingly very disparate—domains: the live coding environment tidal, and the ancient mechanism of epiplokē in greek choral poetry. rather than presenting a systematic comparison of the two, we have opted for a juxtaposition that better reflects the experimental nature of our approach to this analogy and provide a detailed treatment of how rhythmical cycles ground the structure of tidal, and how the metrical and rhythmical architecture of a significant sample of ancient greek lyric can be analysed in terms of epiplokē. dancecult 10(1)12 tidal patterns: a brief introduction tidalcycles, or tidal for short, is a live coding environment (mclean 2014), which approaches algorithmic music in terms of pattern, on multiple levels. it is a kind of programming language, but many people using it would self-identify as musicians rather than professional programmers. tidal therefore falls within the research field of end-user programming (blackwell 2006). it has been primarily created as a system for making music, but is used to pattern a wide range of media such as live video, light control, choreography, and fixed images. tidal is a domain specific language (dsl), implemented as a library within the haskell programming language. haskell has a reputation for being difficult to learn, due to its basis in lambda calculus and strict type systems, but is a remarkably warm host to musical pattern. we have already explored pattern in a historical context, as a particular approach to creating structure. this is somewhat against normal use of the word in electronic and computer music communities, where pattern often simply refers to any discrete sequence. however, by looking deeper into the structure of musical pattern we connect with this wider sense, referring to processes inherent in the making of sequences. from this perspective, pattern is not about sequences, but computational functions that, just like the weaver at their loom, transform and combine sequences. transformations of musical patterns may be grouped into categories, for example laurie spiegel (1981) provides a list of twelve high-level groupings. in the following we put forward just four high-level categories to help address different levels of pattern transformation, namely repetition, symmetry, interference and deviation, relating each of these categories to tidal’s representation of music. repetition patterns generally feature repetitions, often on multiple scales. accordingly, tidal’s representation of time is based on repetition, with the primary reference point being the metric cycle rather than any fixed beat duration, an approach inspired by the work of bernard bel (2001) in formalising tabla rhythms from indian classical music. because time is primarily structured by cycles, and not notes or other discrete steps, tidal breaks from the usual notion of time signature, used in much western music and music software. this results in a metrical fluidity, where cycles can be composed of subcycles with differing temporal structures. furthermore, time can be stretched, compressed and otherwise manipulated in a variety of ways, meaning that while the cycle is the reference point, metrical structure can vary wildly from one cycle to the next. this allows support for polyrhythm, complex meters, and both flowing (continuous) and grid-based (discrete) patterns, subdividable to arbitrary levels of complexity. symmetry symmetrical forms are also common to many patterns, for example as reflection, conceived in music in various ways including inversion. with tidal’s cyclic notion of time, there is also the possibility of rotational symmetry, where events are moved forward and backwards in time. mclean, fanfani and harlizius-klück | cyclic patterns of movement 13 interference interference patterns occur in tidal where two or more patterns can be combined to create a new one, or a pattern combined with a transformed version of itself, creating complex higher-order patterns out of simple parts. as already discussed above in the context of weaving, resulting interference patterns often bear little or no resemblance to the source material. another familiar example of a visual interference is the moire patterning seen when netting overlaps. tidal provides a multitude of methods for combining patterns (thanks in large part to haskell’s healthy range of type constructs for composing well-defined elements together), and these methods may in turn be combined (again, thanks to haskell’s functional nature) to create new methods, providing a very large number of possibilities to explore. deviation where we create recognisable patterns, we set up expectations for what comes next, creating a musical sense of anticipation. of course, musicians then purposefully break those expectations. interestingly, the effects of anticipation and deviation is present even when a listener is very familiar with a piece of music; the anticipation is still perceived as musical structure (huron 2006). with tidal we can break expectations through chance operations, using pseudo-random number generators—mathematical processes useful for taking arbitrary choices. such deviation allows a musician to forego making a decision by making a random choice, or add glitches and imperfections as an aesthetic choice in its own right. in exploring these different flavours and levels of patternings, it quickly becomes clear that they are rarely independent. for example how many different kinds of symmetry can you add to a pattern before they begin to interfere with each other? how much deviation or interference can you add before the sense of repetition breaks down? how long can a repetitive cycle last before you stop perceiving it as such? there is much music to be found on these boundaries. tidal does not make sound itself, but as a pattern engine sends messages to synthesisers (hardware or software) to make sound. by default, tidal is used with superdirt, a synthesis framework designed for use with tidal and implemented in the supercollider environment. we will begin however with patterns of colour, in sympathy with the present medium. transforming sequences tidal really comes in two parts, a little language for describing sequences, and a library of functions for transforming them as patterns. the little language for sequences is denoted with double quotes: "red pink" the above and following figures should be read clockwise, beginning at the top. the above pattern is rendered in a circle, in order to put tidal’s central notion of cyclic pattern in visual form—the dancecult 10(1)14 end of one cycle is also the beginning of the next. there is much that we can do inside these double quotes to describe complex sequences, but first, lets introduce a simple way to transform this sequence using the fast function to speed it up: fast 5 "red pink" now we can see five repetitions of red and pink within a single cycle. it is worth noting that the number 5, as a parameter to fast in the above, is itself a pattern. when we give a pattern as a bare number like this, it simply repeats that number, once per cycle. the below gives a sequence of two numbers to fast instead, so that the first half of each cycle is sped up by a factor of five, and the second half by a factor of three: fast "5 3" "red pink" in the above, the fast function takes two patterns as input, and combines them to return a new pattern. pattern transformations tend to operate relative to cycles, but that does not mean that successive cycles are identical. for example in the following, every 3 is used to apply the function fast "5 3" to "red pink" as above, but only every third cycle. the first six cycles of the resulting pattern are shown below, so that you can see this change over time: every 3 (fast "5 3") "red pink" we can also squeeze the above six cycles into one, again by speeding it up, so that each cycle is identical once more: fast 6 (every 3 (fast "5 3") "red pink") already we can see a strong part of tidal’s flexibility; it is highly composable. functions like fast 6 take a pattern as input, and return a new pattern as output, so that it is straightforward to compose multiple functions together into more complex transformations, as we have done above. furthermore, we did not have to write any code to align "5 3" with "red pink"; in conventional terms, tidal is declarative, in the sense that it takes care of the mechanics of pattern composition for us. mclean, fanfani and harlizius-klück | cyclic patterns of movement 15 an aside: imperative, declarative and kairotic programming different techniques in programming are generally classified into either imperative or declarative programming. imperative programming is where we describe a procedure in terms of how it is done. the usual everyday example of such a program is a cake recipe. instead of describing a cake, a recipe gives a step-by-step procedure for combining different elements, where a cake is the (hopeful) result. in declarative programming, we instead describe what we want, and leave the job of how this is achieved to the computer. from the point of view of pattern-making, this distinction is already problematic in itself, in that how we make something is part of what it is (mclean 2011: 75–77). reflecting on emma cocker’s work described earlier, here we suggest that kairotic coding is a third approach that sits between both declarative and imperative programming. this is akin to answering neither how or what questions, but instead focussing on programmers asking a question themselves: what if? this is where a programmer changes to the structure of code, perceives the end result, and then makes their next change to the code in response. this kairotic approach, where the programmers enter the timeline of their code, has become embedded in the practice-led design of tidal. event time in polyphonic and polymetric sequencing we have already learned the standard unit of time in tidal is the cycle. one impact of this is that if you add additional steps to a sequence, the steps will become shorter in duration, so that they are contained exactly within a single cycle: "red pink orange" "red pink orange blue lightblue" in the musical domain, this means that the more events you add to a pattern, the faster they will be played, in order to fit them into a cycle: sound "bd cp sd" sound "bd cp sd mt lt" in other words, timing in tidal is not based around a notion of a fixed beat duration, but on higher level cycles. this lends metrical flexibility, so for example it is possible to break down individual steps into subcycles, using square brackets: "red [orange green] blue [lightblue yellow black]" https://dj.dancecult.net/public/journals/24/1036-a.mp3 https://dj.dancecult.net/public/journals/24/1036-b.mp3 dancecult 10(1)16 it is also possible to place more than one subcycle inside a single step: "[orange purple, lightblue yellow black]" in the above we can see that lightblue yellow black fills the same span as orange purple. it is not significant that one subcycle is placed on the outside of the other; in musical terms this simply indicates that they form a polyphony, happening at the same time. we can change this behaviour by instead using curly brackets to denote the subsequences: "{orange purple, lightblue yellow black}" we can see that the steps rather than cycles now align, so that orange purple lines up with lightblue yellow in the first cycle. we can also see what it means to be a subcycle, as the subcycle continues where it left off, over successive cycles. from lightblue yellow black, only the first two colours are used in the first cycle to match with the two colours in orange purple, so on the second cycle it continues with black, cycling back to lightblue for its second value. we end up with a structure that repeats every third cycle. let’s listen to the equivalent in the sound domain, listening to a two-step bass drum (bd) clap (cp) sequence against a low (lt) mid (mt) high tom (ht) sequence: sound "[bd cp, lt mt ht]" sound "{bd cp, lt mt ht}" subcycles can be placed within subcycles. the following contains a subcycle with three steps (with a span of one third of a cycle each), of which the middle step is broken down further into two substeps (one sixth of a cycle each): "red [orange [black green] brown] blue" rests, gaps and stretches silence is of course central to music, and in tidal sequences you can insert empty gaps with the ~ character: "red blue ~ orange [purple ~] green" https://dj.dancecult.net/public/journals/24/1036-c.mp3 https://dj.dancecult.net/public/journals/24/1036-d.mp3 mclean, fanfani and harlizius-klück | cyclic patterns of movement 17 alternatively a _ character will stretch the previous step: "red blue _ orange [purple ~] green" you can also use a ? character to replace a step with silence around 50% of the time, varying from one cycle to the next: fast 12 "red blue?" manipulating time music is of course a time-based artform, and in tidal, time is malleable—it both flows in cycles, and develops over time. it can be reversed, shifted forward into the future or back into the past, expanded and contracted, chopped up and rearranged, and subdivided to practically any depth. we have so far focussed on sequences, but there is much more to pattern. let us move on to explore different kinds of patterning, all of which take existing patterns and transform them. of course, everyone listens differently, and so a pattern is not necessarily a puzzle to be solved, but an environment to be explored. the pattern transformation might be perceivable by the listener, or it might only give them a sense of order amongst chaos, but because there is a clear structure in the creation of pattern, the sonic environment that results has the possibility to be an engaging place, explored through the process of listening. many computer music systems represent music as lists of events, an approach which certainly has its advantages. however, tidal instead represents music as a pure, mathematical function, with a timespan as input and returning events active within that timespan as output. each event consists of a value, and a timespan during which the event is active. this approach, a form of functional reactive programming (hudak 1999), allows the temporal structure of tidal patterns to be efficiently manipulated without being calculated, either as a discrete or continuous signal, and separately from the events which are represented within the signal (mclean 2014). time is represented as a rational number, lending itself to precise subdivision. it is not important to understand tidal’s inner representation of time in detail, but worth noting that much of the flexibility seen in the following stems from tidal’s focus on composing together functions of time, rather than linear procedures over data. we have already seen the fast function for speeding up a pattern. the <~ and ~> operators manipulate time a different way, by moving patterns backwards and forwards in time. with tidal’s cyclic notion of time, in practice this results in rotating a pattern. the following pattern shows a quarter rotation, every third cycle: dancecult 10(1)18 every 3 (0.25 <~) $ "red pink grey purple" the iter function also shifts time, but keeps shifting it from one cycle to the next, until the cycle returns back to where it started. this takes place over a given number of cycles, which in the following is four: iter 4 "red pink grey purple" let’s hear some sound-based examples of <~ and iter: iter 4 $ sound "lt mt sd cp" every 3 (<~ 0.25) $ sound "lt mt sd cp" for a complete introduction to the pattern transformations available in tidal, refer to the website: <http://tidalcycles.org>. patterning multiple dimensions of sound in terms of how it is perceived, sound is multi-dimensional. a modern synthesiser may have a keyboard providing a pitch dimension, but will also have a plethora of knobs and sliders for exploring further timbral dimensions. accordingly, tidal allows different aspects of sound to be patterned independently. the following example demonstrates independent patterning of the legato (relative duration) and lpf (low pass filter) parameters, where the structure is defined by the n (note) rather than sound parameter: off 0.125 (|+| n “-12”) $ jux rev $ n (off “<1%8 1%4>“ (+ chord “<major minor major>“) (palindrome $ “<c(3,8) f(3,8) g(3,8) c6(3,8)>“)) # sound “superpiano” # legato (scale 0.5 2 saw) # lpf “<300 [1000 700] 2000>“ # lpq 0.2 the above presents only a small part of tidal’s language for exploring pattern. to get a broader impression of its creative possibilities, please refer to the live performances and demonstrations on the official website: <http://blog.tidalcycles.org/video/> https://dj.dancecult.net/public/journals/24/1036-e.mp3 https://dj.dancecult.net/public/journals/24/1036-f.mp3 http://tidalcycles.org https://dj.dancecult.net/public/journals/24/1036-g.mp3 http://blog.tidalcycles.org/video/ mclean, fanfani and harlizius-klück | cyclic patterns of movement 19 dance, music and song: archaic greek choral lyric as a multi-layered performance a central concern of this article is to suggest a comparison between, on the one hand, ways in which patterns of recurring rhythmic cycles are created and manipulated in tidal, and, on the other hand, the extent to which rhythmic recurrence can be recognized as a structural feature of archaic and classical greek lyric verse through the mechanism of epiplokē. as already anticipated, the nature of this comparison is largely experimental, and a methodological caveat is required before introducing some basic notions of metre and rhythm in ancient greek poetry. as a concept created by hellenistic and later greek metrical theory in order to make sense of the rhythmical patterns of archaic and classical lyric (a poetry written and performed a few centuries earlier), epiplokē is not originally a notion born in the song-culture context where choral lyric was produced—though the idea that the interlacement (greek plekein) of a few rhythmical types generates every possible metrical sequence surfaces as early as plato (republic 400a4-5) and possibly earlier (lomiento 2004). in a similar fashion, the recent re-conceptualization of epiplokē as a principle of rhythmic modulation by thomas cole is an interpretative tool that is largely arbitrary, and has not met with universal scholarly consensus (see haslam 1991). that said, we think that both the weaving idea at the core of the ancient notion of epiplokē and the novel approach to ancient greek rhythmic patterns in terms or recurring cycles are capable of directing our attention to key modes of ancient greek versification—modes that present striking similarities with tidal’s approach to rhythm. the shipwreck of the largest part of ancient greek poetry has been especially severe in regards to music and dance, two fundamental dimensions of both cultic-civic and dramatic choral lyric. the orchestic movements of the choristers in circular, processional, or rectangular formations, and the melodies of the songs to the accompaniment of the lyre or the pipe are completely lost to us with the exception of a few papyri containing fragments of lyric passages provided with musical notation. in short, we are left with three typologies of textual evidence that somewhat reflect the performance of choral lyric poetry: a) intra-textual self-referential utterances by the choral persona describing the actual dancing or the musical features of the on-going performance; b) the metrical and rhythmical patterns of the poem as far as we can reconstruct them from the textual tradition; c) ancient scholarship on meter, rhythm and music commenting on features of archaic or classical choral performances. while some scholars entertain the possibility that different musical and verbal rhythmical levels interacted in the actual performance of sung greek poetry (e.g. gentili and lomiento 2003: 3–4 and passim) it is probably more practical to think of a single rhythmical pattern, with different yet complementary layers and realizations. from this viewpoint: a) the steps of the dancers; b) the down beat (thesis “beating”) and the up beat (arsis “lifting”) of the musical sequences and; c) the metrical sequences of the text, represent three layers of the overarching rhythmical texture of the poem/song. interference patterns are generated by verbal demarcation, i.e. the sequence of word-ends which occur in certain (fixed or not) positions within the metrical design (e.g. caesura and diaeresis), thus creating an interplay of different structural levels.11 furthermore, since ancient greek had a musical accent, the natural pitch of accented syllables represented a further element that interacted with the musical melody. dancecult 10(1)20 ancient greek meter and rhythm: a brief introduction ancient greek is a quantitative language with tonal accent. metrical structures are built through the opposition of long (-) and short (⏑) elements (corresponding to syllables), combined into metrical sequences (battezzato 2009). conventionally, a long element corresponds in length to two short ones: in many cases a long element may be substituted with two shorts (known as resolution), and two shorts substituted by a long (known as contraction). depending on their position within the internal structure of a metrical sequence, certain elements may be realized as either short or long syllable (anceps, denoted by ×). the fundamental metrical units are known as metra (singular metron) and are composed by two to six elements: among the metra mentioned in this article figure dactlyl (-⏑⏑), cretic (-⏑-), iamb (×-⏑-), trochee (-⏑-×), ionic a minore (⏑⏑--), ionic a maiore (--⏑⏑), anapaest (⏑⏑-), and choriamb (-⏑⏑-). larger sequences generated by the combination of metra are called cola (singular colon), single metrical phrases of around 12 syllables (usually reduplicating metra in dimeters and trimeters), which the poet may demarcate through word-end (caesura). a combination of cola generates the verse or period, the fundamental self-contained structure in metrical composition. a period is marked off and framed by a metrical pause that must coincide with word-end, and that makes the last element before the pause metrically indifferent. in the layout of lyric poems transmitted by papyri and medieval manuscripts (called colometry), periods are generally longer than a single line. the strophe is generated by a number of periods, and in choral lyric it recurs throughout the poem (in responsion with the antistrophe in triadic structure, i.e. in the sequence strophe-antistrophe-epode), and it probably corresponded to a musical unit, repeated in the course of the song. as martin west points out while tracing the prehistory of greek rhythm, the basic rhythmical movements are a pair of symmetrical sequences, …-⏑⏑-⏑⏑-… and …-⏑-×-⏑-…, and a combination of them in asymmetrical ones, …-⏑⏑-×-⏑-… and …-⏑-×-⏑⏑-… (west 1982: 19). greek lyric has strong regional characterizations: the aeolic meters and rhythms represent the older stratum of greek versification, and they have been shown to share structural features with the meters of an ancient indian religious poem, the rig veda. characteristic of aeolic meters is the freedom of the first two quantities (××), called aeolic base, which can be realized as two short syllables (⏑⏑), two long (--), or one short and one long (-⏑ or ⏑-). one of the fundamental rhythmical and metrical units of the aeolic system is the glyconic (××-⏑⏑-⏑-); a shorter variant of this colon, where the final syllable is omitted, is called pherecratean (××-⏑⏑--). the colon resulting from cutting off the aeolic base from a glyconic is called dodrans (-⏑⏑-⏑dod). an expanded form (-⏑⏑-⏑⏑-⏑dodd), and a reversed one (-⏑-⏑⏑dod¨), are also common aeolic cola. metrical periods are generated through the combination of these cola with iamb (×-⏑-) or cretic (-⏑-) as suffix or prefix, or with internal expansion of glyconic (e.g. choriambic expansion glcho ××-⏑⏑-⏑⏑-⏑-). choral lyric use of aeolic rhythms in larger strophic systems shows complex patterns of repetition and modulation within strophe, with each period/verse developing elements of the preceding one. what results is often the alternation between dominant sequences and others that “seem to be adaptations or inversions of these common sequences. how to code these patterns is one of the greatest challenges facing metrical theory” (rutherford 2001: 447). following west (1982: 66) a strophe from a choral poem by simonides (542.21-30 poetae melici graeci) may illustrate this point: mclean, fanfani and harlizius-klück | cyclic patterns of movement 21 τοὔνεκεν οὔ ποτ᾽ ἐγὼ τὸ μὴ γενέσθαι δυνατὸν dodd + dod¨ ⏑⏑-⏑⏑-⏑⏑--⏑⏑διζήμενος κενεὰν ἐς ἄ iamb + ⏑⏑-⏑⏑-⏑⏑⏑-⏑   πρακτον ἐλπίδα μοῖραν αἰῶνος βαλέω, glyconic + iamb‖ -⏑-⏑⏑-⏑--⏑πανάμωμον ἄνθρωπον, εὐρυεδές ὅσοι ⏑⏑-⏑+ glyconic ⏑⏑-⏑-⏑-⏑⏑-⏑    καρπὸν αἰνύμεθα χθονός· glyconic -⏑-⏑⏑-⏑ἐπὶ δ᾽ ὑμὶν εὑρὼν ἀπαγγελέω. ⏑⏑-⏑+ dod¨ ⏑⏑-⏑-⏑-⏑⏑πάντας δ᾽ ἐπαίνημι καὶ φιλέω, iamb + dod¨ --⏑-⏑-⏑⏑ἑκὼν ὅστις ἔρδῃ 2 catalectic iambs ⏑-⏑-μηδὲν αίσχρόν· ἀνάγκᾳ δ᾽ pherecratean -⏑-⏑⏑-   οὐδὲ θεοὶ μάχονται ithyphallic ⦀ -⏑---rhythm is considered by ancient scholarship as the “ordered disposition of musical quantities”, resulting in different patterns obtained by the opposition of thesis and arsis (not necessarily equal in length) according to the ratio between them (2:2, 2:1, 3:2). the early reflection on rhythm poses as the two fundamental rhythmical categories (genus, from greek genos) the even genus (ratio 2:2) and the double genus (1:2 and 2:1). this division between even and double genus is already theorized in 5th century bc by the sophist damon, teacher of socrates, whose doctrine surfaces in a passage of plato’s republic (400a-c). here, damon seems not to distinguish between the two metra (dactyl -⏑⏑ and anapaest ⏑⏑-) of the even genus (2:2), nor between the two (trochee -⏑-⏑ and iamb ⏑-⏑-) of the double genus (2:1 and 1:2).12 this implies that a long sequence of … -⏑⏑-⏑⏑⏑⏑-⏑⏑… may be in abstract marked off in both dactylic and anapaestic segments, and the same goes for a sequence … -⏑-⏑-⏑-⏑-⏑-⏑-⏑ … (trochaic and iambic segments). the rhythmical affinity between the members of each pair of antithetical metra (one falling, with initial long, and one rising, with initial short or double short) was also recognized by ancient metricians. epiplokē in context: from variegation in metre to pattern operator of rhythmical cycles according to the ancient metrical theory, one of the modalities through which metra are generated is a mechanism of inter-weaving (epiplokē), whose superseding principle is affinity/ likeness (suggeneia, lit. “kinship”);13 within a single rhythmical type genus, each meter is created through the transference (initial addition and subtraction, or internal transposition) of a quantity from one to the other of a given pair. in fact, however, one type of ancient epiplokē encompasses four metra of six quantities: choriamb (-⏑⏑-), ionic a minore (⏑⏑--), antispast (⏑--⏑), and ionic a maiore (–⏑⏑). subtracting the initial syllable in a series of choriambs, a sequence of ionic a minore is generated, and so on: -⏑⏑--⏑⏑--⏑⏑--⏑⏑--⏑⏑--⏑⏑choriambs   ⏑⏑--⏑⏑--⏑⏑--⏑⏑--⏑⏑--⏑⏑-ionics a minore     ⏑--⏑⏑--⏑⏑--⏑⏑--⏑⏑--⏑⏑--⏑ antispast        --⏑⏑--⏑⏑--⏑⏑--⏑⏑--⏑⏑--⏑⏑ ionic a maiore again, in a theoretically infinite sequence in epiplokē -⏑⏑--⏑⏑--⏑⏑--⏑⏑--⏑⏑--⏑⏑one may mark off either a series of choriambs, or ionics a minore, or antispasts, or ionics a maiore, depending where one decides to start. in this sense, epiplokē has been aptly defined as “a sort of matrix from where you could hack out” different segments (dale 1968: 70). dancecult 10(1)22 while ancient metricians were mainly concerned with providing a mechanical and abstract explanation for the genesis of the nine fundamental metra of greek versification, the concept of epiplokē as a pattern of rhythmical interweaving invites an analysis that goes beyond the theoretical frame of metrical segmentation into discrete units (or, employing a fitting analogy, of musical bars), and thus beyond the simple phase-shifting rotation that the above diagram may seem to imply. ancient epiplokē provides us with an interpretative tool to recognize instances of alternation/ variegation and modulation in lyric versification (poikilia in greek), especially in cases where ancient colometry seems to reflect such a principle. particularly in the choral lyric sections of drama, alternating sequences of rhythm in epiplokē (e.g.  a dactylic passage followed by anapaests) tend to be regularized by modern editors, who often build series of identical cola out of the poikilia transmitted by the ancient editions, and restore an alleged (and arbitrary) regularity and rhythmical coherence.14 a broadened perception of epiplokē as a key concept of versification, and a tool to reconsider rhythmical continuity and modulation in archaic and classical greek lyric sustains the work of thomas cole on pattern analysis of metrical sequences. against the horizontal model of metrical segmentation and demarcation represented by the system of metra, cole proposes to think of a cyclical movement—the circumference of a clock face being an apt image for it—of “undemarcated recurrence” (cole 1988: 4). a given cycle of epiplokē, that is, “partakes simultaneously of the movements that it comprises” (haslam 1991: 232). regardless of the pattern of verbal demarcation or rhetorical division, a word-end recurring at certain intervals within the verses/periods should be seen as a potential way of structuring a rhythmical sequence, rather than fixed points or sorts of musical bars. thus, a sequence like ⸣-⸤⏑⏑-⏑-⏑-⸣-⸤⏑⏑-⏑-⏑-⸣-⸤⏑⏑-⏑-occurring at aristophanes’ knights 553-555 (strophe, with ⸣ denoting colon and line division; see fig. 3 for visualization) and 583-585 (antistrophe, ⸤ colon and line division), shows a remarkably different verbal articulation in strophe and antistrophe.15 that is, dividing the sequence into eight-syllable cycles in the strophe word-ends occur so as to suggest a iambo-choriambic colon (choriamb + iambic metron -⏑⏑-×-⏑-), while in the antistrophe the pattern of word-ends shifts a syllable, thus producing an anacreontic (a metre of the ionic family: ⏑⏑-×-⏑--).16 the epiplokē of choriambic and ionic (also contemplated by the ancient doctrine), acting in the context of strophic responsion, should be seen as a continuous rhythmical cycle with interweaving demarcations and encompassing both the metra (⸣-⸤⏑⏑-×-⏑-⸣-⸤⏑⏑-×-⏑-⸣-⸤⏑⏑-⏑--), rather than being disambiguated as featuring either one or the other meter. what is missing is precisely the point of junction between different cola (haslam 1991: 232). mclean, fanfani and harlizius-klück | cyclic patterns of movement 23 figure 3. aristophanes’ knights 553-555 (strophe) 585-585 (antistrophe) can be interpreted and represented as a cycle of iono-choriambic epiplokē of eight syllables. a switch in the starting point of the cycle determines the alternating demarcation of strophe and antistrophe. a passage from a choral ode in sophocles’ philoctetes (strophe 686-690 = antistrophe 702–706) shows a cycle of iono-choriambic epiplokē, in this case within internal responsion. in the colometry below, we have chosen to visualize the pattern of alternating catalectic ionic dimeters (in the form ⏑⏑-⏑-⏑-) and hypercatalectic choriambic dimeters (-⏑⏑-⏑-⏑--). most modern editors, in fact, prefer a colometry that is either consistently choriambic or ionic, with a sequence of 4 choriambic dimeters (-⏑⏑-⏑-⏑-, the fourth catalectic, whereas in the ionic colometry there would be a series of 3 anacreontic, with a typical clausola) following an acephalous choriambic dimeter (⏑⏑--⏑⏑-).17 the two alternative colometries are shown in the table: τόδε δ᾽ αὖ θαῦμά μ᾽ἔχει, πῶς ποτε πῶς ποτ᾽ ἀμφιπλήκτων ῥοθίων μόνος κλύων, πῶς ἄρα πανδάκρυτον οὕτω βιοτὰν κατέσχεν ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ τόδε δ᾽ αὖ θαῦμά μ᾽ ἔχει, πῶς ποτε πῶς ποτ᾽ ἀμφιπλήκτων ῥοθίων μόνος κλύων, πῶς ἄρα πανδάκρυτον οὕτω βιοτὰν κατέσχεν ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ ⏑ the mechanism of epiplokē encourages us to see these sequences as a cycle of interwoven ionicchoriambic dimeters rather than as segmented cola, with rhythmical ambiguity as a meaningful part of the poetic design: -⏑⏑-×-⏑--|⏑⏑-×-⏑-⸣-⸤⏑⏑-×-⏑--|⏑⏑-×--. a further application of epiplokē takes place within the structure of a single verse where rhythmical shifts are mediated by modulating sequences common to both metrical types (often ⏑ -). as it has been aptly noted, “rhythmics, like harmonics (music theory), is much concerned with modulation, μεταβολή” (haslam 1991: 233). in the sequence ×-⏑--⏑⏑-×-⏑-, an iambic-trochaic epiplokē ×-⏑frames a ionic-choriambic epiplokē ⏑--⏑⏑-, with the sequence ⏑functioning as modulating device. coles’ repositioning of epiplokē as a principle of rhythmical continuity proves dancecult 10(1)24 indeed very effective in cases of ambiguity of rhythmical patterns. such ambiguity is in fact an integral aspect of epiplokē and, within this view, cyclically recurrent patterns are at the root of archaic and classical verse design. in particular, coles questions the ancient metrical theory and practice of colometry, as this implies a large recourse to the category of catalexis, acephaly and the like (i.e. metra shortened of a final quantity at the end or at the beginning of a verse) in order to resort to sequences of cola of a standard length. the cyclical element introduced by epiplokē changes the paradigm, and invites us to think of different points at which the cycle may begin. metrical demarcation is thus superseded by the different principle of rhythmical continuity. patterns of verbal demarcations within verses, sometimes in contrast with the apparent rhythmical cycle, invite us also to reflect on the complex interaction of layers in the performance of a choral lyric poem: the musical rhythm (recurring in strophe and antistrophe, which we have seen sometimes display different demarcations within cycles), the metrical patterns interfering with verbal demarcation (word-end marked by caesura and diaeresis), and the lost choral schemata (maybe regulated by the beating of the feet in correspondence of the thesis within cola). if epiplokē in its original designation was meant to bring to mind the character of pattern generation through a dyadic system of elements typically a feature of ancient weaving technology, a closer look at how the mechanism works in context may reflect as well a further distinctive feature of weaving on the warp-weighted loom—the possibility to effect pattern connections and variations within (and in the course of) the overall fabric design, rather than stitching together different pieces already woven.18 algorave as a luddite movement algorave might at times be presented as sci-fi made real, as an outcome of progress. we argue that a better approach is to take a longer view, looking for historical connections which help us understand algorave in relation to wider human culture, and might give clues about its future. we consider algorave as a reaction to technological progress, rather than as an outcome from it. today, general purpose computing is becoming as ubiquitous as woven fabric, and is maintained and developed by a global industry of software engineers. while the textile industry developed out of worldwide practices over millennia, deeply embedded in culture, the software industry has developed over a single lifetime, the practice of software engineering literally constructed as a military operation. nonetheless, the similarity between weavers and programmers is stark if we consider weaving itself as a technology. here we do not refer to the inventions of the industrial age, but the fundamental, structural crossing of warp and weft, with its extremely complex, generative properties to which we have become largely blind since replacing human weavers with powerlooms and jacquard devices. it is clear that weaving has been a digital art from the very beginning (harlizius-klück 2017). software engineers are now threatened with job loss under strikingly similar circumstances, thanks to breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (ai) and “deep learning” methods, taking advantage of the processing power of industrial-scale server farms. jen-hsun hu, chief executive of nvidia who make some of the chips used in these servers is quoted as saying that now, “instead of people writing software, we have data writing software” (standage 2016). mclean, fanfani and harlizius-klück | cyclic patterns of movement 25 one question is what to do with all the software engineers, if their jobs were to disappear. but another important question is what to do with all the programming languages? consider that with the arrival of powerlooms and knitting machines, many craftspeople continued hand weaving and knitting in their homes and social clubs for pleasure, rather than out of necessity. this was hardly a surprise, as people have always made fabric, and indeed in many parts of the world handweaving has remained the dominant form of fabric making. through much of the history of general purpose computing however, any cultural context for computer programming has remained behind its industrial and military contexts. there has of course been a hackerly counter-culture from the beginning of modern-day computing, but consider that the celebrated early hackers in mit were funded by the military while war flared in vietnam, and the renowned early cybernetic serendipity exhibition of electronic art included presentations by general motors and boeing, showing no evidence of an undercurrent of political dissent (usselmann 2003). in a sense, computer programming culture has not yet happened at scale. looking forward, we therefore see great possibilities. all the young people now learning how to write code for industry may find that the industry has disappeared by the time they graduate, and that their programming skills give no insight into the workings of deep learning networks. but the good side is that it seems that the scene is set for programming to be untethered from necessity. the activity of programming, free from a military-industrial imperative, may become dedicated almost entirely to cultural activities such as music-making and sculpture, augmenting human abilities to bring understanding to our own data, breathing computational pattern into our lives. programming languages could slowly become closer to natural languages, simply by developing through use while embedded in culture. perhaps the growing practice of live coding over the past two decades is a precursor to this. our hope is that we will begin to think of code and data in the same way as we do of knitting patterns, weaving block designs and the greek poetic metre discussed above, because in essence, they are one and the same: languages with structures intricately (and literally) woven into our lives. so perhaps the algorave movement should take lessons from the luddites. because they were not just agents of disruption, but also agents against disruption, not campaigning against technology, but for technology as a positive cultural force. conclusion the activity and site of algorave is increasingly distant from that of contemporary software engineering, in that notions of quality control, test suites, and client relationships are sidelined, replaced with programming as creative, live interaction, where errors and failures are embraced as musical imperatives. this does not mean that the fundamentals of computer science are discarded, indeed the focus on pattern and mathematics brings these fundamentals to the fore, where the creative possibilities of strict type systems are plumbed with great enthusiasm, as we have seen with tidal. one motivation for this article has been that in order to understand the place of algorithms in electronic dance music, we must take a longer comparative view, placing algorave on long line of dancecult 10(1)26 cultures engaging shared experience of discrete patterns and movement. taking ancient greek culture as our starting point, we have considered the then contemporary technology of the warpweighted loom for its binary nature, relating the cyclic patterns of weave with the cyclic metrical patterns evident in ancient greek choral lyric, including the metrical transformations of epiplokē. the ancient technology of weaving functions as a pervasive paradigm for conceptualizing pattern generation in early greek thought and poetics. at the same time, the interference of warp and weft also brings useful perspective to the interferences explored through tidal. there is much to separate tidal and epiplokē, the first being a system for creating metrical sequences, the latter only employed as a system for analysing them (due to the loss of the original music). but there are also fascinating comparisons to be drawn, such as the cyclic structures at play, the cyclic modulations and transformations, the disregarding of established metrical subdivisions, and the notion of pattern that unites music, dance and language. by looking for ancient perspectives on emerging technology, we find alternative narratives, which provide extremely rich seams of history to explore for understanding. notes 1 we also employed this device to live code musical patterns in a performance at the art areal festival in munich 2015. a second version of this device, enhanced by an augmented reality layer to provide dynamic feedback was tried out by dave griffiths at the algomech algorave in sheffield 2017 as part of a performance with alexandra cardenas and alex mclean. 2 as a pervasive practice of ritual, religious and civic participation in every greek polis, choral dancing was the distinctive element in the complex, multimedia performance that was greek choral lyric—a genre of poetry that we experience today only as what remains: written texts, sometimes only in fragments. the fact that choristers were mostly non-professional dancers implies the exposure and participation of the average citizen to a significant number of choral activities. 3 see fragment 44 b4 d.-k.: “and certainly everything that is known possesses number. for it is not possible either to think or to know anything without this”. for a comprehensive investigation of pythagorean arithmetic and weaving with reference to plato see harlizius-klück (2004). 4 for more on dyadic arithmetic, see: <http://www.praetexta.de/psephoi/e_psephoi_01.html>. 5 odd and even numbers are theorised in euclid’s elements in two sections: the definitions opening book 7 and the propositions 21–36 in book 9, whose nucleus is commonly traced back to pythagorean mathematics. 6 the reference work on weaving as both a symbol and a conceptual metaphor (a myth in the authors’ terminology) in greece and rome is scheid and svenbro (1996). see as well fanfani, harlow and nosch (2016). 7 see pherecydes of syros (6th century bc) fr. 76, (schibli 1990). lucretius’ de rerum natura (1st century bc) surely drew on greek sources (namely 5th century bc atomists, leucippus and democritus). as for the concept of atomic bonding and conglomerates, these are illustrated throughout the whole didactic poem through a sustained use of weaving metaphors, where atoms are defined as primordia. these are literally “first-threads”, where the root ordior (“to warp”) brings in as http://kairotic.org/weavecoding-munich/ https://fo.am/blog/2017/11/27/pattern-matrix-algomech2/ http://www.praetexta.de/psephoi/e_psephoi_01.html mclean, fanfani and harlizius-klück | cyclic patterns of movement 27 well the idea of order and a reference to the starting-border of the weave. see fanfani and harliziusklück (2016). 8 the metapoetics of craftsmanship uses literary imagery, notably metaliterary metaphors, to illustrate the quality, structure and modes of performance of a poem in terms of a given craft. weaving (and related textile techniques like plaiting, braiding, stringing) is a favourite conceptual vehicle for the generation/composition of the poem/song already in old indian sacred hymns (the rig veda). archaic greek literature appropriates this device in a rather genre-specific fashion. it is mainly choral lyric (ritually marked performances of sung and danced poems executed by a chorus) that provides the richest repertoire of weaving metaphors for song-making. here, through the poetic ‘i’ (more often referring to the chorus than to the poet/composer), the imagery of weaving/plaiting/stringing invests explicitly the performance of the song. a further ramification of weaving imagery in archaic greek poetics can be observed at the level of terminology: a number of key words designating the poem/ song itself, or structural features of it, are etymologically or conceptually grounded on elements or mechanisms of weaving technology (see fanfani and harlizius-klück 2016). 9 referring to rug production in contemporary afghanistan, tuck (2006: 540) observes that “weavers reduce images to numerical grids that are then remembered and communicated throughout the course of production in the form of a chantlike song”. perhaps more interestingly for the purpose of this article, tuck proceeds to exemplify the numerical sequences of a few traditional woven patterns, noting that in case of bichrome threads, “complex patterned textiles would call for long strings of number sequences, all of which would require not only memorization of repeating patterns of numbers along the horizontal axis of a loom’s warp but also the correct relationship of a given line of numbers to that which proceeds and follows it in sequence. the songs thus appear to be mnemonic devices communicating this information”. 10 interestingly enough, the strand of greek poetic imagery that associates weaving with choral lyric invests the element of dance in a distinctive way: instances of the image of “weaving/plaiting/ stringing together a chorus of dancers” (collected by calame 1997: 34–35 fn. 63) are often significantly connected to circular choruses. circularity is a primary morphological feature of the lyric chorus, often in ritual context. (the dithyrambic chorus, linked to the cult of dionysus, is probably the best-known example of circular dance in agonistic context. in a competition between tribes, 1000 athenian citizens performed dithyrambs in circular formation annually at the greater dionysia festival). the act of weaving/plaiting together the dancers is usually the province of the chorus leader, the choregos. in a number of cases, the image of weaving a dance is associated with mixed choruses of young boys and young girls in the context of wedding or courtship rituals. (for an instance of circular dance, refer to the aetiological myth of the crane dance led by theseus in the scholia ab to homer’s iliad 18.590. for an instance of movement in a row, refer to the necklace dance described by lucian, on dance 12). 11 in traditional metrical terminology, caesura designates word-end within a metron (the primary metrical unit), while diaeresis marks word-end coinciding with metron-end. 12 it bears noting that rhythmical terminology precedes reflection on meter. our oldest attestations present terminology for rhythmical patterns rather than for individual meters. this has been elaborated at a later stage, when metricians in alexandrian (hellenistic) period made the effort of extending rhythmical terminology as to include nine fundamental metra, the combination of which could describe every verse (period). dancecult 10(1)28 13 for a comprehensive overview of ancient sources (both greek and latin) on epiplokē see palumbo stracca (1979: 90–107). 14 in the context of the summer school of greek metrics and rhythmics at the university of urbino, 4–8 september 2017, several scholars have shown how the mechanism of epiplokē may in fact highlight significant thematic motifs within a given choral ode through alternating, modulating, and responding combinations of metra in epiplokē. 15 in other words, the pattern of word-ending in the strophe is coincident with the iambo-trochaic colon, while in the antistrophe it seems to be following the anacreontic cola. 16 see cole (1988: 5–6): “for metrists and colometrists, of course, aristophanes’ rhythm must be either iambo-choriambic or anacreontic, not both; and this leads to a dilemma: one or the other set of demarcations must be selected as basic—a series of colon or metron diaereses (divisions) separating rhythmical units—and the other dismissed. . . . epiploke provides the simplest and most natural way of avoiding the dilemma in passages of this sort, and as such it deserves a place in any discussion of the rhythmical procedures used in greek poetry”. 17 but, as dale (1968: 147) points out tentatively, “where there is no doubt as to colometry and it is merely the attribution to ionic or aeolic (i.e. choriambic) which is uncertain, a decision is perhaps not of great importance. choriambic series and ionic series are in ἐπιπλοκή, and perhaps the best we can do is to call such passages aeolo-ionic, whether this be taken merely as a confession of our ignorance or (as i believe) as a valid indication that such ἐπιπλοκή was objectively present in the actual choral rendering of the passage in question”. 18 some observations on these features of ancient weaving, and its reflection in archaic terminology for poetics have been proposed by two of us in an online publication (harlizius-klück and fanfani 2017). references battezzato, luigi. 2009. “metre and music”. in the cambridge companion to greek lyric, ed. felix budelmann, 130–46. cambridge: cambridge university press. 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temporary organisation for its promotion”. in read_me—software art and cultures, ed. olga goriunova and alexei shulgin. aarhus: aarhus university press. west, m.l. 1982. greek metre. oxford: oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1145/2633638.2633647 http://www.egr.msu.edu/aesc310/resources/big data and ai/artificial intelligence economist.pdf http://www.egr.msu.edu/aesc310/resources/big data and ai/artificial intelligence economist.pdf http://www.jstor.org/stable/40025056 https://doi.org/10.1162/002409403771048191 kaos, kilowatt and ketamine: a cultural history of the free tekno movement giorgia gaia independent researcher <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.07> as a researcher with a keen interest in exploring subcultural dance movements, my current focus is the earliest communitas to which i belonged: the free tekno movement. this journey began during the turn of the millennium when i took my initial steps into the european underground rave scene. my research aim is to trace the evolution of this vibrant scene over time, seeking to understand its development and the various factors that have contributed to its transformation. in this article, i will introduce the historical and theoretical foundations of my research. the primary objective of this project is to chronicle the cultural history of the free tekno movement, from its very beginning until the present. however, this essay is not intended to be a detailed literature review of the phenomenon. in the period from 1990 to 2005, italy, my country of origin, emerged as a prominent destination for traveling sound systems coming mostly from the uk and france. these sound systems discovered italy to be a hospitable and accommodating location for their trucks and parties, making it a significant hub in the subculture. during my youth as a punk enthusiast, i spent my free time in an extraordinary village situated near rimini, my hometown. this village, known as mutonia, and which still exists, represents a permanent autonomous zone settled along the banks of the marecchia river in santarcangelo di romagna, italy. mutonia is a community with a distinctive "mad max" aesthetic, and it has thrived since its establishment in 1990. this unique haven was birthed by a collective of punk travelers and artists who came to be known as the mutoid waste company. figure 1. the “time-machine” sculpture in mutonia. photo credit: giorgia gaia (2021). i was particularly captivated by the ambiance of the unconventional gatherings of the mutoids. these weird parties provided the background for my initial forays into mind-expanding experiences in a post-apocalyptic setting. the folklore surrounding the early raves hosted in mutonia between 1990 and 2000, evokes tales of extended psychedelic cyberpunk odysseys. these events were characterized by an eclectic mix of art, tequila and lsd, resulting in wild, endless journeys into the realms of altered consciousness. as suggested by their name, the mutoid waste company have a distinctive approach of utilizing the refuse of consumerist society to craft their giant mutant machines and spectacular sculptures. born in 1984 in west london, stemming from the imaginative minds and skilled hands of joe rush, a punk artist, and robin cooke, a hippy mechanic. over time, this artistic movement expanded to encompass a broader collective of punk artists, eccentric travelers and anarchists. figure 2. an artwork in mutonia. photo credit: filippo mozone (2019). throughout its history, the mutoid waste company's artistic visions materialized in diverse geographic locations, leading to what joe describes as a “huge absurd bit of anarchy” (rush 2015). one illustrative example of their unconventional actions is depicted in the image of tankhenge, a rendition of stonehenge constructed from tanks, alongside a mig 21 aircraft stolen from a russian army camp. this audacious creation took shape during the winter of 1990, shortly after the fall of the berlin wall. figure 3. tankhenge, a mutoid artwork in berlin (1990). figure 4. a russian mig 21 aircraft transported in berlin by the mutoids (1990). upon their arrival in santarcangelo di romagna in 1990, a countryside town in close proximity to rimini, the mutoids made quite an entrance with their science fiction inspired costumes and unconventional vehicles. they immediately occupied a parcel of land where they commenced expressing their art through mesmerizing fire performances and astonishing mobile robots. the local residents, having never encountered anything similar before, quickly developed an appreciation for this peculiar and distinctive manifestation of human creativity. figure 5. a robot constructed with recycled material in mutonia. photo credit: giorgia gaia (2017). figure 6. an art corner in mutonia. photo credit: giorgia gaia (2021). however, in july 2013, the santarcangelo di romagna municipality issued an order calling for the "demolition" and "restoration" of the state-owned area housing mutonia. this decision led to the emergence of a protest movement advocating for the mutoids and opposing the eviction of mutonia. this movement gained momentum on a national scale, eventually reaching the italian parliament. in response to the widespread protests and the recognition by the superintendencies of bologna and ravenna of the mutoid community as a "bene cittadino" or cultural asset, the municipality of santarcangelo, in february 2014, reversed its earlier eviction order. as a result, the mutoid community was granted ownership of the land, recognizing it as an artistic treasure to be preserved. video 1. the arrival of mutoids in santarcangelo di romagna. the mutoids invade us. (1996). the style of events orchestrated by the mutoids throughout the years, can be considered as the archetype of a free tekno party: illegal, mainly with electronic tribal music, radical street theater, surreal science-fiction means of locomotion, techno-punk-inspired costumes, terrifying monsters that move around spitting fire (cooke 2001). to gain a deeper understanding of the historical origins of the mutoid waste company and, by extension, the free party scene, it is relevant to delve into the history of joe rush. joe rush, alongside fellow mutoids, spent their formative years in england within a highly unique countercultural milieu known as frestonia. frestonia was the adopted name of the inhabitants of freston road, an area in london that had been squatted and self-declared the free and independent republic of frestonia. this is the very site where the clash recorded their legendary album, combat rock, in 1982. within this tiny republic, various lifestyles merged, encompassing the excesses of the punk movement, with the “apocalypse hotel” serving as a favored venue. figure 7. the clash standing before the apocalypse hotel, freston road. photo credit: pennie smith (1982). figure 8. the entrance of frestonia squatted area. photo credit: tony sleep. several of the founding members of frestonia were actively involved in the creation of the albion free state manifesto, which was published in 1974. the text of this manifesto can be found in the booklet titled "rehearsal for the year 2000". notably, the manifesto's opening articles encapsulate its foundational principles: the only state is your state of mind and the only government is your body; the world is a common treasure house for all. use your birth certificate as a credit card for: free love, free shelter, free food and freedom to do whatever doesn’t infringe the freedom of others. money is the meanest measurement of human energy there is. figure 9. “rehearsal of the year 2000” booklet cover (1976). considering how and why the free tekno movement emerged as a countercultural phenomenon in england, subsequently spreading throughout europe, it is essential to delve into the history of free festivals. arguably, the first free festival in the uk took place in shepon mallet, a small town very close to glastonbury, on 19th september 1970, just a day after the passing of jimi hendrix. with the name “pop, folk and blues”, the festival happened at the worthy farm pilton with a one-pound entrance fee, all farms milk free and sheltered fields for camping. during the 1980s, a nomadic community of travelers was born, drawing individuals from diverse subcultures such as punks, hippies and the earliest ravers. this collective came to be known as the peace convoy, comprising approximately 600 people who identified as "new age travelers". their journey culminated in the infamous battle of beanfield in 1985 when the peace convoy was en route to stonehenge to establish their free festival. a police roadblock was located seven miles from their destination. the encounter resulted in numerous injuries among the travelers, with more than 500 of them eventually being arrested, constituting one of the most extensive mass detentions of civilians in the annals of english legal history (mckay 1996). figure 10. a “peace convoy” bus in glastonbury (1986). it was 1988, the second summer of love in the united kingdom. this time was characterized by the spreading of illegal parties set to the beats of acid house music and the distinctive sounds of the roland 303 synthesizers. it was when a new substance decisively infiltrated the dance floors, significantly shaping contemporary dance culture—that substance was ecstasy (reynolds 2013). ecstasy brought about heightened sensations of love and empathy among ravers, and a notable decrease in various forms of violence. these gatherings evolved into a form of medicine for addressing social repression and feelings of alienation. if the mutoids were to become the artistic and aesthetic soul of the free tekno movement, then spiral tribe were the musical and spiritual epicenter of it. after the second summer of love, a period marked by the resurgence of paid parties and clubs, spiral tribe defiantly declared their commitment to the illegal free rave scene. they promptly began organizing events across the united kingdom equipped with their sound system (st john 2009). figure 11. mark angelo, sebastian vaughan (69db) and other spiral tribe members. photo credit: ariel wizman (1992). their notoriety reached new heights in 1992 following the castlemorton rave, during which spiral tribe, diy and circus warp gave life to a temporary rave-town completely beyond the control of authorities. in the aftermath of castlemorton, many members of the spiral tribe faced arrest; their vehicles and sound systems were seized. they were charged with conspiracy against the state, ultimately compelling spiral tribe to depart the united kingdom. figure 12. participants at castlemorton rave. photo credit: alan lodge (1992). figure 13. a sound system at castlemorton rave. photo credit: alan lodge (1992). they transformed an old trailer into a legendary mobile studio named studio 23, hosting resident producers crystal distortion and 69db, and they established their own record label: network 23. spiral tribe began their exile in paris in summer 1993 when, together with other sound systems, they announced the first teknival. their exile kickstarted the blossoming of huge, free, illegal teknival scene across westernand eastern europe which influenced dance culture of more than a generation, including mine, of course. my ongoing research project, which delves into the free tekno or teknival movement and the roles played by "kaos”, "kilowatt” and ”ketamine” as a triad of recurring cultural elements within the scene, commenced with the establishment of a conceptual and historical framework. the remainder of my essay offers a brief introduction to these three interwoven conceptual histories. following years of participant observation, in 2023 i started interviewing some of the movement's founding members, debbie griffith and jeff 23 from spiral tribe being among the first. presently, the research is still in its initial stages. it's worth noting that the term "teknival" was actually coined by debbie, one of the crew's founding members. in our interview, she explained that after their exile in france, they needed a name able to express their novel rave party concept. consequently, she merged the words "carnival", "tekno" and "festival" to create "teknival".[1] et voilàle teknival. figure 14. the flyer of the first teknival (1992). teknivals predominantly feature electronic music and are characterized by radical art in the mutoid style, independent sound systems and clandestine locations, often set amidst natural landscapes or within warehouse settings. these events are known for their extensive drug experimentation, free admission, lack of security or fences and a profound emphasis on both physical and mental liberation. techno vs tekno the use of the letter “k” in “tekno” primarily serves to distinguish the underground scene from the commercial one. tekno music is generally faster than techno and was initially identified as hardcore tekno, but over time it has diversified into various subgenres. for many ravers, tekno represents the sound of rebellion and revolution. one noteworthy aspect of the tekno scene is that the dj typically performs behind the crowd or remains hidden behind the wall of the sound system, in stark contrast to most other scenes where djs are on stage. this practice is rooted in the illegal nature of tekno events, where djs prefer to stay concealed and anonymous. it also conveys an important message: in the realm of tekno, what truly matters is the music and the sound systems. on the dance floor, all individuals are equal, and the dj is not idolized as in other genres. tekno becomes a form of musical devotion. figure 15. the front of stage for dj live performances and light controls in tranzit sound system stage at step evolution, czech republic. photo credit: giorgia gaia (2023). kaos from its inception, the teknival scene focused on challenging the conventional norms of the dance scene and worked towards the creation of ephemeral, chaotic realities fueled by idealism. it was because the ages had been so oppressive and so materialistic and so conformist, rave showed the pure chaos of the human experience. it was mind blowing. and that’s why the government cracked down on it because it was dangerous to see. suddenly everyone, black people, white people, rich and poor people, were together dancing under the same bloody sky in the same music.[2] in the tekno scene, dancing assumes a political dimension, as the ability to travel with tech gear and set up a party spontaneously in any location represents an assertion of independence. defending the human right to party became a means of reaffirming individual and collective freedom, effectively transforming hedonism into a form of activism. the entire tekno scene draws inspiration from radical anarchist concepts and the pursuit of authentic experiential freedom, often expressed through chaos. within this movement, the number 23 holds significant spiritual importance, symbolizing chaos. discordianism, for example, views 23 as the holy number associated with eris, the goddess of chaos. robert anton wilson also delves into the concept of the "23 enigma" or the "law of five" (wilson 1987: 198). in our interviews, debbie referred to 23 as "the cosmic joke that chaos is playing on us," while jeff23 mentioned the influence of raw’s writings. jeff23 also mentioned how psychic tv, with band leader genesis p-orridge, influenced the appearance of number 23 in the electronic music scene of the time.[3] in 1986, psychic tv decided in fact to attempt a mission: release 23 albums on the 23rd day of 23 consecutive months. however, the series was discontinued after 17 albums. figure 16. “principia discordia” cover (1970). a milestone documentary about this scene is world traveller adventures, released in 2006. of the 4 episodes, one is titled 23 minute warning, which includes interviews with the members of spiral tribe. video 2. an episode of the documentary series “world traveler adventures” (dentice and noi 1993). in this convergence of spiritual, rebellious and anarcho-chaotic philosophies, the everyday lives of ravers underwent a transformation towards a nomadic lifestyle. their existence evolved into a continuous and immersive odyssey, passionately embarking on a continuous and immersive journey towards envisioned cyberpunk and utopian landscapes. in this context, the tribal nomadic lifestyle embraced by ravers exemplified their ontological anarchy, aligning with the vision put forth by hakim bey (1991). the "tribe" coalesced around the shared sense of belonging to a specific sound system, forging a close-knit community that embarked on this immersive journey together. kilowatt the term "kilowatt"(kw) serves as a measure of the power required to operate a sound system and is used to indicate its potency. historically, the concept of the sound system can be traced back to 1950s kingston, jamaica, where it was born. these sound systems consisted of large speakers, generators, amplifiers and turntables, all loaded into the back of a van and transported to various neighborhood corners to provide the musical backdrop for street parties (henriques 2011). during this era, very few individuals could afford to purchase their own records or radios, so sound systems became the primary means through which people discovered and enjoyed new music. serving as a critical avenue for introducing new sounds to a broader audience, sound systems played a significant role in shaping emerging musical movements, as happened for the free tekno or teknival movement. in the present day, the free tekno movement has evolved, and its radicalism has waned compared to its earlier days. the nomadic lifestyle is no longer as central to the movement as it once was, but the sense of community creation remains a fundamental aspect of its identity. i have been collecting vinyls for years and we all decided to put all our vinyls in a library and to give up all money and put everything to go for the sound system, the trucks and our shared life. we were totally tribal. it was a proper community going on.[4] throughout the history of the tekno movement, numerous sound system crews or tribes have gathered under the motto "the only good system is a sound system". in recent years, teknivals have adopted a more competitive stance in terms of the amount of kilowatts (kw) each sound system possesses. this sometimes leads to the creation of massive walls of speakers, resulting in an excess of decibels and, occasionally, a lack of creativity. the shift towards a focus on technology over the power of radical art in the tekno movement raises significant implications for discussions about technology, ontological anarchy and teknivals. these implications are areas that i aim to explore in the course of future research. however, it's important to note that in its essence, teknival serves as a communal space of potentiality that encourages a complete experimental attitude. this attitude extends beyond music and art production and encompasses all aspects of social interaction. figure 17. a sound system wall at a teknival in albania. photo credit: giorgia gaia (2021). ketamine kilowatts are essential for producing music, and it is the music itself, along with its capacity to alter consciousness, that holds paramount importance in this context. music and asc have the unique ability to induce liminal trance states, rewiring human brains and facilitating profound transformations. the sound system is the healer. the music is the healer. the revolution really has to come from inside you. it’s the change of consciousness. it’s not to go out into the fields and take fuckload of bad drugs. there needs to be a place for the free parties today.[5] alterations of consciousness have indeed played a significant role in the history of teknivals, with the consumption of mind-altering substances being prevalent. in the early days of the movement, there was an idyllic and profoundly psychedelic atmosphere. however, in time the scene became increasingly saturated with a wide variety of drugs, including some considered "bad" or harmful (d’onofrio 2018). the pirate ethos of the movement embraced the flow of illegal goods from different parts of the world, serving as a vital conduit for the distribution of both beneficial and harmful substances. ravers from eastern europe, in particular, have mentioned that teknivals facilitated access to psychedelics and mind-altering substances that were otherwise challenging or impossible to find, such as lsd, dmt, mdma and, of course, ketamine. debbie shared that as early as 1991, substances that were not widely known began to be discussed and consumed at their parties. we were starting to hear rumours of this new drug called ketamine. obviously, we couldn’t wait to try it. when it eventually arrived, i think it was about july or august 1991 in england. it was from a lab in switzerland and it was fantastic. we absolutely loved it.[6] ketamine holds a central place in the tekno scene for two primary reasons. firstly, it was within this context that the substance was first extensively explored and distributed for hedonistic and psychedelic purposes, finding a highly receptive environment. secondly, it encapsulates the entire essence of the paradox associated with the use of substances with profound psychedelic potential for recreational purposes—the duality of altered states of consciousness. ketamine is “both a source of healing and harm, integration and disintegration” (jansen 2000). like many substances, it can be beneficial when used responsibly, but can become toxic when abused. unfortunately, at the turn of the new millennium, coinciding with the expansion of the teknival scene in most european countries, a significant proportion of the community suffered from ketamine, opioid or cocaine addiction. at the beginning of the millennium, teknival became a routine. during the weekends in france, italy and eastern europe, thousands of individuals gathered for week-long raves, whether in squats, warehouses or forests. bologna's livello 57, one of the scene's prominent community centers, drew 10 to 15,000 people, myself included. in 1996, harm reduction experiments began in italy, thanks to a collective called lab57. their primary focus was on drug-checking during large raves and parties and the promotion of europe's largest self-organized anti-prohibitionist street parades, which continued until 2006. the first street rave parade in bologna took place in 1997, in a collaborative effort of lab57 and mutoids. like the rest of the movement, lab57 had a political stance on harm reduction. they viewed party substances as a cultural phenomenon rather than a social problem, recognizing their active role in the ongoing process of defining drug consumption and safety within society. figure 18. an info point curated by lab57 during an illegal rave party (2013). illegal raves are now illegal the increasing illegality of raves and the challenges faced by countercultural movements are indeed pressing issues. many countries have taken stricter measures against unauthorized gatherings, particularly those involving a large number of participants. moreover, the advent of the internet and digital surveillance has raised concerns about censorship and control. countercultural movements that promote freedom of expression often find themselves at odds with governments seeking to maintain order and control over public spaces. the tekno scene has historically faced opposition from authorities. however, for many participants, this struggle between chaos and order is where the spiritual and activist significance lies. it represents a form of resistance against oppressive forces and a celebration of individual and collective freedom. as the tekno movement and other countercultures continue to navigate these challenges, they may also explore new ways to adapt, evolve and preserve their core values in the face of increasing restrictions and surveillance. figure 19. policemen against ravers in czechtek. photo credit: jan zátorský(2005). author biography giorgia gaia is an independent researcher, with ma degrees in cultural and social anthropology and in history of hermetic philosophy and related currents at the university of amsterdam. since her early twenties she has been involved in the underground scene of rave culture, as a dj and cultural producer. her academic research has focused on countercultures, esoteric communities, occultism and psychonautic. being herself continuously involved in the creation of alter(n)ate realities and magickal experimentations, since 2013 she is co-curator of ozora festival’s cultural area. in 2018 she founded occulture conference, a berlin based festival exploring occultism and esoteric arts. references bey, hakim. 1991. t.a.z.: the temporary autonomous zone, ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism. brooklyn: autonomedia. cooke, robin. 2001. “mutoid waste recycledelia and earthdream”. in freenrg: notes from the edge of the dance floor, ed. graham st john, 204–48. d’onofrio, tobia. 2018. rave new world: l’ultima controcultura. fano: agenziax. henriques, julian. 2011. sonic bodies: reggae sound systems, performance techniques, and ways of knowing. london: bloomsbury publishing. jansen, karl l. r. 2000. ketamine: dreams and realities. sarasota: maps. mckay, george. 1996. senseless acts of beauty: cultures of resistance since the sixties. london: bath press. reynolds, simon. 2013. generation ecstasy: into the world of techno and rave culture. new york: routledge. rush, joe. “berlin”. mutoid waste company. 10 august 2015. <https://cargocollective.com/mutoidwasteco/berlin>, (accessed 1 october 2023). st john, graham. 2009. technomad: global raving countercultures. london: equinox publishing. wilson, robert anton. 1987. cosmic trigger: final secret of the illuminati. pennsylvania: new falcon publications. filmography dentice, alberto and cesare noi. 1996. the mutoids invade us. galeazzo arcibaldo di romagna. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5x4oucsckfk> (accessed 1 october 2023). raclot, damien and krystof gillier. 2004. the spiral philosophy: 23 minute warning. uwe. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruofqthcrqw> (accessed 1 october 2023). notes [1] debbie griffith, interview with author (video call), 5 april 2023. [2] debbie griffith, interview with author (video call), 5 april 2023. [3] debbie griffith, interview with author (video call), 5 april 2023; and jeff23, interview with author (phone call), 23 march 2023. [4] jeff23, interview with author (phone call), 23 march 2023. [5] jeff23, interview with author (phone call), 23 march 2023. [6] debbie griffith, interview with author (video call), 5 april 2023. dancecult 9(1) 2017: guest editor’s introduction, masthead and table of contents women and electronic dance music culture guest editors rebekah farrugia and magdalena olszanowski volume 9 number 1 2017 executive editor graham st john (university of fribourg, ch) from the floor editors alice o’grady (university of leeds, uk) dave payling (staffordshire university, uk) graham st john (university of fribourg, ch) reviews editor ed montano (rmit university, au) foreign languages editor luis-manuel garcia (university of birmingham, uk) production editor botond vitos (university of fribourg, ch) operations director ed montano (rmit university, au) art director botond vitos (university of fribourg, ch) copyeditors luis-manuel garcia (university of birmingham, uk) jerome hansen (uk) katrina loughrey (au) kath o’donnell (au) magdalena olszanowski (concordia university, ca) production assistants paul jasen (carleton university, ca) garth sheridan (rmit university, au) dancecult journal of electronic dance music culture issue 9(1) 2017 issn 1947-5403 ©2017 dancecult published yearly at <http://dj.dancecult.net> international advisory board sean albiez (southampton solent university, uk), eliot bates (university of birmingham, uk), andy bennett (griffith university, au), mark j butler (northwestern university, us), anthony d’andrea (university of limerick, ie), rebekah farrugia (oakland university, us), kai fikentscher (de), luis-manuel garcia (university of birmingham, uk), françois gauthier (university of fribourg, ch), anna gavanas (institute for futures studies, se), ross harley (university of new south wales, au), tim lawrence (university of east london, uk), geert lovink (university of amsterdam, nl), alejandro l. madrid (university of illinois, chicago, us), paolo magaudda (university of padova, it), charity marsh (university of regina, ca), ed montano (rmit university, au), andrew murphie (university of new south wales, au), alice o’grady (university of leeds, united kingdom), christopher partridge (lancaster university, uk), anne petiau (itsrs / université paris 5, fr), hillegonda c rietveld (london south bank university, uk), geoff stahl (victoria university of wellington, nz), sonjah nadine stanley-niaah (university of west indies, jm), graham st john (university of fribourg, ch), jonathan sterne (mcgill university, ca), will straw (mcgill university, ca), rupert till (university of huddersfield, uk), tobias c. van veen (université de montréal, ca), michael veal (yale university, us), botond vitos (university of fribourg, ch) dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture is a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture (edmc). launched in 2009, as a platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on the shifting terrain of edmcs worldwide, dancecult houses research exploring the sites, technologies, sounds and cultures of electronic music in historical and contemporary perspectives. playing host to studies of emergent forms of electronic music production, performance, distribution, and reception, as a portal for cutting-edge research on the relation between bodies, technologies, and cyberspace, as a medium through which the cultural politics of dance is critically investigated, and as a venue for innovative multimedia projects, dancecult is the leading venue for research on edmc. cover: rucyl mills, harlem, 2015. photo by magdalena olszanowski http://dj.dancecult.net volume 9 number 1 2017 introduction to women and electronic dance music culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 01 rebekah farrugia and magdalena olszanowski feature articles delian modes: listening for delia derbyshire in histories of electronic dance music. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 09 frances morgan post-feminism’s “new sexual contract” and electronic dance music’s queered femme voices . . . . . . . 28 robin james forty-seven djs, four women: meritocracy, talent and postfeminist politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 tami gadir lick my legacy: are women-identified spaces still needed to nurture women-identified djs? . . . . . . . 73 maren hancock from the floor – online “why would i want to put my art in your museum if i have my own house?” an interview with rucyl magdalena olszanowski fear in the festival field: threat, apprehension and apathy kaitlyne a. motl like so many things i both know and don’t know lisa busby mapping a lineage of female event producers living in british columbia jennifer rebbetoy onwards and upwards: playing my way through the gender division donna bentley reviews techno studies: ästhetik und geschichte elektronischer tanzmusik (kim feser and matthias pasdzierny, eds.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .90 timor kaul hip-hop headphones: a scholar’s critical playlist (james b. peterson) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .93 james cox an introduction to music technology, second edition (dan hosken) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .96 martin k. koszolko low end theory: bass, bodies and the materiality of sonic experience (paul c. jasen) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .98 daniel schnee digital arts: an introduction to new media (cat hope and john ryan) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 toby young issn 1947-5403 ©2017 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 9(1): 1–8 issn 1947-5403 ©2017 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2017.09.01.00 introduction: women and electronic dance music culture rebekah farrugia and magdalena olszanowski oakland university (us) / concordia university (canada) rebekah farrugia is an associate professor of media studies at oakland university. her scholarship explores the politics and intersections of gender, community and place in contemporary music genres such as electronic dance music and hip-hop. she is the author of beyond the dance floor: female djs, technology, and electronic dance music culture. her current book project is tentatively titled women rapping revolution: hip hop and community building in twenty-first century detroit. <farrugia@oakland.edu> magdalena olszanowski is an artist, teacher in media arts at john abbott college and phd candidate in communication studies at concordia university. her work on gender, electronic music and sound and image technologies, with a particular focus on women’s expression as inflected by censorship, can be found in journals such as feminist media studies, visual communication quarterly and dancecult. she has participated in the edm scene in nearly every capacity over the last fifteen years. she is also currently working on microfemininewarfare, a documentary featuring women electronic music composers. <http://raisecain.net>. <magdalena.olszanowski@concordia.ca> this special edition of dancecult seeks to situate women at the center of the cultural production of electronic dance music culture (edmc) and to highlight their myriad contributions while acknowledging the intersectional difficulties they face daily. highlighting the contributions of women while interrogating the misogyny in electronic dance music has been foregrounded in recent time and shows no signs of slowing down. female-led collectives have been forming for years and are finally being taken seriously in public discourse and in popular press. the discourse, however, is tied together with its insistence of “a lack” of women involved, which this issue aims to problematize. while women are underrepresented in edmc and are not afforded the same opportunities as men, several of the pieces of this issue highlight the disparities that contribute to women’s marginalization rather than talking about marginalization wholesale. women’s marginalization has been brought up in the journal in the past and we hope to expand its somewhat limited scope. guest editors’ introduction http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2017.09.01.00 mailto:farrugia@oakland.edu http://raisecain.net mailto:magdalena.olszanowski@concordia.ca dancecult 9(1)2 in the introduction to a special issue of dancecult on production technologies and studio practice, ed montano and simon zagorski-thomas (2014) acknowledge that despite efforts and critical engagements “accounts of dj culture—despite differing temporal and geographic contexts—describe dj culture as primarily a ‘masculine’ pursuit”. other articles also face this dilemma with titles such as anna friz’s (2004) heard but unscene, women in electronic music, and most recently, where is she? finding the women in electronic music culture (abtan 2016), in which abtan discusses from her own experience what a lack of women within the milieu does for edmc. constantly focusing on a lack is an affront to the women who form the scene and have developed it throughout its history. there are many women who take on roles as agents, promoters, designers, vjs and other forms of labour that support edm. some do this while also being producers, performers and djs, as well as having other jobs. they are an operational necessity. tara rodgers, in her seminal pink noises (2010), also asks: “is there perhaps more women than people expect who are using electronic technologies, but they’re left out of history?” (223). she also notes the whiteness of edmc as a result of “a lot of music critics and the people writing histories” having been white men, and that “experimental music as it’s been constructed has been very white” (224). while women in/and edmc have been the theme of several articles of dancecult in the past (gregory 2009; farrugia 2010; madden 2011; reitsamer 2011; olszanowski 2012; bhardwa 2013; madden 2016) this is the first time a dedicated edition to the issue has emerged. contemporary edmc scholars are re-shifting the conversations and re-writing the limited histories to make room for more female role models, spaces and skill sharing practices to be established on a scale large enough to serve as inspiration for young girls to imagine being involved. we think 2017 is a particularly pertinent time for this issue for a number of reasons. edmc’s popularity continues to expand and while popular press outlets are beginning to question gender imbalances there continues to be a lack of attention paid to the impact of intersectional identity markers and cultural production that does not necessarily conform to popular genres and spaces. the popularity of edmc has exploded in the 2010s with large-scale festivals in the us and europe drawing hundreds of thousands of party-goers. edm is now big business. in 2016, the international music summit claimed that the global edm industry was worth $7.1 billion and the largest growing music genre (watson 2016). yet, a 2016 vice survey of 24 festivals that took place during the first half of 2016 found that the number of femaleidentifying djs and producers at these events ranged from 3.2% to 28.9% (friedlander 2016). these statistics reflect the reality that although the industry is growing the top income earners continue to be men. not one woman made forbes’ top 12 highest paid edm artist list in 2016 or in any previous year. such gender imbalances are no longer going unquestioned in the popular press. rather, writers and publications are beginning to advocate for change. they are questioning gender disparities, compiling relevant data, and profiling more female artists. while we welcome this recent focus on gender disparity, coverage continues to obfuscate intersectional identity markers and often homogenizes “women in edmc” as if farrugia and olszanowski | introduction to women and electronic dance music culture 3 “woman” is a singular category and as if all women face the same misogyny and experience it in only gendered ways. gender as inflected by racial discrimination is a prevalent issue as exemplified by maren hancock’s article on vancouver’s lick club, and rucyl’s interview with magdalena olszanowski, in which rucyl examines what it meant to see no one like her for many years. this issue, in part, serves as a starting point for more research that analyzes and interrogates this potential shift; many spaces are still inaccessible and still not written about and we recognize are also missing from this issue. if we are to do rigorous scholarship we must examine popular culture and also look at alternative venues, spaces and formats beyond the nightclub or the dj where electronic dance music resides. as such, rather than aiming to present a coherent scholarly narrative, we have compiled an issue with authors that span various contexts and geographic locations, pose manifold questions, and employ a range of methods, theories and perspectives in their analyses. the overwhelming majority of historical accounts and ethnographies—as well as popular press coverage—of edm scenes and participants have situated men at their center (butler 2006; kirn 2011; holmes 2012). in part, this is because although women have been present and active since the beginning, it wasn’t until the 1990s and 2000s that it became more common for women to be involved in edmc as djs, producers, event planners and booking agents. angela mcrobbie was one of the first scholars to theorize young women’s relationships to rave culture and to question their marginalization in edmc. in postmodernism and popular culture (1994: 168), mcrobbie notes the possibilities rave culture offered young women because of the alternative, strong subjectivities that emerged from its collective meanings; and yet, she also observed that girls appeared “to be less involved in the cultural production of rave, from the flyers, to the events, to the djing, than their male counterparts”. building on mcrobbie’s work, maria pini’s ethnography club cultures and female subjectivity: the move from home to house (2001) concludes that participation in dance culture has much to offer women with respect to how they negotiate their femininity and the opportunities for gender role transgression both on and off the dance floor—from their adoption of androgynous clothing, to their partaking in drug culture and comfort level with attending all night events alone. by the mid to late 1990s, more women were engaging in the cultural production roles that mcrobbie noted they were absent from in rave’s early years. subsequently, corporations sought to capitalize on what they perceived to be the latest trend. advertisers employed models and actors to mimick djing in an effort to sell products and popular press sources like playboy fetishized both women and edm technology. futuremusic, a music technology production magazine, repeatedly has had women’s body parts co-joined with gear and models in bikinis holding equipment on their covers. concurrently, academic work began to focus more directly on women engaged with edmc practices such as djing and producing (farrugia 2004; farrugia & swiss 2008; rodgers 2010; farrugia 2012; olszanowski 2012; rodgers 2010; gadir 2016). of concern have been the potential challenges that women may experience in music scenes and communities because of their sex and gender where dancecult 9(1)4 the taken-for-granted notion is that knowledgeable men produce the culture/industry that less informed women may participate in. recently, even the heretofore taken for granted notion of the dance floor as a feminized space where women are welcome has been called into question. christabel stirling (2016) argues that it is not uncommon in some london dance music scenes, such as dubstep, for women to be confronted with a male-dominated and even misogynistic environment on the dance floor or else be excluded from it altogether. this issue expands the aforementioned work to feature critically engaged research that problematizes the popular discourse on women and edm. by doing so, it provides emerging analyses that expand “women and electronic music” as a complex and often incoherent landscape and not a homogenous essentialist category. we position the complexity and contradictions of doing an issue focused on women and edmc as productive and generative. what is particular to a woman’s subjectivity, identity and experience in the scene? how are spaces for and by women produced and maintained? how do we enact inclusionary politics alongside the precarious position and emotional labour of participation? how can we account for and present women’s experiences without an obfuscation of each of their specificities? how can the seemingly problematic foregrounding of gender as a boundary marker be useful? we realize that our introduction struggles and straddles an entangled tension. on one hand we refuse to yield to the “lack of women in edmc” rhetoric to instead visibilize the women involved, yet on the other we understand that analyses of the marginalized position of women are vital. what we want is to be careful in taking up “woman” as an unquestioned category. tara rodgers in pink noises (2010) also stumbles upon this dilemma, suggesting that she frames her project with the unstable terms men and women, and does so because as the articles in this issue also illustrate: “these social categories significantly affect the organization of electronic music histories and the distribution of resources in related material realms” (4). we end with a call-to-action for more deliberate and entangled research on the intersection of women and electronic dance music, both searching out new methods of research and new research that focuses on disability, age and race. we cannot simply think of women and electronic dance music without being intersectional or we fall back into the type of marginalizing discourse that popular press about women in edmc is currently faced with. we realize that the issue has several spots missing—a journal issue could never be fully comprehensive. one intersectional identity not addressed here is the experience of women in edmc with disabilities. over the past decade, disability studies has gained traction as a subject of inquiry in musicology and popular music studies. research has begun to explore the complex and varied stories that music has to tell about disability (lerner and straus 2006) and to draw attention to the ways in which musical works are products of cultural attitudes that view persons with disabilities as other (mckay 2009). in the introduction to a special issue of popular music on disability, mckay noted that emerging work was addressing the intersection of “disabled musical forms and their related (sub)cultural practices (early jazz, punk rock)” (2009: 3). it was our hope that this issue farrugia and olszanowski | introduction to women and electronic dance music culture 5 of dancecult would bring electronic dance music into this conversation, and while it was unable to do so, we note the consideration of how much work needs to be done within our discipline and welcome readers to do so! we welcome all feedback and comments on the issue. please get in touch. summary of contents frances morgan’s “delian modes: listening for delia derbyshire in histories of electronic dance music” article weaves a feminist media analysis of how different forms of media have produced the legacy of delia derbyshire, the composter, and delia derbyshire the persona as created by narratives of (mostly) men within the uk electronic music milieu. she asks “why the authors of these narratives have been eager to claim derbyshire as a pioneer in a form with which she had no personal involvement, and consider the basis of these claims by drawing on selected works by the composer”? these narratives are tantamount to erasing derbyshire and re-writing her history within their own power structures. morgan challenges these narratives, and is much more aligned with kara blake’s documentary the delian mode which accepts, in its content and presentation, the little derbyshire wanted known about her reclusive life. robin james argues that resilient femininity is the new norm in early 21st century western liberal democracies. in the context of pop music, women artists’ performance of unrestrained, unrehearsed vocalizations fulfill an expectation and expression of rebellious, individualistic agency. in “‘post-feminism’s ‘new sexual contract’ and edmc’s queered femme voices”, james considers three ways white women and femme musicians across edmc use vocal and authorial voices to reimagine post-feminist practices of self-ownership and property-in-person in an effort to create alternative femininities. the essay considers how brooklyn “gender-problematizing goth dance band” bottoms, berlin edm collective decon/recon and queer top 40 dancepop singer-songwriter sia each develop musical voices that are alternatives to post-feminist narratives of voice-as-agency. despite government institutions’ official efforts to ensure equal male and female representation as prescribed by “the gender equality act”, women djs continue to be underrepresented at high profile edmc events in norway. tami gadir investigates this ongoing problem in her essay “forty-seven djs, four women: meritocracy, talent and postfeminist politics”. drawing on focus group research with musikkfest participants she argues that many participants continue to believe in a meritocratic industry driven by “hard work” that supersedes identity categories. the genderedness of “talent” and romantic conceptions of dj work complicate the situation, as does norway’s contemporary “postfeminist”, neoliberal climate. gadir concludes that as a result, men’s domination in the realms of djing, production and event promotion continue to go unquestioned and gender barriers remain unacknowledged. consequently, both utopian and “postfeminist” perspectives of dance music cultures ultimately avoid and deny the hostility and violence that takes place because of gender—behind dj booths, on dance floors and in-between gigs. dancecult 9(1)6 in “lick my legacy: are women-identified spaces still needed to nurture womenidentified djs?”, maren hancock takes a close look at the impact of lick club, a lesbian bar in vancouver, bc, that operated from 2003–11 and employed predominantly female djs. hancock herself had a long-running and intimate relationship with lick as a dj and promoter for the club from 2003 to 2009 and credits it with propelling her dj career. in addition to her own experiences, the arguments made here also draw on interviews hancock conducted with key players in lick’s local dj network as well as quantitative survey data collected from female djs across canada. based on her research findings, hancock argues that although female djs are becoming more common in canadian nightclubs and festivals, networks comprised of queer, female and non-binary people are still of significant importance to the careers of professional female and non-binary djs. moreover, the presence of a physical space such as the lick club that provides access to mentors, dj equipment and performance opportunities can be integral to developing professional female and nonbinary djs who are generally shut out of dj culture’s predominantly male networks. this issue’s from the floor section consists of five articles from magdalena olszanowski, kaitlyne a. motl, lisa busby, jennifer rebbetoy and donna bentley that span conversations with artists, reflections on time “in the field” and relationships with event planners. magdalena olszanowski interviews rucyl mills, an electronic music composer and multiformat artist about her history, her road to becoming an artist, staying an artist without compromise, the importance of community and other women, not giving up, being taken seriously as a female artist, the negotiations that artists have to make with others, themselves and their equipment, and how she managed to flip her father’s assertion for her benefit, and follow her own motto: “why would i want to put my art in your museum if i have my own house?” in “fear in the festival field: threat, apprehension and apathy”, kaitlyne a. motl provides a first-hand account on the necessity of re-working ethics guidelines for university research. her violent gendered experience points to the unequivocal need for ethics to account for the vulnerabilities of researchers, especially those who are doing field work and are already marginalized. she also provides some pointers on how to follow up with problems that occur. artist and lecturer in music at goldsmiths, lisa busby’s “like so many things i both know and don’t know” takes us on a loopy journey of her process detailing two projects— her own i begin alone in this action: a series of sounding zones and her collaboration as part of the nomadic female dj troupe. the reflection’s non-linear form works to highlight the non-linear ways of her music making, performance and collaborative ethos. the piece weaves interviews, conversations, personal reflection, journaling and a philosophical critical analysis to expose the complexity of making and performing electronic music through a feminist lens that aims to resist power, hegemonic ideals and definitions within the field. these modes of analysis are also questioned by busby as they are being employed, such as the position of “the feminine” and improvisation within edmc. she asks questions—both in theory and practice—and the answers follow, but not in the way we expect; they find farrugia and olszanowski | introduction to women and electronic dance music culture 7 their ways into other sections or transmute into other questions. as a result, the reader is left with several points of feminist action to pursue within their own networks. jennifer rebbetoy details the stories of six event producers—corrine bundschuh, sara spicer, liz thomson, andrea graham, zan comerford and ruhamah buchanan—in “mapping a lineage of female event producers living in british columbia”. the piece weaves their various obstacles and challenges as women in the field with a focus on all they have been able to accomplish. it is an inspirational narrative that puts women center stage within edmc and challenges notions of women’s invisibility. donna bentley, a self-proclaimed djing hobbyist, provides a first-hand account of her history with getting into djing and why she’s not pursued the craft to be, as she points out, “a big name dj”. unsurprisingly, she details the kind of “unspoken barriers” in place for women, such as the commonplace hetero and cis-normative phrases, “you must be the djs girlfriend” and ignored while setting up to play, or the ways that female djs are expected to pay their dues and play for free more than men while others make money from their production. however, without having so much at stake of “making it” in the scene, she has been able to find and nurture a community of support with other women in her hometown. acknowledgements we would like to thank all those who helped bring this issue to fruition including all of the contributors, anonymous reviewers, journal editor graham st john and those that keep challenging our scene. references abtan, freida. 2016. “where is she? finding the women in electronic music culture”. contemporary music review 35 (1): 53–60. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1176764> bhardwa, bina. 2013. “alone, asian and female: the unspoken challenges of conducting fieldwork in dance settings”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 5 (1): 39–60. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.01.03> butler, mark j. 2006. unlocking the groove : rhythm, meter, and musical design in electronic dance music. bloomington: indiana university press. farrugia, rebekah. 2004. “sisterdjs in the house: electronic/dance music and women-centered spaces on the net”. women’s studies in communication 27 (2): 236–62. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2004.10162474> ——— 2010. “‘let’s have at it!’: conversations with edm producers kate simko and dj denise”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1 (2): 87–93. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.06> ——— 2012. beyond the dance floor: female djs, technology and electronic dance music culture. bristol, uk: intellect. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1176764 http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.01.03 http://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2004.10162474 http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2010.01.02.06 dancecult 9(1)8 farrugia, rebekah and thomas swiss. 2008. “producing producers: women talk about electronic/ dance music”. current musicology 86: 79–100. <http://dx.doi.org/10.7916/d88914gx> friedlander, emilie. 2016. “we crunched the numbers and electronic music festivals still have a gender problem”. vice, 14 july: <https://thump.vice.com/en_us/article/qkazzq/2016electronic-music-festivals-gender-breakdown> (accessed 6 august 2017). friz, anna. 2004. “heard but unscene, women in electronic music”. dpi: studio xx electronic review 5. <http://dpi.studioxx.org/index.php?id=37/> (accessed 1 may 2012). gadir, tami. 2016. “resistance or reiteration: rethinking gender in dj cultures”. contemporary music review 35 (1): 115–29. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1176767>. gregory, julie. 2009. “too young to drink, too old to dance: the influences of age and gender on (non) rave participation”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1 (1): 65–80. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.04> holmes, thom. 2012. electronic and experimental music. new york: routledge. kirn, peter. 2011. the evolution of electronic dance music. montclair, nj: backbeat books. lerner, neil and joseph straus. 2006. sounding off: theorizing disability in music. new york: routledge. madden, dave. 2011. “cross-dressing to backbeats: the status of the electroclash producer and the politics of electronic music”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 4 (2): 27–47. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.02.02> ——— 2016. “dj mini and montreal’s vulgar dance music”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 8 (1): 1–20. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2016.08.01.02> mckay, george. 2009. “introduction: special issue on popular music and disability”. popular music 28 (3): 293–5. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143009990079> mcrobbie, angela. 1994. postmodernism and popular culture. new york: routledge. montano, ed and simon zagorski-thomas. 2014. “production technologies and studio practice in electronic dance music culture”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 6 (1): 1–7. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.01.00> olszanowski, magdalena. 2012. “what to ask women composers: feminist fieldwork in electronic dance music”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 4 (2): 3–26. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.02.01> reitsamer, rosa. 2011. “the diy careers of techno and drum ‘n’ bass djs in vienna”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 3 (1): 28–43. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.02d> rodgers, tara. 2010. pink noises: women on electronic music and sound. durham, nc: duke university press. stirling, christabel. 2016. “‘beyond the dance floor’? gendered publics and creative practices in electronic dance music”. contemporary music review 35 (1): 30–49. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1176772> watson, kevin. 2016. “international music summit business report: an annual study of the electronic music industry”. <http://www.internationalmusicsummit.com/wp-content/ uploads/2016/05/ims-business-report-2016.pdf> (accessed 12 september 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.7916/d88914gx https://thump.vice.com/en_us/article/qkazzq/2016-electronic-music-festivals-gender-breakdown https://thump.vice.com/en_us/article/qkazzq/2016-electronic-music-festivals-gender-breakdown http://dpi.studioxx.org/index.php?id=37/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1176767 http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.04 https://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/dancecult/article/view/271/232 http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2016.08.01.02 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143009990079 http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.01.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.02.01 http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.02d http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1176772 http://www.internationalmusicsummit.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ims-business-report-2016.pdf http://www.internationalmusicsummit.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ims-business-report-2016.pdf genre in practice: categories, metadata and music-making in psytrance culture dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 12(1): 22–47 issn 1947-5403 ©2020 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.09 genre in practice: categories, metadata and music-making in psytrance culture christopher charles university of bristol (uk) abstract digital technology has changed the way in which genre terms are used in today’s musical cultures. web 2.0 services have given musicians greater control over how their music is categorised than in previous eras, and the tagging systems they contain have created a non-hierarchical environment in which musical genres, descriptive terms, and a wide range of other metadata can be deployed in combination, allowing musicians to describe their musical output with greater subtlety than before. this article looks at these changes in the context of psyculture, an international edm culture characterised by a wide vocabulary of stylistic terms, highlighting the significance of these changes for modern-day music careers. profiles are given of two artists, and their use of genre on social media platforms is outlined. the article focuses on two genres which have thus far been peripheral to the literature on psyculture, forest psytrance and psydub. it also touches on related genres and some novel concepts employed by participants (”morning forest” and ”tundra”). keywords: psyculture; genre; internet; forest psytrance; psydub christopher charles is a musician and researcher from bristol, uk. his recent phd thesis (2019) looked at the careers of psychedelic musicians in bristol with chapters on event promotion, digital music distribution, and online learning. he produces and performs psydub music under the name geoglyph, and forest psytrance under the name espertine. email: <chrischarles89@yahoo.co.uk>. feature article mailto:chrischarles89@yahoo.co.uk charles | genre in practice: categories, metadata and music-making in psytrance culture 23 introduction the internet has brought about important changes to the nature and function of genre in today’s musical cultures. social media platforms allow users to communicate ideas about musical categories directly to others without the use of intermediaries; the tagging systems they contain encourage a combinatorial categorisation practice in which genre terms are employed alongside other organisational concepts in a non-hierarchal manner. however, the implications of these developments for musical participation and for the nature of musical communities have yet to be fully explored. the present paper aims to contribute to this discussion by offering a close study of genre in the careers of two edm producers, demonstrating how genre is used to position their output within a wider musical field. the backdrop to this article is psychedelic trance culture (psyculture), a global edm culture which holds within it a diverse spectrum of musical styles.1 each genre within psyculture has its own set of musicians, event crews and record labels, and yet all are part of a relatively unified culture held together by a yearly calendar of large, multi-genre festivals. participants use genre concepts as a means of positioning themselves within the scene, when producing music, running a record label, organizing an event or planning a dj set. online, genre terms are deployed as a means of drawing participants together, advertising events and releases and organising digital music items. the article draws partly on ethnographic phd research conducted in the city of bristol, uk, between 2014 and 2018 (charles 2019). bristol has a vibrant local pedm scene representing a large portion of the genre spectrum. here, i attended numerous events and interviewed producers, djs and event promoters from a range of musical styles. a field diary and interview transcripts contributed to my understanding of local psyculture, whilst social media allowed me to connect with the wider global scene. in ethnomusicological fashion, i also learned how to make psychedelic music of my own, focusing on dark psytrance and psychedelic dub. two local musicians, krosis and globular, acted as my primary informants in this endeavour. the second half of the article looks at these artists, beginning with a description of their music and continuing with an analysis of how genre is used within their online distribution strategies. genre as words for the purposes of the following discussion, it is useful to momentarily detach genre terminology from the wider set of concepts and practices which constitute a musical system. genre terms are often a focus of debate in a music scene, especially where underground or diy music-making is concerned. more widely, they are a form of cultural knowledge and their deployment is a key aspect of musical participation beyond the maintaining of musical boundaries. early popular music scholarship depicted genre as a tool used for organising musical commerce. frith, for example, describes industry genre categories as a means of “organizing dancecult 12(1)24 the sales process”: “genre is a way of defining music in its market or, alternatively, the market in its music” (1996: 75, 76). for record companies, radio stations and record stores, genre categories have been a means of identifying, reaching and, where necessary, creating an ideal consumer. this has often involved the appropriation of terms already associated with niche or marginalised musical practices. negus observes that “terms such as rock’n’roll, salsa, funk and jazz were drawn from their vernacular use within particular cultural traditions and then used by the music industry as a way of organizing catalogues” (1999: 162). hierarchies of power within music industries have thus been reflected in hierarchies of power with regards to musical labelling. more recent writing has suggested that genre terms are not just a way of organising music sales, but also a way of shaping cultural experience. holt states that “a genre category can only be established if the music has a name. . . . the name becomes a point of reference and enables certain forms of communication, control, and specialization into markets, canons, and discourses” (2007: 3). similarly, horner argues that, to name a set of phenomena ‘rock music’ is to contribute to our sense of it and our experience of it. it gives us a sense of its relation to other phenomena (non-music, other types of music) and the ways in which we should think about, experience and respond to it (1999: 21). this reflects a general shift towards viewing genre not as separate from music-making but rather as integral to it. stokes argues that, when people use words to describe, organize or manipulate musical cognition, those words might be considered adjuncts of musical discourse, part of the process by which musical experience is recognized and organized, and not in some sense alien to it or parasitic upon it (2003: 230). today’s music cultures are characterised by stylistic diversity and the use of a wide vocabulary of genre terms. the ability to recognise, distinguish and wield genre concepts is an important component of participation and necessary for creative involvement. some writers have taken a bourdieuian approach linking competence in identifying musical genres with the acquisition of “cultural capital”.2 mcleod explicitly makes this point with reference to edm cultures. the process of naming new subgenres within electronic/dance music communities is not only directly related to the rapidly evolving nature of the music itself. it is also a function of the marketing strategies of record companies, accelerated consumer culture, and the appropriation of the musics of largely non-white, lower-class people by middleand upper-middle-class whites in the united states and great britain. further, the naming process acts as a gate-keeping mechanism that generates a high amount of cultural capital needed to enter electronic/dance communities (mcleod 2001: 60). charles | genre in practice: categories, metadata and music-making in psytrance culture 25 this approach is useful in highlighting the centrality of cultural knowledge in the shaping of musical communities. however, it is not necessarily representative of the motives behind the creation and sharing of new genre concepts in contemporary music scenes. certainly, these may have exclusive qualities and may contribute to the formation of insular cultural groupings. on the other hand, genre concepts also have formative properties, allowing participants to make connections and expand musical networks. musicians certainly have little incentive to limit genre networks, as the success of their careers depend on having as many listeners as possible. in order to better understand genre categories as an aspect of musical discourse without falling back on insider/outsider dichotomies which characterised subcultural studies and later bourdieu-influenced writing, it is useful to treat genre terms as resources on which participants draw as they engage with a music scene. these are components of the cultural “tool kit” (after ann swidler) used to create meaningful forms of musical and social experience, and they are continually tested and re-tested by participants through their strategic engagements with a music scene.3 this approach requires us to assume that “genres are not static assemblages of empirically verifiable musical characteristics” (brackett 2015: 190), but rather complex, shifting entities. scene members engage with these actively, bringing their own ideas as to what a term means and where the limits of a genre’s musical network lie. a key issue here is the changing levels of influence over genre terms held by musicians themselves. whereas the major music distributors of the 20th century attempted, with limited success, to control genre in order to create a regulated environment for the sale of music, other kinds of musical/social network structures have allowed musicians and fans greater ability to decide how music is classified. underground music scenes have often possessed their own distribution channels such as zines, pirate radio stations and websites, allowing musicians and fans greater control over genre concepts.4 more recently, the internet has allowed scene members to create their own channels for interacting directly with each other, from obscure genre-specific forums to vast social networking sites where musicians feel able to “exercise full control over their careers, gaining independence and empowerment through do-it-yourself methods” (suhr 2012: 1). as internet-mediated diy musicianship has moved to the fore as a normative way of enacting a music career, musicians have become increasingly able to wield genre terms themselves, using them to organise cultural material and communicate musical arguments directly to listeners. genre and the internet when the first internet music distribution services (cdnow, amazon) emerged in the mid-1990s, decisions about musical genre were made by the individual or group responsible for managing a given website: the webmaster. like traditional record store owners, webmasters primarily used genre as a tool for the sale of musical product, although their dancecult 12(1)26 actual knowledge of genre was limited. surveying the music websites of the late-1990s, fabbri states that webmasters “seem to agree that certain kinds or types of music are broadly acknowledged, though they are probably much less interested in understanding how this knowledge is organized” (1999: 10). there was little room for musicians, or even other intermediaries such as record labels, to make decisions about how music was classified. the subsequent emergence of web 2.0 placed the focus of attention on the user and the sharing of user-generated content.5 within this paradigm, it became common for the user of a website to be responsible for classification of information, rather than the webmaster. this was facilitated by the emergence of the “tag”, a piece of information appended to a digital item in order to classify it and to help users find similar content. early internet music platforms such as myspace gave musicians the ability apply genres to their own music in the form of tags. by 2007, musicians on myspace could choose up to three genres from a selection of 122 categories (silver et al. 2016: 7), allowing them to describe their musical output with some degree of subtlety. this is a top-down tagging system, meaning that the tags defined by the creators of the website, and there are a finite set which can be used. later, towards 2007-2008, services such as soundcloud and bandcamp gave users the ability to create their own classifications. this is a bottom-up tagging system, meaning that tags are created by users and there is no limit to the number or variety of terms which can be used. this system may also be referred to as a “folksonomy”, highlighting the informal, collective means by which tags are generated.6 not all of today’s services fall into this category—indeed, many maintain a top-down system, which has its own advantages including the reduction of redundant or duplicate tags (e.g. “rock & roll” and “rock ‘n’ roll”). however, such systems are slow to catch up with emerging musical terminology. gaffney and rafferty suggest that “folksonomies, with their adaptability, can better account for this rapidly changing vocabulary than a controlled vocabulary” (2009: 376). genre is not the only principle used to organise music digitally, but rather is one among several types of metadata associated with music files. other examples include track title, album title, artist name, date of release and artwork. these metadata allow for multiple ways of searching through a collection of music by drawing similarities between items and creating connections between pieces of data held in different locations. different people will have different criteria in their use of metadata and will bring different forms of cultural knowledge to bear on the process of organising music. metadata are thus “entangled within the creative inclinations and existent knowledge practices” of users (audette-longo 2016: 522). when given free-reign to create their own tags, internet users employ a range of terms that they find suitable for describing their music. these often include a mixture of genre concepts and other types of metadata. figure 1 shows the list of tags chosen by the psychedelic dub producer globular for the release of his album holobiont (2016) on bandcamp. charles | genre in practice: categories, metadata and music-making in psytrance culture 27 figure 1. the bandcamp tags used by globular for his album holobiont (2016). this list contains several different kinds of information, including genre terms, geographic locations and the name of the artist and album. the genre terms vary in terms of the range of musical activity that they encompass, including broad categories (electronic, downtempo) and narrower ones pertaining specifically to psychedelic music (psydub, psybient). however, there is no indication of hierarchy here, nor that certain styles are embedded within others. the tags are merely strings of letters used to draw comparisons between files in its database, and they perform their linking function without reference to the meanings of the words in question. looking at lastfm, a user-made radio station streaming platform, sordo et al. observe that “users browse a—albeit very rich—flat list of terms” (2013: 347, emphasis in original). the flat nature of bottom-up tagging systems gives users a great deal of scope for creativity and the ability to deploy organisational ideas that do not neatly align with conventional genre categories. these may be part of a musical culture’s wider vocabulary for music. in psytrance culture, for example, there are certain frequently-used terms which are not understood as freestanding genre categories, but are nonetheless used to describe and to organise music. examples include “tribal”, “uplifting” and “old-school”, which do not appear on their own but always appear in conjunction with more well-defined musical terms. others, such as “morning” and “night” (referring to psytrance music suitable for particular times of day) have more precise stylistic implications, but they are nonetheless modifiers rather than freestanding genre concepts. other concepts are used in tagging that are not understood as genres at all, but rather as descriptions of the sonic or affective qualities of a particular piece of music. normative examples in psyculture include “glitchy”, “funky”, “atmospheric” and “euphoric”. classification is not their primary function, and they are not normally understood as genres dancecult 12(1)28 even where they pertain to generic terminology (e.g. glitch or funk). however, like genre terms, they can be used to draw attention to similarities between different pieces of music and may therefore act in an organisational as well as descriptive capacity. in today’s tagging systems it is not only the meanings of individual tags, but also their meaning when used in combination, that contributes to their semiotic properties. certain genres make sense only when used alongside stronger musical concepts: for example, “instrumental” and “lo-fi”, which may be applied to instances of rock or hip-hop music. as noted earlier, this problematises the notion of subgenre and hierarchical genre structures in general. borrowing from slobin’s (1993) idea of “interculture”, these terms might be thought of as intergenres which cut across musical systems.7 this is not to say that subgenre is no longer used as a categorical principle, nor that hierarchical structures cannot emerge within tag systems. indeed, subgenre remains an important organisational force within many musical cultures, and tag systems can demonstrate hierarchical properties, as suggested by silver et al. (2016). rather, hierarchies emerge within tag systems through the act of labelling musical material, and they are maintained by participants according to their own understanding of the real-world relationships between musical practices. a term which must be briefly addressed here is “metagenre”. shuker defines metagenres as “loose amalgams of various styles (e.g. alternative rock, world music)”, contrasting these with “actual” genres, which “arguably exist in a purer, more easily understood and specified form (e.g. disco)” (2005: 122). the term has appeared in the literature on psytrance: for example, lindop notes that psytrance has qualities consistent with shuker’s “metagenre” in that it is used as an overarching category for a wide range of psychedelic edm styles (2010: 117-18). although useful in highlighting the relative specificity of different genre terms, this idea is not in common use within today’s musical cultures, and it does not help us understand how participants themselves distinguish between different types of musical categories. indeed, the prefix “meta-” should point to a higher level of organisation altogether. genre itself is already a meta-category, as are style, subgenre, tempo and various culture-specific principles which are used to organise musical material. for the purposes of the present discussion, it is therefore better to reserve the “meta-” prefix for this higher level of taxonomic behaviour. case studies: krosis and globular the following sections look at the music of two pedm producers in bristol, krosis and globular. here, the artist is taken as the unit of analysis, allowing for an exploration of the range of generic concepts which they use and the means by which they position their output within the pedm genre spectrum. each profile will begin by looking at a selection of genres with which these musicians are associated, before moving on to analysis of how tags are used to describe their music online. as noted earlier, psyculture is a vast musical field encompassing “a shifting sonic quilt of genre influences as well as a diversity of national/regional populations and scenes in which recognisable sounds have emerged” (st john 2010: 1). an exhaustive list of pedm genres cannot be provided here, nor is there space for a musicological history of psytrance.8 charles | genre in practice: categories, metadata and music-making in psytrance culture 29 however it is necessary to establish some musical details in order to contextualise the genres discussed in the following sections. briefly, psytrance itself is a four-to-the floor edm style focusing on “trippy” synthesizer sounds: highly modulated, unusual sounds designed to augment a psychedelic experience. rhythmically it is distinguished by a sixteenth-note rhythm in the kick and bass parts, overlaid with a complex layer of synthetic leads and abstract sound effects which are usually generated using various forms of fm synthesis. full-on and progressive psytrance are the most popular kinds of psytrance and are often the musical focus of pedm events (lindop 2010). these are relatively melodic genres with a tempo of 135-145 bpm and a bright, digital-sounding production aesthetic. beyond this, the wider field of pedm genres is conceived by participants in terms of a tempo spectrum. at one end are slow genres which are based on non-trance musical styles, including psybient (ambient music), psydub (dub reggae) and psybreaks (breakbeats); in the middle are trance-based genres such as full-on psytrance, progressive psytrance, and goa trance; at the far end are very fast, intense genres meant for performance at night, including dark psytrance, forest, hi-tech and psycore, the latter reaching tempi upwards of 190 bpm. large-scale psychedelic events such as festivals are discursively structured around this spectrum, with faster genres being played at night and slower ones during the day, an ideal format which is referred to as a “full-spectrum” event. this scheme is not always followed in practice, however, with differing tastes and the practicalities of event organisation giving rise to other ways of structuring an event. in addition, many event crews and labels specialise in a particular genre or portion of the spectrum. psyculture thus has “many internal differences and micro-taste cultures rapidly forming, merging or falling away” (st john 2010: 7). having highlighted the complex relationship between terminology and practice, the genre definitions given in the following sections may seem rather static. these must be understood as the researcher’s own interpretation of the common meanings of pedm genre concepts based on several years of listening to, performing, and producing such music. they are by no means definitive and are subject to change as psyculture develops. krosis: forest psytrance, morning forest and tundra krosis is a bristol producer who works in several different genres of psytrance, with a focus on the darker styles and sounds. at the time of writing he has three musical projects: krosis, which is dedicated to the genres dark, full-on night (or night-time) and forest psytrance; final form, which is for faster hi-tech psytrance; and murk squad, an experimental collaboration combining psytrance with hip-hop. although they overlap stylistically in some ways, these projects represent separate creative endeavours on the part of the producer and require him to engage with different stylistic strands within psyculture. in an ideal psytrance party, lower-tempo melodic music is played during the day and faster, more abstract music is played at night. two common terms used to describe the latter in the uk are night (or night-time) and dark psytrance (darkpsy). these are relatively dancecult 12(1)30 similar genre concepts and are often used interchangeably, although closer examination reveals distinct usage. night-time is related to full-on psytrance and retains some of its melodic characteristics; its production aesthetic is similarly clean and digital-sounding. darkpsy, by contrast, is understood as a separate genre altogether. its production aesthetic is murky and aggressive, with shredding buzzsaw-sounding fm leads and horror-themed atmospheric sounds.9 the all-night performances of dj goa gil, who helped to establish darkpsy stylistically in the late 1990s and early 2000s, have infused the genre with occult or ritual connotations.10 there is no precise cutoff point between night-time and darkpsy— many tracks could fall into either category and both might be applied simultaneously to a musical item. forest psytrance, the focus of the current section, is a more specific category than either night-time or darkpsy and might be considered a subset of one or both genres. the name refers to an ideal performance location—an outdoor party in a wooded area—as well as an imaginary space described by the musical. the album tumult (2005) by swedish duo derango is often cited by fans as the genre’s point of origin, although the term has a longer history, notably in finland (aittoniemi 2012). today forest psytrance is a largely european phenomenon. noted producers in the current scene include muscaria (austria), dohm (lithuania), goch (macedonia) and fafazz (france). forest’s tempo range is very narrow, rarely straying outside of 148-150 bpm. the genre is characterised by organic sounds which contrast with the technical sounds of most psytrance. forest tracks tend to burble, squawk and chirp rather than buzz, bleep or glitch. these sounds are not normally acoustic in origin but rather generated using software synthesis. in an extended article on dark psytrance genres, argentinian darkpsy duo megalopsy explain this aesthetic: forest is oozing, organic music that crinkles and crackles, and crunches all the way thru. the name says it all, it’s really all about using the music to create an atmospheric feeling, almost like being swallowed by the forest itself, showing you the dark and bright aspects of nature, nature as a force itself, sometimes you don’t need to put birds singing, sometimes you can make a synth ‘become’ a bird. there are a lot of ‘becomings’ in forest music; synths are turned into leaves, branches, water, etc (megalopsy 2013). in addition to these organic leads and fx, forest is characterised by atmospheric sound effects which are achieved through the use of extensive reverb and delay. the intended effect is that of being lost in a deep, dark woodland, surrounded by unusual creatures. these themes are further explored through track titles, album artwork and event decorations, which often evoke foliage or mythological creatures (fig. 1). trolls, goblins and ents are especially popular. in this respect, forest also has several commonalities with black metal, a fast, highly distorted form of heavy metal with pagan or satanic themes, which also draws on northern-european mythology and nature imagery.11 many forest artists, including krosis, have a history as fans and performers of black metal. charles | genre in practice: categories, metadata and music-making in psytrance culture 31 figure 2. the front cover of under the moss vol. 3, a compilation of lithuanian forest psytrance. artwork by forest freaks, reproduced under a creative commons license (cc by-nc-nd 3.0). forest shares uncertain boundaries with darkpsy. both might be considered subgenres of psytrance but whether one is further embedded within the other is unclear. the following is a description of forest given by dj basilisk, who runs a free psytrance distribution service called ektoplazm: murky, organic, and complex. an extension of darkpsy but different in some way that is sometimes hard to describe. forest music has a particular vibe that you will learn to recognize over time but most of it will forever remain somewhat hard to distinguish from regular darkpsy (basilisk n.d.a). on ektoplazm, forest is always used in conjunction with the tag “darkpsy” and is never used on its own, suggesting a hierarchical relationship. however, the website is not organised hierarchically and in theory forest could be paired with other terms. indeed, many forest tracks have a melodic quality reminiscent of goa trance and an overall sound-world which dancecult 12(1)32 is softer than that of most contemporary darpsy.12 more recently, lower-tempo forest has emerged, leading to the addition of the category “swamp” on ektoplazm in 2015, described by basilisk as “the downtempo counterpoint to forest music” (basilisk, n.d.b). as such the organic sounds and natural imagery of forest psytrance have the potential to be combined with other genre concepts from across the pedm spectrum. krosis krosis started his musical career as a black metal drummer and vocalist before discovering psytrance in the early 2010s. he was immediately attracted to the speed and heaviness of darkpsy and began learning to dj and produce in this style. by 2014, he was performing regularly at tribe of frog (one of the largest psytrance nights in the uk) and soon became a resident dj, requiring him to frequently give dj sets in a range of high-tempo psytrance styles. as a resident, krosis must complement performers from outside bristol, so a high degree of stylistic understanding and flexibility is key to his musical career. as a producer krosis has focused on darkpsy and forest psytrance, the latter appealing to his past experience in black metal and affinity for fantasy video games; his alias, for example, comes from the 2011 game the elder scrolls v: skyrim, which draws on traditional fantasy themes and imagery. in our first interview in 2014, krosis described the challenge of recognising forest among other psytrance variants. krosis: trying to define forest is the hardest one. that took me so long, and then thinking i knew what it was, and then finding out that still i didn’t quite have my definition right. the challenge here lies in perceiving subtle differences in timbre, atmosphere, melody and harmony, drawing connections between tracks in order to create coherence in his dj sets. krosis sifts through vast numbers of new tracks every year, assessing them for their quality and stylistic content, and records his favourites in a spreadsheet colour-coded by genre. (green, naturally, represents forest.) however, he is keen to emphasise the flexibility of his categorical approach: krosis: i always see them as descriptions rather than definitions, and you’re trying to define it in that sense then you’re missing the point, because, you know… it should be about the vibe of the actual track. krosis uses the music streaming platform soundcloud to distribute dj mixes and previews of his own upcoming tracks. here, he has the opportunity to describe his music directly to listeners using tags and descriptive writing. classification on soundcloud is divided into two parts: a principle genre which is displayed in the top right corner of a track, and a set of additional tags which are displayed underneath. for the most part, krosis gives psytrance as the principle genre for his tracks, with various uses of “twilight”, “night”, “forest” in the additional tags (see fig. 3). charles | genre in practice: categories, metadata and music-making in psytrance culture 33 figure 3. the track “ancient agnostic” on krosis’ soundcloud page. one of krosis’ tracks, “ice of phendrana”, is marked “tundra :p” on soundcloud, with an emoticon indicating playful intentions (fig. 3). this term is krosis’ own invention; it refers to a particular kind of psytrance with an atmosphere reminiscent of a frozen, barren landscape. similar imagery is found in heavy metal cultures, in particular black metal and power metal. it is also found in fantasy literature and video games; phendrana is a snowy region in the 2002 nintendo game metroid prime. on soundcloud the tag has been combined with “forest”, suggesting some stylistic overlap between these genres. musically, “ice of phendrana” is characterised by sustained pads and icy synthetic bell sounds with some sparse, organic-sounding fm leads suggesting a few straggling trees, perhaps at the edges of a vast boreal forest. krosis later released an ep on bandcamp, tundra (2020), exploring the concept more fully (fig. 4), although he was not responsible for tagging the album and “tundra” was not used as a tag. figure 4. “ice of phendrana” on krosis’ soundcloud page. dancecult 12(1)34 figure 5. the front cover of krosis’ ep tundra (2020). artwork by jazzmine, co-founder of blue hour sounds, reproduced with permission. krosis’ output also explores another unusual concept, “morning forest”. this is a seemingly contradictory idea: “morning” is a term used to refer to upbeat, daytime psytrance designed for the early hours after a night of dancing. most djs will play upbeat, melodic music at this time, a tradition with long history dating back to the original goa scene. today, morning is used to describe particular instances of full-on or progressive psytrance. (again, like forest, this is a modifier rather than a full musical description.) however, krosis finds this music inappropriate in many situations. krosis: the amount of times i’ve had a booming hot sunrise and morning prog—there’s been a few, but mostly it’s grey miserable sunrises with triumphant morning prog and, nah, sometimes you need some more misanthropic kind of grey-weather forest for the people that don’t quite want to slow it down yet but do still want some melody. charles | genre in practice: categories, metadata and music-making in psytrance culture 35 finding that he enjoyed playing at this transitional time during parties, but lacking a repertoire which suited the often-drizzly atmosphere of uk outdoor parties, krosis began producing and performing music which combined features of both musical styles. this idea crystallized in 2015 when he discovered the italian psytrance label blue hour sounds, the name of which refers to the colour of the sky in the twilight hour just before dawn. the following description is given for the compilation the dark side of dawn (2015) on the label’s bandcamp page: blue hour sounds artists and passionate djs robin gaiana and peyo selected these stunning sonic sculptures, searching for music that can forge a bridge from dark foresty nights into mystical misty mornings. expect serious rolling basslines, deep atmospheres, crunchy leads and dense forest sounds, with just a hint of color to call out for the coming of day (gaiana and peyo 2015). soon after discovering this release, krosis decided to create a morning forest-themed mix for soundcloud. this included several of his own tracks and some others which he felt were representative of the concept. a suitable picture was chosen for the thumbnail: a few solitary trees on snowy ground with a distant church looming in the mist, suggesting a solemn, reverent atmosphere reminiscent of heavy metal (fig. 5). the use of the tag “ultra-spiritual” lightens the tone, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the work of internet comedian jp sears, who satirizes new age spirituality. krosis’ mix succeeded in attracting the attention of blue hour sounds, and shortly afterwards they asked if he would like to join as a producer, culminating in the release of his ep tundra on the label in 2020. soundcloud thus offered a means for krosis to assemble various resources, including genre terms, music and visual imagery, in order to communicate a complex musical idea to listeners and to advance his career by creating new connections within the psytrance scene. figure 6. krosis’ morning forest mix, the green chapel (2016), on soundcloud. globular: psychill and psydub globular writes a kind of music known as psychedelic dub or psydub, which combines the musical attributes of psytrance music with those of dub reggae. psydub is one among several psychedelic downtempo or psychill genres which cover the lower end of the pedm tempo dancecult 12(1)36 spectrum.13 other terms include “psybient” which refers to a relatively pure form of psychill with roots in goa trance and psytrance; “psybreaks” which indicates the use of breakbeat rhythms in the percussion parts and “psybass” which suggests crossover with newer styles of bass music, such as dubstep or trap. as with the psytrance variants in the previous section, these terms can be used interchangeably or in combination according to the characteristics of a given project. most psychill artists produce in more than one style and a psychill album will usually contain a range of tempos and textures (see, for example, the music of shpongle, ott or solar fields). these various downtempo pedm genres are united by the use of production techniques found in psytrance and goa trance, including fm leads, 303-like filter resonance and prominent delay or echo effects. alongside this goa-trance lineage, however, psychill also has roots in the experimental and ambient music of artists such as jean-michel jarre and the klf. because of this wider history, psychill acts as a point of contact between psyculture and other electronic music cultures. psychill also has links to music for films, tv and video games. for example, producer solar fields’ music was used in the game mirror’s edge (electronic arts 2008). many psychill artists are also part of a wider music scene focused on world music or “ethnic” sounds. these artists, such as kaya project, desert dwellers and hilight tribe, are notable for their acoustic instrumentation and live, band-format performances, and they may appear at world music or transformational events rather than psytrance festivals.14 the distinguishing characteristics of psydub, the genre to which the present section is devoted, involve the use of musical features found in reggae and dub music including the “skank” (offbeat chord stabs), acoustic percussion and sustained bass notes. this music is largely associated with the uk, and many of the genre’s most famous producers live in the south of england.15 the album in dub (2002), in which producer/engineer ott remixed tracks by the celebrated goa trance artist hallucinogen, is considered by fans to be the genre’s point of origin. however, psydub’s lineage also lies in the ambient dub music of the 1990s characterized by artists like the orb and orbital and, beyond this, in the work of jamaican dub reggae pioneers such as king tubby and augustus pablo. as such, psydub is not a pure genre of pedm but rather has considerable overlap with other kinds of music and other scenes outside of psyculture. like other psychill genres, psydub is not normally played on the main stage at psytrance events, but rather on smaller secondary stages. only very recently have psychill-focused events begun to appear in the uk (such as anthropos festival in 2019), and it is not yet clear whether these will become a long-term addition to the pedm event calendar, joining the darkpsy-focused festivals noted in the previous section. more widely, downtempo musicians are somewhat peripheral members of the psytrance scene, and are rarely the main focus of attention at pedm events. this has both advantages and disadvantages: on the one hand, they do not have the same level of visibility as festival-headlining psytrance artists; on the other hand, they may cast their net wider and gain fans among people who do not listen to psytrance at all. charles | genre in practice: categories, metadata and music-making in psytrance culture 37 globular globular is a relatively well-known psydub producer who performs at major psychedelic events around the world. he has adhered closely to the psydub genre throughout his musical career and has only the one musical project; he does not have another alias or run a record label. globular’s music is highly melodic and features guitar, folk music samples and acoustic percussion alongside software instruments and effects. it also features harmonic progressions and chord sequences more reminiscent of rock or reggae music than edm. the tracks “synchronicity city 3.0” (2013) and “infinity inside” (2014) use a changing bass line to reharmonize lengthy recurring melodies, for example, whilst “…and it speaks of everything” (2016) and “up the xylem elevator” (2013) are ambient, guitar-based pieces reminiscent of grunge and alternative rock. these characteristics differentiate globular from many of his psydub-producing peers who largely make timbral, digital-sounding music with a static approach to harmony (e.g. quanta, land switcher). figure 7. the cover of globular’s album holobiont (2016). artwork by object, reproduced under a creative commons license (cc by-nc-nd 3.0). dancecult 12(1)38 the relationship between globular’s music and psytrance is not entirely straightforward; similarly, it is not clear that he is a dub producer, as this entails a certain set of production processes and sounds.16 globular outlined these issues in our first interview in 2014. christopher charles: so how would you describe your style? what exactly do you do? is it a type of dub music, is it reggae? globular: i guess i call it psydub because that’s what everyone recognises it by, but in reality i would say it’s more reggae than dub. [laughs] yeah. and the people that are doing, like, deep techno dub and stuff like that, that’s more dub, i think. because the more i kind of really think about it in terms of dub, i realise that it’s not—it’s too fast, it’s too kind of, there’s too much going on. like, dub’s like really pared down, slow and kind of simple. yeah. nice and echoey. yeah. but obviously it takes huge influences from dub. so would you say that psydub is related to psytrance, is it a type of psytrance, or is it nebulous sort of something that hovers around psytrance? i personally, pretty much... the similarities kind of end at the psy. [laughs] but, i mean, there’s some pretty big similarities. like, there’s a lot of squelchy kind of lead sounds and kind of very specific psy-scene sounds that do cross over a lot. but for me the main thing... i mean, i don’t listen to psytrance basically. i’m not a psytrance person. my music just seems to fit into the psytrance scene. and that’s why people think that it fits in and i’m happy for that to be the case. globular contrasts his position with that of the other psydub producers whose music is sonically closer to psytrance than his own. globular: i feel like they know the scene and they kind of came at it from a psy angle. they’ve always been going to psy parties and stuff like that, and that’s not where i came from, that’s all. the detachment that globular experiences from psytrance culture is not unusual. there are many pedm scene members who enjoy the atmosphere of psychedelic parties but struggle with the intensity and repetitiveness of psytrance music. during my research from 20142018, several participants expressed a wish for a separate downtempo event scene in the uk, and this began to materialise around 2017 with the emergence of anthropos festival and the psychedelic jelly club night in bristol. this problematises the notion of psychill as a subset of psychedelic trance culture. rather, it might be understood as a parallel culture drawing on a shared pool of musical, visual and thematic resources. charles | genre in practice: categories, metadata and music-making in psytrance culture 39 globular does not normally release his music through record labels but rather publishes it himself directly via internet platforms. he is associated with the group shanti planti, but this is more of a collective than a record label in the traditional sense, and they do not act as intermediaries between artist and audience. similarly, he is a member of a booking agency called feel life music (formerly sofa beats) which specialises in downtempo music, but they do not represent him online except where bookings are concerned. rather, globular distributes his music directly to listeners using platforms such as bandcamp, soundcloud and ektoplazm. he maintains a large web of connections on social media, giving potential listeners as many ways as possible to discover his music. we have already looked at globular’s use of tags on bandcamp, noting the various types of metadata incorporated including geographic locations, the name of the artist and album and a variety of genre terms. for example, on soundcloud he tends to use “psydub” as the principle genre of his tracks whilst using additional tags for a range of other concepts and metadata (fig. 8). occasionally, other pieces of information are used in place of the principle genre. a recording of his set at boom festival in 2016 is marked “boom”; a track which appeared on the shanti planti compilation middle peace (2014) is marked “middle peace” (fig. 8). the latter was a charity compilation raising funds for save the children. the aim with this tag was not to create further links within the online psychill network, but rather to highlight the project and raise its profile on social media. figure 8. globular’s track “the intralocuter” on soundcloud. figure 9. globular’s track from the shanti planti compilation middle peace. dancecult 12(1)40 between 2017 and 2020, i had the opportunity to collaborate with globular on a large-scale musical project. the resulting album, messages from the resonator (globular and geoglyph 2020) contains elements of our respective musical languages as well as further influences which neither of us had previously explored in our own music. (my own music as geoglyph tends also towards a conventional psydub/psybreaks sound similar to globular’s.) at that time we were interested in the relationship between trip-hop—a genre that originated in our hometown of bristol through bands such as massive attack and portishead—and psychill, which inherited some of its musical characteristics from the former. two tracks on our album, “take down everything” and “m.i.n.d.”, demonstrate jazzy hip-hop and drum ‘n’ bass characteristics respectively, whilst “a general benevolent presence” has a trip-hop inflected electric piano part. after we finished the album in early 2020, the question of musical categories arose. how should we market this multi-genre album? after some discussion, globular suggested the set of tags in fig. 10 for the album’s bandcamp page. figure 10. the bandcamp tags used by globular and geoglyph for the album messages from the resonator (2020). here the tags normally associated with psydub are accompanied by terms from outside of psyculture: “electronica”, “hip hop” and “trip-hop”.17 in this way, tagging systems can accommodate polystylistic projects in which different tracks have different combinations charles | genre in practice: categories, metadata and music-making in psytrance culture 41 of genre characteristics. whether this actually helps an album to reach a wider audience is unclear. nonetheless, the tagging process also helped us to reflect on the project, to note its roots in bristol’s musical legacy and its connections with other music outside of psyculture. the descriptive aspect of tagging may therefore also be important, helping artists to understand their own output and how it fits into a wider cultural context. discussion as categories within the pedm spectrum, forest psytrance and psydub have quite different relationships with their parent culture. forest psytrance is a relatively “pure” form of pedm like those discussed by lindop (2010: 121-24): its roots lie in the goa trance/ psytrance tradition and it has little overlap with genres outside of psyculture (except for a few commonalities with black metal as noted earlier). these characteristics have arisen from a developmental process which toynbee calls “intensification” (2000: 143), meaning that a set of stylistic conventions have been refined and reinforced by participants. this gives rise to a culture-specific vocabulary of concepts which can be used to place creative work within a given cultural sphere. as demonstrated by krosis, this can be done subtly, with participants combining contradictory concepts (“morning forest”) and making novel contributions of their own (“tundra”). by contrast, psydub is a clear example of the “psychedelicised” music identified by lindop (2010: 121); that is, psydub is a non-pedm genre that has been imbued with psychedelic characteristics in order to make it suitable for performance at pedm events. lindop describes this process in terms of “subcultural capital”.18 the process of psychedelicisation is analogous to the means by which knowledge, style and taste generate ‘subcultural capital’ among participants. by adapting a given style to the expectations of a psytrance party crowd, the music takes on a greater level of authenticity (lindop 2010: 121). as argued earlier, this bourdieuian approach has been useful in recognising the importance of stylistic competence (recognising, naming and producing certain musical styles) in the formation of underground musical cultures in the late-twentieth century. however, it is no longer a useful way of understanding genre in today’s complex, overlapping, internetmediated musical worlds. here, there is no stable field within which aesthetic judgements are made, nor a “conscious and mutually agreed set of standards” by which the boundaries of a musical culture are enforced (hodkinson 2002: 81). rather, today’s internet users engage with a plurality of musical cultures and frequently create artifacts with contrasting or conflicting features drawn from different cultural spheres. lindop comes to a similar conclusion, noting the emergence of “practices not considered by thornton” in the psychedelicisation process (2010: 124). a more constructive approach is taken by madrid who, in his study of nor-tec music in tijuana, argues that nor-tec “should be understood as a strategy based on the social dancecult 12(1)42 signification of an aesthetic idea”, and that genre is “used to identify the specific niches in which these artists want to fit within the international cosmopolitan community of electronic music” (2008: 10, 77). this gives the musician more scope for creativity and the ability to imagine how their output will give them access to certain cultural spheres. crucially, artists may position themselves between cultures, opting for an interstitial existence which allows them to engage with multiple genre concepts, discursive strands and musical histories. this, i suggest, is a more appropriate way of understanding downtempo music, which has often occupied an ambiguous position between other music scenes (edm, dub, electronica). in order to understand this new artist-led environment, scholars must move away from a bourdieuian model in which genre terms are a means of excluding unwanted elements from a musical system, and towards a more inclusive, connective view of genre. if, as frith argued, popular music categories once functioned as a means of creating the ideal consumer (1996: 85), their function today is the creation of new networks, often integrating existing musical practices and infrastructure in the process. the result is that genre has become more modular; rather than full descriptions, many of today’s genre terms function as units which can be joined together into larger assemblages. these might not even be full words but rather fragments of words, for example the prefix “psy” which is prepended to downtempo genres to indicate that they have been psychedelicised. (another example is the set of “wave” genres which have arisen on streaming platforms—synthwave, vaporwave, sovietwave.) more widely, descriptive approaches are coming to the fore as a means of organising music on streaming platforms, for example the popular “beats to study/relax to” playlists on youtube and spotify.19 as shown by krosis and globular, genre plays an especially important role in shaping diy music careers. strategic use of genre can help forge vital connections, increasing an artist’s reach within a music scene, as well as helping them to understand their position within a wider cultural field. however, it is not just producers who do this. other scene members also make strategic use of genre: djs when creating mixes for mixcloud; listeners when uploading their favourite albums to youtube; event promoters when creating advertising material for facebook. in this way, bottom-up tagging systems perform their function as folksonomies, allowing everyday users to contribute to a culture’s stylistic vocabulary and not just gatekeepers or prominent scene members. this is not to say that intermediaries are absent from today’s musical networks. indeed, as demonstrated in this paper, online labels still play a role in forming connections between artist and audience. however, these relationships are normally sought out voluntarily, with musicians using labels strategically for their signifying power in relation to genre. (see, for example, krosis’ relationship with blue hour sounds or globular’s relationship with shanti planti.) furthermore, distribution services with intermediaries (e.g. ektoplazm and its webmaster, dj basilisk) can perform a stabilizing function, creating durable connections between concepts and sounds. thus it is neither disintermediation nor reintermediation alone, but rather the interplay between the two, which shapes today’s musical landscape. charles | genre in practice: categories, metadata and music-making in psytrance culture 43 further developments may occur as services begin to make connections and distinctions of their own. recommendation algorithms are already a central means by which listeners discover new music, and it seems likely that platforms will begin to seek out real-world meanings and relationships as a means of organising content, perhaps through automated analysis of musical material. what will happen if a major platform such as youtube begins to have its own ideas about the difference between pedm genres, for example? this is unlikely to change musical practice overnight, but it will require musicians to explore new labelling strategies and new ways of communicating with listeners online. notes 1 i will refer to this musical field as “psychedelic electronic dance music” or pedm. 2 bourdieu describes cultural capital as a familiarity with cultural norms, tastes and expectations “which is convertible, on certain conditions, into economic capital” (1986: 243). 3 in her widely-cited 1986 paper, swidler outlines “an image of culture as a ‘tool kit’ of symbols, stories, rituals, and world-views, which people may use in varying configurations to solve different kinds of problems” (1986: 273). 4 see fikentscher (2000) for a discussion of diy and underground dance music culture, and haenfler 2015) for a discussion of punk rock, which is perhaps the genre most closelyassociated with “diy” cultural production. 5 baym and bunett (2009) offer a description of musical fandom and web 2.0, describing it as an era “in which user-generated content stands alongside professionally produced content in claiming audience attention” (2009: 434). 6 the term “folksonomy” was coined by thomas vander wal in 2004 and later formalised on his personal website in 2007, where he offers the following definition: folksonomy is the result of personal free tagging of information and objects (anything with a url) for one’s own retrieval. the tagging is done in a social environment (usually shared and open to others). folksonomy is created from the act of tagging by the person consuming the information (vander wal 2007). 7 slobin’s book subcultural sounds (1993) presages several key issues later raised by web 2.0 tagging systems, in particular by examining the notion of hierarchy or embeddedness between musical styles. slobin expands on the then-prevalent notion of subculture by offering “superculture” and “interculture” as complementary concepts: “supersuggests an overarching, suban embedded unit, and intera crosscutting trend” (1993:12). 8 see rietveld (2010), st john (2012) and aittoniemi (2012) for further musical and historical details on psytrance culture. 9 vitos (2009, 2015) has written several papers on dark psytrance music and culture. he states that darkpsy “can be considered the hard core of psytrance, sending its acid-infused musical structures into overdrive at a tempo that ranges from 150 to 200bpm (beats per minute), and it is played predominantly during the night at out-door psytrance festivals” (2015: 262). 10 see mcateer (2002) and st john (2011) for further details on goa gil, whose marathon dark psytrance dj sets are often described in religious or mystical terms. dancecult 12(1)44 11 baulch (2007) offers a discussion of black metal’s musical, visual, and performative characteristics—albeit in the unusual context of the extreme metal scene in1990s bali, indonesia. 12 see, for example, the under the moss series of compilations by the lithuanian label forest freaqs. 13 here i am using “psychill” as an umbrella term due to its relative neutrality, but in practice its relationship with other downtempo genres is non-hierarchical. 14 “transformational” in this instance refers to a wider psychedelic/hippie festival culture which overlaps with, but does not encompass, psytrance culture. prominent examples of transformational festivals include burning man (us) and shambhala (uk). 15 notable psydub acts based in the south of england include ott, globular, quanta, shpongle, kuba and gaudi. 16 veal (2007) and henrique (2010) have written book-length descriptions of dub reggae’s history and production techniques. a key feature is the remixing or ‘versioning’ of preexisting reggae tracks in real time using a mixing desk. psydub, by contrast, is not usually remixed (except for ott’s famous album hallucinogen in dub) and is therefore an example of what veal calls “designer dub”, referring to “music designed as a work of dub from the beginning” (2007: 228). 17 in the uk, electronica has a specific meaning roughly synonymous with trip-hop indicating jazz-inflected, sample-based electronic music. artists working in this genre include bonobo, mr scruff and lemon jelly. 18 like bourdieu’s cultural capital (see above), thornton’s “subcultural capital” entails familiarity with a particular set of cultural norms and values, albeit those of underground youth cultures rather than high culture. she describes this in terms of the “fashionable haircuts and wellassembled record collections” which distinguish subcultural club-goers from the mainstream crowd (thornton 1995: 11). 19 winston and saywood (2019) offer one of the first analyses of the “beats to relax/study to” phenomenon and the lofi hip-hop genre with which it is associated. observing the use of these mixes for performing intellectual work (e.g. studying, coding) in a relaxed and efficient manner, the authors find lofi “reflective of lived experience within the material conditions of post-fordist late capitalism” which requires “emotional and personal investment” from workers (winston and saywood 2019: 48). references aittoniemi, toni. 2012. “cultural and musical dimensions of goa trance and early psychedelic trance in finland”. ma dissertation (musicology), university of helsinki. audette-longo, michael. 2016. ““everybody knows there is here”: surveying the index-local in cbc radio 3”. in the oxford handbook of music and virtuality, ed. sheila whiteley and shara rambarran, 314-28. new york: oxford university press. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199321285.013.28>. baulch, emma. 2007. making scenes: reggae, punk and death metal in 1990s bali. london: duke university press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199321285.013.28 charles | genre in practice: categories, metadata and music-making in psytrance culture 45 baym, nancy and robert burnett. 2009. “amateur experts: international fan labour in swedish independent music”. international journal of cultural studies 12(5): 433-49. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1367877909337857>. bourdieu, pierre. 1986. “the forms of capital”. in handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education, ed. john richardson, 241-58. westport: greenwood. brackett, david. 2015. “popular music genres: aesthetics, commerce and identity”. in the sage handbook of popular music, ed. andy bennett and steve waksman, 278-95. london: sage. <http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473910362.n11>. charles, christopher. 2019. “psyculture in bristol: careers, projects, and strategies in digital music-making”. phd dissertation (musicology), university of bristol. fabbri, franco. 1999. “browsing music spaces: categories and the musical mind”. sydney, australia: international association for the study of popular music conference. <http://www.tagg.org/others/ffabbri9907.html>, (24 february 2020). fikentscher, kai. 2000. “you better work!” underground dance music in new york city. middletown: wesleyan university press. frith, simon. 1996. performing rites: evaluating popular music. oxford: oxford university press. gaffney, michael and pauline rafferty. 2009. “making the long tail visible: social networking sites and independent music discovery”. program: electronic library and information systems 43(4): 375-91. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/00330330910998039>. haenfler, ross. 2015. “punk rock, hardcore and globalization”. in the sage handbook of popular music, ed. andy bennett and steve waksman, 278-95. london: sage. <http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473910362.n16>. henriques, julian. 2010. sonic bodies: reggae sound systems, performance techniques, and ways of knowing. london: continuum. hodkinson, paul. 2002. goth: identity, style and subculture. oxford: berg. <http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/9781847888747>. holt, fabian. 2007. genre in popular music. chigaco: university of chicago press. <http://dx.doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226350400.001.0001>. horner, bruce. 1999. “discourse”. in key terms in popular music and culture, ed. bruce horner and thomas swiss, 18-34. oxford: blackwell. lee, jaesung, jonghoon chae and dae-won kim. 2016. “effective music searching approach based on tag combination by exploiting prototypical acoustic content”. multimedia tools and applications 76: 6065-77. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3554-4>. lindop, robin. 2010. “re-evaluating musical genre in uk psytrance”. in the local scenes and global culture of psytrance, ed. graham st john, 114-30. london: routledge. <http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203847879>. madrid, alejandro. 2008. nor-tec rifa! electronic dance music from tijuana to the world. new york: oxford university press. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195326376.001.0001>. mcateer, michael. 2002. “redefining the ancient tribal ritual for the 21st century: goa gil and the trance dance experience”. ba thesis (musicology), reed college. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1367877909337857 http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473910362.n11 http://www.tagg.org/others/ffabbri9907.html http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/00330330910998039 http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473910362.n16 http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/9781847888747 http://dx.doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226350400.001.0001 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3554-4 http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203847879 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195326376.001.0001 dancecult 12(1)46 mcleod, kembrew. 2001. “genres, subgenres, and more: musical and social differentiation within electronic/dance music communities”. journal of popular music studies 13: 59-76. <http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781315094588-19>. megalopsy, 2013. “darkpsy”. dark prisma, 6 october. <http://www.darkprisma.com.ar/ megalopsy/darkpsy.txt>. internet archive. <https://web.archive.org/web/20131007041320/ http://www.darkprisma.com.ar/megalopsy/darkpsy.txt>, (9 october 2020). negus, keith. 1999. music genres and corporate cultures. oxford, routledge. <http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203169469>. reynolds, simon. 2013. energy flash: a journey through rave music and dance culture. london: faber and faber. rietveld, hillegonda. 2010. “infinite noise spirals: the musical cosmopolitanism of psytrance.” in the local scenes and global culture of psytrance, ed. graham st. john, 69-88. london: routledge. <http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203847879>. silver, daniel, monica lee and c. clayton childress. 2016. “genre complexes in popular music”. plos one 11(5). <http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0155471>. slobin, mark. 1993. subcultural sounds: micromusics of the west. hanover, nh: wesleyan university press. sordo, mohamed, fabien gouyon, luís sarmento, òscar celma and xavier serra. 2013. “inferring semantic facets of a music folksonomy with wikipedia”. journal of new music research 42(4): 346-63. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09298215.2013.848904>. shuker, roy. 2005. popular music: the key concepts. 2nd ed. london: routledge. st john, graham. 2010. “psytrance: an introduction”. in the local scenes and global culture of psytrance, ed. graham st john, 1-17. london: routledge. <http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203847879>. ———. 2011. “dj goa gil: kalifornian exile, dark yogi and dreaded anomaly”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 3(1): 97-128. <https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.05>. ———. 2012. global tribe: technology, spirituality and psytrance. sheffield: equinox. stokes, martin. 2003. “talk and text: popular music and ethnomusicology”. in analysing popular music, ed. alan moore, 218-39. cambridge: cambridge university press. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511482014.011>. suhr, h. cecilia. 2012. social media and music: the digital field of cultural production. oxford: peter lang. swidler, ann. 1986. “culture in action: symbols and strategies”. american sociological review 51(2): 273-86. <http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2095521>. toynbee, jason. 2000. making popular music: musicians, creativity and institutions. london: arnold. veal, michael. 2007. dub: soundscapes and shattered songs in jamaican reggae. middletown: wesleyan university press. vander wal, thomas. “folksonomy coinage and definition”. off the top. 2 february 2007. <http://www.vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html>, (7 october 2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781315094588-19 http://www.darkprisma.com.ar/megalopsy/darkpsy.txt http://www.darkprisma.com.ar/megalopsy/darkpsy.txt http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203169469 http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203847879 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0155471 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09298215.2013.848904 http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203847879 https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.05 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511482014.011 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511482014.011 http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2095521 http://www.vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html charles | genre in practice: categories, metadata and music-making in psytrance culture 47 vitos, botond. 2009. “the inverted sublimity of the dark psytrance dancefloor”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(1): 37-141. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.10>. ———. 2015. “pushing the boundaries: investigating the musical and social aesthetics of dark psytrance”. in exploring psychedelic trance and electronic dance music in modern culture, ed. emília simão, armando malheiro da silva and sérgio tenreiro de magalhães, 260-77. <http://dx.doi.org/10.4018/978-1-4666-8665-6.ch011>. winston, emma and laurence saywood. 2019. “beats to relax/study to: contradiction and paradox in lofi hip hop”. iaspm journal 9(2): 40-54. <https://doi.org/10.5429/2079-3871(2019)v9i2.4en>. discography basilisk, dj. n.d.a. “forest”. available at: <https://ektoplazm.com/style/forest>, (7 october 2020). ———. n.d.b. “swamp”. available at: <https://ektoplazm.com/style/swamp> (7 october 2020). gaiana, robin and peyo. 2015. the dark side of the dawn. blue hour sounds (cd comp): bhscd013. <https://bluehoursounds.bandcamp.com/album/va-the-dark-side-of-dawn>. <https://www.discogs.com/peyo-5-gaiana-the-dark-side-of-dawn/release/7829061>. globular. 2016. holobiont. self-released (lp). <https://www.discogs.com/globular-holobiont/release/8383197>. globular. 2014. digging and building. self-released (ep). <https://www.discogs.com/globular-digging-building/master/683205>. globular and geoglyph. 2020. messages from the resonator. self-released (lp). <https://www. discogs.com/globular-2-geoglyph-messages-from-the-resonator/release/15110713>. krosis, 2020. tundra. blue hour sounds (ep): bhsdig033. ludography electronic arts. 2008. mirror’s edge. stockholm: ea dice. bethesda game studios. 2011. the elder scrolls v: skyrim. rockville: bethesda softworks. nintendo. 2002. metroid prime. austin: retro studios. http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.10 http://dx.doi.org/10.4018/978-1-4666-8665-6.ch011 https://doi.org/10.5429/2079-3871(2019)v9i2.4en https://ektoplazm.com/style/forest https://ektoplazm.com/style/swamp https://bluehoursounds.bandcamp.com/album/va-the-dark-side-of-dawn https://www.discogs.com/peyo-5-gaiana-the-dark-side-of-dawn/release/7829061 https://www.discogs.com/globular-holobiont/release/8383197 https://www.discogs.com/globular-digging-building/master/683205 https://www.discogs.com/globular-2-geoglyph-messages-from-the-resonator/release/15110713 https://www.discogs.com/globular-2-geoglyph-messages-from-the-resonator/release/15110713 dancecult 14(1) 2022: editor's introduction, masthead and table of contents v14.1 2022 dancecult journal of electronic dance music culture issue 14(1) 2022 issn 1947-5403 ©2022 dancecult published yearly at <http://dj.dancecult.net> international advisory board sean albiez (southampton solent university, uk), anthony d’andrea (university of limerick, ie), mark j butler (northwestern university, us), rebekah farrugia (oakland university, us), kai fikentscher (de), alistair fraser (maynooth university, ie), luis-manuel garcia (university of birmingham, uk), anna gavanas (institute for futures studies, se), ross harley (university of new south wales, au), tim lawrence (university of east london, uk), geert lovink (university of amsterdam, nl), alejandro l. madrid (university of illinois, chicago, us), paolo magaudda (university of padova, it), charity marsh (university of regina, ca), andrew murphie (university of new south wales, au), alice o’grady (university of leeds, united kingdom), christopher partridge (lancaster university, uk), dave payling (staffordshire university, uk), anne petiau (itsrs / université paris 5, fr), hillegonda c rietveld (london south bank university, uk), geoff stahl (victoria university of wellington, nz), sonjah nadine stanley-niaah (university of west indies, jm), graham st john (university of huddersfield, uk), jonathan sterne (mcgill university, ca), will straw (mcgill university, ca), rupert till (university of huddersfield, uk), botond vitos (leuphana university, de), toby young (university of oxford, uk) dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture is a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture (edmc). launched in 2009, as a platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on the shifting terrain of edmcs worldwide, dancecult houses research exploring the sites, technologies, sounds and cultures of electronic music in historical and contemporary perspectives. playing host to studies of emergent forms of electronic music production, performance, distribution, and reception, as a portal for cutting-edge research on the relation between bodies, technologies, and cyberspace, as a medium through which the cultural politics of dance is critically investigated, and as a venue for innovative multimedia projects, dancecult is the leading venue for research on edmc. cover: smokescreen campout birthday celebration, nottinghamshire, 2022 photo by nick clague executive editor graham st john (university of huddersfield, uk) production editor botond vitos (leuphana university, de) from the floor editor dave payling (staffordshire university, uk) reviews editor toby young (university of oxford, uk) operations director botond vitos (leuphana university, de) foreign languages editor moses iten (rmit, au) managing editor tommy colton symmes (rice university, us) community manager katrina loughrey (de) art director botond vitos (leuphana university, de) operations associate dave payling (staffordshire university, uk) associate editors ben assiter (goldsmiths, university of london, uk) alistair fraser (maynooth university, ie) moses iten (rmit, au) rupert till (university of huddersfield, uk) production assistant patricio lópez-serrano (de) http://dj.dancecult.net issn 1947-5403 ©2022 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net v14.1 2022 executive editor’s introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 01 graham st john feature articles exploring personal spectres in electronic music. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 02 gareth whitehead technique, experience and the social function of techno music: a comparative analysis of theodor adorno and robert fink . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 luciano pascual moments of connection as means of survival: a study of queer identity, freedom and community in uk raves during the covid-19 pandemic . . . . . 39 daisy avis-ward transpositions digital cumbia: tradition and postmodernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 israel márquez (trans. moses iten) from the floor – online smokescreen free party sound system andy riley outlook festival: a celebration of sound system culture ivan mouraviev 8-bit music on twitch: how the chiptune scene thrived during the pandemic kirsten hermes plugging the creative drain: a glimpse into electronic music migration in northern ireland ciara power plague raver reflections: what happened in the pandemic stays in the pandemic richard anderson the power to name and other dilemmas presented by brazilian funk subgenres liv sovik and brian d’aquino reviews do you remember house? chicago’s queer of colour undergrounds (micah e. salkind) & fabulous: the rise of the beautiful eccentric (maddison moore) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .76 jacob mallinson bird the boy from medellín (dir. matthew heineman) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .81 ana maría díaz pinto & juan diego díaz explosions in the mind: composing psychedelic sounds and visualisations (jonathan weinel) . . . . . . . . . . .86 dave payling the discourse community of electronic dance music (anita jóri) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .88 andrew whelan dancefloor-driven literature: the rave scene in fiction (simon a. morrison) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .92 toby young dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 14(1): 1–1 issn 1947-5403 ©2022 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.00 executive editor’s introduction welcome to dancecult’s 19th issue. it has been another big year at the journal. first up, earlier in 2022 we received news from scopus that all content dating back to dancecult’s first issue in 2009 is now indexed with scopus. more recently, after much backchannel exchange, i’m pleased to announce that this issue arrives as we enter into a five year understanding with the department of music and music technology at the university of huddersfield, in which the department will serve as publisher. integral to this undertaking, we welcome rupert till to the team as associate editor. at the same time, we welcome the continuing support from maynooth academic publishing, which will cover our annual ojs fees for another three years. without this institutional support, we could not continue operating. after five issues at the helm, toby young is stepping down from his position as reviews editor, a role he has performed with aplomb since taking over in the wake of ed montano’s departure. thank you toby, we wish you well in your future endeavours. while toby’s shoes will be difficult to fill, his departure provides a prospective reviews editor with a great opportunity. in the near future, we will be posting an announcement for this position now open. over on the dancecult research network (https://dancecult-research.net), new editorial assistant james cannon is performing a stellar job updating and improving the existing reference lists. please check these resources and input missing content, including any of your own publications, and include or update your own biographical information. much of this information is outdated. as a reminder, users are encouraged to update these lists themselves. a reminder that we are always looking for ideas for content and themed issues. if you are interested in the possibility of editing or coediting an issue on a specific subject please get in touch with me (g.stjohn@dancecult.net). for prospective from the floor content, contact dave payling (dave@dancecult.net). otherwise, if you have any recommendations for existing articles published in a language other than english (and notably in spanish, german or french) that might be appropriate for translation in our transpositions section, please get in touch with foreign languages editor moses iten at moses@dancecult.net. on the back of the first dancecult conference which was held online in september 2021, i am happy to announce that there are currently plans for an in-person dancecult conference likely to be held in the uk in november 2023. more information will be shared about this in the coming weeks. as for the content of this issue itself, this issue features fifteen articles, with a cover photograph by nick clague reproduced from andy riley’s ftf article on smokescreen sound system. please enjoy, graham st john (executive editor) dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 13 november 2022 https://dancecult-research.net/ mailto:g.stjohn@dancecult.net mailto:dave@dancecult.net mailto:moses@dancecult.net dancecult 14(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 14(1) 2022: 76–93 issn 1947-5403 ©2022 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net do you remember house? chicago’s queer of colour undergrounds micah e. salkind oxford: oxford university press, 2018 isbn: 9780190698416 (hardcover) rrp: £79 (hardcover) fabulous: the rise of the beautiful eccentric maddison moore yale: yale university press, 2018 isbn: 9780300204704 (hardcover) rrp: us$19.95 (hardcover) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.11> jacob mallinson bird university of oxford (uk) in do you remember house? chicago’s queer of colour undergrounds and fabulous: the rise of the beautiful eccentric, micah salkind and madison moore each outline a sensitive history of what it means to carve one’s own place in the world. whether embodying a fabulousness to counteract both the mundanity of everyday life and also systems of white supremacy and queerphobia, or creating a musical movement to empower queers of colour in a vast matrix of intergenerational connection, these authors chart historical and contemporaneous examples of queer tenacity, creativity and vibrancy. moore offers a history of “fabulousness”, from effete, flâneur dandies to voguing superstars, with constant recourse to the fashion, music, dance and performance cultures that make up a fabulous ideal; and salkind offers a history of chicago’s house scene, from its disco origins to present day, always shedding light on the ways in which queers of colour propelled this now global music. centring on mutual themes of race, queerness, temporality, glamour/fabulousness, space and, importantly, work/werk, moore and salkind depict the bittersweet utopia that fabulous embodiment can bring. both authors employ a poignant methodology, weaving at times complex theorising with oral histories, interviews, historical writing and autoethnographic vignettes. where moore’s theory of fabulousness emerges consistently across fabulous, dipping in and out reviews reviews 77 of historical context, contemporary interview and personal reverie, salkind’s text more forcefully demarcates its theoretical drive, and moves from a linear history of house music in its first part to contemporary autoethnographic work in the second. what is most impressive in salkind’s text are the ways in which they allow the music to begin their theorisations: whether the participatory discrepancies of the groove of house music leading to a theorisation of delayed pleasure, the non-teleological drive of the music reflecting intergenerational memory, or the remixed and sampled tracks offering a repertoire in motion being emblematic of shifting histories, salkind’s musico-social theory is enlightening throughout. the joy in both moore and salkind, though, is that the subject matter is clearly inextricably personal: salkind’s opening excitement of sneaking out as a 16-year-old to go to deep fix’s “where the wild things are” rave continues throughout the book, and reading moore’s work clearly signals an inalienable intimacy with the subject matter: the places, the people, the music, the dance, the clothing, namely the sheer fabulousness of queer, eccentric life. the temporality of such experiences is vitally important throughout each text and sits interestingly alongside current queer approaches. in conversation with queer theorists like jack halberstam (2005) and josé esteban muñoz (2009), whose theories of queer time are well known — as sitting outside of a heteronormative system, and of existing in an over-therainbow “not yet here” — moore and salkind add interesting new dimensions. for moore, while clearly agreeing that queer utopia is not yet here, as muñoz would have it, they also remind us of the intensely present aspect of queerness, and of fabulousness. they write: “fabulous queer utopia is about living in the present but carrying an alternative possibility, a certain future, and yanking it into the here and now” (71), elsewhere stating that “fierceness, fabulousness, and all other visions of spectacular appearance are about imagining space and carving it out for yourself in the here and now, not waiting for the right time to do so” (109). while muñoz and halberstam certainly argue for the making-present of queer utopia, notable in the liminal space of the nightclub, moore’s more quotidian fabulousness — dressing iconically down the street etc. — makes liminal de facto heteronormative space, affecting straight time and space, and rightly so. moore is also attendant to, following carolyn dinshaw’s work, the importance of “queer histories” and how they create “affective relations” between past and present (71). this is a key point for salkind, who consistently makes reference to the intergenerational power and impetus of house music. writing of “ancestral affiliations” (135) and the “intergenerational, cross-cultural mentorship” (176) that is so vital to house music’s growth, salkind spends considerable time on a crucial concept: neostalgia. neostalgia, the desire for a connection to the past that one may never have had personally to begin with, resonates beyond house music and to all queer experience. those of us who never lived through, say, the genesis of house, the ballroom scene, the aids pandemic, or the like, still feel that connection, a connection that is made manifest every time, for moore, we dress fabulously, or, for salkind, we lose ourselves in the music.1 salkind writes beautifully of the heady mixture of past and present in these experiences: the unctuous affectivity of bodies, sound, time and place is felt throughout their work. dancecult 14(1)78 the joys that come with fabulousness and house music aren’t without their struggles, though, and the labour of queer people and queers of colour is foregrounded throughout. moore’s analysis playfully riffs off a ludic linguistics of “work” versus “werk”, where “werk!”, the queer affirmation yelled at balls and drag bars (and sometimes even street corners), “is a type of aesthetic labour actually seen on the body, and it highlights the effort that goes into making memorable aesthetic moments that happen” (27). creating a look is work, and that work, to extend carol hanisch (1969), is always political. alok vaid-menon, trans non-binary activist and social media star, says in interview with moore: “what keeps me going is there’s a long tradition of people doing this work, and it is work. it’s not just getting ready. it’s actual, political work. it’s strategy, it’s planning, it’s pr, it’s how we talk about it. every walk i make is already a [protest] march” (51). and they are certainly right: to live fabulously is political, and to sashay down the street is a political act. this work, salkind contends, is as much political as it is academic, writing that “queer people of colour are always already theorising, even before a scholar enters the club” (16). this is politics, theoria and praxis, in action, a symbiotically lived politic that effuses these texts. what is most bittersweet, and expressed by both authors, is how often this work goes unnoticed or, worse, stolen. here the double-turn of queer fabulousness, in all its forms, emerges. “you can’t understand fabulousness unless you get that it emerges from trauma, duress, exclusion, exhaustion and depression, and that in some ways being fabulous is the only thing that can get us out of bed in the morning”, moore writes (21). it isn’t a halcyon, rose-tinted joie de vivre, but the only possible way of living. add to this salkind’s poignant discussions of “generational dissonance” and the decimation of queer communities through hiv and aids, and queer joy is soon seen to be wrapped, knotted even, with queer pain. this idea resonates with other queer theories, notably and touchingly eve kosofsky sedgwick’s (2003) notion of queer shame. for sedgwick, queer shame is not a by-product of being queer, but rather it is structurally integral to queerness: we are queer because of queer shame (see also halperin and traub 2009).. in a similar vein, moore and salkind don’t offer pain and trauma as contrasting elements of queer, fabulous joy— they see them as mutually constitutive. the points the authors raise above are significantly informed by, and indeed are only intelligible in their fullness by attention to, race and racism. while queer temporality, for example, may be one thing, moore reminds their reader that “brown people have to wait for things in a way that white folks don’t necessarily have to” (164), a poignant insertion of waiting into the radical nowness-cum-futurity of queer joy. salkind, similarly, writes extensively of the erasure of queers of colour who worked/werked the cultural labour of house music, and their exclusion from the spaces that were once made for them. clubs that purported inclusivity became “profoundly discouraging for black gay men in particular” (43), an example of exclusionary door policies that are still hideously contemporary. salkind offers a measured response to such issues; speaking of clubs that actively seek to promote inclusivity of all kinds, salkind offers the term “safer”, rather than safe, spaces, foregrounding the fact that “the work of creating a safety is never done” (186). throughout reviews 79 both texts, the doubly marginalised position of queers and women of colour is brought to the fore, and adds critical dimension to the werk undertaken. subtle moves like the above perhaps render salkind’s text more acutely critical than moore’s. throughout, salkind has a measured idea of utopia, one that is constantly in progress, and one that is malleable, multifarious. while moore argues, after muñoz, for a “critical idealism … a way of living that privileges hope and possibility instead of the suffocating anti-utopian negativism that is often de rigueur (186)”, sometimes this hope can be for a potentially untenable or uncritical utopia. i am thinking, for example, of the various calls to end gender that reappear throughout the book. at first reading, these desires to end gender seem justified, an end, surely, to the gender-based violence that befalls queer people on a daily basis. considering the call further, i begin to think of certain trans friends, and the conversations we have about their gender: about how they are fighting for their gender and their right to express their gender, a gender that is so deeply important to them. for many, gender is joyful — “gender euphoria”, as it’s often called — and while gender must be opened up, its negative effects dismantled, its violence pacified, to end gender altogether would deny many people an important structuring point of their identity: certainly, people must be safe not to have a gender, and we must work to make this a reality, but we must also be attentive to those for whom gender is critical. moore shows elsewhere that they are seemingly aware of this when they state for example that “not every queer person is a fabulous eccentric, not every queer person should be” (85). here the difficulties of utopian thinking arise; if queerness is undefinable multiplicity, surely utopia is also. importantly, moore consciously and effectively dismisses what one could imagine being a prevalent conservative or normative critique (and one that gets woefully bandied around the british press…): that fabulousness and the like is somehow frivolous, unimportant, or even selfishly narcissistic. to this moore argues that, rather than flippant dressing, “our real selves [are] the ones wearing make-up and high heels” (45), an aesthetics of self that echoes my favourite foucault quotation: “from the idea that the self is not given to us, i think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art” (foucault 1991: 351). parrying superficiality—in its negative affect—moore adds that “we care about surfaces” (45) and the body, reminiscent of important aspects of butlerian gender theory and spectrally unpicking a cartesian dualism. in other words, embodied, performative identity isn’t an afterthought, it’s the real deal. this is certainly present in salkind’s work also: for the djs and performers at queen!, dressing and makeup aren’t optional, but utterly integral. what is perhaps most special about these texts, and what captivates so much, is a kind of queer reading that they encourage, and how their subject matters, historical and contemporary, reverberate with their readers. reading both of these works, i felt—as i am sure many queer people will—the neostalgia of so many culture-shifting moments, the empathy and kinship of the joys and traumas of queer life, and my own memories of losing myself and finding myself in the sweaty underbellies of queer nightclubs. the texts mutually create a living archive of queer fabulousness; one that is very much needed, and one that sheds a light on the creative labour of communities too often overlooked. dancecult 14(1)80 notes 1 for interesting discussions of a different sort of neostalgia and desire for connection with queer past, see halperin 2007. references foucault, michel. 1991. “on the genealogy of ethics: an overview of work in progress”. in the foucault reader, ed. paul rabinow, 343-364. london: penguin books. halberstam, jack. 2005. in a queer time and place: transgender bodies, subcultural lives. new york: new york university press. halperin, david. 2007. what do gay men want? an essay on sex, risk, and subjectivity. michigan: the university of michigan press. halperin, david and valerie traub, ed. 2009. gay shame. chicago: university of chicago press. hanisch, carol. “the personal is political”. february 1969. <https://www.carolhanisch.org/chwritings/pip.html>, (accessed 8.10.22). muñoz, josé esteban. 2009. cruising utopia: the then and there of queer futurity. new york: new york university press. sedgwick, eve kosofsky. 2003. touching feeling: affect, pedagogy, performativity. durham: duke university press. https://www.carolhanisch.org/chwritings/pip.html reviews 81 the boy from medellín dir. matthew heineman usa: amazon original, 2020 <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13009186/> <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.12> ana maría díaz pinto university of california, davis (us) juan diego díaz university of california, davis (us) directed by academy award-nominated and emmy award-winning filmmaker matthew heineman, the boy from medellín (2020), portrays a week in the life of colombian reggaetón artist josé osorio balvin—better known by his stage name j balvin—in advance of the culminating concert of his colores 2019 tour in his hometown of medellín. although this is heineman’s first music-themed documentary, it is not his first biographical film tackling complex social issues in latin america, as cartel land (2015) attests. the boy from medellin, joins a catalogue of biographical documentary films portraying the tensions between public and private life of popular musicians such as jay-z (fade to the back, 2004), george harrison (living in the material world, 2011), residente (residente, 2017), anitta (vai anitta, 2018), taylor swift (miss americana, 2020), and billie eilish (billie eilish: the world’s a little blurry, 2021). as is often the case in these documentaries, heineman engages many complex aspects of j balvin’s life and work, of which we will focus on two: the development of the reggaetón scene in medellín, centering balvin’s position within it; and the negotiation between balvin’s public and private personas. from this second topic, we will elaborate on the artist’s engagement with the political realities he encountered in colombia, the role of social media in shaping relationships between artists and audiences, mental health issues, and the “return to the hood” and overcoming topoi. as in other latin american countries, reggaetón arrived in colombia through piracy and the exchange of cassettes and discs within the rap and dembow community in the late 1990s and early 2000s (navarro 2019). programing mostly puerto rican reggaetón at the beginning, radio stations and figures such as el gurú del sabor (fernando londoño) were crucial in disseminating and popularizing the genre within the country, paving the way for the emergence a local scene in medellín, which is now recognized as a reggaetón powerhouse (garcía 2013). it is within this scene that josé, as j balvin chose to call himself in this initial period, and other youths from medellín began to incursion into reggaetón composition and singing. with josé and groups such as 3 pesos and golpe a golpe, the medellín scene gradually grew, reaching international visibility for its high professional productions when a group of artists created the recording label palma productions in the https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13009186/ dancecult 14(1)82 early 2000s. one of the first goals of these artists was creating a sound and aesthetics distinct from its caribbean counterpart. they accomplished that by using romantic lyrics, melodic lyricism with influences from anglo-american pop, and chord progressions with inversions and extensions emulating the harmonic colors of jazz (franco 2018). if the puerto rican reggaetón of the first wave (i.e., from the early 2000s until 2010) was characterized by a robust percussive texture similar to that of dancehall, in combination with synthesizers playing the harmonic sequence i–vi–v, the colombian reggaetón of those days used more chordal variety, as we can hear in “obra de arte” an iconic reggaetón by fainal & shako, famously performed by balvin, that features the harmonic progression i7–iv7–vi7–v7. the first part of the documentary features a young j balvin consolidating his career as a reggaetón artist in medellín through dogged work. this narrative of struggle and selfimprovement is consistent with a hip-hop street aesthetics that centers and idealizes the artist’s humble origins. although reggaetón lyrics in the early stages in colombia featured the typical puerto rican malianteo and fronteo (i.e., texts based on crudeness, confrontation and hyper-masculinity), artists such as j balvin and later maluma, contributed to develop a distinct colombian approach called romantiqueo, or use of romantic lyrics. the documentary features various pieces in this tradition such as “ay vamos,” “en mi,” and “obra de arte,” which can be contrasted with the confrontational style that characterized early colombian productions such a “tiradera pa’l guru,” a piece first performed in 2003 by a collective of reggaetón artists called colombian flow.1 the main theme and source of tension in the film is balvin’s dilemma: one the one hand he has come to his home city to reconnect with his family, friends and fans, to visit the neighborhood where he grew up, and to perform what he called “the most important concert of his career” in medellín’s largest venue (a local football stadium). on the other, the volatile social situation in colombia, perceived by many as the result of president iván duque’s neoliberal policies, created the expectation among many of his fans that j balvin and other high-profile artists should intervene either by voicing criticism against the government or calling for the end to violence in the streets. initially balvin resists getting involved because he believes that artists are not to engage in politics, but through multiple interactions with producers, family members and fellow artists, he changes his mind. yet many thought his intervention (a call to the government to listen to the youth and to end violence in the streets during his final concert) was both late and lukewarm. while dealing with this conflict, various contradictions are revealed. balvin, who is shown arriving in medellín in his private jet, driving luxurious cars and living in a mansion with an army of servers (practically all women in the film are either balvin’s fans or part of his supporting team), tries to connect with people from poor neighborhoods by walking down the streets, shaking hands and taking selfies with them. it is no wonder that he struggled to connect with “the hood.” the neighborhood where he grew up, the humble origins that lend him authenticity within reggaetón discourse, is only visited, not inhabited. colombian society seems incomprehensible for him. reviews 83 balvin’s reluctance to speak up in the middle of colombia’s political upheaval is, nonetheless, atypical among fellow latin american reggaetón artists who are known for their ongoing political engagement within their communities. during the wave of youthled political and social revolts that swept colombia and other latin american countries at the end of 2019, many reggaetón musicians responded to their fans’ call for action. in puerto rico, for instance, the demands were directed against governor ricardo rosselló (incidentally, son of former governor pedro rosselló, who persecuted and banned the underground musicians who eventually developed reggaetón on the island during the mid-1990s), accused of corruption and homophobia. reggaetón artists such as bad bunny, ñengo flow, daddy yankee and residente marched in the streets along with thousands of protestors. likewise, in chile, the revolt against president sebastián piñera’s neoliberal agenda was supported by chilean and puerto rican reggaetón artists such as pablo chill-e, lizz, don omar, zion, nicky jam and others. surely balvin’s inaction in the context of this tradition of reggaetón political activism in latin america confused his colombian audiences and intensified their criticism of his silence. of course, balvin and other reggaetón artists are not the first popular musicians to have experienced pressure from their audiences to take political stances at critical junctures. ingrid monson (2007), for instance, documented the case of many black jazz musicians during the african american civil rights and black power movements in the us in the 1960s and 1970s, who felt morally pressured to take political action. philip auslander’s (2004 and 2006) tri-partite concept of musical personae, which includes the real person, the musical person, and the character (in songs, for example), is useful to understand the complex interaction of public and private aspects of the life these performers. in heineman’s documentary, balvin appears as a professional and well-established musician ( j balvin) with a fragile real human behind the scenes ( josé). his musical personae is that of a dreamer cangri (influential person in reggaetón slang), enriched by the nuances from the fictional characters described or alluded to in his songs. for instance, in introspective scenes, we hear songs like “7 de mayo” whose lyrics reinforce the image of a sensitive man who acknowledges his humble origins and is committed to supporting up and coming artists. other characters in balvin’s songs, not shown in the documentary, include the promiscuous macho, explicit in “si tu novio te deja sola” and “mojaita.” heineman addresses the artist’s inner complexity by including extended sections of j balvin’s concerts, images of josé with his spiritual guide and medical team, and scenes of balvin incarnating the cangri character, for example when he receives phone messages from artists such as will.i.am prior to his concert. while these three aspects of his musical personae are identifiable at different points of the film, it is difficult to draw clean boundaries among them. at the climax of the final concert and its aftermath, the narrative of the sensitive, crisis-ridden, conflicted artist gives way to a larger story of overcoming. one prominent aspect that amplifies balvin’s conflict is social media communication. with the advent of social media platforms such as twitter, tiktok and instagram, many fans have now the opportunity to interact with their favorite musicians and with fellow dancecult 14(1)84 fans. with artists constantly posting both professional and personal information, these platforms have created a sense of closeness between musicians and audiences that did not exist before when interactions where limited to live concerts or reading/watching the news and thus more purely parasocial. artists have recognized that this virtual closeness is beneficial to promote their careers and to understand their fans’ desires. one aspect of this perceived closeness is that many audiences feel that artists are part of their communities and thus should be sensitive and committed to their causes and tribulations. this issue is explicitly portrayed in the documentary. it is through social media that j balvin learns about the reactions of his fans to the strikes in medellín and to the assassination of young student dylan cruz by the colombian police. more importantly, he reads and hears their louder and louder calls for him to intervene through these platforms. at a dramatic point he takes the bold decision of meeting one of his critics (local rapper mañas ru-fino), all arranged through social media. we’ll let readers watch the documentary to learn how two contemporary musicians from the same city negotiate their opposing views on the artist’s commitment to social justice. in a vivid manner, the boy from medellín, thus engages the real challenges that artists face now that social media functions as a public forum. the narrative of j balvin’s “return to the hood” proposed in this documentary is therefore problematic but should not be judged as insensitive or trivializing. the complex political situation that j balvin encountered in colombia, intensified by social media activity, and expectations of political involvement on his part, had a real toll on josé’s mental health. the efforts that he and his team made to deal with the conflict and to put on a successful performance were enormous. his intentions to connect with the people he grew up with seem genuine on the screen despite his understandable distance from their daily experience and his detached attitude. the “return to the hood” and overcoming narratives served heineman to weave these threads of balvin’s experience into the fabric of his musical personae. at the same time, the two narratives cemented balvin’s position as a politically outspoken latin american reggaetón artist: at the concert, which represents the overcoming, balvin joins fellow reggaetón musicians from the region in voicing his concern for social justice. in the end, the relationship between balvin and his audience is simultaneously strained and reinforced. the singer uses the streets of medellín as an extension of the scenic space, but those streets are no longer known in depth; the city may have been his place of humble origins but is now only partially accessible from his position of fame. the boy from medellín is therefore an obligatory watch for those interested in reggaetón culture, its aesthetics, politics, narratives, dynamics of local production and popularization, the struggles of the real person behind the artist, the blurred boundaries that social media creates between audiences and artists, and the development of reggaetón scenes in latin american cities in general, and in medellín in particular. the five-episode tv documentary series flow importado, ritmo pegado (2018), which documents the rise to fame of key reggaetón figures from medellín, including j balvin himself, offers important historical context to heineman’s film. although the boy from medellin stands on its own, readers will gain a deeper understanding of the stories of j balvin and the other reggaetón artists reviews 85 shown in the film as well as their audiences’ passion for the genre, from watching the tv series beforehand. the boy from medellín will not disappoint even those purely interested in reggaetón aesthetics; the director devoted about ten minutes to the final concert, a fortunate decision that allows us to appreciate balvin’s artistic craft in all its splendor. notes 1 this performance of “tiradera pa’l gurú” can be watched here: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yotgsfifqo0>. references auslander, philip. 2004. “performance analysis and popular music: a manifesto”. contemporary theater review 14(1): 1-13. auslander, philip. 2006. “musical personae”. the drama review 50(1): 100-119. garcía, julio. 2013. “del tango al reggaetón: medellín, capital de los contrastes musicales.” bbc news mundo , 17 october. <https://www.bbc.com/mundo/ noticias/2013/11/131017_cultura_medellin_capital_musical_colombia_jgc>. monson, ingrid. 2007. freedom sounds: civil rights call out to jazz and africa. oxford: oxford university press. navarro, fernando. 2019. “medellín, la fábrica del reggaetón”. el país, 30 november. <https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/11/26/eps/1574784498_877729.html>. filmography franco, andrés. 2018. flow importado, ritmo pegado. medellín: telemedellín. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yotgsfifqo0 https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias/2013/11/131017_cultura_medellin_capital_musical_colombia_jgc https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias/2013/11/131017_cultura_medellin_capital_musical_colombia_jgc https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/11/26/eps/1574784498_877729.html dancecult 14(1)86 explosions in the mind: composing psychedelic sounds and visualisations jonathan weinel singapore: palgrave macmillan, 2021 isbn: 9789811640544 (hardcover), 9789811640551 (ebook) rrp: £89.99 (hardcover), £71.50 (ebook) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.13> dave payling staffordshire university (uk) explosions in the mind (eitm) is part of the palgrave studies in sound series, exploring sonic and audio-visual themes. it is weinel’s second book, and can be read as a companion to his earlier inner sound: altered states of consciousness in electronic music and audiovisual media (weinel, 2018). inner sound explores altered states of consciousness (ascs) in audio-visual media from a theoretical perspective, and contextualises it with related work, whereas eitm focusses squarely on weinel’s own praxis, originating from his phd studies and extended to the present day. the book is richly illustrated with many full colour images and includes supplementary materials hosted online by the publisher, comprising audio and video samples and working software apps for experimenting with the techniques discussed in the book. weinel frames his work around altered states of consciousness, specifically psychedelic experiences and how they can be interpreted in sound and vision. psychedelic theories such as leary’s “seven levels of energy consciousness” (1998), are introduced, in this case explaining how it has influenced the design of surfer stem (2010); weinel’s audio composition discussed in chapter 2. with topics ranging from digital performance through to painting and direct animation techniques, an extensive range of artistic disciplines are represented. each chapter commences with personal anecdotes revealing the nature of the content ahead and are then interwoven with informative references to popular culture and recollections of weinel’s experiences. after these introductory notes there follows a detailed examination of the individual artworks themselves. as an example, cenote sagrado (2014), is one of weinel’s audio-visual compositions inspired by his visit to a ritualistic sacrifice centre, the sacred cenote in mexico. after discussing its historical significance the technical realisation of the composition itself is detailed: in this case direct animation on film stock and rhythmic hardware sound synthesis. a recurring compositional technique is also included here: the piece is structured to emulate the onset, plateau and termination phases that one might experience in a psychedelic trip, and this determines the audio-visual qualities in each section. from a dance music perspective, eitm explores some of the more niche, and often more sonically “harder”, edm genres including flashcore—a form of speedcore techno with elements of electroacoustic music—hard trance, acid techno and hardcore rave music. weinel incorporates some of these edm styles into his electroacoustic compositions, surfer reviews 87 stem using elements from dubstep for example. vaporwave is another genre weinel uses, taking a plunderphonics approach to 1980s and 1990s audio trivia sample loops to create an immersive nostalgia trip in his cyberdream (2019) virtual reality experience. these genres are generally touched on quite briefly but there is a lot of material to cover, and sound is only one component of the many multimedia productions on show here. eitm introduces weinel’s creative works chronologically with respect to their date of creation, and is sequenced to cover the categories of electroacoustic composition, real-time performance, audio-visual composition, interactive projects, vj performance and virtual reality experiences, mirroring weinel’s artistic journey. overall, it is an engaging read and will be of interest to artists, practitioners and academics from the disciplines of electronic music, creative coding, djing and vjing, composition, performance and related fields. it is highly relevant to those utilising a practise-based approach to research where this can lead to insights into methods for expanding an artist’s creative repertoire. a practise-based approach to research is continually rising in popularity across a range of creative disciplines and this volume will provide a useful reference for others to follow. the frameworks provided in the concluding chapter 8 are particularly indicative and useful in this respect. introduced here are three design frameworks, specifically: psychedelic journeys in sound, asc simulations and synaesthetic visualisations of sound, which have been formulated through practise and can be implemented by others desiring to create asc inspired artworks. the conclusion also discusses how the covid-19 pandemic has influenced the development of virtual clubs and dance events incentivising the shift to digital and online experiences, providing motivation and increased relevance for continued study. references leary, timothy. 1998. the politics of ecstasy. berkeley, california: ronin. weinel, jonathan. 2018. inner sound: altered states of consciousness in electronic music and audiovisual media. oxford, uk: oxford university press. weinel, jonathan. 2019. “cyberdream vr: visualizing rave music and vaporwave in virtual reality”. in proceedings of the 14th international audio mostly conference: a journey in sound, 277–81. new york, usa: association for computing machinery. <https://doi.org/10.1145/3356590.3356637>. discography weinel, jonathan. 2010. entoptic phenomena ep. 2010. (mp3): entopic. <https://www.discogs.com/release/2332275-jon-weinel-entoptic-phenomena-ep>. filmography weinel, jonathan. 2014. cenote sagrado. uk. <https://vimeo.com/107164661>. https://doi.org/10.1145/3356590.3356637 https://www.discogs.com/release/2332275-jon-weinel-entoptic-phenomena-ep https://vimeo.com/107164661 dancecult 14(1)88 the discourse community of electronic dance music anita jóri bielefeld: transcript verlag, 2022 isbn: 9783837657586 (paperback) rrp: $45.90 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.14> andrew whelan university of wollongong (australia) the discourse community of electronic dance music is a book about how people communicate about electronic dance music online. it is an important contribution to edmc and online interaction research for two reasons. firstly, it develops a methodological framework for engaging with how people talk about musical phenomena online, how to evaluate these “discourse communities” and what coheres them. secondly, the book therefore poses crucial, albeit largely tacit questions to the field of popular music studies broadly, and the field of edmc research in particular: how do people talk about music and what should researchers do about that, which is to say, what is their method of analysis? how is that method justified and what is scalable or portable about it? jóri’s framework is operationalised across three language domains. respectively, these are structure and meaning (e.g. insider terminology, compensatory strategies such as “likes” and emojis and identity markers such as “i” and “we”); interaction management (e.g. hierarchical dynamics in terms of frequency of contributions and extent of interaction in terms of response rates); and social phenomena (linguistic expressions of friendship and community, tokens of mutual interest etc.). as chapter one elucidates, jóri’s framework draws on susan herring’s canonical work on computer-mediated discourse analysis (2004). she directs this in pursuit of what, following john swales, she calls “discourse communities”, a heuristic analogous to “virtual scenes” (38-9), intended to capture the interpersonal networks and exchanges occurring at the research sites. these sites are: the web forums we are the music makers and gearspace (devoted to aphex twin and music production technology respectively); the facebook groups tb-303 owners club and italo disco maniacs; the “classic” websites, vintage synth explorer and resident advisor; and the blogs matrixsynth, female:pressure tumblr and little white earbuds. the second chapter contains a thorough discussion of discourse-related research methods, including corpus-based and multimodal discourse analyses and cognate approaches. reviews 89 linguistic anthropology does not get a mention, although conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis—two closely linked sociological approaches—are both discussed and incorporated. the book also draws on research on youth culture, popular music and edmc in english, german and hungarian, and is thus valuable as an interdisciplinary (and even intercultural) dialogue and a gateway to further research. although some of the discourse and method material can be technical—and here an index would have been helpful—jóri does not presuppose technical knowledge on the reader’s part, and most technical matters are explained in accessible prose. one consequential term that is not defined at the point of its introduction though is “genre”. first appearing in the literature review, and germane to the discussion of “community” as a discursive phenomenon, “genre” can be confusing to those unfamiliar with its application in linguistics (perhaps especially for readers anticipating the musical use of that term). genre is formulated here as an event e.g., a news report, or a presidential press conference (75). another term, upon which the project is predicated, is “community” (71-73). the book raises important questions about what an online social group is and how to measure it through its language use, not all of which it sets out to address. the term “community” is not problematised. this isn’t necessarily a shortcoming: “community” sometimes functions as a sort of placeholder, indexing empirically observable phenomena. the book is agnostic on the content of “community” or what it might entail politically (with the important caveat that jóri is direct about the gendered language use in her data, and about the broader exclusionary patterns in edmc). but jóri still has to develop tools to assess the extent and content, as it were, of group cohesion. one way of doing this is by reference to the use of “we” as an indicator of community (119, 125, 137, 147). the assumptions underlying the idea that “we” would stand in this way are not explicated. one can imagine situations where there is community sentiment, but people do not use “we”, and the converse, where “we” is abused by powerful figures seeking to impose the appearance of consensus. ultimately (and going by her account of the data, rightly), jóri determines “we” is of limited efficacy as an indicator and suggests it be abandoned (174). what are the implications of this? is it telling us something about collective identity, or is it telling us something about communication? if the latter, is it about mediation, or is it about communicative strategy? jóri does not speculate on these questions, but they help to show how, by engaging so thoroughly with online data, she pushes the parameters of cmda and similar corpus-oriented approaches as far as they will go. one important aspect of the book is how it works across different online platforms: forums, blogs and so on, each with distinct affordances. as jóri acknowledges, there is a relationship between platform design and community structure. for example, some of the limited interaction on the matrixsynth blog, despite its popularity, may be attributable to the matrixsynth closed facebook group (164). “community”, such as could be discerned by use of “we”, might therefore not map neatly onto a corpus assembled at a single site, because gertrude stein’s adage, “there is no there there” (1937: 17), still applies to the internet. dancecult 14(1)90 those who are present are always also in at least one other place. this does not undermine the analysis, but it does invite methodological reflection about scope, site and corpus. any analysis will have self-defined limits. as jóri shows, the strength of a corpus approach itself requires sensitivity in a context of platform porosity. the classification scheme jóri applies provides a picture of the shape of the relationships inside the group and how they are conducted. it can be used to measure the scale, frequency and intensity (the “temperature”) of social interaction. this enables comparative work, but it also means that the local ethnographic flavour comes from (naturally occurring) terminology, rather than multi-turn sequences evidencing how participants negotiate meaning and their respective positions. for example, in the analysis of the italo disco facebook group, jóri lists some of the adjectives used to describe italo tracks, including “bomb, very hot, very sophisticated, obscure girl of italo, superfluous, cheap, wonderful, great, hot girl of italo, such a beauty, bumped up, awesome crasher, nice, lovely, extremely rare, beautiful” (154). the lingua franca is presumably english, though jóri points out that familiarity with the italian language is regarded positively within the group. the gender politics of these adjectives are evident. jóri suggests that “bomb” is so gendered, and though we know (from tom jones) that there can be a “sexbomb”, i am not sure about this: bomba in italian seems more along the lines of “sensational”. local context matters. the same connotation to “bomb” would not extend—to me at least—to say, rage against the machine’s “bombtrack”, or the radio bomb drum ‘n’ bass project, where we might instead say “bomb” signifies fantasies of hypermasculinity. jóri attributes this gendered use of language to the historical conjuncture in which italo disco rose to prominence, along with the majority male participants in the group. this book—and the forms of analysis which jóri conducts so adroitly in it—is most compelling where it touches on much bigger and broader preoccupations in contemporary sociocultural research. the historical backdrop of italo and contemporary language use around it are one example of this; that is, that the milieu in which italo disco emerged continues to influence how italo is described. another important context, raised several times in the book, is that of nostalgia (131, 152, 156). articulating local language practices to much broader cultural concerns both validates the methodology and serves to pinpoint the cultural phenomena so identified. this becomes riveting at the points where music appears to shape language use, as when jóri observes regarding italo disco that [t]he characteristics of the music genre—expresses romanticism, emotions, affections, and sexuality—highly influenced the characteristics of the discourse … the group’s language use … showed an interesting tendency of ‘emotionally driven’ discourse (161). we cannot know from the data, and jóri does not conjecture on what mechanisms might “shift” emotional registers from music to discourse about it. nonetheless, this discussion of the interplay between language use and music—or the nature of multimodal interaction—is reviews 91 deeply significant, and resonates with a lot of preoccupations in the literature about popular music, and perhaps especially about edmc given its sometimes tangential orientation to lyrical meaning. similarly, the perennial questions about method and how to access, or how people report on, musical experiences are cast in fresh light by the work jóri conducts here. jóri’s book commands attention because of how it generates these kinds of insights, especially relative to more established music research methods (music criticism, interviews, fieldwork etc.). the discourse community of electronic dance music is methodologically rigorous, rich in empirical detail and speaks to much bigger debates in the scholarship on popular music and edmc. references herring, susan c. 2004. “computer-mediated discourse analysis: an approach to researching online behavior.” in designing for virtual communities in the service of learning, ed. sasha barab, rob kling and james h. gray, 338–376. cambridge: cambridge university press. <https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511805080.016>. stein, gertrude. 1937. everybody’s autobiography. new york, random house. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511805080.016 dancecult 14(1)92 dancefloor-driven literature: the rave scene in fiction simon a. morrison london: bloomsbury, 2021 isbn: 9781501389924 (paperback) rrp: £28.99 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.15> toby young guildhall school of music and drama (uk) as reviews editor of dancecult, one of the delights of my role has been discovering the wealth of ways that filmmakers around the world depict, interpret and critique electronic dance music culture through an artistic lens. until encountering simon morrison’s excellent book on dancefloor-driven literature i perhaps had not given the same credence to novelists for going beyond simple descriptions of club cultures, but as this delightful foray into the entangled world of prose and beats demonstrates clearly and effectively, fiction has produced as much considered and vibrant commentary on edmc as film, if not more. in his book, morrison sets out to explore this entanglement by mobilising sociocultural knowledge around the uk rave scene in the 1990s as a lens through which to analyse literary texts. he draws on three central uses of edm in fiction—figurative, mechanical and diegetic—as “ways in” to the texts, unpicking the multiple ways that authors choose to (re) present the sonic and haptic world of rave both in and through text. at its heart there are some central questions (or even tensions) which need resolving: “how might authors write about something so otherworldly as a nightclub scene? how might they write lucidly and fluidly about the rigid metronomic beat of electronic music? … [and how] might they accurately recount in fixed symbols the drifting, hallucinatory effects of a drug experience?” (61). morrison chooses to answer these rigorously and strategically by moving from the broad to the specific. beginning with the broad, the first half of the book (chapters 1-5) employs sub/club-cultural theories as points of disciplinary grounding to help define the terms and contexts at play. whilst a lot of this material is well-trodden in edmc scholarship, morrison presents it with an admirable deftness, and as he starts to introduce elements of literary theory in chapter 5, the more unique and interesting qualities of this work begins to reveal itself. for me though, it is in the second half of the book (chapters 6-9)—the literary case studies—that the book really comes into its own. beginning with irvine welsh’s seminal ecstasy (1996), a vivid picture emerges of authors not so much compelled to recreate or even aesthetically elevate the subterranean deviance of clubspace, as to revel in the messiness of it; to wallow in the rich, sticky potential of all those chaotic signifiers of excess and abandon and use this potential to radically redefine the literary canon. what comes across clearly from morrison’s writing is the richness and playfulness with which his case study authors both guide us, and are themselves guide by, the visceral reviews 93 expressionism of rave and club spaces; intertwining vivid descriptions of these hedonistic spaces with nuanced and layered narrative approaches that capture of even mimic the non-hierarchical and anti-teleological anarchy of repetitive beats. one beautiful example morrison shares is of jeff noon’s needle in the groove (1999) and the way his prose style allows the complexity and repetition of the music to almost infect his language, creating textures of language—a liquid dub poetics, if you will— that cleverly reflects the repeating, layering, sampling and splicing of sonic material. another interesting theme that emerges is the complex dependency on drug-taking imagery as a shorthand for depictions of power, hedonism and release. it is interesting how many of the novels that morrison discusses employ the postmodern storytelling strategies of “classic” partying writers (think the hazy multiplicities of william burroughs or the brutal clash between fact and fiction in hunter s. thompson) to invoke the paradoxical vigour and fragility of drug-taking. we see this tendency particularly clearly in morrison’s third case study on nicholas blincoe, whose chaotic fictional ethnography portray the acid delirium admirably. there’s something more general about technology and control in dance spaces that is strongly hinted at here, but perhaps not fully unpacked. i was reminded of the wonderful moment in china miéville’s bizarre urban fantasy king rat (1998)—a reimagination of the pied piper fairytale set in london’s breakbeat and dnb scene, not included by morrison—where the protagonist discovers that instead of merely spinning records, a dat with multiple layered flute samples loaded onto it is much more effective for controlling everyone in the club. omissions aside—i’d also want to include rainald goetz’s stunning avant garde novella rave (1998) here—dancefloor-driven literature is wonderful book, filled with both academic richness and personal joy. a particular strength of this book is morrison’s ability to dance between literary theory, thick description, journalistic interviews and unabashed connoisseurship with elegance and ease. intermediality, rather than translation, is at the heart of morrison’s approach, and where a lesser writer might have tried to pin the literature down into rigid theoretical frameworks and taxonomies, we are left with a beautiful sense of aesthetic awe and openness that has more than inspired me to go and read more fiction. highly recommended. saborítmico: a report from the dance floor in mexico emilio ocelotl universidad nacional autónoma de méxico (mexico) luis n. del angel mcmaster university (canada) marianne teixido universidad nacional autónoma de méxico (mexico) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2018.10.01.11> rggtrn (pronounced reɣɣaeˈtɾon), originally an electroacoustic and mixed music duo founded in 2012 in mexico city, has evolved into a collective that engages in algorithmic dance music and audiovisual improvisation informed by the latinx context that revolves around its members. this text is a first effort to document our journey as a nomadic group interested in music such as reggaeton, cumbia sonidera, and tribal. this article discusses: 1) the interaction between the performer, the audience, and the technology; 2) the multiple layers of exclusion that live coding communities exercise towards gender and division of labor within the audiovisual performance; 3) the collective musical culture of the members of rggtrn, the communities they belong to and for which they perform. figure 1. rggtrn at iclc 2017. credit: tatiana durán. neither a band nor a dj in 2015, we, rggtrn organized a gig at the hackerspace rancho electrónico in mexico city.[1] this event, which included the participation of tristetren and alias616, was our first gig in which we shared the stage with both live coding and non-live coding musicians—alias616, for example, makes techno with modular synthesizers. this gig was notable for us as a considerable amount of people (around forty) showed up, and most importantly, they had fun. all this gained us an invitation to perform again one year later at the anniversary of this same hackerspace. when this new gig arrived we noticed that in the lineup we were the only live coders. this party, though, was completely dedicated to dance and was divided into three large stages: one for rock, one for latin music and a third for djs and electronica. this gig, then, presented some challenges for us as described as follows. first, there was only one projector available at the venue, making it impossible to project everyone’s code (we were two audio performers and elihú garret, a guest visual artist). secondly, the stage was brightly lit and the projector was set up too close to the wall so elihú’s visuals passed almost unseen. as we are neither a live band nor djs (but something in between), the organizers were not sure which of the three stages to put us on, so we ended performing along with the salsa and cumbia bands. at that time, our performance felt more like a set of songs produced by a traditional live band than a dj set, however, in this stage—destined to latin music—the liveness of our music and the fluency of our improvisational techniques were distant from what a latin band can actually do. when we arrived at the event—just ten minutes before our performance—people were so engaged with dancing to the rhythm of salsa and cumbia that, of course, they did not want to stop. and there we were, on stage, with computers instead of congas, brass, keyboard and other instruments conventionally associated with tropical music, throwing out patterns that poorly resembled the music they had been dancing a couple minutes ago. tropical music made with acoustic instruments is usually danced in couples, and while rggtrn’s music alludes to this style of music, the straightness of our automated beat suggests an individual dancing approach, which, in that occasion, caused discomfort to some people from the audience. after this party, we started to wonder which would be the traits that distinguish rggtrn from a live music band and a dj. in this regard, we think that working with code gives the possibility of expanding the musical thoughts of each member of the collective as we consider that our live coding approach is directly related to an arrangement of experiences that are expressed in our lines of code. these musical thoughts are not fixed in a track but constantly modified and executed according to the flow of the performance and the choices from the performer in turn. the intentions of each member of rggtrn is revealed by an individual and deliberate use of their previous experience that ultimately blends into a unified audiovisual improvisation. the results of each set are defined by a mixture of multiple individual contributions. the latter enables us to individually express, experiment, agree and disagree during performance. each of us code in individual non-shareable ides and documents but the interventions of each participant are made explicit in the code projected. this approach presents some drawbacks as, now and then, the technical possibilities of venues do not permit us having a projector for each one of us (sometimes, there is not even a projector). to agree on turns, ongoing changes, and other details, we use verbal communication. this system of turns allows us to maintain a stream of music with continuous changes and varied personalities. each performance serves as a public action where we uncover issues connected to our practice. the relationship between the audio and the video, for example, has generated discussions that transcended the technical and relates to divisions of labor (discussed in the following section). visuals tend to be relegated to the background, becoming an accessory and are excluded from this space of recognition, agreement and dissent. normalization as invisibilization and the geography of exclusion in 2016 we began to problematize the relationships between the audiovisual performance and gender. during that time, we were in colombia collaborating with the algo0ritmos, a collective based in medellín, whose activity revolves around the development of code-based musical interfaces and education through creative programming. a workshop and an algorave were carried out in collaboration with them at platohedro, a colombian organization focused on culture and education, and whose activities focus on the creative and critical use of software. rggtrn’s 2016 tour throughout colombia (pinkdata 2016) during this tour, concerns about gender were raised by the two female members of rggtrn: jessica rodriguez and marianne teixido. it was originally intended that marianne would document the tour and jessica would make visuals for the algorave in medellin. coincidently, alexandra cárdenas organized another algorave in manizales a week later and invited us to play there. she asked under which name we wanted to appear in the flyer, and jessica answered that we would all appear as rggtrn—jessica and marianne were usually listed as guest artists on flyers. in the end, they both made visuals at manizales’ algorave. this sparked several debates about the division of labor in rggtrn’s performances, and the invisibility of women live coders in latin america. the main criticism about the division of labor relates to the fact that it is "common" in the mexican live coding scene to find women coding visuals, and men coding audio. maybe this situation cannot be applied to other parts of the world, but in mexico it is the trend from what we have experienced so far. sometimes the visual artist does not appear on the flyer which implies that their work is less valuable than the work of the audio live coder. in performance, sound can be more dominant than video because it is more pervasive to the senses than image. in an audiovisual performance, sound is everywhere, but visuals are often limited to a fixed space. if you want to watch the visuals you have to face towards the projection screen and if you close your eyes or look to another place the visuals lose their importance. the predominance of the sound over the video is a manifestation of these gendered power relations established under a mutual, silent and harmful consensus. a few months ago, marianne interviewed the mexican live coder malitzin cortés regarding her participation at mutek mx 2017. she mentions the difficulties experienced as a female audio performer where people, most of the time, assume she is a visual artist. she recounts that when she arrives at soundchecks and starts setting up, people often ask surprised: "do you play music? really?" (teixido 2017). despite these barriers, malitzin has gained space in this practice and is, along with libertad figueroa, now one of the mexican live coders with most international recognition. these hierarchies also play out in where the visual artist is able to locate themself. venues usually have little or no accommodations that guarantee the technical conditions for visuals to happen. usually, the projector is far from the stage and because hdmi or vga cables are often short, the visual artist is forced to position themself near to the projector and therefore, away from the stage. although sometimes not being visible on the stage is the visual artist’s decision, the absence of the minimum technical requirements does not leave room for that choice to exist. the visual artist, then, is often off-stage, displaced to the periphery of the performance space and less visible. this lack of visibility of video performers (usually assumed to be women) replicates women's struggle for visibility in the field of music technology. despite an active participation of women in the creation, interpretation and development of electronic music, often male names are the ones that survive in archives and historical retellings. an example of this is the documentary i dream of wires (fantinatto and amm 2014), which retells the story of electronic music and the synthesizer. however, it omits the names of the women like suzanne ciani, laurie spiegel, joan tower, ellen dale lerner, bebe barron, else marie pade, pauline oliveros, delia derbyshire, alice shields, eliane radigue, micheline coulombe saint-marcoux, ruth white, daphne oram, among others, who collaborated actively in the process that the filmmakers intend to document. the invisibility of women in the history of electronic music also extends to live coding practice to some extent in latin america in terms of live performance and software development. discussions around visibility, struggle for space, and reconfiguration of the division of labor are important in latin america. the challenge is to consider the decolonial feminist perspective within the electronic art, particularly, in live coding. it is necessary to start looking to women live coders from latin america such as libertad figueroa, daniela moreno wray, viviana ramírez, mitzi olvera, karina álvarez, olivia jack, valerie rejas, malitzin cortés, and karen del valle. it is also important to promote the appropriation of live coding and other art-oriented technologies among latin american women to foster their sorority ties and individual expression, increase their access to computer technologies, and promote technological self-defense in order to counter a strongly macho and violent latinx society. the work that joanne armitage, norah lorway, alexandra cárdenas, shelly knotts and miri kat (bolt 2017) have done to achieve visibility within the live coding scene is very important. nevertheless, alongside the gender perspective, we should also consider other factors of exclusion and invisibilization including geographical location, language and economic and sociocultural status; we should be aware that these intersect, generating barriers of double or multiple exclusion. mispronunciation = rggtrn rggtrn—formerly known as ~on—was born in 2013 as an audiovisual duo at the national center for the arts in mexico city. being born within this institution and influenced by its music traditions led rggtrn’s first performances to happen inside a scene dominated by contemporary, electroacoustic, and acousmatic music.[2] at that time we had some uncertainty as to what type of music and visuals the duo should make in order to fit into the niche of live coding—we thought that live coding was all about contemporary music and abstract visuals. moreover, we were wondering if contemporary music was the real goal of live coding and dance music a side effect of it. although, in 2012, the duo played a set of dance-ish dubstep music at the symposium of music and code /*vivo*/, it was not until 2015 that we decided to experiment with dance music influenced by tribal-guarachero and reggaetón.[3] one year before, nevertheless, we made a small tour in europe. in bilbao, after our first gig, a couple of drinks, and some jokes, we proposed to the other people who had performed to continue partying at a reggaeton dance club located nearby. thor magnusson, a live coder, tired, commented that he did not feel like dancing "reggeatron" and went back to his hotel followed by the rest of the performers. this fortunate mispronunciation (i.e. "reggaeton" with an "r" inbetween the "t" and the "o") in addition to our new interest in making electronic music informed by latin dance genres, gave birth to the current name of the collective. we think that the name of the collective represents some kind of glitch that happens when translating words and practices from one language, culture, or environment to another. for us, this glitch that is multidirectional and both positive and negative, presents constantly to us in different ways when composing and performing with english-derived programming languages like supercollider. examples of these include misunderstanding functions, mistranslating and transliterating concepts and appropriating inbuilt sounds and synthesizers, among others. all of these makes us feel a bit of discomfort during the process of composition and result in musical hybridization and sometimes just musical assimilation. otherness towards the "collective" musical culture(s) tribal was one of the first genres we addressed with a great welcoming from close friends and members of the live coding community. in 2016 we began to explore other latin american musical genres such as cumbia sonidera which we performed in some algorave gigs in the uk with good success too.[4] however, when we share, through social networks, rggtrn’s cumbias to mexican colleagues trained in academic music, their response is always a laughing emoji. this little laughing face, without any further feedback, conveys to us that the music made by the collective is not considered serious. as a collective, we have observed a strong division between classical and popular music that is very explicit in mexico city’s music scene. moreover, classical is the most valued music, followed by genres like jazz, rock and techno, leaving mexican styles almost at the very bottom. mexican music genres such as banda, huapango and son are persistently heard in the streets, on public transportation, at parties, bars and clubs. we, as mexicans, are immersed in this type of music, we know how to dance it—at least the basic steps. it is part of our collective musical culture and it is associated with the festive character of the country. genres often heard at algoraves in mexico include techno, breakcore, noise and experimental. on the other hand, electronic cumbia, nortech, tribal, nopal beat and other genres influenced by latin folk music, commonly heard in the music scene in mexico city, tijuana, guadalajara and monterrey are rarely performed in algoraves.[5] the aforementioned genres are more often explored through more traditional electronic tools such as daws and midi controllers. however, their exploration through code is interesting, as managing lines of text that represent sections of instruments that are orchestrated and have frequent fills represent compositional and interpretive challenges. this exploratory work has already begun in mexico with micorex who use live coding techniques to compose, interpret and merge styles like mexican bolero with electronic music. conclusions as members of rggtrn, we continue seeking to reaffirm our own algorithmic musical style, prioritizing mexican and latin american culture. in our exploration, we have found that problematics described by sound, image and software are representative of day-to-day aspects of mexican society, namely women frequently constrained by assumptions of a lack of knowledge and expertise, a persistent devaluation of the country’s culture(s) and an intent of neocolonialization through foreign cultural products. our critique of the division of labor emerged from an observation of how we were approaching our work within the collective. now that we are aware of issues regarding gender and visibility, we have started to revise our workflow and inter-group dynamics so to minimize inherent hierarchies within them. one way to do this is by making all of us equally responsible for rggtrn’s intellectual and aesthetic direction. rggtrn is an exercise in displacement with respect to the way we approach technology and its possible uses and looks to create a type of distortion/noise/dissent in counterpoint to the music usually heard in algoraves. figure 2. rggtrn at volta dec. 2017. credit: amaury gutiérrez acosta. author biographies stephanie marianne teixido guzmán. from mexico city, currently a student of communication at the universidad nacional autónoma de méxico specializing in audiovisual production. her interests intersect with visual arts, live coding, performance, video art, mapping, experimental photography and live cinema. she collaborates with the "images in motion" department of the national center for arts (mexico), the collective chipotle, the experimental film collective la ruina (im)producciones, and she makes photographic essays on the alternative mexican music scenes for the online magazines. email: <ztp.txdo@gmail.com> emilio ocelotl reyes. from mexico city, currently an ma candidate in music technology at the universidad nacional autónoma de méxico. his interests are sociology, live coding, computer music, sound and interactivity. in 2013 and 2016 he was awarded a "young composers" scholarship from the mexican center for sonic arts (cmmas) (morelia, michoacán, méxico). he is a member of the livecodenet ensemble and the collective rggtrn. email: <emilio.ocelotl@gmail.com> luis n. del angel. from mexico city, currently a phd candidate in communication, new media, and cultural studies at mcmaster university, canada. his research intersects with live coding, metacreation and software studies. from 2010 to 2013 he worked at the national center for the arts (mexico) exploring live coding and free/libre and open source software. he is a member of the live coding collective rggtrn (mexico) and the laptop ensemble the cybernetic orchestra (canada). email: <navarrol@mcmaster.ca> web: <https://rggtrn.github.io/> references bolt, isabelle. 2017. "meet the female coders pushing electronic music into the future". mixmag, 31 august. <https://mixmag.net/feature/female-coders-algorave> (accessed 3 august 2018). paz, vic. 2016. "a look at the latin american influence in world electronic music: exporting traditional sounds ready for fusion". vice, october 4. <https://thump.vice.com/es_mx/article/vv8nz8/una-mirada-a-la-influencia-latinoamericana-en-la-musica-electronica-mundial> (accessed 4 november 2018). stephens, alexis. 2013. "meet mexico city's electronic underground". vice, july 25. <https://thump.vice.com/en_us/article/bma8gz/meet-mexico-citys-electronic-underground> (accessed 4 november 2018). teixido, marianne. 2017. "cndsd: live code en mutek méxico 2017". noisey, 24 november. <https://noisey.vice.com/es_mx/article/bj79y8/cndsd-live-code-en-mutek-mexico-2017> (accessed 6 august 2018). filmography fantinatto, robert and jason amm. 2014. i dream of wires. canada: waveshaper media. < https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3636334/> (accessed 08 november 2018). pinkdata. 2016. "planckillallremix". youtube. uploaded 12 november 2017. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcyninpuugy> (accessed 23 july 2018). notes [1] rggtrn is jessica rodríguez, emilio ocelotl, marianne teixido and luis navarro del angel. [2] the national centre for the arts hosts the escuela superior de musica, which is a public music school focused on teaching both academic music and jazz music. [3] tribal-guarachero is a music style from center and north mexico, and reggaeton is a music style from puerto rico. [4] cumbia sonidera is a mexican music style derived from colombian cumbia and the dj culture. see <https://algorave.com/about/> [5] for more information on these genres, see paz (2016) and stephens (2013). introduction to ageing with edmc dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 11(1): 3–6 issn 1947-5403 ©2019 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.01 introduction to ageing with edmc david madden pepperdine university (us) david madden is an assistant professor of screen arts at pepperdine university. his research considers the cultural politics of electronic music from the intersections of history, technology, ageing and gender. currently he is writing a historical book on electronic music (mcgill-queen’s university press, forthcoming) and undertaking a micro historiography of the performers of the ondes martenot. he is also a musician, community arts organizer and artist, whose work crosses screens, dancefloors and media. <david.madden@pepperdine.edu> wide-spread and often alarmist reports of the growing ageing population spreading throughout the west and beyond are contested by researchers, media makers, activists and community organizers. these groups are increasingly turning to critical approaches of age and ageing to better understand the cultural dynamics of these generational shifts. such is the case in many parts of the world where “seniors” are the fastest growing age group who are expected to double in population in the next few decades. at the centre of this burgeoning work, scholars counter homogenous narratives of ageing populations (mason 2018) and fear-laden narratives that are imbued with totalizing apocalyptic demographics. typically portrayed pejoratively as the “silver” or “grey tsunami”, these normative accounts reaffirm what cultural historian margaret m. gullette calls the decline-oriented approach to age and ageing. as she writes: being too old, we are inveigled to believe, is a personal problem, aging. . . . ‘decline’ is the name i use for the entire system that worsens the experience of aging-past-youth. . . . historical forces produce waves of decline. we have been enduring a tidal wave (gullette 2011: 5). normative associations of age and ageing tend to only link age with a numerical category and frequently associate ageing with inevitable health problems, costs and issues. these narratives of decline operate on both individual and collective consciences, shaping our responses to ageing populations and the scripts that circumscribe our behaviour. feature articleguest editor’s introduction http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.01 mailto:david.madden@pepperdine.edu dancecult 11(1)4 the spirit of the emerging cultural approaches to age and ageing (katz 2005) informs the set of concerns and questions guiding this timely special edition of dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture. from these cultural perspectives, ageing is understood more as an experience and as a process that is connected to social and cultural forces and contingencies. this situated view sees “age” not as a number or as a variable, but as a potential lens to examine the world. this issue brings age/ageing studies in contact with electronic dance music culture (edmc) by highlighting the work of edmc theorists and practitioners. it offers scholarship tied to a growing group of researchers undertaking historical cultural studies of popular music (bennett 2013; forman 2013; katz 2014), gender ( jennings and gardner 2012), memory (grenier and valois-nadeau, forthcoming; hyltén-cavallius 2012) and ageing. the following key questions are addressed, with many more possibilities and queries calling for attention. how can stories of older djs, producers and scene actors contribute to our understandings of age studies and edmc? how might electronic dance music scenes and practices offer critiques of successful ageing and ageing scripts? how do relationships to musical praxis change through the passage of time? scholarship in this area seems long overdue, particularly in edmc, given its intensely intimate and layered connections with time, from the highly regulated scenes that build their distinctions through attention to alternating bpms, what steve goodman (2004) has referred to as “speed tribes”, to the hyper accelerated cyclical change of musical styles (straw 1991), and the narcotic embellishments, musical or otherwise, that play with party-goers’ perceptual and temporal fields, as well as the physicality of its spaces and the bodies it draws into such temporal vortexes. dance music scenes also have a way of both reaffirming and queering heteronormative and dominant temporalities, which presume that a life course should proceed in a linear and sequential way, from birth to death (taylor 2010). through different experiences of multiple life courses and through different valuations and uses of time such as “coming out”, “cruising time”, “ecstasy time”, and “speed time”, writes jodie taylor, queers problematize “normative progressions into adulthood and maturity”, thereby “placing queers outside many categories of ageappropriate behaviour” (2010: 894). this special edition includes feature articles and from the floor contributions from a range of approaches, disciplines, settings and theoretical frameworks that consider the distinct ways to think with ageing and edmc, broadly defined. alice o’grady and anna madill’s “being and performing ‘older’ woman in electronic dance movement culture” focuses on a group of club-goers that usually get left out of the popular press and in edmc scholarship. their accounts of ageing female psytrance clubbers complicates the scene’s longstanding reputation of intergenerational inclusiveness, as many of the participants in their study developed tactics to counter ageism and sexual harassment on and off the dancefloor. through interviews and a deep engagement with edmc’s limited literature on ageing, the authors’ push to the fore older women’s experiences and perspectives of club culture. madden | introduction to ageing with edmc 5 in “the irony and the ecstasy: the queer ageing of pet shop boys and lcd soundsystem in electronic dance music”, larissa wodtke discusses the aesthetics of irony and ambivalence in the work of these two pop and rock infused dance groups. wodtke details their belated musical ascension, coming when neil tennant (pet shop boys) and james murphy (lcd) were both in their 30s, and its challenge to the youth-oriented foundations of popular music and the hedonism of edm. this positionality, claims the author, places them in a queer tension as they balance and negotiate their “old age” (in pop terms) within these youthful settings. lastly, with “baby raves: youth, adulthood and ageing in contemporary british edm culture”, zoe armour examines the limits of age in translocal edm sound system and super(club) culture through interrogating formations of intergenerational relationships across a wide spectrum of party attendees. armour then looks at the baby rave phenomenon, which she periodizes from 2004 onward, as it relates to notions of heritage, and the way these raves have tapped into a new and robust consumer market and thereby generating new festival and super(club) experiences. the issue includes an additional feature article: carlos palombini’s “a danceable shower of bullets: sound morphologies, concrescence and neurosis in the genesis of an edm beat.” with the assistance of from the floor editor dave payling, the ftf section brings together several pieces, including a snapshot of one of brazil’s most important hip-hop scenes and an interview with one of electronic music’s most controversial figures. michel brasil offers “boom bap, trap and ageing in belo horizonte’s rap music scene”, his account of ageing rappers and beatmakers in brazil’s sixth largest city. tristan kneschke interviews genesis breyer p-orridge, perhaps best known as the front-person of the industrial art music group throbbing gristle, who’s recently been in the news due to her health problems and reports of abuse that continue to complicate her artistic legacy. in “travellers and sound system protest: matthew smith’s visual commentary”, dave payling reviews exist to resist, smith’s photo-journey through uk underground dance music culture (the piece includes an interview with smith). alistair fraser explores “death of/in british drum ‘n’ bass music”. dj donna bentley asks “have things really changed, or is it just me? ageing and dance music culture”. and finally, sébastien lavoie explains “my practice of live performance of spatial electronic dance music”. let these contributions provide an opening for more edmc studies of age and ageing. these studies might attend to the changing valuations of dance music’s material culture, or to the way scenes, genres and artists’ careers change in relation to the contingencies of time. ageing offers an approach to interrogate the world, lived experiences and the pressures, promises, rhythms and vibes that surround us. dancecult 11(1)6 acknowledgements many thanks to the contributors for their timely works and to dancecult and graham st john for making this special edition possible. this research was generously funded by ageing + communication + technologies (act), and the social sciences and humanities research council of canada (sshrc). i also want to thank pepperdine university and the communication division for their ongoing support as well. references bennett, andy. 2013. music, style and aging: growing old disgracefully? philadelphia, pa: temple university press. forman, murray. 2013. “kill the static: temporality and change in the hip-hop mainstream (and its ‘other’)”. in redefining mainstream popular music, sara baker, andy bennet and jodie taylor, ed., 61–74. new york: routledge. goodman, steve. 2004. “speed tribes: netwar, affective hacking and the audio-social”. in cultural hacking, ed. thomas dullo and franz liebl, 139–55. berlin: springer-verlag. grenier, line and valois-nadeau, fannie. forthcoming. a senior moment: cultural mediations of memory and ageing. bielefeld germany: transcript verlag. gullette, margaret, m. 2011. agewise: fighting the new ageism in america. chicago and london: the university of chicago press. hyltén-cavallius, sverker. 2012. “memoryscapes and mediascapes: musical formations of ‘pensioners’ in late 20th-century sweden”. popular music 31(2): 279–95. <https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261143012000050>. jennings, ros and gardner, abigail. 2012. ‘rock on’: women, ageing and popular music. burlington, vt: ashgate. katz, stephen. 2014. “music, performance and generation: the making of boomer biographies”. in aging, media, culture, ed. c. lee harrington, denise d. bielby and anthony r. bardo, 93–106. lanham, md: lexington books. — — —. 2005. cultural aging: life course, lifestyle, and senior worlds. peterborough, on: broadview press. mason, melanie. 2018. “california’s senior population is growing faster than any other age group. how the next governor responds is crucial”. la times, 7 october. <https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-pol-ca-next-california-demographics> (accessed 16 october 2019). straw, will. 2001. “systems of articulation, logics of change: scenes and communities in popular music”. cultural studies 5(3): 368–88. <https://doi.org/10.1080/09502389100490311>. taylor, jodie. 2010. “queer temporalities and the significance of ‘music scene’ participation in the social identities of middle-aged queers”. sociology 44(5): 893–907. <https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038510375735>. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261143012000050 https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-pol-ca-next-california-demographics https://doi.org/10.1080/09502389100490311 https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038510375735 pop as process: the digitalization of groove, form and time dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 13(1): 2–21 issn 1947-5403 ©2021 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.01 pop as process: the digitalization of groove, form and time anders reuter independent researcher abstract pop music production is increasingly dominated by practices from hip-hop and edm. the shift is hosted by a new generation of the digital audio workstation (daw) that not only connects with but also reflects contemporary ubiquitous computing culture. this article examines the temporal consequences of this digitalization of pop production and how it challenges traditional interpretations of the relationship between groove, repetition and teleology. using analysis of three current pop tracks, digital culture theory and process philosophy i approach contemporary pop temporality through a process paradigm. i argue that groove is rooted in signification of technology and genre-based practices rather than performance-based notions of difference, tension or timing discrepancy. pop production is based on a hybridization of human and algorithmic agency which entails new kinds of temporal ambiguity, multiplicity, precision and infinitesimal detail. in conclusion, i discuss how these novel temporal traits manifest themselves prereflexively as tacit knowledge. keywords: pop; music production; groove; digitalization; process philosophy anders reuter received his phd from university of copenhagen in 2021. entitled “pop processing: the digitalization of musical time and space”, it intersected popular music studies and new media studies. he also works as a journalist, writer and music producer. feature article https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.01 reuter | pop as process: the digitalization of groove, form and time 3 introduction “time has changed in the wake of the digital computational revolution” (hansen 2009: 295). new media theorist mark hansen even calls it a banal proposition because of the “extensive work of temporalizing that is currently carried out by technical artifacts in our world today” (2009: 298). indeed, music holds a particular relationship to time. as philosopher susanne langer writes: “music makes time audible, and its form and continuity sensible” (1953: 110). perhaps more than any musical form, pop is inherently entangled with the computational shift from inception to distribution to reception. concurrently, hip-hop and edm and their temporalities have in the past decades moved and adapted to the pop single format. this assimilation has arguably found a new home or even realisation in recent iterations of the digital audio workstation (daw), offering new production practices in pop music production.1 the question then arises: what does the computational shift mean for music’s relationship to time? or, more specifically, how does digitalization affect essential temporal features of pop music such as groove, form and teleology? i begin this article with a critical discussion of the performance-paradigm in popular music theory and hold it against hip-hop and edm-theory on the relationship between repetition and technology. i then analyse how hip-hop and edm-derived characteristics gain particular digital or even algorithmic character in contemporary pop music production in three tracks: martin garrix & dua lipa’s “scared to be lonely”, post malone’s “rockstar” and katy perry’s “chained to the rhythm”. they present various, and often dissimilar, kinds of temporal discrepancies and teleologies which, i argue, are part of a shift towards a musical process ontology. i turn to digital media theory to discuss the musical implications of this computational temporality in pop music. ubicomp (ubiquitous computing) culture displays new heterogenous temporal properties that can be traced in digital pop music’s novel levels of automation, precision, synchronicity and multiplicity that fundamentally defy human scale. i conclude that music production’s increasing shift towards a digital process ontology challenges anthropocentric, performance and difference-based interpretations of agency and time. instead, rhythm and time in pop are better understood as digital processes that signify particular music technologies and their genre-based practices. with inspiration from process philosophy, i discuss how a focus on how sounds multiply, relate or even grasp each other across loops and signal processing could present a new path for musical analysis. in the end, i argue that—in contrast to musicology’s dominant phenomenological interpretations—these processes manifest prereflexively, as tacit knowledge of the technology-bound processes unfolding. repetition, difference and processual technology signification a key question in popular music studies is the relationship between rhythm and time. in theory on performed popular music rhythm, the combination of repetition and spontaneous irregularity is understood as integral in music’s fundamental temporal push or drive forward. this is probably best described in charles keil’s influential work on rhythm, dancecult 13(1)4 in which he describes what he calls participatory discrepancies. according to keil, music is a communal or social activity and for it to be “personally involving and socially valuable, [it] must be ‘out of time’ and ‘out of tune’” (1987: 275). for keil, these discrepancies are corporeally bound and create what he calls the music’s vital drive. similar thoughts can be found in anne danielsen’s research into groove and time.2 here, drive is created via microrhythmic tension or through structural tension, which is, for example, the tension created by counter-rhythms such as the 4:3 pattern. according to danielsen, a groove is heard as repetition with a difference or sameness depending on the listeners’ resolution and experience; “a low-resolution, non-confident listener will probably tend to hear the ‘same thing,’ despite considerable differences from one repetition to the next” (danielsen 2018: 40–41). in other words, from this phenomenological perspective, it is the microrhythmic or structural tension that affords (the confident) listener the feeling of groove, of time and the work moving forward. nevertheless, to danielsen, it is not decisive whether a groove is exact or not, because even in “music performed by machines and not human beings—every repetition may be experienced as repetition with a difference, because the time is different” (danielsen 2018: 49).3 mark butler’s edm-research switches the perspective from human performance to technology. to him, edm sidesteps the timing variations that tend to inform human performance. “in the ways in which they repeat, edm compositions actively model technology”, and this turns exact repetition into “an intentionally cultivated creative strategy” (butler 2014: 188). instead of negating the existence of repetition without difference, exact repetition can be valued for what it does, making it “possible to appreciate its epistemological reality” (butler 2014: 190). yet the discrepancies of, for example, hiphop grooves do present a type of tension, or perhaps rather a particular negotiation of tension. mike d’errico writes about the relationship between repetition and discrepancy: “when a rhythmically dissonant moment is repeated, what was previously a rupture in the coherence of the groove becomes transitional material, enhancing the effect of the anacrusis and solidifying the stability of the beat” (d’errico 2015: 287). the consequence of d’errico’s argument is that instability, rupture and discrepancies within the loop can actually reinforce stability. in fact, the amount of detail being repeated verbatim emphasizes its inhuman automated perfection. instead of understanding discrepancies as signifiers of human performance, this perspective allows us to see temporal signification as intricately bound to technology. accordingly, various types of electronic grooves will have specific origins in practices that are equally historical, genre-related and directly embedded in specific types of music technology. as joseph schloss writes on hip-hop rhythm: “the circuitry and programming of different models of samplers are believed to impart special characteristics to the music (perhaps the best known of these characteristics is the legendary ‘mpc swing’, a rhythmic idiosyncrasy first noted in the akai mpc 60 sampler, circa 1988)” (schloss 2014: 202). particular music technologies afford particular rhythms. from turntable-cuts between breakbeats on vinyl to drum machines to samplers and mpc’s, hip-hop aesthetics is based on a variety of technology-bound grooves. reuter | pop as process: the digitalization of groove, form and time 5 the technological frames—the instruments shaping hip-hop as well as edm’s loops— have many (inter)faces, each with their own temporalities, and today these are all available in the grid of the contemporary daw. here, the affordances of previous music technologies— possibilities as well as limitations—are transposed to a digital context defined by a novel level and type of processual fitting, juxtaposition and interconnection. instead of blunt technological determinism, it is based on complex layers of technological signification. however, while the daw can do and signify virtually anything in terms of groove and time, the more recent iterations of the daw also afford specific and novel temporal features of their own. new temporalities in the daw the first generation of 1990s daws was based on a logic from the analogue recording studio.4 industry leading programs such as pro tools, cubase and logic had interfaces that were built on recording, organising and editing sound and midi through skeuomorphic representations of the recording studio. this included virtual effect racks and mixing desks and a tape-recorder logic of start, stop and record. the recording timeline was horizontal, an axis of time upon which sound events could be stacked vertically. steve goodman writes: “as with european musical notation’s inheritance from written text, digital audio software sequencers have inherited the habit of left-to-right visual scanning. the timeline constitutes the spatialization of the clock into a horizontal time” (goodman 2008: 257). the timeline of the first generation of the daws thus seemingly represents a traditional linear temporality. yet, as goodman argues, the temporal homogeneity begins to dissolve in the operations of the interface. “a temporal sequence of sounds suddenly occupies an area of the computer screen. what is opened up by this spatialization is the ease of temporal recombination” (goodman 2008: 257). he concludes that this facilitates nonlinear digital editing, which is different from analogue fast-forwarding and rewinding. however, recent developments in digital music production extend beyond temporal juxtapositions of cut-and-paste techniques and manipulating time by, for example, timestretching (changing the speed without changing pitch) or pitch scaling (changing pitch without changing speed). the dissolution of temporal linearity has been taken a step further in a new generation of highly popular daws such as fl studio and ableton live. these put the multiplicity, grid-based sequencing of interrelational parts and algorithmic processing at the centre of music production. fl studio can essentially perform the same functions as traditional daws, and its layout is in many ways similar to hardware-sequencers like the roland tr-808 or the tb-303. however, it is as software innately based on fast, intuitive and beat-centred sequencing in the interface. while the time-axis-bound regime of the timecursor does to some extent prevail in its sequencer, it does so almost multidimensionally, across windows of loops within loops, audio and midi metadata. a new automatised relationship between detail and the whole is therefore created; singular edits potentially apply to functions across fragments and the whole track. it is a practice based on a fast, programmable multiplicity where temporal events are constantly interconnected. dancecult 13(1)6 ableton live represents a perhaps even more conspicuous alternative to the traditional timeline. it consists of two view types and concurrent work modes: arrangement view and session view. the latter offers an inherently loop-based operationality. anything from short sound bites to whole albums can be triggered, manipulated and interrelated on the fly via a grid of coloured squares. as its name implies, it is a musical practice that is based on a live and improvisational approach to producing music. while session view in many ways works as a virtualisation of the logic of an mpc, its mouldable interface control and connectivity of processes differs. music production becomes processual—something ongoing, running. accordingly, in a pop production context, the final product (the track) becomes a screen-dump, as all the running processes are bounced down, frozen and committed to a definitive format. additionally, the use of samples and prepacked loops has been taken to a new level in cloud-based music production. when producers across the globe can access and use the same downloadable presets, samples and full loops (for instance through subscriptions to services such as splice, noiiz or loopcloud) the creative emphasis is put on their use and relation to other parts. this entails an increased emphasis on processual interconnectivity. in a sense, this is a practice or logic that is already embedded in the modularity of sound synthesis. essentially, analogue sound synthesis is based on fluctuating voltage used to shape and control other kinds of fluctuating voltages. it is a system of signal processing through the interconnected modelling of sound across parameters. from this perspective, music production becomes a macro-synthesis of sound working as a hybrid algorithmic structure. it is not just in its basis on loops, but in the conjunction of multiple automated functions that process and define each other mutually. from the dancefloor to the pop charts this shift in practices in music production has happened almost concurrently with pop music’s assimilation of hip-hop and edm aesthetics and practices. edm festivals had mainly been a european phenomenon, but in the 2000s, the us experienced a surge in the number of highly successful edm pop festivals.5 this spawned a new generation of djs that became super-stars, and the sound began to move into the mainstream as this new type of dj-producer became massively sought after in the pop music industry’s “song machine” (seabrook 2012). the skills, technology and aesthetics of djing was thus imported to the pop charts, adding the role of the dj-producer to paul thebergés’ definition of the “hyphenated musician”, which already includes a combination of a singer-songwriterproducer-engineer-musician-sound designer (théberge 1997: 221–22). to track and exemplify the assimilation of hip-hop, edm and digital temporalities, i will analyse three tracks, all from 2017, that represent differing temporalities as well as technology significations. reuter | pop as process: the digitalization of groove, form and time 7 interrelational algorithms: “scared to be lonely” (2017) garrix and dua lipa’s hit “scared to be lonely” is an example of the pop format’s adaptation of edm’s “break routine”, or what has been labelled the “pop drop” (sloan and harding, 2020: 46-52).6 from one perspective, this form represents an almost extreme teleological push with its overt and relentless revelling in setting up formal difference, announced extensively by framing devices. from another (macro) perspective, the break routine’s formal units in the shorter pop format produce an element of formal circularity exceeding the traditional verse-prechorus-chorus formula. the same could be said of “scared to be lonely” where one begins to predict the formal units’ circular unfolding. because of the formulaic order, the constant push towards the next formal unit and its dramatization, everything is expected. in other words, the track ambiguously exhibits both highly goaloriented forward-pushing linearity and formal circularity. if we turn to the rhythmic elements of “scared to be lonely”, we hear that the climactic drop-like dance chorus is defined by a wall of bass and synthesizers. these all display the same envelope (understood as the way the sound changes over time). they do this in a very unusual manner defined by the algorithmic nature of compression.7 compression follows an essential rule: if a signal’s volume exceeds threshold x, then attenuate the signal by the ratio y. sidechain compression is slightly more complicated and contains more directly interrelated processes across signals. it is basically the process of one sound’s transients triggering a compressor that controls (and ducks the signal of ) one or several other signals.8 in edm, this is often done so that a four-on-the-floor kick drum activates a compressor that ducks the volume of bass and synths. the result is that the wall of sound (and thus most of the track) bounces back up on the offbeat. in “scared to be lonely” the wall bounces to a different rhythm. it is difficult to aurally disentangle exactly how the interrelational dynamic processes are set up, but it is likely either an lfo-tool, a volume modulation plugin, or one or several sidechains with one of them being a so-called ghost sidechain trigger.9 the latter is a sound trigger that is not sent to the main output, so it is not heard, but it still works as a trigger for a sidechain compressor. in “scared to be lonely”, the ghost sidechain triggers on the 8ths, but with one or several beats lifted or missing resulting in the synth/bass-layer’s uneven bounces. this irregular feel is amplified by the envelope settings’ fairly slow attack and decay creating particularly slow swells and ducks which adds to the irregularity and fundamentally unnatural feel of the wall’s collective envelope. regardless of the exact production methods utilised, the wall is essentially created and shaped by a chain of algorithms. the manner of its process (shaped through settings of factors such as ratio, envelope, knee-type, etc.) is part and parcel of its creative use. while various types of analogue compression have been used extensively by producers throughout recent electronic music history, the digital domain of contemporary daw’s afford new levels of control, automation, precision and intersectionality. from a groove perspective, the gridded drums and the wall’s unusual envelope interconnect in a very particular way. dancecult 13(1)8 while perhaps not qualifying as a groove from a traditional perspective, the wall does, however, display very tangible discrepancies. the gridded drums supply a background that the wall both bounces to and differs from in character and envelope. the discrepancies are repeated verbatim according to the exactness of the digital grid. recent developments in hip-hop do display some substantially different characteristics that i will now discuss with an example of trap hip-hop in pop music. suspended difference: “rockstar (feat. 21 savage)” (2017) post malone’s “rockstar” excels in excessive sameness. except for the introduction of the rapper 21 savage and minor variations, the arrangement, dynamics and mood of the track stay the same for its almost four minutes long duration. it revels in its restrained lack of variation, drive or push. for instance, more than half of the track consists of the same twobar melody. the lyrics do change, but they are sung with an unusual lack of variation which is amplified by the heavy use of auto-tune. the beat is a typical trap beat with rolling hi-hat figures, the metallic “young chop snare” (from the producer young chop’s sample library), and a boomy 808 kick-drum and a bass (which is probably a pitched kick-drum with a long decay). the timing and timbral differences due to the minute velocity variations that traditionally define drum performance are not only quantised and repeated with exact sameness. they are also repeated in such a way that the reverb-less dry punches of the hi-hat and snare sound like on-off switches, punch-card coded in the grid of the piano-roll. taking the practice of sequencing beats into account, where minute squares on the grid activate sounds, it is perhaps not surprising that the aesthetic outcome begins to resemble miniature auditory monoliths. devoid of performative, corporeal or tactile gesture, it is the sound and signification of the sequencer and its operationality. while fl studio is undoubtedly used for a plethora of musical styles that do not fit this interpretation, it is difficult not relate the sound of, for instance, trap music and the practices of fl studio’s digital sequencing. here, instead of imagined narratives of performed, physical, gestural activity, the beat is embedded and defined by automation and digital multiplicity at the expense of human activity and agency. except for the intro and outro, the beat loops throughout the track. it breaks occasionally in a way that resembles a dj turning the music down before a chorus or drop, yet here it is mostly followed by a return to the same continuous lead melody. the minor formal change in the module where the melody changes slightly and goes up is repeated twice by post malone leaving it somewhere between a chorus, bridge and prechorus. in this a’, the rhythm in the melody stays more or less the same as in a. in other words, instead of a versechorus form, this is mainly one idea, one sound, one beat. the verse becomes the chorus and vice versa, and any sign of goal, direction, build-up or variation are punctured by the loop-based sameness.10 instead of the golden-section aesthetics of a verse-chorus form’s bridge, the introduction of 21 savage happens exactly in the middle of the track (1:49 into the 3:38 long track). the reuter | pop as process: the digitalization of groove, form and time 9 palindromic form is not unusual in hip-hop and arguably adds to the overall repetitive nature. it is a principle of addition and division, blocks that fit and connect, loops that stack horizontally and vertically, order that defies formal tension. indeed, time still passes, but kinaesthesia (understood as the sensation of moving) is deliberately deferred. it does not create a sense of time-pushing or striving for something else, and it is not based on irregularity or a stable instability. the suspended difference in “rockstar” aesthetically excels in and celebrates stable exactness with a lack of cuts, discrepancies, tension and teleological aspirations. i will now turn to a pop track that is based on blending the production practices of both edm and hip-hop. groove as technology-signification: “chained to the rhythm” (2017) katy perry’s “chained to the rhythm” subscribes to a more conventional form and teleology. it begins with an intro of two bars. here, the rhythm section of drums, bass and other indistinct instruments (mainly piano and keyboard) are bandpass-filtered so that only midfrequencies remain, resembling (a sample of ) an old record. when the first verse begins, the song’s main groove is established. it primarily consists of synthetic claps, bass guitar and the indistinct group of instruments from the intro, but the group is now panned wide. in fact, this indistinct group of sound sources are grouped together in numerous unusual ways that all define the track’s groove. while the claps are clear and quantised, the indistinct group and its shared rhythmic pattern is submitted to a collective envelope bouncing to a sidechain-compressor. the 95 bpm sway of the song’s groove is built on the sidechained group’s collective envelope (again, it is difficult to decipher the programmed processes, but it sounds as if the sidechain trigger is either the kick drum, a ghost trigger or the bass). besides the sidechain, a bandpass filter (different than the one in the intro) in the midrange frequencies adds to the group’s sampled feel. this is further amplified in the verse after the first chorus. here, the claps are muted, and the indistinct group is hardly audible. but the frequencies are slowly swept back to include the upper registers due to two separate low-pass filters that gradually open up the threshold so that the respective upper frequencies of the sounds are let through. this creates movement and tension towards the pre-chorus. in other words, the groove of the track is based on signifying the hip-hop practice of sampling breakbeats as wells as eq-filtering and sweeps of edm dj’ing (just as the title is a reference to several classic house music tracks). while the former represents a circular temporality, the latter creates tension and linear variation, pushing time forward. this combination produces not only a temporal ambiguity, but also juxtaposes significations of genre-based practices that define the track’s groove. the groove is thus based less on individual timing of sound sources and more on a highly mediatized group of instruments lacking individuality. composing groove is thus less about moving individual sounds to an earlier or later position on a time axis as it is about the composite directly interrelated dancecult 13(1)10 result across sound sources. it is more about setting up processes that shape collective inflections—or a lack thereof—in ongoing genre-signifying, interconnected negotiations. perspectives for pop as process from a listening perspective, the production of pop music is increasingly characterised by a black-boxing of origins. the lack of distinguishable performance-based sound sources decreases the layman pop listener’s chance to decipher the origins or the intricate technical processes that constitute a track. in the following, i will discuss how pop music’s processuality can be interpreted as an intersection of a broad range of practices that entail a shift to a process paradigm. i will then compare this to the tracks analysed through the lens of new media theory. in his analysis of interface-based music production, mike d’errico suggests the term “procedural listening”. “[it is] a dominant skill developed by audio producers that allows both musicians and audiences to focus on the process-oriented mechanics of media forms, rather than simply audio content.” (d’errico 2016: 77, italics in original). bridging the producer and the recipient, it connects with the listener orientation of the dj or laptop-performer, where the processual character of the work installs a position of being both performer and observer. d’errico argues how this entails a shift in the focus and the creativity towards the formal mechanics of the computational system (d’errico 2016: 96). it is essentially a position and an approach that stems from hip-hop and edm’s intertwined histories and aesthetics. the preference for loops and process-control rests upon both the creative (ab)use of technology and an afrodiasporic adoration for the negotiation of the ongoing. for instance, joseph g. schloss describes how the aesthetics of sample-based hiphop is based on a veneration for processual mastery, where it is less about the significance of the individual sound objects and more about producer’s skill in manipulating them (schloss 2004: 159). it is a combination of cultural and aesthetic sensibilities that are met, hosted and expanded upon in particular usages of technology. this has interpretive consequences for notions of groove, time and how they relate. in his analysis of the interaction between humans, data and nonhumans, sociologist mike michael describes what he calls co(a)gents. “the value of particular co(a)gents rests not so much on their empirical ‘accuracy’ as on their capacity to illuminate otherwise hidden processes” (michael 2004: 10). essentially, characteristics such as timing carry less meaning than the processual assemblage they help constitute. what’s important is the way that details repeat. correspondingly, groove has little to do with the discrepancy of, for instance, a snare drum, and more to do with what technological process the discrepancy signifies as part of an interrelational material whole. what does this type of looping signify? the timing characteristics of the three songs analysed above all signify fairly concrete technological practices that again signify genre. in other words, in a step away from humanistic interpretations of music production, groove in contemporary pop music is increasingly produced by a particular entanglement between timbre and media materiality as they are defined by digital processes. reuter | pop as process: the digitalization of groove, form and time 11 prehensions in the grid the grid rules in all the tracks analysed above. arguably, it is most present in the sequenced trap-beat of “rockstar”, but it also works as very active but to some extent silent partner in “scared to be lonely” and “chained to the rhythm”. groove is thus created in a push and pull between quantised rigidity where sounds obey the grid directly and sounds that both connect and divert according to the grid indirectly. in other words, the sounds and the virtual reference structure are connected in differing ways. in this type of grid-based music, where the grid structure can literally grasp the sounds, we need to account for the reference structure and how it directly or indirectly affects the music’s temporal features. the griddeviations of the wall in “scared to be lonely” and the sample-like group in “chained to the rhythm” do seem paradoxical. from a performance-based perspective, they hold substantial discrepancies. yet these are shaped in intricate, detailed, complicated and distinctly inhuman ways. the levels of complexity are humanly impossible, and these are then repeated verbatim as the unruly and somewhat unpredictable is ambiguously repeated with digital accuracy. this processual intersection of human on non-human agencies begins to echo the process philosophy of alfred north whitehead. his fundamental concept that asks “how an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is” does indeed seem to resonate with contemporary culture (whitehead 1978 [1929]: 23, italics in original).11 a central tenet in his process philosophy is the concept of prehensions that are “concrete facts of relatedness” (whitehead 1978: 23). luciana parisi relates whiteheads process ontology to digital media and how they are defined by prehensions that grasp, connect, include and exclude, and transform data, thereby defining what an entity is and how it relates to others (parisi 2013: xii). adding this perspective to the interpretation of digital pop music’s processes puts the emphasis not on static entities, but the mutually constitutive character of shaping sound. how are individual sounds shaped by combinations of functions? for instance, the staging of dua lipa’s vocal is defined by not only reverb, but reverb combined with several functions including various types of dynamic compression and gating. it is also a process of grasping, including, excluding and transforming. these operations entail agencies of both subjects (lipa and the producer) and objects (the algorithmic processes of the daw’s signal processing). interpreting the wall of “scared to be lonely” is essentially an analysis of how the grid grasps the functions of one or several sidechain compressors that control the envelope of multiple sounds. interpreting pop music thus becomes an analysis of how entities specifically relate across microcosm and macrocosm. arguably, “rockstar” demonstrates less direct interrelations across sound sources, but it still revels in the multiplicity of functions across the particular and the general. new essential questions arise: what is the relationship between individual sounds and the grouping of them and how are they grouped? with, for example, midi, many seemingly different sources—pitch-control information (e.g., auto-tune or melodyne), dynamic control (such as compression) or frequency filters—can become similar or even dancecult 13(1)12 one (like the grouping of sounds in “scared to be lonely” and “chained to the rhythm”). conversely, one source can become many when the same metadata is applied to multiple sources. grouping sounds is not a new thing. but connecting, interrelating and multiplying in the daw is not just easier; it is part and parcel of the compositional practice. when sounds increasingly interrelate or are subject to master effects, it blurs distinctions and creates a de-hierarchisation of individual sounds and metadata. this turn to the assemblages of prehensions therefore involves a shift of focus towards how data (audio or metadata) multiply across a track, how (often algorithmic) processes interrelate and which patterns they form. topology, temporal ambiguity and the human scale the three tracks are all fundamentally based on setting up, controlling, editing and adjusting running processes. even so, the outcomes are very different. in “scared to be lonely”, the overtly teleological pop drop dynamic seemingly poses a stark contrast to the suspended difference of the trap circularity in “rockstar”. lury, parisi and terranova argue how contemporary society is increasingly subject to a topological rationality. this “participates in and renews the specificity of the material and the sensuous”, and is “dynamic, soft and tractable, both precise and vague, able to operate the physical and sensual horizon of experience beyond and beneath the law-like symbolic system of signification” (lury, parisi and terranova 2012: 28). it is a logic in which figures, forms and patterns emerge and disappear and it entails a loss of fixity, distance and perspective. as such, “scared to be lonely” can be heard as a reflection of this topological flux. yet, “rockstar” seemingly defies this. music history is ripe with examples of static or circular music, but “rockstar”’s innately digital character gains a new level of precision, multiplicity and fundamentally a different value coming from the inside of the digital’s topological nature. from this perspective, the trap track begins to exemplify what media theorist wolfgang ernst calls the true luxury of today’s temporal economy: the resistance towards permanent change. in other words, the excessive difference-defying sameness afforded by digital music production and exhibited in “rockstar” not only reflects a societal shift towards precision and synchronisation. it is at the same time an aesthetic opposition to contemporary society’s topological character. as music as well as an algorithmic structure, the excessive negation of difference in “rockstar” bends and negates its own topological nature. the substantial differences and embedded temporal ambiguities of the three tracks seem to echo similar ambiguities in new media networks’ temporalities. indeed, time is ambiguous in ubicomp culture. on one hand, media have become the social metronomes of the everyday as our lives are increasingly defined by digital exactness (neverla 2010: 183). instantaneity, coordination and synchronization rule as the local constantly links to the global. digital media plant temporal flags with exact precision and divide time with infinitesimal accuracy. yet, on the other hand, information is also constantly permutating. persistence meets flux reuter | pop as process: the digitalization of groove, form and time 13 in the ambiguous duality between the relentless presence and a constant development of cloud-based computing. concurrently, our access to the past and its juxtaposition with the present is changed by the expansion of information. in contemporary society we work polychronically; we engage in multiple activities simultaneously and place less value on temporal order. as couldry and hepp argue, temporality becomes heterogenous (couldry and hepp 2016: 107). the issue is not so much a lack of time to react, but a lack of time for interpretation or making narrative sense (couldry and hepp 2016: 114). from wolfgang ernst’s media archaeological perspective, sound is liberated from semantics and hermeneutics as “the microphysical close reading of sound, where the materiality of the recording medium itself becomes poetical, dissolves any semantically meaningful archival unit into discrete blocks of signals” (2012: 60, italics in original). as a consequence, “[m]edia culture turns from phonocentrism to mathematics, liberating sonicity from the conventional time domain” (ernst 2016: 118).12 ernst’s media materialism defies direct reference, but still holds signifying capabilities beyond direct conscious attention. this does not mean that ernst rejects social, political or economic factors, but he proposes a media materialism that accounts for a lack of human gesture. digital processes flatten the hierarchy and level the ground between the human and its coexistence with the nonhuman. the implications for pop music seem quite important. for one, a programming paradigm at the expense of a recorded performance paradigm involves two very different types of mediatization. one is based on utilizing hardware and treating recorded sound. the other is based on processual metadata-control and cloudbased databases. one rests upon a medial transformation, whereas the other entails the media itself as an environment; this is again part of networked computational culture. one is based on human agency, and the other substantially utilizes distributed agency that includes digital automation to a degree where loops and, more generally, processes form interrelational algorithmic structures. agency is innately entangled with, divided amongst and dispersed to actors outside the human realm, and this challenges the pedestal of the human subject and its perception.13 this inherent controlling of processes puts the producer’s agency in a place where performance, control and programming meet. it relies on digital algorithms’ abilities to predict dynamic fluctuations and allows for precision and control to an unprecedented degree. new levels and kinds of complexity are created in the infinitesimal details that are subject to discrete variations between loops and interrelational functions across sound sources. this demands new kinds of attention, skill and talent from the producer. the craft or creativity consists of setting, editing and adjusting interrelational processes through combinations of mainly metadata. yet, this control is also met with a level of stochasticism embedded in the interrelated algorithmic agency. in the hybridization of human and machinic agency, the art lies in controlling or even taming the automated processes and how they combine. dancecult 13(1)14 tacit knowledge from a listening perspective, this means that temporality manifests differently. the (kantian) claim that phenomena depend upon the mind to exist is thereby suspended. this arguably presents some challenges for phenomenological understandings of digitalization. mark hansen has, in a long line of publications, critiqued overtly phenomenological interpretations of twenty-first century media. he argues that ubicomp culture essentially disjoins worldly temporalization from human temporalization due to the sheer speed and infinitesimal detail that can be adjusted and repeated beneath the threshold of human attention. it is essentially a question of scale and complexity. “ubicomp environments, precisely because they offer information peripherally—which is also to say, in a timeframe beneath the threshold of conscious perception—catalyze sensation according to a protocol that is not wholly biotic, but is crucially and irreducibly technical” (hansen 2013: 72). to hansen, ubiquitous computing makes the microtemporal sensuous. arguably, few art forms revel as much in sensuous microtemporality as digital music. pop’s digital temporality, its scale, its hybridized agency, its level of complexity including the staging of the microtemporal challenges overt anthropocentric interpretations. like the inherent, immanent character of ubicomp that exists in the peripheral background, beyond or outside human perception, so do the processes that constitute digital pop. however, instead of completely writing intentionality off in a black-boxing of algorithmic processes, taina bucher argues that “tacit knowledge” of the underlying logic of algorithmic systems linger in background (2018: 62).14 the same argument could be made for listening to digital processes. it is a processual unfolding that manifests less in relation to direct or conscious interpretations. in this shift from perception to sensation, musical referentiality gains an indirect character where it is more subject to prereflexive experience of the logic of the music unfolding. the processual transferral of inscriptional value also offers a somewhat different approach to technological evocations of the past. it adds a temporal element to the opaqueness of mediation. however, it is more akin to wolfgang ernst’s beforementioned prereflexive media archaeology than notions of sonic patina that nostalgically transport the listener to days gone by or retromania.15 the palette of technology-embedded temporalities that manifest as signifiers of practices and genre are experienced preconsciously. similarly, process philosophy’s disbandment of the subject as primary or originary also entails a particular mode of registering data where participation precedes recognition. this is not to say that listening to contemporary pop music is devoid of consciousness perception. but, compared to performed music, pop music in the twenty-first century represents a different, digital process-based ontology that suggests different aesthetic potentialities and lends itself to novel kinds of listening. this is less about interpretation, semantics, phenomenological intentionality or teleology-inducing difference. it is tacit knowledge lingering in the background of the manner in which musical processes unfold. reuter | pop as process: the digitalization of groove, form and time 15 a strict process paradigm will deny repetition without difference. however, combining process ontology with phenomenological listening arguably presents some fundamental problems, as the latter is based on a unified conscious perception. process ontology will deny the privileging of a unified conscious perception because of the multitude of objectsubject independent temporal unfoldings. the increased privileging of technological agency challenges the human performance logic of groove theory as well as musicological interpretations of time in general. it represents a departure from correlationism and phenomenological interpretations of musical time. instead, topology and heterogenous temporality signify new process-bound interpretations of musical time. it puts the emphasis on how music unfolds in time qualitatively. digital pop music offers very intricate and particular technology-signifying heterogenous temporalities that are based on a negotiation of the relationship between music and time in ways that are innately digital. to resign the temporalities of digital pop to an overt unilinear flux that does not distinguish between the hows, the manner, the types of unfolding in its distributed agencies, would be a disservice. because it is exactly here—in the ambiguity and complexity of the temporal—that the listening pleasure of digitally produced pop music resides. notes 1 i discuss the new generation of daws in further detail in the article “who let the daws out? the digital in a new generation of the digital audio workstation” (reuter, forthcoming in popular music and society). 2 danielsen’s “presence and pleasure: the funk grooves of james brown and parliament” (2006) has been highly influential in groove studies, and her research later continued into digital music (see, e.g. 2010, 2018, 2019, 2020; brøvig-hanssen and danielsen 2016). 3 see also danielsen (2006: 162). danielsen distinguishes between what she calls “even rhythm on the grid, on the one hand, and deep, groovy rhythmic designs, on the other” (danielsen 2019: 596). scepticism towards exact, non-different repetition is fairly common in groove studies. luis-manuel garcia argues that exact repetition has been the subject of a devaluation where it is put in a position of “the other” compared to repetition with a difference (garcia 2005: 5). when russell potter distinguishes between what he calls blank repetition and repetition with a difference, garcia duly criticizes potter for claiming that a certain acceptable level of repetition elevates jazz, blues and rap at the expense of the more quantized grooves of disco, techno and other dance music genres (2005: 5). 4 see théberge (1997), möllenkamp (2014) and strachan (2017). 5 for more on the history of edm pop, see reynolds (2012), matos (2015), holt (2017) and gálvez (2019). mark butler argues that edm has “emerged as a label for recent, commercially popular genres such as dubstep” (butler 2014: 5 fn. 4). he emphasizes that popular as well as academic writing since the 1990s has generally used the term to encompass all genres within the category of electronic dance music and that this definition should not be confused with the narrower, more recent one. to separate the general label edm from the more dancecult 13(1)16 recent iteration, i use the label edm pop, as holt (2017) and james (2015) do. it defines mainly house and dubstep-inspired, drop-based electronic music that in a recorded music context abides to a pop single length, format and function. i am acutely aware of the almost blasphemic potential here. for instance, mandy-suzanne wong writes that many authors feel that edm outside clubs and raves is an aesthetical failure (2013: 195). however, my purpose and focus here is not a comparison, but to track changes in pop. 6 traditional edm dj sets last hours and a break routine usually lasts between twenty minutes and multiple hours, so even though this form is always moving towards the drop, parts may very well be experienced as stand-stills. however, the timeframe changes when the break routine is imported to the three or four-minute musical format of a pop track. because there is significantly less time between the breakdown and the drop, edm pop tracks often display intense momentum-building and contrasts between breakdown, build up and the drop. edm pop can also display very intricate formal recombinations that blur distinctions between pre-chorus, chorus, post-chorus and the pop drop. for more on the mere resent iterations of popular music form, see barna (2020) or peres (2018). 7 cormen et al. offers a definition of an algorithm. “informally, an algorithm is any well-defined computational procedure that takes some value, or set of values, as input and produces some value, or set of values, as output. an algorithm is thus a sequence of computational steps that transform the input into the output” (cormen et al. 2009: 13). 8 see hodgson (2011) and d’errico (2015). 9 it has not been possible to settle the exact technique used here. however, the point is more the algorithmic character entailed in contemporary production methods. for example, plugins such wavesfactory’s trackspacer, cableguys’ volumeshaper or polyverse’s gatekeeper offer intricate volume modulation control that expand the accessibility and possibilities of traditional use of lateral dynamic processing (such as the compressor, gate, limiter, expander). 10 the main variation is the addition of 21 savage. his vocal is significantly different, with less reverb, lower frequencies and more compression, which is a vocal staging with substantially more proximity than post malone’s reverberated voice. 21 savage’s lower frequency range compliments the track’s overall frequency response, and its drier, closer sound offers a sense of relief from post malone’s distance. furthermore, 21 savage initially abides by the lead melody, but begins to break out and rap or sing more freely, seemingly almost improvisational, which is intensified when the track switches briefly to the a’ before returning to the lead melody with post malone as the lead vocalist. in other words, the introduction of 21 savage can be heard as a sort of a bridge or solo, and it offers a shift or release in the track’s excessive sameness. 11 new media researchers have, in various ways, employed the process-relational philosophy of alfred north whitehead to account for computational culture and contemporary society in general (e.g. shaviro, 2009; hansen, 2015; bucher, 2018). for instance, steve shaviro writes, “in a world where everything from music to dna is continually being sampled and recombined, and where the shelf life of an idea, no less than of fashion in clothing, can be measured in months if not weeks, whitehead’s question is the truly urgent one” (2009: x). luciana parisi has in a long line of publications engaged with whitehead to account for the aesthetics of algorithmic structures in relation to how they reveal the limits of rationality and perception (see parisi 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017a, 2017b). reuter | pop as process: the digitalization of groove, form and time 17 12 ernst’s media materialism is heavily influenced by a german media studies and particularly friedrich kittler (and to some extent also foucault’s reading of media). kittler’s influential writings traced the invention of the alphabet to the distinct emergence of analogue media (such as the gramophone) that again lead to digitalization and the computer (see, for example, kittler 1999). for kittler, the move is from the symbolic order to one that essentially rules out human perception and thus also hermeneutic sense-orientation as well as phenomenological strategies (kittler 2017). 13 in his analysis and comparison of early minimalism and disco, robert fink makes a likeminded argument. he writes how the hour-long repetitions of minimalism and (ecstasyfuelled) weekend-raves challenge the human scale of classical musical teleology, which is based on goal-direction and “a basic phenomenological congruence with the way we perceive quotidian bodily rhythms” (fink 2005: 44). due to the ambiguous nature of repetition, he suggests the non-binary term “recombinant teleology” (fink 2005: 42–7). 14 the term originally stems from michael polanyi, see polanyi (1966). 15 see katz (2010: 155) and reynolds (2011). references agawu, kofi. 1995. “the invention of ‘african rhythm’”. journal of the american musicological society 48(3): 177–92. <https://doi.org/10.2307/3519832>. barna, alyssa. 2020. “the dance chorus in recent top-40 music”. the 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https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-25253-3_14 https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.05.11.4/mto.05.11.4.garcia.pdf https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.05.11.4/mto.05.11.4.garcia.pdf https://doi.org/10.3898/newf.77.03.2012 reuter | pop as process: the digitalization of groove, form and time 19 ———. 2016. “topology of sensibility”. in ubiquitous computing, complexity, and culture, ed. ulrik ekman, jay david bolter, lily diaz, morten sondergaard and maria engberg, 33–47. new york/london: routledge. hodgson, jay. 2011. “lateral dynamics processing in experimental hip hop: flying lotus, madlib, oh no, j-dilla and prefuse 73”. journal of the art of record production 5. <https://www.arpjournal.com/asarpwp/lateral-dynamics-processing-in-experimental-hiphop-flying-lotus-madlib-oh-no-j-dilla-and-prefuse-73/>, (accessed 15 november 2021). holt, fabian. 2017. “edm pop: a soft shell formation in a new festival economy”. in weekend societies, ed. graham st. john, 25–43. new york: bloomsbury publishing inc. <https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501311413.ch-002>. james, robin. 2015. resilience & melancholy: pop music, feminism, neoliberalism. ropley: john hunt publishing. katz, mark. 2010. capturing sound: how technology has changed music (rev. ed.). berkeley: university of california press. keil, charles. 1966. “motion and feeling through music”. the journal of aesthetics and art criticism 24(3): 337–49. <https://doi.org/10.1111/1540_6245.jaac24.3.0337>. ———. 1987. “participatory discrepancies and the power of music”. cultural anthropology 2(3): 275–83. <https://doi.org/10.1525/can.1987.2.3.02a00010>. keil, charles and steven feld. 1994. music grooves: essays and dialogues. chicago: university of chicago press. kittler, friedrich. 1993. draculas vermächtnis technische schriften. leipzig: reclam verlag. ———. 1999. gramophone, film, typewriter. stanford: stanford university press. ———. 2017. “real time analysis, time axis manipulation”. cultural politics 13(1): 1–18. <https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-3755144>. kramer, jonathan. d. 1988. the time of music: new meanings, new temporalities, new listening strategies. new york: schirmer. langer, susanne. k. 1953. feeling and form: a theory of art. new york: charles scribner’s sons. lury, celia, luciana parisi and tiziana terranova. 2012. “introduction: the becoming topological of culture”. theory, culture & society 29(5): 3–35. <https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276412454552>. michael, mike. 2004. “on making data social: heterogeneity in sociological practice”. qualitative research 4(1): 5–23. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794104041105>. matos, michaelangelo. 2015. the underground is massive: how electronic dance music conquered america. new york: dey street books. möllenkamp, andreas. 2014. “paradigms of music software development”. national institute for music research, berlin: 9th conference on interdisciplinary musicology. <https:// www.kulturwissenschaften.uni-hamburg.de/personen/moellenkamp-2014-paradigms.pdf>, (accessed 8 november 2021). parisi, luciana. 2013. contagious architecture: computation, aesthetics, and space. cambridge, ma: mit press. ———. 2015. “cutting away from smooth space”. in the lure of whitehead, ed. nicholas gaskill and a. j. nocek, 267–96. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. <https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816679959.003.0011>. https://www.arpjournal.com/asarpwp/lateral-dynamics-processing-in-experimental-hip-hop-flying-lotus-madlib-oh-no-j-dilla-and-prefuse-73/ https://www.arpjournal.com/asarpwp/lateral-dynamics-processing-in-experimental-hip-hop-flying-lotus-madlib-oh-no-j-dilla-and-prefuse-73/ https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501311413.ch-002 https://doi.org/10.1111/1540_6245.jaac24.3.0337 https://doi.org/10.1525/can.1987.2.3.02a00010 https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-3755144 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276412454552 https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794104041105 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<https://www.top40theory.com/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-postchorus>, (accessed 3 june 2020). polanyi, michael. 1966. the tacit dimension. garden city: doubleday & company, inc. potter, russell. a. 1998. “not the same: race, repetition, and difference in hip-hop and dance music”. in mapping the beat: popular music and contemporary theory, ed. thomas swiss, andrew herman and john sloop, 31–46. malden, ma: blackwell malden. reynolds, simon. 2011. retromania: pop culture’s addiction to its own past. london: faber & faber. ———. 2012. “how rave music conquered america”. the guardian. <http://www.theguardian. com/music/2012/aug/02/how-rave-music-conquered-america>, (accessed 6 february 2020). rietveld, hillegonda. c. 2018. “machine possession dancing to repetitive beats”. in over and over: exploring repetition in popular music, ed. olivier julien and christophe levaux, 60-67. new york: bloomsbury academic. <https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501324871.ch-005>. schloss, joseph g. 2004. making beats: the art of sample-based hip-hop. middletown: wesleyan university press. ———. 2014. making beats: the art of sample-based hip-hop, 2nd ed. middletown: wesleyan university press. seabrook, john. 2012. “the song machine”. the new yorker 88(6): 48–55. march 19. shaviro, steven. 2009. without criteria: kant, whitehead, deleuze, and aesthetics. cambridge, ma: mit press. sloan, nate, and charlie harding. 2020. switched on pop: how popular music works, and why it matters. new york: oxford university press. snead, james a. 1984. “repetition as a figure of black culture”. in black literature and literary theory, ed. henry louis gates jr., 59–79. london/new york: methuen. solberg, ragnhild torvanger. 2014. “‘waiting for the bass to drop’: correlations between intense emotional experiences and production techniques in build-up and drop sections of electronic dance music”. dancecult 6(1): 61–82. <https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.01.04>. strachan, robert. 2017. sonic technologies: popular music, digital culture and the creative process. new york: bloomsbury academic & professional. théberge, paul. 1997. any sound you can imagine, making music / consuming technology. hanover, n.h/london: wesleyan university press. whitehead, alfred north. 1978. process and reality. new york: the free press. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708616655765 https://doi.org/10.7312/wein17214-008 https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350014725.ch-002 https://www.top40theory.com/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-postchorus http://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/aug/02/how-rave-music-conquered-america http://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/aug/02/how-rave-music-conquered-america https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501324871.ch-005 https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.01.04 reuter | pop as process: the digitalization of groove, form and time 21 discography katy perry. 2017. chained to the rhythm. witness. capitol. <https://www.discogs.com/master/1193114-katy-perry-witness> martin garrix & dua lipa. 2017. scared to be lonely. stmpd rcrds/epic. <https://www.discogs.com/release/9742067-martin-garrix-dua-lipa-scared-to-be-lonely> post malone. 2017. rockstar ( feat. 21 savage). republic records. <https://www.discogs.com/release/11104981-post-malone-feat-21-savage-rockstar> https://www.discogs.com/master/1193114-katy-perry-witness https://www.discogs.com/release/9742067-martin-garrix-dua-lipa-scared-to-be-lonely https://www.discogs.com/release/11104981-post-malone-feat-21-savage-rockstar dancecult 11(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 11(1) 2019: 97–116 issn 1947-5403 ©2017 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net raving iran susanne regina meures (dir.) switzerland: christian frei filmproduktion gmbh/zürcher hochschule der künste zhdk, 2016 <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5945286/> <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.06> gay jennifer breyley monash university (australia) susanne regina meures’ multi-award-winning 2016 documentary raving iran shows a year in the lives of anoosh and arash, aka blade & beard. at the time of filming, from september 2013 to august 2014, blade & beard were tehran-based djs, producers and dance party organisers, specialising in “dark and melodic techno” (blade&beard), with fideles and mind against among their influences. raving iran follows anoosh and arash as they appear to navigate iran’s unique bureaucratic system, seeking to release and distribute their album, and as they organise the next dance party and consider their future. the film opens with anoosh and arash being pulled over by police as they drive through tehran at night. the camera focuses on the city’s old murals, showing portraits of iraniraq war heroes and iran’s revolutionary leaders—rather than the many, arguably equally interesting, artistic murals in tehran (see the guardian 2015), or the city’s broad range of street art—before briefly showing anoosh and arash djing at a private party. the first daytime scene features the sound of the call to prayer: a recurrent sound in the film. anoosh and arash make several phone calls to organise a dance party in the desert. as with many dance parties around the world, they face financial and legal challenges. while it is not illegal to travel and camp in the desert, there will be illegal activities at the party (again, like most dance parties), so anoosh and arash take precautions to avoid disturbing nearby rural residents and to be prepared for unexpected visits from the authorities. finally, with all preparations made, the djs and their friends set out on a party bus for the desert. until this point of the film, the soundtrack mainly features ghazal shakeri (her “nuinspired” remix of “man o to” (“me and you”), with lyrics adapted from rumi), but as the bus reaches the desert, it shifts to the more pensive “whisper”, by the neo-mystical californian fusion group axiom of choice, featuring singer mamak khadem. this choice of song—one with little connection to blade & beard’s techno world—suggests an atmospheric shift from what meures presents as a generally threatening governmental sphere to an implied reviews http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5945286/ http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.06 http://www.ravingiran.com/ http://www.facebook.com/pg/bladebeard/about http://www.mamak-khadem.com/music-1 dancecult 11(1)98 positive “spirituality” (a word often used in association with khadem’s work) at the desert party. like dance-party-goers around the world, anoosh and arash talk of the connections and sense of community felt by people at parties in iran, but the film gives little sense of this with its central focus of the government-created obstacles faced by musicians and djs. when anoosh and arash return to tehran after the desert party, they head to the ministry of culture and islamic guidance, which issues—or denies—permits for musicians to perform in official venues or record and release music within the official government system. this visit is presumably made solely for the purposes of the film, to show viewers what iran’s “islamic” regulations are, as it is clear that anoosh and arash know that their work does not meet the ministry’s requirements. since the advent of the internet, it has become customary for artists to release music outside iran, and to distribute it primarily in digital form. however, for the purposes of the film’s narrative, anoosh and arash ask ministry staff about permits for their album. unsurprisingly, they are told that their work is unlikely to be approved, so they proceed to look for someone willing to print their unauthorised cd covers. after several rejections, they eventually find a late-night printer willing to do the job. with the album completed and packed in its cover, the next step is to distribute it: again, anoosh and arash go to shops that they would know are unlikely to be interested, so that the film can continue its depiction of the extent of governmental restrictions on music and cultural life in iran. disheartened, anoosh and arash discuss emigration, acknowledging that it is not easy to make music outside iran either, but hoping they could at least “have a future” elsewhere. they consider the possibilities for iranian musicians to emigrate, one of the most effective being through the acquisition of visas for north america or europe, obtained by securing an invitation to a festival. while getting advice about seeking asylum, anoosh and arash maintain their hope for this festival option, looking at online images of zurich’s street parade as they agree that “this is where we belong”. at the next filmed dance party, police turn up and arrest anoosh, who spends a night in jail. things look up, though, when he receives a call from the rote fabrik cultural centre in switzerland with the news that blade & beard’s application to lethargy/street parade in zurich has been successful. finally things seem to be moving ahead fairly quickly. after one final call to prayer over tehran, anoosh and arash are at the airport. it is at this point in the film that viewers with their own experience of migration, from iran or other countries, have reported feeling particularly upset. in a film that is quite slowly paced, the scene at the airport—in which anoosh and arash farewell their family and friends, not knowing when or if they will see them again—is presented casually, and less than a minute in length. electronic musician rojin sharafi explains why this brevity is especially upsetting: “i cried, actually, at the scene when they say a very short goodbye to their friends and family, but it wasn’t actually that deep, the whole thing was [skimmed over]—because i know how it feels [that moment of farewell], it was very traumatic for me, but i think for someone who didn’t really experience that, it’s like a very normal scene—so goodbye, bye!”1 reviews 99 like many other viewers, sharafi is critical of the film’s unnuanced narrative of anoosh and arash’s supposed move from a state of constant restriction in iran to one of “freedom” in europe. “i had problems with the scenes in iran, but not that much,” she reflects. “my problem began when they get to europe . . . because i have this feeling it has two parts: one in iran, where they are very exhausted and everything, and the second part in europe and they’re living their dream . . . i have the feeling they have a lot of problems now. the film stops one or two weeks after they arrive in europe”. indeed, with its final scenes of a decision to “say yes” to switzerland, the film’s narrative structure is similar to that of a romance. a more balanced documentary might have followed anoosh and arash’s life for a year in switzerland, as they lived in shared housing for asylum seekers, hearing cowbells at night, and faced different forms of restriction on their music and other aspects of their lives. “two djs negotiate their possibilities in complex and unfair bureaucratic and capitalist systems” is not as catchy as “two djs defy the islamic regime” (raving iran). meures has defended the approach taken in raving iran, in part justifying it with the film’s commercial success. however, some see that success as a symptom of a widespread problem in the ways iran and other “non-western” countries are portrayed in popular media around the world. as tehran-based siavash amini puts it: “right now people in this region are going through the roughest periods of their history and this is being exploited for journalistic and artistic exoticist quests. people trying to sell it as extra flavor to what they do disgusts me . . . the only reason we mentioned things like that . . . in the past was to raise awareness to how dangerous narrow and often conveniently concise media-friendly narratives or exotic flavors can be to people actually trying to do something they love while living here . . . both nationalistic pride and exoticism in any form are part of the same idiotic bipolar system” (in hignelltully 2019; see also breyley 2018). in europe and elsewhere, filmmakers, journalists and academics who have wanted to present more nuanced narratives that complicate notions of freedom and assumptions about where freedom exists have reported pressure from funding bodies, producers, editors and academic supervisors to simplify their work or fetishise their subjects, in some cases resulting in inaccuracies (nooshin 2017; javdani 2019). one musician who objected to the “clichéd” way a german radio station represented her as a female artist from iran was told it would “sell more tickets”.2 meanwhile, in iran, for musicians and djs who choose to live and work there (see haidari 2019; deep house tehran; set; idj’s iranian top 10), one of the greatest current obstacles is the economic sanctions imposed on the country by the united states (temp-illusion), along with misconceptions spread internationally by various media. unfortunately, raving iran contributes more to those misconceptions than it does to an understanding of edm in iran. notes 1 rojin sharafi, personal communication with the author (berlin), 20 september 2019. 2 personal communication with the author (berlin), 20 september 2019. http://www.ravingiran.com/ http://deephousetehran.net/about/ http://setfest.org/ http://www.internationaldjmag.com/the-iranian-connection.html http://modernismunbound.com/articles/interview-temp-illusion/ dancecult 11(1)100 references blade & beard. <http://www.facebook.com/pg/bladebeard/about> (accessed 25 september 2019). breyley, gay jennifer. 2018. “‘i hung around in your soundtrack’: affinities with joy division among contemporary iranian musicians”. in heart and soul: critical essays on joy division, ed. aileen dillane, martin j. power and eoin devereux, 209-28. london: rowman & littlefield. haidari, niloufar. 2019. ‘sounds of tehran: why should i sit here and pretend that we’re suffering?’ we present. <https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/story/sounds-of-tehran> (accessed 12 october 2019). hignell-tully, daniel alexander. 2019. “interview with siavash amini”. tone shift. 27 may. <http://toneshift.net/2019/05/27/interview-with-siavash-amini> (accessed 2 october 2019). javdani, sadaf. 2019. “as an iranian academic, i’m fed up of being asked to focus on poverty and oppression”. the guardian. 22 august. <http://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/ aug/22/as-an-iranian-academic-im-fed-up-of-being-asked-to-focus-on-poverty-andoppression> (accessed 25 september 2019). nooshin, laudan. 2017. “whose liberation? iranian popular music and the fetishization of resistance”. popular communication 15(3): 163-91. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2017.1328601> raving iran. <http://www.ravingiran.com> (accessed 25 september 2019). the guardian. 2015. “the toast of tehran: iran’s superstar street artist — in pictures”. 26 february. <http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/feb/26/the-toast-oftehran-irans-superstar-street-artist-in-pictures> (accessed 2 october 2019). http://www.facebook.com/pg/bladebeard/about https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/story/sounds-of-tehran http://toneshift.net/2019/05/27/interview-with-siavash-amini http://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/aug/22/as-an-iranian-academic-im-fed-up-of-being-asked-to-focus-on-poverty-and-oppression http://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/aug/22/as-an-iranian-academic-im-fed-up-of-being-asked-to-focus-on-poverty-and-oppression http://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/aug/22/as-an-iranian-academic-im-fed-up-of-being-asked-to-focus-on-poverty-and-oppression http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2017.1328601 http://www.ravingiran.com/ http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/feb/26/the-toast-of-tehran-irans-superstar-street-artist-in-pictures http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/feb/26/the-toast-of-tehran-irans-superstar-street-artist-in-pictures reviews 101 sweet harmony: rave|today philly adams and kobi prempeh (curs.) london, uk: saatchi gallery, 12 july – 14 september 2019. <https://www.saatchigallery.com/art/sweet_harmony.php> <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.07> chris christodoulou university of westminster (uk) described by the saatchi gallery as a “revolutionary survey of rave culture”,1 sweet harmony: rave|today appears at a bittersweet time for uk underground dance music. thirty years after the second summer of love, the conservative party is the best part of a decade in power, neoliberalism continues to dominate the political discourse and free parties emitting soundtracks characterised by “a succession of repetitive beats”—as described by section 63 of the 1994 criminal justice act—continue to be outlawed.2 an added layer of poignant incongruity comes with the staging of a show about a music-driven countercultural movement at an established cultural institution such as the saatchi gallery. the event may appear to celebrate the sounds, imagery and attendant lifestyles of rave culture, but the controlled gallery setting diminishes any sense of its “revolutionary” otherness. sweet harmony is a prime example of gallerification; the event marks the transition of rave culture from a resistant form of mass participation—arguably the last great youth movement to emerge from outside, or at least the margins of, mainstream culture—to an event whose value is shaped by its status as a curated artefact. nevertheless, the attempt of curators kobi prempeh and juan rincon (voltage and sci-arc) to capture an “authentic” visual commentary resonates in the exhibited work, mainly comprising multimedia room installations and large-scale photography. the images are a mixture of journalistic and personal approaches which articulate key aspects of rave’s diverse musical and social milieu: photographers derek ridgers and matthew smith’s images of enraptured figures and crowds at key parties like spiral tribe and protest marches capture the political spirit of rave culture’s impulse for social resistance; former time out nightlife editor dave swindells and filmmaker-photographer ewan spencer illuminate the weekender hedonism of inner city clubland with images of brand-conscious metropolitan dancers in sweaty reverie, while artist-filmmaker vinca petersen and author molly macindoe’s depictions of transformed warehouses and rave-bound journeys point to the psychogeographic motivation underscoring long voyages to far-flung rural sound-systems, along with rave’s reterritorialisation of abandoned spaces in post-industrial towns and cities. anna-lena krause’s post-club portraits are the only images to feature posed subjects, but the figures’ individuated self-consciousnesses mark a revealing contrast to the carefree togetherness suggested by photographs that were mostly taken in the pre-internet age. the relatively limited sense of connectedness offered by online culture has arguably diverted https://www.saatchigallery.com/art/sweet_harmony.php http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.07 dancecult 11(1)102 much of rave’s radical communality, which, not so long ago, only seemed to accompany the liminal experience of mass, all-night dancing at a dance event or festival. in this sense, a feeling of melancholy pervades sweet harmony; whether you were there or not, it is hard to avoid feeling nostalgia for the anarchy and anonymity exemplified by rave culture’s pre-criminal justice act era. it is an illuminating irony then, that the act itself is barely mentioned; unsurprising perhaps, given the saatchi brothers’ involvement in multiple election campaigns for the tories who introduced the bill that preceded it. the immersive experience promised by sweet harmony’s organisers is somewhat reinforced by the vinyl hunter shop in the centre of the gallery, where a dj mixes dance music classics live alongside the opportunity to actually buy vinyl. another impressive feature of this space is the large wall of flyers, where the iconography of posters featuring dj line-ups and contemporaneous graphic styles evoke a sense of scale and period as much as any of the more artistically elaborate exhibits. however, the sense of dance culture’s mainstream co-option is jarringly illustrated by the spotify-branded listening stations in the “play room”, featuring contemporary edm rather than music from the acid house and rave eras. corporate sponsorship and underground dance music make uneasy bedfellows and the presence of a music-streaming giant like spotify feels antithetical to the rave ethos that the exhibition purports to commemorate. there is much for ravers to revel in at sweet harmony. at specific moments, the event captures the radical alterity and transformative bliss of what was an extraordinary period of british youth culture. curatorially, its content and spatial organisation articulates a subjective and temporal disorientation that seemed so dangerous to the political and cultural establishment in the late-1980s and early-1990s. unfortunately though, the event carries the diversionary air of a historical sideshow. these are experiences of ecstatic timelessness that are presented as belonging to the past, despite assertions within the show itself of their enduring legacy (e.g. the subtitle, “rave|today”). arguably, it would have been dishonest for the saatchi gallery to recount in a more complete way the political atmosphere of the period, given its owner’s role in helping to elect the political party who brought the criminal justice bill into being. but, for all its reverence of the second summer of love, the material presented in sweet harmony feels inconsistent with the idea of raving as a revolutionary experience, both in practice and in spirit. notes 1 saatchi gallery. sweet harmony: rave | today [press release]. available at: <https://www.saatchigallery.com/art/sweet_harmony.php> (accessed 30 july 2019). 2 criminal justice and public order act 1994 c.33 part v section 63: powers to remove persons attending or preparing for a rave. available at: <https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ ukpga/1994/33/part/v/crossheading/powers-in-relation-to-raves> (accessed 30 september 2019). https://www.saatchigallery.com/art/sweet_harmony.php https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/33/part/v/crossheading/powers-in-relation-to-raves https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/33/part/v/crossheading/powers-in-relation-to-raves reviews 103 popular viennese electronic music, 1990–2015: a cultural history ewa mazierska london and new york: routledge, 2019. isbn: 978-1-138-71391-8 (hardcover) rrp: £95 (hardcover) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.08> anita jóri berlin university of the arts (germany) ewa mazierska’s book is definitely a niche work, covering a largely unexplored territory of research, both in terms of subject and methodology. when it comes to the extant literature on vienna as a music city, one can find a broad variety of studies on classical music (particularly the first wave classicism of beethoven, haydn, mozart, et al.; and the second wave modernism of schoenberg, berg and webern), with only a few texts (e.g. reitsamer 2011) that report on the city as a contemporary centre of electronic (dance) music. these few articles were, of course, milestone sources for mazierska’s book. however, as mazierska notes, austrian popular music deserves more scholarly attention in general, and the special characteristics of the viennese electronic music scene in particular have not been discussed as a whole, less still the relationship between the music, place and culture (1); although, as she notes, doing research on the correlations between music and place/city generates many methodological problems (17–19). throughout the book, mazierska is sophisticated and prudent about the terminology she uses. one can, for example, find a particularly interesting discussion about the problems surrounding the genre name “electronica” as popularised by the us music industry. this is the reason why the author chose the wording of “popular electronic music” in the title of the book, instead of electronica. however, mazierska suggests that the two terms mean the same in her work. in this sense, viennese popular electronic music refers to “music produced by viennese artists . . . or also includes record companies which released these records . . . places where this music was presented and appreciated . . . and a web of relations connecting musicians, institutions and individuals working for their success . . . as well as their fans. it can encompass art and artists, as well as scenes” (9). so the scope of the research is broad and also includes themes of music business research, such as the local record industry and the effects of digitisation. the described period is from 1990–2015; the 1990s were the heydays of viennese popular electronic music, and the study pays extra attention to this decade. the book is based on several methodological and theoretical strands—which are interweaved and combined throughout the whole work: the history and theory of electronic music and its subgenres with a special focus on dub, ambient, techno and noise; research on the relationship between http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.08 dancecult 11(1)104 music and place, positioning electronic music within the longer history of music in vienna; research about the “future of music” that considers the digital shift and the transformation of the music industry; and finally the interface between music and gender (summarised 9–10). in addition to these theoretical frameworks, the book is based on more than fifty interviews with people active in the scene, such as musicians, heads of record labels, music promoters, managers of record shops, employees of institutions promoting austrian music, academics and music fans. the first chapter positions vienna on a historical and cultural map where it is celebrated as the world capital of music. the subtitle of the chapter, “from mozart to conchita wurst”, suggests a long cultural history: from viennese classicism, through romanticism, to early modern music and music between the world wars, the author finally gets to the viennese contemporary popular music (17–45). the chapter also gives an informative insight about the connections between urbanisation, social life and music during these phases. therefore, mazierska always reflects on the actual political situation and its effects on the local music scene. for example, readers are informed about the us american (“coloniser”) influences on austrian popular music in the 1950s which completely changed from ’60s, when the local musicians found their own style of music, “austropop”. following this linear history, the second chapter discusses the vienna electronica as scene and industry. the author looks into it from a bird’s-eye perspective to describe vienna’s musical history and its individual characteristics. to do so, this section begins with a clarification of the concept of “scene” with the help of classic theories and models by cohen (1999), kruse (2010), peterson and bennett (2004), etc. this is followed by a detailed chronology where readers are informed about the developments of clubs, events, fanzines and the local industry, including labels and record stores. according to mazierska, “[t]he peak of the scene was between 1995 and 1999” (62), which were—probably not coincidentally—also the golden years of the record industry in general. as mentioned, the most striking findings about the local scene characteristics can be read in this chapter. for example, based on the conducted interviews, the author writes about the scene members’ social background (mostly middle class youngsters), the importance of record stores as centres of knowledge-transfer, and few venues and their strict operating rules which led the viennese electronic music to a “bourgeoise and displaced phenomenon” (58) rather than a rebellious one. after describing the above—and other—characteristics, the third chapter looks into specific case studies of the most well-known and popular musicians whose careers were (and some of them are still) active during almost the entire discussed period. these include, following the chronological order of the subchapters, sin, kruder and dorfmeister, tosca, sofa surfers, patrick pulsinger, peter rehberg, christian fennesz and the label mego, electric indigo and sweet susie. every subchapter (and case study) starts out with a chronological career description of the musician(s) and follows up with their discography and style of music. these analyses reviews 105 are mainly based on mazierska’s own impressions and the interviewees’ answers, and the descriptions do not follow any specific analytical methodology. therefore, it excludes paratextual journalistic material and reception, which might have been fruitful as reflection tools. however, the author tried to focus on the connections between the city of vienna as a place and the music produced by these artists. this can be seen the most in the subchapters about the style of the musicians: mazierska was interested in the specialty of the so-called “vienna sound”. these different artists also demonstrate the wealth of styles and genres of viennese electronic musicians: they all work with different subgenres. such detailed historical and socio-cultural analysis of the careers of these different musicians did not exist before, so, also in this sense, the study fills a research gap. furthermore, the author considers most of these artists’ work as a manifestation of postmodern art and also sees them as trendsetters with their local characteristics, and not as “imitators” of anglo-american artists. this is the other reason why she chose them to be analysed in the book. although all of these subchapters and musicians are important in different ways, i would like to highlight only two of them because they differ from the others in terms of their subjects: “peter rehberg, christian fennesz and the label mego: between glitch and bécs” (chapter 8) and “women in a mixed world: electric indigo and sweet susie” (chapter 9). i found it interesting that in the former the author dedicated a whole case study to noise or experimental electronic music. this section might feel a little alien to the others, but mazierska’s main argument was to include as many different genres as possible. in this sense, the subchapter on electric indigo and sweet susie is also different from the others in terms of its categorisation of music by the musicians’ gender. here the author also gives a longer introduction to the problems of male-dominated edmc and the research of that phenomenon—see also dancecult’s special issue in 2017. in this regard, the subchapter about electric indigo and sweet susie also creates awareness of female artists who are often neglected in the histories of electronic (dance) music. finally, in the conclusions, the author highlights again her main arguments: 1) austrian electronic (dance) music deserves more scholarly attention that focuses on the “stories” of artists and protagonists rather than their technical properties and 2) viennese popular electronic musicians have created their own style/sound of music, instead of copying the anglo-american market. furthermore, by looking at the careers of the abovementioned musicians, the author found out that vienna as a city offers “comfortable” life to them, for example, with its affordable housing and proper studios. mazierska finishes her work with several open questions for future investigations on other examples: “were electronic musicians in countries such as belgium, poland or hungary as lucky in this period as their austrian counterparts? did they show the same interest in similar genres and develop similar ideas?” (218). with these questions, she also suggests for others to conduct comprehensive research on other european cities, in order that we would have a better picture about the differences between these places. in addition, in my opinion, dancecult 11(1)106 with the help of these suggested studies, one could also better describe the different “sounds” of these cities because one would have comparative cases at hand. in this sense, one could also talk about the specific “viennese sound” with stronger counterexamples at hand. mazierska’s self-reflection is appreciable: “no doubt that some readers familiar with the phenomenon described here will be surprised and unhappy with omissions, simplifications and mistakes made in this book. my defence is that no study is ever comprehensive and flawless, and this is particularly the case of works which cover a largely unexplored territory” (12–13). she also encourages others to correct these mistakes and fills these gaps, in their own future work. i think the book is definitely a great beginning for a new comprehensive research body on european cities and their electronic (dance) music scenes. additionally, this book will be a great basis for further research on the viennese electronic music scene. references cohen, sara. 1999. “scenes.” in key terms in popular music and culture. ed. bruce horner and thomas swiss, 239–50. oxford: blackwell. kruse, holly. 2010. “local identity and independent music scenes, online and off ”. popular music and society, 5: 12–15. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007760903302145>. peterson, richard and andy bennett. 2004. “introducing music scenes”. in music scenes: local, translocal and virtual, ed. andy bennett and richard a. peterson, 1–15. nashville: vanderbilt university press. reitsamer, rosa. 2011. “the diy careers of techno and drum ‘n’ bass djs in vienna”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 3(1): 28–43. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.02>. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007760903302145 http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.02 reviews 107 the relentless pursuit of tone: timbre in popular music. robert fink, melinda latour and zachary wallmark (eds.) new york: oxford university press, 2018. isbn: 9780199985227 (hardcover), 9780199985234 (paperback) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.09> maria perevedentseva goldsmiths, university of london (uk) as i write, anniversary celebrations of the apollo 11 lunar mission are in full swing, brian eno reissues are flying off the shelves, and it seems that musicology may at long last be experiencing a similar breakthrough with timbre: an object with a comparable pull on the imagination and one which, like the moon, is simultaneously an unavoidable physical reality and a void for the projection of our earthly desires. the last few years have seen a dramatic increase in academic engagement with timbre, with problems of ontology, function, representation, and affective and conceptual signification receiving an airing (e.g. van elferen 2017; wallmark et al. 2018; lavengood 2019; dolan and rehding forthcoming). the publication of the relentless pursuit of tone marks a pivotal point by turning our attention to timbre in popular music, in whose aesthetics it plays a decisive, but until now, under-theorised role. the book’s fifteen chapters put to rest any notion of timbre’s ineffability, showcasing— through sections on genre, voice, instrument and production—a glorious variety of analytical and representational techniques with which to capture its slippery essence. the usual spectrograms are joined by jocelyn neal’s phonetic descriptions of country guitar “twang” and griffin woodworth’s echomimetic representation of filter envelopes in funk. nina sun eidscheim’s deconstructionist reading of the persistent “disidentification” (153) of jimmy scott’s voice and jonathan howland’s topical archaeology of “luxe pop” are joined by material histories of studio technologies from jan butler, and embodied ecological theories of timbre cognition by simon zagorski-thomas. it is clear that a dominant methodology has not yet been established, and this emerging field is all the better for it. it is fitting that the first chapter is given to cornelia fales, whose identification of the paradox of timbre in a landmark article (2002) continues to animate both her contribution and the collection as a whole. the paradox is multifaceted, stemming from the incommensurability of the acoustic world, where sound is produced according to rational and quantifiable laws, and the phenomenal world, where timbre is (not as rationally or measurably) “perceptualized”, a perception which “differs most radically” from the acoustic features that provoke it (24). this same tension—between material reality and its mental representation—is at the heart of the timbre versus tone debate outlined in the editors’ http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.09 dancecult 11(1)108 introduction, where tone is defined as a “complex quasi-object shaped by cultural networks” and timbre as the “dispassionate” scientific object providing the real “physical and perceptual correlates” to tone (9-10). the book’s explicit aim is to bridge this gap by “illuminating how the materiality of sound can structure cultural practice” (12), but a latent distrust of the cultural pole is evident throughout, compensated for by detailed descriptions of sound production and psychoacoustic processes, coupled with genuine surprise and delight when a homology between acoustic and phenomenal worlds is identified. these descriptions—ranging from melinda latour’s dissection of carlos santana’s transcendental sustain to woodworth’s unpacking of the transistorised oscillators that powered funk musicians’ subversive use of synthesisers—are hugely valuable, and it is heartening to see such thorough engagement with the technicalities of popular music’s sonic construction. however, as jonathan sterne has observed, “technologies of listening . . . emerge out of techniques of listening” (2003, 92; original emphases), suggesting that we should not abandon trust in our ears and minds entirely, but instead use them to probe how cultural practices in turn structure the materiality of sound. simon frith makes a similar point in his afterword (368), and in the end, the timbre/tone (and its attendant real/cultural) dualism boils down to the ultimate philosophical chicken-and-egg of where “reality” really resides—a debate too expansive both for this review and the text it is reviewing. whilst every chapter in this rich volume warrants detailed discussion, two essays from fales and robert fink, which deal with timbre in electronic dance music and bass cultures respectively, are of particular interest to dancecult’s readership. in “hearing timbre: perceptual learning among early bay area ravers”, fales analyses the scene-specific discursive attempts by users of the sfraves listserv to understand timbre, citing edm’s timbral “nonspecificity” or sourcelessness as enabling rare feats of “perceptual learning” (25, 24). she argues that it is edm’s disconnect from the acoustic sources of the natural world, coupled with the dissociative effects of mdma (a frequent topic of conversation on sfraves), which allows listeners to learn to hear timbre not implicitly, as a monitor and proxy for the sound source, but explicitly and in itself, attending only to its immanent qualities. furthermore, fales suggests that this nonspecificity also operates at the conceptual level, because whilst many of the posts she analyses share a narrative arc of “before . . . perceptual inadequacy and . . . after” (35), the affordances of timbre, even when tacitly grasped by listeners, remain largely affective and sub-linguistic. in “below 100hz. toward a musicology of bass culture”, fink critiques the acoustically “unsound” (112) theorisations of the affective power of sub-bass and bass culture, as formulated by steve goodman (2010) and julian henriques (2011), which he argues have idealised bass sounds into occupying “fetish object” status (89). in order to put bass in its place, fink details subwoofer design, the transduction of low frequency waves through space, and the aural and haptic sensation of those waves by human perceivers, systematically debunking any notion of the exceptional power, force and physicality of bass. he concludes reviews 109 that the “power” of deep bass is “our intuitive perception of how difficult it is to hear these frequencies at all”, and so bass culture can only be understood “as culture” because the “sound” around which it is centred “is a timbre of no timbre” (112). i fundamentally agree with fink that it is the liminality of bass that gives it its symbolic power, but, as an avid bass-head myself, i have spent enough nights having my bones rattled by sound systems ranging from aba shanti-i to digital mystikz to know that there is a matereal basis to bass culture beyond subwoofers, and beyond the idealising projections of listeners. as fales observes in her conclusion, despite the difficulties of hearing timbre at all, human propensity for perceptual learning, and the “astronomical decibel levels” of a rave context “where the parameters of timbre and rhythm predominate” mean that there is “very little that is truly cognitively impenetrable” (39). producers and djs help us along in that respect, by isolating and eqing bass solos and drops so that our attention is turned more fully to the bass, making the almost-inaudible engulf the sensorium.1 fink’s main gripe appears to be with goodman’s florid, ccru-inspired discursive formulation of bass as malevolent weapon or force, and this chapter is a useful antidote to that narrative. at times, however, in his dismissal of the audible and sensible reality of bass, it seems fink falls prey to the inverse of the same “acoustic fundamentalism” (112) of which he accuses his adversaries. nevertheless, “below 100hz” is exemplary in its attention to the material conditions and technical specificities of tone production, and this represents one of the great strengths of the relentless pursuit as a whole: in addition to its thorough explorations of the cultural and perceptual dimensions of timbre, the book contains a treasure trove of sophisticated discussions of sound technology whilst managing to avoid the lacklustre didacticism of much other gear literature. in “the sound of evil”, zachary wallmark considers in finegrained detail the detuning, overdriving and distortion of guitar and vocal timbres in death metal, whose noisiness and difficulty he links to sacrificial violence and its overcoming by fans and producers. steve waksman looks at the ill-fated guitar synthesiser, which resolved initial stumbling blocks of translating guitarists’ idiosyncratic pitch control and attack types into information analogue circuitry and, later, midi could process. its failure, he argues, resulted from the “faustian bargain” (271) struck by its adopters, who traded the kudos of virtuosic guitar rock and jazz for an enhanced but for all purposes “sourceless” sonic palette. jan butler and paul théberge consider studio technologies aside from specific instruments, the former looking at the changing status of liveness as a site of rock authenticity in the age of the studio album, and the latter at reverb’s trajectory from a consolidator of space to special effect, where the once-stable relationship between acoustic, musical and listening spaces has become contingent and separable. touching on similar themes, albin zak sketches a cultural history of the recording industry in mid-century america, then undergoing waves of democratisation as emerging youth markets overtook djs and studio professionals as arbiters of musical value. zak’s chapter also highlights another thread running through the relentless pursuit; namely, popular music’s irrepressible zeal for turning one group’s dancecult 11(1)110 sonic off-cuts—in zak’s case lo-fi production values and untrained vocal and instrumental technique—into another group’s aesthetic ideal. this transformation undergirds catherine provenzano’s investigation into auto-tune’s redistribution of musical labour and its rationalisation along racial and class lines. it also serves as the backbone for mark samples’ chapter on the voice of tom waits, whose “damaged” and imperfect timbre cemented waits’ artistic authenticity, and was eventually granted a legally protected status of its own. zagorski-thomas’ “the spectromorphology of recorded music” serves as an appropriate closing chapter for this expertly curated collection, outlining a robust methodology that takes on both timbre and tone, and their interrelation. he borrows from james gibson’s ecological theory of perception, and neuroscientific theories of embodied cognition and cross-domain mapping, relating these to denis smalley’s work on gestural surrogacy to explore how ostensibly sourceless recorded sounds generate schematic “sonic cartoons” that suggest a sourced, embodied provenance. the sources these cartoons specify in the perceiving mind, however, are not concrete, real-world objects but instead take the form of “experiential affective structures” (348). zagorski-thomas applies these theories to analyse perceptions of fullness, fidelity and moving through space in “acoustic pop” and electronica, arguing that timbre perception is “based on our embodied experience and the metaphorical connections we can make between that primary ‘lived-in’ experience and our secondary experience of the world around us” (359). as such, while the distance between actual and perceived source can remain vast, they share a core structural affinity which gives perceptions a coherence and consistency with the external world which, in turn, enables listeners to act on, react to, and make sense of, their physical environment. this brings us back to—and perhaps offers a way out of—fales’ paradox and the dialectic between the real and the perceptual which drives the relentless pursuit. as the first of its kind, the book leaves plenty of openings for emerging timbre researchers to sink their teeth into and develop. for edm scholars, the ideas presented this book offer a potential way out of the music-analytical stalemate that has dogged our subfield since its inception, by showcasing approaches that enable us to engage more directly with the “matter” (i.e. the sounds and technologies) of electronic dance music. at the same time, each chapter is incredibly well structured and easy to navigate which, along with the book’s companion website and the sheer depth and diversity of the topics covered, makes it an indispensable pedagogical tool for advanced undergraduates and above. in short, the relentless pursuit it is a timely collection that deserves to be read widely, and in full, by popular music scholars and tone-chasers of all stripes alike. notes 1 clubs like london’s fabric, for example, have bespoke “bodysonic” wooden dancefloors with bass transducers placed underneath, so that clubbers “feel” the low-end frequencies through their feet. reviews 111 references dolan, emily, and alexander rehding, eds. forthcoming. the oxford handbook of timbre. new york: oxford university press. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190637224.001.0001>. fales, cornelia. 2002. “the paradox of timbre”. ethnomusicology 46 (1): 56–95. <http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/852808>. goodman, steve. 2010. sonic warfare: sound, affect, and the ecology of fear. cambridge, ma: mit press. henriques, julian. 2011. sonic bodies: reggae sound systems, performance techniques, and ways of knowing. new york: continuum. kane, brian. 2014. sound unseen: acousmatic sound in theory and practice. new york: oxford university press. lavengood, megan. 2019. “what makes it sound ’80s?: the yamaha dx7 electric piano sound”. journal of popular music studies 31 (3): 73–94. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2019.313009>. sterne, jonathan. 2003. the audible past: cultural origins of sound reproduction. durham: duke university press. van elferen, isabella. 2017. “agency, aporia, approaches: how does musicology solve a problem like timbre?”. contemporary music review 36 (6): 483–87. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2017.1452685>. wallmark, zachary, marco iacoboni, choi deblieck, and roger kendall. 2018.”embodied listening and timbre: perceptual, acoustical, and neural correlates”. music perception 35 (3): 332–63. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/mp.2018.35.3.332>. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190637224.001.0001 http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/852808 http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2019.313009 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2017.1452685 http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/mp.2018.35.3.332 dancecult 11(1)112 fyre fraud jenner furst and julia willoughby nason (dirs.) usa: hulu and the cinemart, 2019. <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7843600/> rrp: us$99 (hardcover), us$35 (paperback) fyre: the greatest party that never happened chris smith (dir.) usa: library films, vice studios and jerry media, 2019. <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9412098/> <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.10> tommy symmes rice university (us) the following is a review of two films: fyre fraud (hosted by hulu) and fyre: the greatest party that never happened (hosted by netflix). both films document fyre festival, a 2017 music festival that continues to be the focus of controversy, particularly with respect to its promotional methods. both films give accounts of the leadup, occurrence and fallout of the festival, were released within a week of each other and share some interlocutors. some of these individuals are named in million-dollar court cases, some were deceived and manipulated by people in positions of authority, and many have competing interests in the landscape of industrial taste-making. the films are already in deep conversation with each other. the narrative recounted in both films bears repeating: entrepreneur billy mcfarland and musician ja rule join forces to produce a luxury festival in the bahamas. they enlist a team of powerful media companies, raise millions from private investors, and promise extravagant experiences to a client base of instagram elites that they do not deliver. the media companies lose money and look dishonest, investors lose money and look disconnected from reality, and popular lifestyle influencers lose money and look naïve. hundreds of bahamians work hundreds of unpaid hours, but this remains in the background of the public shaming of so many venerable contemporary american institutions. the documentaries are in general agreement about who the villain is here: billy mcfarland is accused of being a “compulsive liar”, “scammer”, “hustler” and “dr. evil”. in fraud, mcfarland appears as an interviewee of the filmmakers. fyre, on the other hand, uses footage of mcfarland that was originally collected by the teams hired to promote the festival during the leadup to the festival. both films are ruthless in their condemnation of his character. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7843600/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9412098/ http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.10 reviews 113 fyre fraud released on 14 january 2019 and directed by the team of jenner furst and julia willoughby nason, fyre fraud hit streaming platform hulu four days before the release of netflix’s counterpart. an array of interviewees—lawyers, journalists, cultural critics and culture industry bureaucrats—contemplate topics including fomo (fear of missing out), the distribution of culpability in networked authority structures, the vulnerable psychology of millennials, the ethos of tumult that is wall street and the susceptibility of developing regions to first-world frauds all in relation to the fyre festival. fraud is strong in its detailing of mcfarland’s earlier business ventures—for example a credit card or an app for booking celebrities—setting the stage for his more ambitious project. it does so with the assistance of some of his former employees and mcfarland himself, who narrates his lifelong entrepreneurial development. mcfarland is adamant that he had the best intentions to put on an event that was “going to change the landscape [of the festival industry], and deliver an experience that people would talk about for years” (fraud 9:00). other key individuals are featured. the brightly lit, smiley calvin wells, a principal investor for a new york city firm, appears prominently in fraud. concerned by the amount of money people in his networks were investing in fyre festival and distrustful of mcfarland, wells attempted, unsuccessfully, to delegitimize the festival by critiquing its questionable promotions. he blames this failure on the impotence of the facts in this social-media dominated, “post-truth” world, but seems at times more impressed than incensed by the persuasive campaign assembled by the fyre festival team and the companies they contracted for media production and marketing. oren aks, the former jerry media employee assigned to their contract with fyre festival, is also interviewed. seated behind a laptop, as if reenacting the tricks and techniques he used to promote the festival, he shares his two cents regarding the manipulation of social media and the recipe for a viral trend and his dismay at realizing he had been deceived about the product he had advertised. bahamians in the film call out the unjust treatment they suffered at the hands of the fyre festival. delroy jackson recounts warning mcfarland and ja rule that organizational and construction resources were inadequate given the short timeline. ava turnquest, a reporter for local news outlet the tribune, accuses fyre festival of unoriginality in scamming the bahamas; a place “so ripe for fraud” (fraud 26:30). she portrays the festival as a predictable result of deplorable economic relations between the us and bahamas, as proof of the persistence of colonial attitudes so coherent with the conditions of contemporary pop culture. jia tolentino, a staff writer for the new yorker, joins turnquest in her diagnosis. interviewed in front of floor-to-ceiling high-rise windows, tolentino discusses fyre festival in relation to its conditions of possibility, in relation to the forces which dominate contemporary culture. tolentino illustrates the intricate and fragile relation between subject and society, suggesting: “billy [mcfarland] is baked in the oven of millennial reality construction that asserts itself in response to the precarity of the times” (fraud 10:10). dancecult 11(1)114 these analyses, albeit blithe in tone, contribute nuance to questions of legal and ethical responsibility central to the film. in addition, fraud introduces three instagram influencers, the festival’s target clientele, who recount arriving at the festival, struggling for orientation, and departing. tolentino provides us with a succinct definition of an influencer. “an influencer is someone who has effectively monetized their identity. that is their work: the performance of an attractive life” (fraud 32:05). they also contribute personal action-style footage of the crisis (empty stages, beach drinking, wandering in the dark, hoarding toilet paper). but fraud does not introduce any attendees who suffered more severe physical injury than surprise, boredom or dehydration. fraud finally interviews anastasia eremenko, mcfarland’s girlfriend. she reads aloud letters he sends her from prison and is shown after one of his court dates weeping alone in the street. eremenko is adamant about the swirling misrepresentations of mcfarland’s character, steadfast in her support of him. and mixed into shots that suggest her continued backing of this irredeemable villain, the film concludes that “it’s a great time to be a conman in america” (fraud 1:33:45). building from conversations with the above and other interlocutors, fyre fraud uses fyre festival to frame “the nexus of social media influence, late-stage capitalism, and morality in the post-truth era” (publicity material; see “fyre fraud: details”). the festival serves as a ready-made material specificity through which the film’s experts weave abstract threads of contemporary popular culture. but despite these strengths, the production feels heavyhanded; the film relies on bland-yet-antsy collages of stock visuals and cheap-looking b-roll from generic festival scenes of attractive women dancing or crowds walking. long awkward pauses after mcfarland speaks in interviews imply volumes about his trustworthiness, but do so pedantically. viewers might therefore understand the film to enact some of the very culture it critiques, namely one that values the speed and spectacular quality of visual electronic media over the story or material reality it represents. fyre: the greatest party that never happened hot on the heels of fraud came fyre: the greatest party that never happened, released by netflix on january 18th, 2019 and directed by chris smith (also american movie, the pool). the production is sleek, the pacing confident, and in contrast to fraud’s stock visuals much of the footage is original. fyre attends to moments leading up to the festival to offer viewers a prime view of the planning process and blooming drama. fyre includes abundant footage of mcfarland and ja rule leading organizational efforts, making definitive and questionable decisions in meetings, talking social media strategy and selling their brand. multiple times we hear them reiterate their pitch: “we’re selling a pipe dream to your average american loser!” (fyre 12:05). the film’s interlocutors affirm that mcfarland once fell asleep with a beer in his hand on the beach, that he would ride a jetski in time-sensitive moments, even that he resembled dr. evil (fyre 1:09:40). but most of this individual critique is reserved specifically for mcfarland; despite the damning documentation that fyre publishes, ja rule sustains little direct individual critique. reviews 115 much of the juicy visual content was collected on site in the bahamas by matte projects, a video production company contracted by fyre festival. brett kincaid, director of matte, testifies unapologetically to the quality of the work. he says of fyre, “they were hiring the best of the best in each category: best talent, best distribution, best social media company” (fyre 6:45). he makes sure viewers appreciate how his team produced and launched a video that trended globally from an island without internet, offering an interesting take on the accusations of false advertising and fraudulent promotion levelled against fyre festival and its teams. according to kincaid, the real fyre festival was the smaller-scale event that occurred during “the shoot [for the viral video]. the shoots were parties . . . the commercial was what everybody wanted” (fyre 1:30:12). jerry media is a company that generates online attention and social influence for clients; it is that “best social media company” named by kincaid and hired by fyre, and also the executive producer who partnered with vice in the creation of this documentary. ceo mick purzycki represents jerry media for the film. his script—just like the film—is sleek, persistent, and confident in explaining to the viewer the victimization his company suffered at the hands of fyre festival. but he too claims that there was substance and value in the work they did, asserting that his employers were “trying to tap into a culture and a zeitgeist that they believed in” (fyre 14:00). for purzycki as for kincaid, the inspiration was far from bunk, and if there was never a problem with the original inspiration, how can anyone fault those who had a contract to promote that inspiration using social media? purzycki does admit, however, that in the days prior to the festival jerry media deleted “the negative comments that were degrading the brand” from fyre festival’s social media presence (fyre 44:45). in other words, jerry media hid complaints and questions about festival details to prevent attendees from discovering that the festival infrastructure looked quite different from the promotional material. marc weinstein, a music festival consultant and fyre festival contractor, describes his failed attempts at convincing the leadership to be honest about their insufficient preparation time, about the fact that it was not going to be a luxury experience and about attendees becoming trapped on the island with no available return flights. but weinstein admits that each time he was rebuked, he put his head down and attempted to complete his assignments, to maintain the chain of command, to play his role in this peculiar machine. andy king, an event producer who styles himself “billy [mcfarland]’s whisperer,” also wonders about his responsibility for continuously vetting mcfarland’s personal character to the festival team for the good of the event (fyre 1:12:20). maryann rolle, a bahamian restaurateur, might have appreciated more critical thought from jerry media, weinstein and company. feeding staff, influencers and attendees with little preparation time, rolle tells viewers she lost $50,000 of savings trying to host the big american money hinting at long-term investment. j.r., a bahamian who organized local laborers for fyre festival, recounts fleeing for safety after the festival because those laborers had turned to him seeking payment. fyre festival leadership had vanished in the wind. dancecult 11(1)116 following the festival, mcfarland was charged with tampering with wire transfers. but after posting bail he continued to sell tickets for haute events in new york city; tickets which often did not exist. at that point gabrielle bluestone, a vice reporter who also contributes to the film, published an article linking mcfarland to sustained fraudulent activities while still on bail (bluestone 2018). mcfarland was arrested again, this time without possibility of posting bail. the effect of interspersing contributions from critics like bluestone with interlocutors like purzycki—especially when they align in tutti condemnation of mcfarland the naughty—is the same as the effect of jerry media co-producing this film with vice whilst repurposing their own video footage. jerry media’s self-promotion is not completely unabashed, but it is thorough. fyre submits that the promotion was the most real—maybe even the only real thing—about fyre festival. fyre is a statement, in form as in content, about the power of social media technologies. kincaid sums up this morass of deferred accountability with another quippy analogy: “if you shoot a commercial for bmw, how are you supposed to know if that car has a faulty engine?” (fyre 1:16:50). accordingly, perhaps we can consider fyre as much promotion as it is documentary. the two films reviewed differ in several ways. fyre fraud is preoccupied with the question of assigning responsibility for social media influence. fyre fraud’s viewer feels ethically superior to the clear villains and awestruck by the naivete of those swept up in their schemes, because all of this apparent chaos fits into a clean, almost algorithmic state-of-the-world. meanwhile, fyre: the greatest party that never happened demonstrates the capabilities of social media technologies. it is a crisis take to fraud’s algorithm, an illustration of real power fallen into the wrong hands. but both play blame games about who is responsible for the millions of dollars demanded by workers, investors, contractors, lawyers and others. both document the professional turn of social media identity and the attendant rise in the influence of models with popular social media identities. and both make us feel like we all need a good read of baudrillard’s simulacrum and simulation. viewed side-by-side, the two films provide us with spectacular material for reflecting not just on right and wrong in contemporary social media culture, but also real and fake. we are left puzzled: were the original intentions valid? who is responsible for viral momentum? and might the festival have happened after all? references baudrillard, jean. 1983. simulations. los angeles, ca: semiotext(e). bluestone, gabrielle. 2018. “fyre fest’s founder is going to prison, but the spirit of his scam lives on”. vice news, 12 june. <https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3ayma/fyre-festsfounder-is-going-to-prison-but-the-spirit-of-his-scam-lives-on> (accessed 9 september 2019). “fyre fraud: details”. hulu, 14 january 2019. <https://www.hulu.com/movie/fyre-fraude47078f3-1c0e-49a8-9da9-c571a7a20fec> (accessed 5 september 2019). https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3ayma/fyre-fests-founder-is-going-to-prison-but-the-spirit-of-his-scam-lives-on https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3ayma/fyre-fests-founder-is-going-to-prison-but-the-spirit-of-his-scam-lives-on https://www.hulu.com/movie/fyre-fraud-e47078f3-1c0e-49a8-9da9-c571a7a20fec https://www.hulu.com/movie/fyre-fraud-e47078f3-1c0e-49a8-9da9-c571a7a20fec dancecult 11(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 11(1) 2019: 97–116 issn 1947-5403 ©2017 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net raving iran susanne regina meures (dir.) switzerland: christian frei filmproduktion gmbh/zürcher hochschule der künste zhdk, 2016 <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5945286/> <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.06> gay jennifer breyley monash university (australia) susanne regina meures’ multi-award-winning 2016 documentary raving iran shows a year in the lives of anoosh and arash, aka blade & beard. at the time of filming, from september 2013 to august 2014, blade & beard were tehran-based djs, producers and dance party organisers, specialising in “dark and melodic techno” (blade&beard), with fideles and mind against among their influences. raving iran follows anoosh and arash as they appear to navigate iran’s unique bureaucratic system, seeking to release and distribute their album, and as they organise the next dance party and consider their future. the film opens with anoosh and arash being pulled over by police as they drive through tehran at night. the camera focuses on the city’s old murals, showing portraits of iraniraq war heroes and iran’s revolutionary leaders—rather than the many, arguably equally interesting, artistic murals in tehran (see the guardian 2015), or the city’s broad range of street art—before briefly showing anoosh and arash djing at a private party. the first daytime scene features the sound of the call to prayer: a recurrent sound in the film. anoosh and arash make several phone calls to organise a dance party in the desert. as with many dance parties around the world, they face financial and legal challenges. while it is not illegal to travel and camp in the desert, there will be illegal activities at the party (again, like most dance parties), so anoosh and arash take precautions to avoid disturbing nearby rural residents and to be prepared for unexpected visits from the authorities. finally, with all preparations made, the djs and their friends set out on a party bus for the desert. until this point of the film, the soundtrack mainly features ghazal shakeri (her “nuinspired” remix of “man o to” (“me and you”), with lyrics adapted from rumi), but as the bus reaches the desert, it shifts to the more pensive “whisper”, by the neo-mystical californian fusion group axiom of choice, featuring singer mamak khadem. this choice of song—one with little connection to blade & beard’s techno world—suggests an atmospheric shift from what meures presents as a generally threatening governmental sphere to an implied reviews http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5945286/ http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.06 http://www.ravingiran.com/ http://www.facebook.com/pg/bladebeard/about http://www.mamak-khadem.com/music-1 dancecult 11(1)98 positive “spirituality” (a word often used in association with khadem’s work) at the desert party. like dance-party-goers around the world, anoosh and arash talk of the connections and sense of community felt by people at parties in iran, but the film gives little sense of this with its central focus of the government-created obstacles faced by musicians and djs. when anoosh and arash return to tehran after the desert party, they head to the ministry of culture and islamic guidance, which issues—or denies—permits for musicians to perform in official venues or record and release music within the official government system. this visit is presumably made solely for the purposes of the film, to show viewers what iran’s “islamic” regulations are, as it is clear that anoosh and arash know that their work does not meet the ministry’s requirements. since the advent of the internet, it has become customary for artists to release music outside iran, and to distribute it primarily in digital form. however, for the purposes of the film’s narrative, anoosh and arash ask ministry staff about permits for their album. unsurprisingly, they are told that their work is unlikely to be approved, so they proceed to look for someone willing to print their unauthorised cd covers. after several rejections, they eventually find a late-night printer willing to do the job. with the album completed and packed in its cover, the next step is to distribute it: again, anoosh and arash go to shops that they would know are unlikely to be interested, so that the film can continue its depiction of the extent of governmental restrictions on music and cultural life in iran. disheartened, anoosh and arash discuss emigration, acknowledging that it is not easy to make music outside iran either, but hoping they could at least “have a future” elsewhere. they consider the possibilities for iranian musicians to emigrate, one of the most effective being through the acquisition of visas for north america or europe, obtained by securing an invitation to a festival. while getting advice about seeking asylum, anoosh and arash maintain their hope for this festival option, looking at online images of zurich’s street parade as they agree that “this is where we belong”. at the next filmed dance party, police turn up and arrest anoosh, who spends a night in jail. things look up, though, when he receives a call from the rote fabrik cultural centre in switzerland with the news that blade & beard’s application to lethargy/street parade in zurich has been successful. finally things seem to be moving ahead fairly quickly. after one final call to prayer over tehran, anoosh and arash are at the airport. it is at this point in the film that viewers with their own experience of migration, from iran or other countries, have reported feeling particularly upset. in a film that is quite slowly paced, the scene at the airport—in which anoosh and arash farewell their family and friends, not knowing when or if they will see them again—is presented casually, and less than a minute in length. electronic musician rojin sharafi explains why this brevity is especially upsetting: “i cried, actually, at the scene when they say a very short goodbye to their friends and family, but it wasn’t actually that deep, the whole thing was [skimmed over]—because i know how it feels [that moment of farewell], it was very traumatic for me, but i think for someone who didn’t really experience that, it’s like a very normal scene—so goodbye, bye!”1 reviews 99 like many other viewers, sharafi is critical of the film’s unnuanced narrative of anoosh and arash’s supposed move from a state of constant restriction in iran to one of “freedom” in europe. “i had problems with the scenes in iran, but not that much,” she reflects. “my problem began when they get to europe . . . because i have this feeling it has two parts: one in iran, where they are very exhausted and everything, and the second part in europe and they’re living their dream . . . i have the feeling they have a lot of problems now. the film stops one or two weeks after they arrive in europe”. indeed, with its final scenes of a decision to “say yes” to switzerland, the film’s narrative structure is similar to that of a romance. a more balanced documentary might have followed anoosh and arash’s life for a year in switzerland, as they lived in shared housing for asylum seekers, hearing cowbells at night, and faced different forms of restriction on their music and other aspects of their lives. “two djs negotiate their possibilities in complex and unfair bureaucratic and capitalist systems” is not as catchy as “two djs defy the islamic regime” (raving iran). meures has defended the approach taken in raving iran, in part justifying it with the film’s commercial success. however, some see that success as a symptom of a widespread problem in the ways iran and other “non-western” countries are portrayed in popular media around the world. as tehran-based siavash amini puts it: “right now people in this region are going through the roughest periods of their history and this is being exploited for journalistic and artistic exoticist quests. people trying to sell it as extra flavor to what they do disgusts me . . . the only reason we mentioned things like that . . . in the past was to raise awareness to how dangerous narrow and often conveniently concise media-friendly narratives or exotic flavors can be to people actually trying to do something they love while living here . . . both nationalistic pride and exoticism in any form are part of the same idiotic bipolar system” (in hignelltully 2019; see also breyley 2018). in europe and elsewhere, filmmakers, journalists and academics who have wanted to present more nuanced narratives that complicate notions of freedom and assumptions about where freedom exists have reported pressure from funding bodies, producers, editors and academic supervisors to simplify their work or fetishise their subjects, in some cases resulting in inaccuracies (nooshin 2017; javdani 2019). one musician who objected to the “clichéd” way a german radio station represented her as a female artist from iran was told it would “sell more tickets”.2 meanwhile, in iran, for musicians and djs who choose to live and work there (see haidari 2019; deep house tehran; set; idj’s iranian top 10), one of the greatest current obstacles is the economic sanctions imposed on the country by the united states (temp-illusion), along with misconceptions spread internationally by various media. unfortunately, raving iran contributes more to those misconceptions than it does to an understanding of edm in iran. notes 1 rojin sharafi, personal communication with the author (berlin), 20 september 2019. 2 personal communication with the author (berlin), 20 september 2019. http://www.ravingiran.com/ http://deephousetehran.net/about/ http://setfest.org/ http://www.internationaldjmag.com/the-iranian-connection.html http://modernismunbound.com/articles/interview-temp-illusion/ dancecult 11(1)100 references blade & beard. <http://www.facebook.com/pg/bladebeard/about> (accessed 25 september 2019). breyley, gay jennifer. 2018. “‘i hung around in your soundtrack’: affinities with joy division among contemporary iranian musicians”. in heart and soul: critical essays on joy division, ed. aileen dillane, martin j. power and eoin devereux, 209-28. london: rowman & littlefield. haidari, niloufar. 2019. ‘sounds of tehran: why should i sit here and pretend that we’re suffering?’ we present. <https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/story/sounds-of-tehran> (accessed 12 october 2019). hignell-tully, daniel alexander. 2019. “interview with siavash amini”. tone shift. 27 may. <http://toneshift.net/2019/05/27/interview-with-siavash-amini> (accessed 2 october 2019). javdani, sadaf. 2019. “as an iranian academic, i’m fed up of being asked to focus on poverty and oppression”. the guardian. 22 august. <http://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/ aug/22/as-an-iranian-academic-im-fed-up-of-being-asked-to-focus-on-poverty-andoppression> (accessed 25 september 2019). nooshin, laudan. 2017. “whose liberation? iranian popular music and the fetishization of resistance”. popular communication 15(3): 163-91. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2017.1328601> raving iran. <http://www.ravingiran.com> (accessed 25 september 2019). the guardian. 2015. “the toast of tehran: iran’s superstar street artist — in pictures”. 26 february. <http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/feb/26/the-toast-oftehran-irans-superstar-street-artist-in-pictures> (accessed 2 october 2019). http://www.facebook.com/pg/bladebeard/about https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/story/sounds-of-tehran http://toneshift.net/2019/05/27/interview-with-siavash-amini http://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/aug/22/as-an-iranian-academic-im-fed-up-of-being-asked-to-focus-on-poverty-and-oppression http://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/aug/22/as-an-iranian-academic-im-fed-up-of-being-asked-to-focus-on-poverty-and-oppression http://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/aug/22/as-an-iranian-academic-im-fed-up-of-being-asked-to-focus-on-poverty-and-oppression http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2017.1328601 http://www.ravingiran.com/ http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/feb/26/the-toast-of-tehran-irans-superstar-street-artist-in-pictures http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/feb/26/the-toast-of-tehran-irans-superstar-street-artist-in-pictures reviews 101 sweet harmony: rave|today philly adams and kobi prempeh (curs.) london, uk: saatchi gallery, 12 july – 14 september 2019. <https://www.saatchigallery.com/art/sweet_harmony.php> <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.07> chris christodoulou university of westminster (uk) described by the saatchi gallery as a “revolutionary survey of rave culture”,1 sweet harmony: rave|today appears at a bittersweet time for uk underground dance music. thirty years after the second summer of love, the conservative party is the best part of a decade in power, neoliberalism continues to dominate the political discourse and free parties emitting soundtracks characterised by “a succession of repetitive beats”—as described by section 63 of the 1994 criminal justice act—continue to be outlawed.2 an added layer of poignant incongruity comes with the staging of a show about a music-driven countercultural movement at an established cultural institution such as the saatchi gallery. the event may appear to celebrate the sounds, imagery and attendant lifestyles of rave culture, but the controlled gallery setting diminishes any sense of its “revolutionary” otherness. sweet harmony is a prime example of gallerification; the event marks the transition of rave culture from a resistant form of mass participation—arguably the last great youth movement to emerge from outside, or at least the margins of, mainstream culture—to an event whose value is shaped by its status as a curated artefact. nevertheless, the attempt of curators kobi prempeh and juan rincon (voltage and sci-arc) to capture an “authentic” visual commentary resonates in the exhibited work, mainly comprising multimedia room installations and large-scale photography. the images are a mixture of journalistic and personal approaches which articulate key aspects of rave’s diverse musical and social milieu: photographers derek ridgers and matthew smith’s images of enraptured figures and crowds at key parties like spiral tribe and protest marches capture the political spirit of rave culture’s impulse for social resistance; former time out nightlife editor dave swindells and filmmaker-photographer ewan spencer illuminate the weekender hedonism of inner city clubland with images of brand-conscious metropolitan dancers in sweaty reverie, while artist-filmmaker vinca petersen and author molly macindoe’s depictions of transformed warehouses and rave-bound journeys point to the psychogeographic motivation underscoring long voyages to far-flung rural sound-systems, along with rave’s reterritorialisation of abandoned spaces in post-industrial towns and cities. anna-lena krause’s post-club portraits are the only images to feature posed subjects, but the figures’ individuated self-consciousnesses mark a revealing contrast to the carefree togetherness suggested by photographs that were mostly taken in the pre-internet age. the relatively limited sense of connectedness offered by online culture has arguably diverted https://www.saatchigallery.com/art/sweet_harmony.php http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.07 dancecult 11(1)102 much of rave’s radical communality, which, not so long ago, only seemed to accompany the liminal experience of mass, all-night dancing at a dance event or festival. in this sense, a feeling of melancholy pervades sweet harmony; whether you were there or not, it is hard to avoid feeling nostalgia for the anarchy and anonymity exemplified by rave culture’s pre-criminal justice act era. it is an illuminating irony then, that the act itself is barely mentioned; unsurprising perhaps, given the saatchi brothers’ involvement in multiple election campaigns for the tories who introduced the bill that preceded it. the immersive experience promised by sweet harmony’s organisers is somewhat reinforced by the vinyl hunter shop in the centre of the gallery, where a dj mixes dance music classics live alongside the opportunity to actually buy vinyl. another impressive feature of this space is the large wall of flyers, where the iconography of posters featuring dj line-ups and contemporaneous graphic styles evoke a sense of scale and period as much as any of the more artistically elaborate exhibits. however, the sense of dance culture’s mainstream co-option is jarringly illustrated by the spotify-branded listening stations in the “play room”, featuring contemporary edm rather than music from the acid house and rave eras. corporate sponsorship and underground dance music make uneasy bedfellows and the presence of a music-streaming giant like spotify feels antithetical to the rave ethos that the exhibition purports to commemorate. there is much for ravers to revel in at sweet harmony. at specific moments, the event captures the radical alterity and transformative bliss of what was an extraordinary period of british youth culture. curatorially, its content and spatial organisation articulates a subjective and temporal disorientation that seemed so dangerous to the political and cultural establishment in the late-1980s and early-1990s. unfortunately though, the event carries the diversionary air of a historical sideshow. these are experiences of ecstatic timelessness that are presented as belonging to the past, despite assertions within the show itself of their enduring legacy (e.g. the subtitle, “rave|today”). arguably, it would have been dishonest for the saatchi gallery to recount in a more complete way the political atmosphere of the period, given its owner’s role in helping to elect the political party who brought the criminal justice bill into being. but, for all its reverence of the second summer of love, the material presented in sweet harmony feels inconsistent with the idea of raving as a revolutionary experience, both in practice and in spirit. notes 1 saatchi gallery. sweet harmony: rave | today [press release]. available at: <https://www.saatchigallery.com/art/sweet_harmony.php> (accessed 30 july 2019). 2 criminal justice and public order act 1994 c.33 part v section 63: powers to remove persons attending or preparing for a rave. available at: <https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ ukpga/1994/33/part/v/crossheading/powers-in-relation-to-raves> (accessed 30 september 2019). https://www.saatchigallery.com/art/sweet_harmony.php https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/33/part/v/crossheading/powers-in-relation-to-raves https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/33/part/v/crossheading/powers-in-relation-to-raves reviews 103 popular viennese electronic music, 1990–2015: a cultural history ewa mazierska london and new york: routledge, 2019. isbn: 978-1-138-71391-8 (hardcover) rrp: £95 (hardcover) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.08> anita jóri berlin university of the arts (germany) ewa mazierska’s book is definitely a niche work, covering a largely unexplored territory of research, both in terms of subject and methodology. when it comes to the extant literature on vienna as a music city, one can find a broad variety of studies on classical music (particularly the first wave classicism of beethoven, haydn, mozart, et al.; and the second wave modernism of schoenberg, berg and webern), with only a few texts (e.g. reitsamer 2011) that report on the city as a contemporary centre of electronic (dance) music. these few articles were, of course, milestone sources for mazierska’s book. however, as mazierska notes, austrian popular music deserves more scholarly attention in general, and the special characteristics of the viennese electronic music scene in particular have not been discussed as a whole, less still the relationship between the music, place and culture (1); although, as she notes, doing research on the correlations between music and place/city generates many methodological problems (17–19). throughout the book, mazierska is sophisticated and prudent about the terminology she uses. one can, for example, find a particularly interesting discussion about the problems surrounding the genre name “electronica” as popularised by the us music industry. this is the reason why the author chose the wording of “popular electronic music” in the title of the book, instead of electronica. however, mazierska suggests that the two terms mean the same in her work. in this sense, viennese popular electronic music refers to “music produced by viennese artists . . . or also includes record companies which released these records . . . places where this music was presented and appreciated . . . and a web of relations connecting musicians, institutions and individuals working for their success . . . as well as their fans. it can encompass art and artists, as well as scenes” (9). so the scope of the research is broad and also includes themes of music business research, such as the local record industry and the effects of digitisation. the described period is from 1990–2015; the 1990s were the heydays of viennese popular electronic music, and the study pays extra attention to this decade. the book is based on several methodological and theoretical strands—which are interweaved and combined throughout the whole work: the history and theory of electronic music and its subgenres with a special focus on dub, ambient, techno and noise; research on the relationship between http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.08 dancecult 11(1)104 music and place, positioning electronic music within the longer history of music in vienna; research about the “future of music” that considers the digital shift and the transformation of the music industry; and finally the interface between music and gender (summarised 9–10). in addition to these theoretical frameworks, the book is based on more than fifty interviews with people active in the scene, such as musicians, heads of record labels, music promoters, managers of record shops, employees of institutions promoting austrian music, academics and music fans. the first chapter positions vienna on a historical and cultural map where it is celebrated as the world capital of music. the subtitle of the chapter, “from mozart to conchita wurst”, suggests a long cultural history: from viennese classicism, through romanticism, to early modern music and music between the world wars, the author finally gets to the viennese contemporary popular music (17–45). the chapter also gives an informative insight about the connections between urbanisation, social life and music during these phases. therefore, mazierska always reflects on the actual political situation and its effects on the local music scene. for example, readers are informed about the us american (“coloniser”) influences on austrian popular music in the 1950s which completely changed from ’60s, when the local musicians found their own style of music, “austropop”. following this linear history, the second chapter discusses the vienna electronica as scene and industry. the author looks into it from a bird’s-eye perspective to describe vienna’s musical history and its individual characteristics. to do so, this section begins with a clarification of the concept of “scene” with the help of classic theories and models by cohen (1999), kruse (2010), peterson and bennett (2004), etc. this is followed by a detailed chronology where readers are informed about the developments of clubs, events, fanzines and the local industry, including labels and record stores. according to mazierska, “[t]he peak of the scene was between 1995 and 1999” (62), which were—probably not coincidentally—also the golden years of the record industry in general. as mentioned, the most striking findings about the local scene characteristics can be read in this chapter. for example, based on the conducted interviews, the author writes about the scene members’ social background (mostly middle class youngsters), the importance of record stores as centres of knowledge-transfer, and few venues and their strict operating rules which led the viennese electronic music to a “bourgeoise and displaced phenomenon” (58) rather than a rebellious one. after describing the above—and other—characteristics, the third chapter looks into specific case studies of the most well-known and popular musicians whose careers were (and some of them are still) active during almost the entire discussed period. these include, following the chronological order of the subchapters, sin, kruder and dorfmeister, tosca, sofa surfers, patrick pulsinger, peter rehberg, christian fennesz and the label mego, electric indigo and sweet susie. every subchapter (and case study) starts out with a chronological career description of the musician(s) and follows up with their discography and style of music. these analyses reviews 105 are mainly based on mazierska’s own impressions and the interviewees’ answers, and the descriptions do not follow any specific analytical methodology. therefore, it excludes paratextual journalistic material and reception, which might have been fruitful as reflection tools. however, the author tried to focus on the connections between the city of vienna as a place and the music produced by these artists. this can be seen the most in the subchapters about the style of the musicians: mazierska was interested in the specialty of the so-called “vienna sound”. these different artists also demonstrate the wealth of styles and genres of viennese electronic musicians: they all work with different subgenres. such detailed historical and socio-cultural analysis of the careers of these different musicians did not exist before, so, also in this sense, the study fills a research gap. furthermore, the author considers most of these artists’ work as a manifestation of postmodern art and also sees them as trendsetters with their local characteristics, and not as “imitators” of anglo-american artists. this is the other reason why she chose them to be analysed in the book. although all of these subchapters and musicians are important in different ways, i would like to highlight only two of them because they differ from the others in terms of their subjects: “peter rehberg, christian fennesz and the label mego: between glitch and bécs” (chapter 8) and “women in a mixed world: electric indigo and sweet susie” (chapter 9). i found it interesting that in the former the author dedicated a whole case study to noise or experimental electronic music. this section might feel a little alien to the others, but mazierska’s main argument was to include as many different genres as possible. in this sense, the subchapter on electric indigo and sweet susie is also different from the others in terms of its categorisation of music by the musicians’ gender. here the author also gives a longer introduction to the problems of male-dominated edmc and the research of that phenomenon—see also dancecult’s special issue in 2017. in this regard, the subchapter about electric indigo and sweet susie also creates awareness of female artists who are often neglected in the histories of electronic (dance) music. finally, in the conclusions, the author highlights again her main arguments: 1) austrian electronic (dance) music deserves more scholarly attention that focuses on the “stories” of artists and protagonists rather than their technical properties and 2) viennese popular electronic musicians have created their own style/sound of music, instead of copying the anglo-american market. furthermore, by looking at the careers of the abovementioned musicians, the author found out that vienna as a city offers “comfortable” life to them, for example, with its affordable housing and proper studios. mazierska finishes her work with several open questions for future investigations on other examples: “were electronic musicians in countries such as belgium, poland or hungary as lucky in this period as their austrian counterparts? did they show the same interest in similar genres and develop similar ideas?” (218). with these questions, she also suggests for others to conduct comprehensive research on other european cities, in order that we would have a better picture about the differences between these places. in addition, in my opinion, dancecult 11(1)106 with the help of these suggested studies, one could also better describe the different “sounds” of these cities because one would have comparative cases at hand. in this sense, one could also talk about the specific “viennese sound” with stronger counterexamples at hand. mazierska’s self-reflection is appreciable: “no doubt that some readers familiar with the phenomenon described here will be surprised and unhappy with omissions, simplifications and mistakes made in this book. my defence is that no study is ever comprehensive and flawless, and this is particularly the case of works which cover a largely unexplored territory” (12–13). she also encourages others to correct these mistakes and fills these gaps, in their own future work. i think the book is definitely a great beginning for a new comprehensive research body on european cities and their electronic (dance) music scenes. additionally, this book will be a great basis for further research on the viennese electronic music scene. references cohen, sara. 1999. “scenes.” in key terms in popular music and culture. ed. bruce horner and thomas swiss, 239–50. oxford: blackwell. kruse, holly. 2010. “local identity and independent music scenes, online and off ”. popular music and society, 5: 12–15. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007760903302145>. peterson, richard and andy bennett. 2004. “introducing music scenes”. in music scenes: local, translocal and virtual, ed. andy bennett and richard a. peterson, 1–15. nashville: vanderbilt university press. reitsamer, rosa. 2011. “the diy careers of techno and drum ‘n’ bass djs in vienna”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 3(1): 28–43. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.02>. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007760903302145 http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.02 reviews 107 the relentless pursuit of tone: timbre in popular music. robert fink, melinda latour and zachary wallmark (eds.) new york: oxford university press, 2018. isbn: 9780199985227 (hardcover), 9780199985234 (paperback) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.09> maria perevedentseva goldsmiths, university of london (uk) as i write, anniversary celebrations of the apollo 11 lunar mission are in full swing, brian eno reissues are flying off the shelves, and it seems that musicology may at long last be experiencing a similar breakthrough with timbre: an object with a comparable pull on the imagination and one which, like the moon, is simultaneously an unavoidable physical reality and a void for the projection of our earthly desires. the last few years have seen a dramatic increase in academic engagement with timbre, with problems of ontology, function, representation, and affective and conceptual signification receiving an airing (e.g. van elferen 2017; wallmark et al. 2018; lavengood 2019; dolan and rehding forthcoming). the publication of the relentless pursuit of tone marks a pivotal point by turning our attention to timbre in popular music, in whose aesthetics it plays a decisive, but until now, under-theorised role. the book’s fifteen chapters put to rest any notion of timbre’s ineffability, showcasing— through sections on genre, voice, instrument and production—a glorious variety of analytical and representational techniques with which to capture its slippery essence. the usual spectrograms are joined by jocelyn neal’s phonetic descriptions of country guitar “twang” and griffin woodworth’s echomimetic representation of filter envelopes in funk. nina sun eidscheim’s deconstructionist reading of the persistent “disidentification” (153) of jimmy scott’s voice and jonathan howland’s topical archaeology of “luxe pop” are joined by material histories of studio technologies from jan butler, and embodied ecological theories of timbre cognition by simon zagorski-thomas. it is clear that a dominant methodology has not yet been established, and this emerging field is all the better for it. it is fitting that the first chapter is given to cornelia fales, whose identification of the paradox of timbre in a landmark article (2002) continues to animate both her contribution and the collection as a whole. the paradox is multifaceted, stemming from the incommensurability of the acoustic world, where sound is produced according to rational and quantifiable laws, and the phenomenal world, where timbre is (not as rationally or measurably) “perceptualized”, a perception which “differs most radically” from the acoustic features that provoke it (24). this same tension—between material reality and its mental representation—is at the heart of the timbre versus tone debate outlined in the editors’ http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.09 dancecult 11(1)108 introduction, where tone is defined as a “complex quasi-object shaped by cultural networks” and timbre as the “dispassionate” scientific object providing the real “physical and perceptual correlates” to tone (9-10). the book’s explicit aim is to bridge this gap by “illuminating how the materiality of sound can structure cultural practice” (12), but a latent distrust of the cultural pole is evident throughout, compensated for by detailed descriptions of sound production and psychoacoustic processes, coupled with genuine surprise and delight when a homology between acoustic and phenomenal worlds is identified. these descriptions—ranging from melinda latour’s dissection of carlos santana’s transcendental sustain to woodworth’s unpacking of the transistorised oscillators that powered funk musicians’ subversive use of synthesisers—are hugely valuable, and it is heartening to see such thorough engagement with the technicalities of popular music’s sonic construction. however, as jonathan sterne has observed, “technologies of listening . . . emerge out of techniques of listening” (2003, 92; original emphases), suggesting that we should not abandon trust in our ears and minds entirely, but instead use them to probe how cultural practices in turn structure the materiality of sound. simon frith makes a similar point in his afterword (368), and in the end, the timbre/tone (and its attendant real/cultural) dualism boils down to the ultimate philosophical chicken-and-egg of where “reality” really resides—a debate too expansive both for this review and the text it is reviewing. whilst every chapter in this rich volume warrants detailed discussion, two essays from fales and robert fink, which deal with timbre in electronic dance music and bass cultures respectively, are of particular interest to dancecult’s readership. in “hearing timbre: perceptual learning among early bay area ravers”, fales analyses the scene-specific discursive attempts by users of the sfraves listserv to understand timbre, citing edm’s timbral “nonspecificity” or sourcelessness as enabling rare feats of “perceptual learning” (25, 24). she argues that it is edm’s disconnect from the acoustic sources of the natural world, coupled with the dissociative effects of mdma (a frequent topic of conversation on sfraves), which allows listeners to learn to hear timbre not implicitly, as a monitor and proxy for the sound source, but explicitly and in itself, attending only to its immanent qualities. furthermore, fales suggests that this nonspecificity also operates at the conceptual level, because whilst many of the posts she analyses share a narrative arc of “before . . . perceptual inadequacy and . . . after” (35), the affordances of timbre, even when tacitly grasped by listeners, remain largely affective and sub-linguistic. in “below 100hz. toward a musicology of bass culture”, fink critiques the acoustically “unsound” (112) theorisations of the affective power of sub-bass and bass culture, as formulated by steve goodman (2010) and julian henriques (2011), which he argues have idealised bass sounds into occupying “fetish object” status (89). in order to put bass in its place, fink details subwoofer design, the transduction of low frequency waves through space, and the aural and haptic sensation of those waves by human perceivers, systematically debunking any notion of the exceptional power, force and physicality of bass. he concludes reviews 109 that the “power” of deep bass is “our intuitive perception of how difficult it is to hear these frequencies at all”, and so bass culture can only be understood “as culture” because the “sound” around which it is centred “is a timbre of no timbre” (112). i fundamentally agree with fink that it is the liminality of bass that gives it its symbolic power, but, as an avid bass-head myself, i have spent enough nights having my bones rattled by sound systems ranging from aba shanti-i to digital mystikz to know that there is a matereal basis to bass culture beyond subwoofers, and beyond the idealising projections of listeners. as fales observes in her conclusion, despite the difficulties of hearing timbre at all, human propensity for perceptual learning, and the “astronomical decibel levels” of a rave context “where the parameters of timbre and rhythm predominate” mean that there is “very little that is truly cognitively impenetrable” (39). producers and djs help us along in that respect, by isolating and eqing bass solos and drops so that our attention is turned more fully to the bass, making the almost-inaudible engulf the sensorium.1 fink’s main gripe appears to be with goodman’s florid, ccru-inspired discursive formulation of bass as malevolent weapon or force, and this chapter is a useful antidote to that narrative. at times, however, in his dismissal of the audible and sensible reality of bass, it seems fink falls prey to the inverse of the same “acoustic fundamentalism” (112) of which he accuses his adversaries. nevertheless, “below 100hz” is exemplary in its attention to the material conditions and technical specificities of tone production, and this represents one of the great strengths of the relentless pursuit as a whole: in addition to its thorough explorations of the cultural and perceptual dimensions of timbre, the book contains a treasure trove of sophisticated discussions of sound technology whilst managing to avoid the lacklustre didacticism of much other gear literature. in “the sound of evil”, zachary wallmark considers in finegrained detail the detuning, overdriving and distortion of guitar and vocal timbres in death metal, whose noisiness and difficulty he links to sacrificial violence and its overcoming by fans and producers. steve waksman looks at the ill-fated guitar synthesiser, which resolved initial stumbling blocks of translating guitarists’ idiosyncratic pitch control and attack types into information analogue circuitry and, later, midi could process. its failure, he argues, resulted from the “faustian bargain” (271) struck by its adopters, who traded the kudos of virtuosic guitar rock and jazz for an enhanced but for all purposes “sourceless” sonic palette. jan butler and paul théberge consider studio technologies aside from specific instruments, the former looking at the changing status of liveness as a site of rock authenticity in the age of the studio album, and the latter at reverb’s trajectory from a consolidator of space to special effect, where the once-stable relationship between acoustic, musical and listening spaces has become contingent and separable. touching on similar themes, albin zak sketches a cultural history of the recording industry in mid-century america, then undergoing waves of democratisation as emerging youth markets overtook djs and studio professionals as arbiters of musical value. zak’s chapter also highlights another thread running through the relentless pursuit; namely, popular music’s irrepressible zeal for turning one group’s dancecult 11(1)110 sonic off-cuts—in zak’s case lo-fi production values and untrained vocal and instrumental technique—into another group’s aesthetic ideal. this transformation undergirds catherine provenzano’s investigation into auto-tune’s redistribution of musical labour and its rationalisation along racial and class lines. it also serves as the backbone for mark samples’ chapter on the voice of tom waits, whose “damaged” and imperfect timbre cemented waits’ artistic authenticity, and was eventually granted a legally protected status of its own. zagorski-thomas’ “the spectromorphology of recorded music” serves as an appropriate closing chapter for this expertly curated collection, outlining a robust methodology that takes on both timbre and tone, and their interrelation. he borrows from james gibson’s ecological theory of perception, and neuroscientific theories of embodied cognition and cross-domain mapping, relating these to denis smalley’s work on gestural surrogacy to explore how ostensibly sourceless recorded sounds generate schematic “sonic cartoons” that suggest a sourced, embodied provenance. the sources these cartoons specify in the perceiving mind, however, are not concrete, real-world objects but instead take the form of “experiential affective structures” (348). zagorski-thomas applies these theories to analyse perceptions of fullness, fidelity and moving through space in “acoustic pop” and electronica, arguing that timbre perception is “based on our embodied experience and the metaphorical connections we can make between that primary ‘lived-in’ experience and our secondary experience of the world around us” (359). as such, while the distance between actual and perceived source can remain vast, they share a core structural affinity which gives perceptions a coherence and consistency with the external world which, in turn, enables listeners to act on, react to, and make sense of, their physical environment. this brings us back to—and perhaps offers a way out of—fales’ paradox and the dialectic between the real and the perceptual which drives the relentless pursuit. as the first of its kind, the book leaves plenty of openings for emerging timbre researchers to sink their teeth into and develop. for edm scholars, the ideas presented this book offer a potential way out of the music-analytical stalemate that has dogged our subfield since its inception, by showcasing approaches that enable us to engage more directly with the “matter” (i.e. the sounds and technologies) of electronic dance music. at the same time, each chapter is incredibly well structured and easy to navigate which, along with the book’s companion website and the sheer depth and diversity of the topics covered, makes it an indispensable pedagogical tool for advanced undergraduates and above. in short, the relentless pursuit it is a timely collection that deserves to be read widely, and in full, by popular music scholars and tone-chasers of all stripes alike. notes 1 clubs like london’s fabric, for example, have bespoke “bodysonic” wooden dancefloors with bass transducers placed underneath, so that clubbers “feel” the low-end frequencies through their feet. reviews 111 references dolan, emily, and alexander rehding, eds. forthcoming. the oxford handbook of timbre. new york: oxford university press. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190637224.001.0001>. fales, cornelia. 2002. “the paradox of timbre”. ethnomusicology 46 (1): 56–95. <http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/852808>. goodman, steve. 2010. sonic warfare: sound, affect, and the ecology of fear. cambridge, ma: mit press. henriques, julian. 2011. sonic bodies: reggae sound systems, performance techniques, and ways of knowing. new york: continuum. kane, brian. 2014. sound unseen: acousmatic sound in theory and practice. new york: oxford university press. lavengood, megan. 2019. “what makes it sound ’80s?: the yamaha dx7 electric piano sound”. journal of popular music studies 31 (3): 73–94. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2019.313009>. sterne, jonathan. 2003. the audible past: cultural origins of sound reproduction. durham: duke university press. van elferen, isabella. 2017. “agency, aporia, approaches: how does musicology solve a problem like timbre?”. contemporary music review 36 (6): 483–87. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2017.1452685>. wallmark, zachary, marco iacoboni, choi deblieck, and roger kendall. 2018.”embodied listening and timbre: perceptual, acoustical, and neural correlates”. music perception 35 (3): 332–63. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/mp.2018.35.3.332>. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190637224.001.0001 http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/852808 http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2019.313009 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2017.1452685 http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/mp.2018.35.3.332 dancecult 11(1)112 fyre fraud jenner furst and julia willoughby nason (dirs.) usa: hulu and the cinemart, 2019. <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7843600/> rrp: us$99 (hardcover), us$35 (paperback) fyre: the greatest party that never happened chris smith (dir.) usa: library films, vice studios and jerry media, 2019. <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9412098/> <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.10> tommy symmes rice university (us) the following is a review of two films: fyre fraud (hosted by hulu) and fyre: the greatest party that never happened (hosted by netflix). both films document fyre festival, a 2017 music festival that continues to be the focus of controversy, particularly with respect to its promotional methods. both films give accounts of the leadup, occurrence and fallout of the festival, were released within a week of each other and share some interlocutors. some of these individuals are named in million-dollar court cases, some were deceived and manipulated by people in positions of authority, and many have competing interests in the landscape of industrial taste-making. the films are already in deep conversation with each other. the narrative recounted in both films bears repeating: entrepreneur billy mcfarland and musician ja rule join forces to produce a luxury festival in the bahamas. they enlist a team of powerful media companies, raise millions from private investors, and promise extravagant experiences to a client base of instagram elites that they do not deliver. the media companies lose money and look dishonest, investors lose money and look disconnected from reality, and popular lifestyle influencers lose money and look naïve. hundreds of bahamians work hundreds of unpaid hours, but this remains in the background of the public shaming of so many venerable contemporary american institutions. the documentaries are in general agreement about who the villain is here: billy mcfarland is accused of being a “compulsive liar”, “scammer”, “hustler” and “dr. evil”. in fraud, mcfarland appears as an interviewee of the filmmakers. fyre, on the other hand, uses footage of mcfarland that was originally collected by the teams hired to promote the festival during the leadup to the festival. both films are ruthless in their condemnation of his character. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7843600/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9412098/ http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.10 reviews 113 fyre fraud released on 14 january 2019 and directed by the team of jenner furst and julia willoughby nason, fyre fraud hit streaming platform hulu four days before the release of netflix’s counterpart. an array of interviewees—lawyers, journalists, cultural critics and culture industry bureaucrats—contemplate topics including fomo (fear of missing out), the distribution of culpability in networked authority structures, the vulnerable psychology of millennials, the ethos of tumult that is wall street and the susceptibility of developing regions to first-world frauds all in relation to the fyre festival. fraud is strong in its detailing of mcfarland’s earlier business ventures—for example a credit card or an app for booking celebrities—setting the stage for his more ambitious project. it does so with the assistance of some of his former employees and mcfarland himself, who narrates his lifelong entrepreneurial development. mcfarland is adamant that he had the best intentions to put on an event that was “going to change the landscape [of the festival industry], and deliver an experience that people would talk about for years” (fraud 9:00). other key individuals are featured. the brightly lit, smiley calvin wells, a principal investor for a new york city firm, appears prominently in fraud. concerned by the amount of money people in his networks were investing in fyre festival and distrustful of mcfarland, wells attempted, unsuccessfully, to delegitimize the festival by critiquing its questionable promotions. he blames this failure on the impotence of the facts in this social-media dominated, “post-truth” world, but seems at times more impressed than incensed by the persuasive campaign assembled by the fyre festival team and the companies they contracted for media production and marketing. oren aks, the former jerry media employee assigned to their contract with fyre festival, is also interviewed. seated behind a laptop, as if reenacting the tricks and techniques he used to promote the festival, he shares his two cents regarding the manipulation of social media and the recipe for a viral trend and his dismay at realizing he had been deceived about the product he had advertised. bahamians in the film call out the unjust treatment they suffered at the hands of the fyre festival. delroy jackson recounts warning mcfarland and ja rule that organizational and construction resources were inadequate given the short timeline. ava turnquest, a reporter for local news outlet the tribune, accuses fyre festival of unoriginality in scamming the bahamas; a place “so ripe for fraud” (fraud 26:30). she portrays the festival as a predictable result of deplorable economic relations between the us and bahamas, as proof of the persistence of colonial attitudes so coherent with the conditions of contemporary pop culture. jia tolentino, a staff writer for the new yorker, joins turnquest in her diagnosis. interviewed in front of floor-to-ceiling high-rise windows, tolentino discusses fyre festival in relation to its conditions of possibility, in relation to the forces which dominate contemporary culture. tolentino illustrates the intricate and fragile relation between subject and society, suggesting: “billy [mcfarland] is baked in the oven of millennial reality construction that asserts itself in response to the precarity of the times” (fraud 10:10). dancecult 11(1)114 these analyses, albeit blithe in tone, contribute nuance to questions of legal and ethical responsibility central to the film. in addition, fraud introduces three instagram influencers, the festival’s target clientele, who recount arriving at the festival, struggling for orientation, and departing. tolentino provides us with a succinct definition of an influencer. “an influencer is someone who has effectively monetized their identity. that is their work: the performance of an attractive life” (fraud 32:05). they also contribute personal action-style footage of the crisis (empty stages, beach drinking, wandering in the dark, hoarding toilet paper). but fraud does not introduce any attendees who suffered more severe physical injury than surprise, boredom or dehydration. fraud finally interviews anastasia eremenko, mcfarland’s girlfriend. she reads aloud letters he sends her from prison and is shown after one of his court dates weeping alone in the street. eremenko is adamant about the swirling misrepresentations of mcfarland’s character, steadfast in her support of him. and mixed into shots that suggest her continued backing of this irredeemable villain, the film concludes that “it’s a great time to be a conman in america” (fraud 1:33:45). building from conversations with the above and other interlocutors, fyre fraud uses fyre festival to frame “the nexus of social media influence, late-stage capitalism, and morality in the post-truth era” (publicity material; see “fyre fraud: details”). the festival serves as a ready-made material specificity through which the film’s experts weave abstract threads of contemporary popular culture. but despite these strengths, the production feels heavyhanded; the film relies on bland-yet-antsy collages of stock visuals and cheap-looking b-roll from generic festival scenes of attractive women dancing or crowds walking. long awkward pauses after mcfarland speaks in interviews imply volumes about his trustworthiness, but do so pedantically. viewers might therefore understand the film to enact some of the very culture it critiques, namely one that values the speed and spectacular quality of visual electronic media over the story or material reality it represents. fyre: the greatest party that never happened hot on the heels of fraud came fyre: the greatest party that never happened, released by netflix on january 18th, 2019 and directed by chris smith (also american movie, the pool). the production is sleek, the pacing confident, and in contrast to fraud’s stock visuals much of the footage is original. fyre attends to moments leading up to the festival to offer viewers a prime view of the planning process and blooming drama. fyre includes abundant footage of mcfarland and ja rule leading organizational efforts, making definitive and questionable decisions in meetings, talking social media strategy and selling their brand. multiple times we hear them reiterate their pitch: “we’re selling a pipe dream to your average american loser!” (fyre 12:05). the film’s interlocutors affirm that mcfarland once fell asleep with a beer in his hand on the beach, that he would ride a jetski in time-sensitive moments, even that he resembled dr. evil (fyre 1:09:40). but most of this individual critique is reserved specifically for mcfarland; despite the damning documentation that fyre publishes, ja rule sustains little direct individual critique. reviews 115 much of the juicy visual content was collected on site in the bahamas by matte projects, a video production company contracted by fyre festival. brett kincaid, director of matte, testifies unapologetically to the quality of the work. he says of fyre, “they were hiring the best of the best in each category: best talent, best distribution, best social media company” (fyre 6:45). he makes sure viewers appreciate how his team produced and launched a video that trended globally from an island without internet, offering an interesting take on the accusations of false advertising and fraudulent promotion levelled against fyre festival and its teams. according to kincaid, the real fyre festival was the smaller-scale event that occurred during “the shoot [for the viral video]. the shoots were parties . . . the commercial was what everybody wanted” (fyre 1:30:12). jerry media is a company that generates online attention and social influence for clients; it is that “best social media company” named by kincaid and hired by fyre, and also the executive producer who partnered with vice in the creation of this documentary. ceo mick purzycki represents jerry media for the film. his script—just like the film—is sleek, persistent, and confident in explaining to the viewer the victimization his company suffered at the hands of fyre festival. but he too claims that there was substance and value in the work they did, asserting that his employers were “trying to tap into a culture and a zeitgeist that they believed in” (fyre 14:00). for purzycki as for kincaid, the inspiration was far from bunk, and if there was never a problem with the original inspiration, how can anyone fault those who had a contract to promote that inspiration using social media? purzycki does admit, however, that in the days prior to the festival jerry media deleted “the negative comments that were degrading the brand” from fyre festival’s social media presence (fyre 44:45). in other words, jerry media hid complaints and questions about festival details to prevent attendees from discovering that the festival infrastructure looked quite different from the promotional material. marc weinstein, a music festival consultant and fyre festival contractor, describes his failed attempts at convincing the leadership to be honest about their insufficient preparation time, about the fact that it was not going to be a luxury experience and about attendees becoming trapped on the island with no available return flights. but weinstein admits that each time he was rebuked, he put his head down and attempted to complete his assignments, to maintain the chain of command, to play his role in this peculiar machine. andy king, an event producer who styles himself “billy [mcfarland]’s whisperer,” also wonders about his responsibility for continuously vetting mcfarland’s personal character to the festival team for the good of the event (fyre 1:12:20). maryann rolle, a bahamian restaurateur, might have appreciated more critical thought from jerry media, weinstein and company. feeding staff, influencers and attendees with little preparation time, rolle tells viewers she lost $50,000 of savings trying to host the big american money hinting at long-term investment. j.r., a bahamian who organized local laborers for fyre festival, recounts fleeing for safety after the festival because those laborers had turned to him seeking payment. fyre festival leadership had vanished in the wind. dancecult 11(1)116 following the festival, mcfarland was charged with tampering with wire transfers. but after posting bail he continued to sell tickets for haute events in new york city; tickets which often did not exist. at that point gabrielle bluestone, a vice reporter who also contributes to the film, published an article linking mcfarland to sustained fraudulent activities while still on bail (bluestone 2018). mcfarland was arrested again, this time without possibility of posting bail. the effect of interspersing contributions from critics like bluestone with interlocutors like purzycki—especially when they align in tutti condemnation of mcfarland the naughty—is the same as the effect of jerry media co-producing this film with vice whilst repurposing their own video footage. jerry media’s self-promotion is not completely unabashed, but it is thorough. fyre submits that the promotion was the most real—maybe even the only real thing—about fyre festival. fyre is a statement, in form as in content, about the power of social media technologies. kincaid sums up this morass of deferred accountability with another quippy analogy: “if you shoot a commercial for bmw, how are you supposed to know if that car has a faulty engine?” (fyre 1:16:50). accordingly, perhaps we can consider fyre as much promotion as it is documentary. the two films reviewed differ in several ways. fyre fraud is preoccupied with the question of assigning responsibility for social media influence. fyre fraud’s viewer feels ethically superior to the clear villains and awestruck by the naivete of those swept up in their schemes, because all of this apparent chaos fits into a clean, almost algorithmic state-of-the-world. meanwhile, fyre: the greatest party that never happened demonstrates the capabilities of social media technologies. it is a crisis take to fraud’s algorithm, an illustration of real power fallen into the wrong hands. but both play blame games about who is responsible for the millions of dollars demanded by workers, investors, contractors, lawyers and others. both document the professional turn of social media identity and the attendant rise in the influence of models with popular social media identities. and both make us feel like we all need a good read of baudrillard’s simulacrum and simulation. viewed side-by-side, the two films provide us with spectacular material for reflecting not just on right and wrong in contemporary social media culture, but also real and fake. we are left puzzled: were the original intentions valid? who is responsible for viral momentum? and might the festival have happened after all? references baudrillard, jean. 1983. simulations. los angeles, ca: semiotext(e). bluestone, gabrielle. 2018. “fyre fest’s founder is going to prison, but the spirit of his scam lives on”. vice news, 12 june. <https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3ayma/fyre-festsfounder-is-going-to-prison-but-the-spirit-of-his-scam-lives-on> (accessed 9 september 2019). “fyre fraud: details”. hulu, 14 january 2019. <https://www.hulu.com/movie/fyre-fraude47078f3-1c0e-49a8-9da9-c571a7a20fec> (accessed 5 september 2019). https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3ayma/fyre-fests-founder-is-going-to-prison-but-the-spirit-of-his-scam-lives-on https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3ayma/fyre-fests-founder-is-going-to-prison-but-the-spirit-of-his-scam-lives-on https://www.hulu.com/movie/fyre-fraud-e47078f3-1c0e-49a8-9da9-c571a7a20fec https://www.hulu.com/movie/fyre-fraud-e47078f3-1c0e-49a8-9da9-c571a7a20fec sound systems at the george floyd protests in minneapolis during the summer of 2020 tommy symmes rice university (us) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.06> downtown, 3rd june people raise their voices together and musical chants weave through the protest. sometimes everyone sings in unison with the lead sound system. other times megaphones and handheld drums dispersed in the crowd concentrate smaller groups, shifting between tunes. thousands march, soaked in amplified sound and the sounds of their own voices and the sounds of instruments carried and played by their friends, soaked in sounds that bounce off downtown high-rises lining the route. marshals bring the march to a brief standstill so that speakers might more directly minister to attendees. tension builds as their testimonies condemn the masses, including those in attendance, for their complicity and tacit support of a violent and corrupt law enforcement agency. “i don’t give a fuck if you’re at this protest right now!” and then tension releases, erupts, as people are invited to scream at the top of their lungs the name of any victim of police brutality. “folks we have got to change the energy in the atmosphere!” as the march returns to its origin point, the lead pickup truck pulls off to the side and several protesters follow. the flourish of post-disco horns leak from the speakers in its bed, “and the sun begins to fade”, while whitney houston serenades a small group of dancing protesters. people slowly disperse, wander off to another action or to their rides. the nearby metrotransit rail, running on a reduced schedule due to transportation restrictions following the onset of covid-19 in minneapolis in mid-march, will be obstructed for a little while yet as this critical mass dissipates. when george floyd was murdered on 25th may, covid-19 cases were on the rise in the us. minnesota’s governor walz has warned that if bars and nightlife providers fail to lower their risk of transmission, they will face another statewide closure. many of these establishments are only able to offer outdoor service at a limited capacity; they usher patrons through on a schedule to insure adequate turnover and to stay in business. the contradiction is obvious to many: the partitioned space and time in commercial and public service settings sits in stark contrast to the mass protest movement where bodies mix, sing and remain together for many hours. is it uncanny that city health officials have been unable to identify a surge in cases after three months of protests? although cacophonous, disruptive and by definition oppositional, the protests aren’t free-for-alls. they feature preplanned speaker lineups representing different facets of the protest coalitions building up to the charisma of the event’s headliners; marshals to guide the march and provide a barrier between it and any police or military presence; medics with basic first aid supplies and know-how, and water; and tail and lead vehicles to carry protesters who have difficulty marching. programs focus attention on a series of interconnected platforms that revolve predominantly around the formal and fiscal critique of the minneapolis police department and its supporting institutions. they also call for the return of community safety programs to the control and oversight of their various communities. organizers clean microphones with disinfectant wipes before offering them to speakers, and they have a bottle of hand sanitizer ready when speakers are through. others circulating through the crowd approach people without face coverings and offer clean, disposable masks. protesters greet each other by bumping elbows and gossiping about police who don’t cover their faces when making arrests. more than fifteen organizations collaborate to schedule and organize protests. they balance responsibilities and tasks for any given event so that each protest is the materialization of a slightly different assembly of the coalition. they make sure each action will have the resources it needs from its supporting cast, and momentum is maintained in the insistent repetitions of their message: “no justice, no peace! prosecute the police!” memorial square, 2nd june while decentralized musical protests scatter themselves across the city in confrontations with an institutional web of police authority, the site of george floyd’s murder has become a memorial to the cause and its martyr. standing strong behind cement barricades, parked cars, medic tents and visible community security personnel, this place will persist. for many days after the initial uprising, music of many kinds fills the memorial square. a pair of djs mix long, joyous sets of vinyl, willfully sharing a few dub, reggae, late disco and early hip-hop corners of their collections. a parcel truck parked not far away has its lift gate open to display impressive homespun cabinets and speakers, and a gang of friends pump contemporary club and leftfield pop from the bed of the truck, bobbing just behind the sound. teenagers dance to somali pop. children squat on a curb playing a motley assortment of percussion and a melodica. visitors and wanderers carrying personal speakers in their bags or on their bikes further decorate the musical chaos. by 2:00 am, this variety has given way to a hip-hop party on a roof of one of the buildings in the square (that also serves as a watch post for the security teams). lean, shirtless torsos topped by faces covered with bandanas and masks raise fists and blow clouds of purple smoke at the sky, at the sound of distant helicopters. word arrives that torrential rain is only a few minutes away, and the late night crowd springs into action. people work together to pull and hang tarps over the offerings of flowers, paintings, messages and other gifts that clutter the focal points of the memorial. others rush to secure tents that are already blowing around, to protect the rooftop sound system, to cover trash bins. the storm hits and several bare feet join the raindrops in a dance on the asphalt. the storm passes and people tuck away tarps for next time. a chant begins and grows and blossoms: “whose streets? our streets!” renegade party, 6th june military choppers hover above buildings shuttered with broad sheets of plywood. and spray paint is everywhere: colorful peace signs, “justice 4 george”, the names of others murdered by police, inspirational claims to life, statements of independence and defiance of authority. the thrum of the choppers and this urgent street art set the tone for one of the first renegade parties in minneapolis since commercial shutdowns in mid-march. a community is dancing together on lake street 10 blocks from the scorched windowpanes and shattered glass of what was, only a few days before, the mpd 3rd precinct headquarters. a toddler and a dog ramble about, grilled cheeses are grilled and intermittent passersby arrested by the vibe join in the bouncing, twirling, mixing bodies. dance floor acquaintances greet each other with surprise. no one thought they would be dancing for many months, but the murder of george floyd and the subsequent police response to protests have hampered the ability of city hall to persuade citizens that they should maintain solitude for the sake of society. “the whole damn system is guilty as hell!” taking back pride, 28th june minneapolis pride cancelled their official parade this summer, so they encourage people who feel isolated to purchase merchandise at their online store. but it has become increasingly difficult for some to connect this branded corporatist parade to a commemoration of the 1969 stonewall riots in nyc. activists critical of the corporatism have been rumbling for years about taking back pride, and the cancellation of the official event provided an opportunity to pull new people into the protest movement. so without police, corporate floats, nonprofit organizations or permits, a black trans pride parade stomps through downtown from the mpd 1st precinct to loring park. music and chants pump from a truck-loaded sound system contributed by one of the prominent underground techno crews (who also throw an annual pride afterparty). smaller speakers, megaphones and musical instruments punctuate the throngs of people demonstrating resistance to heternormativity, racism and capitalism, demonstrating support for queer minorities. the crowd is many thousands strong, large enough that different chants float up and down the column: “black lives, they matter here! trans lives, they matter here! native lives, they matter here! queer lives, they matter here! latinx lives, they matter here!” the fingers of sign language translators whir: “1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 fuck 12!” at the destination, whooping masses spill from the column into loring park and are welcomed by a new sound system already assembled and waiting at the foot of a grassy incline. the rest of the program features speakers and then djs and will run into the early evening. the underground has set up off to the side to play a bit of midwest house on something of a second stage if you’d rather just dance; some trickle over, but most bear witness to the program on the main stage. “sequeerity” dispels a couple of small commotions, and the event comes to a safe, warm conclusion under the early wisps of a purple-orange sunset. different futures as funding and ideological support for the minneapolis police department continue to crumble, and as community-led safety initiatives collect momentum and affirmation, these musical protests across minneapolis have barely slowed. every week there are new instances of american police brutality that demand attention and invite resistance, that connect themselves systemically to the murder of george floyd. every week the protests grip an amorphous system of oppression more tightly. and every week, the rhythms of the movement find their beat in a chant whose repetition is building a different type of power: “say his name! george floyd!” author biography tommy symmes is a graduate student at rice university in houston, tx. his dissertation focuses on dance music and dance music events in minneapolis, mn, and he is broadly interested in critique of ideology and contemporary aesthetics of resistance. email: tcsymmes@gmail.com dancecult 11(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 11(1) 2019: 97–116 issn 1947-5403 ©2017 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net raving iran susanne regina meures (dir.) switzerland: christian frei filmproduktion gmbh/zürcher hochschule der künste zhdk, 2016 <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5945286/> <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.06> gay jennifer breyley monash university (australia) susanne regina meures’ multi-award-winning 2016 documentary raving iran shows a year in the lives of anoosh and arash, aka blade & beard. at the time of filming, from september 2013 to august 2014, blade & beard were tehran-based djs, producers and dance party organisers, specialising in “dark and melodic techno” (blade&beard), with fideles and mind against among their influences. raving iran follows anoosh and arash as they appear to navigate iran’s unique bureaucratic system, seeking to release and distribute their album, and as they organise the next dance party and consider their future. the film opens with anoosh and arash being pulled over by police as they drive through tehran at night. the camera focuses on the city’s old murals, showing portraits of iraniraq war heroes and iran’s revolutionary leaders—rather than the many, arguably equally interesting, artistic murals in tehran (see the guardian 2015), or the city’s broad range of street art—before briefly showing anoosh and arash djing at a private party. the first daytime scene features the sound of the call to prayer: a recurrent sound in the film. anoosh and arash make several phone calls to organise a dance party in the desert. as with many dance parties around the world, they face financial and legal challenges. while it is not illegal to travel and camp in the desert, there will be illegal activities at the party (again, like most dance parties), so anoosh and arash take precautions to avoid disturbing nearby rural residents and to be prepared for unexpected visits from the authorities. finally, with all preparations made, the djs and their friends set out on a party bus for the desert. until this point of the film, the soundtrack mainly features ghazal shakeri (her “nuinspired” remix of “man o to” (“me and you”), with lyrics adapted from rumi), but as the bus reaches the desert, it shifts to the more pensive “whisper”, by the neo-mystical californian fusion group axiom of choice, featuring singer mamak khadem. this choice of song—one with little connection to blade & beard’s techno world—suggests an atmospheric shift from what meures presents as a generally threatening governmental sphere to an implied reviews http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5945286/ http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.06 http://www.ravingiran.com/ http://www.facebook.com/pg/bladebeard/about http://www.mamak-khadem.com/music-1 dancecult 11(1)98 positive “spirituality” (a word often used in association with khadem’s work) at the desert party. like dance-party-goers around the world, anoosh and arash talk of the connections and sense of community felt by people at parties in iran, but the film gives little sense of this with its central focus of the government-created obstacles faced by musicians and djs. when anoosh and arash return to tehran after the desert party, they head to the ministry of culture and islamic guidance, which issues—or denies—permits for musicians to perform in official venues or record and release music within the official government system. this visit is presumably made solely for the purposes of the film, to show viewers what iran’s “islamic” regulations are, as it is clear that anoosh and arash know that their work does not meet the ministry’s requirements. since the advent of the internet, it has become customary for artists to release music outside iran, and to distribute it primarily in digital form. however, for the purposes of the film’s narrative, anoosh and arash ask ministry staff about permits for their album. unsurprisingly, they are told that their work is unlikely to be approved, so they proceed to look for someone willing to print their unauthorised cd covers. after several rejections, they eventually find a late-night printer willing to do the job. with the album completed and packed in its cover, the next step is to distribute it: again, anoosh and arash go to shops that they would know are unlikely to be interested, so that the film can continue its depiction of the extent of governmental restrictions on music and cultural life in iran. disheartened, anoosh and arash discuss emigration, acknowledging that it is not easy to make music outside iran either, but hoping they could at least “have a future” elsewhere. they consider the possibilities for iranian musicians to emigrate, one of the most effective being through the acquisition of visas for north america or europe, obtained by securing an invitation to a festival. while getting advice about seeking asylum, anoosh and arash maintain their hope for this festival option, looking at online images of zurich’s street parade as they agree that “this is where we belong”. at the next filmed dance party, police turn up and arrest anoosh, who spends a night in jail. things look up, though, when he receives a call from the rote fabrik cultural centre in switzerland with the news that blade & beard’s application to lethargy/street parade in zurich has been successful. finally things seem to be moving ahead fairly quickly. after one final call to prayer over tehran, anoosh and arash are at the airport. it is at this point in the film that viewers with their own experience of migration, from iran or other countries, have reported feeling particularly upset. in a film that is quite slowly paced, the scene at the airport—in which anoosh and arash farewell their family and friends, not knowing when or if they will see them again—is presented casually, and less than a minute in length. electronic musician rojin sharafi explains why this brevity is especially upsetting: “i cried, actually, at the scene when they say a very short goodbye to their friends and family, but it wasn’t actually that deep, the whole thing was [skimmed over]—because i know how it feels [that moment of farewell], it was very traumatic for me, but i think for someone who didn’t really experience that, it’s like a very normal scene—so goodbye, bye!”1 reviews 99 like many other viewers, sharafi is critical of the film’s unnuanced narrative of anoosh and arash’s supposed move from a state of constant restriction in iran to one of “freedom” in europe. “i had problems with the scenes in iran, but not that much,” she reflects. “my problem began when they get to europe . . . because i have this feeling it has two parts: one in iran, where they are very exhausted and everything, and the second part in europe and they’re living their dream . . . i have the feeling they have a lot of problems now. the film stops one or two weeks after they arrive in europe”. indeed, with its final scenes of a decision to “say yes” to switzerland, the film’s narrative structure is similar to that of a romance. a more balanced documentary might have followed anoosh and arash’s life for a year in switzerland, as they lived in shared housing for asylum seekers, hearing cowbells at night, and faced different forms of restriction on their music and other aspects of their lives. “two djs negotiate their possibilities in complex and unfair bureaucratic and capitalist systems” is not as catchy as “two djs defy the islamic regime” (raving iran). meures has defended the approach taken in raving iran, in part justifying it with the film’s commercial success. however, some see that success as a symptom of a widespread problem in the ways iran and other “non-western” countries are portrayed in popular media around the world. as tehran-based siavash amini puts it: “right now people in this region are going through the roughest periods of their history and this is being exploited for journalistic and artistic exoticist quests. people trying to sell it as extra flavor to what they do disgusts me . . . the only reason we mentioned things like that . . . in the past was to raise awareness to how dangerous narrow and often conveniently concise media-friendly narratives or exotic flavors can be to people actually trying to do something they love while living here . . . both nationalistic pride and exoticism in any form are part of the same idiotic bipolar system” (in hignelltully 2019; see also breyley 2018). in europe and elsewhere, filmmakers, journalists and academics who have wanted to present more nuanced narratives that complicate notions of freedom and assumptions about where freedom exists have reported pressure from funding bodies, producers, editors and academic supervisors to simplify their work or fetishise their subjects, in some cases resulting in inaccuracies (nooshin 2017; javdani 2019). one musician who objected to the “clichéd” way a german radio station represented her as a female artist from iran was told it would “sell more tickets”.2 meanwhile, in iran, for musicians and djs who choose to live and work there (see haidari 2019; deep house tehran; set; idj’s iranian top 10), one of the greatest current obstacles is the economic sanctions imposed on the country by the united states (temp-illusion), along with misconceptions spread internationally by various media. unfortunately, raving iran contributes more to those misconceptions than it does to an understanding of edm in iran. notes 1 rojin sharafi, personal communication with the author (berlin), 20 september 2019. 2 personal communication with the author (berlin), 20 september 2019. http://www.ravingiran.com/ http://deephousetehran.net/about/ http://setfest.org/ http://www.internationaldjmag.com/the-iranian-connection.html http://modernismunbound.com/articles/interview-temp-illusion/ dancecult 11(1)100 references blade & beard. <http://www.facebook.com/pg/bladebeard/about> (accessed 25 september 2019). breyley, gay jennifer. 2018. “‘i hung around in your soundtrack’: affinities with joy division among contemporary iranian musicians”. in heart and soul: critical essays on joy division, ed. aileen dillane, martin j. power and eoin devereux, 209-28. london: rowman & littlefield. haidari, niloufar. 2019. ‘sounds of tehran: why should i sit here and pretend that we’re suffering?’ we present. <https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/story/sounds-of-tehran> (accessed 12 october 2019). hignell-tully, daniel alexander. 2019. “interview with siavash amini”. tone shift. 27 may. <http://toneshift.net/2019/05/27/interview-with-siavash-amini> (accessed 2 october 2019). javdani, sadaf. 2019. “as an iranian academic, i’m fed up of being asked to focus on poverty and oppression”. the guardian. 22 august. <http://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/ aug/22/as-an-iranian-academic-im-fed-up-of-being-asked-to-focus-on-poverty-andoppression> (accessed 25 september 2019). nooshin, laudan. 2017. “whose liberation? iranian popular music and the fetishization of resistance”. popular communication 15(3): 163-91. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2017.1328601> raving iran. <http://www.ravingiran.com> (accessed 25 september 2019). the guardian. 2015. “the toast of tehran: iran’s superstar street artist — in pictures”. 26 february. <http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/feb/26/the-toast-oftehran-irans-superstar-street-artist-in-pictures> (accessed 2 october 2019). http://www.facebook.com/pg/bladebeard/about https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/story/sounds-of-tehran http://toneshift.net/2019/05/27/interview-with-siavash-amini http://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/aug/22/as-an-iranian-academic-im-fed-up-of-being-asked-to-focus-on-poverty-and-oppression http://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/aug/22/as-an-iranian-academic-im-fed-up-of-being-asked-to-focus-on-poverty-and-oppression http://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/aug/22/as-an-iranian-academic-im-fed-up-of-being-asked-to-focus-on-poverty-and-oppression http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2017.1328601 http://www.ravingiran.com/ http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/feb/26/the-toast-of-tehran-irans-superstar-street-artist-in-pictures http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/feb/26/the-toast-of-tehran-irans-superstar-street-artist-in-pictures reviews 101 sweet harmony: rave|today philly adams and kobi prempeh (curs.) london, uk: saatchi gallery, 12 july – 14 september 2019. <https://www.saatchigallery.com/art/sweet_harmony.php> <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.07> chris christodoulou university of westminster (uk) described by the saatchi gallery as a “revolutionary survey of rave culture”,1 sweet harmony: rave|today appears at a bittersweet time for uk underground dance music. thirty years after the second summer of love, the conservative party is the best part of a decade in power, neoliberalism continues to dominate the political discourse and free parties emitting soundtracks characterised by “a succession of repetitive beats”—as described by section 63 of the 1994 criminal justice act—continue to be outlawed.2 an added layer of poignant incongruity comes with the staging of a show about a music-driven countercultural movement at an established cultural institution such as the saatchi gallery. the event may appear to celebrate the sounds, imagery and attendant lifestyles of rave culture, but the controlled gallery setting diminishes any sense of its “revolutionary” otherness. sweet harmony is a prime example of gallerification; the event marks the transition of rave culture from a resistant form of mass participation—arguably the last great youth movement to emerge from outside, or at least the margins of, mainstream culture—to an event whose value is shaped by its status as a curated artefact. nevertheless, the attempt of curators kobi prempeh and juan rincon (voltage and sci-arc) to capture an “authentic” visual commentary resonates in the exhibited work, mainly comprising multimedia room installations and large-scale photography. the images are a mixture of journalistic and personal approaches which articulate key aspects of rave’s diverse musical and social milieu: photographers derek ridgers and matthew smith’s images of enraptured figures and crowds at key parties like spiral tribe and protest marches capture the political spirit of rave culture’s impulse for social resistance; former time out nightlife editor dave swindells and filmmaker-photographer ewan spencer illuminate the weekender hedonism of inner city clubland with images of brand-conscious metropolitan dancers in sweaty reverie, while artist-filmmaker vinca petersen and author molly macindoe’s depictions of transformed warehouses and rave-bound journeys point to the psychogeographic motivation underscoring long voyages to far-flung rural sound-systems, along with rave’s reterritorialisation of abandoned spaces in post-industrial towns and cities. anna-lena krause’s post-club portraits are the only images to feature posed subjects, but the figures’ individuated self-consciousnesses mark a revealing contrast to the carefree togetherness suggested by photographs that were mostly taken in the pre-internet age. the relatively limited sense of connectedness offered by online culture has arguably diverted https://www.saatchigallery.com/art/sweet_harmony.php http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.07 dancecult 11(1)102 much of rave’s radical communality, which, not so long ago, only seemed to accompany the liminal experience of mass, all-night dancing at a dance event or festival. in this sense, a feeling of melancholy pervades sweet harmony; whether you were there or not, it is hard to avoid feeling nostalgia for the anarchy and anonymity exemplified by rave culture’s pre-criminal justice act era. it is an illuminating irony then, that the act itself is barely mentioned; unsurprising perhaps, given the saatchi brothers’ involvement in multiple election campaigns for the tories who introduced the bill that preceded it. the immersive experience promised by sweet harmony’s organisers is somewhat reinforced by the vinyl hunter shop in the centre of the gallery, where a dj mixes dance music classics live alongside the opportunity to actually buy vinyl. another impressive feature of this space is the large wall of flyers, where the iconography of posters featuring dj line-ups and contemporaneous graphic styles evoke a sense of scale and period as much as any of the more artistically elaborate exhibits. however, the sense of dance culture’s mainstream co-option is jarringly illustrated by the spotify-branded listening stations in the “play room”, featuring contemporary edm rather than music from the acid house and rave eras. corporate sponsorship and underground dance music make uneasy bedfellows and the presence of a music-streaming giant like spotify feels antithetical to the rave ethos that the exhibition purports to commemorate. there is much for ravers to revel in at sweet harmony. at specific moments, the event captures the radical alterity and transformative bliss of what was an extraordinary period of british youth culture. curatorially, its content and spatial organisation articulates a subjective and temporal disorientation that seemed so dangerous to the political and cultural establishment in the late-1980s and early-1990s. unfortunately though, the event carries the diversionary air of a historical sideshow. these are experiences of ecstatic timelessness that are presented as belonging to the past, despite assertions within the show itself of their enduring legacy (e.g. the subtitle, “rave|today”). arguably, it would have been dishonest for the saatchi gallery to recount in a more complete way the political atmosphere of the period, given its owner’s role in helping to elect the political party who brought the criminal justice bill into being. but, for all its reverence of the second summer of love, the material presented in sweet harmony feels inconsistent with the idea of raving as a revolutionary experience, both in practice and in spirit. notes 1 saatchi gallery. sweet harmony: rave | today [press release]. available at: <https://www.saatchigallery.com/art/sweet_harmony.php> (accessed 30 july 2019). 2 criminal justice and public order act 1994 c.33 part v section 63: powers to remove persons attending or preparing for a rave. available at: <https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ ukpga/1994/33/part/v/crossheading/powers-in-relation-to-raves> (accessed 30 september 2019). https://www.saatchigallery.com/art/sweet_harmony.php https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/33/part/v/crossheading/powers-in-relation-to-raves https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/33/part/v/crossheading/powers-in-relation-to-raves reviews 103 popular viennese electronic music, 1990–2015: a cultural history ewa mazierska london and new york: routledge, 2019. isbn: 978-1-138-71391-8 (hardcover) rrp: £95 (hardcover) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.08> anita jóri berlin university of the arts (germany) ewa mazierska’s book is definitely a niche work, covering a largely unexplored territory of research, both in terms of subject and methodology. when it comes to the extant literature on vienna as a music city, one can find a broad variety of studies on classical music (particularly the first wave classicism of beethoven, haydn, mozart, et al.; and the second wave modernism of schoenberg, berg and webern), with only a few texts (e.g. reitsamer 2011) that report on the city as a contemporary centre of electronic (dance) music. these few articles were, of course, milestone sources for mazierska’s book. however, as mazierska notes, austrian popular music deserves more scholarly attention in general, and the special characteristics of the viennese electronic music scene in particular have not been discussed as a whole, less still the relationship between the music, place and culture (1); although, as she notes, doing research on the correlations between music and place/city generates many methodological problems (17–19). throughout the book, mazierska is sophisticated and prudent about the terminology she uses. one can, for example, find a particularly interesting discussion about the problems surrounding the genre name “electronica” as popularised by the us music industry. this is the reason why the author chose the wording of “popular electronic music” in the title of the book, instead of electronica. however, mazierska suggests that the two terms mean the same in her work. in this sense, viennese popular electronic music refers to “music produced by viennese artists . . . or also includes record companies which released these records . . . places where this music was presented and appreciated . . . and a web of relations connecting musicians, institutions and individuals working for their success . . . as well as their fans. it can encompass art and artists, as well as scenes” (9). so the scope of the research is broad and also includes themes of music business research, such as the local record industry and the effects of digitisation. the described period is from 1990–2015; the 1990s were the heydays of viennese popular electronic music, and the study pays extra attention to this decade. the book is based on several methodological and theoretical strands—which are interweaved and combined throughout the whole work: the history and theory of electronic music and its subgenres with a special focus on dub, ambient, techno and noise; research on the relationship between http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.08 dancecult 11(1)104 music and place, positioning electronic music within the longer history of music in vienna; research about the “future of music” that considers the digital shift and the transformation of the music industry; and finally the interface between music and gender (summarised 9–10). in addition to these theoretical frameworks, the book is based on more than fifty interviews with people active in the scene, such as musicians, heads of record labels, music promoters, managers of record shops, employees of institutions promoting austrian music, academics and music fans. the first chapter positions vienna on a historical and cultural map where it is celebrated as the world capital of music. the subtitle of the chapter, “from mozart to conchita wurst”, suggests a long cultural history: from viennese classicism, through romanticism, to early modern music and music between the world wars, the author finally gets to the viennese contemporary popular music (17–45). the chapter also gives an informative insight about the connections between urbanisation, social life and music during these phases. therefore, mazierska always reflects on the actual political situation and its effects on the local music scene. for example, readers are informed about the us american (“coloniser”) influences on austrian popular music in the 1950s which completely changed from ’60s, when the local musicians found their own style of music, “austropop”. following this linear history, the second chapter discusses the vienna electronica as scene and industry. the author looks into it from a bird’s-eye perspective to describe vienna’s musical history and its individual characteristics. to do so, this section begins with a clarification of the concept of “scene” with the help of classic theories and models by cohen (1999), kruse (2010), peterson and bennett (2004), etc. this is followed by a detailed chronology where readers are informed about the developments of clubs, events, fanzines and the local industry, including labels and record stores. according to mazierska, “[t]he peak of the scene was between 1995 and 1999” (62), which were—probably not coincidentally—also the golden years of the record industry in general. as mentioned, the most striking findings about the local scene characteristics can be read in this chapter. for example, based on the conducted interviews, the author writes about the scene members’ social background (mostly middle class youngsters), the importance of record stores as centres of knowledge-transfer, and few venues and their strict operating rules which led the viennese electronic music to a “bourgeoise and displaced phenomenon” (58) rather than a rebellious one. after describing the above—and other—characteristics, the third chapter looks into specific case studies of the most well-known and popular musicians whose careers were (and some of them are still) active during almost the entire discussed period. these include, following the chronological order of the subchapters, sin, kruder and dorfmeister, tosca, sofa surfers, patrick pulsinger, peter rehberg, christian fennesz and the label mego, electric indigo and sweet susie. every subchapter (and case study) starts out with a chronological career description of the musician(s) and follows up with their discography and style of music. these analyses reviews 105 are mainly based on mazierska’s own impressions and the interviewees’ answers, and the descriptions do not follow any specific analytical methodology. therefore, it excludes paratextual journalistic material and reception, which might have been fruitful as reflection tools. however, the author tried to focus on the connections between the city of vienna as a place and the music produced by these artists. this can be seen the most in the subchapters about the style of the musicians: mazierska was interested in the specialty of the so-called “vienna sound”. these different artists also demonstrate the wealth of styles and genres of viennese electronic musicians: they all work with different subgenres. such detailed historical and socio-cultural analysis of the careers of these different musicians did not exist before, so, also in this sense, the study fills a research gap. furthermore, the author considers most of these artists’ work as a manifestation of postmodern art and also sees them as trendsetters with their local characteristics, and not as “imitators” of anglo-american artists. this is the other reason why she chose them to be analysed in the book. although all of these subchapters and musicians are important in different ways, i would like to highlight only two of them because they differ from the others in terms of their subjects: “peter rehberg, christian fennesz and the label mego: between glitch and bécs” (chapter 8) and “women in a mixed world: electric indigo and sweet susie” (chapter 9). i found it interesting that in the former the author dedicated a whole case study to noise or experimental electronic music. this section might feel a little alien to the others, but mazierska’s main argument was to include as many different genres as possible. in this sense, the subchapter on electric indigo and sweet susie is also different from the others in terms of its categorisation of music by the musicians’ gender. here the author also gives a longer introduction to the problems of male-dominated edmc and the research of that phenomenon—see also dancecult’s special issue in 2017. in this regard, the subchapter about electric indigo and sweet susie also creates awareness of female artists who are often neglected in the histories of electronic (dance) music. finally, in the conclusions, the author highlights again her main arguments: 1) austrian electronic (dance) music deserves more scholarly attention that focuses on the “stories” of artists and protagonists rather than their technical properties and 2) viennese popular electronic musicians have created their own style/sound of music, instead of copying the anglo-american market. furthermore, by looking at the careers of the abovementioned musicians, the author found out that vienna as a city offers “comfortable” life to them, for example, with its affordable housing and proper studios. mazierska finishes her work with several open questions for future investigations on other examples: “were electronic musicians in countries such as belgium, poland or hungary as lucky in this period as their austrian counterparts? did they show the same interest in similar genres and develop similar ideas?” (218). with these questions, she also suggests for others to conduct comprehensive research on other european cities, in order that we would have a better picture about the differences between these places. in addition, in my opinion, dancecult 11(1)106 with the help of these suggested studies, one could also better describe the different “sounds” of these cities because one would have comparative cases at hand. in this sense, one could also talk about the specific “viennese sound” with stronger counterexamples at hand. mazierska’s self-reflection is appreciable: “no doubt that some readers familiar with the phenomenon described here will be surprised and unhappy with omissions, simplifications and mistakes made in this book. my defence is that no study is ever comprehensive and flawless, and this is particularly the case of works which cover a largely unexplored territory” (12–13). she also encourages others to correct these mistakes and fills these gaps, in their own future work. i think the book is definitely a great beginning for a new comprehensive research body on european cities and their electronic (dance) music scenes. additionally, this book will be a great basis for further research on the viennese electronic music scene. references cohen, sara. 1999. “scenes.” in key terms in popular music and culture. ed. bruce horner and thomas swiss, 239–50. oxford: blackwell. kruse, holly. 2010. “local identity and independent music scenes, online and off ”. popular music and society, 5: 12–15. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007760903302145>. peterson, richard and andy bennett. 2004. “introducing music scenes”. in music scenes: local, translocal and virtual, ed. andy bennett and richard a. peterson, 1–15. nashville: vanderbilt university press. reitsamer, rosa. 2011. “the diy careers of techno and drum ‘n’ bass djs in vienna”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 3(1): 28–43. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.02>. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007760903302145 http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.02 reviews 107 the relentless pursuit of tone: timbre in popular music. robert fink, melinda latour and zachary wallmark (eds.) new york: oxford university press, 2018. isbn: 9780199985227 (hardcover), 9780199985234 (paperback) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.09> maria perevedentseva goldsmiths, university of london (uk) as i write, anniversary celebrations of the apollo 11 lunar mission are in full swing, brian eno reissues are flying off the shelves, and it seems that musicology may at long last be experiencing a similar breakthrough with timbre: an object with a comparable pull on the imagination and one which, like the moon, is simultaneously an unavoidable physical reality and a void for the projection of our earthly desires. the last few years have seen a dramatic increase in academic engagement with timbre, with problems of ontology, function, representation, and affective and conceptual signification receiving an airing (e.g. van elferen 2017; wallmark et al. 2018; lavengood 2019; dolan and rehding forthcoming). the publication of the relentless pursuit of tone marks a pivotal point by turning our attention to timbre in popular music, in whose aesthetics it plays a decisive, but until now, under-theorised role. the book’s fifteen chapters put to rest any notion of timbre’s ineffability, showcasing— through sections on genre, voice, instrument and production—a glorious variety of analytical and representational techniques with which to capture its slippery essence. the usual spectrograms are joined by jocelyn neal’s phonetic descriptions of country guitar “twang” and griffin woodworth’s echomimetic representation of filter envelopes in funk. nina sun eidscheim’s deconstructionist reading of the persistent “disidentification” (153) of jimmy scott’s voice and jonathan howland’s topical archaeology of “luxe pop” are joined by material histories of studio technologies from jan butler, and embodied ecological theories of timbre cognition by simon zagorski-thomas. it is clear that a dominant methodology has not yet been established, and this emerging field is all the better for it. it is fitting that the first chapter is given to cornelia fales, whose identification of the paradox of timbre in a landmark article (2002) continues to animate both her contribution and the collection as a whole. the paradox is multifaceted, stemming from the incommensurability of the acoustic world, where sound is produced according to rational and quantifiable laws, and the phenomenal world, where timbre is (not as rationally or measurably) “perceptualized”, a perception which “differs most radically” from the acoustic features that provoke it (24). this same tension—between material reality and its mental representation—is at the heart of the timbre versus tone debate outlined in the editors’ http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.09 dancecult 11(1)108 introduction, where tone is defined as a “complex quasi-object shaped by cultural networks” and timbre as the “dispassionate” scientific object providing the real “physical and perceptual correlates” to tone (9-10). the book’s explicit aim is to bridge this gap by “illuminating how the materiality of sound can structure cultural practice” (12), but a latent distrust of the cultural pole is evident throughout, compensated for by detailed descriptions of sound production and psychoacoustic processes, coupled with genuine surprise and delight when a homology between acoustic and phenomenal worlds is identified. these descriptions—ranging from melinda latour’s dissection of carlos santana’s transcendental sustain to woodworth’s unpacking of the transistorised oscillators that powered funk musicians’ subversive use of synthesisers—are hugely valuable, and it is heartening to see such thorough engagement with the technicalities of popular music’s sonic construction. however, as jonathan sterne has observed, “technologies of listening . . . emerge out of techniques of listening” (2003, 92; original emphases), suggesting that we should not abandon trust in our ears and minds entirely, but instead use them to probe how cultural practices in turn structure the materiality of sound. simon frith makes a similar point in his afterword (368), and in the end, the timbre/tone (and its attendant real/cultural) dualism boils down to the ultimate philosophical chicken-and-egg of where “reality” really resides—a debate too expansive both for this review and the text it is reviewing. whilst every chapter in this rich volume warrants detailed discussion, two essays from fales and robert fink, which deal with timbre in electronic dance music and bass cultures respectively, are of particular interest to dancecult’s readership. in “hearing timbre: perceptual learning among early bay area ravers”, fales analyses the scene-specific discursive attempts by users of the sfraves listserv to understand timbre, citing edm’s timbral “nonspecificity” or sourcelessness as enabling rare feats of “perceptual learning” (25, 24). she argues that it is edm’s disconnect from the acoustic sources of the natural world, coupled with the dissociative effects of mdma (a frequent topic of conversation on sfraves), which allows listeners to learn to hear timbre not implicitly, as a monitor and proxy for the sound source, but explicitly and in itself, attending only to its immanent qualities. furthermore, fales suggests that this nonspecificity also operates at the conceptual level, because whilst many of the posts she analyses share a narrative arc of “before . . . perceptual inadequacy and . . . after” (35), the affordances of timbre, even when tacitly grasped by listeners, remain largely affective and sub-linguistic. in “below 100hz. toward a musicology of bass culture”, fink critiques the acoustically “unsound” (112) theorisations of the affective power of sub-bass and bass culture, as formulated by steve goodman (2010) and julian henriques (2011), which he argues have idealised bass sounds into occupying “fetish object” status (89). in order to put bass in its place, fink details subwoofer design, the transduction of low frequency waves through space, and the aural and haptic sensation of those waves by human perceivers, systematically debunking any notion of the exceptional power, force and physicality of bass. he concludes reviews 109 that the “power” of deep bass is “our intuitive perception of how difficult it is to hear these frequencies at all”, and so bass culture can only be understood “as culture” because the “sound” around which it is centred “is a timbre of no timbre” (112). i fundamentally agree with fink that it is the liminality of bass that gives it its symbolic power, but, as an avid bass-head myself, i have spent enough nights having my bones rattled by sound systems ranging from aba shanti-i to digital mystikz to know that there is a matereal basis to bass culture beyond subwoofers, and beyond the idealising projections of listeners. as fales observes in her conclusion, despite the difficulties of hearing timbre at all, human propensity for perceptual learning, and the “astronomical decibel levels” of a rave context “where the parameters of timbre and rhythm predominate” mean that there is “very little that is truly cognitively impenetrable” (39). producers and djs help us along in that respect, by isolating and eqing bass solos and drops so that our attention is turned more fully to the bass, making the almost-inaudible engulf the sensorium.1 fink’s main gripe appears to be with goodman’s florid, ccru-inspired discursive formulation of bass as malevolent weapon or force, and this chapter is a useful antidote to that narrative. at times, however, in his dismissal of the audible and sensible reality of bass, it seems fink falls prey to the inverse of the same “acoustic fundamentalism” (112) of which he accuses his adversaries. nevertheless, “below 100hz” is exemplary in its attention to the material conditions and technical specificities of tone production, and this represents one of the great strengths of the relentless pursuit as a whole: in addition to its thorough explorations of the cultural and perceptual dimensions of timbre, the book contains a treasure trove of sophisticated discussions of sound technology whilst managing to avoid the lacklustre didacticism of much other gear literature. in “the sound of evil”, zachary wallmark considers in finegrained detail the detuning, overdriving and distortion of guitar and vocal timbres in death metal, whose noisiness and difficulty he links to sacrificial violence and its overcoming by fans and producers. steve waksman looks at the ill-fated guitar synthesiser, which resolved initial stumbling blocks of translating guitarists’ idiosyncratic pitch control and attack types into information analogue circuitry and, later, midi could process. its failure, he argues, resulted from the “faustian bargain” (271) struck by its adopters, who traded the kudos of virtuosic guitar rock and jazz for an enhanced but for all purposes “sourceless” sonic palette. jan butler and paul théberge consider studio technologies aside from specific instruments, the former looking at the changing status of liveness as a site of rock authenticity in the age of the studio album, and the latter at reverb’s trajectory from a consolidator of space to special effect, where the once-stable relationship between acoustic, musical and listening spaces has become contingent and separable. touching on similar themes, albin zak sketches a cultural history of the recording industry in mid-century america, then undergoing waves of democratisation as emerging youth markets overtook djs and studio professionals as arbiters of musical value. zak’s chapter also highlights another thread running through the relentless pursuit; namely, popular music’s irrepressible zeal for turning one group’s dancecult 11(1)110 sonic off-cuts—in zak’s case lo-fi production values and untrained vocal and instrumental technique—into another group’s aesthetic ideal. this transformation undergirds catherine provenzano’s investigation into auto-tune’s redistribution of musical labour and its rationalisation along racial and class lines. it also serves as the backbone for mark samples’ chapter on the voice of tom waits, whose “damaged” and imperfect timbre cemented waits’ artistic authenticity, and was eventually granted a legally protected status of its own. zagorski-thomas’ “the spectromorphology of recorded music” serves as an appropriate closing chapter for this expertly curated collection, outlining a robust methodology that takes on both timbre and tone, and their interrelation. he borrows from james gibson’s ecological theory of perception, and neuroscientific theories of embodied cognition and cross-domain mapping, relating these to denis smalley’s work on gestural surrogacy to explore how ostensibly sourceless recorded sounds generate schematic “sonic cartoons” that suggest a sourced, embodied provenance. the sources these cartoons specify in the perceiving mind, however, are not concrete, real-world objects but instead take the form of “experiential affective structures” (348). zagorski-thomas applies these theories to analyse perceptions of fullness, fidelity and moving through space in “acoustic pop” and electronica, arguing that timbre perception is “based on our embodied experience and the metaphorical connections we can make between that primary ‘lived-in’ experience and our secondary experience of the world around us” (359). as such, while the distance between actual and perceived source can remain vast, they share a core structural affinity which gives perceptions a coherence and consistency with the external world which, in turn, enables listeners to act on, react to, and make sense of, their physical environment. this brings us back to—and perhaps offers a way out of—fales’ paradox and the dialectic between the real and the perceptual which drives the relentless pursuit. as the first of its kind, the book leaves plenty of openings for emerging timbre researchers to sink their teeth into and develop. for edm scholars, the ideas presented this book offer a potential way out of the music-analytical stalemate that has dogged our subfield since its inception, by showcasing approaches that enable us to engage more directly with the “matter” (i.e. the sounds and technologies) of electronic dance music. at the same time, each chapter is incredibly well structured and easy to navigate which, along with the book’s companion website and the sheer depth and diversity of the topics covered, makes it an indispensable pedagogical tool for advanced undergraduates and above. in short, the relentless pursuit it is a timely collection that deserves to be read widely, and in full, by popular music scholars and tone-chasers of all stripes alike. notes 1 clubs like london’s fabric, for example, have bespoke “bodysonic” wooden dancefloors with bass transducers placed underneath, so that clubbers “feel” the low-end frequencies through their feet. reviews 111 references dolan, emily, and alexander rehding, eds. forthcoming. the oxford handbook of timbre. new york: oxford university press. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190637224.001.0001>. fales, cornelia. 2002. “the paradox of timbre”. ethnomusicology 46 (1): 56–95. <http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/852808>. goodman, steve. 2010. sonic warfare: sound, affect, and the ecology of fear. cambridge, ma: mit press. henriques, julian. 2011. sonic bodies: reggae sound systems, performance techniques, and ways of knowing. new york: continuum. kane, brian. 2014. sound unseen: acousmatic sound in theory and practice. new york: oxford university press. lavengood, megan. 2019. “what makes it sound ’80s?: the yamaha dx7 electric piano sound”. journal of popular music studies 31 (3): 73–94. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2019.313009>. sterne, jonathan. 2003. the audible past: cultural origins of sound reproduction. durham: duke university press. van elferen, isabella. 2017. “agency, aporia, approaches: how does musicology solve a problem like timbre?”. contemporary music review 36 (6): 483–87. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2017.1452685>. wallmark, zachary, marco iacoboni, choi deblieck, and roger kendall. 2018.”embodied listening and timbre: perceptual, acoustical, and neural correlates”. music perception 35 (3): 332–63. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/mp.2018.35.3.332>. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190637224.001.0001 http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/852808 http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2019.313009 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2017.1452685 http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/mp.2018.35.3.332 dancecult 11(1)112 fyre fraud jenner furst and julia willoughby nason (dirs.) usa: hulu and the cinemart, 2019. <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7843600/> rrp: us$99 (hardcover), us$35 (paperback) fyre: the greatest party that never happened chris smith (dir.) usa: library films, vice studios and jerry media, 2019. <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9412098/> <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.10> tommy symmes rice university (us) the following is a review of two films: fyre fraud (hosted by hulu) and fyre: the greatest party that never happened (hosted by netflix). both films document fyre festival, a 2017 music festival that continues to be the focus of controversy, particularly with respect to its promotional methods. both films give accounts of the leadup, occurrence and fallout of the festival, were released within a week of each other and share some interlocutors. some of these individuals are named in million-dollar court cases, some were deceived and manipulated by people in positions of authority, and many have competing interests in the landscape of industrial taste-making. the films are already in deep conversation with each other. the narrative recounted in both films bears repeating: entrepreneur billy mcfarland and musician ja rule join forces to produce a luxury festival in the bahamas. they enlist a team of powerful media companies, raise millions from private investors, and promise extravagant experiences to a client base of instagram elites that they do not deliver. the media companies lose money and look dishonest, investors lose money and look disconnected from reality, and popular lifestyle influencers lose money and look naïve. hundreds of bahamians work hundreds of unpaid hours, but this remains in the background of the public shaming of so many venerable contemporary american institutions. the documentaries are in general agreement about who the villain is here: billy mcfarland is accused of being a “compulsive liar”, “scammer”, “hustler” and “dr. evil”. in fraud, mcfarland appears as an interviewee of the filmmakers. fyre, on the other hand, uses footage of mcfarland that was originally collected by the teams hired to promote the festival during the leadup to the festival. both films are ruthless in their condemnation of his character. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7843600/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9412098/ http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.10 reviews 113 fyre fraud released on 14 january 2019 and directed by the team of jenner furst and julia willoughby nason, fyre fraud hit streaming platform hulu four days before the release of netflix’s counterpart. an array of interviewees—lawyers, journalists, cultural critics and culture industry bureaucrats—contemplate topics including fomo (fear of missing out), the distribution of culpability in networked authority structures, the vulnerable psychology of millennials, the ethos of tumult that is wall street and the susceptibility of developing regions to first-world frauds all in relation to the fyre festival. fraud is strong in its detailing of mcfarland’s earlier business ventures—for example a credit card or an app for booking celebrities—setting the stage for his more ambitious project. it does so with the assistance of some of his former employees and mcfarland himself, who narrates his lifelong entrepreneurial development. mcfarland is adamant that he had the best intentions to put on an event that was “going to change the landscape [of the festival industry], and deliver an experience that people would talk about for years” (fraud 9:00). other key individuals are featured. the brightly lit, smiley calvin wells, a principal investor for a new york city firm, appears prominently in fraud. concerned by the amount of money people in his networks were investing in fyre festival and distrustful of mcfarland, wells attempted, unsuccessfully, to delegitimize the festival by critiquing its questionable promotions. he blames this failure on the impotence of the facts in this social-media dominated, “post-truth” world, but seems at times more impressed than incensed by the persuasive campaign assembled by the fyre festival team and the companies they contracted for media production and marketing. oren aks, the former jerry media employee assigned to their contract with fyre festival, is also interviewed. seated behind a laptop, as if reenacting the tricks and techniques he used to promote the festival, he shares his two cents regarding the manipulation of social media and the recipe for a viral trend and his dismay at realizing he had been deceived about the product he had advertised. bahamians in the film call out the unjust treatment they suffered at the hands of the fyre festival. delroy jackson recounts warning mcfarland and ja rule that organizational and construction resources were inadequate given the short timeline. ava turnquest, a reporter for local news outlet the tribune, accuses fyre festival of unoriginality in scamming the bahamas; a place “so ripe for fraud” (fraud 26:30). she portrays the festival as a predictable result of deplorable economic relations between the us and bahamas, as proof of the persistence of colonial attitudes so coherent with the conditions of contemporary pop culture. jia tolentino, a staff writer for the new yorker, joins turnquest in her diagnosis. interviewed in front of floor-to-ceiling high-rise windows, tolentino discusses fyre festival in relation to its conditions of possibility, in relation to the forces which dominate contemporary culture. tolentino illustrates the intricate and fragile relation between subject and society, suggesting: “billy [mcfarland] is baked in the oven of millennial reality construction that asserts itself in response to the precarity of the times” (fraud 10:10). dancecult 11(1)114 these analyses, albeit blithe in tone, contribute nuance to questions of legal and ethical responsibility central to the film. in addition, fraud introduces three instagram influencers, the festival’s target clientele, who recount arriving at the festival, struggling for orientation, and departing. tolentino provides us with a succinct definition of an influencer. “an influencer is someone who has effectively monetized their identity. that is their work: the performance of an attractive life” (fraud 32:05). they also contribute personal action-style footage of the crisis (empty stages, beach drinking, wandering in the dark, hoarding toilet paper). but fraud does not introduce any attendees who suffered more severe physical injury than surprise, boredom or dehydration. fraud finally interviews anastasia eremenko, mcfarland’s girlfriend. she reads aloud letters he sends her from prison and is shown after one of his court dates weeping alone in the street. eremenko is adamant about the swirling misrepresentations of mcfarland’s character, steadfast in her support of him. and mixed into shots that suggest her continued backing of this irredeemable villain, the film concludes that “it’s a great time to be a conman in america” (fraud 1:33:45). building from conversations with the above and other interlocutors, fyre fraud uses fyre festival to frame “the nexus of social media influence, late-stage capitalism, and morality in the post-truth era” (publicity material; see “fyre fraud: details”). the festival serves as a ready-made material specificity through which the film’s experts weave abstract threads of contemporary popular culture. but despite these strengths, the production feels heavyhanded; the film relies on bland-yet-antsy collages of stock visuals and cheap-looking b-roll from generic festival scenes of attractive women dancing or crowds walking. long awkward pauses after mcfarland speaks in interviews imply volumes about his trustworthiness, but do so pedantically. viewers might therefore understand the film to enact some of the very culture it critiques, namely one that values the speed and spectacular quality of visual electronic media over the story or material reality it represents. fyre: the greatest party that never happened hot on the heels of fraud came fyre: the greatest party that never happened, released by netflix on january 18th, 2019 and directed by chris smith (also american movie, the pool). the production is sleek, the pacing confident, and in contrast to fraud’s stock visuals much of the footage is original. fyre attends to moments leading up to the festival to offer viewers a prime view of the planning process and blooming drama. fyre includes abundant footage of mcfarland and ja rule leading organizational efforts, making definitive and questionable decisions in meetings, talking social media strategy and selling their brand. multiple times we hear them reiterate their pitch: “we’re selling a pipe dream to your average american loser!” (fyre 12:05). the film’s interlocutors affirm that mcfarland once fell asleep with a beer in his hand on the beach, that he would ride a jetski in time-sensitive moments, even that he resembled dr. evil (fyre 1:09:40). but most of this individual critique is reserved specifically for mcfarland; despite the damning documentation that fyre publishes, ja rule sustains little direct individual critique. reviews 115 much of the juicy visual content was collected on site in the bahamas by matte projects, a video production company contracted by fyre festival. brett kincaid, director of matte, testifies unapologetically to the quality of the work. he says of fyre, “they were hiring the best of the best in each category: best talent, best distribution, best social media company” (fyre 6:45). he makes sure viewers appreciate how his team produced and launched a video that trended globally from an island without internet, offering an interesting take on the accusations of false advertising and fraudulent promotion levelled against fyre festival and its teams. according to kincaid, the real fyre festival was the smaller-scale event that occurred during “the shoot [for the viral video]. the shoots were parties . . . the commercial was what everybody wanted” (fyre 1:30:12). jerry media is a company that generates online attention and social influence for clients; it is that “best social media company” named by kincaid and hired by fyre, and also the executive producer who partnered with vice in the creation of this documentary. ceo mick purzycki represents jerry media for the film. his script—just like the film—is sleek, persistent, and confident in explaining to the viewer the victimization his company suffered at the hands of fyre festival. but he too claims that there was substance and value in the work they did, asserting that his employers were “trying to tap into a culture and a zeitgeist that they believed in” (fyre 14:00). for purzycki as for kincaid, the inspiration was far from bunk, and if there was never a problem with the original inspiration, how can anyone fault those who had a contract to promote that inspiration using social media? purzycki does admit, however, that in the days prior to the festival jerry media deleted “the negative comments that were degrading the brand” from fyre festival’s social media presence (fyre 44:45). in other words, jerry media hid complaints and questions about festival details to prevent attendees from discovering that the festival infrastructure looked quite different from the promotional material. marc weinstein, a music festival consultant and fyre festival contractor, describes his failed attempts at convincing the leadership to be honest about their insufficient preparation time, about the fact that it was not going to be a luxury experience and about attendees becoming trapped on the island with no available return flights. but weinstein admits that each time he was rebuked, he put his head down and attempted to complete his assignments, to maintain the chain of command, to play his role in this peculiar machine. andy king, an event producer who styles himself “billy [mcfarland]’s whisperer,” also wonders about his responsibility for continuously vetting mcfarland’s personal character to the festival team for the good of the event (fyre 1:12:20). maryann rolle, a bahamian restaurateur, might have appreciated more critical thought from jerry media, weinstein and company. feeding staff, influencers and attendees with little preparation time, rolle tells viewers she lost $50,000 of savings trying to host the big american money hinting at long-term investment. j.r., a bahamian who organized local laborers for fyre festival, recounts fleeing for safety after the festival because those laborers had turned to him seeking payment. fyre festival leadership had vanished in the wind. dancecult 11(1)116 following the festival, mcfarland was charged with tampering with wire transfers. but after posting bail he continued to sell tickets for haute events in new york city; tickets which often did not exist. at that point gabrielle bluestone, a vice reporter who also contributes to the film, published an article linking mcfarland to sustained fraudulent activities while still on bail (bluestone 2018). mcfarland was arrested again, this time without possibility of posting bail. the effect of interspersing contributions from critics like bluestone with interlocutors like purzycki—especially when they align in tutti condemnation of mcfarland the naughty—is the same as the effect of jerry media co-producing this film with vice whilst repurposing their own video footage. jerry media’s self-promotion is not completely unabashed, but it is thorough. fyre submits that the promotion was the most real—maybe even the only real thing—about fyre festival. fyre is a statement, in form as in content, about the power of social media technologies. kincaid sums up this morass of deferred accountability with another quippy analogy: “if you shoot a commercial for bmw, how are you supposed to know if that car has a faulty engine?” (fyre 1:16:50). accordingly, perhaps we can consider fyre as much promotion as it is documentary. the two films reviewed differ in several ways. fyre fraud is preoccupied with the question of assigning responsibility for social media influence. fyre fraud’s viewer feels ethically superior to the clear villains and awestruck by the naivete of those swept up in their schemes, because all of this apparent chaos fits into a clean, almost algorithmic state-of-the-world. meanwhile, fyre: the greatest party that never happened demonstrates the capabilities of social media technologies. it is a crisis take to fraud’s algorithm, an illustration of real power fallen into the wrong hands. but both play blame games about who is responsible for the millions of dollars demanded by workers, investors, contractors, lawyers and others. both document the professional turn of social media identity and the attendant rise in the influence of models with popular social media identities. and both make us feel like we all need a good read of baudrillard’s simulacrum and simulation. viewed side-by-side, the two films provide us with spectacular material for reflecting not just on right and wrong in contemporary social media culture, but also real and fake. we are left puzzled: were the original intentions valid? who is responsible for viral momentum? and might the festival have happened after all? references baudrillard, jean. 1983. simulations. los angeles, ca: semiotext(e). bluestone, gabrielle. 2018. “fyre fest’s founder is going to prison, but the spirit of his scam lives on”. vice news, 12 june. <https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3ayma/fyre-festsfounder-is-going-to-prison-but-the-spirit-of-his-scam-lives-on> (accessed 9 september 2019). “fyre fraud: details”. hulu, 14 january 2019. <https://www.hulu.com/movie/fyre-fraude47078f3-1c0e-49a8-9da9-c571a7a20fec> (accessed 5 september 2019). https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3ayma/fyre-fests-founder-is-going-to-prison-but-the-spirit-of-his-scam-lives-on https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3ayma/fyre-fests-founder-is-going-to-prison-but-the-spirit-of-his-scam-lives-on https://www.hulu.com/movie/fyre-fraud-e47078f3-1c0e-49a8-9da9-c571a7a20fec https://www.hulu.com/movie/fyre-fraud-e47078f3-1c0e-49a8-9da9-c571a7a20fec virtual dance floors: shall we dance or fly? emília simão gallaecia university and portuguese catholic university (portugal) paula guerra university of porto (portugal) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.04> digital platforms as technological infrastructures that support human flows and social dynamics of all kinds are today even more essential to guarantee the continuity of some of our habits, now suspended. in cyberspace we are experiencing aesthetic and technical recreations and behavioural reconfigurations, some collective and others individual, some optional and others imposed, because apparently the world has changed. since the reconfiguration of the global digital society in the 20th century, electronic dance music (edm) has also been reframed by translocal, transglobal and transvirtual movements (bennett 2004) with migrations to the web and within the web. in the present era many already consider post-digital society, does it still make sense to continue to separate the physical/organic from the digital/technological experience? or is this metaphorical separation between real and virtual not appropriate anymore, considering that everything is reality as long as it is experienced? from the tangible real to the imaginary virtual, the reality in fact may just be a matter of perception (deleuze and parnet 2004). lévy (1998) already stated that in digital networks nothing is false or imaginary, that virtual dynamics are identical to the physical as long as they are consciously experienced. in second life (sl), a real time immersive 3d environment that simulates the real and social life of humans extending their physical and organic life (kahn and kellner 2003), there have been musical events for some years, from raves and edm festivals to virtual versions of burning man (burn2). in territories like sl, people have been listening and dancing to psytrance in virtual dance floors for over 12 years, sharing psychedelic experiences with their friends and their second selves (simão, silva and magalhães 2015). nowadays, from sl to plug in to social networks' live streams and other similar platforms, these virtual experiences seem to be more effective than ever: virtual dance floors and performances are not totally new phenomena but are growing exponentially. it was predictable that social networks would reach a point of saturation and emptiness (turkle 2011) and perhaps immersive environments and virtual reality (vr) experiences will now gain more users. in effect, these environments are more conducive to simultaneous sensory stimuli for a better and more reliable extension of the human experience (myeung-sook 2001). taking the sl psychedelic trance virtual gatherings as examples, we know that for many virtual dancers, the digital dance floors can be extensions or alternatives to physical parties, but not substitutions (figure 1). figure. 1: psyparty @ organica_2016. photo credit: emília simão (2016). when attending these environments, the psyvatars (simão and guerra 2016) point out limitations to the virtual dance floors, namely: the lack of human warmth, the direct interaction between pairs, the lack of movement and dance ritual, the resignation of the body (not in the sense of alienation or psychedelic experience, but in terms of physical perception) and the lack of multisensory experience. on the other hand, others argue that the objective of the party is reached as long they have the fundamental—the music. the subjects who are more connected virtually are often more connected physically or in person (wellman et al. 2006) and in these sl communities (even smaller than other em and edm communities), the feeling of belonging and empathy between the virtual members is quite evident. beyond these similarities there are other parallels between the conventional and the virtual dance floor: musical aesthetics, empathy between members, the figure of the dj and the centrality of the dance floor, decor and visual expressions, clothing, accessories and recreational consumptions, among others. it is also important to mention the constant concern in recreating the main elements of the physical parties. more than a simulacrum, these events are thus framing their own place and identity. this imposed digital migration has clearly intensified the virtual dynamics, as well as boosting the hybridism of these digital incubators, but even though these virtual dance floors and online music events in general have proliferated in the first months of 2020, it is more prudent to consider them viable alternatives than effective replacements. today we are living in the territories of the future surrendered to the permeability and fluidity of the cyber-era (wilson and atkinson 2005), listening and dancing to electronic and algorithmic music, but are we prepared to give up the real-physical-offline-sweaty dance floors? in the coexistence of isolation and crowds, the dance floor warriors must resist becoming purely egovatars of cyberspace and keep festivals and rave culture alive (simão and guerra 2016). author biographies emília simão is vice-director and professor of multimedia and arts at the gallaecia university and at the portuguese catholic university, portugal. she focuses her research on edmc, neo-tribes, digital aesthetics and media arts. emília is the founder/co-coordinator of obemmaelectronic music and media art observatory and also member of citcemresearch centre for culture, space and memory (up) and ciesg-research center on multimedia and arts (esg). she co-authored/edited several international edited books on edmc, immersive environments and new media arts. paula guerra is professor of sociology at the university of porto and researcher at the institute of sociology up. she is part of other national and international research institutes: cegot, citcem, dinâmia’cet and griffith centre for social and cultural research. paula is the founder/coordinator of the kismif project and co-coordinator of the kismif conference (https://www.kismifconference.com/en/). she co-authored the edited books diy cultures and underground music scenes (routledge, 2018) and punk, fanzines and diy cultures in a global world (palgrave, 2020). references bennett, andy and richard a. peterson, eds. music scenes: local, translocal and virtual. nashville: vanderbilt university press, 2004. deleuze, gilles. and claire parnet. 2004. dialogues. lisbon: relógio d’água. kahn, richard and douglas kellner. 2003. "internet subcultures and oppositional politics". in the post-subcultures reader, ed. david muggleton and rupert weinzierl, 299-314. berg: oxford. lévy, pierre. 1999. cibercultura. são paulo: editora 34. myeung-sook, yoh. 2001. "the reality in virtual reality, virtual systems and multimedia". in proceedings of seventh international conference, 666-74. 2002. <https://doi.org/10.1109/vsmm.2001.969726>. simão, emilia. and paula guerra. 2018. "territories and mobilities of (trance)virtuality: the second life of freaks". in is working papers, 3rd serie, n.º 11, 2-20. university of porto: porto. simão, emilia, sérgio t. de magalhães and armando m. da silva. 2015. "psychedelic trance on the web: exploring digital parties at second life". in exploring psychedelic trance and electronic dance music in modern culture, ed. simão, emilia, sérgio t. de magalhães and armando m. da silva, 109-31. hershey, pa: igi global. <https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-4666-8665-6>. turkle, sherry. 2011. alone together: why we expected more from technology and less from each other. new york: basic books. wilson, brian and michael atkinson. 2005. "rave and straightedge, the virtual and the real". in youth & society, 36(3): 276-311. <https://doi.org/10.1177/0044118x03260498>. weekend societies: electronic dance music festivals and event-cultures graham st john (ed.) new york: bloomsbury, 2017. isbn: 978-1-5013-0931-1 (hardcover), 9781501343773 (paperback), 9781501309335 (e-pub) rrp: $108 (hardcover), $39.95 (paperback), $28.76 (e-pub) charles de ledesma independent researcher (uk) weekend societies sets out to explore what festivals—mostly from the electronic dance music culture (edmc) family—look like today, how they operate, who goes to them, and why. under the sturdy editorship of graham st john, who has written widely on this intermingled, kaleidoscopic and often psychedelic topic, a wide palette of festal event types are explored, and in many different ways. contributions range from tobias c. van veen’s exploration of montreal’s tightly curated mutek—which nominally excludes dj performance while “inviting” top names—to the late ed montano’s informed history of the multi-city stereosonic festival (now defunct), which pinpoints a commercial peak of edm culture in australia where the dj is an elevated, even anointed, figure of adulation. although theoretical backbones across the collection are varied and often loosely applied, one appears as a fairly firm anchor in an ever-shifting sea of heterogeneous cultural expression. in st john’s introduction, dance music festival and event cultures, he discusses the value of the idea of a “transformational festival”, promoted by documentary film-maker jeet-kei leung in a 2010 tedx talk and further developed in the documentary webseries the bloom. st john explains, “i have long been cognisant that festivals, especially those across the alternative spectrum of events, are transformational. in fact, this is among my chief motivations ... [in that] they permit entrants to become liminars (literally: threshold dwellers) while occupying the demarcated time-space framework of the event” (10). the festival here is more than mere bacchanalian fun and frenzy over throbbing and variously sync-ed bpms, but can promote “the interwoven agendas of personal growth and global consciousness that are the legacy of the transpersonal culture” (11). a prime weekend societies project then is to explore how this could be done, or at least attempted, at the featured festal spaces. the collection’s most fascinating inroad into the purportedly transformational ethos comes in deirdre ruane’s harm reduction or psychedelic support? caring for drug-related crises at transformation festivals. wasting no time on festival charms per se, ruane draws on fieldwork from three psychedelic support organizations—kcuk (uk), the zendo project (usa) and kosmicare (portugal)—documented at seven festivals during 2014’s northern hemisphere season. the central element of transformation for ruane emerges in the dramatic tension between apparently opposing professional strategies for dealing with the bad class a trips of entrants, and other, often-connected episodes, across the festal events attended. opening the chapter with useful fieldwork data edits, ruane asks if it would be possible to sit with or talk to one man receiving help at burning man’s zendo camp. “the shift leader quietly points me towards one guy sitting cross-legged on the floor, swaying and moving his hands fluidly...i ask him what he took...and he closes up and pulls away (saying), ‘i don’t see why i should tell you that...it’s irrelevant to my personal quest’” (116). ruane consequently explores the deep debate between the more dominant “harm reduction” approach which looks for ways to bring the entrant safely away from enveloping darkness and isolation towards a perceived “normalcy”, while the psychedelic support mission, pointed to above, attempts to work with difficult emotions, and behaviour, which can rise in a psychedelic “phase of (self) dissolution” (121). this in turn aims to aid an entrant’s potentially transformational episode. ruane concludes, “psychedelic support training sessions propose an alternative view, in keeping with the more fluid concept of self within psychedelic culture. volunteers are encouraged to respect visitors in deeply altered states, which may indicate valuable internal processes—as one participant said, “we don’t know if they are meeting god” (131). a contrasting depiction of the transformational festival emerges in a colourful account of california’s raindance campout. researcher bryan schmidt contextualizes the small annual event, which is only slightly bigger than a private party, through the founder, little john’s perspective. john is less interested in putting on a show, and more eager to “summon artistic display enacted by the participants themselves” (96), which include dance, painting, poetry, sculpting, installation-building and more. now we arrive at, for schmidt, an inter-connected concept that he finds useful in raindance’s peculiar situation: nicholas bourriaud’s relational aesthetics (2002), which helpsin integrating all these kinds of artistic expression, flow and play, seemingly almost de rigour at the campout. relational art extols “being together” as a central theme, elevating the encounter between beholder and picture, thus allowing for—even leading to—transformation(s). another example of a transformational approach to festival-making can be found in anne petiau’s masterly discussion of the gift exchange process underpinning many of france’s teknivals. introducing the concept of the donation principle, petiau walks us through a potted-history of the french outdoor rave tradition —its ups and downs, triumphs and tragedies, from the free-spirited ’90s to the harder, repressive later years. built on gift economy principles, the researcher finds a complex and often contested social ecology at work: “the party-as-gift and the gift of music (can) also generate social superiority ... [while] a certain pleasure be find in...a generosity that makes sense of itself” (170). it is not unlikely that large numbers of teknival adherents have experienced both personal and social transformation in the very material acts of co-creating these vast events, often with dozens of sound systems, which, at their peak, lingered on from days into weeks. further chapters explore equally fascinating and instructive avenues of the edmc, or wider alternative festival, experience. judy park starts her ethnography searching for a cultural home: asian american youth in the edm festival scene with a reminder that “few scholars have focused on non-white participants’ negotiations of race or class” (71). while applying notions of belonging and authenticity to her debate, park concludes “asian american youth have turned to the edm festival scene to fill the cultural void created by their status as perpetual foreigners” (87). based on her data, she arrives at the sober assessment that, for many ethnic interviewees, white people are still the main characters at events. likewise getting her boots muddy in the field, alice o’grady, in dancing outdoors, return to the almost prophetic theorizing of hakim bey in applying the “temporary autonomous zone” (taz) to britain’s persistent alternative party circuit, and reminds us of the impact of the 1994 criminal justice and public oder act; a draconian measure intended to snuff out outdoor party action. at smaller scale diy events like alchemy and magikana she finds a healthy, fulfilling taz at work where activities like blacksmithing demonstrations sit easily alongside eclectic dj sets, dancing and play for all ages. last, paolo maguadda’s towards a cosmopolitan weekend dance culture in spain analyses two contrasting cases from spanish electronic music cultural history: the wild ruta destroy techno bashes of the ’90s, and sonar—the barcelona electronic music happening, which, unlike the ruta parties held in warehouses and clubs in valencia’s dock areas, lasting only for a brief giddy period in the ’90s, has helped construct “a legitimate discourse of electronic music as art” (176). by the time the reader reaches the concluding chapter she may well be in need of a good old festival yarn, transformational or otherwise, and that is ably provided by st john in his history of burning man, held annually for upwards of 70,000 on the nevada desert playa. the editor eschews cultural anthropology stances, delving into a kind of mad max soap opera for an imagined anarchic age, starting with the widely acknowledged view that burning man organizers were for many years opposed to sound system culture. a true latter-day veteran of burning man, st john ventures to all vectors of the vast playa to see the changes, and interviews some fascinating characters. terbo ted, recognized as the first person to play a dj set there, remembers, “ravers were always pariahs...we were the poor people on the wrong side of the tracks and the wrong side of the man [the central burning figure]” (226). st john regales us with tales of resistance such as the time a crazy man tried to chainsaw through sound system cables and when shadowy people dropped poo bundles from a helicopter onto a repetitive beats dancefloor. in time, however, the account reaches the space cowboy’s vast flamboyant mog, a mega-beefy mobile system, and mutant vehicles such as the out-of-this-world dancetronauts system verily crush all opposition. these shenanigans lead st john to offer thoughts on the playa’s various shades of “discommunitas”, but the reader leaves with a fundamentally warm glow from the high octane party, and its multi-tendrilled desert cosmos. weekend societies is a welcome and valuable contribution to an expanding literature on the alternative festival phenomenon, offering numerous avenues for further investigation given an eager researchers’ capacity to fend off chain saw-wielding critics, party round-the-clock, and hunt for the most innovative of creative expressions wherever the transformational path may lead. outlook festival: a celebration of sound system culture ivan mouraviev university of bristol (united kingdom) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.06> introduction outlook festival is a multi-day music event held in coastal croatia every year since 2008. a resident advisor review called it “probably the best bass music event in the world” (unicomb 2018), and the festival frequently brands itself as “europe’s biggest celebration of sound system culture” (outlook festival 2015). the festival emerged just as dubstep was exploding into the mainstream of electronic dance music culture in the late 2000s. it was established by a group of five event promoters in the united kingdom some of whom were already organizing successful multi-genre sound system events, such as subdub in leeds. as such, outlook festival has always been about bass, centering on jungle / drum ‘n’ bass, garage, grime and dubstep, a cluster of low-end driven dance musics that emerged in london during the 1990s and early 2000s but have roots in the “dub diaspora” (sullivan 2014). dub itself—and its flipside, roots reggae—is also ever-present at outlook. sound system heavyweights jah shaka, channel one and iration steppas are regular performers. younger generations of dub-inspired sound systems such as sinai and firmly rooted are also increasingly powering their own stages at the festival, alongside bespoke audio providers like neuron audio, void acoustics and danley sound labs. in short, outlook festival is a microcosm of the sounds, technologies, people, practices, values and ideas that make up contemporary uk bass culture. it’s a convergence of sub(bass) cultures where low-frequency fetishism is par for the course. the event is worthy of attention from a variety of scholarly perspectives, especially festival studies and electronic dance music culture (edmc) research, as well as interdisciplinary inquiries into sonic materialism and sound systems, an emerging field that i loosely term “bass culture studies” (mouraviev 2022). this article reports on my fieldwork at the first outlook festival held in the uk, from 30 june to 3 july 2022 at cholmondeley castle gardens, cheshire. i will begin by introducing the festival’s history, exploring its musical programming and identity as a bass music event. i then turn to the preliminary findings from my research, drawing on interviews and first-person journal entries to consider the overriding narrative of the event: disappointing sound quality and strict noise control. what happens when the raison d’être of a bass festival—crowds submitting themselves to days of amplified sound below 50 hz—is challenged by local residents and authorities? a brief history of outlook festival outlook was established by the aforementioned group of british event promoters who, together with the organisers of garden festival, ran their first collaborative event in croatia in 2008. the first festival was in petrčane, a small beach-front village near zadar, with approximately 800 participants (jenkins 2018). it featured djs such as digital mystikz and gilles peterson and was successful enough that the group returned to organise another event in 2009. in 2010–13, outlook quickly came into its own. the organisers expanded the scale of the event significantly, selling approximately 4,000 tickets in 2010 and 11,000 the following year (jenkins 2018). the festival has since settled on average audience sizes of 10,000 to 15,000 and a duration of four days, with participants camping onsite or staying in local accommodation. most performers are djs; talks, workshops and film screenings are occasionally held; and “launch parties” are regularly hosted around the world to promote the festival, from the united states and europe to south asia and australasia. musically, while the festival’s early emphasis on uk bass music has remained stable, its period of rapid growth in 2010–13 and beyond has seen many established artists invited as headline acts. this includes dub-reggae stars such as barrington levy and damian marley, hip-hop pioneer grandmaster flash, grime mcs stormzy and skepta and more recently neo-soul singer jorja smith. from 2013 to 2019, the festival also held an annual opening concert by “the outlook orchestra” featuring artists such as lauryn hill and re-orchestrated live renditions of hip-hop and reggae songs.[1] bass, space and place space and architecture are key to outlook festival’s identity. in 2010, the festival moved to a new site in pula that would become an icon of the event: the nineteenth-century fort punta christo, an abandoned naval base-turned-music venue. known colloquially as the fort, this structure was a strategic asset of the austro-hungarian empire before falling into disuse and being largely abandoned until 1980 (big up magazine 2012). outlook’s organisers were able to clear old overgrowth and transform pockets of the fort into multiple unique stages enclosed by ruins and stone walls, as well as a nearby beach stage (jenkins 2018). of these spaces, one of the most popular was the moat, a tall and narrow passage built in a canal surrounding the fort (figures 1 and 2). figure 1. the moat, fort punta christo. before excavation. photo credit: indigo burns (2010). reproduced with permission. figure 2. the moat stage at outlook festival 2011, fort punta christo. photo credit: indigo burns (2011). reproduced with permission. in 2013, the first opening concert was held in the nearby ancient roman amphitheatre, the pula arena, solidifying the role of imperial structures in the festival’s design and marketing appeal. reflecting this, from 2014 to 2019, outlook produced ‘site walkthrough’ videos showcasing the pula arena and each stage at the fort: site walkthrough video for outlook festival at fort punta christo (2018). while the fort may have been effective at driving sales and imparting a sense of timeless significance to the music performed within, it still carries a cult following amongst outlook fans today. this is partly owing to the particular acoustics of each stage and the sonic intensity they afforded. i learned this because outlook participants like to share (sometimes highly technical) opinions on the quality of each stage and sound system; this was the basis of daily conversation at the 2022 uk festival. as one participant said about the moat, “you go in there and come out a different person”; another attendee of the 2019 festival argued “[the] moat was alright if you were past the halfway point [but] sinai sound in the subdub arena was uncomparably [sic] the best—it was a whole new dimension”. today’s outlook the closing of a chapter that was outlook’s final year at the fort in 2019 was further underlined by the 2020 event being cancelled due to covid-19. since then, the festival has transformed considerably, moving to a smaller venue in tisno and rebranding as “outlook origins”. croatia recently joined the european union but the uk has left, affecting both audience demographics and the festival’s ability to import bespoke sound systems (minamore 2017; james 2019). outlook is also not necessarily unique as a bass music festival. it takes cues from established dub-reggae festivals held elsewhere in europe, such as dub camp and rototom sunsplash, and in the uk, events such as notting hill carnival and boomtown are comparable in their musical programming. croatia has also become a popular site for similar events over the last decade. new festivals such as fresh island have emerged alongside smaller local efforts; croatian bass music event seasplash celebrates 20 years of operation in 2022. but perhaps the most distinguishing feature of outlook remains its close relationship with “golden-era dubstep, drum & bass, [and] uk garage” (unicomb 2018), with “golden-era” being code for the uk-based formations of these genres prior to their assimilation into mainstream edm culture post-2008. the celebration of “authentic”—read: not from the usa—dubstep is core to the festival, and some performers still consider outlook a dubstep event “at its heart” (duploc 2018). bass, genre and “vibes” before delving into fieldwork, it is worth observing how festivals like outlook expand beyond the immediate confines of british club music while retaining a singular emphasis on low-end pressure. a productive conceptual framework, i suggest, is post-genre “vibes” discourse: an increasing tendency to reject supposedly outdated generic categories in favour of affective modes of production and consumption (james 2017, 2021; garcia 2020). post-genre thinking is easily identifiable on apps such as spotify, where users are ushered towards mood-based playlists such as “chill hits” and “pollen”, the latter of which has the tag-line “genre-less. quality first always.” there may be deeper underlying synergies to uncover, though, between an affect-first approach to music and the already “sonic-materialist” epistemology of dub-diasporic sound system cultures (henriques 2011). are bass-centric events such as outlook—where the main priority is vibration, from which affective vibe emerges—not a prime example of post-genre thinking come alive? my earliest conversations at the 2022 uk festival suggested as much. as one fellow festival-goer told me on the first day, “i don’t really believe in genre. i’m just interested in bass”. but of course, outlook festival is not genre-less. this is symbolised by its “sister festival” dimensions, established in 2012 by the same organisers to cater to fans of house, techno and more experimental corners of edm. held at the same site in croatia immediately before or after outlook, dimensions can be read as entrepreneurial—why not run a second festival when you’re already importing expensive equipment and occupying the site for weeks?—but it also invites critical analysis of how the boundaries of bass music are negotiated. a defining trait of dub-diasporic music is, as tricia rose once wrote metaphorically of hip-hop, “deliberately working in the red”, pushing bass and recording technologies to the limits of distortion—in both studio and performance contexts (1994: 75). this approach is arguably opposed to the groove-based construction of genres with roots in disco, like house. but the distinction falls apart in hybrid contexts: listen to the meditative bass loops of, say, steppa dub, where aspects of chicago house and berlin techno fuse with 1970s dub sensibilities, and djs express their own particular mixture of distortion and groove in performance. returning to the context of outlook, djs who perform at the festival frequently also play at dimensions and vice versa; during fieldwork i met several participants who had attended both festivals. all of which is to say that “bass music”, like most generic categories in dance music, is hard to distil and highly contingent, especially when set against supposedly distinct categories like house and techno. this underlines the methodological value of scene-specific ethnography and other methods, such as performance analysis, for understanding bass music’s terms of engagement. from the floor: outlook uk 2022 as i venture towards the stages on the first day of outlook uk 2022, i notice the crowd is relatively thin. it’s my first time attending an outlook festival, and i’m full of anticipation. the mood is mellow. the average age seems closer to 30 than 20 and there are more men than women around. reflecting on the relaxed crowd, a tall man named joe summarises the atmosphere to me as “chill […] there’s no assholes and i’ve got more space to dance”. the site itself is a large, flat and open field surrounded by farmland at cholmondeley castle. the castle isn’t visible from my tent. when it comes into view on the horizon behind the main stage, the brief moment of excitement is dampened by the realisation that it’s beyond the bounds of the actual festival site (figure 3), making the environment a far cry from the immersive ruins of fort punta christo. figure 3. outlook festival 2022 with cholmondeley castle in the background. photo credit: ivan mouraviev (2022). the first stage i arrive at is the subdub arena, tucked away to the left of the main stage area alongside a lake on one side and food stalls on the other. it’s now clear the subdub arena was responsible for the booming bass i heard at a distance shortly after setting up camp. this aligns with who’s scheduled to play here for the first two days: leeds’s iration steppas, a dub-reggae sound system known for pushing extreme volume. this also ends up foreshadowing the narrative that would cloud the festival from friday onwards; the organisers supposedly received over thirty noise complaints from local residents on the first night alone with the iration steppas, as dubstep mc sgt pokes would say on saturday, “cocking it up for the rest of us”. but for now, i’m enjoying the total immersion in sound that is subdub, a circular grassy space enclosed by haybales and four speaker stacks on the inside, with a dancefloor measuring less than 100 square metres. throughout the first 24 hours, i find myself gravitating towards the subdub arena every chance i get. there’s something meditative about the music and sound systems here, no doubt aided by the record selection skewing heavily towards steppa dub, a uk-based subgenre. ganja smoke periodically floats through the air; people are dancing quietly and freely in slow but spontaneous movements. the arena is also a de facto thoroughfare between the food stalls and another stage down the same path, the smuggler’s cove, which is mostly hosting dubstep and garage djs. this makes the subdub crowd a constantly shifting mix of experienced dub-heads and younger dance music fans who are passing through, but stick around for ten minutes to discover something new. one minute, there’s a passer-by exclaiming “just get another deck?!” in response to the traditional selecta style performance on one turntable; the next, there’s a seasoned steppa fan waiting shrewdly for the security guard to wander away, so they can shove the steel barrier aside and get as close as physically possible to the bass bins. by far the most intriguing stage, however, is the sinai arena in the main festival site (figure 4). this stage is powered by sinai sound system from sheffield. sinai’s reputation precedes it, with their clean sound respected across dub and electronic dance music circles. headline acts such as skream are among the many djs set to play here over the weekend. expectations are high. figure 4. the sinai arena. photo credit: ivan mouraviev (2022). arriving at the sinai arena on thursday, i’m immediately unsure of the sound. the stage is an open tent measuring about 30 by 30 metres with four speaker stacks, one in each corner, padded by haybales (figure 5). there’s a raised stage in the centre. it’s quiet: groups of friends are having free-flowing conversations throughout the space without earplugs on, going against the unspoken but ingrained expectation that a bass music event should be so loud as to prohibit speaking more than a few words at a time. this has multiple flow-on effects: while i can hear kicks and bass below 100 hz, i’m hardly feeling them. the sound is also oddly directional, with bass pressure drastically fluctuating depending on where i stand. further distracting me from the music are some strange high-frequency reflections that i attribute to reverberation created by the tent’s architecture. in our interview after the festival, nik, an attendee from new york who i befriended early in the festival, described it “like we were listening to someone’s boombox at times […] it wasn’t worth even hanging out there”. figure 5. sinai sound system. photo credit: ivan mouraviev (2022). when i meet sinai’s owner-operator, huw williams, outside the tent on sunday afternoon, he’s chatting casually with a group of friends. i gingerly spark up a conversation about the sound issues, wary that he may have already spent the entire weekend fielding questions and complaints from disappointed festival goers. but huw is more than up for it. he explains how the apparent reverberation effect was most likely from him setting the rear speakers about 16 db quieter than the front, in an attempt to excite and draw the crowd in towards the front while also preventing excess noise from escaping at the other end. huw also explains the full extent of the police and noise control presence at the festival, describing how, by sunday morning, there were multiple wireless noise detectors dotted around the site, with police ready to “shut down the entire event” should a signal exceeding 98 db be detected. later that evening, the festival is nearly over and the number of noise complaints apparently received by the organisers are in the hundreds. a blog post published by a local council on friday states that “removal of sub-bass elements from the loudspeaker systems” is being implemented (robinson 2022). festival staff with earpieces are hovering behind djs to keep overzealous performers from pushing gain knobs too high. it’s also been announced on the festival app that sunday night’s schedule has been brought forward by four hours—ending at midnight rather than 4 am—“to show respect and consideration for our local environment”. people are rightly annoyed, but many dancers are also seemingly unaware of the last-minute change and continue to happily rave to a mix of genres across each stage. frustration still bubbles up, though. during one of the final dubstep takeovers at the tiltyard stage, a few members of the crowd start shouting towards the dj, gesturing with upward-pointed index finger asking them to turn it up. though these exclamations are initially brushed off as drunk antics, they lead to a final interaction which sticks in my memory: mc sgt pokes eventually replies, mid-performance: “you know we can’t do that, you’ve been here all weekend […] focus on the unity. the unity is bigger”. conclusion in this article i have explored outlook’s past and present and highlighted elements of the festival worthy of critical attention from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives in edmc and festival studies. outlook festival has been an important player in uk bass culture for nearly 15 years. it continues to attract ravers from around the world to its unique site on the adriatic coast and championing dub-diasporic sound system music. the 2022 uk edition of the festival was not without its problems; it seems unlikely to return to the same cheshire site next year. predictably, fans took to social media after the event to reflect on the sound issues, with one informant in a private facebook group suggesting a more isolated site will be required in future years if sound restrictions are to be avoided. in closing, this comment is worth quoting for how it highlights the centrality of loudness in the ontology of bass culture (emphasis mine): outlook uk; beautiful place, absolute vibes everywhere, no drama, ridiculous sound restrictions […] outlook origins: exact same situation except it seems to be a bit too close to residential areas again meaning silly sound restrictions. i'd be more than happy to go a festival that's just in a field somewhere and be able to listen to all the sound as it's meant to be heard. author biography ivan mouraviev is a dj-producer and phd candidate at the university of bristol, uk. his thesis investigates bass materialism through the lenses of dj culture and performance in three contemporary spaces, focusing on bristol, outlook festival, and an online discord community. broader research interests include music & the internet and video game music. email: fe19330@bristol.ac.uk references “dimensions festival 2012 program by big up magazine issuu”. issuu. 13 september. <https://issuu.com/bigupmagazine/docs/dimensionsprogram2012>, (accessed 1 august 2022). garcia, luis-manuel. 2020. “feeling the vibe: sound, vibration, and affective attunement in electronic dance music scenes”. ethnomusicology forum 29(1): 21-39. <https://doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2020.1733434>. henriques, julian. 2011. sonic bodies: reggae sound systems, performance techniques, and ways of knowing. london, new york: continuum. james, chris. 2019. “outlook festival 2019 – the final fort”. ohanamag. 3 october. <https://www.ohanamag.com/events/outlook-festival-the-final-fort/>, (accessed 15 may 2020). james, robin. 2017. “is the postin post-identity the postin post-genre?”. popular music 36(1): 21–32. <https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261143016000647>. ———. “no genre, just vibes”. it’s her factory. 15 november 2021. <https://www.its-her-factory.com/2021/11/no-genre-just-vibes/>, (accessed 16 november 2021). jenkins, dave. 2018 “the history of outlook festival”. ukf. 11 april. <https://ukf.com/words/the-history-of-outlook-festival/21705>, (accessed 9 february 2020). minamore, bridget. 2017 “ten years in, who does outlook festival serve?” vice. 18 september. <https://www.vice.com/en/article/xwgxdw/outlook-festival-2017-review>, (accessed 1 july 2020). mouraviev, ivan. “bass culture and the black humanities: an introduction”. centre for black humanities. 11 june 2022. <https://bristolblackhumanities.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/2022/06/11/bass-culture-and-the-black-humanities-an-introduction-by-ivan-mouraviev/>, (accessed 9 july 2022). “outlook festival 2018: a dubstep guide | duploc.com”. duploc. 5 september 2018. <https://duploc.com/outlook-2018>, (accessed 9 february 2020). robinson, mark. 2022. “outlook festival”. wrenbury-cum-frith parish council. 1 july 2022. <https://www.wrenbury-pc.gov.uk/2022/07/outlook-festival-2/>, (accessed 10 august 2022). rose, tricia. 1994. black noise: rap music and black culture in contemporary america. middletown, ct: wesleyan university press. sullivan, paul. 2014. remixology: tracing the dub diaspora. london: reaktion books. unicomb, matt. 2018. “outlook festival 2018”. resident advisor. 14 september. <https://www.residentadvisor.net/reviews/23079>, (accessed 9 february 2020). filmography outlook festival. “outlook festival 2015 highlights”. youtube, 4:46. uploaded on 20 november 2015. <https://youtu.be/9uil-ahvgsu>, (accessed 10 august 2022). outlook festival. “outlook festival 2018 site walkthrough (fort punta christo)”. youtube, 2:00. uploaded on 3 may 2018. <https://youtu.be/yhtqd6pu4h8>, (accessed 10 august 2022). notes [1] although us hip-hop has never had a strong foothold in the uk—rap in local accents and grime find more favour—the viability of hip-hop at outlook festival is suggestive of bass culture as a broad church. hip-hop is indeed bass-centric in its production, and more importantly has roots shared with genres like jungle / drum ‘n’ bass in the dub diaspora, genres in which the mc and sound system are foundational to live performance. a danceable shower of bullets: sound morphologies, concrescence and neurosis in the genesis of an edm beat dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 11(1): 72–96 issn 1947-5403 ©2019 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.05 a danceable shower of bullets: sound morphologies, concrescence and neurosis in the genesis of an edm beat carlos palombini universidade federal de minas gerais (ufmg) (brazil) universidade federal do estado do rio de janeiro (unirio) (brazil) abstract the processes that lead from volt-mix to tamborzão, two bases (beats) of funk carioca (funk from the greater rio de janeiro city), are analysed with reference to pierre schaeffer’s typo-morphology of sonic objects (1966). such transformations are viewed as instances of gilbert simondon’s concretization (1958). they are synchronous with changes in the geopolitics and human geography of bailes funk (funk dances). as the volt-mix morphs into the tamborzão, the epicentre of these events moves from clubs in the suburbs and periphery to favelas, and funkeiros (funksters) become subjected to tensions arising from control of their spaces by rival factions of illicit substance retailers. these shifts coincide with the rise of a human character, the neurótico (neurotic), and with the collective feeling of neurose (neurosis) associated with circulating in those territories. keywords: electronic dance music analysis; sound morphology; anthropology of sound carlos palombini obtained his ph.d. in music from the university of durham with the thesis “pierre schaeffer’s typo-morphology of sonic objects” in 1993. he is currently professor of musicology in the federal university of minas gerais (ufmg), a member of the master’s and ph.d. programme in music of the federal university of the rio de janeiro state (unirio) and a fellow of the national research council (cnpq). email: <cpalombini@gmail.com>. feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.05 mailto:cpalombini@gmail.com. palombini | a danceable shower of bullets 73 introduction in “song structure and social structure”, alan lomax (1962: 425) hypothesized that “when a distinctive and consistent musical style lives in a culture or runs through several cultures, one can posit the existence of a distinctive set of emotional needs or drives that are somehow satisfied or evoked by this music”. in “sound structure as social structure”, steven feld built on lomax’s work to pioneer “a qualitative and intensive comparative sociomusicology without unsituated laminations of variously collected and historically ungrounded materials” (feld 1984: 385). for feld, lomax’s questions should be sorted out with “the thorough, long-term, historically and ethnographically situated case study” (ibid.), which he located “in a larger comparative framework for the sociomusical analysis of classless and egalitarian societies” (feld 1984: 383). the present article results from fieldwork on funk carioca conducted in a class-based and inegalitarian society from 2005 to date. it focuses on one component of the musical production, the base (henceforth beat), which is analysed with reference to pierre schaeffer’s solfège of sonic objects, as suggested by alistair riddell in 1996.1, 2, 3 after sketching elementary production techniques, i examine the processes whereby, in the course of the 1990s, a 1988 la electro track gives rise to an afro-brazilian beat in the greater rio de janeiro city. previous research (e.g. mattos 2006, 2012; caceres, ferrari and palombini 2014; gularte 2014) shows that this process is concomitant with the emergence of an identity trend, which i situate in its geopolitical context, revealing analogies between the synchronous transformations of sonority and society. in conclusion, i venture hypotheses on the meaning of this analogy. in another paper we have sketched the sound morphologies of three beats of funk carioca, the first brazilian genre of electronic dance music, each of which associated with one decade of this music: volt-mix (1990s), tamborzão (2000–2009) and beatbox (2010s) (caceres, ferrari and palombini 2014). we have observed that the passage from volt-mix to tamborzão entails a reduction of activity in the upper region of the beat texture, whereas that from tamborzão to beatbox results in losses in the lower region. furthermore, we have shown that such reductions are synchronous with a generally accepted narrative concerning the geopolitics of the bailes (henceforth dances): these events started in clubs of the greater rio de janeiro city suburbs and periphery in the 1980s; they were expelled from there in the second half of the 1990s; and they found their home in the favelas from 2000 to 2008, at which point perversely devised public security policies started to uproot them (for a case study see facina and palombini 2017).4 the eviction of funk dances from clubs to favelas coincides with the passage from volt-mix to tamborzão, and with losses in the upper region of the tessitura. their eradication from favelas coincides with the passage from tamborzão to beatbox, and with losses in the lower region of the tessitura. the diachronic morphology of beats thus links funk carioca to a well-known trope in the historiography of samba: the oppositional pair morro/asfalto, in which morro (hill) designates the hillsides where the poor build their homes—and, by metonym, the poor themselves—whilst asfalto (asphalt) refers to the urban areas with regular public services where the middle and upper classes dancecult 11(1)74 generally live. perhaps because in the meantime the number of favelas on flat surfaces has increased and suchlike favelas have played a significant role in the development of the genre, the historiography of funk carioca replaces morro with favela to engender the favela/asfalto oppositional pair. beats in funk carioca of the 1990s, a beat is generally an instrumental version, usually on the b-side of imported singles, as used in rhythmic counterpoint to vocal expression, be it rima na hora (improvised rhyme) or pre-composed rap. the technical proceedings of brazilian djs of the 1990s have not been compiled. musical productions in deferred time evince variation and derivation of beats by combination of segments from imported tracks and by interpolation or superposition of elements from afro-brazilian recordings. although common sense repeats that funk carioca derives from miami bass, the most popular instrumental track of the period, the “808 beatapella mix” on the b-side of dj battery brain’s 8 volt mix, is an obscure representative of los angeles electro that dj nazz (carlos machado) discovered in the us and distributed in rio. the “808 beatapella mix” has often been used in the form of a four-bar loop, with splash added to the last snare drum of the cycle and the subsequent hi-hat removed (fig. 1). figure 1. the volt-mix loop: on the lower lines, bass drum, and snare drum; on the middle line, voltage oscillation; on the top line, closed hi-hat. transcribed by lucas ferrari.5 http://www.mixcloud.com/carlospalombini/8-volt-mix-dj-battery-brain-1988 palombini | a danceable shower of bullets 75 the volt-mix texture characterizes itself by the range of its tessitura, from lower low (bass drum on the lowest line) to medium (snare drum on the second line) and upper high (closed hi-hat on the fourth line). notated in semiquavers on the third line, a rebound in the form of double clicks cyclically crosses the medium from end to end, thus linking upper-low and lower-high registers (fig. 2). this musical figure was obtained by connecting the trigger output of the drum machine to the audio input of the recording console, as done by the masterdon committee in “funkbox party” in 1983 and by the egyptian lover in “egypt, egypt” in 1984.6 and because the sonorities of the tr-808 are purposefully hyper-real, rebounds of voltage do not strike a discordant note among pre-programmed sounds.7 figure 2. the volt-mix loop. spectrogram of the five double attacks of voltage oscillation terminating on a single attack. odd-numbered attacks coincide with closed hi-hat; the third and the sixth attacks coincide with bass drum. interline spacing confers transparency to the texture. clearness of contours follows from the different densities of each line; from their different degrees of originality; from their different masses and factures—each line evocative of percussion on skin, percussion on skin with added rattle of metal wires, and percussion on metal.8, 9, 10 pierre schaeffer’s solfège of the sonic object expounds the notion of perceptual field: dancecult 11(1)76 . . . a first quality of the field of perception is to be able to compare two objects, discovering in them a single property. a second one is to be capable of ordering these values. a third is to manage to fix the degrees of this scale with greater or lesser accuracy (schaeffer 1966: 383). he propounds three such fields: a perceptual field of pitches, a perceptual field of durations and a perceptual field of intensities. we shall concern ourselves exclusively with the sites and calibres of complex masses in the perceptual field of pitches.11 the site of a mass in the field of pitches is the place in which this mass is located in the tessitura according to ordinal, relative scales.12 its calibre is the area that this mass occupies therein: at one extreme, white noise spans the entire field; at the other, the sine wave occupies one point in there. between one extreme and the other, we find different noise bands. figure 3 represents the approximate sites and calibres of snare drum, closed hi-hat, bass drum and voltage oscillation as well as three planes. figure 3. the volt-mix loop. representation of sites and calibres of: snare drum, with attack in the lower medium followed by granular resonance in the middle and upper medium; closed hi-hat in the upper high; bass drum in the low; and voltage oscillation, sweeping the medium register from end to end. also represented are three planes: bass drum and snare drum in the forefront (red and orange); voltage oscillation in the background (green); closed hi-hat in between (yellow and green). palombini | a danceable shower of bullets 77 montage amongst the range of funk carioca subgenres the word montagem (henceforth montage) characterizes the autonomy of the producer-dj in the selection and combination of heterogeneous sound materials, especially voice recordings, which they organize in fragmentary and repetitive ways. in the european avant-garde of the post-war years, schaeffer’s “étude pathétique”, from his cinq études de bruits (1990), may be considered a precursor (schaeffer 1950: 42–43). on the other side of the atlantic, farley jackmaster funk explored the fragmentation and repetition of his name in the track “farley farley”, released in 1985. in the early 1990s, funk carioca would turn such procedures into a subgenre in its own right. early montages were created on the tonos audio center control ic-3, manufactured by empresa brasileira de equipamentos eletrônicos (embrasom), later replaced by the gemini pdm-7008 and gemini pdm-7024. the latter offered five memory slots with the capability to store up to twenty-four seconds of sound distributed among two two-second slots, two four-second slots and one twelve-second slot. also in use was the gemini ds-1224, equally with twenty-four seconds of storage. a conversation between afro-diasporic cultures is audible in early instrumental montages that include recordings of berimbau—a brazilian gourd-resonated musical bow with ancestors in africa. among the simpler productions, available from the early berimbau montages playlist, “berimbau volt” starts with a berimbau that continues after the entrance of the “808 beatpella mix”. “berimbau são bento” employs the same formula but uses a two-bar volt-mix loop instead. somewhat more complex, “berimbau pipo’s”, named after the equipe pipo’s (pipo’s sound system), begins with a superimposition of berimbau on a loop extracted from the percapella mix of the single “bleeding heart” by the los angeles duo bardeux; the “808 beatpella mix” enters; the combination of berimbau and bardeux continues throughout; the beatpella ceases, prepares its re-entrance, and the ensemble carries on. probably due to its afro-latin feeling, early berimbau montages developed a taste for the bardeux loop, as shown by “berimbau agitado i”, “berimbau agitado ii” and “berimbau studio rap”. all these montages pertain to the earlier half of the 1990s and have been rescued by dj daydanic from mds that once belonged to the cash box and a muralha sound systems. in 1993 dj mamut created “contexto 2”, now known as “jack matador”, released on the lp pipo’s 2: o encontro da massa in 1994. “jack matador” acquired pop status in the underground and engendered countless responses in the form of newer tracks, thus establishing the reputation of the subgenre (essinger 2005: 110–13). also in 1994 the fourth beats, funks e raps album, produced by djs grandmaster raphael and amazing clay, presented djs alessandro and cabide’s “macumba lelê”: an atabaque beat starts; the berimbau develops figurations; the “808 beatpella mix” enters; the atabaque varies. the term atabaque is popularly used for candomblé-sounding skinned barrel-drums in general. it designates herein a variety of loops that converge towards the tamborzão. on the origin of the instrument, spirito santo states: http://www.ubu.com/sound/schaeffer.html http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/sets/early-berimbau-montages http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/sets/early-berimbau-montages http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/berimbau-volt http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/berimbau-sao-bento http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/berimbau-pipos http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/3-berimbau-agitado-1 http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/berimbau-agitado-2 http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/berimbau-studio-rap http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/b-2-contexto-2 https://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/sets/lp-pipos-2-o-encontro-da-massa http://www.mixcloud.com/carlospalombini/grandmaster-raphael-beats-funks-e-raps-iv-1994 http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/djs-alessandro-e-cabide-montagem-macumba-lele dancecult 11(1)78 i have little doubt about the atabaque not being african. neither is it brazilian. i do however like to use its context—epoch, making, origins—to allude to losses of know-how and of access to materials by force of slavery: they have led to the use of casks as drum shells in ports of the american colonies. because casks and the craft of coopery are directly linked to the packing and transportation of goods by ship, it is easy to imagine a relationship between the maritime trade in american colonies and the use of casks as drum shells: people of the african diaspora working in harbours. nevertheless, the form of that which we call atabaque is ostensibly brazilian. it appears clearly in bahia in association with candomblé, as iconography demonstrates. other places are uruguay, with her candombe drums, and cuba, where the congas display an unsurpassable level of craftsmanship. they all belong to the same family. it is a history that organology recounts.13 thus, the characteristically latino atabaque sound frequently heard in african-american productions since disco provides a sonic link between dj cultures of the northern and southern hemispheres. melôs and raps the “bleeding heart” radio edit, on the b-side of the homonymous single, became locally known as “melô da princesinha”, which roughly translates as “the little princess melody”, though a melô is not exactly a melody.14 the term alludes to a triple procedure that lies at the root of funk carioca and consists in: (a) providing english lyrics with sound-alike, humorously homophone portuguese words; (b) naming those tracks as the “melô of such and such”; (c) using instrumental versions as beats for traditional melodies or pop tunes to which new lyrics are supplied. mc d’eddy’s “rap do pirão” was certainly not the first rap, but when it won the clube mauá competition in 1992, grandmaster raphael recorded that performance live and started to broadcast it.15 the following year he included “rap do pirão” in the first beats, funks e raps lp. “rap do pirão” triggered the age of raps, which would last until 1998, when dj luciano oliveira released an obscure old-styled rap whose production hinted at the new decade. tamborzão we do not know when raça rubro-negra, a traditional association of flamengo football club supporters, adopted a version of “rap do pirão” as one of their anthems. this music is now sung at entrance gates and on bleacher seats to the accompaniment of instrumental ensembles similar to those of baterias de escolas de samba (henceforth samba school drum units). since exchanges between stadium shouts and funk dances logically predate the birth of the musical genre, football must have played an as yet uninvestigated role in the genesis of funk carioca. the same may be said of samba schools: in rio, the personae of the football fan, of the samba school drummer and of the funkster frequently overlap. mestre jorjão is a well-known mestre de bateria (henceforth master of drums) whose apprenticeship took http://www.mixcloud.com/carlospalombini/dj-grandmaster-raphael-beats-funks-e-raps-1993 http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/raca-rubro-negra-rap-do-pirao-2011 palombini | a danceable shower of bullets 79 place in mocidade independente de padre miguel, a west rio samba school famous for the innovations of its drumming unit. in 1997 he was spending his second year as a guest master of drums at unidos do viradouro, on the other side of the guanabara bay, when he decided to underline the refrain of the samba-enredo “trevas! luz! a explosão do universo” with what appears to be a variation of the volt-mix bass-drum/snare-drum pattern (fig. 4; dominguinhos do estácio et al. 1997).16 figure 4. funk carioca pattern, probably a variation on the volt-mix bass-drum/snare-drum figure, as used by master jorjão in repetitions of the samba-enredo refrain of the unidos do viradouro samba school in 1997. transcribed by lucas ferrari. the following year dj luciano oliveira, also from west rio, drew inspiration from the “funk with samba school instruments” of the group funk’n lata—directed by ivo meirelles, from the iconic mangueira samba school drum unit—in order to create, on the digital drum machine roland r-8 mk-ii, a loop “to increase, to give body to the [voltmix] sound” (ivanovici 2006).17 he therefore chose, edited and sequenced ambo kick, attack tom 2, attack tom 1, slap high conga and open low conga. the resulting loop appeared in combination with the volt-mix in mcs tito and xandão’s “rap da vila comari”, produced by luciano oliveira for dj marcio lugarini’s cd dj lugarino apresenta os melhores da zona oeste. initially designated as batuque, a “generic name of african dances”, or tambor neurótico (neurotic drum), this loop (fig. 5) became known as tamborzão (big drum) and appeared as a beat of its own in the 1999 montage “a gota”, by dj cabide, second track of the cd a gota, cerol fininho, vol. 1: o som das galeras (andrade 1999: 53). figure 5. the tamborzão loop: on the lower line, ambo kick (k01); on the middle lines, attack tom 1 (t01) and attack tom 2 (t02); on the top line, open low conga (p14); above the top line, slap high conga (p16). transcribed by lucas ferrari. http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/viradouro-1997-trevas-luz-a-explosao-do-universo http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/mcs-tito-e-xandao-rap-da-vila-comari-dj-luciano-oliveira-1998 http://www.mixcloud.com/carlospalombini/dj-lugarino-apresenta-os-melhores-da-zona-oeste http://www.mixcloud.com/carlospalombini/dj-lugarino-apresenta-os-melhores-da-zona-oeste http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/tamborzao-puro http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/dj-cabide-montagem-a-gota-1999 http://www.mixcloud.com/carlospalombini/a-gota-cerol-fininho-vol-1-o-som-das-galeras http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/tamborzao-puro dancecult 11(1)80 in order to establish sites and calibres of masses of the tamborzão with some degree of precision we have had to reconstruct its lines one by one on an r-8 mk-ii (figs. 6–8). figure 6. tamborzão: the three ambo-kick attacks. figure 7. tamborzão: the three attack-tom-2 attacks followed by one attack-tom-1 attack. http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/tamborzao-o-bumbo-8-compassos http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/tamborzo-os-tom-tons-8-compassos palombini | a danceable shower of bullets 81 figure 8. tamborzão: the two s lap-high-conga attacks followed by two open-low-conga attacks. having isolated these objects, we were then able to locate their sites and calibres in the overall texture (fig. 9). figure 9. tamborzão: the relative sites and calibres of slap high conga, attack tom 2 and ambo kick in the loop texture. https://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/tamborzao-as-congas-8-compassos dancecult 11(1)82 compared morphologies by focusing our attention on different spans of duration we shall find sonic objects at three levels of complexity (schaeffer 1966). let us take loops for hyper-objects and segment them into macro-objects, or cycles of the loop, and then further segment these cycles into microobjects, or notes. notes are “formed sounds with fixed mass, meaning sounds whose matter answers to the criterion of homogeneity, except for their dynamics” (schaeffer 1966: 529). formed sounds share the characteristic of “presenting good form, that is to say, of being fused together by an undeniable unity of facture, which corresponds to an optimal time of memorization for the ear” (schaeffer 1966: 443). volt-mix micro-objects volt-mix notes were produced on a roland tr-808 rhythm composer. this drum machine was manufactured from 1980 to 1983 and offers sixteen on-board sounds that stylize acoustic percussions by means of analogue synthesis. the volt-mix loop uses three classes of such notes and ascribes each class to one of three lines: bass drum, snare drum and closed hi-hat, all of which follow the attack/resonance model. instead of relying on pre-sets, a fourth line resorts to the technical device described under “beats”, resulting in a series of six impulsions, or abrupt attacks without resonance. impulsions may seem “elementary in structure, although their details, if time-stretched, could prove very complex (which the ear cannot grasp when duration is too short)” (schaeffer 1966: 438). figure 2 shows that five of these impulsions consist of two attacks separated by so short a time gap that the ear is incapable of identifying iterations as such. these pre-sets paraphrase the effects of beater and sticks hitting in various ways differently sized sounding-bodies made of different materials: metal for hi-hat; skin for bass drum and snare drum. although bass drum and snare drum exhibit similar sounding-bodies of different sizes, their resonators vary: bass drum has an open resonator; snare drum has a resonating head; hi-hat integrates resonator and sounding-body into each of its cymbals. these factors account for differences of sound matter between the less transient component of attack/resonance classes, and such differences manifest themselves through the signature criterion of grain.18 bass drum shows no grain—unless by grain we mean the shaking of windows and walls. snare drum obtains an iterative resonant grain as soon as its resonant head enters into vibration and into contact with metal wires. closed hit-hat displays a resonance grain to which an iteration grain adds itself as a result of an interaction between cymbals. this heterogeneous and yet coherent ensemble of characters allows for the ingenious interplay of values to which the volt-mix texture owes much of its appeal.19 the lower the site of the note, the longer it resonates, but bass drum, the lowest and longest one, lacks granulation and appears at the comparatively moderate rate of four notes per bar; snare drum, in the medium, with medium duration, is coarsely granular and appears at the low rate of two notes per bar; hi-hat, the highest and shortest one, is finely granular and appears at the high rate of eight notes per bar. palombini | a danceable shower of bullets 83 tamborzão micro-objects tamborzão notes originate from the roland r-8 mk-ii human rhythm composer. this digital drum machine was released in 1992 and offers two hundred on-board samples of sounds from acoustic instruments, from analogue and digital equipment (cr-78, tr808, tb-303, tr-909) and from other sources. the tamborzão loop distributes samples of five acoustic instruments into three lines: ambo kick; attack tom 1 and attack tom 2; slap high conga and open low conga. all of these notes follow the attack/resonance model, but differently from the volt-mix, whose lines individually taken are all flat, the tamborzão presents internal variations of site and intensity in the middle line, and of site, duration and harmonic timbre in the upmost line.20 nevertheless, the dynamic of the middle line is not perceived as such but rather as a feature of the cell. this happens because, in addition to the rhythmic uneventfulness of the line of tom-toms, tamborzão notes show similarities of facture, mass and duration, and the line of tom-toms is all the more prone to fade into the background since it is sited in the middle (and closer to the external lines than snare drum is close to bass drum or to hi-hat in the volt-mix). on the other hand, differences between slap high conga and open low conga tie together characteristics of site, duration and harmonic timbre in such a way that the listener is likely to ascribe this interplay of variations to a performer’s repertoire of articulations. volt-mix and tamborzão macro-objects both loops may be designated as pedals of cells, or pk, each k corresponding to one cycle of the loop (schaeffer 1966: 459).21, 22 to establish a distinction between a volt-mix k and a tamborzão k we shall resort to two other types: threads (t) and accumulations (a). threads are “complex or harmonic packets of elementary n or x objects tied in a bundle” or “slowly evolving fusions of sounds” (schaeffer 1966: 450, 457).23 an accumulation is a “profuse reiteration of brief elements, all relatively similar” (schaeffer 1966: 439). by assimilating the volt-mix k to a t and the tamborzão k to an a we are implying that each of these pedals may be taken as a pt or a pa respectively. since both loops consist exclusively of notes x, a volt-mix k would be a tx and a tamborzão k would be an ax. volt-mix and tamborzão identities the volt-mix cell distributes each of its three attack/resonance classes among three lines spaciously sited across the field of pitches, from lower low to upper high, while a line of impulsions spans the medium from end to end, thus basting both extremes. the tamborzão cell distributes each of its three attack/resonance classes among three lines compacted between lower low and upper medium, above which the attack transients of all notes take up the field of pitches. were the ear capable of isolating this zone we should discern in there the disembodied synthesis of the rhythmic pattern through an ensemble of unresonated attacks. the volt-mix delineates its rhythmic identity through the bass-drum/snare-drum pattern. it receives its name and signature from voltage oscillation, whether this line is perceived dancecult 11(1)84 as a series of impulses or as integrated into an allure, or regular oscillation. this figure unfolds in time between the second snare and the first snare of the subsequent bar and it may be considered a hyperbole of the attack/resonance model. the tamborzão delineates its rhythmic identity by means of the ambo-kick/tom-toms pattern, approximately in the same region as the bass-drum/snare-drum pattern of the volt-mix. its signature feature is the line of congas, not least because it is the most clearly discernable one. an isolated volt-mix line is likely to evoke its original pattern; an isolated tamborzão line will not do so. the paradox of the tamborzão is that it uses samples of an afro-panamerican ensemble to suggest the afro-brazilianness of candomblé drumming. rhythmic derivation the tamborzão kick drum duplicates all but the second bass drum beat of the volt-mix, which it replaces with its first slap high conga beat.24 the second slap high conga beat of the tamborzão turns up in the place where the third bass drum beat of the volt-mix would be (and where the second kick drum beat of the tamborzão actually is). the two open low conga beats of the tamborzão fulfil a double role: the first one takes the place of the second snare drum beat of the volt-mix; their ensemble replaces, with augmentation, the anacrusis of voltage oscillation. the second tom-tom beat of the tamborzão appears where the first snare drum beat of the volt-mix would be. ontology the volt-mix is either the beatapella mix of dj battery brain’s single or a loop extracted therefrom, in the role of beat for melôs, montages and raps. we remain uncertain about the authorship of the tamborzão: individual, according to some; collective, according to others; individual with collective contributions, according to others yet. in a 2006 video-interview, dj cabide relates: then i did that montage, ‘a gota’, it came out and sound systems immediately started to copy it. i said: ‘no, the tambor is the west rio tambor that luciano has created.’ i used it. people began to ask me: ‘where is that tamborzão from?’ ‘that tamborzão is the west rio tamborzão made by luciano’. it was the beginning of funk. everybody started to copy it, to put it into the music, and the evolution began to evolve, to evolve, to evolve until we got to the present-day tamborzão (ivanovici 2006).25 is the tamborzão a specific loop or a variety of loops characterizing “the evolution of evolution”? if the latter is correct, as cabide seems to suggest, at what point does an atabaque become a tamborzão? and at what point does a tamborzão turn into a tambor?26 gilbert simondon explains in du mode d’existence des objets techniques: instead of starting from the individuality of the technical object or even from its specificity, which is rather unstable, so as to try to define the laws of its genesis within the framework of that individuality and that specificity, we would do better to reverse palombini | a danceable shower of bullets 85 the problem. it is starting from the criteria of its genesis that we may define the individuality and specificity of the technical object. the individual technical object is not such and such a thing, something given hic et nunc, but something that has a genesis. the unity of the technical object, its individuality and specificity are the characters of consistency and convergence of its genesis. the genesis of the technical object is part of its being. the technical object is that which is not anterior to its becoming but which is present at each stage of this becoming; the technical object is a unit of becoming. the petrol engine is not this or that engine given in time and space, but rather the fact that there is a sequence, a continuity that extends from the first engines to those we know, which are still in evolution. on this account, just as in the case of phylogenetic sequences, any particular stage of evolution contains within itself structures and dynamic systems that are at the basis of any evolution of forms. the technical being evolves by convergence and by adaptation to itself; it is unified from within according to a principle of internal resonance. the automobile engine of the present day is not a descendant of the 1910 engine simply because the 1910 engine was the one which our ancestors built. nor is it a descendent of the latter because of greater improvement in relation to use. indeed, for certain uses a 1910 engine is superior to a 1956 engine. for example, it can withstand a high degree of heating without seizing or leaking, because it is constructed with a considerably greater degree of looseness and without fragile alloys such as white metal; it is also more autonomous, because of its magneto ignition. old engines still function on fishing boats without breaking down after being taken over from worn-out cars. it is through an internal examination of the regimes of causality, and of forms in as much as such forms are adapted to those regimes of causality that the present-day car-engine is defined as posterior to the 1910 engine. in a modern engine, each critical piece is so connected with the rest by reciprocal exchanges of energy that it cannot be other than it is. the shape of cylinder, the shape and size of the valves and the shape of the piston are all part of a same system in which a multitude of reciprocal causalities exist. . . . it could be said that the modern engine is a concrete one whereas the old engine was abstract. in the old engine each element comes into play at a certain moment in the cycle and then it is supposed to have no effect on the other elements; the different parts of the engine are like individuals who would work each in his turn without ever knowing one another (simondon 1958: 19–21). simondon designates this process with the term concrétude, translatable as concretization or concrescence. we only need to replace the words “piece” and “element” with “line” to understand concretization at work in the beat. the line of tom-toms, the simplest one, takes on a triple function: to keep up the pulse, as the hi-hat does in the volt-mix; to amalgamate external lines, as voltage oscillation does in the volt-mix; to provide the beat with a dynamic profile, which the volt-mix lacks. the line of congas takes up the anacrustic function and the signature function of voltage oscillation. dancecult 11(1)86 geopolitics and human geography the history of funk carioca, however young, is rife with myths. has it actually consisted in one exodus after the other? doubtless, there were funk dances in the favelas during the 1990s; there were funk dances in suburban and peripheral clubs in the following decade; and there have been funk dances in favelas and in suburban and peripheral clubs in the 2010s. still, between the second half of the 1990s and the earlier half of the subsequent decade the epicentre of funk dances moves away from clubs in the asfalto and from samba school headquarters in favelas towards sports facilities, football pitches, streets and open spaces in favelas. the following quotation from dj byano, who led one of the main favela dances, baile da chatuba, in its heyday, between 2005 and 2010, shows the effects of public security policies on the dances in the 2010s: all of a sudden i start to miss the days when you had a whole menu of community dances to enjoy on weekends. i was happy and i didn’t know it. i’ve played in over thirty favelas and hills of rio de janeiro. i miss it. there were more hits, more mcs. where are they? what’s happened? apart from those in chatuba, where i live, my favourite dances were mangueira, jacaré, caratê and 15th street in cidade de deus, mangueirinha, corte 8, dick and furk mendes. these were the favelas where i loved to work. you could choose: ‘i’m going to nova holanda today: shall i go to mangueira or to jacaré tomorrow? shall i ring my bro in rocinha to go to são carlos? or shall i lead my train to chatuba or vidigal? or should i ring up that babe who lives in grota to enjoy their saturday dance before i go to fazendinha or arará on sunday? is the chapadão dance taking off ?’ time passes, things change. the majority of these people are now married. they have their kids and family. others have travelled and no longer live in rio. the government has face-lifted some communities and has oppressed culture in the favelas of rio by requiring so many documents that a lot of people do not even know from where to start. in reality what keeps funk going now are chopadas and miserable pago-funks where playboys become djs and the cultureless play at 140 bpm for little parties in favela outskirts. that auntie who used to sell drinks in a tent has sold her trailer. the small bar has closed down. that grandpa who used to rent his laje as a camarote has sold his home. that auntie’s hairdresser shop that used to be crowded from friday to sunday no longer exists. the community earns no extra money. that uncle who would arrive from work and set up his bar for the weekend dance... but where is it? though luck: ten years ago you were happy without even knowing it. i’ve lived all that, i’ve enjoyed it and i’ve spread happiness. i would go by kombi or by bus, and happy i was! if one day my kids ask me what the best job in my life was i shall reply: to have done the best dance of the rio de janeiro state, and to have brought happiness to the best favelas of rio. today? i don’t know. i only hear gunshots (fagundes 2016).27 in a 2011 video-interview dj grandmaster raphael contrasts the mores of 1990s dances with those of the decade that byano so misses: palombini | a danceable shower of bullets 87 in those days (viz. the 1990s) there was a somewhat more conscious talk: writing lyrics such as ‘do not fight in the dances’, ‘say no to violence’, all that. mcs used to sing these lyrics. by contrast, fights erupted all the time in the dances. unfortunately, today you have this putaria thing in most of the dances. some djs even find it dandy: ‘i am the king of putaria’. the discourse isn’t right; the text is no good. by contrast, the dances are completely peaceful. you can see that the girls just want to swing their hips, people just want to make eyes at each other, to enjoy the party, to dance to the music, to drink, to have fun. what now? (grandmaster raphael 2011).28 the balance of the volt-mix participated in ritualized fights and in tributes to peace. the propulsive impetus of the tamborzão participated in mating rituals and in chants of war. in a 2006 encounter with dj luciano, cabide describes how the new beat was initially received: you did that vignette, ‘novos ritmos, novas galeras’. indeed, you did that tamborzão. the boss heard it and said: ‘this drum... this is the real funk drum. let’s change funk!’ . . . the mcs themselves went: ‘put that tamborzão, put that neurotic tamborzão, put the tamborzão!’—which we actually called batuque. it was the batuque, not the tamborzão. the mcs went on: ‘put that neurotic tamborzão!’ (ivanovici 2006).29 in her 2006 dissertation carla mattos studied the neurotic and neurosis as native categories amongst 1990s funksters who participated in fight dances.30 she explains: conflict and ‘violence’ had integrative power in the cohabitation of rival crews, but this manner of experiencing rivalry is modified in the context of factions, as observed in two situations. in the first one, we note that, in the ‘corridors’, some young men— the ‘neurotic’ ones—start to distinguish themselves in connection with cultural references from the faction, which idealized armed ‘war’ against the enemy, or alemão, imposing a new moral of the ‘manly subject’, no longer valued for his physical power and disposition to fight. the second occurs in the context of ‘war’ between factions in the favelas, a context called ‘neurotic rhythm’ (mattos 2006), when a new ideal of ‘peaceful’ and ‘leisurely’ social cohabitation in the community and in the dances comes to bear differently on perceptions of risk/danger, on circulation strategies and on practices of identification and (self-)regulation of conducts vis-à-vis local violent criminality (mattos 2012: 655). the pede a paz of the asfalto dances is re-signified in this context. in the favela, ‘peace’ becomes synonymous with ‘leisure’, and funk dances become the counter-neurotic time-space in which everybody may coexist in ‘tranquillity’. the category ‘without neurosis’ expresses the idealization of a non-conflicting social space where it is necessary to adopt a peaceful conduct called blindão (blindage). the construction of this environment ‘without neurosis’ requires: (a) regulation of the conducts of the valente (brave); (b) elimination of the alemão (enemy) from social coexistence; (c) the difficult negotiation of the arrego, that is, the payment of bribes to police officers, in this case, to guarantee the realization of the illegal dances (mattos 2012: 659).31 http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/vinheta-o-rumo-do-funk-equipe-a-gota-dj-luciano dancecult 11(1)88 one of mattos’s interviewees was charles. if his memory served him well, the creation of tamborzão coincided with a mythical episode in the history of the crews. a-side and b-side practically didn’t exist any longer, because lucas was a-side and cidade alta was a-side, but cidade alta was comando vermelho (red command) and lucas was terceiro comando (third command), a rival faction. then the neuroses of cidade alta were already starting: not to fight against lucas, but against us from nova holanda. this happened all the time in the dances. and we kept fighting. in fact, we didn’t understand anything: i would be beaten by the kids from lucas and people from cidade alta would see us being beaten and they would do nothing about it. they would come to the nova holanda dances and i would go to the cidade alta dances. and they would shake hands with me. i didn’t understand anything: ‘fuck, these kids are pure alemão, they’re a-side, they beat us and then they come up to shake hands!’ that’s when the traffic started to intervene in the fight dances. this influence dates from 1998 onwards. we no longer had the liberty to declare what we wanted to be. it had to be their choice, without freedom. and that’s how it went until the end of corridor dances. i remember that the guys from nova holanda went to cidade alta with people from kelson, which was comando vermelho and also b-side and used to fight together with nova holanda and parque união. this crew went to cidade alta with a representative of the dances who actually represented comando vermelho. he said that if people from cidade alta ever fought against people from nova holanda again they would take bullets. the guys would send bullets on them as soon as they left the dance. that’s when the separation happened, when the dances begun to die because bonds of friendship started to be severed, and this begun to bear on a lot of things. the neurosis started: ‘if i go there, shall i be picked up by the guys?’ that was the beginning of neurosis: we could no longer frequent each other’s areas and so our trajectory ended. i remember that at the time of the arrastão it was a-side and b-side together, all the guys, everybody invading the beach. after that some beaches became more restricted, even more so than they already were. for instance, arpoador, in posto 8, became something mad due to these fights between factions in the dances, because when a-side and b-side didn’t represent factions, but crews, everybody could frequent posto 8. vila do pinheiro frequented posto 8. ever since comando vermelho took charge of the dances, we started to evict people from pinheiro, people from lucas, and posto 8 became comando vermelho only (mattos 2012: 669–70).32 in an unpublished manuscript, marcelo gularte presents another version of this story, one that, essentially, confirms it: — a geezer from the lowland told me that the corridor started to take shape in 1992 in the grêmio de raiz da serra, since not many people used to go there yet. that was with the super tropicália sound system. the dances were divided into crews of palombini | a danceable shower of bullets 89 group a and crews of group b. zezinho created this thing and he put security staff to intervene in the fights—milico said. — that may be true, but this division also existed in 1992 in the furacão dances, apart from the fact that it was not called a-side and b-side, but amigo (friend) and alemão. i’ve participated in the beginning of the corridor in the império. before that, there were the crowds. the guys would come in huge crowds, meet face to face and put up a fight—i said (gularte 2014: 778).33 — naldinho said to us that he’s been told about a meeting on that faction thing. the deal was between the leaders of the nova holanda, parque união, kelson and cidade alta crews with a ‘representative’ of comando vermelho. it was a meeting to sort out the ‘cidade alta neurosis’. b-side will become comando vermelho now and a-side will become terceiro comando. sides will change. it will be damn confusion. this won’t even exist anymore because of faction (gularte 2014: 1039–40). for the sake of precision, gularte has contested charles’s narrative in a comment to a facebook post: “parada de lucas never was a-side but always b-side”. he explains: cidade alta was a-side; parada de lucas was b-side. these favelas are quite close to each other, separated by avenida brasil. nova holanda also was b-side and very imposing in the chaparral, in bonsucesso, because they used to walk to the dances in huge crowds. chaparral is a dance that started in 1995 or 1996 and finished in 1999, when the dances were interdicted (palombini 2015).34 from 2000 to 2010 approximately, the tamborzão brings neutralized neurosis into play at favela dances, whose time it regulates with the help of bullets, whether sampled, as in mc sabrina’s recording of “diretoria”, by mc primo, produced by dj junior da provi (2005), or real, as in mc gil do andaraí’s recording of “ao vivo na nova holanda” (2005). as for the following decade, grandmaster raphael observes: i see beatbox and tamborzão as one and the same. it’s a mixture because no one can define the tamborzão. it’s a mixture of everything: it’s got samba with candomblé with... it’s a fairly complicated thing. and beatbox is the same (raphael and palombini 2014). the becoming tamborzão pursues its course in the becoming beatbox, even if, for the favelas, only gunshots have remained. signification of beat morphing to grasp the meaning of the intriguing fact that, for three decades, losses of frequency bands of paradigmatic funk carioca beats have coincided with losses of baile territories we need to take manifold factors into account. the beat is but one element of musical production and, as djs perfect their techniques, so increases their ability not only to manipulate ready-made beats but also to add new elements to them such as viradas (drum fills) and pontos (riffs). we have seen the role this instrumental apprenticeship has played in the emergence of a http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/mc-sabrina-diretoria-do-mc-primo-dj-junior-2005 http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/1-mc-gil-do-andara-ao-vivo-na-nova-holanda dancecult 11(1)90 characteristically afro-brazilian beat. effectively, those losses afford room for manoeuvre in the lower and higher regions, a capability that will be crucial in the 2010s, when the dances come under attack at the epicentre of musical creativity—the favela. funk carioca then opens itself to hybridizations with other genres thus conquering new audiences and spaces. beat morphing is therefore a sonic manifestation of the survival nature of funk carioca culture (moraes et al. 2019). tamborzão marks the rise not only of an ensemble of personality traits, but also of a fiercely provocative attitude vis-à-vis the asphalt. that which we have termed concretion, an inherent characteristic of the mode o being of the beat as a technical object, manifests cohesion not exclusively as a morphological trait, but also as a yearned-for social feature and an antidote to chaos (novaes and palombini 2019). acknowledgements this research has been funded by the national research council (cnpq) under their research-productivity fellowship and grant scheme. the author is grateful to thomas gould for revision, to the dancecult anonymous reviewers for feedback, and to tommy symmes and botond vitos for editing and formatting. notes 1 a base (beat) is the local version of the beat or break beat of african-american hip-hop; on hip-hop beats and break beats see rose (1994: 73–4) and katz (2012: 14). 2 excerpts from traité des objets musicaux are given in the author’s translation. for an english translation of the book, see schaeffer (2017). except for the gilbert simondon quote, which draws on melamphy’s version to a large extent, all foreign language citations are given in the author’s translations, with original italics. 3 “although schaeffer’s efforts resulted in a great many words, some music and lingering epigones, the only people who, i think, have come close to practicing what he was getting at are todays djs. the reason is that they are the only musicians exposed to the intense process of mixing and considering sound on a routine and often context critical level” (riddell 1996). 4 bailes (dances) are events in which funk carioca is played, sung and danced by djs, mcs and funkeiros (henceforth funksters). 5 even if it is highly unlikely that either the volt-mix or the tamborzão has been conceived in 2/2 time, we have used this measure signature throughout as a common denominator between the volt-mix 4/4 and the 2/4 in which brazilian popular music has traditionally been written. 6 this trigger output allowed the tr-808 to control other devices before the midi era. 7 on the aesthetics of tr-808 presets, see the anecdote concerning the cymbal sound in wolbe (2013). 8 “the degree of originality is, in general terms, that which surprises prevision” (schaeffer 1966: 436). palombini | a danceable shower of bullets 91 9 mass is a “criterion of [sonic] matter that . . . corresponds to the occupation of the field of pitches by the sound” (schaeffer 1966: 401). on the notion of perceptual field, see below. 10 the criterion of facture refers to “the manner in which energy is imparted [to the sounding object] and manifests itself in the duration [of the sonic object], in close relation with the maintenance” (schaeffer 1966: 432). 11 complex masses are those of sounds without definite pitch. 12 differently from complex masses, tonic masses present definite pitches, which can be precisely sited without reference to other sounds; for this reason, their scaling is termed cardinal. 13 spirito santo, personal communication with the author (on facebook messenger), 28 june 2016. 14 melôs tend to be satyric in mood and should not be confused with the romantic subgenre of funk carioca that brazilians call funk melody or simply melody. 15 when applied to funk carioca, the word rap may have historical connotations, so as to distinguish the age of melôs from the age of raps, but it can also serve as a short for rap consciente (conscious rap) or refer to relatively elaborate authorial narratives. the term rapper is reserved for practitioners of the musical genre we call, by synecdoche (totum pro parte), brazilian rap or brazilian hip-hop. funk carioca artists are never called rappers but always mcs. 16 on samba-enredo, see araújo (2014: 744–6). 17 as applied to funk’n lata, the term funk refers to the brazilian appropriation of the africanamerican genre of the 1970s rather than to funk carioca. 18 “a homogeneous sound may comprise a microstructure, generally due to the maintenance of a bow, of a reed or even to the roll of drumsticks. this property of the sonic matter evokes the grain of a fabric or mineral” (schaeffer 1966: 548). 19 “values are the distinctive features, which emerge between several sound objects put into structure and form the elements of the abstract musical discourse itself; the other aspects of the object that are not relevant in the musical structure but constitute its concrete substance, its matter, are gathered under the name of character” (chion 1983: 70). 20 harmonic timbre is a remainder, that which we may say about sonic matter after exhausting its description in terms of mass, melodic profile, mass profile, grain and allure. 21 a pedal is a “type of artificial eccentric sound created by mechanical repetition in loop of a cell (hence, of a relatively complicated micro-object). the pedal is therefore a kind of prolonged and cyclic iterative sound” (chion 1983: 136). 22 a cell is “an artificial object for which nature has not prepared us well, although electroacoustic equipment showers us with them: that object which is arbitrarily determined by locking a groove onto itself or by random cutting of a piece of magnetic tape” (schaeffer 1966: 454). 23 harmonic masses are those of sounds with definite pitch. 24 in this paragraph, i use the word “beat” in the oxford english dictionary sense: “a stroke upon a drum, the striking of a drum with the sound produced”. 25 cabide uses the term tambor (drum) as a designation for the tambozão before it was named as such. dancecult 11(1)92 26 i use the term tambor for an undefined group of tamborzão-derived beats that emerged from around 2007 onwards, out of which beatboxes developed. 27 the terms favela and community denote essentially the same, with complex sets of different connotations. chopadas are draught-beer parties. pago-funks are dances in which a combination of romantic pagode and funk carioca is played (see lima 2014). lajes are rooftops of favela houses as places for entertainment and socialization. the word camarote (usually, a seated compartment in a theatre) designates here approximately semicircular structures above the ground floor that surround the internal walls of spaces where funk carioca dances take place. a kombi is a volkswagen minibus used as a means of informal collective transportation. 28 putaria (literally whoredom) is a subgenre that tackles the sexual prowesses of men and women (see moreira 2014). 29 with “novos ritmos, novas galeras” cabide refers to the vignette “o rumo do funk” (the direction of funk) by its lyrics: novas galeras, novos ritmos (new crews, new rhythms). the term “crews” translates galeras: regroupments of bondes (trains), that is, of groups of people from specific communities or favelas, when they associate with other suchlike groups in the dances. crews were divided into lado a (a-side) and lado b (b-side), each individual on either side being designated as amigo (friend), if they belonged to one’s side, or alemão (enemy), if they belonged to the opposite side. the use of the term alemão (literally german) for enemy originates from second world war movies as seen on television. cabide’s boss was kokota, owner of the gota sound system. 30 rival crews engaged in recreational fights in bailes de corredor (corridor dances), or bailes de briga (fight dances). in these events, the space was divided in two sides (a-side and b-side), which would come face to face along two opposing lines of men separated by a fight zone, or corridor, in the middle. 31 pede a paz (asks for peace), that is, the favela asks for peace, was an almost mandatory phrase in conscious raps of the 1990s. 32 “lucas” stands for parada de lucas, a north rio borough and favela. nova holanda is a north rio favela, controlled by comando vermelho, in the maré complex of favelas. next to it, to the north, is parque união, another maré favela, also controlled by comando vermelho. the arrastão was an episode widely exploited for political purposes in which crews of funksters invaded the arpoador beach to fight between themselves; see yúdice (1994). outside the guanabara bay, in south rio, the open sea beaches of copacabana, ipanema and leblon are divided into lifeguard areas, or postos, numbered from one to six, in copacabana, and from seven to twelve, in ipanema and leblon. the arpoador rock separates the beaches of copacabana and ipanema. 33 “lowland” (baixada) stands for baixada fluminense, the lowland of the rio de janeiro state. zezinho was the owner of the zz sound system. furacão 2000 is one of the main sound systems. império refers to império serrano, a traditional samba school in the north rio borough of madureira. 34 chaparral, within walking distance from nova holanda, was one of the last clubs to host corridor dances. http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/vinheta-o-rumo-do-funk-equipe-a-gota-dj-luciano palombini | a danceable shower of bullets 93 references andrade, mario de. 1999. dicionário musical brasileiro. belo horizonte and rio de janeiro: itatiaia. araújo, samuel. 2014. “samba”. in bloomsbury encyclopedia of popular music of the world, 9th vol., ed. david horn and john shepherd, 739–50. london: bloomsbury. caceres, guillermo, lucas ferrari and carlos palombini. 2014. “a era lula/tamborzão: política e sonoridade”. revista do instituto de estudos brasileiros 58: 157–207. <http://dx.doi.org/10.11606/issn.2316-901x.v0i58p157-207>. chion, michel. 1983. guide des 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flavinho machado and heraldo faria. “trevas! luz! a explosão do universo”. recorded live in the early hours of 10 february 1997 at passarela do samba. soundcloud. uploaded on 24 may 2014. <http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/ viradouro-1997-trevas-luz-a-explosao-do-universo>, (accessed 26 march 2017). early berimbau montages. compilation from mid 1990s mds. soundcloud. uploaded on 26 march 2017. <http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/sets/early-berimbau-montages>, (accessed 26 march 2017). the egyptian lover. 1984. egypt, egypt. freak beat records (12-inch): dmsr00661. <http://www.discogs.com/the-egyptian-lover-egypt-egypt/master/33704>. equipe a gota. a gota, cerol fininho, vol. 1: o som das galeras. cd details unknown. mixcloud. uploaded on 16 may 2014. <http://www.mixcloud.com/carlospalombini/a-gota-cerolfininho-vol-1-o-som-das-galeras>, (accessed 28 march 2017). equipe pipo’s. 1994. pipo’s 2: o encontro da massa. audio bass records (lp): pp 02. <http:// www.discogs.com/various-pipos-2-o-encontro-da-massa/release/3502967>. soundcloud. uploaded on 1 september 2016. <http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/ sets/lp-pipos-2-o-encontro-da-massa>, (accessed 26 march 2017). farley jackmaster funk. 1985. funkin with the drums again. trax records (12-inch): tx 106. <http://www.discogs.com/farley-jackmaster-funk-funkin-with-the-drums-again/release/2235>. guillermo caceres. “o tamborzão, parte por parte”. tamborzão lines isolated and recombined. soundcloud. uploaded on 9 april 2016. <http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/sets/otamborzao-parte-por-parte-por-guillermo-caceres>, (accessed 28 march 2017). grandmaster raphael. 1993. beats, funks e raps. london records (lp): lp 17061. <https://www.discogs.com/various-beats-funks-e-raps/release/3076115>. mixcloud. uploaded on 1 august 2014. <http://www.mixcloud.com/carlospalombini/djgrandmaster-raphael-beats-funks-e-raps-1993>, (accessed 26 march 2017). grandmaster raphael and dj amazing clay. 1994. beats, funks e raps. vol. 4. label not on label (lp): 502.178. cd version on mixcloud. uploaded on 14 november 2014. <http://www. mixcloud.com/carlospalombini/grandmaster-raphael-beats-funks-e-raps-iv-1994>, (accessed 25 march 2017). the masterdon committee. 1983. funkbox party. enjoy records (12-inch): 6032. <http://www.discogs.com/masterdon-committee-funkbox-party/release/1257806>. mc gil do andaraí. “ao vivo na nova holanda”. live recording from 2005. soundcloud. uploaded on 31 march 2015. <http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/1-mc-gil-doandara-ao-vivo-na-nova-holanda>, (accessed 30 march 2017). mc sabrina. “diretoria”. by mc primo, produced by dj junior da provi in 2005. soundcloud. uploaded on 1 may 2016. <http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/mc-sabrina-diretoriado-mc-primo-dj-junior-2005>, (accessed 30 march 2017). pierre schaeffer. 1990. cinq études de bruits. in pierre schaeffer, l’œuvre musicale (4-cd box set). ina-grm: ina c 1006 (cd 1). <http://www.discogs.com/pierre-schaeffer-lœuvremusicale/release/330134>. ubuweb. undated upload. <http://www.ubu.com/sound/ schaeffer.html>, (accessed 26 march 2017). http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/viradouro-1997-trevas-luz-a-explosao-do-universo http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/viradouro-1997-trevas-luz-a-explosao-do-universo http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/sets/early-berimbau-montages http://www.discogs.com/the-egyptian-lover-egypt-egypt/master/33704 http://www.mixcloud.com/carlospalombini/a-gota-cerol-fininho-vol-1-o-som-das-galeras http://www.mixcloud.com/carlospalombini/a-gota-cerol-fininho-vol-1-o-som-das-galeras http://www.discogs.com/various-pipos-2-o-encontro-da-massa/release/3502967 http://www.discogs.com/various-pipos-2-o-encontro-da-massa/release/3502967 http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/sets/lp-pipos-2-o-encontro-da-massa http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/sets/lp-pipos-2-o-encontro-da-massa http://www.discogs.com/farley-jackmaster-funk-funkin-with-the-drums-again/release/2235 http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/sets/o-tamborzao-parte-por-parte-por-guillermo-caceres http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/sets/o-tamborzao-parte-por-parte-por-guillermo-caceres https://www.discogs.com/various-beats-funks-e-raps/release/3076115 http://www.mixcloud.com/carlospalombini/dj-grandmaster-raphael-beats-funks-e-raps-1993 http://www.mixcloud.com/carlospalombini/dj-grandmaster-raphael-beats-funks-e-raps-1993 http://www.mixcloud.com/carlospalombini/grandmaster-raphael-beats-funks-e-raps-iv-1994 http://www.mixcloud.com/carlospalombini/grandmaster-raphael-beats-funks-e-raps-iv-1994 http://www.discogs.com/masterdon-committee-funkbox-party/release/1257806 http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/1-mc-gil-do-andara-ao-vivo-na-nova-holanda http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/1-mc-gil-do-andara-ao-vivo-na-nova-holanda http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/mc-sabrina-diretoria-do-mc-primo-dj-junior-2005 http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/mc-sabrina-diretoria-do-mc-primo-dj-junior-2005 http://www.discogs.com/pierre-schaeffer-l�uvre-musicale/release/330134 http://www.discogs.com/pierre-schaeffer-l�uvre-musicale/release/330134 http://www.ubu.com/sound/schaeffer.html http://www.ubu.com/sound/schaeffer.html dancecult 11(1)96 raça rubro-negra. “rap do pirão”. recording from 30 january 2011 at one of the entrance gates of the engenhão stadium before a match between the flamengo and vasco da gama teams. soundcloud. uploaded on 13 november 2014. <http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/ raca-rubro-negra-rap-do-pirao-2011>, (accessed 26 march 2017). “tamborzão puro”. from a collection of funk carioca beats available on the web around 2005. soundcloud. uploaded on 19 may 2014. <http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/ tamborzao-puro>, (accessed 30 march 2017). filmography “grandmaster raphael”. youtube. uploaded on 14 october 2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqgpby0o6wu>, (accessed 29 march 2017). ivanovici, tatiana. 2006. “a história do tamborzão do funk”. interview with djs luciano oliveira and everton cabide in the latter’s studio. original youtube source unavailable. location and date confirmed by director in email of 18 february 2014. youtube. re-uploaded on 26 december 2013. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic_awpmu3kk>, (accessed 27 march 2017). http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/raca-rubro-negra-rap-do-pirao-2011 http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/raca-rubro-negra-rap-do-pirao-2011 http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/tamborzao-puro http://soundcloud.com/carlos-palombini/tamborzao-puro http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqgpby0o6wu http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic_awpmu3kk smokescreen free party sound system andy riley dj and producer (united kingdom) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.05> when it comes to the uk free party scene, one of the most prominent sound systems over the last quarter of a century has been smokescreen. their parties and club nights have become synonymous with quality house music, good vibes and a loyal crowd prepared to travel far and wide for a night on the tiles, or under the stars. from humble beginnings, smokescreen carved out a particular brand of deep house, which they made their own. over the years, their djs have gone on to enjoy international careers, build studios, start record labels and equipment businesses, as well as creating workshops for the next generation of djs and producers. but their roots remain, and smokescreen are as popular now as they were during their hedonistic heyday over the course of the 90s, and now attracting the next generation of party people who come out to dance with the old-school heads (some of whom are their parents!). smokescreen was born in 1991. originally from sheffield, the crew concentrated their early endeavours around the steel city. as their reputation grew, their free parties started to gain momentum (picking up the baton from trailblazing rigs such as nottingham’s diy). in ‘93 smokescreen started their first regular club night at the lo club derby, further cementing their reputation as word of mouth spread and more people were bitten with the smokescreen bug. as 1994 approached, the free party scene was truly vibrant, but became more politicized in the build up to the tory 1994 criminal justice act (cja), a kneejerk reaction to the now legendary castlemorton free festival in 1992. the new law would criminalise free parties to the extent that it actually prohibited the public playing of music which it defined as “wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”.  in response smokescreen, and other midlands sound systems, organised to raise awareness with a series of all-nighters entitled “all systems no”, later emended to “all systems go” once the bill became law. these events would raise funds to provide support to any crews affected by the proposed new law and build a community sound system that could be used instead of individual systems risking their own kit to do parties. smokescreen and diy also took their rigs to the subsequent cja demos in london that summer which attracted thousands of people from all over the country. butts quarry party 1994. photo credit garry pfeffer: 1994 lincolnshire free party 1994. photo credit garry pfeffer: 1994 derbyshire quarry party 1995. photo credit garry pfeffer: 1995 by 94/95 smokescreen hit their peak, putting on a party and/or a club night every weekend. people from sheffield, nottingham, derby, birmingham, as well as revellers from the across the country, would wait in anticipation for the directions to appear by answerphone on saturday night and turn out in their hundreds, while regular club nights such as nottingham’s skyy club were rammed to capacity. around this time smokescreen embarked on their first international road trip to croatia. this was to be one of several trips to europe including teknivals in the czech republic and spain where smokescreen provided the house sound amongst the techno systems of desert storm and total resistance. crich, whatstandwell quarry 1996. photo credit garry pfeffer: 1996 phantom manor lincolnshire 2000. photo credit garry pfeffer: 2000 as the decade drew to a close smokescreen club nights continued apace, and perhaps the most fondly remembered are derby’s rockhouse nights. for ten years smokescreen hosted what became a clubbing institution with 800 people coming through the door every month to get sweaty on the illuminated dance floor. at the same time the free parties continued around the derbyshire and lincolnshire traveller sites, and in any woodland or quarries that might be available. these didn’t come without considerable risk and smokescreen parties in derbyshire and nottinghamshire were busted, people arrested and equipment confiscated. in 1999 at a small party in lincolnshire, smokescreen were made an example of. several members were arrested and charged, and smokescreen’s famed rig was seized for the final time. 10,000 quid’s worth of amps, cables and speakers disappeared for good. but you can’t keep a good crew down and such was the support and good will for the party people who had sacrificed everything, that funds were raised, equipment provided and smokescreen lived to groove another day! and so to the 21st century. smokescreen saw in the millennium collaborating with fellow house aficionados diy at a huge party with around a 1000 people in attendance, as well as an “unofficial” party outside one of the gates at the glastonbury festival that year in 3 days of glorious sunshine. by this time several core djs had made the step into music production, culminating with the hugely successful “drop music” record label. drop music enabled the smokescreen sound to be exported all over the world, and some of their djs to represent on the global stage, playing in some of the top national and international clubs, but all the while keeping to the smokescreen ethos of quality house, refusing to compromise or bow to trends and whatever the stylistic flavour of the month might be. an attitude which has served them well for the best part of 30 years. meanwhile the party continues, with a smokescreen club night at nottingham’s maze having run for 10 years solid, and a dance floor as enthusiastic as ever. as i said earlier, you can’t keep a good crew down! max heath smokescreen set on mhyh radio. (the camouflaged disco 2021). smokescreen 30th birthday 2022 celebrating 30 years of house mayhem smokescreen embarked on a series of club nights and parties including stops at ultrasound in lincoln, glowbalistic in leeds, s4g boat party in london, glastonbury festival, duvet vous in bristol, hidden warehouse in nottingham, hockley social club in birmingham, quadrant in prague and the fantastic smokescreen campout weekender. for the weekender smokescreen pulled out all the stops; recruiting the services of 50 plus djs and friends from the local scene, and including two tented arenas, a bar, on-site food, an “afters” club space and camping for 750 plus people. it truly was the highlight of what was already shaping up to be a fantastic summer for many people. going into autumn 2022 smokescreen have once again sold out the hidden warehouse in nottingham, with another one planned in december. thirty years on, and smokescreen look to be as relevant and vibrant as ever. long may it continue. smokescreen campout birthday celebration nottinghamshire 2022. photo credit: nick clague 2022 smokescreen campout birthday celebration nottinghamshire 2022. photo credit: nick clague 2022 smokescreen campout birthday celebration nottinghamshire 2022. photo credit: nick clague 2022 smokescreen campout birthday celebration nottinghamshire 2022. photo credit: nick clague 2022 author biography andy riley has been djing with smokescreen from 1993 to present. in 1998 he and fellow smokescreen member laurence ritchie formed inland knights and began writing tracks for their label dropmusic. dropmusic went on to become one of the most highly regarded house labels of the 21st century and catapulted ritchie and riley to national and international success. despite this andy and laurence never strayed far from their underground roots and still maintain an involvement with both smokescreen and their local scene. website: http://soundcloud.com/inland-knights and https://soundcloud.com/borrowed discography the camouflaged disco. “max (smokescreen) camouflaged disco mhyh radio show 03.07.2021”. soundcloud audio, 2:00:34, 2021. <https://soundcloud.com/thecamouflageddisco/maxsmokescreencamouflaged-disco-mhyh-radio-show-02072021>. teaching live coding of electronic dance music: a case study lee cheng the education university of hong kong <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2018.10.01.10> live coding is a relatively new performance practice that emphasizes the expressive possibilities afforded by computer programming. live coding has often been associated with contemporary musical styles such as electronic dance music (edm), which favors the design of rhythms through algorithms and does not require extensive musicianship training. while literature has addressed both live coding and edm pedagogy, research that fuses the two remains sparse. this paper presents a case study on teaching undergraduate students the live coding of edm with sonic pi in an elective course. it aims to examine the pedagogical implications of using live coding to teach edm in a classroom environment. a mixed method approach was adopted to examine participants’ (n = 39) perceptions of the difficulties, learning processes, and teaching methods involved in creating edm through live coding. the findings of this case study indicated that technical programming skills presented beginner students with the most difficulty, whereas learning edm via live coding was found to be motivating and effective. introduction live coding is a way of improvising music or video animation through live edits of running source code. this relatively new performance practice, emerging after 2000, gained traction due to the affordability and mobility of laptops that permit real-time signal processing (ward et al. 2004; blackwell and collins 2005; mclean and wiggins 2010). within the context of musical and visual performance, live coding places particular demands on the creative process, as it requires a shared vocabulary for exploration and experimentation (sorensen and brown 2007). while conventional musicianship focuses on expressiveness via the development of a musician’s motor skills, live coding offers an alternative path to learning music through the design and programming of algorithms and is therefore considered the “antithesis of immediate physical musicianship” (collins 2007). because of its great potential and adaptability for improvisation (collins, mclean, rohrhuber and ward 2003), live coding has been a teaching tool for the study of contemporary musical styles, especially electronic dance music (edm) which favors the design of rhythms through algorithms. while studies investigating the pedagogy of live coding and edm have been present (e.g. ruthman et al. 2010; manaris, stevens and brown 2016), there is a sparse of literature that fuses together the two domains. this paper presents a case study of teaching undergraduate students the skill of live coding edm in an elective course. literature review as a presentation tool for displaying the writing of source code, live coding has been a pedagogical strategy for teaching programming concepts in computer science (gaspar and langevin 2007). as a creative process, live coding provides an environment for artistic expression in which programming favors creativity and improvisation in an educational context. ruthmann et al. (2010) developed an interdisciplinary general education course entitled sound thinking that focuses on the development of students’ computational thinking through the live coding of music. they argued that the musical goals of live coding may motivate students’ development of creativity and imagination. mclean and wiggins (2010) surveyed 32 live coders to examine the relationship between live coding and creativity. they concluded that live coding environments may be involved in the creation of higher-order conceptual representations of time-based art. the algorithmic generation of edm has been an area of interest for music technologists and researchers. collins (2008) designed an algorithmic generator for edm and synth pop that was fully implemented in supercollider. wooller and brown (2011) presented an algorithm that can musically augment the real-time performance of edm by generating new musical materials through morphing. anderson, eigenfeldt and pasquier (2013) developed a generative music system that composes edm based on a corpus of transcribed musical data. many other algorithmic systems to create edm are available, yet there is scant literature on its pedagogical impact on music learning. while edm is a viable teaching content for preparing students with forms of emerging artistry in the digital era (väkevä 2010), fusing together live coding and edm could be an effective classroom learning activity in school music education. aim this study aims to examine the pedagogical implications of using live coding to teach edm in a classroom environment. the following three research questions guided the study. 1. what are the difficulties of learning live coding in the classroom context? 2. what benefits does live coding offer to students learning edm? 3. what may be an effective method for teaching edm by live coding? methods a mixed methods approach including a survey questionnaire and semi-structured interviews was used to investigate the participants’ (n = 39) learning experiences in a university elective course on live coding. this approach allowed the triangulation of data to strengthen the validity of the findings (greene, caracelli and graham 1989). both music and non-music major students were invited to participate in the survey questionnaire, while students majoring in music were asked to participate in the interview. case study the case study in this paper is the teaching of live coding in the university setting of an elective course. the course, entitled introduction to music technology, was offered to any non-first and non-final year undergraduate student for selection, among other elective courses, to fulfil the curriculum requirement of their individual programs. the content of this course includes overviews of music history and recent music technology, practical experience with digital audio workstations, a case study in music technology, musical genres relating to music technology, a site visit to a recording studio, and performance technology. thirty-nine undergraduate students enrolled in this course were invited to participate in this case study. twenty-five of the participants were pre-service teachers, and eight of them were pre-service music teachers. only four of them indicated that they had never learned music formally through instrumental/vocal training, while the other students had on average 11 years of musical training. most of the students had attained abrsm grade 8 practical examination or the equivalent for their instruments/vocal. live coding was part of the performance technology component, which accounts for two lessons and a total of six hours. this component was preceded by the introduction of musical genres associated with music technology, including edm and its subgenres. the topic of live coding includes basic syntax and parameters, the use of synthesizers and samplers, iterations, audio synthesis, and basic algorithmic design for creating music. students were given time in each lesson to practice music with sonic pi and to complete assigned tasks. after lecturing and tutorial sessions, the students were required to form groups (2 to 3 students) and perform with live coding and other electronic/digital musical instruments for an assessment. survey questionnaire and semi-structured interviews the questionnaire consisted of five parts. the first and second parts collected participants’ musical and computing backgrounds; the third and fourth parts assessed their learning experiences of edm and live coding in the course; and the final part assessed their opinions on live coding pedagogy. the items in the third, fourth, and final parts of the questionnaire were rated on a 5-point likert scale. the interview questions were designed to follow up on the data obtained from the survey questionnaire. the interviews provided qualitative data on the participants’ perceptions of their learning experience of live coding in the course, focusing on the learning difficulties which provide hints to improve the effectiveness of the teaching process. the interview was guided by the following series of open-ended questions. 1. under what circumstances do you listen to electronic dance music? 2. what did you find most difficult about learning sonic pi in this course? 3. what difficulties did you encounter designing music algorithms? 4. how did you solve the problems you encountered? 5. what did you find most difficult about learning electronic dance music? 6. between learning live coding and electronic dance music, which did you find more difficult, and why? findings computer literacy and experience in edm only six participants indicated that they were familiar with one or more programming languages, while the other participants had never learned any programming. the programming languages with which they were familiar included object-oriented languages such as java and swift, and networking languages such as php and javascript. none of the participants indicated that they had previously learned computer music, visual, or multimedia programming languages such as max/msp, puredata or supercollider, although half of the class was studying music at this university. these responses implied that the course session on live coding was a novel experience for most of the participants. the participants were asked to rate whether they recognized various edm sub-genres as listed in table 1. the survey data indicated that they were not familiar with many edm genres. only three of the sub-genres garnered more than half of the responses, including the most common ones such as disco and hip-hop. drum and bass also rated highly. however, it is of the researcher-teacher’s suspicion that the participants may have mistaken drum and bass to indicate the general use of the drum and bass, as in a rhythm section, and that the students did not recognize drum and bass as a musical sub-genre. most of the other sub-genres garnered no more than a quarter of the responses. sub-genre response sub-genre response sub-genre response ambient 8 breakbeat 3 disco 27 drum and bass 27 downtempo 1 dubstep 8 electro 8 electronica 3 garage 8 hardcore 4 hardstyle 0 hip-hop 24 house 7 industrial 1 idm 1 jungle 3 post-disco 2 techno 3 trance 3 trap 1 vaporwave 0 table 1. participants’ (n=39) recognition of edm sub-genres. comparatively, the participants’ responses regarding their experience in electronic/digital musical instruments (e/dmi) for edm shows more depth compared with their computer programming and edm experience. fifteen participants responded indicating they had played the synthesizer, followed by nine responses for both the percussion pad and looper, then seven responses for digital audio workstations and the drum machine, and six responses for the sampler. no participant indicated music-making experience with the turntable. e/dmi response e/dmi response e/dmi response synthesizer 15 sampler 6 turntable 0 vocoder 1 looper 9 drum machine 7 percussion pad 9 digital audio workstation 7 table 2. participants’ (n = 39) experience on electronic/digital musical instruments. when asked about the difficulties of learning edm in the course, the participants’ responses mostly concerned the distinction between the different edm sub-genres, as in the following responses: i think the most difficult part [in learning edm] is to memorize all of the specialties and characteristics of each genre. they are all edm, but they are different in a very particular way (student a). before knowing each genre, i think it is important to understand their history—to understand how a genre was created, why people practice a genre within a particular culture, and what is unique about each genre (student b). it’s difficult to remember the suggested tempo, groove, and timbre of each genre, because they sound so similar (student c). experience in live coding the participants were asked to rate their learning and practical experience in live coding on a 5-point likert scale. the questions and the mean scores are listed in table 3. question m sd to what extent has edm motivated your learning of live coding? 2.95 0.99 to what extent has edm motivated your learning of algorithmic design? 2.90 1.07 how difficult do you find learning live coding? 3.67 0.96 how interesting do you find learning live coding? 2.92 0.87 to what extent has live coding been effective in helping you to learn algorithmic design? 2.95 0.83 to what extent has live coding been effective in helping you to learn edm? 3.00 0.86 table 3. mean (m) and standard deviations (sd) of participants’ rating on live coding experience for edm. the participants responded “moderate” on most of the items concerning the motivational effect and effectiveness for learning algorithmic design, live coding, and edm, and the mean scores ranged from 2.92 to 3.00. the mean score relating to the difficulty in learning live coding was exceptionally high (m = 3.67). when asked about the difficulties in learning live coding in the interview, the participants without prior computer programming experience referred to the basic techniques of programming, as shown in the following responses: i never learned programming before, and when i was asked to write a piece of code for music, i made a lot of mistakes with computer grammar (syntax), and i spent a lot of time fixing those problems. sometimes i didn’t even know what the problem was (student d). the most difficult part for me was memorizing the code. this is similar to learning a new language, in that we have to memorize words and their structures (student e). the participants with prior programming experience reported a similar level of difficulty, with an example provided by student e: i previously learned java and c++, and they have very different syntax. i always mistype the code of other languages into the music programming language we learned in this course, which then generated a lot of syntax errors, until i finally became familiar with sonic pi (student e). regarding the learning of algorithmic design by programming music, the participants reported difficulties in learning the syntax of live coding: i have certain ideas on what programming can do in terms of music performance, and yet it’s difficult to put these into practice. it’s hard for me to write an algorithm that performs music by itself, as i had hoped (student f). other than the problems of basic programming techniques, the participants also reflected on more specific issues related to programming music. for example, one participant reflected on his/her difficulty in searching for references: i tried to search for some examples from the internet to solve my problem, but there was nothing available. it’s much harder to find references for music programming than for other types of programming (student g). apart from searching for online sources, the participants reported using other methods of inquiry, such as asking the teacher or other students. live coding pedagogy the questions concerning live coding pedagogy were asked in the final part of the questionnaire. the participants were asked which types of teaching methods they found applicable to live coding, including lecturing/direct teaching (n = 16), self-directed learning (n = 12), group performance/practice (n = 15), task-oriented learning (n = 18), and demonstrating (n = 15). when asked about their opinion on the effectiveness of instruction in music with live coding in a computer classroom environment, the participants rated an average score of 3.00 (sd = 0.89). participants also reflected that live coding could be a potential component in school music education, which aligns with the current trend of stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and steam (stem+arts) education in hong kong: the supervisor teacher at my teaching practice asked me what can music education do with stem or e-learning, since the school principal encouraged every subject teacher to do so. ipad music-making using apps like garageband could be an option, but i think live coding should be more feasible since it only requires a computer to work with (student i). discussion the responses regarding the participants’ musical and computer programming background suggested a novice level in computer music, which positions the findings of this study as relevant to a beginner’s perspective on learning edm through live coding. the findings of this study revealed that the technical issues represent the most difficult challenges for participants learning live coding, despite the motivational effect and self-assessed effectiveness of learning edm and algorithmic design. these technical difficulties include debugging, syntaxing, becoming familiar with the coding language and environment. compared with learning technical programming skills, the participants’ difficulties in learning edm are knowledge-based, such as understanding and memorizing the characteristics of different edm sub-genres. the pedagogical approach of using live coding to teach edm in the classroom context for non-music major students contributes to conventional lecturing by involving students in the edm creative process incorporating with other digital musical instruments for an original and collaborative performance. while the learning of edm often involves individualized hardware equipment, such as turntables and drum machines, using live coding as a teaching tool could lower the barrier and make the learning of edm more accessible in the classroom context with practical experiences by the learners. participants’ responses regarding the types of teaching methods they found applicable to live coding reflect no strong consensus on a specific format, which suggested a mixed-method of teaching could be more feasible, such as the interdisciplinary approach of steam, as suggested by one of the participants. teacher support is important especially for beginners in computer programming, not only because coding requires help but also because live coding is still an emerging performance practice that may not be as familiar as other conventional music practices. despite the difficulties encountered during the learning process, participants’ achievement in learning edm was reflected by their creative works demonstrating their ability to manipulate live coding as a musical tool for a collaborative performance. by learning live coding and putting it into practice for a collaborative edm performance, participants also developed attributes in generic skills including, but not limited to, communication skills, teamwork, project management, and creativity. these attributes could help develop learners into adaptable people who could transfer their generic skills into the ever diversifying and rapidly changing future workplaces (bassett 2013). conclusion this case study examined the pedagogical context of live coding in teaching edm in a classroom environment from the perspective of beginning students in computer programming. the technical programming skills were found to be the most difficult part for beginning live coders, whereas learning edm via live coding was found to be motivating and effective. with adaptability and convenience inherent to live coding environments, task-oriented learning may be an appropriate teaching method to complement direct teaching and lecturing. future research inspired by this pilot study may include: (1) pedagogical approaches in teaching live coding as an interdisciplinary subject matter; (2) teaching algorithmic design for music creation; and (3) empirical research on the benefits of learning edm through live coding. author biography lee cheng (www.leecheng.info | lcheng@eduhk.hk) is an interdisciplinary artist-teacher and researcher, currently working as a lecturer ii of the department of cultural and creative arts at the education university of hong kong. his research and artistic interests interdisciplinarize music, multi-media, technology and education. he is also serving as the director of eduhk ilork, a laptop orchestra and mobile device ensemble. web: <www.ilork.com> references anderson, christopher, arne eigenfeldt and philippe pasquier. 2013. “the generative electronic dance music algorithmic systems (gedmas)”. in proceedings of the aaai conference on artificial intelligence and interactive digital entertainment, 5–8. bellevue: aaai press. bassett, peter. 2013. “benefits beyond music: transferable skills for adult life”. unpublished master’s thesis, university of sheffield. blackwell, alan frank and nick collins. 2005. “the programming language as a musical instrument”. in proceedings of the 17th workshop of the psychology of programming interest group, 120–30. brighton: university of sussex. collins, nick, alex mclean, julian rohrhuber and adrian ward. 2003. “live coding in laptop performance”. organised sound, 8(3): 321–30. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s135577180300030x.> collins, nick. 2007. ‘live coding practice’. in proceedings of the 7th international conference on new interfaces for musical expression, 112–7. new york: acm press. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1279740.1279760>. collins, nick. 2008. “infno: generating synth pop and electronic dance music on demand”. in proceedings of the international computer music conference. montreal: international computer music association. gaspar, alessio and sarah langevin. 2007. “restoring coding with intention in introductory programming courses”. in proceedings of the 8th acm sigite conference on information technology education, 91–8. destin: acm press. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1324302.1324323>. manaris, bill, blake stevens and andrew r. brown. 2016. “jythonmusic: an environment for teaching algorithmic music composition, dynamic coding and musical performativity”. journal of music, technology and education 9(1): 33–56. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jmte.9.1.33_1>. mclean, alex and geraint wiggins. 2010. “live coding towards computational creativity”. in proceedings of the international conference on computational creativity, 175–9. lisbon: department of informatics engineering, university of coimbra. ruthmann, alex, jesse m. heines, gena r. greher, paul laidler and charles saulters, ii. 2010. “teaching computational thinking through musical live coding in scratch”. in proceedings of the 41st acm technical symposium on computer science education, 351–5. new york: acm. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1734263.1734384>. sorensen, andrew and andrew r. brown. 2007. “aa-cell in practice: an approach to musical live coding”. in proceedings of the international computer music conference, 292–9. copenhagen: international computer music association. väkevä, lauri. 2010. “garage band or garageband®? remixing musical futures”. british journal of music education, 27(1): 59–70. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0265051709990209>. ward, adrian, julian rohrhuber, fredrik olofsson, alex mclean, dave griffiths, nick collins and amy alexander. 2004. “live algorithm programming and a temporary organization for its promotion”. in proceedings of the readme software art conference, 243–61. aarhus, denmark. wooller, rené and andrew r. brown. 2011. “note sequencing morphing algorithms for performance of electronic dance music”. digital creativity 22(1): 13–25. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2011.538704>. frankenstein goes to holocaust: mostri sonori, hyper mash-up, audio espropri riccardo balli milan: agenzia x, 2016. isbn: 978-88-98922-12-3 (paperback) rrp: €14 (paperback) paolo magaudda university of padova (italy) the task of reviewing this second book by riccardo balli (aka dj balli), written in italian for the independent publisher agenziax (milan), is a challenging one, not least because the book has a very unique approach to structure, genre, content and language. in short, it is not far from the truth that this is the most bizarre and unconventional book i have ever reviewed in my scholarly career. as the title itself suggests, the book is not just a classic essay on music culture, even though much of its content are “serious” essays or interviews; instead it is an original and unique texture of different kinds of materials and literary genres, including parody and situationist détournements, imbued with a dose of sexually explicit pranks. two things are, however, clear and plain: first, that frankenstein goes to holocaust is a tribute to the culture, practice and aesthetics of plunderphonics and music plagiarism, and a useful and inspiring read for musicians and listeners who fell in love with making music by cutting and pasting sounds produced by other; secondly, that balli’s book is above all an act of creative writing or, even better, an imaginative attempt to compose a book that is completely dissimilar to any other book about music i have come across. indeed, while the regular essays about plunderphonics and plagiarism included in the book are interesting readings (including, for example, the italian translation of john oswald’s classic plunderphonics essay), where the book shines is in its challenge to develop a meta-discursive reflection on plunderphonics and plagiarism, instilled with a demystifying attitude. to understand the approach of this book more deeply, it is useful to say a few words about dj balli’s activity as artist, musician and cultural entrepreneur (a history that i know quite well, knowing him for almost two decades). since the late ‘90s, dj balli has been engaged in creating and supporting several kinds of radical, disturbing and downright weird electronic-based musics, both as musician and manager of the experimental music label sonic belligeranza. recently, his enduring creative efforts have expanded toward book writing, again exploring some of the most unconventional electronic music genres. the first fruit of this literary foray was apocalypso disco (2014), which explored the landscape of electronic post-techno music genres through a literary re-writing of philip dick’s novel clans of the alphane moon: a story in which a fictional society is divided into seven tribes, based on different electronic music styles. the essential structure adopted in frankenstein goes to holocaust recalls what is already seen in balli’s previous work with even more space to the work of literary détournement, but this time focusing on mary shelley’s novel frankenstein; evidently a very fitting metaphor to talk about those music styles characterised by putting together sonic parts coming from many different “bodies”. hence, the book unfolds by intertwining different kinds of materials, including at least three categories of texts, held together in a unique flow of forty-six short chapters. first of all, we have “conventional” texts, represented by essays and interviews on significant issues concerning plagiarism and plunderphonics, written by journalists, musicologists and plagiarism practitioners. among them, an interesting reading is the opening essay by francesco fusaro about the roots of plunderphonics in classical music, focusing on the sub-genre of “musical variations”: the basic compositional practice of creating new music by elaborating themes composed by other composers (featured in the repertoires of haydn, schumann, liszt and so on). the relevance of this book is not just the content, but also the way it is reflexively reworked with a plagiarist and demystifying attitude. thus, for example, we also find another seminal text on plagiarism, plunderphonia by chris cutler which is not simply translated from english to italian, but also creatively elaborated through alterations in the original text, enriching it with musical references as well as sexual pranks, putting in practice (in textual terms) the art of plundering existing contents to create something definitively new, yet always within a frame of demystification of authorship. a second layer in the book’s composition is the core literary metaphor that supports the patchwork put together by the author (i.e. the creative elaboration of the novel frankenstein), revisited by twenty-three experts in alternation with the book’s other contents. as is obvious, the idea of a new living entity made up by parts coming from other dead bodies is a perfect metaphor to give expression to the culture of plagiarism and plunderphonics. to do this, balli’s writing exercise consists of re-writing shelley’s original text infusing in it musical references coming from those same music electronic genres performed by balli as a musician (including styles like 8-bit music, gabber and grindcore), with the further addition of other interventions. in these excerpts we read about mary shelley (called squirting mary) and lord byron(anism) engaged in an mcing contest where all participants “should attempt to create the most horrific sonic monster of music history” (25). after much effort, the monster finally comes to life in the shape of a mash-up generated in shelley’s “bedroom studio” with a gameboy, where the modified machine starts producing “most scary sounds: remixes of neo-melodic neapolitan singers in a porno-grindcore style!” (38). as the readers can tell from these examples, demystification is a relevant ingredient of the book, as the author does not attempt to sacralise the art of plagiarism, instead insisting on a relentless endeavour to reframe plagiarism in a sarcastic way, explicitly linked with the situationist tradition. this demystification is particularly evident in the third type of content in the book, represented by a set of dadaist passages where, for example, famous bands’ names are distorted in irreverent ways with mash-up techniques; some also accompanied by humorous visuals, including a photo of the singer “woody allin”, a poster of the “turandeath rancid opera” or “lionel nietzsche’s” album “is it truth you are looking for?”. probably the most situationist section of the book is where the author recalls the history of his alter ego, bally corgan—inspired by billy corgan from the smashing pumpkins (who the author physically resembles)—an alter ego actually used by dj balli along the years in both his recordings and live acts. above all, this last example helps to understand the actual continuity between the situationist spirit of the book and balli’s whole artistic career. unfortunately available to an italian-speaking readership only, the book succeeds in offering an original, meta-discursive and demystifying contribution on plunderphonic culture, not just for the content it offers, but also for its ability to intertwine multiple discursive layers, producing an experiment that is finally able—like frankenstein’s efforts—to give birth to a weird and bizarre textual monster. references balli, riccardo. 2014. apocalypso disco. milan: agenziax. cutler, chris. 1994.“plunderphonia”. musicworks 60: 6–19. oswald, john. 1986. “plunderphonics, or audio piracy as a compositional prerogative”. musicworks 34: 6. onwards and upwards: playing my way through the gender division donna bentley independent author and dj <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2017.09.01.14> from as far back as i can remember, my preference for music always fell under the edm umbrella. it wasn’t just about the music for me. i was lucky enough to catch the back end of the ’90s when the dance scene was peaking. i loved the feeling of connection and freedom the dance movement brought. on the surface, it seemed all about letting go, and being open minded. ironically some of my experiences at the start of my journey seemed to lack this ethos. it wasn’t a problem making friends in the crowd, it was getting onto the other side of the dj booth that seemed to be an issue. i had set my intention to start djing while i was still at university. why not get paid for something that you love, but my rose-tinted glasses got a bit cracked as i slowly realised the hurdles that lie ahead. vinyl was still at its heyday and equipment was expensive. youth opportunities didn’t exist for studio time, and by the time it did i was too old to participate. dj school also wasn’t yet a thing, or at least not something i had discovered. my god, we didn’t even have internet in our uni halls (we are talking back in the year 2000. i was in attendance at one of the universities in sheffield. i would say the nightlife didn’t have an impact on my choice to study there, but pre commercialised gatecrasher and hed kandi were based there). i had started buying records long before i had my own decks. i set my intention to be positive. there was no use having decks with nothing to play on them. even record buying felt daunting sometimes; i didn’t notice many other women buying records. the record shops seemed to be choc-full of over-confident young males. the shop assistants were affable enough, and before the days of shazam, happily listened to my descriptions of tracks that i had heard in clubs at certain nights and helpfully offered a selection of records to listen to; that’s if i could get on the decks at all to listen to my prospective purchases. my funds were limited so i had to choose carefully. holding space on the decks when i managed to get on them to listen to my prospective purchases was another thing in itself. everyone else seemed to take ages, their need seemed greater, and i will admit i let the projected frustrations of others chivvy me along. i needed my own set up and for that i needed money. the best break i could get at the time was as a corporate dj for a relative’s firm. my sister also worked for the same firm and we decided to team up. i wasn’t so fond of more mainstream flavours of music or events, but it paid. this was going to be my springboard, and looking back, i realise it was. i learned about performance contracts and how to hold my own behind a stack of music equipment. most nights were fine, but it’s funny how the more unpleasant incidents seemed to stick in the psyche. sadly, when i did get to play in dance music venues some of my experiences were not so dissimilar until several years later. i was prepared for unwanted sexual advances from men and built up a repertoire of verbal deflection tactics and cheeky one-liners. i always found it interesting, the concept of being at work and the need to deflect advances (almost like going to your job and people assuming that maybe you were only there because you wanted to get “on the job”). or odd people that wanted to openly criticise you whilst you were working. comments regarding my clothing, appearance and capabilities, or perceived lack thereof, were a regular source of annoyance. thank goodness, i didn’t experience these problems during my daytime pursuits. sadly, though some male punters pushed boundaries and it became awkward, sometimes it felt outright dangerous, and sometimes it was even the bouncers who were sleazy. i always went away feeling very unsettled after experiencing unwanted attention from the door staff. that always left a bad taste in my mouth. what always shocked me the most was when other women seemed negative about the prospect of a female dj. i remember one lady let the side down somewhat when she walked straight up to a young man that happened to be helping me out that evening and started talking business. i interjected politely and assertively stating that i was the dj for the evening and the look of shock on her face was like i may as well have gone and given her a good slap with a wet kipper. sadly this experience wasn’t so uncommon. on other occasions i was clearly the djs girlfriend, or he had just let me “have a go” on the decks. on the other hand, life always exists in balance. the positive feedback from people who enjoyed what i did was enough to keep me going forwards. in parallel, i was studying to become a biological research scientist, and was quickly getting used to being a young female in male-dominated environments. in both contexts i felt like the odd one out. i missed out on lads’ nights and such. it was an interesting dynamic really, no one was outwardly unkind, but by the same token it almost seemed like i was politely tolerated and kept at arm’s length. it even felt like, no matter how good i was or what potential i had, i wasn’t quite good enough to be in there. i didn’t even feel considered at times, which was most frustrating. i knew i was living and working in a time when females were under-represented in many areas — and incidentally both areas i was interested in (i.e. stem subjects and edm). back then, sourcing my own equipment was a priority. that lingering feeling of being fenced off outside the clique always came back when i tried to take advantage of being at a place with a working dj set up. nowadays, the people i am around are really supportive and it is a progressive experience. when i do look back i remember the girlfriends of lots of djs and other females expressing an interest, and even though they were around the equipment and people, it seemed like there were unspoken barriers in place. it takes time to find decent people and get decent jobs. starting out was like being a healthcare intern, getting the jobs that needed doing, which other more established staff would run a mile from. i know this dynamic happens in every industry; it’s always with the view towards portfolio building, gaining experience. choices were limited, so i took what i could to gain some exposure. you had to at least be able to say that you had played-out somewhere, this was increasingly apparent. fun times on the dark side included people trying not to pay up, or offering substances in lieu of payment. i managed to wangle taxi fare on one occasion after the promoter buggered off without paying me. the event organiser tossed a couple of bags of white powder across the table and expected me to leave. feeling a little like a drugs whore, i explained that two baggies of donkey smack (my loving term of endearment for ketamine) wasn’t currency. it was even suggested that i should sell these to get the money. this was definitely not within my remit. i left the baggies on the table, not wanting to provoke another potentially sketchy situation and instead made up the deficit in beer allowance after at least securing funds for transport home. at this point, i didn’t mind doing the odd gig for free to be able to say that i had played out, if it was agreed in advance. on the other hand, having invested in kit and records you could argue that i was already out of pocket and i didn’t want the gigs to cost me. i’m not really into “pay to play” but then i also learned that so many people out there were desperate for a chance and would consistently play out for free. unless it was my own night i wasn’t willing to get into that. another amazing gig fail was when i was asked to play at a free party in a run-down area on the outskirts of nottingham in 2007. i had been to a few good raves in my time. i had the ’90s hands in the air romantic vision of people being in the countryside dancing in unison whilst i got to play some records. i told my friends, rallied support and got ready. the location was kept secret until last minute, which was standard. i got the intel, packed up the decks, had a friend in tow, and off we went. it was not what i considered a rave. despite being illegal, those i had visited in the past seemed to be frequented by quite conscious and generally very interesting people. i think a squat party was a more fitting description (in my mind a rave and a squat are different). i remember the event being held in a disused industrial building in a practically derelict part of town. the surroundings reminded me of the set of the film saw, and i really didn’t feel comfortable. i didn’t really feel safe around anyone. maybe it was the smell of petrol, lads driving cars inside the building or the strange man that wanted me to go off on my own and explore the neighbouring abandoned building with him. i felt like a tourist with some kind of dark insight into the more depraved side of life. people were literally passed out on the floor and using the back walls as a bathroom. this wasn’t my kind of event. the sound system was diabolical, static central. even if everything else was kosher, the music itself was enough to keep us away. we left almost as fast as we arrived making sure that we cancelled the invitations that were sent out, a suitable excuse was fabricated. i couldn’t be seen there. things picked up upon discovering women’s only nights. due to the finite number of women in djing, chances were you were guaranteed a set at one of these events (unless you were utterly terrible or had bad politics going on). one of the best breaks i got was playing a night called demo. this was the edition that was held at the former blueprint nightclub before it moved to the maze. the first ladies only edition was held in 2008. i got a prime slot, in a big room, the floor was full, and i got an encore. even to this day i hold that gig in my personal hall of fame for best gigs played out ever! getting gigs got easier from then on. people remembered the night being amazing and spoke about it. being associated with that made all the dj contributors a little bit amazing too and their favourite djs got invited back for another event (myself included). it took me a while to realise that being female and a bit scarce was actually an advantage at times. people were more likely to remember you, and if you as a punter went into a venue and asked about the lady dj, chances are you would find the person you were looking for. male djs were “10 a penny” and had to come out with creative names or gimmicks to stand out. i started to stand out just because i was of the opposite gender. i also noticed that coming across other females who weren’t afflicted by this internalised sexism that blighted some of us was actually really helpful. on my second round at dj school i met dj elmo, who is one of the people involved in “soul buggin” it’s only taken a couple of us to get together to form a supportive and progressive network where opportunities are shared. i am happy to say things are looking up in the uk. as a comparison, as i was getting more gigs here, through a university connection i was invited to dj in india at “aura bar” in delhi, this was back in 2006. this was an eye-opener for sure. the status of women in certain pockets of society there is precarious. i knew my contact was from the educated and more open realms of indian society and that they were also very well connected. things looked good from this side of the pond, but upon getting there very little seemed to materialise. it was like a mega-amplified version of dealing with the woman who only wanted to do business with my roadie. i really felt infantilized. even the people acting on your behalf didn’t seem to disclose much. in the physical sense i was looked after, however, i often felt like i was sat in the corner and fed whilst others spoke business. i had very little say, and when i did speak i didn’t really feel listened to. i didn’t know what was going on half the time. no one wanted to pay because fathers and husbands pay for girls. a woman taking a job in some peoples’ eyes was a phase (or that was the impression i got from the people i spoke to, others were shocked that i was out driving around so late on my own back in the uk). for further context, in south india there is a midnight curfew, when clubs shut. as you must be home before midnight you start clubbing as early as 6pm. on the way home you try not to run into the police. anyway i digress; i did get to play towards the end of my trip at aura bar in new delhi. i was back-to-back with another dj. finally, i felt so relieved that i got to play. i noticed as well that the club scene was very different. poorer echelons of society had no chance of getting into a club whatsoever, as it was a very glamourous state of affairs. clubs and bars were adjunct to hotels and a lot more cash seemed to flow. it was interesting, but i preferred my home scene more, even the muckier parts of it. on the other hand, despite feeling left out at times i was well looked after, but i also realise my skin tone associated me with money, so even if i looked like crap i could pretty much get in anywhere. i am not sure how the scene there is now, it’s been at least six years since i’ve visited, but i can say for sure that back home it’s nice seeing more females playing out, more female door staff and generally more respect overall. we still have a way to go but we are going the right way. i never wanted to be a big name dj and am more than happy with my position as a hobbyist; darting between my two prominent musical stomping grounds of nottingham and manchester, playing records that i like, to people who frequent my favourite venues. i feel lucky that i’ve found a supportive group of people and have played in some nice places. in nottingham, i’ve been fortunate enough to play at some of the city’s landmark venues, including the maze, rough trade, broadway and the bodega as well as in bars in popular parts of town such as hockley, mansfield road and beeston. i’ve got my favourite festival slots including oxjam, alchemy, the castle and kozfest. i’ve had radio appearances since moving to the city, the most recent one being for local motive radio. acknowledgements i would like to acknowledge all the people that helped me along my way. particular people include fellow lady djs elmo, sonia hawkes of the stiff kittens, lotta lox and other inspirational ladies i’ve met along the way. you picked me up when i was low and pushed me forwards when i wasn’t feeling confident. you also passed forward opportunities, for which i am always grateful. i’d even like to thank the people that gave me a hard time, because you too also helped me, by making me stronger. you helped me learn how to re-enforce my boundaries, get out of sticky situations and pushed me out of my comfort zone. all the weird situations i was put into still serve as amazing anecdotes today and every experience i’ve had has been a privilege. thanks all. author biography i would describe myself as a dj hobbyist. i'm still djing with vinyl, although i may have to make the transition to digital at some point, but for as long as i can get away with it i'll keep on with the records for now. i’ve held various residencies, and play a variety of genres depending on the venue and crowd. girl kandeyce jorden (dir.) usa: current mood productions, 2018. <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2624640/> maren hancock york university (toronto) most films depicting djs and their attendant culture—whether documentary or drama—feature predominantly masculine points of view. girl, a full-length documentary focused on legendary hard house/trance dj sandra collins as well as six other women-identified djs, offers a unique collection of feminine voices and experiences, making it an important contribution to the history of edm and the study of dj culture. part wish-fulfillment, part confessional, part documentary and part cautionary tale of the push and pull of excessive partying of touring life, girl covers a lot of ground. filmmaker, visual artist and actor kandeyce jorden notes that it was an enthusiasm for dance music and culture that inspired her to direct this film. early in the film’s narrative, jorden states that were she not a filmmaker, she “would secretly want to be a dj”. later in the film she expresses a yearning for collins’ seemingly carefree life as a dj: “she never made lists, she never returned phone calls ... being in the moment ... was starting to feel like a drug”. it is no surprise then that, alongside collin’s narratives, there is a prominent foregrounding of the director herself and the resultant changes to her life experience in the wake of touring with collins. with regards to structure, the film breaks down into two sections. the front matter outlines jorden’s background: jorden narrates via voiceover, first introducing herself before describing her relationship with her film director partner and their success collaborating on a short film together. after marrying, jorden stayed home to raise their newborn son while her husband pursued a burgeoning career. she describes feeling a need for more in her life than “just being a mother”. when her husband was hired to write and direct a film about a female dj to be produced by paul oakenfold—which never materialized—jorden expresses jealousy of his “hang outs” with oakenfold, complete with access to glamorous parties and women. as she clarifies, “i didn’t want to be left behind” so she decided to shoot a documentary about “girls who really do this”. this first section features interview footage with dj rap, collette, dj irene and the more unknown rebecca sin, lady d and dj mea. each dj is interviewed separately, and each addresses one or more of the now-familiar themes identified in the growing body of work on gender and dj culture (rogers 2010; farrugia 2012; gavanas & reitsamer 2013, 2016; gadir 2017), albeit from primarily white, cis-gendered and correspondingly hegemonic perspectives; in the film, jorden profiles one racialized dj (lady d) and one openly queer dj (irene). aside from irene, all of the other djs profiled present as femme, meaning they face obstacles that arise via stratification due to both appearance and sexuality. as lady d notes, women are policed in terms of their appearance and sexuality and viewed dichotomously as either virgins or whores. dj irene as a queer female deftly sidesteps this sexist stratification. indeed, critical evidence exists of how queer and non-femme women-identified djs encounter less sexist barriers due to the fact that they are not viewed as “fuckable”, and therefore granting them honorary male—and not sexualized—status (farrugia 2012). as influential scholars have concluded, research beyond hegemonic white norms, including further studies of how race and sexuality intersect with gender to impact djs’ experiences of their work, are much needed (rogers 2010; farrugia 2012). as a professional dj with two decades’ experience (including five years of steady touring) who is a white cis-female, it makes sense that the film resonated with me, particularly around topics such as autonomy, loneliness, credibility, safety and self-medication on tour. each dj has an interesting story to tell, but dj irene makes a compelling subject in particular, both in terms of her challenging early life as a young single mom at the age of fourteen residing in a foster home, and her queer persona which shields her from the kind of policing of appearance and sexuality experienced by women presenting as femme. irene describes her musical style as aggressive, and comments enthusiastically that during her hard-hitting dj sets she “comes out slugging and keeps going ... i don’t like foreplay ... i’ll just fuck you now because i’m going to fuck you later”. jorden depicts her subjects reveling in the joy of being a dj, and their ability to entertain an audience as they are moving in the moment. as lady d puts it, in an obvious ode to michael jackson, you help people “leave that 9-5’er on the shelf”. in an incredible sharing of communal joy, the film captures its subjects’ passion for their craft. the second section of the film leaves the six other djs behind to focus on the relationship that develops between jorden and sandra collins over the remaining course of filming. jorden explains that while pursuing interview subjects she kept hearing about sandra collins, “who plays boy’s music better than most boys”. jorden decides that collins is the subject for whom jorden has been searching and is certain that collins “had a story to tell”. finally, jorden tracks collins down but still has difficulty securing an interview with her alone, even as jorden tours with collins on and off over the course of a few years. ultimately, jorden suppresses her own identity somewhat in order to realize her vision of edm hedonism. over the course of filming, jorden’s marriage breaks up and she moves into her own place in venice, ca, sharing custody of her son with her ex-husband, who remains supportive of her ambitions. interestingly, jorden’s self-insertion into the narrative fills in the space where collins would not pour her own confessions. a particularly original and engaging feature of girl is its exploration of both motherhood and its seeming counterpoint: a type of hedonism enabled by being a touring dj. jorden does not flinch in addressing the impact of drugs and alcohol on those whose job it is to “bring the party”. as acknowledged, an interesting aspect of the film arises in the juxtaposition of dj and domestic lifestyles. the film presciently documents how djing is (still) gendered as male dominated, while child rearing is (still) gendered female in western culture according to a binary conception of gender. djs are professional partiers in a sense, and whilst male djs are lauded for indulging to excess because “boys will be boys”, women face judgment as transgressive according to the good girl/bad girl narrative that echoes the age-old virgin/whore dichotomy discussed above. jorden describes collins’ reputation in dj culture as the “peter pan of the female race” partly due to collins’ experience of losing of her parents and her isolation from her siblings. when jorden first meets collins, the latter expresses feelings of being orphaned and in need of being mothered, saying to jorden, “i need a mom ... can i have you as a mom?” jorden’s response: “i felt protective of her, as if she were a sister”. this connection through a sense of the familial—and by extension, domestic—is disrupted toward the end of the film when collins takes jorden on a tour of eastern europe and their relationship changes; jorden begins to “party too hard” in russia, abandoning her mothering role. the intense relationship comes to a head when jorden pressures collins to stay out (and up) longer, until finally collins’ loses her patience with jorden, understandably expressing her exhaustion and frustration with jorden’s choices and lack of self-awareness. as jorden admits: “i wasn’t at my best and i can tell that everyone around me agreed”. it comes as no surprise then, that—upon returning to the hotel room—she realizes that she has lost her wallet and passport. the dj leaves to catch an impending flight to the next gig without telling jorden if she will be re-joining the tour or not. jorden is stranded while she awaits new documents to leave the country. at this juncture, she films her self-reckoning realization that, for her, partying is an empty activity, which led to a distancing of her subject. collins took jorden on tour with her because, as collins states in the film, she needed someone to tour with (assumedly for safety and stability; which again, i relate to) and until that point jorden had played a maternal role for collins. in a way, by losing herself and her identification to the party scene, stranding herself in a hotel in russia with nothing else to do but “drink vodka”, jorden experienced a stereotypical aspect of djing, as per her wish at the beginning of the film. before concluding i would like to comment briefly on the visual and audio aspects of the film. jorden paints a dreamlike portrait replete with footage of lavish outdoor parties, and eye-catching long shots of burning man, which she attended for the first time with collins. throughout the film, jorden does an admirable job of working with the iconography of light, for example, demonstrating the full variety of sensations that accompany the unique feeling of watching a sunrise after dancing all night. we get a montage of dancers, fashions and indoor smoking, inducing nostalgia for the early ’00s. the exceedingly well-curated music suits the accompanying visuals, spanning a variety of edm’s multitudinous genres (helpfully, track listings appear in the credits). in addition to the sheer visual appeal and the structural aspects of the film, jorden evokes an aural sense of being at the party by tracking voices and conversation to filter in and out of the film’s audio, initially overtaking and ultimately receding from the musical soundtrack. references farrugia, rebekah. 2012. beyond the dance floor: female djs, technology, and electronic dance music culture. bristol, uk: intellect. gadir, tami. 2017. “forty-seven djs, four women: meritocracy, talent and postfeminist politics”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 9(1): 50–72. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2017.09.01.03>. gavanas, anna and rosa reitsamer. 2013. “dj technologies, social networks and gendered trajectories in european dj cultures”. in dj culture in the mix: power, technology and social change in electronic dance music, ed. bernardo attias, anna gavanas, and hillegonda rietveld, 51–78. new york, ny: bloomsbury. — 2016. “neoliberal working conditions, self-promotion and dj trajectories: a gendered minefield”. popscriptum 12. <https://www2.huberlin.de/fpm/popscrip/themen/pst12/pst12_gavanas_reitsamer.pdf> (accessed 25 october 2017). rogers, tara. 2010. pink noises: women on electronic music and sound. durham: duke university press. dancecult 11(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 11(1) 2019: 97–116 issn 1947-5403 ©2017 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net raving iran susanne regina meures (dir.) switzerland: christian frei filmproduktion gmbh/zürcher hochschule der künste zhdk, 2016 <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5945286/> <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.06> gay jennifer breyley monash university (australia) susanne regina meures’ multi-award-winning 2016 documentary raving iran shows a year in the lives of anoosh and arash, aka blade & beard. at the time of filming, from september 2013 to august 2014, blade & beard were tehran-based djs, producers and dance party organisers, specialising in “dark and melodic techno” (blade&beard), with fideles and mind against among their influences. raving iran follows anoosh and arash as they appear to navigate iran’s unique bureaucratic system, seeking to release and distribute their album, and as they organise the next dance party and consider their future. the film opens with anoosh and arash being pulled over by police as they drive through tehran at night. the camera focuses on the city’s old murals, showing portraits of iraniraq war heroes and iran’s revolutionary leaders—rather than the many, arguably equally interesting, artistic murals in tehran (see the guardian 2015), or the city’s broad range of street art—before briefly showing anoosh and arash djing at a private party. the first daytime scene features the sound of the call to prayer: a recurrent sound in the film. anoosh and arash make several phone calls to organise a dance party in the desert. as with many dance parties around the world, they face financial and legal challenges. while it is not illegal to travel and camp in the desert, there will be illegal activities at the party (again, like most dance parties), so anoosh and arash take precautions to avoid disturbing nearby rural residents and to be prepared for unexpected visits from the authorities. finally, with all preparations made, the djs and their friends set out on a party bus for the desert. until this point of the film, the soundtrack mainly features ghazal shakeri (her “nuinspired” remix of “man o to” (“me and you”), with lyrics adapted from rumi), but as the bus reaches the desert, it shifts to the more pensive “whisper”, by the neo-mystical californian fusion group axiom of choice, featuring singer mamak khadem. this choice of song—one with little connection to blade & beard’s techno world—suggests an atmospheric shift from what meures presents as a generally threatening governmental sphere to an implied reviews http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5945286/ http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.06 http://www.ravingiran.com/ http://www.facebook.com/pg/bladebeard/about http://www.mamak-khadem.com/music-1 dancecult 11(1)98 positive “spirituality” (a word often used in association with khadem’s work) at the desert party. like dance-party-goers around the world, anoosh and arash talk of the connections and sense of community felt by people at parties in iran, but the film gives little sense of this with its central focus of the government-created obstacles faced by musicians and djs. when anoosh and arash return to tehran after the desert party, they head to the ministry of culture and islamic guidance, which issues—or denies—permits for musicians to perform in official venues or record and release music within the official government system. this visit is presumably made solely for the purposes of the film, to show viewers what iran’s “islamic” regulations are, as it is clear that anoosh and arash know that their work does not meet the ministry’s requirements. since the advent of the internet, it has become customary for artists to release music outside iran, and to distribute it primarily in digital form. however, for the purposes of the film’s narrative, anoosh and arash ask ministry staff about permits for their album. unsurprisingly, they are told that their work is unlikely to be approved, so they proceed to look for someone willing to print their unauthorised cd covers. after several rejections, they eventually find a late-night printer willing to do the job. with the album completed and packed in its cover, the next step is to distribute it: again, anoosh and arash go to shops that they would know are unlikely to be interested, so that the film can continue its depiction of the extent of governmental restrictions on music and cultural life in iran. disheartened, anoosh and arash discuss emigration, acknowledging that it is not easy to make music outside iran either, but hoping they could at least “have a future” elsewhere. they consider the possibilities for iranian musicians to emigrate, one of the most effective being through the acquisition of visas for north america or europe, obtained by securing an invitation to a festival. while getting advice about seeking asylum, anoosh and arash maintain their hope for this festival option, looking at online images of zurich’s street parade as they agree that “this is where we belong”. at the next filmed dance party, police turn up and arrest anoosh, who spends a night in jail. things look up, though, when he receives a call from the rote fabrik cultural centre in switzerland with the news that blade & beard’s application to lethargy/street parade in zurich has been successful. finally things seem to be moving ahead fairly quickly. after one final call to prayer over tehran, anoosh and arash are at the airport. it is at this point in the film that viewers with their own experience of migration, from iran or other countries, have reported feeling particularly upset. in a film that is quite slowly paced, the scene at the airport—in which anoosh and arash farewell their family and friends, not knowing when or if they will see them again—is presented casually, and less than a minute in length. electronic musician rojin sharafi explains why this brevity is especially upsetting: “i cried, actually, at the scene when they say a very short goodbye to their friends and family, but it wasn’t actually that deep, the whole thing was [skimmed over]—because i know how it feels [that moment of farewell], it was very traumatic for me, but i think for someone who didn’t really experience that, it’s like a very normal scene—so goodbye, bye!”1 reviews 99 like many other viewers, sharafi is critical of the film’s unnuanced narrative of anoosh and arash’s supposed move from a state of constant restriction in iran to one of “freedom” in europe. “i had problems with the scenes in iran, but not that much,” she reflects. “my problem began when they get to europe . . . because i have this feeling it has two parts: one in iran, where they are very exhausted and everything, and the second part in europe and they’re living their dream . . . i have the feeling they have a lot of problems now. the film stops one or two weeks after they arrive in europe”. indeed, with its final scenes of a decision to “say yes” to switzerland, the film’s narrative structure is similar to that of a romance. a more balanced documentary might have followed anoosh and arash’s life for a year in switzerland, as they lived in shared housing for asylum seekers, hearing cowbells at night, and faced different forms of restriction on their music and other aspects of their lives. “two djs negotiate their possibilities in complex and unfair bureaucratic and capitalist systems” is not as catchy as “two djs defy the islamic regime” (raving iran). meures has defended the approach taken in raving iran, in part justifying it with the film’s commercial success. however, some see that success as a symptom of a widespread problem in the ways iran and other “non-western” countries are portrayed in popular media around the world. as tehran-based siavash amini puts it: “right now people in this region are going through the roughest periods of their history and this is being exploited for journalistic and artistic exoticist quests. people trying to sell it as extra flavor to what they do disgusts me . . . the only reason we mentioned things like that . . . in the past was to raise awareness to how dangerous narrow and often conveniently concise media-friendly narratives or exotic flavors can be to people actually trying to do something they love while living here . . . both nationalistic pride and exoticism in any form are part of the same idiotic bipolar system” (in hignelltully 2019; see also breyley 2018). in europe and elsewhere, filmmakers, journalists and academics who have wanted to present more nuanced narratives that complicate notions of freedom and assumptions about where freedom exists have reported pressure from funding bodies, producers, editors and academic supervisors to simplify their work or fetishise their subjects, in some cases resulting in inaccuracies (nooshin 2017; javdani 2019). one musician who objected to the “clichéd” way a german radio station represented her as a female artist from iran was told it would “sell more tickets”.2 meanwhile, in iran, for musicians and djs who choose to live and work there (see haidari 2019; deep house tehran; set; idj’s iranian top 10), one of the greatest current obstacles is the economic sanctions imposed on the country by the united states (temp-illusion), along with misconceptions spread internationally by various media. unfortunately, raving iran contributes more to those misconceptions than it does to an understanding of edm in iran. notes 1 rojin sharafi, personal communication with the author (berlin), 20 september 2019. 2 personal communication with the author (berlin), 20 september 2019. http://www.ravingiran.com/ http://deephousetehran.net/about/ http://setfest.org/ http://www.internationaldjmag.com/the-iranian-connection.html http://modernismunbound.com/articles/interview-temp-illusion/ dancecult 11(1)100 references blade & beard. <http://www.facebook.com/pg/bladebeard/about> (accessed 25 september 2019). breyley, gay jennifer. 2018. “‘i hung around in your soundtrack’: affinities with joy division among contemporary iranian musicians”. in heart and soul: critical essays on joy division, ed. aileen dillane, martin j. power and eoin devereux, 209-28. london: rowman & littlefield. haidari, niloufar. 2019. ‘sounds of tehran: why should i sit here and pretend that we’re suffering?’ we present. <https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/story/sounds-of-tehran> (accessed 12 october 2019). hignell-tully, daniel alexander. 2019. “interview with siavash amini”. tone shift. 27 may. <http://toneshift.net/2019/05/27/interview-with-siavash-amini> (accessed 2 october 2019). javdani, sadaf. 2019. “as an iranian academic, i’m fed up of being asked to focus on poverty and oppression”. the guardian. 22 august. <http://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/ aug/22/as-an-iranian-academic-im-fed-up-of-being-asked-to-focus-on-poverty-andoppression> (accessed 25 september 2019). nooshin, laudan. 2017. “whose liberation? iranian popular music and the fetishization of resistance”. popular communication 15(3): 163-91. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2017.1328601> raving iran. <http://www.ravingiran.com> (accessed 25 september 2019). the guardian. 2015. “the toast of tehran: iran’s superstar street artist — in pictures”. 26 february. <http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/feb/26/the-toast-oftehran-irans-superstar-street-artist-in-pictures> (accessed 2 october 2019). http://www.facebook.com/pg/bladebeard/about https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/story/sounds-of-tehran http://toneshift.net/2019/05/27/interview-with-siavash-amini http://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/aug/22/as-an-iranian-academic-im-fed-up-of-being-asked-to-focus-on-poverty-and-oppression http://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/aug/22/as-an-iranian-academic-im-fed-up-of-being-asked-to-focus-on-poverty-and-oppression http://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/aug/22/as-an-iranian-academic-im-fed-up-of-being-asked-to-focus-on-poverty-and-oppression http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2017.1328601 http://www.ravingiran.com/ http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/feb/26/the-toast-of-tehran-irans-superstar-street-artist-in-pictures http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/feb/26/the-toast-of-tehran-irans-superstar-street-artist-in-pictures reviews 101 sweet harmony: rave|today philly adams and kobi prempeh (curs.) london, uk: saatchi gallery, 12 july – 14 september 2019. <https://www.saatchigallery.com/art/sweet_harmony.php> <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.07> chris christodoulou university of westminster (uk) described by the saatchi gallery as a “revolutionary survey of rave culture”,1 sweet harmony: rave|today appears at a bittersweet time for uk underground dance music. thirty years after the second summer of love, the conservative party is the best part of a decade in power, neoliberalism continues to dominate the political discourse and free parties emitting soundtracks characterised by “a succession of repetitive beats”—as described by section 63 of the 1994 criminal justice act—continue to be outlawed.2 an added layer of poignant incongruity comes with the staging of a show about a music-driven countercultural movement at an established cultural institution such as the saatchi gallery. the event may appear to celebrate the sounds, imagery and attendant lifestyles of rave culture, but the controlled gallery setting diminishes any sense of its “revolutionary” otherness. sweet harmony is a prime example of gallerification; the event marks the transition of rave culture from a resistant form of mass participation—arguably the last great youth movement to emerge from outside, or at least the margins of, mainstream culture—to an event whose value is shaped by its status as a curated artefact. nevertheless, the attempt of curators kobi prempeh and juan rincon (voltage and sci-arc) to capture an “authentic” visual commentary resonates in the exhibited work, mainly comprising multimedia room installations and large-scale photography. the images are a mixture of journalistic and personal approaches which articulate key aspects of rave’s diverse musical and social milieu: photographers derek ridgers and matthew smith’s images of enraptured figures and crowds at key parties like spiral tribe and protest marches capture the political spirit of rave culture’s impulse for social resistance; former time out nightlife editor dave swindells and filmmaker-photographer ewan spencer illuminate the weekender hedonism of inner city clubland with images of brand-conscious metropolitan dancers in sweaty reverie, while artist-filmmaker vinca petersen and author molly macindoe’s depictions of transformed warehouses and rave-bound journeys point to the psychogeographic motivation underscoring long voyages to far-flung rural sound-systems, along with rave’s reterritorialisation of abandoned spaces in post-industrial towns and cities. anna-lena krause’s post-club portraits are the only images to feature posed subjects, but the figures’ individuated self-consciousnesses mark a revealing contrast to the carefree togetherness suggested by photographs that were mostly taken in the pre-internet age. the relatively limited sense of connectedness offered by online culture has arguably diverted https://www.saatchigallery.com/art/sweet_harmony.php http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.07 dancecult 11(1)102 much of rave’s radical communality, which, not so long ago, only seemed to accompany the liminal experience of mass, all-night dancing at a dance event or festival. in this sense, a feeling of melancholy pervades sweet harmony; whether you were there or not, it is hard to avoid feeling nostalgia for the anarchy and anonymity exemplified by rave culture’s pre-criminal justice act era. it is an illuminating irony then, that the act itself is barely mentioned; unsurprising perhaps, given the saatchi brothers’ involvement in multiple election campaigns for the tories who introduced the bill that preceded it. the immersive experience promised by sweet harmony’s organisers is somewhat reinforced by the vinyl hunter shop in the centre of the gallery, where a dj mixes dance music classics live alongside the opportunity to actually buy vinyl. another impressive feature of this space is the large wall of flyers, where the iconography of posters featuring dj line-ups and contemporaneous graphic styles evoke a sense of scale and period as much as any of the more artistically elaborate exhibits. however, the sense of dance culture’s mainstream co-option is jarringly illustrated by the spotify-branded listening stations in the “play room”, featuring contemporary edm rather than music from the acid house and rave eras. corporate sponsorship and underground dance music make uneasy bedfellows and the presence of a music-streaming giant like spotify feels antithetical to the rave ethos that the exhibition purports to commemorate. there is much for ravers to revel in at sweet harmony. at specific moments, the event captures the radical alterity and transformative bliss of what was an extraordinary period of british youth culture. curatorially, its content and spatial organisation articulates a subjective and temporal disorientation that seemed so dangerous to the political and cultural establishment in the late-1980s and early-1990s. unfortunately though, the event carries the diversionary air of a historical sideshow. these are experiences of ecstatic timelessness that are presented as belonging to the past, despite assertions within the show itself of their enduring legacy (e.g. the subtitle, “rave|today”). arguably, it would have been dishonest for the saatchi gallery to recount in a more complete way the political atmosphere of the period, given its owner’s role in helping to elect the political party who brought the criminal justice bill into being. but, for all its reverence of the second summer of love, the material presented in sweet harmony feels inconsistent with the idea of raving as a revolutionary experience, both in practice and in spirit. notes 1 saatchi gallery. sweet harmony: rave | today [press release]. available at: <https://www.saatchigallery.com/art/sweet_harmony.php> (accessed 30 july 2019). 2 criminal justice and public order act 1994 c.33 part v section 63: powers to remove persons attending or preparing for a rave. available at: <https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ ukpga/1994/33/part/v/crossheading/powers-in-relation-to-raves> (accessed 30 september 2019). https://www.saatchigallery.com/art/sweet_harmony.php https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/33/part/v/crossheading/powers-in-relation-to-raves https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/33/part/v/crossheading/powers-in-relation-to-raves reviews 103 popular viennese electronic music, 1990–2015: a cultural history ewa mazierska london and new york: routledge, 2019. isbn: 978-1-138-71391-8 (hardcover) rrp: £95 (hardcover) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.08> anita jóri berlin university of the arts (germany) ewa mazierska’s book is definitely a niche work, covering a largely unexplored territory of research, both in terms of subject and methodology. when it comes to the extant literature on vienna as a music city, one can find a broad variety of studies on classical music (particularly the first wave classicism of beethoven, haydn, mozart, et al.; and the second wave modernism of schoenberg, berg and webern), with only a few texts (e.g. reitsamer 2011) that report on the city as a contemporary centre of electronic (dance) music. these few articles were, of course, milestone sources for mazierska’s book. however, as mazierska notes, austrian popular music deserves more scholarly attention in general, and the special characteristics of the viennese electronic music scene in particular have not been discussed as a whole, less still the relationship between the music, place and culture (1); although, as she notes, doing research on the correlations between music and place/city generates many methodological problems (17–19). throughout the book, mazierska is sophisticated and prudent about the terminology she uses. one can, for example, find a particularly interesting discussion about the problems surrounding the genre name “electronica” as popularised by the us music industry. this is the reason why the author chose the wording of “popular electronic music” in the title of the book, instead of electronica. however, mazierska suggests that the two terms mean the same in her work. in this sense, viennese popular electronic music refers to “music produced by viennese artists . . . or also includes record companies which released these records . . . places where this music was presented and appreciated . . . and a web of relations connecting musicians, institutions and individuals working for their success . . . as well as their fans. it can encompass art and artists, as well as scenes” (9). so the scope of the research is broad and also includes themes of music business research, such as the local record industry and the effects of digitisation. the described period is from 1990–2015; the 1990s were the heydays of viennese popular electronic music, and the study pays extra attention to this decade. the book is based on several methodological and theoretical strands—which are interweaved and combined throughout the whole work: the history and theory of electronic music and its subgenres with a special focus on dub, ambient, techno and noise; research on the relationship between http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.08 dancecult 11(1)104 music and place, positioning electronic music within the longer history of music in vienna; research about the “future of music” that considers the digital shift and the transformation of the music industry; and finally the interface between music and gender (summarised 9–10). in addition to these theoretical frameworks, the book is based on more than fifty interviews with people active in the scene, such as musicians, heads of record labels, music promoters, managers of record shops, employees of institutions promoting austrian music, academics and music fans. the first chapter positions vienna on a historical and cultural map where it is celebrated as the world capital of music. the subtitle of the chapter, “from mozart to conchita wurst”, suggests a long cultural history: from viennese classicism, through romanticism, to early modern music and music between the world wars, the author finally gets to the viennese contemporary popular music (17–45). the chapter also gives an informative insight about the connections between urbanisation, social life and music during these phases. therefore, mazierska always reflects on the actual political situation and its effects on the local music scene. for example, readers are informed about the us american (“coloniser”) influences on austrian popular music in the 1950s which completely changed from ’60s, when the local musicians found their own style of music, “austropop”. following this linear history, the second chapter discusses the vienna electronica as scene and industry. the author looks into it from a bird’s-eye perspective to describe vienna’s musical history and its individual characteristics. to do so, this section begins with a clarification of the concept of “scene” with the help of classic theories and models by cohen (1999), kruse (2010), peterson and bennett (2004), etc. this is followed by a detailed chronology where readers are informed about the developments of clubs, events, fanzines and the local industry, including labels and record stores. according to mazierska, “[t]he peak of the scene was between 1995 and 1999” (62), which were—probably not coincidentally—also the golden years of the record industry in general. as mentioned, the most striking findings about the local scene characteristics can be read in this chapter. for example, based on the conducted interviews, the author writes about the scene members’ social background (mostly middle class youngsters), the importance of record stores as centres of knowledge-transfer, and few venues and their strict operating rules which led the viennese electronic music to a “bourgeoise and displaced phenomenon” (58) rather than a rebellious one. after describing the above—and other—characteristics, the third chapter looks into specific case studies of the most well-known and popular musicians whose careers were (and some of them are still) active during almost the entire discussed period. these include, following the chronological order of the subchapters, sin, kruder and dorfmeister, tosca, sofa surfers, patrick pulsinger, peter rehberg, christian fennesz and the label mego, electric indigo and sweet susie. every subchapter (and case study) starts out with a chronological career description of the musician(s) and follows up with their discography and style of music. these analyses reviews 105 are mainly based on mazierska’s own impressions and the interviewees’ answers, and the descriptions do not follow any specific analytical methodology. therefore, it excludes paratextual journalistic material and reception, which might have been fruitful as reflection tools. however, the author tried to focus on the connections between the city of vienna as a place and the music produced by these artists. this can be seen the most in the subchapters about the style of the musicians: mazierska was interested in the specialty of the so-called “vienna sound”. these different artists also demonstrate the wealth of styles and genres of viennese electronic musicians: they all work with different subgenres. such detailed historical and socio-cultural analysis of the careers of these different musicians did not exist before, so, also in this sense, the study fills a research gap. furthermore, the author considers most of these artists’ work as a manifestation of postmodern art and also sees them as trendsetters with their local characteristics, and not as “imitators” of anglo-american artists. this is the other reason why she chose them to be analysed in the book. although all of these subchapters and musicians are important in different ways, i would like to highlight only two of them because they differ from the others in terms of their subjects: “peter rehberg, christian fennesz and the label mego: between glitch and bécs” (chapter 8) and “women in a mixed world: electric indigo and sweet susie” (chapter 9). i found it interesting that in the former the author dedicated a whole case study to noise or experimental electronic music. this section might feel a little alien to the others, but mazierska’s main argument was to include as many different genres as possible. in this sense, the subchapter on electric indigo and sweet susie is also different from the others in terms of its categorisation of music by the musicians’ gender. here the author also gives a longer introduction to the problems of male-dominated edmc and the research of that phenomenon—see also dancecult’s special issue in 2017. in this regard, the subchapter about electric indigo and sweet susie also creates awareness of female artists who are often neglected in the histories of electronic (dance) music. finally, in the conclusions, the author highlights again her main arguments: 1) austrian electronic (dance) music deserves more scholarly attention that focuses on the “stories” of artists and protagonists rather than their technical properties and 2) viennese popular electronic musicians have created their own style/sound of music, instead of copying the anglo-american market. furthermore, by looking at the careers of the abovementioned musicians, the author found out that vienna as a city offers “comfortable” life to them, for example, with its affordable housing and proper studios. mazierska finishes her work with several open questions for future investigations on other examples: “were electronic musicians in countries such as belgium, poland or hungary as lucky in this period as their austrian counterparts? did they show the same interest in similar genres and develop similar ideas?” (218). with these questions, she also suggests for others to conduct comprehensive research on other european cities, in order that we would have a better picture about the differences between these places. in addition, in my opinion, dancecult 11(1)106 with the help of these suggested studies, one could also better describe the different “sounds” of these cities because one would have comparative cases at hand. in this sense, one could also talk about the specific “viennese sound” with stronger counterexamples at hand. mazierska’s self-reflection is appreciable: “no doubt that some readers familiar with the phenomenon described here will be surprised and unhappy with omissions, simplifications and mistakes made in this book. my defence is that no study is ever comprehensive and flawless, and this is particularly the case of works which cover a largely unexplored territory” (12–13). she also encourages others to correct these mistakes and fills these gaps, in their own future work. i think the book is definitely a great beginning for a new comprehensive research body on european cities and their electronic (dance) music scenes. additionally, this book will be a great basis for further research on the viennese electronic music scene. references cohen, sara. 1999. “scenes.” in key terms in popular music and culture. ed. bruce horner and thomas swiss, 239–50. oxford: blackwell. kruse, holly. 2010. “local identity and independent music scenes, online and off ”. popular music and society, 5: 12–15. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007760903302145>. peterson, richard and andy bennett. 2004. “introducing music scenes”. in music scenes: local, translocal and virtual, ed. andy bennett and richard a. peterson, 1–15. nashville: vanderbilt university press. reitsamer, rosa. 2011. “the diy careers of techno and drum ‘n’ bass djs in vienna”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 3(1): 28–43. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.02>. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007760903302145 http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.02 reviews 107 the relentless pursuit of tone: timbre in popular music. robert fink, melinda latour and zachary wallmark (eds.) new york: oxford university press, 2018. isbn: 9780199985227 (hardcover), 9780199985234 (paperback) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.09> maria perevedentseva goldsmiths, university of london (uk) as i write, anniversary celebrations of the apollo 11 lunar mission are in full swing, brian eno reissues are flying off the shelves, and it seems that musicology may at long last be experiencing a similar breakthrough with timbre: an object with a comparable pull on the imagination and one which, like the moon, is simultaneously an unavoidable physical reality and a void for the projection of our earthly desires. the last few years have seen a dramatic increase in academic engagement with timbre, with problems of ontology, function, representation, and affective and conceptual signification receiving an airing (e.g. van elferen 2017; wallmark et al. 2018; lavengood 2019; dolan and rehding forthcoming). the publication of the relentless pursuit of tone marks a pivotal point by turning our attention to timbre in popular music, in whose aesthetics it plays a decisive, but until now, under-theorised role. the book’s fifteen chapters put to rest any notion of timbre’s ineffability, showcasing— through sections on genre, voice, instrument and production—a glorious variety of analytical and representational techniques with which to capture its slippery essence. the usual spectrograms are joined by jocelyn neal’s phonetic descriptions of country guitar “twang” and griffin woodworth’s echomimetic representation of filter envelopes in funk. nina sun eidscheim’s deconstructionist reading of the persistent “disidentification” (153) of jimmy scott’s voice and jonathan howland’s topical archaeology of “luxe pop” are joined by material histories of studio technologies from jan butler, and embodied ecological theories of timbre cognition by simon zagorski-thomas. it is clear that a dominant methodology has not yet been established, and this emerging field is all the better for it. it is fitting that the first chapter is given to cornelia fales, whose identification of the paradox of timbre in a landmark article (2002) continues to animate both her contribution and the collection as a whole. the paradox is multifaceted, stemming from the incommensurability of the acoustic world, where sound is produced according to rational and quantifiable laws, and the phenomenal world, where timbre is (not as rationally or measurably) “perceptualized”, a perception which “differs most radically” from the acoustic features that provoke it (24). this same tension—between material reality and its mental representation—is at the heart of the timbre versus tone debate outlined in the editors’ http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.09 dancecult 11(1)108 introduction, where tone is defined as a “complex quasi-object shaped by cultural networks” and timbre as the “dispassionate” scientific object providing the real “physical and perceptual correlates” to tone (9-10). the book’s explicit aim is to bridge this gap by “illuminating how the materiality of sound can structure cultural practice” (12), but a latent distrust of the cultural pole is evident throughout, compensated for by detailed descriptions of sound production and psychoacoustic processes, coupled with genuine surprise and delight when a homology between acoustic and phenomenal worlds is identified. these descriptions—ranging from melinda latour’s dissection of carlos santana’s transcendental sustain to woodworth’s unpacking of the transistorised oscillators that powered funk musicians’ subversive use of synthesisers—are hugely valuable, and it is heartening to see such thorough engagement with the technicalities of popular music’s sonic construction. however, as jonathan sterne has observed, “technologies of listening . . . emerge out of techniques of listening” (2003, 92; original emphases), suggesting that we should not abandon trust in our ears and minds entirely, but instead use them to probe how cultural practices in turn structure the materiality of sound. simon frith makes a similar point in his afterword (368), and in the end, the timbre/tone (and its attendant real/cultural) dualism boils down to the ultimate philosophical chicken-and-egg of where “reality” really resides—a debate too expansive both for this review and the text it is reviewing. whilst every chapter in this rich volume warrants detailed discussion, two essays from fales and robert fink, which deal with timbre in electronic dance music and bass cultures respectively, are of particular interest to dancecult’s readership. in “hearing timbre: perceptual learning among early bay area ravers”, fales analyses the scene-specific discursive attempts by users of the sfraves listserv to understand timbre, citing edm’s timbral “nonspecificity” or sourcelessness as enabling rare feats of “perceptual learning” (25, 24). she argues that it is edm’s disconnect from the acoustic sources of the natural world, coupled with the dissociative effects of mdma (a frequent topic of conversation on sfraves), which allows listeners to learn to hear timbre not implicitly, as a monitor and proxy for the sound source, but explicitly and in itself, attending only to its immanent qualities. furthermore, fales suggests that this nonspecificity also operates at the conceptual level, because whilst many of the posts she analyses share a narrative arc of “before . . . perceptual inadequacy and . . . after” (35), the affordances of timbre, even when tacitly grasped by listeners, remain largely affective and sub-linguistic. in “below 100hz. toward a musicology of bass culture”, fink critiques the acoustically “unsound” (112) theorisations of the affective power of sub-bass and bass culture, as formulated by steve goodman (2010) and julian henriques (2011), which he argues have idealised bass sounds into occupying “fetish object” status (89). in order to put bass in its place, fink details subwoofer design, the transduction of low frequency waves through space, and the aural and haptic sensation of those waves by human perceivers, systematically debunking any notion of the exceptional power, force and physicality of bass. he concludes reviews 109 that the “power” of deep bass is “our intuitive perception of how difficult it is to hear these frequencies at all”, and so bass culture can only be understood “as culture” because the “sound” around which it is centred “is a timbre of no timbre” (112). i fundamentally agree with fink that it is the liminality of bass that gives it its symbolic power, but, as an avid bass-head myself, i have spent enough nights having my bones rattled by sound systems ranging from aba shanti-i to digital mystikz to know that there is a matereal basis to bass culture beyond subwoofers, and beyond the idealising projections of listeners. as fales observes in her conclusion, despite the difficulties of hearing timbre at all, human propensity for perceptual learning, and the “astronomical decibel levels” of a rave context “where the parameters of timbre and rhythm predominate” mean that there is “very little that is truly cognitively impenetrable” (39). producers and djs help us along in that respect, by isolating and eqing bass solos and drops so that our attention is turned more fully to the bass, making the almost-inaudible engulf the sensorium.1 fink’s main gripe appears to be with goodman’s florid, ccru-inspired discursive formulation of bass as malevolent weapon or force, and this chapter is a useful antidote to that narrative. at times, however, in his dismissal of the audible and sensible reality of bass, it seems fink falls prey to the inverse of the same “acoustic fundamentalism” (112) of which he accuses his adversaries. nevertheless, “below 100hz” is exemplary in its attention to the material conditions and technical specificities of tone production, and this represents one of the great strengths of the relentless pursuit as a whole: in addition to its thorough explorations of the cultural and perceptual dimensions of timbre, the book contains a treasure trove of sophisticated discussions of sound technology whilst managing to avoid the lacklustre didacticism of much other gear literature. in “the sound of evil”, zachary wallmark considers in finegrained detail the detuning, overdriving and distortion of guitar and vocal timbres in death metal, whose noisiness and difficulty he links to sacrificial violence and its overcoming by fans and producers. steve waksman looks at the ill-fated guitar synthesiser, which resolved initial stumbling blocks of translating guitarists’ idiosyncratic pitch control and attack types into information analogue circuitry and, later, midi could process. its failure, he argues, resulted from the “faustian bargain” (271) struck by its adopters, who traded the kudos of virtuosic guitar rock and jazz for an enhanced but for all purposes “sourceless” sonic palette. jan butler and paul théberge consider studio technologies aside from specific instruments, the former looking at the changing status of liveness as a site of rock authenticity in the age of the studio album, and the latter at reverb’s trajectory from a consolidator of space to special effect, where the once-stable relationship between acoustic, musical and listening spaces has become contingent and separable. touching on similar themes, albin zak sketches a cultural history of the recording industry in mid-century america, then undergoing waves of democratisation as emerging youth markets overtook djs and studio professionals as arbiters of musical value. zak’s chapter also highlights another thread running through the relentless pursuit; namely, popular music’s irrepressible zeal for turning one group’s dancecult 11(1)110 sonic off-cuts—in zak’s case lo-fi production values and untrained vocal and instrumental technique—into another group’s aesthetic ideal. this transformation undergirds catherine provenzano’s investigation into auto-tune’s redistribution of musical labour and its rationalisation along racial and class lines. it also serves as the backbone for mark samples’ chapter on the voice of tom waits, whose “damaged” and imperfect timbre cemented waits’ artistic authenticity, and was eventually granted a legally protected status of its own. zagorski-thomas’ “the spectromorphology of recorded music” serves as an appropriate closing chapter for this expertly curated collection, outlining a robust methodology that takes on both timbre and tone, and their interrelation. he borrows from james gibson’s ecological theory of perception, and neuroscientific theories of embodied cognition and cross-domain mapping, relating these to denis smalley’s work on gestural surrogacy to explore how ostensibly sourceless recorded sounds generate schematic “sonic cartoons” that suggest a sourced, embodied provenance. the sources these cartoons specify in the perceiving mind, however, are not concrete, real-world objects but instead take the form of “experiential affective structures” (348). zagorski-thomas applies these theories to analyse perceptions of fullness, fidelity and moving through space in “acoustic pop” and electronica, arguing that timbre perception is “based on our embodied experience and the metaphorical connections we can make between that primary ‘lived-in’ experience and our secondary experience of the world around us” (359). as such, while the distance between actual and perceived source can remain vast, they share a core structural affinity which gives perceptions a coherence and consistency with the external world which, in turn, enables listeners to act on, react to, and make sense of, their physical environment. this brings us back to—and perhaps offers a way out of—fales’ paradox and the dialectic between the real and the perceptual which drives the relentless pursuit. as the first of its kind, the book leaves plenty of openings for emerging timbre researchers to sink their teeth into and develop. for edm scholars, the ideas presented this book offer a potential way out of the music-analytical stalemate that has dogged our subfield since its inception, by showcasing approaches that enable us to engage more directly with the “matter” (i.e. the sounds and technologies) of electronic dance music. at the same time, each chapter is incredibly well structured and easy to navigate which, along with the book’s companion website and the sheer depth and diversity of the topics covered, makes it an indispensable pedagogical tool for advanced undergraduates and above. in short, the relentless pursuit it is a timely collection that deserves to be read widely, and in full, by popular music scholars and tone-chasers of all stripes alike. notes 1 clubs like london’s fabric, for example, have bespoke “bodysonic” wooden dancefloors with bass transducers placed underneath, so that clubbers “feel” the low-end frequencies through their feet. reviews 111 references dolan, emily, and alexander rehding, eds. forthcoming. the oxford handbook of timbre. new york: oxford university press. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190637224.001.0001>. fales, cornelia. 2002. “the paradox of timbre”. ethnomusicology 46 (1): 56–95. <http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/852808>. goodman, steve. 2010. sonic warfare: sound, affect, and the ecology of fear. cambridge, ma: mit press. henriques, julian. 2011. sonic bodies: reggae sound systems, performance techniques, and ways of knowing. new york: continuum. kane, brian. 2014. sound unseen: acousmatic sound in theory and practice. new york: oxford university press. lavengood, megan. 2019. “what makes it sound ’80s?: the yamaha dx7 electric piano sound”. journal of popular music studies 31 (3): 73–94. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2019.313009>. sterne, jonathan. 2003. the audible past: cultural origins of sound reproduction. durham: duke university press. van elferen, isabella. 2017. “agency, aporia, approaches: how does musicology solve a problem like timbre?”. contemporary music review 36 (6): 483–87. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2017.1452685>. wallmark, zachary, marco iacoboni, choi deblieck, and roger kendall. 2018.”embodied listening and timbre: perceptual, acoustical, and neural correlates”. music perception 35 (3): 332–63. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/mp.2018.35.3.332>. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190637224.001.0001 http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/852808 http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2019.313009 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2017.1452685 http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/mp.2018.35.3.332 dancecult 11(1)112 fyre fraud jenner furst and julia willoughby nason (dirs.) usa: hulu and the cinemart, 2019. <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7843600/> rrp: us$99 (hardcover), us$35 (paperback) fyre: the greatest party that never happened chris smith (dir.) usa: library films, vice studios and jerry media, 2019. <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9412098/> <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.10> tommy symmes rice university (us) the following is a review of two films: fyre fraud (hosted by hulu) and fyre: the greatest party that never happened (hosted by netflix). both films document fyre festival, a 2017 music festival that continues to be the focus of controversy, particularly with respect to its promotional methods. both films give accounts of the leadup, occurrence and fallout of the festival, were released within a week of each other and share some interlocutors. some of these individuals are named in million-dollar court cases, some were deceived and manipulated by people in positions of authority, and many have competing interests in the landscape of industrial taste-making. the films are already in deep conversation with each other. the narrative recounted in both films bears repeating: entrepreneur billy mcfarland and musician ja rule join forces to produce a luxury festival in the bahamas. they enlist a team of powerful media companies, raise millions from private investors, and promise extravagant experiences to a client base of instagram elites that they do not deliver. the media companies lose money and look dishonest, investors lose money and look disconnected from reality, and popular lifestyle influencers lose money and look naïve. hundreds of bahamians work hundreds of unpaid hours, but this remains in the background of the public shaming of so many venerable contemporary american institutions. the documentaries are in general agreement about who the villain is here: billy mcfarland is accused of being a “compulsive liar”, “scammer”, “hustler” and “dr. evil”. in fraud, mcfarland appears as an interviewee of the filmmakers. fyre, on the other hand, uses footage of mcfarland that was originally collected by the teams hired to promote the festival during the leadup to the festival. both films are ruthless in their condemnation of his character. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7843600/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9412098/ http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.10 reviews 113 fyre fraud released on 14 january 2019 and directed by the team of jenner furst and julia willoughby nason, fyre fraud hit streaming platform hulu four days before the release of netflix’s counterpart. an array of interviewees—lawyers, journalists, cultural critics and culture industry bureaucrats—contemplate topics including fomo (fear of missing out), the distribution of culpability in networked authority structures, the vulnerable psychology of millennials, the ethos of tumult that is wall street and the susceptibility of developing regions to first-world frauds all in relation to the fyre festival. fraud is strong in its detailing of mcfarland’s earlier business ventures—for example a credit card or an app for booking celebrities—setting the stage for his more ambitious project. it does so with the assistance of some of his former employees and mcfarland himself, who narrates his lifelong entrepreneurial development. mcfarland is adamant that he had the best intentions to put on an event that was “going to change the landscape [of the festival industry], and deliver an experience that people would talk about for years” (fraud 9:00). other key individuals are featured. the brightly lit, smiley calvin wells, a principal investor for a new york city firm, appears prominently in fraud. concerned by the amount of money people in his networks were investing in fyre festival and distrustful of mcfarland, wells attempted, unsuccessfully, to delegitimize the festival by critiquing its questionable promotions. he blames this failure on the impotence of the facts in this social-media dominated, “post-truth” world, but seems at times more impressed than incensed by the persuasive campaign assembled by the fyre festival team and the companies they contracted for media production and marketing. oren aks, the former jerry media employee assigned to their contract with fyre festival, is also interviewed. seated behind a laptop, as if reenacting the tricks and techniques he used to promote the festival, he shares his two cents regarding the manipulation of social media and the recipe for a viral trend and his dismay at realizing he had been deceived about the product he had advertised. bahamians in the film call out the unjust treatment they suffered at the hands of the fyre festival. delroy jackson recounts warning mcfarland and ja rule that organizational and construction resources were inadequate given the short timeline. ava turnquest, a reporter for local news outlet the tribune, accuses fyre festival of unoriginality in scamming the bahamas; a place “so ripe for fraud” (fraud 26:30). she portrays the festival as a predictable result of deplorable economic relations between the us and bahamas, as proof of the persistence of colonial attitudes so coherent with the conditions of contemporary pop culture. jia tolentino, a staff writer for the new yorker, joins turnquest in her diagnosis. interviewed in front of floor-to-ceiling high-rise windows, tolentino discusses fyre festival in relation to its conditions of possibility, in relation to the forces which dominate contemporary culture. tolentino illustrates the intricate and fragile relation between subject and society, suggesting: “billy [mcfarland] is baked in the oven of millennial reality construction that asserts itself in response to the precarity of the times” (fraud 10:10). dancecult 11(1)114 these analyses, albeit blithe in tone, contribute nuance to questions of legal and ethical responsibility central to the film. in addition, fraud introduces three instagram influencers, the festival’s target clientele, who recount arriving at the festival, struggling for orientation, and departing. tolentino provides us with a succinct definition of an influencer. “an influencer is someone who has effectively monetized their identity. that is their work: the performance of an attractive life” (fraud 32:05). they also contribute personal action-style footage of the crisis (empty stages, beach drinking, wandering in the dark, hoarding toilet paper). but fraud does not introduce any attendees who suffered more severe physical injury than surprise, boredom or dehydration. fraud finally interviews anastasia eremenko, mcfarland’s girlfriend. she reads aloud letters he sends her from prison and is shown after one of his court dates weeping alone in the street. eremenko is adamant about the swirling misrepresentations of mcfarland’s character, steadfast in her support of him. and mixed into shots that suggest her continued backing of this irredeemable villain, the film concludes that “it’s a great time to be a conman in america” (fraud 1:33:45). building from conversations with the above and other interlocutors, fyre fraud uses fyre festival to frame “the nexus of social media influence, late-stage capitalism, and morality in the post-truth era” (publicity material; see “fyre fraud: details”). the festival serves as a ready-made material specificity through which the film’s experts weave abstract threads of contemporary popular culture. but despite these strengths, the production feels heavyhanded; the film relies on bland-yet-antsy collages of stock visuals and cheap-looking b-roll from generic festival scenes of attractive women dancing or crowds walking. long awkward pauses after mcfarland speaks in interviews imply volumes about his trustworthiness, but do so pedantically. viewers might therefore understand the film to enact some of the very culture it critiques, namely one that values the speed and spectacular quality of visual electronic media over the story or material reality it represents. fyre: the greatest party that never happened hot on the heels of fraud came fyre: the greatest party that never happened, released by netflix on january 18th, 2019 and directed by chris smith (also american movie, the pool). the production is sleek, the pacing confident, and in contrast to fraud’s stock visuals much of the footage is original. fyre attends to moments leading up to the festival to offer viewers a prime view of the planning process and blooming drama. fyre includes abundant footage of mcfarland and ja rule leading organizational efforts, making definitive and questionable decisions in meetings, talking social media strategy and selling their brand. multiple times we hear them reiterate their pitch: “we’re selling a pipe dream to your average american loser!” (fyre 12:05). the film’s interlocutors affirm that mcfarland once fell asleep with a beer in his hand on the beach, that he would ride a jetski in time-sensitive moments, even that he resembled dr. evil (fyre 1:09:40). but most of this individual critique is reserved specifically for mcfarland; despite the damning documentation that fyre publishes, ja rule sustains little direct individual critique. reviews 115 much of the juicy visual content was collected on site in the bahamas by matte projects, a video production company contracted by fyre festival. brett kincaid, director of matte, testifies unapologetically to the quality of the work. he says of fyre, “they were hiring the best of the best in each category: best talent, best distribution, best social media company” (fyre 6:45). he makes sure viewers appreciate how his team produced and launched a video that trended globally from an island without internet, offering an interesting take on the accusations of false advertising and fraudulent promotion levelled against fyre festival and its teams. according to kincaid, the real fyre festival was the smaller-scale event that occurred during “the shoot [for the viral video]. the shoots were parties . . . the commercial was what everybody wanted” (fyre 1:30:12). jerry media is a company that generates online attention and social influence for clients; it is that “best social media company” named by kincaid and hired by fyre, and also the executive producer who partnered with vice in the creation of this documentary. ceo mick purzycki represents jerry media for the film. his script—just like the film—is sleek, persistent, and confident in explaining to the viewer the victimization his company suffered at the hands of fyre festival. but he too claims that there was substance and value in the work they did, asserting that his employers were “trying to tap into a culture and a zeitgeist that they believed in” (fyre 14:00). for purzycki as for kincaid, the inspiration was far from bunk, and if there was never a problem with the original inspiration, how can anyone fault those who had a contract to promote that inspiration using social media? purzycki does admit, however, that in the days prior to the festival jerry media deleted “the negative comments that were degrading the brand” from fyre festival’s social media presence (fyre 44:45). in other words, jerry media hid complaints and questions about festival details to prevent attendees from discovering that the festival infrastructure looked quite different from the promotional material. marc weinstein, a music festival consultant and fyre festival contractor, describes his failed attempts at convincing the leadership to be honest about their insufficient preparation time, about the fact that it was not going to be a luxury experience and about attendees becoming trapped on the island with no available return flights. but weinstein admits that each time he was rebuked, he put his head down and attempted to complete his assignments, to maintain the chain of command, to play his role in this peculiar machine. andy king, an event producer who styles himself “billy [mcfarland]’s whisperer,” also wonders about his responsibility for continuously vetting mcfarland’s personal character to the festival team for the good of the event (fyre 1:12:20). maryann rolle, a bahamian restaurateur, might have appreciated more critical thought from jerry media, weinstein and company. feeding staff, influencers and attendees with little preparation time, rolle tells viewers she lost $50,000 of savings trying to host the big american money hinting at long-term investment. j.r., a bahamian who organized local laborers for fyre festival, recounts fleeing for safety after the festival because those laborers had turned to him seeking payment. fyre festival leadership had vanished in the wind. dancecult 11(1)116 following the festival, mcfarland was charged with tampering with wire transfers. but after posting bail he continued to sell tickets for haute events in new york city; tickets which often did not exist. at that point gabrielle bluestone, a vice reporter who also contributes to the film, published an article linking mcfarland to sustained fraudulent activities while still on bail (bluestone 2018). mcfarland was arrested again, this time without possibility of posting bail. the effect of interspersing contributions from critics like bluestone with interlocutors like purzycki—especially when they align in tutti condemnation of mcfarland the naughty—is the same as the effect of jerry media co-producing this film with vice whilst repurposing their own video footage. jerry media’s self-promotion is not completely unabashed, but it is thorough. fyre submits that the promotion was the most real—maybe even the only real thing—about fyre festival. fyre is a statement, in form as in content, about the power of social media technologies. kincaid sums up this morass of deferred accountability with another quippy analogy: “if you shoot a commercial for bmw, how are you supposed to know if that car has a faulty engine?” (fyre 1:16:50). accordingly, perhaps we can consider fyre as much promotion as it is documentary. the two films reviewed differ in several ways. fyre fraud is preoccupied with the question of assigning responsibility for social media influence. fyre fraud’s viewer feels ethically superior to the clear villains and awestruck by the naivete of those swept up in their schemes, because all of this apparent chaos fits into a clean, almost algorithmic state-of-the-world. meanwhile, fyre: the greatest party that never happened demonstrates the capabilities of social media technologies. it is a crisis take to fraud’s algorithm, an illustration of real power fallen into the wrong hands. but both play blame games about who is responsible for the millions of dollars demanded by workers, investors, contractors, lawyers and others. both document the professional turn of social media identity and the attendant rise in the influence of models with popular social media identities. and both make us feel like we all need a good read of baudrillard’s simulacrum and simulation. viewed side-by-side, the two films provide us with spectacular material for reflecting not just on right and wrong in contemporary social media culture, but also real and fake. we are left puzzled: were the original intentions valid? who is responsible for viral momentum? and might the festival have happened after all? references baudrillard, jean. 1983. simulations. los angeles, ca: semiotext(e). bluestone, gabrielle. 2018. “fyre fest’s founder is going to prison, but the spirit of his scam lives on”. vice news, 12 june. <https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3ayma/fyre-festsfounder-is-going-to-prison-but-the-spirit-of-his-scam-lives-on> (accessed 9 september 2019). “fyre fraud: details”. hulu, 14 january 2019. <https://www.hulu.com/movie/fyre-fraude47078f3-1c0e-49a8-9da9-c571a7a20fec> (accessed 5 september 2019). https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3ayma/fyre-fests-founder-is-going-to-prison-but-the-spirit-of-his-scam-lives-on https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3ayma/fyre-fests-founder-is-going-to-prison-but-the-spirit-of-his-scam-lives-on https://www.hulu.com/movie/fyre-fraud-e47078f3-1c0e-49a8-9da9-c571a7a20fec https://www.hulu.com/movie/fyre-fraud-e47078f3-1c0e-49a8-9da9-c571a7a20fec plugging the creative drain: a glimpse into electronic music migration in northern ireland ciara power queen’s university belfast and free the night (northern ireland) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.08> introduction in august 2022, the belfast telegraph published an article titled “belfast needs to create more venues for electronic music fans, says ni-born dj” (reid 2022). the piece spotlights the experiences and thoughts of neil kerr—better known as mount palomar—who echoes the utter frustration experienced by those in the northern irish electronic community. kerr describes the lack of venues as an ongoing issue, with only one venue in belfast city centre which hosts independent, underground style nights, resulting in a decrease in the number of opportunities for artists (and industry workers) in electronic music who want to “display their skills outside of mainstream events” (reid 2022). many of the issues raised in the article concern what drives talent exports in electronic music from northern ireland to leave, and for the most part, not return. this article reflects on an urgent need to plug the creative drain; a theme that i am researching in my current phd project that documents and connects electronic music scenes in belfast and dublin. it includes some background information into electronic music and the broader night time economy in northern ireland, the experiences of three northern irish electronic music exports, and some theoretical understandings from richard florida (2002; 2008). as this reflection will show, there is a need for greater understanding of the demographic, social, political and economic push and pull factors (latukha 2022: 2226-7) which influence electronic music talent migration in northern ireland, but also attract such electronic music talent from other global scenes. context within electronic music, belfast crowds have been described by many touring artists i have spoken to as some of the best in the global scene. historically, rave culture was important in a divided northern ireland during the tail-end of the troubles—a three-decade conflict between irish catholics and british protestants that lasted from the late 1960s until the creation of the good friday agreement in 1998. the dancefloor allowed ravers to escape decades of sectarian hate and violence. it was an attractive, anti-conflict zone where catholic and protestant youths congregated and danced together in venues like the ulster sports hall, belfast art college, circus circus in banbridge, and kelly’s in portrush (mclaughlin 2004; mclaughlin and mcloone 2012). unfortunately, my fieldwork encounters have revealed that many iconic electronic music venues have closed their doors. this has had a knock-on effect for local club nights which have been in decline since the 1990s. there is little opportunity for professional development in dance music in northern ireland, and many young people in the industry choose to go abroad to develop their knowledge, skills, and careers. the experiences of fahad, a northern irish creative director, event operations manager, and label manager, correspond with my observations. fahad migrated to other locations in the uk and europe, including ibiza, manchester, and glasgow, to develop his career prospects in electronic music. he recently returned to belfast, but believes his ability to throw parties in his local electronic music scene is strained: belfast has always had a reputation as an amazing place to throw parties taps aff, loads of yeeeeos and good energy which was the case when we started. after attendance of other parties and the dying nature of our own in recent months this magic has died (fahad 2022).[1] the lack of progressive night time policies in northern ireland also plays a significant factor in electronic music sustainability and is an encompassing push factor for electronic music migration. in 2021, free the night launched as a campaign to rectify decades of misunderstanding of nightlife and advocate for progressive, safe and culturally rich nightlife environments. free the night discovered that creative drain was a concerning issue in electronic music and other late night music scenes. also, recent changes to licensing legislation, which came into effect in october 2021, only permit for nightclubs in northern ireland to open until 3am up to 104 nights per year (department of communities 2022). transforming licensing laws in northern ireland could help retain and regain northern irish talent in electronic music. in august 2022, free the night circulated a nation-wide survey, which gathered over 900 responses, to gain insight into perceptions and experiences of nightlife in northern ireland. respondents believed that changes to licensing laws could make northern ireland a more attractive places to visit and live (79%) and help ease the amount of creative and worker migration (45%) (power forthcoming). understanding brain drain dynamics can indicate the current structural issues related to a lack of policy intervention from the northern irish government for retaining and regaining talent (pivotal 2021), which also informs creative migration. the influence of brain drain in many societies, brain drain continues to be increasingly challenging, particularly for developing countries. it is not surprising that talent migration threatens the economic development of countries, caps competitiveness and reduces human capital. lenient international border laws create vast opportunities for talent to migrate from their home countries to enhance their career prospects and search for better standards of living (beine et al. 2008; khilji et al. 2015; biglari et al. 2022; latukha et al. 2022). as previously mentioned, northern ireland is rich in history of civil and community conflict, yet also shares features of advanced economies including “counter-urbanism, deindustrialisation, occupational shifts, ageing, and growing levels of education, all of which influence migration rates” (green 2018; shuttleworth et al. 2021: 1-2). despite brain drain primarily impacting developing countries, a recent report published by independent think-tank, pivotal (2021), highlighted that northern ireland has an established pattern of educational migration and a loss of thousands of young people each year. for instance, in 2018/19, over 17,000 students studied outside of northern ireland, whereas in the same year, just 3,470 students chose to come to northern ireland to study (pivotal 2021). taking inspiration from pivotal, there are questions that need to be addressed in relation to electronic music migration: what motivates electronic music workers to leave and not return? are there both urban and regional inequities that influence migration? should arts, culture and night time policies place greater emphasis on retaining and regaining electronic music industry talent? could a stronger night-time infrastructure increase job opportunities and encourage creative and industry workers to stay and/or return to their home electronic music scenes? talent migration has been recognised as a commonality in creative, arts and cultural industries, as moving abroad can be an important career developer. the downside of this, however, is that for the most part, “the pilgrimage becomes a permanent migration” in creative communities (bennet 2010: 117). this facet is echoed by nikki, a dj, radio presenter and phd graduate based in brixton, london. initially, nikki left northern ireland at 18 years of age to study in newcastle and subsequently went to nottingham to complete her phd. she decided to leave for university to experience life beyond belfast and has since stayed in england as job prospects for both science and creative industries fair better in mainland uk. leaving ni for uni and joining university radio nottingham gave me a platform that i probably wouldn't have had if i stayed. winning various awards while at the station led to more opportunities and experiences that have undoubtedly helped my djing career, as well as getting my current 9-5 job at the bbc… i think leaving has allowed me to make more connections and great friends in the music world across various cities, including nottingham and london, but still feeling a part of belfast too (nikki 2022).[2] theorising creative migration let’s rewind back to the first decade of the millennium when an explosion of discourse emerged which highlighted the need for cities and regions to be more “creative” (verdich, 2010:129). jumping on this trend, policy makers on a global scale began to consider the benefits of social, human and creative capital to promote economic growth and attract people to cities as means of diversifying and developing the local economy. interestingly, city and regional planners moved away from strategies focused on developing infrastructure and attracting business, towards attracting the creative class, “through a focus on characteristics such as a 24/7 lifestyle, cultural amenity and ethnic diversity” (verdich 2010: 129-30). much of policymakers’ focus on creativity and attracting the creative class stems from the work of richard florida (2002; 2014). in sum, florida argues that economic development is driven by the creative economy, and for this expansion to be successful, cities must promote and attract the creative class [a social group of professional workers who work in jobs that require innovation and creativity, but who also consume cultural products avidly (verdich 2010: 129-30)] and how quality of place, or “the unique set of characteristics that define a place and make it attractive”, plays an important part in attracting creative talent (florida 2002: 231). florida’s claims loosely tie in with the experiences of tammy, a promoter and event manager currently based in deptford, london. tammy chose to leave northern ireland in the summer of 2021 for several reasons, but the strict covid-19 restrictions and restrictive licensing laws in northern ireland were the primary push factors towards migration: the lack of clubs that opened 'late' i always found quite limiting. especially when electronic music events to me always felt like a late-night activity. when you know clubs not that far away in england open so much later you really feel disadvantaged. the lack of diversity in clubs and musical genres didn’t help either … although i feel like we are starting to see a change in this in ni (tammy 2022).[3] florida’s ideologies have faced some scrutiny. in research on migration experiences of a group of artists who have moved to stockholm, sweden, borén and young (2013) consider the “usefulness” of analysing creative migration dynamics of the creative class. they argue that florida’s work continues to be of high influence even though both statistical and empirical data of migration patterns and reasons for migration are complex, they offer some support for his claims, but also do not totally confirm his work. the usefulness of florida’s theories for workers in electronic music in belfast and dublin will be explored in more detail in my thesis, but it is worth noting that creative and talent migration appears to be not fixed or given (as richard florida claims), rather it is complex and multifaceted, and determined by varying sociocultural, political, economic and geographic factors of cities, regions and nations. next steps despite choosing to live away from northern ireland, it is apparent that fahad, nikki and tammy still feel an important connection to electronic music in their home country, and they all agree that more could be achieved to nurture support for northern ireland’s creative people and cultural environments in electronic music. unanimous across the board was the view that northern ireland’s night time economy and culture was in need of policy intervention in the areas of licensing, transport, safety, night governance and management. fahad also pointed out how an increase in arts council funding could elevate workers’ pressures, and tammy noted how diverse club spaces, which attract people from different cultural backgrounds, has the potential to retain and regain electronic music talent. for nikki, affordability and career prospects in the creative industries in northern ireland would make it more attractive to live. nikki posed an important question considering the rising cost of living: “[h]ow can we build a vibrant creative night time scene if no one can afford to participate in it?”. nikki’s plan had always been to eventually return to belfast, but when the time comes, she is hopeful that it is more affordable, and more jobs will be available. i think there is probably a creative drain happening in ni (and arguably other parts of the uk and ireland too), it does feel like creative jobs are very london-centric. i can't see this being sustainable as people start to become priced out of london. better investment into the creative and cultural environment might see more people stay in ni or come back after university, or more people or agencies setting up a base in belfast (nikki 2022).[4] this article has briefly reflected on the aspects which influence creative migration in northern ireland. while this article did not cover every push and pull factors, lived experiences of those who work in electronic music demonstrate that regressive licensing laws, minimal creative and career opportunities, and lack of venue spaces are linked to creative drain in northern ireland. considering the experiences of northern irish talent exports in electronic music, is it time to consider a cultural ‘rebirth’ within arts, culture and the night time economy? author biography ciara power is a phd candidate in anthropology and ethnomusicology from queen’s university belfast. her project documents and connects experiences of electronic music in belfast and dublin. she is interested in learning about aspects that might affect, help, or limit electronic music scenes, particularly in the age of covid-19. ciara is also lead researcher with nightlife advocacy group, free the night, a campaign dedicated to creating safe, progressive and culturally rich nightlife environments in northern ireland. cpower14@qub.ac.uk references beine, michel., docquier, fréderic. and rapoport, hillel. (2008). “brain drain and human capital formation in developing countries: winners and losers”. the economic journal 118(528): 631–652. <https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0297.2008.02135.x>. bennett, dawn. 2010. “creative migration: a western australian case study of creative artists”. australian geographer 41(1): 117-28. <https://doi.org/10.1080/00049180903535626>. biglari, shirin., mayo, liam., beynaghi, ali., maknoon, reza., moztarzadeh, fathollah. and mozafari, masoud. 2022. “rethinking the brain drain: a framework to analyze the future behavior of complex socio-economic systems”. futures 135(1): 1-31. <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2021.102835>. borén, thomas. and young, craig. 2013. “the migration dynamics of the “creative class”: evidence from a study of artists in stockholm, sweden”. annals of the association of american geographers 103(1): 195-210. <https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2011.628263>. department for communities. 2022. the licensing and registration of clubs (amendment) act (northern ireland) 2021 guide. (belfast: social policy unit, 2022). <https://minutes3.belfastcity.gov.uk/documents/s94318/appendix%202%20-%20guide%20to%20act.pdf>, (accessed 5 september 2022). florida, richard. (2014). the rise of the creative class--revisited: revised and expanded. arizona: basic books. florida, richard. 2002. the rise of the creative class. new york: basic books. green, anne. 2018. “understanding the drivers of internal migration”. in internal migration in the developed world, ed. tony champion, thomas cooke and ian shuttleworth, 120–146. london: routledge.  khilji,shaista, e. andkeilson,brian.2014. “in search of global talent: is south asia ready?”. south asian journal of global business research,3(2):114–134. <https://doi.org/10.1108/sajgbr-05-2014-0033>. latukha, marina., shagalkina, mariia., mitskevich, ekaterina. and elena strogetskaya. 2022. “from brain drain to brain gain: the agenda for talent management in overcoming talent migration from emerging markets”. the international journal of human resource management 33(11): 2226-55. <https://doi.org/10.1080/09585192.2021.1949374>. mclaughlin, noel and mcloone, martin, 2012. rock and popular music in ireland: before and after u2. ireland: irish academic press. mclaughlin, noel. 2004. "bodies swayed to music: dance culture in ireland." irish studies review 12(1): 77-85. <https://doi.org/10.1080/0967088042000192130>. pivotal. retaining and regaining talent in northern ireland. belfast: pivotal: public policy forum, 2021. <https://www.pivotalppf.org/our-work/publications/16/retaining-and-regaining-talent>, (accessed 5 september 2022). power, ciara. forthcoming. “dancing to the same beats?: the role of people, policy and place in electronic music scenes in belfast and dublin”. ph.d. dissertation (anthropology), queen’s university belfast. reid, kurtis. 2022. “belfast needs to create more venues for electronic music fans, says ni-born dj”. belfast telegraph, 22 august. <https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/entertainment/music/belfast-needs-to-create-more-venues-for-electronic-music-fans-says-ni-born-dj-41930081.html>, (accessed 5 september 2022). shuttleworth, ian, foley, brian. and champion, tony. 2021. “internal migration in northern ireland: are people becoming more stuck in place?” population, space and place 27(7): 1-13. <https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2338>. verdich, madeleine. 2010. “creative migration? the attraction and retention of the ‘creative class’ in launceston, tasmania”. australian geographer 41(1): 129-40. <https://doi.org/10.1080/00049180903535642>. notes [1] fahad, email communication with the author (northern ireland), 16 august 2022. [2] nikki, email communication with the author (northern ireland), 22 august 2022. [3] tammy, email communication with the author (northern ireland), 11 august 2022. [4] nikki, email communication with the author (northern ireland), 22 august 2022. dancecult 14(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 14(1) 2022: 76–93 issn 1947-5403 ©2022 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net do you remember house? chicago’s queer of colour undergrounds micah e. salkind oxford: oxford university press, 2018 isbn: 9780190698416 (hardcover) rrp: £79 (hardcover) fabulous: the rise of the beautiful eccentric maddison moore yale: yale university press, 2018 isbn: 9780300204704 (hardcover) rrp: us$19.95 (hardcover) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.11> jacob mallinson bird university of oxford (uk) in do you remember house? chicago’s queer of colour undergrounds and fabulous: the rise of the beautiful eccentric, micah salkind and madison moore each outline a sensitive history of what it means to carve one’s own place in the world. whether embodying a fabulousness to counteract both the mundanity of everyday life and also systems of white supremacy and queerphobia, or creating a musical movement to empower queers of colour in a vast matrix of intergenerational connection, these authors chart historical and contemporaneous examples of queer tenacity, creativity and vibrancy. moore offers a history of “fabulousness”, from effete, flâneur dandies to voguing superstars, with constant recourse to the fashion, music, dance and performance cultures that make up a fabulous ideal; and salkind offers a history of chicago’s house scene, from its disco origins to present day, always shedding light on the ways in which queers of colour propelled this now global music. centring on mutual themes of race, queerness, temporality, glamour/fabulousness, space and, importantly, work/werk, moore and salkind depict the bittersweet utopia that fabulous embodiment can bring. both authors employ a poignant methodology, weaving at times complex theorising with oral histories, interviews, historical writing and autoethnographic vignettes. where moore’s theory of fabulousness emerges consistently across fabulous, dipping in and out reviews reviews 77 of historical context, contemporary interview and personal reverie, salkind’s text more forcefully demarcates its theoretical drive, and moves from a linear history of house music in its first part to contemporary autoethnographic work in the second. what is most impressive in salkind’s text are the ways in which they allow the music to begin their theorisations: whether the participatory discrepancies of the groove of house music leading to a theorisation of delayed pleasure, the non-teleological drive of the music reflecting intergenerational memory, or the remixed and sampled tracks offering a repertoire in motion being emblematic of shifting histories, salkind’s musico-social theory is enlightening throughout. the joy in both moore and salkind, though, is that the subject matter is clearly inextricably personal: salkind’s opening excitement of sneaking out as a 16-year-old to go to deep fix’s “where the wild things are” rave continues throughout the book, and reading moore’s work clearly signals an inalienable intimacy with the subject matter: the places, the people, the music, the dance, the clothing, namely the sheer fabulousness of queer, eccentric life. the temporality of such experiences is vitally important throughout each text and sits interestingly alongside current queer approaches. in conversation with queer theorists like jack halberstam (2005) and josé esteban muñoz (2009), whose theories of queer time are well known — as sitting outside of a heteronormative system, and of existing in an over-therainbow “not yet here” — moore and salkind add interesting new dimensions. for moore, while clearly agreeing that queer utopia is not yet here, as muñoz would have it, they also remind us of the intensely present aspect of queerness, and of fabulousness. they write: “fabulous queer utopia is about living in the present but carrying an alternative possibility, a certain future, and yanking it into the here and now” (71), elsewhere stating that “fierceness, fabulousness, and all other visions of spectacular appearance are about imagining space and carving it out for yourself in the here and now, not waiting for the right time to do so” (109). while muñoz and halberstam certainly argue for the making-present of queer utopia, notable in the liminal space of the nightclub, moore’s more quotidian fabulousness — dressing iconically down the street etc. — makes liminal de facto heteronormative space, affecting straight time and space, and rightly so. moore is also attendant to, following carolyn dinshaw’s work, the importance of “queer histories” and how they create “affective relations” between past and present (71). this is a key point for salkind, who consistently makes reference to the intergenerational power and impetus of house music. writing of “ancestral affiliations” (135) and the “intergenerational, cross-cultural mentorship” (176) that is so vital to house music’s growth, salkind spends considerable time on a crucial concept: neostalgia. neostalgia, the desire for a connection to the past that one may never have had personally to begin with, resonates beyond house music and to all queer experience. those of us who never lived through, say, the genesis of house, the ballroom scene, the aids pandemic, or the like, still feel that connection, a connection that is made manifest every time, for moore, we dress fabulously, or, for salkind, we lose ourselves in the music.1 salkind writes beautifully of the heady mixture of past and present in these experiences: the unctuous affectivity of bodies, sound, time and place is felt throughout their work. dancecult 14(1)78 the joys that come with fabulousness and house music aren’t without their struggles, though, and the labour of queer people and queers of colour is foregrounded throughout. moore’s analysis playfully riffs off a ludic linguistics of “work” versus “werk”, where “werk!”, the queer affirmation yelled at balls and drag bars (and sometimes even street corners), “is a type of aesthetic labour actually seen on the body, and it highlights the effort that goes into making memorable aesthetic moments that happen” (27). creating a look is work, and that work, to extend carol hanisch (1969), is always political. alok vaid-menon, trans non-binary activist and social media star, says in interview with moore: “what keeps me going is there’s a long tradition of people doing this work, and it is work. it’s not just getting ready. it’s actual, political work. it’s strategy, it’s planning, it’s pr, it’s how we talk about it. every walk i make is already a [protest] march” (51). and they are certainly right: to live fabulously is political, and to sashay down the street is a political act. this work, salkind contends, is as much political as it is academic, writing that “queer people of colour are always already theorising, even before a scholar enters the club” (16). this is politics, theoria and praxis, in action, a symbiotically lived politic that effuses these texts. what is most bittersweet, and expressed by both authors, is how often this work goes unnoticed or, worse, stolen. here the double-turn of queer fabulousness, in all its forms, emerges. “you can’t understand fabulousness unless you get that it emerges from trauma, duress, exclusion, exhaustion and depression, and that in some ways being fabulous is the only thing that can get us out of bed in the morning”, moore writes (21). it isn’t a halcyon, rose-tinted joie de vivre, but the only possible way of living. add to this salkind’s poignant discussions of “generational dissonance” and the decimation of queer communities through hiv and aids, and queer joy is soon seen to be wrapped, knotted even, with queer pain. this idea resonates with other queer theories, notably and touchingly eve kosofsky sedgwick’s (2003) notion of queer shame. for sedgwick, queer shame is not a by-product of being queer, but rather it is structurally integral to queerness: we are queer because of queer shame (see also halperin and traub 2009).. in a similar vein, moore and salkind don’t offer pain and trauma as contrasting elements of queer, fabulous joy— they see them as mutually constitutive. the points the authors raise above are significantly informed by, and indeed are only intelligible in their fullness by attention to, race and racism. while queer temporality, for example, may be one thing, moore reminds their reader that “brown people have to wait for things in a way that white folks don’t necessarily have to” (164), a poignant insertion of waiting into the radical nowness-cum-futurity of queer joy. salkind, similarly, writes extensively of the erasure of queers of colour who worked/werked the cultural labour of house music, and their exclusion from the spaces that were once made for them. clubs that purported inclusivity became “profoundly discouraging for black gay men in particular” (43), an example of exclusionary door policies that are still hideously contemporary. salkind offers a measured response to such issues; speaking of clubs that actively seek to promote inclusivity of all kinds, salkind offers the term “safer”, rather than safe, spaces, foregrounding the fact that “the work of creating a safety is never done” (186). throughout reviews 79 both texts, the doubly marginalised position of queers and women of colour is brought to the fore, and adds critical dimension to the werk undertaken. subtle moves like the above perhaps render salkind’s text more acutely critical than moore’s. throughout, salkind has a measured idea of utopia, one that is constantly in progress, and one that is malleable, multifarious. while moore argues, after muñoz, for a “critical idealism … a way of living that privileges hope and possibility instead of the suffocating anti-utopian negativism that is often de rigueur (186)”, sometimes this hope can be for a potentially untenable or uncritical utopia. i am thinking, for example, of the various calls to end gender that reappear throughout the book. at first reading, these desires to end gender seem justified, an end, surely, to the gender-based violence that befalls queer people on a daily basis. considering the call further, i begin to think of certain trans friends, and the conversations we have about their gender: about how they are fighting for their gender and their right to express their gender, a gender that is so deeply important to them. for many, gender is joyful — “gender euphoria”, as it’s often called — and while gender must be opened up, its negative effects dismantled, its violence pacified, to end gender altogether would deny many people an important structuring point of their identity: certainly, people must be safe not to have a gender, and we must work to make this a reality, but we must also be attentive to those for whom gender is critical. moore shows elsewhere that they are seemingly aware of this when they state for example that “not every queer person is a fabulous eccentric, not every queer person should be” (85). here the difficulties of utopian thinking arise; if queerness is undefinable multiplicity, surely utopia is also. importantly, moore consciously and effectively dismisses what one could imagine being a prevalent conservative or normative critique (and one that gets woefully bandied around the british press…): that fabulousness and the like is somehow frivolous, unimportant, or even selfishly narcissistic. to this moore argues that, rather than flippant dressing, “our real selves [are] the ones wearing make-up and high heels” (45), an aesthetics of self that echoes my favourite foucault quotation: “from the idea that the self is not given to us, i think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art” (foucault 1991: 351). parrying superficiality—in its negative affect—moore adds that “we care about surfaces” (45) and the body, reminiscent of important aspects of butlerian gender theory and spectrally unpicking a cartesian dualism. in other words, embodied, performative identity isn’t an afterthought, it’s the real deal. this is certainly present in salkind’s work also: for the djs and performers at queen!, dressing and makeup aren’t optional, but utterly integral. what is perhaps most special about these texts, and what captivates so much, is a kind of queer reading that they encourage, and how their subject matters, historical and contemporary, reverberate with their readers. reading both of these works, i felt—as i am sure many queer people will—the neostalgia of so many culture-shifting moments, the empathy and kinship of the joys and traumas of queer life, and my own memories of losing myself and finding myself in the sweaty underbellies of queer nightclubs. the texts mutually create a living archive of queer fabulousness; one that is very much needed, and one that sheds a light on the creative labour of communities too often overlooked. dancecult 14(1)80 notes 1 for interesting discussions of a different sort of neostalgia and desire for connection with queer past, see halperin 2007. references foucault, michel. 1991. “on the genealogy of ethics: an overview of work in progress”. in the foucault reader, ed. paul rabinow, 343-364. london: penguin books. halberstam, jack. 2005. in a queer time and place: transgender bodies, subcultural lives. new york: new york university press. halperin, david. 2007. what do gay men want? an essay on sex, risk, and subjectivity. michigan: the university of michigan press. halperin, david and valerie traub, ed. 2009. gay shame. chicago: university of chicago press. hanisch, carol. “the personal is political”. february 1969. <https://www.carolhanisch.org/chwritings/pip.html>, (accessed 8.10.22). muñoz, josé esteban. 2009. cruising utopia: the then and there of queer futurity. new york: new york university press. sedgwick, eve kosofsky. 2003. touching feeling: affect, pedagogy, performativity. durham: duke university press. https://www.carolhanisch.org/chwritings/pip.html reviews 81 the boy from medellín dir. matthew heineman usa: amazon original, 2020 <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13009186/> <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.12> ana maría díaz pinto university of california, davis (us) juan diego díaz university of california, davis (us) directed by academy award-nominated and emmy award-winning filmmaker matthew heineman, the boy from medellín (2020), portrays a week in the life of colombian reggaetón artist josé osorio balvin—better known by his stage name j balvin—in advance of the culminating concert of his colores 2019 tour in his hometown of medellín. although this is heineman’s first music-themed documentary, it is not his first biographical film tackling complex social issues in latin america, as cartel land (2015) attests. the boy from medellin, joins a catalogue of biographical documentary films portraying the tensions between public and private life of popular musicians such as jay-z (fade to the back, 2004), george harrison (living in the material world, 2011), residente (residente, 2017), anitta (vai anitta, 2018), taylor swift (miss americana, 2020), and billie eilish (billie eilish: the world’s a little blurry, 2021). as is often the case in these documentaries, heineman engages many complex aspects of j balvin’s life and work, of which we will focus on two: the development of the reggaetón scene in medellín, centering balvin’s position within it; and the negotiation between balvin’s public and private personas. from this second topic, we will elaborate on the artist’s engagement with the political realities he encountered in colombia, the role of social media in shaping relationships between artists and audiences, mental health issues, and the “return to the hood” and overcoming topoi. as in other latin american countries, reggaetón arrived in colombia through piracy and the exchange of cassettes and discs within the rap and dembow community in the late 1990s and early 2000s (navarro 2019). programing mostly puerto rican reggaetón at the beginning, radio stations and figures such as el gurú del sabor (fernando londoño) were crucial in disseminating and popularizing the genre within the country, paving the way for the emergence a local scene in medellín, which is now recognized as a reggaetón powerhouse (garcía 2013). it is within this scene that josé, as j balvin chose to call himself in this initial period, and other youths from medellín began to incursion into reggaetón composition and singing. with josé and groups such as 3 pesos and golpe a golpe, the medellín scene gradually grew, reaching international visibility for its high professional productions when a group of artists created the recording label palma productions in the https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13009186/ dancecult 14(1)82 early 2000s. one of the first goals of these artists was creating a sound and aesthetics distinct from its caribbean counterpart. they accomplished that by using romantic lyrics, melodic lyricism with influences from anglo-american pop, and chord progressions with inversions and extensions emulating the harmonic colors of jazz (franco 2018). if the puerto rican reggaetón of the first wave (i.e., from the early 2000s until 2010) was characterized by a robust percussive texture similar to that of dancehall, in combination with synthesizers playing the harmonic sequence i–vi–v, the colombian reggaetón of those days used more chordal variety, as we can hear in “obra de arte” an iconic reggaetón by fainal & shako, famously performed by balvin, that features the harmonic progression i7–iv7–vi7–v7. the first part of the documentary features a young j balvin consolidating his career as a reggaetón artist in medellín through dogged work. this narrative of struggle and selfimprovement is consistent with a hip-hop street aesthetics that centers and idealizes the artist’s humble origins. although reggaetón lyrics in the early stages in colombia featured the typical puerto rican malianteo and fronteo (i.e., texts based on crudeness, confrontation and hyper-masculinity), artists such as j balvin and later maluma, contributed to develop a distinct colombian approach called romantiqueo, or use of romantic lyrics. the documentary features various pieces in this tradition such as “ay vamos,” “en mi,” and “obra de arte,” which can be contrasted with the confrontational style that characterized early colombian productions such a “tiradera pa’l guru,” a piece first performed in 2003 by a collective of reggaetón artists called colombian flow.1 the main theme and source of tension in the film is balvin’s dilemma: one the one hand he has come to his home city to reconnect with his family, friends and fans, to visit the neighborhood where he grew up, and to perform what he called “the most important concert of his career” in medellín’s largest venue (a local football stadium). on the other, the volatile social situation in colombia, perceived by many as the result of president iván duque’s neoliberal policies, created the expectation among many of his fans that j balvin and other high-profile artists should intervene either by voicing criticism against the government or calling for the end to violence in the streets. initially balvin resists getting involved because he believes that artists are not to engage in politics, but through multiple interactions with producers, family members and fellow artists, he changes his mind. yet many thought his intervention (a call to the government to listen to the youth and to end violence in the streets during his final concert) was both late and lukewarm. while dealing with this conflict, various contradictions are revealed. balvin, who is shown arriving in medellín in his private jet, driving luxurious cars and living in a mansion with an army of servers (practically all women in the film are either balvin’s fans or part of his supporting team), tries to connect with people from poor neighborhoods by walking down the streets, shaking hands and taking selfies with them. it is no wonder that he struggled to connect with “the hood.” the neighborhood where he grew up, the humble origins that lend him authenticity within reggaetón discourse, is only visited, not inhabited. colombian society seems incomprehensible for him. reviews 83 balvin’s reluctance to speak up in the middle of colombia’s political upheaval is, nonetheless, atypical among fellow latin american reggaetón artists who are known for their ongoing political engagement within their communities. during the wave of youthled political and social revolts that swept colombia and other latin american countries at the end of 2019, many reggaetón musicians responded to their fans’ call for action. in puerto rico, for instance, the demands were directed against governor ricardo rosselló (incidentally, son of former governor pedro rosselló, who persecuted and banned the underground musicians who eventually developed reggaetón on the island during the mid-1990s), accused of corruption and homophobia. reggaetón artists such as bad bunny, ñengo flow, daddy yankee and residente marched in the streets along with thousands of protestors. likewise, in chile, the revolt against president sebastián piñera’s neoliberal agenda was supported by chilean and puerto rican reggaetón artists such as pablo chill-e, lizz, don omar, zion, nicky jam and others. surely balvin’s inaction in the context of this tradition of reggaetón political activism in latin america confused his colombian audiences and intensified their criticism of his silence. of course, balvin and other reggaetón artists are not the first popular musicians to have experienced pressure from their audiences to take political stances at critical junctures. ingrid monson (2007), for instance, documented the case of many black jazz musicians during the african american civil rights and black power movements in the us in the 1960s and 1970s, who felt morally pressured to take political action. philip auslander’s (2004 and 2006) tri-partite concept of musical personae, which includes the real person, the musical person, and the character (in songs, for example), is useful to understand the complex interaction of public and private aspects of the life these performers. in heineman’s documentary, balvin appears as a professional and well-established musician ( j balvin) with a fragile real human behind the scenes ( josé). his musical personae is that of a dreamer cangri (influential person in reggaetón slang), enriched by the nuances from the fictional characters described or alluded to in his songs. for instance, in introspective scenes, we hear songs like “7 de mayo” whose lyrics reinforce the image of a sensitive man who acknowledges his humble origins and is committed to supporting up and coming artists. other characters in balvin’s songs, not shown in the documentary, include the promiscuous macho, explicit in “si tu novio te deja sola” and “mojaita.” heineman addresses the artist’s inner complexity by including extended sections of j balvin’s concerts, images of josé with his spiritual guide and medical team, and scenes of balvin incarnating the cangri character, for example when he receives phone messages from artists such as will.i.am prior to his concert. while these three aspects of his musical personae are identifiable at different points of the film, it is difficult to draw clean boundaries among them. at the climax of the final concert and its aftermath, the narrative of the sensitive, crisis-ridden, conflicted artist gives way to a larger story of overcoming. one prominent aspect that amplifies balvin’s conflict is social media communication. with the advent of social media platforms such as twitter, tiktok and instagram, many fans have now the opportunity to interact with their favorite musicians and with fellow dancecult 14(1)84 fans. with artists constantly posting both professional and personal information, these platforms have created a sense of closeness between musicians and audiences that did not exist before when interactions where limited to live concerts or reading/watching the news and thus more purely parasocial. artists have recognized that this virtual closeness is beneficial to promote their careers and to understand their fans’ desires. one aspect of this perceived closeness is that many audiences feel that artists are part of their communities and thus should be sensitive and committed to their causes and tribulations. this issue is explicitly portrayed in the documentary. it is through social media that j balvin learns about the reactions of his fans to the strikes in medellín and to the assassination of young student dylan cruz by the colombian police. more importantly, he reads and hears their louder and louder calls for him to intervene through these platforms. at a dramatic point he takes the bold decision of meeting one of his critics (local rapper mañas ru-fino), all arranged through social media. we’ll let readers watch the documentary to learn how two contemporary musicians from the same city negotiate their opposing views on the artist’s commitment to social justice. in a vivid manner, the boy from medellín, thus engages the real challenges that artists face now that social media functions as a public forum. the narrative of j balvin’s “return to the hood” proposed in this documentary is therefore problematic but should not be judged as insensitive or trivializing. the complex political situation that j balvin encountered in colombia, intensified by social media activity, and expectations of political involvement on his part, had a real toll on josé’s mental health. the efforts that he and his team made to deal with the conflict and to put on a successful performance were enormous. his intentions to connect with the people he grew up with seem genuine on the screen despite his understandable distance from their daily experience and his detached attitude. the “return to the hood” and overcoming narratives served heineman to weave these threads of balvin’s experience into the fabric of his musical personae. at the same time, the two narratives cemented balvin’s position as a politically outspoken latin american reggaetón artist: at the concert, which represents the overcoming, balvin joins fellow reggaetón musicians from the region in voicing his concern for social justice. in the end, the relationship between balvin and his audience is simultaneously strained and reinforced. the singer uses the streets of medellín as an extension of the scenic space, but those streets are no longer known in depth; the city may have been his place of humble origins but is now only partially accessible from his position of fame. the boy from medellín is therefore an obligatory watch for those interested in reggaetón culture, its aesthetics, politics, narratives, dynamics of local production and popularization, the struggles of the real person behind the artist, the blurred boundaries that social media creates between audiences and artists, and the development of reggaetón scenes in latin american cities in general, and in medellín in particular. the five-episode tv documentary series flow importado, ritmo pegado (2018), which documents the rise to fame of key reggaetón figures from medellín, including j balvin himself, offers important historical context to heineman’s film. although the boy from medellin stands on its own, readers will gain a deeper understanding of the stories of j balvin and the other reggaetón artists reviews 85 shown in the film as well as their audiences’ passion for the genre, from watching the tv series beforehand. the boy from medellín will not disappoint even those purely interested in reggaetón aesthetics; the director devoted about ten minutes to the final concert, a fortunate decision that allows us to appreciate balvin’s artistic craft in all its splendor. notes 1 this performance of “tiradera pa’l gurú” can be watched here: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yotgsfifqo0>. references auslander, philip. 2004. “performance analysis and popular music: a manifesto”. contemporary theater review 14(1): 1-13. auslander, philip. 2006. “musical personae”. the drama review 50(1): 100-119. garcía, julio. 2013. “del tango al reggaetón: medellín, capital de los contrastes musicales.” bbc news mundo , 17 october. <https://www.bbc.com/mundo/ noticias/2013/11/131017_cultura_medellin_capital_musical_colombia_jgc>. monson, ingrid. 2007. freedom sounds: civil rights call out to jazz and africa. oxford: oxford university press. navarro, fernando. 2019. “medellín, la fábrica del reggaetón”. el país, 30 november. <https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/11/26/eps/1574784498_877729.html>. filmography franco, andrés. 2018. flow importado, ritmo pegado. medellín: telemedellín. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yotgsfifqo0 https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias/2013/11/131017_cultura_medellin_capital_musical_colombia_jgc https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias/2013/11/131017_cultura_medellin_capital_musical_colombia_jgc https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/11/26/eps/1574784498_877729.html dancecult 14(1)86 explosions in the mind: composing psychedelic sounds and visualisations jonathan weinel singapore: palgrave macmillan, 2021 isbn: 9789811640544 (hardcover), 9789811640551 (ebook) rrp: £89.99 (hardcover), £71.50 (ebook) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.13> dave payling staffordshire university (uk) explosions in the mind (eitm) is part of the palgrave studies in sound series, exploring sonic and audio-visual themes. it is weinel’s second book, and can be read as a companion to his earlier inner sound: altered states of consciousness in electronic music and audiovisual media (weinel, 2018). inner sound explores altered states of consciousness (ascs) in audio-visual media from a theoretical perspective, and contextualises it with related work, whereas eitm focusses squarely on weinel’s own praxis, originating from his phd studies and extended to the present day. the book is richly illustrated with many full colour images and includes supplementary materials hosted online by the publisher, comprising audio and video samples and working software apps for experimenting with the techniques discussed in the book. weinel frames his work around altered states of consciousness, specifically psychedelic experiences and how they can be interpreted in sound and vision. psychedelic theories such as leary’s “seven levels of energy consciousness” (1998), are introduced, in this case explaining how it has influenced the design of surfer stem (2010); weinel’s audio composition discussed in chapter 2. with topics ranging from digital performance through to painting and direct animation techniques, an extensive range of artistic disciplines are represented. each chapter commences with personal anecdotes revealing the nature of the content ahead and are then interwoven with informative references to popular culture and recollections of weinel’s experiences. after these introductory notes there follows a detailed examination of the individual artworks themselves. as an example, cenote sagrado (2014), is one of weinel’s audio-visual compositions inspired by his visit to a ritualistic sacrifice centre, the sacred cenote in mexico. after discussing its historical significance the technical realisation of the composition itself is detailed: in this case direct animation on film stock and rhythmic hardware sound synthesis. a recurring compositional technique is also included here: the piece is structured to emulate the onset, plateau and termination phases that one might experience in a psychedelic trip, and this determines the audio-visual qualities in each section. from a dance music perspective, eitm explores some of the more niche, and often more sonically “harder”, edm genres including flashcore—a form of speedcore techno with elements of electroacoustic music—hard trance, acid techno and hardcore rave music. weinel incorporates some of these edm styles into his electroacoustic compositions, surfer reviews 87 stem using elements from dubstep for example. vaporwave is another genre weinel uses, taking a plunderphonics approach to 1980s and 1990s audio trivia sample loops to create an immersive nostalgia trip in his cyberdream (2019) virtual reality experience. these genres are generally touched on quite briefly but there is a lot of material to cover, and sound is only one component of the many multimedia productions on show here. eitm introduces weinel’s creative works chronologically with respect to their date of creation, and is sequenced to cover the categories of electroacoustic composition, real-time performance, audio-visual composition, interactive projects, vj performance and virtual reality experiences, mirroring weinel’s artistic journey. overall, it is an engaging read and will be of interest to artists, practitioners and academics from the disciplines of electronic music, creative coding, djing and vjing, composition, performance and related fields. it is highly relevant to those utilising a practise-based approach to research where this can lead to insights into methods for expanding an artist’s creative repertoire. a practise-based approach to research is continually rising in popularity across a range of creative disciplines and this volume will provide a useful reference for others to follow. the frameworks provided in the concluding chapter 8 are particularly indicative and useful in this respect. introduced here are three design frameworks, specifically: psychedelic journeys in sound, asc simulations and synaesthetic visualisations of sound, which have been formulated through practise and can be implemented by others desiring to create asc inspired artworks. the conclusion also discusses how the covid-19 pandemic has influenced the development of virtual clubs and dance events incentivising the shift to digital and online experiences, providing motivation and increased relevance for continued study. references leary, timothy. 1998. the politics of ecstasy. berkeley, california: ronin. weinel, jonathan. 2018. inner sound: altered states of consciousness in electronic music and audiovisual media. oxford, uk: oxford university press. weinel, jonathan. 2019. “cyberdream vr: visualizing rave music and vaporwave in virtual reality”. in proceedings of the 14th international audio mostly conference: a journey in sound, 277–81. new york, usa: association for computing machinery. <https://doi.org/10.1145/3356590.3356637>. discography weinel, jonathan. 2010. entoptic phenomena ep. 2010. (mp3): entopic. <https://www.discogs.com/release/2332275-jon-weinel-entoptic-phenomena-ep>. filmography weinel, jonathan. 2014. cenote sagrado. uk. <https://vimeo.com/107164661>. https://doi.org/10.1145/3356590.3356637 https://www.discogs.com/release/2332275-jon-weinel-entoptic-phenomena-ep https://vimeo.com/107164661 dancecult 14(1)88 the discourse community of electronic dance music anita jóri bielefeld: transcript verlag, 2022 isbn: 9783837657586 (paperback) rrp: $45.90 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.14> andrew whelan university of wollongong (australia) the discourse community of electronic dance music is a book about how people communicate about electronic dance music online. it is an important contribution to edmc and online interaction research for two reasons. firstly, it develops a methodological framework for engaging with how people talk about musical phenomena online, how to evaluate these “discourse communities” and what coheres them. secondly, the book therefore poses crucial, albeit largely tacit questions to the field of popular music studies broadly, and the field of edmc research in particular: how do people talk about music and what should researchers do about that, which is to say, what is their method of analysis? how is that method justified and what is scalable or portable about it? jóri’s framework is operationalised across three language domains. respectively, these are structure and meaning (e.g. insider terminology, compensatory strategies such as “likes” and emojis and identity markers such as “i” and “we”); interaction management (e.g. hierarchical dynamics in terms of frequency of contributions and extent of interaction in terms of response rates); and social phenomena (linguistic expressions of friendship and community, tokens of mutual interest etc.). as chapter one elucidates, jóri’s framework draws on susan herring’s canonical work on computer-mediated discourse analysis (2004). she directs this in pursuit of what, following john swales, she calls “discourse communities”, a heuristic analogous to “virtual scenes” (38-9), intended to capture the interpersonal networks and exchanges occurring at the research sites. these sites are: the web forums we are the music makers and gearspace (devoted to aphex twin and music production technology respectively); the facebook groups tb-303 owners club and italo disco maniacs; the “classic” websites, vintage synth explorer and resident advisor; and the blogs matrixsynth, female:pressure tumblr and little white earbuds. the second chapter contains a thorough discussion of discourse-related research methods, including corpus-based and multimodal discourse analyses and cognate approaches. reviews 89 linguistic anthropology does not get a mention, although conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis—two closely linked sociological approaches—are both discussed and incorporated. the book also draws on research on youth culture, popular music and edmc in english, german and hungarian, and is thus valuable as an interdisciplinary (and even intercultural) dialogue and a gateway to further research. although some of the discourse and method material can be technical—and here an index would have been helpful—jóri does not presuppose technical knowledge on the reader’s part, and most technical matters are explained in accessible prose. one consequential term that is not defined at the point of its introduction though is “genre”. first appearing in the literature review, and germane to the discussion of “community” as a discursive phenomenon, “genre” can be confusing to those unfamiliar with its application in linguistics (perhaps especially for readers anticipating the musical use of that term). genre is formulated here as an event e.g., a news report, or a presidential press conference (75). another term, upon which the project is predicated, is “community” (71-73). the book raises important questions about what an online social group is and how to measure it through its language use, not all of which it sets out to address. the term “community” is not problematised. this isn’t necessarily a shortcoming: “community” sometimes functions as a sort of placeholder, indexing empirically observable phenomena. the book is agnostic on the content of “community” or what it might entail politically (with the important caveat that jóri is direct about the gendered language use in her data, and about the broader exclusionary patterns in edmc). but jóri still has to develop tools to assess the extent and content, as it were, of group cohesion. one way of doing this is by reference to the use of “we” as an indicator of community (119, 125, 137, 147). the assumptions underlying the idea that “we” would stand in this way are not explicated. one can imagine situations where there is community sentiment, but people do not use “we”, and the converse, where “we” is abused by powerful figures seeking to impose the appearance of consensus. ultimately (and going by her account of the data, rightly), jóri determines “we” is of limited efficacy as an indicator and suggests it be abandoned (174). what are the implications of this? is it telling us something about collective identity, or is it telling us something about communication? if the latter, is it about mediation, or is it about communicative strategy? jóri does not speculate on these questions, but they help to show how, by engaging so thoroughly with online data, she pushes the parameters of cmda and similar corpus-oriented approaches as far as they will go. one important aspect of the book is how it works across different online platforms: forums, blogs and so on, each with distinct affordances. as jóri acknowledges, there is a relationship between platform design and community structure. for example, some of the limited interaction on the matrixsynth blog, despite its popularity, may be attributable to the matrixsynth closed facebook group (164). “community”, such as could be discerned by use of “we”, might therefore not map neatly onto a corpus assembled at a single site, because gertrude stein’s adage, “there is no there there” (1937: 17), still applies to the internet. dancecult 14(1)90 those who are present are always also in at least one other place. this does not undermine the analysis, but it does invite methodological reflection about scope, site and corpus. any analysis will have self-defined limits. as jóri shows, the strength of a corpus approach itself requires sensitivity in a context of platform porosity. the classification scheme jóri applies provides a picture of the shape of the relationships inside the group and how they are conducted. it can be used to measure the scale, frequency and intensity (the “temperature”) of social interaction. this enables comparative work, but it also means that the local ethnographic flavour comes from (naturally occurring) terminology, rather than multi-turn sequences evidencing how participants negotiate meaning and their respective positions. for example, in the analysis of the italo disco facebook group, jóri lists some of the adjectives used to describe italo tracks, including “bomb, very hot, very sophisticated, obscure girl of italo, superfluous, cheap, wonderful, great, hot girl of italo, such a beauty, bumped up, awesome crasher, nice, lovely, extremely rare, beautiful” (154). the lingua franca is presumably english, though jóri points out that familiarity with the italian language is regarded positively within the group. the gender politics of these adjectives are evident. jóri suggests that “bomb” is so gendered, and though we know (from tom jones) that there can be a “sexbomb”, i am not sure about this: bomba in italian seems more along the lines of “sensational”. local context matters. the same connotation to “bomb” would not extend—to me at least—to say, rage against the machine’s “bombtrack”, or the radio bomb drum ‘n’ bass project, where we might instead say “bomb” signifies fantasies of hypermasculinity. jóri attributes this gendered use of language to the historical conjuncture in which italo disco rose to prominence, along with the majority male participants in the group. this book—and the forms of analysis which jóri conducts so adroitly in it—is most compelling where it touches on much bigger and broader preoccupations in contemporary sociocultural research. the historical backdrop of italo and contemporary language use around it are one example of this; that is, that the milieu in which italo disco emerged continues to influence how italo is described. another important context, raised several times in the book, is that of nostalgia (131, 152, 156). articulating local language practices to much broader cultural concerns both validates the methodology and serves to pinpoint the cultural phenomena so identified. this becomes riveting at the points where music appears to shape language use, as when jóri observes regarding italo disco that [t]he characteristics of the music genre—expresses romanticism, emotions, affections, and sexuality—highly influenced the characteristics of the discourse … the group’s language use … showed an interesting tendency of ‘emotionally driven’ discourse (161). we cannot know from the data, and jóri does not conjecture on what mechanisms might “shift” emotional registers from music to discourse about it. nonetheless, this discussion of the interplay between language use and music—or the nature of multimodal interaction—is reviews 91 deeply significant, and resonates with a lot of preoccupations in the literature about popular music, and perhaps especially about edmc given its sometimes tangential orientation to lyrical meaning. similarly, the perennial questions about method and how to access, or how people report on, musical experiences are cast in fresh light by the work jóri conducts here. jóri’s book commands attention because of how it generates these kinds of insights, especially relative to more established music research methods (music criticism, interviews, fieldwork etc.). the discourse community of electronic dance music is methodologically rigorous, rich in empirical detail and speaks to much bigger debates in the scholarship on popular music and edmc. references herring, susan c. 2004. “computer-mediated discourse analysis: an approach to researching online behavior.” in designing for virtual communities in the service of learning, ed. sasha barab, rob kling and james h. gray, 338–376. cambridge: cambridge university press. <https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511805080.016>. stein, gertrude. 1937. everybody’s autobiography. new york, random house. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511805080.016 dancecult 14(1)92 dancefloor-driven literature: the rave scene in fiction simon a. morrison london: bloomsbury, 2021 isbn: 9781501389924 (paperback) rrp: £28.99 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.15> toby young guildhall school of music and drama (uk) as reviews editor of dancecult, one of the delights of my role has been discovering the wealth of ways that filmmakers around the world depict, interpret and critique electronic dance music culture through an artistic lens. until encountering simon morrison’s excellent book on dancefloor-driven literature i perhaps had not given the same credence to novelists for going beyond simple descriptions of club cultures, but as this delightful foray into the entangled world of prose and beats demonstrates clearly and effectively, fiction has produced as much considered and vibrant commentary on edmc as film, if not more. in his book, morrison sets out to explore this entanglement by mobilising sociocultural knowledge around the uk rave scene in the 1990s as a lens through which to analyse literary texts. he draws on three central uses of edm in fiction—figurative, mechanical and diegetic—as “ways in” to the texts, unpicking the multiple ways that authors choose to (re) present the sonic and haptic world of rave both in and through text. at its heart there are some central questions (or even tensions) which need resolving: “how might authors write about something so otherworldly as a nightclub scene? how might they write lucidly and fluidly about the rigid metronomic beat of electronic music? … [and how] might they accurately recount in fixed symbols the drifting, hallucinatory effects of a drug experience?” (61). morrison chooses to answer these rigorously and strategically by moving from the broad to the specific. beginning with the broad, the first half of the book (chapters 1-5) employs sub/club-cultural theories as points of disciplinary grounding to help define the terms and contexts at play. whilst a lot of this material is well-trodden in edmc scholarship, morrison presents it with an admirable deftness, and as he starts to introduce elements of literary theory in chapter 5, the more unique and interesting qualities of this work begins to reveal itself. for me though, it is in the second half of the book (chapters 6-9)—the literary case studies—that the book really comes into its own. beginning with irvine welsh’s seminal ecstasy (1996), a vivid picture emerges of authors not so much compelled to recreate or even aesthetically elevate the subterranean deviance of clubspace, as to revel in the messiness of it; to wallow in the rich, sticky potential of all those chaotic signifiers of excess and abandon and use this potential to radically redefine the literary canon. what comes across clearly from morrison’s writing is the richness and playfulness with which his case study authors both guide us, and are themselves guide by, the visceral reviews 93 expressionism of rave and club spaces; intertwining vivid descriptions of these hedonistic spaces with nuanced and layered narrative approaches that capture of even mimic the non-hierarchical and anti-teleological anarchy of repetitive beats. one beautiful example morrison shares is of jeff noon’s needle in the groove (1999) and the way his prose style allows the complexity and repetition of the music to almost infect his language, creating textures of language—a liquid dub poetics, if you will— that cleverly reflects the repeating, layering, sampling and splicing of sonic material. another interesting theme that emerges is the complex dependency on drug-taking imagery as a shorthand for depictions of power, hedonism and release. it is interesting how many of the novels that morrison discusses employ the postmodern storytelling strategies of “classic” partying writers (think the hazy multiplicities of william burroughs or the brutal clash between fact and fiction in hunter s. thompson) to invoke the paradoxical vigour and fragility of drug-taking. we see this tendency particularly clearly in morrison’s third case study on nicholas blincoe, whose chaotic fictional ethnography portray the acid delirium admirably. there’s something more general about technology and control in dance spaces that is strongly hinted at here, but perhaps not fully unpacked. i was reminded of the wonderful moment in china miéville’s bizarre urban fantasy king rat (1998)—a reimagination of the pied piper fairytale set in london’s breakbeat and dnb scene, not included by morrison—where the protagonist discovers that instead of merely spinning records, a dat with multiple layered flute samples loaded onto it is much more effective for controlling everyone in the club. omissions aside—i’d also want to include rainald goetz’s stunning avant garde novella rave (1998) here—dancefloor-driven literature is wonderful book, filled with both academic richness and personal joy. a particular strength of this book is morrison’s ability to dance between literary theory, thick description, journalistic interviews and unabashed connoisseurship with elegance and ease. intermediality, rather than translation, is at the heart of morrison’s approach, and where a lesser writer might have tried to pin the literature down into rigid theoretical frameworks and taxonomies, we are left with a beautiful sense of aesthetic awe and openness that has more than inspired me to go and read more fiction. highly recommended. dancecult 15(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 15(1) 2023: 113–131 issn 1947-5403 ©2023 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net raving mckenzie wark durham: duke university press, 2023. isbn: 978-1-4780-1938-1 rrp: $15.95 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.12> kim feser free university of berlin (germany) the cover design is reminiscent of a notebook: handwritten “practices / raving / mckenzie wark” on a monochrome pink background. the small book is published in the practices series alongside the titles fly-fishing, juggling, and running (tomorrowing has only been announced so far, which somehow seems appropriate). the series’ website states that the volumes shall “reveal the pleasures of losing oneself in doing anything that holds sway over us, no matter how common or minor it might seem” (duke university press n.d.). how does raving fit into this randomly appearing list of profane desubjectifying practices? raving unfolds in both detailed intimate as well as abstract theoretical passages, whereby these perspectives repeatedly transform into each other. mckenzie wark writes in the styles of autofiction (“these things did not happen. the person to whom they did not happen is me” [4]) and autotheory (“to gather concepts from situations” [4]). personal story fragments about raving and its entanglement with other practices—particularly social belonging, gender transition, drug use, sex and writing in bed—merge with political-theoretical thoughts on related aspects of queerness, blackness, gentrification, commodification and club culture. six chapters, partly based on earlier published texts and lectures/performances, are written in this oscillating style. they are supplemented by a “glossary of concepts” (91–94), condensed paragraphs on key terms used throughout the book, including in chapter titles. the concepts are defined as “impersonal characters in the autotheory text” (93) and shall function as “resonant abstractions” (93). in addition to these impersonal characters, the book is populated by many people known by name or anonymised, often by single capital letters. some of them are also referenced in footnotes, bibliography and notes on a collection of colour photos showing scenes from raves, festivals and clubs. most of the personal situations described in the book happened recently in brooklyn, new york. additionally, there are some memories of the 1990s (including “edward” [43], who plays a crucial role in wark’s [2020] previous autofictional/autotheoretical book reverse cowgirl). reviews https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.12 dancecult 15(1)114 the author mentions that she was asked to write a book for the series, and therefore proposed “raving” (47). that seems to be an obvious choice: she calls herself a raver but also clarifies that her main activity is writing and lecturing. the tension between these practices is addressed in the book. at raves, the author of raving avoids students and is avoided by them (61). she is also aware that her book might be part of “style extraction” (56, 94) if it commodifies gestures and information that emerged from raves. such phenomena of contemporary capitalism are fundamentally criticised in wark’s work, from a hacker manifesto (2004) to capital is dead: is this something worse? (2019). in raving, mckenzie wark, respectively the autofictional/autotheoretical first person writer, situates herself specifically: “the point of view will be that of this middle-aged, middle-class, white transsexual dance freak” (6). these attributes are addressed at various explicit, implicit and conceptual levels. she has the urge to dance excessively in order to achieve a state of bodily experience beyond normative gender-specific attributions and thoughts. consuming drugs, mostly ketamine, seems to help: “dancing and k make it all go away!” (42) that’s how she wants to reach her goal: “a dissociative time, a transsexual time, a ketamine time” (30). this “k-time”, an immanent and not utopian temporality (no time for “tomorrowing”), is one of the book’s central concepts (92). it refers to the so called “k-hole” (30), a dissociative hallucinatory state after taking ketamine. also, it’s situated in a critical discussion with mark fisher’s (aka “k-punk”) thoughts on “acid communism”. in collective “k-time” the presence of “ketamine femmunism” (30) can be experienced, as wark writes in the “ketamine femmunism” chapter (based on an online lecture on fisher for the berlin haus der kulturen der welt [house of world cultures]). “femmunism” (92) is described as a collective state where dominant masculinity is absent and obsolete. wark’s cautious remark that femmunism “might mingle” with blackness (94), almost sounds manifesto-like given her general reluctance to embrace hopeful scenarios. wark also describes how she prepares herself before going out. how she packs her silver rave bag, how she meets lovers and close friends. how several circles of “rave friends” interact via social media and share information about upcoming events. how she enters the dance floor by herself or with others. but ravers sometimes are annoyed by stereotypical “coworkers” (91) who lack the intense desire for “k-time”, because their participation in the rave is subordinate to their work lives. worse are the harassing “punishers”, mostly “straight, white, cis men” (92), who only attend raves for spectacle purposes. the mix of the crowd is regulated by door policy which is, along with spatial design and sound, an essential aspect of rave as a “constructed situation” (93). due to the praxis of “reparative discrimination” (93) people “who need it most” (93) and “whose style is being extracted” (94) are given priority admission. wark mentions that she and her transsexual friends often receive free entry or head to the locations which they can easily access. depending on venues this works specifically for black people. wark emphasises the background of the entire constellation in this regard: “the rave, techno, nightlife, surround: they’re all, among other things, gifts of blackness” (9). reviews 115 given the social dynamics, risks, and potentials that mckenzie wark discusses, raving seems fundamentally different from the more individually defined practices fly-fishing, juggling and running—if that’s not a completely biased perspective of a review for a journal of electronic dance music culture. but what is the book’s contribution to a critical discourse on electronic dance music culture? the one-word title, which is due to the book series practices, can be misleading. the book is neither a basic introduction to the practice of raving, nor a study of participant observation. as indeed the author points out, it combines a very subjective autofictional perspective with an exuberant creation of concepts. this seems inspired particularly by deleuze/guattari, kathy acker (see wark [2021]) and kodwo eshun (whose praise of raving is quoted on the back cover). the oscillation between fiction around the character “mckenzie wark” and meaningful conceptualization, strengthened not least by the “big name” the author has made for herself through her previous relevant publications, seems to evoke rather enthusiastic approval or possibly sceptical rejection. a productive-critical reading attitude is possible, however, if the relationship between the formation of concepts and the situations described is investigated immanently. the book itself invites to read between the lines, to be aware of subliminal counterpoints or barely noticeable voices. to name some aspects: the brief stories and details about raves and club culture are predominantly set in brooklyn / new york. they are shaped by the specific conditions of gentrification and “style extraction”, the presence of coworkers and, not least, academics. in view of locally different conditions of underground and capitalization, of confining “normal” lifestyles and resistant practices, of possible contrasts between rural and urban lifestyles, the nature and goals of raves might also have to be accentuated differently. also, the book is permeated by the theme of age, without this being explicitly reflected in the concepts: “it’s not always easy, being a middle-aged, clockable transsexual raver” (1, see 42, 57). based on this initial statement, and against the background of a reference to a club event for her 60th birthday (88), wark’s discomfort and inner struggle with the demands of beauty and youthfulness become apparent. in general, health issues seem to play a role only at the descriptive level. physical care and mutual awareness are mentioned, but there are several instances of risky drug use, including a fatal ghb overdose (73). when it comes to inventing expressions for key concepts, however, a euphoric ketamine hype dominates. references duke university press. n.d. practices. <https://www.dukeupress.edu/series/practices>, (accessed 17 october 2023). wark, mckenzie. 2004. a hacker manifesto. cambridge: stanford university press. wark, mckenzie. 2019. capital is dead: is this something worse?. new york: verso books. wark, mckenzie. 2020. reverse cowgirl. los angeles: semiotext(e). wark, mckenzie. 2021. philosophy for spiders: on the low theory of kathy acker. durham: duke university press. dancecult 15(1)116 spectacle, fashion and the dancing experience in britain, 1960–1990 jon stratton london: palgrave macmillan, 2022. isbn: 978-3-031-09011-0 rrp: €117.69 (hardcover), €93.08 (ebook) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.13> tara hill university of hamburg (germany) telling the whole history of dance music in a book seems like no mean feat. so even if jon stratton’s spectacle, fashion and the dancing experience in britain, 1960–1990 limits itself to the usually labelled “crucial years” of the development of postmodern youth culture—or at least its roots after rock‘n’roll restarted the 1950s youngsters’ life with a mixture of middle class romance and rebelliousness—covering all three decades of the dance movement comes across as an ambitious project. yet reading stratton’s succinct account still comes across as curiously pleasing read. as an almost lexical text, ticking the boxes of the whos, the whens, the wheres and the whys, it caters to a college freshman or an introductory youth culture class just as well as to the senior pop culture zine editor or sophomore style blogger. providing an overview of the subculture styles which—overtly or covertly, overground or underground—formed the face of a generation, or more important: its image. it performs kind of a double stunt: it’s not classic subculture research, stratton claims, which can explain what distinguishes these new movements, but more its relation to a politics of aesthetics and its relation to the “wilder” conceptual brother, a politics of the ecstatic. therefore, the theoretical framework of the book centres around guy debord’s (1967) situationist movement and especially its centrepiece society of the spectacle (la société du spectacle). herein, the cultural turn after the 1960s, sort of a “technicolour” explosion of creativity after the black and white movie era (you could similarly compare it to the evolution from silent to spoken movies) was performed by the rise of two key factors: fashion and dancing. in the 1980s, in the increasingly seamless society of the spectacle, a lifeworld was formed which was commodified, mediated by colour television and other media, though not yet by computers; an experiential world where surveillance was becoming normalised and increasingly extensive. clubs, with their rituals for entry, and their electronic dance music and lighting often linked to the beat, seemed like an alternative world, indeed a temporary autonomous zone (taz). for many, dancing along with others in the apparently safe space of a club appeared to offer escape and existential meaning, ecstasy, in an alienated reality. the dj became the shamanic guide taking the dancers through this experience. https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.13 reviews 117 while the first chapter tells of the rise of the dj with records starting to replace live music sessions and ballrooms where standard dances in couples became discos and clubs, twist was the first dance introducing heavy pelvic movements from african americans to the uk. the second chapter sets the scene with the beatles hysteria, the dave clarke five and introduces the genre of “stomp”—proving the brits needed some help with the transition from partner dances to solo and improvisational, as well as more and more ecstatic dancing. as the rolling stones introduced african drumming in their (up to this day) legendary live shows, the phenomenal gary glitter turned into the icon of the emerging glam rock scene. while middle class kids learnt how to sit down to listen to prog rock—genesis, yes and king crimson—like their parents might have listened to a classic record or chamber music with fully but passively immersing themselves into the quadrophonic and stereophonic sound spectacular of the 1970s, glam rock came to life with cult bandleader marc bolan, a.k.a. the legendary t-rex, and took to a crowd that loved extravagant outfits, more over the top than the hippies ever were, and huge showmanship. david bowie came up next and started his own, very influential ziggy stardust cult, a persona well-loved into the early 1980s (chapter 4 and 5). the new romantics, stratton explains, who flocked into the nightlife at that time weren’t so much a scene of their own, but a remnant of early club culture. their heavy focus on styling and outfit can be traced back to saint martin’s, the london art school. androgyny and heavy make-up, theatrics and gender role reversal were established in mainstream culture, through hit projects like ultravox. the last chapter deals with the now pretty much established bond between rave culture and the temporary autonomous zone. it starts off tracing the often-overlooked influence new york disco and the early club scene had on the uk warehouse and later acid house movement. compared to the watering holes of past decades, david mancuso’s loft and the paradise garage, which spawned the first superstar technoshaman dj, larry levan, did not sell alcohol but focused on an impeccable living room and after hour spot with psychedelics and/or designer drugs. this encouraged ecstatic dancing through the night: it was the quality of immersion that made dancing at the loft and paradise garage so special. uk sound engineers and clubs were developing similar systems. for example, tony andrews, the co-founder of the sound system company, specialising in speakers, funktion-one, and who has been designing speakers since the late 1960s, comments: “when [a sound system] is good, it puts you into a meditative state.” (rothlein 2014) funktion-one systems have been installed in many of the most highly regarded clubs such as space on ibiza and berghain in berlin. it is immersion that heightens the possibility of the ecstatic experience. here we have the technological basis for the transformation in clubbing that began in the late 1970s and morphed into rave culture. (28) the now legendary myth of the four englishmen who went to ibiza to come back and revolutionise british society is retold here, too. though the story of the legendary night dancecult 15(1)118 when nicky holloway, johnny walker and danny rampling went to ibiza’s infamous late night powerhouse amnesia and took the new drug ecstasy for the first time to afterwards bring it back to great britain, open the clubs hacienda, shoom and heaven and create the “second summer of love”, uk’s acid house revolution, stratton is careful to remind us of the “whitewashing” which is done by excluding detroit techno and chicago house’s black and disco’s gay roots. the history of dance music (206–210) then tells another story: the one from the jazz ballroom being replaced by cheaper record collection spinning nights everyone could afford. while stomp and twist made the brits move their pelvis, the quality of sound hugely profited by the sound systems built by the religiously inspired dub music collectives in jamaica, before they moved to notting hill carnival. as the merits of the uk’s minorities become clearer, one wonders what the closing with thatcher’s brutal rave ban meant for society. also, newer discussions like jimmy saville’s behaviour as a sex offender would have proven interesting for the proposed change in nightlife—from a dirty pick-up place for cheap thrills to a meditative, spiritual cleansing practice or festivities of joy, explained with help of bey’s taz—where exactly big beat belongs here, which stratton mentions in the end of this highly entertaining, short read, remains as unclear as the exact role of fashion mentioned in the title. apart from that, stratton delivers a good overview of the main movements in 30 years of dance history which have left its mark on humanity. references bey, hakim. 1991. t.a.z.: the temporary autonomous zone. new york: autonomedia. debord, guy. 1967. la société du spectacle. paris: buchet-chastel. rothlein, jordan. 2014, march 24. industry standards: funktion-one. resident advisor. <https://ra.co/features/1836>, (accessed 25 october 2023). https://ra.co/features/1836 reviews 119 this track contains politics: the culture of sampling in experimental electronica hannes liechti bern: norient books, 2022. isbn: 978-3-9525444-2-6 (softcover) rrp: €29,00 (softcover) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.14> moses iten rmit (australia) this track contains politics: the culture of sampling in experimental electronica investigates why producers of contemporary, digital, experimental electronic music choose to compose using samples. based on a phd, this is hannes liechti’s first book and has been published by the switzerland-based norient (n.d.), founded by ethnomusicologist thomas burkhalter in 2002 as a network bringing together a global community of thinkers and artists concerned with music, sound and media cultures. their emphasis is on “the changing geography of multi-layered modernities, far beyond old ideas of north versus south, west versus east” (beyer, burkhalter and liechti 2015). it is therefore not surprising that the producers interviewed for this book cover politics including the genocide of armenians and the exclusion of africans in argentinian history. hannes liechti has been working with norient these recent years as a journalist, curator and events producer. his role as an applied cultural producer needs to be considered as adding to the potential impact of this book, not just amongst researchers but also practitioners. norient played an important role in convincing me to build on my creative practice to become a researcher as some years ago i had been commissioned to write an essay based on my own practice as a dj/producer of cumbia (iten 2013), as well as contributing with podcasts (iten 2016), a playlist (iten 2015) and a mixtape (iten 2011). this has led me to follow their research outputs with great interest as an example of research and practice intersecting. the tension between artistic practice and theoretical analysis is the biggest challenge liechti attempts to overcome in this book. this track contains politics was highly anticipated reading for me for several reasons. i’m both a researcher and dj/producer, focused on electronic dance music, djand sound system cultures and am therefore interested in how this book stimulates both my research and creative practice, for which sampling has been central.1 like liechti, i am interested in methodologies which reflect the practice being analysed, which in my case i have proposed as the dj-as-researcher approach (iten 2022). although a committed cultural producer, liechti is external to the field he is examining, which he presents as a potential advantage “as it allows the researcher to ask simple questions and take novel positions” (80). indeed, reading liechti’s book is making me reflect on my own practice, in which sampling has been https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.14 dancecult 15(1)120 a driving force. his incessant questioning of “why” a particular sample and compositional approach has been chosen, has increased my appreciation of the sometimes hidden political intent behind seemingly aesthetic or conceptual decisions. liechti identifies most literature on sampling has mainly been concerned with copyright issues and/or the particular practice of analogue-era sampling in hip-hop.2 there is therefore much need for new research on the ongoing relevance of sampling in today’s digital era where the practice has become a ubiquitous and seemingly banal. this track contains politics is focused on particular (political) intentions of a specific technique (sampling), in a niche creative field of (experimental electronica) music. whilst this appears to be a narrow focus, liechti’s expansive review of the literature on sampling, politics as a cultural concept and electronic dance music—of which the academic understanding can include non-dance oriented experimental electronic music—shows the scope of his research is actually quite broad. in the first few pages of the book, a useful brief history of sampling is provided, concluding with the current state of sampling as an indispensable and ubiquitous practice (11–14). liechti points out most of the literature on sampling at first largely fixated on its association with hip-hop and the subsequent demise of the technique becoming restricted due to copyright lawsuits (20–22). the ongoing relevance to producers and researchers in this era when sampling appears a banal part of music making, is argued by liechti as achievable by focusing on the motivations and intent behind the sampling. this he explores as part of “the socio-political potential of sampling”, which is also where the biggest gaps in research on sampling are to be found (15–22). the are several theoretical advances proposed in this book. firstly, trackology is introduced as a way of allowing the analytical focus to be on tracks—as opposed to songs—“as a tool for uncovering knowledge of the world” (77). the core interest of trackology according to liechti, is the “search for traces within popular music”, based on michael rappe’s method of “music archaeology” (78). traces could have been explored further as a concept. in my own phd research for example, i have been applying edouard glissant’s creolization theory which includes a conceptualization of traces as cultural memory passed on via music (2020). instead, the weight of liechti’s theory is in the methodology. the ethnography is combined with a musical analysis of each of the five tracks. in order to apply a musicological approach to analyse tracks of experimental electronica largely composed by sampling, liechti created “the fader of visibility (fov)” model. this addresses the significance of the “visibility” (and invisibility) of the samples in the composition (101–107). then in order to determine the motivations and intent behind the sampling, liechti develops another model called the “spider of sampling reasons” model (109–143). this demonstrates in a neat diagram each producer’s particular approach to sampling. both models are then applied to analyse and compare the case studies which follow. each of the five case studies features one track by a different producer, all active in what liechti discusses broadly as “the field of experimental electronica” (52–53). in the book’s very useful glossary, experimental electronica is defined as produced on laptops, mostly instrumental and with a sound that is “often abrasive, shaped by cuts, disruptions, reviews 121 noises, and dissonances” (316). the five tracks selected for analysis engage with a diverse set of political issues: the russian invasion of ukraine’s donbas region; gender issues and the memory of genocide in the armenian diaspora; recognition of afro-argentines in the history contemporary argentina; and the taboo of zoophilia. whilst the analysis is narrowed down to just five tracks, this broad range of political issues is also engaged with by liechti, further illuminating the context of each individual producer’s intent. these extramusical perspectives have largely come from ethnographic fieldwork, which have produced some of the most illuminating passages in the book. the methodological challenges and limitations encountered during the research of this book are outlined over several pages, revealing rare insight into not only the value of failure to future researchers but also the precarious conditions under which laptop producers of experimental electronica operate (69–75). whilst liechti admits a close look over the shoulders of the producers in the process of sampling was difficult to access, this did happen with one of his research participants. the results of this participant observation are featured in the penultimate chapter of the book, which liechti calls an “interlude”, serving as a great accompaniment to the conclusion which follows. the observations made of us-based producer lara sarkissian at work was facilitated by her being invited to participate in a residency at center for art and media in karlsruhe, germany, curated by norient. liechti suggests more funded residencies like this are needed, in order to facilitate more focused observation of the practice of laptop producers (294–295). ultimately, i admired liechti’s tenacity in theorizing the playful and often random approaches of the producers he observed and interviewed. his theoretical rigour is balanced by his sensitive and nuanced voice, which is strongest when it becomes active, especially in the self-reflexive passages which reveal themselves when he addresses some of the problems encountered in trying to do fieldwork in the intimate work environments of “laptop producers”, which liechti prefers over the term of the “derogatory” term of “bedroom producer” (316). liechti cites fellow musicologist-ethnographer mark butler (2006) several times, who also applied musicology theory to analyse the electronic dance music producers. i largely agreed with the critique that butler’s theorizing seemed more about “adding edm to the music theorist’s repertory” than “bringing music theory into edm’s varied and vibrant discourse” (marshall 2009: 199). this tension is also present in liechti’s research. however, butler went on to continue to further advance the study of edm (2014) and i can imagine liechti’s commitment to both practice and research is putting him on a similarly inspired path. notes 1 i have been a professional dj/producer for twenty years and have toured the world with the project cumbia cosmonauts. i am currently completing a phd at rmit university, melbourne, on digital cumbia and sound system culture, as well as working as a researcher with the sonic street technologies research project, for university of sydney and goldsmiths university, london. dancecult 15(1)122 2 in terms of sampling in hip-hop, making beats: the art of sample-based hip-hop (2004) by joseph schloss is a particularly useful work based on ethnographic research. references beyer, theresa, thomas burkhalter and hannes liechti, eds. 2015. seismographic sounds: visions of a new world. berne: norient. <https://doi.org/10.56513/zmhg1392>. beyer, theresa and thomas burkhalter, eds. 2012. out of the absurdity of life: globale musik. berne: traversion/norient. <https://doi.org/10.56513/vlgz1905>. butler, mark j. 2014. playing with something that runs: technology, improvisation, and composition in dj and laptop performance. oxford and new york: oxford university press. butler, mark. 2006. unlocking the groove: rhythm, meter, and musical design in electronic dance music. bloomington: indiana university press. glissant, edouard. 2020. introduction to a poetics of diversity. translated by celia britton. liverpool: liverpool university press. iten, moses. 2011. “arab awakening”. norient. <https://norient.com/podcasts/arabawakeningmixtape>, (accessed 18 october 2023). iten, moses. 2012. “insider’s perspectives on new wave cumbia” in beyer, theresa and thomas burkhalter (edited by). out of the absurdity of life: globale musik. berne: traversion/ norient. 264-77. <https://doi.org/10.56513/vlgz1905>. iten, moses. 2013. “perspectives on new wave cumbia”. norient. <https://norient.com/stories/ new-wave-cumbia>, (accessed 18 october 2023). iten, moses. 2015. “five video clips from mexico”. norient. <https://norient.com/video/fivevideo-clips-from-mexico>, (accessed 18 october 2023). iten, moses. 2016. “the sound of cumbia”. norient. <https://norient.com/podcasts/the-sound-of-cumbia>, (accessed 18 october 2023). iten, moses. 2022. “the dj-as-researcher approach: methods emerging through digital cumbia fieldwork”. paper presented at “performing, engaging, knowing” symposium, 2020. hosted by the ictm study group on applied ethnomusicology, the lucerne school of music, the department of composition, electroacoustics, university of music and performing arts vienna and the swiss society for ethnomusicology. <https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7274023>. marshall, wayne. 2009. “reviewed work: unlocking the groove: rhythm, meter, and musical design in electronic dance music by mark j. butler”. music theory spectrum 31(1): 192–99. <https://doi.org/10.1525/mts.2009.31.1.192>. norient. n.d. “about”. <https://norient.com/>, (accessed 18 october 2023) schloss, joseph glenn. 2004. making beats: the art of sample-based hip-hop. middletown, ct: wesleyan university. reviews 123 berghain, techno und die körperfabrik: ethnographie eines stammpublikums guillaume robin marburg: büchner-verlag, 2021. isbn: 978-3-96317-274-8 (paperback), isbn 978-3-96317-812-2 (ebook) rrp: €22,00 (paperback), €18,00 (ebook) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.15> anja schwanhäusser university of göttingen (germany) bars and nightclubs count among the mythological places of the city, as rolf lindner (2022) writes in his in einer welt von fremden: eine anthropologie der stadt. as part of his recent role as guest researcher at the centre marc bloch at the humboldt university, guillaime robin has tracked one such place, in his study of the world’s most famous berlin club, berghain. in the introduction he cites the two most well-known, but rarely spelledout, concepts in cultural studies in reference to club culture: heterotopia (michel foucault) and the non-lieu (marc augé). although augé did not mean industrial wastelands with the term non-lieu, rather airports, train stations and motorway rest stops, the term never-theless testifies to the transitionary character of the nocturnal locations, converted ruins of post-industrial society. for robin, berghain is a transgressive, social, sensual and reflexive place, where “the exploration of self and community meet, where the utopia of the body takes shape” (10) (this and the following quotes are all translations by the reviewer). robin has the genuinely ethnological goal of writing about club culture not from the point of view of its musical actors (djs, club operators, party organisers), but from the perspective of its audience. for this purpose, he conducted a study among regulars, and especially the global, urban nomads of the “easyjet generation”, as the journalist tobias rapp (2009) calls them. in terms of methodology, he bases the study on twelve interviews and around 30 online questionnaires, supplemented by the manageable number of twelve “observational sittings” (15) at the club. in doing so, he faces the challenge of describing a quasi-sacred place, without himself succumbing to mythologization: the analysis aims “to go beyond the blind reverence of the initiated and to scrutinize these cliches under the magnifying glass” (15). there’s an attempt at a balancing act between empathy and distance in the text, which is not always successful, for instance when robin presents a berghain party as being akin to an ancient ritual and asks: “to what extent can berghain be seen as a revival of bacchanalia?” (13). this flowery formulation irritates at first. there are more recent berlin-specific traditions which would lend themselves better as a comparison. for example, the tradition of the berlin secret societies or the queer scene surrounding the german physician and sexologist magnus hirschfeld. on the other hand, the sensual anthropology in the school of david howes (2005) doesn’t shy away from a certain pathos either. thus, the reference https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.15 dancecult 15(1)124 to bacchanalia is not to be understood analytically but as a metaphor to capture the genuine berghain atmosphere, as experienced by a cosmopolitan, queer scene. the first chapter, “bodies in space”, is about the significance of the club for its regulars and the transition from the “profane” world beyond the club into the “sacred” (40) halls of berghain. with the term rite of passage (arnold van gennep) and communitas (victor turner), robin describes the character of the space, the shifting bodily perceptions, the temporary sense of community, as well as the internal control mechanisms which grant a harmonious night of celebrating. he sees the special feature of berghain, in addition to its symbolical situation in the berlin party-metropolis, as being the aura of secrecy that surrounds it. this is created through the strict door policy, the photography ban, the seemingly sacred architecture, the complex system of rules of conduct and the so-called “hainweh” (47)—a portmanteau word made up of hain from berghain and weh meaning to ache, a play on the german word heimweh that means to be homesick—with which fans express their passionate attachment to the place. the recourse to an online questionnaire, which is often quoted in the text, might initially surprise the empirical cultural studies readership. in place of the personal experiences of the researcher are instead short and concise reports from the actual participants, reminiscent of blogger style. unfortunately, robin does not explain this method and its implementation in more detail, but he uses it extremely creatively. the subjective descriptions by the guests of their self-image and their personal opinions about club politics are astonishingly involved and in parts even poetically formulated. one extremely interesting question which has unfortunately also not been elaborated on and brought to any conclusion is: does the example of berghain perhaps reveal a change in techno culture in general, away from a subculture which is open to all, where social differences are blurred by cheap drugs, and towards a more homogenous, exclusive subculture, whose members are recruited largely from more privileged segments of society? (89) a court decision in recent years equating clubs with high-culture events for tax purposes would seem to point in this direction. the second chapter, “utopian bodies”, is about stylisations as a way of separating oneself from the everyday identity and from each other, while at the same time being a way of creating community. in reference to foucault’s concept of utopian bodies as well as in reference to piotr nathan’s mural, “rituals of disappearance”, in berghain, robin defines the stylistic transformations as the individual’s longing to dissolve. this dissolution takes place in various forms and media, through the equalising procedure at the berghain entrance, the adaptation of dominant dress and dance codes, anonymisation (e.g., by wearing fetish masks) as well as through the consuming of drugs. a central finding is that subjective feelings of freedom and liberation are closely linked to a communal and institutional set of rules, with self-discipline and self-constraint: “it’s not so much a matter of total liberation, but much more about a strongly controlled disinhibition, which goes hand in hand with the ethics of consent and the respect of others’ bodies” (94). in robin’s description, a party night seems to run like an almost perfect machine where almost nothing goes wrong. robin writes that he has left out sequences which are too reviews 125 voyeuristic. this is understandable, yet it gives rise to an argumentative gap. what happens when shame boundaries are crossed, not because one wants to, but because one is driven to it by obsession? nevertheless, he offers an extremely interesting insight into this “body factory” and its culture. the “crows”, as the audience is also called, voluntarily adapt to the institutional constraints, regulations and codifications thereby giving the club its individual character. in the third chapter, “degendering the dancefloor”, the focus is on gender-specific stylisations and the play with gender identities. with reference to judith butler, robin defines gender as performance. especially for guests from less liberal countries, berlin and berghain offer a “safe space” (105). here also new subcultural trends come on stage, such as the “sex-positive” movement, which promotes an openness to diverse gender identities, sexual practices and to nudity. robin rightly notes that the nocturnal rulebook can lead to a “homonormativity”, where certain homosexual codes dominate and thus exclude other forms of expression. in the fourth chapter, “underground resist-dance”, robin opens up the perspective to the broader berlin club scene and, in particular, to the period of the pandemic. due to the enforced closures, considerable financial and cultural damage was done, and the cultural diversity of the metropolis has suffered. the perseverance with which the techno culture actors have defended their “right to dance” and “right to the city” (150), robin presents as being proof that clubs are more than just spaces for commercial events. as already demonstrated by birmingham cultural studies, in a study to which robin, however, does not refer, partying is shown to be more than hedonistic consumption. the charge of hedonism was famously invoked by politicians during the pandemic in order to devalue outdoor dancing at night. as robin shows though, it is, on the contrary, a way of life and culture which is pushed through even in times of crisis, and against prevailing opinion. the author also recalls earlier protests, with which clubs resisted displacement and gentrification. without questioning the pandemic-related regulative measures, he interprets these activities as a positive expression of a political consciousness in nightlife: “the proliferation of these wild raves, which were often interrupted by the police . . . thus emphasises the active role of the techno audience and its desire to assert itself as a driving force in the scene” (148). the fifth chapter is called “closing”, similar to the last act at a dance night at berghain. here, robin comes to the unsurprising conclusion that a berghain club night is not a bacchanalia. extremely interesting, however, is his reasoning, in which he returns to the central thesis of the first chapter: “berghain is undoubtedly a space of freedom like no other, but it is above all an extremely codified space in which the liberation of the body is linked to self-discipline and strong control mechanisms” (160). the transgression of boundaries and ecstatic forms of dissolution in the community are thus only possible because of the strict set of rules. as in the process of civilization (norbert elias), to which robin refers, the increasing loosening of control over emotions comes at the price of an increase in the suppression of inner drives, so that ecstatic celebration is also only possible through a sophisticated system of control. this is expressed on several levels: the rejection of sexist dancecult 15(1)126 and objectifying heteronormative practices as well as of “body shaming”; the maintaining of a respectful distance, and a strong internalisation of respect for the body of others. robin points here to a possibly generalizable connection between discipline and ecstasy which, also for other subcultural contexts, is worthwhile examining. it is a perspective of our current time, which is “woke” and “aware”. it turns out that within order and its compliance (also) lies a longing for “pleasure” and the dissolution of boundaries. robin’s study provides a particularly successful and exhaustingly complex description of the sensuality of the club experience. the central insight, that liberation can only be achieved through self-discipline, is extremely illuminating. the bacchanal thus becomes a code for a subcultural practice that is characterised by the inner contradiction of control and the dissolution of boundaries. the book is an innovative contribution to the “sensual turn” in urban scene-, popand subcultural research. in the past decades this field has mostly been concerned with the economic aspects of partying (creative industries, subcultural capital and such). in robin’s work, on the other hand, questions of cultural order and creativity and of social change (again) come to the fore in an exemplary way. by taking into account the social origins and the phenomenon of the global easyjet generation in his analysis, robin also makes a contribution to the question as to the extent to which popular culture and popular means of pleasure have nowadays become the guiding culture of the middle-class. the study shows that for the queer global elite, going to visit a cultural site such as berghain is just as important as a visit to the opera in new york or sydney. last but not least, he provides a very good, in part poetically formulated portrait of the “loaners”, typical figures of the big city as described by rolf lindner (2022), accompanied by beautiful photographs by mike d’hondt. thus, the study can also be connected to the analysis of figures and figuration of urban anthropology. references howes, david, ed. 2005. empire of the senses. the sensual culture reader. oxford: berg publishers. lindner, rolf. 2022. in einer welt von fremden: eine anthropologie der stadt. berlin: matthes & seitz berlin. rapp, tobias. 2009. lost and sound: berlin, techno, und der easyjetset. frankfurt am main: suhrkamp. reviews 127 ears as portals: alternative realities of musical infrastructures. a ctm festival 2023 review ctm festival: “portals”, 2023. <https://www.ctm-festival.de/festival-2023/welcome> <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.16> luigi monteanni soas, university of london (uk) what is a portal? whether you base your definition on fantasy and sci-fi tropes of selfgenerating megadungeons (berti forthcoming) and interdimensional gateways (yalcinkaya 2022) or on informational technologies such as the internet (magaudda 2020), the portal conveys the idea of a device and threshold offering an access to some other space, a passage towards somewhere radically different. of course, a portal can be secret or hidden, dangerous, or difficult to activate. by connecting multiple points in space and time the portal is a twoway medium offering exceptional insight and mobility to who actively chooses to exploit its powers (hanson 2021). “portals” is also the theme chosen by ctm festival for its 24th edition, which took place in berlin between 27th january and 5th february 2023. ctm probed the possibility of a curational approach that makes “contact with specific modes of experience, histories, communities, and speculative futures” reflecting on “the preconditions, thresholds, regulation, and fundamental function of sound and music as gateways to other realities” (ctm 2023). in this sense, the festival’s portal(s) used different venues and art spaces around the city—15 in total including kunstquartier bethanien, silent green, adk, fablab neukölln, festsaal, monom, kqb, rso, hau1, hau2, kw, panke, radialsystem, morphine raum and, obviously, berghain—to allow trespassers to behold and overhear geographically and subculturally heterodox musical contexts. of course, as i have mentioned, portals are not just there: they deform and disrupt the concepts of reality, space, and time to generate something, to make something happen by creating new threads, pathways, and experiences. this is an idea that is expressed through aural means by ctm radio lab winner isuru kumarasinghe, who describes his installation “gilunu” (submerged, in sinhala) as follows: when we step into a space or a place, where the resonance is changed or enhanced, we naturally feel like engaging with that resonance … to see how the space transforms the sound and how in return it transforms us. it becomes like a portal into a different world, as part of this world, just for this moment. (ctm 2023) accordingly, the festival embraced multidisciplinarity, structuring this week of activities around club nights and music performances as much as around exhibitions, installations, https://www.ctm-festival.de/festival-2023/welcome https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.16 dancecult 15(1)128 screenings, workshops, labs and talks which, besides never resulting as secondary activities, helped inform the awareness of currently forming processes of musicmaking around the world. part of these experiments were the afropollination project, in which piranha arts (berlin) and boutique foundation/nyege nyege collective (kampala) established a transnational laboratory for sonic research to bring together artists from six african nations and germany, the exhibition “we found our own reality” curated by artist paul purgas, in which installations, archive materials, artworks, a series of live performances and commissioned texts were gathered to account for the under-explored histories of the sound studio at the national institute of design in ahmedabad, the first electronic music studio in india (purgas 2023), the radio lab open call showcasing an always different array of audio-installative endeavors within the medium of radio, presenting works by anna kravets and, of course, kumarasinghe and discussions that surveyed a number of themes, including the impending generational change in club culture and issues of cultural production during the ongoing invasion of ukraine. from this perspective, ctm has shown how it is possible to use programming as a tool to produce new forms of sensory and intellectual knowledge, forging connections between music circuits and performers accentuating the elements of uniqueness that the selected musical acts bear from their context. from the audiences’ and organization’s point of view, after years of pandemic fatigue and a life-affirming 2022 edition based on bringing back the joys of the dancing body, ”portals” seems again to give more space to contemplative and introspective listening experiences, betting on a courageous line-up presenting comparatively fewer resounding names than many previous editions. this is an attention that both staff and attendees seemed to be more than willing to offer given the almost total sold outs and the constant, remarkable presence of the organizers and curators. of course, even for a militant practitioner of sleep deprivation techniques such as myself, it would be impossible to map the festival extensively; an endeavor that goes also beyond the scope of the present text. therefore, the following selection of highlights is not only extremely personal but should give a glimpse in an impressionistic fashion of what i tried to convey above. among the performances, personal favorites include the improvisation between afropollination’s sound artist jessica ekomane and the ugandan diy synth builder afrorack establishing new canons of non-eurocentric sound synthesis, the heavily poetic minimalism and metal-infused tribute to mourning songs and traditional lamentations by sara parkman and maria w. horn of funeral folk, the extreme, pedagogic interactivity of poulomi desai, slowly inviting the audience to take control of her unorthodox, non-musical instrumentation challenging the idea of authenticity in regional music and the objectification of the ”south asian female body” in popular culture, the queering post-rave romanticism of the neapolitan neo-melodic performance by 2023 shape+ alumni nziria and light artist bianca peruzzi with the collaboration of choreographer franka marlene foth and dancer janan laubscher, the screamo meme music for tiktok doomscrollers of lil mariko supported by the raw, physical spoken word grime of iceboy violet, the a/v cyberpunk of japanese gabber and black-metal crossover ensemble vmo, tzusig’s anxiety-inducing and reviews 129 betrayal-themed dance provocations, the ambiguously brutal and theatrical genre-juggling of vieze meisje and the kampala singeli dance-fest conjured by queen asher’s productions, galvanized by the singing of her mother rehema tajiri and by dancers nana and zai. but above all, a special mention goes to asep nayak, a papuan producer and pioneer of the electronic wisisi: a genre that from the rituals of harvesting ceremonies in wamena was recreated and innovated through fl studio beats and mp3 technologies. i had previously binged on wisisi on youtube for a couple years and i would have never believed i could experience it live in front of my eyes and twitching muscles. witnessing this act really made the festival for me, showing that music can really create extraordinary junctions between audiences and scenes. from this perspective, despite the partiality of my account, this year’s ctm showed even more interest towards the subterranean, the peripheral and the subcultural. as noted by juliet hoornaert in her review of the festival for the magazine gonzo circus (2023), ctm presented a broad, generous conception of music, in which scratching the surface already meant pointing at the underlying artistic and social symmetries and disparities between manifold scenes. what i personally found to be the most remarkable aspect of the festival was its ability to put the listener in the right conditions to experience sound. whether it is for the dauntlessness of the curation or for the carefully selected list of locations, there was always the feeling that one was always offered the possibility to listen to something in the best technical and contextual conditions possible, whether with their ears or through the whole body in motion, creating the possibility for a range of extremely different styles, from pop and hyperpop to black metal, folk, spoken word, singeli and wisisi to coexist as equals. throughout, agreeing with a discussion i had with ctm cofounder jan rolf, which informed this piece, i appreciated the feeling of urgency that the festival expressed in reorganizing the field of musical knowledge, trying to push many peripheral phenomena to the foreground of the clubbing experience, highlighting distinct aspects of geographical and subcultural locality. in this sense, going back to the possible question of what a current club culture is or should be today, i support the stances of scholars such as silver (2014), labelle (2018), rief (2009) and magaudda (2020), arguing that clubbing today should employ music and technology as vibrational tools to cultivate particular forms of reflexivity and modes of experience that reconfigure the boundaries around youth cultures and other social identities, allowing a better circulation of sociality and power. therefore, the contemporary club culture that i envision, and that ctm seems to support, sees sound, festivals, venues, scenes, and encounter as the fundamental infrastructures allowing this special type of circulation; an alternative flow proving that, contrarily to what attali (1985) has noted, music does not only move along the routes of war, power and trade. accordingly, the portal is an apt metaphor of how to reflect on this ambiguous and exceptionally powerful type of infrastructure. seeing the progressive attention to socializing the organizing process through open calls, curatorial collaborations, and commitment to support less-known music movements, i have no doubt regarding this edition’s awareness dancecult 15(1)130 relative to these issues. nonetheless, accounting for my own experience as well as the one of many attendees, journalists and even participating artists with whom i chatted during the events, some elements seemed worth reconsidering. first, even though focusing on the netherworld of the global underground, the large majority of the invited projects still benefits from the support and visibility offered by many institutional organizations (e.g., shape+, goethe-institut), agencies and renown musical labels (e.g., nyege nyege, pan) albeit from the fringes of the music industry. thus, even though these associations often work with positive affirmation strategies, how it is possible to create further representation and inclusion for projects that fall off the actors’ curatorial purview still needs to be assessed. secondly, the petty hostility and unwillingness to help finding solutions of some of the berghain staff, arguably a staple of ctm’s program, inside and outside the venue, remains at odds with the “be respectful to others” attitude promoted on their website (berghain n.d.), creating spaces in which edginess and even mockery have prevailed. this has prevented me, for instance, from entering the night i was looking forward to the most (“bodily overdrive”), which is hence not mentioned in this review. then, more in the form of a suggestion than a critique, i argue that this edition’s theme should be, in view of the next, socially meaningful topic of 2024 edition “sustain”, further examined, keeping in focus how these infrastructures come into being, shift and are regulated; what are the portals that are still difficult to open, that benefit from advantaged access or remain closed? when translating the metaphor to the reality of today’s musical infrastructures, we should ask ourselves who controls the points of entrance and exit. who has access to them and under which conditions? how can we make sure that they remain functional, but their usage is not overly regulated? overall, for me this edition was a definite success and a positive example to follow for other festivals of the same kind. thus, i’m confident that all these points might be explored in the next years. references attali, jacques. 1985. noise: the political economy of music. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. berghain. n.d. “awareness”. <https://www.berghain.berlin/en/awareness/>, (accessed 22 august 2023) berti, paolo. forthcoming. “megadungeon: a model for media complexity”. magazén 4(1). ctm. 2023. ctm 2023—portals. <https://www.ctm-festival.de/festival-2023/welcome>, (accessed 21 august 2023). hanson, kara. 2021. “at the threshold: science fiction portals as agents of liminality”. medium, 9 august: <https://kshanson.medium.com/at-the-threshold-science-fiction-portals-as-agentsof-liminality-1f1e65ff1b2a>, (accessed 21 august 2023). hoornaert, juliet. 2023. “ctm 2023: een futuristisch ravecongres”. gonzo circus, 14 february: <https://www.gonzocircus.com/ctm-2023-toekomstfestival-vol-klankanarchie/>, (accessed 21 august 2023). reviews 131 labelle, brandon. 2018. sonic agency: sound and emergent forms of resistance. london: goldsmiths press. magaudda, paolo. 2020. “music scenes as infrastructures: from live venues to algorithmic data”. in popular music, technology, and the changing media ecosystem, ed. tamás tófalvy and emília barna, 23–42. london: palgrave macmillan. purgas, paul. 2023. “introduction”. in we found our own reality: an exploration of india’s first electronic music studio and its resonances into the present, ed. paul purgas, 4-5. berlin: ctm festival. rief, silvia. 2009. club cultures: boundaries, identities and otherness. new york: routledge. silver, micah. 2019. figures in air: essays toward a philosophy of audio. new york: inventory press. yalcinkaya, günseli. 2022. “the worlds of technology and magic are closer than you think”. dazed, 4 july: <https://www.dazeddigital.com/science-tech/article/56442/1/new-age-oftechnology-mysticism-magic-somerset-house>, (accessed 21 august 2023). dancecult 14(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 14(1) 2022: 76–93 issn 1947-5403 ©2022 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net do you remember house? chicago’s queer of colour undergrounds micah e. salkind oxford: oxford university press, 2018 isbn: 9780190698416 (hardcover) rrp: £79 (hardcover) fabulous: the rise of the beautiful eccentric maddison moore yale: yale university press, 2018 isbn: 9780300204704 (hardcover) rrp: us$19.95 (hardcover) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.11> jacob mallinson bird university of oxford (uk) in do you remember house? chicago’s queer of colour undergrounds and fabulous: the rise of the beautiful eccentric, micah salkind and madison moore each outline a sensitive history of what it means to carve one’s own place in the world. whether embodying a fabulousness to counteract both the mundanity of everyday life and also systems of white supremacy and queerphobia, or creating a musical movement to empower queers of colour in a vast matrix of intergenerational connection, these authors chart historical and contemporaneous examples of queer tenacity, creativity and vibrancy. moore offers a history of “fabulousness”, from effete, flâneur dandies to voguing superstars, with constant recourse to the fashion, music, dance and performance cultures that make up a fabulous ideal; and salkind offers a history of chicago’s house scene, from its disco origins to present day, always shedding light on the ways in which queers of colour propelled this now global music. centring on mutual themes of race, queerness, temporality, glamour/fabulousness, space and, importantly, work/werk, moore and salkind depict the bittersweet utopia that fabulous embodiment can bring. both authors employ a poignant methodology, weaving at times complex theorising with oral histories, interviews, historical writing and autoethnographic vignettes. where moore’s theory of fabulousness emerges consistently across fabulous, dipping in and out reviews reviews 77 of historical context, contemporary interview and personal reverie, salkind’s text more forcefully demarcates its theoretical drive, and moves from a linear history of house music in its first part to contemporary autoethnographic work in the second. what is most impressive in salkind’s text are the ways in which they allow the music to begin their theorisations: whether the participatory discrepancies of the groove of house music leading to a theorisation of delayed pleasure, the non-teleological drive of the music reflecting intergenerational memory, or the remixed and sampled tracks offering a repertoire in motion being emblematic of shifting histories, salkind’s musico-social theory is enlightening throughout. the joy in both moore and salkind, though, is that the subject matter is clearly inextricably personal: salkind’s opening excitement of sneaking out as a 16-year-old to go to deep fix’s “where the wild things are” rave continues throughout the book, and reading moore’s work clearly signals an inalienable intimacy with the subject matter: the places, the people, the music, the dance, the clothing, namely the sheer fabulousness of queer, eccentric life. the temporality of such experiences is vitally important throughout each text and sits interestingly alongside current queer approaches. in conversation with queer theorists like jack halberstam (2005) and josé esteban muñoz (2009), whose theories of queer time are well known — as sitting outside of a heteronormative system, and of existing in an over-therainbow “not yet here” — moore and salkind add interesting new dimensions. for moore, while clearly agreeing that queer utopia is not yet here, as muñoz would have it, they also remind us of the intensely present aspect of queerness, and of fabulousness. they write: “fabulous queer utopia is about living in the present but carrying an alternative possibility, a certain future, and yanking it into the here and now” (71), elsewhere stating that “fierceness, fabulousness, and all other visions of spectacular appearance are about imagining space and carving it out for yourself in the here and now, not waiting for the right time to do so” (109). while muñoz and halberstam certainly argue for the making-present of queer utopia, notable in the liminal space of the nightclub, moore’s more quotidian fabulousness — dressing iconically down the street etc. — makes liminal de facto heteronormative space, affecting straight time and space, and rightly so. moore is also attendant to, following carolyn dinshaw’s work, the importance of “queer histories” and how they create “affective relations” between past and present (71). this is a key point for salkind, who consistently makes reference to the intergenerational power and impetus of house music. writing of “ancestral affiliations” (135) and the “intergenerational, cross-cultural mentorship” (176) that is so vital to house music’s growth, salkind spends considerable time on a crucial concept: neostalgia. neostalgia, the desire for a connection to the past that one may never have had personally to begin with, resonates beyond house music and to all queer experience. those of us who never lived through, say, the genesis of house, the ballroom scene, the aids pandemic, or the like, still feel that connection, a connection that is made manifest every time, for moore, we dress fabulously, or, for salkind, we lose ourselves in the music.1 salkind writes beautifully of the heady mixture of past and present in these experiences: the unctuous affectivity of bodies, sound, time and place is felt throughout their work. dancecult 14(1)78 the joys that come with fabulousness and house music aren’t without their struggles, though, and the labour of queer people and queers of colour is foregrounded throughout. moore’s analysis playfully riffs off a ludic linguistics of “work” versus “werk”, where “werk!”, the queer affirmation yelled at balls and drag bars (and sometimes even street corners), “is a type of aesthetic labour actually seen on the body, and it highlights the effort that goes into making memorable aesthetic moments that happen” (27). creating a look is work, and that work, to extend carol hanisch (1969), is always political. alok vaid-menon, trans non-binary activist and social media star, says in interview with moore: “what keeps me going is there’s a long tradition of people doing this work, and it is work. it’s not just getting ready. it’s actual, political work. it’s strategy, it’s planning, it’s pr, it’s how we talk about it. every walk i make is already a [protest] march” (51). and they are certainly right: to live fabulously is political, and to sashay down the street is a political act. this work, salkind contends, is as much political as it is academic, writing that “queer people of colour are always already theorising, even before a scholar enters the club” (16). this is politics, theoria and praxis, in action, a symbiotically lived politic that effuses these texts. what is most bittersweet, and expressed by both authors, is how often this work goes unnoticed or, worse, stolen. here the double-turn of queer fabulousness, in all its forms, emerges. “you can’t understand fabulousness unless you get that it emerges from trauma, duress, exclusion, exhaustion and depression, and that in some ways being fabulous is the only thing that can get us out of bed in the morning”, moore writes (21). it isn’t a halcyon, rose-tinted joie de vivre, but the only possible way of living. add to this salkind’s poignant discussions of “generational dissonance” and the decimation of queer communities through hiv and aids, and queer joy is soon seen to be wrapped, knotted even, with queer pain. this idea resonates with other queer theories, notably and touchingly eve kosofsky sedgwick’s (2003) notion of queer shame. for sedgwick, queer shame is not a by-product of being queer, but rather it is structurally integral to queerness: we are queer because of queer shame (see also halperin and traub 2009).. in a similar vein, moore and salkind don’t offer pain and trauma as contrasting elements of queer, fabulous joy— they see them as mutually constitutive. the points the authors raise above are significantly informed by, and indeed are only intelligible in their fullness by attention to, race and racism. while queer temporality, for example, may be one thing, moore reminds their reader that “brown people have to wait for things in a way that white folks don’t necessarily have to” (164), a poignant insertion of waiting into the radical nowness-cum-futurity of queer joy. salkind, similarly, writes extensively of the erasure of queers of colour who worked/werked the cultural labour of house music, and their exclusion from the spaces that were once made for them. clubs that purported inclusivity became “profoundly discouraging for black gay men in particular” (43), an example of exclusionary door policies that are still hideously contemporary. salkind offers a measured response to such issues; speaking of clubs that actively seek to promote inclusivity of all kinds, salkind offers the term “safer”, rather than safe, spaces, foregrounding the fact that “the work of creating a safety is never done” (186). throughout reviews 79 both texts, the doubly marginalised position of queers and women of colour is brought to the fore, and adds critical dimension to the werk undertaken. subtle moves like the above perhaps render salkind’s text more acutely critical than moore’s. throughout, salkind has a measured idea of utopia, one that is constantly in progress, and one that is malleable, multifarious. while moore argues, after muñoz, for a “critical idealism … a way of living that privileges hope and possibility instead of the suffocating anti-utopian negativism that is often de rigueur (186)”, sometimes this hope can be for a potentially untenable or uncritical utopia. i am thinking, for example, of the various calls to end gender that reappear throughout the book. at first reading, these desires to end gender seem justified, an end, surely, to the gender-based violence that befalls queer people on a daily basis. considering the call further, i begin to think of certain trans friends, and the conversations we have about their gender: about how they are fighting for their gender and their right to express their gender, a gender that is so deeply important to them. for many, gender is joyful — “gender euphoria”, as it’s often called — and while gender must be opened up, its negative effects dismantled, its violence pacified, to end gender altogether would deny many people an important structuring point of their identity: certainly, people must be safe not to have a gender, and we must work to make this a reality, but we must also be attentive to those for whom gender is critical. moore shows elsewhere that they are seemingly aware of this when they state for example that “not every queer person is a fabulous eccentric, not every queer person should be” (85). here the difficulties of utopian thinking arise; if queerness is undefinable multiplicity, surely utopia is also. importantly, moore consciously and effectively dismisses what one could imagine being a prevalent conservative or normative critique (and one that gets woefully bandied around the british press…): that fabulousness and the like is somehow frivolous, unimportant, or even selfishly narcissistic. to this moore argues that, rather than flippant dressing, “our real selves [are] the ones wearing make-up and high heels” (45), an aesthetics of self that echoes my favourite foucault quotation: “from the idea that the self is not given to us, i think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art” (foucault 1991: 351). parrying superficiality—in its negative affect—moore adds that “we care about surfaces” (45) and the body, reminiscent of important aspects of butlerian gender theory and spectrally unpicking a cartesian dualism. in other words, embodied, performative identity isn’t an afterthought, it’s the real deal. this is certainly present in salkind’s work also: for the djs and performers at queen!, dressing and makeup aren’t optional, but utterly integral. what is perhaps most special about these texts, and what captivates so much, is a kind of queer reading that they encourage, and how their subject matters, historical and contemporary, reverberate with their readers. reading both of these works, i felt—as i am sure many queer people will—the neostalgia of so many culture-shifting moments, the empathy and kinship of the joys and traumas of queer life, and my own memories of losing myself and finding myself in the sweaty underbellies of queer nightclubs. the texts mutually create a living archive of queer fabulousness; one that is very much needed, and one that sheds a light on the creative labour of communities too often overlooked. dancecult 14(1)80 notes 1 for interesting discussions of a different sort of neostalgia and desire for connection with queer past, see halperin 2007. references foucault, michel. 1991. “on the genealogy of ethics: an overview of work in progress”. in the foucault reader, ed. paul rabinow, 343-364. london: penguin books. halberstam, jack. 2005. in a queer time and place: transgender bodies, subcultural lives. new york: new york university press. halperin, david. 2007. what do gay men want? an essay on sex, risk, and subjectivity. michigan: the university of michigan press. halperin, david and valerie traub, ed. 2009. gay shame. chicago: university of chicago press. hanisch, carol. “the personal is political”. february 1969. <https://www.carolhanisch.org/chwritings/pip.html>, (accessed 8.10.22). muñoz, josé esteban. 2009. cruising utopia: the then and there of queer futurity. new york: new york university press. sedgwick, eve kosofsky. 2003. touching feeling: affect, pedagogy, performativity. durham: duke university press. https://www.carolhanisch.org/chwritings/pip.html reviews 81 the boy from medellín dir. matthew heineman usa: amazon original, 2020 <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13009186/> <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.12> ana maría díaz pinto university of california, davis (us) juan diego díaz university of california, davis (us) directed by academy award-nominated and emmy award-winning filmmaker matthew heineman, the boy from medellín (2020), portrays a week in the life of colombian reggaetón artist josé osorio balvin—better known by his stage name j balvin—in advance of the culminating concert of his colores 2019 tour in his hometown of medellín. although this is heineman’s first music-themed documentary, it is not his first biographical film tackling complex social issues in latin america, as cartel land (2015) attests. the boy from medellin, joins a catalogue of biographical documentary films portraying the tensions between public and private life of popular musicians such as jay-z (fade to the back, 2004), george harrison (living in the material world, 2011), residente (residente, 2017), anitta (vai anitta, 2018), taylor swift (miss americana, 2020), and billie eilish (billie eilish: the world’s a little blurry, 2021). as is often the case in these documentaries, heineman engages many complex aspects of j balvin’s life and work, of which we will focus on two: the development of the reggaetón scene in medellín, centering balvin’s position within it; and the negotiation between balvin’s public and private personas. from this second topic, we will elaborate on the artist’s engagement with the political realities he encountered in colombia, the role of social media in shaping relationships between artists and audiences, mental health issues, and the “return to the hood” and overcoming topoi. as in other latin american countries, reggaetón arrived in colombia through piracy and the exchange of cassettes and discs within the rap and dembow community in the late 1990s and early 2000s (navarro 2019). programing mostly puerto rican reggaetón at the beginning, radio stations and figures such as el gurú del sabor (fernando londoño) were crucial in disseminating and popularizing the genre within the country, paving the way for the emergence a local scene in medellín, which is now recognized as a reggaetón powerhouse (garcía 2013). it is within this scene that josé, as j balvin chose to call himself in this initial period, and other youths from medellín began to incursion into reggaetón composition and singing. with josé and groups such as 3 pesos and golpe a golpe, the medellín scene gradually grew, reaching international visibility for its high professional productions when a group of artists created the recording label palma productions in the https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13009186/ dancecult 14(1)82 early 2000s. one of the first goals of these artists was creating a sound and aesthetics distinct from its caribbean counterpart. they accomplished that by using romantic lyrics, melodic lyricism with influences from anglo-american pop, and chord progressions with inversions and extensions emulating the harmonic colors of jazz (franco 2018). if the puerto rican reggaetón of the first wave (i.e., from the early 2000s until 2010) was characterized by a robust percussive texture similar to that of dancehall, in combination with synthesizers playing the harmonic sequence i–vi–v, the colombian reggaetón of those days used more chordal variety, as we can hear in “obra de arte” an iconic reggaetón by fainal & shako, famously performed by balvin, that features the harmonic progression i7–iv7–vi7–v7. the first part of the documentary features a young j balvin consolidating his career as a reggaetón artist in medellín through dogged work. this narrative of struggle and selfimprovement is consistent with a hip-hop street aesthetics that centers and idealizes the artist’s humble origins. although reggaetón lyrics in the early stages in colombia featured the typical puerto rican malianteo and fronteo (i.e., texts based on crudeness, confrontation and hyper-masculinity), artists such as j balvin and later maluma, contributed to develop a distinct colombian approach called romantiqueo, or use of romantic lyrics. the documentary features various pieces in this tradition such as “ay vamos,” “en mi,” and “obra de arte,” which can be contrasted with the confrontational style that characterized early colombian productions such a “tiradera pa’l guru,” a piece first performed in 2003 by a collective of reggaetón artists called colombian flow.1 the main theme and source of tension in the film is balvin’s dilemma: one the one hand he has come to his home city to reconnect with his family, friends and fans, to visit the neighborhood where he grew up, and to perform what he called “the most important concert of his career” in medellín’s largest venue (a local football stadium). on the other, the volatile social situation in colombia, perceived by many as the result of president iván duque’s neoliberal policies, created the expectation among many of his fans that j balvin and other high-profile artists should intervene either by voicing criticism against the government or calling for the end to violence in the streets. initially balvin resists getting involved because he believes that artists are not to engage in politics, but through multiple interactions with producers, family members and fellow artists, he changes his mind. yet many thought his intervention (a call to the government to listen to the youth and to end violence in the streets during his final concert) was both late and lukewarm. while dealing with this conflict, various contradictions are revealed. balvin, who is shown arriving in medellín in his private jet, driving luxurious cars and living in a mansion with an army of servers (practically all women in the film are either balvin’s fans or part of his supporting team), tries to connect with people from poor neighborhoods by walking down the streets, shaking hands and taking selfies with them. it is no wonder that he struggled to connect with “the hood.” the neighborhood where he grew up, the humble origins that lend him authenticity within reggaetón discourse, is only visited, not inhabited. colombian society seems incomprehensible for him. reviews 83 balvin’s reluctance to speak up in the middle of colombia’s political upheaval is, nonetheless, atypical among fellow latin american reggaetón artists who are known for their ongoing political engagement within their communities. during the wave of youthled political and social revolts that swept colombia and other latin american countries at the end of 2019, many reggaetón musicians responded to their fans’ call for action. in puerto rico, for instance, the demands were directed against governor ricardo rosselló (incidentally, son of former governor pedro rosselló, who persecuted and banned the underground musicians who eventually developed reggaetón on the island during the mid-1990s), accused of corruption and homophobia. reggaetón artists such as bad bunny, ñengo flow, daddy yankee and residente marched in the streets along with thousands of protestors. likewise, in chile, the revolt against president sebastián piñera’s neoliberal agenda was supported by chilean and puerto rican reggaetón artists such as pablo chill-e, lizz, don omar, zion, nicky jam and others. surely balvin’s inaction in the context of this tradition of reggaetón political activism in latin america confused his colombian audiences and intensified their criticism of his silence. of course, balvin and other reggaetón artists are not the first popular musicians to have experienced pressure from their audiences to take political stances at critical junctures. ingrid monson (2007), for instance, documented the case of many black jazz musicians during the african american civil rights and black power movements in the us in the 1960s and 1970s, who felt morally pressured to take political action. philip auslander’s (2004 and 2006) tri-partite concept of musical personae, which includes the real person, the musical person, and the character (in songs, for example), is useful to understand the complex interaction of public and private aspects of the life these performers. in heineman’s documentary, balvin appears as a professional and well-established musician ( j balvin) with a fragile real human behind the scenes ( josé). his musical personae is that of a dreamer cangri (influential person in reggaetón slang), enriched by the nuances from the fictional characters described or alluded to in his songs. for instance, in introspective scenes, we hear songs like “7 de mayo” whose lyrics reinforce the image of a sensitive man who acknowledges his humble origins and is committed to supporting up and coming artists. other characters in balvin’s songs, not shown in the documentary, include the promiscuous macho, explicit in “si tu novio te deja sola” and “mojaita.” heineman addresses the artist’s inner complexity by including extended sections of j balvin’s concerts, images of josé with his spiritual guide and medical team, and scenes of balvin incarnating the cangri character, for example when he receives phone messages from artists such as will.i.am prior to his concert. while these three aspects of his musical personae are identifiable at different points of the film, it is difficult to draw clean boundaries among them. at the climax of the final concert and its aftermath, the narrative of the sensitive, crisis-ridden, conflicted artist gives way to a larger story of overcoming. one prominent aspect that amplifies balvin’s conflict is social media communication. with the advent of social media platforms such as twitter, tiktok and instagram, many fans have now the opportunity to interact with their favorite musicians and with fellow dancecult 14(1)84 fans. with artists constantly posting both professional and personal information, these platforms have created a sense of closeness between musicians and audiences that did not exist before when interactions where limited to live concerts or reading/watching the news and thus more purely parasocial. artists have recognized that this virtual closeness is beneficial to promote their careers and to understand their fans’ desires. one aspect of this perceived closeness is that many audiences feel that artists are part of their communities and thus should be sensitive and committed to their causes and tribulations. this issue is explicitly portrayed in the documentary. it is through social media that j balvin learns about the reactions of his fans to the strikes in medellín and to the assassination of young student dylan cruz by the colombian police. more importantly, he reads and hears their louder and louder calls for him to intervene through these platforms. at a dramatic point he takes the bold decision of meeting one of his critics (local rapper mañas ru-fino), all arranged through social media. we’ll let readers watch the documentary to learn how two contemporary musicians from the same city negotiate their opposing views on the artist’s commitment to social justice. in a vivid manner, the boy from medellín, thus engages the real challenges that artists face now that social media functions as a public forum. the narrative of j balvin’s “return to the hood” proposed in this documentary is therefore problematic but should not be judged as insensitive or trivializing. the complex political situation that j balvin encountered in colombia, intensified by social media activity, and expectations of political involvement on his part, had a real toll on josé’s mental health. the efforts that he and his team made to deal with the conflict and to put on a successful performance were enormous. his intentions to connect with the people he grew up with seem genuine on the screen despite his understandable distance from their daily experience and his detached attitude. the “return to the hood” and overcoming narratives served heineman to weave these threads of balvin’s experience into the fabric of his musical personae. at the same time, the two narratives cemented balvin’s position as a politically outspoken latin american reggaetón artist: at the concert, which represents the overcoming, balvin joins fellow reggaetón musicians from the region in voicing his concern for social justice. in the end, the relationship between balvin and his audience is simultaneously strained and reinforced. the singer uses the streets of medellín as an extension of the scenic space, but those streets are no longer known in depth; the city may have been his place of humble origins but is now only partially accessible from his position of fame. the boy from medellín is therefore an obligatory watch for those interested in reggaetón culture, its aesthetics, politics, narratives, dynamics of local production and popularization, the struggles of the real person behind the artist, the blurred boundaries that social media creates between audiences and artists, and the development of reggaetón scenes in latin american cities in general, and in medellín in particular. the five-episode tv documentary series flow importado, ritmo pegado (2018), which documents the rise to fame of key reggaetón figures from medellín, including j balvin himself, offers important historical context to heineman’s film. although the boy from medellin stands on its own, readers will gain a deeper understanding of the stories of j balvin and the other reggaetón artists reviews 85 shown in the film as well as their audiences’ passion for the genre, from watching the tv series beforehand. the boy from medellín will not disappoint even those purely interested in reggaetón aesthetics; the director devoted about ten minutes to the final concert, a fortunate decision that allows us to appreciate balvin’s artistic craft in all its splendor. notes 1 this performance of “tiradera pa’l gurú” can be watched here: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yotgsfifqo0>. references auslander, philip. 2004. “performance analysis and popular music: a manifesto”. contemporary theater review 14(1): 1-13. auslander, philip. 2006. “musical personae”. the drama review 50(1): 100-119. garcía, julio. 2013. “del tango al reggaetón: medellín, capital de los contrastes musicales.” bbc news mundo , 17 october. <https://www.bbc.com/mundo/ noticias/2013/11/131017_cultura_medellin_capital_musical_colombia_jgc>. monson, ingrid. 2007. freedom sounds: civil rights call out to jazz and africa. oxford: oxford university press. navarro, fernando. 2019. “medellín, la fábrica del reggaetón”. el país, 30 november. <https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/11/26/eps/1574784498_877729.html>. filmography franco, andrés. 2018. flow importado, ritmo pegado. medellín: telemedellín. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yotgsfifqo0 https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias/2013/11/131017_cultura_medellin_capital_musical_colombia_jgc https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias/2013/11/131017_cultura_medellin_capital_musical_colombia_jgc https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/11/26/eps/1574784498_877729.html dancecult 14(1)86 explosions in the mind: composing psychedelic sounds and visualisations jonathan weinel singapore: palgrave macmillan, 2021 isbn: 9789811640544 (hardcover), 9789811640551 (ebook) rrp: £89.99 (hardcover), £71.50 (ebook) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.13> dave payling staffordshire university (uk) explosions in the mind (eitm) is part of the palgrave studies in sound series, exploring sonic and audio-visual themes. it is weinel’s second book, and can be read as a companion to his earlier inner sound: altered states of consciousness in electronic music and audiovisual media (weinel, 2018). inner sound explores altered states of consciousness (ascs) in audio-visual media from a theoretical perspective, and contextualises it with related work, whereas eitm focusses squarely on weinel’s own praxis, originating from his phd studies and extended to the present day. the book is richly illustrated with many full colour images and includes supplementary materials hosted online by the publisher, comprising audio and video samples and working software apps for experimenting with the techniques discussed in the book. weinel frames his work around altered states of consciousness, specifically psychedelic experiences and how they can be interpreted in sound and vision. psychedelic theories such as leary’s “seven levels of energy consciousness” (1998), are introduced, in this case explaining how it has influenced the design of surfer stem (2010); weinel’s audio composition discussed in chapter 2. with topics ranging from digital performance through to painting and direct animation techniques, an extensive range of artistic disciplines are represented. each chapter commences with personal anecdotes revealing the nature of the content ahead and are then interwoven with informative references to popular culture and recollections of weinel’s experiences. after these introductory notes there follows a detailed examination of the individual artworks themselves. as an example, cenote sagrado (2014), is one of weinel’s audio-visual compositions inspired by his visit to a ritualistic sacrifice centre, the sacred cenote in mexico. after discussing its historical significance the technical realisation of the composition itself is detailed: in this case direct animation on film stock and rhythmic hardware sound synthesis. a recurring compositional technique is also included here: the piece is structured to emulate the onset, plateau and termination phases that one might experience in a psychedelic trip, and this determines the audio-visual qualities in each section. from a dance music perspective, eitm explores some of the more niche, and often more sonically “harder”, edm genres including flashcore—a form of speedcore techno with elements of electroacoustic music—hard trance, acid techno and hardcore rave music. weinel incorporates some of these edm styles into his electroacoustic compositions, surfer reviews 87 stem using elements from dubstep for example. vaporwave is another genre weinel uses, taking a plunderphonics approach to 1980s and 1990s audio trivia sample loops to create an immersive nostalgia trip in his cyberdream (2019) virtual reality experience. these genres are generally touched on quite briefly but there is a lot of material to cover, and sound is only one component of the many multimedia productions on show here. eitm introduces weinel’s creative works chronologically with respect to their date of creation, and is sequenced to cover the categories of electroacoustic composition, real-time performance, audio-visual composition, interactive projects, vj performance and virtual reality experiences, mirroring weinel’s artistic journey. overall, it is an engaging read and will be of interest to artists, practitioners and academics from the disciplines of electronic music, creative coding, djing and vjing, composition, performance and related fields. it is highly relevant to those utilising a practise-based approach to research where this can lead to insights into methods for expanding an artist’s creative repertoire. a practise-based approach to research is continually rising in popularity across a range of creative disciplines and this volume will provide a useful reference for others to follow. the frameworks provided in the concluding chapter 8 are particularly indicative and useful in this respect. introduced here are three design frameworks, specifically: psychedelic journeys in sound, asc simulations and synaesthetic visualisations of sound, which have been formulated through practise and can be implemented by others desiring to create asc inspired artworks. the conclusion also discusses how the covid-19 pandemic has influenced the development of virtual clubs and dance events incentivising the shift to digital and online experiences, providing motivation and increased relevance for continued study. references leary, timothy. 1998. the politics of ecstasy. berkeley, california: ronin. weinel, jonathan. 2018. inner sound: altered states of consciousness in electronic music and audiovisual media. oxford, uk: oxford university press. weinel, jonathan. 2019. “cyberdream vr: visualizing rave music and vaporwave in virtual reality”. in proceedings of the 14th international audio mostly conference: a journey in sound, 277–81. new york, usa: association for computing machinery. <https://doi.org/10.1145/3356590.3356637>. discography weinel, jonathan. 2010. entoptic phenomena ep. 2010. (mp3): entopic. <https://www.discogs.com/release/2332275-jon-weinel-entoptic-phenomena-ep>. filmography weinel, jonathan. 2014. cenote sagrado. uk. <https://vimeo.com/107164661>. https://doi.org/10.1145/3356590.3356637 https://www.discogs.com/release/2332275-jon-weinel-entoptic-phenomena-ep https://vimeo.com/107164661 dancecult 14(1)88 the discourse community of electronic dance music anita jóri bielefeld: transcript verlag, 2022 isbn: 9783837657586 (paperback) rrp: $45.90 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.14> andrew whelan university of wollongong (australia) the discourse community of electronic dance music is a book about how people communicate about electronic dance music online. it is an important contribution to edmc and online interaction research for two reasons. firstly, it develops a methodological framework for engaging with how people talk about musical phenomena online, how to evaluate these “discourse communities” and what coheres them. secondly, the book therefore poses crucial, albeit largely tacit questions to the field of popular music studies broadly, and the field of edmc research in particular: how do people talk about music and what should researchers do about that, which is to say, what is their method of analysis? how is that method justified and what is scalable or portable about it? jóri’s framework is operationalised across three language domains. respectively, these are structure and meaning (e.g. insider terminology, compensatory strategies such as “likes” and emojis and identity markers such as “i” and “we”); interaction management (e.g. hierarchical dynamics in terms of frequency of contributions and extent of interaction in terms of response rates); and social phenomena (linguistic expressions of friendship and community, tokens of mutual interest etc.). as chapter one elucidates, jóri’s framework draws on susan herring’s canonical work on computer-mediated discourse analysis (2004). she directs this in pursuit of what, following john swales, she calls “discourse communities”, a heuristic analogous to “virtual scenes” (38-9), intended to capture the interpersonal networks and exchanges occurring at the research sites. these sites are: the web forums we are the music makers and gearspace (devoted to aphex twin and music production technology respectively); the facebook groups tb-303 owners club and italo disco maniacs; the “classic” websites, vintage synth explorer and resident advisor; and the blogs matrixsynth, female:pressure tumblr and little white earbuds. the second chapter contains a thorough discussion of discourse-related research methods, including corpus-based and multimodal discourse analyses and cognate approaches. reviews 89 linguistic anthropology does not get a mention, although conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis—two closely linked sociological approaches—are both discussed and incorporated. the book also draws on research on youth culture, popular music and edmc in english, german and hungarian, and is thus valuable as an interdisciplinary (and even intercultural) dialogue and a gateway to further research. although some of the discourse and method material can be technical—and here an index would have been helpful—jóri does not presuppose technical knowledge on the reader’s part, and most technical matters are explained in accessible prose. one consequential term that is not defined at the point of its introduction though is “genre”. first appearing in the literature review, and germane to the discussion of “community” as a discursive phenomenon, “genre” can be confusing to those unfamiliar with its application in linguistics (perhaps especially for readers anticipating the musical use of that term). genre is formulated here as an event e.g., a news report, or a presidential press conference (75). another term, upon which the project is predicated, is “community” (71-73). the book raises important questions about what an online social group is and how to measure it through its language use, not all of which it sets out to address. the term “community” is not problematised. this isn’t necessarily a shortcoming: “community” sometimes functions as a sort of placeholder, indexing empirically observable phenomena. the book is agnostic on the content of “community” or what it might entail politically (with the important caveat that jóri is direct about the gendered language use in her data, and about the broader exclusionary patterns in edmc). but jóri still has to develop tools to assess the extent and content, as it were, of group cohesion. one way of doing this is by reference to the use of “we” as an indicator of community (119, 125, 137, 147). the assumptions underlying the idea that “we” would stand in this way are not explicated. one can imagine situations where there is community sentiment, but people do not use “we”, and the converse, where “we” is abused by powerful figures seeking to impose the appearance of consensus. ultimately (and going by her account of the data, rightly), jóri determines “we” is of limited efficacy as an indicator and suggests it be abandoned (174). what are the implications of this? is it telling us something about collective identity, or is it telling us something about communication? if the latter, is it about mediation, or is it about communicative strategy? jóri does not speculate on these questions, but they help to show how, by engaging so thoroughly with online data, she pushes the parameters of cmda and similar corpus-oriented approaches as far as they will go. one important aspect of the book is how it works across different online platforms: forums, blogs and so on, each with distinct affordances. as jóri acknowledges, there is a relationship between platform design and community structure. for example, some of the limited interaction on the matrixsynth blog, despite its popularity, may be attributable to the matrixsynth closed facebook group (164). “community”, such as could be discerned by use of “we”, might therefore not map neatly onto a corpus assembled at a single site, because gertrude stein’s adage, “there is no there there” (1937: 17), still applies to the internet. dancecult 14(1)90 those who are present are always also in at least one other place. this does not undermine the analysis, but it does invite methodological reflection about scope, site and corpus. any analysis will have self-defined limits. as jóri shows, the strength of a corpus approach itself requires sensitivity in a context of platform porosity. the classification scheme jóri applies provides a picture of the shape of the relationships inside the group and how they are conducted. it can be used to measure the scale, frequency and intensity (the “temperature”) of social interaction. this enables comparative work, but it also means that the local ethnographic flavour comes from (naturally occurring) terminology, rather than multi-turn sequences evidencing how participants negotiate meaning and their respective positions. for example, in the analysis of the italo disco facebook group, jóri lists some of the adjectives used to describe italo tracks, including “bomb, very hot, very sophisticated, obscure girl of italo, superfluous, cheap, wonderful, great, hot girl of italo, such a beauty, bumped up, awesome crasher, nice, lovely, extremely rare, beautiful” (154). the lingua franca is presumably english, though jóri points out that familiarity with the italian language is regarded positively within the group. the gender politics of these adjectives are evident. jóri suggests that “bomb” is so gendered, and though we know (from tom jones) that there can be a “sexbomb”, i am not sure about this: bomba in italian seems more along the lines of “sensational”. local context matters. the same connotation to “bomb” would not extend—to me at least—to say, rage against the machine’s “bombtrack”, or the radio bomb drum ‘n’ bass project, where we might instead say “bomb” signifies fantasies of hypermasculinity. jóri attributes this gendered use of language to the historical conjuncture in which italo disco rose to prominence, along with the majority male participants in the group. this book—and the forms of analysis which jóri conducts so adroitly in it—is most compelling where it touches on much bigger and broader preoccupations in contemporary sociocultural research. the historical backdrop of italo and contemporary language use around it are one example of this; that is, that the milieu in which italo disco emerged continues to influence how italo is described. another important context, raised several times in the book, is that of nostalgia (131, 152, 156). articulating local language practices to much broader cultural concerns both validates the methodology and serves to pinpoint the cultural phenomena so identified. this becomes riveting at the points where music appears to shape language use, as when jóri observes regarding italo disco that [t]he characteristics of the music genre—expresses romanticism, emotions, affections, and sexuality—highly influenced the characteristics of the discourse … the group’s language use … showed an interesting tendency of ‘emotionally driven’ discourse (161). we cannot know from the data, and jóri does not conjecture on what mechanisms might “shift” emotional registers from music to discourse about it. nonetheless, this discussion of the interplay between language use and music—or the nature of multimodal interaction—is reviews 91 deeply significant, and resonates with a lot of preoccupations in the literature about popular music, and perhaps especially about edmc given its sometimes tangential orientation to lyrical meaning. similarly, the perennial questions about method and how to access, or how people report on, musical experiences are cast in fresh light by the work jóri conducts here. jóri’s book commands attention because of how it generates these kinds of insights, especially relative to more established music research methods (music criticism, interviews, fieldwork etc.). the discourse community of electronic dance music is methodologically rigorous, rich in empirical detail and speaks to much bigger debates in the scholarship on popular music and edmc. references herring, susan c. 2004. “computer-mediated discourse analysis: an approach to researching online behavior.” in designing for virtual communities in the service of learning, ed. sasha barab, rob kling and james h. gray, 338–376. cambridge: cambridge university press. <https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511805080.016>. stein, gertrude. 1937. everybody’s autobiography. new york, random house. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511805080.016 dancecult 14(1)92 dancefloor-driven literature: the rave scene in fiction simon a. morrison london: bloomsbury, 2021 isbn: 9781501389924 (paperback) rrp: £28.99 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.15> toby young guildhall school of music and drama (uk) as reviews editor of dancecult, one of the delights of my role has been discovering the wealth of ways that filmmakers around the world depict, interpret and critique electronic dance music culture through an artistic lens. until encountering simon morrison’s excellent book on dancefloor-driven literature i perhaps had not given the same credence to novelists for going beyond simple descriptions of club cultures, but as this delightful foray into the entangled world of prose and beats demonstrates clearly and effectively, fiction has produced as much considered and vibrant commentary on edmc as film, if not more. in his book, morrison sets out to explore this entanglement by mobilising sociocultural knowledge around the uk rave scene in the 1990s as a lens through which to analyse literary texts. he draws on three central uses of edm in fiction—figurative, mechanical and diegetic—as “ways in” to the texts, unpicking the multiple ways that authors choose to (re) present the sonic and haptic world of rave both in and through text. at its heart there are some central questions (or even tensions) which need resolving: “how might authors write about something so otherworldly as a nightclub scene? how might they write lucidly and fluidly about the rigid metronomic beat of electronic music? … [and how] might they accurately recount in fixed symbols the drifting, hallucinatory effects of a drug experience?” (61). morrison chooses to answer these rigorously and strategically by moving from the broad to the specific. beginning with the broad, the first half of the book (chapters 1-5) employs sub/club-cultural theories as points of disciplinary grounding to help define the terms and contexts at play. whilst a lot of this material is well-trodden in edmc scholarship, morrison presents it with an admirable deftness, and as he starts to introduce elements of literary theory in chapter 5, the more unique and interesting qualities of this work begins to reveal itself. for me though, it is in the second half of the book (chapters 6-9)—the literary case studies—that the book really comes into its own. beginning with irvine welsh’s seminal ecstasy (1996), a vivid picture emerges of authors not so much compelled to recreate or even aesthetically elevate the subterranean deviance of clubspace, as to revel in the messiness of it; to wallow in the rich, sticky potential of all those chaotic signifiers of excess and abandon and use this potential to radically redefine the literary canon. what comes across clearly from morrison’s writing is the richness and playfulness with which his case study authors both guide us, and are themselves guide by, the visceral reviews 93 expressionism of rave and club spaces; intertwining vivid descriptions of these hedonistic spaces with nuanced and layered narrative approaches that capture of even mimic the non-hierarchical and anti-teleological anarchy of repetitive beats. one beautiful example morrison shares is of jeff noon’s needle in the groove (1999) and the way his prose style allows the complexity and repetition of the music to almost infect his language, creating textures of language—a liquid dub poetics, if you will— that cleverly reflects the repeating, layering, sampling and splicing of sonic material. another interesting theme that emerges is the complex dependency on drug-taking imagery as a shorthand for depictions of power, hedonism and release. it is interesting how many of the novels that morrison discusses employ the postmodern storytelling strategies of “classic” partying writers (think the hazy multiplicities of william burroughs or the brutal clash between fact and fiction in hunter s. thompson) to invoke the paradoxical vigour and fragility of drug-taking. we see this tendency particularly clearly in morrison’s third case study on nicholas blincoe, whose chaotic fictional ethnography portray the acid delirium admirably. there’s something more general about technology and control in dance spaces that is strongly hinted at here, but perhaps not fully unpacked. i was reminded of the wonderful moment in china miéville’s bizarre urban fantasy king rat (1998)—a reimagination of the pied piper fairytale set in london’s breakbeat and dnb scene, not included by morrison—where the protagonist discovers that instead of merely spinning records, a dat with multiple layered flute samples loaded onto it is much more effective for controlling everyone in the club. omissions aside—i’d also want to include rainald goetz’s stunning avant garde novella rave (1998) here—dancefloor-driven literature is wonderful book, filled with both academic richness and personal joy. a particular strength of this book is morrison’s ability to dance between literary theory, thick description, journalistic interviews and unabashed connoisseurship with elegance and ease. intermediality, rather than translation, is at the heart of morrison’s approach, and where a lesser writer might have tried to pin the literature down into rigid theoretical frameworks and taxonomies, we are left with a beautiful sense of aesthetic awe and openness that has more than inspired me to go and read more fiction. highly recommended. dancecult 13(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 12(1) 2020: 143–158 issn 1947-5403 ©2020 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net exploring nightlife: space, society and governance jordi nofre and adam eldridge (editors) london: rowman and littlefield, 2018 300 pp. isbn: 978-1786603289 rrp: £32 <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.14> fiona hutton victoria university of wellington (new zealand) exploring nightlife is a fascinating and insightful volume exploring often overlooked issues related to the “night” and those who inhabit it. the concepts of nightlife, night time, and urban nightscapes are closely scrutinised by the diverse authors in this collection. nightlife for the purposes of this review is conceived as both the actual physical sites for the consumption of intoxicating substances and experiences, and as the location of such sites within city nightscapes. therefore, nightlife, as the authors in this book highlight, refers to more than physical venues. it is a more fluid concept that can also refer literally to life at night: how the urban landscape is transformed after dark, and how the city at night is consumed by its often-diverse populations. as the editors note in their introduction to the book, nightlife is not new, but the regeneration and gentrification of urban areas is a phenomenon that has taken on increased significance in the post-industrial era of neo-liberalism. such regeneration often has a relationship with nightlife, either by altering, sometimes radically, existing ebbs and flows of urban nightscapes or through the introduction and development of new nightlife areas and venues. the idea that this type of intervention and regeneration in inner city locations and other areas perceived as run down, risky and dangerous will “save” the area and its inhabitants while providing economic stimulation and profits is one that is critically interrogated in this volume. a variety of topics such as: harm reduction; power and resistance in city nightscapes throughout processes of gentrification and regeneration; resistance to regeneration as a form of social control; and the displacement of existing nightlife traditions, are explored by the authors in this volume providing a critical and nuanced discussion of some of the key themes related to nightlife and the city after dark. reviews https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.14 dancecult 13(1)144 a key theme running through many of the chapters in this volume is the success of regeneration and gentrification, and the typically dramatic effects these kinds of urban policies have on nightlife and those who inhabit(ed) urban nightscapes. several authors question these kinds of developments noting the displacement of important nightlife traditions to make way for allegedly new and improved ways of experiencing the spaces and places of the night. it is also notable that the capitalist model of economic revitalisation and profit is a key presence in schemes of regeneration and gentrification, in contexts that have previously had very different ways of approaching social life: for example, the socialist perspective of pre-war yugoslavia that viewed nightlife and leisure as important for human development, not as an escape from capitalist oppression of labour as noted by nihad cengic and jordi martin-diaz (54). the gentrification of nightlife after the bosnian war to accommodate new migrant groups as well as the emerging youthful middle classes, coupled with new kinds of state policies, radically altered the nightscapes of sarajevo, producing tensions between old and new residents of the city. as peta wolfison in chapter 2 notes class inequalities are often embedded in gentrification and regeneration developments, producing tensions between urban populations and antagonism towards city planners who have “ruined” previously thriving night time economies. similarly, in johhannesburg crystal oloukoi’s description, in chapter 1, of urban redevelopments and the symbolic violence wrought by gentrification paints a vivid picture of sanitised and surveilled spaces with previous inhabitants displaced to other parts of the city. a westernised view of nightlife is challenged by atepheh amid in chapter 5, through her discussion of the city of mashhad in iran. using religion as a lens to explore the redevelopment and gentrification of a particular part of mashhad that contains an important shrine, a different view of the night unfolds. a vibrant, thriving nightlife culture, built over centuries exists or existed in mashhad and the night was not associated with sin and immorality as it is in many western cultures. a 24-hour city was built around the arrival of pilgrims to visit the shrine at any time of the day or night, and places serving food or providing accommodation were bustling and numerous. the plan to redevelop this area to accommodate more pilgrims and visitors to the shrine is critiqued in this chapter with amid pointing to the negative impact on the local cultural and economic success of the area. the redevelopment has overwhelmed existing night time communities and failed to attract pilgrims to the new modernised area. similar to other chapters in this volume she points to the detrimental effects of gentrification on public night time spaces and the cultural diversity they engender. this volume therefore raises key questions around gentrification and regeneration such as who are they actually for and who do they benefit? although, more pertinent questions to ask may be who should they actually be for and who should they actually benefit? as noted in the example of amsterdam by irina van aalst and ilse van liempt in chapter 11. here “touristification” is viewed as problematic and as upsetting the balance between sex workers and residents in the red-light district of amsterdam. the redevelopment reviews 145 of this area of the city to reduce the visibility of sex work, to attract a more respectable class of tourist to the area, has had detrimental effects on the urban spaces/s and on the sex work industry. locals can no longer shop for essentials like bread in their newly developed upmarket environment, and sex work clients are scared away by the high level of tourism that makes clients of sex workers highly visible. here the impression is that urban development was outward facing in a global tourist context rather than inward facing for local residents and businesses, and raises the question of who should these kinds of regeneration and gentrification plans be aimed at? these are also issues raised by daniel malet calvo, joao carlos martins and inigo sanchez-fuarros in chapter 9 throughout their consideration of the “studentification” of lisbon through the presence of erasmus students. the commodification of the student experience has contributed to the segregation of urban nightlife between eramus and local students, while the gentrification of areas of the city offering commercialised student nightlife experiences continues the eviction and displacement of previous populations. it could be argued that areas with countercultural and resistance traditions are replaced with “controlled diversity” the phrase used by penny-panagiota koutrolikou in chapter 4 (79). however, perhaps encouragingly, calvo et al. also note that not all erasmus students flock to the commercialised experience with some preferring more diverse nightlife experiences. in chapter 4 penny-panagiota koutrolikou also notes issues of displacement of some populations through the gentrification process in her exploration of the nightlife developments in athens. the concept of “ghettos of the mind” is raised here in relation to fears about particular, often inner-city, neighbourhoods, exaggerated through media discourse and sensationalism. this chapter also raises questions about surveillance and control – are increased surveillance and control the price paid for gentrification and revitalisation of inner city and other run-down areas? new gentrified populations demand safety and reassurance through increased policing and control of undesirable pre-existing residents, as they experience newly developed residential and nightlife areas. as pertinently noted in this chapter, solutions to problems such as addiction and poverty are seen through repression and displacement, rather than through helping the populations that need it (77). resistance to regeneration and gentrification is also noted the brazilian context, in rio de jenerio by marcos paulo ferreria de gois, in chapter 13, with more intensive policing accompanying the revitalisation and redevelopment of urban areas, aiming to control unruly groups. the effect was to reduce the numbers of patrons visiting these newly developed areas at night, similar to the experiences in amsterdam, and “the heavy-handed actions, as a result, only worked as a stimulus for the creation of other night places, protected from the eyes of authority” (218). these kinds of observations bring to the fore the fluidity and flexibility of nightlife, and the perseverance of resistance in urban nightscapes. this perseverance of resistance is noted by some of the authors in this volume, notably samantha wilkinson in chapter 7 and jose sanchez-garcia in chapter 6. mahragan music is seen as resistance music, linked to working class male populations, and exists on the dancecult 13(1)146 margins of city nightscapes in cairo. mahragan enthusiasts are seen as misfits and the music as vulgar and uncivilised by those who want to present a westernised, cultured face to the global world. the endurance of mahragan music, its politics of resistance and challenge to dominant groups, signals that these hidden and underground spaces of the night time economy continue alongside the gentrification that often dramatically alters urban landscapes, echoed in the erasmus students who seek out “authentic” local experiences and resist more commercialised entertainment developments. the pleasures and harms related to alcohol and other drug intoxication are also explored in this edited collection. the choices of young people in two suburban areas in manchester, uk about where and how to consume alcohol may also be read as resistance to commercialised nightlife spaces from which they are excluded due to age, gender or class. young people in these under researched cultural contexts moved between spaces for alcohol consumption and a number of things played a part in their choices: others inhabiting the bars/pubs; the atmosphere; what kind of night out they wanted and so on. for those choosing to drink in outside spaces, such as parks, the freedom and excitement experienced were preferable to being in enclosed spaces. samantha wilkinson—in chapter 5—makes the important point that outdoor spaces were not necessarily used for drinking because young people had nowhere else to go – some groups of young people actively sought out and chose these kinds of places for alcohol consumption. her work also demonstrates that the nightscape is multi-faceted and complex with a number of different ways of engaging with suburban drinking environments, allowing a rejection of commercialised venues. marion roberts in her discussion in chapter 8 notes the gendered aspect of the night time economy with women struggling to find a (safe) space or place in this hyper masculine environment. intoxicated women face a number of issues, not least the accusation that they are inviting harms such as sexual violence by being intoxicated. often policies to make the night time playscape safer are gender neutral, ignoring the issues faced by women in particular, although roberts points to two promising initiatives based on improving mini-cab safety, and raising the profile of the unacceptability of sexual violence and harassment of women in nightlife venues. however, the challenge to undo deeply embedded notions of traditional masculinities and femininities in spaces of intoxication is fraught with tensions that “require concerted and explicit action to challenge” (143). the development and commercialisation of the leisure industry and night time spaces has led to the normalisation of the use of illicit drugs in some clubs and venues. the notion of pleasure, bound up with illicit intoxications, is explicitly engaged with by helena valente, christina vales pires and helena carvalho in chapter 12 in their exploration of harm reduction in the portuguese context. they focus on a peer based harm reduction organisation that offers advice to club and other party goers around alcohol and other drug use, and sometimes provides reagent testing of substances. the importance of engaging with discourses of pleasure is noted by the authors of this chapter, as well as the necessity reviews 147 of moving away from medicalised notions of harm reduction that are not necessarily appropriate for a mainly youthful population using drugs in a recreational manner. the success of this approach is demonstrated through interviews with users of the services, who note their behavioural change in terms of not mixing drugs, taking less of a substance or drinking less alcohol. reducing the harms related to the city nightscape and moving patrons successfully through their intoxication experiences is an important part of urban development that should not be forgotten or sidelined. it is clear from the chapters in this volume that the night is a complex phenomenon, entangled in a number of debates related to space and place as well as numerous social, cultural and historical contexts. the arguments presented by the authors in this edited collection raise important questions around gentrification and development of city nightscapes, not least who benefits or should benefit from these kinds of developments. sadly, it seems that often such developments sweep away existing thriving and diverse nightlife cultures displacing marginalised populations and moving them further to the outskirts of urban life. however, that resistance is still apparent speaks to the importance of diversity in shaping nightlife spaces and places, even if from the margins. this volume grapples with the thorny problems surrounding the development of nightlife, gentrification and regeneration in a global context, not least the complexities in developing nightscapes that are as risk free as possible, while maintaining diversity and respect for existing nightlife cultures – a highly recommended read. dancecult 13(1)148 dutch dance, 1988-2018: how the netherlands took the lead in electronic music culture mark van bergen (trans. andrew cartwright) amsterdam: mary go wild, 2018 320 pp. isbn: 9-789082-075854 rrp: €17.50 <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.15> sean nye university of southern california (us) in an iconic scene from the social network, young mark zuckerberg and napster-founder sean parker are sitting in a sleek dance club in san francisco. while discussing business, they are immersed in some hypnotic music bordering on progressive house or trance. the track is cassius’s “the sound of violence”, but as remixed by dennis de laat, a producer from the netherlands. moreover, de laat’s mix was released on a sublabel of spinnin’ records, one of the bestselling dance labels in the world—itself based in hilversum near amsterdam. that a dutch producer would soundtrack a key scene from a film concerned with big-tech entrepreneurship would come as no surprise to mark van bergen, the author of dutch dance, 1988-2018: how the netherlands took the lead in electronic music culture. the topic of this book is primarily the history and rise of dutch dance music both within holland and abroad. when exploring the lineups of major edm festivals over the last decade, the presence of global stars from the netherlands certainly stands out: tiësto, armin van buuren, martin garrix, afrojack, hardwell, chuckie, and nicky romero, to name a few. however, partly because of underground tendencies that avoid the commercial mainstream, edmc studies has scarcely touched on why and how these dutch stars came to have such prominence in dance pop. dutch dance is the first book in english to attempt a recounting of this history up through commercial success. the book is divided into four chapters, or “dance stages”, that explore the respective decades of this history, from the 1980s to the 2010s. a longtime journalist and lecturer on edm and the music industry, van bergen has assembled an impressive array of interviews and insider knowledge. dutch dance is also a long-time project, as this book is an expanded edition of an original 2013 publication that covered a 25-year history. van bergen’s publisher, mary go wild, is itself the publishing wing of a key dance store in amsterdam that was launched in 2013. mary go wild, as store and publishing house, resulted from a successful book launch of a volume of the same name. multiple books focusing on dutch dance have followed, the majority of which have not appeared in english (e.g. bergen 2013). https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.15 reviews 149 given this relative scarcity of english scholarly resources, questions of presenting and translating dutch dance history for an international audience are key. the volume’s strengths lie here in that it is primarily a scene history, with a wealth of details, although i will discuss some critical responses to the framing and analysis of this history. i recommend that readers focus on the insights into the music industry and the regional dance scenes discussed by van bergen. as an overarching history of four decades, the book explores key styles in dutch dance’s evolution. in the 1980s chapter, van bergen primarily explores the reception of disco, house, techno, and new beat in holland, emphasizing the foundations of dance music in queer and black american dance cultures. regarding the 1980s scene in holland, particular attention is given to pioneering djs such as eddy de clercq and joost van bellen at the amsterdam club roxy, as well as hillegonda rietveld’s experiences at the hacienda when house music exploded. van bergen promotes the notion of a dutch “autumn of love” as a response to the famed british “summer of love” in 1988. this idea resituates and complicates the uk focus in the development of rave culture, demonstrating a transnational evolution of rave across europe.1 in the 1990s chapter, van bergen shifts to a key period of transformation in dutch dance culture. he emphasizes the innovations of dutch gabber and hardcore, and the founding of the event organization id&t, which has had lasting marks on dutch dance to this day. importantly, van bergen does not forget holland’s key success at this time with respect to eurodance, exploring acts from twenty 4 seven to 2 unlimited, followed later by the vengaboys. such a focus demonstrates the long history of dance pop in holland beyond current edm stars. van bergen points out key features in 1990s rave, such as the links between gabber and soccer culture, as well as the full array of hardcore djs from paul elstak to gizmo. he further addresses the debates on the shift by paul elstak to happy hardcore, along with stars such as charlie lownoise and mental theo. still, critical limits to the national focus in this narrative emerge here. a number of transnational stories are left out. with respect to gabber, van bergen surprisingly only makes mention of inspirations from the belgian scene, with no discussion of the influences of marc acardipane and pcp records from frankfurt, as well as lenny dee and industrial strength in new york. in terms of techno and house, i would also have been interested in more discussion of the international networks of pioneering artists such as speedy j and miss djax. to be sure, there is a great deal to cover in this history, and van bergen lays important groundwork in addressing this decade. when he turns to the 2000s, important shifts are also highlighted. by the beginning of the 2000s, the massive influence of three dutch trance stars—tiësto, ferry corsten, and armin van buuren—could be observed, along with the refinement of gabber into the more accessible and popular genre of hardstyle. he also highlights the founding of another major events company, q-dance, in connection with hardstyle. important stories are recounted here in how various artist networks evolved: for example, ferry corsten’s production talents were combined with tiësto’s focus on djing. trance stars were also becoming dancecult 13(1)150 representative of a new transnational european identity, reflected in tiësto’s famous djset at the opening ceremonies of the 2004 summer olympics in greece. van bergen also reminds us of some major shifts in monetary and political organization that are sometimes not addressed in dance history—for example, the introduction of the euro in 2002, along with the continued expansion of the e.u. and the schengen area (172-73). these developments of trance and hardstyle then lead to the 2010s and the “fourth stage”, with the particular dutch stamp on edm pop with a new generation of stars such as martin garrix and hardwell, with major commercial success in the usa. indeed, this final chapter is properly called “vegas billboards”. van bergen emphasizes that “enormous billboards in hotspot cities like miami and las vegas display the faces of dutch djs” (234). i can attest to such billboards in hollywood, as well as on a visit to las vegas in 2013. images of tiësto, along with scottish star calvin harris, were displayed on the mgm grand casino in sizes equal to the announcements of david copperfield and cirque du soleil. however, despite the chapter’s title, i did not find many details on las vegas’s particular history, such as tiësto’s move to las vegas and his residency at club hakkasan at the mgm grand.2 still, in taking this review full circle back to the social network, van bergen at least discusses the rise and expansion of the aforementioned spinnin’ records as a global label and brand (249-256). beyond these detailed scene histories, however, the results in dutch dance when it comes to a critical analysis of the music industry and dance culture are decidedly mixed. the tone of the writing tends too much toward pop rhetoric. for example, van bergen states with casual positivity that dutch dance’s brand “has gone from strength to strength” (10). the constant mix of historical narration and interview quotations, some of which read like pr statements, does not provide enough variation in analysis. a troubling feature for scholars, there are also no footnotes or page number citations, so it can be difficult to locate van bergen’s sources (though a bibliography and an index are included). furthermore, there are repeated attempts to compare holland in the age of edm to the dutch golden age, which borders too much on clichés rather than a close analysis of dutch politics, culture, and economics since the 1970s. van bergen primarily positions the netherlands as a place of neoliberal entrepreneurship, with music little different from any other import cargo, which can be refined and sold around the globe (272–273). little critique regarding this is offered, although dutch edm stars have come under heightened scrutiny regarding cultural appropriation and the excesses of commercialization – more recently by house legend marshall jefferson.3 quite a number of underground dutch artists are left out of the picture in this later edm-star focus, though again, edmc scholarship has also not done enough to address the pop mainstream. how this history is framed and critiqued within the context of dance music and the current crisis in the festival economy will be ever more important. van bergen does, however, provide a detailed history across four decades, which demonstrates that major stars such as tiësto certainly did not emerge out of thin air. more research on dutch dance history and festival culture is needed, which hopefully reviews 151 will include translations of more recent memoires published by mary go wild and related organizations. notes 1 for a comparable discussion, see gert van veen’s “amsterdam’s autumn of love” in resident advisor: https://ra.co/features/1945 2 see the report in rolling stone in 2013: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/ tiesto-commits-to-long-term-residency-in-las-vegas-48833/ 3 see marshall jefferson, “why i quit djing”, in mixmag, 28 october, 2020. https://mixmag. net/feature/marshall-jefferson-why-i-quit-djing. reference van bergen, mark. 2013. dutch dance: 25 jaar dance in nederland. amsterdam: xander uitgevers. https://ra.co/features/1945 https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/tiesto-commits-to-long-term-residency-in-las-vegas-48833/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/tiesto-commits-to-long-term-residency-in-las-vegas-48833/ https://mixmag.net/feature/marshall-jefferson-why-i-quit-djing https://mixmag.net/feature/marshall-jefferson-why-i-quit-djing dancecult 13(1)152 the new age of electronic dance music and club culture anita jóri, martin lücke (editors) cham: springer, 2020 226 pp. isbn: 978-3-030-39001-3 (hb), 978-3-030-39004-4 (pb), 978-3-030-39002-0 (ebook) rrp: €103.99 (hb), €62.39 (pb), €85.59 (ebook) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.16> tom smith university of st andrews (united kingdom) in the time since the new age of electronic dance music and club culture was written, everything has changed for berlin’s nightlife and the world’s clubbing landscape. yet the ideas articulated in this edited volume still stand up to, and illuminate, the changes to clubbing brought by the pandemic and point to important considerations as clubs begin to contemplate emerging from shutdowns. anita jóri and martin lücke’s volume emerged from a conference in june 2017 held at berghain in berlin, which brought together academics with industry professionals. the breadth of discussions in this volume is a testament to the extraordinary cross-disciplinary work being undertaken to enhance and challenge our understandings both of berlin as a clubbing metropole and the wider electronic music industry. the project is inspired, in jóri and lücke’s words, by the belief that “scholars and practitioners should work more closely with each other in order to create a common language amongst them, thereby aligning research and practical fields” (2). the range of different written styles, personal reflections and academic insights is one of the strengths of the book, as are the many chapters that demonstrate the potential for analysing unconventional sources of knowledge on dance music to improve our understanding of the face-to-face and virtual networks around electronic music. contributors analyse online communities (youtube and facebook), work by activist collectives, bookshop bestseller lists and even techno music created live without recorded sound. this powerful case for drawing on different kinds of expertise shows how work on electronic music can contribute a great deal to similar trends across humanities scholarship today. the volume’s introduction describes the background to the conference and outlines the content of the articles. it avoids broader statements about the book’s contribution to existing scholarship, which rather undersells the important insights its authors and editors bring to the field both individually and collectively. some of the volume’s authors, too, could signal more clearly the potential reach of their ideas and methodologies and their significance for wider scholarly debates. this leaves readers to draw connections and trends between articles ourselves, but in some ways this approach is welcome, given that the authors and editors could not have foreseen the changes to the club industry so soon after the essays went to press. https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.16 reviews 153 one such connection is the closure or repurposing of clubs as physical spaces and the increase in virtual clubbing and musical communities. botond vitos’s proposed project on how music fans might use audio media to recreate club experiences in their personal spheres, for example, will have gained in salience over the course of the pandemic. jóri’s own contribution on facebook groups for collectors of the roland tb-303 bass line explores computer-mediated discourse analysis methods that will be of interest for scholars now researching the online club communities that have flourished during the pandemic, such as club quarantine, united we stream and keep hush. some reflection on the conference’s own setting at berghain would be interesting in this respect, given that the club’s physical space has been given over to art exhibitions since march 2020, with other berlin clubs like the kitkatclub even operating as test centres during the pandemic. the concern around gentrification and closures in berlin—a live issue since the earliest years of the twenty-first century—also takes on new urgency in 2021. of particular interest here are lukas drevenstedt’s piece on changes and gentrification in berlin and kata katz’s article about the closure of echo books. drevenstedt and katz both show that clubs and electronic music depend on a complex and “sensitive ecosystem” and call for recognition of the components that make up these musical worlds (10). further investigation is needed into musicians’ and nightclub proprietors’ creativity in the face of extreme, often prohibitive pressures caused by berlin’s rapid gentrification. these insights have acquired new international significance since the pandemic, with scholarship of this sort having an important role to play as clubs continue to respond to the hardships of 2020 and 2021. the volume’s focus on berlin is interesting and justified: the city plays such an important role in the world’s electronic music scenes, both as a symbolic centre and in terms of the opportunities it offers to djs, producers, club promoters and clubbers. the best contributions are those that “provincialise” berlin – to use dipesh chakrabarty’s term – not just as a place but an idea that means different things and is mobilised in different ways depending on context, both within and outside the city (2000: 3–6). such articles locate berlin scenes in their specific environment and resist the urge to extrapolate to other contexts, which can be tempting given berlin’s symbolic weight in electronic music culture. benedikt brilmayer’s history of electronic musical instruments, for example, situates important developments in berlin alongside significant innovations that came to berlin more belatedly. this work is a reminder that the city’s symbolic importance for clubbers is a relatively new development, historically speaking, but that it has nonetheless been a centre for musical developments over many years. ewa mazierska’s article analyses the symbolic, economic and stylistic importance of berlin for “musickers” (a neologism by christopher small encompassing musicians, other industry professionals, clubbers and fans (1998)) in vienna and cities in the west of poland. these local scenes demonstrate how berlin’s prestige in other european contexts is shifting and contingent. in fact, a strength of the volume is its differentiated focus specifically on austrian electronic music (bianca ludewig, mazierska, josef schaubruch), a context often overlooked in studies of club culture. dancecult 13(1)154 the volume is most clearly aligned with current scholarship on electronic music where it turns its attention to diversity and social justice in club scenes. ludewig’s article serves as a good introduction to this topic in berlin and austria, ranging widely from her feminist collective work with female:pressure and meetup berlin, through discussions of racism and whiteness in the telling of techno history in germany. patrick valiquet addresses the industry’s gendered assumptions and hierarchies—both implicit and explicit—in his analysis of darsha hewitt’s youtube pedagogy. katz asks just how radical the crowds are at berlin’s many protest parties, a question that has gained relevance given some of the berlin scene’s responses to 2020’s black lives matter protests (kirn 2020). reflecting on these articles, i found myself asking similar questions of material from elsewhere in the volume: jóri’s examples suggesting further possible conclusions about how masculinity works in online communities around electronic music, and lücke raising the question of how quantitative surveys might contribute insights around gender, race and class to understanding the social component of club scenes. it would be interesting to reflect on how the articles in this volume fit alongside work on other genres of electronic music in germany and austria. i think, for example, of research on hip-hop in the german context (e.g. el-tayeb 2003; weheliye 2009; saied 2012), on germany’s reggae and dancehall scenes (aikins 2005; pfleiderer 2018) or on eurodance (thom 2016), which allow a more expansive definition of ‘electronic dance music cultures’. the new age of electronic dance music and club culture will be welcomed by students and scholars in many disciplines working on berlin, austria, electronic music and popular music, social media, and many topics besides. individual articles will no doubt find a home on course reading lists: ludewig’s already features on my own course on german popular music and articles like lücke’s and brilmayer’s function as potentially useful reference works for statistics and historical information around electronic music in berlin. the book is meticulously referenced, and its bibliographies provide a wealth of further reading. taken as a whole, the volume provides insights into many of the ongoing questions guiding current scholarly debates, and even as those debates shift in response to the pandemic, these essays suggest where our future enquiries might go. references aikins, joshua kwesi. 2005. “wer mit feuer spielt . . . aneignung und widerstand – schwarze musik/kulturen in deutschlands weißem mainstream”. in mythen, masken und subjekte: kritische weißseinsforschung in deutschland, ed. maureen maisha eggers, grada kilomba, peggy piesche and susan arndt, 283–300. berlin: unrast. chakrabarty, dipesh. 2000. provincializing europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference. princeton, nj: princeton university press. reviews 155 el-tayeb, fatima. 2003. “‘if you can’t pronounce my name, you can just call me pride’: afrogerman activism, gender and hip hop”. gender and history 15(3): 460–86. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0953-5233.2003.00316.x>. kirn, peter. 2020. “no love parades this time: in the midst of crisis, an image of tonedeaf ravers in berlin”, cdm, 1 june. <https://cdm.link/2020/06/crisis-and-racism-in-berlin/>, (accessed 18 june 2021). pfleiderer, martin. 2018. “soul rebels and dubby conquerers: reggae and dancehall music in germany in the 1990s and early 2000s”. popular music 37(1): 81–99. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143017000587>. saied, ayla güler. 2012. rap in deutschland: musik als interaktionsmedium zwischen partykultur und urbanen anerkennungskämpfen. bielefeld: transcript. small, christopher. 1998. musicking: the meanings of performing and listening. middletown, ct: wesleyan university press. thom, nico. 2016. “the popularization of electronic dance music: german artists/producers and the eurodance phenomenon”. in perspectives on german popular music, ed. michael ahlers and christoph jacke, 111–5. new york: routledge. weheliye, alexander. 2009. “my volk to come: peoplehood in recent diaspora discourse and afro-german popular music”. in black europe and the african diaspora, ed. darlene clark hine, trica danielle keaton, and stephen small, 161–79. chicago: university of illinois press. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0953-5233.2003.00316.x https://cdm.link/2020/06/crisis-and-racism-in-berlin/ https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143017000587 dancecult 13(1)156 join the future: bleep techno and the birth of british bass music matt anniss london: velocity press, 2019 300 pp. isbn: 978-1-9132-3100-2 rrp: £14.99 <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.17> ian trowell independent scholar matt anniss’ book on the bleep scene feels like an extension or output of warp records, exuding the purple colour scheme that distinguished the sheffield label from its outset. it takes its title from the early (and somewhat overlooked) record release from tuff little unit and employs the sans serif font and simple design of tight blocky design with italicised elements seen on early releases such as the lfo album frequencies. the label, established in 1989 as both a continuum and fresh direction of previous initiatives such as fon (a studio, a label and a shop), initially became the imprimatur of the bleep sound. anniss grew up through this scene and clearly holds on to its importance. his book draws heavily on his recent journalism work for the red bull music academy where he has been documenting the early experiments and activists in this yorkshire scene. he writes in an impassioned and detailed style, the narrative constantly driven by both the author’s own feelings for the scene and a need to establish himself as an original participant in it. at times it feels as if the book is written for a cohort of believers who keep the faith, like an updated occurrence of the northern soul mythology. there is an important rationale to the book, as anniss argues for re-assessing the historical understanding of this scene within the wider complex chronology of dance music. he has a point here, and he sets out to demolish myths, redress historical versions, timeframes and figures, and re-situate the northern origins of bleep. this intent is signalled early on, where anniss sets out the official version of “british dance music finding a distinctive voice” (6) with a when (1991) and a where (london). the originators and perpetrators of this version of history are not initially called out, though simon reynolds’ go-to work on dance music energy flash is clearly the main culprit. reynolds’ book, dense and magisterial, covers bleep and the sheffield scene in an eight-page section within the chapter “second wave of rave 1990-1992” (reynolds 1998: 97-104). anniss ultimately calls out reynolds, whilst acknowledging his pioneering work, towards the end of the book where reynolds is accused of mixing cause and effect, downplaying the north and overplaying the south (238). this version of events set out by reynolds—his hardcore continuum within a wider lineage of dance music linking detroit, chicago, new york and the uk—proliferates as an authoritative discourse, in some way a testament to reynolds’ powerful writing. anniss does not list the numerous sources that peddle this accepted version of events, but examples https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.17 reviews 157 are plentiful. for a typical (recent) case, richard king’s the lark ascending sees uk rave culture having the simplistic lineage of ibiza clubbers pioneering the balearic scene and moving on to set up the london club shoom (king 2019: 267). end of story. anniss conducts his careful counter-history, exploring what michel foucault considers as the important rupture points, unearthing an “archaeology of a silence” (macey 2019: 95). this is both a noisy silence of dance music at full volume, and a silent noisiness as the sub-bass that defines the bleep scene is often felt through the vibrations that engulf the body and surrounding environment of the nightclub. there is a constant trope throughout all of anniss’ interviews regarding the severity of the bass sound; stories of household hifi speakers unable to detect the sound, of studio engineers saying it’s more than my job’s worth to cut the record, of club spaces and glass fittings dangerously vibrating as the white labels are played out for the first time. the bass horror script of blown out equipment and speakers, akin to star trek’s scotty engine-room scenario, is an apocryphal story that crops up in many testimonies of dance music. the book is structured in four parts named after classic bleep records, riffing on (or more appropriately, sampling from) the warp catalogue. the first part, covered in four chapters, is most interesting for me, and anniss works hard to craft a different history to the bleep sound, establishing his counter-narrative to rave mythology. he covers the cultural, social, political and topographical background of the places and spaces that gave rise to this sound, settling on three pivotal ideas. firstly, the north of england in the second and third terms of thatcher’s government, depicted as a kind of war mentality with left wing councils such as sheffield offering youth opportunities in arts. secondly, anniss carves out an interstitial place in the subcultural slew of the early 1980s, a post-northern soul fandom that was previously hindered by racist attitudes. new protagonists repopulate the husk of the scene in the early 1980s to hold jazz-funk all-dayers, dance competitions, the nurturing of dance crews. this quickly leads to an embrace of the nascent electro and break-dancing scene around 1983, with venues such as nottingham’s rock city and its saturday afternoon sessions offering an important beacon. thirdly, anniss documents the important role of sound system culture, the lovers rock and dub genres, and the illicit and distinctive blues club scene. anniss identifies a convergence of these trends, giving rise to clubs such as jive turkey in sheffield. further influences are added such as the championing of house music around 1986 and the influx of a small cohort of fashion obsessed northern hooligans or grafters noted for stealing and dealing designer goods. some of these peripheral characters are clustered on an ibiza scene, but two years before it became famed for the balaeric sound. anniss touches upon the importance of fashion without significant detailing – there is mention of jive turkey being very dressy and, from experience, i’d say this was something of an understatement! the second part of the book documents the key activists, chapter by chapter. manchester’s gerald simpson (a guy called gerald) takes the chronological priority with his 1988 track voodoo ray proving a club hit and eventually breaking into the mainstream charts. anniss suggests that this provokes a response from sheffield, who admired the record, dancecult 13(1)158 giving birth to bleep. this movement is carefully tracked through bradford’s unique 3 who release theme in late 1988, leeds based nightmares on wax who debut in 1989, their city colleagues lfo from 1990, and importantly sheffield’s forgemasters who provide warp’s inaugural release track with no name. part three of the book documents the spreading out of the scene, starting close to home with the relatively overlooked sheffield label ozone, and then radiating out to midlands based network, luton’s chill, the wider bleep and breaks movement, and finally an overseas perspective. part four is anniss’ take on the decline and legacy of the scene, taking the castle morton 1992 rave as a watershed (the moment where king commences his writing). anniss suggests a split into darkcore/jungle and happy hardcore/rave, such that bleep and bass has an increasingly vestigial presence. there are some insurmountable problems. the elephant in the room concerns warp’s disputed origins and divergent versions of an acrimonious break up, hindered by co-founder steve beckett’s declining to be interviewed. whereas beckett contributes to both reynolds’ overarching work, and rob young’s labels unlimited focus on warp, anniss powers on and is driven by his enduring closeness to the scene, sharing spliffs with the protagonists as they recall hazy nights in bedroom studios and dub-plate mayhem. anniss doesn’t proffer any academic or subcultural theory, though his historical approach of testimony and anecdote glimpses oversights and omissions. there is little contemporaneous source material apart from a single i-d report on the northern bleep scene. further, in 1990 a clutch of warp releases made significant inroads into the mainstream charts, jockeying with early 1990s dance-era novelty records such as mc hammer, partners in kryme’s turtle power, fab and mc parker’s thunderbirds tribute and timmy mallett’s glib sampling of early house records. both tricky disco and lfo climbed the charts, sharing similar videos of cut-up scenes from early cinematography and eadweard muybridge stop-motion photography. none of this recalled or analysed by anniss. the pace is urgent, intense and breathless, with dot-to-dot detail of dance spaces, club names, tracks and dance moves. anniss takes an occasional moment to stop and sample the air, such as on snake pass between manchester and sheffield (64) or at park hill flats for a brutalist memoir to accompany the concluding paragraphs. anniss forgoes an index for a pure chronographical time-line that carries the book through, mimicking the urgency of a dub-plate record – a desire to get the thing out there as soon as it is produced. references king, richard. 2019. the lark ascending: the music of the british landscape. london: faber & faber. macey, david. 2019. the lives of michel foucault. london: verso. reynolds, simon. 1998. energy flash: a journey through rave music and dance culture. london: picador. boom bap, trap and ageing in belo horizonte’s rap music scene michel brasil state university of minas gerais (brazil) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.11> belo horizonte is the sixth largest brazilian city in terms of population, with circa 2.5 million inhabitants. the city is the capital of the state of minas gerais, a hilly place that was one of the first brazilian cities where the elements of hip-hop culture could be noticed, in the middle of the 1980s. despite not having as much visibility as são paulo and rio de janeiro, belo horizonte has one of the most important and diverse rap/hip-hop scenes in the country. i have a long-term relationship with local hip-hop, whether as a fan, communicator, musician and, more recently, researcher. between 2016 and 2018 i carried out research on the local rap scene. i was interested in local beat making practices, in order to investigate the use of samples by the producers of the city. during the fieldwork, i mainly visited studios to interview producers and observe recording sessions, but i would also go to some gigs and parties. the major part of my fieldwork was made among what i’m calling “the boom bap generation”, a group of coeval rappers and beatmakers that grew during the 1990s. most of these artists emerged in the local hip-hop scene in the early 2000s and extended the footsteps of the local pioneers, helping to consolidate belo horizonte's rap music. these artists are now more than 35 years old and a large number of them are still active in the scene. in other contexts, being 35 years old is a regular stage of adulthood, but in hip-hop, that age indicates experience and longevity, since most people get involved with hip-hop during adolescence and their early youth. in a milieu where most people are between the ages of 16 and 24, being 35-or-more years old may demonstrate a respectable experience in the scene. this report is a record of some situations experienced in the field that highlight the passage of time and the clash between generations in the local hip-hop. such a clash of generations doesn’t occur explicitly, through disses, exchanges of insults or physical attacks. it is something that happens between the lines of coexistence and in the daily life of local culture. to a large extent, the more experienced hip-hoppers have always welcomed and encouraged the younger ones. i talked to dj roger dee, who has been part of belo horizonte’s hip-hop since the first generation of local hip-hoppers, and one of those who share this feeling. i asked him what it's like to get old in the scene and witness several generations of hip-hoppers. dee presented a very positive account of this experience: first of all, i think that i’m not an old guy in hip-hop. you can’t say that: “this guy is old in hip-hop”, because we’re always updating ourselves in hip-hop. secondly, i’ve witnessed several generations doing several different things, each generation in their time. i see the current time as a very productive time to belo horizonte’s hip-hop. there were a lot of important periods to me, and also some periods in which i think it was hard for the hip-hop to survive here. but what gives me hope is the fact that there’s always emerged a generation that perfectly understood what the essence of hip-hop was and kept it alive until today. i think this current generation is giving continuity to my dream, and the endurance of my dream is their dream.[1] however, aside from all the intergenerational support and mutual respect, it was possible to perceive some disparities among distinct generations in private conversations and in the events experienced during the overall period i have been involved with local hip-hop. such divergences include peculiar understanding of the essence of hip-hop, the lack of acknowledgment of older producers’ works by the younger and, more recently, divergences in musical taste, exemplified in this account by the debate on “boom bap” and “trap” beats. duelo de mcs 15 april 2018. a sunday afternoon. after almost four years, i’m going to duelo de mcs again. duelo de mcs is the most important hip-hop party in the city of belo horizonte. the event involves all the elements of hip-hop, but the main focus of the audience is the rap battle involving local mcs. duelo de mcs can be translated as “mcs’ duel”, or “mcs’ battle”, and the name is due to the fact that the event started as a small rap battle, and gained a huge proportion since its beginning, in 2008. it happens once a month, on sundays, and is held under santa tereza’s viaduct, located downtown belo horizonte. after more than 10 years of existence, duelo de mcs epitomizes belo horizonte’s hip-hop. the event reached national prominence due to its longevity and by annually hosting a national rap battle, called duelo de mcs nacional (national rap battle), which involves representatives from all the regions of the country. the national battle has a complex qualifying process that involves several stages. only 16 mcs qualify to the final stage in belo horizonte, in a large event of rhyming battles that provides cash prizes, record deals, as well as a huge visibility for the winning mcs. duelo de mcs national battle (2018) i witnessed the rise of the event, at its early days. until 2012, my friday night’s program was leaving my job around 7:00 pm, walking downtown and meeting my girlfriend and friends at praça da estação (station square) to wait for duelo de mcs to begin. my son was born in 2012, and since that i’ve had to change some habits. my nightlife has to be limited, and i can’t attend the events that often. from this time on, i can’t remember going to duelo anymore. now, things are quite different from what it was at that time. the event is not weekly anymore, and it doesn’t happen on friday nights. several local artists arose after duelo’s rise, along with a new generation of fans. even what is considered rap music changed, as well as the way the beats sound, the content and the way rappers sing. that day i went to the event all by myself, i hadn’t arranged with anyone. if i went to duelo a few years earlier, it wouldn’t be necessary to call anybody, because i was sure i could meet a lot of friends there. but now things are very different. that sunday i couldn’t find more than 5 people i knew. there were around 800 people at the event, and a great part of them seemed to be less than 20 years old. the clothes are different, and also haircuts, tattoos (in the face) and accessories. i remember that when i met castilho, one of the 5 people i knew, the only thing i could say was, “i think we’re getting old, dude. i don’t know anybody. there are only teenagers here”! castilho is a rapper from a band called zimun. he was part of a group of people that organized duelo de mcs in its early days. now he is only involved with his band and his personal projects. he totally agreed with me and said he was there just waiting for a friend and then they would go to another place. he also said that he couldn’t recognize a large number of familiar faces there. this personal experience of returning to duelo de mcs clearly exposed to me the passage of time, and how a new generation occupied a space that my contemporary fellows have built and lived. after that, i started to talk about these feelings with some of the respondents that contributed to my research, like rapper neghaum, a rapper from the “boom bap generation”. he started to rap in 1999, and since then he has been in the scene, first with the group kontrast, but now at his solo career. i asked his opinion on the differences between being a former young person and now an adult in hip-hop: young people feel attracted by hip-hop, but today it has mature people too. i think the feeling is the same in both cases, but when you’re an adult, your actions are somehow limited. you can’t go to the gigs with the same frequency, because you have a lot of grown people’s tasks to do. you don’t live with your parents anymore, when you come home, there is no “mommy-made” food, no done laundry. you have to do this kind of stuff, for you and your offspring. young people have more energy and more readiness to perform their actions within hip-hop, but the feeling rooted inside ourselves is the same.[2] as well as roger dee, neghaum sees himself linked to new generations, but he addresses some issues of being mature in hip-hop, especially the demands and responsibilities of adult life, which reduces time and energy available for artistic and cultural action. since most old-school local artists have not been able to achieve full sustainability in their artistic careers, they have to divide themselves between other professional tasks and artistic dedication. this becomes an even greater challenge in adulthood, since most of them have children and other family demands. boom bap and trap throughout my research, i came across two categories used by local producers to define beat making trends: “boom bap” and “trap”. the term “boom bap” is used by local artists and audiences to describe those beats from the “golden era” of rap music. originating on the east coast of the united states, this style has frequent use of acoustic drum tones, usually extracted from drum breaks of funk bands, as well as other samples of several musical genres from the past decades. the drum loops are based in a constant eighth-notes hi-hat pattern, and they sound clearly at the top of the mix. “boom bap” is used to refer to beats made by producers like rza, dj premier, 9th wonder, and used by rappers like krs one, nas and groups like wu tang clan, onyx and mobb deep. wu tang clan’s “c.r.e.a.m.” is a good example of this style (1994). the term “trap”, in turn, refers to the contemporary beats that evolved after 2000, especially from atlanta producers and rappers. these beats have a slower tempo, around 70 bpm, roland tr-808 electronic drum tones are often used, as well as several synthesizer tones with a somber, gloomy feature as heard in future’s “codeine crazy” (2014). another predominant feature is the constant use of subwoofer tones on the bass drum and bass lines. the type of beat programming also differs markedly from the boom bap beats. an unfolded hi-hat marking is used, based on 16th-notes, with frequent variation, through the insertion of 32nd-notes or 16th-triplets-notes along the hi-hat line, resulting in a rattle sensation, or a "tssss" sound. most of the time, both terms are locally used in a generalizing way, which suppresses other styles of beat production. in a conversation during the fieldwork, mc and journalist pdr valentim highlighted this frivolous use of the two terms: maybe “boom bap” is everything that isn’t “trap”. but, in practice, it may not be effectively this way, because there are a lot of other ways to make a rap beat. there are other kinds of stuff that aren’t necessarily what we understand as boom bap. but i think that the main use of the terms is this: when it isn’t trap, they say it’s boom bap, you know.[3] it has been possible to notice, in the last few years, a shift in the beats created and used by the local artists. this change dialogues with those noted in international rap music, especially in the mainstream rap scene. like american rappers, local rappers are increasingly singing over trap beats. rapper fabrício fbc’s work is a clear example of this trend. fbc is an important exponent of the generation that arose from 2010 onwards, after the rise of duelo de mcs. his first ep, caos (2013), didn’t feature any trap beat. but his album sca (2018), has just one boom bap track: “contradições” (contradictions) (fbc 2018a). all the others are trap style tracks, like “ela é green” (she’s green) (fbc 2018b). during our conversation, pdr valentim emphasized the role of trap as the contemporary trend in rap music: i think trap music is in the place of what, currently, hip-hop music business presents as the main trend, right? trap became the main trend so everybody will somehow try to align themselves with the trend. so, it’s like: “trap music is what is hype? those kids are enjoying that? so that’s what i’m gonna do. i need to update myself, so i’ll make some trap stuff”. i must confess that it was hard for me to appreciate this new generation of rappers that sing over trap beats. it took me a long time to start enjoying them. i thought they talk too much about money and pleasure, i thought they cared too much about melodic singing and, above all, the beats sounded very unusual. i started to think that i was too old for all this trap stuff, and maybe my musical taste was tied to a certain era and the affective relationship i have with a group of songs and artists. i thought that i would never enjoy this new beat making trend with a slower tempo, synthesized drum tones and rattle hi-hat lines. but after listening more carefully to the tracks of local artists, i became more receptive to some of them, especially those who i consider that write critical lyrics, like gustavo djonga and fabrício fbc. both rappers are aligned with contemporary trends of rap music, but their singular touch made it possible for me to start enjoying this contemporary trend. in an interview with producer/rapper clebin quirino, we talked about boom bap rap and he stated that the predilection for boom bap beats is part of the experience of a particular generation of artists and audience: the guys that like boom bap beats are the ones that listened to rap music during the 1990s. the guys that listened to rap music after the decade of 2000 have distinct standards to say what is fine, what is cool to listen to. but most parts of the guys who ask me for a beat are people that listened to rap music during the 1990s. these are the guys that have this boom bap taste. and i also like that.[4] as well as clebin, i observed that younger rappers and beatmakers are those who have adhered to this trend more easily, and they use trap beats in a natural and ordinary way. but i also observed that older artists are also singing over trap beats as well, even though they’re not acquainted to it. talking to some people about that fact, i realized that the two trends are not mutually excluding. producers who make boom bap beats also make trap style beats. rappers who sing over trap beats also sing over boom bap beats. here is one example. 4 april 2018. labs studio. producer/beatmaker preto c and rapper neghaum worked on a track of neghaum’s new solo work album. the beat of the song was a real trap beat, with all the features a trap beat must have: rattling hi-hats, sub-bass frequencies, and an ethereal atmosphere. but it was a love song. during the session, neghaum experimented with different words in the sentences, to verify the flow, his breathing during his chant, and the pronunciation of each word. one hour later we started to talk about the local scene and the new generation of artists and audiences that rule the contemporary scenario of the local rap music. i remember i asked neghaum why he decided to work on a trap beat. he said: i was curious to try a trap beat because it’s a challenge for us who are older. and i think it is also linked to the question of adapting to the business, the market, the scene itself, do you understand? that's why i wanted to make it. and i confess to you that each day i enjoy this new stuff more. it was hard for me... to be curious about that, adapt myself to it, and desiring to sing over it. but it is necessary, right? nowadays i understand this language better. but i must confess that when i listen to a boom bap beat it sounds much more comfortable to me, it’s much more convenient to me.[5] in january 2018, i talked to dica beats, a young beatmaker from the current generation. during his interview, he stated that he’s more into boom bap beats, which have an “underground” feel. he declared, “if you want to be massively listened, you gotta make a trap. but i don’t like it very much. i like those boom bap beats that are more underground.”[6] dica linked boom bap to an alternative style of rap music. what one day was the main trend in rap music, now is seen by the new generation as alternative, underground, and sometimes outdated. young people rap over a boom bap beat to evoke an underground aura. experienced rappers rhyme over a trap beat to access a contemporary feeling. outro in circa 4 decades of existence in belo horizonte, hip-hop culture remains active through the participation of different generations of practitioners. because it is a living and constantly changing phenomenon, contemporary hip-hop embraces new attributes as well as solidifies the learning that comes from the experience of the founding fathers (and mothers). as well as other contexts, it is possible to observe a process of aging of local audiences and artists of rap music. although not with the same measure, it is possible to observe much of the issues reported by forman (2013, 2014). however, generational differences are still not so visible in the local context. the local discussion on boom bap and trap is a suitable case for looking at differences between generations on a local level. those who grew up listening to rap music in the 1990s have a natural tendency to value boom bap rap, while the younger ones value trap, a trend in contemporary rap music. such predilections illustrate the formation of musical taste in each of the generations and reverberate the experience of the agents in local hip-hop culture at different times. still, the choice for one or other style is not exclusive, since there are young people who like boom bap and older people who like trap. in this sense, the choice of rappers, djs and beatmakers is based on the interest of diversifying their musicality; their relationship with the audience and the current context of mainstream rap, as well as the intention of being linked to less commercial (or underground) sub-genres. furthermore, this debate also exposes some challenges of growing old at a local hip-hop scene, like being present in gigs and parties; communicating with new generations; being listened by a younger audience; not looking thematically and musically dated; being able to appreciate the musical aesthetics of the new generations; as well as being respected among the youngsters, without accessing an “age-based authority” (forman 2014) that relies on arguments like “i’ve been there...” or “back in the days...”. in belo horizonte, hip-hop is aging but is still young. this assumed contradiction is what makes it possible to embrace, sometimes in a conflicted way, an aesthetic and generational diversity. acknowledgements i would like to acknowledge clebin quirino, roger dee, neghaum, pdr valentim, preto c, castilho, dica beats, paula manzali,and also the minas gerais state agency for research and development (fapemig) for supporting the research through its scholarship program. author biography michel brasil is a musician, communicator and researcher. his research interests are black music (from brazil and abroad), rap/hip-hop, baile funk music, and brazilian popular music. michel performs as a drummer in several acts involving funk, rap, rock and black music. he is also a collaborator at a rap music radio show called hora rap, broadcasted by the radio of the federal university of minas gerais (rádio ufmg educativa 104,5 fm). email: michelbrasil83@gmail.com. references forman, murray. 2013. “kill the static: temporality and change in the hip-hop mainstream (and its ‘other’)”. in redefining mainstream popular music, ed. jodie taylor, andy bennett and sarah baker, 61-74. new york: routledge. ——— 2014. “visualizing place, representing age in hip-hop: converging themes in scarface’s ‘my block’”. continuum: journal of media & cultural studies 28 (3): 300–13. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2014.900879>. discography fbc, fabricio. 2013. caos (ep). fbc (youtube). <https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=pljtstzj-o_bgrljb34ttzzb5imcgf8tb->(accessed 03 august 2019). ——— 2018a. s.c.a. paralax/pro beats (youtube). <http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=pluaal52tav48rvxf82qhwt5n1kerhbvro> (accessed 03 august 2019). ——— 2018b. contradições. brazil: paralax/pro beats (youtube). <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pmyuizgcni> (accessed 04 august 2019). ——— 2018c. ela é green ft. doug now & hot. brazil: paralax/pro beats (youtube). <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvx4q0prxxw> (accessed 04 august 2019). future. 2014. codeine crazy, track 16 on monster. freebandz entertainment (mp3 audio). <https://www.discogs.com/future-monster/master/828333>. wu-tang clan. 1994. c.r.e.a.m, track 9 on enter the wu-tang (36 chambers). rca (cd): bg2 66336. <https://www.discogs.com/wu-tang-clan-enter-the-wu-tang-36-chambers/master/25303>. filmography “duelo de mcs nacional 2018 cobertura oficial”. youtube. uploaded on 30 january 2019 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bukhqbeqcjq> (accessed 03 august 2019). notes [1] dj roger dee, personal communication with the author (on whatsapp), 30 october 2018. [2] neghaum, personal communication with the author (on whatsapp), 5 november 2018. [3] pdr valentim, interview with the author (belo horizonte), 5 april 2018. [4] clebin quirino, interview with the author (produto novo studio, belo horizonte), 11 october 2017. [5] neghaum, personal communication with the author (labs studio, belo horizonte), 4 april 2018. [6] dica beats, interview with the author (digital recording), 19 january 2018. dancecult 17(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic music & dance culture 17(1) 2025: 150–167 issn 1947-5403 ©2025 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net dance your way home: a journey through the dancefloor emma warren london: faber & faber, 2023. isbn: 9780571366040 (paperback) rrp: uk£12.99 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.13> richard anderson university of liverpool (uk) at the time of writing, in august 2025, london’s southbank centre, which is arguably the epitome of uk “high culture” is running a month-long summer programme of free events inspired by emma warren’s book dance your way home. depending upon one’s perspective this can be seen as an act of “gallerification”, in which folk/popular/working class cultures are recuperated into a canonical presentation within elitist institutions, or part of an evolving movement of genuine recognition of social dance as an inclusive expression of human joy. either way, the southbank’s programme represents a hugely significant impact for a contemporary written word text. dance your way home is not an academic treatise on the act of dancing, but a very accessible, and at times deeply personal autobiography outlining the vital importance of moving to music for oneself and for societies. structured in three parts, the book is steeped in uk dancefloor history. in part one, warren traces the initial foundations her dancing is built on. from domestic bopping to television music show top of the pops, to her irish heritage and late seventies uk sound system cultures from whose roots blossomed much of what dancecult examines. the second part highlights warren’s progression onto dancefloors from school discos, her underage clubbing in london, to her right-place, right-time at manchester university in the early nineties. through these back drops, the story of dance’s cultural global explosion is set and illuminated with personal reminiscences, interviews with contemporary luminaries and scattered with explanations of academic studies from a breadth of disciplines which support the range of arguments warren lays forth on dancing’s importance. reviews https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.13 reviews 151 dancing is lovingly set, not as subservient to, or a side effect of music and musical styles, but as having its own primacy. hence dancing threads its way throughout the book, in various locations and spaces, and in different social and racial cultures, functioning as crossgenerational ever-presence in twentieth and twenty-first century eras. the part memoir nature of the text acts as a constraint to the potential span of the subject matter. the book’s focus on social dance as presented in the global north, most specifically in the british isles predominately in the last fifty years could be considered a limitation. however, in adopting this position, warren recounts dance movement emergences with a lived experience sincerity. in telling her tales of house, techno, drum‘n’bass, and later grime histories, she includes reference to so-called legendary uk clubs such as shroom, the hacienda, phenomenon one and plastic people, not because these were definitive, but because she danced there herself at those times. she clearly articulates the legacies of numerous less renowned but no less significant nights and venues from her past and recognises many other “nerve centres” (181) operating beyond those she attended, of having parallel prominence and vitality. when the book does narrate histories that are not her own, warren ensures she does so with care, placing these as part of a lineage her own dancing is scaffolded on. this is especially evident within the important chapters on the hitherto neglected spaces of the school disco and youth club, where so many british adolescents, to varying degrees, learnt how to dance. the latter aspect is expanded on in warren’s (2025) latest work, up the youth club. chapter three’s detailed account of strangling church repression of dancing in ireland which contributed to an exodus of young women from the country, including her own grandmother; and eighties chicago gymnasiums recounted through interviews in chapter seven are similarly approached with recognition that these are not warren’s direct experiences. like walking, dancing is presented throughout as a fundamentally human activity, if you dance, you are a dancer (33), and dancefloors are situated wherever we make them (307). in this sense the book stands alongside the equally brilliant but more historically comprehensive dancing in the streets by the late barbara ehrenreich (2006). in both books, social dance finds a voice celebrating non-specialist everyday dancing, joining the still surprisingly recent emergence of social dance texts within the dance academy. there is much resonance here with the historically situated concepts of dancing as community expression found in malnig’s (2009), and dodds and cook’s (2013) collected works. what is fresh in dance your way home is the drawing of more personal connectivity between the performative club dancing, by crews and individuals in the eighties, to direct involvement in djing, and promoting club nights such as a guy called gerald’s recollections of their professional dancing lessons and aspirations (225–26). in the final part of the book, warren herself participates in a studio dance class, with the academy setting transformed into a place of therapy as she becomes aware of her dyspraxia. the restorative and healing power of dancing is a recurrent theme throughout the text. dancecult 17(1)152 warren employs a meticulously researched array of scientific study findings to describe everyday dance’s benefits for physical and mental health. another of the book’s themes warren is at pains to point out is that dancing is always historically situated, and many of the dance movements she has experienced have emerged as a response to specific, frequently harsh, social circumstances. she encapsulates this most succinctly in quoting the title of alice walker’s (2013) collection, hard times require furious dancing (223). the sense of community and resilience in the face of repressions, that finds expression through collective everyday dancing and a sense of temporary belonging or embraced by what mary fogarty described as a sense of an alternative “family” (2015: 247), is at the core of dance your way home’s message and that we can all dance our own histories. references dodds, sherril and susan cook. 2013. bodies of sound: studies across popular music and dance. farnham: ashgate. ehrenreich, barbara. 2006. dancing in the streets: a history of collective joy. london: granta publications. fogarty, mary. 2015. “the body and dance”. in the routledge reader on the sociology of music, ed. john shepherd and kyle devine, 245–54. new york: routledge. malnig, julie. 2009. ballroom, boogie, shimmy sham, shake: a social and popular dance reader. chicago: university of illinois press. walker, alice and shiloh mccloud. 2013. hard times require furious dancing: new poems. novato: new world library. warren, emma. 2025. up the youth club: illuminating a hidden history. london: faber & faber. reviews 153 black music in britain in the 21st century monique charles (ed.) with mary w. gani liverpool: liverpool university press, 2023. isbn: 978-1-80207-840-4, eisbn: 978-1-83764-659-3 rrp: uk£29,99 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.14> charlet brethomé (université du québec à montréal, canada) following her work on grime, cultural sociologist monique charles edits a collective volume that brings together researchers and practitioners to explore, from multiple approaches, black music in britain in the twenty-first century. with the editorial collaboration of mary w. gani (a lawyer specialising in the music industry), the book offers a panorama that combines academic papers, interviews, and visual essays. published in the series “liverpool studies in the politics of popular culture”, the volume seeks to analyse musical scenes in relation to the regimes of power that shape their emergence, circulation and reception. the book is clearly situated within the lineage of black atlantic studies. this characterises the transmission, unfolding and interconnections of black cultures around the atlantic, as well as the cultural hybridisations resulting from the long history of forced removal of black populations from their territories and cultural milieus (gilroy 1993). it is therefore a welcome contribution that deepens and extends analysis of this continuum from the vantage point of contemporary black british musics. notably, it expands the classic roots/ routes dichotomy (gilroy 1993) by emphasising the role of digital infrastructures and networks—what the editors term “routers”—in the contemporary formation of genres and publics. the book’s richness—and, potentially, its limitation—lies in the multiplicity of genres examined and the diversity of problematisations, contexts and methods mobilised. the centrality of sound system culture, dub and reggae is nonetheless clear, as many of the forms under study partly emerge from these matrices. in this respect, the book already helps to capture the resonances and contemporary traces of sound system culture within new musical assemblages. the entire first section is devoted to these contemporary articulations. whether in hyacinth’s study on roots manuva’s album “dub come save me”, charles’s attempt to systematise a “sound system sensibility”, gani’s interview with lawrence “l.j.” johnson, or télémaque’s photo-essay “trap atlantic”, each contribution shows the extent to which the musical objects under scrutiny are marked by the circulation and hybridisation of techniques, technologies, sounds and melodies. each case also demonstrates how these cultural productions—actualising the black atlantic continuum—braid together the global and the local, and past with present and future. https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.14 dancecult 17(1)154 the second section, which examines genres that emerged or persisted into the twentyfirst century, likewise includes an interview with a music industry professional and a photo essay. these two formats depart from conventional research articles and allow readers to inhabit different standpoints and perspectives. charles’s interview with ugwu traces the personal trajectory of an industry professional within the circulatory contexts already outlined, particularly between nigeria and london. charles and facey’s photo essay likewise offers a direct view of the places and the spatial organisation of steel pan practice in east london. more broadly, these chapters press further on the role of cultural industries in the recuperation, transformation and marginalisation of black musics and musicians. in particular, the chapters by palmer and toppin on the lovers rock scene and the jungle genre, respectively show how racism and patriarchy have jointly contributed to the invisibilisation and reshaping of scenes and musics in favour of certain audiences, industries and male and/or white musicians. the other two chapters in this section trace two very different pathways through which artists and musical forms (re-)emerge. muir examines black majority churches as sites that—through their locations, relational networks and pentecostal habitus—enable the development of musical competences convertible into the field of popular music and thus into economic capital. melville, by contrast, shows how contemporary information and communication technologies facilitate the circulation of techniques and recent tracks and contribute significantly to the revival of jazz in england among a new generation representative of contemporary urban british life. finally, the third and last section, “socio-political and economic issues”, interrogates contemporary black british musics critically through their contexts of emergence and diffusion. the opening chapters—by “hussla d” johnson and wallace, on the one hand, and by lambros fatsis, on the other—are particularly illuminating for understanding the processes of invisibilisation, criminalisation and thus marginalisation that unfold across black music scenes. the former provides an exemplary analysis of how cultural industries select and profit from particular cultural trajectories over others. sketching the contours of a political economy of reggae authenticity that marginalises british artists in favour of jamaican artists or labels, even though these musics are disseminated and consumed in england. fatsis, for his part, shows how ambient western racism materialises around black sound and forms of gathering, further criminalising and stigmatising these populations and their cultural productions. these two chapters are especially productive for night studies, as they help to grasp how the neoliberal capture of festive and musical forms that once placed society “in crisis” proceeds both through their whitewashing and through the criminalisation and marginalisation of their blackness. the final three chapters by scott, bushay and madar consider, from distinct perspectives, the role of music and its representations for artists and audiences: grime as a practice of refusal vis-à-vis expected social and racial positions; hip-hop as pedagogical practice by and for black women; and the ways black men receive the dominant images and aesthetics associated with them and negotiate them. reviews 155 overall, this collection edited by monique charles offers a rich and nuanced panorama of a field too seldom examined in its complexity, given the tendency to treat black musics monolithically under the rubric of the “urban”. although the approaches vary, the shared emphasis on sound system culture as a constitutive matrix, the black atlantic continuum and a critical race approach provides the book with strong internal coherence. that said, greater parity between conceptual labour and empirical precision would have been welcome. moreover, while some chapters—especially in the third section—foreground the cultural industries, several analyses would benefit from engaging more directly with industry-specific processes of appropriation and whitewashing. doing so would sharpen a highly fertile line of critique that reads the marginalisation of black cultures and their re-undergrounding (a promising avenue) as among the conditions of possibility for contemporary “nightlife cities”. finally, the near-exclusive focus on london invites the question of how black musics are configured elsewhere in britain. reference gilroy, paul. 1993. the black atlantic, modernity and double consciousness. cambridge: harvard university press. dancecult 17(1)156 platformed! how streaming, algorithms and artificial intelligence are shaping music cultures tiziano bonini and paolo magaudda cham, switzerland: palgrave macmillan, 2024. isbn 978-3-031-43964-3 (hardcover), isbn 978-3-031-43965-0 (ebook) rrp: uk£109.00 (hardcover), uk£109.00 (paperback), uk£87.50 (e-book) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.15> seán finnan technological university dublin (ireland) earlier this summer, spotify’s ceo and co-founder daniel ek, led a €600 million investment into a start-up named helsing, specialising in artificial intelligence military software. deerhoof and a number of other indie bands withdrew their catalogue from the music streaming platform, baulking at having their music accessible via a platform who shares a ceo with a military startup. deerhoof described the company as “creepy” and a “datamining scam masquerading as a ‘music company’” (green and strauss 2025). in this now well established digital economy, deerhoof point to the complexity of digital platforms such as spotify’s business model—are they a music company, data broker, advertiser or something more sinister? in platformed!, a work by tiziano bonini and paolo maguadda, the authors seek to tease out the social factors and historical conditions that have allowed spotify to become an almost monolithic presence in the mediation of music, the influence its having on contemporary music culture and the anxieties that come with a company using data profiling as a means to ascertain the taste of a listener. the story is complicated and brings with it hardline opinions on the effect streaming culture is having on music. the authors are attentive to such qualitative judgements; that streaming platforms have ruined the music experience of a younger generation by dematerialising the music product, that such platforms have encourage a disengaged listening curated by the machine rather than a human, or that musicians are now writing music tailored to the algorithm and its penchant for instant hooks. for the authors, such judgements afford streaming platforms such as spotify too much agency, while at the same time, ignoring the impact that social practices had on the development of online music sharing, streaming and datafication prior to spotify’s arrival. instead the authors, drawing from the work of science and technology scholars such as latour, argue that the evolution of technologies do not follow “a single, coherent logic” (6) but respond to the distinct conjuncture of social, political and economic pressures— conditions that are informed by the agency of social actors, and not primarily by the technology itself. to illustrate such, the authors provide a historical account of music’s circulation as a commercial artefact, its transition from an analogue artefact to a digital https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.15 reviews 157 one and the impact new online peer-to-peer networks had in the late 1990s on normalising the consumption of digital music. at each stop on this whirlwind tour of music’s evolution as a commercial product, driven by the demands of industry, there is a counterpoint proposed, the disruption by non-industry actors, early hackers such as shawn fanning of napster, or music researchers such as karlheinz brandenburg and his work on developing the mp3 format and the anonymous role that hordes of music fans had in making use of new technologies like peer-to-peer file sharing in distributing music for free. by presenting the various technological breakthroughs that allowed for music streaming to come into existence, the authors are reminding the reader at each moment that technology is consistently implicated within its social moment. in other words, just because a technology exists, does not mean it will be adopted. while the term “streaming” might now be predominantly associated with listening to music or watching videos on demand, streaming technology was not originally intended for such. originally developed in the 1990s, during a period when transmitting sound on the web faced “almost insurmountable technological constraints” (24), streaming was explored as a means to mirror radio’s capacity for broadcasting live events, using the internet instead of the airwaves. experiments with streaming technologies followed a “variety of different trajectories” (29), from internet radio experiments to webcasting of parliamentary debates, and through its myriad uses, often outside of dominant commercial industries, became normalised as a broadcasting tool. yet it was only with the transition towards what srnicek (2017) has termed “platform capitalism” that streaming became commercially viable. in chapter three, the authors provide an accessible overview of the rise of the platform society, detailing the multifaceted computational infrastructure they rely upon in order to operate; datafication of user behaviour, data analysis of music (in the case of music streaming platforms), algorithms for personalised recommendations, guiding the reader through the complicated industrial business practices of what can appear to be merely immaterial websites. it’s a necessary detour that situates spotify’s business model within wider economic and technological trends and illustrates the structural shifts that have been impacting the cultural industries over the past decade or so. streaming technologies may have been with us for over three decades, yet it is their implication with algorithmic processes and artificial intelligences that are currently provoking the most unease. whether it’s the development of artificial intelligence that can automatically produce a song in a sonic style according to various user prompts, or the increasing appearance of ai music in spotify playlists, such transitions again inflame anxieties around the nature of human creativity and its replacement by machines. in chapters four, anxieties around the role that algorithms have in music selection are examined, particularly in the fear that the human curator has been sidelined by automated processes. the authors draw from bonini’s own ethnographic research with gandini (2019) on curating playlists to illustrate the continued presence of real live humans in the editorial offices of streaming platforms, even if the authors here warn that a small number of playlists are increasingly influential in determining the viability of a musician’s career. dancecult 17(1)158 taking on such a large scope as the transformation of music cultures as a result of music streaming platforms means there will inevitably be a considerable amount of shifts left unaddressed in the work. while there is much focus on individual tactics of resistance, it would be interesting to understand more about how various music scenes and non-corporate streaming initiatives are enacting algorithmic resistance, a term the authors use for listeners who attempt to “circumvent, control, or mislead the data collection mechanisms enacted by platforms’ algorithms” (115). despite this, platformed! provides a valuable primer for anyone wishing to get their bearings in the ever-shifting landscape of music’s situatedness in digital media ecologies and a reminder of the power that artists and fans have in shaping music cultures. references bonini, tiziano and alessandro gandini. 2019. “‘first week is editorial, second week is algorithmic’: platform gatekeepers and the platformization of music curation”. social media + society 5(4): 1–11. <https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119880006>. green, walden and matthew strauss. 2025. “deerhoof to remove music from spotify”. pitchfork. 30 june: <https://pitchfork.com/news/deerhoof-to-remove-music-from-spotify/>, (accessed 1 august 2025). srnicek, nick. 2017. platform capitalism. cambridge, uk; medford, ma: polity press. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119880006 https://pitchfork.com/news/deerhoof-to-remove-music-from-spotify/ reviews 159 dance music: a feminist account of an ordinary culture tami gadir new york: bloomsbury academic, 2023. isbn: 978-1-5013-4640-8 (paperback), 978-1-5013-4641-5 (hardcover) rrp: us$92.05 (hardcover), us$28.66 (paperback) welcome to the club: the life and lessons of a black woman dj dj paulette manchester: manchester university press, 2024. isbn: 978-1-5261-6690-6 (hardcover) rrp: uk£20.00 (hardcover) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.16> maren hancock macewan university (canada) over the past two decades, dance music studies have shifted meaningfully from celebratory accounts of subcultural resistance to more critical, intersectional appraisals of labour, space, power and politics. two recent books extend and deepen this shift: welcome to the club: the life and lessons of a black woman dj by dj paulette and dance music: a feminist account of an ordinary culture by tami gadir. although distinct in genre and methodology— gadir’s book is an academic monograph, while paulette’s is a memoir—both texts challenge the idealized narratives that have dominated scholarly and popular accounts of dj culture. together, they offer a much-needed recalibration of what it means to make, live, and think through dance music in the twenty-first century. gadir opens her book with a thesis that is almost deceptively simple: “dance music is ordinary” (1). by this, she means that dance music culture is not necessarily mundane (although it often is, as she demonstrates), but socially and structurally embedded; indeed, dance music is shot through with the same exclusions, hierarchies and contradictions as any other cultural practice. this assertion is a direct challenge to decades of scholarship and fan writing that frame dj culture as inherently emancipatory, utopian or exceptional. for gadir, origin stories about detroit, chicago, berlin and new york may have been politically useful in early subcultural theory, but they have since become canonical and limiting: “what has happened since,” she argues in the conclusion, “is that such interventions have become the accepted stories of dance music culture. as such, they no longer serve their original function, and their politics are no longer radical.” (168) paulette (who is mononymous) presents a similar critique from a different angle. her memoir, welcome to the club, tracks over 30 years in the industry—from early gigs in manchester’s queer nightlife scene, including her role as a resident at the hacienda’s https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.16 dancecult 17(1)160 flesh, through corporate pr work at mercury records and eventually to international stardom. yet despite her longevity and acclaim, paulette reflects repeatedly on how her contributions—like those of many black women djs—have been marginalized or omitted entirely from mainstream dance music history: “the winners in dance music have mainly been men,” she writes, quoting carl loben, “and men are more likely to push themselves forward and take the credit” (128). when paulette became the resident dj at flesh, the club’s legendary and first queer night, she was one of only two women djs to hold down a hacienda residency. she describes how her residency at flesh “enabled [her] to join a boy’s club which changed [her] life” (5) and “was unarguably the catalyst for [her] career” (32). still, paulette stresses that hacienda was not the only “thing” in manchester–remember, dominant narratives dominate history. paulette stresses that, as important as the hacienda was, “if history is to be correct, we have to acknowledge the other stories that have been squashed down and pushed out” (35). she emphasizes that a “vibrant underground dj scene” (33) existed at the time that hasn’t been awarded historical prominence, “inhabited by a cluster of black music promoters” (33). despite this, “black people weren’t invited into the city centre–any city centre–in england and the early nineties were not a ‘black creative’ friendly space” (33). her reflections offer lived evidence to support gadir’s claim that historiographic gatekeeping and cultural memory are structured by race, gender and power. gadir’s research spans a decade of fieldwork and interviews conducted across the uk, tel aviv, zurich, oslo and sydney, with a focus on how gender, race, class and regulatory frameworks shape dance music environments. her methods include participant observation and critical discourse analysis, with a particular emphasis on mythologies of meritocracy and postfeminism. if gadir’s work serves as a feminist audit of the dance music studies field, paulette’s memoir functions as a counter-archive: a first-person record of scenes and struggles often left undocumented. paulette’s memoir is rooted in her singular but deeply intersectional experience as a queer black woman navigating predominantly white and male spaces. yet her storytelling is far from anecdotal. she consistently situates her experiences within broader systems of exclusion—whether confronting the “lead-lined” glass ceiling while working in pr for mercury records (54), being told she’d never get booked as “a black, female dj with grey hair” (122), or having samples of her autobiography dismissed by male colleagues such as frank broughton for not having enough sex and drugs to make it interesting. thankfully, paulette ignored his advice when manchester press approached her to write the book in 2021. one of the many strengths of welcome to the club lies in paulette’s insistence that embodied experience is not separate from theory—it is theory in motion. paulette stresses that her book is neither a complete history of edm nor her definitive biography; rather, it’s “a series of snapshots that follow a chronological arc from the start of [her] dj’ing career to the present day, bending this through the prism of other people’s histories to acknowledge the wider picture. after all, ten people at a party will never tell reviews 161 the same story.” (2–3) here, paulette introduces a theme both glaringly obvious and yet somehow still ignored: history is subjective and favours hegemonic subjects. acknowledging her intersectional positionality within what bell hooks characterizes as “white supremacist patriarchal” culture, paulette states, “i have the unique perspective of an outsider with insider knowledge and an insider with outside knowledge” (3). both paulette and gadir foreground the ongoing struggles women face in dj culture, though with different emphases. in chapter 5 of dance music, gadir dissects how gender operates not just at the level of representation, but in sonic codes, gatekeeping, and audience perception. female djs are often marketed either as “sexy and incompetent” or musically credible but non-conforming to beauty norms (121–123). these binaries echo in media representation and club booking policies, and paulette’s narrative personalizes these structural forces. she documents the repeated erasure of her skills, the scrutiny of her appearance and the exhausting dance between authenticity and acceptability. her story makes visible the emotional and economic toll of navigating these contradictions alongside unpredictable, irregular employment —what gadir names as “precarity in informal economies” (140) and paulette describes more viscerally as “losing your mojo” (121). both gadir and paulette extend their analysis into ageism, showing how dance music’s obsession with youth further marginalizes women. paulette, now in her fifties, writes candidly about facing dwindling bookings and backhanded compliments. yet she refuses invisibility: “remind yourself that few white men have a problem with celebrating their wins... you too should remember and feel pride in yourself and your achievements.” (139) her memoir becomes a feminist act of citation—of herself and of the women who built the scene alongside her. in chapter 2, paulette describes how she “started to build a network of female supporters” (47–48), and this is key to her narrative. throughout welcome to the club, paulette shouts out the amazing women she encountered, including but not limited to: smokin’ jo, dulcie danger, caroline prothero, jamz supernova, marcia carr, colleen ‘cosmo’ murphy, judy griffith, gladys pizarro, jaguar, erica mckoy, niks, lakuti, naomi pohl, anz, sherelle and more. if you don’t know these women, you should look them up. one of gadir’s most provocative contributions is her critique of “transcendence” as a central value in dance music discourse. in chapter 4, she questions whether the romanticized peak experience—of becoming one with the dance floor, the lights, the crowd—is truly emancipatory or simply another consumerist ideal dressed in subcultural clothing, stating “[t]he popular discourses on utopianism in dance music culture leave little room for addressing problematic gender dynamics” (164). for gadir, transcendence is often an individualist fantasy that displaces collective political action. paulette’s memoir complements this critique with realism and wit. while she recounts moments of joy, connection and artistic mastery, she never glorifies the scene. instead, she foregrounds its labour: lugging records, facing hostile sound techs, staying professional in the face of condescension and recovering from burnout: “the glamour is fleeting, the graft is real, and the sacrifices are many” (74), she writes. paulette’s story echoes gadir’s insistence that even the most exceptional spaces can be host to ordinary experiences. dancecult 17(1)162 both books reject dance music exceptionalism in favour of something more politically grounded. gadir’s final chapter critiques the field of dance music studies itself for clinging to outdated narratives of resistance and transcendence. she asks, “what function does dance music writing whose main goal is advocacy or defence serve now that there is no longer an orthodoxy to challenge?” (170) in its place, she calls for a post-utopian, anti-capitalist feminist praxis that acknowledges the limitations of dance floors while mobilizing their collectivist potential toward structural change. paulette’s conclusion, subtitled “a manifesto”, similarly balances critique with hope. she doesn’t romanticize the past, but she insists that club culture can still be a site of joy, community and creative resistance: “community is the foundation. collaboration is the future. alliances reinforce the chain.” (195) she reminds readers that love—for music, for people, for the party—is not apolitical; it is the engine that keeps us going. in sum, these two books—one a rigorous academic intervention, the other a vital work of cultural memory—deserve to be read in tandem as both disrupt the plur mnemonic. paulette and gadir challenge scholars, djs, promoters, fans and all stakeholders in dance music to move beyond myth and toward accountability. whether we encounter dj culture in lecture halls or on dance floors, in archives or behind the decks, dance music and welcome to the club remind us that the work of rethinking dance music culture is far from finished. reviews 163 live spielen: liveness in performances elektronischer tanzmusik josef schaubruch hildesheim: universitätsverlag hildesheim, 2024. isbn: 978-3-96424-101-6 (paperback) rrp: €27,00 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.17> jack mcneill university of york (uk) as i write this review i am looking at an old ticket stub on my desk for an event in july 2025 in leeds. the stub includes all the usual information you’d expect from the gig ticket: venue, time, price, promoter, etc. the headline of the stub displays the name of the artist, followed by the following text in bold: “live dj set”. to some, this may be paradoxical; how can a dj set where an artist is playing pre-produced records one after the other be “live”? some may even see such a claim as audacious if the artist is not playing their own work using acoustic, amplified and/or electronic musical instruments and employing a level of mastery or even virtuosity. some may take a more sympathetic view. surely the presence of the artist and audience and some sort of interaction between the two is enough to make the performance “live”. debates around what a live performance involves are pervasive in electronic dance music cultures. views are manifold, and long have ravers, artists and enthusiasts debated the nuances of liveness in electronic dance music performance. if this is a debate you have had or are preparing for your next heated discussion on the topic, perhaps you might want to come equipped with some robust arguments. and if robust arguments on liveness are what you are looking for, look no further than josef schaubruch’s live spielen. live spielen is a comprehensive and critical review on notions of liveness in electronic dance music performances. rather than attempting to provide an absolute definition of the term, schaubruch highlights the theoretical and practical complexities and vagueness bound up with it. the work is convincing and presents a solid theoretical background around liveness in dance music genres, before undertaking empirical study and analysis on electronic artists who perform live and have a variety of different perspectives on what that means to them. schaubruch considers a number of positions on the notion of liveness, spanning from more common (mostly electronic) instrumental performances to the understanding of the dj set as a “live” practice (or not, as some argue), and the importance of corporeality, embodiment and an audience’s presence and interaction with the artist to a live performance. the first chapter is centred around the ambiguity of live performance in electronic music. it elegantly outlines the anxieties of electronic dance music artists around whether something might be live, as well as introducing the various constellations of live performance in electronic music, including turntablism, live coding, hardware performances and more. in this theoretical introduction, schaubruch also emphasises that his reflections on liveness often stem from less tangible phenomena like practice and affect as well as technologies, placing artists and audiences as critical to his discussion. chapter 2 presents a solid and https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.17 dancecult 17(1)164 comprehensive literature review. this chapter is particularly strong and is a useful resource for those working in or interested in the blooming academic discussion around liveness and electronic dance music. notable in the chapter is linguistic analysis of genre and musical role (e.g. dj/producer) across english and german, and the assertion that providing a single binary definition of “liveness” (i.e. “live” and “not live”) is no longer possible. in doing so, schaubruch mostly avoids falling into traps around defining what may or may not be authentic, again focussing on the multiplicity and vagueness of the terms he explores. following the rigorous review of literature, he provides a brief outline of his methodology which is clear and addresses gaps in field, particularly in the empirical study of liveness in electronic dance music. his discussion around reflexive grounded theory is both engaging and goes some way in addressing the perpetual complexity of aligning the specificities of dance music cultures with research methodologies. at the same time, there is a clear engagement with the author’s positionality as researcher, artist and participant in the dance music culture. the fourth chapter plots schaubruch’s findings and his own theoretical reflections on them, extracting broader themes stemming from the empirical work with artists who professionally engage with live electronic music performance. the outcomes are expansive, supported by informative diagrams. one particularly striking observation, albeit one that might be predictable to the reader, is the cultural capital that liveness holds for the artists interviewed. there is an inherent tension among artists’ reflections on what “liveness” is, with some focussed on the practice of using live instruments itself, while others with more of a focus towards creating moments of presence with audiences. not one to shy away from the complexity of these arguments, schaubruch explores where these tensions intersect, extending notions of subject and object to body (artist) and equipment, as well as artist and audience, exploring the relationships between musicians and instruments as an illustrative comparison. overall, live spielen presents a thorough, rigorous and engaging analysis on the role that liveness has in the performance of electronic dance music. he leans into the diversity and conflicts in both the literature and the points of view of the artists he interviews to illustrate the richness and potential in various definitions of live performances of electronic dance music. there are a (very small) handful of instances where it might be inferred that value judgements around live performances being “better” than dj sets, particularly in the “grad an liveness”, are being made. although these appear to emerge from the author’s empirical work, their absolute presentation may be seen to negate the vagueness in terminology that schaubruch so effectively builds throughout most of the text. while not necessarily within the scope of this work, an exploration on the role of liveness in studio production, and how live performances translate to the composition and production of fixed media is missing in the book and perhaps presents a gap for future work. admittedly, when i first received the ticket for the above-mentioned event in leeds, i scoffed at the absurdity of a “live dj set”. i was convinced that the headline description of the event was wholly paradoxical, perhaps a marketing ploy that plays into schaubruch’s assertions on the cultural capital of the live set. having read live spielen and considered the vagueness of the notion liveness in electronic dance music however, i am not so sure, and this is one of the great successes of this text; it questions as much as it answers. reviews 165 assembling a black counter culture deforrest brown, jr. new york: primary information, 2022. isbn: 9781734489736 (paperback) rrp: us$15.00 <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.18> emre öztürk humboldt-universität zu berlin (germany) deforrest brown jr. is a musician, media theorist and curator who has been an essential voice in questioning the current state of global electronic music and framing it within the radical black perspective. in assembling a black counter culture (2022), he traces the “black secret technology” centering detroit techno meanwhile covering black vernacular cultures, racial capitalism, industrialization and black resistance. combining both academic and underground knowledge, brown visits the black labor, ingenuity and futuristic desire, questioning techno’s later depoliticized and dehistoricized reception within various discursive and practical realms among the global electronic music industry. more than a linear musical timeline, this book is rather a counter-archive; interviews, artist biographies, scene insights and media archaeology are constant while brown digs further into the direction of techno’s cybernetic essence and creative drive. doing so, the book references valuable literature at the intersection of racial capitalism, cybernetics, and black desire, citing authors like cedric robinson, paul gilroy, kodwo eshun, fred moten, as well as frequently referring to the afrofuturist heritage and diasporic myth-science.  starting from detroit, brown later situates techno within the broader black atlantic, as well as its further branches through locations like japan, germany and the uk. while each chapter breaks down techno’s timeline by focusing on different perspectives, locations or concepts, brown eventually re-assembles all the information in the final chapter, “the collapse of modern culture” a title that is very much self-explanatory. brown merely hesitates to express his personal opinion, in fact, he clearly shows his position also on the very first page of the book with five different diagrams; the first one being a forecast of unbearable ecological load that inevitably leads to the “collapse of modern civilization”, and the second one that maps out the timeline of the black atlantic that starts with the global slave trade that he indicates the inevitable future result, “the journey home”. in that sense, brown underlines the inescapable outcomes of a culture that is assembled through racial capitalism and neocolonialism, combining self-reflexive insights with the comprehensive research data he provides. in the first few pages, the book cruises through the racialized history of the us and colonialism with their connection to current racial capitalism and the “rise of modern industrial complexes”. while discussing the essence of black usage of media and machines https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.18 dancecult 17(1)166 in the context of electronic music and dance cultures, brown pays dues to early architects of afrofuturism such as sun ra, lee “scratch” perry or george clinton, discussing their influence on later black electronic musics. he quickly sets its route to detroit in the following chapter, zooming into the life of techno’s originators in the us midwest, where post-fordist racial capitalism peaked post world war ii. one of brown’s main arguments is that techno’s emergence is inseparable from the conditions of post-fordist america and the automation of black labor. he conceptualizes techno as an embodied and racialized extension of the workers’ engagement with industrial machinery, adding that the music’s futuristic desires are not merely stylistic but are direct reflection of the industrial environment, that he eventually refers to as “black secret technology.” brown positions detroit techno pioneers like juan atkins, jeff mills and underground resistance as sonic engineers responding to industrial debilitation and using machines and rhythms to pursue new aesthetic forms and sonic fiction, while continously providing examples from afrofuturistic heritage and mythscientific practice that points out to the everlasting connection between pasts, presents and the futures of the black atlantic sonic futurism. brown also goes over the world’s changing economic and political climate and its impacts on the racialized, social and financial structure of the usa and beyond, zooming into cases such as us’s post-civil war and more contemporary topics such as racial policies and riots, or state-driven violence in the 20th century as what equally shaped the conditions for techno to flourish. at the intersection of racialized structures and mainstream media, he constantly provides concrete examples of techno and other black music being whitewashed through media tools such as news narrations, charts or interviews to show the doubleedged sword of british and american music market; where britain has become a melting pot of different black music with enough financial stability to the us’s, covering techno’s expansion overseas and its results with another self-explanatory chapter called “wake up america, you are dead!”. next chapter “detroit-berlin axis” provides even more insights by revealing further connections of black musical cultures with racial capitalism and neocolonialism, focusing on the genre’s second decade of existence and exportation outside of the us, under “a colonial project that white european crowds fetishize detroit’s sonic labor and whitewashing it”as brown puts it, diving into stories from post-cold war era berlin with a hedonistic, neocolonial venture that simultaneously serves for the western cultural hegemony. exampling paternalistic assumptions of kraftwerk and other westernwhite influences on detroit techno, or scholars such as stockhausen and adorno, brown maps out the post-colonial multiculturalism that reappropriates the african american musical continuum on the 1990s and beyond, going over cases like underground resistance or drexciyan empire as black resistance in response.  brown brings his focus to the present in the final chapters, interrogating how platform capitalism has restructured the global music economy and further marginalized black producers. he maps out the consolidation of power in media platforms, streaming services and corporate-backed festivals, showing how these infrastructures continue the exploitation and erasure of black creative labor. here he reframes all previous chapters through the lens reviews 167 of platform capitalism and questions its impacts on techno and beyond, going over the capitalization of the black body, mind, and labor through contemporary technological infrastructure. yet, he already made the conclusion clear many times throughout the book, that blackness is always already in counter-position to the structures of racial capitalism that seek to contain it. if there is a central claim in assembling a black counter culture, it is that resistance, speculative imagination and reassembling are constant variables of the black secret technology. dancecult 16(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 16(1) 2024: 140–152 issn 1947-5403 ©2024 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net rude citizenship: jamaican popular music, copyright, and the reverberations of colonial power larisa kingston mann chapel hill: university of north carolina press, 2022.  isbn: 978-1-4696-6724-9 (paperback), 978-1-4696-6723-2 (hardcover) rrp: us$95 (hardcover), us$32.50 (paperback)  <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.16> aadita chaudhury york university (canada) / goldsmiths, university of london (uk) in rude citizenship: jamaican popular music, copyright, and the reverberations of colonial power, larisa kingston mann unravels the moral economies and legal copyright frameworks that inform and animate the ongoing evolution of jamaican popular music. mann’s intervention into the study of jamaican music and culture in this context is novel in multiple ways. existing approaches to theorizing jamaican popular music have contended with ways in which practitioners of the culture incorporate elements of embodied social knowledge (henriques 2011), challenge the dominance of a stratified system of social classes (cooper 2004) and create a sense of kinship with ancestral histories of migration and ritual practices (niaah 2010; stanley niaah 2008). mann’s approach presents an account of how jamaican musical cultures challenge dominant epistemologies about intellectual property and ownership based on colonial notions of enclosure—positioning the conditions in which jamaican popular music emerges in relation to global struggles against the loss of commons—ecological, economic and cultural. mann locates the legal framework of copyright as part of a wider set of colonial worldmaking apparatuses that create enclosures around popular music and culture, entangling them in regimes of ownership and intellectual property that most closely adhere to ideas of musical composition and creativity within a eurocentric framework of cultural production, centering specific individuals and collectives in isolation from their cultural milieu as auteurs. within the broader context of british imperialism in which jamaican popular genres like reggae, ska, dancehall and dub have emerged, there are additionally reviews https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.16 reviews 141 class, geographical and economic considerations of practitioners that contribute not only to the evolution of distinct musical styles but also to their legibility within the political economy of global music and associated legal regimes. mann’s most important and unique contribution to this growing literature on the embodied knowledges and epistemologies emanating from jamaican music’s ethos is linking the ways it challenges class and coloniality within jamaica to how the notion of “rude citizenship” (130, 177)—the sociocultural, affective, and embodied practices of poor jamaicans contrasted with the state-supported ideals of the elite classes—created “a kind of sheltering space where poor jamaicans can produce this relatively autonomous cultural life” (7). it is through this perspective of rude citizenship—which encapsulates how the jamaican poor resisted forms of coloniality by challenging certain white supremacist norms of conduct still affirmed by elites in jamaican post-independence society—that mann shows how anti-blackness and coloniality pervaded post-independence jamaica. even though “the state and its elite intellectuals (…) were at odds over the appropriate forms and distributions of power, they tended to remain more in agreement about cultural norms of conduct, reading the poor as ‘rude’ rather than as challenging coloniality” (9). accordingly, within marginalized spaces in jamaican society, popular musical cultures reflected the moral economies and embodied representations of various approaches to pushing back against state-enforced, anti-black understandings of personhood, creativity and conduct. these cultural practices present considerable epistemological challenges to dominant global orders surrounding the status of intellectual property and ownership when it comes to music, countering established notions of copyright law. when considered through the prism of notions of “rudeness” and rude citizenship as per mann’s articulation, we can begin to observe the impacts of persistent coloniality and anti-blackness in post-independence jamaica as broad, cascading forms that create the scaffolding in which jamaican popular music, legal mechanisms like international copyright law and notions of ownership interface and operate, each challenging the limits of the other. in this nexus, jamaican musical practices, regardless of their genre, represent part of a pluriverse in which traditional cultures of orality, notions of sonic commons that not only enable but also celebrate forms of hybridity facilitated by mixing and sampling practices and other embodied and aural knowledges—frequently demonstrate their continuous evolution and autonomy even as newer mechanisms of legal and physical enclosure emerge by engaging with and producing forms of musical composition that defy colonial constructs of copyright law. in this way, the musical forms, textures, pedagogies, and epistemologies that undergird the ethos of jamaican popular music continue to refract the moral economies surrounding the idea of “rude citizenship” within the domains of music and cultural production, legal regimes and beyond. jamaican popular music and dance culture, its technological innovations and migrating evolutionary trajectories will likely continue to lay significant challenges to the global hegemonic legal orders around creative composition, collaboration and ownership. dancecult 14(1)142 mann’s work in rude citizenship extends this inquiry well beyond the realm of music into broader conversations about coloniality, indigenous approaches to legal worldmaking and the nature of cultural production itself. by questioning the fundamental underlying assumptions in western conceptions of musical and sonic composition with examples from jamaican popular music, mann’s provocation in rude citizenship asks readers to question their understanding of auteurship, originality and notions of musical talent. references cooper, carolyn. 2004. sound clash: jamaican dancehall culture at large. 2004th edition. new york, ny: palgrave macmillan. henriques, julian. 2011. sonic bodies: reggae sound systems, performance techniques, and ways of knowing. 1st edition. new york: continuum. niaah, sonjah stanley. 2010. dancehall: from slave ship to ghetto. illustrated edition. ottawa: university of ottawa press. stanley niaah, sonjah. 2008. “performance geographies from slave ship to ghetto.” space and culture 11(4): 343–60. reviews 143 together, somehow: music, affect, and intimacy on the dancefloor luis manuel garcia-mispireta durham: duke university press, 2023. isbn: 978-1-4780-2008-0 (cloth), 978-1-4780-2504-7 (paperback) rrp: us$107.95 (cloth), us$28.95 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.17> rory fewer university of california, riverside (usa) luis manuel garcia-mispireta’s together, somehow: music, affect, and intimacy on the dancefloor adds an essential contribution to a limited yet gradually expanding body of ethnomusicological scholarship on electronic dance music cultures. through a multi-sited ethnography of house, techno and minimal dance music scenes in chicago, paris and berlin, the author evaluates the utopian potential of the dancefloor, illustrating the affective dimensions that generate its feelings of social cohesion as well as the ambivalence and exclusions that surround its possibility. in making its arguments, this book draws not only from interviews conducted with partygoers across these scenes, but also auto-ethnographic anecdotes and analytical frameworks from sound and affect studies. a primary focus of this book centers on how the dancefloor enables forms of intimacy between strangers that would otherwise be inappropriate in other spaces, a point illustrated early on with a memorable anecdote in which the author’s face was briefly caressed by a stranger while dancing at panorama bar in berlin, “an exchange of surprising warmth between strangers” (3). garcia-mispireta builds empirically from a range of anecdotes to make potent claims about these forms of “stranger-sociability” (5), including how conventions of touch in nightlife cultures serve the multiple functions of “communicating sociability, transmitting affect, and both sensing and navigating a crowded environment” (53). the author incorporates an extensive amount of musical analysis to argue that the affective qualities of corporeal exchanges on the dancefloor meet further intensification through the haptic qualities of electronic dance music. specifically, the distribution of frequencies in electronic dance music composition results in a type of material impact, described as “sonic spikes [that] strike the body in a very concrete way, eliciting sensations not only in the ear but also in the body’s skin, flesh, viscera, and bones” (70). electronic dance music genres often utilize sounds that index tactile experience, such as clapping or breathing, a practice which “rel[ies] on the ability of listener-dancers to associate certain sounds with an enfleshed sound source” (73). garcia-mispireta also provides a close analysis of musical texture to argue that electronic dance music makes use of granular sounds that likewise evoke tactile experience. this combination of vibrational impact, bodily indexicality and granular texture ultimately “invites an engagement with sound that is alive to texture, touch, https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.17 dancecult 14(1)144 and other fleshy excitations” (87). the book’s larger theories of togetherness are predicated on these affects as devices through which crowd solidarity is enacted or imagined. the author details these affective encounters of sonic and embodied proximities to theorize the vague sense of togetherness that the dancefloor produces. these affective encounters (articulated corporeally and musically) intensify in a process that the author calls the “thickening of the social” (124). thickening is a process whereby the imbrication of dancefloor affect gives initial coherence to a type of crowd solidarity. thickening results in a vague feeling of togetherness that the author explains through the concept of liquidarity, defined as “a form of fluid solidarity in which vagueness is a crucial condition of its emergence” (32). liquidarity is necessarily vague because in order to coalesce it must also obfuscate the power differentials that would deny its possibility. “vagueness” is thus used by the author as an analytic to effectively describe the contradictions that allow nightlife spaces to simultaneously contain forms of inclusion and exclusion, and which threaten to dissolve these “vague” feelings of social cohesion as they are inevitably problematized by the presence of partygoers with differential access to this solidarity, including, for example, partygoers who are disproportionately targeted by unsolicited touching or have differing cultural expectations for intimacy. the duality of this vagueness is most apparent in the final chapter, in which the author details door policies and the regulation of diversity as a “dissonance between a utopian desire for unproblematically inclusive collectivity and the practices of exclusion that help to make the experience of cosmopolitan conviviality possible” (215). for these reasons, liquidarity is a phenomenon that can only take fragile shape. as the author writes, it “sustains an intimate world on the merest whiff of sociability” (104). the ultimate objective of this intimate world and its utopian aspirations—the “something” as noted in the title of the book—are likewise vague. garcia-mispireta writes that they “provide a sense of what a utopia of postidentitarian belonging might feel like, rather than a coherent model of how it would function” (223). this book offers a novel contribution to ethnomusicological scholarship and will surely lend itself as an important resource for scholars and other readers interested in the global phenomenon of electronic dance music culture or studies on music and affect more generally. however, it is important to note the structural challenges that nearly made such a project impossible. this book is prefaced with a description of the obstacles the author met as a firstgeneration, queer scholar of color working on topics deemed “disciplinarily unconventional and low-prestige” (xv) by the institutions of ethnomusicology. as it offers a series of theories pertinent to understanding the ubiquitous communities of the “dancefloor”, this book thus also serves as a reminder to current and future ethnomusicologists of the structural changes required to ensure similarly profound work continues to reach fruition. reviews 145 out of space: how uk cities shaped rave culture (revised and expanded edition) jim ottewill bristol: velocity press, 2024. isbn: 978-1-913231-63-7 (paperback) rrp: £14.99 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.18> alistair fraser maynooth university (ireland) a friend of mine, breffni, tells a wonderful story about discovering rave culture in north western (nw) london, aged 17. out and about with friends one evening, he came across a spiral tribe free party in a warehouse in nw london. it was unlike anything else he’d known. it was music and a vibe, music and an embrace; a feeling, then, and one he continues to enjoy and chase after. today, after a few decades of raving, he’s employed to make urban places more liveable for all (and he’s successful at it). back then, though, it was the rave culture he discovered that went on to make the city liveable; it was rave culture that went on to make so many places and spaces of wonder, discovery and joy. uk cities since the late 1980s and early 1990s have been bound up with rave culture in profound ways. both the city and the culture have existed in relation to each other and to a wider array of places and spaces. those fleeting moments on the dancefloor, the randomness of meeting and hugging strangers, the chaos, the buzz—it all needed somewhere to occur and rave culture did manage to create those geographies. indeed, looking back at the story of rave culture, perhaps one of the most notable aspects was simply that the promoters, free party collectives, djs, sound engineers, new age travellers, ravers and clubbers found so many spaces to embrace each other. looking around now, it’s hard not to be worried about the future. what chance will our children have of making discoveries like breffni’s? a similar anxiety pervades out of space: how uk cities shaped rave culture (2024). in this expanded version of his 2022 book with the same title, jim ottewill takes the act of “looking around” to an elevated level. ottewill works his way across the country, from north to south, to ask the promoters, the originators and the djs who got things started and kept things going, to tell their stories. what we get out of this is a brilliant and rich historical geography of rave culture in the uk. we get insightful biographical details about the promoters and djs; rare nuggets about how clubs got started; and fantastic quotes that capture the vitality and energy—the love—that went into and came out of rave culture. out of space has ten core chapters. the bulk of them are dedicated to covering developments in glasgow, manchester, liverpool, sheffield, birmingham, london and other smaller cities and towns such as coventry and margate. chapters 7 and 8 focus on party and sound system scenes with fewer fixed ties to any particular place but with strong bonds to uk cities. then in chapter 10 and the concluding chapter, ottewill examines the contemporary struggle to find a place for rave culture in uk cities. https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.18 dancecult 14(1)146 the book has two standout features. the first is a justifiable sense of awe and respect toward the great many people who have dedicated so much of their lives to emplacing rave culture in uk cities. it’s been their task to find venues, bring in the crowds and deal with authorities or angry neighbours. it’s their labour and often their capital that’s generated the landscape of rave culture in the uk. out of space is a book that fist-bumps those people. it works. it’s a book with love and hugs. alongside the love, though, the second feature is an overriding sense of dread. ottewill has his finger on the pulse of rave culture in the uk. he’s spotting the novel ideas and experiments, such as community ownership models that try to counteract rising rents and the overall loss of space; and highlighting other efforts to battle the growing sense that rave culture is on the decline. yet, it is precisely the fact that rave culture is on the decline that jumps out from the book, especially in the final two chapters. this leads me to wonder if a weakness in out of space is that ottewill is too committed to rave culture. he wants to spot and discuss some of the ways that rave culture can keep going. he knows this means we need space. but to my mind, ottewill does not dedicate enough energy to asking if there is going to be enough of a commitment from younger generations to the making of spaces like clubs or other dancefloors. for sure, processes such as gentrification are a major source of pressure on clubs and promoters. regulations, insurance, health, safety and the wider institutionalization of cultural practice with respect to capitalist life also bear down on rave culture. but what about generational differences? thirty years or more have passed since breffni (and kids like him) discovered spiral tribe (and then, for breffni, bedlam and numerous other events and venues). today, though, a great many young people are on smartphones or playsations all day long. they’re updating their followers on instagram. they’re tik-tokking videos; creating, capturing, commodifying and sometimes cancelling culture in novel ways that just might not need the same sorts of spaces that rave culture needed. against this backdrop, to want clubs and raves to keep going—to seek out a space for them in the city—is one thing. but maybe we might need to accept that our kids won’t want to spend quite so much of their weekends bubbling around on an ecstatic ride in hot sweaty clubs, warehouses or other venues. one has to wonder if our kids will need the same spaces as rave culture needed. will they seek out the same sorts of life-changing or mind-altering experience that so many ravers desired? in short, maybe rave culture is running out of space; but maybe it’s also running out of ravers. these minor critiques aside, out of space is a fantastic book precisely because it can provoke debates about the past, present and future of rave culture. ottewill writes clearly, quotes the people he interviewed astutely and ensures the reader knows there they are relative to the rest of the book. it’s a brilliantly crafted text, demonstrating serious writing skills and drawing on an incredibly rich archive of material collected via first-hand interviews and other sources. my sense is that anyone interested in the rise, development and significance of rave culture will need this book. anyone fighting to keep the vibe alive should also get a copy. reviews 147 venue stories: narratives, memories, and histories from britain’s independent music spaces fraser mann, robert edgar and helen pleasance (eds.) sheffield: equinox publishing, 2023. isbn: 9781800504431 (hardcover), 9781800503731 (paperback) rrp: us$100.00 (hardcover), us$32.00 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.19> max gibson university of california, davis (usa) drawing together a chorus of individual voices, venue stories is a dynamic collection of creative non-fiction entries that speak on music, place, experience and community across british independent music scenes in the 20th and 21st century. in their curation of the chapters, editors mann, edgar and pleasance state that their mission was to “bring stories and remembrances together, add shape to them and develop a scholarly understanding of how we can offer an alternative mode of historiography through editorial processes that are akin to the role of the museum curator” (2). conceived and developed during the covid-19 pandemic, this is not the usual collection of formal academic essays, but instead a radical attempt at shining light on histories that are usually ignored, marginal or not considered serious enough; venue stories acts as a site of resistance to erasure through the creation of an archive of stories not usually told. utilizing autoethnography, journalism, historiography, essaying, interview and most importantly memoir, the authors create multiple narratives of hidden microhistories. creative non-fiction as a genre is increasingly common within academia, yet rarely does a collection come together like this that achieves its mission of illuminating histories through a multiplicity of voices, rather than the usual single-authored narrative. this approach is apparent when examining the variety of people in this collection beyond the familiar academic researcher: band members, djs, producers, journalists, bartenders, photographers and more. each contribute their lived experiences and perspectives, and having an eclectic roster makes for an enjoyable read. the shifts in writing styles take the reader from the depths of despair—over half the chapters end with the closure of cherished venues—to uncontrollable laughter—who would have thought the destruction of a bass guitar could be so funny? (69–77). yet this emotional journey is never at the expense of intention of the book. each account reveals a microcosm within a broader community, scene and history, where musical worlds are lived, embodied and reenacted through memory, and then relived through writing; the act of memory writing affords the network of microhistories to be acknowledged and remembered and serves as a way of expressing personal experience and embodied knowledge within larger structures. memory writing thus becomes an analytical methodology. https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.19 dancecult 14(1)148 venue stories contributes a great deal to the regional histories of music scenes and venues in the areas of birmingham, leicester, liverpool and london. places such as brighton, glasgow, leeds, manchester, sheffield, teesside, york and the north of england are also represented. each entry acts as a scratching of the surface of histories that have yet to be written, and thus could lead way to a book of each region or venue in question. many chapters engage with a single venue, most of which are on the toilet circuit. robert edgar theorizes on the concept of the toilet venue, arguing that they affectionately received their name from the bands and audiences who would come together as a community in seedy spaces full of mythic history (40–50). some of the mythic venues included here are the charlotte, eric’s, and the bull and gate. other authors, instead look inward, and focus on journeys of discovery, coming-of-age and personal troubles through their venue experiences. especially important is how these authors grapple with the politics of access and inclusion, particularly that of safety and economic parity. gender politics are prevalent in penelope wickson’s experience in the 1990s birmingham jungle scene where she describes a masculinist environment rife with sexism and inappropriate behaviour toward female participants (162–174); vim renault and lene cortina, of punkgirldiaries, outline their experiences as female band members in the world of punk, a global phenomenon famous for breaking with traditional norms, which afforded them opportunities usually unusual for women (78–87); and polly hancock’s memoir reveals promotional sexism during the hype indie night at the bull and gate, london (60–68). economic politics are present in anna maria barry’s contribution who explicitly points out that working-class talent is underrepresented across the creative industries, not just in live music (124–134). ed garland’s account of sitting on a bench in leicester’s the charlotte venue introduces the reader to the perspective and experience of music in venues from a position of sitting rather than standing and points to the rarely addressed issue of physical accessibility in live music venues (145–152). myriad genres and scenes are represented through venue stories, including heavy metal, hard rock, britpop, as well as indie and underground musics. whether a product of living musical memory or simply due to its global influence, the genre with the most references is punk and its cousins. punk memories act as the main undertow that bring venues to life. while not intentional, the narratives of venue stories, emphasize live music performed by bands; stories concerning electronic dance music and djs, however, do make up a small number of chapters. a striking entry is thomas jackson’s chapter on his punk-rock dj dad, whose experience as a working-class industrial worker-turned dj illuminates the not-yettold activities and histories of venues, towns and regions alike (238–247). a standout feature of venue stories is the ubiquity of musical materiality that is littered across nearly every entry; indeed, the editors point out that “[m]aterial culture, the imagination and the memory have equal weight in these contributions and how they are reviews 149 written” (16). whether it is zines, instruments, seating, pa systems, badges, clothes or multitudinous memorabilia, objects are imbued with experiences and memories, and while they might not resonate like a venue, they are valuable for understanding how material culture fits into broader society, musics and histories. it would be wonderful to see these materials brought together in an exhibit that complements the book. those seeking applications of academic theory will find a selection of authors who situate their experiences and stories of venues within analytical frameworks—ed garland’s application of julian henrique’s listening skin is masterful (148)—but readers should not expect it from every chapter. simultaneously, some might question the reliability and rigor of memory writing; the very act of working from memory elicits the possibility of inaccuracies. yet this is to miss the point of the book. many authors acknowledge the fallibility of memory as a caveat to their narratives and some even go out of their way to work with archival documents to crosscheck specific dates and performances—pleasance’s postscript one, is humorously enlightening (28). rich in content and histories, the many individual narratives in venue stories are woven together and offer a model for those working through creative non-fiction as a methodology for writing histories pertaining to music, place and experience. the hidden microhistories of individuals represent larger structures of culture and community and are afforded agency to speak; the very nature of this book is radically effective. dancecult 14(1)150 living at night in times of pandemic: night studies and club culture in france and germany anita jóri and guillaume robin (eds.) bielefeld: transcript verlag, 2024. isbn: 978-3-8376-6726-4 (paperback) |rrp: 42,00€ (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.20> jack mcneill university of york (uk) discourse around dance music cultures (dmcs) has reached a turning point; a crossroads where underlying tensions, inconsistencies, inequalities and critical questions have begun to simmer to the surface, demanding attention and discussion. since its inception, themes of utopianism and togetherness have dominated this discourse without questioning such a narrative’s relationship with individual and community actual experiences. scholars of and participants in dmcs alike will be all too familiar with the assertion that dmcs and their related subcultures report a dominant message: one of unity, togetherness and inclusion. while utopianism and escapism are critical to the creation of the other-worlds of dance music spaces (garcia-mispireta 2023; o’grady 2012), the complex, conflicting and everdeveloping politics of the dancefloor demand frank, direct and ongoing consideration. living at night makes a comprehensive attempt at this through the lens of paris and berlin’s club scenes after the covid-19 pandemic. during the pandemic and in the following years global political movements and changes in media discourse shifted both internal and external perceptions of dmcs. many (although naturally not all) global dance music communities and institutions began to question their practices, policies, interior structures, broader values and relationships with local and international communities. the cities that living at night deals with, have undergone this process in recent years. what this text does particularly well is use them as a site to highlight the potentiality for positive change through framing club culture as utopian, while at the same time recognising the complex realities of clubbing communities. it pulls into question narratives that have been broadly, and sometimes uncritically, accepted, highlighting inherent tensions within dmcs. while the focus is on paris and berlin, the work could be applied more broadly to dmcs across europe and, in some cases, globally. again, this is timely, joining other texts, such as luis manuel garcia-mispireta’s recently published together somehow, which go some way in addressing similar issues. the book is split into three sections. the first, “scenes and communities”, looks at questions of urban and community identity in dmcs, questioning some pervasive and oftrepeated discourses in dmcs in detail. frédéric trottier-pistien’s second chapter critically analyses the city-twinning of detroit and berlin and its consistencies and inconsistencies, https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.20 reviews 151 while sophia abidi methodically parses some, but not all, subcultural characteristics of participants in berlin’s dmcs. in the final chapter of the section, diana weis considers the tensions between subcultural expression and high fashion surrounding berlin’s club scene, and berghain in particular. the second section, “diversity and inclusion”, engages in much needed critical discussions around the tension between inclusion, exclusion, awareness and micropolitics in dmcs. xan egger, neo seefried and mascha naumann’s chapter exposes some internal tensions in the scene, concomitantly making the case of the potentiality and concrete utopias presented by queer dmcs. ines liotard furthers this discussion, shining a light on the historical development of queer club culture in paris, while diana raiselis discusses the potential and problematics of awareness policies and approaches in contemporary club culture post-covid. the final section, “social and ecological challenges for a sustainable culture”, looks at some of the pressing issues facing contemporary dmcs and the role that social and ecological responsibility and action plays. edna hernández gonzález writes engagingly about artificial light and the tension between nighttime and its economy. guillaume robin’s chapter provides insight on sense of belonging and meaning in dmc communities in berlin, providing interesting reflections on areas for future work, particularly with “migrant clubbing communities” (a term that robin sees as problematic). this is followed by max eulitz’ thought-provoking personal prose reflecting on a clubbing experience in kyiv, which, like in many chapters before, presents the potentiality of club spaces in adverse times. the book ends with an insightful and practical conversation between robin and katharina wolf, presenting contemporary work around the social, ecological and financial stability of berlin’s club scene. the level of self-reflection and criticality that such a text requires is evident throughout. but this is also a complex task and there are a handful of brief moments in the book that stray into the defensive, engaging with binary suggestions of what might be good or bad for the club scene, including some attempts to “debunk” common myths. there are other moments where arguments of high and low culture are invoked; arguments that often expose the fragility with which studying dmcs comes. but perhaps in a culture where multiplicity and difference form its fabric, positioning dmcs’ value in opposition to what might be considered “mainstream” is not always useful. nevertheless, it is important to make very clear that such arguments are few and far between, and do not consist full chapters. indeed, the work in living at night is most successful when it embraces the dmcs’ diversity; in the discussions around the otherness of dmcs and their opposition to hegemony, and how actors in the scene might negotiate that, while legitimising its existence without any suggestion of what might perceived as good or bad. since the pandemic, european dmcs have seen club closures, thanks to gentrification, and aggressive legislation that makes it more difficult for nightlife to survive (drevenstedt 2020; garcia-mispireta 2016). criticism is directed at dmcs, where the boundaries between utopianism and permissibility are blurred (garcia-mispireta 2023); where hedonism as resistance to hegemony and nightlife as freedom get caught up in complex and often problematic behaviours and attitudes. it is a testament to scholarship in dmcs dancecult 14(1)152 and living at night that researchers and members of its community can hold themselves and their peers accountable; refocus the lens on themselves and use insider and informed perspectives to report on pertinent issues. living at night turns the mirror on dmcs in europe, not to show the fairest of them all, but to reflect on its complexity, on the possibility of what utopia and hedonism have to offer in opposition to and harmony with the everyday, warts and all. references drevenstedt, lukas. 2020. “dimensions of club culture: learning from berlin”. in the new age of electronic dance music and club culture, ed. anita jóri and martin lücke, 9–20. cham: springer international publishing. garcia-mispireta, luis manuel. 2016. “techno-tourism and post-industrial neo-romanticism in berlin’s electronic dance music scenes”. tourist studies 16(3): 276–95. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1468797615618037>. garcia-mispireta, luis manuel. 2023. together, somehow: music, affect, and intimacy on the dancefloor. durham: duke university press. o’grady, alice. 2012. “spaces of play: the spatial dimensions of underground club culture and locating the subjunctive”. dancecult 4(1): 86–106. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.01.04>. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1468797615618037 http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.01.04 weekend societies in the walled garden: montréal’s piknic electronik in the post-pandemic era tobias c. van veen california state university northridge (usa) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.11> mutek at piknik electronik 2011–2012, tobias c. van veen (2023a) piknic electronic has been one of the defining features of montréal’s post-rave scene. established in 2003, it began as a smaller-scale sunday after-party of a few hundred vibrating souls, held in parc jean drapeau on the île de st. hèlene. the island park is situated in the middle of the st. laurent river, across from the city (and bigger island) of montréal. what made the piknic particularly unique was the dancefloor, situated underneath trois disques, a towering alexander calder sculpture created for expo ’67. with its modernist metal arms arising like church spires, the sculpture framed the speakers and sky above the unholy sin of shaking-and-shimmying below. figure 1. beats and bubbles under the alexander calder statue at mutek 2014. photo credit: tobias c. van veen (2014). from the dancefloor, a glance west across the waters revealed the setting sun behind the montréal skyline, as the party went from early afternoon well into the evening dusk. while the event always had an admission fee to enter the cordoned-off site, it originally had no on-site bar or food venues, taking advantage of a wonderful french cultural custom enshrined in québec’s lax liquor laws allowing one to bring your own wine, as long as one is also carrying a picnic. thus, piknic was born, with electronic punters arriving with their baskets and bottles, getting smashed under a gleaming monument to yesterday’s modernism. the event rode the long tail of the post-raver vibe, satisfying the need for an aging raver populace to come together in what st john has aptly coined “weekend societies” (st john 2017). figure 2. in the heat of the dancefloor as the sun slowly sets over the city at mutek 2014. photo credit: tobias c. van veen (2014). arriving from the late morning onwards, montréal’s dancefloor denizens would crawl out from the clubs, arise from the depths of the after-hours and often just awake and attend a sunday for the boogie-down—much like berlin’s berghain scene, which effectively shifted the meaning of “late” to the next day entirely. i attended piknic frequently from its inception in 2003 until i departed montréal in 2008, as well as subsequent mutek showcases from 2009–2014. figure 3. as the sun set, the statue and the vibe both became lit. mutek 2014. photo credit: tobias c. van veen (2014). practically everyone arrives by way of public transport. i would catch dancefloor colleagues heading to the parc on the underground métro, carrying their bundles of boozy picnics for a bring-your-own-bottle event that would often descend into a sordid affair, with beats echoing across the concrete while couplings would escape to the woods. in canada, long before recreational legalization in 2018, cannabis was widely used and (mostly) tolerated and other psychedelic substances consumed, with little if any interference from the authorities. it was a near ideal urban space for a temporary zone of sonic catharsis, where the sound system could thump well into the evening. with hours of music in my ears, i could return home in due time for a decent night’s sleep before restarting the grad-school grind on monday. figure 4. the scene spilled beyond the gates, as mini parties dis/assembled everywhere, including along the banks of the river st. laurent. mutek 2014. photo credit: tobias c. van veen (2014). over the years, several epic mutek showcases at piknic were held. when mutek would overtake piknic, it added a degree of the avant-garde to the staple mainstream djs. this said, piknic eschewed the edm influence and increasing popification of electronic dance music, sticking to acclaimed producers and djs in founding genres. the mutek piknics became an important part of the international festival over the years, often creating a more open, casual and autonomous space for a more intimate and unsanctioned encounter with the event’s producers and djs. with its unscheduled tag teams and drunken dj sets becoming legendary in the scene lore, piknic was often the highlight of the mutek festival experience, as attendees and artists jived elbow-to-elbow on a dancefloor where the minimalism of the music echoed the modernism of calder’s statue. without any dancefloor infrastructure save for a small, scarcely-raised stage, there was no green room, vip lounge or other barrier between artists and attendees, facilitating a “post-rave” mix-up that mostly eschewed boundaries physical and social, as well as mixing up genders and ethnicities on the dancefloor. figure 5. a fully mixed scene lets loose the smoke at mutek 2014. photo credit: tobias c. van veen (2014). while there have been too many notable mutek events at piknic to mention (see van veen 2009), stand-outs included a multi-hour vinyl and traktor dvs (digital vinyl system) tag team between richie hawtin and ricardo villalobos in 2006 (see: video and video). hawtin and villalobos upped the ante on extended and inventive mixing that demonstrates a level of skill rarely heard in the digital era. also notable was nôze’s bonkers-drunk dj set in 2008 that had the duo eating grass—of the lawn variety—after drinking several bottles of vodka, while still nailing a stellar deep house mix on wax. wolf and lamb likewise dropped an unforgettable deep house set in 2012 that had the whole of piknic grooving without respite. on the side stage, sutekh (a.k.a. rrose) played a memorable leftfield set in 2011, crafting such a creative musical journey that it mixed bach cantatas into experimental ‘60s electronics and spaced-out acid techno. figure 6. sutekh moving the crowd through centuries of cantatas at mutek 2011. photo credit: tobias c. van veen (2011). memorable too was james holden’s dj set that followed sutekh’s, laying down an italo disco journey that left attendees in a cosmic state of un/consciousness. figure 7. james holden laying the second “scène” to waste at mutek 2011. photo credit: tobias c. van veen (2011). spatial conditions for spacing out/tuning in piknic deserves its reputation as a vibrant space for notable dj and live performances by a who’s-who of international techno, electro and house music masters, as well as throwdown sets from stellar local djs and producers. what i am interested in reflecting on is how each set at piknic becomes accented by the spatial conditions of the site. by this i mean that the material conditions of the site, its location, positioning between art and nature, the city and the river, all of which amount to its place, contributed to a space in which a certain era of piknic took shape. with the notion of era, we introduce temporality to this spatial manifestation that amplifies its imaginary from the place. era signifies how no place stays the same; and thus no space remains as-is, stuck in time. this era felt like a time-away-from-time, an island escape from the urban pressure cooker, as one stepped into a surreal admixture of iconic metal sculpture and green nature. in remarking upon this era, i draw from my own notes and not just banal nostalgia. from 2011: in front of the dj booth, the relationship between dancer and dj is almost at eye-level, producing an intimacy to the dancefloor. there is very little if any fencing. separation is minimal amongst the scene. minimal music carries the echoes of modernism as it pings the calder statue. the fabrication and power that calder pursued, of suspended metal, girders and physics, has become alive in the music echoing below. figure 8. the stylin’ scene in full-motion at mutek 2014. photo credit: tobias c. van veen (2014). the best piknics during this era were the warm summer nights; but sometimes the thunder and rain would descend, creating a dedicated dancefloor eking it out under umbrellas. the concrete space under the calder statue was surrounded by stacks of quad sound, wickedly tuned for a warm vibe that emphasized intimacy over mind blasting volume. one could dance directly in front of the speaker stacks and for many years (before minimal fencing of the dj booth), one could directly approach the dj. under the calder statue, the dancefloor was never more than a few hundred, though several hundred more could dance and listen from the periphery in the surrounding trees and grass. it was at once intimate yet wild. figure 9. fully activated dancefloor surrounds the small, raised dj booth at mutek 2012. photo credit: tobias c. van veen (2012). figure 10. the “old” piknic at mutek 2014, under the calder statue, but with the commercialization of amenities and byo-no-more. photo credit: tobias c. van veen (2014). the event quickly grew, however, with organisers adding a cash bar and food on the dancefloor periphery, resulting in event-altering changes to the admission policies. once piknic began selling alcohol, you couldn’t legally bring your own, as it became a liquor-controlled space and so the vibe of the event changed as fewer attendees brought picnics. the blankets-and-lounge atmosphere began to give way to a harder, more drug-driven scene, often arriving unslept from montréal’s afterhours and clubs. the organisers began bringing-in more festival infrastructure, with fencing and barriers creating a more policed and controlled atmosphere. the diy ambiance and post-raver-autonomy gave way to a spicely-priced plastic-cup affair. soon enough, only the mutek piknics retained the post-raver vibe. mutek hosted its last piknic under trois disques in 2012, until returning years later after picnik’s move to a different location, circa 2018. by then, piknic had become a global venture, with outposts in barcelona (2012), melbourne and dubai (2014), santiago (2015) and paris (2019). but then something happened to the site that, in a way, gave new life to piknic. from 2017–2019, the city of montréal undertook renovations at parc jean drapeau, replacing the meandering forest-lane that led to trois disques (providing shade and secrecy for piknic’s dancefloor) with an allée calder: a boring concrete lane lacking in the imagination and esoteric mystery of calder’s modernism, more amenable perhaps to the straight f1 attendees the parc is often known for (see tucker 2019). having ripped out many of the trees, the allée provides a predictable sightline from the métro station to the statue. figure 11. east from the allée calder is the former american pavilion from expo ’67, built by buckminster fuller. photo credit: tobias c. van veen (2022). however, with the renovations, piknic was forced to move locations to an enclosed, fenced area just north of the former site. no longer is the dancefloor underneath the iconic calder statue; now it is a massive, well-enclosed pen of trees and park, surrounded by well-stocked bars that only accept plastic or tap—and no cash. while the original site ran a smaller, second stage in an exquisite forest clearing, backed by a small river tributary, the new site has the second sound system directly adjacent to the main floor, resulting in a blaring clash of stupendously-loud speakers. the entire event is now festival-sized, primed for thousands, with raised stages and flown sound systems. while there is enclosed parkland in which to play, the overall area is much smaller and the vibe is more corporate, much more a festival in the gen z sense of edm festivals, where the attendees are more an audience of (still dancing) spectators than a scene in which artists, dancers and creatives mix. everything is strictly organised and thus strictly policed, with lines of porta-potties and corporate vendors. it is the weekend society all nicely packaged for the next generation. all this said—as in critiqued—it is also surprisingly and somewhat mercifully, advertising free, with no gigantic ad-banners adorning the dj stages. there are many things to applaud in the upscaling of piknic, including a banger, properly flown sound system; a wooden dancefloor that is soft on the feet; a fake grass zone on the dancefloor’s periphery, with small plastic picnic tables and lounge areas; plenty of security and emergency services. of course, it is penned as per all 21c concerts, with an ever-bigger barrier between audience and performer ensuring that the vibe never spilleth over into the dangerous illusions—i speak ironically—of dancefloor autonomy and demands for participatory communitas that defined ‘80s and ‘90s rave culture. floundering with the flow: piknic in 2022 piknic electronik | octaveone + claire | 29 may 2022 (tobias c. van veen, 2023b) walking into the event on may 7th, 2022, downing an (illegit) beer as i slowly drifted past a line of cop cars, i finally arrived at the scene after riding the montréal metro to parc jean drapeau. i found myself carried along by the massive influx of attendees, as we crested in the hundreds over a metal set of stairs that bypassed the park’s ring road to the ticket check-in. as i went with the flow of hundreds of youthful bodies (feeling all the ages of my four-plus decades), i felt relaxed and at peace with the slow intake scenario, as did mostly everyone else. the vibe was good, not at all the jittery, post-club scene that i remember piknic descending into a decade prior. i was buoyed by the energy, which felt amazingly positive—not the least because this was the first summer of piknic’s return since the pandemic. if the intimacy and modernist uniqueness of the original site have been depleted by the new event’s walled-garden, transforming something of a renegade event into a kind of paradise-lost, it made up for it on two accounts. figure 12. up and over the stairs into the walled pleasure dome that if only kubla kahn did decree. photo credit: tobias c. van veen (2022). first, of course, remains the potential of electronic music to mindmeld the masses into a kind of melee of unfettered movement. and i’ll add one more alliterative moment: it was marvelous. i was there for local talent (and fellow friends and colleagues) djs claire and cyan (ckut)—two female producers and djs who held court with deep, minimal and bangin’ acid techno. claire was especially impressive, a talented sound sculptor on the decks, creating a strong connection with the crowd through her flawless vinyl mixing, accentuated by her eye-contact with the dancefloor. dj cyan is more akin to a techno-cyborg, delivering the dancefloor a hard and rapid digital set that accelerated the arena into sweet anticipation for the live headliners that night, whom were no less than detroit’s veteran techno producers, octave one. octave one did not disappoint: with lawrence burden’s signature head wobble and his brother lenny’s laser-focused midi moves, they appropriately doused the dancefloor with a shattering cascade of polyrhythmic percussion, slamming low-end 4/4 and an exuberant, if not ecstatic refrain of synthesizer soul that screamed detroit. the soundsystem was at its peak, as much felt as heard, with full volume clarity delivering across the audio spectrum. figure 13. octave one from the side of the thundering dancefloor. photo credit: tobias c. van veen (2022). the other aspect defeating the enclosure vibes of the walled garden was the audience itself—which despite the commercial surrounds nonetheless contributed something all-the-more intangible to the vibe. graham st john writes of the vibe that it expresses “a desire for a sacred sociality, a social warmth howsoever temporary, perceived to have been lost or forgotten in the contemporary world of separation, privatisation and isolation” (2009: 38–9). this “contemporary world” of consumer surveillance, fragmented sociality, isolated existence and precarious employment became all the more palpable (and oppressive) during the lockdowns and restrictions of the pandemic. thus, the escape from pandemic isolation has amplified and altered the vibe, just like how the post-1989 vibe of berlin’s techno culture was intensified by the fall of the berlin wall, creating new political and spatial conditions for a cultural explosion of the ecstatic. being in the crush of the crowd, which was so intensely packed that one could barely move, was nonetheless a warm and gracious experience, though at times, admittedly claustrophobic, even in the open-air environment. it was possibly one of the most packed outdoor dancefloors i’ve ever been on—which is saying something, given the suffocating warehouse crush of the ‘90s massives. the gen z attendees were in exuberant moods and the vibe was totally high and flyin’. sally strommer defines the vibe as “an active communal force … . the vibe is an active, exhilarating feeling of now-ness that everything is coming together” (2001: 73). people were in the zone, being in the moment of the crush, with not too many phones held aloft. mostly, the scene was dancing and not recording, participating and not spectating. figure 14. thick in the midst of an ever-growing mainstage dancefloor at piknic 2022. photo credit: tobias c. van veen (2022). the very fine and high-flyin’ vibe is perhaps attributable to a post-pandemic effect of exuberant release, which for some of the youth, might be the first time they had ever been on such a large-scale, open-air dancefloor. as the dancefloor let loose from nearly three years of depressive viral ugliness, it occurred to me that i was bearing witness to parts of a generation (in a particular time and space) coalescing into a scene (see straw 2001; van veen 2016). caught in the throng, it occurred to me that for many of gen z, it is at events like these, possibly in this very moment, that the collectivity of a generation comes to know itself. a scene is shaped; its sensibilities and boundaries are construed in moments where a dancefloor circumscribes a particular mass movement of bodies. this event and events like it, are pivotal for gen z youth who came of age during an era of lockdowns, social media and, in the us, continuing civil unrest. in canada, the québec provincial government issued some of the strictest lockdown measures, with curfews in the city of montréal that kept residents from enjoying the (relatively safe!) experience of the outdoors. that said, one can only wonder—or rather, absent of a proper ethnographical survey/interview process—what the existential uplift really amounts to, given the overwhelming gloom and doom of a death-dealing climate crisis that gen z, thankfully but sadly, is all too aware of (see this interview with britt wray). it is a very different existential jouissance than that experienced by the late 1980s-to-90s ravers encompassing boomers, gen x and (young) millennials. for the acid house to raver generation, rave culture was the escape hatch from the cold war that went hand-in-hand with early internet utopianism, an ecstatic network of spontaneous dance uprisings releasing pre-millennial tension, where for a brief moment, we all dreamed of a techno-utopian dancefloor replete with the return of collective ritual. the internet was to connect us in harmony and superintelligence; the brutal capitalist realism (and dreary dullness) of the mental health epidemic of social media was yet to come. for the ravers, dreams of retiring the missile silos for social programs and collective emancipation from a classist and racist society flickered on the horizon… at least until 9/11 and the iraq war, the patriot act and all that has followed, as the us descends into authoritarianism. today’s flavour of jouissance would be a fascinating topic for a deep dive into the gen z psyche, howsoever intersectionally and geopolitically situated in respect to ongoing formations of edmcs during a new, permanent era of climate and political crisis. figure 15. gen z getting an early start at mutek 2014—with millennial parents. photo credit: tobias c. van veen (2014). and so the return of gen z to this dancefloor, at least, keeping in mind that it is not synecdoche to the global diversity of scenes and peoples as it transects geopolitical borders and intersectional identities, has been as joyous as it is momentous, the biggest generation since the boomers to let loose their fashion and style. a brief note on that fashion and style—for the most part, it seems to have been cribbed from late 1980s and early 90s j.c. penney, from bellybutton-high jeans (a.k.a. “mom jeans”) to massive, round, wireframed glasses. plus a lot of white t-shirts. it is very clean, unlike the grunge and scrappy wear of 90s raverfolk. it is also more vanilla, unlike the highly-manicured, scantily-clad and neon night-vibe of massive edm festivals. it bears little resemblance to the styles that emerged out of 20th century dance cultures, whether disco decadence or the cand-e raver fashion of late 90s to mid 00’s millennials, covered in bracelets, fun fur and day-glo. also mostly absent were the flowing phat pants of the raverkin, though the perennial recycling of 1960s psychedelia, often repackaged in various ways, continues unabated. mostly what i saw was a kind of jeans-and-t-shirt vibe, as if the z generation was a blank canvas awaiting its own stylistic expression in fashion. some darker styles were prevalent, with a smattering of goths, but the majority of the crowd could be described, in the overheard conversation of some commentators, as “very west island”, a geographical reference to the visible presence of middle-class, english-speaking youth, a.k.a. “preppies”, in a province that is mostly french. that said, by observation the majority were white, french-speaking québecois in their twenties, with smaller groups of people of colour, including black haitians and muslim women in hijab (i point this out because the headscarf is a contested, fraught and in educational, judicial and public service spaces, banned article of clothing in québec, under a law that many consider to be racist despite its pretense of defending québec as a secular state). that said, the event was still very pale in respect to its epidermal context in montréal, which is notable given the large afro-canadian, caribbean-canadian and immigrant haitian communities that make up the city itself. there were also very few (if any) visibly indigenous peoples, a point worth noting, insofar as many dance cultures in the colonized west are still very much settler gatherings. as for age, the average age for earlier piknics was in the mid-20s to early 30s and up, with scenesters from previous decades making visible appearances. the new scene at piknic is youthful—perhaps because of the aging-out of dancefloor denizens, the change in venue site and continuing concerns in 2022 over catching covid-19. in short, the event had a fuck-it vibe, which i suspect signals a dark nihilism just lurking behind the safe-space vibe of gen-z, as they realise how truly screwed they are—a generational scene primed for dark jouissance as the climate and political apocalypse lets loose. figure 16. early gen x at mutek 2011, a thriving intergenerational dancefloor. photo credit: tobias c. van veen (2011). after the sets were done, i stayed until the sweet end of the summer night, following over a thousand or so revellers as they made their way in a chanting and dancing throng to the metro station. swarming like a human sea past the turnstiles, we averted our eyes from the usual line of riot-gear wearing cops. returning from piknic on the metro is a part of the experience, as the subway cars are packed with exuberant and wide-eyed crowds. travellers hopping on the train are greeted with whoops and the scene and the vibe spill back into the city, seeding it with a taste of the dancefloor’s wild abandon… figure 17. the dancefloor grew so big that we retreated up the hill into the trees with the setting sun. piknic 2022. photo credit: tobias c. van veen (2022). author biography dr. tobias c. van veen is author of afrofuturism and abolition: exodus, music and mythscience, forthcoming from bloomsbury academic (2026). tobias is co-founder of the afrofuturist studies & speculative arts series at bloomsbury; lead editor of the “black lives, black politics, black futures” special issue of topia: canadian journal of cultural studies (2018); editor of the afrofuturism special issue of dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture (2013); and co-editor of the special issue echoes from the dub diaspora (2015). since 1993 tobias has exhibited with galleries and festivals worldwide as an award-winning media/sound artist, photographer and filmmaker. he is director of the afrofuturist short film lost alien (2018), distributed by cinema politica and his sound/video installations have been featured by new york live arts and the black speculative arts movement (bsam) in the exhibitions curating the end of the world (2020), altered-worlds: black utopia and the age of acceleration (2021) and the democracy project at carnegie hall (2024). tobias hosts the other planes: afro/futurism podcast, is creative director of sound-art label iosound.ca and he spins vinyl on twitch at http://twitch.tv/pandemixdjs. references schiffman, richard. 2022. “for gen z, climate change is a heavy emotional burden.” yale environment 360, yale school of the environment. <https://e360.yale.edu/features/for-gen-z-climate-change-is-a-heavy-emotional-burden>, (accessed 01 august 2023). st john, graham. 2009. “neotrance and the psychedelic festival.” dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(1): 35–64. ———. 2017. weekend societies: electronic dance music festivals and event-cultures. new york: bloomsbury academic. straw, will. 2001. “scenes and sensibilities.” public: cities scenes 22: 245–57. strommer, sally. 2001. “‘c'mon to my house’: underground-house dancing”. dance research journal 33(2): 72–86. tucker, ethan. 2019. “montreal’s iconic expo 67 just completed a major renovation.” architectural digest, 25 october. <https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/montreals-iconic-expo-67-completed-major-renovation>, (accessed 11 may 2023). van veen, tobias c. 2009. “convergence and soniculture: 10 years of mutek.” dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(1): 95–117. ———. 2011. unpublished field notes. montréal, canada. ———. 2016. “being-scene at mutek: remixing spaces of gender and ethnicity in electronic music performance.” in weekend societies: electronic dance music festivals and event cultures, ed. graham st john, 195–218. london: bloomsbury academic press. filmography nina obrecht. “richie & ricardo @ mutek 06”. youtube, 4:28. uploaded on 28 january 2008a. <https://youtu.be/68uy-wn5hzi?si=ypd26g9gcwho9_-h>, (accessed 21 october 2025). ———. “richie hawtin vs. ricardo villalobos (mutek 06)”. youtube, 5:03. uploaded on 28 january 2008b. <https://youtu.be/b63zzi3zhte?si=ji7ja4nboefq63sb>, (accessed 21 october 2025). tobias c. van veen. “mutek at piknik electronik 2011–2012”. youtube, 5:33. uploaded on 9 october 2023a. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhlb5sjednm>, (accessed 4 august 2025). ———. “piknic electronik | octaveone + claire | 29 may 2022”. youtube, 6:21. uploaded on 9 october 2023b. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okb-ohiaiwg>, (accessed 4 august 2025). the voice of the apocalypse: terence mckenna as raving medium dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 15(1): 61–91 issn 1947-5403 ©2023 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.04 the voice of the apocalypse: terence mckenna as raving medium graham st john university of huddersfield (uk) abstract the acid house rave scene of the early nineties sought its champions and there was no spruiker more willing, vocal and weird than terence mckenna, a figure for whom rave was a novelty signal in a forecasted apocalypse. a slate of music collaborations with mckenna in the early nineties had one feature in common. they recorded mckenna speaking in an alien tongue. releases with the shamen, space time continuum and zuvuya featured mckenna emulating the “elf chatter” that had poured from him in entranced states under the influence of powerful psychoactive tryptamines. subsequently, producers of psychedelic electronica mined the “unenglishable” sprechen of this surreal psychopomp as if it was precious aural ore. drawing upon in-depth biographical research, i demonstrate that this strange prediscursive realm has proven appealing into the present era in which mckenna has become a medium—not of language, meaning or ideology, but of the unspeakable. over three decades, mckenna’s voice has been adopted by audio alchemists sampling from a vast archive of spoken word material to evoke, affect and burlesque states transcending language and history. while mckenna died in 2000, he remains likely the most sampled individual in the history of electronic music. and as illustrated in this article, electronic artists have adopted his voice as a sonic template for the unknown. what i call mckennasploitation intrigues since, as is further demonstrated, it transpires in an era of growing uncertainty. the article suggests that mckenna is the voice of the apocalypse in two interrelated senses. first, the sampling evokes the “apocalypse” of the self, mind and culture that is the perennial desire of ecstatic dance movements. second, mckenna is posthumously prolific in an era of accelerating crisis and novelty, a circumstance with uncanny echoes of his prophesied “eschaton”. in psytrance and other psychedelic electronic styles, these strands are woven into a mckennaesque aesthetic. keywords: terence mckenna, nanomedia, psychedelics, remixticism, sampling, psytrance graham st john is cultural anthropologist specialising in transformational events, movements and figures. a marie curie senior research fellow in the department of music and design arts at the university of huddersfield, uk, and author of the forthcoming intellectual biography terence mckenna: the strange attractor (mit press, 2024), among graham’s ten books are: mystery school in hyperspace: a cultural history of dmt (north atlantic books 2015), global tribe: technology, spirituality and psytrance (equinox 2012), and technomad: global raving countercultures (equinox 2009). he has also edited several anthologies including weekend societies: electronic dance music festivals and event cultures (bloomsbury 2017), victor turner and contemporary cultural performance (berghan 2009), and rave culture and religion (routledge 2004). graham is executive editor of dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture. web: www.edgecentral.net feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.04 http://www.edgecentral.net/ dancecult 15(1)62 introduction in the early nineties, psychedelic philosopher terence k. mckenna (1946-2000) became the figurehead of a scene for which he himself served as midwife. through that decade, in the wake of his involvement in several music productions and a role as a “raver in residence” at a variety of venues, the “crusty” edges of the acid house rave community comprised the audience most receptive to a prophetic output that mckenna named timewave zero (in which he predicted the world’s end on 21 december 2012). exploring music collaborations, live shows, his appearance on the hit parade and the proliferation of voice sampling, this article addresses mckenna’s posthumous notoriety in psychedelic electronica, where his voice has been remediated in a world in which his mind became iconic for going out of one’s mind. the article is indebted to sustained biographical research.1 that research began excavating the roots and legacy of two interwoven themes looming large in mckenna’s life. these themes permeate an aesthetic appealing within psychedelic electronica: the significance of the “elves” with whom mckenna grew intimate in transpersonal travels in tryptamine “hyperspace”, and the embrace of an apocalyptic sensibility, a mythopoetics concerned with new beginnings (what mckenna deemed “novelty”) as much as endings. as will be demonstrated, these themes are evident in the spoken word sampling of a figure whose haunting of the present has garnered little attention among scholars.2 commenting on a grateful dead show he attended towards the end of his life, comparative religionist joseph campbell observed that the concert was “the antidote to the atomic bomb”. dionysus, he imagined, was “talking through these kids”. when asked if he agreed with campbell, consistent with his prophetic eschatology, mckenna replied that he regarded dead shows as “mini-reflections of the real party, the real dionysian revel at the end of time”. such concerted psychedelic cavalcades were not just responses of activists to the prospect of nuclear armageddon, but were sparks cast backwards from “the party at the end of the world”. in this way, the grateful dead were regarded as “the house band of the apocalypse”. echoing his reversed reading of mircea eliade’s idea that ritual replays cosmic time, mckenna soon applied his logic to nineties raves, which reminded him that “you are really somehow at the end of the world” (badillion 1991: 27). according to mckenna’s thorough reading of alfred north whitehead, the emergent acid house rave and new edge scene represented a “concrescence” of novelty. as such, this movement echoed what mckenna frequently held to be the “transcendental object at the end of time”. in mckenna’s philosophy of time, as a demonstration of backwards flowing casuistry, the future casts a shadow over the present. according to this model, all events, people and inventions are ricochets of this future transcendental object, which amounts to a future big bang and a kind of temporal “black hole”. mckenna developed a time chart to measure and predict novelty in historical time, which according to his model, had a definite end coming soon. at times, he imagined the transcendental object as a spinning mirrorball that sends out scintillations of light that sparkle throughout the cosmic disco. “all around this transcendental object, and at greater and lesser distances, are all the people st john | the voice of the apocalypse: terence mckenna as raving medium 63 who have ever lived”, its thousands of twinkling, refractive surfaces representing “religions, scientific theories, gurus, works of art, poetry, great orgasms, great soufflés, great paintings, etc”. and if you are a buddha, a christ, a mohammed or a guru, you are just “dumb lucky” to be struck by a divine reflection from the transcendental mirrorball at the end of time (mckenna 1995: 29). figure 1. alien dreamtime promotional card. courtesy michael horowitz “something is calling us out of nature and sculpting us in its own image,” mckenna breathed on “timewave zero”, the release produced from a live performance at san francisco’s transmission theatre on february 26-27, 1993. presaging captain morpheus from the matrix, he continues: you can feel it. you can feel it in your own dreams. you can feel it in your own trips. you can feel that we’re approaching the cusp of a catastrophe, and that beyond that cusp we are unrecognizable to ourselves. the wave of novelty that has rolled unbroken since the birth of the universe has now focused and coalesced itself in our species (space time continuum with terence mckenna, 1993). dancecult 15(1)64 as mckenna became an instrument in the soundtrack for the “apocalypse” in early nineties rave, we are compelled to parse a strange scene. as he himself queried, what should we make of “a 46-year-old man at three in the morning hanging out with thousands of loaded teenagers exhorting them to the eschaton” (kent 1998: 45)? during 1993, arguably the peak year of his fame, mckenna gave more interviews than any other time in his career. this media blitz was the result of a publicity campaign that seized on his newfound fame in the rave community, which arrived after his uk singles chart appearance and which sought to take advantage of this popularity during an intensive book publishing phase. via leslie rossman, his publicist at harper san francisco, mckenna was pitched to niche media where he would rave on a range of subjects, including raves. “why are these young [ravers] adopting mckenna as their guru?” scene media reps were enticed by such alluring inquiry implicit to a press package boasting what were understood to be some of mckenna’s distinct attributes: i.e. that his raps had the privilege of being sampled on “rave dance music,” and that he was “the first author to be the center performer at a rave”.3 rossman’s dedication to promoting her client and friend was instrumental to the media tsunami upon which mckenna surfed. my communications with some of mckenna’s closest friends and confidantes indicate that he remained ambivalent about these developments, to which he committed due to financial pressures and the need to support his kids. while the media attention generated at this juncture was part of an orchestrated strategy to capitalise on his growing fame, the hype soon receded in accord with his desire to retire from touring. but mckenna’s rave pivot cannot be easily dismissed as hype and self-aggrandizement. not unlike his hero, marshall mcluhan, mckenna recognised the role of the artist as seer. it was a genuine recognition that he pursued to his own end, including during his final appearance on hawaii at allchemical arts.4 mckenna’s sincerity with regard to the visionary potential of art was unimpeachable. creative play, visionary art and ecstatic dance were all pivotal to what he saw as the coming transit, in which ravers were championed as agents of cultural transcendence and consciousness evolution. not only the product of biographical work, the analysis presented here supplements my ongoing research addressing the arts of “remixticism” within psychedelic electronic music scenes. “remixticism” refers to a diy digital artifice inherent to psyculture and heir to surrealism, the beats and punk; it is the merger of techno and hippy scenes, which fraser clark called “zippy” (st john 2012a: 102; 2013a). in fashioning a socio-sonic aesthetic emically understood as the “vibe”, electronic musicians/djs narrate this sensibility using available digital technologies to select from a vast archive of spoken word and popular cultural material. “nanomedia” notable in the psycultural dance music continuum include voice grabs from film scripts, radio programs, computer games, podcasts, commentaries or lectures—which mckenna called “raps” and “raves”. this material is exploited for content typically edited and condensed into a few lines carefully chosen to be digitally sutured into eight to ten minute tracks (st john 2015: 344). mckenna’s intellectual nomadism across technology, religion and consciousness has provided a vast archive for artists seeking to project sound that can be seen, read, tasted and felt. composed for performance on st john | the voice of the apocalypse: terence mckenna as raving medium 65 dance floors that serve morphologically as rites of passage and/or carnivals for the gathering multitudes, this material serves to evoke, affect and caricature altered states. mckennasploitation is observable in this light. this analysis suggests that the posthumous proliferation of mckenna’s voice furnishes the psychedelic vibe with an apocalyptic aesthetic. here i intend two usages of “apocalypse” that operate simultaneously. in the first, mckenna’s voice mediates the desirable transcendence of mind, self and culture associated with altered states of consciousness— including (though not exclusively) states inaugurated by psychedelics (notably tryptamines dmt and psilocybin). this deconditioning was necessary given, as mckenna frequently proclaimed, “culture”—i.e. faith, political party affiliation, celebrity worship—“is not your friend”. second, his voice resounds during an era of mounting crises, global anxiety and deepening uncertainty connected to a profusion of climate chaos, nationalist populism, a global pandemic, us race riots, new wars in europe and the middle east, and more. this cataclysm of crises echoes mckenna’s lifelong fixation with terminal conditions, right through to his own relatively early end (aged 53) from the aggressive brain cancer glioblastoma multiforme. as mckenna claimed in the early nineties, we are living “in the twilight of a great empire” (mckenna 1991). inflected with both significances, mckenna samples evoke and affect transcendent conditions that are paradoxically beyond language and yet composed of syntax. figure 2. raving poet of the apocalypse. courtesy of allan badiner. dancecult 15(1)66 the rave-o-lution mckenna’s mercurial mind, provocative thinking and psychedelic eschatology endeared him to the post-rave milieu. as his spoken commentary on “re:evolution”—the 1992 collaboration with uk outfit the shamen, released on their platinum album boss drum— demonstrated, rave served to bootstrap the end of history. the release became the subject of the five-track single, re: evolution (the shamen with terence mckenna 1993; see figure 3).5 short of achieving the end of history, it would in fact bootstrap mckenna, whose fame grew at this time. between 1991-1993, he became involved in performance and recording collaborations in london and san francisco. as raver-in-residence in an international circuit of clubs, conferences and festivals, he became the surrealist psychopomp of psychedelic electronica. figure 3. the shamen with terence mckenna, re: evolution, single, 1993. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aausg-l6dqc st john | the voice of the apocalypse: terence mckenna as raving medium 67 an important early conduit for mckenna’s entry to the rave scene was an experimental filmmaker who was literally drawn to california by the voice of mckenna. a digital media artist dwelling in the east village of the eighties, ken adams was inspired to make for the west coast to find and capture on film the man who had spoken (over the radio) so elegantly and lucidly about psychedelics. adams and his then wife and partner in media production outfit rose x, britt welin, eventually rendezvoused with the psychedelic pied piper at esalen in the summer of 1989, when they decided to collaborate on experimental art films. the couple became mckenna’s neighbours in occidental, where adams recalls one noteworthy afternoon over at the mckenna house. terence and his then wife kathleen harrison were asked about their music preferences. a box of grateful dead live tapes was produced. “this is cool”, adams said, “but there’s another kind of thing happening in the psychedelic world called ‘raves’, and they make electronic dance music and they do a lot of psychedelics”. he looked at terence. “and they all think that you are some kind of special guy”. the entreaty was met with skepticism by mckenna, a self-effacing figure who was lukewarm about parties and even cooler about being the centre of attention at them. adams began exposing his friend to new sounds, like the orb’s little fluffy clouds, but it wasn’t easy to plant a seed of possibility in the mind of a man who would rather scoob up in the company of his books than be out on tour. would he become victim to the ceaseless demands of micro-celebrityhood or adapt his growing popularity to his own ends? it wasn’t long before he opened a new chapter in his life and broke through to a much younger demographic.6 there was another paver of mckenna’s path to micro-celebrityhood: scotsman, techno-hippie trickster and founder and editor of both the encyclopaedia psychedelica and evolution magazine, fraser clark. the flourishing of acid house in late-eighties uk was received by clark as the renaissance of sixties idealism. as a techno-tribal revitalization of albion, the psychedelic edges of this scene resonated with what mckenna was calling, “the archaic revival”. clark knew a good rave when he heard one. running with mckenna’s “stoned monkey” speculations, clark brokered the new age traveller/techno (“zippy”) merger as a redemptive millennial reclamation. in turn, clark’s own utopian zeal towards the “ravelation” did not fail to impress mckenna (clark 1997: 185–202).7 when promoting the archaic revival in london in october 1991, clark invited mckenna to speak at the proto “festi-club” evolution. the appearance proved to be a pivotal gear shift in mckenna’s career. armed with dat machines, a few electronic musicians realised they were in the presence of a golden sampleable resource. mckenna became something of a mascot for “shamanarchists” and others among the “guerilla rave networks of mad jihad dance fanatics and sound terrorists” celebrated on the sleeve of the clark’s shamanarchy in the uk (1992).8 at evolution, two audience members were especially eager to meet mckenna after the show, whereupon they invited the bard of hyperspace to collaborate on a spoken word “rave” track. it seems mckenna was made an offer he could not refuse. the duo were dancecult 15(1)68 colin angus (another scotsman) and richard west (aka mr c) of the shamen, a pioneer “indie-dance” act akin to a “twenty first century grateful dead” (reynolds 1998: 87).9 the recorded rave was the protomix for mckenna’s ticket to the world. angus was an enabler. in the early nineties, the pioneering indie-rocker turned electronic musician sought to use the shamen’s growing fame to create an elevated platform for mckenna. “re:evolution” encapsulated angus’ desire to showcase mckenna’s hyperbolic oratory over acidic instrumentation. when they toured the u.s. west coast in january 1992, angus and west met with adams and mckenna at mckenna’s place in sonoma. everyone got baked, and they eventually played the demo, now with backing track. “gentlemen, i hope we shall not be accused of demagoguery,” mckenna announced.10 “if the truth could be told so as to be understood, it will be believed”. by 1992, bbc radio one listeners were tuning in to mckenna paraphrasing william blake—part of his eight-minute monologue accompanying the shamen. “the 20th century is the shudder that announces the approaching cataracts of time over which our species and the destiny of this planet is about to be swept”. “re:evolution” was on its way to becoming one of the strangest hits to ever make top 20 on the uk singles chart. until then, mckenna was a relatively obscure intellectual whose chief beats were the esalen institute and new dimensions radio. on the hit single, among the most popular promotions of his apocalyptica, mckenna claimed that “history is the shock wave of the eschaton. . . . and what this means for those of us who will live through this transition into hyperspace, is that we will be privileged to see the greatest release of compressed change probably since the birth of the universe”. mckenna’s growing fanbase were informed that rave culture was rediscovering “the art of natural magic with sound”. they were being apprised that “large groups of people getting together in the presence of this kind of music are creating a telepathic community, a bonding that, hopefully, will be strong enough to carry the vision out into the mainstream of society” (“re:evolution”, from the shamen, boss drum, 1992). on the “live at the warfield” version, “rave culture” was championed as “the real new world order”. its habitués were beseeched directly by a figure coming over like the jim jones of pop: “take back the planet—it’s yours, it’s yours. these are the last minutes of human history folks. the countdown is on. this is not a test. we’re leaving this world behind, for a brighter, better world that has always existed; in our imagination” (“re: evolution (live at the warfield)”, from the shamen (with terence mckenna), 1993). the shamen generated controversy and pushback at the bbc, in the music industry and among the tabloids over their chart-topping single and sonic billboard for mdma, “ebeneezer goode” (also on boss drum). their association with the man who the list announced as the “wizened psychedelic guru”, and new musical express regarded as “not your average acid casualty”, added to the strife (bush 1992: 9; fadele 1993: 28). mckenna might have missed out on performing at the brits awards, but his celebrity status garnered more press for his book food of the gods, in which “psychedelic shamans” were observed to “constitute a worldwide and growing subculture of hyperdimensional explorers” (mckenna st john | the voice of the apocalypse: terence mckenna as raving medium 69 1992a: 9). this golden age fantasy appealed to shamanarchists assembling under full moons and embracing psychoactive mushrooms as a lifestyle staple. fictive vignettes in food of the gods divulged a fantasy of clan members of “the paleolithic cult of the great horned goddess” who “swallow the body of the goddess” at primitive full moon parties where “heavy foot stamping channelled the energy of the first wave of visions”. it is not difficult to imagine the audience at the camden centre on 15 june 1992—“alchemical youth at the edge of the world”—identifying as participants in reclaimed dance rituals in which they were “dissolved in the higher wordless truth of ecstasy” (ibid: 57, 58). such depictions were well received by a generation exposed to the psychedelic rave communitas and anxious about the planetary future. speaking to the disenchanted, “re:evolution” amplified the gospel to a wider audience. as mckenna proclaimed from his podium on the hit parade, rave “is the cutting edge of the last best hope for suffering humanity” (“re: evolution (live at the warfield)”, from the shamen (with terence mckenna), 1993). mckenna’s next book, true hallucinations: being an account of the author’s extraordinary adventures in the devil’s paradise, was launched on 26-27 february 1993 with a multimedia collaboration and 48 hour rave held in san francisco’s soma district.11 the brainchild of adams, alien dreamtime was mounted in a warehouse on 11th st near fulsom (see figure 4). the space, then called the transmission theatre (later club z, now audio nightclub), was leased by a real estate entrepreneur who also owned the club next door (in more recent years, halcyon). alien dreamtime gave mckenna the opportunity to belt out his greatest hits supported by techno-ambient arrangement space time continuum, didgeriduista stephen kent and live video mixing by rose x. alien dreamtime was an unlicensed event that the san francisco police dept unsuccessfully attempted to shut down on both nights.12 prior to this, mckenna consistently renounced direct action. he did not, for instance, protest the uk’s criminal justice act (which outlawed music with repetitive beats), and he avoided becoming the new psychedelic pied piper of youth, a role that earlier saw nixon label timothy leary as “the most dangerous man in america”. nevertheless, mckenna became an intellectual apologist for rave, defending it in the face of moralistic attacks. the aggressive police intervention at alien dreamtime appeared to be a stimulus. soon after, in an interview for trip magazine, mckenna associated officialdom’s violent reaction to raving with “the last gasp of calvinism”; this was a perverse impulse among custodians of “dominator” culture “to stand between people and the experience of their own body”. the impulse—that “makes drugs illegal, frowns on rock ‘n’ roll, frowns on dance”—had a long background in the history lesson that mckenna was eager to share with anyone who would listen. “it’s a fear of the unconscious, the power-obsessed do not like people carrying on—but people like to carry on”. and then he gave voice to his own role vis-à-vis ravers. “i’d like to turn them on to the concept that through psychedelics they can actually bring a spiritual dimension back into their lives that isn’t in the hands of the churches or madison avenue”. such commentary prompted trip to anoint mckenna “the rave generation’s spiritual voice” (mckenna in anon a, 1993). dancecult 15(1)70 figure 4. flier for alien dreamtime 1993. courtesy of michael horowitz. alien dreamtime was a benchmark event for all concerned, including jonah sharp of space time continuum. sharp transplanted from the uk to san francisco in 1992 and had opened for psychic tv. he had witnessed leary speaking in the chillout room at “shiva’s erotic banquet”, an otherwise chaotic and surreal mega-rave in downtown l.a. leary’s integration with dance music culture made sense to sharp. when introduced to the idea, sharp and psychic tv manager johnathan nelson saw the potential of staging a live music event as a vehicle for mckenna.13 mckenna’s spoken word would feature on sharp’s album alien dreamtime (space time continuum with terence mckenna, 1993). on the opening track, “archaic revival”, a “new myth” is declared to be pivotal for resetting “the compass of the self ”. as “the last sane moment”—i.e. the paleolithic era—is retrieved in order to effect “the forward escape into hyperspace”, the narrative toyed with mckenna’s stock-in-trade paradox: a futurism permeated with primitivist logic. st john | the voice of the apocalypse: terence mckenna as raving medium 71 figure 5. alien dreamtime—space time continuum with terence mckenna. signature to mckenna is his recounting of encounters he had in states of dmt entrancement with the “machine elves from hyperspace” from the mid-60s. in one noted performance, he related the story of an interrupted dmt experience in 1966 in a rooming house he managed on telegraph avenue, berkeley. he was mid-trip in his room when a resident, rosemary, came rapping on his door. the trip was ruptured such that, leaping up from his entranced state, mckenna pulled the inhabitants of hyperspace back into the room with him. he spun around to open the door, “an elf hanging off each hand”. rosemary was greeted with “wey dukwham waxibo gwani haptigo butix shning” (mckenna 1992).14 as illustrated by alien dreamtime, in which he broke into this unique brogue, the “elven language” became a feature of mckenna’s stage act. in his primary mid-60s states of dmt entrancement—the significance of which is addressed at some length in st john (forthcoming)—the elves had instructed him to use his voice to “make an object”, whereupon a “language” that was “unhooked from english” arose within him. the spontaneous tongue that he had first known in his room in berkeley two decades before, propelling mckenna on a life-long quest for comprehension, was now emulated in his guise as raving frontman. dancecult 15(1)72 he typically declared that while there was no meaning to his “wordblurt”, the enunciation felt satisfying. as was reported from the stage of the transmission theatre, following years of reflection, he concluded that “meaning and language are two different things”. the emergent “alien voice” wanted to reveal “the syntactical nature of reality”: “the real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish” (“speaking in tongues”, from space time continuum with terence mckenna [1993]).15 mckenna was no ordinary channeller, as he was no medium of any identifiable entity (for example, jane robert’s seth). nor did the “elf chatter” represent meaningful information, intelligible language, or what wouter hanegraaff calls an “articulated revelation” (1998: 24-41). if this “elf chatter” revealed anything at all, it was the idea of the syntactical structure of reality. if this wasn’t mckenna’s everest of the weird, he had at the very least achieved the foothills of kook. as apparently the only tongue besides english in which he ever gained confidence, the “elf chatter” was a long-time feature of mckenna’s rap. this “translinguistic stuff ” enhanced his vocabulary after many episodes smoking what he described in letters to his friend rick watson as “nn unspeakable” (a riff on nn-dimethyltryptamine). he once offered a description of the effect of long hours of the resultant contentless “transmissions”: “your face, your mouth, is just hanging down to your waist. . . . i mean, it’s like you’ve just done something to the whole front of your head, and all the musculature has dissolved, because you’ve been making all these sounds that you never make” (mckenna 1984). in later stage performances and recorded workshops in relatively sober states he attempted to simulate the syntax and order of these satisfying noetic emissions that felt like meaning but could not be interpreted with any known dictionary—i.e.: “nideughey voundwy haxigivitchny moughamvwa takitam didikini hipikektet”.16 as he described it, this “very primitive language . . . is the shadow thrown by a hyperdimensional object . . . you are just rotating this thing, going into it, expanding it, taking it apart, melting it, fusing it, remaking it” (mckenna 1988a: 64). quite aware of just how ridiculous these simulations appeared wrenched from their context—like observing a raver absent the music—mckenna was nevertheless compelled to reproduce this surreal sprechen before wider audiences. it was in these states that he claimed to have discovered “the source of meaning before it is contextually located” (mckenna 2020). he was effectively performing a glossolalian mimicry. this seemed more conscious and controlled in his on-stage antics than in his private trips, or for that matter, than in pentecostalism, with its trancelike conditions of speaking in tongues. “it’s almost like a kind of spontaneous singing. but your mind steps aside, and this linguistic stuff comes out”. the experience was a source of fascination. it intrigued him that, even though this phenomenon carried an acoustic signal, it was not primarily characterized by that which could be heard. in his view, the “meaning” of this behaviour resides in what happens when the acoustic signal is processed by the visual cortex. “it is a new kind of language. it’s a visible, threedimensional language” (mckenna 1988b). transfixed by this xenolinguistics, mckenna once spent a week in a tent on hawaii taking eight grams of mushrooms almost every night, while recording himself “shrieking in nostratic”. people, he reported, found these bizarre recordings “extremely alarming” (mckenna 1988a: 64; mckenna 1997). st john | the voice of the apocalypse: terence mckenna as raving medium 73 the collaborations continued in 1993 as, with assistance from richard allen of delerium records, the psychedelic psychopomp saddled up with uk artists paul chousmer, phil pickering and mick west. as ambient techno outfit zuvuya, they produced the album dream matrix telemetry. zuvuya was a short-lived act entirely dedicated to amplifying mckenna’s transdimensional rite of passage. using fragments from interview material and effects from a yamaha spx90, zuvuya mediated mckenna’s rupture of the mundane plane. this hour-long ode to the “ecology of souls” into which he had been transported on dmt was among the molecule’s most public celebrations. the performance took up the “sculptured jewelled machines” sung into existence by the “gnome-like artisans” that had crowded forward to offer their “visible language” for inspection. “i somehow shattered the membrane between myself and ordinary space”, mckenna announces, referencing the 1966 berkeley episode recounted earlier. “i carried the trip into the room with me . . . an elf hanging off each hand” (see figure 6; zuvuya with terence mckenna 1993). figure 6. zuvuya with terence mckenna—dream matrix telemetry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlkhq2bun-i dancecult 15(1)74 mckenna’s elven sprechen routine became an anticipated feature of his public performances, delivered in increasingly bizarre contexts and typically the source of much levity. as conveyed on dream matrix telemetry, the message was simple. it is “terribly important” that you do what they do and learn how to sing the transdimensional language, for “they are the initiators of the human species into a new ontos of language, where meaning is beheld” (terence mckenna with zuvuya, 1993).17 amid the tribal breakbeats and didjeridu of zuvuya’s subsequent album, shamania (see figure 7), mckenna announces on “the whisper in trees” that on the “other side . . . machine elf gnome creatures speak in a language which you see” (zuvuya with terence mckenna 1994).18 figure 7. zuvuya with terence mckenna—shamania (1994, sleeve artwork by kathleen harrison). st john | the voice of the apocalypse: terence mckenna as raving medium 75 what in the mid-nineties was “glossolalia” emitted during readings in small bookstores in the u.k. had, by the late nineties, transmuted into exotic chanting performed as part of live guest appearances with maui ethno-trance act, lost at last. the freak flag was strung aloft at san francisco’s maritime hall on 12 december 1998. appearing in a hooded garment, speaking of the “opulescent expressenses of the abyss” and enunciating “the living language that pours from the psychedelic body”, mckenna broke into strange ululations before appreciative fans (see figure 8; mckenna 1998). figure 8. terence mckenna with lost at last, san francisco’s maritime hall, 12 december 1998 (see the video: from mckenna, 1998). divine moments of truth at that stage, and not long before his final rupture of the mundane plane, mckenna became freak royalty. but the path to eternity featured momentous detours. with that in mind, we now cast our minds back a few years to february-march of 1988 when mckenna made a brief stop in goa (mckenna 1988). in a short-lived guise as journalist on assignment to the region, our elf-specialist had apparently arrived in the former portuguese colony of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2csdiq5snq dancecult 15(1)76 india courtesy of mel ziegler.19 i am uncertain exactly where he went in goa at this time, or whom he met, but it is synchronous that mckenna visited the transnational interzone at this time. regardless of whether mckenna attended a full moon party on anjuna beach or not, his presence in goa at this time is intriguing. this was a catalytic moment in the trance dance movement fomented partly as a result of his own interventions. judging by the frequency in which mckenna’s voice has been sampled within goa trance productions, its psytrance progeny and post-genres like psybient, it is no accident that “psy” is a cultural movement in which mckenna’s thought-forms have forged deep grooves.20 the camden centre rap of 15 june 1992 was a pivotal juncture in mckenna’s turn towards rave. at “alchemical youth at the edge of the world”, he expressed enthusiasm for 20th-century art forms that strove for new ways of visually processing what is heard. “ever since jazz and cubism and throughout the evolution of 12-tone row, abstract expressionism, rock ’n’ roll, [and] pop-up virtual reality”, he claimed, art-making processes have been preparing us “to see what we mean”. rave and its many afterparties were capitalising on this development and were expected to deliver us into “a telepathic society” (mckenna 1992b). and dmt and psilocybin were presaged as the chief means by which meaning was to be made manifest. if made sufficiently intimate with dmt, the emergent youth culture of the nineties would be surfing the crest of the novelty wave. among those paying attention was dj nik sequenci, who backed mckenna with ambient sounds on his early nineties uk tours. compelled to drop into the novelty wave, sequenci soon found himself custodian of a quantity of transdimensional board wax from hawaii. during his first smoke of the “pink power”, sequenci had elves and fairies playing psychedelic trance, regaling him to return to earth and recreate that music.21 unable to transpose these visions into sound himself, he sought out martin glover (a.k.a. youth), formerly the bass player of industrial metal band killing joke and a studio production dynamo at brixton’s butterfly records. subsequently, youth invited raja ram among others to a ceremonial smoke-out with this pink crystal dmt in the back garden at butterfly records. the occasion proved momentous, catalyzing the birth of seminal goa label dragonfly records and the formation of trance-galactic supergroup, shpongle.22 although he was an unwitting midwife, goa trance and its cultural progeny was inspired by a bag of dmt sourced from mckenna.23 with psychedelic culture perceived as a novelty leap, and visionary arts and dance music events attracting strange “agents of evolution”, mckenna traversed the globe throughout the nineties promoting his psychedelic shamanism at a host of venues. his discourse was not untypically backdropped by djed sound sculptures. by the mid-nineties, he had served as intellectual-in-residence at various clubs, venues and dance halls in san francisco and london, and he had performed with several “authentically impossible to project into the commercial domain type bands” (gyrus & eden 1996). and through such commitments, he became the figurehead provocateur of a revitalising movement he had himself championed and energised. st john | the voice of the apocalypse: terence mckenna as raving medium 77 as we already know, fraser clark was a principal co-conspirator. in his quest for a “future perfect state”, clark divined that the new club cultures were contexts for interdimensional travel. the critical hub was london’s megatripolis, where mckenna appeared on the opening night in 1993 and returned for a parallel youniversity lecture the following year. since clark imagineered megatripolis as a future memory and learning model for the megatripolitan utopia to which humanity was destined, his techno-organic sciencefuturism aligned with mckenna’s vision of the “transcendental object”. back across the atlantic, speaking at the launch of clark’s zippy pronoia tour of the u.s. at the wetlands nightclub in manhattan on 15 june 1994, mckenna announced that “every fifty years or so, society needs liberation from the forces of fascism”. fifty years since hiroshima, “a vanguard of liberators has secured a beach head on the east coast of america, and has begun to work its way inland along the hudson” (st john 2004: 217).24 mckennaesque the “zippies” may have been flowers destined for history’s dustbin, but not so mckenna. his raving frontman antics were apparently short-lived, but long after his passing, like audiotronic séance masters, dj-producers have reanimated mckenna’s voice. steeped in a cut-up heritage, media-shamans and electro-esotericists have sampled mckenna’s voice probably more than any other individual in the history of electronica. cobbling together repurposed audio from a vast archive of hundreds of hours of raps, his voice is vamped to create epic audio-narratives of dream travel, soul flight and cosmic transit. his voice has been sampled so frequently in psychedelic trance productions that an alien anthropologist landing at a random party could easily conclude that they are witnessing transmissions from the governing authority. at events worldwide from the nineties through to the present, producers and djs have collaborated with event designers to sculpt a vibe steeped in (or at least lightly audio-airbrushed with) mckenna.25 his voice would become personally amplified, privately filtered and individually interpreted in a world in which mckenna’s mind became iconic for going out of one’s mind. the psychedelic progeny of goa trance and ambient are the chief beneficiaries of mckennaesque. while leary’s voice was solicited ad nauseam in early productions, the new mood was captured by eat static when remixing mckenna’s voice in “prana”: “we’re not dropping out here, we’re infiltrating and taking over” (see figure 9; eat static 1993). digital alchemists were converting the content of long-form raps into breviloquent gestures. as the irresistible force, morris gould opted to conclude his watershed ambient album flying high with two words from his sponsor: “true weirdness” (the irresistible force 1992). the preference for mckenna within this scene revealed a penchant for tryptamine-derived (over lsd) gnosis. sonic engineers excavated the archive for a trove of information and associated messages. experimenting with goa-breaks on “skwirm”, andie guthrie (as funkopath) spliced mckenna to cut to the chase: “a psychedelic person is not willing to be a good citizen or a good anything that is defined by somebody else. i mean a shaman is a true anarchist” (funkopath 1997). dancecult 15(1)78 figure 9. eat static—abduction (1993). these sound bites are examples of what was earlier identified as “nanomedia”, sampled content that offers a unique medium for the transmission of what christopher partridge has named “popular occulture” (partridge 2004). while evident across electronic music genres, nanomediation is prominent in psytrance where vocal samples are lifted and often repurposed. producer/djs serve as media shamans who craft dance music journeys in which scene tropes like the “monstrous” (st john 2011a), the “outlaw” (st john 2012b), the “alien” (st john 2013b) and the “native” (st john 2013c) animate the dance floor. here, vocal sampling enables fragmented, albeit persistent, commentary on disparate “projects of the self ”, a development that leverages a spectrum of narratives that are “progressive” or “transgressive”; dispositions that are hopeful or nihilistic (st john 2012a: 101). where mckenna’s rave joins the ravers, the mood is typically optimistic. that is, producers are disposed to mine mckenna for hopeful millenarian prognostications that were often levelled against the pessimistic and exclusivist apocalypticism of fundamentalist christianity— which he regarded as a “death cult” (mckenna 1987). st john | the voice of the apocalypse: terence mckenna as raving medium 79 as psytrance artists converted his raps into rhapsodies, mckenna’s voice was received like a shaman overseeing the initiation of adepts into a mystery cult. “our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas, by the absence of consciousness”, the psychedelic shaman announces on “transparent”, a track by gustavo manfroni, a.k.a. burn in noise (2008). with the “redemption of the human spirit” at stake, dance floor neophytes are charged to “bring back a small piece of the picture and contribute it to the building of the new paradigm”. the primary gnosis amplified by electronic musicians is that humans are divine beings. on another track on another dance floor, a digitized mckenna stands astride an invisible podium championing the “light-filled vegetable” illuminating the darkness. “we are not fallen beings. when you take into your life the gnosis of the light-filled vegetable . . . the first thing that comes to you is: you are a divine being. you matter. you count” (streamers 2012). as his very own archive, “mckenna” became a standard device for musicians seeking to craft a transformative audioscape complete with obstacles and trials. “hypnagogia are dancing mice, little coloured candies, pieces of ribbon, gears, screws, the trivia”. thus spake terence: “the impedimenta of the phantasmagoria of your mind”. on this track produced by canadian ryan k. hanna, a.k.a. monkey machine (2011), mckenna riffs on the realm of hypnagogia encountered in the dmt state. “you have to go through what mircea eliade called the rupture of the mundane plane”. and then the pace of his voice is curbed: “. . . and then visually coherent emotionally information laden high content hallucinations occur, and many people have taken psychedelic drugs and never gotten past the hypnagogia”. musical compositions experimenting with mckennaesque often aim to facilitate transit beyond this phase. as mckenna’s raps have been pillaged by musicians for messages that evoke liminal states of transcendence—passage between realms—under certain contexts the informative content of the original material takes a backseat to its transformative efficacy. in such contexts, to couch this in celebrated terminology paraphrased from mcluhan: “the medium becomes the message”. for a host of artists, mckenna became a “medium” for the psychedelic experience. now, this is not easily navigable terrain, and i make no claim to having undertaken any measurement of audience receptivity. music (including any nanomedia) is differentially interpreted in the minds of individual beholders. what may amount to the successful transmission of informational content for one listener may, for another, be meaningful less due to a grasp of mckenna’s original extemporisations, than to the way his scribbly intonations furnish an extraordinary experience. additionally, the intent of composer-producers may not translate well to audiences for a variety of subjective and environmental reasons. downstream from the earlier recording collaborations, the subsequent vocal remixes are designed to transmit the content—the message—of mckenna’s visions. and yet, like audio prosthetics, these artefacts are also the functional means to effect transcendent states, with the sound of mckenna’s voice carrying the transcendent sensibility desired. in the end, compositions that re-create mckenna’s transdimensional voyages become vehicles for future voyagers. dancecult 15(1)80 the “elves” gambol in the background of this aesthetic. in the wake of alien dreamtime and zuvuya, artists tapped the seam of mckenna’s elven sprechen. while the first artists to sample the elf chatter in a dance track were the ray castle-led tribal acid outfit sonic sufi— on the title track of their 1995 release sacramental. the standout sample was performed by shpongle on “a new way to say ‘hooray!’” (shpongle 2001; see figure 10). before breaking into his elf chatter, the track has terence capturing the moment of contact following dmt inhalation. and you take it, in, and in and in, and there’s a sound like the crumpling of a plastic bread wrapper, or the crackling of a flame. and a tone. a hummmmmmmmmmmmmmm. . . . and there is a cheer. the gnomes have learned a new way to say hooooooooooraaaay.26 figure 10. shpongle — tales of the inexpressible (2001). since there is no apparent information, no overt meaning, conveyed in these most alien of “small mouth noises”—i.e. the elfspeak—i suggest that their reproduction emphasizes mckenna’s role as medium of the unspeakable. with their chosen name a direct outcome https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31qa6v4emiq st john | the voice of the apocalypse: terence mckenna as raving medium 81 of the desire to formulate a lexicon for an experience for which existing language was inadequate, over two decades, shpongle led the charge to convert mckenna’s voice into a sonic template for the unknown. while the elf chatter became signature to the mckennaesque aesthetic, mckenna’s sampled voice also signalled the desired “unenglishable” states of consciousness (mckenna 1984). in short bursts, sample-smiths find the words to explicate what words can’t explain. “i go to a place where language finds it very hard to pull over, look around”, announces mckenna, summoned by israelis liquid on safi (2006). “it’s almost as though it takes you to a world that is not english”. deploying the words of mckenna to convey this indeterminate world became a commonplace technique, faithful to revelations concerning language deriving from sufficient doses of tryptamines. in another example, russian psybass duo mahaon (2013) conjure mckenna with a slow and deliberate delivery. “psychedelic drugs are as important to the study of ufos as the telescope was to the redefining of astronomy. you can meet the alien”. as that final line is repeated in a composition that “alienates” mckenna’s voice, the work insinuates the self ’s encounter with the other. other times the voice is garbled or indistinct, perhaps not unlike audio marked “indistinct chatter” in movie subtitle tracks. but with mckenna the indistinct chatter is distinctly mckenna, a recognizable voice even though the meaning may be occluded. sometimes the distinctly indistinct voice is used to distinct effect, as it is on a remix of the collaboration “liquid hook” performed by liquid soul in 2018 at psy-fi festival in the netherlands. interactive noise’s remix of this popular track was performed before thousands during the festival’s closing set. for several minutes, mckenna’s familiar avuncular voice, chopped up and filtered, offers background noise before an exhilarating crescendo that serves as a memorable sonic representation of a breakthrough event triggered by smoking dmt. what i find curious in this notable example is how mckenna’s voice has become inherently meaningful as the backing vocals to psychedelic liminality. in this and many other cases, not only are djs and producers re-suturing and synthesising the syntax of the wizard of words to express the notion of the world made manifest through sound, but mckenna is also summoned as a kind of “trip sitter” for psychedelic enthusiasts. as artists committed to these performances, mckennaesque extended to audio-video productions, such as the live transmedia performance of alien dreamtime that has been produced on cd, vhs and dvd.27 in an effort to depict the thought patterns inside mckenna’s head, rose x earlier produced the video “experiment at petaluma”. ken adams later produced imaginatrix: the terence mckenna experience, a production involving thousands of layered images, motion graphics and private video recordings made with mckenna between 1989–1994 to map the unchartable, mediate the immediate, convey the unspeakable and lift the veils on language itself. adams adopts the concept of the “imaginatrix” to describe—sampling mckenna—“a universe inside the human mind”, “a place where realities are made of thoughts”, a “place that shamans have known of for millennia”. taking up key themes in mckenna’s philosophy, the production is a commendable attempt to produce a “visibly beheld topology” of mckenna’s speech (adams 2014).28 https://youtu.be/lhhogvz7rlo?si=vqhlwmr1vovbvirc&t=8083 dancecult 15(1)82 the party at the end of the world the parallel youniversity crowd craning their necks to catch mckenna’s “small mouth noises” at megatripolis in 1994 were sequentially delivered the news: this was the most novel moment in all of history; with each passing moment, novelty accumulates; all evolutionary data reveals that the peak of history’s trip is “coming soon”. mckenna was flier-dropping his audience—a mix of the intrigued, the perplexed and the bemused—datum on this “super-novel” transformative event he named the “zero” moment of his “timewave” chart, a prophesied commitment revealing a complex personal mythopoetics. some artists appear to recognize how mckenna’s signature project—his philosophy of time—offers subliminal language for the psychedelic deconditioning of cultural programming. this understanding is represented, for example, by collaboration mindzik whose track “s.a.r.p.” features samples from manual of evasion: lx94, a 1994 dadaist film experiment directed by portuguese filmmaker edgar pêra. alongside robert anton wilson and rudy rucker, mckenna played a revolutionary “temponaut” who breaks free from his imprisonment in clock time. “forward to the new order of the transtemporal dream”, he declares in a lifted soundbite. “history is ending. . . . science gives us the big bang. i give you the big surprise” (in mindzik 2018; see figure 11). figure 11. terence mckenna, lisbon, 1994, on the set of manual of evasion lx94, directed by edgar pêra. courtesy of edgar pêra. st john | the voice of the apocalypse: terence mckenna as raving medium 83 it is no coincidence that the psychedelic constituency of the rave scene and its descendants have comprised the audience most receptive to mckenna’s timewave siren, even if many weren’t on board with “the end is nigh” sentiments tinged with the apocalypse according to revelation.29 where mckenna promoted a transformative event akin to the big bang on drugs, it made sense to a community dedicated to manifesting transformative events. it was palatable to an underground scenius populated with crews optimizing events designed as cosmic cavalcades, more transcendent, more novel than those confabulated last season. event teams within this pre-millennium attention economy vied to cultivate an experience more outlandish than that produced by their competitors. mckenna’s discourse on acceleration and complexity was assimilable for those augmenting events with technology and aesthetics designed to inaugurate sensorial experiences more novel than those encountered last year, last week or even just yesterday. mckenna’s uber-novel zero event predicted for 21 december 2012 was hyped as the event to end all events, a potential stimulus for action if not a cause for celebration. in his quip saved for enquiries about the nature of “the event” that awaits us at the end of time, the ultimate goal of evolution was “a great party” (badillion 1991: 27). the comment, “i’ll see you at the end of the world”, and the irish toast, “may ye be alive at the end o’ the world”, were favoured partings. would anyone want to miss that? mckenna cultivated a raptured audience for the “bifurcation” event ahead. that it would be an uncertain event in which his audience should expect to experience a transformed consciousness, to become unknowable to themselves and even be completely othered as a species, lent the event a je ne sais quoi appealing to those jonesing to be transported out of their minds. such transcendent states have long been coveted by seasonal and periodic trance dance movements bent on cultivating disembodiment and annihilation of the self in ecstatic states (see baldini 2010). these movements understand death and birth as inseparable. in the nineties, mckenna was propagating a new discourse on apocalyptic festivity. implicit to his mythopoetics on time and inherent to his novelty thesis, the end was at the same time a new beginning—a transition point.30 it was a motif essential for transformational dance event cultures accustomed to celebrating seasonal transitions. despite the outlandish implications of his ideas, his mythopoetics can be factored among the reasons why mckenna has been courted by the psychedelic trance scene. that the waveof-time had a synchronous relationship with the mayan calendar movement drew more intense associations, as borne out in the obsession with 21 december 2012, when elements within psyculture forged a planetary consciousness movement reliant on the inauguration of a “new time” (st john 2011b). given he departed a dozen years preceding the main event, mckenna was unavailable for the preparations, let alone the festivities. “this is a strange thing to happen to a philosopher”, mckenna pondered while taking stock of his career when back in the familiar confines of esalen in august 1993. like an intrepid returnee from an off-planetary venture, he described how he had recently “found myself in clubs at four in the morning raving at people at high decibel with the perfect knowledge that they couldn’t understand a word i was saying” (mckenna 1993). the live rave format was not an ideal context for transmitting mckenna’s ideas. that these scenes dancecult 15(1)84 were deaf to some of his ideas was a disappointment from which he is unlikely to have been shaken, had he lived passed his early fifties. as he announced in the early nineties, his conviction was that music is the least appropriate context for tryptamine experiments, let alone a dance party. it was his lasting contention that waiting in silent darkness was the right way to approach the “thing in itself ”, uncoloured by light, sound or expectation. “let the pythagorean inner music issue from your soul, then you will be amazed, and then if it bores you, flip on the top of the pops” (anon b 1993: 18). outro figure 12. terence mckenna, by geoff taylor. the question of how the figure who argued that “culture is not your friend” might have suffered the contemporary dance and festival scene must await further discussion. despite his ambivalence with dance music events as vehicles for psychonautical experimentation, outside of his career as an amateur ethnobotanist (which i have not addressed here), mckenna evolved from raving frontman to surreal psychopomp for a large population within psychedelic electronica. there, his sampled vocal sound bites evince the most mediated (or nanomediated) voice in the history of electronic music. with the assistance of the cybercultural surround that he championed throughout his career, mckenna retains a disembodied presence in the popular underground of music making and performance. as his voice reverberates in an era of accelerating crisis, complexity and uncertainty—which he devoted his life to comprehending—that he continues to shadow the present with his endof-history mythopoetics warrants attention. as i have demonstrated, mckenna’s sonorous weight has been felt largely, though not exclusively, within “psy” electronica, from goa and st john | the voice of the apocalypse: terence mckenna as raving medium 85 psytrance to psybient styles. while many samples echo and address the cognitive libertarian philosophy pursued through mckenna’s recorded public performances, a growing weight of samples appear to be sans direct or overt signification. as the digital echoing of his tryptamine-inspired rambling “elven” sprechen mixed in dance tracks suggests, the voice is often channelled without any clear articulation. as illustrated in the interactive noise remix of “liquid hook” performed by liquid soul at psy-fi festival in 2018, this rambling, inchoate and sometimes partially audible aesthetic—perhaps the true terrain of raving—is deployed by artists to evoke, affect and burlesque non-ordinary states of consciousness, or mini-apocalypses of the self. in such contexts, while the meaning of mckenna’s words might not have been quite lost in translation within electronica, it does appear that his voice has become the message. as illustrated by his influence on a multitude of artists inhabiting the world of psychedelic electronica, and by the impact of his voice dropped on dance floors at clubs, parties and festivals two decades downstream from his departure, mckenna has become a medium of the unspeakable. and with respect to his deference to mcluhan, the medium has become the message. while artists clearly hold a range of motives when electing to sample mckenna, from out-right caricature to a functional means of transcendence, he appears primed to serve in the afterlife as a psychopompic trip sitter for a global community of dance music enthusiasts. acknowledgements this article was produced with the assistance of a marie skłodowska-curie actions postdoctoral fellowship undertaken in the department of music and design arts at the university of huddersfield. i am grateful to all my interviewees whose comments i have drawn upon in this article. thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their useful feedback, to managing editor tommy symmes for the excellent copyediting and to production editor boti vitos and production assistant patricio lópez-serrano for the quality layout. notes 1 see terence mckenna: the strange attractor (st john forthcoming). 2 despite the growing interest in mckenna among scholars of religion (see davis 2019). 3 from a 1993 pitch statement from harper san francisco, courtesy of leslie rossman. 4 held on the kona coast of hawaii in september 1999, allchemical arts was mckenna’s co-founded conference on psychedelics and art. 5 the single featured mckenna’s full monologue transcribed on the front and back cover art and accompanying poster. 6 ken adams, interview with author on zoom, 23 june 2023. 7 no-longer available online, fraser clark’s “book of ravelations” was steeped in mckenna. for more on mckenna’s influence on dance culture, see partridge (2006a: 49–51) and partridge (2006b: 113–9). dancecult 15(1)86 8 among the first releases to feature tracks sampling mckenna, the cd version of shamanarchy in the uk includes psychic tv’s “ecstacy in the uk”, which features mckenna commenting on the “partnership society” that worshipped gaia, and the “reawakening of this feminine ecological earth-centered awareness that is definitely feeding into the aesthetics of this counterculture that is arising”. “what is going on is an attempt to recapture the shamanistic institutions and styles that existed before history”. 9 colin angus, email interview with the author, 2 july 2021. angus’ clarifications: 19 july 2023. to record his voice, the shamen reached an agreement with mckenna and clark’s label evolution. 10 colin angus, email to the author, 20 july 2023. 11 true hallucinations was originally published as a “talking book” in 1984. 12 for more details on this, see st john (forthcoming). 13 jonah sharp, email to author, 6 february 2022. mckenna and sharp again collaborated on halloween 1994 at the great american music hall in san francisco. 14 the incident is narrated with accompanying animation in the documentary the transcendental object at the end of time (bergmann 2014). 15 jonah sharp also produced the speaking in tongues 12-inch featuring a remix of mckenna’s alien melody on “speaking in tongues (smack mix)”. 16 a direct quote from the transcript of mckenna, “ethnobotany of shamanism” (1988a). 17 mckenna’s son finn contributed artwork to the cover design of dream matrix telemetry. 18 material from zuvuya’s interview with mckenna was deployed on shamania and their e.p. shaman i am (1994). 19 in 1988, mckenna was commissioned by mel ziegler of banana republic clothing to write his own travel column titled “our man in nirvana” for doomed publication trips. 20 the influence is not exclusively on psytrance. as illustrated by the prolific tagging of mckenna on soundcloud, his voice is carried on a diversity of styles, suggesting that the novelty of mckenna has not worm off. 21 nik sequenci, interviewed by the author, 3 february 2012. 22 formed by raja ram and simon posford, shpongle’s debut release are you shpongled? (which features track “divine moments of truth”, 1998) is infused with dmt and drenched with mckenna. 23 for the story of the fate of the contents of the “pink packet”, c/o mckenna, and via sequenci, youth and raja ram, see st john (2015: 202–11). 24 posted on the well in 1994. 25 for further details on mckenna’s influence on the underground dance movement, see, st john (2004: 210–32). 26 for the sample, see “shpongle a new way to say ‘hooray!’” (youtube). the sample is from mckenna (1994). the line “a new way to say hooray” invokes syd barrett’s lyrics from “the gnome,” from pink floyd’s 1967 debut album the piper at the gates of dawn: “another way for gnomes to say, ooooooh my.” 27 the video alien dreamtime, first released on vhs in 1993, featured live video mixing by rose x (adams 1993). the 2003 dvd was produced by magic carpet media / rose x media house (britt welin and ken adams). st john | the voice of the apocalypse: terence mckenna as raving medium 87 28 imaginatrix also uses 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pocm-1039. <https://www.discogs.com/release/1125535-eat-static-abduction>. funkopath. 1997. skwirm. 21-3 records (vinyl, 12-inch, white label): to3 005. <https://www.discogs.com/release/1158180-funkopath-skwirm>. irresistible force, the. 1992. mountain high. rising high records (2 x vinyl, lp, album): rsn lp5. <https://www.discogs.com/release/43714-the-irresistible-force-flying-high>. “liquid hook” (interactive noise remix). 2018. liquid soul & captain hook. iboga records (file, flac): ibogadigital459. <https://www.discogs.com/artist/1592823-interactive-noise>. liquid on safi. 2006. “shamanic madness”, on 13 moon, compiled by cosmic sun. spliff music (cd, compilation): sp1cd017. <https://www.discogs.com/release/870044-cosmic-sun-13-moon>. mahaon. 2013. “you can meet the alien”, on the awakening. ajnavision records (cd, album): ajna005cd. <https://www.discogs.com/release/4052712-mahaon-the-awakening>. mindzik. 2018. “s.a.r.p”, on the journey within, compiled by demoniac insomniac. active meditation music (cd): ammcd008cd. <https://www.discogs.com/release/20519812-demoniac-insomniac-the-journey-within>. monkey machine. 2012. “horned goddess”. neurotransmitter. altar records (cdr, album): arcdap01. <https://www.discogs.com/release/3388772-monkey-machine-neurotransmitter>. shamanarchy in the uk, evolution, 1992 (cd x 2, compilation): evo cd 2. <https://www.discogs.com/release/834303-various-shamanarchy-in-the-uk>. shamen, the. 1992. boss drum. one little indian. (cd, album): ek 52925. <https://www.discogs.com/release/49459-the-shamen-boss-drum>. shamen, the (with terence mckenna). 1993. re: evolution. one little indian (cd, single): 118tp7cd. <https://www.discogs.com/release/76284-the-shamen-with-terence-mckenna-re-evolution>. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/jrpc.25.2.186 https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318817_10 https://www.discogs.com/release/1366875-burn-in-noise-passing-clouds https://www.discogs.com/release/1125535-eat-static-abduction https://www.discogs.com/release/1158180-funkopath-skwirm https://www.discogs.com/release/43714-the-irresistible-force-flying-high https://www.discogs.com/artist/1592823-interactive-noise https://www.discogs.com/release/870044-cosmic-sun-13-moon https://www.discogs.com/release/4052712-mahaon-the-awakening https://www.discogs.com/release/20519812-demoniac-insomniac-the-journey-within https://www.discogs.com/release/3388772-monkey-machine-neurotransmitter https://www.discogs.com/release/834303-various-shamanarchy-in-the-uk https://www.discogs.com/release/49459-the-shamen-boss-drum https://www.discogs.com/release/76284-the-shamen-with-terence-mckenna-re-evolution dancecult 15(1)90 shamen, the (with terence mckenna). 1993. “re: evolution (live at the warfield)”, re: evolution. one little indian (cd, single): 118tp7cd. <https://www.discogs.com/release/76284-the-shamen-with-terence-mckenna-reevolution>. shpongle. 1998. are you shpongled? twisted records (cd, album): twscd4. <https://www.discogs.com/release/27195-shpongle-are-you-shpongled>. ———. 2001. tales of the inexpressible. twisted records (cd, album): twscd13. <https://www.discogs.com/release/35076-shpongle-tales-of-the-inexpressible>. sonic sufi. 1995. “sacramental”. sacramental. psy-harmonics (cd, album): psy-018. <https://www.discogs.com/release/57437-sonic-sufi-sacramental>. space time continuum with terence mckenna. 1993. alien dreamtime. astralwerks (cd, album, mixed): asw6107-2. <https://www.discogs.com/release/13634894-space-time-continuum-with-terencemckenna-alien-dreamtime>. ———. 1993. speaking in tongues. astralwerks (vinyl, 12-inch, 33 ⅓ rpm): asw 6108. <https://www.discogs.com/release/98254-space-time-continuum-w-t-mc-kennaspeaking-in-tongues>. streamers. 2012. “power and light”. yellow sunshine explosion (3 x file, mp3, ep, 320 kbps): ysedep001. <https://www.discogs.com/release/3836328-streamers-power-and-light>. zuvuya with terence mckenna. 1993. dream matrix telemetry. delerium records (cd, album): delec cd 2012 <https://www.discogs.com/release/16988-terence-mckenna-with-zuvuya-dream-matrixtelemetry>. ———. 1994. shamania. delerium records (cd album): delec cd. 021. <https://www.discogs.com/release/581693-zuvuya-with-terence-mckenna-shamania>. ———. 1994. shaman i am. delerium records (vinyl, 12”, 33 ⅓ rpm, ep, white label): delec ep 031. <https://www.discogs.com/release/11084302-zuvuya-terence-mckenna-shaman-i-am>. filmography adams, ken (prod.). 1993. alien dreamtime. city of tribes communications (vhs): cotvt-001-3, <https://www.discogs.com/release/6952340-spacetime-continuumfeaturing-terence-mckenna-and-stephen-kent-alien-dreamtime>. adams, ken (dir). 2014. imaginatrix: the terence mckenna experience. magic carpet media. bergmann, peter. 2014. the transcendental object at the end of time. @ 2:20:58 on youtube. uploaded on 16 november, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aalardrcqcy&t=578s>. “liquid soul full closing set at psy-fi 2018”, @ 2:14:44 on youtube, uploaded 30 january 2019, <https://youtu.be/lhhogvz7rlo?si=vqhlwmr1vovbvirc&t=8083>. mckenna, terence. 1984. “the gnostic astronaut”. shared visions bookstore, berkeley, ca, june 1984. uploaded to youtube, deus ex mckenna ~ terence mckenna archive, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceyxuz1poby>. https://www.discogs.com/release/76284-the-shamen-with-terence-mckenna-re-evolution https://www.discogs.com/release/76284-the-shamen-with-terence-mckenna-re-evolution https://www.discogs.com/release/27195-shpongle-are-you-shpongled https://www.discogs.com/release/35076-shpongle-tales-of-the-inexpressible https://www.discogs.com/release/57437-sonic-sufi-sacramental https://www.discogs.com/release/13634894-space-time-continuum-with-terence-mckenna-alien-dreamtime https://www.discogs.com/release/13634894-space-time-continuum-with-terence-mckenna-alien-dreamtime https://www.discogs.com/release/98254-space-time-continuum-w-t-mc-kenna-speaking-in-tongues https://www.discogs.com/release/98254-space-time-continuum-w-t-mc-kenna-speaking-in-tongues https://www.discogs.com/release/3836328-streamers-power-and-light https://www.discogs.com/release/16988-terence-mckenna-with-zuvuya-dream-matrix-telemetry https://www.discogs.com/release/16988-terence-mckenna-with-zuvuya-dream-matrix-telemetry https://www.discogs.com/release/581693-zuvuya-with-terence-mckenna-shamania https://www.discogs.com/release/11084302-zuvuya-terence-mckenna-shaman-i-am https://www.discogs.com/release/6952340-spacetime-continuum-featuring-terence-mckenna-and-stephen-kent-alien-dreamtime https://www.discogs.com/release/6952340-spacetime-continuum-featuring-terence-mckenna-and-stephen-kent-alien-dreamtime https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aalardrcqcy&t=578s https://youtu.be/lhhogvz7rlo?si=vqhlwmr1vovbvirc&t=8083 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceyxuz1poby st john | the voice of the apocalypse: terence mckenna as raving medium 91 ———. 1987. “psychedelics before and after history,” california institute of integral studies, san francisco, 2 october. sound photosynthesis. uploaded to youtube, terence talks: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcrgy2bdk0u>. ———. 1988. “places i have been”. hermosa beach, los angeles, california, 15 may, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdtqnxevee4>. ———. 1992. “hermeticism & alchemy”. workshop, new york. uploaded to youtube deus ex mckenna ~ terence mckenna archive, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yndbpyh1ea>. ———. 1998. “terence mckenna – lost at last – san francisco, ca – 1998”. uploaded to youtube, complete_mckenna_archive, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2csdiq5snq>. ———.2020. “terence mckenna gives an example of glossolalia”. uploaded to terence mckenna, youtube, 29 september,<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxiovtdpzgq>. pêra, edgar (dir). 1994. manual of evasion: lx94. companhia de filmes principe real. “shpongle a new way to say ‘hooray!’” youtube 8:32, uploaded on 6 april 2010. <https://youtu.be/undzxogkepw?t=39>. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcrgy2bdk0u https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdtqnxevee4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yndbpyh1ea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2csdiq5snq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxiovtdpzgq https://youtu.be/undzxogkepw?t=39 future nostalgia? 21st century disco dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 13(1): 36–53 issn 1947-5403 ©2021 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.03 future nostalgia? 21st century disco william d.j. rees the university of exeter (uk) abstract this article investigates 21st century disco and its nostalgic influences from 1970s and 1980s dance culture. first, it outlines the article’s argument that contemporary disco music, whilst being influenced by its musical past, has different meanings in the present, and that artists are combining past influences with their own innovations. second, it explores academic interpretations of nostalgia, and how these relate to popular culture. third, it analyses three albums that consciously incorporate 1970s and 1980s disco aesthetics: daft punk’s random access memories (2013), nile rodgers and chic’s it’s about time (2018) and dua lipa’s future nostalgia (2020). it does this through a combination of analysing different media including artists’ stated intentions in interviews, lyrics and sounds. this opens a discussion of nostalgia in these albums, exploring what nostalgic feelings, specifically for 1970s and 1980s disco culture, can tell us about our present. finally, it contextualises disco culture’s historical journey to the present. keywords: disco, nostalgia, retro, daft punk, chic, dua lipa william d.j. rees is an mphil/phd candidate at the university of exeter. his interdisciplinary research explores themes of decadence and subcultures in modern american history. find his history writing and podcast here: <https://willdoeshistory.wordpress.com/>. feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.03 https://willdoeshistory.wordpress.com/ rees | future nostalgia? 21st century disco 37 disco in the 2020s 21st century disco may have similarities to disco records and aesthetics of the past, but its meanings have changed since the 1970s and 1980s. the music itself, and the cultural context in which it exists have both changed and remained the same. it no longer displays the utopian and futuristic aesthetics imagined by 1970s and 1980s disco, but rather, it explores how we in the present envision that disco culture once imagined the future. what can the current fascination with this specific retro style tell us about the present? what function does disco have now? disco in the 21st century is not just a cool aesthetic, a signifier stripped of its political energy. it is more than apolitical escapism, and, as in the 1970s and 1980s, disco today should not be imagined as apolitical. alongside its intergenerational appeal, contemporary writings on disco culture have identified its important role in emancipatory histories, perhaps most notably those for lgbtq+ liberation. many contemporary disco artists use dance music to assert their stances in identity politics, with dua lipa for instance, highlighting gender inequalities. nile rodgers, a veteran of disco culture, has used his latest chic material to draw links between difficulties in the past and the present moment. the utopia of disco aims to be inclusive, inviting people towards non-discriminatory unity. it is comforting music that helps people during unpredictable times, whether it be the socioeconomic challenges of the 1970s, the austerity and trump presidency of the 2010s, or the covid-19 pandemic at the start of the 2020s. nostalgia is memory, imagined or real, infused with emotion. for random access memories (2013), rather than relying on samples from past tracks, as they had done in previous albums, daft punk consciously sought to make new music that sounded as though it could have been from the 1970s and 1980s disco era. as with back-to-basics trends in rock, such as the shift from 1970s prog rock to punk, or 1980s and 1990s glam rock to grunge, the use of live instrumentation in disco could be seen as a return to the emotional core of dance music: the beat and the groove. with this considered, disco has been far from static in the 21st century. varied electronic influences can be heard in disco albums such as róisín murphy’s róisín machine (2020), jessie ware’s what’s your pleasure? (2020), kylie minogue’s disco (2020) and the weekend’s after hours (2020). whether or not the nostalgic aspects of these albums are considered artistically regressive, it would appear that disco has appealed to listeners and artists during covid-19 lockdowns and helped them cope through unpredictable times. although historically rooted, it seems that disco is now as much a part of the present moment as the past. people are creating new disco memories, and in the process, giving the culture new meanings. nostalgia when considering the continuities between 20th and 21st century disco cultures, “nostalgia” can be a loaded term. historically, nostalgia has had pejorative associations. the term was coined in the medical dissertation of the 17th century swiss physician johaness hofer to dancecult 13(1)38 explain the homesickness of swiss mercenaries (hofer 1934: 381; davis 1979: 1). the word comes from the greek compound nóstos, meaning homecoming, and álgos, meaning pain. hofer suggested that this state of “afflicted imagination” could cause a lack of sleep, physical weakness, heart palpitations and stupidity (sprengler 2009: 11-12). left untreated, he believed it could result in death. although hofer coined the term itself, the general emotion can also be found in ancient storytelling, such as homer’s odyssey and the bible (sedikides et al. 2008: 304). in biological terms, nostalgia seems to be evolutionarily hardwired into humans, rather than a recent societal construct (oba et al. 2016: 1070). in academic circles, much of the negativity attached to the term has continued throughout history, in which it has primarily been considered as an undesirable psychological condition. linguist, dirk klopper, has suggested: “the notion that nostalgia is in some way regressive, whether it relates to a personal or a political history, is a legacy of the hermeneutics of suspicion” (klopper 2016: 11). professor of technology, william c. kurlinkus, has added that these negative associations continue into the present: “nostalgia has gotten a pretty bad rap. at best it’s dismissed as an empty longing for an artificially sweetened past, and at worst, a propagandistic roadblock that halts progress” (2018: 5). nostalgia can be thought of as an obsessive and inescapable longing for the past, perhaps derived from an individual’s dissatisfaction with their present. in contrast, “retro”, the idea of imitating styles from the past, perhaps sounds quainter, and thus to those in the culture industry, more marketable. in popular music studies, hauntology has been an influential framework for approaching recent cultural fascinations with the past. hauntology contends that the contemporary culture industry is excessively nostalgic, recycling retro trends rather than producing anything new. by extension, this is thought to preclude culture’s transgressive potential. writing at the turn of the 2010s, mark fisher defined hauntology as “the failure of the future” (2012: 16). discussing 2000s popular culture, he reasoned that twenty-first-century electronic music had failed to progress beyond what had been recorded in the 20th century: practically anything produced in the 2000s could have been recorded in the 1990s. electronic music had succumbed to its own inertia and retrospection. (fisher 2012: 16) not only did fisher believe this lack of imagination to be culturally boring, but further, that it was a symptom of political stagnation, obscuring society’s capacity to envision alternatives to the capitalist status quo. in his words, it represented “the acceptance of a situation in which culture would continue without really changing, and where politics was reduced to the administration of an already established (capitalist) system” (fisher 2012: 16). in retromania, simon reynolds suggests that even amongst younger artists, popular music has become fixated upon “archived memories of yesteryear or retro-rock leeching off ancient styles” (2011: 420). like fisher, reynolds links this cultural inertia to the conditions of capitalism, and measures culture by a criterion of radicalism. for marxists and socialists, culture is often assessed by its capacity to generate social ruptures, by its revolutionary, or at least subversive, potential. nostalgia can seem the opposite of this. karl rees | future nostalgia? 21st century disco 39 marx himself, in the eighteenth brumaire of louis bonaparte (1852), considered nostalgia to be a superstition that needs to be rejected so that progressive politics of the future can be brought into being (klopper 2016: 10). more recently, some academics across popular music studies, psychology and the social sciences have challenged perceptions of nostalgia as something inherently negative. although it is acknowledged that it can be addictive if excessive, the emerging consensus amongst psychologists moves nostalgia away from past definitions as a disease of the mind needing to be cured, instead suggesting that it serves necessary societal and biological functions. broadly, it is argued that “it has capacity to improve perceptions of friendship and social support, nurture sentiments of protection and love, lower anxiety, and prompt sociable behaviour” (“nostalgia” 2021). marc augé has argued that nostalgia interrupts the “unconscious fidelity” and “idleness” of routine, allowing for subversive, or at least escapist potential: “nostalgia comes to undermine the routine, possibly to test it by reintroducing the idea of the possible into the humdrum daily rounds, otherwise free of problems and questions” (2016: 79). sedikides et al have suggested that on a personal level, nostalgia functions as a response to “dysphoric states such as negative mood and loneliness”, which “increases self-esteem, fosters social connectedness, and alleviates existential threat” (2008: 304). similarly, zhou et al have written that it is a “predominantly (albeit not exclusively) positive emotion that serves vital psychological functions”, and that “one of these functions is to facilitate socially beneficial reactions” (2012: 47). they found, for instance, that nostalgia made people more charitable. connecting to the idea of “future nostalgia”, nostalgia is linked not only to the past, but, in contrast to hauntology, it can be used more productively to evoke past ideas of the future. some argue that this allows for radical ways of thinking as it presents past visions of how society could have alternatively developed. in this way, it has been proposed that nostalgia can be creatively inspiring for individuals and the collective (boym 2001: 354; badbury 2012; duncan, stevens and sonn 2012). arguing that nostalgia can be forward looking, pickering and keightley suggest that we should change the way it is understood as a concept (2006). wing-yee cheung et al have argued that nostalgia has the capacity “to facilitate perceptions of a more positive future”, and that it “may constitute a catalyst for linking one’s personal past, present, and future, thus providing a sense of self-continuity” (2013: 1493). janelle lynn wilson proposes that “nostalgia is not a mere passive longing for the past, but a potentially dynamic vehicle for (re)envisioning and (re)creating various pasts and futures” (2015: 490). this article builds upon interpretations in popular music studies of nostalgia as potentially invigorating. creative uses of nostalgia, for instance, have been observed by ballam-cross, who found that chillwave, synthwave, and vaporwave subcultures utilise nostalgia to creatively rework past popular culture in ways that are meaningful to its younger participants (2021: 91). arno van der hoeven has argued that nostalgia in popular music culture is important in fostering feelings of belonging, continuity, and identity (2018: 238). elodie roy has also found that nostalgia can potentially be creative in allowing artists dancecult 13(1)40 to reinterpret popular music’s past in ways that are relevant to them, rather than nostalgia stagnating any new musical expression (2014: 156). daft punk’s random access memories (2013) while there were numerous successful disco singles in the 2000s, daft punk’s commercially lucrative and critically acclaimed 2013 album, random access memories, seemed to reposition disco as a dominant mainstream genre. the title of the album itself hints at something that is both retrospective and futuristic. random access memories of course, ends on the word “memories”, but the phrase itself relates to computers. random-access memory, or ram, refers to the process by which computers present data, bringing together different past “memories” to produce a current sequence. computers are devices symbolic of modernity and the future, constantly linking together and presenting bits of the past. in the album, daft punk, both as artists and as their robot personas, are engaged in a similar process, bringing together elements of past dance music styles. alongside younger dance music collaborators, random access memories involved older disco veterans such as giorgio moroder, producer of donna summer’s classic love to love you baby (1975), and chic’s nile rodgers. in promotional interviews, the collaborators emphasised both the oldness and newness of what daft punk were doing. there was a nostalgic drive to the album, as todd edwards put it, “they wanted to pick up this west coast vibe. . . going back to the time of fleetwood mac, the doobie brothers. . . the eagles” (the creators project 2013a). edwards added that the methods used to achieve this seemingly backward style were a subversion of modern dance music techniques, where the sound is largely produced on a computer rather than through live instrumental performances in the studio. he believed this was “a lost artform”, suggesting that, there was no going further into this direction that’s been constantly replicated and imitated and emulated, and so the concept was, they reverse gears, and went back to a time that no one’s really focusing on, and even just the way they record music. (the creators project 2013a) giorgio moroder expressed similar sentiments: so, daft punk wanted to do something and do it in a way that’s not done by just pushing a note or a chord. you definitely hear that it’s nice and full, and the drums and the bass have that warm, that full sound. it’s time to have something new in the dance world. i love disco or dance anyway, but this is like a step forward. they had to do something that is different. still dance, still electronic, but give that human touch back. (the creators project 2013b) contemporary music artist, pharrell williams, thought that the album represented a back to basics for dance music, as if to say, “let’s go back to that magical time where music, and the liveliness of music, is what moved people” (the creators project 2013c). he added that he believed a hubris had taken place in modern dance music: “people lost respect for rees | future nostalgia? 21st century disco 41 the groove”. chic’s nile rodgers summarised the feeling of going back into dance music’s history to regain the fundamental human connection of the groove: “it’s like they went back to go forward” (the creators project 2013d). daft punk’s intentions are summarised in the title of the album’s opening track, “give life back to music”. disco’s history is apparent throughout the album, via combined processes of “heritagisation”, continuation and revitalisation (poirrier 2015: 377). the choice of collaborators adds to this. nile rodgers features in multiple tracks on the album, and he has been involved with some of disco’s biggest hits throughout the course of the genre’s history. besides his work with chic, his discography includes sister sledge’s we are family (1979), diana ross’ “i’m coming out” (1980), david bowie’s let’s dance (1983), madonna’s like a virgin (1984) and duran duran’s “notorious” (1986), among others. elsewhere, the track, “giorgio by moroder”, features giorgio moroder giving a spoken biography of his musical career over electronic instrumentation, and with it, a history of modern dance music’s inception (poirrier 2015: 373). many of the songs he worked on, especially “love to love you baby”, have been considered seminal in the establishment and early development of electronic dance music. “giorgio by moroder” seems to self-consciously connect an earlier phase of modern dance music, namely electronic disco and the development of hi-nrg, to a present and future in which mechanised sounds have become, and seem to be becoming, ever more prevalent. as with all daft punk music videos, the singles for random access memories take place in spaces that are liminal, enigmatic and cosmic. like the reality-distorting experience of dance music and lights in the discotheque, time itself feels suspended. collaborator pharrell williams has described random access memories as sounding as if from an alternate reality: somewhere outside of the ether that we exist in is a multitude of realms of possibility and alternate directions, and i think they just went in those libraries and just dusted off those things. it’s kind of like the mid ‘70s, early ‘80s of a different universe and dimension, not of this one. (the creators project 2013c) daft punk had already been influential in the music industry for their catchy french house classics, but the success of random access memories, the single “get lucky” in particular, can be seen as a moment in which disco that consciously drew on old aesthetics gained a newfound popularity. there had been big 21st century disco influenced hits, such as those from jamiroquai, kylie minogue and sophie ellis-bextor, but “get lucky” not only had resemblances to 1970s and 1980s disco, it was explicitly located within disco culture. during certain moments of the 2010s, disco re-emerged as the dominant musical style in the charts. disco was not the only mainstream genre that was reproducing 1970s styles. in rock, haim’s something to tell you (2017) had a warm fleetwood mac vibe to it, while the arctic monkeys’ long-term shift towards retro styles has thus far culminated in tranquility base hotel + casino (2018), complete with a modernist architecture model on the front cover. similarly, the strokes have increasingly used 1970s sounds and equipment in their dancecult 13(1)42 recordings, and a 1970s sci-fi feel can be seen in their video aesthetics for the new abnormal (2020). this retro sci-fi style extends to vocalist, julian casablancas’ other band, the voidz, and he also provided vocals for “instant crush” on random access memories. beyoncé’s lemonade (2016) drew from influences across several genres including reggae, hip hop, soul, blues, and funk, with throwbacks to the 1970s amongst other eras. childish gambino’s “redbone” (2016), was a 1970s style funk track that went viral online, linking the black radicalism of the era to continued inequalities in the present, with its refrain for listeners to “stay woke”. the revitalisation of disco, however, considering it had once been shunned as a genre, seemed to many a significant “revival”—as if it had ever really been absent. chic’s it’s about time (2018) the impact of this ongoing resurgence of disco can be seen in the delayed recognition of nile rodgers’ massive influence on modern popular music, given his involvement, as previously discussed, with many of the biggest dance hits of the 20th, and thus far, 21st centuries. although his band, chic, has been popular since the 1970s, it was not until the 2010s that rodgers became a household name in the music industry, and his eventual ascendance into the pantheon of pop personifies the acceptance of disco’s continued relevance. following the success of random access memories, nile rodgers produced new chic material which blended the band’s classic sound with collaborations from younger artists including cosha, mura masa and vic mensa. in the album’s first released single, “i’ll be there” (2015), nile rodgers recounted his personal history of disco and the commercial success it brought him, alongside throwback samples from previous chic songs: “life began for me, when a single dj dropped the needle on my vinyl (everybody dance)”. the song is a bridge for chic, it being their first release since chic-ism (1992). “i’ll be there” cast an appreciative look back on the band’s history, but simultaneously looked forward to new musical possibilities. it was reflective whilst rejecting stasis: “now i don’t wanna live in the past, but it’s a nice place to visit. so, if you come along, i’ll be there”. nile rodgers could easily rely upon his discography of hit releases, but as demonstrated by the collaborations on the album, he had a desire to remain contemporary and relevant, to produce music that is both “timely and timeless” (wodtke 2019: 43). the title of the recent album, it’s about time (2018), is of course, a joke—it’s the first chic album since 1992—but it could also be interpreted more literally, with several of the songs linking into themes about time. “till the world falls” (2018) is about a generalised state of chaos, alluding to the unpredictability and divisive rhetoric of the trump presidency in the 2010s. rodgers has been explicit in saying that disco is his response to the harshness of the world, having commented in an interview: “things now seem completely out of control. so, i thought to myself, ‘what if we could bring order to chaos through music?’” (halls 2018). disco is proposed as offering an escapist, more inclusive alternative. as the song states: “the world has gone mad, we might be safer on the dancefloor” and “we keep dancing, until the world falls”. in “boogie all night”, disco dancing is also presented as restorative in a rees | future nostalgia? 21st century disco 43 challenging world: “i’m hoping it will heal me”. this links back to older themes in chic’s music, such as in “good times” (1979): “good times, these are the good times. leave your cares behind”. disco is, as the song puts it, “an end to this stress and strife”, suggesting that all is not well in the world outside the discotheque. the similarities between tracks on it’s about time and “good times” connects the uncertainty of life in 1970s new york to the cultural, economic and political turmoil of the 2010s. the politics of disco’s past is relevant to the present. dua lipa’s future nostalgia (2020) disco seems nostalgic for many, even for those who did not live through the 1970s. although nostalgia has historically been thought of as an individual act of reflection, it is now more often understood as a collective and intergenerational experience (kurlinkus 2018: 7). in this way, it is possible for someone to be nostalgic for times, places and cultures that they did not directly experience, whether grounded in historical evidence or myths. they may feel a sense of familiarity with the past through literature or popular culture, including both period movies and television shows, or those made retrospectively about it (e.g. second world war and wild west movies). millennial artist, dua lipa, has a relationship with disco nostalgia that is both personal and intergenerational. in her album, future nostalgia (2020), she wanted to emulate the dance records that she enjoyed in her own youth, tapping into a personal sense of nostalgia. intergenerationally, the style of the music and aesthetic of the album fuse many past styles, but 1970s and 1980s disco is the core focus. it may seem odd that dua lipa, an artist in her mid-twenties, decided explicitly to title her album as nostalgic. her youth, and the continued popularity of retro styled disco amongst young audiences, poses questions: what do millennials have to be nostalgic about, and what is the relevance of particular 20th century dance music styles? younger artists are positively embracing disco, both as nostalgic and fresh. lipa’s album title for future nostalgia, although a seemingly vague aesthetic idea, taps into questions about the millennial relationship with 20th century culture. as kurlinkus suggests, “isn’t nostalgia, a regressive emotion, the opposite of design, an innovative act?” (2018: 3). future nostalgia is oxymoronic, suggesting a longing for past ideas of the future. a hauntological interpretation might position such nostalgia as a commercialised phenomenon, lacking any possibility for radical content. lipa’s material, i would argue however, does have something political to say about our society, whether this is considered radical or not. the videos for the singles on the album largely feature dream like sci-fi settings. “levitating”, possibly the most 1970s style disco song, has a video where lipa gets into a lift which is shooting up into space, complete with the disco signifiers of roller blading dancers and an led dancefloor. this is imitative of past sci-fi aesthetics, but similarly to, and possibly inspired by the commercial success of daft punk’s random access memories, it captures that disco feeling dancecult 13(1)44 of time being suspended on the dance floor. as with “get lucky”, “levitating” is a moment of joy within itself, somewhere between our world and the next. future nostalgia is era hopping in its blend of past aesthetics and genres. as one reviewer put it: “‘future nostalgia’ sounds like three madonna eras at once” (gaca 2020). the pulsating synth sound and video for “let’s get physical work out” are a 1980s cliché, styled as a vhs video with lipa instructing viewers through a workout routine. the album cover shows lipa in a 1950s style pink shirt and gloves, driving a car of the period, but her misshapen silver earrings look more modern or futuristic (hahn 2020). lipa has explained that she “wanted to make something that felt nostalgic but had something fresh and futuristic about it too” (kenneally 2020). she has cited diverse pop inspirations, such as gwen stefani, madonna, moloko, blondie and outkast. mixing disco with different genres is nothing new, but rather a continuation of past practices. 1970s and 1980s disco tracks were not as rigid a genre as it might be supposed, with tracks such as the rolling stones’ “miss you” (1978) or the clash’s “the magnificent seven” (1981) being a rock and disco blend. as with much contemporary electronic music, there is a “stylistic diversity” combining genres which have historically been marketed as distinct (charles 2020: 24). in future nostalgia, this includes italo disco, nu-disco, funk, synth-pop, euro disco, hi-nrg, house, techno and r&b. perhaps in a 21st century spotify-era kind of way, this album is influenced by everything at once, as one might track hop between eras in a digital playlist. the album combines all of these genres, using disco as a unifying style. the musical styles and aesthetics of disco and its offshoots offer a catchy, colourful and nostalgic feel, that resonates with audiences in our contemporary moment. this extends to the physical and digital album of future nostalgia. lipa’s website has successfully sold the album in formats associated with different music eras, such as audio file, cd and vinyl. even pre-orders for the cassette copy, a format that has long been generally considered as outdated and obsolete in sound quality, have sold out on her website over a year after the album’s initial release. it is notable that this album, which is a much bigger commercial hit than lipa’s debut album, was released during the covid-19 pandemic, although it was recorded before this. with many audiences in lockdown and unable to experience new social relationships, it is possible that nostalgic desires appeal to audiences because they want new music that is also warm and familiar. if the pandemic has made the world feel unsafe and unpredictable, disco offers a happy sound with a predictable 4/4 beat. dance music albums have thrived, despite the impossibility of social dancing. perhaps their appeal includes some longing for past dance floor connections. it has been speculated that many people responded to the anxiety of covid-19 lockdowns with simple nostalgic activities, such as listening to old music, watching past sports games, knitting and baking (brunk et al. 2020). roller blading, long remembered as a quintessentially 1970s pastime, has also experienced renewed interest, with larger than usual consumer demand for roller skates in 2020 and 2021 (bbc news 2021). this has perhaps been encouraged by their usage in the music video for lipa’s popular hit, “levitating”. rees | future nostalgia? 21st century disco 45 jon freeman of rolling stone has written of future nostalgia’s liberating escapism: “the future beyond the pandemic is vague at best, but we can momentarily escape the grimness of the news cycle and the sameness of our surroundings by setting our bodies free at home” (freeman 2020). in the guardian, alexis petridis identified similar popular music trends in 2020, relating the popularity of disco to covid-19: the big pop trend was disco revivalism. . . . as a genre, disco is lavishly escapist, but the best of it invariably comes with a curious undertow of melancholy. it is music that celebrates the transportive hedonism of the dance floor without ever entirely forgetting that there is something out there you’re keen to be transported from (petridis 2020). of course, disco and future nostalgia may have been popular regardless of covid-19, but as disco culture is rooted in togetherness and self-expression on the dancefloor, it would make sense for it to reflect the desires of societies in lockdown. as lipa herself has reflected on the success of her album during this moment, “happiness is something we all deserve and need in our lives” (weinberg 2021). the opening track of the album, “future nostalgia”, is a funk-based manifesto for lipa. the lyrical music video uses 1970s graphics and camera style, and features lipa moving around a modernist building. it is reminiscent of settings in 1970s episodes of columbo. lipa indicates that retro styles are inspirations for the album in declaring she wants a timeless sound. she wants her music to be new, but also sound as though it could exist as a past great in the future: “you want a timeless song, i wanna change the game, like modern architecture, john lautner coming your way”. accordingly, the song does not do anything particularly new, it is more a case of doing past styles well. the song is a self-confident declaration of her importance: “i know you’re dying trying to figure me out”. lipa asserts that she is a self-confident female artist who does not depend on anyone else: “no matter what you do, i’m gonna get it without ya. i know you ain’t used to a female alpha”. as simon reynolds has noted, there has been a “political turn” in certain strands of electronic music since the 2010s (reynolds 2019). whereas 1970s/1980s disco and house was more implicit in its underlying political messages, modern dance music tends to be more explicit when arguing for the rights of women and minority groups. lipa, in her music, and from her social platform as a celebrity, has spoken of taking political stances on issues such as feminism: “i get a lot of backlash for speaking out, but these are things i’m passionate about and that’s that” (savage 2020). future nostalgia is not just a self-confident assertion of individual female identity, but also discusses the collective anxieties and inequalities experienced by women. “boys will be boys”, a slower and less disco-influenced track on the album, does not hold back, opening with: “it’s second nature to walk home before the sun goes down, and put your keys between your knuckles when there’s boys around”. the chorus comments on the unfairness of girls needing to grow up quickly: “boys will be boys, but girls will be women”. while tracks like helen reddy’s “i am woman” (1972) were anthems for second wave feminism in the 1970s, it is difficult to envision anything as explicit as lipa’s lyrics in the charts of that era—although less commercially mainstream female punk bands dancecult 13(1)46 were often vocally radical in highlighting gender inequalities. even lipa’s feelgood disco bop of “don’t start now”, assertively commands an ex-boyfriend to stop harassing her: “don’t show up, don’t come out. don’t start caring about me now”. the album is styled as retro, but in tracks such as these it foregrounds a more politically contemporary discussion of #metoo era themes. lipa has said of her album: “i want it to be a soundtrack for young girls when they get older. i want it to age well” (levesley 2020). lipa’s music has nostalgic influences, but it aspires to influence the future. it seeks to be timeless and to inspire future generations, to become nostalgic for them just as past music has influenced future nostalgia. contextualising the popular memory of disco in the 20th and 21st centuries since the 1970s, nostalgia for disco has changed over time in the mainstream public consciousness. until the 1990s, disco had a history of being popularly remembered as a dated and meaningless music culture (shapiro 2005: 276). developing into a commercially international commercial phenomenon from the early to late 1970s, it is considered synonymous with that decade. for many americans, the 1970s have negative associations, such as with the watergate scandal, defeat in the vietnam war, violent domestic political groups, energy shortages, tense labour relations and a perceived decline in global power (borstelmann 2012: 1). during the 1970s, disco was described by critics as individualistic and commercialised, incapable of any artistic merit (lawrence 2003: 374). by 1979, the “disco sucks” movement, encouraged by dj steve dahl, began campaigning against disco on the radio. there were resentments against it being played instead of rock, in many cases guided by an underlying homophobia (gillian 2007: 278). this culminated in disco demolition night, a baseball game to which dahl invited people to come and destroy disco records, which turned into a riot. while the music industry has always fluctuated between different trends, this event seemed to make disco a toxic brand, and many companies moved away from it or relabelled “disco” records as different genres (rodgers 2011: 155). disco, and dance music communities more generally, would also be devastated by the aids epidemic during the 1980s, which disproportionately affected and prompted homophobic stigma towards one of their core constituents, lgbtq+ communities. despite industry alienation, not everyone turned their backs on dance music, and disco continued in clubs, often as more of an underground movement. it was foundational for new genres that would be popular in the 1980s, such as house, techno and euro disco (lawrence 2003: 430). disco was also an important part of the history of minority groups in the us, particularly for members of the lgbtq+ community, for many of whom discotheques were emancipatory spaces for self-expression and meeting with other members of the community (echols 2010: 56-57). themes of tolerance, unity and liberation were featured, often implicitly, in disco music – a set of utopian ideas that had been passed to it through 1960s psychedelic culture (lawrence 2003: 10). these influences would arguably become even more pronounced in disco’s offshoots towards the end of the century, such as in house tracks like joe smooth’s “promised land” (1988), and chuck roberts’ sermon proclaiming the emancipatory power of house music, “my house” (1987). rees | future nostalgia? 21st century disco 47 after the 1970s, disco was often seen as commercialised, low-quality music by mainstream culture. genres from the same decade, punk and hip-hop, seemed more directly tied to underground movements and radical politics, and were treated by researchers as such. histories of disco, however, were largely neglected. it was only by the 1990s that this began to change, and many factors may have influenced this. not only had dance genre offshoots of disco continued to be popular, but many of them, such as trance, clearly had diverse audiences and grassroots support. they appeared more radical and authentic than disco had seemed to the general public in the late 1970s. furthermore, it is possible that cultural attitudes had shifted by the 1990s, a shift perhaps influenced by the implicit messages of tolerance from 1970s disco culture. perhaps america was more ready to celebrate a genre that, in its original form, was culturally diverse and embracing of different sexual identities. it may have also been that just the right amount of time had passed between the 1970s and the 1990s for people to feel nostalgic about disco. non-academic books were followed by in-depth histories in the 1990s and 2000s that revised scholarly perceptions of disco, finding that while it was commercialised, there was a radical core to disco that brought people together (see thornton 1995; rietveld 1998; jones and kantonen 1999; lawrence 2003; shapiro 2005 and echols 2010). popular culture in the 2000s was also embracing disco to some extent, with successful singles in the charts such as spiller’s “groovejet (if this ain’t love)” (2000), sophie ellis-bextor’s “murder on the dancefloor” (2001), kylie minogue’s “can’t get you out of my head” (2001), and justin timberlake’s “rock your body” (2003). it would also be influential in the sounds of upcoming bands, such as lcd soundsystem. disco would become even more commercially and culturally popular in the 2010s, and this trend has continued, so far, into the 2020s. it had year-dominating hits such as daft punk’s “get lucky” (2013) and mark ronson and bruno mars’ “uptown funk” (2014). besides being a naturally catchy and accessible genre, it is generally perceived as fun and inclusive, sharing affinities with the identity politics of many millennials and zoomers (generation z), for whom minority rights and gender equality have gained a new political urgency (fisher 2017). as this article has examined, there is a utopian element to disco music, and this links in with how people in the 21st century remember the utopian imaginings of the 1970s. the titles of commercially successful disco albums, daft punk’s random access memories (2013) and dua lipa’s future nostalgia (2020), seem to acknowledge this. disco’s optimistic sound gives hope to many listeners in the present, providing inspiration for their struggles to create a different future. conclusion as posed at the start of this article, what function does disco have now? this paper has reviewed three recent disco albums, finding that nostalgic influences have not necessarily stagnated disco culture. rather, they have been utilised alongside present day influences, and this article has explored how contemporary political attitudes and musical styles have been incorporated into disco. these give disco culture new meanings in the present, without divorcing it from its historic legacy. as the section contextualising disco’s journey from dancecult 13(1)48 the 1970s to the present elucidates, new meanings and interpretations of disco culture are affected by how we interpret its past. as with all history, it is used in ways that are meaningful to us in the present. for daft punk, that was a desire to return to a less mechanical recording process, with more live instrumentation. for nile rodgers, disco links present and past, offering hope in troubled times. for dua lipa, disco can legitimate feelings of happiness, as well as social activism, influencing the future for the better. disco may not seem as different as it did in the 1970s. as with rock or hip-hop, it cannot be born again, but it is still able to make us feel something. it is joy for times of elation, and consolation for when it seems the world, or we as individuals, fall. in line with the ethos of disco: if it feels good, we should use it. disco is said to have had many “revivals” since the 1970s, but this assumes it ever died. rather than being a retro fad, disco has proven an endurable sound that over half a century after its inception is dominating the charts 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features/article/2010s-rise-of-conceptronica-electronic-music/>, (accessed 21 march 2021). rietveld, hillegonda c. 1998. house music, cultural spaces and technologies. farnham: ashgate publishing. rodgers, nile. 2011. le freak: an upside down story of family, disco and destiny. london: sphere. roy, elodie. 2014. “displacing the past. mediated nostalgia and recorded sound”. volume!: la revue des musiques populaires (11)1: 145-158. <https://doi.org/10.4000/volume.4238>. savage, mark. 2020. “dua lipa interview: how i released an album from lockdown”. bbc news, 2 april. <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-52117012>, (accessed 1 september 2021). sedikides, constantine, tim wildschut, jamie arndt and clay routledge. 2008. “nostalgia: past, present, and future”. current directions in psychological science (17)5: 304-307. <https://doi.org/10.1111%2fj.1467-8721.2008.00595.x>. shapiro, peter. 2005. turn the beat around: the secret history of disco. london: faber and faber limited. sprengler, christine. 2009. screening nostalgia: populuxe props and technicolor aesthetics in contemporary america film. new york: berghahn books. thornton, sarah. 1995. club cultures: music, media and subcultural capital. oxford: blackwell. van der hoeven, a. 2018. “songs that resonate: the uses of popular music nostalgia”. in the routledge companion to popular music history and heritage, ed. sarah baker, catherine strong, lauren istvandity and zelmarie cantillon, 238-246. abingdon: routledge. weinberg, lindsay. 2021. “dua lipa explains why she isn’t “jaded” anymore after her 2021 grammys win”. yahoo! entertainment, 15 march. <https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/ dua-lipa-explains-why-she-030347482.html>, (accessed 29 august 2021). wilson, janelle lynn. 2015. “here and now, there and then: nostalgia as a time and space phenomenon”. symbolic interaction (38)4: 478-492. <https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.184>. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsv073 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dance music culture (11)1: 30-52. <https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.03>. zhou, xinyue, tim wildschut, constantine sedikides, kan shi, and cong feng. 2012. “nostalgia: the gift that keeps on giving”. journal of consumer research (39)1: 39-50. <https://doi.org/10.1086/662199>. discography arctic monkeys. 2018. tranquility base hotel + casino. domino (lp): wiglp339. <https://www.discogs.com/arctic-monkeys-tranquility-base-hotel-casino/master/1360573>. beyoncé. 2016. lemonade. parkwood entertainment and columbia (cd): 88985 33682 2. <https://www.discogs.com/beyonc%c3%a9-lemonade/master/992029>. bowie, david. 1983. let’s dance. emi america (lp): aml 3029, oc 062-400 165. <https://www.discogs.com/david-bowie-lets-dance/master/48753>. chic. 1979. “good times”. atlantic (7-inch): 3584. <https://www.discogs.com/chic-good-times/master/126219>. ———. 1992. chic-ism. warner bros. records (cd): 9 26394-2. <https://www.discogs.com/chic-chic-ism/master/53106>. childish gambino. 2016. “redbone”. track 6 on awaken, my love! glassnote (cd): gls-0209-02. <https://www.discogs.com/childish-gambino-awaken-my-love/master/1112335>. the clash. 1981. “the magnificent seven”. epic (7-inch): es 650. <https://www.discogs.com/the-clash-the-magnificent-seven/release/4425162>. daft punk. 2013. “get lucky”. columbia (12-inch): 88883746911, 88883 74691 1. <https://www.discogs.com/daft-punk-get-lucky/master/546596>. ———. 2013. “giorgio by moroder”. track 3 on random access memories. columbia and sony music (lp): 88883716861, 88883 71686 1. <https://www.discogs.com/daft-punk-random-access-memories/master/556257>. ———. 2013. “give life back to music”. track 1 on random access memories. columbia and sony music (lp): 88883716861, 88883 71686 1. <https://www.discogs.com/daft-punk-random-access-memories/master/556257>. ———. 2013. “instant crush”. track 5 on random access memories. columbia and sony music (lp): 88883716861, 88883 71686 1. <https://www.discogs.com/daft-punk-random-access-memories/master/556257>. ———. 2013. random access memories. columbia and sony music (lp): 88883716861, 88883 71686 1. <https://www.discogs.com/daft-punk-random-access-memories/master/556257>. duran duran. 1986. notorious. emi (lp): ddn 331. <https://www.discogs.com/duran-duran-notorious/master/87611>. ellis-bextor, sophie. 2001. “murder on the dancefloor. polydor (12-inch): 570 494-1. <https://www.discogs.com/sophie-ellis-bextor-murder-on-the-dancefloor/master/41890>. haim. 2017. something to tell you. columbia and sony dadc (cd): 88985 45022 2, didx1086158. <https://www.discogs.com/haim-something-to-tell-you/release/10713924>. https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.03 https://doi.org/10.1086/662199 https://www.discogs.com/arctic-monkeys-tranquility-base-hotel-casino/master/1360573 https://www.discogs.com/beyonc�-lemonade/master/992029 https://www.discogs.com/david-bowie-lets-dance/master/48753 https://www.discogs.com/chic-good-times/master/126219 https://www.discogs.com/chic-chic-ism/master/53106 https://www.discogs.com/childish-gambino-awaken-my-love/master/1112335 https://www.discogs.com/the-clash-the-magnificent-seven/release/4425162 https://www.discogs.com/daft-punk-get-lucky/master/546596 https://www.discogs.com/daft-punk-random-access-memories/master/556257 https://www.discogs.com/daft-punk-random-access-memories/master/556257 https://www.discogs.com/daft-punk-random-access-memories/master/556257 https://www.discogs.com/daft-punk-random-access-memories/master/556257 https://www.discogs.com/duran-duran-notorious/master/87611 https://www.discogs.com/sophie-ellis-bextor-murder-on-the-dancefloor/master/41890 https://www.discogs.com/haim-something-to-tell-you/release/10713924 dancecult 13(1)52 kylie. 2001. “can’t get you out of my head”. parlophone (12-inch): 12rdz6562a. <https://www.discogs.com/kylie-cant-get-you-out-of-my-head/master/12136>. ———. 2020. disco. bmg (cd): 538633972, 4050538633979. <https://www.discogs.com/kylie-disco/master/1834392>. lipa, dua 2020. “boys will be boys”. track 11 on future nostalgia. warner brothers (cd): 0190295286101. <https://www.discogs.com/dua-lipa-future-nostalgia/master/1705638>. ———. 2020. “levitating”. warner records (12-inch): wsbx01 uk. <https://www.discogs.com/dua-lipa-feat-dababy-levitating/release/15997520>. ———. 2020. future nostalgia. warner brothers (cd): 0190295286101. <https://www.discogs.com/dua-lipa-future-nostalgia/master/1705638>. ———. 2020. “physical”. warner records (file). <https://www.discogs.com/dua-lipa-physical/release/14730528>. madonna. 1984. like a virgin. sire (lp): 9 25157-1, 1-25157. <https://www.discogs.com/madonna-like-a-virgin/master/18021>. murphy, róisín. 2020. róisín machine. skint (lp): brassic120lp. <https://www.discogs.com/r%c3%b3is%c3%adn-murphy-r%c3%b3is%c3%adnmachine/release/15995504>. reddy, helen. 1972. “i am woman”. capitol records (lp): st-511068. <https://www.discogs.com/helen-reddy-i-am-woman/release/500714>. rodgers, nile and chic. 2015. “i’ll be there”. land of the good groove records and warner bros. records (12-inch): pro-a-548794, 5439-19685-0. <https://www.discogs.com/chic-featuring-nile-rodgers-with-the-martinez-brothers-illbe-there/master/812489>. ———. 2018. “boogie all night”. track 2 on it’s about time. virgin emi records (cd): 00602567858171. <https://www.discogs.com/nile-rodgers-chic-its-about-time/release/12589316>. ———. 2018. it’s about time. virgin emi records (cd): 00602567858171. <https://www.discogs.com/nile-rodgers-chic-its-about-time/release/12589316>. ———. 2018. “till the world falls”. virgin emi records (cdr). | <https://www.discogs.com/nile-rodgers-chic-mura-masa-cosha-vic-mensa-till-theworld-falls/master/1549570>. rhythm controll. 1987. “my house”. catch a beat records (12-inch): 2160. <https://www.discogs.com/rhythm-controll-my-house/release/149626>. the rolling stones. 1978. “miss you”. rolling stones records (7-inch): emi 2802. <https://www.discogs.com/the-rolling-stones-miss-you/master/54065>. ronson, mark and bruno mars. 2015. “uptown funk!”. track 4 on uptown special. sony music and columbia (cdr): rca – 88875053102. <https://www.discogs.com/release/6524779-mark-ronson-uptown-special>. ross, diana. 1980. “i’m coming out”. motown (7-inch): tmg 1210. <https://www.discogs.com/diana-ross-im-coming-out-/release/520692>. sister sledge. 1979. we are family. cotillion (lp): sd 5209. <https://www.discogs.com/sister-sledge-we-are-family/master/108534>. https://www.discogs.com/kylie-cant-get-you-out-of-my-head/master/12136 https://www.discogs.com/kylie-disco/master/1834392 https://www.discogs.com/dua-lipa-future-nostalgia/master/1705638 https://www.discogs.com/dua-lipa-feat-dababy-levitating/release/15997520 https://www.discogs.com/dua-lipa-future-nostalgia/master/1705638 https://www.discogs.com/dua-lipa-physical/release/14730528 https://www.discogs.com/madonna-like-a-virgin/master/18021 https://www.discogs.com/r�is�n-murphy-r�is�n-machine/release/15995504 https://www.discogs.com/r�is�n-murphy-r�is�n-machine/release/15995504 https://www.discogs.com/helen-reddy-i-am-woman/release/500714 https://www.discogs.com/chic-featuring-nile-rodgers-with-the-martinez-brothers-ill-be-there/master/812489 https://www.discogs.com/chic-featuring-nile-rodgers-with-the-martinez-brothers-ill-be-there/master/812489 https://www.discogs.com/nile-rodgers-chic-its-about-time/release/12589316 https://www.discogs.com/nile-rodgers-chic-its-about-time/release/12589316 https://www.discogs.com/nile-rodgers-chic-mura-masa-cosha-vic-mensa-till-the-world-falls/master/1549570 https://www.discogs.com/nile-rodgers-chic-mura-masa-cosha-vic-mensa-till-the-world-falls/master/1549570 https://www.discogs.com/rhythm-controll-my-house/release/149626 https://www.discogs.com/the-rolling-stones-miss-you/master/54065 https://www.discogs.com/release/6524779-mark-ronson-uptown-special https://www.discogs.com/diana-ross-im-coming-out-/release/520692 https://www.discogs.com/sister-sledge-we-are-family/master/108534 rees | future nostalgia? 21st century disco 53 smooth, joe and anthony thomas. 1987. “the promised land”. d.j. international records (12-inch): d j -905. <https://www.discogs.com/joe-smooth-inc-featuring-anthony-thomas-the-promised-land/ master/5568>. spiller. 2000. “groovejet (if this ain’t love)”. positiva (12-inch): 12tiv-137, 7243 8 89119 6 2. <https://www.discogs.com/spiller-groovejet-if-this-aint-love/master/113932>. the strokes. 2020. the new abnormal. rca (lp): 19439-70588-1. <https://www.discogs.com/the-strokes-the-new-abnormal/release/15063478>. summer, donna. 1975. love to love you baby. oasis (lp): oclp 5003, oclp-5003. <https://www.discogs.com/donna-summer-love-to-love-you-baby/master/76255>. timberlake, justin. 2003. “rock your body”. jive (12-inch): 9254950. <https://www.discogs.com/justin-timberlake-rock-your-body/master/90837>. ware, jessie. 2020. what’s your pleasure? pmr records and virgin emi records (lp): v 3245, 0060250882827. <https://www.discogs.com/jessie-ware-whats-your-pleasure/master/1762210>. the weekend. 2020. after hours. xo and republic records (cd): b0031890-02. <https://www.discogs.com/the-weeknd-after-hours/master/1702022>. filmography bbc news. 2021. “why roller-skating is making a comeback”. uploaded on bbc news on 29 january 2021. <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-55819366>, (accessed 21 march 2021). the creators project. 2013a. “interview with todd edwards”. youtube. uploaded 8 april 2013. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf2bu0p_4vo>, (accessed 20 march 2021). ———. 2013b. “interview with giorgio moroder”. youtube. uploaded 3 april 2013. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eydvxo-m0oq>, (accessed 20 march 2021). ———. 2013c. “interview with pharrell williams”. youtube. uploaded 15 april 2013. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qvthogfri0>, (accessed 20 march 2021). ———. 2013d. “interview with nile rodgers”. youtube. uploaded 11 april 2021. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=da_yp9bocai>, (accessed 20 march 2021). lipa, dua. “dua lipa future nostalgia (official lyrics video)”. youtube. uploaded 16 december 2019. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ej-vzybzoq>, (accessed 17 march 2021). ———. “dua lipa let’s get physical work out (official video)”. youtube. uploaded 6 march 2020. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvvonq7luj0>, (accessed 17 march 2021). ———. “dua lipa levitating featuring dababy (official music video)”. youtube. uploaded 2 october 2020. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuvczfqe-kw>, (accessed 22 march 2021). https://www.discogs.com/joe-smooth-inc-featuring-anthony-thomas-the-promised-land/master/5568 https://www.discogs.com/joe-smooth-inc-featuring-anthony-thomas-the-promised-land/master/5568 https://www.discogs.com/spiller-groovejet-if-this-aint-love/master/113932 https://www.discogs.com/the-strokes-the-new-abnormal/release/15063478 https://www.discogs.com/donna-summer-love-to-love-you-baby/master/76255 https://www.discogs.com/justin-timberlake-rock-your-body/master/90837 https://www.discogs.com/jessie-ware-whats-your-pleasure/master/1762210 https://www.discogs.com/the-weeknd-after-hours/master/1702022 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-55819366 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf2bu0p_4vo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eydvxo-m0oq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qvthogfri0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=da_yp9bocai https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ej-vzybzoq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvvonq7luj0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuvczfqe-kw dancecult 11(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 11(1) 2019: 97–116 issn 1947-5403 ©2017 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net raving iran susanne regina meures (dir.) switzerland: christian frei filmproduktion gmbh/zürcher hochschule der künste zhdk, 2016 <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5945286/> <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.06> gay jennifer breyley monash university (australia) susanne regina meures’ multi-award-winning 2016 documentary raving iran shows a year in the lives of anoosh and arash, aka blade & beard. at the time of filming, from september 2013 to august 2014, blade & beard were tehran-based djs, producers and dance party organisers, specialising in “dark and melodic techno” (blade&beard), with fideles and mind against among their influences. raving iran follows anoosh and arash as they appear to navigate iran’s unique bureaucratic system, seeking to release and distribute their album, and as they organise the next dance party and consider their future. the film opens with anoosh and arash being pulled over by police as they drive through tehran at night. the camera focuses on the city’s old murals, showing portraits of iraniraq war heroes and iran’s revolutionary leaders—rather than the many, arguably equally interesting, artistic murals in tehran (see the guardian 2015), or the city’s broad range of street art—before briefly showing anoosh and arash djing at a private party. the first daytime scene features the sound of the call to prayer: a recurrent sound in the film. anoosh and arash make several phone calls to organise a dance party in the desert. as with many dance parties around the world, they face financial and legal challenges. while it is not illegal to travel and camp in the desert, there will be illegal activities at the party (again, like most dance parties), so anoosh and arash take precautions to avoid disturbing nearby rural residents and to be prepared for unexpected visits from the authorities. finally, with all preparations made, the djs and their friends set out on a party bus for the desert. until this point of the film, the soundtrack mainly features ghazal shakeri (her “nuinspired” remix of “man o to” (“me and you”), with lyrics adapted from rumi), but as the bus reaches the desert, it shifts to the more pensive “whisper”, by the neo-mystical californian fusion group axiom of choice, featuring singer mamak khadem. this choice of song—one with little connection to blade & beard’s techno world—suggests an atmospheric shift from what meures presents as a generally threatening governmental sphere to an implied reviews http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5945286/ http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.06 http://www.ravingiran.com/ http://www.facebook.com/pg/bladebeard/about http://www.mamak-khadem.com/music-1 dancecult 11(1)98 positive “spirituality” (a word often used in association with khadem’s work) at the desert party. like dance-party-goers around the world, anoosh and arash talk of the connections and sense of community felt by people at parties in iran, but the film gives little sense of this with its central focus of the government-created obstacles faced by musicians and djs. when anoosh and arash return to tehran after the desert party, they head to the ministry of culture and islamic guidance, which issues—or denies—permits for musicians to perform in official venues or record and release music within the official government system. this visit is presumably made solely for the purposes of the film, to show viewers what iran’s “islamic” regulations are, as it is clear that anoosh and arash know that their work does not meet the ministry’s requirements. since the advent of the internet, it has become customary for artists to release music outside iran, and to distribute it primarily in digital form. however, for the purposes of the film’s narrative, anoosh and arash ask ministry staff about permits for their album. unsurprisingly, they are told that their work is unlikely to be approved, so they proceed to look for someone willing to print their unauthorised cd covers. after several rejections, they eventually find a late-night printer willing to do the job. with the album completed and packed in its cover, the next step is to distribute it: again, anoosh and arash go to shops that they would know are unlikely to be interested, so that the film can continue its depiction of the extent of governmental restrictions on music and cultural life in iran. disheartened, anoosh and arash discuss emigration, acknowledging that it is not easy to make music outside iran either, but hoping they could at least “have a future” elsewhere. they consider the possibilities for iranian musicians to emigrate, one of the most effective being through the acquisition of visas for north america or europe, obtained by securing an invitation to a festival. while getting advice about seeking asylum, anoosh and arash maintain their hope for this festival option, looking at online images of zurich’s street parade as they agree that “this is where we belong”. at the next filmed dance party, police turn up and arrest anoosh, who spends a night in jail. things look up, though, when he receives a call from the rote fabrik cultural centre in switzerland with the news that blade & beard’s application to lethargy/street parade in zurich has been successful. finally things seem to be moving ahead fairly quickly. after one final call to prayer over tehran, anoosh and arash are at the airport. it is at this point in the film that viewers with their own experience of migration, from iran or other countries, have reported feeling particularly upset. in a film that is quite slowly paced, the scene at the airport—in which anoosh and arash farewell their family and friends, not knowing when or if they will see them again—is presented casually, and less than a minute in length. electronic musician rojin sharafi explains why this brevity is especially upsetting: “i cried, actually, at the scene when they say a very short goodbye to their friends and family, but it wasn’t actually that deep, the whole thing was [skimmed over]—because i know how it feels [that moment of farewell], it was very traumatic for me, but i think for someone who didn’t really experience that, it’s like a very normal scene—so goodbye, bye!”1 reviews 99 like many other viewers, sharafi is critical of the film’s unnuanced narrative of anoosh and arash’s supposed move from a state of constant restriction in iran to one of “freedom” in europe. “i had problems with the scenes in iran, but not that much,” she reflects. “my problem began when they get to europe . . . because i have this feeling it has two parts: one in iran, where they are very exhausted and everything, and the second part in europe and they’re living their dream . . . i have the feeling they have a lot of problems now. the film stops one or two weeks after they arrive in europe”. indeed, with its final scenes of a decision to “say yes” to switzerland, the film’s narrative structure is similar to that of a romance. a more balanced documentary might have followed anoosh and arash’s life for a year in switzerland, as they lived in shared housing for asylum seekers, hearing cowbells at night, and faced different forms of restriction on their music and other aspects of their lives. “two djs negotiate their possibilities in complex and unfair bureaucratic and capitalist systems” is not as catchy as “two djs defy the islamic regime” (raving iran). meures has defended the approach taken in raving iran, in part justifying it with the film’s commercial success. however, some see that success as a symptom of a widespread problem in the ways iran and other “non-western” countries are portrayed in popular media around the world. as tehran-based siavash amini puts it: “right now people in this region are going through the roughest periods of their history and this is being exploited for journalistic and artistic exoticist quests. people trying to sell it as extra flavor to what they do disgusts me . . . the only reason we mentioned things like that . . . in the past was to raise awareness to how dangerous narrow and often conveniently concise media-friendly narratives or exotic flavors can be to people actually trying to do something they love while living here . . . both nationalistic pride and exoticism in any form are part of the same idiotic bipolar system” (in hignelltully 2019; see also breyley 2018). in europe and elsewhere, filmmakers, journalists and academics who have wanted to present more nuanced narratives that complicate notions of freedom and assumptions about where freedom exists have reported pressure from funding bodies, producers, editors and academic supervisors to simplify their work or fetishise their subjects, in some cases resulting in inaccuracies (nooshin 2017; javdani 2019). one musician who objected to the “clichéd” way a german radio station represented her as a female artist from iran was told it would “sell more tickets”.2 meanwhile, in iran, for musicians and djs who choose to live and work there (see haidari 2019; deep house tehran; set; idj’s iranian top 10), one of the greatest current obstacles is the economic sanctions imposed on the country by the united states (temp-illusion), along with misconceptions spread internationally by various media. unfortunately, raving iran contributes more to those misconceptions than it does to an understanding of edm in iran. notes 1 rojin sharafi, personal communication with the author (berlin), 20 september 2019. 2 personal communication with the author (berlin), 20 september 2019. http://www.ravingiran.com/ http://deephousetehran.net/about/ http://setfest.org/ http://www.internationaldjmag.com/the-iranian-connection.html http://modernismunbound.com/articles/interview-temp-illusion/ dancecult 11(1)100 references blade & beard. <http://www.facebook.com/pg/bladebeard/about> (accessed 25 september 2019). breyley, gay jennifer. 2018. “‘i hung around in your soundtrack’: affinities with joy division among contemporary iranian musicians”. in heart and soul: critical essays on joy division, ed. aileen dillane, martin j. power and eoin devereux, 209-28. london: rowman & littlefield. haidari, niloufar. 2019. ‘sounds of tehran: why should i sit here and pretend that we’re suffering?’ we present. <https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/story/sounds-of-tehran> (accessed 12 october 2019). hignell-tully, daniel alexander. 2019. “interview with siavash amini”. tone shift. 27 may. <http://toneshift.net/2019/05/27/interview-with-siavash-amini> (accessed 2 october 2019). javdani, sadaf. 2019. “as an iranian academic, i’m fed up of being asked to focus on poverty and oppression”. the guardian. 22 august. <http://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/ aug/22/as-an-iranian-academic-im-fed-up-of-being-asked-to-focus-on-poverty-andoppression> (accessed 25 september 2019). nooshin, laudan. 2017. “whose liberation? iranian popular music and the fetishization of resistance”. popular communication 15(3): 163-91. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2017.1328601> raving iran. <http://www.ravingiran.com> (accessed 25 september 2019). the guardian. 2015. “the toast of tehran: iran’s superstar street artist — in pictures”. 26 february. <http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/feb/26/the-toast-oftehran-irans-superstar-street-artist-in-pictures> (accessed 2 october 2019). http://www.facebook.com/pg/bladebeard/about https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/story/sounds-of-tehran http://toneshift.net/2019/05/27/interview-with-siavash-amini http://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/aug/22/as-an-iranian-academic-im-fed-up-of-being-asked-to-focus-on-poverty-and-oppression http://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/aug/22/as-an-iranian-academic-im-fed-up-of-being-asked-to-focus-on-poverty-and-oppression http://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/aug/22/as-an-iranian-academic-im-fed-up-of-being-asked-to-focus-on-poverty-and-oppression http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2017.1328601 http://www.ravingiran.com/ http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/feb/26/the-toast-of-tehran-irans-superstar-street-artist-in-pictures http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/feb/26/the-toast-of-tehran-irans-superstar-street-artist-in-pictures reviews 101 sweet harmony: rave|today philly adams and kobi prempeh (curs.) london, uk: saatchi gallery, 12 july – 14 september 2019. <https://www.saatchigallery.com/art/sweet_harmony.php> <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.07> chris christodoulou university of westminster (uk) described by the saatchi gallery as a “revolutionary survey of rave culture”,1 sweet harmony: rave|today appears at a bittersweet time for uk underground dance music. thirty years after the second summer of love, the conservative party is the best part of a decade in power, neoliberalism continues to dominate the political discourse and free parties emitting soundtracks characterised by “a succession of repetitive beats”—as described by section 63 of the 1994 criminal justice act—continue to be outlawed.2 an added layer of poignant incongruity comes with the staging of a show about a music-driven countercultural movement at an established cultural institution such as the saatchi gallery. the event may appear to celebrate the sounds, imagery and attendant lifestyles of rave culture, but the controlled gallery setting diminishes any sense of its “revolutionary” otherness. sweet harmony is a prime example of gallerification; the event marks the transition of rave culture from a resistant form of mass participation—arguably the last great youth movement to emerge from outside, or at least the margins of, mainstream culture—to an event whose value is shaped by its status as a curated artefact. nevertheless, the attempt of curators kobi prempeh and juan rincon (voltage and sci-arc) to capture an “authentic” visual commentary resonates in the exhibited work, mainly comprising multimedia room installations and large-scale photography. the images are a mixture of journalistic and personal approaches which articulate key aspects of rave’s diverse musical and social milieu: photographers derek ridgers and matthew smith’s images of enraptured figures and crowds at key parties like spiral tribe and protest marches capture the political spirit of rave culture’s impulse for social resistance; former time out nightlife editor dave swindells and filmmaker-photographer ewan spencer illuminate the weekender hedonism of inner city clubland with images of brand-conscious metropolitan dancers in sweaty reverie, while artist-filmmaker vinca petersen and author molly macindoe’s depictions of transformed warehouses and rave-bound journeys point to the psychogeographic motivation underscoring long voyages to far-flung rural sound-systems, along with rave’s reterritorialisation of abandoned spaces in post-industrial towns and cities. anna-lena krause’s post-club portraits are the only images to feature posed subjects, but the figures’ individuated self-consciousnesses mark a revealing contrast to the carefree togetherness suggested by photographs that were mostly taken in the pre-internet age. the relatively limited sense of connectedness offered by online culture has arguably diverted https://www.saatchigallery.com/art/sweet_harmony.php http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.07 dancecult 11(1)102 much of rave’s radical communality, which, not so long ago, only seemed to accompany the liminal experience of mass, all-night dancing at a dance event or festival. in this sense, a feeling of melancholy pervades sweet harmony; whether you were there or not, it is hard to avoid feeling nostalgia for the anarchy and anonymity exemplified by rave culture’s pre-criminal justice act era. it is an illuminating irony then, that the act itself is barely mentioned; unsurprising perhaps, given the saatchi brothers’ involvement in multiple election campaigns for the tories who introduced the bill that preceded it. the immersive experience promised by sweet harmony’s organisers is somewhat reinforced by the vinyl hunter shop in the centre of the gallery, where a dj mixes dance music classics live alongside the opportunity to actually buy vinyl. another impressive feature of this space is the large wall of flyers, where the iconography of posters featuring dj line-ups and contemporaneous graphic styles evoke a sense of scale and period as much as any of the more artistically elaborate exhibits. however, the sense of dance culture’s mainstream co-option is jarringly illustrated by the spotify-branded listening stations in the “play room”, featuring contemporary edm rather than music from the acid house and rave eras. corporate sponsorship and underground dance music make uneasy bedfellows and the presence of a music-streaming giant like spotify feels antithetical to the rave ethos that the exhibition purports to commemorate. there is much for ravers to revel in at sweet harmony. at specific moments, the event captures the radical alterity and transformative bliss of what was an extraordinary period of british youth culture. curatorially, its content and spatial organisation articulates a subjective and temporal disorientation that seemed so dangerous to the political and cultural establishment in the late-1980s and early-1990s. unfortunately though, the event carries the diversionary air of a historical sideshow. these are experiences of ecstatic timelessness that are presented as belonging to the past, despite assertions within the show itself of their enduring legacy (e.g. the subtitle, “rave|today”). arguably, it would have been dishonest for the saatchi gallery to recount in a more complete way the political atmosphere of the period, given its owner’s role in helping to elect the political party who brought the criminal justice bill into being. but, for all its reverence of the second summer of love, the material presented in sweet harmony feels inconsistent with the idea of raving as a revolutionary experience, both in practice and in spirit. notes 1 saatchi gallery. sweet harmony: rave | today [press release]. available at: <https://www.saatchigallery.com/art/sweet_harmony.php> (accessed 30 july 2019). 2 criminal justice and public order act 1994 c.33 part v section 63: powers to remove persons attending or preparing for a rave. available at: <https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ ukpga/1994/33/part/v/crossheading/powers-in-relation-to-raves> (accessed 30 september 2019). https://www.saatchigallery.com/art/sweet_harmony.php https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/33/part/v/crossheading/powers-in-relation-to-raves https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/33/part/v/crossheading/powers-in-relation-to-raves reviews 103 popular viennese electronic music, 1990–2015: a cultural history ewa mazierska london and new york: routledge, 2019. isbn: 978-1-138-71391-8 (hardcover) rrp: £95 (hardcover) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.08> anita jóri berlin university of the arts (germany) ewa mazierska’s book is definitely a niche work, covering a largely unexplored territory of research, both in terms of subject and methodology. when it comes to the extant literature on vienna as a music city, one can find a broad variety of studies on classical music (particularly the first wave classicism of beethoven, haydn, mozart, et al.; and the second wave modernism of schoenberg, berg and webern), with only a few texts (e.g. reitsamer 2011) that report on the city as a contemporary centre of electronic (dance) music. these few articles were, of course, milestone sources for mazierska’s book. however, as mazierska notes, austrian popular music deserves more scholarly attention in general, and the special characteristics of the viennese electronic music scene in particular have not been discussed as a whole, less still the relationship between the music, place and culture (1); although, as she notes, doing research on the correlations between music and place/city generates many methodological problems (17–19). throughout the book, mazierska is sophisticated and prudent about the terminology she uses. one can, for example, find a particularly interesting discussion about the problems surrounding the genre name “electronica” as popularised by the us music industry. this is the reason why the author chose the wording of “popular electronic music” in the title of the book, instead of electronica. however, mazierska suggests that the two terms mean the same in her work. in this sense, viennese popular electronic music refers to “music produced by viennese artists . . . or also includes record companies which released these records . . . places where this music was presented and appreciated . . . and a web of relations connecting musicians, institutions and individuals working for their success . . . as well as their fans. it can encompass art and artists, as well as scenes” (9). so the scope of the research is broad and also includes themes of music business research, such as the local record industry and the effects of digitisation. the described period is from 1990–2015; the 1990s were the heydays of viennese popular electronic music, and the study pays extra attention to this decade. the book is based on several methodological and theoretical strands—which are interweaved and combined throughout the whole work: the history and theory of electronic music and its subgenres with a special focus on dub, ambient, techno and noise; research on the relationship between http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.08 dancecult 11(1)104 music and place, positioning electronic music within the longer history of music in vienna; research about the “future of music” that considers the digital shift and the transformation of the music industry; and finally the interface between music and gender (summarised 9–10). in addition to these theoretical frameworks, the book is based on more than fifty interviews with people active in the scene, such as musicians, heads of record labels, music promoters, managers of record shops, employees of institutions promoting austrian music, academics and music fans. the first chapter positions vienna on a historical and cultural map where it is celebrated as the world capital of music. the subtitle of the chapter, “from mozart to conchita wurst”, suggests a long cultural history: from viennese classicism, through romanticism, to early modern music and music between the world wars, the author finally gets to the viennese contemporary popular music (17–45). the chapter also gives an informative insight about the connections between urbanisation, social life and music during these phases. therefore, mazierska always reflects on the actual political situation and its effects on the local music scene. for example, readers are informed about the us american (“coloniser”) influences on austrian popular music in the 1950s which completely changed from ’60s, when the local musicians found their own style of music, “austropop”. following this linear history, the second chapter discusses the vienna electronica as scene and industry. the author looks into it from a bird’s-eye perspective to describe vienna’s musical history and its individual characteristics. to do so, this section begins with a clarification of the concept of “scene” with the help of classic theories and models by cohen (1999), kruse (2010), peterson and bennett (2004), etc. this is followed by a detailed chronology where readers are informed about the developments of clubs, events, fanzines and the local industry, including labels and record stores. according to mazierska, “[t]he peak of the scene was between 1995 and 1999” (62), which were—probably not coincidentally—also the golden years of the record industry in general. as mentioned, the most striking findings about the local scene characteristics can be read in this chapter. for example, based on the conducted interviews, the author writes about the scene members’ social background (mostly middle class youngsters), the importance of record stores as centres of knowledge-transfer, and few venues and their strict operating rules which led the viennese electronic music to a “bourgeoise and displaced phenomenon” (58) rather than a rebellious one. after describing the above—and other—characteristics, the third chapter looks into specific case studies of the most well-known and popular musicians whose careers were (and some of them are still) active during almost the entire discussed period. these include, following the chronological order of the subchapters, sin, kruder and dorfmeister, tosca, sofa surfers, patrick pulsinger, peter rehberg, christian fennesz and the label mego, electric indigo and sweet susie. every subchapter (and case study) starts out with a chronological career description of the musician(s) and follows up with their discography and style of music. these analyses reviews 105 are mainly based on mazierska’s own impressions and the interviewees’ answers, and the descriptions do not follow any specific analytical methodology. therefore, it excludes paratextual journalistic material and reception, which might have been fruitful as reflection tools. however, the author tried to focus on the connections between the city of vienna as a place and the music produced by these artists. this can be seen the most in the subchapters about the style of the musicians: mazierska was interested in the specialty of the so-called “vienna sound”. these different artists also demonstrate the wealth of styles and genres of viennese electronic musicians: they all work with different subgenres. such detailed historical and socio-cultural analysis of the careers of these different musicians did not exist before, so, also in this sense, the study fills a research gap. furthermore, the author considers most of these artists’ work as a manifestation of postmodern art and also sees them as trendsetters with their local characteristics, and not as “imitators” of anglo-american artists. this is the other reason why she chose them to be analysed in the book. although all of these subchapters and musicians are important in different ways, i would like to highlight only two of them because they differ from the others in terms of their subjects: “peter rehberg, christian fennesz and the label mego: between glitch and bécs” (chapter 8) and “women in a mixed world: electric indigo and sweet susie” (chapter 9). i found it interesting that in the former the author dedicated a whole case study to noise or experimental electronic music. this section might feel a little alien to the others, but mazierska’s main argument was to include as many different genres as possible. in this sense, the subchapter on electric indigo and sweet susie is also different from the others in terms of its categorisation of music by the musicians’ gender. here the author also gives a longer introduction to the problems of male-dominated edmc and the research of that phenomenon—see also dancecult’s special issue in 2017. in this regard, the subchapter about electric indigo and sweet susie also creates awareness of female artists who are often neglected in the histories of electronic (dance) music. finally, in the conclusions, the author highlights again her main arguments: 1) austrian electronic (dance) music deserves more scholarly attention that focuses on the “stories” of artists and protagonists rather than their technical properties and 2) viennese popular electronic musicians have created their own style/sound of music, instead of copying the anglo-american market. furthermore, by looking at the careers of the abovementioned musicians, the author found out that vienna as a city offers “comfortable” life to them, for example, with its affordable housing and proper studios. mazierska finishes her work with several open questions for future investigations on other examples: “were electronic musicians in countries such as belgium, poland or hungary as lucky in this period as their austrian counterparts? did they show the same interest in similar genres and develop similar ideas?” (218). with these questions, she also suggests for others to conduct comprehensive research on other european cities, in order that we would have a better picture about the differences between these places. in addition, in my opinion, dancecult 11(1)106 with the help of these suggested studies, one could also better describe the different “sounds” of these cities because one would have comparative cases at hand. in this sense, one could also talk about the specific “viennese sound” with stronger counterexamples at hand. mazierska’s self-reflection is appreciable: “no doubt that some readers familiar with the phenomenon described here will be surprised and unhappy with omissions, simplifications and mistakes made in this book. my defence is that no study is ever comprehensive and flawless, and this is particularly the case of works which cover a largely unexplored territory” (12–13). she also encourages others to correct these mistakes and fills these gaps, in their own future work. i think the book is definitely a great beginning for a new comprehensive research body on european cities and their electronic (dance) music scenes. additionally, this book will be a great basis for further research on the viennese electronic music scene. references cohen, sara. 1999. “scenes.” in key terms in popular music and culture. ed. bruce horner and thomas swiss, 239–50. oxford: blackwell. kruse, holly. 2010. “local identity and independent music scenes, online and off ”. popular music and society, 5: 12–15. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007760903302145>. peterson, richard and andy bennett. 2004. “introducing music scenes”. in music scenes: local, translocal and virtual, ed. andy bennett and richard a. peterson, 1–15. nashville: vanderbilt university press. reitsamer, rosa. 2011. “the diy careers of techno and drum ‘n’ bass djs in vienna”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 3(1): 28–43. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.02>. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007760903302145 http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.02 reviews 107 the relentless pursuit of tone: timbre in popular music. robert fink, melinda latour and zachary wallmark (eds.) new york: oxford university press, 2018. isbn: 9780199985227 (hardcover), 9780199985234 (paperback) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.09> maria perevedentseva goldsmiths, university of london (uk) as i write, anniversary celebrations of the apollo 11 lunar mission are in full swing, brian eno reissues are flying off the shelves, and it seems that musicology may at long last be experiencing a similar breakthrough with timbre: an object with a comparable pull on the imagination and one which, like the moon, is simultaneously an unavoidable physical reality and a void for the projection of our earthly desires. the last few years have seen a dramatic increase in academic engagement with timbre, with problems of ontology, function, representation, and affective and conceptual signification receiving an airing (e.g. van elferen 2017; wallmark et al. 2018; lavengood 2019; dolan and rehding forthcoming). the publication of the relentless pursuit of tone marks a pivotal point by turning our attention to timbre in popular music, in whose aesthetics it plays a decisive, but until now, under-theorised role. the book’s fifteen chapters put to rest any notion of timbre’s ineffability, showcasing— through sections on genre, voice, instrument and production—a glorious variety of analytical and representational techniques with which to capture its slippery essence. the usual spectrograms are joined by jocelyn neal’s phonetic descriptions of country guitar “twang” and griffin woodworth’s echomimetic representation of filter envelopes in funk. nina sun eidscheim’s deconstructionist reading of the persistent “disidentification” (153) of jimmy scott’s voice and jonathan howland’s topical archaeology of “luxe pop” are joined by material histories of studio technologies from jan butler, and embodied ecological theories of timbre cognition by simon zagorski-thomas. it is clear that a dominant methodology has not yet been established, and this emerging field is all the better for it. it is fitting that the first chapter is given to cornelia fales, whose identification of the paradox of timbre in a landmark article (2002) continues to animate both her contribution and the collection as a whole. the paradox is multifaceted, stemming from the incommensurability of the acoustic world, where sound is produced according to rational and quantifiable laws, and the phenomenal world, where timbre is (not as rationally or measurably) “perceptualized”, a perception which “differs most radically” from the acoustic features that provoke it (24). this same tension—between material reality and its mental representation—is at the heart of the timbre versus tone debate outlined in the editors’ http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.09 dancecult 11(1)108 introduction, where tone is defined as a “complex quasi-object shaped by cultural networks” and timbre as the “dispassionate” scientific object providing the real “physical and perceptual correlates” to tone (9-10). the book’s explicit aim is to bridge this gap by “illuminating how the materiality of sound can structure cultural practice” (12), but a latent distrust of the cultural pole is evident throughout, compensated for by detailed descriptions of sound production and psychoacoustic processes, coupled with genuine surprise and delight when a homology between acoustic and phenomenal worlds is identified. these descriptions—ranging from melinda latour’s dissection of carlos santana’s transcendental sustain to woodworth’s unpacking of the transistorised oscillators that powered funk musicians’ subversive use of synthesisers—are hugely valuable, and it is heartening to see such thorough engagement with the technicalities of popular music’s sonic construction. however, as jonathan sterne has observed, “technologies of listening . . . emerge out of techniques of listening” (2003, 92; original emphases), suggesting that we should not abandon trust in our ears and minds entirely, but instead use them to probe how cultural practices in turn structure the materiality of sound. simon frith makes a similar point in his afterword (368), and in the end, the timbre/tone (and its attendant real/cultural) dualism boils down to the ultimate philosophical chicken-and-egg of where “reality” really resides—a debate too expansive both for this review and the text it is reviewing. whilst every chapter in this rich volume warrants detailed discussion, two essays from fales and robert fink, which deal with timbre in electronic dance music and bass cultures respectively, are of particular interest to dancecult’s readership. in “hearing timbre: perceptual learning among early bay area ravers”, fales analyses the scene-specific discursive attempts by users of the sfraves listserv to understand timbre, citing edm’s timbral “nonspecificity” or sourcelessness as enabling rare feats of “perceptual learning” (25, 24). she argues that it is edm’s disconnect from the acoustic sources of the natural world, coupled with the dissociative effects of mdma (a frequent topic of conversation on sfraves), which allows listeners to learn to hear timbre not implicitly, as a monitor and proxy for the sound source, but explicitly and in itself, attending only to its immanent qualities. furthermore, fales suggests that this nonspecificity also operates at the conceptual level, because whilst many of the posts she analyses share a narrative arc of “before . . . perceptual inadequacy and . . . after” (35), the affordances of timbre, even when tacitly grasped by listeners, remain largely affective and sub-linguistic. in “below 100hz. toward a musicology of bass culture”, fink critiques the acoustically “unsound” (112) theorisations of the affective power of sub-bass and bass culture, as formulated by steve goodman (2010) and julian henriques (2011), which he argues have idealised bass sounds into occupying “fetish object” status (89). in order to put bass in its place, fink details subwoofer design, the transduction of low frequency waves through space, and the aural and haptic sensation of those waves by human perceivers, systematically debunking any notion of the exceptional power, force and physicality of bass. he concludes reviews 109 that the “power” of deep bass is “our intuitive perception of how difficult it is to hear these frequencies at all”, and so bass culture can only be understood “as culture” because the “sound” around which it is centred “is a timbre of no timbre” (112). i fundamentally agree with fink that it is the liminality of bass that gives it its symbolic power, but, as an avid bass-head myself, i have spent enough nights having my bones rattled by sound systems ranging from aba shanti-i to digital mystikz to know that there is a matereal basis to bass culture beyond subwoofers, and beyond the idealising projections of listeners. as fales observes in her conclusion, despite the difficulties of hearing timbre at all, human propensity for perceptual learning, and the “astronomical decibel levels” of a rave context “where the parameters of timbre and rhythm predominate” mean that there is “very little that is truly cognitively impenetrable” (39). producers and djs help us along in that respect, by isolating and eqing bass solos and drops so that our attention is turned more fully to the bass, making the almost-inaudible engulf the sensorium.1 fink’s main gripe appears to be with goodman’s florid, ccru-inspired discursive formulation of bass as malevolent weapon or force, and this chapter is a useful antidote to that narrative. at times, however, in his dismissal of the audible and sensible reality of bass, it seems fink falls prey to the inverse of the same “acoustic fundamentalism” (112) of which he accuses his adversaries. nevertheless, “below 100hz” is exemplary in its attention to the material conditions and technical specificities of tone production, and this represents one of the great strengths of the relentless pursuit as a whole: in addition to its thorough explorations of the cultural and perceptual dimensions of timbre, the book contains a treasure trove of sophisticated discussions of sound technology whilst managing to avoid the lacklustre didacticism of much other gear literature. in “the sound of evil”, zachary wallmark considers in finegrained detail the detuning, overdriving and distortion of guitar and vocal timbres in death metal, whose noisiness and difficulty he links to sacrificial violence and its overcoming by fans and producers. steve waksman looks at the ill-fated guitar synthesiser, which resolved initial stumbling blocks of translating guitarists’ idiosyncratic pitch control and attack types into information analogue circuitry and, later, midi could process. its failure, he argues, resulted from the “faustian bargain” (271) struck by its adopters, who traded the kudos of virtuosic guitar rock and jazz for an enhanced but for all purposes “sourceless” sonic palette. jan butler and paul théberge consider studio technologies aside from specific instruments, the former looking at the changing status of liveness as a site of rock authenticity in the age of the studio album, and the latter at reverb’s trajectory from a consolidator of space to special effect, where the once-stable relationship between acoustic, musical and listening spaces has become contingent and separable. touching on similar themes, albin zak sketches a cultural history of the recording industry in mid-century america, then undergoing waves of democratisation as emerging youth markets overtook djs and studio professionals as arbiters of musical value. zak’s chapter also highlights another thread running through the relentless pursuit; namely, popular music’s irrepressible zeal for turning one group’s dancecult 11(1)110 sonic off-cuts—in zak’s case lo-fi production values and untrained vocal and instrumental technique—into another group’s aesthetic ideal. this transformation undergirds catherine provenzano’s investigation into auto-tune’s redistribution of musical labour and its rationalisation along racial and class lines. it also serves as the backbone for mark samples’ chapter on the voice of tom waits, whose “damaged” and imperfect timbre cemented waits’ artistic authenticity, and was eventually granted a legally protected status of its own. zagorski-thomas’ “the spectromorphology of recorded music” serves as an appropriate closing chapter for this expertly curated collection, outlining a robust methodology that takes on both timbre and tone, and their interrelation. he borrows from james gibson’s ecological theory of perception, and neuroscientific theories of embodied cognition and cross-domain mapping, relating these to denis smalley’s work on gestural surrogacy to explore how ostensibly sourceless recorded sounds generate schematic “sonic cartoons” that suggest a sourced, embodied provenance. the sources these cartoons specify in the perceiving mind, however, are not concrete, real-world objects but instead take the form of “experiential affective structures” (348). zagorski-thomas applies these theories to analyse perceptions of fullness, fidelity and moving through space in “acoustic pop” and electronica, arguing that timbre perception is “based on our embodied experience and the metaphorical connections we can make between that primary ‘lived-in’ experience and our secondary experience of the world around us” (359). as such, while the distance between actual and perceived source can remain vast, they share a core structural affinity which gives perceptions a coherence and consistency with the external world which, in turn, enables listeners to act on, react to, and make sense of, their physical environment. this brings us back to—and perhaps offers a way out of—fales’ paradox and the dialectic between the real and the perceptual which drives the relentless pursuit. as the first of its kind, the book leaves plenty of openings for emerging timbre researchers to sink their teeth into and develop. for edm scholars, the ideas presented this book offer a potential way out of the music-analytical stalemate that has dogged our subfield since its inception, by showcasing approaches that enable us to engage more directly with the “matter” (i.e. the sounds and technologies) of electronic dance music. at the same time, each chapter is incredibly well structured and easy to navigate which, along with the book’s companion website and the sheer depth and diversity of the topics covered, makes it an indispensable pedagogical tool for advanced undergraduates and above. in short, the relentless pursuit it is a timely collection that deserves to be read widely, and in full, by popular music scholars and tone-chasers of all stripes alike. notes 1 clubs like london’s fabric, for example, have bespoke “bodysonic” wooden dancefloors with bass transducers placed underneath, so that clubbers “feel” the low-end frequencies through their feet. reviews 111 references dolan, emily, and alexander rehding, eds. forthcoming. the oxford handbook of timbre. new york: oxford university press. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190637224.001.0001>. fales, cornelia. 2002. “the paradox of timbre”. ethnomusicology 46 (1): 56–95. <http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/852808>. goodman, steve. 2010. sonic warfare: sound, affect, and the ecology of fear. cambridge, ma: mit press. henriques, julian. 2011. sonic bodies: reggae sound systems, performance techniques, and ways of knowing. new york: continuum. kane, brian. 2014. sound unseen: acousmatic sound in theory and practice. new york: oxford university press. lavengood, megan. 2019. “what makes it sound ’80s?: the yamaha dx7 electric piano sound”. journal of popular music studies 31 (3): 73–94. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2019.313009>. sterne, jonathan. 2003. the audible past: cultural origins of sound reproduction. durham: duke university press. van elferen, isabella. 2017. “agency, aporia, approaches: how does musicology solve a problem like timbre?”. contemporary music review 36 (6): 483–87. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2017.1452685>. wallmark, zachary, marco iacoboni, choi deblieck, and roger kendall. 2018.”embodied listening and timbre: perceptual, acoustical, and neural correlates”. music perception 35 (3): 332–63. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/mp.2018.35.3.332>. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190637224.001.0001 http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/852808 http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2019.313009 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2017.1452685 http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/mp.2018.35.3.332 dancecult 11(1)112 fyre fraud jenner furst and julia willoughby nason (dirs.) usa: hulu and the cinemart, 2019. <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7843600/> rrp: us$99 (hardcover), us$35 (paperback) fyre: the greatest party that never happened chris smith (dir.) usa: library films, vice studios and jerry media, 2019. <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9412098/> <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.10> tommy symmes rice university (us) the following is a review of two films: fyre fraud (hosted by hulu) and fyre: the greatest party that never happened (hosted by netflix). both films document fyre festival, a 2017 music festival that continues to be the focus of controversy, particularly with respect to its promotional methods. both films give accounts of the leadup, occurrence and fallout of the festival, were released within a week of each other and share some interlocutors. some of these individuals are named in million-dollar court cases, some were deceived and manipulated by people in positions of authority, and many have competing interests in the landscape of industrial taste-making. the films are already in deep conversation with each other. the narrative recounted in both films bears repeating: entrepreneur billy mcfarland and musician ja rule join forces to produce a luxury festival in the bahamas. they enlist a team of powerful media companies, raise millions from private investors, and promise extravagant experiences to a client base of instagram elites that they do not deliver. the media companies lose money and look dishonest, investors lose money and look disconnected from reality, and popular lifestyle influencers lose money and look naïve. hundreds of bahamians work hundreds of unpaid hours, but this remains in the background of the public shaming of so many venerable contemporary american institutions. the documentaries are in general agreement about who the villain is here: billy mcfarland is accused of being a “compulsive liar”, “scammer”, “hustler” and “dr. evil”. in fraud, mcfarland appears as an interviewee of the filmmakers. fyre, on the other hand, uses footage of mcfarland that was originally collected by the teams hired to promote the festival during the leadup to the festival. both films are ruthless in their condemnation of his character. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7843600/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9412098/ http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2019.11.01.10 reviews 113 fyre fraud released on 14 january 2019 and directed by the team of jenner furst and julia willoughby nason, fyre fraud hit streaming platform hulu four days before the release of netflix’s counterpart. an array of interviewees—lawyers, journalists, cultural critics and culture industry bureaucrats—contemplate topics including fomo (fear of missing out), the distribution of culpability in networked authority structures, the vulnerable psychology of millennials, the ethos of tumult that is wall street and the susceptibility of developing regions to first-world frauds all in relation to the fyre festival. fraud is strong in its detailing of mcfarland’s earlier business ventures—for example a credit card or an app for booking celebrities—setting the stage for his more ambitious project. it does so with the assistance of some of his former employees and mcfarland himself, who narrates his lifelong entrepreneurial development. mcfarland is adamant that he had the best intentions to put on an event that was “going to change the landscape [of the festival industry], and deliver an experience that people would talk about for years” (fraud 9:00). other key individuals are featured. the brightly lit, smiley calvin wells, a principal investor for a new york city firm, appears prominently in fraud. concerned by the amount of money people in his networks were investing in fyre festival and distrustful of mcfarland, wells attempted, unsuccessfully, to delegitimize the festival by critiquing its questionable promotions. he blames this failure on the impotence of the facts in this social-media dominated, “post-truth” world, but seems at times more impressed than incensed by the persuasive campaign assembled by the fyre festival team and the companies they contracted for media production and marketing. oren aks, the former jerry media employee assigned to their contract with fyre festival, is also interviewed. seated behind a laptop, as if reenacting the tricks and techniques he used to promote the festival, he shares his two cents regarding the manipulation of social media and the recipe for a viral trend and his dismay at realizing he had been deceived about the product he had advertised. bahamians in the film call out the unjust treatment they suffered at the hands of the fyre festival. delroy jackson recounts warning mcfarland and ja rule that organizational and construction resources were inadequate given the short timeline. ava turnquest, a reporter for local news outlet the tribune, accuses fyre festival of unoriginality in scamming the bahamas; a place “so ripe for fraud” (fraud 26:30). she portrays the festival as a predictable result of deplorable economic relations between the us and bahamas, as proof of the persistence of colonial attitudes so coherent with the conditions of contemporary pop culture. jia tolentino, a staff writer for the new yorker, joins turnquest in her diagnosis. interviewed in front of floor-to-ceiling high-rise windows, tolentino discusses fyre festival in relation to its conditions of possibility, in relation to the forces which dominate contemporary culture. tolentino illustrates the intricate and fragile relation between subject and society, suggesting: “billy [mcfarland] is baked in the oven of millennial reality construction that asserts itself in response to the precarity of the times” (fraud 10:10). dancecult 11(1)114 these analyses, albeit blithe in tone, contribute nuance to questions of legal and ethical responsibility central to the film. in addition, fraud introduces three instagram influencers, the festival’s target clientele, who recount arriving at the festival, struggling for orientation, and departing. tolentino provides us with a succinct definition of an influencer. “an influencer is someone who has effectively monetized their identity. that is their work: the performance of an attractive life” (fraud 32:05). they also contribute personal action-style footage of the crisis (empty stages, beach drinking, wandering in the dark, hoarding toilet paper). but fraud does not introduce any attendees who suffered more severe physical injury than surprise, boredom or dehydration. fraud finally interviews anastasia eremenko, mcfarland’s girlfriend. she reads aloud letters he sends her from prison and is shown after one of his court dates weeping alone in the street. eremenko is adamant about the swirling misrepresentations of mcfarland’s character, steadfast in her support of him. and mixed into shots that suggest her continued backing of this irredeemable villain, the film concludes that “it’s a great time to be a conman in america” (fraud 1:33:45). building from conversations with the above and other interlocutors, fyre fraud uses fyre festival to frame “the nexus of social media influence, late-stage capitalism, and morality in the post-truth era” (publicity material; see “fyre fraud: details”). the festival serves as a ready-made material specificity through which the film’s experts weave abstract threads of contemporary popular culture. but despite these strengths, the production feels heavyhanded; the film relies on bland-yet-antsy collages of stock visuals and cheap-looking b-roll from generic festival scenes of attractive women dancing or crowds walking. long awkward pauses after mcfarland speaks in interviews imply volumes about his trustworthiness, but do so pedantically. viewers might therefore understand the film to enact some of the very culture it critiques, namely one that values the speed and spectacular quality of visual electronic media over the story or material reality it represents. fyre: the greatest party that never happened hot on the heels of fraud came fyre: the greatest party that never happened, released by netflix on january 18th, 2019 and directed by chris smith (also american movie, the pool). the production is sleek, the pacing confident, and in contrast to fraud’s stock visuals much of the footage is original. fyre attends to moments leading up to the festival to offer viewers a prime view of the planning process and blooming drama. fyre includes abundant footage of mcfarland and ja rule leading organizational efforts, making definitive and questionable decisions in meetings, talking social media strategy and selling their brand. multiple times we hear them reiterate their pitch: “we’re selling a pipe dream to your average american loser!” (fyre 12:05). the film’s interlocutors affirm that mcfarland once fell asleep with a beer in his hand on the beach, that he would ride a jetski in time-sensitive moments, even that he resembled dr. evil (fyre 1:09:40). but most of this individual critique is reserved specifically for mcfarland; despite the damning documentation that fyre publishes, ja rule sustains little direct individual critique. reviews 115 much of the juicy visual content was collected on site in the bahamas by matte projects, a video production company contracted by fyre festival. brett kincaid, director of matte, testifies unapologetically to the quality of the work. he says of fyre, “they were hiring the best of the best in each category: best talent, best distribution, best social media company” (fyre 6:45). he makes sure viewers appreciate how his team produced and launched a video that trended globally from an island without internet, offering an interesting take on the accusations of false advertising and fraudulent promotion levelled against fyre festival and its teams. according to kincaid, the real fyre festival was the smaller-scale event that occurred during “the shoot [for the viral video]. the shoots were parties . . . the commercial was what everybody wanted” (fyre 1:30:12). jerry media is a company that generates online attention and social influence for clients; it is that “best social media company” named by kincaid and hired by fyre, and also the executive producer who partnered with vice in the creation of this documentary. ceo mick purzycki represents jerry media for the film. his script—just like the film—is sleek, persistent, and confident in explaining to the viewer the victimization his company suffered at the hands of fyre festival. but he too claims that there was substance and value in the work they did, asserting that his employers were “trying to tap into a culture and a zeitgeist that they believed in” (fyre 14:00). for purzycki as for kincaid, the inspiration was far from bunk, and if there was never a problem with the original inspiration, how can anyone fault those who had a contract to promote that inspiration using social media? purzycki does admit, however, that in the days prior to the festival jerry media deleted “the negative comments that were degrading the brand” from fyre festival’s social media presence (fyre 44:45). in other words, jerry media hid complaints and questions about festival details to prevent attendees from discovering that the festival infrastructure looked quite different from the promotional material. marc weinstein, a music festival consultant and fyre festival contractor, describes his failed attempts at convincing the leadership to be honest about their insufficient preparation time, about the fact that it was not going to be a luxury experience and about attendees becoming trapped on the island with no available return flights. but weinstein admits that each time he was rebuked, he put his head down and attempted to complete his assignments, to maintain the chain of command, to play his role in this peculiar machine. andy king, an event producer who styles himself “billy [mcfarland]’s whisperer,” also wonders about his responsibility for continuously vetting mcfarland’s personal character to the festival team for the good of the event (fyre 1:12:20). maryann rolle, a bahamian restaurateur, might have appreciated more critical thought from jerry media, weinstein and company. feeding staff, influencers and attendees with little preparation time, rolle tells viewers she lost $50,000 of savings trying to host the big american money hinting at long-term investment. j.r., a bahamian who organized local laborers for fyre festival, recounts fleeing for safety after the festival because those laborers had turned to him seeking payment. fyre festival leadership had vanished in the wind. dancecult 11(1)116 following the festival, mcfarland was charged with tampering with wire transfers. but after posting bail he continued to sell tickets for haute events in new york city; tickets which often did not exist. at that point gabrielle bluestone, a vice reporter who also contributes to the film, published an article linking mcfarland to sustained fraudulent activities while still on bail (bluestone 2018). mcfarland was arrested again, this time without possibility of posting bail. the effect of interspersing contributions from critics like bluestone with interlocutors like purzycki—especially when they align in tutti condemnation of mcfarland the naughty—is the same as the effect of jerry media co-producing this film with vice whilst repurposing their own video footage. jerry media’s self-promotion is not completely unabashed, but it is thorough. fyre submits that the promotion was the most real—maybe even the only real thing—about fyre festival. fyre is a statement, in form as in content, about the power of social media technologies. kincaid sums up this morass of deferred accountability with another quippy analogy: “if you shoot a commercial for bmw, how are you supposed to know if that car has a faulty engine?” (fyre 1:16:50). accordingly, perhaps we can consider fyre as much promotion as it is documentary. the two films reviewed differ in several ways. fyre fraud is preoccupied with the question of assigning responsibility for social media influence. fyre fraud’s viewer feels ethically superior to the clear villains and awestruck by the naivete of those swept up in their schemes, because all of this apparent chaos fits into a clean, almost algorithmic state-of-the-world. meanwhile, fyre: the greatest party that never happened demonstrates the capabilities of social media technologies. it is a crisis take to fraud’s algorithm, an illustration of real power fallen into the wrong hands. but both play blame games about who is responsible for the millions of dollars demanded by workers, investors, contractors, lawyers and others. both document the professional turn of social media identity and the attendant rise in the influence of models with popular social media identities. and both make us feel like we all need a good read of baudrillard’s simulacrum and simulation. viewed side-by-side, the two films provide us with spectacular material for reflecting not just on right and wrong in contemporary social media culture, but also real and fake. we are left puzzled: were the original intentions valid? who is responsible for viral momentum? and might the festival have happened after all? references baudrillard, jean. 1983. simulations. los angeles, ca: semiotext(e). bluestone, gabrielle. 2018. “fyre fest’s founder is going to prison, but the spirit of his scam lives on”. vice news, 12 june. <https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3ayma/fyre-festsfounder-is-going-to-prison-but-the-spirit-of-his-scam-lives-on> (accessed 9 september 2019). “fyre fraud: details”. hulu, 14 january 2019. <https://www.hulu.com/movie/fyre-fraude47078f3-1c0e-49a8-9da9-c571a7a20fec> (accessed 5 september 2019). https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3ayma/fyre-fests-founder-is-going-to-prison-but-the-spirit-of-his-scam-lives-on https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3ayma/fyre-fests-founder-is-going-to-prison-but-the-spirit-of-his-scam-lives-on https://www.hulu.com/movie/fyre-fraud-e47078f3-1c0e-49a8-9da9-c571a7a20fec https://www.hulu.com/movie/fyre-fraud-e47078f3-1c0e-49a8-9da9-c571a7a20fec digital cumbia: tradition and postmodernity dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 14(1): 60–75 issn 1947-5403 ©2022 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.04 digital cumbia: tradition and postmodernity israel márquez universitat oberta de catalunya uoc (spain)1 translated by moses iten rmit (australia) abstract originally published in the chilean journal revista musical chilena in 2016, this article is focused on the most recent transformation of the popular latin american cumbia genre: so-called “digital cumbia”.2 it developed primarily in buenos aires, argentina and lima, peru, where an interesting scene of artistic experimentation with cumbia and electronic dance music emerged during the 2000s. as a result this new electronic music genre attracted considerable attention from local and international media during the 2010s. despite this public interest the digital cumbia phenomenon has not received much academic attention, so current knowledge on the topic is insufficient. this article attempts to fill this gap with this first analysis of the digital cumbia phenomenon and its impact upon contemporary popular music. keywords: cumbia, electronic music, technology, internet, postmodernity israel márquez has a ph.d in information sciences (complutense university of madrid/ extraordinary ph.d award 2012/2013), a master in information and knowledge society (open university of catalonia), and a degree in journalism (complutense university of madrid). he has been visiting researcher at the school of literature, media & communication (georgia institute of technology), at the it university of copenhagen and at iscte university institute of lisbon. his articles have been published in journals such as journal of youth studies, hispanic research journal, el profesional de la información, signa, observatorio (obs*), arte, individuo y sociedad, américa latina hoy, empiria, aibr, cic, telos, designis, etc. he has published the books la música popular en el siglo xxi. otras voces, otros ámbitos (milenio, 2014), una genealogía de la pantalla. del cine al teléfono móvil (anagrama, 2015) and móviles 24/7. el teléfono móvil en la era de la hiperconectividad (uoc, 2018). email: isravmarquez@ucm.es. transposition mailto:isravmarquez@ucm.es márquez | digital cumbia: tradition and postmodernity 61 cumbia is not dogmatic ( jace clayton, dj/rupture). intro: the mutations of cumbia if there is a musical genre in latin america which has shown an enormous facility to transform and adapt locally to each country—even to particular regions within the same country—it is cumbia. this latin-caribbean rhythm and dance born from the historical confluence and the mestizaje of africans, indigenous americans and spaniards, has travelled and mutated considerably throughout the entire american continent since its genesis in the colombian caribbean, birthplace of other popular musical genres such as bullerengue, porro, mapalé and champeta. cumbia is essentially a mobile genre that has undergone multiple transformations during migration throughout its history. thus, there are regional modalities of colombian cumbia (cumbia sampuesana, soledeña, momposina, cartagenera, banqueña, sanjacintera, etc.) and national variants of it (peruvian, argentinian, chilean, mexican, bolivian cumbia, etc.), which are the result of intense population movements between different regions of the same country (internal migration) and between different countries (external migration). in each place cumbia took on unique characteristics and new variants developed, but it has always maintained a resemblance to its original form. as the us writer and music producer jace clayton aka dj/rupture has pointed out: the simple sound of cumbia mutates with each journey, but its trademark is a slow 4-by-4 rhythm with bass drums and a raspy scraper reminiscent of the rattle of a train. these days minor accordion chords may be substituted for guitars, flutes or keyboards. cumbia is not dogmatic.3 one of the most interesting transformations of cumbia has taken place in peru, where beginning in the 1960s cumbia was mixed with the sounds and textures typical to rock and psychedelic rock, genres on the rise at the time, together with indigenous rhythms from the andes and the amazon. peruvian cumbia managed to develop its own characteristic style from the use of the electric guitar as the main instrument. so much so that to differentiate it from colombian cumbia, the peruvians invented the term “chicha” to refer to peruvian cumbia, a term inspired by the famous ceremonial drink which has been present in peru since the time of the incas. another interesting mutation of cumbia was called tecnocumbia, a variant of the mexican cumbia that became very popular at the end of the 1990s in various countries across the continent. tecnocumbia was an attempt to modernize traditional cumbia through the use of electronic instruments such as synthesizers, electric guitars and bass, in addition to electronic drums which were used instead of emblematic instruments of the genre, such as the guiro or guacharaca which have traditionally been used to mark the typical cumbia rhythm. dancecult 14(1)62 the so-called cumbia rebajada is another type of cumbia, popularized in the city of monterrey via slowed-down versions of colombian cumbia recordings operated by the mexican sonideros. they in turn created the famous cumbia sonidera through the use and manipulation of sound effects, the mixture of fragments of different songs and the sonidero’s own voice, in charge of hyping and greeting people in between the music, the dance and the party. as can be seen, the number of regional and national variants of cumbia demonstrate the incredible mutability of the genre and its ability to adapt to local tastes and idiosyncrasies. alejo carpentier pointed out the range of caribbean music—although very different and diverse—always preserves “a strange family resemblance”, and the same can be said about all these cumbia variants (chicha, tecnocumbia, rebajada but also cumbia sampuesana, sanjacintera, sonidera, etc.).4 in the 21st century new variants of cumbia have emerged which continue to reveal the infinite possibilities of transformation of this musical genre. among these variants is cumbia villera, a new type of cumbia that emerged in the context of the slums of greater buenos aires, of which the main characteristic is the incorporation of lyrics that portray the living conditions of the inhabitants of these villas through direct, violent and sexually explicit language.5 but the main transformation of cumbia in the 21st century has occurred as a consequence of sound experimentation facilitated by new computer technologies (using simple, easyto-use audio editing programs like fruity loops, reason, protools or ableton) and the influence of electronic dance music on the rhythms, sounds and textures typical of cumbia. this type of cumbia is generally known as electronic cumbia, cumbiatronica, new cumbia, or nu-cumbia. but “digital cumbia” has become the most popular expression referring to this interesting and innovative cross between cumbia and electronic music. cumbia as an artistic and social manifestation has been the subject of different studies and academic analysis throughout its history, in the form of articles and books.6 but the new phase represented by digital cumbia, given its newness, has received very little academic attention and practically no studies documenting and critically explaining the phenomenon, with only a few exceptions.7 most of the existing sources of information come from interviews, news and reports published in the media in different parts of the world, in which digital cumbia has been presented as one of the most original and innovative musical propositions to have emerged in the americas in recent years. these documents have been key in preparing this article, along with my own fieldwork, done mainly via interviews—inperson and online—with representatives of this scene in the cities of buenos aires and lima, the main sites of this new musical manifestation.8 this article is the result of all this research, presented as a first attempt of critically addressing the phenomenon of digital cumbia and to open discussion about the meaning of this new musical manifestation in the contemporary artistic panorama, as well as its importance and scope within the general history of cumbia, a story yet to be written... márquez | digital cumbia: tradition and postmodernity 63 side a: digital cumbia in buenos aires curiously, the phenomenon of digital cumbia does not have its origins in colombia, the cradle of cumbia. although the coffee-producing country also has artists who have ventured into the fusion of cumbia and electronic music, like bomba estéreo, the greatest experimentation and exploration of these sounds has taken place in two other latin american countries: argentina and peru, and especially in its two capitals, buenos aires and lima. throughout the decade of the 2000s, an interesting movement began to take shape in both capitals around digital cumbia which managed to attract international media attention and conquer a middle-class and even upper-class audience, something extremely strange for a genre which has traditionally been ignored by the media and perceived as something inferior, as belonging to the lower classes. digital cumbia has its origins in the so-called zizek parties, a series of club nights which began to be held weekly starting in 2006 in the city of buenos aires. these parties arose in a context of nightlife in buenos aires not going through its best moment. in december 2004, nearly 200 people lost their lives as a result of a fire that occurred during a rock concert of the band callejeros at the república cromañón nightclub. as a result, the government of the city decided to review the state of various nightclubs and dance venues—closing several—and the nightlife of buenos aires was greatly affected. it is in this post-cromañón context when the idea of the zizek parties arose, which were conceived with the objective of reactivating the nightlife of buenos aires with a novel concept: that on the same night very different styles of music could be heard, from hip hop and electronics to reggaeton, dancehall, baile funk, or cumbia. the name for the parties was taken from the controversial slovenian philosopher slavoj zizek, who in his writings mixes lacanian psychology, marxism, classic cinema and popular culture. zizek’s name served to symbolize that postmodern mix of rhythms and sounds intended to be realized at these parties, just like the mixed references in the writings of the philosopher. this is how villa diamante, one of the founders of the zizek parties and a key figure in the popularization of digital cumbia, recalls the decision to baptize these parties named after the slovenian philosopher: slavoj zizek is a philosopher who in talking about north american imperialism, cites star wars or in the beginning of a book quotes the x-files. in addition it was a lot of fun to name a cumbia, hip hop and dubstep party after a slovenian philosopher who was married to an argentine and who for many years came to be living no more than ten blocks from my house.9 zizek parties quickly became a veritable laboratory of rhythms and sounds, in which the invited musicians would begin to experiment and collaborate with each other, mixing different rhythms and formats during live improvisations. a scene of digital latin american sounds began to be defined that had not previously existed so overtly. artists who did not know each other before began to get together and collaborate at these parties. in this way a new music was conceived which came to be known as “digital cumbia”, due to the prominence dancecult 14(1)64 of cumbia in that psychedelic environment of exploration and experimentation. this is how the zizek parties existing as a space of cultural experimentation dedicated to music and dance, generated a movement first in argentina and later in other parts of the world.10 the zizek organizers realized a lot of good unreleased and original music was generated at those parties and decided to create a record label called zzk records to release these productions. at first digital cumbia was the main genre for the label and this term was used for its first compilation, which included some of the main representatives of the scene: chancha via circuito, fauna, frikstailers, el remolón, king coya, the peronists, etc. these artists started their careers around this new label born at the cusp of the new digital age. in fact, the birth of the label coincided with the beginning of the rise of social media, represented at the time by myspace, antecedent of current social media like facebook, twitter, youtube, instagram or soundcloud. figure 1. cover of the first zzk records compilation: “zzk sound vol. 1. cumbia digital”. courtesy of zzk records. márquez | digital cumbia: tradition and postmodernity 65 the internet was fundamental from the outset when it came to making this music known to an audience not limited to the zizek parties or to buenos aires, with the consequent creation of a “digital community” and a “knowledge community” around these new rhythms, which began to become increasingly well known internationally thanks to the speed of internet diffusion.11 this is recognized by one of the creators of the zizek parties and of zzk records, grant c. dull, aka “the g”: people have been mixing cumbia and electronic beats for quite some time. what zizek did was give a platform, an audience and a centre of attention so that all these sounds could be heard. the dance floor was our laboratory, the internet our megaphone.12 dull is right to point out people have been mixing cumbia and electronic rhythms for a long time. the success of zzk was in creating a platform where these sounds were found more easily, but the fusion of cumbia and electronic music had already existed long before. the origins of this fusion can be traced to the pioneering work of the german uwe schmidt as señor coconut. this was one of his numerous pseudonyms, along with atom heart, atom™, almost digital, lassigue bendthaus, and a long etcetera. this german based in chile, released an album as señor coconut entitled el baile alemán in 2000, with versions of tracks by the popular german band kraftwerk based on latin instruments and sounds. amongst the homages was a cumbia version of the song ‘trans europe express’. before settling permanently in chile, schmidt had already experimented with this mix of electronic and latin sounds on his 1997 album el gran baile, which he also released as señor coconut.13 years before schmidt, british dj and producer richard blair, who had worked as a sound engineer for albums by artists such as brian eno and sinead o’connor, had already moved to latin america, specifically to colombia, where after collaborating with folk music artists such as totó la momposina decided to form the musical group sidestepper. initially this project mixed salsa and electronic music, drum’n’bass mainly, but over time it incorporated more diverse latin and caribbean influences, including colombian cumbia. another pioneer in the mixture of latin rhythms and electronic music was dick verdult, better known as dick el demasiado, a dutchman who landed in buenos aires in 2003 to organize the second edition of the so-called festicumex, an experimental cumbia festival whose first edition was held in honduras in 1996.14 this festival encouraged several young argentine producers to explore the possibilities of mixing argentine cumbia with electronic music. in a way, the zizek parties went on to create a continuation of this festival. festicumex was a great inspiration for the organizers of the zizek parties, which can be perceived as a kind of continuation of the philosophy of the festival and its incitement to experiment with cumbia based on modern technologies and sounds. finally, before the rise of the zizek parties, there were already latin american djs and producers at the beginning of the 21st century who began to mix cumbia with dub and other types of electronic music. for example, dj taz, javier “sonido” martines, toy selectah and el hijo de la cumbia, who in a way prepared the ground for the type of digital cumbia that dancecult 14(1)66 zzk records would spread years later. it can be seen those responsible for the zizek parties did not invent anything new by mixing cumbia with electronic sounds, since this practice had existed since the beginning of the century and even earlier. but they did know how to create a platform to give visibility to the phenomenon and approach electronic cumbia from a commercial point of view. with this purpose in mind the “digital cumbia” label was conceived to describe and catalogue the new sound, together with carrying out an intense and careful marketing work via the internet and social media, a task which turned out to be one of the key factors of its success. in this way, zzk records’ work in dissemination brought digital cumbia closer to a mass and global audience, challenging many of the stereotypes and social prejudices traditionally associated with this type of music. generalist media such as the new york times, newsweek, bbc, clarín, el país, among others, and specialized publications such as nme, xlr8r, rolling stone, the fader, urb, and the wire, have dedicated news and reports to this scene from different parts of the world, making digital cumbia known to audiences around the globe. however, “digital cumbia” as a label has lost currency in recent years. as of 2009, zzk records no longer uses it to describe their sound, changing it to broader labels such as “contemporary electronic music” or “contemporary latin american music”. this change is intended to highlight the more flexible and eclectic nature of the new latin american electronic music, without limiting it to the experimental crossovers between cumbia and electronic music. similarly, the digital cumbia scene in lima, peru discussed later, prefers the broader “tropical bass” instead of the less open and limited “digital cumbia” label, as in their recordings and sessions they also produce and mix other modern genres of electronic dance music, such as dubstep, moombahton, kuduro, zouk bass, among others. even so, compositions such as those by chancha vía circuito, one of the most successful argentine artists of this scene, continue to appear in the media under the general label of “digital cumbia”, even though his latest creations now contain very little cumbia. his sound has mutated from the digital cumbia of its beginnings to a deeper exploration of folkloric, andean and amazonian sounds, such as those that can be heard on his latest album, amansará, released in 2014. in this regard, he commented the following in an interview with the buenos aires newspaper clarín: i find it strange they keep talking about digital cumbia. it was the first label to get zizek on the pitch. but today i listen to very little cumbia whilst folklore is very present. i think more in an eclectic concept than genre.15 cumbia, in this sense, was the starting point for the exploration of other popular and folkloric sounds. in addition, there are few current artists who maintain a purist vision of digital cumbia. this follows from what mati zundel, another of the artists linked to zzk records and their “digital cumbia”, points out about his album amazónico gravitante (2012): i listen to folklore, electronic music, reggaeton, cumbia, indigenous music, and all that comes out as a salad. i think amazónico gravitante is just that: a salad of genres in which there is everything, from a pop song to an ayahuasca song.16 márquez | digital cumbia: tradition and postmodernity 67 side b: digital cumbia in lima just like cumbia generally and peruvian cumbia in particular, the history of digital cumbia in peru is also a story of travel and displacement.17 in 2009, the two members of dengue dengue dengue, not yet known under this name, travel to argentina invited to the trimarchi design festival in buenos aires. on that trip they encounter the emerging digital cumbia scene. what attracts their attention is not the mix of electronic music with latin american music, something they had already heard in pioneers like señor coconut or sidestepper, but that this mix is being done in a dancefloor setting, a club setting and succeeding. upon their return to peru and inspired by what they had seen in buenos aires, they decide to explore their musical roots and experiment with peruvian cumbia and jungle aesthetics. this is how the new dengue dengue dengue project starts and later they decide to organize the toma! (“take!”) parties, the equivalent in lima of the zizek parties in buenos aires. the “toma! psychotropical beats” parties organized in the lima neighbourhood of barranco, help consolidate the digital cumbia scene in lima and serve as a rediscovery of cumbia and its variant of “chicha” (a musical genre specific to peru) especially among the youth, usually reluctant about this genre. in these parties and in the recordings that begin to circulate, generally distributed free of charge through the internet, they sample classic albums by peruvian cumbia groups like los mirlos and at some parties these groups are even invited to play in their original format, mixing tradition and modernity. this makes the new generations of young peruvians become familiar with classic cumbia groups that perhaps they would not have come to know in other contexts. the international success of dengue dengue dengue and its discourse of “retomar las raíces” (“retaking the roots”) connects with these middle-class youth, who regularly attend their parties and actively follow them via the internet and social media.18 soon—just as happened in buenos aires—cumbia ceases to be the favourite genre and other sounds begin to mix. the “digital cumbia” label begins to be replaced by the broader “tropical bass”, an expression popularized over recent years in different blogs and websites, later adopted by the specialized press. this label is intended to describe a new type of edm with an emphasis on lower frequencies and sub-bass, hence the adjective “bass”, mixed with latin american tropical rhythms. this label isn’t entirely correct either. the word “tropical” in the “tropical bass” label is an exoticizing and simplistic way of referring to latin america as a unified whole, but it does offer a way of describing more broadly what this new generation of young musicians and djs have been doing in beginning to explore latin sounds other than cumbia. all the musicians in this scene agree it’s not just about cumbia, but about a vision towards the merging of popular and folkloric roots of latin america with the rhythms and sounds of modern electronic music, especially that of british origin—also called bass music, or uk bass—which puts a greater emphasis on the sonic possibilities of the low and sub-bass dancecult 14(1)68 frequencies. this type of electronic music has become very popular among middle-class youth in lima, and has expanded internationally thanks to the work of bands like dengue dengue dengue and animal chuki, two of the most prominent exponents of this scene. “bonus track”: the internationalization of cumbia19 the success of digital cumbia (later converted into tropical bass) first in argentina and later peru, stimulated the emergence of a wave of similar musical productions in different parts of the world. what is surprising about this phenomenon is that digital cumbia projects emerged from countries not usually associated with cumbia like the netherlands (umoja, sonido del principe), denmark (copia doble systema) and australia (cumbia cosmonauts). digital cumbia is played at parties like que bajo?! in new york and artists like dengue dengue dengue are hired to perform at internationally famous festivals such as sónar in barcelona. audiences from different parts of the world now enjoy this music, which has become popular via the internet and social media such as youtube and soundcloud, in which geographical borders, racial and linguistic differences are not a problem, or at least to a lesser extent and where the most diverse music circulates and mixes. digital cumbia has become one of the first genres of electronic music conceived in latin america and created and performed by latin american musicians which has crossed the borders on the continent, attracted the interest of an international audience and managed to influence foreign musicians who are now beginning to incorporate rhythms and sounds of digital cumbia in their compositions and dj sessions, like the artists mentioned above and many others brought together under the “global bass” and “tropical bass” labels.20 the exponents of the genre have tried to find answers to the sudden international interest in cumbia which has arisen as a result of its crossover with modern electronic music. the argentine duo frikstailers, for example, understand this crossover as a latin american response to the influence of electronic music on the continent, with which in turn europeans and americans are identifying with: the first thing that comes to mind is our own vision and experience regarding this outward gaze, movements which were very strong and influential for us, like electronic music. from this point of view, this could be understood as the gaze of the other: they somehow see their identity reflected, but with something that is totally alien to them, new and fresh.21 according to simón mejía, founder of the colombian group bomba estéreo, cumbia is a millennial rhythm: it is something mystical, spiritual that has been happening for centuries on our continent and reveals a truth about race that is not pure but mestizo: blacks, indians and whites. this is something other types of music doesn’t have and which makes it so interesting for europeans. márquez | digital cumbia: tradition and postmodernity 69 at the same time he adds this awakening of cumbia is “inevitably linked to a trend and a rediscovery of latin music from another angle, as happened with salsa”.22 finally, villa diamante points out the rise of digital cumbia coincides with an exhaustion of the stylistic resources in european and north american electronic music, from which for a while nothing new has been created. the last innovative genre was dubstep and for many it’s already a dead genre. in this sense, the success of digital cumbia has to do with a rediscovery of cumbia and no new dance genre has appeared for some time in europe, as techno, minimal, house and all the music known as dance music has been around for some time already.23 these and other factors explain the current success of digital cumbia, which has become one of the most innovative and influential musical manifestations of recent times, by revaluing a long rejected genre, marginalized and condemned as cumbia has been. and this not only in latin america but also in other parts of the world. thanks to the fusion of cumbia with modern electronic music, different countries have discovered a genre practically unknown outside latin america. now cumbia belongs to everyone and in the era of globalization and social media, no longer travels and moves only between latin american countries, as had been the norm, but throughout the entire planet. discussion and conclusions digital cumbia represents one of the most original and innovative musical manifestations which emerged from latin america in the 21st century. given the newness of the phenomenon, there has been hardly any academic interest in the issue and most of the information currently available comes from the press and other media. this article has tried to critically approach the problem from a discussion on the origins and development of this new variant of cumbia which has emerged in this digital age. in this last section of the article i would like to present some points by way of discussion and conclusions, in order to generate a debate around this interesting and novel phenomenon and its important role in contemporary popular music. firstly, digital cumbia is a product characteristic of the digital age and of so-called “convergence culture”, a culture in which new media technologies have lowered production and distribution costs, expanded the repertoire of available distribution channels and have empowered consumers to archive, comment, appropriate and re-circulate media content in new and powerful ways.24 as argentine producer chancha vía circuito points out: none of this music would have been possible without digital tools. in my particular case i live it as a blessing, to be able to have these tools available to be able to create music. it is a gift of our times.25 “we are one hundred percent children of the internet”, admits rafael pereira of dengue dengue dengue. “our project was born entirely thanks to the internet. everything we need dancecult 14(1)70 we find on the internet, old cumbias, modern sounds…”.26 it is therefore not surprising of all the information and culture currently available and accessible through the web, interesting and diverse mixtures between genres are produced, as in this case the various crossovers between cumbia and electronic music. the exponents of digital cumbia themselves point out the internet and portals like youtube have been instrumental in discovering many of the electronic music subgenres (dubstep, idm, jungle, drum’n’bass, etc.) which have later crossed over with the characteristic cumbia rhythm and sound, creating that postmodern hybrid that we now know as “digital cumbia”.27 the access and discovery via the internet of music and sounds of all kinds allows a greater convergence of styles, experimentation and musical innovation, which had it not been supported by many of these technological processes would have never reached the heights it did. styles intersecting with cultures previously unimaginable are combining, translating into a heterogeneity and diversity of proposals, mixtures and tastes of an unprecedented magnitude.28 this eclecticism reveals an era being absorbed, documented and expressed mainly by the youngest, as pointed out by the cultural critic henry giroux: inside this postmodern youth culture, identities mix and change instead of becoming more uniform and static. no longer belonging to any place or place, the youth increasingly inhabits changing cultures and social spheres marked by a plurality of languages and cultures.29 for this reason, as we have seen, digital cumbia is more than cumbia and since their outset the zizek parties were a space open to the mixture and experimentation of diverse musical styles, from british dubstep to caribbean reggaeton. the expression “digital cumbia” was more a marketing tool and a way to commercialize the phenomenon, than a clear way of referring to the type of sound experimentation that these young people carried out, in which not only cumbia was mixed with electronic music, but with many other styles, following the “plurality of languages and cultures” which youths today live as completely natural. all this also responds to the eclecticism characteristic of postmodern culture in which these young people have grown up, an eclecticism about which jean-françois lyotard would go so far as to say that it is “the ground zero of general contemporary culture”.30 on the other hand, the very evolution of digital cumbia points to another characteristic of the contemporary cultural climate, the speed at with which new musical genres form and develop. as has been pointed out, several artists have moved on from the label “digital cumbia” and prefer other more encompassing terms such as “tropical bass”, a label which allows them to continue experimenting with a wider range of genres and not limited only to cumbia. digital cumbia has emerged and has developed at an unprecedented speed, and for many, it is already a dead genre. this is precisely the dynamic and “postmodern condition” that is observed in many of the contemporary musical genres, especially those linked to electronic music, which are born, grow and die at breakneck speed (dubstep, grime, hauntology, skweee, witch house, wonky, among others).31 márquez | digital cumbia: tradition and postmodernity 71 despite all this, the importance of digital cumbia in the history of cumbia is fundamental. thanks to its fusion with electronic music, this latin-caribbean genre has become internationalized and managed to reach areas where it was barely known before, especially in various european countries where this type of music was previously unknown. digital cumbia has also brought this genre closer to a middle and upper class latin american audience which previously completely rejected it, associating it with lower classes and perceiving it as an aesthetically poor genre. the efforts of formations such as dengue dengue dengue by sampling records from classic peruvian cumbia bands like los mirlos, and even inviting them to play at their parties in their traditional format, has meant many middle class youths have rediscovered the genre and become interested in it, which supposes a generational rediscovery of one’s own cultural roots and of one’s own musical folklore from an urban perspective and sonority. i will finish the article with a quote from la yegros—one of the female representatives of digital cumbia and responsible for its internationalization with songs like ‘viene de mí’— whose words perfectly summarize everything pointed out in this article: i think today we are going through a super special moment, where our roots can be musically represented in an electronic, modern way, and thus reach a pervious public which identifies with both propositions, the traditional and the electronic.32 notes 1 the author’s current affiliation is universidad complutense de madrid (ucm), spain. 2 original publication in spanish see márquez, israel. 2016. ‘cumbia digital: tradición y postmodernidad’ in revista musical chilena, (226), 53–67. <https://doi.org/10.4067/s0716-27902016000200003>. 3 cited in fiorito (2009: 10). 4 cited in orovio (1994: 6). 5 in recent years, different studies of the cumbia villera phenomenon have appeared like de gori (2005), cragnolini (2006). lardone (2007), vila and semán (2007), martin (2008), wilson and favoretto (2011). 6 for books, see zapata (1962), londono (1983), sabbatella (1997). d’amico (2002), bailon (2013), pacini hernandez (2010), karmy bolton (2013). for articles, see romero (2008), semán and vila (2011), vila and semán (2011), fernandez l’hoeste and vila (2013). 7 see irisarri (2011), baker (2015). both studies collect impressions of the cumbia scene digital in buenos aires but they do not talk about other equally important scenes, such as the one developed in lima, peru, as well as the impact of digital cumbia abroad, aspects addressed in this study. 8 much of the information obtained for the writing of this work was based on interviews with some exponents of digital cumbia in buenos aires and lima. thanks to diego bulacio (villa diamante), grant c. dull (el g), andres schteingart (el remolón), pedro canale (chancha vía circuito), rafael pereira (dengue dengue dengue), paz ferrand (deltatron), and daniel https://doi.org/10.4067/s0716-27902016000200003 dancecult 14(1)72 valle-riestra (animal chuki), for giving me their time and attention and for sharing their experience and knowledge with me in both online and in-person interviews. 9 bulacio 2014, interview. 10 it is interesting to note that in the same decade of 2000, argentina experienced a boom in music visible electronics at events such as the first argentine edition of the international festival creamfields, the experimental art festival fuga jurasica and sound innovations such as electronic tango, a fusion between traditional tango and electronic music represented by bands like gotan project, bajofondo or tanguetto (about electronic tango see liska 2016). in this sense, digital cumbia can be interpreted as another manifestation of that boom in electronic and experimental music which took place in argentina in the first decade of the new century. 11 on the concept of “digital community”, see rheingold (1996). on the concept of “knowledge community”, see lévy (1997). 12 cited in bustamantemix (2009) (translation by the author). 13 that same year, the chilean jorge gonzález (ex-vocalist and leader of the rock group los prisioneros) and producer martín schopf (dandy jack) released an “electrocumbia” album titled gonzalo martínez y sus congas pensantes. in chile the album was not very well received, but it was successful on the european underground circuit, especially in germany and the uk. i thank the anonymous reviewers of this text for this interesting note. 14 angelotti (2004). 15 cited in irigoyen (2015). 16 cited in ungaro rial (2012). 17 see romero (2008). 18 dengue dengue dengue uses capital letters in the slogan “retake your roots” as a play on words to refer to their toma! party series. 19 “bonus track” or “additional track” is a term used in the language of recorded music to refer to a piece of music (normally unreleased) included in special editions or reissues of an album. 20 both global bass and tropical bass are expressions which have gained currency in referring to a new type of edm incorporating sounds of the world (global bass) and from latin america (tropical bass). both terms come from the label “bass music”, an umbrella term which tries to encompass a series of styles of edm that have in common the emphasis on the low frequencies and sub-bass. hence the use of the word “bass”, or “bajo” in spanish. specifically, the term refers to the various styles of music british electronica that emerged from the rave music of the 90s, ranging from jungle and drum’n’bass to modern grime and dubstep. this type of electronic music has most influenced the protagonists of digital cumbia, and many prefer the expression “tropical bass” to the more hermetic “digital cumbia”. in a future article i intend to cover the tropical bass phenomenon in more depth. 21 cited in leites (2013). 22 cited in gabino (2010). 23 cited in gabino (2010). 24 jenkins (2008: 28). 25 canale 2014, interview. 26 pereira 2015, interview. márquez | digital cumbia: tradition and postmodernity 73 27 for a historical explanation of these and other electronic music genres, see blánquez and morera (2002). 28 in this sense, peter burke (2010: 141) has pointed out in the world today “no culture is an island”. with the increase of globalization and the spread of the internet, this reality has become much more evident and the result is that “all cultural traditions today are in contact, to a greater or lesser extent, with alternative traditions”, or in other words, all music today is in contact with alternative music. 29 giroux (1994). 30 lyotard (1987b: 17). 31 on the “postmodern condition” see lyotard (1987). for an explanation on the origin and development of the musical genres mentioned here and others born in the 21st century, see márquez (2014). 32 gazio (2014). references angelotti, claudio. 2004. “dick el demasiado, un exótico holandés llega a buenos aires con su cumbia lunática”, clarín.com, año viii, número 2920 (31 march). <http://edant.clarin.com/diario/2004/03/31/t-733841.htm>, (accessed 12 september 2016). bailón, jaime. 2013. vida, historia y milagros de la cumbia peruana: la chicha no muere ni se destruye, sólo se transforma. íconos revista de ciencias sociales, (18): 53–62. <https://doi.org/10.17141/iconos.18.2004.3117>. baker, geoff. 2015 “cumbia, digitisation and post-neoliberalism in buenos aires’s independent music sector”. <http://musdig.music.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/bakerargentina-report-as-website-150515.pdf>, (accessed 10 june 2015). blánquez, javier y omar morera (coordinadores). 2002. loops: una historia de la música electrónica. barcelona: random house mondadori. burke, peter. 2010. hibridismo cultural. madrid: akal. bustamentemix. 2009. “the digital cumbia revolution is a serious thing…”, pulsobeat (15 july).<http://pulsobeat.com/this-digital-cumbia-revolution-is-a-serious-thing> (accessed 10 may 2015). cragnolini, alejandra. 2006 “articulaciones entre violencia social, significante sonoro y subjetividad: la cumbia “villera” en buenos aires”, trans. revista transcultural de música, número 10, (december). <http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/articulo/147/65>, (accessed 15 june 2015). d’amico, leonardo. 2002. ‘la cumbia colombiana: 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master’s thesis, instituto de desarrollo económico y social ides, universidad nacional de san martín, argentina. supervisor: pablo federico semán. jenkins, henry. 2008. convergence culture. la cultura de la convergencia de los medias de comunicación. barcelona: paidós. karmi bolton, eileen. 2013. “también yo tengo mi cumbia, pero mi cumbia es chilena: apuntes para una reconstrucción sociohistórica de la cumbia chilena desde el cuerpo”, resonancias, número 32 ( june): 93-110. lardone, luz marina. 2007. “el ‘glamour’ de la marginalidad en argentina: cumbia villera, la exclusión como identidad”, revista de ciencias sociales, ii, 116: 87–102. <https://doi.org/10.15517/rcs.v0i116.11197>. leites, pablo. 2013. “frikstailers: una paliza a la monotonía”, vos (11 march ). <http://vos.lavoz.com.ar/electronica/frikstailers-paliza-monotoniam,> (accessed 8 march 2015). lévy, pierre. 1997. collective intelligence. mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace. cambridge, massachusetts: perseus. liska, maría 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postmodernity 75 orovio, helio. 1994. música por el caribe. santiago de cuba: oriente. pacini hernández, deborah. 2010 oye como va! hybridity and identity in latino popular music. filadelfia: temple university press. rheingold, howard. 1996. la comunidad virtual. una sociedad sin fronteras. barcelona: gedisa. rail ungaro, santiago. 2012. “la música no era para subirse a un escenario”, página/12 (5 september). <http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/no/12-6071-2012-08-30.html>, (accessed 16 april 2016). romero, raúl r. 2008. andinos y tropicales. la cumbia peruana en la ciudad global. lima: pontificia universidad católica del perú, instituto de etnomusicología andina. sabbatella, patricia leonor. 1997. “una experiencia didáctica sobre música caribeña: la cumbia”, tavira: revista de ciencias de la educación, 14: 131-8. semán, pablo and pablo vila (edited by). 2011. cumbia: nación, etnia y género en latinoamérica. buenos aires: editorial gorla. vila, pablo and pablo semán. 2007. “cumbia villera: una narrativa de mujeres activadas”, colección monografías, 44. caracas: programa cultura, comunicación y transformaciones sociales, cipost, faces, universidad central de venezuela. available at <http://www.elortiba.org/old/pdf/cumbia_villera7.pdf>. vila, pablo and pablo semán. 2011. troubling gender: youth and cumbia in argentina’s music scene. philadelphia: temple university press. wilson, tomothy and mara favoretto. 2011. “actuar para (sobre)vivir: rock nacional y cumbia villera en argentina”, studies in latin american popular culture, volumen 29: 164–83. <https://doi.org/10.1353/sla.2011.0013>. zapata, delia. 1962 “la cumbia. síntesis musical de la nación colombiana. reseña histórica y coreográfica”, revista colombiana de folclor, iii/7, second edition: 188–204. interviews canale, pedro (2014). interview with the author (online). dull, grant c. (2014). interview with the author (online). ferrand, paz (2014). interview with the author (online). pereira, rafael (2015). interview with the author (online). schteingart, andrés (2015). interview with the author, buenos aires, argentina. valle-riestra, daniel (2015). interview with the author, lima, perú. bulacio, diego (2014). interview with the author (online). http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/no/12-6071-2012-08-30.html http://www.elortiba.org/old/pdf/cumbia_villera7.pdf https://doi.org/10.1353/sla.2011.0013 reparative raving emily l. murphy brock university (canada) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.14> what are we doing here, in this mangled mass of throbbing bodies? i think it’s a form of mourning. what if this body-shaking bass operates at the frequency with which grief…. resonates? what if when we breathe in, sucking back the sharp, sweat-soaked air, we are breathing in the grief of those around us? what if we exhale our own grief out into that sharp, sweat-soaked air and it hangs there, suspended, in-between each beat? what if this breathy grief evaporates and condenses on the walls, along with the sweat, and drips back down to us? what if grief literally drips from the walls? what if it penetrates us and opens us up to porous possibilities of a love that is otherwise? and what if that love, too, then evaporates, condenses and drips back down to us? my experience of raving extends beyond revelry; for me, raving is a reckoning. raving is a process of unearthing both collective and personal ruins, the affective residues of which are held, like shadows on the psyche, as “unthought knowns” (see bollas 1987). for me, raving is a kind of spilling out, and over, and around. so, this is a story: a story about raving, and about reparation. this is a survival story: a story of futures lost and mourned and moved through. dina georgis speaks to the utility of story, claiming that the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and others, do the work of “symbolically elaborating experience in a way that brings narrative coherence and understanding to our existence” or in other words, “allow us to go on living” (2013: 1). how, though, do we go on living when the future has been lost? amidst globalized capitalism and widespread precarity, environmental instability and climate chaos, the bubbling war machine and alienation from the other, “the good life”, as berlant (2011) would say, that so many of us were urged to strive towards, no longer exists in an accessible way; the myth has frayed. and while for many of us marginalized along lines of sexual orientation, race, gender and (dis)ability, that future was never truly promised, the loss of good life is a heavy inheritance to bear nonetheless. we grieve our losses but… grief is tricky thing to capture. cheng speaks to the trouble of “quantifying grief” for the purpose of “proving” damage, suggesting that in doing so the character of grief is lost (2001: 6). here, cheng suggests that: part of the problem has to do with how we understand social healing and the tendency to rely on exclusively material or quantifiable terms to articulate that injury. the vocabulary of grievance … has ironically deflected attention from a serious look at the more immaterial, unquantifiable repository of public and private grief. (2001: 6) in other words, the attempt to quantify injury for the purpose of reparation is a turn away from queerness of grief. indeed, the queer affects of loss or grief are intangible and yet deeply felt—feelings that are not so quantifiable and can never be fully put to rest. so, to begin my story, i ask how do we mourn and move through “the heaviness we feel in a world that, we’re told, has no future” (milstein 2017: 7)? we stumble down a dirt path, illuminated only by the glow of cellphone flashlights. cicadas form an omnipotent wall of sound, but as we are swallowed the buzzing gives way to bass. thunderous and enveloping. beneath a full moon, beneath forgotten power structures, we generate power of our own, we form a tide that pulls the strays out of the bush and into the heat and into the beat. the deviants cordially invite the discontents to the pity party! pushed out of the club and onto the street… there is no “home” for us. no space to call our own. another club shut down, shuttered up, switched into something shiny… something with mass appeal. most of us are without a space to call our own: another ad for a roommate, another real estate agent, another rent cheque cashed… something like modern serfdom. we fight and grind to wiggle out from under someone else’s thumb. so, we must find our freedom elsewhere. the dance floor is our shelter, from the pressure, from the thumb. a shelter from the fight, from the wiggle… . from the “grind!” a different kind of grind. we do our work on the dance floor. dance floor, now, is a flexible term. more so a concept than a space. a feeling, a vibe. a dance floor can happen anywhere. tonight, it is an overgrown access road, hidden away by dirt and trees and powerlines. out of sight from the condo tower that looms overhead. there is little avenue through which to escape the urban sprawl, and our hedonic pursuits are dismissed and disparaged by the old moral safeguards, which bar us from the few spaces not yet repurposed, refurbished and renovated for sensible pleasures. so, we undertake our own renovations. we repurpose, refurbish and take over forgotten spaces, spaces which once served productive aims. power generation. production of matter. we take over and produce anti-matter. anti-productivity. “which is sort of the whole deal”, mckenzie wark says. “take over space. take over machines. take over chemistry” (2023: 2). we take over ecstasy. we get high while the ship goes down. we dance in the wreckage—the “collapsing capital” crumbles around us. ruined economies and ruined futures. we toil in the tall grass, labouring to the beat. the lies our parents told us—go to school … get a job … work hard and the world is yours—once bright and shiny, now rusted over. judith butler asks, “is there a loss that cannot be thought, cannot be owned or grieved, which forms the condition of the possibility for the subject?” (1997: 14). precarity forms the condition of our existence. i (and maybe you, too) inherited a dream that was always, already in decay. haunted by uncertainties, the spectres of environmental degradation and economic destruction shadow our path. so we move, and mourn, and maybe make another route. even the party itself is precarious. it could end at any moment, with the blare of sirens, the blue and red strobe which signals an end to the revelry. time to run. i’d hoped for more. the moment is lost, tacked on to the list. i first lost carnality in the interest of security, and much has been lost since. the immaterial reverberations of these losses hang like spirits overhead and haunt me (and maybe you, too). dina georgis refers to these ghosts as queer affects, queer in that they are “unspeakable, hard to name and … disruptive” (2013: 10). these ghosts can’t be exorcized, and so the grief is unending (our histories of damage do not recede). so, what are we to do with all this grief? how are we to reckon with loss when language fails, when what is lost cannot be named or even “recognized as loss, because what is lost never had any entitlement to existence” (butler 1997: 24)? i go raving, mad to be raving is to be mad, wild, irrational, incoherent, unhinged. “being touched by the queer affects of loss can feel like someone just cut through your skin and left you weeping” (georgis 2013: 7). and at the rave, on the dance floor, in the beat, it can feel like someone has ripped off my skin and left me screaming; sometimes i find myself thrashing with a violence i didn’t think myself capable of. i lose my composure.  there’s a rhythm to (… three … four) this de-composure. and that rhythm rocks you … two … three … four. the bass penetrates you … two … three … four. the music moves through you … two … three … four. the repetition plays a role here, too … three … four. ashton crawley recalls that in church, worshippers would sing a verse and a chorus on repeat for an extended period of time, and “the spirit would fall” (2020: 5). he suggests “the repetition allowed [them] to stay and linger and wait and tarry and imagine”, and that “repetition as a limit becomes also possibility, delimitation, the occasion for meditation and opening and vulnerability” (crawley 2020: 5). there’s something about the “repetition”—in the way the past repeats itself, in the way the beat repeats itself, in the way the future folds back on the past, in the way the body folds into the beat. on the dance floor, i meet the same spirits time and time again, and “what returns to haunt … is not only the reality of [my history] but also the reality of the way that its violence has not been fully known” (caruth 2016: 6). the spirit slips, and falls, and bleeds out into the air. i emerge, damp, from a dark and spiraling hole. buried deeply under moss, and dirt, and worms—i dig myself up, and into an ancient world. the air here is liquid, and time is slow and viscose.  in this ancient world, populated by spiders and fish and specters, temples rise and crumble. temples with the face of my mother . . . with the face of my father … with the face of some long dead ancestor, foreign to me and yet felt so deeply.  faces of my dead friends. faces of dead me(s).   my bones, which seem to be so pliant now, bend and vibrate under my skin. the red devil rips through my veins, sending shockwaves of pain until the rushing cold of the saline flush fills me with some spectre of relief. my body isn’t always mine. fleshy extensions to my left and right wiggle and clench into . . . hands, fists—full of rage and tender longing, slightly raised and throbbing. diving into the sea. pounding against rocks. driving down like nails in a cross.  fractals, like tiny sea creatures, spin in and out of focus, disappearing between the waves of blue which wash over me and veil my surroundings in light. pulsating frequencies extend tendrils of hope and shake out sticky memories, penetrating the clammy membrane of … me.  my skin slips off and i spill out: the feeling of being underwater, of breathing underwater. uncontained.  i’m all around me. i’m all around me. i’m all around me. craig jennex (2023) reminds us that the rave is simultaneously individual and collectivizing; it is a personal exercise that necessarily tethers us to others. and this is where the raving becomes reparative; this is where the mourning meets something more. here, the lost souls and slippery spirits that find themselves pushed under the bridge, out to the forest, into the warehouse bide our time and bind our ties. in the ruins we re-build, we craft a queer kinship—platforms, connections, rhizomatic networks mutating and burrowing underground. raving is a queer mode of relation, a private grieving and collective healing. the community found through the rave reaches far beyond the dance floor, for when i was diagnosed with cancer my present ate my future up a second time. i hungered for help, and my successes served me an empty tray. you can’t pay rent with pink ribbons. feeding on paperwork, ontario works … work didn’t help. productivity only pays off while you’re at it. another broken promise. but those anti-productive networks, rhizomes grown at the rave, they fed me in ways i can’t even describe. there is this song that sometimes plays in my head: “last night a dj saved my life”. well, djs and dancers really saved my life. the rave saved my life. mutual aid built out of abjection and what appeared to me then was an apparition, a party at the end of the world, and in the face an annihilation an image of a not-yet-here where we … take care of each other in spite of what has been lost, we build our own futures. sometimes immaterial, sometimes solid. rarely fully realized but real enough to release some grief and rectify some of society’s wrongs. even if the scale is small, even if the futures imagined are never fully materialized, even if there is no promise of emancipation, the dance floor provides opportunities to commune with ghosts and forge queer relations (see muñoz 2009). jennex says, “queerness, as a concept, is at its most promising when it is embodied, collective, and expanding—when it signals something not-yet-here, but something worth reaching for and moving toward” (2023: 8). the act of raving offers no simple solution for finding what has been lost, but somewhere amidst the sweat and shaking sound, the exhaustion and the ecstasy, i’ve found a way to reckon with my ghosts. and while these ghosts might be private, they can resonate with others. the desire to rave is in some way a desire to unleash, to release; we all have something that knocks to be let out, an unthought known clawing at consciousness. and so, moving through the rave space, then, means moving through a space that is filled with hauntings, that is ripe with queer affects. though we do not encounter each other’s ghosts in a material way—we are not necessarily confronted with the way that violence is enacted differently across people’s social locations—their shared resonance can be felt, if you are open to being released, and absorbed, or rather, to evaporating (see brennan 2004 and crawley 2020). crawley thinks, “to evaporate is to be made into that which can be inhaled and exhaled, that which can be breathed. would we perhaps then evaporate into and be united with it? what then would be our mode of existence?” (2020: 19). maybe what makes the experience of raving queer is that the bodies here leak and spill and bleed into one another; queer affects are exchanged through the flesh and through the atmosphere. in a spacetime like the rave, where one can linger (in the beat, in the rupture, in the club, in between, in … an otherwise world) for hours … days … seemingly months, years, perhaps what we are offered is a ghostly mode of existence. this is an offering of an evaporative way of being wherein we are confronted with the messy stuff of the past and the impossible future, with primal desires and inarticulate affects, and where grief might find space to breathe (even if only for a moment). and maybe, in that space between (beats … bodies … breath), we can encounter love as a part of grief. acknowledgements for the family forged on the dance floor. author biography emily l. murphy is a phd candidate and cultural theorist at brock university whose work sits at the intersection of psychoanalysis and subcultural studies. her dissertation research, under the supervision of dr. hannah dyer and dr. chelsea jones, explores affective space of the rave, and the networks of queer-crip kinship formed therein. she is also a dance floor regular and a dj, playing under the moniker venus in foil. references bollas, christopher. 1987. the shadow of the object: psychoanalysis of the unthought known. new york: columbia university press. berlant, lauren. 2011. cruel optimism. durham: duke university press. <https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822394716>. brennan, thersea. 2004. the transmission of affect. ithaca: cornell university press. <https://doi.org/10.7591/9780801471377>. butler, judith. 1997.  the psychic life of power: theories in subjection. redwood city: stanford university press. caruth, cathy. 2016. unclaimed experience. baltimore: johns hopkins university press. <https://doi.org/10.56021/9781421421650>. cheng, anne anlin. 2001. the melancholy of race: psychoanalysis, assimilation, and hidden grief. oxford: oxford university press. <https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195134032.001.0001>. crawley, ashton. 2020. the lonely letters. durham: duke university press. <https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv123x7d8>. dyer, hannah. 2020. the queer aesthetics of childhood: asymmetries of innocence and the cultural politics of child development. chicago: rutgers university press. <https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvscxrd5>. georgis, dina. 2013. the better story. albany: suny press. jennex, craig. 2023. “queer collectivity in the echoes of the dance floor”. lingering 14: 6-8. <https://content.blackwoodgallery.ca/media/pages/publications/sduk/lingering/f2c3a21a48-1673446726/blackwood_sduk14_lingering.pdf>, (accessed 17 october 2024). milstein, cindy. 2017. rebellious mourning: the collective work of grief. chico: ak press. muñoz, josé esteban. 2009. cruising utopia: the then and there of queer futurity. new york: new york university press. <https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479868780.001.0001>. wark, mckenzie. 2023. raving. durham: duke university press. <https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv33t5gzt>. dancecult 17(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic music & dance culture 17(1) 2025: 150–167 issn 1947-5403 ©2025 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net dance your way home: a journey through the dancefloor emma warren london: faber & faber, 2023. isbn: 9780571366040 (paperback) rrp: uk£12.99 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.13> richard anderson university of liverpool (uk) at the time of writing, in august 2025, london’s southbank centre, which is arguably the epitome of uk “high culture” is running a month-long summer programme of free events inspired by emma warren’s book dance your way home. depending upon one’s perspective this can be seen as an act of “gallerification”, in which folk/popular/working class cultures are recuperated into a canonical presentation within elitist institutions, or part of an evolving movement of genuine recognition of social dance as an inclusive expression of human joy. either way, the southbank’s programme represents a hugely significant impact for a contemporary written word text. dance your way home is not an academic treatise on the act of dancing, but a very accessible, and at times deeply personal autobiography outlining the vital importance of moving to music for oneself and for societies. structured in three parts, the book is steeped in uk dancefloor history. in part one, warren traces the initial foundations her dancing is built on. from domestic bopping to television music show top of the pops, to her irish heritage and late seventies uk sound system cultures from whose roots blossomed much of what dancecult examines. the second part highlights warren’s progression onto dancefloors from school discos, her underage clubbing in london, to her right-place, right-time at manchester university in the early nineties. through these back drops, the story of dance’s cultural global explosion is set and illuminated with personal reminiscences, interviews with contemporary luminaries and scattered with explanations of academic studies from a breadth of disciplines which support the range of arguments warren lays forth on dancing’s importance. reviews https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.13 reviews 151 dancing is lovingly set, not as subservient to, or a side effect of music and musical styles, but as having its own primacy. hence dancing threads its way throughout the book, in various locations and spaces, and in different social and racial cultures, functioning as crossgenerational ever-presence in twentieth and twenty-first century eras. the part memoir nature of the text acts as a constraint to the potential span of the subject matter. the book’s focus on social dance as presented in the global north, most specifically in the british isles predominately in the last fifty years could be considered a limitation. however, in adopting this position, warren recounts dance movement emergences with a lived experience sincerity. in telling her tales of house, techno, drum‘n’bass, and later grime histories, she includes reference to so-called legendary uk clubs such as shroom, the hacienda, phenomenon one and plastic people, not because these were definitive, but because she danced there herself at those times. she clearly articulates the legacies of numerous less renowned but no less significant nights and venues from her past and recognises many other “nerve centres” (181) operating beyond those she attended, of having parallel prominence and vitality. when the book does narrate histories that are not her own, warren ensures she does so with care, placing these as part of a lineage her own dancing is scaffolded on. this is especially evident within the important chapters on the hitherto neglected spaces of the school disco and youth club, where so many british adolescents, to varying degrees, learnt how to dance. the latter aspect is expanded on in warren’s (2025) latest work, up the youth club. chapter three’s detailed account of strangling church repression of dancing in ireland which contributed to an exodus of young women from the country, including her own grandmother; and eighties chicago gymnasiums recounted through interviews in chapter seven are similarly approached with recognition that these are not warren’s direct experiences. like walking, dancing is presented throughout as a fundamentally human activity, if you dance, you are a dancer (33), and dancefloors are situated wherever we make them (307). in this sense the book stands alongside the equally brilliant but more historically comprehensive dancing in the streets by the late barbara ehrenreich (2006). in both books, social dance finds a voice celebrating non-specialist everyday dancing, joining the still surprisingly recent emergence of social dance texts within the dance academy. there is much resonance here with the historically situated concepts of dancing as community expression found in malnig’s (2009), and dodds and cook’s (2013) collected works. what is fresh in dance your way home is the drawing of more personal connectivity between the performative club dancing, by crews and individuals in the eighties, to direct involvement in djing, and promoting club nights such as a guy called gerald’s recollections of their professional dancing lessons and aspirations (225–26). in the final part of the book, warren herself participates in a studio dance class, with the academy setting transformed into a place of therapy as she becomes aware of her dyspraxia. the restorative and healing power of dancing is a recurrent theme throughout the text. dancecult 17(1)152 warren employs a meticulously researched array of scientific study findings to describe everyday dance’s benefits for physical and mental health. another of the book’s themes warren is at pains to point out is that dancing is always historically situated, and many of the dance movements she has experienced have emerged as a response to specific, frequently harsh, social circumstances. she encapsulates this most succinctly in quoting the title of alice walker’s (2013) collection, hard times require furious dancing (223). the sense of community and resilience in the face of repressions, that finds expression through collective everyday dancing and a sense of temporary belonging or embraced by what mary fogarty described as a sense of an alternative “family” (2015: 247), is at the core of dance your way home’s message and that we can all dance our own histories. references dodds, sherril and susan cook. 2013. bodies of sound: studies across popular music and dance. farnham: ashgate. ehrenreich, barbara. 2006. dancing in the streets: a history of collective joy. london: granta publications. fogarty, mary. 2015. “the body and dance”. in the routledge reader on the sociology of music, ed. john shepherd and kyle devine, 245–54. new york: routledge. malnig, julie. 2009. ballroom, boogie, shimmy sham, shake: a social and popular dance reader. chicago: university of illinois press. walker, alice and shiloh mccloud. 2013. hard times require furious dancing: new poems. novato: new world library. warren, emma. 2025. up the youth club: illuminating a hidden history. london: faber & faber. reviews 153 black music in britain in the 21st century monique charles (ed.) with mary w. gani liverpool: liverpool university press, 2023. isbn: 978-1-80207-840-4, eisbn: 978-1-83764-659-3 rrp: uk£29,99 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.14> charlet brethomé (université du québec à montréal, canada) following her work on grime, cultural sociologist monique charles edits a collective volume that brings together researchers and practitioners to explore, from multiple approaches, black music in britain in the twenty-first century. with the editorial collaboration of mary w. gani (a lawyer specialising in the music industry), the book offers a panorama that combines academic papers, interviews, and visual essays. published in the series “liverpool studies in the politics of popular culture”, the volume seeks to analyse musical scenes in relation to the regimes of power that shape their emergence, circulation and reception. the book is clearly situated within the lineage of black atlantic studies. this characterises the transmission, unfolding and interconnections of black cultures around the atlantic, as well as the cultural hybridisations resulting from the long history of forced removal of black populations from their territories and cultural milieus (gilroy 1993). it is therefore a welcome contribution that deepens and extends analysis of this continuum from the vantage point of contemporary black british musics. notably, it expands the classic roots/ routes dichotomy (gilroy 1993) by emphasising the role of digital infrastructures and networks—what the editors term “routers”—in the contemporary formation of genres and publics. the book’s richness—and, potentially, its limitation—lies in the multiplicity of genres examined and the diversity of problematisations, contexts and methods mobilised. the centrality of sound system culture, dub and reggae is nonetheless clear, as many of the forms under study partly emerge from these matrices. in this respect, the book already helps to capture the resonances and contemporary traces of sound system culture within new musical assemblages. the entire first section is devoted to these contemporary articulations. whether in hyacinth’s study on roots manuva’s album “dub come save me”, charles’s attempt to systematise a “sound system sensibility”, gani’s interview with lawrence “l.j.” johnson, or télémaque’s photo-essay “trap atlantic”, each contribution shows the extent to which the musical objects under scrutiny are marked by the circulation and hybridisation of techniques, technologies, sounds and melodies. each case also demonstrates how these cultural productions—actualising the black atlantic continuum—braid together the global and the local, and past with present and future. https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.14 dancecult 17(1)154 the second section, which examines genres that emerged or persisted into the twentyfirst century, likewise includes an interview with a music industry professional and a photo essay. these two formats depart from conventional research articles and allow readers to inhabit different standpoints and perspectives. charles’s interview with ugwu traces the personal trajectory of an industry professional within the circulatory contexts already outlined, particularly between nigeria and london. charles and facey’s photo essay likewise offers a direct view of the places and the spatial organisation of steel pan practice in east london. more broadly, these chapters press further on the role of cultural industries in the recuperation, transformation and marginalisation of black musics and musicians. in particular, the chapters by palmer and toppin on the lovers rock scene and the jungle genre, respectively show how racism and patriarchy have jointly contributed to the invisibilisation and reshaping of scenes and musics in favour of certain audiences, industries and male and/or white musicians. the other two chapters in this section trace two very different pathways through which artists and musical forms (re-)emerge. muir examines black majority churches as sites that—through their locations, relational networks and pentecostal habitus—enable the development of musical competences convertible into the field of popular music and thus into economic capital. melville, by contrast, shows how contemporary information and communication technologies facilitate the circulation of techniques and recent tracks and contribute significantly to the revival of jazz in england among a new generation representative of contemporary urban british life. finally, the third and last section, “socio-political and economic issues”, interrogates contemporary black british musics critically through their contexts of emergence and diffusion. the opening chapters—by “hussla d” johnson and wallace, on the one hand, and by lambros fatsis, on the other—are particularly illuminating for understanding the processes of invisibilisation, criminalisation and thus marginalisation that unfold across black music scenes. the former provides an exemplary analysis of how cultural industries select and profit from particular cultural trajectories over others. sketching the contours of a political economy of reggae authenticity that marginalises british artists in favour of jamaican artists or labels, even though these musics are disseminated and consumed in england. fatsis, for his part, shows how ambient western racism materialises around black sound and forms of gathering, further criminalising and stigmatising these populations and their cultural productions. these two chapters are especially productive for night studies, as they help to grasp how the neoliberal capture of festive and musical forms that once placed society “in crisis” proceeds both through their whitewashing and through the criminalisation and marginalisation of their blackness. the final three chapters by scott, bushay and madar consider, from distinct perspectives, the role of music and its representations for artists and audiences: grime as a practice of refusal vis-à-vis expected social and racial positions; hip-hop as pedagogical practice by and for black women; and the ways black men receive the dominant images and aesthetics associated with them and negotiate them. reviews 155 overall, this collection edited by monique charles offers a rich and nuanced panorama of a field too seldom examined in its complexity, given the tendency to treat black musics monolithically under the rubric of the “urban”. although the approaches vary, the shared emphasis on sound system culture as a constitutive matrix, the black atlantic continuum and a critical race approach provides the book with strong internal coherence. that said, greater parity between conceptual labour and empirical precision would have been welcome. moreover, while some chapters—especially in the third section—foreground the cultural industries, several analyses would benefit from engaging more directly with industry-specific processes of appropriation and whitewashing. doing so would sharpen a highly fertile line of critique that reads the marginalisation of black cultures and their re-undergrounding (a promising avenue) as among the conditions of possibility for contemporary “nightlife cities”. finally, the near-exclusive focus on london invites the question of how black musics are configured elsewhere in britain. reference gilroy, paul. 1993. the black atlantic, modernity and double consciousness. cambridge: harvard university press. dancecult 17(1)156 platformed! how streaming, algorithms and artificial intelligence are shaping music cultures tiziano bonini and paolo magaudda cham, switzerland: palgrave macmillan, 2024. isbn 978-3-031-43964-3 (hardcover), isbn 978-3-031-43965-0 (ebook) rrp: uk£109.00 (hardcover), uk£109.00 (paperback), uk£87.50 (e-book) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.15> seán finnan technological university dublin (ireland) earlier this summer, spotify’s ceo and co-founder daniel ek, led a €600 million investment into a start-up named helsing, specialising in artificial intelligence military software. deerhoof and a number of other indie bands withdrew their catalogue from the music streaming platform, baulking at having their music accessible via a platform who shares a ceo with a military startup. deerhoof described the company as “creepy” and a “datamining scam masquerading as a ‘music company’” (green and strauss 2025). in this now well established digital economy, deerhoof point to the complexity of digital platforms such as spotify’s business model—are they a music company, data broker, advertiser or something more sinister? in platformed!, a work by tiziano bonini and paolo maguadda, the authors seek to tease out the social factors and historical conditions that have allowed spotify to become an almost monolithic presence in the mediation of music, the influence its having on contemporary music culture and the anxieties that come with a company using data profiling as a means to ascertain the taste of a listener. the story is complicated and brings with it hardline opinions on the effect streaming culture is having on music. the authors are attentive to such qualitative judgements; that streaming platforms have ruined the music experience of a younger generation by dematerialising the music product, that such platforms have encourage a disengaged listening curated by the machine rather than a human, or that musicians are now writing music tailored to the algorithm and its penchant for instant hooks. for the authors, such judgements afford streaming platforms such as spotify too much agency, while at the same time, ignoring the impact that social practices had on the development of online music sharing, streaming and datafication prior to spotify’s arrival. instead the authors, drawing from the work of science and technology scholars such as latour, argue that the evolution of technologies do not follow “a single, coherent logic” (6) but respond to the distinct conjuncture of social, political and economic pressures— conditions that are informed by the agency of social actors, and not primarily by the technology itself. to illustrate such, the authors provide a historical account of music’s circulation as a commercial artefact, its transition from an analogue artefact to a digital https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.15 reviews 157 one and the impact new online peer-to-peer networks had in the late 1990s on normalising the consumption of digital music. at each stop on this whirlwind tour of music’s evolution as a commercial product, driven by the demands of industry, there is a counterpoint proposed, the disruption by non-industry actors, early hackers such as shawn fanning of napster, or music researchers such as karlheinz brandenburg and his work on developing the mp3 format and the anonymous role that hordes of music fans had in making use of new technologies like peer-to-peer file sharing in distributing music for free. by presenting the various technological breakthroughs that allowed for music streaming to come into existence, the authors are reminding the reader at each moment that technology is consistently implicated within its social moment. in other words, just because a technology exists, does not mean it will be adopted. while the term “streaming” might now be predominantly associated with listening to music or watching videos on demand, streaming technology was not originally intended for such. originally developed in the 1990s, during a period when transmitting sound on the web faced “almost insurmountable technological constraints” (24), streaming was explored as a means to mirror radio’s capacity for broadcasting live events, using the internet instead of the airwaves. experiments with streaming technologies followed a “variety of different trajectories” (29), from internet radio experiments to webcasting of parliamentary debates, and through its myriad uses, often outside of dominant commercial industries, became normalised as a broadcasting tool. yet it was only with the transition towards what srnicek (2017) has termed “platform capitalism” that streaming became commercially viable. in chapter three, the authors provide an accessible overview of the rise of the platform society, detailing the multifaceted computational infrastructure they rely upon in order to operate; datafication of user behaviour, data analysis of music (in the case of music streaming platforms), algorithms for personalised recommendations, guiding the reader through the complicated industrial business practices of what can appear to be merely immaterial websites. it’s a necessary detour that situates spotify’s business model within wider economic and technological trends and illustrates the structural shifts that have been impacting the cultural industries over the past decade or so. streaming technologies may have been with us for over three decades, yet it is their implication with algorithmic processes and artificial intelligences that are currently provoking the most unease. whether it’s the development of artificial intelligence that can automatically produce a song in a sonic style according to various user prompts, or the increasing appearance of ai music in spotify playlists, such transitions again inflame anxieties around the nature of human creativity and its replacement by machines. in chapters four, anxieties around the role that algorithms have in music selection are examined, particularly in the fear that the human curator has been sidelined by automated processes. the authors draw from bonini’s own ethnographic research with gandini (2019) on curating playlists to illustrate the continued presence of real live humans in the editorial offices of streaming platforms, even if the authors here warn that a small number of playlists are increasingly influential in determining the viability of a musician’s career. dancecult 17(1)158 taking on such a large scope as the transformation of music cultures as a result of music streaming platforms means there will inevitably be a considerable amount of shifts left unaddressed in the work. while there is much focus on individual tactics of resistance, it would be interesting to understand more about how various music scenes and non-corporate streaming initiatives are enacting algorithmic resistance, a term the authors use for listeners who attempt to “circumvent, control, or mislead the data collection mechanisms enacted by platforms’ algorithms” (115). despite this, platformed! provides a valuable primer for anyone wishing to get their bearings in the ever-shifting landscape of music’s situatedness in digital media ecologies and a reminder of the power that artists and fans have in shaping music cultures. references bonini, tiziano and alessandro gandini. 2019. “‘first week is editorial, second week is algorithmic’: platform gatekeepers and the platformization of music curation”. social media + society 5(4): 1–11. <https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119880006>. green, walden and matthew strauss. 2025. “deerhoof to remove music from spotify”. pitchfork. 30 june: <https://pitchfork.com/news/deerhoof-to-remove-music-from-spotify/>, (accessed 1 august 2025). srnicek, nick. 2017. platform capitalism. cambridge, uk; medford, ma: polity press. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119880006 https://pitchfork.com/news/deerhoof-to-remove-music-from-spotify/ reviews 159 dance music: a feminist account of an ordinary culture tami gadir new york: bloomsbury academic, 2023. isbn: 978-1-5013-4640-8 (paperback), 978-1-5013-4641-5 (hardcover) rrp: us$92.05 (hardcover), us$28.66 (paperback) welcome to the club: the life and lessons of a black woman dj dj paulette manchester: manchester university press, 2024. isbn: 978-1-5261-6690-6 (hardcover) rrp: uk£20.00 (hardcover) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.16> maren hancock macewan university (canada) over the past two decades, dance music studies have shifted meaningfully from celebratory accounts of subcultural resistance to more critical, intersectional appraisals of labour, space, power and politics. two recent books extend and deepen this shift: welcome to the club: the life and lessons of a black woman dj by dj paulette and dance music: a feminist account of an ordinary culture by tami gadir. although distinct in genre and methodology— gadir’s book is an academic monograph, while paulette’s is a memoir—both texts challenge the idealized narratives that have dominated scholarly and popular accounts of dj culture. together, they offer a much-needed recalibration of what it means to make, live, and think through dance music in the twenty-first century. gadir opens her book with a thesis that is almost deceptively simple: “dance music is ordinary” (1). by this, she means that dance music culture is not necessarily mundane (although it often is, as she demonstrates), but socially and structurally embedded; indeed, dance music is shot through with the same exclusions, hierarchies and contradictions as any other cultural practice. this assertion is a direct challenge to decades of scholarship and fan writing that frame dj culture as inherently emancipatory, utopian or exceptional. for gadir, origin stories about detroit, chicago, berlin and new york may have been politically useful in early subcultural theory, but they have since become canonical and limiting: “what has happened since,” she argues in the conclusion, “is that such interventions have become the accepted stories of dance music culture. as such, they no longer serve their original function, and their politics are no longer radical.” (168) paulette (who is mononymous) presents a similar critique from a different angle. her memoir, welcome to the club, tracks over 30 years in the industry—from early gigs in manchester’s queer nightlife scene, including her role as a resident at the hacienda’s https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.16 dancecult 17(1)160 flesh, through corporate pr work at mercury records and eventually to international stardom. yet despite her longevity and acclaim, paulette reflects repeatedly on how her contributions—like those of many black women djs—have been marginalized or omitted entirely from mainstream dance music history: “the winners in dance music have mainly been men,” she writes, quoting carl loben, “and men are more likely to push themselves forward and take the credit” (128). when paulette became the resident dj at flesh, the club’s legendary and first queer night, she was one of only two women djs to hold down a hacienda residency. she describes how her residency at flesh “enabled [her] to join a boy’s club which changed [her] life” (5) and “was unarguably the catalyst for [her] career” (32). still, paulette stresses that hacienda was not the only “thing” in manchester–remember, dominant narratives dominate history. paulette stresses that, as important as the hacienda was, “if history is to be correct, we have to acknowledge the other stories that have been squashed down and pushed out” (35). she emphasizes that a “vibrant underground dj scene” (33) existed at the time that hasn’t been awarded historical prominence, “inhabited by a cluster of black music promoters” (33). despite this, “black people weren’t invited into the city centre–any city centre–in england and the early nineties were not a ‘black creative’ friendly space” (33). her reflections offer lived evidence to support gadir’s claim that historiographic gatekeeping and cultural memory are structured by race, gender and power. gadir’s research spans a decade of fieldwork and interviews conducted across the uk, tel aviv, zurich, oslo and sydney, with a focus on how gender, race, class and regulatory frameworks shape dance music environments. her methods include participant observation and critical discourse analysis, with a particular emphasis on mythologies of meritocracy and postfeminism. if gadir’s work serves as a feminist audit of the dance music studies field, paulette’s memoir functions as a counter-archive: a first-person record of scenes and struggles often left undocumented. paulette’s memoir is rooted in her singular but deeply intersectional experience as a queer black woman navigating predominantly white and male spaces. yet her storytelling is far from anecdotal. she consistently situates her experiences within broader systems of exclusion—whether confronting the “lead-lined” glass ceiling while working in pr for mercury records (54), being told she’d never get booked as “a black, female dj with grey hair” (122), or having samples of her autobiography dismissed by male colleagues such as frank broughton for not having enough sex and drugs to make it interesting. thankfully, paulette ignored his advice when manchester press approached her to write the book in 2021. one of the many strengths of welcome to the club lies in paulette’s insistence that embodied experience is not separate from theory—it is theory in motion. paulette stresses that her book is neither a complete history of edm nor her definitive biography; rather, it’s “a series of snapshots that follow a chronological arc from the start of [her] dj’ing career to the present day, bending this through the prism of other people’s histories to acknowledge the wider picture. after all, ten people at a party will never tell reviews 161 the same story.” (2–3) here, paulette introduces a theme both glaringly obvious and yet somehow still ignored: history is subjective and favours hegemonic subjects. acknowledging her intersectional positionality within what bell hooks characterizes as “white supremacist patriarchal” culture, paulette states, “i have the unique perspective of an outsider with insider knowledge and an insider with outside knowledge” (3). both paulette and gadir foreground the ongoing struggles women face in dj culture, though with different emphases. in chapter 5 of dance music, gadir dissects how gender operates not just at the level of representation, but in sonic codes, gatekeeping, and audience perception. female djs are often marketed either as “sexy and incompetent” or musically credible but non-conforming to beauty norms (121–123). these binaries echo in media representation and club booking policies, and paulette’s narrative personalizes these structural forces. she documents the repeated erasure of her skills, the scrutiny of her appearance and the exhausting dance between authenticity and acceptability. her story makes visible the emotional and economic toll of navigating these contradictions alongside unpredictable, irregular employment —what gadir names as “precarity in informal economies” (140) and paulette describes more viscerally as “losing your mojo” (121). both gadir and paulette extend their analysis into ageism, showing how dance music’s obsession with youth further marginalizes women. paulette, now in her fifties, writes candidly about facing dwindling bookings and backhanded compliments. yet she refuses invisibility: “remind yourself that few white men have a problem with celebrating their wins... you too should remember and feel pride in yourself and your achievements.” (139) her memoir becomes a feminist act of citation—of herself and of the women who built the scene alongside her. in chapter 2, paulette describes how she “started to build a network of female supporters” (47–48), and this is key to her narrative. throughout welcome to the club, paulette shouts out the amazing women she encountered, including but not limited to: smokin’ jo, dulcie danger, caroline prothero, jamz supernova, marcia carr, colleen ‘cosmo’ murphy, judy griffith, gladys pizarro, jaguar, erica mckoy, niks, lakuti, naomi pohl, anz, sherelle and more. if you don’t know these women, you should look them up. one of gadir’s most provocative contributions is her critique of “transcendence” as a central value in dance music discourse. in chapter 4, she questions whether the romanticized peak experience—of becoming one with the dance floor, the lights, the crowd—is truly emancipatory or simply another consumerist ideal dressed in subcultural clothing, stating “[t]he popular discourses on utopianism in dance music culture leave little room for addressing problematic gender dynamics” (164). for gadir, transcendence is often an individualist fantasy that displaces collective political action. paulette’s memoir complements this critique with realism and wit. while she recounts moments of joy, connection and artistic mastery, she never glorifies the scene. instead, she foregrounds its labour: lugging records, facing hostile sound techs, staying professional in the face of condescension and recovering from burnout: “the glamour is fleeting, the graft is real, and the sacrifices are many” (74), she writes. paulette’s story echoes gadir’s insistence that even the most exceptional spaces can be host to ordinary experiences. dancecult 17(1)162 both books reject dance music exceptionalism in favour of something more politically grounded. gadir’s final chapter critiques the field of dance music studies itself for clinging to outdated narratives of resistance and transcendence. she asks, “what function does dance music writing whose main goal is advocacy or defence serve now that there is no longer an orthodoxy to challenge?” (170) in its place, she calls for a post-utopian, anti-capitalist feminist praxis that acknowledges the limitations of dance floors while mobilizing their collectivist potential toward structural change. paulette’s conclusion, subtitled “a manifesto”, similarly balances critique with hope. she doesn’t romanticize the past, but she insists that club culture can still be a site of joy, community and creative resistance: “community is the foundation. collaboration is the future. alliances reinforce the chain.” (195) she reminds readers that love—for music, for people, for the party—is not apolitical; it is the engine that keeps us going. in sum, these two books—one a rigorous academic intervention, the other a vital work of cultural memory—deserve to be read in tandem as both disrupt the plur mnemonic. paulette and gadir challenge scholars, djs, promoters, fans and all stakeholders in dance music to move beyond myth and toward accountability. whether we encounter dj culture in lecture halls or on dance floors, in archives or behind the decks, dance music and welcome to the club remind us that the work of rethinking dance music culture is far from finished. reviews 163 live spielen: liveness in performances elektronischer tanzmusik josef schaubruch hildesheim: universitätsverlag hildesheim, 2024. isbn: 978-3-96424-101-6 (paperback) rrp: €27,00 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.17> jack mcneill university of york (uk) as i write this review i am looking at an old ticket stub on my desk for an event in july 2025 in leeds. the stub includes all the usual information you’d expect from the gig ticket: venue, time, price, promoter, etc. the headline of the stub displays the name of the artist, followed by the following text in bold: “live dj set”. to some, this may be paradoxical; how can a dj set where an artist is playing pre-produced records one after the other be “live”? some may even see such a claim as audacious if the artist is not playing their own work using acoustic, amplified and/or electronic musical instruments and employing a level of mastery or even virtuosity. some may take a more sympathetic view. surely the presence of the artist and audience and some sort of interaction between the two is enough to make the performance “live”. debates around what a live performance involves are pervasive in electronic dance music cultures. views are manifold, and long have ravers, artists and enthusiasts debated the nuances of liveness in electronic dance music performance. if this is a debate you have had or are preparing for your next heated discussion on the topic, perhaps you might want to come equipped with some robust arguments. and if robust arguments on liveness are what you are looking for, look no further than josef schaubruch’s live spielen. live spielen is a comprehensive and critical review on notions of liveness in electronic dance music performances. rather than attempting to provide an absolute definition of the term, schaubruch highlights the theoretical and practical complexities and vagueness bound up with it. the work is convincing and presents a solid theoretical background around liveness in dance music genres, before undertaking empirical study and analysis on electronic artists who perform live and have a variety of different perspectives on what that means to them. schaubruch considers a number of positions on the notion of liveness, spanning from more common (mostly electronic) instrumental performances to the understanding of the dj set as a “live” practice (or not, as some argue), and the importance of corporeality, embodiment and an audience’s presence and interaction with the artist to a live performance. the first chapter is centred around the ambiguity of live performance in electronic music. it elegantly outlines the anxieties of electronic dance music artists around whether something might be live, as well as introducing the various constellations of live performance in electronic music, including turntablism, live coding, hardware performances and more. in this theoretical introduction, schaubruch also emphasises that his reflections on liveness often stem from less tangible phenomena like practice and affect as well as technologies, placing artists and audiences as critical to his discussion. chapter 2 presents a solid and https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.17 dancecult 17(1)164 comprehensive literature review. this chapter is particularly strong and is a useful resource for those working in or interested in the blooming academic discussion around liveness and electronic dance music. notable in the chapter is linguistic analysis of genre and musical role (e.g. dj/producer) across english and german, and the assertion that providing a single binary definition of “liveness” (i.e. “live” and “not live”) is no longer possible. in doing so, schaubruch mostly avoids falling into traps around defining what may or may not be authentic, again focussing on the multiplicity and vagueness of the terms he explores. following the rigorous review of literature, he provides a brief outline of his methodology which is clear and addresses gaps in field, particularly in the empirical study of liveness in electronic dance music. his discussion around reflexive grounded theory is both engaging and goes some way in addressing the perpetual complexity of aligning the specificities of dance music cultures with research methodologies. at the same time, there is a clear engagement with the author’s positionality as researcher, artist and participant in the dance music culture. the fourth chapter plots schaubruch’s findings and his own theoretical reflections on them, extracting broader themes stemming from the empirical work with artists who professionally engage with live electronic music performance. the outcomes are expansive, supported by informative diagrams. one particularly striking observation, albeit one that might be predictable to the reader, is the cultural capital that liveness holds for the artists interviewed. there is an inherent tension among artists’ reflections on what “liveness” is, with some focussed on the practice of using live instruments itself, while others with more of a focus towards creating moments of presence with audiences. not one to shy away from the complexity of these arguments, schaubruch explores where these tensions intersect, extending notions of subject and object to body (artist) and equipment, as well as artist and audience, exploring the relationships between musicians and instruments as an illustrative comparison. overall, live spielen presents a thorough, rigorous and engaging analysis on the role that liveness has in the performance of electronic dance music. he leans into the diversity and conflicts in both the literature and the points of view of the artists he interviews to illustrate the richness and potential in various definitions of live performances of electronic dance music. there are a (very small) handful of instances where it might be inferred that value judgements around live performances being “better” than dj sets, particularly in the “grad an liveness”, are being made. although these appear to emerge from the author’s empirical work, their absolute presentation may be seen to negate the vagueness in terminology that schaubruch so effectively builds throughout most of the text. while not necessarily within the scope of this work, an exploration on the role of liveness in studio production, and how live performances translate to the composition and production of fixed media is missing in the book and perhaps presents a gap for future work. admittedly, when i first received the ticket for the above-mentioned event in leeds, i scoffed at the absurdity of a “live dj set”. i was convinced that the headline description of the event was wholly paradoxical, perhaps a marketing ploy that plays into schaubruch’s assertions on the cultural capital of the live set. having read live spielen and considered the vagueness of the notion liveness in electronic dance music however, i am not so sure, and this is one of the great successes of this text; it questions as much as it answers. reviews 165 assembling a black counter culture deforrest brown, jr. new york: primary information, 2022. isbn: 9781734489736 (paperback) rrp: us$15.00 <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.18> emre öztürk humboldt-universität zu berlin (germany) deforrest brown jr. is a musician, media theorist and curator who has been an essential voice in questioning the current state of global electronic music and framing it within the radical black perspective. in assembling a black counter culture (2022), he traces the “black secret technology” centering detroit techno meanwhile covering black vernacular cultures, racial capitalism, industrialization and black resistance. combining both academic and underground knowledge, brown visits the black labor, ingenuity and futuristic desire, questioning techno’s later depoliticized and dehistoricized reception within various discursive and practical realms among the global electronic music industry. more than a linear musical timeline, this book is rather a counter-archive; interviews, artist biographies, scene insights and media archaeology are constant while brown digs further into the direction of techno’s cybernetic essence and creative drive. doing so, the book references valuable literature at the intersection of racial capitalism, cybernetics, and black desire, citing authors like cedric robinson, paul gilroy, kodwo eshun, fred moten, as well as frequently referring to the afrofuturist heritage and diasporic myth-science.  starting from detroit, brown later situates techno within the broader black atlantic, as well as its further branches through locations like japan, germany and the uk. while each chapter breaks down techno’s timeline by focusing on different perspectives, locations or concepts, brown eventually re-assembles all the information in the final chapter, “the collapse of modern culture” a title that is very much self-explanatory. brown merely hesitates to express his personal opinion, in fact, he clearly shows his position also on the very first page of the book with five different diagrams; the first one being a forecast of unbearable ecological load that inevitably leads to the “collapse of modern civilization”, and the second one that maps out the timeline of the black atlantic that starts with the global slave trade that he indicates the inevitable future result, “the journey home”. in that sense, brown underlines the inescapable outcomes of a culture that is assembled through racial capitalism and neocolonialism, combining self-reflexive insights with the comprehensive research data he provides. in the first few pages, the book cruises through the racialized history of the us and colonialism with their connection to current racial capitalism and the “rise of modern industrial complexes”. while discussing the essence of black usage of media and machines https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.18 dancecult 17(1)166 in the context of electronic music and dance cultures, brown pays dues to early architects of afrofuturism such as sun ra, lee “scratch” perry or george clinton, discussing their influence on later black electronic musics. he quickly sets its route to detroit in the following chapter, zooming into the life of techno’s originators in the us midwest, where post-fordist racial capitalism peaked post world war ii. one of brown’s main arguments is that techno’s emergence is inseparable from the conditions of post-fordist america and the automation of black labor. he conceptualizes techno as an embodied and racialized extension of the workers’ engagement with industrial machinery, adding that the music’s futuristic desires are not merely stylistic but are direct reflection of the industrial environment, that he eventually refers to as “black secret technology.” brown positions detroit techno pioneers like juan atkins, jeff mills and underground resistance as sonic engineers responding to industrial debilitation and using machines and rhythms to pursue new aesthetic forms and sonic fiction, while continously providing examples from afrofuturistic heritage and mythscientific practice that points out to the everlasting connection between pasts, presents and the futures of the black atlantic sonic futurism. brown also goes over the world’s changing economic and political climate and its impacts on the racialized, social and financial structure of the usa and beyond, zooming into cases such as us’s post-civil war and more contemporary topics such as racial policies and riots, or state-driven violence in the 20th century as what equally shaped the conditions for techno to flourish. at the intersection of racialized structures and mainstream media, he constantly provides concrete examples of techno and other black music being whitewashed through media tools such as news narrations, charts or interviews to show the doubleedged sword of british and american music market; where britain has become a melting pot of different black music with enough financial stability to the us’s, covering techno’s expansion overseas and its results with another self-explanatory chapter called “wake up america, you are dead!”. next chapter “detroit-berlin axis” provides even more insights by revealing further connections of black musical cultures with racial capitalism and neocolonialism, focusing on the genre’s second decade of existence and exportation outside of the us, under “a colonial project that white european crowds fetishize detroit’s sonic labor and whitewashing it”as brown puts it, diving into stories from post-cold war era berlin with a hedonistic, neocolonial venture that simultaneously serves for the western cultural hegemony. exampling paternalistic assumptions of kraftwerk and other westernwhite influences on detroit techno, or scholars such as stockhausen and adorno, brown maps out the post-colonial multiculturalism that reappropriates the african american musical continuum on the 1990s and beyond, going over cases like underground resistance or drexciyan empire as black resistance in response.  brown brings his focus to the present in the final chapters, interrogating how platform capitalism has restructured the global music economy and further marginalized black producers. he maps out the consolidation of power in media platforms, streaming services and corporate-backed festivals, showing how these infrastructures continue the exploitation and erasure of black creative labor. here he reframes all previous chapters through the lens reviews 167 of platform capitalism and questions its impacts on techno and beyond, going over the capitalization of the black body, mind, and labor through contemporary technological infrastructure. yet, he already made the conclusion clear many times throughout the book, that blackness is always already in counter-position to the structures of racial capitalism that seek to contain it. if there is a central claim in assembling a black counter culture, it is that resistance, speculative imagination and reassembling are constant variables of the black secret technology. dancing through transformational music festivals in western canada: tales from the forest floor kelci mohr <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.10> opening remarks music festivals are places where people can embody the artfulness of life and try on different philosophies just as fluidly as they may change costumes, paint their faces, move their bodies to rhythmic music, encounter the ineffable and play with non-ordinary states of consciousness. festivals open timespaces for participants to step outside of themselves, imagine alternative ways of being, discover and express inner desires and connect deeply with the people and landscapes around them—often through the lens of the psychedelic experience. the following autoethnographic narratives were created to illuminate how people may find meaning through dance floor experiences at “transformational” music festivals in western canada. transformational festivals are loosely defined as multi-day outdoor events that revolve around the ecstatic experience of electronic dance music, visionary art and performance, workshop curriculum, sacred space and ceremony, artisans and vendors and a conscious intention to support transformation and healing processes. i attended the astral harvest festival in driftpile, ab and the shambhala music festival in salmo, bc in the summer of 2015. these abridged writings were originally part of my exploratory master of arts thesis in recreation and leisure studies, entitled “dancing through transformational music festivals: playing with leisure and art” (2016). they aim to capture the collective effervescence of the festival milieu, and to paint an evocative picture of the experience of these potently creative places. through them, i hope to elucidate one way people may reimagine visions for life through co-creating and encountering in these open-minded and open-hearted environments. tales from shambhala festival the air is electric with excitement. it feels like we are in a big city on new year’s eve, but instead we are in the forest, celebrating our annual trip “home” to freedom. suddenly, several camps over, someone yells “shambhalaaaaaaaa-aaaaaaaahhhhhhhh” at the top of their lungs. those around him immediately return his excitement with feverish yelling and yipping. the sonic wave of joy for these people and this place quickly spreads outwards from the source to overwhelm nearby camps. when the hooting and hollering reaches us, it is my turn to pass it on. i let it wash through me; i throw back my head and howl at the sky as loud as i can. “aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh!!!!!” a tingle of exhilaration rushes through my body as i merge my voice with the surrounding sonic pandemonium. figure 1. village stage night scene, shambhala music festival. photo credit: luke gs art and photography (www.lukegs.com, 2015). night is falling, and my crew and i are making our way through the forest to the village stage. the speaker system at this stage is extremely powerful, and we are about to get our minds blown. i am armed with only my earplugs, a backpack full of sangria and a head full of acid. we dropped lsd about three hours ago, and the effects are coming on strongly now. morphing colors and rippling visuals disorient my vision, and i cannot wipe away the silly grin that has colonized my face. nor do i want to, for that matter. the flashing light show and mighty lasers of the giant geodesic dome over the stage shoot dazzlingly vibrant kaleidoscopes across my field of vision, making it hard to focus on our mission of getting a good spot to check out the show. thankfully, i’m not the only one. as a unit, our group slowly bumbles through the crowd and filters up the stairs to the second level viewing area. i can feel the bass and hammering feet of hundreds of dancing people shaking the deck beneath us. zapped by a crescendo of sound, a seething mass of gorgeous humanity throbbing, pulsing, beating the ground with sacred soles and souls. the air crackles with intense excitement as bodies resonate together, intimately synced with the baseline beat. celebratory joints, hugs, smiles and laughs are passed through the crowd as the merriment of festival time reaches its peak. it’s saturday night at shambhala, a time many of us have waited for all year. we take over a small area with a good view of the stage and i close my eyes for a moment, receptive, listening, sensing. i can feel the tiniest of hairs shivering in unison as a multitude of pulsing frequencies ripple through and around my tingling body. the lower the bass, the deeper the effervescent tickle. the speakers produce a wall of sound, and its sheer vibrational force enraptures me. my mind’s eye envisions the modal phenomena of sign-wave cymatics that are currently quivering every particle of my body with a specific sonic symphony. manipulating this energy in the air, i swim through a liquid sea of vibrational frequencies. with eyes still closed, i feel my body begin to translate the music into a corporeal form. i tangibly push the resonances around, contain them for a while, channel them, release them and catch another flow. the music takes me on a rollercoaster ride of rhythm. dancing in flow is a state of consciousness far above and beyond the ordinary. figure 2. crowd gives love at living room stage, shambhala music festival. photo credit: luke gs art and photography (www.lukegs.com, 2014). hours go by. i am soaked in sweat and my feet are sore from pounding the earth, but our crew feeds off the endless energy of the crowd. amidst all of this euphoric chaos, i am struck by a moment of clarity. the bassline echoes my heartbeat, echoes the rhythm of the cosmos, and beyond—wow-wow-wowmp—over and over, we drop. together. it hits me that we are all connected through the frequency of the music, the blood pumping through our veins and the rhythm of life on this rock of a planet that is miraculously hurtling, spiralling through space. connected through love. we are one, here, now, always. a cloaked gentleman is praying at the dj altar, eyes closed, head thrown back, arms outstretched, as the sound washes over his forehead and trickles down the back of his neck. he is peaceful serenity amidst the crazed energy of the dance floor, and i intuitively know he is experiencing the same feeling. we share this moment. when i return to life as usual after this festival, exhausted and blissed out, i know that i’ll have blown off enough steam to get me through my next lap around the sun. the festival represents diving into new experiences, connecting, learning, playing, transforming my preconceptions of what is possible: who i am, what i can do, who i surround myself with, what is most important in life. it’s about getting my metaphorical watermelon noggin split open, feasting on the juicy fruit inside and sharing it with others—like a child’s picnic on a hot summer day. pleasurable, refreshing, nourishing. when my face is fully in the melon, fully in the moment, i slurp up the delicious fruit nectar that dribbles all over myself and wonder at the simple delights of being alive, here, now. i spark up a joint on the dance floor and share it with my fellow legends around me in celebration of life, love and shambhala, the most fantastical adult wonderland i have ever known. figure 3. laser light show at interstellevator stage, astral harvest festival. photo credit: luke gs art and photography (www.lukegs.com, 2014). tales from astral harvest festival after the relative chaos of packing, running around to gather supplies, rallying friends and leaving the city in rush hour traffic, the change of pace upon arrival at the festival is palpably noticeable. as we reach our much-awaited destination, we are greeted by smiling volunteers at the main gate and roll into a patch of grass that will be our camp for the weekend. it feels great to be here—we are finally home! one journey was complete when we arrived at the festival space, and another is about to begin. festival time begins to synchronize us with wandering, unhurried rhythms. a couple of friends convince me to take a quick evening gander around the grounds. i throw on my comfortable unicorn onesie with little thought. as we make for the forest stage, i feel a refreshing sense of freedom: freedom from the timelines and obligations of my regular life; freedom from the heavy school backpack i usually have strapped to my back, laden with books; freedom from the judgments of conventional fashion, as i traipse around in an objectively ridiculous-looking mythical animal blanket. i remember the quote on the sticker i was given by the volunteers at the main gate when i arrived: “your fear of looking bad is holding you back”. for the weekend, the free-flowing festival vibes allow me to let go of the doldrums of everyday life and step into a less burdened version of myself. when we arrive at the stage, the music pumping out of the dj booth is incredible! we aren’t sure who is playing, but the bouncing rhythms throw us into an unexpectedly epic dance session. the crowd is swaying to and fro, jumping up and down, bumping into one another and experiencing the energizing vibrations of the massive speakers before us. the dance floor is our common ground. it feels good to move. i am struck with a sudden awareness of how i needed to shake out the tension that i was holding in my body—tension from the long drive up, from the city rat race, from the everyday stresses of life. we are speaking the language of bass, capturing the pulse and translating it into a gyrating flail of feeling. the music itself ebbs and flows; it brings the crowd into frenzy, then down for a reprieve. a great dj understands the dancing body; it needs variation. anticipating the drop, people eagerly put their arms up in the air. the energy is physically electric. though i am sober, the frequencies resonate inside my centre and rattle around in my skull like a hit that takes me higher. when we dance, we are painting. figure 4. collaborative art piece co-created at astral harvest festival. photo credit: kelci mohr (2015). the following afternoon, i gaze upon our masterpiece as i watch my friend hang up the collaborative art piece we made together. created during a midday downpour of intense proportions, infused into the artwork is the beauty of lotus flowers emerging from muddiness. huddled under our makeshift tarp shelter, our group waited out the rain with communal creation. a spectrum of big kids and small kids freely slapped paint on canvas, talking quietly as they played together, letting their bodies dance across the painting: uninhibited self-expression. a friend strummed his guitar and sang serenely, set against the soundtrack of the pounding storm above. his music serenaded a silky sliding of shades, wet with fat droplets of rain. a beautiful disaster emerged from the experience; messy splendour at once colourful and cohesive; primal and futuristic. the presence of humans belied by footprints, like fluorescent animal tracks. space-like organisms playfully swirl into curving cosmic complexity and completeness. permeable boundaries, merging synchronistically with neighbouring artworks to create a sense of wholeness and oneness. the piece radiates a calm chaos, an emotional psychosocial map of a day at astral harvest. when we paint, we are dancing too. the world is thrown into sharp relief when the sun begins its descent into evening. colours are intensely highlighted by gilded light and elongated shadows. clouds roll quickly by; the wind teases the leaves of the trembling aspens into a shimmering dance of greens, yellows and golds. i am entranced by the feeling of wind on my skin; birds sing somewhere in the distance, beautiful warbling songs that lilt overtop a low background of thumping bass. the massive speakers of the main stage grow insistently louder as the sun passes over the horizon. reverberating back to our campsite, whoops of joy from nearby revellers indicate a mounting excitement. tonight will be the climax of the festival, a monumental release of energy. figure 5. transflowmation fire show, astral harvest festival. photo credit: kelci mohr (2015). in preparation, members of our camping crew are engaging in the usual pre-show rituals: consulting the music schedule, hanging out, preparing food, trying on costumes and painting each other’s faces. we are getting ready for a big party night, especially because some of us have decided to indulge in mdma this evening. a certain special bonding occurs between people who have “tripped” together. there is something about the deep love felt during a hug between friends on mdma, or a wild fit of laughter shared between those coming up on lsd or psychedelic mushrooms, that fuses people together. before we drop, we gather and a friend says a few words to set a communal intention for the experience: “thank you all for being here and sharing this journey. may our trip tonight be filled with joy, love and gratitude for ourselves, each other and this place. let’s dance!” a buzz of agreement echoes through the group. we “cheers” our capsules together and consume them. supplements are passed around to ward off harmful toxicity and negative side effects. i feel grounded by this ritual and ready to head out on the night’s journey. soon after, we make a b-line towards the main stage to see desert dwellers, who have just begun their set. other partiers are also drawn from afar by the carnivalesque light projections of the main stage’s powerful lasers. as night takes hold, people start spinning mesmerizing led flow toys nearby—hula hoops, staffs and poi emit stunningly beautiful light shows when their owners lose themselves in flow, synced to the music. this art form visually demonstrates how when we dance, we are painting. figure 6. unknown led flow artistry, shambhala music festival. photo credit: kelci mohr (2015). we bob and weave further into the main stage, aiming for a spot centred in front of the sound system. along the way, we pass someone wearing a mascot costume cavorting with another reveller in a full bear suit, and a couple of girls with fuzzy neon legwarmers that look like hairy alien caterpillars. these will not be the most elaborate costumes we will see tonight. the creativity that many people infuse into their festival outfits and signage to find their friends in the crowd is all part of the experience. around us, revellers on the dance floor are radiant; many exude blissful smiles, lost in rhythm and movement. others clutch each other, laughing hysterically at some unheard joke. jubilation bubbles up sporadically as people reunite with their friends in the crowd. above us, a mind-bending array of visual artistry plays off fabric stretched into multi-dimensional sail-like forms, and there are several visual artists doing live painting alongside the djs. these sensory delights draw us in like moths to a flame. we sway beneath a purple, green, orange and yellow painted eye that shimmers and changes colour with the music. it scrutinizes no one in particular, yet perhaps symbolizes some omnipresent higher power. the air is thick with different smells; the fresh breeze carries a hint of heady, wooded smoke intermingled with the sweetness of marijuana and the pungent odour of perspiring bodies. i inhale deeply, absorbing the energy of the rich sensory experience all around me. figure 7. interstellevator stage night scene, astral harvest festival. photo credit: luke gs art and photography (www.lukegs.com, 2015). across the dance floor, i see one of the families that we are camped with, dancing with their little boy. he wears gigantic protective earmuffs to block out the powerful speakers, and he is laughing and dancing happily. the energy is infectious. festivaling with kids is a constant reminder of how important it is to keep playing throughout life. when we play, we re-create ourselves. recreation is potently powerful for reimagining who we are. our journey to the stage complete, we let the bass roll off the crowns of our heads and pound deeply into the centre of our chests. it feels primal; the music grabs hold of something visceral within me. clad in a woolly animal hat, i am reborn as a forest creature with my bare feet in the mud. this place is our playground where we can let loose and swing from the jungle gym of life, together. i look over and one of my friends is dancing like a wacky chimpanzee, flailing his limbs this way and that. his head lolls backwards and forwards, his outlandish sombrero bobbing to the rhythm. it is his first festival, and i am remembering mine. there, my mind was blown apart and fused back together into a beautiful symbiosis of new awareness and possibility. i can only hope to share those freeing, expansive feelings with my friends, my community and the world. i continue to be surprised by the lessons i receive and the transformations of self-concept that can emerge from unexpected places, such as dance floors. i reach out and give my friend a big hug; we sway to the music in each other’s embrace, surrounded by members of my community. my heart expands, explodes outwards in a rush of ecstasy. i feel a deep appreciation for all those who have supported, indulged, transformed, laughed and frolicked with me along my journey. gratitude washes over me to be able to share my life with such fine people. figure 8. anonymous group hug, astral harvest festival. photo credit: luke gs art and photography (www.lukegs.com, 2014). closing remarks festivals are celebrations of life, love and community. as immersive, multi-day events held in close relationship to nature, they allow space for “hanging out” and “playing with” different ways of living, being and creating. these leisures on the margins resist normative ideals and can open space for creative processes that remix life into a colourful patchwork of potentiality. they are psychedelic playgrounds of relational freedom where people transcend the everyday and re-imagine themselves and their lives differently. when festivalgoers return to their everyday lives, they carry the reverberations of these ecstatic experiences. the festival as embodied by participants continues to ripple outwards and interrogates or interrupts the potentially alienating rhythms of everyday life. transformational festivals are an expression and a practice of radical love that may help to heal rifts between people, between communities and between humans and the natural world. for some, they re-inspire the potentialities for life in dynamic relation, through an evolving process of embodied encounters. with these vignettes, i have attempted to leave an impression, however partial, of how transformational festivals may be experienced and a vision of how they may be meaningful. festival dance floors are places where people may experiment with love-centered ways of knowing, relating and creating. at their heart, festivals may be seen as metanarratives about love. i hope you, dear reader, have enjoyed the journey. figure 9. love at living room stage, shambhala music festival. photo credit: kelci mohr (2015). author biography kelci mohr is a master of leisure. she is a festival enthusiast, ecstatic dance floor flailer, yogi, aerialist, avid gardener and growth induction artist. she is a transformational guide that assists people to awaken their inner healer and the truth of their heart with somatic tools and plant medicine. she helps people to prepare for, have and integrate psychedelic experiences in nelson, bc, canada. w: www.instagram.com/blooming.inner.gardens/ e: awakeninghearttruth@proton.me references mohr, kelci l. 2016. “dancing through transformational music festivals: playing with leisure and art”. ma thesis (recreation and leisure studies), university of alberta. <https://era.library.ualberta.ca/items/ade040ae-d23f-4f30-94f9-5829c72a65f4>. dancecult 12(1) 2020: editor's introduction, masthead and table of contents v13.1 2021 dancecult journal of electronic dance music culture issue 13(1) 2021 issn 1947-5403 ©2021 dancecult published yearly at <http://dj.dancecult.net> international advisory board sean albiez (southampton solent university, uk), anthony d’andrea (university of limerick, ie), mark j butler (northwestern university, us), rebekah farrugia (oakland university, us), kai fikentscher (de), alistair fraser (maynooth university, ie), luis-manuel garcia (university of birmingham, uk), anna gavanas (institute for futures studies, se), ross harley (university of new south wales, au), tim lawrence (university of east london, uk), geert lovink (university of amsterdam, nl), alejandro l. madrid (university of illinois, chicago, us), paolo magaudda (university of padova, it), charity marsh (university of regina, ca), andrew murphie (university of new south wales, au), alice o’grady (university of leeds, united kingdom), christopher partridge (lancaster university, uk), dave payling (staffordshire university, uk), anne petiau (itsrs / université paris 5, fr), hillegonda c rietveld (london south bank university, uk), geoff stahl (victoria university of wellington, nz), sonjah nadine stanley-niaah (university of west indies, jm), graham st john (au), jonathan sterne (mcgill university, ca), will straw (mcgill university, ca), rupert till (university of huddersfield, uk), botond vitos (de), toby young (university of oxford, uk) dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture is a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture (edmc). launched in 2009, as a platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on the shifting terrain of edmcs worldwide, dancecult houses research exploring the sites, technologies, sounds and cultures of electronic music in historical and contemporary perspectives. playing host to studies of emergent forms of electronic music production, performance, distribution, and reception, as a portal for cutting-edge research on the relation between bodies, technologies, and cyberspace, as a medium through which the cultural politics of dance is critically investigated, and as a venue for innovative multimedia projects, dancecult is the leading venue for research on edmc. cover: pilgrims next to a mobile dj system in modi nagar, india, 2019. photo by bharat s. executive editor graham st john (university of huddersfield, uk) production editor botond vitos (leuphana university, de) from the floor editor dave payling (staffordshire university, uk) reviews editor toby young (university of oxford, uk) operations director botond vitos (leuphana university, de) foreign languages editor moses iten (rmit, au) managing editor tommy colton symmes (rice university, us) community manager katrina loughrey (de) art director botond vitos (leuphana university, de) operations associate dave payling (staffordshire university, uk) associate editors ben assiter (goldsmiths, university of london, uk) alistair fraser (maynooth university, ie) moses iten (rmit, au) kath o’donnell (au) production assistant patricio lópez-serrano (de) http://dj.dancecult.net issn 1947-5403 ©2021 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net v13.1 2021 executive editor’s introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 01 graham st john feature articles pop as process: the digitalization of groove, form and time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 02 anders reuter black feminism and the violence of disco . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 katharina von pawel-rammingen future nostalgia? 21st century disco . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 william d. j. rees covid nights: crisis, and street-level institutions in montreal and beyond. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 david madden challenges to british nightclubs during and after the covid-19 pandemic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 ewa mazierska and tony rigg dancing with dumont: individualism at an early morning melbourne rave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 matthew phillips golden section proportionality in the music of dzihan and kamien . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .101 dave collins and michael dunn transpositions grand paris and electronic dance music: nightlife policies, neoliberal urban planning, and the gentrification of the banlieues . . . . . . . . . . . . . .129 samuel lamontagne (trans. samuel lamontagne and moses iten) from the floor – online out of love: edm tourism to ibiza and the repression of local cultural identity philip hayward beyond club cultures: the mobile dj and devotional music in north india bharat s dance librarian: sonic explorations of the bandcamp underground botond vitos mexican sonidero sound system culture in times of covid-19 moses iten the production of space in chicago footwork adam laurence reviews exploring nightlife: space, society and governance (jordi nofre & adam eldridge, eds). . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 fiona hutton dutch dance, 1988-2018: how the netherlands took the lead in electronic music culture (mark van bergen, trans. andrew cartwright) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148 sean nye the new age of electronic dance music and club culture (anita jóri & martin lücke, eds) . . . . . . . . . . . 152 tom smith join the future: bleep techno and the birth of british bass music (matt anniss) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156 ian trowell dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 13(1): 1–1 issn 1947-5403 ©2021 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.00 executive editor’s introduction 2021 was a big year at dancecult, what with our inaugural conference in september, the organisation of which was led by conference chair, dave payling and staffordshire university. the event was completely online and featured two days of jam packed sessions representing the broad interdisciplinary scope of the dancecult research network. all presentations have been uploaded to youtube and can be viewed at dancecult’s youtube page. we thank everyone for participating in this successful event, and look forward to seeing you next time, when we hope to meet in person. there has been personnel changes at the journal. incoming, i am delighted to welcome moses iten to the dancecult editorial board as our new foreign languages editor (and also joining us in the capacity of associate editor, assisting from the floor editing). as fle, moses steps in to a role formerly held by luis manuel-garcia, our inaugural fle who recently stepped down. luis contributed quality content since 2013, when he initiated the transpositions section. we appreciate the effort from luis over many years to establish transpositions as a venue for quality translations in the field of edmc studies. thanks to luis, an excellent platform was established. another long serving deb member recently stepping down due to other commitments is alice o’grady. a big shout out to alice for her role as from the floor section editor for many years. alice performed a great service to the research community in this capacity. additionally, coming into the team are benjamin assiter as associate editor, who has begun working with managing editor, tommy symmes, and patricio lópez-serrano, our new production assistant. i am happy to report here that we are in the second year of our new arrangement with maynooth university, which is covering our annual open journals systems expense, for which we are extremely grateful (thank you alistair fraser). i am also happy to report that dancecult, as of 2020, is indexed with scopus (and we have made application to be backfilled to 2009). on to the issue itself. the 2021 issue has arrived a month later than usual due to covid related delays (we plan to be back on schedule in 2022). this year we have a mammoth open issue including seven feature articles, a transposition, five from the floor pieces, and four reviews. thanks to all authors, and peer reviewers, and special shout outs to our complete copyediting and production operation. despite the many challenges, we have brought another one to the mat! we have another open issue coming up in november 2022. we welcome submissions for all article categories. for feature articles, please submit by march 2022. best wishes, graham st john (executive editor) dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2021.13.01.00 https://www.youtube.com/channel/ucu7f5fmfwj5y6p1-kre0uxw dancecult 15(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 15(1) 2023: 113–131 issn 1947-5403 ©2023 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net raving mckenzie wark durham: duke university press, 2023. isbn: 978-1-4780-1938-1 rrp: $15.95 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.12> kim feser free university of berlin (germany) the cover design is reminiscent of a notebook: handwritten “practices / raving / mckenzie wark” on a monochrome pink background. the small book is published in the practices series alongside the titles fly-fishing, juggling, and running (tomorrowing has only been announced so far, which somehow seems appropriate). the series’ website states that the volumes shall “reveal the pleasures of losing oneself in doing anything that holds sway over us, no matter how common or minor it might seem” (duke university press n.d.). how does raving fit into this randomly appearing list of profane desubjectifying practices? raving unfolds in both detailed intimate as well as abstract theoretical passages, whereby these perspectives repeatedly transform into each other. mckenzie wark writes in the styles of autofiction (“these things did not happen. the person to whom they did not happen is me” [4]) and autotheory (“to gather concepts from situations” [4]). personal story fragments about raving and its entanglement with other practices—particularly social belonging, gender transition, drug use, sex and writing in bed—merge with political-theoretical thoughts on related aspects of queerness, blackness, gentrification, commodification and club culture. six chapters, partly based on earlier published texts and lectures/performances, are written in this oscillating style. they are supplemented by a “glossary of concepts” (91–94), condensed paragraphs on key terms used throughout the book, including in chapter titles. the concepts are defined as “impersonal characters in the autotheory text” (93) and shall function as “resonant abstractions” (93). in addition to these impersonal characters, the book is populated by many people known by name or anonymised, often by single capital letters. some of them are also referenced in footnotes, bibliography and notes on a collection of colour photos showing scenes from raves, festivals and clubs. most of the personal situations described in the book happened recently in brooklyn, new york. additionally, there are some memories of the 1990s (including “edward” [43], who plays a crucial role in wark’s [2020] previous autofictional/autotheoretical book reverse cowgirl). reviews https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.12 dancecult 15(1)114 the author mentions that she was asked to write a book for the series, and therefore proposed “raving” (47). that seems to be an obvious choice: she calls herself a raver but also clarifies that her main activity is writing and lecturing. the tension between these practices is addressed in the book. at raves, the author of raving avoids students and is avoided by them (61). she is also aware that her book might be part of “style extraction” (56, 94) if it commodifies gestures and information that emerged from raves. such phenomena of contemporary capitalism are fundamentally criticised in wark’s work, from a hacker manifesto (2004) to capital is dead: is this something worse? (2019). in raving, mckenzie wark, respectively the autofictional/autotheoretical first person writer, situates herself specifically: “the point of view will be that of this middle-aged, middle-class, white transsexual dance freak” (6). these attributes are addressed at various explicit, implicit and conceptual levels. she has the urge to dance excessively in order to achieve a state of bodily experience beyond normative gender-specific attributions and thoughts. consuming drugs, mostly ketamine, seems to help: “dancing and k make it all go away!” (42) that’s how she wants to reach her goal: “a dissociative time, a transsexual time, a ketamine time” (30). this “k-time”, an immanent and not utopian temporality (no time for “tomorrowing”), is one of the book’s central concepts (92). it refers to the so called “k-hole” (30), a dissociative hallucinatory state after taking ketamine. also, it’s situated in a critical discussion with mark fisher’s (aka “k-punk”) thoughts on “acid communism”. in collective “k-time” the presence of “ketamine femmunism” (30) can be experienced, as wark writes in the “ketamine femmunism” chapter (based on an online lecture on fisher for the berlin haus der kulturen der welt [house of world cultures]). “femmunism” (92) is described as a collective state where dominant masculinity is absent and obsolete. wark’s cautious remark that femmunism “might mingle” with blackness (94), almost sounds manifesto-like given her general reluctance to embrace hopeful scenarios. wark also describes how she prepares herself before going out. how she packs her silver rave bag, how she meets lovers and close friends. how several circles of “rave friends” interact via social media and share information about upcoming events. how she enters the dance floor by herself or with others. but ravers sometimes are annoyed by stereotypical “coworkers” (91) who lack the intense desire for “k-time”, because their participation in the rave is subordinate to their work lives. worse are the harassing “punishers”, mostly “straight, white, cis men” (92), who only attend raves for spectacle purposes. the mix of the crowd is regulated by door policy which is, along with spatial design and sound, an essential aspect of rave as a “constructed situation” (93). due to the praxis of “reparative discrimination” (93) people “who need it most” (93) and “whose style is being extracted” (94) are given priority admission. wark mentions that she and her transsexual friends often receive free entry or head to the locations which they can easily access. depending on venues this works specifically for black people. wark emphasises the background of the entire constellation in this regard: “the rave, techno, nightlife, surround: they’re all, among other things, gifts of blackness” (9). reviews 115 given the social dynamics, risks, and potentials that mckenzie wark discusses, raving seems fundamentally different from the more individually defined practices fly-fishing, juggling and running—if that’s not a completely biased perspective of a review for a journal of electronic dance music culture. but what is the book’s contribution to a critical discourse on electronic dance music culture? the one-word title, which is due to the book series practices, can be misleading. the book is neither a basic introduction to the practice of raving, nor a study of participant observation. as indeed the author points out, it combines a very subjective autofictional perspective with an exuberant creation of concepts. this seems inspired particularly by deleuze/guattari, kathy acker (see wark [2021]) and kodwo eshun (whose praise of raving is quoted on the back cover). the oscillation between fiction around the character “mckenzie wark” and meaningful conceptualization, strengthened not least by the “big name” the author has made for herself through her previous relevant publications, seems to evoke rather enthusiastic approval or possibly sceptical rejection. a productive-critical reading attitude is possible, however, if the relationship between the formation of concepts and the situations described is investigated immanently. the book itself invites to read between the lines, to be aware of subliminal counterpoints or barely noticeable voices. to name some aspects: the brief stories and details about raves and club culture are predominantly set in brooklyn / new york. they are shaped by the specific conditions of gentrification and “style extraction”, the presence of coworkers and, not least, academics. in view of locally different conditions of underground and capitalization, of confining “normal” lifestyles and resistant practices, of possible contrasts between rural and urban lifestyles, the nature and goals of raves might also have to be accentuated differently. also, the book is permeated by the theme of age, without this being explicitly reflected in the concepts: “it’s not always easy, being a middle-aged, clockable transsexual raver” (1, see 42, 57). based on this initial statement, and against the background of a reference to a club event for her 60th birthday (88), wark’s discomfort and inner struggle with the demands of beauty and youthfulness become apparent. in general, health issues seem to play a role only at the descriptive level. physical care and mutual awareness are mentioned, but there are several instances of risky drug use, including a fatal ghb overdose (73). when it comes to inventing expressions for key concepts, however, a euphoric ketamine hype dominates. references duke university press. n.d. practices. <https://www.dukeupress.edu/series/practices>, (accessed 17 october 2023). wark, mckenzie. 2004. a hacker manifesto. cambridge: stanford university press. wark, mckenzie. 2019. capital is dead: is this something worse?. new york: verso books. wark, mckenzie. 2020. reverse cowgirl. los angeles: semiotext(e). wark, mckenzie. 2021. philosophy for spiders: on the low theory of kathy acker. durham: duke university press. dancecult 15(1)116 spectacle, fashion and the dancing experience in britain, 1960–1990 jon stratton london: palgrave macmillan, 2022. isbn: 978-3-031-09011-0 rrp: €117.69 (hardcover), €93.08 (ebook) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.13> tara hill university of hamburg (germany) telling the whole history of dance music in a book seems like no mean feat. so even if jon stratton’s spectacle, fashion and the dancing experience in britain, 1960–1990 limits itself to the usually labelled “crucial years” of the development of postmodern youth culture—or at least its roots after rock‘n’roll restarted the 1950s youngsters’ life with a mixture of middle class romance and rebelliousness—covering all three decades of the dance movement comes across as an ambitious project. yet reading stratton’s succinct account still comes across as curiously pleasing read. as an almost lexical text, ticking the boxes of the whos, the whens, the wheres and the whys, it caters to a college freshman or an introductory youth culture class just as well as to the senior pop culture zine editor or sophomore style blogger. providing an overview of the subculture styles which—overtly or covertly, overground or underground—formed the face of a generation, or more important: its image. it performs kind of a double stunt: it’s not classic subculture research, stratton claims, which can explain what distinguishes these new movements, but more its relation to a politics of aesthetics and its relation to the “wilder” conceptual brother, a politics of the ecstatic. therefore, the theoretical framework of the book centres around guy debord’s (1967) situationist movement and especially its centrepiece society of the spectacle (la société du spectacle). herein, the cultural turn after the 1960s, sort of a “technicolour” explosion of creativity after the black and white movie era (you could similarly compare it to the evolution from silent to spoken movies) was performed by the rise of two key factors: fashion and dancing. in the 1980s, in the increasingly seamless society of the spectacle, a lifeworld was formed which was commodified, mediated by colour television and other media, though not yet by computers; an experiential world where surveillance was becoming normalised and increasingly extensive. clubs, with their rituals for entry, and their electronic dance music and lighting often linked to the beat, seemed like an alternative world, indeed a temporary autonomous zone (taz). for many, dancing along with others in the apparently safe space of a club appeared to offer escape and existential meaning, ecstasy, in an alienated reality. the dj became the shamanic guide taking the dancers through this experience. https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.13 reviews 117 while the first chapter tells of the rise of the dj with records starting to replace live music sessions and ballrooms where standard dances in couples became discos and clubs, twist was the first dance introducing heavy pelvic movements from african americans to the uk. the second chapter sets the scene with the beatles hysteria, the dave clarke five and introduces the genre of “stomp”—proving the brits needed some help with the transition from partner dances to solo and improvisational, as well as more and more ecstatic dancing. as the rolling stones introduced african drumming in their (up to this day) legendary live shows, the phenomenal gary glitter turned into the icon of the emerging glam rock scene. while middle class kids learnt how to sit down to listen to prog rock—genesis, yes and king crimson—like their parents might have listened to a classic record or chamber music with fully but passively immersing themselves into the quadrophonic and stereophonic sound spectacular of the 1970s, glam rock came to life with cult bandleader marc bolan, a.k.a. the legendary t-rex, and took to a crowd that loved extravagant outfits, more over the top than the hippies ever were, and huge showmanship. david bowie came up next and started his own, very influential ziggy stardust cult, a persona well-loved into the early 1980s (chapter 4 and 5). the new romantics, stratton explains, who flocked into the nightlife at that time weren’t so much a scene of their own, but a remnant of early club culture. their heavy focus on styling and outfit can be traced back to saint martin’s, the london art school. androgyny and heavy make-up, theatrics and gender role reversal were established in mainstream culture, through hit projects like ultravox. the last chapter deals with the now pretty much established bond between rave culture and the temporary autonomous zone. it starts off tracing the often-overlooked influence new york disco and the early club scene had on the uk warehouse and later acid house movement. compared to the watering holes of past decades, david mancuso’s loft and the paradise garage, which spawned the first superstar technoshaman dj, larry levan, did not sell alcohol but focused on an impeccable living room and after hour spot with psychedelics and/or designer drugs. this encouraged ecstatic dancing through the night: it was the quality of immersion that made dancing at the loft and paradise garage so special. uk sound engineers and clubs were developing similar systems. for example, tony andrews, the co-founder of the sound system company, specialising in speakers, funktion-one, and who has been designing speakers since the late 1960s, comments: “when [a sound system] is good, it puts you into a meditative state.” (rothlein 2014) funktion-one systems have been installed in many of the most highly regarded clubs such as space on ibiza and berghain in berlin. it is immersion that heightens the possibility of the ecstatic experience. here we have the technological basis for the transformation in clubbing that began in the late 1970s and morphed into rave culture. (28) the now legendary myth of the four englishmen who went to ibiza to come back and revolutionise british society is retold here, too. though the story of the legendary night dancecult 15(1)118 when nicky holloway, johnny walker and danny rampling went to ibiza’s infamous late night powerhouse amnesia and took the new drug ecstasy for the first time to afterwards bring it back to great britain, open the clubs hacienda, shoom and heaven and create the “second summer of love”, uk’s acid house revolution, stratton is careful to remind us of the “whitewashing” which is done by excluding detroit techno and chicago house’s black and disco’s gay roots. the history of dance music (206–210) then tells another story: the one from the jazz ballroom being replaced by cheaper record collection spinning nights everyone could afford. while stomp and twist made the brits move their pelvis, the quality of sound hugely profited by the sound systems built by the religiously inspired dub music collectives in jamaica, before they moved to notting hill carnival. as the merits of the uk’s minorities become clearer, one wonders what the closing with thatcher’s brutal rave ban meant for society. also, newer discussions like jimmy saville’s behaviour as a sex offender would have proven interesting for the proposed change in nightlife—from a dirty pick-up place for cheap thrills to a meditative, spiritual cleansing practice or festivities of joy, explained with help of bey’s taz—where exactly big beat belongs here, which stratton mentions in the end of this highly entertaining, short read, remains as unclear as the exact role of fashion mentioned in the title. apart from that, stratton delivers a good overview of the main movements in 30 years of dance history which have left its mark on humanity. references bey, hakim. 1991. t.a.z.: the temporary autonomous zone. new york: autonomedia. debord, guy. 1967. la société du spectacle. paris: buchet-chastel. rothlein, jordan. 2014, march 24. industry standards: funktion-one. resident advisor. <https://ra.co/features/1836>, (accessed 25 october 2023). https://ra.co/features/1836 reviews 119 this track contains politics: the culture of sampling in experimental electronica hannes liechti bern: norient books, 2022. isbn: 978-3-9525444-2-6 (softcover) rrp: €29,00 (softcover) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.14> moses iten rmit (australia) this track contains politics: the culture of sampling in experimental electronica investigates why producers of contemporary, digital, experimental electronic music choose to compose using samples. based on a phd, this is hannes liechti’s first book and has been published by the switzerland-based norient (n.d.), founded by ethnomusicologist thomas burkhalter in 2002 as a network bringing together a global community of thinkers and artists concerned with music, sound and media cultures. their emphasis is on “the changing geography of multi-layered modernities, far beyond old ideas of north versus south, west versus east” (beyer, burkhalter and liechti 2015). it is therefore not surprising that the producers interviewed for this book cover politics including the genocide of armenians and the exclusion of africans in argentinian history. hannes liechti has been working with norient these recent years as a journalist, curator and events producer. his role as an applied cultural producer needs to be considered as adding to the potential impact of this book, not just amongst researchers but also practitioners. norient played an important role in convincing me to build on my creative practice to become a researcher as some years ago i had been commissioned to write an essay based on my own practice as a dj/producer of cumbia (iten 2013), as well as contributing with podcasts (iten 2016), a playlist (iten 2015) and a mixtape (iten 2011). this has led me to follow their research outputs with great interest as an example of research and practice intersecting. the tension between artistic practice and theoretical analysis is the biggest challenge liechti attempts to overcome in this book. this track contains politics was highly anticipated reading for me for several reasons. i’m both a researcher and dj/producer, focused on electronic dance music, djand sound system cultures and am therefore interested in how this book stimulates both my research and creative practice, for which sampling has been central.1 like liechti, i am interested in methodologies which reflect the practice being analysed, which in my case i have proposed as the dj-as-researcher approach (iten 2022). although a committed cultural producer, liechti is external to the field he is examining, which he presents as a potential advantage “as it allows the researcher to ask simple questions and take novel positions” (80). indeed, reading liechti’s book is making me reflect on my own practice, in which sampling has been https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.14 dancecult 15(1)120 a driving force. his incessant questioning of “why” a particular sample and compositional approach has been chosen, has increased my appreciation of the sometimes hidden political intent behind seemingly aesthetic or conceptual decisions. liechti identifies most literature on sampling has mainly been concerned with copyright issues and/or the particular practice of analogue-era sampling in hip-hop.2 there is therefore much need for new research on the ongoing relevance of sampling in today’s digital era where the practice has become a ubiquitous and seemingly banal. this track contains politics is focused on particular (political) intentions of a specific technique (sampling), in a niche creative field of (experimental electronica) music. whilst this appears to be a narrow focus, liechti’s expansive review of the literature on sampling, politics as a cultural concept and electronic dance music—of which the academic understanding can include non-dance oriented experimental electronic music—shows the scope of his research is actually quite broad. in the first few pages of the book, a useful brief history of sampling is provided, concluding with the current state of sampling as an indispensable and ubiquitous practice (11–14). liechti points out most of the literature on sampling at first largely fixated on its association with hip-hop and the subsequent demise of the technique becoming restricted due to copyright lawsuits (20–22). the ongoing relevance to producers and researchers in this era when sampling appears a banal part of music making, is argued by liechti as achievable by focusing on the motivations and intent behind the sampling. this he explores as part of “the socio-political potential of sampling”, which is also where the biggest gaps in research on sampling are to be found (15–22). the are several theoretical advances proposed in this book. firstly, trackology is introduced as a way of allowing the analytical focus to be on tracks—as opposed to songs—“as a tool for uncovering knowledge of the world” (77). the core interest of trackology according to liechti, is the “search for traces within popular music”, based on michael rappe’s method of “music archaeology” (78). traces could have been explored further as a concept. in my own phd research for example, i have been applying edouard glissant’s creolization theory which includes a conceptualization of traces as cultural memory passed on via music (2020). instead, the weight of liechti’s theory is in the methodology. the ethnography is combined with a musical analysis of each of the five tracks. in order to apply a musicological approach to analyse tracks of experimental electronica largely composed by sampling, liechti created “the fader of visibility (fov)” model. this addresses the significance of the “visibility” (and invisibility) of the samples in the composition (101–107). then in order to determine the motivations and intent behind the sampling, liechti develops another model called the “spider of sampling reasons” model (109–143). this demonstrates in a neat diagram each producer’s particular approach to sampling. both models are then applied to analyse and compare the case studies which follow. each of the five case studies features one track by a different producer, all active in what liechti discusses broadly as “the field of experimental electronica” (52–53). in the book’s very useful glossary, experimental electronica is defined as produced on laptops, mostly instrumental and with a sound that is “often abrasive, shaped by cuts, disruptions, reviews 121 noises, and dissonances” (316). the five tracks selected for analysis engage with a diverse set of political issues: the russian invasion of ukraine’s donbas region; gender issues and the memory of genocide in the armenian diaspora; recognition of afro-argentines in the history contemporary argentina; and the taboo of zoophilia. whilst the analysis is narrowed down to just five tracks, this broad range of political issues is also engaged with by liechti, further illuminating the context of each individual producer’s intent. these extramusical perspectives have largely come from ethnographic fieldwork, which have produced some of the most illuminating passages in the book. the methodological challenges and limitations encountered during the research of this book are outlined over several pages, revealing rare insight into not only the value of failure to future researchers but also the precarious conditions under which laptop producers of experimental electronica operate (69–75). whilst liechti admits a close look over the shoulders of the producers in the process of sampling was difficult to access, this did happen with one of his research participants. the results of this participant observation are featured in the penultimate chapter of the book, which liechti calls an “interlude”, serving as a great accompaniment to the conclusion which follows. the observations made of us-based producer lara sarkissian at work was facilitated by her being invited to participate in a residency at center for art and media in karlsruhe, germany, curated by norient. liechti suggests more funded residencies like this are needed, in order to facilitate more focused observation of the practice of laptop producers (294–295). ultimately, i admired liechti’s tenacity in theorizing the playful and often random approaches of the producers he observed and interviewed. his theoretical rigour is balanced by his sensitive and nuanced voice, which is strongest when it becomes active, especially in the self-reflexive passages which reveal themselves when he addresses some of the problems encountered in trying to do fieldwork in the intimate work environments of “laptop producers”, which liechti prefers over the term of the “derogatory” term of “bedroom producer” (316). liechti cites fellow musicologist-ethnographer mark butler (2006) several times, who also applied musicology theory to analyse the electronic dance music producers. i largely agreed with the critique that butler’s theorizing seemed more about “adding edm to the music theorist’s repertory” than “bringing music theory into edm’s varied and vibrant discourse” (marshall 2009: 199). this tension is also present in liechti’s research. however, butler went on to continue to further advance the study of edm (2014) and i can imagine liechti’s commitment to both practice and research is putting him on a similarly inspired path. notes 1 i have been a professional dj/producer for twenty years and have toured the world with the project cumbia cosmonauts. i am currently completing a phd at rmit university, melbourne, on digital cumbia and sound system culture, as well as working as a researcher with the sonic street technologies research project, for university of sydney and goldsmiths university, london. dancecult 15(1)122 2 in terms of sampling in hip-hop, making beats: the art of sample-based hip-hop (2004) by joseph schloss is a particularly useful work based on ethnographic research. references beyer, theresa, thomas burkhalter and hannes liechti, eds. 2015. seismographic sounds: visions of a new world. berne: norient. <https://doi.org/10.56513/zmhg1392>. beyer, theresa and thomas burkhalter, eds. 2012. out of the absurdity of life: globale musik. berne: traversion/norient. <https://doi.org/10.56513/vlgz1905>. butler, mark j. 2014. playing with something that runs: technology, improvisation, and composition in dj and laptop performance. oxford and new york: oxford university press. butler, mark. 2006. unlocking the groove: rhythm, meter, and musical design in electronic dance music. bloomington: indiana university press. glissant, edouard. 2020. introduction to a poetics of diversity. translated by celia britton. liverpool: liverpool university press. iten, moses. 2011. “arab awakening”. norient. <https://norient.com/podcasts/arabawakeningmixtape>, (accessed 18 october 2023). iten, moses. 2012. “insider’s perspectives on new wave cumbia” in beyer, theresa and thomas burkhalter (edited by). out of the absurdity of life: globale musik. berne: traversion/ norient. 264-77. <https://doi.org/10.56513/vlgz1905>. iten, moses. 2013. “perspectives on new wave cumbia”. norient. <https://norient.com/stories/ new-wave-cumbia>, (accessed 18 october 2023). iten, moses. 2015. “five video clips from mexico”. norient. <https://norient.com/video/fivevideo-clips-from-mexico>, (accessed 18 october 2023). iten, moses. 2016. “the sound of cumbia”. norient. <https://norient.com/podcasts/the-sound-of-cumbia>, (accessed 18 october 2023). iten, moses. 2022. “the dj-as-researcher approach: methods emerging through digital cumbia fieldwork”. paper presented at “performing, engaging, knowing” symposium, 2020. hosted by the ictm study group on applied ethnomusicology, the lucerne school of music, the department of composition, electroacoustics, university of music and performing arts vienna and the swiss society for ethnomusicology. <https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7274023>. marshall, wayne. 2009. “reviewed work: unlocking the groove: rhythm, meter, and musical design in electronic dance music by mark j. butler”. music theory spectrum 31(1): 192–99. <https://doi.org/10.1525/mts.2009.31.1.192>. norient. n.d. “about”. <https://norient.com/>, (accessed 18 october 2023) schloss, joseph glenn. 2004. making beats: the art of sample-based hip-hop. middletown, ct: wesleyan university. reviews 123 berghain, techno und die körperfabrik: ethnographie eines stammpublikums guillaume robin marburg: büchner-verlag, 2021. isbn: 978-3-96317-274-8 (paperback), isbn 978-3-96317-812-2 (ebook) rrp: €22,00 (paperback), €18,00 (ebook) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.15> anja schwanhäusser university of göttingen (germany) bars and nightclubs count among the mythological places of the city, as rolf lindner (2022) writes in his in einer welt von fremden: eine anthropologie der stadt. as part of his recent role as guest researcher at the centre marc bloch at the humboldt university, guillaime robin has tracked one such place, in his study of the world’s most famous berlin club, berghain. in the introduction he cites the two most well-known, but rarely spelledout, concepts in cultural studies in reference to club culture: heterotopia (michel foucault) and the non-lieu (marc augé). although augé did not mean industrial wastelands with the term non-lieu, rather airports, train stations and motorway rest stops, the term never-theless testifies to the transitionary character of the nocturnal locations, converted ruins of post-industrial society. for robin, berghain is a transgressive, social, sensual and reflexive place, where “the exploration of self and community meet, where the utopia of the body takes shape” (10) (this and the following quotes are all translations by the reviewer). robin has the genuinely ethnological goal of writing about club culture not from the point of view of its musical actors (djs, club operators, party organisers), but from the perspective of its audience. for this purpose, he conducted a study among regulars, and especially the global, urban nomads of the “easyjet generation”, as the journalist tobias rapp (2009) calls them. in terms of methodology, he bases the study on twelve interviews and around 30 online questionnaires, supplemented by the manageable number of twelve “observational sittings” (15) at the club. in doing so, he faces the challenge of describing a quasi-sacred place, without himself succumbing to mythologization: the analysis aims “to go beyond the blind reverence of the initiated and to scrutinize these cliches under the magnifying glass” (15). there’s an attempt at a balancing act between empathy and distance in the text, which is not always successful, for instance when robin presents a berghain party as being akin to an ancient ritual and asks: “to what extent can berghain be seen as a revival of bacchanalia?” (13). this flowery formulation irritates at first. there are more recent berlin-specific traditions which would lend themselves better as a comparison. for example, the tradition of the berlin secret societies or the queer scene surrounding the german physician and sexologist magnus hirschfeld. on the other hand, the sensual anthropology in the school of david howes (2005) doesn’t shy away from a certain pathos either. thus, the reference https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.15 dancecult 15(1)124 to bacchanalia is not to be understood analytically but as a metaphor to capture the genuine berghain atmosphere, as experienced by a cosmopolitan, queer scene. the first chapter, “bodies in space”, is about the significance of the club for its regulars and the transition from the “profane” world beyond the club into the “sacred” (40) halls of berghain. with the term rite of passage (arnold van gennep) and communitas (victor turner), robin describes the character of the space, the shifting bodily perceptions, the temporary sense of community, as well as the internal control mechanisms which grant a harmonious night of celebrating. he sees the special feature of berghain, in addition to its symbolical situation in the berlin party-metropolis, as being the aura of secrecy that surrounds it. this is created through the strict door policy, the photography ban, the seemingly sacred architecture, the complex system of rules of conduct and the so-called “hainweh” (47)—a portmanteau word made up of hain from berghain and weh meaning to ache, a play on the german word heimweh that means to be homesick—with which fans express their passionate attachment to the place. the recourse to an online questionnaire, which is often quoted in the text, might initially surprise the empirical cultural studies readership. in place of the personal experiences of the researcher are instead short and concise reports from the actual participants, reminiscent of blogger style. unfortunately, robin does not explain this method and its implementation in more detail, but he uses it extremely creatively. the subjective descriptions by the guests of their self-image and their personal opinions about club politics are astonishingly involved and in parts even poetically formulated. one extremely interesting question which has unfortunately also not been elaborated on and brought to any conclusion is: does the example of berghain perhaps reveal a change in techno culture in general, away from a subculture which is open to all, where social differences are blurred by cheap drugs, and towards a more homogenous, exclusive subculture, whose members are recruited largely from more privileged segments of society? (89) a court decision in recent years equating clubs with high-culture events for tax purposes would seem to point in this direction. the second chapter, “utopian bodies”, is about stylisations as a way of separating oneself from the everyday identity and from each other, while at the same time being a way of creating community. in reference to foucault’s concept of utopian bodies as well as in reference to piotr nathan’s mural, “rituals of disappearance”, in berghain, robin defines the stylistic transformations as the individual’s longing to dissolve. this dissolution takes place in various forms and media, through the equalising procedure at the berghain entrance, the adaptation of dominant dress and dance codes, anonymisation (e.g., by wearing fetish masks) as well as through the consuming of drugs. a central finding is that subjective feelings of freedom and liberation are closely linked to a communal and institutional set of rules, with self-discipline and self-constraint: “it’s not so much a matter of total liberation, but much more about a strongly controlled disinhibition, which goes hand in hand with the ethics of consent and the respect of others’ bodies” (94). in robin’s description, a party night seems to run like an almost perfect machine where almost nothing goes wrong. robin writes that he has left out sequences which are too reviews 125 voyeuristic. this is understandable, yet it gives rise to an argumentative gap. what happens when shame boundaries are crossed, not because one wants to, but because one is driven to it by obsession? nevertheless, he offers an extremely interesting insight into this “body factory” and its culture. the “crows”, as the audience is also called, voluntarily adapt to the institutional constraints, regulations and codifications thereby giving the club its individual character. in the third chapter, “degendering the dancefloor”, the focus is on gender-specific stylisations and the play with gender identities. with reference to judith butler, robin defines gender as performance. especially for guests from less liberal countries, berlin and berghain offer a “safe space” (105). here also new subcultural trends come on stage, such as the “sex-positive” movement, which promotes an openness to diverse gender identities, sexual practices and to nudity. robin rightly notes that the nocturnal rulebook can lead to a “homonormativity”, where certain homosexual codes dominate and thus exclude other forms of expression. in the fourth chapter, “underground resist-dance”, robin opens up the perspective to the broader berlin club scene and, in particular, to the period of the pandemic. due to the enforced closures, considerable financial and cultural damage was done, and the cultural diversity of the metropolis has suffered. the perseverance with which the techno culture actors have defended their “right to dance” and “right to the city” (150), robin presents as being proof that clubs are more than just spaces for commercial events. as already demonstrated by birmingham cultural studies, in a study to which robin, however, does not refer, partying is shown to be more than hedonistic consumption. the charge of hedonism was famously invoked by politicians during the pandemic in order to devalue outdoor dancing at night. as robin shows though, it is, on the contrary, a way of life and culture which is pushed through even in times of crisis, and against prevailing opinion. the author also recalls earlier protests, with which clubs resisted displacement and gentrification. without questioning the pandemic-related regulative measures, he interprets these activities as a positive expression of a political consciousness in nightlife: “the proliferation of these wild raves, which were often interrupted by the police . . . thus emphasises the active role of the techno audience and its desire to assert itself as a driving force in the scene” (148). the fifth chapter is called “closing”, similar to the last act at a dance night at berghain. here, robin comes to the unsurprising conclusion that a berghain club night is not a bacchanalia. extremely interesting, however, is his reasoning, in which he returns to the central thesis of the first chapter: “berghain is undoubtedly a space of freedom like no other, but it is above all an extremely codified space in which the liberation of the body is linked to self-discipline and strong control mechanisms” (160). the transgression of boundaries and ecstatic forms of dissolution in the community are thus only possible because of the strict set of rules. as in the process of civilization (norbert elias), to which robin refers, the increasing loosening of control over emotions comes at the price of an increase in the suppression of inner drives, so that ecstatic celebration is also only possible through a sophisticated system of control. this is expressed on several levels: the rejection of sexist dancecult 15(1)126 and objectifying heteronormative practices as well as of “body shaming”; the maintaining of a respectful distance, and a strong internalisation of respect for the body of others. robin points here to a possibly generalizable connection between discipline and ecstasy which, also for other subcultural contexts, is worthwhile examining. it is a perspective of our current time, which is “woke” and “aware”. it turns out that within order and its compliance (also) lies a longing for “pleasure” and the dissolution of boundaries. robin’s study provides a particularly successful and exhaustingly complex description of the sensuality of the club experience. the central insight, that liberation can only be achieved through self-discipline, is extremely illuminating. the bacchanal thus becomes a code for a subcultural practice that is characterised by the inner contradiction of control and the dissolution of boundaries. the book is an innovative contribution to the “sensual turn” in urban scene-, popand subcultural research. in the past decades this field has mostly been concerned with the economic aspects of partying (creative industries, subcultural capital and such). in robin’s work, on the other hand, questions of cultural order and creativity and of social change (again) come to the fore in an exemplary way. by taking into account the social origins and the phenomenon of the global easyjet generation in his analysis, robin also makes a contribution to the question as to the extent to which popular culture and popular means of pleasure have nowadays become the guiding culture of the middle-class. the study shows that for the queer global elite, going to visit a cultural site such as berghain is just as important as a visit to the opera in new york or sydney. last but not least, he provides a very good, in part poetically formulated portrait of the “loaners”, typical figures of the big city as described by rolf lindner (2022), accompanied by beautiful photographs by mike d’hondt. thus, the study can also be connected to the analysis of figures and figuration of urban anthropology. references howes, david, ed. 2005. empire of the senses. the sensual culture reader. oxford: berg publishers. lindner, rolf. 2022. in einer welt von fremden: eine anthropologie der stadt. berlin: matthes & seitz berlin. rapp, tobias. 2009. lost and sound: berlin, techno, und der easyjetset. frankfurt am main: suhrkamp. reviews 127 ears as portals: alternative realities of musical infrastructures. a ctm festival 2023 review ctm festival: “portals”, 2023. <https://www.ctm-festival.de/festival-2023/welcome> <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.16> luigi monteanni soas, university of london (uk) what is a portal? whether you base your definition on fantasy and sci-fi tropes of selfgenerating megadungeons (berti forthcoming) and interdimensional gateways (yalcinkaya 2022) or on informational technologies such as the internet (magaudda 2020), the portal conveys the idea of a device and threshold offering an access to some other space, a passage towards somewhere radically different. of course, a portal can be secret or hidden, dangerous, or difficult to activate. by connecting multiple points in space and time the portal is a twoway medium offering exceptional insight and mobility to who actively chooses to exploit its powers (hanson 2021). “portals” is also the theme chosen by ctm festival for its 24th edition, which took place in berlin between 27th january and 5th february 2023. ctm probed the possibility of a curational approach that makes “contact with specific modes of experience, histories, communities, and speculative futures” reflecting on “the preconditions, thresholds, regulation, and fundamental function of sound and music as gateways to other realities” (ctm 2023). in this sense, the festival’s portal(s) used different venues and art spaces around the city—15 in total including kunstquartier bethanien, silent green, adk, fablab neukölln, festsaal, monom, kqb, rso, hau1, hau2, kw, panke, radialsystem, morphine raum and, obviously, berghain—to allow trespassers to behold and overhear geographically and subculturally heterodox musical contexts. of course, as i have mentioned, portals are not just there: they deform and disrupt the concepts of reality, space, and time to generate something, to make something happen by creating new threads, pathways, and experiences. this is an idea that is expressed through aural means by ctm radio lab winner isuru kumarasinghe, who describes his installation “gilunu” (submerged, in sinhala) as follows: when we step into a space or a place, where the resonance is changed or enhanced, we naturally feel like engaging with that resonance … to see how the space transforms the sound and how in return it transforms us. it becomes like a portal into a different world, as part of this world, just for this moment. (ctm 2023) accordingly, the festival embraced multidisciplinarity, structuring this week of activities around club nights and music performances as much as around exhibitions, installations, https://www.ctm-festival.de/festival-2023/welcome https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.16 dancecult 15(1)128 screenings, workshops, labs and talks which, besides never resulting as secondary activities, helped inform the awareness of currently forming processes of musicmaking around the world. part of these experiments were the afropollination project, in which piranha arts (berlin) and boutique foundation/nyege nyege collective (kampala) established a transnational laboratory for sonic research to bring together artists from six african nations and germany, the exhibition “we found our own reality” curated by artist paul purgas, in which installations, archive materials, artworks, a series of live performances and commissioned texts were gathered to account for the under-explored histories of the sound studio at the national institute of design in ahmedabad, the first electronic music studio in india (purgas 2023), the radio lab open call showcasing an always different array of audio-installative endeavors within the medium of radio, presenting works by anna kravets and, of course, kumarasinghe and discussions that surveyed a number of themes, including the impending generational change in club culture and issues of cultural production during the ongoing invasion of ukraine. from this perspective, ctm has shown how it is possible to use programming as a tool to produce new forms of sensory and intellectual knowledge, forging connections between music circuits and performers accentuating the elements of uniqueness that the selected musical acts bear from their context. from the audiences’ and organization’s point of view, after years of pandemic fatigue and a life-affirming 2022 edition based on bringing back the joys of the dancing body, ”portals” seems again to give more space to contemplative and introspective listening experiences, betting on a courageous line-up presenting comparatively fewer resounding names than many previous editions. this is an attention that both staff and attendees seemed to be more than willing to offer given the almost total sold outs and the constant, remarkable presence of the organizers and curators. of course, even for a militant practitioner of sleep deprivation techniques such as myself, it would be impossible to map the festival extensively; an endeavor that goes also beyond the scope of the present text. therefore, the following selection of highlights is not only extremely personal but should give a glimpse in an impressionistic fashion of what i tried to convey above. among the performances, personal favorites include the improvisation between afropollination’s sound artist jessica ekomane and the ugandan diy synth builder afrorack establishing new canons of non-eurocentric sound synthesis, the heavily poetic minimalism and metal-infused tribute to mourning songs and traditional lamentations by sara parkman and maria w. horn of funeral folk, the extreme, pedagogic interactivity of poulomi desai, slowly inviting the audience to take control of her unorthodox, non-musical instrumentation challenging the idea of authenticity in regional music and the objectification of the ”south asian female body” in popular culture, the queering post-rave romanticism of the neapolitan neo-melodic performance by 2023 shape+ alumni nziria and light artist bianca peruzzi with the collaboration of choreographer franka marlene foth and dancer janan laubscher, the screamo meme music for tiktok doomscrollers of lil mariko supported by the raw, physical spoken word grime of iceboy violet, the a/v cyberpunk of japanese gabber and black-metal crossover ensemble vmo, tzusig’s anxiety-inducing and reviews 129 betrayal-themed dance provocations, the ambiguously brutal and theatrical genre-juggling of vieze meisje and the kampala singeli dance-fest conjured by queen asher’s productions, galvanized by the singing of her mother rehema tajiri and by dancers nana and zai. but above all, a special mention goes to asep nayak, a papuan producer and pioneer of the electronic wisisi: a genre that from the rituals of harvesting ceremonies in wamena was recreated and innovated through fl studio beats and mp3 technologies. i had previously binged on wisisi on youtube for a couple years and i would have never believed i could experience it live in front of my eyes and twitching muscles. witnessing this act really made the festival for me, showing that music can really create extraordinary junctions between audiences and scenes. from this perspective, despite the partiality of my account, this year’s ctm showed even more interest towards the subterranean, the peripheral and the subcultural. as noted by juliet hoornaert in her review of the festival for the magazine gonzo circus (2023), ctm presented a broad, generous conception of music, in which scratching the surface already meant pointing at the underlying artistic and social symmetries and disparities between manifold scenes. what i personally found to be the most remarkable aspect of the festival was its ability to put the listener in the right conditions to experience sound. whether it is for the dauntlessness of the curation or for the carefully selected list of locations, there was always the feeling that one was always offered the possibility to listen to something in the best technical and contextual conditions possible, whether with their ears or through the whole body in motion, creating the possibility for a range of extremely different styles, from pop and hyperpop to black metal, folk, spoken word, singeli and wisisi to coexist as equals. throughout, agreeing with a discussion i had with ctm cofounder jan rolf, which informed this piece, i appreciated the feeling of urgency that the festival expressed in reorganizing the field of musical knowledge, trying to push many peripheral phenomena to the foreground of the clubbing experience, highlighting distinct aspects of geographical and subcultural locality. in this sense, going back to the possible question of what a current club culture is or should be today, i support the stances of scholars such as silver (2014), labelle (2018), rief (2009) and magaudda (2020), arguing that clubbing today should employ music and technology as vibrational tools to cultivate particular forms of reflexivity and modes of experience that reconfigure the boundaries around youth cultures and other social identities, allowing a better circulation of sociality and power. therefore, the contemporary club culture that i envision, and that ctm seems to support, sees sound, festivals, venues, scenes, and encounter as the fundamental infrastructures allowing this special type of circulation; an alternative flow proving that, contrarily to what attali (1985) has noted, music does not only move along the routes of war, power and trade. accordingly, the portal is an apt metaphor of how to reflect on this ambiguous and exceptionally powerful type of infrastructure. seeing the progressive attention to socializing the organizing process through open calls, curatorial collaborations, and commitment to support less-known music movements, i have no doubt regarding this edition’s awareness dancecult 15(1)130 relative to these issues. nonetheless, accounting for my own experience as well as the one of many attendees, journalists and even participating artists with whom i chatted during the events, some elements seemed worth reconsidering. first, even though focusing on the netherworld of the global underground, the large majority of the invited projects still benefits from the support and visibility offered by many institutional organizations (e.g., shape+, goethe-institut), agencies and renown musical labels (e.g., nyege nyege, pan) albeit from the fringes of the music industry. thus, even though these associations often work with positive affirmation strategies, how it is possible to create further representation and inclusion for projects that fall off the actors’ curatorial purview still needs to be assessed. secondly, the petty hostility and unwillingness to help finding solutions of some of the berghain staff, arguably a staple of ctm’s program, inside and outside the venue, remains at odds with the “be respectful to others” attitude promoted on their website (berghain n.d.), creating spaces in which edginess and even mockery have prevailed. this has prevented me, for instance, from entering the night i was looking forward to the most (“bodily overdrive”), which is hence not mentioned in this review. then, more in the form of a suggestion than a critique, i argue that this edition’s theme should be, in view of the next, socially meaningful topic of 2024 edition “sustain”, further examined, keeping in focus how these infrastructures come into being, shift and are regulated; what are the portals that are still difficult to open, that benefit from advantaged access or remain closed? when translating the metaphor to the reality of today’s musical infrastructures, we should ask ourselves who controls the points of entrance and exit. who has access to them and under which conditions? how can we make sure that they remain functional, but their usage is not overly regulated? overall, for me this edition was a definite success and a positive example to follow for other festivals of the same kind. thus, i’m confident that all these points might be explored in the next years. references attali, jacques. 1985. noise: the political economy of music. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. berghain. n.d. “awareness”. <https://www.berghain.berlin/en/awareness/>, (accessed 22 august 2023) berti, paolo. forthcoming. “megadungeon: a model for media complexity”. magazén 4(1). ctm. 2023. ctm 2023—portals. <https://www.ctm-festival.de/festival-2023/welcome>, (accessed 21 august 2023). hanson, kara. 2021. “at the threshold: science fiction portals as agents of liminality”. medium, 9 august: <https://kshanson.medium.com/at-the-threshold-science-fiction-portals-as-agentsof-liminality-1f1e65ff1b2a>, (accessed 21 august 2023). hoornaert, juliet. 2023. “ctm 2023: een futuristisch ravecongres”. gonzo circus, 14 february: <https://www.gonzocircus.com/ctm-2023-toekomstfestival-vol-klankanarchie/>, (accessed 21 august 2023). reviews 131 labelle, brandon. 2018. sonic agency: sound and emergent forms of resistance. london: goldsmiths press. magaudda, paolo. 2020. “music scenes as infrastructures: from live venues to algorithmic data”. in popular music, technology, and the changing media ecosystem, ed. tamás tófalvy and emília barna, 23–42. london: palgrave macmillan. purgas, paul. 2023. “introduction”. in we found our own reality: an exploration of india’s first electronic music studio and its resonances into the present, ed. paul purgas, 4-5. berlin: ctm festival. rief, silvia. 2009. club cultures: boundaries, identities and otherness. new york: routledge. silver, micah. 2019. figures in air: essays toward a philosophy of audio. new york: inventory press. yalcinkaya, günseli. 2022. “the worlds of technology and magic are closer than you think”. dazed, 4 july: <https://www.dazeddigital.com/science-tech/article/56442/1/new-age-oftechnology-mysticism-magic-somerset-house>, (accessed 21 august 2023). post-feminism’s “new sexual contract”and electronic dance music’s queered femme voices dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 9(1): 28–49 issn 1947-5403 ©2017 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2017.09.01.02 post-feminism’s “new sexual contract” and electronic dance music’s queered femme voices robin james unc charlotte (us) abstract angela mcrobbie argues that post-feminism’s “new sexual contract” grants otherwise privileged white women the things traditionally denied women as a class, namely, economic success and self-ownership of their bodies as sexual property (mcrobbie 2004). because voice is commonly used as a metaphor for self-possessed agency, this article considers three ways white women and femme musicians across edmc use vocal and authorial voices to reimagine post-feminist practices of self-ownership and property-in-person. brooklyn band bottoms, berlin techno collective decon/recon and australian-american pop star sia, all use voice to craft femininities that deviate from post-feminist gender norms and its “new sexual contract”: bottoms perform femininity as self-dispossession, decon/recon’s anonymous collective authorship centers women and femmes while de-centering private property, and sia disconnects her voice from her person so that her performances of sonic resilience ( james 2015) don’t labor upon her body and turn it into private property. keywords: post-feminism, sia, bottoms, decon/recon, queer robin james is associate professor of philosophy at unc charlotte. she is author of three books, including the sonic episteme, which is under contract with duke university press. her research spans topics in feminist theory, critical race theory, popular music studies and sound studies. feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2017.09.01.02 james | post-feminism’s “new sexual contract” and edm’s queered femme voices 29 both in theory and in practice, liberalism1 treats voice as both the medium for political participation and an inalienable component of membership in society, and indeed, in humanity. this is evident in political theories such as deliberative democracy, habermasian concepts of the public sphere and in actual laws like the first amendment to the us constitution or the un declaration of human rights. thus, it’s not surprising that both music criticism and common speech use “voice” as a metaphor for agency and subjectivity. for example, kat george cites missy elliot’s “body and sex positivity”, “champion[ing] women-supporting-women” and “take-no-prisoners attitude toward feminine autonomy” as evidence of her “strong feminist voice” (george 2016). as george uses it, “voice” has nothing to do with the musical aspects of elliott’s vocal performance—it’s a metaphor for agency and intentionality. in a 2014 essay, rebecca solnit, author of the “men explain things to me” essay that coined the term “mansplaining”, uses “voice” as a metaphor for political activism and personhood: “thanks to the groundbreaking work of earlier generations, feminist voices on crucial issues have become normal and more or less mainstream” (solnit 2014). likewise, pop songs use apparently unrestrained, unrehearsed vocalizations to express rebellious, individualistic agency. taylor swift’s vocal flourish in “shake it off ’s” drop (swift 2014) and poly styrene’s screamed “o bondage, up yours!” (x-ray spex 1977) use vocal excess to show women busting out of sexism’s confines. swift’s forceful, expressive melisma is evidence that she’s shaken off all the restrictive stereotypes she’s tried on throughout the video. styrene’s scream is her (negative) response to the sexist cliché that she articulates in the song’s first line: “little girls should be seen and not heard”. as i argued in my book resilience and melancholy ( james 2015), beginning sometime in the early 2010s, strong, loud, resilient voices are not so much evidence of women’s liberation as they are a new gender norm used to police the boundaries of real, legitimate, respectable femininity. according to cathy cohen’s classical formulation of the concept, respectability politics are a race, class and sexuality-based discourse that privileges femininities that conform to other hegemonic subject positions over those that are insufficiently white, bourgeois and/or cisheterosexual (cohen 1997). arguing that “‘good’ girls are the ones who show a continual, active commitment to overcoming the limitations patriarchy places on women” ( james 2015: 84), i showed how neoliberalism has updated respectability politics to focus less on chastity and more on economic success. as james argues, neoliberalism has upgraded mainstream (white, cis, etc.) notions of femininity and feminine gender roles: passivity is out, assertive agency is in. in early 21st century western liberal democracies, women are expected to be strong, assertive, and resilient; they must overcome the limitations of traditional femininity, limitations like passivity, silence, physical weakness, sexual objectification, poor body image and so on (whitefield-madrano 2016). instead of changing society to be more inclusive and less harmful to women and femmes, postfeminism expects women to get over whatever held them back. overcoming the limitations of traditional femininity, women show they have the kinds of agency demanded of all full participants in the state and the market—that is, that they have “voice”. dancecult 9(1)30 this neoliberal respectability politics impacts how fans and critics evaluate women musicians. for example, noisey’s emma garland argues that “we [have] created an environment in which female artists are being judged only on their feminism” (2015). fans and critics expect women artists to demonstrate some sort of nominally feminist gesture: we like it when demi lovato proclaims her confidence (2016) or when meghan trainor says a firm “no” (2016). as the sheer volume of criticism of lemonade and a seat at the table suggests, we especially like it when beyoncé and solange center black women’s experiences and aesthetics, perhaps because it is easy to (mis)read these albums as presenting relatively hegemonic, middle class, heterosexual representations of black femininity (barlow, escobedo-shepherd). many post-feminist pop songs narrate such overcomings: for example, trainor’s “all about that bass” (2014) is about overcoming poor body image, and daya’s “sit still, look pretty” (2016) is about overcoming the male gaze and its idealized images of femme beauty and complacency. this resilient femininity saturates the pop mainstream. similar attitudes are expressed in the popular media. for example, in a 2016 interview with cbs news, eric trump responded to his father’s (then republican presidential nominee donald trump) comments on what eric’s sister ivanka should do if sexually harassed at work with the claim that “ivanka is a strong, powerful woman . . . . i don’t think she would allow herself to be subjected to that” (shabad 2016). from this perspective, the solution to sexual harassment lies in professional women’s personal fortitude: these women ought to be so self-possessed that they prevent harassment before it even starts. to be harassed at work is thus a sign of failed femininity and poor class and job performance. instead of explicitly denying women access to full political personhood, patriarchy increasingly expects women to conquer those traditional barriers on their own.2 if that’s what respectable, hegemonic femininity looks like in a post-feminist world, how are women negotiating this gender norm and creating alternative femininities? in this article, i consider three instances from 2015 where queer women use musical voice (singing voice, authorial voice) to perform something other than the type of agency, self-possession and economic success that post-feminist gender norms expect women to embody and express. brooklyn “gender-problematizing goth dance band” bottoms (2016), berlin edm collective decon/recon and top 40 dance-pop singer-songwriter sia (who is bisexual) each develop musical voices that are alternatives to post-feminist narratives of voice-as-agency. bottoms work in brooklyn’s queer alternative dance music scene and perform femininity as dispossession. decon/recon work in mainstream—and still overwhelmingly cis-men dominated—house and techno; their authorial practices center women and femmes while de-centering private property. finally, sia works in the multinational commercial dancepop market and disconnects her voice from her person so that her performances of sonic resilience ( james 2015) don’t labor upon her body and turn it into private property. i have selected these three examples because they all use voice to intervene in post-feminism’s demand that women demonstrate self-possession and economic success. i’m limiting my focus in this article to white queer women musicians and music scenes for several reasons: james | post-feminism’s “new sexual contract” and edm’s queered femme voices 31 (1) white supremacist patriarchy designs resilience discourse to work intersectionally and impact women and femmes of color differently than it impacts white women and femmes; (2) as work by scholars such as roderick ferguson, l. h. stallings and alexander weheliye shows, white supremacist patriarchy treats blackness as a type of sexual deviance, alwaysalready queer from jump, and queer in a different way than white queerness; and (3) i consider black women’s responses to post-feminist pop in other work ( james 2017). what is post-feminism? before i talk about the music, i want to clarify what i mean by post-feminism. in general, post-feminism dismisses feminism as obsolete in order to hide ongoing patriarchy behind women’s supposed emancipation. as angela mcrobbie explains, “post-feminism positively draws on and invokes feminism as that which can be taken into account, to suggest that equality is achieved, in order to install a whole repertoire of new meanings which emphasize that it is no longer needed, it is a spent force” (2014: 256). there are specific variations of post-feminism, each citing different reasons for its obsolescence and instituting different norms about feminism’s acceptability. unlike the backlash-style postfeminism of the 1980s, which rejected feminism as harmful and unnecessary, neoliberal post-feminism makes feminism compulsory: explicit, overt feminism is a necessary part of 21st century femininity3. as michelle m. lazar has shown, 21st century “power feminism” is a global discourse, both in the sense that it is “put into circulation by international media corporations”, and articulates itself in varying “glocal” (2006: 206) forms. patriarchy hides itself behind the superficial acceptance of feminist women: if we like feminists, if we even have friends who are feminist, how can we be sexist? “gender retrenchment is secured, paradoxically, through the wide dissemination of discourses of female freedom and (putative) equality” (mcrobbie 2014: 719–20).4 doubling down on the very oppressions it claims to progress beyond, post-feminism resembles concurrent, intersecting phenomena such as homonationalism, wherein “‘acceptance and ‘tolerance’ for gay and lesbian subjects have become a barometer by which the right to and capacity for national sovereignty is evaluated” (puar 2013). post-feminism treats the nominal acceptance of feminist women as evidence that feminism’s political project has already been accomplished. this supposed fact can then be used to call into question the right and capacity for sovereignty among populations where feminism still seems necessary, which tend to be non-white, poor and working-class and non-western. respect for feminist ideas and feminist women is also used as evidence that the so-called “alt-right” are unacceptably extreme. for example, both the press and the republican party treated then candidate donald trump’s brags about sexually harassing women as more reprehensible and damaging to his candidacy than his explicitly racist comments and policy proposals ( jacobs et al. 2016). similarly, the new york times hails the woman killed at the 2017 “unite the right” rally in charlottesville, virginia as a “strong woman” committed to social justice (caron 2017). the press frequently presents heyer’s murder as evidence that actual self-professed nazis are violent extremists and not just dancecult 9(1)32 people with different opinions (feinberg 2017; phillips 2017). the underlying norm here is that women ought to be strong because, much in the same way private property ownership was once a barometer of “civilization”, strong, empowered women, women who possess themselves, are now that barometer. 21st century post-feminism thus revises conventional respectability politics to center less around sexual mores and emphasize empowerment and self-ownership instead.5 in order to keep its cover, patriarchy requires women to incorporate feminism into their gender identity; to count as a “normal woman” whose gender performance is not in need of generally classand/or race-based reform, you have to be “gender aware” (mcrobbie 2014: 732) and profess and practice feminism. the ability to, as jack halberstam puts it, “catapul[t] anachronistic formulations of men, women, and everyone else” is one component of the overall flexibility and adaptability neoliberalism expects us all to embody (2012). but, as dawn foster (2016), bell hooks (2013) and plenty of other feminists have shown, it’s a really narrow sort of feminism, focused on economic empowerment and ownership of one’s self (one’s sexuality, image, body and body image, etc.). this idea of self-ownership and economic empowerment is central to post-feminism’s “new sexual contract” (mcrobbie 2014: 718). the original sexual contract, as theorized by carole pateman, is grounded in “the political fiction of property in the person” (2013: 17). according to 18th century english philosopher john locke, property in person is the private property interest one has in the products of one’s labor; this property interest lets you obtain both (a) more private property (by improving things with your labor) and, more important, (b) political personhood. “by being master of himself, and proprietor of his own person, and the actions or labour of it” (1988: 2–44), one can consent (or not) to the social contract. owning your property-in-person is what gives you voice, in the sense of political personhood and participation. traditionally, women as a class are defined as the group of people who permanently sign away their ownership of their property-in-person—and thus their civil personhood—in marriage contracts.6 women’s civil sub-personhood persists. for example, feminists use the idea of “rape culture” to describe “cultural practices that reproduce and justify the perpetration of sexual violence” (rentschler 2014). among these practices is the idea that men are entitled to use women’s bodies as sexual property and can intrude on their property-in-person with or without their consent. post-feminism gives women their civil personhood—their voice—back by giving them back ownership of their property-inperson. because the original sexual contract defines civil personhood, not just as ownership of one’s own property-in-person, but also as the “use of a woman’s body (sexual property)” (pateman 2007: 184–5), post-feminism’s new sexual contract construes women’s newfound civil personhood/voice in both economic and sexual terms: women can now own both the products of their labor and the use of a woman’s body—their body—as sexual property. sexuality is central to post-feminism’s new sexual contract, and to the kinds of femininities that it sets up as new norms. women’s voices must express the use of one’s body as sexual property. this is why pop critics and fans think “there’s a lot to love about this ode to sexual james | post-feminism’s “new sexual contract” and edm’s queered femme voices 33 agency from pop superstars nicki minaj and ariana grande [titled “get on your knees”] ... but, mostly, it’s refreshing to hear two women reject objectification and assert their status as sexual subjects” (dunlap 2014). similarly, meghan trainor’s 2013–14 megahit “all about that bass” treats heterosexual appeal—what “boys like” and “boys chase”—as the ultimate ground of women’s positive body image. post-feminist voices express women’s civil personhood as cisheterosexuality. in this context, sexual deviance or abnormality registers as a lack of “voice”/civil personhood. women and femmes whose gender expression doesn’t transcend the limits and low status traditionally placed on feminine things read as backwards or pathological or deviant. femininities that lack spectacular agency are queer in the sense of “abnormal”, especially when that spectacle doesn’t include using one’s own body as cisheterosexual property. in the rest of the article, i’ll show how queer femme musicians use musical and authorial voice to contest and build alternatives to post-feminist voice and civil personhood. bottoms signed to jd samson’s atlas chair records and tied to the brooklyn alternative drag scene, bottoms were soundly situated in white queer music and performance subcultures. on their facebook page, they described themselves as “two shitty drag queens, a 303 and a drummer” (2016). like 2014 eurovision winner conchita wurst, bottoms’ queens have beards, but the beards aren’t what make their take on femininity “shitty”. their drag is “shitty” because they intentionally fail in performing the one component of mainstream white femininity that is the focal point of conchita’s winning song “rise like a phoenix”: resilience. conchita’s lyrics depict a person for whom damage and ill-treatment serve as fuel for positive transformation: who or whatever hurt the narrator is the “flame” that births the phoenix. this type of overcoming, overcoming the damage feminization does to a person, is central to post-feminist femininity. bottoms suck at performing feminine resilience. in their debut ep “goodbye” (2015), bottoms talk about the damage and ill-treatment queer people experience and have experienced. there is an entire song about hiv, and the titular song is about suicide. the band told fader that “we’re really interested in the dichotomy of upbeat music with a more depressing lyrical theme. it’s like sad music for the club—people dancing to a suicide note” (fitzmaurice 2015). instead of fighting back against the cruel world, they succumb to it. like the sexual role from which they take their name, bottoms inhabit the feminized strategies of passivity and failure people like jack halberstam (2011) have identified in work by women and femme artists. damage isn’t overcome; it persists, and even if it impedes our agency, it doesn’t impede our ability to enjoy music, dancing, our dancing bodies, or even a night out with our friends. because bottoms don’t perform the resilience component of normal, mainstream white femininity, so their drag seems off, incomplete, failed. lead singer jake diebler understands this failure or “shittiness” as a way to carve out queer subcultures at dancecult 9(1)34 a time when most mainstream lgbt culture has been “assimilated into heteronormative culture” (haberstroh 2015). non-resilient femininity marks their failure or refusal of both post-feminism and homonormativity. both in their drag and in their music, bottoms fail to perform the feminine agency postfeminism demands of women. bottoms’ music articulates a way for women and femmes to experience their bodies and sexualities as something other than property to be used and owned. “my body”, the lead single from the goodbye ep (2015), reimagines aesthetic and sexual pleasure as something besides self-ownership. it does this both narratively and musically. the video stars macy rodman, a white trans singer and performer. in “my body”, rodman cuts up and ultimately eats her breast. she uses a traditionally feminine and heavily eroticized part of a woman’s body as her sexual and gustatory property, but in a way that signals the opposite of the mastery and dominance that both pre-feminist philosophers like locke and post-feminist pop stars like trainor, think such ownership establishes. rodman works on her body, but not in a way that transforms it into her private property or human capital: rather than “improving” it, she undoes it.7 the lyrics proclaim a similar self-dispossession: instead of post-feminist proclamations of positive body image reclaimed from the male gaze, they repeat “i hate my body!” over and over. sung with phrasing and diction that echoes bikini kill, diebler’s vocal performance refashions sounds that are conventionally liberatory and resistant—that is, sounds conventionally interpreted as expressions or manifestations of agency—into an aesthetic experience that is queer because it neither succumbs to, nor overcomes, oppression, but reimagines pleasure and its conditions (like bottoms do sexually). “my body” treats this dispossession as a source of sexual and aesthetic pleasure. first, rodman’s performance depicts her self-dispossession as a form of autoeroticism. for example, at 3:50 in the video, as she cuts her breast open with a chef ’s knife, her facial expressions depict sexual pleasure. second, the music avoids the tension-release structures post-feminist pop uses to represent resilience. traditional cis white femininity involves experiencing your body as an impediment (young 1980) and post-feminist pop makes a spectacle of overcoming body-as-impediment. as james has argued, postmillennial edmpop sonically represents that overcoming in the form of two complimentary tension-release structures: soars and drops (2015). both structures use rhythm and timbre to maximize the sense of sonic crisis and recovery. “my body” avoids that gendered narrative entirely. musically, the song is a 24-bar loop repeated five and a half times; it builds by layering voices, but there’s no tension-release moment (see diagram 1). there’s no climactic sonic overcoming, no crisis from which a girl spectacularly bounces back. just as the lyrics express the opposite of post-feminist resilience, the song’s structure avoids the songwriting techniques commonly used to express and represent that resilience. “my body” doesn’t use feminine resilience to cultivate (in the full sense of this term) aesthetic pleasure. like the video’s narrative, the song’s structure expresses a femininity that does not hinge on mastery and self-ownership. james | post-feminism’s “new sexual contract” and edm’s queered femme voices 35 diagram 1. bottoms, “my body” (2015). decon/recon as rebekah farrugia argues, though “the absence of lyrics in most edm genres and subgenres prevents women from falling readily into typical, gendered traps in which their contributions are viewed only in terms of vocals and/or lyrics, regardless of the actual range of their contributions” (2012: 10), industry practices still exclude women, non-binary, queer and non-men artists from full participation. for example, lamentations about “the sheer lack of women in the dance music industry” (mccarthy 2015) or the fact that “the dance music scene, which is a counter culture at the beginning, has become so conservative dancecult 9(1)36 on many levels” (rroxymore, in docherty 2016) and carefully qualified claims that “certain genres, such as edm, can have a ‘boys only’ mentality that makes it hard for female artists to make a name for themselves” (byers 2015, emphasis mine) are common. techno collective decon/recon think conventional approaches to songwriting and production constitute “a glass ceiling to keep the privileged privileged” (noise manifesto 2016b). they have targeted this glass ceiling, using alternative relations of song production to shatter one specific musical convention that disadvantages women, queers, non-binary people, and non-men: authorial voice and attribution. decon/recon is a collective formed by paula temple and a cast of three rotating musicians. their first ep, #1 (2015), included rroxymore, oni ayhun, jaguar woman (temple), and aquarian jugs (aka planningtorock). it was released on paula temple’s noise manifesto label, which explicitly promotes the work of women, queers and non-cismen in electronic dance music (noise manifesto 2016b). their name clips and combines “deconstruction” and “reconstruction” (noise manifesto 2015), which is how the collective describes their signature compositional process. all members contribute a set of sounds to a sound bank, and then each individual member composes one track with sounds from that sound bank. these tracks are credited to the collective as a whole so listeners can never attribute sounds or arrangements to specific members of the collective. this way, nobody “owns” the track, in the lockean sense of improving something with your labor and thus making it your (intellectual) property, and nobody can be credited with authorial voice. whereas post-feminist pop aims to grant women voice, civil personhood, and property-inperson, decon/recon adopts a compositional style that abolishes the division of labor and private property. as marx and engels show in the german ideology, the division of labor is both what makes private property possible and in the end “identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with reference to activity and is affirmed in the other with reference to the product of the activity” (marx and engels 1978: 159–60). eliminating the division of compositional labor—you might say everyone in the collective made beats in the morning, clipped samples in the afternoon, and composed and produced in the evening—decon/recon makes it impossible for us to interpret their ep as any author’s or artist’s private property/voice. paralleling angela davis’ (2011) argument that women cannot be liberated from patriarchy without also abolishing private property, decon/ recon’s compositional practices suggest that women cannot be liberated from patriarchy without also abolishing authorial voice and private intellectual property. as they put it, decon refers to “the deconstructive process of the ‘artist’ status in terms of superiority or the elaboration of new politically active business models” (noise manifesto 2015). this process deconstructs the relations of production and distribute both hard and soft/social capital away from the women, queers and gender-non-conforming members of the music industry and reconstructs these relations in a way that forces people out of the interpretive habits (like authorial attribution) that support those traditional relations of property and production.8 for example, as farrugia argues, “turning edm producers and djs into brands favors the logic of capital accumulation” (2012: 41). james | post-feminism’s “new sexual contract” and edm’s queered femme voices 37 the decon/recon process also deconstructs classically liberal understandings of gender and sexuality, which treat them as attributes or characteristics of individuals.9 this process reconstructs our concepts of gender and sexuality by framing them as political, social, and economic systems10. in their manifesto, the collective describe identity as something that structures the world and your relation to it, like: the ring of an alarm set on given daily routines in which you wake up the day you are born. is it the repetition of given gestures in which you move as somnambulist, calcifying the borders of a social geography. are these borders producing you as a subject of a constant flashback where past and future vanish and your living trajectory comes to an end by being its own beginning (noise manifesto 2016a). identity is a program that produces people of varying social status, and the decon/ recon method hacks that program. unlike post-feminism, which rehabilitates the status of “woman” and normal, white, cishetero, able-bodied femininity, giving patriarchal minorities a voice, the decon/recon process rewrites the gendered scripts or protocols that assign identities and dole out statuses—in particular the status of “voice” itself: authorial voice, ownership of intellectual property and cultural credit, full liberal personhood and citizenship. they decon “voice” and recon the practice vocalization—the practice or process of what philosophers would call political subjectivation, which is the way individuals and groups get assigned roles and statuses in a social group, the way they get inor ex-cluded in the state or the market (this sounds a bit like what philosopher jacques ranciere means by disagreement). decon/recon takes up gender and sexual identity at the level of epistemology and power relations: we hear them not as voices, but as sonic relationships affected by cisheteropatriarchy. but what does this sound like, and how do people hear it? as tania gualeni notes at dummymag (2015), the sax on dr1-1 recalls no-wave provocateur james chance. the timbral affinity between this musical voice and chance’s sax playing on, say, the august darnell remix of his most famous track “contort yourself ”, recalls no wave’s negativity, which resonates with lee edelman’s notion of queer negativity. edelman argues that negation is sonically an-archic; “negation is a counter-hegemonic response to [european modernity’s] supposedly coherent arche of teleological development, accumulation, and growth” (2004: 508). as a manifestation of this an-arche, “queer death sounds like meaningless repetition, ‘random signals,’ white noise, or ‘electronic buzzing’” (2004: 506–7). chance took pop’s coherent arche and used practices borrowed from free jazz and punk to negate that arche—for example, he sped up michael jackson’s “don’t stop till you get enough” so fast it broke down. likewise, he used meaningless noise (not quite electronic buzzing or white noise, but noisy sax playing) to interrupt our expectations for disciplined timbre. just as edelman is negating the arche of reproductive futurity, chance is negating the arche of pop song form and pop virtuosity. if chance and edelman focus exclusively on the decon, in dr1-1 that uber-macho, confrontational “no” gets reconed into a compositional process and aesthetic that intentionally generates what we might call queer affinities, affinities that don’t follow dancecult 9(1)38 the relations that ensure the white cisheteropatriarchal transfer of wealth and property. instead of saying “no” it says “let’s do this instead”. aesthetically, dr1-1 constructs a sonic affinity between no wave and techno that re-scripts how we understand this particular style of sax playing, this, erm, “voice”, if you will.11 deconstructing conventional relations of composition and production, they reconstruct sonic affinities that dis-identify with white macho queer politics (the negativity). think of it this way: as a practice, decon/recon is neither a “no” nor a contortion (nor even the kind of “riotous” circuit bending james talks about in chapter 2 of resilience & melancholy), but a way to find pleasure—seriously great techno—in different terms and through unconventional affinities. as london-based edm retailer juno describes it in their review, these unconventional affinities sound like “a wonderfully off kilter feeling running through all four tracks, as the traditional tropes of techno rub up against odd textural tones and weirded out strings” ( juno records 2015). this isn’t an-arche, but relationality that flouts arche. from disidentifications to the queer art of failure to the epistemology of the closet to “punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens”, crafting alternative affinities beyond and below cisheterocapitalist kinship structures is about as queer method 101 as it gets. if the “decon” is more and other than chance’s or edelman’s “no”, the “recon” is more or other than the “creative” in neoliberalism’s “creative destruction”. as david harvey, naomi klein, and plenty of others have argued, neoliberal market logics demand that all bugs get recycled into features. i’ve shown that this imperative has specific implications for oppressed groups, who, through things like resilience and grit and the like, must turn their gender, racial, class, and other identity-based damage into a resource, both for them individually (in the form of human capital) and for society as a whole. though decon/recon seems to be a parallel process to creative destruction or resilience, its similarity is only superficial. creative destruction and resilience deregulate the surface but control the background conditions; for a musical analogy, think about reich’s gradual processes, or cage’s chance pieces. reich describes gradual musical processes as giving the composer “impersonal and also a kind of complete control” (reich 1974) because by controlling the background conditions—say, what kind of mic you swing from how high over what kind of speaker in what room—the composer indirectly determines the range of possible outcomes. neoliberal markets control background conditions so that the outcomes are always favorable to systems of domination. decon/recon intervenes in background conditions (i.e., compositional practices) for a different end—in fact, for the opposite end—for outcomes that are not favorable to systems of domination but to oppressed groups.12 as temple explains, the point is creating the environment, the atmospheres, in order to make that possible. whether that happens or not is a different matter. to have the attitudes and structures where people are not being sidelined or discriminated against, where they feel they can be part of it too without having to face additional barriers (in sullivan 2016). if voice is the most foreground manifestation of agency, attention to background conditions seems like inattention to voice. however, it’s these background conditions that determine james | post-feminism’s “new sexual contract” and edm’s queered femme voices 39 what it means to speak, who counts as a speaker, and what sorts of voices can emerge from this background. post-feminism proclaims women, too, have a voice without challenging the white supremacist, patriarchal assumptions that determine what counts as a voice or a vocalist. it assimilates some women into existing power structures without revolutionizing those structures, structures like property-in-person as the basis of civil personhood. whereas post-feminist methods would make a spectacle of women claiming authorial voice, this collective’s methods revolutionize the concept and practice of political membership. obscuring who did what on the ep makes it impossible for audiences to interpret any division of labor into the record (e.g., the division between producer and studio musician, songwriter, vocalist, etc.) and to use private property as the basis for personhood and political enfranchisement. sia collaborating with producers like giorgio moroder and david guetta, sia furler has a catalog full of dance-pop records. famous first as a songwriter and second as a vocalist, she never eschews authorial voice. however, her signature as a pop star, the thing that stands out as her “brand” in the way the symbol did for prince or the gilded left glove did for michael jackson, is her personal anonymity. for example, in january 2015 billboard ran a listicle “6 secretive sia moments” which collected several videos where “she’s gone out of her way to avoid associating her face with her voice and talent” (richin 2015). she’s no thomas pynchon or elena ferrante, but sia does intentionally avoid public attention to her person, especially when it comes to her appearance and her sexuality. in “my anti-fame manifesto” she compares celebrity to a judgy “mother-in-law” who is “not just making cracks about dying before i give her some grandkids, she’s asking me if i’m barren. she’s asking me whether i’m ‘so unattractive under those clothes that her son/daughter doesn’t want to fuck me anymore’, or if i’m ‘so dumb i don’t know what a dick is and how to use it’” (sia 2013). beauty, heterosexuality, motherhood—these are all components of normative white femininity. and they’re the things sia thinks fame and celebrity take from her, much in the same way traditional marriage contracts take women’s property-in-person and sign them over to husbands. hermione hoby’s (2014) claim that this “faceless fame...seems unprecedented for a female pop star”13 reinforces the gendered character of such exploitation. this is why sia uses the mother-in-law metaphor: concluding her manifesto with the statement “me and fame will never be married”. sia clearly understands—implicitly if not explicitly— anonymity as a way to protect herself from the same kind of gendered exploitation marriage exacts on women: it protects her from having the public use her body as sexual property. whether live or in video, she generally obscures her face from the audience. she does this in one of two ways, each of them involving a blunt-cut blonde bob wig. first, in videos, album covers and other mass-distributed paraphernalia, the wig represents sia. it either stands by itself, like a brand symbol (e.g., on the covers for a thousand forms of fear and this is acting), or it’s worn by actors and dancers to indicate that they are sia’s proxy (e.g., dancecult 9(1)40 maddie ziegler in “chandelier” and “elastic heart”). second, in live performances sia sings from behind an extremely large version of this wig with the bangs falling just at nose level so they don’t interfere with the mic picking up her voice. according to maura johnson (2016), this has the effect of presenting sia as “an omniscient narrator of the feelings wordlessly portrayed by others”. this visual rhetoric of anonymity disarticulates the musical structures that conventionally express post-feminist resilience from her femme subjectivity. obscuring her face makes it more difficult for audiences to interpret her songs’ musical expression as personal expression of her person or persona. if regular arguments with my students are any indication here, pop audiences commonly interpret vocal expression as the immediate expression of singers’ emotions, not as practiced and calculated matters of musical technique. by making it impossible to read her facial expressions or other body language (for example, for her 2016 saturday night live performance she stood still at the mic), sia interrupts that interpretive habit. we can’t match her musical expression to her facial expression and body language, or use the latter to contextualize and interpret the former. her lack of physical expression is even more extreme than a classical musician—they frequently (if unintentionally) use facial expressions and body language—and audiences generally interpret them as performing a work that is not primarily rooted in their personal experience or expressions, generally because the work is written by somebody else. obscuring her face and personal identity helps sia draw a similar line between composer and performer, work and performance. without facial expressions or body language (or even much information about her body—she frequently performs in loose-fitting outfits that obscure her physique; this deflects attempts to see her body as sexual property to be gossiped about by “sharp-tongued mothers-inlaw”), the only data we get is from her vocal technique. this is acting, the title of her 2015 album, underscores the point that this is all technique. sia and her collaborators originally wrote all the songs on this album for other singers to record and release: they were never intended to express anything about corporate-person/ pop star sia. singing them, sia embodies the songs as an actor does a character in a script. this is precisely how she describes it in an interview: “generally, they’re songs that aren’t from my perspective, so it feels like acting” (spanos 2015).14 actors use techniques— stanislavski’s, meisner’s, adler’s, etc.—to create credible performances of other people’s emotions, comportment, and general being-in-the-word. she uses musical techniques to evoke emotional responses in listeners, but they’re not really pop star sia’s or person sia furler’s emotions that she’s communicating.15 for example, “alive”, the lead single on the album, was written with and for adele, from adele’s perspective (weatherby 2015). “alive” prominently features specific technique she uses to convey a particular script: the technique is overblowing her vocal break, and the script is feminine resilience. resilience means turning noise into signal, damage into profit/human capital. it’s a kind of post-feminist co-optation of the queer performance strategy jose muñoz calls “disidentification”. in disidentificatory performances, “the phobic object, through a campy over-the-top performance, is reconfigured as sexy and glamorous; and not as the pathetic and abject spectacle that it james | post-feminism’s “new sexual contract” and edm’s queered femme voices 41 appears to be in the dominant eyes of heteronormative culture” (muñoz 1994: 3). as a component of post-feminism, resilience discourse demands women perform their damaged femininities as having been overcome—that they make a spectacle of these pathetic and abject traits as things they have left in the past. aesthetically, resilience co-opts formerly resistant strategies, like cutting or going into the red (two practices tricia rose identifies as central to hip hop aesthetics), transforming them from destabilizing practices into ones that reinforce the stability of the status quo. this is what sia does with her overblown break: she turns her break into an ornament, transforming what is conventionally a flub into a feature. in the way fetty wap uses mordant-like turns or mariah used to use melisma, sia uses the break in her voice as an ornament. blowing through her break as we hear her voice crack, sia recalls coltrane overblowing his sax. for example, in the build up to the first big hit on “alive” she switches between a descending glissando and an overblown break to ornament “breathing”: on the first and third measures, she uses the former, on the second and fourth, the latter. the hook does the same thing: the first two repetitions she ornaments “i” in “alive” with some descending sixteenth notes, the third repetition she replaces that with an overblown break, and in the final repetition she combines the two. sia uses this overblown break as an ornament, a kind of intensification of pitch-centric ornaments (like the melisma). as an ornament, her vocal break sonically represents resilience: what traditionally sounds like an error is now the crux of sia’s vocal technique, noise is recycled into signal. fans and critics interpret her voice this way. for example, aimee cliff argues that “her voice sounds like it’s constantly hovering on a precipice, rasping, crumbling, and breaking at perfect moments” (2016). later in her article, cliff compares women’s ownership of their “ugly” voices to women’s reclamation of their body image from narrow beauty standards.16 cliff concludes her article with the claim that sia’s overblown vocals are a post-feminist victory: “she’s liberated a new standard for female voices in major label pop, making it cool, and even desirable, to scream and falter and generally let your voice do whatever you feel like doing”. turning noise into signal, sia’s voice sonifies post-feminist resilience.17 lyrically, “alive” is all about resilience, about surviving struggle and trauma. maura johnson describes it as a “dour bange[r] that emphasize[s] resilience in the face of an uncaring and unfair world” (2016). we hear sonic resilience, but we don’t have a woman pop star to attribute it to. it’s not scripting a persona’s or performer’s personal subjectivity. just like iggy azalea’s rap accent abstracts sounds from the cultural traditions and lived experiences that they otherwise communicate, sia’s overblown break abstracts the sound of resilience from the discourse that supports it and gives it broad intelligibility. sia stays within the musical conventions of post-feminist pop, but creates a distance between those sounds and her identity. her singing voice might perform sonic resilience, but sia the singer doesn’t let us attribute that resilience to her as a person or a persona.18 this interrupts the pedagogical function of edm-pop’s sonic signifiers of resilience (soars and drops) by abstracting the structure of feeling away from the structure of resilient post-feminist subjectivity. this helps us disassociate the pleasure we feel in listening to her sing this way from the structure of feeling—resilience—that we feel at least ambivalent, if not bad, about. or, the pleasure dancecult 9(1)42 we might feel in listening is not the feminine and feminizing pleasure that the performance of resilience produces. this pleasure asks us to experience our bodies in terms outside compulsory femininity. when we enjoy singing and/or hearing it, we’re going off script. in this sense, then, sia’s overblown breaks produce pleasures that queer neoliberal white femininity.19 separating herself and her identity from the sonic spectacle, sia undercuts the interpretive move that lets listeners hear the sonic damage in her voice as an expression of her damaged femininity. demanding women labor upon themselves to transform their feminine damage into private property, post-feminism co-opts feminist practices like consciousness-raising into a form of enclosure.20 in this context, women’s empowered voices are evidence of that enclosure, a display of self-ownership and personhood-as-property. these displays contribute to a new type of respectability politics wherein only people who display economic success and/or self-ownership of one’s sufficiently white, able, and gender-conforming body as private property are recognized as women. across queer dance music subcultures, mainstream house and techno and top 40 pop, the women and femme artists studied in this paper have developed various ways of queering post-feminist gender norms by practicing femme voice as something besides enclosure. all of them address post-feminism’s “new sexual contract”, which restores personhood to women in the form of property-in person and ownership of one’s body as sexual property. sia and bottoms use vocal techniques to perform femininities that refuse the resilient overcoming of sexual objectification in sexual self-ownership, and decon/recon’s compositional methods disarticulate authorial voice from intellectual property ownership. these are far from the only ways to work around or avoid postfeminism’s transformation of feminine gender performance into a practice of enclosure. for example, ashon crawley has argued that billie holiday and nina simone’s vocal performance choices in “strange fruit” exemplify a black aesthetic tradition that frames versioning other people’s material (e.g., covering a song) as contributing to a commons rather than laboring on that material to transform it into one’s private property. similarly, i have argued that black women hip hop artists use extra-vocal sounds to negotiate postfeminist respectability politics, which, as i argued above, use sexual self-ownership to police the boundary between hegemonic and subaltern femininities ( james 2017). in all of these cases, sound is the medium for negotiating and performing femininities that don’t follow post-feminist gender norms. this may be more than a coincidence. as jennifer stoever and i have each individually suggested, because classically liberal approaches to social identities treat them as primarily visible phenomena, colorblind racism and post-feminist patriarchy maintain the illusion of equality by emancipating the visual sphere while doubling-down on racialization and gendering in other perceptual registers, especially sound ( james 2016; stoever 2016). traditionally, liberal democracies relied on uneven distributions of personhood-as-property to maintain the illusion of formal equality before the law amid systemic white supremacist patriarchy. now that those distributions of personhood-asproperty are shifting, sound is a taking on some of the work traditionally performed by those disproportionate distributions. because we are accustomed to looking for inequalities (e.g., james | post-feminism’s “new sexual contract” and edm’s queered femme voices 43 justice is blind), 21st century liberal democracies sustain the myth of political emancipation and formal equality before the law by hiding white supremacist patriarchy where we can’t see it: in norms about listening, hearing, speaking and singing, music aesthetics, and so on. this means that popular music studies can make important contributions to the analysis of both contemporary discourses and practices of domination, and the strategies and tactics oppressed groups use to resist and build alternative ways of living. in this article i’ve addressed how white women and femme edmc artists in western liberal democracies use voice to queer post-feminist gender norms. that’s a very limited slice of both identities and genres, and there is a lot of ground for future research to cover, both in studying differentlysituated people and different genres and in comparative analysis across identity groups and genres. acknowledgements i presented versions of this paper at the 2016 popcon and as a part of the dancecult block of panels at the 2017 iaspm-international meeting. i would like to thank all my co-panelists and discussants at both conferences. i am also grateful to the co-editors and anonymous reviewers for their feedback. notes 1 i mean “liberalism” in the political philosophy sense of social contractarianism and its variants, not in the vernacular american sense referring to the democratic party and the political left. 2 like all respectability politics, this expectation lets a few extremely privileged women experience some of the benefits otherwise reserved for men, while simultaneously intensifying the oppression and exclusion of multiply marginalized women. 3 rebekah farrugia explains the difference between these two types of post-feminism as follows: “dovetailing with the backlash, the term ‘post-feminism’ also entered the popular consciousness at this time...to indicate both a rejection of feminism, implying its failure, as well as a time when feminism is no longer necessary, signifying its success” (2012: 39). two of the three artists i discuss here are loosely within the edm category that farrugia discusses in her book on women in edmc. farrugia observes that most women djs and producers she studied rejected overt identifications with feminism. however, her fieldwork was done prior to 2013–14, when post-feminism broke pop music. thus, i take the women artists i study as responding to a different cultural terrain than the women djs and producers farrugia studies. 4 for more on 21st century post-feminism, see banet-weiser and portwood stacer (2006), joseph (2009) and gill (2016). 5 respectability politics refers to the practice of seeking assimilation to white bourgeois privilege by demonstrating the capacity to embody and perform its norms and expectations. for more on classical respectability politics, see cohen (1997). for more on post-feminist revisions of respectability politics, see james (2017). dancecult 9(1)44 6 the permanence is the main thing that distinguishes marriage contracts from employment contracts, which are also about signing over one’s property-in-person to one’s employer: employment contracts are limited in duration, both in terms of hours per day or week, and overall. 7 “improvement” has always been measured in hegemonic terms. this goes all the way back to locke, who did not recognize native americans’ use of nature as “improving” it because it didn’t transform land into private property. see mills and pateman (2013). 8 critics (malinowski 2015) still try to attribute specific sounds to individual members of the collective, so they’re not entirely successful in altering everyone’s habits and desires. 9 see alcoff (2006). 10 for more on gender and sexuality as a system, see rubin (1975). 11 that affinity continues on dr1-4. the main melodic voice is staccato, stuttery and clumsy in a way that also recalls chance’s sax playing on “buy”. 12 to be clear, though reich and decon/recon are both addressing composition at the level of background conditions, decon/recon aren’t using reichian musical processes. in reichian gradual processes, the composer articulates a set of background conditions from which sounds emerge. in decon/recon’s case, they articulate the background conditions in which composers do their work. in the former case, composers address the work’s background conditions; in the latter case, artists address the background conditions of composers and composition. 13 notably, hoby contrasts sia’s anonymity with kanye’s fame, which culminates in “face so recognisable and so emblematic of celebrity that the world, god bless it, gave us coinye west, a bitcoin emblazoned with the rapper’s image. this is the man who married the woman most famous for being famous and then reportedly spent four days of his honeymoon retouching the image, until his and kim’s faces were perfectly ready for the instagram history they made (2,347,389 “likes” and counting)” (hoby 2014). here, kanye’s fame manifests as both money-property and marriage-property, including the access to a woman as sexual property. hoby’s choice of counterexample is further evidence that audiences interpret sia’s anonymity in gendered terms connected to women’s property-in-person and use of their body as sexual property. 14 here’s the full quote: “most of the songs, if not all of them, i wrote for other people and they were rejected. generally, they’re songs that aren’t from my perspective, so it feels like acting. i have rejects from rihanna, shakira, beyoncé [knowles], demi lovato, all the good girls, [and] katy [perry]”, she said of the tunes on this is acting, noting her private persona also comes into play (spanos 2015). 15 in this case, the repeated performance of a structure doesn’t remake us in its image. so this is the opposite of butler’s theory of how performance works to create the gendered body as such. 16 citing sasha geffen, cliff argues that although conventionally “like it does with women’s bodies, popular culture permits a narrow range of acceptable beauty in women’s voices,’ it seems like it’s no longer taboo for a woman to sound like she’s near-breakdown on a huge pop anthem—it’s a cause for celebration. female artists, more and more, are actively allowing imperfections and limit-pushing moments into their records” (2016). james | post-feminism’s “new sexual contract” and edm’s queered femme voices 45 17 i’m not arguing that sia is the first to use ‘flawed’ vocals. what’s new is the way critics and fans evaluate that technique. the quote here treats sia as setting a standard to which others should aspire, not as a rebel or an outlier. this parallels the shift in attitudes toward feminism: it makes a girl normal, not an anti-social revolutionary. 18 it’s possible to interpret sia’s refusal of resilience as an attempt to overcome resilience discourse itself. however, as i argue in resilience & melancholy, the spectacular performance of feminized damage is the first step or element of neoliberal resilience—opening oneself up and displaying one’s vulnerabilities for others is key. sia’s silence about her inner self doesn’t fit this formula. she’s not practicing a type of meta-resilience (i.e., a resilient overcoming of resilience discourse) because she’s not showing us how resilience discourse has harmed her and then overcoming that. 19 this isn’t the first time sia has experimented with sonic resilience and written it off-script. she wrote “diamonds”, the rihanna song that i use as my definitive example of sonic melancholy in resilience & melancholy. “diamonds” has an undercut soar, a soar that never intensifies, a soar that never comes through with the overcoming of sonic damage soars usually produce. 20 enclosure refers to the 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<http://www.cyclicdefrost.com/2016/02/paula-temple-weve-got-tounderstand-what-balance-means-interview-by-david-sullivan/> (accessed 29 november 2016). weatherby, taylor. 2015. “sia revealed her next single was written for adele”. billboard, 8 september. <http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/6686015/sia-single-alive-written-foradele-this-is-acting> (accessed 29 november 2016). whitefield-madrano, autumn. 2016. face value. new york: simon & schuster. young, iris marion. 1980. “throwing like a girl: a phenomenology of feminine body comportment motility and spatiality”. human studies 3(1): 137–56. <https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02331805>. http://noisemanifesto.com/post/116385407624/pre-order-limited-edition-from http://noisemanifesto.com/deconrecon http://noisemanifesto.com/manifesto https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2017/08/22/the-man-who-organized-the-charlottesville-rally-is-in-hiding-and-too-toxic-for-the-alt-right/?utm_term=.5f54abe6a3da 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2015. “confident”, confident. hollywood records: d001882902. <https://www.discogs.com/demi-lovato-confident/release/7595165>. daya. 2016. “sit still, look pretty”, sit still, look pretty. artbeatz: artbeatz02. <https://www.discogs.com/daya-sit-still-look-pretty/release/9257780>. sia. 2014. 1000 forms of fear. rca: 88843-07404-1. <https://www.discogs.com/sia-1000-forms-of-fear/release/5869814>. ——— 2016. this is acting. rca: 88875180552. <https://www.discogs.com/sia-this-is-acting/release/8040034>. swift, taylor. 2014. “shake it off ”, 1989. big machine records: bmrbd0550a. <https://www.discogs.com/taylor-swift-1989/release/6237864>. trainor, meghan. 2014. all about that bass. epic records: 88875025002. <https://www.discogs.com/meghan-trainor-all-about-that-bass/release/6155996>. ———. 2016. “no”, thank you. epic records: 88985320702. <https://www.discogs.com/meghan-trainor-no/release/8928508>. x-ray spex. 1977. o bondage, up yours. virgin records: vs 189. <https://www.discogs.com/x-ray-spex-oh-bondage-up-yours/release/691610>. filmography “the beat still doesn’t drop at eric prydz ultra 2014”. youtube. uploaded 10 may 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7snepghx9i> (accessed 28 november 2016). “bottoms—my body”. vimeo. uploaded 25 may 2015. <https://vimeo.com/128821585> (accessed 11 october 2017). “sia—chandelier”. directed by sia and daniel askill. youtube. uploaded 6 may 6 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vjpbrbu-tm> (accessed 11 october 2017). “sia—elastic heart”. directed by sia and daniel askill. youtube. uploaded 7 january 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwzgaexj-es> (accessed 11 october 2017). https://www.discogs.com/bottoms-goodbye/release/7477446 https://www.discogs.com/contortions-buy/release/6565355 https://www.discogs.com/rroxymore-oni-ayhun-aquarian-jugs-jaguar-woman-deconrecon-1/release/6929368 https://www.discogs.com/rroxymore-oni-ayhun-aquarian-jugs-jaguar-woman-deconrecon-1/release/6929368 https://www.discogs.com/demi-lovato-confident/release/7595165 https://www.discogs.com/daya-sit-still-look-pretty/release/9257780 https://www.discogs.com/sia-1000-forms-of-fear/release/5869814 https://www.discogs.com/sia-this-is-acting/release/8040034 https://www.discogs.com/taylor-swift-1989/release/6237864 https://www.discogs.com/meghan-trainor-all-about-that-bass/release/6155996 https://www.discogs.com/meghan-trainor-no/release/8928508 https://www.discogs.com/x-ray-spex-oh-bondage-up-yours/release/691610 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7snepghx9i https://vimeo.com/128821585 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vjpbrbu-tm https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwzgaexj-es a laptop and some talent: we are your friends, the edm pop dj and the gig economy rosie dwyer university of california san diego (usa) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.10> figure 1. we are your friends poster. photo credit: warner bros. entertainment inc. (2015). what does it take to be a dj? for cole carter, the aspiring dj at the center of we are your friends (wayf), it takes three things: “a laptop, some talent, one track” (joseph 2015: 0:04:32). it’s a strange claim in a film ostensibly meant to celebrate dj culture. it seems to evoke familiar criticisms from dance music detractors—that djs lack real talent or simply play “one track” on repeat. so why does he say it? the answer resides in the new story wayf tells about djs. wayf positions the aspiring dj within the context of the post-great recession years and the rise of the gig economy. the dj is now a gig worker, and djing is more of a business venture than an art. further, wayf casts djing as a cheap and easy investment, aligning it with the gig economy promise that anyone can reach financial liberation with cheap technologies and little training. by telling a new story about djs within the framework of the gig economy, wayf amplifies a resonance that scholars have detected: between electronic dance music culture and neoliberalism. dancecult readers might cringe at the thought of watching wayf: but they shouldn’t dismiss it entirely. the film follows cole carter, a dj in his early twenties (played by zac efron), as he struggles to become a successful dj and escape his working-class background. he lives in his friend’s parents’ backhouse, performs to make ends meet and, with his three best friends, takes on odd jobs with the hopes of one day renting a home of his own. everything changes when cole meets the famous dj james reed, who takes him under his wing and encourages him to develop a signature production style. after some mishaps—including an affair with james’s girlfriend—cole succeeds in writing the one track that launches his career and rolls out his path to financial stability. we are your friends official trailer (joseph 2015). yes, there are the images of efron’s toned arms on the dj deck, parties in the hollywood hills and monologues about how to “rock the party”. but cringe aside, the film should intrigue dancecult readers because, as a product of the edm pop industry, it grants insight into an underexplored topic: the conceptual meanings of edm pop. by edm pop, i mean the genre that rose to popularity in the late 2000s, whose sound combined house music and top 40s pop, and whose culture was crystalized by dj superstars and massive commercial festivals (holt 2017). as fabian holt suggests, edm pop comprises more than just tracks on the radio—it is defined by its ties to a broader commercial industry, including dj equipment companies and festivals. it is within this broader industry that wayf resides. dreamt up by hollywood, distributed by warner brothers pictures, wayf sought to capitalize on the popularity of edm pop: the year it was released, 2015, was the year that the edm pop industry amassed an estimated all-time high of $6.9 billion (watson 2015: 24). thus, while wayf might tell fictional stories about parties and djs, these stories disclose real data about the conceptual meanings of the genre, a subject which few scholars have studied (holt 2017). the meaning of the dj has long interested electronic dance music scholars; it is this meaning in the context of edm pop that i explore here. edm pop soared into the mainstream just following the great recession, while the gig economy was accelerating. the term gig economy defines both a general condition in which more people work in temporary gig and contract roles, as well as the particular boom of platform-based companies like airbnb and uber, which created gig marketplaces in industries once serviced by workers in stable employment. while the gig economy existed before the great recession, it took off after it, when rising numbers of people lost their jobs or hunted for additional gigs because their wages were low (ravenelle 2019: 175). as the gig economy grew, more workers joined the ranks of the precariat class: workers who lack the job stability, benefits and employment protections of the generations before them (standing 2014: 10). at the same time, gig economy corporations strove to downplay the negative impact of the gig economy on workers through a new ideology: the promise that ordinary people could attain financial freedom, independence and the chance at becoming their own boss through gig work (dolber et al. 2021: 9). both the gig economy and edm pop rose to prominence in the years following the great recession, and the gig economy is critical to understanding the new claims that wayf makes about djs. wayf places the aspiring dj within the context of the post-great recession years and the rise of the gig economy. the dj is now a gig worker, and djing is portrayed as more of a business venture than an art. of course, djs have always worked for themselves and made money from gigs. but within dance music scenes they tended to be viewed, first and foremost, as artists. while wayf at times portrays the dj as an artist, this portrayal is frequently eclipsed by the dj as an entrepreneur who views his work as a promising venture. the film frequently parallels cole’s journey to gain success as a dj with that of other workers who seek success in gigs. for example, cole’s plight as a dj is set in parallel with his friends’ plight in their respective gigs: one friend acts; another books parties and another isn’t sure what he wants to do but suggests they start an app. while these gigs may be creatively coded, the friends refer to themselves not as artists but entrepreneurs, and they treat their gigs as enterprises. in addition to this plot framing, cole explicitly parallels djing with other entrepreneurial ventures when, in the critical opening line, he says “these days, you can invent an app. start a blog. sell shit online. but if you're a dj, all you need is a laptop, some talent, one track” (joseph 2015: 0:04:29). here, he draws a parallel between the choice to dj and the choice to invent an app, start a blog or sell shit online and other purely commercial business ventures. the result is that wayf glosses over the artistry of djing while spotlighting the business acumen behind it, linking djing more strongly to a gig economy job than to an artistic vocation. the aspiring dj acts as a parable for the aspiring worker in the gig economy at large, searching for financial stability in the precarity of the post-great recession years. figure 2. cole and his friends dream of financial independence. photo credit: tony rivetti jr., warner bros. entertainment inc. (2014). additionally, wayf portrays djing as a cheap and easy investment, connecting it to the gig economy promise that anyone can attain financial independence even if they lack money or training. the gig economy establishes not only a material condition but an ideological promise: the promise that anyone, regardless of their background, can be their own boss. if in the past, starting your own business required money, today, thanks to platform apps, you need only cheap items you’re already likely to own—like a laptop or a cell phone. similarly, if in the past you needed training, today you can learn on the job. the new precariat class, expected to work a variety of gigs throughout their life, lack the occupational identity and training that was common for stable employed workers before them (standing 2014: 10). accordingly, a staple of gig economy opportunities is that they require little training even as they promise big rewards. cole positively describes djing as cheap in the opening line, when he says that djing requires only “a laptop, some talent, one track” (joseph 2015: 0:04:32). that first requirement—the laptop—is a low-cost investment, a relatively cheap item that many people already own. the laptop resonates specifically with the promise of the gig economy, which positions technologies as key to gain financial independence. the second and third requirement on cole’s list—some talent and one track—highlight the idea that performing and succeeding as a dj is easy. while talent implies an innate ability, to classify a practice according to how much talent it requires is to suggest how difficult it is to do well. by suggesting that djing requires only some talent, he suggests that doing it well is relatively easy. furthermore, to claim that the successful dj requires only one track is to differentiate the dj from other creative vocations for which success depends on prolific output, such as albums or a catalogue of work. this underscores the ease with which one can succeed as a dj. cole shores up this idea in another moment in the film, when he says that to “rock a party”, “you need a caveman’s sense of rhythm, cursory knowledge of mathematics and the broad strokes of ninth grade biology” (joseph 2015: 0:26:21). here, each of the three things a dj needs imply only a rudimentary level of skill. the caveman’s sense of rhythm suggests that the rhythm is so basic even a low-skilled, technologically ignorant person could grasp it. meanwhile, the knowledge of mathematics required—this could be a stand-in for musical principles—need only be superficial. the only other thing one must know is basic facts recalled from high school. together, these statements suggest that djing is something one can do without much prior training. thus, like the promise of starting your own etsy business with no experience and only the laptop in your living room, djing is promised as a cheap and easy way to gain financial independence. figure 3. efron (as cole carter) at the decks. photo credit: warner bros. entertainment inc. (2014). the lines i’ve traced between the edm pop dj and the gig economy enhance our picture of the relationship between electronic dance music and neoliberalism more broadly, a relationship other scholars have investigated. tim lawrence highlights the link between neoliberalism and electronic dance music cultures when he repeatedly suggests in love saves the day that the cultural and aesthetic practices of the disco movement foreshadowed the rise of neoliberalism (2003). for example, he suggests that early disco djs—independent, non-unionized musicians who club owners favored because they were cheaper than bands—were “proto-flexible workers”, foreshadowing neoliberalism’s flexible labor revolution (lawrence 2003: 436). additionally, robin james argues that the neoliberal virtue of resilience is reflected in the sonic aesthetics of edm pop. just as resilience fetishizes bouncing back from injury, edm pop sonically foregrounds a pleasurable bouncing back from tension and transgression (james 2015: chap. 1). compared with these examples, the trend i trace here—djing as a gig job, and the djing art recast through the logic of the gig economy—represents a more explicit link between a dance music culture and neoliberalism. it also reveals how, when neoliberalism infuses a dance music culture, familiar meanings shift. the claim that djing is easy has, indeed, long annoyed the fans and makers of electronic dance music. but in the context of the gig economy, what was once a pejorative becomes a compliment. acknowledgements special thanks to my mom, ellen smucker, for her feedback. author biography rosie dwyer researches neoliberalism and popular music, with a focus on edm pop and the years after the great recession. she is a phd candidate at the university of california san diego and she likes to rave. she can be reached at rosie.dwyer@gmail.com references dolber, brian, michelle rodino-colocino, chenjerai kumanyika and todd wolfson. 2021. “introduction”. in the gig economy: workers and media in the age of convergence, eds. brian dolber, michelle rodino-colocino, chenjerai kumanyika and todd wolfson, 3-15. new york: routledge, taylor and francis group. holt, fabian. 2017. “edm pop: a soft shell formation in a new festival economy”. in weekend societies: electronic dance music festivals and event-cultures, ed. graham st john, 1st ed, 25-43. london: bloomsbury publishing inc. <https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501311413>. james, robin. 2015. “hearing resilience”. in resilience & melancholy: pop music, feminism, neoliberalism. winchester, uk: zero books, apple books e-book. lawrence, tim. 2003. love saves the day: a history of american dance music culture, 1970-1979. durham: duke university press. ravenelle, alexandrea j. 2019. hustle and gig: struggling and surviving in the sharing economy. oakland, california: university of california press. standing, guy. 2014. “the precariat”. contexts 13 (4): 10–12. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1536504214558209>. watson, kevin. 2015. “ims business report 2015”. presented at the international music summit, ibiza, may: <https://www.edmendedigitalewereld.nl/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/ims-business-report-2015-18.pdf>, (accessed 14 november 2024). filmography joseph, max, dir. 2015. we are your friends. amazon prime video. burbank, ca: warner bros. pictures. <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3787590/>. dancecult 12(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 12(1) 2020: 85–97 issn 1947-5403 ©2020 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net bass, mids, tops: an oral history of sound system culture joe muggs & brian david stevens london: strange attractor press, 2019. isbn: 978-1-9072-2277-1 (paperback) rrp: us$29.95 (paperback) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.12> edward k. spencer university of birmingham (uk) university of oxford (uk) knowing how the world enjoys blackness, and seeing what happened to george [floyd], we—black people—get the feeling that people want our culture, but they do not want us. in other words, you want my talent—but you don’t want me. . . . you cannot enjoy the rhythm and ignore the blues (clara amfo speaking on bbc radio 1, tuesday 2nd june 2020). since this book arrives in the wake of the windrush scandal, black lives matter protests in bristol and now boris johnson’s inflammatory remarks regarding the last night of the proms, we must hope that the voices and stories amplified by bass, mids, tops reach a wide audience. it does not deal with reggae sound systems in the same way as henriques (2011) but is instead concerned with a constellation of uk genres that have their roots in black british sound system culture. in a perspicacious foreword, mykaell riley suggests that this oral history is not only about the enjoyment of bass weight but also about “something truly unique to the uk” (11) that is at once personal, cultural and political.1 refreshingly, instead of eulogising bass itself in the manner of recent scholarly monographs (goodman 2010; jasen 2016),2 the book comprises twenty-five interviews with a diverse array of people involved in the development of uk bass culture. as joe muggs notes in his introduction, he “can’t claim peer-reviewed rigour” (20), but his transcripts will certainly be of interest to researchers concerned with rare groove, acid house, jungle, drum ‘n’ bass, garage, dubstep, grime and uk funky. reviews dancecult 12(1)86 at this point some readers might ask whether joe muggs is overshadowed by simon reynolds. the short answer is not really. although his book is inevitably haunted by reynolds’ controversial hardcore continuum,3 from the outset muggs is keen to distance himself from a “definitive history” and linear narratives. he stresses that the book is “quite the opposite, in fact: it’s deliberately partial, arbitrary, and conversational . . . an attempt to look at multiple interwoven continua: life stories, genre stories, sound stories, all happening at once” (14). despite this, the interview transcripts are arranged into a roughly chronological order, beginning with dennis bovell (writer and producer for the lovers rock anthem silly games), norman jay (a key figure in the rare groove era), adrian sherwood (of dub syndicate), youth (martin glover, of killing joke and the orb), tony thorpe (moody boyz), rob smith (smith & mighty), george evelyn (nightmares on wax) and nicolette (vocalist for shut up and dance and massive attack). this is followed by four interviews with key figures from the jungle and early drum ‘n’ bass era, namely dego (of 4hero and reinforced records), dj storm (the self-professed “mum” of metalheadz), jumpin jack frost (who muggs casts as “the archetypal jungle dj”) and krust. the shortlived garage years are represented by sarah lockhart (who worked in a&r long before the establishment of fwd>> and her time at rinse fm), noodles (of groove chronicles along with el-b) and zed bias. this last interview segues into muggs’ conversations with the dubstep producers skream and mala, before kromestar is used as another link (with grime, represented by terror danjah). notwithstanding this domino sequence, the book then starts to seem less teleological during the final sweep of interviews (with t.williams, cooly g, toddla t, samrai, barely legal and shy one). sometimes the transcripts become bogged down with details that are interesting but rather trivial. similarly, the endnotes provide useful track details and demonstrate that muggs is a true anorak, someone who is utterly devoted to archiving musical heritage. intermittently, however, the reader can glimpse some heavier themes pertaining to gender, race, timbral politics and subcultural capital. in the first instance, dj storm ( jayne conneely) explains that she always has to “work that little bit harder” as a woman in a scene that is still overwhelmingly male: “we’ll always turn up on time and look well-presented because we’re women. it’s a shame that we’re not always given the chances we deserve” (192). elsewhere, sarah lockhart recalls the “intimidating” atmosphere of record shops with a collector mentality and stresses that she “didn’t like that it was just boys” at fwd>> (253). on the other hand, nicolette love suwoton appears to embrace longstanding associations between low-frequency sound and maleness when she states that “my voice is so feminine and the bass has a more masculine energy, if you like, so i love that contrast” (145). the timbral articulation of difference is indeed another recurring theme that emerges from the transcripts. although there is some consensus among the interviewees that the acid house era represents a brief period of total unity (with “people from all kinds of backgrounds, colours, nationalities, all coming together” (207), to use jumpin jack frost’s words), george evelyn laments the advent of “the italian piano house thing” and the way that “bass took a reviews 87 back seat in some clubs” (131). for tony thorpe, these “‘progressive”’ timbral developments “killed the unity, the family kind of thing . . . it’s like they forgot about black music and just went ‘oh we’re making money now, fuck that”’ (95). history repeats itself. much later on in the book, tesfa williams talks about trying to establish himself as a house producer and feeling the need to obfuscate his own identity as a black artist through his t.williams moniker: “the market is predominantly white male . . . my first name is african and i knew people would associate whatever with that and that might cause barriers as well” (392). the transcripts also demonstrate that uk bass culture has often been characterised by infighting (e.g. zed bias on the infamous “garage committee”) and closed-minded snobbery (especially when hijacked by hipsters). one of the most telling anecdotes of all arrives in the interview with terror danjah. hungry to reach a new, youthful audience having been at coachella 2011, terror danjah (rodney pryce) worked on an anthemic track titled full attention with the vocalist ruby lee ryder—one featuring the cardinal sin of a tear-out bass dubstep drop. kode9 (steve goodman) was confused and unable to hide his disappointment. but as terror danjah tried to explain, “this is for the people who don’t understand, i’m not known now . . . the people who bought planet mu knew, like people that are connoisseurs, sipping their wine like [comedy posh voice] ‘yas it’s terror danjah’. but the kids don’t know who i am!” (317). we might conclude that insularity and fear of selling out creates a unique set of problems. although muggs’ material is rich and evocative, some nit-picking is now required. given the specific focus of his book, i think that including “uk” in its title would have been a good idea. it would also have been useful to see the precise date of each interview at the start of every transcript. more generally, the book would have benefitted from better proofreading and copy editing—its pages are littered with typographical errors and missing words, and there also seems to be an obvious factual mistake in the nicolette chapter (the title of the massive attack track she features on is “three” not “seven”). my main criticism, however, concerns muggs’ distrust of academia and critical interpretation. this scepticism is by no means unfounded, and muggs may well have goodman/kode9 in mind when he writes that “you could pick musicians who help you make a very specific political point, or rave tracks that illustrate your chosen crypto-lacanian-post-pomo-contra-frankfurt fashion in cultural criticism” (19). but as the interviews make clear, sound system culture is political in every sense of the term, and riley’s excellent foreword could have been matched by an essay-length afterword by a bass music scholar (monique charles and christabel stirling come to mind, for instance). overall, the book is stimulating and frustrating in equal measure. as riley stresses, “formal education about music is vital” (11), and if this “very specific strand of british popular music” (12) is to become a mainstay of undergraduate curricula then i fear that critical, peer-reviewed scholarship is a necessary evil. nevertheless, muggs should be congratulated on gathering fruitful source material for this kind of work. dancecult 12(1)88 notes 1 riley also reflects on his work with the reggae philharmonic orchestra (rpo) in the 1990s: “it was a political statement, it was challenging the system . . . asking questions about what music is about in the uk” (11). additionally, it should be noted here that riley is currently leading an oral history project of his own with the black music research unit at the university of westminster. 2 for an important critique of goodman’s impersonal vibrational ontology, see kane (2015). 3 the hardcore continuum debate involving jeremy gilbert, mark fisher and simon reynolds can be found in the inaugural volume of dancecult. references goodman, steve. 2010. sonic warfare: sound, affect, and the ecology of fear. london: mit press. henriques, julian. 2011. sonic bodies: reggae sound systems, performance techniques, and ways of knowing. new york: continuum. kane, brian. 2015. “sound studies without auditory culture: a critique of the ontological turn”. sound studies 1(1): 2-21. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2015.1079063> jasen, paul. 2016. low end theory: bass, bodies, and the materiality of sonic experience. london: bloomsbury. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2015.1079063 reviews 89 night fever: designing club culture 1960 – today mateo kries, jochen eisenbrand, catherine rossi (editors) weil am rhein, germany: vitra design museum, 2018 398 pp. isbn: 978-3-945852-24-8 (english edition); 978-3-945852-23-1 (german edition) rrp: €59.90 this must be the place: an architectural history of popular music performance venues robert kronenburg new york, ny and london, uk: bloomsbury academic 286 pp. isbn: 978-1-5013-1927-3 (hb), 978-1-5013-1928-0 (pb), 978-1-5013-1929-7 (epdf), 978-1-5013-1930-3 (ebook) rrp: £91.80 (hb), £17.99 (pb), £14.39 (epdf), £14.39 (ebook) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.13> hillegonda c. rietveld london south bank university (uk) the study of the architecture of music venues is a developing area, illustrated here by two publications, one offering a historical perspective on spaces of live popular music performance, the other specifically on the more recent development of clubs where dancing to records prevails. in the introduction to their substantial exhibition catalogue, nightfever, co-curators rossi and eisenbrand explain the focus is on “spaces designed to elicit the after-hour excitement and escape . . . and the design cultures the nightclub has created” (16). created for the german interior design company vitra (2000), the book offers graphic design, architectural drawings and interior photography of a wide range of clubs, accompanied by interviews with its architects and designers, and a selection of reflective essays by a selection of club researchers; it includes maps and floor plans of clubs in belgium, italy, and in clubbing capitals berlin, london, new york, and johannesburg. kronenburg offers a broader architectural timeline of music venues that historically have enabled the experiential and transience of live music, mainly in west-europe and the usa. both publications stress the importance of human interaction, and the social aspects of sharing and interacting with music. for rossi and eisenbrand, the club venue offers a type of participatory theatre in which to act out various persona, a canivalesque space that enables daily identities to disappear. for kronenburg, music venues offer a sense of synchronicity that is uniquely experienced during a live performance, connecting music makers with their audiences. this must be the place is a continuation of kronenburg’s interest in flexible and mobile architecture and the experience of music (see for example, his 2012 monograph on live music venues). as the live industry is increasingly dominated by large international promoters, dancecult 12(1)90 threatening the livelihoods of “grassroots venues”, kronenburg’s 2019 publication attempts to salvage their histories, opening with an ode to the more intimate popular music events in the home, followed by an overview of smaller european theatres that emerged during the dawn of industrialisation, during the 1700s and 1800s. while urbanisation slowly but surely intensified during that era, popular theatre venues became part of circuits for travelling shows, and public houses that were popular for their music and theatre programming would metamorphose into music halls. later in the book, there is a discussion of european social dance venues from the 18th up to the mid-twentieth century, starting with dance pavilions of london’s pleasure gardens, followed by the ballrooms and dancehalls that ultimately swapped their orchestras for djs during the 1970s and 80s. the historical black and white as well as glossy colour prints, both drawings and photographs, add to a deeper understanding of the look of some of these venues. kronenburg further addresses the development of venues in the usa that ultimately became jazz and a dance clubs, including early twentieth century juke joints and blues bars, and a chapter specifically dedicated to the various jazz venues of new orleans. supper clubs and cabaret venues, where one could have dinner while watching a show and maybe have a dance afterwards, offered a variety of jazz and popular music. of particular interest for the design of discos and dance bars are speakeasies, which emerged during the 1920-1933 national alcohol prohibition. also known as the jazz age, or the roaring twenties, during these thirteen years drinking became an underground activity. kronenburg’s interest in film leads to a brief discussion of the use of certain music venues as backdrop for a range of film narratives that mythologize the association of italian-related american mafia with such venues. in the safety of such secretive clubs, marginalized gendered and racialized identities could be explored and asserted, a theme that rossi and eisenbrand identify as an important element of discotheques and nightclubs, where liminality “is explored though the one activity that unites all club culture: dancing” (19). underground dance styles that use the body musically as an expressive instrument can, according to fikentscher (2000: 25), “be understood as part of an american continuum of social dance styles that has been marked by a pervasive african american imprint at least since the 1920s”. in night fever, catharine rossi additionally highlights the importance of avant-garde and experimental movements to the development of night clubs as we now understand them, with reference to happenings in new york, and radical design architects in italy during the 1960s and 1970s. in this way, the combination of design and the musical practices of such venues have had an important influence on the development of discotheques and dance clubs from the 1960s onwards. also contributing to nigh fever, tim lawrence provides an overview of the dance clubs in new york city that further shaped the disco concept, from mancuso’s home, the loft, to the extravagancies of studio 54. for kronenburg, such venues herald the transition from live music performance to “record scenes”, reviewing a range of djled events and venues where participants dance to recorded music, from influential new york dance clubs in the 1960s and 70s, to the northern soul scene in england. yet, it is important to acknowledge that also the dj is a musical performer (rietveld 2016). such venues are often found in areas that are regarded as undesirable, taking place within the reviews 91 night-time that make them invisible to everyday society. yet their pioneering drive can add cultural capital to a neighbourhood and thereby set in motion processes of gentrification that can, ironically, eventually push away these venues. both publications give recognition to the multi-sensory aspect of music venues. for rossi and eisenbrand mobile theatrical lighting and participatory spectacle are of importance to dance clubs. kronenburg further emphasises the importance sound when dancing to records, assuming that the staged music performance stops being a spectacle; this holds true for smaller clubs, but less so for commercially driven events (rietveld, 2013). for both, though, the discussion of music venues mainly focuses on visual aspects rather than the acoustic space in the experience of music. perhaps this is not surprising. architecture is dominated by visual design, with acoustic architecture a smaller component in this field. added to this is the mediation of the story of dance clubs and music venues though text and still images, in which it is a challenge to translate the dynamism of sound and dance. particularly night fever showcases a visually lush selection of key dance clubs, including the post-industrial interior design of manchester’s the haçienda (fac51) by ben kelly, visually echoing the functional modernist interiors by bauhaus and gerrit rietveld; yet despite its visually innovative design it was beset by acoustic challenges. the famously fine-tuned sound system design by richard long for paradise garage is given recognition throughout the catalogue, but this does not translate well visually, unlike images of grace jones being body painted by keith haring for a show in that influential new york underground club. a spectacular colour image of the gold-metal coated despacio sound system seems offered by way of compensation; designed by james murphy this was inspired by both richard long’s work and by the chilled out balearic music aesthetic of ibiza (“despacio” means “slowly”). still, ibiza’s clubs are notably absent, despite its influential dance music clubs and party culture. this just illustrates that the richness and complexity of music club history makes it impossible to be exhaustive. references fikentscher, kai. 2000. “you better work!” underground dance music in new york city. hanover nh, and london, uk: wesleyan university press. kronenburg, robert. 2012. live architecture: popular music venues, stages and arenas. oxford, uk: routledge. rietveld, hillegonda. c. 2016. “authenticity and liveness in digital dj performance”. in musicians and their audiences, ed. ioannis tsioulakis and elina hytönen-ng, 123-33. new york, ny and london, uk: routledge. ——— 2013. “journey to the light? immersion, spectacle and mediation”. in dj culture in the mix: power, technology, and social change in electronic dance music, ed. anna gavanas, bernado a. attias and hillegonda c. rietveld, 79-102. new york, ny and london, uk, bloomsbury academic. “dance! voices from the exhibition ‘night fever: designing club culture 1960 – today’”. vitra magazine. <https://www.vitra.com/en-gb/magazine/details/dance>. https://www.vitra.com/en-gb/magazine/details/dance dancecult 12(1)92 moon juice stomper: a novel (goa 1987-96) ray castle new zealand: independently published, 2019 313 pp. isbn: 978-1791998271 rrp: £12 <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.14> graham st john independent researcher if dance music scenes have windows of fortune, anjuna, goa, in the late eighties was peak oil, and ray castle was there to drill it. after three decades, castle has finally knocked out, psychedelic disco balls and all, what is certain to become the definitive warp and scintillating weft on this “scenius” during its electronic heyday. as perhaps the most influential yet least documented dance music culture in history, this moment has long been an enigma. a golden triangle for cultural exiles and outcastes. a haven for human flotsam and jetsam surging up the electric shores of the arabian sea, before ebbing into the deep recesses of memory. the absence of reporting on this lost horizon and its discommunitarians would normally be enough to draw the attention of enthusiasts of goa and its many after parties. fortunately for us, as the work of a wordsmith with an acute attention to detail, moon juice stomper is a literary charm. among other aliases, as dj masaray, castle performed in goa in the late eighties and early nineties, becoming a vocal critic of the industry that emerged in the subsequent decades. having once elevated ecstatic bodies above the sands of distant languid beaches, castle now sustains the levitational effect in a narrative at times reminiscent of castenada or h. s. thompson. commanding a white-knuckled ride through the “mystical anarchy” of “gonzo goa,” capturing the explosive atmosphere at this freak nadir, his self published intervention in creative nonfiction transports readers inside the minds of the habitués of this remote crossroads … even as they’re going out of their minds. and in doing so, castle does what any freakologist worth their beatific bath salts should do: he delivers us into the heart and soul of the matter. this journey into the many-layered vibe of goa — the roots of goa trance and its worldwide psytrance progeny — is no mean feat, as castle has seamlessly achieved the notoriously difficult and routinely futile task of writing about dancing. this accomplishment stands tall in the history of dance culture narratives. the central characters stand off the page in a third person approach that repeatedly lures readers into the sweet spot. the book is reviews 93 hallucinatory, but also realistic. it conveys the gift economy and music swopping integral to this scene. goa fans and scholars will be fascinated by the effort to weave pseudonymised figures like goa gil, laurent, fred disco, vath, raja ram/tip and space tribe, among many others, into this semi-fictionalised account. enthusiasts will likewise appreciate how track vocal samples are mixed into the narrative, dada-jockey style, and the way the story builds tension and achieves climax at the full moon party under the banyan tree in 1988. other points of intrigue include the descriptions of drug politics, police corruption, party bans, bar/gambling cartels and various historical anecdotes. generations of train spotters will be shooting their cosmic load over these pages. the struggle to sustain “paradise” is an overarching theme, and quite apparent in the efforts to maintain the vibe into the early 1990s as the scene came under growing external and internal pressures. whether castle captured this long tail effect adequately is open to dispute, for the book, it could be warranted, drags. then again, this is faithful to the partyarc of the scene itself: build-up, peak vibe and long come down, with many after parties inclusive. it echoes a movement where parties found ways to survive through the next day and night, and then the following morning, and afternoon… and beyond that, in more remote regions and neighbouring states. as the stakes rose, the illegal parties grew more adventurous with road trips out of goa to maharajstra. the buccaneer spirit of making pirate parties by any means (sustaining the addiction and entitlement to the parties) seems to drive the plot. the effort to treat the goa scene (or “scenius”) like a collective character responding to its own growing notoriety as a nascent global industry and party brand is ultimately commendable. the book might have done more to address the overall impact on the locals of privileged europeans making party in the colony. this said, it does end with a neat twist in which an indian fashion entrepreneur markets the “goa psy trance” brand. it also illustrates one important outcome of the story: how upper middle class indians are now the primary customers of goa bar discos, that charge more for entry than a club in europe, to hear with a beer in their hand dance music that was once banned. in a world stricken by a pandemic that has effectively closed down dance cultures, the scene captured in moon juice stomper appears even more exotic. with its alluring wordcraft, this book holds unquestionable cult gravitas. remixing the music, intrigue, love, bizarre sex, violence and drama of real places, events and figures, not least of all the author himself, the book amplifies a movement in its un/making. every epic era needs its chronicler, and in castle, goa has its homer. dancecult 12(1)94 avicii: true stories dir. levan tsikurishvili usa: black dalmation films, opa people production, piece of magic entertainment, and sf bio, 2017. <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7357302/> <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.15> george musgrave goldsmiths, university of london (uk) university of westminster (uk) it is extremely hard to review a documentary like avicii: true stories and disentangle myself from the research on mental health and the music industry which i have spent the last four years immersed in (gross and musgrave 2016; 2017; 2020). with almost every minute that passes of this profoundly sad, and at times chilling film, i found myself thinking that, in many respects, what i was watching was one of the most extreme case studies imaginable for the conceptual architecture we have developed to try and grapple with the potential for toxicity which a music career presents. knowing the tragic endpoint, of course, changes the way one watches and experiences the film. on the one hand, it is a simple story of a young man making music and the stresses and strains of his working life which ends in tragedy. on the other, it is an allegorical morality tale, which challenges us to think about themes such as corporate ethics, responsibility, creativity, passion and exploitation. the film pivots around two central relationships. the first is the relationship tim bergling has with music making, realised  in the spellbinding form of deeply personal, at times even intimate, footage of him in the studio. we see him creating early versions of loops between 2008 and 2010 (which we as fans know will go on to be huge records), or jamming with nile rodgers, or creating toplines with aloe blacc and chris martin; each of these artists seemingly mesmerised at tim’s ability to reformat their different talents within the remit of edm. the second key relationship is between avicii and the music industry, exemplified and crystallised in his connection with his manager arash “ash” pournouri. it is through this relationship in particular that the moral and ethical challenges of the piece are articulated. at the beginning of the film, it is hard not to begrudgingly admire pournouri — who embodies the entrepreneurial spirit of spinning gold from thin air — as we hear him on the phone to emi pushing the deal for avicii’s first major single higher and higher, up to $500,000. this feeling of respect does not last for long. thirteen minutes in, still at the beginning of avicii’s career, we hear pournouri exclaim almost excitedly, in what turns out to be a chilling and prophetic statement: “tim is going to die. with all the interviews, radio tours and everything, he’ll drop dead”. as a viewer, this early feeling of discomfort permeates much of the ensuing ninety minutes. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7357302/ reviews 95 just a few scenes later, we see bergling having to cancel performing at the 2013 ultra music festival in australia — for what we now know was alcohol induced pancreatitis (ralston 2018) — working on his laptop in hospital and talking about upcoming performances. at this point of the documentary we start to see how his career has become more than just about making music, but is now an infrastructure; with stakeholders and responsibilities and pressures and expectations and dependence. it is in this environment, as those around him make entirely fatuous statements such as “you can do the show if you want to”, that, as a viewer, you start asking questions about whose interests are really being prioritised. who is working for who? indeed, perhaps more conceptually; what is coercion, what is control, and what does it look like? the subtle operation of a system of exploitation rooted in ideas of guilt and responsibility where, as bergling himself says he feels “lucky and blessed”, is laid bare before our eyes. here, and indeed throughout the documentary, you find yourself thinking simply: “who is looking after him?” one day later, we see bergling looking exhausted — a picture of enervate fragility with his eyes rolling back in his head — being cajoled into accepting a series of interviews with the press. it is frightening to watch. appalling, honestly. ticking in the background like a sombre metronome is the counter of shows performed, which we see rattling exponentially higher as the film progresses. forty-six minutes into the film, we are now in 2015, and the show counter ticks over 700 towards 775. we hear from bergling about the enormous stresses and pressures as more and more shows are added to his diary. we hear too from david guetta about the burden of expectations to deliver a global hit again. the sense of pressure feels intense in these scenes, as we see bergling sitting in his villa in ibiza creating the album stories, being reminded by those around him to eat and described by his childhood friend as a “shell”. it is interesting, personally, that i could place my own connection to the music of avicii, as a fan, at this point in the journey of the film. in august 2015, i saw him play at ushuaia in ibiza — the venue which would eventually host his final ever performance. the party was incredible, and just as bergling talks about finding genuine happiness in moments of those shows, so too from my perspective as a fan, i remember that happiness. the following month, in september 2015, he cancelled all of his future performances. it is surreal to think that standing in ushuaia at that time, i had no idea about what was happening to him or the pain he was going through. within the first minute of the documentary, i was reminded of a quote by an interviewee from my own research who described fame as being akin to sitting in the back of a car that someone else is driving at ferocious speed as the g forces push you back in the seat and the world spins past you. this is perhaps the easiest way to read the heart-breaking narrative unfolding over the course of the documentary: a naive, introverted boy hurtling through a world he did not, or could not, understand, in which all he was searching for was, as he phrased it, “finding a connection with people and being accepted”. the speed at which he goes from sending demos to blogs and eating pasta on his bed to headlining a festival and being introduced by madonna is frightening. pournouri has, of course, denied this reading and presentation of events (ralston 2018). indeed, reading things purely in this way denies dancecult 12(1)96 the very real moments of joy we see in the film: the smile on bergling’s face in the early moments as crowds chant along to his first global hit “levels”; the stages with all of the crowds and lights and lasers and confetti; the incredible outdoor studio at the top of the grand canyon writing songs; the footage of him relaxing with his friends in malibu, in the mansion that he was finally able to bring them to honour the “contracts” they wrote in crayons as kids (stating that if any of them “made it” they would invite each other along to their mansions); or on the ile sainte-marie in madagascar after retiring, seemingly at calm. this is the duality of the story, and indeed of musical careers generally; the immense highs and joys, and the indescribable lows. in addition, this reading also denies bergling any sense of agency, and again, this is not what the film shows either. there is footage showing how acutely aware he is of himself and his personality; at sixty minutes in we see him discussing carl jung’s conceptualisation of introversion and we learn that he has been in therapy. he is emotionally attuned in a way that is not surprising for a musician; a type of work that is reliant on the understanding of, and connection to, emotion in the same way that a builder relies on and develops physical strength. bergling was clearly aware that things were deeply wrong with how he was feeling, both physically and emotionally. at the moment in the film when he announces his retirement, one still, as a viewer, finds oneself asking: “how does it get from here, to his suicide in oman?”. you still hope that perhaps there will be a different ending. at around seventy minutes in, there is a marked shift in the tone of bergling’s voice, as what up until this point has been a kind of resigned acceptance morphs into resentful anger. it is in his realisation and articulation of this anger that we see how the environment within which he lived and worked was reliant on him continuing to run on the treadmill. he tells everyone around him that he just wants the performances to stop, seemingly desperate for people to listen to him. “it’s harder to cancel these shows than to do them”, we hear someone in his team say. “it would be harder to do them, for me”, he says. “hear me out”. “as long as you know it could cost you quite a lot”, and they run through each show and how much money would be lost. “it’s giving me anxiety”, he tells them. again, this scene is horrible to watch. we hear the coerciveness of commitments “needing to be honoured”, leading the viewer to ask in whose interest it is for bergling to keep going and whose interests are being represented. we hear his team tell him that he will lose money, but of course what they mean is that they will lose money too. ten minutes later, there is an exchange which, given where the story concludes, makes one feel slightly sick. his manager, tellingly, says: he doesn’t understand the value of money or that his decisions can have very negative consequences for other people, or that the only reason people care is because he is successful right now. if he stopped being successful a lot of people would jump ship. i’m sure of it. what is perhaps most unsettling, or frustrating, or dispiriting, or upsetting — i am unsure of the best word to capture the feeling — is how the film concludes. we see tim in 2016 on a beach, retired from performing live, having separated from his manager, apparently reviews 97 healthier and feeling stronger and working on new music; in theory doing the thing he loved most. by april 2018, he would be dead having taken his own life whilst on holiday in oman. as a viewer, you are left devastatingly unclear how he arrived at the point of such despair. perhaps no one will know. what the documentary appears to show, to my reading at least, was the tragic story of a shy and anxious young man, who loved making music and the deep, meaningful joy it brought him, propelled into a world reliant on the ever more avaricious exploitation of his labour in order to support the development of an economy which had formed around him, where simple human care and compassion had been decimated by the compulsion to keep going and market his music, and against which he tried to fight back. certainly, this is just one reading, and it is important to note that many of the individuals whom the film appears to point fingers of blame at have disputed their representation. nonetheless, it is hard to watch it and not feel that tim had been profoundly let down by many of those around him. rip tim bergling / avicii: 1989-2018 references gross, sally and musgrave, george. 2016. “can music make you sick? music and depression. a study into the incidence of musicians mental health. part 1: pilot survey report”. help musicians uk/musictank. ———. 2017. “can music make you sick? music and depression. a study into the incidence of musicians mental health. part 2: qualitative study and recommendations”. help musicians uk/musictank. ———. 2020. can music make you sick? measuring the price of musical ambition, university of westminster press. ralston, william. 2018. “who really killed avicii?” british gq. <https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/who-really-killed-avicii> (accessed 1 september 2020). https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/who-really-killed-avicii dancecult 15(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 15(1) 2023: 113–131 issn 1947-5403 ©2023 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net raving mckenzie wark durham: duke university press, 2023. isbn: 978-1-4780-1938-1 rrp: $15.95 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.12> kim feser free university of berlin (germany) the cover design is reminiscent of a notebook: handwritten “practices / raving / mckenzie wark” on a monochrome pink background. the small book is published in the practices series alongside the titles fly-fishing, juggling, and running (tomorrowing has only been announced so far, which somehow seems appropriate). the series’ website states that the volumes shall “reveal the pleasures of losing oneself in doing anything that holds sway over us, no matter how common or minor it might seem” (duke university press n.d.). how does raving fit into this randomly appearing list of profane desubjectifying practices? raving unfolds in both detailed intimate as well as abstract theoretical passages, whereby these perspectives repeatedly transform into each other. mckenzie wark writes in the styles of autofiction (“these things did not happen. the person to whom they did not happen is me” [4]) and autotheory (“to gather concepts from situations” [4]). personal story fragments about raving and its entanglement with other practices—particularly social belonging, gender transition, drug use, sex and writing in bed—merge with political-theoretical thoughts on related aspects of queerness, blackness, gentrification, commodification and club culture. six chapters, partly based on earlier published texts and lectures/performances, are written in this oscillating style. they are supplemented by a “glossary of concepts” (91–94), condensed paragraphs on key terms used throughout the book, including in chapter titles. the concepts are defined as “impersonal characters in the autotheory text” (93) and shall function as “resonant abstractions” (93). in addition to these impersonal characters, the book is populated by many people known by name or anonymised, often by single capital letters. some of them are also referenced in footnotes, bibliography and notes on a collection of colour photos showing scenes from raves, festivals and clubs. most of the personal situations described in the book happened recently in brooklyn, new york. additionally, there are some memories of the 1990s (including “edward” [43], who plays a crucial role in wark’s [2020] previous autofictional/autotheoretical book reverse cowgirl). reviews https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.12 dancecult 15(1)114 the author mentions that she was asked to write a book for the series, and therefore proposed “raving” (47). that seems to be an obvious choice: she calls herself a raver but also clarifies that her main activity is writing and lecturing. the tension between these practices is addressed in the book. at raves, the author of raving avoids students and is avoided by them (61). she is also aware that her book might be part of “style extraction” (56, 94) if it commodifies gestures and information that emerged from raves. such phenomena of contemporary capitalism are fundamentally criticised in wark’s work, from a hacker manifesto (2004) to capital is dead: is this something worse? (2019). in raving, mckenzie wark, respectively the autofictional/autotheoretical first person writer, situates herself specifically: “the point of view will be that of this middle-aged, middle-class, white transsexual dance freak” (6). these attributes are addressed at various explicit, implicit and conceptual levels. she has the urge to dance excessively in order to achieve a state of bodily experience beyond normative gender-specific attributions and thoughts. consuming drugs, mostly ketamine, seems to help: “dancing and k make it all go away!” (42) that’s how she wants to reach her goal: “a dissociative time, a transsexual time, a ketamine time” (30). this “k-time”, an immanent and not utopian temporality (no time for “tomorrowing”), is one of the book’s central concepts (92). it refers to the so called “k-hole” (30), a dissociative hallucinatory state after taking ketamine. also, it’s situated in a critical discussion with mark fisher’s (aka “k-punk”) thoughts on “acid communism”. in collective “k-time” the presence of “ketamine femmunism” (30) can be experienced, as wark writes in the “ketamine femmunism” chapter (based on an online lecture on fisher for the berlin haus der kulturen der welt [house of world cultures]). “femmunism” (92) is described as a collective state where dominant masculinity is absent and obsolete. wark’s cautious remark that femmunism “might mingle” with blackness (94), almost sounds manifesto-like given her general reluctance to embrace hopeful scenarios. wark also describes how she prepares herself before going out. how she packs her silver rave bag, how she meets lovers and close friends. how several circles of “rave friends” interact via social media and share information about upcoming events. how she enters the dance floor by herself or with others. but ravers sometimes are annoyed by stereotypical “coworkers” (91) who lack the intense desire for “k-time”, because their participation in the rave is subordinate to their work lives. worse are the harassing “punishers”, mostly “straight, white, cis men” (92), who only attend raves for spectacle purposes. the mix of the crowd is regulated by door policy which is, along with spatial design and sound, an essential aspect of rave as a “constructed situation” (93). due to the praxis of “reparative discrimination” (93) people “who need it most” (93) and “whose style is being extracted” (94) are given priority admission. wark mentions that she and her transsexual friends often receive free entry or head to the locations which they can easily access. depending on venues this works specifically for black people. wark emphasises the background of the entire constellation in this regard: “the rave, techno, nightlife, surround: they’re all, among other things, gifts of blackness” (9). reviews 115 given the social dynamics, risks, and potentials that mckenzie wark discusses, raving seems fundamentally different from the more individually defined practices fly-fishing, juggling and running—if that’s not a completely biased perspective of a review for a journal of electronic dance music culture. but what is the book’s contribution to a critical discourse on electronic dance music culture? the one-word title, which is due to the book series practices, can be misleading. the book is neither a basic introduction to the practice of raving, nor a study of participant observation. as indeed the author points out, it combines a very subjective autofictional perspective with an exuberant creation of concepts. this seems inspired particularly by deleuze/guattari, kathy acker (see wark [2021]) and kodwo eshun (whose praise of raving is quoted on the back cover). the oscillation between fiction around the character “mckenzie wark” and meaningful conceptualization, strengthened not least by the “big name” the author has made for herself through her previous relevant publications, seems to evoke rather enthusiastic approval or possibly sceptical rejection. a productive-critical reading attitude is possible, however, if the relationship between the formation of concepts and the situations described is investigated immanently. the book itself invites to read between the lines, to be aware of subliminal counterpoints or barely noticeable voices. to name some aspects: the brief stories and details about raves and club culture are predominantly set in brooklyn / new york. they are shaped by the specific conditions of gentrification and “style extraction”, the presence of coworkers and, not least, academics. in view of locally different conditions of underground and capitalization, of confining “normal” lifestyles and resistant practices, of possible contrasts between rural and urban lifestyles, the nature and goals of raves might also have to be accentuated differently. also, the book is permeated by the theme of age, without this being explicitly reflected in the concepts: “it’s not always easy, being a middle-aged, clockable transsexual raver” (1, see 42, 57). based on this initial statement, and against the background of a reference to a club event for her 60th birthday (88), wark’s discomfort and inner struggle with the demands of beauty and youthfulness become apparent. in general, health issues seem to play a role only at the descriptive level. physical care and mutual awareness are mentioned, but there are several instances of risky drug use, including a fatal ghb overdose (73). when it comes to inventing expressions for key concepts, however, a euphoric ketamine hype dominates. references duke university press. n.d. practices. <https://www.dukeupress.edu/series/practices>, (accessed 17 october 2023). wark, mckenzie. 2004. a hacker manifesto. cambridge: stanford university press. wark, mckenzie. 2019. capital is dead: is this something worse?. new york: verso books. wark, mckenzie. 2020. reverse cowgirl. los angeles: semiotext(e). wark, mckenzie. 2021. philosophy for spiders: on the low theory of kathy acker. durham: duke university press. dancecult 15(1)116 spectacle, fashion and the dancing experience in britain, 1960–1990 jon stratton london: palgrave macmillan, 2022. isbn: 978-3-031-09011-0 rrp: €117.69 (hardcover), €93.08 (ebook) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.13> tara hill university of hamburg (germany) telling the whole history of dance music in a book seems like no mean feat. so even if jon stratton’s spectacle, fashion and the dancing experience in britain, 1960–1990 limits itself to the usually labelled “crucial years” of the development of postmodern youth culture—or at least its roots after rock‘n’roll restarted the 1950s youngsters’ life with a mixture of middle class romance and rebelliousness—covering all three decades of the dance movement comes across as an ambitious project. yet reading stratton’s succinct account still comes across as curiously pleasing read. as an almost lexical text, ticking the boxes of the whos, the whens, the wheres and the whys, it caters to a college freshman or an introductory youth culture class just as well as to the senior pop culture zine editor or sophomore style blogger. providing an overview of the subculture styles which—overtly or covertly, overground or underground—formed the face of a generation, or more important: its image. it performs kind of a double stunt: it’s not classic subculture research, stratton claims, which can explain what distinguishes these new movements, but more its relation to a politics of aesthetics and its relation to the “wilder” conceptual brother, a politics of the ecstatic. therefore, the theoretical framework of the book centres around guy debord’s (1967) situationist movement and especially its centrepiece society of the spectacle (la société du spectacle). herein, the cultural turn after the 1960s, sort of a “technicolour” explosion of creativity after the black and white movie era (you could similarly compare it to the evolution from silent to spoken movies) was performed by the rise of two key factors: fashion and dancing. in the 1980s, in the increasingly seamless society of the spectacle, a lifeworld was formed which was commodified, mediated by colour television and other media, though not yet by computers; an experiential world where surveillance was becoming normalised and increasingly extensive. clubs, with their rituals for entry, and their electronic dance music and lighting often linked to the beat, seemed like an alternative world, indeed a temporary autonomous zone (taz). for many, dancing along with others in the apparently safe space of a club appeared to offer escape and existential meaning, ecstasy, in an alienated reality. the dj became the shamanic guide taking the dancers through this experience. https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.13 reviews 117 while the first chapter tells of the rise of the dj with records starting to replace live music sessions and ballrooms where standard dances in couples became discos and clubs, twist was the first dance introducing heavy pelvic movements from african americans to the uk. the second chapter sets the scene with the beatles hysteria, the dave clarke five and introduces the genre of “stomp”—proving the brits needed some help with the transition from partner dances to solo and improvisational, as well as more and more ecstatic dancing. as the rolling stones introduced african drumming in their (up to this day) legendary live shows, the phenomenal gary glitter turned into the icon of the emerging glam rock scene. while middle class kids learnt how to sit down to listen to prog rock—genesis, yes and king crimson—like their parents might have listened to a classic record or chamber music with fully but passively immersing themselves into the quadrophonic and stereophonic sound spectacular of the 1970s, glam rock came to life with cult bandleader marc bolan, a.k.a. the legendary t-rex, and took to a crowd that loved extravagant outfits, more over the top than the hippies ever were, and huge showmanship. david bowie came up next and started his own, very influential ziggy stardust cult, a persona well-loved into the early 1980s (chapter 4 and 5). the new romantics, stratton explains, who flocked into the nightlife at that time weren’t so much a scene of their own, but a remnant of early club culture. their heavy focus on styling and outfit can be traced back to saint martin’s, the london art school. androgyny and heavy make-up, theatrics and gender role reversal were established in mainstream culture, through hit projects like ultravox. the last chapter deals with the now pretty much established bond between rave culture and the temporary autonomous zone. it starts off tracing the often-overlooked influence new york disco and the early club scene had on the uk warehouse and later acid house movement. compared to the watering holes of past decades, david mancuso’s loft and the paradise garage, which spawned the first superstar technoshaman dj, larry levan, did not sell alcohol but focused on an impeccable living room and after hour spot with psychedelics and/or designer drugs. this encouraged ecstatic dancing through the night: it was the quality of immersion that made dancing at the loft and paradise garage so special. uk sound engineers and clubs were developing similar systems. for example, tony andrews, the co-founder of the sound system company, specialising in speakers, funktion-one, and who has been designing speakers since the late 1960s, comments: “when [a sound system] is good, it puts you into a meditative state.” (rothlein 2014) funktion-one systems have been installed in many of the most highly regarded clubs such as space on ibiza and berghain in berlin. it is immersion that heightens the possibility of the ecstatic experience. here we have the technological basis for the transformation in clubbing that began in the late 1970s and morphed into rave culture. (28) the now legendary myth of the four englishmen who went to ibiza to come back and revolutionise british society is retold here, too. though the story of the legendary night dancecult 15(1)118 when nicky holloway, johnny walker and danny rampling went to ibiza’s infamous late night powerhouse amnesia and took the new drug ecstasy for the first time to afterwards bring it back to great britain, open the clubs hacienda, shoom and heaven and create the “second summer of love”, uk’s acid house revolution, stratton is careful to remind us of the “whitewashing” which is done by excluding detroit techno and chicago house’s black and disco’s gay roots. the history of dance music (206–210) then tells another story: the one from the jazz ballroom being replaced by cheaper record collection spinning nights everyone could afford. while stomp and twist made the brits move their pelvis, the quality of sound hugely profited by the sound systems built by the religiously inspired dub music collectives in jamaica, before they moved to notting hill carnival. as the merits of the uk’s minorities become clearer, one wonders what the closing with thatcher’s brutal rave ban meant for society. also, newer discussions like jimmy saville’s behaviour as a sex offender would have proven interesting for the proposed change in nightlife—from a dirty pick-up place for cheap thrills to a meditative, spiritual cleansing practice or festivities of joy, explained with help of bey’s taz—where exactly big beat belongs here, which stratton mentions in the end of this highly entertaining, short read, remains as unclear as the exact role of fashion mentioned in the title. apart from that, stratton delivers a good overview of the main movements in 30 years of dance history which have left its mark on humanity. references bey, hakim. 1991. t.a.z.: the temporary autonomous zone. new york: autonomedia. debord, guy. 1967. la société du spectacle. paris: buchet-chastel. rothlein, jordan. 2014, march 24. industry standards: funktion-one. resident advisor. <https://ra.co/features/1836>, (accessed 25 october 2023). https://ra.co/features/1836 reviews 119 this track contains politics: the culture of sampling in experimental electronica hannes liechti bern: norient books, 2022. isbn: 978-3-9525444-2-6 (softcover) rrp: €29,00 (softcover) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.14> moses iten rmit (australia) this track contains politics: the culture of sampling in experimental electronica investigates why producers of contemporary, digital, experimental electronic music choose to compose using samples. based on a phd, this is hannes liechti’s first book and has been published by the switzerland-based norient (n.d.), founded by ethnomusicologist thomas burkhalter in 2002 as a network bringing together a global community of thinkers and artists concerned with music, sound and media cultures. their emphasis is on “the changing geography of multi-layered modernities, far beyond old ideas of north versus south, west versus east” (beyer, burkhalter and liechti 2015). it is therefore not surprising that the producers interviewed for this book cover politics including the genocide of armenians and the exclusion of africans in argentinian history. hannes liechti has been working with norient these recent years as a journalist, curator and events producer. his role as an applied cultural producer needs to be considered as adding to the potential impact of this book, not just amongst researchers but also practitioners. norient played an important role in convincing me to build on my creative practice to become a researcher as some years ago i had been commissioned to write an essay based on my own practice as a dj/producer of cumbia (iten 2013), as well as contributing with podcasts (iten 2016), a playlist (iten 2015) and a mixtape (iten 2011). this has led me to follow their research outputs with great interest as an example of research and practice intersecting. the tension between artistic practice and theoretical analysis is the biggest challenge liechti attempts to overcome in this book. this track contains politics was highly anticipated reading for me for several reasons. i’m both a researcher and dj/producer, focused on electronic dance music, djand sound system cultures and am therefore interested in how this book stimulates both my research and creative practice, for which sampling has been central.1 like liechti, i am interested in methodologies which reflect the practice being analysed, which in my case i have proposed as the dj-as-researcher approach (iten 2022). although a committed cultural producer, liechti is external to the field he is examining, which he presents as a potential advantage “as it allows the researcher to ask simple questions and take novel positions” (80). indeed, reading liechti’s book is making me reflect on my own practice, in which sampling has been https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.14 dancecult 15(1)120 a driving force. his incessant questioning of “why” a particular sample and compositional approach has been chosen, has increased my appreciation of the sometimes hidden political intent behind seemingly aesthetic or conceptual decisions. liechti identifies most literature on sampling has mainly been concerned with copyright issues and/or the particular practice of analogue-era sampling in hip-hop.2 there is therefore much need for new research on the ongoing relevance of sampling in today’s digital era where the practice has become a ubiquitous and seemingly banal. this track contains politics is focused on particular (political) intentions of a specific technique (sampling), in a niche creative field of (experimental electronica) music. whilst this appears to be a narrow focus, liechti’s expansive review of the literature on sampling, politics as a cultural concept and electronic dance music—of which the academic understanding can include non-dance oriented experimental electronic music—shows the scope of his research is actually quite broad. in the first few pages of the book, a useful brief history of sampling is provided, concluding with the current state of sampling as an indispensable and ubiquitous practice (11–14). liechti points out most of the literature on sampling at first largely fixated on its association with hip-hop and the subsequent demise of the technique becoming restricted due to copyright lawsuits (20–22). the ongoing relevance to producers and researchers in this era when sampling appears a banal part of music making, is argued by liechti as achievable by focusing on the motivations and intent behind the sampling. this he explores as part of “the socio-political potential of sampling”, which is also where the biggest gaps in research on sampling are to be found (15–22). the are several theoretical advances proposed in this book. firstly, trackology is introduced as a way of allowing the analytical focus to be on tracks—as opposed to songs—“as a tool for uncovering knowledge of the world” (77). the core interest of trackology according to liechti, is the “search for traces within popular music”, based on michael rappe’s method of “music archaeology” (78). traces could have been explored further as a concept. in my own phd research for example, i have been applying edouard glissant’s creolization theory which includes a conceptualization of traces as cultural memory passed on via music (2020). instead, the weight of liechti’s theory is in the methodology. the ethnography is combined with a musical analysis of each of the five tracks. in order to apply a musicological approach to analyse tracks of experimental electronica largely composed by sampling, liechti created “the fader of visibility (fov)” model. this addresses the significance of the “visibility” (and invisibility) of the samples in the composition (101–107). then in order to determine the motivations and intent behind the sampling, liechti develops another model called the “spider of sampling reasons” model (109–143). this demonstrates in a neat diagram each producer’s particular approach to sampling. both models are then applied to analyse and compare the case studies which follow. each of the five case studies features one track by a different producer, all active in what liechti discusses broadly as “the field of experimental electronica” (52–53). in the book’s very useful glossary, experimental electronica is defined as produced on laptops, mostly instrumental and with a sound that is “often abrasive, shaped by cuts, disruptions, reviews 121 noises, and dissonances” (316). the five tracks selected for analysis engage with a diverse set of political issues: the russian invasion of ukraine’s donbas region; gender issues and the memory of genocide in the armenian diaspora; recognition of afro-argentines in the history contemporary argentina; and the taboo of zoophilia. whilst the analysis is narrowed down to just five tracks, this broad range of political issues is also engaged with by liechti, further illuminating the context of each individual producer’s intent. these extramusical perspectives have largely come from ethnographic fieldwork, which have produced some of the most illuminating passages in the book. the methodological challenges and limitations encountered during the research of this book are outlined over several pages, revealing rare insight into not only the value of failure to future researchers but also the precarious conditions under which laptop producers of experimental electronica operate (69–75). whilst liechti admits a close look over the shoulders of the producers in the process of sampling was difficult to access, this did happen with one of his research participants. the results of this participant observation are featured in the penultimate chapter of the book, which liechti calls an “interlude”, serving as a great accompaniment to the conclusion which follows. the observations made of us-based producer lara sarkissian at work was facilitated by her being invited to participate in a residency at center for art and media in karlsruhe, germany, curated by norient. liechti suggests more funded residencies like this are needed, in order to facilitate more focused observation of the practice of laptop producers (294–295). ultimately, i admired liechti’s tenacity in theorizing the playful and often random approaches of the producers he observed and interviewed. his theoretical rigour is balanced by his sensitive and nuanced voice, which is strongest when it becomes active, especially in the self-reflexive passages which reveal themselves when he addresses some of the problems encountered in trying to do fieldwork in the intimate work environments of “laptop producers”, which liechti prefers over the term of the “derogatory” term of “bedroom producer” (316). liechti cites fellow musicologist-ethnographer mark butler (2006) several times, who also applied musicology theory to analyse the electronic dance music producers. i largely agreed with the critique that butler’s theorizing seemed more about “adding edm to the music theorist’s repertory” than “bringing music theory into edm’s varied and vibrant discourse” (marshall 2009: 199). this tension is also present in liechti’s research. however, butler went on to continue to further advance the study of edm (2014) and i can imagine liechti’s commitment to both practice and research is putting him on a similarly inspired path. notes 1 i have been a professional dj/producer for twenty years and have toured the world with the project cumbia cosmonauts. i am currently completing a phd at rmit university, melbourne, on digital cumbia and sound system culture, as well as working as a researcher with the sonic street technologies research project, for university of sydney and goldsmiths university, london. dancecult 15(1)122 2 in terms of sampling in hip-hop, making beats: the art of sample-based hip-hop (2004) by joseph schloss is a particularly useful work based on ethnographic research. references beyer, theresa, thomas burkhalter and hannes liechti, eds. 2015. seismographic sounds: visions of a new world. berne: norient. <https://doi.org/10.56513/zmhg1392>. beyer, theresa and thomas burkhalter, eds. 2012. out of the absurdity of life: globale musik. berne: traversion/norient. <https://doi.org/10.56513/vlgz1905>. butler, mark j. 2014. playing with something that runs: technology, improvisation, and composition in dj and laptop performance. oxford and new york: oxford university press. butler, mark. 2006. unlocking the groove: rhythm, meter, and musical design in electronic dance music. bloomington: indiana university press. glissant, edouard. 2020. introduction to a poetics of diversity. translated by celia britton. liverpool: liverpool university press. iten, moses. 2011. “arab awakening”. norient. <https://norient.com/podcasts/arabawakeningmixtape>, (accessed 18 october 2023). iten, moses. 2012. “insider’s perspectives on new wave cumbia” in beyer, theresa and thomas burkhalter (edited by). out of the absurdity of life: globale musik. berne: traversion/ norient. 264-77. <https://doi.org/10.56513/vlgz1905>. iten, moses. 2013. “perspectives on new wave cumbia”. norient. <https://norient.com/stories/ new-wave-cumbia>, (accessed 18 october 2023). iten, moses. 2015. “five video clips from mexico”. norient. <https://norient.com/video/fivevideo-clips-from-mexico>, (accessed 18 october 2023). iten, moses. 2016. “the sound of cumbia”. norient. <https://norient.com/podcasts/the-sound-of-cumbia>, (accessed 18 october 2023). iten, moses. 2022. “the dj-as-researcher approach: methods emerging through digital cumbia fieldwork”. paper presented at “performing, engaging, knowing” symposium, 2020. hosted by the ictm study group on applied ethnomusicology, the lucerne school of music, the department of composition, electroacoustics, university of music and performing arts vienna and the swiss society for ethnomusicology. <https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7274023>. marshall, wayne. 2009. “reviewed work: unlocking the groove: rhythm, meter, and musical design in electronic dance music by mark j. butler”. music theory spectrum 31(1): 192–99. <https://doi.org/10.1525/mts.2009.31.1.192>. norient. n.d. “about”. <https://norient.com/>, (accessed 18 october 2023) schloss, joseph glenn. 2004. making beats: the art of sample-based hip-hop. middletown, ct: wesleyan university. reviews 123 berghain, techno und die körperfabrik: ethnographie eines stammpublikums guillaume robin marburg: büchner-verlag, 2021. isbn: 978-3-96317-274-8 (paperback), isbn 978-3-96317-812-2 (ebook) rrp: €22,00 (paperback), €18,00 (ebook) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.15> anja schwanhäusser university of göttingen (germany) bars and nightclubs count among the mythological places of the city, as rolf lindner (2022) writes in his in einer welt von fremden: eine anthropologie der stadt. as part of his recent role as guest researcher at the centre marc bloch at the humboldt university, guillaime robin has tracked one such place, in his study of the world’s most famous berlin club, berghain. in the introduction he cites the two most well-known, but rarely spelledout, concepts in cultural studies in reference to club culture: heterotopia (michel foucault) and the non-lieu (marc augé). although augé did not mean industrial wastelands with the term non-lieu, rather airports, train stations and motorway rest stops, the term never-theless testifies to the transitionary character of the nocturnal locations, converted ruins of post-industrial society. for robin, berghain is a transgressive, social, sensual and reflexive place, where “the exploration of self and community meet, where the utopia of the body takes shape” (10) (this and the following quotes are all translations by the reviewer). robin has the genuinely ethnological goal of writing about club culture not from the point of view of its musical actors (djs, club operators, party organisers), but from the perspective of its audience. for this purpose, he conducted a study among regulars, and especially the global, urban nomads of the “easyjet generation”, as the journalist tobias rapp (2009) calls them. in terms of methodology, he bases the study on twelve interviews and around 30 online questionnaires, supplemented by the manageable number of twelve “observational sittings” (15) at the club. in doing so, he faces the challenge of describing a quasi-sacred place, without himself succumbing to mythologization: the analysis aims “to go beyond the blind reverence of the initiated and to scrutinize these cliches under the magnifying glass” (15). there’s an attempt at a balancing act between empathy and distance in the text, which is not always successful, for instance when robin presents a berghain party as being akin to an ancient ritual and asks: “to what extent can berghain be seen as a revival of bacchanalia?” (13). this flowery formulation irritates at first. there are more recent berlin-specific traditions which would lend themselves better as a comparison. for example, the tradition of the berlin secret societies or the queer scene surrounding the german physician and sexologist magnus hirschfeld. on the other hand, the sensual anthropology in the school of david howes (2005) doesn’t shy away from a certain pathos either. thus, the reference https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.15 dancecult 15(1)124 to bacchanalia is not to be understood analytically but as a metaphor to capture the genuine berghain atmosphere, as experienced by a cosmopolitan, queer scene. the first chapter, “bodies in space”, is about the significance of the club for its regulars and the transition from the “profane” world beyond the club into the “sacred” (40) halls of berghain. with the term rite of passage (arnold van gennep) and communitas (victor turner), robin describes the character of the space, the shifting bodily perceptions, the temporary sense of community, as well as the internal control mechanisms which grant a harmonious night of celebrating. he sees the special feature of berghain, in addition to its symbolical situation in the berlin party-metropolis, as being the aura of secrecy that surrounds it. this is created through the strict door policy, the photography ban, the seemingly sacred architecture, the complex system of rules of conduct and the so-called “hainweh” (47)—a portmanteau word made up of hain from berghain and weh meaning to ache, a play on the german word heimweh that means to be homesick—with which fans express their passionate attachment to the place. the recourse to an online questionnaire, which is often quoted in the text, might initially surprise the empirical cultural studies readership. in place of the personal experiences of the researcher are instead short and concise reports from the actual participants, reminiscent of blogger style. unfortunately, robin does not explain this method and its implementation in more detail, but he uses it extremely creatively. the subjective descriptions by the guests of their self-image and their personal opinions about club politics are astonishingly involved and in parts even poetically formulated. one extremely interesting question which has unfortunately also not been elaborated on and brought to any conclusion is: does the example of berghain perhaps reveal a change in techno culture in general, away from a subculture which is open to all, where social differences are blurred by cheap drugs, and towards a more homogenous, exclusive subculture, whose members are recruited largely from more privileged segments of society? (89) a court decision in recent years equating clubs with high-culture events for tax purposes would seem to point in this direction. the second chapter, “utopian bodies”, is about stylisations as a way of separating oneself from the everyday identity and from each other, while at the same time being a way of creating community. in reference to foucault’s concept of utopian bodies as well as in reference to piotr nathan’s mural, “rituals of disappearance”, in berghain, robin defines the stylistic transformations as the individual’s longing to dissolve. this dissolution takes place in various forms and media, through the equalising procedure at the berghain entrance, the adaptation of dominant dress and dance codes, anonymisation (e.g., by wearing fetish masks) as well as through the consuming of drugs. a central finding is that subjective feelings of freedom and liberation are closely linked to a communal and institutional set of rules, with self-discipline and self-constraint: “it’s not so much a matter of total liberation, but much more about a strongly controlled disinhibition, which goes hand in hand with the ethics of consent and the respect of others’ bodies” (94). in robin’s description, a party night seems to run like an almost perfect machine where almost nothing goes wrong. robin writes that he has left out sequences which are too reviews 125 voyeuristic. this is understandable, yet it gives rise to an argumentative gap. what happens when shame boundaries are crossed, not because one wants to, but because one is driven to it by obsession? nevertheless, he offers an extremely interesting insight into this “body factory” and its culture. the “crows”, as the audience is also called, voluntarily adapt to the institutional constraints, regulations and codifications thereby giving the club its individual character. in the third chapter, “degendering the dancefloor”, the focus is on gender-specific stylisations and the play with gender identities. with reference to judith butler, robin defines gender as performance. especially for guests from less liberal countries, berlin and berghain offer a “safe space” (105). here also new subcultural trends come on stage, such as the “sex-positive” movement, which promotes an openness to diverse gender identities, sexual practices and to nudity. robin rightly notes that the nocturnal rulebook can lead to a “homonormativity”, where certain homosexual codes dominate and thus exclude other forms of expression. in the fourth chapter, “underground resist-dance”, robin opens up the perspective to the broader berlin club scene and, in particular, to the period of the pandemic. due to the enforced closures, considerable financial and cultural damage was done, and the cultural diversity of the metropolis has suffered. the perseverance with which the techno culture actors have defended their “right to dance” and “right to the city” (150), robin presents as being proof that clubs are more than just spaces for commercial events. as already demonstrated by birmingham cultural studies, in a study to which robin, however, does not refer, partying is shown to be more than hedonistic consumption. the charge of hedonism was famously invoked by politicians during the pandemic in order to devalue outdoor dancing at night. as robin shows though, it is, on the contrary, a way of life and culture which is pushed through even in times of crisis, and against prevailing opinion. the author also recalls earlier protests, with which clubs resisted displacement and gentrification. without questioning the pandemic-related regulative measures, he interprets these activities as a positive expression of a political consciousness in nightlife: “the proliferation of these wild raves, which were often interrupted by the police . . . thus emphasises the active role of the techno audience and its desire to assert itself as a driving force in the scene” (148). the fifth chapter is called “closing”, similar to the last act at a dance night at berghain. here, robin comes to the unsurprising conclusion that a berghain club night is not a bacchanalia. extremely interesting, however, is his reasoning, in which he returns to the central thesis of the first chapter: “berghain is undoubtedly a space of freedom like no other, but it is above all an extremely codified space in which the liberation of the body is linked to self-discipline and strong control mechanisms” (160). the transgression of boundaries and ecstatic forms of dissolution in the community are thus only possible because of the strict set of rules. as in the process of civilization (norbert elias), to which robin refers, the increasing loosening of control over emotions comes at the price of an increase in the suppression of inner drives, so that ecstatic celebration is also only possible through a sophisticated system of control. this is expressed on several levels: the rejection of sexist dancecult 15(1)126 and objectifying heteronormative practices as well as of “body shaming”; the maintaining of a respectful distance, and a strong internalisation of respect for the body of others. robin points here to a possibly generalizable connection between discipline and ecstasy which, also for other subcultural contexts, is worthwhile examining. it is a perspective of our current time, which is “woke” and “aware”. it turns out that within order and its compliance (also) lies a longing for “pleasure” and the dissolution of boundaries. robin’s study provides a particularly successful and exhaustingly complex description of the sensuality of the club experience. the central insight, that liberation can only be achieved through self-discipline, is extremely illuminating. the bacchanal thus becomes a code for a subcultural practice that is characterised by the inner contradiction of control and the dissolution of boundaries. the book is an innovative contribution to the “sensual turn” in urban scene-, popand subcultural research. in the past decades this field has mostly been concerned with the economic aspects of partying (creative industries, subcultural capital and such). in robin’s work, on the other hand, questions of cultural order and creativity and of social change (again) come to the fore in an exemplary way. by taking into account the social origins and the phenomenon of the global easyjet generation in his analysis, robin also makes a contribution to the question as to the extent to which popular culture and popular means of pleasure have nowadays become the guiding culture of the middle-class. the study shows that for the queer global elite, going to visit a cultural site such as berghain is just as important as a visit to the opera in new york or sydney. last but not least, he provides a very good, in part poetically formulated portrait of the “loaners”, typical figures of the big city as described by rolf lindner (2022), accompanied by beautiful photographs by mike d’hondt. thus, the study can also be connected to the analysis of figures and figuration of urban anthropology. references howes, david, ed. 2005. empire of the senses. the sensual culture reader. oxford: berg publishers. lindner, rolf. 2022. in einer welt von fremden: eine anthropologie der stadt. berlin: matthes & seitz berlin. rapp, tobias. 2009. lost and sound: berlin, techno, und der easyjetset. frankfurt am main: suhrkamp. reviews 127 ears as portals: alternative realities of musical infrastructures. a ctm festival 2023 review ctm festival: “portals”, 2023. <https://www.ctm-festival.de/festival-2023/welcome> <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.16> luigi monteanni soas, university of london (uk) what is a portal? whether you base your definition on fantasy and sci-fi tropes of selfgenerating megadungeons (berti forthcoming) and interdimensional gateways (yalcinkaya 2022) or on informational technologies such as the internet (magaudda 2020), the portal conveys the idea of a device and threshold offering an access to some other space, a passage towards somewhere radically different. of course, a portal can be secret or hidden, dangerous, or difficult to activate. by connecting multiple points in space and time the portal is a twoway medium offering exceptional insight and mobility to who actively chooses to exploit its powers (hanson 2021). “portals” is also the theme chosen by ctm festival for its 24th edition, which took place in berlin between 27th january and 5th february 2023. ctm probed the possibility of a curational approach that makes “contact with specific modes of experience, histories, communities, and speculative futures” reflecting on “the preconditions, thresholds, regulation, and fundamental function of sound and music as gateways to other realities” (ctm 2023). in this sense, the festival’s portal(s) used different venues and art spaces around the city—15 in total including kunstquartier bethanien, silent green, adk, fablab neukölln, festsaal, monom, kqb, rso, hau1, hau2, kw, panke, radialsystem, morphine raum and, obviously, berghain—to allow trespassers to behold and overhear geographically and subculturally heterodox musical contexts. of course, as i have mentioned, portals are not just there: they deform and disrupt the concepts of reality, space, and time to generate something, to make something happen by creating new threads, pathways, and experiences. this is an idea that is expressed through aural means by ctm radio lab winner isuru kumarasinghe, who describes his installation “gilunu” (submerged, in sinhala) as follows: when we step into a space or a place, where the resonance is changed or enhanced, we naturally feel like engaging with that resonance … to see how the space transforms the sound and how in return it transforms us. it becomes like a portal into a different world, as part of this world, just for this moment. (ctm 2023) accordingly, the festival embraced multidisciplinarity, structuring this week of activities around club nights and music performances as much as around exhibitions, installations, https://www.ctm-festival.de/festival-2023/welcome https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.16 dancecult 15(1)128 screenings, workshops, labs and talks which, besides never resulting as secondary activities, helped inform the awareness of currently forming processes of musicmaking around the world. part of these experiments were the afropollination project, in which piranha arts (berlin) and boutique foundation/nyege nyege collective (kampala) established a transnational laboratory for sonic research to bring together artists from six african nations and germany, the exhibition “we found our own reality” curated by artist paul purgas, in which installations, archive materials, artworks, a series of live performances and commissioned texts were gathered to account for the under-explored histories of the sound studio at the national institute of design in ahmedabad, the first electronic music studio in india (purgas 2023), the radio lab open call showcasing an always different array of audio-installative endeavors within the medium of radio, presenting works by anna kravets and, of course, kumarasinghe and discussions that surveyed a number of themes, including the impending generational change in club culture and issues of cultural production during the ongoing invasion of ukraine. from this perspective, ctm has shown how it is possible to use programming as a tool to produce new forms of sensory and intellectual knowledge, forging connections between music circuits and performers accentuating the elements of uniqueness that the selected musical acts bear from their context. from the audiences’ and organization’s point of view, after years of pandemic fatigue and a life-affirming 2022 edition based on bringing back the joys of the dancing body, ”portals” seems again to give more space to contemplative and introspective listening experiences, betting on a courageous line-up presenting comparatively fewer resounding names than many previous editions. this is an attention that both staff and attendees seemed to be more than willing to offer given the almost total sold outs and the constant, remarkable presence of the organizers and curators. of course, even for a militant practitioner of sleep deprivation techniques such as myself, it would be impossible to map the festival extensively; an endeavor that goes also beyond the scope of the present text. therefore, the following selection of highlights is not only extremely personal but should give a glimpse in an impressionistic fashion of what i tried to convey above. among the performances, personal favorites include the improvisation between afropollination’s sound artist jessica ekomane and the ugandan diy synth builder afrorack establishing new canons of non-eurocentric sound synthesis, the heavily poetic minimalism and metal-infused tribute to mourning songs and traditional lamentations by sara parkman and maria w. horn of funeral folk, the extreme, pedagogic interactivity of poulomi desai, slowly inviting the audience to take control of her unorthodox, non-musical instrumentation challenging the idea of authenticity in regional music and the objectification of the ”south asian female body” in popular culture, the queering post-rave romanticism of the neapolitan neo-melodic performance by 2023 shape+ alumni nziria and light artist bianca peruzzi with the collaboration of choreographer franka marlene foth and dancer janan laubscher, the screamo meme music for tiktok doomscrollers of lil mariko supported by the raw, physical spoken word grime of iceboy violet, the a/v cyberpunk of japanese gabber and black-metal crossover ensemble vmo, tzusig’s anxiety-inducing and reviews 129 betrayal-themed dance provocations, the ambiguously brutal and theatrical genre-juggling of vieze meisje and the kampala singeli dance-fest conjured by queen asher’s productions, galvanized by the singing of her mother rehema tajiri and by dancers nana and zai. but above all, a special mention goes to asep nayak, a papuan producer and pioneer of the electronic wisisi: a genre that from the rituals of harvesting ceremonies in wamena was recreated and innovated through fl studio beats and mp3 technologies. i had previously binged on wisisi on youtube for a couple years and i would have never believed i could experience it live in front of my eyes and twitching muscles. witnessing this act really made the festival for me, showing that music can really create extraordinary junctions between audiences and scenes. from this perspective, despite the partiality of my account, this year’s ctm showed even more interest towards the subterranean, the peripheral and the subcultural. as noted by juliet hoornaert in her review of the festival for the magazine gonzo circus (2023), ctm presented a broad, generous conception of music, in which scratching the surface already meant pointing at the underlying artistic and social symmetries and disparities between manifold scenes. what i personally found to be the most remarkable aspect of the festival was its ability to put the listener in the right conditions to experience sound. whether it is for the dauntlessness of the curation or for the carefully selected list of locations, there was always the feeling that one was always offered the possibility to listen to something in the best technical and contextual conditions possible, whether with their ears or through the whole body in motion, creating the possibility for a range of extremely different styles, from pop and hyperpop to black metal, folk, spoken word, singeli and wisisi to coexist as equals. throughout, agreeing with a discussion i had with ctm cofounder jan rolf, which informed this piece, i appreciated the feeling of urgency that the festival expressed in reorganizing the field of musical knowledge, trying to push many peripheral phenomena to the foreground of the clubbing experience, highlighting distinct aspects of geographical and subcultural locality. in this sense, going back to the possible question of what a current club culture is or should be today, i support the stances of scholars such as silver (2014), labelle (2018), rief (2009) and magaudda (2020), arguing that clubbing today should employ music and technology as vibrational tools to cultivate particular forms of reflexivity and modes of experience that reconfigure the boundaries around youth cultures and other social identities, allowing a better circulation of sociality and power. therefore, the contemporary club culture that i envision, and that ctm seems to support, sees sound, festivals, venues, scenes, and encounter as the fundamental infrastructures allowing this special type of circulation; an alternative flow proving that, contrarily to what attali (1985) has noted, music does not only move along the routes of war, power and trade. accordingly, the portal is an apt metaphor of how to reflect on this ambiguous and exceptionally powerful type of infrastructure. seeing the progressive attention to socializing the organizing process through open calls, curatorial collaborations, and commitment to support less-known music movements, i have no doubt regarding this edition’s awareness dancecult 15(1)130 relative to these issues. nonetheless, accounting for my own experience as well as the one of many attendees, journalists and even participating artists with whom i chatted during the events, some elements seemed worth reconsidering. first, even though focusing on the netherworld of the global underground, the large majority of the invited projects still benefits from the support and visibility offered by many institutional organizations (e.g., shape+, goethe-institut), agencies and renown musical labels (e.g., nyege nyege, pan) albeit from the fringes of the music industry. thus, even though these associations often work with positive affirmation strategies, how it is possible to create further representation and inclusion for projects that fall off the actors’ curatorial purview still needs to be assessed. secondly, the petty hostility and unwillingness to help finding solutions of some of the berghain staff, arguably a staple of ctm’s program, inside and outside the venue, remains at odds with the “be respectful to others” attitude promoted on their website (berghain n.d.), creating spaces in which edginess and even mockery have prevailed. this has prevented me, for instance, from entering the night i was looking forward to the most (“bodily overdrive”), which is hence not mentioned in this review. then, more in the form of a suggestion than a critique, i argue that this edition’s theme should be, in view of the next, socially meaningful topic of 2024 edition “sustain”, further examined, keeping in focus how these infrastructures come into being, shift and are regulated; what are the portals that are still difficult to open, that benefit from advantaged access or remain closed? when translating the metaphor to the reality of today’s musical infrastructures, we should ask ourselves who controls the points of entrance and exit. who has access to them and under which conditions? how can we make sure that they remain functional, but their usage is not overly regulated? overall, for me this edition was a definite success and a positive example to follow for other festivals of the same kind. thus, i’m confident that all these points might be explored in the next years. references attali, jacques. 1985. noise: the political economy of music. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. berghain. n.d. “awareness”. <https://www.berghain.berlin/en/awareness/>, (accessed 22 august 2023) berti, paolo. forthcoming. “megadungeon: a model for media complexity”. magazén 4(1). ctm. 2023. ctm 2023—portals. <https://www.ctm-festival.de/festival-2023/welcome>, (accessed 21 august 2023). hanson, kara. 2021. “at the threshold: science fiction portals as agents of liminality”. medium, 9 august: <https://kshanson.medium.com/at-the-threshold-science-fiction-portals-as-agentsof-liminality-1f1e65ff1b2a>, (accessed 21 august 2023). hoornaert, juliet. 2023. “ctm 2023: een futuristisch ravecongres”. gonzo circus, 14 february: <https://www.gonzocircus.com/ctm-2023-toekomstfestival-vol-klankanarchie/>, (accessed 21 august 2023). reviews 131 labelle, brandon. 2018. sonic agency: sound and emergent forms of resistance. london: goldsmiths press. magaudda, paolo. 2020. “music scenes as infrastructures: from live venues to algorithmic data”. in popular music, technology, and the changing media ecosystem, ed. tamás tófalvy and emília barna, 23–42. london: palgrave macmillan. purgas, paul. 2023. “introduction”. in we found our own reality: an exploration of india’s first electronic music studio and its resonances into the present, ed. paul purgas, 4-5. berlin: ctm festival. rief, silvia. 2009. club cultures: boundaries, identities and otherness. new york: routledge. silver, micah. 2019. figures in air: essays toward a philosophy of audio. new york: inventory press. yalcinkaya, günseli. 2022. “the worlds of technology and magic are closer than you think”. dazed, 4 july: <https://www.dazeddigital.com/science-tech/article/56442/1/new-age-oftechnology-mysticism-magic-somerset-house>, (accessed 21 august 2023). dancecult 17(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic music & dance culture 17(1) 2025: 150–167 issn 1947-5403 ©2025 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net dance your way home: a journey through the dancefloor emma warren london: faber & faber, 2023. isbn: 9780571366040 (paperback) rrp: uk£12.99 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.13> richard anderson university of liverpool (uk) at the time of writing, in august 2025, london’s southbank centre, which is arguably the epitome of uk “high culture” is running a month-long summer programme of free events inspired by emma warren’s book dance your way home. depending upon one’s perspective this can be seen as an act of “gallerification”, in which folk/popular/working class cultures are recuperated into a canonical presentation within elitist institutions, or part of an evolving movement of genuine recognition of social dance as an inclusive expression of human joy. either way, the southbank’s programme represents a hugely significant impact for a contemporary written word text. dance your way home is not an academic treatise on the act of dancing, but a very accessible, and at times deeply personal autobiography outlining the vital importance of moving to music for oneself and for societies. structured in three parts, the book is steeped in uk dancefloor history. in part one, warren traces the initial foundations her dancing is built on. from domestic bopping to television music show top of the pops, to her irish heritage and late seventies uk sound system cultures from whose roots blossomed much of what dancecult examines. the second part highlights warren’s progression onto dancefloors from school discos, her underage clubbing in london, to her right-place, right-time at manchester university in the early nineties. through these back drops, the story of dance’s cultural global explosion is set and illuminated with personal reminiscences, interviews with contemporary luminaries and scattered with explanations of academic studies from a breadth of disciplines which support the range of arguments warren lays forth on dancing’s importance. reviews https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.13 reviews 151 dancing is lovingly set, not as subservient to, or a side effect of music and musical styles, but as having its own primacy. hence dancing threads its way throughout the book, in various locations and spaces, and in different social and racial cultures, functioning as crossgenerational ever-presence in twentieth and twenty-first century eras. the part memoir nature of the text acts as a constraint to the potential span of the subject matter. the book’s focus on social dance as presented in the global north, most specifically in the british isles predominately in the last fifty years could be considered a limitation. however, in adopting this position, warren recounts dance movement emergences with a lived experience sincerity. in telling her tales of house, techno, drum‘n’bass, and later grime histories, she includes reference to so-called legendary uk clubs such as shroom, the hacienda, phenomenon one and plastic people, not because these were definitive, but because she danced there herself at those times. she clearly articulates the legacies of numerous less renowned but no less significant nights and venues from her past and recognises many other “nerve centres” (181) operating beyond those she attended, of having parallel prominence and vitality. when the book does narrate histories that are not her own, warren ensures she does so with care, placing these as part of a lineage her own dancing is scaffolded on. this is especially evident within the important chapters on the hitherto neglected spaces of the school disco and youth club, where so many british adolescents, to varying degrees, learnt how to dance. the latter aspect is expanded on in warren’s (2025) latest work, up the youth club. chapter three’s detailed account of strangling church repression of dancing in ireland which contributed to an exodus of young women from the country, including her own grandmother; and eighties chicago gymnasiums recounted through interviews in chapter seven are similarly approached with recognition that these are not warren’s direct experiences. like walking, dancing is presented throughout as a fundamentally human activity, if you dance, you are a dancer (33), and dancefloors are situated wherever we make them (307). in this sense the book stands alongside the equally brilliant but more historically comprehensive dancing in the streets by the late barbara ehrenreich (2006). in both books, social dance finds a voice celebrating non-specialist everyday dancing, joining the still surprisingly recent emergence of social dance texts within the dance academy. there is much resonance here with the historically situated concepts of dancing as community expression found in malnig’s (2009), and dodds and cook’s (2013) collected works. what is fresh in dance your way home is the drawing of more personal connectivity between the performative club dancing, by crews and individuals in the eighties, to direct involvement in djing, and promoting club nights such as a guy called gerald’s recollections of their professional dancing lessons and aspirations (225–26). in the final part of the book, warren herself participates in a studio dance class, with the academy setting transformed into a place of therapy as she becomes aware of her dyspraxia. the restorative and healing power of dancing is a recurrent theme throughout the text. dancecult 17(1)152 warren employs a meticulously researched array of scientific study findings to describe everyday dance’s benefits for physical and mental health. another of the book’s themes warren is at pains to point out is that dancing is always historically situated, and many of the dance movements she has experienced have emerged as a response to specific, frequently harsh, social circumstances. she encapsulates this most succinctly in quoting the title of alice walker’s (2013) collection, hard times require furious dancing (223). the sense of community and resilience in the face of repressions, that finds expression through collective everyday dancing and a sense of temporary belonging or embraced by what mary fogarty described as a sense of an alternative “family” (2015: 247), is at the core of dance your way home’s message and that we can all dance our own histories. references dodds, sherril and susan cook. 2013. bodies of sound: studies across popular music and dance. farnham: ashgate. ehrenreich, barbara. 2006. dancing in the streets: a history of collective joy. london: granta publications. fogarty, mary. 2015. “the body and dance”. in the routledge reader on the sociology of music, ed. john shepherd and kyle devine, 245–54. new york: routledge. malnig, julie. 2009. ballroom, boogie, shimmy sham, shake: a social and popular dance reader. chicago: university of illinois press. walker, alice and shiloh mccloud. 2013. hard times require furious dancing: new poems. novato: new world library. warren, emma. 2025. up the youth club: illuminating a hidden history. london: faber & faber. reviews 153 black music in britain in the 21st century monique charles (ed.) with mary w. gani liverpool: liverpool university press, 2023. isbn: 978-1-80207-840-4, eisbn: 978-1-83764-659-3 rrp: uk£29,99 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.14> charlet brethomé (université du québec à montréal, canada) following her work on grime, cultural sociologist monique charles edits a collective volume that brings together researchers and practitioners to explore, from multiple approaches, black music in britain in the twenty-first century. with the editorial collaboration of mary w. gani (a lawyer specialising in the music industry), the book offers a panorama that combines academic papers, interviews, and visual essays. published in the series “liverpool studies in the politics of popular culture”, the volume seeks to analyse musical scenes in relation to the regimes of power that shape their emergence, circulation and reception. the book is clearly situated within the lineage of black atlantic studies. this characterises the transmission, unfolding and interconnections of black cultures around the atlantic, as well as the cultural hybridisations resulting from the long history of forced removal of black populations from their territories and cultural milieus (gilroy 1993). it is therefore a welcome contribution that deepens and extends analysis of this continuum from the vantage point of contemporary black british musics. notably, it expands the classic roots/ routes dichotomy (gilroy 1993) by emphasising the role of digital infrastructures and networks—what the editors term “routers”—in the contemporary formation of genres and publics. the book’s richness—and, potentially, its limitation—lies in the multiplicity of genres examined and the diversity of problematisations, contexts and methods mobilised. the centrality of sound system culture, dub and reggae is nonetheless clear, as many of the forms under study partly emerge from these matrices. in this respect, the book already helps to capture the resonances and contemporary traces of sound system culture within new musical assemblages. the entire first section is devoted to these contemporary articulations. whether in hyacinth’s study on roots manuva’s album “dub come save me”, charles’s attempt to systematise a “sound system sensibility”, gani’s interview with lawrence “l.j.” johnson, or télémaque’s photo-essay “trap atlantic”, each contribution shows the extent to which the musical objects under scrutiny are marked by the circulation and hybridisation of techniques, technologies, sounds and melodies. each case also demonstrates how these cultural productions—actualising the black atlantic continuum—braid together the global and the local, and past with present and future. https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.14 dancecult 17(1)154 the second section, which examines genres that emerged or persisted into the twentyfirst century, likewise includes an interview with a music industry professional and a photo essay. these two formats depart from conventional research articles and allow readers to inhabit different standpoints and perspectives. charles’s interview with ugwu traces the personal trajectory of an industry professional within the circulatory contexts already outlined, particularly between nigeria and london. charles and facey’s photo essay likewise offers a direct view of the places and the spatial organisation of steel pan practice in east london. more broadly, these chapters press further on the role of cultural industries in the recuperation, transformation and marginalisation of black musics and musicians. in particular, the chapters by palmer and toppin on the lovers rock scene and the jungle genre, respectively show how racism and patriarchy have jointly contributed to the invisibilisation and reshaping of scenes and musics in favour of certain audiences, industries and male and/or white musicians. the other two chapters in this section trace two very different pathways through which artists and musical forms (re-)emerge. muir examines black majority churches as sites that—through their locations, relational networks and pentecostal habitus—enable the development of musical competences convertible into the field of popular music and thus into economic capital. melville, by contrast, shows how contemporary information and communication technologies facilitate the circulation of techniques and recent tracks and contribute significantly to the revival of jazz in england among a new generation representative of contemporary urban british life. finally, the third and last section, “socio-political and economic issues”, interrogates contemporary black british musics critically through their contexts of emergence and diffusion. the opening chapters—by “hussla d” johnson and wallace, on the one hand, and by lambros fatsis, on the other—are particularly illuminating for understanding the processes of invisibilisation, criminalisation and thus marginalisation that unfold across black music scenes. the former provides an exemplary analysis of how cultural industries select and profit from particular cultural trajectories over others. sketching the contours of a political economy of reggae authenticity that marginalises british artists in favour of jamaican artists or labels, even though these musics are disseminated and consumed in england. fatsis, for his part, shows how ambient western racism materialises around black sound and forms of gathering, further criminalising and stigmatising these populations and their cultural productions. these two chapters are especially productive for night studies, as they help to grasp how the neoliberal capture of festive and musical forms that once placed society “in crisis” proceeds both through their whitewashing and through the criminalisation and marginalisation of their blackness. the final three chapters by scott, bushay and madar consider, from distinct perspectives, the role of music and its representations for artists and audiences: grime as a practice of refusal vis-à-vis expected social and racial positions; hip-hop as pedagogical practice by and for black women; and the ways black men receive the dominant images and aesthetics associated with them and negotiate them. reviews 155 overall, this collection edited by monique charles offers a rich and nuanced panorama of a field too seldom examined in its complexity, given the tendency to treat black musics monolithically under the rubric of the “urban”. although the approaches vary, the shared emphasis on sound system culture as a constitutive matrix, the black atlantic continuum and a critical race approach provides the book with strong internal coherence. that said, greater parity between conceptual labour and empirical precision would have been welcome. moreover, while some chapters—especially in the third section—foreground the cultural industries, several analyses would benefit from engaging more directly with industry-specific processes of appropriation and whitewashing. doing so would sharpen a highly fertile line of critique that reads the marginalisation of black cultures and their re-undergrounding (a promising avenue) as among the conditions of possibility for contemporary “nightlife cities”. finally, the near-exclusive focus on london invites the question of how black musics are configured elsewhere in britain. reference gilroy, paul. 1993. the black atlantic, modernity and double consciousness. cambridge: harvard university press. dancecult 17(1)156 platformed! how streaming, algorithms and artificial intelligence are shaping music cultures tiziano bonini and paolo magaudda cham, switzerland: palgrave macmillan, 2024. isbn 978-3-031-43964-3 (hardcover), isbn 978-3-031-43965-0 (ebook) rrp: uk£109.00 (hardcover), uk£109.00 (paperback), uk£87.50 (e-book) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.15> seán finnan technological university dublin (ireland) earlier this summer, spotify’s ceo and co-founder daniel ek, led a €600 million investment into a start-up named helsing, specialising in artificial intelligence military software. deerhoof and a number of other indie bands withdrew their catalogue from the music streaming platform, baulking at having their music accessible via a platform who shares a ceo with a military startup. deerhoof described the company as “creepy” and a “datamining scam masquerading as a ‘music company’” (green and strauss 2025). in this now well established digital economy, deerhoof point to the complexity of digital platforms such as spotify’s business model—are they a music company, data broker, advertiser or something more sinister? in platformed!, a work by tiziano bonini and paolo maguadda, the authors seek to tease out the social factors and historical conditions that have allowed spotify to become an almost monolithic presence in the mediation of music, the influence its having on contemporary music culture and the anxieties that come with a company using data profiling as a means to ascertain the taste of a listener. the story is complicated and brings with it hardline opinions on the effect streaming culture is having on music. the authors are attentive to such qualitative judgements; that streaming platforms have ruined the music experience of a younger generation by dematerialising the music product, that such platforms have encourage a disengaged listening curated by the machine rather than a human, or that musicians are now writing music tailored to the algorithm and its penchant for instant hooks. for the authors, such judgements afford streaming platforms such as spotify too much agency, while at the same time, ignoring the impact that social practices had on the development of online music sharing, streaming and datafication prior to spotify’s arrival. instead the authors, drawing from the work of science and technology scholars such as latour, argue that the evolution of technologies do not follow “a single, coherent logic” (6) but respond to the distinct conjuncture of social, political and economic pressures— conditions that are informed by the agency of social actors, and not primarily by the technology itself. to illustrate such, the authors provide a historical account of music’s circulation as a commercial artefact, its transition from an analogue artefact to a digital https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.15 reviews 157 one and the impact new online peer-to-peer networks had in the late 1990s on normalising the consumption of digital music. at each stop on this whirlwind tour of music’s evolution as a commercial product, driven by the demands of industry, there is a counterpoint proposed, the disruption by non-industry actors, early hackers such as shawn fanning of napster, or music researchers such as karlheinz brandenburg and his work on developing the mp3 format and the anonymous role that hordes of music fans had in making use of new technologies like peer-to-peer file sharing in distributing music for free. by presenting the various technological breakthroughs that allowed for music streaming to come into existence, the authors are reminding the reader at each moment that technology is consistently implicated within its social moment. in other words, just because a technology exists, does not mean it will be adopted. while the term “streaming” might now be predominantly associated with listening to music or watching videos on demand, streaming technology was not originally intended for such. originally developed in the 1990s, during a period when transmitting sound on the web faced “almost insurmountable technological constraints” (24), streaming was explored as a means to mirror radio’s capacity for broadcasting live events, using the internet instead of the airwaves. experiments with streaming technologies followed a “variety of different trajectories” (29), from internet radio experiments to webcasting of parliamentary debates, and through its myriad uses, often outside of dominant commercial industries, became normalised as a broadcasting tool. yet it was only with the transition towards what srnicek (2017) has termed “platform capitalism” that streaming became commercially viable. in chapter three, the authors provide an accessible overview of the rise of the platform society, detailing the multifaceted computational infrastructure they rely upon in order to operate; datafication of user behaviour, data analysis of music (in the case of music streaming platforms), algorithms for personalised recommendations, guiding the reader through the complicated industrial business practices of what can appear to be merely immaterial websites. it’s a necessary detour that situates spotify’s business model within wider economic and technological trends and illustrates the structural shifts that have been impacting the cultural industries over the past decade or so. streaming technologies may have been with us for over three decades, yet it is their implication with algorithmic processes and artificial intelligences that are currently provoking the most unease. whether it’s the development of artificial intelligence that can automatically produce a song in a sonic style according to various user prompts, or the increasing appearance of ai music in spotify playlists, such transitions again inflame anxieties around the nature of human creativity and its replacement by machines. in chapters four, anxieties around the role that algorithms have in music selection are examined, particularly in the fear that the human curator has been sidelined by automated processes. the authors draw from bonini’s own ethnographic research with gandini (2019) on curating playlists to illustrate the continued presence of real live humans in the editorial offices of streaming platforms, even if the authors here warn that a small number of playlists are increasingly influential in determining the viability of a musician’s career. dancecult 17(1)158 taking on such a large scope as the transformation of music cultures as a result of music streaming platforms means there will inevitably be a considerable amount of shifts left unaddressed in the work. while there is much focus on individual tactics of resistance, it would be interesting to understand more about how various music scenes and non-corporate streaming initiatives are enacting algorithmic resistance, a term the authors use for listeners who attempt to “circumvent, control, or mislead the data collection mechanisms enacted by platforms’ algorithms” (115). despite this, platformed! provides a valuable primer for anyone wishing to get their bearings in the ever-shifting landscape of music’s situatedness in digital media ecologies and a reminder of the power that artists and fans have in shaping music cultures. references bonini, tiziano and alessandro gandini. 2019. “‘first week is editorial, second week is algorithmic’: platform gatekeepers and the platformization of music curation”. social media + society 5(4): 1–11. <https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119880006>. green, walden and matthew strauss. 2025. “deerhoof to remove music from spotify”. pitchfork. 30 june: <https://pitchfork.com/news/deerhoof-to-remove-music-from-spotify/>, (accessed 1 august 2025). srnicek, nick. 2017. platform capitalism. cambridge, uk; medford, ma: polity press. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119880006 https://pitchfork.com/news/deerhoof-to-remove-music-from-spotify/ reviews 159 dance music: a feminist account of an ordinary culture tami gadir new york: bloomsbury academic, 2023. isbn: 978-1-5013-4640-8 (paperback), 978-1-5013-4641-5 (hardcover) rrp: us$92.05 (hardcover), us$28.66 (paperback) welcome to the club: the life and lessons of a black woman dj dj paulette manchester: manchester university press, 2024. isbn: 978-1-5261-6690-6 (hardcover) rrp: uk£20.00 (hardcover) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.16> maren hancock macewan university (canada) over the past two decades, dance music studies have shifted meaningfully from celebratory accounts of subcultural resistance to more critical, intersectional appraisals of labour, space, power and politics. two recent books extend and deepen this shift: welcome to the club: the life and lessons of a black woman dj by dj paulette and dance music: a feminist account of an ordinary culture by tami gadir. although distinct in genre and methodology— gadir’s book is an academic monograph, while paulette’s is a memoir—both texts challenge the idealized narratives that have dominated scholarly and popular accounts of dj culture. together, they offer a much-needed recalibration of what it means to make, live, and think through dance music in the twenty-first century. gadir opens her book with a thesis that is almost deceptively simple: “dance music is ordinary” (1). by this, she means that dance music culture is not necessarily mundane (although it often is, as she demonstrates), but socially and structurally embedded; indeed, dance music is shot through with the same exclusions, hierarchies and contradictions as any other cultural practice. this assertion is a direct challenge to decades of scholarship and fan writing that frame dj culture as inherently emancipatory, utopian or exceptional. for gadir, origin stories about detroit, chicago, berlin and new york may have been politically useful in early subcultural theory, but they have since become canonical and limiting: “what has happened since,” she argues in the conclusion, “is that such interventions have become the accepted stories of dance music culture. as such, they no longer serve their original function, and their politics are no longer radical.” (168) paulette (who is mononymous) presents a similar critique from a different angle. her memoir, welcome to the club, tracks over 30 years in the industry—from early gigs in manchester’s queer nightlife scene, including her role as a resident at the hacienda’s https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.16 dancecult 17(1)160 flesh, through corporate pr work at mercury records and eventually to international stardom. yet despite her longevity and acclaim, paulette reflects repeatedly on how her contributions—like those of many black women djs—have been marginalized or omitted entirely from mainstream dance music history: “the winners in dance music have mainly been men,” she writes, quoting carl loben, “and men are more likely to push themselves forward and take the credit” (128). when paulette became the resident dj at flesh, the club’s legendary and first queer night, she was one of only two women djs to hold down a hacienda residency. she describes how her residency at flesh “enabled [her] to join a boy’s club which changed [her] life” (5) and “was unarguably the catalyst for [her] career” (32). still, paulette stresses that hacienda was not the only “thing” in manchester–remember, dominant narratives dominate history. paulette stresses that, as important as the hacienda was, “if history is to be correct, we have to acknowledge the other stories that have been squashed down and pushed out” (35). she emphasizes that a “vibrant underground dj scene” (33) existed at the time that hasn’t been awarded historical prominence, “inhabited by a cluster of black music promoters” (33). despite this, “black people weren’t invited into the city centre–any city centre–in england and the early nineties were not a ‘black creative’ friendly space” (33). her reflections offer lived evidence to support gadir’s claim that historiographic gatekeeping and cultural memory are structured by race, gender and power. gadir’s research spans a decade of fieldwork and interviews conducted across the uk, tel aviv, zurich, oslo and sydney, with a focus on how gender, race, class and regulatory frameworks shape dance music environments. her methods include participant observation and critical discourse analysis, with a particular emphasis on mythologies of meritocracy and postfeminism. if gadir’s work serves as a feminist audit of the dance music studies field, paulette’s memoir functions as a counter-archive: a first-person record of scenes and struggles often left undocumented. paulette’s memoir is rooted in her singular but deeply intersectional experience as a queer black woman navigating predominantly white and male spaces. yet her storytelling is far from anecdotal. she consistently situates her experiences within broader systems of exclusion—whether confronting the “lead-lined” glass ceiling while working in pr for mercury records (54), being told she’d never get booked as “a black, female dj with grey hair” (122), or having samples of her autobiography dismissed by male colleagues such as frank broughton for not having enough sex and drugs to make it interesting. thankfully, paulette ignored his advice when manchester press approached her to write the book in 2021. one of the many strengths of welcome to the club lies in paulette’s insistence that embodied experience is not separate from theory—it is theory in motion. paulette stresses that her book is neither a complete history of edm nor her definitive biography; rather, it’s “a series of snapshots that follow a chronological arc from the start of [her] dj’ing career to the present day, bending this through the prism of other people’s histories to acknowledge the wider picture. after all, ten people at a party will never tell reviews 161 the same story.” (2–3) here, paulette introduces a theme both glaringly obvious and yet somehow still ignored: history is subjective and favours hegemonic subjects. acknowledging her intersectional positionality within what bell hooks characterizes as “white supremacist patriarchal” culture, paulette states, “i have the unique perspective of an outsider with insider knowledge and an insider with outside knowledge” (3). both paulette and gadir foreground the ongoing struggles women face in dj culture, though with different emphases. in chapter 5 of dance music, gadir dissects how gender operates not just at the level of representation, but in sonic codes, gatekeeping, and audience perception. female djs are often marketed either as “sexy and incompetent” or musically credible but non-conforming to beauty norms (121–123). these binaries echo in media representation and club booking policies, and paulette’s narrative personalizes these structural forces. she documents the repeated erasure of her skills, the scrutiny of her appearance and the exhausting dance between authenticity and acceptability. her story makes visible the emotional and economic toll of navigating these contradictions alongside unpredictable, irregular employment —what gadir names as “precarity in informal economies” (140) and paulette describes more viscerally as “losing your mojo” (121). both gadir and paulette extend their analysis into ageism, showing how dance music’s obsession with youth further marginalizes women. paulette, now in her fifties, writes candidly about facing dwindling bookings and backhanded compliments. yet she refuses invisibility: “remind yourself that few white men have a problem with celebrating their wins... you too should remember and feel pride in yourself and your achievements.” (139) her memoir becomes a feminist act of citation—of herself and of the women who built the scene alongside her. in chapter 2, paulette describes how she “started to build a network of female supporters” (47–48), and this is key to her narrative. throughout welcome to the club, paulette shouts out the amazing women she encountered, including but not limited to: smokin’ jo, dulcie danger, caroline prothero, jamz supernova, marcia carr, colleen ‘cosmo’ murphy, judy griffith, gladys pizarro, jaguar, erica mckoy, niks, lakuti, naomi pohl, anz, sherelle and more. if you don’t know these women, you should look them up. one of gadir’s most provocative contributions is her critique of “transcendence” as a central value in dance music discourse. in chapter 4, she questions whether the romanticized peak experience—of becoming one with the dance floor, the lights, the crowd—is truly emancipatory or simply another consumerist ideal dressed in subcultural clothing, stating “[t]he popular discourses on utopianism in dance music culture leave little room for addressing problematic gender dynamics” (164). for gadir, transcendence is often an individualist fantasy that displaces collective political action. paulette’s memoir complements this critique with realism and wit. while she recounts moments of joy, connection and artistic mastery, she never glorifies the scene. instead, she foregrounds its labour: lugging records, facing hostile sound techs, staying professional in the face of condescension and recovering from burnout: “the glamour is fleeting, the graft is real, and the sacrifices are many” (74), she writes. paulette’s story echoes gadir’s insistence that even the most exceptional spaces can be host to ordinary experiences. dancecult 17(1)162 both books reject dance music exceptionalism in favour of something more politically grounded. gadir’s final chapter critiques the field of dance music studies itself for clinging to outdated narratives of resistance and transcendence. she asks, “what function does dance music writing whose main goal is advocacy or defence serve now that there is no longer an orthodoxy to challenge?” (170) in its place, she calls for a post-utopian, anti-capitalist feminist praxis that acknowledges the limitations of dance floors while mobilizing their collectivist potential toward structural change. paulette’s conclusion, subtitled “a manifesto”, similarly balances critique with hope. she doesn’t romanticize the past, but she insists that club culture can still be a site of joy, community and creative resistance: “community is the foundation. collaboration is the future. alliances reinforce the chain.” (195) she reminds readers that love—for music, for people, for the party—is not apolitical; it is the engine that keeps us going. in sum, these two books—one a rigorous academic intervention, the other a vital work of cultural memory—deserve to be read in tandem as both disrupt the plur mnemonic. paulette and gadir challenge scholars, djs, promoters, fans and all stakeholders in dance music to move beyond myth and toward accountability. whether we encounter dj culture in lecture halls or on dance floors, in archives or behind the decks, dance music and welcome to the club remind us that the work of rethinking dance music culture is far from finished. reviews 163 live spielen: liveness in performances elektronischer tanzmusik josef schaubruch hildesheim: universitätsverlag hildesheim, 2024. isbn: 978-3-96424-101-6 (paperback) rrp: €27,00 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.17> jack mcneill university of york (uk) as i write this review i am looking at an old ticket stub on my desk for an event in july 2025 in leeds. the stub includes all the usual information you’d expect from the gig ticket: venue, time, price, promoter, etc. the headline of the stub displays the name of the artist, followed by the following text in bold: “live dj set”. to some, this may be paradoxical; how can a dj set where an artist is playing pre-produced records one after the other be “live”? some may even see such a claim as audacious if the artist is not playing their own work using acoustic, amplified and/or electronic musical instruments and employing a level of mastery or even virtuosity. some may take a more sympathetic view. surely the presence of the artist and audience and some sort of interaction between the two is enough to make the performance “live”. debates around what a live performance involves are pervasive in electronic dance music cultures. views are manifold, and long have ravers, artists and enthusiasts debated the nuances of liveness in electronic dance music performance. if this is a debate you have had or are preparing for your next heated discussion on the topic, perhaps you might want to come equipped with some robust arguments. and if robust arguments on liveness are what you are looking for, look no further than josef schaubruch’s live spielen. live spielen is a comprehensive and critical review on notions of liveness in electronic dance music performances. rather than attempting to provide an absolute definition of the term, schaubruch highlights the theoretical and practical complexities and vagueness bound up with it. the work is convincing and presents a solid theoretical background around liveness in dance music genres, before undertaking empirical study and analysis on electronic artists who perform live and have a variety of different perspectives on what that means to them. schaubruch considers a number of positions on the notion of liveness, spanning from more common (mostly electronic) instrumental performances to the understanding of the dj set as a “live” practice (or not, as some argue), and the importance of corporeality, embodiment and an audience’s presence and interaction with the artist to a live performance. the first chapter is centred around the ambiguity of live performance in electronic music. it elegantly outlines the anxieties of electronic dance music artists around whether something might be live, as well as introducing the various constellations of live performance in electronic music, including turntablism, live coding, hardware performances and more. in this theoretical introduction, schaubruch also emphasises that his reflections on liveness often stem from less tangible phenomena like practice and affect as well as technologies, placing artists and audiences as critical to his discussion. chapter 2 presents a solid and https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.17 dancecult 17(1)164 comprehensive literature review. this chapter is particularly strong and is a useful resource for those working in or interested in the blooming academic discussion around liveness and electronic dance music. notable in the chapter is linguistic analysis of genre and musical role (e.g. dj/producer) across english and german, and the assertion that providing a single binary definition of “liveness” (i.e. “live” and “not live”) is no longer possible. in doing so, schaubruch mostly avoids falling into traps around defining what may or may not be authentic, again focussing on the multiplicity and vagueness of the terms he explores. following the rigorous review of literature, he provides a brief outline of his methodology which is clear and addresses gaps in field, particularly in the empirical study of liveness in electronic dance music. his discussion around reflexive grounded theory is both engaging and goes some way in addressing the perpetual complexity of aligning the specificities of dance music cultures with research methodologies. at the same time, there is a clear engagement with the author’s positionality as researcher, artist and participant in the dance music culture. the fourth chapter plots schaubruch’s findings and his own theoretical reflections on them, extracting broader themes stemming from the empirical work with artists who professionally engage with live electronic music performance. the outcomes are expansive, supported by informative diagrams. one particularly striking observation, albeit one that might be predictable to the reader, is the cultural capital that liveness holds for the artists interviewed. there is an inherent tension among artists’ reflections on what “liveness” is, with some focussed on the practice of using live instruments itself, while others with more of a focus towards creating moments of presence with audiences. not one to shy away from the complexity of these arguments, schaubruch explores where these tensions intersect, extending notions of subject and object to body (artist) and equipment, as well as artist and audience, exploring the relationships between musicians and instruments as an illustrative comparison. overall, live spielen presents a thorough, rigorous and engaging analysis on the role that liveness has in the performance of electronic dance music. he leans into the diversity and conflicts in both the literature and the points of view of the artists he interviews to illustrate the richness and potential in various definitions of live performances of electronic dance music. there are a (very small) handful of instances where it might be inferred that value judgements around live performances being “better” than dj sets, particularly in the “grad an liveness”, are being made. although these appear to emerge from the author’s empirical work, their absolute presentation may be seen to negate the vagueness in terminology that schaubruch so effectively builds throughout most of the text. while not necessarily within the scope of this work, an exploration on the role of liveness in studio production, and how live performances translate to the composition and production of fixed media is missing in the book and perhaps presents a gap for future work. admittedly, when i first received the ticket for the above-mentioned event in leeds, i scoffed at the absurdity of a “live dj set”. i was convinced that the headline description of the event was wholly paradoxical, perhaps a marketing ploy that plays into schaubruch’s assertions on the cultural capital of the live set. having read live spielen and considered the vagueness of the notion liveness in electronic dance music however, i am not so sure, and this is one of the great successes of this text; it questions as much as it answers. reviews 165 assembling a black counter culture deforrest brown, jr. new york: primary information, 2022. isbn: 9781734489736 (paperback) rrp: us$15.00 <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.18> emre öztürk humboldt-universität zu berlin (germany) deforrest brown jr. is a musician, media theorist and curator who has been an essential voice in questioning the current state of global electronic music and framing it within the radical black perspective. in assembling a black counter culture (2022), he traces the “black secret technology” centering detroit techno meanwhile covering black vernacular cultures, racial capitalism, industrialization and black resistance. combining both academic and underground knowledge, brown visits the black labor, ingenuity and futuristic desire, questioning techno’s later depoliticized and dehistoricized reception within various discursive and practical realms among the global electronic music industry. more than a linear musical timeline, this book is rather a counter-archive; interviews, artist biographies, scene insights and media archaeology are constant while brown digs further into the direction of techno’s cybernetic essence and creative drive. doing so, the book references valuable literature at the intersection of racial capitalism, cybernetics, and black desire, citing authors like cedric robinson, paul gilroy, kodwo eshun, fred moten, as well as frequently referring to the afrofuturist heritage and diasporic myth-science.  starting from detroit, brown later situates techno within the broader black atlantic, as well as its further branches through locations like japan, germany and the uk. while each chapter breaks down techno’s timeline by focusing on different perspectives, locations or concepts, brown eventually re-assembles all the information in the final chapter, “the collapse of modern culture” a title that is very much self-explanatory. brown merely hesitates to express his personal opinion, in fact, he clearly shows his position also on the very first page of the book with five different diagrams; the first one being a forecast of unbearable ecological load that inevitably leads to the “collapse of modern civilization”, and the second one that maps out the timeline of the black atlantic that starts with the global slave trade that he indicates the inevitable future result, “the journey home”. in that sense, brown underlines the inescapable outcomes of a culture that is assembled through racial capitalism and neocolonialism, combining self-reflexive insights with the comprehensive research data he provides. in the first few pages, the book cruises through the racialized history of the us and colonialism with their connection to current racial capitalism and the “rise of modern industrial complexes”. while discussing the essence of black usage of media and machines https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.18 dancecult 17(1)166 in the context of electronic music and dance cultures, brown pays dues to early architects of afrofuturism such as sun ra, lee “scratch” perry or george clinton, discussing their influence on later black electronic musics. he quickly sets its route to detroit in the following chapter, zooming into the life of techno’s originators in the us midwest, where post-fordist racial capitalism peaked post world war ii. one of brown’s main arguments is that techno’s emergence is inseparable from the conditions of post-fordist america and the automation of black labor. he conceptualizes techno as an embodied and racialized extension of the workers’ engagement with industrial machinery, adding that the music’s futuristic desires are not merely stylistic but are direct reflection of the industrial environment, that he eventually refers to as “black secret technology.” brown positions detroit techno pioneers like juan atkins, jeff mills and underground resistance as sonic engineers responding to industrial debilitation and using machines and rhythms to pursue new aesthetic forms and sonic fiction, while continously providing examples from afrofuturistic heritage and mythscientific practice that points out to the everlasting connection between pasts, presents and the futures of the black atlantic sonic futurism. brown also goes over the world’s changing economic and political climate and its impacts on the racialized, social and financial structure of the usa and beyond, zooming into cases such as us’s post-civil war and more contemporary topics such as racial policies and riots, or state-driven violence in the 20th century as what equally shaped the conditions for techno to flourish. at the intersection of racialized structures and mainstream media, he constantly provides concrete examples of techno and other black music being whitewashed through media tools such as news narrations, charts or interviews to show the doubleedged sword of british and american music market; where britain has become a melting pot of different black music with enough financial stability to the us’s, covering techno’s expansion overseas and its results with another self-explanatory chapter called “wake up america, you are dead!”. next chapter “detroit-berlin axis” provides even more insights by revealing further connections of black musical cultures with racial capitalism and neocolonialism, focusing on the genre’s second decade of existence and exportation outside of the us, under “a colonial project that white european crowds fetishize detroit’s sonic labor and whitewashing it”as brown puts it, diving into stories from post-cold war era berlin with a hedonistic, neocolonial venture that simultaneously serves for the western cultural hegemony. exampling paternalistic assumptions of kraftwerk and other westernwhite influences on detroit techno, or scholars such as stockhausen and adorno, brown maps out the post-colonial multiculturalism that reappropriates the african american musical continuum on the 1990s and beyond, going over cases like underground resistance or drexciyan empire as black resistance in response.  brown brings his focus to the present in the final chapters, interrogating how platform capitalism has restructured the global music economy and further marginalized black producers. he maps out the consolidation of power in media platforms, streaming services and corporate-backed festivals, showing how these infrastructures continue the exploitation and erasure of black creative labor. here he reframes all previous chapters through the lens reviews 167 of platform capitalism and questions its impacts on techno and beyond, going over the capitalization of the black body, mind, and labor through contemporary technological infrastructure. yet, he already made the conclusion clear many times throughout the book, that blackness is always already in counter-position to the structures of racial capitalism that seek to contain it. if there is a central claim in assembling a black counter culture, it is that resistance, speculative imagination and reassembling are constant variables of the black secret technology. dancecult 16(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 16(1) 2024: 140–152 issn 1947-5403 ©2024 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net rude citizenship: jamaican popular music, copyright, and the reverberations of colonial power larisa kingston mann chapel hill: university of north carolina press, 2022.  isbn: 978-1-4696-6724-9 (paperback), 978-1-4696-6723-2 (hardcover) rrp: us$95 (hardcover), us$32.50 (paperback)  <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.16> aadita chaudhury york university (canada) / goldsmiths, university of london (uk) in rude citizenship: jamaican popular music, copyright, and the reverberations of colonial power, larisa kingston mann unravels the moral economies and legal copyright frameworks that inform and animate the ongoing evolution of jamaican popular music. mann’s intervention into the study of jamaican music and culture in this context is novel in multiple ways. existing approaches to theorizing jamaican popular music have contended with ways in which practitioners of the culture incorporate elements of embodied social knowledge (henriques 2011), challenge the dominance of a stratified system of social classes (cooper 2004) and create a sense of kinship with ancestral histories of migration and ritual practices (niaah 2010; stanley niaah 2008). mann’s approach presents an account of how jamaican musical cultures challenge dominant epistemologies about intellectual property and ownership based on colonial notions of enclosure—positioning the conditions in which jamaican popular music emerges in relation to global struggles against the loss of commons—ecological, economic and cultural. mann locates the legal framework of copyright as part of a wider set of colonial worldmaking apparatuses that create enclosures around popular music and culture, entangling them in regimes of ownership and intellectual property that most closely adhere to ideas of musical composition and creativity within a eurocentric framework of cultural production, centering specific individuals and collectives in isolation from their cultural milieu as auteurs. within the broader context of british imperialism in which jamaican popular genres like reggae, ska, dancehall and dub have emerged, there are additionally reviews https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.16 reviews 141 class, geographical and economic considerations of practitioners that contribute not only to the evolution of distinct musical styles but also to their legibility within the political economy of global music and associated legal regimes. mann’s most important and unique contribution to this growing literature on the embodied knowledges and epistemologies emanating from jamaican music’s ethos is linking the ways it challenges class and coloniality within jamaica to how the notion of “rude citizenship” (130, 177)—the sociocultural, affective, and embodied practices of poor jamaicans contrasted with the state-supported ideals of the elite classes—created “a kind of sheltering space where poor jamaicans can produce this relatively autonomous cultural life” (7). it is through this perspective of rude citizenship—which encapsulates how the jamaican poor resisted forms of coloniality by challenging certain white supremacist norms of conduct still affirmed by elites in jamaican post-independence society—that mann shows how anti-blackness and coloniality pervaded post-independence jamaica. even though “the state and its elite intellectuals (…) were at odds over the appropriate forms and distributions of power, they tended to remain more in agreement about cultural norms of conduct, reading the poor as ‘rude’ rather than as challenging coloniality” (9). accordingly, within marginalized spaces in jamaican society, popular musical cultures reflected the moral economies and embodied representations of various approaches to pushing back against state-enforced, anti-black understandings of personhood, creativity and conduct. these cultural practices present considerable epistemological challenges to dominant global orders surrounding the status of intellectual property and ownership when it comes to music, countering established notions of copyright law. when considered through the prism of notions of “rudeness” and rude citizenship as per mann’s articulation, we can begin to observe the impacts of persistent coloniality and anti-blackness in post-independence jamaica as broad, cascading forms that create the scaffolding in which jamaican popular music, legal mechanisms like international copyright law and notions of ownership interface and operate, each challenging the limits of the other. in this nexus, jamaican musical practices, regardless of their genre, represent part of a pluriverse in which traditional cultures of orality, notions of sonic commons that not only enable but also celebrate forms of hybridity facilitated by mixing and sampling practices and other embodied and aural knowledges—frequently demonstrate their continuous evolution and autonomy even as newer mechanisms of legal and physical enclosure emerge by engaging with and producing forms of musical composition that defy colonial constructs of copyright law. in this way, the musical forms, textures, pedagogies, and epistemologies that undergird the ethos of jamaican popular music continue to refract the moral economies surrounding the idea of “rude citizenship” within the domains of music and cultural production, legal regimes and beyond. jamaican popular music and dance culture, its technological innovations and migrating evolutionary trajectories will likely continue to lay significant challenges to the global hegemonic legal orders around creative composition, collaboration and ownership. dancecult 14(1)142 mann’s work in rude citizenship extends this inquiry well beyond the realm of music into broader conversations about coloniality, indigenous approaches to legal worldmaking and the nature of cultural production itself. by questioning the fundamental underlying assumptions in western conceptions of musical and sonic composition with examples from jamaican popular music, mann’s provocation in rude citizenship asks readers to question their understanding of auteurship, originality and notions of musical talent. references cooper, carolyn. 2004. sound clash: jamaican dancehall culture at large. 2004th edition. new york, ny: palgrave macmillan. henriques, julian. 2011. sonic bodies: reggae sound systems, performance techniques, and ways of knowing. 1st edition. new york: continuum. niaah, sonjah stanley. 2010. dancehall: from slave ship to ghetto. illustrated edition. ottawa: university of ottawa press. stanley niaah, sonjah. 2008. “performance geographies from slave ship to ghetto.” space and culture 11(4): 343–60. reviews 143 together, somehow: music, affect, and intimacy on the dancefloor luis manuel garcia-mispireta durham: duke university press, 2023. isbn: 978-1-4780-2008-0 (cloth), 978-1-4780-2504-7 (paperback) rrp: us$107.95 (cloth), us$28.95 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.17> rory fewer university of california, riverside (usa) luis manuel garcia-mispireta’s together, somehow: music, affect, and intimacy on the dancefloor adds an essential contribution to a limited yet gradually expanding body of ethnomusicological scholarship on electronic dance music cultures. through a multi-sited ethnography of house, techno and minimal dance music scenes in chicago, paris and berlin, the author evaluates the utopian potential of the dancefloor, illustrating the affective dimensions that generate its feelings of social cohesion as well as the ambivalence and exclusions that surround its possibility. in making its arguments, this book draws not only from interviews conducted with partygoers across these scenes, but also auto-ethnographic anecdotes and analytical frameworks from sound and affect studies. a primary focus of this book centers on how the dancefloor enables forms of intimacy between strangers that would otherwise be inappropriate in other spaces, a point illustrated early on with a memorable anecdote in which the author’s face was briefly caressed by a stranger while dancing at panorama bar in berlin, “an exchange of surprising warmth between strangers” (3). garcia-mispireta builds empirically from a range of anecdotes to make potent claims about these forms of “stranger-sociability” (5), including how conventions of touch in nightlife cultures serve the multiple functions of “communicating sociability, transmitting affect, and both sensing and navigating a crowded environment” (53). the author incorporates an extensive amount of musical analysis to argue that the affective qualities of corporeal exchanges on the dancefloor meet further intensification through the haptic qualities of electronic dance music. specifically, the distribution of frequencies in electronic dance music composition results in a type of material impact, described as “sonic spikes [that] strike the body in a very concrete way, eliciting sensations not only in the ear but also in the body’s skin, flesh, viscera, and bones” (70). electronic dance music genres often utilize sounds that index tactile experience, such as clapping or breathing, a practice which “rel[ies] on the ability of listener-dancers to associate certain sounds with an enfleshed sound source” (73). garcia-mispireta also provides a close analysis of musical texture to argue that electronic dance music makes use of granular sounds that likewise evoke tactile experience. this combination of vibrational impact, bodily indexicality and granular texture ultimately “invites an engagement with sound that is alive to texture, touch, https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.17 dancecult 14(1)144 and other fleshy excitations” (87). the book’s larger theories of togetherness are predicated on these affects as devices through which crowd solidarity is enacted or imagined. the author details these affective encounters of sonic and embodied proximities to theorize the vague sense of togetherness that the dancefloor produces. these affective encounters (articulated corporeally and musically) intensify in a process that the author calls the “thickening of the social” (124). thickening is a process whereby the imbrication of dancefloor affect gives initial coherence to a type of crowd solidarity. thickening results in a vague feeling of togetherness that the author explains through the concept of liquidarity, defined as “a form of fluid solidarity in which vagueness is a crucial condition of its emergence” (32). liquidarity is necessarily vague because in order to coalesce it must also obfuscate the power differentials that would deny its possibility. “vagueness” is thus used by the author as an analytic to effectively describe the contradictions that allow nightlife spaces to simultaneously contain forms of inclusion and exclusion, and which threaten to dissolve these “vague” feelings of social cohesion as they are inevitably problematized by the presence of partygoers with differential access to this solidarity, including, for example, partygoers who are disproportionately targeted by unsolicited touching or have differing cultural expectations for intimacy. the duality of this vagueness is most apparent in the final chapter, in which the author details door policies and the regulation of diversity as a “dissonance between a utopian desire for unproblematically inclusive collectivity and the practices of exclusion that help to make the experience of cosmopolitan conviviality possible” (215). for these reasons, liquidarity is a phenomenon that can only take fragile shape. as the author writes, it “sustains an intimate world on the merest whiff of sociability” (104). the ultimate objective of this intimate world and its utopian aspirations—the “something” as noted in the title of the book—are likewise vague. garcia-mispireta writes that they “provide a sense of what a utopia of postidentitarian belonging might feel like, rather than a coherent model of how it would function” (223). this book offers a novel contribution to ethnomusicological scholarship and will surely lend itself as an important resource for scholars and other readers interested in the global phenomenon of electronic dance music culture or studies on music and affect more generally. however, it is important to note the structural challenges that nearly made such a project impossible. this book is prefaced with a description of the obstacles the author met as a firstgeneration, queer scholar of color working on topics deemed “disciplinarily unconventional and low-prestige” (xv) by the institutions of ethnomusicology. as it offers a series of theories pertinent to understanding the ubiquitous communities of the “dancefloor”, this book thus also serves as a reminder to current and future ethnomusicologists of the structural changes required to ensure similarly profound work continues to reach fruition. reviews 145 out of space: how uk cities shaped rave culture (revised and expanded edition) jim ottewill bristol: velocity press, 2024. isbn: 978-1-913231-63-7 (paperback) rrp: £14.99 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.18> alistair fraser maynooth university (ireland) a friend of mine, breffni, tells a wonderful story about discovering rave culture in north western (nw) london, aged 17. out and about with friends one evening, he came across a spiral tribe free party in a warehouse in nw london. it was unlike anything else he’d known. it was music and a vibe, music and an embrace; a feeling, then, and one he continues to enjoy and chase after. today, after a few decades of raving, he’s employed to make urban places more liveable for all (and he’s successful at it). back then, though, it was the rave culture he discovered that went on to make the city liveable; it was rave culture that went on to make so many places and spaces of wonder, discovery and joy. uk cities since the late 1980s and early 1990s have been bound up with rave culture in profound ways. both the city and the culture have existed in relation to each other and to a wider array of places and spaces. those fleeting moments on the dancefloor, the randomness of meeting and hugging strangers, the chaos, the buzz—it all needed somewhere to occur and rave culture did manage to create those geographies. indeed, looking back at the story of rave culture, perhaps one of the most notable aspects was simply that the promoters, free party collectives, djs, sound engineers, new age travellers, ravers and clubbers found so many spaces to embrace each other. looking around now, it’s hard not to be worried about the future. what chance will our children have of making discoveries like breffni’s? a similar anxiety pervades out of space: how uk cities shaped rave culture (2024). in this expanded version of his 2022 book with the same title, jim ottewill takes the act of “looking around” to an elevated level. ottewill works his way across the country, from north to south, to ask the promoters, the originators and the djs who got things started and kept things going, to tell their stories. what we get out of this is a brilliant and rich historical geography of rave culture in the uk. we get insightful biographical details about the promoters and djs; rare nuggets about how clubs got started; and fantastic quotes that capture the vitality and energy—the love—that went into and came out of rave culture. out of space has ten core chapters. the bulk of them are dedicated to covering developments in glasgow, manchester, liverpool, sheffield, birmingham, london and other smaller cities and towns such as coventry and margate. chapters 7 and 8 focus on party and sound system scenes with fewer fixed ties to any particular place but with strong bonds to uk cities. then in chapter 10 and the concluding chapter, ottewill examines the contemporary struggle to find a place for rave culture in uk cities. https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.18 dancecult 14(1)146 the book has two standout features. the first is a justifiable sense of awe and respect toward the great many people who have dedicated so much of their lives to emplacing rave culture in uk cities. it’s been their task to find venues, bring in the crowds and deal with authorities or angry neighbours. it’s their labour and often their capital that’s generated the landscape of rave culture in the uk. out of space is a book that fist-bumps those people. it works. it’s a book with love and hugs. alongside the love, though, the second feature is an overriding sense of dread. ottewill has his finger on the pulse of rave culture in the uk. he’s spotting the novel ideas and experiments, such as community ownership models that try to counteract rising rents and the overall loss of space; and highlighting other efforts to battle the growing sense that rave culture is on the decline. yet, it is precisely the fact that rave culture is on the decline that jumps out from the book, especially in the final two chapters. this leads me to wonder if a weakness in out of space is that ottewill is too committed to rave culture. he wants to spot and discuss some of the ways that rave culture can keep going. he knows this means we need space. but to my mind, ottewill does not dedicate enough energy to asking if there is going to be enough of a commitment from younger generations to the making of spaces like clubs or other dancefloors. for sure, processes such as gentrification are a major source of pressure on clubs and promoters. regulations, insurance, health, safety and the wider institutionalization of cultural practice with respect to capitalist life also bear down on rave culture. but what about generational differences? thirty years or more have passed since breffni (and kids like him) discovered spiral tribe (and then, for breffni, bedlam and numerous other events and venues). today, though, a great many young people are on smartphones or playsations all day long. they’re updating their followers on instagram. they’re tik-tokking videos; creating, capturing, commodifying and sometimes cancelling culture in novel ways that just might not need the same sorts of spaces that rave culture needed. against this backdrop, to want clubs and raves to keep going—to seek out a space for them in the city—is one thing. but maybe we might need to accept that our kids won’t want to spend quite so much of their weekends bubbling around on an ecstatic ride in hot sweaty clubs, warehouses or other venues. one has to wonder if our kids will need the same spaces as rave culture needed. will they seek out the same sorts of life-changing or mind-altering experience that so many ravers desired? in short, maybe rave culture is running out of space; but maybe it’s also running out of ravers. these minor critiques aside, out of space is a fantastic book precisely because it can provoke debates about the past, present and future of rave culture. ottewill writes clearly, quotes the people he interviewed astutely and ensures the reader knows there they are relative to the rest of the book. it’s a brilliantly crafted text, demonstrating serious writing skills and drawing on an incredibly rich archive of material collected via first-hand interviews and other sources. my sense is that anyone interested in the rise, development and significance of rave culture will need this book. anyone fighting to keep the vibe alive should also get a copy. reviews 147 venue stories: narratives, memories, and histories from britain’s independent music spaces fraser mann, robert edgar and helen pleasance (eds.) sheffield: equinox publishing, 2023. isbn: 9781800504431 (hardcover), 9781800503731 (paperback) rrp: us$100.00 (hardcover), us$32.00 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.19> max gibson university of california, davis (usa) drawing together a chorus of individual voices, venue stories is a dynamic collection of creative non-fiction entries that speak on music, place, experience and community across british independent music scenes in the 20th and 21st century. in their curation of the chapters, editors mann, edgar and pleasance state that their mission was to “bring stories and remembrances together, add shape to them and develop a scholarly understanding of how we can offer an alternative mode of historiography through editorial processes that are akin to the role of the museum curator” (2). conceived and developed during the covid-19 pandemic, this is not the usual collection of formal academic essays, but instead a radical attempt at shining light on histories that are usually ignored, marginal or not considered serious enough; venue stories acts as a site of resistance to erasure through the creation of an archive of stories not usually told. utilizing autoethnography, journalism, historiography, essaying, interview and most importantly memoir, the authors create multiple narratives of hidden microhistories. creative non-fiction as a genre is increasingly common within academia, yet rarely does a collection come together like this that achieves its mission of illuminating histories through a multiplicity of voices, rather than the usual single-authored narrative. this approach is apparent when examining the variety of people in this collection beyond the familiar academic researcher: band members, djs, producers, journalists, bartenders, photographers and more. each contribute their lived experiences and perspectives, and having an eclectic roster makes for an enjoyable read. the shifts in writing styles take the reader from the depths of despair—over half the chapters end with the closure of cherished venues—to uncontrollable laughter—who would have thought the destruction of a bass guitar could be so funny? (69–77). yet this emotional journey is never at the expense of intention of the book. each account reveals a microcosm within a broader community, scene and history, where musical worlds are lived, embodied and reenacted through memory, and then relived through writing; the act of memory writing affords the network of microhistories to be acknowledged and remembered and serves as a way of expressing personal experience and embodied knowledge within larger structures. memory writing thus becomes an analytical methodology. https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.19 dancecult 14(1)148 venue stories contributes a great deal to the regional histories of music scenes and venues in the areas of birmingham, leicester, liverpool and london. places such as brighton, glasgow, leeds, manchester, sheffield, teesside, york and the north of england are also represented. each entry acts as a scratching of the surface of histories that have yet to be written, and thus could lead way to a book of each region or venue in question. many chapters engage with a single venue, most of which are on the toilet circuit. robert edgar theorizes on the concept of the toilet venue, arguing that they affectionately received their name from the bands and audiences who would come together as a community in seedy spaces full of mythic history (40–50). some of the mythic venues included here are the charlotte, eric’s, and the bull and gate. other authors, instead look inward, and focus on journeys of discovery, coming-of-age and personal troubles through their venue experiences. especially important is how these authors grapple with the politics of access and inclusion, particularly that of safety and economic parity. gender politics are prevalent in penelope wickson’s experience in the 1990s birmingham jungle scene where she describes a masculinist environment rife with sexism and inappropriate behaviour toward female participants (162–174); vim renault and lene cortina, of punkgirldiaries, outline their experiences as female band members in the world of punk, a global phenomenon famous for breaking with traditional norms, which afforded them opportunities usually unusual for women (78–87); and polly hancock’s memoir reveals promotional sexism during the hype indie night at the bull and gate, london (60–68). economic politics are present in anna maria barry’s contribution who explicitly points out that working-class talent is underrepresented across the creative industries, not just in live music (124–134). ed garland’s account of sitting on a bench in leicester’s the charlotte venue introduces the reader to the perspective and experience of music in venues from a position of sitting rather than standing and points to the rarely addressed issue of physical accessibility in live music venues (145–152). myriad genres and scenes are represented through venue stories, including heavy metal, hard rock, britpop, as well as indie and underground musics. whether a product of living musical memory or simply due to its global influence, the genre with the most references is punk and its cousins. punk memories act as the main undertow that bring venues to life. while not intentional, the narratives of venue stories, emphasize live music performed by bands; stories concerning electronic dance music and djs, however, do make up a small number of chapters. a striking entry is thomas jackson’s chapter on his punk-rock dj dad, whose experience as a working-class industrial worker-turned dj illuminates the not-yettold activities and histories of venues, towns and regions alike (238–247). a standout feature of venue stories is the ubiquity of musical materiality that is littered across nearly every entry; indeed, the editors point out that “[m]aterial culture, the imagination and the memory have equal weight in these contributions and how they are reviews 149 written” (16). whether it is zines, instruments, seating, pa systems, badges, clothes or multitudinous memorabilia, objects are imbued with experiences and memories, and while they might not resonate like a venue, they are valuable for understanding how material culture fits into broader society, musics and histories. it would be wonderful to see these materials brought together in an exhibit that complements the book. those seeking applications of academic theory will find a selection of authors who situate their experiences and stories of venues within analytical frameworks—ed garland’s application of julian henrique’s listening skin is masterful (148)—but readers should not expect it from every chapter. simultaneously, some might question the reliability and rigor of memory writing; the very act of working from memory elicits the possibility of inaccuracies. yet this is to miss the point of the book. many authors acknowledge the fallibility of memory as a caveat to their narratives and some even go out of their way to work with archival documents to crosscheck specific dates and performances—pleasance’s postscript one, is humorously enlightening (28). rich in content and histories, the many individual narratives in venue stories are woven together and offer a model for those working through creative non-fiction as a methodology for writing histories pertaining to music, place and experience. the hidden microhistories of individuals represent larger structures of culture and community and are afforded agency to speak; the very nature of this book is radically effective. dancecult 14(1)150 living at night in times of pandemic: night studies and club culture in france and germany anita jóri and guillaume robin (eds.) bielefeld: transcript verlag, 2024. isbn: 978-3-8376-6726-4 (paperback) |rrp: 42,00€ (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.20> jack mcneill university of york (uk) discourse around dance music cultures (dmcs) has reached a turning point; a crossroads where underlying tensions, inconsistencies, inequalities and critical questions have begun to simmer to the surface, demanding attention and discussion. since its inception, themes of utopianism and togetherness have dominated this discourse without questioning such a narrative’s relationship with individual and community actual experiences. scholars of and participants in dmcs alike will be all too familiar with the assertion that dmcs and their related subcultures report a dominant message: one of unity, togetherness and inclusion. while utopianism and escapism are critical to the creation of the other-worlds of dance music spaces (garcia-mispireta 2023; o’grady 2012), the complex, conflicting and everdeveloping politics of the dancefloor demand frank, direct and ongoing consideration. living at night makes a comprehensive attempt at this through the lens of paris and berlin’s club scenes after the covid-19 pandemic. during the pandemic and in the following years global political movements and changes in media discourse shifted both internal and external perceptions of dmcs. many (although naturally not all) global dance music communities and institutions began to question their practices, policies, interior structures, broader values and relationships with local and international communities. the cities that living at night deals with, have undergone this process in recent years. what this text does particularly well is use them as a site to highlight the potentiality for positive change through framing club culture as utopian, while at the same time recognising the complex realities of clubbing communities. it pulls into question narratives that have been broadly, and sometimes uncritically, accepted, highlighting inherent tensions within dmcs. while the focus is on paris and berlin, the work could be applied more broadly to dmcs across europe and, in some cases, globally. again, this is timely, joining other texts, such as luis manuel garcia-mispireta’s recently published together somehow, which go some way in addressing similar issues. the book is split into three sections. the first, “scenes and communities”, looks at questions of urban and community identity in dmcs, questioning some pervasive and oftrepeated discourses in dmcs in detail. frédéric trottier-pistien’s second chapter critically analyses the city-twinning of detroit and berlin and its consistencies and inconsistencies, https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.20 reviews 151 while sophia abidi methodically parses some, but not all, subcultural characteristics of participants in berlin’s dmcs. in the final chapter of the section, diana weis considers the tensions between subcultural expression and high fashion surrounding berlin’s club scene, and berghain in particular. the second section, “diversity and inclusion”, engages in much needed critical discussions around the tension between inclusion, exclusion, awareness and micropolitics in dmcs. xan egger, neo seefried and mascha naumann’s chapter exposes some internal tensions in the scene, concomitantly making the case of the potentiality and concrete utopias presented by queer dmcs. ines liotard furthers this discussion, shining a light on the historical development of queer club culture in paris, while diana raiselis discusses the potential and problematics of awareness policies and approaches in contemporary club culture post-covid. the final section, “social and ecological challenges for a sustainable culture”, looks at some of the pressing issues facing contemporary dmcs and the role that social and ecological responsibility and action plays. edna hernández gonzález writes engagingly about artificial light and the tension between nighttime and its economy. guillaume robin’s chapter provides insight on sense of belonging and meaning in dmc communities in berlin, providing interesting reflections on areas for future work, particularly with “migrant clubbing communities” (a term that robin sees as problematic). this is followed by max eulitz’ thought-provoking personal prose reflecting on a clubbing experience in kyiv, which, like in many chapters before, presents the potentiality of club spaces in adverse times. the book ends with an insightful and practical conversation between robin and katharina wolf, presenting contemporary work around the social, ecological and financial stability of berlin’s club scene. the level of self-reflection and criticality that such a text requires is evident throughout. but this is also a complex task and there are a handful of brief moments in the book that stray into the defensive, engaging with binary suggestions of what might be good or bad for the club scene, including some attempts to “debunk” common myths. there are other moments where arguments of high and low culture are invoked; arguments that often expose the fragility with which studying dmcs comes. but perhaps in a culture where multiplicity and difference form its fabric, positioning dmcs’ value in opposition to what might be considered “mainstream” is not always useful. nevertheless, it is important to make very clear that such arguments are few and far between, and do not consist full chapters. indeed, the work in living at night is most successful when it embraces the dmcs’ diversity; in the discussions around the otherness of dmcs and their opposition to hegemony, and how actors in the scene might negotiate that, while legitimising its existence without any suggestion of what might perceived as good or bad. since the pandemic, european dmcs have seen club closures, thanks to gentrification, and aggressive legislation that makes it more difficult for nightlife to survive (drevenstedt 2020; garcia-mispireta 2016). criticism is directed at dmcs, where the boundaries between utopianism and permissibility are blurred (garcia-mispireta 2023); where hedonism as resistance to hegemony and nightlife as freedom get caught up in complex and often problematic behaviours and attitudes. it is a testament to scholarship in dmcs dancecult 14(1)152 and living at night that researchers and members of its community can hold themselves and their peers accountable; refocus the lens on themselves and use insider and informed perspectives to report on pertinent issues. living at night turns the mirror on dmcs in europe, not to show the fairest of them all, but to reflect on its complexity, on the possibility of what utopia and hedonism have to offer in opposition to and harmony with the everyday, warts and all. references drevenstedt, lukas. 2020. “dimensions of club culture: learning from berlin”. in the new age of electronic dance music and club culture, ed. anita jóri and martin lücke, 9–20. cham: springer international publishing. garcia-mispireta, luis manuel. 2016. “techno-tourism and post-industrial neo-romanticism in berlin’s electronic dance music scenes”. tourist studies 16(3): 276–95. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1468797615618037>. garcia-mispireta, luis manuel. 2023. together, somehow: music, affect, and intimacy on the dancefloor. durham: duke university press. o’grady, alice. 2012. “spaces of play: the spatial dimensions of underground club culture and locating the subjunctive”. dancecult 4(1): 86–106. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.01.04>. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1468797615618037 http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.01.04 detroit ecstasy: ruminations on raving, “movement” and place rebekah farrugia oakland university (us) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.08> raving in october 2022, i was driving down i-94 on detroit’s east side and noticed that parts of the famed packard plant were being torn down. located less than four miles east of the motown museum, the long-abandoned car factory is known to many gen xers as the premiere rave space where richie hawtin and his entourage threw parties in the early to mid-1990s. my foray into raves and techno came just three months too late to attend one of these legendary events, but if there were two such spaces in detroit that i could go back in time to experience, then the packard would definitely be number two, right behind the music institute at 1315 broadway, where derrick may djed and the detroit techno sound incubated in the late 1980s. figure 1. packard plant 2023. photo credit: larry peplin (2023). figure 2. gary chandler djing at a dj godfather vs dj gary chandler poor boy party at the packard plant. photo credit: brian gillespie (1997). if you hadn’t experienced detroit in the 1980s or 1990s it’s difficult to fully comprehend the state of the city at the time. the decline of the auto industry that began in the 1970s accelerated a crisis that was already well underway. as jobs left, the tax base dwindled, schools closed, crack took a hold and crime surged. in his 1993 book afterculture: detroit and the humiliation of history, jerry herron sums up the impact of these economic and social conditions with this blunt statement: detroit—more than any other spot in this country—has been so thoroughly humiliated by history, so emptied of the content, both material and human, that used to make this place mean, that it becomes questionable whether the city still exists at all in any practical sense". (1993: 14; emphasis in original) at the time, detroit’s population was just over one million—down by nearly 50% since its peak in 1950—and three quarters of its residents were african american. despite all of the challenges they endured, life was far from devoid of meaning—and consequence—for detroiters at this time. turning to music to express themselves, to respond to the conditions of everyday life, and to build community was a long-ingrained practice in the city. in the early 1980s, the electrifying mojo would begin his nightly radio show with the “landing of the mothership”—a nod to george clinton’s afrofuturism before the term existed. mojo’s sets explored genres and artists that were not typically played on black radio. in one set, listeners could hear deep cuts from prince, new order, kraftwerk and the j. geils band. the city’s pioneering techno producers and djs cite mojo and his eclectic sets that cut across the color line as immensely influential on their musical development. figure 3. artist rendering of the electrifying mojo’s mothership. photo credit: abdul qadim haqq (2015). somehow, it’s been 27 years since i entered the world of electronic dance music and rave culture. i use the word entered quite literally. it didn’t happen in detroit but across the river in my hometown of windsor, on. i was 19 at the time and had gone to an aids benefit drag show with some friends who insisted that we go to this party afterwards and that i was going to love it. later that night, instead of heading east, i drove us to the city’s west end, unaware of how life changing this detour would prove to be. a field of cars and booming bass sounds signaled that we were in the right place. it was already midnight. i had a head cold and was worried about how i was going to stay awake but then one of friends pulled some tiny paper squares out of his pocket that the four of us consumed without hesitation. so many questions swirled in my mind as i paid the $10 cover charge. like why was the hallway covered in black plastic, and how was it even possible that i was hanging out in an elementary school at midnight on a saturday?! we headed into the gym and i was floored by what i saw and heard: two girls with glow in the dark nail polish dancing together off to one side—“cool”; and beyond them a couple hundred people dancing, all facing the dj. huh, looks like an aerobics class i thought. then i heard a sample from mlk’s “i have a dream” speech and thought, ok what’s this really all about? the acid hadn’t even started to kick in yet but it didn’t take long for me to know. this was the beginning of what exactly i wasn’t sure but definitely something. we spent the next several hours dancing to homegrown detroit house and techno. it just went on and on without any breaks; one long soundtrack to this life-altering night. i don’t remember much about the acid’s effects except that it felt like my cold had magically vanished and been replaced with an hours-long burst of energy. i danced a lot and couldn’t make much sense of what i was hearing but felt drawn to all of it in a profound way. i had stepped into a particular kind of “intimate public,” one that garcia-mispireta builds on in his analysis of stranger-intimacy on the dance floor (2023). my best friend was our “home base” and throughout the night she introduced me to “tracy from the detroit area” and other party-goers; these were the most sociable strangers i’d ever encountered. maybe this was because of the ecstasy that i would soon learn was the raver drug of choice. i found it fascinating that gender protocol didn’t apply to the bathrooms where dozens of people hung around communal sinks talking about djs and parties while smoking weed and somewhat discreetly partaking in other drugs. i had no language or reference points for any of it. as the sun came up the acid’s effects slowly dissipated, but the music’s four on the floor bass sounds and the urge to dance lingered within me for days. it would take a while for me to learn the terminology and to be able to recognize the intricacies and subgenres of the music and to learn what makes a good dj set and party; but if there was one thing i was good at, it was studying. it didn’t take long for me to learn that much of this future oriented music i fell in love with was actually from detroit, a city just a bus ride away where i spent my high school years record shopping and going to concerts. years later, reading narratives that compare nights spent at legendary house clubs like the music box in chicago and paradise garage in new york to going to church, it dawned on me that on 20 january 1996, i had experienced a baptism of sorts. for the next few years i was engrossed in plur naivety and the playfulness and experimentation that rave culture inspired. we found freedom in gender fluid fashion and as mireille silcott writes in rave america, “gobbled too many es, said ‘dude’ a lot … and pierced the dickens out of [our] bodies” (1999: 45). parties were where new tracks were dropped and innovative fashions flaunted. it’s where a new generation of kids experienced the queer time that disco bore and a sense of collective effervescence and self-affirmation that was unmatched in daily life. gina arnold argues that in these spaces participants’ identities are “explicitly stated, both to themselves and to others, but rather than attaching to individuality, identity is attached to the idea of becoming an anonymous crowd member” (2018: 128). for an introvert like myself, the simultaneous experience of belonging and anonymity was too seductive. by the end of the nineties the scene in detroit has fizzled out due to overexposure, greed, commercialism and criminalization. even cities like toronto, that had initially adopted a "nonreactionary stance" to parties because they saw the benefits in keeping kids off the streets (silcott 1999: 83), changed their position as rave culture gained more popular press coverage. meanwhile, well-established moral panic in the uk made their way across the pond. by this point, detroit’s approach to illegal parties, like that of most us cities, became increasingly punishing. promoters and patrons were criminalized and threatened with severe penalties that included the confiscation of equipment, heavy fines and even jail time. and with that, dancing all night in warehouses, abandoned theaters and bingo halls, to techno, house and the occasional ghetto tech set, came to a halt. and the challenges the city was facing weren’t all that different from the previous decade. down another 70 000 residents, the city was now 82% black and still struggling to turn its troubles around. movement it was in this context that the detroit electronic music festival (demf) was founded in 2000. up to this point, the city—like the us as a whole—had paid little attention to the local artists who pioneered a new genre of music that had captured the imagination of millions of people worldwide. by now, most of them were living in european cities where they could capitalize on dance music and club culture’s popularity. the history of techno as black music had to a large extent been white-washed, even within detroit, the blackest city in the nation, where it had all begun. the inaugural festival took place at hart plaza on the city’s waterfront over memorial day weekend. it was free and organized to showcase the talent that emerged from the city and to gather the region’s divided populace. edm producer and dj carl craig served as artistic director. leading up to the festival he remarked: i feel that the diversity of the people this event could draw will help expand the cultural diversity within detroit … different cultures coming to the city that don't usually get together … i think that this can help to develop the image that people have of detroit. (glazer: 1999) like the grand performances in los angeles that marina peterson documents in her book sound, space and the city, demf was also a civic performance that first and foremost was intended for the city and its people. the hope was that it could draw suburbanites back from north of 8 mile and down river; and that, through this communal experience, it could begin to heal some of the deep racial tensions that still plagued the region. the music could not only entertain but also uplift and give the city’s image a much-needed boost. figure 4. detroit electronic music festival. photo credit: mike davis (2000). in hindsight, craig’s statement can also be read as an early example of evolving “eventful city” and “festival city” discourses (richards and palmer 2010: 2-3). as fabian holt explains, “these discourses focused on the impact of festivals on the local economy, building on developments within postindustrial economies of tourism and place marketing” (2021: 230). detroit is not a typical tourist locale, but techno fans by the thousands continue to show up every memorial day weekend. local media reported that somewhere in the vicinity of one million people attended the first demf over its three days. the numbers have been debated but their accuracy is inconsequential. in his review, detroit free press columnist brian mccollum noted, "they came—hundreds of thousands ... with bald heads, frizzy afros, green hair, purple hair and everything in between" (2000: c1). like herron before him, mccollum went on to mythologize the moment, writing: "when darkness fell, they were—all of them—simply detroit. this was the moment when the detroit electronic music festival went transcendent. this was the moment when detroit techno arrived". detroit techno had been evolving for nearly two decades by this point, but mccollum’s reporting plays into the appeal of the party, that when one enters its physical and sonic space, everyday life is left behind and new experiences materialize. to say the crowd was “simply detroit” is to affirm craig’s desire, and that of other hopefuls like berlin-based music psychologist stefan koelsch, who believe in music’s ability to increase cultural cohesion; the belief that through collective experience we can really see one another. with respect to public concerts specifically, marina peterson notes that they provide “a space in which an ideal of and for social relations, and for the city is realized through experience” (2010: 15). the local press, organizers and presumably the city officials who greenlighted demf seem to share these sentiments. soon after the festival, a ford focus commercial featured a cyborg-like entity that was half-dj and half auto-plant robot, the soundtrack to which was model 500’s "no ufos". noting the success of the festival, ford stepped in as the primary sponsor the following year. the partnership capitalized on detroit techno’s origin story; that the sounds and sites of factory work and deindustrialization are what inspired the first wave of artists to envision new sounds and alternative ways of being in the world. with ford’s official endorsement and national advertising campaign detroit techno was momentarily mainstream. however, it would take another decade for what became known as edm to really seep into pop music and the country’s collective consciousness. in 2006, demf became movement and it was around this time that we saw an explosion of edm festivals in the us, which helped ensure its continued success. movement still takes place every memorial day weekend in the same place, at hart plaza on the waterfront downtown, but a global fan base has supplanted a local one. more than 20 years in, its audience is whiter and wealthier. what was once a free festival now costs hundreds of dollars to attend. following the festival trend, production costs and admission have continued to skyrocket as has the need to acquire big brand sponsorships. in this sense, its production company paxahau is operating within market logics and “soft shell” tactics—strategies that make it appealing to a wider audience. for instance, it’s not uncommon for one of its stages to be dedicated to pop-edm that attracts a younger, more mainstream crowd and like other major festivals it has surrendered to the “headliner economy” with artists like kraftwerk and richie hawtin and hip-hop acts wu tang clan and public enemy closing out nights over the years. paxahau’s approach is understandable given that festivals are now “one of the main sources of revenue for artist agencies, managers and booking agencies” (holt 2021: 227). holt argues that for festivals like tomorrowland and electric forest humanist values have all but disappeared. admittedly, it’s been a while since i’ve attended the festival but i like to think that movement has maintained what holt calls its “hard core”—that it hasn’t entirely succumbed to mass culture tastes and corporate logics. it remains independent and continues to spotlight detroit artists, thus invoking—at least on some level—early detroit techno musicians’ inspirational sounds that sought to develop imaginative potential and possibilities that seemed unavailable to many at the time, especially in the inner city. maybe this is wishful thinking. place all of this thinking, writing and reminiscing has left me with a collection of conflicting thoughts and emotions. i’m grateful for the artists and the music, for being in the right place at the right time to have had these experiences, but also mournful that while techno’s mark on the city has endured, its connection to the people of detroit fissured long ago. a number of factors impacted this disconnect early on including its (re)packaging as a white, european form of cultural expression for the masses; a discursive framework that overlooked its humanness and a lack of industry support in the us. but launching demf as a free festival harked back to an earlier time when free, public performances were commonplace in the city. it also created the conditions for cultural connection at the level of ideology and affect. but it was only a matter of time before the festival had to start charging an entrance fee which it did in 2002. in addition, the idea that a crowd could be “simply detroit” was devoid of meaning or vision. i can confidently say that there’s little that is simple about detroit or its people. a full decade has passed since detroit filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in us history and while an uptick in investment has resulted in visible changes to the city’s downtown and midtown core, many residents continue to struggle with issues like neighborhood de-investment, lack of affordable housing and high employment. in the face of these challenges, music-making and community-building are more intertwined and prevalent now than ever. techno itself doesn’t quite resonate with african american youth in the city today compared to prior generations, but its diy aesthetic, inventiveness and entrepreneurial zeitgeist persists. inspired by oldschool artists like j. dilla and slum village, and newer emcees like quelle chris, tee grizzley and b free, today hip-hop is the music of choice among detroit youth. entrenched in the city’s musical legacies, they are creating collectives by the dozens and beats on every block; they are converting vacant properties into performance and studio spaces. and the term “networking sideways”—popularized by adrian tonan who recently served as detroit’s first 24hour economy ambassador—is gaining traction as they fuse music and technology to speak their truths, spark creativity and cultivate community, in the footsteps of their forebears. as for me, i still attend a movement afterparty every now and then. “no way back” in particular is a celebrated event among the old school where i’m guaranteed to run into acquaintances, friends and familiar bodies. the music is stellar, the aesthetic minimal, the vibe pluracious; and for this one night i’m back in church, lost in the crowd, dancing like no one’s watching. figure 5. no way back flyer. photo credit: interdimensional transmissions (2023). author biography rebekah farrugia is professor of communication with a specialization in media and popular music studies at oakland university in rochester, michigan. her scholarship explores the relationships between gender, race, community and place in contemporary music genres such as electronic dance music and hip hop. her books include women rapping revolution: hip hop and community building in detroit (university of california press) co-authored with kellie d. hay and beyond the dance floor: female djs, technology and electronic dance music (intellect press). e: farrugia@oakland.edu references arnold, gina. 2018. half a million strong: crowds and power from woodstock to coachella. iowa city: university of iowa press. garcia-mispireta, luis manuel. 2023. together, somehow: music, affect, and intimacy on the dancefloor. durham: duke university press. glazer, joshua. “time has come”. real detroit weekly. december 9, 1999. <www.getrealdetroit.com/coverstory.htm>, (accessed march 15, 2001). herron, jerry. 1993. afterculture: detroit and the humiliation of history. detroit: wayne state university press. holt, fabian. 2021. everyone loves live music: a theory of performance institutions. chicago: university of chicago press. koelsch, stefan. 2013. “from social contact to social cohesion—the 7 cs”. music and medicine: an interdisciplinary journal, 5(4): 204-209. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1943862113508588>. mccollum, brian. “technotown”. detroit free press. 30 may 2000, c1-2. peterson, marina. 2010. sound, space and the city: civic performance in downtown los angeles. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. richards, greg and robert palmer. 2010. eventful cities: cultural management and urban revitalisation. new york: routledge. silcott, mireille. 1999. rave america: new school dancescapes. toronto: ecw press. dancecult 15(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 15(1) 2023: 113–131 issn 1947-5403 ©2023 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net raving mckenzie wark durham: duke university press, 2023. isbn: 978-1-4780-1938-1 rrp: $15.95 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.12> kim feser free university of berlin (germany) the cover design is reminiscent of a notebook: handwritten “practices / raving / mckenzie wark” on a monochrome pink background. the small book is published in the practices series alongside the titles fly-fishing, juggling, and running (tomorrowing has only been announced so far, which somehow seems appropriate). the series’ website states that the volumes shall “reveal the pleasures of losing oneself in doing anything that holds sway over us, no matter how common or minor it might seem” (duke university press n.d.). how does raving fit into this randomly appearing list of profane desubjectifying practices? raving unfolds in both detailed intimate as well as abstract theoretical passages, whereby these perspectives repeatedly transform into each other. mckenzie wark writes in the styles of autofiction (“these things did not happen. the person to whom they did not happen is me” [4]) and autotheory (“to gather concepts from situations” [4]). personal story fragments about raving and its entanglement with other practices—particularly social belonging, gender transition, drug use, sex and writing in bed—merge with political-theoretical thoughts on related aspects of queerness, blackness, gentrification, commodification and club culture. six chapters, partly based on earlier published texts and lectures/performances, are written in this oscillating style. they are supplemented by a “glossary of concepts” (91–94), condensed paragraphs on key terms used throughout the book, including in chapter titles. the concepts are defined as “impersonal characters in the autotheory text” (93) and shall function as “resonant abstractions” (93). in addition to these impersonal characters, the book is populated by many people known by name or anonymised, often by single capital letters. some of them are also referenced in footnotes, bibliography and notes on a collection of colour photos showing scenes from raves, festivals and clubs. most of the personal situations described in the book happened recently in brooklyn, new york. additionally, there are some memories of the 1990s (including “edward” [43], who plays a crucial role in wark’s [2020] previous autofictional/autotheoretical book reverse cowgirl). reviews https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.12 dancecult 15(1)114 the author mentions that she was asked to write a book for the series, and therefore proposed “raving” (47). that seems to be an obvious choice: she calls herself a raver but also clarifies that her main activity is writing and lecturing. the tension between these practices is addressed in the book. at raves, the author of raving avoids students and is avoided by them (61). she is also aware that her book might be part of “style extraction” (56, 94) if it commodifies gestures and information that emerged from raves. such phenomena of contemporary capitalism are fundamentally criticised in wark’s work, from a hacker manifesto (2004) to capital is dead: is this something worse? (2019). in raving, mckenzie wark, respectively the autofictional/autotheoretical first person writer, situates herself specifically: “the point of view will be that of this middle-aged, middle-class, white transsexual dance freak” (6). these attributes are addressed at various explicit, implicit and conceptual levels. she has the urge to dance excessively in order to achieve a state of bodily experience beyond normative gender-specific attributions and thoughts. consuming drugs, mostly ketamine, seems to help: “dancing and k make it all go away!” (42) that’s how she wants to reach her goal: “a dissociative time, a transsexual time, a ketamine time” (30). this “k-time”, an immanent and not utopian temporality (no time for “tomorrowing”), is one of the book’s central concepts (92). it refers to the so called “k-hole” (30), a dissociative hallucinatory state after taking ketamine. also, it’s situated in a critical discussion with mark fisher’s (aka “k-punk”) thoughts on “acid communism”. in collective “k-time” the presence of “ketamine femmunism” (30) can be experienced, as wark writes in the “ketamine femmunism” chapter (based on an online lecture on fisher for the berlin haus der kulturen der welt [house of world cultures]). “femmunism” (92) is described as a collective state where dominant masculinity is absent and obsolete. wark’s cautious remark that femmunism “might mingle” with blackness (94), almost sounds manifesto-like given her general reluctance to embrace hopeful scenarios. wark also describes how she prepares herself before going out. how she packs her silver rave bag, how she meets lovers and close friends. how several circles of “rave friends” interact via social media and share information about upcoming events. how she enters the dance floor by herself or with others. but ravers sometimes are annoyed by stereotypical “coworkers” (91) who lack the intense desire for “k-time”, because their participation in the rave is subordinate to their work lives. worse are the harassing “punishers”, mostly “straight, white, cis men” (92), who only attend raves for spectacle purposes. the mix of the crowd is regulated by door policy which is, along with spatial design and sound, an essential aspect of rave as a “constructed situation” (93). due to the praxis of “reparative discrimination” (93) people “who need it most” (93) and “whose style is being extracted” (94) are given priority admission. wark mentions that she and her transsexual friends often receive free entry or head to the locations which they can easily access. depending on venues this works specifically for black people. wark emphasises the background of the entire constellation in this regard: “the rave, techno, nightlife, surround: they’re all, among other things, gifts of blackness” (9). reviews 115 given the social dynamics, risks, and potentials that mckenzie wark discusses, raving seems fundamentally different from the more individually defined practices fly-fishing, juggling and running—if that’s not a completely biased perspective of a review for a journal of electronic dance music culture. but what is the book’s contribution to a critical discourse on electronic dance music culture? the one-word title, which is due to the book series practices, can be misleading. the book is neither a basic introduction to the practice of raving, nor a study of participant observation. as indeed the author points out, it combines a very subjective autofictional perspective with an exuberant creation of concepts. this seems inspired particularly by deleuze/guattari, kathy acker (see wark [2021]) and kodwo eshun (whose praise of raving is quoted on the back cover). the oscillation between fiction around the character “mckenzie wark” and meaningful conceptualization, strengthened not least by the “big name” the author has made for herself through her previous relevant publications, seems to evoke rather enthusiastic approval or possibly sceptical rejection. a productive-critical reading attitude is possible, however, if the relationship between the formation of concepts and the situations described is investigated immanently. the book itself invites to read between the lines, to be aware of subliminal counterpoints or barely noticeable voices. to name some aspects: the brief stories and details about raves and club culture are predominantly set in brooklyn / new york. they are shaped by the specific conditions of gentrification and “style extraction”, the presence of coworkers and, not least, academics. in view of locally different conditions of underground and capitalization, of confining “normal” lifestyles and resistant practices, of possible contrasts between rural and urban lifestyles, the nature and goals of raves might also have to be accentuated differently. also, the book is permeated by the theme of age, without this being explicitly reflected in the concepts: “it’s not always easy, being a middle-aged, clockable transsexual raver” (1, see 42, 57). based on this initial statement, and against the background of a reference to a club event for her 60th birthday (88), wark’s discomfort and inner struggle with the demands of beauty and youthfulness become apparent. in general, health issues seem to play a role only at the descriptive level. physical care and mutual awareness are mentioned, but there are several instances of risky drug use, including a fatal ghb overdose (73). when it comes to inventing expressions for key concepts, however, a euphoric ketamine hype dominates. references duke university press. n.d. practices. <https://www.dukeupress.edu/series/practices>, (accessed 17 october 2023). wark, mckenzie. 2004. a hacker manifesto. cambridge: stanford university press. wark, mckenzie. 2019. capital is dead: is this something worse?. new york: verso books. wark, mckenzie. 2020. reverse cowgirl. los angeles: semiotext(e). wark, mckenzie. 2021. philosophy for spiders: on the low theory of kathy acker. durham: duke university press. dancecult 15(1)116 spectacle, fashion and the dancing experience in britain, 1960–1990 jon stratton london: palgrave macmillan, 2022. isbn: 978-3-031-09011-0 rrp: €117.69 (hardcover), €93.08 (ebook) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.13> tara hill university of hamburg (germany) telling the whole history of dance music in a book seems like no mean feat. so even if jon stratton’s spectacle, fashion and the dancing experience in britain, 1960–1990 limits itself to the usually labelled “crucial years” of the development of postmodern youth culture—or at least its roots after rock‘n’roll restarted the 1950s youngsters’ life with a mixture of middle class romance and rebelliousness—covering all three decades of the dance movement comes across as an ambitious project. yet reading stratton’s succinct account still comes across as curiously pleasing read. as an almost lexical text, ticking the boxes of the whos, the whens, the wheres and the whys, it caters to a college freshman or an introductory youth culture class just as well as to the senior pop culture zine editor or sophomore style blogger. providing an overview of the subculture styles which—overtly or covertly, overground or underground—formed the face of a generation, or more important: its image. it performs kind of a double stunt: it’s not classic subculture research, stratton claims, which can explain what distinguishes these new movements, but more its relation to a politics of aesthetics and its relation to the “wilder” conceptual brother, a politics of the ecstatic. therefore, the theoretical framework of the book centres around guy debord’s (1967) situationist movement and especially its centrepiece society of the spectacle (la société du spectacle). herein, the cultural turn after the 1960s, sort of a “technicolour” explosion of creativity after the black and white movie era (you could similarly compare it to the evolution from silent to spoken movies) was performed by the rise of two key factors: fashion and dancing. in the 1980s, in the increasingly seamless society of the spectacle, a lifeworld was formed which was commodified, mediated by colour television and other media, though not yet by computers; an experiential world where surveillance was becoming normalised and increasingly extensive. clubs, with their rituals for entry, and their electronic dance music and lighting often linked to the beat, seemed like an alternative world, indeed a temporary autonomous zone (taz). for many, dancing along with others in the apparently safe space of a club appeared to offer escape and existential meaning, ecstasy, in an alienated reality. the dj became the shamanic guide taking the dancers through this experience. https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.13 reviews 117 while the first chapter tells of the rise of the dj with records starting to replace live music sessions and ballrooms where standard dances in couples became discos and clubs, twist was the first dance introducing heavy pelvic movements from african americans to the uk. the second chapter sets the scene with the beatles hysteria, the dave clarke five and introduces the genre of “stomp”—proving the brits needed some help with the transition from partner dances to solo and improvisational, as well as more and more ecstatic dancing. as the rolling stones introduced african drumming in their (up to this day) legendary live shows, the phenomenal gary glitter turned into the icon of the emerging glam rock scene. while middle class kids learnt how to sit down to listen to prog rock—genesis, yes and king crimson—like their parents might have listened to a classic record or chamber music with fully but passively immersing themselves into the quadrophonic and stereophonic sound spectacular of the 1970s, glam rock came to life with cult bandleader marc bolan, a.k.a. the legendary t-rex, and took to a crowd that loved extravagant outfits, more over the top than the hippies ever were, and huge showmanship. david bowie came up next and started his own, very influential ziggy stardust cult, a persona well-loved into the early 1980s (chapter 4 and 5). the new romantics, stratton explains, who flocked into the nightlife at that time weren’t so much a scene of their own, but a remnant of early club culture. their heavy focus on styling and outfit can be traced back to saint martin’s, the london art school. androgyny and heavy make-up, theatrics and gender role reversal were established in mainstream culture, through hit projects like ultravox. the last chapter deals with the now pretty much established bond between rave culture and the temporary autonomous zone. it starts off tracing the often-overlooked influence new york disco and the early club scene had on the uk warehouse and later acid house movement. compared to the watering holes of past decades, david mancuso’s loft and the paradise garage, which spawned the first superstar technoshaman dj, larry levan, did not sell alcohol but focused on an impeccable living room and after hour spot with psychedelics and/or designer drugs. this encouraged ecstatic dancing through the night: it was the quality of immersion that made dancing at the loft and paradise garage so special. uk sound engineers and clubs were developing similar systems. for example, tony andrews, the co-founder of the sound system company, specialising in speakers, funktion-one, and who has been designing speakers since the late 1960s, comments: “when [a sound system] is good, it puts you into a meditative state.” (rothlein 2014) funktion-one systems have been installed in many of the most highly regarded clubs such as space on ibiza and berghain in berlin. it is immersion that heightens the possibility of the ecstatic experience. here we have the technological basis for the transformation in clubbing that began in the late 1970s and morphed into rave culture. (28) the now legendary myth of the four englishmen who went to ibiza to come back and revolutionise british society is retold here, too. though the story of the legendary night dancecult 15(1)118 when nicky holloway, johnny walker and danny rampling went to ibiza’s infamous late night powerhouse amnesia and took the new drug ecstasy for the first time to afterwards bring it back to great britain, open the clubs hacienda, shoom and heaven and create the “second summer of love”, uk’s acid house revolution, stratton is careful to remind us of the “whitewashing” which is done by excluding detroit techno and chicago house’s black and disco’s gay roots. the history of dance music (206–210) then tells another story: the one from the jazz ballroom being replaced by cheaper record collection spinning nights everyone could afford. while stomp and twist made the brits move their pelvis, the quality of sound hugely profited by the sound systems built by the religiously inspired dub music collectives in jamaica, before they moved to notting hill carnival. as the merits of the uk’s minorities become clearer, one wonders what the closing with thatcher’s brutal rave ban meant for society. also, newer discussions like jimmy saville’s behaviour as a sex offender would have proven interesting for the proposed change in nightlife—from a dirty pick-up place for cheap thrills to a meditative, spiritual cleansing practice or festivities of joy, explained with help of bey’s taz—where exactly big beat belongs here, which stratton mentions in the end of this highly entertaining, short read, remains as unclear as the exact role of fashion mentioned in the title. apart from that, stratton delivers a good overview of the main movements in 30 years of dance history which have left its mark on humanity. references bey, hakim. 1991. t.a.z.: the temporary autonomous zone. new york: autonomedia. debord, guy. 1967. la société du spectacle. paris: buchet-chastel. rothlein, jordan. 2014, march 24. industry standards: funktion-one. resident advisor. <https://ra.co/features/1836>, (accessed 25 october 2023). https://ra.co/features/1836 reviews 119 this track contains politics: the culture of sampling in experimental electronica hannes liechti bern: norient books, 2022. isbn: 978-3-9525444-2-6 (softcover) rrp: €29,00 (softcover) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.14> moses iten rmit (australia) this track contains politics: the culture of sampling in experimental electronica investigates why producers of contemporary, digital, experimental electronic music choose to compose using samples. based on a phd, this is hannes liechti’s first book and has been published by the switzerland-based norient (n.d.), founded by ethnomusicologist thomas burkhalter in 2002 as a network bringing together a global community of thinkers and artists concerned with music, sound and media cultures. their emphasis is on “the changing geography of multi-layered modernities, far beyond old ideas of north versus south, west versus east” (beyer, burkhalter and liechti 2015). it is therefore not surprising that the producers interviewed for this book cover politics including the genocide of armenians and the exclusion of africans in argentinian history. hannes liechti has been working with norient these recent years as a journalist, curator and events producer. his role as an applied cultural producer needs to be considered as adding to the potential impact of this book, not just amongst researchers but also practitioners. norient played an important role in convincing me to build on my creative practice to become a researcher as some years ago i had been commissioned to write an essay based on my own practice as a dj/producer of cumbia (iten 2013), as well as contributing with podcasts (iten 2016), a playlist (iten 2015) and a mixtape (iten 2011). this has led me to follow their research outputs with great interest as an example of research and practice intersecting. the tension between artistic practice and theoretical analysis is the biggest challenge liechti attempts to overcome in this book. this track contains politics was highly anticipated reading for me for several reasons. i’m both a researcher and dj/producer, focused on electronic dance music, djand sound system cultures and am therefore interested in how this book stimulates both my research and creative practice, for which sampling has been central.1 like liechti, i am interested in methodologies which reflect the practice being analysed, which in my case i have proposed as the dj-as-researcher approach (iten 2022). although a committed cultural producer, liechti is external to the field he is examining, which he presents as a potential advantage “as it allows the researcher to ask simple questions and take novel positions” (80). indeed, reading liechti’s book is making me reflect on my own practice, in which sampling has been https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.14 dancecult 15(1)120 a driving force. his incessant questioning of “why” a particular sample and compositional approach has been chosen, has increased my appreciation of the sometimes hidden political intent behind seemingly aesthetic or conceptual decisions. liechti identifies most literature on sampling has mainly been concerned with copyright issues and/or the particular practice of analogue-era sampling in hip-hop.2 there is therefore much need for new research on the ongoing relevance of sampling in today’s digital era where the practice has become a ubiquitous and seemingly banal. this track contains politics is focused on particular (political) intentions of a specific technique (sampling), in a niche creative field of (experimental electronica) music. whilst this appears to be a narrow focus, liechti’s expansive review of the literature on sampling, politics as a cultural concept and electronic dance music—of which the academic understanding can include non-dance oriented experimental electronic music—shows the scope of his research is actually quite broad. in the first few pages of the book, a useful brief history of sampling is provided, concluding with the current state of sampling as an indispensable and ubiquitous practice (11–14). liechti points out most of the literature on sampling at first largely fixated on its association with hip-hop and the subsequent demise of the technique becoming restricted due to copyright lawsuits (20–22). the ongoing relevance to producers and researchers in this era when sampling appears a banal part of music making, is argued by liechti as achievable by focusing on the motivations and intent behind the sampling. this he explores as part of “the socio-political potential of sampling”, which is also where the biggest gaps in research on sampling are to be found (15–22). the are several theoretical advances proposed in this book. firstly, trackology is introduced as a way of allowing the analytical focus to be on tracks—as opposed to songs—“as a tool for uncovering knowledge of the world” (77). the core interest of trackology according to liechti, is the “search for traces within popular music”, based on michael rappe’s method of “music archaeology” (78). traces could have been explored further as a concept. in my own phd research for example, i have been applying edouard glissant’s creolization theory which includes a conceptualization of traces as cultural memory passed on via music (2020). instead, the weight of liechti’s theory is in the methodology. the ethnography is combined with a musical analysis of each of the five tracks. in order to apply a musicological approach to analyse tracks of experimental electronica largely composed by sampling, liechti created “the fader of visibility (fov)” model. this addresses the significance of the “visibility” (and invisibility) of the samples in the composition (101–107). then in order to determine the motivations and intent behind the sampling, liechti develops another model called the “spider of sampling reasons” model (109–143). this demonstrates in a neat diagram each producer’s particular approach to sampling. both models are then applied to analyse and compare the case studies which follow. each of the five case studies features one track by a different producer, all active in what liechti discusses broadly as “the field of experimental electronica” (52–53). in the book’s very useful glossary, experimental electronica is defined as produced on laptops, mostly instrumental and with a sound that is “often abrasive, shaped by cuts, disruptions, reviews 121 noises, and dissonances” (316). the five tracks selected for analysis engage with a diverse set of political issues: the russian invasion of ukraine’s donbas region; gender issues and the memory of genocide in the armenian diaspora; recognition of afro-argentines in the history contemporary argentina; and the taboo of zoophilia. whilst the analysis is narrowed down to just five tracks, this broad range of political issues is also engaged with by liechti, further illuminating the context of each individual producer’s intent. these extramusical perspectives have largely come from ethnographic fieldwork, which have produced some of the most illuminating passages in the book. the methodological challenges and limitations encountered during the research of this book are outlined over several pages, revealing rare insight into not only the value of failure to future researchers but also the precarious conditions under which laptop producers of experimental electronica operate (69–75). whilst liechti admits a close look over the shoulders of the producers in the process of sampling was difficult to access, this did happen with one of his research participants. the results of this participant observation are featured in the penultimate chapter of the book, which liechti calls an “interlude”, serving as a great accompaniment to the conclusion which follows. the observations made of us-based producer lara sarkissian at work was facilitated by her being invited to participate in a residency at center for art and media in karlsruhe, germany, curated by norient. liechti suggests more funded residencies like this are needed, in order to facilitate more focused observation of the practice of laptop producers (294–295). ultimately, i admired liechti’s tenacity in theorizing the playful and often random approaches of the producers he observed and interviewed. his theoretical rigour is balanced by his sensitive and nuanced voice, which is strongest when it becomes active, especially in the self-reflexive passages which reveal themselves when he addresses some of the problems encountered in trying to do fieldwork in the intimate work environments of “laptop producers”, which liechti prefers over the term of the “derogatory” term of “bedroom producer” (316). liechti cites fellow musicologist-ethnographer mark butler (2006) several times, who also applied musicology theory to analyse the electronic dance music producers. i largely agreed with the critique that butler’s theorizing seemed more about “adding edm to the music theorist’s repertory” than “bringing music theory into edm’s varied and vibrant discourse” (marshall 2009: 199). this tension is also present in liechti’s research. however, butler went on to continue to further advance the study of edm (2014) and i can imagine liechti’s commitment to both practice and research is putting him on a similarly inspired path. notes 1 i have been a professional dj/producer for twenty years and have toured the world with the project cumbia cosmonauts. i am currently completing a phd at rmit university, melbourne, on digital cumbia and sound system culture, as well as working as a researcher with the sonic street technologies research project, for university of sydney and goldsmiths university, london. dancecult 15(1)122 2 in terms of sampling in hip-hop, making beats: the art of sample-based hip-hop (2004) by joseph schloss is a particularly useful work based on ethnographic research. references beyer, theresa, thomas burkhalter and hannes liechti, eds. 2015. seismographic sounds: visions of a new world. berne: norient. <https://doi.org/10.56513/zmhg1392>. beyer, theresa and thomas burkhalter, eds. 2012. out of the absurdity of life: globale musik. berne: traversion/norient. <https://doi.org/10.56513/vlgz1905>. butler, mark j. 2014. playing with something that runs: technology, improvisation, and composition in dj and laptop performance. oxford and new york: oxford university press. butler, mark. 2006. unlocking the groove: rhythm, meter, and musical design in electronic dance music. bloomington: indiana university press. glissant, edouard. 2020. introduction to a poetics of diversity. translated by celia britton. liverpool: liverpool university press. iten, moses. 2011. “arab awakening”. norient. <https://norient.com/podcasts/arabawakeningmixtape>, (accessed 18 october 2023). iten, moses. 2012. “insider’s perspectives on new wave cumbia” in beyer, theresa and thomas burkhalter (edited by). out of the absurdity of life: globale musik. berne: traversion/ norient. 264-77. <https://doi.org/10.56513/vlgz1905>. iten, moses. 2013. “perspectives on new wave cumbia”. norient. <https://norient.com/stories/ new-wave-cumbia>, (accessed 18 october 2023). iten, moses. 2015. “five video clips from mexico”. norient. <https://norient.com/video/fivevideo-clips-from-mexico>, (accessed 18 october 2023). iten, moses. 2016. “the sound of cumbia”. norient. <https://norient.com/podcasts/the-sound-of-cumbia>, (accessed 18 october 2023). iten, moses. 2022. “the dj-as-researcher approach: methods emerging through digital cumbia fieldwork”. paper presented at “performing, engaging, knowing” symposium, 2020. hosted by the ictm study group on applied ethnomusicology, the lucerne school of music, the department of composition, electroacoustics, university of music and performing arts vienna and the swiss society for ethnomusicology. <https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7274023>. marshall, wayne. 2009. “reviewed work: unlocking the groove: rhythm, meter, and musical design in electronic dance music by mark j. butler”. music theory spectrum 31(1): 192–99. <https://doi.org/10.1525/mts.2009.31.1.192>. norient. n.d. “about”. <https://norient.com/>, (accessed 18 october 2023) schloss, joseph glenn. 2004. making beats: the art of sample-based hip-hop. middletown, ct: wesleyan university. reviews 123 berghain, techno und die körperfabrik: ethnographie eines stammpublikums guillaume robin marburg: büchner-verlag, 2021. isbn: 978-3-96317-274-8 (paperback), isbn 978-3-96317-812-2 (ebook) rrp: €22,00 (paperback), €18,00 (ebook) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.15> anja schwanhäusser university of göttingen (germany) bars and nightclubs count among the mythological places of the city, as rolf lindner (2022) writes in his in einer welt von fremden: eine anthropologie der stadt. as part of his recent role as guest researcher at the centre marc bloch at the humboldt university, guillaime robin has tracked one such place, in his study of the world’s most famous berlin club, berghain. in the introduction he cites the two most well-known, but rarely spelledout, concepts in cultural studies in reference to club culture: heterotopia (michel foucault) and the non-lieu (marc augé). although augé did not mean industrial wastelands with the term non-lieu, rather airports, train stations and motorway rest stops, the term never-theless testifies to the transitionary character of the nocturnal locations, converted ruins of post-industrial society. for robin, berghain is a transgressive, social, sensual and reflexive place, where “the exploration of self and community meet, where the utopia of the body takes shape” (10) (this and the following quotes are all translations by the reviewer). robin has the genuinely ethnological goal of writing about club culture not from the point of view of its musical actors (djs, club operators, party organisers), but from the perspective of its audience. for this purpose, he conducted a study among regulars, and especially the global, urban nomads of the “easyjet generation”, as the journalist tobias rapp (2009) calls them. in terms of methodology, he bases the study on twelve interviews and around 30 online questionnaires, supplemented by the manageable number of twelve “observational sittings” (15) at the club. in doing so, he faces the challenge of describing a quasi-sacred place, without himself succumbing to mythologization: the analysis aims “to go beyond the blind reverence of the initiated and to scrutinize these cliches under the magnifying glass” (15). there’s an attempt at a balancing act between empathy and distance in the text, which is not always successful, for instance when robin presents a berghain party as being akin to an ancient ritual and asks: “to what extent can berghain be seen as a revival of bacchanalia?” (13). this flowery formulation irritates at first. there are more recent berlin-specific traditions which would lend themselves better as a comparison. for example, the tradition of the berlin secret societies or the queer scene surrounding the german physician and sexologist magnus hirschfeld. on the other hand, the sensual anthropology in the school of david howes (2005) doesn’t shy away from a certain pathos either. thus, the reference https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.15 dancecult 15(1)124 to bacchanalia is not to be understood analytically but as a metaphor to capture the genuine berghain atmosphere, as experienced by a cosmopolitan, queer scene. the first chapter, “bodies in space”, is about the significance of the club for its regulars and the transition from the “profane” world beyond the club into the “sacred” (40) halls of berghain. with the term rite of passage (arnold van gennep) and communitas (victor turner), robin describes the character of the space, the shifting bodily perceptions, the temporary sense of community, as well as the internal control mechanisms which grant a harmonious night of celebrating. he sees the special feature of berghain, in addition to its symbolical situation in the berlin party-metropolis, as being the aura of secrecy that surrounds it. this is created through the strict door policy, the photography ban, the seemingly sacred architecture, the complex system of rules of conduct and the so-called “hainweh” (47)—a portmanteau word made up of hain from berghain and weh meaning to ache, a play on the german word heimweh that means to be homesick—with which fans express their passionate attachment to the place. the recourse to an online questionnaire, which is often quoted in the text, might initially surprise the empirical cultural studies readership. in place of the personal experiences of the researcher are instead short and concise reports from the actual participants, reminiscent of blogger style. unfortunately, robin does not explain this method and its implementation in more detail, but he uses it extremely creatively. the subjective descriptions by the guests of their self-image and their personal opinions about club politics are astonishingly involved and in parts even poetically formulated. one extremely interesting question which has unfortunately also not been elaborated on and brought to any conclusion is: does the example of berghain perhaps reveal a change in techno culture in general, away from a subculture which is open to all, where social differences are blurred by cheap drugs, and towards a more homogenous, exclusive subculture, whose members are recruited largely from more privileged segments of society? (89) a court decision in recent years equating clubs with high-culture events for tax purposes would seem to point in this direction. the second chapter, “utopian bodies”, is about stylisations as a way of separating oneself from the everyday identity and from each other, while at the same time being a way of creating community. in reference to foucault’s concept of utopian bodies as well as in reference to piotr nathan’s mural, “rituals of disappearance”, in berghain, robin defines the stylistic transformations as the individual’s longing to dissolve. this dissolution takes place in various forms and media, through the equalising procedure at the berghain entrance, the adaptation of dominant dress and dance codes, anonymisation (e.g., by wearing fetish masks) as well as through the consuming of drugs. a central finding is that subjective feelings of freedom and liberation are closely linked to a communal and institutional set of rules, with self-discipline and self-constraint: “it’s not so much a matter of total liberation, but much more about a strongly controlled disinhibition, which goes hand in hand with the ethics of consent and the respect of others’ bodies” (94). in robin’s description, a party night seems to run like an almost perfect machine where almost nothing goes wrong. robin writes that he has left out sequences which are too reviews 125 voyeuristic. this is understandable, yet it gives rise to an argumentative gap. what happens when shame boundaries are crossed, not because one wants to, but because one is driven to it by obsession? nevertheless, he offers an extremely interesting insight into this “body factory” and its culture. the “crows”, as the audience is also called, voluntarily adapt to the institutional constraints, regulations and codifications thereby giving the club its individual character. in the third chapter, “degendering the dancefloor”, the focus is on gender-specific stylisations and the play with gender identities. with reference to judith butler, robin defines gender as performance. especially for guests from less liberal countries, berlin and berghain offer a “safe space” (105). here also new subcultural trends come on stage, such as the “sex-positive” movement, which promotes an openness to diverse gender identities, sexual practices and to nudity. robin rightly notes that the nocturnal rulebook can lead to a “homonormativity”, where certain homosexual codes dominate and thus exclude other forms of expression. in the fourth chapter, “underground resist-dance”, robin opens up the perspective to the broader berlin club scene and, in particular, to the period of the pandemic. due to the enforced closures, considerable financial and cultural damage was done, and the cultural diversity of the metropolis has suffered. the perseverance with which the techno culture actors have defended their “right to dance” and “right to the city” (150), robin presents as being proof that clubs are more than just spaces for commercial events. as already demonstrated by birmingham cultural studies, in a study to which robin, however, does not refer, partying is shown to be more than hedonistic consumption. the charge of hedonism was famously invoked by politicians during the pandemic in order to devalue outdoor dancing at night. as robin shows though, it is, on the contrary, a way of life and culture which is pushed through even in times of crisis, and against prevailing opinion. the author also recalls earlier protests, with which clubs resisted displacement and gentrification. without questioning the pandemic-related regulative measures, he interprets these activities as a positive expression of a political consciousness in nightlife: “the proliferation of these wild raves, which were often interrupted by the police . . . thus emphasises the active role of the techno audience and its desire to assert itself as a driving force in the scene” (148). the fifth chapter is called “closing”, similar to the last act at a dance night at berghain. here, robin comes to the unsurprising conclusion that a berghain club night is not a bacchanalia. extremely interesting, however, is his reasoning, in which he returns to the central thesis of the first chapter: “berghain is undoubtedly a space of freedom like no other, but it is above all an extremely codified space in which the liberation of the body is linked to self-discipline and strong control mechanisms” (160). the transgression of boundaries and ecstatic forms of dissolution in the community are thus only possible because of the strict set of rules. as in the process of civilization (norbert elias), to which robin refers, the increasing loosening of control over emotions comes at the price of an increase in the suppression of inner drives, so that ecstatic celebration is also only possible through a sophisticated system of control. this is expressed on several levels: the rejection of sexist dancecult 15(1)126 and objectifying heteronormative practices as well as of “body shaming”; the maintaining of a respectful distance, and a strong internalisation of respect for the body of others. robin points here to a possibly generalizable connection between discipline and ecstasy which, also for other subcultural contexts, is worthwhile examining. it is a perspective of our current time, which is “woke” and “aware”. it turns out that within order and its compliance (also) lies a longing for “pleasure” and the dissolution of boundaries. robin’s study provides a particularly successful and exhaustingly complex description of the sensuality of the club experience. the central insight, that liberation can only be achieved through self-discipline, is extremely illuminating. the bacchanal thus becomes a code for a subcultural practice that is characterised by the inner contradiction of control and the dissolution of boundaries. the book is an innovative contribution to the “sensual turn” in urban scene-, popand subcultural research. in the past decades this field has mostly been concerned with the economic aspects of partying (creative industries, subcultural capital and such). in robin’s work, on the other hand, questions of cultural order and creativity and of social change (again) come to the fore in an exemplary way. by taking into account the social origins and the phenomenon of the global easyjet generation in his analysis, robin also makes a contribution to the question as to the extent to which popular culture and popular means of pleasure have nowadays become the guiding culture of the middle-class. the study shows that for the queer global elite, going to visit a cultural site such as berghain is just as important as a visit to the opera in new york or sydney. last but not least, he provides a very good, in part poetically formulated portrait of the “loaners”, typical figures of the big city as described by rolf lindner (2022), accompanied by beautiful photographs by mike d’hondt. thus, the study can also be connected to the analysis of figures and figuration of urban anthropology. references howes, david, ed. 2005. empire of the senses. the sensual culture reader. oxford: berg publishers. lindner, rolf. 2022. in einer welt von fremden: eine anthropologie der stadt. berlin: matthes & seitz berlin. rapp, tobias. 2009. lost and sound: berlin, techno, und der easyjetset. frankfurt am main: suhrkamp. reviews 127 ears as portals: alternative realities of musical infrastructures. a ctm festival 2023 review ctm festival: “portals”, 2023. <https://www.ctm-festival.de/festival-2023/welcome> <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.16> luigi monteanni soas, university of london (uk) what is a portal? whether you base your definition on fantasy and sci-fi tropes of selfgenerating megadungeons (berti forthcoming) and interdimensional gateways (yalcinkaya 2022) or on informational technologies such as the internet (magaudda 2020), the portal conveys the idea of a device and threshold offering an access to some other space, a passage towards somewhere radically different. of course, a portal can be secret or hidden, dangerous, or difficult to activate. by connecting multiple points in space and time the portal is a twoway medium offering exceptional insight and mobility to who actively chooses to exploit its powers (hanson 2021). “portals” is also the theme chosen by ctm festival for its 24th edition, which took place in berlin between 27th january and 5th february 2023. ctm probed the possibility of a curational approach that makes “contact with specific modes of experience, histories, communities, and speculative futures” reflecting on “the preconditions, thresholds, regulation, and fundamental function of sound and music as gateways to other realities” (ctm 2023). in this sense, the festival’s portal(s) used different venues and art spaces around the city—15 in total including kunstquartier bethanien, silent green, adk, fablab neukölln, festsaal, monom, kqb, rso, hau1, hau2, kw, panke, radialsystem, morphine raum and, obviously, berghain—to allow trespassers to behold and overhear geographically and subculturally heterodox musical contexts. of course, as i have mentioned, portals are not just there: they deform and disrupt the concepts of reality, space, and time to generate something, to make something happen by creating new threads, pathways, and experiences. this is an idea that is expressed through aural means by ctm radio lab winner isuru kumarasinghe, who describes his installation “gilunu” (submerged, in sinhala) as follows: when we step into a space or a place, where the resonance is changed or enhanced, we naturally feel like engaging with that resonance … to see how the space transforms the sound and how in return it transforms us. it becomes like a portal into a different world, as part of this world, just for this moment. (ctm 2023) accordingly, the festival embraced multidisciplinarity, structuring this week of activities around club nights and music performances as much as around exhibitions, installations, https://www.ctm-festival.de/festival-2023/welcome https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.16 dancecult 15(1)128 screenings, workshops, labs and talks which, besides never resulting as secondary activities, helped inform the awareness of currently forming processes of musicmaking around the world. part of these experiments were the afropollination project, in which piranha arts (berlin) and boutique foundation/nyege nyege collective (kampala) established a transnational laboratory for sonic research to bring together artists from six african nations and germany, the exhibition “we found our own reality” curated by artist paul purgas, in which installations, archive materials, artworks, a series of live performances and commissioned texts were gathered to account for the under-explored histories of the sound studio at the national institute of design in ahmedabad, the first electronic music studio in india (purgas 2023), the radio lab open call showcasing an always different array of audio-installative endeavors within the medium of radio, presenting works by anna kravets and, of course, kumarasinghe and discussions that surveyed a number of themes, including the impending generational change in club culture and issues of cultural production during the ongoing invasion of ukraine. from this perspective, ctm has shown how it is possible to use programming as a tool to produce new forms of sensory and intellectual knowledge, forging connections between music circuits and performers accentuating the elements of uniqueness that the selected musical acts bear from their context. from the audiences’ and organization’s point of view, after years of pandemic fatigue and a life-affirming 2022 edition based on bringing back the joys of the dancing body, ”portals” seems again to give more space to contemplative and introspective listening experiences, betting on a courageous line-up presenting comparatively fewer resounding names than many previous editions. this is an attention that both staff and attendees seemed to be more than willing to offer given the almost total sold outs and the constant, remarkable presence of the organizers and curators. of course, even for a militant practitioner of sleep deprivation techniques such as myself, it would be impossible to map the festival extensively; an endeavor that goes also beyond the scope of the present text. therefore, the following selection of highlights is not only extremely personal but should give a glimpse in an impressionistic fashion of what i tried to convey above. among the performances, personal favorites include the improvisation between afropollination’s sound artist jessica ekomane and the ugandan diy synth builder afrorack establishing new canons of non-eurocentric sound synthesis, the heavily poetic minimalism and metal-infused tribute to mourning songs and traditional lamentations by sara parkman and maria w. horn of funeral folk, the extreme, pedagogic interactivity of poulomi desai, slowly inviting the audience to take control of her unorthodox, non-musical instrumentation challenging the idea of authenticity in regional music and the objectification of the ”south asian female body” in popular culture, the queering post-rave romanticism of the neapolitan neo-melodic performance by 2023 shape+ alumni nziria and light artist bianca peruzzi with the collaboration of choreographer franka marlene foth and dancer janan laubscher, the screamo meme music for tiktok doomscrollers of lil mariko supported by the raw, physical spoken word grime of iceboy violet, the a/v cyberpunk of japanese gabber and black-metal crossover ensemble vmo, tzusig’s anxiety-inducing and reviews 129 betrayal-themed dance provocations, the ambiguously brutal and theatrical genre-juggling of vieze meisje and the kampala singeli dance-fest conjured by queen asher’s productions, galvanized by the singing of her mother rehema tajiri and by dancers nana and zai. but above all, a special mention goes to asep nayak, a papuan producer and pioneer of the electronic wisisi: a genre that from the rituals of harvesting ceremonies in wamena was recreated and innovated through fl studio beats and mp3 technologies. i had previously binged on wisisi on youtube for a couple years and i would have never believed i could experience it live in front of my eyes and twitching muscles. witnessing this act really made the festival for me, showing that music can really create extraordinary junctions between audiences and scenes. from this perspective, despite the partiality of my account, this year’s ctm showed even more interest towards the subterranean, the peripheral and the subcultural. as noted by juliet hoornaert in her review of the festival for the magazine gonzo circus (2023), ctm presented a broad, generous conception of music, in which scratching the surface already meant pointing at the underlying artistic and social symmetries and disparities between manifold scenes. what i personally found to be the most remarkable aspect of the festival was its ability to put the listener in the right conditions to experience sound. whether it is for the dauntlessness of the curation or for the carefully selected list of locations, there was always the feeling that one was always offered the possibility to listen to something in the best technical and contextual conditions possible, whether with their ears or through the whole body in motion, creating the possibility for a range of extremely different styles, from pop and hyperpop to black metal, folk, spoken word, singeli and wisisi to coexist as equals. throughout, agreeing with a discussion i had with ctm cofounder jan rolf, which informed this piece, i appreciated the feeling of urgency that the festival expressed in reorganizing the field of musical knowledge, trying to push many peripheral phenomena to the foreground of the clubbing experience, highlighting distinct aspects of geographical and subcultural locality. in this sense, going back to the possible question of what a current club culture is or should be today, i support the stances of scholars such as silver (2014), labelle (2018), rief (2009) and magaudda (2020), arguing that clubbing today should employ music and technology as vibrational tools to cultivate particular forms of reflexivity and modes of experience that reconfigure the boundaries around youth cultures and other social identities, allowing a better circulation of sociality and power. therefore, the contemporary club culture that i envision, and that ctm seems to support, sees sound, festivals, venues, scenes, and encounter as the fundamental infrastructures allowing this special type of circulation; an alternative flow proving that, contrarily to what attali (1985) has noted, music does not only move along the routes of war, power and trade. accordingly, the portal is an apt metaphor of how to reflect on this ambiguous and exceptionally powerful type of infrastructure. seeing the progressive attention to socializing the organizing process through open calls, curatorial collaborations, and commitment to support less-known music movements, i have no doubt regarding this edition’s awareness dancecult 15(1)130 relative to these issues. nonetheless, accounting for my own experience as well as the one of many attendees, journalists and even participating artists with whom i chatted during the events, some elements seemed worth reconsidering. first, even though focusing on the netherworld of the global underground, the large majority of the invited projects still benefits from the support and visibility offered by many institutional organizations (e.g., shape+, goethe-institut), agencies and renown musical labels (e.g., nyege nyege, pan) albeit from the fringes of the music industry. thus, even though these associations often work with positive affirmation strategies, how it is possible to create further representation and inclusion for projects that fall off the actors’ curatorial purview still needs to be assessed. secondly, the petty hostility and unwillingness to help finding solutions of some of the berghain staff, arguably a staple of ctm’s program, inside and outside the venue, remains at odds with the “be respectful to others” attitude promoted on their website (berghain n.d.), creating spaces in which edginess and even mockery have prevailed. this has prevented me, for instance, from entering the night i was looking forward to the most (“bodily overdrive”), which is hence not mentioned in this review. then, more in the form of a suggestion than a critique, i argue that this edition’s theme should be, in view of the next, socially meaningful topic of 2024 edition “sustain”, further examined, keeping in focus how these infrastructures come into being, shift and are regulated; what are the portals that are still difficult to open, that benefit from advantaged access or remain closed? when translating the metaphor to the reality of today’s musical infrastructures, we should ask ourselves who controls the points of entrance and exit. who has access to them and under which conditions? how can we make sure that they remain functional, but their usage is not overly regulated? overall, for me this edition was a definite success and a positive example to follow for other festivals of the same kind. thus, i’m confident that all these points might be explored in the next years. references attali, jacques. 1985. noise: the political economy of music. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. berghain. n.d. “awareness”. <https://www.berghain.berlin/en/awareness/>, (accessed 22 august 2023) berti, paolo. forthcoming. “megadungeon: a model for media complexity”. magazén 4(1). ctm. 2023. ctm 2023—portals. <https://www.ctm-festival.de/festival-2023/welcome>, (accessed 21 august 2023). hanson, kara. 2021. “at the threshold: science fiction portals as agents of liminality”. medium, 9 august: <https://kshanson.medium.com/at-the-threshold-science-fiction-portals-as-agentsof-liminality-1f1e65ff1b2a>, (accessed 21 august 2023). hoornaert, juliet. 2023. “ctm 2023: een futuristisch ravecongres”. gonzo circus, 14 february: <https://www.gonzocircus.com/ctm-2023-toekomstfestival-vol-klankanarchie/>, (accessed 21 august 2023). reviews 131 labelle, brandon. 2018. sonic agency: sound and emergent forms of resistance. london: goldsmiths press. magaudda, paolo. 2020. “music scenes as infrastructures: from live venues to algorithmic data”. in popular music, technology, and the changing media ecosystem, ed. tamás tófalvy and emília barna, 23–42. london: palgrave macmillan. purgas, paul. 2023. “introduction”. in we found our own reality: an exploration of india’s first electronic music studio and its resonances into the present, ed. paul purgas, 4-5. berlin: ctm festival. rief, silvia. 2009. club cultures: boundaries, identities and otherness. new york: routledge. silver, micah. 2019. figures in air: essays toward a philosophy of audio. new york: inventory press. yalcinkaya, günseli. 2022. “the worlds of technology and magic are closer than you think”. dazed, 4 july: <https://www.dazeddigital.com/science-tech/article/56442/1/new-age-oftechnology-mysticism-magic-somerset-house>, (accessed 21 august 2023). other kinds of mind there: echologies of psychedelic sonic substance dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 15(1): 13–40 issn 1947-5403 ©2023 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.02 other kinds of mind there: echologies of psychedelic sonic substance trace reddell university of denver (us) abstract cognition in extended brain-body music systems becomes especially agile during psychedelic experience, necessitating a sonic rhetoric emphasizing transformative agency. rooted in the recursive listening spaces of dub, three forms of psychedelic electronica—ambient house, trip-hop and glitch—foster an echological sensibility unique to records made largely from the bits and pieces of other recordings. in this article, longform albums representing each of these genres are offered as sonic pharmakomedia, pharmacologically activated non-human agencies that sustain psychedelic mind-machine systems. managing the psychedelic experience by mediating set and setting through music selection is adopted in psychedelic research, therapy sessions and personal practices alike. i consider set and setting in terms of their contributions to a liminal sonic substance that facilitates encounters with non-human agencies. putting indigenous shamanic practices in conversation with contemporary neuropsychopharmacology, sound studies and psychedelic music production, this article offers a diagnostic inventory of the effects of the sonic substance. keywords: psychedelics, dub, ambient house, trip-hop, glitch trace reddell (phd) is a writer, artist and educator. trace’s first book, the sound of things to come: an audible history of the science fiction film (u of minnesota press, 2018), offers new ways of construing sonic innovation in science fiction cinema. a forthcoming book, the magic circle: sonic substance in psychedelic music (mit press, 2024), develops a theory of sonic psychedelia. trace is a professor in the emergent digital practices program at the university of denver. website: <https://sonicsciencefiction.com/> feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.02 https://sonicsciencefiction.com/ dancecult 15(1)14 dub mechanics in one of the most exuberant passages of more brilliant than the sun (1998)—kodwo eshun’s pioneering history of afrofuturist sonic fictions—we arrive at kingston’s black ark studios to catch lee “scratch” perry deep in a dub mix. optimistically embracing the posthuman with a celebration of the persistence of the synthetic and alien in diasporic black atlantic futurisms, eshun describes the “mythscience of the mixing desk” by which perry, in the guise of the ghost captain, “opens the cybernetics of the studio” (1998: 62). here’s perry at length: i put my mind into the machine and the machine performs reality. invisible thoughtwaves, you put them into the machine by sending them through the controls and the knobs or you jack it into the jackpanel. . . . the jackpanel is like the brain itself so you got to patch up the brain and make the brain a living man. (eshun 1998: 62–3) figure 1. lee “scratch” perry and roland space echo. disco devil vol. 2 (2019). reddell | other kinds of mind there: echologies of psychedelic sonic substance 15 in dynamic interactions between mind and machine, electronic signal flow is a kind of thought-wave, a circuit patch linking the ports of his 16-track soundcraft mixing desk. it routes sends and returns through effects processors—perry’s classic dubs of the ’70s used only the mutron phase shifter and the roland space echo (fig. 1)—to transform the components of a reggae session before recording the outputs onto a four-track reel-to-reel. organizing the signal flow makes the audible electronic brain of the black ark into “a living man” (eshun 1998: 63). this extreme example of what philosopher joel krueger calls “musical offloading” (krueger 2014: 8) would yield perry a temporary new personality named pipecock jackson, and it would eventually lead perry to burn down black ark studios. typically, this kind of offloading is a more utilitarian means of allowing music to take over some of the endogenous “organizational and regulative functions” of the brain and nervous system (krueger 2014: 3–4). when we offload onto music, we “let it do some of the work organizing our emotional responses for us”, using this external resource to manage and enhance otherwise interior cognitive and embodied functions. part of the pleasure that music affords has to do with how it calls out the extended mind. the listener becomes part of “an integrated brain-body music system” of mood regulators that utilize feedback loops between listener and music to sustain itself (krueger 2014: 4). this requires phasing the feedback of the “brain-body music system” into oscillatory synchronization by way of “neural and behavioral entrainment responses” (krueger 2014: 9). bodily and cognitive processes are held by scaffolds of musical affordance, though our recognition of these supports may register as a kind of “letting go” (krueger 2014: 7). lee perry’s experiences of entrainment are extreme, purposeful, exploratory and transformative. when creating a dub, the mixing desk becomes an instrument in its own right. dubbing from the elements of a reggae or dancehall session, perry loops drum and bass lines; radically adjusts tone controls to alter the timbre of a source; removes some instruments and voices from the mix altogether, only to send a fragment of them echoing through the main mix; sends source tracks back through effects processors to echo, reverberate, delay and distort them. in eshun’s account, as it weaves the mind deeply into the extended cognitive affordance, “dub demands symbiosis that externalizes the mind, drastically reconfiguring the human producer into a machine being, an audio cyborg” (1998: 63). it’s a classic cannabis trope. one of the decadent french poet charles baudelaire’s greatest fears around hashish-eating was that it would turn him into “a sort of thinking machine” (1851: 74). in walter benjamin’s hashish protocols, the philosopher agonizes between hashish’s capacity to trigger profane illumination and its contrary tendency to freeze thinking into a photographic still; in either case, a once “unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored” (1935: 236–7). media and literary theorists friedrich kittler and sadie plant both suggest that modernity is in many ways a narrative of emergent technical media and mind-manifesting chemical substances chasing each other, remapping human consciousness and posing new ways of being in the world at a steady clip (plant 1999: 52–3). i suggest that hashish and the camera are parts of a complex pharmakomedia that affords a psychiatric perception of cognitive imbrication in emerging technologies. dancecult 15(1)16 for his part, perry activates the affordance of the mixing desk by blowing clouds of ganja smoke into its circuitry before mixing a dub. a symbiotic intermediation that is afforded by both technological and chemical substances, the dub is a form of “sonic substance”, the lifeforce of its studio incubator (brabec de mori 2015: 25). perry: “i see the studio must be like a living thing, a life itself. the machine must be live and intelligent”. the jackpanel is the brain, patched in a way that it too can be animated as part of the integrated brainbody music system. “you are listenin’ to a machine. i imitate human being, i’m a machine being, i don’t work with human beings” (eshun 1998: 63). the mixing desk is more than a receiver of thought signals, not only the brain of the whole studio, but an autonomous cybernetic entity that emerges within the smoky interstices of the dub and propels the listener into space. “the sound that i get out of the black ark studio”, perry explains, “i don’t really get it out of no other studio. it was like a space craft. you could hear space in the tracks” (eshun 1998: 64). this experience of space is at once tactile, sonic, networked, cosmic and earthy. perry’s rituals go beyond smoke to include candle wax and ashes dripped and flicked into the control board. he buries tapes in the ground to let soil condition them and materially erode the recordings, disinters them and feeds them back into the echo, reverb and delay effects patched into the console. “when you sculpt space with the mixing desk”, eshun writes about perry’s dubs, “these technical effects—gate and reverb, echo and flange—are routes through a network of volumes, doorways and tunnels connecting spatial architectures” (eshun 1998: 63). as ghost captain, perry navigates the domain of the dead. “so me join the ghost squad longtime and them notice me as the ghost captain. i am the ghost captain” (eshun 1998: 65). an entire acoustic ecology of echoes—an echology unique to recordings made from other recordings—springs into existence, riddled with gateways to other worlds. anthropologist bernd brabec de mori proposes an indigenous model of musical affordance that accommodates the complex auditory system of lee perry’s mixing console. i am eager to bring these sound worlds together to articulate the relationship between psychedelic musical affordance and living sonic technologies and to see how these might, in turn, echo each other. healing songs of the peruvian amazon, brabec de mori writes, amount to “nonhuman machines” that bridge interior and exterior realities (2015: 35). they are active even when they are silent. brabec de mori’s work with shipibo-conibo healers documents a form of silent song that offers a unique way of thinking about echological sound systems “on the other side” of cognitively extended, substantively afforded experience. as brabec de mori builds on taussig’s prior field work in the same region of the amazon, circular logics of copying come into play: . . . in most indigenous ontologies a song already exists before it is being sung. . . . the song may be owned by a spirit or linger in some substance before it is obtained by the chanter. if the song existed beforehand, it is the song that brings into being the chanter who brings into being the spirits that previously brought the song into being. (2015: 34) reddell | other kinds of mind there: echologies of psychedelic sonic substance 17 in shamanic sessions, the “singing healer actively and purposefully manipulates the ‘substance’ of this spirit world, its landscapes, its beings”—the various “musical or other sonic entities [that] materialise ‘on the other side’”—“including powerful primordial deities as well as the ‘souls’ of such interesting things like airplanes, the sciences, space craft, x-rays, jaguars, clouds, rivers (these look like great anacondas)” (brabec de mori 2015: 36–7). when the healer changes the voice “here”—the way of singing, the timbre and melody—it leads to “a material transformation of beings” (including the singer) and “the environment ‘there’” (brabec de mori 2015: 37). shamanic songs multiply worlds in moments of metamorphosis and transmutation (brabec de mori 2015: 35, 36). effects of sonic substances are transferred to human bodies through songs and musical performance, audible as well as inaudible, “from a chain of mental representations via performed sequences of sound into non-human agency”. “this worldly” pre-echoes, if you will—the value of sounds here measured in terms of their efficacy there—are assembled for transmission and reception in the spirit domain (brabec de mori 2015: 36). the effectiveness of medicinal substances depends upon the healer imbuing the substance with a song that the shaman sings or whistles. brabec de mori explains that the . . . song may be for instructing, negotiating with, or repulsing non-human persons, like animals, spirits, or ancestors. magical singing is also effective by singing directly to a client. . . . the singers’ voices are understood as a substance that remains in the body. (2015: 25) without direct transmission of the song, remedies composed of “vegetal, animal, or inorganic” materials are ineffectual on their own. they require the supplement of another kind of substance, one “usually (although rather arbitrarily) understood as intangible: sound” (brabec de mori 2015: 25). the sonic pharmakomedia of the shipibo-conibo utilizes tobacco smoke to make breath and song visible in healing ceremonies, giving them substance by creating a kind of “materialized sound” (brabec de mori 2015: 28). within this acoustic ecology of healing—and harming, for like any pharmakon, the sonic substance can be a poison as well as a cure—sound gives substance to otherwise inert materials (brabec de mori 2015: 29). but how does sound give substance to other sounds, and so make a system of them? getting electronic circuits high and in sync with his own chemically extended cognition, lee perry activates the sonic substance at work in the mind-machine of ghost captain and the mixing desk. smoke substantiates sound’s presence as media of the man and the machine. for its depiction of spirit worlds rippled and shaped by the sequencing of the sonic components of indigenous pharmakomedia, i treat brabec de mori’s work here as a model for the echological forms of novel listening experiences that dub affords. dub echologies have clearly nurtured “sampladelic” electronic dance cultures (reynolds 1999: 41). in the following pages, i plan to develop an increasingly psychedelic extended mindmachine sound system built on some impressions of lps by the klf, the orb, space ( jimmy cauty), future sound of london, boards of canada, and flying lotus. this is dancecult 15(1)18 not a comprehensive discographic project, and the level of detail will vary as we expand into the delirious, hallucinatory splay of reference materials common to sample-rich digital music. grouping these together as “nanomedia”, st john captures the subtle scale at which such cognitive sonic affordances thread together vastly distributed domains of auditory experience and reference (2012: 101). accessing the echologies of sampladelic nanomedia, these records facilitate encounters with the non-human agencies that brabec de mori attributes to shipibo-conibo ways of listening, and which i consider a peak of psychedelic sessions. i want to be wary of appropriative elisions or extractions that oversimplify differences between indigenous sonic practices and western cultural traditions (robinson 2020: 5, 14). the fact remains, however, that psychedelic listening experiences are not adequately accounted for by either western musicology and sound studies or neuropsychopharmacology. where i find brabec de mori’s work particularly useful is its investigation of “silent sounds”—hearing sounds, that is, beyond the audible “voices that are not present as sonic waves and cannot be recorded or measured by technical devices” (2015: 30). the model of substance-based listening that brabec de mori proposes necessitates a conflict with the work of composer and theorist r. murray schafer, whose work pathologizes our relationship to recorded phenomena so far as to make it a form of aberrant behavior. schafer bemoans the “schizophonic” split between sound source and its recorded copy that strikes at the very core of our identity and relationship to the world around us through the recorded silent sound artifacts that we carry around inside of our heads. tuning into and receiving non-human agencies already active in the sonic substance feeds back into the afforded mind, cascading into an encounter with the extended mind, even though it isn’t always clear whose mind one finds there. “so make gardens, and eat the fruit of them, them. and they shall also make gardens, and eat the fruit of them”. since the late 1980s, the chill-out zones of nightclubs and raves have provided a place of respite, somewhere you could go to come down from the hi-energy and fast-tempos of the house music in the main room, and from the drugs if they were getting out of hand. in a chill-out room, people can hang out, talk and actually hear each other. to encourage this chilled-out mindset, a new form of music called “ambient house” emerged that is closely associated with the uk house scene. djs and producers alex paterson, jimmy cauty and youth—members of the orb and the klf—favored beatless, though not necessarily rhythmless and un-sequenced, music. the live mixes were a collage form that incorporated bits of ambient music, krautrock, kosmische musik, berlin school electronic, new age and analog space music, nature soundscape records, clips from tv shows, films and other media.1 as the muffled residue of beats from the main venue thudded into the chill-out room, a distant, reverberant, dubby rhythm pulsed beneath the soundscapes, bringing a warm timbral floor to the splashes of chilly synths, guitar sequences ripped from old ’70s space rock, maybe a bit of dialogue from a nasa documentary. all of this suggested a new way to make records. paterson, cauty, youth and soon many others began producing music reddell | other kinds of mind there: echologies of psychedelic sonic substance 19 that captured this sound: the klf’s chill out and jimmy cauty’s space, both from 1990; the orb’s 1991 album, the orb’s adventures beyond the ultraworld (1991); and 1994’s lifeforms, by the future sound of london (see fig. 2). figure 2. four years of ambient house: chill out (1990), space (1990), the orb’s adventures beyond the ultraworld (1991), and lifeforms (1994). by the middle of the decade, the combination of downtempo beats, cinematic and spacious atmospheric sound design, sparse instrumentation, electronic and digital sounds and spoken dialogue rendered ambient house almost indistinguishable from adjacent forms like idm, experimental, ambient techno and acid house. i favor “ambient house” because the term evokes sonic setting in ways that the others do not. but all these post-house genres— described as “armchair techno” and “dance music for the sedentary and stay-at-home”—in fact afford homely ways of listening to electronic music with beats (reynolds 1999: 181). while the language of “intelligence” is forward looking—to the “artificial intelligence” and pseudo-machine language that appears in tracks by autechre and aphex twin—it also recalls the cosmic “head” music of the late-1960s, progressive rock of the 1970s, 1980s ambient and new age music (reynolds 1999: 182–3). with its roots in the chicago warehouse scene suggesting spaces of storage but also of appropriation, ambient house provides a more than symbolic way to think of musical affordance as storing resources for the emotional and imaginal mind. warp label co-founder steve beckett explains that this was music specifically made for coming down to. each cd in their “artificial intelligence” series would be a whole album to sit and listen to, like kraftwerk’s autobahn or a pink floyd record. it would appeal to listeners wanting something to sink into after the party, “when you start hearing the really interesting, mind-blowing stuff. if you’re coming down off [drugs], you can get really lost in your own thoughts and concentrate on the music, pay more attention to detail” (reynolds 1999: 183). ambient house extends cognition into a listening space that is electronically networked, informationally rich, regulating the body with a come-down energy while providing the head a space for intelligent play, information processing and synthesis, creative juxtaposition, imagination and engaged, attentive listening. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwebqcrw7o4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnjw94mb3wk&list=pl1rjqlyh1yfblrwegpae4z4vp14ero33d https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knfjpmvbqg0&list=olak5uy_mkoc8wxczkwynhguwl3pt9wdqzd2eobgy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scp0ovgtmza&list=olak5uy_lpgly3q-3btdwew5ja7y71ffzpl08qbpc dancecult 15(1)20 most of what you hear on an ambient house record is second-hand. recorded or digitally snipped from already existing recordings, source tracks are played at varying speeds, processed through effects and combined in new ways to become a journey. these are iconic “sampladelic” works. in generation ecstasy, simon reynolds maps the “hallucinogenres” of electronic music onto a “digital psychedelia” because the recording innovations of the late1960s led rock away from “naturalistic” to “antinaturalistic” recording techniques on the pathway to newer, sample-based forms.2 throughout the original psychedelic era, the record becomes an artform of multitracking, overdubbing, slowing down or speeding up sounds, chopping tapes up and reassembling them into sonic collages, playing tapes backwards, piling on effects processes and so on. this leads reynolds to position “sampladelia” as “a general rubric for electronic dance music’s revolutionary implications: its radical break with the ideals of real-time interactive playing and natural acoustic space that still govern most music making” (1999: 41). chill out, space, the orb’s adventures beyond the ultraworld and lifeforms are all highly narrative albums. the first takes the listener on a long night drive, the next two take us through outer space and the last seems to take place in some kind of cyborg breeding flotation device. these are presented at epic scale—continuous mixes without track markers on the cds, double lp, double cd sets. compared to the 12” single-orientation of house and other dance music, ambient house records bring back long-form, psychedelic and progressive tendencies. pink floyd is ever-present; the cover of chill out a nod to the pastoral gatefold of atom heart mother (1970), while the orb’s “back side of the moon” is a more obviously cheeky homage. more substantively, the dense interweaving of sampled voices and sound effects with extended, musically atmospheric sequences and narrative concepts on pink floyd’s dark side of the moon (1973) and wish you were here (1975) are key roadmaps to ambient house. all the same, ambient house differs significantly from prog. the almost total samplification and digitization of the “instrument” points ambient house squarely away from prog rock signatures like extended melodic development, improvisation and virtuosic soloing. drums are drum machines or looped samples. there are no lead vocals. but there are plenty of voices. the distant sound of elvis singing “in the ghetto” on chill out’s “elvis on the radio, steel guitar in my soul” is one of the most faraway, spectral sounds on the album, a copy of a copy populating the spacious cosmic terrain of the late-night road trip. max von sydow as emperor ming from the 1980’s flash gordon movie launches the orb’s “earth (gaia)”. slim pickens makes a brief, hilarious cameo in “supernova at the end of the universe”, his major “king” kong of dr. strangelove hollering “ya-hoo!” as the rocket accelerates. apollo mission control chatter crops up repeatedly on adventures beyond the ultraworld. “astronauts report it feels good”, from “supernova”, is used again in a choppedup, skittering replay throughout the next track, “back side of the moon”. such inventive “sampladelia lures the listeners into a sound world honeycombed with chambers that each have their own acoustics”—routes through a network of volumes, doorways and tunnels connecting spatial architectures—accessing cosmic and spectral pockets (reynolds 1999: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwebqcrw7o4&t=1060s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwebqcrw7o4&t=1060s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejnyt8wnmpc&list=olak5uy_mkoc8wxczkwynhguwl3pt9wdqzd2eobgy&index=2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejnyt8wnmpc&list=olak5uy_mkoc8wxczkwynhguwl3pt9wdqzd2eobgy&index=2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrr0w7leiyw&list=olak5uy_mkoc8wxczkwynhguwl3pt9wdqzd2eobgy&index=3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrr0w7leiyw&list=olak5uy_mkoc8wxczkwynhguwl3pt9wdqzd2eobgy&index=3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaneki2pkro&list=olak5uy_mkoc8wxczkwynhguwl3pt9wdqzd2eobgy&index=4 reddell | other kinds of mind there: echologies of psychedelic sonic substance 21 44). though often “sufficiently brief or arcane as to preclude triggering specific pop-cultural associations”, samples afford access to what brabec de mori calls the spirit world “on the other side” (2015: 43, 36). reynolds also suggests that sampling intensifies, amplifies and multiplies the “inherent supernaturalism” of the record (2011: 313). in retromania, his thinking about samples has taken a notably more somber turn: woven out of looped moments that are each like portals to far-flung times and places, the sample collage creates a musical event that never happened; a mixture of timetravel and séance. sampling involves using recordings to make new recordings; it’s the musical art of ghost co-ordination and ghost arrangement. (2011: 313–14) as it evolves over the course of his critical projects, reynolds’ “sampladelia” describes a powerful crisis of the phonographic orientation that has largely defined rock and pop music since the 1950s. reynolds turns to the work of theodore gracyk on rock music, noting that putatively naturalistic records have long involved the use of multitrack consoles for overdubbing, fixing mistakes and adding double-tracked layers to give more presence to voice and instrumentation (reynolds 2011: 44). gracyk’s rhythm and noise regards recording (the act) and recordings (the single or album) as the very essence of rock, “a tradition of popular music whose creation and dissemination centers on recording technology” (1996: 1). records themselves are “the primary medium for the rock tradition”; gracyk shows how by the mid-1960s, musicians like dylan were chasing a “sound”, and even elements of composition and performance were intimately related to how they would eventually come across on record (1996: 51, 12). what might appear on record to be “originating performances” are in fact (re)constructed and “identified with specific works only in retrospect” (grayck 1996: 50). but reynolds reads gracyk only up to the point that “rock phonography uses multiple takes and overdubs to create a quasi-event, something that never ‘happened’”, and ends up concluding that “what you hear on record usually sounds plausible as a real-time occurrence” (1999: 44). “sampladelia goes further”, reynolds announces; “it layers and concatenates musical fragments from different eras, genres and places to create a time-warping pseudo-event, something that could never possibly have happened. different acoustic spaces and recording ‘auras’ are forced into uncanny adjacency” (1999: 44). musical forms like ambient house trigger a “sampladelic supernova” in which all sorts of recorded sounds from many different time periods and places and sources and media collide into a decontextualized flow of the “last eighty years of pan-global recorded sound” (1999: 45). this is precisely what sound ecologist r. murray schafer had always feared would happen! schafer found something fundamentally pathological in the splitting of sound from source that phonographic recording instantiates. the recorded object is divorced from its time and place of origin, from its cause and hence from its natural lifecycle of fading to silence. schafer coins “schizophonia” in 1969 to describe the consequences of this pathology. electroacoustically reproducing recorded sound over loudspeakers or headphones triggers a further schizophonic reaction that rips the listener from their dancecult 15(1)22 natural acoustic surroundings. the problem that schafer diagnoses is a glut of recorded artifacts. “a record or tape collection”, he complains—his language anticipating reynold’s own increasingly anxious analysis of sampladelia—“may contain items from widely diverse cultures and historical periods in what would seem to a person from any century but our own, a meaningless and surrealistic juxtaposition” (schafer 1993: 90, 273). recording and playback thus precipitate a kind of psychoacoustic geolocation crisis. “i employ this ‘nervous’ word in order to dramatize the aberrational effect of this twentieth-century development”, he explains in the glossary to the soundscape (1993: 273). schafer relates schizophonia to schizophrenia specifically to “convey the same sense of aberration and drama” (1993: 91). this triggers schafer’s prescriptive turn toward the recuperative auditory ecology of the “soundscape” and sonic healing, proposing noise mitigation and acoustic environmentalism as curative forms of compositional practice. gracyk’s ideas about the constructed nature of the recorded artifact suggest an alternative to the pathological perspective outlined by schafer and reinforced by reynolds’ growing concern with “retro” trends in music. gracyk regards the record largely as an integrative psychoacoustic experience. from a listener’s perspective, “aesthetic qualities and meanings emerge from the materials” (grayck 1996: 72). reynolds makes the mistake of associating “feel” solely with the work of “seasoned” musicians playing live and interacting with each other. sampladelia abandons “all the elements of ‘feel’: the inflections and supple rhythmic interplay that communicates the fact that flesh-and-blood humans physically shaped this sound together in a real acoustic space” while intensifying the “trompe l’oreille side of psychedelia”, with its “fictitious psycho-acoustic space”, weird tones and textures with “no ready real-world referents” (reynolds 1999: 44). while acknowledging that 1960s rock recordings are largely studio reconstructions from multiple sessions and post-production processing, reynolds goes astray by assuming that the recordings that gracyk describes are inherently livelier while sample-based work is dead, or rather, undead. after repeated emphasis on the “flesh-and-blood human” players making live music, reynolds’ prose takes a grotesque turn full of vivisection and the reanimated corpses of “dead sound” (1999: 45). what he has missed in this moment of schizophonic crisis is the novel form of extended cognition that the affordance-rich resources of ambient house records provide. ambient house celebrates rather than pathologizes schizophonic processes. “astronauts report it feels good” the uncertainty of exactly what “it” is that feels good is what makes this oft-sampled bit of apollo 11 ground control chatter so charming. in context, it has to do with all systems being go for liftoff (nasa 2007). heard in the orb’s “supernova”, then again in “back side of the moon”, whatever “it” is is precisely unspeakable as such, delivered out of context but ultimately reassuring us that the trip is going as planned. this happens as the narrative of the orb’s adventures beyond the ultraworld leaves behind the spacious skies with their “little fluffy clouds” and the gardens of earth (gaia), lifting off toward the space beyond the moon into dimensions unknown. “it” also feels like a drug reference and works as a form of psychedelic double-speak. reddell | other kinds of mind there: echologies of psychedelic sonic substance 23 electronic music has long exhibited a zeal for source content pulled from film, tv shows, nasa archives, nature programs and space documentaries. chopped up, fragmented, re-sequenced and looped into on-flowing dj sets, samples work within the echology of the mix to facilitate “variant projects of the self” (st john 2012: 101). concerned with the transformational potential of sampladelic music, st john’s “aliens are us” acts out its premise, reveling in the mycelial networking among electronic dance music tracks; the text occasionally runs wild with extended transcriptions of spoken word samples (2013: 192–3). it describes a culture of “self-shamanising” producers who regard media recordings as “an ever-renewable pool of spiritual resources available to the self ”, extracting “the tropes and mythographies of popular culture” from the “floating fragments” of pop “detritus”, and then programming them into scripts for gnosis and liminal experience (st john 2013: 199). given their scale as fragments of pop culture and media embedded in a larger mix or track, st john calls these “nanomedia”, positioning them on the far side of the hypermediating affordances provided in electronic dance settings (2013: 101). the dj or producer navigates a larger mediaverse of on-demand resources pulled from information-rich worlds, extracting nano-scaled materials and stitching them into a singular, immersive experience that sustains the extended mind while it synchronizes the moving body. listening extends cognition into the realms of nanomedia. recall “the souls of such interesting things as airplanes, the sciences, space craft, x-rays, jaguars, clouds, rivers (these look like great anacondas)” that brabec de mori describes, and we have another potential indigenous parallel between sonic substance and sampledelic sound cultures (2015: 36–7). st john documents how psychedelic electronica uses space-related samples, evoking “the liminal conditions of space travel” to facilitate the avatar’s quest and hero’s journey through musical affordance (2013: 186). at once “external and internal, extraterrestrial and psychosomatic”, the uncanny valley of “the psychedelic imaginary” directs our movement “farther from routine consciousness (and one’s home)” (st john 2013: 189). space travel is a narrative device for inner travail, an infoshamanic initiation into the spatiotemporal domains of film, television series, documentaries, computer games, nasa radio dialogue, public broadcast and open access media content. these are very intense, highly reiterative and recursive listening experiences that are other-producing, mind-manifesting and selfsustaining. these producers navigate the echologies of pharmakomedia in order to modulate “indeterminate lines between human and alien, the material and the spiritual, consciousness and unconsciousness” as qualities of personhood and self-expression (st john 2013: 199). but why do astronauts report that it feels good? the usefulness of music is a given of contemporary psychedelic research, while therapeutic applications consider music one of the most crucial elements for positive, transformative psychedelic experience. music is the uniter of set and setting, an intermediary mechanism for managing space, facilitating novel mindstates and narrating journeys of self-encounter and healing. one report published in the international review of psychiatry succinctly concludes: “music appears to influence the efficacy of therapy significantly, through modulating emotion, including the facilitating of mystical experiences, and through supporting autobiographical processes” (barrett, preller dancecult 15(1)24 and kaelen 2018: 356). contemporary work in the field generally reinforces the pioneering research of helen bonny and walter pahnke. their 1972 guidebook for psychedelic playlist design, “the use of music in psychedelic (lsd) psychotherapy” recommends specific musical pieces for guided sessions, arcing the trajectory of the trip around very specific affective and cognitive affordances. bonny and pahnke aim for a therapeutic attunement—krueger’s oscillatory entrainment or perry’s jacking into the jack panel— meant to synchronize what is going on in the mind of the listener and the more-or-less consistent pharmacological apparatus. assuming a series of mostly reliable, discrete stages, psychedelic therapies integrate music as an affordance to help shape, direct and script the intense psychedelic experience. at the same time as music shapes the trajectories of psychedelic experience, psychedelics afford a stronger emotional weight and meaningfulness toward the music that we listen to while on them. psychedelics, especially lsd, enhance or increase the significance of the music we listen to—“i’ve been waiting for music like this all my life”—during a session (the orb 1991). research recently conducted by katrin preller et al. at the university of zurich set out to track the “neuropharmacology of personal relevance processing” to better understand lsd’s effects on “the fabric of meaning” (2017: 451). their methodology involved participants listening to music while on lsd. the researchers sought to understand how healthy persons create meaning in response to the world around them, and they sought to model “abnormalities in the attribution of personal relevance to sensory experiences” characteristic of several psychiatric disorders (preller et al. 2017: 451). using a set of songs of varying familiarity for the listener undergoing the study, researchers focused on the mechanistic orientation (both neurochemical and anatomical features) of the brain as it encountered a mixture of personally meaningful and previously meaningless stimuli. the researchers identified a key serotonin receptor potentially involved in “dysfunctional personal relevance attribution”, which is characteristic of psychiatric disorders like addiction and schizophrenia (preller et al. 2017: 453). the outcomes of preller’s project demonstrate that, when under the influence of lsd, previously meaningful music remained meaningful, and the researchers were able to map areas of the brain in which this connection was apparent. the researchers also found that participants’ encounters with music previously deemed neutral or meaningless became more significant for those on lsd. productive lsd therapies make use of an over-attribution of personal meaningfulness to music by stimulating the relevant serotonin receptor (preller et al. 2017: 454). these results align with mendel kaelen et al.’s (2015) work on lsd’s enhancement of the emotional response to music. moreover, music acts as the “hidden therapist” indispensable to successful psychedelic treatments by way of non-human agency (kaelen et al. 2018: 505). activated as sonic substance, music and song become non-human agencies in indigenous healing practices. among the shipibo-conibo, musical affordance includes negotiations with “one or more implied, virtual agents”, “a virtual persona, that exists ‘within’ the music”. brabec de mori calls these “sonic beings”, and he describes a mode of “enchanted listening” that endows the listener “with the faculty of experiencing the effects of interactions, summons, reddell | other kinds of mind there: echologies of psychedelic sonic substance 25 transformations, etc. of those elements that are . . . present within, and only within, the hearing space construed by the music” (brabec de mori 2017: 187). this space of enchanted listening, where aesthetics and meaning are emergent properties of the listening encounter, is an indigenous therapeutic musical affordance. it extends the emotional scaffolding of the extended mind into greater degrees of structural novelty and, perhaps more significantly, strangeness and difference. by forestalling what krueger calls the “independent oscillatory processes” that tend toward synchronization and entrainment, the indigenous models that brabec de mori depicts multiply non-human agencies through the sonic substance (krueger 2014: 3). each nanomedia-scaled affordance is enriched through substantive encounter with other nanomedia-scaled affordances and makes a world of them—“and they shall also make gardens, and eat the fruit of them”—triggering at once substantive, additive, synthetic and integrated echological reiterations of the “dynamic, two-way relation of continuous reciprocal causation” (the orb 1991; krueger 2014: 7). increased affective relevance grows with each conceptually synchronized sample. listening among the shipibo-conibo is operative at the nanomedia scale—“x-rays jaguar rivers like anaconda”—as invisible listeners navigating “over there” negotiate with non-human musical agencies that will lead you safely from one world to another. “orange” there are several sampled voices on boards of canada’s music has the right to children (1998) that i can call up by rote and hear play more or less accurately in my mind’s ear. a few come to me unbidden. “i love you” stands out. its effect has less to do with the words themselves than the way that they are enunciated, repeated against a tinkling background in a childish, maybe alien voice, with an occasionally concerning change in affect. none sound quite as fully bodied in my mind as the repetition of the word “orange” heard throughout “aquarius”. this phrase, this precise snippet of recorded sound, pops into my head with some frequency, and it is always welcome. i think of it as a helper spirit come to say hello—well, “orange”—and i’ve learned to take its popping into my head as an opportunity to ground myself in the return to my experience of myself. of course, it helps that “aquarius” is one of the most openly joyous moments boards of canada have ever produced. the retro funk groove that the duo lock into, the slappy, stepping bassline, the glittering synth glissandos, the child’s laughter, the female voice counting, all creates a very nostalgic situation for me. the flashback is a highly animated experience, an amalgam of visual and sonic effects pulled from pop educational pbs shows like sesame street and the electric company. the song recalls the hyper-episodic structure of these shows, which at any moment could break into a shortform animation or some such, often with a bit of groovy rhythm attached. this detailed, personal association is part of a common cultural imaginary propped up by the children’s television workshop, pbs and film boards of canada, all exploited to great effect by the trip-hop duo that took their name from the latter. marcus eoin and mike sandison have created a significant discography of psychedelic records that explore the relationship between memory, media, time travel, nostalgia, culture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd920s0dgeu&list=pls9zwqxsceujag0jqh4dbylgmqovmrqme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrcr5hycxh0&list=pls9zwqxsceujag0jqh4dbylgmqovmrqme&index=12 dancecult 15(1)26 and identity through judicious integration of sampled nanomedia. the manipulation of the textures of their samples provides the most transportative qualities of their albums. marcus eoin reflects on their sound with rob young of the wire: there are textures in what we try to do, which borrow from certain sounds or eras . . . to trigger something, almost a cascade. it’s like a memory that someone has—even though it’s artificial, they never even had the memory; it’s just you’re ageing a song. and then people feel, is that something familiar i knew from years ago? (young 2005: 42) in a circumvention of reynolds’ sampladelia, which involves the extraction of samples from actual 1960s and 1970s recordings, boards of canada tracks often only seem to come from earlier media. the melodic loops of instruments and fragments of voices cannot be detangled from the way they sound, which typically suggests a warped, flanging, flawed recording and playback medium. boards of canada’s album art features images that are prismatic, overly saturated, with photos of families and children, faces erased or blurred, artificially aged to reveal weird auras and visual artifacts (fig. 3). figure 3. back cover of boards of canada, the campfire headphase (2005). reddell | other kinds of mind there: echologies of psychedelic sonic substance 27 their sound is likewise characterized by refractive processes, deteriorating moments of sonic self-reflections scattered and distorted across time. “it’s not so much that this persistence of the past inside the present is the subject of the record”, simon reynolds (2018) muses in his pitchfork retrospective, “as that it’s the substance out of which boards of canada weave their music, its spectral warp-and-weft”. mike sandison also describes an imaginary regression to an earlier time. he captures the qualities, the feel of the recorded sound of that time before reworking a way back to an alternate contemporary reality of sound-making possibilities now reshaped by the historical impact of this variant universe. whew. it is twisted and kaleidoscopic to the point that i am not sure boards of canada are even in our timeline anymore. in sandison’s words: how about just stop where we are, and let’s just for a minute try and backtrack a way up here, and imagine what would have happened if, in 1982, music had taken this other branch on this side, and where would it be now, and what would it be sounding like now? (young 2005: 46) sonic deep fakes proliferate as eoin and sandison record their own instruments— keyboards, drums and voices—and integrate reverb, delays and echoes to artificially age the recordings. they then create samples based on these recordings for their own mixed tracks. these combine with what may or may not be actual samples of voices from old tv shows, films and commercials. the “network of volumes, doorways and tunnels” that eshun attributes to perry’s dub mix are used here to time travel or tune into broadcasts from alternate universes. my attention is always drawn to the mass media “library music” tracks, the short interludes like “bocuma”, station ids, sound-logos, commercial breaks like “kaini industries”, “roygbiv”, and “wildlife analysis”. the accumulative effect is one of late-night, post-acid peak channel surfing. more imagined than actual, the nanomedia on a boards of canada track are sonic vaporware, packaging for a virtual product that will never exist. the feel of tripping and flipping through imaginary late-night cable programs takes a more sinister turn on geogaddi (2002). its edgy, hypnogogic journey is peppered with enough late-night conspiracy theories to make even the most benign nature program, infomercial and random reruns feel suspect and dangerous. the psychedelic, prismatic quality of mediated time itself results in the muffled shimmer of boards of canada’s sound, its lack of tonal stability and what their interviewer rob young calls its “eccentric orbits” (2005: 44). “in conversation”, young notes, “they’ll often talk about chords coming in at weird angles and diagonals, zapping melodic expectations” (2005: 44). this is a classic psychedelic trope that echoes tommy hall of the 13th floor elevators, who proclaimed in 1966 that the band’s first album aimed at “designing geometric states of mind” (drummond 2007: 296). given all this weird geometry, boards of canada records make me feel like i’m trying somewhat unsuccessfully to tune into something, to get clearer reception of a signal from somewhere ill-defined, necessitating an endless tweaking and adjusting and filtering and clarifying and ultimately losing it and never finding my way back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sswyb9z5fny&list=pls9zwqxsceujag0jqh4dbylgmqovmrqme&index=9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvdc6djz-xi&list=pls9zwqxsceujag0jqh4dbylgmqovmrqme&index=8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvdc6djz-xi&list=pls9zwqxsceujag0jqh4dbylgmqovmrqme&index=8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nnqgdznwhu&list=pls9zwqxsceujag0jqh4dbylgmqovmrqme&index=10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd920s0dgeu&list=pls9zwqxsceujag0jqh4dbylgmqovmrqme&index=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi_jqn_qdc4&list=pl5smxyhicz5l9fs8akali7lr-qo-ua7vf dancecult 15(1)28 geogaddi continually pulls the ear deeper into the sensorium, making us listen more deeply, attend to hidden details, listen to ourselves listening. sound paisleys form here through this reiterative action, complex, fractal scaffolds of musical affordances that spiral into each other (fig. 4). figure 4. boards of canada, geogaddi (2002). front cover photo by peter iain campbell. this feedback feel repeatedly calls attention to itself when we listen to records thought to hold and encode secret information by way of backward masking, time axis manipulation and degradation of signal. geogaddi features samples buried deep in the mix, or played backwards or at the wrong speed, and they can only be discerned by manipulating the material of the recordings themselves. reddit and other online communities devoted to boards of canada are driven by listeners seeking to decode the occult messages about reddell | other kinds of mind there: echologies of psychedelic sonic substance 29 everything from the branch davidians to the dangers of children’s television programs. some clues are hidden so deep in the mix that the audio must be digitized and run through a spectrographic analyzer, where visual patterns are revealed. sound historian joe banks has delved into the world of electronic voice phenomena and satanic messages allegedly buried in heavy metal records, and his insights apply here. his study of the evangelical religious right of the 1980s paints images of bible belt preachers scouring through the local sam goody’s metal records section in search of secretly encoded satanic commands. once you get into backward masking and hidden hypnotic messaging, electronic recording technologies only “help construct, rationalize and validate a fundamentally anti-scientific belief system” (banks 2001: 77). banks describes a form of rorschach audio that instantiates “a positive feedback loop, in which primordial superstitions about the afterlife are sufficiently powerful to inspire the active creation of evp” (2001: 77). as gracyk suspected, these manifest as “aesthetic qualities and meanings [that] emerge from the materials” (1996: 72). psychedelic pharmakomedia afford new ways of listening that trigger a conceptual cascade of cognitive feedback throughout the mind-music system. “one of the peculiarities of consciousness”, rhetorician richard doyle explains, “is the effect that it can have on itself—it cannot be observed without changing in kind; consciousness can attend to itself, ‘feedback,’ and in attending, it is altered” (2011: 159). this cognitive feedback occurs in a profound moment of sonic “ecodelic” experience—a realization of our embeddedness in a dense, living information system. boards of canada extend into the equally vast, living information system of nanomedia artifacts that afford the mind of the self-shamanizing listener. steeped in the aural content and feel of the media-fueled milieu of popular science, conspiracy theory and disinformation, the psychedelic sound systems that boards of canada develop back-track to the sonic textures of the 1970s and 1980s in order to trigger an “affective synchrony” (krueger 2014: 3). boards of canada extend cognition through complex kaleidoscopes of sound—refractive, reiterative, recursive and recombinant—so that the mind, in attending to itself, alters itself. for eoin and sandinson, preparing new projects entails a return to one of their earliest recordings, “turquoise hexagon sun”. they must relearn it, rebuild it, get it back into their repertoire, replicate its feel again, remember who they once were. it’s a magic circle of return and renewal. “for us”, eoin explains, “‘turquoise hexagon sun’ always returns us to a zone where we can throw off the baggage and begin again” (young 2005: 42). “hold up, hold up, i bet you thinking that we dead” simon reynolds worries that sampling is a system of diminishing returns. though concerned in his early work that a sample might be a kind of undead, he valorizes sampladelic forms because they “represent the apotheosis of rock’s interest in sound in itself (timbre, effects) and virtual space (unrealistic acoustics)” (reynolds 1999: 44). but by retromania, reynolds frets: was there already nothing “rich enough, nourishing enough—which is to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqef_-y_imo&list=pls9zwqxsceujag0jqh4dbylgmqovmrqme&index=7 dancecult 15(1)30 say, sufficiently non-derivative—to sustain future forms of revivalism and retro? surely, at a certain point, recycling will just degrade the material beyond the point that further usevalue can be extracted” (2011: 424). brabec de mori also associates music with nutrition, noting that “powerful songs stem from powerful ‘diets’ where access to or communication with powerful entities was established” (2015: 29). the notion of music as cognitive nourishment has of course been a mainstay of psychedelic popular music since grace slick exhorted us in 1967 to “feed your head” in the rousing final lines of “white rabbit”. now, steven ellison’s brainfeeder label echoes and updates the down-the-rabbit hole psychedelic journey with a roster of experimental, glitch, hip-hop, neo-soul and funk records. i hear much of the label’s output, and flying lotus’s records in particular, as a contemporary reflection on integrated brain-body music systems that takes stock of the self-shamanizing potential of contemporary sampladelic echologies. glitch “disrupts the flavor a little bit” (beta 2014). ellison is chatting here in 2014 with the fader about his latest lp, you’re dead! (2014), and this shift from nourishment to flavor is a telling one. driving around la listening to george duke records, ellison and his frequent collaborator thundercat started wondering why nobody made records that good anymore. what if you could make an album so good it killed you? with this as their theme, they each began sketching out a record for a double-lp concept album. the two projects eventually split, partly because flying lotus’s record had become so insular. compressed into 19 brief and fragmented tracks, you’re dead! plays out in a tight, 39-minute-long meditation on death. for the album, flying lotus recorded sessions with keyboardist herbie hancock; saxophonist kamasi washington; rappers kendrick lamar, snoop dogg and ellison’s alter-ego captain murphy; vocalists angel and arlene deradoorian and niki randa and others. but though the album is filled with contributions from these guest session artists, it doesn’t come across in any way like a recorded live session. every guest becomes a sample, a schizophonic artifact that is reactivated in the mix. ellison reflects to the la times that his process was similar to how [he] used to make tracks, by sampling old recordings. “put on a record, get something off the record”, he says. “then you get some drums. then you go to the keyboard. then you go to the bass. it was the same process, but with people”. (roberts 2014) creating a record with other people remains a fully sampladelic project, a point ellison would find himself repeating on npr’s “all things considered” and in other interviews in the wake of you’re dead!’s release. it is as if the compression, the reduction of living collaborators to sampled sounds, was the most compelling and unsettling dimension of the album. within the album’s bardo echology, these samples of featured guests appear as emblems of earthly attachment, hang-ups, words, breath and other sonic affordances in the moment of our letting go (fig. 5). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnjm_jc7j_4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7zsaxgz3he&list=olak5uy_m7qcylqwvmx6pjxhu1tifnyvutekrekuc reddell | other kinds of mind there: echologies of psychedelic sonic substance 31 figure 5. flying lotus, you’re dead (2014). front cover illustration by shintaro kago. you’re dead! is part of a series of flying lotus’ meditations on death. until the quiet comes (2012) was a tribute to ellison’s friend, austin peralta, the promising young jazz pianist who overdosed and died at 22. you’re dead!’s “the boys who died in their sleep” is also dedicated to peralta, and it references lost performers like j. dilla and freddie mercury whose early, prog-inflected queen records proved an instrumental counterpoint to the project’s hard bop-inspired jazz fusion (roberts 2014). flamagra (2019), with contributions from an even larger roster of recognizable guest voices, can be heard as a reflection on climate death. you’re dead! is the bardo album. here, flying lotus narrates his own liminal encounter with mortality within a vast psychedelic mind-machine musical system. lo-fi becomes a psychic defense strategy, with high levels of compression and distortion degenerating his source material into something raw, fragmented, digital and fucked up. lo-fi conditions are provocative in schizophonic sound systems. they were particularly problematic for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6x7jy95lwa&list=olak5uy_lcn3cbblzbirqpj3auikwhjwa9rgistvw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlkxka9jirm&list=olak5uy_m7qcylqwvmx6pjxhu1tifnyvutekrekuc&index=16 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmfe_ea5y4m&list=olak5uy_noognmyqa5ynrqo8ilw8ymfa2xf0sgxhi dancecult 15(1)32 schafer. taking his cues from mcluhan’s hot and cold media, schafer differentiates the signal-to-noise ratios of hi-fi and lo-fi soundscapes (1993: 118, 128, 43). hi-fi soundscapes are expansive and rural, with a low background noise floor against which one can pick out details and maintain a sense of distance. lo-fi soundscapes are denser, urban, claustrophobic. individual sounds in lo-fi systems are “masked by broad-band noise. perspective is lost” (schafer 1993: 43). the chief irony that schafer tracks is that the very introduction of hi-fi sound technology in fact exacerbates the ills of a lo-fi environment (1993: 88). moreover, this schizophonic loss of sonic integrity negatively transforms the average western household: “the overkill of hi-fi gadgetry not only contributes generously to the lo-fi problem, but it creates a synthetic soundscape in which natural sounds are becoming increasingly unnatural while machine-made substitutes are providing the operative signals directing modern life” (schafer 1993: 91). hi-fi home stereos are as bad as headphones. high-fidelity sound reproduction turns the whole room into a pair of headphones that you can walk around inside of, and heaven forbid you should have a quadrophonic set-up! schafer uses the phrase “the submarine home” more than once to evoke the isolating, immersive quality of sound technologies by which listeners find themselves “at the center of the sound”, where we are “massaged” (another mcluhanism) by sound and, since it is a perilously permeable subaquatic craft, “flooded by it” (1993:117). schafer worries most about “the integrity of inner space” (1993: 118). he fears that the integral nature of inner space erodes along with the authenticity of sonic experience. the loss of the original sound source to its recording fosters a never-being-able-to-be-in-the-moment kind of feel. the real culprit here is the collapse of vibrational headspace into a sonic enclosure maintained through mantric-like repetition, which possesses “dark, narcotic powers”, entrancing listeners by delivering the operative signals of sonic delirium (schafer 1993: 119). by contrast, lofi production in you’re dead! and flamagra induces hauntological effects to manage and enhance schizophonic delirium: “listeners may hear this as producing a temporal distance or a haunted, ghostly quality . . . or they may interpret the recording’s crackle as indicating a kinship with music from the era of analog recording” or even with “the circulation of hip hop mixtapes” (solis 2019: 27). in any case, it is a matter of dead media. you’re dead! and flamagra have some of the spectral form of vaporwave about them. vaporwave is an internet-based subgenre built on loops from pilfered sources like smooth jazz, yacht rock, muzak and ’80s weather channel identification bumper music. it is so translucent that attempts to define it simply open a pandora’s vhs tape box full of other microgenres like chopped and screwed hip-hop, hypnogogic pop, chillwave and hauntology. culture theorist grafton tanner provides a taxonomy of sonic effects that explain vaporwave’s obsessive use of dead media and the commodified ghosts of the past (2016: 60). vapor-generating technologies like record players and tape decks, radios and tv emerge in culture alongside a narrative of the uncanny and fantastic. jeffrey sconce shows that popular media—radio plays, tv shows and movies about outer space or the future, psychic phenomena, possession, hypnosis, the supernatural and paranormal and all the other reddell | other kinds of mind there: echologies of psychedelic sonic substance 33 twilight zones of the weird—provide a metaphor for media platforms themselves. radio, tv, films function precisely as the “gateways to electronic otherworlds” that these stories are about, sconce asserts (2000: 4). the self-shamanizing dj, mixer or producer navigates these electronic gateways for personal self-exploration, using samples as the “doorway to the soul, the gateway to other dimensions, pathways occulted in one’s everyday life” (st john 2013: 189). indigenous sonic practices suggest a technoshamanic hauntology. walkers in the rain forest make specific sounds to convey to birds and animals that they mean no harm, and to ask to be left alone. the cosmos extends into invisible realms that necessitate “sonic production and perception”, and still others require our “hearing phenomena beyond the sonic” (brabec de mori 2015: 38–9, n. 17). this is a weird idea to get at, this silent sound. but it is at the root of brabec de mori’s notion of sonic substance, and it has bearing on our understanding of sonic pharmakomedia and psychedelic sound systems, so is not ignorable. i’ll wrap up, then, with some guided reflections on silent sonic substance in you’re dead! the more flying lotus’s albums orient toward death and loss, the more his catalog slots into a larger integrated brain-body music system involving collaboration with non-human machines designed to confront death, echological recursion and loss. like lee perry, he “don’t work with human beings” (eshun 1998: 63). captain murphy and snoop dogg take on the roles of sonic vapor entities and musical affordances in “dead man’s tetris”: “and now i’m left to keep you strong, and i kept you flying lotus” (flying lotus 2014). ellison recalls working with snoop dogg in an npr interview about you’re dead!: . . . his music was the first music that i genuinely fell in love with as a kid, as a teenager, i heard the doggystyle album, and i was 10 years old—i was perfectly primed for that album. i was starting to be rebellious. i was starting to hate everything [laughs]. i was starting to see the dark side of the world. and then there’s this guy from la, with these beats that sound like la. and it was just—it was perfect. it changed me. i always wanted to make music after that; i wanted to make beats after that. . . .to have snoop on there, in the way that he’s on the album—he’s like a gatekeeper, you know? like a bardo demon? exactly. it’s perfect that it’s him. he was like, “you know, i made a song like that back in the day! it was called “murder was the case”. i was like, “oh, you know, i might’ve heard that”. (2014) as cognition extends into the apparatus of musical affordance, ego and individual identity entangle with sonic non-human replicants. throughout the 20th century, these have increasingly taken the form of pop media artifacts. “murder was the case” had already narrated snoop dogg’s own “becoming-media” in death; the track’s music video begins with simulated news coverage of snoop dogg’s murder, then goes into an afterlife journey full of temptation, wish-fulfillment and corruption, before closing with snoop imprisoned in a buried casket (fig. 6). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoesjh7hcno&list=olak5uy_m7qcylqwvmx6pjxhu1tifnyvutekrekuc&index=6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogfvyshbeqa dancecult 15(1)34 figure 6. stills from “murder was the case”, left (courtesy snoopdoggtv) and “never catch me ft. kendrick lamar”, directed by hiro murai, right (courtesy flying lotus). flying lotus’s “never catch me” music video includes casket shots, but that 10-year-old snoop fan is in the box. the casket is a stark extended mind-machine music system that provides the ultimate space of deep listening (fig. 6). in “dead man’s tetris”, snoop dogg becomes a vapor flavor of the past self that he himself lives in living reference to, as a form in memory only. as gatekeeper within an echology that favors flavor over nutrient, snoop dogg hinders—holds up—the death of the contrived self. this is a form of shunyata, a construct built on all manner of cognitive affordances, at last manufactured, artificial, void. captain murphy—another “ghost captain”—is another hindrance. flying in his own alter-ego in ableton live, flying lotus accesses a domain of shamanic experience that “endows us with the facility of creating beings, entities that do exist and do have tangible effects” (brabec de mori 2015: 34). sound events from this world live on in the next. using silent sounds to access the spirit world manages that world’s ability to manifest in our own as illness, death and cures. in silent dimensions, shamanic listening activates “sonicoid” (sound-like) manifestations, which “take the form of beings, entities commonly called ‘spirits’ that act on the world ‘we’ perceive as real” (brabec de mori 2015: 37). they are mirrored through utterance and then left there, recorded in the spirit world, stored and made transferrable as sonic substance through some material platform. from there, the song can be replayed even when one does not hear it, for “a song exists also when it is not sung; a kind of silent transmutation, an act of transformation that takes place in the thoughts of the respective agent”, turns memory into spirit world when a song plays in our head (brabec de mori 2015: 36). it takes a special kind of listening to negotiate with the non-human agencies at work in the sonic substance. listening to silent sounds tends to be pathologized in western https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lxd0vv-ds8 reddell | other kinds of mind there: echologies of psychedelic sonic substance 35 industrial cultures as a form of schizophrenia and “hearing voices”, but in south american cosmogonies, thought is a form of recorded sound that affords extended cognition even when it is not audible. brabec de mori implicates an indigenous schizophonia by which our world lives on in the sonicoid copies that maintain the spirit world (2015: 37). flying lotus digitizes the maintenance of the extended mind-music machine, making the aptly named ableton live the mind and memory of his mixing desk. populated with the copies of his own living musical affordances, non-human sonic entities in digital stems, the vaporous, hauntological echologies here are the “twin or replicated domains where an informatics of desire—a desire to become information—distributes and disperses both consciousness and life into inhuman, inorganic, and extraterrestrial realms” (doyle 2011: 176). the informatic turn to glitch adds new dimensions to the psychedelic mind-machine music systems. with its tetris game bleeps and manipulated loop of queen’s “another one bites the dust”, “dead man’s tetris” compacts the novel form of collaboration with non-human machines—i don’t work with human beings—that we hear throughout you’re dead! these person-scaled beings come from afar, through nanomedia-scaled wormholes, temporarily empty bits, glitches. they call to us, hail us—“hold up, hold up, i bet you thinking that we dead”—and turn us toward them and know themselves as others (flying lotus 2014). flying lotus treats this moment of hailing by his idol and alter-ego simulacra as the very peak of sampladelic experience, and it is the key crisis of the bardo and you’re dead!—“and now i’m left to keep you strong, and i kept you flying lotus” (flying lotus 2014). the sonic affordance sends its parting farewell to the listening dead as it turns to vapor. the glitch in the bardo simulator presents an opportunity to disrupt and distrust psychedelic rhetoric, which is helpful, but challenging. a recurring trope of psychedelic theory typically accommodates and absorbs its own disruption. but in glitch, the inability to communicate brought on by the ego-death simulation conundrum cannot be assimilated. it stubbornly remains “a deficit in the ecodelic experience” (doyle 2011: 183). stuttering, skipping, glitch can never be made to say something that it didn’t because there’s nothing there in the vapor gap of the glitch, and in this way, this silent sound is life-affirming. the glitch in the ego-death mortality simulation is that you’re not dead. all the same, we must one day bid farewell to the many sonic affordances that now occupy our minds, hold us up, which we hear silently, often whether we want to or not, so many that we love, that made us “us”. notes 1 see david toop’s (1995) evocative descriptions of the scene in ocean of sound. 2 published previously by faber & faber in 1998 in the uk as energy flash: a journey through rave music and dance culture. 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discography boards of canada. 1998. music has the right to children. warp records (lp): warplp55. <https://www.discogs.com/release/11778-boards-of-canada-music-has-the-right-tochildren>. ———. 2002. geogaddi. warp records (lp): warplp101. <https://www.discogs.com/release/24435-boards-of-canada-geogaddi>. ———. 2005. the campfire headphase. warp records (lp): warplp123. <https://www.discogs.com/release/541614-boards-of-canada-the-campfire-headphase>. flying lotus. 2012. until the quiet comes. warp records (lp): warplp230x. <https://www.discogs.com/release/3907816-flying-lotus-until-the-quiet-comes>. ———. 2014. you’re dead! warp records: (cd) warpcd256. <https://www.discogs.com/release/6151948-flying-lotus-youre-dead>. ———. 2019. flamagra. warp records (cd): warplcd291. <https://www.discogs.com/release/13660495-flying-lotus-flamagra>. the future sound of london. 1994. lifeforms. astralwerks (cd): asw 6113-2. <https://www.discogs.com/release/2512-the-future-sound-of-london-lifeforms>. 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<https://www.discogs.com/release/1873013-pink-floyd-the-dark-side-of-the-moon>. ———. 1975. wish you were here. harvest (lp): shvl 814. <https://www.discogs.com/release/463597-pink-floyd-wish-you-were-here>. https://www.discogs.com/release/11778-boards-of-canada-music-has-the-right-to-children https://www.discogs.com/release/11778-boards-of-canada-music-has-the-right-to-children https://www.discogs.com/release/24435-boards-of-canada-geogaddi https://www.discogs.com/release/541614-boards-of-canada-the-campfire-headphase https://www.discogs.com/release/3907816-flying-lotus-until-the-quiet-comes https://www.discogs.com/release/6151948-flying-lotus-youre-dead https://www.discogs.com/release/13660495-flying-lotus-flamagra https://www.discogs.com/release/2512-the-future-sound-of-london-lifeforms https://www.discogs.com/master/196829-jefferson-airplane-white-rabbit-plastic-fantastic-lover https://www.discogs.com/master/196829-jefferson-airplane-white-rabbit-plastic-fantastic-lover https://www.discogs.com/release/155071-the-klf-chill-out https://www.discogs.com/release/13139791-lee-scratch-perry-disco-devil-vol-2-6-more-classic-discomixes-from-the-black-ark-studio-1977-8 https://www.discogs.com/release/13139791-lee-scratch-perry-disco-devil-vol-2-6-more-classic-discomixes-from-the-black-ark-studio-1977-8 https://www.discogs.com/release/8277230-orb-the-orbs-adventures-beyond-the-ultraworld https://www.discogs.com/release/8277230-orb-the-orbs-adventures-beyond-the-ultraworld https://www.discogs.com/release/2644617-pink-floyd-atom-heart-mother https://www.discogs.com/release/1873013-pink-floyd-the-dark-side-of-the-moon https://www.discogs.com/release/463597-pink-floyd-wish-you-were-here reddell | other kinds of mind there: echologies of psychedelic sonic substance 39 queen. 1980. “another one bites the dust”. emi (7”): emi 5102. <https://www.discogs.com/release/553834-queen-another-one-bites-the-dust>. space ( jimmy cauty). 1990. space. klf communications (cd): space cd 1. <https://www.discogs.com/release/116942-space-space>. filmography boards of canada. 1998. “aquarius”. youtube, 5:58. uploaded 25 november 2020. <https://youtu.be/rrcr5hycxh0?si=luytcxxurbagvicp>, (accessed 1 april 2023). ———. 1998. “bocuma”. youtube, 1:36. uploaded 25 november 2020. <https://youtu.be/sswyb9z5fny?si=qjr-qhydglcqsejc>, (accessed 1 april 2023). ———. 1998. “kaini industries”. youtube, 1:00. uploaded 25 november 2020. <https://youtu.be/uvdc6djz-xi?si=cl8ovkgr2lto9rf0>, (accessed 1 april 2023). ———. 1998. music has the right to children. youtube playlist. uploaded 25 november 2020. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd920s0dgeu&list=pls9zwqxsceujag0jqh4dbyl gmqovmrqme>, (accessed 1 april 2023). ———. 1998. “roygbiv”. youtube, 2:32. uploaded 25 november 2020. <https://youtu.be/0nnqgdznwhu?si=udxn68e-wr1l2-ly>, (accessed 1 april 2023). ———. 1998. “turquoise hexagon sun”. youtube, 5:08. uploaded 25 november 2020. <https://youtu.be/rqef_-y_imo?si=6bky7cmqlaprawwv>, (accessed 1 april 2023). ———. 1998. “wildlife analysis”. youtube, 1:16. uploaded 25 november 2020. <https://youtu. be/qd920s0dgeu?si=9snvt7ykuwxxjqyi>, (accessed 1 april 2023). ———. 2002. geogaddi. youtube playlist. uploaded 2 october 2020. <https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=gi_jqn_qdc4&list=pl5smxyhicz5l9fs8akali7lr-qo-ua7vf>, (accessed 1 april 2023). -———. 2005. the campfire headphase (full album). youtube, 1:07:05. uploaded 6 march 2021. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhwaebdvyog>, (accessed 1 april 2023). flying lotus. 2012. until the quiet comes. youtube playlist. uploaded 1 october 2020. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6x7jy95lwa&list=olak5uy_ lcn3cbblzbirqpj3auikwhjwa9rgistvw>, (accessed 1 april 2023). ———. 2014. “the boys who died in their sleep”. youtube, 1:50. uploaded 24 november 2020. <https://youtu.be/wlkxka9jirm?si=xpecl_yz8xnwgs-v>, (accessed 1 april 2023). ———. 2014. “dead man’s tetris”. youtube, 2:25. uploaded 24 november 2020. <https:// 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(deluxe edition). youtube playlist. uploaded 24 november 2020. <https://youtu.be/a7zsaxgz3he?si=n0av6mkwairjsp68>, (accessed 1 april 2023). ———. 2019. flamagra. youtube playlist. uploaded 28 september 2020. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmfe_ea5y4m&list=olak5uy_ noognmyqa5ynrqo8ilw8ymfa2xf0sgxhi>, (accessed 1 april 2023). the future sound of london. 1994. lifeforms. youtube playlist. uploaded 7 october 2019. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scp0ovgtmza&list=olak5uy_lpgly3q3btdwew5ja7y71ffzpl08qbpc>, (accessed 1 april 2023). https://www.discogs.com/release/553834-queen-another-one-bites-the-dust https://www.discogs.com/release/116942-space-space https://youtu.be/rrcr5hycxh0%3fsi%3dluytcxxurbagvicp https://youtu.be/sswyb9z5fny%3fsi%3dqjr-qhydglcqsejc https://youtu.be/uvdc6djz-xi%3fsi%3dcl8ovkgr2lto9rf0 https://www.youtube.com/watch%3fv%3dqd920s0dgeu%26list%3dpls9zwqxsceujag0jqh4dbylgmqovmrqme https://www.youtube.com/watch%3fv%3dqd920s0dgeu%26list%3dpls9zwqxsceujag0jqh4dbylgmqovmrqme 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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmfe_ea5y4m&list=olak5uy_noognmyqa5ynrqo8ilw8ymfa2xf0sgxhi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scp0ovgtmza&list=olak5uy_lpgly3q-3btdwew5ja7y71ffzpl08qbpc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scp0ovgtmza&list=olak5uy_lpgly3q-3btdwew5ja7y71ffzpl08qbpc dancecult 15(1)40 jefferson airplane. 1967. “white rabbit (audio)”. youtube, 2:33. uploaded 17 october 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnjm_jc7j_4>, (accessed 1 april 2023). the klf. 1990. chill out (full album). youtube, 44:18. uploaded 21 october 2014. <https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwebqcrw7o4>, (accessed 1 april 2023). ———. 1990. “elvis on the radio, steel guitar in my soul”. youtube. 3:01. uploaded 21 october 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwebqcrw7o4&t=1060s>, (accessed 1 april 2023). murai, hiro. 2014. “flying lotus never catch me ft. kendrick lamar”. youtube, 4:46. uploaded 1 october 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lxd0vv-ds8>, (accessed 1 april 2023). the orb. 1991. “back side of the moon”. youtube, 14:15. uploaded 28 february 2020. <https://youtu.be/kaneki2pkro?si=vuv5lhiz-lw-khtu>, (accessed 1 april 2023). ———. 1991. “earth (gaia)”. youtube, 9:49. uploaded 28 february 2020. <https://youtu.be/ejnyt8wnmpc?si=ym6hk04guytpfq8n>, (accessed 1 april 2023). ———. 1991. the orb’s adventures beyond the ultraworld. youtube playlist. youtube, 14:15. uploaded 28 february 2020. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knfjpmvbqg0&list=o lak5uy_mkoc8wxczkwynhguwl3pt9wdqzd2eobgy>, (accessed 1 april 2023). ———. 1991. “supernova at the end of the universe”. youtube, 11:57. uploaded 28 february 2020. <https://youtu.be/jrr0w7leiyw?si=711rbgxj4ndkfnuk>, (accessed 1 april 2023). queen. “another one bites the dust”. youtube, 3:34. uploaded 31 july 2018. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pquenemwsdq>, (accessed 1 april 2023). snoop dogg. 1994. “murder was the case”. youtube, 4:21. uploaded 29 june 2016. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogfvyshbeqa>, (accessed 1 april 2023). space. 1990. space. youtube playlist. uploaded 1 november 2008. <https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=vnjw94mb3wk&list=pl1rjqlyh1yfblrwegpae4z4vp14ero33d>, (accessed 1 april 2023). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnjm_jc7j_4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwebqcrw7o4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwebqcrw7o4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwebqcrw7o4&t=1060s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lxd0vv-ds8 https://youtu.be/kaneki2pkro%3fsi%3dvuv5lhiz-lw-khtu https://youtu.be/ejnyt8wnmpc%3fsi%3dym6hk04guytpfq8n https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knfjpmvbqg0&list=olak5uy_mkoc8wxczkwynhguwl3pt9wdqzd2eobgy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knfjpmvbqg0&list=olak5uy_mkoc8wxczkwynhguwl3pt9wdqzd2eobgy https://youtu.be/jrr0w7leiyw%3fsi%3d711rbgxj4ndkfnuk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pquenemwsdq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogfvyshbeqa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnjw94mb3wk&list=pl1rjqlyh1yfblrwegpae4z4vp14ero33d https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnjw94mb3wk&list=pl1rjqlyh1yfblrwegpae4z4vp14ero33d nightlife studies: past, present and future dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 15(1): 93–112 issn 1947-5403 ©2023 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.05 nightlife studies: past, present and future jordi nofre nova university lisbon (pt) manuel garcia-ruiz instituto universitário de lisboa (pt) abstract this article attempts to present a comprehensive, synthetic and critical epistemological review of the interdisciplinary field of nightlife studies from the late 19th century to the present, unveiling a fascinating interplay between an “alternative cultural approach”, a “community approach” and a “geographical turn” that arose in the midto late 2000s. in turn, the article sheds light on the strong commitment that many nightologists showed to the future of nightlife during the pandemic, emphasizing how fundamental nightlife is for community-building, multicultural understanding and socio-emotional well-being at individual and collective levels. in its final part, and more than presenting a new research agenda, the article argues for the need to adopt a “militant/activist socioenvironmental approach” that allows shedding light on the old and new challenges and opportunities that exist on the road to promoting a greener, more resilient, inclusive and egalitarian nightlife. keywords: nightlife studies, comprehensive, epistemological review jordi nofre is fct associate research professor in urban geography at the interdisciplinary centre of social sciences, nova university lisbon. his main research focuses on nightlife, tourism and urban change. he is the coordinator of lxnights research group and co-founder of the international night studies network. email: <jnofre@fcsh.unl.pt>. website: <https://www.researchgate.net/profile/jordi-nofre> manuel garcia-ruiz is a researcher in sociology at the center of research and studies in sociology of the university institute of lisbon (cies-iscte), portugal. his main research focuses on nightlife, festivals and leisure and cultural and creative industries. he is the coordinator and founder of the international night studies network. email: <urbiteit@gmail.com>. website: <http://vanhoben.com/> feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.05 mailto:jnofre%40fcsh.unl.pt?subject= https://www.researchgate.net/profile/jordi-nofre mailto:urbiteit%40gmail.com?subject= http://vanhoben.com/ dancecult 15(1)94 introduction the recent global coronavirus pandemic has unveiled the importance of the “nocturnal city” (shaw 2018) for the social, cultural and economic life of many people across the globe (shaw 2018; see also chatterton and hollands 2003, laughey 2006 and haslam 2015). covid-19-related restrictions implemented at local, regional and national levels (such as lockdowns and night curfews) significantly affected the night-time leisure economy in many worldwide regions while stripping night lovers (mainly belonging to gender, ethnic and sexual orientation minorities) of one of their most important spaces for community building and socio-emotional well-being (nofre 2023 and malmquist et al. 2023). at the same time, this unprecedented scenario put nightlife-related professionals and food and beverage sector workers in check. meanwhile, severe mobility restrictions hindered night shift jobs, highlighting the importance of invisible workers such as garbage collectors, transporters, emergency doctors and other professionals who dedicate their nights to guaranteeing the well-being and the smooth functioning of life in society (leonard 1998 and hochschild 2016). however, paradoxically, pandemic-related restrictions also addressed some negative impacts derived from the expansion of the night-time (leisure) economy in central urban areas of many cities occurred since the early 2000s, such as the reduction of waste, light and atmospheric and noise pollution (european environment agency 2020). be that as it may, three years after the onset of covid-19, tens of millions of europeans go out every week in the evening and night to dine, meet with friends, or even dance. in turn, millions more work during night-time hours in logistics centers, back-office centers, central markets, essential services and health care institutions. many people in these groups take night-time public transport, ride-sharing vehicles or their own vehicles to get across the city. meanwhile, informal workers (e.g. domestic workers, street food vendors, drug dealers and sex workers) also work during night-time hours, sometimes taking advantage of the liminal anonymity of the darkness. the subject of this article is the work of a small group of academics on the nightlife of our cities and towns. the social and policy-enhancing impact of their work is often unknown to most academic and local institutions, and to citizens in general. their work is of particular importance as they present fundamental empirical knowledge on the long road to achieving more inclusive, egalitarian, safe and sustainable nightlife. as will be seen in this article, many of these scholars are relatively young and increasingly diverse in terms of gender, sexual orientation and ethno-geographic background. they (i) offer brilliant, detailed explanations of how we dance, behave and relate to each other in nightlife environments according to social class, gender, sexual orientation, age and cultural and ethnic background; (ii) claim to prevent the tangible and intangible cultural heritage of nightlife from falling into oblivion; (iii) denounce all the processes of inequality and segregation, as well as the heteropatriarchal, racist and classist violence that still characterizes some nightlife scenes and spaces across the globe and (iv) allow the voice of those residents affected by the nofre and garcia-ruiz | nightlife studies: past, present and future 95 unwanted presence of high concentrations of nightlife venues in the immediate vicinity of their homes to be considered in the public sphere of opinion. they are the so-called nightlife studies scholars, or in rob shaw’s (2018) terminology, nightologists. the text below attempts to present a comprehensive, synthetic and critical epistemological review of the interdisciplinary field of nightlife studies from the late 19th century to the present, unveiling a fascinating interplay between an “alternative cultural approach”, a “community approach” and a “geographical turn” that arose in the mid-late 2000s. in turn, the article sheds light on the strong commitment that many nightologists showed to the future of nightlife during the pandemic period. they emphasized how fundamental nightlife is for community-building, multicultural understanding and socio-emotional well-being at both individual and collective level. finally, this article argues for the need to adopt a “militant/activist socio-environmental approach” that sheds light on old and new challenges, and on opportunities to promote a greener, more resilient, inclusive and egalitarian nightlife. the authors of this article make special mention of those they consider pioneers, but the paper will focus on the epistemological development of three well-defined periods in nightlife studies over the last four decades. (i) spanning the early 1980s to late 2000s, the first period included the institutionalization of nightlife studies as a new independent research subfield and the so-called “big shake” in the late 2000s. this period closed with the rise of a fascinating interplay between an “alternative cultural approach”, a “community approach” and a “geographical turn”. (ii) from late 2000s to the outbreak of the current coronavirus pandemic in early 2020, the second period contained the most vibrant, exciting and flourishing years of nightlife studies. (iii) and from early 2020 to the time of writing, a third period has been characterized by an uncertain present and an unknown future. the third period poses extremely complex challenges for the future of the nightlife industry. more than a century of building the cradle one might argue, without any risk of being wrong, that the volume of scholarly works about “daytime cities” outweighs the study of the “nocturnal city”. as rob shaw points out in his indispensable book the nocturnal city, “the majority of our research is diurnal” (2018:1). despite this uncontestable fact, the interdisciplinary sub-field of nightlife studies counts an institutionalized history of more than four decades, as we show in this section. however, pioneers deserve to be recognized. the first books about the night in our contemporary times1 date back to the age of the industrial city when some journalists, writers and travelers depicted the urban nightscape of important and vibrant western cities such as paris, london, new york and barcelona, among many others (e.g. delvau 1862, 1867; sala 1862; ritchie 1869; coroleu 1887; darzens and willette 1889; bembo 1912; nevill 1926; de wissant 1928; shaw 1931). beginning in the 1930s and increasing afterwards, a few historians and sociologists—mainly from the united states and the united kingdom—began attending to the role (and multiple dark sides) of nightlife with respect to the reproduction of modern urban societies. these researchers recognized nightlife as a subject for scholarly analysis dancecult 15(1)96 (e.g. cressey 1932; ostrander 1972; erenberg 1974, 1984, 1986; marrus 1974; morris 1980; travis 1983). early 1980s – early 2010s: from square one to the seeds for an epistemological change the institutionalization of nightlife studies as a research subfield began in the 1980s and was further consolidated in later years. at this point, the importance of nightlife in the construction of youth identities had already been mentioned by some subculturalist scholars from birmingham’s centre for contemporary cultural studies (e.g. chambers 1975; clarke et al. 1975; jefferson 1975; mcrobbie 1984). the early development of nightlife studies was primarily focused on four main research topics: (i) drug consumption, alcohol consumption and violence in western urban nightscapes of that time (e.g. cosper, okraku and neumann 1987; homel and clark 1994; winlow and hall 2006; hughes, morleo and bellis 2008); (ii) drunk-driving during and after night-time leisure practices in north america, united kingdom and other anglophone countries (e.g. cameron 1982; massie, campbell and williams 1995; keall, frith and patterson 2004); (iii) the night-time leisure economy as a main strategy and mechanism for the socioeconomic revitalization and urban regeneration of degraded central areas of the city (bianchini 1990, 1995; lovatt and o’connor 1995); (iv) the complex, non-linear interplay (both positive and negative) between venue licensing, alcohol regulation, violence and crime (block and block 1995; chatterton 2002; talbot 2004; hadfield and measham 2009). the 1990s, however, were also a turning point for the development of nightlife studies as they moved away from the so-called social and cultural approach. a particular academic moment and four seminal works are fundamental to explaining such an epistemological transition. paul willis’ common culture (1990) notes how central nightlife is to the construction of youth identities in postmodern societies. and sarah thornton’s club cultures (1996) introduced the term “club cultures” as a lens for youth identity in the era of postmodernity. thornton paved the way for deeper research on youth subcultures, nightlife consumption and socio-spatial segregation, which would become a central topic for many nightologists in later years (feixa and nofre, 2012). the third seminal work is ben malbon’s clubbing: dancing, ecstasy and vitality, which explores “the sociospatial-temporal and bodily-emotional practices which constitute the clubbing experience” (1999: 3). malbon’s book became fundamental for clubbing-related research in later years. last but not least, the fourth seminal work that we should mention is paul chatterton and robert hollands’ urban nightscapes: youth cultures, pleasure spaces, and corporate power (2003). the authors carry out a sensational depiction of the expansion and extreme commodification of the night-time leisure economy in central areas of the post-industrial city, noting both positive (revitalization of degraded central areas of the city) and negative (marginalization of lowincome groups, episodes of violence against outsiders, gentrification, spatial displacement of traditional leisure spaces and practices at evening and night and loss of cultural heritage) impacts at spatial, social and cultural levels. nofre and garcia-ruiz | nightlife studies: past, present and future 97 these four seminal works mentioned above must be put into relation with a younger generation of scholars, especially since the 2000s. this generation comprised an increased presence of women and non-white/non-western scholars, giving nightlife studies a tremendous shake. as happens in most academic renewal processes, there are always pioneers who open the way to new lines of research. undoubtedly, their boldness should be mentioned and recognized. this is the case, for example, of celeste fraser delgado and josé esteban muñoz, who edited the brilliant anthology everynight life in latin/o america (1997). this magnificent work explores the history and potential function of dance in social struggle in both north and south america, and it constitutes a valuable reference in the study of the latin nightlife scene, especially in the united states. interestingly, this anthology exemplifies how this progressive generation of scholars broke with the dominant male-centered, western-centered, class-based nightlife scholarship and policy. this approach to the night was firmly based on the interplay between the criminalistic or regulatory perspective (the night as a synonym of sin, immorality, and disorder) and the neoliberal economic perspective (that views the night as space-time for profits and yields). as an example of the emergence this paradigm in nightlife studies, one should mention academic input from southern and eastern europe (fouce 2000; blázquez and morera 2002; brewster and broughton 2006; sánchez-fuarros 2008; llanos 2015) and from the global south and global east (chongyi 2007; farrer 2008; chew 2009). this work challenged the british interpretation of nightlife as a catalyst for the revitalization of degraded urban areas. and it explicitly recognized that the night and the ‘nocturnalization of daily life’ (koslofsky 2011, shaw 2018), are not concepts that exclusively belong to the western world (ginesi 2013; buchakjian 2015; de góis 2015; song, pan and chen 2016; čengić and martin-diaz 2018; sánchez-garcía 2018). another excellent example of the emergence of such a new social and cultural approach to the study of nightlife—especially since the late 2000s and early 2010s—is found in works that explored how marginalized peoples experience the night in a repressive and punitive neoliberal urban context (boogaarts 2008; hunter 2010; messer 2010; steil 2011). this experience is connected with the emergence of complex spatial, social, cultural and community impacts resulting from the expansion of the night-time leisure economy into central areas of the post-industrial city. this experience of the night is often linked to gentrification, which ushers in the displacement of local communities and the marginalization of low-class (often racialized) actors of the local night. interestingly, some authors note that marginalization and (even violent) repression of marginal actors of the local night (such as street dealers, street drugs consumers, aged sex workers and night wanderers with low purchasing power) and especially of racialized youth of urban peripheries, have been a central characteristic of the night in the current neoliberal urban era (chatterton and hollands 2003; talbot 2004; shildrick and macdonald 2006; talbot and böse 2007). also, in line with this, we should mention brilliant works by authors such as martina böse (2005), david grazian (2009) and shelly ronen (2010), who have denounced commercial nightlife for its tendencies to exacerbate inequalities that are intrinsic to the neoliberal city. dancecult 15(1)98 from the early 2010s to the coronavirus pandemic the focus on inequalities, marginalization and repression was central in the development of nightlife studies over the past decade, up until the 2020 outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic (e.g. may 2014; iturriaga 2015; søgaard 2017; kosnick 2018; sedano 2019). many recent authors have widely demonstrated that the boom of commercial night clubbing in central areas of post-industrial cities is very linked to the arrival of neoliberal urban forces such as gentrification and touristification (e.g. hae 2011; mattson 2015; campkin and marshall 2018; bottà 2019; eldridge 2019; dos santos and de andrade 2019). these forces involve dramatic changes to the spatial, social and cultural fabric of the nocturnal city, while simultaneously tending to criminalize so-called “new deviant leisure”, or in other words, “activities that through their adherence to cultural values inscribed by consumer capitalism, have the potential to result in harm” (smith and raymen 2018: 63). the criminalistic perspective situates commercial and underground clubbing contexts as synonymous with violence and drug-fueled leisure (e.g. allaste and lagerspetz 2002; kavanaugh and anderson 2008; hunt, moloney and evans 2010; demant 2013; carlini and sánchez 2018). such an approach to clubbing scenes reflects “the struggle between middle-class moralism and popular demand” in the field of nightlife consumption in the post-industrial city (springhall 1999: 9). however, the criminalistic perspective regarding clubbing scenes found growing contestation among authors who, since the late 1990s, underlined how central both underground clubbing and self-organized night parties are for the construction of alternative, non-normative youth (and adult) identities (e.g. malbon 1998; pini 2001; st john 2009; henriques 2010; rief 2011; rodgers 2018). this particular critical cultural and social consideration of clubbing was rooted in research conducted in rave cultures, which can be defined as self-organized, informal, unlicensed parties often celebrated in (sometimes abandoned) buildings, old factories and warehouses. the term “rave” has its origins in the wild bohemian parties of the 1950s that belonged to london soho’s beatnik set (nash 2017). but the expansion of what we know today as raves initially originated in thatcher’s britain and later extended through europe in the 1990s ( john 2015). at that time, some scholars rapidly associated raves with the drug-fueled hedonism of post-modern youth (redhead 1993; knutagard 1996; reynolds 1999). however, interestingly, other authors such as fritz pointed out that raves emerged as “a revolutionary political movement . . . to create a new community model” defying the neoliberal urban world since the 1980s (1999: 216; see also luckman 2001 and john 2004). there is no doubt that raves, free-parties or temporary autonomous zones “historically referred to grassroots organized, anti-establishment and unlicensed all-night dance parties, featuring electronically produced dance music, such as techno, house, trance and drum and bass” (anderson and kavanaugh 2007: 499). at the same time, raves were also “a vital part of the lives of many people” (takahashi and olaveson 2003: 72). however, a direct connection between rave culture and radical politicization of youth still seems tenuous at least three decades after the birth of raves. nofre and garcia-ruiz | nightlife studies: past, present and future 99 a research sub-field that counts with an official international network the 2010s have been terrific regarding the quality and number of works dealing with nightlife-related issues, not only in european cities but across the globe. it also witnessed the foundation of some independent research groups on the urban night in both the global north and the global south, as well as the creation of the first international night studies network in 2019.2 this represents the latest step on the road to the institutionalization of nightlife studies as an independent research subfield. this latter process has three fundamental facts. firstly, in 2012 the social sciences and humanities research council of canada granted the project “the urban night” to william straw from mcgill university. although the project was initially based in canada, straw and his team have increasingly been collaborating with scholars and networks based in other countries, mainly from the global south. two years after “the urban night” started, a group of young scholars from different portuguese institutions created lxnights, the first european group researching the urban night. moreover, we must underline the stadt nach acht conference (nights conference) held in berlin since 2016.3 this annual event has gathered a blend of academics and practitioners. it has been organized by club commission berlin in cooperation with the european network newnet, which aims to promote an attractive and more sustainable nightlife culture at international levels. interestingly, not long after the first stadt nach acht conference in november 2016, some attendees met again in london in july 2017 to participate in the tourism and the night symposium, organized by adam eldridge and andrew smith, both from the university of westminster. one year later, anna plyushteva (at that time, from the cosmopolis centre for urban research at vrije universiteit brussel) organized the international conference on the urban night: governance, diversity, mobility. it was held at the research centre for social studies at sofia university in june 2018. these successive scientific meetings sparked h2020 and erc grant proposals over these past five years (e.g. partyeurpe, jirun, euronights, night-we) and boosted new collaborations like edited books, coauthored publications and meetings. the first international night studies network was created in late 2019, and its coordination committee has chaired the annual international conference on night studies4. the first four editions of the conference in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 have enriched our picture of the sub-field of nightlife studies during the current pandemic times. nightlife studies under pandemic times: an uncertain present and an unknown future as in many other fields of social sciences, pandemic-related restrictions have affected the work plans of most of the researchers belonging to the sub-field of nightlife studies. they had an enormous impact on researchers’ abilities to conduct nightlife-related ethnographies, especially where curfews and lockdowns were implemented. as stellmach et al. argue, “a long-term participant observation approach may not be feasible in periods of acute public dancecult 15(1)100 health crisis, but the anthropological method is flexible and adaptable” (2018: 3). dehart points out the need to explore new “analytical and methodological strategies for addressing the current contingencies of research (im)mobility as well as illuminating important elements of our shifting global reality” (2020). during the coronavirus pandemic, nightlife studies continued an impressive amount and quality of production. we must mention a couple of publications that are meant to be central to the development of nightlife studies worldwide in the forthcoming years. the first is the collection transforming urban nightlife and the development of smart public spaces, edited by hisham abusaada, abeer elshater and dennis rodwell (2021). this collection counts a very wide geographical diversity of case studies (e.g. paris in france, tehran in iran, alexandria and cairo in egypt and lucknow in india, among others). it provides well-grounded empirical insights about the positive impact of transforming nocturnal public spaces into arenas for more meaningful experiences. this should encourage a greater sense of identity and community through enhancing cultural and social life in the public space at evening and night hours. the other publication that deserves our attention and admiration is queer nightlife (2021) by kemi adeyemi, kareem khubchandani and ramon rivera-servera. the book focuses on formal (bars and nightclubs) and informal (house parties) nightlife settings that make possible non-normative expressions of intimacy. it also underlines how risky commercial nightlife can be for queer and trans people considering growing homophobic and transphobic violence. the book gathers scholars and artists in a brilliant and engaging way, giving voice directly to queer and trans people (both white and non-white). the study of lgtbqi+ nightlife spaces and their importance for belonging, emancipation and identity within heteronormative, capitalist, urban settings worldwide has also seen recent relevant growth (gorman 2020; khubchandani 2020; rodríguez 2020; eeckhout, herreman and dhoest 2021; lee 2021). we also must mention the relevant number of empirical works published during the pandemic times on sexual violence in nightlife settings. they inform us about the resurgence of (hetero)patriarchal violence in times characterized by radical (and absolutely necessary) voices, discourses and grammars that work for the emancipation and liberation of women, gender minorities and sexual minorities (bulovec and eman 2020; jensen 2020; quigg et al. 2020, 2021; vaadal 2020, 2022). concerned with the recent and worrying rise of sexual violence in nightlife settings, many nightlife studies scholars have, over the past three years, focused their works on the interplay between regulation, policing, security and safety in the nocturnal city. this will continue to be an interesting topic once the pandemic restrictions have been lifted definitively. the reaffirmation of the ideal of the 24-hour city and the increasing importance of private security personnel in regulating the nocturnal city are examples of this scholarship (nofre et al. 2020 and wadds 2020). it strengthens the importance of nightlife settings as time-spaces where cultural values and market imperatives are negotiated in ways that are sometimes conflictual, sometimes beneficial for the community (drevenstdet 2020 and carah et al. 2021). conflictual tensions arising in nightlife settings remind us of nofre and garcia-ruiz | nightlife studies: past, present and future 101 the significant increase of alcohol and drug consumption per capita during youth leisure practices in the evening and night, especially in european countries during the years prior to the pandemic (brunn, brunner and mütsch 2021 and edland-gryt 2021). these past three years have known a growth of works taking the social and cultural approach to nightlife. alternative epistemological approaches that look beyond the interplay between the criminalistic/regulatory perspective and the neoliberal economicist perspective—touched upon in the first part of this article—proved fruitful in areas such as southeastern european countries, muslim countries, india and indonesia (e.g. olt et al. 2019; khubchandani 2020; khorsand, khayredin and alalhesabi 2021; salman et al. 2021). this parallels the acceleration of works offering new historical approaches to the emergence and development of nightlife in the late industrial world, especially in western contexts (e.g. binas-preisendörfer 2020; bird 2020; jones 2020; phillips and pögün-zander 2020; winn 2020). nightlife studies has recently experienced a stretch of golden years despite the global outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic in early 2020. naturally, this includes scholarship that assessed the impact pandemic-related restrictions had on the nightlife industry at local and global levels (e.g. nofre and garcia-ruiz 2023). two topics of special controversy were the prohibition of outdoor gatherings at night and the question of the dancefloor’s high probability of contagion. however, the scientific evidence is still very recent and not definitive (nofre et al. 2023). more particularly, a scholarly discourse criminalizing the night without any scientific base or with very weak methodology arose from fields like epidemiology and computational biology, dominating public opinion even at the global level (e.g. murillo-llorente and pérez-bermejo 2020; cheepsattayakorn, cheepsattayakorn and siriwanarangsun 2021). this epidemiological look on the night as a time-space of high contagion is radically opposed to other works offering a much more social look on the night in times of covid-19. in this sense, a growing number of scholars have argued that nightlife (both formal and informal) can enhance community building and resilience, innovation, sustainability, socioemotional well-being and mutual psychological support under current harsh times (karampampas 2020 and borges 2021). these authors speak about the tangible and intangible dimensions of the economic, social and cultural values of nightlife; they study the extreme importance of night-time leisure practices for many adolescents, teenagers, young adults and adults who suffered psychoemotionally from the lockdown and closure of nightlife venues (anderson and knee 2021 and nofre 2023). final remarks this article has attempted to present a comprehensive, synthetic and critical epistemological review of the interdisciplinary field of nightlife studies from the late 19th century to the present. notably, the part that covers the midto late 2000s up to the coronavirus outbreak three years ago has provided a good overview of new epistemological trends. these trends signal the simultaneous emergence of an “alternative cultural approach”, a “community approach” and a “geographical turn” in nightlife studies. interestingly, this triple turn dancecult 15(1)102 emerged in the mid-2000s as a result of a progressive entry into the academy of a new, younger generation of scholars. they included a greater presence of women, non-white and non-western scholars who rapidly began to break with the dominant male-centered, western-centered, class-based academic and policy approach to nightlife. finally, the article has shed light on the strong commitment that many nightologists showed to the future of nightlife during the pandemic period, emphasizing how fundamental nightlife is for community-building, multicultural understanding and socio-emotional well-being at both individual and collective levels. the number of exciting topics that currently characterize the interdisciplinary field of nightlife studies is enormous. given the limited space allotted to this final section, their enumeration would even merit an entire article. however, more than presenting a new research agenda, this final section aims at calling for adopting a “militant/activist socioenvironmental approach” as a response to the growing challenges posed by the climate emergency, which may seriously affect our nightlife practices. the climate emergency and the coronavirus pandemic have revealed the lack of environmental resilience in the plans of nightlife businesses and in the different tools of nightlife governance (nofre and garciaruiz 2023). as the authors argue: [despite the fact that] some nightlife entrepreneurs have started to deploy a significant number of initiatives for the ‘green’ transformation of their businesses, public support through eu next generation funds lacks in 37% of eu countries, leading the nightlife industry into a future of complex uncertainty in at least 10 of the 27 eu countries. interestingly, the fact that private actors have started to make moves to adapt their businesses and venues to europe’s ecological urban transition should directly challenge the scientific community in terms of establishing the ‘greening’ of the nightlife industry as a new topic in our interdisciplinary research agenda. . . . this line of action emerges as very interesting for the scientific community, as it would allow [both researchers and governments] to monitor of the adaptation of the nightlife industry to europe’s ecological urban transition as well as to assess (quantitatively and qualitatively) the fulfilment of the objectives set for the implementation of low carbon cities in our continent. (nofre and garcia-ruiz 2023: 10) at the intersection between the current uncertain scenario and an unknown future, a robust, well-grounded knowledge is necessary for reflecting on our future nights. what role should the nocturnal city have in the successful achievement of sustainable development goals? being aware that practically all the nightlife studies scholars love the night and their work (which, in many cases, is part of a very personal lifestyle), the urgent need arises to adopt a “militant/activist socio-environmental approach”. nightologists could contribute to promoting greener, more resilient, more inclusive and egalitarian nights. this “ecomilitant/activist approach” in the interdisciplinary field of nightlife studies should not make us forget the (growing) existence of a wide range of inequalities and injustices that continue to characterize a large part of the nightlife scenes and spaces of our cities. nofre and garcia-ruiz | nightlife studies: past, present and future 103 acknowledgements this work was supported by fundação para a ciência e a tecnologia (ceecind/01171/2017, sfrh/bd/121842/2016), centro interdisciplinar de ciências sociais da universidade nova de lisboa and centro de investigação e estudos de sociologia—instituto universitário de lisboa. notes 1 here, we want to note the well-grounded research carried out by historians, anthropologists and archaeologists about the night in classical antiquity. see gonlin and nowell (2018) and ker and wessels (2020). 2 for further information on the network, please visit: <https://nightologists.hypotheses.org/>. 3 for further information, please visit: <https://lxnights.hypotheses.org>. 4 for further information on the annual editions of the conference (including all proceedings books published for each annual edition of the conference), please visit: <https://icnslx.com>. references abussada, hisham, abeer elshater and dennis rodwell (eds.). 2021. transforming urban nightlife and the development of 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london and manchester”. ethnic & racial studies 30(1): 95–118. <https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870601006579>. thornton, sarah. 1996. club cultures: music, media, and subcultural capital. middletown, ct: wesleyan university press. travis, dempsey jerome. 1983. autobiography of black jazz. chicago, il: urban research institute. vaadal, kristine. 2022. “from hooking up to staying in? women negotiating appropriate sexuality in nightlife with age”. sexualities 25(8): 1111–25. <https://doi.org/10.1177%2f13634607211033866>. https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2019-0024 https://doi.org/10.1080/13676260600635599 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1362480616660188 https://doi.org/10.1080/09687637.2017.1279588 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.habitatint.2016.07.009 https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2017-000534 https://www.jstor.org/stable/44368995 https://doi.org/10.1080%2f0042098042000194160 https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870601006579 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f13634607211033866 dancecult 15(1)112 –– –– ––. 2020. “navigating nightlife: women’s discourses on unwanted attention in nightlife settings in norway”. gender, place & culture 27(7): 1023–43. <https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2019.1654982>. wadds, phillip. 2020. policing nightlife: security, transgression and urban order. new york: routledge. wijaya, bambang sukma. 2021. “consuming midnights: indonesian youths’ stay-up-late lifestyle in branded places”. international journal of interdisciplinary cultural studies 17(1): 17–30. <https://doi.org/10.18848/2327-008x/cgp/v17i01/17-30>. willis, paul e. 1990. common culture: symbolic work at play in the everyday cultures of the young. milton keynes: open university press. winlow, simon and steve hall. 2006. violent night: urban leisure and contemporary culture. oxford, uk: berg. winn, harriet. 2020. “‘oh my god, i’m home’: lesbian nightlife in 1990s central auckland”. women’s studies journal 34(1–2): 48–58. <http://www.wsanz.org.nz/journal/docs/wsjnz_34_1-2_winn_48-58.pdf>. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2019.1654982 https://doi.org/10.18848/2327-008x/cgp/v17i01/17-30 http://www.wsanz.org.nz/journal/docs/wsjnz_34_1-2_winn_48-58.pdf no way back michelle lhooq independent researcher <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.09> there are raves that remind you what it is to be alive, and then there are the rest. you never know when a party will crack you open, but the secret sauce often includes these ingredients: djs who weave ideas into tapestries of sound, hours long enough to bend the space-time continuum (12 hours is often the sweet spot); substances that encourage mind-expansion over tunnel vision; a collective desire to go deep. raves aren’t easy. sometimes they rip you up, spit you out, conjure demons. the muck lodged in your psyche gets unstuck, worked out and purged through the body. but then you break into the great beyond. there is one party renowned in the dance music underground for reliably bestowing this deliverance. it is a party with a cult following so strong that we think of it as techno thanksgiving, a family reunion for the american rave scene. this party is also the contemporary torchbearer of the detroit rave continuum, which stretches back to the very roots of rave history. this party is called no way back. no way back is a heavy acid zone. the djs who throw it are associated with the esteemed music labels interdimensional transmissions in detroit and the bunker in new york, and the tight-knit crew are acid house and techno freaks. the burbling squelch of the 303 is like a layer of oil that oozes out of the speakers from the moment the party begins at midnight and winds down in the afternoon. wonky synthesizers that sound like the metallic wails of spaceships landing, the gurgling of machines being burped, the sizzle of brains frying. slide around and hear it hiss. at some point over its 16-year lifespan, it became a crucial part of no way back’s lore that it is an lsd party. nobody talks about this explicitly; the organizers don’t go around dosing the punch or anything silly. it’s just a thing that is understood implicitly, and this unspoken endeavor to dive down the wormhole collectively creates a sort of psychedelic safe space to get really weird and wig out. “when you roll in, you can expect to be immersed into a world with one purpose”, explained the bunker dj and producer jasen loveland, who passed away in 2021 but whose spirit remains embedded in the party. “to make you lose your fucking mind”. i have been attending no way back since 2016, and at the last one, i worried that the cultural forces currently turning global rave culture into a boring version of social media-saturated entertainment would not spare this party, despite everyone’s best intentions. thankfully, i was wrong, and once again left with a sense of total spiritual realignment. so i reached out to the dj crew to understand how no way back manages to reach a dancefloor consciousness of the highest order. there are almost no interviews or press about this party online, but after much cajoling, emailing and rescheduling, i finally got bryan kasenic, brendan m gillen (aka bmg) and erika—several key djs in the no way back crew—on the phone. the first thing they did was point me towards the flier for the very first no way back (see fig. 1) in detroit in december 2007. stated right there, in plain text against a mossy green background, was the party’s manifesto—a statement of intent that still holds true: join us for a rave celebration, where we return to the source, to what inspired us in the first place. our home is in the underground. long before the years of nerf rave, before our music moved into nightclubs, before you had to go see your favorite dj play a trance club or sushi bar, there was an underground. warehouse and gallery parties that were about an environment, a full immersion in the experience of sound. for no way back this is our goal. we shun nostalgia, but welcome a return to the original essence. figure 1. no way back, first flier, 1997. courtesy of no way back. detroit’s electronic music scene in the 2000s was experiencing a nadir, gillen explained. in the late’90s, a media-fueled moral panic over ecstasy use had resulted in a nationwide crackdown on rave culture—and detroit “clamped down hard”, according to a red bull music academy’s report, “breaking up parties, writing tickets and occasionally even brutalizing ravers” (glazer 2014). the actions of the police had a chilling effect on illegal warehouse party organizers, but new clubs, bars and other legal nightlife establishments began to take their place. these venues, however, had 2:00 am closing times and revenue models based around alcohol sales. “i was sick of going to parties and seeing the djs right in front of a pool table, and looking at my reflection in a coors sign. i just found that offensive”, said gillen. “the detroit rave scene in the’90s was anti-alcohol. we didn’t like what happened to people who drink all the time.” at now-legendary acid house parties at the music institute, or by legendary detroit promoters like dean major and analog systems, punters danced all night to druggy anthems like “jesus loves the acid” by ecstasy club and garden of eden’s “the garden of eden”, often on just a $5 hit of lsd. “there was an open culture around it”, gillen said. “people were transforming their lives, and this was a tool to get out of their normal boring jobs and become a really amazing creative person. it was a really fascinating time”. no way back was thus conceived as a return to the source: the original ’90s midwestern rave culture and its anarchic, psychedelic roots. accordingly, the music played at the party reflects the soul of the city. “you can ask someone to play ‘psychedelic,’ and they might come in and play a really fast psytrance set”,kasenic said. “i don’t know if there’s an objective way to define psychedelic music, but because the party is from detroit, there’s so much emphasis on funk”. “if you ask any detroit house or techno artist what their inspirations are, george clinton and parliament-funkadelic are going to come up”, added gillen, noting that maggot brain, funkadelic’s third studio album, was allegedly recorded while the band was heavily dosed on acid. this strain of detroit psychedelia connects george clinton to richie hawtin, a seminal figure of ’90s detroit rave culture who, under his plastikman moniker, released an album called sheet 1 in a perforated cover that looked so much like acid tabs that a fan was arrested just for owning the release (see fig. 2). figure 2. cover of plastikman, sheet 1, 1993 (novamute). aesthetically, one of the most distinctive features of no way back is the draping of beige parachutes over the dancefloor—a visual design that is especially friendly to trippers. “i wanted it to feel like a hug for the audience, with arms coming out towards you. when you lower the ceiling, people feel less exposed, like it’s a cave environment”, explained amber gillen, who designs the decor for the party. at established techno clubs like berghain or tresor, your visual experience is often predetermined by the in-house system of expensive lights and lasers—and these strobing, high-intensity configurations, as the no way back crew points out, can make you feel like you’re stuck in the heart-palpitating, anticipatory come-up phase of a trip. the lighting at no way back is much gentler, thereby allowing psychedelics to provide individualized visual content instead. “the concept is a steady glowing and pulsing light that your frontal cortex can relax to, so you can zone out and feel comfortable in the space”, explained amber. “it’s not flashing or moving too much. there’s also a lot of softer textures like drapery and netting to diffuse the lighting, and just symbols and shapes—no words or texts”. all of these elements thus percolate into a perfectly calibrated psychedelic rave, and these are the reasons why no way back feels so alive. it is a party connected to both its local history and broader lineage: an acid-fueled detroit rave tradition that harkens back to legendary clubs like new york’s paradise garage or the muzic box in chicago—in other words, places where pleasures of the highest sense were attained through dancing out of your fucking mind on lsd. these experiences are harder to find these days. parties get blown up on tiktok and meme’d into simulations of hedonism. the algorithm flattens and sucks out the dancefloor’s soul. but at least for now, there is a parachute-draped rave cave in detroit that opens once a year, where you can walk out into the sunrise covered in sweat and dust, and feel like you’re touching the infinite. author biography michelle lhooq is a music and drugs journalist, and author of the stoner cult classic, weed: everything you want to know but are always too stoned to ask (penguin random house). she writes a substack newsletter called rave new world, and throws a party called weed rave. after studying comparative literature at columbia university, lhooq was a music editor at vice in nyc from 2014-2017, covering electronic music and global nightlife. since moving to los angeles, her writing has appeared in the los angeles times, bloomberg, new york magazine, gq, and others. references glazer, joshua. 2014. “craving the rave: detroit’s electronic music scene in the ’90s”. red bull music academy, may 21, <https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2014/05/detroit-electronic-music-scene-in-the-90s> (accessed 16 october 2023). discography plastikman. 1993. sheet 1. novamute (cd, album): nmcd 3015. <https://www.discogs.com/release/62516-plastikman-sheet-one>. moments of connection as means of survival: a study of queer identity, freedom and community in uk raves during the covid-19 pandemic dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 14(1): 39–59 issn 1947-5403 ©2022 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.03 moments of connection as means of survival: a study of queer identity, freedom and community in uk raves during the covid-19 pandemic daisy avis-ward university college london (ucl) abstract from the start of the pandemic in the uk, reports emerged of illegal raves being held by young people in violation of social distancing regulation. media discourse was laden with condemnation levelled at the public health risk and the perceived immorality and unfairness associated with the behaviour. drawing on 11 semistructured interviews with attendees, this study explores the motivations for going to and experiences of raves during covid-19. raves are unique social safe spaces for lgbtq+ individuals to create community, emotional connections and express their sexual identity. additionally, the pursuit of escapism via raves was no longer only symbolic, as individuals chose to escape the confines of lockdown. these findings illuminate the function of raves as social spaces outside normal society where participants can experience identity expression, connection, and freedom. they offer a more nuanced understanding of raves beyond stereotypes of hedonist youth and immorality. keywords: lgbtq+, identity, raves, community, covid-19 daisy avis-ward received her bsc from university college london in 2021 with an interdisciplinary interest in cultural sociology, social psychology and economics. recently whilst working at sony music, she was a lead researcher on the first large-scale qualitative and quantitative report into gender representation in uk dance music. the report can be found at https://www.thejaguarfoundation.net/report. she djs and runs electronic music club nights across london and is passionate about protecting london’s queer nightlife spaces. email: daisyward51@gmail.com feature article https://www.thejaguarfoundation.net/report dancecult 14(1)40 introduction the social isolation and mass upheaval generated by the covid-19 pandemic provide a unique backdrop for the re-emergence of illegal raves in the uk. raves are defined here as unlicensed all-night parties featuring electronically produced dance music, drug usage and a plur (peace, love, unity, respect) ethos (anderson and kavanaugh 2007). during the pandemic, the physical closeness characteristic of raves made them problematic in new ways, beyond concerns of drug-use and hedonism. these included health risks to the individual and potentially the public and fines of up to £800 for attending or £10,000 for organising (heren 2020). the public outcry and media discourse surrounding raves was predominantly oppositional, describing them as “plague raves” populated by “covidiots” (vice media 2021). as a phenomenon which has instigated abundant news articles and critique from the prime minister for the alleged “flagrant disregard” exhibited by attendees, the relevance of the topic is clear (clark 2020: 1). this research advances our understanding of how attendees’ experiences of raves relate to the wider climate in covid-19. by interviewing 11 individuals who attended, organised, or performed at raves during the pandemic in the uk, this study offers insights into their experiences and motivations for going. there is a specific focus on the significance of community, identity, resistance and how these experiences may hold particular relevance for queer identities. history of uk raves emerging in the uk in 1988, the alternative behaviours associated with raves contributed to growing alarm by parents and policymakers who feared that an entire generation would fall victim to hedonism and drugs (hill 2002; reynolds 2013). this reaction can be situated in thatcher’s neo-victorian morals and the neo-liberal rhetoric of an individualistic, free market britain. rave culture was not the antithesis to thatcherism, but rather an alternative space for youth to explore collectivism, hedonism and solidarity. as raves grew in popularity in the early 1990s, the scene blurred with rave-traveller free-party groups, which culminated in 1992 with the castlemorton rave and 20,000 attendees in a stand-off with the police. the subsequent media coverage of drug use, criminality and hedonism provoked political backlash, and raves were outlawed with the criminal justice act of 1994. despite protesting the bill and continuing to organise raves, the immediate police suppression of both signalled the end of the rave era (hill 2002). the scene has since grown into the commercialised, legal edm (electronic dance music) club scene; whilst the illegal rave or free party scene has remained largely undocumented by scholarship (griffin et al. 2016). this history of mediafuelled tension and government backlash informs existing narratives surrounding raves in the uk, therein making their return to public discourse significant. covid-19 and the re-emergence of raves in march 2020, the uk entered a lockdown in response to the covid-19 pandemic. this legally mandated the population to stay at home and forced the immediate closing of all avis-ward | moments of connection as means of survival 41 restaurants, venues and bars. though the severity of the lockdowns fluctuated, with the strictest period being from march-june 2020, the closure of clubs remained in place for a full year. during this time, the impacts of covid-19, lockdown and mass isolation became more apparent. this included the doubling of self-reported symptoms of depression, and average anxiety scores increased by 3 points to 5.2/10 (ons 2020: 1). the deterioration of mental health disproportionally affected young people; due to the uncertain future they were facing (pierce et al. 2020). the far-reaching economic and social challenges included a 1.1% rise in unemployment, a 65% rise in calls to domestic violence hotlines and increased usage of food banks.1 additionally, behavioural fatigue associated with adhering to covid-19 restrictions emerged (reicher and drury 2021). though covid-19 was a disruptive force, threatening the security of health and incomes, this threat was not shared equally. elderly people were most at risk from the virus whilst healthy younger people were unlikely to face complications or death, a distinction which complicated individual responses to social distancing regulations. circumstantial context also impacted how tolerable lockdown was on an individual level. attempting to aid economic recovery, government responses saw certain areas of society, such as gastronomy, transparently prioritised over others, such as nightlife. widespread throughout the music industry was a “sense of nightlife being hung out to dry” (gillett 2021). despite the many policies like “eat out to help out” that offered economic aid to restaurants, the only meaningful source of state support for music was an arts council funding pot distributed across the entire cultural sector. competing against established cultural institutions with greater experience in public funding applications, many dance music applicants were unable to secure financial aid (gillett 2021). with few alternatives to clubbing and a particularly warm spring, reports of illegal raves appeared in local and national media in may 2020. tabloid headlines read “police are battling to stop illegal raves” (daily mail 2020) and “lockdown raves are putting huge strain on police resources” (telegraph 2020). the daily mail later added that raves represented “one of the ugliest and most disturbing by-products of the nation’s 14-week coronavirus lockdown” (boyle 2020). a minority of publications adopted a more investigative tone, including dazed digital’s “inside the uk’s illegal rave scene, flourishing during lockdown”, which situated raves within their wider history. nonetheless, the dominant narrative often blamed the worsening of the pandemic on widespread non-adherence, individual behaviours and immoral psychological motivations. echoing the media-fuelled outrage surrounding raves in the 1990s, the rhetoric that emerged during the pandemic was marked by strident moralising which saw any social gathering reflective of immense irresponsibility. as is typical of much public discourse, these prevalent perceptions of selfish hedonism failed to grapple with the question of whether the re-emergence of illegal raves could be understood in relation to neglected psychosocial needs during covid-19. this research is framed by the psychological, economic and social effects of the pandemic, as well as the large media-fuelled moral tension surrounding the topic.  dancecult 14(1)42 literature review  as a site of research, raves have been used to examine multiple aspects of youth culture in contemporary society (anderson and kavanaugh 2007). raves have been portrayed as rooted in a deep sense of community and empathy, which has served to explore social and personal identity (hollands 2002), cultural capital (thornton 1996), hedonism and freedom (reynolds 2013) and interpersonal connection (takahashi and olaveson 2003; riley, griffin and morey 2010). other cultural research has depicted raves as a quasi-social movement centred around their countercultural ideology (hill 2002). of the empirical research, most is qualitative and examines the 1988-1994 rave era. for many researchers, this era was inseparable from the socio-political effects of growing neo-liberalism in the uk ( john 2015). after they were outlawed, academic interest in raves reduced significantly, as accessing them became increasingly difficult for researchers. nonetheless, griffin et al. (2016) and riley, griffin and morey (2010) have conducted qualitative research on the rural free party scene, whilst the rest of recent research has explored legal edm events (anderson 2009; conner and katz 2020). there is good reason to give greater analytic attention to illegal raves, particularly because their illegality often affects the organisation and atmosphere, as well as the behaviours people exhibit. this article is furthermore an examination of their resurgence against the novel and embattled backdrop of covid-19; this may help us develop our understanding not only of the ongoing lives of rave culture, but also how these rituals speak to the ever-changing challenges faced in our contemporary moment. community within raves is described as both a fleeting sensation, characteristic of its fluid membership structure, and as a culture fostering solidarity and belonging (thornton 1995; anderson and kavanaugh 2008; riley, griffin and morey 2010). the term “community” is however, highly contested within sociology. in its basic form, it refers to having something in common, either a geographically specific “territorial community” or an activity-based “interest community” (crow and allen 1994: 3). these two concepts coincide in raves with a shared occupation of space, and a uniting countercultural interest. however, the lack of a shared definition throughout the literature, and the subjective nature of the term in cultural vernacular, makes comparisons across research challenging. early research constructs raves across a mainstream/subculture or commercial/alternative divide, whereby members create community founded on shared countercultural interests (thornton 1995). though this theory was initially popular, bennett (1999) and riley, griffin and morey (2010) have since contested this. instead, they characterise raves using maffesoli’s (1996) neo-tribal theory, which argues that in contemporary western society people constantly move between small and temporary groups based on different values and consumption practices. therefore, raves cannot be understood as a sealed subculture as members shifts groups based on the changing “nature of youth’s musical and stylistic preferences” (bennett 1999: 614). riley, griffin and morey (2010) used qualitative research to study the drum and bass club scene, and the rural free party scene, identifying two forms of community. firstly, sociality and proxemics, referring to the emotional attachment and avis-ward | moments of connection as means of survival 43 pleasure in being together; secondly solidarity and belonging which fosters a “keeping warm together” and belonging even in temporary communities (maffesoli 1996: 83). theorising raves as neo-tribal emphasises the fragmented, ephemeral and heterogenous nature of their community. the neo-tribal perspective has prompted further scholarship examining the localised nature of rave communities and edm scenes underlining the cultural forces informing their operation of identity and solidarity (kavanaugh and anderson 2008). recent research has also found that social media enables users to belong to more online communities across a wider variety of interests; membership to interest-based neo-tribes by today’s youth is similarly characterised as ephemeral and temporary (robards 2018).  shared behavioural norms in raving such as synchronised dancing, altruistic behaviours and shared musical interest have been associated with fostering interpersonal crowd connection. canetti conceptualises ritual dance through the “rhythmic crowd” which becomes a “single creature dancing, a creature with fifty legs and a hundred arms” united by the “same purpose” (1962: 32). a crowd dancing in unison explicitly expresses their non-verbal connections through their bodies. the trance music dj therefore becomes a focal point or “technoshaman” who manipulates the crowd’s mood through a unified physical and auditory sensation (silcott 1999: 58). this theoretical work has prompted recent research to explore these experiences empirically. takahashi and olaveson attended raves in canada for 8 months, committing fully to the visceral “embodied” experience of raving (2003: 90). their survey data revealed the most reported experience at raves was “interpersonal connection”; 81% of survey respondents reported feeling positive toward other ravers, and 36% said “to be with people” was their main motivation for going (takahashi and olaveson 2003: 77, 79). distributing the survey at raves may be critiqued for the accuracy of responses, considering the effects of drugs and the party environment. and this simple matter raises questions about how we understand the experiences of ravers within this context. the rave environment is complicated to navigate as a research site, and the temporary and sometimes forgotten experiences it enables muddles a cultural understanding that assumes all meaningful experiences are memorable. nonetheless, their findings provided empirical support for the popular historical scholarship which describes feelings of connection to fellow ravers (collin 1997; silcott 1999). whilst acknowledging the innate complexity of researching experiences of community and connectedness, it is clear this is an important theme within the literature. against the backdrop of homophobic and racist sentiment during the 1990s’ aids crisis in the uk, raves’ plur ethos positioned them as countercultural (reynolds 2013). however, this tendency to portray raves or edm culture as utopias neglects how different identities intersect within the culture. edm culture was profoundly shaped by black and latinx queer communities in the united states, and yet as the music found its popularity in the uk, raves became a primarily straight, white, middle and working-class activity with distinct segregations between gay and straight rave cultures (thornton 1995; garcia 2014).  if we consider evidence of queer spaces built around dance music, the absence of these identities within the literature on uk raves does not mean these groups were not apparent. dancecult 14(1)44 rather, within the small body of research, their stories may have been neglected. in the 1990s, ballroom culture was a thriving queer dance subculture for african american and latinx queers based around fashion, dance and catwalk competitions. along with circuit parties, often termed gay raves, these undergrounds allowed queer people to experience social acceptance and cultural authority in a protected space. ballroom culture’s practices of beauty pageants and runway walks can be seen as “a response to the rejection and humiliation queer folks endure in daily life” (garcia 2014). drawing on buckland’s idea of queer worldmaking in nightlife, ballroom culture exemplifies how the “imaginative possibilities” of queerness are realised through dress and socialising (2002: 36). the value of queer nightlife is also in the creation of support structures. buckland finds that “many queers are worldless”, often cut off from “family, church, and other institutions of community-building” (2002: 38). despite the legalisation of homosexuality and increasingly progressive attitudes towards marginalised sexual identities, many queer people in the uk still report experiencing rejection from their existing support networks when first disclosing their sexual orientation (guasp 2010). the absence of these support networks and the suppressing of their sexual identity position queer spaces which enable these experiences as meaningful. more recently, campkin and marshall’s (2016) survey-based research evidenced the importance of london’s lgbtq+ nightlife spaces for community creation and selfexpression. participants felt “safe” in these spaces; this was attributed to gender-neutral bathrooms and “not feeling other” (campbell and marshall 2016: 3). they also found that 58% of london’s lgbtq+ nightlife spaces had closed between 2006 and 2017, a figure that likely worsened during the pandemic (campbell and marshall 2016: 5). citing large-scale transport projects as the reason for many closures, this constant displacement demonstrates a “hierarchy of desirable spaces” where new projects and identities are prioritised over existing ones (campbell and marshall 2016: 6). despite the gap in research into queer experiences of illegal raves, the broader literature demonstrates the particular significance of community, fashion and safety in queer dance undergrounds. it stands in an ameliorative and agonistic relationship to the structural disavowal and exclusions committed by hegemonic community institutions such as the heteronormative family and the church. raves do not exist in a social vacuum. the nature of the music, the style of dance and the people it attracts are all intimately tied to the socio-cultural landscape in which they emerge. during the 1980s, the hedonism and excess of raves provided an escape from thatcher’s neo-liberal imperative in which all actions were to be productive ( john 2015). redhead argues that under thatcher raves symbolised “a pleasure for its own sake in a time when moral regulation of youth is pervasive” (1993: 7). this frames the pursuit of pleasure in raves as contrary to dominant society, but not as confrontational. more recently, edm events have been defined as hedonistic spaces; by carving out public space to enact hedonistic values, raves escape social norms of rational behaviour (fraser 2012). john (2015) and redhead (1993) find that raves both contest and reflect the norms of society. they mimic an entrepreneurial drive characteristic of britain’s neo-liberal values, whilst contesting the avis-ward | moments of connection as means of survival 45 belief that all activity must be productive. riley, griffin and morey (2010) have interpreted the prevalent element of escapism in raves as a form of everyday politics of aloofness. these accounts all position raves as an escape from the trappings of contemporary society, thus drawing a powerful opposition between the two. uk music festivals market themselves through narratives of freedom and hedonism, echoing the original ethos of raves. however, because of laws about drug usage and licensing and commercial values that operate in these festivals, they do not grant freedom in the same way as raves (griffin et al. 2016). neo-liberal theorists have increasingly argued that even within leisure spaces and one’s demarcated free time, traditional displays of freedom remain bounded, and risk is managed under this ideological governance (griffin et al. 2016). drawing on qualitative research into rural free parties (raves), griffin et al. find that freedom is renegotiated in raves as “an alternative way of life co-produced in a collective form” (2016: 24). rather than positioning festivals and raves across a binary of unfree/free relative to structures of governance and neo-liberal ideology, the lack of visible regulation in raves enabled a greater sense of freedom for their attendees (griffin et al. 2016: 24). nonetheless, the socio-political climate of neoliberalism which continues to operate around raves frames the do you what you want freedom of raves articulated through neoliberal discourse and as an individual right (riley, morey and griffin 2010). discourses of freedom within raves are shaped by the ideological expansion of neoliberalism even as they contest its commercial values; raves are constantly communicating with this socio-political climate. music collectives and events have historically provided an infrastructure for inspiring politics and collective action; the riot grrrl feminist movement and rock against racism both used music to construct a collective identity and direct this toward social change (street 2012). though resistance and politics is an area of academic interest within raves, it is highly contested among those who view raves as a social movement in the minority (hutson 2000). this is because equating raves and youth subcultures (mods, rockers, punks) with social movements is problematic, as these groups are directed toward personal enjoyment rather than a social change agenda (redhead 1993). however, there is a larger body of literature which finds that raves do exhibit a form of subversive politics. they contest public space by playing electronic music from sound systems, and their disregard toward licensing laws is disruptive in a way other forms of music are not. this is especially true in the context of thatcherite moral regulation (rietveld 1998). this public display of playfulness and irony can be understood as a spectacle of resistance which attracts attention and parodies mass culture (conner and katz 2020). using multi-site qualitative methods and a historical approach, conner and katz (2020) find the concept of spectacle is a resistance technique in legal american edm. this is not, however, comparable to structured forms of resistance in social movements, as the momentary and fleeting nature of edm events means any resistance is inconsistent (conner and katz 2020). overall, raves seem to exhibit several forms of subversive politics; however, from the current literature it is hard to determine the degree of consistency to which these political possibilities manifest. dancecult 14(1)46 this literature review has highlighted a significant gap in research on illegal raves held outside of the 1988-1994 period, aside from a small body of empirical research into the free party and illegal rave scene (wilson 2006; riley, griffin and morey 2010; griffin et al. 2016). the outlawing of raves and their subsequent inaccessibility means many researchers have explored legal edm events instead which though useful, are not entirely transferable to this research (fraser 2012; conner and katz 2020). this work nonetheless demonstrates the efficacy of qualitative methods in investigating ravers’ worldviews and lived experiences. the overwhelming and rapid social upheaval caused by the pandemic has created a unique social environment that raves are presumably responding to. reynolds (2013) and john (2015) have situated their understanding of raves firmly in relation to thatcherite britain, highlighting the constant communication between raves and their wider social spaces. to this end, the re-emergence of raves within, and in relation to, the novel context of the pandemic warrants specific attention. furthermore, aside from references to the existence of queer spaces in dance music undergrounds, academic research into these spaces vis-à-vis raves and covid-19 is noticeably quiet. queer undergrounds hold significance for their members as they adopt their own social and cultural norms, particularly in relation to sexual and gender non-conforming identities (buckland 2002). if we understand illegal raves as granting attendees momentary freedom from society through similar means, the overlap of these two worlds provides fertile ground for investigation. methods a fully qualitative research design was adopted with 11 semi-structured interviews lasting from 35 to 75 minutes each. interviews were held on zoom between february 3rd, 2021 and march 23rd, 2021. as the research addresses illegal activities, navigating the ethical complexity of this research meant ensuring confidentiality, anonymity and the participants’ right to leave the study. pseudonyms chosen by me were used throughout the research and data storage. before participating, individuals were provided with an information and consent sheet. this research was granted ethical clearance by the ucl social research unit in november 2020. as the rave community is a closed group, i used convenience sampling to contact potential participants through my social networks. these established several starting points for snowball sampling. of the 11 participants, i knew 4 beforehand; these relationships were crucial in signalling my trustworthiness to the other participants. the sample criteria were to have attended at least 3 raves in the uk between march 2020 and march 2021. takahashi and olaveson critique much of the research on raves for poor methodology, commenting that “the methodology required to adequately explore this experience involves 1) talking to ravers, and 2) raving oneself ” (2003: 74). my positionality as an insider in the rave scene and as a young person was an asset to the research process as the rave scene often operates with an insider/outsider binary. however, as i did not attend any raves during the pandemic, i was able to maintain distance from the experiences of the participants. this research does not intend to be generalisable to all raves during the pandemic, nor does it intend to be positivistic. avis-ward | moments of connection as means of survival 47 most raves attended took place over the summer and autumn of 2020. thereafter, nearly all participants reported no longer attending raves, coinciding with the worsening of the pandemic and the introduction of new fines during christmas 2020 and into 2021. the music characteristic of raves was electronic, generally techno, breakbeat and electro. during the summer, many raves took place outside in forests on the outskirts of london, or on boats in hackney. indoor locations included squats in central london, spaces under railways bridges, disused warehouses and non-residential buildings. the size of raves varied from 200-800 attendees. table 1 provides an overview of the sample. pseudonym gender age role attended queer raves no. of raves attended in covid-19 josh m 21 attendee, dj yes 5–4 max nb* 20 attendee yes 4 ezra m 19 attendee yes 5 noah m 23 organiser, dj yes ~20 oliver m n/a** organiser, dj yes 6 ben nb 21 attendee yes 4 alex m 21 attendee no 4 ethan m 28 attendee no 4–5 lucy f 20 attendee, organiser no ~20 isabel f 19 attendee no ~10 rosie f 20 attendee no 3 table 1. overview of the interviewees. *non-binary. **unwilling to answer. the apparent gender imbalance of this sample (only 3 women) should be understood in relation to wider trends within rave culture. keeler’s quantitative research of raves found only a quarter of her participants were women, and that they were also less likely than men to hold a significant role such as dj or organiser (2017: 162). similarly, riley, griffin and morey found that their subject pool from participant observation was 65-70% male, suggesting that in the context of raves this study’s sample profile is not unexpected (2010: 353). the interview transcripts were analysed using braun and clarke’s (2006) outline for thematic analysis (ta). ta is highly flexible with extensive theoretical freedom allowing for the identification of both explicit and implicit themes of the data. as this research takes a multidisciplinary approach, the adaptability of this method was beneficial (king 2004; braun and clarke 2006). during ta, the active role of the researcher in identifying and reporting the data is also acknowledged, as is the social constructivist epistemological dancecult 14(1)48 stance of the research. recognising these theoretical values and biases, as well as the position between insider and outsider that i occupy, is meant to enhance the credibility of the research. a clear limitation of this study is the skew in the sample towards london raves. furthermore, participants may have struggled to articulate the experience of raving fully. reflecting on takahashi and olaveson (2003), they illuminated the limits of using text to capture the physical and psychological experience of raves; the use of interview may have slightly flattened the reality. analysis this study aimed to understand the experience of raves and motivations for going during covid-19 while focusing on community, identity and resistance. in keeping with research on raves before covid-19, these findings confirm that (i) raves facilitate powerful feelings of connection; (ii) community and solidarity are central experiences of raves; (iii) raves can provide a sense of escape and freedom. the findings also extend the literature by (i) supplementing the gap in recent research on illegal raves; (ii) showing that common themes take on new meanings in the context of covid-19; (iii) examining how queer identities intersect with the experiences of attending illegal raves during covid-19. theme 1: community creation in raves this research finds that community was experienced through the non-verbal connection in the crowd, the organisation of raves and in the relationships and friendships based around raves. within the context of covid-19, community became more significant against a backdrop of profound isolation. the value of experiencing community was intensified by its rarity, but complicated by the newfound danger of physical closeness. ethan described raves as a source of “real connection, togetherness, presence and joy”. for isabel, these were distinctly non-verbal: “you don’t really need to talk to each other, people connect through the music and, the dancing and all of it”. raves as a space for nonverbal connection with a larger group has been linked to synchronised dancing, altruistic behavioural norms and shared music taste (schechner 1995). however, the fleeting nature of this feeling was expressed by josh who found that “in that moment you feel like yeah these are my people, but away from that they could be strangers walking past you on the street and you wouldn’t know”. these findings support the characterisation of “sociality and proxemics” within raves, where there is a momentary joy in sharing spaces and activities (bennett 1999; riley, griffin and morey 2010). the creation of communities based on fleeting relationships, even where members do not know one another appeared meaningful in fostering belonging. those who had been attending raves for longer foregrounded the role of community in the organisation, enjoyment and marketing of raves. increasingly, the raves explicitly avis-ward | moments of connection as means of survival 49 emphasised this. isabel noted that “they [rave organisers] do speak about it as kind of like a family”, whilst lucy saw raves being “advertised through the whole community thing”. nearly all participants described a collective approach to putting on a rave. ethan often helped construct sound equipment, whilst others mentioned scouting for possible locations. oliver, who has been organising raves for 10 years, found the community of raves particularly important: “you have a social environment that connects all these dots together, you know friends meet friends, people get together, people fall in love. i think it’s very relevant to the human experience”. viewing raves as a microcosm of human experiences connects the operation of community more closely to how we understand it in other interest-based social groups. against the backdrop of extensive social isolation and the danger of physical closeness, the significance of community was intensified for the participants. lucy found that “because of covid people want to come together and a lot of people kind of have that mentality of community”. ethan, who lived alone, with no family in the uk, realised that raves  had become a “big, big part of my social life”, creating “proper friend groups”. the scarcity of feeling connected to other people, especially new people, during the pandemic may have made these moments more memorable for the participants. though this research was unable to uncover all the personal circumstances of the participants’ during lockdown, individual differences in living situation and their isolation may have informed their motivation to seek out community in raves, or their justification for doing so. max found raves were important for their mental health; they would “go to one rave in a blue moon, just for my own mental sanity, just to be around people and have fun”. closeness was also described in relation to instances of unsafety at raves as participants were aware of the danger of being near others. some participants directly addressed this risk. lucy recalled: i remember on halloween being stuffed into an archway and the police were outside. and they [the rave organisers] had to lock the door so no one could get in or out, because the police were right there. and this archway was so hot, and everyone was so sweaty that there was like condensation on the roof dripping down onto people, like oh god. you couldn’t even light a cigarette in there because there was no oxygen in the air, it was just water vapor. it was, yeah, [pause] i was pretty scared. this image of inescapable closeness in a poorly ventilated environment powerfully demonstrates the extent of the risks many participants faced. though this description might be seen to fuel accusations of the irresponsibility of raving in the pandemic, the evidence of profound community and moments of connection complicate these accusations. not only do these findings inform our perspectives on lockdown regulation, but also the real impact of social isolation on the individual. this is further demonstrated by the relevance of community, experienced as non-verbal, as emotional relationships and as a motivation in itself for going. on a policy level, more effective tools may be required to prioritise creating and maintaining community through non-physical means. dancecult 14(1)50 theme 2: raves as queer safe spaces the particular significance of queer identities within raves was an unexpected finding of this research, and a consequence of using snowball sampling which began with participants of this scene. like the wider sample, participants who attended queer raves emphasised their experiences of community, self-expression and safety. however, the social conditions that subtend this overlapping of queer safe space and illegal raves complicates a restrictive view of raves in covid-19 as only immoral or unsafe. queer raves were described as safe spaces associated with an absence of hostility and powerful feelings of community. culturally, queer safe spaces are defined both materially and metaphorically as a site of refuge for lgbtq+ communities by operating outside heteronormative bounds (campkin and marshall 2014). five of the participants commented on this. josh, for instance, remarked, “i always get the feeling that you’re safe with these people, and it’s safe space”. ezra described queer raves as “an environment that isn’t hostile… there’s no judgment on the dance floor”. this view was echoed by max, who characterised them as “genuinely non-judgmental spaces”. the freedom from judgement appeared unique to these spaces and related queer raves to the safety found in other underground spaces. ben drew an illuminating parallel between queer raves and the new york “ballroom culture, where you’d walk and pull a look”, inferring the significance of fashion in these spaces. queer raves as spaces for identity expression and performing queerness through fashion, dance and behaviour was unique to the literature on raves. ben comments: so much of my identity is based on like turning looks and being seen as like a nonbinary person and a trans person. which is something like in the day-to-day walking down the street i’m not going to do, because i’m unsafe in that environment. these remarks resonate with buckland’s research on queer dance clubs where participants “get their gayness” from the ritual of “self-fashioning” as queer and performing their sexual identity publicly (2002: 37). regardless of the effects of lockdown, expressing queer sexual identity in public carries risks of abuse which are not present for those who adhere to heteronormative codes of presentation. recognising the importance of experiencing queerness as a community raises questions about the impact of covid-19 on marginalised sexual identities regarding their sense of identity and mental wellbeing. these experiences did not exist in heteronormative environments and distinguished these from rave culture more widely. max shared that their behaviour “depends like on whether i’m surrounded by straight people”. josh commented that at raves which were “heteronormative, you’re slightly more, i guess, conservative”. the need to adjust their behaviour dependent on composition of the space points directly to the importance of queer spaces in allowing identity expression. with the closure of public social spaces, and by proxy many support structures for queer people, during covid-19, queer raves become a rare and valued space for community creation and support. they were important for ben in enabling trans people to come together: “[in the] trans techno scene it’s like we’re hiding until they [raves] happen. then you come out avis-ward | moments of connection as means of survival 51 and see your friends and then you don’t really see them again”. using the terms community and family interchangeably, they referred to queer raves as “a lot more of a family thing because we [trans people] don’t have the same support structures.” recognising queer raves as a source of familial networks supports buckland’s (2002) argument that queer nightlife can help mediate queer peoples’ challenges in accessing traditional support networks. raves facilitated a bonding experience for ben with other trans and non-binary folks: “there’s a collective trauma, everyone can just joke about the same shit happening to them and that brings us together”. max, who also identifies as non-binary, simply stated “i miss my community”. the emotional significance of queer community in raves was profound for participants who related the value of raves to their personal lives and instances of persecution on account of their sexual identity. virtual queer clubs such as club quarantine and queer house party also emerged in the pandemic and were popular, credited as a source of queer belonging (pavka 2020). however, the experience of physically sharing queer spaces is irreplaceable (tayler 2012). the newfound challenge in accessing these spaces may have amplified the isolation felt by queer people, who are more likely to be cut off from family and institutions of community (buckland 2002). situated in a wider environment of feeling unable to express their identity safely and detached from queer community in nightlife spaces, queer raves offered a unique opportunity for this. furthermore, these findings inform our understanding of hierarchies of identity within public spaces, and the damage of inhibiting access to queer ones. a more concentrated effort by policymakers to fund queer spaces outside of nightlife may be needed. nightlife, though valuable, is often focussed on drinking and sexual courting. by complimenting these institutions with queer spaces guaranteed by public funding, queer people may be granted more opportunities to build support structures. theme 3: experiencing escape through raves the literature depicts raves as spaces away from the symbolic repression of the state, neoliberalism and social norms (griffin et al. 2016). the absence of what ethan calls the “normal constructs of society” in raves suggests they can still be understood this way. during the pandemic environment of perceived confinement, raves became profound sources of experiencing freedom and escapism. raves provided a sense of escape as an opportunity to leave the physical confines of lockdown and return to normality. josh articulated the “sense of like escapism and wanting some normality” he sought from raves. this was also expressed as a joyful form of release. ezra found raves were a chance to “forget about all the deadlines, you forget about the fact that you don’t have a job, and you don’t have money coming in, because for eight hours you’re just going to dance”. for many participants, choosing to go to a rave also involved a rational assessment of the potential risks and benefits. josh described it as “weighing up the need for some normality, seeing my friends and my mental health, versus getting covid was, like, just a risk, i guess.” the economic uncertainty, deteriorating job market, and poor dancecult 14(1)52 mental health that many young people were experiencing contributed to the participants’ decision to go to raves. moments of respite from these feelings positioned raves as a space of escape. many of the participants were very aware that going to raves also meant facing the wider consequences of their actions. as oliver put it, “now, you’re not just escaping from yourself, you’re escaping from what’s happening in the world, and i think that has a different taste in covid”. he later added: “while in covid, escapism is not a very personal thing, it’s a very global thing. it doesn’t matter where you stand, you’re ignoring a global issue”. during thatcherite britain and the height of rave culture, experiencing escapism in raves was associated with its alternative social ideals of collectivism and hedonism (reynolds 2013; john 2015). these findings instead portray raves as a risky chance to briefly escape the reality of the virus and return to a feeling of normality found before covid-19. reflecting on lucy’s description of being stuck in an archway at a rave without ventilation, the extent of the personal risk becomes emphasised. though raves may have offered an escape from the regulation of covid-19, participants were not ignorant to the danger of their choices. during covid-19, individual behaviours became significant in their potential larger effect on virus transmission. the public and the private spheres blurred, and escapism was no longer a chiefly individual choice. defining raves through freedom is not to position them across restrictive binaries of free/unfree. rather, these findings suggest that within a complex web of experiences of raves during covid-19, the desire for freedom was influenced and intensified in its opposition to daily life in lockdown. theme 4: the politics and resistance of raving in covid-19 feeling misrepresented and misunderstood by both government and the public was a common experience articulated by participants. for some, this feeling was fuelled by the perceived failings of the government during the pandemic, fostering resentment towards these institutions. this resentment, however, did not directly challenge political institutions so much as it seemed to critique government action during the pandemic. ethan remarked that “i don’t really trust government, i never trusted government figures before this [covid-19] so it’s hard for me to just start trusting them now”. a generalised sense of ambivalence and hostility was popular across participants. max described it as a “fuck the government, um, let’s have fun kind of tone”, whilst oliver characterised raves as “definitely anti-establishment and anti-government in some ways but it doesn’t necessarily hate government”. this generalized anti-establishment stance of many of the participants deviates from riley, griffin and morey’s (2010) description of aloofness from official institutions. though the participants were not actively resisting government, for example as hutson (2000) argues, as aloofness infers complete disengagement. in the 12 years since riley, griffin and morey’s (2010) research, the political landscape of the uk has changed considerably and undergone divisive government austerity policies and brexit. these policies and those under covid-19 have had significant impacts on the daily life of many citizens, avis-ward | moments of connection as means of survival 53 meaning the likelihood of political aloofness may be far less. anti-government rhetoric was far more prevalent than rhetoric resembling riley, griffin and morey’s (2010) description of aloofness. the participants expressed frustration at the perceived scapegoating of raves and their misrepresentation by politicians and the media. ben articulated this sense of misrepresentation: raves are a social interaction that like young people cherish the most, especially when you’re unemployed. it’s like, oh, so none of my social interaction is deemed like valuable enough by the government to take place, because it’s for emotional reward rather than monetary rewards. you can understand why for me it feels like a rejection of trans people.  relating this back to the value queer raves hold for the expression of sexual identity, the banning of raves converged with a feeling of personal rejection for ben. other participants were concerned that the pandemic would provide an excuse for anti-rave regulation to remain even after the virus subsided. oliver thought this may be because of the anti-capitalist features of raves: “i think the government is doing a great job, it’s what they wanted to do, to restrict raves because it’s not taxed, and they’re not getting anything out of it.” noah, an organiser, evoked a similar sentiment by highlighting how official narratives expediently explained the worsening of the pandemic through the individual failings of ravers. the government is kind of blaming raves as the main reason for covid spreading, when there’s a lot of things that don’t get highlighted which do generate the government money… but they go out of their way to portray raves in as negative a light as possible. max thought this was because: symbolically raving feels quite trivial to people and, you could just not do it, is people’s perspective. but it isn’t that simple. to act like its insignificant [pause] i don’t know, i feel like it’s a bit unfair and then to blame it all [covid-19] on the ravers. exasperation with the government’s failings during covid-19 and feelings of misrepresentation more generally may have informed a sentiment of us vs them (thornton 1995). however, unlike thornton’s (1995) model, this specific sentiment did not accord to a subculture/mainstream divide or aesthetic ideals. evidence of resistance to government does not politicise raves in the same way as resistant social movements (huston 2000). rather, in covid-19, where attending raves was a defiance of government regulation, there is inevitable and implicit opposition between the groups. this oppositional sentiment may also help explain the unexpected prevalence of conspiratorial thinking in these findings. though none of the participants expressed any personal allegiance to these conspiracies, all of them commented on their existence within the scene. ben commented that “some people have gone kind of conspiracy theorist about it, like don’t believe in covid, or just completely minimize it”. likewise, max recalled, “they just think the whole thing is a lie, for the government to plot things against us to like dancecult 14(1)54 restrict our freedom and control our life”. for some participants, this feeling was informed by a history of raves being oppositional to the police and government. oliver detailed some of the popular conspiracies he’d heard, “that they’re [the government] using certain technology that can actually detect where people are, it’s the same one they use for the track and trace”. ethan even saw a rave “called scamdemic”. rave attendees have been shown to exhibit greater endorsement of alternative religions and spirituality (takahashi and olaveson 2003). however, this research discovered theories about government surveillance, suggesting certain specificities to the covid-19 context. factoring in the history of tension between raves and authority, and its escalation during the pandemic, conspiracies may serve to justify feelings of persecution. further research could explore this avenue at greater length. this study has merely identified the phenomenon, but without any participants who resonated with these theories explicitly, it is hard to offer more comprehensive explanations. theme 5: the many motivations for raving exploring why people went to raves during covid-19 was an important question when the decision involved facing potential financial and health risks. the opportunity to socialise, to experience joy and feel free provides clues to their motivations. however, when asked explicitly, their reasons were to have fun and to improve their mental wellbeing. the significance of mental health within these findings was unexpected in relation to the literature, but coherent in the context of covid-19. ezra added: mental health has never been worse, and the government is neither investing in mental health or allowing us to do things that will improve our mental health… for a lot of people going out is something that we need to survive. discussions of mental health illuminated a powerful contrast between the momentary elation of raving and the monotony of life during the pandemic. max found that “they’re so overstimulating and like now, when i’m so used to being lethargic and sleepy, having something that is so intense and so like mind-blowing, it’s like pretty wonderful”. others explained the popularity of raves directly in relation to the worsening of mental health during the pandemic. isabel found for many of her friends, raves had a “deeper meaning . . . because a lot of people’s mental health has suffered so much through covid”. the desire to exert agency was another motivation expressed explicitly by participants. for ethan raves were an opportunity to “take control over, sort of, my own existence again”. when asked about the public health risks of raving, he commented that “it just comes down to like your personal liberties and like i’m sort of taking my life into my hands every time i step out of my door”. other participants alluded to a desire to live their youth fully and exercise their right to do so. rosie, who is 19, commented that “i’m getting older, so i just want to like go out as much as possible, in case something happens, and like the world ends”. a similar concern was mentioned by lucy who felt “i’m not going to get these youthful years back”. supporting griffin et al. (2016), these discourses express freedom in avis-ward | moments of connection as means of survival 55 raves through neo-liberal discourses, and they position raves as an opportunity to reclaim lives, which people increasingly felt unable to control. the motivations for doing something are difficult to attribute to any single cause, and many of the participants struggled to explain why they wanted to go to raves; they just did. attempts to explain motivations for going therefore risk inadvertently pathologizing the participants. in the same way that reynolds critiques the literature for “over-politicising” raves, i am aware of the risk of overexplaining the motivations for raving (2013: 515). the profound mundanity and anxiety which characterises the world during covid-19 may mean the simple experience of socialising and enjoying music became more valuable. additionally, this discussion of mental wellbeing as a motivation for attending raves is not to justify the behaviours of attendants as medical necessity, but rather to underscore that this area requires greater attention from policy makers. in this research, recognising the vitality and contribution of raves to mental health goes some way to explain the significant risks people were prepared to undertake to dance during the pandemic. this research has begun to address the gap in empirical literature on illegal raves. it has also extended findings from edm research on the significance of community, resistance, freedom, and identity within the novel context of covid-19. situating these findings in relation to the mental health crisis and its impact on young people, the need to address this in wider policy is emphasised. further research may address this in finer detail and explore the unexpected findings, particularly the experience of lgbtq+ individuals in raves and the notable presence of conspiratorial thinking. conclusion this research has found that the prevalent depiction of raves during covid-19 as immoral, selfish and risky is reductive with regard to the complexity and value they have for those attending. against a backdrop of isolation, a mental health crisis, homophobia and government distrust intensified by covid-19, raves offered participants meaningful experiences of community, identity expression and joy. within this unique context, the motivations for going to raves and the experiences of them became deeply intertwined. the only motivation explicitly mentioned by several participants was mental health, which likely reflects a wider trend in deteriorating mental health during the pandemic. the relevance of community and identity expression within raves was especially significant and had special characteristics for those attending queer raves. in a wider social environment where creating community without fear of judgement was more difficult, queer raves adopted a new role as socially safe for this group. raves during covid-19 were closely tied to the unique challenges of this environment. the relevance of connection, safe spaces, belonging and escapism mirror corresponding experiences of isolation and stress throughout the pandemic. by acknowledging the nuance of these concepts beyond binary models of morality, raves can be reframed as spaces that, while undoubtedly posing risks, encompass diverse and meaningful experiences for those attending. dancecult 14(1)56 notes 1 for unemployment statistics, see international labour organisation (2021: 2). for domestic violence statistics, see office for national statistics (2020b: 1). for food bank statistics, see trussell trust (2020). references anderson, tammy. 2009. “understanding the alteration and decline of a music scene: observations from rave culture”. sociological forum 24(2): 307–36. <https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1573-7861.2009.01101.x>. anderson, tammy and phillip kavanaugh. 2007. “a ‘rave’ review: conceptual interests and analytical shifts in research on rave culture”. sociology compass 1(2): 499–519. <https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00034.x>. bennett, andy.1999. “subcultures or neo‐tribes? 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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8654343/police-battling-stop-illegal-raves-including-140-revellers-cramming-canal-boat-party.html avis-ward | moments of connection as means of survival 59 takahashi, melanie. and tim olaveson. 2003. “music, dance and raving bodies: raving as spirituality in the central canadian rave scene”. journal of ritual studies 17(2): 72-96. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/44368995>. thornton, sarah. 1995. club cultures: music, media and subcultural capital. cambridge: polity press. trussell trust. 2020. “new report reveals how coronavirus effected food bank usage”. trussell trust, 14 september: <https://www.trusselltrust.org/2020/09/14/new-report-reveals-howcoronavirus-has-affected-food-bank-use/>, (accessed 10 october 2022). https://www.jstor.org/stable/44368995 https://www.trusselltrust.org/2020/09/14/new-report-reveals-how-coronavirus-has-affected-food-bank-use/ https://www.trusselltrust.org/2020/09/14/new-report-reveals-how-coronavirus-has-affected-food-bank-use/ the power to name and other dilemmas presented by brazilian funk subgenres liv sovik universidade federal do rio de janeiro (brazil) brian d’aquino goldsmiths university of london (united kingdom) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.10> introduction playing recorded music through a purposedly assembled or custom-built mobile sound system, often in the open air, is a consolidated practice and a distinctive feature of popular culture in many countries across the global south and beyond. launched in 2021, sonic street technologies (sst) is a european research council-funded research project aiming to document, map out and compare these subaltern and street-based uses of sound technologies. jamaican sound systems, colombian picos, brazilian radiolas and mexican sonidos are examples of highly sophisticated sst. they are designed to enhance the sonic features of one or more specific music genre and cater for a certain crowd. the large music-fueled street gatherings are often at the beating heart of local and diasporic communities who creatively resist exploitation and marginalization through music and dance. because of their demographics, they are often seen as suspect by the authorities. despite persistent middle class disdain and police repression, sst are the engine for several decades of popular experimentation with music, sound, and technology. they not only succeed in providing affordable entertainment, but kick-start the informal economy and nurture skills and talents among disadvantaged sectors of society. in researching the knowledge and ways-of-knowing (henriques 2011) of sonic street technologies, the project aims to investigate some of the ways technology can be repurposed to suit specific social needs—sometimes rather different from those intended by the original designers or manufacturers. as part of the research team, we are committed to working in close cooperation with practitioners and local researchers in a non-extractive fashion. sharing our findings, seeking out and supporting local strengths, and using our institutional base to build recognition from outside the scene are some of the strategies we employ to add value to the sst scenes as well as the research entities already active in the field. mapping sonic street technologies one of the project’s main goals and commitments is to produce an online map of functioning sound systems and other sst around the world. launched in october 2022 and currently in progress, the sonic map aims to consolidate the idea of sst as a grassroots technological continuum able to account for a rich and varied field. to populate the map, a survey form aimed at sst owners and practitioners has been drafted. the form asks for information about each particular sound system (or sonido, or radiola, etc.): the technology employed, the music played, the crew demographics, and so on. delivering the questionnaire to the appropriate stakeholders is a job in itself. to do this we rely on a tentacular network of researchers, promoters and music connoisseurs active in the different scenes. designing the questionnaire has been quite a laborious process. we wanted to respect the culture’s natural inclination towards secrecy and protect sensitive data, ask for detail without being intrusive, all of which posed difficult problems. even more complicated has been making sure that the survey form can work across different environments and cultures, and especially that the data collected will make sense and allow comparison on a global scale. to do so, the survey had to achieve a certain degree of standardization. this required a process of linguistic and cultural translation that inevitably involves the power/knowledge nexus of any research project, but especially those dealing with popular music and culture.  the section of the questionnaire related to music genres was one of the most challenging to draft. the focus of our research is on the technology rather than the music and the project builds on the idea that sound engineers from different scenes might have more in common than djs or selectors, precisely because technology provides a common ground between very different music cultures. but from an insider’s perspective music is undoubtedly the force that brings a community together, the reason behind technological experimentation, and ultimately what people identify with. in short: without the love of music there would be no sound systems playing on the street. so, the survey design could not take the music lightly. the problems of calling musics by their names drafting a classification of music genres that can be recognised within different sst scenes around the globe shows up the theoretical and political implications of the survey tool. as researchers, we conceived the sonic map as one way to try to facilitate dialogue between sound practitioners and music lovers that we tend to consider distant relatives—while those involved may never have heard of their “extended family” and we do not always have precise knowledge about what they call the music they play or listen to. as we take decisions on the categories to be used in the survey, we find ourselves with having to use names, a knowledge/power game that requires not only acknowledgement of sources and other appropriate strategies of self-mitigation. a first aspect to be considered in these decisions is the geographical and temporal limits of cultural and linguistic codes. music is a fluid entity in constant mutation and migration, and a genre may change name over time, be marketed under different labels in different countries, or be identified according to its different—culturally perceived—features. a good example of this is the nuances of jamaican dancehall music terminology. by working with researcher and practitioners in the field we found out that the term “bashment”, very common, especially in the us and the uk, to describe the “harder” style of 2000s dancehall is barely acknowledged in jamaica at all, while the term “ragamuffin”, widely used outside of jamaica to refer to late 1980s and early 1990s dancehall, today may sound derogatory to a jamaican connoisseur. another issue has to do with the classifications employed by the global music industry and the way they are appropriated, translated and challenged out on the streets. grammy-influenced macro labels such as “latin” or “world” music are often contested and make very little sense in the global south, where the music is actually produced and initially consumed and called by other names. on the other hand, ultra-specific, short-lived categories can be understood as mere marketing and rejected out of hand. this was the case a few years ago with rihanna’s “work”, based on a well-known dancehall sample but labelled as “tropical house”, causing outrage in jamaica (see campbell 2016). even categories apparently more “neutral” such as “electronic” or “rap” can be shaky. a lot of the music of the african diaspora currently flooding both the streets and the charts worldwide could easily fall into either category. but it is called afrobeats instead, a name created in the uk and for some time also quite contested (see akinsete 2019). meanwhile, the algorithm-driven classification of music by “mood” and the proliferation of national, regional or city-based subgenres used by streaming platforms will increasingly complicate the problem of classification by genre in the future. finally, common to all such major categories of music is the necessary “ear” that distinguishes, say, between norteña, peñonera and sonidera as different styles of cumbia that are played in mexico, distinctions that may be obvious to the ear, but are difficult to describe in words, much less generally recognized—which is important for the purposes of the sonic map. this is especially problematic for a questionnaire aimed at sst practitioners who do not usually produce the music but rather play it, or re-produce it, sometimes decades after and thousands of miles away from the time and place in which the music was originally created. how, then, to make a survey questionnaire that, on the one hand, is sufficiently granular to allow comparison between different sst, and at the same time does not increase the number of subgenres to the point that there are so many separate grains that they cannot be gathered together? in short: which strategies to employ to make sure that the sonic map both reflects the local communities of practitioners and music lovers and is useful as a globalized reading of many local scenes by them and by academic researchers, which are also the project’s target audience? classifying the subgenres of brazilian funk the project experimented with thinking about all of these tensions when it came to the group of musical styles classified as “brazilian funk”, internationally known too as “funk favela”, and referred to as “funk carioca” in brazil, or simply “funk”. brazilian funk is a genre-bending phenomenon from the beginning. one of its first academic chroniclers, anthropologist hermano vianna (1988), traces its development from the black music balls that started in the early to mid 1970s (partly at the initiative of black cultural associations), playing all kinds of us american music and slowly narrowing to emphasise soul. this phase ended when the idea of five thousand stylish black young people getting together in the canecão concert venue, in the heart of the predominantly white and middle class southern zone of rio de janeiro, spooked the authorities. in 1976, organizers and musicians were accused of subversive activities, while the canecão preferred to hold the mpb (música popular brasileira) concerts for which it became known for forty years. vianna uses “baile funk” to refer to the balls at the canecão, as well as those that arose in the slum neighbourhoods and favelas of rio de janeiro and around the country. he also recounts how soul gave way to rap, which began to share the stage with funk by the mid 1980s. the distinction between funk and rap is a delicate one. funk carioca is less influenced by us funk than by the miami bass variant of rap, from which it adopted electronic beats and sexually explicit lyrics. while rap artists like edi rock and mano brown of racionais mcs reaffirm their common cultural origins and social nexus, rap has mostly moved elsewhere. balls are now not only known as baile funk, as in the 1980s, but effectively play funk rhythms measured in bpms and identified by name (like voltmix, tamborzão, beatbox).[1] meanwhile funk lyrics continue to challenge bourgeois mores in other ways than “excessive” sex. today, brazilian funk is perhaps the most influential contemporary music genre in the country, vital in the favelas but sung and danced to at middle class parties, and producing a seemingly endless stream of subgenres. the problem for the questionnaire and the map was apparently technical: how to name these many subgenres of brazilian funk in a way that was sufficiently fine-grained to be used in future research? what happens if five years from now someone wants to know “what was really played” in a specific scene? how does one translate very local and intimate understanding of music in terms that can speak to completely different geographical, cultural and social environments? as the questionnaire evolved, brian d’aquino drew up an initial list of nine subcategories of brazilian funk including brega (or kitsch) funk, which started in recife and is oriented to dance. a spotify video on the emergence of brega funk in recife, in the northeast of brazil (spotify brazil 2019) funk carioca, from rio de janeiro, relatively well known abroad and indebted to miami bass. a selection of funk carioca and “funkified” international tunes (pl sheik 2022) selection of the most played on tiktok 2022 and in rio de janeiro (mnr yg 2022) tati quebra barraco, an early female funk star, famously received funding from the ministry of culture to participate in a feminist festival in germany in 2004. her hit “sou feia mas tô na moda” [i’m ugly but trendy] became the title of a documentary by denise garcia on women funk stars, launched in 2005. sou feia mas tô na moda (junior lopes 2022) then there is funk melody, with a light electronic beat and a pop sound; funk paulista, from sao paulo; funk ostentação, which is sometimes compared to gangsta rap and (see below) may be the same as funk paulista. a selection of funk ostentação tracks (vs fest music 2022) “funk o$tentação” – renato barreiros and konrad dantas, producer kondzilla (2022) proibidão, which focuses on the violent side of favelas, exalting—at least apparently—drug traffickers and organized crime. here is a sample, unfortunately very dependent on understanding the words. selection proibidões of the best from 2022 (victor músicas 2021) rasteirinha, funk played at less than 100 bpm, with samba, reggaeton and other influences; rave funk, more electronic; and pagofunk, which combines funk with pagode, the music played at “backyard” samba parties. selection of pagofunk tracks most played in 2022 (includes some tracks that are not pagofunk) (onda dos bailes 2022) checking these categories to make sure they cover the brazilian funk scene meant consulting scholar-connoisseurs of funk who might answer such a query on a national scale. a first question by liv sovik on the listserv of the brazilian association of ethnomusicology (abet) yielded a reply from michel brasil, a scholar of rap from belo horizonte. he suggested, along with melody, ostentação and proibidão, already included in the nine suggested categories, those of consciente, montagem, and aquecimento (warm-up), while deferring to funk researcher carlos palombini, of the universidade federal de minas gerais. while waiting for further responses, liv also consulted leonardo moraes batista, of the quilombo do pensamento negro at universidade federal do rio de janeiro, who backed up eight of the nine initial categories, though he said that funk paulista and ostentação are the same thing and added funk pop (think: anitta), trap funk and funk putaria (literally, indecent funk). in sum, he fused two of the proposed categories, endorsed six of the remaining ones, excluded rave funk and added pop, trap and putaria as subgenres of brazilian funk. here are samples of the funk pop and trap subgenres. gloria groove (featuring iza) – “yoyo” (2019) mc hariel, mc kevin, mc pedrinho, mc ryan sp, mc brinquedo, salvador, mc ig – “é o trap, é o funk 1.0” (ryan elenco do funk 2019) when carlos palombini weighed in, he referred to an article in which he and co-author dennis novaes discuss proibidões and quote mcs as saying are more like common journalism than sensationalism. they introduce the article as follows: the proibidão is a subgenre of carioca funk music, together with consciente, putaria, montagem, melody and ostentação. these terms refer mainly to themes: proibidão to “life in crime”, putaria to erotic prowess, melody to romance, ostentação to the praise of possessions. but they also refer to techniques: montagem to the repetition of vocal fragments of different origins; and to standpoints: funk consciente adopts explicitly critical, pedagogical or moralizing perspectives. to the six subgenres, one could add: gospel funk, named for its theme; comedy funk, neurotic funk and pop-funk, each named for their ethos (novaes and palombini 2019: 287-307). these categories are complicated because music can crosscut categories of theme, technique, ethos and standpoint: “when the fragments come from proibidões, is it montagem or proibidão?” the authors ask. the subgenres proibidão and consciente can be understood as expressing different positionalities on involvement with violence; classification of a given piece of music as one or the other depends in part on how it is performed and by whom. on the other hand, in the 1990s wearing given designer brands indicated affiliation to different gangs in favelas, so what is basically funk ostentação has the connotations of a proibidão. one might add to novaes and palombini’s list of complications the fact that subgenres emerge, reach a certain ascendancy but can drift off the scene, remaining associated to a certain historical moment without creating new memories. what is to be done? thinking through the subgenres of brazilian funk made clear the difficulties of trying to serve the interests of different audiences while operating on both local and global scales. it also provided a chance to reflect once more on the meaning of doing “global” research on popular culture, because a global perspective is most evidently the one presumed by the music industry—and parts of academia. these actors clearly tend to see—or, in this case, listen to—the world from the global north, while insisting on their perspective being neutral. through their eyes and ears the west thus reaffirms itself as the “universal measure of mankind”, as iain chambers (forthcoming) aptly puts it. echoing this perspective is a risk inherent to any research that aims to classify, in order to analyse, street music and culture all over the world. nurturing extended research networks that include both practitioners and researchers can be one way to minimize this risk. this exploration of brazilian funk nomenclature thus comes full circle to the problem that any choice implies for an international project: reinforcing a single subject position—and the authority of the researcher over the researched—by choosing a set of subgenres that not everyone will agree with, or including so many lesser categories that they become unintelligible. the decision, now informed by the considerations of different authors and actors, was to come full circle and use only the broader category of “brazilian funk” which is understandable to everyone. likewise cumbia, champeta and dancehall will just be listed as broad categories on the surveys, whilst subgenres are to be further investigated in the qualitative research. an earlier version of this article was published in the blog section of the sonic street technologies website: https://sonic-street-technologies.com. author biographies liv sovik is researcher and research coordinator for brazil of the erc-funded sonic street technologies. she is a professor of the school of communication of universidade federal do rio de janeiro, author of aqui ninguém é branco (2009) and tropicália rex (2018), and editor of stuart hall’s da diaspora: identidades e mediações culturais (2003). since her phd thesis (1994), she has worked with the brazilian popular music tradition as a field in which imaginaries are developed and evidenced. brian d’aquino holds a phd in international studies from l’orientale university of naples and is currently a senior research assistant to the erc-funded sonic street technologies project at goldsmiths, university of london. he is the author of black noise. tecnologie della diaspora sonora (meltemi, 2021) and a founding member of the research group sound system outernational. he has been running the bababoom hi fi sound system and released vinyl records under the bababoom hi fi imprint since 2004. references akinsete, korete. 2019 “call us by our name: stop using ‘afrobeats’”. op-ed, okayafrica digital platform, 2 april. available at: https://www.okayafrica.com/afrobeats-genre-name-stop-op-ed/ (accessed 12 october 2022). cáceres, guillermo, lucas ferrari and carlos palombini. 2014. “a era lula/tamborzão: política e sonoridade. revista do instituto de estudos brasileiros 58: 157-207. campbell, curtis. 2016 “give dancehall its due – richie stephens, lisa hanna”. the gleaner, 12 february. available at: https://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/entertainment/20160214/give-dancehall-its-due-richie-stephens-lisa-hanna (accessed 12 october 2022). chambers, iain. forthcoming. “learning from the sea: migration and maritime archives.” in fabris, angela, göschl, albert and schneider, steffen, sea of literatures: towards a theory of mediterranean literature, de gruyter (pre-print available at http://www.peopleinmotion-costaction.org/2021/02/24/2702/ (accessed 13 october 2022). henriques, julian. 2011. sonic bodies: reggae sound systems, performance techniques, and ways of knowing. bloomsbury publishing usa. novaes, dennis and carlos palombini. 2019. “o labirinto e o caos: narrativas proibidas e sobrevivências num subgenera do funk carioca”. in nó em pingo d’água: sobrevivência, cultura e linguagem, ed. adriana carvalho lopes, adriana facina and daniel n. silva, 287-307. belo horizonte: mórula/insular. palombini. carlos. 2009. “soul brasileiro e funk carioca”. opus, goiânia 15(1): 37-61, june 2009. sovik, liv. 2018. “o rap desorganiza o carnival”. in tropicália rex, 103-27. rio de janeiro: mauad. vianna, hermano. 1988. o mundo funk carioca. rio de janeiro: zahar. filmography gloria groove. “gloria groove yoyo (feat. iza)”. youtube, 3:11. uploaded on 13 june 2019. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkfmybbwejy> (accessed 19 october 2022). junior lopes. “tati quebra barraco sou feia mas tô na moda”. youtube, 3:05. uploaded on 21 march 2012. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvnjq8f-caa> (accessed 19 october 2022). kondzilla. “funk ostentação antigo”. youtube, 1:31:38. uploaded on 4 may 2020. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8m3cryqjmfm> (accessed 19 october 2022). mnr yg. “sequência das mais tocadas no tiktok 2022 vs os funks mais tocados no rj [ funk carioca ] @pl-1”. youtube, 13:04. uploaded on 17 april 2022. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_zqplahsua> (accessed 19 october 2022). onda dos bailes. “pagofunk 2022 seleção das mais tocadas (tik tok)”. youtube, 59:41. uploaded on 9 april 2022. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lh-elomkffy> (accessed 19 october 2022). pl sheik. “15 minutinhos de funk carioca x musicas internacionais versão funk rj 🇧🇷🔥💣 brazilian funk”. youtube, 14:51. uploaded on 5 february 2022. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbrt4eb4ies> (accessed 19 october 2022). ryan elenco do funk. “é o trap, é o funk 1.0 mc hariel, mc kevin, mc pedrinho, mc ryan sp, mc brinquedo, salvador, mc ig”. youtube, 41:07. uploaded on 13 june 2019. <https://www.youtube.com/embed/x11ixqbwl5c> (accessed 19 october 2022). spotify brasil. “o brega funk vai dominar o mundo”. youtube, 18:51. uploaded on 12 november 2019. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qlr-qilt1k> (accessed 19 october 2022). victor músicas. “funk proibidão com grave 2022 funk 2022 (set funk atualizado 2022) seleção dos melhores funk 2022”. youtube, 31:00. uploaded on 31 july 2021. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6qe2gkpihs> (accessed 19 october 2022). vs fest music. “funk ostentação antigo”. youtube, 1:31:38. uploaded on 4 may 2020. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avx-hzkwf08> (accessed 19 october 2022). notes [1] see palombini (2009), cáceres, ferrari and palombini (2014) and the introductory pages of sovik (2018). dancecult 16(1) 2024: editor's introduction, masthead and table of contents spaces of dancing edited by ben assiter v16.1 2024 dancecult journal of electronic dance music culture issue 16(1) 2024 issn 1947-5403 ©2024 dancecult published yearly at <http://dj.dancecult.net> international advisory board sean albiez (southampton solent university, uk), anthony d’andrea (university of limerick, ie), rebekah farrugia (oakland university, us), kai fikentscher (de), alistair fraser (maynooth university, ie), luis-manuel garcia (university of birmingham, uk), anna gavanas (institute for futures studies, se), ross harley (university of new south wales, au), moses iten (rmit, au), anita jóri (berlin university of the arts, de), tim lawrence (university of east london, uk), geert lovink (university of amsterdam, nl), paolo magaudda (university of padova, it), charity marsh (university of regina, ca), andrew murphie (university of new south wales, au), jordi nofre (nova university lisbon, pt), alice o’grady (university of leeds, united kingdom), christopher partridge (lancaster university, uk), dave payling (staffordshire university, uk), anne petiau (itsrs / université paris 5, fr), hillegonda c rietveld (london south bank university, uk), geoff stahl (victoria university of wellington, nz), sonjah nadine stanley-niaah (university of west indies, jm), graham st john (university of huddersfield, uk), jonathan sterne (mcgill university, ca), will straw (mcgill university, ca), rupert till (university of huddersfield, uk), botond vitos (leuphana university, de), toby young (university of oxford, uk) dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture is a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture (edmc). launched in 2009, as a platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on the shifting terrain of edmcs worldwide, dancecult houses research exploring the sites, technologies, sounds and cultures of electronic music in historical and contemporary perspectives. playing host to studies of emergent forms of electronic music production, performance, distribution, and reception, as a portal for cutting-edge research on the relation between bodies, technologies, and cyberspace, as a medium through which the cultural politics of dance is critically investigated, and as a venue for innovative multimedia projects, dancecult is the leading venue for research on edmc. cover: the stairs to the shelter. photo by andrew rochfort. executive editor graham st john (university of huddersfield, uk) production editor botond vitos (leuphana university, de) from the floor editor dave payling (staffordshire university, uk) reviews editor anita jóri (berlin university of the arts, de) operations director botond vitos (leuphana university, de) foreign languages editor moses iten (rmit, au) managing editor tommy colton symmes (rice university, us) community manager katrina loughrey (de) art director botond vitos (leuphana university, de) operations associate dave payling (staffordshire university, uk) associate editors ben assiter (goldsmiths, university of london, uk) alistair fraser (maynooth university, ie) moses iten (rmit, au) rupert till (university of huddersfield, uk) production assistant patricio lópez-serrano (de) http://dj.dancecult.net issn 1947-5403 ©2024 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net v16.1 2024 executive editor’s introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 01 graham st john guest editor’s introduction to “spaces of dancing” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 02 ben assiter feature articles the steady decline of club culture in dublin: neoliberal policy, touristification and the pandemic . . . . 09 caroline ann o’sullivan “being a dj is my form of resistance”: the dance floor as a safer space for queer-feminist communities in vienna . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 magdalena fuernkranz london dubstep culture in an online discord community: the mediation of bass, space and place . . . 51 ivan mouraviev noise as a spectre in dub techno . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 bahadırhan koçer squelches, wobbles and risers: continuous processes and subgenres in electronic dance music . . . . . . 98 jeremy w. smith transposition berghain, techno and the body factory: ethnography of a club’s regulars. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .125 guillaume robin from the floor – online reflections from the frontlines of grassroots venue design ella adu finding shelter: recollections of shanghai’s underground music scene in the 2010s tianyu jiang foraging places and spaces through dance: the mycelium-like spaces of post-1989 berlin affording its ongoing club culture phoebe janssen passinho chronicles: unveiling urban narratives through dance natalia figueredo an old school stomper: reflections on place, identity, and drugs and the fluctuating roles of the participating ethnographer sarah raine platformization and its ongoing impact on dance music spaces danielle antoinette hidalgo reparative raving emily murphy windows on the dancefloor ruth hughes reviews rude citizenship: jamaican popular music, copyright, and the reverberations of colonial power (mckenzie wark) 140 larisa kingston mann together, somehow: music, affect, and intimacy on the dancefloor (luis manuel garcia-mispireta) . . . . . . 143 rory fewer out of space: how uk cities shaped rave culture (revised and expanded edition) (jim ottewill) . . . . . . . 145 alistair fraser venue stories: narratives, memories, and histories from britain’s independent music spaces (fraser mann, robert edgar and helen pleasance. eds.). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 max gibson living at night in times of pandemic: night studies and club culture in france and germany (anita jóri and guillaume robin. eds.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150 jack mcneill dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 16(1): 1–1 issn 1947-5403 ©2024 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.00 executive editor’s introduction welcome to the 21st issue of dancecult (issue 16.1). i will leave it to ben assiter to introduce his guest edition on the theme of “space”, but i should note that, in addition to the themed edition, the issue features open submission content, including two feature articles: bahadırhan koçer’s “noise as a spectre in dub techno” and jeremy w. smith’s “squelches, wobbles and risers: continuous processes and subgenres in electronic dance music”. it also features a transpositions piece “berghain, techno and the body factory: ethnography of a club’s regulars” that was translated from the german by its author guillaume robin and foreign languages editor moses iten. as usual, the issue features a set of book reviews. in her second year as reviews editor, five book reviews have been expertly compiled by anita jóri, who continues to hit the ground running. these reviews are: aadita chaudhury’s review of larisa kingston mann’s rude citizenship: jamaican popular music, copyright, and the reverberations of colonial power (university of north carolina press, 2022); rory fewer’s review of luis manuel garcia-mispireta’s together, somehow: music, affect, and intimacy on the dancefloor (duke university press, 2023); alistair fraser’s review of jim ottewill’s out of space: how uk cities shaped rave culture (revised and expanded edition) (velocity press, 2024); max gibson’s review of fraser mann, robert edgar and helen pleasance’s edited volume venue stories: narratives, memories, and histories from britain’s independent music spaces (equinox publishing, 2023); jack mcneill’s review of anita jóri and guillaume robin’s edited volume living at night in times of pandemic: night studies and club culture in france and germany (transcript verlag, 2024).  at this time, we must wish fond farewell to tommy symmes, who has served as managing editor since 2018. tommy, who has worked on seven issues, including the current issue, was the first person to fill the managing editor position and has done so with great dedication and care, becoming quite instrumental to ensuring the journal’s ongoing stature as a professional venue for publication in this field. we wish tommy well in his future endeavours. the journal, dozens of authors and countless readers, have benefited from tommy’s attention to detail and love of music. further thanks, as always, to our entire team, as well as the many anonymous reviewers, and our supporters, whose ongoing efforts are vital to our operation. graham st john, executive editor, dancecult. https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.00 squelches, wobbles and risers: continuous processes and subgenres in electronic dance music dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 16(1): 98–124 issn 1947-5403 ©2024 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.06 squelches, wobbles and risers: continuous processes and subgenres in electronic dance music jeremy w. smith the ohio state university (us) abstract edm is notorious for having copious genres and subgenres. there are many facets of edm genre distinctions, but this article focuses on one musical aspect: the utilization of “continuous processes” such as crescendos, glissandi and filter sweeps of various lengths (smith 2021). some continuous processes signify belonging to certain subgenres. for example, acid house is known for a “squelching” sound, dubstep is known for its “wobble bass” and it is common to hear conversations about which subgenres have the most intense “risers”. in general, continuous processes are used more prominently in subgenres that are more intense, psychedelic and electronic than others. the article’s findings are based on analysis of production guides and fan discourse, as well as the author’s fieldwork and interviews with producers. three analytical case studies are presented, comparing the use of continuous processes in multiple versions of a work (the original mix and remixes) from different subgenres. keywords: genres, risers, music analysis, production techniques, interviews jeremy w. smith is an assistant professor of music theory at the ohio state university. his research is primarily on the analysis of electronic dance music (edm), especially continuous processes (such as glissandi and filter sweeps). he has published on this topic in music theory online and contributed a chapter to the evolution of electronic dance music (bloomsbury, 2021). a secondary research interest is video-game music. jeremy is also an active musician who has played euphonium with various local ensembles. feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.06 smith | squelches, wobbles and risers 99 introduction the study of genres in music and other art forms is complicated. genre studies asks how consumers, producers and vendors place works into various categories to facilitate cultural discourse. foundational texts on genre in popular music from several different decades all agree that genres are social constructs, which are only partially based on formal musical characteristics.1 cultural-historical analysis and musical analysis are both necessary in genre studies, and this article uses both to discuss how specific production techniques are linked with various edm genres. genres evolve over time, and the way the word genre is used has also evolved. in today’s popular-music landscape there is a seemingly endless list of subgenres and “microgenres”, and anyone can now add to that list by tagging a track with their own descriptive labels in streaming services, as the origin story of hyperpop goes.2 on the other hand, some of the most popular artists such as beyoncé and taylor swift are known for transcending genre boundaries altogether. furthermore, as eric drott explained, platforms such as spotify and deezer use surveillance to generate personalized “mood-, activity-, and context-based playlists” that frequently change and are not based on traditional genre labels (2018: 255). given all this, it may be tempting to say “genre is dead” ( johnson 2020: 177). however, i agree with tom johnson that “genre is not dead” and is still relevant in many ways (2020: 177).3 as i will discuss in this article, scholars, djs, producers and fans still speak about meaningful distinctions between edm genres and subgenres. it is part of the cultural language that is used to communicate within edm communities. other metagenres like rock, pop, metal and hip-hop also have a large number of subgenres, but edm arguably has the most subgenres within its large umbrella, with a multitude of them being established well before the 21st century and the digital streaming era (mcleod 2001: 60).4 kembrew mcleod’s 2001 article discussed “genres, subgenres, sub-subgenres and more” within edm, and his main points are still relevant. mcleod argued there are many reasons for the proliferation of subgenre names, but one of the most significant is marketing strategies, which fans react to in various ways (mcleod 2001: 67-9). artists and fan communities sometimes establish new names as a way of “subcultural gate-keeping” to differentiate insiders from outsiders (mcleod 2001: 72). this can be intimidating for those just getting into edm culture. another difficulty for those learning to differentiate between subgenres is that edm is primarily instrumental, so lyrics and vocal personas do not play a significant role in its subgenre distinctions. instead, tempo, drum patterns, formal structure, distinctive timbres or effects and prominence of melodies (or lack thereof ) are the main musical factors in edm genre distinctions. some of these also relate to specific instruments and production technologies that are associated with specific places and time periods, such as the roland tb-303 synthesizer being associated with acid house in the 1980s. many facets of edm subgenre distinctions have already been articulated in scholarship, including geographical, historical, cultural and musical factors (butler 2006: 45-47; wiltsher 2016: 416-19). this article discusses all of these and provides a scholarly update on discourse about edm genres in the 2020s, but also highlights one aspect of the discourse dancecult 16(1)100 that has not been significantly discussed in previous scholarship, namely, the role of what i call “continuous processes” (such as wobbles and risers) in genre distinctions (smith 2021). continuous processes are “musical gestures with continuous changes to musical parameters rather than discrete, step-by-step ones” (smith 2021). the parameter changed can be anything, such as pitch, filter cutoff, volume or speed. examples of continuous processes include glissandi (e.g. risers), crescendos, accelerations and filter sweeps. continuous processes are an important aspect of edm in general, and they have various functions in this repertoire, such as embellishing riffs with creative effects and orienting dancers toward formal structure. they are usually created by manipulating what mark j. butler calls “continuous controllers” such as knobs, wheels or sliders, and they are often programmed in daws through lfos or automation curves (2014: 71). sometimes, particularly for short (but still perceivable) continuous processes like wobbles, they are embedded into the distinctive timbres of electronic instruments or presets. this article adds to the discussion of edm genres by arguing that the ways continuous processes are used or not used, particularly how prominent they are in the structure and overall sound of a track, is a significant factor in terms of the musical characteristics that help distinguish edm subgenres. the heuristic of continuous processes can help describe specific production techniques in more detail, and it can explain connections between various techniques in many subgenres. edm tracks combine continuous processes with discrete processes like traditional melodies and rhythms with clearly separated notes. figure 1 shows a screenshot from a track i made in ableton live 11. it demonstrates the importance of both discrete processes (rhythmic “blocks”) and continuous processes (red automation lines and sine curves for lfos). figure 1. screenshot of a track made by the author in ableton live 11. smith | squelches, wobbles and risers 101 it is important to consider why continuous processes such as wobbles and risers are emphasized or suppressed by producers for specific tracks and subgenres. two important factors are the inherent instability of continuous processes and their historical link with electronic (not acoustic) instruments. in general, continuous processes are used more prominently in subgenres that are perceived as being more intense, psychedelic and especially more electronic, than others.5 some continuous processes are also used to signify belonging to specific subgenres. for example, acid house is known for a distinctive “squelching” sound and dubstep is known for its “wobble bass”. it is also common to hear conversations in edm culture about which subgenres have the most frequent and intense risers. my findings are based on personal experiences and discussions with fans at edm events in the usa and canada, analytical readings of numerous tracks, online fan discourse, production guides and interviews i conducted in late 2022 with several producers who work in different edm genres. one interviewee is joe smooth ( joseph lorenzo jr. welbon), who rose to prominence as a chicago house dj in the 1980s and still produces many genres today.6 another is man parrish, who helped define “electro” (a.k.a. electronic funk) in the 1980s.7 he explained to me his thought process for producing different contemporary edm genres. a third interviewee is db mokk, an italian trance producer.8 the fourth interviewee is nghtmre (tyler marenyi), who primarily produces bass music such as dubstep and drum ‘n’ bass.9 both db mokk and nghtmre are currently active performers and producers who released recent lps of their original music. after an overview of the history of edm genres, this article will discuss the state of edm genres and scenes today, explaining how continuous processes play a role in categorizations. following this broad discussion, the article presents some analytical case studies, comparing the use of continuous processes in multiple versions of a work (the original mix with one or more remixes) from different genres or subgenres. the first two case studies show how electro house uses continuous processes more prominently than deep house and progressive house. they compare the original mixes of “fly away” by damian lazarus and the ancient moons (2017; deep house) and “the veldt” by deadmau5 (2012; progressive house) with electro-house remixes by dennis ferrer and tommy trash, respectively. the third case study compares the original mix of “another dose” by nghtmre (2022; drum ‘n’ bass) with a remix by diesel and kozmoz (nghtmre 2023; dubstep). a brief history of edm genres before discussing current edm genres and how continuous processes play a role in them, i will briefly discuss their historical development. many people conceptualize edm genres as a developing evolutionary story or family history (wiltsher 2016: 418). other resources provide a more detailed history, so i will only supply a brief overview here. the first edm was an outgrowth of disco music in the 1970s. in the early 1980s, people started differentiating between the dance music heard at clubs in various american cities: house in chicago, techno in detroit and garage (now sometimes called garage house) in new dancecult 16(1)102 york (garcia-mispireta 2018: 40-1). house (named after a club named the warehouse) and garage (named after a club named the paradise garage) were relatively similar in style, although garage was somewhat slower and more inspired by soul and gospel, whereas house was faster, more percussion-driven and more inspired by funk (garcia-mispireta 2018: 40). chicago-house producer joe smooth told me house has “the attention driven around the drums and the rhythm of the song”, whereas techno is more “aggressive” with “hard-edged sounds”.10 techno was influenced by kraftwerk’s electropop, and is known for its mechanistic aesthetic (reynolds 2013: 5). luis-manuel garcia-mispireta states that early techno was “a new, futuristic-sounding dance music that drew heavily from electronic funk, [and] relied more heavily on synthesized samples instead of acoustic ones” (2018: 41). all of these early types of edm were linked with queer and african american communities. in the mid-to-late 1980s, american house music (especially the subgenre of acid house) became popular for the rave scene in the uk (reynolds 2013: 67). then in the 1990s many new genres and variants developed, particularly in europe. one was hardcore, which evolved into jungle and drum ‘n’ bass. these genres are significantly faster than house and techno (wiltsher 2016: 416-7). they also feature prominent use of breakbeats, which are “drum patterns sampled from the percussion-only sections, or ‘breaks,’ of old funk records” (butler 2006: 78). another genre emerging in the 1990s was uk garage, which combined a variety of influences and later led to dubstep (wiltsher 2016: 417). ambient and trance also developed as a counterpoint to hardcore (reynolds 2013: 211, 539). by the start of the 21st century edm was growing in popularity outside of rave contexts, and it really took off in the late 2000s with the rise of the worldwide edm festival scene (reuter 2021: 6). house, trance and dubstep were the most popular varieties at large festivals (reynolds 2013: 681-2). progressive house and trance came to be seen as almost identical, while electro house was a grittier version with the same beat (russell 2023). in the 2010s these merged into big-room house, which some viewed as a derogatory term for mainstream commercialized edm. this decade also saw edm become highly influential for mainstream pop music, such that the formal structures of numerous top-40 songs became a fusion of verse-chorus form and edm form.11 trap edm also emerged in the 2010s, as a variant of hip-hop’s trap subgenre. today trap, dubstep, drum ‘n’ bass and other genres are often grouped together under the term “bass music”. as i explain in the following section, bass music is one of several currently large categories, along with house, trance, techno, chillout and edm pop. the term “edm” itself also has an interesting history. in their historical analyses, garcia-mispireta and anita jóri have shown that the abbreviation edm for “electronic dance music” was first widely used among fan communities and scholars in the 1990s (garcia-mispireta 2018: n. 1; jóri 2021: 28-31). it originally referred to various types of underground club music ( jóri 2021: 29-30). in the 2000s though, the abbreviation was co-opted by the north american music industry (st. john 2017: n. 1). for many fans and smith | squelches, wobbles and risers 103 producers “edm” came to represent a new mainstream type of music, often associated with weekend festivals ( jóri 2021: 31-4). mcleod proposed an added slash (electronic/ dance music) “because not all the musics consumed by these communities are necessarily designed for dancing”; some are intended for close listening with headphones (2001: 60). today, many producers recognize edm as an umbrella term, but also acknowledge its commercial connotations. scholars still use it to refer to the broad metagenre, but sometimes separate it into various contexts with added descriptors. for example, robin james (2015) and fabian holt (2017) use the term “edm pop” throughout their work. streaming sites sometimes refer to just this pop genre as edm or “dance music” while the broader metagenre becomes “electronic” or “electronica”. one notable example of edm pop is beyoncé’s album renaissance (2022), which is a tribute to early chicago house and its importance in black and queer culture (battan 2022). current edm genres and continuous processes the current state of edm genres is as complex as ever. music creators can add customized genre tags to their own music on soundcloud or bandcamp, and each streaming platform has its own system of genre labels. the algorithms of spotify include several thousand “genreshaped distinctions” as tracked on the site “every noise at once”.12 with myriad resources available, it can be hard for someone not active in the edm community to understand its genre categories and trends. in this section i will discuss how continuous processes play a role in edm genre distinctions and outline today’s largest genres. my primary sources are my own interviews with fans and producers, existing scholarship, websites, articles and books that are targeted specifically to edm producers or listeners. these include production guides such as rick snoman’s (2019) dance music manual and lessons from companies such as edmprod. another site with genre information is beatport (an online music store). there is also ishkur’s guide to electronic music, an extensive (though somewhat dated) project that includes witty, irreverent commentary.13 several fans have referenced this in my discussions with them. using ishkur’s guide we can trace the lineage of any subgenre from right to left while listening to examples (see figure 2). another important source (which ishkur himself cites) is online record store discogs.14 finally, di.fm is an online radio site specifically for edm, and it includes almost 100 channels of various genres and subgenres, each with its own detailed explanation.15 dancecult 16(1)104 figure 2. screenshot from ishkur’s guide to electronic music. before going into more detail, it is important to clarify a few common misconceptions. although there are countless genres and subgenres of edm, there are only several of the largest categories at a time, and these change through the generations. for example, at the end of the 1990s, the “four fundamental genres of dance music” were generally regarded as house, techno, hardcore and garage (wiltsher 2016: 417). also, not everyone in the edm community agrees on specific subgenre labels, and there can be some overlap between them. sometimes there are even multiple names for what is essentially the same subgenre, or the names for the same thing change over time. many artists, albums and even individual tracks are described with multiple subgenre names and are often tagged as such (charles 2020: 258). however, communities still develop around specific subgenre tags and groups of tags. smith | squelches, wobbles and risers 105 as mentioned previously, genres are not only defined by their musical characteristics, and especially not by a single musical characteristic being present or absent. rather, there are standard expectations for musical features in certain genres, but degree of emphasis matters. nick wiltsher provides an example: “a smooth crescendo of rushing snares is unremarkable in a trance record, but notable in a dubstep track” (2016: 418). similarly, certain musical traits (such as a “distorted” timbre) are valorized in some genres and critiqued in others (wiltsher 2016: 418). continuous processes such as squelches, wobbles and risers are used more prominently in subgenres that are perceived as being more intense, psychedelic and especially more electronic than others. tyler marenyi (nghtmre) told me that he agrees with this thesis and considers what i call continuous processes to be an important part of distinctions between subgenres.16 for him, tempo and drum patterns are the primary factors in distinguishing larger generic categories (such as house as opposed to drum ‘n’ bass), but subgenres that are known for their overtly electronic sounds (such as electro house) use continuous processes more than others. this makes sense given that continuous musical motions (often made with knobs, wheels, sliders and automation curves) are generally associated with electronic sounds and compositions, rather than western classical music that is acoustic and based on the discrete grids of the 5-line staff and piano keyboard (dolan 2012: 4). intended listening contexts often play a role in genre naming, and continuous processes relate to this too. in an interview, producer man parrish referred to continuous processes as different types of effects, and when i asked how he used them in different genres, he said he thinks about what the purpose of the genre is and the environment in which the track is likely to be heard. for example, for edm pop or radio edits, he used “simple” effects, whereas for genres designed to be heard in underground club settings, he used more short, “trippy” and “weird” effects, such as “stretching a voice out” or shifting pitch on it.17 another way continuous processes are commonly used in edm is to build anticipation, in a buildup leading to a drop.18 as joe smooth told me, djs build anticipation through risers (ascending pitch slides or glissandi, often combined with filter sweeps) and through continuously adding more of the reverb effect to make the sounds grow roomier.19 the specific ways this is done, however, can be a characteristic of specific subgenres or individual artists. in edm fan discourse it is common to hear conversations about which performers and which subgenres have the most intense risers or most climactic drops. continuous processes in 6 current edm genres this section discusses the specific roles of continuous processes in subgenre distinctions for 6 current edm genres: house, edm pop, trance, techno, bass music and chillout. some of these are more accurately described as scenes or metagenres, but most contemporary edm can be clearly placed into one of these large categories. this heuristic reduction is not a perfect method of summarizing current genres, but it represents an overview of my research findings. a summary of the information in this section is presented in figure 3. dancecult 16(1)106 figure 3. a table summarizing musical characteristics for six current edm genres or scenes. house music is still one of the largest edm genres. it is the direct successor to disco and is primarily defined by its drumbeat and tempo range (around 120 bpm). the drum machine beat usually features a “four-on-the-floor” kick (sounding on every beat), with snares or claps on the backbeats (2 and 4) and hi-hats usually on the offbeats in between each beat (snoman 2019: 339). house is often described as “groovy”, emphasizing syncopated rhythms in the pitched components and auxiliary percussion. it is also the type of edm that most prominently features harmony in the form of standalone chord progressions (compared with trance that features longer melodies, edm pop with vocal melodies and other genres where melody and harmony are scarce). house provided the biggest influence on edm pop, which often combines verse-chorus structure with house beats to create pop songs. differences between house subgenres are often based on timbre and the utilization of continuous processes. for example, longer, more intense risers are generally used in more mainstream types of house, such as big room and future house (russell 2023). subgenres that are perceived as more electronic (such as electro house) use continuous processes with greater prominence than more acoustic subgenres such as deep house, which is characterized by its combination of house beats with elements of funk, soul or jazz (salkind 2019: 83). smith | squelches, wobbles and risers 107 sometimes short continuous processes are linked with distinctly electronic timbres or techniques that are characteristic of certain subgenres. for example, acid house (historically associated with chicago in the 1980s) is known for its “squelch” effects, particularly in the basslines, created with the roland tb-303 synthesizer (butler 2006: 68-9). simon reynolds describes how the machine was typically used: having programmed a bass riff on the keyboard, you tweak the knobs to modulate the pitch, accent and other parameters of each individual note in the bassline. the result is bass patterns that are as complex and trippy as a computer fractal, riddled with wriggly nuances and glissandi, curlicues and whorls. (reynolds 2013: 30, emphasis mine) an exemplary track using the squelch sounds of acid house is phuture’s (1987) “acid tracks”. one of the group’s members, dj pierre, said that they liked the tb-303’s “acid squiggle” (reynolds 2013: 31). trance is another large genre that is fairly similar to house. the tempo is the same or slightly faster than house and the drumbeat is also generally the same. the difference is primarily in musical texture and degrees of emphasis. also, trance is of european origin and is still more associated with europe, compared to house with its american origins. trance is often described as a highly emotional genre with emphasis on lead melodies (compared to house’s emphasis on groovy loops). it is “energetic, anthemic, and uplifting” (russell 2023). sometimes the subgenre of uplifting trance is used as a synecdoche (snoman 2019: 365). it is also known for clear formal structures with long breakdown and buildup sections.20 relatedly, trance is known for particularly long pitch risers (one type of continuous process). producer db mokk told me it is very common to have twooctave glissandi in trance buildup sections “to create tension”.21 a long riser in a buildup section can be heard at 3:15-3:28 in db mokk’s (2022) “close to you (extended mix)”. differences between trance subgenres generally revolve around how psychedelic they are perceived to be (charles 2020: 29-35). one common continuous process that gives sounds a psychedelic feel is a filter sweep on long chords. techno is still a significant genre, though in my experience some fans consider it more of a historical term. like house and trance, it is a “four-on-the-floor” genre, but its tempo is roughly 130-140 bpm (butler 2006: 78). techno is characterized by its mechanistic aesthetic, with clearly electronic timbres. the texture emphasizes percussion, short repetitive bass riffs and sound effects, with no clear melodies (snoman 2019: 353-4). it is rhythmically complex with the various parts interlocking like an industrial machine. contrasting with trance, the formal structures of individual tracks are subtle and more about general shapes than clear divisions (butler 2006: 228). continuous processes are not as common in techno as in other genres, and when used they are generally less prominent. sometimes this includes slow crescendos or filter sweeps that last 16 bars or more but are not very intense. for example, in brikha’s (2011) “read only memory”, the kick drum gradually fades in, then the entire track subtly crescendos for several minutes. butler calls this continuous process a “gradual transformation” in his analysis of a 1999 release of the piece (2006: 144). subgenre names for techno often reflect fusions between it and other genres, such as hard techno dancecult 16(1)108 (hardcore and techno) and tech house (techno and house). one prominent subgenre is minimal techno, which emphasizes minimalist textures and subtle changes, somewhat like the music of philip glass or steve reich. bass music is a recent term for types of edm that emphasize bass parts and sub-bass frequencies, combining several individual genres into one large umbrella.22 many of these such as drum ‘n’ bass can be placed on what reynolds termed the “hardcore continuum”, with hardcore’s characteristic high tempos (wiltsher 2016: 417). however, other bass genres such as dubstep and trap are known for their half-time drum feels (with the snare being on beat 3 instead of beats 2 and 4). bass genres are generally experimental with drum patterns, often using breakbeats, or in the case of trap many hi-hat notes in quick succession (christodoulou 2020: 4). there are bass-heavy versions of house though, which keep the house tempo and drumbeat. some artists like nghtmre and nero use different bass genres within the same live set. in general, bass music prominently uses short continuous processes (typically lasting one measure or less) as effects that embellish the notes of bass riffs. this takes place in all formal sections, whereas in house, trance and techno it is more common in breakdown sections specifically. one short continuous process is a characteristic identifier of dubstep: the wobble bass (d’errico 2015). this is similar to the squelching sound of acid house, but it is less associated with a specific instrument. it is often created with lfo modulation to pitch and filtering on a “bright harmonically rich” bass (snoman 2019: 382). an example occurs at 3:06 in “none of ur business” (von d 2014). intense risers are also common in various bass genres, though they are not as long as those used in trance. they are perhaps 2 or 4 bars long instead of 8 or 16 bars long. chillout genres are on the other end of the spectrum, purposely being less intense, usually with slower tempos and warm, mellow timbres. the genre names and characteristics are less solidified in this category, but some common terms are ambient, downtempo and lounge. listeners use this music to relax and unwind, whether at home or in the chill-out room of a club (butler 2006: 35). sometimes a drumbeat is entirely absent, but more often a steady beat is combined with gentle synth pads. since chillout is less intense, continuous processes are not usually a salient feature. similar to techno, when they are used it is generally in more subtle ways. one interesting genre in this category is trip-hop, which combines hip-hop beats with experimental use of samples from various african american musical styles. dj shadow and nightmares on wax are two notable trip-hop artists. although race plays a role in characterization of many subgenre names throughout edm, chillout seems to be the area where race divisions are most apparent, with trip-hop and downtempo known for being black and ambient known for being white (szabo 2021). there are many other types of edm, but this section has provided an overview of six large genres or scenes that comprise most current edm. the next section of the article features some analytical case studies that demonstrate how continuous processes play a role in subgenre distinctions. this will be done by comparing the use of continuous processes in multiple versions of a work (the original mix with one or more remixes) from different genres or subgenres. smith | squelches, wobbles and risers 109 analytical case studies “fly away” one interesting case study on how continuous processes affect genre is “fly away” by damian lazarus and the ancient moons (2017). multiple sites like beatport and discogs list the original mix as being deep house, which (as mentioned earlier) is characterized by its combination of house tempos and electronic beats with elements of funk, soul or jazz music. ishkur’s guide states that deep house is known for being “organic” such that it emphasizes “sounds and textures that could come from the real world as opposed to synthesized sounds generated via waveforms, oscillators and envelopes”.23 it is a label that has persisted in common parlance through several decades, which is uncommon for edm subgenres, although one similar subgenre that emerged in the 2010s is future house (russell 2023). the original deep house mix of “fly away” is notable for its lack of continuous processes. there are some, including soft risers, small crescendos and some wavy electronic effects, but as in most deep house tracks they are not as common or as prominent as they are in other subgenres. the highs and lows of sonic energy are not starkly differentiated. instead, the track uses mostly discrete processes, with a mix of acoustic and electronic instruments. the structure is verse-chorus form with prominent vocals, which is unusual for all types of edm except edm pop. figure 4 shows a transcription of the vocal part in the second chorus. notice how discrete it is, fitting neatly onto the traditional staff. figure 4. transcription of the vocal from chorus 2 in “fly away” (damian lazarus and the ancient moons 2017: track 1).24 dancecult 16(1)110 dennis ferrer’s remix of “fly away” was released alongside the original, but it is quite different (damian lazarus and the ancient moons 2017: track 2). some obvious changes are the faster tempo, new bass riff and short vocal samples (replacing lyrical verses and choruses). continuous processes are also much more prominent in it. this remix is characteristic of the electro house subgenre, and the framework of continuous processes can help us understand why. electro house is a subgenre that came to prominence with edm festivals in the late 2000s and 2010s. the term has not been commonly used for new music in the 2020s, but the currently popular bass house has similar musical traits. electro house is one of numerous subgenres known for having intense drops, but it is also known for having sounds and effects that are overtly electronic, contrasting with the acoustic and soulful aspects of deep house. many of the electronic effects feature continuous processes like changes in pitch, echo, pan or speed. simon reynolds states that electro house features “dirty bass” sounds, created with sawtooth waves that are used to make “grinding and whirring” bass lines (2013: 682). similarly, di.fm describes electro house as having “powerful buzzing basslines” and “party rocking drops”.25 producer aden russell writes that electro house features “synth sounds to create risers for energy, like noise and pitch-modulated oscillators” (2023). all of this explains why electro house features more prominent use of continuous processes than other types of house, and ferrer’s remix of “fly away” is a good example of this. in the remix, many of the most prominent continuous processes occur in the breakdownbuildup section, which breaks down the texture of the track before building up the tension leading to a climactic drop.26 figures 5-9 present analysis of this section. one sound layer that is new in the remix (not in the original) is introduced right at the start of the breakdown. it features an alternation between pitches g2 and a2, with continuous movement between them. the speed of the alternation also changes continuously, first accelerating then decelerating. the decrescendo (as it fades out) is also another continuous process. a transcription such as the one in figure 5 can be helpful for understanding some aspects of this sound layer, but it cannot represent the continuous aspects well. one way to represent that better is through a line graph for the speed of the alternation (figure 6), which approximates what ferrer might have visually seen as an automation curve. this graph was created through my own listening to the track slowed down and with the alternation emphasized. smith | squelches, wobbles and risers 111 figure 5. transcription of the g-a alternation in “fly away (dennis ferrer remix)” (damian lazarus and the ancient moons 2017: track 2). figure 6. line graph of the g-a alternation’s speed (1:55-1:59) in “fly away (dennis ferrer remix)” (damian lazarus and the ancient moons 2017: track 2). another sound layer that fades in as the g-a alternation fades out (around 2:00 in the track) is what i call the “sliding riff ”. in this riff, short continuous glissandi add embellishment in between the discrete pitches, which is common in electro house and many edm subgenres that are known for emphasizing electronic effects. figure 7 is a transcription that shows the perceived pitches, and figure 8 is a melodic range spectrogram showing some of the slides between pitches.27 dancecult 16(1)112 figure 7. transcription of the “sliding riff” that fades in around 2:00 in “fly away (dennis ferrer remix)” (damian lazarus and the ancient moons 2017: track 2). lines represent continuous pitch scoops and falls. figure 8. melodic range spectrogram of the “sliding riff” (2:14-2:17) in “fly away (dennis ferrer remix)” (damian lazarus and the ancient moons 2017: track 2). after the sliding riff is firmly established in the texture, a voice layer enters at 2:17. this voice is from the original mix, but in the remix it has timbral effects (such as echo) added to make it sound more electronic and spacey. the spacey voice, and later another voice added by ferrer for the remix, combine with a crescendo to build up to the climactic drop at 2:56. as expected, the continuous process of the crescendo is more pronounced in the electro house remix compared with the original mix, although it is still not a huge crescendo relative to some other edm tracks. figure 9 shows the entire breakdown-buildup section visually in multiple ways, highlighting how continuous processes play a significant role. smith | squelches, wobbles and risers 113 figure 9. visual representation of the entire breakdown-buildup section (1:55-2:56) in “fly away (dennis ferrer remix)” (damian lazarus and the ancient moons 2017: track 2). top layer: melodic range spectrogram. middle: plain spectrogram. bottom: waveform. later in the track (3:54), the spacey voice gets “stretched out” and has even more echo effects applied to it. at the same time, there is a very low repeated sound effect that fits reynolds’ description of the “whirring” bass characteristic of electro house (2013: 682). these two layers that feature continuous processes are transcribed in figure 10. the whirring bass sound starts well before this though, at 3:27 in a regular bass register, before quickly descending to a range where it is almost imperceptible and more felt than heard. to summarize the findings from this case study, there are many continuous processes in ferrer’s remix that help enculturated edm listeners place it in the subgenre of electro house, compared with the original deep house mix that features few continuous processes. figure 10. transcription of the “spacey voice” and “whirring bass” at 3:54 in “fly away (dennis ferrer remix)” (damian lazarus and the ancient moons 2017: track 2). dancecult 16(1)114 “the veldt” for another case study, compare the original progressive house mix of “the veldt” by deadmau5 featuring chris james with tommy trash’s electro house remix (deadmau5 2012). the subgenre of progressive house originated with some uk artists in the 1990s, who wanted to distance themselves from the original american house sound (reynolds 2013: 519). the adjective “progressive” does mean forward-thinking and experimental in edm circles, but less so than in rock communities (as in progressive rock), because by the early 2010s progressive house was associated with successful mainstream artists such as eric prydz and deadmau5. musically, progressive house is known for long tracks that add more and more layers over time and feature prominent lead melodies (russell 2023). it is similar to trance and the two are often conflated, although trance is more energetic and uplifting, while progressive house usually has a more chill sound with warm, mellow timbres (russell 2023). compared to electro house (which is harsher and more overtly electronic), progressive house uses fewer continuous processes, and those that it does use (such as automation on reverb) are not very salient (snoman 2019: 331). the original progressive house version of “the veldt” exemplifies this, as can be heard in the final buildup section that leads to the last drop at 7:59. the spectrogram and waveform in figure 11 show some continuous changes in volume and timbre, but these processes are not prominent. there are continuous processes that build up to climactic moments in this track, but they are not very steep or loud. figure 11. spectrogram and waveform of the final buildup and drop (approximately 7:45-8:10) in “the veldt” (deadmau5 2012: track 1). smith | squelches, wobbles and risers 115 the tommy trash remix, on the other hand, features bright, harsh timbres, long risers and big filter sweeps (deadmau5 2012: track 4). figure 12 shows a spectrogram and waveform for the final (second) buildup and drop (4:07-4:37). the waveform shows a high amount of compression and distortion, which explains the harsh timbres. this buildup section uses several prominent continuous processes to create tension. in addition to the long risers and overall crescendo, the voice that repeats “[chil]-dren made” changes timbre to gradually become more robotic. towards the end of the buildup (around 4:30) a high-pass filter sweep gradually removes low frequencies, then a noise sweep and the snare-roll technique propel the music toward a one-beat anacrustic cue just before the drop at 4:37.28 these processes communicate to fans that the subgenre is one with intense buildups. for example, snoman claims the snare roll is not used in less intense genres such as progressive house (2019: 333). also, during the core sections of this track there are many short, wobbly continuous processes that distinguish it from the original mix.29 some examples of this are shown at 4:41 and 4:44 in figure 13. when comparing the original mix with the tommy trash remix, the differences between timbres and utilization of continuous processes are striking. the bright, harsh timbres, combined with the frequent and prominent use of various continuous processes, signify the electro house subgenre. figure 12. spectrogram and waveform of the final (second) buildup and drop (4:07-4:37) in “the veldt (tommy trash remix)” (deadmau5 2012: track 4). dancecult 16(1)116 figure 13. spectrogram showing short continuous processes at 4:41 and 4:44 in the second core section of “the veldt (tommy trash remix)” (deadmau5 2012: track 4). “another dose” the final case study shows how continuous processes can help distinguish between two genres of bass music: drum ‘n’ bass and dubstep. the original mix of “another dose” was released by nghtmre on his 2022 album drmvrse. in an interview he explained to me that the album was created with the narrative of the hero’s journey in mind, and it is somewhat autobiographical.30 “another dose” is the penultimate track, and it is a celebratory apotheosis. it is energetic throughout, with drum ‘n’ bass’s characteristic fast tempo, although there is a brief section with half-time feel (2:23), and there are two sections with absent drums (0:33, 1:39) that lead to drops (0:55, 2:01). in general, drum ‘n’ bass music may or may not feature salient continuous processes. the genre is more defined by its fast tempo, use of breakbeats or 2-step patterns and textural emphasis on the eponymous two elements (christodoulou 2020: 4). however, other bass genres such as dubstep and future bass are specifically distinguished by their use of continuous processes (russell 2023). the original mix of “another dose” does often use continuous processes (such as crescendos, short pitch slides and the gradual addition of echo effects), but they are subtle and do not significantly change the energy of the track. for example, in the breakdown-buildup sections (0:33 and 1:39), there are no big risers or filter sweeps, but instead the increases in energy leading to the drops come from crescendos and the continuous strengthening of the reverb effect. in the first such section, sixteenth-note drums also fade in. figure 14 shows a transcription of some layers in the second half of the first breakdown-buildup. smith | squelches, wobbles and risers 117 figure 14. transcription of some layers from the second half of the first breakdown-buildup section (0:42-0:55) in “another dose” (nghtmre 2022: track 12). the remix by diesel (american basketball icon shaquille o’neal) and kozmoz is a dubstep track that is much slower than the original mix (nghtmre 2023: track 14). it also uses continuous processes more prominently. this is typical for dubstep, which is known not only for its wobble bass as discussed earlier, but also its intense risers and “the biggest crowd destroying bass drops”.31 in this remix, there are three buildup-drop cycles, the first and last of which are also preceded by a breakdown. risers are frequent and salient in the mix, not only during buildups (0:44, 1:32 and 2:35) but also during core sections (1:14, 2:03 and 3:05). there are even distinct risers just before and after the proper buildups (0:42, 1:29 and 2:32 before, and 0:59, 1:47 and 2:50 after). the number of buildup-drop cycles is also striking, with three in less than four minutes. this is quite intense and one signifier of certain genres like dubstep. in addition to risers, there are noise sweeps in both the breakdown sections. the first breakdown (0:29) starts with a descending noise sweep to decrease energy and concludes with an ascending noise sweep, along with the riser, to increase energy before the buildup section (0:44). all of these longer continuous processes are in addition to the many short ones such as the wobble bass. since the continuous processes are so salient in this remix, they show up well on a spectrogram, as evidenced by figure 15. to summarize, this case study of “another dose” unveils how continuous processes are integral to the genre of dubstep, but not to the genre of drum ‘n’ bass. dancecult 16(1)118 figure 15: spectrogram of 0:28-1:04 showing prominent continuous processes in the first breakdown, buildup and drop of “another dose (diesel and kozmoz remix)” (nghtmre 2023: track 14). conclusion there are many facets to the discourse of edm subgenres, including geographical, historical and cultural factors, but this article has shown that continuous processes are one important aspect of the conversation. edm producers, performers and fans frequently reference techniques such as squelches, wobbles and risers in their discussions of specific pieces and subgenres. the framework of continuous processes is a useful way of understanding these techniques because it can explain a variety of musical gestures under one common label. this reflects how hardware and software such as knobs, sliders and automation curves are used in the creation of edm, as well as how creators refer to most of these processes as “effects”. continuous processes can vary greatly in length and prominence, and they can be used in many ways, but the specific ways they are used or not used is important for genre categorizations in this repertoire. other musical aspects of edm genres are important too, though, and one interesting finding of this study is that continuous processes seem to be more relevant to distinctions between subgenres or smaller categories rather than larger ones. the first two case studies in the previous section (of “fly away” and “the veldt”) analyze differences between subgenres of house music, showing how deep house and progressive house do not feature continuous processes as prominently as electro house. the third case study of “another dose” discusses two genres under the umbrella of bass music, showing how certain types of continuous processes are integral to the definition of dubstep, whereas that is not the case for drum ‘n’ bass. smith | squelches, wobbles and risers 119 both the dubstep remix of “another dose” and the electro-house remix of “the veldt” feature harsh timbres with plenty of distortion, as well as frequent, salient continuous processes. this may raise a question about the musical differences between electro house and dubstep. the important thing to remember is that, as marenyi told me and as these case studies corroborate, larger categories are more often defined by their tempo and drumbeats, whereas the use of continuous processes more often defines smaller categorizations such as subgenres.32 all house music has approximately the same tempo and drumbeat, but electro house uses more prominent continuous processes than most other subgenres. dubstep has a distinctive tempo and half-time beat, but the continuous processes (the wobble bass and intense risers) are necessary components of it too, whereas they are not for some other types of bass music. there are also cases where continuous processes are not the most effective tool for analyzing differences between subgenres. for example, the original mix of “threshold” by nghtmre is dubstep (2022: track 2). but the remix by vanic is trap, and the differences between them are primarily in the discrete drum patterns (nghtmre 2023: track 3). future work on edm genres could continue the conversation by discussing the role of continuous processes in other types of edm that have not been thoroughly explored in this article. for example, it would be interesting to compare some of the most overtly electronic and experimental types of edm (for example glitch or idm) with electro house or electroacoustic art music. it would also be worth investigating how the discourse about edm subgenre distinctions compares to that of other metagenres like rock, pop, metal and hip-hop. are fans of other metagenres as willing to have overlap between categories and evolution of hierarchical distinctions? how might this relate to various contexts in which the music is heard, such as at clubs, concerts and festivals, or with headphones or the car radio? do continuous processes and effects play less of a role in subgenre distinctions for other metagenres? how does this relate to the methods of musical production (such as effects pedals in shoegaze rock), and how has that changed over time with the increasing digitization of production studios? for edm, continuous processes play a significant role indeed in subgenre categorizations, as evidenced by this article’s titular descriptions of musical gestures: squelches, wobbles and risers. notes 1 for example, see fabbri 1982; negus 1999; holt 2007; brackett 2016. 2 for more on the origin of hyperpop, see dandridge-lemco 2020. 3 similar ideas about the “central irony of the ‘postgenre’ attitude” are discussed by nick seaver (2022: 137). 4 on the term metagenre, see mcleod (2001); butler (2006, 33); anderton (2010); perevedentseva (2023). dancecult 16(1)120 5 many psychedelic genres lie on the “pedm genre spectrum” (charles 2020: 28). the framework of continuous processes can help explain what makes specific types of sounds such as the “reese bass” be labeled psychedelic, in a detailed way that points out connections with other psychedelic sounds (perevedentseva 2023: 50). 6 joe smooth, interview with the author (on zoom), 30 september 2022. 7 man parrish, interview with the author (on zoom), 29 september 2022. 8 db mokk, email to author, 1 october 2022. db mokk requested that their real name remain anonymous. 9 tyler marenyi, interview with the author (on zoom), 21 october 2022. 10 joe smooth, interview with the author (on zoom), 30 september 2022. 11 for more on how edm influenced formal structures in 2010s top-40 pop, see james 2015; peres 2016; adams 2019; barna 2020. 12 for more explanation of “every noise at once”, its creator glenn mcdonald and spotify metadata in general, see johnson (2020: n. 15) and seaver (2022: 130-3). as of this writing, the site is no longer currently being updated, with the last status update being in january 2024. see <everynoise.com>, (accessed 17 october 2024). 13 see ishkur’s guide to electronic music at <https://music.ishkur.com/>, (accessed 24 september 2024). 14 see discogs at <https://www.discogs.com/>, (accessed 10 october 2024). 15 see di.fm at <https://www.di.fm/>, (accessed 17 october 2024). di.fm also hosts regular talk shows with producers discussing various aspects of edm. 16 tyler marenyi, interview with the author (on zoom), 21 october 2022. 17 man parrish, interview with the author (on zoom), 29 september 2022. 18 in this article i use the term drop to mean the instantaneous and climactic moment that low frequencies (such as the kick drum) return, usually when a core section starts. in recent years some have used the term drop to refer to an entire formal section (a primary, energetic section of a track), but this is not how edm producers typically and traditionally use the term. for example, see how the term is used in snoman (2019: 294). 19 joe smooth, interview with the author (on zoom), 30 september 2022. 20 for an overview of formal structures in edm tracks, see butler (2006: 206-40) and solberg (2014). 21 db mokk, email to author, 1 october 2022. 22 tyler marenyi, interview with the author (on zoom), 21 october 2022. 23 from the ishkur homepage, click on “us deep house”; see <https://music.ishkur.com/>, (accessed 17 october 2024). 24 all transcriptions in this article are made by the author. 25 see <https://www.di.fm/electro>, (accessed 17 october 2024). 26 in most edm genres, the breakdown and buildup are usually two distinct sections of a track, with a clear boundary between them. sometimes, however, the demarcation between them is blurred so there is only one distinct formal section (collins and dunn 2021: 105-6). 27 the spectrograms and waveforms in this article were generated with sonic visualizer. 28 on the snare-roll technique and noise sweeps, see smith (2021) and snoman (2019: 332–3). 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<https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.21.27.2/mto.21.27.2.smith.html>. snoman, rick. 2019. dance music manual. 4th edition. milton park, abingdon, oxon; new york: routledge. solberg, ragnhild. 2014. “‘waiting for the bass to drop’: correlations between intense emotional experiences and production techniques in build-up and drop sections of electronic dance music”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 6(1): 61-82. <https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.01.04>. st. john, graham. 2017. “introduction: dance music festivals and event-cultures.” in weekend societies: electronic dance music festivals and event-cultures, edited by graham st. john, 1-24. new york, ny: bloomsbury academic. szabo, victor. 2021. “why is(n’t) ambient so white?” in the oxford handbook of electronic dance music, edited by luis-manuel garcia-mispireta and robin james. oxford university press. <https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190093723.013.33>. wiltsher, nick. 2016. “the aesthetics of electronic dance music, part i: history, genre, scenes, identity, blackness.” philosophy compass 11 (8): 415-25. <https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12333>. discography aril brikha. 2011. “read only memory”. track 10 on deeparture in time—revisited. art of vengeance (2xcd): aovcd001. <https://www.discogs.com/release/2719687-aril-brikha-deeparture-in-time-revisited>. damian lazarus and the ancient moons. 2017. fly away. crosstown rebels (12-inch): crm 191. <https://www.discogs.com/release/11298731-damian-lazarus-theancient-moons-fly-away>. db mokk. 2022. “close to you (extended mix)”. track 2 on bright: extended versions vol. 1. extrema global music (3xfile): egmsin351. <https://www.discogs.com/master/2709953-dbmokk-bright-extended-versions-vol1>. deadmau5. 2012. the veldt ep. ultra records (4xfile): ul 7697. <https://www.discogs.com/release/3690264-deadmau5-the-veldt-ep>. nghtmre. 2022. drmvrse. lowly (13xfile). <https://soundcloud.com/nghtmre/sets/drmvrse>. nghtmre. 2023. drmvrse remixes. lowly (14xfile). <https://soundcloud.com/nghtmre/sets/drmvrse-remixes>. https://www.edmprod.com/genres/ https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.21.27.2/mto.21.27.2.smith.html https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.01.04 https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190093723.013.33 https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12333 https://www.discogs.com/release/2719687-aril-brikha-deeparture-in-time-revisited https://www.discogs.com/release/11298731-damian-lazarus-the-%09ancient-moons-fly-away https://www.discogs.com/master/2709953-db-%09mokk-bright-extended-versions-vol-%091 https://www.discogs.com/release/3690264-deadmau5-the-veldt-ep https://soundcloud.com/nghtmre/sets/drmvrse https://soundcloud.com/nghtmre/sets/drmvrse-remixes dancecult 16(1)124 phuture. 1987. acid tracks. trax records (12-inch): tx142. <https://www.discogs.com/release/1949-phuture-acid-tracks>. von d. 2014. “none of ur business”. track 11 on positive energy. lutetia dubz (14xfile): lutetialp 02. <https://www.discogs.com/release/6601351-von-d-positive-energy>. https://www.discogs.com/release/1949-phuture-acid-tracks https://www.discogs.com/release/6601351-von-d-positive-energy dancecult 15(1) 2023: editor's introduction, masthead and table of contents psychedelica and electronica guest editors trace reddell and graham st john v15.1 2023 dancecult journal of electronic dance music culture issue 15(1) 2023 issn 1947-5403 ©2023 dancecult published yearly at <http://dj.dancecult.net> international advisory board sean albiez (southampton solent university, uk), mark j butler (northwestern university, us), anthony d’andrea (university of limerick, ie), rebekah farrugia (oakland university, us), kai fikentscher (de), alistair fraser (maynooth university, ie), luis-manuel garcia (university of birmingham, uk), anna gavanas (institute for futures studies, se), ross harley (university of new south wales, au), tim lawrence (university of east london, uk), geert lovink (university of amsterdam, nl), alejandro l. madrid (university of illinois, chicago, us), paolo magaudda (university of padova, it), charity marsh (university of regina, ca), andrew murphie (university of new south wales, au), alice o’grady (university of leeds, united kingdom), christopher partridge (lancaster university, uk), dave payling (staffordshire university, uk), anne petiau (itsrs / université paris 5, fr), hillegonda c rietveld (london south bank university, uk), geoff stahl (victoria university of wellington, nz), sonjah nadine stanley-niaah (university of west indies, jm), graham st john (university of huddersfield, uk), jonathan sterne (mcgill university, ca), will straw (mcgill university, ca), rupert till (university of huddersfield, uk), botond vitos (leuphana university, de), toby young (university of oxford, uk) dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture is a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture (edmc). launched in 2009, as a platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on the shifting terrain of edmcs worldwide, dancecult houses research exploring the sites, technologies, sounds and cultures of electronic music in historical and contemporary perspectives. playing host to studies of emergent forms of electronic music production, performance, distribution, and reception, as a portal for cutting-edge research on the relation between bodies, technologies, and cyberspace, as a medium through which the cultural politics of dance is critically investigated, and as a venue for innovative multimedia projects, dancecult is the leading venue for research on edmc. cover: disco ball in subharmonic mycelial space. artwork by trace reddell. executive editor graham st john (university of huddersfield, uk) production editor botond vitos (leuphana university, de) from the floor editor dave payling (staffordshire university, uk) reviews editor anita jóri (berlin university of the arts, de) operations director botond vitos (leuphana university, de) foreign languages editor moses iten (rmit, au) managing editor tommy colton symmes (rice university, us) community manager katrina loughrey (de) art director botond vitos (leuphana university, de) operations associate dave payling (staffordshire university, uk) associate editors ben assiter (goldsmiths, university of london, uk) alistair fraser (maynooth university, ie) moses iten (rmit, au) rupert till (university of huddersfield, uk) production assistant patricio lópez-serrano (de) http://dj.dancecult.net issn 1947-5403 ©2023 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net v15.1 2023 executive editor’s introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 01 graham st john guest editor’s introduction to “psychedelica and electronica” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 04 trace reddell and graham st john feature articles other kinds of mind there: echologies of psychedelic sonic substance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 trace reddell timbre and the “zone of entanglement” in electronic dance music: re-thinking musico-social ontologies with the mycelial turn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 maria perevedentseva the voice of the apocalypse: terence mckenna as raving medium . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 graham st john nightlife studies: past, present and future. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 jordi nofre and manuel garcia-ruiz from the floor – online from spontinuity to dream seeds: my journey with light shows from the sixties to the present c. scott taylor kaos, kilowatt and ketamine: a cultural history of the free tekno movement giorgia gaia detroit ecstasy: ruminations on raving, “movement” and place rebekah farrugia no way back michelle lhooq dancing through transformational music festivals in western canada: tales from the forest floor kelci mohr conversation – online beyond the brain: happening at east edge paul chambers reviews raving (mckenzie wark) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 kim feser spectacle, fashion and the dancing experience in britain, 1960–1990 (jon stratton) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 tara hill this track contains politics: the culture of sampling in experimental electronica (hannes liechti). . . . . . 119 moses iten berghain, techno und die körperfabrik: ethnographie eines stammpublikums (guillaume robin) . . . . . . . 123 anja schwanhäusser ears as portals: alternative realities of musical infrastructures (a ctm festival 2023 review) . . . . . . . . 127 luigi monteanni dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 15(1): 1–3 issn 1947-5403 ©2023 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.00 executive editor’s introduction this edition arrives hard on the heels of the first in-person dancecult conference (dc23) which was held at, and with the support of, the department of music and design arts at the university of huddersfield, 19-20 october 2023. the event convened 40 presenters from around the world speaking on a vast range of subjects broadly connected across the field of electronic music and dance culture. the final programme is available on the drn website, and videos of presentations (including keynotes from profs trace reddell and alice o’grady) will soon be available on dancecult’s youtube channel. this event could not have been held without the support of many people. as dc23 chair, i wish to take this opportunity to thank all participants and performers, and notably members of the dc23 organising committee, which, besides myself, included anita jóri, dave payling, rupert till and botond vitos, along with other volunteers, including phd students pierre griscelli and jake mehew. dc23 pursued the vibe all the way to sheffield for the afterparty where a busload of 20 delegates made their way to jabbarwocky, where there were performances from euan pattie, bot cocktail, matt annis, nicolas bougaïeff and lila hart. as a networking event, dc23 was designed to encourage further dancecult research network conferences and symposia organised by local committees in different locations worldwide. given the success of dc23, there are great prospects for such future events. in this 20th edition of dancecult, i have the distinct pleasure of welcoming anita jóri to the team as reviews editor. the broad and fascinating range of book and event reviews anita has compiled for this edition are listed in the guest editors’ introduction that follows. also, over the past year, drn editorial assistant james cannon made a thorough update and overhaul of references listed on the dancecult research network page. thank you james! this is now a very significant up-to-date resource. to keep these lists updated, please remember to add relevant content and update your own biographical information under “people”. finally, a matter that brings me no pleasure at all. on october 7, 2023, tragic events occurred in israel, part of a series of coordinated attacks which have triggered a humanitarian crisis in gaza. the hamas-led massacre of attendees at the supernova sukkot gathering (also known as the “re’im music festival massacre”), a psychedelic trance festival celebrating “friends, love and infinite freedom”, was among two dance parties that were affected in the region (at which approximately 400 people were either murdered or abducted). words don’t come easy, not least because these events took place within a savage mise-en-scène that has precipitated an unfolding disaster and a new low in israeli-palestinian relations. my comments below are limited to nova, and reflect my humble vocation as a perennial https://dancecult-research.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/dc23-final-programme.pdf https://www.youtube.com/channel/ucu7f5fmfwj5y6p1-kre0uxw https://dancecult-research.net/references/ dancecult 15(1)2 student of the vibe. in my recent talk at dc23, i was moved to reflect on the tragedy of nova and beyond, for which words felt as inadequate as language long deployed in struggles to articulate the vibe, that secret sauce present across dance scenes, cultures and movements in the history of electronic music. the vibe is multi-sensorial, enigmatic, precarious. the closer one attends to it, the more invisible it seems to become. no vibe is the same, and yet all share a socio-sonic sensibility. in israel, the vibe seems unrecognisable outside what trancistim (psytrance enthusiasts) know as ha’matzav (“the situation”). the vibe, however we come to define it (and that is not my intention here), was assailed in unprecedented ways at nova, the lives of hundreds of partygoers violently cut short within the precincts of that realm with which many of us are intimate regardless of “the situation”, or the style of music amplified. as inadequate as my efforts were, at dc23 i reflected upon this dark hour of cascading violence and heartbreak through the refractive mechanism implicit to the rotary mirrored orb iconic to electronic music and dance cultures since the days of disco. the mirrorball may seem like an incongruous object of contemplation in this context, but let me draw my bow. the mirrorball, or as it is more often known, the “discoball”, is among the most alluring yet elusive fetishes in modern history. a familiar object and a veritable enigma, the ball of a thousand mirrors has radiated beams of light across countless dance floors over the last century. romantic accessory in ballrooms of the 1920s; queer fetish in underground clubs of the 1970s; and a prolific icon in the world of clubbing, raving and dance festivals into the present. with its many reflective mirrors, the discoball is both multifaceted and a singular unit. while enjoying a pervasive presence as a symbol of unity amid difference, the omnipresent mirrorball is also a perfectly fraught symbol of freedom. recently, independent research led me to the proposition that, if the mirrorball is a multifaceted mirror to life on the dance floor, the revolving mosaic of mirrors surely reflects loss, pain and suffering, as much as it does freedom, love and happiness. the mirrorball’s omniscience, as such, is not a novel subject. it’s metaphorical freight as an all-seeing-eye, as witness, a kind of universal camera, was a fictive novum scripted into sydney pollack’s acclaimed drama they shoot horses don’t they? set during the great depression, the film depicts a grueling dance marathon that serves as an allegory for oppressive conditions faced notably by women and people of colour in the us, then and in the present (the film was released in 1969). a mirrorball is shown throughout the film occupying a commanding position above the goings-on in the dancehall. in a near final scene, the viewer ascends to a mirrorball perspective on suffering. this spectacular panoramic on tragedy—where the mirrorball grew indistinguishable from a surveillance dome—is remote from its otherwise iconic role as a rose-coloured reflector. this motif of silent sentinel returned in the wake of a tragedy that unfolded on another dance floor fifty years after the production of they shoot horses. phoenix lindsayhall’s ghostly galaxy of queer stars, “never stop dancing”—installed at victori + mo’s, brooklyn, in the wake of the 2016 pulse nightclub massacre in orlando, florida—is a remarkable testament to the versatility of the discoball. representing each victim, the http://www.phoenixlindseyhall.com/never-stop-dancing-1 st john | executive editor’s introduction 3 work’s forty-nine hanging sculptures—motionless discoballs of varying size and drop length coated with white porcelain—transformed animate glitterballs into sepulchral golf balls. what once sparkled with light now cast long shadows. likened to a charm for an exiled (here, queer latinx) community, a beacon of safe haven, a deflector of threats, the mirrorball was recruited as a witness to tragedy. that the discoball, long embraced as a captivating pleasure dome, continues to spin while mirroring an unprecedented hate crime is a shocking image. this capacity for the mirrorball to serve as witness to events over which it appears to hold an imperious perspective assists my searching reflections on events for which no words can be adequate. in israel, where psytrance is almost popular music, and where dance parties have long been operated in the context of regional tension, mirrored orbs strategically positioned above the dance floor may actually be surveillance domes. discoballs might not have been endogenous to the topography of the (outdoor) dance floors at nova. still, it is not impossible to imagine the international enigmata of the vibe suspended over broken campsites, glittering in the morning sun, at once freedom fetish and vigilant orb. finally, as a title, “never stop dancing” seems more than apt in this context, prompting what feels to me like a true algorithm: light begets dance begets hope. graham st john (executive editor, dancecult) 22 november 2023. introduction to edm and its discontents: the contested meaning of “electronic dance music” dancecult: journal of electronic music & dance culture 17(1): 2–5 issn 1947-5403 ©2025 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.01 journal of electronic music & dance culture introduction to edm and its discontents: the contested meaning of “electronic dance music” anita jóri leuphana university lüneburg (de) anita jóri is a postdoc research associate at the leuphana university of lüneburg. jóri’s research and publications focus on the discursive and terminological aspects of electronic (dance) music culture. she is one of the curators of ctm festival’s discourse programme. she is also the author of the monograph the discourse community of electronic dance music (transcript, 2022) and one of the editors of the books the new age of electronic dance music and club culture (springer, 2020); musik & empowerment (springer, 2020); musik & marken (springer, 2022) and living at night in times of pandemic: night studies and club culture in france and germany (transcript, 2024). i believe many readers of dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture have experienced, at least once, being questioned about their research subject, particularly by scene actors such as musicians, promoters and fans. how often have we found ourselves in conversations where we had to defend “our electronic dance music” and articulate what that means? the theme of this special issue arises from the realization that the phrase “electronic dance music” and its acronym “edm” have acquired contested meanings, especially among scholars, journalists and various actors involved in the field, including musicians, fans and industry professionals. researchers (e.g. holmes 2020; jóri 2021) and journalists (e.g. glazer 2014) have sought to trace the evolution of this nomenclature, yet a consensus regarding their definitions remains elusive and debated among practitioners, journalists and academics. in research, both terms are generally used interchangeably as overarching labels for a diverse array of electronic musical styles and genres. however, it has become evident that “electronic dance music” and “edm” can carry distinct connotations. specifically, edm has developed into a contentious term within underground electronic music scenes, often associated with mainstream, profit-driven genres and artists. this shift began in the early 2000s, when electronic music and dance cultures underwent a process of mainstreaming. this association is further reinforced guest editor’s introduction https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.01 jóri | introduction to edm and its discontents 3 by the music industry—particularly in the us—not only through the release of widely marketed music but also by organizing megafestivals like the electric daisy carnival and ultra music festival, as well as through awards such as the american music award for favorite electronic dance music artist ( jóri 2021). in an effort to differentiate these meanings, holt (2017) introduced the category of “edm pop”, which provides a useful distinction from edm as a mere acronym for electronic dance music. over the last few decades, alternative collective terms such as “dance”, “dance music” (thornton 1995; bennett 2001), “rave music” (reynolds 2013) and “techno” (sicko 1999) have also emerged in the literature. these umbrella terms do not carry the same negative associations among their users and are often preferred by journalists. hence, it is high time for researchers in this field to critically examine why scene members opt for alternative terms like “dance music”, “dance” or “club music” instead of the genre names commonly used in academic discourse. thus, this issue of dancecult provides an opportunity to discuss how scholarship can contribute to more widely accepted terminology. to address these questions and explore the discursive and cultural or regional conflicts surrounding this terminology, this special issue has encouraged researchers to share their experiences, perspectives, suggestions and findings regarding the controversies surrounding electronic dance music and edm. we have also welcomed discussions on the debate concerning “edm pop” and the broader “edm pop industry”. ultimately, this issue aims to foster open lines of inquiry and promote inclusive dialogue on these and related topics. our goal here is not to perpetuate binary thinking, such as underground vs. mainstream or authentic vs. commercial, but rather to see edm pop as part of electronic music and dance cultures. it is more interesting to analyse what it adds to (or perhaps takes from) other communities within this vast cultural milieu. this discussion extends beyond mere terminology; it encompasses the power dynamics inherent in these language choices. for many individuals, the ability to “know how to use” specific terms serves as a form of gatekeeping, reflecting an internalized knowledge. for instance, when someone inquires if i research “electro” (often referred to as “electro music”), i recognize from experience that they may not be referencing the genre that emerged in the early 1980s. instead, they might be asking whether my focus aligns with electronic dance music cultures more broadly. this awareness provides insight into the questioner’s familiarity with the subject, informing me about how in-depth our discussion can go. importantly, this recognition is not a judgment of the other person’s knowledge; rather, it serves as a signpost for our conversation. conversely, if someone identifies “my field” simply as “dance”, it may indicate a deeper level of understanding regarding the complexities of the genre and its associated cultures. therefore, as the call for papers for this issue was published, the following suggested themes were anticipated: the evolution of the terms “electronic dance music” and “edm”; different meanings of “electronic dance music” and “edm”; other umbrella terms, such dancecult 11(1)4 as “dance,” “techno,” and “rave music”; regional variants in terminology; “edm pop” and its industry; “edm pop” events and audiences; trends and processes of genre (re-)naming; the political and cultural consequences of certain terminologies; and the power relations associated with these terms. the authors of this issue have succeeded in exploring these and similar topics, demonstrating the pressing need for further research on the subject. i feel honoured to be the guest editor of this special issue at this milestone moment, as we introduce the change in the title of the journal to dancecult: journal of electronic music and dance cultures, which also responds to the aforementioned debates. summary of content in “edm, tech house, or business techno? ‘trolling’ inauthentic club music through social media,” gaute barlindhaug takes a closer look at the tension between authenticity and commercialization in electronic music and dance cultures. by analysing a meme exchange between artists, the article critiques how the term “edm” is often used derogatorily to label certain club musics as inauthentic. barlindhaug’s findings reveal how this reflects broader debates about the roots of club culture and the potential cultural stagnation stemming from a protective stance or gatekeeping against commercialization. the article ultimately argues that while edm’s popularization raises ethical concerns about inclusion, it opens avenues for reaching new audiences, suggesting a fluid understanding of authenticity within the community. devpriya chakravarty’s “negotiating sonic spaces: exploring urban indian youth and the semantic flux of electronic dance music culture” examines how urban indian youth engage with electronic dance music culture (edmc). highlighting the interplay of local and global influences, chakravarty positions edmc as a platform for challenging traditional norms and fostering communal ties. this article illustrates the complexities of identity within the indian context and underscores the unique adaptations of edm that diverge from western paradigms, emphasizing the fluidity of cultural belonging amid globalizations. in “beats on airwaves: radio, electronic dance music selection and meanings”, dennis mathei investigates the challenges of categorizing electronic dance music on german radio. by proposing the term “e/dm” to create a broader spectrum of electronically produced music, mathei highlights the diverse genres and styles that resist easy classification. the article calls for more precise definitions to honour the complexities of electronic dance music and edm and their cultural contexts, reflecting ongoing issues of representation and genre fluidity within the field. manoli moriaty and nina kehagia’s “playing by the rules? genre conventions in contemporary dj performance” explores how genre influences dj practices across drum and bass, house and techno. their research shows that while djs acknowledge genre conventions, they view them as flexible frameworks for innovation. this adaptability underscores the ongoing tension between traditional skills and modern expressions in jóri | introduction to edm and its discontents 5 djing, resonating with broader debates about genre and authenticity within electronic music and dance cultures. furthermore, this issue includes kirsten hermes’s article, “augmented creativity: using ai collaborators to make a music video”, supporting emerging concepts and research in ai co-creativity, that is not related to the overall theme. additionally, the “from the floor” section presents various perspectives on the special issue’s theme. guglielmo bottin discusses the socio-historical evolution of the term “italodisco,” while dylan davis, mike callander and david haberfeld critique edm’s commercial nature, arguing that it stifles artistic freedom. rose dwyer links djing practices to the gig economy, highlighting the implications for dance music culture in a neoliberal context. finally, two ethnographic articles by the author team of arsène werlen, cyber shanahoy, anonymous and david verbuč, as well as tobias c. van veen, while not directly related to the theme, provide further insights into contemporary club and dance cultures. references bennett, andy. 2001. cultures of popular music. maidenhead: open university press. glazer, joshua. 2014. “etymology of edm: the complex heritage of electronic dance music”. cuepoint. <https://medium.com/cuepoint/etymology-of-edm-the-complex-heritage-ofelectronic-dance-music-d3e3aa873369>, (accessed 2 june 2020). holmes, thom. 2020. electronic and experimental music: technology, music, and culture. new york and london: routledge. holt, fabian. 2017. “edm pop: a soft shell formation in a new festival economy”. in weekend societies: electronic dance music festivals and event-cultures, ed. graham st. john, 25–43. london: bloomsbury. jóri, anita. 2021. “the meanings of electronic dance music and edm”. in the evolution of electronic dance music, ed. ewa mazierska, tony rigg and les ginnon, 25–40. london: bloomsbury. reynolds, simon. 2013. energy flash. a journey through rave music and dance culture. london: faber and faber. sicko, dan. 1999. techno rebels. the renegades of electronic funk. detroit: wayne state university press. thornton, sarah. 1995 club cultures: music, media and subcultural capital. cambridge: polity. https://medium.com/cuepoint/etymology-of-edm-the-complex-heritage-of-electronic-dance-music-d3e3aa873369 https://medium.com/cuepoint/etymology-of-edm-the-complex-heritage-of-electronic-dance-music-d3e3aa873369 windows on the dance floor ruth hughes independent researcher <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.15> figure 1. in/out. photo credit: opashona ghosh (2023). the dance floor is an interface between private and public life: a space both for escaping and confronting. the window, a glass surface, has material qualities that are textural and temperate, interacting with the physical space of the dance floor and its surroundings. both visually and physically reflective, it alters our optical and aural perception when interacting with it. we see ourselves reflected in its materiality, cold glass reacting with collective body heat and breath to create condensation, a communal body of water. under the guise of concealment from the outside world, we often overlook our relationship with the exterior in spaces of dancing. as a fellow dancer and dj, i’ve seen ways that windows on dance floors can affect our experiences; their function as a threshold of space; their materiality; their practical uses and what all of this might mean for our perception of ourselves as well as the collective dance floor. what does a window on a dance floor facilitate? the framed window presents a gateway, framing the internal and external. separating, containing and creating a stage for possibility, often playing with ideas of virtual reality and illusion. the window frames the outside as much as it frames the inside. in south london, avalon café’s dance floor on surrey canal road frames the train tracks. in amsterdam, the upstairs dance floor in de school’s muzieklokaal frames a display of the motorway, a mirage of moving cars through rising steam conjoins a communion of body, machine and heat. the windows at fold in canning town are fitted with external light, often giving the illusion of false sunlight, as well as allowing sunlight in. windows—dan loane, (2024) reflections and mass / framing a body of water and liquefaction reflected in the glass, bodies contort into one. the body of water rolling down the surface, a communion of breath and mass. a collective body of water. a place where incorporeal bodies meet, not a community, but a communion. the body curls and dips around the steel frame, weightless. a vision/ghost occupying an otherworldly space. the lightness and opacity of the glass, the lack of physical presence that vanishes at any second. shapes integrate and fragment, passing and becoming one again. imagine the framed window as a stage, both for the interior and panoramic exterior, the other and outside—our reflective internal. there is a simultaneity between the inside and outside when you look beyond the architecture of the dance floor, the performance of being in the club space and how we co-exist in a new way. bodies and machines, trains and motorways, journeying and meeting. the corporeal vanishes into the panoramic exteriority through the window. searching and desire figure 2. reddit discussion screenshot. photo credit: ruth hughes (2023). when there are no windows there are phone screens, metal fixtures, tiles. there’s no fixed way to participate in a dance floor, but euphoria is often associated with the ultimate dance floor experience; this desire is reflected when searching for your euphoric self in these spaces and materials. assimilating your ideal self and your real self, there can often be two separate experiences of the corporeal and the gateway world of a foggy distortion. gaze watching and being watched plays a role in our enjoyment of the dance floor and in our interactions with other dancers. the window provides a layer for our bodies to be viewed through or protected with, its glass pane creates a threshold of separation, a cover, camouflage or filter. seeing the dance floor through the window from outside before entering can create assumptions and expectations. whilst some spaces welcome this, others challenge vigilance via shutters, small gaping holes filtering the internal and external from one another. breath and threshold figure 3. morning sun in the old union building. photo cred: ruth hughes (2018). in opening a window, you bring the fresh air into a space and bridge worlds. figure 4. morning sun in the old union building. photo credit: ruth hughes (2018) london sunshine brought a lucidity to the dance floor. as the sun rose, illuminating the room, we noticed the dust that was converging in the air around us. we opened the windows. the building had previously been home to a worker’s union and was in the process of being redeveloped into single room apartments for individuals looking to get onto the property ladder. the sun allowed us to see the markings on the floors, allowing us to realise what these rooms were materialising into. something about the possibilities and fragility of space was surprising, the fantasy of the environment was completely replaced. there was a clarity that came with the morning light. man-made / virtual reality and lens fold, canning town deep into a 24 hour unfold party and the sun sharply hits the hot air through gaps in the fixed shutters. peering through, eye pressed to the window, it’s not actually the sun but a lighting rig fitted onto the outside of the building. the augmented reality of the dance floor becoming a vessel for time travel. sonic filters fold window field recording, hughes (2024) the thrum of a kick drum moves through the glass panes of every window in my house, the windows in the smoking area, the passing cars. the window is a shapeshifting vessel for potential and altering perception, a framing of fantasy and reality on the dance floor, and hosts a materiality that brings bodies together. author biography ruth hughes is a sound artist, dj and composer based in london. she recently took part in a sound and music residency at somerset house. discography hughes, ruth. 2023. “fold window field recording”. soundcloud, 0:10. <https://on.soundcloud.com/fsgtlsnbmjbdbngy7>. loane, dan. 2024. “windows—dan loane”. soundcloud, 5:36. <https://on.soundcloud.com/ktrk9v6xqtwhmwr47>. passinho chronicles: unveiling urban narratives through dance natalia figueredo university of barcelona (spain) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.11> introduction the article discusses how choreography and music produced in the favelas (“marginalized neighbourhoods”) of brazil may be approached simultaneously as a political practice and as a narrative which performatively reconfigures dystopian urban scenarios. the music videos “rabisca o chão” and “notorius 150” serve as a backdrop to guide us through the social conjuncture in which funk is inserted.[1] this includes funk as a music produced in the favelas; the passinho dance style funk gave birth to; the socio-spatial context of the favela; the black body as the centre of the narrative and the television news footage representing the war on drugs. ultimately, this article highlights how artistic expression lays the groundwork for forging a new identity for black communities in brazil by demonstrating the political potential inherent in dancing. funk as urban chronicle in 2019 between clicks on youtube and attempts at dancing in my living room, i came across a video which caught my attention for presenting funk carioca (“funk from rio de janeiro”) as an urban chronicle. the music video “rabisca o chão” shows a dance performance created and envisioned by the group imperadores da dança (“emperors of dance”) from the favela of jacaré in the north of rio de janeiro. music video “rabisca o chão” by imperadores da dança (2019). the clip is a dance production presenting two (coexisting) realities. first, there is the media representation of the favela and what is often portrayed as the war on drugs. at the beginning of the music video, we watch black and white images of police clashes made by news from an aerial or distant perspective. the sounds of gunshots and shifts to images of military intervention are followed by a poem called rei da balística (“king of ballistics”) by severo idd: pow pow pow!!! got scared big boss? no warning is given when the firing starts! first law of the favela huh: always walk prepared to never be caught off guard bang bang another body lying on the ground you don't even need to be a psychic the media will say it was a thief i guess a lot of doctors are being hired every week there’s an operation pow pow pow pow pow today it’s like new year's eve pow! gun bang! rifle boom! grenade trrrr… glock in burst twenty-eight years of listening to this every day fuck! call me king of ballistics the day has dawned sunday i'm going to the street market to buy my pastry with sugarcane juice shiiiiii, they broke down my door. fuck! i guess it was the cops… who has nothing to hide has nothing to fear? go for it you’ll see! the worst thing about this world is paying without obligation. i thought that to break into the house of others would need a mandate on asphalt it’s one thing in the favela they hit first and ask questions later hesitate and you’ll see! if you are not going to end up all broken.[2] this poem is recited alongside black and white news footage, in which crime and violence are highlighted (fig. 1). when the funk beat kicks in, the images gain colour and the media footage is replaced by a group of boys (the imperadores da dança) entering the shot by dancing passinho, a dance style originating from the funk carioca of rio de janeiro (fig. 2). the dancers reintroduce us to the same neighbourhood which had just been portrayed through media footage, but this time from a ground-level perspective. as they move through the streets, others join them in dance movements. the linear path of their dancing through the alleyways fosters a sense that we are all walking together. it is as if a new territorial map has emerged. figure 1. still from the video “rabisca o chão” (imperadores da dança 2019). figure 2. still from the video “rabisca o chão” (imperadores da dança 2019). while there are basic passinho moves, there are no rules to demarcate what is “correct” or “incorrect”. this gives dancers the freedom to interpret moves in various ways, and personal adaptations can evolve into distinctive styles. the goal of the dancer is not to imitate but to reinvent. it is the cultural background of the dancers that is largely responsible for giving this improvisation the hybrid aesthetic tone of passinho.[3] this playful competition serves as the driving creative force behind the continuous evolution of this dance style. the improvisational aspect of the dance creates an idea of being in a different space in the music video “rabisca o chão”. in contrast to the first presented images of a dystopic reality in the favela, the choreography presents a new spatial relationship. while dancing, the dancer is no longer part of the confrontation presented at the beginning of the video. in this sense, the dance moves contemplate a different reality, in which unfamiliar spaces are presented as familiar. favelas are considered to be one of the faces of the black diaspora in brazil. although each favela has a specific history of emergence, it can generally be said these urban areas descend from a long history of a lack of public policies for the inclusion of poor and black people in the country. therefore, carioca funk is a cultural manifestation representing these historical, social and geographical origins. in the same way passinho is also deeply connected with issues linked to the favelas and broader brazilian reality. such a reality can be seen in “rabisca o chão” when the state's narrative is placed alongside the narrative of the favela residents, the dancers. while funk carioca has earned its place as a musical genre within brazilian culture, the art emanating from this cultural framework mirrors the lived experiences of its community, offering a profound representation of life and permeating it with fresh perspectives and meanings. funk, along with other cultural expressions originating in marginalized neighbourhoods of brazil, has played a significant role in shaping an identity rooted in local aesthetics. this cultural movement serves as a form of urban narrative, telling stories and experiences of these communities. since the 1990s, when funk carioca transcended the limits of rio's favelas and started being played on the “asphalt” of wealthier neighbourhoods, it has evolved into one of the largest cultural mass phenomena in brazil.[4] this widespread popularity has led to heterogeneous movements that encompass countless rhythms, themes and expressions. to name a few subgenres, there are 150 bpm, bregafunk, proibidão, funk melody, trapfunk, funk ostentação, charme and many others.[5] its popularity is directly related to the fact that this cultural movement incorporates the lifestyles and experiences of brazilian youth, especially those living in favelas. funk carioca and its subgenres constantly renew themselves, bringing to the lyrics of the songs and the movement of the dance bodies aspects of its territoriality. electronic musicality, blended with atabaques (“drums”), gives funk an unmistakable vibe.[6] however, since its emergence, dance has played a central role in this genre, forming a kind of seam between parties and songs. thus, among its diverse characteristics, funk is fundamentally electronic dance music.[7] that is, the sound is not only heard passively by the ears, but also felt throughout the body, activated by the beats. in brazil’s black electronic musicality, countless songs discuss the impact of low-, mediumand high-frequency technology on the body (albuquerque 2023). this makes the dancing body a revealing element of funk. the black body as the centre of the narrative thinking about what dance can do politically, in 2020, i came across another music video that explored this relationship between passinho, funk and territories. music video “noturno 150” by heavy baile (2020). “noturno 150” is a production by multimedia funk collective heavy baile, in which the dancer (ronald sheick) choreographically infiltrates the paintings of master painters of the western tradition held in the collections of the metropolitan museum of fine art in new york. while degas painted classical ballerinas, heavy baile brings masterful brazilian passinho to break down the european aesthetics (fig. 3). the dancer crosses spaces that the black body supposedly does not occupy. figure 3. still from the video “noturno 150” (heavy baile 2020). this reinforces the notion that dance in the favelas also emerges as an artistic way of life. the narrative of both music videos explores the possibility of fostering an alternative form of urban and social mobility through fast and vigorous dance movements. in seemingly unsuitable terrains for dancing, the dancers lay the groundwork for cultivating a new identity for communities residing in brazilian favelas. the dancing bodies and narratives presented in both music videos are elements that allow us to investigate the process of territorialisation of the passinho dance from the dimension of the dancer's body (here thought of as territory), reaching the space where they dance (physically and socially) and beyond (media representations, for example). the fundamental question is how can an urban and contemporary dance create new spaces within its own territory? the choreography of urban dynamics the possibilities of navigating through different locations constitute the urban rhythm, a dynamic that resembles a kind of a dance. in other words, the urban dynamics functions as a dance, as physical movement interacts with urban elements such as traffic lights, sidewalks and pathways. consequently, daily commutes establish a system of flows within the city, continually shaping and reshaping the spaces. thus, the built environment confines movement and establishes rhythms like a conductor in front of an orchestra. nonetheless, it is not only physical elements that determine the urban choreography of everyday life. consider, for example, the iconic scene from “singin' in the rain” (kelly et al. 1952), where the actor gene kelly dances in rain. in his joy, the character jumps and spins into and out of space. the dance itself seems endless, until kelly is interrupted by a police officer who stops the dance by simply appearing in the scene, stopping, and crossing his arms. the police, in other words, choreograph the scene—much like they choreograph the first part of the music video “rabisca o chão”. this perception underscores that the police is a tangible construction that is comparable to architecture (lepecki 2011). their primary role is to ensure the reproduction and preservation of predetermined patterns of individual and collective movement. this combination of elements allows us to understand urban space as a choreography orchestrated by different elements present, or not, in the same space. these human dynamics between the body and space shape the urban environment. urban space permeated by ephemeral movements characterizes everyday life. consequently, bodies not only form a society with other bodies but with all other mobile and immobile elements of the context in which we find ourselves daily. this demonstrates how the city is primarily shaped by an experience and perception that is always corporal. in this context, we can understand passinho as a series of rehearsals in which the dancer experiences space with the body. they do this by placing themselves at the centre of the narrative and speculating on other ways to occupy the streets where they live. dance movements bring an imagination that presents itself in the form of a freedom: to be able to walk without having to be “always prepared”, as expressed in the poem of severo idd quoted above. this aspect is further emphasised by the fact that these productions primarily take place in public spaces such as squares, streets, cultural centres and bars. it is not an art form that removes young people from the streets; rather, it positions them within the public sphere, right at the epicentre of the struggle for the right to the city. the "street bodies" that dance at balls, in museums and alleys, do more than challenge the attempts at discipline and control over bodily actions that are imposed on them by society. the lack of discipline and non-docility—in the sense used by foucault (1995)—of these bodies provokes a sensitive signal of the possibility of a physical existence outside normative patterns. after all, the most important thing we learn from foucault is that the living body is the central object of all politics. there is no politics that is not body politics (preciado 2020). the dancers in the video examples discussed in this article are dancing in the streets and inside paintings, in the process inscribing these spaces with their bodies. through passinho, we can reflect on the capacity of corporeal material to challenge the stereotypical perceptions of the city's territories. the dancing body is capable of shifting the perception of space from place to affection, being able to cognitively modify the way in which a certain group in a given historical time perceives and signifies space. in this way, dance can be understood as a type of body knowledge constructed and sedimented simultaneously as it is experienced. passinho, while not explicitly aligned with any particular cause or intended as a form of political activism, can be regarded as a cultural expression that transcends the boundaries of everyday life, assuming unforeseen social roles (e.g., steering young individuals away from drug trafficking, serving as a strategy for social interaction and fostering aspirations to pursue a professional artistic career). such roles can directly impact the local daily life in which this youthful expression originates. this urban and contemporary dance, which mixes several references translated into vivid movements, ends up becoming a significant element of the body's intervention in the social territory that regulates and controls it. however, the performance is not presented as a direct alternative to the historical violence that permeates the reality of those who live in the favela. instead, the dancer openly exposes this reality. in this manner, young people who embrace passinho can take control of their own representation, even though we know that this process involves different interests on the part of mainstream media, the state and the consumer market. conclusion the music videos “rabisca o chão” and “noturno 150” offer several perspectives in discussing this complexity. this includes music produced in the favelas; the dance style of passinho, created from funk, hip hop and other brazilian (or not) references within the favelas; the socio-spatial context of the favela; the black body as the centre of the narrative and finally, the representation of the favelas from outside by television news footage showing the war on drugs and police interventions. returning to the beginning of the text, when i first watched these two music videos, i felt like the dancers were inviting me to take a walk through the city. these elements reveal how both the music video and the choreography function as tools of political agency. in this case, the dancer negotiates space, whether it be the symbolic space of grand art galleries (and power), or the simple right to walk freely through the streets of their own city. despite the engaging power of the passinho, it is evident that it cannot fully dismantle a longstanding and defining history of segregation and stigma. nevertheless, this dance style emerges as an alternative that challenges the boundaries of the (normative) narrative constructions. ultimately, these videos reveal how the performative act of dancing in these contested spaces rewrites the story of the favela, forging new collective identities for black communities in brazil.  author biography natalia figueredo is an architect, urbanist and cultural theorist from the brazilian amazonia, engaged actively as a member of the observatory of anthropology of urban conflicts (oacu) and contributes to the training platform antiarq. presently pursuing a phd in culture and society at the university of barcelona, her research delves into informal urbanism within the amazonian urban territory. moreover, natalia collaborates with sonic street technology, a project at goldsmiths, university of london, focusing on music technologies in urban amazonia. e: natcfigueredo@gmail.com references albuquerque, gg. 2023. “cientistas do grave: o som afroeletrônico”. volume morto, 28 august: <https://volumemorto.com.br/cientistas-do-grave/>, (accessed 17 september 2024). britto, fabiana, jacques dultra and paola berenstein. 2008. “cenografias e corpografias urbanas: um diálogo sobre as relações entre corpo e cidade”. cadernos ppgau/ ufba n. 6: p. 79-86. fernandes, c. s., de oliveira, h. s., & barroso, f. m. 2021. “os relíquias do passinho: táticas e performances do corpo que dança”. esferas, 19, 44–53. <https://doi.org/10.31501/esf.v0i19.12367>. foucault, michel. 1991. “docile bodies”. in discipline and punish. new york: vintage books:<https://doi.org/10.1093/jmp/jhp026>. gilroy, paul. 1993. the black atlantic: modernity and double consciousness. cambridge and london: harvard university press. henriques, j. 2021. “street systems and knowledge systems [sst research 2.0]”. sonic street technology. posted 4 october 2021: <https://sonic-street-technologies.com/sst-research-2-0-street-technologies-and-knowledge/>, (accessed 17 september 2024). lepecki, a. (2011). “coreo-política e coreo-polícia”. ilha revista de antropologia, 13(1,2). <https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-8034.2011v13n1-2p41>. nascimento, l. m. p. do. (2017). no território do passinho: transculturalidade e ressignificação dos corpos que dançam nos eespaços periféricos [universidade federal do espírito santo]. <https://repositorio.ufes.br/items/b28d9538-aab9-4746-93c4-6c9348129209>, (accessed 17 september 2024). preciado, paul b. 2020. “learning from the virus”. artforum: <https://www.artforum.com/features/learning-from-the-virus-247388/>, (accessed 17 september 2024). sá, s. p. de. 2007. “funk carioca: música eletrônica popular brasileira?!”. e-compós, 10(0). <https://doi.org/10.30962/ec.195>. sá, s. p. de. 2003. música eletrônica e tecnologia: reconfigurando a discotecagem. recife: anais do xii compós. sovik, liv and brian d'aquino (2022). "the power to name and other dilemmas presented by brazilian funk subgenres". dancecult: journal of electronic dance music and culture 14 (1). <https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.10>. filmography branco, renée castelo. 2013. da cabeça aos pés. brazil: globonews documentário. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_myazqq55qg>. donen, stanley and gene kelly. 1952. singin’ in the rain. usa: mgm. <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0045152/>. heavy baile. noturno 15. youtube, 2:50. uploaded on 2 september 2020. <https://youtu.be/u4hvmf_lkwm?si=gjn_o-b5l1zl1cwh> (accessed 17 september 2024). imperadores da dança. rabisca o chão. youtube, 7:01. uploaded on 20 november 2019. <https://youtu.be/knfrzpuiwzk?si=mv0xb8qhan414dnr> (accessed 17 september 2024). notes [1] for a discussion of the funk genre and subgenres see sovik and d'aquino (2022). [2] this poem has been translated by the author. here is a transcription by the author in the original language of brazilian portuguese: pa pum pum!!! ficou assustado chefão? quando a bala come não tem aviso prévio! primeira lei da favela hein: ande sempre preparado pra nunca ser pego de surpresa pá pum mais um corpo estirado no chão não precisa nem ser vidente a mídia vai falar que era ladrão acho que tão contratando médico demais toda semana tem operação pá pum pum pum pum hoje tá pique reveillon pá pistola pum fuzil bum granada trrrr... glock em rajada vinte e oito anos escutando isso todo dia porra! pode me chamar de rei da balística o dia amanheceu domingão vou na feira comprar meu pastel com caldo de cana xiiiiii, arrombaram minha porta. fudeu. acho que foram os canas... quem não deve não teme? vai nessa pra tu ver! a pior coisa desse mundo é pagar sem dever. eu pensei que pra invadir a casa dos outros precisaria de um mandato no asfalto é uma coisa [3] passinho is not the only style of dancing funk carioca. at the same funk party there would be several types of dances, and relationships to gender characteristics and sexual orientation are great indicators of the ways to move the body to the sound of funk. see more in renée castelo branco’s (2013) documentary “da cabeça aos pés”. [4]do morro pro asfalto ("from the hill to the asphalt") is a colloquial expression typically used in rio de janeiro to mark the social difference between the middle-class neighbourhoods (asphalt) and the favelas (hill). it is an expression that connotes the social and racial inequality that permeates brazilian cities, a deep socio-economic division which the journalist zuenir ventura (1994) called "cidade partida" (“cracked city”). [5]funk carioca has had different influences and went through several stages. the first phase was its emergence in the favelas of rio de janeiro in the late 1970s, influenced by the sound of miami bass. dj's played only music in english at parties, which was mainly marked by the beat of the electronic drum in the song planet rock produced by afrika bambaataa. the second was the development of the rio style, with brazilian lyrics and production, highlighting the work of dj marlboro. finally, the third is the recent popularisation of the genre in brazil as well as in the universe of electronic music lovers (sá 2007). [6] due to its influence, it is common in brazil to refer to carioca funk and its subgenres simply as funk. [7] this means that funk is dancing music played by djs for audiences in open spaces (bailes) or closed spaces (clubs), and its chronological cut dates back to the late 80s (see sá 2003). dancecult 17(1) 2025: editor's introduction, masthead and table of contents edm and its discontents edited by anita jóri v17.1 2025 journal of electronic music & dance culture dancecult journal of electronic music & dance culture issue 17(1) 2025 issn 1947-5403 ©2025 dancecult published yearly at <http://dj.dancecult.net> international advisory board sean albiez (southampton solent university, uk), anthony d’andrea (university of limerick, ie), rebekah farrugia (oakland university, us), kai fikentscher (de), alistair fraser (maynooth university, ie), luis-manuel garcia (university of birmingham, uk), anna gavanas (institute for futures studies, se), ross harley (university of new south wales, au), moses iten (rmit, au), anita jóri (berlin university of the arts, de), tim lawrence (university of east london, uk), geert lovink (university of amsterdam, nl), paolo magaudda (university of padova, it), charity marsh (university of regina, ca), andrew murphie (university of new south wales, au), jordi nofre (nova university lisbon, pt), alice o’grady (university of leeds, united kingdom), christopher partridge (lancaster university, uk), dave payling (staffordshire university, uk), anne petiau (itsrs / université paris 5, fr), hillegonda c rietveld (london south bank university, uk), geoff stahl (victoria university of wellington, nz), sonjah nadine stanley-niaah (university of west indies, jm), graham st john (university of huddersfield, uk), jonathan sterne (mcgill university, ca), will straw (mcgill university, ca), rupert till (university of huddersfield, uk), toby young (university of oxford, uk) dancecult: journal of electronic music & dance culture is a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic music & dance culture (emdc). launched in 2009, as a platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on the shifting terrain of emdcs worldwide, dancecult houses research exploring the sites, technologies, sounds and cultures of electronic music in historical and contemporary perspectives. playing host to studies of emergent forms of electronic music production, performance, distribution, and reception, as a portal for cutting-edge research on the relation between bodies, technologies, and cyberspace, as a medium through which the cultural politics of dance is critically investigated, and as a venue for innovative multimedia projects, dancecult is the leading venue for research on emdc. cover: scene from an edm festival in india photo by devpriya chakravarty executive editor graham st john (university of huddersfield, uk) production editor botond vitos (de) from the floor editor dave payling (staffordshire university, uk) reviews editor anita jóri (leuphana university, de) operations director dave payling (staffordshire university, uk) foreign languages editor moses iten (rmit, au) managing editor moses iten (rmit, au) community manager katrina loughrey (de) art director dave payling (staffordshire university, uk) operations manager evan shulman (sdsu, usa) associate editors ben assiter (goldsmiths, university of london, uk) alistair fraser (maynooth university, ie) moses iten (rmit, au) rupert till (university of huddersfield, uk) production assistant patricio lópez-serrano (de) http://dj.dancecult.net journal of electronic music & dance culture issn 1947-5403 ©2025 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net v17.1 2025 executive editor’s introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 01 graham st john guest editor’s introduction to “edm and its discontents”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 02 anita jóri feature articles edm, tech house, or business techno? “trolling” inauthentic club music through social media . . . . . . 06 gaute barlindhaug negotiating sonic spaces: exploring urban indian youth and the semantic flux of electronic dance music culture . . . . . . . . . . . 30 devpriya chakravarty beats on airwaves: radio, electronic dance music selection and meanings. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 dennis mathei playing by the rules? genre conventions in contemporary dj performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 manoli moriaty and nina kehagia augmented creativity: using ai collaborators to make a music video . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .102 kirsten hermes transpositions “it’s not just a party, ya know?”: work and affective circuits in lgbtqia+ music collectives in the south of brazil. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .129 adriana amaral, simone luci pereira, lucas aguiar goulart and jonara cordova from the floor – online historical emergence and current uses of the term italodisco guglielmo bottin on the spectrum: where is edm placed within electronic dance music culture? dylan davis, mike callander and david haberfeld a laptop and some talent: we are your friends, the edm pop dj and the gig economy rosie dwyer weekend societies in the walled garden: montréal’s piknic electronik in the post-pandemic era tobias c. van veen a thrice-experienced clubnight: three ethnographic readings of a club night in ankali, prague, 7 june 2024 arsène werlen, cyber shanahoy, anonymous and david verbuč reviews dance your way home: a journey through the dancefloor (emma warren) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150 richard anderson black music in britain in the 21st century (monique charles ed. with mary w. gani) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 charlet brethomé platformed! how streaming, algorithms and artificial intelligence are shaping music cultures (tiziano bonini and paolo magaudda) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156 seán finnan dance music: a feminist account of an ordinary culture (tami gadir) & welcome to the club: the life and lessons of a black woman dj (dj paulette) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 maren hancock live spielen: liveness in performances elektronischer tanzmusik (josef schaubruch) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 jack mcneill assembling a black counter culture (deforrest brown, jr.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 emre öztürkl dancecult: journal of electronic music & dance culture 17(1): 1–1 issn 1947-5403 ©2025 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.00 journal of electronic music & dance culture executive editor’s introduction i wish to begin by announcing dancecult’s q1 ranking for music as measured for 2024 on scimago. for this great achievement i wish to thank all who have worked on and produced content for dancecult since its inception in 2009. in a period of transition there are several changes to announce. no, you are not experiencing a typological error. the 22nd issue of dancecult, guest edited by anita jóri, coincides with a zeitgeist-echoing nomenclature mod that has been a long time coming. dancecult’s subtitle has been altered, from journal of electronic dance music culture to journal of electronic music and dance culture (edmc to emdc). this modification arrives as a result of discussions within the deb over changes to the meaning of “edm” (“electronic dance music”) over many years. in short, while the acronym “edm” has suffered semantic uniformity as a result of the acronym’s commercial co-option, dancecult seeks to retain its status as the flagship journal for research on all electronic musics and dance cultures (including the genre or meta-genre of edm). see anita’s introduction and the articles in the issue for more details. we have made parallel alterations consistent with this modification across the dc/drn sites. at the same time, there are a few personnel changes. botond vitos has stepped down from his roles at dancecult. this is a significant change for us, since boti has been involved with dancecult since its inception. he published in the first issue, was soon working as a pa, and from 4.2 took over as production editor, a role that he has held down ever since, taking his tally to 17 issues as pe, including this his final issue. boti has also served as operations director since 2018 (taking over from ed montano), and as art director since before that. boti has, then, been pivotal to the inception, development and success of the journal. his labours have been so prodigious that he will be replaced by three or four people. among the latter are dave payling, who has adopted the od role, and who we now welcome as art director, and evan shulman, who i welcome aboard as operations manager, a new role assisting the od. in the new year, we will be announcing for a new production editor (a funded position). i want to take this opportunity to thank boti, whose professional approach and reliability have been seminal to the journal’s stature, and who has essentially held up dancecult’s back end for 15 years. his efforts have assisted countless authors, many starting out their careers through his support. that kind of effort, for the most part unfunded until recent years, is largely immeasurable, but never forgotten. much respect! finally, from this issue, moses iten has assumed the role of managing editor, and we welcome him into this crucial role. moses was also responsible for the transpositions article in this issue. read on! graham st john executive editor https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.00 https://www.scimagojr.com/journalsearch.php?q=21101027516&tip=sid&clean=0 dancecult 17(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic music & dance culture 17(1) 2025: 150–167 issn 1947-5403 ©2025 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net dance your way home: a journey through the dancefloor emma warren london: faber & faber, 2023. isbn: 9780571366040 (paperback) rrp: uk£12.99 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.13> richard anderson university of liverpool (uk) at the time of writing, in august 2025, london’s southbank centre, which is arguably the epitome of uk “high culture” is running a month-long summer programme of free events inspired by emma warren’s book dance your way home. depending upon one’s perspective this can be seen as an act of “gallerification”, in which folk/popular/working class cultures are recuperated into a canonical presentation within elitist institutions, or part of an evolving movement of genuine recognition of social dance as an inclusive expression of human joy. either way, the southbank’s programme represents a hugely significant impact for a contemporary written word text. dance your way home is not an academic treatise on the act of dancing, but a very accessible, and at times deeply personal autobiography outlining the vital importance of moving to music for oneself and for societies. structured in three parts, the book is steeped in uk dancefloor history. in part one, warren traces the initial foundations her dancing is built on. from domestic bopping to television music show top of the pops, to her irish heritage and late seventies uk sound system cultures from whose roots blossomed much of what dancecult examines. the second part highlights warren’s progression onto dancefloors from school discos, her underage clubbing in london, to her right-place, right-time at manchester university in the early nineties. through these back drops, the story of dance’s cultural global explosion is set and illuminated with personal reminiscences, interviews with contemporary luminaries and scattered with explanations of academic studies from a breadth of disciplines which support the range of arguments warren lays forth on dancing’s importance. reviews https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.13 reviews 151 dancing is lovingly set, not as subservient to, or a side effect of music and musical styles, but as having its own primacy. hence dancing threads its way throughout the book, in various locations and spaces, and in different social and racial cultures, functioning as crossgenerational ever-presence in twentieth and twenty-first century eras. the part memoir nature of the text acts as a constraint to the potential span of the subject matter. the book’s focus on social dance as presented in the global north, most specifically in the british isles predominately in the last fifty years could be considered a limitation. however, in adopting this position, warren recounts dance movement emergences with a lived experience sincerity. in telling her tales of house, techno, drum‘n’bass, and later grime histories, she includes reference to so-called legendary uk clubs such as shroom, the hacienda, phenomenon one and plastic people, not because these were definitive, but because she danced there herself at those times. she clearly articulates the legacies of numerous less renowned but no less significant nights and venues from her past and recognises many other “nerve centres” (181) operating beyond those she attended, of having parallel prominence and vitality. when the book does narrate histories that are not her own, warren ensures she does so with care, placing these as part of a lineage her own dancing is scaffolded on. this is especially evident within the important chapters on the hitherto neglected spaces of the school disco and youth club, where so many british adolescents, to varying degrees, learnt how to dance. the latter aspect is expanded on in warren’s (2025) latest work, up the youth club. chapter three’s detailed account of strangling church repression of dancing in ireland which contributed to an exodus of young women from the country, including her own grandmother; and eighties chicago gymnasiums recounted through interviews in chapter seven are similarly approached with recognition that these are not warren’s direct experiences. like walking, dancing is presented throughout as a fundamentally human activity, if you dance, you are a dancer (33), and dancefloors are situated wherever we make them (307). in this sense the book stands alongside the equally brilliant but more historically comprehensive dancing in the streets by the late barbara ehrenreich (2006). in both books, social dance finds a voice celebrating non-specialist everyday dancing, joining the still surprisingly recent emergence of social dance texts within the dance academy. there is much resonance here with the historically situated concepts of dancing as community expression found in malnig’s (2009), and dodds and cook’s (2013) collected works. what is fresh in dance your way home is the drawing of more personal connectivity between the performative club dancing, by crews and individuals in the eighties, to direct involvement in djing, and promoting club nights such as a guy called gerald’s recollections of their professional dancing lessons and aspirations (225–26). in the final part of the book, warren herself participates in a studio dance class, with the academy setting transformed into a place of therapy as she becomes aware of her dyspraxia. the restorative and healing power of dancing is a recurrent theme throughout the text. dancecult 17(1)152 warren employs a meticulously researched array of scientific study findings to describe everyday dance’s benefits for physical and mental health. another of the book’s themes warren is at pains to point out is that dancing is always historically situated, and many of the dance movements she has experienced have emerged as a response to specific, frequently harsh, social circumstances. she encapsulates this most succinctly in quoting the title of alice walker’s (2013) collection, hard times require furious dancing (223). the sense of community and resilience in the face of repressions, that finds expression through collective everyday dancing and a sense of temporary belonging or embraced by what mary fogarty described as a sense of an alternative “family” (2015: 247), is at the core of dance your way home’s message and that we can all dance our own histories. references dodds, sherril and susan cook. 2013. bodies of sound: studies across popular music and dance. farnham: ashgate. ehrenreich, barbara. 2006. dancing in the streets: a history of collective joy. london: granta publications. fogarty, mary. 2015. “the body and dance”. in the routledge reader on the sociology of music, ed. john shepherd and kyle devine, 245–54. new york: routledge. malnig, julie. 2009. ballroom, boogie, shimmy sham, shake: a social and popular dance reader. chicago: university of illinois press. walker, alice and shiloh mccloud. 2013. hard times require furious dancing: new poems. novato: new world library. warren, emma. 2025. up the youth club: illuminating a hidden history. london: faber & faber. reviews 153 black music in britain in the 21st century monique charles (ed.) with mary w. gani liverpool: liverpool university press, 2023. isbn: 978-1-80207-840-4, eisbn: 978-1-83764-659-3 rrp: uk£29,99 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.14> charlet brethomé (université du québec à montréal, canada) following her work on grime, cultural sociologist monique charles edits a collective volume that brings together researchers and practitioners to explore, from multiple approaches, black music in britain in the twenty-first century. with the editorial collaboration of mary w. gani (a lawyer specialising in the music industry), the book offers a panorama that combines academic papers, interviews, and visual essays. published in the series “liverpool studies in the politics of popular culture”, the volume seeks to analyse musical scenes in relation to the regimes of power that shape their emergence, circulation and reception. the book is clearly situated within the lineage of black atlantic studies. this characterises the transmission, unfolding and interconnections of black cultures around the atlantic, as well as the cultural hybridisations resulting from the long history of forced removal of black populations from their territories and cultural milieus (gilroy 1993). it is therefore a welcome contribution that deepens and extends analysis of this continuum from the vantage point of contemporary black british musics. notably, it expands the classic roots/ routes dichotomy (gilroy 1993) by emphasising the role of digital infrastructures and networks—what the editors term “routers”—in the contemporary formation of genres and publics. the book’s richness—and, potentially, its limitation—lies in the multiplicity of genres examined and the diversity of problematisations, contexts and methods mobilised. the centrality of sound system culture, dub and reggae is nonetheless clear, as many of the forms under study partly emerge from these matrices. in this respect, the book already helps to capture the resonances and contemporary traces of sound system culture within new musical assemblages. the entire first section is devoted to these contemporary articulations. whether in hyacinth’s study on roots manuva’s album “dub come save me”, charles’s attempt to systematise a “sound system sensibility”, gani’s interview with lawrence “l.j.” johnson, or télémaque’s photo-essay “trap atlantic”, each contribution shows the extent to which the musical objects under scrutiny are marked by the circulation and hybridisation of techniques, technologies, sounds and melodies. each case also demonstrates how these cultural productions—actualising the black atlantic continuum—braid together the global and the local, and past with present and future. https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.14 dancecult 17(1)154 the second section, which examines genres that emerged or persisted into the twentyfirst century, likewise includes an interview with a music industry professional and a photo essay. these two formats depart from conventional research articles and allow readers to inhabit different standpoints and perspectives. charles’s interview with ugwu traces the personal trajectory of an industry professional within the circulatory contexts already outlined, particularly between nigeria and london. charles and facey’s photo essay likewise offers a direct view of the places and the spatial organisation of steel pan practice in east london. more broadly, these chapters press further on the role of cultural industries in the recuperation, transformation and marginalisation of black musics and musicians. in particular, the chapters by palmer and toppin on the lovers rock scene and the jungle genre, respectively show how racism and patriarchy have jointly contributed to the invisibilisation and reshaping of scenes and musics in favour of certain audiences, industries and male and/or white musicians. the other two chapters in this section trace two very different pathways through which artists and musical forms (re-)emerge. muir examines black majority churches as sites that—through their locations, relational networks and pentecostal habitus—enable the development of musical competences convertible into the field of popular music and thus into economic capital. melville, by contrast, shows how contemporary information and communication technologies facilitate the circulation of techniques and recent tracks and contribute significantly to the revival of jazz in england among a new generation representative of contemporary urban british life. finally, the third and last section, “socio-political and economic issues”, interrogates contemporary black british musics critically through their contexts of emergence and diffusion. the opening chapters—by “hussla d” johnson and wallace, on the one hand, and by lambros fatsis, on the other—are particularly illuminating for understanding the processes of invisibilisation, criminalisation and thus marginalisation that unfold across black music scenes. the former provides an exemplary analysis of how cultural industries select and profit from particular cultural trajectories over others. sketching the contours of a political economy of reggae authenticity that marginalises british artists in favour of jamaican artists or labels, even though these musics are disseminated and consumed in england. fatsis, for his part, shows how ambient western racism materialises around black sound and forms of gathering, further criminalising and stigmatising these populations and their cultural productions. these two chapters are especially productive for night studies, as they help to grasp how the neoliberal capture of festive and musical forms that once placed society “in crisis” proceeds both through their whitewashing and through the criminalisation and marginalisation of their blackness. the final three chapters by scott, bushay and madar consider, from distinct perspectives, the role of music and its representations for artists and audiences: grime as a practice of refusal vis-à-vis expected social and racial positions; hip-hop as pedagogical practice by and for black women; and the ways black men receive the dominant images and aesthetics associated with them and negotiate them. reviews 155 overall, this collection edited by monique charles offers a rich and nuanced panorama of a field too seldom examined in its complexity, given the tendency to treat black musics monolithically under the rubric of the “urban”. although the approaches vary, the shared emphasis on sound system culture as a constitutive matrix, the black atlantic continuum and a critical race approach provides the book with strong internal coherence. that said, greater parity between conceptual labour and empirical precision would have been welcome. moreover, while some chapters—especially in the third section—foreground the cultural industries, several analyses would benefit from engaging more directly with industry-specific processes of appropriation and whitewashing. doing so would sharpen a highly fertile line of critique that reads the marginalisation of black cultures and their re-undergrounding (a promising avenue) as among the conditions of possibility for contemporary “nightlife cities”. finally, the near-exclusive focus on london invites the question of how black musics are configured elsewhere in britain. reference gilroy, paul. 1993. the black atlantic, modernity and double consciousness. cambridge: harvard university press. dancecult 17(1)156 platformed! how streaming, algorithms and artificial intelligence are shaping music cultures tiziano bonini and paolo magaudda cham, switzerland: palgrave macmillan, 2024. isbn 978-3-031-43964-3 (hardcover), isbn 978-3-031-43965-0 (ebook) rrp: uk£109.00 (hardcover), uk£109.00 (paperback), uk£87.50 (e-book) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.15> seán finnan technological university dublin (ireland) earlier this summer, spotify’s ceo and co-founder daniel ek, led a €600 million investment into a start-up named helsing, specialising in artificial intelligence military software. deerhoof and a number of other indie bands withdrew their catalogue from the music streaming platform, baulking at having their music accessible via a platform who shares a ceo with a military startup. deerhoof described the company as “creepy” and a “datamining scam masquerading as a ‘music company’” (green and strauss 2025). in this now well established digital economy, deerhoof point to the complexity of digital platforms such as spotify’s business model—are they a music company, data broker, advertiser or something more sinister? in platformed!, a work by tiziano bonini and paolo maguadda, the authors seek to tease out the social factors and historical conditions that have allowed spotify to become an almost monolithic presence in the mediation of music, the influence its having on contemporary music culture and the anxieties that come with a company using data profiling as a means to ascertain the taste of a listener. the story is complicated and brings with it hardline opinions on the effect streaming culture is having on music. the authors are attentive to such qualitative judgements; that streaming platforms have ruined the music experience of a younger generation by dematerialising the music product, that such platforms have encourage a disengaged listening curated by the machine rather than a human, or that musicians are now writing music tailored to the algorithm and its penchant for instant hooks. for the authors, such judgements afford streaming platforms such as spotify too much agency, while at the same time, ignoring the impact that social practices had on the development of online music sharing, streaming and datafication prior to spotify’s arrival. instead the authors, drawing from the work of science and technology scholars such as latour, argue that the evolution of technologies do not follow “a single, coherent logic” (6) but respond to the distinct conjuncture of social, political and economic pressures— conditions that are informed by the agency of social actors, and not primarily by the technology itself. to illustrate such, the authors provide a historical account of music’s circulation as a commercial artefact, its transition from an analogue artefact to a digital https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.15 reviews 157 one and the impact new online peer-to-peer networks had in the late 1990s on normalising the consumption of digital music. at each stop on this whirlwind tour of music’s evolution as a commercial product, driven by the demands of industry, there is a counterpoint proposed, the disruption by non-industry actors, early hackers such as shawn fanning of napster, or music researchers such as karlheinz brandenburg and his work on developing the mp3 format and the anonymous role that hordes of music fans had in making use of new technologies like peer-to-peer file sharing in distributing music for free. by presenting the various technological breakthroughs that allowed for music streaming to come into existence, the authors are reminding the reader at each moment that technology is consistently implicated within its social moment. in other words, just because a technology exists, does not mean it will be adopted. while the term “streaming” might now be predominantly associated with listening to music or watching videos on demand, streaming technology was not originally intended for such. originally developed in the 1990s, during a period when transmitting sound on the web faced “almost insurmountable technological constraints” (24), streaming was explored as a means to mirror radio’s capacity for broadcasting live events, using the internet instead of the airwaves. experiments with streaming technologies followed a “variety of different trajectories” (29), from internet radio experiments to webcasting of parliamentary debates, and through its myriad uses, often outside of dominant commercial industries, became normalised as a broadcasting tool. yet it was only with the transition towards what srnicek (2017) has termed “platform capitalism” that streaming became commercially viable. in chapter three, the authors provide an accessible overview of the rise of the platform society, detailing the multifaceted computational infrastructure they rely upon in order to operate; datafication of user behaviour, data analysis of music (in the case of music streaming platforms), algorithms for personalised recommendations, guiding the reader through the complicated industrial business practices of what can appear to be merely immaterial websites. it’s a necessary detour that situates spotify’s business model within wider economic and technological trends and illustrates the structural shifts that have been impacting the cultural industries over the past decade or so. streaming technologies may have been with us for over three decades, yet it is their implication with algorithmic processes and artificial intelligences that are currently provoking the most unease. whether it’s the development of artificial intelligence that can automatically produce a song in a sonic style according to various user prompts, or the increasing appearance of ai music in spotify playlists, such transitions again inflame anxieties around the nature of human creativity and its replacement by machines. in chapters four, anxieties around the role that algorithms have in music selection are examined, particularly in the fear that the human curator has been sidelined by automated processes. the authors draw from bonini’s own ethnographic research with gandini (2019) on curating playlists to illustrate the continued presence of real live humans in the editorial offices of streaming platforms, even if the authors here warn that a small number of playlists are increasingly influential in determining the viability of a musician’s career. dancecult 17(1)158 taking on such a large scope as the transformation of music cultures as a result of music streaming platforms means there will inevitably be a considerable amount of shifts left unaddressed in the work. while there is much focus on individual tactics of resistance, it would be interesting to understand more about how various music scenes and non-corporate streaming initiatives are enacting algorithmic resistance, a term the authors use for listeners who attempt to “circumvent, control, or mislead the data collection mechanisms enacted by platforms’ algorithms” (115). despite this, platformed! provides a valuable primer for anyone wishing to get their bearings in the ever-shifting landscape of music’s situatedness in digital media ecologies and a reminder of the power that artists and fans have in shaping music cultures. references bonini, tiziano and alessandro gandini. 2019. “‘first week is editorial, second week is algorithmic’: platform gatekeepers and the platformization of music curation”. social media + society 5(4): 1–11. <https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119880006>. green, walden and matthew strauss. 2025. “deerhoof to remove music from spotify”. pitchfork. 30 june: <https://pitchfork.com/news/deerhoof-to-remove-music-from-spotify/>, (accessed 1 august 2025). srnicek, nick. 2017. platform capitalism. cambridge, uk; medford, ma: polity press. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119880006 https://pitchfork.com/news/deerhoof-to-remove-music-from-spotify/ reviews 159 dance music: a feminist account of an ordinary culture tami gadir new york: bloomsbury academic, 2023. isbn: 978-1-5013-4640-8 (paperback), 978-1-5013-4641-5 (hardcover) rrp: us$92.05 (hardcover), us$28.66 (paperback) welcome to the club: the life and lessons of a black woman dj dj paulette manchester: manchester university press, 2024. isbn: 978-1-5261-6690-6 (hardcover) rrp: uk£20.00 (hardcover) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.16> maren hancock macewan university (canada) over the past two decades, dance music studies have shifted meaningfully from celebratory accounts of subcultural resistance to more critical, intersectional appraisals of labour, space, power and politics. two recent books extend and deepen this shift: welcome to the club: the life and lessons of a black woman dj by dj paulette and dance music: a feminist account of an ordinary culture by tami gadir. although distinct in genre and methodology— gadir’s book is an academic monograph, while paulette’s is a memoir—both texts challenge the idealized narratives that have dominated scholarly and popular accounts of dj culture. together, they offer a much-needed recalibration of what it means to make, live, and think through dance music in the twenty-first century. gadir opens her book with a thesis that is almost deceptively simple: “dance music is ordinary” (1). by this, she means that dance music culture is not necessarily mundane (although it often is, as she demonstrates), but socially and structurally embedded; indeed, dance music is shot through with the same exclusions, hierarchies and contradictions as any other cultural practice. this assertion is a direct challenge to decades of scholarship and fan writing that frame dj culture as inherently emancipatory, utopian or exceptional. for gadir, origin stories about detroit, chicago, berlin and new york may have been politically useful in early subcultural theory, but they have since become canonical and limiting: “what has happened since,” she argues in the conclusion, “is that such interventions have become the accepted stories of dance music culture. as such, they no longer serve their original function, and their politics are no longer radical.” (168) paulette (who is mononymous) presents a similar critique from a different angle. her memoir, welcome to the club, tracks over 30 years in the industry—from early gigs in manchester’s queer nightlife scene, including her role as a resident at the hacienda’s https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.16 dancecult 17(1)160 flesh, through corporate pr work at mercury records and eventually to international stardom. yet despite her longevity and acclaim, paulette reflects repeatedly on how her contributions—like those of many black women djs—have been marginalized or omitted entirely from mainstream dance music history: “the winners in dance music have mainly been men,” she writes, quoting carl loben, “and men are more likely to push themselves forward and take the credit” (128). when paulette became the resident dj at flesh, the club’s legendary and first queer night, she was one of only two women djs to hold down a hacienda residency. she describes how her residency at flesh “enabled [her] to join a boy’s club which changed [her] life” (5) and “was unarguably the catalyst for [her] career” (32). still, paulette stresses that hacienda was not the only “thing” in manchester–remember, dominant narratives dominate history. paulette stresses that, as important as the hacienda was, “if history is to be correct, we have to acknowledge the other stories that have been squashed down and pushed out” (35). she emphasizes that a “vibrant underground dj scene” (33) existed at the time that hasn’t been awarded historical prominence, “inhabited by a cluster of black music promoters” (33). despite this, “black people weren’t invited into the city centre–any city centre–in england and the early nineties were not a ‘black creative’ friendly space” (33). her reflections offer lived evidence to support gadir’s claim that historiographic gatekeeping and cultural memory are structured by race, gender and power. gadir’s research spans a decade of fieldwork and interviews conducted across the uk, tel aviv, zurich, oslo and sydney, with a focus on how gender, race, class and regulatory frameworks shape dance music environments. her methods include participant observation and critical discourse analysis, with a particular emphasis on mythologies of meritocracy and postfeminism. if gadir’s work serves as a feminist audit of the dance music studies field, paulette’s memoir functions as a counter-archive: a first-person record of scenes and struggles often left undocumented. paulette’s memoir is rooted in her singular but deeply intersectional experience as a queer black woman navigating predominantly white and male spaces. yet her storytelling is far from anecdotal. she consistently situates her experiences within broader systems of exclusion—whether confronting the “lead-lined” glass ceiling while working in pr for mercury records (54), being told she’d never get booked as “a black, female dj with grey hair” (122), or having samples of her autobiography dismissed by male colleagues such as frank broughton for not having enough sex and drugs to make it interesting. thankfully, paulette ignored his advice when manchester press approached her to write the book in 2021. one of the many strengths of welcome to the club lies in paulette’s insistence that embodied experience is not separate from theory—it is theory in motion. paulette stresses that her book is neither a complete history of edm nor her definitive biography; rather, it’s “a series of snapshots that follow a chronological arc from the start of [her] dj’ing career to the present day, bending this through the prism of other people’s histories to acknowledge the wider picture. after all, ten people at a party will never tell reviews 161 the same story.” (2–3) here, paulette introduces a theme both glaringly obvious and yet somehow still ignored: history is subjective and favours hegemonic subjects. acknowledging her intersectional positionality within what bell hooks characterizes as “white supremacist patriarchal” culture, paulette states, “i have the unique perspective of an outsider with insider knowledge and an insider with outside knowledge” (3). both paulette and gadir foreground the ongoing struggles women face in dj culture, though with different emphases. in chapter 5 of dance music, gadir dissects how gender operates not just at the level of representation, but in sonic codes, gatekeeping, and audience perception. female djs are often marketed either as “sexy and incompetent” or musically credible but non-conforming to beauty norms (121–123). these binaries echo in media representation and club booking policies, and paulette’s narrative personalizes these structural forces. she documents the repeated erasure of her skills, the scrutiny of her appearance and the exhausting dance between authenticity and acceptability. her story makes visible the emotional and economic toll of navigating these contradictions alongside unpredictable, irregular employment —what gadir names as “precarity in informal economies” (140) and paulette describes more viscerally as “losing your mojo” (121). both gadir and paulette extend their analysis into ageism, showing how dance music’s obsession with youth further marginalizes women. paulette, now in her fifties, writes candidly about facing dwindling bookings and backhanded compliments. yet she refuses invisibility: “remind yourself that few white men have a problem with celebrating their wins... you too should remember and feel pride in yourself and your achievements.” (139) her memoir becomes a feminist act of citation—of herself and of the women who built the scene alongside her. in chapter 2, paulette describes how she “started to build a network of female supporters” (47–48), and this is key to her narrative. throughout welcome to the club, paulette shouts out the amazing women she encountered, including but not limited to: smokin’ jo, dulcie danger, caroline prothero, jamz supernova, marcia carr, colleen ‘cosmo’ murphy, judy griffith, gladys pizarro, jaguar, erica mckoy, niks, lakuti, naomi pohl, anz, sherelle and more. if you don’t know these women, you should look them up. one of gadir’s most provocative contributions is her critique of “transcendence” as a central value in dance music discourse. in chapter 4, she questions whether the romanticized peak experience—of becoming one with the dance floor, the lights, the crowd—is truly emancipatory or simply another consumerist ideal dressed in subcultural clothing, stating “[t]he popular discourses on utopianism in dance music culture leave little room for addressing problematic gender dynamics” (164). for gadir, transcendence is often an individualist fantasy that displaces collective political action. paulette’s memoir complements this critique with realism and wit. while she recounts moments of joy, connection and artistic mastery, she never glorifies the scene. instead, she foregrounds its labour: lugging records, facing hostile sound techs, staying professional in the face of condescension and recovering from burnout: “the glamour is fleeting, the graft is real, and the sacrifices are many” (74), she writes. paulette’s story echoes gadir’s insistence that even the most exceptional spaces can be host to ordinary experiences. dancecult 17(1)162 both books reject dance music exceptionalism in favour of something more politically grounded. gadir’s final chapter critiques the field of dance music studies itself for clinging to outdated narratives of resistance and transcendence. she asks, “what function does dance music writing whose main goal is advocacy or defence serve now that there is no longer an orthodoxy to challenge?” (170) in its place, she calls for a post-utopian, anti-capitalist feminist praxis that acknowledges the limitations of dance floors while mobilizing their collectivist potential toward structural change. paulette’s conclusion, subtitled “a manifesto”, similarly balances critique with hope. she doesn’t romanticize the past, but she insists that club culture can still be a site of joy, community and creative resistance: “community is the foundation. collaboration is the future. alliances reinforce the chain.” (195) she reminds readers that love—for music, for people, for the party—is not apolitical; it is the engine that keeps us going. in sum, these two books—one a rigorous academic intervention, the other a vital work of cultural memory—deserve to be read in tandem as both disrupt the plur mnemonic. paulette and gadir challenge scholars, djs, promoters, fans and all stakeholders in dance music to move beyond myth and toward accountability. whether we encounter dj culture in lecture halls or on dance floors, in archives or behind the decks, dance music and welcome to the club remind us that the work of rethinking dance music culture is far from finished. reviews 163 live spielen: liveness in performances elektronischer tanzmusik josef schaubruch hildesheim: universitätsverlag hildesheim, 2024. isbn: 978-3-96424-101-6 (paperback) rrp: €27,00 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.17> jack mcneill university of york (uk) as i write this review i am looking at an old ticket stub on my desk for an event in july 2025 in leeds. the stub includes all the usual information you’d expect from the gig ticket: venue, time, price, promoter, etc. the headline of the stub displays the name of the artist, followed by the following text in bold: “live dj set”. to some, this may be paradoxical; how can a dj set where an artist is playing pre-produced records one after the other be “live”? some may even see such a claim as audacious if the artist is not playing their own work using acoustic, amplified and/or electronic musical instruments and employing a level of mastery or even virtuosity. some may take a more sympathetic view. surely the presence of the artist and audience and some sort of interaction between the two is enough to make the performance “live”. debates around what a live performance involves are pervasive in electronic dance music cultures. views are manifold, and long have ravers, artists and enthusiasts debated the nuances of liveness in electronic dance music performance. if this is a debate you have had or are preparing for your next heated discussion on the topic, perhaps you might want to come equipped with some robust arguments. and if robust arguments on liveness are what you are looking for, look no further than josef schaubruch’s live spielen. live spielen is a comprehensive and critical review on notions of liveness in electronic dance music performances. rather than attempting to provide an absolute definition of the term, schaubruch highlights the theoretical and practical complexities and vagueness bound up with it. the work is convincing and presents a solid theoretical background around liveness in dance music genres, before undertaking empirical study and analysis on electronic artists who perform live and have a variety of different perspectives on what that means to them. schaubruch considers a number of positions on the notion of liveness, spanning from more common (mostly electronic) instrumental performances to the understanding of the dj set as a “live” practice (or not, as some argue), and the importance of corporeality, embodiment and an audience’s presence and interaction with the artist to a live performance. the first chapter is centred around the ambiguity of live performance in electronic music. it elegantly outlines the anxieties of electronic dance music artists around whether something might be live, as well as introducing the various constellations of live performance in electronic music, including turntablism, live coding, hardware performances and more. in this theoretical introduction, schaubruch also emphasises that his reflections on liveness often stem from less tangible phenomena like practice and affect as well as technologies, placing artists and audiences as critical to his discussion. chapter 2 presents a solid and https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.17 dancecult 17(1)164 comprehensive literature review. this chapter is particularly strong and is a useful resource for those working in or interested in the blooming academic discussion around liveness and electronic dance music. notable in the chapter is linguistic analysis of genre and musical role (e.g. dj/producer) across english and german, and the assertion that providing a single binary definition of “liveness” (i.e. “live” and “not live”) is no longer possible. in doing so, schaubruch mostly avoids falling into traps around defining what may or may not be authentic, again focussing on the multiplicity and vagueness of the terms he explores. following the rigorous review of literature, he provides a brief outline of his methodology which is clear and addresses gaps in field, particularly in the empirical study of liveness in electronic dance music. his discussion around reflexive grounded theory is both engaging and goes some way in addressing the perpetual complexity of aligning the specificities of dance music cultures with research methodologies. at the same time, there is a clear engagement with the author’s positionality as researcher, artist and participant in the dance music culture. the fourth chapter plots schaubruch’s findings and his own theoretical reflections on them, extracting broader themes stemming from the empirical work with artists who professionally engage with live electronic music performance. the outcomes are expansive, supported by informative diagrams. one particularly striking observation, albeit one that might be predictable to the reader, is the cultural capital that liveness holds for the artists interviewed. there is an inherent tension among artists’ reflections on what “liveness” is, with some focussed on the practice of using live instruments itself, while others with more of a focus towards creating moments of presence with audiences. not one to shy away from the complexity of these arguments, schaubruch explores where these tensions intersect, extending notions of subject and object to body (artist) and equipment, as well as artist and audience, exploring the relationships between musicians and instruments as an illustrative comparison. overall, live spielen presents a thorough, rigorous and engaging analysis on the role that liveness has in the performance of electronic dance music. he leans into the diversity and conflicts in both the literature and the points of view of the artists he interviews to illustrate the richness and potential in various definitions of live performances of electronic dance music. there are a (very small) handful of instances where it might be inferred that value judgements around live performances being “better” than dj sets, particularly in the “grad an liveness”, are being made. although these appear to emerge from the author’s empirical work, their absolute presentation may be seen to negate the vagueness in terminology that schaubruch so effectively builds throughout most of the text. while not necessarily within the scope of this work, an exploration on the role of liveness in studio production, and how live performances translate to the composition and production of fixed media is missing in the book and perhaps presents a gap for future work. admittedly, when i first received the ticket for the above-mentioned event in leeds, i scoffed at the absurdity of a “live dj set”. i was convinced that the headline description of the event was wholly paradoxical, perhaps a marketing ploy that plays into schaubruch’s assertions on the cultural capital of the live set. having read live spielen and considered the vagueness of the notion liveness in electronic dance music however, i am not so sure, and this is one of the great successes of this text; it questions as much as it answers. reviews 165 assembling a black counter culture deforrest brown, jr. new york: primary information, 2022. isbn: 9781734489736 (paperback) rrp: us$15.00 <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.18> emre öztürk humboldt-universität zu berlin (germany) deforrest brown jr. is a musician, media theorist and curator who has been an essential voice in questioning the current state of global electronic music and framing it within the radical black perspective. in assembling a black counter culture (2022), he traces the “black secret technology” centering detroit techno meanwhile covering black vernacular cultures, racial capitalism, industrialization and black resistance. combining both academic and underground knowledge, brown visits the black labor, ingenuity and futuristic desire, questioning techno’s later depoliticized and dehistoricized reception within various discursive and practical realms among the global electronic music industry. more than a linear musical timeline, this book is rather a counter-archive; interviews, artist biographies, scene insights and media archaeology are constant while brown digs further into the direction of techno’s cybernetic essence and creative drive. doing so, the book references valuable literature at the intersection of racial capitalism, cybernetics, and black desire, citing authors like cedric robinson, paul gilroy, kodwo eshun, fred moten, as well as frequently referring to the afrofuturist heritage and diasporic myth-science.  starting from detroit, brown later situates techno within the broader black atlantic, as well as its further branches through locations like japan, germany and the uk. while each chapter breaks down techno’s timeline by focusing on different perspectives, locations or concepts, brown eventually re-assembles all the information in the final chapter, “the collapse of modern culture” a title that is very much self-explanatory. brown merely hesitates to express his personal opinion, in fact, he clearly shows his position also on the very first page of the book with five different diagrams; the first one being a forecast of unbearable ecological load that inevitably leads to the “collapse of modern civilization”, and the second one that maps out the timeline of the black atlantic that starts with the global slave trade that he indicates the inevitable future result, “the journey home”. in that sense, brown underlines the inescapable outcomes of a culture that is assembled through racial capitalism and neocolonialism, combining self-reflexive insights with the comprehensive research data he provides. in the first few pages, the book cruises through the racialized history of the us and colonialism with their connection to current racial capitalism and the “rise of modern industrial complexes”. while discussing the essence of black usage of media and machines https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.18 dancecult 17(1)166 in the context of electronic music and dance cultures, brown pays dues to early architects of afrofuturism such as sun ra, lee “scratch” perry or george clinton, discussing their influence on later black electronic musics. he quickly sets its route to detroit in the following chapter, zooming into the life of techno’s originators in the us midwest, where post-fordist racial capitalism peaked post world war ii. one of brown’s main arguments is that techno’s emergence is inseparable from the conditions of post-fordist america and the automation of black labor. he conceptualizes techno as an embodied and racialized extension of the workers’ engagement with industrial machinery, adding that the music’s futuristic desires are not merely stylistic but are direct reflection of the industrial environment, that he eventually refers to as “black secret technology.” brown positions detroit techno pioneers like juan atkins, jeff mills and underground resistance as sonic engineers responding to industrial debilitation and using machines and rhythms to pursue new aesthetic forms and sonic fiction, while continously providing examples from afrofuturistic heritage and mythscientific practice that points out to the everlasting connection between pasts, presents and the futures of the black atlantic sonic futurism. brown also goes over the world’s changing economic and political climate and its impacts on the racialized, social and financial structure of the usa and beyond, zooming into cases such as us’s post-civil war and more contemporary topics such as racial policies and riots, or state-driven violence in the 20th century as what equally shaped the conditions for techno to flourish. at the intersection of racialized structures and mainstream media, he constantly provides concrete examples of techno and other black music being whitewashed through media tools such as news narrations, charts or interviews to show the doubleedged sword of british and american music market; where britain has become a melting pot of different black music with enough financial stability to the us’s, covering techno’s expansion overseas and its results with another self-explanatory chapter called “wake up america, you are dead!”. next chapter “detroit-berlin axis” provides even more insights by revealing further connections of black musical cultures with racial capitalism and neocolonialism, focusing on the genre’s second decade of existence and exportation outside of the us, under “a colonial project that white european crowds fetishize detroit’s sonic labor and whitewashing it”as brown puts it, diving into stories from post-cold war era berlin with a hedonistic, neocolonial venture that simultaneously serves for the western cultural hegemony. exampling paternalistic assumptions of kraftwerk and other westernwhite influences on detroit techno, or scholars such as stockhausen and adorno, brown maps out the post-colonial multiculturalism that reappropriates the african american musical continuum on the 1990s and beyond, going over cases like underground resistance or drexciyan empire as black resistance in response.  brown brings his focus to the present in the final chapters, interrogating how platform capitalism has restructured the global music economy and further marginalized black producers. he maps out the consolidation of power in media platforms, streaming services and corporate-backed festivals, showing how these infrastructures continue the exploitation and erasure of black creative labor. here he reframes all previous chapters through the lens reviews 167 of platform capitalism and questions its impacts on techno and beyond, going over the capitalization of the black body, mind, and labor through contemporary technological infrastructure. yet, he already made the conclusion clear many times throughout the book, that blackness is always already in counter-position to the structures of racial capitalism that seek to contain it. if there is a central claim in assembling a black counter culture, it is that resistance, speculative imagination and reassembling are constant variables of the black secret technology. dancecult 16(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 16(1) 2024: 140–152 issn 1947-5403 ©2024 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net rude citizenship: jamaican popular music, copyright, and the reverberations of colonial power larisa kingston mann chapel hill: university of north carolina press, 2022.  isbn: 978-1-4696-6724-9 (paperback), 978-1-4696-6723-2 (hardcover) rrp: us$95 (hardcover), us$32.50 (paperback)  <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.16> aadita chaudhury york university (canada) / goldsmiths, university of london (uk) in rude citizenship: jamaican popular music, copyright, and the reverberations of colonial power, larisa kingston mann unravels the moral economies and legal copyright frameworks that inform and animate the ongoing evolution of jamaican popular music. mann’s intervention into the study of jamaican music and culture in this context is novel in multiple ways. existing approaches to theorizing jamaican popular music have contended with ways in which practitioners of the culture incorporate elements of embodied social knowledge (henriques 2011), challenge the dominance of a stratified system of social classes (cooper 2004) and create a sense of kinship with ancestral histories of migration and ritual practices (niaah 2010; stanley niaah 2008). mann’s approach presents an account of how jamaican musical cultures challenge dominant epistemologies about intellectual property and ownership based on colonial notions of enclosure—positioning the conditions in which jamaican popular music emerges in relation to global struggles against the loss of commons—ecological, economic and cultural. mann locates the legal framework of copyright as part of a wider set of colonial worldmaking apparatuses that create enclosures around popular music and culture, entangling them in regimes of ownership and intellectual property that most closely adhere to ideas of musical composition and creativity within a eurocentric framework of cultural production, centering specific individuals and collectives in isolation from their cultural milieu as auteurs. within the broader context of british imperialism in which jamaican popular genres like reggae, ska, dancehall and dub have emerged, there are additionally reviews https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.16 reviews 141 class, geographical and economic considerations of practitioners that contribute not only to the evolution of distinct musical styles but also to their legibility within the political economy of global music and associated legal regimes. mann’s most important and unique contribution to this growing literature on the embodied knowledges and epistemologies emanating from jamaican music’s ethos is linking the ways it challenges class and coloniality within jamaica to how the notion of “rude citizenship” (130, 177)—the sociocultural, affective, and embodied practices of poor jamaicans contrasted with the state-supported ideals of the elite classes—created “a kind of sheltering space where poor jamaicans can produce this relatively autonomous cultural life” (7). it is through this perspective of rude citizenship—which encapsulates how the jamaican poor resisted forms of coloniality by challenging certain white supremacist norms of conduct still affirmed by elites in jamaican post-independence society—that mann shows how anti-blackness and coloniality pervaded post-independence jamaica. even though “the state and its elite intellectuals (…) were at odds over the appropriate forms and distributions of power, they tended to remain more in agreement about cultural norms of conduct, reading the poor as ‘rude’ rather than as challenging coloniality” (9). accordingly, within marginalized spaces in jamaican society, popular musical cultures reflected the moral economies and embodied representations of various approaches to pushing back against state-enforced, anti-black understandings of personhood, creativity and conduct. these cultural practices present considerable epistemological challenges to dominant global orders surrounding the status of intellectual property and ownership when it comes to music, countering established notions of copyright law. when considered through the prism of notions of “rudeness” and rude citizenship as per mann’s articulation, we can begin to observe the impacts of persistent coloniality and anti-blackness in post-independence jamaica as broad, cascading forms that create the scaffolding in which jamaican popular music, legal mechanisms like international copyright law and notions of ownership interface and operate, each challenging the limits of the other. in this nexus, jamaican musical practices, regardless of their genre, represent part of a pluriverse in which traditional cultures of orality, notions of sonic commons that not only enable but also celebrate forms of hybridity facilitated by mixing and sampling practices and other embodied and aural knowledges—frequently demonstrate their continuous evolution and autonomy even as newer mechanisms of legal and physical enclosure emerge by engaging with and producing forms of musical composition that defy colonial constructs of copyright law. in this way, the musical forms, textures, pedagogies, and epistemologies that undergird the ethos of jamaican popular music continue to refract the moral economies surrounding the idea of “rude citizenship” within the domains of music and cultural production, legal regimes and beyond. jamaican popular music and dance culture, its technological innovations and migrating evolutionary trajectories will likely continue to lay significant challenges to the global hegemonic legal orders around creative composition, collaboration and ownership. dancecult 14(1)142 mann’s work in rude citizenship extends this inquiry well beyond the realm of music into broader conversations about coloniality, indigenous approaches to legal worldmaking and the nature of cultural production itself. by questioning the fundamental underlying assumptions in western conceptions of musical and sonic composition with examples from jamaican popular music, mann’s provocation in rude citizenship asks readers to question their understanding of auteurship, originality and notions of musical talent. references cooper, carolyn. 2004. sound clash: jamaican dancehall culture at large. 2004th edition. new york, ny: palgrave macmillan. henriques, julian. 2011. sonic bodies: reggae sound systems, performance techniques, and ways of knowing. 1st edition. new york: continuum. niaah, sonjah stanley. 2010. dancehall: from slave ship to ghetto. illustrated edition. ottawa: university of ottawa press. stanley niaah, sonjah. 2008. “performance geographies from slave ship to ghetto.” space and culture 11(4): 343–60. reviews 143 together, somehow: music, affect, and intimacy on the dancefloor luis manuel garcia-mispireta durham: duke university press, 2023. isbn: 978-1-4780-2008-0 (cloth), 978-1-4780-2504-7 (paperback) rrp: us$107.95 (cloth), us$28.95 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.17> rory fewer university of california, riverside (usa) luis manuel garcia-mispireta’s together, somehow: music, affect, and intimacy on the dancefloor adds an essential contribution to a limited yet gradually expanding body of ethnomusicological scholarship on electronic dance music cultures. through a multi-sited ethnography of house, techno and minimal dance music scenes in chicago, paris and berlin, the author evaluates the utopian potential of the dancefloor, illustrating the affective dimensions that generate its feelings of social cohesion as well as the ambivalence and exclusions that surround its possibility. in making its arguments, this book draws not only from interviews conducted with partygoers across these scenes, but also auto-ethnographic anecdotes and analytical frameworks from sound and affect studies. a primary focus of this book centers on how the dancefloor enables forms of intimacy between strangers that would otherwise be inappropriate in other spaces, a point illustrated early on with a memorable anecdote in which the author’s face was briefly caressed by a stranger while dancing at panorama bar in berlin, “an exchange of surprising warmth between strangers” (3). garcia-mispireta builds empirically from a range of anecdotes to make potent claims about these forms of “stranger-sociability” (5), including how conventions of touch in nightlife cultures serve the multiple functions of “communicating sociability, transmitting affect, and both sensing and navigating a crowded environment” (53). the author incorporates an extensive amount of musical analysis to argue that the affective qualities of corporeal exchanges on the dancefloor meet further intensification through the haptic qualities of electronic dance music. specifically, the distribution of frequencies in electronic dance music composition results in a type of material impact, described as “sonic spikes [that] strike the body in a very concrete way, eliciting sensations not only in the ear but also in the body’s skin, flesh, viscera, and bones” (70). electronic dance music genres often utilize sounds that index tactile experience, such as clapping or breathing, a practice which “rel[ies] on the ability of listener-dancers to associate certain sounds with an enfleshed sound source” (73). garcia-mispireta also provides a close analysis of musical texture to argue that electronic dance music makes use of granular sounds that likewise evoke tactile experience. this combination of vibrational impact, bodily indexicality and granular texture ultimately “invites an engagement with sound that is alive to texture, touch, https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.17 dancecult 14(1)144 and other fleshy excitations” (87). the book’s larger theories of togetherness are predicated on these affects as devices through which crowd solidarity is enacted or imagined. the author details these affective encounters of sonic and embodied proximities to theorize the vague sense of togetherness that the dancefloor produces. these affective encounters (articulated corporeally and musically) intensify in a process that the author calls the “thickening of the social” (124). thickening is a process whereby the imbrication of dancefloor affect gives initial coherence to a type of crowd solidarity. thickening results in a vague feeling of togetherness that the author explains through the concept of liquidarity, defined as “a form of fluid solidarity in which vagueness is a crucial condition of its emergence” (32). liquidarity is necessarily vague because in order to coalesce it must also obfuscate the power differentials that would deny its possibility. “vagueness” is thus used by the author as an analytic to effectively describe the contradictions that allow nightlife spaces to simultaneously contain forms of inclusion and exclusion, and which threaten to dissolve these “vague” feelings of social cohesion as they are inevitably problematized by the presence of partygoers with differential access to this solidarity, including, for example, partygoers who are disproportionately targeted by unsolicited touching or have differing cultural expectations for intimacy. the duality of this vagueness is most apparent in the final chapter, in which the author details door policies and the regulation of diversity as a “dissonance between a utopian desire for unproblematically inclusive collectivity and the practices of exclusion that help to make the experience of cosmopolitan conviviality possible” (215). for these reasons, liquidarity is a phenomenon that can only take fragile shape. as the author writes, it “sustains an intimate world on the merest whiff of sociability” (104). the ultimate objective of this intimate world and its utopian aspirations—the “something” as noted in the title of the book—are likewise vague. garcia-mispireta writes that they “provide a sense of what a utopia of postidentitarian belonging might feel like, rather than a coherent model of how it would function” (223). this book offers a novel contribution to ethnomusicological scholarship and will surely lend itself as an important resource for scholars and other readers interested in the global phenomenon of electronic dance music culture or studies on music and affect more generally. however, it is important to note the structural challenges that nearly made such a project impossible. this book is prefaced with a description of the obstacles the author met as a firstgeneration, queer scholar of color working on topics deemed “disciplinarily unconventional and low-prestige” (xv) by the institutions of ethnomusicology. as it offers a series of theories pertinent to understanding the ubiquitous communities of the “dancefloor”, this book thus also serves as a reminder to current and future ethnomusicologists of the structural changes required to ensure similarly profound work continues to reach fruition. reviews 145 out of space: how uk cities shaped rave culture (revised and expanded edition) jim ottewill bristol: velocity press, 2024. isbn: 978-1-913231-63-7 (paperback) rrp: £14.99 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.18> alistair fraser maynooth university (ireland) a friend of mine, breffni, tells a wonderful story about discovering rave culture in north western (nw) london, aged 17. out and about with friends one evening, he came across a spiral tribe free party in a warehouse in nw london. it was unlike anything else he’d known. it was music and a vibe, music and an embrace; a feeling, then, and one he continues to enjoy and chase after. today, after a few decades of raving, he’s employed to make urban places more liveable for all (and he’s successful at it). back then, though, it was the rave culture he discovered that went on to make the city liveable; it was rave culture that went on to make so many places and spaces of wonder, discovery and joy. uk cities since the late 1980s and early 1990s have been bound up with rave culture in profound ways. both the city and the culture have existed in relation to each other and to a wider array of places and spaces. those fleeting moments on the dancefloor, the randomness of meeting and hugging strangers, the chaos, the buzz—it all needed somewhere to occur and rave culture did manage to create those geographies. indeed, looking back at the story of rave culture, perhaps one of the most notable aspects was simply that the promoters, free party collectives, djs, sound engineers, new age travellers, ravers and clubbers found so many spaces to embrace each other. looking around now, it’s hard not to be worried about the future. what chance will our children have of making discoveries like breffni’s? a similar anxiety pervades out of space: how uk cities shaped rave culture (2024). in this expanded version of his 2022 book with the same title, jim ottewill takes the act of “looking around” to an elevated level. ottewill works his way across the country, from north to south, to ask the promoters, the originators and the djs who got things started and kept things going, to tell their stories. what we get out of this is a brilliant and rich historical geography of rave culture in the uk. we get insightful biographical details about the promoters and djs; rare nuggets about how clubs got started; and fantastic quotes that capture the vitality and energy—the love—that went into and came out of rave culture. out of space has ten core chapters. the bulk of them are dedicated to covering developments in glasgow, manchester, liverpool, sheffield, birmingham, london and other smaller cities and towns such as coventry and margate. chapters 7 and 8 focus on party and sound system scenes with fewer fixed ties to any particular place but with strong bonds to uk cities. then in chapter 10 and the concluding chapter, ottewill examines the contemporary struggle to find a place for rave culture in uk cities. https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.18 dancecult 14(1)146 the book has two standout features. the first is a justifiable sense of awe and respect toward the great many people who have dedicated so much of their lives to emplacing rave culture in uk cities. it’s been their task to find venues, bring in the crowds and deal with authorities or angry neighbours. it’s their labour and often their capital that’s generated the landscape of rave culture in the uk. out of space is a book that fist-bumps those people. it works. it’s a book with love and hugs. alongside the love, though, the second feature is an overriding sense of dread. ottewill has his finger on the pulse of rave culture in the uk. he’s spotting the novel ideas and experiments, such as community ownership models that try to counteract rising rents and the overall loss of space; and highlighting other efforts to battle the growing sense that rave culture is on the decline. yet, it is precisely the fact that rave culture is on the decline that jumps out from the book, especially in the final two chapters. this leads me to wonder if a weakness in out of space is that ottewill is too committed to rave culture. he wants to spot and discuss some of the ways that rave culture can keep going. he knows this means we need space. but to my mind, ottewill does not dedicate enough energy to asking if there is going to be enough of a commitment from younger generations to the making of spaces like clubs or other dancefloors. for sure, processes such as gentrification are a major source of pressure on clubs and promoters. regulations, insurance, health, safety and the wider institutionalization of cultural practice with respect to capitalist life also bear down on rave culture. but what about generational differences? thirty years or more have passed since breffni (and kids like him) discovered spiral tribe (and then, for breffni, bedlam and numerous other events and venues). today, though, a great many young people are on smartphones or playsations all day long. they’re updating their followers on instagram. they’re tik-tokking videos; creating, capturing, commodifying and sometimes cancelling culture in novel ways that just might not need the same sorts of spaces that rave culture needed. against this backdrop, to want clubs and raves to keep going—to seek out a space for them in the city—is one thing. but maybe we might need to accept that our kids won’t want to spend quite so much of their weekends bubbling around on an ecstatic ride in hot sweaty clubs, warehouses or other venues. one has to wonder if our kids will need the same spaces as rave culture needed. will they seek out the same sorts of life-changing or mind-altering experience that so many ravers desired? in short, maybe rave culture is running out of space; but maybe it’s also running out of ravers. these minor critiques aside, out of space is a fantastic book precisely because it can provoke debates about the past, present and future of rave culture. ottewill writes clearly, quotes the people he interviewed astutely and ensures the reader knows there they are relative to the rest of the book. it’s a brilliantly crafted text, demonstrating serious writing skills and drawing on an incredibly rich archive of material collected via first-hand interviews and other sources. my sense is that anyone interested in the rise, development and significance of rave culture will need this book. anyone fighting to keep the vibe alive should also get a copy. reviews 147 venue stories: narratives, memories, and histories from britain’s independent music spaces fraser mann, robert edgar and helen pleasance (eds.) sheffield: equinox publishing, 2023. isbn: 9781800504431 (hardcover), 9781800503731 (paperback) rrp: us$100.00 (hardcover), us$32.00 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.19> max gibson university of california, davis (usa) drawing together a chorus of individual voices, venue stories is a dynamic collection of creative non-fiction entries that speak on music, place, experience and community across british independent music scenes in the 20th and 21st century. in their curation of the chapters, editors mann, edgar and pleasance state that their mission was to “bring stories and remembrances together, add shape to them and develop a scholarly understanding of how we can offer an alternative mode of historiography through editorial processes that are akin to the role of the museum curator” (2). conceived and developed during the covid-19 pandemic, this is not the usual collection of formal academic essays, but instead a radical attempt at shining light on histories that are usually ignored, marginal or not considered serious enough; venue stories acts as a site of resistance to erasure through the creation of an archive of stories not usually told. utilizing autoethnography, journalism, historiography, essaying, interview and most importantly memoir, the authors create multiple narratives of hidden microhistories. creative non-fiction as a genre is increasingly common within academia, yet rarely does a collection come together like this that achieves its mission of illuminating histories through a multiplicity of voices, rather than the usual single-authored narrative. this approach is apparent when examining the variety of people in this collection beyond the familiar academic researcher: band members, djs, producers, journalists, bartenders, photographers and more. each contribute their lived experiences and perspectives, and having an eclectic roster makes for an enjoyable read. the shifts in writing styles take the reader from the depths of despair—over half the chapters end with the closure of cherished venues—to uncontrollable laughter—who would have thought the destruction of a bass guitar could be so funny? (69–77). yet this emotional journey is never at the expense of intention of the book. each account reveals a microcosm within a broader community, scene and history, where musical worlds are lived, embodied and reenacted through memory, and then relived through writing; the act of memory writing affords the network of microhistories to be acknowledged and remembered and serves as a way of expressing personal experience and embodied knowledge within larger structures. memory writing thus becomes an analytical methodology. https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.19 dancecult 14(1)148 venue stories contributes a great deal to the regional histories of music scenes and venues in the areas of birmingham, leicester, liverpool and london. places such as brighton, glasgow, leeds, manchester, sheffield, teesside, york and the north of england are also represented. each entry acts as a scratching of the surface of histories that have yet to be written, and thus could lead way to a book of each region or venue in question. many chapters engage with a single venue, most of which are on the toilet circuit. robert edgar theorizes on the concept of the toilet venue, arguing that they affectionately received their name from the bands and audiences who would come together as a community in seedy spaces full of mythic history (40–50). some of the mythic venues included here are the charlotte, eric’s, and the bull and gate. other authors, instead look inward, and focus on journeys of discovery, coming-of-age and personal troubles through their venue experiences. especially important is how these authors grapple with the politics of access and inclusion, particularly that of safety and economic parity. gender politics are prevalent in penelope wickson’s experience in the 1990s birmingham jungle scene where she describes a masculinist environment rife with sexism and inappropriate behaviour toward female participants (162–174); vim renault and lene cortina, of punkgirldiaries, outline their experiences as female band members in the world of punk, a global phenomenon famous for breaking with traditional norms, which afforded them opportunities usually unusual for women (78–87); and polly hancock’s memoir reveals promotional sexism during the hype indie night at the bull and gate, london (60–68). economic politics are present in anna maria barry’s contribution who explicitly points out that working-class talent is underrepresented across the creative industries, not just in live music (124–134). ed garland’s account of sitting on a bench in leicester’s the charlotte venue introduces the reader to the perspective and experience of music in venues from a position of sitting rather than standing and points to the rarely addressed issue of physical accessibility in live music venues (145–152). myriad genres and scenes are represented through venue stories, including heavy metal, hard rock, britpop, as well as indie and underground musics. whether a product of living musical memory or simply due to its global influence, the genre with the most references is punk and its cousins. punk memories act as the main undertow that bring venues to life. while not intentional, the narratives of venue stories, emphasize live music performed by bands; stories concerning electronic dance music and djs, however, do make up a small number of chapters. a striking entry is thomas jackson’s chapter on his punk-rock dj dad, whose experience as a working-class industrial worker-turned dj illuminates the not-yettold activities and histories of venues, towns and regions alike (238–247). a standout feature of venue stories is the ubiquity of musical materiality that is littered across nearly every entry; indeed, the editors point out that “[m]aterial culture, the imagination and the memory have equal weight in these contributions and how they are reviews 149 written” (16). whether it is zines, instruments, seating, pa systems, badges, clothes or multitudinous memorabilia, objects are imbued with experiences and memories, and while they might not resonate like a venue, they are valuable for understanding how material culture fits into broader society, musics and histories. it would be wonderful to see these materials brought together in an exhibit that complements the book. those seeking applications of academic theory will find a selection of authors who situate their experiences and stories of venues within analytical frameworks—ed garland’s application of julian henrique’s listening skin is masterful (148)—but readers should not expect it from every chapter. simultaneously, some might question the reliability and rigor of memory writing; the very act of working from memory elicits the possibility of inaccuracies. yet this is to miss the point of the book. many authors acknowledge the fallibility of memory as a caveat to their narratives and some even go out of their way to work with archival documents to crosscheck specific dates and performances—pleasance’s postscript one, is humorously enlightening (28). rich in content and histories, the many individual narratives in venue stories are woven together and offer a model for those working through creative non-fiction as a methodology for writing histories pertaining to music, place and experience. the hidden microhistories of individuals represent larger structures of culture and community and are afforded agency to speak; the very nature of this book is radically effective. dancecult 14(1)150 living at night in times of pandemic: night studies and club culture in france and germany anita jóri and guillaume robin (eds.) bielefeld: transcript verlag, 2024. isbn: 978-3-8376-6726-4 (paperback) |rrp: 42,00€ (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.20> jack mcneill university of york (uk) discourse around dance music cultures (dmcs) has reached a turning point; a crossroads where underlying tensions, inconsistencies, inequalities and critical questions have begun to simmer to the surface, demanding attention and discussion. since its inception, themes of utopianism and togetherness have dominated this discourse without questioning such a narrative’s relationship with individual and community actual experiences. scholars of and participants in dmcs alike will be all too familiar with the assertion that dmcs and their related subcultures report a dominant message: one of unity, togetherness and inclusion. while utopianism and escapism are critical to the creation of the other-worlds of dance music spaces (garcia-mispireta 2023; o’grady 2012), the complex, conflicting and everdeveloping politics of the dancefloor demand frank, direct and ongoing consideration. living at night makes a comprehensive attempt at this through the lens of paris and berlin’s club scenes after the covid-19 pandemic. during the pandemic and in the following years global political movements and changes in media discourse shifted both internal and external perceptions of dmcs. many (although naturally not all) global dance music communities and institutions began to question their practices, policies, interior structures, broader values and relationships with local and international communities. the cities that living at night deals with, have undergone this process in recent years. what this text does particularly well is use them as a site to highlight the potentiality for positive change through framing club culture as utopian, while at the same time recognising the complex realities of clubbing communities. it pulls into question narratives that have been broadly, and sometimes uncritically, accepted, highlighting inherent tensions within dmcs. while the focus is on paris and berlin, the work could be applied more broadly to dmcs across europe and, in some cases, globally. again, this is timely, joining other texts, such as luis manuel garcia-mispireta’s recently published together somehow, which go some way in addressing similar issues. the book is split into three sections. the first, “scenes and communities”, looks at questions of urban and community identity in dmcs, questioning some pervasive and oftrepeated discourses in dmcs in detail. frédéric trottier-pistien’s second chapter critically analyses the city-twinning of detroit and berlin and its consistencies and inconsistencies, https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.20 reviews 151 while sophia abidi methodically parses some, but not all, subcultural characteristics of participants in berlin’s dmcs. in the final chapter of the section, diana weis considers the tensions between subcultural expression and high fashion surrounding berlin’s club scene, and berghain in particular. the second section, “diversity and inclusion”, engages in much needed critical discussions around the tension between inclusion, exclusion, awareness and micropolitics in dmcs. xan egger, neo seefried and mascha naumann’s chapter exposes some internal tensions in the scene, concomitantly making the case of the potentiality and concrete utopias presented by queer dmcs. ines liotard furthers this discussion, shining a light on the historical development of queer club culture in paris, while diana raiselis discusses the potential and problematics of awareness policies and approaches in contemporary club culture post-covid. the final section, “social and ecological challenges for a sustainable culture”, looks at some of the pressing issues facing contemporary dmcs and the role that social and ecological responsibility and action plays. edna hernández gonzález writes engagingly about artificial light and the tension between nighttime and its economy. guillaume robin’s chapter provides insight on sense of belonging and meaning in dmc communities in berlin, providing interesting reflections on areas for future work, particularly with “migrant clubbing communities” (a term that robin sees as problematic). this is followed by max eulitz’ thought-provoking personal prose reflecting on a clubbing experience in kyiv, which, like in many chapters before, presents the potentiality of club spaces in adverse times. the book ends with an insightful and practical conversation between robin and katharina wolf, presenting contemporary work around the social, ecological and financial stability of berlin’s club scene. the level of self-reflection and criticality that such a text requires is evident throughout. but this is also a complex task and there are a handful of brief moments in the book that stray into the defensive, engaging with binary suggestions of what might be good or bad for the club scene, including some attempts to “debunk” common myths. there are other moments where arguments of high and low culture are invoked; arguments that often expose the fragility with which studying dmcs comes. but perhaps in a culture where multiplicity and difference form its fabric, positioning dmcs’ value in opposition to what might be considered “mainstream” is not always useful. nevertheless, it is important to make very clear that such arguments are few and far between, and do not consist full chapters. indeed, the work in living at night is most successful when it embraces the dmcs’ diversity; in the discussions around the otherness of dmcs and their opposition to hegemony, and how actors in the scene might negotiate that, while legitimising its existence without any suggestion of what might perceived as good or bad. since the pandemic, european dmcs have seen club closures, thanks to gentrification, and aggressive legislation that makes it more difficult for nightlife to survive (drevenstedt 2020; garcia-mispireta 2016). criticism is directed at dmcs, where the boundaries between utopianism and permissibility are blurred (garcia-mispireta 2023); where hedonism as resistance to hegemony and nightlife as freedom get caught up in complex and often problematic behaviours and attitudes. it is a testament to scholarship in dmcs dancecult 14(1)152 and living at night that researchers and members of its community can hold themselves and their peers accountable; refocus the lens on themselves and use insider and informed perspectives to report on pertinent issues. living at night turns the mirror on dmcs in europe, not to show the fairest of them all, but to reflect on its complexity, on the possibility of what utopia and hedonism have to offer in opposition to and harmony with the everyday, warts and all. references drevenstedt, lukas. 2020. “dimensions of club culture: learning from berlin”. in the new age of electronic dance music and club culture, ed. anita jóri and martin lücke, 9–20. cham: springer international publishing. garcia-mispireta, luis manuel. 2016. “techno-tourism and post-industrial neo-romanticism in berlin’s electronic dance music scenes”. tourist studies 16(3): 276–95. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1468797615618037>. garcia-mispireta, luis manuel. 2023. together, somehow: music, affect, and intimacy on the dancefloor. durham: duke university press. o’grady, alice. 2012. “spaces of play: the spatial dimensions of underground club culture and locating the subjunctive”. dancecult 4(1): 86–106. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.01.04>. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1468797615618037 http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.01.04 noise as a spectre in dub techno dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 16(1): 72–97 issn 1947-5403 ©2024 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.05 noise as a spectre in dub techno bahadırhan koçer ankara university of music and fine arts (turkey) abstract this article explores dub techno’s history and sonic characteristics, focusing on the role of noise as a critical stylistic element. it introduces hauntology as a hermeneutic framework to understand the intricate function of noise within the genre. this interpretive paradigm elevates noise beyond mere auditory embellishments, imbuing it with significant philosophical resonance. the article presents a chronological exegesis of dub techno’s evolution and positions it as a conduit for philosophical contemplation. it highlights the enigmatic aesthetic essence of noise, urging readers to reevaluate its role in dub techno and electronic dance music. the objective is to offer insights and promote understanding, encouraging readers to engage with noise as a key component of philosophical and aesthetic discourse in dub techno. keywords: dub techno, aesthetics, noise, hauntology, electronic dance music bahadırhan koçer is a composer, producer and sound designer currently undertaking a phd in music sciences at ankara university of music and fine arts. with a bachelor’s degree in cinematography and a master’s degree in musicology and music theory, his academic research focuses on the stylistic and philosophical dimensions of electronic music subgenres, with particular attention to texture, temporality, atmosphere and affect. beyond his academic work, bahadırhan is an active content creator, primarily exploring the realms of noise design and dub techno. feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.05 koçer | noise as a spectre in dub techno 73 understanding noise and temporal dislocation in dub techno in dub techno, noise is a distinctive element, creating an enigmatic auditory landscape. noise operates as a sonic disruptor and an essential layer, blending chaos and order. it imbues compositions with texture, evoking both intimacy and expansiveness. noise serves as a conduit for expressing intricate emotional nuances and conceptual complexities, transforming sound into compositions that challenge conventional categorizations. noise’s relationship with hauntology, a concept coined by jacques derrida and shaped by mark fisher, is pivotal in dub techno. the term refers to the temporal dissonance that arises when elements from the past infiltrate the present, casting a ghostly shadow on the contemporary (coverley 2021: 8). this framework resonates with noise in dub techno, where sonic artifacts from diverse temporal origins converge. noise becomes a portal through which the past echoes into the present, fostering a profound sense of temporal and emotional dislocation. history and sound of dub techno when examining the genesis of dub techno through an isolated lens, an atypical narrative emerges, distinct from the gradual historical, political and cultural forces often associated with music genres. a thorough analysis of various digital sources boldly suggests that the inception of the genre is commonly attributed to the creative minds of moritz von oswald and mark ernestus, known collectively as basic channel. this attribution is so deeply ingrained that it implies dub techno’s “invention” hinged on a specific mixing technique pioneered by von oswald and ernestus in the early 1990s (baines 2015). this technique, characterized by the heavy use of reverb, delay and spatial effects, transformed traditional techno rhythms into immersive, atmospheric soundscapes. von oswald himself echoes this sentiment, reminiscing about his tenure in a record shop during the early 1980s, where he was immersed in imported reggae records, particularly those curated by lee perry (schmidt 2008). these reggae influences would later resurface with heightened resonance in the early 1990s, triggered by ernestus’ deeper engagement with reggae music and culminating in the co-founding of basic channel, the seminal dub techno record label (schmidt 2008). chronologically delineated, von oswald and ernestus’s creative synergy unfolds through a series of labels established between 1992 and 1997. this chronicle, encompassing maurizio (1992), basic channel (1993), main street records (1994), chain reaction (1995) and rhythm & sound (1997), serves as a canvas for nuanced auditory variations, each layer building upon the fundamental ethos of dub techno (dub monitor 2021). this ethos, rooted in the fusion of deep, minimal techno rhythms with the spatial effects and improvisational techniques of dub music, creates an immersive and atmospheric listening experience. vinyl emerges as the quintessential conduit for the genre’s expression, a sentiment echoed by ansgar jerrentrup’s assertion that techno’s essence is intrinsically bound to this format due to the physical engagement it demands from djs and listeners (2000: 67). dub techno’s dancecult 16(1)74 evolution as collaborative enterprises birth a medley of labels, resulting in a distinct auditory realm that reverberates with homage to its origins while venturing into uncharted sonic territories (spruill 2022). influences and innovations on another note, the friendship between von oswald and lloyd “bullwackie” barnes, frequently discussed within the context of dub, blossomed in new york and significantly molded von oswald’s production outlook (schmidt 2008).1 it is reasonable to surmise that von oswald possessed a keen understanding of the dub version culture, an integral aspect of dub music. he recounts delving into the realm of jamaican dub traditions, with a particular highlight on a remix endeavor showcased in the chosen brothers and rhythm & sound’s 1998 album mango walk. in this instance, von oswald embraced the b-side approach, crafting a remix edition of the original track featured on the reverse side of the record (schmidt 2008). reflecting on his exploration beyond the confines of berlin’s techno scene and the assimilation of dub music’s mixing techniques and aesthetics into his own production domain, von oswald attributes this transformative journey to mark ernestus’ fervor for dub music. notably, in an interview, he identifies bullwackie as a catalytic influence that helped shape the duo’s sonic identity (red bull music academy 2018). in the same interview, von oswald delves into the distinctive low-frequency essence that characterizes the new york dub sound, using bullwackie’s mixing methodology as a paradigm. in this discourse, von oswald underscores that within the realm of new york’s dub sound, low frequencies reverberate “more like a pulse” rather than conforming to conventional bass patterns (schmidt 2008). within a broader context, it becomes lucid that von oswald’s fascination with the role of low frequencies, emblematic of dub music, remains a central motif in this exploration. alessio kolioulis suggests that von oswald and ernestus’ quest for “new, revolutionary sounds” during 1993-1995 was spurred by their dissatisfaction with the increasingly popular berlin club techno scene (2015: 78). this dissatisfaction stemmed from the scene’s tendency towards uniformity, commercialization and a focus on more aggressive, dancefloor-oriented tracks, which they felt lacked depth and artistic exploration. this view highlights dub techno’s distinctness from techno’s broader phenomenon, particularly the berlin or detroit techno sound. despite von oswald’s ties to detroit’s techno community, he asserted that his produced music did not align with detroit techno’s identity (red bull music academy 2018). this assertion, made by von oswald himself, hints at the nuanced divergence of dub techno from established techno norms. it is fair to infer that dub techno draws from dub music’s mixing approach, evident in the term “dub”. labels by von oswald and ernestus during 1993-1995, especially basic channel, reinvigorated dub through their influence (kolioulis 2015: 77). koçer | noise as a spectre in dub techno 75 aesthetic and sonic features dub techno’s minimalist structure lends an atmospheric, ambient quality (spruill 2022). this entwines it with ambient music (baines 2015). kolioulis contends that the synergy between minimalism and dub gave birth to dub techno, echoing jerrentrup’s foresight about minimalist-technoid structures shaping techno’s trajectory (2015: 77; 2000: 67). dub techno engenders a “futuristic melancholy”, amalgamating urban soundscapes with electronic dub music (kolioulis 2015: 65). this fusion, capturing the “warmth and humanity” of dub alongside techno’s “precise, mechanistic iciness”, exemplifies von oswald and ernestus’ craftsmanship (baines 2015). spruill elaborates that dub techno, with its tempo of 120-130 bpm and four-on-the-floor foundation, gives classic dub elements a “dub techno twist” (2022). this stands in contrast to the slower tempo and characteristic syncopation of jamaican dub, which typically features tempos around 60-90 bpm and emphasizes off-beat rhythms. notably, dub techno assimilates dub music’s delay technique, yielding a distinct echo effect (kolioulis 2015: 65). online tutorials often promote “distorted” and “noisedriven” elements as essential components of dub techno, exemplified by techniques such as snare drum processing and echo creation (esen 2021). the inheritance of the concept of live improvisation in dub techno’s production, as expounded within this work, can be discerned as a direct offshoot of the console practices prevalent in dub music’s production and performance arena. the integration of live performance within the tapestry of dub music engendered a metamorphosis of mixing engineers into veritable “creative engineers”, an attribute that notably resonates in the realm of dub techno (vendryes 2015: 12). von oswald emphasized the importance of live mixing in dub techno, showcasing how artists can skillfully manipulate echoes and create a spacious sound without overcrowding the mix. this improvisational fluidity extends its embrace to the notion of spontaneous recording within dub techno compositions. oswald’s outlook on embracing sonic imperfections, guided by the resonance of the prevailing vibe, finds a harmonious consonance with the ethos of dub techno (schmidt 2008). the discernment of the listener’s perspective during the dynamic process of live mixing emerges as a pivotal facet, one that oswald describes as the “ability to listen to the music with other people’s ears”, encapsulating not only the essential character of dub techno but also its entwined relationship with hardware-oriented contemplations (red bull music academy 2018). the nexus of noise as a narrative, stylistic or evocative leitmotif within the soundscape of dub techno profoundly shapes the very essence of this genre.2 spruill proclaims that the acute emphasis of dub techno on “micro” nuances such as hisses and fuzz augments our perceptual insight into its intricate spatial dimensions (2022). these diminutive sonic fragments, akin to intricately woven threads, substantiate the multi-dimensional auditory realm of dub techno, wherein each sonic component attains a state of organic resonance, flourishing within its aural habitat (spruill 2022). oswald, in his explication of noise’s role within dub techno, extols the profound contribution of analog hardware to the genre, dancecult 16(1)76 underlining that noise does not reside as a blemish, but rather is an inherent constituent, enriching the very ambiance of the musical narrative (red bull music academy 2008). cultural shifts and comparative analysis in exploring the nuances of dub techno, it is evident that the genre stands as a distinctive departure from its roots in traditional dub through both its auditory features and the context in which it is experienced. while dub is deeply entrenched in a community-based sound system culture—marked by an enveloping bass that one feels as much as hears, and a rich use of echo and reverb to animate physical spaces—dub techno diverges into a realm that emphasizes a more introspective and solitary auditory experience. this transition is exemplified by the work of early dub techno producers who melded the resonant textures of dub with the structured, repetitive rhythms of techno, crafting a sound that promotes personal introspection over communal vibrancy. furthermore, dub techno’s approach to sound involves a layering of echoes and reverbs that is more textured than in traditional dub. these layers are not merely for dancefloor dynamics but are designed to create a profound, immersive experience that resonates over time, encouraging a form of sonic meditation. this depth of sound illustrates a shift from the immediate physical response sought in communal dub settings to a reflective engagement suited to private listening environments.3 the synthesis of dub and techno into dub techno marks not just a stylistic evolution but a cultural shift in how music is experienced—from vibrant communal gatherings around sound systems in dub to more isolated listening experiences in dub techno. this transformation underscores a broader societal shift towards personal media consumption, and it reflects the evolving relationship between technology, music and listeners in the digital age. the classification of dub techno often necessitates its contextualization through the prism of comparative analysis with genres that share proximate auditory attributes. this thematic affinity with electronic ambient music underscores a shared foundational framework in music production. certain quarters emphasize the stylistic congruence betwixt ambient and dub techno (dub monitor 2022). oswald, however, is skeptical about rigid categorical confines when contemplating musical genres comes to the fore (schmidt 2008). he resolutely eschews tethering his compositions to the club milieu, adamantly rejecting the premise of demarcating dub and techno along the axis of their club-affiliated tenets (schmidt 2008). oswald’s critical reflections on the proclivity of techno aficionados to dismiss western classical music as “archaic” serve as a revealing window into his nuanced musical perspective (schmidt 2008). dub monitor posits an expansive vista for genre definitions, invoking sensory resonance, energy modulation, stylistic nuances and points of inception in the taxonomic contemplation of sub-genres like deep techno (2021). possessing shared attributes with deep techno—characterized by a leisurely tempo, nuanced structural composition and the conspicuous presence of a prominent noise layer—dub techno emerges as an embedded sub-genre within this milieu (dub monitor 2021).4 koçer | noise as a spectre in dub techno 77 literature review the investigation of dub techno and the role of noise within the genre intersects with numerous scholarly discussions on hauntology and the conceptualization of noise. this section synthesizes existing literature to provide a comprehensive understanding of these themes. by examining how noise functions as a stylistic and philosophical element in dub techno, this review sets the stage for a deeper exploration of the genre’s sonic and cultural implications. it also introduces the theoretical framework of hauntology, which offers critical insights into the historical and hauntological dimensions of noise in music. hauntology in music several scholars have employed the concept of hauntology to analyze different facets of music, illustrating how this philosophical approach reveals the complex interplay between historical influences and contemporary soundscapes. mark fisher’s (2013) article, the metaphysics of crackle: afrofuturism and hauntology, links past and future through hauntology and afrofuturism in music. fisher discusses how electronic genres like dub and hip-hop engage with spectral remnants of past forms, challenging conventional time and narrative boundaries. producers like burial and the caretaker use hauntological practices to evoke pastness with vinyl crackles and outdated samples, creating soundscapes that feel both ancient and futuristic. fisher’s analysis explores how music recontextualizes historical sounds to critique modern cultural and technological conditions, highlighting music’s role in navigating historical narratives (fisher 2013: 42). nchamah miller (2023) delves into hauntology in jacques derrida’s work, focusing on historical discourse. in history and hauntology in jacques derrida’s spectres of marx, miller explains how derrida uses hauntology to reinterpret marx’s historical materialism, emphasizing spectral presences in marx’s writings that represent unresolved ideologies and futures haunting contemporary society.5 this challenges traditional linear history, proposing a continuously haunted narrative. miller’s insights extend to music, showing how past musical forms and their ideologies continue to shape contemporary music (2023: 2). yair rubinstein’s (2020) study, uneasy listening: towards a hauntology of aigenerated music, examines hauntology in ai-generated music. rubinstein explores how ai reanimates past auditory elements, creating music that is uncannily familiar and unsettling. ai often mimics past genres, echoing their styles and creating eerie familiarity, which critiques postmodern cultural production by flattening historical depth into aesthetic styles. rubinstein highlights how technology perpetuates and transforms musical legacies, examining digital technologies’ impact on cultural and historical perceptions in music (2020: 77). clinton mccallum’s (2005) examination of john oswald’s plexure in the hauntology of music: adorno, freud, and derrida in john oswald’s plexure illustrates hauntology in musical compositions through plunderphonics, where past musical elements haunt present compositions. mccallum critiques how oswald’s work both replicates and subverts the dancecult 16(1)78 commercial music industry’s strategies using adorno’s theory of the culture industry and freud’s theories of memory and the unconscious, linking listeners to forgotten memories and emotions (2005: 1). alessio kolioulis’s (2015) article, borderlands: dub techno’s hauntological politics of acoustic ecology, explores how dub techno reflects and critiques urban and socio-political environments. dub techno uses echoes of industrial and post-industrial cityscapes to reflect political and economic transformations, mapping urban landscapes through sound. kolioulis shows how dub techno’s hauntological aspects provide insights into broader socio-political issues, using the genre to critique and reflect the conditions under which it is produced (2015: 64). these scholars collectively highlight the interconnections between hauntology and music, emphasizing the role of spectral presences and historical influences in shaping contemporary soundscapes. this paper contributes to this literature by specifically examining how hauntology informs the production techniques and aesthetic choices in dub techno, providing a nuanced understanding of how historical echoes and socio-political contexts are embedded in the genre’s sound design. by exploring these dimensions, this study adds to the discourse on hauntology in music by illustrating the unique ways dub techno engages with and reflects its historical and cultural environment. defining noise parallel to these hauntological discussions, the exploration of the definition of noise reveals a dynamic and multifaceted discourse that stretches across disciplines and eras. marshall bartholomew (1942), in acoustics of music, defines noise as sound lacking tone due to its complexity or irregularity, disrupting the clarity of musical tones. he acknowledges a spectrum rather than a dichotomy between tone and noise, reflecting the subjectivity in perceiving sound (bartholomew 1942: 159). this spectrum view leads to alan p. meriam’s sociocultural analysis in the anthropology of music, which emphasizes the importance of distinguishing music from noise within societies to maintain cultural identity through sound (1964: 63). meriam’s cultural constructs segue into jacques attali’s (1985) radical interpretation of noise as organized sound in the political economy of music. attali views music as an organization of noise into harmony, introducing a political dimension where noise and its organization reflect and shape societal realities (1985: 4-24). this perspective links to john foreman’s (1990) practical concerns in “basics of sound”, defining noise as unwanted sound disrupting daily activities, highlighting its subjective nature as an irritant (1990: 1). foreman’s focus on noise’s impact complements kristoffer jensen’s (2004) technical analysis in irregularities, noise, and random fluctuations in musical sounds, which defines noise as non-tonal sounds changing unpredictably over time. jensen (2004) illustrates noise as an integral component of the sound environment, adding texture to musical expressions. paul hegarty’s (2005) noise/music expands on this by arguing that noise’s definition is koçer | noise as a spectre in dub techno 79 subjective, shaped by cultural influences and individual perceptions, revealing its relative nature within societal frameworks (2005). greg hainge’s (2013) noise matters asserts that understanding noise requires acknowledging its inherent subjectivity and engaging with it philosophically. hainge urges a shift towards an exploratory approach to noise within cultural studies (2013: 1). this sets the stage for darrin verhagen’s (2015) noise, music, and perception, which defines noise as lacking harmony and organization, stressing its subjective perception and advocating for an inclusive understanding of auditory experiences. verhagen’s insights align with eleonora montuschi’s (2017) arguments in there is ‘noise’ and noise, emphasizing that noise should not be inherently negative. montuschi (2017) calls for a paradigm shift in perceiving noise, suggesting contemporary technologies can decipher its complex nature, redefining it in a nuanced light. these varying perspectives illustrate that the definition of noise is fluid and contextdependent, shaped by cultural, technical and philosophical lenses. this paper will utilize these definitions to explore how noise functions within dub techno, examining how the genre employs noise both as a creative tool and as a commentary on technological and societal conditions. by analyzing the specific uses of noise in dub techno, this study contributes to our broader understanding of noise by highlighting its multifaceted role in music production and cultural critique. noise as a spectre in 1983, jacques derrida prophesied a forthcoming integration of ghosts into the fabric of existence, positing that “ghosts are a part of the future” (coverley 2021: 8). derrida introduced the concept of “hauntology” to the realm of literary discourse, ingeniously coining it as a play on “ontology” in his work specters of marx published in 1993 (coverley 2021: 10).the influence of thinkers such as mark fisher subsequently propelled hauntology studies into prominence, imbuing the term with significance. derrida’s formulation employed the notion of specters to delineate instances where the past exerts its influence upon the future, perpetually haunting it in various enigmatic ways. in this context, derrida’s specters assume the symbolic embodiment of an elusive and intricate unity between the past and the future. the diffusion of the hauntology concept into the domain of music criticism and analysis can be traced back to simon reynolds’ use of the term in a music blog in 2005 (coverley 2021: 9). the terms “haunting” and “haunted” resonate across an array of canonical and non-canonical sources that seek to elucidate the sonic characteristics of dub techno. to approach dub techno from a hauntological standpoint, the conceptual boundaries delineated by mark fisher become pertinent. fisher’s perspective posits hauntology as a framework wherein the present can only be apprehended as “a sum of its pasts” (2012: 16). in fisher’s paradigm, electronic music, especially post-2005, has failed to yield creations with genuine dancecult 16(1)80 future-shaping potential. this discernible trend of post-millennium electronic music lacking groundbreaking innovations is underscored by fisher’s assertion that “practically anything produced in the 2000s could have been recorded in the 1990s” (2012: 16). this phenomenon, characterized by electronic music’s entrenchment in retrospection, has resulted in its diminishing capacity for pioneering futuristic narratives. fisher’s articulation of hauntology comes to the fore in the context of this phenomenon. coverley underscores that fisher contends the first decade of the 21st century has rendered the future’s imaginative faculties impotent, resulting in distortion, deceleration, stagnation and regression of “cultural time” (2021: 9). fisher’s hauntological perspective underscores the repercussion of a lack of creative future imagination, driving contemporary musical practices towards perpetuating past patterns and stifling humanity’s collective musical vision. consequently, hauntology accentuates the present’s dearth of originality in musical creation and the failure of recent political, intellectual and material advancements to instill hope for the future. hauntology’s conceptual tenets shine a spotlight on junctures where alternative trajectories, distinct from historical pathways, could be pursued (coverley 2021: 10). fisher’s endeavor, in light of the decline of counterculture’s revolutionary essence by the 1970s, aimed to resuscitate the latent potential of an era that preceded the ascendance of neoliberalism (coverley 2010: 10). in this vein, fisher’s pursuit sought to counteract the pervasive proliferation of late capitalism and reclaim the possibilities of a time before neoliberalism’s entrenched dominance. recognition must be accorded to fisher’s unambiguous declaration that electronic music has encountered a state of “failure” (2012: 16). this declaration emanates from the observation that rather than ushering in novelty and venturing into uncharted realms, electronic music—spanning from high culture composers to popular music ensembles—has plunged into a retrospective impasse, ceaselessly reiterating established paradigms. this proclivity can be comprehended through the lens of a broad political backdrop. in essence, the phenomenon wherein exclusively the echoes of the past reverberate and, furthermore, these historical sonances are revisited in an era where they exclusively resonate, constitutes one of the byproducts of the transition from a hauntological standpoint to a neoliberal milieu. noise in dub techno: an empirical overview upon an examination of the nexus between fisher’s thought-provoking discourse and electronic music, a peculiar vantage point emerges for approaching the notion of noise within music production. this perspective holds relevance in the context of dub techno as well. delving into the foundational underpinnings of dub techno, oswald ponders the transformation of noise into an unwelcome presence due to the advent of technological advancements that yield sonorities of pristine clarity (red bull music academy 2018). he contends that noise, stemming from the acoustic properties of the hardware employed in the early manifestations of dub techno—owing to the intrinsic noisiness of analog equipment— necessitates reevaluation. oswald subtly implies that noise ought not to be inherently koçer | noise as a spectre in dub techno 81 perturbing, advocating for the retention of noise within the musical fabric. moreover, he expounds that noise can, in certain instances, serve as an invaluable narrative facet within the structure of dub techno, thus enabling the genre to adopt a distinctive narrative idiom (red bull music academy 2018). consequently, within oswald’s construct, noise attains the status of an essential stratum in the composition of dub techno. in a sense, oswald’s disposition encapsulated by the maxim “if the vibe’s right . . . let’s go for it” espouses a rejection of noise’s outright exclusion, thereby solidifying noise as an integral element of the dub techno soundscape for those adhering to such an ethos (schmidt 2008). this inclination toward stylistic noise integration is palpable across a multitude of tracks that reside within the framework of dub techno sonority. notably, the pervasive utilization of noise as a compositional facet within the domain of dub techno merits thoughtful contemplation. below, figure 1 offers a comprehensive compilation of 50 distinctive dub techno tracks, each paired with its respective producer, track title, year of release and identifiable noise type.6 this assemblage furnishes a panoramic view of dub techno compositions imbued with noise, engendering insights into the intricate interplay between noise and the sonic tapestry of this genre. figure 1. list of 50 different dub techno tracks with identified noise. dancecult 16(1)82 figure 1 (continued). list of 50 different dub techno tracks with identified noise. upon scrutiny of the chart, discernible patterns and trends emerge. the deliberate integration of noise into dub techno tracks emerges as a nuanced artistic choice, marked by an array of noise types that contribute multifarious sonic attributes to each composition. this span of noise typologies encompasses traditional elements such as vinyl crackle and static, as well as unconventional auditory elements including rain, indoor sounds and forest ambiance. this assortment underscores the genre’s wide-ranging acoustic palette, elucidating how noise functions as a versatile medium for sonic experimentation. the temporal distribution of tracks encapsulated within this chart unveils the genre’s temporal continuum and its evolutionary trajectory. encompassing a timespan from 1994-2022, this chronicle enshrines nearly three decades of dub techno production. this temporal expanse is emblematic of the genre’s enduring allure and its adaptational prowess, transcending generational boundaries to captivate listeners and galvanize creators across epochs. upon closer examination of the types and distribution of noise within dub techno, salient thematic trajectories emerge. notably, the persistent presence of vinyl crackle, an auditory emblem of the analog epoch in music production, underscores the genre’s ongoing homage to its nascent analog origins. this enduring auditory element highlights the genre’s deep-rooted connection to its historical beginnings, reaffirming its commitment koçer | noise as a spectre in dub techno 83 to preserving the essence of its foundational sound. furthermore, the incorporation of unconventional noise types such as rain and indoor sounds augments the genre’s capacity for sonic innovation, extending its auditory horizons beyond conventional paradigms to encompass more immersive and atmospheric auditory experiences. noteworthy is the alignment of certain noise types with specific track titles, imbuing compositions with nuanced layers of significance. it invites contemplation regarding the deliberate pairing of noise types and track titles, and whether this nexus imparts a deeper stratum of meaning, thereby eliciting specific emotive and perceptual responses in the audience. the inclusion of noise types articulates the genre’s capacity to weave intricate auditory narratives, encompassing realms that span the gamut from nostalgic evocations to futuristic visions, from tranquil ambiances to the fringes of the avant-garde. perpetually evolving, dub techno’s engagement with noise as a stylistic tenet underscores its resonance as a bedrock of the genre’s sonic identity, effectually resonating with its auditors on a profound sensory and emotive plane (figure 2). figure 2. hauntological elements in dub techno. on the other hand, the resonance of noise within the realm of electronic music production can be attributed, at a surface level, to a fascination with analog technology.7 yet, delving into the finer nuances of its role as a stylistic element within dub techno, sound reveals a more intricate narrative that extends beyond a mere affinity for analog technology. as previously expounded, oswald’s assertion that the initial instances of noisy dub techno were a consequence of analog hardware utilization sets the groundwork for fisher’s hauntological concept within the music domain. this trend of analog technology fascination in contemporary music production can be comprehended through the lens of hauntology, particularly in contrast to the imprints of earlier recording methods juxtaposed with the timeless anonymity conferred by digital technology (coverley 2021: 12). dancecult 16(1)84 fisher advances the notion that the advent of internet technology intensified the desire to emulate the auditory attributes of bygone eras characterized by analog equipment. the establishment of an ever-expanding archive of past recordings, easily accessible through this technological evolution, rekindled the prominence of hauntology. within this framework, fisher envisions an “atemporal” contemporary era, in which the past’s presence is not relegated to oblivion but rather assumes a “technological uncanny” demeanor (coverley 2021: 12). the digital realm, particularly the cyber expanse, has ushered in an era where the evergrowing repository of historical recordings is instantaneously within reach, inundating the present with a ceaseless flow of records from the past. fisher’s contention is that this technological revolution of the early 21st century catalyzed the resurgence of hauntology, manifesting as a cultural and political reaction to the temporal indistinctness of a present moment where the past no longer undergoes oblivion (coverley 2021: 12). the pervasiveness of nostalgia across diverse artistic spheres has convoluted the essence of the concept itself. the resurgence of retro tendencies breathes life into specters of the past, engendering a phenomenon known as post-nostalgia, a phenomenon that can bind the present within the historical confines. approaching dub techno from a hauntological vantage point introduces a sense of skepticism toward the role and significance of noise. within the context of the dub techno soundscape, noise manifests in distinct forms: static, vinyl crackle and soundscape. the presence of static noise, even in contemporary tracks where analog hardware noise is virtually absent, implies an intentional embrace of noise as a stylistic component. similarly, vinyl crackle, despite its erstwhile association with undesirability, asserts its role within the dub techno sonic architecture. moreover, the incorporation of diverse noise elements, ranging from urban and rural environments to natural soundscapes, contributes to a pronounced drone-like quality within many dub techno tracks. the multifaceted relationship between dub techno and noise thus becomes apparent. in electronic music’s domain, sampling practices wield a distinct allure, often overshadowing the deliberate inclusion of noise. while dub techno’s sampling practices evoke the “clicks and cuts” aesthetic, electronic music genres founded entirely on sampling, such as vaporwave, encapsulate a political manifestation quality aligned with hauntology. thus, while sampling practices find resonance within dub techno, this discussion refrains from delving into the domain of sampling practices. in summation, the incorporation of noise within the sonic tapestry of dub techno serves to invoke sensory echoes of the past. concurrently, the perpetuation of dub echo and reverb techniques, as preserved by the “creative engineers” in kingston, jamaica during the 1960s, remains largely unchanged in parametric design, thereby imbuing contemporary dub techno recordings with echoes from history (vendryes 2015: 12). the replication of hardware-induced noise from the early stages of dub techno, through sampling and digital tools, underscores the persistence of the past within the present. through a hauntological koçer | noise as a spectre in dub techno 85 lens, the phase of post-nostalgia foreseen by fisher becomes palpable, as the technological limitations of the past endure within the realm of modern technology. while the specific influence of neoliberalism or post-capitalism in this sphere lies beyond the scope of this exploration, derrida’s construct and fisher’s concept of “technological uncanny” illuminate the discourse (coverley 2021: 12). while noise emerges as an alluring aesthetic element for dub techno producers, a hauntological perspective invites contemplation regarding the cyclical repetition of oswald and ernestus’s pioneering dub techno creation for almost four decades, indicative of an absence of new artistic paradigms. in the realm of electronic music, hauntology encapsulates the manifold ways through which the past is reconfigured, echoing through the sonic texture, structure and medium of the genre itself. scrutinizing the dub techno discography elucidates how the static noise generated by archaic hardware continues to haunt the modern-day manifestation of dub techno. the technicalities of a spectral aesthetics in figure 1 above, each track exemplifies the integration of noise into the structure of dub techno through diverse techniques and stylistic intentions. in certain tracks, noise is employed as a primary element, either sampled or transformed into a musical component via resonators. in others, it is designed to function more subtly, creating an atmospheric backdrop or backcloth. there are also instances where noise is utilized to achieve percussive effects, construct melodic phrases and harmonic patterns and to serve as a drone element resonating at a fixed pitch.8 the methods of employing noise extend beyond the aforementioned approaches. nonetheless, stylistic similarities can be observed among some of the tracks listed in figure 1. the exploration of these nuances is left to the discerning reader, as it is evident that analyzing all the tracks mentioned in figure 1 would constitute the subject of a more comprehensive study, which itself would encounter significant limitations. therefore, this section of the study aims to provide an example of how noise becomes an indispensable component of sound aesthetics in the dub techno production process through a brief analysis of two distinct examples. the a-side “rondell eins” from pole’s 2000 album rondell and the final track “urban wind” from martin schulte’s 2011 album urban spirit are selected as the two subjects for this analysis. in these tracks, noise is integrated into the sound using fundamentally different techniques and with entirely different intentions, transforming it into an aesthetic element. the process of noise becoming aestheticized in the context of hauntology as a spectre renders these two tracks significant examples (figure 3). dancecult 16(1)86 figure 3. the transformation of noise into a spectral element.9 “rondell eins” by pole the track commences with a warm hiss. while speculative assessments can be made regarding the unprocessed state of this sound, it would be misleading to draw definitive conclusions about its source. nonetheless, it is plausible to infer that the processing chain applied to the noise channel likely includes 1/8 or 1/16 quantization, a compressor that narrows the dynamic range and accentuates the texture and a sequence of filtering processes, probably involving equalization (eq) and additional reverberation effects. furthermore, advanced techniques such as granular synthesis or micro-sampling may also be incorporated into the processing workflow. these processes can be posited to serve two primary objectives within the dub techno genre: first, to render tonal or transient-based grooves or note values perceptible; and second, to musicalize the noise within the dub techno aesthetic framework. the qr codes below, which direct to auditory material, provide an illustration of a noise layer generated by applying similar processing techniques to a sampled one measure of vinyl recording from chopin’s piano sonata no 2 released in 1964 by vox label (figure 4). an a/b comparison example has been created, with “a” representing the pre-processed state and “b” representing the post-processed state, to elucidate the transformation process. koçer | noise as a spectre in dub techno 87 figure 4. sampled, looped and processed measure. figure 5. unprocessed noise (a). figure 6. processed noise (b). dancecult 16(1)88 in the audio processing workflow followed to transform sound a into sound b, the sample was first looped using ableton live 12. after being quantized to 1/16, an eq was applied to enhance the low frequencies and obscure the tonal center. subsequently, a gated delay was used to produce a rhythmic narrative, along with a reverb send and an echo send set to l 1/8 and r 1/16. the processes were limited to these steps, and a kick drum was added to achieve a four-on-the-floor effect (figure 7). figure 7. visual representation of the audio processing workflow. koçer | noise as a spectre in dub techno 89 in “rondell eins”, the evolving hiss, modulated by various effects throughout the track, functions as a fundamental layer that creates a robust textural presence and serves as a compositional element facilitating transitions between sections. this noise element, audible from the initial seconds of the track, could plausibly originate from a vinyl crackle or might be generated in real-time by hardware or software rather than being sample-based.10 the critical aspect lies not in the source of the noise but in its evocation of malfunction. within the domain of music production, malfunction sounds, typically considered undesirable, are embraced and aestheticized in “rondell eins”, almost serving as a foundational compositional element. at the 00:36 mark, a brief string section implies that these noise elements could have been extracted from an actual vinyl record. furthermore, after 06:00, the noise passes through a new processor simulating malfunction, producing a sharp digital glitch effect.11 the track resolves around 06:49 with audible string sounds, completing the past’s evocation. these instances signify an homage to, deconstruction of and re-aestheticization of unwanted sounds produced by past equipment’s inadequacies, integrating them into the music’s structure. this treatment of noise in the track epitomizes the spectral aesthetics discussed in this research. the use of noise and malfunction sounds in “rondell eins” aligns with the principles of hauntology, which refers to the persistence of elements from the past that linger in the present, creating a spectral presence. the hiss and glitch elements serve as auditory specters, invoking the era of vinyl records and the imperfections of early recording technology. these sounds are not merely nostalgic references; they are actively recontextualized within the track, transforming their historical associations into a new aesthetic form. this process of re-aestheticization aligns with the hauntological notion of the past haunting the present, as the noise elements evoke memories of older media while simultaneously being reshaped by contemporary production techniques. the integration of malfunction sounds, such as the digital glitch effect introduced after 06:00, further emphasizes the hauntological theme. glitches, which are typically seen as errors or faults in digital media, are repurposed in “rondell eins”. this repurposing challenges traditional notions of what constitutes musicality and highlights the creative potential of noise and error in electronic music. the interplay between past and present, error and intention, underscores the track’s spectral aesthetic. “urban wind” by martin schulte compared to the previously examined and discussed track, “urban wind” opens with a harsher malfunctioning crackle. this crackle sound crescendos over two measures, creating a pulse. all the subsequently added progressive elements shape themselves around this pulse. a groove is captured at the climax, where the bassline and other elements reach their peak, and the structure of the track’s narrative becomes established. the occasionally used found sound noise and tonal musical elements, due to the reverberant sounding mix, almost depict a metro station, an underpass atmosphere or some liminal metropolitan area. the aforementioned malfunctioning crackle and all other added sounds, while potentially being classified as noise in their own contexts, gain a musical identity within the structure of “urban wind”. dancecult 16(1)90 this situation merits examination from a hauntological perspective. in this example, a simple noise is transferred from one context (the malfunctioning real) to another (the artistic groovy pattern). this transformation alters all the political, cultural, structural and contextual origins carried by the sampled noise. in other words, the unwanted noise in its original context continues to exist as a desired spectre within the structure of “urban wind”. the following figures exhibit a sound design approach similar to that used in “urban wind”: the process of sampling and decontextualizing the noise to achieve a certain dynamic through filter, amplitude or frequency modulations, and reinforcing this dynamic with resonators around the tonal center that the noise element naturally carries (figure 10). additionally, granular synthesis (figure 11) is employed to experimentally process the noise. the processed noise is then used as a backcloth to provide the dub techno atmosphere. this process is exemplified in the a/b comparison below. figure 8. unprocessed noise (a). figure 9. processed noise (b). figure 10. tonal center reinforcement.12 koçer | noise as a spectre in dub techno 91 figure 11. granular synthesis processing.13 the primary distinction between “urban wind” and “rondell eins” lies in their respective approaches to incorporating noise and malfunction sounds within the dub techno framework. both tracks utilize noise as a central element, yet they employ distinct methods and aesthetic strategies. “rondell eins” features a warm hiss and digital glitch effects, which are employed to evoke a sense of spectral presence and hauntological aesthetics. the evolving hiss in “rondell eins” functions as a foundational layer, facilitating transitions and emphasizing the textural presence of noise. this noise is often processed to simulate malfunctions and digital errors, embracing the imperfections of early recording technology. these sounds are integrated into the composition to reflect on the past while recontextualizing them within a contemporary production framework. conversely, “urban wind” begins with a more abrasive malfunctioning crackle that crescendos to establish a pulse, around which all progressive elements are structured. this pulse serves as the driving force of the track’s narrative, with found sound noises and tonal elements creating an atmosphere reminiscent of a liminal urban area. the noise elements in “urban wind”, although potentially classified as noise in other contexts, are transformed into a musical identity within the track. this transformation underscores the creative potential of decontextualizing and re-aestheticizing unwanted noise, rendering it a desired spectre within the composition. these divergent approaches to integrating noise not only illustrate different aesthetic and production techniques but also reflect the broader thematic concerns of hauntology, wherein elements of the past continually influence and shape the present. it is important to recognize that these are merely two examples among many; there are numerous possible approaches, both unlocked and yet to be discovered. the critical point is that dub techno inherently embraces noise as an element—in this case, a spectral one. dancecult 16(1)92 noise, hauntology and the sonic identity of dub techno in dub techno, noise transcends mere background sound to become a fundamental component of the genre’s aesthetic and philosophical depth. this style, characterized by its intricate layering of sounds, utilizes noise not only to challenge auditory norms but also to express complex emotional and conceptual nuances. such integration of static noises and found sounds within dub techno is a deliberate, alchemical process, transforming raw auditory elements into transcendent musical compositions that defy traditional categorization. this approach to noise within dub techno aligns closely with the concept of hauntology. coined by jacques derrida, hauntology explores the phenomenon of the past persisting within the present, creating a sense of temporal dissonance and spectral presence that influences contemporary experience. in dub techno, noise acts as a medium through which these spectral presences are invoked, allowing historical sounds and styles to permeate modern compositions and reflect the genre’s rich historical lineage. the roots of dub techno extend beyond its recognized pioneers, moritz von oswald and mark ernestus, reaching back to reggae and the innovative mixing techniques of dub music, which include live improvisation and the strategic use of delays. these influences are embedded within dub techno’s minimalist and atmospheric structure, combining the ambient sounds of urban and electronic landscapes with traditional dub elements to evoke a futuristic yet nostalgic ambiance. in this context, noise is more than an incidental byproduct of sound production; it is an essential element of dub techno’s identity. this perspective challenges conventional views of noise as an imperfection or unwanted sound. instead, noise in dub techno is celebrated as a critical ingredient that adds depth, texture and historical resonance to the music. such utilization reflects the hauntological ethos, where the past’s echoes are not merely remnants but active participants in shaping contemporary soundscapes. mark fisher’s hauntological framework is particularly relevant in understanding dub techno’s fascination with analog technology and historical recording techniques. in the digital age, the vast archives of past recordings contribute to an atemporal present, where history is constantly accessible and can be recontextualized within new musical formats. dub techno exemplifies this through its use of analog sounds, vinyl crackles and environmental noises that draw direct lines to past musical forms, thus embodying hauntological principles. however, employing hauntology as a lens to view dub techno also invites critical perspectives on the role of noise in the genre. one might question whether the persistent use of traditional techniques and noises hinders the potential for truly innovative musical narratives. in this view, noise in dub techno is not just a disruptor but a symbol of hauntological presence—a tangible manifestation of historical influences that continue to resonate within the modern auditory landscape. ultimately, the integration of noise in dub techno can be seen as a creative reconciliation with the temporal dissonances highlighted by hauntology. it allows the past to echo into koçer | noise as a spectre in dub techno 93 the present, enriching the music with layers of meaning and depth. this synthesis of noise and hauntology in dub techno not only enhances the genre’s musical complexity but also deepens its philosophical inquiry into how we perceive and interact with sound, history and memory. this philosophical exploration underscores dub techno as not merely a musical style but as a profound commentary on the interplay between time, technology and cultural expression. conclusion framed within the hauntological perspective, noise becomes an agent of temporal resonance. the hauntology concept, championed by jacques derrida and expounded upon by mark fisher, illuminates the pervasive influence of the past upon the present. this framework is particularly pertinent in the context of dub techno, where the persistent presence of noise resonates with the notion of specters infiltrating contemporary discourse. the ever-expanding digital archive and the emergence of atemporal musical landscapes are emblematic of the hauntological specters that fisher envisioned. noise within dub techno serves as a conduit through which the past reverberates into the present. elements such as static, vinyl crackle and immersive soundscapes in dub techno tracks evoke sensory memories and temporal dislocations, creating a rich auditory experience. the intentional replication of hardware-induced noise, despite technological advancements, reaffirms the genre’s homage to its historical roots. this hauntological dialogue highlights the cyclical nature of artistic paradigms and invites reflection on the future trajectory of dub techno. examining noise, hauntology and dub techno reveals a vivid tapestry of sonic resonances and temporal echoes. the symbiotic relationship between noise and hauntology uncovers a path for exploring the genre’s philosophical foundations, illustrating how noise transcends mere auditory presence to become a portal through which the past reverberates into the present. as dub techno’s reverberations continue to influence various genres and eras, the exploration of noise and hauntology within its realm encourages contemplation of the boundless dimensions of sound, memory and the ever-evolving narrative of music itself. notes 1 lloyd “bullwackie” barnes was a seminal figure in jamaican dub music. his innovative sound engineering and production techniques significantly shaped the genre. while often underrecognized, his contributions were pivotal in defining dub’s sonic characteristics. barnes’ pioneering use of sound manipulation and emphasis on rhythm and bass were foundational to the genre’s development, and his sound formula subsequently impacted the aesthetics of dub techno. 2 in this context, “noise” encompasses a range of sonic elements, such as hisses, static, crackles and other non-musical sounds that are intentionally incorporated into the music (see figure 1). dancecult 16(1)94 3 for further exploration of the transformation from communal to individualized listening within dub techno, see koçer’s (2023) “dub techno as orphic experience: auditory aesthetics, spatiality, and sound”. 4 dub techno amalgamates core elements of dub and techno to form a distinct sonic identity. its rhythmic foundation, characterized by a four-on-the-floor beat and minimalist structure, aligns with techno conventions. conversely, dub’s influence is evident in the genre’s emphasis on atmosphere, spatialization, and echo. while dub techno shares rhythmic and aesthetic elements with its parent genres, its unique synthesis of these components creates a distinctive sonic space. differentiating features include a focus on introspection and the intentional use of echo and reverb to build depth and immersion. 5 as delineated by miller in his work spectres of marx, derrida encapsulates marx within the recognition that he grappled with the persistent presence of spectral manifestations from both the future and the past (2015: 9). derrida strategically employs the notion of hauntology as a conceptual tool to engender a dichotomy between marx’s ontological perspective and historical materialism. within this literary work, the concept of hauntology serves as a vehicle for generating a discernible cleavage amidst the confines of closed conceptual frameworks, exemplified by elements like class conflicts in marx’s ontological framework (miller 2015: 5). the impetus that initially propelled the emergence of the term “hauntology” can be traced back to derrida’s critical scrutiny of marx’s ideas; subsequently, this term transcended its original context due to the influence exerted by figures such as mark fisher and simon reynolds. in this discourse, the discourse of “hauntology in music” takes root, initially adopting the definition outlined by mark fisher. within this context, the conceptual scaffolding furnished by fisher in his analysis of the “failure of future” assumes a pivotal role (2012: 16). this framework specifically addresses the dearth of forward-looking tendencies, the prevalence of stagnated retro-futurism in creative endeavors of the post-millennium era. 6 the 50 tracks were carefully selected based on specific criteria, including those classified under the “dub techno” label or closely associated with it. tracks with stylistic attributes synonymous with the genre were included, enhancing the dataset’s representation. the chosen tracks underwent rigorous scrutiny through spectrum analysis, allowing for a detailed examination of sonic components. the current compilation consists of 50 tracks, but future expansion could reveal new facets of noise’s interplay within the dub techno structure. the timeline from 1994 to 2022 encapsulates the genre’s evolution, with three distinct categories of noise: static, vinyl crackle and found sound. these noise types highlight the multifaceted nature of noise’s integration within the sonic architecture of dub techno compositions. the collection aims to exemplify the pervasive deployment of noise as a structural motif within the dub techno paradigm. 7 interestingly, a notable trend in contemporary music production involves the creation of software plug-ins explicitly designed to emulate the sonic attributes of analog hardware, utilizing digital technology. a prime example is the taip plug-in by baby audio, psp vintage warmer by psp audioware, console & tape machine emulation by overloud tapedesk and j37 tape by waves. these tools aim to replicate the unique character of analog sound despite digital origins. as evidence of this inclination, a blog post dedicated to evaluating such plug-ins, offered a thought-provoking query. “digital recording technology offers myriad benefits over an all-analog studio, but you still can’t beat the sonic supremacy of recording koçer | noise as a spectre in dub techno 95 sounds directly to tape—or can you?” (sweetwater 2022). this inquiry underscores that the notion that crystal-clear sonic perfection might not necessarily equate to auditory satisfaction resonates beyond the confines of dub techno culture, permeating the production realm of a diverse array of musical genres. 8 in figure 1, each track exemplifies the integration of noise into the structure of dub techno through diverse techniques and stylistic intentions. for instance, susumu yokota’s “kinoko” prominently features forest sounds as a primary sonic element, transforming environmental noise into a central musical component. in contrast, burger/ink’s “elvism” employs static as a subtle backdrop, creating an atmospheric foundation for the track. noise can also be utilized in more intricate ways. pole’s “rondell eins” incorporates static to construct percussive elements, while rhythm & sound’s “carrier” deploys static as a drone, providing a sustained tonal center. furthermore, martin schulte’s “urban wind” exemplifies the use of vinyl crackle as a melodic element, shaping the track’s harmonic progression. 9 the sequence map illustrates the process of incorporating noise into dub techno tracks. it begins with the sampling and capturing of noise by the producer, who then utilizes digital signal processing (dsp) tools to apply various processing techniques. this processed noise is transformed into a spectral element, which can be integrated into the track as a drone, layer, or other musical component. this integration aesthetically represents the spectres of the past, enhancing the track with spectral aesthetics and contributing to the overall texture and depth of the dub techno composition. 10 consequently, the noise in figure 1 is classified as “static”. 11 it is worth noting that a variety of plug-ins specifically designed to emulate digital sound malfunctions, such as glitch 2 by illformed, digitalis by aberrant dsp, i wish by polyverse, and stutter edit 2 glitch vst by izotope, are widely used in contemporary music production. 12 this image illustrates the use of resonators and an auto filter in the sound design process to reinforce the tonal center and modulate the frequency of the sampled noise. the resonators module is configured to enhance specific tonal characteristics of the noise. the filter is set to 5.57 khz with a decay rate of 72.2. different pitch settings are applied to each resonator to create a harmonic instance (in this case d#aug chord), with specific decibel adjustments to balance the output. the dry/wet mix is set to 33%, blending the resonated sound with the original noise. the auto filter is used to further shape the noise by applying a high-pass filter centered at 1.43 khz with a resonance of 25.2. the filter’s envelope settings include an attack time of 0.00 ms and a release time of 200 ms. the drive is set to 4.00 db to add slight distortion, enhancing the texture of the noise. quantize settings allow for precise control over the filter’s modulation, and an lfo is used to introduce subtle variations in the filter frequency, amount and shape. 13 the speed and grid size parameters are adjusted to capture and synchronize the grains of the sampled noise, ensuring a coherent texture. the density and size parameters, along with pitch adjustments, create varied and dynamic textures, with randomization settings introducing subtle variations. the grain shape is set to a triangle, and the grain direction is manipulated to control the movement and flow of the grains, adding depth and complexity. additional parameters, such as feedback, grain volume and random panning further process the noise, creating a rich, evolving soundscape. dancecult 16(1)96 references attali, jacques. 1985. noise: the political economy of music. trans. b. massumi. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. baines, josh. “a bullshitter’s guide to dub techno.” vice. october 2015. <https://www.vice.com/en/article/pg8gg9/a-bullshitters-guide-to-dub-techno>. 15 (accessed 19 august 2023). bartholomew, wilmer tilett. 1942. 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(2012). “what is hauntology?”. film quarterly 66: 16-24. <https://dx.doi.org/10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.16>. fisher, mark. 2013. “the metaphysics of crackle: afrofuturism and hauntology.” dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 5: 42-55. <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.02.03>. foreman, john. 1990. sound analysis and noise control. new york: van nostrand reinhold. hainge, greg. 2013. noise matters: towards an ontology of noise. new york: bloomsbury academic. hegarty, paul. 2005. noise/music: a history. new york: continuum. jensen, kristoffer. 2004. “irregularities, noise and random fluctuations in musical sounds.” the journal of music and meaning 2. <http://www.musicandmeaning.net/issues/showarticle. php?artid=2.3>, (accessed 16 october 2024). jerrentrup, ansgar. 2000. “techno music: its special characteristics and didactic perspectives”. the world of music 42(1): 65–82. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/41699314>. koçer, bahadırhan. 2023. “dub techno as orphic experience: auditory aesthetics, spatiality, and sound”. master’s thesis (musicology and music theory), istanbul technical university. kolioulis, alessio. 2015. “dub techno’s hauntological politics of acoustic ecology.” dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 7(2): 64-85. <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.02.04>. meriam, alan parkhurst. 1964. the anthropology of music. evanston: northwestern university press. miller, nchamah. 2015. “history and hauntology in jacques derrida’s spectres of marx”. nodo50. <https://www.nodo50.org/cubasigloxxi/taller/miller_100304.pdf>, (accessed 19 august 2023). montuschi, eleonora. 2017. “there is ‘noise,’ and noise.” perspectives on science 25: 204-225. schmidt, torsten. 2008. “moritz von oswald”. red bull music academy. <https://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/lectures/moritz-von-oswald-early-morning-freestyles>, (accessed 19 august 2023). spruill, max. 2022. “techno history guide: a deep dive into dub”. 6am. <https://6amgroup.com/articles/guides-all/techno-history-guide-a-deep-dive-into-dub>, (accessed 19 august 2023). https://www.vice.com/en/article/pg8gg9/a-bullshitters-guide-to-dub-techno https://www.attackmagazine.com/technique/beat-dissected/basic-channel-style-dub-techno/ https://dx.doi.org/10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.16 https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.02.03 http://www.musicandmeaning.net/issues/showarticle.php?artid=2.3 http://www.musicandmeaning.net/issues/showarticle.php?artid=2.3 http://www.jstor.org/stable/41699314 https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.02.04 https://www.nodo50.org/cubasigloxxi/taller/miller_100304.pdf https://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/lectures/moritz-von-oswald-early-morning-freestyles https://6amgroup.com/articles/guides-all/techno-history-guide-a-deep-dive-into-dub koçer | noise as a spectre in dub techno 97 sweetwater. 2022. “9 best tape emulation plug-ins”. sweetwater. <https://www.sweetwater.com/ insync/best-tape-emulation-plug-ins/>, (accessed 19 august 2023). vendryes, thomas. 2015. “versions, dubs and riddims: dub and the transient dynamics of jamaican music.” dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 7( 2): 5-24. <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.02.01>. verhagen, darrin. 2015. “noise, music & perception: towards a functional understanding of noise composition”. ph.d. dissertation (fine art), rmit university. discography martin schulte. 2011. “urban wind”. track 4 on urban spirit. telrae (4xfile): telrae 006. <https://www.discogs.com/release/5126005-martin-schulte-urban-spirit>. pole. 1998. “rondell eins”. track a on rondell. kiff sm (12-inch): kiff 16. <https://www.discogs.com/release/114496-pole-rondell>. filmography dub monitor. “a brief tour of ambient techno”. youtube, 7:22. uploaded 13 february 2022. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wyddg7jbgs&t=299s>, (accessed 19 august 2023). dub monitor. “before basic channel, there was. . . .”. youtube, 12:42. uploaded 19 september 2021. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sowltdoq6-g>, (accessed 19 august 2023). red bull music academy. “moritz von oswald talks dub, remixing and being inspired”. youtube, 1:23:02. uploaded 22 march 2018. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7ceb-fbhoe>, (accessed 17 august 2023). https://www.sweetwater.com/insync/best-tape-emulation-plug-ins/ https://www.sweetwater.com/insync/best-tape-emulation-plug-ins/ https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2015.07.02.01 https://www.discogs.com/release/5126005-martin-schulte-urban-spirit https://www.discogs.com/release/114496-pole-rondell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wyddg7jbgs&t=299s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sowltdoq6-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7ceb-fbhoe dancecult 17(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic music & dance culture 17(1) 2025: 150–167 issn 1947-5403 ©2025 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net dance your way home: a journey through the dancefloor emma warren london: faber & faber, 2023. isbn: 9780571366040 (paperback) rrp: uk£12.99 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.13> richard anderson university of liverpool (uk) at the time of writing, in august 2025, london’s southbank centre, which is arguably the epitome of uk “high culture” is running a month-long summer programme of free events inspired by emma warren’s book dance your way home. depending upon one’s perspective this can be seen as an act of “gallerification”, in which folk/popular/working class cultures are recuperated into a canonical presentation within elitist institutions, or part of an evolving movement of genuine recognition of social dance as an inclusive expression of human joy. either way, the southbank’s programme represents a hugely significant impact for a contemporary written word text. dance your way home is not an academic treatise on the act of dancing, but a very accessible, and at times deeply personal autobiography outlining the vital importance of moving to music for oneself and for societies. structured in three parts, the book is steeped in uk dancefloor history. in part one, warren traces the initial foundations her dancing is built on. from domestic bopping to television music show top of the pops, to her irish heritage and late seventies uk sound system cultures from whose roots blossomed much of what dancecult examines. the second part highlights warren’s progression onto dancefloors from school discos, her underage clubbing in london, to her right-place, right-time at manchester university in the early nineties. through these back drops, the story of dance’s cultural global explosion is set and illuminated with personal reminiscences, interviews with contemporary luminaries and scattered with explanations of academic studies from a breadth of disciplines which support the range of arguments warren lays forth on dancing’s importance. reviews https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.13 reviews 151 dancing is lovingly set, not as subservient to, or a side effect of music and musical styles, but as having its own primacy. hence dancing threads its way throughout the book, in various locations and spaces, and in different social and racial cultures, functioning as crossgenerational ever-presence in twentieth and twenty-first century eras. the part memoir nature of the text acts as a constraint to the potential span of the subject matter. the book’s focus on social dance as presented in the global north, most specifically in the british isles predominately in the last fifty years could be considered a limitation. however, in adopting this position, warren recounts dance movement emergences with a lived experience sincerity. in telling her tales of house, techno, drum‘n’bass, and later grime histories, she includes reference to so-called legendary uk clubs such as shroom, the hacienda, phenomenon one and plastic people, not because these were definitive, but because she danced there herself at those times. she clearly articulates the legacies of numerous less renowned but no less significant nights and venues from her past and recognises many other “nerve centres” (181) operating beyond those she attended, of having parallel prominence and vitality. when the book does narrate histories that are not her own, warren ensures she does so with care, placing these as part of a lineage her own dancing is scaffolded on. this is especially evident within the important chapters on the hitherto neglected spaces of the school disco and youth club, where so many british adolescents, to varying degrees, learnt how to dance. the latter aspect is expanded on in warren’s (2025) latest work, up the youth club. chapter three’s detailed account of strangling church repression of dancing in ireland which contributed to an exodus of young women from the country, including her own grandmother; and eighties chicago gymnasiums recounted through interviews in chapter seven are similarly approached with recognition that these are not warren’s direct experiences. like walking, dancing is presented throughout as a fundamentally human activity, if you dance, you are a dancer (33), and dancefloors are situated wherever we make them (307). in this sense the book stands alongside the equally brilliant but more historically comprehensive dancing in the streets by the late barbara ehrenreich (2006). in both books, social dance finds a voice celebrating non-specialist everyday dancing, joining the still surprisingly recent emergence of social dance texts within the dance academy. there is much resonance here with the historically situated concepts of dancing as community expression found in malnig’s (2009), and dodds and cook’s (2013) collected works. what is fresh in dance your way home is the drawing of more personal connectivity between the performative club dancing, by crews and individuals in the eighties, to direct involvement in djing, and promoting club nights such as a guy called gerald’s recollections of their professional dancing lessons and aspirations (225–26). in the final part of the book, warren herself participates in a studio dance class, with the academy setting transformed into a place of therapy as she becomes aware of her dyspraxia. the restorative and healing power of dancing is a recurrent theme throughout the text. dancecult 17(1)152 warren employs a meticulously researched array of scientific study findings to describe everyday dance’s benefits for physical and mental health. another of the book’s themes warren is at pains to point out is that dancing is always historically situated, and many of the dance movements she has experienced have emerged as a response to specific, frequently harsh, social circumstances. she encapsulates this most succinctly in quoting the title of alice walker’s (2013) collection, hard times require furious dancing (223). the sense of community and resilience in the face of repressions, that finds expression through collective everyday dancing and a sense of temporary belonging or embraced by what mary fogarty described as a sense of an alternative “family” (2015: 247), is at the core of dance your way home’s message and that we can all dance our own histories. references dodds, sherril and susan cook. 2013. bodies of sound: studies across popular music and dance. farnham: ashgate. ehrenreich, barbara. 2006. dancing in the streets: a history of collective joy. london: granta publications. fogarty, mary. 2015. “the body and dance”. in the routledge reader on the sociology of music, ed. john shepherd and kyle devine, 245–54. new york: routledge. malnig, julie. 2009. ballroom, boogie, shimmy sham, shake: a social and popular dance reader. chicago: university of illinois press. walker, alice and shiloh mccloud. 2013. hard times require furious dancing: new poems. novato: new world library. warren, emma. 2025. up the youth club: illuminating a hidden history. london: faber & faber. reviews 153 black music in britain in the 21st century monique charles (ed.) with mary w. gani liverpool: liverpool university press, 2023. isbn: 978-1-80207-840-4, eisbn: 978-1-83764-659-3 rrp: uk£29,99 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.14> charlet brethomé (université du québec à montréal, canada) following her work on grime, cultural sociologist monique charles edits a collective volume that brings together researchers and practitioners to explore, from multiple approaches, black music in britain in the twenty-first century. with the editorial collaboration of mary w. gani (a lawyer specialising in the music industry), the book offers a panorama that combines academic papers, interviews, and visual essays. published in the series “liverpool studies in the politics of popular culture”, the volume seeks to analyse musical scenes in relation to the regimes of power that shape their emergence, circulation and reception. the book is clearly situated within the lineage of black atlantic studies. this characterises the transmission, unfolding and interconnections of black cultures around the atlantic, as well as the cultural hybridisations resulting from the long history of forced removal of black populations from their territories and cultural milieus (gilroy 1993). it is therefore a welcome contribution that deepens and extends analysis of this continuum from the vantage point of contemporary black british musics. notably, it expands the classic roots/ routes dichotomy (gilroy 1993) by emphasising the role of digital infrastructures and networks—what the editors term “routers”—in the contemporary formation of genres and publics. the book’s richness—and, potentially, its limitation—lies in the multiplicity of genres examined and the diversity of problematisations, contexts and methods mobilised. the centrality of sound system culture, dub and reggae is nonetheless clear, as many of the forms under study partly emerge from these matrices. in this respect, the book already helps to capture the resonances and contemporary traces of sound system culture within new musical assemblages. the entire first section is devoted to these contemporary articulations. whether in hyacinth’s study on roots manuva’s album “dub come save me”, charles’s attempt to systematise a “sound system sensibility”, gani’s interview with lawrence “l.j.” johnson, or télémaque’s photo-essay “trap atlantic”, each contribution shows the extent to which the musical objects under scrutiny are marked by the circulation and hybridisation of techniques, technologies, sounds and melodies. each case also demonstrates how these cultural productions—actualising the black atlantic continuum—braid together the global and the local, and past with present and future. https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.14 dancecult 17(1)154 the second section, which examines genres that emerged or persisted into the twentyfirst century, likewise includes an interview with a music industry professional and a photo essay. these two formats depart from conventional research articles and allow readers to inhabit different standpoints and perspectives. charles’s interview with ugwu traces the personal trajectory of an industry professional within the circulatory contexts already outlined, particularly between nigeria and london. charles and facey’s photo essay likewise offers a direct view of the places and the spatial organisation of steel pan practice in east london. more broadly, these chapters press further on the role of cultural industries in the recuperation, transformation and marginalisation of black musics and musicians. in particular, the chapters by palmer and toppin on the lovers rock scene and the jungle genre, respectively show how racism and patriarchy have jointly contributed to the invisibilisation and reshaping of scenes and musics in favour of certain audiences, industries and male and/or white musicians. the other two chapters in this section trace two very different pathways through which artists and musical forms (re-)emerge. muir examines black majority churches as sites that—through their locations, relational networks and pentecostal habitus—enable the development of musical competences convertible into the field of popular music and thus into economic capital. melville, by contrast, shows how contemporary information and communication technologies facilitate the circulation of techniques and recent tracks and contribute significantly to the revival of jazz in england among a new generation representative of contemporary urban british life. finally, the third and last section, “socio-political and economic issues”, interrogates contemporary black british musics critically through their contexts of emergence and diffusion. the opening chapters—by “hussla d” johnson and wallace, on the one hand, and by lambros fatsis, on the other—are particularly illuminating for understanding the processes of invisibilisation, criminalisation and thus marginalisation that unfold across black music scenes. the former provides an exemplary analysis of how cultural industries select and profit from particular cultural trajectories over others. sketching the contours of a political economy of reggae authenticity that marginalises british artists in favour of jamaican artists or labels, even though these musics are disseminated and consumed in england. fatsis, for his part, shows how ambient western racism materialises around black sound and forms of gathering, further criminalising and stigmatising these populations and their cultural productions. these two chapters are especially productive for night studies, as they help to grasp how the neoliberal capture of festive and musical forms that once placed society “in crisis” proceeds both through their whitewashing and through the criminalisation and marginalisation of their blackness. the final three chapters by scott, bushay and madar consider, from distinct perspectives, the role of music and its representations for artists and audiences: grime as a practice of refusal vis-à-vis expected social and racial positions; hip-hop as pedagogical practice by and for black women; and the ways black men receive the dominant images and aesthetics associated with them and negotiate them. reviews 155 overall, this collection edited by monique charles offers a rich and nuanced panorama of a field too seldom examined in its complexity, given the tendency to treat black musics monolithically under the rubric of the “urban”. although the approaches vary, the shared emphasis on sound system culture as a constitutive matrix, the black atlantic continuum and a critical race approach provides the book with strong internal coherence. that said, greater parity between conceptual labour and empirical precision would have been welcome. moreover, while some chapters—especially in the third section—foreground the cultural industries, several analyses would benefit from engaging more directly with industry-specific processes of appropriation and whitewashing. doing so would sharpen a highly fertile line of critique that reads the marginalisation of black cultures and their re-undergrounding (a promising avenue) as among the conditions of possibility for contemporary “nightlife cities”. finally, the near-exclusive focus on london invites the question of how black musics are configured elsewhere in britain. reference gilroy, paul. 1993. the black atlantic, modernity and double consciousness. cambridge: harvard university press. dancecult 17(1)156 platformed! how streaming, algorithms and artificial intelligence are shaping music cultures tiziano bonini and paolo magaudda cham, switzerland: palgrave macmillan, 2024. isbn 978-3-031-43964-3 (hardcover), isbn 978-3-031-43965-0 (ebook) rrp: uk£109.00 (hardcover), uk£109.00 (paperback), uk£87.50 (e-book) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.15> seán finnan technological university dublin (ireland) earlier this summer, spotify’s ceo and co-founder daniel ek, led a €600 million investment into a start-up named helsing, specialising in artificial intelligence military software. deerhoof and a number of other indie bands withdrew their catalogue from the music streaming platform, baulking at having their music accessible via a platform who shares a ceo with a military startup. deerhoof described the company as “creepy” and a “datamining scam masquerading as a ‘music company’” (green and strauss 2025). in this now well established digital economy, deerhoof point to the complexity of digital platforms such as spotify’s business model—are they a music company, data broker, advertiser or something more sinister? in platformed!, a work by tiziano bonini and paolo maguadda, the authors seek to tease out the social factors and historical conditions that have allowed spotify to become an almost monolithic presence in the mediation of music, the influence its having on contemporary music culture and the anxieties that come with a company using data profiling as a means to ascertain the taste of a listener. the story is complicated and brings with it hardline opinions on the effect streaming culture is having on music. the authors are attentive to such qualitative judgements; that streaming platforms have ruined the music experience of a younger generation by dematerialising the music product, that such platforms have encourage a disengaged listening curated by the machine rather than a human, or that musicians are now writing music tailored to the algorithm and its penchant for instant hooks. for the authors, such judgements afford streaming platforms such as spotify too much agency, while at the same time, ignoring the impact that social practices had on the development of online music sharing, streaming and datafication prior to spotify’s arrival. instead the authors, drawing from the work of science and technology scholars such as latour, argue that the evolution of technologies do not follow “a single, coherent logic” (6) but respond to the distinct conjuncture of social, political and economic pressures— conditions that are informed by the agency of social actors, and not primarily by the technology itself. to illustrate such, the authors provide a historical account of music’s circulation as a commercial artefact, its transition from an analogue artefact to a digital https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.15 reviews 157 one and the impact new online peer-to-peer networks had in the late 1990s on normalising the consumption of digital music. at each stop on this whirlwind tour of music’s evolution as a commercial product, driven by the demands of industry, there is a counterpoint proposed, the disruption by non-industry actors, early hackers such as shawn fanning of napster, or music researchers such as karlheinz brandenburg and his work on developing the mp3 format and the anonymous role that hordes of music fans had in making use of new technologies like peer-to-peer file sharing in distributing music for free. by presenting the various technological breakthroughs that allowed for music streaming to come into existence, the authors are reminding the reader at each moment that technology is consistently implicated within its social moment. in other words, just because a technology exists, does not mean it will be adopted. while the term “streaming” might now be predominantly associated with listening to music or watching videos on demand, streaming technology was not originally intended for such. originally developed in the 1990s, during a period when transmitting sound on the web faced “almost insurmountable technological constraints” (24), streaming was explored as a means to mirror radio’s capacity for broadcasting live events, using the internet instead of the airwaves. experiments with streaming technologies followed a “variety of different trajectories” (29), from internet radio experiments to webcasting of parliamentary debates, and through its myriad uses, often outside of dominant commercial industries, became normalised as a broadcasting tool. yet it was only with the transition towards what srnicek (2017) has termed “platform capitalism” that streaming became commercially viable. in chapter three, the authors provide an accessible overview of the rise of the platform society, detailing the multifaceted computational infrastructure they rely upon in order to operate; datafication of user behaviour, data analysis of music (in the case of music streaming platforms), algorithms for personalised recommendations, guiding the reader through the complicated industrial business practices of what can appear to be merely immaterial websites. it’s a necessary detour that situates spotify’s business model within wider economic and technological trends and illustrates the structural shifts that have been impacting the cultural industries over the past decade or so. streaming technologies may have been with us for over three decades, yet it is their implication with algorithmic processes and artificial intelligences that are currently provoking the most unease. whether it’s the development of artificial intelligence that can automatically produce a song in a sonic style according to various user prompts, or the increasing appearance of ai music in spotify playlists, such transitions again inflame anxieties around the nature of human creativity and its replacement by machines. in chapters four, anxieties around the role that algorithms have in music selection are examined, particularly in the fear that the human curator has been sidelined by automated processes. the authors draw from bonini’s own ethnographic research with gandini (2019) on curating playlists to illustrate the continued presence of real live humans in the editorial offices of streaming platforms, even if the authors here warn that a small number of playlists are increasingly influential in determining the viability of a musician’s career. dancecult 17(1)158 taking on such a large scope as the transformation of music cultures as a result of music streaming platforms means there will inevitably be a considerable amount of shifts left unaddressed in the work. while there is much focus on individual tactics of resistance, it would be interesting to understand more about how various music scenes and non-corporate streaming initiatives are enacting algorithmic resistance, a term the authors use for listeners who attempt to “circumvent, control, or mislead the data collection mechanisms enacted by platforms’ algorithms” (115). despite this, platformed! provides a valuable primer for anyone wishing to get their bearings in the ever-shifting landscape of music’s situatedness in digital media ecologies and a reminder of the power that artists and fans have in shaping music cultures. references bonini, tiziano and alessandro gandini. 2019. “‘first week is editorial, second week is algorithmic’: platform gatekeepers and the platformization of music curation”. social media + society 5(4): 1–11. <https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119880006>. green, walden and matthew strauss. 2025. “deerhoof to remove music from spotify”. pitchfork. 30 june: <https://pitchfork.com/news/deerhoof-to-remove-music-from-spotify/>, (accessed 1 august 2025). srnicek, nick. 2017. platform capitalism. cambridge, uk; medford, ma: polity press. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119880006 https://pitchfork.com/news/deerhoof-to-remove-music-from-spotify/ reviews 159 dance music: a feminist account of an ordinary culture tami gadir new york: bloomsbury academic, 2023. isbn: 978-1-5013-4640-8 (paperback), 978-1-5013-4641-5 (hardcover) rrp: us$92.05 (hardcover), us$28.66 (paperback) welcome to the club: the life and lessons of a black woman dj dj paulette manchester: manchester university press, 2024. isbn: 978-1-5261-6690-6 (hardcover) rrp: uk£20.00 (hardcover) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.16> maren hancock macewan university (canada) over the past two decades, dance music studies have shifted meaningfully from celebratory accounts of subcultural resistance to more critical, intersectional appraisals of labour, space, power and politics. two recent books extend and deepen this shift: welcome to the club: the life and lessons of a black woman dj by dj paulette and dance music: a feminist account of an ordinary culture by tami gadir. although distinct in genre and methodology— gadir’s book is an academic monograph, while paulette’s is a memoir—both texts challenge the idealized narratives that have dominated scholarly and popular accounts of dj culture. together, they offer a much-needed recalibration of what it means to make, live, and think through dance music in the twenty-first century. gadir opens her book with a thesis that is almost deceptively simple: “dance music is ordinary” (1). by this, she means that dance music culture is not necessarily mundane (although it often is, as she demonstrates), but socially and structurally embedded; indeed, dance music is shot through with the same exclusions, hierarchies and contradictions as any other cultural practice. this assertion is a direct challenge to decades of scholarship and fan writing that frame dj culture as inherently emancipatory, utopian or exceptional. for gadir, origin stories about detroit, chicago, berlin and new york may have been politically useful in early subcultural theory, but they have since become canonical and limiting: “what has happened since,” she argues in the conclusion, “is that such interventions have become the accepted stories of dance music culture. as such, they no longer serve their original function, and their politics are no longer radical.” (168) paulette (who is mononymous) presents a similar critique from a different angle. her memoir, welcome to the club, tracks over 30 years in the industry—from early gigs in manchester’s queer nightlife scene, including her role as a resident at the hacienda’s https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.16 dancecult 17(1)160 flesh, through corporate pr work at mercury records and eventually to international stardom. yet despite her longevity and acclaim, paulette reflects repeatedly on how her contributions—like those of many black women djs—have been marginalized or omitted entirely from mainstream dance music history: “the winners in dance music have mainly been men,” she writes, quoting carl loben, “and men are more likely to push themselves forward and take the credit” (128). when paulette became the resident dj at flesh, the club’s legendary and first queer night, she was one of only two women djs to hold down a hacienda residency. she describes how her residency at flesh “enabled [her] to join a boy’s club which changed [her] life” (5) and “was unarguably the catalyst for [her] career” (32). still, paulette stresses that hacienda was not the only “thing” in manchester–remember, dominant narratives dominate history. paulette stresses that, as important as the hacienda was, “if history is to be correct, we have to acknowledge the other stories that have been squashed down and pushed out” (35). she emphasizes that a “vibrant underground dj scene” (33) existed at the time that hasn’t been awarded historical prominence, “inhabited by a cluster of black music promoters” (33). despite this, “black people weren’t invited into the city centre–any city centre–in england and the early nineties were not a ‘black creative’ friendly space” (33). her reflections offer lived evidence to support gadir’s claim that historiographic gatekeeping and cultural memory are structured by race, gender and power. gadir’s research spans a decade of fieldwork and interviews conducted across the uk, tel aviv, zurich, oslo and sydney, with a focus on how gender, race, class and regulatory frameworks shape dance music environments. her methods include participant observation and critical discourse analysis, with a particular emphasis on mythologies of meritocracy and postfeminism. if gadir’s work serves as a feminist audit of the dance music studies field, paulette’s memoir functions as a counter-archive: a first-person record of scenes and struggles often left undocumented. paulette’s memoir is rooted in her singular but deeply intersectional experience as a queer black woman navigating predominantly white and male spaces. yet her storytelling is far from anecdotal. she consistently situates her experiences within broader systems of exclusion—whether confronting the “lead-lined” glass ceiling while working in pr for mercury records (54), being told she’d never get booked as “a black, female dj with grey hair” (122), or having samples of her autobiography dismissed by male colleagues such as frank broughton for not having enough sex and drugs to make it interesting. thankfully, paulette ignored his advice when manchester press approached her to write the book in 2021. one of the many strengths of welcome to the club lies in paulette’s insistence that embodied experience is not separate from theory—it is theory in motion. paulette stresses that her book is neither a complete history of edm nor her definitive biography; rather, it’s “a series of snapshots that follow a chronological arc from the start of [her] dj’ing career to the present day, bending this through the prism of other people’s histories to acknowledge the wider picture. after all, ten people at a party will never tell reviews 161 the same story.” (2–3) here, paulette introduces a theme both glaringly obvious and yet somehow still ignored: history is subjective and favours hegemonic subjects. acknowledging her intersectional positionality within what bell hooks characterizes as “white supremacist patriarchal” culture, paulette states, “i have the unique perspective of an outsider with insider knowledge and an insider with outside knowledge” (3). both paulette and gadir foreground the ongoing struggles women face in dj culture, though with different emphases. in chapter 5 of dance music, gadir dissects how gender operates not just at the level of representation, but in sonic codes, gatekeeping, and audience perception. female djs are often marketed either as “sexy and incompetent” or musically credible but non-conforming to beauty norms (121–123). these binaries echo in media representation and club booking policies, and paulette’s narrative personalizes these structural forces. she documents the repeated erasure of her skills, the scrutiny of her appearance and the exhausting dance between authenticity and acceptability. her story makes visible the emotional and economic toll of navigating these contradictions alongside unpredictable, irregular employment —what gadir names as “precarity in informal economies” (140) and paulette describes more viscerally as “losing your mojo” (121). both gadir and paulette extend their analysis into ageism, showing how dance music’s obsession with youth further marginalizes women. paulette, now in her fifties, writes candidly about facing dwindling bookings and backhanded compliments. yet she refuses invisibility: “remind yourself that few white men have a problem with celebrating their wins... you too should remember and feel pride in yourself and your achievements.” (139) her memoir becomes a feminist act of citation—of herself and of the women who built the scene alongside her. in chapter 2, paulette describes how she “started to build a network of female supporters” (47–48), and this is key to her narrative. throughout welcome to the club, paulette shouts out the amazing women she encountered, including but not limited to: smokin’ jo, dulcie danger, caroline prothero, jamz supernova, marcia carr, colleen ‘cosmo’ murphy, judy griffith, gladys pizarro, jaguar, erica mckoy, niks, lakuti, naomi pohl, anz, sherelle and more. if you don’t know these women, you should look them up. one of gadir’s most provocative contributions is her critique of “transcendence” as a central value in dance music discourse. in chapter 4, she questions whether the romanticized peak experience—of becoming one with the dance floor, the lights, the crowd—is truly emancipatory or simply another consumerist ideal dressed in subcultural clothing, stating “[t]he popular discourses on utopianism in dance music culture leave little room for addressing problematic gender dynamics” (164). for gadir, transcendence is often an individualist fantasy that displaces collective political action. paulette’s memoir complements this critique with realism and wit. while she recounts moments of joy, connection and artistic mastery, she never glorifies the scene. instead, she foregrounds its labour: lugging records, facing hostile sound techs, staying professional in the face of condescension and recovering from burnout: “the glamour is fleeting, the graft is real, and the sacrifices are many” (74), she writes. paulette’s story echoes gadir’s insistence that even the most exceptional spaces can be host to ordinary experiences. dancecult 17(1)162 both books reject dance music exceptionalism in favour of something more politically grounded. gadir’s final chapter critiques the field of dance music studies itself for clinging to outdated narratives of resistance and transcendence. she asks, “what function does dance music writing whose main goal is advocacy or defence serve now that there is no longer an orthodoxy to challenge?” (170) in its place, she calls for a post-utopian, anti-capitalist feminist praxis that acknowledges the limitations of dance floors while mobilizing their collectivist potential toward structural change. paulette’s conclusion, subtitled “a manifesto”, similarly balances critique with hope. she doesn’t romanticize the past, but she insists that club culture can still be a site of joy, community and creative resistance: “community is the foundation. collaboration is the future. alliances reinforce the chain.” (195) she reminds readers that love—for music, for people, for the party—is not apolitical; it is the engine that keeps us going. in sum, these two books—one a rigorous academic intervention, the other a vital work of cultural memory—deserve to be read in tandem as both disrupt the plur mnemonic. paulette and gadir challenge scholars, djs, promoters, fans and all stakeholders in dance music to move beyond myth and toward accountability. whether we encounter dj culture in lecture halls or on dance floors, in archives or behind the decks, dance music and welcome to the club remind us that the work of rethinking dance music culture is far from finished. reviews 163 live spielen: liveness in performances elektronischer tanzmusik josef schaubruch hildesheim: universitätsverlag hildesheim, 2024. isbn: 978-3-96424-101-6 (paperback) rrp: €27,00 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.17> jack mcneill university of york (uk) as i write this review i am looking at an old ticket stub on my desk for an event in july 2025 in leeds. the stub includes all the usual information you’d expect from the gig ticket: venue, time, price, promoter, etc. the headline of the stub displays the name of the artist, followed by the following text in bold: “live dj set”. to some, this may be paradoxical; how can a dj set where an artist is playing pre-produced records one after the other be “live”? some may even see such a claim as audacious if the artist is not playing their own work using acoustic, amplified and/or electronic musical instruments and employing a level of mastery or even virtuosity. some may take a more sympathetic view. surely the presence of the artist and audience and some sort of interaction between the two is enough to make the performance “live”. debates around what a live performance involves are pervasive in electronic dance music cultures. views are manifold, and long have ravers, artists and enthusiasts debated the nuances of liveness in electronic dance music performance. if this is a debate you have had or are preparing for your next heated discussion on the topic, perhaps you might want to come equipped with some robust arguments. and if robust arguments on liveness are what you are looking for, look no further than josef schaubruch’s live spielen. live spielen is a comprehensive and critical review on notions of liveness in electronic dance music performances. rather than attempting to provide an absolute definition of the term, schaubruch highlights the theoretical and practical complexities and vagueness bound up with it. the work is convincing and presents a solid theoretical background around liveness in dance music genres, before undertaking empirical study and analysis on electronic artists who perform live and have a variety of different perspectives on what that means to them. schaubruch considers a number of positions on the notion of liveness, spanning from more common (mostly electronic) instrumental performances to the understanding of the dj set as a “live” practice (or not, as some argue), and the importance of corporeality, embodiment and an audience’s presence and interaction with the artist to a live performance. the first chapter is centred around the ambiguity of live performance in electronic music. it elegantly outlines the anxieties of electronic dance music artists around whether something might be live, as well as introducing the various constellations of live performance in electronic music, including turntablism, live coding, hardware performances and more. in this theoretical introduction, schaubruch also emphasises that his reflections on liveness often stem from less tangible phenomena like practice and affect as well as technologies, placing artists and audiences as critical to his discussion. chapter 2 presents a solid and https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.17 dancecult 17(1)164 comprehensive literature review. this chapter is particularly strong and is a useful resource for those working in or interested in the blooming academic discussion around liveness and electronic dance music. notable in the chapter is linguistic analysis of genre and musical role (e.g. dj/producer) across english and german, and the assertion that providing a single binary definition of “liveness” (i.e. “live” and “not live”) is no longer possible. in doing so, schaubruch mostly avoids falling into traps around defining what may or may not be authentic, again focussing on the multiplicity and vagueness of the terms he explores. following the rigorous review of literature, he provides a brief outline of his methodology which is clear and addresses gaps in field, particularly in the empirical study of liveness in electronic dance music. his discussion around reflexive grounded theory is both engaging and goes some way in addressing the perpetual complexity of aligning the specificities of dance music cultures with research methodologies. at the same time, there is a clear engagement with the author’s positionality as researcher, artist and participant in the dance music culture. the fourth chapter plots schaubruch’s findings and his own theoretical reflections on them, extracting broader themes stemming from the empirical work with artists who professionally engage with live electronic music performance. the outcomes are expansive, supported by informative diagrams. one particularly striking observation, albeit one that might be predictable to the reader, is the cultural capital that liveness holds for the artists interviewed. there is an inherent tension among artists’ reflections on what “liveness” is, with some focussed on the practice of using live instruments itself, while others with more of a focus towards creating moments of presence with audiences. not one to shy away from the complexity of these arguments, schaubruch explores where these tensions intersect, extending notions of subject and object to body (artist) and equipment, as well as artist and audience, exploring the relationships between musicians and instruments as an illustrative comparison. overall, live spielen presents a thorough, rigorous and engaging analysis on the role that liveness has in the performance of electronic dance music. he leans into the diversity and conflicts in both the literature and the points of view of the artists he interviews to illustrate the richness and potential in various definitions of live performances of electronic dance music. there are a (very small) handful of instances where it might be inferred that value judgements around live performances being “better” than dj sets, particularly in the “grad an liveness”, are being made. although these appear to emerge from the author’s empirical work, their absolute presentation may be seen to negate the vagueness in terminology that schaubruch so effectively builds throughout most of the text. while not necessarily within the scope of this work, an exploration on the role of liveness in studio production, and how live performances translate to the composition and production of fixed media is missing in the book and perhaps presents a gap for future work. admittedly, when i first received the ticket for the above-mentioned event in leeds, i scoffed at the absurdity of a “live dj set”. i was convinced that the headline description of the event was wholly paradoxical, perhaps a marketing ploy that plays into schaubruch’s assertions on the cultural capital of the live set. having read live spielen and considered the vagueness of the notion liveness in electronic dance music however, i am not so sure, and this is one of the great successes of this text; it questions as much as it answers. reviews 165 assembling a black counter culture deforrest brown, jr. new york: primary information, 2022. isbn: 9781734489736 (paperback) rrp: us$15.00 <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.18> emre öztürk humboldt-universität zu berlin (germany) deforrest brown jr. is a musician, media theorist and curator who has been an essential voice in questioning the current state of global electronic music and framing it within the radical black perspective. in assembling a black counter culture (2022), he traces the “black secret technology” centering detroit techno meanwhile covering black vernacular cultures, racial capitalism, industrialization and black resistance. combining both academic and underground knowledge, brown visits the black labor, ingenuity and futuristic desire, questioning techno’s later depoliticized and dehistoricized reception within various discursive and practical realms among the global electronic music industry. more than a linear musical timeline, this book is rather a counter-archive; interviews, artist biographies, scene insights and media archaeology are constant while brown digs further into the direction of techno’s cybernetic essence and creative drive. doing so, the book references valuable literature at the intersection of racial capitalism, cybernetics, and black desire, citing authors like cedric robinson, paul gilroy, kodwo eshun, fred moten, as well as frequently referring to the afrofuturist heritage and diasporic myth-science.  starting from detroit, brown later situates techno within the broader black atlantic, as well as its further branches through locations like japan, germany and the uk. while each chapter breaks down techno’s timeline by focusing on different perspectives, locations or concepts, brown eventually re-assembles all the information in the final chapter, “the collapse of modern culture” a title that is very much self-explanatory. brown merely hesitates to express his personal opinion, in fact, he clearly shows his position also on the very first page of the book with five different diagrams; the first one being a forecast of unbearable ecological load that inevitably leads to the “collapse of modern civilization”, and the second one that maps out the timeline of the black atlantic that starts with the global slave trade that he indicates the inevitable future result, “the journey home”. in that sense, brown underlines the inescapable outcomes of a culture that is assembled through racial capitalism and neocolonialism, combining self-reflexive insights with the comprehensive research data he provides. in the first few pages, the book cruises through the racialized history of the us and colonialism with their connection to current racial capitalism and the “rise of modern industrial complexes”. while discussing the essence of black usage of media and machines https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.18 dancecult 17(1)166 in the context of electronic music and dance cultures, brown pays dues to early architects of afrofuturism such as sun ra, lee “scratch” perry or george clinton, discussing their influence on later black electronic musics. he quickly sets its route to detroit in the following chapter, zooming into the life of techno’s originators in the us midwest, where post-fordist racial capitalism peaked post world war ii. one of brown’s main arguments is that techno’s emergence is inseparable from the conditions of post-fordist america and the automation of black labor. he conceptualizes techno as an embodied and racialized extension of the workers’ engagement with industrial machinery, adding that the music’s futuristic desires are not merely stylistic but are direct reflection of the industrial environment, that he eventually refers to as “black secret technology.” brown positions detroit techno pioneers like juan atkins, jeff mills and underground resistance as sonic engineers responding to industrial debilitation and using machines and rhythms to pursue new aesthetic forms and sonic fiction, while continously providing examples from afrofuturistic heritage and mythscientific practice that points out to the everlasting connection between pasts, presents and the futures of the black atlantic sonic futurism. brown also goes over the world’s changing economic and political climate and its impacts on the racialized, social and financial structure of the usa and beyond, zooming into cases such as us’s post-civil war and more contemporary topics such as racial policies and riots, or state-driven violence in the 20th century as what equally shaped the conditions for techno to flourish. at the intersection of racialized structures and mainstream media, he constantly provides concrete examples of techno and other black music being whitewashed through media tools such as news narrations, charts or interviews to show the doubleedged sword of british and american music market; where britain has become a melting pot of different black music with enough financial stability to the us’s, covering techno’s expansion overseas and its results with another self-explanatory chapter called “wake up america, you are dead!”. next chapter “detroit-berlin axis” provides even more insights by revealing further connections of black musical cultures with racial capitalism and neocolonialism, focusing on the genre’s second decade of existence and exportation outside of the us, under “a colonial project that white european crowds fetishize detroit’s sonic labor and whitewashing it”as brown puts it, diving into stories from post-cold war era berlin with a hedonistic, neocolonial venture that simultaneously serves for the western cultural hegemony. exampling paternalistic assumptions of kraftwerk and other westernwhite influences on detroit techno, or scholars such as stockhausen and adorno, brown maps out the post-colonial multiculturalism that reappropriates the african american musical continuum on the 1990s and beyond, going over cases like underground resistance or drexciyan empire as black resistance in response.  brown brings his focus to the present in the final chapters, interrogating how platform capitalism has restructured the global music economy and further marginalized black producers. he maps out the consolidation of power in media platforms, streaming services and corporate-backed festivals, showing how these infrastructures continue the exploitation and erasure of black creative labor. here he reframes all previous chapters through the lens reviews 167 of platform capitalism and questions its impacts on techno and beyond, going over the capitalization of the black body, mind, and labor through contemporary technological infrastructure. yet, he already made the conclusion clear many times throughout the book, that blackness is always already in counter-position to the structures of racial capitalism that seek to contain it. if there is a central claim in assembling a black counter culture, it is that resistance, speculative imagination and reassembling are constant variables of the black secret technology. platformization and its ongoing impact on dance music spaces danielle antoinette hidalgo chico state (us) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.13> introduction in an instagram story posted by baby weight, a dj/producer with about 7000 followers, on 3 february 2022, she playfully emphasizes the branding work that today’s dj must engage in to stay in the game: “nala [another dj/producer] … unveiled the industry secret that 40% of your dj career is convincing other people that you’re cool. um, i’m just here to say the other 60% is  silently screaming”. the brand-building that djs are expected to do today is primarily playing out on social media, perhaps especially on platforms like x/twitter, instagram and tiktok. baby weight’s instagram story reflects one of many examples of how djs are currently navigating these digital spaces. this article begins to make sense of the ongoing platformization of dance music by describing and analyzing recurring brand-building practices enacted by djs post-lockdown, teasing out how these practices enable djs to promote their work while also opening space for debates about the state of the industry. how have these practices both contributed to “a flattened, technological sameness” and a generative new normal that aims to directly address inclusivity, anti-harassment policies and outcomes and other hopeful change (assiter 2020)? dance music spaces in the digital age although an emphasis on technological innovation and change has been central to research about dance music’s history, sociological trends and media attention, a close analysis of today’s digital media effects is few and far between. we know very little about how today’s dance music content creators navigate their digital brands across multiple platforms. while dance music scholars have been slow to take up this line of research, dance music content creators—djs, their fans and other folks in the industry—are constantly thinking and talking about these digital shifts, often on the platforms themselves. for example, djs/producers openly debate and discuss topics such as: brand-building tactics and frustrations; touring problems and related advice; gendered branding tactics; the sexualization of women djs; racism and privilege in the industry; psas (public service announcements) about sexual assault and harassment, stolen property, and/or unprofessional behavior; crowdsourcing or sharing tips about music; working with other industry players such as booking agents and any number of industry-related tips. these topics are posted as #hottakes, questions, crowdsourcing and as status maneuvering strategies. some of the posts are direct brand-building (for example, posting music, a flyer for an upcoming event, pictures, videos and links to merchandise such as t-shirts) while other posts constitute indirect brand-building such as networking with other industry players, interacting with fans, or sharing personal reflections about the industry. a third category of posts entail brand-building—advertising—but without making it seem like the creator is posting an ad, a practice i call authenticity maneuvering. this is a distinctly cultural practice wherein dance music content creators employ “strategies to gain and maintain legitimacy” (hidalgo 2022: 9). those who skillfully authenticity maneuver often mask their commercial practices while those who are less adept at authenticity maneuvering occasionally run into trouble because their commercial practices are more obvious, leaving them vulnerable to criticism. authenticity maneuvering also helps djs educate, often calling out practices they see as troubling and dangerous in physical and digital dance music spaces. these categories are not mutually exclusive; sometimes djs will post about an upcoming show whilst also making a political statement or make a political statement while critiquing an industry-related issue. at the same time, clubs and clubbers also shape and inform djs’ brand-building, creating a feedback loop wherein clubs and clubbers are also building their own brands. for clubs and festivals, the brand-building often looks almost exactly like the djs’ content, though more transparently commercial. for clubbers and festival goers, their posts are often fan-based, prompting reposts from their favorite djs and events. wrapped up in the 24/7 imperative to post, djs are also expected to weigh in on current events, recent deaths and other tragedies in the industry, much like content creators in other industries.[1] this is an additional requirement, one that ramped up during the first couple years of the pandemic and has started to shift on-the-ground policies and behavior across the industry, particularly as festivals and other party promoters organize and monitor their events. this sociological shift requires more in-depth study. their engagement with current events and topics also leads to other questions unanswered by current research. what has changed since the pandemic started and how have those changes been impacted by digital expectations and behavior? as content creators navigate ongoing authenticity expectations (see hund 2023), how are these expectations realized across differences of race, gender, sexuality and class, and how do they impact the actual work that dance music’s content creators are expected to be able to do? answering these questions will elucidate concerns about how digital media is impacting dance music industry standards (see chandran 2023) and music industry trends in general. from the floor: irregular scheduled programming the pervasive influence of digital platforms has significantly shaped the landscape of emdc (electronic music and dance culture) spaces, prompting the need for a deeper exploration of how djs, clubs and clubbers are navigating today’s augmented reality: or the ongoing enmeshment of the digital and physical in our everyday lives (jurgenson 2011). for this short piece, i turn to some of nala’s social media posts as they reflect a few central ways that djs are both promoting their brands and thinking deeply about the state of the industry. after posting a few incredulous “state of the industry” tweets, nala emphasizes what she typically posts: “okay, no more existential thoughts on twitter lmfao needed a week to point out how fucking weird the culture is and now i’m back to regularly scheduled programming”.[2] “regularly scheduled programming” constitutes djs’ typical brand-building posts which often include promoting their upcoming shows, recently released music, merch they’re selling or an advertisement they’re doing for another brand. these are posted with tags to djs, clubs, festivals, record labels and other brands they’re working with. these typical posts constitute an opportunity to promote one’s brand while also actively promoting brand partnerships that are either one-off or ongoing. given the “regularly scheduled programming”, what constitutes irregular scheduled programming or “existential thoughts on twitter . . . [about] how fucking weird the culture is”? for nala, these posts look like the following: “woke up this morning wondering if there were any female, bipoc or lgbt dj/producers from the us that became massive headliners in the last 10 years [raised eyebrow emoticon]”.[3] many replies later, charlie knot tweets: “love that you asked this, and the replies speak for themselves”.[4] knot highlights other comments made in the thread such as “this has to change”, “the us[(as in the united states)] scene is so fucking stale it hurts” and baby weight’s “i just oof’d the biggest oof i ever oof’d because this statement bypassed my heart and went straight for every fiber every tendon every blood platelet”.[5] in short, attempting to answer this question highlights how relentless and pervasive the problem is, summed up in nala’s response (see below) to another dj/producer’s answer that reads: tokimonsta // lp giobbi // blessed madonna // sara landry // octo octa //eris drew // honey dijon // all popped in the last 10 years and well deserved. [clapping emoticon] honey & blessed have been grinding for 25+ years but really became headliners this last decade. no one blows up overnight even when it seems it.[6] nala replies: definitely all incredible artists! wish that was reflected on line ups. however, i don’t see this in vegas, red rocks or at festivals. i have to disagree with the overnight notion as there’s plenty of examples of that in the us for a specific demographic [wink emoticon].[7] in this response, nala correctly emphasizes how “a specific demographic”—read: white cishet men—dominate the line-ups and many of those men (unlike djs/producers from the us who are women, bipoc, or lgbt) have become “massive headliners in the last 10 years”. this ongoing fact requires more research about how whiteness, masculinity and privilege continue to play out across emdc (see conner and dickens 2023 and hidalgo 2024). for example, utilizing mckenzie wark’s (2023) definition of punishers at raves (“[a] social type labeled by ravers to denote, firstly, a kind of non-raver. often, but not always, straight, white, cis men. treats the space as a spectacle for their entertainment, contributes nothing, gets in the way”), i think it’s worth thinking about how punishers also operate online (wark 2023: 92-93; my emphasis). where do we see punishers on these platforms, depositing themselves in the middle of these debates, trolling and posting any number of sexist, racist and other problematic posts? what does their involvement do? how do they treat the space as a spectacle for their own entertainment, contribute nothing and get in the way? relatedly, are some of the djs/producers who have become massive headliners in the last 10 years also punishers and, if so, what are they able to get away with? what do they do? while my research on platformization in dance music culture is ongoing, what’s clear so far is how much work is required to not only tour, produce and release music, but also to create and post content across platforms. analyzing the kind of content that djs/producers post, “irregular scheduled programming” content is typically posted by industry players who are already navigating a system that often excludes, ignores or fails to make room for them. straight, white cis men djs/producers rarely post questions like nala’s, instead sticking to “regular scheduled programming” content that often includes the following: how excited they are about headlining yet another festival, any number of posts that focus entirely on them or their friends and their non-stop tour schedules. in other words, these men do not seem interested in disrupting the larger dance music industry status quo and rarely stop to consider how their privilege has supported and continues to support their ongoing success. john summit is a case in point. in september 2023, he performed on the main stage at chicago’s arc festival, a slot that was also shared by other headliners like eric prydz and boris brejcha. in fact, fatboy slim came on before john summit closed the main stage, and peggy gou was the only woman dj with a prime-time spot on this stage over 3 full festival days. as a dj/producer from the us who has exploded onto the scene over the course of the last 3 years, john summit’s headlining status happened quickly, once again reflecting how straight, white, cis men like him are often welcomed and supported by the industry. as a recent bio suggests, his “rise to prominence is a testament to the power of hard work and creative passion … [in addition to] his infectious energy and boundless enthusiasm.”[8] a critical reading of his bio suggests that hard work, creative passion and boundless energy aren’t the only reasons why he’s a headliner now. another reason is a dance music industry system that repeatedly privileges, supports and recognizes the work of cishet white men while marginalizing and often ignoring everyone else. strengthened by #blm, metoo and other reckonings in dance music, the culture is finally, though slowly, starting to recognize the historical and contemporary work of women, bipoc and lgbt artists in dance music. returning to the kind of branding work that djs engage in across digital platforms, white cishet men djs often maintain the status quo, while marginalized groups struggle for recognition. as another example, wtchcrft highlights this stark difference across djs’ posts during the ongoing genocide in gaza. why is it always the smaller artists, students, minorities etc. who are the first to speak up about these kinds of atrocities? the ones with the most to lose, with next to no solidarity from those with a wider reach and who are much more secure in their position in their fields?[9] wtchcrft’s questions should echo across dance music culture, but they are questions djs with a “wider reach…who are much more secure in their position in their fields” often conveniently ignore. while instagram user @raversforpalestine and this “open letter” directly counter “business as usual” in today’s emdc, wtchcrft’s questions remain relevant, highlighting the deafening silence of so many stakeholders in dance music today.[10] “irregular scheduled programming” threads aim to address these problems, actively discussing and arguing about them whilst also offering solutions. conclusion my work calls for a deeper exploration of the effects of digital media on dance music culture and industry standards, emphasizing the need to examine how these shifts impact both creators and consumers of dance music content. the 24/7 imperative of current event commentary—that demanded by the expectations of digital presence—drives the “regular” and “irregular” scheduled programming. this programmed response to platformization plays out differently when intersected with the race and gender of these cultural actors themselves. those speaking up with “irregular scheduled programming” content, who discuss important inequities, are far more often on the demographic margins. a sustained analysis of how whiteness, masculinity and privilege operate in emdc (including who is conducting research on dance music!) will likely reveal more inequities, some insight regarding how to implement change now and how authenticity maneuvering can aid and inhibit that change. author biography danielle antoinette hidalgo, phd, is associate professor of sociology at california state university, chico and author of dance music spaces: clubs, clubbers, and djs navigating authenticity, branding, and commercialism (2022, lexington books), winner of the mid-south sociological association’s stanford m. lyman distinguished book award. she is working on her next book, titled dance music in the digital age. references assiter, ben. 2020. “no screenshots on the dance floor. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 12(1). <https://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/dancecult/article/view/1170/998> (accessed 14 october 2023). <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.01> chandran, nyshka. 2023. “clubbing is becoming big business. what does this mean for dance music?” resident advisor, 6 september: <https://ra.co/features/4235> (accessed 14 october 2023). conner, christopher t. and david r. dickens. 2023. electronic dance music: from deviant subculture to culture industry. lanham: lexington books. hidalgo, danielle antoinette. 2022. dance music spaces: clubs, clubbers, and djs navigating authenticity, branding, and commercialism. lanham: lexington books. hidalgo, danielle antoinette. 2024. “dance music reckonings: authenticity, whiteness, and toxic masculinity.” in handbook of critical music industry studies, ed. david arditi and ryan nolan. switzerland: palgrave macmillan. hund, emily. 2023. the influencer industry: the quest for authenticity on social media. princeton: princeton university press. jurgenson, nathan. 2011. “digital dualism versus augmented reality” the society pages, 24 february <https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/02/24/digital-dualism-versus-augmented-reality/> (accessed 15 october 2023). wark, mckenzie. 2023. raving. durham: duke university press. notes [1] for example, djs have been discussing this imperative, often frustrated by the ongoing expectations of their work as djs/producers; while posting about social and political issues remains important to many djs, it’s the 24/7 imperative to post that can be exhausting and debilitating (especially if djs must navigate hate on their pages or in their dms). [2] see <https://twitter.com/thisisnalaa/status/1709658535737561195?s=20> (posted 4 october 2023, accessed 18 october 2024). [3] see <https://twitter.com/thisisnalaa/status/1709611795080712622?s=20> (posted 4 october 2023, accessed 18 october 2024). [4] see <https://twitter.com/chuck_says_yes/status/1709722026632515652> (posted 4 october 2023, accessed 18 october 2024). [5] see <https://twitter.com/babyweightmusic/status/1709612435961729306> (posted 4 october 2023, accessed 18 october 2024). [6] see <https://twitter.com/mikeylion_/status/1709676936291905941> (posted 4 october 2023, accessed 18 october [7] see <https://twitter.com/thisisnalaa/status/1709678272097952112> (posted 4 october 2023, accessed 18 october 2024). [8] see john summit’s bio here: <https://goldenvoice.com/events/detail/?event_id=639118> (accessed 18 october 2024). [9] see <https://twitter.com/wtchcrft666/status/1734779485944246370?s=46> (posted 12 december 2023, accessed 18 october 2024). [10] ravers for palestine’s open letter can still be signed (link here: <https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1jkvfzvcidtuppittiihpbwc_zbpmhzzgtolmyg68ihc/viewform?edit_requested=true#responses>). released by late october 2023, the letter calls for the electronic music scene to “urgently speak out against israel’s brutal and ongoing attack on gaza” (see <https://www.instagram.com/p/cy6ybtvi3kv/?igsh=mzrlodbinwflza%3d%3d> (posted 27 october 2023, accessed 18 october 2024). the letter states: “we urgently call on london’s electronic music parties and spaces, as well as our fellow ravers and artists, to publicly declare their solidarity with the palestinian people in the face of the brutal violence they are currently experiencing in gaza. . . . if queer music venues in london do not now publicly stand against the attempted erasure and extermination of palestinians, their advocacy in support of queer causes is hollow and their claims to embody dissidence, liberation and resistance are forever void.” dancecult 14(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 14(1) 2022: 76–93 issn 1947-5403 ©2022 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net do you remember house? chicago’s queer of colour undergrounds micah e. salkind oxford: oxford university press, 2018 isbn: 9780190698416 (hardcover) rrp: £79 (hardcover) fabulous: the rise of the beautiful eccentric maddison moore yale: yale university press, 2018 isbn: 9780300204704 (hardcover) rrp: us$19.95 (hardcover) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.11> jacob mallinson bird university of oxford (uk) in do you remember house? chicago’s queer of colour undergrounds and fabulous: the rise of the beautiful eccentric, micah salkind and madison moore each outline a sensitive history of what it means to carve one’s own place in the world. whether embodying a fabulousness to counteract both the mundanity of everyday life and also systems of white supremacy and queerphobia, or creating a musical movement to empower queers of colour in a vast matrix of intergenerational connection, these authors chart historical and contemporaneous examples of queer tenacity, creativity and vibrancy. moore offers a history of “fabulousness”, from effete, flâneur dandies to voguing superstars, with constant recourse to the fashion, music, dance and performance cultures that make up a fabulous ideal; and salkind offers a history of chicago’s house scene, from its disco origins to present day, always shedding light on the ways in which queers of colour propelled this now global music. centring on mutual themes of race, queerness, temporality, glamour/fabulousness, space and, importantly, work/werk, moore and salkind depict the bittersweet utopia that fabulous embodiment can bring. both authors employ a poignant methodology, weaving at times complex theorising with oral histories, interviews, historical writing and autoethnographic vignettes. where moore’s theory of fabulousness emerges consistently across fabulous, dipping in and out reviews reviews 77 of historical context, contemporary interview and personal reverie, salkind’s text more forcefully demarcates its theoretical drive, and moves from a linear history of house music in its first part to contemporary autoethnographic work in the second. what is most impressive in salkind’s text are the ways in which they allow the music to begin their theorisations: whether the participatory discrepancies of the groove of house music leading to a theorisation of delayed pleasure, the non-teleological drive of the music reflecting intergenerational memory, or the remixed and sampled tracks offering a repertoire in motion being emblematic of shifting histories, salkind’s musico-social theory is enlightening throughout. the joy in both moore and salkind, though, is that the subject matter is clearly inextricably personal: salkind’s opening excitement of sneaking out as a 16-year-old to go to deep fix’s “where the wild things are” rave continues throughout the book, and reading moore’s work clearly signals an inalienable intimacy with the subject matter: the places, the people, the music, the dance, the clothing, namely the sheer fabulousness of queer, eccentric life. the temporality of such experiences is vitally important throughout each text and sits interestingly alongside current queer approaches. in conversation with queer theorists like jack halberstam (2005) and josé esteban muñoz (2009), whose theories of queer time are well known — as sitting outside of a heteronormative system, and of existing in an over-therainbow “not yet here” — moore and salkind add interesting new dimensions. for moore, while clearly agreeing that queer utopia is not yet here, as muñoz would have it, they also remind us of the intensely present aspect of queerness, and of fabulousness. they write: “fabulous queer utopia is about living in the present but carrying an alternative possibility, a certain future, and yanking it into the here and now” (71), elsewhere stating that “fierceness, fabulousness, and all other visions of spectacular appearance are about imagining space and carving it out for yourself in the here and now, not waiting for the right time to do so” (109). while muñoz and halberstam certainly argue for the making-present of queer utopia, notable in the liminal space of the nightclub, moore’s more quotidian fabulousness — dressing iconically down the street etc. — makes liminal de facto heteronormative space, affecting straight time and space, and rightly so. moore is also attendant to, following carolyn dinshaw’s work, the importance of “queer histories” and how they create “affective relations” between past and present (71). this is a key point for salkind, who consistently makes reference to the intergenerational power and impetus of house music. writing of “ancestral affiliations” (135) and the “intergenerational, cross-cultural mentorship” (176) that is so vital to house music’s growth, salkind spends considerable time on a crucial concept: neostalgia. neostalgia, the desire for a connection to the past that one may never have had personally to begin with, resonates beyond house music and to all queer experience. those of us who never lived through, say, the genesis of house, the ballroom scene, the aids pandemic, or the like, still feel that connection, a connection that is made manifest every time, for moore, we dress fabulously, or, for salkind, we lose ourselves in the music.1 salkind writes beautifully of the heady mixture of past and present in these experiences: the unctuous affectivity of bodies, sound, time and place is felt throughout their work. dancecult 14(1)78 the joys that come with fabulousness and house music aren’t without their struggles, though, and the labour of queer people and queers of colour is foregrounded throughout. moore’s analysis playfully riffs off a ludic linguistics of “work” versus “werk”, where “werk!”, the queer affirmation yelled at balls and drag bars (and sometimes even street corners), “is a type of aesthetic labour actually seen on the body, and it highlights the effort that goes into making memorable aesthetic moments that happen” (27). creating a look is work, and that work, to extend carol hanisch (1969), is always political. alok vaid-menon, trans non-binary activist and social media star, says in interview with moore: “what keeps me going is there’s a long tradition of people doing this work, and it is work. it’s not just getting ready. it’s actual, political work. it’s strategy, it’s planning, it’s pr, it’s how we talk about it. every walk i make is already a [protest] march” (51). and they are certainly right: to live fabulously is political, and to sashay down the street is a political act. this work, salkind contends, is as much political as it is academic, writing that “queer people of colour are always already theorising, even before a scholar enters the club” (16). this is politics, theoria and praxis, in action, a symbiotically lived politic that effuses these texts. what is most bittersweet, and expressed by both authors, is how often this work goes unnoticed or, worse, stolen. here the double-turn of queer fabulousness, in all its forms, emerges. “you can’t understand fabulousness unless you get that it emerges from trauma, duress, exclusion, exhaustion and depression, and that in some ways being fabulous is the only thing that can get us out of bed in the morning”, moore writes (21). it isn’t a halcyon, rose-tinted joie de vivre, but the only possible way of living. add to this salkind’s poignant discussions of “generational dissonance” and the decimation of queer communities through hiv and aids, and queer joy is soon seen to be wrapped, knotted even, with queer pain. this idea resonates with other queer theories, notably and touchingly eve kosofsky sedgwick’s (2003) notion of queer shame. for sedgwick, queer shame is not a by-product of being queer, but rather it is structurally integral to queerness: we are queer because of queer shame (see also halperin and traub 2009).. in a similar vein, moore and salkind don’t offer pain and trauma as contrasting elements of queer, fabulous joy— they see them as mutually constitutive. the points the authors raise above are significantly informed by, and indeed are only intelligible in their fullness by attention to, race and racism. while queer temporality, for example, may be one thing, moore reminds their reader that “brown people have to wait for things in a way that white folks don’t necessarily have to” (164), a poignant insertion of waiting into the radical nowness-cum-futurity of queer joy. salkind, similarly, writes extensively of the erasure of queers of colour who worked/werked the cultural labour of house music, and their exclusion from the spaces that were once made for them. clubs that purported inclusivity became “profoundly discouraging for black gay men in particular” (43), an example of exclusionary door policies that are still hideously contemporary. salkind offers a measured response to such issues; speaking of clubs that actively seek to promote inclusivity of all kinds, salkind offers the term “safer”, rather than safe, spaces, foregrounding the fact that “the work of creating a safety is never done” (186). throughout reviews 79 both texts, the doubly marginalised position of queers and women of colour is brought to the fore, and adds critical dimension to the werk undertaken. subtle moves like the above perhaps render salkind’s text more acutely critical than moore’s. throughout, salkind has a measured idea of utopia, one that is constantly in progress, and one that is malleable, multifarious. while moore argues, after muñoz, for a “critical idealism … a way of living that privileges hope and possibility instead of the suffocating anti-utopian negativism that is often de rigueur (186)”, sometimes this hope can be for a potentially untenable or uncritical utopia. i am thinking, for example, of the various calls to end gender that reappear throughout the book. at first reading, these desires to end gender seem justified, an end, surely, to the gender-based violence that befalls queer people on a daily basis. considering the call further, i begin to think of certain trans friends, and the conversations we have about their gender: about how they are fighting for their gender and their right to express their gender, a gender that is so deeply important to them. for many, gender is joyful — “gender euphoria”, as it’s often called — and while gender must be opened up, its negative effects dismantled, its violence pacified, to end gender altogether would deny many people an important structuring point of their identity: certainly, people must be safe not to have a gender, and we must work to make this a reality, but we must also be attentive to those for whom gender is critical. moore shows elsewhere that they are seemingly aware of this when they state for example that “not every queer person is a fabulous eccentric, not every queer person should be” (85). here the difficulties of utopian thinking arise; if queerness is undefinable multiplicity, surely utopia is also. importantly, moore consciously and effectively dismisses what one could imagine being a prevalent conservative or normative critique (and one that gets woefully bandied around the british press…): that fabulousness and the like is somehow frivolous, unimportant, or even selfishly narcissistic. to this moore argues that, rather than flippant dressing, “our real selves [are] the ones wearing make-up and high heels” (45), an aesthetics of self that echoes my favourite foucault quotation: “from the idea that the self is not given to us, i think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art” (foucault 1991: 351). parrying superficiality—in its negative affect—moore adds that “we care about surfaces” (45) and the body, reminiscent of important aspects of butlerian gender theory and spectrally unpicking a cartesian dualism. in other words, embodied, performative identity isn’t an afterthought, it’s the real deal. this is certainly present in salkind’s work also: for the djs and performers at queen!, dressing and makeup aren’t optional, but utterly integral. what is perhaps most special about these texts, and what captivates so much, is a kind of queer reading that they encourage, and how their subject matters, historical and contemporary, reverberate with their readers. reading both of these works, i felt—as i am sure many queer people will—the neostalgia of so many culture-shifting moments, the empathy and kinship of the joys and traumas of queer life, and my own memories of losing myself and finding myself in the sweaty underbellies of queer nightclubs. the texts mutually create a living archive of queer fabulousness; one that is very much needed, and one that sheds a light on the creative labour of communities too often overlooked. dancecult 14(1)80 notes 1 for interesting discussions of a different sort of neostalgia and desire for connection with queer past, see halperin 2007. references foucault, michel. 1991. “on the genealogy of ethics: an overview of work in progress”. in the foucault reader, ed. paul rabinow, 343-364. london: penguin books. halberstam, jack. 2005. in a queer time and place: transgender bodies, subcultural lives. new york: new york university press. halperin, david. 2007. what do gay men want? an essay on sex, risk, and subjectivity. michigan: the university of michigan press. halperin, david and valerie traub, ed. 2009. gay shame. chicago: university of chicago press. hanisch, carol. “the personal is political”. february 1969. <https://www.carolhanisch.org/chwritings/pip.html>, (accessed 8.10.22). muñoz, josé esteban. 2009. cruising utopia: the then and there of queer futurity. new york: new york university press. sedgwick, eve kosofsky. 2003. touching feeling: affect, pedagogy, performativity. durham: duke university press. https://www.carolhanisch.org/chwritings/pip.html reviews 81 the boy from medellín dir. matthew heineman usa: amazon original, 2020 <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13009186/> <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.12> ana maría díaz pinto university of california, davis (us) juan diego díaz university of california, davis (us) directed by academy award-nominated and emmy award-winning filmmaker matthew heineman, the boy from medellín (2020), portrays a week in the life of colombian reggaetón artist josé osorio balvin—better known by his stage name j balvin—in advance of the culminating concert of his colores 2019 tour in his hometown of medellín. although this is heineman’s first music-themed documentary, it is not his first biographical film tackling complex social issues in latin america, as cartel land (2015) attests. the boy from medellin, joins a catalogue of biographical documentary films portraying the tensions between public and private life of popular musicians such as jay-z (fade to the back, 2004), george harrison (living in the material world, 2011), residente (residente, 2017), anitta (vai anitta, 2018), taylor swift (miss americana, 2020), and billie eilish (billie eilish: the world’s a little blurry, 2021). as is often the case in these documentaries, heineman engages many complex aspects of j balvin’s life and work, of which we will focus on two: the development of the reggaetón scene in medellín, centering balvin’s position within it; and the negotiation between balvin’s public and private personas. from this second topic, we will elaborate on the artist’s engagement with the political realities he encountered in colombia, the role of social media in shaping relationships between artists and audiences, mental health issues, and the “return to the hood” and overcoming topoi. as in other latin american countries, reggaetón arrived in colombia through piracy and the exchange of cassettes and discs within the rap and dembow community in the late 1990s and early 2000s (navarro 2019). programing mostly puerto rican reggaetón at the beginning, radio stations and figures such as el gurú del sabor (fernando londoño) were crucial in disseminating and popularizing the genre within the country, paving the way for the emergence a local scene in medellín, which is now recognized as a reggaetón powerhouse (garcía 2013). it is within this scene that josé, as j balvin chose to call himself in this initial period, and other youths from medellín began to incursion into reggaetón composition and singing. with josé and groups such as 3 pesos and golpe a golpe, the medellín scene gradually grew, reaching international visibility for its high professional productions when a group of artists created the recording label palma productions in the https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13009186/ dancecult 14(1)82 early 2000s. one of the first goals of these artists was creating a sound and aesthetics distinct from its caribbean counterpart. they accomplished that by using romantic lyrics, melodic lyricism with influences from anglo-american pop, and chord progressions with inversions and extensions emulating the harmonic colors of jazz (franco 2018). if the puerto rican reggaetón of the first wave (i.e., from the early 2000s until 2010) was characterized by a robust percussive texture similar to that of dancehall, in combination with synthesizers playing the harmonic sequence i–vi–v, the colombian reggaetón of those days used more chordal variety, as we can hear in “obra de arte” an iconic reggaetón by fainal & shako, famously performed by balvin, that features the harmonic progression i7–iv7–vi7–v7. the first part of the documentary features a young j balvin consolidating his career as a reggaetón artist in medellín through dogged work. this narrative of struggle and selfimprovement is consistent with a hip-hop street aesthetics that centers and idealizes the artist’s humble origins. although reggaetón lyrics in the early stages in colombia featured the typical puerto rican malianteo and fronteo (i.e., texts based on crudeness, confrontation and hyper-masculinity), artists such as j balvin and later maluma, contributed to develop a distinct colombian approach called romantiqueo, or use of romantic lyrics. the documentary features various pieces in this tradition such as “ay vamos,” “en mi,” and “obra de arte,” which can be contrasted with the confrontational style that characterized early colombian productions such a “tiradera pa’l guru,” a piece first performed in 2003 by a collective of reggaetón artists called colombian flow.1 the main theme and source of tension in the film is balvin’s dilemma: one the one hand he has come to his home city to reconnect with his family, friends and fans, to visit the neighborhood where he grew up, and to perform what he called “the most important concert of his career” in medellín’s largest venue (a local football stadium). on the other, the volatile social situation in colombia, perceived by many as the result of president iván duque’s neoliberal policies, created the expectation among many of his fans that j balvin and other high-profile artists should intervene either by voicing criticism against the government or calling for the end to violence in the streets. initially balvin resists getting involved because he believes that artists are not to engage in politics, but through multiple interactions with producers, family members and fellow artists, he changes his mind. yet many thought his intervention (a call to the government to listen to the youth and to end violence in the streets during his final concert) was both late and lukewarm. while dealing with this conflict, various contradictions are revealed. balvin, who is shown arriving in medellín in his private jet, driving luxurious cars and living in a mansion with an army of servers (practically all women in the film are either balvin’s fans or part of his supporting team), tries to connect with people from poor neighborhoods by walking down the streets, shaking hands and taking selfies with them. it is no wonder that he struggled to connect with “the hood.” the neighborhood where he grew up, the humble origins that lend him authenticity within reggaetón discourse, is only visited, not inhabited. colombian society seems incomprehensible for him. reviews 83 balvin’s reluctance to speak up in the middle of colombia’s political upheaval is, nonetheless, atypical among fellow latin american reggaetón artists who are known for their ongoing political engagement within their communities. during the wave of youthled political and social revolts that swept colombia and other latin american countries at the end of 2019, many reggaetón musicians responded to their fans’ call for action. in puerto rico, for instance, the demands were directed against governor ricardo rosselló (incidentally, son of former governor pedro rosselló, who persecuted and banned the underground musicians who eventually developed reggaetón on the island during the mid-1990s), accused of corruption and homophobia. reggaetón artists such as bad bunny, ñengo flow, daddy yankee and residente marched in the streets along with thousands of protestors. likewise, in chile, the revolt against president sebastián piñera’s neoliberal agenda was supported by chilean and puerto rican reggaetón artists such as pablo chill-e, lizz, don omar, zion, nicky jam and others. surely balvin’s inaction in the context of this tradition of reggaetón political activism in latin america confused his colombian audiences and intensified their criticism of his silence. of course, balvin and other reggaetón artists are not the first popular musicians to have experienced pressure from their audiences to take political stances at critical junctures. ingrid monson (2007), for instance, documented the case of many black jazz musicians during the african american civil rights and black power movements in the us in the 1960s and 1970s, who felt morally pressured to take political action. philip auslander’s (2004 and 2006) tri-partite concept of musical personae, which includes the real person, the musical person, and the character (in songs, for example), is useful to understand the complex interaction of public and private aspects of the life these performers. in heineman’s documentary, balvin appears as a professional and well-established musician ( j balvin) with a fragile real human behind the scenes ( josé). his musical personae is that of a dreamer cangri (influential person in reggaetón slang), enriched by the nuances from the fictional characters described or alluded to in his songs. for instance, in introspective scenes, we hear songs like “7 de mayo” whose lyrics reinforce the image of a sensitive man who acknowledges his humble origins and is committed to supporting up and coming artists. other characters in balvin’s songs, not shown in the documentary, include the promiscuous macho, explicit in “si tu novio te deja sola” and “mojaita.” heineman addresses the artist’s inner complexity by including extended sections of j balvin’s concerts, images of josé with his spiritual guide and medical team, and scenes of balvin incarnating the cangri character, for example when he receives phone messages from artists such as will.i.am prior to his concert. while these three aspects of his musical personae are identifiable at different points of the film, it is difficult to draw clean boundaries among them. at the climax of the final concert and its aftermath, the narrative of the sensitive, crisis-ridden, conflicted artist gives way to a larger story of overcoming. one prominent aspect that amplifies balvin’s conflict is social media communication. with the advent of social media platforms such as twitter, tiktok and instagram, many fans have now the opportunity to interact with their favorite musicians and with fellow dancecult 14(1)84 fans. with artists constantly posting both professional and personal information, these platforms have created a sense of closeness between musicians and audiences that did not exist before when interactions where limited to live concerts or reading/watching the news and thus more purely parasocial. artists have recognized that this virtual closeness is beneficial to promote their careers and to understand their fans’ desires. one aspect of this perceived closeness is that many audiences feel that artists are part of their communities and thus should be sensitive and committed to their causes and tribulations. this issue is explicitly portrayed in the documentary. it is through social media that j balvin learns about the reactions of his fans to the strikes in medellín and to the assassination of young student dylan cruz by the colombian police. more importantly, he reads and hears their louder and louder calls for him to intervene through these platforms. at a dramatic point he takes the bold decision of meeting one of his critics (local rapper mañas ru-fino), all arranged through social media. we’ll let readers watch the documentary to learn how two contemporary musicians from the same city negotiate their opposing views on the artist’s commitment to social justice. in a vivid manner, the boy from medellín, thus engages the real challenges that artists face now that social media functions as a public forum. the narrative of j balvin’s “return to the hood” proposed in this documentary is therefore problematic but should not be judged as insensitive or trivializing. the complex political situation that j balvin encountered in colombia, intensified by social media activity, and expectations of political involvement on his part, had a real toll on josé’s mental health. the efforts that he and his team made to deal with the conflict and to put on a successful performance were enormous. his intentions to connect with the people he grew up with seem genuine on the screen despite his understandable distance from their daily experience and his detached attitude. the “return to the hood” and overcoming narratives served heineman to weave these threads of balvin’s experience into the fabric of his musical personae. at the same time, the two narratives cemented balvin’s position as a politically outspoken latin american reggaetón artist: at the concert, which represents the overcoming, balvin joins fellow reggaetón musicians from the region in voicing his concern for social justice. in the end, the relationship between balvin and his audience is simultaneously strained and reinforced. the singer uses the streets of medellín as an extension of the scenic space, but those streets are no longer known in depth; the city may have been his place of humble origins but is now only partially accessible from his position of fame. the boy from medellín is therefore an obligatory watch for those interested in reggaetón culture, its aesthetics, politics, narratives, dynamics of local production and popularization, the struggles of the real person behind the artist, the blurred boundaries that social media creates between audiences and artists, and the development of reggaetón scenes in latin american cities in general, and in medellín in particular. the five-episode tv documentary series flow importado, ritmo pegado (2018), which documents the rise to fame of key reggaetón figures from medellín, including j balvin himself, offers important historical context to heineman’s film. although the boy from medellin stands on its own, readers will gain a deeper understanding of the stories of j balvin and the other reggaetón artists reviews 85 shown in the film as well as their audiences’ passion for the genre, from watching the tv series beforehand. the boy from medellín will not disappoint even those purely interested in reggaetón aesthetics; the director devoted about ten minutes to the final concert, a fortunate decision that allows us to appreciate balvin’s artistic craft in all its splendor. notes 1 this performance of “tiradera pa’l gurú” can be watched here: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yotgsfifqo0>. references auslander, philip. 2004. “performance analysis and popular music: a manifesto”. contemporary theater review 14(1): 1-13. auslander, philip. 2006. “musical personae”. the drama review 50(1): 100-119. garcía, julio. 2013. “del tango al reggaetón: medellín, capital de los contrastes musicales.” bbc news mundo , 17 october. <https://www.bbc.com/mundo/ noticias/2013/11/131017_cultura_medellin_capital_musical_colombia_jgc>. monson, ingrid. 2007. freedom sounds: civil rights call out to jazz and africa. oxford: oxford university press. navarro, fernando. 2019. “medellín, la fábrica del reggaetón”. el país, 30 november. <https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/11/26/eps/1574784498_877729.html>. filmography franco, andrés. 2018. flow importado, ritmo pegado. medellín: telemedellín. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yotgsfifqo0 https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias/2013/11/131017_cultura_medellin_capital_musical_colombia_jgc https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias/2013/11/131017_cultura_medellin_capital_musical_colombia_jgc https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/11/26/eps/1574784498_877729.html dancecult 14(1)86 explosions in the mind: composing psychedelic sounds and visualisations jonathan weinel singapore: palgrave macmillan, 2021 isbn: 9789811640544 (hardcover), 9789811640551 (ebook) rrp: £89.99 (hardcover), £71.50 (ebook) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.13> dave payling staffordshire university (uk) explosions in the mind (eitm) is part of the palgrave studies in sound series, exploring sonic and audio-visual themes. it is weinel’s second book, and can be read as a companion to his earlier inner sound: altered states of consciousness in electronic music and audiovisual media (weinel, 2018). inner sound explores altered states of consciousness (ascs) in audio-visual media from a theoretical perspective, and contextualises it with related work, whereas eitm focusses squarely on weinel’s own praxis, originating from his phd studies and extended to the present day. the book is richly illustrated with many full colour images and includes supplementary materials hosted online by the publisher, comprising audio and video samples and working software apps for experimenting with the techniques discussed in the book. weinel frames his work around altered states of consciousness, specifically psychedelic experiences and how they can be interpreted in sound and vision. psychedelic theories such as leary’s “seven levels of energy consciousness” (1998), are introduced, in this case explaining how it has influenced the design of surfer stem (2010); weinel’s audio composition discussed in chapter 2. with topics ranging from digital performance through to painting and direct animation techniques, an extensive range of artistic disciplines are represented. each chapter commences with personal anecdotes revealing the nature of the content ahead and are then interwoven with informative references to popular culture and recollections of weinel’s experiences. after these introductory notes there follows a detailed examination of the individual artworks themselves. as an example, cenote sagrado (2014), is one of weinel’s audio-visual compositions inspired by his visit to a ritualistic sacrifice centre, the sacred cenote in mexico. after discussing its historical significance the technical realisation of the composition itself is detailed: in this case direct animation on film stock and rhythmic hardware sound synthesis. a recurring compositional technique is also included here: the piece is structured to emulate the onset, plateau and termination phases that one might experience in a psychedelic trip, and this determines the audio-visual qualities in each section. from a dance music perspective, eitm explores some of the more niche, and often more sonically “harder”, edm genres including flashcore—a form of speedcore techno with elements of electroacoustic music—hard trance, acid techno and hardcore rave music. weinel incorporates some of these edm styles into his electroacoustic compositions, surfer reviews 87 stem using elements from dubstep for example. vaporwave is another genre weinel uses, taking a plunderphonics approach to 1980s and 1990s audio trivia sample loops to create an immersive nostalgia trip in his cyberdream (2019) virtual reality experience. these genres are generally touched on quite briefly but there is a lot of material to cover, and sound is only one component of the many multimedia productions on show here. eitm introduces weinel’s creative works chronologically with respect to their date of creation, and is sequenced to cover the categories of electroacoustic composition, real-time performance, audio-visual composition, interactive projects, vj performance and virtual reality experiences, mirroring weinel’s artistic journey. overall, it is an engaging read and will be of interest to artists, practitioners and academics from the disciplines of electronic music, creative coding, djing and vjing, composition, performance and related fields. it is highly relevant to those utilising a practise-based approach to research where this can lead to insights into methods for expanding an artist’s creative repertoire. a practise-based approach to research is continually rising in popularity across a range of creative disciplines and this volume will provide a useful reference for others to follow. the frameworks provided in the concluding chapter 8 are particularly indicative and useful in this respect. introduced here are three design frameworks, specifically: psychedelic journeys in sound, asc simulations and synaesthetic visualisations of sound, which have been formulated through practise and can be implemented by others desiring to create asc inspired artworks. the conclusion also discusses how the covid-19 pandemic has influenced the development of virtual clubs and dance events incentivising the shift to digital and online experiences, providing motivation and increased relevance for continued study. references leary, timothy. 1998. the politics of ecstasy. berkeley, california: ronin. weinel, jonathan. 2018. inner sound: altered states of consciousness in electronic music and audiovisual media. oxford, uk: oxford university press. weinel, jonathan. 2019. “cyberdream vr: visualizing rave music and vaporwave in virtual reality”. in proceedings of the 14th international audio mostly conference: a journey in sound, 277–81. new york, usa: association for computing machinery. <https://doi.org/10.1145/3356590.3356637>. discography weinel, jonathan. 2010. entoptic phenomena ep. 2010. (mp3): entopic. <https://www.discogs.com/release/2332275-jon-weinel-entoptic-phenomena-ep>. filmography weinel, jonathan. 2014. cenote sagrado. uk. <https://vimeo.com/107164661>. https://doi.org/10.1145/3356590.3356637 https://www.discogs.com/release/2332275-jon-weinel-entoptic-phenomena-ep https://vimeo.com/107164661 dancecult 14(1)88 the discourse community of electronic dance music anita jóri bielefeld: transcript verlag, 2022 isbn: 9783837657586 (paperback) rrp: $45.90 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.14> andrew whelan university of wollongong (australia) the discourse community of electronic dance music is a book about how people communicate about electronic dance music online. it is an important contribution to edmc and online interaction research for two reasons. firstly, it develops a methodological framework for engaging with how people talk about musical phenomena online, how to evaluate these “discourse communities” and what coheres them. secondly, the book therefore poses crucial, albeit largely tacit questions to the field of popular music studies broadly, and the field of edmc research in particular: how do people talk about music and what should researchers do about that, which is to say, what is their method of analysis? how is that method justified and what is scalable or portable about it? jóri’s framework is operationalised across three language domains. respectively, these are structure and meaning (e.g. insider terminology, compensatory strategies such as “likes” and emojis and identity markers such as “i” and “we”); interaction management (e.g. hierarchical dynamics in terms of frequency of contributions and extent of interaction in terms of response rates); and social phenomena (linguistic expressions of friendship and community, tokens of mutual interest etc.). as chapter one elucidates, jóri’s framework draws on susan herring’s canonical work on computer-mediated discourse analysis (2004). she directs this in pursuit of what, following john swales, she calls “discourse communities”, a heuristic analogous to “virtual scenes” (38-9), intended to capture the interpersonal networks and exchanges occurring at the research sites. these sites are: the web forums we are the music makers and gearspace (devoted to aphex twin and music production technology respectively); the facebook groups tb-303 owners club and italo disco maniacs; the “classic” websites, vintage synth explorer and resident advisor; and the blogs matrixsynth, female:pressure tumblr and little white earbuds. the second chapter contains a thorough discussion of discourse-related research methods, including corpus-based and multimodal discourse analyses and cognate approaches. reviews 89 linguistic anthropology does not get a mention, although conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis—two closely linked sociological approaches—are both discussed and incorporated. the book also draws on research on youth culture, popular music and edmc in english, german and hungarian, and is thus valuable as an interdisciplinary (and even intercultural) dialogue and a gateway to further research. although some of the discourse and method material can be technical—and here an index would have been helpful—jóri does not presuppose technical knowledge on the reader’s part, and most technical matters are explained in accessible prose. one consequential term that is not defined at the point of its introduction though is “genre”. first appearing in the literature review, and germane to the discussion of “community” as a discursive phenomenon, “genre” can be confusing to those unfamiliar with its application in linguistics (perhaps especially for readers anticipating the musical use of that term). genre is formulated here as an event e.g., a news report, or a presidential press conference (75). another term, upon which the project is predicated, is “community” (71-73). the book raises important questions about what an online social group is and how to measure it through its language use, not all of which it sets out to address. the term “community” is not problematised. this isn’t necessarily a shortcoming: “community” sometimes functions as a sort of placeholder, indexing empirically observable phenomena. the book is agnostic on the content of “community” or what it might entail politically (with the important caveat that jóri is direct about the gendered language use in her data, and about the broader exclusionary patterns in edmc). but jóri still has to develop tools to assess the extent and content, as it were, of group cohesion. one way of doing this is by reference to the use of “we” as an indicator of community (119, 125, 137, 147). the assumptions underlying the idea that “we” would stand in this way are not explicated. one can imagine situations where there is community sentiment, but people do not use “we”, and the converse, where “we” is abused by powerful figures seeking to impose the appearance of consensus. ultimately (and going by her account of the data, rightly), jóri determines “we” is of limited efficacy as an indicator and suggests it be abandoned (174). what are the implications of this? is it telling us something about collective identity, or is it telling us something about communication? if the latter, is it about mediation, or is it about communicative strategy? jóri does not speculate on these questions, but they help to show how, by engaging so thoroughly with online data, she pushes the parameters of cmda and similar corpus-oriented approaches as far as they will go. one important aspect of the book is how it works across different online platforms: forums, blogs and so on, each with distinct affordances. as jóri acknowledges, there is a relationship between platform design and community structure. for example, some of the limited interaction on the matrixsynth blog, despite its popularity, may be attributable to the matrixsynth closed facebook group (164). “community”, such as could be discerned by use of “we”, might therefore not map neatly onto a corpus assembled at a single site, because gertrude stein’s adage, “there is no there there” (1937: 17), still applies to the internet. dancecult 14(1)90 those who are present are always also in at least one other place. this does not undermine the analysis, but it does invite methodological reflection about scope, site and corpus. any analysis will have self-defined limits. as jóri shows, the strength of a corpus approach itself requires sensitivity in a context of platform porosity. the classification scheme jóri applies provides a picture of the shape of the relationships inside the group and how they are conducted. it can be used to measure the scale, frequency and intensity (the “temperature”) of social interaction. this enables comparative work, but it also means that the local ethnographic flavour comes from (naturally occurring) terminology, rather than multi-turn sequences evidencing how participants negotiate meaning and their respective positions. for example, in the analysis of the italo disco facebook group, jóri lists some of the adjectives used to describe italo tracks, including “bomb, very hot, very sophisticated, obscure girl of italo, superfluous, cheap, wonderful, great, hot girl of italo, such a beauty, bumped up, awesome crasher, nice, lovely, extremely rare, beautiful” (154). the lingua franca is presumably english, though jóri points out that familiarity with the italian language is regarded positively within the group. the gender politics of these adjectives are evident. jóri suggests that “bomb” is so gendered, and though we know (from tom jones) that there can be a “sexbomb”, i am not sure about this: bomba in italian seems more along the lines of “sensational”. local context matters. the same connotation to “bomb” would not extend—to me at least—to say, rage against the machine’s “bombtrack”, or the radio bomb drum ‘n’ bass project, where we might instead say “bomb” signifies fantasies of hypermasculinity. jóri attributes this gendered use of language to the historical conjuncture in which italo disco rose to prominence, along with the majority male participants in the group. this book—and the forms of analysis which jóri conducts so adroitly in it—is most compelling where it touches on much bigger and broader preoccupations in contemporary sociocultural research. the historical backdrop of italo and contemporary language use around it are one example of this; that is, that the milieu in which italo disco emerged continues to influence how italo is described. another important context, raised several times in the book, is that of nostalgia (131, 152, 156). articulating local language practices to much broader cultural concerns both validates the methodology and serves to pinpoint the cultural phenomena so identified. this becomes riveting at the points where music appears to shape language use, as when jóri observes regarding italo disco that [t]he characteristics of the music genre—expresses romanticism, emotions, affections, and sexuality—highly influenced the characteristics of the discourse … the group’s language use … showed an interesting tendency of ‘emotionally driven’ discourse (161). we cannot know from the data, and jóri does not conjecture on what mechanisms might “shift” emotional registers from music to discourse about it. nonetheless, this discussion of the interplay between language use and music—or the nature of multimodal interaction—is reviews 91 deeply significant, and resonates with a lot of preoccupations in the literature about popular music, and perhaps especially about edmc given its sometimes tangential orientation to lyrical meaning. similarly, the perennial questions about method and how to access, or how people report on, musical experiences are cast in fresh light by the work jóri conducts here. jóri’s book commands attention because of how it generates these kinds of insights, especially relative to more established music research methods (music criticism, interviews, fieldwork etc.). the discourse community of electronic dance music is methodologically rigorous, rich in empirical detail and speaks to much bigger debates in the scholarship on popular music and edmc. references herring, susan c. 2004. “computer-mediated discourse analysis: an approach to researching online behavior.” in designing for virtual communities in the service of learning, ed. sasha barab, rob kling and james h. gray, 338–376. cambridge: cambridge university press. <https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511805080.016>. stein, gertrude. 1937. everybody’s autobiography. new york, random house. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511805080.016 dancecult 14(1)92 dancefloor-driven literature: the rave scene in fiction simon a. morrison london: bloomsbury, 2021 isbn: 9781501389924 (paperback) rrp: £28.99 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.15> toby young guildhall school of music and drama (uk) as reviews editor of dancecult, one of the delights of my role has been discovering the wealth of ways that filmmakers around the world depict, interpret and critique electronic dance music culture through an artistic lens. until encountering simon morrison’s excellent book on dancefloor-driven literature i perhaps had not given the same credence to novelists for going beyond simple descriptions of club cultures, but as this delightful foray into the entangled world of prose and beats demonstrates clearly and effectively, fiction has produced as much considered and vibrant commentary on edmc as film, if not more. in his book, morrison sets out to explore this entanglement by mobilising sociocultural knowledge around the uk rave scene in the 1990s as a lens through which to analyse literary texts. he draws on three central uses of edm in fiction—figurative, mechanical and diegetic—as “ways in” to the texts, unpicking the multiple ways that authors choose to (re) present the sonic and haptic world of rave both in and through text. at its heart there are some central questions (or even tensions) which need resolving: “how might authors write about something so otherworldly as a nightclub scene? how might they write lucidly and fluidly about the rigid metronomic beat of electronic music? … [and how] might they accurately recount in fixed symbols the drifting, hallucinatory effects of a drug experience?” (61). morrison chooses to answer these rigorously and strategically by moving from the broad to the specific. beginning with the broad, the first half of the book (chapters 1-5) employs sub/club-cultural theories as points of disciplinary grounding to help define the terms and contexts at play. whilst a lot of this material is well-trodden in edmc scholarship, morrison presents it with an admirable deftness, and as he starts to introduce elements of literary theory in chapter 5, the more unique and interesting qualities of this work begins to reveal itself. for me though, it is in the second half of the book (chapters 6-9)—the literary case studies—that the book really comes into its own. beginning with irvine welsh’s seminal ecstasy (1996), a vivid picture emerges of authors not so much compelled to recreate or even aesthetically elevate the subterranean deviance of clubspace, as to revel in the messiness of it; to wallow in the rich, sticky potential of all those chaotic signifiers of excess and abandon and use this potential to radically redefine the literary canon. what comes across clearly from morrison’s writing is the richness and playfulness with which his case study authors both guide us, and are themselves guide by, the visceral reviews 93 expressionism of rave and club spaces; intertwining vivid descriptions of these hedonistic spaces with nuanced and layered narrative approaches that capture of even mimic the non-hierarchical and anti-teleological anarchy of repetitive beats. one beautiful example morrison shares is of jeff noon’s needle in the groove (1999) and the way his prose style allows the complexity and repetition of the music to almost infect his language, creating textures of language—a liquid dub poetics, if you will— that cleverly reflects the repeating, layering, sampling and splicing of sonic material. another interesting theme that emerges is the complex dependency on drug-taking imagery as a shorthand for depictions of power, hedonism and release. it is interesting how many of the novels that morrison discusses employ the postmodern storytelling strategies of “classic” partying writers (think the hazy multiplicities of william burroughs or the brutal clash between fact and fiction in hunter s. thompson) to invoke the paradoxical vigour and fragility of drug-taking. we see this tendency particularly clearly in morrison’s third case study on nicholas blincoe, whose chaotic fictional ethnography portray the acid delirium admirably. there’s something more general about technology and control in dance spaces that is strongly hinted at here, but perhaps not fully unpacked. i was reminded of the wonderful moment in china miéville’s bizarre urban fantasy king rat (1998)—a reimagination of the pied piper fairytale set in london’s breakbeat and dnb scene, not included by morrison—where the protagonist discovers that instead of merely spinning records, a dat with multiple layered flute samples loaded onto it is much more effective for controlling everyone in the club. omissions aside—i’d also want to include rainald goetz’s stunning avant garde novella rave (1998) here—dancefloor-driven literature is wonderful book, filled with both academic richness and personal joy. a particular strength of this book is morrison’s ability to dance between literary theory, thick description, journalistic interviews and unabashed connoisseurship with elegance and ease. intermediality, rather than translation, is at the heart of morrison’s approach, and where a lesser writer might have tried to pin the literature down into rigid theoretical frameworks and taxonomies, we are left with a beautiful sense of aesthetic awe and openness that has more than inspired me to go and read more fiction. highly recommended. historical emergence and current uses of the term­­ italodisco guglielmo bottin university of bologna (italy) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.08> since the early 2000s, italodisco has been rediscovered numerous times by new generations of djs, producers and clubbers, to the point of becoming a perpetual déjà vu. the t­erm italodisco can refer to a largely anthologized repertoire of both well-known and relatively obscure tracks (some of which are considered almost an archaeology of modern electronic dance music), as well as a tongue-in-cheek, openly kitsch approach to production that can be revived in the present to mimic a supposedly inherently italian version of 1980s dance and synth-pop. as a fully electronic, post-disco, but still pre-electronic dance music style, italodisco often appears in the literature when discussing its popularity among djs and pioneering musicians in the chicago and detroit club scenes of the 1980s, who were admittedly influenced by italian productions in the development of house and techno (sicko 2010; lawrence 2016). the cultural aspects and reception of italodisco have been discussed extensively, with a particular focus on an imagined and projected italian-ness from the outside, rather than a musical autochthony claimed by italian artists (magaudda 2016; kaspar 2020). such analyses are often made from the point of view of the subsequent revival and rehabilitation of italodisco, rather than from the perspective of its initial circulation, and usually do not discuss the historical use of the genre’s name. some scholarly accounts, including the one in the encyclopedia of popular music (conti and kirby 2017) have attempted to define and describe italodisco on a musical level, although most authors end up lumping together recordings from the late 1970s by producers such as giorgio moroder and la bionda (who worked within the munich sound production system) and conservatory-trained arrangers such as claudio simonetti, mauro malavasi and celso valli (who used highly skilled professional session players and vocalists), with the cheaper, programmed and “synthetic” dance music created in smaller studios in the 1980s, often by self-taught musicians coming from punk and new wave (bottin forthcoming-a). the latter corpus is stylistically indebted to both british new wave/synth-pop and high-energy, a disco subgenre originally inspired by moroder’s synthesizer-based eurodisco, but further developed in the usa by bobby orlando and patrick cowley (niebur 2022). adding to the confusion, italodisco is currently used in popular discourse and on streaming platforms playlists to refer to both old and new songs with italian lyrics produced in a funk, disco or post-disco style. it seems quite clear to me that a proper discussion of the term has yet to take place. in this article, i will examine its emergence and show how its meaning and use has evolved and multiplied in the present. looking at historical uses of the term, an often-told story is that the concept of italodisco was developed in germany in 1983 to market dj and club-oriented music licensed from italy. it is widely believed that the word itself was coined by bernhard mikulski, a polish immigrant who established zyx records in merenberg. in the early 1970s, mikulski operated as a wholesaler of foreign music, initially with a company named pop-import (kaspar 2020). in 1983, zyx released two compilations, the best of italo-disco (various 1983a) and italo-boot mix various 1983a), which are considered the first anthologies of the genre. earlier in the same year (according to catalogue numbers), zyx also released zyx mix–a special remix of high energy danceable stuff and synthetic dance music (various 1983b), which were also compilations featuring mostly italian productions. this suggests that the same repertoire was initially presented under different style descriptors. in german, the prefix italo is used in compound words to indicate a connection with the country or culture of italy, such as in italoamerikanisch and italowestern, the latter in reference to films that are known in the anglo-american world as “spaghetti westerns” (i will come back to the use of the qualifier “spaghetti” soon). however, the second half of the word italodisco may be misleading, as the music of the 1980s that zyx marketed as italo, was sonically very different from the disco music of the 1970s. it had no acoustic drums, soulful vocals, strings or brass sections; it was all electronic and programmed. for this reason, i prefer to use italo or spell italodisco as one word, since it is not merely shorthand for "italian disco music", as the hyphenated spelling italo-disco may seem to suggest. while the 1983 zyx compilations are often credited with being the first to use the term italo, as an index of some inherent italian essence or quality, a closer examination of the label’s catalogue shows that the phrase “original italodisco”, complete with the italian tricolour on the record cover, appeared in conjunction with dance tracks licensed from italy the previous year (fig. 1). figure 1. some of the 12-inch singles marketed by zyx as “original italodisco” before the italo-boot mix and the best of italo disco compilations were released. photo credit: guglielmo bottin (2025). these included the british-sounding, new wave ep girls on me by the roman band amin-peck (1982) which was simultaneously released in italy and in the uk; a rap version of david bowie’s “let’s dance” (kex 1983) produced in milan with vocals by caribbean-british singer glen white and mr. flagio’s cover version of “take a chance” (1983), originally by bill laswell’s nyc music collective material, produced in genoa by flavio vidulich and giorgio bacco. zyx also released italian-produced funk and soul music, such as flowchart’s “ask the boss” (1982) produced by davide romani and fio zanotti with vocals by african american singer alphonso thornton. "ask the boss" was apparently the first record to be marketed as “original italo disco”. the stylistic diversity of the music on zyx’s compilations suggests that, at least in the early 1980s, italodisco was not a defined musical genre. mikulski’s use of the term italodisco probably just reflects the fact that he licensed a lot of dance music from italy, which he felt the need to present as having some italian essence. nominal italianicity was often seen as commercially attractive, perhaps linked to stereotypes of good taste and genuineness, or the success of made in italy products in the fields of design and fashion. however, not all the singles licensed from italy by zyx were presented as italo (see table 1). cat no. artist title description 5017 flowchart ask the boss oid 5018 amin peck girl on me oid 5019 steel mind bad passion oid 5021 funk machine dance on the groove 5023 advance take me to the top oid 5030 kkk gang 5031 mr. flagio take a chance oid 5033 kex let's dance oid 5036 hypnosis pulstar oid 5038 moonbase waiting for a train oid 5040 steely chuck mcdonald dream 5042 gaz nevada i.c. love affair 5043 samoa park tubolar affair 5044 doctor's cat feel the drive oid 5046 scoop say you go 5047 smiles n. 1,4 / magnetic dance 5048 gianni pettenati bandiera gialla 5049 kex go go go oid 5050 faxe time for changes 5051 n.o.i.a. the rule to survive 5052 mike cannon voices in the dark 5053 kangaroo kangaroo 5056 judy b. love is just a game 5059 koto japanese war machine 5060 hipnosis oxygene/bormaz 5061 brand image are you loving 5066 sylvi foster hookey 5067 the d. light scratch your face 5068 styloo pretty face 5069 iudy the island of the sun 5073 samoa park monkey latino 5074 brando rainy day 5076 baby's gang happy song 5077 koto chinese revenge 5078 phaeax talk about 5079 den harrow to meet me 5080 flexx love them from flexxy-ball 5081 savage don't cry tonight 5082 video somebody (hey girl) 5083 cockroach get back 5084 body games stop love 5085 doctor's cat watch out oid 5086 digital game i'm your boogie man! 5087 philadelphia t.s.o.p. 5088 travel sex sexiness 5092 helen witch 5093 mark tower you aren't fall in love 5094 talko the hustle 5095 various (compilation) italo-boot mix vol.1 oid 20.029 various (compilation) zyx mix "high energy dance" 20.032 various (compilation) synthetic dance music 70.001 various (compilation) the best of italo-disco oid table 1. some of the italian disco tracks licensed by zyx in 1982-1983 were not initially presented as “original italo disco” (oid). moreover, it seems that the italo tag was not used much after release no. 5049. after the zyx compilations in germany, the term italo was picked up in other countries. benelux-based high fashion music published italo dance tracks in 1984 (various 1984a). in finland, k-tel released the compilations italian disco music (various 1984b) and hit line italo disco in 1984 and 1986 (various 1984b; 1986) (figure 2). figure 2. italodisco compilations released in the netherlands and finland around 1984-1986. photo credit: guglielmo bottin (2025). as italodisco songs quickly became popular throughout europe and beyond, they spawned foreign attempts at imitation. stephen hill (2024) recently compiled a partial list of 1980s imitators of the italo sound: fake (sweden), real life (australia), falco (austria), modern talking, bad boys blue and alphaville (germany), f.r. david and desireless (france). a largely overlooked scene that was stylistically similar to italodisco was the sabadell sound, named after the catalan city where it originated.[1] it is noteworthy that, until recently, italians did not refer to this genre of music as “italo”. before the rehabilitation of the genre in the mid-2000s, it was simply referred to as “dance-music” (d’agostino 1982) or “disco-dance italiana” (gedda 1984).[2] the term “spaghetti dance”, mentioned by some scholars (kaspar 2020; pitrolo 2022), was not common among italians, even though it was occasionally brought up by the national music press (as a reworking of the spaghetti western, a very familiar expression to their readers), in particular when reporting on the european success of italian artists such as mike francis or matia bazar (assante 1986; la stampa 1986). such recorded uses of spaghetti dance in the mid-1980s, although sporadic, are consistent with the hypothesis that the word italodisco was not adopted by the italian journalists until much later. in fact, it appeared in major italian newspapers such as corriere della sera, la repubblica or la stampa only around 2005, in articles about "electroclash" events associated with german djs and record labels like kompakt, k7! and international deejay gigolo (culicchia 2005; di rienzo 2005; torriero 2005). this shows that the revival and rehabilitation of italodisco from a massified genre that had little to do with 1970s disco and its underlying political message, to one whose appeal surprisingly “endures due to, rather than in spite of, its banality and cheapness” (pitrolo 2022: 77), took place elsewhere in europe before it was even recognised in its country of origin. going back a few years, the titles of some albums released in the late 1970s show that the idea of cosmopolitan-sounding yet somehow genuinely italian dance music predates the zyx releases of 1982 and 1983 (bottin forthcoming-b). in 1977, multinational label metronome released discoteca italiana (various 1997) a multi-artist anthology of italian disco songs; in 1978, disco italiano (ferrari 1978), a collection of dance re-arrangements of traditional and popular italian songs was released in north america. a similar project was carried out by italian trumpet virtuoso nini rosso and arranger vince tempera with italian discosound (rosso 1978), released also in greece, france, israel and canada. in 1979, the compilation italo top hits (various 1978) was distributed by k-tel in germany, austria and switzerland, showing how the prefix “italo” in the context of popular music was used in german-speaking countries well before 1983. figure 3. 1977–1979 compilations showing the idea of an italian disco sound and the use of the term italo predates 1983. photo credit: guglielmo bottin (2025). in the late 1970s a small number of italian conservatory-trained arrangers (such as mauro malavasi, celso valli, claudio simonetti and fio zanotti) jumped on the disco bandwagon producing songs and longer suites for the international market, often in collaboration with english writers and/or singers. faceless projects such as macho, change, tantra and recognizable performers such as la bionda, dd sound and easy going all enjoyed international success, but it was not until much later that such music was described as italodisco. at the time of their original release, the us press referred to these records as eurodisco or european disco (freedberg 1981; miles 1981), just as they did with german and french productions. in the 1990s, discomagic’s the golden age of italo dance (various 1991) and saifam’s italo disco golden hits (saifam 1994), were anthologies released by labels that worked closely with zyx and were familiar with the commercial appeal of 1980s italodisco. the first italian compilation that presented a selection of italo tracks as “underground” music is probably gianluca pandullo’s i-robots italo electro disco underground classics (various 2004). another peculiar attempt to anthologize “alternative” italodisco in the noughties was disco italia. essential italo disco classics (various 2008), released in 2008 by the british label strut records. the booklet has interesting liner notes and interviews, but the music selection comprises mostly disco, funk and boogie, not the electronic styles usually associated with italodisco. surprisingly, it also includes two french productions: the opening track by claude vallois and denis desrouvres (“tha kee tha tha”) and the closing one by étienne roda-gil and didier viseux (“maquillage”). it's unlikely, but possible, that the names of the french songwriters sounded a bit italian to the british compilers. perhaps their love of the music blinded them to its origins. in the 2020s, the word "italo" has become even more common, although its meaning has become increasingly blurred. currently, the term is used to refer to (at least) five rather different musical corpora: 1. electronic dance music and synth-pop, mostly produced in italy in the 1980s and sung in english (with few exceptions). the first anthologies were probably the ones released in germany around 1983. i personally refer to this historical corpus as “italo” or “italodisco”. 2. funk, soul and disco music produced in italy in the 1970s. early examples include marcella bella’s “nessuno mai” (1974) and her 1976 cover version of modugno’s neapolitan song “resta cu’mme” (originally from 1957).[3] other well-known ones include alan sorrenti’s “figli delle stelle” and ornella vanoni’s “ti voglio”, both from 1977. these songs had italian lyrics and were aimed at the domestic market. this may lead to naming this corpus with an italian expression: disco italiana. these artists and records initially lacked recognition abroad. however, some were later identified by international audiences since the early 2000s, driven by a growing interest in retro music. 3. late 1970s disco created by italian musicians but sung in english. these were producer-driven studio projects, typically recorded by hired session musicians rather than recognisable artists. with songs typically co-written by native english-speaking lyricists and by african american vocalists, they were made with an international market in mind. i refer to this genre as “italian disco” because it preceded the advent of fully electronic dance music made with sequencers and drum machines. this earlier iteration of italian dance music productions tried to match the disco sound that was coming out of the united states, germany and france. 4. recent dance music and synth-pop that tend to emulate the sound and lyrical/vocal style of 1980s italodisco. the emergence of a scene that could be termed neo-italo is connected to the resurgence of historical italodisco in the mid-2000s. this phenomenon is usually accompanied by the rediscovery of previously overlooked tracks from the past and the repositioning/re-semanticization of the italodisco style as authentic and spontaneous or even underground, in contrast to the perceived standardization and mainstreaming of techno and house during the same period (jóri 2022: 152). examples of neo italo include the berlin-based italian collective slow motion, the dutch labels moustache records, bordello a parigi, venti d’azzurro, the swedish studio project sally shapiro, the us imprint italians do it better and acts such as mind enterprises. 5. new pop-dance tracks with italian titles or lyrics, produced by both italian and non-italian musicians. this 2020s strain of (mostly european) house music usually does not attempt to imitate the italodisco sound of the 1980s but still plays with varying degrees of real or apparent italianicity. some even claim to continue a mythicised italian heritage of dance music, such as the italomania compilation series from the bavarian imprint toy tonics (the label name itself plays with another ethnic signifier: teutonic). although there is minimal overlap between the aforementioned repertoires, the terms i have proposed are far too similar and thus run the risk of confusion when used casually. nevertheless, an examination of the contemporary meanings of the term is essential for understanding the stylistic and temporal divergences observed in genre-specific playlists on streaming platforms and in emic discourse about what is currently considered (or passed off as) italodisco. most vernacular and journalistic discussions of italodisco tend to emphasise an alleged autochthonous quality, however difficult and problematic it may be to find or claim genuine ethnic or national essentiality in much western popular music. what is instead often overlooked is that italians were creating dance music with english lyrics and a cosmopolitan sound, deliberately moving away from the italian tradition. therefore, the perceived “italianness” of both 1970s italian disco and 1980s italodisco (straw 2008; magaudda 2016) is more often the result of a retrospective characterisation rather than something intended or infused by the artists when they were creating this music. the fact that the term “italodisco” was not commonly used in italy until the mid-2000s seems to confirm this. author biography guglielmo bottin is a lecturer at the university of milan and research fellow at the university of bologna. after graduating in psychology, he worked as a producer and dj, performing in over 30 countries worldwide. during his doctoral fellowship in musicology, he was a visiting researcher at the institute for music and media studies at the humboldt university, where he conducted a theoretical and ethnographic investigation of groove and machinic rhythms. he is a founding member of grid, a research group on italodisco. references assante, ernesto. 1986. “italiani, anzi, europei: cantano i matia bazar”. la repubblica, 25 october: 25. <https://ricerca.repubblica.it/ricerca/repubblica?query=amsterdam&fromdate=1986-10-25&todate=1986-10-25&sortby=score&author=&mode=any>, (accessed 6 august 2025). bottin, guglielmo. forthcoming-a. “problèmes d’amour: alexander robotnick’s italian post-disco anomaly”. in just can’t get enough: synth-pop and its legacies, ed. geoff stahl, nabeel zuberi and holly kruse. bloomsbury. ———. forthcoming-b. “the origins of italodisco”. in oxford handbook of pop music, ed. eric weisbard. oxford university press. conti, jacopo, and phil kirby. 2017. “italo disco”. in encyclopedia of popular music of the world, edited by david horn and paolo prato: 417–19. london: bloomsbury. culicchia, giuseppe. 2005. “il tocco di herr mayer”. la stampa, 3 november: 50. <http://www.archiviolastampa.it/component/option,com_lastampa/task,search/mod,libera/action,viewer/itemid,3/page,50/articleid,0245_01_2005_0300_0056_1890146/anews,true/>, (accessed 6 august 2025). d’agostino, roberto. 1982. “la via emiliana alla dance-music”. radiocorriere, june: <https://archive.org/details/radiocorriere-1982-25/rc-1982-25>, (accessed 6 august 2025). di rienzo, gabriele. 2005. “le ‘elettronotti’ dei supercrucchi”. repubblica torino, 15 april: 14. <https://ricerca.repubblica.it/ricerca/repubblica?query=supercrucchi&view=repubblica>, (accessed 6 august 2025). freedberg, mike. 1981. “r&b”. the boston phoenix, 29 december: 5. <https://archive.org/details/sim_boston-phoenix_1981-12-29_10_52>, (accessed 6 august 2025). gedda, alberto. 1984. “ormai la disco-dance italiana è una realtà affermata in campo internazionale”. stampa sera, 7 september: 17. <http://www.archiviolastampa.it/component/option,com_lastampa/task,search/mod,libera/action,viewer/itemid,3/page,1/articleid,1379_02_1984_0245_0017_19804743/>, (accessed 6 august 2025). jóri, anita. 2022. the discourse community of electronic dance music. bielefeld: transcript verlag. kaspar, paul. 2020. “italo disco. zwischen italienität und internationalität”. in one nation under a groove, ed. ralf von appen, 49–74. bielefeld: transcript verlag. la stampa. 1986. “francis e la «spaghetti dance»”. 27 march: 19. <http://www.archiviolastampa.it/component/option,com_lastampa/task,search/mod,libera/action,viewer/itemid,3/page,19/articleid,0989_01_1986_0072_0019_13524194/>, (accessed 6 august 2025). lawrence, tim. 2016. life and death on the new york dance floor, 1980-1983. durham: duke university press. magaudda, paolo. 2016. “un gioco di ‘specchi culturali’: popular music, italianità e la circolazione transnazionale dell’italodisco”. cinergie, 9 april: 94–102. <https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2280-9481/6876>. miles, milo. 1981. “off the record”. the boston phoenix, 12 may: 28. <https://archive.org/details/sim_boston-phoenix_1981-05-12_10_19>, (accessed 6 august 2025). niebur, louis. 2022. menergy: san francisco’s gay disco sound. new york: oxford university press. pitrolo, flora. 2022. “gimmick! italo disco, copy and consumption”. in global dance cultures in the 1970s and 1980s, ed. flora pitrolo and marko zubak, 75–99. cham: springer. sicko, dan. 2010. techno rebels: the renegades of electronic funk. detroit: wayne state university press. straw, will. 2008. “music from the wrong place: on the italianicity of quebec disco”. criticism 50 (1): 113–32. torriero, doriana. 2005. “ballando a cavallo di capodanno”. corriere della sera (roma), 30 december: 16. <https://archivio.corriere.it/archivio/interface/slider.html#!torriero-capodanno/nobwradghgtgpmaxga1nangdwpyccamyangac5waepszeualnltgaqdguadtvlbbnjabfalpa>, (accessed 6 august 2025). discography amin peck. 1982. girl on me. zyx records (12-inch): zyx 5018. <https://www.discogs.com/release/194013-amin-peck-girl-on-me>. bottin. 2009. no static. italians do it better (12-inch): idib 014. <https://www.discogs.com/release/1616100-bottin-no-static>. ferrari, gene & the disco roma band. 1978. disco italiano. sunrise music (2lp): sm-117. <https://www.discogs.com/release/492981-gene-ferrari-the-disco-roma-band-disco-italiano>. flowchart. 1982. ask the boss. zyx records (12-inch): zyx 5017. <https://www.discogs.com/release/372396-flowchart-ask-the-boss>. i-f. 1999. mixed-up in the hague. panama records (cd): pan-001. <https://www.discogs.com/release/17779-various-mixed-up-in-the-hague-vol-1>. irregular disco workers. 2014. italofficina. bordello a parigi (12-inch): bap 046. <https://www.discogs.com/release/7237405-irregular-disco-workers-italofficina> kex. 1983. let’s dance. zyx records (12-inch): zyx 5033. <https://www.discogs.com/release/347306-kex-lets-dance>. marcella. 1974. nessuno mai. cgd (7-inch): cgd 2407. <https://www.discogs.com/release/2801407-marcella-nessuno-mai>. ———. 1976. resta cu’ mme. cgd (7-inch): cgd 4303. <https://www.discogs.com/release/3161977-marcella-resta-cu-mme-impazzire-ti-far%c3%b2>. material. 1982. one down. celluloid (lp): 60206-1. <https://www.discogs.com/release/1263470-material-one-down>. mr. flagio. 1983. take a chance. zyx records (12-inch): zyx 5031. <https://www.discogs.com/release/34969-mr-flagio-take-a-chance>. problems, the. 2014. moustache italo anthem. moustache records (12-inch): mst 023. <https://www.discogs.com/release/5885581-the-problems-moustache-italo-anthem->. rosso, nini. 1978. italian discosound. sprint (2lp): lai 6023. <https://www.discogs.com/release/3607415-nini-rosso-italian-discosound>. sorrenti, alan. 1977. figli delle stelle. emi (7-inch): 8c 006-18307. <https://www.discogs.com/release/3085691-alan-sorrenti-figli-delle-stelle>. vanoni, ornella. 1977. io dentro/io fuori. vanilla (2lp): ovl 2008-2009. <https://www.discogs.com/release/11316237-ornella-vanoni-io-dentro-io-fuori>. various. 1977. discoteca italiana. metronome (lp): 60.703. <https://www.discogs.com/release/2487578-various-discoteca-italiana>. various. 1978. italo top hits. k-tel (lp): 1279. <https://www.discogs.com/release/9285137-various-italo-top-hits>. various. 1983a. the best of italo-disco. zyx records (2lp): zyx 70.001. <https://www.discogs.com/release/76104-various-the-best-of-italo-disco>. various. 1983b. italo boot mix vol. 1. zyx records (lp): zyx 5095. <https://www.discogs.com/release/34981-various-italo-boot-mix-vol-1>. various. 1983c. zyx mix (a special remix of "high energy danceable stuff". zyx records (lp): zyx 5026. <https://www.discogs.com/release/597796-various-zyx-mix-a-special-remix-of-high-energy-danceable-stuff?srsltid=afmboop_xityge0smf_gggqjmbwnyfqpyutcfv0rbqxvlwjeur5qmkt7>. various. 1983b. synthetic dance music. zyx records (lp): zyx 20.032. <https://www.discogs.com/release/821972-various-synthetic-dance-music>. various. 1983e. zyx mix (high energy danceable stuff). zyx records (lp): zyx 20.029. <https://www.discogs.com/release/3589567-various-zyx-mix>. various. 1984a. italo dance tracks. high fashion music (lp): 88.097. <https://www.discogs.com/release/323432-various-italo-dance-tracks>. various. 1984b. italian disco music. k-tel (lp): id-7050. <https://www.discogs.com/release/526963-various-italian-disco-music>. various. 1986. k-tel hit line italo disco. k-tel (lp): id-7109. <https://www.discogs.com/release/254616-various-k-tel-hit-line-italo-disco>. various. 1991. decadance the golden age of the italo dance. discomagic (cd): cd 546. <https://www.discogs.com/release/1072144-various-decadance-the-golden-age-of-the-italo-dance>. various. 1994. italo disco golden hits. saifam (cd): sm 104-2. <https://www.discogs.com/release/4558603-various-italo-disco-golden-hits>. various. 2004. i-robots italo electro disco underground classics. irma (2lp): 515186-1. <https://www.discogs.com/release/237059-i-robots-italo-electro-disco-underground-classics>. various. 2008. disco italia (essential italo disco classics 1977-1985). strut (cd): strut036. <https://www.discogs.com/release/1351088-various-disco-italia-essential-italo-disco-classics-1977-1985>. various. 2015. italian dance wave disco uno. slowmotion (12”): slomo 017. <https://www.discogs.com/release/6575916-various-italian-dance-wave-disco-uno>. various. 2024. italomania ii the new wave of italian disco. toytonics (2lp): toyt150. <https://www.discogs.com/release/31810859-kapote-presents-toy-tonics-italomania-ii-the-new-wave-of-italian-disco>. notes [1] more examples of non-italian italodisco are listed on <https://iventidazzurro.com/iventi-charts-magazines>. [2] in 1999, dutch dj i-f (a.k.a. ferenc van der sluijs) released the mixed-up in the hague compilation, including several italodisco tracks alongside 1980s us electro and hi-energy. [3] the song was covered by boney m and became a eurodisco hit under the title “take the heat off me”. marcella bella’s original version, on the other hand, can hardly be described as a “true disco record, as it combines many different styles: pounding rock drums (not four-on-the-floor), philly sound-inspired marcato strings, a very prominent lead synthesizer theme and an overly melodic bridge section. dancecult 16(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 16(1) 2024: 140–152 issn 1947-5403 ©2024 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net rude citizenship: jamaican popular music, copyright, and the reverberations of colonial power larisa kingston mann chapel hill: university of north carolina press, 2022.  isbn: 978-1-4696-6724-9 (paperback), 978-1-4696-6723-2 (hardcover) rrp: us$95 (hardcover), us$32.50 (paperback)  <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.16> aadita chaudhury york university (canada) / goldsmiths, university of london (uk) in rude citizenship: jamaican popular music, copyright, and the reverberations of colonial power, larisa kingston mann unravels the moral economies and legal copyright frameworks that inform and animate the ongoing evolution of jamaican popular music. mann’s intervention into the study of jamaican music and culture in this context is novel in multiple ways. existing approaches to theorizing jamaican popular music have contended with ways in which practitioners of the culture incorporate elements of embodied social knowledge (henriques 2011), challenge the dominance of a stratified system of social classes (cooper 2004) and create a sense of kinship with ancestral histories of migration and ritual practices (niaah 2010; stanley niaah 2008). mann’s approach presents an account of how jamaican musical cultures challenge dominant epistemologies about intellectual property and ownership based on colonial notions of enclosure—positioning the conditions in which jamaican popular music emerges in relation to global struggles against the loss of commons—ecological, economic and cultural. mann locates the legal framework of copyright as part of a wider set of colonial worldmaking apparatuses that create enclosures around popular music and culture, entangling them in regimes of ownership and intellectual property that most closely adhere to ideas of musical composition and creativity within a eurocentric framework of cultural production, centering specific individuals and collectives in isolation from their cultural milieu as auteurs. within the broader context of british imperialism in which jamaican popular genres like reggae, ska, dancehall and dub have emerged, there are additionally reviews https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.16 reviews 141 class, geographical and economic considerations of practitioners that contribute not only to the evolution of distinct musical styles but also to their legibility within the political economy of global music and associated legal regimes. mann’s most important and unique contribution to this growing literature on the embodied knowledges and epistemologies emanating from jamaican music’s ethos is linking the ways it challenges class and coloniality within jamaica to how the notion of “rude citizenship” (130, 177)—the sociocultural, affective, and embodied practices of poor jamaicans contrasted with the state-supported ideals of the elite classes—created “a kind of sheltering space where poor jamaicans can produce this relatively autonomous cultural life” (7). it is through this perspective of rude citizenship—which encapsulates how the jamaican poor resisted forms of coloniality by challenging certain white supremacist norms of conduct still affirmed by elites in jamaican post-independence society—that mann shows how anti-blackness and coloniality pervaded post-independence jamaica. even though “the state and its elite intellectuals (…) were at odds over the appropriate forms and distributions of power, they tended to remain more in agreement about cultural norms of conduct, reading the poor as ‘rude’ rather than as challenging coloniality” (9). accordingly, within marginalized spaces in jamaican society, popular musical cultures reflected the moral economies and embodied representations of various approaches to pushing back against state-enforced, anti-black understandings of personhood, creativity and conduct. these cultural practices present considerable epistemological challenges to dominant global orders surrounding the status of intellectual property and ownership when it comes to music, countering established notions of copyright law. when considered through the prism of notions of “rudeness” and rude citizenship as per mann’s articulation, we can begin to observe the impacts of persistent coloniality and anti-blackness in post-independence jamaica as broad, cascading forms that create the scaffolding in which jamaican popular music, legal mechanisms like international copyright law and notions of ownership interface and operate, each challenging the limits of the other. in this nexus, jamaican musical practices, regardless of their genre, represent part of a pluriverse in which traditional cultures of orality, notions of sonic commons that not only enable but also celebrate forms of hybridity facilitated by mixing and sampling practices and other embodied and aural knowledges—frequently demonstrate their continuous evolution and autonomy even as newer mechanisms of legal and physical enclosure emerge by engaging with and producing forms of musical composition that defy colonial constructs of copyright law. in this way, the musical forms, textures, pedagogies, and epistemologies that undergird the ethos of jamaican popular music continue to refract the moral economies surrounding the idea of “rude citizenship” within the domains of music and cultural production, legal regimes and beyond. jamaican popular music and dance culture, its technological innovations and migrating evolutionary trajectories will likely continue to lay significant challenges to the global hegemonic legal orders around creative composition, collaboration and ownership. dancecult 14(1)142 mann’s work in rude citizenship extends this inquiry well beyond the realm of music into broader conversations about coloniality, indigenous approaches to legal worldmaking and the nature of cultural production itself. by questioning the fundamental underlying assumptions in western conceptions of musical and sonic composition with examples from jamaican popular music, mann’s provocation in rude citizenship asks readers to question their understanding of auteurship, originality and notions of musical talent. references cooper, carolyn. 2004. sound clash: jamaican dancehall culture at large. 2004th edition. new york, ny: palgrave macmillan. henriques, julian. 2011. sonic bodies: reggae sound systems, performance techniques, and ways of knowing. 1st edition. new york: continuum. niaah, sonjah stanley. 2010. dancehall: from slave ship to ghetto. illustrated edition. ottawa: university of ottawa press. stanley niaah, sonjah. 2008. “performance geographies from slave ship to ghetto.” space and culture 11(4): 343–60. reviews 143 together, somehow: music, affect, and intimacy on the dancefloor luis manuel garcia-mispireta durham: duke university press, 2023. isbn: 978-1-4780-2008-0 (cloth), 978-1-4780-2504-7 (paperback) rrp: us$107.95 (cloth), us$28.95 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.17> rory fewer university of california, riverside (usa) luis manuel garcia-mispireta’s together, somehow: music, affect, and intimacy on the dancefloor adds an essential contribution to a limited yet gradually expanding body of ethnomusicological scholarship on electronic dance music cultures. through a multi-sited ethnography of house, techno and minimal dance music scenes in chicago, paris and berlin, the author evaluates the utopian potential of the dancefloor, illustrating the affective dimensions that generate its feelings of social cohesion as well as the ambivalence and exclusions that surround its possibility. in making its arguments, this book draws not only from interviews conducted with partygoers across these scenes, but also auto-ethnographic anecdotes and analytical frameworks from sound and affect studies. a primary focus of this book centers on how the dancefloor enables forms of intimacy between strangers that would otherwise be inappropriate in other spaces, a point illustrated early on with a memorable anecdote in which the author’s face was briefly caressed by a stranger while dancing at panorama bar in berlin, “an exchange of surprising warmth between strangers” (3). garcia-mispireta builds empirically from a range of anecdotes to make potent claims about these forms of “stranger-sociability” (5), including how conventions of touch in nightlife cultures serve the multiple functions of “communicating sociability, transmitting affect, and both sensing and navigating a crowded environment” (53). the author incorporates an extensive amount of musical analysis to argue that the affective qualities of corporeal exchanges on the dancefloor meet further intensification through the haptic qualities of electronic dance music. specifically, the distribution of frequencies in electronic dance music composition results in a type of material impact, described as “sonic spikes [that] strike the body in a very concrete way, eliciting sensations not only in the ear but also in the body’s skin, flesh, viscera, and bones” (70). electronic dance music genres often utilize sounds that index tactile experience, such as clapping or breathing, a practice which “rel[ies] on the ability of listener-dancers to associate certain sounds with an enfleshed sound source” (73). garcia-mispireta also provides a close analysis of musical texture to argue that electronic dance music makes use of granular sounds that likewise evoke tactile experience. this combination of vibrational impact, bodily indexicality and granular texture ultimately “invites an engagement with sound that is alive to texture, touch, https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.17 dancecult 14(1)144 and other fleshy excitations” (87). the book’s larger theories of togetherness are predicated on these affects as devices through which crowd solidarity is enacted or imagined. the author details these affective encounters of sonic and embodied proximities to theorize the vague sense of togetherness that the dancefloor produces. these affective encounters (articulated corporeally and musically) intensify in a process that the author calls the “thickening of the social” (124). thickening is a process whereby the imbrication of dancefloor affect gives initial coherence to a type of crowd solidarity. thickening results in a vague feeling of togetherness that the author explains through the concept of liquidarity, defined as “a form of fluid solidarity in which vagueness is a crucial condition of its emergence” (32). liquidarity is necessarily vague because in order to coalesce it must also obfuscate the power differentials that would deny its possibility. “vagueness” is thus used by the author as an analytic to effectively describe the contradictions that allow nightlife spaces to simultaneously contain forms of inclusion and exclusion, and which threaten to dissolve these “vague” feelings of social cohesion as they are inevitably problematized by the presence of partygoers with differential access to this solidarity, including, for example, partygoers who are disproportionately targeted by unsolicited touching or have differing cultural expectations for intimacy. the duality of this vagueness is most apparent in the final chapter, in which the author details door policies and the regulation of diversity as a “dissonance between a utopian desire for unproblematically inclusive collectivity and the practices of exclusion that help to make the experience of cosmopolitan conviviality possible” (215). for these reasons, liquidarity is a phenomenon that can only take fragile shape. as the author writes, it “sustains an intimate world on the merest whiff of sociability” (104). the ultimate objective of this intimate world and its utopian aspirations—the “something” as noted in the title of the book—are likewise vague. garcia-mispireta writes that they “provide a sense of what a utopia of postidentitarian belonging might feel like, rather than a coherent model of how it would function” (223). this book offers a novel contribution to ethnomusicological scholarship and will surely lend itself as an important resource for scholars and other readers interested in the global phenomenon of electronic dance music culture or studies on music and affect more generally. however, it is important to note the structural challenges that nearly made such a project impossible. this book is prefaced with a description of the obstacles the author met as a firstgeneration, queer scholar of color working on topics deemed “disciplinarily unconventional and low-prestige” (xv) by the institutions of ethnomusicology. as it offers a series of theories pertinent to understanding the ubiquitous communities of the “dancefloor”, this book thus also serves as a reminder to current and future ethnomusicologists of the structural changes required to ensure similarly profound work continues to reach fruition. reviews 145 out of space: how uk cities shaped rave culture (revised and expanded edition) jim ottewill bristol: velocity press, 2024. isbn: 978-1-913231-63-7 (paperback) rrp: £14.99 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.18> alistair fraser maynooth university (ireland) a friend of mine, breffni, tells a wonderful story about discovering rave culture in north western (nw) london, aged 17. out and about with friends one evening, he came across a spiral tribe free party in a warehouse in nw london. it was unlike anything else he’d known. it was music and a vibe, music and an embrace; a feeling, then, and one he continues to enjoy and chase after. today, after a few decades of raving, he’s employed to make urban places more liveable for all (and he’s successful at it). back then, though, it was the rave culture he discovered that went on to make the city liveable; it was rave culture that went on to make so many places and spaces of wonder, discovery and joy. uk cities since the late 1980s and early 1990s have been bound up with rave culture in profound ways. both the city and the culture have existed in relation to each other and to a wider array of places and spaces. those fleeting moments on the dancefloor, the randomness of meeting and hugging strangers, the chaos, the buzz—it all needed somewhere to occur and rave culture did manage to create those geographies. indeed, looking back at the story of rave culture, perhaps one of the most notable aspects was simply that the promoters, free party collectives, djs, sound engineers, new age travellers, ravers and clubbers found so many spaces to embrace each other. looking around now, it’s hard not to be worried about the future. what chance will our children have of making discoveries like breffni’s? a similar anxiety pervades out of space: how uk cities shaped rave culture (2024). in this expanded version of his 2022 book with the same title, jim ottewill takes the act of “looking around” to an elevated level. ottewill works his way across the country, from north to south, to ask the promoters, the originators and the djs who got things started and kept things going, to tell their stories. what we get out of this is a brilliant and rich historical geography of rave culture in the uk. we get insightful biographical details about the promoters and djs; rare nuggets about how clubs got started; and fantastic quotes that capture the vitality and energy—the love—that went into and came out of rave culture. out of space has ten core chapters. the bulk of them are dedicated to covering developments in glasgow, manchester, liverpool, sheffield, birmingham, london and other smaller cities and towns such as coventry and margate. chapters 7 and 8 focus on party and sound system scenes with fewer fixed ties to any particular place but with strong bonds to uk cities. then in chapter 10 and the concluding chapter, ottewill examines the contemporary struggle to find a place for rave culture in uk cities. https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.18 dancecult 14(1)146 the book has two standout features. the first is a justifiable sense of awe and respect toward the great many people who have dedicated so much of their lives to emplacing rave culture in uk cities. it’s been their task to find venues, bring in the crowds and deal with authorities or angry neighbours. it’s their labour and often their capital that’s generated the landscape of rave culture in the uk. out of space is a book that fist-bumps those people. it works. it’s a book with love and hugs. alongside the love, though, the second feature is an overriding sense of dread. ottewill has his finger on the pulse of rave culture in the uk. he’s spotting the novel ideas and experiments, such as community ownership models that try to counteract rising rents and the overall loss of space; and highlighting other efforts to battle the growing sense that rave culture is on the decline. yet, it is precisely the fact that rave culture is on the decline that jumps out from the book, especially in the final two chapters. this leads me to wonder if a weakness in out of space is that ottewill is too committed to rave culture. he wants to spot and discuss some of the ways that rave culture can keep going. he knows this means we need space. but to my mind, ottewill does not dedicate enough energy to asking if there is going to be enough of a commitment from younger generations to the making of spaces like clubs or other dancefloors. for sure, processes such as gentrification are a major source of pressure on clubs and promoters. regulations, insurance, health, safety and the wider institutionalization of cultural practice with respect to capitalist life also bear down on rave culture. but what about generational differences? thirty years or more have passed since breffni (and kids like him) discovered spiral tribe (and then, for breffni, bedlam and numerous other events and venues). today, though, a great many young people are on smartphones or playsations all day long. they’re updating their followers on instagram. they’re tik-tokking videos; creating, capturing, commodifying and sometimes cancelling culture in novel ways that just might not need the same sorts of spaces that rave culture needed. against this backdrop, to want clubs and raves to keep going—to seek out a space for them in the city—is one thing. but maybe we might need to accept that our kids won’t want to spend quite so much of their weekends bubbling around on an ecstatic ride in hot sweaty clubs, warehouses or other venues. one has to wonder if our kids will need the same spaces as rave culture needed. will they seek out the same sorts of life-changing or mind-altering experience that so many ravers desired? in short, maybe rave culture is running out of space; but maybe it’s also running out of ravers. these minor critiques aside, out of space is a fantastic book precisely because it can provoke debates about the past, present and future of rave culture. ottewill writes clearly, quotes the people he interviewed astutely and ensures the reader knows there they are relative to the rest of the book. it’s a brilliantly crafted text, demonstrating serious writing skills and drawing on an incredibly rich archive of material collected via first-hand interviews and other sources. my sense is that anyone interested in the rise, development and significance of rave culture will need this book. anyone fighting to keep the vibe alive should also get a copy. reviews 147 venue stories: narratives, memories, and histories from britain’s independent music spaces fraser mann, robert edgar and helen pleasance (eds.) sheffield: equinox publishing, 2023. isbn: 9781800504431 (hardcover), 9781800503731 (paperback) rrp: us$100.00 (hardcover), us$32.00 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.19> max gibson university of california, davis (usa) drawing together a chorus of individual voices, venue stories is a dynamic collection of creative non-fiction entries that speak on music, place, experience and community across british independent music scenes in the 20th and 21st century. in their curation of the chapters, editors mann, edgar and pleasance state that their mission was to “bring stories and remembrances together, add shape to them and develop a scholarly understanding of how we can offer an alternative mode of historiography through editorial processes that are akin to the role of the museum curator” (2). conceived and developed during the covid-19 pandemic, this is not the usual collection of formal academic essays, but instead a radical attempt at shining light on histories that are usually ignored, marginal or not considered serious enough; venue stories acts as a site of resistance to erasure through the creation of an archive of stories not usually told. utilizing autoethnography, journalism, historiography, essaying, interview and most importantly memoir, the authors create multiple narratives of hidden microhistories. creative non-fiction as a genre is increasingly common within academia, yet rarely does a collection come together like this that achieves its mission of illuminating histories through a multiplicity of voices, rather than the usual single-authored narrative. this approach is apparent when examining the variety of people in this collection beyond the familiar academic researcher: band members, djs, producers, journalists, bartenders, photographers and more. each contribute their lived experiences and perspectives, and having an eclectic roster makes for an enjoyable read. the shifts in writing styles take the reader from the depths of despair—over half the chapters end with the closure of cherished venues—to uncontrollable laughter—who would have thought the destruction of a bass guitar could be so funny? (69–77). yet this emotional journey is never at the expense of intention of the book. each account reveals a microcosm within a broader community, scene and history, where musical worlds are lived, embodied and reenacted through memory, and then relived through writing; the act of memory writing affords the network of microhistories to be acknowledged and remembered and serves as a way of expressing personal experience and embodied knowledge within larger structures. memory writing thus becomes an analytical methodology. https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.19 dancecult 14(1)148 venue stories contributes a great deal to the regional histories of music scenes and venues in the areas of birmingham, leicester, liverpool and london. places such as brighton, glasgow, leeds, manchester, sheffield, teesside, york and the north of england are also represented. each entry acts as a scratching of the surface of histories that have yet to be written, and thus could lead way to a book of each region or venue in question. many chapters engage with a single venue, most of which are on the toilet circuit. robert edgar theorizes on the concept of the toilet venue, arguing that they affectionately received their name from the bands and audiences who would come together as a community in seedy spaces full of mythic history (40–50). some of the mythic venues included here are the charlotte, eric’s, and the bull and gate. other authors, instead look inward, and focus on journeys of discovery, coming-of-age and personal troubles through their venue experiences. especially important is how these authors grapple with the politics of access and inclusion, particularly that of safety and economic parity. gender politics are prevalent in penelope wickson’s experience in the 1990s birmingham jungle scene where she describes a masculinist environment rife with sexism and inappropriate behaviour toward female participants (162–174); vim renault and lene cortina, of punkgirldiaries, outline their experiences as female band members in the world of punk, a global phenomenon famous for breaking with traditional norms, which afforded them opportunities usually unusual for women (78–87); and polly hancock’s memoir reveals promotional sexism during the hype indie night at the bull and gate, london (60–68). economic politics are present in anna maria barry’s contribution who explicitly points out that working-class talent is underrepresented across the creative industries, not just in live music (124–134). ed garland’s account of sitting on a bench in leicester’s the charlotte venue introduces the reader to the perspective and experience of music in venues from a position of sitting rather than standing and points to the rarely addressed issue of physical accessibility in live music venues (145–152). myriad genres and scenes are represented through venue stories, including heavy metal, hard rock, britpop, as well as indie and underground musics. whether a product of living musical memory or simply due to its global influence, the genre with the most references is punk and its cousins. punk memories act as the main undertow that bring venues to life. while not intentional, the narratives of venue stories, emphasize live music performed by bands; stories concerning electronic dance music and djs, however, do make up a small number of chapters. a striking entry is thomas jackson’s chapter on his punk-rock dj dad, whose experience as a working-class industrial worker-turned dj illuminates the not-yettold activities and histories of venues, towns and regions alike (238–247). a standout feature of venue stories is the ubiquity of musical materiality that is littered across nearly every entry; indeed, the editors point out that “[m]aterial culture, the imagination and the memory have equal weight in these contributions and how they are reviews 149 written” (16). whether it is zines, instruments, seating, pa systems, badges, clothes or multitudinous memorabilia, objects are imbued with experiences and memories, and while they might not resonate like a venue, they are valuable for understanding how material culture fits into broader society, musics and histories. it would be wonderful to see these materials brought together in an exhibit that complements the book. those seeking applications of academic theory will find a selection of authors who situate their experiences and stories of venues within analytical frameworks—ed garland’s application of julian henrique’s listening skin is masterful (148)—but readers should not expect it from every chapter. simultaneously, some might question the reliability and rigor of memory writing; the very act of working from memory elicits the possibility of inaccuracies. yet this is to miss the point of the book. many authors acknowledge the fallibility of memory as a caveat to their narratives and some even go out of their way to work with archival documents to crosscheck specific dates and performances—pleasance’s postscript one, is humorously enlightening (28). rich in content and histories, the many individual narratives in venue stories are woven together and offer a model for those working through creative non-fiction as a methodology for writing histories pertaining to music, place and experience. the hidden microhistories of individuals represent larger structures of culture and community and are afforded agency to speak; the very nature of this book is radically effective. dancecult 14(1)150 living at night in times of pandemic: night studies and club culture in france and germany anita jóri and guillaume robin (eds.) bielefeld: transcript verlag, 2024. isbn: 978-3-8376-6726-4 (paperback) |rrp: 42,00€ (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.20> jack mcneill university of york (uk) discourse around dance music cultures (dmcs) has reached a turning point; a crossroads where underlying tensions, inconsistencies, inequalities and critical questions have begun to simmer to the surface, demanding attention and discussion. since its inception, themes of utopianism and togetherness have dominated this discourse without questioning such a narrative’s relationship with individual and community actual experiences. scholars of and participants in dmcs alike will be all too familiar with the assertion that dmcs and their related subcultures report a dominant message: one of unity, togetherness and inclusion. while utopianism and escapism are critical to the creation of the other-worlds of dance music spaces (garcia-mispireta 2023; o’grady 2012), the complex, conflicting and everdeveloping politics of the dancefloor demand frank, direct and ongoing consideration. living at night makes a comprehensive attempt at this through the lens of paris and berlin’s club scenes after the covid-19 pandemic. during the pandemic and in the following years global political movements and changes in media discourse shifted both internal and external perceptions of dmcs. many (although naturally not all) global dance music communities and institutions began to question their practices, policies, interior structures, broader values and relationships with local and international communities. the cities that living at night deals with, have undergone this process in recent years. what this text does particularly well is use them as a site to highlight the potentiality for positive change through framing club culture as utopian, while at the same time recognising the complex realities of clubbing communities. it pulls into question narratives that have been broadly, and sometimes uncritically, accepted, highlighting inherent tensions within dmcs. while the focus is on paris and berlin, the work could be applied more broadly to dmcs across europe and, in some cases, globally. again, this is timely, joining other texts, such as luis manuel garcia-mispireta’s recently published together somehow, which go some way in addressing similar issues. the book is split into three sections. the first, “scenes and communities”, looks at questions of urban and community identity in dmcs, questioning some pervasive and oftrepeated discourses in dmcs in detail. frédéric trottier-pistien’s second chapter critically analyses the city-twinning of detroit and berlin and its consistencies and inconsistencies, https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.20 reviews 151 while sophia abidi methodically parses some, but not all, subcultural characteristics of participants in berlin’s dmcs. in the final chapter of the section, diana weis considers the tensions between subcultural expression and high fashion surrounding berlin’s club scene, and berghain in particular. the second section, “diversity and inclusion”, engages in much needed critical discussions around the tension between inclusion, exclusion, awareness and micropolitics in dmcs. xan egger, neo seefried and mascha naumann’s chapter exposes some internal tensions in the scene, concomitantly making the case of the potentiality and concrete utopias presented by queer dmcs. ines liotard furthers this discussion, shining a light on the historical development of queer club culture in paris, while diana raiselis discusses the potential and problematics of awareness policies and approaches in contemporary club culture post-covid. the final section, “social and ecological challenges for a sustainable culture”, looks at some of the pressing issues facing contemporary dmcs and the role that social and ecological responsibility and action plays. edna hernández gonzález writes engagingly about artificial light and the tension between nighttime and its economy. guillaume robin’s chapter provides insight on sense of belonging and meaning in dmc communities in berlin, providing interesting reflections on areas for future work, particularly with “migrant clubbing communities” (a term that robin sees as problematic). this is followed by max eulitz’ thought-provoking personal prose reflecting on a clubbing experience in kyiv, which, like in many chapters before, presents the potentiality of club spaces in adverse times. the book ends with an insightful and practical conversation between robin and katharina wolf, presenting contemporary work around the social, ecological and financial stability of berlin’s club scene. the level of self-reflection and criticality that such a text requires is evident throughout. but this is also a complex task and there are a handful of brief moments in the book that stray into the defensive, engaging with binary suggestions of what might be good or bad for the club scene, including some attempts to “debunk” common myths. there are other moments where arguments of high and low culture are invoked; arguments that often expose the fragility with which studying dmcs comes. but perhaps in a culture where multiplicity and difference form its fabric, positioning dmcs’ value in opposition to what might be considered “mainstream” is not always useful. nevertheless, it is important to make very clear that such arguments are few and far between, and do not consist full chapters. indeed, the work in living at night is most successful when it embraces the dmcs’ diversity; in the discussions around the otherness of dmcs and their opposition to hegemony, and how actors in the scene might negotiate that, while legitimising its existence without any suggestion of what might perceived as good or bad. since the pandemic, european dmcs have seen club closures, thanks to gentrification, and aggressive legislation that makes it more difficult for nightlife to survive (drevenstedt 2020; garcia-mispireta 2016). criticism is directed at dmcs, where the boundaries between utopianism and permissibility are blurred (garcia-mispireta 2023); where hedonism as resistance to hegemony and nightlife as freedom get caught up in complex and often problematic behaviours and attitudes. it is a testament to scholarship in dmcs dancecult 14(1)152 and living at night that researchers and members of its community can hold themselves and their peers accountable; refocus the lens on themselves and use insider and informed perspectives to report on pertinent issues. living at night turns the mirror on dmcs in europe, not to show the fairest of them all, but to reflect on its complexity, on the possibility of what utopia and hedonism have to offer in opposition to and harmony with the everyday, warts and all. references drevenstedt, lukas. 2020. “dimensions of club culture: learning from berlin”. in the new age of electronic dance music and club culture, ed. anita jóri and martin lücke, 9–20. cham: springer international publishing. garcia-mispireta, luis manuel. 2016. “techno-tourism and post-industrial neo-romanticism in berlin’s electronic dance music scenes”. tourist studies 16(3): 276–95. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1468797615618037>. garcia-mispireta, luis manuel. 2023. together, somehow: music, affect, and intimacy on the dancefloor. durham: duke university press. o’grady, alice. 2012. “spaces of play: the spatial dimensions of underground club culture and locating the subjunctive”. dancecult 4(1): 86–106. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.01.04>. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1468797615618037 http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.01.04 london dubstep culture in an online discord community: the mediation of bass, space and place dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 16(1): 51–71 issn 1947-5403 ©2024 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.04 london dubstep culture in an online discord community: the mediation of bass, space and place ivan mouraviev independent (uk) abstract what happens when a music scene’s spaces of performing, socialising and dancing— including venues, radio stations, record stores and internet forums—are reconfigured online? when the scene in question gravitates around extreme sub-bass and the sound systems that reproduce it, how exactly does that scene take shape on the internet? this article addresses these questions by presenting a digital ethnography conducted with real heads, a dubstep-centric music community on the social media platform discord established in 2019. the analysis focuses on a weekly broadcast of dj sets by real heads hosted on the livestreaming site twitch. i explore how this communal project, born out of covid-19, reworks the space and sociality of early or so-called “real” dubstep (when the genre first emerged in london in 2001–6) through inherited musical practices and regimes of subcultural capital, particularly from pirate and internet radio. in doing so, the article wrestles with the tensions between the (im) material space of the internet and the community’s investment in dubstep’s sonics, heritage and performance practices. i argue that real heads represents a novel form of dj culture that warrants critical attention, and ultimately show how the group’s online performances afford potent affective experience outside the physical space and visceral materiality of traditional sound system events: materiality that, at first glance, should be non-negotiable for “real” dubstep heads. keywords: dubstep, bass culture, space and place, materialism, dj performance, digital ethnography dr ivan mouraviev is a musician and independent researcher currently based in london. his thesis “towards a musicology of bass culture” (university of bristol, 2024) combines analysis with fieldwork to examine how djs in the dub diaspora leverage felt vibration and discontinuity to create affect, and ultimately challenge dominant interpretations of edm’s politics and aesthetics. he has forthcoming publications in the journal of popular music studies and performance research; additional research interests include video game music and global hip-hop. email: <specwrites@proton.me> feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.04 mailto:specwrites@proton.me dancecult 16(1)52 introduction what happens when a music scene’s spaces of performing, socialising and dancing—including venues, radio stations, record stores and internet forums—are reconfigured online? when the scene in question gravitates around “bass culture”, in all its materialist concerns with low-frequency vibration and the sound systems that reproduce it (as musicologist robert fink discusses), how exactly does that scene take shape on the internet?1 in this article, i address these questions by presenting a digital ethnography conducted with real heads, a dubstep-centric music community on the social media platform discord.2 specifically, real heads are a group of djs, producers and fans invested in the sounds, spaces and practices of early dubstep, from when the genre first emerged in london in 2001-2006 and was thriving in emergent social networks of the young internet, but had yet to be assimilated into mainstream edm.3 i chose to investigate real heads because, as an affinity group whose online sociality parallels that of early dubstep web spaces, it presents an ideal case study of bass culture on the internet. while real heads have diverse interests beyond dubstep, and neither is the community deliberately designed to replicate aspects of early dubstep, i will show how this parallel nevertheless emerges through inherited practices and regimes of subcultural capital (enabled by readily available historical sources about the genre online). these connections will primarily be explored in the context of fruit sessions, a weekly broadcast of dj sets by real heads hosted on the livestreaming site twitch that began during covid-19 and continues today as a valued social tradition.4 sociologist nick prior would term this “new amateur” musicianship done “to professional standards . . . without the infrastructural support or conventional credentials accorded to professionals” (2018: 343). i thus argue fruit sessions warrants critical attention both as a performance space that functions analogously to early dubstep radio stations, and in general as a self-organised community project enabled by the internet. in undertaking this analysis, the article will reflect on how sonic experience mediates community in online and offline space (though the ethnography does not venture into participants’ home studios). it will also wrestle with the at-times contradictory materialism of bass culture, the growing literature around which is criticized by fink for eulogizing low frequencies as “exemplary”, “ethereal” and having “more reality” than others, providing “little practical information about how bass culture actually works” (2018: 89–90). “in the final analysis”, writes fink, “the ‘sound’ of the sub-bass is a timbre of no timbre, a tone whose expressive effect comes largely from that which we cannot hear […] we must understand bass as culture” (2018: 112). while i heed this call, i also contend that doing so need not preclude examining both the music and its social mediation. dubstep and fruit sessions offer a valuable window into this topic and its imbrication with the (im) materiality of the internet. the article will proceed as follows. i will first outline the practical and conceptual aspects of the study, including a discussion of the relational nature of space and place in the digital mouraviev | london dubstep culture in an online discord community 53 ethnography. the next section will situate real heads in its wider context as one of several dubstep-centric online communities formed over the last decade, partly in reaction to the mainstreaming of the genre and its transgressing of bass culture’s materialist ideals. i will then detail real heads’ structure and sociality, noting the central role that early dubstep heritage plays in the community’s exchanges of subcultural capital. finally, the article will explore fruit sessions as a case study in online dubstep performance that connects this study’s interrelated threads. online spaces, networks and ethnography my ethnography with real heads consisted of four months of participant-observation in may-august 2022, and 9 semi-structured online interviews conducted up to may 2023. i kept a detailed diary and observed life in the community in three settings: discussions of dubstep in any context, the oversight and social environment of fruit sessions and the dj performances in fruit sessions itself. i recruited interviewees to depict a broad crosssection of the community in terms of how long they had been a member. each interviewee also had at least some experience performing on fruit sessions and could be considered an active member, which i defined as participating in any discussion more than once a week. i joined real heads in march 2020 in the wake of covid-19, but only became an active member in late 2021. this was ironically when britain’s social distancing restrictions were being lifted. i felt motivated to re-invest in being a dj for the first time since the pandemic and thus looked to discord as a space to share work-in-progress tracks and keep up with dubstep, as someone with few personal connections in the scene—an experience i learned was not uncommon amongst real heads. i gradually became more involved in the server’s communal projects such as fruit sessions and made my researcher status known. this process helped establish trust, and once fieldwork began it provided me with a valuable insider view of social and musical activities as a practicing dj in the community. building trust also meant that the boundaries between research and leisure were productively blurred. for example, i lived in bristol for the duration of the ethnography, and within weeks of becoming active i was invited to a mix session by another bristol-based member, shortly after which i performed as a guest dj on their radio show and attended a local club night with members from elsewhere in england. these experiences gave a more rounded view of the community’s dj culture and underlined the extent to which the project was a form of “fieldwork at home”, where working with and being a member of real heads became mutually influential rather than a conflict of interest (stock & chiener 2008: 110). approaching real heads as a fieldsite, it became clear the community was (and remains) a complex network of people, platforms, music and ideas rather than a singular online space. for example, fruit sessions were organised internally within discord but broadcast publicly on twitch with a different chatroom environment, and they entailed musical practices inherited from london pirate and internet radio stations. the leisure and labour of the community also often spread to spaces on reddit, facebook, instagram, soundcloud, dancecult 16(1)54 bandcamp, youtube and other edm-specific discord groups. these platforms were integral to how members shared links to music, informally exchanged knowledge and promoted their creative outputs as new amateur musicians. each site blurred together in a “polymedia” environment: a terrain that digital music researcher blake durham finds is marked by increasingly homogenous audiovisual and social affordances rather than technological features that truly distinguish one platform from another (2018: 148). to understand these relations, i drew on the work of communications scholar jenna burrell, who lends precision to the notion of “the field”—difficult to define even in offline ethnography—by treating research sites as networks comprised of overlapping, changeable relations (2017: 56). burrell’s foregrounding of networks reflects an emerging consensus in online ethnography, in which scholars such as christine hine argue that the internet is an “embedded, embodied, everyday” phenomenon rather than distinct “virtual” world, though engagement through spatial metaphor remains important (burrell 2017: 53).5 as daniel allington and colleagues also find, the “ostensibly ‘placeless’ medium” of the music streaming platform and social network soundcloud—a vital tool for real heads and other bass music communities—tends to reflect offline geopolitical inequalities, a reminder that online networks always have material roots (2015: 211). early dubstep: origins and transformation since its inception in early 2000s london, dubstep has been a subculture almost exclusively about bass, tethered to the practice of reggae sound systems. dubstep emerged from the reinterpretation of garage and house grooves into swung, syncopated beats known as 2-step, which london producers such as el-b engineered with minimalist textures that cut vocals and other instrumental layers to foreground bass and percussion. this stoked a multiracial albeit male-dominated “dark” garage scene with big apple records (1992-2004) in croydon being a hotspot (martin 2015). steve goodman, critic and dj-producer under the name kode9, heard the transformation of 2-step into dark garage as analogous to the remixing of reggae songs into bass-forward dub instrumentals that began in 1970s jamaica (see veal 2007: 51). goodman subsequently coined the term “dub step” (marlow 2014). dubstep is thus less a direct descendant of dub than it is a kind of convergent evolution in studio methodology and musical logics, spurred by decades of jamaican music’s influence on uk club culture (melville 2020: 53). dubstep producers reconfigured 2-step into mixes intended for levels of bass amplification not typically available in clubs, distributing their music via exclusive acetate records known as “dubplates” (veal 2007: 52). the subculture revolved around live events (especially club night fwd), local cultural hubs (such as big apple), a handful of radio stations (such as pirate rinse fm) and online communities (martin 2015). in turn, space, both real and virtual, was an important dimension of early dubstep: artists sought to carve out space for bass in both recorded mixes and on the dance floor as the genre developed with an online-offline geography. mouraviev | london dubstep culture in an online discord community 55 as dubstep coalesced as a genre and became increasingly popular, the tipping point in its mainstreaming was january 2006. dj mary anne hobbs hosted a show on bbc radio 1 titled “dubstep warz” featuring several dj sets by leading artists from the south london scene (bbc 2006). thousands of listeners re-distributed “dubstep warz” and exposed the genre to a global audience via myspace, diy mix archive site barefiles, the recently founded youtube, dubstep forum (dsf) and other smaller fora (fintoni 2018). when dubstep warz was initially announced on dsf, the forum was already approaching a total membership of 10,000. the announcement stimulated a feedback loop that built initial anticipation for the broadcast, during which hobbs shouted out “all the crew posting on dubstep forum”, with dsf then seeing a surge in new activity in the following weeks (akingbehin 2020). dubstep warz catalysed a process that would not only transform dubstep but also spur the development of the north american “edm” industry (d’errico 2015). this process impacted popular musical culture to such an extent that in musicologist mike d’errico’s assessment, electronic music after dubstep warz constitutes a “dubstep era” (2015). by the late 2000s, artists such as britney spears began capitalising on dubstep in chart music, british djs including skream and benga began playing to sold-out arenas and north american “edm” artist skrillex became the face of dubstep internationally upon releasing his first ep (d’errico 2015). in these contexts, the stylistic and spectral composition of dubstep was radically reinterpreted and became known pejoratively as “brostep”, reflecting a perception that the music’s aesthetics invoke hypermasculine aggression and are popular among young, male “frat-bro” audiences (d’errico 2015). skrillex, among other producers, popularised a “maximalist” aesthetic of timbral and melodic complexity that was a far cry from the aesthetics of artists associated with british label dmz (such as mala and coki), who emphasised sub-bass pressure, harmonic stasis and space in the recorded mix (d’errico 2015). as a 2009 dsf post summarised, to “real” dubstep fans, brostep sounded like an “unpalatable mush of midrange madness” and “pissing contest” between “edm” participants hungering insatiably for ever-filthier bass drops (spacer 2009).6 however, british dubstep was also a scene dominated by men, and dance music ethnographer christabel stirling observed that mainstream “edm” festivals saw dubstep audiences approach gender parity for the first time (2016: 142). no brostep allowed: “real” dubstep discourse and communities online dubstep’s sensationalised transformation in the “edm” industry has had a lasting effect on djs and fans committed to the genre’s subcultural roots. the arrival of brostep and “edm” became the “constitutive outside” against which real heads, and communities like it, define themselves online (born 2010: 221). more than mere posturing between fans, “real” dubstep discourse offers a window into what happens when the mainstreaming of a genre also entails “treblification” that threatens its sonic materiality and, thus, identity (marshall 2014: 44). dancecult 16(1)56 during the 2010s, online communities converged on a shared understanding of “real” dubstep in opposition to brostep, with the distinction between these categories routinely debated.7 the term “real” dubstep was established in 2011 with the founding of the reddit community r/realdubstep at the height of brostep’s popularity. the forum’s description lists canonical british artists and labels such as skream and dmz as a guide to what is deemed acceptable for discussion. “this is a community about dubstep music and culture. the sounds that come from the fusion of break beat, 2 step garage, dub reggae and more. . . . if you’re looking for the dirtier side of dubstep, please check /r/dubstep.”8 the designation of a genre as more “real” than another is not entirely lost on the community, with one member, for example, writing: “i get it, your genre was bastardised, but . . . [you’re a] bunch of old wankers trying to tell everyone how to act and police their music tastes”.9 a range of communities similar to r/realdubstep were established on facebook in the 2010s, such as shitty tune share for us wastes who like dubstep (known as shitty dubstep), memeplates at roughly 139.6bpm and dubstep vinyl collectors. shitty dubstep closely resembles the long-form asynchronous discussions housed in dsf and real heads’ mixture of informal and formal sociality. alongside memes and in-jokes, users share new dubstep releases, discuss current issues in the scene and promote their own dj sets. they often hyperlink to a wider ecosystem of youtube channels such as getdarker, who upload rare mixes and early dubstep ephemera. unlike r/realdubstep, however, these facebook groups only tacitly imply their relationship with “real” dubstep as part of a wider regime of subcultural capital.10 in shitty dubstep, this manifests as the stipulation “no brostep” in the group description, and dubstep vinyl collectors is largely self-selecting since mainstream dubstep releases tend to circulate only via digital formats. by contrast, the “139.6bpm” in memeplates plays on dubstep’s conventional tempo of 140 beats per minute (bpm), a niche reference that targets the tendency for “real” dubstep enthusiasts to be music producers and djs with a technical—and at times pedantic—understanding of the genre. defining “real” dubstep “real” dubstep certainly functions as a discursive mechanism by which fans (often selfrighteously) distinguish their tastes online, but how do these communities make sense of the category musically? as the r/realdubstep description indicates, “real” dubstep is generally defined as music adhering stylistically to the british dubstep canon, though in practice, it tends to be more precisely defined in opposition to brostep. brostep producers are criticised for their preoccupation with broad-spectrum synthesised timbres that detract from or downplay sub-bass, and that performed live, do not require speakers capable of extreme low-end amplification. as one dsf member in the above-cited thread writes, a “real” dubstep experience is about feeling a “rumble in your chest . . . if there aint no sub bass in the tune and it kinda just wails away on midrange . . . its gonna be hard to get that same effect” (spacer 2009). this reference to felt vibration and frequency bands is crucial because it highlights how brostep’s mid-range stylistic elements make it significantly more mouraviev | london dubstep culture in an online discord community 57 audible on earbuds and other listening media with a limited bass response, making the music accessible entirely outside of clubs. yet “real” dubstep is difficult to divorce from its performance at live sound system events and the jamaican dub-reggae traditions that power them (marshall 2014: 63). “real” dubstep’s insistence on felt bass thus emerges as a partly political response to the appropriation of a black and multicultural genre by predominantly white (though mixed gender) audiences in north america. nevertheless, “real” dubstep is laden with contradictions. dubplate records are prized to the extent that their significance exceeds their materiality. the genre can be about subcultural exclusivity as much as it is a pursuit of tactile sonic experience. if the music no longer requires expensive, labour intensive specialist sound systems to make bass audible, is it dubstep at all? this perspective was raised in my interview with nate, a dj-producer and moderator of real heads who, asked to define dubstep as a bass culture, emphasises “the hardware that you need to make loud, low waves. and then the ways that you can turn that up to eleven”.11 this does not make dubstep incompatible with the “treble culture” of mobile and internet listening, however (marshall 2014). several interviewees recalled discovering the genre online at an early age before attending sound system dances or listening with audiophilic gear was possible. for example, sir ebral, an occasional fruit sessions participant, remarks that “i had no clue” dubstep was bass-centric: “i was one of those listening on my laptop speakers. . . . i still do it now. . . . as long as everything else pleases my ears, i know the bass will be fine”.12 dubstep livestreamed through a project like fruit sessions today is thus an evolution of this story that warrants critical attention, which i will turn to shortly below. being a real head: dubstep heritage and subcultural capital some notes on the community’s structure and how discord works are helpful at this juncture. first is size and intimacy: real heads houses a wide range of members and discussions, but the core of the community is small and tight knit. as of 2024 there are 900 members, mostly young men living in countries including puerto rico, new zealand and india, though the majority are in europe, the uk and the us. about 100 members are active and approximately 20 interact daily. the group, or server in discord’s terminology, is private, meaning new members can only join through a direct invite from an existing member. active members often address each other by their real names, flowing freely from chat about life to debates about politics or dubstep. about a third of all members are electronic music djs and producers, some of whom perform regularly, sell records and go on tour; but practically none told me they pursue music full-time, or could earn a living doing so. nevertheless, these members altruistically share information on music production, djing and entrepreneurship. a smaller group arranges in-person meetings at raves in the uk a few times a year. this level of closeness is not necessarily atypical for niche groups on discord, but it differs substantially from the more anonymous, asynchronous sociality found in “real” dubstep groups on reddit and facebook (ng & gamble 2022). dancecult 16(1)58 discord servers are organised by textand voice-based channels, with most of real heads’ interactions occurring in the former. users can embed links, gifs, emotes and files, and create nested threads and forum channels organized by topic. this makes discord a hybrid social media platform that combines the peer moderation and ephemeral nature of channel-based instant messaging with the asynchronous interaction and communityoriented features of forums like dsf. in real heads, the channel structure (managed by a small team of moderators) creates a diverse set of spaces in which members engage in often collaborative and reciprocal exchanges such as fruit sessions. the main channel is #heads-speak, a loosely music-focused lounge that is also the landing area for new members. below #heads-speak in the user interface are ten narrower discussion channels. the most important of these are #music-share, #mix-share and #new-releases, channels dominated by members sharing links to tracks, albums and playlists. this behaviour plays a powerful role in individuals’ expression of their identity and subcultural capital, occasionally blooming into fleshed-out conversation about dubstep or other genres. also important are #productionchat and #show-off-tunes-and-feedback, where members discuss production strategies and work-in-progress tracks, respectively. in #events, members either share recordings of club nights they have attended or arrange in-person meetings at upcoming events. for djs, #sync-or-spin is dedicated to organising fruit sessions and general dj chat. a #dubsteplore channel also hosts exchanges about early dubstep’s history a few times a month. when i ask interviewees “what does it mean to be a real head?” there is little consensus. the owner of the server, kar, states he chose the name real heads as a joke, a view borne out by the responses of other interviewees and the ironic use of similar terms in other dubstep communities.13 yet during fieldwork it became clear that knowledge of and appreciation for “real” dubstep unites members, as part of the community’s wider regime of subcultural capital. a sentiment of “no brostep” is the invisible rule governing new members that they must discover on their own, where brostep and north american “edm” are excluded through social enforcement. having some personal investment in “real” dubstep is, therefore, a soft prerequisite for participating in the community. a striking manifestation of this social environment is visual. the server’s icon by which users can identify it in discord’s interface borrows directly from big apple records, a fondly remembered record store in croydon, south london that played a pivotal role in the 1990s “dark garage” scene from which dubstep would emerge a short time later (big apple records 2020). when a new member joins, they are greeted with a screen showing the server’s icon in the centre, lifted from big apple’s cartoonish banana peel logo. a photograph in the background shows a group of dubstep djs and producers (see fig. 1 and fig. 2 below). taken in 2006 at third base, the venue where the influential dmz club night was hosted, the photo is a who’s who of the british dubstep canon (clark 2008). these images immediately communicate a particular sense of place; you are entering a record store-like online hang out for “real” dubstep heads. mouraviev | london dubstep culture in an online discord community 59 figure 1. big apple records’ logo (left) and its former storefront (right). photo credit: big apple records (2022). figure 2. the real heads splash page shown to new members. dancecult 16(1)60 in our interview, nate relates the server’s iconography explicitly to “secret knowledge”, framing the banana as basically a dog whistle . . . from the outset, someone who joins the server is going to see that . . . [and] either they’re gonna know what it is or they’re not. that’s quite a large part of the identity of the server i think.14 nate is surprisingly plain here in stating that being a real head is about belonging to an exclusive subculture, though this perspective is not universal. lacu, for example, a frequent fruit sessions participant, suggests in our interview that the server’s network of relationships can be understood as analogous to what big apple did for early dubstep. “[it’s] a community of like-minded people who support each other, who help each other learn. . . . when one person gets a platform . . . they’ll promote the other people from the server, use their tunes [in dj sets]”.15 this comparison to big apple is significant given the prominent role it plays in real heads’ iconography, and because big apple indeed sustained a network of musical relationships, diy projects and radio-centric dj culture not dissimilar to that facilitated by real heads. big apple’s archival material on facebook shows that it was a laddish, homosocial and racially mixed social network. dj hatcha worked behind the counter and was a tastemaker in the fledgling dubstep scene in the years approximately 2001-2004 (martin 2015). he attracted djs from local pirate stations to the store, mentored younger artists such as skream and would play their latest dubplates at influential club night fwd. garage producer artwork, who worked in the studio above big apple and also mentored artists there, summarises: “we were all making records for hatcha to spin and meeting in the record shop to discuss the sound. . . . it was a bit like a bass university” (2010). the networked space of real heads reconfigures this social environment into a flatter hierarchy—enabling a wider range of djs, producers and listeners to interact and collaborate—though it has not always been welcoming. a pointed illustration of the community’s enforcement of “real” dubstep authenticity occurred in early 2022. kar had added real heads to third-party indexing websites such as disboard, which allow the public to browse servers by category and join even if a server is invite-only. this led to a temporary but unusually large influx of new users who, in seeing real heads listed as a dubstep community, joined on the assumption that dubstep’s mainstream manifestations would be welcome. although the community has never had a formal initiation process (some servers ask new users to introduce themselves after agreeing to rules, for example), what resulted was a tongue-in-cheek hazing in #heads-speak where established members would ask what kind of dubstep new members liked. when they responded, predictably, by sharing music that fell outside “real” dubstep, this was viewed as an irredeemable faux-pas and they were made unwelcome. some real heads preferred a compassionate approach, with nate, for example, remarking in our interview that “if they obviously don’t know the unspoken rule of what kind of music is ok . . . then i’m not going to tell them that their music’s shit”.16 lacu similarly shares that he dislikes the “snobbery” of some resolutely antibrostep real heads.17 by contrast, zane, also a regular dj on fruit sessions, argues new mouraviev | london dubstep culture in an online discord community 61 members have a role to play in respecting the intentions of the server: it’s your job to take the time to assess the situation . . . if you’re not going to . . . look at some other links that people have posted recently and get an idea of what the community’s like . . . then i think you deserve to be made fun of.18 “where bass matters”: fruit sessions and performing dubstep online every sunday, a small group of real heads hang out on the livestreaming website twitch to enjoy performances by members of the community over a few hours. this weekly ritual is named fruit sundays as another play on the big apple logo, and given the broadcasts are publicly accessible, they function effectively as an online radio station. in dubstep, garage, jungle and related uk club genres, stations such as the internet-based sub fm and the (now licensed) pirate rinse fm have provided important space for djs and their audiences since the 1990s (macpherson 2014). sub fm’s tag line “where bass matters” attests to how a particular sense of sonic materiality and shared space is central to these stations’ communities.19 moreover, in the context of grime, musicologist alex de lacey shows how they have fostered collectivity for a “black counterpublic” in response to decades of overpolicing and exclusion from public spaces and dominant channels of distribution (2021: 201–2). i argue fruit sessions is an internet-specific evolution of this vital performance tradition in british bass culture. new amateur djs draw on the practices of early dubstep pirate and internet radio and in turn reconfigure these stations’ sense of place. yet they also relocate the illicit and decentralised social networks of earlier radio forms to the digital platforms of discord and twitch, where bass culture encounters new social contexts and modes of performance that scholars have only recently started to interrogate. structure, context and values of the project fruit sessions began in early 2020 as a creative outlet for djs and a social event for the community during covid-19. the project was initiated by nate, who explains that it evolved from a simpler, jukebox-like listening activity within discord. the sound quality of these sessions was poor and nate envisioned the server hosting a series of live dj sets instead. he established a twitch channel describing the project as a community committed to underground bass music and real dubstep, inviting viewers to participate as djs and join real heads. as the project continued into 2021 and became a weekly fixture it settled on a standardised format still in use today, equivalent to an open mic. up to six or seven djs each perform a one-hour set (usually from home), with broadcasts running from approximately 18:00 to midnight gmt. any member with the necessary equipment and internet connection can participate by putting their name forward in #sync-or-spin. to arrange a broadcast, someone—often but not always a moderator—posts in the channel a few hours or days in advance to check the number of willing participants. during fieldwork, there were approximately ten regular dj participants and up to 20 other members who regularly joined dancecult 16(1)62 as viewers. less than three available djs usually meant that week’s broadcast was cancelled. there was no requirement for broadcasts to be recorded, although djs increasingly decided to record and archive their sets online, sharing recordings in #mix-share or #sync-or-spin the next day. djs performed on a range of formats, with some opting for vinyl or vinyldigital hybrid sets, though most participants used digital players (cdjs or midi-based controllers) given the prohibitive cost of records. in interviews, the question of whether and how the project was promoted beyond real heads and its significance to participants during the pandemic prompted lively discussion. small promotional efforts were occasionally made, and some sessions in 2020 were especially popular, reaching an approximate peak of 50 viewers. nevertheless, nate explains that growth was not a goal; the project was initially only “a lockdown thing” aimed at members who missed being able to go out to raves.20 this is corroborated by zane, for whom fruit sessions was “a great community thing that helped a lot of people when they couldn’t hear live music and see their friends”.21 lacu similarly enjoyed fruit sessions because “it felt like connecting with people. . . . i was home all day with no job because i was furloughed. . . . [then] i found a community of people who were into the same music as me”.22 fruit sessions also entailed advantages for participating djs musically. nate, for example, describes how it was an opportunity to practice regularly before an audience: “it was just a way to keep djing to people, not just to myself, [and] have a bit of feedback. that made it enjoyable”.23 relatedly, for lacu, a productive tension arose in knowing the audience consisted mostly of his peers: it almost to an extent feels like you’re playing in front of people, even though you’re not. . . . you would start to get a little bit nervous . . . because they were peers and you know that . . . the only people that are watching are other djs who dj the same music as you. it’s not like it’s just a bunch of punters having a drink sitting on their phone or talking to their mates. . . . like, if they’re watching it, they’re watching it, generally.24 zane echoes these perspectives, describing how fruit sessions facilitated both community and musical experimentation: i’ll very freely play my new music not necessarily knowing if it’s going to work. . . . i think it’s a good environment to test out new tracks, obviously throw in some old ones, and have a bit of a reaction in the crowd . . . it’s just fun. . . . . a bit of practice, bit of community.25 thus, fruit sessions developed during 2021 into an established tradition enjoyed by a small subset of real heads as an informal, social practice arena, likely explaining why it continues today despite the lifting of covid-19 restrictions. another notable aspect of fruit sessions is the tension between the project’s liberal oversight and social-musical internal policing in the community. individual creative choices are generally respected, as zane suggests in the freedom he has to experiment with genre. longer-term members and more experienced djs also enthusiastically encourage mouraviev | london dubstep culture in an online discord community 63 beginner djs and newcomers to play on the broadcast, often emphasising that addressing the audience with a microphone or camera is not obligatory. attesting to this, in 2022, another member named sir ebral and i performed live online for the first time on fruit sessions; we continued to perform monthly throughout the year. to a lesser extent, freedom extends to the musical content of dj sets, in that there is rarely formal gatekeeping of genre. uk club mainstays including garage, dub, dubstep, jungle, drum ‘n’ bass and genres on the periphery of this continuum like house, techno and footwork are all played regularly. however, real heads being a dubstep-centric community means dubstep is the focus of most performances, and the musical programming of fruit sessions is therefore to some extent governed by self-selection. the unspoken etiquette, of course, is “no brostep”, which djs are likely to be familiar with because they must already be members of the server to participate. nate elaborates: when we started . . . we just booked people, so to speak, who were . . . going to play the stuff that we considered to be the in-group of tunes. ‘cause there definitely is boundaries to the scene, particularly surrounding the history of brostep and dubstep. i guess we have had a couple of people play some brosteppy stuff. . . . but we didn’t really gatekeep them exactly. we didn’t tell them, you have to stop playing this stuff. but in the chat people would be like, uh, cringe [laughs].26 5 for the reload: internet-mediated sonic intimacy it’s fruit sessions on a sunday and axle is in the mix. he is playing a hybrid set using mostly vinyl and a few digital tracks. there are ten viewers, with three or four heads hanging out in the chat, sharing occasional reactions to the stream. the record currently being played—j:kenzo’s “ruffhouse” (2011)—is familiar to “real” dubstep fans, and axle has cued another record on the left turntable. we reach the breakdown of “ruffhouse”, a dj-friendly 16-bar section amenable to blending with other records, consisting of a thin texture with only hi-hats and a plucky synth ostinato. axle slides up the fader for the left turntable, bringing the new record gradually into the mix. the newly entering melody creates a bubbling anticipation. it is instantly recognisable as the lead synth line of leftlow’s “cluedub” (2019), with its wobble envelope filter, triplet quaver rhythm and descending stepwise pitch contour all borrowing from canonical early dubstep producer coki. axle has timed the entry of “cluedub” perfectly, with the 16 bars before its drop section overlapping exactly with the 16-bar instrumental breakdown of “ruffhouse”. this mix is suggestive of the technique known as a double drop, where the climaxes of two records are synchronised, typically with the bass line of one record filtered out. but axle instead opts for the straightforward route, fading out “ruffhouse” immediately before “cluedub” drops and hits like a truck. the synth melody is now pitched down and doubled, running at a mid-range and sub-bass register. a hyped reaction in the chat is imminent, although instead of words or emotes, the crowd simply enters one number: “5”. a few more 5s stream in, and as another user types the twitch text command “!5”, a customised chat bot for the fruit dancecult 16(1)64 sessions channel is also triggered to send the phrase “⚠ 5 ⚠ 5 ⚠ 5 ⚠”. having faded out “ruffhouse” and completed mixing these two records, axle turns away from the decks and toward his laptop, seeing a flood of 5s in the chat. he knows exactly what is happening: the crowd is calling for a rewind. axle turns around to stop “cluedub”, scratching it back and forth to punctuate the moment before re-cueing the record to be played from the top. the preceding passage is a narrativized excerpt from my observations as a fruit sessions viewer during fieldwork in june 2022. this moment captures a typical sunday night broadcast, and effectively illustrates how “5 for the reload” has been a cherished tradition in dj-audience interaction in dubstep radio since the early 2000s. as the excerpt shows, listeners ask the dj to rewind the record by simply stating “5”—or many 5s if the energy of the moment demands it—using the chat function of an internet station, or less commonly by sending an sms to the phone line of a terrestrial station. the rewind is a central dj technique in bass culture that primarily enacts moments of sonic rupture and catalyzes further improvisation (henriques 2011: 165).27 it is therefore unsurprising that “5 for the reload” has been adopted in other scenes such as grime. nevertheless, the practice is particularly well-regarded in dubstep and arises in contexts like fruit sessions because of its inception in the gourmet beats radio show hosted by north american dubstep pioneer dj joe nice. journalist laurent fintoni addresses this in a cultural history of the rewind, noting how “5 for the reload” came about spontaneously during one of joe nice’s shows on sub fm. “i don’t remember what tune i was playing,” joe recalls, “but the chatroom was going crazy, and i said, ‘i need 5 for the reload’ expecting to see the word [rewind] five times in the chat.” instead, [audience member] dave q went straight for the number. “i just put in a ‘5’ and that was an instant rewind. it became the thing that you just write ‘5’ if you want a pull up.” (fintoni 2015) this origin story is significant given sub fm’s importance in real heads. since its inception in 2004, the station has shaped the careers of dubstep performers like joe nice and served as a training ground for aspiring djs in the scene (including other real heads members and me). sub fm was established in london by garage dj whistla—incidentally also a member of real heads—who notes that his experience of organising (and performing on) pirate stations in the 1990s directly informed his founding of the station (clark 2009). a snapshot of sub fm’s website from 2010 describes the station as “a community of likeminded people who love bass music” and, despite being a legal internet station, invokes pirate radio as a marker of legitimacy and subcultural capital with the tagline “giving you the best in online pirate soundz”.28 this nested connection to “pirate soundz” is noteworthy because the likely predecessor to “5 for the reload” is a similar practice developed in the 1990s on pirate radio. as media scholar matthew fuller notes, a flurry of calls dropped after the first ring would act as a code to djs that listeners wanted a rewind (2005: 50). for fuller, this ritual made the audience-performer relationship tangible, drawing both parties out of abstract airwaves and into a shared grounded place, even if the illegal, ephemeral mouraviev | london dubstep culture in an online discord community 65 nature of pirate radio meant stations were never rooted in the same location for long. he writes: the message is not so much that people simply want to listen to the track but that they are out there, that the listening is being done collectively, that there is hype about a certain track, and . . . a system of feedback and production to intensify it. (fuller 2005: 50) it is precisely this feedback system that came alive in fruit sessions moments like the one illustrated above. as such, “5 for the reload” can be productively brought into dialogue with the sonic materialisms of bass culture, which media scholar malcolm james theorises as “sonic intimacy” (2021: 16). in a recent monograph, james explores the pirate radio media ecology of london’s 1990s jungle scene, notably echoing fuller in identifying “hype” as the relational state of feeling that pirate radio engendered for its participants ( james 2021: 56). jungle pirates helped people feel “they were known and heard by others . . . in a fractured and sped-up society”, argues james (2021: 65). hype assumed multiple forms, from listeners “feeling the rave” in their living room and djs gauging the presence of listeners through shout-outs, to crews savouring the rush of ending a broadcast unscathed by authorities (2021: 74). in the early millennium, stations such as rinse fm mediated similar experiences for the dubstep and grime scenes (macpherson 2014). james, however, is pessimistic about the dominance of digital media and the internet as distribution channels in the late 2000s. he explains how, at least in grime, the proprietary “closed-circuit” designs of mobile phones and youtube diluted the “expression of craft and illegal diy” formerly present in jungle, limiting experimentation and displacing the collectivity of pirate radio with the individualized pursuit of view counts (2021: 102, 89). hype was transformed into cold agonism as grime producers also adapted to the “trebly” output of mp3s and phones by engineering bass lines in higher octaves with thick compression, foreshadowing the reinterpretation of “real” dubstep as brostep that arrived shortly after (marshall 2014: 62). the performance of “real” dubstep on fruit sessions today does not fit neatly into this narrative. certainly, for djs broadcasting safely and legally from home via twitch, the stakes of hype are lower. the locality of pirate radio and its illicit shared labour is watered down in the reach and anonymity of the internet, with chest-rattling bass unattainable in most participants’ studios. the racialised geography of london and pirate radio’s concomitant fostering of a black counterpublic is also a less material concern for a largely (though by no means exclusively) white group of bass enthusiasts online. yet the real heads community nevertheless embraces this performance space and its seemingly diluted, trebly materialism, finding sonic intimacy in an unlikely format. why? i suggest the answer lies in fruit sessions manifesting a different kind of hype, shaped by early dubstep’s entanglement with the internet and stations such as sub fm. this observation is underscored by the sociality of the rewind in the context of a streaming platform like twitch. for example, i found that the vitality of “5 for the reload” was brought to light by its absence during quiet broadcasts, when only a few djs were available (often because of members’ family or work commitments) or the chat room was inactive (because dancecult 16(1)66 those performing simply had not captivated listeners). there was an unspoken ethos in this regard where most djs would only rewind a track if they registered 5s from at least two different chat participants, as with the axle example above. in fact, this invisible threshold of dj-audience intimacy is embedded in joe nice’s anecdote about how “5 for the reload” came about: the listeners serendipitously misinterpreted his demand as a request to type the number 5, although joe’s intention was, seemingly, to instead sense the crowd’s size and energy as though it were a face-to-face set. in other words, he wanted at least five people to ask for a rewind, otherwise it would not have been appropriate to perform one. the sonic intimacy engendered by “5 for the reload” invites critical reflection on how the internet can act as a tool for musical dissemination and create space for new creative practices in unexpected ways. in a state-of-the-field column written shortly after dubstep warz aired, clark comments on joe nice’s stage presence as a dj, noting how he would “motion to the crowd for reloads (using his own terminology, “5”)” even at in-person shows (clark 2006). this reveals an unexpected line of influence where “5 for the reload”, a practice specific to internet radio, was already spilling over into club performance early in the history of dubstep. this offers a new perspective on the long historical relationship between technology and “liveness” in popular music; as philip auslander theorises, live performances have come to replicate their studio-recorded counterparts over time (2008). “5 for the reload” can thus also be understood within a broader continuum of net-native musical practice that includes subcultures like the exclusively online vaporwave, where, as georgina born and christopher haworth show, “the net itself becomes central to the creative practices defining the genre, acting as shared horizon of meaning, content medium, production studio, and means of distribution” (2018: 605). in this brief case study of real heads, music also emerges as a potent mediator between several overlapping scales and modes of space. the hype of early dubstep’s pirate and internet radio stations in postmillennial london comes alive in joe nice’s in-person and online performances, in turn becoming integrated within “real” dubstep practice and manifesting over a decade later in the internationally distributed network of fruit sessions. as stirling finds in her ethnography of audiences in dubstep and other dance musics in london, djs in real heads articulate a “merging of ‘imagined community’ and physical reality” mediated by sonic experience (2021: 131). this underlines, in turn, the radical potential of black diasporic bass cultures such as dubstep. the shared experience of felt vibration, shaped by socially embedded tastes and the contingencies of live performance, facilitates “ways of knowing” space through sound (henriques 2011: 121). this knowledge exceeds what cultural theorist kodwo eshun calls “big p politics” to become “sensual/sensory politics” (2006: 294). conclusion this article has weaved together digital ethnography, analysis and theory to examine how the sonic culture of “real” dubstep is mediated by online space. real heads inherit and reconfigure early dubstep practices and spaces, which converge in fruit sessions and mouraviev | london dubstep culture in an online discord community 67 represent a new kind of dj culture mediated by digital platforms. whereas marshall posits “treble culture” as a “suggestive foil” to bass culture, in dubstep, rather than existing in a paradoxical relationship, bass and treble culture emerge as co-constitutive. given early dubstep’s online-offline geography, the discursive negotiation of its genre boundaries and its circulation in online spaces has been integral to its identity from the beginning. beyond this, the real heads community illustrates how the internet also allows for the sonic materiality of a staunchly bass-obsessed subculture like dubstep to involve potent affective experience even when it is mediated by layers of digital platforms, mobile devices and lossy audio compression. my analysis of the internet-specific practice “5 for the reload” shows, in this regard, how livestreamed dj performance can afford a sense of co-presence and hype despite operating outside the visceral materiality and physical space of live sound system events. at first glance, this materiality should be non-negotiable for “real” dubstep heads. bass culture on the internet, especially in the context of platforms like discord and twitch, remains underexplored territory in popular music studies, and i hope to have offered some insights and productive paths forward for future research. acknowledgements a huge thank you to the admins, mods and community overall for welcoming me and my project, and to stim gamble for your insightful feedback on an earlier version of the article. notes 1 bass culture is best understood as emergent from a network of genres—sometimes referred to with the contested term bass music—that value live performance in the tradition of reggae sound systems, and tend to engage with black diasporic styles, traditions and ideas. as fink explains, bass culture is “a virtual archipelago of thumping musics situated along . . . the african diaspora”, including dub, hip-hop, british club music, latin american dance genres and more, which “come together in a culture of musical resistance predicated on the ability to dominate collective spaces with large quantities of low-frequency sound” (2018: 88). 2 the community’s name has been changed to protect its anonymity, but the intended meaning, that the group is a space for authentic bass music fans, is preserved. 3 a definitional note: i use edm throughout to denote electronic dance music in general. this is distinct from “edm” as it has developed in the north american music industry over the last fifteen years, where the acronym refers to a cluster of locally popular genres influenced by dubstep. i will use “edm” in quotation marks to refer to the specific north american formation, in line with leading scholarship. see, for example, garcia 2015: 73, note 2. 4 i have also renamed fruit sessions for privacy while maintaining its intended meaning as a play on the banana in the logo of big apple records, a croydon store influential in early dubstep. 5 relatedly, i deliberately describe this study as an online ethnography to avoid the baggage of “virtual” (which best describes immersion in video games and similar media), “digital” (which dancecult 16(1)68 does not necessarily denote internet activity) and other terms such as business researcher robert kozinets’ “netnography”, not typically used in the humanities (2015: 6). 6 spencer details these perspectives and their gendered dynamics in his thesis about dubstep on the internet (2020: 17–23). 7 see, for example: <https://www.reddit.com/r/realdubstep/comments/ay3qqy/what_is_the_ line_between_true_dubstep_and_brostep/>, (accessed 12 october 2024). 8 see forum description at <https://www.reddit.com/r/realdubstep/>, (accessed 12 october 2024). 9 see <https://www.reddit.com/r/realdubstep/comments/k3r31/just_curious_but_what_is_ the_difference_between/>, (accessed 10 march 2023). 10 these unspoken relationships affirm the dynamics of subcultural capital observed decades ago by sarah thornton in british club scenes, revealing “real” dubstep’s longer historical trajectory (1995: 24–27). 11 nate, interview with the author (on zoom), 29 may 2022. 12 sir ebral, interview with the author (on zoom), 4 march 2023. 13 kar, interview with the author (on zoom), 28 may 2022. 14 nate, interview with the author (on zoom), 29 may 2022. 15 lacu, interview with the author (on zoom), 16 march 2023. 16 nate, interview with the author (on zoom), 29 may 2022. 17 lacu, interview with the author (on zoom), 16 march 2023. 18 zane, interview with the author (on zoom), 27 march 2023. 19 see <http://www.sub.fm/>, (accessed 12 october 2024). 20 nate, interview with the author (on zoom), 29 may 2022. 21 zane, interview with the author (on zoom), 27 march 2023. 22 lacu, interview with the author (on zoom), 16 march 2023. 23 nate, interview with the author (on zoom), 29 may 2022. 24 lacu, interview with the author (on zoom), 16 march 2023. emphasis added. 25 zane, interview with the author (on zoom), 27 march 2023. 26 nate, interview with the author (on zoom), 29 may 2022. 27 these qualities of the rewind are detailed in de lacey’s study of dj performance practices in grime (2023: 83–84). 28 see <https://web.archive.org/web/20100825194646/http://www.sub.fm/>, (accessed 15 october 2024). references akingbehin, richard. 2020. “ancient memories: revisiting dubstep forum”. 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https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/27/jungle-garage-and-grime-20-years-of-rinse-fm https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/27/jungle-garage-and-grime-20-years-of-rinse-fm https://www.fabriclondon.com/posts/hyperdub-archive-21st-century-skank-the-haunting-of-uk-garage-2001 https://www.fabriclondon.com/posts/hyperdub-archive-21st-century-skank-the-haunting-of-uk-garage-2001 https://www.vice.com/en/article/9bgm5e/an-oral-history-of-dubstep-vice-lauren-martin-610 https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v27i6.12338 mouraviev | london dubstep culture in an online discord community 71 spacer. 2009. “brostep”. dubstep forum, 4 october. <https://www.dubstepforum.com/forum/ viewtopic.php?p=1432779>, (accessed 10 march 2023). spencer, edward. 2020. “the drop and the fall: an investigation of bass music”. phd thesis, university of oxford. stirling, christabel. 2021. “sonic methodologies in urban studies”. in the bloomsbury handbook of sonic methodologies, ed. michael bull and marcel cobussen, 115-40. london and new york: bloomsbury. ———. 2016. “’beyond the dance floor’? gendered publics and creative practices in electronic dance music”. contemporary music review 35(1): 130-49. <https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1176772> stock, jonathan and chou chiener. 2008. “fieldwork at home: european and asian perspectives”. in shadows in the field: new perspectives for fieldwork in ethnomusicology, ed. gregory barz and timothy cooley, 108-24. 2nd ed. oxford; new york: oxford university press. thornton, sarah. 1995. club cultures: music, media and subcultural capital. cambridge: polity press. veal, michael. 2007. dub: soundscapes and shattered songs in jamaican reggae. middletown: wesleyan university press. discography j:kenzo. 2011. “ruffhouse”. track a on ruffhouse/therapy. tempa (12-inch). tempa 062. <https://www.discogs.com/master/650189-jkenzo-ruffhouse-therapy>. leftlow. 2019. “cluedub”. track a on cluedub/boa/cluedub (skeptical remix). system (12-inch). systm 026. <https://www.discogs.com/release/13321407-leftlow-cluedub-boa-cluedub-skeptical-remix>. https://www.dubstepforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1432779 https://www.dubstepforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1432779 https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1176772 https://www.discogs.com/master/650189-jkenzo-ruffhouse-therapy https://www.discogs.com/release/13321407-leftlow-cluedub-boa-cluedub-skeptical-remix an old school stomper: reflections on place, identity, and drugs and the fluctuating roles of the participating ethnographer sarah raine university college dublin (ireland) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.12> subway city, birmingham (summer 2012) i find a space in the main room of the subway city, a subterranean venue occupying the cavernous inside of bricked arches, opening into an industrial, rough-and-ready outdoor area.[1] finding space to dance is not hard, as most people are clustered by the diy bar or smoking outside. we haven’t arrived that early, driving up from oxford and walking into this all-night event around 11pm. without warm bodies pressed against me, it feels wrong, and although the high tempo bass vibrates the air around me and familiar breaks structure the set, it is already not the hard house experience of my teens. looking around, i am unsurprised to find that the fluffy boots, the complex uv hair adventures and the handmade outfits of the early to mid 2000s hard house scene are also absent from this rather monochrome bunch milling around the space. my fluffy boots—hand-sewn and rancid from club floors before the uk smoking ban—are long gone, unceremoniously binned before i left for university, the other pieces surviving a little longer, reinvented for parties. all that remains stylistically are my boxing boots, light and comfortable enough for a whole night of dancing. and as ever, i am here to dance. it takes some time to warm up physically and emotionally, exposed as one of few dancers on the floor and fuelled by an energy drink alone, but eventually a familiar sample brings me back to some core movements. as i get into the beat, i use the space around me, returning to old favourites, the tight arm shapes, sharp head and shoulder dips, stomping legs (dominant on the right, but consciously using the left for variation of direction), beginning to throw in a few twists. 15 minutes later, i am completely in the music and anticipating the breaks and the build ups, when someone taps me on the shoulder. “have you got anything?” ripped from the music i am confused and take a moment to look at the stranger and wonder what they want. “no, i don’t”, i finally respond, realising that—based upon my dancing—they think that i am on drugs and may have some to share or sell. i did learn to dance like this on a variety of stimulants, and perhaps next to the basic marching stomps of the smattering of dancers around me, i do look like a good bet for someone hoping to buy on the inside. it is sound logic, i suppose. a sober (or even drunk person) could not or would not dance like that. with a little shrug, i return to dancing, but after fifteen minutes or so the dj changes and the music moves into hard trance, away from the bouncy camp of hard house and towards longer ethereal breaks, unsuited to my dancing. i head to the bar and watch as more people begin to arrive. the nearby pubs and bars are beginning to close and subway city offers well-oiled revellers the club stage of their night out. leaning against the bar waiting my turn in brightly coloured leggings, i stand out amongst the allsaint greys and blacks. and whilst i am probably only a couple of years older than most of these people, i feel generationally removed. now in my late-twenties, i am already an older member of a multigenerational scene, separated by my colours and my dancing, by my memories of how it used to be: an old school stomper. as a (lapsed) insider, i experienced this and other nights like it as indicative of cultural change and changes in my own embodied experience. with insufficient evidence for any scholarly claim for cultural change, in the piece that follows i focus on my own embodied experience—from chemically heightened to comparative sobriety—consciously avoiding the term “nostalgia”. instead, i turn to place, placemaking and work that attempts to consider the role that drugs play in embodied experience and what this might mean for our current and remembered spaces of dancing. storm at the emporium, coalville, leicestershire (summer 2003) having driven from derby—the five of us crammed into a decidedly shabby hatchback—we arrive in coalville late in the evening light of a british summer. not raining, but grey skies still blanket the shabby streets, unnoticed by clubbers eager to get in early and stay until the sun rises again. we join the long queue for the door, a sense of slight unease as we remember the little twists of cheap speed secreted in fluffy boots and bikini tops, yet we all get through with a nod of the head. once inside, we move from this queue straight into another and wait to check our flimsy jackets and bags into the coatroom. we only need a little cash for a water bottle to be refilled with tepid bathroom water, and perhaps a digital camera, if you wish to document the wide-eyed, sweaty antics of the night ahead. club veterans, if only 17 years old, we pace ourselves, taking pre-wrapped speed bombs in the toilets and making sure that we are all safe. the press of heat, colour, noise, base-y smells escaping from our collective pores is a potent cocktail, an instigator as we all come up, pupils widening, heart rates increasing, euphoria and energy mounting as our bodies clamour to move. and together we do, finding a small space on the crowded floor, with no time nor self-awareness for tentative engagements, but rather a cascade of kinetic energy as your body does what the music tells you. and we dance for what seems like days, finding new ways of shifting from one footwork type to another, or picking up something new from other dancing bodies, small revolutions in movement that will be retained even if the rest of the evening becomes misty and vague. a break is enforced—by a slight sub-genre change, the need to pee, a friend suggesting another bomb—and it’s back to the bathrooms. the “ladies” are filled with all folk: people in fake fur skirts, cropped tops, wings, wigs—it is colourful and queer, gender fluidity the norm, the cotton candy camp of hard house and funky house creating a strict tribe separate from the wide-eyed skinheads in the scouse house room.[2] the task done, we cool down—water on wrists and necks—and seamlessly engage in deep, meaningful conversations with strangers on clubbing, life and love, organically filtering back into the room to continue our momentary friendship or to drift apart again, reuniting enthusiastically later in the night. making sense of disjointed place(s) my hard house places of the early and mid-2000s were, even at the time (and since remembered), black box spaces, primarily locations for dancing, divorced from the wider outside world: temporally, culturally, aurally, socially. when i started clubbing at the early age of sixteen, hard house clubs were not spaces of prohibition or controlled access.[3] drugs were not used out in the open of the dance floor, but taken in bathrooms, secreted into the club. they were, however, ubiquitous. perhaps reflective of a drug-focused music scene, each social interaction was warm and easy. i do not remember one edgy interaction with a stranger, although i was not keen on seeing the vacant eyes of clubbers in a k-hole (see riley et al. 2009) or having to deal with the friend who always went too hard too soon. these were explicitly queer and fluid places, safe spaces of experimentation, which existed, floating within a named city, but—as i would later discover—critically divorced from my future engagements with those cities and even buildings. as i returned to dance in the 2010s, and again as a phd researcher and resident of birmingham until 2021, i struggled to equate the imposing and somehow now-commercialised civic buildings and the dank, cold industrial labyrinths with the queer cocoons of my colourful clubbing memories, changes in demographic and ethos (and perhaps my comparative sobriety, too) stripping the remembered warmth from these places. my engagements with, experiences of and attempts to map clubbing places are in constant flux. whilst the physical place remains the same, the embodied place may be entirely different and at times unrecognisable to the clubber, particularly to those, like me, who have returned. by extension, my mental maps of cities are not linear and cumulative, but rather combative and messy, created through half-remembered or chemical-tinged adventures, lying detached from its actual geography. the embodied and social experience of drug taking—or the move to comparative sobriety—also adds an additional messy layer to this sensory experience of place. beyond these struggles with (re)experienced place, i have also begun to consider these experiences and questions in relation to my more recent ethnographic engagements in dance-focused communities. if my experiences are now so different due to my comparative sobriety, what can we say about drug use and the ethnographic experience? this is particularly relevant to our invocations of embodied experience within musical places through our published writing, especially within our fluctuating positions as the participating ethnographer. as a fresh-faced doctoral student, a sober engagement with research was an institutional requirement, made without question or comment. but as an emboldened (and slightly cantankerous) research fellow, i now reflect upon what may be lost without more nuanced and reflexive considerations. place, drugs and the ethnographer whilst not until now a part of my academic writing, these reflections on experience, place, clubbing geographies, community and indeed drugs have long since been central to my ruminations on ethnography. in 2012, i moved into a very different dance-focused music scene: northern soul. and in 2015, i began a three-year ethnographic doctoral study of this retrospective and multigenerational community. much was different, from the strict etiquette of the northern soul space to the primacy of the ageing body on the dance floor. i was a classroom teacher when i entered the scene and later a doctoral researcher, aware of the ethical expectations and bureaucratic requirements of uk institutions. all my engagements with northern soul were undertaken under the steam of a gin and tonic or two, and all detailed interviews i completed sober and away from the dance floor. these decisions had a significant impact on my engagement. on an embodied level as a dancer, i struggled to make the leaps in development that i had previously experienced in grimy hard house clubs. no longer free from the watching eyes of others, i rarely had breakthrough moments on the dance floor, and i was competent only by the end of my 3-year phd and 6 years on the scene. in terms of access and understanding, this decision also meant that it took me some time to identify the extent of drug use within the scene and to appreciate the associated complexities and scene-specific moralities, hidden as it was from other scene members (see raine 2020: 95-9). equally, the northern soul places of most of the young people in my study were not the same as those that i had experienced sober even though we danced, chatted and drank in the same physical place. i am not, here, advocating that ethnographers must engage in the same chemical experiences as their participants, but rather arguing that fieldwork researchers must identify and make explicit these limitations and attempt to articulate and evoke the worlds of others. it is the task of the ethnographer—as the conduit of the ethnographic research (see shehata 2015)—to make explicit the nature of the sources and experiences drawn upon in the construction of their thick descriptions (geertz 1973) and critical insights. whilst the ethnographer cannot be objective, they can make their analytical framework—to include their own positionality and embodied experience—clear to the reader. in terms of ethnographic writing—the evocative recreation of a place, a happening—it is essential to immerse the reader in an environment with which they may not be familiar. it is within the embodied and emotive language of the writer that the seeds of important themes and insights are sown, to be further analysed as part of wider structures and processes as the ethnography develops. from my memories of hard house nights, it is clear that in removing the embodied experience of drug taking, you potentially remove insights into the caring function of the wider community and the disjointed clubber experience of space and place. and in not making explicit one’s own drug taking, you do not sufficiently consider or attempt to articulate the chemical synergies between the sensory experience of music-focused happenings and recreational drugs. why, then, do so many popular music ethnographers remove themselves from this essential layering of music scene experience? whilst many scholars discuss the importance of drug taking for their research participants (see for example malbon 1999; taylor 2010, 2012; wilson 2007; farrow 2020), surprisingly few explicitly analyse their own embodied and chemically enhanced engagements, either as a member of these communities or as a visiting ethnographer. for some, like me on the northern soul scene, it may be that they did not engage in this element. but for others, it is clear that they have written out this layer of knowledge development from their research (see wilson 2019 reflecting on wilson 2007). in her seminal book club cultures, sarah thornton “submits [her]self to the experiment” of taking ecstasy in a club context and reflecting upon the experience (1995: 89). whilst this is a rare example of explicit drug reflections, it is couched in terms of a measured and purposeful one-off experiment of the non-using researcher. it is not an account of an ongoing strand of embodied knowing and understanding which the researcher brings to the research and—significantly for the theme of this special issue of dancecult—to the places that they experience, analyse and invoke. in working through my own embodied experiences, ethnographic research and fluctuating roles that i occupy in my private and scholarly life, i have found inspiration in narcofeminism. this scholarly approach draws heavily upon sociologist elizabeth ettorre who has written extensively on feminist ethnography and “drug user researchers” (see 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017). as chang summarises, narcofeminism is “a site of feminist resistance to patriarchal order and modes of rationality”, a “conceptual framework and burgeoning political movement” formed by activists and more recently applied by scholars (2023: 760). as a framework, it has been applied to not only consider the gendered experiences of drug takers—to include “ways of accomplishing a gendered identity” through drug-taking—and drug policies, but also to consider the emancipatory and activist uses of drugs (measham 2002: 335). feminist autoethnography is here applied as a means to “speak back”, to analyse and communicate experiences that have been hidden or obscured, both on an individual and a societal level (chang 2023: 762, 763; see also denshire 2014: 831). whether an exploration of pleasure or trauma, this theoretical and methodological approach aims to reclaim control over the stories being told, to reflect upon the complexities of drug use and to provide respectful counternarratives to inform both policy and scholarship (chang 2023: 762; dennis et al. 2023: 946). writers such as florêncio (2023) work within this approach to reflect upon drug taking, queer bodies and world-making, and to critically consider club cultures. in his autoethnographic reflections, he describes evocative moments of queer care (in relation to drug-taking) within the club space, a context that i also recognise as a clubber. florêncio offers a richly layered understanding of the queer club scenes through the placing of himself within the narrative. reflecting upon this embodied experience, he argues that such queer care practices “are not just about harm reduction but about investing ourselves in the lives and dignity of others” (florêncio 2023: 877). these words offer food for thought for dance floor ethnographers. we, too, should reflect upon our invested relationships with the communities that we research. (explicit) dance floor ethnographies the cultural worlds that we occupy and attempt to analyse are messy and entangled, with many boundaries blurred in the process of worldand self-making. whilst narcofeminism offers one approach through which we can theorise our embodied engagement as participating ethnographers in club scenes, further exploration is required into how we can justify these engagements within our institutions. essential processes—this time institutional—are also hidden in published work: the ethical frameworks and processes which made these projects possible. yes, more critical and open ways of analysing these experiences—many of which already exist in sociology, criminology (see wakeman 2013, 2014, 2021) and queer studies—are required within popular music studies. yet these can only be successfully applied if we are all able to access more nuanced institutional processes for the protection of researcher and the researched alike as we attempt to communicate “the dignity of others” in the work that we create. author biography dr. sarah raine is an sfi-irc pathway fellow based in ucd’s school of music, ireland. she is the pi of improvising across boundaries: voicing the experience of women and gender-minority improvising musicians (2023-2027), funded by science foundation ireland/irish research council. sarah is an editor for jazz research journal, a co-managing editor of riffs, a book series editor for equinox publishing (music industry studies/icons of pop music) and a member of the subcultures network. references chang, judy. 2023. “narcofeminism: a feminist autoethnography on drugs”. the sociological review 71(4): 760-79. <https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261231176893>. dennis, fay, pienaar, kiran and marsha rosengarten. 2023. “afterword: tensions and possibilities for a narcofeminist sociology”. the sociological review 71(4): 945-54. <https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261231174978>. ettorre, elizabeth. 2013. “drug user researchers as autoethnographers: ‘doing reflexivity’ with women drug users”. substance use and misuse 48(13): 1377-85. <https://doi.org/10.3109/10826084.2013.814999>. ———. 2015. “embodied deviance, gender, and epistemologies of ignorance: re-visioning drugs use in a neurochemical, unjust world”. substance use and misuse 50(6): 794-805. <https://doi.org/10.3109/10826084.2015.978649>. ———. 2016. autoethnography as feminist method. london and new york: routledge. ———. 2017. “feminist autoethnography, gender, and drug use: ‘feeling about’ empathy while ‘storying the i’”. contemporary drug problems 44(4): 356-74. <https://doi.org/10.1177/0091450917736160>. farrow, david. 2020. “feeling pain/making kin in the brooklyn noise music scene”. current musicology 106: 9-31. <https://doi.org/10.7916/cm.v106ispring.6757>. florêncio, joão. 2023. “drugs, techno and the ecstasy of queer bodies”. the sociological review 71(4): 861-80. <https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261231174970>. geertz, clifford. 1973. the interpretation of cultures. new york: basic books. malbon, ben. 1999. clubbing: dancing, ecstasy, vitality. london: routledge. measham, fiona. 2002. “‘doing gender’—‘doing drugs’: conceptualizing the gendering of drugs cultures”. contemporary drug problems 29: 335-73. <https://doi.org/10.1177/009145090202900206>. raine, sarah. 2020. authenticity and belonging in the northern soul scene: the role of history and identity in a multicultural music culture. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. riley, sarah, morey, yvette and christine griffin. 2009. “ketamine: the divisive disassociate. a discourse analysis of the constructions of ketamine by participants of a free party (rave) scene”. addiction research and theory 16(3): 217-30. <https://doi.org/10.1080/16066350801983715>. shehata, samer. 2015. “ethnography, identity, and the production of knowledge”, in interpretation and method: empirical research methods and the interpretive turn, ed. dvora tanow and peregrine schwartz-shea, 244-63. london: taylor and francis. taylor, jodie. 2010. “queer temporalities and the significance of ‘music scene’ participation in the social identities of middle-aged queers”. british sociological association 44(5): 893-907. <https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038510375735>. ———. 2012. playing it queer: popular music, identity and queer world-making. bristol: peter lang. thornton, sarah. 1995. club cultures. cambridge: blackwell. wakeman, steven. (2013), “for an embodied sociology of drug use: mephderone and ‘corporeal pleasure’”. in corporeality: the body and society, ed. cassandra a., ogden and stephen wakeman, 47-68. chester: university of chester. ———. 2014. “fieldwork, biography and emotion: doing criminological autoethnography”. the british journal of criminology 54(5): 705-21. <https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azu039>. ———. 2021. “doing autoethnographic drugs research: some notes from the field”. international journal of drug policy 98. <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2021.103504>. wilson, andrew. 2007. northern soul: music, drugs and subcultural identity, portland: willan publishing. ———. 2019. “searching for the subcultural heart of northern soul: from pillheads to shredded wheat”. in the northern soul scene, ed. sarah raine, tim wall and nicola watchman smith, 179-96. sheffield: equinox publishing. notes [1] subway city was on livery street in the city centre of birmingham and has since been renamed tunnel club. [2] i use this term to describe gabba. many hard house nights seemed to have gabba or a general hardcore room, in addition to main rooms with hard house, hard trance and funky house. [3] ben malbon (1999) discusses entry into the club as a key moment. whilst bouncers were indeed positioned on the doors of music venues hosting a hard house event, i was never challenged and always gained entry. this was possibly due to the lack of consistent id checks in the early 2000s or a vaguely remembered fake id, courtesy of a student discount company who didn’t check birth dates. reflections from the frontlines of grassroots venue design ella adu university of the arts london (uk) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.08> do good parties need good buildings? histories of diy music culture in britain would suggest they don’t. arguably, the co-dependence between architecture and real-estate positions the architect as an antagonist to the propagation of grassroots venues in british cities. nonetheless, it’s essential for small venues to negotiate the established structures of urban governance to access civil resources in the long term: public safety, funding and spatial security. free parties are fun, but the future of diy venues should not be relegated to a state of universal precarity. in the uk, the existing legislation that manages the built environment is incompatible with diy methodologies. this article explores how architectural practice can be adapted to work in solidarity with grassroots operators and, in doing so, subvert and contest dominant modes of building production. two case-studies are used to illustrate these complexities. the specific and situated architectural methods and case studies described in this article refer to work by beep studio, an architectural practice based in south east london, with specialist experience in grassroots typologies. beep studio founder and director ed holloway describes his practice as follows: i created beep studio in 2011 with a core focus on regenerative design as a mode of operating in a rich ecology of community led groups. one of my main interests is to develop collaborative and symbiotic relationships that increase access to, as well as celebrate grassroots culture. some of the more recent community led projects beep studio have supported are very much a ground up process, with many up against barriers with leases, council bureaucracy or lack of funds, and are often fighting to secure their place as a cultural and community led organisation. beep studio members enjoy participatory roles, nurturing community clients to develop accessible cultural spaces.[1] this exploration defines a new music venue as that which has been created where previously one did not exist, highlighting the unique challenges in trying to replenish the rapidly diminishing stock of london’s diy venues. this is because there is significant difference between reoccupying a site with a pre-existing licence for amplified music, versus transforming a previously unlicenced site into a licensed venue with the requisite designations. the production of spatial bureaucracy to fully recognise the ordeal faced by those working to open new music venues, conventional methods of planning, designing and constructing buildings should be understood. in the uk, the built environment is produced through a set of design processes and bureaucratic functions: specifically planning, licensing and building regulations. these statutory processes are underpinned by carceral laws which protect the interests of private property ownership. there are various ways to make buildings, but the majority are designed, built and exchanged according to a fixed a programme of delivery: the riba plan of work, which self-describes as ‘the definitive model for the design and construction process of buildings’ in britain. within this context, an architect takes on the role of project lead, responsible for the design and specification of the build, in addition to overseeing the construction process and subsequent handover of the building to its intended operator. the architect is the primary mediator between all stakeholders of the building: landowners, responsible authorities, technical consultants and engineers, tradespeople, contractors, volunteers, trustees, promoters, punters and venue operators. all workers contributing to the development of the brief, design and construction of a building have their work allocated through protocols of contracting, bidding and tendering. spatial bureaucracy in the context of neoliberal crisis in britain, grassroots music venues are being eradicated by a set of interlocked hostilities: the covid-19 pandemic, speculative residential development, increased business rates and 13 years of austerity among them (o'connor 2023). these material transformations are facilitated by a rightward shift in the broader political sphere, entrenching regressive attitudes across all levels of spatial legislation. built environment regulations in the uk are at once oppressively pedantic and wantonly disordered. some sectors (offices) enjoy the freedoms associated with ongoing deregulation of planning permissions whilst others, (licensed venues) undergo intensified scrutiny (see for example licensing sub-committee 2022 and kollewe 2023). traversing these administrative minefields to permit, license and construct a new music venue poses an existential risk to the grassroots operator. professional fees associated with meeting statutory requirements pose a financial risk, which must be calibrated with the operational risk should the planning, licensing or building control application be denied. once opened, a venue can still be subject to statutory disciplining in the form of an enforcement, should the operation fail to meet the conditions described in the initial application. similarly, an architect’s own professional habitus internalises regressive neoliberal frameworks. the profession is deeply hierarchical sexist, elitist and ununionized, contributing to top-down modes of production (see hill 2019, ucl 2022 and riba 2023). willingly or not, the traditional architect is often complicit in the reproduction of unequal property relations which stifle grassroots potential. figure 1. diagram to describe the “hierarchies of operational investment” required to establish different types of music and party venues. ella adu, 2023. alternative productions of space: meanwhile-use meanwhile-use arrangements can offer a regularised alternative to squats or ad-hoc temporary event notices (see fig.1).[2] both case studies presented in this exploration are examples of meanwhile-use lease and license agreements. a 2020 report commissioned by the greater london authority (gla) defines meanwhile-use as: a situation where a site is utilised for a duration of time before it is turned into a more permanent end state, taking advantage of a short window of opportunity. meanwhile interventions are tactical and slot into wider strategies of planned change… . (arup 2020: 14) “wider strategies of planned change” highlights the use of meanwhile-tenancies as a subprocess of regeneration (arup 2020). the sites in question are often derelict and will be located within a larger regeneration masterplan under the ordinance of a dedicated council department, or a quango often in partnership with a private developer.[3] when evaluating statutory applications, the regeneration department is legally separated from the planning department, whose spatial policies and ambitions may or may not be aligned. this division of responsibility within the council is exacerbated by sustained under-funding, resulting in contradictory advice, protracted meetings and even refusal of statutory permissions. refusals can occur despite internal support from other council departments such as business development, regeneration and culture. nonetheless, meanwhile-use occupancies offer affordable and relatively sustainable modes of building re-use by reappropriating existing spatial typologies to revive degraded cultural and social infrastructures. often, grassroots operators deploy mixed-use programmes where daytime activities—community gardens, cafés or meeting spaces—supplement licensable night-time activities—amplified music, performance or comedy events—thereby maximising opportunities for revenue generation. meanwhile-use: embedded risks meanwhile-use programmes intensify both the occupancy and the usage of buildings they inhabit. in the context of local planning policies, these diversified uses might be seen to conflict with the strategic aims of a local plan. in granting said programmes with the necessary planning or licensing permissions, councils may deviate from established policies on a discretionary, case-by-case basis, exposing them to some legislative risk. diversifying building usage can provoke a frustrating paradox: grassroots operators rely on the revenue generated by day-to-night occupancy models to meet the costs of developing the necessary built infrastructure, business operations, staff wages and other overheads, within a lease period that could end abruptly if the surrounding regeneration programme is accelerated. yet, these multi-use models themselves generate legislative risk to the council, exacerbating the potential for statutory enforcements or refusals, particularly if the meanwhile occupancy is longer than 2 years, tending towards “permanence” (see fig.2). interfacing with local authorities subjects operators to slow and complex matrixes of bureaucratic decision-making, which consumes already limited temporal and financial resources. existing protocols of spatial governance struggle to accommodate the occupancy models needed to support grassroots inhabitation. even in meanwhile-use arrangements, there is some cynicism in deploying grassroots organisations to oversee the planned obsolescence of unwanted sites. grassroots operators are tasked with the material and programmatic rehabilitation of the site, without invitation to partake in long-term visions of prosperity or tenure security once the wider redevelopment is complete. the riba plan of work is aligned with macro legislative frameworks designed to regulate built spaces which are permanent. it does not easily integrate with time-sensitive diy methods, which prioritise collective practice, experimentation and iteration through trial and error. these conditions pose an extraordinary waste of the social equity generated from diy innovation. however, the current paradigm is not inevitable and (with perseverance) can be transformed. grassroots venues can conform to, or subvert, established structures of urban governance relating to planning, environmental health, building regulations and licensing. new typologies of architectural practice can emerge from these struggles. figure 2. diagram to describe the statutory milestones needed to comply with uk planning and building legislation, and how these intersect with meanwhile-use arrangements. ella adu, 2023.[4] the role of the architect an architect working on music venues might be routinely asked about acoustic design optimisation. yet, the ongoing degradation to diy music culture cannot be remediated through the design process alone. in the built environment, sound propagation is regulated through design (planning), but usually enforced through frameworks of safety and public order (licensing). therefore, the music emitted from music venues must be controlled operationally, through the management, or mitigation, of behaviours associated with sound including: the hours at which sound is being emitted, the volume of sound and the sound of those leaving the venue. sound (impacting others) is perceived as noise and consequently managed as “nuisance”. subsequently, the construction of music venues becomes an explicitly political venture involving careful negotiation with responsible authorities—including licensing officers, environmental health, the police and elected members—alongside sensitive consultation with neighbouring communities, to build a positive consensus toward the proposed venue. applying technocratic or design-based solutions in isolation of applied political coordination can be explicitly harmful to the operator and surrounding communities. moreover, achieving statutory compliance requires a level of bureaucratic literacy beyond the scope of most grassroots operators. architects are essential for various kinds of administrative synthesis: scouring local plans to identify legislation which safeguards local culture, summarising a planning officer’s report, advocation in a licensing sub-committee hearing or writing letters of appeal, among other examples. to negotiate these conditions, the grassroots venue designer must go beyond conventional parameters of architectural thinking and commit to a more holistic role, working as an ally, advocate and pragmatic administrator. in these instances, design takes on many forms. it can be carefully designed conversations with a regeneration project lead at a local authority quango who is either unaware, or unmoved, by the fact that they hold the venue’s future under total subordination. or it may be the design of an iterative decision-making process to help grassroots operators clarify their interests and incorporate requests from community investors. this holistic role is made possible by the grassroots architect’s personal investment in the diy scene outside the confines of waged work: “as an ordinary punter”, as studio director ed holloway describes. this dual experience, as both organiser and reveller, affords the architect uniquely situated knowledge that encompasses networks of friendship, resources and methodologies which circulate through the diy scene. these contexts enable the designer to platform modes of tacit knowledge which are otherwise ignored by conventional orthodoxies of spatial production. the role of the architect and the bureaucratic difficulties facing diy operators is best understood through example. the following case studies demonstrate the complexities of building new grassroots venues in london. case study 1: ‘strategic deviance’ in a former industrial estate, north london  grow tottenham was a mixed-use scheme, including events spaces, which ran from 2018-2022.[5] located in a former warehouse in tottenham, the site was secured from a housing association landlord under a 1-year rolling licence to occupy prior to commercial development. the meanwhile-use tenancy was organised through a third-party regeneration company, who implemented sub-licence arrangements for grassroots operators. the site contained three warehouse units, two of which were operated by a nightclub (referred to as operator a). the other warehouse, alongside a large external area, was operated by grow london cic (referred to as operator b).   as a one-year rolling occupancy, the site was technically subjected to the same statutory measures as longer or permanent tenures. however, the realistic timescales needed to obtain development permissions through planning would mean that the tenant operations might be expired before such permissions could be granted (see fig. 2). both operators (a and b) implemented a variety of uses which would not otherwise be regularly permitted in the context of residential and commercial redevelopment, illustrating how meanwhile-use frameworks can support diverse building uses.   the architects worked with grow (operator b) to renovate the site under a light-touch provision of design services. considering the building’s limited lifespan, key spatial interventions—accessibility, fire-plan arrangements and noise-control measures—were installed by trade professionals, with some assistance from community volunteers. these interventions supported various community uses: an event space, studios, a café and bar and extensive hard-standing garden, followed by a greenhouse and further garden infrastructure (time out 2019). the interventions were successfully iterated over time and in response to the community’s evolving needs. a local stakeholder captures the unique and transformative spatial dynamics of grow tottenham very effectively. there was something very special about being in a place where you can move things around, can use it for your own purposes, can shift things around—we had pop up events, supper clubs, community parties, bbqs, drama classes, the kids played sports, we did everything there. it was a messy space but it was also one that people felt a sense of belonging to. (gibbin and bacon 2023: 11) the collaborative programming at grow tottenham exemplifies how flexibly designed spaces can afford a plurality of socially embedded uses. figures 3 and 4. diverse spatial usage at grow tottenham, image courtesy of grow london cic. operator a began to consolidate their operation as a predominantly night-time venue, adding piecemeal renovations and extensions to their portion of the site to support the demands of a growing audience. these refurbishments were self-directed, occurring outside of professional guidance from an architect and included terrace structures, internal linings and subdivisions. as the warehouse meanwhile-occupation progressed beyond the originally anticipated time frames, operations onsite attracted attention from statutory officers within the local council, who approached the leaseholders to formalise planning and building control applications. operator b was able to comply more readily with the requirements set out by the local building control officer, having developed their space with early engagement from a design professional. compliance was more involved for operator a, who subsequently employed the architect to facilitate formal plan submissions and a specification of works to retrofit the building to meet specific fire codes within the building regulations. ultimately both operators a and b were forced to close their facilities as the surrounding masterplan progressed. onsite activities and crowds associated with the night-time events organised by operator b were deemed too disruptive in the context of newly adjacent residential units. case study 2: co-design and compliance under a local authority landlord in an emergency meeting with a local authority landlord, 120 minutes have elapsed and it still not clear who is responsible for structural degradation caused by years of water ingress to an external wall at the west of the property. worse still, the incoming water is significantly polluted, having been incurred as runoff from a poorly levelled car-park which is also owned by the council. this case study explores the challenges of designing a meanwhile-venue under the jurisdiction of a local authority landlord, who is obliged to administer the design process through established bureaucracies of spatial production. this contrasts with the previous case study, which explored more informal meanwhile conditions under a third-party provider. in 2020, a cbs based in south-east london launched a public investment fund to build a community owned music venue.[6] the operators had secured a derelict building from the council on a peppercorn rent, on the basis that they would refurbish the site to a state of good repair over the course of their 10-year tenancy. the architects conducted a detailed survey of the site in its “as built” state and identified several significant issues which contradicted information which had been supplied by the council to qualify conditions of the lease. subsequently, the operators were unable to sign the lease in good faith. a lengthy process of renegotiation ensued, as the landlord redefined conditions in the lease. this exchange reveals how forensic aspects of the design process can support the operator’s legal advocation. however, the cbs was only eligible to receive grants which would help fund extensive refurbishment works once the lease was signed. other grants were similarly constrained in the context of diy procurement networks, thereby limiting scope to economise efficiently. these conditions reveal the entangled disadvantages facing grassroots operators when accessing established financial instruments that are unable to accommodate their nuanced needs. the operator wanted to use the construction process as a platform for collective skill-building in their community. young people and volunteer groups could contribute to lighter trade elements such as painting, plastering and joinery. while this was an achievable ambition, it exposed the contractors (responsible for all aspects of site safety) to operational risk, requiring additional layers of agreement and coordination between design and construction teams who would need to run overlapping schedules of work. here, the architects’ knowledge of warranties and liabilities under building contracts provided a solution to this volunteer opportunity without undermining core building works, or the client’s need for compliant (and insurable) building fabrication. as a community-owned venue, this operator was accountable to the collective aspirations of their community mandate. this required considerable campaign work to garner support from a diverse network of stakeholders including community members, the planning department and the mayor of the borough. the architects implemented a successful co-design process at the design-brief stage, involving periods of discussion, workshopping and evaluation, ensuring the operator’s collective values were consolidated at all stages of the design process. this process of collaborative learning was essential to the organisation’s long-term operational development. conclusions space is the primary medium through which collective struggles and cultural transformations are experienced and reproduced. diy venues are a means to resist the co-option of nightlife into regeneration campaigns which sterilise, surveil and privatise our cities. the production of grassroots venues is regulated through regimes of bureaucracy, law and private ownership, which often disenfranchise grassroots practitioners. assembling these spaces requires thoughtful negotiation and a willingness to take on significant risks. under these conditions, the grassroots operators described in both case studies present extraordinary determination, resilience and hopefulness in persisting and evolving their diy programmes. diy operations are diverse: encapsulating a range of identities, methodologies and aspirations, which influence the extent to which prospective venues may deviate from conventional modes of building production. alternative practical methods can include multi-disciplinary occupancies, access to alternative supply chains, adaptative retrofitting and communal ownership. in london, access to space is contested and politicised. to reclaim spaces for grassroots culture, architects must embed radical sensibilities within their professional practice, ensuring meaningful collaboration with grassroots communities at all design stages to successfully realise programmes of design justice. acknowledgements many thanks to ed holloway (director, beep studio ltd). author biography ella is a multi-disciplinary designer whose practice includes writing, teaching and sound-system, alongside traditional architectural work. as a part ii architectural assistant, ella works at beep studio, supporting grassroots organisations to retrofit brownfield sites for cultural programmes. in addition to her pursuits as a designer, ella is a sound-system operator with tanum soundsystem and member of patch collective, with whom she enjoys organising parties and contributing to printed publications. ella is an associate lecturer at ual. references arup. 2020. meanwhile use london. the greater london authority. london: gla. gibbin, izzyand nicoal bacon. 2023. grow tottenham: understanding the impact. london: social life. <https://www.social-life.co/media/files/090323_grow_tottenham_final_march_2023.pdf>, (accessed 17 october 2024). hill, eleanor. 2019. “why haven’t british architects unionised?” failed architecture, 17 july. <https://failedarchitecture.com/why-havent-british-architects-unionised/>, (accessed 17 october 2024). kollwe, julia. 2023. london financial district to have 11 more towers by 2030. the guardian, 11 november. <https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/nov/01/london-financial-district-to-receive-11-extra-towers-by-2030>, (accessed 17 october 2024). o'connor, roisin. 2023. “grassroots music venues in middle of ‘full-blown crisis’, music venue trust tells jeremy hunt”. the independent, 26 september. <https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/grassroots-music-venues-autumn-budget-jeremy-hunt-b2418593.html>, (accessed 17 october 2024). riba. 2023. “riba publishes 2022 gender and ethnicity pay gap data”. riba, 27 march. <https://www.architecture.com/knowledge-and-resources/knowledge-landing-page/2022-gender-and-ethnicity-pay-gap-data>, (accessed 17 october 2024). licensing sub-committee. (2022). “minutes of the open section of the licensing sub-committee held on thursday 28 july 2022 at 10.00 am”. london: southwark council. <https://moderngov.southwark.gov.uk/documents/g7484/printed%20minutes%20thursday%2028-jul-2022%2010.00%20licensing%20sub-committee.pdf?t=1>, (accessed 17 october 2024). time out. 2019. “grow tottenham (closed)”. time out, 25 january. <https://www.timeout.com/london/things-to-do/grow-tottenham>, (accessed 17 october 2024). ucl. 2022. ucl apologises and takes action following investigation into the bartlett school of architecture”. ucl: news, 9 june. <https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/jun/ucl-apologises-and-takes-action-following-investigation-bartlett-school-architecture>, (accessed 17 october 2024). notes [1] ed holloway, email to author, 1 december 2023. [2] temporary event notice (ten) is a form of single event licence with oversight by the licensing authorities for grant. [3] a quasi-ngo (quango) is semi-public organisation with devolved government power. it formally exists outside of civil service departments but is largely financed and controlled by governmental authorities. [4] meanwhile tenancies are subject to the same compliance as permanent arrangements, highlighting the need for better defined discretionary policies for planning and building control permissions in the context of temporary spatial programmes. [5] see <http://www.growtottenham.org/>, (accessed 17 october 2024). [6] a community benefit society (cbs) is a type of not-for-profit organisational structure which is registered with the financial conduct authority, and whose revenues and purpose serve the community. dancecult 16(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 16(1) 2024: 140–152 issn 1947-5403 ©2024 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net rude citizenship: jamaican popular music, copyright, and the reverberations of colonial power larisa kingston mann chapel hill: university of north carolina press, 2022.  isbn: 978-1-4696-6724-9 (paperback), 978-1-4696-6723-2 (hardcover) rrp: us$95 (hardcover), us$32.50 (paperback)  <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.16> aadita chaudhury york university (canada) / goldsmiths, university of london (uk) in rude citizenship: jamaican popular music, copyright, and the reverberations of colonial power, larisa kingston mann unravels the moral economies and legal copyright frameworks that inform and animate the ongoing evolution of jamaican popular music. mann’s intervention into the study of jamaican music and culture in this context is novel in multiple ways. existing approaches to theorizing jamaican popular music have contended with ways in which practitioners of the culture incorporate elements of embodied social knowledge (henriques 2011), challenge the dominance of a stratified system of social classes (cooper 2004) and create a sense of kinship with ancestral histories of migration and ritual practices (niaah 2010; stanley niaah 2008). mann’s approach presents an account of how jamaican musical cultures challenge dominant epistemologies about intellectual property and ownership based on colonial notions of enclosure—positioning the conditions in which jamaican popular music emerges in relation to global struggles against the loss of commons—ecological, economic and cultural. mann locates the legal framework of copyright as part of a wider set of colonial worldmaking apparatuses that create enclosures around popular music and culture, entangling them in regimes of ownership and intellectual property that most closely adhere to ideas of musical composition and creativity within a eurocentric framework of cultural production, centering specific individuals and collectives in isolation from their cultural milieu as auteurs. within the broader context of british imperialism in which jamaican popular genres like reggae, ska, dancehall and dub have emerged, there are additionally reviews https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.16 reviews 141 class, geographical and economic considerations of practitioners that contribute not only to the evolution of distinct musical styles but also to their legibility within the political economy of global music and associated legal regimes. mann’s most important and unique contribution to this growing literature on the embodied knowledges and epistemologies emanating from jamaican music’s ethos is linking the ways it challenges class and coloniality within jamaica to how the notion of “rude citizenship” (130, 177)—the sociocultural, affective, and embodied practices of poor jamaicans contrasted with the state-supported ideals of the elite classes—created “a kind of sheltering space where poor jamaicans can produce this relatively autonomous cultural life” (7). it is through this perspective of rude citizenship—which encapsulates how the jamaican poor resisted forms of coloniality by challenging certain white supremacist norms of conduct still affirmed by elites in jamaican post-independence society—that mann shows how anti-blackness and coloniality pervaded post-independence jamaica. even though “the state and its elite intellectuals (…) were at odds over the appropriate forms and distributions of power, they tended to remain more in agreement about cultural norms of conduct, reading the poor as ‘rude’ rather than as challenging coloniality” (9). accordingly, within marginalized spaces in jamaican society, popular musical cultures reflected the moral economies and embodied representations of various approaches to pushing back against state-enforced, anti-black understandings of personhood, creativity and conduct. these cultural practices present considerable epistemological challenges to dominant global orders surrounding the status of intellectual property and ownership when it comes to music, countering established notions of copyright law. when considered through the prism of notions of “rudeness” and rude citizenship as per mann’s articulation, we can begin to observe the impacts of persistent coloniality and anti-blackness in post-independence jamaica as broad, cascading forms that create the scaffolding in which jamaican popular music, legal mechanisms like international copyright law and notions of ownership interface and operate, each challenging the limits of the other. in this nexus, jamaican musical practices, regardless of their genre, represent part of a pluriverse in which traditional cultures of orality, notions of sonic commons that not only enable but also celebrate forms of hybridity facilitated by mixing and sampling practices and other embodied and aural knowledges—frequently demonstrate their continuous evolution and autonomy even as newer mechanisms of legal and physical enclosure emerge by engaging with and producing forms of musical composition that defy colonial constructs of copyright law. in this way, the musical forms, textures, pedagogies, and epistemologies that undergird the ethos of jamaican popular music continue to refract the moral economies surrounding the idea of “rude citizenship” within the domains of music and cultural production, legal regimes and beyond. jamaican popular music and dance culture, its technological innovations and migrating evolutionary trajectories will likely continue to lay significant challenges to the global hegemonic legal orders around creative composition, collaboration and ownership. dancecult 14(1)142 mann’s work in rude citizenship extends this inquiry well beyond the realm of music into broader conversations about coloniality, indigenous approaches to legal worldmaking and the nature of cultural production itself. by questioning the fundamental underlying assumptions in western conceptions of musical and sonic composition with examples from jamaican popular music, mann’s provocation in rude citizenship asks readers to question their understanding of auteurship, originality and notions of musical talent. references cooper, carolyn. 2004. sound clash: jamaican dancehall culture at large. 2004th edition. new york, ny: palgrave macmillan. henriques, julian. 2011. sonic bodies: reggae sound systems, performance techniques, and ways of knowing. 1st edition. new york: continuum. niaah, sonjah stanley. 2010. dancehall: from slave ship to ghetto. illustrated edition. ottawa: university of ottawa press. stanley niaah, sonjah. 2008. “performance geographies from slave ship to ghetto.” space and culture 11(4): 343–60. reviews 143 together, somehow: music, affect, and intimacy on the dancefloor luis manuel garcia-mispireta durham: duke university press, 2023. isbn: 978-1-4780-2008-0 (cloth), 978-1-4780-2504-7 (paperback) rrp: us$107.95 (cloth), us$28.95 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.17> rory fewer university of california, riverside (usa) luis manuel garcia-mispireta’s together, somehow: music, affect, and intimacy on the dancefloor adds an essential contribution to a limited yet gradually expanding body of ethnomusicological scholarship on electronic dance music cultures. through a multi-sited ethnography of house, techno and minimal dance music scenes in chicago, paris and berlin, the author evaluates the utopian potential of the dancefloor, illustrating the affective dimensions that generate its feelings of social cohesion as well as the ambivalence and exclusions that surround its possibility. in making its arguments, this book draws not only from interviews conducted with partygoers across these scenes, but also auto-ethnographic anecdotes and analytical frameworks from sound and affect studies. a primary focus of this book centers on how the dancefloor enables forms of intimacy between strangers that would otherwise be inappropriate in other spaces, a point illustrated early on with a memorable anecdote in which the author’s face was briefly caressed by a stranger while dancing at panorama bar in berlin, “an exchange of surprising warmth between strangers” (3). garcia-mispireta builds empirically from a range of anecdotes to make potent claims about these forms of “stranger-sociability” (5), including how conventions of touch in nightlife cultures serve the multiple functions of “communicating sociability, transmitting affect, and both sensing and navigating a crowded environment” (53). the author incorporates an extensive amount of musical analysis to argue that the affective qualities of corporeal exchanges on the dancefloor meet further intensification through the haptic qualities of electronic dance music. specifically, the distribution of frequencies in electronic dance music composition results in a type of material impact, described as “sonic spikes [that] strike the body in a very concrete way, eliciting sensations not only in the ear but also in the body’s skin, flesh, viscera, and bones” (70). electronic dance music genres often utilize sounds that index tactile experience, such as clapping or breathing, a practice which “rel[ies] on the ability of listener-dancers to associate certain sounds with an enfleshed sound source” (73). garcia-mispireta also provides a close analysis of musical texture to argue that electronic dance music makes use of granular sounds that likewise evoke tactile experience. this combination of vibrational impact, bodily indexicality and granular texture ultimately “invites an engagement with sound that is alive to texture, touch, https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.17 dancecult 14(1)144 and other fleshy excitations” (87). the book’s larger theories of togetherness are predicated on these affects as devices through which crowd solidarity is enacted or imagined. the author details these affective encounters of sonic and embodied proximities to theorize the vague sense of togetherness that the dancefloor produces. these affective encounters (articulated corporeally and musically) intensify in a process that the author calls the “thickening of the social” (124). thickening is a process whereby the imbrication of dancefloor affect gives initial coherence to a type of crowd solidarity. thickening results in a vague feeling of togetherness that the author explains through the concept of liquidarity, defined as “a form of fluid solidarity in which vagueness is a crucial condition of its emergence” (32). liquidarity is necessarily vague because in order to coalesce it must also obfuscate the power differentials that would deny its possibility. “vagueness” is thus used by the author as an analytic to effectively describe the contradictions that allow nightlife spaces to simultaneously contain forms of inclusion and exclusion, and which threaten to dissolve these “vague” feelings of social cohesion as they are inevitably problematized by the presence of partygoers with differential access to this solidarity, including, for example, partygoers who are disproportionately targeted by unsolicited touching or have differing cultural expectations for intimacy. the duality of this vagueness is most apparent in the final chapter, in which the author details door policies and the regulation of diversity as a “dissonance between a utopian desire for unproblematically inclusive collectivity and the practices of exclusion that help to make the experience of cosmopolitan conviviality possible” (215). for these reasons, liquidarity is a phenomenon that can only take fragile shape. as the author writes, it “sustains an intimate world on the merest whiff of sociability” (104). the ultimate objective of this intimate world and its utopian aspirations—the “something” as noted in the title of the book—are likewise vague. garcia-mispireta writes that they “provide a sense of what a utopia of postidentitarian belonging might feel like, rather than a coherent model of how it would function” (223). this book offers a novel contribution to ethnomusicological scholarship and will surely lend itself as an important resource for scholars and other readers interested in the global phenomenon of electronic dance music culture or studies on music and affect more generally. however, it is important to note the structural challenges that nearly made such a project impossible. this book is prefaced with a description of the obstacles the author met as a firstgeneration, queer scholar of color working on topics deemed “disciplinarily unconventional and low-prestige” (xv) by the institutions of ethnomusicology. as it offers a series of theories pertinent to understanding the ubiquitous communities of the “dancefloor”, this book thus also serves as a reminder to current and future ethnomusicologists of the structural changes required to ensure similarly profound work continues to reach fruition. reviews 145 out of space: how uk cities shaped rave culture (revised and expanded edition) jim ottewill bristol: velocity press, 2024. isbn: 978-1-913231-63-7 (paperback) rrp: £14.99 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.18> alistair fraser maynooth university (ireland) a friend of mine, breffni, tells a wonderful story about discovering rave culture in north western (nw) london, aged 17. out and about with friends one evening, he came across a spiral tribe free party in a warehouse in nw london. it was unlike anything else he’d known. it was music and a vibe, music and an embrace; a feeling, then, and one he continues to enjoy and chase after. today, after a few decades of raving, he’s employed to make urban places more liveable for all (and he’s successful at it). back then, though, it was the rave culture he discovered that went on to make the city liveable; it was rave culture that went on to make so many places and spaces of wonder, discovery and joy. uk cities since the late 1980s and early 1990s have been bound up with rave culture in profound ways. both the city and the culture have existed in relation to each other and to a wider array of places and spaces. those fleeting moments on the dancefloor, the randomness of meeting and hugging strangers, the chaos, the buzz—it all needed somewhere to occur and rave culture did manage to create those geographies. indeed, looking back at the story of rave culture, perhaps one of the most notable aspects was simply that the promoters, free party collectives, djs, sound engineers, new age travellers, ravers and clubbers found so many spaces to embrace each other. looking around now, it’s hard not to be worried about the future. what chance will our children have of making discoveries like breffni’s? a similar anxiety pervades out of space: how uk cities shaped rave culture (2024). in this expanded version of his 2022 book with the same title, jim ottewill takes the act of “looking around” to an elevated level. ottewill works his way across the country, from north to south, to ask the promoters, the originators and the djs who got things started and kept things going, to tell their stories. what we get out of this is a brilliant and rich historical geography of rave culture in the uk. we get insightful biographical details about the promoters and djs; rare nuggets about how clubs got started; and fantastic quotes that capture the vitality and energy—the love—that went into and came out of rave culture. out of space has ten core chapters. the bulk of them are dedicated to covering developments in glasgow, manchester, liverpool, sheffield, birmingham, london and other smaller cities and towns such as coventry and margate. chapters 7 and 8 focus on party and sound system scenes with fewer fixed ties to any particular place but with strong bonds to uk cities. then in chapter 10 and the concluding chapter, ottewill examines the contemporary struggle to find a place for rave culture in uk cities. https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.18 dancecult 14(1)146 the book has two standout features. the first is a justifiable sense of awe and respect toward the great many people who have dedicated so much of their lives to emplacing rave culture in uk cities. it’s been their task to find venues, bring in the crowds and deal with authorities or angry neighbours. it’s their labour and often their capital that’s generated the landscape of rave culture in the uk. out of space is a book that fist-bumps those people. it works. it’s a book with love and hugs. alongside the love, though, the second feature is an overriding sense of dread. ottewill has his finger on the pulse of rave culture in the uk. he’s spotting the novel ideas and experiments, such as community ownership models that try to counteract rising rents and the overall loss of space; and highlighting other efforts to battle the growing sense that rave culture is on the decline. yet, it is precisely the fact that rave culture is on the decline that jumps out from the book, especially in the final two chapters. this leads me to wonder if a weakness in out of space is that ottewill is too committed to rave culture. he wants to spot and discuss some of the ways that rave culture can keep going. he knows this means we need space. but to my mind, ottewill does not dedicate enough energy to asking if there is going to be enough of a commitment from younger generations to the making of spaces like clubs or other dancefloors. for sure, processes such as gentrification are a major source of pressure on clubs and promoters. regulations, insurance, health, safety and the wider institutionalization of cultural practice with respect to capitalist life also bear down on rave culture. but what about generational differences? thirty years or more have passed since breffni (and kids like him) discovered spiral tribe (and then, for breffni, bedlam and numerous other events and venues). today, though, a great many young people are on smartphones or playsations all day long. they’re updating their followers on instagram. they’re tik-tokking videos; creating, capturing, commodifying and sometimes cancelling culture in novel ways that just might not need the same sorts of spaces that rave culture needed. against this backdrop, to want clubs and raves to keep going—to seek out a space for them in the city—is one thing. but maybe we might need to accept that our kids won’t want to spend quite so much of their weekends bubbling around on an ecstatic ride in hot sweaty clubs, warehouses or other venues. one has to wonder if our kids will need the same spaces as rave culture needed. will they seek out the same sorts of life-changing or mind-altering experience that so many ravers desired? in short, maybe rave culture is running out of space; but maybe it’s also running out of ravers. these minor critiques aside, out of space is a fantastic book precisely because it can provoke debates about the past, present and future of rave culture. ottewill writes clearly, quotes the people he interviewed astutely and ensures the reader knows there they are relative to the rest of the book. it’s a brilliantly crafted text, demonstrating serious writing skills and drawing on an incredibly rich archive of material collected via first-hand interviews and other sources. my sense is that anyone interested in the rise, development and significance of rave culture will need this book. anyone fighting to keep the vibe alive should also get a copy. reviews 147 venue stories: narratives, memories, and histories from britain’s independent music spaces fraser mann, robert edgar and helen pleasance (eds.) sheffield: equinox publishing, 2023. isbn: 9781800504431 (hardcover), 9781800503731 (paperback) rrp: us$100.00 (hardcover), us$32.00 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.19> max gibson university of california, davis (usa) drawing together a chorus of individual voices, venue stories is a dynamic collection of creative non-fiction entries that speak on music, place, experience and community across british independent music scenes in the 20th and 21st century. in their curation of the chapters, editors mann, edgar and pleasance state that their mission was to “bring stories and remembrances together, add shape to them and develop a scholarly understanding of how we can offer an alternative mode of historiography through editorial processes that are akin to the role of the museum curator” (2). conceived and developed during the covid-19 pandemic, this is not the usual collection of formal academic essays, but instead a radical attempt at shining light on histories that are usually ignored, marginal or not considered serious enough; venue stories acts as a site of resistance to erasure through the creation of an archive of stories not usually told. utilizing autoethnography, journalism, historiography, essaying, interview and most importantly memoir, the authors create multiple narratives of hidden microhistories. creative non-fiction as a genre is increasingly common within academia, yet rarely does a collection come together like this that achieves its mission of illuminating histories through a multiplicity of voices, rather than the usual single-authored narrative. this approach is apparent when examining the variety of people in this collection beyond the familiar academic researcher: band members, djs, producers, journalists, bartenders, photographers and more. each contribute their lived experiences and perspectives, and having an eclectic roster makes for an enjoyable read. the shifts in writing styles take the reader from the depths of despair—over half the chapters end with the closure of cherished venues—to uncontrollable laughter—who would have thought the destruction of a bass guitar could be so funny? (69–77). yet this emotional journey is never at the expense of intention of the book. each account reveals a microcosm within a broader community, scene and history, where musical worlds are lived, embodied and reenacted through memory, and then relived through writing; the act of memory writing affords the network of microhistories to be acknowledged and remembered and serves as a way of expressing personal experience and embodied knowledge within larger structures. memory writing thus becomes an analytical methodology. https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.19 dancecult 14(1)148 venue stories contributes a great deal to the regional histories of music scenes and venues in the areas of birmingham, leicester, liverpool and london. places such as brighton, glasgow, leeds, manchester, sheffield, teesside, york and the north of england are also represented. each entry acts as a scratching of the surface of histories that have yet to be written, and thus could lead way to a book of each region or venue in question. many chapters engage with a single venue, most of which are on the toilet circuit. robert edgar theorizes on the concept of the toilet venue, arguing that they affectionately received their name from the bands and audiences who would come together as a community in seedy spaces full of mythic history (40–50). some of the mythic venues included here are the charlotte, eric’s, and the bull and gate. other authors, instead look inward, and focus on journeys of discovery, coming-of-age and personal troubles through their venue experiences. especially important is how these authors grapple with the politics of access and inclusion, particularly that of safety and economic parity. gender politics are prevalent in penelope wickson’s experience in the 1990s birmingham jungle scene where she describes a masculinist environment rife with sexism and inappropriate behaviour toward female participants (162–174); vim renault and lene cortina, of punkgirldiaries, outline their experiences as female band members in the world of punk, a global phenomenon famous for breaking with traditional norms, which afforded them opportunities usually unusual for women (78–87); and polly hancock’s memoir reveals promotional sexism during the hype indie night at the bull and gate, london (60–68). economic politics are present in anna maria barry’s contribution who explicitly points out that working-class talent is underrepresented across the creative industries, not just in live music (124–134). ed garland’s account of sitting on a bench in leicester’s the charlotte venue introduces the reader to the perspective and experience of music in venues from a position of sitting rather than standing and points to the rarely addressed issue of physical accessibility in live music venues (145–152). myriad genres and scenes are represented through venue stories, including heavy metal, hard rock, britpop, as well as indie and underground musics. whether a product of living musical memory or simply due to its global influence, the genre with the most references is punk and its cousins. punk memories act as the main undertow that bring venues to life. while not intentional, the narratives of venue stories, emphasize live music performed by bands; stories concerning electronic dance music and djs, however, do make up a small number of chapters. a striking entry is thomas jackson’s chapter on his punk-rock dj dad, whose experience as a working-class industrial worker-turned dj illuminates the not-yettold activities and histories of venues, towns and regions alike (238–247). a standout feature of venue stories is the ubiquity of musical materiality that is littered across nearly every entry; indeed, the editors point out that “[m]aterial culture, the imagination and the memory have equal weight in these contributions and how they are reviews 149 written” (16). whether it is zines, instruments, seating, pa systems, badges, clothes or multitudinous memorabilia, objects are imbued with experiences and memories, and while they might not resonate like a venue, they are valuable for understanding how material culture fits into broader society, musics and histories. it would be wonderful to see these materials brought together in an exhibit that complements the book. those seeking applications of academic theory will find a selection of authors who situate their experiences and stories of venues within analytical frameworks—ed garland’s application of julian henrique’s listening skin is masterful (148)—but readers should not expect it from every chapter. simultaneously, some might question the reliability and rigor of memory writing; the very act of working from memory elicits the possibility of inaccuracies. yet this is to miss the point of the book. many authors acknowledge the fallibility of memory as a caveat to their narratives and some even go out of their way to work with archival documents to crosscheck specific dates and performances—pleasance’s postscript one, is humorously enlightening (28). rich in content and histories, the many individual narratives in venue stories are woven together and offer a model for those working through creative non-fiction as a methodology for writing histories pertaining to music, place and experience. the hidden microhistories of individuals represent larger structures of culture and community and are afforded agency to speak; the very nature of this book is radically effective. dancecult 14(1)150 living at night in times of pandemic: night studies and club culture in france and germany anita jóri and guillaume robin (eds.) bielefeld: transcript verlag, 2024. isbn: 978-3-8376-6726-4 (paperback) |rrp: 42,00€ (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.20> jack mcneill university of york (uk) discourse around dance music cultures (dmcs) has reached a turning point; a crossroads where underlying tensions, inconsistencies, inequalities and critical questions have begun to simmer to the surface, demanding attention and discussion. since its inception, themes of utopianism and togetherness have dominated this discourse without questioning such a narrative’s relationship with individual and community actual experiences. scholars of and participants in dmcs alike will be all too familiar with the assertion that dmcs and their related subcultures report a dominant message: one of unity, togetherness and inclusion. while utopianism and escapism are critical to the creation of the other-worlds of dance music spaces (garcia-mispireta 2023; o’grady 2012), the complex, conflicting and everdeveloping politics of the dancefloor demand frank, direct and ongoing consideration. living at night makes a comprehensive attempt at this through the lens of paris and berlin’s club scenes after the covid-19 pandemic. during the pandemic and in the following years global political movements and changes in media discourse shifted both internal and external perceptions of dmcs. many (although naturally not all) global dance music communities and institutions began to question their practices, policies, interior structures, broader values and relationships with local and international communities. the cities that living at night deals with, have undergone this process in recent years. what this text does particularly well is use them as a site to highlight the potentiality for positive change through framing club culture as utopian, while at the same time recognising the complex realities of clubbing communities. it pulls into question narratives that have been broadly, and sometimes uncritically, accepted, highlighting inherent tensions within dmcs. while the focus is on paris and berlin, the work could be applied more broadly to dmcs across europe and, in some cases, globally. again, this is timely, joining other texts, such as luis manuel garcia-mispireta’s recently published together somehow, which go some way in addressing similar issues. the book is split into three sections. the first, “scenes and communities”, looks at questions of urban and community identity in dmcs, questioning some pervasive and oftrepeated discourses in dmcs in detail. frédéric trottier-pistien’s second chapter critically analyses the city-twinning of detroit and berlin and its consistencies and inconsistencies, https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.20 reviews 151 while sophia abidi methodically parses some, but not all, subcultural characteristics of participants in berlin’s dmcs. in the final chapter of the section, diana weis considers the tensions between subcultural expression and high fashion surrounding berlin’s club scene, and berghain in particular. the second section, “diversity and inclusion”, engages in much needed critical discussions around the tension between inclusion, exclusion, awareness and micropolitics in dmcs. xan egger, neo seefried and mascha naumann’s chapter exposes some internal tensions in the scene, concomitantly making the case of the potentiality and concrete utopias presented by queer dmcs. ines liotard furthers this discussion, shining a light on the historical development of queer club culture in paris, while diana raiselis discusses the potential and problematics of awareness policies and approaches in contemporary club culture post-covid. the final section, “social and ecological challenges for a sustainable culture”, looks at some of the pressing issues facing contemporary dmcs and the role that social and ecological responsibility and action plays. edna hernández gonzález writes engagingly about artificial light and the tension between nighttime and its economy. guillaume robin’s chapter provides insight on sense of belonging and meaning in dmc communities in berlin, providing interesting reflections on areas for future work, particularly with “migrant clubbing communities” (a term that robin sees as problematic). this is followed by max eulitz’ thought-provoking personal prose reflecting on a clubbing experience in kyiv, which, like in many chapters before, presents the potentiality of club spaces in adverse times. the book ends with an insightful and practical conversation between robin and katharina wolf, presenting contemporary work around the social, ecological and financial stability of berlin’s club scene. the level of self-reflection and criticality that such a text requires is evident throughout. but this is also a complex task and there are a handful of brief moments in the book that stray into the defensive, engaging with binary suggestions of what might be good or bad for the club scene, including some attempts to “debunk” common myths. there are other moments where arguments of high and low culture are invoked; arguments that often expose the fragility with which studying dmcs comes. but perhaps in a culture where multiplicity and difference form its fabric, positioning dmcs’ value in opposition to what might be considered “mainstream” is not always useful. nevertheless, it is important to make very clear that such arguments are few and far between, and do not consist full chapters. indeed, the work in living at night is most successful when it embraces the dmcs’ diversity; in the discussions around the otherness of dmcs and their opposition to hegemony, and how actors in the scene might negotiate that, while legitimising its existence without any suggestion of what might perceived as good or bad. since the pandemic, european dmcs have seen club closures, thanks to gentrification, and aggressive legislation that makes it more difficult for nightlife to survive (drevenstedt 2020; garcia-mispireta 2016). criticism is directed at dmcs, where the boundaries between utopianism and permissibility are blurred (garcia-mispireta 2023); where hedonism as resistance to hegemony and nightlife as freedom get caught up in complex and often problematic behaviours and attitudes. it is a testament to scholarship in dmcs dancecult 14(1)152 and living at night that researchers and members of its community can hold themselves and their peers accountable; refocus the lens on themselves and use insider and informed perspectives to report on pertinent issues. living at night turns the mirror on dmcs in europe, not to show the fairest of them all, but to reflect on its complexity, on the possibility of what utopia and hedonism have to offer in opposition to and harmony with the everyday, warts and all. references drevenstedt, lukas. 2020. “dimensions of club culture: learning from berlin”. in the new age of electronic dance music and club culture, ed. anita jóri and martin lücke, 9–20. cham: springer international publishing. garcia-mispireta, luis manuel. 2016. “techno-tourism and post-industrial neo-romanticism in berlin’s electronic dance music scenes”. tourist studies 16(3): 276–95. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1468797615618037>. garcia-mispireta, luis manuel. 2023. together, somehow: music, affect, and intimacy on the dancefloor. durham: duke university press. o’grady, alice. 2012. “spaces of play: the spatial dimensions of underground club culture and locating the subjunctive”. dancecult 4(1): 86–106. <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.01.04>. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1468797615618037 http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.01.04 edm, tech house, or business techno? “trolling” inauthentic club music through social media dancecult: journal of electronic music & dance culture 17(1): 6–29 issn 1947-5403 ©2025 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.02 journal of electronic music & dance culture edm, tech house, or business techno? “trolling” inauthentic club music through social media gaute barlindhaug uit the arctic university of tromsø (norway) abstract this article explores how the term edm, along with other newer labels for club music, is used among some audiences to distinguish between authenticity and inauthenticity within club culture. the focus is on discussions in social media, with the facebook group the worst techno memes ever group page (twtmegp) as a prime example. for many, both audiences and artists, upholding the legacy from the early days of house and techno is an important mark of authenticity. applying genre labels that emerged later in the history of club music, like edm, are interpreted by some as disregarding the early legacy of club and dance music. the contemporary commercial music often associated with edm, has the potential to frame it as a loaded term. however, it remains difficult for many to define how far audiences and artists can diverge from the original underground roots of house and techno while still being considered authentic. in an analysis of online discussions that frequently ridicule edm and other newer musical labels, i will exemplify the fluid meanings genre labels can have within club cultural communities, as well as uncover some of the complexity around upholding established ideals of authenticity in club music. keywords: club music, edm, authenticity, meme culture, techno, gatekeeping gaute barlindhuag has been involved in producing electronic music since the early 90s. initially, this was as a recording artist with a variety of collaborators, but more lately the work has focused on composing music for film and theatre. parallel to this, barlindhaug has pursued a career as an academic, gaining a phd in electronic music and aesthetics in 2019. he is currently working as an associate professor at the university of tromsø, lecturing in media and documentation science. since the early 2000s, he has also been involved in organizing the insomnia festival for electronic music in tromsø and several international festival collaborations. feature article https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.02 barlindhaug | edm, tech house, or business techno? 7 as a former musician now working in academia, the use of edm as an academic umbrella term for all electronic club music, covering genres like techno, house and trance, was a surprise to me. in my experience, being a middle-aged northern european man who has worked with electronic music since the early 1990s, edm—an initialism for electronic dance music—is a term loaded with cultural and political significance concerning the roots and social ideals of club music. in this article, i seek to explain this by demonstrating how part of the audience interprets differences in the labeling of club music as a demarcation between authenticity and inauthenticity within the music. i, of course, understand a need within academia to use broad terms to cover cultural practices that are in fact related, but not all musical audiences interpret the label as neutrally as academics. the challenge is that, as a term, edm only started to gain traction within the music industry around 2000 (glacer 2014). for decades, artists, audiences and writers had navigated the scene using specific genre labels like techno and house, as well as broader terms like “rave music” or “club music” (reynolds 1998; brewster and broughton 2000). though the term “electronic dance music” first appeared in the united states as a label for artists such as moby, future sound of london and danny tenaglia, the popularization of edm as an initialism corresponds with a significant shift in club culture, both in terms of its commercialization and cultural outreach ( jóri 2021: 27). in this text, i will therefore continue to apply the older term “club music” as an umbrella term for the full variety of genres of dance music. within academia, the concept of authenticity has been a recurring topic examining the different ways audiences ascribe ideals like “real” or “original” to the music when evaluating it. in club culture, similar ideas of authenticity can, in my opinion, partly be traced through audience criticism of the term edm. the emergence of edm at a specific time in the history of club culture means that its use as an all-encompassing term for club music can impact how the roots and legacy of club culture are framed, touching upon what constitutes “realness” and “originality”. to demonstrate how the labeling of music can be understood as a mark of authenticity in club music, i will analyze some examples of memes and discussions from the satirical facebook group the worst techno memes ever group page or twtmegp (2025). in this group, not only edm but also genres like tech house and, lately, melodic techno, have been mocked as inauthentic, while techno and house are understood to encompass authenticity. artist statements have been reposted and often ridiculed, memes have been made, and even artists themselves have joined the discussion about what counts as authentic within what has now become the global club music industry. through this, i will also demonstrate how unstable the idea of authenticity can be and how difficult it is to define the demarcation between the authentic and inauthentic. i will start this article with an introduction to twtmegp, my methods and an overview of the academic studies of meme culture, as well as arguing why this approach might be fruitful for understanding what authenticity can be. then i will go into a preliminary discussion about authenticity in club music, before i analyze examples from twtmegp. https://www.facebook.com/groups/574963892707751 dancecult 17(1)8 studying social media and twtmegp twtmegp (the worst techno memes ever group page) is a facebook page created in 2016 and as of early 2025 it had 187,000 members, in addition to accounts on instagram and x. the purpose of the group is to share humorous memes and other satirical content about techno and club music culture. the “about” section sets the tone of the group, establishing an ironic view on both its content as well as the club music scene: twtmegp techno meme community people complain about dance music so much on this page it makes me wonder if any of you actually like the music and if not what are you doing here? the rules are.. no hating no racist connotations no misogyny only techno relevant memes! (twtmegp 2025) the group operates in a private setting, visible to all, but allows only members to post and see other posts. everything is moderated by an active moderating team, with the central figure being uk-based dj mitch davis. as with all other phenomena on social media, twtmegp does not exist in isolation. much of what is shared in the group—either memes, news articles, or artists’ social media content—originates from other parts of the media landscape but is recontextualized for satirical purposes. in this way, the group takes part in what can be labeled as small viral events, happenings and opinions shared online and gradually becoming part of a larger cross-platform online discussion (hemsley and mason 2013: 139) i have followed the group for eight years, collecting memes and the comments they spark. this has resulted in a thorough digital ethnographic study that provides ecological valid information on the group (varis 2015: 65). posts and memes in the group makes jokes and sparks comments relating to many aspects associated with club culture, from extensive drug use and sexual escapades to different artists and venues. the memes i present in this text are the ones coded to thematize authenticity within club culture, in which edm and other genre labels become part of the discussion. based on my engagement with the group, i have chosen two sets of memes from this category that i will discuss in this text. first, there is a selection of memes that exemplifies the baseline assumptions about edm and other newer genre labels as symbols for inauthenticity, as opposed to earlier genre labels like house and techno. second, i have selected two examples of meme exchanges for a more in-depth analysis that exemplifies the difficulty of drawing the line between authenticity and inauthenticity in today’s expanding club culture scene. according to my experience barlindhaug | edm, tech house, or business techno? 9 with the group, i would claim that the majority of the members are young adults and older people who, like myself, have probably followed club music for decades. analyses of facebook users show that the largest age group spans 20–39 years (ribeiro et al. 2020: 328). this age span makes the group a good subject for a study of how historical developments and changes play into the discussions about authenticity. based on their profile names, the majority of the posts—especially when they are related to authenticity—are made by men, but women also participate in the group as members and moderators. according to mitch davis himself, in order to fight back against possible misogyny in the group, women have always been part of the moderating team (ium 2020). there have been debates in academia about retrieving data from social media for years: should all data available be free to use, or must it be treated as private? a point made is whether the persons posting believe they are voicing their opinions in a private space or not (fuchs 2018: 390; british psychological society 2021: 8–9). this has been especially problematic with research into smaller secret groups on facebook, where sensitive and personal matters are being discussed ( johnson et al. 2018). however, twtmegp is a facebook group with over 180,000 members, and is visible and accessible to anybody who logs into facebook. in addition, the group and its leading moderator have been featured in different online magazines. even so, the individuals active in the group probably did not anticipate that they would end up being discussed in an academic context. i have therefore chosen to follow fuchs’s guidelines when conducting research into social media and have anonymized the participants (fuchs 2018: 390; franzke et al. 2020: 7). however, in the context of facebook, the possibility of reidentification has been an issue, though mostly within larger data sets (zimmer 2020: 319). as a precaution, all searchable text has therefore been removed. twtmegp has a search function that can help users retrieve older posts in the group. however, this does not work on the text that is part of the pictures posted, nor does the search retrieve the comments made on posts. in cases where i have kept the names of people posting, these are musicians and artists who can be regarded as public figures. naming these artists is crucial for analyzing the cultural importance of their opinions within twtmegp. meme culture has been the subject of academic research for years. as the name suggests, the word meme draws inspiration from dawkins’s biological concept of genes, establishing the internet meme as a cultural unit, a text or a picture, that changes and adapts itself to suit different situations (díaz 2013: 84). the concept of the “image macro”—a picture that can spread through the internet by changing captions—constitutes a classic example of such a definition (miltner 2018: 414–24). now, however, there is a trend to abandon the genetic analogy, instead placing more emphasis on the people who create, manipulate and spread memes (shifman 2013: 41). memes are subsequently studied as one of several ways that we can express social, political and cultural statements in digital media, in part as an evolution of earlier forms of tactical media (denisova 2019: 17). in addition to “content” and “form”, shifman described a third dimension when studying memes: “stance”, which “… depict[s] dancecult 17(1)10 the ways in which addressers position themselves in relation to the text, its linguistic codes, the addressees, and other potential speakers” (shifman 2013: 40). when re-creating a meme, the user can either imitate a position they find appealing or use a different discursive orientation. sharing some of the subcultural backgrounds as memes, the concept of trolling can also be useful in understanding memes as a form of communication. originating in the antagonistic and abusive corners of the internet, we later started seeing trolling more as a way of catching the viewer’s attention either by activating emotional engagement or by forwarding a claim so outrageous that a response has to be made (phillips 2015: 181). within equal power relations, this can function as an effective way of sparking a discussion, even one that is not driven by antagonism and hate. the potential in meme culture to convey cultural meaning and establish social bounds has inspired others to look at memes in relation to music. based on shifman’s definition of “stance”, gesoff has studied memes about jazz music, arguing that they function as community building, enforcing the boundaries as well as helping to transform outsiders to insiders (2023: 24). memes about contemporary music have also been studied for making fun of its perceived elitism as well as pointing out real concerns about the music (freitas 2022: 437). my research on twtmegp not only investigates how memes establish ideas within musical communities but also how the exchange and creation of memes debate these ideals. in addition to shifmann’s “stance”, i have also chosen to build on tulloch’s approach to memes as value hypotheses, a way “to represent and reflect on different aspects of reality” (2021: 295). in his view, memes can be used as means to interrogate the underlying logic of different representations of reality. in part, this also corresponds to baspehlivan’s (2024) concept of the “memescape”, a special relationship that brings together digital subjects, memes and collective affects. in this space, there emerges a possibility for the circulation and creation of political discourse and affects (baspehlivan 2024: 38). “here, the so-called stable constants of knowledge, truth, and meaning as produced by striated segmented places instead orient towards the playful instability of constantly moving signs, which are often ambiguous and ambivalent” (baspehlivan 2024: 38). twtmegp strongly resembles baspehlivan’s description: users reposting artists’ pictures and quotes, giving them meaning through comments and memes, and sparking a playful debate with other members who might, through meme creation, contest their viewpoints. what is authenticity? in the academic context of music, authenticity is primarily understood as a quality we as audiences turn to when we evaluate the music, not a quality of the music itself but to an ideal shared among a group of audiences. it is often a quality of the ethical type: authentic music is perceived as honest, real, uncorrupted, even “loyal” toward the audience (martinelli 2008: 122). such ethical judgments are not, however, defined through one singular ideal but rather used as the basis for varied and often contradictory claims to authenticity (moore barlindhaug | edm, tech house, or business techno? 11 2002: 209). it is clear that the concept manifests itself in different ways within different artistic expressions (rudbig 1996: 226). a broad definition of authenticity can be a pre-established set of ethical ideals the audience uses to evaluate the music they encounter, applied not only to the music itself but also to its broader context of production and consumption. it is, as gunders (2012) describes it, not inherent in the music but is something ascribed to it, changing depending on who is making the judgment and when the judgment is being made. moore distinguishes between three different kinds of authenticity: “that artists speak the truth of their own situation; that they speak the truth of the situation of (absent) others; and that they speak the truth of their own culture, thereby representing (present) others” (2002: 209). he further defines these as first-person, third-person and second-person authenticity. most of what has been written about authenticity in popular music has discussed it from the perspective of a rock music audience. within this realm the concept has been extensively constructed around the artist’s instrumental or vocal performances, with a hostility toward newer technology. musicians relying on technology in their performances were deemed fake by some audiences, establishing a distinction between “real” rock musicians and “fakery” of pop (frith 1986: 267). such ideals have consequently linked authenticity within popular music to a lack of mediation, something that moore connects to first-person authenticity in rock music, the artist conveying their message directly to their audience (moore 2002: 212). one explanation for this can be found in a continuation of earlier folk music audiences’ hostility toward technology, where authenticity would even condemn technology such as electric guitars (marshall 2006: 22). the hostility to technology has also been directed toward commercial and impersonal aspects of the music industry. gunders underscores this by claiming that authenticity is seen as “an antidote toward the industry in which it operates” (2012: 148). this resistance toward commercialization can in many cases correspond to a focus on the honesty of the artist and their expression, further establishing the authentic as the alternative, avant-garde, more marginalized music in contrast to the mainstream (martinelli 2008: 124). authenticity in contemporary club music and the term edm atton (2019) has summed up several discussions on authenticity in rock music and points out how crucial the performer’s integrity is to the audience’s belief in the performer. as he defines it, the work appears authentic “to the degree it accords with the personality of the performer, the views and experience of the audience, the transmission of an ‘inherited’ performance (which is itself considered authentic) or the communal experience of performer and audience alike” (atton 2019: 206). this definition opens an important space for discussing authenticity, where not only the use of technology is important but various artistic and ethical considerations are also expected to be fulfilled. from the perspective of electronic music, expecting that an “authentic” artist is not aided by new technology is not necessarily very productive, though audiences might evaluate artists’ mastery of technology, especially as this relates to djing (rietveld 2016: 11–13). dancecult 17(1)12 what especially puts club music at odds with established ideals of rock authenticity is that the instruments fetishized in its production—like the roland tb 303 and roland tr 808—are of the sort that are not performed in a traditional sense but instead programmed (théberge 1997: 168; barlindhaug 2019: 92). as in other musical genres, authenticity in club music also varies among its audience. for instance, gunders claims it is largely built on the rock mythos, pointing out that audiences of club music also object to musicians faking their musical skill (2012: 152–53). he concludes by pointing to an online discussion that appeared between artist moby and his fans over the fact that moby was obviously using playback during concerts (2012: 153). the point i would make is that for other audiences moby has a rather ambiguous standing: being a massive commercial success, many perceive him as an inauthentic artist who does not actually represent the club music he might claim to embody. these claims to authenticity are not, however, linked—as gunders argues—to moby’s use of technology to cover up any lack of skill as a musical performer. constitutions of authentic musicianship within the electronic club music scene can, in my opinion, diverge drastically from the established rock ethos. due to the fact that electronic club music emerged in the african american club music scene of the 1980s, the use of technology has been viewed as a means of self-expression rather than complying with the strictures of the music industry (frith 1986: 276; rose 1994: 71; goodman 2012: 173–75; rietveld 1998: 22). as mentioned, many of the instruments favored by artists in the scene broke with established instrumentalist ideals, since they are programmed rather than performed. the music was seldom experienced live in a traditional sense, but through the medium of a dj. instead, it has been argued that it is the audience’s dance-floor experience that constitutes the live experience, not the artist’s instrumental performance (thornton 1996: 29; ferreira 2008: 20). returning to gunders’s example, the controversy over moby can be traced as far back as 1995. pioneering detroit techno innovators drexciya criticized moby (and also richie hawtin) in melody maker by saying that what they did could not be called “techno” (mothersole 1995). on the twentieth anniversary of moby’s play, in 2019, fact magazine posted ryan diduck’s article “all play and no work: how moby’s bestselling album damaged electronic music”, which claimed that through the problematic sampling of african american cultural heritage, the 1999 album had turned techno into “a cheap and trivial pastime for white men” (2019). play contains several vocal samples from lomax’s ethnographical recordings of african american singers, raising questions about representation of musical heritage (hesmondhalgh 2006: 57). these objections to moby and his music uncover aspects that for many audiences can be more important markers of authenticity than whether the artist is using playback or not. central for both drexciya and diduck, is the respect for musical tradition and the cultural roots of club culture. diduck (2019) underscores how moby capitalizes on musical history in which he, as a white person, played no part, and drexciya felt that moby was not acknowledging the role black musicians from detroit had in inventing the genre of “techno”. barlindhaug | edm, tech house, or business techno? 13 it is apparent that drexciya and diduck both evaluate moby according to certain predefined ideals about what techno is, and both claim that moby is failing to meet some key benchmarks. this mostly concerns ethical considerations about respect toward musical traditions and norms of innovation and creativity. a racial aspect is also apparent through his “exploitation” of african american music, failing to pay homage to the innovators of techno and earlier black music pioneers. these arguments partly follow similar lines atton describes for establishing authenticity: conformity to some established norms about music and the artist’s behavior (2019: 206). the difference is that, compared to rock music, as audiences of club music they often place less emphasis on the artists’ actual musical performance and more on the larger context of production and consummation of music. as mentioned, club music is rooted in the emergence of new technology and needs other strategies to establish such historical ties. drexciya and diduck clearly move away from what moore defines as first-person authenticity—the artist being true to their own situation. labeling something as techno, as drexciya and diduck do, is an act that places a focus on a specific cultural tradition rooted in african american music, establishing authentic club music in response to that context. we here move into what moore describes as secondand third-person authenticity, speaking the truth to their own group, or another group which is not present (moore 2001: 2009). while most examples moore uses to illustrate his understanding of authenticity are gathered from rock music, thornton’s accounts of club music are used to exemplify secondperson authenticity (moore 2001: 219). she describes how departing from liveness and moving toward the recording as the primary means of musical expression provoked a need to establish a new form of authenticity through cultural events and environments (thornton 1996: 51). the authenticity of club culture becomes connected to a community of venues and clubgoers rather than the singular artist. drexciya and diduck’s critique of moby shows how this becomes difficult to uphold in part due to the increasing popularity and commercialization of the music. from being an underground phenomenon in the late 1980s (sicko 2010; brewster and broughton 2006; rietveld 1998), club music such as house and techno saw growing international popularity at the end of the decade. to uphold authenticity, a link to the place and time of pioneering ancestors (as drexciya also focused on) had to be established in the music, while also taking into account the facelessness of technology and global dislocation (thornton 1996: 76). at this point, the authenticity of club culture moves toward what moore defines as third-person authenticity. just like the blues rock of the 1960s had to establish a connection to the harsh racist environment of the mississippi delta (moore 2001: 215), club culture had to retain its connection to its past as an underground culture. gilbert and pearson also point out that departing from the underground and becoming a part of the mainstream would strip the culture of its subversive character (1999: 158). for some, it became a “sellout” through which, for instance, its opposition to capitalist forces was lost. dancecult 17(1)14 today, club music has become even bigger still, in terms of money and its popular appeal, while new media platforms are simultaneously reshaping the culture. through promotion and distribution via social media, the symbolic framing of music has become more important (bartmanski and woodward 2020: 148). music that once represented a niche by being hard to find must now depend on external references to retain its underground status. in 2024 mouraviev wrote an article examining how social media worked to uphold the subcultural legacy of dubstep in the wake of its popularization though edm, establishing a dichotomy between “real” dubstep and the more commercial brostep (2024: 15–16). much the same situation is the starting point for hidalgo’s (2023) research into how artists in the club scene today navigate ideals of authenticity in the context of social media. what hidalgo identifies as an ideal strived toward by many artists is framing themselves in relation to club culture’s plur ethos: peace, love, unity and respect (2023: 20–21). this has been defined as an important aspect for several organizers of contemporary club and rave music (park 2015: 16), but has perhaps today, detached from its intended meaning and turned into a rather hollow catchphrase. hidalgo, however, emphasizes that it stems from the values of the original club culture (2023: 20), in part echoing the historic context of the african americans and the gay club scene that was important during the early years of house and techno (garcia-mispireta 2018: 36). this period fostered an inclusiveness both to race and sexuality, an ethos that to a certain degree can be seen as a legacy of the earlier days of disco (lawrence 2006). however, this ideal of inclusiveness within club culture often comes with a degree of exclusivity. garcia-mispireta (2023), after conducting extensive fieldwork in clubs in paris, berlin and chicago, concludes that the harmony found on the dance floor in several clubs is due to the fact that people have already passed through a process of selection. according to him, it represents an “embedded diversity” that creates a safe and harmonious space where individuals who might pose a threat to the established subculture represented in the club are kept out (garcia-mispireta 2023: 212). this could also be seen as a legacy from earlier disco culture, where the dance floor represented a place where people otherwise marginalized in society could feel a sense of release and could even address injustices (garcia-mispireta 2023: 8). an important aspect of the discussion about early club culture’s legacy, is how it connects to the term edm. hidalgo and others make the claim that the contemporary commercial edm scene largely lacks these historic ideals of inclusion and respect (anderson 2009: 24; park 2015: 31; conner and katz 2020: 461; hidalgo 2023: 20–21). a description of this divide is found in simon reynolds’s piece in the guardian from 2012. he argues that rave culture, as it existed in europe, had struggled to gain a foothold in the united states. in his words, it had to be rebranded into edm in order to make it big there. in part this was done to distance itself from the drug use associated with european rave culture, but while the drug use persisted, reynolds argues that the growing edm scene mowed away from the inclusive ethos found in the earlier club/rave scene (reynolds 2012). much of the same sentiment is repeated in a more humorous way by clive martin, a british writer for vice magazine, who claims that while the united states was attempting to catch up barlindhaug | edm, tech house, or business techno? 15 with something that has been popular in europe for decades, it misunderstood some key concepts. he returns to gunders´s account of club music artists bringing more live instruments into their performance, but turns this development into a comic punchline. he argues the americans are totally missing the point when they are trying to make “live” dance music: “live drums are completely unacceptable” (martin 2013). an example on how this view on edm is continued in social media today can be seen in a post from mixmag some years ago. posting “to all haters”, mixmag’s editorial called for a stop to homophobic, sexist and transphobic comments on its facebook page, pointing to the origin of both house and techno within marginalized communities (fig. 1).1 a comment appeared (by what appears to be an american white male) opening with the phrase “edm was always an inclusive place […] however”, then going on to criticize mixmag for trying to press a political agenda. the most “liked” response to this comment was made by a famous british dj, simply stating “…….edm?”. for an “informed audience” this would underscore the notion that using the term edm means you lack any knowledge or appreciation of the authentic club music and that you are at odds with the original ethos of the club scene. this distinction is also made in the later editions of brewster and broughton’s last night a dj saved my life (2000); in the chapter “sell-out?” it is suggested that edm was a rebranding exercise pursued in order to detach club music from its black and gay roots (2006: 540). figure 1. “to all the haters” mixmag dancecult 17(1)16 at this point, discussions about authenticity intersect with current discussions about genres as a commercial apparatus of labeling and marketing (alacovska and o’brien 2021: 642). the term edm can be used to attract a specific segment of consumers. the way the popularization of edm coincides with the growing popularity and commercialization of club music leads many to use edm as a description of a new commercial club music. academics are of course aware of how this can be in conflict with their use of “electronic dance music” as an umbrella term ( jóri 2001: 27; garcia-mispireta 2018: 57). my analysis of memes in twtmegp will bring more insight into how newer genre labels like edm, as opposed to earlier genre labels, are used to define inauthenticity, but also reveal insights into how such ideals can be established as well as negotiated. twtmepg: drawing a line between the authentic and inauthentic today’s club music continues to morph into new genres, and the scene continues to expand, causing the line between the authentic and inauthentic to be in constant flux. what makes twtmegp interesting is that through memes, humor and sometimes more sober discussions, members establish their “stance” (in shifman’s terms), discussing and negotiating the borders between authentic and inauthentic, as well as giving genre labels different symbolic status. in this process, the idea of the memescape comes into play (baspehlivan 2024: 38), where statements made about authenticity are questioned through the playful exchange of symbols. having followed the group for years, i will define the baseline assumption about edm as signifying the opposite of authenticity in club music, representing an ethical departure from its original underground status, its social inclusivity and its non-commercialism. a post that exemplifies this, is reposted from an interview with dj dvs1, reading: “hard techno is the edm of this generation” (xceed 2023). three days later, the post had over 300 comments, mostly stating that he was right, that hard techno was garbage (referring to the group’s prevailing understanding of edm). there were, however, two people that tried to point out that edm was not a genre, but a term used to label all dance music. they were rather quickly reminded that it might have been the intention at one point, but that it now was used to describe bad commercial dance music. one person explained it as: […] you know what he means. overpaid playback/sync dj’s playing commercial electronic dance music with big buildups and drops, often with cheesy elements and vocals. 128 bpm, pryda snare right before the drop, festival bangers with electro and trance instrumentation. vip tables for crappy rich people, slutty champagne waiters with sparklers, co2 cannons, confetti, strobe lights and cakes in your face. not to forget the people on the dancefloor not dancing but filming everything on their mobile phones to let people on social media know that you are having a ‘good time’. this is what i think of when someone mentions edm (comment on twtmegp 2024). barlindhaug | edm, tech house, or business techno? 17 what makes this statement interesting is that, besides few actual musical explanations, it mainly focuses on ethical aspects, associating edm with a superficial, commercialized and impersonal social movement, underpinning the opinion that edm is a commercial rebranding of club music (reynolds 2012). in addition, it exemplifies how the posts in twtmegp follow tulloch’s analysis of memes as a way to represent different aspects of reality (2021: 295). the reposting of the interview opens a space where alternative interpretations in the comments section come into play, establishing the term edm as a negative label, perhaps in opposition to what it was originally intended to encompass. together with artists like timmy trumpet, skrillex, as well as steve aoki with his cake throwing (steveaoki 2021), david guetta has been central in shaping edm as a negative term (fig. 2). in addition to his massive commercial success, guetta has become a soft target due to his disregard for the cultural roots of club music, exemplifying how important the legacy of early club culture is for twtmegp members. in an interview with abc in october 2018, he claimed to have brought house music to the united states, which instantly sparked a long stream of ridicule in social media and twtmegp (matthew 2018; gardner 2018), as common knowledge places the birth of house music in chicago. figure 2 “david guetta” twtmegp 2023 dancecult 17(1)18 moving beyond the term edm, in twtmegp labels such as tech house and lately melodic techno have also been used as a marker of inauthenticity and commercialization. the memes on melodic techno often refer to how the genre excessively borrows musical elements associated with 1990s trance while claiming to be new and innovative (fig. 3). in addition to making fun of actual musical subgenres, the fictitious genre of “business techno” has been invented to criticize the commercialization of club music (fig. 4). this has been used to label artists that have diverged from the expected non-commerciality associated with the roots of techno. it is hard to pinpoint exactly how the term was coined, but it was clear that richie hawtin (also criticized by drexciya in the 1990s for commercially exploiting techno) has been associated with the genre. this fictive genre has also been used outside twtmegp as a label for an unethical drive to commercialize techno. one example is the german artist apparat, who in response to the emergence of “plague raves” (a term coined at club events operating on the fringe of legality during the covid-19 pandemic), said: “business techno is getting out of hand, it should officially be a subgenre of edm” (apparat 2020). another artist that uses this term is the british dj and producer dave clarke. in an interview, he criticizes the edm movement for being a commercial and artistic circus, but continues “…business techno took from edm and basically put business first, which is completely opposite to what techno was” (green 2024). figure 3 “melodic techno” twtmegp 2023 figure 4 “fake business techno” twtmegp 2024 barlindhaug | edm, tech house, or business techno? 19 for the members of twtmegp, edm, tech house and business techno embody the inauthentic, while older genre labels like house and techno symbolize the authentic; however, it can be challenging to define exact borders for the inauthentic. from time to time, ideas of authenticity collide with artists’ desire to reach new audiences. how far from the underground ideal can an artist depart before it becomes a problem for the audience? to exemplify these challenges, i will dig into two earlier discussions that have taken place in the group—examples that show how complex it is to draw a demarcation line between the authentic and inauthentic. the first example is related to the saudi arabian festival sandstorm and its extensive lineup of djs. the notion that these djs were selling out to a corrupt and murderous regime was almost unanimous (fig. 5). dance culture’s legacy within the gay community seemed misplaced in a country known for cracking down on lgbt rights. among artists that the group members defined as edm, their participation was of course anticipated and confirmed what many saw as an expected lack of morals. responding to steve aoki’s performance at the festival, one member ironically commented: “not steve aoki” (fig. 6). in contrast to this, what upset many was that there were some “decent names” in the lineup, artists that for many twtmegp embodied authenticity. among them was jeff mills, hailed as one of the pioneers of techno in detroit during the early 1990s (reynolds 1998: 205). on social media, mills defended his choice by arguing that this was an opportunity to reach out to an audience that had not had the chance to experience this type of music. he himself reflected on the importance of spreading music to new regions of the world, pointing to his experience of hearing european electronic music in detroit ( juno daily 2021). figure 5 “sandstorm” twtmegp 2021 figure 6 “not steve aoki” twtmegp 2021 dancecult 17(1)20 mills’s participation in sandstorm received widespread condemnation from members of twtmegp, even sparking new memes ridiculing mills’s justification for performing there (fig. 7). this exemplifies how arguments for spreading music to new groups of audiences can in some cases conflict with the audience’s perceptions of what constitutes ethical behavior from an artist. my second example touches upon the same dilemma but illustrates my point that the borders between the authentic and inauthentic are in flux. it all started when a twitter post from artist seth troxler related to an ongoing discussion about duo camelphat was shared on twtmegp. troxler was of the opinion that their music was not house, but edm disguised as house. however, the screenshot shared of troxler’s tweet, also included a reply from a club promoter complaining that troxler had asked £30,000 for a gig, calling it “…as #underground as a 12 story building” (fig. 8). this caused amusement, since troxler is an artist who on several occasions has advocated for the original spirit of club music (hidalgo 2022: 28), and for some his proposed dj fee contradicted his self-proclaimed authenticity. figure 7 “are we the baddies?” twtmegp 2021. figure 8 “seth troller” twtmegp 2019. barlindhaug | edm, tech house, or business techno? 21 while jeff mills’s attendance at sandstorm was unanimously condemned by the group members, the memes following troxler’s tweet turned into a longer meme exchange where the actual act of gatekeeping the authentic become debated. what was first made fun of was how troxler took the role of drawing the line between the authentic and the inauthentic. we find this in a meme depicting a confused baby yoda with the caption “me front row trying to decipher if this is ‘edm disguised as house music’”, with someone commenting “is that seth troxler at a camelphat concert?” (fig. 9). these memes about troxler become part of a specific trend i have seen among memes in twtmegp that makes fun of the actual ideals of authenticity, especially considerations about the underground. this points to what martinelli describes as authenticity as a guarantee for the alternative/avant-garde (2008: 124). the question raised with some memes is whether there is any musical difference, and if there is, are there any reasons why the underground should be any better? a good example is a version of a well-used image macro, reading: “techno people be like” and a happy face besides “a hair dryer with a kick drum” (fig. 10). figure 9 “me front row” twtmegp 2019 dancecult 17(1)22 figure 10 “techno people” twtmegp 2023 figure 11 “goes to berghain twice” twtmegp 2019 however, the interesting part in the meme exchange concerning troxler appeared when he himself entered twtmegp, turning it into a direct exchange of opinions between troxler and the audience. the meme that brought troxler to post in the group was a variant of a meme that has existed for a long time within the group (fig. 11), a picture of a strangely dressed person with the caption “goes to berghain once” (or “twice”). berghain is a club in berlin known for its strong ties to the gay community as well as its underground ideals, but at the same time, it is renowned for its exclusivity, being a club notoriously difficult to gain entrance to (garcia-mispireta 2023: 189). in twtmegp, berghain has gained the status as more or less the antidote to edm, the guardian of authenticity within the club scene. at the same time, its strict door policy has been the subject of many memes, partly questioning the authenticity of their exclusivity. the meme that troxler responded to was a picture of himself in tight red shorts, red shirt and roses in his hair, with the caption “goes to berghain twice”. troxler himself is well known for humorous press photos, even doing promotional pictures in the nude (nadin 2013), so the meme has a degree of homage as well as humor. when someone commented that he actually had djed at the club, twice, troxler posted a meme himself, under the heading “i’m a bit of a memer myself ” showing a scene from the simpsons: homer sitting in the control room of the nuclear power plant with people standing behind him seeking safety in the doorway. the captions over both homer and the bystanders are “never been to berghain” and over the control panel it reads “making meme’s about people who go to berghain once” (fig. 12). barlindhaug | edm, tech house, or business techno? 23 figure 12 “never been to berghain” twtmegp 2019 figure 13 “troxler” twtmegp 2019 this meme exchange between troxler and twtmegp members turned into a debate about who has the authority to define authenticity, and in a humorous way commenting on the gatekeeping that is going on in the group. considering berghain’s status within the club scene, troxler could point to the fact that he, in comparison to other people, actually had been there. he might demand a lot of money for his performances, but displays the right symbols concerning the legacy of club music and has performed at the club that for many is the benchmark of authenticity. as atton argues, the central argument of authenticity in music is about how it accords with the personality of the artist and the views and expectations of the audience (2019: 206). but the result can be both artistically and culturally conservative. people on the inside function as gatekeepers who uphold their own ideals of authenticity. what later came to unfold in this meme exchange centers specifically on how authenticity might not be compatible with trying to expand the music to new audiences. here we perceive a friction that emerges due to the “embedded diversity” that garcia-mispireta describes within parts of club culture (garcia-mispireta 2023: 212). however, these attempts to preserve the existing subculture can sometimes hinder the vitality of the genre. through fieldwork within the philadelphia rave scene, anderson uncovered that the inability to recruit new people led to a decline in the scene (2009: 317). part of this decline came as a consequence of the rave scene becoming too alternative for its own good (2009: 322). this point became apparent when a new artist, dave clarke, entered the meme exchange. he posted a meme with a well-used picture from social media: two persons dancing furiously together with two cats (fig. 13). the persons are captioned as techno and tech house, while the cat dancing in the front is troxler. clarke’s exact intention with this meme is not entirely clear, but it positions troxler between house and techno that he might find enjoyable. troxler, however, dancecult 17(1)24 responded by posting a promotional picture of clarke performing at tomorrowland with the caption “nothing says underground anarchists hard techno dj like your own stage at tomorrowland”—the case being that the tomorrowland festival is mostly associated with commercial edm (fig. 14). clarke responded quickly with a picture of troxler, this time in a pink dress and black braids, with the caption “nothing says gentrification of house more than playing spice girls at a gig in ibiza” (fig. 15). figure 14 “clarke tomorrowland” twtmegp 2019 figure 15 “gentrification of house” twtmegp 2019 on the surface, the memes exchanged between troxler and clarke can be seen as a humorous competition about who is most authentic. looking into the comments, however, a more serious discussion emerges concerning the role of authenticity markers, abolishing bigger festivals to stick true to the traditions of underground club culture. clarke argues that it should be about bringing music you believe in, out to a new and larger audience, explaining: “…i tried to get techno presented there with liebing, klock etc, etc, and while the stage design was not my first choice, the music was…”. this exemplifies the contradictions that the struggle for authenticity can involve, debating authenticity as a guarantee for the avantgarde and marginalized music (martinelli 2008: 124). edm, and the culture connected to it, do not necessarily eliminate the possibility of presenting good music and sway the ethics of audiences. this also connects us to the first meme i discussed, posted more than four years later: dj dvs1 claiming that “hard techno is the new edm”. in the interview, dvs1 was speculating that for younger audiences, hard techno might influence them to seek out deeper, more underground music. striving for exclusivity and positioning yourself as cultural gatekeepers, does not always help build a community for club music. although it can be fun to ridicule the commercial ethics of edm, the meme exchange between troxler and clarke also uncovers a deeper discussion: how can one uphold the legacy from the origins of club music while still gaining a larger audience. barlindhaug | edm, tech house, or business techno? 25 conclusion through this article i have shown how some people use the term edm and other newer genre labels to brand certain club music as inauthentic. the authentic, on the other hand, is defined through a link to the roots of club culture in the marginalized, underground communities of the late 1980s. my analyses of memes and discussions in twtmegp show, however, how difficult it can be to define the line between the authentic and inauthentic. this is partly linked to what garcia-mispireta calls the scene’s “embedded diversity”—the desire to keep the established subculture safe (2023: 212). on the other hand, safeguarding something too jealously can also result in cultural decline (anderson 2009: 317). while mills’s performance at sandstorm was condemned by the members of twtmegp, my analysis of the exchange of memes between artist troxler and clarke reveals that it can be considered appropriate to reach new audiences through what might be seen as inauthentic venues. some comments from twtmegp members even poke fun at the gatekeeping that exists within parts of the communities. it is apparent that champagne waiters and co2 cannons are taking it too far, yet troxler’s attempt to label camelphat as edm was interpreted by many members of twtmegp as a condescending move. as shown, much of the discussions on authenticity within club music corresponds with moore’s definition of third-person authenticity, connecting it to the historic time and place of club music’s origins. this stands in contrast to the instrumentalist skills that are important in other musical genres. what my examples reveal is that this might make club music’s authenticity particularly unstable and is perhaps the reason why the label edm has come to encapsulate inauthenticity. in my experience, club music’s ideals of innovation and expansion do not always mix well with a focus on conserving a historic moment in time. one cannot demand that club music should be the same as in late 1980s for it to retain its authenticity. the invention of the term business techno, however, exemplifies that there are clear ethical considerations that for many ought to be followed. money should not come before music, as clarke puts it, and embracing sexual and ethnic minorities is also important. the global outreach that club music has today does not necessarily stand in opposition to the original cultural ideals of inclusion and respect, but for some—perhaps mostly the older 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press. tulloch, bonnie, j. 2023. “memes to an end: why internet memes matter to information research”. libri, 73(4): 293-305. <https://doi.org/10.1515/libri-2021-0098> twtmegp. 2025. the worst techno memes ever group page. facebook group <https://www.facebook.com/groups/574963892707751>, (accessed february 2025) varis, piia. 2015. “digital ethnography”. in the routledge handbook of language and digital communication, eds. alexandra georgakopoulou and tereza spilioti, 55-68. new york: routledge. < https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315694344> zimmer, michael (2020). ““but the data is already public”: on the ethics of research in facebook”. in the ethics of information technology, eds. keith w miller and mariarosaria taddeo, 229-241. new york: routledge. <https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003075011-17 > filmography steveaoki. tiktok. june 1, 2021. <https://www.tiktok.com/@steveaoki/video/6968601124228123910>, (accessed 16 october 2025) xceed. “the new frontiers of techno, with dvs1 | cue interview by xceed”. youtube, 9:21. uploaded on 6 december 2023. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=2ba7lvvk14u>, (accessed february 2025) https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/aug/02/how-rave-music-conquered-america https://doi.org/10.1145/3394231.3397923 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315597010 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429026324%3e%20 https://www.facebook.com/groups/574963892707751 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315694344 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315694344%20%3e%20 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003075011-17%20 https://www.tiktok.com/@steveaoki/video/6968601124228123910 https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=2ba7lvvk14u beyond the brain: happening at east edge paul chambers university of adelaide (australia) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.11> setting the scene beyond the brain began in 1995 was a monthly all-night dance party in north-east new south wales, australia. by 1997, they had evolved into multi-room, performance-infused, music and art happenings attracting over two thousand people. unlike the bush and community hall parties then happening regularly around the byron bay hinterland, the original aim was to organise high-profile and professional parties inspired by london’s megatripolis and return to the source. psychedelics were integral to the background and aesthetic of the events; beyond the brain was the title of a book by stanislav grof (1985), an early pioneer in the use of psychedelics in psychiatry. grof successfully treated mental disorders by administering lsd and returning to a patient’s source of trauma, often related to the birthing process. his research was curtailed by the decision to criminalise the drug. originally known by its indigenous name, cavenbah, the arakwal people had a long history of living and fishing in the byron bay area, before european settlement established an economy around logging, dairying and meat-works (stewart 2008). in the 1960s and ’70s, surfers and hippies arrived to enjoy the beauty of the region (hoskins 2013). there were established sannyasin and lgbtq+ communities, together with “ferals”, a local eco-conscious counterculture pursuing alternative and sustainable lifestyles. local events, such as electric tepee, fused electronic music, lighting projections and ritual celebration. many in the local scene had experienced the annual party seasons in goa, india that had been playing electronic dance music at outdoor, black light-lit gatherings by the beach or in jungle clearings since the 1980s (reynolds 1998, castle 2019). lsd was the primary drug of choice (davis 2004, cole & hannan 2015). the byron/lismore/nimbin area of the 1990s was a unique place in time. it was like “the sixties” had never finished and was an ongoing project. there was a degree of psychedelic maturity in the area, with many seasoned “experts”, as documented by graham st john (2015). this society was, as jimi hendrix would say, “experienced”. at a wider societal level, there was a groundswell of psychedelic consciousness happening, linked to the burgeoning rave scene. connected with this were the writings of terence mckenna who had grown to become the international spokesperson/proselytiser for a movement for cognitive liberty. thus, the scene was set and the zeitgeist primed for a communal psychedelic celebration. catching the wave the first beyond the brain was organised by nick taylor, ljudan thorpe, kathryn chambers and me, at the union hall at southern cross university in may 1995. we wanted the party to go all night, from 10pm until 6am, and we declined to use the licensed bar. at the time, alcohol was frowned upon within the local party scene, considered as bringing an unwelcome energy to the celebration. instead, we had a chai shop, serving cakes and spiced tea, the kind of refreshments available at the parties in goa and at local doofs (strong 2001).[1] jaime rocco drew the design on the first flyer (fig. 1), which was printed on fluoro pink and yellow paper and distributed far and wide. despite this, the event was attended mainly by “family”, people in the local party crew who, like the organisers, went to most parties happening in the area. the night went well, though only made enough to cover costs and pay a modest fee to those performing. this became a long-term pattern at future events, no matter how big they got. fig. 1. beyond the brain, 5 may 1995. to soften the somewhat institutional nature of the setting, we put thought and energy into decorating the space. we included a pointed star in white tape in the centre of the dance floor, and we used as much lighting as we could afford. oz of squiffy vision and dee of project shine did the lighting, making good use of projections onto home-made screens and installations, and they would be involved in all the remaining beyond the brain events. in the “dance” space, the music featured a style then rapidly morphing into a recognisable genre known as psytrance, featuring stomping kicks, eastern motifs and spoken word samples. local producers such as nick taylor and ray castle were making this music and were well-connected to other producers around the world. it was cutting-edge in its use of the latest digital synthesisers, and it still had stylistic variety. i played in the “chill out” space, along with chin bindi (jedda selke), who became the resident dj and played at every party. here, the musical vibe was eclectic, conceived as a space to unwind and converse away from the intensity of the dance floor, where changes to the music were made slowly and sensitively. if those conditions were met, pretty much anything could be played, but most music was contemporary and made with electronic instruments. the flyer for the next party at the same venue used an image from the in blissful company lp by quintessence, featuring raja ram, then making and releasing music as the infinity project. it was a geometric design that seemed to move as you looked at it (fig 2). this party featured work by local visual artists, thus fusing an art exhibition with a dance party, another of the original aims of beyond the brain. apparent at this event was how many young people turned up who no one recognised. our decision to use an unlicensed bar had the unconsidered consequence of making the event open to all ages, and word had obviously got out among local youth. this boosted the numbers on the door but raised objections from those unused to seeing so many strangers at a party. there was not much to be done but adapt to the situation. increased numbers allowed for more adventurous future productions. by this party, the roles of organisation had largely fallen to kathy and me. we had become experienced and well-known for this role in the previous two years and this shift happened quite organically. fig. 2. beyond the brain, 2 june 1995. the third party was held at the epicentre in byron bay, a sprawling ex-abattoir and whaling station, located on an area of flat land between swamp and the pacific ocean at belongil, adjacent to byron bay. the energy of the place is hard to express in writing. the site’s colonial history conveyed feelings of slaughter and suffering that could still be detected in the architecture and traces of equipment attached to the walls and floors. yet it also had a reputation within the scene as an old corroboree site, a place of tribal gathering and celebration. it had two main spaces that could hold hundreds of people each. what shifted the decision to move was the presence of a canberra artistic collective called temple state, who were holding an exhibition in the epicentre at the time. doing the party together promised temple state a bigger audience than they would get on their own. in return, beyond the brain got impressive art installations and a strange spoken-word performance for the chill out. the event’s flyer superimposed jaime’s artwork from the first flyer over a section of an alex grey painting (fig. 3). the arrival of consumer-level computers and the internet made the job of writing, producing and distributing promotional material much easier. the story of beyond the brain can be matched by the development and expansion of promotional material, from hand-drawn designs to colourful and professionally produced artworks, from press releases to full page adverts, accompanied by increasingly verbose hyperbole, all calibrated to get people excited and anticipating the next event. this party was a huge success, the whole energy of the event changed and it felt like a real turning point. fig. 3. beyond the brain, 8 july 1995. rather than attempting to capitalise on the success of the epicentre as a venue, we returned to lismore for the fourth beyond the brain. this was the first time that alex clarke, a digital artist from lismore, did the flyer and the result immediately advanced another level in professionalism (fig 4). with hindsight, all this promotion was over the top, because word-of-mouth did most of the work. but the flyer was considered important in setting the scene, as well as providing a sought after souvenir. word had definitely gone out for this party because it was rammed, with loads of high school kids coming from nimbin and lismore in particular. the main room played an expanded selection of psychedelic dance music than goa trance, featuring a dj from brisbane named mechanoid (jay bryan). the room also featured a performance by “cyberslut”, women from the scene who were to reappear at future events under various guises and personnel. performance provided another dimension to the party, as well as giving more people opportunity to get involved and become invested in the event. alex clarke projected some of his video art, and even though this amounted to a few recurring loops of animation, alongside the colourful lighting, they looked really cool. all future events would include computer animation, films and vision mixing, taking up a sizeable chunk of the budget. this event went until 8am and the whole experience was too much for the university authorities. we were sad to lose the space, but our next event was locked in: brisbane’s institute of modern art. fig. 4. beyond the brain, 4 august 1995. the flyer alex did for this event presented the core crew of the beyond the brain parties, now established after 5 events (fig. 5). the ground floor upon entry had an exhibition of psychedelic art, much of it using fluoro paint and created by people in the scene. the next floor up was the “elemental ambient zone” with djs and live musicians, complete with sympathetic lights and atmosphere. the top floor was the “transcendance space”, featuring pumping dance music and lighting by squiffy vision and ekayod spectrum. the latter were nigel and damo, who worked for a professional production company in brisbane. they became regulars and loved to turn up with intelligent lighting that kept the parties looking amazing. since we wanted to emphasise the art angle at this event, coda (dhuwa) and tetsuo industries (justin de leeuw) were given prominent billing for their “art installations”. in truth, both artists were becoming crucial to the production, particularly once we moved permanently to the epicentre. not only were they creative geniuses, but they fell into the role of site forepersons at subsequent events, allocating roles and supervising projects. fig. 5. beyond the brain, 23 september 1995. the wider party scene at that time was very healthy. and it was a magical time. the epicentre was living up to its name, and the complex had become like the village of an enterprising and entrepreneurial counterculture, more concerned with artistic projects, health practices and hedonism than making money. and then there was the 10,000 cows vegan café, established with a mission to heal the bloody history of the site. many of the crew moved in permanently, adding artworks to beautify their everyday surroundings. oz had set up home there, as had regular live musicians kavi and tone wandaller. coda lived there and was allowed to decorate the spaces and write koan-like statements on the building. sculptures hung from the decaying skeleton of the old slaughterhouse, spirals of reflective materials adorned the walls, and mayan hieroglyphics nestled against calligraphic spiritual exhortations, illuminated by crystal-infused prismatic projections. you could look up at the sky through the exposed rafters while keeping warm around braziers to a soundtrack of electronic ambience. it was a space to hang out, talk ideas through, visualise and plan what could be done next. the only limit was the budget—the more “out there” the idea, the better. this was also a time when things started getting strange. east edge psychedelia for the sixth beyond the brain, we went with full-colour flyers and three rooms, something then unheard of in the area. the epicentre allowed room for expansion along its labyrinthine passageways and multiple rooms. musically, the scene was changing, with big beat music coming into vogue. as most of the doofs played trance, that had to be included. and of course, we needed a chill space. a solution was found in an area backing onto a space where many of the crew now lived, an open-air “indoor space” known as the cycad garden. the flyer was created by alex clarke and di james (fig. 6). where alex was good with fonts and layout, di had a deep psychological perspective. the result was an androgynous god-like face superimposed onto the centre of a merkaba crystal structure, situated in a vortex of coloured lights. articulating a growing confidence in promoting the whole party package, the rooms were named “maximum peakage”, “optimum freakage” and “ambient tweakage”. exuding a symmetry and colour choice that felt pleasing emotionally, the flyer left a lingering impression of mystery while promising a sense of fun. fig. 6. beyond the brain, 3 may 1996. beyond the brain was now taking months to organise and a whole week to set up, with many working for a free ticket. often, these people were quite loose, strangers in every sense. the event had become a magnet for creatives, dreamers, hedonists and the weird. more people getting involved allowed for more autonomy in creative decision making and a shared sense of ownership that was crucial to the event’s success. the team coming together, and the collective energy unleashed for the party even seemed to affect the contextual conditions. the sixth event was preceded by torrential rain, accompanied by a king tide that washed the byron beach away. as roads flooded, we were concerned this could impact the numbers attending. yet there were loads of people, and it totally went off. far and wide, the event had become synonymous with a good time. the seventh event coincided with the next visit of temple state. their talented director, clint hurrell, had overseen the design of some amazing installations. temple state brought tall, narrow, pyramid structures, rather like egyptian obelisks, designed to hold intelligent lights that pulsed beams of light in all directions. once again, the flyer was a collaboration between di and alex (fig. 7). the focus was an egg encircled by a bronze serpent, an image symbolising eternal rebirth. the egg was situated in the foreground of a fractal vortex, almost like the egg was dropping into or coming out of water. the increasingly complex list of creative personnel highlighted the many artists keen to be involved who were often not closely connected with the party scene. the event also had a fourth room between the dance space and the cycad garden, featuring sound generating installations built by marcus bowden that made noises when touched, turning the area into a playground for adults. another part of this event was the epicentre cinema, situated in a room in the old abattoir and accessible from a corridor near the cycad garden. the colourfully painted cinema had been established in the epicentre site by nic touches clouds, a video artist, who had opened it up to the party. fig. 7. beyond the brain, 26 july 1996. simon greaves (sico) was the scene’s main sound system operator and essential member of the crew. a significant element of the parties was that we always set-up four speaker stacks in the dance spaces, designed to encourage people not to look forward at the dj, but at each other. this reflected the goa experience of ray castle, myself and other people. we sought to create conditions conducive to a transcendental experience, as opposed to a spectacle passively observed. a significant proportion of the music being played at the event was made by producers based on the pacific rim; this included not only the byron area, but also brisbane, sydney and melbourne, as well as tokyo. many of the producers knew each other; collaborations evolved out of friendships or through djing at the same parties, many of which were outdoors and open to nature (cole 1999). finished tracks were swapped on dat tapes, and producers could get their music played on dance floors across the world, long before a commercial release. a contemporary study of 87 australian producers by fred cole provides an illuminating account of the “harder-edged upper frequency chaos” then being produced, how it was made and what inspired it (1999: 8). two of the australian producers who cole interviewed were nick taylor and ray castle from byron. both played regularly at beyond the brain, had lived in tokyo and were well-connected with djs and producers living there. in melbourne, the psy-harmonics label released influential compilations, such as dancing to the sound of the sun (1995) and hacking the reality myth (1996), featuring music by artists from japan, melbourne, sydney and byron. melbourne dj andrew till, from the psy-harmonics label, performed at the seventh beyond the brain. techniques such as gating, switching a sound off and on rapidly, were common features in the psychedelic repertoire. another was a frenzied element that taylor described as “not really randomness. it’s chaos with a flow: navigating your way through it is the challenge” (1999: 63). unsurprisingly and implicit to the name “psytrance”, psychedelics were an obvious inspiration for much of the music getting produced. a sub-chapter in cole’s thesis on illegal drug use describes their creative stimulation. certain drugs were said to induce compositional styles that allowed people to relate to particular forms of music. dmt in particular was a common subject of discourse in the north coast scene (st john 2015).it undoubtedly had an influence on musical production, which cole described in his thesis as having a “high sparkly top end; and a really tinkly weird sound that infiltrated trance music” (cole 1999: 120). psychedelics were associated with themes of spirituality, tribalism and self-realisation, as evident in artist names, track titles and spoken-word samples programmed into the music then produced. examples include sacramental (sonic sufi), “whirling dervish” (crazy party, psy-harmonics vol. 2) and ancient future. together with the treble-rich synapse-shredding sonic character of much of the music, such stylistic attributes contributed to a distinctive “east edge” psychedelia.[2] chaos surfing by 1997, beyond the brain had turned into a category 5 “strange attractor”, building and mutating, inexorably sucking more people into its vortex. and just when it reached a zenith of energy, excitement and anticipation, in walked terence mckenna, then on an australian speaking tour. while beyond the brain was never about big names well-known in the local scene and wider community, mckenna was an exception. he connected ideas around psychedelics and consciousness in circulation since the sixties, with elements in the rave scene open to such influences. the intonations and tone of his voice made him engaging to listen to. given his ability to communicate the ineffable “logos” messages of the plant psychedelics, it was inspiring to organise an event for mckenna, and he motivated others to become involved (mckenna 1991). as we started planning the event, it was decided to extend it over 3 days. given the main title “forward the future”, this multi-day event was designed to give mckenna the opportunity to present in different formats (fig. 8). day 1, his first public appearance in australia, was at the epicentre big space on friday 21 february. beyond the brain would take place on the next night, where mckenna would rap in the cycad garden. mckenna’s sunday rap, to be performed in a theatre in lismore, would be more lecture-like in style (using slides to illustrate his “timewave zero” idea). as the outline for the event firmed up, we went into flyer mode. alex was very keen to start designing, and i explained to him an image i had of mckenna “juggling the future” at this event, connected to the elemental forces of nature. alex created a somewhat unusual layout in an a3 landscape design. one half of the design featured mckenna’s face looming out of the forces of fire, water, air and earth, with two hands juggling three balls, each symbolising the trio of planned events. fig. 8. forward the future, 21-23 february 1997. also, quite fortuitously performing at beyond the brain, was tsuyoshi suzuki, the biggest psytrance artist on the planet at that time. the epicentre turned into a crucible of creativity as enthusiasm took over, a collective endeavour operating on pure excitement and expectation. organising became “chaos surfing” as the event became a phenomenon happening on its own trajectory. a strong mayan theme emerged in what was painted and created, which happened organically as people were tuning into the premillennial atmosphere. a crew from nimbin offered to decorate a long black corridor leading to the dance space. it took them several days, using paint, artwork, fluoro wool and black lights, all for free tickets and to contribute. many people arrived during the set-up, often from interstate, explaining the kind of performance they wanted to do and requesting to be included on the ever-expanding door list. i cannot remember kathy or me ever refusing anyone who wanted to get involved. the boundaries between audience and performer blurred, helping to create a feeling that anything could happen. a crowd of about 250 gathered to welcome mckenna at the first event on friday evening, and as he began talking, fractal projections appeared behind. on the saturday night, beyond the brain began with a sun matrix activation ceremony, a combination of smudging space cleansing and choreographed ritual incantation. all the beyond the brain parties began with a ritual ceremony to create a sense of the sacred we believed possible at these events. mckenna spoke in the ancient future realisation space, where he performed 3 raps, with music in between by pangalacticspermia (a nod to the theory of psilocybin mushroom’s origin in outer space). this one-time act comprised kavi, tone, ab didgeridoo oblivion (sean candy), skai talon, steve berry, nick spacetree and matt ledger, with andrew richards on mixing duties. mckenna was seated on a mushroom-like dais, raised up above an enthusiastic audience of around 750, framed by obelisks and painted ancient egyptian figures, with giant fluoro sculptures to one side. the crowd were generally respectful and enjoying the moment, the odd unmistakeable waft of dmt detectable in the air. an unforgettable moment for me was mckenna reciting lewis carroll’s jabberwocky at the height of the party. the other crowning moment was tsuyoshi’s set. of course, the dance floor was packed, its occupants gesticulating with glee and abandon. there was a great vibe everywhere. demographically, it was the most balanced of all beyond the brain parties. all age groups were represented. many people were attending their first party or were not regular doofers. personally, it stands out as one of the peak experiences of my life. there was a palpable aura of safety, celebration and exaltation. it felt like much of the town and surrounding area were there, a tribute to the tolerance and acceptance of the community. beyond the brain with terence mckenna, a film of mckenna’s rap at beyond the brain, set against footage of the 1997 beyond the brain parties, from set-up to aftermath, is now available for viewing. end of an era the afterglow from forward the future was lasting and widespread. as word had spread far and wide, there was a lot of interest in the epicentre as a venue. it was always going to be a challenge to follow the mckenna event but it was a chance to try to take beyond the brain even further. after brainstorming ideas, the idea emerged to create peak moments in the party, where various complimentary sensual stimuli would be programmed together for maximum affect. it was ambitious, but a sign of where the events had come to. we did not make this aim widely known but printed a warning as a duty of care: “some segments of tonight’s event will be mood enhanced using harmonic blends of colour, aroma, sacred geometry and psychoacoustic waves”. the making of the flyer for the ninth beyond the brain had an interesting story. i had an idea that a tree that was alive and sentient should somehow be the central symbol on the flyer. i met an artist attending local parties and checked out their work. one image of a tree spirit was “it”. i gained permission to use the artwork and gave it to alex, who incorporated the image against a lava-like background of fractals (fig. 9). the back of the flyer provided all the necessary information (fig.10). there was so much going on, it was like a whole festival happening on one night. then living locally and already a big name in the psychedelic trance scene, olli wisdom of space tribe was top of the bill. joining him was goa legend fred disko from melbourne. techno dj kazu kimura came down from brisbane, and kicking things off was byron high school student and dj georgia brown. fig. 9. beyond the brain, 20 september 1997. fig. 10. beyond the brain, back of flyer, 20 september 1997. the main dance room went up another level in terms of lighting and installations. oz had obtained huge mirrors, and these were combined with white projection surfaces to make them look kaleidoscopic. all the walls were covered at ground level by psychedelic art: banners from space tribe, a range of artwork by hannah gordon (a talented artist from the local scene), a large banner commissioned by me for an earlier party painted by jo and zoe (two more local doofers). there was also the “green man”, a commissioned papier-mâché face by alicia and john that turned up at several subsequent events and always seemed to affect the weather in the same way. we also booked 3d holographic lasers from technofear, playing this down in the event promotion so that it would be unexpected and blow people away. capping it off was a fire performance by venus. looking back, this room had all the elements of a classic byron-style goa party, but taken to a whole new level. but one installation really encapsulated beyond the brain. two weeks before the event, we were approached by brin, who wanted to make a dragon sculpture for the party. work began feverishly and gradually took the form of a giant dragon’s head that was placed by the front door, through which everyone would need to transit to enter and leave the party. initially using wood and white muslin, by the end of this heroic effort we needed two red spotlights for the eyes and a smoke machine to breathe smoke through the nostrils. but if beyond the brain was all about money, these events would never have been what they became. everyone was contributing “for the party”; it was bigger than any single person. this event was our most polished production. by then, the crew had worked together for so long that everyone knew what they were doing. demographically, the event attracted lots of young people with many coming down from the gold coast and brisbane. while it was another spectacular party, it also felt like the end of an era. up until this event, there was always a supreme confidence that right was on our side, the intentions were positive, and so many people were benefitting that it was unstoppable. but btb had turned into an event of epic renown, heralded throughout the shire and beyond, and a point had been reached. relationships were getting strained in the intensity and the “soul” of the event was in danger of being lost. we had pushed the envelope of the dance party as far as we could. burning man was the closest comparison. neither we, nor beyond the brain, felt invincible anymore. not long after, the local council stepped in and stopped any more similar events on the grounds of safety. beyond the brain were true multi-media “happenings”, a fusion of dance, art exhibition and performance theatre. they were also first and foremost parties. despite all the ambition and artistic aspirations, events had to “go off”, and if this worked everything would fall into place. if you wanted to come to party and nothing more, they delivered. but if you stopped to think about what the art might mean, the messages in the symbolism, the meanings behind the performances, the connections that might exist between all the work that had gone into this one night of celebration, they provided material for deep and lasting thoughts around possibility, consciousness, relationships and value. they were also very much the product of a time and place: byron bay just before house prices rocketed and demographics shifted following the completion of the pacific highway upgrade to brisbane and sydney. the community and atmosphere were tolerant, laid back, spiritual, colourful, friendly, powerful and magical; “freaks”, “greens” and “alternatives” were in the majority. people were prepared to work together quite selflessly, doing it for the doof. there was a sense of collective ownership and belonging which involved everyone and their aspirations. no one in the crew ever really got paid back for their efforts, compared to most “regular” occupations. it was about something else. these were visionary events happening at the right time in the perfect place—a superb and loose venue, right next to a beautiful beach, at a glorious collective moment where the creative chemistry of so many people came together. there is an openness and egalitarian acceptance that psychedelic use engenders that can, at least temporarily, dissolve the hierarchies, jealousies, grudges and judgements characteristic of human personalities. at beyond the brain, people came together as a team to create and enjoy something bigger than themselves. in doing so, those involved were able to transcend patterns of passivity, negativity and fear. the super-efforts expended to produce the parties seemed to activate latent human possibilities on both a personal and collective level, allowing access to a higher order of reality where miracles can happen. no potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. author biography paul chambers obtained his phd from the university of adelaide in 2019, with a thesis entitled “people, platforms, practice: the social mediation of electronic music production”. paul started clubbing in the 1980s, was a dj and promoter through the 1990s, and continues to make and perform electronic music. references carroll, lewis. 2009. through the looking-glass. auckland: the floating press. castle, ray. 2019. moon juice stomper: a novel: goa 1987–96. independently published. cole, fred. 1999. “creative practices in australian techno and other electronica: a folio of original compositions and supporting documentation”. phd dissertation, southern cross university. cole, fred and michael hannan. 2015. “goa trance”. perfect beat, 3(3): 1–14. <https://doi.org/10.1558/prbt.v3i3.28745>. davis, erik. 2004. “hedonic tantra: golden goa’s trance transmission”. in rave culture and religion, ed. graham st john, 273–86. london & new york: routledge. grof, stanislav. 1985. beyond the brain: birth, death and transcendence in psychotherapy. new york: state university of new york press. hoskins, ian. 2013. coast: a history of the new south wales edge. sydney: newsouth. mckenna, terence. 1991. the archaic revival: speculations on psychedelic mushrooms, the amazon, virtual reality, ufos, evolution, shamanism, the rebirth of the goddess, and the end of history. san francisco: harpersanfrancisco. reynolds, simon. 1998. energy flash: a journey through rave music and dance culture. london: picador. st john, graham. 2009. technomad: global raving countercultures. equinox: london. ———. 2015. mystery school in hyperspace: a cultural history of dmt. berkeley, north atlantic books. stewart, yvonne. 2008. “living on country”. transforming cultures ejournal 3(1): 353–76. <https://doi.org/10.5130/tfc.v3i1.694>. strong, peter. 2001. “doofstory: sydney park to the desert”. in freenrg: notes from the edge of the dance floor, ed. graham st john, 112–41. altona: common ground publishing. discography prana. 1996. message for east edge. celtic records (12inch): celt004. <https://www.discogs.com/release/203744-prana-message-for-east-edge-rmxs>. psy-harmonics vol. 2 (dancing to the sound of the sun). 1995.psy-harmonics (cd, comp): psy-015. <https://www.discogs.com/release/43046-various-psy-harmonics-vol-2-dancing-to-the-sound-of-the-sun>. quintessence. 1969. in blissful company. island records (vinyl, lp, album): ilps.9110q. <https://www.discogs.com/release/2644733-quintessence-in-blissful-company>. sonic sufi. 1995. sacramental. psy-harmonics (cd, album): psy-018. <https://www.discogs.com/release/57437-sonic-sufi-sacramental>. third eye. 1993. ancient future. psy-harmonics (cd, album): psy-001. <https://www.discogs.com/release/45075-third-eye-ancient-future>. filmography chambers, paul. 2023. beyond the brain with terence mckenna, australia: youtube. uploaded 23 september 2023. <https://youtu.be/igksd3unghy>, (accessed november 2023). notes [1] in the early 1990s, the word “doof” emerged into a lingua franca understood by “techno tribes” proliferating up and down the australian east coast, signifying the ubiquitous sound of the kick drum that signalled a party was happening. [2] taken from the title of a contemporary track written by tsuyoshi suzuki as prana. playing by the rules? genre conventions in contemporary dj performance dancecult: journal of electronic music & dance culture 17(1): 77–101 issn 1947-5403 ©2025 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.05 playing by the rules? genre conventions in contemporary dj performance manoli moriaty and nina kehagia liverpool hope university (uk) and university of liverpool (uk) abstract genre conventions play a central role in shaping contemporary dj performance, influencing how techniques and technologies are applied across styles such as techno, house and drum ’n’ bass. while scholarship has examined questions of authenticity, automation and the shift from analogue to digital technologies, less attention has been given to how djs adapt their practices in response to genre-specific expectations. using a mixed-method approach that combined an anonymised online survey with five semi-structured interviews, this study explores how performers negotiate issues of skill, legitimacy and audience perception. findings reveal that drum ’n’ bass djs emphasise abrupt transitions and rewinds, techno performers favour multilayered mixing and live processing, while house djs prioritise smooth transitions and curation. across genres, debates about automation remain, yet most participants framed djing as a balance of technical ability and artistic judgement. we conclude that genre conventions continue to structure performance practice, though increasingly navigated with flexibility. keywords: dj performance, digital technology, genre and practice, club culture, mixed methods manoli moriaty is a music producer, performer and scholar. active since the early 2000s, he began djing with mobile sound systems and later promoted manchester events such as hit & run, illuminaughty and metanast. his compositions draw on niche offshoots of popular genres and avantgarde sonorities. he has published research on human–computer interaction, poly-disciplinary collaboration and dj and turntablist communities. manoli holds a phd from the university of salford and is a lecturer in music production at liverpool hope university. manolimoriaty.com nina kehagia is a music and culture curator, strategist and pgr researcher at the university of liverpool. her research explores cultural heritage, music cities and dance music history. she is head of content at shesaid.so, a board member of the liverpool city region music board and broadcaster on resonance 104.4 fm. ninakeh.com feature article https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.05 https://manolimoriaty.com/ https://www.ninakeh.com/ dancecult 17(1)78 introduction the performance practices of electronic music and dance culture (emdc) djs have been the subject of substantial debate among practitioners, scholars and the general public. a prominent focus has been the transition from analogue to digital technologies, which has reshaped the role of the dj, introduced new technical possibilities and provoked debates around authenticity, labour and virtuosity. as will be discussed, scholarly contributions have been influential in challenging reductive assumptions about digital performance and in highlighting how audience expectations have shifted with evolving tools and interfaces. yet, while valuable, much of this research either treats djing as a unified practice or focuses narrowly on particular subgenres. the ways in which djs adapt their techniques and technological apparatus in relation to genre-specific conventions remain comparatively underexplored. this article addresses that gap by investigating how djs working within different genres belonging to the wider field of emdc engage with performance technologies, media formats and audience interaction, and how their choices are shaped by both public discourse and internal scene norms. the specific subgenres we have focused on are techno, house and drum ‘n’ bass. in this context, we understand genre not simply as a category of music, but as a set of expectations and conventions that inform both the djs’ stylistic decisions and the audiences’ interpretive framework. technique refers to the embodied practices through which djs manipulate sound, while technology encompasses both the hardware and software used to enact those techniques. our study is guided by the following research questions: • how do djs utilise technology within their performances? • how have recent developments in music technology affected djs’ performances? • are there significant differences between the techniques and technologies employed among djs of a different (sub)genre? the article begins with a literature review addressing five areas: audience perception of dj technique; development of dj instruments; preconceptions surrounding dj practice and established conventions of emdc genres. this is followed by an outline of our methodology, which combines an anonymised online survey with semi-structured interviews. the survey results are then presented, providing quantitative data on performance strategies and attitudes across emdc genres, while the interviews offer qualitative insights into individual perspectives from djs with different levels of experience. together, these methods enable us to cross-reference self-reported practices with circulating discourses—both public and internal to dj communities—and to reflect critically on our own assumptions as practitioner-researchers. the article concludes with our reflections on genre as a defining influence in contemporary dj performance. moriaty and kehagia | playing by the rules? genre conventions in contemporary dj performance 79 technique and audience perception dj performance has developed over more than seventy years, gaining scholarly and cultural attention alike. the practice achieved broader legitimacy in the early 1980s alongside the rise of hip hop culture, notwithstanding the initial resistance of audiences. the typical dj instrument—two turntables and a mixer—distanced itself from traditional notions of musical performance, as did the performer’s new stage role as both creator and audience of the music, what mark butler describes as “listener orientation” (2014: 106). hip-hop djs’ role in legitimising dj performance cannot be understated, as the exaggerated gesturality of early scratch djs made technical skill visible in ways comparable to that of traditional instrumentalists (katz 2012). by contrast, in the preceding disco era, djs were celebrated mainly for their curatorial expertise, while their technical abilities often remained opaque to general audiences (lawrence 2013). by the mid-1990s, the term turntablist superseded that of scratch dj, aimed to distinguish those performers who engaged with records as sound sources rather than simply as playback media, marking a broader shift toward recognising djing as a form of musicianship (katz 2019; de llera blanes 2017). this wider recognition by audiences proved short-lived, however, with the emergence of digital dj systems in the early 2000s complicating the legibility of performance. systems such as final scratch and cdjs sparked debates over authenticity and automation (van veen and attias 2011 and 2012), noting how these tools divided communities: some saw them as “enhancing”, while others feared they diminished human agency (farrugia and swiss 2005: 37). at the same time, the core skills demanded by vinyl djing–tactility, reliance on visual cues, and particularly the central technique of manual beatmatching–remained crucial to how audiences perceived skill (montano 2010; butler 2006: 325). other studies posit that while concerns over automation have indeed lessened, newer tools introduced other challenges. butler (2014) and d’errico (2022) argue that digital automation has increased the opacity between action and result, reducing audiences’ ability to assess performer input. rietveld (2016) similarly observes that the value placed on beatmatching has diminished, and while contemporary tools afford looping, cueing and real-time processing, they also obscure visible effort, fuelling debates about authenticity. butler adds that djs must now balance sonic quality with performative clarity, a view supported by our own experience of djing, recognising that many advanced techniques go unnoticed by audiences lacking specific performance literacy. a similar phenomenon occurs within the context of classical music, where trained performers use subtle cues for timing and phrasing (lisboa, demos and chaffin 2018), which remain largely invisible to general listeners. henderson and gabora further note that audiences often conflate authenticity with technicality, while expert listeners are better able to distinguish the two, and they define authenticity as what feels “natural” or “true to an essence” (2013: 2524), reinforcing rietveld’s point that djs today must convey presence through gestures and stage positioning, partly shaped by marketing and visual culture (2016). rietveld suggests that djs increasingly resemble “digital music performers”, using dancecult 17(1)80 dramatic movements that may not directly affect sound but fulfil audience expectations. the importance of visible engagement is further supported by rudnicki, murrath and poels (2025), who show that perceived performance quality rises when djs exhibit gestural involvement. gates, subramanian and gutwin (2006) similarly describe crowd monitoring as a form of embodied knowledge. parallels with orchestral conducting can also be drawn: djs, like conductors, often use theatrical gestures to convey intention. such gestures, though non-sonic, shape audience perception (vines et al. 2005; luck and toiviainen 2006; kumar and morrison 2016), echoing zander’s (2000) and epstein’s (2009) framing of gesture as psychological influence or “projected intention”. yet, unlike conductors, djs receive immediate audience feedback. clubgoers “vote with their feet” (rietveld 2013: 3) and as farrugia (2012) notes, djs treat crowd movement as a live cue. in this way, dj gestures are both expressive and responsive, anchored in a dynamic, affective exchange between performer and audience. contemporary dj instruments the instruments used in dj performance have undergone a significant transformation over the past fifteen years. shaped by changes in media formats, software and audience expectations, the traditional setup of two turntables and a mixer has been extended, hybridised or replaced as new tools emerged. earlier innovations emphasised compatibility and durability; recent ones prioritise creative manipulation, shifting the dj’s role from selector to live arranger and audio sculptor, closer to the notion of live music performance (van veen and attias 2011). a key turning point in the design of playback devices came with the rise of cd players for djs, particularly pioneer’s cdj-1000. unlike earlier players such as the cdj-500, these units introduced vinyl-style jog wheels and cue-point memory, enabling djs to mark, recall and manipulate playback speed and direction akin to analogue turntables. this offered new precision and responsiveness, supporting creative remixing and real-time restructuring of pre-recorded music in ways that were previously inaccessible to vinyl djing. the format also marked a shift from tactile cueing via headphones and needle drops toward greater visualisation of waveform data on integrated screens, setting a new standard for club performance equipment. later models added support for digital files and external storage, completing the transition from cd decks to media players, and subsequent generations incorporated looping, auto-sync and quantisation. though controversial at first, these features soon became integral: looping in particular allowed performers to isolate and repeat elements, transforming linear recordings into modular live resources, in line with broader electronic production practices built on repetition and variation. changes in mixer design were also responsible for a shift in dj performance. earlier djs’ audio processing was restricted to rudimentary equaliser spectral manipulation, with many performers also incorporating external effect units for a wider range of processing. by contrast, many contemporary dj mixers include effects that afford a greater degree of signal manipulation, via both traditional tonal and time-based processors—filters, delays, moriaty and kehagia | playing by the rules? genre conventions in contemporary dj performance 81 phasers, reverbs—as well as more modern transformative effects, such as beat repeaters, rhythm gates and waveshapers, as well as synthesiser tones, like those found in rane’s seventy a-track signature edition mixer. moreover, these integrated units benefit from networking, with the media players able to communicate information about each track’s tempo and grid position to the mixer, thereby allowing for the effects’ modulation rate to be synchronized to the music. these tools support both aesthetic enhancement and structural functions, such as signalling transitions or building breakdowns. additionally, the rise of dj software like traktor, serato and rekordbox included metadata libraries and detailed waveform displays. while some critics argue that these tools deskill performers and turn djing from aural to visual, many performers today exploit their affordances to develop more sophisticated performance strategies. more recent developments are seen in hybrid controllers. systems such as native instruments’ s4 and roland’s dj-808, not only combine playback and mixing interfaces within a single unit, but also integrate elements of production and performance equipment, including samplers, sequencers and drum machines. largely inspired by earlier approaches which exploited such studio devices for stage performance, hybrid systems further blur the line between djing and live electronic performance, inviting comparisons with hardware setups previously used in live techno, electro and hip-hop performance. despite these innovations, many djs still favour minimal setups (morse 2023), valuing tactile immediacy and reduced complexity. some deliberately avoid advanced features to maintain clarity, restrain the use of effects, and focus on musicality, phrasing and audience connection. rather than replacing earlier practices, modern instruments have expanded the dj’s expressive toolkit. from cue points to hybrid controllers, each development has reshaped the relationship between music, technology and audience, going on to redefine what it means to perform with pre-recorded sound in a live context. preconceptions on dj practice contemporary dj practice remains shaped by entrenched assumptions about effort, creativity and the legitimacy of new technologies. these preconceptions reflect contrasting views of skill and artistry among practitioners and audiences alike. the advent of digital systems such as final scratch catalysed debates over the loss of “human agency” in djing (farrugia and swiss 2005). for many, such tools threatened the embodied labour of vinyl, particularly beatmatching, long regarded as the “fundamental skill of edm mixing” (butler 2006: 325). as van veen and attias note, automating key processes alters not only performance but also the ritual and risk once integral to mixing (2012). the use of automatic tempo synchronisation (“sync”) is, for some, emblematic of this shift, equated with a loss of craft. negative portrayals in popular media reinforce such views. films like kevin & perry go large (bye 2000) and comedies such as people just do nothing (clough 2014) present djs as incompetent or delusional, while even more informed depictions, such as we are your friends ( joseph 2015), reduce performance to a few gestures. such representations dancecult 17(1)82 contribute to the perception of djing as effortless or gimmick-driven, echoing anxieties that technological mediation dilutes creativity. these tensions also persist within dj communities. while some performers embrace tools like sync to reallocate attention toward layering, looping or effects, others view them as shortcuts incompatible with authentic practice. van veen, for instance, likens sync to “plagiarism”, whereas attias argues that avoiding such tools limits creative potential (see van veen and attias 2011). crucially, these debates are often driven by audience perceptions. djs may adapt their approaches—choosing particular instruments or emphasising gestures with little sonic function—to maintain performance legibility for diverse audiences. carl cox, for example, avoids certain controllers because audiences “better comprehend the dj’s inputs” when jog wheels are used (playdifferently 2017). online forums and social media amplify these gatekeeping discourses. as weatherill-hunt notes, criticism of digital tools often rests on “superficial value judgements” and “outdated notions of musical creation” (2023: 2). djs sometimes conform to these expectations rather than challenge them, reinforcing the very preconceptions they privately reject. taken together, these dynamics show that djing remains a contested practice, validated by accessibility yet undermined by persistent doubts about effort, skill and authenticity. rather than resolving these contradictions, many djs negotiate them in performance, adapting technique and presentation to the expectations of audiences, peers and the wider cultural landscape. genre conventions in discussing preconceptions and some of the negative connotations these carry insofar dj practice is concerned, it is important to note that genres within emdc serve as powerful cultural signifiers. emerging from distinct historical trajectories, geographic origins and social contexts, we understand genres not only as stylistic categories restricted to sonic elements, but also as frameworks that shape audience expectations and inform how djs construct and deliver performances. as rietveld argues, genre is “socially constructed through specific technologies, rituals and practices” (1998: 5), impacting both musical form and performance technique. montano similarly notes that each genre develops its own codes of behaviour—aural, visual and technical—that frame what is considered authentic or skilled (2009). these conventions are reinforced through community discourse and practice, influencing everything from track selection and mixing style to the structure of a set. as a result, what might be seen as virtuosic or technically adept in one genre may be considered banal or unskilled in another. this section outlines genre-specific mixing approaches, highlighting how performance conventions reflect broader aesthetic and cultural norms. perceptions of skill and virtuosity in dj performance are not only shaped by what is heard, but also by what is seen or imagined. in digital contexts, where gesture and sound are often decoupled, traditional markers of musical labour become less legible. dennis smalley’s moriaty and kehagia | playing by the rules? genre conventions in contemporary dj performance 83 concept of technological listening (1997), developed in electroacoustic music, refers to a listening mode attuned to the sonic affordances and manipulations made possible through technology. in compositions where sound sources are obscured or transformed, listeners may interpret subtle sonic cues as evidence of creative agency. as a result, electroacoustic composers tend to avoid making their sound design processes transparent. applied to djing, technologically literate listeners may detect signs of virtuosic control even in the absence of visible gesture, while less informed observers may perceive this as passivity or lacking effort. virtuosity in djing thus often operates beneath the surface, intelligible only through shared cultural knowledge of tools, techniques and genre aesthetics. this dynamic becomes especially relevant when considering genre-specific expectations. to illustrate genre-specific dj conventions, we discuss examples from techno and drum ‘n’ bass, two genres cited by interview participants and survey responders. it should be noted, however, that these constitute broad generalisations for each genre, and covering the wider specificities of their constituent subgenres would require a much more extensive study. instead, we are providing these as examples to support the arguments we are discussing here. drum ’n’ bass dj sets are often marked by pronounced techniques, two of the most distinctive being rewinds and double drops. a rewind involves returning a track to its beginning after a climax, often with the audible reversing of the record, heightening tension and reinforcing appreciation among performers and audiences. in jungle, the precursor to drum ’n’ bass, this practice symbolised shared energy rooted in jamaican sound system tradition. christodoulou (quoted in fraser 2004) notes that mcs would call for a “rewind”, signalling the dj to replay a massive tune from its opening bars so the crowd could relive peak moments. this convention is also common in genres with similar cultural roots, such as uk garage and dubstep (fintoni 2015). comparable cultural weight in drum ’n’ bass is carried by the double drop, which requires aligning two tracks so both peak sections coincide (frankland 2016), while using equalisation to avoid frequency clashes. like the rewind, the double drop is not unique to drum ’n’ bass, but it is widely regarded as a demonstration of technical command, particularly among genre-literate audiences. techno also carries strong djing conventions, with performers traditionally expected to mix multiple tracks simultaneously (van veen and attias 2011), often incorporating external sound-generating and processing devices. in a feature for resident advisor (lynch 2019), jeff mills emphasises this layered method: “advanced djs” frequently use three or more playback devices to blend track fragments, effects, and percussion into a continuous soundscape, treating records as modular building blocks rather than self-contained compositions. techno tracks are often referred to as tools, with stripped-down versions carrying this distinction, such as “arrp (tool edit)” by drumcell and thomas hoffknecht (2022), which preserves only rhythm elements of the original track. this multi-layered approach in mixing is further evident in the performance contakt, created by richie hawtin and other artists from the minus record label roster, as well as becoming the focus of the film making contakt (demirel, hawtin and guckian 2010). the performance involves a total of eleven audio sources: four music tracks from traktor, dancecult 17(1)84 three external synthesisers and drum machines, plus four effect channels. in describing his technical approach, hawtin explains that using sync allows him to concentrate on other aspects, such as looping and mixing stripped track elements, to “delve into a different area of creativity and hopefully come up with something that wasn’t possible before” (koch 2008). this approach embraces technological innovation beyond the norms of analogue practice, recontextualising recorded music through the processing, generation and mixing capacities of modern dj instruments, whose ability to keep performance elements precisely synchronised makes such experimentation possible. nevertheless, many techno djs still prefer to neither use the sync function nor perform multilayered mixes, without however being critical of technology. dave clarke states that he is not interested in the debate between manually beatmatching versus using sync and “with talented people that use sync, i’m not gonna have a go at them at all, i think that would be a really lame, flat-earth approach” (keeling 2017). he also adds that the lack of automated synchronisation instils liveness in the performance, and “working” his sets is a matter of “work ethic” for him, while suggesting that the sync function is often used by “tech house people, and… edm people” (that is, the subgenre that has in recent time appropriated the collective term of emdc), questioning whether the latter actually perform mixes while on stage. this statement reinforced our earlier assertion on djs performance approaches being influenced not only by audience perceptions, but also through their own sensitivities on authenticity. genre conventions often function as stabilising frameworks that guide dj technique and audience expectations, yet adherence to them is not necessarily restrictive. for many performers, aligning with genre norms is a deliberate way of honouring the histories and communities that shape a music’s identity, while also fostering affective continuity with audiences through recognisable stylistic cues. deviation from these norms can be both risky and transformative: djs who subvert expectations by introducing unfamiliar techniques, blending outside styles, or re-purposing technology may be perceived as either innovative or transgressive. as smalley’s (1997) concept of technological listening suggests, audiences attuned to digital manipulation may interpret such gestures as virtuosic, while less technologically literate observers may find them disjointed or unskilled. djs who challenge genre expectations thus navigate between innovation and alienation, their reception hinging on whether departures are read as creative evolution or as violations of core musical values. these dynamics are further explored in the following section through insights from interview participants and survey respondents. methodology our study uses a mixed-method design informed by grounded theory, combining an anonymised online survey with five semi-structured interviews. grounded theory was selected to minimise early theoretical bias and allow patterns to emerge from participant responses (glaser and strauss 1967). while our experience as djs shaped initial assumptions, moriaty and kehagia | playing by the rules? genre conventions in contemporary dj performance 85 we allowed the data to guide interpretation and refine research questions. the survey was conducted in two rounds: the first included open-ended responses; the second, informed by themes from round one, used multiple-choice and scaled questions to enable clearer cross-comparison. the first survey was designed using language familiar to djs and club contexts, drawing from our experience. it was trialled among professional and social contacts, yielding 46 responses. findings from this phase informed vocabulary, genre categories and technique descriptors used in the second round. the second survey, shared via dj-oriented forums and social media, targeted a wide range of genres and experience levels. it consisted of four sections: • section 1 gathered demographic and contextual data—years of experience, typical performance settings, equipment preferences and format choices—to explore correlations between tools, experience and performance context. • section 2 focused on genre orientation, asking whether djs performed one or multiple genres and which genre informed their style. to ensure accurate data, respondents were invited to submit multiple entries if their approach varied significantly by genre, format, or setting. • section 3 addressed performance techniques and equipment use: number of tracks mixed simultaneously, eq preferences, use of volume faders, crossfaders, effects, looping, tempo matching (manual versus automated) and set preparation. these questions captured both functional choices and stylistic tendencies. • section 4 explored attitudes toward djing, drawing from practitioner discourse and peer-reviewed literature. topics included the balance between art and technique, the role of virtuosity, audience engagement and whether djs consider themselves musicians. respondents also shared views on the impact of technology: whether it simplifies djing, and whether that’s seen as a positive. in addition, we conducted five semi-structured interviews with djs. the selection criteria for the interview participants focused on electing a representative sample of diverse genre affiliations and levels of professional experience. our interviews explored perceptions of skill, innovation, legitimacy, and how performers interpret audience feedback and genre norms. fourteen open-ended questions guided the conversations, covering themes such as personal style, stage presence, conformity or resistance to genre expectations, and comparisons between djing and traditional musicianship. these interviews were shaped by earlier survey findings, as well as experience gained through our own practice, offering deeper insight into how djs understand and navigate their role. all procedures complied with liverpool hope university ethics guidelines; survey responses were anonymised, interview participation was voluntary with informed consent, and interviewees able to withdraw or request anonymity up to 30 days before publication. dancecult 17(1)86 survey results between the two survey rounds, we amassed a total of 158 responses that addressed a wide range of emdc genres, as well as some responses from djs of other types of music, such as reggae, hip-hop and disco (see fig. 1). almost three quarters of the responses concentrated on the genres of techno, house and drum ‘n’ bass. as this poses a limit in deducting useful conclusions in the other genres, our analysis will mainly focus on the three genres that provided sufficient data. the first datasets (figs. 2–4) show responses on music formats, playback instruments and approaches to curation and set preparation. clear genre-based trends emerge. drum ’n’ bass and house djs more often blend multiple styles, while techno djs typically remain within one genre. techno is most associated with music events; house with casual settings and drum ’n’ bass with broadcasting and corporate contexts. across all genres, improvisation is favoured over predefined playlists, though drum ’n’ bass leans toward full-library improvisation; techno toward curated subsets and house toward a balance of both. set planning follows similar lines: drum ’n’ bass and techno djs favour improvisation, while house djs mix planning with spontaneity. digital formats dominate, particularly in house; vinyl is rare, though some djs use multiple formats. cdjs/media players are most common in techno, controllers appear more in house and techno and drum ’n’ bass shows greater use of turntables, hybrids and midi controllers. two clarifications are worth noting for this dataset: first, the question regarding genre variety was included to allow djs who blend multiple genres within a set to reflect on that practice directly, rather than imply a fixed genre allegiance. second, the survey deliberately separated questions on playlist preparation from those addressing live performance strategies, to prevent respondents from conflating the act of curating a playlist with rigidly following one during a set. this strategy is also evident in the next set of questions (figs. 5-10), presenting the responses to questions around using performance instruments and their affordances. most responders cue tracks using headphones, with minimal reliance on visual aids or monitor speakers, indicating continued adherence to traditional methods. house djs predominantly mix two tracks at a time, while techno and drum ‘n’ bass djs more often report mixing three or more, suggesting genre-based expectations around layering and complexity. equaliser and volume adjustments are generally smooth across all genres, with house and techno favouring gradual blending. drum ‘n’ bass, however, shows a slightly greater use of pronounced eq changes, aligning with its dynamic mixing style. crossfader use varies, as house djs favour smooth transitions, while techno and drum ‘n’ bass participants more often report rarely using it or opting for quick cuts. key matching is not a priority for many respondents, though selection-based matching is still widely practised. manual key adjustments remain rare. effects are used occasionally by most, with house and drum ‘n’ bass djs favouring onboard mixer effects, and techno djs showing greater engagement with external units. manual tempo matching remains dominant across all genres, despite available automation tools. drum ‘n’ bass sets tend to maintain consistent tempo, while techno and house djs are more open to small or significant tempo variations. finally, most djs retain track moriaty and kehagia | playing by the rules? genre conventions in contemporary dj performance 87 recognisability during performance, though techno shows a stronger tendency toward transformation, echoing some of the sentiments expressed by the previously discussed techno performers. similarly, looping and sampling are used most frequently by techno djs, with house and drum ‘n’ bass reporting more moderate engagement with this particular technique. figure 1. survey question 2-1b: “which genre(s) you mainly perform in your sets?” figure 2. (left) survey question 1-3: “what is your preferred music format?” (right) survey question 1-4: “what if your preferred type of playback instrument?” dancecult 17(1)88 figure 3. (left) survey question 2-1a: “do you typically perform one genre (including its subgenres), or do you combine a range of different genres?” (right) survey question 1-2: “in which settings do you mainly perform?” figure 4. (left) survey question 2-1a: “how do you approach curating a set?” (right) survey question 3-12: “do you prepare your sets?” figure 5. (left) survey question 3-7: “how do you cue tracks?” (right) survey question 3-1: “up to how many tracks will you mix simultaneously?” moriaty and kehagia | playing by the rules? genre conventions in contemporary dj performance 89 figure 6. (left) survey question 3-2: “how do you use equaliser controls?” (right) survey question 3-3: “how do you use channel volume controls?” figure 7. (left) survey question 3-6: “how do you use the crossfader?” (right) survey question 3-10: “do you use consider key matching?” figure 8. (left) survey question 3-4: “how often do you use effects?” (right) survey question 3-5: “if using effects, do you use an external unit or the mixer’s built-in system?” dancecult 17(1)90 figure 9. (left) responses to question 3-9: “how do you approach tempo matching?” (right) responses to question 3-11: “how do you approach tempo over the duration of a set?” figure 10. (left) survey question 3-13: “how do you approach track manipulation?” (right) survey question 3-9: “how often you use looping and/or sampling?” the last set of data (figures 11-18) concerns wider questions around dj performances, specifically the preconceptions around use of technology, audience engagement, and the role of the dj among other musical practices. across all three genres, there is a strong consensus that djing incorporates both artistic and technical elements, with “both equally” selected most frequently. similarly, most djs prioritise a balance of creativity and technical skill in their performances. techno djs slightly lean toward technical skill, while drum ‘n’ bass djs show a small skew toward creativity. a strong plurality in all genres prefers a blend of traditional and contemporary approaches, though techno performers appear more inclined toward innovation. virtuosity is largely seen as important but not central: most respondents selected moriaty and kehagia | playing by the rules? genre conventions in contemporary dj performance 91 “neutral”, suggesting ambivalence or context-dependent interpretations. responses to crowd engagement show that house djs most strongly prioritise audience interaction, while techno djs demonstrate a wider spread of answers, including some who deem it unimportant. this may reflect the differing performance environments and aesthetic values among genres. the question of whether djs are musicians received mixed reactions. while many techno djs agreed or strongly agreed, responses in drum ‘n’ bass and house were more evenly distributed, with significant neutrality and some disagreement. this indicates ongoing tension in how djing is framed relative to traditional musicianship. on the topic of technology, most respondents agreed that djing has become “easier”, particularly in the techno group. however, opinions were more divided regarding whether this ease is positive. while many respondents across genres held a neutral stance, house djs appeared slightly more favourable, suggesting a nuanced relationship between perceived accessibility and authenticity. figure 11. survey question 4-1: “do you view djing more as an art form, a technical skill, or both?” figure 12. survey question 4-2: “do you focus on contemporary or innovative approaches that challenge or evolve djing norms?” figure 13. survey question 4-3: “do you prioritise creativity or technical skills in your performances?” dancecult 17(1)92 figure 14. survey question 4-4: “is virtuosity central to your performances?” figure 15. survey question 4-5: “how important is crowd engagement to your performance?” figure 16. responses to question 4-6: “do you agree with the statement that djs are musicians?” figure 17. survey question 4-7: “do you agree with the statement that technology has made djing “easy”?” moriaty and kehagia | playing by the rules? genre conventions in contemporary dj performance 93 figure 18. survey question 4-8: “if you feel that modern equipment makes djing “easy”, do you agree that this is a positive thing?” interviews in our survey, we also included the option for responders to state whether they are willing to further express their opinions surrounding dj practice by participating in interviews with the authors. from those responding to our call for interviews, five participants were selected, as to represent a range genre affiliations and levels of professional experience. our interviewees were raj pannu, thomas node, ray arkaei and dan bean, as well as mf who preferred to remain anonymous, all of whom we acknowledge for their insightful contributions to our research. this summary will aim to highlight how some of the answers the interviewees provided correlate with our survey results, as well as some divergent insights that emerged during our conversations. one of the contested topics that concerned our inquiry is whether djs are deemed musicians. we posed this question to our interviewees, who provided diverging opinions which however points towards a particular aspect: raj pannu: i would say absolutely, yes. but obviously, it depends on the dj…. there’s that kind of impression or attitude where people say, ‘well, you’re just playing other people’s music, and there’s none of your own input in there’… maybe the people who dismiss djs as not proper musicians need to see the proper djs, the ones who actually do it well. because maybe they’re just not exposed to the ones who are the true artists.1 ray arkaei: if you’re a pure dj who is selecting music, you’re not a musician. you’re a selector, you’re a curator.... but a lot of people eventually transition into making music based on their vast experience listening to so much. so, djs have the potential to become musicians. let’s just say that. not everybody uses that potential, but by default, someone who picks a sequence of songs to be played in a specific order, whether they do it live, pre-arrange it at home, or even play back a recorded set, if that’s all they do, they’re not a musician… on an abstract level, if you’re a dj, you’re not a musician. but you have the capability to be a musician. you have the technology to become a musician.2 dancecult 17(1)94 thomas node: you’ve got to have an ear for music. you don’t have to learn how to read sheet music, but you do have to understand how music works–how it flows, how people respond to it. that’s all part of musicianship. and if you’re producing music as well, how can you not be considered a musician? djing and production usually go hand in hand. if you’ve been djing for a long time, you have to understand music to a certain degree. that’s enough for me to say you’re a musician: you’re playing music, curating it, and presenting it to an audience. i mean, it’s different from playing an instrument, but i’d still consider djs musicians.3 mf: not really, no. i say that as someone who has played guitar for about 35 years…. i don’t really see djing as the same thing as playing a musical instrument. you don’t need to know any theory at all. i mean, it’s helpful if you’re playing melodic music, it helps to have an ear for what tracks could go well together…. but i don’t see djing as quite the same field as playing a musical instrument.4 dan bean: if you’ll permit me to say, i don’t actually think it’s that interesting a question. i think the much more interesting question is ‘is it good? does it move me? does it speak to me?’ 5 our responders allude that djs are in fact not musicians purely on the virtue of selecting and mixing music, with that role being often described as a curator of music. despite three responders, ra, rp and tn, being initially positive on that question, they went on to explain that only a good dj can be considered a musician—something which is of course highly subjective—but at the same time highlight that djs can potentially be elevated to the same status of musicianship with the condition that they are able to produce compelling musical experiences. this sentiment was further reflected in db’s laconic response, who is disinterested in titular signifiers, and instead judges djs on the quality of experience they can produce through their work. mf entirely dismisses this potential, without however suggesting a hierarchy between traditional musicianship and djing, but rather that the two practices require significantly different skillsets as to not belong on the same field. the next question concerned the topic of virtuosity, an element that many of the scholarly accounts examined have discerned within dj practice. in asking whether djing displays virtuosity, our interviewees responded: rp: [in the context of turntablism] i think it’s important to be able to do that. to show off your skills, essentially. and outside of the normal dj realm, club djs and all that, you can show that in various ways. maybe the audience has to be a little bit educated to understand what those ways are. but that shouldn’t be the focus. i mean, you have to entertain people as well as educate them and inform them. so yeah, it’s a balance of all of those things. but the showing off part, or the showing your skills part, that’s not so important. it’s more important on the turntablism side of things. moriaty and kehagia | playing by the rules? genre conventions in contemporary dj performance 95 ra: that’s a difficult one. because we are biased as djs answering this question. we have an analytical ear. when i’m playing, someone might ask, ‘what remix is this?’ while i have three and a half faders up, and i’m like ‘this is not a remix! it’s me mashing stuff up now!’ as a consumer, you don’t really know this. the person on the dancefloor, i don’t think that is important for them, unless they are specifically a nerdy crowd that wants this…. with scratching, it’s apparent. but with layering four songs over one another? you can’t tell…. sometimes i would come up with a really cool blend in the middle of a set, and i had a button setup where i could flip the camera and zoom in on the mixer to show people ‘look, this is four tracks playing at once’. but nobody really cared. i would read the chat at the same time, and my dj friends would say, ‘you’re crazy’. but the general audience was just like, “yeah, whatever. nice music”. so again, it’s a matter of perspective, where do you come from, and is it important to exhibit skill? i think it’s nice to show something, but we have to work on people’s ability to appreciate what’s happening. otherwise, it’s just a monkey pushing buttons. tn: there have been plenty of online debates about this, usually from older djs who say, ‘the dj should be in the corner, invisible’. and, to a degree, that’s valid. but at the same time, what they’re doing still needs to be good and executed with skill and technique. so, i don’t necessarily need to see the dj, but if they are visible, it’s fine, as long as they’re not throwing a cake in my face…. at that point, i don’t even know if you’d still call it djing, but if people are paying good money to see it, then why not? but it’s not that important for me, the music is still the main thing. mf: i think the virtuosity comes from the producers of the music first and foremost. the way it’s presented by the dj is secondary to that. i think it’s good to be able to put across an emotion or a feeling from the dj’s perspective and have some kind of impact on the crowd. but the idea of virtuosity in djing? it’s really only in, as i said before, in the likes of hip-hop. i’m not really seeing it so much in most other genres. db: i don’t think it’s central to my performances. i think i kind of just do the minimum to be able to present the music in the way that i want to. i think there are lots of obvious examples in many genres where people are doing really advanced things in the way that they manipulate sound, that requires some dexterity (and) skill. and i think those things count. when done well, they’re very beautiful. whether it’s kind of turntablism in hip-hop or jeff mills or stingray, they’re virtuoso operators of their equipment. these responses were particularly interesting, insofar their divergence with written discourse surrounding djing. all interviewees point out that out that while virtuosity is evident in turntablism, it is not only rarely displayed in club djing, but also undesirable, as it can often be perceived as ostentatious and performative from general audiences. the responses further point that although the techniques of club djs can indeed display a high level of skill and creativity, this is only perceivable by those who are well versed in the same art. this latter dancecult 17(1)96 point offers a useful conclusion on why scholars—many of whom fully grasp that work that goes in a dj set—can identify virtuosity through their analytical skills, something which of course can also be identified (and missed) when encountering any type of performance without sufficient context. the final responses concern the question regarding whether new dj instruments have made djing easier, and the impact of this among newcomers: rp: [a] good dj is a good dj, no matter what the equipment is. it’s the same as being a producer. you don’t have to use logic or fl studio to be a good producer. you just have to have good ideas. i guess you just have to be into what you’re doing. and that passion shines through. mainly, i guess, technology has made mixing a bit easier. obviously, cue points and that kind of stuff, yeah, that helps. you know, looping and onboard effects are all nice to have. but again, they can be used in a very gimmicky way. they don’t really add to—going back to this painting the picture idea—they should only be used towards the furthering of the artform rather than just as a way to escape actually being creative musically. ra: i think democratization of any art form is good…. but the more people have access to something, of course, it increases the amount of mediocrity that gets pushed out. anybody can release an infinite amount of garbage music, and it makes it very hard for me as a curator to find music that i think is worth playing: not just today, but 10 years from now. but on a moral level, i think it’s a great thing that this stuff is so easy. and on a creative level, sure, there’s a point to be made: okay, all these things we learned, like putting needles on records, you can now replace them with a button. but it’s great because when we push this button, we can do 20 other new things. so should i really waste time explaining to someone, ‘look, this is how a pitch fader works?’ sure, it’s an important skill to have in an emergency if the automatic beat gridding in your software messes up. but is it an essential skill i would hammer into people? no. it’s cool that you can drag any song into dj pro and it’s automatically beat gridded to perfection. there’s nothing wrong with that. nothing at all, because when you asked me if selection trumps technique, my answer was selection. and then technology enables you to improve technique. and then you can focus on selection. there’s nothing wrong with that. every time someone complains that technology is ‘taking away’ from djing, i think it’s an expression of their dissatisfaction, whether it’s over lack of recognition, fame, or whatever validation they expected but never got. tn: it depends on the genre. i don’t think you can just throw together an idm set easily; it’s all about track selection. but for house or techno, definitely. i tried putting some house tracks into virtual dj’s auto-mix just to see what it would do. it’s gotten better. a computer can sequence house tracks together pretty well, so a human should be able to do it easily. it’s definitely lowered the bar. and producers are making tunes specifically designed to be easy to mix, so djs don’t have to think as much. that definitely lowers the skill requirement. moriaty and kehagia | playing by the rules? genre conventions in contemporary dj performance 97 mf: it’s definitely easier than it was. you don’t have to learn the craft the same way–like you mentioned before about belt drives. that was a challenge for me. back then, i had just gotten my first job, and i bought these second-hand technics turntables with tiny little pitch knobs on them. and there was no youtube in the ‘90s to tell you how to do it. you just had to learn it yourself. whereas now, even the internet makes it easier; anything you want to know, you can just look up and watch a tutorial video. also, it doesn’t take long to get your head around rekordbox and cdjs…. but it’s good that it opens up to more people. you know, it’s a fun thing to do…it’s the same in any field, technology always evolves to make things easier. but it’s down to the individual whether they want to make it easier for themselves or challenge themselves in any way. db: i think generally art should be as accessible as possible, or the ability to create should be as accessible as possible. music making equipment [for example], the cheaper it is, and more people can get involved, that’s good for people. i think that the more people that are creating in the world, the better. that’s the main thing. there’s a lot of debate about all this kind of stuff, and i think a lot of those discussions completely miss the point. what people are actually talking about [is] what they’re actually bothered about. i think what actually matters, really again, coming back to what i said before about that sense of community in the dance. and the presence or the lack of that is actually what bothers people. here the responses, although articulated in wildly diverging manners, converge towards the same conclusions; modern technologies do lower the entry point in regard to training before one can operate a dj instrument, and that is a positive thing as it attracts more people into joining the community. at the same time, the bar is raised for anyone wishing to distinguish themselves, as many of the skills previously perceived as virtuosic are now obsolete, and djs need to exploit the creative potential of new instruments if they are to generate truly compelling experiences on the dancefloor. conclusion this study set out to explore how genre conventions influence dj performance practices, particularly in relation to the integration of technology, use of performance techniques and broader attitudes toward musicianship and creativity. focusing on drum ‘n’ bass, house and techno, the three most represented genres in our survey, we found clear patterns that point to genre-specific expectations which continue to shape the way djs prepare, perform and reflect on their practice. the quantitative data indicates that genre does, to a significant extent, inform performance approaches. drum ‘n’ bass djs, for instance, are more likely to perform with multiple formats; use rewinds or abrupt transitions and maintain consistent tempos throughout their sets, techniques that align with published accounts of dj active in that genre. techno djs, by contrast, tend to use multiple playback sources and looping to construct evolving soundscapes. house djs showed the strongest preference for smooth transitions, keydancecult 17(1)98 aligned mixing and a more curated approach to set preparation, consistent with the genre’s aesthetic. these findings are broadly corroborated by the interviews. performers often described their genre not only as a musical style, but as a cultural framework with its own norms and performative expectations. several techno and house djs spoke about the value placed on subtlety, pacing and modulation, whereas drum ‘n’ bass djs highlighted the importance of energy shifts, impactful transitions and real-time crowd engagement. the interviews also revealed that while many performers acknowledge genre conventions, they do not necessarily view them as fixed, but rather, as a set of traditions that can be adhered to or challenged via innovation. crucially, the tension between traditional markers of skill (such as manual beatmatching) and newer forms of expression (like processing or live remixing) was not resolved along technological lines, but along aesthetic and cultural ones. while automation features were commonly used, most djs still described their work as a balance of technical and artistic judgment, particularly in how they respond to audiences and shape a set’s emotional arc. future research will expand this work by developing a taxonomy of contemporary dj approaches, situating them within both historical and current contexts. analysing and comparing seminal and modern dj sets with sufficient documentation will provide insights into how performers have developed and continue to refine their craft. taken together, the data suggests that genre continues to play a vital role in shaping how djs perform and how they are perceived, but that performers navigate these conventions with increasing flexibility. rather than eroding the craft, digital technologies have made space for new forms of virtuosity, ones that are often less visible, but no less deliberate. notes 1 raj pannu, interview with the authors (on zoom), 20 november 2024. 2 ray arkaei, interview with the authors (on zoom), 16 january 2025. 3 thomas node, interview with the authors (on zoom), 15 january 2025. 4 mf, interview with the authors (on zoom), 10 november 2024. 5 dan bean, interview with the authors (on zoom), 5 november 2024. references butler, mark j. 2006. unlocking the groove: rhythm, meter, and musical design in electronic dance music. bloomington: indiana university press. – – – . 2014. playing with something that runs: technology, improvisation, and composition in dj and laptop performance. new york: oxford university press, <https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195393613.001.0001>. d’errico, mike. 2022. push: software design and the cultural politics of music production. oxford university press, <https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190943301.001.0001>. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195393613.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190943301.001.0001 moriaty and kehagia | playing by the rules? genre conventions in contemporary dj performance 99 de llera blanes, guillermo. 2017. “controllers as musical instruments and controllerism as a musical practice: practices of a new 21st century musical culture”. master’s thesis, faculdade de ciências sociais e humanas, universidade nova de lisboa, <https://doi.org/10.13140/ rg.2.2.32611.60962>. epstein, david. 2009. shaping time: music, the brain, and performance. new york: basic books. farrugia, rebekah. 2012. beyond the dance floor: female djs, technology and electronic dance music culture. bristol: intellect books. farrugia, rebekah and thomas swiss. 2005. “tracking the djs: vinyl records, work, and the debate over new technologies”. journal of popular music studies 17(1): 30–44. 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of a white gay aesthetic at the saint, 1980–4”. in dj culture in the mix: power, technology, and social change in electronic dance music, ed. bernardo alexander attias, anna gavanas and hillegonda c. rietveld. bloomsbury: 219–46. lisboa, tânia, alexander p. demos and roger chaffin. 2018. “training thought and action for virtuoso performance”. musicae scientiae, 22(4): 519–38. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1029864918782350>. https://doi.org/10.13140/rg.2.2.32611.60962 https://doi.org/10.13140/rg.2.2.32611.60962 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1524-2226.2005.00032.x https://medium.com/cuepoint/wheel-it-up-history-of-the-rewind-21fdcff243d9 https://www.skiddle.com/news/all/andy-c-interview-double-drop/28832/ https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.02.03 https://doi.org/10.1145/1142405.1142418 https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1308.4707 https://doi.org/10.5406/j.ctvfjd0z8.22 https://ra.co/features/3110 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01049 https://doi.org/10.1177/1029864918782350 dancecult 17(1)100 luck, geoff and petri toiviainen. 2006. “ensemble musicians’ synchronization with conductors’ gestures: an automated feature-extraction analysis”. music perception 24(1): 75–90. <https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2006.24.2.189>. lynch, will. 2019. “the art of djing: jeff mills”. resident advisor, 2 april. <https://ra.co/features/3436>, (accessed 10 july 2025). montano, ed. 2009. “dj culture in the commercial sydney dance music scene”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 1(1): 63–86. <https://doi.org/10.12801/19475403.2009.01.01.05>. – – – . 2010a. “‘how do you know he’s not playing pac-man while he’s supposed to be djing?’: technology, formats and the digital future of dj culture”. popular music 29(3): 397–416. <https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261143010000449>. morse, phil. 2023. “7 reasons djs still use vinyl & turntables today”. digital dj tips. 27 august: <https://www.digitaldjtips.com/7-reasons-djs-still-use-vinyl-turntables-today/>, (accessed 10 november 2024). rietveld, hillegonda c. 1998. this is our house: house music, cultural spaces and technologies. aldershot: ashgate. – – – . 2013. “introduction”. in dj culture in the mix: power, technology, and social change in electronic dance music, eds. bernardo alexander attias, anna gavanas and hillegonda c. rietveld. bloomsbury: 1–15. – – – . 2016. “authenticity and liveness in digital dj performance”. in musicians and their audiences: performance, speech and mediation (1st ed.), eds. ioannis tsioulakis and elina hytönen-ng. routledge: 123–33. <https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315597010>. rudnicki, konrad, timon murrath and karolien poels. 2025. “the relation between djs behavior and their audience’s positive affect and perception of the show. a field study in electronic dance music clubs”. empirical studies of the arts 0(0). <https://doi.org/10.1177/02762374251340660>. smalley, dennis. 1997. “spectromorphology: explaining sound-shapes”. organised sound 2(2): 107–126. <https://doi.org/10.1017/s1355771897009059>. van veen, tobias c. and bernando alexander attias. 2011. “off the record: turntablism and controllerism in the 21st century (part 1)”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 3(1). <https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.08>. – – – . 2012. “off the record: turntablism and controllerism in the 21st century (part 2)”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 4(1). <https://doi.org/10.12801/19475403.2012.04.01.09>. vines, bradley w., marcelo m. wanderley, roberto nuzzo, daniel j. levitin and carol l. krumhansl. 2005. “performance gestures of musicians: what structural and emotional information do they convey?”. music perception 22(1): 59–78. <https://doi.org/1007/978-3-540-24598-8_43>. weatherill-hunt, jonathan. 2023. “has it always been like this? paths of gear and format fetishism in electronic dance music: a short study of discourse and attitudes over time”. university of huddersfield: dancecult conference. zander, rosamund stone and benjamin zander. 2000. the art of possibility: transforming professional and personal life. boston: harvard business school press. https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2006.24.2.189 https://ra.co/features/3436 https://ra.co/features/3436 https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.05 https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2009.01.01.05 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261143010000449 https://www.digitaldjtips.com/7-reasons-djs-still-use-vinyl-turntables-today/ https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315597010 https://doi.org/10.1177/02762374251340660 https://doi.org/10.1017/s1355771897009059 https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.08 https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.01.09 https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2012.04.01.09 https://doi.org/1007/978-3-540-24598-8_43 moriaty and kehagia | playing by the rules? genre conventions in contemporary dj performance 101 discography drumcell & thomas hoffknecht. 2022. severance check ep. clr (wav): clr099. <https://www.discogs.com/release/23757095-drumcell-thomas-hoffknecht-severancecheck-ep>. filmography bye, ed. 2000. kevin & perry go large. united kingdom: tiger aspect pictures, <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0205177/>. clough, jack. 2014–18. people just do nothing. united kingdom: roughcut tv, <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3762198/>. demirel, ali m., richie hawtin and niamh guckian. 2010. making contakt. minus multimedia, <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1599989/>. joseph, max. 2015. we are your friends. united states: warner bros. pictures, <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3787590/>. koch, dean. 2008, september 3. “richie hawtin 2008 dj setup”. vimeo. uploaded on 3 september 2008, <https://vimeo.com/1655321>, (accessed 10 february 2025). playdifferently. 2017. “how i play: carl cox model 1 dj set-up”. youtube, 9:30. uploaded 20 november 2017, <https://youtu.be/nwbrd9a1lda?si=xdzmnjsipdlbyjvu>, (accessed 10 february 2025). pointblank music school. “dj fresh interview”. youtube, 14:01. uploaded 22 january 2015. <https://youtu.be/hjzhpv5n_t8?si=joeeki00aabjxiw9>, (accessed 10 july 2025). https://www.discogs.com/release/23757095-drumcell-thomas-hoffknecht-severance-check-ep https://www.discogs.com/release/23757095-drumcell-thomas-hoffknecht-severance-check-ep https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0205177/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3762198/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1599989/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3787590/ https://vimeo.com/1655321 https://youtu.be/nwbrd9a1lda?si=xdzmnjsipdlbyjvu https://youtu.be/hjzhpv5n_t8?si=joeeki00aabjxiw9 the steady decline of club culture in dublin: neoliberal policy, touristification and the pandemic dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 16(1): 9–30 issn 1947-5403 ©2024 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.02 the steady decline of club culture in dublin: neoliberal policy, touristification and the pandemic. caroline ann o’sullivan technological university dublin (ireland) abstract the public health restrictions implemented by the irish government due to covid-19 resulted in one of the most extensive music industry lockdowns in europe. dublin, however, was already experiencing a large scale contraction of club culture. prior to the pandemic, the physical spaces that dance music and club culture thrived in over the past 40 years had greatly diminished, many being demolished to make way for hotels and upmarket student accommodation. the onset of the pandemic meant this contraction intensified, and 2021 and 2022 saw the permanent closure of a number of high-profile and pivotal venues across the city. in discussing the effects of touristification and the pandemic on dedicated dancing spaces in dublin, i contend that the underlying neoliberal government policies and outdated restrictive licensing laws have profoundly and detrimentally shaped the current clubbing landscape. the article explores the efforts of activist groups and grassroots campaigns, illustrating how the community has sought to reclaim space and mitigate the looming threat of decline. it specifically highlights campaigns for legislative reform and efforts to persuade policymakers that dublin needs “no more hotels” and “clubbing is culture”. the concluding section of the article assesses the outlook for dublin’s clubbing community and proposes avenues for future research. keywords: clubbing, gentrification, touristification, night-time economy, dublin caroline ann o’sullivan is a senior lecturer and head of school of media in technological university dublin. a cultural sociologist, she has been researching music and media culture in dublin and edi issues in the creative industries for over 20 years. she is a member of the steering committee of the european wide live music mapping project and is the branch chair of the uk and ireland branch of the international association of the study of popular music. feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.02 dancecult 16(1)10 ireland went into its first covid-19 lockdown on 12 march 12 2020. at 120 days, this lockdown was the longest in europe; however, for the music industry, the lockdown was even more restrictive. many venues and nightclubs closed their doors entirely until 22 october 2021—a total of 589 days. some venues were able to remain open during that time, but they faced severe restrictions to trade and were prohibited from having live music, including djs. all nightclubs and venues were permitted to open in november 2021, but the easing of restrictions lasted for just three weeks before they had their opening hours reduced and were shut down again entirely on 7 december. it would be 22 january 22 2022, before there was a full reopening of the sector. while assessing the impact that covid-19 has had on ireland’s dance music culture, this article argues that neoliberal government policy, planning decisions and the changing realities of living in dublin city in the preceding 20 years had resulted in a scene that was already in a perilous state of contraction. prior to the pandemic, the physical spaces that club culture had thrived in for the previous four decades had greatly diminished, and a seven-night-a-week club culture in the city is now reminisced about by older clubbers as something that existed in the halcyon days of the late 1990s. this paper conducts historical and policy analysis to elucidate the factors contributing to this decline. nightclubs, often situated in prime city centre locations coveted by developers and property speculators, have been demolished to accommodate hotels and upscale student housing. meanwhile, ireland’s antiquated and stringent licensing laws—which mandate some of the earliest club closing times in the eu—coupled with exorbitant insurance costs, render many clubs economically unviable. the paper contends that this contraction has intensified post-pandemic, detailing the impact of policy decisions and evaluating the short-term outlook for irish dance music culture. the particular circumstances of clubbing in dublin the decade from the early 1990s to the early 2000s could be described as the high point of late night and club culture in dublin.1 the kitchen, a nightclub operating in the basement of the clarence hotel, a landmark building famously owned by members of u2, opened in 1994 on essex st. on the edge of the temple bar district. it was one of the first legitimate alcohol licensed venues for dance music  in dublin. once designated as the site for the central dublin bus station, temple bar had become a de facto cultural quarter by the end of the 1980s because the national transport agency, cié, rented out its properties to artists and musicians while it awaited government funding. a change in government resulted in a change of policy, and in 1991 the temple bar area renewal and development act was enacted, along with special tax reliefs designed to encourage investors to finance the refurbishment program.2 the kitchen and the temple bar “cultural quarter” quickly became a focal point of dance music culture in the city, showcasing international acts and opportunities to young emerging dj talent. in 1995 the temple bar music centre, a 650-capacity venue with rehearsal space and digital recording studios, opened on curved st. the club scene in dublin mushroomed; soon after, on any given saturday night in the o’ sullivan | the steady decline of club culture in dublin 11 mid to late 1990s, a discerning clubber could choose between club nights with top djs in several locations across temple bar including the funnel, the furnace and club so. a short trip across the river liffey on the north side of the city, there was a cluster of more underground but equally popular clubs including the temple of sound, the asylum and the ormond multimedia centre.3 while many of the new clubs had a musical linage and had previous incarnations as dance halls or rock music venues such as the mean fiddler, olympic ballroom or the tivoli theatre, others such as the pod and the temple theatre were purpose built and dedicated to dance music. meanwhile, catering to more mainstream tastes or less committed club-goers, over 60 nightclubs and venues across both the city centre and dublin’s suburbs offered late-night dancing to mainstream pop or alternative music, often incorporating elements of contemporary dance music. legislating dancing a behaviour and attitudes survey conducted by the irish times in 1991 found that close to one in four—23 per cent—of irish adults went to nightclubs weekly (pope 2022). in 2021, a similar survey found that figure was 6 per cent (mullaly 2022). give us the night, the national campaigning body for night life in ireland, reports that there has been an 84% decline in public spaces for dancing since the year 2000 (2022b: foreword). a report commissioned by the irish nightclub industry association in 2009 counted a total of 522 dance venues across ireland in 2000, with 100 in dublin alone (gurdgiev 2009: 8). this compares to just 70 across the entire country in 2024 (burns 2024). while the covid-19 pandemic may have precipitated this decline, to understand fully the context within which clubbing operates in ireland it is necessary to go back almost 200 years. ireland’s night clubs and late-night venues are governed by two licencing laws: the intoxicating liquor act 1927, amended in 2003 and 2008 (with the latter amending legislation dating back to 1833), and the public dance halls act 1935. these acts are pivotal to dancing and late-night events in the city. the intoxicating liquor act introduced and regulates special exemptions orders (seos); these allow the owner or operator of a licenced premises to apply to their local district court for an exemption from prohibited hours. that is, they can serve alcohol until a later hour, whereby they are deemed to be holding a special occasion. this special occasion is typically a “dance in a premises, which is licensed for public dancing under the public dance halls act 1935” (gurdgiev 2009: 7). a separate seo from the district court is required for every night a venue wants to stay open past 12:30am. the almost 90-year-old public dance halls act was enacted under the heavy influence of the anti-jazz movement driven by catholic clergy and the gaelic league on the grounds that it was both morally indecent and culturally corrupting (see o’connor 2005). its primary motivation was to curb the rise of the emerging jazz movement in the local dance halls and clubs that had opened across the country after irish independence. the act states that: dancecult 16(1)12 subject to the provisions of this act, any person may apply to the justice of the district court exercising jurisdiction in any licensing area for a licence (in this act referred to as a public dancing licence) to use a particular place, whether licensed or not licensed for the sale of intoxicating liquor, situate in such licensing area for public dancing, and such justice may, if he so thinks proper, grant such licence to such person. (irish statute book 1935) the 2008 amendment to the intoxicating liquor act has arguably had the most serious detrimental impact on clubbing in ireland since its enactment. it almost doubled the fee for special exemption orders from €220 to €410 (comprising a €300 court fee and additional excise duty of €110) for each order. the resulting increased cost of staying open until 2:30am for 6 nights per week became prohibitive for the majority of club owners and venue promoters. the change in law also limited nightclubs to staying open until 1:00am on sundays, even with an individual extension, leading many clubs to cease operations on sundays altogether. additionally, it restricted alcohol sales in premises with theatre licenses to normal licensing hours or during extended hours under a special exemption order. this closed what the government deemed a loophole that had allowed theatres like the gaiety, tivoli and olympia to transform into nightclubs, staying open until 4:00am 2 to 3 nights a week throughout the late ‘90s and 2000s. the change in legislation could hardly have come at a more inopportune time, coinciding with the 2008 banking crisis that resulted in a global economic recession and consequently less discretionary income for club goers. increased costs and restricted opening hours have directly contributed to the decline of a thriving and sustainable club culture in ireland and especially in dublin. this is further evidenced by the drastic reduction in the granting of seos by district courts, from 93,247 in 2005 to 34,806 in 2019.4 changing face of dublin after the global financial crisis there has been an increased focus on tourism as a driver of socioeconomic development.5 now ireland and dublin are frequently marketed as the tech capital of europe.6 the irish government, its agencies and semi-state bodies have adopted the richard florida (2002) doctrine of the creative class, marketing ireland’s and in particular dublin’s possession of the “three ts” —technology, talent and tolerance—to cement dublin’s reputation as the cosmopolitan and progressive tech capital of europe. in fact, florida himself has used dublin as a case study in his work to illustrate his creative class theory (2002: 300-2). in an address to the dublin regional authority and the dublin employment pact in 2007, florida predicted that dublin was well placed to capitalise on the “creative age” and become a “truly creative sustainable society” (mcdonald 2007). lawton, murphy and redmond note that florida’s influence was particularly significant from 2007 to 2010 and that a number of organisations in dublin, including dublin chamber and the dublin regional authority, adopted the florida rhetoric to the point it became “dominant aspects of policy formation in dublin” (lawton, murphy and redmond o’ sullivan | the steady decline of club culture in dublin 13 2014: 36). this policy has remained in place. in a 2018 speech to moneyconf, a large scale fintech conference spinoff of the web summit which originated in dublin, the then irish taoiseach (prime minister) leo varadkar stated: ireland is in some ways emblematic of the revolutionary changes that have taken place in the world of finance and technology. from being an inward-looking, insular place at the edge of europe, ireland is an increasingly multicultural, and globalised country, a melting pot of nationalities which is proud to engage with the world. (varadker 2018) what many irish politicians and policy makers, however, have either failed to acknowledge or tacitly chosen to ignore is that the theory of the “creative city” is based on young multicultural creatives having easy access to spaces and places to live, socialise and create. this includes spaces such as nightclubs. writing about new york and london, hae posits that “city governments have been increasingly aware of the significance of cultural amenities and leisure businesses in repositioning their cities as competitive in global/regional markets” (2011: 567). he goes on to argue that this has resulted in a correlating increase in the priority assigned to nightlife policy in britain. however, in the case of dublin, it can be argued that the focus on developing the creative city from 2009 to 2019 overlooked vital ingredients of what makes a city attractive to young professionals in the first place. i contend that it has only been since the global pandemic, when tourism came to a standstill and remote working became the norm, that local and national government has had to refocus on the liveability of the city. gentrification or touristification as a cause for the diminishing spaces of dancing dublin is not the only city that has seen its clubbing culture eroded over the past 15 years. issues of gentrification in clubbing hotspots such as london, berlin and amsterdam have become a prevalent theme when identifying the underlying causes for the demise of club scenes.7 the process of gentrification can be viewed in general terms as broad socio-spatial change which centres on the transformation of working class and industrial neighbourhoods into middle class residential and new commercial spaces (kelly 2014: 175). while gentrification of this nature is evident across dublin, undoubtedly impacting the night-time economy, it does not however paint a full picture. some scholarship, including rabiei-dastjerdi, mcardle and hynes’  (2021) “which came first, the gentrification or the airbnb” and “tourism gentrification” by cocolagant (2018), has argued that another form of gentrification is touristification. sequera and nofre (2018), however, identify substantial epistemological differences between touristification and gentrification, since the expansion of urban tourism in a central urban area is not always a pre-condition for gentrification. they argue that gentrification and touristification should be examined as two distinct but complementary (or even simultaneous) processes (sequera and nofre 2018: 847). in differentiating the “complex dancecult 16(1)14 phenomenon of urban touristification”, they identified characteristics such as cross-class displacement, disneyfication of retail, worsening of community liveability, risk investment funding ownership of property and housing dominated by temporary accommodation (sequera and nofre 2018: 850). many of these characteristics can be clearly evidenced in dublin particularly over the past decade. jover and díaz-parra identify touristification as a process that encompasses displacement as well as other material and symbolic consequences stemming from mass tourism on a given territory (2020: 5). meanwhile, cocola-gant contends the proliferation of gentrified landscapes creates tourist friendly spaces providing visitors with sanitised areas, consumption opportunities and a middle-class sense of taste (2018: 286). none of this is more evident than in the liberties, a historically working-class area of dublin which has become the almost unrecognisable “home of the black stuff ”, with the guinness storehouse at its centre. attracting over 1.5 million visitors a year, the storehouse is the most popular tourist attraction in ireland. on the neighbouring streets antique shops have been replaced by souvenir shops and butcher shops replaced by vegan friendly cafés. clancy’s (2020) detailed analysis found that airbnb penetration here has been particularly significant. this aligns with nofre’s assertion that the touristification of the city is a significant driver of urban and neighbourhood change (2021: 2). ireland hosted more than 11 million tourists in 2018, a figure approximately twice ireland’s population.8 (irish times 2020). dublin is one of the main tourist destinations among european cities, and the principal arrival destination for the majority of tourists visiting the country. a 2019 report by esta noted that dublin had one of the highest visitors to local ratios worldwide, with 427 tourists for every 100 locals.9 nofre maintains that “touristification of nightlife is emerging as one of the most aggressive forms of material, symbolic and heritage dispossession of local communities within the central historic neighbourhoods of many european cities” (2021: 1157). in dublin, airbnb has monopolised the short-term renting market with listings of almost 10,000 properties including entire houses, apartments and private and shared rooms. its impact was acknowledged by government in 2019 when they implemented planning legislative reforms to regulate the short-term letting sector by updating the residential tenancies act. the amendment required anyone who was renting an entire property for more than 90 days in the year to apply for planning permission to dublin city council for change of use. the long-term policy of providing social housing via private rather than publicly owned property has also had an impact. from 2010 onwards, the lack of available social housing required dublin city council to purchase bed and breakfasts and rooms in hotels for emergency homeless accommodation. the use of these resources has increased year on year; over 3,500 adults resided in such accommodations at the end of 2021, compared to 800 in mid-2014 (baptista et al. 2022: 24). the ongoing severe housing crisis has resulted in a major brain drain of young professionals and students from the city and an increasing lack of creative talent to drive the music scene forward.10 in their study of berlin, sachse and raiselis (2020) note that club culture can occupy a complicated position as both accelerator and victim of neighbourhood o’ sullivan | the steady decline of club culture in dublin 15 gentrification, and as both a commodity and a casualty of creative-city marketing strategies. this is certainly the case in dublin, and the following section outlines how many pivotal nightclubs and late-night venues in the city have been particularly impacted by the demand for hotel accommodation. high profile club closures to make way for hotels as outlined above, 2008 was a turning point for club culture in dublin. although the temple theatre, the olympic ballroom and the kitchen had already closed prior to the financial crisis, many others shut in the decade preceding the covid-19 pandemic. while some nightclubs, such as the hub on eustace street—closed in 2018—and sides on dame lane—a nightclub under many guises from the late 1980s until it closed in 2019—are still physically in place behind hoardings soon to emerge as hotels, others have already been demolished to make way for urban redevelopment. andrews lane theatre, which opened in 1989 and closed in 2016, was demolished and redeveloped as the wren urban nest hotel. the tivoli theatre, which had been a nightclub in various incarnations for over half a century from 1964 to 2019, suffered a similar fate and is now a staycity aparthotel. the groundbreaking pod/redbox/crawdaddy complex in the old harcourt st. train station was arguably the most important dance venue in ireland in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. opened firstly with the pod in 1993, it was then extended to the redbox in 1996. when crawdaddy, the final part of the expansion was opened in 2004, the entire complex had a capacity of almost 2300. it was shut down in 2013 and sold in 2016. the new owners were granted planning permission to become a “covent garden-style district” in dublin city centre called “opera quarter” (woods 2018). the site is now home to a deli, offices and a pret a manger. rumours—a nightclub attached to the gresham hotel on o’connell st., dublin’s principal thoroughfare—was repurposed into hotel bedrooms during a major refurbishment of the hotel in 2014. fireworks, a nightclub on pearse st., suffered the same fate around 2010 when the trinity city hotel extended into the old nightclub premises. all of these closures point to evidence of the suburbanisation of the city centre, replacing characterful venues and late-night haunts—sometimes fairly or otherwise associated with anti-social behaviour—with hotels, apartments and up-market cafés and restaurants. covid-19: the final death knell for club culture? the onset of the covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent lengthy lockdown had a significant impact on the remaining nightclubs and venues, and 2020-21 saw further permanent closures of long-standing, high-profile nightclubs. the issue also began to gain public attention. it was announced in november 2020 that rírá, a nightclub on dame court which had been open since the early 1990s, would remain permanently shut. its owners had been granted planning permission for a major expansion of the central hotel on south great george’s st. and dame court into a new 6,554 sq. m, 5-storey hotel, with 125 bedrooms and a rooftop extension. in objecting to the planning application, cllr. daragh moriarty (labour dancecult 16(1)16 party) observed that dublin’s “cultural fabric is being eroded one new hotel at a time”, and that it was vitally important that the city council take action to stop and reverse it (2020). in a separate observation, cllr. claire byrne (green party) observed that “we have already witnessed an excessive erosion of our club culture in the city in particular over the past few years, mostly to make way for hotels and student accommodation” (2020). cllr byrne stated, “we are running out of places to dance” (byrne 2020). jam park, a 2,800-capacity nightclub in the dublin suburb of swords that had previously traded as the wright venue, closed its doors permanently in 2021 and is now the european headquarters for riot games. they did, however, keep the 3m diameter disco ball which spins over the workers as they livestream games all over the globe, in a grim reminder of the venue’s former glory. commercial venues and nightclubs are not the only spaces that have diminished over the past five years. community spaces, recording studios and rehearsal spaces which would have housed ad hoc dance events have all suffered from the impact of the shortage of prime real estate. jigsaw, the community space in dublin 1 which opened as seomra spraoi (irish for “playroom”) in 2004 and had been a thriving hub for a diverse range of dance music cultures over its lengthy existence—including dublin digital radio (ddr) and other collectives—closed in april 2021. cultural activism: time to stand up fight back previous research conducted before the pandemic identified a downward spiral in music scenes and club culture in dublin.11 some of this was attributed to the decrease in physical spaces for dancing, but also to the emergence of a “networked sociality” that was changing not only the experiences of clubbers in dublin but also diminishing the need for a regular physical copresence amongst music fans across the city (wittel 2001: 52). from as early as 2010 it was identified that for many young music fans in the city the emphasis was on connection, not location. wellman argues for the emergence of networked individualism, wherein social relations are in the process of moving from being completely place-centred, to being completely person-centred and a-spatial (2002: 14). during the pandemic, however, the experience of being locked down at home or even in their childhood bedrooms began to change the outlook for many. the need for an active physical space for congregating and dancing became a cause that young people mobilised and fought for. this triggered a succession of grassroots “cultural activism” which advocated for an authentic nighttime culture that wasn’t just a pastiche put-on for visiting tourists.12 publications such as the dublin inquirer, four four mag and dj magazine had already started to shine a light on the issues, encouraging readers to rally and engage with politicians and policy makers around legislative change.13 club promoter and entrepreneur andrea horan described dublin as a city that was “losing its late night soul”, where too “many cultural hubs in dublin have been bulldozed to make way for just-for-profit hotels” (horan 2019). this situation spurred her to create a club night called “no more hotels” beginning o’ sullivan | the steady decline of club culture in dublin 17 in june 2019, which ran every couple of months in wigwam on middle abbey street until february 2020. in collaboration with thinkhouse and algorithm—a pr consultancy focussed on youth culture and a creative production studio respectively—no more hotels produced a documentary and large-scale art project entitled “clubbing is culture”, which ran on culture night (a national celebration of culture) on 28 september 2020.14 the project projection mapped slogans such as “where will we dance now” and “save our clubs”, along with quotes from dublin clubbers lamenting the demise of the scene, onto the sites of previous clubs around the city. visually striking, presented on a night that the city was bustling with people who were visiting late night galleries and cultural events and constructed by a public relations company to reach audiences further afield, the project gained traction on social media and in the mainstream media. the documentary featured prominent dubliners including the sitting lord mayor of dublin and green party councillor hazel chu, both of whom championed the concept of clubbing as culture. a public statement of support from dublin’s first citizen was seen by many activists as a breakthrough, and one could argue that the green party, which has been a minority partner in the ruling coalition of national government since june 2020, began to assert their limited influence in night-time economy policy around this time. proposed changes in government policy can be attributed to the vision of catherine martin td, who was appointed as minister for tourism, culture, arts, gaeltacht, sport and media in the new government cabinet. the period of the pandemic also saw the revival of “give us the night”, the volunteer group of professionals who work within the nighttime industry. the group had been active around the period of the change in the intoxicating liquor act in 2008, particularly highlighting the change to costs of seos, and had made many interventions in the following decade. over the lockdown they became extremely active, lobbying government to reopen the night-time economy in a safe and sustainable manner. they have become a respected advocacy group, and they have made formal presentations to the national parliament on issues regarding the sector, particularly around licencing laws and music venues. the founders of dublin digital radio (ddr), whose broadcasts by their own admission became a “space of commune and solidarity during crisis”, have become critical advocates for dj culture and electronic music in dublin (byrne 2021). in the absence of clubs, the station and its network have become a critical infrastructure and base for djs in the city. after the permanent closure of jigsaw, the community venue where they based their radio station and hosted many of their fundraising parties, they spoke openly about the “neoliberal hellscape that is dublin”.15 over 2021 and 2022 they worked with the community action tenants union (catu) to host a number of novel events to shine a light on gentrification across the city. this included a community-based marathon football match and sound system in michael mallin park in september 2022 that was also broadcast live on ddr to protest the fact that the park was facing demolition to be replaced by an eight-storey hotel (heyraud 2022). dancecult 16(1)18 dublin is dying? it’s not dead yet. while unrest and agitating for change was gaining momentum over the period of the covid-19 lockdown, the real turning point in public consciousness came with the announcement on 1 october 2021 that the cobblestone would close. a pub in smithfield on the north side of the city with a famous reputation for supporting the traditional irish music scene, the cobblestone was to face a similar fate to so many nightclubs. smithfield was historically the market area of dublin with famous wholesale fruit, vegetable, flower and fish markets. a working-class area in the north inner city, it was earmarked for regeneration in the early 1990s by dublin city council and by the late ‘90s it was completely transformed. two storey cottages were demolished and replaced by 6or 7-storey apartment and office blocks and an art house cinema. businesses that served the local community and the market traders shut down and were replaced by up-market restaurants and café bars. smithfield square, where the cobblestone is located, is home to the famous the smithfield horse fair which used to be held on the first sunday of every month. but due to antisocial behaviour and a number of complaints from the new neighbours in the square, it can now only be held twice a year (mccárthaigh 2013). when researching “the sound wars”, o’keeffe found smithfield square had become a non-place of sound, with no site-specific sounds other than the general sounds of an urban space, traffic and construction (2017:13). it means that there are no sounds defined as belonging. in 2021 marron estates ltd. sought to continue the trend for regeneration and displacement when they applied to dublin city council for planning permission to construct a 9-storey hotel which would demolish a large portion of the live music venue to the rear of the pub, leaving only the front bar of the pub remaining.16 the plan also proposed to demolish two adjoining buildings which, like the cobblestone, were sites of architectural, historic and social interest. this news came when pubs were still in partial lockdown and nightclubs and music venues were still completely closed. soon after, a campaign was started entitled “dublin is dying”, which rallied protests and céilís (traditional irish dance events) against the planning application and also mobilised people into submitting planning objections. over 34,000 people signed the petition to save the pub, and a further 700 people submitted individual objections to the planning.17 on 29 november 29 2021, dublin city council refused the planning application. marron estates appealed the decision to an bord pleanála on 22 december 22 2021, but withdrew the appeal in may after sustained pressure from government and opposition politicians, the save the cobblestone group and the dublin is dying group. this victory reinvigorated the music community across all genres of music. they recognised that the demolition of their favourite venues to make way for another hotel did not have to be a fait accompli, and that there was a point in putting up a fight. give us the night’s (2022) budget submission in made a number of proposals to strengthen and grow the night-time economy in 2023. they focused on venue infrastructure, sound proofing grants, reducing vat rates and licencing costs, night-time transport and a o’ sullivan | the steady decline of club culture in dublin 19 first-time venue grant. their influence was evident in some of the announcements that were made in the run up to the subsequent budget in relation to nightlife and music venues. however, as i will discuss in the next section, many of these announcements have failed to materialise. this is once again demoralising and frustrating for venue owners, promoters and clubbers, for while the advocacy groups have had minor successes as a result of their tireless campaigning, it remains to be seen whether they will affect any change on these substantive issues. changing government policy? caught in the midst of negotiating a government when covid-19 struck, the incoming coalition government witnessed first-hand the impact the pandemic was having on the night-time economy, and it was included as a specific objective in the “programme for government” document published by the three coalition partners, fine gael, fianna fáil and the green party which outlined their vision for the lifetime of the government. the specific objectives on night-time culture were ambitious and far reaching, and all were set out to be achieved within the lifetime of the government. it committed to setting up a night-time economy task force within the first 30 days of government, and one was established in july 2020 (department of taoiseach 2020: 89). for many within the sector, although faced with continued lockdowns, this, finally, was a noticeable and measurable change in government policy. the multi-disciplinary task force consisted of representatives from government departments including justice; environment, climate and communications; enterprise, trade and employment; housing, local government and heritage; tourism, culture, arts, gaeltacht, sport and media and state bodies fáilte ireland, the arts council and an garda síochána and give us the night. the taskforce published its report on 15 september 2021. the report acknowledged how the pandemic utterly changed the operating landscape for the tourism, culture, arts, gaeltacht, sport and media sectors—most of which sustained the night-time economy. it also recognised that these sectors were among the hardest hit by the pandemic; to all extents and purposes they had been closed or experiencing very low levels of activity. this resulted in the bulk of businesses and individuals in these sectors becoming wholly dependent on state supports for most of 2020 and 2021 (night-time economy taskforce 2021). the report acknowledged that “many within the industry strongly believe that club culture must now be judged beyond its economic value, like other more established forms of culture”. it went further: club culture has traditionally welcomed and brought together various minority groups, and it is commonly recognised that the roots of this culture stem from within the lgbtqi+ community. safe spaces to congregate, socialise and dance are vital, a sentiment that has been repeatedly expressed by this community and others. (nighttime economy taskforce 2021) dancecult 16(1)20 these were seismic admissions in terms of supporting advocacy groups’ longstanding campaigns to reform ireland’s licencing laws and re-establish a coherent and distinctive club culture. the taskforce called for an immediate review of the seo process and cost structure to make early and significant reductions in the fees. it recognised the additional costs and bureaucratic burden seos caused for sustaining businesses. its stated strategic objective was that there should be a removal of the seo process. when the night-time sector partially reopened in october 2021 fees associated with seos were waived, however venues still needed to apply for an exemption every night they opened late. the sector went through further lockdowns from october 2021 to january 2022, and the minister for justice extended the wavier until april 2022.18 on 25 november 2021, the fine gael minister for justice helen mcentee announced there would be a review of existing liquor licencing legislation. she invited a public consultation on the “review of alcohol licensing” which was open for two months until 21 january.19 the consultation received over 5,000 responses from interested groups, organisations and individuals. on 25 october 2022, newspapers and news website all over ireland ran the story that irish nightclubs would now be able to stay open under new licencing laws.20 the minister for justice had published the general scheme of the sale of alcohol bill and was presenting it to cabinet on that day. the proposed legislation appeared to have cross party support, and using a normal legislature timetable would have been expected to be enacted by spring or summer in 2023. however, in july 2023 taoiseach leo varadkar announced it would be well into 2024 before the bill would come before the dáil, and it was unlikely that the bill would be enacted until the second half of the year. perhaps this was evidence of the government’s inconsistent commitment, as in april 2022 it removed the fee waiver for seos, reverting to the full cost of €410 per individual extension. more nightclubs announced their permanent closure as a result. those venue owners and promoters who are so far managing to remain open have publicly decried the reintroduction of the fees and the impact that they have on the sector, particularly in the context of trying to recover from the economic losses of the pandemic. in the absence of enacting legislation, the government had the opportunity to remove the fee for seos in the budget for 2024. it chose not to do so. in response, advocacy groups have mobilised a number of large-scale protests. dance at the dáil first became active in december 2021 when lockdowns were selectively eased and certain businesses were allowed to resume trading. it began its protest on 3 december 2021 with a call to action to make the government take responsibility for its hypocritical rules and guidelines, which had left the industry in a perilous state and had played no fair role in getting the industry back on track.21 the group has regularly played music and protested outside of the dáil since 2021. since lockdown restrictions were lifted, it focused its activism on the removal of seos, and it has held regular dance protests since the budget was announced in october 2023. in february 2023, the then taoiseach leo varadkar publicly stated that he supported the proposed legislative reform and the night-time economy. in an address to the dublin chamber agm he spoke of the opportunities that lay ahead for the city. o’ sullivan | the steady decline of club culture in dublin 21 reforming our antiquated licensing laws is an opportunity to boost the experience and night-time economy, and give people and performers more autonomy about how, when and where they socialise. it will also help to build stronger, safer communities. (varadkar 2023) however, although it can be argued that there appears to be a genuine intention for reform amongst a small number of members of government, it appears the overall political ambition for the legislative change that would allow for a thriving and sustainable nighttime club sector is absent. willingness to face down other vested and parochial interests and the lobbying groups for licenced vintners means that significant changes are unlikely in the short to medium term. give us the night’s response on x (formerly twitter) to the budget announcement articulated the sentiment of the constituency it represented. govt had many options to ease pressures on the night-time sector today and have done literally nothing. needless to say, punitive seo costs (which should be gone by now) remain intact. can the govt say with a straight face that it supports the nighttime economy?22 organising and insuring dancing those venues and promoters that are managing to stay open have been greatly impacted by the cost-of-living crisis, increased and prohibitive insurance costs and ironically the cost of hotel accommodation to host international djs to play club nights. this is illustrated in an exchange on the website x between two dublin promoters in september 2023. checking hotel prices before you even check if an act is available to play in one of the remaining clubs that aren’t yet a hotel 🙃23 these days i’m like, i’ll pay you €200 more if you will stay in my clean, nice, quiet spare room.24 it’s crazy, honest to god. checking flights first used to be the dealbreaker.25 the difficulties in accommodating international djs has resulted in many promotors looking towards irish based talent to headline nights. international djs would once have been the mainstay of every mid-sized club night line-up. this is increasingly no longer the case. temporary pleasure is a group of architects and club creatives who describe themselves as “a rave architecture collective generating temporary spaces and moments in time” whose mission is to fight the disappearance of irish club spaces.26 they raised €25,781 to build a temporary club which opened in mid-august 2022 for 6 weeks. they hoped to repeat the venture with a more ambitious project in the summer of 2023, and secured a venue in the docklands part of the city which was due to open in july. two weeks before opening on 23 june they announced on social media they would not be going ahead with the venture as dancecult 16(1)22 they could not secure adequate insurance despite having received public funding for their events (byrne 2023). the increasing cost of insurance has become untenable for many nightclubs and venue owners. late-night venues who made it through the pandemic, and who have closed their doors in 2023—such as dashi on north king st. and tramline on d’olier st.—have cited insurance costs as one of the final nails in the coffin for their businesses. the pandemic together with the costs now associated with running a business in ireland in broad terms are the reason for this regrettable decision today. . . . the failure of successive governments to reform both licensing and the insurance industry price gouging practices has made a great business unviable in today’s economy.27 the licenced vintners association reported that the average insurance premium for late night bars and nightclubs was €92,117.10 (healy 2023). the future of dublin clubbing nofre posits that the closure of “traditional”, historical nightlife venues means not only the material and symbolic dispossession of local communities, but also the loss of the tangible and intangible cultural heritage of our cities (2023: 506). one could argue the picture that has been painted in this article is one of a managed and deliberate decline of cultural heritage. but irish djs, activists, producers and promoters have proven over the past 30 years that they are both resourceful and creative. despite challenges, they consistently find ways for cultural practices and new musical heritages to evolve and thrive. the grassroots irish traditional music revival which has captured the imagination of the public, particularly amongst those under 30, has proven an inspiration to many in the club sector. while they appreciate the promise of government support, they are determined to move forward without it, driven by the desire to build a club culture that is uniquely and unapologetically irish. although campaigners have been disappointed at the rate of legislative change and have questioned the government’s actual commitment to reform, incremental changes have continued to be implemented. in may 2024, dublin city council appointed a night-time economy advisor. while such posts have not been successful in every location, there are enough case studies where they have had a positive impact to be hopeful that this is a constructive intervention.28 since the pandemic, dublin has seen a resurgence of grassroots initiatives to activate temporal spaces by music collectives such as club comfort, 1815fc and ecliptic newsstand. they have been successful in activating digital technologies such as patreon to finance events, and they have run numerous successful ad hoc events. another collective named kirkos ensemble has taken over an old hairdressing salon on prussia st. in stoneybatter as a venue and rehearsal space for contemporary music and performance art. there has also been a move to more temporary spaces which host once-off events or short series. silo is a new 3,500 capacity electronic music event space which opened from october 2023 to january 2024. the arts council has shown leadership in its administration o’ sullivan | the steady decline of club culture in dublin 23 of government funding, and it has successfully piloted the use of alternative arts venues for one-off dance music events in several high-profile locations across the city. but this has not been without controversy. the national concert hall has hosted two iterations of the “haunted dancehall” in association with promoters foggy notions. it was reported in the irish times that the board of the national concert hall were concerned about the event being repeated after worrying feedback about the 2022 event due to the nature of the event; minutes of a board meeting recorded staff complaining about “abuse of nch facilities” (coyle 2023). the event did proceed in 2023 with a much earlier curfew than its previous iteration. and the inference about who and what type of music was welcome in one of our national institutions was not lost on much of the public. the complex, a community arts space in smithfield which houses dublin digital radio (ddr), has hosted several dance music events in the past two years including “alternating current”, the 3-day electronic and electroacoustic music festival run by ddr. while these temporary spaces and one-off events are welcome in terms of bringing vibrancy back to the city in the post covid-19 landscape, the ongoing challenge is best summed up by dj and give us the night campaigner robbie kitt in a 2022 interview with una mullally of the irish times. we need physical infrastructure, if we don’t have spaces that allow us to create lineage, then whatever the expression of cultural heritage made right now will be too temporary to sustain itself into the future. i think there are chilling implications of that in terms of what that does to our cultural journey. how do we advance our cultural expression if we don’t have continuity? (mullally 2022) conclusion throughout this article i have identified a number of interrelated factors that have contributed to the ongoing demise of club culture in dublin. the impact of touristification has been transformative, visibly altering the city’s landscape and its night-time activities. temple bar, once the bohemian cultural quarter of the city populated by nightclubs, dive bars and illegal afterparties, is now dominated by faux traditional irish pubs catering entirely to tourists. while there is no doubt that the pandemic and the extended lockdown had a precipitating effect on the permanent closure of some nightclubs, many of these venues were already on their knees. the subsequent cost of living crisis, resulting in unsustainable energy bills, and the ongoing prohibitive and disproportionate cost of insurance became the point of no return. developers and investment funds who seek planning permission for large numbers of hotels rather than cultural, creative spaces or long-term accommodation make profit-driven decisions. their aim is to acquire money from the tourist population and from the government for providing emergency accommodation. all these factors have been underpinned by a repeated neoliberal government policy agenda, combined with resistance to updating outdated legislation. the prioritization of economic and commercial interests over cultural vitality and community engagement has resulted in the insidious dancecult 16(1)24 undermining the viability of club culture in the city. while this article has focused on historical and policy analysis, there is space for further research into the lived experiences of club-goers in the city. a spatiotemporal mapping of dublin and its nightclubs and music venues, as has been conducted in cities such as liverpool and manchester, would also be useful to influence policy at both local and national levels. this work could strengthen the recent grassroots cultural activism and the work of national advocacy groups. although there is some indication of a governmental desire for change, legislative reform to support club culture is unlikely before the next government election in early 2025, and even then it is not guaranteed. ensuring the survival of club culture and genuine cultural recognition will require a sustained and ongoing effort (assiter 2022: 5). notes 1 for further explorations of music and music scenes in dublin in the 90s see mclaughlin (2004), o’flynn (2009) and nugent (2022). 2 see powell (1991), o’hare (2001) and haughey family (2020). 3 for a social history of the dublin club scene during the 1990s and early 2000s see wynne-jones (2022). 4 see <https://www.instagram.com/p/ccnq3nysu1e/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link>, (accessed 17 october 2024). 5 see namberger et al. (2019). 6 see for example mcdermott (2023). 7 in “from dancefloors to tables”, assiter (2022) discusses the issue of gentrification in london. gentrification in berlin has been widely analysed, including by picaud (2019), feiereisen and sassin (2021) and kate shaw, whose pioneering 2005 work also researched the impact of gentrification in amsterdam. 8 see <https://www.tourismireland.com/docs/default-source/visitor-facts-and-figures/visitorfacts-and-figures-2018.pdf ?sfvrsn=150bb1dd_1>, (accessed 17 october 2024). 9 see the interactive document at <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/ d/1vzaqdydguzh8b1b56me_uusxi-39exo9vjbgvbdyzps>, (accessed 17 october 2024). 10 egan’s (2023) excellent analysis of the severe housing crisis in dublin is important for further context. 11 see o’sullivan (2020) on the demise of local music scenes in dublin. 12 for a detailed discussion and definition of cultural activism see verson (2007). 13 see thomas (2016), guest (2019) and finnan (2021). 14 see <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pecgnxz6pbc>, (accessed 17 october 2024). 15 see <https://x.com/dublindigiradio/status/1386777283189526528>, (accessed 17 october 2024). 16 a full planning application from marron estates, and the dublin city council decision and objections can all be found here: <https://planning.agileapplications.ie/dublincity/ application-details/146422>, (accessed (17 october 2024). https://www.instagram.com/p/ccnq3nysu1e/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link https://www.tourismireland.com/docs/default-source/visitor-facts-and-figures/visitor-facts-and-figures-2018.pdf?sfvrsn=150bb1dd_1 https://www.tourismireland.com/docs/default-source/visitor-facts-and-figures/visitor-facts-and-figures-2018.pdf?sfvrsn=150bb1dd_1 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vzaqdydguzh8b1b56me_uusxi-39exo9vjbgvbdyzps https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vzaqdydguzh8b1b56me_uusxi-39exo9vjbgvbdyzps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pecgnxz6pbc https://x.com/dublindigiradio/status/1386777283189526528 https://planning.agileapplications.ie/dublincity/application-details/146422 https://planning.agileapplications.ie/dublincity/application-details/146422 o’ sullivan | the steady decline of club culture in dublin 25 17 see the petition here: <https://my.uplift.ie/petitions/save-the-cobblestone>, (accessed (17 october 2024). 18 for further detail see the department of justice (2022) press release announcing the measure. 19 see department of justice press release published on november 25 2021 <https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/9b22e-minister-mcentee-launches-public-consultationon-reform-of-alcohol-licensing-laws/>, (accessed 17 october 2024). 20 coverage was extensive and included all national news outlets and specialist press. see for example lehane (2022), muk (2022), pepper (2022), bray (2022), blaney (2022), mcconnell and hosford (2022), o’mahony (2022) and simpson (2022). 21 see <https://www.instagram.com/p/cxkakw7oxqu/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igs h=mzrlodbinwflza%3d%3d>, (accessed 17 october 2024). 22 see <https://twitter.com/giveusthenight/status/1711819312476922113>, (accessed 17 october 2024). 23 see <https://twitter.com/sam_greenwood_/status/1704787217476952295>, (accessed 17 october 2024). 24 see <https://twitter.com/rob_rua/status/1704788833219318145>, (accessed 17 october 2024). 25 see <https://twitter.com/sam_greenwood_/status/1704789150543589590>, (accessed 17 october 2024). 26 see <https://temporary-pleasure.com/>, (accessed 17 october 2024). 27 see <https://www.instagram.com/p/cuuvrx3mum3/>, (accessed 17 october 2024). 28 see seijas and gelders (2020) for an analysis of night mayors across 40 cities. references assiter, ben. 2022. “from dancefloors to tables: socially distanced clubbing, temporary urbanism, and the gentrification of london’s nightlife”. annals of leisure research 27(1): 187-93. <https://doi.org/10.1080/11745398.2022.2027252>. 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https://fora.ie/clancourt-harcourt-street-tripod-3943767-apr2018/ https://doi.org/10.1177/026327601018006003 https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45636-8_2 https://analog-rhythms.com/2023/08/06/where-we-danced-dublin-clubs-of-the-1990s-and-2000s https://analog-rhythms.com/2023/08/06/where-we-danced-dublin-clubs-of-the-1990s-and-2000s timbre and the “zone of entanglement” in electronic dance music: re-thinking musico-social ontologies with the mycelial turn dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 13(1): 41–60 issn 1947-5403 ©2023 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.03 timbre and the “zone of entanglement” in electronic dance music: re-thinking musico-social ontologies with the mycelial turn maria perevedentseva university of salford (uk) abstract this article weaves together relational tendencies in recent scholarship spanning philosophy, mycology, psychopharmacology and timbre studies in order to argue that timbre’s unbounded ontology and cyclical re-use across electronic dance music (edm) history affords listeners experiential access into radically distributed modes of being. taking its cue from the biological structure of fungal mycelium, from whose flowers the psychoactive compounds of many psychedelic drugs are derived, this study builds on established models of edm’s affectivity to propose that timbre in edm manifests a psychedelic and specifically social form of consciousness. highlighting the potential for entrainment that edm’s synthesised timbres make possible, a conception of timbre as a mycelial “zone of entanglement” is put forward, in which the material and cultural, individual and social and spiritual and fleshly dimensions of the listening experience are folded into a reverberant unity, in turn encouraging a negotiation of the ethics that this entanglement entails. keywords: timbre, mycelium, ontology, psychedelics, electronic dance music maria perevedentseva is a lecturer in musicology at the university of salford. in 2022, she completed her phd at goldsmiths with a thesis titled ‘something for your mind, your body and your soul. timbre and meaning in electronic dance music’. she is a co-founder of the music and online cultures research network (www.mocren.org) and has chapters forthcoming in the cambridge companion to electronic dance music, a volume on music studies after the internet, and a handbook of popular music methodologies. email: <m.perevedentseva@salford.ac.uk> feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.03 http://www.mocren.org/ mailto:m.perevedentseva%40salford.ac.uk dancecult 15(1)42 introduction mushrooms are having a moment. authors including anna tsing (2015), tim ingold (2018) and merlin sheldrake (2020) have brought the curious lives of these non-plant, nonhuman organisms to widespread public attention, highlighting how the “anarchic filigree” of hyphae that constitute the mycelium root structure of fungi problematise notions of the individual and constitute the “ecological connective tissue” through which “much of the world is stitched into relation” (sheldrake 2020: 7, 52). the symbiotic tendencies of fungi, which create resource-distribution networks between themselves and plant partners (the so-called “wood-wide web”), as well as their remarkable capacity to thrive in hostile climates, have spurred diverse research efforts exploring their potential to improve the resilience of natural ecosystems and create sustainable new materials for use in fashion, construction and many other fields. given their cultural currency, fungi are also making marks in artistic circles. for example, youtuber mycolyco harnesses the creative potential of the electrical signals that communicate across fungal bodies to create modular synth jams (mycolyco n.d.). recent trends in philosophy also tend towards relational, nondualist ontologies, exemplified in the resurgence of timbre scholarship since the mid-2000s. timbre is now understood to straddle the “great binarism” of the material-immaterial divide, with its conceptual unity dependent on the interplay between spectral, temporal and spectrotemporal functions of frequency sinusoids, covaried with embodied perceptions of pitch and rhythm (wallmark 2022: 12). models of mind-world continuity also characterise next-generation research into the effects of psychedelic drugs. these studies often invoke dual-aspect monism as a unifying concept that neutralises distinctions between mind and brain to theorise how increases in neural connectivity under psychedelics affect behaviour and social outlook (heal et al. 2018). psychedelic states, of course, have also long interested scholars of electronic dance music (edm), especially forms derived from black american house and techno as they mutated alongside the incipient rave culture of the late 1980s and 1990s. in this literature, the ego-dissolution associated with psychedelics is mirrored in theories of an ideal oceanic oneness achieved in peak moments of dance floor ecstasy—a state of “jouissance” that dissolves the parameters of individuality into effervescent, communal, pre-subjective and pre-linguistic affect (malbon 1999; gilbert and pearson 1999: 64). in this study, i consider these related theoretical trends to be indicative of what i call the “mycelial turn” in scholarship. below, i think through the interlinked renaissance of three strands of inquiry—mycology, psychopharmacology and timbre—to argue that timbre in edm manifests a psychedelic and specifically social form of consciousness through affiliative entrainment. in so doing, i suggest that timbre in edm challenges traditional philosophical boundaries between mind and body, affect and meaning and self and other, embodying the ecology of life that ingold dubs the “zone of entanglement” (2016: 106). as such, i argue that timbre reveals in microcosm the bonds and continuities along which encultured life is lived. perevedentseva | timbre and the “zone of entanglement” in electronic dance music 43 the mycelial turn building on alan rayner’s suggestion that the “whole of biology would have been different had the mycelium—rather than . . . a mouse or a sea-urchin—been taken as the prototypical exemplar of the organism”, anthropologist tim ingold questions the viability of both humanistic and scientific inquiry rooted in the ontology of the “blob” (2018: 215). he asks, “what if we were to think of the person, like the fungal mycelium, not as a blob, but as a bundle of lines, or relations, along which life is lived”, and proposes a conception of the world as one made up of “intricately enmeshed relations rather than one already divided into discrete and autonomous entities” (ingold 2018: 215–16). similar leanings towards less bounded conceptions of being can be found across a broad spectrum of recent theoretical work. ecological theorists voice convictions that “relations and structures are both metaphysically and causally more basic than objects and properties” (buccella 2021: 3.1). psychologist kenneth gergen echoes this point and argues for a vision of human being and action in which “the very idea of the individual person is a byproduct of a relational process” (gergen 2009: xxvi). theories of extended mind are likewise motivated by an impulse to get away from the notion of consciousness as a “private mental space”, suggesting instead that both the tools that humans use in accomplishing various tasks, as well as social interactions and institutionalised practices, can be considered aspects of consciousness (gallagher 2013: 4). elizabeth grosz’s concept of the “incorporeal” pushes these ideas further in an attempt to circle round to an expansive understanding of consciousness as rooted in the body and enmeshed with worldly matter. from her disciplinary background in philosophy, she argues that the material and ideal are not “two substances but two ways in which the real is distributed” (grosz 2017: 251). this leads her to propose that “there is always something in the organization of matter”, and thus of the material world inhabited by other incorporeal entities, that “contains the smallest but perhaps most significant elements of ideality”, without which “even the most elementary forms of organization and orientation” would be impossible (grosz 2017: 251, 250). therefore, through the incorporeal, ideality, consciousness and the orientation towards social organisation can be viewed as “attenuated” attributes of materiality (grosz 2017: 253). the play on words implicit in the concept articulates a parity between the real and the ideal, and indicates the existence of something real that is not of the body, as well as corporeality’s incorporation of that something into its processes of becoming. put another way, grosz’s incorporeal ontology recognises that qualitative relations—and the yearning for relations—are prerequisites for the organisation of all living forms into ever more complex formations. the relational, associative ontology of fungal mycelium appeals to all of these projects by rejecting both dualism and individualism as archetypes for cognition and social life. like the linguistic turn of the mid-20th century and the affective turn of the 1990s, the mycelial turn can be thought of as a loose coalition of intellectual tendencies that attempts to renew the frameworks used to theorise foundational concepts like meaning, dancecult 15(1)44 being, consciousness and the self, and their positioning in relation to society, culture and the wider environment. with its privileging of communication and continuity across the human–non-human divide, the mycelial turn seeks to re-enchant models of agency and coexistence put forward by (post)structuralism, cybernetics, and actor-network theory. furthermore, it seeks to move past the perceived “semiophobia” that underpinned the aversion to culture and discourse animating affect theory, and concerns itself instead with the cultures of nature and the symbiotic transfer of genes, traits and resources (boysen 2018: 225). its conceptual preoccupation with collaboration is also reflected methodologically in its entwining of disciplines ranging from biology, philosophy and computational science to anthropology, linguistics and the arts. in short, the mycelial turn constitutes both the study and performance of radical relationality as it sutures biocultural life, and the promiscuous cross-referencing in the ensuing paragraphs should be taken in that spirit. ruminating on the growing momentum behind similar trends, rob nixon argues that the metaphor of the wood wide web “dramatize[s] interconnectedness rather than centering agency in a bounded, sovereign self ”, and that its surge in its popularity represents a “yearning for systemic changes that reduce social abandonment” (2021: 367, 354). he draws a parallel between the market in neoliberal economics and the megaforest sustained by mycorrhizal networks formed between tree roots and fungi. both are superorganisms comprised of “clustered communication” between diverse processes and lifeforms but represent diametrically opposing strategies for dealing with resource distribution and growth: whereas the market prioritises competition, extraction and inequality, the megaforest relies on long-range cooperation, “self-interested altruism” and “diffuse intelligence” (nixon 2021: 256–257). tsing’s lyrical paean to the matsutake mushroom similarly frames the biology and economics of its cultivation as a model for survival in capitalist ruins, and it notes how matsutake trade is sustained by the negotiated coexistence of complementary and divergent natural and cultural interests and cycles of destruction and rebirth (2015: 273). in both of these texts, the renewed interest in plant communication and the mycelial networks that facilitate it appear symptomatic of a desire to reimagine the rapidly disintegrating neoliberal world order. in a political sense, then, the mycelial turn represents a search for alternative ways to manage the hyperconnectivity of competing ecosystems and recalibrate relations between individuals and collectives. similar egalitarian ideals, of course, also animate many musical countercultures, among them edm which, with its wide-eyed mantra of peace, love, unity and respect (plur), strives to liquidate boundaries of race, class, gender and sexuality stratifying its dancing crowds. tavia nyong’o, however, takes a critical view of this oceanic conception of dance music’s collective affectivity. in her persuasive re-reading of freud, she reminds us that the oceanic is not pure regression into a “prelapsarian” unity but rather an “exhilarating extension” of human senses and faculties that constitutes an inescapable part of living and loving with others (nyong’o 2008: 108, 107). ultimately, she argues, “the oceanic feeling-tone becomes . . . nothing more nor less than ordinary affect, worthy perhaps of note, but not, in itself, a means for social transformation” (nyong’o 2008: perevedentseva | timbre and the “zone of entanglement” in electronic dance music 45 109). similarly, for mark fisher, the political “failure” of edm is tied up precisely with the failure of the affective unity of dancing crowds to manifest more politically productive long-term relationships (reynolds 2017). at the end of the rave, its warm ocean congeals once again into ingold’s blobs, and isolated individuals are left at the mercy of the affective machinations of external forces. the intervention into this problematic that the mycelial turn enables has to do with its retention of a concept of the self. the mycelial self, however, is not as a prisoner of discourse which tries at every opportunity to dissolve the ego-institution that holds it captive, but a meaningful multiplicity whose agency is sustained via concrete relations to other (non)human entities. as nixon writes, “it is a biological and ontological error to construe the individual and the collective as polar opposites” (2021: 263). moreover, sheldrake makes the important point that the partners in a mycorrhizal relationship do not form a “third” organism but rather remain always themselves, in their cultural and species-specific particularity (2020: 139). the mycelial refutation of the ontology of the blob, therefore, does not seek to eliminate difference in encounters with an other. instead, it recognises an already existing matereal relationship and seeks ways to manage differences among related parties in order to sustain life and enable collective flourishing. furthermore, a mycelial understanding of group behaviour and its potential for goaldirected change goes beyond the swarm analogy popularised by new materialist thinkers (e.g. bennett 2009; goodman 2005, etc.). this is because, properly speaking, members of a swarm remain discrete entities, whereas mycelium is constituted by thread-like fungal hyphae whose tips are densely interwoven, making it impossible to dismantle the network by picking them off individually (sheldrake 2020: 53). applying this idea to the cultural formation of a raving crowd makes it possible to think about the longevity of the relationships that make it up, and how the sentiments of unity expressed during peak experiences may be able to initiate lasting reorientations to others. as a living, growing tissue that signifies “time in place”, mycelium adds depth and continuity to more established static spatial metaphors of dancefloor populations (tsing 2015: 234). in this view, the prized ephemerality of edm happenings, and the ephemeral communities that they create, are more than hallucinatory mirages because the relations that make them up extend beyond individual events, even while the structures of their entanglements transform. the mycelial principle of continuity thus offers a new way of conceptualising the unity and cohesion of edm as social life, and it leaves open the possibility of its transformation into new states that reconfigure transient relationships as sustainable social bonds. unlike the oceanic model, a mycelial paradigm sees the opening-up of relations and extension of organismal boundaries as a prerequisite for, rather than end-goal of, any transformation. moreover, a mycelial model recognises the continued existence of the particular interests, politics and orientations of its constituents: the listeners who have arrived at this juncture via their own culturallyand behaviourally-contingent paths. on its own, however, this updated construct cannot tell us anything about the qualitative specificity of this musicosocial matrix. what is it like for edm listeners to be, think, feel and know as part of this dancecult 15(1)46 extended living entity? to answer this question, it is necessary to analyse the forms of contact and communication particular to this mode of communion in a way that centres music rather than the social interactions that traditionally form the focus of ethnographic studies of the dancefloor. after all, the music of edm outlasts the time and space confines of individual raves, accompanying fans through their everyday engagements and weaving a connecting thread between them even when they are spatially dispersed. timbre represents an apt vehicle for analysing these kinds of continuous relations for several reasons. first, the re-use of particular synthesised timbres throughout edm history— the korg m1 organ, rimshot snares, the “hoover” and countless other examples—constitutes its own circular economy of meanings that sustains specific subgenre communities across time. second, timbre’s material-immaterial ontology itself encapsulates the incorporeal contact between listeners and the environment that the mycelial turn seeks to theorise. moreover, as i show below, timbre cognition shares striking similarities with altered states of consciousness experienced under the influence of psychedelic drugs, which also often play a part in peak unitive edm experiences. thus, after a foray into psychedelic neuroscience, i will return to timbre to argue that it manifests a substantive, spatially unmoored zone of entanglement that keeps the mycelial matrix of edm relations alive during, between and beyond those most intense collective moments of dance floor communion. before that, however, it is wise to sound a brief note of caution. the mushrooming of popular literature on fungi and plant communication in recent years has raised the fears of some mycologists that the principles of this inter-species collaboration, which are only beginning to be understood, have been exaggerated in order to advance a moralistic agenda (popkin 2022; karst, jones and hoeksema 2023). for example, the portrayal of the wood wide web as an altruistic “social network” of tree families can all too easily ignore the complex dance along the “mutualism–parasitism continuum” that justine karst describes as characterising all symbiotic plant-fungi relationships (wohlleben 2016: 3; karst et al. 2008: 1032). so, even though the scholarly consensus currently holds that mycorrhizal networks do exist and trade resources like carbon and glucose, it is not known whether, and to what extent, this type of resource-sharing benefits partners more than hosts. as such, these mycological discoveries are not yet ready to dethrone the (itself distorted) darwinian principle of competition as the driving evolutionary force, so any temptations to luxuriate in new age sentiments of one-worldism should be kept in check. maintaining a critical stance on this does not refute the present argument. a mycelial model of edm’s musico-social ontology need not be seen to imply a totalising superorganism into which listeners are subsumed in their pursuit of musical pleasure. in other words, in challenging blob ontology, the mycelial turn does not go so far as to eradicate any notion of the embodied and encultured self. however, irrespective of whether the mutualism of fungal networks represents altruism proper, this mutualism belies an awareness of the presence and (both complementary and contradictory) interests of the incorporeal morethan-self. therefore, while it is inadvisable to make any grand claims as to the scalability of such collectivist impulses, the metaphorical allure of the “ancient tendency” towards perevedentseva | timbre and the “zone of entanglement” in electronic dance music 47 entangled life holds firm (sheldrake 2020: 158). in instrumentalising the ontology of the fungal mycelium as a model for social relations, it is this insistent orientation to the morethan-self that this study retains going forward. psychedelics and timbral consciousness profound perspectival shifts such as those afforded by mycelial thinking are now understood to be key outcomes of the use of psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin mushrooms and lsd, itself derived from the ergot fungus. both psilocybin and lysergic acid are endogenously synthesised secondary metabolites of fungi which share a structural relationship with the neurotransmitter serotonin. unlike primary metabolites, their ecological function is itself somewhat social, serving to reinforce the vitality of the fungal organism’s inter-species partners by promoting better chemical resilience (kennedy 2014: 28). given the significant similarities between insect, animal and human modes of neural transmission, this suggests that the behaviour-altering effects that these metabolites evolved to have in insects and animals should obtain when these substances are ingested by humans as well (kennedy 2014: 56). indeed, because of the pivotal role played by serotonin in a vast swathe of biological processes ranging from breathing to learning, memory and mood, the modulation of serotonergic processes is believed to lie at the heart of the cognitive and behavioural changes that characterise the psychedelic experience (lebedev et al. 2015: 3138). below, i provide an overview of the neuroscience of psychedelic states—highlighting its mycelial emphasis on prosociality and connectivity—and articulate its links to timbre cognition via the theory of connectome harmonics. working at the forefront of the new wave of psychedelics research, robin carhartharris and karl friston (2019) have theorised the rebus model (relaxed beliefs under psychedelics) of the psychology of the psychedelic experience, based on the bayesian brain and the related principles of free energy and entropy. in this framework, core mental concepts, habits and beliefs are believed to be hierarchically encoded and embedded in deep neural networks that optimise probabilistic representations of the organism’s interaction with their environment. this involves the continuous comparison of low-level sensory input with previously encoded high-level representations, with the aim of minimising prediction error by updating expectations according to best-fit prior beliefs. maintaining the integrity of this system depends on “compressing” or otherwise de-emphasising low-level stimulus signals which may interfere with higher-level models and cause psychologically disturbing feelings of surprise (carhart-harris and friston 2019: 322). free energy, in this sense, is a measure of surprise, with increases of free energy and entropic neural activity believed to correlate positively with the perceived richness of subjective experience, until a critical threshold is breached and the experience shades into psychosis (carhart-harris and friston 2019: 317). according to rebus, psychedelics work by binding to the 5-ht2ar serotonin receptor subtype which is especially prominent in the cortex and other high-level association regions belonging to the default-mode network (dmn), which represents a “uniquely deep” dancecult 15(1)48 collection of networks responsible for metacognition and perspective-taking (carhartharris and friston 2019: 322). the “definitive mind-manifesting function” of psychedelic drugs is believed to be their disruption of the normal workings of the dmn, such that signals from lower-level sensory, cognitive and emotional networks are able to feed through to the surface of consciousness without being filtered out by high-level priors (carhartharris and friston 2019: 323). operationally speaking, the psychedelic activation of 5-ht2ars decreases the amplitude of low-frequency cortical rhythms which correlate with resting-state dmn activity and confer top-down expectations about perceptual stimuli, weakening the brain’s ability to “entrain and constrain emotion and perception to a central narrative” such as “the self ” (carhart-harris and friston 2019: 324–25). the dysregulation of the brain’s hierarchical organisation, in turn, opens the doors to enhanced neural criticality, a cognitive state maximally poised between order and disorder in which a relaxation of prior-held beliefs can coincide with their revision. carhart-harris and friston have termed this the “anarchic brain” (2019: 333). in this condition, lower-level emotional, cognitive and sensory stimuli exert a level of influence that is otherwise dampened, which is believed to have powerful therapeutic effects by weakening the neural “top-heaviness” of a variety of psychopathologies (carhart-harris and friston 2019: 333). in the most general terms, rebus posits that we are indeed creatures of habit, and that psychedelics create opportunities for the temporary rewiring of those habits which may ultimately lead to more lasting neurological change. to date, some significant observed effects of the anarchic brain include increased sensitivity to context and sensory stimuli, increased emotional empathy and decreased feelings of social exclusion (vollenweider and preller 2020).1 these recent findings corroborate decades (if not centuries) of anecdotal accounts of psychedelic experiences during which people believe they have reached profound new insights about themselves and the world they inhabit, many of which involve heightened feelings of ego dissolution and communion with others. the archetypal psychedelic ideal of unitive consciousness frequently extends beyond empathic prosociality into more wide-reaching perceptions of oneness with objects and other non-human organisms populating the environment, often by endowing those entities with new meanings and agencies (richards 2016: 68; pokorny et al. 2017: 754). therefore, the noetic quality of oneness achieved under psychedelics may be explained by increased neural criticality which minimises feelings of disturbance or surprise, making fluid the boundaries that segregate networks and the concepts they undergird and allowing those under the influence to feel a sense of ease and continuity with the world as it is. there is also a potentially significant place for music, sound and timbre in aiding this process. in experimental settings, music has been shown to provide a sense of guidance through the space and time of a psychedelic trip, and to increase perceptions of emotional “openness” and “resonance” between self and the social environment (kaelen et al. 2018: 510). this is mirrored in musicological work, where lsd’s common effects of dechronicization (defined as the sense of moving outside of conventional perceptions of perevedentseva | timbre and the “zone of entanglement” in electronic dance music 49 time), depersonalization and dynamization are read into various musical manipulations of listeners’ impressions of time and space (hicks 1999: 63; see also bannister 2019). furthermore, although speculative, carhart-harris and friston suggest that meaningful metrics for understanding the increased perception of “harmony” in the body-mind under psychedelics could be a result of the synchronised nesting of cortical rhythms in states of criticality (2019: 339). this hypothesis is based on pioneering work by selen atasoy et al., who have proposed a unifying account of complex patterns of neural signalling based on what they call “connectome harmonics” which represent “frequency-specific building blocks of cortical activity” (2018: 289). their theory posits that, similar to the ways that harmonic waves undergird coordinated spatiotemporal activity in other natural phenomena, structural connectivity in the brain is dependent on the synchronised oscillation of neuronal traffic in different regions, with composites of particular frequencies and amplitudes being associated with particular networks and states of consciousness. specifically, the authors observe that the loss of consciousness (whether natural or drug-induced) confines neural activity to a narrow range of frequencies and amplitudes, whereas the enhanced consciousness associated with psychedelic states activates a broader range of the connectome harmonic spectrum and increases overall cortical connectivity (atasoy et al. 2018: 289). in effect, these “harmonic brain modes” are conceived of as stacks of individual oscillatory frequencies, akin to the frequency partials that make up sound tones and help to determine pitch and timbre; at one point in the article, atasoy et al. even liken psychedelic consciousness to a “rich symphony” (2018: 278, 289). aside from the pleasing timbral analogy of a given state of consciousness having a particular spectrotemporal profile, another important aspect of the work on harmonic brain modes pertains to the present argument around timbre and edm. this relates, on the one hand, the confinement of neural activity to low frequencies ranging from 0.05–500 hz, with psychedelic drugs specifically affecting frequency ranges below 100 hz, to the similar privileging of bass and sub-bass frequencies in edm production and performance, on the other. this parallelism suggests that, despite a current lack of scholarship investigating the cognitive mechanics of timbral entrainment, the engineering of edm basslines—especially the use of techniques like lfos, typically pitched below 20 hz—could afford a structurally deep level of synchrony between listeners and the auditory environment of edm. that is to say, it seems plausible that the possibility of synchronising the body-mind to the periodicity of frequency sinusoids that create the percept of timbre could be included in the definition of entrainment as the “the temporal dynamics of interacting rhythmic systems” (clayton et al. 2020, 136). recent studies working under the general resonance theory paradigm have shown that both endogenous and exogenous rhythms, including in speech and music, can induce synchronisation with the neural activity of specific cortical regions and alter consciousness (see young 2022 for a review). moreover, in an exciting development, kristin weineck et al. have newly discovered that neural entrainment is stronger to spectral flux than the more commonly-studied parameter of a sound’s temporal envelope, especially when listening to slow, familiar and spectrally complex music with a steady beat (2022: 14–5). as dancecult 15(1)50 such, it seems likely that the spectrotemporal characteristics of complex electronic timbres commonly found in edm could induce entrainment with the harmonic modes of listeners’ cortical rhythms in different conscious states. recent publications by maria witek (2019) and luis-manuel garcia (2020) have made compelling arguments regarding the importance of rhythmic entrainment, vibration and sympathetic resonance to the “vibe” of oceanic unity sought from the edm experience. witek, in fact, makes a direct (though hypothetical) link between the “extended consciousness” ideally achieved in the rave to the neural hyperconnectivity induced by drugs like lsd and mdma (2019: 108). garcia, meanwhile, underscores the importance of cultural ties and emotional contagion in facilitating what he calls “affective attunement” to the vibe of the dance floor (2020: 10). i want to build on this work and argue that timbre in edm—both ontologically and in terms of the specific vibratory properties of the synthesised timbres that characterise edm as a metagenre—plays a key role in rewiring perceptual habits and reconfiguring organismal boundaries to enable a relational, radically distributed and specifically social form of consciousness. seen in this way, timbre itself is psychedelic in the true sense of the word, manifesting the embodied mind and the musical, social and cultural relations it is enmeshed in and emerges from. consider the iconic reese bass. first used in kevin “reese” saunderson’s (1988) techno track “just want another chance”, it eventually found a new life across the atlantic, underscoring countless jungle and 2-step releases and influencing the more extreme bass experimentations in dubstep and grime. this bassline is created by overlaying saw waves to achieve phase cancellation, lending the sound its distinctive throbbing, pulsating quality. in one of the most celebrated examples—groove chronicles’ (1997) anthem “stone cold”— the reese appears to be supplemented by an lfo which further exaggerates this internal pulse, inducing a hybrid of timbral and rhythmic entrainment through auditory-motor coupling to the gestural onsets of its slow, low-frequency undulations, and creating an embodied sensation of a dynamic interior core that is tantalisingly close to overspilling its perceived bodily confines.2 furthermore, the inaudible sub-20 hz frequencies of the lfo manifest in perceptible changes to the bassline timbre by sculpting its internal composition. per the theory of harmonic brain modes, this too could be entraining listeners to the cortical rhythms that coordinate psychedelic neural hyperconnectivity, thus amplifying the unitive, unconstrained consciousness that these states promote. so, while in need of empirical testing, the potential for the entrainment of brain and body to the timbre of the reese bass succinctly articulates the continuity between self and environment that i propose electronic timbre affords. towards the end of their rebus article, carhart-harris and friston make a delicately whimsical, almost naïve, proposition. they suggest that the structural organisation of the dual-aspect brain/mind “recapitulates” the organisation of social systems, implying that the proven increases in prosociality and liberal attitudes as a result of taking the drugs could thereby prime users for taking action to remodel the social world in their mind’s image (carhart-harris and friston 2019: 336). my argument might tentatively recast https://youtu.be/rt4fhebzdsm perevedentseva | timbre and the “zone of entanglement” in electronic dance music 51 this isomorphism as the embodied mind recapitulating the structural organisation of the mycelial networks that cultivate the chemicals that facilitate such transformations. timbre, moreover, in sharing and making palpable that deeply relational and unbounded structural constitution, could be another agent that enables listeners to grasp the “continuousness” of their relations to each other and the environment they dwell in (carhart-harris and friston 2019: 339). below, i further probe the psychedelic qualities of timbre cognition and its potential for affiliative entrainment. i then conclude with a brief consideration of the ethical implications of this connectivity. timbre and the social in her study of 1990s rave communities in san francisco, cornelia fales (2018) observes an unusual degree of implicit perceptual learning and timbral awareness among scene participants. she reasons that, partly due to the nature of the synthesised timbres employed, and partly because of how they are arranged in tracks and live dj performances, listeners are able to hear timbre in itself, rather than relying on a default evolutionary mode of hearing that overwrites the phenomenal qualities of timbre with a fixed concept (usually the identity of the sound source). fales likens this reconfiguration of cognitive processes to the effects of mdma which, in similar ways to those of lsd and psilocybin described above, “dissolve[s] the default synthesis tendencies of the auditory system” and “undoes one of the final procedural steps in processing simultaneous acoustic elements into efficient chunks of perceived sound” (2018: 35). she argues that, like the drug, edm allows listeners to ask, “what am i hearing at this exact moment?”, thereby “break[ing] the flow of undifferentiated sound received passively and reflexively” and “bring[ing] otherwise implicit auditory details to attention” (fales 2018: 31). fales’ speculations suggest that the types of electronic timbres that make up edm are perceived uncoupled from everyday sound sources, thus encouraging edm listeners to enjoy the “unconstrained cognition” characteristic of psychedelic states (kennedy 2014: 119). this lack of constraint, in turn, enables listeners to perceive timbres in all their strangeness and fullness, without “disturbing” feelings of surprise at having contravened entrenched high-level beliefs. this is significant, firstly because the therapeutic benefits of psychedelic drugs may lie in their potential to rewire perceptual habits, and secondly because electronic timbre apparently mimics the effects of psychedelics in edm settings. taken together, these propositions suggest that the concerted recycling of particular timbres across edm’s epochs and subgenres could, over time, allow for the consolidation of new, unconstrainted modes of cognition. eventually, this could lead to newly habituated forms of listening that are, from the outset, undergirded by enhanced neural plasticity. therefore, regardless of whether an edm listener is under the influence of psychedelics at a given moment, their neural architecture, having undergone this perceptual “training”, will be primed for attuning to sensory, environmental and contextual stimuli, thus inducing the associated feelings of continuity between self, music and world. dancecult 15(1)52 a limitation of fales’ theory is precisely that it does not consider the implications of this heightened timbral awareness for the social dynamics of edm (surprising given the wellknown pro-social effects of mdma as an empathogenic drug, and her own disciplinary background in ethnomusicology). she remains invested in a conception of the mind and mental life more generally as radically separate from the “real” world, over-emphasising the cognitive processes that take place above the neck and seemingly dismissing the importance of embodied gesture and auditory-motor coupling to timbre perception. in recent years, this latter point has received conclusive empirical backing (wallmark et al. 2018). from the embodied cognition perspective central to mycelial thinking, timbre is only truly cognitively accessible through gesture, which structures the listening environment from the viewpoint of action and gives embodied, material existence to what remains otherwise in the realm of the virtual. maintaining this link is key to understanding edm as a form of socio-cultural contact between listeners and their world that the present argument seeks to advance. a more philosophically compelling conceptualisation of the relationship between the material and the ideal that timbre enables is given by isabella van elferen in her 2020 book timbre: paradox, materialism, vibrational aesthetics. in it, she seeks to overcome the binaries between acoustic and perceptual ontologies of timbre by proposing that timbre exists as a “vital relationality” along a “vibratory continuum” that unites all worldly matter (van elferen 2020: 190, 13). she argues that the material sensation of sound constitutes the connecting link between the respective poles of the (real) sounding object in vibratory motion and the “nonobject” that is the phenomenon of timbre (van elferen 2020: 139–141). furthermore, van elferen posits that timbre constitutes a form of virtual agency that animates energy transfer along the vibrational continuum. she likens this to a newton’s cradle, writing that timbre brings together the potential of the “meta-acoustic” and inaudible into a “performative knot” that is the aesthetic event (van elferen 2020: 139–160). by distributing agency throughout the ecology of “radical immanence” that constitutes the musical assemblage, she ultimately argues that timbre breaks down barriers between subject and object and cause and effect, and shows the “redundancy of onto-theological dualism” as agency surges through the network, activating “interactive feedback” (van elferen 2020: 157). on the face of it, van elferen’s vital materialist account of the musicking assemblage in which timbre holds together the extremities of the vibrational continuum appears to satisfy the criteria for a relational timbral ontology that i called for above. however, her insistence on voids, limina and the aporetic qualities of timbre, which in the book are only ever analysed from the perspective of a solitary listener, means that all of the actors in her assemblages are, in fact, rather limited in terms of their agency. this is because they can only ever connect two points, whose singularity means that they cannot be triangulated according to established laws or habits to foster intersubjectivity and shared meaning. in his critique of actor-network theory, ingold writes that because “networks still presuppose dyadic relationships between separate entities”, “the relation itself has no material presence” (2008: 210). eugene thacker similarly distinguishes between connectivity and collectivity in his polemic against vital materialism. connectivity in a network, he claims, does not perevedentseva | timbre and the “zone of entanglement” in electronic dance music 53 necessarily equal collectivity, and the mere act of being connected does not automatically entail activism or agency (thacker 2004). van elferen’s preferred analogy for timbre’s relational power—the newton’s cradle—is telling in the uniformity of agency possessed by its constituents; each isolated sphere (or blob) imparts an almost identical amount of energy which is transferred linearly along the material–immaterial continuum, prioritising homeostasis over the possibility of transformation of any sort. like the oceanic model of musical affect discussed above, therefore, the relationships established in van elferen’s timbral assemblage can only go so far as temporarily negating a sense of self. riffing on rimbaud, she writes that “in music more than any other relational form, i is another” (van elferen 2020: 158). on the other hand, a mycelial model can offer an expansion of the perimeter of this self such that, like the mind-manifesting consciousness induced by psychedelic drugs, it is perpetually, tangibly and qualitatively entangled with other selves. an example of this radically open musico-social ontology can be found on deepchord’s (2018) lp immersions. the overall sound-world of the record is in keeping with the ambient and dub techno styles that rod modell has cultivated across his deepchord, echospace and cv313 projects since the early 2000s, and with the explicitly psychedelic aesthetic of the astral industries label on which it was released. online, the two sides of the record are listed as “immersions i” and “immersions ii”, though the vinyl itself has no inscriptions to indicate which side is which—both begin and end with fades, are around 18 minutes long, deceptively fast at 140bpm, and share the same instrumentation. this is comprised of muted 4/4 kicks; brushed hi-hats; a woody, anacrustic percussive lick and a syncopated chime, both treated with reverb and delay. the arrangement is completed with two highpitched, translucent pads and several synth lines placed front and centre of the sound stage, which approximate environmental sounds of lapping waves, fluttering and rustling. aside from the timbral composition, the form of the record itself is presented as essentially boundless. it can start and end at any point and continues indefinitely, with only the surface crackle of the vinyl providing any external measure of the passing of time, itself locked into an infinite loop. what is especially interesting about immersions from a timbral standpoint, however, is that it thwarts timbre’s evolutionary function of generating a coherent schema of object location in the space-time of the auditory environment. the soundstage of the recording is unbounded and curiously arranged; kick drums, conventionally expected to provide depth and gravity, are instead suspended in mid-air, and thickly connotative timbral indices of the forest and the ocean are superimposed onto one (infinite) frame. the instrumental lines, while recognisably distinct in terms of their spectrotemporal profiles, are difficult to discretise into individual streams because of their slow fade-ins and near-imperceptible attack onsets. everything is exquisitely round, with pads expanding and contracting through filter and amplitude envelope modulations akin to the breathing walls experienced on lsd. the reverb on the chimes creates its own luminous micro-climates, reminiscent of the space-making techniques of dub-reggae, pulsating in concert with the earthy strokes of the hats which resound, paradoxically, near the bottom of the audio field. the absence of https://youtu.be/seinpnzuvrg dancecult 15(1)54 definitive timbral and rhythmic onsets means that, in gestural terms, this music is always already in motion. the proprioception of the listeners who enactively perceive its timbres is similarly distributed across and entrained to all the cyclical processes that make up the track. in other words, the listener’s virtual body-mind in the recording is fantastically openended—more than one, more than self. in a social listening setting, this becomes especially palpable as other listeners similarly (but not always simultaneously) entrain to the various timbral skeins of this living tapestry, becoming integrally entwined in its fold. the retention of others as others in a mycelial framework, alongside the concurrent recognition of their being inextricable from (more-than-)selves, brings an ethical dimension to timbre’s entanglements. zachary wallmark writes that timbre “does much of the perceptual work ‘revealing and connecting’ us . . . to the ‘materially binding’, ethically motivating presence of others”, and in doing so, constitutes “an ethical wager” that requires an empathic understanding of others’ needs and capabilities (2022: 187, 189). like garcia and witek, discussed above, i believe that the multiple levels of entrainment afforded by edm’s complex array of interlocking periodic cycles could play a key role in enabling these empathic ties. i wish to extend their theses to suggest that timbre, alongside groove and the unspecified vibrations they invoke, likewise works to bring the participants of edm’s multifarious communities into deep states of synchrony from which mind-manifesting empathic relations and shared meanings can arise. in an earlier work, garcia argues that an emphasis on tactile textures in the sounds of edm inclines participants towards an affect of “embodied intimacy” (2015: 60). here i want to push those ideas in two directions: beyond the haptic qualities of timbre alone to include also their cultural meanings, and beyond the spatial proximity of the dance floor to include all listeners that have made contact with these sounds across the metagenre’s history. this, to my mind, is the social consciousness that a mycelial, psychedelic conception of timbre affords. it brings with it a social contract to protect and renew in a sustainable way the social bonds through which dance music cultures emerged, and which are nurtured—or sometimes harmed—by continued participation in its rituals. to be clear, in suggesting that timbre enables trans-historical contact, i do not mean to imply an equivalence in the quality of each listener’s experience of this contact. this is where the mycelial emphasis on retaining difference is most crucial, and where it has the most wide-reaching political ramifications. with respect to the reese bass, alongside its psychosomatic qualities, its potential for trans-historical contact is also significant for the ways in which it entangles listeners with the complex history of cultural exchanges that fed the development of edm. in effect, the history of this gesture unites the so-called “discontinuum” of detroit techno with the diverse ecologies of british and other afrodiasporic bass musics that have continued to rework many of the same idioms (eshun 1998: 131). in allowing access to this, sometimes terse, often imbalanced, field of cultural interpenetration, timbre in edm enlivens the urgency of the questions that cultural differences pose. in other words, it encourages listeners to re-evaluate the ethics of these exchanges, and their own cultural positionality in relation to the communities involved, in embodied and visceral ways. the different types of perevedentseva | timbre and the “zone of entanglement” in electronic dance music 55 access to material and symbolic resources that cultural identity and background enable in everyday life, therefore, cannot be indiscriminately smoothed over through the psychedelic prosthesis of timbre: the specific links and origins that timbres establish in particular dance music communities must be acknowledged. however, if timbre has prosocial effects similar to those of group synchrony through rhythmic entrainment, then timbre in edm could facilitate tacit, situationally-specific social bonds which, in turn and over time, could enable more explicit types of communal meaning-making to collectively negotiate the politics and ethics of this cultural access.3 affiliative entrainment to timbre thus constitutes a necessary first step in inviting listeners into mycelial zones of entanglement. in these zones, the material and cultural, individual and social, and spiritual and fleshly dimensions of the listening experience are folded into a reverberant unity, re-articulating the cultural specificities of individual listeners’ life experiences while showing them to be irreducibly interdependent. of course, it is not realistic to expect this unitive condition to arise in every instance of edm listening, and history has shown that edm’s plur credentials are frequently undermined by inequality, discrimination and abuse. as is the case with all complex social formations, equilibrium is fragile, fleeting, and reliant on the fortuitous coming-together of multiple biological, chemical and cultural factors: the listeners’ perceptual acuity for hearing timbre and relating this to other sonic features; their experience with and knowledge of the musical culture in which they are participating; their individual background, behavioural dispositions and mood and many others. like the psychedelic experience itself, the neural criticality that underpins timbre cognition and entrainment is thus highly pliable and prone to environmental influences that can instantly take a turn for the worse, leading to feelings of anxiety and other mental and physical disturbances. yet, i would argue that due precisely to the entanglement of all of these factors in social listening settings, timbral entrainment can also generate a drive to sustain those relationships via other, more concrete, means. this goes back to nyong’o’s point about genuine social transformation requiring more than an undifferentiated oceanic affectivity. in the timbral zone of entanglement, listeners are made aware that they are partaking in a social experience that extends beyond what they usually consider to be their selves, thereby prompting a collaborative rationalisation of this newly manifested way of being. in bringing edm’s variegated histories and cultures to the surface of cognition, therefore, specific timbres that have repeatedly inscribed themselves onto edm’s historical grooves suffuse what van elferen has negatively described as timbre’s “neutralized space-time” with incorporeal cultural substance (2020: 204). furthermore, this substance reverberates across edm’s musico-social matrix, spurring on further cross-cultural entanglements into the future. the potential of psychedelic drugs to reprogram cognitive habits towards more socially-oriented behaviour, and the apparent reinforcement of that potential in the timbral construction of edm, thus makes tangible the yearning for relations characteristic of the mycelial turn. dancecult 15(1)56 conclusion in interrogating the ontological assumption of the “blob” by drawing together philosophical trends that suggest a mycelial turn in scholarship, this article has attempted to connect a relational understanding of the ontology of timbre in electronic dance music to a more fundamental reconsideration of how we as human beings are thought to exist in and experience the world. i have argued that timbre, like psychedelic drugs, is mind-manifesting. that is to say, timbre brings the operations of perception and cognition to the experiential surface and extends them through the environment by showing the essential continuity of mind, body and world. i have drawn a parallel between the increased plasticity in the organisational structure of the mind-brain under psychedelics and a mycelial model of social and cultural life, which also prioritises a unitive-with-many organismal ontology. furthermore, i have proposed that affiliative timbral entrainment in edm settings makes palpable the social and cultural connections that weave together disparate lifeworlds. in doing so, i have attempted to extend the oceanic model of edm’s vibratory affectivity to highlight timbre’s ability not only to loosen the bounds of the self but also bind it ever-tighter with others. finally, in overlaying social and timbral relations that are always cultural, and always particular, i have argued that the mycelial musico-social matrix of the edm listening experience necessarily entails ethical considerations, and that the empathic forms of contact that timbre enables prime listeners for the meaningful negotiations of those ethics as they strive to sustain the musical ecosystems that they, in turn, are sustained by. acknowledgements i would like the thank the chase ahrc doctoral training partnership for their generous support of my doctoral work, from which aspects of the present research are derived. notes 1 despite broad consensus around the idea that psychedelics affect perception by altering neural connectivity through serotonin receptor agonism, interpretations differ as to the role of the dmn, the possibility of isolating causes for specific neurological changes and the generalisability of the results obtained from different small-scale studies. for example, alternatives to rebus propose that psychedelics elicit hyperconnectivity and increased suggestibility by flooding the central neural “switchboard” of the thalamus, thereby increasing global connectivity with sensorimotor and salience networks, rather than by disrupting topdown processing (avram et al. 2022; kennedy 2014: 106). 2 in a recent study of edm production practices, ranghild brøvig-hanssen et al. (2021) have shown that timbral manipulation plays a fundamental role in the programming of microrhythmic nuances upon which pleasurable perceptions of groove are based. their findings highlight the interdependence of different sonic parameters in achieving particular psychosomatic effects. so while my focus in this article is on the timbral basis of entrainment perevedentseva | timbre and the “zone of entanglement” in electronic dance music 57 rather than the more established focus on rhythm, it is important to recognise that the one necessarily entails the other, and vice versa. at a given level of mathematical abstraction—and indeed in the fullness of the perceptual present of musical listening—rigid conceptual distinctions between rhythm, pitch and timbre become far more porous. 3 in their paper outlining the music and social bonding (msb) hypothesis, patrick savage et al. (2021) argue that music reinforces affiliative relationships among groups by fostering predictability via periodicity and repetition, both of which facilitate entrainment through synchronisation and auditory-motor coupling. martin clayton et al. 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dancecult: journal of electronic music & dance culture 17(1): 30–52 issn 1947-5403 ©2025 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.03 journal of electronic music & dance culture negotiating sonic spaces: exploring urban indian youth and the semantic flux of electronic dance music culture devpriya chakravarty griffith university (australia) abstract over the past two decades, electronic dance music (edm) has gained immense popularity among india’s urban middle-class youth, driven by the rise of commercial edm festivals and local artists. this study examines how indian urban youth engage with edm culture (edmc), focusing on participation, performance and consumption, as well as the meanings attached to edm within this demographic. based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews (2020–2023), the research highlights the shift of indian dance music scene from its global underground origins to a commercialised mainstream culture. annual, commercial multi-day festivals, featuring diverse genres, are central to edmc in india, fostering a translocal ethos. these events, distinct from global rave culture, cater to middle-class, cosmopolitan youth navigating tensions between traditional values and global aspirations. this article elucidates the bicultural identities emerging from these negotiations, showing how contested understandings of dance music shape cultural practices and collective identities within india’s urban youth. keywords: edmc, ethnography, popular music, youth culture, urban indian youth devpriya chakravarty is an ethnographer researching electronic dance music, indian urban youth and popular music. her doctoral work explored indian youths’ motivations for attending edm festivals. she is committed to developing an emic, theory of “vibe” to understand music-centred youth cultures. she is currently a research fellow on an arc project at griffith university in gold coast, australia. feature article https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.03 chakravarty | negotiating sonic spaces 31 introduction electronic dance music (edm) has evolved into a prominent cultural phenomenon among urban, middle-class and globalised segments of contemporary indian youth, particularly over the past two decades. this emergence is marked by the proliferation of translocal, commercial festivals, a growing visibility of local artists and the incorporation of the genre’s sonic sensibilities into mainstream bollywood music. while the adaptation of electronic dance music culture (edmc) in india prompts critical inquiries into how urban youth negotiate cultural identity, belonging, and community within a globalised framework, scholarly attention of its localised manifestations in the indian context remains limited. in this study, based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted between 2020 and 2023, i seek to address two key questions: first, the cultural practices surrounding edmc participation, performance and consumption in india. second, the ways in which urban indian youth interpret and employ the terms edm and edmc. in the indian context, the genre is predominantly associated with dj nights and performances by both international and local artists. however, the indian culture diverges from its global trajectory, transitioning from its subcultural, underground origins to a commercialised, mainstream cultural form. among the most notable aspects of this culture in india are the annual multi-day greenfield festivals, held in non-urban settings with on-site accommodation. commercial greenfield music festivals, in this context are understood as large-scale, commercial outdoor music events held on undeveloped (or greenfield) sites, where organizers build temporary infrastructure to host live performances, camping, and audience amenities for the duration of the event (see anderton 2019). in india, these events attract participants from across the country, fostering a translocal ethos (see chakravarty 2023). these events, aimed predominantly at a middle-class, cosmopolitan indian youth, cultivate an emergent urban, globalised identity grounded in shared musical tastes and lifestyles. unlike the global associations of dance music with raves and underground scenes, the indian commercial scene is primarily centred on legal, heavily commercialised events resembling global festivals such as tomorrowland and electric daisy carnival, offering diverse electronic genres across multiple stages. contemporary, urban, globalised and digitally active indian youth navigate daily cultural negotiations, resulting in the formation of a dual cultural identity (see chakravarty and bennett 2023). edmc acts as both a symbol of cosmopolitan aspiration and a site to navigate cultural tensions between globalised aesthetics and local socio-cultural constraints. ultimately, this study reveals how contested interpretations of edm impact cultural formation within india’s urban youth context. given how the paramount focus of this article is to explore the cultural dynamics and social practices of indian edmc, the research presented relies on a combination of secondary and primary sources. secondary sources provide a foundational understanding of the local history of dance music in india, shedding light on the processes of localisation and festivalisation shaping its evolution in india. complementing this, primary data drawn from ethnographic fieldwork and interviews investigates two key aspects. first, the cultural dancecult 17(1)32 practices and performances that underpin participation and consumption of the culture in urban india. second, the contemporary meanings, perceptions and applications of the terms edm and edmc within this demographic. together, these approaches provide a comprehensive sociological analysis of the culture in india. semantic flux: conceptual and theoretical framing i use “semantic flux” to refer to the ongoing, multi-directional processes through which the signifiers edm, rave, trance and related labels are continually reinterpreted, contested and repurposed by different social actors within the context of india. the conceptualisation of semantic flux, as applied in this article, draws on bourdieu’s (1989) description of how social worlds are structured as symbolic systems wherein meaning is not fixed but exhibits indeterminacy, vagueness and elasticity, along with variation over time. this idea of a semantic elasticity allowing meanings to shift and vary is substantiated by hall’s (1980) note on the processual, contested nature of meaning in communication. as cultural phenomena evolve, the language used to describe them is itself subject to continuous renegotiation, producing a symbolic/semantic struggle (see bourdieu 1989). semantic struggles—through critique and discourse—can be central for social transformation. at a foundational level, semantic change arises from both cultural innovations—such as new technologies—and from intrinsic linguistic processes like subjectification (see hamilton et al. 2016).1 linguistic scholarship further shows how social factors—ideological shifts, community practices and institutional pressures—direct semantic evolution (see amato et al. 2018; amaral 2021). within popular music cultures, this dynamic is particularly pronounced. as musical styles evolve, new terms and labels enter the cultural ecosystem that either assimilate into or disrupt existing stylistic norms. this is evident in silver et al’s analysis of 3 million myspace musician profiles, showing how genre categories are mutable (2016). genres thus operate as dynamic systems, wherein their semantic contours shift alongside broader cultural transitions. bennett’s (2008) study further emphasises that meanings attributed to popular music are neither fixed nor solely determined by structural factors such as class or race; instead, they emerge through reflexive, localised processes of interpretation. van venrooij (2015) traced the semantic emergence of 12 edm genres in the uk, illustrating how new subgenres and their attendant vocabularies crystallise within social networks, only to be reconfigured as scenes globalise. similarly, ferreira and rabot (2017) highlight persistent ambiguities in edm discourse: terms like rave, electronic and dance music variously overlap or diverge as the genre shifts from underground subculture to mainstream culture. these terminological negotiations reflect broader semantic flux, driven by globalisation, commercialisation and evolving audience practices. semantic flux is thus not a peripheral by-product of cultural evolution but an integral process of evolving and transitioning socio-cultural practices. drawing on these sociological perspectives, i employ semantic flux to capture the shifting meaning around both the term edm and the associated cultural performances by indian edmc members. chakravarty | negotiating sonic spaces 33 edm culture(s) in india: goa trance studies by the late 1960s, goa had become emblematic in western understanding as a site of authentic spirituality, its appeal fuelled by dance-music tourism drawing goa freaks to its northern beaches in search of hallucinogens and hedonism (saldanha 2006; st. john 2012). in the early 1970s, goa freaks hosted full-moon beach parties at christmas and new year at anjuna, baga, calangute and vagator (see fig. 1), practices that continued into the 1980s, featuring cannabis use, nude bathing and listening to live and/or recorded psychedelic rock. goa trance emerged in goa when djs such as laurent, fred disko, swiss rudi, stefano and gil collaborated with acidheads, experimenting with looping musical fragments on magnetic tape (st john 2011; mothersole 2012). although goa trance achieved global prominence, the scene within goa declined in the early 2000s owing to regulatory restrictions and increased domestic tourism (d’andrea 2004; saldanha 2010). figure 1. map of india with goa, showing the districts, cities and main beaches of the goan region. image source: wikimedia commons (gnu free documentation license). dancecult 17(1)34 existing dance music scholarship focuses largely on goa trance rather than trance in goa and/or india. in st john’s works (2010, 2011 and 2012), for example, goa trance is situated as a crucible of ritualised counterculture. goa trance emerged as a neospiritual experience wherein sound systems, light shows and embedded rituals produce collective trance states that spread from anjuna to festivals worldwide. scholarly focus foregrounding goa-based forms of the genre becomes more directly pertinent to the history of edm in india discussed in this article. through ethnographic accounts of anjuna’s full-moon parties, saldanha demonstrated how “white counterculture” (2007: 69) in goa, was sustained by colonial logics. in his analyses of goa trance gatherings, saldanha (2002b, 2006 and 2010) shows how embodied musical scenes produced dynamic, non-subjective orderings of corporeal difference, materialised through dance, proximity and refrains. far from dissolving racial boundaries, psychedelic trance often intensified them, revealing the limits of a purportedly inclusive rave culture. in other words, the goa freaks hardly ever danced or partied with the goa locals.2 deploying the concept of “viscosity”, saldanha (2007: 49) illustrates how race was enacted through corporeality within shared trance spaces, explicating how goa trance’s utopian ethos reproduced stark racial segregation between western tourists and local indians. goa villagers and locals were present at the site but usually in the role of tea stall and souvenir shop vendors and rarely shared the dance floor with goa freaks. corporeality in goa’s psytrance parties was thus sorted and segmented along race, class and tourist-local lines (saldanha 2006). while saldanha argues how psytrance had paradoxically thickened rather than transcended racial segregation in goa, d’andrea (2009) disagrees with this hypothesis, and instead puts forth a two-fold counterargument. first, psytrance insiders tend to reject tourists—irrespective of race—thus claiming the goa observations were not racially informed. second, spatial segregation between insiders and outsiders forms a basic feature of electronic dance scenes around the world, and goa was no different, for its members regularly attend other scenes interlinked across global countercultural circuits. d’andrea provides ethnographic evidence of ongoing party networks and scene adaptations through the 2000s to highlight insider claims that the goa psytrance “scene ain’t the same” (2010: 40); complaints about over-commercialisation; poorer music/drug quality and increased state surveillance. while these observations lay bare the shifting political-economic conditions that determined how the scene operated, d’andrea also argues that discourses of collapse obscure the scene’s resilience. he employs a transnational lens and instead argues that goa’s psytrance network evolved under such circumstances and did not simply wither. however, in his other work (see d’andrea 2007), he also demonstrates how the once-fluid, grassroots psytrance community in goa has been reframed by commercialisation, festival branding and rising ticket costs, leading long-term participants to perceive a loss of authenticity and to experience new economic barriers to entry. chakravarty | negotiating sonic spaces 35 edmcs in india: the localised evolution the evolution of edmc in india demands a broader, more nuanced account than the existing dance-music scholarship provides. while contemporary indian edmc often gets traced back to goa trance, that narrative underplays the decisive roles of local artists, scenes and cultural participants across the subcontinent (see faiza et al. 2010). spanning five decades, the history of electronic music in india—from the 1970s to the 2020s—reveals a complex interplay of global influences and local innovations. bollywood—the mainstream indian film industry based in mumbai—serves as a primary hub of national film production. traditionally, bollywood integrates music, songs and dance as integral tools of cinematic storytelling, allowing bollywood to exert hegemonic control over india’s popular music landscape (manuel 1991; dwyer 2014). unsurprisingly, several of the earliest and most influential electronic experiments in india (1970s-1990s) emerged from within this industrial ecosystem. musicians like r.d. burman, kesri lord, bappi lahiri, charanjit singh, ilaiyaraaja and the pakistani sibling duo nazia and zoheb hassan challenged and transgressed established traditional music norms in the country, incorporating emerging electronic technologies and international influences both within and outside of bollywood. r.d. burman revolutionised bollywood with electronic elements, blending rock, jazz and traditional music. kesri lord introduced the minimoog synthesiser, contributing to burman’s innovative soundtracks in bollywood projects they collaborated on (sarrazin 2019; booth 2022). charanjit singh’s ten ragas to a disco beat (1982) predated acid house by four years, blending indian ragas with disco beats (aitken 2011; kreps 2015). bappi lahiri’s disco-infused bollywood soundtracks in the early 1980s popularised synthesised music and the disco-based sounds (majumdar 2022). despite these advancements, however, electronica remained overshadowed by bollywood and confined to goa’s rave culture until urban clubs and festivals emerged post-2000, fostering india’s edm community (faiza et al. 2010). the 1990s were pivotal: india’s 1991 new economic policy (nep) liberalised the economy—reshaping labour markets, consumption and especially broadcasting—and thereby opened mass exposure to global popular culture (zuberi 2002). this period marked middle-class households gaining access to satellite television, thus exposing the urban youth to global popular music cultures through mtv and channel [v] ( juluri 2003). increasing gentrification and urbanisation of major indian cities also led to the rise of india’s new middle class and the formation of a globally oriented, english-educated youth (saldanha 2002a; ganguly-scrase 2009). this generation of globalised youth began forming a bicultural identity, torn between local traditions and global pop-cultural influences (saldanha 2002a; chakravarty and bennett 2023). simultaneously, two major shifts occurred in indian popular music. bollywood films, reflecting socio-economic changes, saw the rise of innovative composers like a.r. rahman, blending traditional and modern music (beaster-jones 2017). at the same time, indipop— an independent, commercially oriented popular music scene—emerged, producing stars like dancecult 17(1)36 daler mehndi and alisha chinai who appealed to youth with hybrid aesthetics (sarrazin 2019). the indipop scene also gave rise to a remix music culture, where djs reimagined bollywood classics with contemporary electronic sonic sensibilities (beaster-jones 2009). although the indipop scene and the remix era were short-lived due to bollywood’s hegemony and cultural capital, the late 1990s and early 2000s scene established the dj as a central figure in india’s music scene, fostering cultural hybridity through remixed hindi film songs (beaster-jones 2009; faiza 2010). the changing music and lifestyle patterns among the urban, middle-class youth also led to an increase in the presence and number of pubs, clubs, lounges and cafés in major urban areas (saldanha 2002a). urbanisation and the increasing disposable income of the middle class further fuelled the growth of clubbing culture (grover 2018). these spaces became crucial sites for the globalised youth to enact the hybridity in their identities and enact their experiential modernities (saldanha 2002a). however, as bollywood absorbed indipop’s most successful artists and pubs and clubs remained limited to select urban pockets, there remained a dearth of an easily accessible cultural arena for the youth to perform their changing identity and lifestyle. this void began to be addressed from 2007, with the launch of the country’s first and currently largest edm festival, sunburn, goa (faiza et al. 2010). following the success of sunburn, several other similar large-scale, commercial, annual edm festivals emerged, like magnetic fields, evc and supersonic, contributing to the burgeoning popularity of edm festivals in the 2010s and 2020s (daga 2023). these festivals catered to the evolving identity of urban, globalised indian youth, seeking new forms of cultural expression. indian edmc scene members in india, official definitions—such as those outlined in the national youth policy of the government of india (2019)—classify youth as individuals aged 15–34, representing approximately 27.5% of the national population. however, this study focuses on a more specific subgroup: contemporary, urban, middle-class indian youth. this demographic is uniquely shaped by socio-economic and cultural transformations following india’s economic liberalisation in the 1990s. the introduction of satellite music television channels during this period significantly influenced their cultural sensibilities. furthermore, this cohort emerged as early adopters of digital technologies in the 2000s, a trend intensified by the state’s digital india initiative launched in 2015 (kaka et al. 2019). these developments alongside increasing internet access and the proliferation of social media platforms, have profoundly affected how urban youth interact, consume and express themselves. the rise of pubs, clubs and electronic dance music (edm) festivals has also been pivotal in shaping contemporary urban youth culture. events like sunburn, launched in 2007, have provided spaces for young people to articulate and experiment with evolving identities. these sociocultural shifts reflect broader late-modern consumerist tendencies and globalised influences, which inform the distinctiveness of urban youth cultures in 21st-century india. chakravarty | negotiating sonic spaces 37 commercial forms of contemporary edmc in india among urban indian youth are the aftermath of and have been deeply informed by these late-modern globalised tendencies. present-day edmc in the country operates on a pan-indian scale, and almost every major city hosts multiple edm events throughout the year, with annual festivals being the most sought-after experiences by the edmc youth (chakravarty 2023; chakravarty and bennett 2023). thus, these individuals belong to the new indian middle class, defined by their globalised outlook, digital literacy, english-medium education and socio-economic privilege. the research underpinning this study focuses on individuals actively engaged in india’s translocal edmc scene. this community forms around shared practices, interests and lifestyles associated with edm, offering a lens through which to explore the intersections of globalised modernity, digital culture and youth identity. as such, this demographic exemplifies how urban indian youth navigate the complexities of contemporary consumerism and cultural hybridity, positioning themselves within broader sociocultural dynamics in late-modern india. figure 2. edmc festival participation and membership in an indian commercial edm festival. photo credit: hari, 2022 (used with permission). to understand the indian urban edmc youth and their cultural performances, it is essential to address two key aspects of the semantic flux within edm and edmc. first, it is necessary to examine how these terms have been historically deployed, utilised and interpreted to dancecult 17(1)38 make social and academic sense of dance music communities, from their inception to their evolution, revealing the localised development of edm in india. second, investigating how contemporary community members perceive the terms edm and edmc and the diverse meaning-making processes informing their edmc-related performances. such an exploration provides valuable insights into the motivations driving youth participation in this emerging music-centred urban culture in contemporary india. on the semantic flux in edm terminology and the indian context edm serves as an overarching term encompassing diverse subgenres and styles, including house, techno, trance and drum and bass, among others. two defining characteristics distinguish edm from other musical genres. first, its production heavily depends on electronic technologies such as synthesizers, drum machines, sequencers and samplers. second, edm is inherently designed for dancing, typically in live performance settings. the genre is experienced in various contexts, including raves, dance parties, nightclubs and music festivals. within dance music scholarship, edm has been examined as a musical text, a cultural artefact and a youth cultural phenomenon (mazierska et al. 2021). here, the term edm is used to acknowledge its evolution, encompassing not only transformations in the music itself but also the cultural scenes that have emerged in its diverse and proliferating permutations. early academic references to edm are scarce. during the 1990s and early 2000s, terms such as “rave”, “dance” and “club culture(s)” were more prevalent in scholarly discourse (see redhead 1993; malbon 1999; bennett 2001). however, in contemporary scholarship and journalism, edm functions as a descriptive umbrella term for myriad electronic music genres that gained popularity after the late 1970s (see butler 2012; mazierska et al. 2021). jóri’s (2021) in-depth literature review of academic literature, journalistic accounts and online content from the discourse community from the 1980s till current times gives us a better understanding of how the term “edm” is applied. journalistic usage of “edm” predates its adoption in academic writing, as evidenced in reynolds’ characterisation of the term as a “profusion of scenes and subgenres” (1998: 9). in academic discourse, on the other hand, terms like rave, club culture and dance music were more common. larkin defined rave as “a one-off gathering for late-night consumption of prerecorded dance music” (1994: 302), wherein the music is usually 125–140 bpm, dance-focused and produced for release on independent and non-commercial labels. similarly, thornton referred to british youth’s “dance music” as “discotheque or club music” (1995:114). bennett, in theorising contemporary dance music scenes, noted that the 1990s club-based dance music scene introduced the sociological term of “club cultures” (2001: 125). by the late 1990s, increasing commercialisation of dance music cultures led to rave scenes merging with dance club scenes, forming a “rave-club culture continuum” (anderson 2009: 21). the 2000s marked another shift, with multi-day commercial edm festivals gaining prominence ( jóri 2021). as outlined earlier, this article employs the term edm to reflect its evolution, capturing a semantic flux reflecting shifts in both the music and the cultural landscapes surrounding it. the focus is on exploring emerging music scenes and youth cultures in india, centred on chakravarty | negotiating sonic spaces 39 edm consumption and festival attendance. in the indian urban context, edm represents a broad spectrum of electronically produced subgenres, including house, techno, trance, psytrance and deep house, among others, often associated with dj performances and edm artists. contemporary indian edm and its semantic usage can be understood culturally through the indian urban youths’ in situ performances, who form membership within the scene. edm, for the urban indian youth, similar to current global trends, is a broad term or a “super genre” (parker 2014, p. 45). musically, edm in india is largely associated with dj nights or performances by edm artists. unlike global edm culture, which transitioned from underground to mainstream, the indian edm scene is predominantly commercial and legal. multi-day, greenfield festivals are the pinnacle of the indian edm experience, typically held in regional settings, featuring on-site accommodation and attracting attendees nationwide. such festivals epitomise translocality, a concept drawn from brickell and datta’s geographical framework (2011), denoting simultaneous cultural exchange across diverse locales. dowd et al. (2004) similarly connect translocality to music scenes, demonstrating how such festivals unite participants from dispersed local settings. in india, these commercial edm festivals appeal primarily to middle-class, urbanised and globalised youth, whose shared musical tastes and lifestyles foster a collective translocal identity. unlike underground raves, these events align with global commercialised festivals like tomorrowland and electric daisy carnival, showcasing multiple edm genres across several stages in a highly structured, legal format. figure 3. scene from an edm festival in india. photo credit: devpriya chakravarty (2021). dancecult 17(1)40 indian edm in context: reflecting on political economies both saldanha and d’andrea’s political-economic analysis (discussed earlier) lends itself to the understanding of how contemporary forms of edmc modalities in india operate. emerging shifts in the political economy of popular musics in india were marked by the nep of india 1991, as outlined in an earlier section. while not edm-specific, ganguly-scrase’s (2009) study of india’s expanding middle classes under neoliberal reforms post 1991, lays crucial groundwork for understanding who the principal participants of contemporary mainstream indian edmc are, as well as how cultural capital and disposable income shape access to global music forms. this analysis is further expanded by juluri’s (2002) characterisation of india’s late 1990s mtv generation as the cohort of contemporary youth whose identities were shaped by music television, forming a transgenerational youth culture. in my earlier work on the contemporary edmc scene in india (see chakravarty 2023), i trace how since 2010 commercially organised festivals (enchanted valley carnival, sunburn, vh1 supersonic, etc.) mediate urban–rural dynamics, pricing structures and sponsorship logics, effectively enabling access through participation to those with sufficient economic and social capital. it shows how festival economies both include and exclude indian youth along class lines. such observation echo d’andrea’s analysis of the commercialisation of the goa trance scene in early 2000s, wherein “global nomads” (2007: 1)—typically wellresourced expatriates—leverage their social and economic capital to shape goa’s rave spaces through vip zoning, tourism infrastructures and curatorial influence, thereby entrenching class-based inclusion and exclusion and reframing local semantic understandings of trance culture. similarly, large-scale, mainstream festivals shaping india’s contemporary edm scene, also bear class-based markers of leisure-based tourist activities. the difference is that the majority of current indian edmc participants have been translocal/transnational tourists. such insights are foundational for understanding how economic politics—festival commercialisation, tourist consumption, spatial segregation and the privileges of insider elites—produce inclusion/exclusion dynamics and reshape the meanings (semantic flux) attributed to edm in india. saldanha (2002a) explicated how popular music and its mediated forms like mtv shape a formative practice in bangalore, through which an indian metropolitan, upwardly mobile youth produce distinctive spatialities, social identities and modes of sociability. the growing demand for globalised cultural goods and the means (mobility, disposable income) to consume them has deeply informed the current form of edmc membership in india. commercial edm festivals in india predominantly attract urban, middle-class youth with global outlooks, whose common musical preferences and lifestyles contribute to the formation of a shared translocal identity. in contrast to underground raves, these gatherings mirror international, commercially driven events such as tomorrowland and electric daisy carnival, presenting a range of edm genres across multiple stages within a highly regulated and formally organised framework. the most prominent form of edmc membership is achieved through access to large-scale edm festivals in the country. high-priced festival chakravarty | negotiating sonic spaces 41 tickets, travel expenses to greenfield festival sites and the leisure time required to attend annual events set a class barrier to entry, requiring economic capital as a prerequisite for membership. this is because these resources are largely confined to the urban middle-class demographic in india. additionally, given that the indian youth who tend to seek identity and community through edmc participation are usually the youth that either formed the mtv generation of the country itself or gained access to global popular music through the ready availability of the internet. being digitally enabled and ready access to global popular music, grants this section of youth a certain level of social and cultural capital. while there continues to be a scarcity of ethnographically informed studies to illustrate this, my earlier studies (see chakravarty 2023; chakravarty and bennett 2023) and observations made during my ethnographic fieldwork for this study, bring to light the continuation of class forming an unequivocal prerequisite for contemporary edmc membership in india. exclusionary political economies are expressed through the distinct roles played at the venues. it is usually the urban middle-class indian youth who populate the dance floor and identify as edmc members. meanwhile, the on-site workforce, the working-class indians, form the seasonal staff, security personnel and local labourers. thus, even though contemporary indian edm festival sites bear a great potential for a certain section of the indian youth to actively engage in acts of contesting cultural identity, the underlying class-based hierarchies still exist and operate, echoing saldanha’s corporeal differences present in goa trance gatherings of the 1970s-1990s in goa (see 2002 and 2006). interpretations of edm semantics in india: cultural negotiations and performing bicultural identities through the processes of globalisation, individuals within their home country may encounter new cultural influences that facilitate the development of biculturalism—where two distinct cultural streams are embraced—and bicultural identities. this dual identification emerges from both direct and indirect cultural interactions (meca et al. 2020). such individuals often maintain strong ties to their local culture while simultaneously adopting a global identity aligned with broader, global cultural trends (arnett 2005). west et al. (2017) identify three key processes through which bicultural individuals navigate their cultural contexts: integration, hybridisation and cultural frame switching. integration involves merging one’s cultural identities into a cohesive whole by reconciling conflicts and appreciating similarities between cultural systems. this process emphasises resolving tensions between cultural groups while fostering a harmonious coexistence of both identities. hybridisation, in contrast, entails actively combining elements of two cultural streams to create a distinct, blended cultural identity. this process moves beyond reconciliation by generating a “third culture” (useem 1971:14–15) that uniquely bridges the initial cultural systems. cultural frame switching, the third process, involves the dynamic activation of cultural knowledge and behaviours in response to specific contextual or situational cues, such as cultural imagery (west et al. 2017; meca et al. 2020). each of these strategies highlights different ways bicultural individuals adapt to and negotiate their cultural environments. dancecult 17(1)42 the contemporary urban indian youth’s bicultural identity stems from the country’s recent sociocultural currents, rapid globalisation and urbanisation, which have forged a fraction within the fabric of their identity. growing up in middle-class and socio-economically privileged households meant that this cohort had early and easy access to global popular media, culture and music. such exposures instilled within them a sense of western-centric lifestyle aspirations, fostering a new sense of music culture. emergent lifestyle aspirations of the youth were also continually and simultaneously surrounded by existing and ongoing traditional societal and cultural norms (see chakravarty 2023; chakravarty and bennett 2023). this section of the indian youth population also underwent another level of hybridity when it comes to their communicative language, wherein, their first language was often merged and combined with english, resulting in dual speaks like hinglish (hindi and english), benglish (bangla and english), tamlish (tamil and english) and so on. the self-reflections of research participants, illustrate how the nature of their bicultural identity reflects the lived experiences of the urban indian youth alongside the interplay of globalised influences and traditional indian values shaped by recent socio-economic and cultural transformations of their milieu: when i talk to my friends and even peers, i hardly use just one language, you know? my mother tongue is hindi, so i use like a mix and match of hindi and english. it is how we grew up, yaar [man]. we grew up mixing english and our own language. like, i never say thank you or welcome in my language.3 everything is a combination of what we saw on tv and what we were told by my parents. from clothes to food to movies and music. my wardrobe is mostly fusion ethnic and western clothes and so is my spotify playlist. i can’t choose one or the other.4 i find it easier to use english words at times. my native language, bangla, i feel, is harder than english…[laughs]…i don’t know…maybe because i read things in english, watch english stuff and listen to music with english or hindi lyrics, my bangla vocabulary is very limited.5 the above statements reveal how globalisation, media and cultural heritage contribute to hybrid identities and practices, aligning with sociological frameworks on biculturalism and identity negotiation. globalised, urban indian youth’s embodiment of a dual cultural alignment results in their identity being in a constant state of flux and liminality. they, therefore, tend to find themselves “betwixt and between” (turner 1967) the two poles of cosmopolitan and traditional. sid’s use of a “mix and match” linguistic style, much like the other participants of this research, highlights a semantic hybridisation, a characteristic of bicultural adaptation. such integrations of english into everyday communication reflect a functional and symbolic reconciliation of local and global cultural streams, aligning with tadmor and tetlock’s (2006) concept of integration. this linguistic flexibility demonstrates how bicultural individuals negotiate cultural dualities to maintain social belonging. pooja’s chakravarty | negotiating sonic spaces 43 description of her “fusion” wardrobe and spotify playlist, on the other hand, exemplifies hybridisation, where distinct cultural streams are actively combined to create a unique cultural expression (west et al. 2017). her inability to “choose one or the other” underscores the internalisation of dual cultural influences, fostering a blended identity that transcends binary distinctions between local and global. these narratives collectively underscore how bicultural individuals actively integrate, hybridise and navigate cultural frames to construct fluid identities. they reveal the nuanced processes of cultural negotiation facilitated by globalisation, demonstrating the interplay between cultural heritage and global influences in shaping contemporary identities. when talking about how music, lifestyle and community choices for maya and tony were shaped based on their access to global forms of mediated cultures, themes of hybridity and integration become more apparent: it was always interesting when my sister and i would be watching, say taylor swift music video on tv, and we would say, that is how we want to talk, dress, etc. as soon as we switched the tv off, we could hear dadi [grandmother] praying in the next room and playing bhajan [hindu devotional music] on her phone. the two worlds were always kinda bumping like heads on.6 i remember the friendships i made in middle school, were based on pop music videos we liked on mtv, like backstreet boys or nsync, or sitcoms we watched like friends or how i met your mother. because no-one at my home was into that stuff, and it was the same for the other kids.7 in maya’s account and self-reflection of how the juxtaposition of taylor swift music videos and her grandmother’s devotional music took the form of a collision, symbolises the cultural tensions inherent in bicultural contexts. tony’s experiences echo a similar form of negotiated identity, which in turn informed the collective bonds he fostered with his peers. this duality reflects saldanha’s (2002) argument that cultural identities are shaped by ongoing negotiations between competing cultural streams. it can be argued that, rather than expressing identities that are anchored elsewhere, consumption-based youth cultures are now the sites where identities are constructed (hollands 1995). one of my respondents, tia clarified that, “it is not a rave. raves have different associations. these are commercial events, with security where drugs and even weed are illegal”.8 marking a clear distinction between the indian edmc scene and raving, tia further added: “but this is where everyone is, the crowd, the artists, and my friends. so, this is my kinda edm”. similar sentiments are echoed by another participant, sid: “i like the commercial bits. they add a touch of indian cheesiness too, like flags, some random bollywood dj mash-up. i like that combo. makes it relatable. this is edm, raving is the next level”. such respondent accounts highlighting how commercial edmc differs from an understanding of raving further reinforce the duality inherent in the member understanding of edmc performances, positioning edmc as a site that bridges mainstream and normative cultural consumption and experiential and dual bicultural. elements of dancecult 17(1)44 localisations embedded within the edmc practices in india, as noted in the form of “fusion” in respondent accounts above, make edm more accessible to indian audiences but also signify the creation of a unique cultural product that resonates with dual cultural affiliations. themes of biculturality, hybridity and dualities are similarly reflected in the way the term “edm” is deployed, employed and applied as well. the semantic flux aligns with their identity flux, thus making the meaning-making processes closer to an active act of seeking belongingness for the youth. thus, participation in edmc serves as a performative space where the indian urban youth negotiate, contest and express their hybrid identities by engaging with a cultural site that equally embodies a liminal characteristic. figure 4. indian edm festival sunburn, featuring the indian national flag on its main stage during a big international act depicting the inherent dualities present in the country’s edmc performances. photo credit: devpriya chakravarty (2021). chakravarty | negotiating sonic spaces 45 negotiating sonic spaces: festivalisation and translocality of indian edmc building on bennett et al.’s (2014) concept of the festivalisation of culture—which emphasises the growing prominence and institutionalisation of festivals within contemporary cultural, social and economic contexts—indian edmc performances can be interpreted as an interaction between local and global cultures, communities, identities and lifestyle narratives, shaped and experienced through the festival framework. traditionally, festivals functioned as communal rituals that reinforced collective values and traditions. in the modern era, however, they have transformed into platforms for celebrating cultural identities, fostering community and expressing lifestyle practices, heavily influenced by globalisation and commodification. such events often serve as sites of cultural consumption, offering economic benefits, promoting tourism and facilitating communal connections while navigating the intersection of local representation and global integration (turner 1982; gertz 1991). while contemporary festivals may retain elements of their traditional roles, they also cater to a broader range of purposes, particularly in articulating the cultural identities and lifestyle practices of participants (mckay 2000; bennett 2004). in a fragmented cultural landscape, festivals like indian edm events have adapted to the dynamics of cultural pluralism, mobility and globalisation, providing valuable perspectives on identity, community, locality and belonging. these festivals often strive to balance the dual aims of representing local identities and engaging with the broader forces of social transformation (bennett and woodward 2014). consequently, modern festivals emerge as critical spaces for representing, integrating and exploring cultural diversity (luckman 2014), particularly within the indian edmc context, where translocality is a significant sociological dimension. the concept of translocality is employed here to describe the interconnected network of local cultural sites. annual commercial edm festivals in india take place across the country and the indian edmc youth, despite being from dispersed locales, come together to attend these pan-indian events based on shared taste in music and lifestyle. thereby, contemporary edm festivals in the country stand testament to an emerging urban translocal youth culture. localised patterns of festivalisation in indian edmc form a salient part of the indian youth’s cultural membership and performance. as evidenced in prior studies of mine (see chakravarty 2023; chakravarty and bennett 2023), there emerges an indian way of raving, wherein commercial edm events are preferred as cultural sites over raving and these sites become apt avenues to transgress constricting normative expectations to form alternative collectives. the new communities built, although ephemeral in nature, mirroring the liminal festal scape, are formed based on shared crises in identity and a mutual need to seek new forms of belongingness. several studies on edmc have concentrated on the religious parallels found within the practice of raving, as well as the displaced religious experiences characteristic of trance scenes (gauthier 2004). these works highlight both direct and dancecult 17(1)46 indirect regio-spiritual associations with specific dimensions of edmc (see st john 2006). however, seeking spiritual or religious fulfilment is generally not part of indian edmc membership. contemporary urban participants emphasise this distinction: om claims that “this is india. religion and bollywood is everywhere. i like edm festivals because it is like a break from that”.9 another respondent, rizul, reinstates this idea: “religion, for me, is strict. it has too many rules around food, clothes, how you talk. there are no such rules at edm festivals”.10 demonstrated by their vignettes, it becomes apparent that performances within the contemporary indian edmc are based and conditioned on transcending the otherwise strictly and at times rigid religious traditions of the mainstream society that informs their everyday lives. this is further evidenced by dia’s emphasis on attending edm events as a personal choice, in contrast to her participation in religious events: it doesn’t matter whether you are religious or not. you will end up going to religious festivals, ceremonies because the family will drag you there. here, i come by choice. this is very different from spiritual and religious stuff and i like it that way.11 greenfield commercial edm festivals in india act as sites wherein the participants challenge their everyday normative traditions and, in doing so, come together in an edm-based communitas. unlike traditional forms of music cultures in the country that are often either rooted in religious, regional, or cinematic contexts, edm is valued for its ability to transcend linguistic and cultural boundaries, offering a universal soundscape for its listeners. this stems from disenchantment with how bollywood functions in hindi despite the massive linguistic diversity in the country. edm, on the other hand, being mostly a-lyrical, tends to be more translocal in nature, as highlighted by shree: it is almost funny how the biggest film and music industry in india is bollywood. the movies and songs are in hindi. people like me, who do not speak or understand hindi, only have regional music for us. edm is not about the language and so everyone in the country can enjoy edm, no matter what language they speak.12 shree’s statement is an example of how for urban indian youth, edm is more than just music; it is a medium through which they negotiate their cultural identities. as globalisation and digitisation continue to influence their lives, edm offers a platform for a sense of collective self-expression and cultural experimentation. participation in edm events allows young people to explore facets of their identity that may not align with traditional expectations. the bicultural nature of urban indian youth identity is a recurring theme in their engagement with edmc. these individuals often find themselves caught between local traditions and global aspirations. while traditional values emphasise familial ties and societal identities, global influences advance an alternative cosmopolitan lifestyles and music choices. edmc, with its emphasis on shared experiences of such biculturalities, provides a space where these dualities can coexist. contemporary indian local edm artists like ritviz and nucleya mirror similar dualities in their sonic format, wherein they blend traditionally and culturally familiar sounds (from old bollywood movies and/or iconic chakravarty | negotiating sonic spaces 47 instruments common in cultural festivities) with electronica to provide the members with a sound that resonates with the edmc youth’s own cultural anxieties, as illustrated by a number of research participants: nucleya’s amazing, bro! sounds i know, because they were all around me mixed with sounds i like and identify with. have you heard his city bass soundtracks? so good. he picks up like iconic city-based ethnic sounds and made it into a hard-core techno bass thing! how good is that!13 i love how ritviz blends classical beats with edm beats. i relate to that stuff, because that fusion speaks to me! i am also same kind of fusion as a person.14 conclusion evidenced by ethnographic findings presented in this article and previous work published elsewhere (see chakravarty 2023; chakravarty and bennett 2023), it becomes apparent that within the indian context, the cultural understanding and practices of edmc, along with the insiders’ perceptions of their own participation within it, are in a state of semantic and performative flux. this flux is liminal in nature and informed by the bicultural nature of their identity. to form a sociological understanding of the complex nature of cultural identity and expressions through their edmc activities in india, it is necessary to first build a comprehensive understanding of the sociocultural and political-economical history, capturing the semantic flux around edm in india, first. thus, this article has aimed to present a historical perspective to the contemporary youth sociologies in urban india in and around edmc. contemporary forms of indian edmc exemplify the inherent cultural tensions in the urban youth’s bicultural identity formation. it simultaneously absorbs globalised influences while embedding unique means of localisation, such as the fusion of bollywood and regional sounds with electronic music. these processes generate spaces where cultural hybridity thrives and the indian edmc youth re-negotiate their sense of belongingness and the dualities within their cultural identity. membership in edmc offers a performative avenue for the urban indian youth to contest and transcend traditional societal constraints. festival sites become spaces of experiential hybridity where young people express their shifting individual and collective identities through music, lifestyle and social cohesion. unlike traditional cultural events tied to religion or region, edm offers a translocal format that allows the members to overcome traditional linguistic, sub-ethnic and cultural barriers, fostering a new and alternative sense of community. this inclusivity, however, is shaped by socio-economic privilege, reinforcing the association of edmc with the globalised, middle-class elite. while rooted in global edmc trajectories, the indian context demonstrates significant divergences. the commercialisation and legal framework surrounding indian edmc contrast sharply with the underground origins of rave culture in the west. similarly, the dancecult 17(1)48 cultural products emerging from this scene reflect indian realities—such as the integration of folk and classical elements into electronic music by artists like nucleya and ritviz— creating a sonic representation of hybrid identities. the semantic fluidity surrounding terms like edm and edmc further illustrates how urban indian youth adapt global concepts to their local realities. this redefinition is mirrored in their linguistic hybridity, as they navigate everyday communication with multilingual fluency, blending english with regional languages. such practices reflect broader processes of cultural integration, hybridisation and frame-switching, essential strategies for negotiating the complexities of bicultural life. ultimately, indian edmc operates as both a site of cultural resistance and accommodation, offering its participants a break from traditional societal expectations while simultaneously fostering new forms of belonging. these spaces emphasise the liminality of youth identity in contemporary india, situated between the polarities of cosmopolitan aspirations and traditional values. by situating indian edmc within broader sociological frameworks of globalisation, consumerism and youth culture, it becomes evident that this phenomenon is not merely a cultural import but a locally negotiated and distinctly indian articulation of global modernity. notes 1 a process wherein linguistic 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dreaded anomaly”. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture, 3 (1): 97–128. <https://doi. org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.05>. ———. 2010. the local scenes and global culture of psytrance. london and new york: routledge. <https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203847879>. ———. 2006. “electronic dance music culture and religion: an overview”. culture and religion 7 (1): 1–25. <https://doi.org/10.1080/01438300600625259>. turner, victor. 1982. celebration: studies in festivity and ritual. washington: smithsonian institute press. ———. 1967. the forest of symbols: aspects of ndembu ritual. ithaca: cornell university press. useem, john. 1971. “the study of cultures”. sociological focus 4 (4): 3–26. van venrooij, alex. 2015. “a community ecology of genres”. poetics 52: 104–23. <https://doi. org/10.1016/j.poetic.2015.06.005>. west, alexandria l., rui zhang, maya yampolsky and joni y. sasaki. 2017. “more than the sum of its parts: a transformative theory of biculturalism”. journal of cross-cultural psychology 48 (7): 963–90. <https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022117709533>. zuberi, nabeel. 2002. “india song: popular music genres since economic liberalization”. in popular music studies, eds. david hesmondhalgh and keith negus. oxford: oxford university press. discography singh, charanjit. 1982. synthesizing ten ragas to a disco beat (lp). his master’s voice” ecsd 2912. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380210128289 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0155471 https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.05 https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.05 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203847879 https://doi.org/10.1080/01438300600625259 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2015.06.005 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2015.06.005 https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022117709533 dancecult 15(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 15(1) 2023: 113–131 issn 1947-5403 ©2023 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net raving mckenzie wark durham: duke university press, 2023. isbn: 978-1-4780-1938-1 rrp: $15.95 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.12> kim feser free university of berlin (germany) the cover design is reminiscent of a notebook: handwritten “practices / raving / mckenzie wark” on a monochrome pink background. the small book is published in the practices series alongside the titles fly-fishing, juggling, and running (tomorrowing has only been announced so far, which somehow seems appropriate). the series’ website states that the volumes shall “reveal the pleasures of losing oneself in doing anything that holds sway over us, no matter how common or minor it might seem” (duke university press n.d.). how does raving fit into this randomly appearing list of profane desubjectifying practices? raving unfolds in both detailed intimate as well as abstract theoretical passages, whereby these perspectives repeatedly transform into each other. mckenzie wark writes in the styles of autofiction (“these things did not happen. the person to whom they did not happen is me” [4]) and autotheory (“to gather concepts from situations” [4]). personal story fragments about raving and its entanglement with other practices—particularly social belonging, gender transition, drug use, sex and writing in bed—merge with political-theoretical thoughts on related aspects of queerness, blackness, gentrification, commodification and club culture. six chapters, partly based on earlier published texts and lectures/performances, are written in this oscillating style. they are supplemented by a “glossary of concepts” (91–94), condensed paragraphs on key terms used throughout the book, including in chapter titles. the concepts are defined as “impersonal characters in the autotheory text” (93) and shall function as “resonant abstractions” (93). in addition to these impersonal characters, the book is populated by many people known by name or anonymised, often by single capital letters. some of them are also referenced in footnotes, bibliography and notes on a collection of colour photos showing scenes from raves, festivals and clubs. most of the personal situations described in the book happened recently in brooklyn, new york. additionally, there are some memories of the 1990s (including “edward” [43], who plays a crucial role in wark’s [2020] previous autofictional/autotheoretical book reverse cowgirl). reviews https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.12 dancecult 15(1)114 the author mentions that she was asked to write a book for the series, and therefore proposed “raving” (47). that seems to be an obvious choice: she calls herself a raver but also clarifies that her main activity is writing and lecturing. the tension between these practices is addressed in the book. at raves, the author of raving avoids students and is avoided by them (61). she is also aware that her book might be part of “style extraction” (56, 94) if it commodifies gestures and information that emerged from raves. such phenomena of contemporary capitalism are fundamentally criticised in wark’s work, from a hacker manifesto (2004) to capital is dead: is this something worse? (2019). in raving, mckenzie wark, respectively the autofictional/autotheoretical first person writer, situates herself specifically: “the point of view will be that of this middle-aged, middle-class, white transsexual dance freak” (6). these attributes are addressed at various explicit, implicit and conceptual levels. she has the urge to dance excessively in order to achieve a state of bodily experience beyond normative gender-specific attributions and thoughts. consuming drugs, mostly ketamine, seems to help: “dancing and k make it all go away!” (42) that’s how she wants to reach her goal: “a dissociative time, a transsexual time, a ketamine time” (30). this “k-time”, an immanent and not utopian temporality (no time for “tomorrowing”), is one of the book’s central concepts (92). it refers to the so called “k-hole” (30), a dissociative hallucinatory state after taking ketamine. also, it’s situated in a critical discussion with mark fisher’s (aka “k-punk”) thoughts on “acid communism”. in collective “k-time” the presence of “ketamine femmunism” (30) can be experienced, as wark writes in the “ketamine femmunism” chapter (based on an online lecture on fisher for the berlin haus der kulturen der welt [house of world cultures]). “femmunism” (92) is described as a collective state where dominant masculinity is absent and obsolete. wark’s cautious remark that femmunism “might mingle” with blackness (94), almost sounds manifesto-like given her general reluctance to embrace hopeful scenarios. wark also describes how she prepares herself before going out. how she packs her silver rave bag, how she meets lovers and close friends. how several circles of “rave friends” interact via social media and share information about upcoming events. how she enters the dance floor by herself or with others. but ravers sometimes are annoyed by stereotypical “coworkers” (91) who lack the intense desire for “k-time”, because their participation in the rave is subordinate to their work lives. worse are the harassing “punishers”, mostly “straight, white, cis men” (92), who only attend raves for spectacle purposes. the mix of the crowd is regulated by door policy which is, along with spatial design and sound, an essential aspect of rave as a “constructed situation” (93). due to the praxis of “reparative discrimination” (93) people “who need it most” (93) and “whose style is being extracted” (94) are given priority admission. wark mentions that she and her transsexual friends often receive free entry or head to the locations which they can easily access. depending on venues this works specifically for black people. wark emphasises the background of the entire constellation in this regard: “the rave, techno, nightlife, surround: they’re all, among other things, gifts of blackness” (9). reviews 115 given the social dynamics, risks, and potentials that mckenzie wark discusses, raving seems fundamentally different from the more individually defined practices fly-fishing, juggling and running—if that’s not a completely biased perspective of a review for a journal of electronic dance music culture. but what is the book’s contribution to a critical discourse on electronic dance music culture? the one-word title, which is due to the book series practices, can be misleading. the book is neither a basic introduction to the practice of raving, nor a study of participant observation. as indeed the author points out, it combines a very subjective autofictional perspective with an exuberant creation of concepts. this seems inspired particularly by deleuze/guattari, kathy acker (see wark [2021]) and kodwo eshun (whose praise of raving is quoted on the back cover). the oscillation between fiction around the character “mckenzie wark” and meaningful conceptualization, strengthened not least by the “big name” the author has made for herself through her previous relevant publications, seems to evoke rather enthusiastic approval or possibly sceptical rejection. a productive-critical reading attitude is possible, however, if the relationship between the formation of concepts and the situations described is investigated immanently. the book itself invites to read between the lines, to be aware of subliminal counterpoints or barely noticeable voices. to name some aspects: the brief stories and details about raves and club culture are predominantly set in brooklyn / new york. they are shaped by the specific conditions of gentrification and “style extraction”, the presence of coworkers and, not least, academics. in view of locally different conditions of underground and capitalization, of confining “normal” lifestyles and resistant practices, of possible contrasts between rural and urban lifestyles, the nature and goals of raves might also have to be accentuated differently. also, the book is permeated by the theme of age, without this being explicitly reflected in the concepts: “it’s not always easy, being a middle-aged, clockable transsexual raver” (1, see 42, 57). based on this initial statement, and against the background of a reference to a club event for her 60th birthday (88), wark’s discomfort and inner struggle with the demands of beauty and youthfulness become apparent. in general, health issues seem to play a role only at the descriptive level. physical care and mutual awareness are mentioned, but there are several instances of risky drug use, including a fatal ghb overdose (73). when it comes to inventing expressions for key concepts, however, a euphoric ketamine hype dominates. references duke university press. n.d. practices. <https://www.dukeupress.edu/series/practices>, (accessed 17 october 2023). wark, mckenzie. 2004. a hacker manifesto. cambridge: stanford university press. wark, mckenzie. 2019. capital is dead: is this something worse?. new york: verso books. wark, mckenzie. 2020. reverse cowgirl. los angeles: semiotext(e). wark, mckenzie. 2021. philosophy for spiders: on the low theory of kathy acker. durham: duke university press. dancecult 15(1)116 spectacle, fashion and the dancing experience in britain, 1960–1990 jon stratton london: palgrave macmillan, 2022. isbn: 978-3-031-09011-0 rrp: €117.69 (hardcover), €93.08 (ebook) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.13> tara hill university of hamburg (germany) telling the whole history of dance music in a book seems like no mean feat. so even if jon stratton’s spectacle, fashion and the dancing experience in britain, 1960–1990 limits itself to the usually labelled “crucial years” of the development of postmodern youth culture—or at least its roots after rock‘n’roll restarted the 1950s youngsters’ life with a mixture of middle class romance and rebelliousness—covering all three decades of the dance movement comes across as an ambitious project. yet reading stratton’s succinct account still comes across as curiously pleasing read. as an almost lexical text, ticking the boxes of the whos, the whens, the wheres and the whys, it caters to a college freshman or an introductory youth culture class just as well as to the senior pop culture zine editor or sophomore style blogger. providing an overview of the subculture styles which—overtly or covertly, overground or underground—formed the face of a generation, or more important: its image. it performs kind of a double stunt: it’s not classic subculture research, stratton claims, which can explain what distinguishes these new movements, but more its relation to a politics of aesthetics and its relation to the “wilder” conceptual brother, a politics of the ecstatic. therefore, the theoretical framework of the book centres around guy debord’s (1967) situationist movement and especially its centrepiece society of the spectacle (la société du spectacle). herein, the cultural turn after the 1960s, sort of a “technicolour” explosion of creativity after the black and white movie era (you could similarly compare it to the evolution from silent to spoken movies) was performed by the rise of two key factors: fashion and dancing. in the 1980s, in the increasingly seamless society of the spectacle, a lifeworld was formed which was commodified, mediated by colour television and other media, though not yet by computers; an experiential world where surveillance was becoming normalised and increasingly extensive. clubs, with their rituals for entry, and their electronic dance music and lighting often linked to the beat, seemed like an alternative world, indeed a temporary autonomous zone (taz). for many, dancing along with others in the apparently safe space of a club appeared to offer escape and existential meaning, ecstasy, in an alienated reality. the dj became the shamanic guide taking the dancers through this experience. https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.13 reviews 117 while the first chapter tells of the rise of the dj with records starting to replace live music sessions and ballrooms where standard dances in couples became discos and clubs, twist was the first dance introducing heavy pelvic movements from african americans to the uk. the second chapter sets the scene with the beatles hysteria, the dave clarke five and introduces the genre of “stomp”—proving the brits needed some help with the transition from partner dances to solo and improvisational, as well as more and more ecstatic dancing. as the rolling stones introduced african drumming in their (up to this day) legendary live shows, the phenomenal gary glitter turned into the icon of the emerging glam rock scene. while middle class kids learnt how to sit down to listen to prog rock—genesis, yes and king crimson—like their parents might have listened to a classic record or chamber music with fully but passively immersing themselves into the quadrophonic and stereophonic sound spectacular of the 1970s, glam rock came to life with cult bandleader marc bolan, a.k.a. the legendary t-rex, and took to a crowd that loved extravagant outfits, more over the top than the hippies ever were, and huge showmanship. david bowie came up next and started his own, very influential ziggy stardust cult, a persona well-loved into the early 1980s (chapter 4 and 5). the new romantics, stratton explains, who flocked into the nightlife at that time weren’t so much a scene of their own, but a remnant of early club culture. their heavy focus on styling and outfit can be traced back to saint martin’s, the london art school. androgyny and heavy make-up, theatrics and gender role reversal were established in mainstream culture, through hit projects like ultravox. the last chapter deals with the now pretty much established bond between rave culture and the temporary autonomous zone. it starts off tracing the often-overlooked influence new york disco and the early club scene had on the uk warehouse and later acid house movement. compared to the watering holes of past decades, david mancuso’s loft and the paradise garage, which spawned the first superstar technoshaman dj, larry levan, did not sell alcohol but focused on an impeccable living room and after hour spot with psychedelics and/or designer drugs. this encouraged ecstatic dancing through the night: it was the quality of immersion that made dancing at the loft and paradise garage so special. uk sound engineers and clubs were developing similar systems. for example, tony andrews, the co-founder of the sound system company, specialising in speakers, funktion-one, and who has been designing speakers since the late 1960s, comments: “when [a sound system] is good, it puts you into a meditative state.” (rothlein 2014) funktion-one systems have been installed in many of the most highly regarded clubs such as space on ibiza and berghain in berlin. it is immersion that heightens the possibility of the ecstatic experience. here we have the technological basis for the transformation in clubbing that began in the late 1970s and morphed into rave culture. (28) the now legendary myth of the four englishmen who went to ibiza to come back and revolutionise british society is retold here, too. though the story of the legendary night dancecult 15(1)118 when nicky holloway, johnny walker and danny rampling went to ibiza’s infamous late night powerhouse amnesia and took the new drug ecstasy for the first time to afterwards bring it back to great britain, open the clubs hacienda, shoom and heaven and create the “second summer of love”, uk’s acid house revolution, stratton is careful to remind us of the “whitewashing” which is done by excluding detroit techno and chicago house’s black and disco’s gay roots. the history of dance music (206–210) then tells another story: the one from the jazz ballroom being replaced by cheaper record collection spinning nights everyone could afford. while stomp and twist made the brits move their pelvis, the quality of sound hugely profited by the sound systems built by the religiously inspired dub music collectives in jamaica, before they moved to notting hill carnival. as the merits of the uk’s minorities become clearer, one wonders what the closing with thatcher’s brutal rave ban meant for society. also, newer discussions like jimmy saville’s behaviour as a sex offender would have proven interesting for the proposed change in nightlife—from a dirty pick-up place for cheap thrills to a meditative, spiritual cleansing practice or festivities of joy, explained with help of bey’s taz—where exactly big beat belongs here, which stratton mentions in the end of this highly entertaining, short read, remains as unclear as the exact role of fashion mentioned in the title. apart from that, stratton delivers a good overview of the main movements in 30 years of dance history which have left its mark on humanity. references bey, hakim. 1991. t.a.z.: the temporary autonomous zone. new york: autonomedia. debord, guy. 1967. la société du spectacle. paris: buchet-chastel. rothlein, jordan. 2014, march 24. industry standards: funktion-one. resident advisor. <https://ra.co/features/1836>, (accessed 25 october 2023). https://ra.co/features/1836 reviews 119 this track contains politics: the culture of sampling in experimental electronica hannes liechti bern: norient books, 2022. isbn: 978-3-9525444-2-6 (softcover) rrp: €29,00 (softcover) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.14> moses iten rmit (australia) this track contains politics: the culture of sampling in experimental electronica investigates why producers of contemporary, digital, experimental electronic music choose to compose using samples. based on a phd, this is hannes liechti’s first book and has been published by the switzerland-based norient (n.d.), founded by ethnomusicologist thomas burkhalter in 2002 as a network bringing together a global community of thinkers and artists concerned with music, sound and media cultures. their emphasis is on “the changing geography of multi-layered modernities, far beyond old ideas of north versus south, west versus east” (beyer, burkhalter and liechti 2015). it is therefore not surprising that the producers interviewed for this book cover politics including the genocide of armenians and the exclusion of africans in argentinian history. hannes liechti has been working with norient these recent years as a journalist, curator and events producer. his role as an applied cultural producer needs to be considered as adding to the potential impact of this book, not just amongst researchers but also practitioners. norient played an important role in convincing me to build on my creative practice to become a researcher as some years ago i had been commissioned to write an essay based on my own practice as a dj/producer of cumbia (iten 2013), as well as contributing with podcasts (iten 2016), a playlist (iten 2015) and a mixtape (iten 2011). this has led me to follow their research outputs with great interest as an example of research and practice intersecting. the tension between artistic practice and theoretical analysis is the biggest challenge liechti attempts to overcome in this book. this track contains politics was highly anticipated reading for me for several reasons. i’m both a researcher and dj/producer, focused on electronic dance music, djand sound system cultures and am therefore interested in how this book stimulates both my research and creative practice, for which sampling has been central.1 like liechti, i am interested in methodologies which reflect the practice being analysed, which in my case i have proposed as the dj-as-researcher approach (iten 2022). although a committed cultural producer, liechti is external to the field he is examining, which he presents as a potential advantage “as it allows the researcher to ask simple questions and take novel positions” (80). indeed, reading liechti’s book is making me reflect on my own practice, in which sampling has been https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.14 dancecult 15(1)120 a driving force. his incessant questioning of “why” a particular sample and compositional approach has been chosen, has increased my appreciation of the sometimes hidden political intent behind seemingly aesthetic or conceptual decisions. liechti identifies most literature on sampling has mainly been concerned with copyright issues and/or the particular practice of analogue-era sampling in hip-hop.2 there is therefore much need for new research on the ongoing relevance of sampling in today’s digital era where the practice has become a ubiquitous and seemingly banal. this track contains politics is focused on particular (political) intentions of a specific technique (sampling), in a niche creative field of (experimental electronica) music. whilst this appears to be a narrow focus, liechti’s expansive review of the literature on sampling, politics as a cultural concept and electronic dance music—of which the academic understanding can include non-dance oriented experimental electronic music—shows the scope of his research is actually quite broad. in the first few pages of the book, a useful brief history of sampling is provided, concluding with the current state of sampling as an indispensable and ubiquitous practice (11–14). liechti points out most of the literature on sampling at first largely fixated on its association with hip-hop and the subsequent demise of the technique becoming restricted due to copyright lawsuits (20–22). the ongoing relevance to producers and researchers in this era when sampling appears a banal part of music making, is argued by liechti as achievable by focusing on the motivations and intent behind the sampling. this he explores as part of “the socio-political potential of sampling”, which is also where the biggest gaps in research on sampling are to be found (15–22). the are several theoretical advances proposed in this book. firstly, trackology is introduced as a way of allowing the analytical focus to be on tracks—as opposed to songs—“as a tool for uncovering knowledge of the world” (77). the core interest of trackology according to liechti, is the “search for traces within popular music”, based on michael rappe’s method of “music archaeology” (78). traces could have been explored further as a concept. in my own phd research for example, i have been applying edouard glissant’s creolization theory which includes a conceptualization of traces as cultural memory passed on via music (2020). instead, the weight of liechti’s theory is in the methodology. the ethnography is combined with a musical analysis of each of the five tracks. in order to apply a musicological approach to analyse tracks of experimental electronica largely composed by sampling, liechti created “the fader of visibility (fov)” model. this addresses the significance of the “visibility” (and invisibility) of the samples in the composition (101–107). then in order to determine the motivations and intent behind the sampling, liechti develops another model called the “spider of sampling reasons” model (109–143). this demonstrates in a neat diagram each producer’s particular approach to sampling. both models are then applied to analyse and compare the case studies which follow. each of the five case studies features one track by a different producer, all active in what liechti discusses broadly as “the field of experimental electronica” (52–53). in the book’s very useful glossary, experimental electronica is defined as produced on laptops, mostly instrumental and with a sound that is “often abrasive, shaped by cuts, disruptions, reviews 121 noises, and dissonances” (316). the five tracks selected for analysis engage with a diverse set of political issues: the russian invasion of ukraine’s donbas region; gender issues and the memory of genocide in the armenian diaspora; recognition of afro-argentines in the history contemporary argentina; and the taboo of zoophilia. whilst the analysis is narrowed down to just five tracks, this broad range of political issues is also engaged with by liechti, further illuminating the context of each individual producer’s intent. these extramusical perspectives have largely come from ethnographic fieldwork, which have produced some of the most illuminating passages in the book. the methodological challenges and limitations encountered during the research of this book are outlined over several pages, revealing rare insight into not only the value of failure to future researchers but also the precarious conditions under which laptop producers of experimental electronica operate (69–75). whilst liechti admits a close look over the shoulders of the producers in the process of sampling was difficult to access, this did happen with one of his research participants. the results of this participant observation are featured in the penultimate chapter of the book, which liechti calls an “interlude”, serving as a great accompaniment to the conclusion which follows. the observations made of us-based producer lara sarkissian at work was facilitated by her being invited to participate in a residency at center for art and media in karlsruhe, germany, curated by norient. liechti suggests more funded residencies like this are needed, in order to facilitate more focused observation of the practice of laptop producers (294–295). ultimately, i admired liechti’s tenacity in theorizing the playful and often random approaches of the producers he observed and interviewed. his theoretical rigour is balanced by his sensitive and nuanced voice, which is strongest when it becomes active, especially in the self-reflexive passages which reveal themselves when he addresses some of the problems encountered in trying to do fieldwork in the intimate work environments of “laptop producers”, which liechti prefers over the term of the “derogatory” term of “bedroom producer” (316). liechti cites fellow musicologist-ethnographer mark butler (2006) several times, who also applied musicology theory to analyse the electronic dance music producers. i largely agreed with the critique that butler’s theorizing seemed more about “adding edm to the music theorist’s repertory” than “bringing music theory into edm’s varied and vibrant discourse” (marshall 2009: 199). this tension is also present in liechti’s research. however, butler went on to continue to further advance the study of edm (2014) and i can imagine liechti’s commitment to both practice and research is putting him on a similarly inspired path. notes 1 i have been a professional dj/producer for twenty years and have toured the world with the project cumbia cosmonauts. i am currently completing a phd at rmit university, melbourne, on digital cumbia and sound system culture, as well as working as a researcher with the sonic street technologies research project, for university of sydney and goldsmiths university, london. dancecult 15(1)122 2 in terms of sampling in hip-hop, making beats: the art of sample-based hip-hop (2004) by joseph schloss is a particularly useful work based on ethnographic research. references beyer, theresa, thomas burkhalter and hannes liechti, eds. 2015. seismographic sounds: visions of a new world. berne: norient. <https://doi.org/10.56513/zmhg1392>. beyer, theresa and thomas burkhalter, eds. 2012. out of the absurdity of life: globale musik. berne: traversion/norient. <https://doi.org/10.56513/vlgz1905>. butler, mark j. 2014. playing with something that runs: technology, improvisation, and composition in dj and laptop performance. oxford and new york: oxford university press. butler, mark. 2006. unlocking the groove: rhythm, meter, and musical design in electronic dance music. bloomington: indiana university press. glissant, edouard. 2020. introduction to a poetics of diversity. translated by celia britton. liverpool: liverpool university press. iten, moses. 2011. “arab awakening”. norient. <https://norient.com/podcasts/arabawakeningmixtape>, (accessed 18 october 2023). iten, moses. 2012. “insider’s perspectives on new wave cumbia” in beyer, theresa and thomas burkhalter (edited by). out of the absurdity of life: globale musik. berne: traversion/ norient. 264-77. <https://doi.org/10.56513/vlgz1905>. iten, moses. 2013. “perspectives on new wave cumbia”. norient. <https://norient.com/stories/ new-wave-cumbia>, (accessed 18 october 2023). iten, moses. 2015. “five video clips from mexico”. norient. <https://norient.com/video/fivevideo-clips-from-mexico>, (accessed 18 october 2023). iten, moses. 2016. “the sound of cumbia”. norient. <https://norient.com/podcasts/the-sound-of-cumbia>, (accessed 18 october 2023). iten, moses. 2022. “the dj-as-researcher approach: methods emerging through digital cumbia fieldwork”. paper presented at “performing, engaging, knowing” symposium, 2020. hosted by the ictm study group on applied ethnomusicology, the lucerne school of music, the department of composition, electroacoustics, university of music and performing arts vienna and the swiss society for ethnomusicology. <https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7274023>. marshall, wayne. 2009. “reviewed work: unlocking the groove: rhythm, meter, and musical design in electronic dance music by mark j. butler”. music theory spectrum 31(1): 192–99. <https://doi.org/10.1525/mts.2009.31.1.192>. norient. n.d. “about”. <https://norient.com/>, (accessed 18 october 2023) schloss, joseph glenn. 2004. making beats: the art of sample-based hip-hop. middletown, ct: wesleyan university. reviews 123 berghain, techno und die körperfabrik: ethnographie eines stammpublikums guillaume robin marburg: büchner-verlag, 2021. isbn: 978-3-96317-274-8 (paperback), isbn 978-3-96317-812-2 (ebook) rrp: €22,00 (paperback), €18,00 (ebook) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.15> anja schwanhäusser university of göttingen (germany) bars and nightclubs count among the mythological places of the city, as rolf lindner (2022) writes in his in einer welt von fremden: eine anthropologie der stadt. as part of his recent role as guest researcher at the centre marc bloch at the humboldt university, guillaime robin has tracked one such place, in his study of the world’s most famous berlin club, berghain. in the introduction he cites the two most well-known, but rarely spelledout, concepts in cultural studies in reference to club culture: heterotopia (michel foucault) and the non-lieu (marc augé). although augé did not mean industrial wastelands with the term non-lieu, rather airports, train stations and motorway rest stops, the term never-theless testifies to the transitionary character of the nocturnal locations, converted ruins of post-industrial society. for robin, berghain is a transgressive, social, sensual and reflexive place, where “the exploration of self and community meet, where the utopia of the body takes shape” (10) (this and the following quotes are all translations by the reviewer). robin has the genuinely ethnological goal of writing about club culture not from the point of view of its musical actors (djs, club operators, party organisers), but from the perspective of its audience. for this purpose, he conducted a study among regulars, and especially the global, urban nomads of the “easyjet generation”, as the journalist tobias rapp (2009) calls them. in terms of methodology, he bases the study on twelve interviews and around 30 online questionnaires, supplemented by the manageable number of twelve “observational sittings” (15) at the club. in doing so, he faces the challenge of describing a quasi-sacred place, without himself succumbing to mythologization: the analysis aims “to go beyond the blind reverence of the initiated and to scrutinize these cliches under the magnifying glass” (15). there’s an attempt at a balancing act between empathy and distance in the text, which is not always successful, for instance when robin presents a berghain party as being akin to an ancient ritual and asks: “to what extent can berghain be seen as a revival of bacchanalia?” (13). this flowery formulation irritates at first. there are more recent berlin-specific traditions which would lend themselves better as a comparison. for example, the tradition of the berlin secret societies or the queer scene surrounding the german physician and sexologist magnus hirschfeld. on the other hand, the sensual anthropology in the school of david howes (2005) doesn’t shy away from a certain pathos either. thus, the reference https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.15 dancecult 15(1)124 to bacchanalia is not to be understood analytically but as a metaphor to capture the genuine berghain atmosphere, as experienced by a cosmopolitan, queer scene. the first chapter, “bodies in space”, is about the significance of the club for its regulars and the transition from the “profane” world beyond the club into the “sacred” (40) halls of berghain. with the term rite of passage (arnold van gennep) and communitas (victor turner), robin describes the character of the space, the shifting bodily perceptions, the temporary sense of community, as well as the internal control mechanisms which grant a harmonious night of celebrating. he sees the special feature of berghain, in addition to its symbolical situation in the berlin party-metropolis, as being the aura of secrecy that surrounds it. this is created through the strict door policy, the photography ban, the seemingly sacred architecture, the complex system of rules of conduct and the so-called “hainweh” (47)—a portmanteau word made up of hain from berghain and weh meaning to ache, a play on the german word heimweh that means to be homesick—with which fans express their passionate attachment to the place. the recourse to an online questionnaire, which is often quoted in the text, might initially surprise the empirical cultural studies readership. in place of the personal experiences of the researcher are instead short and concise reports from the actual participants, reminiscent of blogger style. unfortunately, robin does not explain this method and its implementation in more detail, but he uses it extremely creatively. the subjective descriptions by the guests of their self-image and their personal opinions about club politics are astonishingly involved and in parts even poetically formulated. one extremely interesting question which has unfortunately also not been elaborated on and brought to any conclusion is: does the example of berghain perhaps reveal a change in techno culture in general, away from a subculture which is open to all, where social differences are blurred by cheap drugs, and towards a more homogenous, exclusive subculture, whose members are recruited largely from more privileged segments of society? (89) a court decision in recent years equating clubs with high-culture events for tax purposes would seem to point in this direction. the second chapter, “utopian bodies”, is about stylisations as a way of separating oneself from the everyday identity and from each other, while at the same time being a way of creating community. in reference to foucault’s concept of utopian bodies as well as in reference to piotr nathan’s mural, “rituals of disappearance”, in berghain, robin defines the stylistic transformations as the individual’s longing to dissolve. this dissolution takes place in various forms and media, through the equalising procedure at the berghain entrance, the adaptation of dominant dress and dance codes, anonymisation (e.g., by wearing fetish masks) as well as through the consuming of drugs. a central finding is that subjective feelings of freedom and liberation are closely linked to a communal and institutional set of rules, with self-discipline and self-constraint: “it’s not so much a matter of total liberation, but much more about a strongly controlled disinhibition, which goes hand in hand with the ethics of consent and the respect of others’ bodies” (94). in robin’s description, a party night seems to run like an almost perfect machine where almost nothing goes wrong. robin writes that he has left out sequences which are too reviews 125 voyeuristic. this is understandable, yet it gives rise to an argumentative gap. what happens when shame boundaries are crossed, not because one wants to, but because one is driven to it by obsession? nevertheless, he offers an extremely interesting insight into this “body factory” and its culture. the “crows”, as the audience is also called, voluntarily adapt to the institutional constraints, regulations and codifications thereby giving the club its individual character. in the third chapter, “degendering the dancefloor”, the focus is on gender-specific stylisations and the play with gender identities. with reference to judith butler, robin defines gender as performance. especially for guests from less liberal countries, berlin and berghain offer a “safe space” (105). here also new subcultural trends come on stage, such as the “sex-positive” movement, which promotes an openness to diverse gender identities, sexual practices and to nudity. robin rightly notes that the nocturnal rulebook can lead to a “homonormativity”, where certain homosexual codes dominate and thus exclude other forms of expression. in the fourth chapter, “underground resist-dance”, robin opens up the perspective to the broader berlin club scene and, in particular, to the period of the pandemic. due to the enforced closures, considerable financial and cultural damage was done, and the cultural diversity of the metropolis has suffered. the perseverance with which the techno culture actors have defended their “right to dance” and “right to the city” (150), robin presents as being proof that clubs are more than just spaces for commercial events. as already demonstrated by birmingham cultural studies, in a study to which robin, however, does not refer, partying is shown to be more than hedonistic consumption. the charge of hedonism was famously invoked by politicians during the pandemic in order to devalue outdoor dancing at night. as robin shows though, it is, on the contrary, a way of life and culture which is pushed through even in times of crisis, and against prevailing opinion. the author also recalls earlier protests, with which clubs resisted displacement and gentrification. without questioning the pandemic-related regulative measures, he interprets these activities as a positive expression of a political consciousness in nightlife: “the proliferation of these wild raves, which were often interrupted by the police . . . thus emphasises the active role of the techno audience and its desire to assert itself as a driving force in the scene” (148). the fifth chapter is called “closing”, similar to the last act at a dance night at berghain. here, robin comes to the unsurprising conclusion that a berghain club night is not a bacchanalia. extremely interesting, however, is his reasoning, in which he returns to the central thesis of the first chapter: “berghain is undoubtedly a space of freedom like no other, but it is above all an extremely codified space in which the liberation of the body is linked to self-discipline and strong control mechanisms” (160). the transgression of boundaries and ecstatic forms of dissolution in the community are thus only possible because of the strict set of rules. as in the process of civilization (norbert elias), to which robin refers, the increasing loosening of control over emotions comes at the price of an increase in the suppression of inner drives, so that ecstatic celebration is also only possible through a sophisticated system of control. this is expressed on several levels: the rejection of sexist dancecult 15(1)126 and objectifying heteronormative practices as well as of “body shaming”; the maintaining of a respectful distance, and a strong internalisation of respect for the body of others. robin points here to a possibly generalizable connection between discipline and ecstasy which, also for other subcultural contexts, is worthwhile examining. it is a perspective of our current time, which is “woke” and “aware”. it turns out that within order and its compliance (also) lies a longing for “pleasure” and the dissolution of boundaries. robin’s study provides a particularly successful and exhaustingly complex description of the sensuality of the club experience. the central insight, that liberation can only be achieved through self-discipline, is extremely illuminating. the bacchanal thus becomes a code for a subcultural practice that is characterised by the inner contradiction of control and the dissolution of boundaries. the book is an innovative contribution to the “sensual turn” in urban scene-, popand subcultural research. in the past decades this field has mostly been concerned with the economic aspects of partying (creative industries, subcultural capital and such). in robin’s work, on the other hand, questions of cultural order and creativity and of social change (again) come to the fore in an exemplary way. by taking into account the social origins and the phenomenon of the global easyjet generation in his analysis, robin also makes a contribution to the question as to the extent to which popular culture and popular means of pleasure have nowadays become the guiding culture of the middle-class. the study shows that for the queer global elite, going to visit a cultural site such as berghain is just as important as a visit to the opera in new york or sydney. last but not least, he provides a very good, in part poetically formulated portrait of the “loaners”, typical figures of the big city as described by rolf lindner (2022), accompanied by beautiful photographs by mike d’hondt. thus, the study can also be connected to the analysis of figures and figuration of urban anthropology. references howes, david, ed. 2005. empire of the senses. the sensual culture reader. oxford: berg publishers. lindner, rolf. 2022. in einer welt von fremden: eine anthropologie der stadt. berlin: matthes & seitz berlin. rapp, tobias. 2009. lost and sound: berlin, techno, und der easyjetset. frankfurt am main: suhrkamp. reviews 127 ears as portals: alternative realities of musical infrastructures. a ctm festival 2023 review ctm festival: “portals”, 2023. <https://www.ctm-festival.de/festival-2023/welcome> <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.16> luigi monteanni soas, university of london (uk) what is a portal? whether you base your definition on fantasy and sci-fi tropes of selfgenerating megadungeons (berti forthcoming) and interdimensional gateways (yalcinkaya 2022) or on informational technologies such as the internet (magaudda 2020), the portal conveys the idea of a device and threshold offering an access to some other space, a passage towards somewhere radically different. of course, a portal can be secret or hidden, dangerous, or difficult to activate. by connecting multiple points in space and time the portal is a twoway medium offering exceptional insight and mobility to who actively chooses to exploit its powers (hanson 2021). “portals” is also the theme chosen by ctm festival for its 24th edition, which took place in berlin between 27th january and 5th february 2023. ctm probed the possibility of a curational approach that makes “contact with specific modes of experience, histories, communities, and speculative futures” reflecting on “the preconditions, thresholds, regulation, and fundamental function of sound and music as gateways to other realities” (ctm 2023). in this sense, the festival’s portal(s) used different venues and art spaces around the city—15 in total including kunstquartier bethanien, silent green, adk, fablab neukölln, festsaal, monom, kqb, rso, hau1, hau2, kw, panke, radialsystem, morphine raum and, obviously, berghain—to allow trespassers to behold and overhear geographically and subculturally heterodox musical contexts. of course, as i have mentioned, portals are not just there: they deform and disrupt the concepts of reality, space, and time to generate something, to make something happen by creating new threads, pathways, and experiences. this is an idea that is expressed through aural means by ctm radio lab winner isuru kumarasinghe, who describes his installation “gilunu” (submerged, in sinhala) as follows: when we step into a space or a place, where the resonance is changed or enhanced, we naturally feel like engaging with that resonance … to see how the space transforms the sound and how in return it transforms us. it becomes like a portal into a different world, as part of this world, just for this moment. (ctm 2023) accordingly, the festival embraced multidisciplinarity, structuring this week of activities around club nights and music performances as much as around exhibitions, installations, https://www.ctm-festival.de/festival-2023/welcome https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.16 dancecult 15(1)128 screenings, workshops, labs and talks which, besides never resulting as secondary activities, helped inform the awareness of currently forming processes of musicmaking around the world. part of these experiments were the afropollination project, in which piranha arts (berlin) and boutique foundation/nyege nyege collective (kampala) established a transnational laboratory for sonic research to bring together artists from six african nations and germany, the exhibition “we found our own reality” curated by artist paul purgas, in which installations, archive materials, artworks, a series of live performances and commissioned texts were gathered to account for the under-explored histories of the sound studio at the national institute of design in ahmedabad, the first electronic music studio in india (purgas 2023), the radio lab open call showcasing an always different array of audio-installative endeavors within the medium of radio, presenting works by anna kravets and, of course, kumarasinghe and discussions that surveyed a number of themes, including the impending generational change in club culture and issues of cultural production during the ongoing invasion of ukraine. from this perspective, ctm has shown how it is possible to use programming as a tool to produce new forms of sensory and intellectual knowledge, forging connections between music circuits and performers accentuating the elements of uniqueness that the selected musical acts bear from their context. from the audiences’ and organization’s point of view, after years of pandemic fatigue and a life-affirming 2022 edition based on bringing back the joys of the dancing body, ”portals” seems again to give more space to contemplative and introspective listening experiences, betting on a courageous line-up presenting comparatively fewer resounding names than many previous editions. this is an attention that both staff and attendees seemed to be more than willing to offer given the almost total sold outs and the constant, remarkable presence of the organizers and curators. of course, even for a militant practitioner of sleep deprivation techniques such as myself, it would be impossible to map the festival extensively; an endeavor that goes also beyond the scope of the present text. therefore, the following selection of highlights is not only extremely personal but should give a glimpse in an impressionistic fashion of what i tried to convey above. among the performances, personal favorites include the improvisation between afropollination’s sound artist jessica ekomane and the ugandan diy synth builder afrorack establishing new canons of non-eurocentric sound synthesis, the heavily poetic minimalism and metal-infused tribute to mourning songs and traditional lamentations by sara parkman and maria w. horn of funeral folk, the extreme, pedagogic interactivity of poulomi desai, slowly inviting the audience to take control of her unorthodox, non-musical instrumentation challenging the idea of authenticity in regional music and the objectification of the ”south asian female body” in popular culture, the queering post-rave romanticism of the neapolitan neo-melodic performance by 2023 shape+ alumni nziria and light artist bianca peruzzi with the collaboration of choreographer franka marlene foth and dancer janan laubscher, the screamo meme music for tiktok doomscrollers of lil mariko supported by the raw, physical spoken word grime of iceboy violet, the a/v cyberpunk of japanese gabber and black-metal crossover ensemble vmo, tzusig’s anxiety-inducing and reviews 129 betrayal-themed dance provocations, the ambiguously brutal and theatrical genre-juggling of vieze meisje and the kampala singeli dance-fest conjured by queen asher’s productions, galvanized by the singing of her mother rehema tajiri and by dancers nana and zai. but above all, a special mention goes to asep nayak, a papuan producer and pioneer of the electronic wisisi: a genre that from the rituals of harvesting ceremonies in wamena was recreated and innovated through fl studio beats and mp3 technologies. i had previously binged on wisisi on youtube for a couple years and i would have never believed i could experience it live in front of my eyes and twitching muscles. witnessing this act really made the festival for me, showing that music can really create extraordinary junctions between audiences and scenes. from this perspective, despite the partiality of my account, this year’s ctm showed even more interest towards the subterranean, the peripheral and the subcultural. as noted by juliet hoornaert in her review of the festival for the magazine gonzo circus (2023), ctm presented a broad, generous conception of music, in which scratching the surface already meant pointing at the underlying artistic and social symmetries and disparities between manifold scenes. what i personally found to be the most remarkable aspect of the festival was its ability to put the listener in the right conditions to experience sound. whether it is for the dauntlessness of the curation or for the carefully selected list of locations, there was always the feeling that one was always offered the possibility to listen to something in the best technical and contextual conditions possible, whether with their ears or through the whole body in motion, creating the possibility for a range of extremely different styles, from pop and hyperpop to black metal, folk, spoken word, singeli and wisisi to coexist as equals. throughout, agreeing with a discussion i had with ctm cofounder jan rolf, which informed this piece, i appreciated the feeling of urgency that the festival expressed in reorganizing the field of musical knowledge, trying to push many peripheral phenomena to the foreground of the clubbing experience, highlighting distinct aspects of geographical and subcultural locality. in this sense, going back to the possible question of what a current club culture is or should be today, i support the stances of scholars such as silver (2014), labelle (2018), rief (2009) and magaudda (2020), arguing that clubbing today should employ music and technology as vibrational tools to cultivate particular forms of reflexivity and modes of experience that reconfigure the boundaries around youth cultures and other social identities, allowing a better circulation of sociality and power. therefore, the contemporary club culture that i envision, and that ctm seems to support, sees sound, festivals, venues, scenes, and encounter as the fundamental infrastructures allowing this special type of circulation; an alternative flow proving that, contrarily to what attali (1985) has noted, music does not only move along the routes of war, power and trade. accordingly, the portal is an apt metaphor of how to reflect on this ambiguous and exceptionally powerful type of infrastructure. seeing the progressive attention to socializing the organizing process through open calls, curatorial collaborations, and commitment to support less-known music movements, i have no doubt regarding this edition’s awareness dancecult 15(1)130 relative to these issues. nonetheless, accounting for my own experience as well as the one of many attendees, journalists and even participating artists with whom i chatted during the events, some elements seemed worth reconsidering. first, even though focusing on the netherworld of the global underground, the large majority of the invited projects still benefits from the support and visibility offered by many institutional organizations (e.g., shape+, goethe-institut), agencies and renown musical labels (e.g., nyege nyege, pan) albeit from the fringes of the music industry. thus, even though these associations often work with positive affirmation strategies, how it is possible to create further representation and inclusion for projects that fall off the actors’ curatorial purview still needs to be assessed. secondly, the petty hostility and unwillingness to help finding solutions of some of the berghain staff, arguably a staple of ctm’s program, inside and outside the venue, remains at odds with the “be respectful to others” attitude promoted on their website (berghain n.d.), creating spaces in which edginess and even mockery have prevailed. this has prevented me, for instance, from entering the night i was looking forward to the most (“bodily overdrive”), which is hence not mentioned in this review. then, more in the form of a suggestion than a critique, i argue that this edition’s theme should be, in view of the next, socially meaningful topic of 2024 edition “sustain”, further examined, keeping in focus how these infrastructures come into being, shift and are regulated; what are the portals that are still difficult to open, that benefit from advantaged access or remain closed? when translating the metaphor to the reality of today’s musical infrastructures, we should ask ourselves who controls the points of entrance and exit. who has access to them and under which conditions? how can we make sure that they remain functional, but their usage is not overly regulated? overall, for me this edition was a definite success and a positive example to follow for other festivals of the same kind. thus, i’m confident that all these points might be explored in the next years. references attali, jacques. 1985. noise: the political economy of music. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. berghain. n.d. “awareness”. <https://www.berghain.berlin/en/awareness/>, (accessed 22 august 2023) berti, paolo. forthcoming. “megadungeon: a model for media complexity”. magazén 4(1). ctm. 2023. ctm 2023—portals. <https://www.ctm-festival.de/festival-2023/welcome>, (accessed 21 august 2023). hanson, kara. 2021. “at the threshold: science fiction portals as agents of liminality”. medium, 9 august: <https://kshanson.medium.com/at-the-threshold-science-fiction-portals-as-agentsof-liminality-1f1e65ff1b2a>, (accessed 21 august 2023). hoornaert, juliet. 2023. “ctm 2023: een futuristisch ravecongres”. gonzo circus, 14 february: <https://www.gonzocircus.com/ctm-2023-toekomstfestival-vol-klankanarchie/>, (accessed 21 august 2023). reviews 131 labelle, brandon. 2018. sonic agency: sound and emergent forms of resistance. london: goldsmiths press. magaudda, paolo. 2020. “music scenes as infrastructures: from live venues to algorithmic data”. in popular music, technology, and the changing media ecosystem, ed. tamás tófalvy and emília barna, 23–42. london: palgrave macmillan. purgas, paul. 2023. “introduction”. in we found our own reality: an exploration of india’s first electronic music studio and its resonances into the present, ed. paul purgas, 4-5. berlin: ctm festival. rief, silvia. 2009. club cultures: boundaries, identities and otherness. new york: routledge. silver, micah. 2019. figures in air: essays toward a philosophy of audio. new york: inventory press. yalcinkaya, günseli. 2022. “the worlds of technology and magic are closer than you think”. dazed, 4 july: <https://www.dazeddigital.com/science-tech/article/56442/1/new-age-oftechnology-mysticism-magic-somerset-house>, (accessed 21 august 2023). guest editors’ introduction to “psychedelica and electronica” dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 15(1): 4–12 issn 1947-5403 ©2023 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.01 introduction to “psychedelica and electronica” trace reddell university of denver (us) graham st john university of huddersfield (uk) this is trace here reminding you that psychedelic music has evolved, mutated, hybridized and flourished over the past sixty years. lightning recap, heard in your favorite rock-doc voice-over, friends. psychedelia inevitably evokes a unique form of folk, pop and rock that crystallized a wide range of social, technological and cultural trends in the second half of the 1960s. by 1970, rock bands like hawkwind and gong launched their spaced-out silver machines and pixie tea pots into the festival scene. over the course of the decade, countless bands all over the world unleashed their regionalized takes on psychedelic sounds. in the early 1980s, a neo-psychedelic revival and new garage rock scene sprouts up in the wake of punk. meanwhile, german electronica, jamaican dub, indian raga, disco and dance music are just some of the forms that feed a simultaneously cosmic and psychedelic, ancient and futuristic sensibility into the swelling currents of hip-hop, techno, house and trance. this increasingly international tangle of psychedelic musical influences feed into the various acid house, ambient house, psybient, goa/psytrance, trip-hop, glitch-hop, neuro and other scenes of particular interest here. of course, new instruments, electronic effects processes and production practices forever changed the soundscape of popular music in the second half of the 1960s. across the trail of genres and scenes mentioned above, a good part of the psychedelic dimension appears to involve technological innovation and experimentation. most of these music scenes have also been associated with psychoactive chemicals of some kind or another, particularly the tryptamines, and the formation of new drug music subcultures. psychedelic substances can certainly foster new ways of making sounds, and they can be participatory agents engaged in expressivity and sound-making. these sonic, technological and psychopharmacological affordances are often conflated in practice, at times in endlessly compelling and generative ways. but with “psychedelia” overcoded as an historical trope of sixties pop culture, here we have adopted “psychedelica” to convey a more agile, adaptable and living sonic ecology. feature articleguest editor’s introduction http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.01 reddell and st john | introduction to “psychedelica and electronica” 5 shifting from the people and things that make sounds to the activity of listening also provides a useful calibration ahead of the content that follows. certainly, the capacity for psychedelics to enhance our experience of the music that we listen to is remarkable, even while music acts as a powerful resource that profoundly shapes setting and guides mindset during psychedelic experience. mri scans suggest that the brain regions most engaged in listening to music are also stimulated by lsd and psilocybin. researchers at the johns hopkins department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences have therefore concluded that psychedelics and music are mechanistically related in the brain (strickland, garcia-romeu and johnson 2021: 473). writing research papers for science journals increasingly entails making spotify playlists to support a psilocybin study. mapping the brain of a listening subject administered psilocybin while listening to an intentionally crafted playlist lets researchers model the neurological and cognitive activities that turn out to be involved with how we experience emotional resonance, attribute meaningfulness, construct and manage our identities and maintain an historical narrative for ourselves. the music is sequenced to help stimulate the somewhat reliable arc of the psychedelic experience. psychedelic therapists often do this as well, a practice validated by research. a review presented by frederick barrett of johns hopkins, katrin preller of university hospital for psychiatry zurich, and postdoctorate researcher mendel kaelen of the imperial college london succinctly concludes that music significantly effects therapy by “modulating emotion, including the facilitating of mystical experiences, and through supporting autobiographical processes” (barrett et al, 2018: 356). it seems that contemporary psychedelic research initiatives and therapies are equally inconceivable without the integration of music. listening on psychedelics is one of the most important tools to measure cognitive activity, monitor neurological health and foster personal growth. given the contemporary resurgence of clinical psychedelic research, psychedelic therapies and decriminalized personal use of some psychedelic substances—and granting the prominent role that music is understood to play in all of these contexts—it is past time for a reassessment of the special relationship between psychedelics and electronica. this special issue of  dancecult addresses a few of the interactions between psychedelics and electronic dance music cultures since the late 1960s. it takes the form of three feature articles, five from the floors and a conversation piece. the edition includes other nonthemed feature and reviews content (see below). you are in for quite a journey. the variety of spatiotemporal landscapes alone is notable. the magical kingdom of endor, a small hippie ballroom in boulder, co, 1968. the black ark studio, kingston, jamaica, mid-1970s. a chill-out room in the late 1980s, in heaven. mutonia, a cyberpunk zone near santarcangelo di romagna, italy, 1990. the epicentre pleasure factory, byron bay, australia, 1990s. the dance floors of western canadian transformational festivals, astral harvest 2014, and shambhala, 2015. the mycelial pathways of a modular mushroom synthesist’s youtube channel, www, 2023. as for the music discussed, little is identified as psychedelic per se, and few of the musicians, producers and even our writers invest much dancecult 15(1)6 in the terminology. the acid house and psytrance discussed by graham st john and paul chambers, and the psychedelic rock bands mentioned in scott taylor’s ftf, are in fact the outliers here. two of the three feature articles focus on psychedelic-adjacent forms that include jamaican dub, dub techno, ambient house, trip-hop, glitch-hop and electric mushroom music. the variety of writerly persona on display is also noticeable. each feature and ftf article presents a notably unique voice, and one of the features even celebrates a particularly unique voice! my own “other kinds of mind there: echologies of psychedelic sonic substance” feeds the tools of dub production—reverb, delay and echo—into a rhetorical apparatus reflecting on three sample-based forms of psychedelic electronica: ambient house, trip-hop and glitch-hop. i propose an echology of “sonic substance”, the latter a term that i have adopted from anthropologist bernd brabec de mori to propose that psychedelic chemicals and sonic materials work together to make the trip-defining capacities of set and setting deeply entangled and virtually indistinguishable. this article considers psychedelic forms in the wake of dub sampling that converge with some different electronic music cultures, with an emphasis on the mind-manifesting properties of recorded sound. turning soundscape ecologist r. murray schafer’s prohibition against recorded sound on its head, i argue that sample-based psychedelic forms valorize rather than pathologize “schizophonic” conditions. here, i try to rhetorically sample my way into the sonic psychotomimetic state of “hearing voices in my head” afforded by the non-human agencies of silent (non-sound wave originating) sounds recalled from memory, intentional or otherwise. i consider how these afford us and meditate briefly on our ultimate loss of them. maria perevedentseva’s “timbre and the ‘zone of entanglement’ in electronic dance music: re-thinking musico-social ontologies with the mycelial turn” is an original and very generous survey of the critical network of recent scholarship that has formed around mushrooms. it’s more nuanced than that suggests, of course, but the fact is that we’ve all been lacking a general overview of what perevedentseva calls “the mycelial turn”, and this nutrientrich compost will keep this reader returning for ages. a theme of “renaissance” informs the work as mycology, neuropsychopharmacology and timbre studies bring a sense of renewal to the investigation of the unique tonal tendencies of edm, dub techno in particular, and so manifest novel modes of minded-ness and social collectivity through extended affective affiliations. electrically and vibrationally, bass entrains deep ecologies that summon listeners to engage new forms of collective ontology, collaborative embodiment and social meaning-making. tuning into some of the synthetic timbral forms threaded throughout edm history, perevedentseva explains that the “circular symbolic economy of meanings specific to particular subgenre communities” reflect and refract psychedelic interventions in individual consciousness as well as social connection, valorizing the unstable wobble as a sonic sign of resistance against reductive experiences of “we are all one now”. the mycelial turn, in this respect, specifically offers potent alternatives to oceanic models of psychedelic experience in the edm sonic ecosystem. reddell and st john | introduction to “psychedelica and electronica” 7 graham st john’s “the voice of the apocalypse: terence mckenna as raving medium” tracks the schizophonic mckenna as his voice emerges to become one of the iconic tropes of acid house and psytrance, a sonic meme, a tryptameme, in fact. st john tracks mckenna’s transformation into the medium of the ineffable, the voice of that which can’t be voiced. that this un-voice should become what st john calls the “most sampled individual in the history of electronic music” is delightful, schizophonia at its most stark raving. mckenna loops the ouroboros loop—“as his very own archive, ‘mckenna’ became a standard device for musicians seeking to craft a transformative audioscape”, right?—and his transcendent unspeakable elf chatter channels something beyond language and history. can language trip? our magic 8-ball says, “signs point to yes.” you see, the insertion of mckenna’s voice throughout st john’s “the voice of the apocalypse” plays out for us on the page in a way that delivers the very effect that it serves in the acid house and psytrance tracks that he’s writing about. this offers up several brilliant “spinning mirrorball” moments, as mckenna’s voice—sampled and remixed throughout st john’s text—exerts the “remystic” sway of the “transcendental object” at the end of time from which all history flows backward, reflected in moments of its recursive emergence through the acid house rave scene that it in part triggered! such circular logics are prevalent throughout the history of psychedelic music, leading to my adoption of “the magic circle” (a rejected title for the beatles’ 1966 album, revolver) to characterize the perennial nature of psychedelic experience. here, graham, has unintentionally refracted one of my most transcendental and apocalyptic mirrorball hallucinations, which happened when i saw pink floyd at mile high stadium, denver, colorado, in spring 1988, dosed on six tabs of lsd and working telepathically with other members of the audience to smoothe out the fragmented pieces—rapidly dodging in uneven lines, left and right, up and down—of a vast mirrorball suspended in the air above the stadium as a way to assuage the crisis of ego-death that the acid and the concert’s heavy musical themes had trigged. what is particularly noteworthy about the three themed features is the way in which each rhetorically acts out its central premise. my own piece integrates samples and echoes beyond the typical function of any kind of scholarly citation; instead, these take on the role of glitchy, intrusive thoughts, here played out not as fraught lapses of conscience or impulsive urges to do dangerous things but rather as supportive cognitive affordances, blessings from the internal sound bank, sonic sustenance. i have opted for sharing a personal set of musical affordances that in fact model what i seek to better understand. the highly individualized sonic practices of boards of canada and flying lotus give guidance to the sound ghosts that mull about in all our brains, so that we might know better how to draw on their resources in times of need and personal re-creation, and so that we will be prepared for the parting from them that is our inevitable fate. perevedentseva’s piece is also, i have suggested, rich with nutrients. beyond the perceived and readable, an even richer, lfo electric resource bolts through the many threads of the team of experimental researchers, theorists, scholars, and musicians assembled here, linking seemingly disparate dancecult 15(1)8 lines of research and scholarship with a deep, subharmonic rumble that works on the gut as much as the brain. and the injection of mckenna’s voice into st john’s “the voice of the apocalypse” delivers the very tryptameme effect that the piece is about. mckenna’s voice both guides and disrupts, taking over the text, opening up wormholes to other worlds of written text and recorded tracks alike, pushing this historical analysis, these written words, into a multifaceted transformational technology. the point is, as much as the three articles are about something, each of them also do something to the receptive reader. they may be regarded as psychedelic affordances in their own right. are you getting a sense of how these mycelial affective affiliations work in this special issue of dancecult on “psychedelica and electronica”? wait until you get a load of what’s going down on the floors. graham here, rounding out our introduction. just as trace has given shape to the music, i’ll here supply shape to the dance component inherent to “psychedelica and electronica”. electronic dance movements are event cultures that are not infrequently contexts for personal hierophanies and shared encounters with the transcendent involving consciousness alteration achieved through combinations of rhythm, dance and the use of a pharmacopeia of psychoactive plants and compounds (not uncommonly regarded as “psychedelic” or “entheogenic”). while such experiences are diverse and will not always involve these latter ingredients, a spectrum of chemical accoutrements—lsd, psilocybin (from mushrooms), dmt and a host of novel research chemicals, alongside mdma, ketamine and cannabis1— are present in the cultural bloodstream of dance musics, events and their communities. the trend in my three-and-a-half decades of research on, and personal experience with, diverse event cultures, is to bear witness to these occasions playing out among the more meaningful, significant and compelling experiences in the lives of interlocutors. across electronic music and dance scenes, the vibe amounts to emic parlance connoting a quality of experience tantamount to a sacred, and even religious, experience. a recognition of the “special sauce” of raving, doofing, burning, etc., compels researchers to transit beyond the clinical-juridical paradigm that has conventionally targeted the prevalence of psychoactive substances (including psychedelics) as evidence of a pathological-criminal crisis. as my own experience attests, the implications of such episodes are significant, and formative, for individuals (including musicians) and the dance music communities that emerge in the wake of epic “trips.” these episodes hold the potential to incite or revive genres, aesthetics and events, with the latter not uncommonly perceived as spiritually significant spaces, like churches or temples—the staging grounds of transformational experiences. emerging internationally in the last three decades, “transformational festivals” and other transfestive events possessing the design of the rite of passage have embraced the ecstatic and transcendent techne of the electrosonic dance assemblage that possesses digital, chemical and sensory elements to effect transformative outcomes. psychedelic substances have become pivotal to the superliminality orchestrated and optimised within these spaces. reddell and st john | introduction to “psychedelica and electronica” 9 while these developments have continued apace, and have been afforded some treatment (e.g. st john 2013; newson et al. 2021), research remains limited in this field. there is much scope to address the psychedelic liminality of transfestive eventscapes, their multisensorial aesthetics and their diverse habitués. personal and autoethnographic in style (not scholarly), contributions to this issue of dancecult assist readers in exploring this terrain. our from the floor content is comprised of a broad contingent of contributions, most of which were solicited and all of which are as visually impressive as they are textually rewarding. the first offering comes from humble psychedelic lightshowman, c. scott taylor. in “from spontinuity to dream seeds: my journey with light shows from the sixties to the present”, taylor recounts (for the first time) the intriguing story of spontinuity, the 1960s and 1970s “family” of light warriors, and his later dream seeds project. literally working in the dark for much of his career, taylor illuminates the lightshow artform that was formative to psychedelic shows. i should point out that taylor did not come to me with the idea to tell this story. it was only through my persuasion that he took up the task, and i thank him for leaning into the narrative. his entry will be of great interest not only to sixties aficionados but to vjs and other visual artists working with digital and other media who will count taylor among their light-jockey forebears. from grateful dead and jefferson airplane shows lit by taylor and friends in boulder in the 1960s, we transit to mutoid waste co sculptures created in london, berlin and italy in the 1980s. giorgia gaia’s “kaos, kilowatt and ketamine: a cultural history of the free tekno movement” is replete with imagery of the mutoid’s recycledelic interventions that formed the visual backdrop for spiral tribe and other proto tekno outfits signature to the 1990s teknival movement emergence. gaia has created a platform for her ongoing research at the intersection of “kaos, kilowatts and ketamine.” from there, we embark on a trio of personal odysseys addressing events in north america from the 1990s through to the present. in “detroit ecstasy: ruminations on raving, ‘movement’ and place”, rebekah farrugia gives account of her experience in detroit’s techno scene of the ’90s, while also addressing the emergence of that city’s movement festival. when farrugia references detroit’s legendary no way back parties at the bottom end of her article, she effectively creates an opening for creator of substack newsletter rave new world, michelle lhooq, who takes the baton with her report on the event known among its fanbase as techno thanksgiving. in “no way back,” lhooq interviews several key djs in the no way back crew to give account of what has long been one of the more serious, and seriously under-reported, underground events. enlivened by her own adventures at no way back, and addressing its sound and visual design, the author traces the unique strain of detroit psychedelia coursing through the veins of nwb. bringing home our from the floor contingent, in an autoethnographic reprise from her highly commendable ma thesis, “dancing through transformational music festivals in western canada: tales from the forest floor”, kelci mohr gives a masterclass in courageous writing and creative research practice. dancecult 15(1)10 the issue’s conversation piece by paul chambers, “beyond the brain: happening at east edge”, represents something of a scoop for dancecult. in australia’s northeast new south wales in the mid-1990s, byron bay’s beyond the brain parties became, as chambers indicates, “synonymous with a good time”. this matter of factoid has never been properly recognised in cultural histories of that region, or in the history of “doof ” (i.e. the australian rave underground). but now, with this evocative historical document, there is no excuse to ignore their significance. integral to his article’s import, chambers kicks up some dust with the launch of beyond the brain with terence mckenna, a film produced by chambers (in conjunction with jenny lusk) about the beyond the brain (btb) event in february 1997 that was headlined by terence mckenna. this new documentary film, which frames btb around mckenna’s three-part spoken word performance, and which has waited over a quarter-of-a-century to be exposed to the light, is launched in conjunction with this issue of dancecult. combined, chambers’ article and video open a window on a long-forgotten feralien moment, a fertile underground scene that had its efflorescence in the beyond the brain events. given his co-cat herding role in producing these events among a large network of contributors (many of whom are name-checked in his article), chambers is well positioned to undertake this documentation. while the features in this issue may be as orthogonal to one another as can be imagined under the title “psychedelica and electronica”, each component of this strange trinity holds significance and value. focused on a figure inspiring milieus of musicians and dance floor occupants over three decades, my own entry on terence mckenna stretches our understanding of “psychedelic music”. what might be considered so surprising about this attention to mckenna is that while he had undertaken his own independent study of the history or art, music did not itself feature among his chief interests, and nor did it feature in his considerable repertoire. mckenna was no great fan of any music. and nor might it be added was he known for his dance moves. he, quite famously, did not listen to music during his psychedelic experiences—his so-called “heroic doses” (i.e. five grams of dried psilocybe cubensis in silent darkness). in one of his earliest recorded public appearances, at berkeley’s shared visions bookstore in july 1983, mckenna explained that in his preference for sensory deprivation he was not decrying music, conceding that music is “an ursprache . . . a language of emotion” (mckenna 1983). but while mckenna had an intellectual approach to what he called the “pythagorean inner music” (anon 1993) that may issue from one’s soul during the psychedelic experience, whether through lack of inclination or absence of training there was no effort to translate that inner sound into music. mckenna was no musician, although he did develop in his final years an interest in drone music. drone is “my idea of what experimental music is supposed to sound like,” he once informed john balance and peter christopherson from european experimental band coil (balance and christopherson 1996). returning to that early rap at shared visions, it was there that mckenna divulged how one of his most memorable trips had been afforded by a single drone-like sound, described like “the seed around which the multiplicity of the hallucinogenic vision can gather itself and constellate”. and then the beethoven of words reddell and st john | introduction to “psychedelica and electronica” 11 tinkled notes high and weird. “i blush to tell you this, but some of my most interesting trips have been to the accompaniment of my floor heater which makes a buzz like a refrigerator. and that buzz becomes the cutting edge of a light which is like a comet giving off in the eddies of its trail … hallucination—all the hallucinations there are” (mckenna 1983). there’s much that one can read from this admission, not least that taking a psychedelic compound can afford one’s capacity to hear, or perhaps more accurately in the case of mckenna, to see, the music, where previously none was experienced. this is not a subject addressed in my study of mckenna’s virtual psychopomp legacy in this issue, but mckenna’s blushingly honest appraisal of his set merging with setting—which alludes to the significance of what trace identifies as the “non-human agencies at work in the sonic substance”—invokes the implications of humans being taken by psychedelics (in this case, psilocybe cubensis). given the growing receptivity of psychedelics within academia across schools and disciplines—trends concomitant with decriminalisation—it is a natural expectation that psychedelics will enjoy a renaissance mirrored in studies of electronic music and dance culture. for ethnomusicologists, psychologists, historians, anthropologists, philosophers and students of popular music, among others, there remains much to address in terms of psychological and cultural implications, methodological innovations, and legal dilemmas, not to mention aesthetics, phenomenology, relationality and technology—all relatively under-researched terrain touched (and indeed transformed) by psychedelics. it is hoped that the content of this issue of dancecult will inspire future scholarship in this continuing terra incognita in which electronic dance musics, their cultural movements and aesthetic sensibilities are impacted by psychedelics. the edition also includes an additional non-guest issue feature article by jordi nofre and manuel garcia-ruiz: “nightlife studies: past, present and future”. and finally, it features event and book reviews compiled by dancecult’s new reviews editor, anita jóri: kim feser’s review of mckenzie wark’s raving (duke university press, 2023); tara hill’s review of jon stratton’s spectacle, fashion and the dancing experience in britain, 1960–1990 (palgrave macmillan, 2022); moses iten’s review of hannes liechti’s this track contains politics: the culture of sampling in experimental electronica (norient books, 2022); anja schwanhäußer’s review of guillaume robin’s berghain, techno und die körperfabrik: ethnographie eines stammpublikums (büchner-verlag, 2021), and; luigi monteanni’s review essay of berlin’s 2023 ctm festival, “ears as portals: alternative realities of musical infrastructures”. trace reddell and graham st john (guest editors), october 2023. notes 1 we do not join the fraught and ongoing debate about “psychedelic” drug classification. both technical and experiential in application, “psychedelic” is a “tricksy” term with a built-in ambiguity—an ambiguity said to be among its strengths (dickins 2023). dancecult 15(1)12 references barrett, frederick s., katrin h. preller and mendel kaelen. 2018. “psychedelics and music: neuroscience and therapeutic implications”. international review of psychiatry 30(4): 350–62. <https://doi.org/10.1080/09540261.2018.1484342> anon. 1993. “terence mckenna—the re: evolution(ary) shaman”. freakbeat 8 (19 april): 17–19, 23–24. balance, john, and peter christopherson. 1996. “black sun magazine”. internet archive (added 12 september 2015), <https://archive.org/details/blacksunmagazine/ terence+mckenna+interview.mp3> (accessed 6 october 2023). bonny, helen, and walter pahnke. 1972. “the use of music in psychedelic (lsd) psychotherapy”. journal of music therapy 9(2): 64-87. dickins, robert. 2023. “psychedelic tricksy: why the word psychedelic evades simple definitions”. psychedelic press (23 january): <https://psychedelicpress.substack.com/p/psychedelic> (accessed 6 october 2023). mckenna, terence. 1983. “the syntax of psychedelic time: fractals, endpoints, end times, zero points”. shared visions bookstore, berkeley, ca ( july), the library of consciousness: <https://www.organism.earth/library/document/syntax-of-psychedelic-time> (accessed 6 october 2023). newson, martha, ragini khurana, freya cazorla and valerie van mulukom. 2021. “‘i get high with a little help from my friends’: how raves can invoke identity fusion and lasting cooperation via transformative experiences”. frontiers in psychology 12 (24 september). st john, graham. 2013. “writing the vibe: arts of representation in electronic dance music culture”. conversation. dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 5(1): <https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.01.11>. strickland, justin c., albert garcia-romeu and matthew w. johnson. 2021. “set and setting: a randomized study of different musical genures in supporting psychedelic therapy”. acs pharmacology & translational science 4(2): 472–8. <https://doi.org/10.1021/acsptsci.0c00187>. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540261.2018.1484342 https://archive.org/details/blacksunmagazine/terence+mckenna+interview.mp3 https://archive.org/details/blacksunmagazine/terence+mckenna+interview.mp3 https://psychedelicpress.substack.com/p/psychedelic https://www.organism.earth/library/document/syntax-of-psychedelic-time https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2013.05.01.11 https://doi.org/10.1021/acsptsci.0c00187 berghain, techno and the body factory: ethnography of a club’s regulars dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 16(1): 125–139 issn 1947-5403 ©2024 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.07 berghain, techno and the body factory: ethnography of a club’s regulars guillaume robin université paris cité (france) translated by: guillaume robin université paris cité (france) moses iten rmit (australia) abstract this research explores the sociological dimensions of berghain—the iconic berlin techno club—by focusing on its regular attendees and their shared experience of secrecy.1 the fieldwork-based study draws parallels between berghain and ancient bacchanalian rites, both spaces where social norms are suspended, allowing for a collective transformation of bodies and identities. it emphasizes the club’s “code of silence” as a vital element of the communal experience, creating a space where anonymity and discretion are key. methodologically, robin employs ethnographic methods, by combining qualitative interviews and participant observation sessions, immersing himself in the berghain scene to understand how this secrecy fosters a sense of belonging among regulars and releases the body. this research also explores how the covid 19 pandemic has reshaped the club’s sociological contours, including shifts in the audience and the reinvention of the space. overall, this study addresses how secrecy, rituals, and social dynamics at berghain shape its audience’s collective identity. keywords: secrecy, ethnography, bacchanalia, collective identity, techno culture guillaume robin has a phd in german studies. he works as a lecturer at université paris-cité laboratoire identités cultures territoires. his research focuses on body history and cultural anthropology in 20th-century germany, and more specifically on the ethnography of berlin’s electronic music scenes. he is an active contributor to the academic journal allemagne d’aujourd’hui, for which he has co-edited several issues with prof. jean-louis georget on photography, contemporary dance and alternative medicine. https://cv.hal.science/guillaume-robin-berlin https://ict.u-paris.fr/annuaire/guillaume-robin/ transposition http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.07 https://cv.hal.science/guillaume-robin-berlin https://ict.u-paris.fr/annuaire/guillaume-robin/ dancecult 16(1)126 introductory note from the foreign languages editor the first three sections of this transpositions article are translations of the first three chapters of guillaume robin’s book berghain, techno und die körperfabrik: ethnographie eines stammpublikums, originally published in german in 2021. the book was also published in 2021 in french, as berlin bacchanales. the fourth and final section of this article—in the shape of an epilogue—was written by the author exclusively for dancecult and is based on his ongoing research on the impact covid 19 has had on electronic dance music culture (see jóri and robin 2024). berghain was substantially affected by covid 19, as well as the ongoing war in ukraine. please note, this epilogue has not been subject to double blind peer review. “dance, dance, otherwise we are lost!”2 – pina bausch the return of the bacchanalia? a typical monday morning in berlin’s friedrichshain district: while cars begin to park in front of aldi for the day’s shopping, berghain gently closes its doors. in the nearby park, exhausted ravers rest on patches of sparse grass, winding down after a long party night. the night owls draped in black fabric emerge into daylight, which the club has released after thirty hours of pounding basslines and frenzied dancing. the wasteland around has since been replaced by a public garden where exhausted ravers like chilling out after a night of partying. by devoting their bodies to dancing instead of the logic of efficiency, berghain dancers defy the social convention of resting on sundays. much about berghain is “typically berlin”, but not everything. few places make you feel as alive in your body. it is a space that resonates with what foucault describes as “heterotopias” (foucault 2019): where selfdiscovery and community converge; where “utopias of the body” come to life. the era of ostgut, an underground gay club from berlin’s late nineties subculture, is over. berghain has replaced it and in twenty years has become the ultimate destination of pilgrimage for techno fans worldwide. berghain has become so famous that criticism is rife of the club having become too commercial. this fame in the era of social media generates a collective fascination or even a cult that can border on fetishism: s. collects berghain flyers to build his “wall of shame”3; c. carefully preserves the colorful stickers on the back of her smartphone; k. spends up to five hours waiting in line; w. flies several times a year to berlin to enjoy the famous berghain’s klubnacht (“club night”); m. used to spend an average of 30 hours in the club every week and hadn’t missed a single club night in three years until the covid-19 lockdowns. no place in electronic music history has fuelled such fantasies. just hop on the first budget flight to berlin and you’ll hear people talking about berghain. it’s almost as robin | berghain, techno and the body factory 127 if the struggle tourists have in pronouncing this german word hints at the challenge of actually getting into the techno temple. the well-known club owes its name to the contraction of kreuzberg and friedrichshain, the berlin districts once under american and soviet occupation. the slightly remote berghain is located in a former industrial area near the spree river, just a few hundred meters from the former “death strip” that once divided east and west and is now home to the east side gallery. originally housed in a former goods station warehouse, ostgut— the former name of berghain—closed in 2003 to make way for the construction of the o2 world arena (today uber arena), a sports and events venue. a year later, berghain opened nearby in a former power station built in the style of socialist classicism, which then belonged to vattenfall. initially, the club’s owners norbert thormann and michael teufele rented the space from the energy provider, then decided to purchase it in 2011. the proximity to a demilitarized zone, abandoned in the 1990s and far from appealing at the time, along with the lack of nearby residential areas and the low rents, explains why so many bars and clubs flocked to this urban fringe along both sides of the spree river. the berghain is surrounded by supermarkets and parking lots, so-called “non-places”, as coined by the french anthropologist marc augé (2010) in reference to these spaces of transit and interchangeable modernity which render humans anonymous. the only other nearby buildings are the fire and police stations. like all heterotopias, berghain is located on the urban fringe, part of an abandoned landscape in a post-industrial environment. it’s this geographic location above all that gives berghain its heterotopic character. the club fascinates because in some ways it contradicts the values that have structured western society for millennia: belief in progress, a sense of decency, self-realization through work, order, moderation and reason. through its excesses widely reported by the media, berghain would come to mark the return of the bacchanalia.4 klubnacht after klubnacht, it offers a bacchanal, a temporary triumph of the dionysian over the apollonian, a duality nietzsche described in the birth of tragedy (2008). as western countries are witnessing a strong return of the dionysian, this return to paganism—which controversial sociologist michel maffesoli calls the “return of the tribes” (1996)—could be considered as a response to the individualism of modern societies, now seen as a dead end. hubris arises in rebellion against moderation and rationality, as well as against the urge to impose restrictions and control on everything. berghain seems to embody all of this and the hedonistic utopia used to be symbolized at the foot of the entrance stairs by a statue of bacchus drinking from a cornucopia.5 from the rave scene and berlin’s “keller-jahre” (“cellar-years”) of the 1990s to today’s sex-positive techno parties, there’s been a distinct berlin pursuit of unrestrained hedonism: an embrace of raw, unapologetic animality, free from moral judgement. by maintaining strict silence about what happens within its walls, berghain enables bodies to fully surrender to excess and the indulgence of emotion, the enjoyment of dance, drugs, nudity, sexuality and trance without shame. in the shadow of dionysus, maffesoli (1992) argues that the orgiastic surge is a way of resisting the hyper-rationality of modern societies, obsessed with control and zero risk.6 dancecult 16(1)128 if we take seriously the hypothesis of a return to these pagan times of communitas, in which individuals in (and under) ecstasy reconnect with their bodies, the community, and the cosmos in general, then we can see an analogy between the ancient mystery cults and berghain.7 before they took on their current meaning of noisy, orgiastic festivities, bacchanalia were religious celebrations in honor of bacchus in ancient rome, starting from the 3rd century bc. in ancient greece as well, dionysia—the annual celebrations in honor of dionysus—had been held since the 6th century bc. like bacchanalia, dionysia were mystery cults where secrecy played a central role. these cults were not public but practiced only among insiders, called mystes—a greek word meaning “the silent ones”. insiders had to recite an incantation proving they belonged to the circle of secret-bearers. without knowledge of this code, entry to the temple was denied. during the initiation ordeal, to get through the mystes were not allowed to speak. the near-religious silence that berghain’s regulars maintain lining up and the carefully guarded secret that manifests itself through the photography ban, show striking similarities to the secrecy of the bacchanalia. piotr nathan—whose giant mural rituals of disappearance could be admired in the cloakroom area until 2017—described his work as a “gateway to the mystery”, an invitation “to enter the mystical ambiguity, to marvel at the enigmatic nature and explore the secret behind this massive mural” (coultate 2017).8 the artwork made of 171 aluminum panels, 5 meters high and 25 meters wide, depicted natural phenomena like “volcanic eruptions, sandstorms, waterspouts, and the shimmering of the northern lights over a nocturnally quiet place”— mystical landscapes that also evoke the mysteries of antiquity. like a door to another world, berghain recalls the roman bacchanalia, which were associated with these mystery cults. bacchanalia were a pretext for drunkenness, orgiastic outbursts, and sometimes even ritual killings. due to the scandals they provoked and the threat they posed to public order, the roman senate eventually banned them. nathan’s work reminds us that secrecy lies at the heart of the berghain’s festivities. unlocking its secrets requires understanding its heterotopic dynamics. if bodies move and express themselves differently at berghain, if they sweat and radiate so intensely, it’s because the club—through its distinct visual and acoustic design—creates a unique relationship with the body. in many ways, like the bacchanalia, berghain remains a heterotopia, captivating precisely because it disrupts the order, decorum, and rationality of modern life. it offers a space for collective release, a place where primal instincts are reignited, transforming the club into a modern-day sanctuary for the body’s most profound desires and untamed energy. in this sense, berghain embodies one of those “other spaces” that foucault (2019) speaks of—a heterotopia where celebration and secrecy go hand in hand, a marginal place that fosters the body’s utopias. most books on techno for the broader public are focused on the phenomenon from the perspective of its musical actors (djs, club owners, party organizers) but rarely from the viewpoint of its audience and its bodily dynamics. they often refer to its musical origins in detroit (sicko 1999) or the techno boom of the early 1990s (denk and von thülen 2014), helping to forge the myth of its origins. the pioneering work of sociologists and cultural robin | berghain, techno and the body factory 129 anthropologists has expanded the scope of knowledge from various perspectives, focusing on techno as a form of post-traditional community (hitzler and pfadenhauer 2001); the ethnography of the berlin scene (schwannhäuser 2010) or the club economy (kühn 2016). berghain has inspired academic research but also contemporary literature like the novels tomorrow berlin by oscar coop-phane (2015), demande à la nuit by anne-laure jaeglé (2016) and axolotl roadkill by helene hegemann (2012).9 as for reports from journalists or bloggers on berghain, they are prolific. they focus in general on the excesses of the club, with the ban on photography only heightening the tendency towards hyperbole. these countless reports about berghain often resort to recurring stereotypes: berghain is sometimes compared to a temple or cathedral and overinterpreted from the perspective of a religious experience. other times, it is portrayed for its monumental and dystopian aspect, akin to the moloch in fritz lang’s metropolis (1927), as a god-machine devouring dancers under the watchful eye of sven marquardt, who is elevated to the role of cerberus, the guardian of the underworld. some books, like tobias rapp’s lost and sound (2009), mention berghain only in passing. only one work, written in a patchwork style, is entirely dedicated to the club: die clubmaschine: berghain (schulz and kilian 2018). this question of the machine’s role is undoubtedly an interesting approach, but it alone does not explain the dynamics of the audience. this ethnographic analysis aims to move beyond the blind reverence of insiders and scrutinize clichés. the reflection which follows is based on three years of ethnographic research within berghain’s techno scene. methodologically, it draws on fieldwork conducted among berghain’s regular clientele through observation once or twice a month, particularly on sundays during peak hours of the so-called berghain klubnacht. the focus of this study is on bodily practices within the techno scene.10 it combines participant observation sessions with twelve interviews and approximately thirty online questionnaires from regulars.11 it is important to approach the term “audience” with caution: there is no singular “techno scene”, just as there is no singular “berghain audience”. the regulars of klubnacht are neither the same as the saturday night crowd, nor those attending the snax parties (reserved for gay people only) or the finest fridays. yet, how can one establish a sociology of these regular guests? how can the club be conceptualized as a heterotopia in foucault’s sense? to what extent is berghain, unlike any other club in the world, a place for the expression of foucault’s “utopian body”? is it truly an inclusive space and as queer as it is often presented to be? the idea of conducting an ethnographic study on berghain emerged when i observed at various festivals in brandenburg (garbicz, nation of gondwana, her damit) that berghain regulars were often identifiable by their distinctive dance style.12 one thing was clear: berghain is much more than a machine. it is a generator of bodily experiments. it is nothing without its audience and without the bodies that fill, shape, and bring to life the space by dancing. dancecult 16(1)130 bodies in space initiated into the secret it was so hot and humid that the sticker came off my iphone. a security guard saw it and tried to escort me out, thinking i had broken the house rules. i asked him to wait for a few seconds so i could warn my friends that i was leaving. i ditched the guy with my phone and kept dancing all day in the panorama bar. after 10 hours, he finally found me again. he was still holding my phone and was really angry. it was the latest generation iphone. he told me i was messing with him. i got banned for three months. after all, there are other priorities than smartphones! (a., poland) in the beginning was the body. we must immediately temper the expectations of readers who have not yet experienced berghain on a sunday who imagine they can approach the mystical experience of the klubnacht through sleazy details or sensational anecdotes. both the writer and the field researcher fail in their attempts to describe the berghain experience in concepts, so impossible is it to put into words the electric atmosphere on the dance floor at peak times, when the techno tracks roar like thunder. the berghain experience is lived in the present moment, through and within the body. it takes shape in the belly, thighs, breath and skin. the klubnacht cannot be photographed. bodies dance more freely when they know they are not being observed by a camera’s eye. just as secrecy was central to the mystery cults of antiquity, so too is it at berghain, as it protects the club from the outside world. when exposed to the secular world, such spaces risk losing their heterotopic essence. in the age of social media, the danger is particularly acute: these carefully guarded realms of intimacy could be instantly shared, reducing lived experience to mere images, and threatening the very privacy and uniqueness that define them. the photography ban isn’t just limited to techno clubs in berlin but is a subcultural code of conduct, as evidenced by the “no photos” signs at the entrances to the wagenburg (“trailer park”) in lohmühle and the køpi squat. in such places, tourists quickly learn to leave their camera at home. berlin is not a zoo to be toured. this “no photos ethic” (glad 2017) has become a fundamental pillar of berlin’s subcultures, reflecting a general rejection of the touristification and mainstreamification of the city. it has allowed berlin clubs to maintain their brand image of providing unique experiences. in 2019, the photography exhibition space c/o berlin nostalgically paid tribute to the city’s techno scene with an exhibition titled no photos on the dance floor! not without contradiction, the exhibition subtly implied that photography could never fully capture the essence of the present moment in a party, but only fleeting remnants—like the bodily fluids seen in wolfgang tillmans’ images. berlin’s clubs, it suggested, possess no photographic memory. the dimension of secrecy is central to maintaining heterotopias. this is why berlin techno clubs, enforce a strict no-photo policy, as displayed in black and white at the entrance to the berghain. the club’s official instagram account boasts 277,000 followers. yet, on the page, there is just a single post: a dry reminder of the photography ban, repeated in four languages. this paradox—where, in an image-saturated world, the absence of images becomes more compelling than the images themselves—reveals a deeper robin | berghain, techno and the body factory 131 truth. by forbidding the visual documentation of the party, the club slips into the realm of fantasy. the only way to communicate the experience is through storytelling, which fuels its mythos. the rare videos that manage to bypass the watchful eyes of the audience and security provoke an outpouring of outrage from regulars and are swiftly removed, reinforcing the club’s elusive allure. tourists who dare to snap photos while waiting in line at berghain, unaware of the rules, are admonished by regulars. those bold enough to take pictures inside the club are immediately thrown out: yeah, that was the first year. a spaniard took a photo from above inside berghain. it was dealt with quickly. he got in at 12:10 a.m., and fifteen minutes later, he was out. there aren’t many rules in the place, except that one (t., germany). at the club’s entrance, phone cameras are covered by the security with a colorful sticker. removing it results in an immediate ban. by strictly enforcing this policy, berghain presents itself as a photographic black hole. there are almost no pictures of the club’s interior online. to get around the rule, various  stratagems are resorted to on social media to depict the berghain experience. when it comes to selfies, regulars master the art of staying off-screen: they capture their party outfits, the club’s façade, or the bracelet on their wrist. from forbidden selfies in berghain’s bathrooms known as kloporn (“toilet porn”) and fleeting shots of the queue for @berghainlinelife on instagram, to a simple black screen hash tagged in tribute to the dj—all these traces hint at the ineffable nature of the moment by merely suggesting it. some even find creative loopholes, snapping photos under colored stickers to frame the unrepresentable.13 in an era of ubiquitous smartphones and blurred lines between real and virtual spaces, berghain stands as a countermodel. it partly shifts focus away from self-obsession and instead fuels the construction of its own mythology. since heterotopias are maintained through a cult of secrecy, the smartphone camera would first act as a bridge to the outside world, bringing the profane into the sacred. besides, the immediate experience of music and dance is distorted by the presence of the photographic eye, which acts as an instance of control and judgment. as a regular from germany said: “no one would feel so free here if they knew they were being filmed or photographed”. those who feel observed tend to control their behavior and movements more. the absence of the smartphone camera guarantees the sense of freedom that allows for an immediate physical experience. this no photos rule could be seen as a form of digital detox. only when separated from their own image and free from any interference in their immediacy can bodies fully immerse themselves in the experience of being alive, since berghain is a physical experience and a show to be lived in the moment and in that sense, capturing the moment resists the smartphone lens. the photography ban also ensures respect for privacy in a space where deviance is permitted. for historical reasons, linked to state surveillance practices during the nazi dictatorship and later under the stasi in east germany, the german public is particularly sensitive when it comes to private data and the threat of surveillance through the camera’s eye. dancecult 16(1)132 an ethnographic sketch of the “crows” the berghainis—a german term for the club’s regulars—are often compared to crows because of their black outfits. regulars are considered those who have visited the club at least once a month for more than a year and continue to do so.14 they can be seen dressed in small groups in the streets leading to the club, especially on sunday mornings or during peak hours on sunday evenings, spending an average of 16 hours inside the club. some stay for as long as 36 hours, from the opening on saturday at midnight until closing on monday morning. since this ethnographic study is qualitative rather than statistical, it was still necessary to choose a sample that would be as representative as possible of the gender diversity that characterizes its regular audience. therefore, the full spectrum of the lgbtqia community was included in this sample. it should be noted that this field survey was carried out between 2018 and 2019 and that since then the share of the club’s historic gay audience and the queer community of berghain may have declined in favour of a more heterosexual crowd. a rough estimate of the gender distribution aligned then with that of the surveyed regulars: it suggests that the audience as a whole, at peak times, consisted of half lgbt+ members and half heterosexual people, though the proportion of lgbt+ visitors can reach up to 60%, especially when popular resident djs like boris perform for the closing. despite the eclecticism of the regular audience, it is still possible to establish a typical profile of the berghainis based on the criteria of nationality, origin, age, education level and professional status. first, the regulars are not only registered residents of berlin. the majority have lived in berlin for an average of three and a half years, but there is also a small proportion of commuters who travel to berghain six to ten times a year as regulars. these regulars come from munich, bucharest, nice, brussels, stockholm, tbilisi, kyiv, even dubai. this international club tourism—popularized by tobias rapp as the “easyjet-set” (2009: 268) and documented in a report from 2019 commissioned by the berlin club commission—raises questions about identity in the context of globalization.15 luis manuel garcia (2015a) described this phenomenon of shuttle migration, linked to “techno tourism” and facilitated by cheap flights, as a modern form of “affective citizenship”. as a regular from paris said: “in berlin, i really feel at home”. the berghain, as a new home, thus reflects this geographic displacement of affects. frequent visits to berlin gives these “techno-tourists the paradoxical feeling of being both at home in berlin and a tourist in their own city” (garcia 2015a). this sociocultural belonging to a subcultural scene far from their home country resembles the search for a chosen citizenship based on a community of affect rather than traditional identity markers tied to language, origin, or regional or national culture. in this nightlife tourism, there is a form of post-industrial neo-romanticism that emotionally connects these “techno-migrants” with local berlin scenes, with the city, its vibe and its musical landscape (garcia 2015b). like berlin as a whole, berghain fuels the fantasy of belonging to a place where one can fully immerse in the party, but ultimately remain a stranger. the berghain audience is not composed exclusively of berliners or even germans: robin | berghain, techno and the body factory 133 it is fluid, mobile, and globalized. this study confirms the immense diversity of identities at berghain. the panel of respondents included 11 germans, 7 french, 3 australians, 3 americans, 3 poles, 2 italians, 2 spaniards, and also regulars of brazilian, korean, finnish, greek, iranian, irish, dutch, kyrgyz, south african, russian, swiss, syrian, ukrainian, franco-lebanese, german-russian or german-american origins. what stands out most in the berghain crowd is its vibrant cultural mix. given the average age of the regulars, it would be problematic to describe techno as a youth culture in the case of berghain. while this may be true in most european techno clubs, berlin is different. berghain, more than any other club, is a place where where the denormalisation of subcultural practices is not linked to age. while age often dictates cultural practices in most social contexts, berghain is heterotopic, especially considering the youth obsession prevalent elsewhere: once, i was kissing a guy in the garden outside, and he told me his mother was there too. then she appeared, and he called her over. he didn’t stop cuddling and kissing me while she was there. she hung out with us for a bit, and we talked about the music. then she gave him a bag of speed. what a beautiful mother-son relationship! only at berghain! ( j. from ireland). in terms of age, the average age is just over 29 years, while the average age of men among the regulars seems higher than that of women. the estimated average age of the regular berghain crowd looks very similar to the median age of clubgoers, which the above mentioned berlin club commission clarified in its 2018 study (30.2 years). the relatively high age of the audience thus contradicts the thesis that techno subcultures would be predominantly youth subcultures. like the rock scene, the berlin electronic dance music scene has matured and so has its audience. this relatively high age of ravers is not unique to berghain but characteristic of the berlin club scene in general, where different age norms apply compared to european party capitals. however, what distinguishes berghain from other berlin clubs is the age distribution of the regulars, particularly guests in their forties, fifties, and even sixties which are more rarely seen in other clubs. in our study, the forties group seemed no less represented than young adults (18–24 years). the youngest respondent, from leipzig, was 21 years old, and the oldest was 48. there were also people in their fifties and a regular from the us even confessed that he went to berghain twice a year with his 70-year-old mother, sharing ecstasy with her. people who would be considered old in a parisian techno club can enter berghain without being judged: in the queue, i noticed that they rejected attractive young men, and i wondered how the bouncers would react when they saw an old lady in front of them. it wasn’t a problem at all. they let me in (m. from germany, age 48). however, the age of regulars must also be viewed in the context of their length of belonging to the scene. membership in the crowd of regulars seems to be temporary. of dancecult 16(1)134 the roughly 40 respondents, only one knew berghain’s predecessor club ostgut and only two had been to berghain at its early stages. very few had been regulars for more than five years. most regulars stay for only a few years and soon leave the scene, which induces extreme physical strain over time. in 2024, my observations in the field confirmed this observation: many of the people who were interviewed at the time have since left the scene or attend only occasionally. it is also often assumed that the arbitrariness and “the aura of jacobin terror” (rapp 2009) that reigns at the door would create a form of social levelling. neither money nor social status guarantees entry: unlike new york clubs of the 1970s; parisian clubs of the 1980s; or today’s vip-table clubs on ibiza. there are no vip rooms at berghain. nor at the other berlin clubs. even the club’s booking page makes it clear to djs that berghain offers no table reservations or special vip treatment.16 while class differences take a backseat to “subcultural capital” (thornton 1995), this radical equality remains a sociological fantasy.17 the regular berghain crowd is largely recruited from a highly socially integrated part of the population, with the majority in stable employment. among the surveyed regulars, there was a minority of students, which can be explained by the strict door policy towards visitors under 21. the relatively high entry price of 18 euros at the time of the survey makes it one of the most expensive clubs in berlin, even though drink prices remain more or less the same. adding the cost of wardrobe and re-entry, drinks and drugs, the average weekend cost ranged between 50 and 100 euros per capita at the time of the survey. in autumn 2019, the introduction of an additional 5 euros re-entry fee sparked discontent among many regulars, who saw it as a form of financial discrimination.18 others found the price increase irrelevant and viewed the debate as a pastime for privileged social classes. at the time of the survey, only two of forty respondents were unemployed or in vocational retraining (8%). only 16% were students, 60% were employees, and 16% were self-employed. except for three, all regulars had a university degree, and half had obtained a master’s degree.19 this observation has to be combined with the average educational level within the respective age groups. for instance, only three out of fourty individuals had not completed secondary education. this hypothesis seems underpinned by the breakdown of professions among regulars, with people from low-skilled jobs (construction workers, waitstaff, cleaners, cashiers, etc.) being strongly underrepresented. what’s striking in contrast is an overrepresentation of academic professions, engineers, doctors, it managers, consultants, as well as a group that could be labeled as urban creative workers, such as screenwriters, tech entrepreneurs, music producers and graphic designers. this finding seems to support the established hypothesis that once you cross the berghain threshold, social boundaries claim to be lifted, but less so in practice. to put it differently, berghain may not be a place of social segregation, but it’s also not the egalitarian and heterogeneous space one might imagine and that some regulars claim it to be. five years after this study, the social divide has probably widened even further. robin | berghain, techno and the body factory 135 epilogue: post-corona perspectives on the profile of berghain’s regulars since the end of the pandemic and the ongoing war in ukraine, the sociological makeup of berghain’s regular crowd has shifted significantly. one of the most notable changes is the aging of the club’s regular attendees. many long-time berghain-goers, now in their 30s and 40s, have seen their connection to the scene become more sporadic. life changes, such as career commitments, relocations and parenthood, have distanced them from the once routine weekend ritual. the sense of belonging in club culture is deeply tied to social accessibility and rising prices along with decreasing purchasing power in berlin, have contributed to less frequent attendance. many former regulars now visit only once a month or even once every three months, while others have left the scene entirely. this reduced frequency has weakened the sense of community, which had previously been reinforced by consistent attendance. as the cost of clubbing rises, this sense of belonging is increasingly replaced by a more individualistic, consumer-driven experience. berghain, once viewed as a cornerstone of a tight-knit community, is now perceived by many as more of a luxury or occasional indulgence rather than a regular communal gathering. a social leveling has also occurred, marked by an increase in entry prices—from €18 in 2021 to €25 in 2024—further accelerating the club’s transformation. the rising cost of living, exacerbated by inflation and higher energy prices due to the ukraine war, has made clubbing less accessible to many, especially in the post-pandemic period. this has contributed to a noticeable rejuvenation of the crowd, with younger attendees—often from wealthier, more privileged backgrounds—filling the void left by departing veterans. this transformation can also be seen as part of a longer-term process of “hypisation” of the crowd, as described by fashion historian diana weis ( jori and robin 2024: 63-85), where the underground increasingly intersects with the fashionable elite. as weis argues, the line between these worlds is fine: through subtle shifts in aesthetic codes, it becomes difficult to tell who is imitating whom—berghain or balenciaga, berlin’s techno underground or parisian haute couture. this blurring of boundaries has undoubtedly contributed to the alienation of many long-standing regulars, who find themselves distancing from these evolving aesthetic norms. another key shift is the mainstreaming and “heteronormalization” of the crowd. while berghain has long been a bastion of gay and queer culture, the growing influx of straight clubbers has begun to dilute the queer-centric atmosphere that once defined it. some of berghain’s queer regulars have even disengaged for political reasons. the club’s decision to cancel arabian panther’s performances due to his pro-palestinian stance, has led to a boycott movement within the techno community in 2024, which has further compounded the estrangement. the war in ukraine has also had an impact. while many berghain regulars had travelled to tbilisi’s bassiani club during the lockdown, the end of the pandemic has coincided with an influx of ukrainian refugees into the berghain scene. this porous exchange reflects broader changes in berlin’s club culture, which is now even more international. dancecult 16(1)136 finally, the dynamics on berghain’s dance floor have shifted with the changes to the sound system. the installation of new subwoofers, particularly in the middle-front area, has altered the soundscape and reshaped crowd movement. the once-iconic “front left” corner, historically a sanctuary for “freaks” and queer people, has lost some of its significance as a crucible of unique experiences, as the demographic transformation of the club continues to unfold. these many shifts are not only altering the sociologic composition of the crowd but also changing the ethos of the space itself. acknowledgements i need to thank büchner verlag from which the chapters translated from german for this article were taken. i’m grateful for the support of this translation from moses iten and the laboratoire identités cultures territoires les europes dans le monde, université paris cité. i’d also like to thank my friend and colleague anita jóri, for having recommended my work for translation and her collaboration on the book we co-edited: living at night in times of pandemic: night studies and club culture in france and germany, published by transcript verlag in 2024. notes 1 in german, see robin, guillaume. 2021. berghain, techno und die körperfabrik: ethnographie eines stammpublikums. marburg: büchner-verlag. in french, see berghain: berlin bacchanales. 2021. auxonne: le murmure. 2 the story of this quote comes from choreographer pina bausch’s speech when she was awarded the kyoto prize in 2007. “let me start with a story. in greece i was once i was once with some gypsy families. we were sitting together and talking and at some point they started dancing and i was asked to join in. i had great inhibitions and the feeling that i couldn’t do it. then a little girl came up to me, maybe twelve years old, and asked me again and again to dance along. she said: ‘dance, dance, otherwise we are lost’”. this phrase from that little girl became the starting point of a social movement in france in 2020, launched by many concerned dance teachers who were no longer able to practice their profession due to the pandemic. this collective organized dance demonstrations in 15 cities in france. 3 a play on words in reference to the so called “walk of shame”, the path back to the entrance taken by visitors rejected by berghain’s bouncers. 4 the research revealed that the image of bacchanal certainly provides interesting food for thought, but by focusing on the excesses, it fails to reveal the important mechanisms of control and self-control within the club. 5 this statue was dismantled and moved to the garden. 6 critics argue his ideas downplay the importance of individualism and overlook structural inequalities, making his work both influential and divisive in academic circles. robin | berghain, techno and the body factory 137 7 the thiasos (“processions of initiates”) practiced a hidden initiation cult usually at night and in caves. the mystery took shape in the darkness, which reminds us of the half-light of the mountain grove. the roman bacchanalia associated with mystery cults were a pretext for drunkenness, orgiastic outbursts, but also for ritualistic acts. because of the scandals they brought with them and the danger they posed to public order; the roman senate eventually banned them. 8 “i believe it is not too farfetched to describe this form of celebration as a ritual, a mystery in the sense of a cultic officiating, during which the innermost element remains a secret. in the context of the music and aura of berghain, the terms cult and secret receive a nonverbal reading. the mural rituals of disappearance provides the first visual impression, appearing as a gateway to the entrance area of the club. it is inviting to enter the mystical ambiguity, to marvel at the enigmatic nature and explore the secret behind this massive mural” (coultate 2017). 9 axolotl roadkill (hegemann 2011) was inspired by or plagiarized airen’s novel strobo (2009). 10 in its 2019 study on club culture, the clubcommission berlin provides the following definition of the scene: “as soon as an audience becomes a regular audience and meets regularly at fixed locations (here: clubs) for a shared experience (here: club event), one speaks of a scene. to be more precise, several local audiences form a network, which is then referred to as a scene. it is important to note that club culture is always produced by those in the scene for those in the scene”. 11 the anonymity of these people was granted voluntarily. the immersion in the field is what we call participant observation. in other words: by putting on the outfit for the berghain, do we understand better the physical habitus of the regulars. it is only by becoming an active member in the space ourselves that interactions are established and we immerse ourselves in the physical and psychological disposition of the actors. it is important to prioritize the immediacy of participation, but this must also be prioritized in order to avoid the possible lack of critical distance and loss of information, taking notes afterwards and to develop the analysis at more favourable times (soule 2007). while aware of this methodological risk of favouring participation over observation, we claim an immersive relationship with the research field. being part of the dance community and being identified as such is part of this methodological approach. only active, full and honest participation allows access to interviews and the collection of information. 12 although techno, unlike codified dances, is not based on a sequence of dance figures to be performed, the dance style practiced in berghain is still the product of a physical technique that is learnt through imitation and is therefore a factor for integration into the community. “the boring berghain style...every newcomer tends to learn this wiggling from left to right like penguin” (a., regular from ukraine). although the regulars have difficulty describing the ‘berghain style’, they often call it martial, aggressive, robotic or even ‘stompy’. the body is anchored to the floor, similar to the squat position (knees and hips slightly bent, buttocks backwards). the weight of the body rests on the feet, while the shoulders and upper body move from left to right. 13 berghainsticker. https://www.instagram.com/berghainsticker, accessed 6 october 2024. 14 around 40 people took part in the survey, 12 in the form of interviews, about 30 in the form of a long questionnaire consisting of around 200 questions. https://www.instagram.com/berghainsticker dancecult 16(1)138 15 the clubcommission berlin commissioned goldmedia for a study on berlin’s club culture in 2019. according to this report, 10 percent of clubgoers are foreign and 20 percent of the regulars from outside the city of berlin and the surrounding state of brandenburg. 16 the berghain website stated: “we don’t offer table reservations, guest list, advance tickets or vip treatment”. www.ostgut.de/booking, accessed 2020. please note this link is no longer active. 17 thornton uses the term “subcultural capital” (1995) to describe the knowledge of codes, aesthetics and style that are important in the club scene. 18 see facebook of the berghain klubnacht boycott protest movement (yekaterynin 2019). 19 in 2020, the proportion of university entrants in the total population in the corresponding year of birth was 54.8 %, according to a statistical report which shows the level of education in germany and the distribution of the population by age group and highest school-leaving qualification. these statistics have since been updated, see statista research department (2024). references airen. 2009. strobo. berlin: subkultur verlag. augé, marc. 2010. nicht-orte. munich: beck c. h. berghainsticker. “#berghain #sticker”. 19 november 2014. <https://www.instagram.com/berghainsticker>, (accessed 6 october 2024). coop-phane, oscar. 2015. tomorrow, berlin. london: hachette uk. coultate, aaron. “wall mural from berghain to be sold off ”, resident advisor, 17 mar 2017. <https://ra.co/news/38482>, (accessed 4 october 2024). denk, felix and sven von thülen. 2014. the sound of family / der klang der familie: berlin, techno and the reunification. berlin: suhrkamp. foucault, michel. 2019. le corps utopique, les hétérotopies. paris: éditions lignes. garcia, luis-manuel. 2015a. “at home, i’m a tourist: musical migration and affective citizenship in berlin”. in journal of urban cultural studies, vol. 2. 121–134. <https://doi.org/10.1386/jucs.2.1-2.121_1> garcia, luis-manuel. 2015b. “techno-tourism and post-industrial neo-romanticism in berlin’s electronic dance music scenes”. in tourist studies 16/3. 258–275. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797615618037> glad, vincent. “le berghain à berlin et l’éthique du “no photos””, libération, 6 september 2017. <https://www.liberation.fr/debats/2017/09/06/le-berghain-a-berlin-et-l-ethique-du-nophotos_1594579/>, (accessed 4 october 2024). hegemann, helene. axolotl roadkill. 2012. london: corsair. hitzler, ronald and michaela pfadenhauer. 2001. techno-soziologie: erkundungen einer jugendkultur. new york: springer. <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-663-11611-0> jaeglé, anne laure. 2016. demande à la nuit. montreuil: ville brule. jóri, anita and guillaume robin. 2024. living at night in times of pandemic: night studies and club culture in france and germany. bielefeld: transcript verlag. <https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839467268> http://www.ostgut.de/booking https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/sticker/ https://www.instagram.com/berghainsticker https://ra.co/news/38482 https://doi.org/10.1386/jucs.2.1-2.121_1 https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797615618037 https://www.liberation.fr/debats/2017/09/06/le-berghain-a-berlin-et-l-ethique-du-no-photos_1594579/ https://www.liberation.fr/debats/2017/09/06/le-berghain-a-berlin-et-l-ethique-du-no-photos_1594579/ https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-663-11611-0 robin | berghain, techno and the body factory 139 kühn, jan-michael. die wirtschaft der techno-szene: arbeiten in einer subkulturellen ökonomie. springer 2016. <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-13660-4> maffesoli, michel. 1996 [1988]. the time of the tribes: the decline of individualism in mass society. trans. sage publications. new york: sage publications. <https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446222133> maffesoli, michel. 1992 [1986]. the shadow of dionysus: a contribution to the sociology of the orgy. trans. cindy linse and mary kristina palmquist. new york: state university of new york press. nietzsche, friedrich. 2008 [1872]. the birth of tragedy. trans. douglas smith. oxford: oxford university press. rapp, tobias. 2010. lost and sound: berlin, techno and the easyjet set. berlin: innervisions. schulz, jorinde and jörg kilian. 2018. die clubmaschine: berghain. hamburg: textem verlag. schwanhäusser, anja. 2010. kosmonauten des underground: ethnografie einer berliner szene. frankfurt and new york: campus verlag. sicko, dan. 1999. techno rebels: the renegades of electronic funk. detroit: wayne state university press. soule, bastien. 2007. “observation participante ou participation observante? usages et justifications de la notion de participation observante en sciences sociales”. in recherches qualitatives vol.27(1). <https://doi.org/10.7202/1085359ar> statista research department. “verteilung der bevölkerung in deutschland nach altersgruppen und beruflichem bildungsabschluss im jahr 2023”. march 2024. <https://de.statista.com/ statistik/daten/studie/197265/umfrage/beruflicher-bildungsstand-derbevoelkerung-ingermany>, (accessed 6 october 2024). yekaterynin, stanislav. “berghain klubnacht boycott”. 15 september 2019. <https://www.facebook.com/events/398251287502767>, (accessed 6 october 2024). filmography lang, fritz. 1927. metropolis. ufa: germany. <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017136/> https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-13660-4 https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446222133 https://doi.org/10.7202/1085359ar https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/197265/umfrage/beruflicher-bildungsstand-derbevoelkerung-in-germany https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/197265/umfrage/beruflicher-bildungsstand-derbevoelkerung-in-germany https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/197265/umfrage/beruflicher-bildungsstand-derbevoelkerung-in-germany https://www.facebook.com/events/398251287502767 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017136/ foraging places and spaces through dance: the mycelium-like spaces of post-1989 berlin affording its ongoing club culture phoebe janssen university of amsterdam (netherlands) <http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.10> spore germination—the right conditions for a mycelium to emerge sheltered from direct light, mycelium waits for its time and much like a dancer it flourishes in the hidden and humid spaces, far from sterile and bright environments. what seems like a dystopian habitat at first can become a source of life for those seeking collaborative approaches to restructuring and resilience in times of drastic change and deterioration. the year 1989 saw the introduction of a new sense of precariousness due to the imminent collapse of the known polarised world order. if a century of exhilarating globalised warfare had not already been enough destabilisation for the world, then the last decade of the 20th century manifested the instability in a grand manner. despite all this, the 90s are a pinnacle of hope in popular cultural memory. they offered a glimpse of the promised progress settling in, a glimpse of resurgence from the ruins of the recent active and passive wars. the sensation of resurgence always strikes me in autumn. with every end of summer, i dread colder days. that is, until the first mushrooms fruit. they act as a reminder of all the possibilities outside of summery bliss. whenever i read about mushrooms and mycelium, i am in awe of their resilience, their determination to endure and keep popping up in seemingly hostile spaces. in her 2015 book, the mushroom at the end of the world, anna lowenhaupt tsing gracefully describes the life of the matsutake mushroom which thrives in places ridden by human intervention or even destruction. she stresses the collaborative survival and entanglement of all—but especially this—species of mushroom. the place i grew up in, and its cultural rebirth after a trouble-ridden 20th century parallels the growing cycles of mycelia and its spores and mushrooms. this place is berlin, germany. like many other capitals, berlin has a rich history in cultural and architectural expressions. it is uniquely characterised by its drastic changes due to the bombings of world war ii, the following divide of the city and its delayed reconstruction. a chance to return to the status of the metropolis it used to be seemed to have been missed, but berlin nonetheless reinvented itself in the past three decades. it was one of the first places to become a hub of electronic dance music outside of the english-speaking world, and it would only be fair to assume that in a reunited city these idiomatic clubs would also be spread across its entirety. when you search for clubs in germany’s capital, however, most points on the map will be located to the east and around the river spree, dividing the city diagonally.  colonisation: mycelium growing and spreading after the fall of the wall, berlin functioned as a new, fertile breeding ground for dreams of the people of the east and west, as well as aficionados of new electronic sounds. the 1990s were overwhelming for the city. the fluctuating composition of people, cultural events, locations and perceptions thereof, alongside the many buildings and areas waiting (if not begging) for resignification, offered a previously unseen multitude of potential for abandoned, previously state-owned buildings and newly accessible land that had been locked away in the border zones. initially, the local history was renegotiated by leaving some state-owned buildings from the german democratic republic (gdr) untouched, while others were replaced with prussian-style buildings they had once replaced themselves, or with entirely new spaces. the unified berlin constructed its mycelium in the spaces of contemporary europe as a descendant of the prussian empire and as a post-soviet space, but most notably as a city of possibilities. entangled through their shared precarious survival, these different social subsets collaboratively explored avenues and venues others might have shied away from. the city still has a lot of so-called wastelands that the government and private investors have yet to touch. this large amount of potential grew into a bubble, only to burst mid-decade. nonetheless, the underlying network of dancers and party organisers remained intact below the surface, simply waiting for their time to fruit again. reminiscent of this burst, berlin’s perceived, imagined and lived identity as a capital, as a cultural metropolis and as a european city still invites new spaces to pop up amongst the mélange of architecture. creatives and their communities have been and still are using this intertwined and seemingly everlasting potential to let their ideas fruit like mushrooms across the old border zone and in previously state-owned territories. the ongoing reconstruction and resignification continue to underline the symbolic reproduction of culture in the urban landscape. whilst there are many interpretations and uses of space across berlin, the ones that keep fruiting are clubs. the temporary escape, the exuberant self, collective expression and the inorganic sounds continue to echo amongst the concrete and bricks alike. key to this process is what tsing calls “contamination”. new collaborations amongst mycelia or humans can only fruit when they are contaminated with something or someone new. contamination introduces the new and, in consequence, diversifies the space which unfortunately does not always make it more resilient for the future (tsing 2015: 29, 43). it is a collaborative effort to (de)stabilise spaces that are characterised by the seasonality with which people come and go; places are available and evaporate. collectively they aim, intentionally and unintentionally, to strengthen the clubbing mycelium and cross-contaminate spaces and people to ensure there will be dancing, sporing, growing, fruiting. fruiting: mushrooms growing under the deliberately vague waiver of “temporary use”, the city’s senate granted permission to almost anything in the mid-90s. the sheer amount of places that were ready to germinate and transform into something new is still unique in comparison to other european cities. the city’s policymakers have turned to capitalise on this. as a result, the wastelands and their temporary uses take on a central role in the marketing of the city as a free and creative hub nowadays. berlin certainly experienced physical gentrification, but the symbolism is of high relevance there too. the symbolic rebirth as a creative city established berlin as a returning player amongst the big cities of europe more than the physical reconstruction of the cityscape could have. this type of appropriation logically leads to frustrations and conflicts in the various scenes making use of voided spaces. creators and users of temporary spaces, landowners, policymakers and potential investors are in a continuous interplay and negotiation about the spaces in berlin causing old ones to be scrapped or redesigned while new ones pop up regularly. in contrast to other economically devastated cities across the globe, in berlin the empowerment of the users and creators of these spaces is much greater. it results in a preserved instability, akin to seasons of rain and draught, that enables the constant production of new cultural capital relying on berlin's wastelands. if all physical space was to be exhausted, the social self-perception of berlin would crumble too. if all clubs and other creative spaces were to be permanent, one could argue that their innovative feel might get lost. it seems to be that club culture has to fruit like mushrooms in autumn before decomposing and leaving nothing but inspiration and the invisible mycelium of dancers behind, waiting keenly for a new season and new scenery of sporulation. sporulation: getting carried away by the beat but if the club is gone and the new one is not yet extant, then where do the dancers go? they create a new space themselves. the first techno party in east berlin was tekknozid. it was organised in an old sed (political party ruling the gdr) sponsored youth centre before it moved to the haus junger talente in the klosterstraße, which is located in the historic centre of the city (denk and von thülen 2012: 98). the connotations of these types of spaces and the euphoria attached to the socio-political momentum of 1989 equally contributed to the establishment of the new music’s spaces. by reclaiming these politically charged locations, clubbers collectively not only resignified the physical space but also acknowledged its affordances and potential future. the newly created dancing spaces resided alongside the previously established subcultural and german-german spaces. in march of 1990, tacheles was founded in mitte. the geographical location was a wasteland without governmental or private investor interests. initially it was squatted for housing purposes, but it later became the first club in the east (denk and von thülen 2012: 103). in contrast to west berlin, there was very little commercial pressure in the east because of the high number of empty courtyards, industrial plants and wastelands left from world war ii and the gdr’s properties. another pioneering club was e-werk, a former power substation that remained connected to the electricity network for years. with no neighbours, and near the famous border control checkpoint charlie in kreuzberg, it was an ideal location for extensive noisy club nights (denk and von thülen 2012: 106ff). dancers of east, west and everywhere used the various types of architecture appropriated by their newly found peers to cope with the new sound coming from the anglophone world, as well as the new social constellations of the city and, by proxy, country. neither side nor the previously existing (musical) scenes had settled in these border locations. their shared indeterminacy might have frightened some, but as tsing argues throughout her piece, it is precisely the precarity and the unknown that creates new life. resurgence after an event of destruction is one of mycelium’s core qualities; when what is above the ground is seemingly lost, the underground network can regroup and regrow once the timing and environment is right again (tsing 2015: 20, 181f, 278). berlin’s clubs are no different. without glorifying the short life spans of some clubs or the financial instability some owners or promoters face(d) due to this, clubs provided (and still do so to this day) a sense of newness and neutrality and enabled dancers to collectively get carried away by the beat. figure 1: clubs in east and west berlin seasonality of mycelium every clubber has their favourite club, decided through a process of foraging nightand daytime experiences, musical meanderings and many other personal factors. though these clubs differ in their resident djs and signature sounds, chances are that they will be in the same spots on the map. there is a word for berlin’s clubbing mycelium in german: clubmeile. it refers to a metaphorical line along which the majority of berlin’s clubs are located. the map above highlights, in black, the former wall and with red x’s the location of some randomly selected clubs. today, the northern end, near alexanderplatz, is marked by weekend, a club on the top three floors of a former gdr construction: the haus des reisens. less than a kilometre further down, along the metro lines, there is the golden gate club. walfisch and boogaloo used to be around there too. next to the metro stop heinrich-heine-strasse lie sage, kitkat and the new location of tresor. across the water nearby, legendary bar25—a now-closed heterotopia-like place—was hidden behind an innocent-seeming wooden fence. on the same territory as bar 25, there is now kater blau (rapp 2009: 28f). walking towards the ostbahnhof station in the east, the imposing building of berghain and the panorama bar awaits. from there, back to the water, one passes cassiopeia, suicide circus and behind the oberbaumbrücke watergate and club der visionäre. having crossed the water, but still following the river to the east, there are arena, ost, the salon zur wilden renate, else, ms hoppetosse and previously also the magdalena. on the other side of the water, near ostkreuz train station are salon zur wilden renate and ://aboutblank, and further down in rummelsburg, sisyphos. the list goes on and changes from year to year with expiring licensing and new clubs exchanging hands and spaces. across the three neighbourhoods of mitte, kreuzberg and friedrichshain, nearly all of berlin's clubs reside within reasonable walking distance (rapp 2009: 31). their proximity enables clubbers to continue dancing until, and sometimes beyond, their physical exhaustion. there are clubs elsewhere in the city, of course, but their numbers and life spans are (even more) limited. the architecture and urban (re)design of the border zone uniquely affords space for dancers from here, there and everywhere to come together. when mycelia meet, they do not fight each other, they grow closer and merge. the social norms of different subcultures present in clubs each created and still create their own space within the same buildings. where queers preside different rules apply than on other nights and similarly with local versus tourist-dominated spots. the former border and with it the urban remnants of the gdr’s socialist infrastructure afforded ostensibly endless opportunities for club culture enthusiasts in the early 1990s and does so today. although there are many other cultural institutions and hotspots near the border strip, the clustering of clubs is most notable. it is their synthesis and use of architecture that resignified the majority of the border strip and offered a new, shared ground for encounters and collective space exploration through dance. to this day, the city’s clubs employ the mycelium that was germinated by the euphoria of the 90s. they tap into the moment of germination with every club opening and, arguably, with every night danced through anew. when summer comes and most dancers venture to the festival fields and holiday destinations, their spores fly elsewhere only to return with autumn’s rain. the mycelia of east, west, queers, tourists and club cultures merged in the city and its many empty spaces to grow into a variety of mushrooms, waiting to be picked by keen foragers from berlin and elsewhere then and now. author biography berlin-born but currently based between amsterdam and naarm/melbourne, phoebe max alice janssen is a cultural musicologist and visual anthropologist researching environmental and cultural sustainability in city spaces. they employ an interdisciplinary lens rooted in social and urban anthropology, sociology and the critical humanities. references denk, felix and sven von thülen. 2012. der klang der familie: berlin, techno und die wende. berlin: suhrkamp. lowenhaupt tsing, anna. 2015. the mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. princeton: princeton university press. rapp, tobias. 2009. lost and sound: berlin, techno and the easyjet set. berlin: suhrkamp. dancecult 14(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 14(1) 2022: 76–93 issn 1947-5403 ©2022 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net do you remember house? chicago’s queer of colour undergrounds micah e. salkind oxford: oxford university press, 2018 isbn: 9780190698416 (hardcover) rrp: £79 (hardcover) fabulous: the rise of the beautiful eccentric maddison moore yale: yale university press, 2018 isbn: 9780300204704 (hardcover) rrp: us$19.95 (hardcover) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.11> jacob mallinson bird university of oxford (uk) in do you remember house? chicago’s queer of colour undergrounds and fabulous: the rise of the beautiful eccentric, micah salkind and madison moore each outline a sensitive history of what it means to carve one’s own place in the world. whether embodying a fabulousness to counteract both the mundanity of everyday life and also systems of white supremacy and queerphobia, or creating a musical movement to empower queers of colour in a vast matrix of intergenerational connection, these authors chart historical and contemporaneous examples of queer tenacity, creativity and vibrancy. moore offers a history of “fabulousness”, from effete, flâneur dandies to voguing superstars, with constant recourse to the fashion, music, dance and performance cultures that make up a fabulous ideal; and salkind offers a history of chicago’s house scene, from its disco origins to present day, always shedding light on the ways in which queers of colour propelled this now global music. centring on mutual themes of race, queerness, temporality, glamour/fabulousness, space and, importantly, work/werk, moore and salkind depict the bittersweet utopia that fabulous embodiment can bring. both authors employ a poignant methodology, weaving at times complex theorising with oral histories, interviews, historical writing and autoethnographic vignettes. where moore’s theory of fabulousness emerges consistently across fabulous, dipping in and out reviews reviews 77 of historical context, contemporary interview and personal reverie, salkind’s text more forcefully demarcates its theoretical drive, and moves from a linear history of house music in its first part to contemporary autoethnographic work in the second. what is most impressive in salkind’s text are the ways in which they allow the music to begin their theorisations: whether the participatory discrepancies of the groove of house music leading to a theorisation of delayed pleasure, the non-teleological drive of the music reflecting intergenerational memory, or the remixed and sampled tracks offering a repertoire in motion being emblematic of shifting histories, salkind’s musico-social theory is enlightening throughout. the joy in both moore and salkind, though, is that the subject matter is clearly inextricably personal: salkind’s opening excitement of sneaking out as a 16-year-old to go to deep fix’s “where the wild things are” rave continues throughout the book, and reading moore’s work clearly signals an inalienable intimacy with the subject matter: the places, the people, the music, the dance, the clothing, namely the sheer fabulousness of queer, eccentric life. the temporality of such experiences is vitally important throughout each text and sits interestingly alongside current queer approaches. in conversation with queer theorists like jack halberstam (2005) and josé esteban muñoz (2009), whose theories of queer time are well known — as sitting outside of a heteronormative system, and of existing in an over-therainbow “not yet here” — moore and salkind add interesting new dimensions. for moore, while clearly agreeing that queer utopia is not yet here, as muñoz would have it, they also remind us of the intensely present aspect of queerness, and of fabulousness. they write: “fabulous queer utopia is about living in the present but carrying an alternative possibility, a certain future, and yanking it into the here and now” (71), elsewhere stating that “fierceness, fabulousness, and all other visions of spectacular appearance are about imagining space and carving it out for yourself in the here and now, not waiting for the right time to do so” (109). while muñoz and halberstam certainly argue for the making-present of queer utopia, notable in the liminal space of the nightclub, moore’s more quotidian fabulousness — dressing iconically down the street etc. — makes liminal de facto heteronormative space, affecting straight time and space, and rightly so. moore is also attendant to, following carolyn dinshaw’s work, the importance of “queer histories” and how they create “affective relations” between past and present (71). this is a key point for salkind, who consistently makes reference to the intergenerational power and impetus of house music. writing of “ancestral affiliations” (135) and the “intergenerational, cross-cultural mentorship” (176) that is so vital to house music’s growth, salkind spends considerable time on a crucial concept: neostalgia. neostalgia, the desire for a connection to the past that one may never have had personally to begin with, resonates beyond house music and to all queer experience. those of us who never lived through, say, the genesis of house, the ballroom scene, the aids pandemic, or the like, still feel that connection, a connection that is made manifest every time, for moore, we dress fabulously, or, for salkind, we lose ourselves in the music.1 salkind writes beautifully of the heady mixture of past and present in these experiences: the unctuous affectivity of bodies, sound, time and place is felt throughout their work. dancecult 14(1)78 the joys that come with fabulousness and house music aren’t without their struggles, though, and the labour of queer people and queers of colour is foregrounded throughout. moore’s analysis playfully riffs off a ludic linguistics of “work” versus “werk”, where “werk!”, the queer affirmation yelled at balls and drag bars (and sometimes even street corners), “is a type of aesthetic labour actually seen on the body, and it highlights the effort that goes into making memorable aesthetic moments that happen” (27). creating a look is work, and that work, to extend carol hanisch (1969), is always political. alok vaid-menon, trans non-binary activist and social media star, says in interview with moore: “what keeps me going is there’s a long tradition of people doing this work, and it is work. it’s not just getting ready. it’s actual, political work. it’s strategy, it’s planning, it’s pr, it’s how we talk about it. every walk i make is already a [protest] march” (51). and they are certainly right: to live fabulously is political, and to sashay down the street is a political act. this work, salkind contends, is as much political as it is academic, writing that “queer people of colour are always already theorising, even before a scholar enters the club” (16). this is politics, theoria and praxis, in action, a symbiotically lived politic that effuses these texts. what is most bittersweet, and expressed by both authors, is how often this work goes unnoticed or, worse, stolen. here the double-turn of queer fabulousness, in all its forms, emerges. “you can’t understand fabulousness unless you get that it emerges from trauma, duress, exclusion, exhaustion and depression, and that in some ways being fabulous is the only thing that can get us out of bed in the morning”, moore writes (21). it isn’t a halcyon, rose-tinted joie de vivre, but the only possible way of living. add to this salkind’s poignant discussions of “generational dissonance” and the decimation of queer communities through hiv and aids, and queer joy is soon seen to be wrapped, knotted even, with queer pain. this idea resonates with other queer theories, notably and touchingly eve kosofsky sedgwick’s (2003) notion of queer shame. for sedgwick, queer shame is not a by-product of being queer, but rather it is structurally integral to queerness: we are queer because of queer shame (see also halperin and traub 2009).. in a similar vein, moore and salkind don’t offer pain and trauma as contrasting elements of queer, fabulous joy— they see them as mutually constitutive. the points the authors raise above are significantly informed by, and indeed are only intelligible in their fullness by attention to, race and racism. while queer temporality, for example, may be one thing, moore reminds their reader that “brown people have to wait for things in a way that white folks don’t necessarily have to” (164), a poignant insertion of waiting into the radical nowness-cum-futurity of queer joy. salkind, similarly, writes extensively of the erasure of queers of colour who worked/werked the cultural labour of house music, and their exclusion from the spaces that were once made for them. clubs that purported inclusivity became “profoundly discouraging for black gay men in particular” (43), an example of exclusionary door policies that are still hideously contemporary. salkind offers a measured response to such issues; speaking of clubs that actively seek to promote inclusivity of all kinds, salkind offers the term “safer”, rather than safe, spaces, foregrounding the fact that “the work of creating a safety is never done” (186). throughout reviews 79 both texts, the doubly marginalised position of queers and women of colour is brought to the fore, and adds critical dimension to the werk undertaken. subtle moves like the above perhaps render salkind’s text more acutely critical than moore’s. throughout, salkind has a measured idea of utopia, one that is constantly in progress, and one that is malleable, multifarious. while moore argues, after muñoz, for a “critical idealism … a way of living that privileges hope and possibility instead of the suffocating anti-utopian negativism that is often de rigueur (186)”, sometimes this hope can be for a potentially untenable or uncritical utopia. i am thinking, for example, of the various calls to end gender that reappear throughout the book. at first reading, these desires to end gender seem justified, an end, surely, to the gender-based violence that befalls queer people on a daily basis. considering the call further, i begin to think of certain trans friends, and the conversations we have about their gender: about how they are fighting for their gender and their right to express their gender, a gender that is so deeply important to them. for many, gender is joyful — “gender euphoria”, as it’s often called — and while gender must be opened up, its negative effects dismantled, its violence pacified, to end gender altogether would deny many people an important structuring point of their identity: certainly, people must be safe not to have a gender, and we must work to make this a reality, but we must also be attentive to those for whom gender is critical. moore shows elsewhere that they are seemingly aware of this when they state for example that “not every queer person is a fabulous eccentric, not every queer person should be” (85). here the difficulties of utopian thinking arise; if queerness is undefinable multiplicity, surely utopia is also. importantly, moore consciously and effectively dismisses what one could imagine being a prevalent conservative or normative critique (and one that gets woefully bandied around the british press…): that fabulousness and the like is somehow frivolous, unimportant, or even selfishly narcissistic. to this moore argues that, rather than flippant dressing, “our real selves [are] the ones wearing make-up and high heels” (45), an aesthetics of self that echoes my favourite foucault quotation: “from the idea that the self is not given to us, i think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art” (foucault 1991: 351). parrying superficiality—in its negative affect—moore adds that “we care about surfaces” (45) and the body, reminiscent of important aspects of butlerian gender theory and spectrally unpicking a cartesian dualism. in other words, embodied, performative identity isn’t an afterthought, it’s the real deal. this is certainly present in salkind’s work also: for the djs and performers at queen!, dressing and makeup aren’t optional, but utterly integral. what is perhaps most special about these texts, and what captivates so much, is a kind of queer reading that they encourage, and how their subject matters, historical and contemporary, reverberate with their readers. reading both of these works, i felt—as i am sure many queer people will—the neostalgia of so many culture-shifting moments, the empathy and kinship of the joys and traumas of queer life, and my own memories of losing myself and finding myself in the sweaty underbellies of queer nightclubs. the texts mutually create a living archive of queer fabulousness; one that is very much needed, and one that sheds a light on the creative labour of communities too often overlooked. dancecult 14(1)80 notes 1 for interesting discussions of a different sort of neostalgia and desire for connection with queer past, see halperin 2007. references foucault, michel. 1991. “on the genealogy of ethics: an overview of work in progress”. in the foucault reader, ed. paul rabinow, 343-364. london: penguin books. halberstam, jack. 2005. in a queer time and place: transgender bodies, subcultural lives. new york: new york university press. halperin, david. 2007. what do gay men want? an essay on sex, risk, and subjectivity. michigan: the university of michigan press. halperin, david and valerie traub, ed. 2009. gay shame. chicago: university of chicago press. hanisch, carol. “the personal is political”. february 1969. <https://www.carolhanisch.org/chwritings/pip.html>, (accessed 8.10.22). muñoz, josé esteban. 2009. cruising utopia: the then and there of queer futurity. new york: new york university press. sedgwick, eve kosofsky. 2003. touching feeling: affect, pedagogy, performativity. durham: duke university press. https://www.carolhanisch.org/chwritings/pip.html reviews 81 the boy from medellín dir. matthew heineman usa: amazon original, 2020 <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13009186/> <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.12> ana maría díaz pinto university of california, davis (us) juan diego díaz university of california, davis (us) directed by academy award-nominated and emmy award-winning filmmaker matthew heineman, the boy from medellín (2020), portrays a week in the life of colombian reggaetón artist josé osorio balvin—better known by his stage name j balvin—in advance of the culminating concert of his colores 2019 tour in his hometown of medellín. although this is heineman’s first music-themed documentary, it is not his first biographical film tackling complex social issues in latin america, as cartel land (2015) attests. the boy from medellin, joins a catalogue of biographical documentary films portraying the tensions between public and private life of popular musicians such as jay-z (fade to the back, 2004), george harrison (living in the material world, 2011), residente (residente, 2017), anitta (vai anitta, 2018), taylor swift (miss americana, 2020), and billie eilish (billie eilish: the world’s a little blurry, 2021). as is often the case in these documentaries, heineman engages many complex aspects of j balvin’s life and work, of which we will focus on two: the development of the reggaetón scene in medellín, centering balvin’s position within it; and the negotiation between balvin’s public and private personas. from this second topic, we will elaborate on the artist’s engagement with the political realities he encountered in colombia, the role of social media in shaping relationships between artists and audiences, mental health issues, and the “return to the hood” and overcoming topoi. as in other latin american countries, reggaetón arrived in colombia through piracy and the exchange of cassettes and discs within the rap and dembow community in the late 1990s and early 2000s (navarro 2019). programing mostly puerto rican reggaetón at the beginning, radio stations and figures such as el gurú del sabor (fernando londoño) were crucial in disseminating and popularizing the genre within the country, paving the way for the emergence a local scene in medellín, which is now recognized as a reggaetón powerhouse (garcía 2013). it is within this scene that josé, as j balvin chose to call himself in this initial period, and other youths from medellín began to incursion into reggaetón composition and singing. with josé and groups such as 3 pesos and golpe a golpe, the medellín scene gradually grew, reaching international visibility for its high professional productions when a group of artists created the recording label palma productions in the https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13009186/ dancecult 14(1)82 early 2000s. one of the first goals of these artists was creating a sound and aesthetics distinct from its caribbean counterpart. they accomplished that by using romantic lyrics, melodic lyricism with influences from anglo-american pop, and chord progressions with inversions and extensions emulating the harmonic colors of jazz (franco 2018). if the puerto rican reggaetón of the first wave (i.e., from the early 2000s until 2010) was characterized by a robust percussive texture similar to that of dancehall, in combination with synthesizers playing the harmonic sequence i–vi–v, the colombian reggaetón of those days used more chordal variety, as we can hear in “obra de arte” an iconic reggaetón by fainal & shako, famously performed by balvin, that features the harmonic progression i7–iv7–vi7–v7. the first part of the documentary features a young j balvin consolidating his career as a reggaetón artist in medellín through dogged work. this narrative of struggle and selfimprovement is consistent with a hip-hop street aesthetics that centers and idealizes the artist’s humble origins. although reggaetón lyrics in the early stages in colombia featured the typical puerto rican malianteo and fronteo (i.e., texts based on crudeness, confrontation and hyper-masculinity), artists such as j balvin and later maluma, contributed to develop a distinct colombian approach called romantiqueo, or use of romantic lyrics. the documentary features various pieces in this tradition such as “ay vamos,” “en mi,” and “obra de arte,” which can be contrasted with the confrontational style that characterized early colombian productions such a “tiradera pa’l guru,” a piece first performed in 2003 by a collective of reggaetón artists called colombian flow.1 the main theme and source of tension in the film is balvin’s dilemma: one the one hand he has come to his home city to reconnect with his family, friends and fans, to visit the neighborhood where he grew up, and to perform what he called “the most important concert of his career” in medellín’s largest venue (a local football stadium). on the other, the volatile social situation in colombia, perceived by many as the result of president iván duque’s neoliberal policies, created the expectation among many of his fans that j balvin and other high-profile artists should intervene either by voicing criticism against the government or calling for the end to violence in the streets. initially balvin resists getting involved because he believes that artists are not to engage in politics, but through multiple interactions with producers, family members and fellow artists, he changes his mind. yet many thought his intervention (a call to the government to listen to the youth and to end violence in the streets during his final concert) was both late and lukewarm. while dealing with this conflict, various contradictions are revealed. balvin, who is shown arriving in medellín in his private jet, driving luxurious cars and living in a mansion with an army of servers (practically all women in the film are either balvin’s fans or part of his supporting team), tries to connect with people from poor neighborhoods by walking down the streets, shaking hands and taking selfies with them. it is no wonder that he struggled to connect with “the hood.” the neighborhood where he grew up, the humble origins that lend him authenticity within reggaetón discourse, is only visited, not inhabited. colombian society seems incomprehensible for him. reviews 83 balvin’s reluctance to speak up in the middle of colombia’s political upheaval is, nonetheless, atypical among fellow latin american reggaetón artists who are known for their ongoing political engagement within their communities. during the wave of youthled political and social revolts that swept colombia and other latin american countries at the end of 2019, many reggaetón musicians responded to their fans’ call for action. in puerto rico, for instance, the demands were directed against governor ricardo rosselló (incidentally, son of former governor pedro rosselló, who persecuted and banned the underground musicians who eventually developed reggaetón on the island during the mid-1990s), accused of corruption and homophobia. reggaetón artists such as bad bunny, ñengo flow, daddy yankee and residente marched in the streets along with thousands of protestors. likewise, in chile, the revolt against president sebastián piñera’s neoliberal agenda was supported by chilean and puerto rican reggaetón artists such as pablo chill-e, lizz, don omar, zion, nicky jam and others. surely balvin’s inaction in the context of this tradition of reggaetón political activism in latin america confused his colombian audiences and intensified their criticism of his silence. of course, balvin and other reggaetón artists are not the first popular musicians to have experienced pressure from their audiences to take political stances at critical junctures. ingrid monson (2007), for instance, documented the case of many black jazz musicians during the african american civil rights and black power movements in the us in the 1960s and 1970s, who felt morally pressured to take political action. philip auslander’s (2004 and 2006) tri-partite concept of musical personae, which includes the real person, the musical person, and the character (in songs, for example), is useful to understand the complex interaction of public and private aspects of the life these performers. in heineman’s documentary, balvin appears as a professional and well-established musician ( j balvin) with a fragile real human behind the scenes ( josé). his musical personae is that of a dreamer cangri (influential person in reggaetón slang), enriched by the nuances from the fictional characters described or alluded to in his songs. for instance, in introspective scenes, we hear songs like “7 de mayo” whose lyrics reinforce the image of a sensitive man who acknowledges his humble origins and is committed to supporting up and coming artists. other characters in balvin’s songs, not shown in the documentary, include the promiscuous macho, explicit in “si tu novio te deja sola” and “mojaita.” heineman addresses the artist’s inner complexity by including extended sections of j balvin’s concerts, images of josé with his spiritual guide and medical team, and scenes of balvin incarnating the cangri character, for example when he receives phone messages from artists such as will.i.am prior to his concert. while these three aspects of his musical personae are identifiable at different points of the film, it is difficult to draw clean boundaries among them. at the climax of the final concert and its aftermath, the narrative of the sensitive, crisis-ridden, conflicted artist gives way to a larger story of overcoming. one prominent aspect that amplifies balvin’s conflict is social media communication. with the advent of social media platforms such as twitter, tiktok and instagram, many fans have now the opportunity to interact with their favorite musicians and with fellow dancecult 14(1)84 fans. with artists constantly posting both professional and personal information, these platforms have created a sense of closeness between musicians and audiences that did not exist before when interactions where limited to live concerts or reading/watching the news and thus more purely parasocial. artists have recognized that this virtual closeness is beneficial to promote their careers and to understand their fans’ desires. one aspect of this perceived closeness is that many audiences feel that artists are part of their communities and thus should be sensitive and committed to their causes and tribulations. this issue is explicitly portrayed in the documentary. it is through social media that j balvin learns about the reactions of his fans to the strikes in medellín and to the assassination of young student dylan cruz by the colombian police. more importantly, he reads and hears their louder and louder calls for him to intervene through these platforms. at a dramatic point he takes the bold decision of meeting one of his critics (local rapper mañas ru-fino), all arranged through social media. we’ll let readers watch the documentary to learn how two contemporary musicians from the same city negotiate their opposing views on the artist’s commitment to social justice. in a vivid manner, the boy from medellín, thus engages the real challenges that artists face now that social media functions as a public forum. the narrative of j balvin’s “return to the hood” proposed in this documentary is therefore problematic but should not be judged as insensitive or trivializing. the complex political situation that j balvin encountered in colombia, intensified by social media activity, and expectations of political involvement on his part, had a real toll on josé’s mental health. the efforts that he and his team made to deal with the conflict and to put on a successful performance were enormous. his intentions to connect with the people he grew up with seem genuine on the screen despite his understandable distance from their daily experience and his detached attitude. the “return to the hood” and overcoming narratives served heineman to weave these threads of balvin’s experience into the fabric of his musical personae. at the same time, the two narratives cemented balvin’s position as a politically outspoken latin american reggaetón artist: at the concert, which represents the overcoming, balvin joins fellow reggaetón musicians from the region in voicing his concern for social justice. in the end, the relationship between balvin and his audience is simultaneously strained and reinforced. the singer uses the streets of medellín as an extension of the scenic space, but those streets are no longer known in depth; the city may have been his place of humble origins but is now only partially accessible from his position of fame. the boy from medellín is therefore an obligatory watch for those interested in reggaetón culture, its aesthetics, politics, narratives, dynamics of local production and popularization, the struggles of the real person behind the artist, the blurred boundaries that social media creates between audiences and artists, and the development of reggaetón scenes in latin american cities in general, and in medellín in particular. the five-episode tv documentary series flow importado, ritmo pegado (2018), which documents the rise to fame of key reggaetón figures from medellín, including j balvin himself, offers important historical context to heineman’s film. although the boy from medellin stands on its own, readers will gain a deeper understanding of the stories of j balvin and the other reggaetón artists reviews 85 shown in the film as well as their audiences’ passion for the genre, from watching the tv series beforehand. the boy from medellín will not disappoint even those purely interested in reggaetón aesthetics; the director devoted about ten minutes to the final concert, a fortunate decision that allows us to appreciate balvin’s artistic craft in all its splendor. notes 1 this performance of “tiradera pa’l gurú” can be watched here: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yotgsfifqo0>. references auslander, philip. 2004. “performance analysis and popular music: a manifesto”. contemporary theater review 14(1): 1-13. auslander, philip. 2006. “musical personae”. the drama review 50(1): 100-119. garcía, julio. 2013. “del tango al reggaetón: medellín, capital de los contrastes musicales.” bbc news mundo , 17 october. <https://www.bbc.com/mundo/ noticias/2013/11/131017_cultura_medellin_capital_musical_colombia_jgc>. monson, ingrid. 2007. freedom sounds: civil rights call out to jazz and africa. oxford: oxford university press. navarro, fernando. 2019. “medellín, la fábrica del reggaetón”. el país, 30 november. <https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/11/26/eps/1574784498_877729.html>. filmography franco, andrés. 2018. flow importado, ritmo pegado. medellín: telemedellín. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yotgsfifqo0 https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias/2013/11/131017_cultura_medellin_capital_musical_colombia_jgc https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias/2013/11/131017_cultura_medellin_capital_musical_colombia_jgc https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/11/26/eps/1574784498_877729.html dancecult 14(1)86 explosions in the mind: composing psychedelic sounds and visualisations jonathan weinel singapore: palgrave macmillan, 2021 isbn: 9789811640544 (hardcover), 9789811640551 (ebook) rrp: £89.99 (hardcover), £71.50 (ebook) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.13> dave payling staffordshire university (uk) explosions in the mind (eitm) is part of the palgrave studies in sound series, exploring sonic and audio-visual themes. it is weinel’s second book, and can be read as a companion to his earlier inner sound: altered states of consciousness in electronic music and audiovisual media (weinel, 2018). inner sound explores altered states of consciousness (ascs) in audio-visual media from a theoretical perspective, and contextualises it with related work, whereas eitm focusses squarely on weinel’s own praxis, originating from his phd studies and extended to the present day. the book is richly illustrated with many full colour images and includes supplementary materials hosted online by the publisher, comprising audio and video samples and working software apps for experimenting with the techniques discussed in the book. weinel frames his work around altered states of consciousness, specifically psychedelic experiences and how they can be interpreted in sound and vision. psychedelic theories such as leary’s “seven levels of energy consciousness” (1998), are introduced, in this case explaining how it has influenced the design of surfer stem (2010); weinel’s audio composition discussed in chapter 2. with topics ranging from digital performance through to painting and direct animation techniques, an extensive range of artistic disciplines are represented. each chapter commences with personal anecdotes revealing the nature of the content ahead and are then interwoven with informative references to popular culture and recollections of weinel’s experiences. after these introductory notes there follows a detailed examination of the individual artworks themselves. as an example, cenote sagrado (2014), is one of weinel’s audio-visual compositions inspired by his visit to a ritualistic sacrifice centre, the sacred cenote in mexico. after discussing its historical significance the technical realisation of the composition itself is detailed: in this case direct animation on film stock and rhythmic hardware sound synthesis. a recurring compositional technique is also included here: the piece is structured to emulate the onset, plateau and termination phases that one might experience in a psychedelic trip, and this determines the audio-visual qualities in each section. from a dance music perspective, eitm explores some of the more niche, and often more sonically “harder”, edm genres including flashcore—a form of speedcore techno with elements of electroacoustic music—hard trance, acid techno and hardcore rave music. weinel incorporates some of these edm styles into his electroacoustic compositions, surfer reviews 87 stem using elements from dubstep for example. vaporwave is another genre weinel uses, taking a plunderphonics approach to 1980s and 1990s audio trivia sample loops to create an immersive nostalgia trip in his cyberdream (2019) virtual reality experience. these genres are generally touched on quite briefly but there is a lot of material to cover, and sound is only one component of the many multimedia productions on show here. eitm introduces weinel’s creative works chronologically with respect to their date of creation, and is sequenced to cover the categories of electroacoustic composition, real-time performance, audio-visual composition, interactive projects, vj performance and virtual reality experiences, mirroring weinel’s artistic journey. overall, it is an engaging read and will be of interest to artists, practitioners and academics from the disciplines of electronic music, creative coding, djing and vjing, composition, performance and related fields. it is highly relevant to those utilising a practise-based approach to research where this can lead to insights into methods for expanding an artist’s creative repertoire. a practise-based approach to research is continually rising in popularity across a range of creative disciplines and this volume will provide a useful reference for others to follow. the frameworks provided in the concluding chapter 8 are particularly indicative and useful in this respect. introduced here are three design frameworks, specifically: psychedelic journeys in sound, asc simulations and synaesthetic visualisations of sound, which have been formulated through practise and can be implemented by others desiring to create asc inspired artworks. the conclusion also discusses how the covid-19 pandemic has influenced the development of virtual clubs and dance events incentivising the shift to digital and online experiences, providing motivation and increased relevance for continued study. references leary, timothy. 1998. the politics of ecstasy. berkeley, california: ronin. weinel, jonathan. 2018. inner sound: altered states of consciousness in electronic music and audiovisual media. oxford, uk: oxford university press. weinel, jonathan. 2019. “cyberdream vr: visualizing rave music and vaporwave in virtual reality”. in proceedings of the 14th international audio mostly conference: a journey in sound, 277–81. new york, usa: association for computing machinery. <https://doi.org/10.1145/3356590.3356637>. discography weinel, jonathan. 2010. entoptic phenomena ep. 2010. (mp3): entopic. <https://www.discogs.com/release/2332275-jon-weinel-entoptic-phenomena-ep>. filmography weinel, jonathan. 2014. cenote sagrado. uk. <https://vimeo.com/107164661>. https://doi.org/10.1145/3356590.3356637 https://www.discogs.com/release/2332275-jon-weinel-entoptic-phenomena-ep https://vimeo.com/107164661 dancecult 14(1)88 the discourse community of electronic dance music anita jóri bielefeld: transcript verlag, 2022 isbn: 9783837657586 (paperback) rrp: $45.90 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.14> andrew whelan university of wollongong (australia) the discourse community of electronic dance music is a book about how people communicate about electronic dance music online. it is an important contribution to edmc and online interaction research for two reasons. firstly, it develops a methodological framework for engaging with how people talk about musical phenomena online, how to evaluate these “discourse communities” and what coheres them. secondly, the book therefore poses crucial, albeit largely tacit questions to the field of popular music studies broadly, and the field of edmc research in particular: how do people talk about music and what should researchers do about that, which is to say, what is their method of analysis? how is that method justified and what is scalable or portable about it? jóri’s framework is operationalised across three language domains. respectively, these are structure and meaning (e.g. insider terminology, compensatory strategies such as “likes” and emojis and identity markers such as “i” and “we”); interaction management (e.g. hierarchical dynamics in terms of frequency of contributions and extent of interaction in terms of response rates); and social phenomena (linguistic expressions of friendship and community, tokens of mutual interest etc.). as chapter one elucidates, jóri’s framework draws on susan herring’s canonical work on computer-mediated discourse analysis (2004). she directs this in pursuit of what, following john swales, she calls “discourse communities”, a heuristic analogous to “virtual scenes” (38-9), intended to capture the interpersonal networks and exchanges occurring at the research sites. these sites are: the web forums we are the music makers and gearspace (devoted to aphex twin and music production technology respectively); the facebook groups tb-303 owners club and italo disco maniacs; the “classic” websites, vintage synth explorer and resident advisor; and the blogs matrixsynth, female:pressure tumblr and little white earbuds. the second chapter contains a thorough discussion of discourse-related research methods, including corpus-based and multimodal discourse analyses and cognate approaches. reviews 89 linguistic anthropology does not get a mention, although conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis—two closely linked sociological approaches—are both discussed and incorporated. the book also draws on research on youth culture, popular music and edmc in english, german and hungarian, and is thus valuable as an interdisciplinary (and even intercultural) dialogue and a gateway to further research. although some of the discourse and method material can be technical—and here an index would have been helpful—jóri does not presuppose technical knowledge on the reader’s part, and most technical matters are explained in accessible prose. one consequential term that is not defined at the point of its introduction though is “genre”. first appearing in the literature review, and germane to the discussion of “community” as a discursive phenomenon, “genre” can be confusing to those unfamiliar with its application in linguistics (perhaps especially for readers anticipating the musical use of that term). genre is formulated here as an event e.g., a news report, or a presidential press conference (75). another term, upon which the project is predicated, is “community” (71-73). the book raises important questions about what an online social group is and how to measure it through its language use, not all of which it sets out to address. the term “community” is not problematised. this isn’t necessarily a shortcoming: “community” sometimes functions as a sort of placeholder, indexing empirically observable phenomena. the book is agnostic on the content of “community” or what it might entail politically (with the important caveat that jóri is direct about the gendered language use in her data, and about the broader exclusionary patterns in edmc). but jóri still has to develop tools to assess the extent and content, as it were, of group cohesion. one way of doing this is by reference to the use of “we” as an indicator of community (119, 125, 137, 147). the assumptions underlying the idea that “we” would stand in this way are not explicated. one can imagine situations where there is community sentiment, but people do not use “we”, and the converse, where “we” is abused by powerful figures seeking to impose the appearance of consensus. ultimately (and going by her account of the data, rightly), jóri determines “we” is of limited efficacy as an indicator and suggests it be abandoned (174). what are the implications of this? is it telling us something about collective identity, or is it telling us something about communication? if the latter, is it about mediation, or is it about communicative strategy? jóri does not speculate on these questions, but they help to show how, by engaging so thoroughly with online data, she pushes the parameters of cmda and similar corpus-oriented approaches as far as they will go. one important aspect of the book is how it works across different online platforms: forums, blogs and so on, each with distinct affordances. as jóri acknowledges, there is a relationship between platform design and community structure. for example, some of the limited interaction on the matrixsynth blog, despite its popularity, may be attributable to the matrixsynth closed facebook group (164). “community”, such as could be discerned by use of “we”, might therefore not map neatly onto a corpus assembled at a single site, because gertrude stein’s adage, “there is no there there” (1937: 17), still applies to the internet. dancecult 14(1)90 those who are present are always also in at least one other place. this does not undermine the analysis, but it does invite methodological reflection about scope, site and corpus. any analysis will have self-defined limits. as jóri shows, the strength of a corpus approach itself requires sensitivity in a context of platform porosity. the classification scheme jóri applies provides a picture of the shape of the relationships inside the group and how they are conducted. it can be used to measure the scale, frequency and intensity (the “temperature”) of social interaction. this enables comparative work, but it also means that the local ethnographic flavour comes from (naturally occurring) terminology, rather than multi-turn sequences evidencing how participants negotiate meaning and their respective positions. for example, in the analysis of the italo disco facebook group, jóri lists some of the adjectives used to describe italo tracks, including “bomb, very hot, very sophisticated, obscure girl of italo, superfluous, cheap, wonderful, great, hot girl of italo, such a beauty, bumped up, awesome crasher, nice, lovely, extremely rare, beautiful” (154). the lingua franca is presumably english, though jóri points out that familiarity with the italian language is regarded positively within the group. the gender politics of these adjectives are evident. jóri suggests that “bomb” is so gendered, and though we know (from tom jones) that there can be a “sexbomb”, i am not sure about this: bomba in italian seems more along the lines of “sensational”. local context matters. the same connotation to “bomb” would not extend—to me at least—to say, rage against the machine’s “bombtrack”, or the radio bomb drum ‘n’ bass project, where we might instead say “bomb” signifies fantasies of hypermasculinity. jóri attributes this gendered use of language to the historical conjuncture in which italo disco rose to prominence, along with the majority male participants in the group. this book—and the forms of analysis which jóri conducts so adroitly in it—is most compelling where it touches on much bigger and broader preoccupations in contemporary sociocultural research. the historical backdrop of italo and contemporary language use around it are one example of this; that is, that the milieu in which italo disco emerged continues to influence how italo is described. another important context, raised several times in the book, is that of nostalgia (131, 152, 156). articulating local language practices to much broader cultural concerns both validates the methodology and serves to pinpoint the cultural phenomena so identified. this becomes riveting at the points where music appears to shape language use, as when jóri observes regarding italo disco that [t]he characteristics of the music genre—expresses romanticism, emotions, affections, and sexuality—highly influenced the characteristics of the discourse … the group’s language use … showed an interesting tendency of ‘emotionally driven’ discourse (161). we cannot know from the data, and jóri does not conjecture on what mechanisms might “shift” emotional registers from music to discourse about it. nonetheless, this discussion of the interplay between language use and music—or the nature of multimodal interaction—is reviews 91 deeply significant, and resonates with a lot of preoccupations in the literature about popular music, and perhaps especially about edmc given its sometimes tangential orientation to lyrical meaning. similarly, the perennial questions about method and how to access, or how people report on, musical experiences are cast in fresh light by the work jóri conducts here. jóri’s book commands attention because of how it generates these kinds of insights, especially relative to more established music research methods (music criticism, interviews, fieldwork etc.). the discourse community of electronic dance music is methodologically rigorous, rich in empirical detail and speaks to much bigger debates in the scholarship on popular music and edmc. references herring, susan c. 2004. “computer-mediated discourse analysis: an approach to researching online behavior.” in designing for virtual communities in the service of learning, ed. sasha barab, rob kling and james h. gray, 338–376. cambridge: cambridge university press. <https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511805080.016>. stein, gertrude. 1937. everybody’s autobiography. new york, random house. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511805080.016 dancecult 14(1)92 dancefloor-driven literature: the rave scene in fiction simon a. morrison london: bloomsbury, 2021 isbn: 9781501389924 (paperback) rrp: £28.99 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2022.14.01.15> toby young guildhall school of music and drama (uk) as reviews editor of dancecult, one of the delights of my role has been discovering the wealth of ways that filmmakers around the world depict, interpret and critique electronic dance music culture through an artistic lens. until encountering simon morrison’s excellent book on dancefloor-driven literature i perhaps had not given the same credence to novelists for going beyond simple descriptions of club cultures, but as this delightful foray into the entangled world of prose and beats demonstrates clearly and effectively, fiction has produced as much considered and vibrant commentary on edmc as film, if not more. in his book, morrison sets out to explore this entanglement by mobilising sociocultural knowledge around the uk rave scene in the 1990s as a lens through which to analyse literary texts. he draws on three central uses of edm in fiction—figurative, mechanical and diegetic—as “ways in” to the texts, unpicking the multiple ways that authors choose to (re) present the sonic and haptic world of rave both in and through text. at its heart there are some central questions (or even tensions) which need resolving: “how might authors write about something so otherworldly as a nightclub scene? how might they write lucidly and fluidly about the rigid metronomic beat of electronic music? … [and how] might they accurately recount in fixed symbols the drifting, hallucinatory effects of a drug experience?” (61). morrison chooses to answer these rigorously and strategically by moving from the broad to the specific. beginning with the broad, the first half of the book (chapters 1-5) employs sub/club-cultural theories as points of disciplinary grounding to help define the terms and contexts at play. whilst a lot of this material is well-trodden in edmc scholarship, morrison presents it with an admirable deftness, and as he starts to introduce elements of literary theory in chapter 5, the more unique and interesting qualities of this work begins to reveal itself. for me though, it is in the second half of the book (chapters 6-9)—the literary case studies—that the book really comes into its own. beginning with irvine welsh’s seminal ecstasy (1996), a vivid picture emerges of authors not so much compelled to recreate or even aesthetically elevate the subterranean deviance of clubspace, as to revel in the messiness of it; to wallow in the rich, sticky potential of all those chaotic signifiers of excess and abandon and use this potential to radically redefine the literary canon. what comes across clearly from morrison’s writing is the richness and playfulness with which his case study authors both guide us, and are themselves guide by, the visceral reviews 93 expressionism of rave and club spaces; intertwining vivid descriptions of these hedonistic spaces with nuanced and layered narrative approaches that capture of even mimic the non-hierarchical and anti-teleological anarchy of repetitive beats. one beautiful example morrison shares is of jeff noon’s needle in the groove (1999) and the way his prose style allows the complexity and repetition of the music to almost infect his language, creating textures of language—a liquid dub poetics, if you will— that cleverly reflects the repeating, layering, sampling and splicing of sonic material. another interesting theme that emerges is the complex dependency on drug-taking imagery as a shorthand for depictions of power, hedonism and release. it is interesting how many of the novels that morrison discusses employ the postmodern storytelling strategies of “classic” partying writers (think the hazy multiplicities of william burroughs or the brutal clash between fact and fiction in hunter s. thompson) to invoke the paradoxical vigour and fragility of drug-taking. we see this tendency particularly clearly in morrison’s third case study on nicholas blincoe, whose chaotic fictional ethnography portray the acid delirium admirably. there’s something more general about technology and control in dance spaces that is strongly hinted at here, but perhaps not fully unpacked. i was reminded of the wonderful moment in china miéville’s bizarre urban fantasy king rat (1998)—a reimagination of the pied piper fairytale set in london’s breakbeat and dnb scene, not included by morrison—where the protagonist discovers that instead of merely spinning records, a dat with multiple layered flute samples loaded onto it is much more effective for controlling everyone in the club. omissions aside—i’d also want to include rainald goetz’s stunning avant garde novella rave (1998) here—dancefloor-driven literature is wonderful book, filled with both academic richness and personal joy. a particular strength of this book is morrison’s ability to dance between literary theory, thick description, journalistic interviews and unabashed connoisseurship with elegance and ease. intermediality, rather than translation, is at the heart of morrison’s approach, and where a lesser writer might have tried to pin the literature down into rigid theoretical frameworks and taxonomies, we are left with a beautiful sense of aesthetic awe and openness that has more than inspired me to go and read more fiction. highly recommended. guest editors’ introduction to "spaces of dancing” dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 16(1): 2–8 issn 1947-5403 ©2024 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.01 introduction to “spaces of dancing” ben assiter goldsmiths, university of london (uk) with the dance floor at its core, spaces of dancing are integral to electronic music and dance culture (emdc). on a micro level, these are unique social and sonic spaces, produced through music, bodies and an array of sensory and chemical technologies. zooming out, dance floors are embedded within the architectures of nightlife venues, including nightclubs, informal rave spaces and an expanding range of spatial and temporal types. these architectures are entangled in wider dynamics of urban (and rural) space, in which conflicts over noise, disorder and cultural value impact the production of nightlife scenes. spaces of dancing are also increasingly mediated by digital technologies, which blur distinctions between online and offline space. this special issue of dancecult considers spaces of dancing across these multiple, overlapping scales. it draws on a range of approaches to issues of space in emdc, inviting readers to think about the ways in which different spatial dimensions shape and inform one another. as such, this issue comprises wide-lens analyses of urban nightlife and digital ethnographies, as well as more poetic explorations of spaces of dancing. taken together, they demonstrate not only how spaces of dancing need to be understood within wider physical and online geographies, but also how such geographies may be enriched when placed in dialogue with the social and aesthetic textures of the dance floor. i hope for this special issue to participate in an ongoing conversation involving not only emdc and nightlife scholars, but also architects, urban planners, promoters, djs and nightlife activists, as well as the partygoers without whom spaces of dancing would cease to exist. before presenting the contributions that make up this special issue, i will first introduce some of the key themes that inform spatial approaches to emdc. much of emdc studies has sought to understand the unique social space of the dance floor. this has ranged from the study of spatio-temporal, bodily and emotional practices (malbon 1999); to the pursuit of the ever-enigmatic “vibe” (st john 2008); as well as the varieties of “stranger intimacy” that characterise many dance floor socialities (garcia 2023). spaces of dancing have the potential to reimagine normative modes of interaction and belonging along lines of gender (pini 2001), sexuality (buckland 2002) and race (melville guest editor’s introduction http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.01 assiter | introduction to “spaces of dancing” 3 2020), but at the same time, the utopian discourses that frame many spaces of dancing conceal their reproduction of exclusions and inequalities (saldanha 2007). in recent years, many emdc communities have distanced themselves from vaguer promises of togetherness, focussing on more specific questions of identity, access and safety, situated within explicit political framings and activisms. though rarely acknowledged, spaces of dancing are also spaces of labour, produced by an often invisible and precarious workforce (rennela 2021; prashar-savoie 2023). another approach to issues of space in emdc is to focus on the material architectures of nightclubs and other spaces of dancing (rossi and eisenbrand 2018; rietveld 2022; gillen 2023). the physical spaces of emdc are typically divided into the formal and informal venues of club and rave culture. nightclubs generally follow a purpose-built design directed toward music, social dancing and multisensory experience. they can function as infrastructure for the emergence of genres, scenes and communities, as well as the spatial nodes through which emdc is entangled within the lucrative yet highly regulated structures of the night-time economy. no less important are the temporary spaces of rave and free-party culture, which repurpose locations including disused office blocks, urban brownfield sites and farmland on an informal and often illegal basis. definitions of informal nightlife spaces can also be expanded to include the spectrum of transitory and domestic spaces that form part of many nights out. such spaces have particular significance for queer communities, who have historically been excluded from many formal nightlife spaces (adeyemi et al. 2021). beyond the more traditional infrastructures of club and rave culture, recent years have witnessed transformations to spaces of dancing, as demonstrated by the proliferation of electronic dance music festivals (st john 2017) and audiophile and listening bars, meanwhile use venues (kolioulis 2018) and other iterations of temporary urbanism in nightlife (assiter 2024). to this growing list of emergent spatial and temporal types we can also add art galleries, museums and other institutional spaces, which increasingly host electronic dance music as part of late events, exhibitions and other hybrid cultural forms. these emergent spaces of dancing draw attention to reinscribed processes of commercialisation, institutionalisation and gentrification, while simultaneously affording—as magdalena fuernkranz’s contribution to this issue demonstrates—the possibility of new social and aesthetic formations. spaces of dancing need also be situated within wider dynamics of urban space, and a growing body of literature is exploring how emdc and nightlife relate to the production of cities (nofre and eldridge 2018; stahl and bottà 2019; darchen et al. 2021). recent decades have witnessed the closure of nightlife venues across a range of urban contexts— including dublin, as caroline o’sullivan explores in this issue. financialised property markets, restrictive licensing legislation and the compounding effects of covid-19 have contributed to conditions of intensifying spatial precarity, with disproportionate impacts on venues serving bipoc, lgbtq+ and working-class communities (oloukoï 2018; campkin 2023). where nightclubs are often positioned as the passive victims of urban displacement, it is imperative to note the ways in which gentrification works both “with dancecult 16(1)4 and against nightlife” (hae 2012: 8). such dynamics are shaped further by new modes of nocturnal governance, as well as nightlife industry bodies, grassroots campaigns and calls to democratise the night (kolioulis et al. 2021). on a wider geographic scale, spaces of dancing are entangled with the flows of the creative and tourism industries, and they play an increasing role in neoliberal city branding metrics. as with other popular music cultures, the physical geographies of emdc exist in evercloser relation with the mediations of online space (baym 2018; jones 2021). as ivan mouraviev argues in this special issue, emdc’s digital and physical spaces are perhaps best conceived together, as part of an “online-offline geography”. during the covid-19 lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, emdc communities used digital media to reimagine the co-present intimacies of spaces of dancing (vandenburg et al. 2020). though exceptional, these circumstances accelerated the longer-term ascendance of livestreaming in emdc, as popularised and standardised by platforms including boiler room (heuguet 2016). in conjunction with social media platforms, livestreaming has the capacity to fragment and repackage dance music events as content, with short video clips of djs forming a key currency in economies of promotion, distribution and attention. online mediations also shape stylistic developments (haworth and born 2022), as demonstrated by the emergence of so-called “tiktok techno”. where social media is often criticised for recentring the visual in emdc, it simultaneously makes space for additional expressions of identity through fashion, dance or the simple presence of bodies on screen. digital technologies can also widen access to electronic dance music events, presenting opportunities to expand the imagined communities and modes of interaction that comprise emdc. though contemporary online spaces raise new social, cultural and aesthetic questions, they must also be situated within a longer history of emdc’s technological remediation, including london’s jungle pirate radio stations of the 1990s ( james 2020), or the “sfraves” mailing list that networked the emergence of the west coast us rave scene (matos 2015). spaces of dancing might also be discussed in terms of acoustics and sonic space, more abstract notions of discursive space or questions of temporality including the distinctions between day and night-time spaces, as well as the rhythmic distribution of emdc events. crucially, this special issue seeks to stimulate discussion as to how spaces of dancing are formed at the intersection of multiple spatial dimensions. as lefebvre (1991) famously argued, space is not simply an empty container or context—it is an evolving social production. this reveals how spaces of dancing are shaped by prevailing spatial, economic and political forces, but also how new spatial forms have the potential to initiate new social relations. how, for example, do notions of safe(r) space relate to the physical, sonic and digital architectures of spaces of dancing? how do planning and licensing regulations impact what spaces of dancing are possible in different urban contexts, and to which communities they are accessible? what is the relationship between emdc’s online and offline spaces of dancing, and what hybrid spatial forms may be afforded by the development of vr and ai technologies? given the ongoing transformation of urban and online space, how do we imagine future spaces of dancing, and how can we work to make them more inclusive, equitable and joyful? assiter | introduction to “spaces of dancing” 5 summary of content in “the steady decline of club culture in dublin: neoliberal policy, touristification and the pandemic”, caroline o’sullivan examines the loss and transformation of dublin’s nightlife spaces in contexts of urban, economic and regulatory pressure. where dublin’s nightclubs were impacted heavily by ireland’s lengthy covid-19 lockdowns, o’sullivan argues that the pandemic intensified the longer-term precarity of the city’s club culture, which had been in decline since the early 2000s. along with ireland’s historically restrictive licensing legislation, o’sullivan attributes this decline primarily to the recent neoliberal expansion of dublin’s tech and tourism sectors. such changes have led to the direct displacement of nightclubs by hotels, as well as broader disruptions to the city’s housing market and cultural infrastructures that are vital to sustain music and nightlife scenes. where all of this might determine an overly pessimistic outlook for the future of dublin’s club culture, o’sullivan emphasises that the pandemic also served as the catalyst for the emergence of activist projects including “clubbing is culture”, “give us the night” and “temporary pleasure”, which campaign through various means for novel and sustainable approaches to nightlife. magdalena fuernkranz’s article, “being a dj is my form of resistance”: the dance floor as a safer space for queer-feminist communities in vienna”, explores how four viennese dance music collectives and event series produce spaces that challenge heteronormativity and centre the needs of flinta (female, lesbian, intersex, non-binary, trans and agender) communities. building on the dance floor’s potential as a site of (re)learning, fuernkranz highlights the intersection of online and irl strategies in producing spaces that blend nightlife with political activism. fuernkranz also draws attention to novel collaborations between dance music communities and institutional spaces. where such spaces often present architectural limitations for dance music events, she demonstrates how they provide alternate funding models, alongside institutional systems that can be deployed in the production of safer dance floors, oriented around an explicit politics of care. in “bass, space, place: the mediation of london dubstep culture in an online discord community”, ivan mouraviev examines the online mediation of bass culture. where the internet may appear incompatible with the material sonics and socialities of dubstep, mouraviev situates an online discord community, real heads, within a longer-term history of dubstep’s online-offline geography. in this expanded spatial ecology, dubstep is constituted as much by pirate radio stations and internet forums as by record shops, nightclubs and in-person events. as mouraviev demonstrates, the internet functions not only as an extension and reproduction of irl performance, it plays an active role in shaping the development of dj cultures and practices more broadly. where such reappraisals might destabilise mythologised conceptions of physicality and felt vibration in dubstep and other iterations of bass culture, mouraviev’s article highlights the need for research on emdc that takes seriously the diverse continuum of online and offline spaces of dancing. dancecult 16(1)6 the first half of the from the floor section of this special issue considers global spaces of dancing in urban contexts. ella adu’s “reflections from the frontlines of grassroots venue design” offers an architect’s perspective on producing more sustainable models for diy nightlife spaces in london. in “finding shelter: recollecting shanghai’s underground music scene in the 2010s”, tianyu jiang demonstrates the importance of oral testimonies in documenting the ephemeral legacies of a shanghai nightclub. phoebe janssen’s “foraging places and spaces through dance: the mycelium-like spaces of post-1989 berlin affording its ongoing club culture” explores how fungi may be used as a framework to understand the spatial and temporal distribution of berlin’s nightclubs. natalia figueredo’s contribution, “passinho chronicles: unveiling urban narratives through dance”, turns to brazilian funk, examining the role of dance in remapping the racialised geographies of the favela. the remaining from the floor contributions adopt more varied approaches to space. in her article “an old school stomper: reflections on place, identity, and drugs in the uk hard house scene and the fluctuating roles and experiences of the participating ethnographer”, sarah raine considers hard house events as contested spaces of memory, chemical mediation and ethnography. daniella antoinette hidalgo’s “platformization and its ongoing impact on dance music spaces” reflects on the role of online space in shaping emdc within structures of platform capitalism. in “reparative raving”, emily murphy offers a moving account of rave as a space of affect and queer grief. to round off the section, ruth hughes’ multimedia piece, “windows on the dancefloor”, contemplates the window as a portal between the internal and external spaces of the dance floor. i would like to offer a heartfelt thanks to all the authors who contributed to this special issue, as well as to the peer reviewers and editorial team at dancecult for all their hard work behind the scenes. a special thanks is also due to executive editor graham st john, for trusting me with this special issue, and for all his patience and advice in guiding me through the process. i hope to share spaces of dancing with all of you some day. references adeyemi, kemi, kareem khubchandani and ramón h. rivera-servera, eds. 2021. queer nightlife. ann arbor: university of michigan. assiter, ben. 2024. “from dancefloors to tables: socially distanced clubbing, temporary urbanism, and the gentrification of london’s nightlife.” annals of leisure research 27(1): 187-93. <https://doi.org/10.1080/11745398.2022.2027252>. baym, nancy. 2018. playing to the crowd: musicians, audiences, and the intimate work of connection. new york: nyu press. buckland, fiona. 2002. impossible dance club culture and queer world-making. middletown: wesleyan university press. campkin, ben. 2023. queer premises: lgbtq+ venues in london since the 1980s. london: bloomsbury. https://doi.org/10.1080/11745398.2022.2027252 assiter | introduction to “spaces of dancing” 7 darchen, sébastien, damien charrieras and john willsteed, eds. 2021. electronic cities: music, policies and space in the 21st century. new york: palgrave macmillan. garcia, luis-manuel. 2023. together, somehow: music, affect, and intimacy on the dancefloor. durham: duke university press. gillen, john leo. 2023. temporary pleasure: nightclub architecture, design and culture from the 1960s to today. munich, london, and new york: prestel. hae, laam. 2012. the gentrification of nightlife and the right to the city: regulating spaces of social dancing in new york. new york: routledge. haworth, christopher and georgina born. 2022. “music and intermediality after the internet: aesthetics, materialities, and social forms”. in music and digital media: a planetary anthology, ed. georgina born, 378-438. london: ucl press. <https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800082434> james, malcolm. 2020. sonic intimacy: reggae sound systems, jungle pirate radio and grime youtube music videos. london: bloomsbury academic. jones, ellis. 2021. diy music and the politics of social media. london: bloomsbury. kolioulis, alessio. 2018. “more day in the night? the gentrification of london’s night-time through clubbing”. bollettino della societa ̀ geografica 14(2): 207–18. <https://bsgi.it/index.php/bsgi/article/view/536/241>. kolioulis, alessio, julian siravo, paul apostolidis, camille kummer-buléon, louis matheou and cosimo campani. 2021. working nights: municipal strategies for nocturnal workers. uk: autonomy. <https://autonomy.work/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/working_nights-2.pdf>. lefebvre, henri. 1991. the production of space. oxford: blackwell. malbon, ben. 1999. clubbing: dancing, ecstasy and vitality. london and new york: routledge. matos, michaelangelo. 2015. the underground is massive: how electronic dance music conquered america. new york: dey st. melville, caspar. 2020. it’s a london thing: how rare groove, acid house and jungle remapped the city. manchester: manchester university press. nofre, jordi mateo and adam eldridge eds. 2018. exploring nightlife space, society and governance. london: rowman and littlefield. oloukoï, chrystel. 2018. “precarious gentrification: dreading the night while ‘taking back the city’ in johannesburg”. in exploring nightlife space, society and governance, 19-34. london: rowman and littlefield. pini, maria. 2001. club cultures and female subjectivity: the move from home to house. new york: palgrave macmillan prashar-savoie, anjali. 2023. “towards a worker-centred club culture”. ctm festival magazine. <https://www.ctm-festival.de/magazine/towards-a-worker-centred-club-culture>. rennela, mathys. 2021. “abolish dj idolatry”. technomaterialism. <https://technomaterialism.com/abolish-dj-idolatry>. rietveld, hillegonda. 2022. “the nightclub”. in the bloomsbury handbook of popular music, space and place, ed. geoff stahl and j. mark percival, 139-152. london: bloomsbury. rossi, catherine and jochen eisenbrand. 2018. “introduction”. in night fever: designing club culture, 1960-today, ed. mateo kries, jochen eisenbrand, catherine rossi and kirsten thietz, 14–23. weil am rhein: vitra design museum. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800082434 https://bsgi.it/index.php/bsgi/article/view/536/241 https://autonomy.work/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/working_nights-2.pdf. https://technomaterialism.com/abolish-dj-idolatry dancecult 16(1)8 saldanha, arun. 2007. psychedelic white: goa trance and the viscosity of race. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. st john, graham. 2008. “trance tribes and dance vibes: victor turner and electronic dance music culture”. in victor turner and contemporary cultural performance, ed. graham st john, 149–73. new york: berghahn. –––, ed. 2017. weekend societies: electronic dance music festivals and event cultures. london: bloomsbury. stahl, geoff and giacomo bottà, eds. 2019. nocturnes: popular music and the night. new york: palgrave macmillan. vandenberg, femke, michaël berghman and julian schaap. 2020. “the ‘lonely raver’: music livestreams during covid-19 as a hotline to collective consciousness?” european societies 23. <https://doi.org/10.1080/14616696.2020.1818271>. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616696.2020.1818271 beats on airwaves: radio, electronic dance music selection and meanings dancecult: journal of electronic music & dance culture 17(1): 53–76 issn 1947-5403 ©2025 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.04 beats on airwaves: radio, electronic dance music selection and meanings dennis mathei saw marketingund medienforschung (de) abstract this article investigates electronic dance music on german radio stations. how is this music selected by editors? which terminology is employed and presented onair? what are the implications of this for audiences and researchers? what types of electronic dance music and related music are currently featured on german radio? what are their characteristics? in order to address these questions, a multi-method approach is employed, encompassing playlist and musicological analyses, as well as interviews with radio editors. electronic dance music on german radio is characterised by heterogeneity of variants and trends, with fluid transitions to other popular music. distinguishing between different types of this music can often be a challenging task. editors’ expertise in genres is evident in their work, but this is only apparent at certain times, as genres are not mentioned on-air most of the time, which adds to the confusion surrounding electronic dance music and its contested meanings. keywords: electronic dance music, radio, music selection, terminology, electronic/dance music dennis mathei (phd) is a project manager in market research, specialising in radio and music research. he studied musicology at folkwang university (germany) and graduated in cultural science from leuphana university lüneburg (germany), writing his thesis on productivity and value creation in techno culture. his area of expertise is electronic dance music, particularly house and techno. he has been a dj in bochum and the ruhr valley for several years. contact: kontakt@de-mathei.de feature article https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.04 dancecult 17(1)54 introduction this article investigates electronic dance music (edm) on german radio stations, which are a source for contested meanings and consequently represent a compelling subject of research. due to the need for differentiation, i have chosen to go against the grain of dancecult’s terminological usage by applying the non-capitalised form of edm to the umbrella term which encompasses traditional club music such as house, techno or drum’n’bass, its scene and commercial variants, as well as capitalised edm as a genre of edm and precursors such as italodisco. capitalised edm appears to be closer to the language of journalists and radio editors, who utilise it to describe a genre, which i would argue is also closer to audiences’ understanding (glazer 2014; jóri 2021: 31–2) and whose musical characteristics will be addressed later on. the differentiation between edm and edm is proposed to narrow the terminological gap between academia and non-academia. in edm’s early days, radio had an important role in the dissemination of this new music. djs like electrifying mojo in detroit (sicko 2010: 44–5), monika dietl (denk and von thülen 2012: 64–5) and radio dt64 in east germany and berlin (denk and von thülen 2012: 129–34) featured edm in their evening shows on regular radio stations. in contrast, uk pirate radio played a pivotal role in the dissemination of jungle (cordell and james 2021). what was once a novelty has become part of radio music’s mainstream. despite its continued importance in shaping the widely audible landscape of edm and allocating meaning to it, there has been a paucity of research into the status quo of edm on the radio, its musical characteristics and the reasons for its selection. such an analysis seems imperative, which is precisely what this article sets out to achieve by examining the playlists of eight german stations with a mixed music selection and one specialised edm station. how do radio stations and editors select, define and speak about edm? how do they publicly address it? when can music be considered edm, or normal electronically produced pop music intended for dancing or electronic music? what is the current status of this type of music? what does the labelling edm and the selection of edm mean for editors, radio stations, audiences, the study of edm and the terminology applied? by researching edm on german radio, one is confronted with the problem of demarcation, which seems emblematic for this special issue of dancecult. the question of where to draw the line occurred frequently during analysis. based on a multi-method approach with playlist and musicological analyses and interviews with editors, the repertoire of edm on german radio stations with the widest audience reach and one edm station is analysed, as well as reasons for and ways of selection. the article begins by exploring format radio and music, followed by an examination of the methods employed. findings of the survey are subdivided into edm on german radio and meanings, stylistic categories of edm, historic edm titles and the present status of edm including possible routes for new titles to become selected. the article is closed by a discussion on the findings and on terms like “edm pop” (holt 2017) and “electronic/ dance music” (mcleod 2001). mathei | beats on airwaves 55 format radio and music this chapter addresses characteristics of format radio and its dependence on music research in the selection process. radio is still widely used and integrated into daily routines due to its “flexibility–the fact that it can leave the listener free to perform other activities while he is listening” (crisell 1994: 12). andrew crisell identifies radio as “a blind medium” (1994: 3), the distinctive qualities of which derive from this limitation, including the usage of language, music, sound signalling or presenter attitudes. radio’s reliance on sound and music is a consequence of its struggle to compete with other media. the advent of television in the us led in the 1950s to the creation of the still-dominating format radio with its german variant, formatradio. the concept of format radio is heavily influenced by the logic of the top 40-format. developed by robert todd storz and bill stewart as “formula radio”, this programming concept focuses on the most popular songs (schramm 2019: 46–7). format radio has evolved into different strands with diverging musical focuses, such as top 40, adult oriented rock or dance. all radio stations in this survey are representatives of format radio, including the specialised one. format radio describes certain strategies regarding content programming that follow defined targets. a format radio pursues the goal of establishing a distinctive radio programme as a branded product in the radio market. on the foundation of information given by market research, a marketing strategy is developed that is tailored precisely to the needs of a clearly defined target group. this is done by combining all programming elements [e.g., music, moderation style, news, sound elements] as well as all other activities of a station [such as external representation, off-air events], which must be consistently aligned with the strategic marketing objectives and constantly checked empirically for listener acceptance (goldhammer 1995: 142).1 music is for full-service and music-centred format radio (schramm 2019: 49) of significance, because it is the main programming component (schramm and mayer 2023: 1). in this regard the term musikfarbe (münch 2001: 161) is of importance, which translates to english as “music colour”. it describes a consistent musical-sonic appearance of a radio station. programming formats aim for a specific music colour to make them instantly recognisable and reliable. music colour encompasses different genres but can also be limited to one or a few genres. radio stations are unified by their goal to achieve a good durchhörbarkeit, which describes the quality of a music selection to keep the audience listening in order to raise the chances for advertisements to be listened to (schramm 2019: 59). the struggle for the attention of media users results in a modus operandi that avoids risks, particularly during the morning, which is the most important time of day for generating revenue through advertising. in order to achieve durchhörbarkeit, private and public broadcasting stations rely on market and music research to satisfy the needs of aspired target groups. nearly every title has undergone music research processes several times and received a sufficient amount of positive feedback to justify its play. there are different methods of music research for radio with diverging objectives. while mapping studies are more fundamental in nature by identifying dancecult 17(1)56 music-related audience clusters that shall be addressed, call-outs and archive tests seek to ascertain music that target audiences like.2 call-outs are conducted regularly to monitor whether titles are accepted and can be upgraded for rotation. the aim of music research is to identify the familiarity, appeal, saturation and burn of titles (schramm, 2019: 53–4). titles are put into rotation categories based on scores from music research, which determine the number of plays and rotation frequency.3 most popular current titles form the so-called a-rotation (schramm 2019: 57). music research for radio is confronted with the dilemma of being “acceptance research” (neuwöhner 1998: 158), which aims to identify what is familiar and accepted by target groups.4 this results in well-known titles that have been successful in music research being presented, to prevent the audience from switching over due to unfamiliar music. this leads to fairly similar song pools (schramm and mayer 2023: 3). method and research subjects this article is divided into four parts of empirical analysis involving, first, selection processes, understanding and terms used for edm by german radio editors. second, the categorisation of edm and related music titles on selected radio stations. third, the analysis of historical edm titles with regard to trends and processes of canonisation and fourth, analysis of the present status of edm on selected stations. to begin with, radio stations needed to be selected for analysis. the media analysis ma audio (ma) was chosen for selection.5 this is the german measurement system for audience reach concerning radio and audio-related media. it also provides information on listening habits, media usage and audience demographics. deduced benchmark figures of ma result from the number of people who have stated that they have listened to a specific radio station, channel or streaming service at a certain point in time and for a specific period of time. i chose to draw on daily reach for my analysis since it can be regarded as a standard benchmark figure for broadcasters.6 findings are displayed as frequencies or as percentages of market share. for selection of terrestrial radio stations, frequencies have been used (ard media 2024). based on the highest scores from daily audience reach, eight (hot) adult contemporary [(hot) ac] or contemporary hit radio (chr) stations were selected (fig. 1). ac is the dominant format radio in germany, followed by chr (schramm 2019: 48). both consist of a high proportion of music and sparse presentation. while chr focuses on current chart music for a target group from 14 to 29 years, ac stations adopt a more expansive approach to music and target groups, encompassing individuals from 14 to 49 years of age. ac stations share an emphasis on music from the charts, deriving from different genres such as pop, rock and dance from the last decades up to current music (schramm 2019: 49). ac itself can be subdivided into variants that differ by their musical focus, such as the more progressive hot ac. sunshine live is a private broadcasting station that is centred around different types and genres of electronic music, especially dance music, with the self-description being a “24/7 electronic music radio” (sunshine live n.d.) without any reference to dance. this reflects the actual playlist, in which not every title is meant for dancing. sunshine live offers a number mathei | beats on airwaves 57 of channels that are reserved for genres of edm. distinctive features are curated shows by djs and presentations of dj sets. channels are sorted by genre, character, mixes, decades, places and functional contexts, gender, mood and atmosphere, as well as canon (classics), which are again bundled into categories. some adjustments to the sample were necessary. the reasons for selecting or excluding radio stations are based on higher representativeness and balance. otherwise, the focus would have been on populous states at the expense of eastern german states. the selection process is intended to ensure a balanced representation of private and public broadcasters, as well as a balanced geographical distribution. germany has a dual broadcasting system divided into a public sector that is financed by a legally prescribed licence fee for every german household and an ad-financed private sector (schramm 2019: 48–51). stations from berlin were excluded due to low audience reaches. berlin’s status as techno capital is, for the types of analysed radio stations and a research question that is concerned with edm’s popular side, rather irrelevant. figure 1. stations selected for analysis. dancecult 17(1)58 in order to answer how music is selected and which terminology is employed, guided interviews by phone were conducted with editors from selected stations who are involved in rotation selection. interviews were recorded and analysed through “qualitative content analysis” (mayring 2014). i reached out to five selected stations and arranged interviews with marc möllmann (head of music n-joy), jan kuhlmann (editor ndr 2) and another head of music, who wanted to remain anonymous.7 the following questions were asked: is there an umbrella term that you use for different kinds of dance music, such as (examples from actual playlist)? follow-up question: why not (edm / dance / elektronische tanzmusik)? do you distinguish between different kinds of dance music in your editorial work? how? please give examples? how do you define titles by artemas and ásdís? are edm genre terms of importance for your work on-air and off-air? please describe how you discover new music for selection. on the basis of my professional expertise, i hypothesised that there are multiple categories for different kinds of music. artemas and ásdís were chosen because titles of both share similarities to edm regarding production techniques. ásdís is also affiliated with edm as a vocalist for edm titles. findings from interviews served the musicological analysis of the following parts. the next section addresses the question: when can music be considered edm and what types of edm are featured on german radio? in order to identify different types of electronic dance music and related music and their characteristics, playlist and musicological analyses were utilised for the following parts. playlist analysis is a method of market research that tackles different questions concerned with music selection. here, its primary function was to identify the number and time of plays. data for playlist analysis was derived from “www. musictrace.de” and contained information on titles, musicians, total plays, daytime and nighttime play, distributor, language/instrumental and publication date.8 the time period of the playlist sample was from 29 july until 4 august 2024, directly after the second weekend of tomorrowland 2024, which is an important edm festival. findings from playlist analysis provided the foundation for music analysis. the playlist data needed to be processed in order of evaluability, which included spellings, for example. based on my musicological knowledge and professional expertise, i manually separated titles into categories of nonedm versus edm and related music. this accounts for 1093 titles, encompassing non-edm titles by edm musicians, precursors, all titles on sunshine live and music that allows for dancing with production methods similar to edm, such as build-ups or drops. subsequently, total sums were calculated and different tables created. mathei | beats on airwaves 59 my categorisation and analysis of edm titles on german radio into stylistic categories in this article is grounded in musicological analysis: it focuses on the parameters of rhythm, bpm, harmony, sound and especially form. a musicological approach for the analysis of edm has been applied by mark j. butler (2006), mathieu guillien (2021) or dennis mathei (2023). the question concerning the current status of edm cannot be answered without historic edm titles that are also featured on radio. therefore, the same combined approach of playlist and musicological analyses was used for the analysis of historical edm titles with regard to trends and processes of canonisation on selected stations. it was hypothesised that there are aesthetic emphases, recurring titles and recourse to historic edm titles. finally, what types of edm are selected? to answer the question regarding the present status of edm, its characteristics and selection processes for new titles, the approach of playlist and musicological analyses was used in combination with insights from interviewees regarding ways into and reasons for selection. the assumption was made that there were connecting phenomena among edm titles and that social media had become significant for selection. i distinguish between the genre edm and edm as an umbrella term. by doing so, i follow the definition given by journalist joshua glazer (2014), who describes edm as: …a narrow genre name meant to indicate the most pop-friendly end of the dance music spectrum. the sonic signature of an edm song is generally clear – shrill melodic synth lines and over-the-top pop choruses (frequently sung by mainstream singers or rappers), broken up by dreamy sonic lulls and swelling builds. as musicologist mathieu guillien notes, the overall structure of edm titles consists of a sequence of verse and chorus (2021: 60). selection, understanding and terms for edm on selected radio stations now i will present the terminology used and differentiations done by radio editors from selected stations regarding edm. when speaking of the whole of edm, dance was the umbrella term of choice among the interviewees, while elektronische tanzmusik is not used. the reasons for using dance without electronic are rather unspectacular and have evolved over time. there are pragmatic reasons for this as electronic dance music or elektronische tanzmusik are too cumbersome and time-consuming to pronounce. consequently, interviewees abbreviate it to dance. the omission of electronic is not considered problematic in their editorial work, as the electronic nature of this music is taken for granted. edm is pronounced either in the english or german way, and interviewees understand it to be a genre of edm, which seems to align with the understanding of sunshine live and journalists (glazer 2014; jorí 2021: 30–2). interviewees stated that genre names and umbrella terms are in some regards insignificant since they are not mentioned on-air during daytime. edm musicians and genres are not presented as such. off-air, genres become relevant in the selection process by maintaining an equilibrium between themselves and underlying stylistic categories, in accordance with dancecult 17(1)60 the underlying rotation rules. instead of genres, the interviewees and their staff categorise edm for editorial purposes into two or three categories, such as dance pop and dance, or pop dance, dance and club, or similar. dance as a stylistic category shall not be confused with dance as an umbrella term. editors tend to separate edm from other types of pop, allowing for dancing, by allocating it to other pop categories with different attributes, such as modern. the distinction between edm and other types of pop shows a gradual development from club music to other popular music genres that are produced using similar electronic techniques and equipment and that encourage dancing. stylistic categories of edm on german radio in this section, i will give insights from my musicological analysis of the body of titles from the playlists of selected radio stations. the identified heterogeneity, fragmentation and fluidity of edm (mcleod 2001; mazierska; gillon and rigg 2021: 3) are also reflected in edm and related music on german radio. it appears as a juxtaposition of different structural forms, sound designs, tempi, genres and origins. genres and subgenres of edm are often separated by “nuances” of sound (glazer 2014). genres are understood as “a set of musical events (real or possible) whose course is governed by a definite set of socially accepted rules” (fabbri 1981: 52) that are not static but dynamic and fluid (negus 1999). the following categories are not to be equated with genres. categories should be understood as containers for stylistic variants that derive from and encompass different genres (moore 2001: 441). there are different types of edm and related music on german radio which can be categorised by musical criteria such as form, sound or voice usage. terms used for my categories are inspired by the terminology of the interviewees but not adapted. criteria stem from my musicological analysis of the playlist bodies. i chose to draw inspiration from the editor’s terminology because first i wanted to shed light on editorial work regarding edm. more importantly, the terminology addresses gradations and nuances of popular edm and related music which correlate with actual musical criteria of the categories. analysis of the dance body of the playlists brought four emphases to light that are labelled: club, dance, dance pop and crossover. categories differentiate in terms of structures, sound, appeal and context. club and dance pop are described first because both show the highest degree of difference, while dance occupies the middle ground. club the category club is not reduced to a genre of edm yet it has a binding link in the underlying track structure, which is the foundation of many kinds of club music (butler 2006). track describes a musical structure which presents itself as an ongoing ostinato without major structural changes in its horizontal development. instead, change occurs through vertical construction by adding and subtracting elements (mathei 2023: 154-62). tracks are at the core of cultural practices of genres of edm (kühn 2017: 179–81). despite diverging beat patterns, bpm rates and sound aesthetics, club music genres share in their respective core similarities regarding structure, vertical construction, sound processes and structural mathei | beats on airwaves 61 elements (butler 2006: 34). titles in the category of club, are characterised by being primarily instrumental or using vocals and voices closer to an instrument. other important criteria are the length and intensity of the sound design, which contribute to its character as club music. dance pop the category dance pop encompasses titles that combine song structures with the beat design and partial integration of structural elements of edm (wicke and ziegenrücker 2007: 676-77). it is founded on a horizontal construction, which is frequently concomitant with a variation in chord progression or key. it adheres to the principles of harmony. it takes the form of a verse-chorus structure, repeated two or three times, which may or may not include a bridge (a-b-a-b-c-b| a-b-a-b). dance pop appears poppier than fabian holt’s definition of “edm pop” (2017), which could rather be attributed to the category of dance. dance dance as a category lies between club and dance pop. it has a hybrid appearance since it combines elements from track music with elements of pop music. compared to dance pop, music in the dance category contains more instrumental passages and dance elements, such as build-ups, drops, snare rolls and white noise. as with dance pop or pop in general, dance is based on a sequence of verse and chorus. it is important to note that dance can also manifest in a structure of b-a-b in which the verse functions more as an intermediate section. choruses take on different structural functions according to their composition as a chorus, build-up or post-chorus. dance is characterised by a horizontal construction with integrated vertical construction, but not as prominently as in club. crossover one problem arises when trying to categorise edm on german radio or in general, and that is, where to draw the line? “i like the way you kiss me” by artemas (2024) is electronically produced, uses sequencing, has a constant beat and has been created by a producer. yet the song positions itself closer to dark wave (wicke and ziegenrücker 2007: 184-5). the question concerns also the other end of the dance spectrum. both ásdís and dua lipa have songs in their repertoire with constant beats and electronic sounds intended for dancing, but which are ‘more pop’ than dance pop. historic edm titles on german radio now i will examine the historic edm titles on german radio as they have been played during the time frame of the survey, with a focus on trends and processes of canonisation. genres of edm have become an integral part of song pools and reached the status of classics. the range of historic edm titles on german radio spreads over four decades up to the recent past. it appears as a reflection and juxtaposition of what has once been popular and successful. historic edm titles exhibit a heterogeneity of forms and stylistic developments, thereby highlighting edm’s dancecult 17(1)62 flexibility and adaptability, which encompasses a series of musical trends and phases over time. popular dance styles and sounds of today are unequal to the past. juxtaposing different genres of edm without any reference, blurs distinctions between them (see fig. 2). the question concerning demarcation occurs again regarding historic edm titles on selected radio stations but is concerned with edm’s date of origin. in other words, can for example “living on video” by trans-x (1983), be considered edm or something else? productionwise it meets many criteria, such as being producer-music and utilising instruments and techniques similar to edm. by applying a rather conservative understanding of edm’s date of origin, the earliest representatives of edm in the playlists of selected stations date back to the midor late 1980s with artists like marrs and guru josh, which is followed by early 90s artists such as snap, haddaway or urban cookie collective. furthermore, historic titles on selected stations include established representatives from different edm genres, such as daft punk, jxl, tiësto and avicii, as well as the fortuitous wamdue project, paul kalkbrenner and wankelmut, who had a background in the scene and one surprising hit outside the scene. historic edm titles on selected stations appear as a mixture of different aesthetic and stylistic variants with diverging structural forms and emphases in sound design. by looking at historic edm titles in an ascending manner, certain developments and emphases become apparent that have been influential for a period of time. the following description does not intend to offer a complete history and focuses on one example concerned with trends. trends, in my understanding, describe certain aesthetics which are dominating and formative for a certain period. this can relate, on the one hand, to stylistic rules that concern the whole appearance of a subgenre, and, on the other, to specific elements of titles, such as sound and rhythm design, which distinguish them from related styles. in some cases, the latter can be traced back to a small number of producers. afterwards such an aesthetic will fade and be replaced by another trend. trends are frequently followed by a translation of an aesthetic following the logic of pop music. consequently, successful representatives of a genre aesthetic and translations of these aesthetics into different spheres of edm find their way into radio playlists. such an effect takes place first in scenes and migrates at a later point in time to other spheres of edm when an aesthetic is taken up by producers outside of genres of origin. this can be exemplified by french touch, which was represented by daft punk, stardust and modjo in playlists of selected stations. at first this subgenre of house music was a scene phenomenon published by independent labels but managed to receive a high amount of dissemination in a short time due to the success of the aforementioned. french house is based on a blend of sliced soul, funk, disco, r’n’b or 70s pop samples, house music and a frequent use of filters (guillien 2021: 52).9 it can either be instrumental or utilise vocals (guillien 2021: 54) and relies (more) on track structures. french house’s aesthetic found its translation into other forms and spheres of dance. “crying at the discotheque” by alcazar (2000) applies similar techniques, but by using a bigger proportion of the underlying sample and a song structure, it appears closer to a reinterpretation of sheila b. (and) devotion’s “spacer” (1979) and is better positioned in the domain of dance pop. mathei | beats on airwaves 63 repetition of a body of titles and recourse to this body in the production of contemporary edm both have their part in the formation of a radio song canon of edm. canon is understood as a canonised repertoire of musical works or songs (von appen, doehring and rösing 2008: 26). canonisation has a stabilising function for current music by establishing a framework through which contemporary music is “perceived, categorised and valued” (von appen, doehring and rösing 2008: 26).10 three types of canonisation can be identified, which are the canon of songs, musicians and records. the song canon contains the well-known repertoire that is still played, for example on the radio or at public events. its main criterion for inclusion is popularity (von appen, doehring and rösing 2008: 30–1). by looking at the history of edm on selected stations during the time frame of the survey, different processes of song canonisation can be identified. first, there are two ways of canonisation through repetition: by repeating the actual titles and by using elements from them. in the first case, the number of radio stations playing particular titles is significant. titles are kept alive through repetition. repetition through recourse can involve any popular or successful title that has become part of the pop music canon in general. a certain number of historic edm titles from the playlists of the selected stations have served as source material for current titles (fig. 2) from this survey’s top 40 of most played titles and beyond (see fig. 3). this only accounts for edm titles. if other pop titles were included, the table would expand significantly. the position of titles already within a canon is consolidated by contemporary music through recourse. figure 2. historic edm as source material. dancecult 17(1)64 figure 3. top 40 titles on selected stations. mathei | beats on airwaves 65 this is a canonisation apart from the dancefloors of edm. it cannot be considered a genre canon of edm; it constitutes a canon of its own with a wider reach. songs and tracks of different origins are juxtaposed equally. it functions as a form of levelling of differences and genres, in which anything can become dance. the second process of canonisation can be identified by labelling a title as classic, which is a common practice of radios and by two channels of sunshine live: classics and zeitreise (german for “time travel”). while the term classics acts more in a performative manner, as it elevates titles into the status of a classic, zeitreise acts in the manner of personal or generational nostalgia due to categorisations into decades. present status of edm on german radio this chapter is concerned with the present status of edm on german radio. it is hard to grasp sonically due to a palette of sounds that encompass different sound signatures of genres, synthesisers, instruments and singers. even regarding individual producers, it is sometimes difficult to speak of a personal style of production. consecutive releases appear in different sonic forms. there are many titles with sounds or impressions from different genres of edm. for analysis and illustration, a top 40 of most played titles by selected station during the time frame of the survey has been created (fig. 3). note that not all mentioned titles in this chapter are part of the top 40 due to a more precise illustration of edm on german radio. a precise analysis would go beyond the scope of this article. there are musical emphases and aspects among different titles that share similarities, which will now be addressed. the general aesthetic key findings besides heterogeneity are teasing, shortening, acceleration of tempo and revival. teasing can be identified among the majority of titles from the top 40. the term refers to the practice of starting a music piece with a stripped-down version of the chorus or a small melodic, often instrumental extract from it. teasing has the character of a miniature introduction which ends after a few bars. this development is not limited to edm and has been taking place in different music genres. shortening describes the structural streamlining of music titles in general. this leads in consequence to shorter duration. the majority of titles from the top 40 are based on two units of verse and chorus, while the classic song format of the last decades typically encompassed three units and a bridge (wicke and ziegenrücker 2007: 676-77). a bridge appears to be an exception nowadays, as it is present in only six titles. for many years 3:30 minutes has been the standard duration of titles on german radio. a sample taken of titles from 1994 to 2010 has an average length of 3:40 minutes and for edm-hits of 3:44 minutes. the average duration of the top 40 is 2:51 minutes.11 teasing and shortening both appear to be consequences of a tiktokification of contemporary popular music in the sense of catching the recipient’s attention right from the start. acceleration of tempo does not concern current edm on german radio as a whole, but a number of titles from selected radio stations have a rate that goes beyond 130 bpm and, thus, the average of well-known edm-hits (fig. 4). a bpm analysis of all titles would go beyond the scope of this article. dancecult 17(1)66 figure 4. titles above 130 bpm on selected stations. acceleration of bpm is a development that is in some regards linked to a rise of aesthetics from the past, which can manifest in two forms: direct recourse and revival. direct recourse encompasses the musical practices of remix, cover and interpolation that rely on pre-existing material. representatives of remixes and covers from this top 40 are, for example, cyril’s “stumblin’ in” (2023) or jaxomy’s “pedro” (2024), which have their take on songs by the same name by chris norman and suzi quatro (1978) and raffaella carrà (1980). there is a significant number of titles that take material from existing works. this practice is called “interpolation” and understood as “taking part of an existing musical work (as opposed to a sound recording) and incorporating it into a new work” (usco 2021: 5). it differs from sampling, as it “does not involve using any of the actual audio sounds contained in a preexisting recording” (usco 2021: 5). there are several examples in the survey and the top 40 which make use of interpolation. this appears, on one hand, in the form of new lyrics over an existing melody, as with kygo and ava max “whatever” (2024), citing shakira’s “whenever, wherever” (2001). on the other hand, it appears by integrating pre-existing melodic material into new compositions as, for example, in “substitution” by purple disco machine and kungs (2023), which uses a melodic fragment from alphaville’s “big in japan” (1984). interpolation is a general trend in recent pop music (usco 2021: 2–6). contemporary edm on german radio presents itself as an accumulation of different genre characteristics. there is a revival and adaptation of characteristics from edm genres of former times. a certain number of titles encompass elements and sound designs that are long gone. these recourses span over different genres and aesthetics from the 1970s to the early 2000s, with an emphasis on the 1990s. “honey boy” by purple disco machine (2024) in collaboration with nile rodgers, appears as an update of chic’s version of disco (lawrence 2003: 368), in which rodgers’ distinct guitar play worked as a sonic signature. although produced electronically, the piece disguises its electronic mode of production. titles that use elements from trance are reminiscent of 1990s trance aesthetics or its commercialised variants (volkwein 2003: 28–30). on one hand this is achieved by citing a piece from that period, as with “in your arms (for an angel)” by topic (2022), which cites paul van dyks “for an angel” (1998). on the other hand, this is done through similarity. calvin harris and ellie goulding’s “miracle” (2023) includes a piano whose sound is reminiscent of the mathei | beats on airwaves 67 one used in “children” (1996) by robert miles. it contains a motif which appears to be a fairly close inversion of the ascending head motif from “children”. furthermore, former no. 1 in german charts “vois sur ton chemin (techno mix)” by bennett (2023) has been part of rotations for a long period. by putting the genre in brackets, it is clear how the track is intended and positioned genre-wise. harder and faster variants of edm with a linkage to 1990s aesthetics also found their way into rotations lately with “miss you” by southstar (2022) and “pedro” by jaxomy (2024). the top 40 is dominated by male producers. amongst the top 40 producers were no females and only one non-binary producer, felix “fee” jaehn.12 women in the top 40 appear only in the role of singers, alongside their male counterparts. there is an almost equal proportion between male (46%) and female voices (54%). two titles use a choir. the top 40 contains few tracks and is dominated by titles linked to dance and dance pop. among the top 40 are six titles which have been played by all selected radio stations and hence have the widest geographical reach (fig. 5). they derive from the categories of dance pop and dance with varying levels of sound intensity. since these titles are represented by all radio stations, they can be regarded as equally popular and important for rotations at that time. noteworthy, 2/3 of the most played titles of this survey’s top 40 are also featured on sunshine live, which shows a strong similarity among song pools of selected stations regardless of any specialisation. figure 5. titles played by all selected stations. dancecult 17(1)68 other ways to look at popular edm on german radio are the sum of total plays and most titles, which includes collaborations and remixes (fig. 6). total plays and most titles diverge from the top 40, which is more diverse. nearly the same musicians are represented in both categories, with the exception of avicii and vize regarding titles and jax jones and glockenbach regarding plays. this refers to a higher relevance of the latter at the time of the analysis. the heterogeneity identified for edm on german radio is also applicable to producers, as evidenced by the top two producers with the most titles. david guetta is represented by titles that have been released over a period of 15 years. during his career he has production-wise frequently changed. often his music applies an over-the-top aesthetic but is not limited to it. the same is true for robin schulz, who started his career in 2014 and varied his musical output since. besides dance-orientated pieces with different genre impressions, schulz is represented by electronic, beat-driven pop songs and ballads. figure 6. most titles and most plays on selected stations. there are also edm musicians with lesser dissemination on german radio who often come from independent labels and have a background in edm genres. this is due to sunshine live’s specialisation but is not limited to it. the number of plays declines gradually to one play per week because of either a low rotation or titles being featured outside of rotation. in the evening and nighttime, radio’s status can change in some regards more to a medium of deliberate listening with lower audience reach. tracks were primarily featured during the evening or nighttime. it is the time for radio shows that serve as a form of auditory mathei | beats on airwaves 69 preparation for the nightlife or feature musical topics in which genres can become relevant. it is also the time of day when edm was first featured on regular radio by electrifying mojo or dt64. such shows address an audience which seeks to engage more intensely with music and appear as a service for music aficionados. this segment focuses more on club music, genre music and features musicians from the core of edm genres, such as adam beyer or green velvet. in many ways, it is the opposite of the kinds of edm written about so far. there are different ways new music can become part of selections and rotations. first, there are established industry-related paths of music promotion radio editors utilise. sampling pools for new releases such as “musik promotion network” are a primary source for research. closely related is the direct approach by promoters from major and independent labels, distributors, aggregators and freelancers. regarding the industry origins of edm on german radio, it shows a clear picture, with the majority deriving from major labels. besides those, there are 35 other distributors. among these are “edm-majors” like kontor or zyx, established independent distributors such as rough trade or [pias] and 19 distributors with one title in rotation. the number of titles by distributors plummets from several hundred by majors to a fraction distributed by others (fig. 7). figure 7. edm titles by distributors on selected stations. the next tools editors use for music research are music charts. monitoring social media platforms and charts has become an integral part of the wotrk routine for editorial staff. one longer-lasting title on german radio in 2023 and 2024 has been “stumblin’ in” by cyril (2023). first uploaded on tiktok, the title went viral after being used by the football club bayern münchen (wehner 2024). similar is the case of “move” by adam port (2024), which had risen to prominence on tiktok. “move” had been unreleased while being part of adam port’s dj sets, which found their way into social media (fuchs 2024). dancecult 17(1)70 the third source of information for editors is music trends derived from festivals. data for the playlist sample was collected directly after tomorrowland 2024. it shows the significance of this festival for edm and its impact on selections. even after this short period of time, some of the top 10 most played titles (beschoner 2024) found their way into selections and were almost equally featured on sunshine live and non-specialised radio stations. this applies for example to “move”. related to the success of “move” is the rise of afro house or afro inspired dance (fuchs 2024). it has already been labelled the next big thing by interviewees. sunshine live has dedicated a separate channel to the genre. afro house appears according to my analysis as a blend of house music with african genres of edm and african (seeming) vocals, chants, instruments and rhythms. representative of this is hugel’s “i adore you” (2024), sharing a mellow and melancholic character with a bpm rate of 120. afro house, as the playlists show, has already been translated into dance. discussion edm on german radio is an essential component of music selection for reaching desired target audiences. it is characterised by a heterogeneity of genres, trends and stylistic categories from club tracks to crossovers and sounds, which accounts for current and historic titles. distinguishing between edm and related music can often be challenging, due to the fluid transitions between genres and due to producers, who constantly change their musical output. edm on german radio cannot be categorised within a specific genre or a collective style. its variety feeds from different origins from which elements are transferred and stylistically enclosed. interpolations and processes of canonisation both play a role in establishing a body of (ever) recurring titles and melodies. edm on the radio is not detached from general developments in pop music, as trends, interpolations, shortening and teasing illustrate. findings of this survey probably account for other countries’ radio stations as well since many musicians featured on selected german stations reach a worldwide audience. radio editors’ expertise in genres is evident in their work, but this is only apparent at certain times, as genres are not mentioned on-air most of the time. genres are subject to different treatment off-air, during evening hours and on audio channels dedicated to them. rather than assigning specific meanings to edm and its genres, radio stations tend to obscure the distinction between them by employing juxtaposition without any clear separation of genres in their on-air communication. absence of genre names engenders a state of affairs in which any given piece of music with beats may be designated as dance music. finally, the status quo of edm on german radio in relation to the terminology employed in academia will be discussed. edm on german radio is characterised by its dynamism and heterogeneity with regard to appeals, genres and sounds. it is both more accessible and harsher in sound, than definitions such as “edm pop” (holt 2017) assume. due to the selection of (hot) ac and chr stations, the scope of edm and related music presented mathei | beats on airwaves 71 is limited. other genres that utilise techniques of edm—such as schlager, a popular music genre particular to germany—were not featured on selected stations. the tendency to utilise edm as a genre and dance as an umbrella term among interviewees, puts them closer to an understanding of “dance” by professionals ( jóri 2021: 30). there might be cases in which editors of german radio stations use edm as an umbrella term, but this just adds more to the confusion. in contrast, sunshine live calls itself an electronic music radio station without mentioning dance, since the featured music is not exclusively intended for dancing, which is similar to mcleod’s reasoning for electronic/dance music (2001). although i have used electronic dance music (edm) as an umbrella term so far, i would like to argue for kembrew mcleod’s (2001) “electronic/dance music” for which i will use the acronym “e/dm”. e/dm carries an openness that seems appropriate for the diversity of the subject. understood as meta genre, the term broadens the focus to music that is not “designed for dancing” (mcleod 2001: 60). this correlates with contemporary e/dm titles and related music on german radio, which encompasses a wide spectrum of electronically or digitally produced music. e/dm’s popular side is broader with fluent transitions to pop and different modes of aesthetic expression. producers are not limited to dance music and compose ballads or electronic pop songs too. an additional point to note pertains to the genesis of e/dm, which started non-electronically. despite mcleod’s assertion that “the synthesizer is the instrument most associated” with disco (2001: 62), a significant portion of its historical evolution has been characterised by analogue and string-driven sounds (lawrence 2003). distinguishing between electronic and dance music would expand the scope of research to other genres of dance and electronic music. confronted with the diversity and changing nature of e/dm, the need for substantiated musicological definitions regarding genres become apparent. as mathieu guillien criticises, “musicology does not play its role” in unravelling the confusions surrounding e/dm and its genres, despite having the tools to define music by objective criteria such as form, rhythm, sequences and harmony (2021: 60). in turn, sociology often fails to define its musical research subjects by not referencing the music itself. the study of e/dm lacks distinct definitions and needs “more precise musicological terminology” (guillien 2021: 61), that is guided by sociological and (sub)cultural insights on contexts of genres and is regularly updated. music, its structures and its sounds, should be treated with respect to both its inner workings and its audible appearance. this is also true for the popular side of e/dm. as the survey has shown, music from this genre is successful but heterogeneous, consisting of either electronic or danceable music, which invites prolific analysis. acknowledgements many thanks to the interviewees, everyone involved at dancecult and my family. dancecult 17(1)72 notes 1 quote from goldhammer (1995) translated by the author. 2 in mapping studies, up to 50 variants of music genres are tested in regard to appeal and alleged affiliation to a radio station. call-outs are concerned with current or recurrent titles, while archive tests focus on older titles. 3 scores for titles are determined by market research agencies or departments, statistical methods and in consultation with editors. 4 concept from neuwöhner (1998) translated by the author. 5 ma is based on four surveys which are concerned with different aspects. ma radio is the main data set and includes reach measuring for radio stations distributed, e.g., by vhf or digital audio broadcasting, online audio usage and streaming service usage. data for ma radio is collected via computer-assisted telephone interviewing on the basis of the sampling scheme “adm-master-sample”. the scheme contains main statistical data for the description of the population that has participated. ma includes members of the general population from the age of 14 years on. ma is released in two reports each year. data collection for ma radio is conducted twice per year. during each research period 65,000+ interviews are conducted (mmc 2024). 6 daily reach indicates the number of daily listeners of a radio station. this accounts for all persons that have stated they were listening to a specific station for 15 minutes during a day. it is displayed in two forms, as the time from 5:00 am to 0:00 pm or as the average day from monday to friday. 7 interview by the author with marc möllmann, by phone on 26 march 2024 and 24 october 2024. interview by the author with jan kuhlmann, by phone on 07 august 2024. interview with anonymous head of music, by phone on 04 april 2024. 8 musictrace is a commercial provider of radio reach figures. i do not have any affiliation with musictrace and bought the data 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https://themusic.com.au/features/from-darwin-to-deutschland-cyril-eyes-a-bright-future-theres-a-lot-of-new-music-coming/wfz_1dtx1tk/04-07-24 https://themusic.com.au/features/from-darwin-to-deutschland-cyril-eyes-a-bright-future-theres-a-lot-of-new-music-coming/wfz_1dtx1tk/04-07-24 mathei | beats on airwaves 75 wicke, peter, wieland and kai-erik ziegenrücker. 2007. handbuch der populären musik: geschichte, stile, praxis, industrie. mainz: schott. discography artemas. 2024. i like the way you kiss me. self-released (download): none. <https://www.discogs.com/release/30414053-artemas-i-like-the-way-you-kiss-me>. alcazar. 2000. “crying at the discotheque”. on crying at the discotheque. bmg sweden (maxisingle): 74321 72164 2. <https://www.discogs.com/release/336861-alcazar-crying-at-the-discoteque>. alphaville. 1984. “big in japan”. track 1 on big in japan. wea (12-inch): 24-9505-0. <https://www.discogs.com/de/release/691076-alphaville-big-in-japan>. bennett. 2023. vois sur ton chemin (techno mix). warner music central europe (download): none. <https://www.discogs.com/de/release/29545378-bennett-vois-sur-ton-chemin-techno-mix>. carrà, raffallea. 1980. “pedro”. track 1 on pedro. cbs (7inch): 8579. <https://www.discogs.com/de/release/4114765-raffaella-carra-pedro>. cyril. 2023. stumblin‘ in. spinnin’ records (download): none. <https://www.discogs.com/ release/31175446-cyril-stumblin-in>. harris, calvin and ellie goulding. 2023. miracle. columbia (download): g010005017683x. <https://www.discogs.com/de/release/26570351-calvin-harris-ellie-goulding-miracle>. hugel, topic, arash and daecolm. 2024. i adore you. virgin (download): none. <https://www. discogs.com/de/release/31262494-hugel-x-topic-5-x-arash-feat-daecolm-i-adore-you>. jaxomy, agatino romero and raffaella carrà. 2024. pedro. sony music entertainment (download): none. <https://www.discogs.com/de/release/30237530-raffaella-carr%c3%a0-jaxomy-agatinoromero-pedro>. klangkarussel. 2012. “sonnentanz”. track 1 on sonnentanz. universal music group (maxisingle): 06025 3716846 0. <https://www.discogs.com/release/4161227-klangkarussell-sonnentanz>. kygo and ava max. 2024. whatever. kygo, rca (download): none. <https://www.discogs.com/release/29533084-kygo-with-ava-max-whatever>. miles, robert. 1996. “children”. track 1 on children. urban (maxi-single): 577 911-2. <https://www.discogs.com/de/release/30926-robert-miles-children>. norman, chris and suzi quatro. 1978. “stumblin ‘in”. track 1 on stumblin ‘in. electrola (maxi-single): 1 c 006-61 907. <https://www.discogs.com/de/release/417330-chris-norman-suzi-quatro-stumblin-in>. port, adam, stryv and malachiii. 2024. move. keinemusik (download): km069. <https://www.discogs.com/de/release/30913743-adam-port-stryv-feat-malachiii-move>. purple disco machine, benjamin ingrosso, nile rodgers and shanseea. 2024. honey boy. columbia (download): none. <https://www.discogs.com/de/release/31165784-purple-disco-machine-benjamin-ingrossofeat-nile-rodgers-and-shenseea-honey-boy>. https://www.discogs.com/release/30414053-artemas-i-like-the-way-you-kiss-me https://www.discogs.com/release/336861-alcazar-crying-at-the-discoteque https://www.discogs.com/de/release/691076-alphaville-big-in-japan https://www.discogs.com/de/release/29545378-bennett-vois-sur-ton-chemin-techno-mix https://www.discogs.com/de/release/4114765-raffaella-carra-pedro https://www.discogs.com/release/31175446-cyril-stumblin-in https://www.discogs.com/release/31175446-cyril-stumblin-in https://www.discogs.com/de/release/26570351-calvin-harris-ellie-goulding-miracle https://www.discogs.com/de/release/31262494-hugel-x-topic-5-x-arash-feat-daecolm-i-adore-you https://www.discogs.com/de/release/31262494-hugel-x-topic-5-x-arash-feat-daecolm-i-adore-you https://www.discogs.com/de/release/30237530-raffaella-carr%c3%a0-jaxomy-agatino-romero-pedro https://www.discogs.com/de/release/30237530-raffaella-carr%c3%a0-jaxomy-agatino-romero-pedro https://www.discogs.com/release/4161227-klangkarussell-sonnentanz https://www.discogs.com/release/29533084-kygo-with-ava-max-whatever https://www.discogs.com/de/release/30926-robert-miles-children https://www.discogs.com/de/release/417330-chris-norman-suzi-quatro-stumblin-in https://www.discogs.com/de/release/30913743-adam-port-stryv-feat-malachiii-move https://www.discogs.com/de/release/31165784-purple-disco-machine-benjamin-ingrosso-feat-nile-rodgers-and-shenseea-honey-boy https://www.discogs.com/de/release/31165784-purple-disco-machine-benjamin-ingrosso-feat-nile-rodgers-and-shenseea-honey-boy dancecult 17(1)76 purple disco machine, kungs. 2023. substitution. columbia local (download): g010004978388m. <https://www.discogs.com/de/release/26766455-purple-disco-machine-kungs-substitution>. shakira. 2001. “whenever, wherever”. track 1 on whenever, wherever. epic (maxi-single): epc 671913 1. <https://www.discogs.com/de/release/14694633-shakira-whenever-wherever>. sheila b. devotion. 1979. “spacer”. track 1 on spacer. carrere (12-inch): 2141 208. <https://www.discogs.com/release/99999-sheila-b-devotion-spacer>. southstar. 2022. miss you. columbia (download): g010004872060o. <https://www.discogs.com/de/release/25464025-southstar-miss-you>. topic, robin schulz, nico santos and paul van dyk. 2022. in your arms (for an angel). virgin records (download): none. <https://www.discogs.com/de/release/21928921-topic-5-x-robin-schulz-x-nico-santos-xpaul-van-dyk-in-your-arms-for-an-angel>. trans-x. 1983. “living on video”. track 1 on living on video / vivre sur vidéo. polydor (12ich):811810-1. <https://www.discogs.com/de/release/19008841-trans-x-living-on-video-vivre-survid%c3%a9o>. van dyk, paul. 1998. “for an angel”. track 1 on for an angel. jive (maxi-single): rtd103.2094.3. <https://www.discogs.com/de/release/29496-paul-van-dyk-for-an-angel>. https://www.discogs.com/de/release/26766455-purple-disco-machine-kungs-substitution https://www.discogs.com/de/release/14694633-shakira-whenever-wherever https://www.discogs.com/release/99999-sheila-b-devotion-spacer https://www.discogs.com/de/release/25464025-southstar-miss-you https://www.discogs.com/de/release/21928921-topic-5-x-robin-schulz-x-nico-santos-x-paul-van-dyk-in-your-arms-for-an-angel https://www.discogs.com/de/release/21928921-topic-5-x-robin-schulz-x-nico-santos-x-paul-van-dyk-in-your-arms-for-an-angel https://www.discogs.com/de/release/29496-paul-van-dyk-for-an-angel thrice-experienced clubbing: three ethnographic readings of a club night in ankali, prague, 7 june 2024 arsène werlen university of manchester (uk) cyber shanahoy the new school (usa) anonymous david verbuč university of ljubljana (slovenia) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.12> introduction: david verbuč in this piece, we present three ethnographic vignettes from a 7 june 2024 club night in ankali, prague, written by students from the international summer school course theory and ethnography of electronic dance music scenes. the summer school, hosted with guest lecturer dr. luis manuel garcia-mispireta, was held at the faculty of humanities, charles university in prague, between 3–8 june 2024 (see fhs 2024). the three ethnographic vignettes follow the summer school guidelines that luis and i shared with the students, where we asked them to write down fieldnotes from the ankali club night experience, and turn three significant ethnographic or autoethnographic moments from the night into ethnographic prose. they were also required to add elements of self-reflection, as well as quotes from interviews/conversations with the club organizers and attendees, conveying emic perspectives of the club experience. moreover, we asked them to focus specifically on the following ethnographic aspects of the event: time (temporal progression), space, audience, sensory experiences, body, gender, sexuality and/or stranger intimacy. these analytic foci were drawn from in-class theoretical and methodological discussions during the summer school, which was one of our key pedagogical goals: to teach the students how to combine theory and ethnography while researching electronic dance music scenes. students were able to choose from the following three assignment options and to submit either (a) fieldnotes plus three ethnographic vignettes, (b) fieldnotes plus three autoethnographic vignettes and (c) fieldnotes plus three ethnographic vignettes including creative sections (poetry, drawings etc.). at the end, we received 15 student submissions in total, from which we selected the three most outstanding entries for this publication. here they appear without fieldnotes, only as clubbing ethnographic / autoethnographic vignettes, with the last one also featuring a poem. all three were abridged to suit the requirements of the dancecult journal and one of the authors wanted to remain anonymous. we had promised the students beforehand that we would find a public platform to publish the three best submissions. this is luis manuel garcia-mispireta’s brief assessment of our work: “i cannot overstate how delighted i was with the results of this assignment. we adapted this from david verbuč's teaching practice, since he has been teaching the ethnography of urban music scenes for years. my contribution was to adapt the assignment's task to electronic music scenes specifically, along with developing pre-fieldwork methodological training that took nightlife contexts into account”. while we acknowledge the significance of our summer school in terms of its educational value for the students, we are also not willing to take all the credit for the students’ exemplary writing and ethnographic skills evidenced in these three texts, which transcend the educational benefits of our brief summer school course. in terms of the structure of this submission, we believe that the juxtaposition of three parallel ethnographic texts presented by three students focusing on the same event offers a valuable comparative analytical perspective, providing for a multi-perspective and intersubjective experiential reading of the same club event (see kurosawa 1950; heider 1988; wolf 1992). more specifically, the authors’ positions shape their ethnographic texts. in terms of nationality: arsène is swiss but residing in great britain; cyber is australian but living in new york and anonymous is canadian but now studying in the czech republic. with regard to their gender: arsène identifies as a “queer man”; cyber as “genderqueer” and anonymous as female. their age at the time of the summer school was: arsène 25 years; cyber 36 years and anonymous 22 years old. their student status at the time of the summer school was: arsène doing phd; cyber a ba and anonymous also a ba. none of them had previous experience in conducting fieldwork. in terms of years of participation in electronic dance music scenes, arsène had 7 years of experience, cyber 15 years and anonymous no previous experience. the only participant with some knowledge of prague's electronic dance music scene was cyber, having experienced the local scene for four days. these positions, as it becomes apparent in the texts below, shape how the students approached the ankali nightlife experience in different ways, as well as their subsequent translation of their sensations and observations in writing. overall, each of the authors focuses on different aspects of the clubbing experience (one also on the night after), each of them employing different styles of writing and all of them meeting, talking and interacting with different people throughout the night. in this way, the three authors co-create an insightful and engaging complementary interweaving of three clubbing narratives that gradually grow into a larger whole. as a final note on the performers: the main djs of the 7 june “pinkies release party” in ankali, were mark broom, farahdiba back-to-back with jardabpm, jesse back-to-back with pink concrete, schaumstoff and timmi. see also the link for the event below with the running order and house rules included (see ankali 2024). ethnographic experience 1: arsène werlen 2:20 am i’m still trying to find my footing. techno isn’t my usual scene, and i’ve never been clubbing in prague. the crowd is also straighter than i’d imagined. with the added fact of being here on research, i’m having fun but am also aware that i only partly know the social codes of this event. i walk to the chillout room with cushioned benches on either side and notice my classmate lounging on the right side. i wave at her and sit, trying to get comfortable but still buzzing with uncertainty. we listen to the music in silence for a couple of minutes and a young man with blonde hair enters the room while taking a puff from his vape. i smile at him as a sort of welcome to the space. he flashes me a grin in return, looking into my eyes as he sits down on the opposite side of the room. for a minute or two we keep looking elsewhere and soaking in the relaxed atmosphere and whenever our eyes meet, he flashes me another tender smile. i’m not sure if he’s trying to flirt or if this is a way to acknowledge that we’re both visibly queer men sharing a special moment and space. maybe it’s both, or it doesn’t really matter. either way, his smiles have made me feel somewhat tethered, more comfortable in this half-unfamiliar space, ready to tackle the hours to come. a young man with dark hair enters. he waves at the blonde one and sits on his side, after which they immediately snuggle up, the blonde one’s head resting on the other one’s shoulder, lifting his legs up on the wall. as i hear them quietly starting to speak czech, i see that the dark-haired one is lightly playing with the other’s hair. mine and the blonde’s eyes lock again—we exchange another soft, slightly shy smile. i don’t recognise them in the club after but leave the chillout room feeling less anxious than when i entered it. 3:55 am it’s the middle of mark broom’s headline set and the energy is running high at my end of the dancefloor. i look around and notice someone: a tall man in a white tank top and dangly necklace, deep in the music, creating a complementary rhythm to the track by clapping his hands. he commands a lot of attention, but in a way that doesn’t feel like a performance of superiority over other dancers. at some point, he locks eyes with a slightly older man dancing a metre and a half away. he turns to his side and, looking at him with a grin, starts a “come hither” gesture to the beat of the track. i can feel a loose circle of eyes on them. the other man approaches in a slightly jerky walk, also on beat. they embrace in a laugh and rock each other from side to side before dancing on their own again. it feels like something has been unlocked for this corner of the dancefloor now, a sense of dancing together rather than next to each other. i look at the tall man’s movements from the corner of my eye. he moves his shoulders and wrists with quite a feminine, carefree attitude and seeing someone else move in a queer way brings me joy. we dance some more, and i accidentally bump my beer bottle against his arm. i turn to apologise and see he is already gasping, hand over his open mouth, playfully dramatizing the situation. i play along, fake a gasp and say, “oh my god i’m sooooo sorry, you will never forgive me!” he shakes his head and we both laugh; it seems clear to me that we are both acknowledging each other as gay through this interaction. we keep dancing, each focused on our own space. i get really into the music, putting both more and less thought into the way i move, even letting myself do a couple of spins. after a while, the same man leans into my ear and says something i can’t make out. it sounds like either “you look like you make sense of yourself” or “you know how to make space for yourself”. i pick a compliment from his tone and thank him anyways, after which he adds “i’m the same, i appreciate that”. then, he leans in further and wraps his arms around me in a sweaty, tight, tender embrace, nestling his face in the space between my neck and shoulder. i’m still confused about what he said to me but let myself melt into this hug, almost feeling like i’ve just been blessed, for a second or two. we separate flashing big joyful smiles at each other and go on dancing in our respective corners. ethnographic experience 2: cyber shanahoy it was my first weekend in prague for the summer. having little understanding of the local scene and zero ability to speak czech, i was reliant on the possibility of stranger intimacy to help guide my stay and be the catalyst for any connections i might make with others. as a 36-year-old genderqueer femme dyke who has been involved in diy, punk and rave scenes at different times in my life since 2001, i am not satisfied just being a tourist. i’m always hoping to find underground subcultures everywhere i go. on friday night the class went to pinkies, an electronic, house / techno party at ankali for participant observation. ankali is part of a shift in techno nightlife in prague, having opened in 2018 when members of off-location parties polygon and nite vibes teamed up to create a permanent club space. yalin, a promoter and dj who books pinkies, claims that “ankali is the best club in prague” and that prior to its opening there were “no proper techno clubs, they [ankali] are the ones who started everything”. having no other information to go off i have to take his word for it, even though i feel curious if someone slightly older from an adjacent scene would say the same thing.[1] a quick look online and anakli’s socio-political stance is clear. a pro-palestine instagram post written by members of the collective was shared on the day of the pinkies event. on their website the house rules read like the type of club environment i’m most familiar with as a queer person living in bushwick, brooklyn: “just treat others with respect regardless of origin, age, gender, sexual orientation and religion”. ankali, at face value, is the type of club i would want to check out in a new city. except, i was not feeling it, having stayed up late the night before jumping around with my dorm mate to the new charli xcx album brat, which had just dropped at midnight. monster energy drink in hand, wearing blue camo cargo pants, a black baby doll tee and dyed blue hair pulled into pigtails exposing an undercut, i boarded the bus from chodov to meet up with my classmates. we trekked over cobblestone to a dark dirt path before arriving in a back-alleyway where the entrance to ankali, located in a former soap factory, sat beyond a line of hopeful clubgoers. inside was a “choose your own adventure”. in the ambient room, on a padded platform in front of the dj, two women took their shoes off and laid on their backs. the dj sat on a bench, headphones around their neck, discreetly smoking while selecting vinyl records of slow, chilled grooves. in cubbies between the ambient room and dance floor i saw a group chatting and a couple making out. by the bathroom, a plaque by local ngo konsent publicized ankali’s participation in the respect is sexy program.[2] the dance floor can be accessed by two points: the back and side front. the side front entrance/exit allows easy access between the dance floor and bathroom without having to weave one’s way through an entire room of dancers. outside, stacked wood pallets are benches; club-mate crates are stools; cuts of fabric hang from the trees and a big yellow neon light is balanced across some branches. i floated between all the different areas, never quite feeling 100% present in any because the only place i would probably feel 100% was in bed. in the bathroom, a guy from czechia who was hoping to purchase mdma, shared that he now lives in amsterdam and made a comment about how it’s more accepting of queers than here. in the yard/garden i met a techno loving guy from the emirates who has been to prague ten times, with this being his third time to ankali, as well as a guy who works in finance who had met his spanish boyfriend ten months before on tinder. around 4:00am the dance floor filled up while headliner mark broom was on. someone near the front thrashed around, caught in the music, but not everyone was locked in, with some mid-conversation. two men were dancing shirtless next to each other, while in the other direction two men openly made out. i left after the sun had risen around 6:00 am. i woke up in the late afternoon. it was saturday. my dorm mate and i couldn’t agree on a plan. he wanted to go back to ankali for a queer night called dick. i wanted to go to a free party that i knew very little about. a few days prior while at a cafe i saw a poster, hand printed on cardboard with torn edges and a chaotic, spikey, design. the only information on it read “casino soundsystem”, along with a string of numbers (coordinates) and a date, that upcoming saturday. i convinced him to join me and we took a taxi to a bus stop on the side of a mountain. “dobrý den, ahhm, anglicky? ahhm, free party?”. i said in the most busted czech with an aussie accent to two men in the shadows. one opened the gate and told us to walk 1km down the path. it was pitch black except for the ghostly shell of old buildings illuminated by the moon. eventually we heard 180+ bpm in the distance and approached an area in the forest that had been transformed into a temporary autonomous zone. in a large dish on the ground people were battling beyblades, a perfect opportunity to interact with strangers: a french guy who was hitchhiking through europe and a 52-year-old italian lady with purple hair who works as a primary school teacher. the police arrived and the music stopped. someone played nwa’s “fuck the police” off their phone until they left and the party continued. as the sun rose more was revealed. four teenage girls at the very front with their hands against the vibrating sound system, while the dj played behind it, blocked from view. one of them put her sneakers on top of a speaker and danced barefoot in the dirt. later, in the tall grass while writing in my notebook, a lady, who looked in her 40s, asked me something in czech. i told her i only speak english and she responded, “google translate”. i handed her my phone and she typed, “this party is awesome!” i typed out a question for her in english asking how i could find more parties like this, pressed the translate key and handed her my phone. she directed me to a facebook group to follow. around 10:30 am i went back to the dorm satisfied that due to some stranger intimacy my time in prague was starting to unfold. ethnographic experience 3: anonymous in the heart of prague's vibrant nightlife scene lies a subculture that thrives on the interplay of music, identity and community. navigating through the pulsating beats and dimly lit ankali rooms, i encounter a myriad of individuals whose stories and interactions reveal the deeper layers of club culture. this narrative captures not only the sensory overload of a typical night out, but also the profound sense of connection and safety that permeates these spaces. it highlights the paradox of feeling supported and safe to express one's sexuality and identity more freely in an environment that, on the surface, may appear chaotic and uninhibited.   through my conversations with athena, muki and paolo, i uncover the underlying dynamics that make ankali a haven for diversity and inclusivity. the conversations and observations documented here offer insights into how these spaces foster a sense of community and belonging through their unique blend of exclusivity and openness.   athena sometime after 1am, i head outside to get some air. passing through the plastic flaps covering the entrance to the main room, the volume is instantly muted, the pulsing of the bassline the only clear intonation. my head swims with the atmosphere, buzzing with music, voices, dim red lights and the pervasive smell of cigarette smoke. outside, i encounter a group of 20-something-year-olds. after brief introductions, i compliment the girl to my right on her style: chunky black boots, fishnet tights and a black dress. her name is athena, and she has long straight hair that sways behind her when she moves. we start talking about the fashion in places like ankali, and i ask her whether she feels the need to dress up when she goes out clubbing, or if she dresses similarly to her everyday apparel. athena shakes her head: “i feel a lot less sexualized in a space like this than in a normal club, and it allows me to wear much more revealing clothing than i would normally be comfortable wearing” she explains. it is interesting that being less sexualized leads people to dress in what is usually considered a ‘sexually provocative’ way. athena, shrugging, says, “i never really thought about it that way, but i suppose i like to feel sexy, i like to look good without feeling the danger element that you get in certain places”. looking around, i notice the diverse attire: some bold and performative, others ordinary, as if picked from streetwear. there is no dress code, no conformity; there is no judgment, only praise. i realized that in an environment as diverse as this one, not one person stuck out. everyone was weird, so no one was weird. the lack of conformity somehow seemed to generate a sense of community, and although people clearly came to ankali with groups of friends and acquaintances, there was a feeling of intimacy between these groups. athena commented, “this is a way to feel connected to people through music, not just the people i came with but all these beautiful people who came to share an experience, you know?”. 2:45am i head to the bar to speak with some more people. immediately, a couple standing there catches my eye. i walk up and introduce myself, and they enthusiastically ask me where i’m from. barely two minutes into the small talk and introductions, they ask me if i want to do a shot with them. minutes later, i am standing with the burning taste of becherovka in my throat asking the pair—muki and paolo—about their night. muki is a fascinating person to look at, with a severe buzzcut and silver gauges stretching her ears. despite the roughness of these details, her face is youthful and sweet. she wears no makeup, and i cannot guess her age—23 at most—but it is hard to tell. i ask if they go out to events like these often. paolo nods and says ankali is one of their favourite spots to attend events and raves. i ask the pair if they feel that the space is inclusive, and they exchange a look that i can’t read. “it’s a difficult topic because it will always seem inclusive”, muki starts, “but if you’re in the scene for a bit you start to find some social bubbles”. it certainly seems like the people at ankali are comfortable and settled in their groups, that they are regular attendees of events like these. muki pauses, then adds that “overall i think [ankali is] more inclusive than other spaces”. perhaps the feeling of conviviality is not due to openness as i first thought, but simply the fact that everyone here, whether they are aware of it or not, knows one another. they know what to expect from the crowd, and they know where they fit in. the thought occurs to me that maybe standing out is the best possible way to fit in with a community like this one, which values creativity, daring and wildness.   before coming to prague i had never encountered a nightlife scene that wasn’t fixated on hooking up and making friends and getting drunk. we share a laugh as muki, a native of prague, points out that that is what tourists come to prague for. certainly, no one here is a tourist, or at least they don’t act like one. musingly, paolo says: “in terms of inclusivity, i like that it is exclusive. i like that it filters out tourists, you can’t just walk in here, you have to know what is going on. the exclusivity is part of the experience”. this exclusivity was not what i expected. can people only be truly inclusive if there is a certain degree of homogeneity, a shared mindset, a something-in-common? closing thoughts this club, like many others in prague, is more than just a place to dance. it is a microcosm of a larger cultural shift, a space where traditional notions of gender and sexuality are continuously renegotiated. it is a living, breathing entity that thrives on the energy and diversity of its patrons. it is a space where people can stand out and fit in simultaneously, where being weird is an asset and being a bit wild is a requirement. as i leave the club in the early hours of the morning, the city of prague awakens around me. in the everyday world, the rules and roles reassert themselves, but the memory of the club remains as an expression of what is possible within the intimacy of shared human experience. lit by moonlight beat pulsing through veins, a symphony of human bodies, swaying, undulating, becomes a sea of unity. the bass thumps: a shared heartbeat, synchronizing the pulse of life exhale, reverberating through the dark, inhale faces blur, enmeshed by a collective breath, sweat mingles with air, chemical-infused fog, a haze of freedom and abandon, as limbs stretch, unfurl, like wings in flight. a silent conductor orchestrates liberation, each drop, each rise, a symphonic apogee. we, the dancers, the passionate chorus, echo in unison, translating music into outstretched limbs. in this moment, life is infinite, the turgid turning of time, lost and found in rhythm, each beat a step towards dawn. here, there is no yesterday, no tomorrow, only now, only the pulse, the breathless heartbeat, beat of music, beat of being alive, united but apart, strangers made not strange, united in humanity, united in dance. author biographies arsène werlen is an esrc-funded phd student in sociology at the university of manchester and a member of the morgan centre for research into everyday lives. his thesis focuses on trans experiences of belonging within contemporary mancunian clubbing scenes: touching on collective aspects of trans life; the social role of dancing; ambivalent in/exclusions and experiences of solidarity across identity-based differences. his approach centres the lived experience of marginalised people and the intersubjectivity arising from marginalised social circles. email: arsene.werlen-2@manchester.ac.uk   cyber shanahoy is a queer, working class, diy filmmaker originally from western sydney, australia. since 2001 they have been involved in various alternative and underground subcultures, from riot grrrl to rave. they currently live in brooklyn, working at an all ages music venue and completing a ba in urban studies at the new school. email: shanahoy@gmail.com david verbuč is assistant professor of ethnomusicology at the faculty of arts, university of ljubljana, slovenia. he is an author of the book diy house shows and music venues in the us: ethnographic explorations of place and community (2022). verbuč’s academic writing and research includes the (auto)ethnographic and micro-historical study of village and urban music in socialist and post-socialist slovenia; ethnographic and archival analysis of romani / sinti musicians in slovenia; the ethnographic examination of diy music venues and scenes in the us, as well as the theoretical analysis of ethnographic and archival methods of research. email: david.verbuc@gmail.com references ankali. 2024. “07–06 friday pinkies release party”. ankali. <anka.li/2024/06/pinkies-release-hardgroove/>, (accessed 12 may 2025). fhs. 2024. “2024 ethnomusicology summer school”. faculty of humanities, charles university website. <https://fhs.cuni.cz/fhseng-1300.html#4>, (accessed 12 may 2025). heider, karl g. 1988. “the rashomon effect: when ethnographers disagree”. american anthropologist 90(1): 73–81. kontra, gabriela. ed. 2021. location tba: temporary utopia of prague raves 2015–2020. prague: divočina. kurosawa. akira, dir. 1950. rashomon. rko radio pictures. wolf, margery. 1992. a thrice-told tale: feminism, postmodernism, and ethnographic responsibility. stanford university press. notes [1] editor’s note: for an overview of czech’s techno/rave scene, past and present, see kontra (2021). [2] konsent is a czech educational organisation that works with local bars and clubs, as well as other institutions, on the prevention of sexual harassment and gender violence. from spontinuity to dream seeds: my journey with lightshows from the sixties to the present c. scott taylor independent researcher <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2023.15.01.06> it is said in some western esoteric teachings that universe is, in essence, a show of light. by this i understand that the “light of the soul” is the “electric fire of spirit” made manifest in the physical realms, and the lightshow is a sacred embodiment of the ecstatic dance of minds at play. well, that’s how i experience it, anyway. my history with lightshows begins with my father, an avid photographer who documented our travels in panama, europe and around the us as a family in the ’50s and ’60s. he found a way, in 1959, to make a reel-to-reel tape recorder change slides on cue with a music soundtrack and his spoken narrative. truly funky old-time tech. as a military family, we moved many times. by my high school years, we had settled in colorado springs. in the summer of 1967, on a whim and a ten-speed bicycle, i went to drop city, an early (and seminal) communal arts experiment outside trinidad, colorado. comprised of geodesic domes made from the tops of automobiles, it had been featured in time magazine, alerting me to the local presence of hippies. welcomed and offered a joint, i danced under my first “psychedelic lightshow”. i was invited to play with coloured liquids on a homemade overhead projector aimed at the triangles that made up the dome. liquid lights entered my mind that first night. figure 1. clark richert, co-founder of drop city in the performance dome, with the ultimate, a group painting that spun under a strobe light, revealing different images based on speed of strobe, 1967. courtesy of denver post. figure 2. author at dining table, drop city, 1967. courtesy of denver post. the magical kingdom of endor following high school and a brief sojourn at pennsylvania state university, in the fall of 1967 i returned to colorado springs. there, i joined up with a ragtag “hippie family”. we pooled our resources and rented a former downtown strip club, painted glowing fluorescent fairies and wizards on the black walls, borrowed some projectors and with our house band baby magic, opened to a bemused public who did not understand what on earth we were doing. a hippie nightclub? what? our first hippie nightclub, the magical kingdom of endor, lasted only a few weeks. we soon found a better venue for our family: 1111 pearl street, downtown boulder, colorado. arriving in boulder in early 1968, we discovered a small city at the inception of its hippie era. the new venue was on the second floor with a back alley entrance, a ballroom with a balcony and four small apartments that looked out onto pearl street. the new home for the magical kingdom of endor (after the “witch” in the old testament who only used her magic for good) was quickly decorated and set up. we had a headshop in one apartment and lived in the others. the lightshow took over the balcony, facing the low stage at the head of the ballroom below. a group of boulder artists (see bardomatrix.com) had preceded us with their lightshows. john chick, one of the artists, dropped by one day. he was preparing to leave for kathmandu and offered to give us an overhead projector. an amazing relic from a bygone era, john told us it had been used in new york for some of the earliest lightshows (possibly league for spiritual discovery, timothy leary’s lecture accompaniment). to this day, i have never seen another like it. instead of a plastic “fresnel lens”, with concentric rings moulded into it to focus light, it had two 9” square optical glass lenses. it produced a brilliant image and was housed in a heavy black case. it became central to our array of light-manipulating techniques. we added another overhead projector and two slide projectors with telephoto lenses and (wired) remote controls. i taped the controls onto the sides of the lenses. this enabled me to change slides while keeping my hands on the lenses. i used my fingers to “bend the light”, shaping, melting, morphing images that i could control with great precision. my buddy herbie and i ran the lightshow. herbie was an instant liquid light master, somehow making forms appear unlike anyone i have known. others worked with us at various times. there is skill involved in working with liquid light. envision two large clear glass clock faces, one a bit larger, nested together. in the bottom one are two clear liquids that do not mix, usually water and mineral oil. colours are added to the liquids: food colouring in the water, and ink or dye in the oil. the smaller top clock face sits in the liquids. the top “plate” is held between fingers and thumb of each hand, just above the surface of the bottom plate, balanced and gently moved. the top plate can manipulate the liquids, causing it to flow, wash across, or take on shapes. both plates can sit on patterns, such as pressed glass cake platters found in thrift stores, or cutout patterns. a skilled artist can create an endless assortment of shapes and movements. effects such as using a straw held in the mouth and blowing on the liquids, or dripping more colours into the liquids add to the possibilities. figure 3. clock face “dishes” with liquids, on overhead projector. i had been a photographer for many years, and i spent what money i had on film to build an image library. i copied images where i could find them, and took many, many hundreds of slides of my own. i gathered a “visual database”, as it is called on my computer now. i collected a huge number of images from nature, artworks, faces, macro-photography. placing two images on screen at once, morphing them into each other, then replacing one, morphing, replacing the other and on and on, consumes a steady supply of content. consider that one image may be on screen for less than ten seconds, for a three hour show. the art of the lightshow is quintessentially remix art, sampling the visually available universe as part of a process of unfolding the dense information matrix in which we live. the lightshow artist takes what exists—colour, liquid movement, moments of time (which is what a photographic slide is), moving images and light effects—mixes them in new ways and shares them with a happy and appreciative audience. it is ephemeral. as i see it, one need not be concerned that one’s art has been shown on screen for a few seconds as part of a lengthy montage. art has always involved remixing sources, and the lightshow follows this long established method. figure 4. mixed image of overhead projector dishes with liquids and fish. the human perceptual system perceives but does not record movement well. the majority of memory is in the form of moments, still images. slides projected on a screen are very close to what makes up our memories. we recall still images with little movement. this is our common experience, and the lightshow reflects this. at endor, during our stoned discussions about our role, aside from the techniques of colours and images (mixing and moving to accentuate the music), we realized we were working in two diametrically opposite ways. the liquids were impossible to replicate night to night. the movement of the dishes was intuitive, spontaneous, abstract, while the slides were images programmed to provide a loosely connected sense of narration. in trying to define what it was that we were doing, herbie and i stumbled upon a new word: spontinuity. spontaneous continuity. we were billed as spontinuity from then on. figure 5. business card for spontinuity lights: marty wolff, scott taylor and charlie morrell 1969 (herbie missed the photo shoot!). from their earliest days, lightshows have been described as “an attempt to replicate the psychedelic experience”. we found this ludicrous. only psychedelics themselves can do that. so what were we doing? clearly, we had a fantastic palette to work from and a potentially significant role to play in the culture in which we lived. we chose to see ourselves as one element in the alchemical process that opens the ecstatic state of celebration that is the live music event: rhythm, music, colour and light, swirling in a kind of “tribal” ritual. thematically, i programmed the show. kodak carousel projectors were my main tools. each carousel tray could hold 80 slides (eventually increased to 140). i grouped slides under general themes and filled trays with these themes. i typically had eight trays for a show. if i knew some of the lyrics to the songs that were scheduled to be performed, i would find images to match. otherwise, i had trays in reserve full of slides i was familiar with, and through my manual control of the lens, could shut off the image, release, remove and replace a tray for another better suited, and reopen the projector to continue the show without interruption. the transitions were key to the flow of a good show. in addition, we found ways to warp light. the technique is called lumia. flexible mirrors could warp and ripple images. suddenly, an image that had been static could ripple as if on water, then morph into an image of the ocean. mirror glass glued onto a flexible backing, then broken, could produce shattered reflections that escaped the screen on stage, traveling around the room in pieces. we were working with images that were delightful, fun, thought provoking. we were careful with our imagery—nothing of a dark terrifying nature, only images that were uplifting and joyous, even mystically inspiring— were appropriate for our audiences. figure 6. mixed image, mirrored dolphins and flower of life meditation. endor was a meeting place for the waves of hippies travelling cross country. the mountains offered places to camp, and boulder became a hippie mecca. our house band, baby magic, opened for various local and traveling groups, such as black pearl, alice cooper, conal implosion, zephyr and others. we served organic snacks and each of us wore costumes (mine was knee high moccasins, a flowing silk shirt, beads and an elf hat over my shoulder length hair). figure 7. author, stoned, just after endor was shut down. 1968. after about three months, the town “leaders” accused us of bringing the hippies to boulder. during our friday and saturday night shows, uniformed police stood on the sidewalk with “noise complaint” forms on clipboards, asking passing people to sign them. it did not take long for the local constabulary to close us down, but only after a city council meeting where we tried to meet their arguments with reason. no dice. within six months, having realized we were a solution to, not a cause of, the city’s “hippie invasion”, the council relented and offered some of us a purpose-built “youth centre” to manage. we declined; our family had by then disbanded, and we went our separate ways. i went to key west in the summer of ’68, and wound up living on the streets until i was picked up as the light artist for the smiths, who had a three week gig at a local club. (this was the original american group named the smiths, later just smith, not the english group from the ’80s.) money from that work and from selling my hotrod 1931 model a ford pickup truck brought in just enough to get off the streets and buy tickets for 6 hippies to go to belize, where we wanted to buy an island. but that is another story. spontinuity after endor when returning to boulder in the winter of ’68-69, i resumed work in the lightshow scene. at that time, we found support from the university of colorado student council to book bands and do shows. bands included the grateful dead, steve miller, eric burdon and war, john mayall and the local soon-to-be famous zephyr, among many more. doing lights for the grateful dead was exceptional. as a jam band, their style included a song in which they “trade leads”, with each musician leading the others on improvisations. the dead are the only band i have ever worked with who slowed to a common tempo, and together, all nodded to me and my partner to take the lead. they then played along as accompaniment to our spontaneous narrative imagery. it was a revelation to be let inside the performance, rather than being an adornment. it was a lovely gesture, one i have never forgotten. figure 8. mixed by author, using “stargate”, courtesy of robert venosa. we were doing shows in the glenn miller ballroom on the university campus. we had lots of extra projection surfaces. i found more slide projectors and put still images on the walls. i watched members of the audience in their altered states turn away from the stage to lie down and gaze at serene images of yoga postures, esoteric charts describing the “spiritual components of the human”, sacred geometry, etc. these are the few images we used that contained words. they were well received. figure 9. a typical diagram for the back walls, for those seeking seeds for their personal quest. i was asked by eric burdon and war to tour with them, performing concerts across the southwest. the weirdest lightshow i ever did was with them at a us air force base outside tucson, arizona, where about fifteen people showed up at the high school auditorium. the band treated it as a dress rehearsal and just kept on rockin’. the tour only lasted a few weeks before i returned to boulder. on 9 july 1969, we did the first large scale concert/festival in the university of colorado’s folsom stadium, called the moon bowl. the event featured country joe and the fish, steve miller, sons of champlin, tim hardin and buddy guy. the lightshow consisted of 12 artists under my direction, using 21 projectors and ran for almost six hours, non-stop. it began with a liquid projection of a black screen that resolved into a galaxy of bubbles, morphing into the spectrum, out of which appeared a 16mm animated film we made of the story of evolution. (i have wondered whether the person who did the opening sequence for big bang theory saw that show). some of the projectors melted during the show—we left a few things melted down. that event was another highpoint. figure 10. moon bowl poster. note bottom right, lights by spontinuity. art by bill hess. then in 1970 came marriage and home life, and i had to suspend my lightshow. the late nights and party life had been too much. i had helped set up the mammoth gardens project in denver, where a rich young dude bought an old roller skating rink and set up a club. we were hired to do the lighting, which mostly consisted of stage lighting, not much lightshow per se. i did lights for joe cocker, mad dogs and englishmen, jethro tull, the who and more. i moved on and became a furniture designer and maker. herbie kept spontinuity alive for a while, doing lights for local events in colorado until his life as a gold miner led elsewhere. figure 11. herbie hendricks at 72, master of the overhead projector. courtesy of herbie hendricks. dream seeds i had moved to australia by the time the world of digital projection arrived in the early 2000s. i fell in love with the possibilities, and once again set out on the lightshow journey. i renamed my new company dream seeds. digital imagery has such purity of colours, clarity of images and built-in animations that are fun to play with, but i will always insist that merging and shifting images through one’s fingers over the lens has more nuance, art and organic beauty than any computer will ever achieve. dream seeds has performed at numerous festivals in australia and the us (joyfest, harmony fest, byron bay peace festival, oregon country faire, she shamans) as well as concerts, weddings, parties and lectures. figure 12. lightshow for a wedding, 2021, sunshine coast, australia. in ’02, ’03 and ‘04, i was hired to be “the lighting guy” for a series of three wesak festivals, a new age version of buddha’s birthday celebrations, in brisbane, at uluru and in sydney. i provided backdrop visuals for each speaker, having only hours to interview them, find or create images and graphics and get it on screen behind them. i still own the glass dishes (large clear clock faces in different sizes) and some other effects gear for the full light shows i will, one day, perform again. i have projectors, thousands of slides, plus many thousands of created and curated images on my hard drives, and i can do a lightshow at the drop of an elf hat. my work as a light artist in recent years has involved much travel. between 2005 and 2017, i travelled around the world as a storyteller to places including sydney, melbourne, byron bay, brisbane, mumbai, new delhi, bruges, miami, asheville, houston, santa fe, boulder, portland, san francisco, los angeles, malibu, cancun, isla mujeres and hawaii. i carried a projector and laptop, doing lightshow/lecture/workshops and presenting an illustrated contemporary neo-myth called the “legend of the golden dolphin”, hundreds of times. that’s a topic for another place. the medium holds so many possibilities. figure 13. from the legend of the golden dolphin. changes along the way i watched the “classic” lightshow that used liquids, images and light manipulation blossom in the ’60s then fade away. it did not take long for them to virtually disappear. by the mid-70s the shows were mostly memories. programmed stage lighting and fancy machines to spin lights and change colours had moved in. and then came lasers. while fascinating for a short while, for me (and i have learned that other lightshow artists agree) lasers are quite limited, and are soulless flickers of curious light and patterns without the organic mystery of photographs, film and most certainly liquids. liquid projections can be just sloshing around with colours. when done by masterful artists they can be astonishingly creative. a lightshow i saw with timothy leary’s lecture in santa monica in 1969 was truly magical, using the most basic equipment to weave living rainbows that wrapped and warped the room. masters of the lumia technique, their shows consisted of rainbow light only, working with light itself, as bent and shaped by liquids, wave machines, lenses and mirrors. i wish i knew who they were. figure 14. mixed image: wet web, frog, flower, mandala and mystical figures. most concert lighting performances now consist of preprogrammed materials with little live, analog, hands-on creation. the projection of liquids has found a small resurgence and lumia has become more common than it used to be. these days a few artists are using cameras linked to digital projectors to capture imagery of liquids or other media on flat panels of leds.[1] philosophy as an artist working in the “psychedelic space”, i feel a strong obligation to uphold a high standard of positive content. to me, it is a moral obligation. with much personal experience and study of the psychedelic space, i know that vulnerability and openness to suggestion often guides the experience. associations can be triggered by images. as leary taught us, the quality of the psychedelic experience depends on “set” and “setting”. both mindset and environment are affected by music and lightshows. associations that are triggered by images of traumatising incidents are not appropriate for those in the delicate state created by psychedelics. i am acutely aware that, to see a flowing stream of faces morphing into flowers, into waves, into the intent gaze of a buddha, into a fibonacci spiral of sunflower seeds, into a film clip of a small mountain creek glistening in sunlight, is to be presented with inspirations for personal discovery and reflection. figure 15. the path leads to wisdom. on a dance floor i experience images as brief glimpses upon which to reflect. among the minds of people who are high, ideas can be enhanced, highlighted, made more available. there, one can experience the glory in a child’s smile or feel the “delicious grace of moving one’s hand”, as leary put it. figure 16. welcome to the gate of future dreams. to support happy, dancing people by shining a light on beauty is a kind of social service. it has been an act of service that i have been fortunate to offer over my years in the dark, usually unseen and often unacknowledged, surrounded by people in joyous communion with themselves and their companions. for me, it has always been a kind of ritual, an event in which artists are empowered to flood the sensory experience of a willing congregation with sound, colour and light, to enhance ecstatic communion. it is a great pleasure to “shine a light” so that others may find joy. author biography an american ex-pat living in australia since 1999, i have enjoyed various kinds of employment. in the us, i was a furniture designer and builder, a founder of several independent schools, a teacher of permaculture, an independent researcher on interspecies communication, a workshop leader and a storyteller. in australia, i have authored a book on dolphins, earned two degrees, taught at universities, written and presented a tv special, led a wellness program at a dolphin rescue facility, become a beekeeper and been a storyteller. all along, i have done lightshows and worked with light as an art form and means of service. notes [1] see psychedelic lightshow preservation society on facebook. dancecult 17(1) reviews dancecult: journal of electronic music & dance culture 17(1) 2025: 150–167 issn 1947-5403 ©2025 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net dance your way home: a journey through the dancefloor emma warren london: faber & faber, 2023. isbn: 9780571366040 (paperback) rrp: uk£12.99 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.13> richard anderson university of liverpool (uk) at the time of writing, in august 2025, london’s southbank centre, which is arguably the epitome of uk “high culture” is running a month-long summer programme of free events inspired by emma warren’s book dance your way home. depending upon one’s perspective this can be seen as an act of “gallerification”, in which folk/popular/working class cultures are recuperated into a canonical presentation within elitist institutions, or part of an evolving movement of genuine recognition of social dance as an inclusive expression of human joy. either way, the southbank’s programme represents a hugely significant impact for a contemporary written word text. dance your way home is not an academic treatise on the act of dancing, but a very accessible, and at times deeply personal autobiography outlining the vital importance of moving to music for oneself and for societies. structured in three parts, the book is steeped in uk dancefloor history. in part one, warren traces the initial foundations her dancing is built on. from domestic bopping to television music show top of the pops, to her irish heritage and late seventies uk sound system cultures from whose roots blossomed much of what dancecult examines. the second part highlights warren’s progression onto dancefloors from school discos, her underage clubbing in london, to her right-place, right-time at manchester university in the early nineties. through these back drops, the story of dance’s cultural global explosion is set and illuminated with personal reminiscences, interviews with contemporary luminaries and scattered with explanations of academic studies from a breadth of disciplines which support the range of arguments warren lays forth on dancing’s importance. reviews https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.13 reviews 151 dancing is lovingly set, not as subservient to, or a side effect of music and musical styles, but as having its own primacy. hence dancing threads its way throughout the book, in various locations and spaces, and in different social and racial cultures, functioning as crossgenerational ever-presence in twentieth and twenty-first century eras. the part memoir nature of the text acts as a constraint to the potential span of the subject matter. the book’s focus on social dance as presented in the global north, most specifically in the british isles predominately in the last fifty years could be considered a limitation. however, in adopting this position, warren recounts dance movement emergences with a lived experience sincerity. in telling her tales of house, techno, drum‘n’bass, and later grime histories, she includes reference to so-called legendary uk clubs such as shroom, the hacienda, phenomenon one and plastic people, not because these were definitive, but because she danced there herself at those times. she clearly articulates the legacies of numerous less renowned but no less significant nights and venues from her past and recognises many other “nerve centres” (181) operating beyond those she attended, of having parallel prominence and vitality. when the book does narrate histories that are not her own, warren ensures she does so with care, placing these as part of a lineage her own dancing is scaffolded on. this is especially evident within the important chapters on the hitherto neglected spaces of the school disco and youth club, where so many british adolescents, to varying degrees, learnt how to dance. the latter aspect is expanded on in warren’s (2025) latest work, up the youth club. chapter three’s detailed account of strangling church repression of dancing in ireland which contributed to an exodus of young women from the country, including her own grandmother; and eighties chicago gymnasiums recounted through interviews in chapter seven are similarly approached with recognition that these are not warren’s direct experiences. like walking, dancing is presented throughout as a fundamentally human activity, if you dance, you are a dancer (33), and dancefloors are situated wherever we make them (307). in this sense the book stands alongside the equally brilliant but more historically comprehensive dancing in the streets by the late barbara ehrenreich (2006). in both books, social dance finds a voice celebrating non-specialist everyday dancing, joining the still surprisingly recent emergence of social dance texts within the dance academy. there is much resonance here with the historically situated concepts of dancing as community expression found in malnig’s (2009), and dodds and cook’s (2013) collected works. what is fresh in dance your way home is the drawing of more personal connectivity between the performative club dancing, by crews and individuals in the eighties, to direct involvement in djing, and promoting club nights such as a guy called gerald’s recollections of their professional dancing lessons and aspirations (225–26). in the final part of the book, warren herself participates in a studio dance class, with the academy setting transformed into a place of therapy as she becomes aware of her dyspraxia. the restorative and healing power of dancing is a recurrent theme throughout the text. dancecult 17(1)152 warren employs a meticulously researched array of scientific study findings to describe everyday dance’s benefits for physical and mental health. another of the book’s themes warren is at pains to point out is that dancing is always historically situated, and many of the dance movements she has experienced have emerged as a response to specific, frequently harsh, social circumstances. she encapsulates this most succinctly in quoting the title of alice walker’s (2013) collection, hard times require furious dancing (223). the sense of community and resilience in the face of repressions, that finds expression through collective everyday dancing and a sense of temporary belonging or embraced by what mary fogarty described as a sense of an alternative “family” (2015: 247), is at the core of dance your way home’s message and that we can all dance our own histories. references dodds, sherril and susan cook. 2013. bodies of sound: studies across popular music and dance. farnham: ashgate. ehrenreich, barbara. 2006. dancing in the streets: a history of collective joy. london: granta publications. fogarty, mary. 2015. “the body and dance”. in the routledge reader on the sociology of music, ed. john shepherd and kyle devine, 245–54. new york: routledge. malnig, julie. 2009. ballroom, boogie, shimmy sham, shake: a social and popular dance reader. chicago: university of illinois press. walker, alice and shiloh mccloud. 2013. hard times require furious dancing: new poems. novato: new world library. warren, emma. 2025. up the youth club: illuminating a hidden history. london: faber & faber. reviews 153 black music in britain in the 21st century monique charles (ed.) with mary w. gani liverpool: liverpool university press, 2023. isbn: 978-1-80207-840-4, eisbn: 978-1-83764-659-3 rrp: uk£29,99 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.14> charlet brethomé (université du québec à montréal, canada) following her work on grime, cultural sociologist monique charles edits a collective volume that brings together researchers and practitioners to explore, from multiple approaches, black music in britain in the twenty-first century. with the editorial collaboration of mary w. gani (a lawyer specialising in the music industry), the book offers a panorama that combines academic papers, interviews, and visual essays. published in the series “liverpool studies in the politics of popular culture”, the volume seeks to analyse musical scenes in relation to the regimes of power that shape their emergence, circulation and reception. the book is clearly situated within the lineage of black atlantic studies. this characterises the transmission, unfolding and interconnections of black cultures around the atlantic, as well as the cultural hybridisations resulting from the long history of forced removal of black populations from their territories and cultural milieus (gilroy 1993). it is therefore a welcome contribution that deepens and extends analysis of this continuum from the vantage point of contemporary black british musics. notably, it expands the classic roots/ routes dichotomy (gilroy 1993) by emphasising the role of digital infrastructures and networks—what the editors term “routers”—in the contemporary formation of genres and publics. the book’s richness—and, potentially, its limitation—lies in the multiplicity of genres examined and the diversity of problematisations, contexts and methods mobilised. the centrality of sound system culture, dub and reggae is nonetheless clear, as many of the forms under study partly emerge from these matrices. in this respect, the book already helps to capture the resonances and contemporary traces of sound system culture within new musical assemblages. the entire first section is devoted to these contemporary articulations. whether in hyacinth’s study on roots manuva’s album “dub come save me”, charles’s attempt to systematise a “sound system sensibility”, gani’s interview with lawrence “l.j.” johnson, or télémaque’s photo-essay “trap atlantic”, each contribution shows the extent to which the musical objects under scrutiny are marked by the circulation and hybridisation of techniques, technologies, sounds and melodies. each case also demonstrates how these cultural productions—actualising the black atlantic continuum—braid together the global and the local, and past with present and future. https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.14 dancecult 17(1)154 the second section, which examines genres that emerged or persisted into the twentyfirst century, likewise includes an interview with a music industry professional and a photo essay. these two formats depart from conventional research articles and allow readers to inhabit different standpoints and perspectives. charles’s interview with ugwu traces the personal trajectory of an industry professional within the circulatory contexts already outlined, particularly between nigeria and london. charles and facey’s photo essay likewise offers a direct view of the places and the spatial organisation of steel pan practice in east london. more broadly, these chapters press further on the role of cultural industries in the recuperation, transformation and marginalisation of black musics and musicians. in particular, the chapters by palmer and toppin on the lovers rock scene and the jungle genre, respectively show how racism and patriarchy have jointly contributed to the invisibilisation and reshaping of scenes and musics in favour of certain audiences, industries and male and/or white musicians. the other two chapters in this section trace two very different pathways through which artists and musical forms (re-)emerge. muir examines black majority churches as sites that—through their locations, relational networks and pentecostal habitus—enable the development of musical competences convertible into the field of popular music and thus into economic capital. melville, by contrast, shows how contemporary information and communication technologies facilitate the circulation of techniques and recent tracks and contribute significantly to the revival of jazz in england among a new generation representative of contemporary urban british life. finally, the third and last section, “socio-political and economic issues”, interrogates contemporary black british musics critically through their contexts of emergence and diffusion. the opening chapters—by “hussla d” johnson and wallace, on the one hand, and by lambros fatsis, on the other—are particularly illuminating for understanding the processes of invisibilisation, criminalisation and thus marginalisation that unfold across black music scenes. the former provides an exemplary analysis of how cultural industries select and profit from particular cultural trajectories over others. sketching the contours of a political economy of reggae authenticity that marginalises british artists in favour of jamaican artists or labels, even though these musics are disseminated and consumed in england. fatsis, for his part, shows how ambient western racism materialises around black sound and forms of gathering, further criminalising and stigmatising these populations and their cultural productions. these two chapters are especially productive for night studies, as they help to grasp how the neoliberal capture of festive and musical forms that once placed society “in crisis” proceeds both through their whitewashing and through the criminalisation and marginalisation of their blackness. the final three chapters by scott, bushay and madar consider, from distinct perspectives, the role of music and its representations for artists and audiences: grime as a practice of refusal vis-à-vis expected social and racial positions; hip-hop as pedagogical practice by and for black women; and the ways black men receive the dominant images and aesthetics associated with them and negotiate them. reviews 155 overall, this collection edited by monique charles offers a rich and nuanced panorama of a field too seldom examined in its complexity, given the tendency to treat black musics monolithically under the rubric of the “urban”. although the approaches vary, the shared emphasis on sound system culture as a constitutive matrix, the black atlantic continuum and a critical race approach provides the book with strong internal coherence. that said, greater parity between conceptual labour and empirical precision would have been welcome. moreover, while some chapters—especially in the third section—foreground the cultural industries, several analyses would benefit from engaging more directly with industry-specific processes of appropriation and whitewashing. doing so would sharpen a highly fertile line of critique that reads the marginalisation of black cultures and their re-undergrounding (a promising avenue) as among the conditions of possibility for contemporary “nightlife cities”. finally, the near-exclusive focus on london invites the question of how black musics are configured elsewhere in britain. reference gilroy, paul. 1993. the black atlantic, modernity and double consciousness. cambridge: harvard university press. dancecult 17(1)156 platformed! how streaming, algorithms and artificial intelligence are shaping music cultures tiziano bonini and paolo magaudda cham, switzerland: palgrave macmillan, 2024. isbn 978-3-031-43964-3 (hardcover), isbn 978-3-031-43965-0 (ebook) rrp: uk£109.00 (hardcover), uk£109.00 (paperback), uk£87.50 (e-book) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.15> seán finnan technological university dublin (ireland) earlier this summer, spotify’s ceo and co-founder daniel ek, led a €600 million investment into a start-up named helsing, specialising in artificial intelligence military software. deerhoof and a number of other indie bands withdrew their catalogue from the music streaming platform, baulking at having their music accessible via a platform who shares a ceo with a military startup. deerhoof described the company as “creepy” and a “datamining scam masquerading as a ‘music company’” (green and strauss 2025). in this now well established digital economy, deerhoof point to the complexity of digital platforms such as spotify’s business model—are they a music company, data broker, advertiser or something more sinister? in platformed!, a work by tiziano bonini and paolo maguadda, the authors seek to tease out the social factors and historical conditions that have allowed spotify to become an almost monolithic presence in the mediation of music, the influence its having on contemporary music culture and the anxieties that come with a company using data profiling as a means to ascertain the taste of a listener. the story is complicated and brings with it hardline opinions on the effect streaming culture is having on music. the authors are attentive to such qualitative judgements; that streaming platforms have ruined the music experience of a younger generation by dematerialising the music product, that such platforms have encourage a disengaged listening curated by the machine rather than a human, or that musicians are now writing music tailored to the algorithm and its penchant for instant hooks. for the authors, such judgements afford streaming platforms such as spotify too much agency, while at the same time, ignoring the impact that social practices had on the development of online music sharing, streaming and datafication prior to spotify’s arrival. instead the authors, drawing from the work of science and technology scholars such as latour, argue that the evolution of technologies do not follow “a single, coherent logic” (6) but respond to the distinct conjuncture of social, political and economic pressures— conditions that are informed by the agency of social actors, and not primarily by the technology itself. to illustrate such, the authors provide a historical account of music’s circulation as a commercial artefact, its transition from an analogue artefact to a digital https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.15 reviews 157 one and the impact new online peer-to-peer networks had in the late 1990s on normalising the consumption of digital music. at each stop on this whirlwind tour of music’s evolution as a commercial product, driven by the demands of industry, there is a counterpoint proposed, the disruption by non-industry actors, early hackers such as shawn fanning of napster, or music researchers such as karlheinz brandenburg and his work on developing the mp3 format and the anonymous role that hordes of music fans had in making use of new technologies like peer-to-peer file sharing in distributing music for free. by presenting the various technological breakthroughs that allowed for music streaming to come into existence, the authors are reminding the reader at each moment that technology is consistently implicated within its social moment. in other words, just because a technology exists, does not mean it will be adopted. while the term “streaming” might now be predominantly associated with listening to music or watching videos on demand, streaming technology was not originally intended for such. originally developed in the 1990s, during a period when transmitting sound on the web faced “almost insurmountable technological constraints” (24), streaming was explored as a means to mirror radio’s capacity for broadcasting live events, using the internet instead of the airwaves. experiments with streaming technologies followed a “variety of different trajectories” (29), from internet radio experiments to webcasting of parliamentary debates, and through its myriad uses, often outside of dominant commercial industries, became normalised as a broadcasting tool. yet it was only with the transition towards what srnicek (2017) has termed “platform capitalism” that streaming became commercially viable. in chapter three, the authors provide an accessible overview of the rise of the platform society, detailing the multifaceted computational infrastructure they rely upon in order to operate; datafication of user behaviour, data analysis of music (in the case of music streaming platforms), algorithms for personalised recommendations, guiding the reader through the complicated industrial business practices of what can appear to be merely immaterial websites. it’s a necessary detour that situates spotify’s business model within wider economic and technological trends and illustrates the structural shifts that have been impacting the cultural industries over the past decade or so. streaming technologies may have been with us for over three decades, yet it is their implication with algorithmic processes and artificial intelligences that are currently provoking the most unease. whether it’s the development of artificial intelligence that can automatically produce a song in a sonic style according to various user prompts, or the increasing appearance of ai music in spotify playlists, such transitions again inflame anxieties around the nature of human creativity and its replacement by machines. in chapters four, anxieties around the role that algorithms have in music selection are examined, particularly in the fear that the human curator has been sidelined by automated processes. the authors draw from bonini’s own ethnographic research with gandini (2019) on curating playlists to illustrate the continued presence of real live humans in the editorial offices of streaming platforms, even if the authors here warn that a small number of playlists are increasingly influential in determining the viability of a musician’s career. dancecult 17(1)158 taking on such a large scope as the transformation of music cultures as a result of music streaming platforms means there will inevitably be a considerable amount of shifts left unaddressed in the work. while there is much focus on individual tactics of resistance, it would be interesting to understand more about how various music scenes and non-corporate streaming initiatives are enacting algorithmic resistance, a term the authors use for listeners who attempt to “circumvent, control, or mislead the data collection mechanisms enacted by platforms’ algorithms” (115). despite this, platformed! provides a valuable primer for anyone wishing to get their bearings in the ever-shifting landscape of music’s situatedness in digital media ecologies and a reminder of the power that artists and fans have in shaping music cultures. references bonini, tiziano and alessandro gandini. 2019. “‘first week is editorial, second week is algorithmic’: platform gatekeepers and the platformization of music curation”. social media + society 5(4): 1–11. <https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119880006>. green, walden and matthew strauss. 2025. “deerhoof to remove music from spotify”. pitchfork. 30 june: <https://pitchfork.com/news/deerhoof-to-remove-music-from-spotify/>, (accessed 1 august 2025). srnicek, nick. 2017. platform capitalism. cambridge, uk; medford, ma: polity press. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119880006 https://pitchfork.com/news/deerhoof-to-remove-music-from-spotify/ reviews 159 dance music: a feminist account of an ordinary culture tami gadir new york: bloomsbury academic, 2023. isbn: 978-1-5013-4640-8 (paperback), 978-1-5013-4641-5 (hardcover) rrp: us$92.05 (hardcover), us$28.66 (paperback) welcome to the club: the life and lessons of a black woman dj dj paulette manchester: manchester university press, 2024. isbn: 978-1-5261-6690-6 (hardcover) rrp: uk£20.00 (hardcover) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.16> maren hancock macewan university (canada) over the past two decades, dance music studies have shifted meaningfully from celebratory accounts of subcultural resistance to more critical, intersectional appraisals of labour, space, power and politics. two recent books extend and deepen this shift: welcome to the club: the life and lessons of a black woman dj by dj paulette and dance music: a feminist account of an ordinary culture by tami gadir. although distinct in genre and methodology— gadir’s book is an academic monograph, while paulette’s is a memoir—both texts challenge the idealized narratives that have dominated scholarly and popular accounts of dj culture. together, they offer a much-needed recalibration of what it means to make, live, and think through dance music in the twenty-first century. gadir opens her book with a thesis that is almost deceptively simple: “dance music is ordinary” (1). by this, she means that dance music culture is not necessarily mundane (although it often is, as she demonstrates), but socially and structurally embedded; indeed, dance music is shot through with the same exclusions, hierarchies and contradictions as any other cultural practice. this assertion is a direct challenge to decades of scholarship and fan writing that frame dj culture as inherently emancipatory, utopian or exceptional. for gadir, origin stories about detroit, chicago, berlin and new york may have been politically useful in early subcultural theory, but they have since become canonical and limiting: “what has happened since,” she argues in the conclusion, “is that such interventions have become the accepted stories of dance music culture. as such, they no longer serve their original function, and their politics are no longer radical.” (168) paulette (who is mononymous) presents a similar critique from a different angle. her memoir, welcome to the club, tracks over 30 years in the industry—from early gigs in manchester’s queer nightlife scene, including her role as a resident at the hacienda’s https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.16 dancecult 17(1)160 flesh, through corporate pr work at mercury records and eventually to international stardom. yet despite her longevity and acclaim, paulette reflects repeatedly on how her contributions—like those of many black women djs—have been marginalized or omitted entirely from mainstream dance music history: “the winners in dance music have mainly been men,” she writes, quoting carl loben, “and men are more likely to push themselves forward and take the credit” (128). when paulette became the resident dj at flesh, the club’s legendary and first queer night, she was one of only two women djs to hold down a hacienda residency. she describes how her residency at flesh “enabled [her] to join a boy’s club which changed [her] life” (5) and “was unarguably the catalyst for [her] career” (32). still, paulette stresses that hacienda was not the only “thing” in manchester–remember, dominant narratives dominate history. paulette stresses that, as important as the hacienda was, “if history is to be correct, we have to acknowledge the other stories that have been squashed down and pushed out” (35). she emphasizes that a “vibrant underground dj scene” (33) existed at the time that hasn’t been awarded historical prominence, “inhabited by a cluster of black music promoters” (33). despite this, “black people weren’t invited into the city centre–any city centre–in england and the early nineties were not a ‘black creative’ friendly space” (33). her reflections offer lived evidence to support gadir’s claim that historiographic gatekeeping and cultural memory are structured by race, gender and power. gadir’s research spans a decade of fieldwork and interviews conducted across the uk, tel aviv, zurich, oslo and sydney, with a focus on how gender, race, class and regulatory frameworks shape dance music environments. her methods include participant observation and critical discourse analysis, with a particular emphasis on mythologies of meritocracy and postfeminism. if gadir’s work serves as a feminist audit of the dance music studies field, paulette’s memoir functions as a counter-archive: a first-person record of scenes and struggles often left undocumented. paulette’s memoir is rooted in her singular but deeply intersectional experience as a queer black woman navigating predominantly white and male spaces. yet her storytelling is far from anecdotal. she consistently situates her experiences within broader systems of exclusion—whether confronting the “lead-lined” glass ceiling while working in pr for mercury records (54), being told she’d never get booked as “a black, female dj with grey hair” (122), or having samples of her autobiography dismissed by male colleagues such as frank broughton for not having enough sex and drugs to make it interesting. thankfully, paulette ignored his advice when manchester press approached her to write the book in 2021. one of the many strengths of welcome to the club lies in paulette’s insistence that embodied experience is not separate from theory—it is theory in motion. paulette stresses that her book is neither a complete history of edm nor her definitive biography; rather, it’s “a series of snapshots that follow a chronological arc from the start of [her] dj’ing career to the present day, bending this through the prism of other people’s histories to acknowledge the wider picture. after all, ten people at a party will never tell reviews 161 the same story.” (2–3) here, paulette introduces a theme both glaringly obvious and yet somehow still ignored: history is subjective and favours hegemonic subjects. acknowledging her intersectional positionality within what bell hooks characterizes as “white supremacist patriarchal” culture, paulette states, “i have the unique perspective of an outsider with insider knowledge and an insider with outside knowledge” (3). both paulette and gadir foreground the ongoing struggles women face in dj culture, though with different emphases. in chapter 5 of dance music, gadir dissects how gender operates not just at the level of representation, but in sonic codes, gatekeeping, and audience perception. female djs are often marketed either as “sexy and incompetent” or musically credible but non-conforming to beauty norms (121–123). these binaries echo in media representation and club booking policies, and paulette’s narrative personalizes these structural forces. she documents the repeated erasure of her skills, the scrutiny of her appearance and the exhausting dance between authenticity and acceptability. her story makes visible the emotional and economic toll of navigating these contradictions alongside unpredictable, irregular employment —what gadir names as “precarity in informal economies” (140) and paulette describes more viscerally as “losing your mojo” (121). both gadir and paulette extend their analysis into ageism, showing how dance music’s obsession with youth further marginalizes women. paulette, now in her fifties, writes candidly about facing dwindling bookings and backhanded compliments. yet she refuses invisibility: “remind yourself that few white men have a problem with celebrating their wins... you too should remember and feel pride in yourself and your achievements.” (139) her memoir becomes a feminist act of citation—of herself and of the women who built the scene alongside her. in chapter 2, paulette describes how she “started to build a network of female supporters” (47–48), and this is key to her narrative. throughout welcome to the club, paulette shouts out the amazing women she encountered, including but not limited to: smokin’ jo, dulcie danger, caroline prothero, jamz supernova, marcia carr, colleen ‘cosmo’ murphy, judy griffith, gladys pizarro, jaguar, erica mckoy, niks, lakuti, naomi pohl, anz, sherelle and more. if you don’t know these women, you should look them up. one of gadir’s most provocative contributions is her critique of “transcendence” as a central value in dance music discourse. in chapter 4, she questions whether the romanticized peak experience—of becoming one with the dance floor, the lights, the crowd—is truly emancipatory or simply another consumerist ideal dressed in subcultural clothing, stating “[t]he popular discourses on utopianism in dance music culture leave little room for addressing problematic gender dynamics” (164). for gadir, transcendence is often an individualist fantasy that displaces collective political action. paulette’s memoir complements this critique with realism and wit. while she recounts moments of joy, connection and artistic mastery, she never glorifies the scene. instead, she foregrounds its labour: lugging records, facing hostile sound techs, staying professional in the face of condescension and recovering from burnout: “the glamour is fleeting, the graft is real, and the sacrifices are many” (74), she writes. paulette’s story echoes gadir’s insistence that even the most exceptional spaces can be host to ordinary experiences. dancecult 17(1)162 both books reject dance music exceptionalism in favour of something more politically grounded. gadir’s final chapter critiques the field of dance music studies itself for clinging to outdated narratives of resistance and transcendence. she asks, “what function does dance music writing whose main goal is advocacy or defence serve now that there is no longer an orthodoxy to challenge?” (170) in its place, she calls for a post-utopian, anti-capitalist feminist praxis that acknowledges the limitations of dance floors while mobilizing their collectivist potential toward structural change. paulette’s conclusion, subtitled “a manifesto”, similarly balances critique with hope. she doesn’t romanticize the past, but she insists that club culture can still be a site of joy, community and creative resistance: “community is the foundation. collaboration is the future. alliances reinforce the chain.” (195) she reminds readers that love—for music, for people, for the party—is not apolitical; it is the engine that keeps us going. in sum, these two books—one a rigorous academic intervention, the other a vital work of cultural memory—deserve to be read in tandem as both disrupt the plur mnemonic. paulette and gadir challenge scholars, djs, promoters, fans and all stakeholders in dance music to move beyond myth and toward accountability. whether we encounter dj culture in lecture halls or on dance floors, in archives or behind the decks, dance music and welcome to the club remind us that the work of rethinking dance music culture is far from finished. reviews 163 live spielen: liveness in performances elektronischer tanzmusik josef schaubruch hildesheim: universitätsverlag hildesheim, 2024. isbn: 978-3-96424-101-6 (paperback) rrp: €27,00 (paperback) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.17> jack mcneill university of york (uk) as i write this review i am looking at an old ticket stub on my desk for an event in july 2025 in leeds. the stub includes all the usual information you’d expect from the gig ticket: venue, time, price, promoter, etc. the headline of the stub displays the name of the artist, followed by the following text in bold: “live dj set”. to some, this may be paradoxical; how can a dj set where an artist is playing pre-produced records one after the other be “live”? some may even see such a claim as audacious if the artist is not playing their own work using acoustic, amplified and/or electronic musical instruments and employing a level of mastery or even virtuosity. some may take a more sympathetic view. surely the presence of the artist and audience and some sort of interaction between the two is enough to make the performance “live”. debates around what a live performance involves are pervasive in electronic dance music cultures. views are manifold, and long have ravers, artists and enthusiasts debated the nuances of liveness in electronic dance music performance. if this is a debate you have had or are preparing for your next heated discussion on the topic, perhaps you might want to come equipped with some robust arguments. and if robust arguments on liveness are what you are looking for, look no further than josef schaubruch’s live spielen. live spielen is a comprehensive and critical review on notions of liveness in electronic dance music performances. rather than attempting to provide an absolute definition of the term, schaubruch highlights the theoretical and practical complexities and vagueness bound up with it. the work is convincing and presents a solid theoretical background around liveness in dance music genres, before undertaking empirical study and analysis on electronic artists who perform live and have a variety of different perspectives on what that means to them. schaubruch considers a number of positions on the notion of liveness, spanning from more common (mostly electronic) instrumental performances to the understanding of the dj set as a “live” practice (or not, as some argue), and the importance of corporeality, embodiment and an audience’s presence and interaction with the artist to a live performance. the first chapter is centred around the ambiguity of live performance in electronic music. it elegantly outlines the anxieties of electronic dance music artists around whether something might be live, as well as introducing the various constellations of live performance in electronic music, including turntablism, live coding, hardware performances and more. in this theoretical introduction, schaubruch also emphasises that his reflections on liveness often stem from less tangible phenomena like practice and affect as well as technologies, placing artists and audiences as critical to his discussion. chapter 2 presents a solid and https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.17 dancecult 17(1)164 comprehensive literature review. this chapter is particularly strong and is a useful resource for those working in or interested in the blooming academic discussion around liveness and electronic dance music. notable in the chapter is linguistic analysis of genre and musical role (e.g. dj/producer) across english and german, and the assertion that providing a single binary definition of “liveness” (i.e. “live” and “not live”) is no longer possible. in doing so, schaubruch mostly avoids falling into traps around defining what may or may not be authentic, again focussing on the multiplicity and vagueness of the terms he explores. following the rigorous review of literature, he provides a brief outline of his methodology which is clear and addresses gaps in field, particularly in the empirical study of liveness in electronic dance music. his discussion around reflexive grounded theory is both engaging and goes some way in addressing the perpetual complexity of aligning the specificities of dance music cultures with research methodologies. at the same time, there is a clear engagement with the author’s positionality as researcher, artist and participant in the dance music culture. the fourth chapter plots schaubruch’s findings and his own theoretical reflections on them, extracting broader themes stemming from the empirical work with artists who professionally engage with live electronic music performance. the outcomes are expansive, supported by informative diagrams. one particularly striking observation, albeit one that might be predictable to the reader, is the cultural capital that liveness holds for the artists interviewed. there is an inherent tension among artists’ reflections on what “liveness” is, with some focussed on the practice of using live instruments itself, while others with more of a focus towards creating moments of presence with audiences. not one to shy away from the complexity of these arguments, schaubruch explores where these tensions intersect, extending notions of subject and object to body (artist) and equipment, as well as artist and audience, exploring the relationships between musicians and instruments as an illustrative comparison. overall, live spielen presents a thorough, rigorous and engaging analysis on the role that liveness has in the performance of electronic dance music. he leans into the diversity and conflicts in both the literature and the points of view of the artists he interviews to illustrate the richness and potential in various definitions of live performances of electronic dance music. there are a (very small) handful of instances where it might be inferred that value judgements around live performances being “better” than dj sets, particularly in the “grad an liveness”, are being made. although these appear to emerge from the author’s empirical work, their absolute presentation may be seen to negate the vagueness in terminology that schaubruch so effectively builds throughout most of the text. while not necessarily within the scope of this work, an exploration on the role of liveness in studio production, and how live performances translate to the composition and production of fixed media is missing in the book and perhaps presents a gap for future work. admittedly, when i first received the ticket for the above-mentioned event in leeds, i scoffed at the absurdity of a “live dj set”. i was convinced that the headline description of the event was wholly paradoxical, perhaps a marketing ploy that plays into schaubruch’s assertions on the cultural capital of the live set. having read live spielen and considered the vagueness of the notion liveness in electronic dance music however, i am not so sure, and this is one of the great successes of this text; it questions as much as it answers. reviews 165 assembling a black counter culture deforrest brown, jr. new york: primary information, 2022. isbn: 9781734489736 (paperback) rrp: us$15.00 <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.18> emre öztürk humboldt-universität zu berlin (germany) deforrest brown jr. is a musician, media theorist and curator who has been an essential voice in questioning the current state of global electronic music and framing it within the radical black perspective. in assembling a black counter culture (2022), he traces the “black secret technology” centering detroit techno meanwhile covering black vernacular cultures, racial capitalism, industrialization and black resistance. combining both academic and underground knowledge, brown visits the black labor, ingenuity and futuristic desire, questioning techno’s later depoliticized and dehistoricized reception within various discursive and practical realms among the global electronic music industry. more than a linear musical timeline, this book is rather a counter-archive; interviews, artist biographies, scene insights and media archaeology are constant while brown digs further into the direction of techno’s cybernetic essence and creative drive. doing so, the book references valuable literature at the intersection of racial capitalism, cybernetics, and black desire, citing authors like cedric robinson, paul gilroy, kodwo eshun, fred moten, as well as frequently referring to the afrofuturist heritage and diasporic myth-science.  starting from detroit, brown later situates techno within the broader black atlantic, as well as its further branches through locations like japan, germany and the uk. while each chapter breaks down techno’s timeline by focusing on different perspectives, locations or concepts, brown eventually re-assembles all the information in the final chapter, “the collapse of modern culture” a title that is very much self-explanatory. brown merely hesitates to express his personal opinion, in fact, he clearly shows his position also on the very first page of the book with five different diagrams; the first one being a forecast of unbearable ecological load that inevitably leads to the “collapse of modern civilization”, and the second one that maps out the timeline of the black atlantic that starts with the global slave trade that he indicates the inevitable future result, “the journey home”. in that sense, brown underlines the inescapable outcomes of a culture that is assembled through racial capitalism and neocolonialism, combining self-reflexive insights with the comprehensive research data he provides. in the first few pages, the book cruises through the racialized history of the us and colonialism with their connection to current racial capitalism and the “rise of modern industrial complexes”. while discussing the essence of black usage of media and machines https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.18 dancecult 17(1)166 in the context of electronic music and dance cultures, brown pays dues to early architects of afrofuturism such as sun ra, lee “scratch” perry or george clinton, discussing their influence on later black electronic musics. he quickly sets its route to detroit in the following chapter, zooming into the life of techno’s originators in the us midwest, where post-fordist racial capitalism peaked post world war ii. one of brown’s main arguments is that techno’s emergence is inseparable from the conditions of post-fordist america and the automation of black labor. he conceptualizes techno as an embodied and racialized extension of the workers’ engagement with industrial machinery, adding that the music’s futuristic desires are not merely stylistic but are direct reflection of the industrial environment, that he eventually refers to as “black secret technology.” brown positions detroit techno pioneers like juan atkins, jeff mills and underground resistance as sonic engineers responding to industrial debilitation and using machines and rhythms to pursue new aesthetic forms and sonic fiction, while continously providing examples from afrofuturistic heritage and mythscientific practice that points out to the everlasting connection between pasts, presents and the futures of the black atlantic sonic futurism. brown also goes over the world’s changing economic and political climate and its impacts on the racialized, social and financial structure of the usa and beyond, zooming into cases such as us’s post-civil war and more contemporary topics such as racial policies and riots, or state-driven violence in the 20th century as what equally shaped the conditions for techno to flourish. at the intersection of racialized structures and mainstream media, he constantly provides concrete examples of techno and other black music being whitewashed through media tools such as news narrations, charts or interviews to show the doubleedged sword of british and american music market; where britain has become a melting pot of different black music with enough financial stability to the us’s, covering techno’s expansion overseas and its results with another self-explanatory chapter called “wake up america, you are dead!”. next chapter “detroit-berlin axis” provides even more insights by revealing further connections of black musical cultures with racial capitalism and neocolonialism, focusing on the genre’s second decade of existence and exportation outside of the us, under “a colonial project that white european crowds fetishize detroit’s sonic labor and whitewashing it”as brown puts it, diving into stories from post-cold war era berlin with a hedonistic, neocolonial venture that simultaneously serves for the western cultural hegemony. exampling paternalistic assumptions of kraftwerk and other westernwhite influences on detroit techno, or scholars such as stockhausen and adorno, brown maps out the post-colonial multiculturalism that reappropriates the african american musical continuum on the 1990s and beyond, going over cases like underground resistance or drexciyan empire as black resistance in response.  brown brings his focus to the present in the final chapters, interrogating how platform capitalism has restructured the global music economy and further marginalized black producers. he maps out the consolidation of power in media platforms, streaming services and corporate-backed festivals, showing how these infrastructures continue the exploitation and erasure of black creative labor. here he reframes all previous chapters through the lens reviews 167 of platform capitalism and questions its impacts on techno and beyond, going over the capitalization of the black body, mind, and labor through contemporary technological infrastructure. yet, he already made the conclusion clear many times throughout the book, that blackness is always already in counter-position to the structures of racial capitalism that seek to contain it. if there is a central claim in assembling a black counter culture, it is that resistance, speculative imagination and reassembling are constant variables of the black secret technology. on the spectrum: where is edm placed within electronic dance music culture? dylan davis swinburne university (australia) mike callander rmit university (australia) david haberfeld electronic dance music artist, melbourne (australia) <https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.09> intro (f.u.s.e.–from our minds to yours [intro]) electronic dance music sits on a wide-ranging spectrum which runs from highly commercial enterprises to radical activities. the history of electronic dance music involves the creation, occupation and repurposing of space for temporal freedoms. these acts, often in defiance of the law, fit within existing theories of lefebvre (2014), certeau (2011) and bey (2003). parallel with this commercial to radical spectrum is a spectrum of freedoms. electronic dance music can exist anywhere on these spectra, from deserts, fields, queer spaces, free parties, squatted buildings, clubs, warehouses, festivals, street parties to a wide range of other spaces. within these spaces, freedoms are fluid around behaviour, sexual activity, protest and politics. the spectrum of electronic dance music today is extremely broad, from illegal dance parties in storm drains, squatted warehouses and parks, to small intimate clubs and bars, large purpose-built clubs serving audiences a range of sounds, festivals drawing larger crowds over numerous days, some focusing on music, others drawing on the lifestyle, others on big names and spectacle. electronic dance music sits comfortably across all these spaces. the opposite is true for edm. edm is a sub-genre that populates the most commercial aspects of this spectrum, the largest festivals, the biggest clubs, the sound itself taking a back seat to the spectacle. freedoms at these events are also curtailed. these events and venues are commercial entities that focus primarily on profit. as such they are criticised for bland race and gender biased lineups, lineups based on social media followers, fake djs playing pre-recorded sets, the emphasis on spectacle rather than music, the emphasis on the dj over the music and the dj over the producer. in the next sections we will explore each of these issues in more detail. losing control (dbx – losing control) edm operates within a tightly controlled environment, with strict regulations on behaviour, music selection and even atmosphere. this control, while intended to ensure safety and profitability, can also limit the potential for spontaneity and genuine autonomy. this runs counter to bey’s (2003) evasion of control, unlike aspects of electronic dance music culture that exist outside the structures of authority, this characteristic is inherently compromised in edm’s commercial settings. edm sits within lefebvre’s (2014) abstract space, a space which operates based on a set of agreed-upon rules and norms that govern behaviour. this includes things like dress codes, security protocols, unspoken social etiquette within events, and even rituals such as cake throwing. these rules, while often implicit, contribute to the controlled and regulated nature of edm environments. these environments, as spaces of leisure and entertainment, are designed and managed to regulate behaviour and ensure profitability. the ways in which these spaces are managed can be defined, in de certeau’s terms (2011), as strategies where those in power, such as event organisers and the high-profile artist-brands with whom they collaborate, seek to control the space and the actions of those within it. these strategies of control manifest in various ways. firstly, spatial design: the layout of the club or event, the placement of the dj booth, the bar, the dance floor, and the vip areas are all carefully considered to direct the flow of movement and create specific atmospheres. this spatial arrangement aims to optimize the use of space for profit maximization while also shaping the desired social interactions. in the early 1970s, djs were largely unseen, sometimes performing remotely from another room (lawrence 2004; brewster and broughton 2011). djs like francis grasso began to command a degree of “rockstar” status, (brewster and broughton 2011). grasso’s dj booth at the sanctuary was situated on the altar of a former church (morgan 2011). soon after, djs were elevated both physically and culturally (rietveld 2013). by the late 1990s, the edm dj had become a superstar (brewster and broughton 2006), often equated to god or a quasi-religious figure, epitomised in the faithless track, “god is a dj”. this status and attention were accompanied by immense pressure and “high expectations of technical perfection” (rietveld 2013: 93). secondly, rules and regulations: commercial clubs implement various rules and regulations, such as dress codes, entry fees, and security protocols, to control the behaviour of patrons and maintain order. these rules serve to enforce a certain standard of conduct and limit disruptive or undesirable activities. thirdly, a curated atmosphere to which the music selection, lighting, décor and even the staff’s demeanour contribute, with the intention to evoke specific feelings and associations. this type of experience aims to attract a particular target audience and ensure their continued patronage. part of this curated atmosphere are the dj lineups booked by edm event organisers. white light (secret desire – white light) the lineups for most edm events are predominately bland. most of the acts are cis-gendered white men. barnes (2020) identifies that over eighty percent of artists booked for mainstream dance music festivals were male (see also gadir 2017 and 2023), with seventy six percent of them being white. the queer, poc roots of electronic dance music have been discarded, and the gender and racial diversity at the roots of electronic dance music culture have been corporatised to a bland homogeneity (ghanny 2016). statistics show that these events fail to embrace a wider representation (barnes 2020; gadir 2017). it is also worth noting that these events repeatedly draw upon the same artists and have similar lineups. this homogeny is characteristic of the abstract space (lefebvre 2014) that edm occupies, it needs to erase differences and impose uniformity, prioritizing functionality and efficiency over unique characteristics. edm prioritizes maximizing capacity and profit over creating unique atmospheres. when faced with these accusations, of gender imbalance, whitewashing and lack of diversity, the usual response is denial and rejection (gadir 2017), which is a product of abstract space. the abstract space of edm is primarily motivated by money. dirty cash (dirty cash [money talk] – the adventures of stevie v) edm is bound by exchange. this is evident in edm culture, where events function as businesses, with entry fees, drink prices and vip sections all reflecting the commodification of space and experience. commercial dance clubs, while offering spaces for subcultural expression, can also contribute to the reproduction of dominant culture in an effort to maintain profit. the emphasis on consumerism, the promotion of mainstream music and trends and the reinforcement of social hierarchies through edm’s vip culture can all work to undermine the temporary autonomous zones’ (bey 2003) potential for genuine subversion and social critique. meanwhile, the raw ingredient for edm, the music, doesn’t command huge sums. instead, the value-adds are less musical. these include djs and performance fees that are inflated thanks to commissions paid to booking agents, managers and publicists; elaborate technical and hospitality riders; large scale audiovisual production costs and more. with only a small portion of the proceeds paid to producers, producers who might otherwise be comfortable in the studio are instead forced onto the stage and into the limelight. the hyper fixation on commercial outcomes and profits can be to the detriment of performing artists who have many mouths to feed and many fans to please. this is evident in the suicide of the artist, avicii (youngs 2018; ptatscheck 2021; taylor 2024). following avicii’s suicide, his father called for a systematic overhaul of the music industry, in terms of how record labels, agents, managers and organisers take care of artists struggling with issues of alcoholism and drug dependence. the eyes of edm are firmly focused on profit, which makes it blind to other more pressing issues. just close your eyes (close your eyes [optikonfusion] – acen) edm’s blindness to issues of representation and diversity go hand in hand with its blindness to the behaviour of some artists. over the last decade numerous artists have been accused of sexual assault. edm festivals continue to book these big-name artists and in some instances their peers have rallied in support of the accused. the artist diplo has been accused of sexual assault, statutory rape and revenge porn but is still playing at large commercial festivals (craighead 2024; lewis 2023 and 2024). similarly, gaslamp killer has continued to play shows after facing rape allegations (hernan 2018). derrick may has faced several sexual assault allegations and continues to play shows (ross 2020b).[1] after publishing allegations of sexual assault and harassment by derrick may in late 2020 and early 2021, journalist annabel ross (2022a) was banned from reviewing detroit’s movement festival. when she attended nevertheless as a patron, detroit identities including carl craig and omar s posted her photo on social media accompanied by strong words in support of may. ross has championed the cause against harassment by high profile edm personalities, notably with her article exposing the behaviour of eric morillo, who before his death was still playing shows even though sexual assault allegations had been widespread (2020a; 2020c). the russian artist vakula, whose misogyny was highlighted by his use of album artwork to attack several big-name female djs, is still playing shows (cetin 2019b). this toxic behaviour extends beyond edm events to music vendors, with beatport accused of having a toxic workplace (ross 2022b). figure 1. now deleted instagram posts by omar s and carl craig. photo credit: ross (2022a). plastic dreams (plastic dreams by jaydee) as part of the tightly controlled environment of edm events, it has become common for superstar djs to “fake” it, playing pre-recorded sets synced to fireworks and visual effects. the lack of dj skills on display is reminiscent of milli vanilli rather than any bona fide rockstar. a succinct (and amusing) commentary on the cult-like status enjoyed by edm djs is the saturday night live (snl) skit, “when will the bass drop?” (2014). saturday digital short: when will the bass drop? snl (saturday night live 2014). in this skit, the dj’s performance is more theatrical than musical. with the main musical goal reduced to pushing an oversize button marked bass, he teases the audience, even feigns a heart attack, but also finds time to play jenga, fry an egg and process credit card payments from adoring fans (callander 2023). the skit is likely inspired by commentary from deadmau5: “i just roll up with a laptop and a midi controller and select tracks and hit a spacebar” (truss 2012). the audience don’t know what the dj is doing and some don’t care (callander 2023). at the same time, some have started to scrutinise edm djs’ performances, as is evident in this tiktok: @madelineargy ♬ original sound madz madz (madeline argy 2023) a visibly distressed @madelineargy asks: “what the fuck do djs actually do? because i don't think they're remixing the song on the spot. i think they make it ahead of time. so what dials are they pressing? what are the buttons doing? is it a volume dial? is it even connected to anything?” (2023).[2] the audience are noticing that fake djs are part of edm’s ongoing efforts to emphasise spectacle over music. throwing shapes, and cakes (throwing shapes by dirty vegas) the emphasis of spectacle rather than music, and emphasis on the dj over the producer suggest that edm festivals are more focused on what is seen than what is heard. each new event attempts to dominate the audiences’ senses. within this atmosphere, organised transgressions can occur that give the feel of behavioural freedoms but are again aspects of control and spectacle. steve aoki 80 ft. cake throw hits fan in wheelchair (uncut version) (steve aoki 2013). while steve aoki’s elaborate cake-throwing is unmistakably attention-seeking, it could also be read as an attempt at reconnecting with fans, especially as festival numbers have grown and artists are situated further away from the crowds. note the “i want cake in my face” sign in the image below, this is a two-way interaction between artist and audience. figure 2. i want cake in my face! photo credit: ultramusic (2013). these antics first appeared in live shows as a marketing accompaniment to a music video, released on aoki’s dim mak label. the video featured cakes exploding in the faces of various characters, and aoki brought the reference to his performance to coincide with the release (etalk 2023). the caking endured long after the publicity cycle, however, thanks to phenomenal public demand from aoki fans, who can be seen actively seeking out his theatrics, with a select few “lucky” patrons enjoying the full experience of that interaction. view this post on instagram a post shared by steve aoki (@steveaoki) sonnemondsterne festival (steveaoki 2024). aoki estimates that he throws around 2000 cakes per year in his performances (etalk 2023)—the exclusivity of being caked is relative to the large number of patrons attending edm festivals and aoki headline shows. the cake throwing becomes part of the curated atmosphere of edm events and in its own way become a mechanism for control. it restricts the artists to a particular act, the audience to a specific form of participation and reinforces the idea of a space governed by consensus. steve aoki cake throw and how it started | the feed | etalk (2023). energy flash red bull pick me up (joey beltram – energy flash) while commercialisation has led to a bland mutant that is called edm, commercialisation has brought money into electronic dance music culture too, and in a few cases this has had a positive impact. red bull music academy (rbma) was one such positive. rbma is known for increasing knowledge, building capacity and sharing histories and approaches from seminal artists who shaped electronic dance music culture. rbma began in the late 1990’s starting out as workshops and lectures for electronic dance music makers, delivered by prominent djs and artists. rbma took place in different parts of the world each year and during its twenty-year life span held events in more than 60 countries (red bull music academy n.d.). the austrian beverage company funded the academy and its activities until 2019 when it was shut down. rbma became an incubator for artists and a range of activities at the intersection of electronic dance music culture and contemporary art. while it was seen as a successful marketing vehicle for the beverage company, redirecting their energy away from sports, rbma built capacity by seeking out underground artists and presenting their knowledge to a wider audience. rbma’s activities saw a variety of speakers and artists from diverse backgrounds and artistic practices extending beyond music and across the creative arts. this helped to promote early career artists that were local to each rbma event. the mix of higher profile and emerging artists provided real and aspirational pathways for artists early in their career, that were not necessarily linked to commercial appeal. this type of community building placed a focus on artistic merit and education, rather than financial requirements or gain. while wall street praised red bull’s financial success, more importantly, the wider electronic dance music community celebrated and danced to its artists. figure 3. the red bull music academy interview couch. photo credit: cettin (2019a). rewind (artful dodger feat. craig david – re-rewind) edm is a problematic mutation of electronic dance music. it sits in its own space on the spectrum, an abstract space, wallowing in a huge money pit but restricted in behaviour because of financial strategies. it is not allowed to enjoy the temporal behavioural freedoms that take place at events at the other end of the spectrum. the lack of freedom for artists to express themselves can inhibit and thwart experimentation. this is disturbingly evident in the form of promoters requesting pre-recorded dj sets at edm events. the homogenous music selection, and a hyper focus on social media erodes individual expression and the ability to explore new creative outcomes. the controlled settings which limit artists within the edm environment place elevated expectations on techniques that are perfect in every way with a degree of rockstar status. electronic dance music was born out of an underground post-disco subculture, and created a new sound and culture through experimentation and diversity. in contrast, edm culture is a supercharged hyperreal package that places emphasis on entertainment and experience with an appetite for the bigger, bolder, which equates to more popular and commercially appealing events. for the audience, the spectacle places emphasis on the experience over the music. the atmosphere is strictly controlled and regimented, from song choice, synchronised visuals and pyrotechnics to the audiences’ expected behaviour. this undermines the personal freedoms of the audience and removes them from any participatory experience to the role of spectator. in many electronic dance music genres and cultures, the audience is an active participant, the dancefloor is the focus, with artists and audience interacting in the dance (haberfeld 2021). in edm, the audience is a consumer exploited for commercial gain, audiences are given a homogenous and predictable experience that lacks diversity and prioritizes profit over unique artistic expression. edm is lucrative and market driven. it is a controlled experience that uses the strategic management of space, atmosphere and artist image, at the expense of genuine artistic expression and audience autonomy. for the industry, edm’s opportunity to grow and develop is stymied by its reliance on profit. the only path for development is to become even larger, with greater spectacle, and by doing so become less and less human and even more distant from the electronic dance music culture from which it mutated. the authors acknowledge that electronic dance music sits on a wide spectrum that includes commercial and profit driven activities. what we are primarily concerned by is edm’s deliberate move away from genuine music creation, performance, creative practices and how this will impact the future of expression across electronic dance music culture. author biographies dylan davis (phd) has extensive experience in design process, community engagement, digital storytelling, interaction design, and audio production and composition. dylan is also a composer and a musician whose practice covers performance and production. his works includes music productions for festivals such as melbourne music week, recordings for a range of international record labels and community-based music projects. he explores the compositional and performance methods and practices for electronic and electroacoustic music of the techno and acid house genre. mike callander (phd) is a lecturer at rmit university and a dj/producer. his practice-led research examines the intersections between dj techniques, music formats, performance technologies and dance music culture. callander’s creative outputs have reached european music festivals, art galleries in singapore and melbourne, australian morning tv and international record stores. he has collaborated with chart-topping commercial artists such as the avalanches while also maintaining a coveted weekly dj residency at revolver upstairs, arguably australia’s best-known nightclub. callander is ableton certified, one of fewer than 400 people worldwide to be endorsed as an educator by the makers of live and push. david haberfeld (phd) is an accomplished and awarded electronic dance music artist, academic, researcher and music technologist with diverse experiences as producer, composer, and performer since the early 1990s. david has successfully led and responded to the rapid changes in the way we produce, perform, market, manage and teach electronic music for three decades; including how digitalisation has impacted audience engagement. his experiences are unique, combining academic, industrial, and creative practices with over 200 published music works. under the artist moniker honeysmack, he is globally recognised as someone who has significantly contributed to australia’s electronic dance music community for many years. references barnes, marcus. 2020. “race, representation, and reshaping festival culture”. beatportal, 23 november: <https://www.beatportal.com/articles/17193-race-representation-and-reshaping-festival-culture>, (accessed 4 september 2024). bey, hakim. 2003. taz: the temporary autonomous zone, ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism. new york: autonomedia. callander, mike. 2023. “thinking about syncing: examining the 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<https://www.vice.com/en/article/beatport-electronic-dance-music-online-store-toxic-workplace/>, (accessed 15 november 2024). taylor, alex. 2024. “avicii’s dad on his son’s legacy, mental health and survivor’s guilt.” bbc news, 16 june. <https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c722jj9ep2wo>, (accessed 4 november 2024). truss, si. 2012. “deadmau5: "we all hit play."” music radar, 26 june. <https://www.musicradar.com/news/dj/deadmau5-we-all-hit-play-550353>, (accessed 20 october 2024). ultramusic. 2013. “erick morillo is the tip of the iceberg.” tumblr, 10 august: <https://ultra.tumblr.com/post/57901500219/steve-aokis-best-cake-throw-ever?>, (accessed 23 may 2025). youngs, ian. 2018. “avicii: the superstar dj behind some of the decade’s biggest hits.” bbc news, 20 april: <https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-43845137>, (accessed 4 november 2024). filmography etalk. 2023. “steve aoki cake throw and how it started” youtube, 4:02. uploaded on 11 march 2023. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hhvilqwkow>, (accessed 2 october 2024). madeline argy. (@madelineargy). 2023. “what do djs actually do? explained in detail”. tiktok, 21 july. <https://www.tiktok.com/@madelineargy/video/7257983414014446875>, (accessed 20 october 2024). saturday night live. 2014. “snl digital short: when will the bass drop? – snl” youtube, 2:54. uploaded on 19 may 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=douv7q1c1su>, (accessed 12 november 2024). steve aoki. 2013. “steve aoki 80 ft. cake throw hits fan in wheelchair (uncut version)” youtube, 1:50. uploaded on 8 august, 2013. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmaolcbsoya>, (accessed 4 august 2025). steveaoki. 2024. “sonnemondsterne festival”. instagram, uploaded 28 august 2024. <https://www.instagram.com/reel/c_nnlwlxxrd>, (accessed 4 august 2025). notes [1] while the music of artists like gaslamp killer and derrick may originated on the electronic dance music spectrum at points distinct from edm, as a result of their subsequent success and reach their actions can be scrutinised as part of the edm discource. [2] @madelineargy’s performance is likely also theatrical and satirical. “it’s not just a party, ya know?”: work and affective circuits in lgbtqia+ music collectives in the south of brazil dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 17(1): 129–149 issn 1947-5403 ©2025 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.07 “it’s not just a party, ya know?”: work and affective circuits in lgbtqia+ music collectives in the south of brazil adriana amaral fluminense federal university (brazil) simone luci pereira paulista university and state university of rio de janeiro (brazil) lucas aguiar goulart paulista university (brazil) jonara cordova university of vale do rio dos sinos (brazil) translated by: joão pedro wizniewsky amaral federal university of santa maria (brazil) moses iten deakin university (australia) abstract this article addresses the application of affective theories in relation to electronic dance music parties, specifically from a global south perspective. the aim is to comprehend the circumstances of collective and individual formations facilitated through music as an element that intensifies affect, as well as the labor demanded by the creation of these affects. drawing inspiration from ethnographic methodology and employing observational techniques and informal interviews, this study explores work, affective circuits and music scenes through a pilot study of a party that’s been running for 5 years, organized by coletivo t in porto alegre, southern brazil. in this way, the analysis of parties, embodiment and urban spaces unfolds through an archaeology of the city’s electronic music scene. this reveals a distinct circuit from its inception, marked by both ruptures and continuities in the aesthetics and identities of these events and their participants. keywords: electronic music, affective circuits, collectives, lgbtqia+, street parties transposition https://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2025.17.01.07 dancecult 17(1)130 adriana da rosa amaral — phd in social communication at the pontifical catholic university of rio grande do sul (puc-rs), brazil; with a postdoctoral fellowship at the university of surrey, united kingdom. professor at the post-graduate program in communication at the fluminense federal university (ff), rio de janeiro, brasil. researcher at cnpq, brazil. editor of the book series “popular culture and world politics” and coordinator of the research laboratory in pop culture, communication and technologies (cultpop). <adriana.amaral08@gmail.com> simone luci pereira — phd in social sciences at the pontifical catholic university of são paulo, brazil. she has held 3 postdoctoral fellowships in the areas of music (unirio/faperj), communication (ufrj) and social sciences, youth and childhood (clacso). professor at the post-graduate communication department at paulista university (são paulo, brazil) and at the post-graduate communication department at state university of rio de janeiro (rio de janeiro, brazil). researcher at cnpq, brazil. coordinator of urbesom (research group on urban cultures, music and communication). <simonelp@uol.com.br> lucas aguiar goulart — phd and master in social psychology at the federal university of rio grande do sul (ufrgs), porto alegre, brazil; with a postdoctoral fellowship at the paulista university (unip), são paulo, brazil. <la_goulart@hotmail.com> jonara cordova — master and phd candidate in communication sciences at the university of vale do rio dos sinos (unisinos), rio grande do sul, brazil. capes/proex scholarship holder in the culture, citizenship and communication technologies line. member of cultpop – research laboratory in pop culture, communication and technologies. <jonarappg@gmail.com> introduction in this article, we are interested in understanding the articulation between electronic music parties, bodies and corporealities in action and urban spaces, which bring with them the combination of social and urban spatial dimensions, as well as their possibilities for producing difference and plurality. these three interconnected themes help us comprehend how parties and music collectives—as we analyze here—carry political meanings related to the power of bodies in action and in collectivity (fernández 2013; liska 2023). in environments like these, the ludic, the festive, the corporeal and the aesthetic elements are inseparable from their politicization as urban experiments, corresponding with a renewed understanding of what the political itself entails, linked to performative agency (butler 2010) and the activation and reframing of identity discussions. issues of gender and sexuality, as well as class and geolocations are brought forth in the intersectionality of the city; as are issues involving access, means of production, dissemination and organization of parties by individuals and collectives embarking on their trajectories. mailto:adriana.amaral08@gmail.com mailto:la_goulart@hotmail.com mailto:jonarappg@gmail.com amaral et al. | it’s not just a party, ya know? 131 we understand that the use of affect theory in musical environments—especially in electronic music and/or related to the lgbtqia+ community—is useful in intricately mapping elements of various cultural and subjective productions, as well as the possibility of better focusing on materialization through affect theory. some interpretations of this theory propose the idea of a presumed “purity” of corporeal affections, embracing a reiteration of mind-body binarism (hemmings 2005). this makes the investigation of how non-hegemonic identities, feelings and cultural elements can come together in the combination of musical waves and other bodies particularly unique, conveying meanings that are both contingent and material (garcia 2020). our analysis will focus on coletivo t (“collective t”) and street music events produced by them. originally from porto alegre, in rio grande do sul, the collective is formed by lgbtqia+ djs, performers and producers, mostly trans individuals, with a focus on creating a safe space for the expression of dissident identities, as well as addressing the lack of visibility in other city electronic music events (and in the city itself ). we begin by discussing the relationship between labor and affective circuits, music scenes and corporealities. we contextualize how the electronic music scene emerges in the city of porto alegre and then conduct an ethnographic analysis of one of the collective’s parties, to form an understanding of this scene of bodies coming together and the affective circuits of embodied identities, understandings and feelings. affects, affective circuits, and music scenes to reflect on how music scenes acknowledge political-aesthetic elements to consider gender and sexuality, we will use the understanding of affect and the so-called affective turn. the conceptualization of affect used in this work is an attempt to understand music as a unique apparatus of subjectivation and community production, composing and materializing desires, scenes and collectives. affect is understood as a measure preceding other productions, whether conscious (ideas) or even unconscious (feelings, desire), also understood as pre-conscious. this pre-consciousness occurs as a corporeal affect—that is, it is materialized before its displacement into other instances normally understood by the social sciences—whether in individual models (consciousness) or collective ones (ideology, imaginary, culture). therefore, affect is an infinitesimal particle that, in certain positions and moments, ends up acting on bodies. it never occupies or solidifies within bodies, but is always “in-between” them, always collective in its interaction (massumi 2002). another important characteristic of affect lies precisely in its actualization and virtuality—that is, in its conditions of manifestation. affect exists, according to a bergsonian understanding, within a virtuality, on an inaccessible plane of immanence and eventually ascending to the realm of materialities upon its actualization. it is in the encounter between bodies that they can ascend and affect, whether these bodies are human or non-human. hence, this plane of virtuality is not susceptible to prior readings; it can only be seen dancecult 17(1)132 through its inscription, in the affectation of bodies in a given space or movement. the effects of affect are striking in their intensity and unpredictability, because they originate in a virtual state and ascend in an uncertain manner, making them impossible to predict or meta-analyze. there are attempts to restrict the productive possibilities of affects especially with the aim of enhancing capital circulation and its conditions of production and reproduction (including sexual, racial, and gender aspects). however, this production is composed of what is called “affective labor”. this concept refers to workers—particularly female workers— whose objective is the (attempted) systematization of affects into predetermined thoughts and feelings (referred to as “assemblages”), aiming to shape them by exerting a certain type of subjectivizing control, limiting the possibilities of actualization, materialization, and inscription of affects into desire (hardt and negri 2001). this perception of affects as central to the interpretation of social phenomena is named “the affective turn” in the social sciences—a post-anthropocentric understanding of the production of materiality, desire and cultures. this turn is based principally on the denial of an ideological/imaginary metanarrative and the production of a map of possible movements and potentialities of affects. the focus of this turn becomes what we call “networks of affectation”, as it often includes a diverse and extensive range of understandings based on post-anthropocentrism and non-hierarchical relations between humans and non-humans. these analyses come from an attempt to free oneself from the epistemological and ontological framework of capital reproduction circuits and their foundations. differences promoted by these needs—such as human and non-human, cultural and natural, organic and artificial, rational and emotional, and especially individual and collective—no longer organize the analyses, creating space for the promotion of new compositions and resignifications. that is, new assemblages outside the affective circuits of capital production (clough and halley 2007). the understanding of “affective labor” often hovers around identities typically associated with women (mothers, wives) or caretaking professions (healthcare, secretaries). however, the field of art and entertainment is also considered “affective labor”, due to its function of organizing emotions and ideas.1 in amaral and grohmann’s research on communication and music in brazil, labor constitutes one of its material aspects (2022). the affective circuit of entertainment is seminally examined by theodore adorno (2002), who portrays cultural products as shaping affective-sentimental instances oriented toward escapism, while simultaneously reproducing the same structures found in spaces of labor. in doing so, they maintain the reproductive mechanisms of capital. however, music itself as an object becomes a differential choice from an affective perspective, due to the difficulty of measuring music subjectively. attempts to understand music symbolically, as understood in cultural studies, or strictly ideologically, as done by the frankfurt school, prove to be reductionist when considering the centrality that they attribute to lyrics, social contexts, or strategic positions within cultural industries. these amaral et al. | it’s not just a party, ya know? 133 analyses are relevant in political terms, but they do not consider the understanding of music itself, the affects of vibration, melody and their inscription in the encounter with individuals’ bodies and the geographical instances where these bodies are located—in their homes, at parties, in cultural scenes, et cetera (thompson and biddle 2013). the vibration of music, which is commonly translated into bodily affects (goosebumps, dance, movement), triggers intersubjective effects of affects that circulate between bodies. the production of sound waves, rhythms and melodies promotes a differential embodiment, fostering the materialization of collective desires and feelings that operate directly in the encounter between the body-wave and individuals’ bodies. meaning is constructed not through typically understood manifestations (speech, clothing, social position), but through affective cohabitation and collective experience of the vibratory presence of sound and its affective manifestations in the body. this brings about unique corporeal embodiments and productions in musical scenes (henriques 2015). the material aspects of music in media and communication research have many dimensions, infrastructure, socio-cultural aspects, the economic and political context, as well as environmental consequences, which affect the way music is circulated, produced, and consumed. these aspects – from the material aspects of the media to the material aspects of production – are inseparable (amaral and grohmann 2022: 84). affective labor can be considered not only as an instance that aims to maintain affective circuits linked to the reproduction of capital, but also as a means to question them. if we acknowledge that affective circuits, which produce identities of “normality” in terms of gender, sexuality, race and national belonging, are extremely important for capitalist maintenance (berlant 2010), the work on the effectiveness of counter-heteronormative spaces with a focus on music and vibration opens up a possible rearticulation for other affective effects and relations between and among bodies. these rearticulations offer possibilities for non-normative readings, promoting differential possibilities of subjectivation and access to relationships initially thought impossible or paradoxical, but they emerge as possible due to the agencies fostered in these affective scenes. parties, corporealities and spaces of the city the universe of parties that utilize public and semi-public spaces (delgado 2007) in cities, has gained relevance in recent years. the pioneering works on cultural studies (hebdige 1979; hall and jefferson 2006) and post-subcultural studies (thornton 1996; amaral 2008) analyzing festive and/or musical environments of youth groups—which consider socialities and identities related to class, gender/sexuality, race/ethnicity, generation and symbolic capital as significant elements for the convergence of ludic, affective and belonging dimension—are already well-known. in the past three decades, the notion of music scene (straw 2006; bennett and peterson 2004; sá and janotti jr. 2013) has served as an important conceptual and analytical axis for reflecting on sets of more or less organized social and cultural activities that have a dancecult 17(1)134 strong component of construction in urban cultures and cities, centered around music and its sounds, performances, dances, aesthetics, fashion, tastes and lifestyles. these activities configure territories within the city through the dynamics of cultural/musical production and consumption that extend beyond fixed demarcations in terms of identities and subcultural or post-subcultural perspectives. in recent years, parties and other sound-musical manifestations articulate issues related to youth (and other) identities and renewed uses of the city.2 polivanov and medeiros (2020) provide a bibliographic review of the still scarce works on the issue of women in electronic music scenes, particularly in cities of the global north such as manchester (hutton 2006), new york (pini 2001), montreal (abtan 2016), among others. we focus on studies produced in latin america that examine urban street parties as forms of resistance, where collective actions challenge aspects of everyday life and contest urban tensions. these parties forge new social alliances in the city of rio de janeiro (barroso 2022), while the batekoo parties in são paulo also highlight aesthetics and values that reconfigure racial identities, gender performativities and power relations (oliveira 2022). similarly in buenos aires, argentina, the batuka collective uses percussion and communal musical practices that articulate forms of social organization for cis women, non-binary individuals and trans men (liska 2022). when it comes to electronic dance music parties in brazil, this scene has developed since the 1980s and the 1990s in nightclubs in cities such as são paulo, rio de janeiro, porto alegre and recife, constructing a clubber (from the english for clubbing or club) scene with many branches and developments (sá 2003; assef 2010; braga 2018; amaral 2018; neves and silva 2018). since the beginning of the 2010s, the search for alternative festive spaces has been central in the electronic dance music scene, in contrast with the more hegemonic models of club culture of the 2000s (braga 2018). referred to as “street parties” by many djs, artists, attendees, and producers (braga 2018; pereira and gheirart 2023), there has been a type of renewal of the scene, with itinerant parties being produced by artist collectives (linked in varying degrees by racial/ethnic, gender/sexuality and class-based movements and agendas), minimal financial investment, as well as collaborative forms of production (transportation, set design, lighting, organization, djing, performances, etc.), utilizing streets, squares, city tunnels, and even warehouses and parking lots. a scene or circuit of electronic music parties has been established on city streets and other public spaces, as well as abandoned areas occupying the so-called urban “fractures” (pereira and gheirart 2023), giving them renewed meanings. in general, the parties in this scene share a search for musical and electronic experimentation, as well as on the importance of music and its communicative dimension within urban environments (herschmann and fernandes 2014). they bring people together to dance, perform their bodies and identities, as well as build connections, belongings, socialities and ways of being together in the metropolis. this does not exclude engendered political meanings; rather, it articulates and emphasizes them—particularly those connected to struggles for resistance and the reexistences of dissident identities and groups; as well as the reclaiming of spaces in the city, their use, occupation and visibility. amaral et al. | it’s not just a party, ya know? 135 in são paulo, parties like mamba negra, capslock, autonoma a-temporária, vampire haus, blum—among many others—have built an independent electronic music scene self-defined by the social actors themselves. emerging through a process of conflict and negotiation, this scene consolidated during the 2010s and sparked important discussions about alternative music cultures, public cultural policies, regulations, and the use of public spaces in the city (pereira and gheirart 2023). also, in belo horizonte, the capital city of minas gerais state, this new scene has given birth to movements “with a strong influence from popular and festive occupations that…emerged and strengthened” the political protest actions throughout brazil in 2013, as well as also articulating “themselves with the street carnival mobilizations” (cortez and siqueira 2022: 89). collectives such as masterplano, 1010 and mientras dura have been producing parties in that city since 2015, connecting electronic music, visual interventions, artistic performances, and “empowerment discourse for women, black people and the lgbtqia+ community” (cortez and siqueira 2022: 90) in public spaces and/or spaces outside of nightclubs. in porto alegre, the capital of rio grande do sul, the electronic music scene has undergone similar transformations to other cities in the country. starting in the 1990s with indoor parties held in venues such as abandoned factories, warehouses and nightclubs, as well as open-air raves documented in fontanari’s ethnography (2003), the scene later transitioned to street parties produced by collectives composed of minorities (cordova and bernardo 2023), which form the focus of our observation and analysis in this article. more about the city itself will be discussed in the next section. by addressing issues related to identity, these parties confront us with the theme of bodies and corporealities—that is, the ways in which meanings, practices and sociocultural sensitivities are constructed through bodies in action, which act as producers of agency, identities, subjectivities and aesthetics (marmól and roa 2020)—positioning this as an important phenomenon for analysis. bodies here are understood from a foucauldian perspective of “strategic relations” that encompass forms of power, management and control by normativities and institutions, but also encompass counterpowers, fissures, lines of escape and resistances (fernández 2013; valenzuela arce 2009). bodies are considered mediations (lindón 2012), ambivalently articulating processes of control, normalization and subjection, as well as freedom, transgression, and resistance. valenzuela arce (2009) complements this approach to bodies—particularly youth bodies—with the notions of biopowers and bioresistances, in which the body emerges as a vital and strategic element for young people, through which they seek recognition and relations of belonging. in this way, bodies are composed in diverse modalities, whether in their singular or collective dimensions. in this collective dimension—which fernández (2013: 21-22) calls situations “between bodies”, meaning the activation of the power of bodies through interactions in mobilizations, protest marches, or parties—affections are constructed, bringing into play “bodies in action” that create “machinic sequences” full of dynamism and collective potential. drawing on a deleuzian reading of spinoza’s notion of affects and bodies, fernández emphasizes the power of action released by the collective intensities dancecult 17(1)136 made possible “between bodies”—that is, within affects understood as the capacity to affect and be affected—which situations such as the parties analyzed here can generate. in the face of normative, governmental or moral biopowers, the use of bodies arises as a way to elaborate bioresistances through multiple forms of signifying them, whether through clothing and other aesthetic expressions, or through the embrace of sexualities and genders seen as dissident, emphasizing the collective agency of individuals and their possibilities of constructing processes of subjectivation that are centered on the body, its uses, and its capacity to affect and be affected. by being held in public, semi-public (delgado 2007), or collective spaces (caiafa 2003; pereira et al 2021) of the city, this renewed electronic music scene also confronts us with issues involving the spatial dimensions of the social and the urban dimensions, developing what lindón has named a “betweenness” (2012), an approach that articulates a mutual configuration of the city and bodies in action. it is worth remembering that—beyond the urban environment and its spaces conceived by the order of the state, institutions and macrostructural dimensions of power and inequalities—the city is also shaped by the logic of the uses and appropriations by its people and groups, always in contention and negotiation. discussions in cultural geography help us understand space and territory in their unequal dimensions of power and their effects on the social position of individuals (massey 2008; haesbaert 2014). in a reflection that encompasses both the order and discipline of spaces and their forms of occupation, reclaiming, and resignification within a constant dynamic of power and appropriation, the construction of the spatial dimension has emerged as the fabric of lived experiences that are contested and negotiated. as massey suggests, space needs to be understood both in its dimensions of power and in its potential for the presentation and visibility of difference, plurality and heterogeneity (2008). in agreement with this author, we emphasize the importance of the spatial dimension when thinking about cities, their interdictions and barriers, but also their uses and the various strategies of resistance, which, in spatiality, can find the possibility of constructing heterotopias. in this sense, collectives and electronic music parties highlight their political dimension, as they underscore dissident identities and bodies in action and make use of public and semi-public spaces in the city. in these territories appropriated and occupied by parties and musical activities, they become places of use, shared senses of belonging, connections, encounters, identity elaborations and possibilities for developing careers connected to music scenes. we understand these actions as possibilities for new performative dimensions of politics (butler 2010), even if they are more ephemeral or take the form of cracks and fissures in everyday life. it is important to recall the reflection proposed by milton santos (2017) regarding cities and the nature of spaces. the author defines “luminous zones” and “opaque zones”. both, respectively, relate to urban spaces with greater or lesser technical, financial and informational density, indicating their capacity to attract capital, economic activities and amaral et al. | it’s not just a party, ya know? 137 visibility. tourist and business areas, for example, can be considered luminous zones, while degraded or labeled violent areas can be considered opaque zones. global cities characterized by the expulsion of marginalized individuals—lower-class people, black people, as well as sexual and gender dissidents—from central areas to the outskirts and peripheries, reinforce the existence of this capitalist logic of expanding opaque zones as the hegemonic model of urban planning. in this scenario, the occupation and appropriation of the luminous zones in the city center by the youth of parties like t stand out, conveying new meanings to squares, streets and other territories through their presence and actions. this resignification occurs because, according to santos (2017: 325), luminous zones are associated with “spaces of exactitude”, capitalist rationality, and fast-paced time. however, “slow people”—along with their alternative temporalities—who inhabit opaque zones create “fabulating and creativity spaces”, enabling the construction of territories of art, resistance and sensitivity through poetry, music, dance and encounters forged at parties. they promote environments of collective production and creation, fostering possibilities for multiple and dissenting existences through the resignification and occupation of urban spaces with their bodies; presences; temporalities and aesthetic, cultural, communicative and political actions. we emphasize, thus, the ways in which the interactions between musical practices/ parties, bodies/corporealities and cities can be employed to create, mark, or transform the meanings of individual and collective experiences, as well as our understanding of them. “far away from the capitals”: porto alegre’s electronic music scene it is important to provide context for porto alegre’s electronic music scene, brazil’s southernmost capital, which has gone through several waves. there are divergent opinions regarding the possible beginnings of the scene, but according to the “native history” and mythical accounts shared by fontanari’s research collaborators (2003), reports date back to a party in 1991 or 1992 that brought together around 50 people at a nightclub called porto de elis.3 however, it is commonly discussed among those who experienced the scene in the 1990s, that 1993 was the year when porto alegre effectively launched itself into the country’s electronic music circuit with the lm party, which featured performances by international artists including moby and altern8. during the mid-1990s, the buzz of raves and other parties spread club culture—as well as subgenres like techno, house and trance, among others—to certain parts of the city. this coincided with a decline in the popularity of the so-called gaucho rock genre produced in the city. gaucho rock—as a distinct facet of the broader brazilian rock (brock) scene that originated in the 1970s—reached its peak in the 1980s. its identity was characterized by a fusion of punk rock, new wave sounds and ironic lyrics that reflected the language of the city’s youth (govari 2020), contrasting with the aesthetic features of electronic music culture. it is important to highlight that many participants in the early-1990s electronic music scene in porto alegre either came from, or were part of, the alternative rock scene. club dancecult 17(1)138 culture (thornton 1996) initially reached the city through the exchange of records brought back by travelers and ideas among djs and partygoers. the profile of these individuals was predominantly white, cisgender, middleto upper-class and university-educated, although among them there were people who identified with other gender identities, referred to at that time as gls (gays, lesbians, and sympathizers).4 in the 1990s—according to fontanari (2003)—the scene had a well-defined public, consisting of young communication undergraduate students from the two largest universities in the city: ufrgs and pucrs.5 many of the influential figures in the scene at that time had access to travel, both internationally and to são paulo—considered the model city for the scene in brazil. despite their connections with the country’s largest city, participants in the scene still perceived themselves as people coming from the idea of a province or the countryside, both as a form of regional identification and a form of scorn, in dialogue with the gaucho rock scene. the idea of ‘province’, periphery, region, is used in a paradoxical sense. while the notion of ‘province’ is used to refer to the local scene, it is also connected to the rest of the world. ‘our’ culture is also the one that comes from outside, and the ‘capital of the gaúchos’ of which ‘we are taking control’, is the city where we were born (fontanari 2003: 64). on the other hand, while the gaucho rock scene was treated by the press and media as a scene whose identity was tied to the city (bonfim 2016; govari 2020), the same did not apply to electronic music, which was related to the perspective of drug use. the media within the scene itself (webzines, internet forums) would focus on the idea of community and the so-called p.l.u.r. (peace, love, unity, respect) set of principles, which were part of what the participants of the scene and researchers like garcia (2020) referred to as the “vibe”. another interesting aspect of this initial period is linked to the means of communication, especially the internet. given the profile of the majority of participants in this scene— students and young people from middleor upper-class backgrounds—already had access to the internet at a time when it was not yet so common in brazil, it is understood that the internet played a central role in disseminating club culture and promoting events (fontanari 2003). in addition, the internet fostered a sense of community in virtual environments and forums such as the #tecno-rs channel on irc, the e-zine e-ar (electronic alternative resistance) and later on websites like poavibe (later poabeat), all of this predating the formation of social networking sites and digital platforms as we understand them today.6 during this period, most of the parties took place in the central regions of the city between the following neighborhoods: centro histórico, bomfim, independência, and cidade baixa or further south from the city, but still along the margins of guaiba lake, according to fontanari’s cartography (2003). geographically, porto alegre’s downtown is not located in the middle of the city but alongside the guaiba lake (previously categorized as a river and estuary by geographers); so, the nightlife of the city has always had a strong amaral et al. | it’s not just a party, ya know? 139 connection to the territory surrounding the freshwater and the harbor. towards the late-1990s and early-2000s, a process of professionalization of the amateur cena eletrônica (or “electronic scene” in english) began, with the creation of event production companies, agencies and education for djs and producers. moreover, the rave parties grew larger, reaching different types of audiences. the connections with alternative fashion events and fairs like mix bazar, and electronic music expanding from the dance floors and the internet to the radio, further facilitated its popularization and the expansion of the events themselves. this brought with it complexities and contradictions around this movement and, later on, a certain saturation with a decrease in the number of parties, accompanied by increasing ticket prices as the audience changed. in the 2000s, with the rise of subgenres with more broken beats such as breakbeats, jungle and drum ‘n’ bass, the itinerant party quarta quebrada gained prominence and attracted black djs and black people from the start, as these subgenres originated in the peripheries of the city. in the late-2000s, djs like eduardo herrera (who moved to london) and fabricio peçanha (who became famous in the mainstream circuit and moved to santa catarina) left the city. during this period, there was also a resurgence of other genres and styles of parties, sometimes focused on nostalgia for the 1970s and 1980s, or pop rock, diva-centric pop music and indie rock cover bands (amaral and sartori 2017). the 2010s were years in which the electronic music scene in porto alegre was reduced to a few events and some parties more connected to the visual and audiovisual arts scene, as well as having a relationship with different alternative aesthetics and public policies. among the initiatives for re-existence, we highlight the kino beat festival: “a project created in 2009 by the dj gabriel cevallos as a showcase of music-related films of the porto alegre department of culture. it keeps evolving, incorporating new languages and formats every year” (kino beat 2025). the kino beat festival continues to this day and has maintained its more experimental focus, expanding the concept of electronic dance music beyond the traditional club setting, as well as hosting artist residences. while other sporadic electronic music events either focused on mainstream circuit parties or parties that emulated the nostalgia of the 90s, the more alternative kino beat project occupies an in-between space, although it is still predominantly characterized by a production focused on a middleto upper-class, university-educated and white audience. the theme of technology—a central theme for electronic music since its inception—alongside the audiovisual aspects that have always been important to the scene, continue to be part of its configuration in the city. in the late-2010s, with the popularization of home production technologies, the electronic music scene in porto alegre—and the metropolitan region—became virtualized, and the production of subgenres such as vaporwave, futurefunk and trap, among others, emerged and spread through digital platforms. the scene has become less focused on the streets and nightclubs, and more focused on performances and online networks, as reported by conter (2016) in his media archaeology of electronic music in rio grande do sul. dancecult 17(1)140 the transformations in the scene during this period were technological, social and generational, among others, shaping a new circuit of music producers and audiences that were not centered in the city’s downtown area but rather in its outskirts and peripheries. there was also an increased presence of different aesthetics and social and gender identities, with a slightly higher representation of women but still a minority in terms of racial diversity, according to research interviews conducted by conter and sartori (2019). the researchers have also noted that there were few aesthetic references to the city or regional identity in these musical and audiovisual productions, as they often opted for transnational references and critiques of the capitalist system and mainstream culture. during this period, the organization of street parties became more complex due to a series of municipal administrations linked to right-wing governments. their regulations profoundly affected the city’s nightlife and the notion of occupying public spaces until the the post-pandemic period of the early 2020s, when they started gaining more space again. 5 years of coletivo t: a party as a political act and the changes in the electronic dance music scene of porto alegre coletivo t (or collective t in english), created in the city of porto alegre, rio grande do sul, in 2018, is a collective composed of lgbtqia+ djs, performers, and producers, with 75% of the members identifying themselves as trans and/or non-binary people. the group emerged with the aim of promoting the inclusion of lgbtqia+ professionals in the electronic music scene in porto alegre. the focus of coletivo t has arisen from a history of the erasure of lgbtqia+ individuals in parties organized by other collectives, as well as the need to create a safe space where marginalized people could occupy and express themselves, being fully heard and respected. in addition to organizing parties, the collective created the subdivision t rec., an independent record label. in their first release, they brought together 20 lgbtqia+ latin american artists in a compilation called vitamina t (2021a). alongside this project, the album tramóia (2021b) was also released, featuring tracks from four artists from the collective. the realization of these projects was supported by beck’s beer. in 2023, coletivo t celebrated its fifth anniversary. in order to make the occasion memorable, the collective organized the event jardim t: 5 anos de travessia (translating to english as garden t: 5 years of crossing). the event took place on two sundays in april at jardim lutzenberger, at the casa de cultura mario quintana (ccmq), located in downtown porto alegre. the event was made possible through an open call for trans artists promoted by ccmq, an institution affiliated with the state department of culture, whose aim was to bring visibility to the trans cause. the event was conceived by pétrus vargas, artistically known as pv5000, one of the founders of coletivo t. in this article, we focus on the first date of the event, which took place on april 23, starting at 5:00 pm with a panel discussion on event production and the electronic music scene in porto alegre, featuring djs nogayra and pv5000, as well as other members of the amaral et al. | it’s not just a party, ya know? 141 collective. from 7:00 pm, the djs played music for the party, which ended at 10:00 pm. at the beginning, the host, isa blame, guided the conversation, asking questions for the members of coletivo t to answer. the event began before sunset, something that was mentioned by pétrus as an important aspect for the collective, because the opportunity to occupy a public space during the day to talk about cultural production has been very rare for the lgbtqia+ community, especially for trans people. usually, these groups only find space at night, at parties, where their knowledge is rendered invisible and their voices are silenced. during the panel discussion, different themes emerged, and we will delve into them here: the beginnings of the parties; identity construction and changes in the electronic music scene through partying as a political act; the first street event, as well as music references. pétrus vargas (dj pv5000) explains that coletivo t started together with bruno louzada (dj baroque angel) in 2018, producing a party in the 4th district with various performances and djs.7 however, they ended up accumulating a large debt because they didn’t have experience in event production, which led them to pause the parties for a while. in 2019, they went back to hosting events, but on a much smaller scale, with small parties. before the gentrification process, the abandoned factories in the 4th district hosted the first coletivo t parties. pétrus mentions that one of the parties even took place in an industrial kitchen, site of a former medicines factory. gradually, other members have joined the collective. bruno explains that it was during this period that they began to understand what they wanted to convey through the party and the visual direction they intended to pursue, working with designer librae, who continues to shape the visual identity of the collective. later on, multidisciplinary artist isabela pereira (also known as bela) from ceará joined the collective and moved to porto alegre, where she started djing. shortly after, una (dj nogayra) also joined the collective. all these people mentioned are transgender and this is how the identity of coletivo t and its members has developed collectively. as pétrus says: i transitioned while already being a part of t [coletivo t], so it’s crazy how the collectives you’re a part of change with you, and you change with them. i think that’s the power of a collective... it’s crazy to find yourself within the identities of others, you know? i think that happened to me a lot, like being in a space where there are few identities and then starting to discover others and discover yourself through others. and i think that t was a lot of that, we were discovering ourselves through each other (vargas 2023). in this excerpt, pétrus emphasizes how the collective helped him find his own gender identity through his relationships with other transgender people. through encountering different identities, the dj began to see and understand himself as a transgender man. therefore, while the identity of a collective is shaped and transformed by the individuals who are part of it, those involved also have their identities shaped and transformed by the collective. dancecult 17(1)142 this process of identity construction is reflected in the production of events, as parties have a political dimension, enabling different bodies and identities—previously erased and marginalized—to occupy spaces in the city. they not only occupy the electronic music scene in porto alegre but also transform it. this transformation began before the creation of coletivo t. pétrus mentions that in 2017, greta, the women’s collective he was a part of, started including transgender people on the guest lists for their parties, something that was already happening at some events in são paulo. and then, at this first greta party, i met marine, who is a photographer, and isabela, who was this girl who later joined [colecttive] t. and they, two transgender girls, much younger than us, they came and said: ‘dude, we only came because you created this list, because we see it happening in many places and only now have you realized it, but we came here to tell you that this is dope’. and then we started becoming friends with them, ya know? then we started exchanging and stuff, and then marine joined greta and said, ‘okay, listen, now i’m going to make the list, now a trans person will make a trans list’. and then, at the second greta party, there were like ten trans people. damn, ya know, i didn’t even know all of this existed in porto alegre at that time. and now, these days, we see that trans people, they like being in the space. because it’s no longer a hostile space, because, man, when you’re alone in a place, it’s not good, ya know. it’s not good to be the only trans person in this environment, especially in the electronic music scene, that doesn’t fit (vargas 2023). the trans list is an example of an initiative that allowed people with other gender identities to go to parties whose public was predominantly composed of cisgender and heterosexual people, thus redefining the electronic music scene of the city. pétrus recalls that when they started going to parties in 2015, there were already collectives organizing electronic music events, but there were hardly any lgbtqia+ people in those places (vargas 2023). una emphasizes that besides occupying spaces, it is important to create mechanisms for dissident individuals to feel comfortable, accepted, and respected in the venue (nogeira 2023). bringing this theme into dialogue beyond the collective, rather than limiting it within the group, increases awareness among the community attending the events. one of the members of t, known as dj lovinho, commented on the need for opportunities like this: it is very important that t has been selected in this call for proposals to show the people who attend the party, especially cisgender and white individuals who don’t have much perspective beyond going to a party (...) there is a whole lot of work that people completely take for granted. there are people who mess up, people who are not in their place, cisgender white men who end up messing up in a scene that is not theirs, who don’t know half of the struggle it is. t being selected in this call for proposals helps to show that it’s really awesome, it’s not just a party, ya know (escobar 2023). amaral et al. | it’s not just a party, ya know? 143 one of the biggest events of coletivo t took place in october 2022, hosted in response to incidents of transphobia at a party in porto alegre organized by another collective. pétrus also admits having experienced transphobia alongside friends. they didn’t receive any support from other people present who witnessed the prejudice. una believes this has to do with the comfortable position that cisgender people are in and how the demands of trans people are not a priority for them. transphobia also manifests itself in silencing, as when one is aware that a trans person is being discriminated against without taking a stand against it, means being complicit. in order to address these problems, the collective members had internal discussions and decided not to talk about instances of transphobia on instagram, the main social media platform used by the group. they decided instead to turn the situation into an opportunity to showcase the quality of work by trans djs and performers. the party where the transphobic incident occurred was sponsored by beck’s beer. therefore, they reached out to the company to expose what had happened and propose a party entirely produced by trans people. this is how coletivo t’s first party in a public space destrava a rua (translating to english as unlock the street), happened with the support of beck’s. the event was entirely led by trans people, including transgender, transmasculine and non-binary individuals, in various roles such as djs, performers, the visuals team, hosts, mcs, planners, bar tenders and general staff. when it comes to musical subgenres, pétrus mentions that house was one of his first influences, but he felt the need to hear something at the parties with lyrics that he could better relate to, since he had limited knowledge of the english language. therefore, when he decided to start djing, he made the choice to include more brazilian songs in his sets. una adds this has an impact on the dance floor, that people resonate and interact more with the music. they opt for more underground brazilian artists from funk and rap, particularly from the lgbtqia+ community. however, they also mix brazilian music with subgenres like house and techno. in considering these statements, we can identify in the practices of coletivo t the ongoing importance of resistance tactics mobilized to create, occupy and transform space. in other words, there was initially a need to create a collective in order to strengthen these individuals through horizontal unity. thus, the trans lists were created, allowing people with other genre identities to join the parties. subsequently, the electronic music scene in porto alegre has become increasingly occupied by transgender people, both as partygoers, as producers and organizers. this led to the recognition of the need to transform the scene to make it safer and more accessible for these dissident identities. although this process is still ongoing, there are already visible signs of change, with new aesthetics and music being created, transforming the electronic music scene in porto alegre through the influence of the lgbtqia+ community. dancecult 17(1)144 final considerations the objective of this article is to understand electronic dance music parties from the perspective of the global south, drawing on affect theory as an analytical framework and using the case study the parties organized by coletivo t in the city of porto alegre (southern region of brazil). we observed that the experiences generated by music and sonorities are intertwined with political dimensions related to corporealities and affective processes, which are appropriated, developed and expressed by dissident identity formations in that context. our discussion of parties, corporealities and urban spaces has been developed through an archeology of the urban electronic dance music scene, which has evolved into a form distinct from its original configuration, producing both ruptures and continuities in the aesthetics and identities of these events and their participants. regarding corporealities and identities, what can be observed is that in the 1990s, the electronic music scene in the city was predominantly composed of cis gay men and some cis lesbian women, with a predominance of white, heterosexual individuals from middle-class backgrounds. in the 2000s, with the rise of drum and bass, there began to be a greater presence of black people, something that is even more noticeable nowadays. in recent years, this scene has increasingly highlighted the presence of transgender people and people from different social classes, including those from peripheral areas. while this does not necessarily indicate an egalitarian and prejudice-free scene, it does point to greater diversity and internal differentiation, offering possibilities for the construction of more equitable and plural spaces and interactions that must be taken into account from intersectional perspectives. in terms of the geographical spaces in the city utilized by this electronic music circuit, a continuity is perceived, where the parties continue to occupy the central area of the city, which is built along the banks of the guaíba lake. it can be inferred that this may be linked to the hegemonic presence of rap and other genres in the peripheral and metropolitan areas of the city, establishing more entrenched acoustic territorialities (and musical consumption). young people from the periphery who enjoy and identify with electronic music parties often need to travel to the centre, exposing the limitations and constraints imposed by the dynamics of access as well as (physical and symbolic) mobilities in the city. when it comes to the dimensions of work within the scene, it can be observed that it has gone through waves of amateurism and professionalization since its inception. this can be noticed, for example, in the collaboration with clothing and beverage brands at different times. this seems to impact the cycles of this scene and its political aspects or meanings. while in the beginning the parties had more universal and abstract themes such as peace, unity and respect, nowadays the political dimension is expressed through the affirmation, resistance and visibility of identity issues. these strategies are simultaneously political and affective, as the performative dimensions of corporealities take center stage. we call attention to the fact that, in terms of media production and consumption, the use of the internet emerged in the early days of the scene—initially with e-zines, web flyers, amaral et al. | it’s not just a party, ya know? 145 and websites—and has continued with digital platforms (instagram), but with different approaches and usage strategies. the musical practices and parties of coletivo t bring out the search for non-heteronormative spaces and connections, where music plays a central role as a mediator of encounters, sharing, affections and the construction of subjectivities (vila 2017). they promote, hence, environments of joint production and creation, as well as possibilities for multiple and dissident existences in the redefinition and occupation of urban spaces with their bodies, presences, temporalities and aesthetic, cultural, communicative and political deeds. in this sense, affective circuits are developed based on interaction, intersubjectivity and the ability to affect and be affected by other bodies, facilitated by sounds, vibrations, socialities and encounters. therefore, we emphasize the ways in which the interactions between musical practices and parties in the city, bodies, corporealities and affects can be employed, creating, marking, or transforming the meanings of individual and collective experiences, as well as our understanding of them. acknowledgments we thank the federal agencies that have funded our research cnpq (national council for scientific and technological development) and capes (coordination for the improvement of higher education personnel). notes 1 duffy (2017) discusses the work of digital influencers as “aspirational labor,” since it creates a form of connection with audiences in which the work produced on digital platforms generates a sense of identification and desire to be part of that circuit as well. 2 this is not an exhaustive literature review of all the works that have delved into this thematic articulation. we merely highlight some reflections that help us perceive this analytical perspective in latin america. 3 the name of this nightclub was a reference to the popular brazilian music singer elis regina, born and raised in porto alegre (brasil). 4 the interviews from fontanari’s research (2003) have already demonstrated that even at this time there were discussions about gender, ethnicity and social class with the participation of working-class individuals, non-heterosexual individuals and non-white individuals, nonetheless in a very incipient way. regarding gender issues, many interviewees revealed that their participation in the scene helped them “come out of the closet” and construct their identities. 5 the federal university of rio grande do sul and the pontifical catholic university of rio grande do sul. 6 the e-ar was an electronic fanzine (e-zine) sent via email and produced amateurishly by members of the scene. dancecult 17(1)146 7 former industrial hub of porto alegre, where the neighborhoods floresta, farrapos, humaitá, marcílio dias, navegantes and são geraldo are located, in the northeast zone. due to flooding, industries gradually vacated the area. subsequently, the old warehouses and abandoned factories began to be used for hosting parties. currently, the region is undergoing a process of gentrification due to a revitalization plan initiated by the municipal government of porto alegre, which is focused on higher-income populations. bonfim and amaral (2017) have observed the beginning of this gentrification process. references abtan, freida. 2016. “where is she? finding the women in electronic music culture”. contemporary music review, 35(1): 53-60. 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https://www.sibetrans.com/trans/public/docs/9-batuka-mercedes-liska.pdf https://www.sibetrans.com/trans/public/docs/9-batuka-mercedes-liska.pdf http://dx.doi.org/10.15448/1980-3729.2018.3.29193 https://doi.org/10.15448/1980-3729.2022.1.42438 https://doi.org/10.15448/1980-3729.2022.1.42438 https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582x231172437 https://doi.org/10.30962/ec.2267 https://doi.org/10.30962/ec.2267 amaral et al. | it’s not just a party, ya know? 149 pini, maria. 2001. club cultures and female subjectivity. the move from home to house. new york: palgrave polivanov, beatriz, medeiros, beatriz, 2020. “mulheres no rock e na música eletrônica: estratégias de atuação de musicistas e djs no rio de janeiro e montreal”. 29° encontro anual da compós proceedings. <https://proceedings.science/compos/compos-2020/trabalhos/ mulheres-no-rock-e-na-musica-eletronica-estrategias-de-atuacao-de-musicistas-e-d?lang=ptbr>, (accessed 30 sep 2025). sá, simone pereira de and jeder janotti jr, eds. 2013. cenas 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lexington books. discography various artists. 2021a. vitamina t. t-rec (download). <https://ttt-rec.bandcamp.com/album/tram-ia> various artists. 2021b. tramóia. t-rec (download). <https://ttt-rec.bandcamp.com/album/vitamina-t> https://proceedings.science/compos/compos-2020/trabalhos/mulheres-no-rock-e-na-musica-eletronica-estrategias-de-atuacao-de-musicistas-e-d%3flang%3dpt-br https://proceedings.science/compos/compos-2020/trabalhos/mulheres-no-rock-e-na-musica-eletronica-estrategias-de-atuacao-de-musicistas-e-d%3flang%3dpt-br https://proceedings.science/compos/compos-2020/trabalhos/mulheres-no-rock-e-na-musica-eletronica-estrategias-de-atuacao-de-musicistas-e-d%3flang%3dpt-br https://doi.org/10.30962/ec.83 https://ttt-rec.bandcamp.com/album/tram-ia https://ttt-rec.bandcamp.com/album/vitamina-t “being a dj is my form of resistance”: the dance floor as a safer space for queer-feminist communities in vienna dancecult: journal of electronic dance music culture 16(1): 31–50 issn 1947-5403 ©2024 dancecult http://dj.dancecult.net http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.03 “being a dj is my form of resistance”: the dance floor as a safer space for queer-feminist communities in vienna magdalena fuernkranz university of music and performing arts, vienna (austria) abstract vienna based queer-feminist networks, dj collectives and event formats such as female:pressure, dishes, unsafe+sounds and hyperreality provide a platform for exploration of a radical, uncompromising queer-feminist approach in institutionalized spaces. the dance floor becomes a safer space for nonconformism, as well as a platform for time-limited utopias and subcultures in an institutional framework. as subcultural spaces, these collectives create events that form intensive, multi-layered and progressive line-ups and advocate for greater visibility and representation of marginalized groups on the dance floor. this paper explores the potentials and limitations of queer-feminist djs and djcollectives, music producers and club organizers that make use of social spaces such as the dance floor to create safer spaces for queer dance music communities. i suggest that queer-feminist djing and its contexts are shaped by ideas of fourth-wave feminism, queer-feminist networks as well as by the use of social media to provide spaces for cultural production and political activism. keywords: safer space, dance music communities, networks, fourth-wave feminism, queer-feminism magdalena fuernkranz is a postdoctoral fellow and senior scientist at the department of popular music at the university of music and performing arts vienna. as co-leader of the projects “performing diversity” and “female jazz musicians in austria”, her recent research has focused on performativity, gender and intersectionality in pop and rock music, austrian music scenes and gender/identity in jazz. she is co-editor of performing sexual identities. nationalities on the eurovision stage (2017), author of elizabeth i in film und fernsehen. de-/konstruktion von weiblicher herrschaft (2019), co-author of aufführungsrituale der musik. zur konstituierung kultureller vielfalt am beispiel österreich (2021) and co-editor of the thema special issue yugoslav disco: digging into an “excluded” musical culture of late socialism (2024). w: <https://www.ipop.at/magdalena-fuernkranz> feature article http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2024.16.01.03 https://www.ipop.at/magdalena-fuernkranz dancecult 16(1)32 primer vienna based queer-feminist networks, dj collectives and events such as female:pressure, dishes, unsafe+sounds and hyperreality offer a stage for emancipatory experimental electronic music on the dance floor. although the city is home to a diverse, creative and sophisticated electronic dance scene, there are few venues that allow an exploration of a radical queer-feminist approach. the identity-creating function of the aforementioned events offers different modes of subjectivation to be externalized on the dance floor, respective communities to stand up against values of social norms and political discourses to be conveyed. the feeling of belonging is central, especially for marginalized people. electronic dance music tends to mirror and map the geographical and social-political topologies of its era (fraser 2012: 507). the club is a political space that, at its best, proactively opposes hetero-normative social orders such as racism, sexism and homophobia and advocates awareness, tolerance, respect and acceptance.1 as members of non-commercial networks and collectives, the aforementioned djs and event organizers are embedded in the broader field of electronic dance scenes. hitzler, bucher and niederbacher define scenes as “thematically focused cultural social networks of people”—with an “issue”—that are oriented to the activities of the “scenesters” (2005: 20). regarding electronic music scenes, the various networks consist of associations between “individual djs, musicians, event organizers, producers, promotors, agents and crews and other ‘organisational elites’” (hitzler, bucher and niederbacher 2005: 27). in general, the majority is dominated by (young) men that obtain a gatekeeping function in electronic music scenes based on their accumulation of social, cultural and symbolic capital.2 the aim of this study is to examine how queer-feminist discourses are adopted and used by the creators and members of female:pressure, dishes, unsafe+sounds and hyperreality whose diversity includes queer-feminist cultural producers from different genders, sexual identities, generations and classes. their education regarding (queer) feminism belongs to different feminist waves as well as different approaches to queer activism and institutionalized queer theory. genz and brabon state that while feminism itself understands a critical engagement with pop culture as a component of political struggle, queer networks use the internet for the organization of music events, the production of websites, podcasts, e-zines and blogs (2009: 254-60). shiva et al. (2019) as well as diamond et al. (2013) describe internet activism as a key feature of fourth wave feminism. emphasising intersectionality, interlocking systems of power and their contribution to the social stratification of marginalized groups—such as trans and bipoc individuals—munro adds that fourthwave feminists advocate for greater visibility and representation of marginalized groups in society, politics, media and business by arguing that society would be more fair-minded, unbiased and non-discriminatory if practices and politics incorporated the perspectives of all people (2013: 25). i understand queer-feminist communities’ rituals on the dance floor as the intersection of personhood, oppression, transgression and performance by referring to alexander m. cannon’s (2020) idea of capturing time in atmospheric dance spaces and the djs’ work. fuernkranz | “being a dj is my form of resistance” 33 “these emergent communities repeat sounds and actions to generate or solidify histories and memories attached to orientation” (cannon 2020: 124). dance and exhaustion become thereby a kind of physical condensation of transience. in the intertwining of music and dance, the experience of “bass pressure” on space and body and the movements of the bodies seem to be a performative discharge of rhythms and impulses, biographies and collective memories (garcia 2020: 6). techno-moves thereby represent a specific movement repertoire that is primarily mimetic. as reynolds describes it, “dance-moves spread through the crowd like superfast viruses” (2008: xxii). dance-moves are an essential part of ritualized ecstasy in techno spaces and their narratives; they design social bodies and renegotiate body politics. as ueno defines it, techno-dance consists of a series of gestures and behaviors that are, in each moment, experienced, experimental, repetitive, mimetic and performative. this ‘unlearned’ dance, which is transmitted, propagated and imitated in an unnoticed way, through ‘entraining’ rhythms and beats from one body to another, is dependent on the mimesis without a model. (ueno 2003: 106) by defining techno as repetition and citation, ueno concludes that it shapes the embodied quality of the presence through the recollection and revival of stories, while remaining an expression from within. according to ueno, it can be placed in the proximity of butler’s concept of performativity, “in which the original itself is always already a copy open to an infinite reiteration of gestures” (butler 1990: 107). between an individual singular and collective plural of movements, techno-dance as a bodily action does not refer to something given, something substantial that is to be expressed through it. according to zebracki, the dancing body intrinsically exposes a do-it-yourself ethos, “yet, there are limitations to the body’s ‘own’ agency, as it is connected to previous experience, current encounter and future rumination” (2016: 113). the theatrical dimension of techno-dance covers the individual performance and challenges a re-experiencing of certain codes which have been internalized. fittingly, therefore, ueno finds resistance potential in techno-spaces at the micro-level of interacting bodies, in the (re)learning of social repertoires of movement and the realityconstructing redesign in an interactive space (2003: 106). this paper discusses how vienna based queer-feminist networks, dj collectives and events shape the dance floor, create safer spaces for non-conformism, integrate subcultures in institutional frameworks by providing time-limited utopias and advocate for greater visibility and representation of marginalized groups on the dance floor. i will examine the motivation of the founders and members of female:pressure, dishes, unsafe+sounds and hyperreality to create their own networks in electronic music scenes, and i will outline their embeddedness in the broader field of edm scenes. different queer-feminist approaches within and outside these networks and events become visible with analysis of their social media activities and their interaction with media formats. furthermore, i investigate how the aforementioned actors convey their virtual labor, curatorship and activism. i also investigate their self-understandings as activists and artists and their self-representations online and on the dance floor. i am interested in forms of (virtual) activism and gatekeeping framed dancecult 16(1)34 by the contexts of feminist and anti-commercial agency, that are embedded in the (sub) cultural feminist scenes and networks. these are developed to protest forms of exclusion by formulating strategies to counteract the exclusion of female, trans and non-binary idividuals. by exploring how these djs and collectives discuss issues of inclusion in their music, activism and virtual networks, i suggest that queer-feminist djing and its contexts are shaped by ideas of fourth-wave feminism and provide spaces for cultural production and political activism. my analysis shows how these cultural workers and activists adopt a “politics of ambiguity” in their works, performances and self-representations, and how they refer to queer theory to distinguish themselves from earlier feminist waves, especially second-wave feminism (genz and brabon 2009: 158). methodological approach the core of my research data emerged from “virtual ethnography” and content analysis of social media postings from members of female:pressure, dishes, unsafe sounds and hyperreality.3 this is complemented by an analysis of their websites, interviews in various austrian magazines and newspapers and face to-face interviews. the interviews were in-depth, lasted between 30 and 60 minutes and were conducted between january and september 2023 in vienna. the interviewees were female, white, middle class and between 30 and 45 years old. they were selected due to substantial engagement with the aforementioned networks and events by administering the social media accounts, organizing events or producing radio shows or podcasts. central issues were discussed during the observation period: issues of inclusion, the development of virtual activism, the creation of safer spaces, the contradictions inscribed in the networks and strategies for women’s and queers’ advancement. i use the term “safer space” to signal that every safe space is located within given power structures and therefore suffers from racist, sexist and heteronormative influences. a safer space has the ability to reduce power, but it is never free of toxic influences. i hereby draw on deller’s definition of safer space practice as “understanding and prioritizing the needs of the most at-risk—not as a way of sealing them off from the realities of life, but as a way of resourcing, equipping and supporting people to meet those realities” (2019: 223). my analysis will present only a small part of the queer-feminist djs’, dj collectives’, music producers’ and club organizers’ work that is split into various local as well as virtual activities. all quotations from the face-to-face interviews i conducted are marked as such. quotations without this indication come from other activities of the networks and events. i have translated the face-to-face interviews, other interviews and social media postings from german. female:pressure the network female:pressure was founded in 1998 by the vienna-based techno dj and music producer susanne kirchmayr also known as electric indigo, as a technically systematized answer to common comments that there are too few female identifying people in the edm fuernkranz | “being a dj is my form of resistance” 35 scene (female:pressure 2024a). as an international online database that addresses female djs, musicians, producers, composers and visual artists, the network advocates for the professional advancement of women who are active in the field of electronic music and digital art. female:pressure intends to make the existence and works of female artists visible while simultaneously serving as a publicly accessible source of information. according to the network, in july 2024, over 3,000 members from 85 countries were active (female:pressure 2024a). on facebook the network is described as a “transnational network of women, afab, transgender, transfeminine, transmasculine, intersex + gender” (female:pressure 2024a). by establishing female:pressure, kirchmayr highlighted the need for queer-feminist networks in the electronic music scene as well as the use of a database as a platform for representation and communication between peers why are there still not many women in the electronic music scene? we have heard this question countless times. while we think that the perceived lack of gender diversity is caused by a complex combination of societal factors, experience shows that marginalized gender groups are hardly less active. in fact, their activities are less recognised and additionally often forgotten in historiography. raising visibility [and audibility] of players in the electronic music scenes is therefore one of our main goals. < vision > the female:pressure project is continuously growing and advancing. initially planned as a mere insight into the status quo, it now also serves an archival purpose with links to works of artists who are no longer active or who are sadly deceased. over the years, we broadened the simple focus on women in favour of an explicit inclusion of transgender and non-binary members. we practice an intersectional and anti-racist approach to our work and try to listen to and learn from each other on the female:pressure mailing list. (female:pressure 2024a) reitsamer found out that in addition to the digital database, female:pressure radio programs are broadcast on the free radio stations radio fsk in hamburg and radio orange in vienna, and events and club nights are organized in different european cities (2013: 399). the mailing list is “the heart of the community, through which projects are continuously planned, publications and events announced, and sensitive political topics discussed” (nemec 2019). surveys that quantify the gender distribution of artists performing at electronic music festivals were published in 2013, 2015, 2017, 2020 and 2022 (female:pressure 2024b). the 2022 survey revealed a rise of female acts from 9.2% in 2012 to 26.9% in 2020-2021; additionally, the data on non-binary artists showed an increase from 0.4% to 1.3% from 2017 to 2021. furthermore, the report included a section on issues of diversity such as racism and ageism, as well as specific suggestions for festival organizers, artists, journalists, policy advocacy groups and festival attendees (female:pressure 2024b). joint actions such as the perspectives festival have emerged from the network (aha 2015). according to reichle (2013), these events draw attention to the still prevalent dancecult 16(1)36 underrepresentation of female musicians in edm culture. projects such as the visibility tumblr (2015-2019)—a curated image-based collection of female, non-binary and trans individuals in performing arts and music production in their working environment—or the female:pressure podcast series established in 2018—wherein members periodically present their music—enhance the network’s output. female:pressure encourages viennese female djs, producers, organizers and musicians to deal with their own role as well as clichés that are repeatedly forced upon them as artists. even though it “remains a youth-oriented cultural network . . . it is not restricted to young women” (reitsamer 2013: 399). the network acknowledges political feminism and the power of female collectivity beyond the gender binary, age, class, ethnicity and race. feminist formations such as female:pressure act as a platform of self-empowerment against the suppression of queer individuals and women in edm scenes, create safer spaces for female identifying djs and musicians, support female cultural producers and promote their professional development. while media coverage infrequently reports on the network’s activities, kirchmayr’s activism has been a catch for her career, i know that in the past i was not booked at some festivals because i was associated with female:pressure. that has changed to some extent, but overall, my role in that regard is certainly not career-enhancing. . . . in the industry, it’s sometimes more of a stigma to have feminism attached to you. (vihaus 2017) kirchmayr’s statement can be regarded as an example of the exclusion of female djs from scene networks, coupled with the prejudice that women are not taking active roles in music scenes as music producers, as observed by mcrobbie (1994).4 according to kirchmayr, the motivation for female, non-binary and trans djs to launch their own forms of networking separates techno’s origins and its utopian nature from male-dominated scenes and networks by providing safer spaces for female identifying djs and their audienes. she explains, there wasn’t this incredible hierarchy at techno parties. techno as a musical language, and indeed as an international language that everyone can use and that can connect across geographical, cultural and social boundaries, that was another utopia of early electronic club culture. due to the fact that in the club the social boundaries can be crossed more easily at the techno party because this kind of dancing and the music, which lasts for hours and is relatively unbroken, simply ensure that time and space as a dimension can be largely ignored. these are ideal conditions for precisely such social phenomena to happen. (niedermayr 2012: 42) moreover, kirchmayr mentions another reason for the invisibility of female identifying and queer djs on the dance floor. it might be caused by a mixture of ageism and the higher dependence on some sort of novelty factor. this is just an assumption and unfortunately, i don’t have scientific data for verification. but it doesn’t sound implausible to me that there can be parallels to careers of actresses whose chances to succeed decrease with age as is commonly known. (femmecult 2014) fuernkranz | “being a dj is my form of resistance” 37 vienna’s commercial club scene in particular is dominanted by white male djs aged 30-50 acting as gatekeepers for young male music producers who intend to enter the scene. as a member of female:pressure observes, this space continuously reproduces hetero-normative social orders. incidentally, that’s also the only reason why i’m not stopping. because i don’t want to say i’m too old for it. i think to myself, i’m certainly not going to do people that favour. because i’m one hundred per cent sure that in vienna in particular, in this very tight-knit scene, a lot of people would want me to finally quit. i’m not doing that. being a dj is my form of resistance.5 even though studies show that age is not an important trait in youth oriented music scenes and networks, the analysed interviews argue that the intersection of age and gender affects the careers of female identifying djs in vienna.6 the network’s social media activities show that it is primarily used as a promotion tool for its members. the postings consist mainly of announcements for gigs, events, calls for participants, snippets of members’ works or advertising for podcast episodes. generally, the network’s followers don’t comment on the posts at all or simply react with emojis. even though most of the posts are in english, and i observed little communication, in most cases the mentioned artists appreciate the feature. nevertheless, several collaborations arose from calls for participation in events; touring djs were invited to perform at clubs. practices such as inviting touring djs or establishing collaborations via social media are the central forms of virtual networking. the dance floor as a safer space is not only promoted by social media, but it has the ability to turn online platforms into a safer space for the dance floor. djs and artists from the wider (virtual) network become part of real, professional co-operation and contribute to the visibilty of marginalized groups on the dance floor. internet activism is the key feature of fourth wave feminism, and i assume that in the case of female:pressure, social media posts in particular work as a catalyst for female identifying and non-binary communities in electronic music scenes. reitsamer describes them as “central forms of translocal networking” as well as instances of political as well as gender activism (2012: 406). dishes dishes is an event and project of “rrriot—verein zur förderung und vermittlung feministischen kulturschaffens” (association for the promotion and mediation of feminist cultural work). it is curated and implemented by chris attila izsák, marlene kager and therese kaiser with the support of the austrian federal ministry for arts, culture civil service and sport, as well as the city of vienna and “ske—cultural sponsorship for composers”. the event offers a special stage for emancipatory experimental electronic music by focusing on national and international artists that take a progressive approach to electronic music. although vienna is home to a diverse and experimental scene, there are few commercial venues that allow an exploration of the same. dishes provides a platform for these approaches in high culture spaces. contributions from different contexts of dancecult 16(1)38 contemporary electronic music come together to form a multi-layered and progressive “menu” (izsák, kager and kaiser 2022b). co-organizer marlene kager states, “we liked the idea of viewing a line-up as a menu. the theme continues through social media, the logo as a plate, the merch as tea towels and the line-up release as alphabet soup” (karlbauer 2022). coorganizer chris attila izsák adds, “in keeping with the title, there will of course be a dinner with the artists. after the years of zero networking, it’s even more important to strengthen collective processes” (karlbauer 2022). promotion informs that “with the first dish a progressive line-up with positions from different european scenes is served. concerts and dj sets by a total of seven artists are on the menu” (izsák, kager and kaiser 2022a). by combining the idea of food with experimental music; visual art; queer-feminist, non-binary and female artists and an institutionalized space such as the wiener volkstheater, the event opens up previously foreclosed places to progressive sounds, art and politics. the “wiener volkstheater”, roughly translated as people’s theatre, was founded in 1889 by request of the citizens of vienna in order to offer a popular equivalent to the elitist hofburgtheater. the latter was initiated by empress maria theresa of austria, who wanted a theater next to her palace in 1741 (yates 2008: 81). although the volkstheater itself has become a place of high culture, dishes takes up the originally intended low-threshold accessibility and enables the subcultural audience to reclaim space in a high culture institution. the first edition of dishes took place in april 2022 at the “rote bar” (red bar) in the “wiener volkstheater” (izsák, kager and kaiser 2022a). the organizers focused on concerts and live performances, formats that are more associated with bar settings. according to izsák, “it was clear to us quite early on that we wanted to place more emphasis on concerts. it seems to me that the bar offers different possibilities, which benefit from the changeable and yet decadent character of the space” (karlbauer 2022). the lineup consisted of female identifying and trans artists from various genres and disciplines. the third edition of dishes, in turn, offered mainly concerts, featuring artists who are usually found in subcultural spaces. additionally, a film program curated by otherness archive, a visual archive documenting queer films and its pioneers, was screened. in general, the event’s social media accounts promote the event series and the featured artists. the posts consist mainly of announcements for the shows, promotion of the artists and pictures of the featured djs and food. generally, dishes’ followers do not comment on the posts at all or simply react with emojis or exclamations such as “love”, “awesome” or “hot”. subsidies allow the organizers to provide a special setting for the invited artists and the audience. at dishes, we have the opportunity to give a certain space. we can let people rehearse for two or three weeks and everyone, even the sound and light engineers, get paid. we’re able to try things out and kind of give people space to try things out as well. we even have dressing rooms there, people can dress up, do elaborate makeup; we can facilitate a different, more comprehensive experience. both for the artists themselves and for all the people that are in the audience. and that’s the beauty of it. our securities are not huge guys yelling at people. they’re nice people. yes, and they just try to make everyone feel comfortable.7 fuernkranz | “being a dj is my form of resistance” 39 the organizers emphasize the queer-feminist idea of the event’s line-up compared to other events. as izsák remarks, “most festivals still display the same line-ups they had before the pandemic: male dominated” (karlbauer 2022). organizing a sustainable event, creating networks between artists and audiences and a safer space for female, non-binary and trans audiences are all challenges to the androcentric structures of the music business, especially festival organization. dishes explores how the relationship between a subculture—as specifically a reaction to a main hegemonic culture—and an institutionalized space that is part of that hegemonic culture can form a synergy and open up new spaces of transmedia collaboration. theatres and other institutions allow electronic subcultures to develop new forms of expression in non-commercial environments and provide safer spaces for queer-feminist electronic music scenes through their institutionalized systems. izsák confirms that the organizers are “interested in the question of what possibilities institutional spaces and free scenes can open up for each other. the course is usually that first there are subcultural aspirations and, in most cases, these become institutionalized or capitalized over time” (karlbauer 2022). however, collaborations with institutionalized spaces have limitations. “the structures of a huge institutional colossus that wants to crush the event . . . where you can’t turn on a fog machine, for example, because they have the wrong smoke detectors”.8 because the volkstheater’s two rooms are limited to 200 guests and the event series receives subsidies, the organizers decided to relocate dishes “so that we can really let a lot of people in”.9 the fourth event took place in october 2023 in the nightclub flex that hosts regularly dj-sets and performing artists. citing a capitalist logic, dishes organizers argue that due to the size and the low basic costs of the nightclub, more profit can be generated, which in turn affects the fees of all those involved.10 with subcultural events taking place in well-established institutions, appropriations by established institutions of the subculture occur. concerning the event dishes, a highculture institution reproduces subcultural values and promotes cultural workers such as musicians, djs, choreographers, costumes designers, light designers and sound engineers emerging out of subcultures. co-founder therese kaiser states that “it’s only fair that we somehow open up these spaces, especially in times with few non-commercial spaces, especially for music”.11 the financial support of subculture events in institutionalized spaces comes with the responsibility of audience development for these institutions. these strategic future-oriented processes of opening up, in which cultural institutions consciously turn to their partners, build and deepen long-term and sustainable relationships with existing and potential visitors in order to remain relevant to them. hyperreality the argument that line-ups with a high proportion of women and non-binary acts would not attract people and thus reduce economic success is disproved with the hyperreality series. initiated by marlene engel in 2017, the aim was to create a concept, that includes at least 50 dancecult 16(1)40 per cent female identifying individuals. the program reflects the diverse manifestations of contemporary club culture, features newcomers and pioneers alike and aims to promote the exchange between local and global club culture. the press release points out that the festival “offer[s] an exciting cross-section of global club culture. . . . hyperreality is again relying on the tried and tested male quota of 30%” (schachinger 2019). from 2017-2018 the event was part of the wiener festwochen, a highly subsidized cultural festival in vienna that takes place every year in may and june. since its very first edition, hyperreality has made it its mission to celebrate the local club scene; instead of playing warm-up sets for international headliners, performances and dj sets from local artists are prominently woven into the overall line-up. engel’s goal was to include female identifying artists as regular djs as well as headliners to provide a platform for the visibility of various genders, which is almost a prerequisite for an event with public subsidies: the line-ups i put together fall more or less under contemporary club culture, a field with an extremely large number of interesting, exciting artists, among whom the marginalized, those on the fringes of society, often make particularly unusual or exciting music. (karlbauer 2018) engel concludes that networking plays an important role in the current electronic music scene: on the one hand, it is important for hyperreality to reflect exactly that, to consciously include groups that are potentially underprivileged in the music world, through networks that are rather male (and white), the press or simply due to a lack of money. on the other hand, the programming has arisen simply from the demand to show the best and most interesting things that are happening in the field at the moment. programmatically, therefore, we have not always had to actively seek to create a balance. the proportion of women has resulted from their content. (karlbauer 2018) however, as curator of the club concept of the “wiener festwochen”, engel could draw on a comparatively larger budget than private club organizers. concurrently, engel privately organized the “bliss” event series. according to femdex, an initiative that strove to highlight female identifying djs and producers between 2016-2020, bliss was the only one among 29 events evaluated to achieve a 50 per cent share of women (vihaus 2017). engel remarks, with hyperreality, unlike bliss, i work with subsidies and have grant money at my disposal. of course, with private events, it’s also about recouping the money—but with bliss, i didn’t even know how high the percentage of gender was until femdex analyzed the lineup—it’s much more reflective of the scene i’m in. (vihaus 2017) even though a queer-feminist scene is forming in vienna’s male-dominated club scene, those who book acts and organize events are responsible for the representation of female identifying, non-binary and bipoc acts in clubs. as engel states, fuernkranz | “being a dj is my form of resistance” 41 in the first moment you see the line-up, of course, but it’s also about the structures, from the booker to the management to the security. i always wonder how it would feel for me if i worked in a club and there were only women around me. (vihaus 2017) engel adds that she relies on 50 per cent women in the security team. when engel left vienna in 2021, lisa holzinger, director of the not-for-profit organization “sisters+ for queer-feminist art and culture” started co-directing hyperreality. holzinger’s takeover of the festival was the first edition with an overall budget, and it became more inclusive, safer space for its community with a dance floor code of conduct. as one co-organizer remarks: it’s more about community, so the sisters events are a safer space, and that has certainly come more into hyperreality, it’s much more about the people who go there and a little less about the lineup and the whole show aspects of it . . . now it has to become a thing that is not attached to a person, but somehow stands for something that can somehow exist on its own.12 the focus was shifted away from the line-up to other aspects, such as the idea of providing a safer space that corresponds directly to the event series’ code of conduct. hyperreality is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neurotype, physical appearance, body, age, race, ethnicity, nationality, language, or religion. we do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form. everyone participating in the hyperreality community—including, but not limited to the festival—is required to agree to the following code of conduct. this includes all attendees, performers, volunteers, and staff. (hyperreality 2023) the fact that the safety concept is written in english refers to the international character of the festival. moreover, it allows the organizers to reach the broad non-german-speaking public and thus guarantee that more of the attendees are aware of it. at the same time that it is associated with a specific (intellectual) group of people, hyperreality as an international and translocal network. according to the organizers, harassment includes offensive comments regarding gender expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, physical appearance, age, race or ethnicity. moreover, the code of conduct mentions other examples such as unwelcome comments related to a person’s lifestyle choices including food, health, parenting and employment, misgendering or use of dead names, gratuitous sexual behavior in spaces where they are not appropriate. physical contact or simulated contact without consent or inappropriate social contact has to be avoided by prioritizing “marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort” (hyperreality 2023). the event therefore not only showcases progressive music making, but also advocates for representation, awareness and collective decision-making. at this point, the code of conduct tries to be as inclusive as possible. any form of discrimination is forbidden, including discrimination towards dancecult 16(1)42 parenting or mental health. ensuring the respect of gender identity and clearly pointing out personal and physical border spaces allow the dance floor to be staged as a safer space for a female identifying and queer community. one co-organizer states that, “the audience is a different kind of audience. the spaces—how they’re designed and so on—that works much better since holzinger is in charge. because of its much queerer audience than before”.13 with public spaces, where feminist electronic dance culture is allowed to take place, being essential for building communities, tronto’s politics of care become crucial. tronto examines the political implications of caring practices, that are valued at the personal level by defining care as universal (laurin and martin 2022: 1579). according to tronto, good care is comprised of four elements: attention, responsibility, competence and capacity to respond; consequently care consists of: caring about, taking care of, caregiving, care receiving and caring with (tronto 2013: 103). in the context of hyperreality, three aspects of tronto’s concept are central. first, “caring about” requires attention and includes the physical aspects of organizing the event hyperreality, including completing a funding application and curating a program. second, “taking care of ” requires responsibility and refers to the affective investment in and attachment to others, the provision of a code of conduct and an overall safer space. third, “caring with” allows hyperreality to act politically, to mobilize its audience, musicians and other associated citizens to bring about social change. hyperreality’s social media accounts promote the festival, the featured artists and merchandising, and they post recaps of the parties. the event series uses social media primarily as promotion tool. fittingly, therefore, the followers do not comment on the posts at all or simply react with emojis. when dishes announced that hyperreality’s awareness team would be present during their event in october 2023, around 80 followers liked the post but no one posted a comment. similar to female:pressure, the network’s social media activities show that it is primarily used as a promotion tool. hyperreality is a safer space based on a shared interest in the advancement of the careers of marginalized djs, an intersectional solidarity for protesting exclusions from dance music scenes, harassment online and during the event and tokenism in the music business. in 2023, the festival released its own compilation for the first time, which reflects its diversity.14 with this initiative, hyperreality underlines its commitment to the local music scene and sets an example for an inclusive and diverse club culture (hyperreality press release 2023). one co-organizer, who was responsible for the production of the record, explains that, so a person who is attached to an established label anyway, would not get that from hyperreality. it’s also very clear that this won’t be a white cis man. who could benefit from a professional recording? who could do the mastering, or the mixing? who embodies hyperreality’s values?15 furthermore, the organizers tried to combine approaches of fair pay and inclusive cultural work with regard to the idea of a festival recording. fuernkranz | “being a dj is my form of resistance” 43 besides the focus on the representation of flinta (women, lesbians, intersexual, nonbinary, trans and agender people), who form the majority of the festival team and bookings, lisa holzinger sees utopian potential in collective work. when she took over the festival’s lead, she decided that “the time of ‘one-person shows’ was over. i think it’s important that different positions and points of view are reflected in the programming” (ben saoud 2023). regarding the fact that every subculture works with codes that are not accessible for a broader audience, “low-threshold” accessibility does not apply since the kind of music performed at hyperreality is hardly ever encountered in everyday life. with a mixture of genre-crossing local and international artistic positions, the music programme covers a broad spectrum of contemporary and experimental electronic dance music. with €18 admission for one 18-hour event, the parties are affordable for the audience (ben saoud 2023). hyperreality’s goals include fair pay, giving local and international acts the same status and providing an awareness team to ensure that guests have contact persons they can turn to if they have experienced assaults. unsafe+sounds festival an event series that combines electronic dance music and the ambiguities that constitute the discourses around the techno scene, the unsafe+sounds festival was established in 2014. entering its ninth edition in 2023, the festival presents “musical positions of a contemporary culture that resists the prescriptions of the mainstream, and critically and reflectively depicts the reality that surrounds us, sometimes with radical results” (music export 2021). experimental, emancipatory or subversive approaches in electronic music represent fragments of a global avant-garde by providing alternative perspectives and new musical territories. the artistic director shilla strelka and the discourse program director bianca ludewig show a common interest in the influence of music on bodily movement. the festival’s program combines the corresponding socio-political questions and contextualizes them on the basis of a wide range of intersectional perspectives. with different spaces being taken up by club culture, the unsafe+sounds festival takes place in various viennese locations such as the alternative music club “das werk” (the factory) and the “wotruba church”, built between august 1974 and october 1976 on the basis of a model by sculptor fritz wotruba, which was inspired by the chartres cathedral. these locations challenge hegemonic and capitalist ideas of club music as a male dominanted genre located in unsafe spaces. experimental sounds and progressive trends in contemporary electronic music shape a club culture beyond the mainstream. the patriarchal church as a location for queerfeminist club music challenges the utopian idea of the genre. historically charged locations are deliberately chosen in order to confront visitors with the space’s past and demonstrate the possibilities of utopia. a place of centuries of abuse becomes a safer space, albeit for a limited period of time. the eighth edition of unsafe+sounds, “tainted futures—agency of immediacy”, was described as “pushing back against the viral feeling of insecurity and focuses on artistic dancecult 16(1)44 positions that confront our reality” (strelka 2022). the performing artists engaged creatively with the changing environment by searching for appropriate sounds of the future and the human existence. the festival challenged the human fears of war, climate crises, natural disasters, epidemics and pandemics, energy crises, banking crises and right-wing pressure with the slogan “farewell to utopia, now for real” (strelka 2022). strelka describes the festival’s approach as, something for your body, your mind, and your soul. . . . the club is not a zone isolated from reality, like a space-time capsule whose focus is on a utopian space beyond our current reality. in my eyes, the club is the focal point of the present. it anticipates the future, but in it the present is also crystallized. . . . the times for utopia seem to be over. in the energies that the club releases, in the intensities, the feeling of a now manifests itself. (benkeser 2022) the dance floor allows its communities to act out feelings such as euphoria or ecstasy. strelka observes dance floor aesthetics as, “feelings that seem to have no justification in our crisis-ridden time, our shattered society. . . . strategies of overpowering play an increasingly important role in aesthetics” (benkeser 2022). the idea of celebrating together on the queer-feminist dance floor as a safer space offers the possibility of escaping a patriarchal and misogynistic reality. sicko (2010) and schwanhäußer (2010) describe the techno scene as in search of atmospheric spaces, while at the same time reflecting and eluding the general tendencies of an experience-oriented society. the dance floor becomes a space for negotiating precarization, self-empowerment, cultural capital, queer expression as well as queer strategies for social change. spaces for electronic dance music effect and unfold a listening and dancing fascination; simon reynolds asks, “how do you write a history of a culture that is fundamentally amnesiac and non-verbal?” (2008: xxv). by trying to answer this question, the discourse program features musicians, researchers, performers, journalists and activists, and it promotes dialogue that enhances understanding among individuals with diverse viewpoints, focusing on its queer-feminist protagonists. consequently, the unsafe+sounds festival tries to create a safer space not only within the framework of the festival, but also in the implementation of the accompanying program. with the festival’s attempt of connecting sonic aesthetics and social trends, urgent sociocultural and socio-political topics are addressed in screenings, panel discussions, performances and other discursive formats. curated by strelka and ludewig, the accompanying program explored the “politics of the body in search of audio-social potentials” in four thematic blocks: “how does music change in the globalized (platform) capitalism of the present?”; “what is happening beyond the attention machine? experimental music and noise from regions of the so-called ‘global south’”; “enjoyment, pleasure, intensity, intimacy & communality in the context of sound experiences and alternative sound cultures” and “local history and status quo” (strelka 2022). a range of diverse activists, musicians, organizers and researchers discussed these socio-political issues and contextualized them. fuernkranz | “being a dj is my form of resistance” 45 strelka describes community, the body, politics or the political and aesthetics as the central themes she has been working on for years. while for me aesthetic aspects of sonic sensuality are very important, respectively the subjective and private potential in the immediacy of soundscapes, bianca ludewig puts a strong focus on the actions, on agency, the political potentials of our practices and how they might work beyond that into the public sphere. (benkeser 2022) strelka and ludewig show a common interest in the influence of music on bodily movement. overall, the festival’s concept refers to ueno’s idea of the resistance potential in techno-spaces as a re-experiencing of certain codes, the (re)learning of social repertoires of movement and the reality-constructing redesign in an interactive space (2003: 106). by investigating the unsafe+sounds festival’s social media accounts, it turns out that the comment function on facebook and instagram is limited. the postings do have likes, on average around 30, but there are virtually no comments. the digital space obviously has no added value for the festival organizers. on the one hand, this may indicate that the discourse takes place directly at the festival, which would certainly speak for the program. on the other hand, a safer space for the festival visitors is not only guaranteed on site, but also in the digital space. the possibility to comment remains limited and is moderated, which prevents hate comments but at the same time reduces the interest in a digital exchange. even though it seems that the situation is similar to female:pressure’s and hyperreality’s online activities and their followers’ responses, i assume that in the case of unsafe+sounds the moderation is a deterrent. the reduced interest in digitial exchange limits the influence of social media on the dance floor and the discourse program. the activism takes place on-site with the invited artists that engage creatively with human fears, the changing environment and (gender) politics. the discourse program’s focus on socio-political questions has the ability to induce processes of emancipation and transformation for the participating djs, producers and audiences. fittingly, therefore, strelka notes, “everything that challenges our perception is severe and emancipatory. emancipatory, transformative forces can also be found in experiments. it’s about breaking free from dominant forms” (benkeser 2022). accordingly, electronic dance music combines the character of action and performance, and in its ritualization, it unfolds a potential effect that can be perceived as transformative for the festival’s participants. conclusions this article has explored the dance floor as a safer space for queer-feminist communities in vienna who adopt a “politics of ambiguity” in their works, performances and selfrepresentations through a case study of three events and the network female:pressure (genz and brabon 2009: 158). i have outlined the various ways the organizers as well as female:pressure members make use of the dance floor and the internet, especially social media, for cultural production, political activism and networking. their work is based on a shared interest in music making and the advancement of their careers as musicians, djs, dancecult 16(1)46 producers, organizers and promoters. it also shares a cross-generational, cross-gender and cross-subgenre solidarity for protests against exclusions of female, queer and non-binary acts from club nights and virtual harassment, as well as harassment on the dance floor. the study shows that gender identity remains an essential category for participating on the dance floor, contributing to cultural production and organizing events in electronic dance music scenes. examining female:pressure, dishes, unsafe+sounds and hyperreality reveals challenges for marginalized sexual and gender identities; it also reveals the empowerment of women that is negotiated in the fourth feminist wave. the differences in women’s experiences based on sexuality, class and ethnicity influenced fourth wave feminists’ work, motivating them to build queer-feminist allies with activism and to use the internet as catalyst for their work. notes 1 at its worst, the club perpetuates the reproduction of hetero-normative social orders, as authors such as rodgers (2010), farrugia (2012) or hutton (2016) have discussed. 2 the exclusion of female, non-binary and queer cultural producers from such networks, coupled with the sexist idea that women are not intensive record collectors nor active musicians, music producers and event organizers in music scenes can be regarded as central motivation for women to launch their own forms of networking, separating their cultural labor from the existing male-dominated networks in electronic music scenes (see mcrobbie 1994, cohen 1997, straw 1997 and vihaus 2017). 3 virtual ethnography is a research method that uses the internet and other information technologies to collect and share cultural knowledge. these interactions take place in virtual environments such as chat rooms, web-based discussion forums and newsgroups (see hine 2000). 4 mcrobbie (1994) advocated an approach to youth culture emphasizing the role of cultural production and the aesthetic element in youth cultures to offer an active picture of the involvement of girls and young women and to demonstrate the creative interplay between music, music production, dance and forms of visual image-making. 5 member of female:pressure, personal communication with the author (vienna), 24 february 2023. 6 i hereby draw on findings of bennett (2006), leonard (2007) and reitsamer (2013). in his 2006 study, andy bennett explores the continuing significance of punk rock for an older generation of fans. marion leonard (2007) examines how female rock performers negotiate age in their performance as rock musicians. accordingly, rosa reitsamer (2013) anaylsed the do-it-yourself careers of austrian djs and found out that age is not an important trait in youth oriented electronic music scenes. 7 therese kaiser, personal communication with the author (vienna), 2 february 2023. 8 therese kaiser, personal communication with the author (vienna), 2 february 2023. 9 therese kaiser, personal communication with the author (vienna), 2 february 2023. 10 therese kaiser, personal communication with the author (vienna), 2 february 2023. 11 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